SF&F encyclopedia (A-A)
ABBEY, EDWARD
(1927-1989) US writer, perhaps best known for his numerous essays on the
US West, in which he clearly expresses a scathing iconoclasm about human
motives and their effects on the world. In The Monkey-Wrench Gang (1975;
rev 1985) and its sequel, Hayduke Lives! (1990), this pessimism is
countered by prescriptions for physically sabotaging the polluters of the
West which, when put into practice, nearly displace normal reality;
structure-hitting, as practised by 21st century saboteurs in Bruce
STERLING's Heavy Weather (1994), seems to derive from EA's premise Good
Times (fixup 1980) is set in a balkanized USA after nuclear fallout has
helped destroy civilization; an Indian shaman, along with other characters
similar to those in The Monkey-Wrench Gang, fights back against tyranny.
ABBOTT, EDWIN A(BBOTT)
(1839-1926) UK clergyman, academic and writer whose most noted work,
published originally as by A Square, is FLATLAND: A ROMANCE OF MANY
DIMENSIONS (1884). Narrated and illustrated by Mr Square, the novel falls
into two parts. The first is a highly entertaining description of the
two-dimensional world of Flatland, in which inhabitants' shapes establish
their (planar) hierarchical status. In the second part, Mr Square travels
in a dream to the one-dimensional universe of Lineland, whose inhabitants
are unable to conceive of a two-dimensional universe; he is in turn
visited from Spaceland by a three-dimensional visitor - named Sphere
because he is spherical - whom Mr Square cleverly persuades to believe in
four-dimensional worlds as well. Flatland is a study in MATHEMATICS and
PERCEPTION, and has stayed popular since its first publication. See also:
DIMENSIONS; HISTORY OF SF.
ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE INVISIBLE MAN
The INVISIBLE MAN.
ABE, KOBO
(1924-1993) Japanese novelist, active since 1948, several of whose later
novels have been translated into English. He is known mainly for his work
outside the sf field, like Suna no Onna (1962; trans E.Dale Saunders as
Woman in the Dunes 1964 US), and has been deeply influenced by Western
models from Franz KAFKA to Samuel Beckett (1906-1989); the intensely
extreme conditions to which he subjects his alienated protagonists allow a
dubious sf interpretation of novels like Moetsukita Chizu (1967; trans
E.Dale Saunders as The Ruined Map 1969 US), or Tanin no Kao (1964; trans
E.Dale Saunders as The Face of Another 1966 US). However, Dai-Yon Kampyoki
(1959; trans E.Dale Saunders as Inter Ice Age 4 1970 US) is undoubtedly
sf. It is a complex story set in a near-future Japan threatened by the
melting of the polar icecaps. The protagonist, Professor Katsumi, has been
in charge of developing a computer/information system capable of
predicting human behaviour. This system, fatally for him, predicts his
compulsive refusal to go along with his associates and his government in
the creation of genetically engineered children, adapted for life in the
rising seas. Most of the novel, narrated by Katsumi, deals with a

philosophical confrontation between his deeply alienated refusal of the
future and the computer's knowing representations of that refusal and the
alternatives to it. The resulting psychodramas include a mysterious murder
and the enlistment of his unborn child into the ranks of the mutated
water-breathers. A later novel, Hako-Otoko (1973; trans E.Dale Saunders as
The Box Man 1973 US) has some borderline sf elements; its protagonist
walks about and lives in a large cardboard carton along with many other
Tokyo residents who have refused a life of normalcy. Hakobune Sakura
Maru1984; (trans Juliet Winter Carpenter as The Ark Sakura 1988 US)
expands that basic metaphor in a tale about a man obsessively engaged with
his bomb shelter. Beyond the Curve (coll trans Juliet Winters Carpenter
1991 US) collects sf short stories - some sf - published in Japan 1949-66.
See also: DISASTER; GENETIC ENGINEERING; JAPAN; PSYCHOLOGY; UNDER THE SEA.
ABEL, R(ICHARD) COX
Charles BARREN.
aB HUGH, DAFYDD
(1960- ) US writer, whose Welsh-sounding name has been legalized. He is
perhaps best known for his novella, "The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured his
Larinks, a Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk" (1990 AISFM). Most of his work is
fantasy, or-in the case of the Arthur War Lord sequence, comprising Arthur
War Lord (1994) and Far Beyond the Wave (1994)-is sf with a fantasy
coloration. The sequence features the adventures of a man who, via TIME
TRAVEL convention, chases a female CIA agent into Arthurian times, where
she is attempting to assassinate the king, and thus to change history.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Fallen Heroes (1994) is unexceptionable.
ABLEMAN, PAUL
(1927- ) UK novelist known mainly for work outside the sf field whose
first story of genre interest is The Prophet Mackenbee for Lucifer in
1952, about an sf writer and inventor who surrounds himself with disciples
in an absurd world. His first book, I Hear Voices (1958 France). The
Twilight of the Vilp (1969) is not so much sf proper as an informed and
sophisticated playing with the conventions of the genre in a FABULATION
about the author of a work and his relation to its components. The
eponymous Galaxy-spanning Vilp cannot, therefore, be taken literally.
ABORIGINAL SCIENCE FICTION
US magazine published from Massachusetts by Absolute Entertainment Inc.
and more recently by the Second Renaissance Foundation Inc., ed Charles C.
RYAN, first issue Oct 1986, 5 issues in both 1987 and 1988, then
bimonthly; 30 issues to Dec 1991, quarterly from 1992, currently
suspended, last issue seen 45/46 Spring 1994. The original format was 24pp
tabloid (11 x 17in; about 280 x 430mm), but changed to smallBEDSHEET with
4 in 1987. A feature is the use of full-page, full-colour illustration
throughout the magazine, which from 8 (1988) to 22 (1990) was printed
entirely on slick paper: cover art for every story, as the editor put it.
The title results from an ongoing but not very good joke about the
publisher, envisaged as a crazy alien, who produces the magazine for the
aboriginals of Earth. The fiction has been reasonable but seldom
excellent, with the work of little known writers like Robert A.Metzger

mixed, very occasionally, with that of big names like Larry NIVEN. The
regular book-review columns are by Darrell SCHWEITZER and Janice M.Eisen.
Editor Ryan previously brought out the magazine GALILEO (1976-80), and
continues, as he did then, to make most of his sales through subscription
rather than newsstand purchases. At the end of 1991, with a hiatus in the
bimonthly appearance, the future of this courageous but never very
exciting magazine looked uncertain, with production and (increased)
postage costs no longer covered by sales. 1992 saw three double issues
only; 1993 saw four issues, two labelled as doubles; there was only one
double issue in 1994 due to illness in the editor's family. In early 1995
the title was offered for sale, though publisher/editor Ryan said he would
stay on as editor if asked by the new owners, if any. A spin-off reprint
anthology in magazine format is Aboriginal Science Fiction, Tales of the
Human Kind: 1988 Annual Anthology (anth chap 1988) ed Ryan.
ABOUT, EDMOND (FRANCOIS VALENTIN)
(1828-1885) French writer of much fiction, some of it sf, notably L'homme
a l'oreille cassee (1862; trans Henry Holt as The Man with the Broken Ear
1867 US; vt Colonel Fougas' Mistake 1878 UK; vt A New Lease of Life 1880
UK), which is included in A New Lease of Life, and Saving a Daughter's
Dowry (coll trans 1880 UK). In this tale a mummified military man is
revived 46 years after his death and causes havoc with his Napoleonic
jingoism. Another work in an English-language version is The Nose of a
Notary (trans 1863 US; vt The Notary's Nose 1864; vt The Lawyer's Nose
1878 UK), which is included in The Notary's Nose and Other Stories (coll
trans 1882 UK). See also: MONEY.
ABRAMOV, ALEXANDER
(1900-1985) and SERGEI (1944- ) Russian authors of the sf adventure novel
Horsemen from Nowhere (trans George Yankovsky 1969 Moscow). One of their
short stories appears in Vortex (anth 1970) ed C.G.Bearne. A later novel
is Journey across Three Worlds (trans Gladys Evans with other stories as
coll 1973 Moscow).
ABSENT MINDED PROFESSOR, THE
Film (1961). Walt Disney. Dir Robert Stevenson, starring Fred MacMurray,
Nancy Olson, Keenan Wynn. Screenplay Bill Walsh. 97 mins. B/w.
Historically important as the financially successful template for a great
many lightweight, comparatively low-budget sf comedies from the Disney
studio, though it was not their first live-action fantasy comedy (The
Shaggy Dog, 1959). Subsequent movies in a similar vein include The
Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969), The Love Bug (1969) and The Cat from
Outer Space (1978); because these are largely assembly-belt products aimed
at children, they do not receive entries in this volume. TAMP, perhaps the
best, features MacMurray as a high-school science teacher who accidentally
invents flubber (flying rubber), an ANTIGRAVITY substance he fits in a
Model-T Ford. The flying scenes (matte work by Peter Ellenshaw) are
astonishingly proficient for the period, but the science is puerile, the
humour broad and the characters stereotyped. MacMurray gives one of his
most charmingly deft performances. The sequel was Son of Flubber (1963).
ABSOLUTE ENTERTAINMENT LTD

ABORIGINAL SCIENCE FICTION.
ABSOLUTE MAGNITUDE
US SEMIPROZINE, from 1993, current, four issues to spring 1995,
small-BEDSHEET format, ed and pub Warren Lapine from Greenfield,
Massachusetts. Subtitled "The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures", AM
began life as Harsh Mistress, but that title-intended to echo Robert
A.HEINLEIN's novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) - sounded like a
bondage 'zine to magazine distributors, and the magazine was retitled (its
numbering resuming with #1) with its third issue, Fall/Winter 1994. Its
production values improved after the first two issues, and AM is now a
professional-looking magazine, whichpublishes a broader selection of sf
than its title implies. Contributors have included Terry BISSON,
C.J.CHERRYH, and Hal CLEMENT. Aimed at a wider readership than most of the
US semiprozines that began to appear in the mid-nineties, AM may realize
its ambition to develop into a fully professional publication.
ABSURDIST SF
The word absurdist became fashionable as a literary term after its
consistent use by the French novelist and essayist Albert Camus
(1913-1960) to describe fictions set in worlds where we seem at the mercy
of incomprehensible systems. These systems may work as metaphors of the
human mind - outward manifestations of what J.G.BALLARD means when he uses
the term INNER SPACE - or they may work as representations of a cruelly
arbitrary external world, in which our expectations of rational coherence,
whether from God or from human agencies, are doomed to frustration, as in
the works of Franz KAFKA. In this encyclopedia we cross-refer works of
Absurdist sf to the blanket entry on FABULATION, but do not thereby wish
to discount the usefulness of Absurdist sf as a separate concept,
especially when we are thinking about some sf written between about 1950
and 1970. During this period Brian W.ALDISS, Ballard, David R.BUNCH, Jerzy
KOSINSKI, Michael MOORCOCK, Robert SHECKLEY, John T.SLADEK, Kurt VONNEGUT
Jr and many other writers tended to create metaphorical worlds shaped
externally by a governing PARANOIA, and internally tortured by the psychic
white noise of ENTROPY. Kafka haunted this work, of course - because Kafka
can easily be transposed into terms that suggest a political protest. Most
Absurdist writers were also indebted (a debt they tended freely to
acknowledge) to the 19th-century Symbolist tradition, as exemplified by
figures like Jean-Marie VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM, and to its 20th-century
successors, from the 'pataphysics of Alfred JARRY to the Surrealism of
Andre Breton (1896-1966) and many others. In the end, however, it might be
suggested that Absurdist writers - as they did with Kafka - translated the
Symbolist and Surrealist traditions into political terms: in the end,
Absurdist sf can be seen as a protest movement. The world - they said should not be absurd.
ABYSS, THE
Film (1989). 20th Century-Fox. Dir James CAMERON, starring Ed Harris,
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Todd Graff, Michael Biehn. Prod Gale Anne
HURD. Screenplay Cameron. 139 mins. Colour. Despite the largest budget of
the period's undersea fantasies (DEEPSTAR SIX; LEVIATHAN) at about $60
million, and despite director Cameron's impressive track record with sf,

this was not a box-office smash. A nuclear-missile-armed US submarine
crashes at the edge of the Cayman Trough and the crew of an experimental,
submersible drilling rig are asked to help rescue any survivors. A
hurricane cuts communications with the surface; the laid-back, jokey rig
workers clash with a paranoid team of naval commandos who blame everything
on the Russians; and ALIENS dwelling in the Trench (looking a little like
angels, and therefore good) teasingly appear to some people but not
others. The peace-lovers clash stereotypically with the nuke the aliens
group, and mayhem is followed by transcendental First Contact. Cameron is
good at the low-key establishment of team cameraderie among working
people, but the cute-alien theme and the relationship between estranged
husband and wife have traces of marshmallow softness. The moral-blackmail
finale of an earlier version of the script (aliens threaten world with
tidal waves if world peace is not restored) is replaced by something that
looks more like divine intervention. The film's moralizing is attractive
but simplistic. More interestingly, most of the miraculous technology on
display is either actually possible today or plausible for the NEAR
FUTURE. The novelization, whose author not unfairly calls it a real novel,
is The Abyss (1989) by Orson Scott CARD. In 1992 the director's cut THE
ABYSS: SPECIAL EDITION was released, at 171 mins more than half an hour
longer than the original. The restored climax (tough-minded version) may
be more interesting in theory, but in practice is marred by unconvincing
special effects in the tidal wave. Richer characterization and more
cold-war politics do not compensate for the now sluggish pacing of this
bloated variant edition. See also: CINEMA; MONSTER MOVIES; UNDER THE SEA.
ACE BOOKS
US paperback-publishing company founded by pulp-magazine publisher
A.A.Wyn in 1953. Under editor Donald A.WOLLHEIM, Ace published a high
proportion of sf, much of it in the Ace Double format of two titles bound
together DOS-A-DOS. The series included the first or early novels of many
writers who became famous, such as John BRUNNER, Samuel R.DELANY, Philip
K.DICK, Gordon R.DICKSON, Thomas M.DISCH, R.A.LAFFERTY, Ursula K.LE GUIN,
Robert SILVERBERG and Roger ZELAZNY. Terry CARR became an editor in 1964
and later began the Ace Science Fiction Specials series, which received
considerable praise. Carr left the company in 1971, followed by Wollheim,
who began his own imprint, DAW BOOKS, in 1972. Carr rejoined as freelance
editor of a second series of Ace Specials in 1984, this time restricted to
first novels; it included NEUROMANCER (1984) by William GIBSON, THE WILD
SHORE (1984) by Kim Stanley ROBINSON, Green Eyes (1984) by Lucius SHEPARD,
In the Drift (fixup 1985) by Michael SWANWICK and Them Bones (1984) by
Howard WALDROP. In-house editors Beth MEACHAM and Terri WINDLING and, for
a longer period, Susan Allison, also ensured that some high-quality books
continued to be published in the 1980s, although the emphasis remained on
sf adventure. In 1975 Ace had been sold to Grosset & Dunlap; a new sale in
July 1982 saw Ace absorbed by Berkley and ceasing to be an independent
company, although it remained as an imprint. Ace had been publishing,
prior to the sale, more sf than any other publisher; the
Putnam/Berkley/Ace combination continued to dominate US sf publishing, in
terms of number of books, until 1987, thereafter maintaining second place.
Further reading: There are several checklists of Ace sf publications, but

none are complete. Double your Pleasure: The Ace SF Double (1989 chap) by
James A.Corrick is useful for doubles, while Dick Spelman's Science
Fiction and Fantasy Published by Ace Books (1953-1968) (1976 chap) covers
the important years. See also: HUGO.
ACE DOUBLES
Ace Doubles were well-known for two reasons: their format - two short
novels bound back-to-back - and their titles - to say they were dramatic
was an understatement. Terry Carr, who worked for Ace during the sixties,
used to say that if the Bible had been reprinted as an Ace Double, the Old
Testament would be called "Master of Chaos" and the New Testament would be
called "The Man with Three Souls."
ACKER, KATHY
(1948- ) US-born writer and playwright, in the UK for many years before
returning to the USA in 1989. KA expresses an apocalyptic sense of the
latterday world in works whose tortured absurdity (FABULATION) sometimes
catches the reader by surprise, or transfixes the spectator of one of her
plays, which have been as a whole perhaps more telling than her prose. The
Birth of the Poet (staged 1984 Rotterdam; in Wordplays 5, anth 1986) runs
a gamut from the nuclear HOLOCAUST of the first act to the picaresque jigs
and jags of the second and third. Two novels - Don Quixote (1986), a
surrealistic afterlife fantasy, and Empire of the Senseless (1988), which
features the not-quite terminal coupling of fleshly beings and ROBOTS are of some interest. Her use of sf icons and decor in this book resembles
that of William S.BURROUGHS, especially in the homage to CYBERPUNK it
contains, conveyed by cut-ups of text by William GIBSON.
ACKERMAN, FORREST J(AMES)
(1916- ) US editor, agent and collector. A reader of the sf magazines
from their inception, he was an active member of sf FANDOM from his early
teens, and as early as 1932 served as associate editor of The Time
Traveller, the first FANZINE. For many decades thereafter he wrote stories
and articles prolifically for fan journals - using his own name and a wide
variety of elaborate pseudonyms, including Dr Acula, Jacques DeForest
Erman, Alden Lorraine, Vespertina Torgosi, Hubert George Wells (cheekily),
Weaver Wright and many others - and becoming known in fan circles as Mr
Science Fiction; he won several awards for these activities, including a
HUGO in 1953 for Number One Fan Personality. His first story was A Trip to
Mars in 1929 for the San Francisco Chronicle, which won a prize for the
best tale by a teenager; some of his more interesting work was assembled
in Science Fiction Worlds of Forrest J.Ackerman and Friends (anth 1969).
He collected sf books and memorabilia from the very first, publishing in I
Bequeath (to the Fantasy Foundation) (1946 chap) a bibliography of the
first 1300 items, and eventually housing his 300.000-item library, which
he called the Fantasy Foundation, in a 17-room house in Hollywood, the
maintenance of which proved difficult to manage over the years. The
library was further celebrated in Souvenir Book of Mr Science Fiction's
Fantasy Museum (1978 chap Japan). Disposals of collectable books have been
made at times; and part of the library was auctioned in 1987, grossing
over $550.000. FJA was active as an editor for many years, though not
deeply influential; he edited both the magazine Famous Monsters of

Filmland (1958-82) and the US PERRY RHODAN series (1969-77), as well as
several sf anthologies, including The Frankenscience Monster (anth 1969),
Best Science Fiction for 1973 (anth 1973), Gosh! Wow! (Sense of Wonder)
(anth 1982), Mr Monster's Movie Gold (anth 1982) and The Gernsback Awards,
Vol 1: 1926 (anth 1982). Notorious for his punning and use of simplified
words, he is credited with introducing the term SCI FI in 1954. He was
agent for a number of writers, notably A.E.VAN VOGT. His wife, Wendayne
Ackerman (1912-1990), was also a fan, and translated the STRUGATSKI
brothers' Trudno byt' bogom (1964) as Hard to be a God (1973 US). Other
works: In Memoriam H.G.Wells 1866-1946 (1946 chap) with Arthur Louis
Jocquel II; James Warren Presents the Best from Famous Monsters of
Filmland (anth 1964); James Warren Presents Famous Monsters of Filmland
Strike Back! (anth 1965); James Warren Presents Son of Famous Monsters of
Filmland (anth 1965); Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977 chap),
nonfiction; J.R.R.Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: A Fantasy Film (1979
chap), nonfiction; A Reference Guide to American Science Fiction Films,
Volume 1 (1981) with A.W.Strickland, only 1 vol published; Lon of 1000
Faces (1983), nonfiction; Fantastic Movie Memories (1985), nonfiction;
Reel Futures (anth 1994) with Jean Stine. See also: COLLECTIONS.
ACKERMAN, WENDAYNE
Forrest J.ACKERMAN.
ACKROYD, PETER
(1949- ) UK author who began writing as a poet before turning to literary
biographies of figures like T.S.Eliot and Charles DICKENS. His third
novel, Hawksmoor (1985), interestingly conflates the occult geography of
London constructed by an 18th-century architect - who closely resembles
the historical Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736) - with a series of
20th-century murders investigated by an Inspector Hawksmoor. As an
alternate-world FABULATION, the book verges on sf. First Light (1989)
invokes a similar sense of time-slippage, featuring a 20th-century
neolithic dig over which appears a night sky whose star positions are
those of neolithic times. Other Works: The House of Doctor Dee (1993).
ACTION MAGAZINES
FUTURE FICTION.
ACTON, Sir HAROLD (MARIO MITCHELL)
(1904-1994) UK writer, long resident in Italy, best known for highly
civilized reflections, in books like Memoirs of an Aesthete (1948), on his
own style of life. His sf novel, Cornelian (1928), tells of a popular
singer in a world which privileges old age.
ACULA, Dr
Forrest J.ACKERMAN.
ACWORTH, ANDREW
(?-?) UK writer - possibly, according to Darko SUVIN, a barrister named
Andrew Oswald Acworth (?1857-?) - whose sf novel, A New Eden (1896), set
100 years in the future, features the escape of two depressed protagonists
from the decaying republican UK to an egalitarian island UTOPIA which
fails to cheer them up - despite electric factories, birth control and

euthanasia.
ADAM AND EVE
Brian W.ALDISS has given the name Shaggy God stories to stories which
provide simple-minded sf frameworks for Biblical myths. A considerable
fraction of the unsolicited material submitted to sf magazines is reputed
to consist of stories of this kind, the plot most frequently represented
being the one in which survivors of a space disaster land on a virgin
world and reveal (in the final line) that their names are Adam and Eve.
Understandably, these stories rarely see print, although A.E.VAN VOGT's
Ship of Darkness (1947) was reprinted in Fantastic in 1961 as a fantasy
classic; another example is The Unknown Assassin (1956) by Hank JANSON.
Straightforward variants include Another World Begins (1942; vt The
Cunning of the Beast) by Nelson BOND (the most prolific writer of pulp
Shaggy God stories), in which God is an ALIEN and Adam and Eve are
experimental creatures who prove too clever for him; and Evolution's End
(1941) by Robert Arthur, in which an old world lurches to its conclusion
and Aydem and Ayveh survive to start the whole thing over again. Charles
L.HARNESS's The New Reality (1950) goes to some lengths to set up a
framework in which a new universe can be created around its hero, his
faithful girlfriend, and the arch-villain (Dr Luce), and uses the idea to
far better effect. More elaborate sf transfigurations of Biblical
mythology include George Babcock's Yezad (1922) and Julian Jay SAVARIN's
Lemmus trilogy (1972-7); a more subtle and sophisticated exercise along
these lines can be found in Shikasta (1977) by Doris LESSING. Adam and Eve
are, of course, frequently featured in allegorical fantasies, notably
George MACDONALD's Lilith (1895), Mark TWAIN's Extracts from Adam's Diary
(1904) and Eve's Diary (1906), George Bernard SHAW's Back to Methuselah
(1921), John Erskine's Adam and Eve (1927), John CROWLEY's The Nightingale
Sings at Night (1989) and Piero Scanziani's The White Book (1969; trans
Linda Lappin 1991 UK). The names Adam and Eve - particularly the former are frequently deployed for their metaphorical significance. Adam is a
natural name to give to the first ROBOT or ANDROID, and thus we find Eando
BINDER writing a biography of Adam Link, Robot (1939-42; fixup 1965), and
William C.ANDERSON chronicling the career of Adam M-1 (1964). Adam Link
was provided with an Eve Link, but what they did together remains a matter
for speculation. VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM had earlier described Thomas Alva
Edison's creation of the perfect woman in L'Eve future (1886; trans Robert
M.Adams as Tomorrow's Eve 1982). The metaphor is found also in some
SUPERMAN stories, including two novels entitled The New Adam, one by
Noelle ROGER (1924; trans L.P.O.Crowhurst 1926 UK), the other by Stanley
G.WEINBAUM (1939), and in prehistoric romances, most notably in
Intimations of Eve (1946) and Adam and the Serpent (1947) by Vardis FISHER
and in the final volume of George S.VIERECK and Paul ELDRIDGE's Wandering
Jew trilogy, The Invincible Adam (1932), where much is made of the matter
of the lost rib. Alfred BESTER's last-man-alive story Adam and No Eve
(1941) uses the names in an ironic vein. More ambitious sf Creation myths
of a vaguely Adamic kind can be found in stories in which human beings are
enabled to play a part in cosmological processes of creation or
re-creation (COSMOLOGY). One example is van Vogt's The Seesaw (1941;
integrated into THE WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER fixup 1951); others are James

BLISH's The Triumph of Time (1958; vt A Clash of Cymbals) and Charles
Harness's THE RING OF RITORNEL (1968). Shaggy God stories briefly became
popular alternatives to orthodox history in the works of Immanuel
VELIKOVSKY and Erich VON DANIKEN, and it is likely that they will continue
to exert a magnetic attraction upon the naive imagination. See also:
ANTHROPOLOGY; EVOLUTION; ORIGIN OF MAN; RELIGION.
ADAMOVIC, IVAN
(1967- ) Czech translator and writer, an associate editor of the sf
magazine Ikarie and a contributor to Encyklopedie science fiction
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1992). His Czech SF in the Last Forty
Years appeared in SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, Mar 1990.
ADAMS, DOUGLAS (NOEL)
(1952- ) UK scriptwriter and novelist who worked 1978-80 as an editor on
the DR WHO tv series; his two Doctor Who episodes, Shada and City of
Death, have provided plot elements for more than one of his later novels,
but have not themselves been novelized. He came to wide notice with his
HITCH HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY sequence, whose first incarnation was as
two BBC RADIO series, the first in 1978, the second in 1980, totalling 12
parts in all, the last 2 scripted in collaboration with producer John
Lloyd. Both series were assembled as The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the
Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts (coll 1985) ed Geoffrey Perkins; the
scripts as published here were modified for subsequent radio performances,
and were also released on record albums in a format different from any of
the radio incarnations. The second and third full reworkings of the
sequence - as a tv series and as the first two volumes of a series of
novels - seem to have been put together more or less simultaneously, and,
although there are some differences between the two, it would be difficult
to assign priority to any one version of the long and episodic plot. In
novel form, the sequence comprises The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
(1979; vt The Illustrated Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy 1994) The
Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe and
Everything (1982), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984); and Mostly
Harmless (1992). The first three volumes were assembled as The
Hitchhiker's Trilogy (omni 1984 US), and the first four were assembled as
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts (omni 1986;
vt The Hitchhiker's Quartet 1986 US; rev with Young Zaphod Plays it Safe
added vt The More than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide: Five Stories 1987 US).
One basic premise frames the various episodes contained in the differing
versions of the sequence, though volumes three and four of the novel
sequence carry on into new territory, and volume five seems to terminate
the entire sequence, with an effect of melancholia. A human-shaped ALIEN,
on contract to revise the eponymous guide, has under the name Ford Prefect
spent some time on Earth, where he befriends the protagonist of the
series, Arthur Dent. On learning that Earth is to be demolished to make
way for an interstellar bypass, Prefect escapes the doomed planet with
Dent, and the two then hitch-hike around the Galaxy, undergoing various
adventures. Various satirical points are made, and, as the sequence moves
ahead into the final episodes, DA's underlying corrosiveness of wit
becomes more and more prominent. Earth proves to have been constructed

eons earlier as a COMPUTER whose task it is to solve the meaning of life;
but its demolition, only seconds before the answer is due, puts paid to
any hope that any meaning will be found. For the millions of fans who
listened to the radio version, watched the tv episodes, and laughed
through the first two volumes of the book sequence, volumes three and four
must have seemed punitively unamused by the human condition; and in Mostly
Harmless (1992), a late addition to the sequence, the darkness only
increases. But a satirist's intrinsic failure to be amused by pain did, in
retrospect, underlie the most ebullient earlier moments. A second sequence
- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark
Tea-Time of the Soul (1988) - confirmed the dark bent of DA's talent.
Though the tales inventively carry the eponymous detective through a wide
range of sf experiences, this second series did not gain the extraordinary
response of the first. In a sense that only time can test, it could be
said that the Hitch Hiker's Guide has become folklore. Other works: The
Meaning of Liff (1983; rev vt The Deeper Meaning of Liff 1990) with John
Lloyd, humour; The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book (anth
1986), ed (anon), charity fundraising book for Comic Relief; Last Chance
to See (1991) with Mark Carwardine, nonfiction book promoting wildlife
conservation, with text by DA to photographs by Carwardine; Doctor Who:
The Scripts: Pirate Planet (1994), reprinting an old DR WHO script. About
the author: Don't Panic: The Official Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Companion (1988; rev 1993 with David K.Dickson) by Neil GAIMAN. See also:
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GAMES AND TOYS; GODS
AND
DEMONS; HUMOUR; MUSIC; MYTHOLOGY; ROBOTS; SATIRE; SPACE OPERA.
ADAMS, FREDERICK UPHAM
(1859-1921) US writer whose two sf UTOPIAS - President John Smith: The
Story of a Peaceful Revolution (Written in 1920) (1897) and The Kidnapped
Millionaires: A Tale of Wall Street and the Tropics (1901) - put into
stiffly earnest narrative form the arguments that direct election of the
US President would lead to a benevolent socialism and that the tycoons of
Wall Street were a doomed race.
ADAMS, HARRIET S(TRATEMEYER)
(1892-1982) US writer and, after the death of her father Edward
STRATEMEYER in 1930, editor of his publishing syndicate. Under a variety
of house names, including Carolyn Keene, Franklin W.Dixon and Laura Lee
Hope, she was herself responsible for writing approximately 170 of the
Stratemeyer Syndicate novels about the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys,
Nancy Drew and others; for further titles, she supplied plots and
outlines. Under the house name Victor APPLETON she wrote the last in the
first series of Tom Swift books, Tom Swift and his Planet Stone (1935),
and successfully revived Tom Swift, or, to be more accurate, his son Tom
Swift, Jr., in a new series which began publication in 1954 (TOM SWIFT for
details). About the author: Stratemeyer Pseudonyms and Series Books: An
Annotated Checklist of Stratemeyer and Stratemeyer Syndicate Publications
(1982) ed Deirdre Johnson.
ADAMS, HUNTER
Jim LAWRENCE.

ADAMS, JACK
Collaborative pseudonym of US writers Alcanoan O. Grigsby (?-?) and Mary
P.Lowe (?-?) whose Nequa, or The Problem of the Ages (1900) carries the
character Jack Adams - in fact a wronged woman named Cassie - to polar
regions, where she and her bigoted fiance (who does not recognize her as
Adams) are rescued by the inhabitants of Altruria (William Dean HOWELLS,
though there is no explicit connection between his utopias and this one).
The Altrurians take them to their country, which lies inside a HOLLOW
EARTH, demonstrate their flying machines and other marvels, and explain
their sexually egalitarian, non-Christian culture (FEMINISM). Nequa, as
Jack Adams now calls herself, will marry her fiance only if he attains
some wisdom. Nequa is a surprisingly enjoyable salutary tale.
ADAMS, JOHN
John S.GLASBY.
ADAMS, LOUIS J.A.
Joe L.HENSLEY; Alexei PANSHIN.
ADAMS, NEAL
(1941- ) Influential and remarkably prolific US COMIC-strip artist
specializing in the SUPERHERO genre, with a strong, gutsy yet
sophisticated line style. His continued claim to fame probably rests
largely on his ground-breaking personal reinterpretation of DC COMICS's
Batman. He attended the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan, then worked
for Archie Comics 1959-60 before establishing himself in syndicated
newspaper strips with a strip version of the tv series Ben Casey, which he
drew for dailies and Sundays 1962-6. He assisted on other newspaper strips
including Bat Masterson (1961), Peter Scratch (1966), Secret Agent
Corrigan (1967) and Rip Kirby (1968). He began working for National
Periodical Publications (DC Comics) in 1967 drawing Deadman (Strange
Adventures 206-216). Other characters to benefit from his innovative touch
included Spectre, SUPERMAN, Batman (in Detective Comics, 9 issues between
369, Nov 1967, and 439, Mar 1974, and 9 issues in Batman between 219, Feb
1970, and 255, Apr 1974, as well as in other associated titles), Flash,
Green Lantern and the X-MEN. He drew the team-up title Green Lantern-Green
Arrow continuously from 76 (Apr 1970) to 89 (May 1972). 85 (Snowbirds
Don't Fly) and 86 (They Say It'll Kill Me, But They Won't Say When) of
this title featured a story about the drug scene and won an Academy of
Comic-Book Art Award for NA and writer Denny O'Neill. His output for DC,
MARVEL COMICS and other leading publishers was prolific throughout the
1970s and early 1980s; in addition he produced book covers, film posters,
advertising art and the set and costume design for an unsuccessful sf
play, Warp (1973; THEATRE). In 1987 he formed his own publishing company,
Continuity Comics. NA has also had a high profile as a campaigner for
comics creators' rights, notably in connection with the financial
recognition by DC of SUPERMAN's creators, Jerry SIEGEL and Joe Shuster. NA
was involved in the setting-up of the Academy of Comic-Book Art (ACBA) in
1970.
ADAMS, PAMELA CRIPPEN
Robert ADAMS.

ADAMS, (FRANKLIN) ROBERT
(1932-1990) US soldier and writer who was best known for the
post-HOLOCAUST Horseclans sequence of adventures set after AD2500 in a
series of states occupying what was once the USA and dominated from behind
the scenes by a strain of immortal MUTANTS, while an unsavoury group of
human scientists opposes them from a secret base. Occasionally the reader
gains sight of repulsive sects who decayedly parody 20th-century movements
- ECOLOGY, for instance - that were betes-noires of the author, who was
not averse to polemical intrusions. The sequence comprises The Coming of
the Horseclans (1975; exp 1982), Swords of the Horseclans (1977) and
Revenge of the Horseclans (1977) - all three being assembled as Tales of
the Horseclans (omni 1985) - A Cat of Silvery Hue (1979), The Savage
Mountains (1980), The Patrimony (1980), Horseclans Odyssey (1981), The
Death of a Legend (1981), The Witch Goddess (1982), Bili the Axe (1982) which contained a background summary - Champion of the Last Battle (1983),
A Woman of the Horseclans (1983), Horses of the North (1985), A Man Called
Milo Morai (1986), The Memories of Milo Morai (1986), Trumpets of War
(1987), Madman's Army (1987) and The Clan of the Cats (1988). Two
SHARED-WORLD anthologies - Friends of the Horseclans (anth 1987) and
Friends of the Horseclans II (anth 1989) - also appeared, both edited with
his wife, Pamela Crippen Adams (1961- ). A second series, the Castaways in
Time alternate-history TIME-TRAVEL sequence, comprises Castaways in Time
(1980), The Seven Magical Jewels of Ireland (1985), Of Kings and Quests
(1986), Of Chiefs and Champions (1987), Of Myths and Monsters (1988) and
Of Beginnings and Endings (1989). Most of his remaining work, including
another, unfinished series, was fantasy; some of his anthologies, however
- including Robert Adams' Book of Alternate Worlds (anth 1987) with Pamela
Crippen Adams and Martin H.GREENBERG, Robert Adams' Book of Soldiers (anth
1988) with P.C.Adams and Greenberg, and Alternatives (anth 1989) with P.C.
Adams - were of sf interest. Other works: The Stairway to Forever
sequence, comprising The Stairway to Forever (1988) and Monsters and
Magicians (1988). As Editor: Barbarians (anth 1985) with Martin
H.Greenberg and Charles G.WAUGH and Barbarians II (anth 1988) with
P.C.Adams and Greenberg; the Magic in Ithkar sequence, with Andre NORTON,
comprising Magic in Ithkar (anth 1985), 2 (anth 1985), 3 (anth 1986) and 4
(anth 1987); Hunger for Horror (anth 1988) with P.C.Adams and Greenberg;
Phantom Regiments (anth 1990) with P.C.Adams and Greenberg. See also:
ALTERNATE WORLDS; SWORD AND SORCERY.
ADAMS, SAMUEL HOPKINS
(1871-1958) US writer, prolific and popular author of novels and
screenplays, including that for the film It Happened One Night (1934). He
wrote an sf novel with Stewart Edward WHITE (whom see for details), The
Mystery (1907), about a ship found at sea with no crew aboard, and
supplying an sf explanation for their disappearance: side-effects of a new
radioactive element. The sequel, The Sign at Six (1912), also sf, is by
White alone. SHA's solo sf books are The Flying Death (1908), an
impossible crime tale in which Long Island, New York, is invaded by a
pteranodon; and The World Goes Smash (1938), a NEAR-FUTURE story of a US
civil war in which New York is devastated.

ADAMS, TERRY A.
(? - ) US writer whose Sentience sequence - Sentience: A Novel of First
Contact (1986) and The Master of Chaos (1989) - begins in the conflict
between true humans and D'Neerans, who are human telepaths (ESP), and
builds into a SPACE-OPERA sequence involving new races and challenges.
They are told in a skittish but engaging style designed to give some sense
of a telepath's way of thinking.
ADAMSKI, GEORGE
UFOS.
AD ASTRA
UK magazine, small-BEDSHEET format, published by Rowlot Ltd, ed James
Manning, 16 issues, bimonthly, Oct/Nov 1978-Sep/Oct 1981, only first 2
issues dated. Its subtitle, Britain's First ScienceFact/ScienceFiction
Magazine, contained the seeds of its eventual demise. It attempted to
cover too many fields, most in no real depth. The fiction (about 2 stories
an issue) - mainly from UK authors, including John BRUNNER, Garry
KILWORTH, David LANGFORD and Ian WATSON - was supplemented by a melange of
film, book, games and theatre reviews, together with cartoon strips, sf
news (from Langford), science articles, many about astronomy, and
PSEUDO-SCIENCE articles.
ADDEO, EDMOND G.
Richard M.GARVIN.
ADDISON, HUGH
Pseudonym used by UK author and journalist Harry Collinson Owen
(1882-1956) for his future-WAR novel The Battle of London (1923), one of
several contemporary works which warned of a communist revolution in the
UK. It was given a slight twist by the inclusion of an advantageous German
attack on London.
ADELER, MAX
Principal pseudonym of US writer and businessman Charles Heber Clark
(1841-1915), who wrote also as John Quill, under which name he published
The Women's Millennium (1867), possibly the first sex-role-reversal
DYSTOPIA. Set in an indeterminate future, and told from the perspective of
an even later period when some balance has been achieved, it is a
remarkably cutting demonstration of the foolishness of male claims to
natural superiority. As MA, he specialized in rather facetious tall tales,
both sf and fantasy, many of which end in the perfunctory revelation that
all was a dream. This convention aside, they remain of interest,
especially Professor Baffin's Adventures (1880; vt The Fortunate Island
1882), a long lost-race tale (LOST WORLDS) which first appeared in
Beeton's Christmas Annual (anth 1880 UK) as centrepiece to The Fortunate
Island - a linked assemblage of stories and sketches by various authors
which made up the bulk of the volume - and was later published in An Old
Fogey and Other Stories (coll 1881 UK; rev vt The Fortunate Island and
Other Stories 1882 US). It is MA's story that almost certainly supplied
Mark TWAIN with the basic premise and some of the actual plot of A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). When accused of
plagiarism, Twain responded evasively. Other works: Random Shots (coll

1878 UK); Transformations (coll 1883 UK); A Desperate Adventure (coll 1886
UK); By the Bend of the River (coll 1914). About the author: 'Professor
Baffin's Adventures' by Max Adeler: the Inspiration for A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur's Court? by David KETTERER in Mark Twain Journal 24
(Spr 1986); 'John Quill': The Women's Millennium, introduced by Ketterer
in Science Fiction Studies 15 (1988); Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee:
Reconsiderations and Revisions, by Horst H.Kruse in American Literature
62, 3 (Sept 1990). See also: SHARED WORLDS.
ADERCA, FELIX
ROMANIA.
ADLARD, MARK
Working name used by UK writer Peter Marcus Adlard (1932- ) for all his
books. An arts graduate of Cambridge University, he was until his
retirement in 1976 a manager in the steel industry. His knowledge of
managerial and industrial problems plays a prominent role in his Tcity
trilogy: Interface (1971), Volteface (1972) and Multiface (1975). The
series is set in a city of the NEAR FUTURE. By calling it Tcity, MA
plainly intended to confer on it a kind of regimented anonymity in the
manner of Yevgeny ZAMIATIN; at the same time, he was probably making a pun
on Teesside, the industrial conurbation in the northeast of England where
he was raised (also, in some north-England dialects t'city means simply
the city). With a rich but sometimes sour irony, and a real if distanced
sympathy for the problems and frustrations of both management and workers,
MA plays a set of variations, often comic, on AUTOMATION, hierarchical
systems, the MEDIA LANDSCAPE, revolution, the difficulties of coping with
LEISURE, class distinction according to INTELLIGENCE, fantasies of SEX and
the stultifying pressures of conformity. The Greenlander (1978) is the
first volume of a projected non-genre trilogy, further volumes of which
have not appeared. His books are ambitious in scope and deserve to be more
widely known. About the author: The Many Faces of Adlard by Andy
Darlington in Arena 7, March 1978.
ADLER, ALLEN A.
(1916-1964) US writer, mostly for films, co-author of the story used as
the basis for the film FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956), although he had nothing to
do with the novelization by W.J.Stuart (Philip MACDONALD). AAA's only sf
novel was an unremarkable adventure, also set on a planet threatened by a
monster: Mach 1: A Story of the Planet Ionus (1957; vt Terror on Planet
Ionus 1966).
ADOLPH, JOSE B.
LATIN AMERICA.
ADVENT: PUBLISHERS
Chicago-based specialist publishing house, owned by sf fans, which
publishes critical and bibliographical material. The first book was Damon
KNIGHT's In Search of Wonder (1956); other notable volumes include James
BLISH's two collections of critical essays (as William Atheling Jr) and,
later, his posthumous The Tale that Wags the God (coll 1987), as by Blish.
A: P's most important scholarly publication has been Donald H.TUCK's The
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy through 1968 (vol 1 1974; vol

2 1978; vol 3 1982). See also: SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS.
ADVENTURES OF BRISCO COUNTY, JR., THE
Us tv series (1993-1994). Boam/Cuse Productions for Warner Bros. Series
creators/exec prods Jeffrey Boam, Carlton Cuse. Co-prods David Simkins,
Paul Marks. Writers included Boam, Cuse, Simkins, Brad Kern, John
McNamara, John Wirth. Directors included Kim Manners, Andy Tennant.
Starred Bruce Campbell as Brisco, Julius Carry as Lord Bowler, Christian
Clemenson as Socrates Poole. Recurring players included Billy Drago as
John Bly, Kelly Rutherford as Dixie Cousins, John Pyper-Ferguson as Pete
Hutter, John Astin as Professor Wickwire. Two-hour pilot Sep 1993,
followed by 26 one-hour episodes. Part WILD, WILD WEST, part Indiana
Jones, and part just plain strange, this Fox Newtork Western series
followed a familiar pattern: despite being a solid hit with critics and sf
fans, its rating were spectacularly low, and not even a landslide finish
in TV Guide's 1994 "Save Our Shows" viewer poll persuaded network
executives to renew it for a second season. The convoluted premise
featured popular horror-film star Campbell as Brisco County, Jr., the
Harvard-educated son of a noted bounty hunter. Drawn to 1890s San
Francisco following the murder of his father, Brisco Jr. learns that
notorious outlaw John Bly has larger schemes in mind. Turning bounty
hunter himself to track down Bly, he comes across a glowing orb with
mysterious powers, in which Bly is also interested. Much of the show's run
was spent pursuing Bly and his associates, while other episodes paid
homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and television's THE AVENGERS
(1961-69). Quirky, sly humour was the show's hallmark: a train is stopped
by the Wile E.Coyote gimmick of painting a lifelike mural onto a boulder
blocking the track; Brisco's horse Comet races prototype motorcycles and
cracks a safe ("He's not so smart; took him two tries!"); and one episode
featured a Blackbeard-like pirate who is relocated to the Nevada desert.
Recurring plots and characters were a major part of the show's appeal,
with Drago's silkily dangerous Bly ultimately revealed as a time
traveller, and eccentric outlaws the order of the day. The clever writing,
energetic performances and excellent production values may not have made
TAOBC, J a ratings success, but reruns and taped episodes are worth
seeking out.
ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION, THE
Film (1984). Sherwood Productions. Dir W.D.Richter, starring Peter
Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Lloyd.
Screenplay Earl Mac Rauch. 103 mins. Colour. The crazed but incoherent
tale of rock-musician-neurosurgeon-particle-physicist Banzai (Weller), a
kind of imaginary 1930s pulp hero with a distinctly 1980s ambience. In
this episode Banzai defeats an alien INVASION which began in 1938 (as
described by Orson Welles, who pretended it was fiction) led by
frantically overacting John Lithgow. The film is ill directed and badly
photographed, and appears to have been made by underground junk
intellectuals who accidentally stumbled over a fairly big budget. REPO
MAN, from the same year, is a wittier and better organized example of what
might be called designer cult movies. See also: ANDROIDS; WAR OF THE
WORLDS.

ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, THE
SUPERMAN.
ADVENTURES OF THE ROCKETEER
TheROCKETEER.
ADYE, TIM
M.H.ZOOL.
A.E. or AE
Pseudonym used by Irish poet George William Russell (1867-1935) for all
his writing. In 1886 he and William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) helped found
the Dublin Lodge of the Theosophical Society, and much of his work
reflects a mystical agenda - not very coherently in the supernatural tales
assembled in The Mask of Apollo, and Other Stories (coll 1904), but with
very much more force in The Interpreters (1922), a philosophical fiction
set in an idealized venue. More elegiacally and more concretely, in The
Avatars: A Futurist Fantasy (1932), set in a future Ireland, this agenda
comes to life in the form of two supernal beings who hauntingly invoke a
vision of a world less abandoned to materialism, and thus draw the
protagonists to the margin of the Great Deep, as Monk Gibbon puts it in
his long and informative essay on A.E.'s work which introduces The Living
Torch (coll 1937), a posthumous volume of nonfiction.
AELITA
Film (1924). Mezhrabpom. Dir Yakov A.Protazanov, starring Nikolai
M.Tseretelli, Igor Ilinski, Yulia Solntseva. Screenplay Fyodor Otzep,
Alexei Faiko, based on Aelita (1922) by Alexei TOLSTOY. 78 mins cut from
120 mins. B/w. This striking example of early sf cinema is a satiric
comedy in which a group of Soviet astronauts travel to Mars, where they
find the mass of the people living under an oppressive regime and spark
off an abortive revolution; one of them teaches the lovely daughter of a
Martian leader how to kiss. A is a very stylized silent film; its
futuristic, Expressionistic sets, by Isaac Rabinovitch of the Kamerny
Theatre, were to influence the design in FLASH GORDON. The sf elements in
the story are vigorous and witty (though in the end it is revealed to be
All a Dream), but occupy only a small part of the film. See also: CINEMA.
AELITA AWARD
RUSSIA.
A FOR ANDROMEDA
UK tv serial (1961). A BBC TV production. Prod Michael Hayes, Norman
Jones, written John ELLIOT from a storyline by Fred HOYLE. 7 episodes, the
first 6 45 mins, the last 50 mins. B/w. The cast included Peter Halliday,
John Nettleton, Esmond Knight, Patricia Neale, Frank Windsor, Mary Morris,
Julie Christie. A radio signal transmitted from the Andromeda Galaxy
proves, when decoded by maverick scientist Fleming (Halliday), to contain
instructions for the building of a supercomputer. Once built by Earth
scientists, the COMPUTER in turn provides instructions on how to create a
living being. The final result is a beautiful young girl, named,
naturally, Andromeda, mentally linked to the ever-more-powerful computer;
her existence causes a great deal of controversy within the government.

She helps Fleming wreck the computer, and is hurt and (seemingly) drowned.
The story is intelligently presented despite its absurdities. The serial
brought Julie Christie into the public eye for the first time. The
novelization by Hoyle and Elliot is A for Andromeda (1962). The tv sequel
was The ANDROMEDA BREAKTHROUGH (1962).
AFRICA
ARABIC SF; BLACK AFRICAN SF.
AGHILL, GORDON
Pseudonym used collaboratively by Robert SILVERBERG and Randall GARRETT
on two stories in 1956.
AGUILERA, JUAN MIGUEL
SPAIN.
AHERN, JERRY
Working name of US author Jerome Morrell Ahern (1946- ), most of whose
output consists of violent post-HOLOCAUST novels, most notably in his
Survivalist sequence, in which ex-CIA agent John Rourke attempts to
preserve his family after a global nuclear conflict. Perhaps the most
influential series in the subgenre of SURVIVALIST FICTION, it comprises
Survivalist 1: Total War (1981), 2: The Nightmare Begins (1981), 3: The
Quest (1981), 4: The Doomsayer (1981), 5: The Web (1983), 6: The Savage
Horde (1983), 7: The Prophet (1984), 8: The End is Coming (1984), 9: Earth
Fire (1984), 10: The Awakening (1984), 11: The Reprisal (1985), 12: The
Rebellion (1985), 13: Pursuit (1986), 14: The Terror (1987), 15: Overlord
(1987), 16: The Arsenal (1988), 17: The Ordeal (1988), unnumbered: The
Survivalist: Mid-Wake (1988), 18: The Struggle (1989), 19: Final Rain
(1989), 20: Firestorm (1990) and 21: To End All War (1990). The
continuation - beginning with the unnumbered The Survivalist: The Legend
(1991), 22: Brutal Conquest (1991); 23: Call to Battle (199224: Blood
Assassins (1993), 25: War Mountain (1993), 26: Countdown (1993) and 27:
Death Watch (1993) - takes place after the Earth's atmosphere has been
destroyed by a catastrophic fire, and Rourke has saved his family and
himself by entering cryogenic sleep, emerging after 500 years to find a
world deserted except for the personnel of the Eden Project - fresh from
500 years of hibernation aboard a fleet of space shuttles - and surviving
groups of Nazis (sic) and fanatical communists. A second but similar
sequence, the Defender series, comprises The Defender 1: The Battle Begins
(1988), 2: The Killing Wedge (1988), 3: Out of Control (1988), 4: Decision
Time (1989), 5: Entrapment (1989), 6: Escape (1989), 7: Vengeance (1989),
8: Justice Denied (1989), 9: Death Grip (1990), 10: The Good Fight (1990),
11: The Challenge (1990) and 12: No Survivors (1990). With his wife,
Sharan A(nn) Ahern (1948- ), whose contributions were sometimes anonymous,
he wrote the short Takers sequence, comprising The Takers (1984) and River
of Gold (1985), as well as some singletons. He also contributed Deathlight
(1982) to the long-running Nick Carter sequence, writing as Nick CARTER.
Other works: The Freeman (1986), Miamigrad (1987), WerewolveSS (1990) and
The Kamikaze Legacy (1990), all with Sharon A.Ahern. See also: SOCIAL
DARWINISM.
AHERN, SHARON A.

Jerry AHERN.
AH! NANA
METAL HURLANT.
AHONEN, ERKKI
FINLAND.
AI
The commonly used acronym for Artificial Intelligence, an item of
terminology used increasingly often in information science, and hence in
sf, since the late 1970s. Most writers would agree that for a COMPUTER or
other MACHINE of some sort to qualify as an AI it must be self-aware.
There are as yet none such in the real world. See also: CYBERNETICS;
CYBERSPACE.
AIKEN, JOAN (DELANO)
John AIKEN; ALTERNATE WORLDS.
AIKEN, JOHN (KEMPTON)
(1913-1990) US-born UK writer, son of Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) and
brother of Joan Aiken (1924- ) and Jane Aiken Hodge (1917- ). JA published
his first sf story, Camouflage, with ASF in 1943, in the Probability Zero
sequence of short-shorts; though his first sizeable effort wasDragon's
Teeth, with NW in 1946; but did not remain active in the field. His only
novel, World Well Lost (fixup 1970 as John Paget; as JA 1971 US), based on
his 1940s NW stories, was published by ROBERT HALE LIMITED. It describes
with some energy a conflict between a totalitarian Earth and free-minded
colonists in the system of Alpha Centauri. Conrad Aiken, Our Father (1989)
with Joan Aiken and Jane Aiken Hodge, is a revealing memoir.
AIKIN, JIM
Working name of US writer James Douglas Aikin (1948- ), whose sf novel,
Walk the Moons Road (1985), gave operatic colour to a moderately intricate
PLANETARY ROMANCE featuring aliens, humans, seas, politics and sex on a
planet which is not Earth. His second novel, The Wall at the Edge of the
World (1993), more ambitiously sets its protagonist - a non-TELEPATH in a
post-HOLOCAUST society - the task of reconciling his home culture with
that of the wild women who live in hinterlands.
AINSBURY, RAY
A.Hyatt VERRILL.
AINSWORTHY, RAY
Lauran Bosworth PAINE.
AIRSHIPS
TRANSPORTATION.
AIR WONDER STORIES
US BEDSHEET-size PULP MAGAZINE, 11 issues, July 1929-May 1930, published
by Stellar Publishing Corp., ed Hugo GERNSBACK, managing editor David
Lasser. This was a prompt comeback by Gernsback after the filing of
bankruptcy proceedings against his Experimenter Publishing Co., with which
he had founded AMAZING STORIES. AWS announced itself in its first

editorial as presenting solely flying stories of the future, strictly
along scientific-mechanical-technical lines... to prevent gross
scientific-aviation misinformation from reaching our readers. To this end
Gernsback hired three professors and one Air Corps Reserve major, whose
names appeared prominently on the masthead. The stories were by the
foremost pulp writers of the day, including Edmond HAMILTON, David KELLER,
Victor MACCLURE, Ed Earl REPP, Harl VINCENT and Jack WILLIAMSON; Raymond
Z.GALLUN published his first story here. The cover designs for all issues
were by Frank R.PAUL, who had previously worked on AMZ. A sister magazine,
SCIENCE WONDER STORIES, began one month earlier, in June 1929. In 1930
Gernsback merged them into WONDER STORIES.
AITMATOV, CHINGIZ (TOREKULOVICH)
(1928- ) Formerly Soviet (now Kyrgyzstanian) writer and diplomat, known
mostly for his mainstream fiction (for which he has been a Nobel
candidate), which poetically depicts Man-Nature relations. His one venture
into sf is I Dol'she Veka Dlitsia Den' (1980; trans John French as The Day
Lasts Longer than a Hundred Years 1983 UK): part of this novel
realistically depicts life in a small Kirghiz town near a secret Soviet
cosmodrome, and part comprises a NEAR-FUTURE thriller set on board the
Soviet-US carrier Parity, which encounters ALIENS. Written before
perestroika, the novel raised controversy due to its obvious pacifist
mood.
AKERS, ALAN BURT
Kenneth BULMER.
AKERS, FLOYD
L.Frank BAUM.
AKI, TANUKI
[s] Charles DE LINT.
AKIRA
Animated film (1987). Akira Committee. Dir Katsuhiro OTOMO, from a
screenplay by Otomo and Izo Hashimoto, based on the graphic epic Akira
(begun 1982) by Otomo. Animation studio: Asahi. Chief animator: Takashi
Nakamura. 124 mins. Colour. A is the most successful attempt yet to
transfer sophisticated, state-of-the-art comic-book graphics to the
screen. Story-boarded in great detail by the comic's own creator, it is
set in the teeming edginess of Neo-Tokyo in 2019. The convoluted story
deals with two ex-orphanage kids in a biker gang, one tough and one a
loser; the weaker one, Tetsuo, develops PSI POWERS, discovers the remnants
of superbeing Akira stored at Absolute Zero below the Olympic Stadium,
metamorphoses, and becomes (along with others with whom he melds) the seed
of a new cosmos. The link between persecution, adolescent angst and
psychic power seems to come straight from Theodore STURGEON's MORE THAN
HUMAN (1953), and the opportunistic plotting draws also on Philip K.DICK,
Ridley SCOTT's BLADE RUNNER and many other sources. Though A oscillates
too extremely between bloody violence, sardonic cynicism (about
scientists, the military, religious cults, politicians, terrorists) and
dewy-eyed sentiment, and though the novelistic narrative - which despite
weepy moments is rather low on human feeling - is unfolded awkwardly and

at too great a length, much can be forgiven. Its sheer spectacle and the
density and stylish choreography of its apocalyptic, CYBERPUNK ambience
are unparalleled in cartoon films. See also: CINEMA; COMICS; JAPAN.
AKSYONOV, VASSILY (PAVLOVICH)
(1932- ) Russian MAINSTREAM WRITER, one of those whose careers began in
the Khrushchev Thaw and who responded to the subsequent chill by
emigrating to the USA, where he became a citizen. His sf novel, Ostrov
Krym (1981 US; trans anon as The Island of Crimea 1984 US) is a powerful
ALTERNATE WORLD story set in a Crimea which is an ISLAND (not, as in this
world, a peninsula), and where a pre-revolutionary government has
survived; the real-life model is obviously China/Taiwan. The Soviet Union
soon invades.
ALBANIA
There has been some sf in Albanian since the late 1960s, but not until
1978 was the first sf book published there. By 1991 there had been about a
dozen, of which five were by Thanas Qerama, a prolific writer and also an
editor of juvenile science magazines; examples are Roboti i pabindur
Disobedient Robot (coll 1981), Nje jave ne vitin 2044 One Week in the Year
2044 (1982) and Misteri i tempullit te lashte Mystery of the Old Church
(1987). The following authors have written at least one sf book each:
A.Bishqemi, N.Deda, B.Dedja, Vangjel Dilo, Dh. Konomi, Flamur Topi and
B.Xhano.
ALBANO, PETER
(?1940- ) US writer known mainly for the Seventh Carrier sequence of
military-sf adventures about a WWII Japanese aircraft carrier which has
been unthawed decades later from polar ice to do good: The Seventh Carrier
(1983), The Second Voyage of the Seventh Carrier (1986), Return of the
Seventh Carrier (1987), Attack of the Seventh Carrier (1989), Trial of the
Seventh Carrier (1990) and Revenge of the Seventh Carrier (1992), Ordeal
of the Seventh Carrier (1992), Challenge of the Seventh Carrier (1993) and
Super Carrier (1994). His other novels, Waves of Glory (1989) and Tides of
Valor (1990), are unremarkable.
ALBING PUBLICATIONS
COSMIC STORIES; STIRRING SCIENCE STORIES.
ALBRECHT, JOHANN FRIEDRICH ERNST
GERMANY.
ALDANI, LINO
ITALY.
ALDERMAN, GILL
Working name of UK writer Gillian Alderman (1941- ), who worked in
microelectronics research until 1984. She began publishing sf with the
first two volumes of her Guna sequence - The Archivist: A Black Romance
(1989) and The Land Beyond: A Fable (1990) - which established her very
rapidly as a figure of interest in the field. As usual in the PLANETARY
ROMANCE, the world in which the tales are set (Guna) is heavily
foregrounded throughout both volumes. Quite similar to Earth - with which
its more technologically advanced civilizations have had concourse for

many centuries - Guna is perhaps most remarkable for the wide range of
relationships found there between the sexes, running from the complex
matriarchy depicted in the first volume through Earth-like patterns of
repressive patriarchy hinted at broadly in the second. Although it is
clearly GA's intent, dexterously achieved, to make some FEMINIST points
about male hierarchical thinking, she abstains from creating characters
whose consciousnesses reflect these issues. The homosexual male
protagonists of The Archivist, for instance, whose long love affair and
estrangement provide much of the immediate action of the book, exhibit no
normal resentment at the dominant role of women; and the political
revolution fomented by the elder lover has little or nothing to do with
sexual politics in any Earthly sense. The long timespan of The Archivist,
the Grand Tour evocations of landscape which make up much of its bulk, and
its distanced narrative voice mark a contemplative sf fantasist of the
first order. The Land Beyond, a chill book set in a cold part of the
planet, is less engaging; but GA is clearly a writer to welcome.
ALDISS, BRIAN W(ILSON)
(1925- ) UK writer, anthologist and critic, educated at private schools,
which he disliked. He served in the Royal Signals in Burma and Sumatra,
was demobilized in 1948 and worked as an assistant in Oxford bookshops.
BWA began his writing career by contributing fictionalized sketches about
bookselling to the trade magazine The Bookseller; these were later
assembled as his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). BWA began
publishing sf with Criminal Record for Science Fantasy in 1954. There
followed such notable tales as Outside (1955), Not for an Age (1955),
which was a prizewinner in an Observer sf competition), There is a Tide
(1956) and Psyclops (1956), all of which appeared in BWA's first sf
volume, Space, Time and Nathaniel (Presciences) (coll 1957). No Time Like
Tomorrow (coll 1959 US) reprints 6 stories from the 14 in Space, Time and
Nathaniel and adds another 6. These early stories were ingenious and
lyrical but dark in mood. BWA remains a prolific writer of short stories
(his total well exceeded 300 by 1995), almost all under his own name,
though he has used the pseudonyms C.C.Shackleton, Jael Cracken and John
Runciman for a few items. All the World's Tears (1957), Poor Little
Warrior (1958), But Who Can Replace a Man? (1958), Old Hundredth (1960)
and A Kind of Artistry (1962) are among the most memorable stories
collected in The Canopy of Time (coll of linked stories 1959); of the
stories listed, only All the World's Tears and But Who Can Replace a Man?
appear, with expository passages that make the book into a loose future
HISTORY, in the substantially different Galaxies like Grains of Sand (coll
of linked stories 1960 US; with 1 story added rev 1979 UK). The Airs of
Earth (coll 1963; with 2 stories omitted and 2 stories added, rev vt
Starswarm 1964 US) and BEST SCIENCE FICTION STORIES OF BRIAN W.ALDISS
(coll 1965; rev 1971; vt Who Can Replace a Man? 1966 US) also assemble
early work. BWA received a 1959 award at the World SF CONVENTION as most
promising new author, but his work was less well received in certain
quarters where his emphasis on style and imagery, and his lack of an
engineering mentality, were regarded with suspicion. His first novel,
Non-Stop (1958; cut vt Starship 1959 US), is a brilliant treatment of the
GENERATION STARSHIP and also the theme of CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; it has

become accepted as a classic of the field. Vanguard from Alpha (1959 dos
US; with Segregation added, rev as coll vt Equator: A Human Time Bomb from
the Moon! 1961 UK) - which became part of The Year Before Yesterday
(1958-65; fixup 1987 US; rev vt Cracken at Critical: A Novel in Three Acts
1987 UK) - and Bow Down to Nul (1960 US dos; text restored vt The
Interpreter 1961 UK) are much less successful, but The Primal Urge (1961
US) is an amusing treatment of SEX as an sf theme. Always ebullient in his
approach to sexual morality, BWA was one of the authors who changed the
attitudes of sf editors and publishers in this area during the 1960s. The
Long Afternoon of Earth (fixup 1962 US; exp vt Hothouse 1962 UK) won him a
1962 HUGO award for its original appearance as a series of novelettes. It
is one of his finest works. Set in the FAR FUTURE, when the Earth has
ceased rotating, it involves the adventures of humanity's remnants, who
live in the branches of a giant, continent-spanning tree (DEVOLUTION).
Criticized for scientific implausibility by James BLISH and others,
Hothouse (BWA's preferred title) nevertheless displays all his linguistic,
comic and inventive talents. It also illustrates BWA's main thematic
concerns, namely the conflict between fecundity and ENTROPY, between the
rich variety of life and the silence of death. The Dark Light Years (1964)
is a lesser work, though notable for the irony of its central dilemma how one comes to terms with intelligent ALIENS who are physically
disgusting. Greybeard (cut 1964 US; full version 1964 UK) is perhaps BWA's
finest sf novel. It deals with a future in which humanity has become
sterile due to an accident involving biological weapons. Almost all the
characters are old people, and their reactions to the incipient death of
the human race are well portrayed. Both a celebration of human life and a
critique of civilization, it has been underrated, particularly in the USA.
Earthworks (1965; rev 1966 US) is a minor novel about OVERPOPULATION. An
Age (1967; vt Cryptozoic! 1968 US) is an odd and original treatment of
TIME TRAVEL, which sees time as running backwards with a consequent
reversal of cause and effect, comparable but superior to Philip K.DICK's
Counter-Clock World (1967), published in the same year. During the latter
half of the 1960s BWA was closely identified with NEW-WAVE sf, and in
particular with the innovative magazine NEW WORLDS, for which he helped
obtain an Arts Council grant in 1967. Here BWA published increasingly
unconventional fiction, notably his novel Report on Probability A (1968;
written 1962 but unpublishable until the times changed), an sf
transposition of the techniques of the French anti-novelists into a
Surrealist story of enigmatic voyeurism, and his Acid-Head War stories,
collected as Barefoot in the Head: A European Fantasia (fixup 1969). Set
in the aftermath of a European war in which psychedelic drugs have been
used as weapons, the latter is written in a dense, punning style
reminiscent of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939); it is an extraordinary
tour de force. The novella The Saliva Tree (1965 FSF; 1988 chap dos US)
won a NEBULA and featured in The Saliva Tree and Other Strange Growths
(coll 1966). It is an entertaining tribute to H.G.WELLS, though the plot
is reminiscent of The Colour out of Space (1927) by H.P.LOVECRAFT. Further
volumes of short stories include Intangibles Inc. (coll 1969; with 2
stories omitted and 1 added, rev vt Neanderthal Planet 1970 US), The
Moment of Eclipse (coll 1970), which won the BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD
in 1972, and The Book of Brian Aldiss (coll 1972 US; vt Comic Inferno 1973

UK). Novels of this period include Frankenstein Unbound (1973), a
time-travel fantasia which has Mary SHELLEY as a major character and
presents in fictional form the myth-of-origin for sf he advocated in his
history of the genre, Billion Year Spree (1973; rev and exp with David
WINGROVE as Trillion Year Spree 1986, which won a Hugo); and The
Eighty-Minute Hour: A Space Opera (1974 US), a comedy in which BWA's
penchant for puns and extravagant invention is thought by some critics to
be overindulged. His long fantasy novel The Malacia Tapestry (1976) is a
much more balanced work. Set in a mysterious, never-changing city, it is a
love story with fantastic elements. Beautifully imagined, it is a
restatement of BWA's obsessions with entropy, fecundity and the role of
the artist, and was perhaps his best novel since Greybeard. Brothers of
the Head (1977), about Siamese-twin rock stars and their third, dormant
head, was a minor exercise in Grand Guignol; with an additional story, it
was also assembled as Brothers of the Head, and Where the Lines Converge
(coll 1979). Enemies of the System: A Tale of Homo Uniformis (1978) was a
somewhat disgruntled DYSTOPIAN novella. Moreau's Other Island (1980; vt An
Island Called Moreau 1981 US) plays fruitfully with themes from H.G.Wells:
during a nuclear war a US official discovers that bioengineering
experiments performed on a deserted island are a secret project run by his
own department. Stories collected in Last Orders and Other Stories (coll
1977; vt Last Orders 1989 US), New Arrivals, Old Encounters (coll 1979)
and Seasons in Flight (coll 1984) were unwearied, though sometimes hasty.
The 1970s also saw BWA beginning to publish non-sf fictions more
substantial than his previous two, The Brightfount Diaries and The Male
Response (1961 US). He gained his first bestseller and some notoriety with
The Hand-Reared Boy (1970). This, with its two sequels, A Soldier Erect
(1971) and A Rude Awakening (1978), deals with the education, growth to
maturity and war experiences in Burma of a young man whose circumstances
often recall the early life of the author; the three were assembled as The
Horatio Stubbs Saga (omni 1985). More directly connected to his sf are
four novels set in contemporary and near-future Europe, loosely connected
through the sharing of some characters. The sequence comprises Life in the
West (1980), listed by Anthony BURGESS in his Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best
in English since 1939 (1984); Forgotten Life (1988); Remembrance Day
(1993) and Somewhere East of Life: Another European Fantasia (1994). The
four flirt brusquely with autobiography, but are of greatest interest for
their tough-minded grasp of late 20th century European cultures. A
novella, Ruins (1987 chap), also explores contemporary material. Some
years had passed since his last popular success as an sf novelist when BWA
suddenly reasserted his eminence in the field with the publication of the
Helliconia books - HELLICONIA SPRING (1982), which won the 1983 JOHN
W.CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD, Helliconia Summer (1983) and Helliconia Winter
(1985) - three massive, thoroughly researched, deeply through-composed
tales set on a planet whose primary sun is in an eccentric orbit around
another star, so that the planet experiences both small seasons and an
eon-long Great Year, during the course of which radical changes afflict
the human-like inhabitants. Cultures are born in spring, flourish over the
summer, and die with the onset of the generations-long winter. A team from
an exhausted Terran civilization observes the spectacle from orbit.
Throughout all three volumes, BWA pays homage to various high moments of

pulp sf, rewriting several classic action climaxes into a dark idiom that
befits Helliconia. As an exercise in world-building, the Helliconia books
lie unassailably at the heart of modern sf; as a demonstration of the
complexities inherent in the mode of the PLANETARY ROMANCE when taken
seriously, they are exemplary; as a Heraclitean revery upon the
implications of the Great Year for human pretensions, they are (as is
usual with BWA's work) heterodox. Dracula Unbound (1991) continues through
a similar time-travel plot the explorations of Frankenstein Unbound,
although this time in a lighter vein. Two summatory collections - Best SF
Stories of Brian W.Aldiss (coll 1988; vt Man in his Time: Best SF Stories
1989), not to be confused with the similarly titled 1965 collection, and A
Romance of the Equator: Best Fantasy Stories (coll 1989), not to be
confused with A Romance of the Equator (1980 chap), which publishes the
title story only - closed off the 1980s, along with Science Fiction Blues
(coll 1988). This latter collects materials used by BWA in Dickensian
stage readings he began to give in the 1980s at conventions and other
venues; these readings have reflected something of the vast, exuberant,
melancholy, protean corpus of one of the sf field's two or three most
prolific authors of substance, and perhaps its most exploratory; this
impatient expansiveness is also reflected in the stories assembled as A
Tupolev Too Far (coll 1993). Kindred Blood in Kensington Gore (1992 chap),
a short play, gave BWA the opportunity to conduct on stage an imaginary
conversation in similar terms with the posthumous Philip K.DICK. BWA has
been an indefatigable anthologist and critic of sf. His anthologies (most
of which contain stimulating introductions and other matter) include
Penguin Science Fiction (anth 1961), Best Fantasy Stories (anth 1962),
More Penguin Science Fiction (anth 1963), Introducing SF (anth 1964), Yet
More Penguin Science Fiction (anth 1964) - assembled with his earlier two
Penguin anths as The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus (omni 1973 - and The
Penguin World Omnibus of Science Fiction (anth 1986) with Sam J.LUNDWALL.
The Book of Mini-Sagas I (anth 1985) and The Book of Mini-Sagas II (anth
1988) are associational collections of 50-word stories. The Space Opera
series of anthologies comprises Space Opera (anth 1974), Space Odysseys
(anth 1975), Evil Earths (anth 1975), Galactic Empires (anth in 2 vols
1976) and Perilous Planets (anth 1978). Anthologies ed in collaboration
with Harry HARRISON are: Nebula Award Stories II (1967); the Year's Best
SF series comprising Best SF: 1967 (1968 US; vt The Year's Best Science
Fiction No 1 1968 UK), The Year's Best Science Fiction No 2 (anth 1969;
exp vt Best SF: 1968 1969 US), The Year's Best Science Fiction No 3 (anth
1970; vt Best SF: 1969 1970 US), The Year's Best Science Fiction No 4
(anth 1971; vt Best SF: 1970 1971 US), The Year's Best Science Fiction No
5 (anth 1972; vt Best SF: 1971 1972 US), Best SF: 1972 (anth 1973 US; vt
The Year's Best Science Fiction No 6 1973 UK), Best SF: 1973 (anth 1974
US; cut vt The Year's Best Science Fiction No 7 1974 UK), Best SF 1974
(anth 1975 US; cut vt The Year's Best Science Fiction No 8 1975 UK) and
The Year's Best Science Fiction No 9 (anth 1976; vt Best SF: 1975 1976
US); All About Venus (anth 1968 US; exp vt Farewell, Fantastic Venus! A
History of the Planet Venus in Fact and Fiction 1968 UK); The
Astounding-Analog Reader (anth in 2 vols 1968 UK paperback of 1973 divided
Vol 1 into 2 vols, and Vol 2 did not appear at all from this publisher);
and the Decade series comprising Decade: The 1940s (1975), The 1950s

(1976) and The 1960s (1977). Also with Harrison, with whom BWA has had a
long and, considering the wide gulf between their two styles of fiction,
amazingly successful working relationship, he edited two issues of SF
Horizons (1964-5), a short-lived but excellent critical journal, and
Hell's Cartographers (anth 1975), a collection of six autobiographical
essays by sf writers, including the two editors. Most of BWA's nonfiction
has a critical relation to the genre, though Cities and Stones: A
Traveller's Jugoslavia (1966) is a travel book. The Shape of Further
Things (1970) is autobiography-cum-criticism. Billion Year Spree (1973), a
large and enthusiastic survey of sf, is BWA's most important nonfiction
work (HISTORY OF SF); its argument that sf is a child of the intersection
of Gothic romance with the Industrial Revolution gives profound pleasure
as a myth of origin, though it fails circumstantially to be altogether
convincing; the book was much expanded and, perhaps inevitably, somewhat
diluted in effect as Trillion Year Spree (1986) with David WINGROVE.
Science Fiction Art (1975) is an attractively produced selection of sf
ILLUSTRATION with commentary, mostly from the years of the PULP MAGAZINES,
and Science Fiction Art (1976) - note identical title - presents a
portfolio of Chris FOSS's art. Science Fiction as Science Fiction (1978
chap), This World and Nearer Ones (coll 1979), The Pale Shadow of Science
(coll 1985 US) and... And the Lurid Glare of the Comet (coll 1986 US)
assemble some of his reviews and speculative essays. As literary editor of
the Oxford Mail for many years, BWA reviewed hundreds of sf books; his
later reviews have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the
Guardian, the Washington Post and elsewhere. BWA is a regular attender of
sf conventions all over the world, a passionate supporter of
internationalism in sf and all other spheres of life, and a consistent
attacker of UK-US parochialism. Like Harlan ELLISON in the USA, BWA is an
energetic and charismatic speaker and lecturer. He was guest of honour at
the 23rd World SF Convention in 1965 (and at several since) and received
the BSFA vote for Britain's most popular sf writer in 1969. In 1977 he won
the first James Blish Award (AWARDS) and in 1978 a PILGRIM AWARD, both for
excellence in SF criticism. He was a founding Trustee of WORLD SF in 1982,
and its president from 1983. Bury My Heart at W.H.Smith's: A Writing Life
(1990; trade edition cut by 6 chapters 1990), a memoir, reflects on the
public life of a man of letters in the modern world. Other works: A Brian
Aldiss Omnibus (omni 1969); Brian Aldiss Omnibus 2 (omni 1971); Pile:
Petals from St Klaed's Computer (graph 1979) with Mike Wilks, an
illustrated narrative poem; Foreign Bodies (coll 1981 Singapore); Farewell
to a Child (1982 chap), poem; Science Fiction Quiz (1983); Best of Aldiss
(coll 1983 chap); My Country 'Tis Not Only of Thee (1986 chap); The Magic
of the Past (coll 1987 chap); Sex and the Black Machine (1990 chap), a
collaged jeu d'esprit; Bodily Functions: Stories, Poems, and a Letter on
the Subject of Bowel Movement Addressed to Sam J.Lundwall on the Occasion
of His Birthday February 24th, A.D.1991 (coll 1991); Journey to the Goat
Star (1982 The Quarto as The Captain's Analysis; 1991 chap US); Home Life
with Cats (coll 1992 chap), poetry. About the author: Aldiss Unbound: The
Science Fiction of Brian W.Aldiss (1977) by Richard Matthews; The Entropy
Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British New Wave in Science Fiction
(1983) by Colin GREENLAND; Apertures: A Study of the Writings of Brian
Aldiss (1984) by Brian GRIFFIN and David Wingrove; Brian W.Aldiss (1986)

by M.R.COLLINGS; Brian Wilson Aldiss: A Working Bibliography (1988 chap)
by Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE; A is for Brian (anth 1990) edited by Frank
Hatherley, a 65th-birthday tribute; The Work of Brian W.Aldiss: An
Annotated Bibliography and Guide (1992) by Margaret Aldiss (1933- ). See
also: ABSURDIST SF; ADAM AND EVE; ANTHOLOGIES; ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF;
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; BLACK HOLES; BOYS' PAPERS; BRITISH SCIENCE
FICTION ASSOCIATION; CLICHES; COSY CATASTROPHE; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL
WORKS ABOUT SF; DEFINITIONS OF SF; DISASTER; ECOLOGY; ESP; EVOLUTION;
FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GENETIC ENGINEERING; GODS AND DEMONS; GOLDEN AGE
OF SF;
GOTHIC SF; HIVE-MINDS; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; HORROR IN SF; IMMORTALITY;
ISLANDS; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION; METAPHYSICS;
MUSIC;
NEW WRITINGS IN SF; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; PARALLEL WORLDS; PASTORAL;
PERCEPTION; POCKET UNIVERSE; POETRY; PROTO SCIENCE FICTION; PSYCHOLOGY;
RADIO; RECURSIVE SF; ROBOTS; SOCIOLOGY; SPACE HABITATS.
ALDRICH, THOMAS BAILEY
(1836-1907) US writer responsible for Pansy's Wish: A Christmas Fantasy
(1869). Out of his Head, a Romance (coll of linked stories 1862) and The
Queen of Sheba (1877) are early examples of the marginal subgenre of sf in
which contemporary explorations in PSYCHOLOGY suggest storylines ranging
from amnesia to metempsychosis (and ultimately, it might be added,
channelling).
ALDRIDGE, ALAN
Stephen R.BOYETT.
ALEXANDER, DAVID
(? - ) US author of the Soldiers of War Western sequence as by William
Reed; of the Phoenix sequence of post-HOLOCAUST military-sf adventures,
comprising Dark Messiah (1987), Ground Zero (1987), Metalstorm (1988) and
Whirlwind (1988); and of vols 9-12 of the C.A.D.S. post-holocaust military
sequence under the house name Jan Sievert (Ryder SYVERTSEN). DA is not to
be confused with David M.ALEXANDER.
ALEXANDER, DAVID M(ICHAEL)
(1945- ) US lawyer and writer whose first sf novel, The Chocolate Spy
(1978), concerns the creation of an organic COMPUTER using cloned
braincells ( CONES), and whose second, Fane (1981), set on a planet whose
electromagnetic configurations permit the controlled use of MAGIC,
describes an inimical attempt to augment these powers. DMA is not to be
confused with David ALEXANDER.
ALEXANDER, JAMES B(RADUN)
(1831- ?) US writer whose sf fantasmagoria, The Lunarian Professor and
his Remarkable Revelations Concerning the Earth, the Moon and Mars;
Together with an Account of the Cruise of the Sally Ann (1909), might have
been excluded from this encyclopedia - on the grounds that the insectoid
Lunarian pedagogue and all that he surveys turn out to be a dream - were
it not that JBA's imagination, though patently influenced by H.G.WELLS, is
too vivid to be ignored. The altruistic three-sexed Lunarians, the future
HISTORY of Earth (derived from mathematical models, which the professor

passes on to the narrator), the TERRAFORMING of Mars, the journeys made
possible through ANTIGRAVITY devices - all are of strong sf interest.
ALEXANDER, ROBERT W(ILLIAMS)
(1905-1980) Irish author of several thrillers in the late 1920s and early
1930s under his own name before he adopted the pseudonym Joan Butler for
41 humorous novels. These latter, written in a very distinctive style,
have resonances of Thorne Smith (1892-1934) and P.G.WODEHOUSE. Cloudy
Weather (1940) and Deep Freeze (1951) centre on the resurrection of
Egyptian mummies by scientific means. Space to Let (1955) features the
building of a Venus rocket. Home Run (1958) is about the invention of
pocket-size atom bombs. ESP plays a prominent part in The Old Firm (1956),
while Bed and Breakfast (1933), Low Spirits (1945), Full House (1947) and
Sheet Lightning (1950) focus on the supernatural. RWA used his own name
for two further sf novels, still written in his well established humorous
style; both are set in the future and reflect on the aspirations of youth.
In Mariner's Rest (1943) a group of children shipwrecked on a South Sea
island during WWII are discovered some 10 years later running their own
community. Back To Nature (1945) describes how young people abandon the
comforts of a 21st-century city for the rigours of a more natural
lifestyle. Other works: Ground Bait (1941); Sun Spots (1942).
ALF
US tv series (1986-90). Warner Bros TV for NBC. Created by Paul Fusco and
Ed Weinberger. Prod Tom Patchett. Writers include Fusco, Patchett. Dirs
include Fusco, Patchett, Peter Bonerz. 25 mins per episode. Colour. ALF,
an alien life form - in the line of extraterrestrial descent from MY
FAVORITE MARTIAN and Mork in MORK AND MINDY, though also influenced
heavily by E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982), EXPLORERS (1985) and the
success of the Muppets - moves in with the Tanner family, a sitcom
collection of typical Americans, after his spaceship crashlands in their
garage. A furry puppet, somewhere between cute and obnoxious, voiced and
operated by series creator Paul Fusco, ALF mainly sits in the middle of
the living room insulting people, plotting to eat the family cat, making
tv-style smart-ass remarks and dispensing reassuring sentiment. The sf
premise aside, ALF is basically one of those stereotype sitcom characters
- like Benson (Robert Guillaume) in Soap or Sophia (Estelle Getty) in The
Golden Girls - whose otherness (extraterrestrial, racial, social or
mental) provides an excuse for them to comment rudely, satirically and
smugly on the foibles of everyone else. The regular cast includes Max
Wright, Anne Schedeen, Andrea Elson and Benji Gregory, as the Tanners, and
John LaMotta and Liz Sheridan, as the nosy neighbours straight from I Love
Lucy and Bewitched. See also: SATIRE.
ALFVEN, HANNES
Olof JOHANNESSON.
ALGOL
US SEMIPROZINE (1963-84) ed from New York by Andrew PORTER, subtitled The
Magazine about Science Fiction. A began as a duplicated FANZINE but in the
1970s became an attractive printed magazine in small-BEDSHEET format,
published four times a year. With 34, Spring 1979, it changed its name to

Starship; it ceased publication with 44, Winter/Spring 1984, its
20th-anniversary issue. A ran articles on sf and sf publishing, interviews
with authors, and reviews and texts of speeches. Regular columnists
included Vincent DI FATE (on sf artwork), Richard A.LUPOFF (on books),
Frederik POHL, and Susan WOOD (on fanzines and books). Occasional
contributors included Brian W.ALDISS, Alfred BESTER, Ursula K.LE GUIN,
Robert SILVERBERG, Ted WHITE and Jack WILLIAMSON. A, which shared the HUGO
for Best Fanzine in 1974, was much more interesting than its sister
publication, the monthly news magazine SF CHRONICLE, also ed Porter. The
latter still continues; the economics of magazine publishing meant that it
was the more ambitious and expensive publication that had to go.
ALGOZIN, BRUCE
Nick CARTER.
al-HAKIM, TAWFIQ
Tawfiq al-HAKIM.
ALIEN
Film (1979). 20th Century-Fox. Dir Ridley SCOTT, starring Sigourney
Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Yaphet
Kotto, Veronica Cartwright. Alien design H.R.GIGER. Screenplay Dan
O'Bannon, from a story by O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, with uncredited
input from prods Walter Hill and David Giler. 117 mins. Colour. One of the
most influential sf films ever made, A is actually much closer to HORROR
in its adherence to genre conventions. The merchant spaceship Nostromo, on
a routine voyage, visits a planet where one of the crew is attacked by a
crablike creature in an abandoned ALIEN spacecraft. Back aboard the
Nostromo this metamorphoses, partly inside the crewman's body, into an
almost invulnerable, rapidly growing, intelligent carnivore. Science
officer Ash (Holm), who unknown to the crew is a ROBOT instructed to keep
the alien alive for possible commercial exploitation, attacks Ripley
(Weaver); he is messily dismantled. The alien picks off, piecemeal, all
the remaining crew but Ripley. There is a fine music score by Jerry
Goldsmith. Giger's powerful alien design, inorganic sleekness blended with
curved, phallic, organic forms, renders the horror sequences extremely
vivid, but for all their force they are plotted along deeply conventional
lines. Considerably more original is the sense - achieved through design,
terse dialogue and excellent direction - that this is a real working
spaceship with a real, blue-collar, working crew, the future unglamorized
and taken for granted. Also good sf are the scenes on the alien spacecraft
(Giger's design again) which project a genuine sense of otherness. Tough,
pragmatic Ripley (contrasted with the womanly ineffectiveness of
Cartwright as Lambert) is the first sf movie heroine to reflect cultural
changes in the real world, where by 1979 FEMINISM was causing some men and
many women to think again about the claustrophobia of traditional female
roles. A, which was made in the UK, was a huge success. It had precursors.
Many viewers noticed plot similarities with IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND
SPACE (1958) and with A.E.VAN VOGT's Discord in Scarlet (1939); a legal
case about the latter resemblance was settled out of court for $50,000.
The sequels were ALIENS (1986) and ALIEN(3) (1992). The novelization is
Alien (1979) by Alan Dean FOSTER. See also: CINEMA; HUGO; MONSTER MOVIES;

TERRORE NELLO SPAZIO.
ALIEN CONTAMINATION
CONTAMINATION: ALIEN ARRIVA SULLA TERRA.
ALIEN CRITIC, THE
US FANZINE ed from Portland, Oregon, by Richard E.GEIS. For its first 3
issues, AC was an informal magazine written entirely by the editor and
titled Richard E.Geis. With the title-change in 1973, the magazine's
contents began to diversify, featuring regular columns by John BRUNNER and
Ted WHITE as well as a variety of articles and a series of interviews with
sf authors and artists, although its characteristic flavour still derived
from the editor's own outspoken reviews and commentary. With 12 in 1975
the title changed to Science Fiction Review, a title used also by Geis for
his previous fanzine PSYCHOTIC. TAC/Science Fiction Review won HUGOS for
Best Fanzine in 1974 (shared), 1975, 1977 and 1979. TAC's circulation
became quite wide, and it effectively became a SEMIPROZINE. In pain from
arthritis, Geis cancelled the magazine after 61, Nov 1986, though he
continued to publish shorter, more personal fanzines under other titles.
Science Fiction Review was revived as a semiprozine in 1989, with some
fiction added to the old SFR mix; 10 issues to May 1992, none since, ed
Elton Elliott. The schedule changed from quarterly to monthly with 5, Dec
1991, at which point the magazine also began to be sold at newsstands.
This brave attempt at making a SMALL-PRESS magazine fully professional
foundered five issues later.
ALIEN NATION
1. Film (1988). 20th Century-Fox. Dir Graham Baker, starring James Caan,
Mandy Patinkin, Terence Stamp. Prod Gale Anne HURD, Richard Kobritz.
Screenplay Rockne S.O'Bannon. 90 mins. Colour. Los Angeles, 1991. The
Newcomers, or Slags, are 300,000 humanoid ALIENS, genetically engineered
for hard labour, survivors of a crashlanded slave ship, grudgingly
accepted but disliked by humans, and ghettoized. Working in partnership
with a human (Caan), Sam Francisco (Patinkin) becomes the first alien
police detective in LA. There are murders related to the use of alien
drugs. A stereotyped buddy-cop story follows (uneasy relationship between
races deepens as tolerance is learned). This is an efficient, unambitious
adventure film whose observations of racial bigotry towards cultural
strangers - effectively boat people - are good-humoured but seldom rise
above cliche. The novelization is Alien Nation (1988) by Alan Dean FOSTER.
2. US tv series (1989-90). Kenneth Johnson Productions for Fox Television.
Starring Gary Graham and Eric Pierpoint. 100min pilot episode dir and
written Johnson, plus 21 50min episodes. The short-lived tv series that
followed the film combined routine crime stories with mild SATIRE of
NEAR-FUTURE Los Angeles and lessons about civil rights. The
bizarre-looking but adaptable Newcomers act and talk exactly like humans,
portraying housewives, teenagers, used-car salesmen, criminals, police and
other stereotypes. The exception is George (no longer Sam) Francisco,
whose earnest, humourless approach and precise speech recall Spock of STAR
TREK. A few episodes involve the pregnancy of the male Newcomer hero.
Johnson also produced the much harder-edged V. The cliffhanger ending of
the series was not resolved until Oct 1994, when a well-made two-hour tv

movie, Alien Nation: Dark Horizon was broadcast on Fox TV, scripted by
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider.
ALIENS
Visitors to other worlds in stories of the 17th and 18th centuries met no
genuine alien beings; instead they found men and animals, sometimes
wearing strange forms but always filling readily recognizable roles. The
pattern of life on Earth was reproduced with minor amendments: UTOPIAN
improvement or satirical (SATIRE) exaggeration. The concept of a
differently determined pattern of life, and thus of a lifeform quite alien
to Earthly habits of thought, did not emerge until the late 19th century,
as a natural consequence of the notions of EVOLUTION and of the process of
adaptation to available environments promulgated by Lamarck and later by
Darwin. The idea of alien beings was first popularized by Camille
FLAMMARION in his nonfictional Real and Imaginary Worlds (1864; trans 1865
US) and in Lumen (1887; trans with some new material 1897 UK). These
accounts of LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS describe sentient plants, species for
which respiration and alimentation are aspects of the same process, etc.
The idea that divinely created souls could experience serial REINCARNATION
in an infinite variety of physical forms is featured in Flammarion's
Urania (1889; trans 1891 US). Aliens also appear in the work of another
major French writer, J.H.ROSNY aine: mineral lifeforms are featured in The
Shapes (1887; trans 1968) and The Death of the World (1910; trans 1928).
Like Flammarion, Rosny took a positive attitude to alien beings: Les
navigateurs de l'infini The Navigators of Infinity (1925) features a love
affair between a human and a six-eyed tripedal Martian. In the tradition
of the French evolutionary philosophers Lamarck and Henri Bergson, these
early French sf writers fitted both humans and aliens into a great
evolutionary scheme. In the UK, evolutionary philosophy was dominated by
the Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest. Perhaps inevitably, UK
writers imagined the alien as a Darwinian competitor, a natural enemy of
mankind. H.G.WELLS in THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898) cast the alien as a
genocidal invader - a would-be conqueror and colonist of Earth (INVASION).
This role rapidly became a CLICHE. The same novel set the pattern by which
alien beings are frequently imagined as loathsome MONSTERS. Wells went on
to produce an elaborate description of an alien society in THE FIRST MEN
IN THE MOON (1901), based on the model of the ant-nest (HIVE-MINDS), thus
instituting another significant cliche. Early US PULP-MAGAZINE sf in the
vein of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS usually populated other worlds with
quasihuman inhabitants - almost invariably including beautiful women for
the heroes to fall in love with - but frequently, for melodramatic
purposes, placed such races under threat from predatory monsters. The
specialist sf magazines inherited this tradition in combination with the
Wellsian exemplars, and made copious use of monstrous alien invaders; the
climaxes of such stories were often genocidal. Edmond HAMILTON was a
prolific author of stories in this vein. In the early SPACE OPERAS meek
and benevolent aliens usually had assorted mammalian and avian
characteristics, while the physical characteristics of nasty aliens were
borrowed from reptiles, arthropods and molluscs (especially octopuses).
Sentient plants and entities of pure energy were morally more versatile.
In extreme cases, alien allies and enemies became straightforwardly

symbolic of Good and Evil: E.E.Doc SMITH's Arisians and Eddorians of the
Lensman series are secular equivalents of angels and demons. Occasionally
early pulp-sf writers were willing to invert their Darwinian assumptions
and put humans in the role of alien invaders - significant early examples
are Hamilton's Conquest of Two Worlds (1932) and P.Schuyler MILLER's
Forgotten Man of Space (1933) - but stories focusing on the exoticism of
alien beings tended to take their inspiration from the works of A.MERRITT,
who had described a fascinating mineral life-system in The Metal Monster
(1920; 1946) and had transcended conventional biological chauvinism in his
portrayal of The Snake-Mother (1930; incorporated in The Face in the Abyss
1931). Jack WILLIAMSON clearly showed Merritt's influence in The Alien
Intelligence (1929) and The Moon Era (1932). A significant advance in the
representation of aliens was achieved by Stanley G.WEINBAUM, whose A
Martian Odyssey (1934) made a deep impression on readers. Weinbaum
followed it up with other accounts of relatively complex alien biospheres
(ECOLOGY). Another popular story which directly challenged vulgarized
Darwinian assumptions was Raymond Z.GALLUN's Old Faithful (1934), in which
humans and a Martian set aside their extreme biological differences and
acknowledge intellectual kinship. This spirit was echoed in Liquid Life
(1936) by Ralph Milne FARLEY, which proposed that a man was bound to keep
his word of honour, even to a filterable virus. Some of the more
interesting and adventurous alien stories written in the 1930s ran foul of
editorial TABOOS: The Creator (1935; 1946 chap) by Clifford D.SIMAK, which
suggested that our world and others might be the creation of a godlike
alien (the first of the author's many sf considerations of
pseudo-theological themes - GODS AND DEMONS; RELIGION), was considered
dangerously close to blasphemy and ended up in the semiprofessional MARVEL
TALES, which also began serialization of P.Schuyler Miller's The Titan
(1934-5), whose description of a Martian ruling class sustained by
vampiric cannibalism was considered too erotic, and which eventually
appeared as the title story of The Titan (coll 1952). The influence of
these taboos in limiting the potential the alien being offered writers of
this period, and thereby in stunting the evolution of alien roles within
sf, should not be overlooked. Despite the Wellsian precedents, aliens were
much less widely featured in the UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES. Eden PHILLPOTTS
used aliens as objective observers to examine and criticize the human
world in Saurus (1938) and Address Unknown (1949), but the latter novel
explicitly challenges the validity of any such criticism. Olaf STAPLEDON's
STAR MAKER (1937) built humans and aliens into a cosmic scheme akin to
that envisaged by Rosny and Flammarion. Stapledon also employed the alien
as a standard of comparison in one of his most bitter attacks on
contemporary humanity, in The Flames (1947). The alien-menace story
remained dominant in sf for many years; its popularity did not begin to
wane until the outbreak of WWII, and it has never been in danger of dying
out. Such xenophobia eventually became unfashionable in the more reputable
magazines, but monstrous aliens maintained their popularity in less
sophisticated outlets. The CINEMA lagged behind written sf in this
respect, producing a host of cheap MONSTER MOVIES during the 1950s and
1960s, although there was a belated boom in innocent and altruistic aliens
in films of the 1970s. While pulp sf writers continued to invent nastier
and more horrific alien monsters during the late 1930s and 1940s - notable

examples include John W.CAMPBELL Jr's Who Goes There? (1938), as Don
A.Stuart, and A.E.VAN VOGT's Black Destroyer (1939) and Discord in Scarlet
(1939) - the emphasis shifted towards the problems of establishing
fruitful COMMUNICATION with alien races. During the WWII years human/alien
relationships were often represented as complex, delicate and uneasy. In
van Vogt's Co-operate or Else! (1942) a man and a bizarre alien are
castaways in a harsh alien environment during an interstellar war, and
must join forces in order to survive. In First Contact (1945) by Murray
LEINSTER two spaceships meet in the void, and each crew is determined to
give away no information and make no move which could possibly give the
other race a political or military advantage - a practical problem which
they ultimately solve. Another Leinster story, The Ethical Equations
(1945), assumes that a correct decision regarding mankind's first actions
on contact with aliens will be very difficult to achieve, but that
priority should definitely be given to the attempt to establish friendly
relationships; by contrast, Arena (1944) by Fredric BROWN bleakly assumes
that the meeting of Man and alien might still be a test of their ability
to destroy one another. (Significantly, an adaptation of Arena for the tv
series STAR TREK changed the ending of the story to bring it into line
with later attitudes.) Attempts to present more credibly unhuman aliens
became gradually more sophisticated in the late 1940s and 1950s,
particularly in the work of Hal CLEMENT, but writers devoted to the design
of peculiar aliens adapted to extraordinary environments tended to find it
hard to embed such speculations in engaging stories - a problem constantly
faced by Clement and by more recent workers in the same tradition, notably
Robert L.FORWARD. Much more effective in purely literary terms are stories
which juxtapose human and alien in order to construct parables criticizing
various attitudes and values. Despite John W.Campbell Jr's editorial
enthusiasm for human chauvinism - reflected in such stories as Arthur
C.CLARKE's Rescue Party (1946) and L.Ron HUBBARD's Return to Tomorrow
(1954) - many stories produced in the post-WWII years use aliens as
contrasting exemplars to expose and dramatize human follies. Militarism is
attacked in Clifford D.Simak's You'll Never Go Home Again (1951) and Eric
Frank RUSSELL's The Waitabits (1955). Sexual prejudices are questioned in
Theodore STURGEON's The World Well Lost (1953). Racialism is attacked in
Dumb Martian by John WYNDHAM (1952) and Leigh BRACKETT's All the Colours
of the Rainbow (1957). The politics of colonialism (COLONIZATION OF OTHER
WORLDS) are examined in The Helping Hand (1950) by Poul ANDERSON, Invaders
From Earth (1958 dos) by Robert SILVERBERG and Little Fuzzy (1962) by
H.Beam PIPER. The bubble of human vanity is pricked in Simak's Immigrant
(1954) and Anderson's The Martyr (1960). The general human condition has
been subject to increasingly rigorous scrutiny through metaphors of alien
contact in such stories as A MIRROR FOR OBSERVERS (1954) by Edgar
PANGBORN, Rule Golden (1954) by Damon KNIGHT, What Rough Beast? (1980) by
William Jon WATKINS and The Alien Upstairs (1983) by Pamela SARGENT. Sharp
SATIRES on human vanity and prejudice include Brian W.ALDISS's The Dark
Light Years (1964) and Thomas M.DISCH's The Genocides (1965) and Mankind
Under the Leash (1966 dos). The most remarkable redeployment of alien
beings in sf of the 1950s and 1960s was in connection with
pseudo-theological themes (RELIGION). Some images of the inhabitants of
other worlds had been governed by theological notions long before the

advent of sf - interplanetary romances of the 19th century often featured
spirits or angels - and the tradition had been revived outside the sf
magazines by C.S.LEWIS in his Christian allegories OUT OF THE SILENT
PLANET (1938) and Perelandra (1943; vt Voyage to Venus). Within sf itself,
however, the religious imagination had previously been echoed only in a
few Shaggy God stories (ADAM AND EVE). In sf of the 1950s, though, aliens
appear in all kinds of transcendental roles. Aliens are spiritual tutors
in Dear Devil (1950) by Eric Frank Russell and Guardian Angel (1950) by
Arthur C.Clarke, in each case wearing diabolical physical form ironically
to emphasize their angelic role. Edgar Pangborn's Angel's Egg (1951) and
Paul J.MCAULEY's Eternal Light (1991) are less coy. Raymond F.JONES's The
Alien (1951) is ambitious to be a god, and the alien in Philip Jose
FARMER's Father (1955) really is one. In Clifford D.Simak's Time and Again
(1951: vt First He Died) every living creature, ANDROIDS included, has an
immortal alien commensal, an sf substitute for the soul. In James BLISH's
classic A CASE OF CONSCIENCE (1953; exp 1958) alien beings without
knowledge of God appear to a Jesuit to be creations of the Devil. Other
churchmen achieve spiritual enlightenment by means of contact with aliens
in The Fire Balloons (1951; vt In this Sign) by Ray BRADBURY, Unhuman
Sacrifice (1958) by Katherine MACLEAN, and Prometheus (1961) by Philip
Jose Farmer. In Lester DEL REY's For I Am a Jealous People (1954) alien
invaders of Earth turn out to have made a new covenant with God, who is no
longer on our side. Religious imagery is at its most extreme in stories
which deal with literal kinds of salvation obtained by humans who adopt
alien ways, including Robert Silverberg's Downward to the Earth (1970) and
George R.R.MARTIN's A Song for Lya (1974). The evolution of alien roles in
Eastern European sf seems to have been very different. The alien-menace
story typical of early US-UK sf is absent from contemporary Russian sf,
and the ideological calculation behind this absence is made clear by Ivan
YEFREMOV in Cor Serpentis (trans 1962; vt The Heart of the Serpent), which
is explicitly represented as a reply to Leinster's First Contact. Yefremov
argues that, by the time humans are sufficiently advanced to build
interstellar ships, their society will have matured beyond the suspicious
militaristic attitudes of Leinster's humans, and will be able to assume
that aliens are similarly mature. UK-US sf has never become that confident
- although similar ideological replies to earlier work are not unknown in
US sf. Ted WHITE's By Furies Possessed (1970), in which mankind finds a
useful symbiotic relationship with rather ugly aliens, is a reply to The
Puppet Masters (1951) by Robert A.HEINLEIN, which was one of the most
extreme post-WWII alien-menace stories, while Joe HALDEMAN's THE FOREVER
WAR (1974) similarly responds to the xenophobic tendencies of Heinlein's
STARSHIP TROOPERS (1959), and Barry B.LONGYEAR's Enemy Mine (1979) can be
seen as either a reprise of van Vogt's Co-operate - or Else! or a reply to
Brown's Arena; Orson Scott CARD took the unusual step of producing an
ideological counterweight to one of his own stories when he followed the
novel version of the genocidal fantasy ENDER'S GAME (1977; exp 1985) with
the expiatory Speaker for the Dead (1986). This is not to say that
alien-invasion stories are not still being produced - Larry NIVEN's and
Jerry POURNELLE's Footfall (1985) is a notable example - and stories of
war between humans and aliens have understandably retained their
melodramatic appeal. The recent fashionability of militaristic sf (WAR)

has helped to keep the tradition very much alive; examples include the
Demu trilogy (1973-5; coll 1980) by F.M.BUSBY, THE UPLIFT WAR (1987) by
David BRIN and the shared-world anthology series The Man-Kzin Wars
(1988-90) based on a scenario created by Larry Niven. Anxiety has also
been maintained by stories which answer the question If we are not alone,
where are they? with speculative accounts of a Universe dominated by
predatory and destructive aliens; notable examples include Gregory
BENFORD's Across the Sea of Suns (1984), Jack Williamson's Lifeburst
(1984) and David Brin's Lungfish (1986). Stories dealing soberly and
thoughtfully with problems arising out of cultural and biological
differences between human and alien have become very numerous. This is a
constant and continuing theme in the work of several writers, notably Jack
VANCE, Poul Anderson, David LAKE, Michael BISHOP and C.J.CHERRYH.
Cherryh's novels - including her Faded Sun trilogy (1978-9), Serpent's
Reach (1980), the Chanur series (1982-6) and Cuckoo's Egg (1985) - present
a particularly elaborate series of accounts of problematic human/alien
relationships. Such relationships have become further complicated by
virtue of the fact that the gradual decay of editorial taboos from the
1950s onwards permitted more adventurous and explicit exploration of
sexual and psychological themes (PSYCHOLOGY). This work was begun by
Philip Jose Farmer, in such stories as THE LOVERS (1952; exp 1961), Open
to Me, My Sister (1960) and Mother (1953), and has been carried forward by
others. Sexual relationships between human and alien have become much more
complex and problematic in recent times: STRANGERS (1974; exp 1978) by
Gardner R.DOZOIS is a more sophisticated reprise of THE LOVERS, and other
accounts of human/alien love affairs can be found in Jayge CARR's
Leviathan's Deep (1979), Linda STEELE's Ibis (1985) and Robert THURSTON's
Q Colony (1985). And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side
(1971) by James TIPTREE Jr displays human fear and loathing of the alien
curiously alloyed with self-destructive erotic fascination, and the
Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-9) by Octavia BUTLER takes human/alien intimacy
to its uncomfortable limit. The greatest difficulty sf writers face with
respect to the alien is that of depicting something authentically strange.
It is common to find that aliens which are physically bizarre are entirely
human in their modes of thought and speech. Bids to tell a story from an
alien viewpoint are rarely convincing, although heroic efforts are made in
such stories as Stanley SCHMIDT's The Sins of the Fathers (1976), John
BRUNNER's The Crucible of Time (1984) and Brian HERBERT's Sudanna, Sudanna
(1985). Impressive attempts to present the alien not merely as unfamiliar
but also as unknowable include Damon KNIGHT's Stranger Station (1956),
several novels by Philip K.DICK - including The Game-Players of Titan
(1963), GALACTIC POT-HEALER (1969) and Our Friends From Frolix-8 (1970) Stanislaw LEM's SOLARIS (1961; trans 1970) and Phillip MANN's The Eye of
the Queen (1982). Such contacts as these threaten the sanity of the
contactees, as does the initial meeting of minds between human and alien
intelligence in Fred HOYLE's The Black Cloud (1957), but here - as in most
such stories - the assumption is made that common intellectual ground of
some sort must and can be found. Faith in the universality of reason, and
hence in the fundamental similarity of all intelligent beings, is strongly
evident in many accounts of physically exotic aliens, including those
featured in Isaac ASIMOV's THE GODS THEMSELVES (1972). This faith is at

its most passionate in many stories in which first contact with aliens is
achieved via radio telescopes; these frequently endow such an event with
quasitranscendental significance. Stories which are sceptical of the
benefits of such contact - examples are Fred HOYLE's and John ELLIOT's A
for Andromeda (1962) and Stanislaw Lem's HisMaster's Voice (1968; trans
1983) - have been superseded by stories like James E.GUNN's The Listeners
(fixup 1972), Robert Silverberg's Tower of Glass (1970), Ben BOVA's
Voyagers (1981), Jeffrey CARVER's The Infinity Link (1984), Carl SAGAN's
Contact (1985), and Frederick FICHMAN's SETI (1990), whose optimism is
extravagant. Where once the notion of the alien being was inherently
fearful, sf now manifests an eager determination to meet and establish
significant contact with aliens. Despite continued exploitation of the
melodramatic potential of alien invasions and interstellar wars, the
predominant anxiety in modern sf is that we might prove to be unworthy of
such communion. Anthologies of stories dealing with particular alien
themes include: From off this World (anth 1949) ed Leo MARGULIES and Oscar
J.FRIEND; Invaders of Earth (anth 1952) ed Groff CONKLIN; Contact (anth
1963) ed Noel Keyes; The Alien Condition (anth 1973) ed Stephen GOLDIN;
and the Starhunters series created by David A.DRAKE (3 anths 1988-90).
ALIENS
Film (1986). Brandywine/20th Century-Fox. Prod Gale Anne HURD, dir James
CAMERON, starring Sigourney Weaver, Paul Reiser, Carrie Henn, William
Hope, Michael Biehn, Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein. Screenplay
Cameron, based on a story by Cameron, David Giler, Walter Hill. 137 mins.
Colour. This formidable sequel to ALIEN is more an action than a HORROR
movie, reminiscent of all those war films and Westerns about beleaguered
groups fighting to the end. Ripley (Weaver, in a fine performance), the
sole survivor at the end of Alien, is sent off again with a troop of
marines to the planet (now colonized) where the original alien was found.
The colony has been wiped out by aliens (lots of them this time); the
marines, at first sceptical, are also almost wiped out. Ripley saves a
small girl (Henn), the sole colonist survivor, and finally confronts the
Queen alien. A is conventional in its disapproval of corporate greed; less
conventional is its demonstration of the inadequacy of the machismo
expressed by all the marines, women and men. A peculiar subtext has to do
with the fierce protectiveness of motherhood (Ripley and the little girl,
the Queen and her eggs). This is a film unusually sophisticated in its use
of sf tropes and is arguably even better than its predecessor. The
novelization is Aliens (1986) by Alan Dean FOSTER. See also: HUGO.
ALIEN(3)
Film (1992). A Brandywine Production/20th Century-Fox. Dir David Fincher,
starring Sigourney Weaver, Charles Dance, Charles S.Dutton, Lance
Henriksen, Paul McGann, Brian Glover. Screenplay David Giler, Walter Hill,
Larry Ferguson, based on a story by Vincent Ward. 110 mins. Colour. One of
Hollywood's occasional, strange films so unmitigatedly uncommercial that
it is impossible to work out why they were ever made. The film had an
unusually troubled development history, previous screenwriters having
included William GIBSON and Eric Red, and previous directors Renny Harlin
and Vincent Ward (director of The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey 1988);

some of Ward's story ideas were retained, and the final script was
reworked by producers Hill and Giler. The latter has said that he sees a
subtext about the AIDS virus in this film, and the film itself supports
this. The final director, Fincher, had previously been known primarily for
his inventive rock videos. Ripley (Weaver, who also has a credit as
producer), having twice survived alien apocalypse (ALIEN; ALIENS)
crashlands on a prison planet occupied by a displeasing men-only group of
double-Y-chromosomed mass murderers and rapists, who have now adopted a
form of Christian fundamentalism, as well as three variously psychopathic
minders. Her companions on the ship are dead, but she brings (unknown to
her) an alien parasite within her and an external larva hiding in her
ship. The latter grows, kills, grows again, lurks, and wipes out most of
the base (as before). But the - again female - alien seems somehow
unimportant this time; the film's twin centres are the awfulness of the
prison, explicitly and repeatedly compared to a cosmic anus, and the
pared-to-the-bone Ripley, head shaven, face anguished, torso skinny,
sister and mirror image of Alien herself: her sole function is as victim.
Even the ongoing feminist joke (Ripley is as ever the one with metaphoric
balls) is submerged in the bewildering, monochrome intensity of pain and
dereliction, photographed in claustrophobic close-up throughout, that is
the whole of this film. All else - including narrative tension and indeed
the very idea of story - is subjugated to this grim motif. This (probably
bad) film is almost admirable in its refusal to give the audience any
solace or entertainment at all. At the end, Ripley immolates herself for
the greater good, falling out of life as an alien bursts from her chest;
she cradles it like a blood-covered baby as she falls away and away into
the fires of purgatory.
ALIENS: FIRST CONTACT
No one knows for sure who first used the term "alien" to describe
extraterrestrials. But the concept of creatures from other planets has
been around for a long time. The idea of an alien and a human meeting and
communicating was a familiar theme by the time H.G.Wells's published The
War of the Worlds in 1898. Wells book was the first to dramatize an alien
invasion of the earth. And these Martians were definitely NOT our friends.
Rather, they were "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic."After War
of the Worlds appeared, American pulp magazines took the theme of The
Aliens and ran with it. And Aliens have been IN in America ever since...
in novels, stories, films, and television.
ALIEN WORLDS
UK DIGEST-size magazine. 1 undated issue, cJuly 1966, published and ed
Charles Partington and Harry Nadler, some colour illustrations, stories by
Kenneth BULMER, J.R.(Ramsey) Campbell and Harry HARRISON; articles on film
were also included. AW grew from the FANZINE Alien (16 issues, 1963-6),
which had also published stories and film articles. Its publishers lacked
the distribution strength to make it work as a professional magazine.
ALKON, PAUL K(ENT)
(1935- ) Professor of English Literature at the University of Southern
California and author of Origins of Futuristic Fiction (1987), a vigorous
study of the idea of the future that developed in the late 18th and early

19th centuries, as reflected in the fiction and literary theory of the
time. PA resuscitated the almost forgotten figure of Felix Bodin, arguably
the first to provide (in 1834) an aesthetics of sf, his theories appropriately futuristic - antedating their subject matter. Science
Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology (1994) is a
competent introductory survey.
al-KUWAYRI, YUSUF
ARABIC SF.
ALLABY, (JOHN) MICHAEL
(1933- ) UK writer. Most of his books are nonfiction studies in fields
like ECOLOGY, but his The Greening of Mars (1984) with James (Ephraim)
Lovelock (1919-), though basically a nonfiction study of how that planet
might be settled, is told as a fictionalized narrative whose tone is
upliftingly UTOPIAN.
ALLBEURY, TED
Working name of UK spy-fiction writer Theodore Edward le Bouthillier
Allbeury (1917- ), some of whose NEAR-FUTURE thrillers, like Palomino
Blonde (1975; vt OMEGA-MINUS 1976 US), The Alpha List (1979) and The
Consequences of Fear (1979), edge sf-wards. All our Tomorrows (1982)
depicts a Russian-occupied UK and the resistance movement that soon takes
shape.
ALLEN, F.M.
Pseudonym of Irish-born UK writer and publisher Edmund Downey
(1856-1937), whose short DISASTER sequence, set in Ireland - The Voyage of
the Ark, as Related by Dan Banim (1888) and The Round Tower of Babel
(1891) - conflates hyperbolic comedy and sf instruments, ending in a
visionary plan to build a great tower for profit. A House of Tears (1888
US), as by Edmund Downey, is fantasy, as are Brayhard: The Strange
Adventures of One Ass and Seven Champions (1890) and The Little Green Man
(1895). The Peril of London (1891 chap as by FMA; vt London's Peril 1900
chap as Downey), set in the NEAR FUTURE, warns against a Channel Tunnel
being constructed by the nefarious French.
ALLEN, (CHARLES) GRANT (BLAIRFINDIE)
(1848-1899) UK writer, born in Canada, known primarily for his work
outside the sf field, including the notorious The Woman who Did (1895),
which attacked contemporary sexual mores. He was professor of logic and
principal of Queen's College, Jamaica, before moving to the UK. He wrote a
series of books based on EVOLUTION theory before turning for commercial
reasons to fiction. After the success of The Woman who Did he published a
self-indulgent novel of social criticism, The British Barbarians (1895),
in which a time-travelling social scientist of the future is scathing
about tribalism and taboo in Victorian society. GA's interest in
ANTHROPOLOGY is manifest also in the novel The Great Taboo (1890) and in
many of the short stories assembled in Strange Stories (coll 1884); this
collection includes two sf stories originally published under the
pseudonym J.Arbuthnot Wilson: Pausodyne (1881), an early story about
SUSPENDED ANIMATION, and A Child of the Phalanstery (1884), about a future
society's eugenic practices. (The former is also to be found in The Desire

of the Eyes and Other Stories coll 1895 the latter in Twelve Tales, with a
Headpiece, a Tailpiece and an Intermezzo coll 1899.) GA's other
borderline-sf stories are The Dead Man Speaks (1895) and The Thames Valley
Catastrophe (1897). The above-mentioned collections also feature a handful
of fantasy stories. The Devil's Die (1897) is a mundane melodrama which
includes an account of a bacteriological research project. GA's early
shilling shocker Kalee's Shrine (1886), written with May Cotes (not
credited in some US reprint editions), is a fantasy of mesmerism with some
sf elements. See also: CANADA; SATIRE; SOCIOLOGY; TABOOS; TIME TRAVEL.
ALLEN, HENRY WILSON
(1912-1991) US author, as Will Henry, of many Westerns, including
MacKenna's Gold (1963), later filmed. His sf novel, Genesis Five (1968),
narrated by a resident Mongol, depicts the Soviet creation of a dubious
SUPERMAN in Siberia.
ALLEN, IRWIN
(1916-1991) US film-maker long associated with sf subjects. He worked in
radio during the 1940s; later, with the arrival of tv, he created the
first celebrity panel show. In 1951 he began producing films for RKO, and
in 1953 won an Academy Award for The Sea Around Us, a pseudo-documentary
which he wrote and directed. He then made a similar film for Warner
Brothers, The Animal World (1956), which contained dinosaur sequences
animated by Willis H.O'BRIEN and Ray HARRYHAUSEN. In 1957 he made The
Story of Mankind, a bizarre potted history with a fantasy framework, and
then turned to sf subjects: a bland remake of TheLOST WORLD (1960), VOYAGE
TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA (1961) and Five Weeks in a Balloon (1962). In
1964 he returned to tv and produced a series, VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE
SEA (1964-8), based on the movie. Other sf tv series followed: LOST IN
SPACE (1965-8), TheTIME TUNNEL (1966-7) and LAND OF THE GIANTS (1968-70).
A further tv project, CITY BENEATH THE SEA, failed to generate the
necessary interest and was abandoned, the pilot episode being released as
a feature film (vt One Hour to Doomsday) in 1970. Ever resilient, IA
switched back to films. In 1972 he made the highly successful The Poseidon
Adventure, which began the disaster film cycle of the 1970s, followed by
the even more successful The Towering Inferno (1974). Theatrically, IA's
fortunes with disaster films began to founder with The Swarm (1978), based
on the 1974 novel by Arthur HERZOG about killer bees attacking Houston.
Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979) and When Time Ran Out... (1980; vt
Earth's Final Fury) were similar to The Swarm in their absurdity and their
parade of embarrassed star cameos; their box-office failure contributed
significantly to the petering out of the borderline-sf disaster movie
cycle. However, IA had already transferred the essential formula - B-movie
dramatics, spectacular (often secondhand) devastation footage, large casts
- of the disaster movie to tv with Flood! (1976), followed by the
diminishing returns of Fire! (1977) and Cave-In (1979, transmitted 1983).
Another made-for-tv movie by IA (pilot for an unsold tv series planned as
a return to the themes of The Time Tunnel) was Time Travelers (1976),
based on an unpublished story by Rod SERLING; its use of stock footage as
the story's centrepiece - here the fire from In Old Chicago (1938) - is an
IA trademark. Subsequently his sf/fantasy work for tv has included The

Return of Captain Nemo (1978), a three-part miniseries (based on Jules
VERNE's characters and themes recycled from Voyage to the Bottom of the
Sea) which was edited into a feature film for release outside the USA, and
a two-part Alice in Wonderland (1985) with second-string stars. Throughout
his career IA has reworked a limited repertoire of basic formulae - the
Verne/DOYLE expedition drama, the juvenile sf-series format, the disaster
scenario - invariably setting groups of lazily stereotyped characters
against colourful, threatening, bizarre but somehow cheap backdrops. His
productions are wholly contemptuous (or ignorant) of scientific accuracy
or even plausibility. The only variation in tone and effect has been
strictly budgetary, with Michael Caine and Paul Newman essentially no
different from David Hedison and Gary Conway, and even the most
earth-shattering cataclysm failing to disturb the tidy complacency of IA's
Poverty-Row worldview. In the end, his most interesting work might just
have been The Story of Mankind, in which Harpo Marx played Isaac Newton.
JB/KN/PNSee also: DISASTER; TELEVISION.
ALLEN, JOHANNES
(1916-1973) Danish journalist and author of popular fiction and film
scripts. Among his few sf titles the best known is Data for din dod (1970;
trans Marianne Helweg as Data for Death 1971 UK), which tells of a
criminal organization whose acquisition of advanced computer techniques
permits it to blackmail people with information about their time of death.
ALLEN, ROBERT
Working name of UK writer Allen Robert Dodd (1887- ?), whose only sf
novel, Captain Gardiner of the International Police: A Secret Service
Novel of the Future (1916 US), is set 60 years after WW1, when an
International Federation governs all the world but for the sinister East,
whose plots are foiled by the eponymous secret agent.
ALLEN, ROGER MacBRIDE
(1957- ) US writer who began writing with a SPACE-OPERA series, The Torch
of Honor (1985) and Rogue Powers (1986), whose considerable impact may
seem excessive to anyone familiar only with the books in synopsis, as
neither might have appeared to offer anything new. The Torch of Honor
begins with a scene all too evocative of Robert A.HEINLEIN's sf juveniles
from three decades earlier, as a batch of space cadets graduates from
academy into interstellar hot water after learning - in a scene which any
viewer of John Ford's Cavalry Westerns would also recognize - of the death
of many of their fellows in a space encounter. But RMA, while clearly
making no secret of his allegiance to outmoded narrative conventions,
remained very much a writer of the 1980s in the physical complexity and
moral dubiety of the Galaxy his crew enters, fighting and judging and
having a fairly good time in the task of saving planets. The second novel,
which features a no-nonsense female protagonist and a lovingly described
ALIEN culture, builds on the strengths of the first while disengaging to
some degree from the debilitating simplicities of military sf. Orphan of
Creation (1988), a singleton, demonstrates with greater clarity than the
series the clarity and scientific numeracy of RMA's mind and narrative
strategies. The story of a Black anthropologist who discovers in the USA
the bones of some Australopithecines who had been transported there by

slave traders, the novel gives an impressive accounting of the nature of
ANTHROPOLOGY as a science, and mounts a welcome attack on the strange
1980s vogue for Creationism. Farside Cannon (1988), in which the
NEAR-FUTURE Solar System witnesses political upheaval on time-tested
grounds, and The War Machine (1989) with David A.DRAKE, part of the
latter's Crisis of Empire sequence, were sufficiently competent to keep
interest in RMA alive. Supernova (1991), with Eric KOTANI, relates, again
with scientific verisimilitude, the process involved in discovering that a
nearby star is due to go supernova and flood Earth with hard radiation.
The Modular Man (1992) deals complexly with the implications of a ROBOT
technology sufficiently advanced for humans to transfer their
consciousnesses into machines. But potentially more interesting than any
of these titles is the Hunted Earth sequence, comprising The Ring of
Charon (1991) and The Shattered Sphere (1994). After the passing of a beam
of phased gravity-waves - a new human invention - has awakened a long
dormant semi-autonomous being embedded deep within the Moon, the Earth is
shunted via wormhole to a new solar system dominated by a multifaceted
culture occupying a DYSON SPHERE. The remnants of humanity must work out over the course of the second volume - where Earth is while countering, or
coming to terms with, the attempted demolition of the Solar System to make
a new sphere. Although the human cultures described in the first volume
are unimaginatively presented, the exuberance of RMA's large-scale
plotting (and thinking) makes it seem possible that Hunted Earth will
become one of the touchstone galactic epics of the 1990s. Other Works:
Isaac Asimov's Caliban (1993) and its sequel, Isaac Asimov's Inferno
(1994), both tied to ASIMOV's Robot universe. See also: ASTEROIDS; BLACK
HOLES; MOON; OUTER PLANETS; WEAPONS.
ALLEY OOP
US COMIC strip, created and drawn by V(incent) T(rout) Hamlin
(1900-1993), initially in 1932 for a firm which collapsed, then from 1933
for the NEA syndicate until his retirement in 1971, when it was taken over
by other artists. Drawn in a style more comically exaggerated than usual
in adventure strips, though with clear affection, Oop is a tough and
likeable Neanderthal warrior, half Popeye, half Buck Rogers. His
adventures were initially restricted to his home territory of Moo (the
echo of Mu clearly being deliberate) but he soon began to visit various
human eras - and the Moon - via Professor Wonmug's TIME-TRAVEL device.
There were several pre-War comic-book versions, including Alley Oop and
Dinny (graph 1934), a Big Little Book; Alley Oop in the Invasion of Moo
(graph 1935), an original story in a format similar to the Big Little
Books; as a one-short comic, issue 35 of The Funnies in 1938; and Alley
Oop and the Missing King of Moo (1938 chap). Some extended tales appear in
Hamlin's Alley Oop: The Adventures of a Time-Traveling Caveman: Daily
Strips from July 20, 1946 to June 20, 1947 (graph coll 1990).
ALLHOFF, FRED
(1904-1988) US journalist and writer known in the sf field for Lightning
in the Night (1940 Liberty; 1979), a future-WAR tale which, when
serialized, caused considerable stir because of its defence of the
arguments of General Billy Mitchell (1879-1936) about the primacy of air

power in any future conflict, for its portrayal of a semi-defeated USA in
1945 as she recoups her moral and physical forces and begins to thrust
back the Axis invaders, and for its presentation of a vast and successful
US effort to develop the atomic bomb before Hitler can, and to use the
threat of dropping it to end the war (HITLER WINS).
ALLIGATOR
Film (1980). Alligator Associates/Group 1. Dir Lewis Teague, starring
Robert Forster, Robin Riker, Michael Gazzo, Dean Jagger. Screenplay John
SAYLES, based on a story by Sayles and Frank Ray Perilli. 91 mins cut to
89 mins. Colour. A pet baby alligator is flushed down the toilet, and it
or another grows into a monster, aided by hormone-experiment waste
materials illicitly dumped in the sewers. A policeman investigates the
increasingly violent and bizarre alligator attacks, climaxing in the
destruction of a wedding party held by (of course) the wicked polluter. A
is funny and well made. Sayles has remarked that my original idea was that
the alligator eats its way through the whole socio-economic system. Many
1970s and 1980s MONSTER MOVIES, including this one, have been deliberately
subversive of comfortable social norms.
ALLIGHAM, GARRY
(1898- ?) South African writer whose imaginary history, written as from
the year 1987, Verwoerd - The End: A Lookback from the Future (1961),
argues for a benevolently administered apartheid. See also: POLITICS.
ALLOTT, KENNETH
(1912-1973) UK writer best known for his distinguished and melancholy
poetry, which was assembled in Collected Poems (coll 1975). The Rhubarb
Tree (1937), with Stephen Tait, is one of several 1930s novels predicting
a fascist government in the UK. Jules Verne (1940) is a fluent study, free
of the usual literary condescensions.
ALLPORT, ARTHUR
Raymond Z.GALLUN.
ALL-STORY, THE
US PULP MAGAZINE published by the Frank A.MUNSEY Corp.; ed Robert Hobard
Davis. AS appeared monthly Jan 1905-Mar 1914, weekly from 7 Mar 1914 (as
All-Story Weekly), incorporated Cavalier Weekly (The CAVALIER) to form
All-Story Cavalier Weekly from 16 May 1914, and reverted to All-Story
Weekly 15 May 1915-17 July 1920, when it merged with Argosy Weekly to form
Argosy All-Story Weekly (The ARGOSY). TAS was the most prolific publisher
of sf among the pre-1926 pulp magazines; it became important through its
editor's discovery of several major authors. Foremost of these in
popularity were Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, who was represented with 16 serials
and novelettes 1912-20, Ray CUMMINGS, notably with The Girl in the Golden
Atom (1919-20; fixup 1921), and A.MERRITT. Other authors who contributed
sf to TAS included Douglas DOLD, George Allan ENGLAND, Homer Eon FLINT, J.
U.GIESY, Victor ROUSSEAU, Garrett P.SERVISS, Francis STEVENS and Charles
B.STILSON. Many of TAS's stories were reprinted in FAMOUS FANTASTIC
MYSTERIES and FANTASTIC NOVELS. Further reading: Under the Moons of Mars:
A History and Anthology of the Scientific Romances in the Munsey Magazines
1912-1920 (anth 1970) ed Sam MOSKOWITZ.

ALL-STORY CAVALIER WEEKLY
The ALL-STORY.
ALL-STORY WEEKLY
The ALL-STORY.
ALMEDINGEN, E.M.
Working name of Russian-born writer Martha Edith von Almedingen
(1898-1971), who emigrated to the UK in 1923. Of her children's fictions,
which made up about half her total works, several are of fantasy interest.
Her only title of clear sf import is Stand Fast, Beloved City (1954),
about a DYSTOPIAN tyranny.
ALPERS, HANS JOACHIM
(1943- ) German sf editor, critic, SMALL-PRESS publisher, literary agent
and author, sometimes as Jurgen Andreas; editor 1978-80 of Knaur SF and
1980-86 of the Moewig SF list. With Ronald M.Hahn (1948- ) he edited the
first anthology of native German sf (GERMANY), Science Fiction aus
Deutschland Science Fiction from Germany (anth 1974), and he was a
co-editor of Lexicon der Science Fiction Literatur (2 vols 1980; rev 1988;
new edn projected 1993), an important sf encyclopedia covering almost all
authors with German editions of their work. Further lexicons, of weird
fiction and fantasy, are projected for 1993-4. With Hahn again and Werner
Fuchs, HJA edited Reclams Science Fiction Fuhrer (1982), an annotated
survey of sf novels with listings by author. With Fuchs HJA edited for
Hohenheim six anthologies of sf stories (1981-4) covering sf history by
the decades 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, with 2 vols for each, and has edited
the Kopernikus sf anthologies for Moewig (15 vols 1980-88). Also for
Moewig he edited a German paperback edition of Analog (ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION) (8 vols 1981-4) and a series of sf almanacs and year
books - Science Fiction Jahrbuch (1981-7) and Science Fiction Almanach
(1982-7) - containing sf data, stories and essays, the Almanac
concentrating on the German scene. He wrote the GERMANY entry in this
encyclopedia.
ALPHAVILLE
(vt Une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution)
Pathe-contemporary/Chaumiane-Film Studio. Dir Jean-Luc Godard, starring
Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Howard Vernon, Akim Tamiroff. Screenplay
Godard. 100 mins. B/w. In this archetypal French New Wave film,
intergalactic secret agent Lemmy Caution (Constantine) arrives at the
planet Alphaville to deal with Alpha 60, the computer used to impose
conformity on the inhabitants. He succeeds, meeting the computer's logic
with his own illogic, and at the same time wins the affections of the
ruler's daughter (Karina). A typical pulp-sf plot is transformed into an
allegory of feeling versus technology, the past versus the present:
Alphaville itself is an undisguised (but selectively seen) Paris of the
1960s; Caution (a tough guy from the 1940s, hero of many novels by UK
thriller writer Peter Cheyney 1896-1951) does not use a spaceship to get
there, but simply drives his own Ford car through intersidereal space - an
ordinary road. A is filmed in high contrast, deep shadows and glaring
light. It is a not always accessible maze of allusions culled from a wide

variety of sources: semantic theory, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice,
Hollywood B-movies, comic books and pulp sf. The latter, like the other
components of A, is used by Godard as a means of playfully imaging
philosophical debate. See also: CINEMA.
ALRAUNE
(vt Unholy Love; vt Daughter of Destiny) Film (1928). Ama Film. Dir
Henrik Galeen, starring Brigitte Helm, Paul Wegener, Ivan Petrovich.
Screenplay Galeen, from Alraune (1911; trans 1929) by Hanns Heinz EWERS.
125 mins. B/w. A professor of genetics (Wegener) conducts a cold-blooded
experiment into the Nature-versus-nurture controversy. Using the semen of
a hanged man to fertilize a whore, he creates life - a girl baby called
Alraune - by artificial insemination in the laboratory. After this
sciencefictional beginning, A becomes, like Frankenstein (1818) by Mary
SHELLEY, a fantastic GOTHIC melodrama of retribution for a crime against
Nature; nevertheless, in its distrust of the scientist, A is wholly
central to the development of sf. Alraune (Helm), who is named after and
compared throughout with the mythic mandrake root that grows where a
hanged man's seed falls, appears to have no soul, and when, as a young
woman, she learns of her dark origins, she revenges herself against her
father, the professor - although at the end there is hope she will be
heartless no longer. Usually spoken of as a great classic of the German
silent cinema, A is actually more of an early exploitation movie, stylish
but prurient, with more than a whiff of incest in the theme. Helm's
eroticism, which we are to deplore, was in fact the reason for the film's
commercial success. However, Galeen considerably softened the portrait of
Alraune rendered in Ewers' sensationalist novel: whereas in the book she
is a monster of depravity, causing illness and suicide wherever she goes,
in the film she merely causes mayhem and a little pain. This is generally
agreed to be the best of the five film versions of the 1911 book, the
others being from 1918 (twice - Germany and Hungary - the latter being
directed by Mihaly Kertesz, who became Michael Curtiz, the director of
Casablanca, 1942), 1930 (Germany, again starring Helm) and 1952 (Germany,
starring Hildegard Knef and Erich von Stroheim). See also: CINEMA; SEX.
ALTERED STATES
Film (1980). Warner Bros. Dir Ken Russell, starring William Hurt, Blair
Brown, Bob Balaban, Charles Haid. Screenplay Sidney Aaron (Paddy
CHAYEFSKY), based on Altered States (1978) by Chayefsky. 102 mins. Colour.
Research scientist Jessup (Hurt) experiments with altered states of
consciousness, with drugs, and with a sensory-deprivation tank. The
alterations allow the primitive DNA in his genes to express itself
(DEVOLUTION and METAPHYSICS for why this is lunatic); he devolves into an
apeman (APES AND CAVEMEN), and later spends some time as primordial ooze.
This is bad for his marriage. In this hearty blend of New Age mysticism
and old-fashioned Jekyll-and-Hyde horror, director Russell has great fun
with hallucinatory psychedelic trips and serious-sounding (but strictly
bogus) scientific talk. The seriousness is skin-deep, and so is the film.
However, even Russell's bad films - some claim there is no other category
- are watchable.
ALTERNATE HISTORIES

ALTERNATE WORLDS; HISTORY IN SF.
ALTERNATE WORLDS
An alternate world - some writers and commentators prefer the designation
alternative world on grammatical grounds - is an account of Earth as it
might have become in consequence of some hypothetical alteration in
history. Many sf stories use PARALLEL WORLDS as a frame in which many
alternate worlds can be simultaneously held, sometimes interacting with
one another. Hypothetical exercises of this kind have long been popular
with historians (HISTORY IN SF) and their virtue was proclaimed by Isaac
d'Israeli in The Curiosities of Literature (coll 1791-1823). A classic
collection of such essays, ed J.C.Squire, If It had Happened Otherwise
(anth 1931; vt If, or History Rewritten; exp 1972) took its inspiration
from G.M.Trevelyan's essay If Napoleon had Won the Battle of Waterloo
(1907); its contributors included G.K.CHESTERTON, Andre MAUROIS, Hilaire
BELLOC, A.J.P.Taylor and Winston Churchill. The most common preoccupations
of modern speculative historians were exhibited in two essays written for
Look: If the South had Won the Civil War (1960; 1961) by MacKinlay KANTOR
and If Hitler had Won World War II (1961), by William L.Shirer. The
tradition has been continued in the MAINSTREAM by the film IT HAPPENED
HERE (1963), Frederic MULLALLY's Hitler Has Won (1975) and Len DEIGHTON's
SS-GB (1978). Another event seen today as historically pivotal, the
invention of the atom bomb, is the basis of two novels by Ronald W.CLARK:
Queen Victoria's Bomb (1967), in which the atom bomb is developed much
earlier in history, and The Bomb that Failed (1969; vt The Last Year of
the Old World UK), in which its appearance on the historical scene is
delayed. Alternative histories are used satirically by non-genre writers
in R.Egerton Swartout's It Might Have Happened (1934) and Marghanita
LASKI's Tory Heaven (1948), and the notion is given a more philosophical
twist in Guy DENT's Emperor of the If (1926). The continuing popularity of
alternative histories with mainstream writers is further illustrated by
John HERSEY's White Lotus (1965), Vladimir NABOKOV's Ada (1969), Martin
Cruz SMITH's The Indians Won (1970), Guido Morselli's Past Conditional
(1975; trans 1981) and Douglas Jones's The Court Martial of George
Armstrong Custer (1976). Murray LEINSTER introduced the idea of alternate
worlds to GENRE SF in Sidewise in Time (1934), and Stanley G.WEINBAUM used
it in a light comedy, The Worlds of If (1935); but the first serious
attempt to construct an alternative history in sf was L.Sprague DE CAMP's
LEST DARKNESS FALL (1939; 1941), in which a man slips back through time
and sets out to remould history by preventing or ameliorating the Dark
Ages. This story is set entirely in the distant past, but in The Wheels of
If (1940) de Camp displayed a contemporary USA which might have resulted
from 10th-century colonization by Norsemen. Most subsequent sf stories in
this vein have tended to skip lightly over the detailed process of
historical development to examine alternative presents, but sf writers
with a keen interest in history often devote loving care to the
development of imaginary pasts; a recent enterprise very much in the
tradition of LEST DARKNESS FALL is Harry TURTLEDOVE's Agent of Byzantium
(coll of linked stories 1986). The extraordinary melodramatic potential
inherent in the idea of alternate worlds was further revealed by Jack
WILLIAMSON's THE LEGION OF TIME (1938; 1952), which features alternative

futures at war for their very existence, with crucial battles spilling
into the past and present. The idea of worlds battling for survival by
attempting to maintain their own histories was further developed by Fritz
LEIBER in Destiny Times Three (1945; 1957) and in the Change War series,
which includes THE BIG TIME (1958; 1961). Such stories gained rapidly in
extravagance: The Fall of Chronopolis (1974) by Barrington J.BAYLEY
features a time-spanning Empire trying to maintain its reality against the
alternative versions which its adversaries are imposing upon it. Attempts
by possible futures to influence the present by friendly persuasion were
presented by C.L.MOORE in Greater than Gods (1939) and by Ross ROCKLYNNE
in The Diversifal (1951). The notion of competing alternative histories is
further recomplicated in TIME-TRAVEL stories in which the heroes range
across a vast series of parallel worlds, each featuring a different
alternative history (alternate universes are often created wholesale,
though usually ephemerally, in tricky time-travel stories; see also TIME
PARADOXES). The policing of time-tracks - either singly, as in Isaac
ASIMOV's The End of Eternity (1955), which features the totalitarian
control of history by social engineers, or in great profusion - has
remained a consistently popular theme in sf. One of the earliest such
police forces is featured in Sam MERWIN's House of Many Worlds (1951) and
Three Faces of Time (1955); the exploits of others are depicted in H.Beam
PIPER's Paratime series, begun with Police Operation (1948), in Poul
ANDERSON's Time Patrol series, whose early stories are in Guardians of
Time (coll 1960), in John BRUNNER's Times without Number (fixup 1962 dos),
and - less earnestly - in Simon Hawke's Time Wars series (Nicholas
Yermakov), begun with The Ivanhoe Gambit (1984). Keith LAUMER's Worlds of
the Imperium (1962 dos) and sequels, Avram DAVIDSON's Masters of the Maze
(1965), Jack L.CHALKER's Downtiming the Night Side (1985), Frederik POHL's
The Coming of the Quantum Cats (1986), Mike MCQUAY's Memories (1987) and
Michael P.KUBE-MCDOWELL's Alternities (1988) are convoluted adventure
stories of an essentially similar kind. John CROWLEY's Great Work of Time
(1989) is a more thoughtful work about a conspiracy which attempts to use
time travel to take charge of history. Early genre-sf stories of conflict
between alternate worlds tend to assume that our world is better than most
of the alternatives. This assumption owes much to our conviction that the
right side won both the American Civil War and WWII. Ward MOORE's classic
BRING THE JUBILEE (1953) paints a relatively grim portrait of a USA in
which the South won the Civil War; and images of worlds in which the Nazis
triumphed (HITLER WINS) tend to be nightmarish - notable examples include
Two Dooms (1958) by C.M.KORNBLUTH, THE SOUND OF HIS HORN (1952) by SARBAN,
THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE (1962) by Philip K.DICK, The Proteus Operation
(1985) by James P.HOGAN, and Moon of Ice (1988) by Brad LINAWEAVER. An
interesting exception is Budspy (1987) by David DVORKIN, where a
successful Third Reich is presented more evenhandedly. Other
turning-points in which our world is held to have gone the right way
include the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution - whose suppression
produces technologically primitive worlds in Keith ROBERTS's excellent
PAVANE (fixup 1968), Kingsley AMIS's The Alteration (1976), Martin GREEN's
The Earth Again Redeemed (1978), Phyllis EISENSTEIN's Shadow of Earth
(1979) and John Whitbourn's A Dangerous Energy (1992) - and the Black
Death, which aborts the rise of the West in Robert SILVERBERG's The Gate

of Worlds (1967) and L.Neil SMITH's The Crystal Empire (1986). The idea
that our world might have turned out far better than it has is more often
displayed by ironic satires, including: Harry HARRISON's Tunnel Through
the Deeps (1972; vt A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! UK), in which the
American colonies never rebelled and the British Empire remains supreme;
D.R.BENSEN's And Having Writ... (1978), in which the aliens whose crashing
starship is assumed to have caused the Tunguska explosion survive to
interfere in the course of progress; S.P.SOMTOW's The Aquiliad (fixup
1983), in which the Roman Empire conquered the Americas; and William
GIBSON's and Bruce STERLING's THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (1990), in which
Babbage's calculating machine precipitates an information-technology
revolution in Victorian England. More earnest examples are fewer in
number, but they include The Lucky Strike (1984) by Kim Stanley ROBINSON,
in which a US pilot refuses to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima, and
Elleander Morning (1984) by Jerry YULSMAN, which imagines a world where
Hitler was assassinated before starting WWII. More philosophically
inclined uses of the alternate-worlds theme, involving the worldviews of
individual characters rather than diverted histories, were pioneered in
genre sf by Philip K.Dick in such novels as Eye in the Sky (1957), Now
Wait for Last Year (1967) and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974).
Intriguing homage is paid to Dick's distinctive use of the theme by
Michael BISHOP's The Secret Ascension (1987; vt Philip K.Dick is Dead,
Alas). Other novels which use alternate worlds to explore personal
problems and questions of identity include Bob SHAW's The Two-Timers
(1968), Gordon EKLUND's All Times Possible (1974), Sheila FINCH's
Infinity's Web (1985), Josephine SAXTON's Queen of the States (1986), Ken
Grimwood's Replay (1986) and Thomas BERGER's Changing the Past (1989).
Radical alternative histories, which explore the consequences of
fundamental shifts in biological evolution, include Harry Harrison's
series about the survival of the dinosaurs, begun with West of Eden
(1984); Harry Turtledove's A Different Flesh (fixup 1988), in which Homo
erectus survives in the Americas until 1492; and Brian M.STABLEFORD's The
Empire of Fear (1988), in which 17th-century Europe and Africa are ruled
by vampires. More radical still are novels which portray universes where
the laws of physics are different. Some of these are described in George
GAMOW's series of educative parables Mr Tompkins in Wonderland (coll
1939), and the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory has encouraged
their use in more recent sf, a notable example being The Singers of Time
(1990) by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson. Worlds of Maybe: Seven
Stories of Science Fiction (anth 1970) ed Robert Silverberg contains
further work on the theme by Poul Anderson, Philip Jose FARMER, Larry
NIVEN and Silverberg, as well as the Murray Leinster story cited above. In
addition to further stories, including the de Camp story mentioned above,
Alternative Histories: Eleven Stories of the World as it Might have Been
(anth 1986) ed Martin H.GREENBERG and Charles G.WAUGH includes the
definitive version of Barton C.Hacker's and Gordon B.Chamberlain's
invaluable bibliography of the theme, Pasts that Might Have Been, II; the
first version appeared in EXTRAPOLATION in 1981. Gregory BENFORD edited
four anthologies on the theme: Hitler Victorious (anth 1985); plus What
Might Have Been 1: Alternate Empires (anth 1989), 2: Alternate Heroes
(anth 1989) and 3: Alternate Wars (anth 1991). Alternatives (anth 1989),

ed Robert ADAMS and Pamela Crippen Adams, presented original stories told
from LIBERTARIAN perspectives. Alternate Presidents (anth 1992) ed Michael
RESNICK examines a particular aspect from Benjamin Franklin to Michael
Dukakis; the same editor's Alternate Kennedys (anth 1992) narrows the
focus yet further. See also: PARANOIA; STEAMPUNK.
ALTMAN, ROBERT
COUNTDOWN; QUINTET.
ALTOV, GENRIKH
Pseudonym of Russian writer and sf critic Henrikh (Saulovich) Altschuller
(1926- ); a trained engineer, he has registered dozens of patents. His
unpublished Altov's Register is a mammoth catalogue of sf ideas, topics
and situations. His three collections of sf stories, some written with his
wife Valentina Zhuravlyova, Legendy O Zviozdnykh Kapitanakh Legends of the
Star Captains (coll 1961), Opaliaiuschii Razum The Scorching Mind (coll
1968) and Sozdan Dlia Buri Created for Thunder (coll 1970), represent the
best of the Soviet style of brainstorming HARD SF. Some of these tales
were assembled in Ballad of the Stars (anth trans Roger DeGaris 1982 US),
which GA ed with Zhuravlyova.
ALVAREZ, JOHN
Lester DEL REY.
AMAZING ADULT FANTASY
MARVEL COMICS.
AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN, THE
Film (1957). Malibu/AIP. Prod and dir Bert I.Gordon, starring Glenn
Langan, Cathy Downs, William Hudson. Screenplay Mark Hanna and Gordon,
from a story by Gordon. 81 mins. B/w. An attempt to duplicate the
commercially successful pathos of The INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) by
reversing its procedure, TACM has an army officer exposed to the radiation
from a plutonium bomb and consequently growing to 60ft (18m) tall.
Poignant dialogues take place between the colossal man (Langan) and his
fiancee (Downs): At high school I was voted the guy most likely to reach
the top. He goes mad and is shot, falling into the Hoover Dam. The poorly
matted special effects allow people standing behind the colossal man to be
seen through his body. Often regarded as schlock producer Gordon's best
film, it raises the question of what his worst must look like: the sequel,
War of the Colossal Beast (1958; vt The Terror Strikes), would be a good
candidate. See also: FOOD OF THE GODS; GREAT AND SMALL; MONSTER MOVIES.
AMAZING DETECTIVE TALES
SCIENTIFIC DETECTIVE MONTHLY.
AMAZING SCIENCE FICTION
AMAZING STORIES.
AMAZING SCIENCE FICTION STORIES
AMAZING STORIES.
AMAZING SCIENCE STORIES
UK PULP MAGAZINE published in Manchester by Pembertons in 1951. Two

unmemorable issues appeared, largely reprints from 2 and 3 of the
Australian THRILLS, INCORPORATED, but also 2 stories reprinted from SUPER
SCIENCE STORIES, a UK edition of which had been published by Pembertons.
AMAZING STORIES
1. The magazine of scientifiction, with whose founding Hugo GERNSBACK
announced the existence of sf as a distinct literary species. It was a
BEDSHEET-sized PULP MAGAZINE issued monthly by Gernsback's Experimenter
Publishing Co. as a companion to SCIENCE AND INVENTION; 1 was dated Apr
1926. The title survived to 1994, having been several times modified in
the interim, but it saw great changes. Gernsback lost control of
Experimenter in 1929 and it was acquired by B.A.Mackinnon and H.K.Fly, who
were almost certainly operating as front-men for Bernarr MACFADDEN. The
name of the company was modified more than once, then changed to
Radio-Science Publications in 1930, then to Teck Publications in 1931; but
these name changes were cosmetic, at least some of the new publishers
being in fact Macfadden employees, and Macfadden was himself listed as
publisher and owner in December 1931; he did not interfere with his
editors. Arthur H.Lynch was named as editor of the May-Oct issues, but
Gernsback's assistant T.O'Conor SLOANE, who had stayed with the magazine,
soon (Nov 1929) assumed full editorship. The magazine reverted to standard
pulp format with the Oct 1933 issue. The title was sold in 1938 to
ZIFF-DAVIS, who installed Raymond A.PALMER as editor (June 1938). Palmer
adopted a radically different editorial policy, concentrating on
action-adventure fiction, much of it mass-produced by a stable of authors
using house names. Howard BROWNE became editor in Jan 1950 and the
magazine became a DIGEST with the Apr-May 1953 issue. After a brief period
with Paul W.FAIRMAN as editor (June 1956-Nov 1958) - during which time the
title was changed to Amazing Science Fiction (Mar 1958) and then Amazing
Science Fiction Stories (May 1958) - Cele GOLDSMITH took over (Dec 1958),
using her married name of Cele Lalli from Aug 1964; she ran the magazine
until June 1965, when the title, which had changed back to Amazing Stories
in Oct 1960, was sold to Sol Cohen's Ultimate Publishing Co. For some
years thereafter the bulk of the magazine's contents consisted of
reprints, with Joseph ROSS acting as managing editor (from Aug 1965).
Harry HARRISON became editor in Dec 1967, but a period of confusion
followed as he handed over to Barry N.MALZBERG in Nov 1968, who was in
turn soon replaced by Ted WHITE in May 1969. White eliminated the reprints
and remained editor until Oct 1978, when Sol Cohen sold his interest in
the magazine to his partner Arthur Bernhard; White's last issue was Feb
1979. Elinor Mavor, using the pseudonym Omar Gohagen (May 1979-Aug 1980)
and then her own name, became editor until the Sep 1982 issue. But in
March 1982 - by which time it had again become Amazing Science Fiction
Stories and had been combined with its long-time companion FANTASTIC (from
the Nov 1980 issue) - the title was sold to TSR Hobbies, the marketers of
the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game (GAMES AND TOYS), who installed
George SCITHERS as editor, his first issue being Nov 1982. Scithers was
replaced in Sep 1986 by Patrick Lucien Price. AMZ's circulation hit an
all-time low in 1984 and recovery was slow, but a surge in sales in 1990
prepared the ground for the magazine to be relaunched in May 1991 in a
large-sized slick format, with the original masthead restored. Kim Mohan

took over as editor at the time of the image-change, and AMZ once again
became monthly rather than bimonthly. Publication was temporarily
suspended with the Dec 1993 issue - renamed Winter 1994 - as AMZ was
continuing to lose money. It resumed with a Spring 1994 issue, now in
digest-format, but only two further digest issues were published that
year, the last being marked as Winter 1995. It seems probable that this
will prove to be the last issue ever. In its earliest days AMZ used a
great many reprints of stories by H.G.WELLS, Jules VERNE and Edgar Allan
POE (considered by Gernsback to be the founding fathers of sf) alongside
more recent pulp stories by Garrett P.SERVISS, A.MERRITT and Murray
LEINSTER. The artwork of Frank R.PAUL was a distinctive feature of the
magazine in this period. Original material began to appear in greater
quantity in 1928, in which year Miles J.BREUER, David H.KELLER and Jack
WILLIAMSON published their first stories in AMZ. SPACE OPERA made a
spectacular advent when the first BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY story,
Armageddon 2419 A.D. (1928; 1962) by Philip Francis NOWLAN appeared in the
same issue (Aug 1928) that E.E.Doc SMITH's The Skylark of Space (1928:
1946) began serialization. Sloane maintained Gernsback's policy of
favouring didactic material that was sometimes rather stilted by
pulp-fiction standards, but extravagant serial novels - notably Smith's
Skylark Three (1930; 1948), Edmond HAMILTON's The Universe Wreckers (1930)
and Jack Williamson's The Green Girl (1930; 1950) - maintained the
balance. From 1930 AMZ faced strong competition from ASTOUNDING STORIES,
whose higher rates of pay secured its dominance of the market. When Ray
Palmer took over the ailing AMZ in 1938 he attempted to boost circulation
in several ways. He aimed at a younger audience, obtaining several stories
from Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, and ultimately (in the mid-1940s) elected to
support a series of PARANOID fantasies by the obsessive Richard S.SHAVER
with insinuations that Shaver's theories about evil subterranean forces
dominating the world by superscientific means were actually true. However,
the bulk of AMZ's contents in the Palmer era consisted of lurid formulaic
material by such writers as Don WILCOX, David Wright O'BRIEN and William
P.McGivern (1922-1982); Palmer was probably a frequent pseudonymous
contributor himself. The fiction-factory system operated by ZIFF-DAVIS
reached its height in the mid-1950s when the contents of several of their
magazines were produced on a regular basis by a small group of writers
including sometime AMZ editor Paul Fairman, Robert SILVERBERG, Randall
GARRETT, Harlan ELLISON and Henry SLESAR. This system resulted in some
confusion with regard to the correct attribution of several floating
PSEUDONYMS, especially Ivar JORGENSEN. Few stories of note appeared under
the first three Ziff-Davis editors, although Edmond Hamilton, Nelson BOND
and Walter M.MILLER were occasional contributors. Under Cele Goldsmith's
editorship AMZ improved dramatically, publishing good work by many leading
authors. Notable contributions included Marion Zimmer BRADLEY's first
Darkover novella, The Planet Savers (Nov 1958; 1962 dos), Harlan Ellison's
first sf novel, The Sound of the Scythe (Oct 1959; rev as The Man with
Nine Lives 1960 dos), and Roger ZELAZNY's NEBULA-winning He Who Shapes
(Jan-Feb 1965; exp as THE DREAM MASTER 1966). Zelazny was one of several
writers whose careers were aided in their early stages by Goldsmith;
others include Ben BOVA (who did a series of science articles), David
R.BUNCH, Thomas M.DISCH, Ursula K.LE GUIN and Robert F.YOUNG. When Ted

White became editor he renewed the attempt to maintain a consistent
standard of quality; although handicapped by having to offer a word-rate
payment considerably less than that of his competitors, he achieved some
degree of success. The special 50th-anniversary issue which he compiled
appeared two months late (it bears the date June 1976) owing to scheduling
difficulties. AMZ's continued survival during the next 15 years was
something of a surprise, given its poor sales, though Scithers in
particular made considerable efforts to maintain its literary quality.
Patrick Lucien Price published good work, too, by such writers as Gregory
BENFORD and Paul J.MCAULEY, and also new writers like Paul Di Filippo, but
the magazine seemed to receive almost no promotion. The new slick
packaging from 1991 was much more attractive than any of AMZ's previous
incarnations, and arguably the most attractive of any sf magazine. Alas,
it proved to be not commercially viable and by Dec 1994 AMZhad subsided
into what may be suspended animation but is more probably death. AMZ had
three UK reprint editions, 1946 (1 undated issue, pulp), 1950-53 (24
undated issues, pulp) and 1953-4 (8 undated issues, digest). Anthologies
based on AMZ stories include The Best of Amazing (anth 1967) ed Joseph
Ross, The Best from Amazing Stories (anth 1973) ed Ted White, Amazing
Stories: 60 Years of the Best Science Fiction (anth 1985) ed Isaac ASIMOV
and Martin H.GREENBERG, Amazing Stories: Vision of Other Worlds (anth
1986) ed Greenberg, and a number of others ed Greenberg. 2. US tv series
(vt Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories) (1985-7). Amblin/Universal for
NBC. Created by Steven SPIELBERG. Producers included Joshua Brand, John
Falsey, David E.Vogel. Writers included Spielberg, Frank Deese, Richard
Christian MATHESON, Mick Garris, Joseph Minion, Menno Meyjes, Michael
McDowell, Paul Bartel. Directors included Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis,
Peter Hyams, Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, Joe DANTE, Martin Scorsese,
Paul Bartel, Irvin Kershner, Danny DeVito, Tom Holland, Tobe Hooper. Two
seasons, each of 22 25min episodes. An ambitious attempt to revive the
1950s-60s anthology format - which came at the same time as actual
revivals of The TWILIGHT ZONE (1985-7) and Alfred Hitchcock Presents
(1985-6), and a few competitors like The Hitch Hiker (1983-6) and Tales
from the Darkside (1984-7) - this was less an sf series than its
pulp-derived title suggested, more often going for the blend of fantasy
and sentiment found in the less scary episodes of the original Twilight
Zone. Kept afloat for two years through NBC having committed themselves astonishingly - to 44 episodes from the very beginning, AS, despite its
large budget and the unusually strong directing talent Spielberg was able
to attract (Eastwood, Zemeckis, Scorsese, Bartel, etc.), was unsuccessful.
Many disappointed viewers and critics felt that Spielberg had stretched
himself too thin, as had Rod SERLING with Twilight Zone, by generating the
often fragile storylines for the bulk of the episodes (16 out of 22 in the
first season); one such projected episode looked even more fragile when
expanded into a feature, BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED (1987). Too many of the
stories, despite good special effects and performances, led nowhere.
Typical of AS's uneven tone was the extended Spielberg-directed episode
The Mission, a 50min WWII-bomber anecdote presciently cast (Kevin Costner,
Kiefer Sutherland) and suspensefully directed, but sinking limply into a
ludicrous and irritating fantasy finale. AS did have surprises - the
gritty cartoon episode The Family Dog, designed by Tim Burton, being

perhaps the overall highlight - but mainly it expressed the
diminishing-return whimsy that was beginning to affect even Spielberg's
big-screen work. Three episodes - The Mission, Mummy, Daddy and Go to the
Head of the Class - were released together as a feature film, Amazing
Stories (1987), outside the USA, and many other episodes have been
released in groups of three on videotape. The versions of individual
episodes are collected in Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories (anth 1986)
and Volume II of Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories (anth 1986), both ed
Steven Bauer.
AMAZING STORIES ANNUAL
US BEDSHEET-size 128pp PULP MAGAZINE published by Hugo GERNSBACK's
Experimenter Publishing Co. Its only issue (1927) ran the first
publication of The Master Mind of Mars (1927; 1928) by Edgar Rice
BURROUGHS. A successor, AMAZING STORIES QUARTERLY, resulted from the
success of ASA.
AMAZING STORIES QUARTERLY
US BEDSHEET-size PULP MAGAZINE, companion to AMAZING STORIES (but twice
as fat) and successor to AMAZING STORIES ANNUAL. 22 issues, Winter
1928-Fall 1934, first under the aegis of Hugo GERNSBACK's Experimenter
Publishing Co. and later (1929-34), ed T.O'Conor SLOANE after Gernsback
had lost control, under several publishers. In addition to short stories
it featured a complete novel in every issue, beginning with H.G.WELLS's
When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) but thereafter using mainly original
material. It published many of the most important early pulp sf novels:
White Lily (Winter 1930; as The Crystal Horde 1952) and Seeds of Life
(Fall 1931; 1951), both assembled as Seeds of Life & White Lily (omni
1966), by John TAINE; The Black Star Passes (Fall 1930; 1953) and Invaders
from the Infinite (Spring/Summer 1932; 1961) by John W.CAMPBELL Jr;
Paradise and Iron (Summer 1930) and The Birth of a New Republic (Winter
1930; 1981) by Miles J.BREUER (the latter with Jack WILLIAMSON); The
Sunken World (Summer 1928 and Fall 1934; 1949) by Stanton A.COBLENTZ; and
The Bridge of Light (Fall 1929; 1950) by A.Hyatt VERRILL. Gernsback's own
Ralph 124C 41+ (1911 Modern Electrics; 1925; ASQ Winter 1929) was
reprinted. Some rebound issues of AMZ were re-released, three to a volume,
in 1940-43 (13 issues) and 1947-51 (15 issues) as Amazing Stories
Quarterly.
AMAZING STORIES SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL
US DIGEST-size magazine. One undated issue, June 1957, published by
ZIFF-DAVIS; ed (uncredited) Paul W.FAIRMAN. This was to be a quarterly
magazine printing book-length novels in imitation of GALAXY SCIENCE
FICTION NOVELS. The only novel was Henry SLESAR's routine novelization of
the film 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957).
AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON
Joe DANTE; FEMINISM.
AMERICAN CYBORG: STEEL WARRIOR
Film (1992). Yoram Globus and Christopher Pearce Present a Global
Pictures Production. Exec prods Amnon Globus and Marcus Szwarcfiter, prod
Marti Raz, dir Boaz Davidson, starring Joe Lara, Nicole Hansen and John

Ryan. Screenplay Brent Friedman and Bill Crounse and Don Pequingot, based
on a story by Davidson and Pearce. 91 mins. Colour. The production
background is obscure, but this straight-to-video exploitation thriller
appears to be, unusually, an Israeli/Canadian co-production. In a
postHOLOCAUST stereotype, a depleted world (we only see one city), 17
years after global nuclear war, has nearly invulnerable cyborgs ruling the
now infertile and dying human race in the service of a malign artificial
intelligence. One woman is able to carry a foetus (which she does in a
bottle, rather than her womb). If she (Hansen) can cross the deadly city
to the docks (a ship awaits to carry her and the baby to Europe, where
things are not so bad), avoiding the killer cyborg (Ryan), aided by
enigmatic warrior Austin (Lara), then there will be new hope for the
world. Story, script and acting are uniformly sub-standard, but the
photography is fine, and the film has a faintly exotic quality, perhaps
because of its Israeli background. This is representative of the many
low-budget attempts to recapture the human-versus-cyborg thrills of
TERMINATOR, and it has the now standard plot twist of BLADE RUNNER as
well.
AMERICAN FICTION
UK numbered pocketbook series which could be regarded (being numbered) as
either an anthology series or a magazine. 12 issues known, most 36pp,
numbered only from 2. Published by Utopian Publications, London; ed Benson
HERBERT and Walter GILLINGS (who jointly owned the company). Irregular,
Sep 1944-Jan 1946. AF was a reprint publication. All issues featured
quasi-erotic covers, with the title story often being an already known sf
or fantasy work under a racy new name. Thus S.P.MEEK's Gates of Light
became Arctic Bride (1944 chap), Edmond HAMILTON's Six Sleepers (1935)
became Tiger Girl (c1945 chap), John Beynon Harris's (John WYNDHAM) The
Wanderers of Time (1933) became Love in Time (1945 chap), Jack
WILLIAMSON's Wizard's Isle (1934) became Lady in Danger (c1945 chap) and
Stanton A.COBLENTZ's Planet of Youth (1932) became Youth Madness (1945
chap). Other featured authors were Ralph Milne FARLEY and Robert BLOCH.
All but 1 and 6 in the series contained short stories as well as the
featured novella, hence their usual listing in indexes as if they
constituted separate book publication of a single novella is technically
incorrect. The emphasis was on weird fiction rather than sf, though
stories from other genres were also used.
AMERICAN FLAGG!
US COMIC-book series (1983-9, 63 issues), published by First Comics,
created by writer/ artist Howard V.CHAYKIN. Generally considered one of
the best sf COMICS of the 1980s, AF is set in a media-saturated USA
reduced to Third-World status, and stars Reuben Flagg, drafted into the
Plexus Rangers in Chicago in the 2030s (Plexus being a Mars-based
mega-cartel planning to sell off the USA piece by piece). AF is
sophisticated fun, featuring cynically humorous writing and male and
female characters with large sexual appetites. Except for 27, written by
Alan MOORE, Chaykin wrote the first 30 issues and drew all but two of the
first 26. The post-Chaykin issues of AK were not well received, and First
Comics took the unprecedented step of making 46 an apology for these.

Chaykin returned with 47 and continued to 50, the end of the first series.
In 1988 a second series, now called Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!, sent
Flagg to the USSR; it had 12 issues, with Chaykin editing, writing (with
John Moore) and providing art direction. There was also a one-off American
Flagg Special in 1986. The first 9 issues of AK have been collected as
First Comics Graphic Novels 3, 12 and 20.
AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE
Australian monthly pocketbook magazine, a companion to SELECTED SCIENCE
FICTION. 41 issues, June 1952-Dec 1955, unnumbered and undated 32pp
booklets. Published by Malian Press, Sydney; no editor named. The first 24
issues did not carry the word magazine on the cover, and it has been
suggested that the publishers had bought book rights rather than serial
rights to stories, which would explain the coyness about its being a
regular periodical. ASFM contained reprints from US magazines of quite a
good standard, including stories by James BLISH, John W.CAMPBELL Jr and
Robert A.HEINLEIN.
A.MERRITT'S FANTASY MAGAZINE
US PULP MAGAZINE. 5 issues, Dec 1949-Oct 1950, published by Popular
Publications; no ed listed - it may have been Mary GNAEDINGER. AMFM was a
companion magazine to FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES and FANTASTIC NOVELS, and
was begun in response to the considerable enthusiasm engendered by the
reprinting of A.MERRITT's fiction in those magazines and elsewhere. Until
the appearance in 1954 of VARGO STATTEN SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, and then
in 1977 of ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, AMFM was the only sf
magazine which attempted to build its appeal on the popularity of a single
author - even though Merritt himself had died in 1943 and much of his
fiction was available elsewhere. In any event, the magazine failed to
establish itself. AMFM also published reprints of stories by other
authors. There was a Canadian reprint edition.
AMERY, CARL
GERMANY.
AMES, CLINTON
Rog PHILLIPS.
AMES, MILDRED
(1919- ) US writer of novels for older children. Of sf interest is Is
There Life on a Plastic Planet? (1975), which effectively transforms the
PARANOID theme of substitution - in this case a shop contains dolls
identical to the young women its owner attempts to suborn - into a
resonant tale of adolescence and identity. Questions of identity also lie
at the heart of Anna to the Infinite Power (1981), whose protagonist sees
another girl in her mirror image, eventually uncovering an experiment in
cloning (CLONES). Other novels, like The Silver Link, the Silken Tie
(1984) and Conjuring Summer In (1986), are fantasy.
AMIS, KINGSLEY (WILLIAM)
(1922- ) UK novelist, poet and critic; father of Martin AMIS. He took his
MA at Oxford, and was a lecturer in English at Swansea 1949-61 and Fellow
of Peterhouse, Cambridge, 1961-3. Though KA is best known for such social

comedies as his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), which won him the sobriquet
Angry Young Man, in the catch-phrase of the time, he has also been closely
connected with sf throughout his professional life. He delivered a series
of lectures on sf in 1959 at Princeton University, probably to their
surprise since sf was presumably not the context in which he was invited
to speak. Revised, these were published as a book, New Maps of Hell (1960
US), which was certainly the most influential critical work on sf up to
that time, although not the most scholarly. It strongly emphasized the
DYSTOPIAN elements of sf. KA, himself a satirist and debunker of note, saw
sf as an ideal medium for satirical and sociological extrapolation;
hitherto, most writing on sf had regarded it as primarily a literature of
TECHNOLOGY. As a survey the book was one-sided and by no means thorough,
but it was witty, perceptive and quietly revolutionary. KA went on to edit
a memorable series of ANTHOLOGIES, Spectrum, with Robert CONQUEST (like KA
a novelist, poet, political commentator and sf fan). They were Spectrum
(anth 1961), Spectrum II (anth 1962), Spectrum III (anth 1963), Spectrum
IV (anth 1965) and Spectrum V (anth 1966). These, too, were influential in
popularizing sf in the UK and to some extent in rendering it respectable.
The last of these volumes is selected almost entirely from ASF, a
reflection, perhaps, of KA's increasing conservatism about HARD SF (and in
his politics) which went along with a dislike for stories of the NEW WAVE,
also evident in The Golden Age of Science Fiction (anth 1981) ed KA alone.
As a writer, too, KA was influenced by sf. He wrote several sf short
stories including Something Strange (1960), a minor tour de force about
appearance and reality and about psychological conditioning. His short sf
can mostly be found in My Enemy's Enemy (coll 1962) and later in Collected
Short Stories (coll 1980; exp 1987). The Anti-Death League (1966) is an
extravagant spy story featuring miniaturized nuclear devices. The James
Bond pastiche Colonel Sun: A James Bond Adventure (1968) as by Robert
Markham contains occasional sf elements. The fantasy The Green Man (1969),
one of KA's best works, blends satirical social comedy with Gothic HORROR;
it was dramatized as a miniseries by BBC TV in 1991. KA's major full-scale
sf work is The Alteration (1976), set in an ALTERNATE WORLD in which the
Reformation has not taken place and Roman Catholic domination has
continued to the present. It won the JOHN W.CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD for
best sf novel in 1977. Russian Hide-and-Seek (1980) is a blackly amusing,
pessimistic story about the vulnerability of English culture, set in a
future England that has for decades been subject to the USSR. KA's
controversial artistic evolution from supposed radical to national
institution (during which he remained always his own man) was neatly
summed up by his receipt of a knighthood in 1990. An autobiographical work
is Memoirs (1991). See also: CHILDREN IN SF; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS
ABOUT SF; DEFINITIONS OF SF; FEMINISM; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND
SCIENCE
FICTION; RELIGION; SATIRE; SF IN THE CLASSROOM.
AMIS, MARTIN (LOUIS)
(1949- ) UK writer, son of Kingsley AMIS. From the first his novels have
threatened and distressed their protagonists - and their readers - with
narrative displacements that gnaw away at consensual reality, so that
moments of normality in his work are, like as not, intended to reveal

themselves as forms of entrapment. His interest in sf-like (and
sf-mocking) venues dates back to his second novel, Dead Babies (1975), set
in an indistinct NEAR FUTURE and featuring a protagonist who has made his
pile by working at a local abortion factory. MA was responsible for the
screenplay for SATURN 3 (1980), though Steve GALLAGHER wrote the book tie.
Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) - which took its title from Jean-Paul
Sartre's definition of Hell, in Huis Clos (1945; trans Stuart Gilbert as
In Camera 1946 UK), as being other people - is an afterlife fantasy.
Einstein's Monsters (coll 1987) assembles several sf stories variously
concerned with the decay of the world into HOLOCAUSTS, nuclear and
otherwise. London Fields (1989) is set in 1999 in a world approaching a
dread millennium. Time's Arrow (1991) - which begins, as does Other
People, at the moment at which its protagonist awakens into a radically
displaced world - is a full and genuine sf novel, based on the premise
that the arrow of time has been reversed (MA's acknowledged sf sources for
this premise run from Philip K.DICK's Counter-Clock World 1967 to Kurt
VONNEGUT Jr's Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969), but very much complexifies the
implications of the conceit by making the protagonist an old Nazi, whose
involvement in the death camps now becomes a hymn to life. Throughout the
book, the reversal of the 20th century reads as a reprieve. It is a tale
whose joys encode ironies so grim that the happier moments of return and
redemption are impossible to read without considerable pain. Time's Arrow
was, inevitably, received as a FABULATION; at the same time, it reads with
all the clarity of reportage. See also: PERCEPTION; TIME TRAVEL.
AMOSOV, N(ICOLAI MIKHAILOVITCH)
(1913- ) Russian engineer and writer. In his sf novel Zapiski iz
budushchego (1967; trans George St George as Notes from the Future 1970 US
as by N.Amosoff) a frozen sleeper awakens to 1991, where he is cured of
leukaemia and reflects somewhat heavily upon the nature of the world he
has come into. See also: CRYONICS.
AMRA
George H.SCITHERS.
ANALOG
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.
ANANIA, GEORGE
ROMANIA.
ANDERSEN, HANS CHRISTIAN
DENMARK
ANDERSON, ADRIENNE
ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
ANDERSON, ANDY
[s] William C.ANDERSON.
ANDERSON, CHESTER (VALENTINE JOHN)
(1932-1991) US novelist and poet, member of the Beat Generation, editor
of underground journals on both coasts, and of Paul WILLIAMS's Crawdaddy,
a rock'n'roll magazine, during the 1980s; he wrote poetry as c v j

anderson. His sf was written in association with Michael KURLAND. Ten
Years to Doomsday (1964), a straight collaboration, is a lightly written
INVASION tale with a good deal of activity in space and on other planets.
The Butterfly Kid (1967) was written by CA alone, but stands as the first
volume of a comically surrealistic SHARED-WORLD trilogy set in Greenwich
Village, the second instalment being The Unicorn Girl (1969) by Kurland
and the third The Probability Pad (1970) by T.A.WATERS. The trilogy stars
all three authors (RECURSIVE SF), who become involved in the attempts of a
pop group to fight off a more than merely psychedelic invasion menace:
Greenwich Village is being threatened by a pill which actualizes people's
fantasies. Other works: Fox & Hare (1980), a fictionalized memoir of the
real lives behind the trilogy. See also: PERCEPTION.
ANDERSON, COLIN
(1904-1980) UK writer whose novel Magellan (1970) depicts a
post-HOLOCAUST Earth dominated by a single city, and the somewhat
metaphysical apotheosis afforded its inhabitants. See also: CITIES.
ANDERSON, DAVID
Raymond F.JONES.
ANDERSON, GERRY
(1929- ) and SYLVIA (? - ) UK tv producers and writers; GA was also an
animator and SA a voice artist. They will forever be remembered for a
succession of 1960s children's puppet adventure shows on tv that
occasionally dealt with sf themes on a far more extensive scale than
contemporary adult programming. GA's first two series, The Adventures of
Twizzle (1958) and Torchy the Battery Boy (1959), were fairly conventional
15min puppet shows, albeit featuring characters whose gimmicks (extensible
arms, electrical powers) were notionally scientific. The Western series
Four Feather Falls (1960) began his run of SuperMarionation shows, its
magical feathers giving it a fantastical touch. With the half-hour series
SUPERCAR (1961-2) GA was joined by his wife SA - who would provide female
voices for and write for subsequent series - and came up with the format
that continued for eight years in FIREBALL XL5 (1962-3), STINGRAY
(1964-5), THUNDERBIRDS (1965-6) and CAPTAIN SCARLET AND THE MYSTERONS
(1967-8). All these feature a wonderful vehicle from the 21st century, an
ongoing struggle with evil forces, a catchy score suitable for spin-off
records, impressively designed miniature sets, a quasi-military
organization of good guys, and a family-like regular cast with a
square-jawed hero, a stammering boffin, a non-weedy girl, a crusty chief
and a sidekick, and usually a mysterious master villain with a bumbling
accomplice. Stingray was the first in colour, and introduced marginally
more adult characterizations: Mike Mercury and Steve Zodiac, the heroes of
Supercar and Fireball XL5, were never as bad-tempered as Troy Tempest in
Stingray could be, and they would certainly never have been caught up in a
three-way romance. Thunderbirds experimented with a 50min running time and
a less confrontational plot premise - the Tracy family were rescuing
innocents, not fighting ALIENS as Troy Tempest had done and Captain
Scarlet would do - and became perhaps the highlight of the As' career,
spinning off two feature films, Thunderbirds are Go (1966) and Thunderbird
Six (1968), and creating a set of characters - Lady Penelope, Parker, the

Hood, Brains and Jeff Tracy and his sons - who would remain identifiable
enough to crop up in tv commercials as late as the early 1990s, when the
series was also rerun on UK tv by the BBC. Captain Scarlet, returning to
the half-hour format, tried for a more realistic approach by scaling down
the exaggerated features of the puppets and adding a premise - spun off
from Thunderbirds are Go - about a war between Earth and the Mysterons of
Mars that was less clear-cut than previous conflicts insofar as Earth
(admittedly by accident) was the initial aggressor. Also, the device of
resurrecting dead personnel and equipment for use in battle raised the
level of violence beyond the cosy destructiveness of the earlier shows. In
1994 a new GA live-action tv production appeared in syndication in the US,
Space Precinct, described by him as a New York cop show transferred to
outer space, and received a not very favourable critical reception.
Captain Scarlet was as far as the As' format could be stretched, and their
subsequent puppet shows - JOE 90 (1968-9) and The Secret Service (1969) were far less successful. The first, focusing on a boy genius, appeared
childish to audiences who had become used to the increasing maturity of
each new show - who had in effect grown up with SuperMarionation. The
second, using live actors alongside puppets, was seen by few and cancelled
mid-season. The As had already produced a live-action film, DOPPELGANGER
(1969; vt Journey to the Far Side of the Sun), by the time they determined
to abandon tv puppets altogether and marry their skills with miniature
effects to real-life actors - who, unfortunately, were almost always
accused of being as wooden as their predecessors - in UFO (1970-73). This
was a marginally more realistic rerun of Captain Scarlet with elements
also of The INVADERS (1967-8), in which a secret organization tried to
fight off a plague of flying saucers. After a nondescript non-sf series,
The Protectors (1972-4), the As launched on their most elaborate venture
yet, SPACE 1999 (1975-7), an internationally cast and impressively mounted
attempt to produce a show with both mass and cult appeal along the lines
of STAR TREK. It is frequently and not entirely without justification
remembered as the worst sf series ever aired. During its run the As
divorced, and GA, who remained on the series, gradually lost control to
his varied UK and US backers. Subsequently GA went back to puppetry with
TERRAHAWKS (1983-6), a feeble imitation of his 1960s triumphs, and worked
extensively in commercials, some re-using characters from his earlier
shows. In their heyday, the SuperMarionation shows - which overlapped to a
degree, creating a detailed 21st-century Universe as a backdrop - gave
birth to TV 21, a successful and well drawn COMIC, along with toys, games,
annuals, books and other now-valued ephemera. See also: TELEVISION.
ANDERSON, KAREN
Poul ANDERSON.
ANDERSON, KEVIN J(AMES)
(1962- ) US technical writer and author who began publishing sf with Luck
of the Draw in Space & Time 63 in 1982, and who gradually became a
prolific contributor of short fiction and articles to various sf journals,
over 100 items having been published by 1992. His first novel,
Resurrection, Inc. (1988), combines elements of the usual sf near-future
DYSTOPIA with elements of the horror novel, reanimated bodies serving a

corrupt society as a worker-class. There followed the Gamearth trilogy Gamearth (1989), Gameplay (1989) and Game's End (1990) - which treats with
some verve a GAME-WORLD crisis involved the coming to life of game-bound
personas who (or which) refuse to be cancelled. More interestingly,
Lifeline (1990) with Doug BEASON sets up and solves a technically complex
sequence of problems in space after a nuclear HOLOCAUST (the result of a
USSR-US contretemps of the sort which, unluckily for the authors, had in
the months before publication abruptly become much less likely) has
stripped four habitats of all Earth support; the Filipino station boasts a
GENETIC-ENGINEERING genius who can feed everyone, a US station has the
eponymous monofilament, and so on. Some of the protagonists carrying on
the quadripartite storyline are of interest in their own right. If one
puts aside the whiplashes of Earth's realtime history, the book stands as
a fine example of HARD SF and a gripping portrayal of the complexities of
near space. The Trinity Paradox (1991), also with Beason, treats the
now-standard sf TIME-PARADOX tale with overdue seriousness, suggesting
that untoward moral consequences attend the sudden capacity of its
protagonist - who has been accidentally timeslipped back to Los Alamos in
1943 - to stop nuclear testing in its tracks. See also: MEDICINE; NUCLEAR
POWER; REINCARNATION.
ANDERSON, MARY
(1872-1964) UK writer whose novel, A Son of Noah (1893), features many of
the conventions of prehistoric sf with the added spice of
pterodactyl-worship on the part of a speciously advanced race. But the
Flood will soon clear the air.
ANDERSON, OLOF W.
(1871-1963) US author of a routinely occult novel with sf elements, The
Treasure Vault of Atlantis (1925 US), with a 70-word subtitle; revived
Atlanteans bring ancient knowledge to bear on contemporary problems. See
also: SUSPENDED ANIMATION.
ANDERSON, POUL (WILLIAM)
(1926- ) US writer born in Pennsylvania of Scandinavian parents; he lived
in Denmark briefly before the outbreak of WWII. In 1948 PA gained a degree
in physics from the University of Minnesota. His knowledge of Scandinavian
languages and literature and his scientific literacy have fed each other
fruitfully through a long and successful career. He is Greg BEAR's
father-in-law. PA's first years as a writer were spent in Minnesota, where
after WWII he joined the Minneapolis Fantasy Society (later the MFS) and
associated with such writers as Clifford D.SIMAK and Gordon R.DICKSON,
both of whom shared with him an attachment to semi-rural (often wooded)
settings peopled by solid, canny stock (frequently, in PA's case, of
Scandinavian descent) whose politics and social views often register as
conservative, especially among readers from the urban East and the UK,
although perhaps this cultural style could more fruitfully be regarded as
a form of romantic, Midwestern, LIBERTARIAN individualism. Although he is
perhaps sf's most prolific writer of any consistent quality, PA began
quite slowly, starting to publish sf with Tomorrow's Children, with
F.N.Waldrop, for ASF in 1947, but not publishing with any frequency until
about 1950 - a selection of eloquent early tales appears in Alight in the

Void (coll 1991) - when he also released his first novel, a post-HOLOCAUST
juvenile, Vault of the Ages (1952). In 1953 PA seemed to come afire: in
addition to 19 stories, he published magazine versions of three novels,
Brain Wave (1953 Space Science Fiction as The Escape, first instalment
only before magazine ceased publication; 1954), Three Hearts and Three
Lions (1953 FSF; exp 1961) and War of Two Worlds (1953 Two Complete
Science-Adventure Books as Silent Victory; 1959 dos). The last of these is
one of PA's many well told but routine adventures, in this case involving
a betrayed Earth, alien overlords and plucky humans; but the other two are
successful, mature novels, each in a separate genre. In Three Hearts and
Three Lions, an ALTERNATE-WORLD fantasy, an Earthman is translated from
the middle of WWII into a SWORD-AND-SORCERY venue where he fights the
forces of Chaos in a tale whose humour is laced with the slightly gloomy
Nordic twilight colours that have become increasingly characteristic of
PA's work (noticeably in Three Hearts's sequel, Midsummer Tempest 1974).
Brain Wave, perhaps PA's most famous single novel, remains very nearly his
finest. Its premise is simple: for millions of years the part of the
Galaxy containing our Solar System has been moving through a vast
forcefield whose effect has been to inhibit certain electromagnetic and
electrochemical processes, and thus certain neuronic functions. When Earth
escapes the inhibiting field, synapse-speed immediately increases, causing
a rise in INTELLIGENCE; after the book has traced various absorbing
consequences of this transformation, a transfigured humanity reaches for
the stars, leaving behind former mental defectives and bright animals to
inherit the planet. After Brain Wave PA seemed content for several years
to produce competent but unambitious stories - in such great numbers that
it was not until many years had passed that they were adequately assembled
in volumes like Explorations (coll 1981) and its stablemates - and SPACE
OPERAS with titles like No World of Their Own (1955 dos; with restored
text vt The Long Way Home 1975 UK); he occasionally wrote under the
pseudonyms A.A.Craig and Winston P.Sanders, and in the mid-1960s as
Michael Karageorge. It was during these years, however, that he began to
formulate and write the many stories and novels making up the complex
Technic History series, in reality two separate sequences. The first
centres on Nicholas van Rijn, a dominant merchant prince of the
Polesotechnic League, an interstellar group of traders who dominate a
laissez-faire Galaxy of scattered planets. Anderson has been widely
criticized for the conservative implications it is possible (though with
some effort) to draw from these stories, whose philosophical implications
he modestly curtails. The second sequence properly begins about 300 years
later, after the first flowering of a post-League Terran Empire, which,
increasingly decadent and corrupt, is under constant threat from other
empires. Most of the sequence features Dominic Flandry, a Terran agent who
- sophisticated, pessimistic and tough - gradually becomes a figure of
stature as Anderson fills in and expands his story, begun in 1951. The
internal chronology of the double sequence is not secure, but the
following list is close. Van Rijn: War of the Wing-Men (1958 dos; with
restored text and new introduction vt The Man who Counts 1978); Trader to
the Stars (coll 1964; with 1 story cut 1964 UK); The Trouble Twisters
(coll 1966); Satan's World (1969); Mirkheim (1977); The Earth Book of
Stormgate (coll 1978; in 3 vols 1980-81 UK); The People of the Wind

(1973). Flandry: Ensign Flandry (1966); A Circus of Hells (1970)and The
Rebel Worlds (1969; vt Commander Flandry 1978 UK), both assembled as
Flandry (omni 1993) The Day of Their Return (1973) andThe People of the
Wind both assembled as The Day of Their Return/The People of the Wind
(omni 1982); Mayday Orbit (1961 dos) and Earthman, Go Home! (1960 dos),
both assembled with revisions as Flandry of Terra (omni 1965); We Claim
These Stars (1959 dos), which is included in Agent of the Terran Empire
(coll 1965); A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows (1974; vt Knight Flandry 1980
UK) and The Rebel Worlds both assembled as The Rebel Worlds/A Knight of
Ghosts and Shadows (omni 1982); A Stone in Heaven (1979); The Game of
Empire (1985), featuring Flandry's daughter, and pointing the way to two
post-Flandry tales: Let the Spacemen Beware (1960 Fantastic Universe as A
Twelvemonth and a Day; 1963 chap dos; with new introduction vt The Night
Face 1978), also included in a separate collection, The Night Face and
Other Stories (coll 1978); and The Long Night (coll 1983). Stories written
later tend to moodier, darker textures. A somewhat smaller sequence, the
Psychotechnic League stories, traces the gradual movement of Man into the
Solar System and eventually the Galaxy itself. There is a good deal of
action-debate about AUTOMATION, the maintenance of freedom in an expanded
polity, and so forth. The sequence comprises, by rough internal
chronology: The Psychotechnic League (coll 1981), Cold Victory (coll
1982), Starship (coll 1982), The Snows of Ganymede (1955 Startling Stories
1958 dos), Virgin Planet (1959), and Star Ways (1956; vt with new
introduction The Peregrine 1978). There are several further series. The
early Time Patrol stories (ALTERNATE WORLDS) are contained in Guardians of
Time (coll 1960; with 2 stories added vt The Guardians of Time 1981) and
Time Patrolman (coll of linked novellas 1983), both assembled as Annals of
the Time Patrol (omni 1984); subsequently, early and later material was
rearranged as The Shield of Time (coll of linked stories 1990) and The
Time Patrol (omni/coll 1991), which re-sorted long stories from the first
volumes along with a new novel, Star of the Sea, plus The Year of the
Ransom (1988) and other new material. The History of Rustum sequence,
mainly concerned with the establishing on laissez-faire lines of a human
colony on a planet in the Epsilon Eridani system, includes Orbit Unlimited
(coll of linked stories 1961) and New America (coll of linked stories
1982). With Gordon R.Dickson, PA wrote the Hoka series about furry aliens
who cannot understand nonliteral language (i.e., metaphors, fictions) and
so take everything as truth, with results intended as comic: Earthman's
Burden (coll of linked stories 1957), Star Prince Charlie (1975) and Hoka!
(coll of linked stories 1984). The Last Viking sequence - The Golden Horn
(1980), The Road of the Sea Horse (1980) and The Sign of the Raven (1980)
- is fantasy, as are the King of Ys novels, written with PA's wife Karen
Anderson (1932- ): Roma Mater (1986), Gallicenae (1987), Dahut (1988) and
The Dog and the Wolf (1988). Although many of the novels and stories
listed as linked to series can be read as singletons, there seems little
doubt that the interlinked complexity of reference and storyline in PA's
fiction has somewhat muffled its effect in the marketplace. This situation
has not been helped by a marked lack of focus in its publication, so that
the interested reader will find considerable difficulty tracing both the
items in a series and their intended relation to one another. With dozens
of novels and hundreds of stories to his credit - all written with a

resolute professionalism and widening range, though also with a marked
disparity between copious storytelling skills and a certain banality in
the creation of characters - PA is still not as well defined a figure in
the pantheon of US sf as writers (like Isaac ASIMOV from the GOLDEN AGE OF
SF and Frank HERBERT from a decade later) of about the same age and
certainly no greater skill. Nonetheless he has been repeatedly honoured by
the sf community, serving as SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA President
for 1972-3, and receiving 7 HUGOS for sf in shorter forms: in 1961 for The
Longest Voyage (Best Short Story); in 1964 for No Truce With Kings (Best
Short Story); in 1969 for The Sharing of Flesh (Best Novelette); in 1972
for The Queen of Air and Darkness (Best Novella), which also won a NEBULA;
in 1973 for Goat Song (Best Novelette), which also won a Nebula; in 1979
for Hunter's Moon (Best Novelette); and in 1982 for The Saturn Game (Best
Novella), which also won a Nebula. PA also won the Gandalf (Grand Master)
Award for 1977. Out of the welter of remaining titles, four singletons and
one short series can be mentioned as outstanding. The High Crusade (1960)
is a delightful wish-fulfilment conception; an alien SPACESHIP lands in
medieval Europe where it is taken over by quick-thinking Baron Roger and
his feudal colleagues who, when the ship takes them to the stars, soon
trick, cajole, outfight and outbreed all the spacefaring races they can
find, and found their own empire on feudal lines. It is PA's most joyful
moment. Tau Zero (1967 Gal as To Outlive Eternity; exp 1970) is less
successful as fiction, though its speculations on COSMOLOGY are
fascinating, and the hypothesis it embodies is strikingly well conceived.
A spaceship from Earth, intended to fly near the speed of light so that
humans can reach the stars without dying of old age (as a consequence of
the time-dilatation described by the Lorentz-Fitzgerald equations),
uncontrolledly continues to accelerate at a constant one gravity after
reaching its intended terminal velocity, so that the disparity between
ship-time and external time becomes ever greater: eons hurtle by outside,
until eventually the Universe contracts to form a monobloc. After a new
Big Bang the ship begins to slow gradually and the crew plans to settle a
new planet in the universe that has succeeded our own. The felt scope of
the narrative is convincingly sustained throughout, though the characters
tend to soap opera. In The Avatar (1978) a solitary figure typical of PA's
later work searches the Galaxy for an alien race sufficiently
sophisticated to provide him with the means to confound a non-libertarian
Earth government. THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS (1989) ambitiously follows
the long lives of a group of immortals, whose growing disaffection with
the recent course of Earth history again points up the sense of
disenchantment noticeable in the later PA, along with a feeling that, in
an inevitably decaying Universe, the tough thing (and the worthy thing) is
to endure. In Harvest of Stars (1993) and its sequel, The Stars Are Also
Fire (1994), that sense of disenchantment once again governs a tale in
which Earth - after centuries of savage environmental exploitation - is no
longer capable of sustaining humanity's quest for new adventures, and for
a new home. The elegy is perhaps soured by some political point-scoring;
but the escape from the dying planet is sustained and exhilarating. Other
works: The Broken Sword (1954; rev 1971); Planet of No Return (1956 dos;
vt Question and Answer 1978); THE ENEMY STARS (1959; with one story added
exp as coll 1987); Perish by the Sword (1959) and The Golden Slave (1960;

rev 1980) and Murder in Black Letter (1960) and Rogue Sword (1960) and
Murder Bound (1962), all associational; Twilight World (2 stories ASF 1947
including Tomorrow's Children with F.N.Waldrop; fixup 1961); Strangers
from Earth (coll 1961); Un-Man and Other Novellas (coll 1962 dos); After
Doomsday (1962); The Makeshift Rocket (1958 ASF as A Bicycle Built for
Brew; 1962 chap dos); Shield (1963); Three Worlds to Conquer (1964); Time
and Stars (coll 1964; with 1 story cut 1964 UK); The Corridors of Time
(1965); The Star Fox (fixup 1965); The Fox, the Dog and the Griffin: A
Folk Tale Adapted from the Danish of C.Molbeck (1966), a juvenile fantasy;
World without Stars (1967); The Horn of Time (coll 1968); Seven Conquests
(coll 1969; vt Conquests 1981 UK); Beyond the Beyond (coll 1969; with 1
story cut 1970 UK); Tales of the Flying Mountains (1963-5 ASF as by
Winston P.Sanders; fixup 1970); The Byworlder (1971); Operation Chaos
(coll of linked stories 1971); The Dancer from Atlantis (1971) and There
Will Be Time (1972), later assembled together as There Will Be Time, and
The Dancer from Atlantis (omni 1982); Hrolf Kraki's Saga (1973), a
retelling of one of the greatest Icelandic sagas, associational; The Queen
of Air and Darkness and Other Stories (coll 1973); Fire Time (1974);
Inheritors of Earth (1974) with Gordon EKLUND - the novel was in fact
written by Eklund, based on a 1951 PA story published in Future; The Many
Worlds of Poul Anderson (coll 1974; vt The Book of Poul Anderson 1975),
not the same as The Worlds of Poul Anderson (omni 1974), which assembles
Planet of No Return, The War of Two Worlds and World without Stars;
Homeward and Beyond (coll 1975); The Winter of the World (1975), later
assembled with The Queen of Air and Darkness as The Winter of the World,
and The Queen of Air and Darkness (omni 1982); Homebrew (coll 1976 chap),
containing essays as well as stories; The Best of Poul Anderson (coll
1976); Two Worlds (omni 1978), which assembles World without Stars and
Planet of No Return; The Merman's Children (1979); The Demon of Scattery
(1979) with Mildred Downey Broxon (1944- ); Conan the Rebel (1980); The
Devil's Game (1980); Winners (coll 1981), a collection of PA's Hugo
winners; Fantasy (coll 1981); The Dark between the Stars (coll 1982); the
Maurai series comprising Maurai and Kith (coll 1982), tales of
post-catastrophe life, and Orion Shall Rise (1983), a pro-technology
sequel, in which humanity once again aspires to the stars; The Gods
Laughed (coll 1982); Conflict (coll 1983); The Unicorn Trade (coll 1984)
with Karen Anderson; Past Times (coll 1984); Dialogue with Darkness (coll
1985); No Truce with Kings (1963 FSF; 1989 chap dos); Space Folk (coll
1989); The Saturn Game (1981 ASF; 1989 chap dos); Inconstant Star (coll
1991), stories set in Larry NIVEN's Man-Kzin universe; The Longest Voyage
(1960 ASF; 1991 chap dos); Losers' Night (1991 chap); Kinship with the
Stars (coll 1991); How to Build a Planet (1991 chap), nonfiction; The
Armies of Elfland (coll 1992). As Editor: West by One and by One (anth
1965 chap); Nebula Award Stories No 4 (anth 1969); The Day the Sun Stood
Still (anth 1972), a common-theme anthology with Gordon R.Dickson and
Robert SILVERBERG; A World Named Cleopatra (anth 1977) ed Roger ELWOOD, a
SHARED-WORLD anthology built around the title story and concept supplied
by PA; 4 titles ed with Martin H.GREENBERG and Charles G.WAUGH,
Mercenaries of Tomorrow (anth 1985), Terrorists of Tomorrow (anth 1985),
Time Wars (anth 1986) and Space Wars (anth 1988); The Night Fantastic
(anth 1991) with Karen Anderson and (anon) Greenberg. About the author:

Against Time's Arrow: The High Crusade of Poul Anderson (1978 chap) by
Sandra MIESEL; Poul Anderson: Myth-Maker and Wonder-Weaver: A Working
Bibliography (latest edition 1989 in 2 vols, each chap) by Gordon BENSON
Jr and Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE. See also: ALIENS; ANTHROPOLOGY; ASTEROIDS;
ATLANTIS; BLACK HOLES; CLONES; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CRIME
AND
PUNISHMENT; CYBORGS; DESTINIES; ECOLOGY; ECONOMICS; END OF THE WORLD;
ESCHATOLOGY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FANTASY; FASTER THAN LIGHT; FORCE
FIELD;
GALACTIC EMPIRES; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; GAMES AND SPORTS; GENETIC
ENGINEERING; GODS AND DEMONS; GRAVITY; HEROES; HISTORY IN SF; HUMOUR;
IMMORTALITY; JUPITER; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION;
MAGIC;
MATTER TRANSMISSION; MUTANTS; MYTHOLOGY; NUCLEAR POWER; PLANETARY
ROMANCE;
POLITICS; PSI POWERS; PSYCHOLOGY; RELIGION; ROBERT HALE LIMITED; ROBOTS;
SCIENTIFIC ERRORS; SENSE OF WONDER; SOCIAL DARWINISM; SOCIOLOGY; SPACE
FLIGHT; STARS; SUN; SUPERMAN; TECHNOLOGY; TERRAFORMING; TIME
PARADOXES;
UNDER THE SEA; UTOPIAS; VENUS; WAR; WEAPONS.
ANDERSON, WILLIAM C(HARLES)
(1920- ) USAF pilot and writer in various genres who published his first
sf, The Valley of the Gods (1957) as Andy Anderson. Like his Pandemonium
on the Potomac (1966), it features a father and daughter: in the former
book they philosophize about the extinction of mankind; in the latter they
act on their anxiety about Man's imminent self-destruction, blowing up a
US city as a Dreadful Warning. Penelope (1963) and Adam M-1 (1964) are
further sf comedies, the former concerned with a communicating porpoise which appears also in Penelope, the Damp Detective (1974) - and the latter
with an ANDROID, the first Astrodynamically Designed Aerospace Man. Other
works: Five, Four, Three, Two, One - Pffff (1960); The Gooney Bird (1968);
The Apoplectic Palm Tree (1969). See also: ADAM AND EVE.
ANDOM, R.
Pseudonym of UK writer Alfred Walter Barrett (1869-1920), who remains
best known for We Three and Troddles: A Tale of London Life (1894) and
other light fiction in the mode of popular figures like Jerome K.Jerome
(1859-1927). His sf and fantasy were similarly derivative; titles of
interest include The Strange Adventure of Roger Wilkins and Other Stories
(coll 1895), The Identity Exchange: A Story of Some Odd Transformations
(1902; vt The Marvellous Adventures of Me 1904), The Enchanted Ship: A
Story of Mystery with a Lot of Imagination (1908) and The Magic Bowl, and
the Blue-Stone Ring: Oriental Tales with Occi(or Acci)dental Fittings
(coll 1909), all exhibiting an uneasy fin de siecle flippancy
characteristic of F.ANSTEY but with less weight. In Fear of a Throne
(1911) is a RURITANIAN fantasy.
ANDRE, ALIX
Gail KIMBERLY.
ANDREAS, JURGEN

Hans Joachim ALPERS.
ANDREISSEN, DAVID
David C.POYER.
ANDREWS, FELICIA
Charles L.GRANT.
ANDREWS, KEITH WILLIAM
Technically a house name, though all titles here listed are in fact by US
writer William H(enry) Keith Jr (1950- ). The Freedom's Rangers sequence
of military-sf adventures, whose heroes roam into various epochs to combat
the KGB, comprises Freedom's Rangers (1989), Freedom's Rangers 2: Raiders
of the Revolution (1989), 3: Search and Destroy (1990), 4: Treason in Time
(1990), 5: Sink the Armada (1990) and 6: Snow Kill (1991). The first
volume features a commando raid through time to kill Hitler; as some of
the titles indicate, the targets thereafter vary. It may be that the
course of real history has determined the progress of the series. Under
his own name Keith has written two Battletech game ties (GAMES AND TOYS):
Mercenary's Star (1987) and The Price of Glory (1987); Renegades Honor
(1988) is another game novelization.
ANDROIDS
Film (1982). New World. Dir Aaron Lipstadt, starring Klaus Kinski, Brie
Howard, Norbert Weisser, Crofton Hardester, Don Opper. Screenplay James
Reigle and Opper, based on a story by Will Reigle. 80 mins. Colour. The
co-scriptwriter, Don Opper, plays Max, the innocent ANDROID (part flesh,
part metal) who does imitations of James Stewart and works for mad Dr
Daniel (Kinski) in a space laboratory, soon invaded by three criminals. He
experiences sex (Max, you're a doll!), is programmed to become a ruthless
killer just as we were accepting him as human, participates in the
awakening of a female android, learns Daniel's true nature (a plot twist
stolen from ALIEN) and gets the girl. A is made with skill and panache, is
good on android politics (for which one might read working-class
politics), and is one of the most confident sf movies yet made, despite
its low budget. The scriptwriters are infinitely more at home with the
themes of written sf than is usual in sf cinema. Lipstadt's subsequent sf
movie, CITY LIMITS (1984), was disappointing.
ANDROIDS
The term android, which means manlike, was not commonly used in sf until
the 1940s. The first modern use seems to have been in Jack WILLIAMSON's
The Cometeers (1936; 1950). The word was initially used of automata, and
the form androides first appeared in English in 1727 in reference to
supposed attempts by the alchemist Albertus Magnus (c1200-1280) to create
an artificial man. In contemporary usage android usually denotes an
artificial human of organic substance, although it is sometimes applied to
manlike machines, just as the term ROBOT is still occasionally applied (as
by its originator Karel CAPEK) to organic entities. The conventional
distinction was first popularized by Edmond HAMILTON in his CAPTAIN FUTURE
series, where Captain Future's sidekicks were a robot, an android and a
brain in a box. The most important modern exceptions to the conventional
rule are to be found in the works of Philip K.DICK. The notion of

artificial humans is an old one, embracing the GOLEM of Jewish mythology
as well as alchemical homunculi. Until the 19th century, though, it was
widely believed that organic compounds could not be synthesized, and that
humanoid creatures of flesh and blood would therefore have to be created
either by magical means or, as in Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein (1818), by
the gruesome process of assembly. Even after the discovery that organic
molecules could be synthesized, some time passed before, in R.U.R. (1920;
trans 1923), Capek imagined androids grown in vats as mass-produced
slaves; these robots were made so artfully as to acquire souls, and
eventually conquered their makers. There was some imaginative resistance
to the idea of the android because it seemed a more outrageous breach of
divine prerogative than the building of humanoid automata. Several authors
toyed with the idea but did not carry it through: the androids in The
Uncreated Man (1912) by Austin Fryers and in The Chemical Baby (1924) by
J.Storer CLOUSTON prove to be hoaxes. Edgar Rice BURROUGHS played a
similar trick in The Monster Men (1913; 1929), but did include some
authentic artificial men as well, as he did also in Synthetic Men of Mars
(1940). In the early sf PULP MAGAZINES androids were rare, authors
concentrating almost exclusively on mechanical contrivances. It was not
until after WWII that Clifford SIMAK wrote the influential Time and Again
(1951; vt First He Died 1953), the first of many stories in which androids
seek emancipation from slavery; here they are assisted in their cause by
the discovery that, in common with all living creatures, they have ALIEN
commensals - sf substitutes for souls. Sf writers almost invariably take
the side of the androids against their human masters, sometimes
eloquently: the emancipation of the biologically engineered Underpeople is
a key theme in Cordwainer SMITH's Instrumentality series; a Millennarian
android religion is memorably featured in Robert SILVERBERG's Tower of
Glass (1970); and androids whose personalities are based on literary
models are effectively featured in Port Eternity (1982) by C.J.CHERRYH.
Cherryh's CYTEEN (1988) is one of the few novels to attempt to present a
society into which androids are fully integrated. Other pleas for
emancipation are featured in Down among the Dead Men (1954) by William
TENN, Slavers of Space (1960 dos; rev as Into the Slave Nebula 1968) by
John BRUNNER and Birthright (1975) by Kathleen SKY, but the liberated
androids in Charles L.GRANT's The Shadow of Alpha (1976) and its sequels
are treated far more ambivalently. An android is used as an innocent
observer of human follies in Charles PLATT's comedy Less than Human
(1986), and to more sharply satirical effect in Stephen FINE's Molly Dear:
The Autobiography of an Android, or How I Came to my Senses, Was Repaired,
Escaped my Master, and Was Educated in the Ways of the World (1988).
Androids also feature, inevitably, in stories which hinge on the confusion
of real and ersatz, including Made in USA (1953) by J.T.MCINTOSH, Synth
(1966) by Keith ROBERTS, the murder mystery Fondly Fahrenheit (1954) by
Alfred BESTER, and Replica (1987) by Richard BOWKER. The confusion between
real and synthetic is central to the work of Philip K.Dick, who tends to
use the terms android and robot interchangeably; he discusses the
importance this theme had for him in his essays The Android and the Human
(1972) and Man, Android and Machine (1976), both of which are reprinted in
The Dark-Haired Girl (coll 1988). His most notable novels dealing with the
subject are DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (1968) and We Can Build

You (1972). Stories featuring androids designed specifically for use at
least in part as sexual partners have become commonplace as editorial
taboos have relaxed; examples include The Silver Metal Lover (1982) by
Tanith LEE and The Hormone Jungle (1988) by Robert REED. Science Fiction
Thinking Machines (anth 1954) ed Groff CONKLIN has a brief section
featuring android stories; The Pseudo-People (anth 1965 vt Almost Human:
Androids in Science Fiction) ed William F.NOLAN mostly consists of stories
of robots capable of imitating men.
ANDROMEDA BREAKTHROUGH, THE
UK tv serial (1962). A BBC TV production. Prod John ELLIOT, written Fred
HOYLE, Elliot. 6 episodes, 5 at 45 mins, the 6th 50 mins. B/w. The cast
included Peter Halliday, Mary Morris, Barry Linehan, John Hollis, Susan
Hampshire. In this sequel to A FOR ANDROMEDA the android woman built
according to instructions from the stars is played by Susan Hampshire, not
Julie Christie; she has not drowned, as previously thought. She is
kidnapped along with scientist Fleming (Halliday) by a Middle Eastern oil
state where a new COMPUTER has been built according to plans stolen from
the Scottish original. This is used by an international cartel in an
attempt at world domination. The plot becomes ever more melodramatic.
World weather is changed by the influence of computer-designed bacteria on
the oceans. The extraterrestrial beings who sent the original computer
instructions are not, we are implausibly told, just malicious: they are
merely undertaking social engineering on other worlds by administering
salutary shocks. (It seems that yellow-star races tend to wipe themselves
out using nuclear weapons or other devices.) This was a less powerful
serial than its memorable predecessor. The novelization is The Andromeda
Breakthrough (1964) by Fred Hoyle and John Elliot.
ANDROMEDA NEBULA, THE
TUMANNOST ANDROMEDY.
ANDROMEDA STRAIN, THE
Film (1971). Universal. Dir Robert WISE, starring Arthur Hill, David
Wayne, James Olson, Kate Reid. Screenplay Nelson Gidding, based on The
Andromeda Strain (1969) by Michael CRICHTON. 130 mins. Colour. This film,
whose director had in 1951 made the classic sf film TheDAY THE EARTH STOOD
STILL, concerns a microscopic organism, inadvertently brought to Earth on
a returning space probe, which causes the instant death of everyone in the
vicinity of the probe's landing (near a small town) with the exception of
a baby and the town drunk. These two are isolated in a vast underground
laboratory complex, where a group of scientists attempts to establish the
nature of the alien organism. The real enemy seems to be not the Andromeda
virus but technology itself: it is mankind's technology that brings the
virus to Earth, and the scientists in the laboratory sequences - most of
the film - are made to seem puny and fallible compared to the gleaming
electronic marvels that surround them; they have, in effect, become
unwanted organisms within a superior body. (Wise deliberately avoided
using famous actors in order to get the muted performances he wished to
juxtapose with the assertive machinery.) The celebration of technology is
only apparent - the film, despite its implausible but exciting ending, is
coldly ironic, and rather pessimistic.

ANDROMEDA THE MYSTERIOUS
TUMANNOST ANDROMEDY.
ANDY WARHOL'S FRANKENSTEIN
FRANKENSTEIN.
ANESTIN, VICTOR
ROMANIA.
ANET, CLAUDE
Pseudonym of Swiss writer Jean Schopfer (1868-1931). His sf novel La fin
d'un monde (1925; trans Jeffery E.Jeffery as The End of a World (1927 US;
vt Abyss) describes the cultural destruction of a prehistoric Ice Age
people by a more advanced culture. See also: ORIGIN OF MAN.
ANIMAL FARM
George ORWELL.
ANMAR, FRANK
William F.NOLAN.
ANNA LIVIA
Working name of Irish-born UK writer and editor Anna Livia Julian Brawn
(1955- ), a lesbian feminist of radical views, which she has advanced in
tales of considerable wit, though at book length her effects become
uneasy. Her second novel, Accommodation Offered (1985), invokes a spirit
world which has a ring of fantasy. Her third, Bulldozer Rising (1988), is
an sf DYSTOPIA which depicts a culture rigidly dominated by young males in
which old women, unpersoned and unperceived from the age of 40, represent
the only remaining human potential, the only hope for revolt. About half
the stories assembled in Saccharin Cyanide (coll 1990) present similar
lessons in sf terms. Other works: Minimax (1992), a feminist vampire
novel.
ANONYMOUS SF AUTHORS
This rubric covers the authors of works which, in their first edition,
appeared with no indication of authorship whatsoever, and any in which
authorship is indicated only by a row of asterisks or some similar symbol.
Works attributed to the author of... are considered only if the work
referred to is itself anonymous. Cases where subsequent editions reveal
authorship are not excluded. All other attributions are regarded as
PSEUDONYMS. Anonymously edited sf ANTHOLOGIES are not particularly common,
unlike the case with ghost and horror stories. Before the 20th century
literary anonymity was prevalent. Though this was most notable among the
numerous works of Grub-Street fictional journalism of the early 19th
century, many novels of a higher status likewise hid their authorship. On
some occasions the practice was adopted by well known writers - e.g., Lord
LYTTON - when the content of a novel differed radically from their earlier
writings; although such works are anonymous in a bibliographic sense (and
so within our purview), their authorship was often widely known at the
time of publication. Other authors used anonymity because their work was
controversial, an attribute common in early sf. Such was the case with
UTOPIAN novels, where the depiction of an ideal state highlighted faults

the writer saw in his (or, rarely, her) own society. Falling into this
category is The Reign of George VI, 1900-1925 (1763), the earliest known
example of the future-WAR novel. Showing the forceful George VI becoming
master of Europe following his successes in the European War of 1917-20,
the anonymous UK author gave no consideration to possible change in
society, technology or military strategy, his depicted future being very
similar to contemporary reality. Of more importance in the HISTORY OF SF
is L'an deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771 France; trans W.Hooper as
Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred 1772 UK) (by L.-S. MERCIER),
the first futuristic novel to show change as an inevitable process. It was
widely translated and reprinted, inspiring many imitators. Also anonymous,
but set in an imaginary country, was the first US utopian work, Equality,
or A History of Lithconia (1802 The Temple of Reason as Equality: A
Political Romance; 1837), which depicted a communal economy in a society
where conurbations had been rejected in favour of an equal distribution of
houses. Other anonymous utopian works, some of considerable importance,
appeared throughout the 19th century. Probably the most influential was
Lytton's The Coming Race (1871). Of similar importance is W.H.HUDSON's A
Crystal Age (1887), whose Darwinian extrapolation, although obscured by
the author's animistic view of the world, shows humankind evolved towards
a hive structure (HIVE-MINDS) and living in perfect harmony with Nature.
Another noteworthy Darwinian novel was Colymbia (1873) (by Robert Ellis
DUDGEON, a friend of and physician to Samuel BUTLER), which describes a
remote archipelago where humans have evolved into amphibious beings.
Integral to this gentle SATIRE is a scene in which the country's leading
philosophers debate their common origins with the seal family. Particular
mention should also be made of Ellis James Davis (?1847-1935), author of
the highly imaginative and carefully detailed novels Pyrna, a Commune, or
Under the Ice (1875) and Etymonia (1875) - both utopias, the first located
under a glacier, the second on an ISLAND - and of Coralia: A Plaint of
Futurity (1876), a supernatural fantasy. Other anonymous sf authors
eschewed the utopian format for a more direct attack on aspects of
contemporary society. Following the build-up in power by Germany in the
early 1870s there appeared The Battle of Dorking; Reminiscences of a
Volunteer (1871 chap) (by Sir George T.CHESNEY), the most socially
influential sf novel of all time. Advocating a restructuring of the UK
military system to meet a conceived INVASION, it provoked a storm in
Parliament and enjoyed numerous reprints and translations throughout the
world; it inspired many anonymous refutations. Many other anonymous sf
works, by contrast, enjoyed only rapid obscurity, in some case to the
detriment of sf's development. Perhaps the three most important of these
are: Annals of the Twenty-ninth Century, or The Autobiography of the Tenth
President of the World Republic (1874) (by Andrew BLAIR), a massive work
describing the step-by-step COLONIZATION of our Solar System; In the
Future: A Sketch in Ten Chapters (1875 chap), the story of a struggle for
religious tolerance in a future European empire; and Thoth: A Romance
(1888) (by J.S.Nicholson 1850-1927), an impressive LOST-WORLD novel set in
Hellenic times and depicting a scientifically advanced race using airships
in the North African desert. Among the diversity of ideas expressed by
anonymous sf authors were the stress inflicted upon an ape (APES AND
CAVEMEN) when taught to speak, in The Curse of Intellect (1895), the

emancipation of women, in the futuristic satire The Revolt of Man (1882)
(by Sir Walter BESANT) and, in Man Abroad: A Yarn of Some Other Century
(1887), the notion that humankind will take its international disputes
into space. The Checklist of Fantastic Literature (1948) by Everett
F.BLEILER lists 127 anonymous works (though many are fantasy rather than
sf). A number of anonymous authors whose identities are now known receive
entries in this volume, the most famous being Mary SHELLEY, author of
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818). Others are too numerous and
their works too slight to merit mention. The Supplemental Checklist of
Fantastic Literature (1963) by Bradford M.DAY adds a further 27 titles to
Bleiler's total, and there are certainly more waiting to be found - such
as The History of Benjamin Kennicott (1932). Anonymous sf authors are
still with us today, particularly in the COMICS and in BOYS' PAPERS, often
retaining their role as social critics or outrageous prognosticators.
However, most modern authors, when seeking to retain their privacy, make
use of PSEUDONYMS. Very few anonymous books - except for anthologies
(which are often released without crediting the compiler) and erotica are published today.
ANOTHER FLIP FOR DOMINICK
The FLIPSIDE OF DOMINICK HIDE.
ANSIBLE
1. The imaginary device invented by Ursula K.LE GUIN for instantaneous
communication between two points, regardless of the distance between them.
The physics which led to its invention is described in The Dispossessed
(1974), but the device is mentioned in a number of the Hainish series of
stories written before The Dispossessed, and indeed is central to their
rationale. It compares interestingly with James BLISH's DIRAC
COMMUNICATOR. (FASTER THAN LIGHT and COMMUNICATION for further discussion
of both.) The ansible has since been adopted as a useful device by several
other writers. 2. Fanzine (1979-87 and 1991 onwards), first sequence being
50 issues, quarto, 4-10pp, ed from Reading, UK, by David LANGFORD. A is a
newszine, a fanzine that carries news on sf and FANDOM. It replaced the
earlier UK newszine Checkpoint (1971-9, 100 issues) ed Peter Roberts
(briefly ed Ian Maule and ed Darroll Pardoe), which in turn had replaced
Skyrack (1959-71, 96 issues) ed Ron Bennett. A's news items were given
sparkle by Langford's witty delivery. A was initially monthly, but
latterly gaps between its issues grew ever longer. In 1987, at the time of
but not due to the appearance of a later newszine, CRITICAL WAVE, Langford
- who had long expressed weariness with the labour of producing A - folded
it. However, he revived A in 1991, the second sequence being an
approximately monthly A4 2pp newssheet with occasional extra issues (given
numbers), beginning with 51. It had reached 93 by April 1995. A won a HUGO
in 1987, and its editor won Hugos as Best Fan Writer in 1985, 1987, and
every year from 1989 to 1994.
ANSON, AUGUST
(? - ) UK writer whose When Woman Reigns (1938) transports its
protagonist to first the 26th and then the 36th century. Author and hero
take a rather dim view of these two periods, because in both men are
subservient to women.

ANSON, CAPTAIN (CHARLES VERNON)
(1841- ?) UK writer, in the Royal Navy 1859-96. His future-WAR tale, The
Great Anglo-American War of 1900 (1896 chap), warrants modest interest for
the worldwide scope of the conflict and for the UK's use of a new
invention to destroy San Francisco and win the war. For verisimilitude,
the tale should perhaps have been set many years further into the future.
ANSTEY, F.
Pseudonym of Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856-1934), UK writer and humorist,
best known for his many contributions to the magazine Punch and for his
classic satirical fantasies, most of which follow the pattern of
introducing some magical item into contemporary society, with chaotic
consequences. These were widely imitated by many writers, including
R.ANDOM, W.D.Darlington (1890-1979) and Richard Marsh (1857-1915), and
thus became the archetypes of a distinctive subgenre of Ansteyan
fantasies. In his most successful work, Vice Versa, or A Lesson to Fathers
(1882; rev 1883), a Victorian gentleman and his schoolboy son exchange
personalities; the novel has to date been twice filmed and at least twice
adapted as a tv serial. In The Tinted Venus (1885) a young man
accidentally revives the Roman goddess of love, and in A Fallen Idol
(1886) an oriental deity exerts a sinister influence on a young artist.
The protagonist of The Brass Bottle (1900) acquires the services of a
djinn; a stage version is The Brass Bottle: A Farcical Fantastic Play
(1911). In Brief Authority (1915) reverses the pattern, with a Victorian
matron established as queen of the Brothers Grimm's M-rchenland. FA's work
comes closest to sf in Tourmalin's Time Cheques (1891; vt The Time
Bargain), one of the earliest TIME-PARADOX stories. The anonymously
published The Statement of Stella Maberley, Written by Herself (1896) is
an interesting story of abnormal PSYCHOLOGY. Other works: The Black Poodle
and Other Tales (coll 1884); The Talking Horse (coll 1891); Paleface and
Redskin, and Other Stories for Girls and Boys (coll 1898); Only Toys!
(1903), for children; Salted Almonds (coll 1906); Percy and Others (coll
1915), the first 5 stories in which feature the adventures of a bee; The
Last Load (coll 1928); Humour and Fantasy (coll 1931).
=====================================================
ANTHOLOGIES
Before the late 1940s, sf short stories, novellas and novelettes (HUGO
for definitions) were largely restricted to MAGAZINES. (Magazines are, of
course, a form of anthology, but they are not so counted in this
encyclopedia.) Since then, increasingly, many readers have been introduced
to sf through stories collected in books. Books are less fragile, kept in
print longer, available in libraries and (especially for young readers in
the days of the lurid PULP MAGAZINES) more acceptable to parents. The
history of sf's ever-increasing respectability over the past half century
has been in part the history of the gradual displacement of magazines by
books, especially paperback books - although many anthology series have
been given their initial publication in hardcover. Much sf was
anthologized in book form from quite early on, in a variety of fantasy and
weird-fiction collections, but none of these was exclusively sf, although
The Moon Terror and Other Stories (anth 1927) ed A.G.Birch, a collection

of four stories from WEIRD TALES, came close to it. The earliest sf
anthology could more properly be described as an anthology of PROTO
SCIENCE FICTION. It is Popular Romances (anth 1812) ed Henry Weber, and
contains Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan SWIFT, Journey to the World
Underground (1741) by Ludwig HOLBERG, Peter Wilkins (1751) by Robert
PALTOCK, Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel DEFOE and The History of
Automathes (1745) by John Kirkby; the latter is a lost-race (LOST WORLDS)
story set in the Pacific Ocean. The usually accepted candidate as first sf
anthology is Adventures to Come (anth 1937) ed J.Berg Esenwein. It was
also sf's first ORIGINAL ANTHOLOGY - i.e., its stories were all previously
unpublished - but they were by unknowns, and it seems the anthology had no
influence at all. Much more important was The Other Worlds (anth 1941) ed
Phil STONG, a hardcover publication reprinting stories by Harry BATES,
Lester DEL REY, Henry KUTTNER, Theodore STURGEON and many other well known
writers from the sf magazines. The first notable paperback anthology was
The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction (anth 1943) ed Donald A.WOLLHEIM, 8 of
whose 10 stories are still well remembered, an extraordinarily high
batting average considering that half a century has since elapsed. The
year that presaged the advancing flood was 1946, when two respectable
hardcover publishers commissioned huge anthologies, both milestones. In
Feb 1946 came The Best of Science Fiction (anth 1946) ed Groff CONKLIN,
containing 40 stories in 785pp, and in Aug came Adventures in Time and
Space (anth 1946) ed Raymond J.HEALY and J.Francis MCCOMAS, containing 35
stories in 997pp. The latter was the superior work and even today reads
like a roll of honour, as all the great names of the first two decades of
GENRE SF parade past. But Conklin's book is not to be despised, including
as it does Sturgeon's Killdozer (1944), Robert A.HEINLEIN's Universe
(1941) and Murray LEINSTER's First Contact (1945). Both Conklin and Healy
went on to do further pioneering work with anthologies. Conklin
specialized in thematic anthologies, of which two of the earliest were his
Invaders of Earth (anth 1952) and Science Fiction Thinking Machines (anth
1954). The thematic anthology has since become an important part of sf
publishing, and many such books are listed in this volume at the end of
the relevant theme entries. Healy did not invent the original sf
anthology, but he was one of the first to edit one successfully. His New
Tales of Space and Time (anth 1951) contains such well remembered stories
as Bettyann by Kris NEVILLE, Here There Be Tygers by Ray BRADBURY and The
Quest for Saint Aquin by Anthony BOUCHER. Kendell Foster CROSSEN was not
slow to take the hint, and half of his compilation Future Tense (anth
1953) consists of original stories, including Beanstalk by James BLISH.
Wollheim had produced (anonymously) an original anthology, too: The Girl
with the Hungry Eyes and Other Stories (anth 1949), the title story being
by Fritz LEIBER. Until the 1970s the original anthology went from strength
to strength, becoming an important alternative market to the sf magazines.
The STAR SCIENCE FICTION STORIES series (1953-9) ed Frederik POHL, of
which there were 6 vols in all, was its next important landmark. John
CARNELL followed, in the UK, with his NEW WRITINGS IN SF series (1964-78;
ed Kenneth BULMER from 22), with 30 vols in all. This was followed rather
more dramatically in the USA by Damon KNIGHT, whose policy was more
experimental and literary than Carnell's, with his ORBIT series (1965-80),
which published 21 vols. Since then the most influential original

anthology series have been Harlan ELLISON's two DANGEROUS VISIONS
anthologies (1968 and 1972), Robert SILVERBERG's NEW DIMENSIONS series
(1971-81), 10 vols in all, and Terry CARR's UNIVERSE series (1971-87), 17
vols in all. The zenith of influence of the original anthologies was
probably the early to mid-1970s; they became a less important component of
sf PUBLISHING in the 1980s. Nonetheless, the 1970s saw a remarkable number
of HUGO and NEBULA nominees drawn from the ranks of the original
anthologies, including a good few winners, and this is a measure of the
change of emphasis from magazines to books. Other original anthologies
which, like the above, receive separate entries in this volume are BERKLEY
SHOWCASE, CHRYSALIS, DESTINIES, FULL SPECTRUM, INFINITY, L.RON HUBBARD
PRESENTS WRITERS OF THE FUTURE, NEW VOICES, NOVA, OTHER EDENS,
PULPHOUSE:
THE HARDBACK MAGAZINE, QUARK, STELLAR and SYNERGY; New Worlds Quarterly
(NEW WORLDS) was also in book format. This list is not fully
comprehensive, but contains most of the sf original anthology series that
ran for three or more numbers. Another original anthology series is WILD
CARDS, ed George R.R.MARTIN, which is also an interesting representative
of a kind of volume that began to flourish only in the 1980s, the
SHARED-WORLD anthology. The majority of these are fantasy rather than sf.
Sf has been one of the few areas of literature to have kept alive the art
of the short story. It is therefore unfortunate that, as sf-magazine
circulations dropped further in the 1980s, so did the popularity of
original anthologies. Nevertheless, as of the early 1990s, the quality of
the best sf short-story writing remains high, and fears expressed about
the imminent death of sf short fiction caused by shrinking markets seem
premature. The general standard of reprint anthologies has dropped since
the mid-1960s, probably because the vast backlog of sf magazines had been
mined and re-mined for gold and not much was left, though obviously new
collectable stories are published every year. In terms of numbers of
anthologies published, however, there has been no very perceptible falling
off. Two extraordinarily prolific anthologists have been Roger ELWOOD,
from 1964 to 1977, and Martin Harry GREENBERG, from 1974 to date, both of
them often in partnership with others and both specializing in thematic
anthologies. Greenberg, who has edited more anthologies than anyone else
in sf, maintains the higher standard. The other two important categories
of anthology are the several Best series, and the various series devoted
to award-winning stories. The Best concept was introduced to sf by Everett
F.BLEILER and T.E.DIKTY, who between them edited 6 annual vols, beginning
with The Best Science-Fiction Stories 1949 (anth 1949); Dikty went on to
edit a further 3 vols alone in 1955, 1956 and 1958 (1957 was omitted).
Judith MERRIL's record was long and distinguished, with 12 annual vols
(1967 was omitted) beginning with SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction
and Fantasy Stories and Novelettes (anth 1956) and ending with SF 12 (anth
1968; vt The Best of Sci-Fi 12 UK 1970). Merril's anthologies were always
lively, with an emphasis on stories of wit and literacy, and certainly
helped to improve standards in sf generally. The editors of the major
magazines, notably ASF, FSF, Gal and NW, published Best anthologies of one
kind or another from their own pages, most consistently and influentially
in the case of FSF. Anthologies had a great deal to do with finding a new
audience for sf in the UK. Here the important date was 1955, when Edmund

CRISPIN launched his Best SF series (1955-70), 7 vols in all. Among the
finest anthologies produced, always gracefully introduced, they were not
selected on an annual basis and are thus not directly comparable to
Merril's books. Later important anthologists in the UK were Kingsley AMIS
and Robert CONQUEST with their Spectrum series (1961-6), 5 vols in all,
and Brian W.ALDISS with the Penguin Science Fiction series (1961-4), 3
vols in all. Aldiss remained an active anthologist for some time, and with
Harry HARRISON he edited 9 Best SF books annually 1967-75, beginning with
Best SF: 1967 (anth 1968 US; vt The Year's Best Science Fiction No 1 UK).
More recent Best series have been edited by Lester DEL REY (1971-5),
starting with Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year (1971) (anth 1972),
from E.P.Dutton & Co., Del Rey's successor as editor of this series being
Gardner DOZOIS (1976-81); by Donald A.Wollheim with Terry Carr (1965-71)
from ACE BOOKS starting with World's Best Science Fiction: 1965 (anth
1965); by Wollheim alone (1972-81) and with Arthur W.SAHA (1982-90) for
DAW BOOKS, starting with The 1972 Annual World's Best SF (anth 1972); by
Carr alone (1972-87), first for BALLANTINE, later various publishers, UK
edition from GOLLANCZ, beginning with The Best Science Fiction of the Year
(anth 1972); by Gardner Dozois alone (1984 to date), beginning with The
Year's Best Science Fiction, First Annual Collection (anth 1984), from
BLUEJAY BOOKS to 1986, then from St Martin's (with UK reprint from
Robinson) starting with Year's Best Science Fiction, Fourth Annual
Collection (anth 1987; vt The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction UK)
and Year's Best Science Fiction, Fifth Annual Collection (anth 1988; vt
Best New SF 2 UK); and by David S.GARNETT in the UK (1988-90), in a
short-lived but interesting series starting with The Orbit Science Fiction
Yearbook (anth 1988). Tastes in these matters are subjective, but the
critical consensus is clearly that Terry Carr's selection was on the whole
the most reliable through to the mid-1980s, and that his mantle has passed
to Gardner Dozois, whose selection is now both the biggest and the best.
Carr's and Dozois's Year's Best collections are required reading for
anybody seriously interested in sf in short forms. Anthologies consisting
of award-winning stories, of course, are of an especially high standard.
Hugo-winning short fiction has been collected in a series of anthologies
ed Isaac ASIMOV (whom see for details). Nebula-winning short fiction has
been regularly anthologized along with some runners up, and also winners
of the Rhysling Award for POETRY; the Science Fiction Hall of Fame
stories, which like the Nebulas are judged by members of the SCIENCE
FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA, have also been anthologized (for details of
both these anthology series see NEBULA). A number of anthologies from the
1970s onwards have been specifically designed for teaching SF IN THE
CLASSROOM, and some are discussed in that entry. Also important have been
various anthologies characterizing particular historical periods of sf
through reprinting their most interesting stories. Sam MOSKOWITZ has been
an important editor in this area, as have been Mike ASHLEY, Brian W.Aldiss
and Harry Harrison, and Isaac Asimov and Martin Harry Greenberg with a
series in which each book reprints stories all from a single year,
beginning with Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories Volume 1, 1939
(anth 1979), from DAW Books, complete in 25 vols. Aside from those
mentioned above, notable anthologists have included Michael BISHOP,
Anthony BOUCHER, Jack DANN, Ellen DATLOW, August DERLETH, Thomas M.DISCH,

James E.GUNN, David HARTWELL, Richard LUPOFF and Barry N.MALZBERG. There
have been many others. A problem for all sf readers is the location in
book collections or anthologies of short stories that have been
recommended to them. Early indexes to sf anthologies, by Walter R.COLE and
Frederick Siemon, have been superseded by a series of books by William
G.CONTENTO, which are essential tools of reference for the serious sf
researcher (see also BIBLIOGRAPHIES), beginning with Index to Science
Fiction Anthologies and Collections (1978) and Index to Science Fiction
Anthologies and Collections: 1977-1983 (1984). After that, researchers
need to turn to the annual compilations produced by Contento with Charles
N.BROWN and published by LOCUS Press (CONTENTO for details).
ANTHONY, PATRICIA
(1947- ) US teacher and writer who began publishing sf with "Blood
Brothers" for Aboriginal in 1987. Her first published-though 4th
completed-novel, COLD ALLIES (1993), aroused considerable interest for its
fast and sophisticated plotting; its hard-nosed liberal take on the moral
quagmires that complicate human actions during the NEAR FUTURE Lebensraum
war, between the Old West and the seemingly ascendent land-hungry Moslem
world, that serves as its setting and ostensible subject; and for its
subtly ambiguous presentation of the eponymous ALIENS, who may be feeders
on the sufferings of other species, who may simply be tourists, or who may
be potential friends in need for a human race near the end of its-and its
planet's-tether. As friends in need, PA's cold allies fit with remarkable
neatness into any analysis of late-century sf as evolving from the
triumphalism of "First SF" into a sobered set of ruminations on the human
race's needto marry out: to seek help wherever we can find help. Perhaps
even more impressive is Brother Termite (1993), which also uses alien
visitors as complex mirrors in whose behaviour-genetic exigencies have
forced them into a ruthlessly manipulative treatment of humans as
expendable "partners", rather like women-it is possible to draw
conclusions about human actions. The story itself-which involves some
glancing satire on contemporary life and politics, and on human obsession
with UFOs and other True-Believer diseases of the psyche-is both complex
and neat. Conscience of the Beagle (1993) - 3rd published but first
written-is a less impressive tale set on a planet inhabited by
fundementalist Christians and infested by terrorism; but Happy Policeman
(1994) continues impressively PA's scrutiny of human beings and human
cultures through the alien mirror. In this case, an ALTERNATE WORLD
reality is created for a small Texas town, and within this enclave aliens
study us, for a while. PA has almost instantly become a writer who speaks
to our current state.
ANTHONY, PIERS
Working name of US writer Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob (1934- ) for all
his published work. Born in England, he was educated in the USA and took
out US citizenship in 1958. He began publishing short stories with
Possible to Rue for Fantastic in 1963, and for the next decade appeared
fairly frequently in the magazines, though he has more and more
concentrated on longer forms; his early work is fairly represented in
Anthonology (coll 1985). His two most ambitious novels came early in his

career. Chthon (1967), his first, is a complexly structured adventure of
self-discovery partially set in a vast underground prison, and making
ambitious though sometimes over-baroque use of PASTORAL and other
parallels; its sequel, Phthor (1975), is less far-reaching, less
irritating, but also less involving. PA's second genuinely ambitious novel
is the extremely long MACROSCOPE (1969; cut 1972 UK), whose complicated
SPACE-OPERA plot combines astrology with old-fashioned SENSE-OF-WONDER
concepts like the use of the planet Neptune as a spaceship. In
constructing a series of sf devices in this book to carry across his
concern with representing the unity of all phenomena, microscopic to
macroscopic, PA evokes themes from SUPERMAN to COSMOLOGY and Jungian
PSYCHOLOGY; of all his works, this novel alone manages to seem adequately
structured to convey the burden of a sometimes mercilessly hasty
imagination. The allegorical implications of MACROSCOPE received more
expansive - but less sustained or intense - treatment in two later series.
In the Tarot series - God of Tarot (1979), Vision of Tarot (1980) and
Faith of Tarot (1980), all recast as Tarot (omni 1987) - various
protagonists engage in a quest for the meaning of an emblem-choked
Universe. The Incarnations of Immortality series - On a Pale Horse (1983),
Bearing an Hourglass (1984), With a Tangled Skein (1985), Wielding a Red
Sword (1986), Being a Green Mother (1987), For Love of Evil (1988) and And
Eternity (1990) - features protagonists who are themselves embodiments of
a meaningful Universe, representing in their very being aspects of the
Universe like Death and Fate. The final volume involves a search to
replace an increasingly indifferent God. In distinct contrast to complex
works like these lies the post-HOLOCAUST sequence comprising Sos the Rope
(1968), winner of the $5000 award from Pyramid Books, FSF and Kent
Productions, Var the Stick (1972 UK; cut 1973 US) and Neq the Sword
(1975), a combat-oriented trilogy assembled as Battle Circle (omni 1978).
Here and in other novels PA resorts to stripped-down protagonists with
monosyllabic and/ or generic names, like Sos or Neq, or like Cal, Veg and
Aquilon, whose adventures on various planets make up his second trilogy,
Omnivore (1968), Orn (1971) and Ox (1976), assembled as Of Man and Manta
(omni 1986 UK): humanity turns out to be the omnivore. Both these series
use action scenarios with thinly drawn backgrounds and linear plots not
comfortably capable of sustaining the weight of significance the author
requires of them. Perhaps the most successful of such books is Steppe
(1976 UK), a singleton featuring Alp, whose single-minded career playing
Genghis Khan in a future dominated by a galaxy-spanning computer-operated
game (GAMES AND SPORTS) is refreshingly unadulterated with any attempts at
significance. Prostho Plus (1967-8 If; fixup 1971) and Triple Detente
(1968 ASF; exp 1974) are both interstellar epics, the former comic and
featuring a dentist, the latter concentrating on an OVERPOPULATION theme
and its solution through culling by INVASION. Far more ambitious - though
again by no means more assured - are two series in the same vein. The
Cluster series, comprising Cluster (1977; vt Vicinity Cluster 1979 UK),
Chaining the Lady (1978), Kirlian Quest (1978), Thousandstar (1980) and
Viscous Circle (1982), is an elaborate space opera; it relates to Tarot in
its use of Kirlian auras and other similar material in a Universe
ultimately obedient to occult commands. The Bio of a Space Tyrant sequence
- Refugee (1983), Mercenary (1984), Politician (1985), Executive (1985)

and Statesman (1986) - slowly but surely embroils its initially ruthless
protagonist in a world whose complexities demand of him a moral (and
therefore self-limiting) response. PA is a writer capable of sweepingly
intricate fiction, though his tendency to produce less demanding work may
obscure this ambitiousness of purview. He is fluent and extremely popular,
though his great success has done little to modify the truculent and
solitary tone of his utterances on a variety of subjects. The critical
apparatus surrounding the republication of But What of Earth? (1976
Canada; text restored 1989 US) with Robert COULSON, related to the Tarot
sequence, serves as an extraordinary (and, with the original Laser Books
edition not in print, not easily testable) exercise in special pleading;
and his autobiography, Bio of an Ogre (1988), similarly reveals a man
unreconciled, unforgiving. It might be added, too, that few of PA's
numerous fantasies (listed below) seem built to last. When he is
helter-skelter - and much of even his better work is marred by
hasty-seeming digressions - PA is of merely marginal interest; but the
ongoing Geodyssey sequence - comprising Isle of Women (1993) and Shame of
Man (1994) - is a strongly argued presentation of humanity's life on
planet Earth, conducted through successive incarnations of exemplary human
types. It is only, in other words, when he embraces a complex
mythologizing vision of the meaningfulness of things that PA becomes
fierce. Other works: The Ring (1968) with Robert E.MARGROFF; The
E.S.P.Worm (1970) with Margroff; Race Against Time (1973), a juvenile;
Rings of Ice (1974), a DISASTER novel based on Isaac Newton Vail's Annular
Theory (PSEUDO-SCIENCE); a series of martial arts fantasies, all with
Roberto Fuentes (1934- ), comprising Kiai! (1974), Mistress of Death
(1974), The Bamboo Bloodbath (1974), Ninja's Revenge (1975) and Amazon
Slaughter (1976); the Xanth series of fantasies comprising A Spell for
Chameleon (1977), The Source of Magic (1979) and Castle Roogna (1979), all
three assembled as The Magic of Xanth (omni 1981), and Centaur Aisle
(1982), Ogre, Ogre (1982), Night Mare (1983), Dragon on a Pedestal (1983),
Crewel Lye: A Caustic Yarn (1984), Golem in the Gears (1986), Vale of the
Vole (1987), Heaven Cent (1988), Man from Mundania (1989), Isle of View
(1990) and Question Quest (1991), The Color of her Panties (1992), Demons
Don't Dream (1993) and Harpy Thyme (1993), plus Piers Anthony's Visual
Guide to Xanth (1989) with Jody Lynn Nye; Hasan (1969-70 Fantastic; exp
1977; exp 1986); Pretender (1979) with Frances Hall (1914- ); the
Apprentice Adept sequence comprising Split Infinity (1980), Blue Adept
(1981) and Juxtaposition (1982), all three assembled as Double Exposure
(omni 1982), and Out of Phaze (1987), Robot Adept (1988), Unicorn Point
(1989) and Phaze Doubt (1990); Mute (1981); Ghost (1986); Shade of the
Tree (1986); the Kelvin of Rud series of fantasies with Robert E.Margroff
comprising Dragon's Gold (1987), Serpent's Silver (1988) and Chimaera's
Copper (1990), all three being assembled as The Adventures of Kelvin of
Rud: Across the Frames (omni 1992; vt Three Complete Novels 1994); and
Orc's Opal (1990) and Mouvar's Magic (1992), both being assembled as The
Adventures of Kelvin of Rud: Final Magic (omni 1992); Total Recall (1989),
a novelization of the film TOTAL RECALL (1990), itself based on Philip
K.DICK's We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (1966); Through the Ice
(1989) with Robert Kornwise (?1971-1987), a collaborative gesture to a
dead teenage writer; Pornucopia (1989), a pornographic fantasy; Hard Sell

(fixup 1990), humorous sf; Dead Morn (1990) with Roberto Fuentes, a
TIME-TRAVEL tale of a visit from the 25th century to a revolutionary Cuba
familiar to the book's co-author; Firefly (1990), horror; Balook (1991),
young-adult sf; the Mode fantasy series, beginning with Virtual Mode
(1991), Fractal Mode (1992) and Chaos Mode (1993) Tatham Mound (1991), a
fantasy based on Amerindian material; Mer-Cycle (1991); vt Mercycle 1993
UK), an sf singleton; The Caterpillar's Question (1992) with Philip Jose
FARMER; Alien Plot (1992); Killobyte (1992); If I Pay Thee Not in Gold
(1993) with Mercedes LACKEY. As Editor: Uncollected Stars (anth 1986) with
Barry N.MALZBERG, Martin H.GREENBERG and Charles G.WAUGH; Tales from the
Great Turtle (anth 1994) with Richard Gilliam. Nonfiction: Letters to
Jenny (coll 1993). About the author: Piers Anthony (1983 chap) by Michael
R.COLLINGS; Piers Anthony: Biblio of an Ogre: A Working Bibliography (1990
chap) by Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE. See also: ASTRONOMY; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT;
DEL REY BOOKS; ECOLOGY; GODS AND DEMONS; HUMOUR; The MAGAZINE OF
FANTASY
AND SCIENCE FICTION; MEDICINE; MUSIC; UNDER THE SEA.
ANTHROPOLOGY
Anthropology is the scientific study of the genus Homo, especially its
species H.sapiens. Physical anthropology deals with the history of
H.sapiens and its immediate evolutionary precursors (some of which in fact
coexisted with H.sapiens); cultural anthropology (ethnology) deals with
the contemporary diversity of human cultures (see also SOCIOLOGY). The
founding fathers of the science - Sir Edward Tylor (1832-1917) and Sir
James Frazer (1854-1941) among them - made the dubious assumption that, by
studying the diversity of contemporary societies and describing a
hierarchy extending from the most primitive to the most highly developed,
they could discover a single evolutionary pattern; this assumption is
built into much early anthropological sf. Modern anthropologists take care
to avoid this kind of thinking, and tend to refer to pre-literate, tribal,
traditional or non-technological societies, rather than primitive ones, in
order to emphasize that there is no single path of progress which all
societies must tread. Anthropological speculations feature in sf in a
number of different ways, representing various approaches to the two
dimensions of inquiry. There is a subgenre of stories dealing directly
with the issues surrounding the physical EVOLUTION of humans from bestial
ancestors and with the cultural evolution of human societies in the
distant past (ORIGIN OF MAN for discussion of such stories); these are
speculative fictions that owe their inspiration to scientific theory and
discovery but, as they participate hardly at all in the characteristic
vocabulary of ideas and imaginative apparatus of sf, they are often seen
as borderline sf at best, although the evocation of ideas drawn from
physical anthropology in such works as NO ENEMY BUT TIME (1982) and
Ancient of Days (1985) by Michael BISHOP is entirely sciencefictional. The
species of fantasy which straightforwardly represents the other dimension
of the anthropological spectrum by dealing in the imaginary construction
of contemporary societies is also borderline; most such stories are
lost-race fantasies (LOST WORLDS) that usually make little use of
scientific anthropology in the design of their hypothetical cultures. Some
prehistoric fantasies are pure romantic adventure stories - e.g., Edgar

Rice BURROUGHS's The Eternal Lover (1925; vt The Eternal Savage) - but the
subgenre includes a considerable number of thoughtful analytical works: J.
H.ROSNY, aine's La guerre du feu (1909; trans as Quest for Fire 1967), the
first 4 vols of Johannes V.JENSEN's Den Lange Rejse (1908-22; vols 1 and 2
trans as The Long Journey: Fire and Ice 1922; vols 3 and 4 trans as The
Cimbrians: The Long Journey II 1923), J.Leslie MITCHELL's Three Go Back
(1932), William GOLDING's The Inheritors (1955) and Bjorn KURTEN's Den
svarta tigern (1978; trans by the author as Dance of the Tiger 1978) are
the most outstanding. There were also anthropological speculations in
travellers' tales, but they were mostly too early to be informed by any
genuinely scientific ideas. One of the most notable of such
proto-anthropological speculations is to be found in Denis Diderot's
Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage (1796), which masquerades as an
addendum to a real travelogue in order to present a debate between a
Tahitian and a ship's chaplain on the advantages of the state of Nature
versus those of civilization. Benjamin DISRAELI's Adventures of Captain
Popanilla (1828) also features a confrontation between the innocent and
happy life of an imaginary South-Sea-island culture and the principles of
Benthamite Utilitarianism. The earliest stories of this kind which embody
speculations drawn from actual scientific thought include some of the
items in Andrew LANG's In the Wrong Paradise and Other Stories (coll 1886)
and a handful of stories by Grant ALLEN, including The Great Taboo (1890)
and some of his Strange Stories (coll 1884). Allen was also the first
writer to bring a hypothetical anthropologist from another culture to
study tribalism and taboo in Victorian society, in The British Barbarians
(1895). Another SATIRE in a similar vein is H.G.WELLS's Mr Blettsworthy on
Rampole Island (1928), in which a deranged young man sees the inhabitants
of New York as a brutal and primitive ISLAND culture. Recent sf stories
which submit humans to the clinical eyes of alien anthropologists include
Mallworld (1981) by S.P.SOMTOW, Cards of Grief (1986) by Jane YOLEN and
(although they are FAR-FUTURE humans) AN ALIEN LIGHT (1988) by Nancy
KRESS. The failings of the lost-race story as anthropological sf lie not
so much in the ambitions of writers as in limitations of the form. These
limitations have occasionally been transcended in more recent times. In
You Shall Know Them (1952; vt Borderline; vt The Murder of the Missing
Link) by VERCORS a species of primate is discovered which fits in the
margin of all our definitions of humanity; it becomes the focal point of a
speculative attempt to specify exactly what we mean - or ought to mean by Man. Brother Esau (1982) by Douglas Orgill and John GRIBBIN, Father to
the Man (1989) by Gribbin alone and Birthright (1990) by Michael STEWART
develop similar premises in more-or-less conventional thriller formats,
while Maureen DUFFY's Gor Saga (1981) uses a half-human protagonist as an
instrument of clever satire (APES AND CAVEMEN). Providence Island (1959)
by Jacquetta HAWKES is a painstaking analysis of a society which has given
priority to the development of the mind rather than technological control
of the environment, thus calling into question the propriety of such terms
as primitive and advanced. Aldous HUXLEY's Island (1962) is somewhat
similar, and a pulp sf story with the same fundamental message is
Forgetfulness (1937) by John W.CAMPBELL Jr (writing as Don A.Stuart),
though this latter skips over any actual analysis of the culture
described. The demise of the lost-race fantasy as an effective vehicle for

anthropological speculation has led to a curiously paradoxical situation,
in that the format has been recast in modern sf by use of
non-technological ALIEN societies on other worlds in place of
non-technological human societies on Earth. Ideas derived from the
scientific study of humankind are widely - and sometimes very effectively
- applied to the designing of cultures which are by definition nonhuman.
So, while most sf aliens have always been surrogate humans, this has not
necessarily been just through idleness or lack of imagination on the part
of writers: there is a good deal of sf in which alien beings are quite
calculatedly and intelligently deployed as substitutes for mankind.
Post-WWII sf has managed to ameliorate the paradoxicality of the situation
by developing a convention which allows a more straightforward revival of
the lost-race format: the lost colony scenario in which long-lost human
colonists on an alien world have reverted to barbarism, often following
the fall of a GALACTIC EMPIRE. The anthropologist and sf writer Chad
OLIVER has written a great many stories which deal with the confrontation
between protagonists whose viewpoints are similar to ours and
non-technological alien societies or human colonies. Notable are Rite of
Passage (1954), Field Expedient (1955) and Between the Thunder and the Sun
(1957). Like Grant Allen, Oliver has also attempted the more ambitious
project of imagining the situation in reverse, with alien anthropologists
studying our culture, in Shadows in the Sun (1954). Other impressive sf
stories which use alien societies in this way are Mine Own Ways (1960) by
Richard MCKENNA, A Far Sunset (1967) by Edmund COOPER, The Sharing of
Flesh (1968) by Poul ANDERSON, Beyond Another Sun (1971) by Tom GODWIN,
THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST (1972; 1976) by Ursula K.LE GUIN (daughter of
anthropologist Alfred Kroeber) and Death and Designation Among the Asadi
(1973; exp vt TRANSFIGURATIONS 1979) by Michael Bishop. Works which use
the lost-colony format to model non-technological human societies include
several interesting novels by Jack VANCE, notably The Blue World (1966),
Le Guin's Rocannon's World (1966) and Planet of Exile (1966), Joanna
RUSS's AND CHAOS DIED (1970), Cherry WILDER's Second Nature (1982) and
Donald KINGSBURY's COURTSHIP RITE (1982; vt Geta). These human societies
are often more different from non-technological human societies than are
the alien examples, and the injection of some crucial distinguishing
feature - usually PSI POWERS - is common. This tends to move the stories
away from strictly anthropological speculation toward a more general
hypothetical SOCIOLOGY. This convergence of the roles of aliens and
technologically unsophisticated humans is shown off to its greatest
advantage in Ian WATSON's THE EMBEDDING (1973), which juxtaposes an
examination of a South American tribe who have a strange language and a
correspondingly strange worldview with the arrival in Earth's
neighbourhood of an equally enigmatic alien race. This is one of the very
few stories to reflect the current state of anthropological science and
its intimate links with modern linguistics and semiology; many sf writers
prefer to take their inspiration from the scholarly fantasies of such
mock-anthropological studies as Robert GRAVES's The White Goddess (1948);
a notable example is Joan VINGE's THE SNOW QUEEN (1980). Another much-used
narrative framework for the establishment of hypothetical human societies
is the post-disaster scenario (DISASTER; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; SOCIOLOGY).
Most fictions in this area deal with the destruction and reconstitution of

society, and are perhaps of more general sociological interest. Where they
bear upon anthropology is not so much in their envisaging different states
of social organization but in their embodiment of assumptions regarding
social evolution. Interesting speculations are to be found in such novels
as William GOLDING's Lord of the Flies (1954), Angela CARTER's HEROES AND
VILLAINS (1969) and Russell HOBAN's RIDDLEY WALKER (1980), and in the
Pelbar series by Paul O. WILLIAMS, begun with The Breaking of Northwall
(1981). By far the most richly detailed of such accounts of
technologically primitive future societies is Le Guin's tour de force of
speculative anthropology, ALWAYS COMING HOME (1985), which describes the
tribal culture of the Kesh, inhabitants of a post-industrial California.
It is ironic that in the real world cultural anthropology's field of study
is rapidly being eroded. No other science suffers so dramatically from
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: the effect the process of observation
has on the subject of that observation. Cultural anthropology may soon
become a largely speculative discipline, looking forward to a possible
future rebirth if and when the possibilities mapped out in sf are
realized; this point is neatly made by Robert SILVERBERG's story Schwartz
Between the Galaxies (1974). There is, of course, a much broader sense in
which a great deal of sf may be said to embody anthropological
perspectives. Sf must always attempt to put human individuals, human
societies and the entire human species into new contexts. Sf writers
aspire - or at least pretend - to a kind of objectivity in their
examination of the human condition. Such an attitude is by no means
unknown in mainstream fiction, but it is not typical. The attitude and
method of sf writers are easily comparable to the difficult but
fundamental task facing anthropologists, who must detach themselves from
the inherited attitudes of their own society and immerse themselves in the
life of an alien culture without ever losing their ability to stand back
from their experience and take the measure of that culture as objectively
as possible. Because of this, workers in the human sciences might find
much to interest them in the study of sf. It is not surprising that the
first sf anthology compiled as a teaching aid in a scientific subject (SF
IN THE CLASSROOM) was the anthropological Apeman, Spaceman (anth 1968) ed
Leon E.STOVER and Harry HARRISON; a more recent example is Anthropology
through Science Fiction (anth 1974) ed Carol Mason, Martin H.GREENBERG and
Patricia WARRICK. A collection of critical essays on the theme is Aliens:
The Anthropology of Science Fiction (anth 1987) ed Eric S.RABKIN and
George Edgar SLUSSER. Further to the last point, it is worth taking note
of the fairly considerable body of sf which represents a speculative
anthropology with no analogue in the science itself, dealing with
H.sapiens not as it is or has been but as it might be or might become. The
ultimate example is, of course, Olaf STAPLEDON's LAST AND FIRST MEN
(1930), which describes the entire evolutionary history of the human race
and its lineal descendants, but there are many other works which deal with
the possibilities of future developments in human nature. Now that the
advent of GENETIC ENGINEERING promises to deliver control of our future
EVOLUTION into our own hands, discussions of the physical anthropology of
the future have acquired a new practical relevance. This point was first
made by J.B.S.HALDANE in his prophetic essay Daedalus, or Science and the
Future (1924); it is elaborately extrapolated in Brian M.STABLEFORD's and

David LANGFORD's future history The Third Millennium (1985) and in many
other works which wonder how human beings might remake their own nature,
once they have the power to do so. See also: PASTORAL; SUPERMAN.
ANTIGRAVITY
The idea of somehow counteracting GRAVITY is one of the great sf dreams:
it is gravity that kept us earthbound for so long, and even now the force
required to escape the gravity well of Earth or any other celestial body
is the main factor that makes spaceflight so difficult and expensive. The
theme of antigravity appeared early in sf, a typical 19th-century example
being apergy, an antigravity principle used to propel a spacecraft from
Earth to Mars in Percy GREG's Across the Zodiac (1880) and borrowed for
the same purpose by John Jacob ASTOR in A Journey in Other Worlds (1894).
C.C.DAIL's Willmoth the Wanderer, or The Man from Saturn (1890) uses a
convenient antigravity ointment to smear on the wanderer's space vehicle.
More famously, in THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901) H.G.WELLS used movable
shutters made of Cavorite, a metal that shields against gravity, to
navigate a spacecraft to the Moon. Other unexplained antigravity devices
remained popular for a long time, especially in juvenile sf, as in the
flying belt used by BUCK ROGERS or the antigravitic flubber, flying
rubber, in the film The ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR (1961). In two notable
short stories of the 1950s about the discovery of antigravity, however Noise Level (1952) by Raymond F.JONES and Mother of Invention (1953) by
Tom GODWIN - there are (not very convincing) attempts to give it a
scientific rationale. Much more famous (and more convincing - although
still wrong) is James BLISH's explanation of the antigravity effect used
by his SPINDIZZIES, the devices that enable whole cities to cross the
Galaxy in the series of stories and novels collected as CITIES IN FLIGHT
(omni 1970): in one, Bridge (1952), he invokes physicists Paul Dirac
(1902-1984) and P.M.S.Blackett (1987-1974) in several pages of formulae
purporting to show that both magnetism and gravity are phenomena of
rotation. The term antigravity is scorned by physicists. Einstein's
General Theory of Relativity sees a gravitational field as equivalent to a
curving of spacetime. Thus an antigravity device could work only by
locally rebuilding the basic framework of the Universe itself; antigravity
would require negative mass, a concept conceivable only in a universe of
negative space which could not co-exist with our own. Charles Eric MAINE
confronted Einstein head-on when, in Count-Down (1959; vt Fire Past the
Future US), he proposed that, if gravity were curved space, all that was
necessary to permit antigravity - he made it sound easy - was to simply
bend space the other way. The proliferation in the 1970s and 1980s of
bestselling popularizing books about modern physics may have something to
do with the fact that antigravity, for so long a popular theme, is now
seldom used by sf writers. See also: IMAGINARY SCIENCE; POWER SOURCES.
ANTIHEROES
HEROES.
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF
Anti-intellectualism takes two forms in sf: a persistent if minor theme
appears in stories in which the intellect is distrusted; more common are
stories about future DYSTOPIAS in which society at large distrusts the

intellect although the authors, themselves intellectuals, do not. In
stories of the first sort, INTELLIGENCE is usually seen to be sterile if
unmodified by intuition, feeling or compassion - a familiar theme in
literature generally. That Hideous Strength (1945) by C.S.LEWIS attacks a
government-backed scientific organization for its thoughtlessness and
smugness about the consequences for humanity of scientific development;
one of the villains, a vulgar journalist, is clearly modelled on
H.G.WELLS. The symbol of the sterile intellect is a disembodied head, cold
and evil, in a bottle. In GENRE SF, too, brains in bottles - or at least
in dome-shaped heads attached to merely vestigial bodies - have been among
the commonest CLICHES, especially in the 1930s. The archetype here is
Alas, All Thinking! (1935) by Harry BATES, in which the EVOLUTION of
mankind is shown to culminate in just such a figure, rendered in a
memorable image; the horrified protagonist, an intelligent man from the
present, resolves to start spending less time on intellectual activities.
The theme of intelligence as insufficient on its own frequently takes the
form of mankind learning to adapt harmoniously to an Eden-like world (LIFE
ON OTHER WORLDS) to which individuals somehow come to belong organically
and transcendentally, a process that bypasses the intellect and proves
impossible to humans whose minds outweigh their hearts. Such an evolution
occurs towards the end of Michael SWANWICK's STATIONS OF THE TIDE (1991)
and is central to J.G.BALLARD's The Drowned World (1962 US).
Significantly, in both books - as in many others - the union with the
non-intellectual world is envisaged as a return to water: back to the
bloodstream, so to speak. Anti-intellectual sf stories were given some
impetus by the bombing of Hiroshima: a distrust of SCIENTISTS and of the
potentially awesome results of irresponsibly wielded scientific knowledge
became quite widespread. These moral issues were often quite responsibly
examined in sf stories, but sf CINEMA tended to take a more simplistic
line. The mid-1950s saw a procession of MONSTER MOVIES in which very often
the monsters were the products of scientific irresponsibility; commonly a
religiose voice, impressively baritone, would intone on the sound-track:
There are some things Man was not meant to know. A new twist on the
anti-intellectual theme became quite common in the pessimistic 1980s: the
uselessness of the intellect in the face of cosmic indifference and
boundless ENTROPY. It has even been suggested, in both sf and science
fact, that intelligence may one day prove to have been a non-viable
mutation, a mere comma in the long, mindless sentence of our Universe.
Bruce STERLING's Swarm (1982) has a clever superhuman outmanoeuvred by an
alien HIVE-MIND which has intelligence genetically available for special
circumstances, but most of the time repudiates it as being an antisurvival
trait. The theme is seldom spelled out as clearly as this, but it appears
- by implication, as a subtext - in all sorts of surprising places, as in
Douglas ADAMS's HITCH HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY books, which are
generally thought of as being funny but in which any intellectual activity
at all is seen as hubris - to be instantly, in Brian W.ALDISS's phrase,
clobbered by nemesis. Indeed, the evanescence of the life of the mind has
long been a wistful theme of Aldiss's own, all the way from The Long
Afternoon of Earth (1962 US; rev vt Hothouse 1962 UK) to his Helliconia
series of the 1980s. It is an implied theme, too, of Richard GRANT's
Rumours of Spring (1987). Books like this are not anti-intellectual as

such; they merely suggest that, in the evolutionary race, it is an error
to bet too heavily on the brain. In written sf, however, we more commonly
find the opposite tack taken: that the life of the intellect is strong and
precious, but needs constantly to be guarded from philistines and
rednecks; that the prejudices of an ill-informed population against
scientists and intellectuals might in the short term result in acts of
violence against thinking people and, in the long term, lead to the
stifling of all progress. One of the commonest themes in sf is the static
society (CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; DYSTOPIAS; POLITICS; UTOPIAS). Wells,
who was attacked by Lewis for a narrow and unfeeling humanism, feared
this, and he did indeed believe that the world would be better off if
governed by a technocracy of trained, literate and numerate experts rather
than by a hereditary ruling class or by demagogues elected through
manipulation of an uninformed democracy. These ideas are expressed in A
Modern Utopia (1905) and many of Wells's later works, but he had already
given them dramatic expression in The Food of the Gods, and How it Came to
Earth (1904), in which the anti-intellectual stupidity and fear of the
general population are contrasted bitterly with the splendour of the new
race of giants unencumbered by medieval prejudice. On the other hand, in
THE TIME MACHINE (1895 US; rev 1895 UK) Wells had rather implied, in
giving the beauty to the Eloi and the brains to the Morlocks, that neither
part of the equation was much good on its own. Many years later Fred HOYLE
was to take up the theme of A Modern Utopia, notably in The Black Cloud
(1957) and Ossian's Ride (1959), where he argues for an intellectual elite
of scientists and technologists and proposes that traditionally
arts-educated intellectuals are in reality anti-intellectual in that,
being innumerate, they distrust and misunderstand science. SATIRE against
anti-intellectualism came to prominence in sf with the generation of the
1950s, especially among those writers associated with GALAXY SCIENCE
FICTION, prominently C.M.KORNBLUTH, Frederik POHL and Robert SHECKLEY.
H.Beam PIPER wrote a satirical plea for thought in Day of the Moron (1951
ASF), but better known is Kornbluth's The Marching Morons (1951 Gal), in
which a small coterie of future intellectuals secretly manipulates the
vast anti-intellectual, moronic majority. Damon KNIGHT and James BLISH
were two other writers who satirically defended eggheads (a newly
fashionable word) against philistine attack. Fritz LEIBER's The Silver
Eggheads (1958 FSF; 1961) presents an appalling if amusing
anti-intellectual future in which only ROBOTS are in the habit of
constructive thought. The 1950s were the era of McCarthyism: it was a
common fear of US writers and artists that to be viewed as a smart aleck
might be a preliminary to being attacked as a homosexual and thence, by a
curious progression, as a communist - that is, to be an intellectual
implied that one was suspicious and unreliable. It is therefore not
surprising that satires of the type noted above should be so densely
clustered during this period. Anti-intellectualism is commonly presented
in connection with two of sf's main themes. One is that of the SUPERMAN
who, through mutation (MUTANTS) or for some other reason, develops
unusually high intelligence. Two such books are MUTANT (1945-53 ASF; fixup
1953) by Henry KUTTNER and Children of the Atom (1948-50 ASF; fixup 1953)
by Wilmar H.SHIRAS; in both, superior intelligence incurs the anger of
normals, and even persecution by them. The second relevant theme concerns

stories set after the HOLOCAUST. In these the survivors, often living in a
state of tribalism or medieval feudalism, are - in a very popular variant
of the story - deeply suspicious of intellectuals, fearing that the
renewal of technology will lead to another disaster. Three good novels of
just such a kind are The Long Tomorrow (1955) by Leigh BRACKETT, A
CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ (1960) by Walter M.MILLER, and Re-Birth (1955 US;
rev vt The Chrysalids 1955 UK) by John WYNDHAM. Surprisingly few
full-length works have taken anti-intellectualism as their overriding
central theme. One such is The Burning (1972) by James E.GUNN, in which
violent anti-intellectualism leads to the destruction of scientists; the
return of science is via witchcraft, a theme that owes something to Robert
A.HEINLEIN's Sixth Column (1941 ASF as by Anson MacDonald; 1949) and
Leiber's Gather Darkness (1943 ASF; 1950). Ursula K.LE GUIN's early sf
story, The Masters (1963), deals movingly with a similar theme in a story
of a world dominated by religion in which independent thought is a heresy
punishable by burning at the stake. But the classic novel of the intellect
at bay is of course Ray BRADBURY's FAHRENHEIT 451 (1953), set in a
not-too-distant future where reading books is a crime.
ANTIMATTER
The concept in PHYSICS that forms of matter may exist composed of
antiparticles, opposite in all properties to the particles which compose
ordinary matter, has a special appeal to sf writers. The idea itself was
first formulated by the physicist Paul Dirac (1902-1984) in 1930; the
confirmation of the existence of such particles came soon, with the
discovery of the positron (the anti-electron) in 1932. However, although
antiparticles can be and are created in the laboratory, this has never
been done in sufficient quantity (less than one trillionth of a gram to
date) to form what we would think of as antimatter. It is a concept that
must at the moment remain theoretical; aside from isolated particles
(low-energy antiprotons have been detected in high-altitude balloon
experiments), there may be little or no natural antimatter anywhere in the
Universe. Antimatter cannot easily exist in our world, since it would
combine explosively with conventional matter, mutually annihilating 100%
of both forms of matter to create energy, a point basic to the plot of
Paul DAVIES's Fireball (1987). Thus antimatter would make a fine power
source if only we knew how to store it: no problem it seems for Scottie,
the engineer in STAR TREK, since the starship Enterprise is fuelled by it.
An early sf view of antimatter's potential usefulness appears in Jack
WILLIAMSON's Seetee Ship (1942-43 ASF; 1951) and its sequel Seetee Shock
(1949 ASF; 1950), originally published as by Will Stewart. (Seetee stands
for CT, which in turn stands for ContraTerrene matter, an old sf term for
antimatter.) Antimatter galaxies, or even an entire antimatter universe
created in the Big Bang at the same time as our matter universe, have been
postulated by physicists, with the enthusiastic support of the sf
community. A.E.VAN VOGT was one of the first to use this idea, which has
since become a CLICHE
ANTON, LUDWIG
(1872- ?) German novelist whose Anglophobe novel Brucken uber den
Weltraum (1922; trans by Konrad Schmidt as Interplanetary Bridges 1933

Wonder Stories Quarterly) describes the colonization of VENUS. Other
works: Die japanische Pest The Japanese Plague (1922); Der Mann im
Schatten Man in the Shadows (1926).
ANTROBUS, JOHN
The BED-SITTING ROOM; Spike MILLIGAN.
ANVIL, CHRISTOPHER
Pseudonym of US writer Harry C.Crosby Jr (?- ), whose two earliest
stories were published under his own name in Imagination in 1952 and 1953,
the first being Cinderella, Inc.. CA has been popularly identified with
ASF since his initial appearance in that magazine with The Prisoner in
1956. He soon followed with the first of the stories making up the Centra
series: Pandora's Planet (1956 ASF; exp 1972), Pandora's Envoy (1961), The
Toughest Opponent (1962), Sweet Reason (1966) and Trap (1969). His
prolific fiction has been noted from the beginning for its vein of comic
ethnocentricity, a vein much in keeping with the expressed feelings of
John W.CAMPBELL Jr who, in his later years at least, felt it
philosophically necessary for humans to win in any significant encounter
with ALIENS. CA supplied this sort of story effortlessly, though his first
novel, The Day the Machines Stopped (1964), is a DISASTER story in which a
Soviet experiment permanently cuts off all electrical impulses in the
world. Chaos results, but Americans are soon making do again with steam
engines and reconstructing a more rural civilization. Most of CA's stories
take place in a consistent future galactic federation (GALACTIC EMPIRES),
and quite a number deal with COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS. Within this
larger pattern are a number of lesser series, most of whose individual
stories were published (usually in ASF) in magazine form only. Archaic,
simplistic, insistently readable, Warlord's World (1975) and Strangers in
Paradise (fixup 1969) are representative of this material; The Steel, the
Mist, and the Blazing Sun (1980), which depicts a Soviet-US war 200 years
hence, is similar. Only the occasional non-ASF story, like Mind Partners
(1960) from Gal, hints at the supple author who remained content within
the cage of Campbell's expectations. Since Campbell's death, CA has been
less active as a writer. What he might have offered has long been missed.
See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; WAR.
APA
An acronym taken from National Amateur Press Association, an organization
founded in 1869 to coordinate the distribution of its members' writings.
An apa is a collection of individually produced contributions which have
been sent to a central editor, who has then collated them and distributed
the assembled result to all contributors. Apas - the term was most often
found used in the plural, and was pronounced as a word - were common in
the late 19th century, and became of genre significance with productions
like The Recluse, published in the 1920s by W.Paul Cook (1881-1948), which
distributed the work of H.P.LOVECRAFT and his circle. Figures involved in
apas like The Recluse soon turned to more formal publishing (SMALL PRESSES
AND LIMITED EDITIONS), but younger fans came into the scene. In 1937,
Donald A.WOLLHEIM founded the Fantasy Amateur Press Association, which
produced in FAPA the first sf apa proper. Many others followed, and apas
remained for many decades an important device within FANDOM for

maintaining affinities and circulating fiction by young writers. In recent
years, computer bulletin boards have tended to supplant the apa as a
forum; but many remain active.
APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD)
The heading for this entry should be seen as no more than a rough
short-hand designation for a subject whose nature is diffuse. As apes we
include the great apes, chimpanzees, orang-utans and monkeys; by cavemen
we mean to designate proto-human races, including Neanderthals, but
without taking a particular stand in the debate on the evolutionary tree
(or grove). We do not, however, refer here to Neanderthals or other
cavemen in their natural habitat, which is the distant past (for which see
ANTHROPOLOGY; ORIGIN OF MAN): our interest here is in survivors,
Neanderthals thawed out of ice-floes or surviving in lost garden enclaves
of our fallen world (like Bigfoot, the Yeti and other legendary humanoid
creatures, who are also relevant to the discussion) or even immortal. Our
reason for conflating apes and cavemen is simple enough: insofar as sf
writers take them both to embody the same set of metaphors - whether as
innocent Candide-like observers of our corrupt mores or funhouse mirrors
of humanity to whom we respond with horror - apes and cavemen have almost
identical functions in the literature of the 19th and early 20th
centuries. For there to have been a sustained imaginative interest in, and
use for, apes and cavemen as observers or mirrors of the human condition,
two conditions were probably necessary. The first is obvious: the human
condition itself must have become an issue for discourse. Though the
pre-18th-century literatures of the world are full of animal doubles,
monsters and prodigies, the degree of kinship to us of these creations has
nothing to do with any attempt to define Homo sapiens as a species; and,
in the absence of any sense (or hope) that we are a species distinct as a
species from other species, there is in traditional literatures an absence
of any propaganda intended to distinguish between us and those others except, perhaps, discourse designed to argue the presence or absence of a
soul. Hierarchies of living things in earlier literature are various, and
principles of exclusion and inclusion tend to cross species, but, before
taxonomical thinking emerged in the 18th century, beings tended to be
thought of as human (or not human) according to their location, actual and
symbolic. It is because he is a cusp figure, a Janus monster facing the
deep past and the exposed future, that the Caliban of Shakespeare's The
Tempest (c1612) - who reappears as a kind of ape in Mrs Caliban (1982) by
Rachel Ingalls (1941- ) - is so terribly difficult to reduce to a
stereotype. The second necessary circumstance was of course Time, or
Progress. Moderns instinctively think of beasts and monsters as being
prior. For there to have been an 18th-century Primitivist vision of the
Noble Savage there must have been a sense that we had advanced - or
retreated - from some earlier state. So it is no surprise that the first
apes-as-human texts of interest to an sf reader are probably two works by
a Primitivist philosopher, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714-1799), whose
Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773-92) and Ancient Metaphysics
(1779-99) contrast humanity's corrupt nature with that of the pacific
orang-utan, a vegetarian flautist who may not have learned to speak but
who was otherwise capable of human attainments. Monboddo's orang-utan was

a potent and poignant figure, and soon entered fiction in Thomas Love
Peacock's Melincourt, or Sir Oran Haut-ton (1817), where he saves a young
maiden from rape, enters Parliament, and gazes wisely upon the human
spectacle. But Peacock was an author of disquisitional SATIRES, a form of
fiction soon swamped in the 19th century by the mimetic novel, where
avatars of Sir Oran Haut-ton could not comfortably abide. The Monikins
(1835) by James Fenimore COOPER features several captured specimens of an
articulate monkey civilization who come from an Antarctic LOST WORLD; but
they relate far more closely to that form of the imaginary-voyage satire
brought into focus by Jonathan SWIFT in Gulliver's Travels (1726; rev
1735), as do the intelligent race of monkeys discovered in Les Emotions de
Polydore Marasquin (1857; trans anon as The Man Among the Monkeys: or,
Ninety Days in Apeland 1873 UK; vt The Emotions of Polydore Marasquin 1888
UK; vt Monkey Island 1888 UK) by Leon Gozlan (1806-1866). The use of apes
or yahoos or houyhnhnms as exemplary inhabitants of a UTOPIA or DYSTOPIA
represents a very different - and ultimately more significant - tradition
than the use of apes as illustrative examples embedded into our own human
world. Indeed, it would not be until the publication of Charles Darwin's
Origin of Species (1859) that the apes-as-human topic became sufficiently
ambiguous or threatening (EVOLUTION) to be of widespread imaginative use
(the ape in Edgar Allan POE's The Murders in the Rue Morgue 1841 is more
or less a trained animal). But now that humans and other primates - as
well as the Neanderthals whose existence soon entered public consciousness
- could all seem members of one family, then the observer became a mirror.
Apes-as-human could be seen as literal parodies of our species (and the
reverse); in an uncomfortably intimate sense, they could represent the
brother or sister we locked in the cellar for their protection, or to
prevent them from shaming us. The terror Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859)
felt whenever he envisioned the East (which he never in fact saw, but
whose imagined inhabitants clearly represented a psychopathic self-image)
turned into opium nightmares of being surrounded by apes. Mr Hyde, in
Robert Louis STEVENSON's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886),
may not be a literal ape-as-human, but he surely fulfils the symbolic
function of the brother-within-the-skin whom it is death to recognize. A
perfectly understandable dis-ease therefore afflicted late-19th-century
versions of the theme, from the frivolousness of Bill Nye'sPersonal
Experiences in Monkey Language (1893) to the pathos and parodic
horrificness of the animal victims of H.G.WELLS's The Island of Dr Moreau
(1896). Further examples are Haydon Perry's The Upper Hand in Contraptions
(anth 1895), Frank Challice Constable's The Curse of Intellect (1895), and
Don Mark Lemon's The Gorilla (1905). The 20th century saw a flourishing,
and a routinization, of the apes-as-human tale, though it never attained
the popularity of its close cousin, the enfant-sauvage-as-Noble-Savage
genre, which featured intensely readable wish-fulfilment tales like
Rudyard KIPLING's Mowgli stories (which mostly appeared in The Jungle Book
coll 1894 and The Second Jungle Book coll 1895) and the Tarzan books of
Edgar Rice BURROUGHS (from 1914). Apes-as-human (or Neanderthals-as-human)
appeared, variously emblematic, in the anonymous The Curse of Intellect
(1895), in Dwala: A Romance (1904) by George Calderon (1868-1915), in
James Elroy FLECKER's The Last Generation (1908 chap), in Gaston LEROUX's
Balaoo (1912; trans 1913), in Max BRAND's That Receding Brow (1919), in

Clement FEZANDIE's The Secret of the Talking Ape (1923), in Erle Stanley
GARDNER's Monkey Eyes (1929), in Sean M'Guire's Beast or Man (1930), in
Mogglesby (1930 Adventure) by T(homas) S(igismund) Stribling (1881-1965),
in John COLLIER's brilliant His Monkey Wife (1930), in an evolutionary
pas-de-deux with the Second Men in Olaf STAPLEDON's LAST AND FIRST MEN
(1930), in G.E.Trevelyan's Appius and Virginia (1932), in Alder
Martin-Magog's Man or Ape? (1933), in L.Sprague DE CAMP's The Gnarly Man
(1939), in Thor Swan's Furfooze (1939), in Aldous HUXLEY's After Many a
Summer Dies the Swan (1939; vt After Many a Summer 1939 UK) (see
alsoDEVOLUTION), in Justin ATHOLL's The Grey Beast (1944 chap), in David
V.REED's The Whispering Gorilla (1950), in Hackenfeller's Ape (1953) by
Brigid Brophy (1929- ), in Philip Jose FARMER's The Alley Man (1959; in
The Alley God coll 1962), in Robert NATHAN's The Mallott Diaries (1965),
and elsewhere. Towards the end of this sequence, something of a new note
could be perhaps detected - in De Camp's fine tale, or in Stephen
GILBERT's Monkeyface (1948) - a lessening of the sense of latent or
explicit menace, perhaps because the process of evolution no longer seemed
quite so insulting to the race which was inflicting WWII upon itself and
upon its cousins. But, in general, ironies or horror or condescension
governed the presentation of the theme. It is possible to detect two very
broad tendencies in more recent years. Articulate and wise apes-as-humans
(streetwise Candides) can be used, as in Roger PRICE's J.G., the Upright
Ape (1960), to present, more or less straightforwardly, a satiric vision
of the contemporary world; other examples would be The Right Honourable
Chimpanzee (1978) by David ST GEORGE and Hans Werner Henze's opera, Der
junge Lord The Young Lord (1965). However, work of this sort tends not to
be created by anyone deeply immersed in sf, where the concept now tends to
be treated with troubled complexity; the ironic distance has been lost. No
longer is it sufficient merely to posit an articulate cousin who looks us
in the eyes: the contemporary sf writer is much more interested in the
moral and speculative consequences (GENETIC ENGINEERING) of our capacity
actually to implement the process of transformation. Stories like Joseph
H.DELANEY's Brainchild (1982), Leigh KENNEDY's Her Furry Face (1983),
Judith MOFFETT's Surviving (1986) and Pat MURPHY's Rachel in Love (1987
IASFM; 1992 chap) are dark fables of that transformation, the last three
importing a FEMINIST agenda through metaphorical identifications of caged
primates and women. Further tales with similar burdens include Deutsche
Suite (1972; trans Arnold Pomerans as German Suite 1979 UK) by Herbert
Rosendorfer (1934- ), Experiment at Proto (1973) by Philip Oakes (1928- ),
Ian MCEWAN's Reflections of a Kept Ape (1978), Paddy CHAYEFSKY's Altered
States (1978), Michael CRICHTON's Congo (1980), Maureen DUFFY's Gor Saga
(1981), Stephen GALLAGHER's Chimera (1982), Douglas Orgill's and John
GRIBBIN's Brother Esau (1982), Bernard MALAMUD's God's Grace (1982), Peter
VAN GREENAWAY's Manrissa Man (1982), Michael BISHOP's Ancient of Days
(1985), L.Neil SMITH's North American Confederacy series (1986-8)
(intermittently), Justin LEIBER's Beyond Humanity (1987), Peter
DICKINSON's Eva (1988), Harry TURTLEDOVE's A Different Flesh (fixup 1988),
Michael STEWART's Monkey Shines (1983), about the genetic transformation
of a monkey (the film version is discussed below), and the same author's
less sophisticated Birthright (1990), about the exploitation of a
Neanderthal survival, Ardath MAYHAR's and Ron Fortier's Monkey Station

(1989), Isaac ASIMOV's and Robert SILVERBERG's Child of Time (1991),
Daniel QUINN's Turner Fellowship Award-winning novel, Ishmael (1992),
whose searching simplicity of idiom returns us all the way back to
Peacock, Niall Duthie's The Duchess's Dragonfly (1993) and Monkey's Uncle
(1994) by Jenni Diski (1947- ). Generally less seriously, perhaps, the
cinema has always been fond of the theme, at least since the archetype of
ape-as-innocent-in-the-human-world appeared in KING KONG (1933) and again
in MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949). One aspect of the theme perhaps more nakedly
apparent in films than in books is the religious subtext of
ape/caveman/Yeti/Bigfoot as, even if savage and dangerous, untainted by
the Fall of Man. Such innocents discovered by a corrupt humanity, and
usually envisaged sentimentally, are the Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon
survivors in TROG (1970), SCHLOCK (1973) - a parody of Trog - ICEMAN
(1984) and Encino Man (1992), the Yeti in The Abominable Snowman of the
Himalayas (1957), and the Bigfoot in many low-budget films and one rather
good big-budget film, HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS (1987). Something rather
different seems to be happening in ACOLD NIGHT'S DEATH (1975), in which
experimental apes experiment on scientists; in Link (1985), in which an
experimental ape becomes homicidal; and in MONKEY SHINES (1988), based on
Michael Stewart's 1983 novel, in which an experimental ape injected with
human genetic material gets more lethal the more human it becomes.
However, in all these films, although the apes are a source of horror, it
is suggested that it is human contact that has infected them; only in
PROJECT X (1987) do the experimental apes remain decent, despite attempts
by the military to teach them to fly nuclear bombers. It is also, indeed,
an increase in INTELLIGENCE, catalysed by an alien monolith, that teaches
the apemen of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) how to use weapons. While most
of these films show apes behaving like humans, a persistent subgenre going
back to Stevenson's THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE shows
humans becoming apes (DEVOLUTION). Such, with cod seriousness, is the
theme of ALTERED STATES (1980) and, a great deal more amusingly, James
Ivory's Savages (1972), in which primitive Mud People become human guests
at a sophisticated country-house party only to revert again, and Howard
Hawks's MONKEY BUSINESS (1952), the only sf movie to star Cary Grant,
Ginger Rogers and Marilyn Monroe. PLANET OF THE APES (1968) and its
sequels have apes replacing humans, initially to complex satirical effect,
eventually - with ever increasing simplemindedness - as a metaphorical
stick with which to beat people; however, because they are set deep into
the future, they escape the natural confines of this entry, as did
L.Sprague de Camp's and P.Schuyler MILLER's Genus Homo (1941; rev 1950) in
an earlier generation, and as does David BRIN's Uplift sequence more
recently. Similarly, Robert Silverberg's At Winter's End (1988) and The
Queen of Springtime (1989 UK; vt The New Springtime 1990 US) place into
the FAR FUTURE the revelation that the surviving inhabitants of Earth are
in fact transformed primates. But none of us has survived in that world.
The ape-as-human story, at its heart, is a tale of siblings.
APHELION
Australian magazine, Summer 1985/6 to Summer 1986/7, 5 issues, ed Peter
McNamara from Adelaide, BEDSHEET-format. One of many short-lived, quixotic
Australian attempts to produce a viable sf magazine in a country with a

population too small to support one, A soon failed, but honourably. Good
stories by George TURNER, Greg EGAN, Rosaleen LOVE and, most often, Terry
DOWLING, were among the better work published in an uneven magazine.
McNamara has gone on to publish well produced sf books by Australian
writers under his SMALL-PRESS imprint, Aphelion Publications.
APOCALYPSE
DISASTER; END OF THE WORLD; ESCHATOLOGY; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER;
RELIGION.
APOSTOLIDES, ALEX
Mark CLIFTON.
APPEARANCE VERSUS REALITY
CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; METAPHYSICS; PERCEPTION.
APPEL, ALLEN (R.)
(1945- ) US writer whose Alex Balfour TIME-TRAVEL sequence - Time after
Time (1985), Twice Upon a Time (1988) and Till the End of Time (1990) hovers, as do so many tales of this sort, between sf and fantasy. The
protagonist's visits, first to the Russian Revolution, then to the time of
Mark Twain and General Custer, and finally to Hiroshima, are without sf
explanation; but Balfour's opportunity to intervene in the 1945
catastrophe engages him potentially in the sort of time-track manipulation
generally conceded to be an sf trope. What distinguishes the books from
many others is their intense focus on the ethical dilemmas that must face
any adult protagonist given the chance to manipulate time-tracks, to kill
a butterfly and change the world.
APPEL, BENJAMIN
(1907-1977) US writer, long and variously active, known mainly for such
work outside the sf field as The Raw Edge (1958). In his sf novel, The
Funhouse (1959; vt The Death Master 1974), satirical (SATIRE) and
LINGUISTIC sideshows sometimes illuminate the story of two UTOPIAS as the
Chief of Police from the anti-technological Reservation is called upon to
save a future USA (the computer-dominated Funhouse) from atomic
demolition. Other works: The Devil and W.Kaspar (1977). Nonfiction: The
Fantastic Mirror: Science Fiction across the Ages (1969), not so much a
critical study as a series of excerpts linked by commentary.
APPLEBY, KEN
Working name of US writer Kenneth Philip Appleby (1953- ). His first sf
novel, The Voice of Cepheus (1989), presents a clear-voiced, optimistic
vision of the consequences of First Contact with an ALIEN species whose
signals have been detected by the young female protagonist and her
astronomer boss.
APPLETON, VICTOR
House name of the US Stratemeyer Syndicate, used mainly on the fourTom
Swift series, which together constitute a central example of the
importance and persistence of the EDISONADE in US sf. Howard R.GARIS wrote
the first 35 of the first series, which stopped at 38. The second series,
which deals with Tom Swift, Jr., was initially the work of Harriet
S.ADAMS, Edward STRATEMEYER's daughter; she generally upgraded the

scientific side of the enterprise, though some of the flavour of the early
Tom Swifts was lost. A third series began in 1981 and a fourth, now with
Byron PREISS as packager, in 1991. The first novel of the first series is
Tom Swift and his Motor Cycle (1910), which is modest enough; but very
soon, as in Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon (1913), the mundane world is
left far behind. The second series begins with Tom Swift and his Flying
Lab (1954) and mounts to titles like Tom Swift and his Repelatron Skyway
(1963). The third series began with The City in the Stars (1981) and ended
with 11, The Planet of Nightmares (1984); writers involved included Neal
BARRETT Jr., Mike MCQUAY and William ROTSLER. The fourth series begins
with Tom Swift 1: The Black Dragon (1991) by Bill MCCAY; other writers
involved include Debra DOYLE and James D.MACDONALD in collaboration,
Steven Grant, F.Gwynplaine MACINTYRE and Mike MCQUAY. (For further
information see TOM SWIFT.) See also: CHILDREN'S SF.
ARABIC SF
There are, of course, many fantastic motifs in medieval Arabic
literature, as in the collection of stories of various genres Alf layla wa
layla One Thousand and One Nights (standard text 15th century; trans by
Sir Richard Burton as The Arabian Nights, 16 vols, 1885-8). In this, the
stories of The City of Brass and The Ebony Horse could be regarded as
PROTO SCIENCE FICTION. A few UTOPIAS were written, too, including
al-Farabi's Risala fi mabadi' ara' ahl al-madina al-fadila (first half of
10th century; trans by Richard Walzer as Al-Farabi on the Perfect State
1985). The first real sf stories were published in the late 1940s by the
famous mainstream Egyptian writer Tawfiq Al-HAKIM, but are not considered
genre sf by Arabic critics, who nominate Mustafa MAHMUD (often transcribed
Mahmoud) as the Father of Arabic sf. Both of these authors have been
translated into English. Although there have been a lot of sf stories
published in Arabic since the 1960s, few authors could be described as sf
specialists. Among them, the most important is probably Imran Talib, a
Syrian, author of seven sf novels and short-story collections to date. The
most interesting of these are the three collections, Kawkab al-ahlam
Planet of Dreams (coll 1978), Laysa fi al-qamar fuqara' There are No Poor
on the Moon (coll 1983) and Asrar min madina al-hukma Secrets of the Town
of Wisdom (coll 1988), and the novel Khalfa hajiz az-zaman Beyond the
Barrier of Time (1985). Talib is also the author of the sole theoretical
study of sf in Arabic: Fi al-khayal al-ilmi About Science Fiction (1980).
Sf is written in practically all Arab countries. In Libya, for example,
Yusuf al-Kuwayri has published the novel Min mudhakkirat rajul lam yulad
From the Diary of a Man Not Yet Born (1971), which gives an optimistic
view of life in Libya in the 32nd century. Mysterious ALIENS affect the
life and work of the hero, a Palestinian living in the occupied
territories, in Palestinian Amil Habibi's popular mainstream sf novel
Al-waqa' al-ghariba fi ikhtifa' Said Abu an-Nahs al-Mutasha'il (1974;
trans as The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist: A
Palestinian who Became a Citizen of Israel 1982). Various other mainstream
writers have written occasional sf stories, as in Qisas Short Stories
(coll) by the Syrian Walid Ikhlasi and Khurafat Legends (coll 1968) by the
Tunisian Izzaddin al-Madani. The Algerian Hacene Farouk Zehar, who writes
in French, has published Peloton de tete Top Platoon (coll 1966). The role

of drama in the Arab world is more important than in the West, and plays
are very often published; some are of sf interest. The famous Egyptian
dramatist Yusuf Idris wrote Al-jins ath-thalith The Third Sex (1971), in
which the protagonist, a scientist called Adam, attempts to discover the
enzymes of life and death and travels to the Fantastic World. Another
Egyptian, Ali Salim, a satirist who writes in colloquial Arabic, has
written several sf plays. In En-nas elli fi es-sama' et-tamna People from
the Eighth Heaven (1965) a protagonist called Dr Mideo struggles against
the bureaucratic Academy of Sciences of the Universe. Fantastic
discoveries and excavations are the main topic of Ali Salim's other sf
plays, Barrima aw bi'r el-qamh Brace, or the Well of Wheat (1968),
Er-ragel elli dihik el-mala'ika A Man who Laughed at Angels (1968) and
Afarit Masr el-gadida Satan from Heliopolis (1972).
ARACHNOPHOBIA
Film (1990). Hollywood Pictures/ Amblin/Tangled Web. Executive prods
Steven SPIELBERG, Frank Marshall. Dir Marshall, starring Jeff Daniels,
Harley Jane Kozak, John Goodman, Julian Sands, Henry Jones. Screenplay by
Don Jakoby, Wesley Strick, from a story by Jakoby and Al Williams. 109
mins. Colour. Frank Marshall, a longtime colleague of Spielberg as a
producer, here made his directorial debut with an almost perfectly
choreographed MONSTER MOVIE. The sf element in this social comedy is a
large, male, hitherto-unknown variety of lethal Venezuelan spider which,
accidentally carried in the coffin of its first victim to a small
Californian town, mates with a local female to produce hordes of smaller
but still lethal offspring, fortunately incapable of reproduction. Aimed
at adults rather than teenagers, the film is as much about the horrors of
small-town life - seen from the perspective of the new (arachnophobic)
doctor in town - as it is about the horrors of killer spiders. The science
is mystifying; nobody who sees the film understands the explanation of how
a sterile male fathers a large family. Goodman's role as the local
exterminator is a tour de force of bizarre comedy. Sophisticated, tartly
observed and more than adequately scary, A is certainly the best
spider-invasion film ever made.
ARANGO, ANGEL
LATIN AMERICA
ARBES, JAKUB
CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
ARCH, E.L.
The pseudonym under which Rachel Ruth Cosgrove Payes (1922- ), originally
a research biologist, publishes her sf, though her first novel, a
juvenile, Hidden Valley of Oz (1951), appeared as by Rachel Cosgrove. Her
sf, from Bridge to Yesterday (1963) onwards, has been efficient but
routine. Other works: The Deathstones (1964); Planet of Death (1964); The
First Immortals (1965); The Double-Minded Man (1966); The Man with Three
Eyes (1967).
ARCHER, LEE
ZIFF-DAVIS house name used 1956-7 on 3 stories in AMZ and Fantastic.
Escape Route (1957 AMZ) is by Harlan ELLISON. The authors of the others

have not been identified.
ARCHER, RON
Ted WHITE.
ARCHETTE, GUY
Chester S.GEIER.
ARCHETYPES
MYTHOLOGY.
ARDREY, ROBERT
(1908-1980) US playwright, novelist and speculative journalist known
mainly for his work outside the sf field, formerly for such plays as
Thunder Rock (performed 1939;1941), which was filmed (1942) by the
Boulting Brothers, latterly for his series of sociobiological
speculations, beginning with African Genesis (1961), commercially the most
successful. As the implications of his biological determinism have sunk in
on advocates of FEMINISM and others, he has seemed increasingly isolated
as an ethological popularizer. The uncomfortable nature of his speculative
attempts may be found in his sf novel, World's Beginning (1944), where US
society is benevolently rationalized by a chemicals company. See also:
ECONOMICS; METAPHYSICS.
ARGENTINA
LATIN AMERICA.
ARGOSY, THE
US PULP MAGAZINE published by the Frank A.MUNSEY Corp.; ed Matthew White
Jr (from 1886 to 1928) and others. It appeared weekly from 9 Dec 1882 as
The Golden Argosy, became The Argosy from 1 Dec 1888, went monthly Apr
1894-Sep 1917, then weekly, as Argosy Weekly, 6 Oct 1917-17 July 1920. It
combined with All-Story Weekly (The ALL-STORY) to become Argosy All-Story
Weekly 24 July 1920-28 Sep 1929. It then combined with MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE
to form two magazines, Argosy Weekly and All-Story Love Tales, the former
continuing as a weekly 5 Oct 1929-4 Oct 1941; it went biweekly from 1 Nov
1941, monthly from July 1942, and became a men's adventure magazine in Oct
1943, publishing its last sf in the July 1943 issue. Of the
general-fiction pulp magazines, TA was one of the most consistent and
prolific publishers of sf. Prior to 1910 it had featured sf and fantasy
serials and short stories by Frank AUBREY, James Branch CABELL, William
Wallace COOK, Howard R.GARIS, George GRIFFITH and others. Its sf output
slackened during the first half of the next decade, a period in which it
published sf by Garrett P.SERVISS and Garret SMITH, as well as stories in
the Hawkins series by Edgar FRANKLIN, but picked up on becoming a weekly.
It discovered a major author on publishing The Runaway Skyscraper (1919)
by Murray LEINSTER (whose memorable The Mad Planet appeared in 1920) and
published novels by Francis STEVENS before the merger with All-Story
Weekly. Following this, White retained the editorship and continued
publishing sf with many works by authors later to appear in the SF
MAGAZINES, notably Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, Ray CUMMINGS, Ralph Milne FARLEY,
Otis Adelbert KLINE, and A.MERRITT. Even in the 1930s such sf and
weird-magazine authors as Eando BINDER, Donald WANDREI, Manly Wade

WELLMAN, Jack WILLIAMSON and Arthur Leo ZAGAT were still appearing in its
pages. Its last serialization was Earth's Last Citadel 1943; 1964) by C.L.
MOORE and Henry KUTTNER. Many of TA's stories were reprinted in FAMOUS
FANTASTIC MYSTERIES and FANTASTIC NOVELS. The US TA should not be confused
with UK magazines of the same name. There were two of these. The Argosy,
pulp-size, Dec 1865-Sep 1901, ed Mrs Henry Wood (1814-1887), published
occasional stories of the supernatural but was not known for sf. The
Argosy, pulp-size, June 1926-Jan 1940, became a DIGEST in Feb 1940,
retitled Argosy of Complete Stories. In both its pulp and digest forms
this magazine primarily published reprints in many genres. Early on it
serialized Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein (1818; rev 1831) and Bram Stoker's
Dracula (1897), and published stories by Lord DUNSANY. Later, in its
digest form, it published many stories by Ray BRADBURY. It lasted into the
1960s. Further reading: Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology
of the Scientific Romances in the Munsey Magazines 1912-1920 (anth 1970)
ed Sam MOSKOWITZ.
ARGOSY ALL-STORY WEEKLY
The ARGOSY.
ARGOSY WEEKLY
The ARGOSY.
ARIEL: THE BOOK OF FANTASY
Large-BEDSHEET-size US magazine (9 x 12in; about 230 x 305mm); 4 issues
(Autumn 1976, 1977, Apr and Oct 1978), published by Morning Star Press; ed
Thomas Durwood. A: TBOF was lavishly produced on glossy paper, emphasizing
fantastic art and HEROIC FANTASY, including episodes of the COMIC strip
Den by Richard CORBEN and a feature on Frank FRAZETTA. Critical and
historical articles were interspersed with fiction by Harlan ELLISON,
Michael MOORCOCK, Keith ROBERTS, Roger ZELAZNY and others. In the main A:
TBOF can be said to have been a triumph of form (good) over content
(generally indifferent).
ARIOSTO, LUDOVICO
ITALY.
ARISS, BRUCE (WALLACE)
(1916-1977) US writer and illustrator. He published Dreadful Secret of
Jonas Harper as early as 1948 in What's Doing? Magazine. Full Circle
(1963), his sf novel about a post-HOLOCAUST conflict between Amerindians
and other survivors after the War of Poisoned Lightning, appeared much
later. He also did a good deal of scriptwriting, served in tv and films as
an art director, and did the illustrations for Reginald BRETNOR's Through
Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot (coll 1962) as Grendel Briarton.
ARKHAM COLLECTOR, THE
ARKHAM SAMPLER.
ARKHAM HOUSE
US SMALL PRESS founded in Sauk City, Wisconsin, by August DERLETH and
Donald WANDREI in order to produce a collection of H.P.LOVECRAFT's
stories, The Outsider and Others (coll 1939). Although this was not
initially a success, the imprint continued (Derleth bought out Wandrei in

1943) and published a variety of weird, fantasy and horror collections by
Lovecraft, Robert E.HOWARD, Frank Belknap LONG, Clark Ashton SMITH and
many others, later including original stories and novels; it produced the
first books of Ray BRADBURY, Fritz LEIBER and A.E.VAN VOGT. By the
mid-1940s it was becoming a legend, and an example to other small presses.
In 1948-9 it published a magazine, ARKHAM SAMPLER. Lovecraft remained a
main interest of the company, but after Derleth's death in 1971, AH (later
under James Turner) began to change direction, publishing among other
things some excellent collections by sf writers (sf previously having been
a rather minor part of the company's output). These were not conservative
choices: they included books from the cutting edge of sf by, for example,
Greg BEAR, Michael BISHOP, John KESSEL and Joanna RUSS. AH remains a power
in sf publishing, with books like GRAVITY'S ANGELS (coll 1991) by Michael
SWANWICK; and with the memorial and definitive Her Smoke Rose up Forever
(coll 1990) AH did for James TIPTREE JR. what half a century earlier it
had done for Lovecraft and Smith. Its early Lovecraft and Smith
collections are among the most valuable collectors' items in the field.
Two useful books about AH are Thirty Years of Arkham House 1939-1969
(1970) by Derleth, and Horrors and Unpleasantries: A Bibliographical
History and Collectors' Guide to Arkham House (1983; exp vt The Arkham
House Companion 1989) by Sheldon JAFFERY. The GRAPHIC NOVEL Arkham Asylum:
A Serious House on Serious Earth (graph 1989) by Grant Morrison (writer)
and Dave MCKEAN (artist), published by DC COMICS, is a sort of tribute.
ARKHAM SAMPLER
US magazine, intermediate format (6 x 9in; about 150 x 230mm), quarterly,
8 issues, Winter 1948-Autumn 1949, published by ARKHAM HOUSE, ed August
DERLETH. An offshoot of Arkham House's book-publishing activities, AS was
a fantasy magazine that used many reprints, but also published original
fiction by Ray BRADBURY and others; a celebrated reprint was
H.P.LOVECRAFT's The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath (1943; Winter-Fall 1948;
1955). The Winter 1949 issue was devoted to sf, containing stories by Ray
BRADBURY, A.E.VAN VOGT and others. At $1.00 AS was rather expensive, which
may have contributed to the shortness of its life. A later Arkham House
periodical was The Arkham Collector, in booklet format, 10 issues Summer
1967-Summer 1971, which mixed publishing news with some fiction, mostly
fantasy and horror. See also: SF MAGAZINES.
ARLEN, MICHAEL
(1895-1956) UK-Armenian writer, born Dikran Kouyoumidjian, who is mainly
remembered for The Green Hat (1924) and other novels of fashionable London
life. His supernatural fiction is to be found in These Charming People
(coll 1923) and May Fair (coll 1924); Ghost Stories (coll 1927) assembles
the supernatural stories from the previous volumes. MA's sf novel, Man's
Mortality (1933) - although derivative of Rudyard KIPLING's pax
aeronautica tale With the Night Mail (1905; 1909 chap US) - vividly
depicts the collapse of International Aircraft and Airways in 1987 after
50 years of oligarchy; the melodramatic story carries some moral bite.
Hell! Said the Duchess (1934) is set in 1938, with Winston Churchill as
premier. A succubus is impersonating the duchess, who is accused of being
a Jane the Ripper but is eventually exonerated. About the author: Michael

Arlen (1975) by Harry Keyishian. See also: TRANSPORTION.
ARMSTRONG, ANTHONY
Working name of UK author and journalist George Anthony Armstrong Willis
(1897-1976), a regular contributor to the magazine Punch. AA began writing
as a novelist with two historical fantasies, Lure of the Past (1920) and
The Love of Prince Raameses (1921), which were linked by the common theme
of REINCARNATION. The historical framework was again used in his
LOST-WORLD adventure Wine of Death (1925), a bloodthirsty novel about a
surviving community of Atlanteans. When the Bells Rang (1943), with Bruce
Graeme (1900-1982), is a morale-boosting alternate-history tale of a 1940
INVASION of the UK by the Nazis, and of their subsequent defeat (HITLER
WINS). AA's short stories are, by comparison, slight, and are generally
humorous. Of note are his two early Edgar Rice BURROUGHS parodies, The
Visit to Mars and The Battlechief of Mars (1926 Gaiety) which briefly
outline the extraordinary exploits of John Waggoner; they have yet to be
reprinted. Other works: The Prince Who Hiccupped and Other Tales (coll
1932); The Pack of Pieces (1942; vt The Naughty Princess 1945); The
Strange Case of Mr Pelham (1957). See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; HITLER WINS.
ARMSTRONG, CHARLES WICKSTEED
(1871- ?) UK writer, still alive in 1951, whose first sf novel, The Yorl
of the Northmen, or The Fate of the English Race: Being the Romance of a
Monarchical Utopia (1892) as by Charles Strongi'th'arm, envisions a feudal
and eugenics-dominated world partially modelled on the works of William
MORRIS. CWA's second novel, Paradise Found, or Where the Sex Problem Has
Been Solved (1936), uncovers once again a UTOPIA founded on eugenic
principles, this time in South America.
ARMSTRONG, GEOFFREY
John Russell FEARN.
ARMSTRONG, MICHAEL (ALLAN)
(1956- ) US writer who began publishing sf with Going after Arviq in
Afterwar (anth 1985) ed Janet MORRIS; this story was expanded (with the
name respelled) into his second novel, Agviq: The Whale (1990), a
post-HOLOCAUST tale set in Alaska and featuring a woman anthropologist
whose book-knowledge of the ancient ways of the Eskimo usefully
sophisticates the vitality of the tribal survivors. MA's first novel,
After the Zap (1987), is likewise set in Alaska, in this case in a
People's Republic which has survived the phenomenon of the title, a pulse
that, down south, has scrambled brains and computers alike. The young
protagonist of his third novel, The Hidden War (1994), attempts to defend
his asteroid-belt home (whose culture is nostalgically based on the Beat
literature of the 1950s), is captured and imprisoned, but then finds Earth
to differ vastly from his preconceptions.
ARMSTRONG, T.I.F.
John GAWSWORTH.
ARMYTAGE, W(ALTER) H(ARRY) G(REEN)
(1915- ) South-African born UK writer and professor of education. Of
interest to sf readers among WHGA's 14 books is Yesterday's Tomorrows: A

Historical Survey of Future Societies (1967). Primarily concerned with
literary versions of the shape the future may take, it assembles its
materials mainly from the 19th and 20th centuries, sometimes from books
not well known to sf readers. It is not a critical work, and the material
in its wide range seems sometimes to be merely cited rather than digested;
it is, nevertheless, a useful work of scholarship. See also: CRITICAL AND
HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; UTOPIAS.
ARNASON, ELEANOR (ATWOOD)
(1942- ) US writer who began to publish sf with A Clear Day in the Motor
City for New Worlds Quarterly 6 (anth 1973) ed Michael MOORCOCK and
Charles PLATT. She has since published stories and poems with some
regularity. Her first novel, The Sword Smith (1978), is a fantasy notable
for the spare elegance of its narrative, which focuses with modest
intensity upon its young protagonist's slow grasp of life's meaning. To
the Resurrection Station (1986), which is sf with touches of GOTHIC
imagery, brings a wide range of characters together in contexts which
wittily embody FEMINIST readings of the world. Daughter of the Bear King
(1987) is another fantasy. With A WOMAN OF THE IRON PEOPLE (1991; vt in 2
vols as In the Light of Sigma Draconis 1992 and Changing Women 1992) EA
came suddenly to wider notice. The long tale is set on a complicated
stage: on the planet of Sigma Draconis II, inhabited by an ALIEN race
seemingly in thrall - as is frequently the case in 1980s sf - to the
imperatives of a sexually coercive biology (SEX), a party of Terrans is
attempting to come to some understanding of this species. The plot, in
true PLANETARY-ROMANCE fashion, takes two humans and two aliens on a trek
through the various domains and landscapes of the world, and lessons not
unlike those taught in The Sword Smith - though far more complexly put are shared by all about sexual dimorphism, the nature of violence and the
intrinsic value of individual persons; and evidence is presented that Homo
sapiens may have learned some wisdom from the DISASTERS which, prior to
the novel's timespan, have almost destroyed Earth. Similar dilemmas are
examined, even more sharply, in Ring of Swords (1993), where an
interstellar war between humans and an alien race is at the point of being
resolved in mutual understanding, or exploding calamitously. The chaotic
ruthlessness of humanity, and the rigid gender separation of the alien
hwarhath, are scrupulously exposed and judged in scenes of very
considerable intellectual force; and the outcome - as perceived by some of
the most complexly conceived characters in modern sf - is hopeful. Other
work: Time Gum (anth 1988 chap) ed with Terry A.Garey, sf POETRY.
ARNAUD, G.-J.
FRANCE.
ARNETT, JACK
Mike MCQUAY.
ARNETTE, ROBERT
A ZIFF-DAVIS house name used in AMZ, Fantastic Adventures and Fantastic
by Robert SILVERBERG and Roger P.Graham (Rog PHILLIPS) for 1 identified
story each and by unidentified authors for 6 stories 1951-7.
ARNO, ELROY

Leroy YERXA.
ARNOLD, EDWIN LESTER
(1857-1935) UK writer, son of Sir Edwin Arnold (1832-1904), Victorian
poet and popularizer of Buddhism. His fantasies include two REINCARNATION
tales, The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician (1890 US; vt Phra
the Phoenician 1910 UK) and Lepidus the Centurion: A Roman of Today
(1901). His best-known novel is Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905;
vt Gulliver of Mars 1964 US), in which Jones tells the story of his brief
disgruntlement with the US Navy, his trip by flying carpet to MARS, his
rescue of a princess, his witnessing of the destruction of her domain,
their adventures together, and his return to a trustful fiancee and
promotion. In the preface to the retitled 1964 edition Richard A.LUPOFF
claims this story as a source for Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's Barsoom. The
provenance is visible in hindsight. Other work: The Story of Ulla and
Other Tales (coll 1895), in which 1 story, Rutherford the Twice-Born, is
fantasy. See also: HISTORY OF SF.
ARNOLD, FRANK
Working name of UK writer Francis Joseph Eric Edward Arnold (1914-1987),
active in WWII; in the 1930s he was an early member of UK FANDOM. Four of
his pulp sf stories from this period are collected in Wings Across Time
(coll 1946), published in the short-lived Pendulum Popular Spacetime
Series, of which he was editor. They are strong on action.
ARNOLD, JACK
(1916-1992) US film-maker who made a number of sf films during the 1950s.
In WWII, while in the Army Signal Corps, which was producing training
films, JA found himself working with the great documentary-maker Robert
Flaherty and received an invaluable crash course in film-making. After
WWII he made several successful documentaries. This led to an offer from
Universal Studios to direct feature films, beginning with Girls in the
Night (1953). In 1953 he directed his first sf film, IT CAME FROM OUTER
SPACE, based on a treatment by Ray BRADBURY. His other relevant films are
CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954), REVENGE OF THE CREATURE (1955),
TARANTULA (1956), TheINCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957), MONSTER ON THE
CAMPUS (1958) and TheSPACE CHILDREN (1958). In 1959 he made the Peter
Sellers comedy The Mouse that Roared, the last of his sf-oriented films.
His MONSTER MOVIES, several of which make excellent, moody use of their
cheap desert locations, have other moments of beauty, as in the underwater
ballet of Creature from the Black Lagoon, when the Creature mimics the
movements of the woman swimmer, unseen by her, with a curious, alien
eroticism. His sf masterwork is The Incredible Shrinking Man, a surreal
classic of sf cinema, with its tragic, suburban hero going mad, like some
King Lear on the blasted heath of his own menacing cellar. JA was a genius
of B-movies. Further reading: Directed by Jack Arnold (1988) by Dana
M.Reemes. See also: CINEMA.
ARNO PRESS
US publisher specializing in facsimile reprint series. In 1975 Arno
published a series of 62 sf titles (49 fiction and 13 nonfiction) ed
R.REGINALD and Douglas MENVILLE. The fiction titles date mostly from the

period 1885-1925; the nonfiction includes useful reprints of various
bibliographic and critical works originally published in very small
editions. In 1976 Arno produced a companion series of 63 supernatural and
occult volumes, also ed Reginald and Menville, and including several
anthologies assembled by them.
ARONICA, LOU
(1958- ) US publisher and editor, with BANTAM BOOKS from 1979, as Vice
President and Publisher of the Spectra sf list which he established in
1985, Vice President and Publisher of mass-market books 1989-1992, and
Vice President and Deputy Publisher 1992-1994; he was also editor of the
Foundation sf programme until it was merged into the Bantam list. In 1994
he became Senior Vice President and Publisher of The Berkley Publishing
Group. As editor in his own right, he produced The Bantam Spectra Sampler
(anth 1985 chap) and, more importantly, edited the FULL SPECTRUM original
anthology series: Full Spectrum (anth 1988) with Shawna MCCARTHY; 2 (anth
1989) with Pat Lobrutto, McCarthy and Amy Stout; 3 (anth 1991) and 4 (anth
1993) with Betsy Mitchell and Stout. As a knowledgeable reader of sf and
fantasy, and as a senior figure in the publishing world, LA has for much
of the past decade exercised considerable influence on the shape of the sf
market.
AROUND THE WORLD UNDER THE SEA
Film (1966). Ivan Tors Productions/MGM. Dir Andrew Marton, starring Lloyd
Bridges, Shirley Eaton, David McCallum. Screenplay Arthur Weiss, Art
Arthur. 120 mins. Colour. This routine melodrama was produced by Ivan
Tors, best known for such marine tv series as Flipper. After tidal waves,
underwater experts use a futuristic submarine to plant a series of
earthquake-warning devices along a fault that encircles the world. The
characters, dialogue and giant eel are hackneyed, and the special effects
cheap. The underwater sequences - not bad - were directed by Ricou
Browning.
ARROW, WILLIAM
House name used by BALLANTINE BOOKS. Donald PFEIL; PLANET OF THE APES;
William ROTSLER.
ART
For art in sf ARTS; for sf artists COMICS, ILLUSTRATION and entries on
individual artists.
ARTHUR, PETER
Arthur PORGES.
ARTHUR C.CLARKE AWARD
This award is given to the best sf novel whose UK first edition was
published during the previous calendar year, and consists of an inscribed
plaque and a cheque forps 1000 from a grant donated by Arthur C.CLARKE.
The winner is chosen by a jury, whose membership varies from year to year,
and the award is administered by the SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION (of which
Clarke is Patron), the BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION and the
International Science Policy Foundation. Each organization provides two
jurors. Clarke's generosity is all the more notable, in hindsight, in that

the award has generally gone to rather non-Clarkean books; the first
award, for novels published during 1986, interestingly went to a non-genre
novel. The awards are listed below by date of announcement. Winners: 1987:
Margaret ATWOOD, THE HANDMAID'S TALE1988: George TURNER, The Sea and
Summer (vt Drowning Towers)1989: Rachel POLLACK, Unquenchable Fire1990:
Geoff RYMAN, The Child Garden1991: Colin GREENLAND, TAKE BACK PLENTY1992:
Pat CADIGAN, SYNNERS1993: Marge PIERCY, Body of Glass1994: Jeff NOON, Vurt
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI; COMPUTERS; CYBERNETICS; CYBERPUNK.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
It’s a hot topic today, but science fiction writers have been interested
in Artificial Intelligence ever since it was the intellectual plaything of
computer theorists. Proof of wider interest in AI was a 1994 contest to
determine if a computer program could convince a judge that it was an
actual human being. The prize? $100.000 dollars... to the human
contestant, of course. No one won. But SF writer Charles Platt, whose
cunning strategy of being "moody, irritable, and obnoxious", struck the
judges as authentic. They gave him a bronze medal for being the "most
human human."
ARTS
By virtue of its nature, sf has one foot firmly set in each of C.P.Snow's
two cultures, and sf stories occasionally exhibit an exaggerated awareness
of that divide. Charles L.HARNESS's notable novella The Rose (1953) takes
the reconciliation of an assumed antagonism between art and science as its
theme, the author adopting the view that the emotional richness of art is
necessary to temper and redeem the cold objectivity of science. Most sf
writers argue along similar lines; even when they cannot celebrate the
triumph of art they lament its defeat. The decline of theatrical artistry
in the face of mechanical expertise is the theme of Walter M.MILLER's
HUGO-winning novelette The Darfsteller (1955), and there are similar
stories dealing with other arts: sculpture in C.M.KORNBLUTH's With These
Hands (1951), fiction in Clifford D.SIMAK's So Bright the Vision (1956),
even COMIC-book illustration in Harry HARRISON's Portrait of the Artist
(1964). The concern of sf writers with the arts is almost entirely a
post-WWII phenomenon; early PULP-MAGAZINE sf writers and writers of
scientific romance paid them little heed. Some 19th-century stories about
artists may be considered to be marginal sf because of the remarkable
nature of the particular enterprises featured therein: Nathaniel
HAWTHORNE's Artist of the Beautiful (1844) concerns the making of a
wondrous mechanical butterfly, and Robert W.CHAMBERS's The Mask (1895) is
about a sculptor who makes statues by chemically turning living things to
stone; but these are allegories rather than speculations. Scrupulous
attention to the arts is paid by many UTOPIAN novels, although some
utopians overtly or covertly accept PLATO's (ironic) claim in The Republic
that artists comprise a socially disruptive force and ought to be banished
from a perfect society. This thesis is dramatically extrapolated in Damon
KNIGHT's The Country of the Kind (1956), where the world's only artist is
an antisocial psychotic and is necessarily expelled from social life. Karl
Marx's related dictum that in the socialist utopia there would be no

painters but only men who paint is similarly dramatized in Robert
SILVERBERG's The Man with Talent (1955). Most utopians find the idea of
abundant LEISURE without art nonsensical, but they have sometimes been
hard-pressed to find material appropriate to fill the gap. The enthusiasm
of Edward BELLAMY's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) for the wonders of
mechanically reproduced music reminds us how dramatically our relationship
with the arts has been transformed by technology, and the treatment of
arts and crafts in such novels as William MORRIS's News from Nowhere
(1890) now seems irredeemably quaint, despite being echoed in such more
recent works as Robert M.Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance (1974). More ambitious attempts to represent the artistic life
of the future are featured in Herman HESSE's Magister Ludi (1943; trans
1949; retrans as The Glass Bead Game 1960), in which the life of society's
elite is dominated by the aesthetics of a game, and in Franz WERFEL's
ironic Stern der Ungeborenen (1946; trans as Star of the Unborn 1946 US).
The aesthetic life and its possible elevation to a universal modus vivendi
are, however, mercilessly treated in some utopian satires - notably in
Alexandr MOSZKOWSKI's account of the island of Helikonda in Die Inselt der
Weisheit (1922; trans as The Isles of Wisdom 1924) and Andre MAUROIS's
Voyage aux pays des Articoles (1927; trans as A Voyage to the Island of
the Articoles 1928). An early sf novel which deals satirically with the
arts is Fritz LEIBER's The Silver Eggheads (1961), in which human
literateurs use wordmills and authored fiction is strictly for the ROBOTS.
In The Return of William Shakespeare (1929) Hugh KINGSMILL used an sf
framework for a commentary on Shakespeare, audaciously crediting his
interpretations to the revivified bard himself. Isaac ASIMOV used a
similar idea for a brief joke, The Immortal Bard (1954), in which a
time-travelling Shakespeare fails a college course in his own works. More
earnest stories of scientifically resurrected artists include Ray
BRADBURY's Forever and the Earth (1950), which features Thomas Wolfe, and
James BLISH's A Work of Art (1956), in which the resurrection of Richard
Strauss into the brain of another man is hailed as a work of art in its
own right, although Strauss discovers that rebirth has failed to re-ignite
his creative powers. TIME-TRAVEL stories featuring the great artists of
the past include Manly Wade WELLMAN's Twice in Time (1940; 1957), whose
hero becomes Leonardo da Vinci, Barry N.MALZBERG's Chorale (1978), whose
hero becomes Beethoven, and Lisa GOLDSTEIN's The Dream Years (1976), which
features the pioneers of the Surrealist movement. Sf writers who have a
considerable personal interest in one or other of the arts often reflect
this in their work. Fritz Leiber's theatrical background is less obvious
in his sf than in his fantasy, though it is manifest in No Great Magic
(1963) and - obliquely - in THE BIG TIME (1961). Samuel R.DELANY is one sf
writer in whose works artists play prominent and significant parts; their
aesthetic performances, especially their music, are sufficiently central
to shape the meanings of the stories - a method taken to its extreme in
DHALGREN (1975). Another is Alexander JABLOKOV, who makes much of the
cultural significance of artistry in The Death Artist (1990) and Carve the
Sky (1991). Music is the art most commonly featured in sf, as discussed
under MUSIC IN SF. Theatre is also widely featured, and much easier to
deploy convincingly. Sf novels which use theatrical backgrounds for
various different purposes include Doomsday Morning (1957) by C.L.MOORE,

John BRUNNER's The Productions of Time (1967) and Showboat World (1975) by
Jack Vance, while the hero of Robert A.HEINLEIN's Double Star (1956) is an
actor. The single work of art most often featured in sf stories is the
Mona Lisa, which receives respectful treatment in Ray Bradbury's The Smile
(1952) and disrespectful treatment in Bob SHAW's The Gioconda Caper
(1976); but the most extravagant use of a work of pictorial art as an
anchor for an sf story is in Ian WATSON's Bosch-inspired The Gardens of
Delight (1980). When it comes to inventing new arts, sf writers are
understandably tentative. The aesthetics of time-tourism are elegantly
developed in C.L.Moore's Vintage Season (1946), but the mask-making art of
Jack Vance's The Moon Moth (1961), the holographic sculpture of William
ROTSLER's Patron of the Arts (1973; exp 1974) and Ian Watson's The Martian
Inca (1977), the music-and-light linkages of John Brunner's THE WHOLE MAN
(1958-9; fixup 1964 US; vt Telepathist 1965 UK), the sartorial art of
Barrington J.BAYLEY's The Garments of Caean (1976 US), the
psycho-sculpture of Robert Silverberg's The Second Trip (1972) and the
laser-based artform of J.Neil SCHULMAN's The Rainbow Cadenza (1983) are
all fairly modest extrapolations of extant arts. The most commonly
depicted class of new artform in modern sf involves the recording of
dreams. An early use of this notion was Isaac Asimov's Dreaming is a
Private Thing (1955); more recent and much more elaborate explorations of
the idea are Hyacinths (1983) by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and The Continent of
Lies (1984) by James MORROW. The aesthetic uses of GENETIC-ENGINEERING
techniques are featured in several stories by Brian M.STABLEFORD,
including Cinderella's Sisters (1989) and Skin Deep (1991). There have
been several notable attempts by sf writers to portray the artists'
colonies of the future, many of them imitative of J.G.BALLARD's lushly
ironic stories of Vermilion Sands (coll 1971 US), which includes a story
about the novel art of cloud-sculpting, The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D
(1967). Lee KILLOUGH's Aventine (coll 1982) is the most blatant exercise
in Vermilion Sands pastiche; more obliquely influenced items are Michael
CONEY's The Girl with a Symphony in her Fingers (fixup 1975; vt The Jaws
that Bite, the Claws that Catch) and several stories by Eric BROWN,
including The Girl who Died for Art and Lived (1987). Pat MURPHY's The
City, Not Long After (1989) is more original and more interesting.
Anthologies of sf stories about the arts include New Dreams this Morning
(1966) ed James Blish and The Arts and Beyond: Visions of Man's Aesthetic
Future (anth 1977) ed Thomas F.MONTELEONE. In Pictures at an Exhibition
(anth 1981) ed Ian WATSON writers base their stories on selected works of
art. See also: GAMES AND SPORTS.
ARZHAK, NIKOLAI
Yuli DANIEL.
AS ALIEN AS APPLE PIE
Aliens in American pulp fiction were almost always monstrous. They looked
like reptiles or insects and their goal was to conquer Earth. And even
though it was biologically implausible, they had an eye for earthly women.
Why did American audiences love to hate aliens? One theory is that many
Americans feared and felt threatened by the waves of immigrants coming to
the United States in the early 20th century. British writers, less

fascinated by alien invasions, were busily writing about military
invasions... something that really did threaten them during the first half
of the 20th century.
ASCHER, EUGENE
Harold Ernest KELLY.
ASH, ALAN
(1908- ?) UK writer in whose routine sf adventure, Conditioned for Space
(1955), a SLEEPER AWAKES, having been encased in a block of ice, to find
himself in the front line of Earth defence in a space war.
ASH, BRIAN
(1936- ) UK writer, scientific journalist and editor. His Faces of the
Future: The Lessons of Science Fiction (1975) assumes that its readers
might be ignorant of sf, which leads to more plot summarizing than is
palatable for sf readers. BA's Who's Who in Science Fiction (1976; rev
1977) was well received by the general press, but heavily attacked in the
sf specialist press for omissions and errors. The revised edition
corrected many of the inaccuracies. BA then edited the thematically
arranged The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1978), whose coverage
is not in fact truly encyclopedic, consisting for the most part of largely
unsigned essays and compilations, by various contributors (listed in the
prelims), arranged in chapters which trace the development of the major sf
themes. A handsome volume, illustrated in colour, it did not work well as
a reference work for people interested in particular writers, and was
widely regarded as a coffee-table book. On the other hand, Who's Who in H.
G.Wells (1979) is a useful guide which encompasses all the fiction, not
only the well known early works.
ASH, FENTON
Frank AUBREY.
ASHE, GORDON
John CREASEY.
ASHLEY, FRED
Frank AUBREY.
ASHLEY, MIKE
Working name of UK editor and researcher Michael Raymond Donald Ashley
(1948 ), who has a special expertise in the history of magazine sf,
fantasy and weird fiction. MA's first major work as an anthology editor
was the 4-vol The History of the Science Fiction Magazines: Part 1
1926-35: (anth 1974), Part 2 1936-45 (anth 1975), Part 3 1946-55 (anth
1976) and Part 4 1956-65 (anth 1978), now projected for 1995 release minus the reprinted stories - as a straightforward reference work. The
long introductions to the stories are packed with information, much of it
unfamiliar, and there are useful bibliographical appendices. MA's other
anthologies are Souls in Metal (anth 1977), Weird Legacies (anth 1977), SF
Choice 77 (anth 1977), The Best of British SF (anth in 2 vols 1977), The
Mammoth Book of Short Horror Novels (anth 1988) and The Pendragon
Chronicles: Heroic Fantasy from the Time of King Arthur (anth 1990) and
its sequel, The Camelot Chronicles (anth 1992); he edited Mrs Gaskell's

Tales of Mystery and Horror (coll 1978), and 2 collections of Algernon
BLACKWOOD stories. MA's work has also resulted in a number of nonfiction
books, the first being Who's Who in Horror and Fantasy Fiction (1977),
which is markedly superior to its companion volume dealing with sf, ed
Brian ASH, and draws interestingly on original research; it covers some
400 writers. Two useful indexes, showing increasing evidence of MA's
thoroughness, are Fantasy Readers' Guide: A Complete Index and Annotated
Commentary to the John Spencer Fantasy Publications (1950-66) (1979chap)
and The Complete Index to Astounding/ Analog (1981 US), the latter with
Terry Jeeves. The Illustrated Book of Science Fiction Lists (1982; vt The
Illustrated Science Fiction Book of Lists US) is well organized and fun
for trivia buffs. But MA's main contribution to sf scholarship lies in his
next three books. Monthly Terrors: An Index to the Weird Fantasy Magazines
Published in the United States and Great Britain (1985 US), compiled by
Frank H.Parnell with the assistance of MA, gives proper professional
coverage to an area indexed previously, if at all, mainly in mimeographed
fan publications. Algernon Blackwood: A Bio-Bibliography (1987 US) is an
admirable work, around 300pp of scrupulous bibliography with a 34pp
biographical preface. MA's masterwork, however, may be the 970pp Science
Fiction, Fantasy and Weird Fiction Magazines (1985 US), ed MA and Marshall
B.TYMN. This book (which is not an index) dramatically superseded - in
number of magazines discussed and in detail - the first edition of The
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1979) ed Peter NICHOLLS as the most
comprehensive account of this difficult area of publishing, and is
interestingly written, much of it by MA himself. The book has uneven
sections, but is generally a triumph. Of similar importance is The
Supernatural Index (1995), which records the contents of approximately
2,200 anthologies in the field. Other works: The Seven Wonders of the
World (1979); Fantasy Readers' Guide to Ramsey Campbell (chap 1980); The
Writings of Barrington J.Bayley (1981 chap); When Spirits Talk (anth 1990
chap); The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits (anth 1993),
associational; The Work of William F.Temple: An Annotated Bibliography &
Guide (1994 US). See also: ANTHOLOGIES; ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION;
BIBLIOGRAPHIES; SF MAGAZINES.
ASHTON, FRANCIS LESLIE
(1904- ?) UK writer whose first sf novel, The Breaking of the Seals
(1946), sets a psychic time-traveller into a prehistoric world where
primitive society ends in chaos with the breaking up of Bahste, Earth's
then moon; a Deluge follows. Its thematic sequel, Alas, That Great City
(1948), set in ATLANTIS, propounds a similar catastrophe, with a new
planet arriving to become the Earth's moon and sinking the continent.
Wrong Side of the Moon (1952), written with Stephen Ashton, deals more
mundanely with an attempt at space travel.
ASHTON, MARVIN
Dennis HUGHES.
ASIMOV, ISAAC
(1920-1992) US writer whose second marriage, in 1973, was to fellow
writer J.O.Jeppson (who now signs herself Janet ASIMOV). IA, born in
Russia, was brought to the USA by his family in 1923, and became a US

citizen in 1928. He discovered sf through the magazines sold in his
father's candy store; and, although he was not strongly involved in sf
FANDOM, he was for a while associated with the FUTURIANS, one of whose
members, Frederik POHL, later published several of IA's early stories in
his magazines ASTONISHING STORIES and SUPER SCIENCE STORIES.
Intellectually precocious, IA obtained his undergraduate degree from
Columbia University in 1939, majoring in chemistry, and proceeded to take
his MA in 1941 and PhD in 1948, after a wartime hiatus which he mostly
spent working in the US Naval Air Experimental Station alongside L.Sprague
DE CAMP and Robert A.HEINLEIN. In 1949 he joined the Boston University
School of Medicine, where he became associate professor of biochemistry, a
position he resigned in 1958 (although he retained the title) in order to
write full-time. IA's fame as an sf writer grew steadily from 1940, and
next to Heinlein he was the most influential US sf writer of his era. His
life story is told in three volumes of memoirs - In Memory Yet Green: The
Autobiography of Isaac Asimov (1920-1954) (1979), In Joy Still Felt: The
Autobiography of Isaac Asimov (1954-1978) (1980)and I.Asimov: a Memoir
(1994) - plus a volume of anecdotes, Asimov Laughs Again (1992), the four
together comprising the most extensive autobiographical record yet
supplied by any sf figure. IA began publishing sf with Marooned off Vesta
for AMAZING STORIES in 1939, and, although his first stories did not
attract the immediate attention accorded to contemporaries like Heinlein
and A.E.VAN VOGT, he very soon developed a strong relationship with John
W.CAMPBELL Jr, editor of ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, who encouraged him,
advised him, and eventually began to publish him. His tutelage was
astonishingly fruitful, as the comments woven into The Early Asimov, or
Eleven Years of Trying (coll 1972; vt in 2 vols The Early Asimov, Book One
1974 and Book Two 1974; vt in 3 vols The Early Asimov, or Eleven Years of
Trying 1 1973 UK, 2 1974 UK and 3 1974 UK) exhaustively demonstrate. The
apprenticeship was, in fact, short. By 1942 the young IA, barely out of
his teens, had already written or had clearly embarked upon the three
works or sequences with which his name would be most associated for the
following half century: first, Strange Playfellow (1940 Super Science
Stories; vt Robbie in all later appearances from 1950), the first story in
the Robot series, during the course of which he articulated the Three Laws
of Robotics; second, Nightfall (1941 ASF), his most famous story and
probably the single most famous US sf story of all time; and, third,
Foundation (1942), the first instalment of the celebrated Foundation
series, during the course of which IA established the GALACTIC EMPIRE as a
template for almost every future HISTORY generated in the field from 1940
onwards. As the Robot and Foundation sequences dominated IA's career into
the 1990s, it is perhaps best to describe Nightfall first. Its success has
been astonishing. Poll after poll, including one conducted by the SCIENCE
FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA, has found it considered the best sf short
story of all time. The original idea - as was often the case in the GOLDEN
AGE OF SF - was largely Campbell's. Emerson had said that, if the stars
were visible only once in a thousand years, how men would believe and
adore; but Campbell suggested to IA that something else would happen.
Nightfall is set upon a world which complexly orbits six suns, at least
one of which is always shining, except for one night of universal eclipse
every two millennia. As the night approaches once again, scientists and

others begin to sense that the psychological effects (PSYCHOLOGY) of utter
darkness may explain the fact that civilization on this world is cyclical,
and every 2000 years the race must start again from scratch. Darkness
falls. But it is not the darkness that finally deranges everyone. It is
the thousands of suddenly and overwhelmingly visible stars. A novel
version, Nightfall (1990 UK) with Robert SILVERBERG, opens out the
original story but in so doing fatally flattens the poetic intensity and
SENSE OF WONDER felt by so many readers at the moment when the stars are
seen. It was the third story of the Robot series, Liar! (1941 ASF; rev
1977 chap), that saw the introduction of the Three Laws of Robotics, whose
formulation IA credited essentially to Campbell, but which Campbell
credited essentially to IA. (The laws are detailed in the entry on ROBOTS.
) That the constraints engendered by these laws were matters of
jurisprudence rather than scientific principle could have been no secret
to IA, who almost certainly promulgated them for reasons that had nothing
to do with science. In the first instance, the Laws helped put paid to the
increasingly worn-out PULP-MAGAZINE convention that the robot was an
inimical metal monster; they allowed IA to create a plausible alternative
for the 1940s in his POSITRONIC ROBOTS; and - in lawyerly fashion - they
generated a large number of stories which probed and exploited various
loopholes. The early stories in the sequence tend, as a consequence, to
treat the history of the robot as a series of conundrums to be solved;
these early tales were assembled as I, ROBOT (coll of linked stories 1950;
cut 1958 UK), a title which included Liar! and Little Lost Robot (1947
ASF; rev 1977 chap). In his two robot novels of the 1950s - The Caves of
Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957) - IA definitively articulated the
problem-solving nature of the series, creating in the human detective Lije
Baley and his robot colleague R.Daneel Olivaw two characters far more
memorable than usually found in his work. The two novels - his best of the
1950s - are set in a future in which the crowded inhabitants of Earth have
moved underground (OVERPOPULATION) while their cultural descendants and
rivals, the Spacers, glory in naked suns. The conflict between the two
contrasting versions of humanity's proper course forward would fuel the
Robot novels (see below) of IA's second career as a fiction writer; his
first came near to its close with the Baley/Olivaw books, which were
assembled in The Rest of the Robots (omni 1964), along with some hitherto
uncollected stories, these latter being separately republished as Eight
Stories from the Rest of the Robots (coll 1966), while the two novels were
also assembled without the stories as The Robot Novels (omni 1971). The
Foundation tales were from the first conceived on a different scale, and
were set sufficiently far into the future so that IA need experience none
of the difficulties of verisimilitude he faced in the Robot sequence,
where his plumping for a robot-dominated NEAR FUTURE came to seem
dangerously parochial as COMPUTERS increasingly came into actual being.
The first Foundation sequence, set thousands of years hence in the closing
centuries of a vast Galactic Empire, comprises Foundation (1942-4 ASF;
fixup 1951; cut vt The 1,000 Year Plan 1955 dos), Foundation and Empire
(1945 ASF; fixup 1952; vt The Man who Upset the Universe 1955) and Second
Foundation (1948-50 ASF; fixup 1953; vt 2nd Foundation: Galactic Empire
1958), with all 3 vols being assembled as THE FOUNDATION TRILOGY (1963; vt
An Isaac Asimov Omnibus 1966 UK). Deriving background elements from an

earlier story, Black Friar of the Flame (1942), the series was originally
conceived by IA as a single extended tale, the fall of the Roman Empire
rewritten as sf; it evolved into a much larger undertaking through
consultation with Campbell, whose refusal to accept in ASF the presence of
ALIENS superior to humanity was responsible for IA's decision not to
introduce any aliens at all into his future history. Grandiose in
conception, although suffering in overall design through having been
written piecemeal over a period of years, the first Foundation trilogy was
nevertheless a landmark, winning a HUGO for 1965 as Best All-Time Series.
Like its model, the Galactic Empire is entering a long senescence; but the
hidden protagonist of the series, Hari Seldon, inventor of the IMAGINARY
SCIENCE of PSYCHOHISTORY, has established two Foundations to shorten the
period of interregnum between the fall and a new galactic order. The first
Foundation, which is public, is given the explicit task of responding
creatively to the historic impulses predicted by psychohistory; the second
Foundation, which is secret, copes with the unknown, as in later tales
represented by the Mule, a MUTANT, the effect of whose paranormal powers
on history Seldon could not have anticipated. The first trilogy closes
open to the future. IA's first three published novels - Pebble in the Sky
(1950), The Stars, Like Dust (1951; cut vt The Rebellious Stars 1954 dos)
and The Currents of Space (1952), all three assembled as Triangle (omni
1961; vt A Second Isaac Asimov Omnibus 1969 UK) - are set earlier in the
galactic empire of the Foundation stories, but have no direct connection
with them; they are relatively minor. Before 1958, when he closed off his
first career as a fiction writer, IA wrote only one completely separate
singleton, The End of Eternity (1955), a complex story of TIME TRAVEL and
TIME PARADOXES considered by some critics to be his best work. As Paul
French, he produced the Lucky Starr CHILDREN'S SF sequence: David Starr,
Space Ranger (1952; vt Space Ranger 1973 UK), Lucky Starr and the Pirates
of the Asteroids (1953; vt Pirates of the Asteroids 1973 UK), Lucky Starr
and the Oceans of Venus (1954; vt The Oceans of Venus 1974 UK), Lucky
Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury (1956; vt The Big Sun of Mercury 1974
UK), Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter (1957; vt The Moons of Jupiter
1974 UK), Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn (1958; vt The Rings of
Saturn 1974 UK). The sequence was assembled in the UK as An Isaac Asimov
Double (omni 1972 UK),; vt Lucky Starr Book 1 1993 US), A Second Isaac
Asimov Double (omni 1973 UK); vt Lucky Starr Book 2 1993 US) and A Third
Isaac Asimov Double (omni 1973 UK); and in the USA the first three titles
were assembled as The Adventures of Lucky Starr (omni 1985). Most of the
best of his short stories - like The Martian Way (1952), Dreaming is a
Private Thing (1955), The Dead Past (1956) and The Ugly Little Boy (1958
Gal; 1989 chap dos) - also came from the 1950s; his short work, very
frequently reprinted in the 1980s, was initially assembled in a series of
impressive volumes, including The Martian Way, and Other Stories (coll
1955), Earth is Room Enough (coll 1957) and Nine Tomorrows: Tales of the
Near Future (coll 1959). But then he stopped. In 1958, there was every
sense that the Robot and Foundation sequences were complete, and no sense
that they could in any plausible sense be related to one another. IA
himself, having abandoned fiction, plunged first into the writing of a
popular-science column in The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION,
which began in November 1958 and appeared continuously, for 399 unbroken

issues, until mounting illness prevented his completing the 400th essay
late in 1991; it won IA a special Hugo in 1963 for adding science to
science fiction. More significantly, he also began to produce an
extraordinary stream of nonfiction titles, many of them very substantial,
on all aspects of science and literature and - more or less - anything
else. The triumphant Opus 100 (coll 1969) was followed by Opus 200 (coll
1979), both being assembled as Opus (omni 1980 UK); and these two were
followed in turn by Opus 300 (coll 1984). By the time of his death in
1992, IA's total of published works had long passed the 400 mark. During
the years from 1958 to about 1980, however, little sf appeared, and what
did varied widely in quality. A film tie, Fantastic Voyage (1966) - which
much later was not so much sequelled as recast in Fantastic Voyage II:
Destination Brain (1987) - did his name no good; but THE GODS THEMSELVES
(1972), which was only the second genuine singleton of his career and
which won both Hugo and NEBULA awards, proved to be his finest single
creation, a complex tale involving catastrophic energy transfers between
alternate universes (ALTERNATE WORLDS) and - rarely for him - intriguing
alien beings. Two collections, Buy Jupiter, and Other Stories (coll 1975;
vt Buy Jupiter!) - which incorporated Have You Seen These (coll 1974 chap)
- and The Bicentennial Man (coll 1976), contained both desultory fillers
and, in the title story of the second volume, his finest single Robot
tale. His presence in the sf world may have been intermittent, but his
reputation continued to grow, and in Spring 1977 IA was involved in
founding the first successful new US sf magazine since 1950, ISAAC
ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, which soon became - and remains - one
of the two or three dominant journals in the field. In the 1980s, to the
relief of his very numerous readers and to the trepidation of critics, he
returned to the sf field as a fully active writer. Never in fact prolific
as an author of fiction, IA began at this time to produce large novels at
intervals of a year or less, most of them comprising an ambitious attempt
to amalgamate the Robot and Foundation sequences into one overarching
series, a task not made easier by the total absence of robots from the
Galactic Empire. The bridging premise is simple: the Galactic Empire (and
Hari Seldon's own career) are the consequences of a robot plot - based on
their by-now enormously sophisticated reading of the Three Laws, by which
they argue that the First Law requires robots to protect the human race as
a whole - to ensure the survival of humanity among the stars. In terms of
internal chronology, the new series comprises THE ROBOTS OF DAWN (1983),
Robots and Empire (1985), Prelude to Foundation (1988), FOUNDATION'S EDGE
(1982), which won a Hugo, Foundation and Earth (1986) and Forward the
Foundation (coll of linked stories 1993), IA's last completed fiction,
which advances the sequence into the lifetime of Hari Seldon. Each tale
was longer than anything IA had ever written before and sold enormously
well, but disappointed some readers because of the undue relaxedness of
the new style, the ponderousness of the action, and the memorial sense
that was given off by the entire enterprise. Meanwhile, earlier material
was assiduously intermixed with the new. The Robot Collection (omni 1983)
assembled The Robot Novels and The Complete Robot (coll 1982), the latter
title containing all the robot stories barring the novels; and The Robot
Novels, in its original 1971 form an omnibus containing the Bayley/Olivaw
tales, now reappeared as The Robot Novels (omni 1988) incorporating THE

ROBOTS OF DAWN as well. Robot Dreams (coll 1986) and Robot Visions (coll
1990), both ed anon by Martin H.GREENBERG, while re-sorting much old
material, also contained new short stories; and The Positronic Man (1976
Stellar Science Fiction Stories, anth ed Judith DEL REY asThe Bicentennial
Man; exp 1992 UK) with Robert Silverberg reworked a relatively late robot
story. With Janet ASIMOV (whom see for titles) IA began a new robot
series, the Norby books for children. Further singletons arrived,
including Azazel (coll of linked stories 1988), Nemesis (1989) and Child
of Time (1958 Gal as The Ugly Little Boy by IA alone; exp 1991; vt The
Ugly Little Boy 1992 US) with Robert Silverberg. New stories were
assembled in The Winds of Change (coll 1986), and the entire career was
memorialized in The Asimov Chronicles: Fifty Years of Isaac Asimov (coll
1989; vt in 6 vols as The Asimov Chronicles 1 1990, 2 1990, 3 1990, 4
1991, 5 1991 and 6 1991) ed Martin H.Greenberg; while at the same time
there appeared The Complete Stories, Volume One (omni 1990), comprising
the contents of Earth is Room Enough, Nine Tomorrows and Nightfall, and
The Complete Stories, Volume Two (coll 1992), assembling work from 1941
through 1976. A cascade of anthologies (see listing below) appeared during
this decade; the Isaac Asimov's Robot City series of TIES by various
writers were issued regularly. During the last two decades of his life,
IA's name seemed ubiquitous; he was given a Nebula Grand Master Award for
1986. It remained the case, however, that for younger generations it had
become hard to see the forest for the trees. Their best course might well
be to stick to the Robots and the Foundation, to THE GODS THEMSELVES, and
to The Asimov Chronicles. There they would hear the clear unerring voice
of the rational man, and the tales he told about solving the true world.
For 50 years it was IA's tone of address that all the other voices of sf
obeyed, or shifted from - sometimes with an eloquence he could not himself
have achieved. It may indeed be said that he lacked poetry; but for five
decades his was the voice to which sf came down in the end. His was the
default voice of sf. Other works: The Death Dealers (1958; vt A Whiff of
Death 1968), associational; Through A Glass, Clearly (coll 1967 UK);
Asimov's Mysteries (coll 1968), associational; Nightfall and Other Stories
(coll 1969; vt in 2 vols Nightfall One 1971 UK and Nightfall Two 1971 UK);
The Best New Thing (1971), a juvenile; The Best of Isaac Asimov (coll 1973
UK) ed anon Martin H.Greenberg; the Black Widowers sequence of
associational detective tales comprising Tales of the Black Widowers (coll
1974), More Tales of the Black Widowers (coll 1976), Casebook of the Black
Widowers (coll 1980), Banquets of the Black Widowers (coll 1984) and
Puzzles of the Black Widowers (coll 1990); The Heavenly Host (1975), a
juvenile; The Dream, Benjamin's Dream and Benjamin's Bicentennial Blast:
Three Short Stories (coll 1976 chap); Good Taste (1976 chap); Murder at
the ABA (1976; vt Authorized Murder 1976 UK), a detection with RECURSIVE
elements; The Key Word and Other Mysteries (coll 1977), associational; The
Far Ends of Time and Earth (omni 1979) assembling Pebble in the Sky, Earth
is Room Enough and The End of Eternity; Prisoners of the Stars (omni
1979), assembling The Stars Like Dust and The Martian Way; 3 by Asimov
(coll 1981 chap); The Union Club Mysteries (coll 1983), associational; The
Alternate Asimovs (coll 1985), ed anon Greenberg, containing early
versions of Pebble in the Sky, The End of Eternity and Belief (1953); The
Edge of Tomorrow (coll 1985), part nonfiction; The Best Mysteries of Isaac

Asimov (coll 1986); The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (coll 1986);
Other Worlds of Isaac Asimov (omni 1987) assembling THE GODS THEMSELVES,
The End of Eternity and The Martian Way; The Ugly Little Boy (1958 Gal;
1989 chap dos); Cal (1991 chap). As Editor: Because of the huge number of
IA anthologies, we omit those that are not of genre interest and also
break our listing into two main divisions: Miscellaneous and Series.
Greenberg is understood always to refer to Martin H.GREENBERG as
collaborator, Waugh to Charles G.WAUGH as collaborator, and Olander to
Joseph D.OLANDER as collaborator. Miscellaneous titles Soviet Science
Fiction (anth 1962) and More Soviet Science Fiction (anth 1962), both of
which IA introduced but did not edit; Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales
(anth 1963) with Groff CONKLIN; Tomorrow's Children (anth 1966); Where Do
We Go from Here? (anth 1971; vt in 2 vols Where Do We Go from Here? Book 1
1974 UK and Book 2 1974 UK); Nebula Award Stories 8 (anth 1973); Before
the Golden Age (anth 1974; paperback edn split into 3 vols in the USA, 4
in the UK); 100 Great Science Fiction Short-Short Stories (anth 1978) with
Greenberg and Olander; The 13 Crimes of Science Fiction (anth 1979) with
Greenberg and Waugh; The Science Fictional Solar System (anth 1979) with
Greenberg and Waugh; Microcosmic Tales (anth 1980) with Greenberg and
Olander; Space Mail (anth 1980) with Greenberg and Olander; The Future in
Question (anth 1980) with Greenberg and Olander; The Seven Deadly Sins of
Science Fiction (anth 1980) with Greenberg and Waugh; Isaac Asimov's
Science Fiction Treasury (omni 1981) assembling Space Mail and The Future
in Question; The Future I (anth 1981) with Greenberg and Olander;
Catastrophes! (anth 1981) with Greenberg and Waugh; The Seven Cardinal
Virtues of Science Fiction (anth 1981) with Greenberg and Waugh; Space
Mail, Volume II (anth 1982) with Greenberg and Olander; TV: 2000 (anth
1982), all with Greenberg and Waugh; Laughing Space (anth 1982) with
J.O.Jeppson (Janet ASIMOV); Speculations (anth 1982) with Alice Laurance;
Flying Saucers (anth 1982) with Greenberg and Waugh; Dragon Tales (anth
1982) with Greenberg and Waugh; The Last Man on Earth (anth 1982) with
Greenberg and Waugh; Science Fiction A to Z (anth 1982) with Greenberg and
Waugh; Caught in the Organ Draft: Biology in Science Fiction (anth 1983)
with Greenberg and Waugh; Hallucination Orbit: Psychology in Science
Fiction (anth 1983) with Greenberg and Waugh; Starships (anth 1983) with
Greenberg and Waugh; The Science Fiction Weight-Loss Book (anth 1983) with
Greenberg and George R.R.MARTIN; Creations: The Quest for Origins in Story
and Science (anth 1983) with Greenberg and George ZEBROWSKI; 100 Great
Fantasy Short Short Stories (anth 1984) with Terry CARR and Greenberg;
Machines that Think: The Best Science Fiction Stories about Robots &
Computers (anth 1984) with Greenberg and Patricia S.WARRICK; Isaac Asimov
Presents the Best Science Fiction Firsts (anth 1984) with Greenberg and
Waugh; Computer Crimes & Capers (anth 1984) with Greenberg and Waugh;
Sherlock Holmes through Time and Space (anth 1984) with Greenberg and
Waugh; Election Day 2084: Science Fiction Stories about the Future of
Politics (anth 1984) with Greenberg; Great Science Fiction Stories by the
World's Greatest Scientists (anth 1985) with Greenberg and Waugh; Amazing
Stories: 60 Years of the Best Science Fiction (anth 1985) with Greenberg;
Science Fiction Masterpieces (anth 1986); The Twelve Frights of Christmas
(anth 1986) with Greenberg and Carol-Lynn Rossel Waugh; Young Star
Travelers (anth 1986) with Greenberg and Waugh; Hound Dunnit (anth 1987)

with Greenberg and Carol-Lynn Rossel Waugh; Encounters (anth 1988); Tales
of the Occult (anth 1989) with Greenberg and Waugh; Visions of Fantasy:
Tales from the Masters (anth 1989). Series titles Hugo Winners: The Hugo
Winners (anth 1962); The Hugo Winners, Vol II (anth 1971; vt in 2 vols
Stories from The Hugo Winners 1973 and More Stories from The Hugo Winners
1973; vt in 2 vols The Hugo Winners, Volume One, 1963-1967 1973 UK and
Volume Two, 1968-1970 1973 UK); The Hugo Winners, Vol III (anth 1977); The
Hugo Winners, Vol IV: 1976-1979 (anth 1985; vt in 2 vols Beyond the Stars
1987 UK and The Dark Void 1987 UK); The Hugo Winners, Vol V: 1980-1982
(anth 1986); The New Hugo Winners: Award-Winning Science Fiction Stories
(anth 1989) with Martin H.Greenberg; The New Hugo Winners Volume 2 (anth
1992) with Greenberg. The Hugo Winners and The Hugo Winners, Vol II were
assembled as The Hugo Winners, Volumes One and Two (omni 1972). The Great
SF Stories, all ed with Greenberg: Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF
Stories 1 (1939) (anth 1979); 2 (1940) (anth 1979); 3 (1941) (anth 1980);
4 (1942) (anth 1980); 5 (1943) (anth 1981); 6 (1944) (anth 1982); 7 (1945)
(anth 1982); 8 (1946) (anth 1982); 9 (1947) (anth 1983); 10 (1948) (anth
1983); 11 (1949) (anth 1984); 12 (1950) (anth 1984); 13 (1951) (anth
1985); 14 (1952) (anth 1985); 15 (1953) (anth 1986); 16 (1954) (anth
1987); 17 (1955) (anth 1987); 18 (1956) (anth 1988); 19 (1957) (anth
1989); 20 (1958) (anth 1990); 21 (1959) (anth 1990); 22 (1960) (anth
1991); 23 (1961) (anth 1991); 24 (1962) (anth 1992); 25 (1963) (anth
1992), at which point the series ended. 1 and 2 of the above were
assembled as The Golden Years of Science Fiction 1 (omni 1982); 3 and 4 as
2 (omni 1983); 5 and 6 as 3 (omni 1984); 7 and 8 as 4 (omni 1984); 9 and
10 as 5 (omni 1986) and 11 and 12 as 6 (omni 1988). The Science Fiction
Shorts, all ed with Greenberg and Waugh: After the End (anth 1982 chap);
Earth Invaded (anth 1982 chap); Mad Scientists (anth 1982 chap); Mutants
(anth 1982 chap); Thinking Machines (anth 1982 chap); Tomorrow's TV (anth
1982 chap); Travels through Time (anth 1982 chap) and Wild Inventions
(anth 1982 chap). The Nineteenth Century series, all ed with Greenberg and
Waugh: Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Science Fiction of the Nineteenth
Century (anth 1981); Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Fantasy of the 19th
Century (anth 1982) and Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Horror and
Supernatural of the 19th Century (anth 1983). The Magical Worlds of
Fantasy, all ed with Greenberg and Waugh: Isaac Asimov's Magical Worlds of
Fantasy 1: Wizards (anth 1983); 2: Witches (anth 1984); 3: Cosmic Knights
(anth 1985); 4: Spells (anth 1985); 5: Giants (anth 1985); 6: Mythical
Beasties (anth 1986; vt Mythic Beasts 1988 UK); 7: Magical Wishes (anth
1986); 8: Devils (anth 1987; vt Devils 1989); 9: Atlantis (anth 1987); 10:
Ghosts (anth 1988; vt Ghosts 1989); 11: Curses (anth 1989) and 12: Faeries
(anth 1991). Numbers 1 and 2 of the above were assembled as Isaac Asimov's
Magical Worlds of Fantasy: Witches & Wizards (omni 1985). The Wonderful
Worlds of Science Fiction, all ed with Greenberg and Waugh: Isaac Asimov's
Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction 1: Intergalactic Empires (anth 1983);
2: The Science Fictional Olympics (anth 1984); 3: Supermen (anth 1984); 4:
Comets (anth 1984); 5: Tin Stars (anth 1986); 6: Neanderthals (anth 1987);
7: Space Shuttles (anth 1986); 8: Monsters (anth 1988; vt Monsters 1989);
9: Robots (anth 1989) and 10: Invasions (anth 1990). The Young series, all
ed with Greenberg and Waugh: Young Extraterrestrials (anth 1984; vt
Asimov's Extraterrestrials 1986; vt Extraterrestrials 1988); Young Mutants

(anth 1984; vt Asimov's Mutants 1986; vt Mutants 1988); Young Ghosts (anth
1985; vt Asimov's Ghosts 1986) and Young Monsters (anth 1985; vt Asimov's
Monsters 1986) - both assembled as Asimov's Ghosts & Monsters (omni 1988
UK) - and Young Witches & Warlocks (anth 1987). The Mammoth books, all ed
with Greenberg and Waugh: Baker's Dozen: 13 Short Fantasy Novels (anth
1985; vt The Mammoth Book of Short Fantasy Novels 1988 UK); The Mammoth
Book of Short Science Fiction Novels (anth 1986 UK); The Mammoth Book of
Classic Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1930s (anth 1988 UK; cut vt
Great Tales of Classic Science Fiction 1990 US); The Mammoth Book of
Golden Age Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1940s (anth 1989 UK); The
Mammoth Book of Vintage Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1950s (anth
1990 UK); The Mammoth Book of New World Science Fiction: Great Short
Novels of the 1960s (anth 1991); The Mammoth Book of Fantastic Science
Fiction: Short Novels of the 1970s (anth 1992); The Mammoth Book of Modern
Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1980s (anth 1993). Nonfiction: We
make no attempt to list IA's enormous nonfiction output; however, of the
hundreds of titles published since Biochemistry and Human Metabolism
(1952; rev 1954; rev 1957) with Burnham Walker and William C.Boyd, more
than half are likely to be of interest to sf readers for their lucid and
comprehensive popularizations of all forms of science. Only a Trillion
(coll 1957) contains three SATIRES. IA's FSF science columns have been
regularly assembled, in many volumes, from Fact and Fancy (coll 1962) on.
Recent non-popular-science titles of interest include: Isaac Asimov on
Science Fiction (coll 1981); Futuredays: A 19th-Century Vision of the Year
2000 (1986); How to Enjoy Writing: A Book of Aid and Comfort (1987) with
Janet Asimov; Asimov's Galaxy: Reflections on Science Fiction (coll 1989);
Frontiers (coll 1990); Our Angry Earth (1991) with Frederik POHL.
Nonfiction as editor: Robots: Machines in Man's Image (anth 1985) with
Karen A.Frenkel; Cosmic Critique: How and Why Ten Science Fiction Stories
Work (anth 1990) with Greenberg. About the author: FSF Oct 1966, Special
Isaac Asimov Issue; The Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov by Joseph
F.Patrouch Jr (1974); Asimov Analysed (1972) by Neil GOBLE; Isaac Asimov
(anth of critical articles 1977) ed Joseph D.Olander and Martin
H.Greenberg; Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction Success
(1982) by James E.GUNN. See also: ANTHOLOGIES; APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE
HUMAN WORLD); ARTS; ASTEROIDS; BIOLOGY; CHILDREN IN SF; CITIES; CLICHES;
CLUB STORY; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH;
CRIME
AND PUNISHMENT; CYBERNETICS; DEVOLUTION; DIMENSIONS; DISCOVERY AND
INVENTION; ENTROPY; FANTASY; FUTUROLOGY; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION;
HISTORY
OF SF; JUPITER; JUVENILE SERIES; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS);
MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MERCURY; MUSIC; OUTER PLANETS; PARALLEL WORLDS;
PHYSICS;
PLANETARY ROMANCE; POLITICS; PSEUDO-SCIENCE; PUBLISHING; RADIO;
RELIGION;
SF MAGAZINES; SCIENTISTS; SERIES; SEX; SHARED WORLDS; SOCIOLOGY; SPACE
OPERA; STARS; TECHNOLOGY; TRANSPORTATION; UNDER THE SEA; UTOPIAS;
VENUS;
VILLAINS.

ASIMOV, JANET (OPAL JEPPSON)
(1926- ) US psychoanalyst and writer, married to Isaac ASIMOV from 1973
until his death in 1992; she signed her early books J.O.Jeppson. She began
to publish sf, most of it for children, with The Second Experiment (1974)
as Jeppson, as were The Last Immortal (1980) and The Mysterious Cure, and
Other Stories of Pshrinks Anonymous (coll 1985), the latter comprising
comical tales of psychiatry. As JA, and in collaboration with Isaac
Asimov, she wrote the Norby Chronicles, a sequence of tales for younger
readers about a ROBOT and the scrapes it gets into: Norby, the Mixed-Up
Robot (1983) and Norby's Other Secret (1984), both assembled as The Norby
Chronicles (omni 1986); plus Norby and the Lost Princess (1985) and Norby
and the Invaders (1985), both assembled as Norby: Robot for Hire (omni
1987); plus Norby and the Queen's Necklace (1986) and Norby Finds a
Villain (1987), both assembled as Norby through Time and Space (omni
1988); plus Norby Down to Earth (1988), Norby and Yobo's Great Adventure
(1989), Norby and the Oldest Dragon (1990) and Norby and the Court Jester
(1991). Of greater general interest is her third solo novel, Mind Transfer
(1988) as JA, which carries over her interest in robots into an adult tale
involving the proposal to gift them with brain structures so sophisticated
that human minds can be transferred into the matrix provided. Sex, aliens
and interstellar travel supervene, and the nature of human identity is
explored with some panache. Other works: Laughing Space: Funny Science
Fiction Chuckled Over (anth 1982) as Jeppson with Isaac Asimov; How to
Enjoy Writing: A Book of Aid and Comfort (1987) with Isaac Asimov.
ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION
ISAAC ASIMOV 'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE.
ASNIN, SCOTT
(? - ) US writer known exclusively for A Cold Wind from Orion (1980), one
of several near-future DISASTER novels published around 1980, and not the
least effective of them. The falling object in this case is a satellite.
ASPRIN, ROBERT LYNN
(1946- ) US writer who began publishing sf with his first novel, The Cold
Cash War (1977), which alarmingly conflates GAME-WORLD antics (like fake
wars between mercenaries representing rival corporations on rented turf Brazil, for instance, being visualized mainly as an arena for
world-dominating firms to play games in) and a political rationale to
legitimize the corporate control of Earth. RLA's later novels continued to
chafe against similar real-life constraints, and it was not until the
invention of the Thieves' World universe that he came into his own. The
individual volumes in the sequence - a SHARED-WORLD fantasy enterpise
crafted by a number of writers - were designed by RLA to comprise a number
of stories written (or edited) so that they read as BRAIDS; he may have
been the first sf or fantasy editor to create a significant braided
anthology or novel. The sequence comprises Thieves' World (anth 1979),
Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn (anth 1980) and Shadows of Sanctuary (anth
1981) - these three being assembled as Sanctuary (omni 1982) - Storm
Season (anth 1982), The Face of Chaos (anth 1983), with Lynn Abbey (1948) and Wings of Omen (anth 1984) with Abbey - these three being assembled
as Cross-Currents (omni 1985) - The Dead of Winter (anth 1985), Soul of

the City (anth 1985) and Blood Ties (anth 1986) - these three all with
Abbey and assembled as The Shattered Sphere (omni 1986) - and Aftermath
(anth 1987), Uneasy Alliances (anth 1989) and Stealer's Sky (anth 1989) these three all with Abbey and assembled as The Price of Victory (omni
1990). Six GRAPHIC-NOVEL versions of material from the sequence were
published, all with Abbey and Tim Sale, beginning with Thieves' World
Graphics 1 (graph 1985), 2 (graph 1986) and 3 (graph 1986). Since 1979
almost all of RLA's work has been fantasy, mostly comic, though his
Phule's Company sequence - Phule's Company (1990) and 2: Phule's Paradise
(1992) - deploys the eponymous passel of ragbag soldiers in a SPACE-OPERA
Universe. His reputation lies mainly in the ingenuity of his braiding
activities as editor, but his comic fiction is craftsmanlike. Other works:
The Myth sequence of fantasy adventures in an Arabian Nights universe,
comprising Another Fine Myth... (1978), Myth Conceptions (1980), Myth
Directions (1982), Hit or Myth (1983) - all 4 being assembled as Myth
Adventures (omni 1984) - and Myth-ing Persons (1984), Little Myth Marker
(1985), M.Y.T.H. Inc. Link (1986), Myth-Nomers and Im-pervections (1987),
M.Y.T.H. Inc in Action (1990) and Sweet MYTHtery of Life (1994) the first
6 volumes being assembled as The Myth-ing Omnibus (omni 1992 UK) and The
Second Myth-ing Omnibus (omni 1992 UK), along with Myth Adventures One
(graph coll 1985) and Myth Adventures Two (graph coll 1986), both with
Phil Foglio and assembling comics versions based on Another Fine Myth...;
Mirror Friend, Mirror Foe (1979) with George TAKEI; The Bug Wars (1979);
Tambu (1979); the Duncan and Mallory sequence of graphic novels, all with
Mel White, comprising Duncan and Mallory (graph 1986), The Bar-None Ranch
(graph 1987), and The Raiders (graph 1988); For King and Country (1991)
with Dafydd ab Hugh (1960- ); Catwoman (1992; vt Catwoman: Tiger Hunt 1993
UK) with Lynn Abbey, a Batman tie. Further RLA work in comics, not yet
collected in book form, includes Myth Adventures 9-12 (all 1986) and Myth
Conceptions 1-8 (1985-7). As Editor: Some of the Elfquest series of
braided anthologies, based on the fantasy sequence created by Richard
Pini, RLA's contributions being The Blood of Ten Chiefs (anth 1986) with
Lynn Abbey and Richard Pini and 2: Wolfsong (anth 1988) with Pini. See
also: HUMOUR.
ASTEROIDS
The asteroids (or minor planets) mostly lie between the orbits of Mars
and Jupiter. The first to be discovered was Ceres, identified by Giuseppe
Piazzi (1746-1826) in 1801; three more, including Vesta and Pallas, were
discovered in the same decade, and more than 2000 have now been
catalogued. Only a few are over 150km (100 miles) in diameter, the largest
(Ceres) being some 700km (435 miles) across. A once popular but now
unfashionable theory originated by Heinrich Olbers (1755-1840) holds that
the asteroids may be the debris of a planet torn asunder in some long-ago
cosmic disaster. A few moral tales of the 1950s - and works of
PSEUDO-SCIENCE to this day - suggested that atomic WAR might have been
responsible. The theory features prominently in James BLISH's thriller The
Frozen Year (1957; vt Fallen Star), while the hypothetical war transcends
time to continue in the mind of a human astronaut in Asleep in Armageddon
(1948) by Ray BRADBURY. Some asteroids have extremely eccentric orbits
which take them inside - in some cases well inside - the orbit of Mars or

even that of the Earth. One such is featured in Arthur C.CLARKE's
Summertime on Icarus (1960), and the climax of James Blish's and Norman L.
KNIGHT's A Torrent of Faces (1967) involves a collision between Earth and
asteroid Flavia. In primitive SPACE OPERAS the asteroid belt tended to
figure as a hazard for all ships venturing beyond Mars. Near misses and
actual collisions were common; Isaac ASIMOV's Marooned off Vesta (1939)
begins with one such. Modern writers, however, generally realize both that
the matter in the asteroid belt is very thinly distributed and that, as
the asteroids all lie roughly in the plane of the ecliptic, it is easy to
fly over or under them en route to the outer planets. The asteroids figure
most frequently in sf in connection with mining. In early pulp sf they
became an analogue of the Klondike, where men were men and mules were
second-hand spaceships. Notable examples of this species of sub-Western
space opera include Clifford D.SIMAK's The Asteroid of Gold (1932),
Stanton COBLENTZ's The Golden Planetoid (1935), Malcolm JAMESON's
Prospectors of Space (1940) and Jack WILLIAMSON's Seetee Ship (1942-3;
fixup 1951; magazine stories and early editions as by Will Stewart). The
analogy between the asteroid belt and the Wild West was soon extended, so
that the lawless asteroids became the perfect place for interplanetary
skulduggery, and they featured frequently in space-piracy stories of the
kind popularized by PLANET STORIES; examples are Asteroid Pirates (1938)
by Royal W.Heckman and The Prison of the Stars (1953) by Stanley MULLEN.
The mythology was co-opted into juvenile sf by Asimov in Lucky Starr and
the Pirates of the Asteroids (1953 as by Paul French; vt The Pirates of
the Asteroids). The use of the asteroids as alien worlds in their own
right or as places fit for COLONIZATION has been understandably limited:
they are too small to offer much scope. Clark Ashton SMITH's The Master of
the Asteroid (1932) and Edmond HAMILTON's The Horror on the Asteroid
(1933) feature humans being marooned as a result of unfortunate collisions
and meeting unpleasantly strange fates. The creature in Eden PHILLPOTTS's
Saurus (1938) was dispatched to Earth from the asteroid Hermes but, as he
was still an egg at the time, he was unable later to give much of an
account of life there. Asteroidal Shangri-Las are featured in Fox
B.Holden's The Death Star (1951) and Poul ANDERSON's Garden in the Void
(1952), but in general the most interesting sf asteroids are those which
turn out to be SPACESHIPS in disguise, like the one in Murray LEINSTER's
The Wailing Asteroid (1961). The asteroid/spaceship in Greg BEAR's EON
(1985) turns out to be pregnant with all manner of astonishing
possibilities. Jack VANCE's I'll Build Your Dream Castle (1947) depicts a
series of asteroidal real-estate deals, but the feats of TERRAFORMING
involved stretch the reader's credulity. Charles PLATT's Garbage World
(1967) features an asteroid which serves as the dumping-ground for
interplanetary pleasure resorts, but this is not to be taken too
seriously. A scattered, tough-minded asteroid-belt society, the Belters,
plays an important role in Larry NIVEN's Tales of Known Space series.
Niven, in traditional fashion, sees the Belters as miners similar in
spirit to the colonists of the Old West. One major work on this theme is
Poul Anderson's Tales of the Flying Mountains (1963-5 ASF as by Winston P.
Sanders; fixup 1970), an episodic novel tracing the development of the
asteroid culture from its inception to its declaration of independence.
(An earlier Sanders story set in the asteroid belt was Barnacle Bull 1960.

) A more up-to-date image of life on the belt frontier is offered in
Mother in the Sky with Diamonds (1971) by James TIPTREE Jr, and a notable
modern HARD-SF story partly set on an unusual asteroid is Starfire (1988)
by Paul PREUSS. Stories in which asteroids are removed from their natural
orbits include Bob SHAW's melodramatic The Ceres Solution (1981), in which
Ceres is used to destroy the MOON, and Farside Cannon (1988) by Roger
McBride ALLEN, in which a similar but less desirable collision is averted.
The asteroids have become less significant as action-adventure sf has
moved out into the greater galactic wilderness, but the idea that
colonization of the Solar System might involve the construction of
purpose-built SPACE HABITATS rather than descents into hostile
gravity-wells has suggested to some writers that hollowed-out asteroids
might have their uses; the most extravagant extrapolation of this notion
can be found in George ZEBROWSKI's Macrolife (1979).
ASTONISHING STORIES
US PULP MAGAZINE, 16 issues Feb 1940-Apr 1943, mostly bimonthly,
published by Fictioneers, Inc., Chicago; ed Feb 1940-Sep 1941 Frederik
POHL and Nov 1941-Apr 1943 Alden H.Norton. Fictioneers, Inc. was a
subsidiary of Popular Publications. After the success of this magazine and
its sister publication, SUPER SCIENCE STORIES, both ed by the 19-year-old
Pohl, Popular Publications went on to acquire various of the Frank
A.MUNSEY magazines, including The ARGOSY, FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES and
FANTASTIC NOVELS, and put Alden H.Norton in overall control of their sf,
including the two being edited by Pohl. AS was a lively and successful
magazine under Pohl and his successor, publishing mainly short stories
while Super Science Stories emphasized novels. Although AS was in part a
training ground for writers who would become famous later, its stories
were surprisingly good considering how little was paid for them: the total
budget per issue was $405. AS was also, with a cover price of 10 cents,
the cheapest sf magazine on the market. It featured stories by, among
others, Isaac ASIMOV, Alfred BESTER, Ray CUMMINGS, Neil R.JONES (several
Professor Jameson stories), Henry KUTTNER, Clifford D.SIMAK and, under
pseudonyms, various FUTURIANS (including Pohl himself and C.M.KORNBLUTH).
A Canadian reprint edition published 3 issues in 1942.
ASTOR, JOHN JACOB
(1864-1912) US writer, descendant of the celebrated fur trader; he went
down with the Titanic. His A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the
Future (1894) features an ANTIGRAVITY device - apergy, borrowed from Percy
GREG's Across the Zodiac (1880) - that powers a craft in a tour of the
Solar System in AD2000. Earth itself is a conventional UTOPIA; JUPITER is
Edenic; Saturn is a kind of Heaven. There is much mystical speculation,
the journey having as much to do with theological allegory as with
scientific prophecy or the theory of parallel EVOLUTION. See also: OUTER
PLANETS; POWER SOURCES; RELIGION.
ASTOUNDING SF
(Ultimate Reprint Co. magazine) ASTOUNDING STORIES YEARBOOK.
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION
US magazine, pulp-size Jan 1930-Dec 1941, BEDSHEET-size Jan 1942-Apr

1943, pulp size May 1943-Oct 1943, DIGEST-size Nov 1943-Feb 1963,
bedsheet-size Mar 1963-Mar 1965, digest-size Apr 1965 to date. It changed
its title to ANALOG (details below) in 1960. Published by Publisher's
Fiscal Corporation (which later became Clayton Magazines) Jan 1930-Mar
1933, STREET & SMITH Oct 1933-Jan 1961, Conde Nast Feb 1961-Aug 1980,
Davis Publications Sep 1980-1992; ed Harry BATES Jan 1930-Mar 1933,
F.Orlin TREMAINE Oct 1933-Nov 1937, John W.CAMPBELL Jr Dec 1937-Dec 1971,
Ben BOVA Jan 1972-Nov 1978, Stanley SCHMIDT Dec 1978-current. ASF was sold
to Dell Magazines, part of the BANTAM/ DOUBLEDAY/Dell publishing group,
early in 1992; the first redesigned ASF under the new management is
projected to be (new logo and different cover style) was Nov 1992. By June
1995 the numeration had reached Vol. 115, no. 6. ASF was brought into
being when the PULP-MAGAZINE publisher William Clayton suggested to one of
his editors, Harry Bates, the idea of a new monthly magazine of
period-adventure stories, largely in order to fill a blank space on the
sheet on which all the covers of his pulp magazines were simultaneously
printed. Bates counterproposed a magazine to be called Astounding Stories
of Super-Science. The idea was accepted, and the first issue appeared in
Jan 1930 under that title. Bates was editor, with assistant editor Desmond
W.HALL and consulting editor Douglas M.DOLD (who in 1931 became editor of
the short-lived MIRACLE SCIENCE AND FANTASY STORIES). Where its
predecessors AIR WONDER STORIES, AMAZING STORIES and SCIENCE WONDER
STORIES were larger than the ordinary pulp magazines and attempted a more
austere respectability, in response to Hugo GERNSBACK's proselytizing
desire to communicate an interest in science through SCIENTIFICTION, ASF
was unashamedly an action-adventure pulp magazine where science was
present only to add a veneer of plausibility to its outrageous melodramas.
The flavour is suggested by the following editorial blurb (for The Pirate
Planet by Charles W.Diffin, Feb 1931): From Earth & Sub-Venus Converge a
Titanic Offensive of Justice on the Unspeakable Man-Things of Torg. The
covers of the Clayton ASF, all the work of Hans Waldemar Wessolowski (H.W.
WESSO), show, typically, men (or women) menaced by giant insects or anticipating KING KONG (1933) - giant apes. Regular contributors included
such names as Ray CUMMINGS, Paul ERNST, Francis FLAGG, S.P.MEEK and Victor
ROUSSEAU. One of the most popular authors was Anthony GILMORE (the
collaborative pseudonym of Bates and Hall), whose Hawk Carse series
epitomized ASF-style SPACE OPERA. In Feb 1931 the title was abbreviated to
Astounding Stories; the full title was resumed in Jan 1933. During late
1932 the magazine became irregular as the Clayton chain encountered
financial problems. In Mar 1933 Clayton went out of business and ASF
ceased publication. Although the vast majority of the stories in its first
incarnation (1930-33) are deservedly forgotten, ASF was a robust and
reasonably successful magazine and, because its rates were so much better
than those of its competitors (two cents a word on acceptance instead of
half a cent a word on publication or later), it had attracted such authors
as Murray LEINSTER and Jack WILLIAMSON. The magazine's title was bought by
STREET & SMITH, a well established pulp chain publisher, and after a
six-month gap it reappeared in Oct 1933, restored to a monthly schedule
which it has ever since maintained or improved upon (it has been
four-weekly since 1981) - a record which no other magazine, even AMZ, can
approach. Desmond Hall remained on the editorial staff for a time, but the

new editor was F.Orlin TREMAINE. The first two Tremaine issues were an
uneasy balance of sf, occult and straight adventure but, with the Dec 1933
issue, ASF became re-established as an sf magazine (with the Street &
Smith takeover the name had once again become Astounding Stories). In that
issue Tremaine announced the formulation of his thought-variant policy:
each issue of ASF would carry a story developing an idea which, as he put
it, has been slurred over or passed by in many, many stories. The first
such story was Ancestral Voices by Nat SCHACHNER. Although the
thought-variant policy can be seen as a publicity gimmick rather than as a
coherent intellectual design for the magazine, during 1934 Tremaine and
Hall together raised ASF to an indisputably pre-eminent position in its
small field. The magazine's payment rates were only half what they had
been, but they were still twice as much as their competitors' and were
paid promptly. ASF solicited material from leading authors: in 1934 it
featured Donald WANDREI's Colossus (Jan), Williamson's Born of the Sun
(Mar) and The Legion of Space (Apr-Sep; 1947), Leinster's Sidewise in Time
(June), E.E.Doc SMITH's Skylark of Valeron (Aug 1934-Feb 1935; 1949), C.L.
MOORE's The Bright Illusion (Oct), John W.Campbell Jr's first Don A.Stuart
story, Twilight (Nov), Raymond Z.GALLUN's Old Faithful (Dec) and
Campbell's The Mightiest Machine (Dec 1934-Apr 1935; 1947). Furthermore,
Charles FORT's nonfiction Lo! (1931) was serialized (Apr-Nov) and ASF's
covers featured some startling work by Howard V.BROWN. Also during 1934
the magazine's wordage increased twice, first by adding more pages, then
by reducing the size of type. ASF continued to dominate the field in the
following years. Superscience epics in the Campbell style were largely
phased out as the moodier stories of Stuart became popular. Stanley
G.WEINBAUM was a regular contributor during 1935 (the year of his death);
H.P.LOVECRAFT's fiction appeared in 1936. Tremaine's intention (announced
in Jan 1935) to publish ASF twice a month did not materialize, but the
magazine prospered and in Feb 1936 made the important symbolic step of
adopting trimmed edges to its pages, which at a stroke made its appearance
far smarter than those of its ragged competitors. Other artists who began
to appear in ASF included Elliott DOLD and Charles SCHNEEMAN. Campbell and
Willy LEY contributed articles; L.Sprague DE CAMP and Eric Frank RUSSELL
had their first stories published. At the same time, ASF's competitors
were ailing: both AMZ and WONDER STORIES switched from monthly to
bimonthly in 1935; Wonder Stories was sold in the following year (becoming
THRILLING WONDER STORIES), and AMZ suffered the same fate in 1938. When
Tremaine became editorial director at Street & Smith late in 1937 and
appointed John W.CAMPBELL Jr as his successor, he handed over a healthy
and successful concern. For his first 18 months as editor Campbell did not
develop the magazine significantly, although in 1938 he published the
first sf stories of Lester DEL REY and L.Ron HUBBARD and reintroduced
Clifford D.SIMAK. In Mar 1938 he altered the title to Astounding
Science-Fiction. His intention was to phase out the word Astounding, which
he disliked, and to retitle the magazine Science Fiction; however, the
appearance in 1939 of a magazine with that title (SCIENCE FICTION)
prevented him from doing so. He toyed briefly with thought-variant
adaptations: Mutant issues (which would show significant changes in the
direction of ASF's evolution - and that of sf generally) and Nova stories
(which would be unusual in manner of presentation rather than basic

theme). Such gimmicks were soon forgotten. In Mar 1939 he began ASF's
successful fantasy companion, UNKNOWN. The beginning of Campbell's
particular GOLDEN AGE OF SF can be pinpointed as the summer of 1939. The
July ASF (later reproduced as Astounding Science Fiction, July, 1939 anth
1981 ed Campbell and Martin H.GREENBERG) contained A.E.VAN VOGT's first sf
story, Black Destroyer, and Isaac ASIMOV's Trends (not his first story,
but the first he had managed to sell to Campbell); the Aug issue had
Robert A.HEINLEIN's debut, Life-Line; in the Sep issue Theodore STURGEON's
first sf story, Ether Breather, appeared. During the same period Hubert
ROGERS became established as ASF's major cover artist. The authors that he
published have frequently attested to Campbell's dynamic editorial
personality. Certainly he fed them ideas, but it was the coincidental
appearance of a number of prolific and imaginative writers which gave ASF
its remarkable domination of the genre-sf field during the WWII years when, to begin with, a boom in sf-magazine publishing meant there was more
competition than ever before. The key figure in 1940 and 1941 was
Heinlein. His stories alone would have made the magazine notable, as a
partial listing will indicate. In 1940 there were Requiem (Jan), If This
Goes On - (Feb-Mar), The Roads Must Roll (June), Coventry (July) and
Blowups Happen (Sep); in 1941 Sixth Column (Jan-Mar; 1949), And He Built A
Crooked House (Feb), Logic of Empire (Mar), Universe (May), Solution
Unsatisfactory (May), Methuselah's Children (July-Sep; 1958), By His
Bootstraps (Oct), Common Sense (Oct). At the same time there were a number
of stories by van Vogt, notably SLAN (Sep-Dec 1940; 1946; rev 1951), and
by Asimov, including Nightfall (Sep 1941) and the early ROBOT series.
Although Campbell lost Heinlein to war work in 1942, he gained Anthony
BOUCHER, Fritz LEIBER and Lewis Padgett (Henry KUTTNER and C.L.MOORE). In
Jan 1942 the magazine switched to bedsheet size - which gave more wordage
while saving paper - but it reverted to pulp size in 1943 for a few months
before becoming the first digest-size sf magazine in Nov 1943 as paper
shortages (which killed off Unknown) became more acute. William Timmins
replaced Rogers as ASF's regular cover artist. ASF's leadership of the
field continued through the 1940s. Most of its regular authors had popular
series to reinforce their appeal: Asimov's Robot and Foundation stories;
van Vogt's Weapon Shops tales and his two Null-A novels; George O.SMITH's
Venus Equilateral stories; Jack Williamson's Seetee stories (as by Will
Stewart); Padgett's Gallegher stories; and E.E.Smith's epic Lensman
series, the last two novels of which marked the last throes of the
superscience epic in ASF. The only serious challenge to ASF's superiority
came from Sam MERWIN Jr's vastly improved STARTLING STORIES, which by 1948
was publishing much good material. However, Startling Stories was a
particularly garish-looking pulp while ASF became more sober and serious
in appearance as the decade went on; the covers featuring Chesley
BONESTELL's astronomical art contributed to this effect. The word
Astounding was reduced to a small-size italic script, often coloured so as
to be virtually invisible. At a casual glance it looked as if Campbell had
achieved his ambition of retitling the magazine. But, with the appearance
of The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION in 1949 and GALAXY SCIENCE
FICTION in 1950, ASF's leadership was successfully challenged. It
continued on an even, respectable keel, but the exciting new authors of
the 1950s, by and large, made their mark elsewhere. The May 1950 issue of

ASF featured Hubbard's first article on DIANETICS, which launched the
PSEUDO-SCIENCE that would later become SCIENTOLOGY. This was symptomatic
of Campbell's growing wish to see the ideas of sf made real, a wish that
led him into a fruitless championing of backyard inventors' space drives
and PSIONIC machines. His editorials - idiosyncratic, deliberately
needling, dogmatic, sometimes uncomfortably elitist and near-racist absorbed much of the energy which had previously gone into the feeding of
ideas to his authors. Many of the notions propounded in the editorials
were duly reworked into fiction by a stable of unexceptional regular
authors such as Randall GARRETT and Raymond F.JONES. ASF's new
contributors included Poul ANDERSON, James BLISH, Gordon R.DICKSON, Robert
SILVERBERG and many others, and its new artists included, notably, Ed
EMSHWILLER (Emsh), Frank Kelly FREAS and H.R.VAN DONGEN. It had settled
into respectable middle age. Still popular with sf fans, it won HUGO
awards in 1953, 1955, 1956 and 1957. During 1960 the magazine's title was
gradually altered to Analog Science Fact Science Fiction, Astounding
fading down as Analog became more visible. That little symbol... is a
home-invented one, wrote Campbell (Jan 1964): In all mathematics,
etcetera, there is... no symbol meaning 'is analogous to'. We invented
one... We do not expect our readers to enunciate our title as clearly as
'ANALOG - Science Fact is analogous to Science Fiction' but we thought you
might be interested in why we did not use the traditional ampersand - &.
(With the Apr 1965 issue the order of the two elements changed, without
explanation, so that it became sf analogous to science fact.) Street &
Smith expired and the magazine was taken over by Conde Nast in Feb 1962.
This was an important change, because it assured ASF of excellent
distribution (as one of a group which included such titles as Good
Housekeeping) at a time when its rivals faced increasing difficulties in
getting distributed and displayed. In Mar 1963 the magazine adopted a very
elegant bedsheet-size format but, lacking the advertising support such an
expensive production required, it reverted to digest size in Apr 1965. The
large issues are most notable for Frank HERBERT's first two Dune serials:
Dune World (Dec 1963-Feb 1964) and The Prophet of Dune (Jan-May 1965),
combined as DUNE (fixup 1965); both were superbly illustrated by John
SCHOENHERR, who became one of the magazine's regular artists of the 1960s.
Other authors who became frequent contributors included Christopher ANVIL,
Harry HARRISON and Mack REYNOLDS. The magazine won further Hugos in 1961,
1962, 1964 and 1965. Although it maintained a circulation above 100, 000
(nearly twice that of its nearest rival) it continued on a slow decline
into predictability. Campbell died in July 1971, being replaced as editor
by Ben BOVA (the first issue credited to Bova was that for Jan 1972). Not
surprisingly, the magazine gained considerably in vitality through having
a new editor after nearly 34 years. Authors such as Roger ZELAZNY, who
would not readily have fitted into Campbell's magazine, began to appear.
While the editorial policy remained oriented towards traditional sf, a
more liberal attitude prevailed, leading to some reader protest over
stories by Joe HALDEMAN and Frederik POHL, which, though mild by
contemporary standards, were not what some old-time readers expected to
find in ASF. New writers like Haldeman and George R.R.MARTIN established
themselves. The range of artists was widened with the addition of Jack
GAUGHAN and the discovery of Rick STERNBACH and Vincent DI FATE. A first

for ASF was the special women's issue (June 1977), which contained a HUGO
winner, Eyes of Amber by Joan D.VINGE, and a NEBULA winner, The Screwfly
Solution, by Raccoona Sheldon (better known as James TIPTREE Jr). Bova won
the Hugo for Best Editor (which had replaced the award for Best Magazine)
every year 1973-7 and again in 1979. The magazine's circulation remained
extremely healthy. Bova resigned in 1978, soon afterwards joining OMNI as
fiction editor. His replacement, Stanley SCHMIDT, was a HARD-SF writer
whose debut had been in ASF in 1968 with A Flash of Darkness. His editing
style is quieter and more modest than Campbell's and Bova's, but he has
continued the magazine with dignity. Magazine publishing, however, was
becoming a less important component of the sf-publishing business
(ANTHOLOGIES; SF MAGAZINES), and, while subscription sales continued to
hold up through the 1970s and 1980s, newsstand sales were dropping. In
1980 Conde Nast decided ASF no longer fitted their list, but they had no
trouble finding a buyer. Davis Publications (whose owner, Joel Davis, was
son of B.G.Davis, a partner in ZIFF-DAVIS, publisher of AMZ) had already
begun publishing sf digest periodicals in 1977 with ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE
FICTION MAGAZINE. In 1980 Davis bought ASF, and soon changed the
publication schedule from 12 to 13 issues a year, presumably in a bid to
gain more newsstand space. Increasingly during the 1980s there was a
feeling that ASF, with its image as the last magazine bastion of the
hard-sf problem story, was becoming a dinosaur: a still formidable
anachronism, but an anachronism nevertheless. The paid circulation
oscillated, but the general direction was down, from 104,000 in 1980 to
83,000 in 1990; newsstand sales dropped from 45,000 to 15,000 during the
same period. In 1990 ASF nevertheless retained the highest circulation of
the pure sf magazines. Though fewer of its stories were now appearing in
Best of the Year anthologies and lists of award winners, it still produced
occasional very good work: award winners during the 1980s included The
Cloak and the Staff (1980) by Gordon R.Dickson, The Saturn Game (1981) by
Poul Anderson, Melancholy Elephants (1982) by Spider ROBINSON, Cascade
Point (1983) by Timothy ZAHN, Blood Music (1983) by Greg BEAR, The Crystal
Spheres (1984) by David BRIN and The Mountains of Mourning (1989) by Lois
McMaster BUJOLD. A Nebula-winning novel first serialized in ASF was
Falling Free (1987-8 ASF; 1988) by Bujold, one of ASF's most popular
writers in recent years. Other writers often associated with ASF in the
1980s (and after) include Michael FLYNN, Charles SHEFFIELD and Harry
TURTLEDOVE. Campbell, Bova and Schmidt all edited a number of anthologies
drawn from ASF (see their entries for further details). Many other
anthologies have drawn extensively on the magazine; indeed, of the 35
stories contained in the first major sf anthology, Adventures in Time and
Space (1946) ed Raymond J.HEALY and J.Francis MCCOMAS, all but three were
from ASF. The 2 vols of The Astounding-Analog Reader (anths 1972 and 1973)
ed Harry HARRISON and Brian W.ALDISS provide an informative chronological
survey of ASF's history. The flavour of ASF's first two decades is
nostalgically, if uncritically, captured in Alva ROGERS's A Requiem for
Astounding (1964). A useful index is The Complete Index to
Astounding/Analog (1981 US) by Mike ASHLEY. The UK edition, published by
Atlas, appeared Aug 1939-Aug 1963. The contents were severely truncated
during the 1940s, and the magazine did not appear regularly, adopting a
variable bimonthly schedule. It became monthly from Feb 1952; from Nov

1953, when it changed from pulp to digest, it was practically a full
reprint (four months behind in cover date) of the US edition, although
some stories and departments were omitted.
ASTOUNDING STORIES
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.
ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.
ASTOUNDING STORIES YEARBOOK
One of the many reprint DIGEST magazines published by Sol Cohen's
Ultimate Reprint Co. 2 issues were released in 1970, the second under the
title Astounding SF. Cohen's use of such a celebrated magazine title was
thought by fans to be cheeky.
ASTROBOY
JAPAN; Osamu TEZUKA.
ASTROGATION
Literally, guidance by the stars. In sf TERMINOLOGY this is the space
equivalent of navigation, and the astrogator is conventionally one of the
most important officers on a SPACESHIP. After a jump through HYPERSPACE,
perhaps, it is necessary, although less frequently now than in the GOLDEN
AGE OF SF, for the astrogator to identify several stars, usually through
spectroscopy, to confirm the craft's position by triangulation.
ASTRONOMY
Astronomers played the key role in developing the cosmic perspective that
lies at the heart of sf. Their science gave birth (not without difficulty,
given the public reluctance of the Medieval Church to accept
non-geocentric cosmologies) to an understanding of the true size and
nature of the Universe. To his astronomical treatise The Discovery of a
New World (3rd edn 1640) John WILKINS appended a Discourse Concerning the
Possibility of a Passage Thither, and took the notion of lunar travel out
of the realms of pure fantasy into those of legitimate speculation.
Johannes KEPLER's Somnium (1634) was developed from an essay intended to
popularize the Copernican theory. The literary image of the astronomer as
it developed in the 18th century was, however, by no means entirely
complimentary. The Elephant in the Moon (1759) by Samuel Hudibras Butler
(1613-1680) has a group of observers witnessing what they take to be
tremendous events on the Moon, but which subsequently turn out to be the
activities of a mouse and a swarm of insects on the objective lens of
their telescope. Jonathan SWIFT's Gulliver's Travels (1726) includes a
sharply parodic account of the astronomers of Laputa. Samuel JOHNSON's
Rasselas (1759) features a comically mad astronomer. The revelations of
astronomy inspired 19th-century writers, including Edgar Allan POE, whose
rhapsodic poem Eureka (1848) draws heavily upon contemporary work. They
also encouraged hoaxers like Richard Adams LOCKE, who foisted his
imaginary descriptions of lunar life on the unwary readers of the New York
Sun in 1835. The development of sf in France was led by the nation's
foremost astronomer, Camille FLAMMARION, who was also one of the first
popularizers of the science. His Lumen (1887; trans 1897) is a remarkable

semi-fictional vehicle for conveying the astronomer's particular sense of
wonder and awe. One of the first popularizers of astronomy in the USA,
Garrett P.SERVISS - author of Curiosities of the Sky (1909) - also became
an early writer of scientific romances; his most notable was A Columbus of
Space (1911). The affinity between astronomy and sf is eloquently
identified by Serviss in Curiosities of the Sky: What Froude says of
history is true also of astronomy: it is the most impressive when it
transcends explanation. It is not the mathematics, but the wonder and
mystery that seize upon the imagination... All of the things described in
the book possess the fascination of whatever is strange, marvellous,
obscure or mysterious, magnified, in this case, by the portentous scale of
the phenomena. Sf is the ideal medium for the communication of this kind
of feeling, but it can also accommodate cautionary tales against the
hubris that may come from the illusion of close acquaintance with cosmic
mysteries. Astronomical discoveries concerning the MOON were rapidly
adopted into sf - Jules VERNE's Autour de la lune (1870; trans 1873) is
particularly rich in astronomical detail - and observations of MARS by
Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) and Percival Lowell (1855-1916), which
seemed to reveal the notorious canals, were a powerful stimulus to the sf
imagination. Many 20th-century discoveries in astronomy have been
inconvenient for sf writers, revealing as they do the awful
inhospitability of our nearest neighbours in space. It was astronomers who
banished Earth-clone worlds to other solar systems and made much early
pulp melodrama seem ludicrous. Intriguing and momentous discoveries in the
Universe beyond the Solar System have, however, provided rich imaginative
compensation (COSMOLOGY). One of the best-known and least theoretically
orthodox contemporary astronomers, Sir Fred HOYLE, has written a good deal
of sf drawing on his expertise, including the classic The Black Cloud
(1957) and, in collaboration with his son Geoffrey, The Inferno (1973);
unkind critics remark that Hoyle's more recent speculative nonfiction,
written in collaboration with Chandra Wickramasinghe - including Lifecloud
(1978), Diseases from Space (1979) and Evolution from Space (1981) - seems
even more fanciful than his fiction. The US astronomer Robert S.Richardson
has also been an occasional contributor to sf magazines under the name
Philip LATHAM, and some of his stories are particularly clever in
dramatizing the work of the astronomer and its imaginative implications.
Examples include To Explain Mrs Thompson (1951), Disturbing Sun (1959) and
The Dimple in Draco (1967). Modern observational astronomy has become far
more abstruse as it has diversified into radio, X-ray and other
frequencies, and its visionary implications have become increasingly
peculiar as its practitioners have found explanations for such enigmatic
discoveries as quasars and empirical evidence for the existence of
theoretically predicted entities like BLACK HOLES and NEUTRON STARS.
Notable sf stories featuring peculiar discoveries by astronomers include
Gregory BENFORD's TIMESCAPE (1980) and Robert L.FORWARD's Dragon's Egg
(1980). The advent of radio astronomy has made a considerable impact on
post-WWII sf in connection with the possibility of picking up signals from
an ALIEN intelligence (COMMUNICATIONS), a theme developed in sf novels
ranging from Eden PHILLPOTTS's cautionary Address Unknown (1949) through
James E.GUNN's enthusiastic The Listeners (fixup 1972) to Carl SAGAN's
over-the-top Contact (1985) and Jack MCDEVITT's The Hercules Text (1986).

In the real world, various projects connected with SETI (Search for
Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) have been mounted or mooted, and many
stories have proposed that the receipt of such a message would be the
crucial event in the history of mankind. A satirical dissent from this
view can be found in StanislawLEM's novel His Master's Voice (1968; trans
1983), and there is also a PARANOID school of thought which suggests that
aliens whose own SETI discovers us might easily turn out to be very
unfriendly; our radio telescopes nearly become the agents of our
destruction in Frank CRISP's The Ape of London (1959) and the tv serial A
FOR ANDROMEDA (1961). Astronomy is sometimes confused by the ignorant with
astrology. Although sf has been remarkably tolerant of some other
pseudo-sciences, it has rarely tolerated astrology. An exception is Piers
ANTHONY's MACROSCOPE (1969), which combines hard-science devices
(including a hypothetical remote viewer of awesome power) with
astrological analysis. Two writers outside the genre have, however,
written satirical novels based on the hypothesis that astrology might be
made absolutely accurate: Edward HYAMS with The Astrologer (1950) and John
CAMERON with (again) The Astrologer (1972). See also: JUPITER; MERCURY;
OUTER PLANETS; STARS; SUN; VENUS.
ATHELING, WILLIAM Jr
James BLISH.
ATHERTON, GERTRUDE (FRANKLYN)
(1857-1948) US novelist, biographer and historian. In a long career that
extended from 1888 to 1946 she published about 50 books in a multitude of
genres, her best-known fiction being The Californians (1898; rev 1935) and
her sf novel Black Oxen (1923). In this book, whose sexual implications
caused a scandal, women (only) are rejuvenated by X-rays directed to the
gonads. Though her explicitness and exuberance would not be remarked upon
today in a woman, she achieved some notoriety in her prime as an erotic
writer; she was also a campaigning (though ambivalent) feminist. The Bell
in the Fog, and Other Stories (coll 1905) and The Foghorn (coll 1934) both
contain fantasy stories. Other works: What Dreams May Come (1888) as by
Frank Lin; The White Morning: A Novel of the Power of German Women in
Wartime (1918).
ATHOLL, JUSTIN
(? - ) UK writer whose several very short sf novels appeared obscurely
but nevertheless are of some interest. The Man who Tilted the Earth (1943
chap) does not go quite so far as the title hints, though an atomic
disintegrator comes close to ending life on the planet. Death in the Green
Fields (1944 chap) features a death-dealing fungus. Land of Hidden Death
(1944 chap) is a LOST-WORLD tale. The Oasis of Sleep (1944 chap) invokes
SUSPENDED ANIMATION. The main story in The Grey Beast (coll 1944 chap)
features an apeman (APES AND CAVEMEN). Other works: The Trackless Thing
(1944 chap); There Goes his Ghost (1944 chap).
ATKINS, FRANK
Frank AUBREY.
ATKINS, JOHN (ALFRED)
(1916- ) UK writer. His The Diary of William Carpenter (1943) is a

psychological fantasy inspired by Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936). Tomorrow
Revealed (1955) is an imaginary future HISTORY reconstructed in AD5000
from a library containing the works of such writers as H.G.WELLS and
C.S.LEWIS. The material assembled, often taken from the works of GENRE-SF
writers as well, builds a picture of history directed towards a
theological goal. A Land Fit for 'Eros (1957) with J.B. Pick (1921- ) is
fantasy.
ATLANTIDE, L'
Die HERRIN VON ATLANTIS.
ATLANTIS
The legend of Atlantis, an advanced civilization on a continent in the
middle of the Atlantic which was overwhelmed by some geological cataclysm,
has its earliest extant source in PLATO's dialogues Timaeus and Critias
(c350BC). The legend can be seen as a parable of the Fall of Man, and
writers who have since embroidered the story have generally shown less
interest in the cataclysm itself than in the attributes of the
prelapsarian Atlanteans, who have often been given moral and scientific
powers surpassing those of mere modern humans. Francis BACON's The New
Atlantis (1627; 1629) portrays Atlantean survivors as the founders of a
scientific utopia in North America. However, it was not until Ignatius
DONNELLY published his Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882) that the
lost continent became a great popular myth. Donnelly's monomaniacal work
contained much impressive learning and professed to be nonfiction. Unlike
Plato and Bacon, who had treated Atlantis as an exemplary parable,
Donnelly was convinced that the continent had existed and had been the
source of all civilization. In fact, Donnelly's was a mythopoeic book of
considerable power, arguably ancestral to all the PSEUDO-SCIENCE texts of
the 20th century, and the inspiration for many works of fiction. Atlantis
had already been used in sf by Jules VERNE. His Twenty Thousand Leagues
Under the Sea (1870; trans 1873) contains a brief but effective scene in
which Captain Nemo and the narrator explore the tumbled ruins of an
Atlantean city. Some of the fiction inspired by the theories of the
Theosophists and spiritualists was less restrained - e.g., A Dweller on
Two Planets (1894) by Phylos the Thibetan (Frederick Spencer Oliver
1866-1899), in which the hero remembers his previous incarnation as a
ruler of Atlantis. Other writers used Atlantis more as a setting for
rousing adventure, one of the best examples being The Lost Continent
(1900) by C.J.Cutcliffe HYNE, a first-person narrative framed by the
discovery of an ancient manuscript in the Canaries. David M.PARRY's The
Scarlet Empire (1906), on the other hand, is set in the present (it
depicts Atlantis preserved under a huge watertight dome, an image which
has since become a comic-strip cliche) and intended as a SATIRE of
socialism. (Other stories about a surviving Atlantis are listed in UNDER
THE SEA.) One of the most successful of all Atlantean romances, filmed
four times (Die HERRIN VON ATLANTIS), was Pierre BENOIT's L'Atlantide
(1919; trans as Atlantida 1920; vt The Queen of Atlantis UK) which
concerns the present-day discovery of Atlantis in the Sahara. Benoit was
accused of plagiarizing H.Rider HAGGARD's The Yellow God (1908) for many
of the details of his story. In fact, the latter was not an Atlantean

romance, and nor was Haggard's When the World Shook (1919), set in
Polynesia, although it has been so described. Arthur Conan DOYLE produced
one Atlantis story, The Maracot Deep, to be found in The Maracot Deep
(coll 1929), which is marred as sf by a large admixture of spiritualism.
Stanton A.COBLENTZ's The Sunken World (1928 Amazing Stories Quarterly; rev
1949) has much in common with Parry's The Scarlet Empire: it involves the
contemporary discovery of a domed undersea city, and the purpose of the
story is largely satirical. Dennis WHEATLEY's They Found Atlantis (1936)
contains more of the same, but without the satire. The heyday of Atlantean
fiction was 1885-1930. Often a subgenre of the LOST-WORLD story, sometimes
of the UTOPIAN story, sometimes both, it was perhaps most often the
vehicle for occultist speculation about spiritual powers, and therefore
only marginally sf. Incidental use of the Atlantis motif by S.P.MEEK and
many others became common in US MAGAZINE sf. Many stories are set in other
mythical lands cognate with Atlantis - Mu, Lemuria, Hyperborea, Ultima
Thule, etc. Fantasy writers who have used such settings include Lin
CARTER, Avram DAVIDSON, L.Sprague DE CAMP, Robert E.HOWARD, Henry KUTTNER
and Clark Ashton SMITH. Two sf/historical novels, Stonehenge (1972) by
Harry HARRISON and Leon STOVER and The Dancer from Atlantis (1971) by Poul
ANDERSON, fit Atlantis into the Mycenean Greek world. Several UK writers
continued the pursuit of Atlantis. Francis ASHTON's The Breaking of the
Seals (1946) and its follow-up, Alas, That Great City (1948), are
old-fashioned romances in which the heroes are cast backwards in time by
mystical means. Pelham GROOM's The Purple Twilight (1948) finds that
Martians destroyed Atlantis in self-defence, later almost destroying
themselves by nuclear WAR. John Cowper POWYS's Atlantis (1954) is an
eccentric philosophical novel in which the aged Odysseus visits the
drowned Atlantis en route from Ithaca to the USA. However, for post-WWII
readers Atlantis seems to have lost its spell-binding quality, and the
films in which it has appeared, like ATLANTIS: THE LOST CONTINENT (1960)
and Warlords of Atlantis (1978) have had little to recommend them - though
more than the dire tv series TheMAN FROM ATLANTIS (1977), which features a
hero with webbed hands. An Atlantean series by Jane GASKELL, colourful and
inventive, but written in a gushing prose, is the Cija sequence: The
Serpent (1963; vt in 2 vols The Serpent 1975 and The Dragon 1975), Atlan
(1965), The City (1966) and Some Summer Lands (1977). These form the
autobiography of a princess of Atlantis, contain a considerable amount of
sexual fantasy, and are closer to popular romance than to sf proper.
Taylor CALDWELL's The Romance of Atlantis (1975; published version written
with Jess Stearn), is based, she claimed, on childhood dreams of her
previous incarnation as an Atlantean empress. A very symbolic Atlantis
arises again from the waves in Ursula K.LE GUIN's The New Atlantis (1975)
as a dystopian USA begins to sink. Where Le Guin's story gave new
metaphoric life to Atlantis, most of the sunken continent's few
appearances in the 1980s were romantic melodramas whose view of Atlantis
was on the whole traditional. One of these was Marion Zimmer BRADLEY's
Atlantis Chronicles: Web of Light (1982) and Web of Darkness (1984), both
assembled as Web of Darkness (omni 1985 UK; vt The Fall of Atlantis 1987
US). These fantasies about Atlantean conflicts between forces of light and
darkness had their origin in a long, unpublished romance Bradley wrote as
a teenager, and indeed their subject matter seems more appropriate to the

1940s than the 1980s. David GEMMELL's lively post-HOLOCAUST Sipstrassi
series of science-fantasy novels features stones of healing and/or
destruction whose source is Atlantis; Atlantis itself plays a prominent
role (through gateways between past and future) in the fourth of the
series, The Last Guardian (1989) - a complex plan to save its destruction
through changing history comes to nothing, though it does produce Noah. A
good nonfiction work on the subject is Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme
in History, Science and Literature (1954; rev 1970) by L.Sprague de Camp.
Henry M.Eichner's Atlantean Chronicles (1971) is a bibliography with
level-headed annotations. Other rational books on the subject are few and
far between, but The End of Atlantis (1969) by J.V.Luce and The Search for
Lost Worlds (1975) by James Wellard are useful and entertaining. See also:
PARANOIA.
ATLANTIS, THE LOST CONTINENT
Film (1961). Galaxy/MGM. Dir and prod George PAL, starring Anthony Hall,
Joyce Taylor, Ed Platt, John Dall. Screenplay Daniel Mainwaring, based on
Atalanta (1949), a play by Sir Gerald Hargreaves (1881-1972). 90 mins.
Colour. A young Greek fisherman becomes involved with a castaway who says
she is a princess from Atlantis. A large, fish-shaped submarine surfaces
and they are both taken there. He is enslaved and witnesses the evils of
the Atlantean culture, which include crimes against God and Nature. These
lead to the eventual destruction and sinking of Atlantis by (a) a
destructive ray generated from a giant crystal and (b) an erupting
volcano. The scope of the special effects was obviously affected by the
low budget, but A.Arnold Gillespie and his team achieved some colourful
spectacles. However, the performances are wooden and the story strictly
pulp. Pal was a better producer than director; this is one of his weakest
films.
ATLAS PUBLICATIONS
SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY.
ATOMCRACKER, BUZZ-BOLT
Don WILCOX.
ATOMIC AGE, THE
End-of-the-world theories have always been a popular theme for SF
writers. Comets smashed into earth, the sun grew cold in the heavens, and
space invaders zapped everything in their path. But when the atom bomb was
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, it became apparent that humans
had the potential to destroy their planet. Nuclear power and radiation
became the annihilators of choice in the SF world. And writers changed the
way they imagined the future.
ATOMIC MAN, THE
TIMESLIP.
ATOM MAN VS. SUPERMAN
SUPERMAN.
ATOROX AWARD
AWARDS; FINLAND.

ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS
Film (1957). Los Altos/Allied Artists. Dir Roger CORMAN, starring Richard
Garland, Pamela Duncan, Russell Johnson, Leslie Bradley. Screenplay
Charles B.Griffith. 70 mins cut to 64 mins. B/w. Two giant crabs,
mutations caused by radiation from an H-bomb test on an island, scuttle
out of the sea and destroy all of one and most of another expedition to
the island. Eerily, they take over the minds (and voices) of their
victims; it is disturbing when a crab the size of a van speaks to you in
the voice of your recently deceased best friend. Vintage Corman: fast,
absurd, intelligently scripted, made on a shoestring. One of the more
memorable MONSTER MOVIES of the 1950s boom.
ATTACK OF THE 50 FT. WOMAN
Made-for-tv movie (first screened Dec 1993). Home Box Office/Warner Bros
Television/Bartleby Ltd. Prod Debra Hill; dir Christopher Guest;
screenplay Joseph Dougherty, based on the screenplay of Attack of the 50
Foot Woman (1958) written by Mark Hanna; starring Daryl Hannah, Daniel
Baldwin, William Windom, Frances Fisher, Christi Conaway. 89 mins. Colour.
This is a remake of a rather dim affair from 1958 with (approximately) the
same title, directed by Nathan Juran, primarily remembered for its
wonderful advertising poster, and the unintentional hilarity of the story.
Some feminist (see FEMINISM) criticism of the 1980s resuscitated the film
as an early icon to do with the empowering of women. The possibly
imaginary feminist subtext of the original is taken up with a vengeance
and foregrounded in this rather one-note tale of a put-upon woman, played
by Hannah (in therapy, and with a philandering husband, played by Baldwin)
who, by alien intervention, grows to be fifty feet tall and gets her own
back. It is a mildly amusing film, better than its original though crudely
propagandizing, with Hannah positively glowing once she gets big enough,
so to speak, to dominate, and to inspire other women. The film ends with a
men's group therapy class including the Baldwin character, supervised by
three vast women, in an alien spacecraft.
ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES
Roger CORMAN.
ATTACK OF THE MONSTERS
DAIKAIJU GAMERA.
ATTANASIO, A(LFRED) A(NGELO)
(1951- ) US writer, BA (biochemistry), MFA (creative writing), MA
(linguistics). He began publishing sf with Once More, the Dream as aa
Attanasio for New Worlds Quarterly 7 (anth 1974) ed Hilary BAILEY and
Charles PLATT; this tale, in its experimental heat and dark extravagance,
proved typical of his short fiction in general. Not particularly
attractive to the magazine markets, most of his shorter works appeared for
the first time in Beastmarks (coll 1985). AAA came to wide notice with the
publication of his first novel, Radix (1981), the first volume of the
Radix Tetrad sequence, which continues with In Other Worlds (1984), Arc of
the Dream (1986) and The Last Legends of Earth (1989). As a whole, the
sequence works as a complex meditation on metamorphosis couched in
SPACE-OPERA terms, so that densely ambitious moments of poetic aspiration

alternate with episodes out of the rag-and-bone shop of PULP-MAGAZINE
fiction. After losing her radiation shield, which guards her against the
full nakedness of the Universe, Earth begins to mutate savagely, a
transformation articulated clearly in Radix itself through the story of a
mutant SUPERMAN, who undergoes the same transcendental jumpstart that
jolts his planet through terrors and DIMENSIONS. By the time The Last
Legends of Earth has come to a close, long after Earth itself has become
an inordinately complicated memory, human beings are strange creatures,
resurrected out of dream, half-persona, half-godling. At the same time,
however, a protagonist engages in a revenge fight with spiderlike ALIENS.
AAA's next sf novel, Solis (1994), is a singleton whose plot and pacing
initially remind one of an early Keith LAUMERadventure, but which expands
upon and darkens its origins in space opera; the protagonist, after a
millennium of CRYONICsleep, awakens into an extremely complex and cruel
world run by AIs, where he is used for pornography and enslaved before his
eventual rescue. It could not be said that AAA is a tempered writer; but
the splurge and dance of his prose can be, at times, enormously
enlivening. Of his other novels, Wyvern (1988) is a pirate-punk
historical, with little or no fantasy content; Hunting the Ghost Dancer
(1991) is an extremely late, and rather heated, example of prehistoric sf
(ANTHROPOLOGY) in which a last Neanderthal is pitted against several of
us; is an historical novel with fantasy elements; The Dragon and the
Unicorn (1994 UK), with its sequel, Arthur (1995 UK), comprises an
Arthurian cycle; and The Moon's Wife (1993) is a fantasy of supernatural
seduction whose roots may well lie in psychosis. See also: MUTANTS.
ATTERLEY, JOSEPH
Pseudonym of George Tucker (1775-1861), Chairman of the Faculty of the
University of Virginia while Edgar Allan POE was a student there, and an
influence on him. JA's A Voyage to the Moon with Some Account of the
Manners and Customs, Science and Philosophy, of the People of Morosofia,
and Other Lunarians (1827) describes a trip to eccentric lunar societies,
including one UTOPIA. The spacecraft is coated with the first antigravitic
metal in literature, a forerunner of H.G.WELLS's Cavorite (ANTIGRAVITY).
The book is true sf, including much scientific speculation. It was
reprinted in 1975 - including a review of 1828 and an introduction by
David G.HARTWELL - as by George Tucker. Another sf work, dealing with
OVERPOPULATION, was A Century Hence, or A Romance of 1941 (1977), as by
George Tucker, ed from his manuscript. See also: FANTASTIC VOYAGES;
HISTORY OF SF; MOON.
AT THE EARTH'S CORE
Film (1976). Amicus/AIP. Dir Kevin Connor, starring Doug McClure, Peter
Cushing, Caroline Munro. Screenplay Milton Subotsky, based on At the
Earth's Core (1922) by Edgar Rice BURROUGHS. 89 mins. Colour. The success
of Amicus's The LAND THAT TIME FORGOT (also based on a Burroughs novel)
inspired the making of this lightweight film, in which genially routine
adventures take place inside a vast cavern visited by a hero and a
scientist in a mechanical mole. There are dinosaurs and ape-things. The
wonders of Burroughs's fascinating, if illogical, HOLLOW-EARTH
world-within-a-world (Pellucidar) are barely hinted at.

ATWOOD, MARGARET (ELEANOR)
(1939- ) Canadian poet and novelist, some of whose poetry, like Speeches
for Doctor Frankenstein (1966 chap US), hints at sf content; but her
interest as a prose writer in the form was minimal until the publication
of THE HANDMAID'S TALE (1985), which won the Governor General's Award in
Canada and the first ARTHUR C.CLARKE AWARD in 1986. The 1990 film version
(THE HANDMAID'S TALE) stiffly travestied the book, treating it as an
improbable but ideologically correct DYSTOPIA, rather than as a fluid
nightmare requiem in the vein of George ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
(1949). The tale of Offred the Handmaid, contextually placed as it is
within a frame dated 200 years later, reads overwhelmingly as a personal
tragedy. The venue is dystopian - a sudden loss of fertility has
occasioned a pre-emptive NEAR-FUTURE coup against all remaining fertile
women by a fundamentalist New England, to keep them from power - and the
lessons taught throughout have a sharp FEMINIST saliency. But Offred's
liquid telling of her tale, and her ambivalent disappearance into death or
liberation as the book closes, make for a novel whose context leads,
liberatingly, out of nightmare into the pacific Inuit culture of the
frame. Despite the occasional infelicity - MA's attempts at the language
of GENRE SF are not unembarrassing - THE HANDMAID'S TALE soon gained a
reputation as the best sf novel ever produced by a Canadian. See also:
CANADA; SATIRE; WOMEN SF WRITERS.
ATWOOD, SAM
Thomas A.EASTON.
AUBREY, FRANK
The first and main pseudonym of UK writer Francis Henry Atkins
(1840-1927). A contributor to the pre-sf PULP MAGAZINESS, he wrote three
LOST-WORLD novels. The first and most successful was Devil-Tree of El
Dorado: A Romance of British Guiana (1896), which capitalized on the
contemporary interest in the Roraima Plateau. Weird themes continued in
FA's writings but sf elements became more prominent: A Queen of Atlantis:
A Romance of the Caribbean (1898) related the discovery of a telepathic
race living in the Sargasso Sea; and King of the Dead: A Weird Romance
(1903) showed remnants of Earth's oldest civilization employing advanced
science to resurrect the dead of untold generations in a bid to regain
their lost empire. The first two of these loosely connected novels are
linked by the appearance in both of Monella, a Wandering-Jew character.
Little is known about FA. There is evidence that he was involved in a
scandal at the turn of the century; following a three-year hiatus, he
began to write again, now as Fenton Ash. Publisher's files indicate that
his son, Frank Howard Atkins Jr (1883-1921) - who wrote many popular
nature stories as F. St Mars - also used this name, perhaps in
collaboration. Stylistic analysis indicates that a later story as by FA,
Caught by a Comet (1910), may have been written exclusively by Frank
Atkins Jr. Many sf stories as by Fenton Ash, all characterized by vividly
imaginative but less than fully realized ideas, appeared in the BOYS'
PAPERS. The majority are lost-world adventures; e.g., The Sunken Island
(1904), The Sacred Mountain (1904), The Radium Seekers, or The Wonderful
Black Nugget (1905), The Temple of Fire, or The Mysterious Island (1905;

cut 1917 ) as Fred Ashley, The Hermit of the Mountains (1906-7), By
Airship to Ophir (1910), The Black Opal: A Romance of Thrilling Adventure
(1906 The Big Budget; 1915), In Polar Seas (1915-16) and The Island of
Gold (1915 The Marvel; 1918). In two further works, A Son of the Stars
(1907-08 Young England) and A Trip to Mars (1907 The Sunday Circle as A
King of Mars; 1909), the lost-world setting shifted to a war-torn Mars,
preceding Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's use of the same idea by some years. In
his chosen market FA was extremely successful and influential. Although
contributing little to the sophistication of sf, he played an important
role in the HISTORY OF SF.
AUEL, JEAN M(ARIE)
(1936- ) US writer who is known solely for her enormously successful
Earth's Children sequence of prehistoric-sf novels (ANTHROPOLOGY; ORIGIN
OF MAN): The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980), The Valley of Horses (1982),
both assembled as The Clan of the Cave Bear/The Valley of Horses (omni
1994 UK), The Mammoth Hunters (1985) and The Plains of Passage (1990). It
could not be suggested that the sequence is very effective as sf, or that,
indeed, it is intended to be read as sf; but most of the events recounted
- as the young Cro-Magnon protagonist grows up in the Neanderthal
community which has adopted her, and begins to effect transformations in
her world - are legitimate anthropological extrapolations pastwards. The
greatest displacement from what might fairly be called romantic realism the plots themselves have novelettish moments - lies in the growing
capacity of the main characters to commune with animals. In any case,
generic definitions aside, JMA's control over masses of detail, and her
compulsive storytelling style, put the Earth's Children books on a level
far above most of their very numerous predecessors. See also: WOMEN SF
WRITERS.
AUGUSTUS, ALBERT Jr
Charles NUETZEL.
AUMBRY, ALAN
Barrington J.BAYLEY.
AUREALIS
Australian SEMIPROZINE, subtitled The Australian Magazine of Fantasy and
Science Fiction, quarterly, A5 format, published by Chimaera Publications,
Melbourne, ed Stephen Higgins and Dirk Strasser, dated by year only. Sep
1990-current, 14 issues to early 1995. Yet another brave attempt by an
Australian SMALL PRESSto publish an sf magazine in a market that has
repeatedly proven itself too small to sustain one, though an initial print
run of 10,000 was claimed. Some stories have been promising, few have
risen to excellence. Mostly new writers mix with a sprinkling of better
established names like Damien BRODERICK, Terry DOWLING, Leanne Frahm and
Rosaleen LOVE. To have lasted over four years in this market is an
achievement.
AURORA
AWARDS; CANADA.
AURORA

Fanzine. JANUS/AURORA.
AUSTER, PAUL
(1947- ) US writer and translator who came to sudden attention - after
years of work - with a series of FABULATIONS playing on detective genres
and the French nouveau roman. City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The
Locked Room (1986), assembled as The New York Trilogy (omni 1987 UK), are
not sf; but Moon Palace (1989) comes very close to a literal reading of
its lunar metaphorical structure. In the Country of Last Things (1987),
however, is sufficiently firm about its future New York setting and the
nightmarish landscape its protagonist must traverse, to rest comfortably
within the genre's increasingly commodious fringe. Mr. Vertigo (1994 UK)
is a MAGIC REALIST vision of early 20th century America as remembered by
an old man who, in his elated childhood, was literally able to fly.
AUSTIN, F(REDERICK) BRITTEN
(1885-1941) UK writer and WWII army captain, most noted for his
collections of stories illustrating problems for UK military security
arising in future WARS from new weaponry and tactics: In Action: Studies
of War (coll 1913) and The War-God Walks Again (coll 1926). The latter
volume is occasionally eloquent. FBA also wrote several volumes of linked
stories, each comprising a kind of anthropological romance telling the
development of a significant aspect of Man's history through the ages;
examples are A Saga of the Sea (coll of linked stories 1929), where a
ship's history is told, and A Saga of the Sword (coll of linked stories
1928). The first and last stories of each of these collections tend to
infringe upon sf material and concerns. Other works, some marginal sf:
Battlewrack (coll 1917); According to Orders (coll 1918); On the
Borderland (coll 1922); Under the Lens (coll 1924); Thirteen (coll
1925US); When Mankind was Young (coll of linked stories 1930); Tomorrow
(coll c1930) The Red Flag (coll of linked stories 1932), the final tale of
which is set in 1977. See also: ORIGIN OF MAN.
AUSTIN, RICHARD
Victor MILAN.
AUSTRALIA
Much early Australian sf falls into subgenres which can be described as
sf only controversially: lost-race romances, UTOPIAN novels and
NEAR-FUTURE political thrillers about racial invasion. Works of utopian
speculation began appearing in Australia about the middle of the 19th
century and were set, appropriately for a new society in a largely
unexplored land, either in the FAR FUTURE or in Australia's deep interior
(indeed, Australia's remoteness encouraged UK and US writers to make
similar use of the land as a venue for utopian speculation). Among early
utopias by Australians are Joseph Fraser's Melbourne and Mars: My
Mysterious Life on Two Planets (1889) and G.MCIVER's Neuroomia: A New
Continent (1894). The lost-race (LOST WORLDS) theme was more romantically
handled in novels such as Fergus HUME's The Expedition of Captain Flick
(1896 UK) and G.Firth Scott's The Last Lemurian (1896 The Golden Penny;
exp 1898 UK). A FEMINIST perspective on social criticism is shown in A
Woman of Mars, or Australia's Enfranchised Woman (1901) by Mary Ann

Moore-Bentley (pseudonym of Mrs H.H.Ling). This depicts an ideal society
on Mars in strongly Christian terms, and deals with an attempt to reform
Earth in conformity with the Martian model. Of more merit is an earlier
novel, C.H.SPENCE's feminist utopia Handfasted (written c1879; 1984),
which depicts a community distinguished by its advocacy of handfasting - a
system of year-long trial marriage by contract. The book is unusual in
that it explores the ways in which its central utopian idea might actually
be adopted within the real-world community. From the time of the
mid-19th-century gold rushes, Australian society was marred by racial
antagonism. By the end of the century, fears of Asian hordes had found
their way into sf in such novels as The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the
Asiatic Invasion of Australia (1895 UK) by Kenneth MACKAY, The Coloured
Conquest (1904) by Rata (Thomas Roydhouse) and The Australian Crisis
(1909) by C.H.Kirmess. Novels of this kind, though less vitriolic and
racist, have persisted up to the present: see John Hooker's The Bush
Soldiers (1984) and Eric Willmot's Up the Line (1991). INVASION by aliens
of a more sciencefictional kind is found in Robert POTTER's The Germ
Growers (1892), one of the earliest books with this theme. However,
although it features space-dwelling shapechangers setting up beachheads in
the Australian outback, and thereby looks forward to GENRE SF, it is also
religious allegory. The various early traditions achieved their apotheosis
in Erle COX's Out of the Silence (1919 Argus; 1925; rev 1947), in many
ways a modern-seeming and sophisticated work of sf. A gentleman farmer in
the outback discovers an ancient time-vault containing, in SUSPENDED
ANIMATION, a beautiful and powerful woman, Earani. She is one of the last
survivors of an early species of humanity which, although more highly
developed than Homo sapiens, was ruthless: one of its cultural heroes
purified the race by inventing a Death Rayto destroy its lower (i.e.,
coloured) racial strains. What is disturbing to the modern reader is the
way the novel takes racialist thinking seriously. Though it finally
rejects the Nazi-like utopia it depicts, this rejection has to be earned
through layers of irony and complex narrative, in all of which Earani's
attitudes are given what today seems more than their due. Indeed, she is
depicted as morally cleaner than many of the 20th-century people she
meets. Little Australian sf of importance was published during the 1930s
and 1940s, though the interplanetary thrillers of J.M.WALSH, such as
Vandals of the Void (1931 UK), should be noted. The next real milestone is
Tomorrow and Tomorrow (cut 1947; full text 1983 as Tomorrow and Tomorrow
and Tomorrow) by M.Barnard ELDERSHAW. Framed by a story set in the 24th
century, it sophisticatedly tells, through a novel supposedly written by
one of the characters, of the tumultuous events occurring in Australian
society during the late 20th century. It was cut by the censor at the time
of first publication because of its supposedly subversive tendencies.
Professional commercial sf is the most international of literary forms although much of it has internalized distinctive US values, its strength
is in imaginative extrapolation rather than in the depiction of any local
experience - and so UK and US sf, requiring no translation and readily
available, has tended to be sufficient to meet the needs of Australian
readers. Thus the indigenous sf industry has never achieved critical mass
in the way it has in some other countries. Nonetheless, since the 1950s
there has always been interest in genre sf among Australian writers and

publishers. There was a flurry of local magazine publishing around the
1950s, with THRILLS, INCORPORATED (1950-51), FUTURE SCIENCE FICTION
(1953-5), POPULAR SCIENCE FICTION (1953-4) and SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY
(1955-7). Also during the 1950s, stories by Australian sf writers began to
appear in the US and UK magazines. The work of Frank Bryning, Wynne
WHITEFORD and A.Bertram CHANDLER (whose magazine publishing began in the
1940s) represented a first consolidation of genre sf by writers in
Australia. These authors expanded from their beachhead in the 1960s and
thereafter, being joined during the 1960s by John BAXTER, Damien
BRODERICK, Lee HARDING, David ROME and Jack WODHAMS. The Australian-UK
magazine VISION OF TOMORROW (1969-70) contained many stories by
Australians, perhaps most notably Harding and Broderick. Harding developed
into a thoughtful writer of sf, mainly for adolescents, whose doubts and
alienation he has captured in a series of powerful metaphors. His most
successful work is Displaced Person (1979; vt Misplaced Persons US), in
which the characters find themselves lost in a bewildering limbo after
they start becoming invisible to others. Other important sf for younger
readers has been produced by Gillian RUBINSTEIN, notably Space Demons
(1986) and Beyond the Labyrinth (1988), and by Victor KELLEHER, such as
Taronga (1986); his The Beast of Heaven (1984) is sf for adults. At the
end of the 1960s John Baxter began a trend by editing two anthologies of
Australian sf, The Pacific Book of Australian Science Fiction (anth 1968;
vt Australian Science Fiction 1) and The Second Pacific Book of Australian
Science Fiction (anth 1971; vt Australian Science Fiction 2). Lee
Harding's anthology Beyond Tomorrow (anth 1976) brought together stories
by Australian and overseas writers, as did his further state-of-the-art
anthology, Rooms of Paradise (anth 1978 UK). Several other one-off
anthologies of Australian sf were published in Australia in the 1970s and
1980s, most notably those edited by Broderick: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth
1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985) and Matilda at the Speed of Light
(anth 1988). In 1975 Paul COLLINS began the magazine VOID (1975-81), which
published original stories by Australian writers. He expanded this
operation in 1980 into the publishing house Cory and Collins (partnered by
Rowena Cory). For some years this firm produced anthologies of sf and
fantasy edited by Collins (as if they were numbers of Void) as well as
novels and collections by David LAKE (who has also published quite widely
overseas), Wodhams, Whiteford and others. Collins himself is a prolific
writer of short stories. A number of other SMALL PRESSES have attempted to
produce either magazines or books containing sf by Australian writers, and
some still do. However, this has not generally proved to be commercially
viable. Currently George TURNER is probably the most prominent Australian
sf writer, having earlier established a reputation as a mainstream
novelist and as a critic. Turner has written several very serious
near-future novels containing detailed social and scientific
extrapolation. His most ambitious work, The Sea and Summer (1987 UK; vt
Drowning Towers US), is a relentless extrapolation of social divisions,
factoring in the consequences of the greenhouse effect. The novel borrows
the frame-story technique of Tomorrow and Tomorrow, as if to state that
Turner deliberately casts himself as M.Barnard Eldershaw's successor.
Damien Broderick continues to publish fiction notable for its innovation
and humour, such as The Dreaming Dragons (1980) and the comic Striped

Holes (1988 US). Wynne Whiteford has gone from strength to strength in
writing traditional sf. Australia has some claim upon the New Zealand-born
Cherry WILDER, who now lives in Germany but who was in Australia for many
years. Keith Taylor (1946- ) is a major fantasy writer. Philippa Maddern
(1952- ), Leanne Frahm and Lucy SUSSEX have written some successful
stories. Rosaleen LOVE's neat sf fables have been collected in The Total
Devotion Machine and Other Stories (coll 1989 UK). Of the newer writers,
the most exciting are Terry DOWLING and Greg EGAN. Most significant
writers since the 1950s have aimed their work predominantly at
international markets. While there has been little success in establishing
Australian sf publishing, Australia has been more notable for its efforts
in two other areas, namely serious writing about sf and, perhaps
unexpectedly, film. In the former category Donald H.TUCK's The
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy Through 1968 (vol 1 1974 US;
vol 2 1978 US; vol 3 1982 US) deserves special mention. Magazines such as
John Bangsund's AUSTRALIAN SF REVIEW (1966-9) and its successor,
AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW: SECOND SERIES (1986-91), published by a
small collective of sf fans, Bruce GILLESPIE's SF COMMENTARY
(1969-current), and SCIENCE FICTION: A REVIEW OF SPECULATIVE LITERATURE
(1977-current) ed Van Ikin (1951- ) have all achieved international
respect. In regard to film, sf had its share in the renaissance in the
Australian movie industry which began in the mid-1970s and continued until
about 1983, with some successes still being produced. The three
post-HOLOCAUST Mad Max films - MAD MAX (1979), MAD MAX 2 (1981; vt The
Road Warrior US) and MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME (1985) - have been
particularly well received. Unfortunately, some more recent ambitious (but
uneven) movies such as The Time Guardian (1987) and As Time Goes By (1987)
have flopped, and the future of sf cinema in Australia is doubtful, with
the film industry as a whole having been in decline for several years. One
recent sf film of note, a hit in Australia and quite successful abroad, is
the comedy YOUNG EINSTEIN (1988). Australian sf CONVENTIONS have been held
regularly since 1952. The 1975 and 1985 World Science Fiction Conventions
(Aussiecon and Aussiecon II) were held in Melbourne.
AUSTRALIAN SF REVIEW
Australian FANZINE (1966-9) ed John Bangsund (1939- ). ASFR was one of
the most literate and eclectic of the serious sf fanzines and, despite its
relative isolation, was able to attract articles from such writers as
Brian W.ALDISS, James BLISH and Harry HARRISON. ASFR also served as a
focal point for renewed interest in sf and FANDOM in Australia, and
brought attention to Australian sf critics such as John BAXTER, John
Foyster, Bruce GILLESPIE, Lee HARDING and George TURNER. ASFR was twice
nominated for a HUGO, and won a Ditmar AWARD in 1969.
AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW: SECOND SERIES
Australian FANZINE (Mar 1986-Autumn 1991), ed The Science Fiction
Collective (at first Jenny Blackford (1957- ), Russell BLACKFORD, John
Foyster, Yvonne Rousseau and Lucy SUSSEX; Janeen Webb joined and Sussex
left in 1987). This worthy successor to the defunct AUSTRALIAN SF REVIEW
was effectively though not officially an academic critical journal, of
variable but often high quality, fannishly enlivened at times by

name-calling. Spirited and regular, it had 27 issues before the collective
collapsed from exhaustion. The most consistent Australian sf journal of
its period, it won little support from local FANDOM who saw it as elitist,
but received a farewell Ditmar AWARD in 1991.
AUSTRIA
Austrian literature must be considered a part of the larger German
literature (GERMANY), although with a distinct voice; Austrian writers
have always been published more by German publishing houses than by
Austrian ones. At the turn of the century, Vienna was a veritable
laboratory for many of the ideas of modern times, from psychoanalysis and
logical positivism to music, the arts and literature: here were found
Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, Schoenberg, Klimt, Schiele, Schnitzler, Karl
Kraus and so on. But, while the former Austro-Hungarian Empire produced
many writers important in fantastic literature (notably Gustav MEYRINK,
Herzmanovsky-Orlando and Leo PERUTZ), its contribution to sf has been
rather modest. True, there is the one UTOPIA that became true: the Zionism
of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) and his desire for the foundation of a home
country for the Jews found a literary expression in Altneuland (1902;
trans as Old-New Land 1947). A utopia of a more parochial sociopolitical
character is Osterreich im Jahre 2020 Austria in 2020 AD (1893) by Joseph
Ritter von Neupauer. The utopias Freiland (1890; trans as Freeland 1891)
and its sequel Eine Reise nach Freiland (1893; trans as A Visit to
Freeland 1894) by the economist Theodor HERTZKA were internationally
successful, although the utopias of the first woman winner (1905) of the
Nobel Peace Prize, Bertha von Suttner (1843-1914), such as Der Menschheit
Hochgedanken The Exalted Thoughts of Mankind (1911), found little
resonance. Under the pseudonym Ludwig Hevesi, Ludwig Hirsch (1843-1910)
wrote MacEck's sonderbare Reise zwischen Konstantinopel und San Francisco
MacEck's Curious Journey between Constantinople and San Francisco (1901)
as well as humorous sketches of Jules VERNE's adventures in Heaven and
Hell in his collection Die funfte Dimension The Fifth Dimension (coll
1906). Hevesi was a collector of utopian literature, and upon his death
his library was catalogued as Bibiotheca Utopistica (reprinted Munich
1977) by an antiquarian bookstore, the first such listing in the German
language. In Im Reiche der Homunkuliden In the Empire of the Homunculids
(1910), Rudolf Hawel (1860-1923), another humorist, has his protagonist
Professor Voraus Ahead sleep into the year 3907, where he encounters a
world of asexual ROBOTS. A curious future-WAR story is the anonymous Unser
letzter Kampf Our Last Battle (1907), presented as the legacy of an old
imperial soldier who describes how the Austro-Hungarian Empire perishes in
a heroic fight against Serbs, Italians and Russians. There is the
occasional sf story among the writings of K.H.Strobl (1877-1946) and
Gustav Meyrink. Strobl's big, sprawling novel Eleagabal Kuperus (1910) is
an apocalyptic vision of a fight between good and evil principles that
involves a sciencefictional attempt by the villain to deprive humanity of
oxygen; his Gespenster im Sumpf Ghosts in the Swamp (1920) is a
nationalistic, anti-socialist and antisemitic account of the doom of
Vienna, and is certainly closer to sf than is the visionary novel of the
great illustrator Alfred Kubin (1877-1959), Die andere Seite The Other
Side (1909). At this time important work was being done at the fringes of

sf. Highly ranked in world literature are the metaphysical parables of
Franz KAFKA, one of a group of Jewish writers from Prague writing in
German who included also Max Brod (1884-1968), Leo Perutz and Franz
WERFEL, who wrote his spiritual utopia Stern der Ungeborenen (1946; trans
as Star of the Unborn 1946) during his US exile. Kafka's texts combine a
total lucidity of prose with a sense of the equally total impenetrability
of the world as a whole, usually seen as having a
totalitarian-bureaucratic character, as in Der Prozess (1925; trans as The
Trial 1935). The story In der Strafkolonie (1919; trans 1933 as In the
Penal Settlement) might be considered an anticipation of the Nazi
concentration camps. Also of note is the expressionist writer Robert
Muller (1887-1924), whose Camera Obscura (1921) is a many-levelled
futuristic mystery novel. Two of the fantastic novels of the great writer
Leo Perutz could be considered as psychedelic sf: Der Meister des Jungsten
Tages (1923; trans as The Master of the Day of Judgement 1930) and St
Petri Schnee (1933; trans as The Virgin's Brand 1934 UK). Both involve
consciousness-altering drugs. The books have a hallucinatory quality, and
currently Perutz is undergoing a revival. An acquaintance of Perutz was
Oswald Levett (1889- ?), a Viennese Jewish lawyer who probably perished in
a German concentration camp. His two sf novels have recently been
reprinted. Verirrt in den Zeiten Lost in Time (1933) is a TIME-TRAVEL
novel of a journey back to the Thirty Years' War and an unsuccessful
attempt to change history; as in Perutz's works, the harder the heroes try
to change their fate, the more they are stuck with it. Papilio Mariposa
(1935) can be read as a fantastic allegory of the fate of the Jews: an
ugly and strange individual is changed into a vampiric butterfly; feelings
of inferiority and the desire for a fantastic harmony with an inimical
environment result in tragedy. In Die Stadt ohne Juden The City without
Jews (1925) by another Jewish writer, Hugo BETTAUER, the expelled Jews are
finally recalled to restore the prosperity of the city. Otto Soyka
(1882-1955), a best-selling mystery novelist in his day but now forgotten,
wrote a novel about a chemical substance that influences people's dreams:
Die Traumpeitsche The Dream Whip (1921). After WWII, Erich Dolezal
(1902-1960) wrote a series of a dozen successful, although stiffly
didactic and boring, juveniles about rocketry, starting with RS 11
schweigt RS 11 Doesn't Answer (1953). Somewhat better are 2 books by the
chemist Friedrich Hecht (1903- ) which combine space travel with
discoveries about ATLANTIS and a civilization on an exploded planet
between Mars and Jupiter (ASTEROIDS): Das Reich im Mond Empire in the Moon
(1951) and its sequel Im Banne des Alpha Centauri Under the Spell of Alpha
Centauri (1955). But the best Austrian sf juvenile is the anti-utopian
Totet ihn Kill Him! (1967) by Winfried Bruckner. Der U-Boot-Pirat
(1951-2), Yuma (1951), Star Utopia (1958) and Uranus (1958) were all
short-lived JUVENILE SERIES. Ernst Vlcek (1941- ), a professional writer
since 1970, wrote hundreds of novels in the field, especially for the
PERRY RHODAN series. The physicist Herbert W.FRANKE, considered the most
important living sf writer in the German language, is also Austrian. He
began his career with a collection of 65 short-short stories, Der grune
Komet The Green Comet (coll 1960), in the Goldmann SF series which he at
the time edited. His first novel was Das Gedankennetz (1961; trans as The
Mind Net 1974 US). Two other novels that have been translated into English

are Der Orchideenkafig (1961; trans as The Orchid Cage 1973 US) and Zone
Null (1970; trans 1974 US). Franke has written more than a dozen sf
novels, collections and radio plays, and has edited a number of
international sf anthologies. Among younger writers are: the physicist
Peter Schattschneider (1950- ), author of the two collections Zeitstopp
Time Stop (coll1982) and Singularitaten Singularities (coll 1984);
Marianne Gruber, author of many short stories and two anti-utopian novels,
Die glaserne Kugel The Glass Sphere (1981) and Zwischenstation
Inter-Station (1986); Barbara Neuwirth (1958- ), who writes brooding
fantasy tales, sometimes with sf elements, her first collection, In den
Garten der Nacht In the Gardens of Night (coll 1990), being one of the
best to appear in many years; and Ernst Petz (1947- ) and Kurt Bracharz
(1947- ), who are both writers of satirical stories. Austria's most
important (and most curious) contribution to sf cinema is a propagandist
effort called 1 April 2000 (1952; vt April 1st, 2000), dir Wolfgang
Liebeneiner. In AD2000 Austria is still occupied by the USA, the USSR,
France and the UK. When, on 1st April, she declares her independence she
is accused of breaking the peace. Forces of the world police, equipped
with death-rays, descend upon her, and in a public trial she has to defend
her right to exist. This is a charmingly naive period piece, sponsored by
the Austrian Government and with a high-class cast, including the Spanish
Riding School and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION
UK magazine. 85 issues, 1 Jan 1951-Oct 1957, published by Hamilton & Co.,
Stafford, fortnightly to 8 then monthly, issues numbered consecutively, no
vol numbers; ed L.G.Holmes (Gordon Landsborough) (Jan 1951-Nov 1952), H.J.
CAMPBELL (Dec 1952-Jan 1956) and E.C.TUBB (Feb 1956-Oct 1957).
Pocketbook-size Jan 1951-Feb 1957, DIGEST-size Mar-Oct 1957. 1 and 2 were
entitled Authentic Science Fiction Series, 3-8 Science Fiction
Fortnightly, 9-12 Science Fiction Monthly, 13-28 Authentic Science
Fiction, 29-68 Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, 69-77 Authentic Science
Fiction again, and finally Authentic Science Fiction Monthly 78-85. This
magazine began as a numbered book series, with each number containing one
novel, but a serial was begun in 26 and short stories appeared from 29. H.
J.Campbell, under whose editorship the magazine considerably improved,
included numerous science articles during his tenure, but E.C.Tubb
gradually eliminated most of the nonfiction. The proportion of original
stories relative to reprints increased. Full-length novels were phased out
and transferred to Hamilton's new paperbook line, Panther Books. The
covers got off to a bad start, but from 35 many fine covers by Davis (art
editor John Richards) and others appeared featuring space flight and
astronomy. Authentic's rates of payment (ps1 per 1000 words) were low even
for the time, and although the magazine sold well it seldom published
stories of the first rank; an exception was The Rose (Mar 1953) by Charles
L.HARNESS. House pseudonyms were common and included Jon J.DEEGAN and Roy
SHELDON. The mainstay contributors, under their own names and pseudonyms,
were Bryan BERRY, Sydney J.BOUNDS, H.K.BULMER, William F.TEMPLE and Tubb.
AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY
AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION.

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION SERIES
AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION.
AUTOMAN
Glen A.LARSON.
AUTOMATION
The idea that mechanical production processes might one day free mankind
from the burden of labour is a common utopian dream, exemplified by Edward
BELLAMY's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) and its modern counterpart,
Mack REYNOLDS's Looking Backward from the Year 2000 (1973). But the dream
has its nightmarish aspects: work can be seen as the way in which people
justify their existence, and the spectres of unemployment and redundancy,
historically associated with poverty and misery, have haunted the
developed countries since the days of the Industrial Revolution. The
utopian dream must be set alongside the memory of the Luddite riots and
the Great Depression, and sociologists such as Jacques Ellul and Lewis
Mumford have waxed eloquent upon the dangers of automation. Thus it is
hardly surprising that an entirely negative view of the prospect of
automation can be found in such works as Les condamnes a mort (1920; trans
as Useless Hands 1926) by Claude FARRERE. Indeed, the history of modern
utopian thought (DYSTOPIAS; UTOPIAS) is very largely the history of a loss
of faith in utopia-through-automation and the growth of various fears:
fear that MACHINES may destroy the world by using up its resources,
poisoning it with waste, or simply by making available the means of
self-destruction; fear that we may be enslaved by our machines, becoming
automated ourselves through reliance upon them; and fear that total
dependence on automated production might render us helpless were the
machines ever to break down. The last anxiety is the basis of one of the
most famous MAINSTREAM-sf stories, The Machine Stops (1909) by
E.M.FORSTER, produced in response to the optimistic futurological writings
of H.G.WELLS. The wonders of automation were extensively celebrated by
Hugo GERNSBACK, and much is made of the mechanical provision of the
necessities of life in his Ralph 124C 41+ (1911; 1925). Even in the early
sf PULP MAGAZINES, however, reservations were apparent in the works of
such writers as David H.KELLER (e.g., The Threat of the Robot 1929) and
Miles J.BREUER (e.g., Paradise and Iron 1930). Laurence MANNING's and
Fletcher PRATT's City of the Living Dead (1930) offers a striking image of
the people of the future living entirely encased in silver wires, all of
their experience as well as all their needs being provided synthetically.
The theme played a highly significant part in the work of John W.CAMPBELL
Jr, who wrote several stories allegorizing mankind's relationship with
machinery. In The Last Evolution (1932) and the linked Don A.Stuart
stories Twilight (1934) and Night (1935), machines outlive their builders,
but in the series begun with The Machine (1935) mankind breaks free of the
benevolent bonds of mechanical cornucopia. Powerful images of people
enslaved and automated by machines were offered in the classic film
METROPOLIS (1926; novelization by Thea VON HARBOU 1926; trans 1927). The
notion of the leisurely, machine-supported life was ruthlessly satirized
in The Isles of Wisdom (1924) by Alexandr MOSZKOWSKI and BRAVE NEW WORLD
(1932) by Aldous HUXLEY. One of the most significant advances in the

automation of labour was anticipated in sf, and now bears the name of the
story in which it appeared: Robert A.HEINLEIN's Waldo (1942) (WALDO). Much
attention has been devoted to ROBOTS, automatic workers which have
received a good deal more careful and sympathetic consideration in GENRE
SF than in the moral tale which coined the word: Karel CAPEK's R.U.R
(1920; trans 1923). Fully automated factories are featured in several of
Philip K.DICK's stories, most notably Autofac (1955), and Dick extended
this line of thought to consider the effects of the automation of
production on the business of warfare in Second Variety (1953). Automated
warfare is also featured in Dr Southport Vulpes's Nightmare(1955) by
Bertrand RUSSELL and in War with the Robots (1962) by Harry HARRISON. The
automation of the home has been taken to its logical extreme in a number
of ironic sf stories, including The Twonky (1942) by Lewis Padgett (Henry
KUTTNER and C.L.MOORE), filmed as TheTWONKY (1952), The House Dutiful
(1948) by William TENN and Nor Custom Stale (1959) by Joanna RUSS.
Automated CITIES are the central figures in Greg BEAR's Strength of Stones
(fixup 1981), and one, Bellwether - the automated city as Jewish mother appears satirically in Dimension of Miracles (1968) by Robert SHECKLEY.
The automation of information storage and recovery systems and calculating
functions is a theme of considerable importance in its own right
(COMPUTERS). The grimmer imagery of the automated future became more
extensive in the 1950s. Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's PLAYER PIANO (1952) tells of a
hopeless revolution against the automation of human life and the human
spirit. Several writers working under John W.CAMPBELL Jr's tutelage,
however, produced stories which argued passionately that robots and
computers would be a tremendous asset to human life if only we could learn
to use them responsibly; rhetorically powerful examples include Jack
WILLIAMSON's The Humanoids (1949) - whose ending decisively overturned the
moral of its classic predecessor, his own With Folded Hands... (1947) and Mark CLIFTON's and Frank RILEY's They'd Rather Be Right (1954; 1957;
vt The Forever Machine). Despite this stubborn defence, the encroachment
of the machine upon the most essential and sacred areas of human activity
and endeavour became a common theme in post-WWII sf. Artists find
themselves replaced by machines in numerous stories (ARTS), most notably
Walter M.MILLER's The Darfsteller (1955), and ANDROIDS or robots often
find a place in the most intimate of human relationships. The basic idea
of Campbell's The Last Evolution - that automation might be the prelude to
the establishment of a self-sustaining, independently evolving mechanical
life-system - was first considered in Samuel BUTLER's Erewhon (1872) and
has been a constant preoccupation of sf writers; other early examples
include Laurence Manning's Call of the Mech-Men (1933) and Eric Frank
RUSSELL's Mechanistra (1942). More recent developments of the theme
include Stanisllaw LEM's The Invincible (1964; trans 1973) and James
P.HOGAN's Code of the Lifemaker (1983), and such pointed SATIRES as John
T.SLADEK's The Reproductive System (1968 UK; vt MECHASM US) and Olaf
JOHANNESSON's Sagan om den stora datamaskinin (1966; trans as The Tale of
the Big Computer 1968; vt The Great Computer; vt The End of Man?). The
sinister twist added by stories dealing with evolving systems of
war-machines was adapted to an interstellar stage in Fred SABERHAGEN's
Berserker series, whose early stories were assembled in Berserker (coll of
linked stories 1967), and the idea of a Universe-wide conflict between

biological and mechanical systems has been further developed by Gregory
BENFORD in Great Sky River (1987) and its sequels. The dangers of
automation comprise one of the fundamental themes of modern dystopian
fiction; different variations can be found in Frederik POHL's The Midas
Plague (1954) and its sequels (collected in Midas World fixup 1983),
Harlan ELLISON's 'Repent, Harlequin!' said the Ticktockman (1965), Michael
FRAYN's A Very Private Life (1968) and Gwyneth JONES's Escape Plans
(1986). At a more intimate level, the notion of the automatization of the
human psyche was a key theme in the later work of Philip K.Dick, displayed
in such novels as DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (1968) and
explained in two notable essays: The Android and the Human (1972) and Man,
Android and Machine (1976). The notion of an intimate hybridization of
human and machine is carried forward in many stories featuring CYBORGS.
See also: CYBERNETICS; SOCIOLOGY; TECHNOLOGY.
AVALLONE, MICHAEL (ANGELO Jr)
(1924- ) US writer active since the early 1950s under a number of names
in various genres. Although he began publishing genre fiction in 1953 with
The Man who Walked on Air in Weird Tales, and though some stories of mild
interest appear in Tales of the Frightened (coll 1963; vt Boris Karloff
Presents Tales of the Frightened 1973) as by Sidney Stuart, his sf is
comparatively limited in amount and extremely borderline in nature,
usually being restricted to such film or tv link-ups as his two Girl from
U.N.C.L.E. ties, The Birds of a Feather Affair (1966) and The Blazing
Affair (1966); his novelization of Robert BLOCH's script for the horror
film of the same name, The Night Walker (1965) as by Sidney Stuart; the
first Man from U.N.C.L.E. novel, The Thousand Coffins Affair (1965); and
the film novelization Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970). Only the
latter is wholehearted sf. MA's best known pseudonym has probably been Ed
Noon, as whom he wrote thrillers; he has also written as Nick CARTER, Troy
Conway, Priscilla Dalton, Mark Dane, Steve Michaels, Dorothea Nile, Edwina
Noone and probably several other names. Of the Coxeman soft-porn thrillers
as by Troy Conway, only a few are sf: The Big Broad Jump (1968), Had Any
Lately? (1979), The Blow-your-Mind Job (1970), The Cunning Linguist (1970)
and A Stiff Proposition (1971). The Craghold Legacy (1971), The Craghold
Curse (1972), The Craghold Creatures (1972) and The Craghold Crypt (1973),
all as by Edwina Noone, are marginal horror novels; as Noone he also
edited Edwina Noone's Gothic Sampler (anth 1967). Other works: The Man
from Avon (1967); The Vampire Cameo (1968) as by Dorothea Nile; Missing!
(1969); One More Time (1970), a film tie; The Beast with the Red Hands
(1973) as by Sidney Stuart; Where Monsters Walk: Terror Tales for People
Afraid of the Dark and the Unknown (coll 1978); Friday the 13th, Part 3,
3-D (1982), a film tie.
AVALON COMPANY, THE
SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS.
AVENGERS, THE
UK tv series (1961-9). ABC TV (which became part of Thames TV in 1968).
Created Sydney Newman. Prods Leonard White (seasons 1 and 2), John Bryce
(seasons 2 and 3), Julian Wintle (season 4), Albert Fennell and Brian
Clemens (seasons 5-7). Writers included Clemens, Terence Feely, Dennis

Spooner, Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks, Eric Paice, Philip Levene,
Roger Marshall, Terry NATION. Dirs included Don Leaver, Peter Hammond, Roy
Baker, Sidney Hayers, Gordon Flemyng, John Moxey, Robert Day, Robert
Fuest, Charles Crichton, Don Chaffey, Don Sharp, John Hough. 7 seasons,
161 50min episodes. B/w 1961-6, colour 1967-9. This series' indirect
precursor, Police Surgeon, began in 1960; prod and written by Julian Bond,
it starred Ian Hendry as a compassionate police surgeon who spent his time
helping people and solving cases. In 1961 Newman, later to be the BBC's
head of drama, changed the format (making it less realistic), title (to
The Avengers), running time (from 25 to 50 mins) and slightly changed
Hendry's character (though he was still a compassionate doctor); most
importantly, he introduced Patrick Macnee as the new protagonist, secret
agent John Steed, a cool, well dressed, absurdly posh gentleman. 1962 saw
the departure of Hendry and the arrival of Honor Blackman as leather-clad
Cathy Gale, judo expert; at first she alternated with Julie Stevens as
Venus Smith, nightclub singer, who appeared in only 6 episodes. The
series, now far removed from its original format, became ever more popular
as Steed and Mrs Gale battled increasingly bizarre enemies of the Crown.
TA peaked in 1965, becoming more lavish, coincident with its sale to US tv
and Blackman's replacement as sidekick by Diana Rigg (strong-minded,
intelligent, cynical and beautiful) as Emma Peel. The scripts became ever
more baroque, not to say rococo. There had been occasional sf episodes
from early on (nuclear blackmail, terrorism using bubonic plague); now sf
plots became the norm, involving everything from invisible men and
carnivorous plants to Cybernauts (killer ROBOTS), ANDROIDS, mind-control
rays and TIME MACHINES, mostly connected with plots to take over the UK or
the world. TA had become perhaps the archetypal 1960s tv series, in its
snobbery about the upper class, its stylish decadence, its high-camp and
its sometimes surreal visual ambience. Robert Fuest, who later made The
FINAL PROGRAMME (1974; vt The Last Days of Man on Earth), directed many of
the later episodes; so did other mildly distinguished film-makers such as
Roy Baker, John Hough and Don Sharp. The writer most associated with the
series, and responsible for much of its new look and lunatic plotting, was
Brian Clemens, who became coproducer of the last 3 series. The last season
(1968-9) had Linda Thorson (playing Tara King) replacing Diana Rigg as
female sidekick, and also introduced Steed's grossly fat boss, Mother,
played by Patrick Newell. At least 9 original novels were based on or
around TA, 5, 6 and 7 being by Keith LAUMER: The Afrit Affair (1968), The
Drowned Queen (1968) and The Gold Bomb (1968). The Complete Avengers
(1988) by Dave Rogers is a book about the series. Although TA belonged
spiritually to the 1960s, Albert Fenell and Brian Clemens revived the
series in 1976, with French financial backing, as The New Avengers, again
starring Patrick Macnee, with Joanna Lumley as female sidekick Purdey and
Gareth Hunt as kung-fu expert Mike Gambit. The series was made by Avengers
(Film and TV) Enterprises/IDTV TV Productions, Paris, with Canadian
episodes co-credited to Nielsen-Ferns Inc.; 2 seasons, 1976-7, 26 50min
episodes, colour. The stories lacked the ease and panache of the 1960s
version, and the sf ingredients became fewer and less inventive; the
Cybernauts returned in one episode. John Steed's visible ageing must have
acted as a kind of memento mori to nostalgic but dissatisfied viewers. In
1977 the entire production company moved to Canada, where the final

episodes were set.
AVENUE VICTOR HUGO
GALILEO.
AVERY, RICHARD
Edmund COOPER.
AVON FANTASY READER
US DIGEST-size magazine published by Avon Books, ed Donald A.WOLLHEIM,
who considered it an anthology series, although it resembled a magazine.
Magazine bibliographers consider it a magazine; book bibliographers think
of it as a series of books. The Avon Fantasy Reader sequence was primarily
devoted to reprints, although it contained also 11 original stories. With
WEIRD TALES as its chief source, it presented work by such authors as
Robert E.HOWARD, H.P.LOVECRAFT, C.L.MOORE and Clark Ashton SMITH. It was
numbered rather than dated, and appeared irregularly: 5 in 1947; 3 per
year 1948-51; 1 in 1952. It was partnered by the Avon Science Fiction
Reader sequence. When Wollheim left Avon in 1952, both runs were
terminated. Nearly two decades later, with George Ernsberger, Wollheim
briefly attempted a kind of successor series, the titles in which can be
treated as anthologies: The Avon Fantasy Reader (anth 1969) and The 2nd
Avon Fantasy Reader (anth 1969).
AVON PERIODICALS
OUT OF THIS WORLD ADVENTURES.
AVON SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY READER
US DIGEST-size magazine, 2 issues in 1953, published by Avon Books; ed
Sol Cohen. A hybrid successor to the AVON FANTASY READER and AVON SCIENCE
FICTION READER, the Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Readerseries started
a year after those had ceased publication and had a different policy,
concentrating on original stories rather than reprints. Both titles
contained stories by John CHRISTOPHER, Arthur C.CLARKE and Milton LESSER.
AVON SCIENCE FICTION READER
US DIGEST-size magazine, published by Avon Books, ed Donald A.WOLLHEIM,
and - as with its companion series, AVON FANTASY READER - treated by
Wollheim as an anthology series but by contemporary readers as a magazine.
It had a policy similar to that of its companion, but featured sf - mostly
of routine pulp quality - rather than fantasy reprints. There were 3
issues, 2 in 1951 and 1 in 1952. Both magazines were terminated when
Wollheim left Avon Books in 1952.
AWARDS
The following 11 English-language awards receive individual entries in
this volume: ARTHUR C.CLARKE AWARD; BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; HUGO;
INTERNATIONAL FANTASY AWARD; JOHN W.CAMPBELL AWARD; JOHN
W.CAMPBELL
MEMORIAL AWARD; NEBULA; PHILIP K.DICK AWARD; PILGRIM AWARD; THEODORE
STURGEON MEMORIAL AWARD; and WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST. Awards given
exclusively for fantasy or horror, such as the August Derleth, Bram
Stoker, British Fantasy, Crawford, Gandalf, Gryphon, Mythopoeic and World
Fantasy awards do not receive entries, and nor generally do awards based

in countries other than the UK and USA: the sheer proliferation of awards
has necessitated this chauvinist ruling. Thus we do not list individually
the Ditmar (an Australian award given to novels, stories, fanzines), the
William Atheling Jr Award (Australian award given to criticism), the Prix
Jules Verne (French award given to novels in the spirit of Jules VERNE;
discontinued in 1980), the Prix Apollo (French award given since 1972 to
best sf novel published in France, regardless of whether it is French or
translated), the Prix Rosny aine (best sf in French), the Seiun (Japanese
award for novels and stories, both Japanese and foreign), the Aurora
(known until 1991 as the Casper; Canadian sf in both English and French),
the Gigamesh (award given by Spanish bookshops for sf in Spanish and
translation), European Science Fiction Award (given at annual Eurocon),
Kurd Lasswitz Award (German equivalent of the Nebula), SFCD-Literaturpreis
(given by large German fan club), Nova Science Fiction (Italian), Atorox
(Finnish) and many others. Other awards, such as the Balrog, the James
Blish and the Jupiter, have not received the necessary administrative
and/or public support and have been short-lived. There are many fan awards
largely given to professionals, like the HUGO. There are others given by
fans to fans; those that most strikingly demonstrate fannish generosity
are awards like DUFF and TAFF (Down Under Fan Fund and Trans Atlantic Fan
Fund) for which it actually costs money to vote. The winner has his or her
expenses paid to a foreign CONVENTION each year, from Australia to the USA
or vice versa (DUFF) and from Europe (usually the UK) to the USA or vice
versa (TAFF). The most important awards not given a full entry are the
Locus Awards, winners of a poll in 13 categories announced each September
by LOCUS and voted on by about 1000 presumably well informed readers. This
represents a constituency of voters about the same size as that for the
Hugos (sometimes bigger). The overlap between Locus voting and Hugo voting
a month later is large, which is why we do not list the lesser-known award
separately. Where the awards differ, it is often thought that the Locus
assessment is the more accurate reflection of general reading tastes. The
Locus Award is not only good for vanity and sales: in recent years it has
taken a very attractive form in perspex and metal. Among the remaining
awards, the following are too specialist, recent or small-scale to warrant
full entries: Big Heart (sponsored by Forrest J.ACKERMAN for services to
FANDOM), Chesley Award (sf artwork, given by the Association of Science
Fiction and Fantasy Artists), Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Memorial Award
(Baltimore-based award for best first novel), Davis Awards (voted on by
readers of Analog and ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE) renamed the
Dell Awards in 1992 when Davis sold out its two sf magazines to Dell,
First Fandom Awards (retrospective awards for services to sf prior to
institution of the Hugos), James Tiptree Jr Award (from March 1992, given
at Wiscon, the Wisconsin convention, for sf or fantasy fiction that best
"explores or expands gender roles", J.Lloyd Eaton Award (from 1979, for a
work of sf criticism), Pioneer Award (given by the SCIENCE FICTION
RESEARCH ASSOCIATION from 1990 for best critical essay of the year about
sf), Prometheus Award (sponsored by the Libertarian Futurist Society for
best "libertarian" sf), Readercon Small Press Awards (inaugurated 1989 for
best work in various sf categories published by small presses), Rhysling
Award (sf POETRY), SFBC Award (chosen by members of the US SCIENCE FICTION
BOOK CLUB), Saturn Awards (sf/fantasy film and tv work, given by the

Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films), SFBC Awards given
by the Science Fiction Book Club in the US according to a popularity poll
among the members, the Turner Tomorrow Award, and the William L.Crawford
Memorial Award (given by the International Association for the Fantastic
in the Arts for a first novel in the fantasy field). The Turner Tomorrow
Award is a literary competition with an unbelievable $500,000 first prize
sponsored by broadcasting magnate Ted Turner, for best original sf-novel
manuscript to be published in hardcover by Turner Publishing and
containing practical solutions to world problems; when the initial winner,
Daniel QUINN, was announced in June 1991, three of the judges, including
novelist William Styron, declared their dismay at so huge a sum going to
the winner of a contest in which none of the place-getters was, in their
view, especially distinguished. The best reference on the subject is
Reginald's Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: A Comprehensive Guide to
the Awards and their Winners (1991) by Daryl F.MALLETT and Robert
REGINALD.
AXLER, JAMES
Laurence JAMES.
AXTON, DAVID
Dean R.KOONTZ.
AYES, ANTHONY or WILLIAM
William SAMBROT.
AYLESWORTH, JOHN B.
(1938- ) Canadian-born US writer whose sf novel, Fee, Fei, Fo, Fum
(1963), is a comic story in which a pill enlarges a man to Brobdingnagian
proportions.
AYME, MARCEL (ANDRE)
(1902-1967) French novelist and dramatist, not generally thought of as a
contributor to the sf field, though several of his best-known novels, such
as La jument verte (1933; appalling anonymous trans as The Green Mare 1938
UK; retrans N.Denny 1955), are fantasies, usually with a satirical point
to make about provincial French life. La belle image (1941; trans as The
Second Face 1951 UK) comes close to sf nightmare in its rendering of the
effect of being given a second, more attractive face. La vouivre (1943;
trans as The Fable and the Flesh 1949 UK) is again a fantasy, its
satirical targets again provincial. Across Paris and Other Stories (coll
trans 1957 UK; vt The Walker through Walls 1962 US) assembles fantasy and
the occasional sf tale. Pastorale (1931 France) is a regressive UTOPIA
that makes more articulate than is perhaps entirely comfortable the
nostalgia that lies beneath MA's urbane Gallic style. Other works:
Clerambard (1950; trans N.Denny 1952 UK), a play; two children's
fantasies, The Wonderful Farm (1951 US) and Return to the Wonderful Farm
(1954 UK; vt The Magic Pictures 1954 US). See also: PSYCHOLOGY.
AYRE, THORNTON
John Russell FEARN.
AYRTON, ELISABETH (WALSHE)
(1910-1991) UK writer, best known for books on cooking, married first to

Nigel BALCHIN, then to Michael AYRTON. Her sf novel, Day Eight (1978),
portrays a NEAR-FUTURE UK in ecological extremis, to which Gaia responds
through a sudden acceleration in the EVOLUTION of species other than
humanity.
AYRTON, MICHAEL
(1921-1975) UK painter and writer, married to Elisabeth AYRTON until his
death. He was much respected as an illustrator, stage designer, painter
and sculptor; through much of this work recurred images of the Minotaur
and of Daedalus, the maker of the Labyrinth. Although little of this was
in evidence in his first book of genre interest, Tittivulus, or The
Verbiage Collector (1953), which was a SATIRICAL fantasy, The Testament of
Daedalus (1962 chap) presents in prose, verse and illustration the
eponymous fabricator's reflections on the problem of flight. The Maze
Maker (1967) is a biography of Daedalus in novel form. Some of the
FABULATIONS assembled in Fabrications (coll 1972) are of sf interest.

SF?
BABBAGE, CHARLES
(1792-1871) UK mathematician and inventor, a founder of the Analytical
Society in 1812, and a Fellow of the Royal Society from 1816. His
recognition of the necessity for accurate calculation of mathematical
tables, as used in navigation and astronomy, led in 1820-22 to his
designing and building a calculating machine, using which he soon
generated a table of logarithms for the positive integers up to 108,000.
He then worked on a far more sophisticated machine, a full-size Difference
Engine, intended to use punched cards in the computation and printing of
mathematical tables. Impatient and not unduly practical, he abandoned this
device before it was completed in favour of the far more ambitious
Analytical Engine which, if built, would have been the world's first
COMPUTER. It was this machine for which Ada, Countess Lovelace, wrote
programs, as described in Ada: The Enchantress of Numbers - A Selection
from the Letters of Lord Byron's Daughter and her Description of the First
Computer (1992) ed Betty A.Toole. (Much later the computer language Ada
was so-named in her honour.) CB spent decades on the project, deriving
many of the basic principles of the digital computer, but 19th-century
technology restricted him to mechanical rather than electronic components,
and consequently the machine was never finished - indeed, it was probably
by definition unfinishable. The Difference Engine remains on view in the
Science Museum, London. Writers who have extrapolated a full-blown success
of Babbage's machines into alternate histories (ALTERNATE WORLDS;
STEAMPUNK) include Michael F.FLYNN, in In the Country of the Blind (1990),
and William GIBSON and Bruce STERLING, in THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (1990 UK),
which transfers Ada's interest to the earlier machine.
BABITS, MIHALY
(1883-1941) Hungarian editor, translator (from English and German) and
writer, best known for his poetry, the finest example of which is probably
the autobiographical Jonas konyve ["The Book of Jonah"] (1938). His sf
novel, Golyakalifa (1916; trans as King's Stork 1948 Hungary; retrans anon

as The Nightmare 1966), is of interest in its depiction of a split
personality. A utopian novel, Elza pilota avagy a tokeletes tarsadalom
["The Pilot Elza, or The Perfect Society"] (1933), remains untranslated.
See also: HUNGARY.
BABYLON 5
US tv series (1993- ). Warner Bros Television. Series created by
J.Michael Straczynski; co-exec prods, Straczynski and Doug Netter;
conceptual consultant Harlan ELLISON; writers include Straczynski, Peter
A.DAVID, Larry DiTillo, Kathryn Drennan, D.C.FONTANA, Scott Frost, David
GERROLD, Christy Marx, Marc Scott Zicree; directors include Menachem
Binetski, Richard Compton, Kevin Cremins, Mario DiLeo, David Eagle, John
Flinn, Lorraine Senna Ferrara, Janet Greek, Bruce Seth Green, Jim
Johnston, Stephen Posey, Jesus Trevino, Mike Vejar. Two-hour pilot episode
Feb 1993, 22 one-hour episodes season one 1994, 18 one-hour episodes to
May 1995 season two 1994-95. Current. The pilot is set in the year 2257,
and the following events are planned to go forward to the year 2262. The
story takes place on a five-mile-long space station, built by the Earth
Alliance in neutral space to help keep the peace between humans and the
four other alien alliances, each of which maintains an ambassador on
board. Four previous stations have disappeared or been destroyed. The
station has a human commander, Jeffrey Sinclair (played by Michael O'Hare)
in the first season, but reassigned as ambassador to the Minbari homeworld
and replaced by Captain John Sheridan (played by Bruce Boxleitner) in the
second. The four ambassadors are loud-mouthed Londo Mollari of the
Centauri, a decadent power of waning strength but the first aliens to have
been encountered by humans, played by Peter Jurasik; Delenn of the
Minbari, an enigmatic race recently at war with Earth, a war called off
for mysterious reasons, played by Mira Furlan; G'Kar of the Narns, a race
that recently rebelled against the influence of the Minbari, played by
Andreas Katsulas; Kosh Naranek of the Vorlons, a methane-breathing race,
always seen in protective garb, about whom practically nothing is known
(voice effects by Chris Franke). This syndicated series is very much the
brain child of Straczynski, who has the writing credit for 23 of the 40
one-hour episodes to date, plus the pilot. Though individual episodes
stand alone, there is an over-arching story, involving the gradual
solution of a number of mysteries, planned to extend over five years. This
is a very unusual and ambitious way to structure a tv series. There is
much political conspiracy - often luridly melodramatic - slowly unravelled
as the story continues, and much of the action is devoted to these, which
include Commander Sinclair's amnesia about a space battle against the
Minbari ten years earlier. Other conspiracies involve soul stealing, and
the possibly malign influence of the human Psi Corps on the Earth
Alliance. The effective special effects are largely computer generated, by
Foundation Imaging, and those for the pilot won an Emmy. The science goes
out of its way, most of the time, not to include the futuristic for its
own sake; that is, some of it is plausible. Human relations are imperfect,
sometimes grating. The series gives the impression of being a little more
prepared to go for the jugular than its immediate competition, STAR TREK:
DEEP SPACE NINE, also set on a space station, whose pilot aired a scant
month before B5's, but which was not in pre-production so long. (That is,

B5 cannot be said to have been launched as any kind of deliberate
imitation.) Due to illness, Harlan Ellison has not written his announced
scripts. Several major roles were dropped or replaced after the pilot.
Other leading roles in the ongoing series are second-in-command Commander
Susan Ivanova (played by Claudia Christian); telepath Talia Winters
(played by Andrea Thompson); the cynical Security Chief Garibaldi (played
by Jerry Doyle); Dr Stephen Franklin (played by Richard Biggs), Lieutenant
Warren Keffer (played by Robert Russler); Vir, Londo's bumbling aide
(played by Stephen Furst); Lennier, Delenn's assistant (played by Bill
Mumy); Bester, possibly malicious Psi Cop (played by Walter Koenig). The
first of a series of novels spun off from the series is Babylon 5, Book
#1: Voices(1995) by John VORNHOLT.
BACHMAN, RICHARD
Stephen KING.
BACK BRAIN RECLUSE
UK SEMIPROZINE, from June 1984, current, 18 issues to Mar 1991, A4
format, ed Chris Reed. Originally an A5-format xeroxed FANZINE, BBR
developed into a professionally printed magazine, with bold design, able
to attract fiction from writers such as Michael MOORCOCK, Ian WATSON and
Garry KILWORTH. BBR is regarded as one of the more impressive semiprozines
to emerge from the UK in the 1980s.
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Film (1985). Amblin Entertainment/Universal. Dir Robert Zemeckis, Steven
SPIELBERG among the executive prods, starring Michael J.Fox, Christopher
Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover, Thomas F.Wilson. Screenplay Zemeckis,
Bob Gale. 116 mins. Colour. One of the major sf hits of the 1980s, BTTF is
a disarming, calculated and intelligent comedy about TIME TRAVEL. Teenage
guitar-playing Marty (Fox), son of a tacky and ineffectual mother and
father (Thompson and Glover), is interrupted by Libyan terrorists while
helping mad scientist Emmett Brown (Lloyd) test a TIME MACHINE mounted in
a DeLorean car, and escapes to 1955. There he seeks out the young Dr
Brown, but is disturbed to find his (now teenaged) mother strongly
sexually attracted to him. The oedipal and culture-clash themes are deftly
worked out with great good humour and something falling mercifully short
of complete good taste. After demonstrating the power of rock'n'roll and
convincing his teenage father to stand up to Biff the bully, he returns
with the young Dr Brown's assistance to find a changed 1985, complete with
a spruce mother and a confident father who is now a successful sf writer.
One of the few sf blockbusters made by a director wholly comfortable with
the conventions of GENRE SF, BTTF deserved its success and won a HUGO.
There was a four-year wait for its two sequels, BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II
and BACK TO THE FUTURE PART III. See also: CINEMA.
BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II
Film (1989). Amblin Entertainment/Universal. Dir Robert Zemeckis, with
Steven SPIELBERG among the executive prods. Starring Michael J.Fox,
Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Thomas F.Wilson. Screenplay Bob Gale,
based on a story by Zemeckis and Gale. 108 mins. Colour. Panned by many
critics as a typically disappointing follow-up, in part because its plot

remains unresolved at the end, this film and BACK TO THE FUTURE PART III
can properly be seen as two halves of a single film, and indeed were shot
simultaneously. In fact it is perhaps the most sophisticated TIME-TRAVEL
film ever made; what was supposed by critics unfamiliar with the genre to
be an incoherence of plot was in large part the perfectly well realized
convolutions of a TIME-PARADOX tale. The story, involving Marty and
Brown's trip to the future, where the older Marty is interestingly a
failure and his son a potential hoodlum, is too complex for synopsis. A
trip back to 1955 generates a DYSTOPIAN 1985, an ALTERNATE WORLD run by
Biff, the bully of the previous film. The scenario is dark; the acting
suffers from Fox's tv sit-com mannerisms and Lloyd's hamming; but the
story, ambitious and intellectually complex for a popular movie, is a joy.
The good aspects of the film were perhaps ahead of their time, demanding a
knowledge in the audience that not enough of them had.
BACK TO THE FUTURE PART III
Film (1989). Credits as for Part II, but also starring Mary Steenburgen.
119 mins. Colour. Made with Part II and released soon after, this is a
hammy but enjoyable resolution of the story. Where Part II emphasizes
change and darkness, this emphasizes continuity and reconciliation. Marty
digs the damaged time machine out of a cave where it was buried in the
past by Dr Brown, who is "now" stranded in the Wild West town which was
Hill Valley, and, to judge from a nearby gravestone, will be shot in the
back on 7 September 1885. Marty returns to that year on 2 September
dressed in Western kitsch and adopting the pseudonym Clint Eastwood. He
finds a rough town on the verge of transition into a decent community, and
demonstrates his irrelevant, suburban 1985 values to the 1885 avatar of
Biff the bully while learning some new ones himself. There is something
pleasantly narcissistic and self-referential about the BTTF series
embracing the past history of its own small-town Californian setting so
passionately, like a communal version of wooing your own mother, the
Freudian threat of the original film. If Marty and Brown make love to
their own history the right way, it is intimated, then Hill Valley will
always be a comfortable, limited, tranquil Garden of Eden. The overall
vision of the three films is of a static paradise poised dangerously above
the dark abyss of uncertainty and change.
BACON, FRANCIS, VISCOUNT ST ALBANS AND BARON VERULAM
(1561-1626)English statesman, philosopher and writer who practised as a
barrister before embarking on a political career which ended in 1621 with
his dismissal, for taking bribes, from the post of Lord High Chancellor of
England. Early in life he planned a vast work, The Instauration of the
Sciences, a review and encyclopedia of all knowledge; the project was
never completed, but FB's reputation as a philosopher rests largely on the
first two parts: De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623 in Latin, based on The
Advancement of Learning [1605]) and Novum Organum Scientiarum (1620 in
Latin). The latter book championed observation, experiment and inductive
theorizing, arguing that the object of scientific inquiry is to discover
patterns of causation. His important contribution to PROTO SCIENCE
FICTION, the posthumously published fragment The New Atlantis (with Sylva
Sylvarum 1627; 1629), is a speculative account of possible technological

progress, probably written as an advertisement for a Royal College of
Science which he hoped to persuade James VI ?
more than a catalogue, it is a remarkably accurate assessment of the
potential of the scientific renaissance. About the author: Francis
Bacon (1961 chap) by J.Max Patrick; Francis Bacon (1978 chap) by Brian
Vickers. See also: ATLANTIS; BIOLOGY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FUTUROLOGY;
MACHINES; MUSIC; UTOPIAS; WEAPONS.
BACON, WALTER
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
BADGER BOOKS
The main imprint of John Spencer ?
their books from about the beginning of 1955 through 1967, when the
imprint was terminated. John Spencer ?
still exists; like several other UK firms (e.g., CURTIS WARREN), it
specialized in the production of purpose-written paperback originals in
various popular genres, though the early 1950s saw some emphasis on
magazines (in small-DIGEST and pocketbook formats), including Out of this
World and Supernatural Stories, both being amalgamated under the latter
title in 1955. Some sf novels had been published, none distinguished,
before the BB imprint was created; but in 1954-67 several dozen issues of
Supernatural Stories were released, some consisting of a number of stories
by a single author under various pseudonyms, and 37 issues comprising
single novels (both categories are treated in this encyclopedia as books).
More significantly, in 1958 BB began an sf series which ran until 1966 and
consisted of 117 novels, almost all originals. One single author,
R.L.FANTHORPE, is popularly identified with BB; but although he did write
most of the titles, both sf and supernatural, he did not write them all.
John S.GLASBY also wrote a number, and other writers like A.A.GLYNN
produced one or two each, almost invariably under pseudonyms (for which
see authors' individual entries) or house names. For sf and supernatural
titles, BB house names included Victor LA SALLE, John E.MULLER and Karl
ZEIGFREID. Writers for BB worked for hire, and technically all BB books
are SHARECROPS, though the publishers exercised control only over length
(very rigidly), with content being a matter of some indifference. It is
understood that some sf readers have trawled the BB list for gems. Steve
HOLLAND suggests that the Glasby novels written as by A.J.Merak are of
some interest. Further reading: Fantasy Readers Guide 1: A Complete
Index and Annotated Commentary to the John Spencer Fantasy Publications
(1979 chap) by Mike ASHLEY; John Spencer and Badger Books: 1948-1967 (1985
chap) by Stephen Holland.
BADHAM, JOHN
(1939- ) US film-maker who showed a penchant for sf as far back as his
early tv work on ROD SERLING'S NIGHT GALLERY (1970-72), for which he
directed adaptations of stories by Basil Copper ("Camera Obscura") and
Fritz LEIBER ("The Girl with the Hungry Eyes"). For the portmanteau tv
film Three Faces of Love he directed Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's "Epicac", a
forerunner of JB's big-screen involvement with COMPUTERS and ROBOTS which
develop human characteristics. His first feature-length genre piece was
Isn't it Shocking? (1973), a well done made-for-tv movie about a

gadget-wielding murderer preying on the elderly. JB's first theatrical
feature was The Bingo Long Traveling All Stars and Motor Kings (1976). He
followed up the enormous success of Saturday Night Fever (1977) with a
lush, romantic, somewhat shallow version of Dracula (1979) and the soapy
Who's Life Is It Anyway? (1981). Then in the 1980s JB turned out a
commercially successful trilogy of borderline sf films on mechanist
themes: BLUE THUNDER (1983), WARGAMES (1983) and SHORT CIRCUIT (1986). All
three deal with superweapons - a police helicopter, a vast military
computer and a military robot - that turn against violence, through,
respectively, human intervention, logical reasoning and a divine lightning
bolt. These are MACHINE movies, dependent on the glamour of robotry while
distrustful of technology without a "heart", suffused with impeccable
liberal sentiment of an increasingly stereotypical and less thoughtful
variety. This is indicated by the change from the hard-edged Blue Thunder,
a paranoid conspiracy movie, to the childish Short Circuit, which is
essentially a reworking of Disney's The Love Bug (1969) with a robot
instead of a Volkswagen. Subsequently JB has directed professional,
impersonal thrillers like Stakeout (1987), Bird on a Wire (1990), The Hard
Way (1991), Point of No Return (1993, vt The Assassin UK) and Another
Stakeout(1993). See also: CINEMA; VILLAINS.
BAD TASTE
Film (1987). WingNut. Prod, dir, ed, screenplay and special effects Peter
Jackson, starring Jackson, Terry Potter, Pete O'Herne, Mike Minett, Doug
Wren. 92 mins cut to 91 mins. Colour. ALIENS invade a small town to kill
humans and use them as a meat-source in a new galactic fast-food
franchise, but the INVASION is defeated, in this deliberately tasteless
(hence the title) low-budget New Zealand parody of sf and SPLATTER MOVIES.
It is in the same undergraduate, disgusting vein as BIG MEAT EATER (1982)
and The Evil Dead (horror, 1982) - drinking vomit, eating live brains but made much later and less proficiently. BT is amateurish (made over
four years at weekends), derivative and only occasionally funny. A better
made, but horribly emetic, film from the same director is Braindead
(1992), but this, a bloodsoaked farce about zombies, is only marginally
science fiction.
BAEN, JIM
Working name of US editor James Patrick Baen (1943- ) from the beginning
of his career in US publishing in 1972, when he became Gothics editor at
ACE BOOKS, though he nevertheless sometimes signed himself James Baen. He
moved to GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION in 1973 as managing editor, taking over
the editorship in 1974 of both Gal and IF from Ejler JAKOBSSON. These
magazines were then in a crisis, which resulted in their amalgamation (as
Gal) in January 1975. JB soon showed himself to be a capable editor, and
over the next two years turned Gal into one of the liveliest current
magazines, introducing popular columns by Jerry POURNELLE (science fact),
Spider ROBINSON (book reviews) and Richard E.GEIS (general comment). Gal
also began regularly to feature the much acclaimed stories of John VARLEY,
and serialized novels by Frank HERBERT, Larry NIVEN, Frederik POHL, Roger
ZELAZNY and others. In 1977 JB returned to Ace Books as sf editor,
becoming executive editor and vice-president before leaving in 1980 to

join Tom Doherty's newly founded TOR BOOKS as editorial director. He
retained this post until his departure in 1983 to form Baen Books, a firm
which, though it distributes its publications through Simon ?
has maintained itself as a full and genuine publisher, generally
specializing in military sf, though the range of authors it publishes is
fairly wide, including Lois McMaster BUJOLD, John DALMAS, David A.DRAKE,
Elizabeth MOON, Niven, Pournelle, S.M.STIRLING and Timothy ZAHN. As an
editor of books in his own right, JB produced some anthologies of reprints
from Gal and If, including The Best from Galaxy III (anth 1975) and #IV
(anth 1976), The Best from If III (anth 1976) and Galaxy: The Best of My
Years (anth 1980). He then produced, in Destinies, Far Frontiers (with
Pournelle) and New Destinies, a sequence of magazine/anthologies printing
original material. The DESTINIES sequence includes Destinies: The
Paperback Magazine of Science Fiction and Speculative Fact, Volume One (in
4 successive "issues", anths 1979), Volume Two (in 4 successive "issues",
anths 1980), The Best of Destinies (anth 1980) and Volume Three (in 2
successive "issues", anths 1981). The FAR FRONTIERS sequence, each
co-edited with Pournelle (and, uncredited, John F.CARR), includes Far
Frontiers (anth 1985), #2 (anth 1985), #3 (anth 1985), #4 (anth 1986), #5
(anth 1986), #6 (anth 1986) and #7 (anth 1986). The third sequence, New
Destinies, following on directly from the second, includes New Destinies
#1 (anth 1987), #2 (anth 1987), #3 (anth 1988), #4 (anth 1988), #6 (anth
1988), which comprises a special tribute to Robert A.HEINLEIN (there is no
#5), #7 (anth 1989), #8 (anth 1989), #9 (anth 1990) and #10 (anth 1992).
He also edited The Science Fiction Yearbook (anth 1985) with Carr and
Pournelle. With Barney COHEN, JB has written one novel, The Taking of
Satcom Station (1982). See also: HISTORY OF SF; SF MAGAZINES.
BAEN BOOKS
Jim BAEN.
BAERLEIN, ANTHONY
(? - ) UK writer whose sf novel, Daze, the Magician (1936), features
crimes committed through the use of MATTER TRANSMISSION.
BAGNALL, R(OBERT) D(AVID)
(1945- ) UK research chemist and writer. The Fourth Connection (coll of
linked stories 1975) presents a series of dramatized speculations on the
fourth DIMENSION, and describes the scientific community's response to the
challenges opened up.
BAHL, FRANKLIN
[s] Rog PHILLIPS.
BAHNSON, AGNEW H.Jr
(1915-c1964) US writer, inventor and textile-machinery manufacturer whose
NEAR-FUTURE political thriller, The Stars are too High (1959), features
hoax aliens with a real GRAVITY-driven ship who try to bring peace to the
world.
BAILEY, ANDREW J(ACKSON)
(1840-1927) Writer, apparently UK despite his given names, in whose The
Martian-Emperor President (1932) Earth is visited by a large spaceship

containing a delegation from Mars.
BAILEY, CHARLES W(ALDO)
(1929- ) US writer and journalist who collaborated with Fletcher KNEBEL
(whom see for details) on Seven Days in May (1962).
BAILEY, DENNIS B.
[r] David F.BISCHOFF.
BAILEY, HILARY
(1936- ) UK writer and editor, married to Michael MOORCOCK 1962-78. She
has written about 15 sf and fantasy stories, including "The Fall of
Frenchy Steiner" (1964) and "Everything Blowing Up: An Adventure of Una
Persson, Heroine of Time and Space" (1980), and was uncredited co-author
with Moorcock of The Black Corridor (1969). When Moorcock's NEW WORLDS
died as a magazine but continued for a while in quarterly paperback book
format, she joined Charles PLATT as co-editor of New Worlds Quarterly 7
(anth 1974; vt New Worlds 6 1975 US), and was sole editor of #8 (anth
1975), #9 (anth 1975) and #10 (anth 1976). Most of her writing is
mainstream fiction with occasional sf elements, as in All the Days of my
Life (1984), her almost successful bid for the bestseller market, which is
essentially an updated Moll Flanders (by Daniel DEFOE [1722]); it begins
in 1941 and ends in 1996. Also set in the very NEAR FUTURE (1991) is A
Stranger to Herself (1989). Hannie Richards, or The Intrepid Adventures of
a Restless Wife (1985) has fantastic elements. See also: HITLER WINS;
SUSPENDED ANIMATION.
BAILEY, J(AMES) O(SLER)
(1903-1979) US scholar, professor of literature at the University of
North Carolina. His Pilgrims through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns
in Scientific and Utopian Fiction (1947) was the first academic study of
sf, which it analyses primarily on a thematic basis, and without ever
using the term "science fiction", referring instead to "scientific
fiction" and the SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE. Only a small amount of its subject
matter is taken from sf magazines, which is less surprising when one
realizes that the work was based on JOB's 1934 doctoral dissertation. JOB
had much trouble finding an academic publisher who would consider sf
worthy of serious study; the book represents the first trickle of the
great torrent of SF IN THE CLASSROOM. He was honoured when the SCIENCE
FICTION RESEARCH ASSOCIATION's PILGRIM AWARD (given annually for
contributions to sf scholarship) was named after his book, and he himself
was the first recipient (1970). JOB edited the 1965 edn of the
HOLLOW-EARTH novel Symzonia (1820) by Adam SEABORN. See also: CRITICAL
AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DEFINITIONS OF SF.
BAILEY, PAUL (DAYTON)
(1906-1987) US osteopath, publisher and editor whose Deliver Me From Eva
(1946) deals with the complications ensuing from the hero's
father-in-law's capacity to increase INTELLIGENCE artificially.
BAIR, PATRICK
(? - ) UK writer whose Faster! Faster! (1950) is a DYSTOPIAN fable with
an sf flavour in which representatives of three classes, caught on a train

which goes on for ever, must work out their destinies. The Tribunal (1970)
satirizes a NEAR-FUTURE revolution in Italy. As David Gurney, he wrote
tales with a more popular slant, like The "F" Certificate (1968), which
treats of a violent UK to come. Other works as Gurney: The Necrophiles
(1969); the Conjurers sequence comprising The Conjurers (1972; vt The
Demonists 1977 US) and The Devil in the Atlas (1976); The Evil Under the
Water (1977).
BAIRD, WILHELMINA
Pseudonym of UK writer Joyce Carstairs Hutchinson (1935- ), who began
publishing sf with "Mantrap" for NW in 1961, writing this and other early
work as by Kathleen James; she soon became inactive in the field, however,
returning only with the Cass sequence of novels set in a CYBERPUNK-like
NEAR FUTURE England, and comprising CrashCourse (1994 US), ClipJoint (1994
US) and "PsyKosis" (1995 US). Her heroine-whose name reflects both
Cassandra and Case, the protagonist of William GIBSON's NEUROMANCER
(1984)-lives as a thief in a culture divided into Aris, Arts, Techs and
Umps (the great majority, who are permanently unemployed); but soon
becomes involved -"feeliefilms" and after becoming well-off is prepared,
in the sequels, to adventure off-Earth. The language throughout is alert,
savvy in the expected noir fashion, and funny.
BAJLA, JAN
[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
BAKER, SCOTT
(1947- ) US-born writer, long resident in France, whose novels are
fantasy and horror with the exception of his first, Symbiote's Crown
(1978), a slyly intelligent though uneasily metaphysical SPACE OPERA.
Other works: Nightchild (1979; rev 1983); Dhampire (1982); the
Firedance sequence comprising Firedance (1986) and Drink the Fire from the
Flames (1987); Webs (1989).
BAKER, SHARON
(1938-1991) US author of 3 PLANETARY ROMANCES - all set on the planet
Naphar - whose richly layered FANTASY surface conceals much sf
underpinning: Naphar's poisonous environment has an sf explanation; the
planet has been colonized by humans who interbred with the native race;
and contacts with galactic civilization remain active. Quarreling, They
Met the Dragon (1984) describes the coming to adulthood of an escaped
slave. Journey to Membliar (1987) and its immediate sequel Burning Tears
of Sassurum (1988) comprise a quest tale culminating in dynastic
revelations in the capital city.
BAKER, W(ILLIAM ARTHUR) HOWARD
(1925-1991) Irish journalist, editor and author, in the UK after WWII.
After working as an editor of Panther Books he began to write for the
Sexton Blake Library in 1955, soon taking over as editor of the series for
Amalgamated Press, writing many titles under various names, and in 1965
taking the series to Mayflower Books, where it flourished briefly. He then
set up his own publishing imprint, which continued to publish Sexton Blake
books (among others). His stable of Sexton Blake writers included Wilfred
MCNEILLY, whose claims (see his entry) to have written most of WHB's

titles are false, and Jack Trevor STORY. His work was brisk and brash, and
he did not waste much time seeking quality, though his war novels were of
some interest; his sf - as editor and as author - rarely ventured beyond
the routine. It is impossible to distinguish much of what he wrote from
what he commissioned and what he doctored, under his own name and others.
Of sf/fantasy interest, he wrote some books under the Peter SAXON house
name, including 2 Guardians psychic investigator tales with McNeilly-Dark
Ways to Death (1968) and The Haunting of Alan Mais (1969) - and one solo:
The Killing Bone (1969). Other titles with McNeilly included The Darkest
Night (1966) and The Torturer (1966). With Stephen FRANCES (both as Saxon)
he wrote The Disorientated Man (1966; vt Scream and Scream Again 1967 US),
which was filmed as SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN(1969), and solo he wrote Black
Honey (1968) and Vampire's Moon (1970 US), both as Saxon. About the
author: "W.Howard Baker" by Jack Adrian, in Million 3 (1991).
BALCH, FRANK
(1880-1937) US writer whose sf novel, A Submarine Tour (1905) features,
in its painfully Vernean progress, visits to more than one LOST WORLD,
including ATLANTIS, in a submarine which hits 80 knots. All ends safely.
BALCHIN, NIGEL (MARLIN)
(1908-1970) UK writer, industrialist and wartime scientific adviser to
the Army Council; married for a time to Elisabeth AYRTON. From the
beginning of WWII his fictions specialized in the creation of
psychologically and physically crippled "competent men", as in The Small
Back Room (1943), and were plotted around scientific problems at the verge
of sf. Though No Sky (1934) is of marginal genre interest, his only sf
novel proper is Kings of Infinite Space (1967), a rather weak NEAR-FUTURE
look at the US space programme. See also: SPACE FLIGHT.
BALDWIN, BEE
Working name of New Zealand writer Beatrice Lillian Baldwin (? - ). Her
sf novel The Red Dust (1965), set in her native land, deals with a typical
Antipodean theme (cf Nevil SHUTE's On the Beach [1957]): the far-reaching
DISASTER whose consequences eventually embroil Southern climes. This time
it is red dust.
BALDWIN, BILL
Working name of US writer Merl William Baldwin Jr (1935- ), known mainly
for the efficient Helmsman adventure-sf sequence, whose plots are deployed
on a galactic scale: The Helmsman (1985 as Merl Baldwin; as BB 1990),
Galactic Convoy (1987), The Trophy (1990), The Mercenaries (1991), The
Defenders (1992) and The Siege (1994).
BALDWIN, MERL
Bill BALDWIN.
BALFORT, NEIL
[s] R.L.FANTHORPE.
BALL-BEARING MOUSETRAP
Most pulp magazines of the 1930s and 40s offered confessional and romance
stories that were pretty hard-boiled. But the stories in Astounding
magazine were surprisingly innocent. So the goal of many SF writers became

slipping off-color references past Editor John W.Campbell's editorial
assistant, Kay Tarrant. The only reported success was by George O. Smith,
who wrote a story entitled "Rat Race", which contained a reference to a
very technological-sounding item called a "ball-bearing mousetrap", which
was, in fact, a tomcat.
BALL, BRIAN N(EVILLE)
(1932- ) UK writer, until 1965 a teacher and lecturer, subsequently
freelance. He began publishing sf with "The Pioneer" for NW in 1962,
edited a juvenile anthology, Tales of Science Fiction (anth 1964), soon
after, and the next year published his first novel, Sundog (1965), one of
his better books, in which - though restricted by ALIENS to the Solar
System - mankind, in the person of space-pilot Dod, transcends its
limitations. There followed a trilogy involving an ancient Galactic
Federation, its relics, TIME TRAVEL, and rebirth: Timepiece (1968),
Timepivot (1970 US) and Timepit (1971). A second series, The Probability
Man (1972 US) and Planet Probability (1973 US), follows the exploits of
Frame-Director Spingarn in his heterodox construction of reality-spaces
(frames) for the delectation (and voluntary destruction) of billions of
bored citizens. Though he sometimes aspires to the more metaphysical side
of the sf tropes he utilizes, BNB's style tends to reduce these
implications to routine action-adventure plots, competently executed.
Other works: Lesson for the Damned (1971); Devil's Peak (1972); Night
of the Robots (1972; vt The Regiments of Night (1972 US); Singularity
Station (1973 US); The Space Guardians (1975), a SPACE 1999 tie; The
Venomous Serpent (1974; vt The Night Creature 1974 US); the two Keegan
books: The No-Option Contract (1975) and The One-Way Deal (1976); the
Witchfinder series, comprising The Mark of the Beast (1976) and The Evil
at Montaine (1977). For children: Princess Priscilla (1975); the Jackson
books, comprising Jackson's House (1975), Jackson's Friend (1975),
Jackson's Holiday (1977) and Jackson and the Magpies (1978); The Witch in
our Attic (1979); Young Person's Guide to UFOs (1979), nonfiction; Dennis
and the Flying Saucer (1980); The Starbuggy (1983); The Doomship of Drax
(1985); Truant from Space (1985 chap); Stone Age Magic (1988); The Quest
for Queenie (1988 chap).
BALL, JOHN (DUDLEY Jr)
(1911-1988) US commercial pilot and writer, much better known for work in
other genres - like In the Heat of the Night (1965) - than for his sf
novels, the first of which, Operation Springboard (1958; vt Operation
Space 1960 UK), is a juvenile about a space race to Venus. Other
works: Spacemaster 1 (1960); The First Team (1972).
BALLANTINE BOOKS
US publishing company founded in 1952 by Ian Ballantine (1916-1995), who
had previously helped found BANTAM BOOKS, and Betty Ballantine; for the
first six months BB operated from their apartment. Although it was a
general publisher, an important priority was the prestigious sf list, the
first of its kind in paperback, with many original works, many of which
were - until 1958 - published simultaneously as hardbacks. BB's first sf
novel was THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1953) by Frederik POHL and C.M.KORNBLUTH;
Pohl also edited BB's Star series of ANTHOLOGIES. By the end of 1953, BB

had also published Ray BRADBURY's FAHRENHEIT 451, Arthur C.CLARKE's
CHILDHOOD'S END, Ward MOORE's BRING THE JUBILEE, Theodore STURGEON's MORE
THAN HUMAN, and others. The list of regular authors resembles an sf roll
of honour: figures in later years included James BLISH, Fritz LEIBER,
Larry NIVEN and many others. Almost 100 early Ballantine covers featured
artwork by Richard POWERS, much of it semi-abstract; meant to emphasize
the modernity and innovative quality of the fiction, the effect was wider
than that: it was as if sf had suddenly grown up. The Powers covers were
one of the symbols of sf's growth to maturity. Ballantine became a
division of Random House in 1973, and the two Ballantines left in 1974.
Judy-Lynn DEL REY became sf editor, and in 1976 her husband Lester DEL REY
took over the fantasy list initiated by Lin CARTER. In 1977 the sf/fantasy
imprint was renamed DEL REY BOOKS. Since that time some sf has been
published under the original Ballantine imprint, but this has mostly been
borderline sf or sometimes, as with novels by Michael CRICHTON, sf books
for which a substantial mainstream sale is expected. In 1990 the combined
imprints of Ballantine, Del Rey and Fawcett, all under the same ownership,
were running fifth in the USA in terms of the number of sf/fantasy/horror
titles published. Further reading: Ballantine Books: The First
Decade: A Bibliographical History ?
(1987) by David Aronovitz. See also: HUGO.
BALLARD, J(AMES) G(RAHAM)
(1930- ) UK writer, born in Shanghai and as a child interned in a
Japanese civilian POW camp during WWII. He first came to the UK in 1946.
He later read medicine at King's College, Cambridge, but left without
taking a degree. JGB discovered sf while in Canada during his period of
RAF service in the early 1950s. His first stories, "Escapement" and "Prima
Belladonna", were published in E.J.CARNELL's NEW WORLDS and SCIENCE
FANTASY, respectively, in 1956. His writing was influenced by the
Surrealist painters and the early Pop artists. From the start, he opened a
new prospect in sf; his interest in PSYCHOLOGY and in the emotional
significance of deserted landscapes and wrecked TECHNOLOGY soon became
apparent in such stories as "Build-Up" (1957; vt "The Concentration
City"), "Manhole 69" (1957), "The Waiting Grounds" (1959), "The
Sound-Sweep" (1960) and "Chronopolis" (1960). On the whole, he eschewed
such sf themes as space travel, time travel, aliens and ESP, concentrating
instead on NEAR-FUTURE decadence and DISASTER. In 1962 he began using the
term INNER SPACE to describe the area of his obsessions, and stated that
"the only truly alien planet is Earth". "The Voices of Time" (1960) is his
most important early story, an apocalyptic view of a terrible new
EVOLUTION (or DEVOLUTION) faced by the human race. As with much of his
work, its impressive quality is a result of JGB's painterly eye, as shown
in his moody descriptions of landscapes. With "Studio 5, the Stars" (1961)
JGB returned to the setting of "Prima Belladonna": a decaying resort,
Vermilion Sands, where poets, artists and actresses pursue perverse whims.
He subsequently wrote seven more stories against this background, and the
series, which constitutes one of his most popular works, was collected as
Vermilion Sands (coll 1971 US; with 1 story added rev 1973 UK). JGB's
first novel, The Wind from Nowhere (1962 US), was written in a fortnight,
and the money that he earned from it enabled him to become a full-time

writer. It is his only work of formula sf, the formula being that of John
WYNDHAM's disaster novels. In The Drowned World (1962 US) JGB inverted the
pattern, creating a hero who conspires with rather than fights against the
disaster that is overtaking his world. It was this novel, with its
brilliant descriptions of an inundated London and an ECOLOGY reverting to
the Triassic, which gained JGB acceptance as a major author. However, the
self-immolating tendency of his characters drew adverse criticism; some
readers, particularly devotees of GENRE SF, wrote JGB off, rather
simplistically, as a pessimist and a life-hater. Certainly his next two
novels, The Burning World (1964 US; rev vt The Drought 1965 UK) and THE
CRYSTAL WORLD (fixup 1966), served further to polarize opinion. Each
contains a lovingly described cataclysm towards which the protagonist
holds ambiguous attitudes. Some commentators - e.g., Kingsley AMIS and
Michael MOORCOCK - praised these works very highly. JGB is regarded by
some as a better short-story writer than novelist, however, and his 1960s
stories drew an enthusiastic audience. "Deep End" (1961), "Billenium"
(1961) (spelt thus on its first appearance, and sometimes thereafter),
"The Garden of Time" (1962), "The Cage of Sand" (1962) and "The
Watch-Towers" (1962) are among the excellent stories reprinted in his
collections The Voices of Time and Other Stories (coll 1962 US), Billenium
(coll 1962 US) and The Four-Dimensional Nightmare (coll 1963; rev 1974; vt
The Voices of Time 1984)"The Subliminal Man", "A Question of Re-Entry" and
"The Time-Tombs" (all 1963) are masterpieces of desolation and melancholy,
as is "The Terminal Beach" (1964), which shows JGB beginning to move in a
new direction, towards greater compression of imagery and nonlinearity of
plot. All these stories contain "properties", described objects, which
have become JGB's trademarks: wrecked spacecraft, sand-dunes, concrete
deserts, broken juke-boxes, abandoned nightclubs, and military and
industrial detritus in general. Sympathetic readers regard JGB's unique
"properties" and landscapes as being very appropriate to the contemporary
world: they constitute a "true" dream vision of our times. (In an
essay-"Myth-Maker of the 20th Century", NW #142, 1964-JGB has himself
acknowledged similar qualities in the work of William S.BURROUGHS.)
Perhaps JGB's strongest single collection of stories is The Terminal Beach
(coll 1964 UK), not to be confused with Terminal Beach (coll 1964 US): the
titles have only 2 stories in common. (The earlier US collections of JGB's
short stories are quite different from the contemporaneous UK editions,
and normally have different titles. Most of the earlier short stories
appear in at least two collections.) Other collections, all containing
much good material, are Passport to Eternity (coll 1963 US), The
Impossible Man (coll 1966 US) and The Disaster Area (coll 1967). One
story, "The Drowned Giant"(1965; vt "Souvenir"), was nominated for a
NEBULA, although the fact that JGB has never won an sf AWARD is indicative
of his unpopularity with HARD-SF fans. He did, however, become a
figurehead of the NEW WAVE of the later 1960s: younger UK writers such as
Charles PLATT and M.John HARRISON show his influence directly."You and Me
and the Continuum" (1966) inaugurated a series of stories - "condensed
novels", as JGB has called them - in which he explored the MEDIA LANDSCAPE
of advertising, broadcasting, POLITICS and WAR. Collected as THE ATROCITY
EXHIBITION (coll 1970; vt Love and Napalm: Export USA 1972 US; rev 1990
US), these are JGB's most "difficult" works, and they provoked more

hostility than anything that had gone before; the collection's intended
1970 US edition, from DOUBLEDAY, was printed but, on the instructions of a
panicking executive, pulped just before publication. The hostility was
partly due to the fact that JGB uses real people such as Marilyn Monroe,
the Kennedys and Ronald Reagan as "characters". In the novel Crash (1973)
JGB took his obsession with automobile accidents to a logical conclusion.
Perhaps the best example of "pornographic" sf, it explores the
psychological satisfactions of danger, mutilation and death on the roads;
it is also an examination of the interface between modern humanity and its
MACHINES. Brightly lit and powerfully written, it is a work with which it
is difficult for many readers to come to terms; one publisher's reader
wrote of the manuscript: "The author of this book is beyond psychiatric
help." Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975) are also urban disaster
novels set in the present, the one concerning a driver marooned on a
traffic island between motorway embankments, the other focusing on the
breakdown of social life in a multistorey apartment block. All three of
these novels are about the ways in which the technological landscape may
be fulfilling and reflecting our own ambiguously "worst" desires. In the
mid-1970s JGB returned to the short-story form, in which he still
excelled. Such pieces as "The Air Disaster" (1975), "The Smile" (1976) and
"The Dead Time" (1977) are outstanding psychological horror stories on the
fringes of sf. The collection Low-Flying Aircraft (coll 1976) contains an
excellent original novella, "The Ultimate City", which projects JGB's
urban obsessions of the 1970s into the future. Later volumes of stories
are Myths of the Near Future (coll 1982), Memories of the Space Age (coll
1988 US) and War Fever (coll 1990), all of which contain a good deal of sf
mixed with psychological fantasy. The Unlimited Dream Company (1979),
JGB's first fully fledged fantasy novel, concerns a young man who crashes
a stolen light aircraft into the River Thames, apparently dies and is
reborn, finding himself trapped in the riverside town of Shepperton (where
JGB in reality makes his home). The hero discovers the ability to change
himself into various beasts and birds, and to transform the sleepy suburb
around him into a vivid garden of exotic flowers. More sinisterly, he is
able to "absorb" human beings into his body-before expelling them again,
in the apocalyptic climax to the novel. The book is a remarkable fantasy
of self-aggrandizement, colourfully and compellingly told. It was followed
by JGB's most conventional sf novel in some years, Hello America (1981), a
comparatively light work about the rediscovery of an abandoned
22nd-century USA. JGB moved away from sf again for his most commercially
successful novel to date, Empire of the Sun (1984). Based on his childhood
experiences in Lunghua POW camp near Japanese-occupied Shanghai, it gained
him a vast new readership. The book has great merit as a psychological war
novel, but for the sf reader part of its interest lies in its apparent
revelation of the "sources" of many of JGB's recurring images and
"properties" (those drained swimming pools, abandoned buildings,
low-flying aircraft, drowned landscapes - they are all here). Although it
is not at all an sf or fantasy work, it has much in common with all JGB's
earlier fiction. The novel was filmed in 1987 by Steven SPIELBERG, and JGB
wrote a sequel, The Kindness of Women (1991). This latter is told in the
first person - Empire of the Sun is told in the third - and covers a
50-year timespan: heavily autobiographical, it is an intriguing work for

anyone interested in JGB's career, but contains little direct reference to
sf. Earlier JGB had written another psychological adventure novel, The Day
of Creation (1987). Set in an imaginary African country, it is less
overtly fantastic than The Unlimited Dream Company but resembles that
novel in terms of theme and imagery. The narrator inadvertently causes a
new river to well up from the parched earth, transforming a barren war
zone into a luxuriant, although short-lived, jungle. Like all Ballard's
novels it contains extraordinary descriptive passages embedded in a fairly
simple plot peopled by perverse characters of some psychological
complexity. This book was followed by an acute and entertaining novella,
Running Wild (1988 chap), a Thames Valley murder mystery of marginal sf
interest. Although most of his longer work of the past decade has been
outside the field, the originality and appropriateness of his vision
continue to ensure JGB's standing as one of the most important writers
ever to have emerged from sf. Other works: The Drowned World and The
Wind from Nowhere (omni 1965 US); By Day Fantastic Birds Flew through the
Petrified Forest (1967), wall-poster incorporating text from THE CRYSTAL
WORLD, sometimes wrongly included in JGB bibliographies as a book or chap;
The Day of Forever (coll 1967; rev 1971); The Overloaded Man (coll 1967;
rev vt The Venus Hunters 1980); Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan (1968
chap); CHRONOPOLIS AND OTHER STORIES (coll 1971 US); The Best of
J.G.Ballard (coll 1977); The Best Short Stories of J.G.Ballard (coll 1978
US); News from the Sun (1982 chap); The Crystal World; Crash; Concrete
Island (omni 1991 US); Rushing to Paradise (1994), associational. About
the author: J.G.Ballard: The First Twenty Years (1976) ed James Goddard
and David PRINGLE; Earth is the Alien Planet: J.G.Ballard's
Four-Dimensional Nightmare (1979 US) by David Pringle; J.G.Ballard: A
Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1984 US) by David Pringle; Re/Search
8/9: J.G.Ballard (1984 US) ed Vale and Andrea Juno; J.G.Ballard: Starmont
Reader's Guide 26 (1985 US) by Peter Brigg; Out of the Night and Into the
Dream: A Thematic Study of J.G.Ballard (1991) by Gregory Stephenson. See
also: ABSURDIST SF; ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; ARTS; BRITISH SCIENCE
FICTION AWARD; CITIES; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT;
CYBERPUNK; DEFINITIONS OF SF; ECONOMICS; ENTROPY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES;
FRANCE; GREAT AND SMALL; HISTORY OF SF; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; ISLANDS;
LEISURE; MARS; MEDICINE; MESSIAHS; MUSIC; MUTANTS; OPTIMISM AND
PESSIMISM;
OVERPOPULATION; PERCEPTION; SEX; SPACE FLIGHT; TIME TRAVEL; UFOS.
BALLARD'S DARK VISION
J.G.Ballard may not have courted controversy. But the style and subject
matter of his work just seemed to attract it. After years of writing short
stories and novels noted for their dark visions and ambiguity, Ballard
caused a major explosion with a series of stories called The Atrocity
Exhibition. The U.S. edition was printed in 1970 but destroyed by the
publisher when an executive panicked after reading Ballard’s descriptions
of such real people as the Kennedys, Marilyn Monroe, and Ronald Reagan.
Ballard was unfazed and continued to write controversial works, including
the novel Crash. After reading that work, one reader commented, "The
author of this book is beyond psychiatric help. "It wasn't until a decade
later that Ballard found an appreciative audience. Empire of the Sun,

directed by Steven Spielberg, was a film based on Ballard's childhood
experiences in Shanghai during World War II. It provided clues about the
writer's psyche and motivation. And it brought Ballard a whole new
readership.
BALLINGER, BILL S.
William S.BALLINGER.
BALLINGER, W.A.
Wilfred Glassford MCNEILLY.
BALLINGER, WILLIAM S(ANBORN)
(1912-1980) US screenwriter and novelist who has also signed his books
Bill S.Ballinger. His work in radio and film was successful (he won an
Edgar Award in 1960), but his sf is comparatively obscure, and some listed
titles are dubious. We feel secure about listing The 49 Days of Death
(1969) and The Ultimate Warrior (1975), which novelizes The ULTIMATE
WARRIOR (1975). Other titles which have been ascribed to WSB, but which we
cannot feel secure about, include The Fourth of Forever (1963) and The
Doom Maker (1959) as by B.X.Sanborn, the latter being more widely credited
to WSB than the former. He was perhaps best known for his detective novels
under the name Frederic Freyer.
BALLOONS
For some six months in 1783 Paris was the Cape Canaveral of the 18th
century as Parisians watched a succession of extraordinary ascents by
hot-air balloons. The first successful manned trip took place on 21 Nov,
as reported by Benjamin Franklin, and it started off a long series of
speculations about the conquest of the air. Thomas Jefferson was certain
that balloon TRANSPORTATION would lead to the discovery of the north pole
"which is but one day's journey in a balloon, from where the ice has
hitherto stopped adventurers". Franklin was certain that the new balloons
would revolutionize warfare; and L.S.MERCIER added a new chapter to the
1786 edition of his L'an deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771; rev 1786;
trans as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred 1772) to show how
the "aerostats" were destined to link remote Pekin to Paris in a system of
world communications. When the inhabitants of major European cities
watched the new balloons drifting above, they thought they saw the
beginning of a profound change in human affairs: the assurance of a
growing mastery of Nature. For a brief period there were plays, poems and
stories about balloon travel - even a space operetta, Die Luftschiffer,
performed before Catherine II in the Imperial Court Theatre at St
Petersburg. Expectations about the future carried over into occasional
stories like The Aerostatic Spy (1785), published anon, the first of the
round-the-world stories that ran their course up to Jules VERNE's Cinq
semaines en ballon (1863; trans as Five Weeks in a Balloon 1869). The
balloon proved a most useful marker of the future (as the ROCKET was to do
in a later period), and was used by early sf writers as a convincing way
of establishing the more advanced circumstances of their future worlds.
Balloons were also the source of the first visual fantasies of the future:
there were engravings of balloon battles, vast transport balloons crossing
the Atlantic and airborne troops crossing the Channel. By the 1870s,

however, experiments with heavier-than-air flying machines had turned
popular attention towards airships and aircraft of the future.
BALMER, EDWIN
(1883-1959) US writer and editor, trained as an engineer, who wrote in a
variety of genres and edited (1927-49) the magazine Red Book, which
occasionally published sf. With his brother-in-law William MacHarg
(1872-1951) he wrote The Achievements of Luther Trant (coll 1910), a
series of 9 detective stories with borderline sf elements, notably the
accurate forecasting of the lie detector; some were reprinted in Hugo
GERNSBACK's AMAZING STORIES. EB is best known for his collaborations with
Philip WYLIE, When Worlds Collide (1933), filmed as WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
(1951), and the inferior After Worlds Collide (1934). In the first, Earth
is destroyed in a collision with the planet Bronson Beta; in the second,
escapees settle on the new planet, fight off some Asiatic communists, and
prosper. EB's solo sf novel was Flying Death (1927). Other works: The
Golden Hoard (1934) with Philip Wylie, a mystery thriller. See also:
COMICS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; DISASTER; END OF THE WORLD; HOLOCAUST
AND
AFTER; PREDICTION; SPACESHIPS.
BALROG AWARD
AWARDS.
BALSDON, (JOHN PERCY VYVIAN) DACRE
(1901-1977) UK historian and author; Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford
1927-69. His three sf novels are humorous satires on contemporary mores,
little allowance being made for technological, social or behavioural
change. The most imaginative, Sell England? (1936), is a DYSTOPIA set 1000
years hence. The UK is inhabited solely by a decadent aristocracy, the
other echelons of society living in Africa under a totalitarian
dictatorship. Have a New Master (1935) and The Day They Burned Miss
TermaginOxford Life, coll 1957, as "Mr Botteaux's Story"; exp 1961) are
set, respectively, in a school 30 years hence and in an Oxford of the
immediate future. They have had little influence. Other works: Bedlam
House (1947), borderline SF, set in the Ministry of Anticipation; The
Pheasant Shoots Back (1949), a fantasy juvenile.
BALZAC, HONORE de
(1799-1850) French writer best known for La comedie humaine ["The Human
Comedy"], an immense series of novels into which his PROTO-SCIENCE-FICTION
story, La recherche de l'absolu (in Etudes de moeurs au XIXe siecle, coll
1834; trans as The Philosopher's Stone 1844 US; vt Balthazar, or Science ?
Love 1859; vt The Alchemist 1861; vt The Alkahest 1887; vt The Quest of
the Absolute 1895 UK; vt The Tragedy of a Genius 1912; new trans Ellen
Marriage as the Quest of the Absolute 1990 UK) fits somewhat dissonantly.
Balthazar Claes invests everything into his search for a kind of universal
element that lies at the base of all other elements, but fails. Other
works: HdB is, like Jules VERNE, a bibliographer's nightmare. Of his
numerous early sensational novels, few translations seem to exist, and his
later supernatural fiction appears in very various and chameleon guises.
But some titles are of genre interest: Le Centenaire: ou les deux

Behringeld (1822 as by Horace de Saint-Aubin; trans George Edgar SLUSSER
as The Centenarian, or The Two Behringelds 1976 US), a horror novel; La
Peau de chagrin (1831; trans as Luck and Leather: A Parisian Romance 1842
US; various vts; new trans Katharine Prescott Wormeley as The Magic Skin
1888 US), a fantasy; "Seraphita" (1836; trans anon 1889 US; new trans
Clara Bell 1990 US), an occult romance; "Melmoth Reconcile" (in Etudes
philosophiques, coll 1836; trans in coll The Unknown Masterpiece 1896 UK),
a sequel to Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles MATURIN. About the
author: Balzac (1973) by V.S.Pritchett. See also: MONEY; SCIENTISTS.
BAMBER, GEORGE
(1932- ) US writer whose sf novel, The Sea is Boiling Hot (1971), deals
with a large number of themes, including ECOLOGY: nuclear pollution has
set the seas to boiling; mankind lives in huge domed CITIES; COMPUTERS do
the work and provide sophisticated entertainment; many citizens opt out
for lobotomized relief from a boring world. The protagonist discovers how
to reverse the effects of POLLUTION by reconstituting pollutants into
their original states; DISASTER routinely threatens and breaks.
BANCROFT, LAURA
L.Frank BAUM.
BAND, CHARLES
(1952- ) US film producer, director and entrepreneur, his ambitions often
undone by underbudgeting, but responsible for a vigorous burst of
sf/fantasy/horror exploitation movies in the mid-1980s. His best works
indicate a lively mind and a bizarre B-movie sensibility that has led to
comparison with the Roger CORMAN of the 1950s. Son of exploitation
film-maker Albert Band (I Bury the Living [1956] and others) and brother
of prolific film composer Richard Band, CB produced his first film,
Mansion of the Doomed (1976) - a mad-SCIENTIST picture modelled on Georges
Franju's Les YEUX SANS VISAGE (1959) - at the age of 21, and directed his
first, Crash! (1977), a year later. With the healthy profits from a pair
of derivative 3-D sf efforts that he produced and directed - Parasite
(1982), a MONSTER MOVIE, and METALSTORM: THE DESTRUCTION OF JARED-SYN
(1983) - CB set up Empire International, a prolific grindhouse outfit that
flourished 1983-88, many of its films shot in Italy 1984-8. When Empire
had financial problems, CB sold out to Irwin Yablans, who had produced for
the company, and established a less ambitious production house, Full Moon
International which after a time shot a number of films in Romania. Other
sf films, many of them marginal sf/horror, with which CB was involved as a
producer (sometimes simply because Empire provided funding, sometimes with
fuller creative participation) include - the list may be incomplete - End
of the World (1977), Tourist Trap (1978), The Day Time Ended (1978; vt
Timewarp; vt Vortex), LASERBLAST (1978), Swordkill (1984; vt Ghost
Warrior), The Dungeonmaster (1984; vt RageWar; vt Digital Knights),
RE-ANIMATOR (1985; CB uncredited funded but did not produce), ZONE
TROOPERS (1985), ELIMINATORS (1986), TERRORVISION (1986), Mutant Hunt
(1986), Breeders (1986) CB's first direct-to-video production, FROM BEYOND
(1986), Robot Holocaust (1987), The Caller (1987), Arena (1988) based on
the Fredric BROWN 1944 short story, "Transformations"(1988), Shadow Zone
(1989), ROBOT JOX (1990), Crash and Burn (1990) directed by CB, Dollman

(1990), Doctor Mordrid (1992), co-directed with his father, Bad Channels
(1993), Seed People (1993), Trancers 3: Deth Lives (1993, vt Future Cop
3), Mandroid (1993), Robot Wars (1993) dir Albert Band, Prehysteria (1993)
dir CB and his father, Beach Babes from Beyond Infinity (1993),
Arcade(1994), Trancers 4: Jack of Swords (1994, vt Future Cop 4), Test
Tube Teens from the Year 2000 (1994), Trancers 5: Sudden Death (1995 vt
Future Cop 5), Oblivion (1995) and Prehysteria 2 (1995). Supernatural
HORROR films in which CB was involved, nearly always just as producer
except where noted, include - the list is not fully complete - Dracula's
Dog (1978 vt Zoltan: Hound of Dracula) dir Albert Band, Ghoulies (1984),
Troll (1986), Dreamaniac (1986), Necropolis (1987), Dolls (1987), Ghoulies
II (1987) dir Albert Band, Prison (1988), Ghost Town (1988), Puppetmaster
(1989), Catacombs (1990, vt Curse IV: The Ultimate Sacrifice), Meridian
(1990, vt Kiss of the Beast) dir CB, Puppetmaster II (1990), Demonic Toys
(1990), Netherworld (1990), Puppetmaster III (1990), Subspecies (1990),
The Pit and the Pendulum(1991), Dollman Vs. Demonic Toys (1993) dir CB,
Bloodstone: Subspecies II (1993), Bloodlust: Subspecies III (1994),
Puppetmaster IV (1994), Dragonworld (1994) fantasy rather than horror,
Lurking Fear (1994), DARK ANGEL (1994), Puppetmaster 5: The Final Chapter
(1995), Shrunken Heads (1995). While CB has certainly unleashed a torrent
of middling-to-terrible product - often featuring cheap ROBOTS or small
puppet demons - he deserves credit for fostering such talent as director
Stuart Gordon, producer Brian Yuzna, special-effects-men-turned-directors
David Allen and John Carl Buechler, and writers Danny Bilson and Paul
DeMeo. TRANCERS (1984; vt Future Cop), dir CB from a snappy script by
Bilson and DeMeo, is one of the best sf films of the decade, an
imaginative TIME TRAVEL adventure that beat The TERMINATOR to several
punches and features as many ideas in its brief running time as an Alfred
BESTER novel. CB also dir the disappointing sequel, Trancers 2 (1991; vt
Future Cop 2). More and more from 1987 on, CB has concentrated on
direct-to-video production, which can be profitable if budgets and
shooting schedules are minimized. In the 1990s very few of his films have
had theatrical release, but in the direct-to-video castle he is probably
king. Full Moon built its staff up from 8 to 200 in the 1990s. In 1993 he
launched a new label, Moonbeam, specializing in children's products. With
the success of Prehysteria and Dragonworld in this label, it looks as if
this is where CB's future may lie. However in 1994, CB, never one to
overlook a marketing opportunity, also launched the Torchlight label,
which makes "adult" (i.e. pornographic) films. See also: HORROR IN SF.
BANGS, JOHN KENDRICK
(1862-1922) Extremely prolific US writer under many names, most of whose
books of interest were humorous fantasies, not sf. However, one of them
(his most famous), A House-Boat on the Styx: Being Some Account of the
Divers Doings of the Associated Shades (1896), provides a model for many
stories featuring the famous dead as posthumous protagonists in venues
that usually have an Arcadian glow. From it a suggestive line of
association can be drawn through William Dean HOWELLS's The Seen and
Unseen at Stratford-on-Avon (1914) and the works of Thorne Smith
(1892-1934) down to the various Riverworld tales and novels of Philip Jose
FARMER. The sequels areThe Pursuit of the House-Boat (1897) and The

Enchanted Type-Writer (coll of linked stories 1899). Other works:
Roger Camerden: A Strange Story (1887); New Waggings of Old Tales (coll
1888) with Frank Dempster Sherman, both writing as Two Wags; Tiddlywink
Tales (coll 1891); Toppleton's Client, or A Spirit in Exile (1893); The
Water Ghost (coll 1894); Mr Bonaparte of Corsica (1895); The Idiot (1895);
A Rebellious Heroine (1896); The Bicyclers, and Three Other Farces (coll
1896); Ghosts I have Met and Some Others (coll 1898); The Dreamers: A Club
(coll 1899)Mr Munchausen (1901); Over the Plum-Pudding (coll 1901); Bikey
the Skicycle and Other Tales of Jimmie-Boy (coll 1902), some stories being
sf; Emblemland (1902) with Charles R.Macauley, a desert-island fantasy;
Olympian Nights (1902); The Inventions of an Idiot (coll 1904); Alice in
Blunderland: An Iridescent Dream (1907); The Autobiography of Methuselah
(1909); Jack and the Check Book (1911); Shylock Homes: His Posthumous
Memoirs (coll 1973).
BANISTER, MANLY (MILES)
(1914-1986) US novelist and short-story writer. Conquest of Earth (1957)
is a SPACE OPERA in which a resurgent mankind learns how to conquer the
ALIEN Trisz. Other sf novels have been published in magazine form only.
Other works: Eegoboo: A Fantasy Satire (1957? chap). See also:
RECURSIVE SF.
BANKS, IAIN M(ENZIES)
(1954- ) Scottish writer who distinguishes between his fiction published
for a general market and that aimed more directly at sf readers by signing
the former books Iain Banks and the latter Iain M.Banks; although
differences in register and venue can be detected in the two categories as in the case of Graham Greene's "Entertainments" - those categories tend
to merge. IB's first published novel, The Wasp Factory (1984), is a case
in point: the familial intensities brought to light as the 17-year-old
protagonist awaits the return home of his crazy older brother are
psychologically probing in an entirely mimetic sense, while at the same
time his dreams and behaviour are rendered in terms displaced into the
surrealistic realms of modern horror. IB's second novel, Walking on Glass
(1985), even more radically engages a mixture of genres - a mimetic
rendering of an adolescent's coming of age, a paranoid's displaced and
displacing conviction that he is a warrior from the stars, and the
entrapment of a "genuine" set of characters from an sf war - in something
like internecine warfare. The Bridge (1986), perhaps IB's finest single
novel, once again conflates the literal with displacements of metaphor
which are given the weight of reality, as a comatose man relives (or
anticipates) his own life, which is represented in matrix form as an
enormous bridge, among the interstices of which he engages in a rather
hilarious parody of SWORD-AND-SORCERY conventions. Of later IB novels,
Canal Dreams (1989) also stretches the nature of the MAINSTREAM novel by
being set in AD2000. The IMB novels (some of which were written, at least
in an early form, before The Wasp Factory) are conspicuously more holiday
in spirit and open in texture, seeming at first glance to occupy their
space-opera venues without much thought for the morrow. It is a deceptive
impression, though the exuberance is genuine enough. The first four IMB
novels - Consider Phlebas (1987), The Player of Games (1988), The State of

the Art (1989 US), which was assembled with other stories, some of them
Culture tales (see below), as The State of the Art (coll 1991), and USE OF
WEAPONS (1990) - comprise loose-connected segments of a sequence devoted
to a portrayal of a vast, interstellar, ship-based Culturegoverned by
vast, wry AIs. The underlying premises IMB uses to shape this Culture
stand as a direct challenge to those underlying most future HISTORIES.
Most importantly, and most unusually for SPACE OPERA, the Culture has very
carefully been conceived in genuine post-scarcity terms. In other words,
it boasts no hierarchies bent on maintaining power through control of
limited resources. There are no Empires in the Culture, no tentacled
Corporations, no Enclave whose hidden knowledge gives its inhabitants a
vital edge in their attempts to maintain independence against the military
hardware of the far-off Czar at the apex of the pyramid of power. Even
more remarkably, IMB represents the inhabitants of the Culture - they are
most often met monitoring and exploring the Universe in the vast AI-run
ships which comprise the ganglia of the colossal enterprise - as energetic
volunteers at living in the UTOPIA that has, in a sense, been created for
them. The novels themselves, perhaps understandably, shy clear of any
undue focus on this complex, free-form, secular paradise, concentrating on
wars between the Culture and its occasional enemies. The protagonist of
Consider Phlebas is a mercenary who has chosen the wrong side; in his
battles against the Culture he exposes the reader to a number of sly
ironies, because the doomed civilization for which he is fighting is
remarkably similar to the standard backdrop GALACTIC EMPIRE found in
routine space opera. The Player of Games, though more economically told
than its bulbous predecessor, less challengingly pits its protagonist
against a savage game-based civilization, which he causes to crumble. The
novel The State of the Art contrasts contemporary Earth with a Culture
mission, allowing a variety of satirical points to be made about the
seamy, agonistic, death-obsessed mortals of our planet. USE OF WEAPONS,
constructed with some of the savage inhibiting intricacy of Walking on
Glass, does finally address the question of Culture guilt for its
manipulation of races not yet free of scarcity-bound behaviour; its
portrayal of the relationship between a Culture woman and the mercenary in
her employ is tough-minded, and provides no easy answers. The next two IMB
novels move away from Culture concerns. Against a Dark Background (1993)
is a singleton whose soft, walkabout middle somewhat muffles a tale of
singular desolation, in which a female protagonist is coerced into
ransacking her home planet for a MCGUFFIN-like treasure, and in the course
of accomplishing her goal loses her companions, loses her sense of trust
in her stifling family, and witnesses the further decline of her world.
Feersum Endjinn(1994) is a complex tale told at a scherzo pace, conflating
several plotlines into a neatly planned climax during which a FAR FUTURE
world is saved, folk are reunited, the dead walk, and everyone is
sling-shot into a new paradigm. For many readers and critics, IB/IMB was
the major new UK sf writer of recent decades. Other works: Cleaning Up
(1987 chap) as IMB; Espedair Street (1987) as IB, associational; The Crow
Road (1992) as IB, associational Complicity (1993), associational. See
also: OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; PSYCHOLOGY.
BANKS, MICHAEL A.

(1951- ) US writer and editor who began publishing sf with "Lost ?
Found", with George Wagner, for IASFM in 1978, and who has since published
at least 45 stories, some as by Alan Gould. His first books of sf interest
were the nonfiction Understanding Science Fiction (1982), a primer for
teachers unfamiliar with the field, and Ultraheroes (1983), an sf
interactive text for juveniles. His first sf novel as such was The
Odysseus Solution (1986) with Dean R(odney) Lambe (1943- ), an adventure
tale involving ALIENS; he remains best known perhaps for his
"collaborations" with the late Mack REYNOLDS (whom see for details), in
which he edited or worked up material by Reynolds into Joe Mauser:
Mercenary from Tomorrow (1986) and Sweet Dreams, Sweet Princes (1986).
Other activities included the associate editorship of New Destinies
(DESTINIES) in 1986-7. Much of his nonfiction treats material of interest
to sf writers and readers. Other works: MAB's nonfiction includes
several computer product-training and applications texts, as well as
DELPHI: The Official Guide (1987); The Modem Reference (1988); Word
Processing Secrets for Writers (1989) with Ansen Dibel; and Pournelle's
Guide to PC Communications (1991) with Jerry POURNELLE.
BANNERMAN, GENE
[s] Thomas P.KELLEY.
BANNISTER, JO
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
BANNON, MARK
Paul CONRAD.
BANTAM BOOKS
Large US publishing house, a general publisher, mainly of paperbacks,
rather than an sf specialist. It was founded in 1945 by Ian Ballantine,
but he left in 1952 to form BALLANTINE BOOKS because he wanted to publish
paperback originals, whereas BB's list was almost entirely of reprints although one early sf paperback original (but not published as sf) from BB
was Shot in the Dark (anth 1950) ed Judith MERRIL. In the 1950s and 1960s
BB published some sf, including original collections by Fredric BROWN, but
generally were not major players in sf publishing. Their sf line was
expanded when Frederik POHL was hired as sf consultant in 1975; inter alia
he introduced Samuel R.DELANY to the list, with DHALGREN (1975). Pohl was
followed as sf editor by Sydny Weinberg, who was in turn succeeded in 1980
by Karen Haas. By 1981 BB was publishing over 20 sf/fantasy paperback
originals a year, including such authors as David BRIN and John CROWLEY.
Lou ARONICA took over the sf line in 1982, with considerable success, his
list coming to include Thomas M.DISCH, Richard GRANT, Harry HARRISON,
Robert SILVERBERG and Norman SPINRAD, and introducing Pat CADIGAN, Sheila
FINCH, R.A.MACAVOY and Robert Charles WILSON. By 1985 BB had become one of
the top five sf publishers in terms of number of books published, and in
that year launched the new Bantam Spectra imprint for sf, which emphasized
original publications rather than reprints and also published some
hardcovers. Shawna MCCARTHY joined BB as sf editor in 1985, working for
Aronica, now Publishing Director. Soon BB authors included Karen Joy
FOWLER, William GIBSON, Lisa GOLDSTEIN, Ian MCDONALD, Lewis SHINER and

Connie WILLIS. McCarthy left in 1988. By the late 1980s BB had one of the
most prestigious lines in sf publishing. Its anthology lines included WILD
CARDS and FULL SPECTRUM. In 1986 the German company Bertelsmann, which
already owned BB, bought DOUBLEDAY. As a result, since 1987 Doubleday's
new hardcover imprint, Doubleday Foundation, was closely associated with
Bantam Spectra. In 1989 Aronica became vice-president and publisher of all
BB mass-market books, while retaining his direct control of Bantam
Spectra. It appears (1991) that much of the Doubleday Foundation list will
be returned to Bantam Spectra. The UK Transworld Publishers, which
publishes sf and fantasy under the Corgi Books imprint, is a subsidiary of
BB.
BARBARELLA
1. COMIC strip created by French artist Jean-Claude Forest (1930- ) for
V.Magazine in 1962. The interplanetary SEX adventures of the scantily clad
blonde astronaut were collected as Barbarella (graph coll 1964; trans
Richard Seaver1966 US). Despite its humorous attitudes, B incurred the
wrath of French censorship. This row and the subsequent film version have
tended to obscure the elegance and inventive sf content of the strip.
Forest's later attempts to revive it, reducing the sex and increasing the
sf elements, were less successful. Among his later, lesser known comic
books is the witty La revanche d'Hypocrite ["The Revenge of Hypocrite"]
(graph 1977). 2.Film (1968). De Laurentiis-Marianne/Paramount. Dir Roger
Vadim, starring Jane Fonda, John Phillip Law, Milo O'Shea, David Hemmings,
Anita Pallenberg. Screenplay Terry Southern, Jean-Claude Forest, Vadim,
Vittorio Bonicelli, Brian Degas, Claude Brule, Tudor Gates, Clement Biddle
Wood, based on the comic strip by Forest. 98 mins. Colour. Like Forest's
strip, this Italian-French coproduction parodies the conventions of
PULP-MAGAZINE sf as typified by FLASH GORDON but, where Forest's work was
spare, Vadim's is lush, and it loses some of Forest's sharpness. The film
is sometimes funny but seldom witty, despite the presence of Southern
among the multinational crowd of eight scriptwriters. Barbarella (Fonda),
agent of the Earth government, is sexually and culturally innocent in the
manner of VOLTAIRE's Candide. Her search for a missing scientist on the
planet Sogo results in an ever more baroque series of (mostly sexual)
encounters: with sadistic children and their carnivorous dolls, with a
blind angel (Law), with an inadequate revolutionary (Hemmings), with a
pleasure machine and with the decadent lesbian Black Queen (Pallenberg),
among others. Fonda - whose clothes look as if designed by Earle K.BERGEY
- is memorable for her attractively wide-eyed air, combining eroticism
with bafflement. FEMINIST critics were outraged at Vadim's exploitation of
his real-life wife's sexuality in so voyeuristic a manner - he had done it
before with Brigitte Bardot - though his evocation of the decadence he so
obviously enjoys appears adolescent rather than corrupt. The exoticism
with which the planet Sogo is created is what makes B a distinguished sf
film; a real, if intermittent, SENSE OF WONDER is created by the sheer
alienness of Mario Garbuglia's production design and Enrico Fea's art
direction, all glowingly photographed by Claude Renoir.
BARBARY, JAMES
Jack BEECHING.

BARBEE, PHILLIPS
[s] Robert SHECKLEY.
BARBET, PIERRE
Pseudonym of Dr Claude Pierre Marie Avice (1925- ), French writer; under
his real name he is a pharmacist and an expert on bionics. He has also
used the pseudonyms David Maine and Olivier Sprigel. A highly prolific if
derivative popular writer of sf from 1962, PB has published over 35
novels, some of which have been translated into English: Les grognards
d'Eridan (1970; trans Stanley Hochman as The Napoleons of Eridanus 1976
US) and its sequel L'Empereur d'Eridan (trans Stanley Hochman as The
Emperor of Eridanus 1983 US), which make up a series of SPACE OPERAS based
on Napoleon; the PARALLEL-WORLDS story L'empire du Baphomet (1971; trans
Bernard Kay as Baphomet's Meteor 1972 US) and assembled with Croisade
Stellaire (1974; trans C.J.CHERRYH as "Stellar Crusade" in Cosmic
Crusaders [omni 1980 US]); Liane de Noldaz (1973; trans Stanley Hochman as
The Joan-of-Arc Replay 1978 US); A quoi songent les psyborgs? (1971; trans
Wendayne Ackerman as Games Psyborgs Play 1973 US); La planete enchantee
(1973; trans C.J.Richards as The Enchanted Planet 1975 US).
BARBOUR, DOUGLAS (FLEMING)
(1940- ) Canadian poet and academic, a professor of English at the
University of Alberta, whose "Patterns of Meaning in the SF Novels of
Ursula K.Le Guin, Joanna Russ and Samuel R.Delany, 1962-1972", accepted by
Queen's University in 1976, was the first Canadian doctoral dissertation
in the field of sf. Two competent published studies were spun-off from
this volume: An Opening in the Field: The SF Novels of Joanna Russ (1978
US), a necessary study of Joanna RUSS, and Worlds Out of Words: The SF
Novels of Samuel R.Delany (1979 UK). Several shorter essays, specifically
those on Samuel R.DELANY and Ursula K.LE GUIN, have demonstrated DB's
adhesion to a high-road view of the genre, although he has published a
short piece on The Witches of Karres (1966) by James H.SCHMITZ and has
reviewed with some liberality of grasp. See also: CANADA.
BARBULESCU, ROMULUS
[r] ROMANIA.
BARBUSSE, HENRI
(1874-1935) French writer, best known for his strongly realistic fiction,
especially that concerning WWI. Les enchainements (1925; trans as Chains
in 2 vols 1925 US) attempts - like many novels from the first third of the
century - to present a panoramic vision of mankind's prehistory and
history, in this case through the transcendental experiences of a single
protagonist who is struck by his significant visions while in the middle
of a staircase. See also: ORIGIN OF MAN.
BARCELO, ELIA
[r] SPAIN.
BARCELO, MIQUEL
(1948- ) Spanish (Catalan) computer-systems professor and sf/fantasy book
editor with Ediciones B.Having been publisher of the sf FANZINE Kandama
from 1980, MB became a professional editor in 1986, and is author of

Ciencia ficcion: Guia de lectura ["Science Fiction Reader's Guide"]
(1990). He revised the SPAIN entry in this volume.
BARCLAY, ALAN
Pseudonym of UK writer and civil engineer George B.Tait (1910- ), who
wrote some stories for Science Fantasy, beginning with "Enemy in their
Midst" in 1952, and the Jacko series - mostly for NW, beginning with "Only
an Echo" (1954) and ending with "The Thing in Common" (1956). Parts of
this series became his sf novel Of Earth and Fire (fixup 1974), which pits
Earth's space service against ALIEN intruders. He wrote his novels
exclusively for ROBERT HALE LIMITED. Other works: The City and the
Desert (1976); No Magic Carpet (1976); The Cruel Years of Winter (1978);
The Guardian at Sunset (dated 1979 but 1980).
BARCLAY, BILL or WILLIAM
Michael MOORCOCK.
BARCLAY, GABRIEL
House pseudonym used in 1940 for 2 stories in Astonishing Stories and
Super Science Stories, 1 by Manly Wade WELLMAN and 1 by C.M.KORNBLUTH.
BARFIELD, (ARTHUR) OWEN
(1898- ) UK writer and philologist whose first book, The Silver Trumpet
(1925), was a fantasy. He was long involved with the Anthroposophical
philosophy of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). A member of the Inklings group
and a long-time associate of C.S.LEWIS, OB contributed to Essays Presented
to Charles Williams (anth 1947), which Lewis had organized. As
G.A.L.Burgeon he wrote an sf novel, This Ever Diverse Pair (1950). Later
works include Worlds Apart (1963), described as "A Dialogue of the 1960s",
and Unancestral Voice (1968). About the author: "C.S.Lewis, Owen Barfield
and the Modern Myth" by W.D. Norwood Jr in Midwest Quarterly 4(2) (1967).
BARGONE, FREDERIC CHARLES PIERRE EDOUARD
[r] Claude FARRERE.
BARJAVEL, RENE
(1911-1985) French novelist, active in later life as a screenwriter and
journalist. His first novel to be translated, Ravage (1943; trans Damon
KNIGHT as Ashes, Ashes 1967 US), describes a post- HOLOCAUST France driven
inwards into rural quiescence by the sudden disappearance of electricity
from the world; the corrupting effects of technology are described
scathingly. The next sf work from this important early period is Le
voyageur imprudent (1944; with postscript 1958; trans anon as Future Times
Three 1970 US), a rather pessimistic TIME-TRAVEL story with the usual
paradoxes, partly set in the same future world as the previous novel.
Several novels have not been translated: L'homme fort ["The Strong Man"]
(1946), about a self-created SUPERMAN whose efforts to bring happiness to
humanity are doomed; and Le diable l'emporte ["The Devil Takes All"]
(1948) and its sequel Colomb de la Lune ["Columbus of the Moon"] (1962),
about the consequences of a future WAR. The epigraph to Le diable
l'emporte reads, in translation, "To our grandfathers and grandchildren,
the cavemen."RB's later work decreases in intensity and is less
interestingly (though almost unvaryingly) gloomy about humanity's

prospects. Typical is La nuit des temps (1968; trans Charles Lam Markmann
as The Ice People 1970 UK), a ramblingly told morality tale in which two
long-frozen humans - survivors of an eons-prior nuclear war - revive into
a disaster-bound present age. Other works: Les enfants de l'hombre
["Children of the Shadows"] (coll 1946; exp vt Le prince blesse ["The
Wounded Prince"] 1974); Le grand secret (1973; trans as The Immortals 1974
US); Jour de feu ["Day of Fire"] (1974); Une Rose au Paradis ["A Rose from
Paradise"] (1981); La Tempete ["The Tempest"] (1982).See also: FRANCE.
BARKER, D.A.
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
BARLOW, JAMES
(1921-1973) UK novelist, known mainly for such work outside the sf field
as the anti-communist thriller The Hour of Maximum Danger (1962). His sf
novel, One Half of the World (1957), presents a UK ruled by a totalitarian
leftist regime. The protagonist, finding God again, conflicts with the
powers-that-be.
BARLOW, JAMES WILLIAM
(1826-1913) UK cleric and writer whose sf novel, History of a World of
Immortals without a God (1891 Ireland as by Antares Skorpios; vt The
Immortals' Great Quest 1909 UK as JWB), presents in note form its
protagonist's record of his trip to VENUS, where a large population has
resided in a state of happy non-Christian socialism for many thousands of
years. The inhabitants of the first continent visited by the misogynist
narrator find themselves, after death, reincarnated ( REINCARNATION) on a
second continent far to the south, where they continue their Great Quest
for an explanatory principle, or God.
BARLOWE, WAYNE DOUGLAS
(1958- ) US illustrator whose successful Barlowe's Guide to
Extraterrestrials (1979), in collaboration with Ian Summers (who wrote the
text), was published when he was 21, only two years after he had made his
first sale, a cover for Cosmos. The book featured WDB's excellent
paintings of many of sf's best-known ALIENS. The son of natural-history
artists Sy and Dorothea Barlowe, WDB has a talent for creating believable
surface textures, important in creating aliens - his attention to detail
is reminiscent of Wyeth and Pyle. He works in acrylics and has done book
covers, also magazine covers for ASF and IASFM, to whose ex-editor, Shawna
MCCARTHY, he is married. Expedition: Being an Account in Words and Artwork
of the 2358 A.D. Voyage to Darwin IV (1990), written and illustrated by
WDB, is an interesting work of speculative XENOBIOLOGY, illustrating and
describing the physiology of lifeforms on an imaginary planet.
BARNARD, MARJORIE FAITH
[r] M. Barnard ELDERSHAW.
BARNARD-ELDERSHAW, M.
M. Barnard ELDERSHAW.
BARNE, LEO
[s] L.P. DAVIES.

BARNES, ARTHUR K(ELVIN)
(1911-1969) US pulp writer known also for his works outside the sf field.
He was intermittently active in sf until 1946, his first story being
published in 1931. His Gerry Carlyle series of stories, in which Miss
Carlyle and a sidekick hunt down various alien prey, appeared originally
in TWS. His Interplanetary Hunter (1937-46 TWS; fixup 1956) combines 5 of
these stories, omitting "The Dual World" (1938) and "The Energy Eaters"
(1939). The latter story - and "The Seven Sleepers" (1940), worked into
the fixup - were written with Henry KUTTNER, and used his character Tony
Quade. AKB sometimes used the pseudonym Kelvin KENT, both alone and with
Kuttner. See also: GAMES AND SPORTS; OUTER PLANETS; THRILLING WONDER
STORIES.
BARNES, JOHN (ALLEN)
(1957- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Finalities Besides the
Grave" for AMZ in 1985, and who made some impact on the field with his
first novel, The Man who Pulled Down the Sky (1987), an effective drama
involving highly coloured political conflicts throughout the Solar System.
His second, Sin of Origin (1988), rather more ambitiously attempts to
combine SPACE OPERA, RELIGION and SOCIOLOGY in a tale set on a planet
(which humans call Randall) whose species enjoyed an extremely complex
tripartite form of symbiosis before the arrival of two human sects Christians and communists - who variously, and fatally, come to
"understand" what is happening. As the tripartite symbiosis breaks down,
the surviving singles begin to replicate human forms of behaviour slavery becomes rife - and the novel continues to darken. The final
conclusion is that DNA, found in all sentient species, reproduces by
causing its bearers to destroy themselves and their planets violently in
terminal HOLOCAUSTS, so that DNA spores are blown to new stars. JB's third
novel, Orbital Resonance (1991), a juvenile, rather implausibly at times though showing a marked increase in panache and vigour over the first
books - shows adult humans deciding that their children are better
equipped to handle the challenges of the new in space. The young female
protagonist evinces clear similarities to the heroine of Robert A.
HEINLEIN's Podkayne of Mars (1963). A MILLION OPEN DOORS (1992) also
hearkens deliberately backwards to the exuberant, human-dominated,
outward-looking galaxy of writers like Heinlein, though the story itself a young man comes of age on a strange planet - is perhaps more shadowed by
self-awareness than some of its predecessors. And in Mother of Storms
(1994), which is his most impressive novel, JB creates a powerful and
complex portrait of a NEAR FUTURE world wracked by the eponymous
self-fueling storm, and on the verge of numerous cusps, ethical and
practical. Through VIRTUAL REALITY, SEX has become extraordinarily present
in everyone's consciousness, and GENETIC ENGINEERING helps point the way
to the stars. Meanwhile the storm continues, in a narrative which makes
profitable use of both the bestseller disaster mode and of CYBERPUNK. JB
has become a virtuoso manipulator of sf themes; and the nature of his next
book is impossible to predict from the shape of its predecessor. Other
works: How to Build a Future (1991 chap), nonfiction; the Time Raider
sequence, featuring a Vietnam War veteran transported back to previous
battles: Time Raider #1: Wartide (1992); #2 Battlecry (1992) and #3 Union

Fires (1992).
BARNES, JULIAN (PATRICK)
(1946- ) UK writer who has published detective novels as by Dan
Kavanaugh. His most famous single novel is Flaubert's Parrot (1984). He
has written two books of sf interest. Staring at the Sun (1986) carries
its protagonist from her birth in 1922 into an exiguous future 98 years
later, but closes movingly at a moment when, still archaically alive to
the real world, she gazes at the unfaded reality of the Sun. A History of
the World in 101/2 Chapters (coll of linked stories 1989) begins with
Noah's Ark and gradually assembles a vision of history itself as a
Narrenschiff, or Ship of Fools, or Ark, whose message is nothing without
human love.
BARNES, MYRA EDWARDS
(1933- ) US author of Linguistics and Language in Science Fiction-Fantasy
(1975), a reprint of her 1971 PhD dissertation. This is a useful
introduction to the subject ( LINGUISTICS), although not as comprehensive
as Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction (1980) by
Walter E. MEYERS.
BARNES, (KEITH) RORY
[r] Damien BRODERICK.
BARNES, STEVEN (EMORY)
(1952- ) US writer who began publishing with "Moonglow" in Vampires,
Werewolves and Other Monsters (anth 1974) ed Roger ELWOOD, and whose
career has been associated since its early days with Larry NIVEN, SB's
collaborator on most of his novels, including the first, Dream Park
(1981). The Dream Park sequence - the eponymous venue in which it is set
houses a wide variety of high-tech role-playing games ( GAME-WORLDS;
VIRTUAL REALITY) - continues with The Barsoom Project (1989) and Dream
Park: The Voodoo Game (1991 UK; vt The California Voodoo Game 1992 US),
both also with Niven, and has moments of relatively light-hearted agility,
especially perhaps in the second volume, in which a terraformed MARS (see
also TERRAFORMING) is advertised, although the action does not leave
Earth. Further collaborations include The Descent of Anansi (1982) with
Niven; the ongoing Avalon sequence, comprising The Legacy of Heorot (1987
UK) and The Dragons of Heorot (1995 UK) with Niven and Jerry POURNELLE,
tales of planet-exploitation based on Beowulf and reflecting many of
Pournelle's convictions; and Achilles' Choice (1991) with Niven alone,
which returns to a game-world atmosphere, though not it seems advertently,
in a tale set at a time when athletes can aspire to join the
planet-dominating corporate elite by winning at competitions, the catch
being that they must "Boost" to achieve stardom, and that only the winners
are saved through real-time computer monitoring of the effects of doing
so.SB's solo work has been perhaps less infected by hi-tech gloss. The
Aubry Knight sequence - comprisingStreetlethal (1983), its sequel Gorgon
Child (1989), and Firedance (dated 1993 but 1994) - are moderately
down-to-earth adventure tales set in the kind of CYBERPUNK urban venue in this case, post-earthquake Los Angeles - that is always said to be
gritty, with an abundance of sf instruments involved in keeping the action

moving. The Kundalini Equation (1986) invokes its author's long interest
in martial arts. It might be said that SB has acquired a good amount of
skill and gear, but has yet to speak in his own voice. See also:
LEISURE; SPACESHIPS.
BARNETT, PAUL (LE PAGE)
(1949- ) Scottish writer and editor, resident in England, who has used
the pseudonym John Grant for all his published work except some short
stories and a nonfiction book as by Eve Devereux and a handful of essays
and reviews and a nonfiction book translation under his own name. He
entered the field through editing Aries 1 (anth 1979), which contains the
first and so far only sf short story by Colin WILSON, with whom PB later
edited the nonfiction The Book of Time (1980) and The Directory of
Possibilities (1981). The solo A Directory of Discarded Ideas (1981),
largely on PSEUDO-SCIENCE, led directly to his book-length fiction, Sex
Secrets of Ancient Atlantis (1985), a parody of pseudo-science in general
and ATLANTIS studies in particular. His first novel, The Truth about the
Flaming Ghoulies (1984), a comedy, describes in epistolary form a
NEAR-FUTURE rock band whose members prove to be ANDROIDS. Earthdoom!
(1987) with David LANGFORD is a perhaps overly broad parody of the
DISASTER-novel genre. Albion (1991) is a fantasy novel about a POCKET
UNIVERSE, the first of a projected tetralogy, the second of which, The
World (1992), is more overtly sciencefictional, depicting the fusion of
two alternate universes to form a third. Judge Dredd: The Hundredfold
Problem * (1994), tied to the comic, is set in a dyson sphere ( Freeman
DYSON). By training a publisher's editor, he has served as Technical
Editor for the 2nd edn of this encyclopedia. Other works: The
Legends of Lone Wolf series of ties, SWORD-AND-SORCERY novels based on
gamebooks by Joe Dever (1956- ) and published as co-authorships: Eclipse
of the Kai * (1989), The Dark Door Opens * (1989) - these 2 assembled as
Legends of Lone Wolf Omnibus * (1992) - The Sword of the Sun * (1989; rev
in 2 vols vt The Tides of Treachery * 1991 US and The Sword of the Sun *
1991 US), Hunting Wolf * (1990), The Claws of Helgedad * (1991), The
Sacrifice of Ruanon * (cut 1991), The Birthplace * (1992), The Book of the
Magnakai * (1992), The Tellings * (coll 1993,The Lorestone of Varetta *
(1993, The Secret of Kazan-oud * (1994) and The Rotting Land * (1994),
with History Book: a "Thog the Mighty" Text (1994 chap) being an unserious
appendage to the sequence; much nonfiction, including Dreamers: A
Geography of Dreamland (1984) and Encyclopedia of Walt Disney's Animated
Characters (1987 US; exp 1993 US; further rev 1993 US).See also:
COSMOLOGY; GAMES AND SPORTS; MUSIC.
BARNEY, JOHN STEWART
(1868-1925) US writer whose sf novel, L.P.M.: The End of the Great War
(1915), is an unusually authoritarian EDISONADE in which an impatiently
triumphal US scientist - in this case his name is Edestone - uses the
futuristic weaponry he has invented to defeat the warring nations of
Europe and introduce to the world a government ruled by an "Aristocracy of
Intelligence".
BARNWELL, WILLIAM (CURTIS)
(1943- ) US author whose brief but interesting foray into the sf/fantasy

genre was his well written Blessing Trilogy, consisting of The Blessing
Papers (1980), Imram (1981) and The Sigma Curve (1981). This complex quest
through a post- HOLOCAUST world, where some sort of grand design by
mysterious powers is operating, at first appears lively but conventional
SCIENCE FANTASY. In fact, the intellectual structure of the work is both
demanding and very eccentric: a METAPHYSICAL allegory about free will and
predestination. The holocaust was deliberately brought about to
short-circuit humanity's DEVOLUTION as the left and right hemispheres of
the brain lost contact due to corrupting visual imagery replacing the
purity of the spoken word. This may be the only apocalyptic fiction where
Earth's "Falling" was directly, it appears, due to tv programming rather
than Original Sin. The books read as if produced by a member of a
PSEUDO-SCIENCE cult, but it is not clear which one.
BARON, OTHELLO
[s] R.L. FANTHORPE.
BARR, DENSIL NEVE
Pseudonym of UK writer Douglas Norton Buttrey (1918- ), whose sf novel,
The Man with Only One Head (1955), develops the theme of novels like Pat
FRANK's Mr Adam (1946). Only one man is left fertile; the subsequent
moralistic World Federation set up to deal with the crisis is riddled with
dissension.
BARR, DONALD
(1921- ) US writer and academic, former assistant dean of the Engineering
School of Columbia University, and author of several nonfiction works for
children as well as Who Pushed Humpty Dumpty, or The Education of a
Headmaster (1971), on US education. His sf novel, Space Relations: A
Slightly Gothic Interplanetary Tale (1973), is a SPACE OPERA interlaced
amusingly with "literary" analogues to its tale of a space diplomat, sold
into slavery, who is sexually excited by fear, thus enticing a princess,
and who also finds out grim secrets about an alien INVASION of Earth. A
Planet in Arms (1981) is noticeably less elated.
BARR, GEORGE
(1937- ) US sf illustrator. One of the most meticulous of sf/fantasy
artists, he is also one of the least appreciated - at least for his
professional work. GB started by illustrating sf FANZINES and was
nominated five times for the HUGO as Best Fan Artist, winning in 1968 and
1969. However, he had by then already sold his first professional
illustration to FANTASTIC, the cover for Mar 1961. He continued with some
magazine work, but is perhaps best known for his paperback covers for ACE
BOOKS, DAW BOOKS and others. His often delicate, sometimes whimsical,
artwork is influenced by his appreciation of the work of Arthur Rackham
(1867-1939) and Hannes BOK. GB works primarily in colour, laying
watercolour washes over ball-point lines. In a field that emphasizes
brightness, his pastel shades are almost unique. More recently he has done
many interior illustrations for ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE. A
showcase for his work is Upon the Winds of Yesterday, and Other
Explorations (1976).
BARR, ROBERT

(1850-1912) Scottish editor and a popular and prolific writer. His early
catastrophe story in The IDLER (which he edited), "The Doom of London"
(1892), deals with fog and POLLUTION. It was reprinted in The Face ?
Mask (coll 1894), which contains several other sf and fantasy stories, as
does In a Steamer Chair and Other Shipboard Stories (coll 1892). Other
works: From whose Bourne (1893); Revenge! (coll 1896); Tekla: A Romance of
Love and War (1898 Canada; vt The Countess Tekla 1899 UK).See also:
CANADA.
BARR, TYRONE C.
(? -? ) UK writer. His sf novel, Split Worlds (1959; vt The Last Fourteen
1960 US), sees 14 crew members of a space station survive the
extermination of everyone on Earth. Eventually they must land and breed
and start again, though quarrelling furiously, in a fantastically
transformed world.
BARREDO, EDUARDO
[r] LATIN AMERICA.
BARREN, CHARLES
(1913- ) UK teacher and writer, best known for historical romances and
co-author with R(ichard) Cox Abel of Trivana 1 (1966), in which an
overpopulated Earth establishes a VENUS colony. He was chairman of the
SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION from its inception in 1970 until his retirement
in 1980, subsequently serving as its Honorary Administrator 1980-84.
BARRETT, GEOFFREY JOHN
(1928- ) UK writer who has also published thrillers as Cole Rickard and
Westerns as Bill Wade; his sf novels, written for ROBERT HALE LIMITED
under his own name and as Edward Leighton, Dennis Summers and James
Wallace, are consistently routine. Works: As GJB: The Brain of
Graphicon (1973); The Lost Fleet of Astranides (1974); The Tomorrow Stairs
(1974); Overself (1975); The Paradise Zone (1975); City of the First Time
(1975); Slaver from the Stars (1975); The Bodysnatchers of Lethe (1976);
The Night of the Deathship (1976); Timeship to Thebes (1976); The Hall of
the Evolvulus (1977); The Other Side of Red (1977); Robotria (1977); Earth
Watch (1978).As Edward Leighton: Out of Earth's Deep (1976); A Light from
Tomorrow (1977); Lord of the Lightning (1977).As Dennis Summers: A Madness
from Mars (1976); Stalker of the Worlds (1976); The Robot in the Glass
(1977); The Master of Ghosts (1977).As James Wallace: A Man from Tomorrow
(1976); Plague of the Golden Rat (1976); The Guardian of Krandor (1977).
BARRETT, NEAL Jr
(1929- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "To Tell the Truth" for
Gal in 1960 and who has contributed with some regularity to the sf
magazines. Though he has never been prolific in shorter forms, some of his
later stories, like "Hero" (1979), "A Day at the Fair" (1982), "Trading
Post" (1986), "Sallie C" (1987), "Perpetuity Blues" (1987), "Diner"
(1987), "Stairs" (1988) and "Tony Red Dog" (1989), have caused
considerable stir for the dark bravura of the vision they sometimes expose
of a savaged USA. Some of these stories, though frustratingly (in the
absence of a further gathering) the selection is weighted toward lighter
work, are assembled in Slightly Off Center: Eleven Extraordinarily

Exhilarating Tales (coll 1992). NB's first novels did not seem urgently to
foretell the ambitious author of the 1980s, and titles like Kelwin (1970),
whose eponymous hero has stirring adventures in a post- HOLOCAUST venue,
the equally rambunctious The Gates of Time (1970), and the
alternate-history ( ALTERNATE WORLDS) tale, The Leaves of Time (1971) despite the title, not connected to the earlier volume - seemed little
more than amusing and competently told routine fare, with twists.Stress
Pattern (1974), a densely constructed fable set on an alien planet whose
profligate alienness is at points reminiscent of the worlds of Stanislaw
LEM, was clearly more ambitious, and NB followed this striking work with
the Aldair series - Aldair in Albion (1976), Aldair, Master of Ships
(1977), Aldair, Across the Misty Sea (1980) and Aldair: The Legion of
Beasts (1982) - whose baroque surface tends to disguise the alarming
implications of the tale, for the hero is a genetically engineered
humanoid pig, the FAR-FUTURE Earth he travels lacks real solace, and his
discovery of humans on another planet grants him no peace, for they
themselves have been enslaved by a race of ALIENS. In retrospect, then,
THROUGH DARKEST AMERICA (1987) and its sequel, Dawn's Uncertain Light
(1989), which have gained NB considerable attention 30 years into his
career, are a logical development of his earlier work. Their protagonists'
hegira through a most terrifyingly bleak and terminally scarred USA,
though told with an exhilarating and genre-sensitive competence, conveys a
sense of grieved, embedded, millennial pessimism impossible to sidestep;
and even The Hereafter Gang (1991), which less savagely focuses this
vision on the churning psyche of a middle-aged man in crisis, turns into a
sharp and garish parody of a sentimentalized small-town past over which it
is easy, but dangerous, to pine - posthumously, as it were. NB is a writer
who deserves to have come into his times. Other works: Highwood (1972
dos); Tom Swift: Ark Two * (1982) and Tom Swift: The Invincible Force *
(1983), two Tom Swift tales as by Victor APPLETON; The Hardy Boys: The
Swamp Monster* (1985) and The Hardy Boys: The Skyfire Puzzle * (1985), two
Hardy Boys tales as by Franklin W. Dixon;The Karma Corps (1984);Pink Vodka
Blues (1992), associational; Batman in: the Black Egg of Atlantis * (1992
chap), tied to Batman.See also: ECOLOGY; EVOLUTION; LIVING WORLDS.
BARRETT, WILLIAM E(DMUND)
(1900-1986) US writer who began publishing short stories with "The Music
of Madness" for Weird Tales in 1926. He wrote Flight from Youth (1939)
before WWII, later incorporating it into The Edge of Things (coll 1960),
whose 3 stories all relate in some way to flying. His sf novel, The Fools
of Time (1963), unconvincingly posits an IMMORTALITY drug based on cancer.
Lady of the Lotus (1975) is a fantasy about the Buddha and his wife. [JC]
BARRETTON, GRANDALL
[s] Randall GARRETT.
BARRINGTON, MICHAEL
Collaborative pseudonym of Michael MOORCOCK and Barrington J. BAYLEY on 1
story, "Peace on Earth" (1959). [JC]
BARRON, D(ONALD) G(ABRIEL)
(1922- ) UK architect and writer. In The Zilov Bombs (1962), unilateral

UK nuclear disarmament has led to Soviet domination of all Europe; after
five years (by 1973) the underground is putting pressure on characters
like the narrator, who ultimately solves his moral anxieties by detonating
an A-bomb. [JC]Other works: The Man who was There (1969).
BARRON, (RICHARD) NEIL
(1934- ) US bibliographer and book editor, trained as a librarian, who
has produced some of the liveliest and most readable scholarship in sf,
notably in the three well researched editions of Anatomy of Wonder: A
Critical Guide to Science Fiction (1976; exp 1981; further exp 1987),
which he edited and to which he contributed. These volumes discuss many
individual books, both fiction (including foreign-language) and secondary
literature; the 3rd edn, with over 2600 entries, is by far the most
thorough work of its kind; a 4th edition is projected for 1995. Companion
vols ed NB are Fantasy Literature: A Reader's Guide (1990) and Horror
Literature: A Reader's Guide (1990). NB founded and edited SCIENCE FICTION
?
revived by the SCIENCE FICTION RESEARCH ASSOCIATION in 1982-3. It merged
with FANTASY NEWSLETTER in 1984 to form the newly titled FANTASY REVIEW
(very briefly known at first as SF ?
review editor Jan 1984-Apr 1985. He is a regular contributor to the SFRA
NEWSLETTER. NB received the 1982 PILGRIM AWARD for his contributions to sf
scholarship. [PN]See also: BIBLIOGRAPHIES; COLLECTIONS; CRITICAL AND
HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF.
BARRY, RAY
Dennis HUGHES.
BARTH, JOHN (SIMMONS)
(1930- ) US novelist. One of the leading fabulists ( FABULATION) of his
generation of writers, he is probably best known for his epic
mock-picaresque The Sot-Weed Factor (1960; rev 1967). Giles Goat-Boy, or
The Revised New Syllabus (1966), which derives its language in part from
Vladimir NABOKOV and its central metaphor of the university as the world
in part from Jorge Luis BORGES, can, by taking the metaphor literally, be
read as sf. The hero is rendered literally as goat-horned. The novel
itself is a complex SATIRE on education, human nature and knowledge, and
also a remarkable Bildungsroman. Some of JB's later short fiction, as
assembled in Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice
(coll 1968; exp 1969), contains some intensely academic FANTASY, and
Chimera (coll of linked stories 1972) hovers at the edge of the fantastic
in its literalization in narrative form of the powers of
mythopoeisis.Other works: Letters (1979); The Last Voyage of Somebody the
Sailor (1991). [JC]
BARTHELME, DONALD
(1931-1989) US writer known primarily as a surrealist and black-humorist.
His novels are all FABULATIONS: Snow White (1967), an absurdist dissection
of the fairy tale; The Dead Father (1975), in which the giant figure of a
moribund Father is escorted with trauma and ritual to its final resting
place; and The King (1990), which transports King Arthur and his knights
to WWII. DB's early collections especially - like Come Back, Dr Caligari

(coll 1964), Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (coll 1968) and City
Life (coll 1970) - present in the form of discontinuous spoofs and
iconoclasms a number of ideas and themes taken from MYTHOLOGY, fantasy and
sf. Many of these stories have been reprinted in sf anthologies. His work
as a whole is conveniently assembled in Sixty Stories (coll 1981) and
Forty Stories (coll 1988). [PR/JC]Other works: The Slightly Irregular Fire
Engine (1971 chap); Sadness (coll 1972); Guilty Pleasures (coll 1974);
Amateurs (coll 1976); Great Days (coll 1979); Overnight to Many Distant
Cities (coll 1983).About the author: Donald Barthelme's Fiction: The
Ironist Saved from Drowning (1982) by Charles Molesworth.
BARTHOLOMEW, BARBARA
(1941- ) US writer whose Timeways Trilogy for young adult readers-The
Time Keeper (1985), Child of Tomorrow (1985) and When Dreamers Cease to
Dream (1985) - traverses familiar TIME-TRAVEL themes without undue stress.
Other books for younger readers include The Cereal Box Adventures (1981),
Flight into the Unknown (1982) and The Great Gradepoint Mystery (1983).
[JC]
BARTLETT, VERNON (OLDFIELD)
(1894-1983) UK broadcaster, politician and writer, whose If I Were
Dictator (1935 chap) reflected his centrist politics - he was an
Independent MP 1938-50 - in its reformist agenda. His sf novel proper,
Tomorrow Always Comes (1943), describes in fictional terms the task of
reconstructing a defeated Germany after the end of WWII. [JC]
BARTON, ERLE
R.L. FANTHORPE.
BARTON, JAMES
(? - ) Writer, apparently US, whose post- HOLOCAUST Wasteworld series Wasteworld #1: Aftermath (1983 UK), #2: Resurrection (1984 UK), #3: Angels
(1984 UK) and #4: My Way (1984)-takes its military hero through the US
South and elsewhere, fighting bigots and MUTANTS and winning an Apache
lass. [JC]
BARTON, LEE
R.L. FANTHORPE.
BARTON, SAMUEL
(? -? ) US writer who also published as A.B. Roker. His sf novel, The
Battle of the Swash and the Capture of Canada (1888), thought by Thomas D.
CLARESON to be the first US future- WAR tale, was written to show the
defencelessness of the US coasts (and incidentally the vulnerability of
Canada) as the USA and UK come to blows, a conflict eventually won by the
USA through the invention of self-destructing torpedo boats. He has been
claimed as a US Congressman, Samuel Barton (1785-1858), but it is
extremely unlikely that The Battle of the Swash could have been conceived
30+ years before its publication. [JC]
BARTON, S.W.
[r] Michael KURLAND.
BARTON, WILLIAM R(ENALD III)

(1950- ) US writer whose sf novel, Hunting on Kunderer (1973), confronts
humans with ALIEN natives on a dangerous new planet, and whose A Plague of
All Cowards (1976) was also an sf adventure. Of much greater interest was
Iris (1990) with Michael CAPOBIANCO, in which a group of artists, en route
to Triton, encounters the eponymous GAS GIANT, which has drifted, with
moons, into the Solar System. Alien artefacts are found and epiphanies are
experienced; but the novel is primarily striking for the intense
directness of the prose and for the capacity of the authors to address in
that prose both matters of science (which might be expected in a HARD-SF
novel) and matters of character, for the cast is deeply memorable. Fellow
Traveler (1991), also with Capobianco, is perhaps more straightforward,
but again shows a remarkable grasp of the human shape of experience, in
this case a NEAR-FUTURE Soviet attempt to harness an asteroid for
industrial purposes. Given the current state of the US space program, this
novel is one of the very few of those caught out by the political
transformation of the USSR to make one feel that there have been losses as
well as gains. Dark Sky Legion: An Ahrimanic Novel (1992) is an ambitious,
Galaxy-spanning, metaphysical, highly readable SPACE OPERA which provides
some engrossing speculations about a universe in which FASTER-THAN-LIGHT
travel is impossible and over which a conservative human hegemony
exercises control, ruthlessly braking the tendency of isolated colonies to
vary too far from the declared norm; there are echoes of Wolfbane (1959)
by C.M. KORNBLUTH and Frederic POHL. WB treats this use of power with due
though occasionally rather moody ambiguity. Yellow Matter (1993 chap) is a
savage little sf fable of exogamy. [JC]
BARZMAN, BEN
(1912-1989) Canadian-born US writer and film-writer whose sf novel Out of
this World (1960 UK; vt Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star 1960 US; vt Echo X
1962 US) ambitiously portrays twin Earths and tells a love story involving
people transported between them. [JC]
BASIL, OTTO
(1901-1983) Austrian writer. His sf novel, Wenn das der Fuhrer wusste
(1966; cut trans Thomas Weyr as The Twilight Men 1968 US), is set in an
ALTERNATE WORLD in which HITLER WINS in 1945 through the use of atomic
weapons; after Hitler dies, a battle for power ensues. [JC]See also:
GERMANY.
BASS, T.J.
Working name of US writer Thomas J. Bassler (1932- ), who began
publishing sf with "Star Seeder" for If in 1969. He is almost exclusively
associated with the series that comprises his only book publications, Half
Past Human (1969-70 Gal and If; fixup 1971) and The Godwhale (1974),
itself expanded from an earlier story, "Rorqual Maru" (1972 Gal). Through
a network of intricately interlinked stories, the first novel depicts a
densely overcrowded Earth where problems of OVERPOPULATION have been dealt
with by settling four-toed evolved human stock called Nebishes in vast
underground silos ( CITIES) under the control of a COMPUTER net. Outside
these hives, unevolved humans eke out savage existences; but an ancient
sentient starship named Olga ( CYBORGS) plans to seed the stars with her
beloved, five-toed, normal humans, and eventually succeeds, though the

Earth society of the Nebishes continues, oblivious to any threat. In The
Godwhale, a complexly structured SLEEPER-AWAKES tale, Larry Dever, a human
from our own near future, is mutilated in an accident and decides to enter
SUSPENDED ANIMATION to await a time when nerve regeneration is possible.
However, he is found to be still incurable when awoken millennia later
into an Earth society some time after the events of the previous volume. A
great long-dormant cyborg whale has registered life in the desolate ocean
and has reactivated herself, longing to serve mankind and harvest the seas
for him; she soon comes across humans evolved into Benthics capable of
living under water, and accepts them as human. Larry Dever escapes
servitude in the silos and joins the Godwhale; the seas are alive with
Benthics and lower forms of life - quite evidently, Olga has seeded the
planet. Mankind begins to inhabit the archipelagos and the Earth will once
again bear fruit.In these two books, TJB demonstrates a thorough command
of biological extrapolation and a sustained delight in the creation of a
witty, acronym-choked language suitable for the description of this new
environment. Though his control over the overall structure of a
novel-length fiction is insecure, the abundance of his invention conveyed
to readers of the 1970s a sense of TJB's potential importance as an sf
writer. He has, however, fallen silent, his series incomplete. [JC]See
also: EVOLUTION; HIVE-MINDS; UNDER THE SEA.
BATCHELOR, JOHN CALVIN
(1948- ) US author. His first two novels, The Further Adventures of
Halley's Comet (1981) and The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica
(1983), are borderline fantasy and sf respectively. He has also published
two mainstream novels, American Falls (1985) and Gordon Liddy is My Muse,
by Tommy "Tip" Paine (1990). With John R. Hamilton he wrote Thunder in the
Dust: Images of Western Movies (1987).JCB's novels have a gravity and
consistency which mark him as a significant contemporary writer; they
confront such themes as the morality of terror, the justice of ends and
means, and the construction of history by its victors. Halley's Comet is
an extended Pop- GOTHIC exercise. It presents a satirically and
grotesquely distorted picture of Western capitalism, whose distribution of
wealth and power appears as a weird latter-day version of feudalism.
People's Republic begins with similar Pop grotesquerie, but transforms
into an unremittingly stark NEAR-FUTURE Viking saga, its narrator a kind
of doomed and bloody seawolf. There is a vast backdrop of the collapse of
civilization across Europe and massive worldwide dislocation, apparently
in response to WAR in the Middle East and the virtual end of oil
production. As suppressed racial and other hatreds become rampant, and the
seas fill up with refugees on an uncontemplated scale, the so-called
"fleet of the damned" drifts towards the Antarctic, refused succour on any
populated shore. What are left of the civilized nations carry out a
massive programme of relief and resettlement, but we are led to understand
that the effort is half-hearted and serves the interests more of the
donors than of the disenfranchised and dispossessed hordes on the ice. The
narrative is heightened by awesome descriptions of both natural and
socially engendered cataclysm. Peter Nevsky and the True Story of the
Russian Moon Landing (1993), though told by Nevsky as an old man, is set
at the time of the Apollo 11 Moon shot, and is a fantasy of history rather

than sf; in Father's Day (1994), which is sf, a 21st century American
president must attempt to deal with a threatened coup. [RuB]See also:
DISASTER.
BATEMAN, ROBERT (MOYES CARRUTHERS)
(1922-1973) UK writer, primarily involved in radio and tv work. He did
revision work on Maurice RENARD's The Hands of Orlac for the 1960
translation. His sf novel, When the Whites Went (1963), is set in an
England where only Blacks survive a disease to which all others fall
victim. [JC]See also: POLITICS.
BATES, HARRY
Working name of US editor and writer Hiram Gilmore Bates III (1900-1981),
who began his career with the Clayton chain of PULP MAGAZINES in the
1920s, working as editor of an adventure magazine. When William Clayton,
the owner, suggested that HB initiate a period-adventure companion to it,
he successfully counterproposed a magazine to be called Astounding Stories
of Super-Science, which would compete with AMAZING STORIES. HB edited the
magazine - whose title was soon abbreviated to Astounding Stories (
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION) - for 34 issues, Jan 1930-Mar 1933. (He later
started a companion magazine, STRANGE TALES - intended as a rival to WEIRD
TALES - which lasted for 7 issues, Sept 1931-Jan 1933.) His was the first
true sf pulp magazine, paying four times as well as its competitors and
impatient with the static passages of PSEUDO-SCIENCE characteristic of
Hugo GERNSBACK's magazines. As Jack WILLIAMSON put it in The Early
Williamson (coll 1975): "Bates was professional . . . [he] wanted well
constructed action stories about strong, successful heroes. The
'super-science' had to be exciting and more-or-less plausible, but it
couldn't take much space." HB contributed stories to ASF in collaboration
with his assistant editor, Desmond W. HALL, the two sometimes writing
together as H.B. Winter but more famously as Anthony GILMORE, under which
name they produced the popular Hawk Carse series, which reached book form
as Space Hawk (coll of linked stories 1952); the first of these stories,
"Hawk Carse" (1931), was HB's first publication.After the Clayton group
went bankrupt in 1933, Strange Tales ceased publication and ASF was bought
by the STREET ?
This ended HB's editorial connection with sf, though over the next 20
years he wrote a few short stories. Although he used the pseudonym A.R.
Holmes on occasion, it was mainly under his own name that he published
such notable stories as "A Matter of Size" (1934), a story on the then
popular GREAT-AND-SMALL theme, and "Alas, All Thinking" (1935). "Farewell
to the Master" (1940) was later filmed as The DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL
(1951), although the film lost the story's ironic twist, which
demonstrated the pitfalls of interpreting nonhuman relationships in human
terms - in this instance, the relationship between a huge ROBOT and its
ALIEN "master". HB died in unfortunate obscurity. [MJE]See also:
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; EVOLUTION; SF MAGAZINES.
BATMAN
Neal ADAMS; Brian BOLLAND; DC COMICS; Frank MILLER; Alan MOORE.
*BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED

Film (1987). Amblin/Universal. Executive Prod Steven SPIELBERG. Dir
Matthew Robbins, starring Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Frank McCrae,
Elizabeth Pena, Michael Carmine. Screenplay Brad Bird, Robbins, Brent
Maddock, S.S. Wilson, based on a story by Mick Garris. 106 mins.
Colour.Originally intended as an episode of the tv series AMAZING STORIES,
this film betrays its small-screen origins in its slightness of plot. A
run-down rooming house with diner, which occupies land desired by a
property speculator, is visited by tiny saucer-shaped aliens, who help out
the residents and two elderly owners, eventually (with their new offspring
and other saucers) rebuilding the blown-up premises. Escapist fantasy at
best, this has no relationship other than the dubious aliens to genuine
sf. The novelization is *batteries not included * (1987) by Wayland DREW.
[PN]See also: CINEMA.
BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS
Film (1980). New World. Executive prod Roger CORMAN. Dir Jimmy T.
Murakami, starring Richard Thomas, Robert Vaughn, John Saxon, George
Peppard, Sybil Danning, Morgan Woodward, Steve Davis. Screenplay John
SAYLES, based on a story by Sayles, Anne Dyer. 103 mins. Colour.New World,
never slow to capitalize on a trend, hoped - with partial success - to woo
the STAR WARS market with this space-opera replay of The Magnificent Seven
(1960). It follows the pattern of its Western original right down to
Robert Vaughn's reprise of his role as a world-weary gunslinger. Sayles's
script is entertaining, as are Danning as the huge-breasted Valkyrie,
Woodward as the reptilian mercenary, and the heat-eating twin "Kelvin",
but the emphasis is on space battles which, while better than expected,
leave the story treatment perfunctory. Murakami's heavy direction muffles
the lightness of the script. The special effects were recycled in the
Corman-produced Space Raiders (1983), of which they are the raison d'etre.
[PN]
BATTLE BEYOND THE SUN
Roger CORMAN.
BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES
Film (1973). Apjac/20th Century-Fox. Dir J. Lee Thompson, starring Roddy
McDowall, Claude Akins, Natalie Trundy, Lew Ayres, John Huston. Screenplay
John William Corrington, Joyce Hooper Corrington, based on a story by Paul
Dehn. 86 mins. Colour.The fifth and last of the series beginning with
PLANET OF THE APES (to which this is a "prequel") and the most
disappointing. Established in their own Ape City after the near
destruction of mankind in WWIII, the social-democrat chimpanzee people,
still led by Caesar (from ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES), become
involved in a three-way struggle with a community of radiation-scarred
human survivors and the militant gorilla people. There is a feeling of
pointlessness about this simplistic film's attempt to squeeze a few more
dollars from the series. The novelization is Battle for the Planet of the
Apes * (1973) by David GERROLD. [PN/JB]
BATTLE OF THE ASTROS
GOJIRA; RADON.
BATTLE OF THE WORLDS

Il PIANETA DEGLI UOMINI SPENTI .
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
1. US tv series (1978). Universal Television/ABC-TV. Created by Glen A.
LARSON, also executive prod. Prods included John Dykstra and Don
Bellisario; main writers Larson and Bellisario; dirs included Christian
Nyby II and Dan Haller. 1 season only, beginning with a 150min pilot,
followed by 19 50min episodes, including 3 2-episode stories, plus one
100min episode. Colour.Perhaps the least likable of all tv sf in its
ineptness, its cynicism, its sentimentality and its contempt for and
ignorance of science, BG was devised by Larson (who went on to do a
similar job on BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY) in the wake of the
successful film STAR WARS, which it resembles closely in many respects;
moreover, John Dykstra, who initially did the special effects for BG (he
soon pulled out), had supervised the miniature photography on that film.
The series tells of humans (related to us according to a VON
DANIKEN-derived narration) elsewhere in the Galaxy being largely wiped out
by the robotic Cylons. A group of survivors, including the crew of a
military craft, the Battlestar, search for the legendary human colony of
Earth. Space battles, the raison d'etre of BG, were carried out by planes
apparently designed for flying in atmosphere, with fiery exhausts which,
Larson is quoted as saying, "make Space more acceptable to the
Midwest".The casting of Western star Lorne Green as the patriarchal
leader, Adama, emphasized the obvious subtext of wagon trains rolling west
under constant attack by Indians. Other regular cast members were Dirk
Benedict as Starbuck (ne Solo), Richard Hatch as Apollo (ne Skywalker),
Maren Jensen as Athena and Noah Hathaway as the cute boy, Boxie, whose
nauseating robot dog (ne R2D2) may have been the low point. Ratings began
well but soon fell off and, since each episode cost three times as much as
a conventional one-hour drama, the series was terminated. An attempt to
resuscitate it in altered form was GALACTICA: 1980. ( Glen A. LARSON for a
listing of the 14 spin-off BG books 1978-87, all, according to the covers,
co-authored by Larson, mostly with Robert THURSTON.)2. Film (1978).
Universal. Dir Richard A. Colla, starring the regular cast plus Ray
Milland, Lew Ayres. Screenplay Glen A. Larson. 122 mins, cut to 117 mins.
Colour.To recoup production costs on the tv series, Universal gave
theatrical release to the (edited) pilot episode. This militaristic film
(all politicians seeking peace are self-deluded weaklings) begins the BG
story with a battle against the Cylons, the round-up of survivors, the
beginning of the long trek to Earth, a visit to a pleasure-filled but
corrupt planet where they nearly get eaten, and a second battle against
the Cylons (close relatives of Star Wars's stormtroopers) - clearly a near
thing: "The Cylon fleet is five microns away and closing." The film is
poor. Another two-part episode from the tv series was theatrically
released as Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack (1979); it is more
cardboard still. [PN]See also: SCIENTIFIC ERRORS.
BAUM, L(YMAN) FRANK
(1856-1919) US writer of children's stories, who wrote also as Floyd
Akers, Laura Bancroft, John Estes Cooke, Hugh Fitzgerald, Schuyler
Staunton and Edith Van Dyne. He remains famous for his long series of

tales set in the land of Oz, beginning with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
(1900; vt The New Wizard of Oz 1903), which served as the main source for
the famous film version of 1939. The series continues with: Ozma of Oz
(1907; vt Princess Ozma of Oz 1942 UK);The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904; vt
The Land of Oz 1914); Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz (1908); The Road to Oz
(1909); The Emerald City of Oz (1910); The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913);
The Scarecrow of Oz (1915); Rinkitink in Oz (1916); The Lost Princess of
Oz (1917); The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918), the eponymous lumberjack of which
is not a robot; The Magic of Oz (1919); Glinda of Oz (1920); later titles
were from other hands. Ozma of Oz includes the first appearance of
Tik-Tok, an intelligent clockwork man, one of the first ROBOTS in fiction;
the tale was reworked as The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, a 1913 musical play,
itself then rewritten as the novel Tik-Tok of Oz (1914), which features a
TRANSPORTATION tube through the Earth. LFB's juvenile sf novel The Master
Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale Founded on the Mysteries of Electricity and
the Optimism of its Devotees. It was Written for Boys, but Others May Read
It (1901), is an EDISONADE described rather fully by its title; the child
tinkerer-hero, though his electrical gun and ANTIGRAVITY device are
supplied magically, finds scientific explanations for everything he
experiences. A story in American Fairy Tales (coll 1901; rev with 3 more
stories 1908) describes the freezing of time in a US city. Some of LFB's
other work, which was produced very rapidly (only a sample is listed
below), was fantasy. Among a wide range of authors influenced by LFB,
recent examples include Gene WOLFE in "The Eyeflash Miracles" (1976) and
Free Live Free (1984), and Geoff RYMAN, whose non-fantastic novel "Was . .
." (1992; vt Was 1992 US), partly set in 19th-century Kansas, constitutes
a thorough examination of the roots of Oz. [JC]Other works: A New
Wonderland (1900; vt The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of
Mo 1903); The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1902); John Dough and
the Cherub (1906); The Sea Fairies (1911) and its sequel Sky Island
(1912); The Purple Dragon and Other Fantasies (1897-1905 various mags;
coll 1976); Animal Fairy Tales (1905 The Delineator; coll 1989).About the
author: Wizard of Oz and Who He Was (1957) by Martin GARDNER and R.B. Nye;
The Oz Scrapbook (1977) by David L. Greene and Dick Martin.See also:
CHILDREN'S SF; DIME-NOVEL SF; MACHINES.
BAX, MARTIN
(1933- ) UK doctor of medicine, current (1992) editor of the literary
magazine Ambit and writer. In his sf novel, The Hospital Ship (1976),
which has more than a passing resemblance to the Narrenschiff or Ship of
Fools, a group of experimental doctors sail the world's oceans after a
HOLOCAUST, curing those they can cure, stashing those they definitely
cannot in the ship's mortuary, and applying a variety of techniques, many
sexual, to the in-betweens. [JC]
BAXTER, JOHN
(1939- ) Australian writer, who has also lived and worked in the UK and
USA. He began publishing sf with "Vendetta's End" for Science Fiction
Adventures in 1962, and for the next four years appeared primarily in New
Worlds; he wrote some stories with Ron Smith (1936- ) under the joint
pseudonym Martin Loran. His sf novel, The Off-Worlders (1966 dos US; vt

The God Killers 1968 Aus) portrays the superstition-ridden ex-colony
planet of Merryland and a search for the lost knowledge it contains. The
Hermes Fall (1978 US) depicts with some vigour the DISASTER created when
an asteroid strikes the Earth. Increasingly, JB has concentrated on
writing on the cinema, his work in this genre including the informative,
though not always accurate, Science Fiction in the Cinema (1970), and 11
titles unconnected with sf. The Fire Came By (1976), written with Thomas
A. Atkins, a science-fact book containing some almost-sf speculations,
tells of the great Siberian explosion of 1908. As editor JB produced The
Pacific Book of Australian Science Fiction (anth 1968; vt Australian
Science Fiction 1 1969) and The Second Pacific Book of Australian Science
Fiction (anth 1971; vt Australian Science Fiction 2 1971). [JC/PN]Other
works: The Black Yacht (1982 US); Torched (1986) with John BROSNAN, both
writing as James Blackstone, a horror novel about spontaneous
combustion.See also: CINEMA.
BAXTER, STEPHEN (M.)
(1957- ) UK writer who has also signed his name Steve Baxter and S.M.
Baxter. He began publishing sf with "The Xeelee Flower" for Interzone in
1987, which with most of his other short work fits into his Xeelee
Sequence, an ambiitious attempt at creating a Future HISTORY; novels
included in the sequence are Raft (1989 Interzone; much exp 1991, Timelike
Infinity (1992), Flux (1993) and Rind (1994). The sequence - as centrally
narrated in the second and fourth volume - follows humanity into
interstellar space, where it enoucnters a complex of ALIEN races; the long
epic ends (being typical in this of UK sf) darkly, many aeons hence. SB's
basic mode is HARD SF, and his History is unusually dense with
thought-experiment environments. Raft, for instance, though it labors
under the strain of an ineptly conceived protagonist, effectively posits
an ultra-high-gravity universe, and argues the consequences to migrant
humans of living there; and Flux posits a microscopic folk who live on the
surface of a NEUTRON STAR. The TIME TRAVEL intricacies of Ring are at
points daunting; but the sweeping millennia-long tale is carried off with
a genuine, sciencefictional SENSE OF WONDER. SB's only work of interest
unconnected to Xeelee is Anti-Ice (1993), an ALTERNATE HISTORY tale set in
an England transfigured into a STEAMPUNK dystopia by the discovery of the
eponymous superconductor - extracted from a fallen moonlet - which
explodes with nuclear force when heated, but which is also capable of
powering spaceships. There is an occasional almost metallic flatness of
tone in this novel, a flatness characteristic of SB's work as a whole;
this seems a relatively small price to pay for the exhilaration of the
ride. [JC]Other works:Chiron (1993 chap); The Time Ships (1995), a sequel
to H. G. WELL's THE TIME MACHINE (1895).See also: CLICHES; GRAVITY;
IMAGINARY SCIENCE; INTERZONE.
BAYLEY, BARRINGTON J(OHN)
(1937- ) UK writer, active as a freelance under various names for many
years, author of juvenile stories, picture-strips and features as well as
sf, which he began to publish with "Combat's End" for Vargo Statten
Science Fiction Magazine in 1954. His sf pseudonyms include P.F. Woods (at
least 10 stories), Alan Aumbry (1 story), John Diamond (1 story), and

(with Michael MOORCOCK) Michael BARRINGTON (1 story). Some early tales
appear in The Seed of Evil (coll 1979). All his sf novels have been as
BJB, beginning with Star Virus (1964 NW; exp 1970 dos US). This complex
and somewhat gloomy space epic, along with some of its successors, has had
a strong though not broadly recognized influence on such UK sf writers as
M. John HARRISON; perhaps because BJB's style is sometimes laboured and
his lack of cheerful endings is alien to the expectations of readers of
conventional SPACE OPERA, he has yet to receive due recognition for the
hard-edged control he exercises over plots whose intricate dealings in
TIME PARADOXES and insistent metaphysical drive make them some of the most
formidable works of their type. Though Annihilation Factor (1964 as "The
Patch" NW as by Peter Woods; exp 1972 dos US), Empire of Two Worlds (1972
US) and Collision Course (1973 US; vt Collision with Chronos 1977
UK)-which utilizes the time theories of J.W. DUNNE - are all variously
successful, probably the most fully realized time-paradox space opera from
his pen is The Fall of Chronopolis (1974 US; vt Chronopolis 1979 UK), in
which the Chronotic Empire jousts against a terrifying adversary in doomed
attempts to maintain a stable reality; at the crux of the book it becomes
evident that the conflict is eternal, and that the same forces will oppose
one another through time forever (see also ALTERNATE WORLDS).The Soul of
the Robot (1974 US; rev 1976 UK), along with its sequel The Rod of Light
(1985), marked a change of pace in its treatment of such ROBOT themes as
the nature of self-consciousness; the book makes complex play with a
number of philosophical paradoxes, though BJB's touch here is
uncharacteristically light. The Garments of Caean (1976 US; text restored
1978 UK) utilizes some fairly sophisticated cultural ANTHROPOLOGY in a
space-opera tale of sentient clothing which owns the man. But perhaps the
most significant work BJB produced in the 1970s was in short fiction, most
of it collected in The Knights of the Limits (coll 1978), a remarkable
(though astonishingly bleak) assembly of experiments in the carrying of
story ideas to the end of their tether. Later space operas - The Grand
Wheel (1977), Star Winds (1978 US), The Pillars of Eternity (1982 US), The
Zen Gun (1983 US) and The Forest of Peldain (1985 US) - continued to take
an orrery joy in the galaxies. BJB continues to be seriously
underestimated, perhaps because of his almost total restriction to pulp
formats. [JC] Other works: The Pillars of Eternity and The Garments of
Caean (omni 1989); The Fall of Chronopolis and Collision with Chronos
(omni 1989).About the author: "Knight Without Limit: An Overview of the
Work of Barrington Bayley" by Andy Darlington in Arena 10 (1980); The
Writings of Barrington J. Bayley (1981 chap) by Mike ASHLEY.See also:
ARTS; COSMOLOGY; CYBORGS; ECONOMICS; EVOLUTION; GALACTIC EMPIRES;
HIVE-MINDS; INTERZONE; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; METAPHYSICS; MUSIC; NEW WAVE;
NEW
WORLDS.
BEACH, LYNN
Kathryn LANCE.
BEACHCOMBER
J.B. MORTON.
BEACON MAGAZINES

Ned L. PINES; THRILLING WONDER STORIES.
BEALE, CHARLES WILLING
(1845-1932) US writer in whose The Secret of the Earth (1899) aeronauts
find a hole in the planet and penetrate a routine HOLLOW EARTH inhabited
by a lost race ( LOST WORLDS), which they fail to contact. [JC]Other
works: The Ghost of Guir House (1897).
BEAN, NORMAN
[s] Edgar Rice BURROUGHS.
BEAR, GREG
Working name of US writer Gregory Dale Bear (1951- ), son-in-law of Poul
ANDERSON. He began publishing sf with "Destroyers" for Famous Science
Fiction in 1967, and began to write full-time in 1975. His first stories
and novels were auspicious but not remarkably so, and he gave no immediate
signs of becoming one of the dominant writers of the 1980s. Between 1985
and 1990, however, he published six novels whose importance to the realm
of HARD SF-and to the world of sf in general - it would be hard to
overrate; he also served as President of the SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF
AMERICA 1988-90. Other new writers in that period, like Lucius SHEPARD,
had perhaps a greater grasp of the aesthetic trials and challenges of the
art of fiction; still others, like Kim Stanley ROBINSON, might conceive a
richer world; some, like David BRIN, might be handier with galaxies; and
William GIBSON, by giving CYBERPUNK a habitation, gave Bruce STERLING a
home. But only Orson Scott CARD could legitimately and centrally stand
with GB and manifest the voice of US GENRE SF.It would be a long trek from
Hegira (1979; rev 1987 UK), GB's first novel, a PLANETARY-ROMANCE quest
tale whose venue, a huge artificial hollow world comically called Hegira,
turns out itself to be questing through space at the end of time,
accompanied by a vast conglomeration of similar planets which constitute
en masse a singularity capable of surviving the end of the Universe, and
whose task it is to carry the burden of life into the subsequent reality.
Even in the extensively revised version of 1987, the narrative is
top-heavy with explanations pumped for SENSE OF WONDER. Though the
variegations of cast and scenery are typical of later GB creations - and
though the biological imperatives ( BIOLOGY), and the transcendental
COSMOLOGY at novel's close, would be reiterated time and again in his work
- Hegira seemed to show ambition far beyond the reach of talent. It was an
impression only slowly to be modified by the far-reaching (but frequently
lame) books which followed, like Psychlone (1979; vt Lost Souls 1982),
though Beyond Heaven's River (1980) - a tale which carries a Japanese
fighter pilot from WWII into a morally complex galactic venue 400 years
hence - manages both to create a plausible protagonist and to match his
understanding of the larger picture with ours. Set in a universe which
shares some features with the one in that book are Strength of Stones
(fixup 1981; rev 1988 UK) and some of the stories assembled in The Wind
from a Burning Woman (coll 1983; with 2 stories added, rev vt The Venging
1992 UK) and Tangents (coll 1989) - whose title story won both HUGO and
NEBULA awards. These tales depict with some confidence venues created by a
human civilization faced with the need to balance its nearly infinite
capacity to transform the Universe against ancient moral imperatives. The

title story of the first collection, for instance, evokes a conflict
between environmentalist Naderites and technophilic Geshels which would
echo down the aisles of EON (1985); and "Sisters", in the second
collection, brilliantly affirms a broad-church definition of the human
family.It was not, however, until the publication of BLOOD MUSIC (1985)
that GB began to show his true strength, which might be defined as the
capacity to incorporate the hardest and most cognitively demanding of
hard-sf premises and plot-logics into tales whose protagonists display far
greater complexity than anything unliving. It can be argued that the
singular failure of almost all hard-sf writers to create noteworthy
literature lies in their assumption that it is more difficult to
understand - say - plasma physics than to understand human beings. The
significance of GB's later 1980s novels lies in the fact that his human
beings are more difficult to describe than his physics. (It might be added
that his political views - like most hard-sf writers he constantly
expresses them - are also graced by a lack of dreadful simplicity.) In
BLOOD MUSIC - the 1983 novella version won both Hugo and Nebula - the hard
science is GENETIC ENGINEERING, and the character who ignites the plot is
a humanly ineffectual scientist who illicitly uses biochip technology to
tranform RNA molecules into living computers; these join together into
Gestalts which themselves combine into a single transcendental higher
consciousness incorporating all of life upon the planet into one
externally homogeneous biosphere. The close of the book, as the new
consciousness enters into rapport with the true Universe, has been
appropriately likened to the climax of Arthur C. CLARKE's CHILDHOOD'S END
(1953).GB's other 1985 novel EON, along with its sequel Eternity (1988),
is both more conventional and more enthralling. The conventionality lies
in a partial return to the large-scale enterprises of cosmological SPACE
OPERA, accompanied by a marked retreat from the nearly religious
transcendentalism evoked in GB by any application of information theory.
The grip of the sequence lies in the remarkable fertility of the concepts
presented: the hollowed-out asteroid, from an alternate timeline, whose
final chamber is literally endless; the extraordinary architectonics of
GB's demonstration of the nature of this phenomenon; the enormously
complex COMPUTER-run culture partway up the infinite corridor; the
relentless expansion of perspective, in a series of CONCEPTUAL
BREAKTHROUGHS, as the ordering and end of the entire Universe come into
question in the second volume. In the final analysis, this relentlessness
works perhaps best in the earlier portions of the tale - EON itself is
perhaps the best-constructed epic of cosmology yet written in the field but the two volumes together amply demonstrate GB's control over scale and
cognition.In something like the same spirit, The Forge of God (1987)
tackles the END OF THE WORLD by confronting NEAR-FUTURE humanity with a
sequence of ALIEN intrusions, one of which proves utterly and implacably
fatal to the existence of the planet. The bulldog inexorability with which
GB presents this scenario is darkly exhilarating, and seemed at the time a
welcome prophylactic to the assumption embedded in most hard-sf novels
that catastrophes, no matter how grave, will be sidestepped by the fit: a
sequel, however, Anvil of Stars (1992 UK), somewhat softens the blow of
the first volume by carrying a few human survivors in an alien ship on a
revenge mission directed against the apparent makers of the autonomous

weapons which destroyed Earth. Ultimately more interesting, though told
with a complexity that some readers have found congested, was Queen of
Angels (1990), which embodies a wide range of speculations about the
effects of recent theories about NANOTECHNOLOGY. Set mainly in a Los
Angeles transformed into a kind of beehive of human and para-human
activity, the book tells several kinds of story, in several venues: a
formal tale of detection (told from the complex viewpoint of a
biotransformed female cop); a prose-poem leading into voodoo; a tale of
VIRTUAL REALITY entrapments, and a narrative of the coming to
consciousness of an AI. Throughout, sustaining these strands of story, is
a boding sense of transcendental transformation, a sense that Queen of
Angels is perhaps a snapshot of one moment in an epic which will end in
the total victory of information that GB described in BLOOD MUSIC. A short
novel, Heads (1990 UK), set in something like the same Universe, concisely
conflates a Moon-based search for the Absolute Zero of temperature and the
threat that a cryogenically preserved head might turn out to be that of a
20th-century guru whose manipulative sect generations earlier proved
particularly attractive in some sf circles.Moving Mars (1993), which is
connected to the world depicted in Queen of Angels, and which won the 1995
Nebula Award, is a broader and more traditional tale. Its depiction of
MARS may lack some of the resolute arguments that accompany every
speculative suggestion in Kim Stanley ROBINSON's Mars sequence, but GB's
novel gains a commensurate freedom of sweep in its story - which
intermixes politics and an array of scientific discoveries - of the
emancipation of Mars from the hegemony of a paranoia-driven Earth. The
title, it may be fair to add, is meant literally.It is not easy to say
what might come next; it can be expected that whatever GB writes will
continue to bring sf and the world together, relentlessly. [JC]Other
works: The Speculative Poetry Review #1 (anth 1977 chap), an anthology in
magazine form; a STAR TREK tie, Corona * (1984); the Michael Perrin
fantasy sequence comprising The Infinity Concerto (1984) and The Serpent
Mage (1986), both assembled as Songs of Earth ? rev
1994 US), the UK edition incorrectly implying revised status - GB's
modifications were not incorporated because of production difficulties,
and appear for the first time in the US edition; Sleepside Story (1988
chap); Early Harvest (coll 1988), containing also some nonfiction;
Hardfought (1983 IASFM; 1988 chap dos), reprinting the Nebula-winning
story; Bear's Fantasies (coll 1992).See also: ARKHAM HOUSE; ASTEROIDS;
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; AUTOMATION; BIG DUMB OBJECTS; CHILDREN IN
SF;
CITIES; CYBERNETICS; DEVOLUTION; DISASTER; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION;
EVOLUTION; FANTASY; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GODS AND DEMONS; INTELLIGENCE;
INTERZONE; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; MACHINES;
MATHEMATICS;
MEDICINE; METAPHYSICS; MUTANTS; OMNI; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM;
PSYCHOLOGY;
SPACE HABITATS; WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION.
BEASON, DOUG
(1953- ) US writer and officer in the USAF with a PhD in physics who
began publishing sf with "The Man I'll Never Be" for AMZ in 1987. Return

to Honor (1989), Assault on Alpha Base (1990) and Strike Eagle (1991) are
TECHNOTHRILLERS, but Lifeline (1990) with Kevin J. ANDERSON is of sf
interest, and marked both writers as names to watch. Further novels with
Anderson (whom see for further details of both books), The Trinity Paradox
(1991) and Assemblers of Infinity (1993), interestingly plumb the moral
perils of TIME TRAVELand examine some of the darker implications of
NANOTECHNOLOGY. [JC]See also: NUCLEAR POWER.
BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE
Roger CORMAN.
BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS, THE
Film (1953). Mutual Pictures/Warner Bros. Dir Eugene Lourie, starring
Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway, Kenneth Tobey. Screenplay
Lou Morheim, Fred Freiberger, based on "The Fog Horn" (1951) by Ray
BRADBURY. 80 mins. B/w.This was the second of the 1950s MONSTER MOVIES-the
first being The THING (1951) - and the one that established the basic
formula for most of those that followed. An atomic test in the Arctic
wakes a dinosaur frozen in the ice. It swims to its ancestral
breeding-grounds - an area now covered by the city of New York. It is
finally trapped and killed in an amusement park. This is the first film on
which model animator Ray HARRYHAUSEN had full control over the special
effects, though these are not remarkable. Nor is the film, though it looks
good: Lourie usually worked as an art director on mostly non-sf films,
including some of Jean Renoir's most distinguished; his other sf films are
BEHEMOTH, THE SEA MONSTER (1958), The COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK (1958) and
GORGO (1959). [JB]
BEAST WITH A MILLION EYES
Roger CORMAN.
BEAUJON, PAUL
Pseudonym of UK writer Beatrice Lamberton Warde (1900-1969), whose sf
novella, The Shelter in Bedlem (1937 chap; rev vt Peace Under Earth:
Dialogues from the Year 1946 1938 chap), expressed a grim view of the
DYSTOPIA which would follow the end of conflict. [JC]
BEAUMONT, CHARLES
(1929-1967) US story- and scriptwriter, born Charles Leroy Nutt but later
legally changing his name to CB; he wrote some non-sf under other names.
He began publishing his blend of horror and sf with "The Devil, You Say?"
for AMZ in 1951. Most of his work is collected in The Hunger (coll 1957;
with title story cut vt Shadow Play 1964 UK), Yonder (coll 1958), Night
Ride and Other Journeys (coll 1960), The Magic Man (coll 1965) and The
Edge (coll 1966 UK), which reassembles Yonder and Night Ride;
posthumously, this material was re-sorted and added to in Best of Beaumont
(coll 1982) and Charles Beaumont: Selected Stories (1988; vt The Howling
Man 1992). CB's work combines humour and horror in a slick style extremely
effective in underlining the grimness of his basic inspiration. As a
writer of sf, fantasy and horror movies, he scripted or coscripted Queen
of Outer Space (1958), The Premature Burial (1962), Burn, Witch, Burn
(1962; vt The Night of the Eagle) - based on Conjure Wife (1943; 1953) by
Fritz LEIBER - The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), The

Haunted Palace (1963), The Seven Faces of Dr Lao (1964), The Masque of the
Red Death (1964) and BRAIN DEAD (1989). Several of these were directed by
Roger CORMAN. His numerous tv scripts include around 19 for The TWILIGHT
ZONE . He also collaborated with Chad OLIVER on the brief Claude Adams
series (FSF 1955-6) and edited a horror anthology, The Fiend in You (anth
1962). He was struck in 1964 by a savage illness which ravaged and
eventually killed him. [JC]About the author: The Work of Charles Beaumont
(2nd edn 1990 chap) by William F. NOLAN.See also: HORROR IN SF;
INVISIBILITY.
BEAUMONT, ROGER
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
BEAUTIFUL WOMEN AND THE HYDROGEN MAN
BIJO TO EKITAI NINGEN.
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
US tv series (1987-90). A Witt-Tomas Production for CBS. Created Ron
Koslow. Prods Paul Junger Witt, Tony Thomas, Koslow. Writers included
George R.R. MARTIN, Koslow, Shelly Moore, Linda Campanelli. Dirs included
Richard Franklin, Gus Trikonis, Ron Perlman. 3 seasons, totalling 55 50
min episodes. Colour.An urban fairytale, inspired in its make-up design if
not in its commitment to magic by Jean Cocteau's film La Belle et la Bete
(1946), BATB centres on the relationship between Catherine (Linda
Hamilton), a chic Manhattan district attorney, and Vincent (Ron Perlman),
a poeticizing, romantic, MUTANT lion-man who lives with his adopted father
(Roy Dotrice) in a world of derelicts in tunnels deep beneath the city. He
has a telepathic link with his ladylove. Despite the involvement of
distinguished sf writer George R.R. Martin as story editor, the show was a
combination of soap opera and crime thriller rather than a real sf/fantasy
offering, though the idea of a fantastic city beneath the real one is
interesting. The unorthodox team normally righted wrongs that could as
easily have served as springboards for episodes of any other action
adventure, while for two seasons Catherine and Vincent merely pussy-footed
around their relationship. The show's fragile charm being almost
exhausted, the format underwent severe changes in its final season, first
with the consummation of the central relationship, then with the casual
killing-off of the heroine and several other supporting cast members,
motivating Vincent's character change from mutant Care Bear to raging
vigilante. Catherine was replaced briefly by Diana Bennett (Jo Anderson),
a police officer, but the show never regained the-largely female - fan
following its earlier, more wistful episodes had picked up. A
novelization, largely of the first episode, is Beauty and the Beast *
(1989) by Barbara HAMBLY. [KN/PN]See also: SUPERHEROES.
de BEAUVOIR, SIMONE (LUCIIE ERNESTINE MARIE BERTRAND)
(1908-1986) French writer, famous for a wide variety of work, whose only
sf novel, Tous les hommes son mortels (1946; trans L. Friedman as All Men
Are Mortal 1955 US), examines the dilemmas of IMMORTALITY as experienced
by the protagonist of the book, who becomes deathless in the 13th century,
and retrospectively - from a contemporary point of view - makes a case for
regretting his condition. [JC]

BECHDOLT, JACK
Working name of US writer John Ernest Bechdolt (1884-1954) for his
fiction, though he used his full name for other writing. The Lost Vikings
(1931) features juveniles who discover a lost race ( LOST WORLDS) of
Vikings in Alaska. The Torch (1920 Argosy; 1948) is a post- HOLOCAUST
story set in the New York of AD3000; the torch is the Statue of Liberty's.
[JC]See also: CITIES.
BECK, CHRISTOPHER
T.C. BRIDGES.
BEDFORD, JOHN
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
BEDFORD-JONES, H(ENRY JAMES O'BRIEN)
(1887-1949) Canadian author, later a naturalized US citizen, who was one
of the most prolific and popular pulp writers; of his more than 100
novels, a few - e.g., The Star Woman (1924) - were sf adventures. His
works appeared in the PULP MAGAZINES - The Magic Carpet, Golden Fleece,
All-Story Weekly and numerous others -under at least 15 pseudonyms. His
fictions were primarily historical and adventure, sometimes having sf or
weird elements as a basic framework. Among his earliest fantasies are the
LOST-WORLD adventures of his John Solomon series (in magazine form as by
HBJ, in book form as by Allan Hawkwood): Solomon's Quest (1915); Gentleman
Solomon (1915), about an unknown Middle Eastern pygmy race; Solomon's
Carpet (1915); The Seal of Solomon (1915 Argosy; 1924 UK), about a
community established by Crusaders in the Arabian desert; John Solomon
(1916); John Solomon Retired (1917); Solomon's Son (1918); John Solomon,
Supercargo (1924 UK); John Solomon, Incognito (1925 UK); The Shawl of
Solomon (1925 UK); The Wizard of the Atlas (1928 UK). In similar vein are
Splendour of the Gods (1924) and, in collaboration with W.C. Robertson,
The Temple of the Ten (1921; 1973), both of which appeared under his own
name.More germane to the genre were the several series that later appeared
in The BLUE BOOK MAGAZINE. The first of these was the Trumpets from
Oblivion series, 11 stories running from "The Stagnant Death" (1938) to
"The Serpent People" (1939). In these tales a device capable of recording
sounds and images from the past is used to establish a rational origin for
various myths and legends. A similar gadget is employed in the nine
Counterclockwise stories, running from "Counterclockwise" (1943) to "The
Gods do not Forget" (1944). Also in The Blue Book Magazine appeared two
futuristic series (as by Gordon Keyne) dealing, respectively, with the
struggle to maintain peace in the post-WWII years and with a post-WWII
Bureau of Missing Persons. The first, Tomorrow's Men, comprised "Peace
Hath her Victories" (1943), "The Battle for France" (1943), "Sahara Doom"
(1943) and "Tomorrow in Egypt" (1943). The second series was Quest, Inc.,
with 12 stories from "The Affair of the Drifting Face" (1943) to "The
Final Hoard" (1945). Other series included The Adventures of a
Professional Corpse (1940-41 WEIRD TALES), Carson's Folly (1945-6 Blue
Book Magazine) and The Sphinx Emerald (1946-7 Blue Book Magazine), which
last traces the malign influence of a gem throughout history. [JE]See
also: CANADA; MYTHOLOGY.

BEDSHEET
A term used to describe a magazine format, in contrast to pulp and
DIGEST. The bedsheet format - sometimes called large pulp format - is the
largest of the three; it varies slightly but approximates 8.5 x 11.75in
(216 x 298mm) - i.e., close to A4 (210 x 297mm). It was used by some of
the more prestigious PULP MAGAZINES in the 1920s and 1930s and, in a
slightly narrower version, became popular again in the late 1960s with
such magazines as NEW WORLDS and VISION OF TOMORROW; these, having fewer
pages than the earlier bedsheet magazines, were stapled rather than glued.
Magazines of this type, when printed on coated paper, are often called
slicks; although the term "slick" refers to paper quality rather than
size, slicks (e.g., OMNI) are normally in a smallish bedsheet format.
[PN]See also: SF MAGAZINES.
BED-SITTING ROOM, THE
Film (1969). Oscar Lewenstein/United Artists. Dir Richard Lester,
starring Rita Tushingham, Mona Washbourne, Arthur Lowe, Ralph Richardson,
Spike MILLIGAN, Michael Hordern, Roy Kinnear, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore.
Screenplay John Antrobus from the play by Antrobus Milligan. 91 mins.
Colour.BSR is a FABULATION, a black comedy set in England after WWIII,
where dazed survivors wander about pretending that nothing has happened,
even when some of them mutate into wardrobes, bed-sitting rooms and
parrots. The original play was a much-improvised piece of slapstick, and
what remains of it clashes awkwardly with chillingly bleak settings
showing the realistic aftermath of an atomic war: the shattered dome of St
Paul's Cathedral protruding from a swamp, a line of wrecked cars along a
disembodied length of motorway, a grim landscape dominated by great piles
of sludge and heaps of discarded boots, broken plates and false teeth. The
film effectively has no plot, and its disjointedness, while pleasantly
surreal, gives it an inconsequential air. [JB/PN]
BEEBEE, CHRIS
(? - ) UK writer known exclusively for his Cipola sequence, set in the
21st century on Earth and in a SPACE HABITAT: The Hub (1987) and The Main
Event (1989). The world of the sequence is dominated by COMPUTERS, and
trouble brews when the GRAIL programs go missing; the protagonist tries to
cope. [JC]
BEECHING, JACK
(1922- ) UK writer, mostly of poetry, and (with his first wife) of
juveniles as James Barbary. His novel The Dakota Project (1968) is a
TECHNOTHRILLER whose eponymous government project contains top secrets of
borderline sf interest. [JC]
BEEDING, FRANCIS
Joint pseudonym of UK writers John Leslie Palmer (1885-1944) and Hilary
Saunders (1898-1951) for numerous works in various genres, mainly
detective novels and thrillers; their sf novels are near-future political
thrillers. In The Seven Sleepers (1925 US) villainous Germans are kept
from starting a second world war. In its sequel, The Hidden Kingdom
(1927), Outer Mongolia is threatened with enslavement. The One Sane Man
(1934) features a man's attempt to enforce world peace by threatening

disaster, in this case via weather control. [JC]See also: CRIME AND
PUNISHMENT.
BEERE, PETER
(? - ) UK writer whose Trauma 2020 sequence of 21st-century action
thrillers-Trauma 2020: Urban Prey (1984), #2: The Crucifixion Squad (1984)
and #3: Silent Slaughter (1985) - has some efficient moments, as do his
two novels for young adults, Underworld III (1992), which is sf, and Doom
Sword (1993), which is fantasy. [JC]
BEESE, P.J.
(1946- ) US writer whose sf novel, The Guardsman (1988), with Todd
Cameron Hamilton, is an unremarkable example of interstellar-empire
adventure sf; its nomination for the 1989 HUGO caused some stir, and there
was evidence of block voting. When made aware of this, the authors
requested that their novel be withdrawn from the ballot. [JC]
BEGBIE, (EDWARD) HAROLD
(1871-1929) UK writer and journalist, author of The Day that Changed the
World (1912), as by "The Man who Was Warned", a religious fantasy in which
humankind's spiritual development is sharply uplifted by divine
intervention. HB also wrote On the Side of the Angels (1915), a reply to
Arthur MACHEN's The Bowmen (coll 1915; rev with 2 additional stories,
1915), and two political satires, Clara In Blunderland (1902) and Lost in
Blunderland: The Further Adventures of Clara (1903), both written with
M.H. Temple and J. Stafford Ransome (1860-1931) under the collaborative
pseudonym Caroline Lewis. [JE]
BEGOUEN, MAX
(? -? ) French prehistorian and author of three prehistoric novels, of
which only Les bisons d'argile (1925; trans as Bison of Clay 1926) has
been translated into English. His entry for the Prix Jules Verne (
AWARDS), Quand le mammouth ressuscita ["When the Mammoth Revives"] (1928),
although placed only second, was deemed of sufficient merit to warrant
publication. [JE]Other works: Tisik et Kate, aventures de deux enfants a
l'epoque du renne ["Tisik and Kate: The Adventures of Two Children in the
Time of the Reindeer"] (1946).See also: ORIGIN OF MAN.
BEHEMOTH, THE SEA MONSTER
(vt The Giant Behemoth US) Film (1959). Diamond/Allied Artists. Dir
Douglas Hickox, Eugene Lourie, starring Gene Evans, Andre Morell, Jack
MacGowran, Leigh Madison. Screenplay Lourie. 80 mins, cut to 72 mins. B/w.
Lourie made several MONSTER MOVIES during his career, including The BEAST
FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953), of which BTSM - his least successful - is a
partial remake. The story is the usual one - a prehistoric reptile is
revived by atomic radiation and immediately sets out to demolish the
nearest city, in this case London. There is a good build-up of suspense in
some sequences but, despite the presence of the elderly Willis H. O'BRIEN
(designer of the original KING KONG) on the team, the very low budget
severely restricted the scope of the effects. [JB]
BEHOUNEK, FRANTISEK
[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.

BEKSICS, GUSZTAV
[r] HUNGARY.
BELAYEV, A.
[r] Alexander BELYAEV.
"BELCAMPO"
BENELUX.
BELDEN, DAVID (CORDEROY)
(1949- ) Swiss-born UK writer, in the USA from 1982, whose Galactic
Collectivity sequence - Children of Arable (1986) and To Warm the Earth
(1988) - depicts with clearly felt didactic urgency a FAR-FUTURE Earth
trapped in sterile stasis, with a stagnant galactic civilization
impotently observing the dying of the mother planet. In the first volume a
woman gives birth to a child, and this has a rejuvenating effect (the
novel is rich in feminist and religious discourse); in the second novel of
the sequence, another female protagonist looks to a Collectivity satellite
for a dubious technological fix. [JC]
BELGIUM
BENELUX.
BELIAEV, ALEXANDER
[r] Alexander BELYAEV.
BELIAYEV, ALEXANDER
[r] Alexander BELYAEV.
BELL, CLARE (LOUISE)
(1952- ) UK-born writer, in the USA from 1957; a test-equipment engineer
for a computer firm 1978-90. She began publishing sf with Ratha's Creature
(1983), the first volume of the Ratha Ya sequence of juveniles - continued
with Clan Ground (1984) and Ratha and Thistle-Chaser (1990)-which
delineates the lives of an ALTERNATE-WORLD tribe of intelligent
cougar-like felines, concentrating on Ratha, a rebel who becomes necessary
for the survival of her people. Tomorrow's Sphinx (1986), also an sf
juvenile but this time about an intelligent cheetah, is set on an Earth
abandoned by the humans who have devastated it. In People of the Sky
(1989), for adults, an Amerindian star-pilot discovers a planet inhabited
by Pueblos; their relationship to the indigenous insect ALIENS, which they
ride like horses, and the puzzle of their existence generate sufficient
mystery to keep the competent narrative on the move. CB might choose to
inhabit the consciousnesses of sentient animals - as in The Jaguar
Princess (1993), a fantasy - or of a member of a culture foreign to her
own (such as an Amerindian), but the true "aliens" in her imaginative
world are the (human) representatives of technological society. In
collaboration with M. Coleman EASTON, with whom she lives, both writing as
Clare Coleman, she has published the Ancient Pacific series, Daughter of
the Reef (1992), Sister of the Sun (1993) and Child of the Dawn (1994);
they are essentially historical in nature. [JC]
BELL, ERIC TEMPLE
[r] John TAINE.

BELL, NEIL
Pseudonym of UK writer Stephen Southwold (1887-1964), used on his early
poetry and most of his later novels. Born Stephen Henry Critten, he took
the name Southwold (from his birthplace) because he despised his father,
for reasons made clear in the semi-autobiographical chapters which recur
in many of his novels, including Precious Porcelain (1931) and The Lord of
Life (1933). He wrote juveniles and a few biographical novels under his
adopted name, and also used the pseudonyms Stephen Green, S.H. Lambert,
Paul Martens and Miles. His first sf novel, The Seventh Bowl (1930 as by
Miles; reprinted 1934 as by NB), is a bitter future HISTORY in which the
deployment of a technology of IMMORTALITY by corrupt politicians sets in
train a chain of events leading to the END OF THE WORLD. His second, The
Gas War of 1940 (1931 as by Miles; vt Valiant Clay 1934 as by NB), gives a
more detailed account of an incident - the use of poison gas in war - from
the same future history. The caustic outlook of these works is displayed
also in the apocalyptic black comedy The Lord of Life and in the stories
in his first and best collection, Mixed Pickles: Short Stories (coll
1935); these include the sf stories "The Mouse" and "The Evanescence of
Adrian Fulk" and the sarcastic messianic fantasy ( MESSIAHS) "The Facts
About Benjamin Crede" (also in Ten Short Stories, coll 1948).Precious
Porcelain, The Disturbing Affair of Noel Blake (1932) and Life Comes to
Seathorpe (1946) are three similarly structured mystery stories in which
peculiar happenings are ultimately revealed to have an sf explanation.
Death Rocks the Cradle (1933 as by Martens) is a hallucinatory fantasy
about a UTOPIA populated by covert sadists. One Came Back (1938) is an
interesting realistic novel which extends into the NEAR FUTURE in
describing the founding of a new RELIGION following an apparent miracle.
Occasional sf or fantasy stories crop up in NB's later collections, most
significantly the first of the three horror novellas in Who Walk in Fear
(coll 1954) and several items in Alpha and Omega (coll 1946); the latter
collection includes an introduction descriptive of his working methods.
His quirky studies in abnormal psychology, including Portrait of Gideon
Power (1944 as by Lambert; reprinted 1962 as by NB) and The Dark Page
(1951), are of marginal interest. [BS/JC]Other works: Ten-Minute Tales
(coll 1927 as by Southwold), children's fantasy stories; The Tales of Joe
Egg (coll 1936 as by Southwold), a non-sf juvenile story sequence narrated
by a ROBOTwithin a fantasy frame; The Smallways Rub Along (coll 1938) has
1 sf story; Forty Stories (coll 1948) has 2 sf stories; Three Pair of
Heels (coll 1951); The House at the Crossroads (1966); The Ninth Earl of
Whitby (coll 1966) has 1 sf story.About the author: My Writing Life
(1955), autobiography.See also: BIOLOGY; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; MEDICINE;
PSI POWERS; WAR; WEAPONS.
BELL, THORNTON
R.L. FANTHORPE.
BELLAMY, EDWARD
(1850-1898) US author and journalist, the latter from 1871, when he
abandoned the practice of law before having properly begun it; no lawyers
exist in the AD2000 of his most famous work, the UTOPIA Looking Backward,
2000-1887 (1888) and its sequel, Equality (1897), whose influence in the

19th century was enormous. His early works of fiction were Gothic; though
sentimental and labouredly influenced by Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, they are
nevertheless strangely moving. They do not, however, show any great hint
of the direction his work would take. Dr Heidenhoff's Process (1880),
although not sf, interestingly prefigures some of the tactics of his later
work; the doctor's process claims to mechanically wipe out diseased
memories from those who wish for a new start. The protagonist's girl, who
has been seduced by a rival, is persuaded to try the process, and is
transformed until the last pages of the novel, when it turns out that
Heidenhoff and his process have simply been dreamt by the protagonist, who
awakens to find that his disgraced lover has committed suicide.The
emotional exorbitance and Gothic extremity of this tale are transformed in
Looking Backward into a vision of a utopian society whose equally
exorbitant realization is achieved while the protagonist, whose confusion
upon his arrival into the world of the future is one of the best things in
this uneasy work of fiction, has been in hypnotized sleep ( SLEEPER
AWAKES). The people of AD2000 are devoid of irrational passions and their
highly communalized society reflects a reasonableness so radically opposed
to common sense that one is tempted to posit an impulse of deep violence
behind EB's creation of such a world. William MORRIS was so appalled by
the bureaucratic and machine-like nature of EB's utopia that he was
instantly driven to retort with News from Nowhere (1890 US), which
described an ideal world of a very different sort. EB's book has
nonetheless been extraordinarily popular, especially in the USA, which
suggests a greater receptivity to communist thought in that country than
is generally recognized, and has been treated as a serious model for the
positing of future societies by many thinkers and writers, including Mack
REYNOLDS. The sequel, an uninspired sequence of fictionalized essays, did
little to damage the effect of the earlier book. EB is more important to
the history of utopian thought than he is as a writer of PROTO SCIENCE
FICTION. His influence on the world of GENRE SF, except on didactic
writers like Hugo GERNSBACK, has been indirect and diffuse. [JC]Other
works: Miss Ludington's Sister: A Romance of Immortality (1884); The
Blindman's World and Other Stories (coll 1898), especially the title story
(written 1885).About the author: Utopian Novel in America, 1886-1896: The
Politics of Form (1985) by Jean Pfaelzer.See also: ARTS; AUTOMATION;
ECONOMICS; HISTORY OF SF; MACHINES; MUSIC; NEAR FUTURE; POLITICS;
PSYCHOLOGY; SUSPENDED ANIMATION; TECHNOLOGY.
BELLAMY, FRANCIS RUFUS
(1886-1972) US editor and writer. In his sf novel Atta (1953) a man is
struck by lightning and, after shrinking until 1/2 in (12mm) tall,
combines forces with a warrior ant by the name of Atta. [JC]See also: NEAR
FUTURE.
BELLOC, (JOSEPH) HILAIRE (PETER)
(1870-1953) French-born UK writer, known for his poetry - notably his
Cautionary Tales (coll 1907) for children - his anti-Semitism, his Roman
Catholic apologetics, and his novels. Most of his fiction was written
either to argue a political case or to potboil, and his habit of
displacing his venues from consensual reality served both motives, for his

politics are fantastical and his commercial work tends to commit acts of
vengeance against the hoi polloi. Mr Clutterbuck's Election (1908), A
Change in the Cabinet (1909) and Pongo and the Bull (1910) together make
up a NEAR-FUTURE assault on Edwardian politics in a 1920s UK. Of the
several novels for which his friend and colleague G.K. CHESTERTON provided
illustrations, But Soft - We Are Observed! (1928; vt Shadowed! 1929 US) is
genuine sf, a satirical tale of suspense set in the USA and Europe in
1979, the main target once again being the parliamentary form of
government. Other novels by HB of genre interest and illustrated by
Chesterton are Mr Petre (1925), The Emerald of Catherine the Great (1926;
vt The Emerald US), The Haunted House (1928), The Man who Made Gold (1930)
and The Postmaster-General (1932). Packed with energy though formally
negligent, HB's fiction awaits a modest revival. [JC]About the author:
Hilaire Belloc (1945) by Robert Hamilton.See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS;
POLITICS; TIME TRAVEL.
BELLOW, SAUL
(1915- ) Canadian-born US novelist. Winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for
Literature, SB is perhaps the premier MAINSTREAM novelist of his
generation in the USA today. Some of his books distantly resemble sf,
specifically Henderson the Rain King (1959), a picaresque partly set in a
quasimythical African kingdom. Mr Sammler's Planet (1970) has been wrongly
annexed as sf by several commentators, who perhaps relied on the title
alone; in the novel mankind's reaching of the Moon and establishment there
of a utopia are matters which occur only in conversation. [JC]
BELL PUBLICATIONS
UNIVERSE SCIENCE FICTION.
BELOT, ADOLPHE
(1829-1890) French writer. Of the tales collected in English in A
Parisian Sultana (coll trans H. Mainwaring Dunstan in 3 vols 1879 UK), one
features a superhuman female explorer in Africa and another a LOST WORLD
of Amazons. [JC]
BELYAEV, ALEXANDER (ROMANOVICH)
(1884-?1942) Russian writer whose surname has been variously
transliterated; further spellings include Beliaev, Beliayev and Belyayev.
His death-date is likewise insecure: he died during the German occupation
of the city of Pushkin and, while his body was discovered in January 1942,
it is possible that his death was in fact in late 1941. As one of the
originators of the sf genre in Soviet literature, AB's WELLS- and
VERNE-influenced writings dominated the field between the wars, providing
models for most other Soviet practitioners of the time. His first story,
Golova Professora Douellia (1925 in story form; 1937; trans Antonina W.
Bouis as Professor Dowell's Head 1980 US), is both a prophetic story about
organ transplantation and a dramatic account of life without motion - the
affect of the latter focus being intensified by the author's own invalid
status due to incurable illness. After dealing with traditional themes,
such as that of ATLANTIS in Poslednii Tchelovek Iz Atlantidy ["The Last
Man from Atlantis"] (1927), AB tackled space exploration in Bor'ba V Efire
(1927; trans Albert Parry as The Struggle in Space: Red Dream;

Soviet-American War 1965 US); he returned to this theme in Pryzhok V
Nichto ["Jump into Nowhere"] (1933) and Zvezda KETZ ["The KET Star"]
(1940), the latter promulgating the ideas of Russian space pioneer
Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY.Though the literary style and themes of AB's sf had
standard pulp limitations, a personal note resounded through his otherwise
orthodox representations of potential SUPERMEN, a theme seemingly
encouraged by his own miserable condition. In Tchelovek-Amfibia (1929;
trans L. Kolesnikov as The Amphibian 1959 Russia), the protagonist - a boy
with transplanted shark's gills - is totally uncomfortable in the society
of "normal people"; in Vlastelin Mira ["The Master of the World"] (1929) a
morally wicked but ingenious biophysicist tries to control people through
the use of telepathy; and in Ariel (1941) the same dramatic
incompatibility afflicts a levitating boy, the victim of another mad
scientist's enthusiasms. Despite the manifest ideological content and
frequent cliches in AB's work, his books remain permanently in print,
maintaining his status as the first Soviet sf "classic". [PN/VG/JC]See
also: RUSSIA; UNDER THE SEA.
BEM
A common item of sf TERMINOLOGY, being an acronym of "bug-eyed monster"
and referring to the type of ALIEN being, usually menacing, regularly
pictured on the covers of SF MAGAZINES in the 1930s and 1940s.See also:
MONSTERS.
BEMMANN, HANS
[r] GERMANY.
BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES
Film (1969). Apjac/20th Century-Fox. Dir Ted Post, starring James
Franciscus, Charlton Heston, Linda Harrison, Kim Hunter. Screenplay Paul
Dehn, Mort Abrahams, based on characters created by Pierre BOULLE. 95
mins. Colour.In this first and best of four sequels to PLANET OF THE APES
another time-warped astronaut (Franciscus) crashlands on the ape world.
Like his predecessor he is captured, befriended by the sympathetic
chimpanzee Zira (Hunter), and meets the girl savage (Harrison). But when
he escapes with her underground and discovers the remains of New York City
the film goes off in a blacker direction: he finds a race of deformed,
telepathic MUTANTS who worship a nuclear Doomsday Bomb, and meets the
astronaut hero (Heston) of the previous film, now half-crazed and
venomous, who ultimately detonates the bomb and brings about a HOLOCAUST,
wiping out apes, mutants and humans alike. In its replacement of whimsical
SATIRE by an altogether harsher judgement about the prospects for
intelligent life on Earth, this film is arguably stronger than its
original. The novelization is Beneath the Planet of the Apes * (1970) by
Michael AVALLONE. [JB/PN]
BENELUX
The Benelux consists of three nations: the Netherlands (Holland), Belgium
and Luxembourg. The Dutch language is spoken in the Netherlands and in the
northern part of Belgium, called Flanders. The French-speaking southern
and eastern part of Belgium is called Wallonia. In the field of literature
Flanders and the Netherlands are one domain, and the same can be said for

Wallonia and France. Flemish (from Flanders) and Walloon (from Wallonia)
authors are mostly published, respectively, in the Netherlands (Amsterdam)
and in France (Paris), for reasons of prestige and because of the small
number of Flemish and Walloon publishers.Dutch and Flemish sf took shape
in the 1960s, when several publishers began series of translated sf,
FANDOM was organized and some Dutch and Flemish authors began to write sf
novels. Before the 1960s there were isolated works (original or
translated), but no real tradition of sf. Even during those periods when
the fantastic was flowering everywhere in Western literature (as in the
Romantic era, and at the turn of the century), the quantity of Dutch and
Flemish sf was very small and all of it has been almost totally forgotten,
even by the most comprehensive histories of Dutch and Flemish sf.The sf
boom begun in the 1960s did not last very long. In the 1980s the market
declined to the figures of the early 1960s. In the late 1970s, for
instance, the established sf publishers together published almost 100
books a year (mostly translations); in the early 1990s this had declined
to some 25 books. Most publishers discontinued their sf lines, and by 1992
only two - Meulenhoff and Luitingh - were really active on the sf market.
So one can say that the old situation has been restored: sf (and fantasy
and horror) as genres consist of only isolated works scattered over the
whole literary field.During the early stage of the Romantic era, when the
influence of the Enlightenment was still very strong, several writers
produced, mostly in the form of IMAGINARY VOYAGES, descriptions of a
future Holland. This genre of utopian literature continued during the 19th
century. In the 1890s the Dutch publisher Elsevier produced a famous
complete edition in 65 volumes of the work of Jules VERNE, which was
widely sold but apparently had no real influence on Dutch literature
(except the juvenile market).In the first half of the 20th century only a
few original sf works appeared, and only one of them is still in print,
being considered a masterpiece of Dutch literature: Blokken ["Blocks"]
(1931) by F. Bordewijk (1884-1965). This short novel is set in a
NEAR-FUTURE Russia that has at the same time communist and fascist
characteristics. In part it is a pure description of the State and its
Ruling Council, in part a story about an unsuccessful revolt. A group of
dissidents is mercilessly slaughtered, but at the end it is suggested that
the upheavals will continue until the State is destroyed. It is a warning
not so much against communism or fascism as against every sort of
totalitarian government. Bordewijk also wrote a few sf short stories, most
of which are to be found in his collection Vertellingen van generzijds
["Tales from the Other Side"] (coll 1951). Not included in this collection
is the remarkable "Einde der mensheid" ["End of Mankind"] (1959), a
fictional essay in the manner of Jorge Luis BORGES about a Universe that
consists of layers of "positiva, neutra, and negativa" in an endless
continuation. Mankind is but an unimportant phenomenon in one of the
uncountable layers, and will eventually disappear, leaving no trace at
all.A writer of short fantasies and some sf stories was "Belcampo"
(pseudonym of H.P. Schonfeld Wichers [1902-1990]), whose clever and witty
tales are still popular. Of his sf stories the best are the ROBOT tale
"Voorland" ["Foreland"] (1935) and "Het verhaal van Oosterhuis" ["The Tale
of Oosterhuis"] (1946), a curious blend of imaginary voyage, UTOPIA,
DYSTOPIA and LOST WORLD.In the 1960s and 1970s some MAINSTREAM novelists

wrote one or two sf novels. Het reservaat (1964; trans as The Reservation
1978 UK) by the Fleming Ward Ruyslinck (1929- ) is a bitter dystopian
novel about a near-future Belgium where all dissidents are put away in
reservations disguised as psychiatric clinics. The Belgian government is
depicted as right-wing and as corrupted by the political imperialism of
the USA. However, the reservations are more reminiscent of repression in
the former USSR. As with Bordewijk's novella, the novel is essentially an
attack on repressive societies of all kinds.Hugo Raes (1929- ), also from
Flanders, wrote two imaginary voyages with sf elements, De lotgevallen
["The Events"] (1968) and Reizigers in de anti-tijd ["Voyagers in
Anti-Time"] (1971). His De verwoesting van Hyperion ["The Destruction of
Hyperion"] (1978) is straightforward sf, a post- HOLOCAUST novel about the
nearly immortal descendants of mankind and their fight with evolved rats.
Raes wrote some fine sf short stories, most of which are collected in
Bankroet van een charmeur ["Bankruptcy of a Charmer"] (coll 1967).De
toekomst van gisteren ["The Future of Yesterday"] (1972) by the Dutchman
Harry Mulisch (1927- ) is not a novel but a book-length essay in which the
author explains that he has not in fact written a projected novel of that
title. Had he done so, that novel would have presented an ALTERNATE WORLD
in which the Germans had won WWII (see also HITLER WINS). Within that
alternate world the protagonist is writing a novel about a world alternate
to his, in which the Germans lost the war. So far the concept shows a
remarkable resemblance to Philip K. DICK's THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE
(1962), but - unlike Dick's - the second novel had to be fully reproduced
within the text of the first. What interested Mulisch was the difference
between the real world in which the Germans lost WWII and a world in
which, although the same thing has happened, the present is as imagined by
a writer who has grown up in a fascist world state. In his essay Mulisch
demonstrates that the combination of alternate-world novel and
novel-within-a-novel is rendered theoretically impossible by narrative
restrictions. The book should be obligatory reading for alternate-world
authors.Other relevant modern Dutch authors include Rein Blijstra
(1901-1975), whose 10 humorous stories about all kinds of sf CLICHES are
collected as Het planetarium van Otze Otzinga ["The Orrery of Otze
Otzinga"] (coll 1962). The novelist and playwright Manuel van Loggem
(1916- ) has written interesting FANTASY with slight sf leanings; his best
collection is Het liefdeleven der Priargen ["The Love Life of the
Priargs"] (coll 1968). The novelist and computer expert Gerrit Krol (1934) wrote De man achter het raam ["The Man behind the Window"] (1982), the
rather difficult story of Adam, a thinking COMPUTER, who contemplates the
problem of what a human being really is. When he has developed into a full
human being, he undergoes the fate of all mankind and dies. It is not so
much sf as a novel of ideas, or even a study (disguised as fiction) of
problems of identity and consciousness.In the late 1950s and especially in
the 1970s, some authors came to the fore who can be considered true sf
writers. The Dutch physicist Dionijs BURGER wrote Bolland (1957; trans as
Sphereland 1965 US), a continuation and expansion of Edwin A. ABBOTT's
famous Flatland (1884). As Abbott tried to demonstrate four-dimensional
geometry by means of a story about two-dimensional creatures, Burger tries
to explain Einstein's theories about curved space and the expanding
Universe. His story takes place two generations after the events described

by Abbott; the narrator is a grandson of Abbott's A Square. Abbott's book
may be of higher literary quality, but Burger's is more inventive and
humorous. The book has become a minor classic in the sf world.Sam of de
Pluterdag (1968; trans as Where Were You Last Pluterday? 1973 US), by the
Flemish author Paul VAN HERCK, is a funny satirical novel about a society
in which the higher social levels have access to an additional eighth day
of the week, the "Pluterday". In 1972 it won the first Europa Award.The
two most prolific sf writers are the Dutchman Felix Thijssen (1933- ) and
the Fleming Eddy Bertin (1944- ). Thijssen, originally a writer of
adventure fiction for the juvenile market, started to write sf in 1971
when the first volume of the so-called Mark Stevens cycle appeared. This
is a run-of-the-mill SPACE-OPERA series, whose first volumes seemed aimed
at young adults, but which gradually became more mature. The series ended
with a good eighth volume, De poorten van het paradijs ["The Gates of
Paradise"] (1974). Later Thijssen wrote several rather more serious
novels, the best of which is Emmarg (1976), a sad story about a pregnant
female ALIEN abandoned on Earth. Eddy Bertin has some reputation in the
English-speaking world, thanks to his own translations of several of his
stories. The Membrane Universe series can be called his best work; it is
collected in three volumes: Eenzame bloedvogel ["Lonely Blood-Bird"] (coll
1976), De sluimerende stranden van de geest ["The Slumbering Beaches of
the Mind"] (1981) and Het blinde doofstomme beest op de kale berg ["The
Blind Deaf-Mute Beast on the Bare Mountain"] (1983). The stories are
interspersed with lyrics, fake documents, comments, timetables and so on.
Together, they form a future HISTORY from 1970 to AD3666. Bertin is an
active fan who has been editing his own FANZINE, SF Gids ["SF Guide"]
since 1973, and an ardent bibliographer. In addition to sf, he has written
numerous horror stories, which are perhaps the better part of his opus.A
remarkable Dutch debut was De eersten van Rissan ["The First of Rissan"]
(1980) by Wim Gijsen (1893-1990), a lost-colony novel about the
descendants of mankind on the planet Rissan. In the sequel, De koningen
van weleer ["The Kings of Old"] (1981), it is discovered that the
mysterious First of Rissan are the descendants of the kings of ATLANTIS.
Both novels hold their own with the better US novels of this type. His
later novels are all young-adult fantasy.The most noteworthy forum for
original sf stories in the Dutch language may have been the Vlaamsche
Filmkens ["Flemish Movies"] sequence of booklets written for a young-adult
audience; more than 2000 volumes have been produced in the series, which
began in 1930 and continues. Of this total perhaps 200 have been sf, and
many more have been fantasies. The author involved most centrally was the
pseudonymous John Flanders (? -1964), who also wrote as Jean Ray; other
contributors included Eddy C. Bertin, Dries Nieuwland, Paul Van Herck and
John Vermeulen.The same can be said about Walloon sf as about its
Dutch/Flemish counterpart: only in the 1970s has there been a (small) sf
boom; before and after it, sf consisted of only some individual works by
writers whose output was primarily non-sf. The most prolific early author
was J.H. ROSNY aine, most of whose work was reprinted in France in the
1970s. He is best known for his prehistoric romances; sf proper is but a
small part of his output. In 1973 his sf stories were collected as Recits
de science-fiction ["SF Narratives"] (coll 1973 France); included is his
famous novella about aliens, Les Xipehuz (1887), his first published work.

Other authors from before WWII are Francois Leonard with Le triomphe de
l'homme ["The Triumph of Man"] (1911), a Verne-like novel in which Earth
is accidentally propelled from the Solar System and drifts away into the
Universe until its final destruction; Henri-Jacques Proumen with Le
sceptre est vole aux hommes [The Sceptre is Stolen from the People]
("1930"), about a race of MUTANTS who enslave the population of a Pacific
island; and the poet Marcel Thiry (1897-1977), who wrote the
alternate-world novel Echec au temps ["Set-Back in Time"] (written 1938;
1945), in which Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo.Only one author from
the 1950s and 1960s could be considered an sf writer: Jacques STERNBERG
(1923- ). He is influenced by prewar Surrealism and postwar Absurdism. His
best novel is perhaps La sortie est au fond de l'espace ["The Exit is at
the Bottom of Space"] (1956): the last remaining humans leave a
bacteria-infested Earth only to discover that deep space is even more
dangerous and that mankind has no real meaning in the Universe. A good
story collection, available in English, is Futurs sans avenir (coll 1971;
cut trans as Future without Future 1974 US).In the 1970s a small group of
young sf writers (Vincent Goffart, Paul Hanost and Yves Varende, among
others) formed around the paperback publisher Marabout, and for a while it
looked as if a sort of sf tradition might be beginning. However, after the
collapse of Marabout, the only sf publisher in Wallonia, most authors
moved to other fields of writing.Virtually nothing is known about sf in
tiny Luxembourg, the third country which forms the Benelux-except that it
was the homeland of Hugo GERNSBACK, who in a sense started it all. [JAD]
BENET, STEPHEN VINCENT
(1898-1943) US writer, mainly of poetry and stories, much published in
the Saturday Evening Post. He is best known for a single poem, "American
Names" (whose last line, "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee", gained a
peculiar and singular resonance in the campaign for Amerindian rights),
and for two fantasy stories, The Devil and Daniel Webster (1937 chap),
also published with other fantasies in Thirteen O'Clock: Stories of
Several Worlds (coll 1937), and Johnny Pye and the Fool-Killer (1938
chap), also included with other fantasies in Tales Before Midnight (coll
1939). These collections were brought together to make up Twenty-Five
Short Stories (coll 1943), though most of their contents had already
appeared in the 2-vol Selected Works of Stephen Vincent Benet (coll 1942;
cut vt The Stephen Vincent Benet Pocket Book 1946). Several of SVB's
stories are of genre interest, his best-known being "By the Waters of
Babylon" (1937), a clever post- HOLOCAUST story about a tribal adolescent
boy who discovers the ruins of a great destroyed city ( Hyperlink to:
CITIES). It was a main source of material for what became, after WWII, a
cliched subgenre in the field. [JC/PN]
BENFORD, GREGORY
(1941- ) US physicist and writer who graduated from the University of
Oklahoma 1963 and gained his PhD from the University of California, San
Diego, 1967; in 1971 he was appointed an Assistant Professor of Physics at
the University of California, Irvine, rising to full Professor in 1979.
One of a pair of identical twins, he has written some stories in
collaboration with his brother James. He edited a notable FANZINE, Void,

with various co-editors including Ted WHITE and Terry CARR. His first
published story was "Stand-In" (1965), which won second place in a contest
organized by The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION . He wrote
regular articles on The Science in SF for AMAZING STORIES in collaboration
with David Book 1969-72, continuing the series solo, somewhat less
regularly, until 1976. GB has also written fiction as Sterling Blake.GB
early established himself as a leading writer of HARD SF, although much of
his writing also has a lyrical aspect reminiscent of the work of Poul
ANDERSON. Some of his early work was with Gordon EKLUND, including the
stories combined in If The Stars are Gods (fixup 1977), the title-piece of
which won a NEBULA in 1975, and the less impressive Find the Changeling
(1980). His DISASTER novel Shiva Descending (1980) with William ROTSLER
also fails to convey the imaginative and cognitive energy of his solo
work. However, Heart of the Comet (1986) with David BRIN has moments of
shared power. He also undertook a curious "collaboration" with Arthur C.
CLARKE: Beyond the Fall of Night * (omni 1990; vt Against the Fall of
Night and Beyond the Fall of Night 1991 UK), an "authorised sequel" by GB
alone to Clarke's Against the Fall of Night (1948; 1953); both versions of
the tie include reprints of the earlier story. GB's sequel ignores
Clarke's own subsequent revision of his novel as The City and the Stars
(1956).GB's first solo novel was Deeper than the Darkness (1970; rev vt
The Stars in Shroud 1978), one of many stories in which humanity's
confrontation with ALIENS proves deeply disturbing. Another patchwork
novel, IN THE OCEAN OF NIGHT (fixup 1977), became the foundation-stone of
an extending series of novels, the Ocean sequence, whose titles all
contain metaphorical references to water. The central character of IN THE
OCEAN OF NIGHT, astronaut Nigel Walmsley, reappears in Across the Sea of
Suns (1984; rev 1987), which introduces the theme of a Universe-wide
struggle between organic and inorganic "lifeforms" in which
self-replicating MACHINES appear to have the upper hand; this scenario is
further developed in the Family Bishop sequence - comprising Great Sky
River (1987),Tides of Light (1989) and Furious Gulf (1994) - and centring
upon the forced flight of human Families towards a form of sanctuary in
the heart of the galaxy, harassed all the while by the inorganic mech.
Throughout the sequence, GB interestingly develops the concept of the
Aspect, voluble though partial versions of human ancestors electronically
stored within the minds of the living.GB achieved something of a
breakthrough with TIMESCAPE (1980), which won both the Nebula and the JOHN
W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD. In its description of an attempt to change
history by transmitting a tachyonic message across time it offers one of
the best ever fictional descriptions of scientists at work. Another
NEAR-FUTURE, almost MAINSTREAM novel is Artifact (1985), in which
archaeologists discover evidence of an alien visitation with almost
catastrophic consequences. Against Infinity (1983) is pure sf in terms of
its plot, which involves the search for an enigmatic alien on Ganymede,
but its structure is strongly reminiscent of William Faulkner's novella
"The Bear"; and the novella "To the Storming Gulf" (1985) contains strong
echoes of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Comments on these parallels by critic
Gary K. WOLFE caused some controversy. Chiller (1993) as by Sterling Blake
is again a near future tale, in this case involving CRYONICSand a fanatic
serial killer whose mission it is to prevent people from preserving their

minds.The best of GB's short fiction is collected in In Alien Flesh (coll
1986) and Matter's End (coll 1994). He has co-edited a number of
anthologies with Martin Harry GREENBERG: Hitler Victorious (anth 1986) (
HITLER WINS), Nuclear War (anth 1988), What Might Have Been? Vol I:
Alternate Empires (anth 1989), Vol II: Alternate Heroes (anth 1989) these two assembled as What Might Have Been, Volumes I and II (omni 1990)
-and Vol III: Alternate Wars (anth 1991). All but the second feature
stories of ALTERNATE WORLDS. [BS]Other works: Jupiter Project (1975; rev
vt The Jupiter Project 1980), an intelligent Robert A. HEINLEIN-esque
juvenile; Time's Rub (1984 chap); Of Space/Time and the River (1985 chap);
At the Double Solstice (1986 chap); We Could Do Worse (1988 chap); Iceborn
(1989 Synergy 3 as "Proserpina's Daughter" by GB alone; 1989 chap dos)
with Paul A. CARTER; Centigrade 233 (1990 chap); Matter's End (1991 chap).
See also: ASTRONOMY; AUTOMATION; BLACK HOLES; BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION
AWARD; COMMUNICATIONS; CRYONICS; END OF THE WORLD; ESCHATOLOGY;
EVOLUTION;
GODS AND DEMONS; INVASION; JUPITER; LIVING WORLDS; MONSTERS; NEUTRON
STARS; NEW WAVE; OUTER PLANETS; PHYSICS; PSYCHOLOGY; RELIGION;
SCIENTISTS;
STARS; SUN; TACHYONS; TECHNOLOGY; TERRAFORMING; TIMESCAPE BOOKS;
WEAPONS;
WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST.
BEN-NER, YITZHAK
[r] ISRAEL.
BENNET, ROBERT AMES
(1870-1954) US writer, more often than not of Westerns, and author of
three sf novels. Thyra: A Romance of the Polar Pit (1901) is set in a
clement LOST WORLD, hidden near the North Pole and full of prehistoric
beasts, clairvoyant priestesses and unusually tall socialists whose lives
are based on memories of old Scandinavia. The lost world of The Forest
Maiden (1913) as by Lee Robinet features a flawed SUPERMAN who uses his
PSI POWERS to create a new Eden, whose involuntary Eve is saved only when,
while walking on water in search of her, he slips and sinks. The Bowl of
Baal (1916-17 All Around Magazine; 1975) locates the lost world of Baal,
where dinosaurs survive, in Arabia. [JC]
BENNETT, ALFRED GORDON
(1901-1962) UK writer, documentary film-maker and founder of Pharos
Books, through which he published a fantasy, Whom the Gods Destroy (1946).
His sf novel The Demigods (1939) depicts a world menaced by giant ants,
who derive their abilities from a central controlling brain. His father
was Arthur BENNETT. [JC]Other works: The Forest of Fear (1924); The Sea of
Sleep (1926; vt The Sea of Dreams 1926 US).See also: HIVE-MINDS.
BENNETT, ARTHUR
(1862-1931) UK writer, father of Alfred Gordon BENNETT. His A Dream of an
Englishman (1893) describes in inadequately fictionalized terms the
history of the world in the 20th century; SPACE FLIGHT is mooted. The
Dream of a Warringtonian (1900), self-published in Warrington, UK,
describes a similar period as it applies to Warrington. [JC]

BENNETT, HARVE
TIME TRAX.
BENNETT, MARCIA J(OANNE)
(1945- ) US writer whose Ni-Lach sequence of PLANETARY ROMANCES includes
Where the Ni-Lach (1983), Shadow Singer (1984), Beyond the Draak's Teeth
(1986) and Seeking the Dream Brother (1989). The local-colour quotient is
high, but the sequence itself is unremarkable. Yaril's Children (1988), a
singleton, is set on a planet inhabited by human and MUTANT stock, and
deals with the inevitable problems which ensue. [JC]
BENNETT, MARGOT
(1912-1980) UK writer, from 1945 mostly of detective novels, in a subtle
and atmospheric style. A fantasy story, "An Old-Fashioned Poker for My
Uncle's Head" (1946), was reprinted in FSF in 1954. Her first sf novel,
The Long Way Back (1954), has become well known. Long after a 1984 nuclear
HOLOCAUST has ended European civilization, a reindustrialized and
regimented African state sends a colonizing expedition to legendary Great
Britain, where they find White people living in caves. The denouement
uneasily combines love interests, satire and adventure. [JC]Other works:
The Furious Masters (1968).See also: POLITICS.
BENNETT, RICHARD M.
[r] Granville HICKS.
BENNI, STEFANO
(1947- ) Italian journalist and writer who published several nonfiction
books before releasing his first novel, Terra! (1983; trans Annapaola
Cancogni 1985 US), set in a post- HOLOCAUST world racked by nuclear
winter; the action moves from the underground city of Paris to a race
through space to occupy a new and Edenic planet. Governing the farcical
tone is a genuinely satirical assault on human mores. SB has been likened
to Robert SHECKLEY. [JC]
BENOIST, ELIZABETH S(MITH)
(1901- ) US writer in whose sf novel, Doomsday Clock (1975), a passel of
disparate characters takes refuge from nuclear HOLOCAUST in a very deep
and luxurious bomb shelter, where they tell each other tales and prepare
to die. [JC]
BENOIT, (FERDINAND MARIE) PIERRE
(1886-1962) French writer remembered almost exclusively for L'Atlantide
(1919; trans Mary C. Tongue and Mary Ross as The Queen of Atlantis 1920
UK; vt Atlantida 1920 US), a rather heated romance. Two French Foreign
Legion officers discover, in North Africa, a lost race of Atlantean
survivors whose queen has a rough way with ex-lovers. The novel has
several times been filmed ( Die HERRIN VON ATLANTIS). [JC]See also:
ATLANTIS.
BENSEN, D(ONALD) R(OYNALD)
(1927- ) US editor and author, his novels being usually pseudonymous. The
two anthologies he has edited, The Unknown (anth 1963) and The Unknown
Five (anth 1964), are both fantasy and (all but one story) compiled from
UNKNOWN. He was more important within the sf field for his editorship of

Pyramid Books 1957-67, a period during which that firm became a
significant producer of sf novels in reprint and original forms. In 1968
he became executive editor of Berkley Books. He moved to Dial Press in
1975, directing their Quantum sf programme, and he has also acted as
consulting editor for Dell Books's sf since 1977. He wrote, in And Having
Writ . . . (1978), a smoothly humorous sf novel set in an ALTERNATE WORLD
engendered by the survival of the ALIENS whose crash-landing caused the
Siberian Tunguska explosion of 1908. Thomas Alva Edison and H.G. WELLS
make appearances. [JC]See also: HISTORY IN SF.
BENSON, A(RTHUR) C(HRISTOPHER)
(1862-1925) UK essayist, poet and novelist, elder brother of E.F. BENSON
and Robert Hugh BENSON. Much of his short fiction was fantasy, and can be
found in The Hill of Trouble and Other Stories (coll 1903) and The Isles
of Sunset (coll 1904) - the two books being assembled as Paul the Minstrel
and Other Stories (omni 1911) - and in Basil Netherby (coll 1926). The
Child of the Dawn (1912) is an IMMORTALITY tale, religiously sententious
but occasionally moving. [JC]
BENSON, E(DWARD) F(REDERICK)
(1867-1940) UK novelist, brother of A.C. BENSON and Robert Hugh BENSON
and by far the most prolific of them, with dozens of attractive, realistic
novels and romances to his credit. His fantasy stories are well known, and
some verge on sf: they can be found in The Room in the Tower and Other
Stories (coll 1912), The Countess of Lowndes Square (coll 1920), Visible
and Invisible (coll 1923), Spook Stories (coll 1928) and More Spook
Stories (coll 1934). The Tale of an Empty House (coll 1986) is a
convenient posthumous collection, while The Flint Knife (coll 1986) ed
Jack Adrian (1945- ) assembles mostly uncollected material, including "Sir
Roger de Coverley" (1927), an sf tale which reflects the time theories of
J.W. DUNNE. [JC]Other works: The Luck of the Vails (1901); The Valkyries
(1903); The Image in the Sand (1905); The Angel of Pain (1905 US); The
House of Defense (1906 Canada); David Blaize and the Blue Door (1918);
Across the Stream (1919); "And the Dead Spake - " and The Horror-Horn
(coll 1923 chap US); Colin (1923) and Colin II (1925); The Inheritor
(1930), in which Pan and Dionysius cause conniptions in Cornwall; Ravens'
Blood (1934).
BENSON, GORDON Jr
(1936- ) US bookseller, publisher and bibliographer. GB released the
first of many solo BIBLIOGRAPHIES of sf figures in 1980, and moved into
partnership with UK bibliographer Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE (whom see for
authors treated in collaboration) in 1983. By the late 1980s GB had become
relatively less active, although he continued to participate with
Stephensen-Payne in many projects. His earlier bibliographies were
sometimes technically deficient in their presentation of data, but the
material presented was scrupulously trustworthy, and later editions of
early publications, as well as projects dating from about the mid-1980s,
are far more user-friendly. GB's solo bibliographical work covers the
following authors (whom see for titles): Leigh BRACKETT, A. Bertram
CHANDLER, Hal CLEMENT, Edmond HAMILTON, Harry HARRISON, Edgar PANGBORN, H.
Beam PIPER, Margaret ST CLAIR, William TENN, Wilson TUCKER, Manly Wade

WELLMAN, James WHITE and Jack WILLIAMSON. [JC]
BENSON, ROBERT HUGH
(1871-1914) UK writer; third son of Archbishop Benson and brother of the
writers A.C. BENSON and E.F. BENSON. He was ordained in the Church of
England but later converted to Catholicism. His fiction is intensely
propagandistic; many of his short stories - including the fantasies
featured in A Mirror of Shalott, Composed of Tales Told at a Symposium
(coll 1907) - use Catholic priests as central characters. In his
remarkable apocalyptic novel, Lord of the World (1907), the Antichrist
woos the world with socialism and humanism, and the remnants of the Papal
hierarchy go into hiding. The Dawn of All (1911) shows the alternative as
Benson saw it - a future of utopian Papal rule. [BS]Other works: The Light
Invisible (coll 1903); The Conventionalist (1908); The Necromancers
(1909).See also: DYSTOPIAS; END OF THE WORLD; RELIGION.
BENTLEY, PETER
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
BERESFORD, J(OHN) D(AVYS)
(1873-1947) UK writer. Son of a clergyman, he was crippled in infancy by
polio; both facts were influential in forming his worldview. A determined
but defensive agnosticism normally guides the development of his
futuristic and metaphysical speculations, but occasionally he allowed a
strong wish-fulfilment element into his work, as in The Camberwell Miracle
(1933), in which a crippled girl is cured by a faith-healer; like Arthur
Conan DOYLE he could adopt either an extremely hard-headed rationalism or
a naive mysticism. JDB's first sf novel was the classic The Hampdenshire
Wonder (1911; exp vt The Wonder 1917 US), a biographical account of a
freak superchild born out of his time; the theme was recapitulated in Olaf
STAPLEDON's Odd John (1935). His second, Goslings (1913; vt A World of
Women 1913 US), is the first attempt to depict an all-female society which
treats the issue seriously and with a degree of sympathy. Many of his
early speculative short stories were collected in Nineteen Impressions
(coll 1918) and Signs and Wonders (coll 1921). Some are allegories born of
religious doubt, such as "A Negligible Experiment", in which the impending
destruction of Earth is taken as evidence that God has become indifferent
to mankind; others are visionary fantasies, such as "The Cage", in which a
man is telepathically linked to a prehistoric ancestor for a few seconds;
and yet others are studies in abnormal PSYCHOLOGY - an interest which also
inspired the non-sf novel Peckover (1934). Revolution (1921) is a
determinedly objective analysis of a socialist revolution in the UK.JDB
began a second phase of speculative work in 1941. "What Dreams May Come .
. ." (1941) is a powerful novel about a young man drawn into a utopian
future he has experienced in his dreams, and then returned, altered in
body and mind, to a hopeless messianic quest in the war-torn present. A
Common Enemy (1942) is reminiscent of much of the work of H.G. WELLS,
showing the destruction of society by natural DISASTER as a prelude to
utopian reform. The Riddle of the Tower (1944), written with Esme
Wynne-Tyson (1898- ), is another wartime vision story following a future
history in which utopian prospects are lost and society evolves towards
"automatism", resulting in a hivelike social organization in which

individuality - and ultimately humanity - are lost.There are notable
similarities between the methods and outlook of JDB and Wells (JDB's H.G.
Wells, 1915, was the first critical study of Wells's early work), but JDB
never achieved the critical acclaim he deserved, either for his mainstream
fiction or for his sf. [BS]Other works: All or Nothing (1928) and The Gift
(1946, with Wynne-Tyson) are borderline fantasies about would-be MESSIAHS;
Real People (1929) has a subplot involving ESP; there is 1 sf story, "The
Man who Hated Flies", in The Meeting Place (coll 1929).See also: BIOLOGY;
CHILDREN IN SF; DYSTOPIAS; ECOLOGY; END OF THE WORLD; ESP; EVOLUTION;
HISTORY OF SF; HIVE-MINDS; INTELLIGENCE; POLITICS; RELIGION; SOCIOLOGY;
SUPERMAN.
BERESFORD, LEIGH
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
BERESFORD, LESLIE
(?1891-?1937) UK author who entered the genre with The Second Rising
(1910), a future- WAR novel about the Second Indian Mutiny, and continued
with two UTOPIAN novels published under the pseudonym Pan: The Kingdom Of
Content (1918) and The Great Image (1921). Reverting to his own name, he
wrote a novel about international air piracy, Mr Appleton Awakes (1924;
cut 1932), and a humorous novel about a sensuous ALIEN with supranormal
powers, The Venus Girl (1925; cut 1933). LB was quite prolific in the
magazine market, contributing "War of Revenge" (1921), "The Purple Planet"
(1922) and "The People Of The Ice" (1922) - respectively future-war,
interplanetary and LOST-WORLD adventures - to the BOYS' PAPERS, and "The
Octopus Orchid" (1921) and "The Stranger from Somewhere" (1922), among
others, to the pre-sf PULP MAGAZINES. [JE]Other works: The Last Woman
(1922); The Invasion of the Iron-Clad Army (1928); The Flying Fish (1931).
BERGER, THOMAS (LOUIS)
(1924- ) US writer best known for his work outside the sf field like the
Western epic Little Big Man (1964), which combines farce and FABULATION,
and was notably filmed in 1970. Regiment of Women (1973), which is sf,
presents a world about a century hence where the roles of men and women
have been completely reversed, direly for the men; the book is a blackly
comic and chastening argument from premise, and in this prefigures most of
TB's recent work, either outside the field, like the terrifying Neighbors
(1980), or chillingly within, like Nowhere (1986), a yawningly vacuous
Erewhonian spoof, Being Invisible (1987) and Changing the Past (1989), in
which the laws of human nature, operating like theorems, show that all
lives, even those we would aspire to could we ourselves enter a changed
past, are lived in bondage to the march of inalterable law. [JC]Other
works: Arthur Rex: A Legendary Novel (1978), a fine fantasy.See also:
ALTERNATE WORLDS; INVISIBILITY; SOCIOLOGY; TIME TRAVEL.
BERGER, YVES
(1936- ) French novelist, editor and literary journalist. His
ALTERNATE-WORLD novel, Le sud (1962; trans as The Garden 1963), is set in
an antebellum Virginia. [JC]
BERGEY, EARLE K(ULP)
(1901-1952) US illustrator known to fans as the "inventor of the brass

brassiere". For just over a decade, starting with the Aug 1939 cover of
STRANGE STORIES, EKB painted covers for some of the less sophisticated and
more lurid PULP MAGAZINES, especially those published by Standard
Magazines: 58 covers for Startling Stories, 59 covers for TWS and 13
covers for Captain Future, among others. These, often featuring
half-dressed pin-up girls in peril, represent the pulp style at its most
typical and thus were singled out for ridicule by non-sf readers, and
helped give the SF MAGAZINES a rubbishy reputation. In fact EKB was a
skilled commercial artist, painted faces well, and was by no means
restricted to the subject matter that made him famous. He helped to change
the emphasis of cover art, in which he specialized, from gadgetry to
people. [PN/JG]See also: THRILLING WONDER STORIES.
BERGSOE, VILHELM
[r] DENMARK.
BERGSTRESSER, MARTA
[s] Marta RANDALL.
BERK, HOWARD
(1926- ) US writer in whose interesting sf novel, The Sun Grows Cold
(1971), a man whose brain has been tampered with and whose previous lives
were disastrous reawakens ( SLEEPER AWAKES) in a terrifying future world.
He asks to be restored to his amnesia. HB has published in other genres.
[JC]
BERKLEY SHOWCASE, THE
Original anthology series from Berkley Books, consisting of The Berkley
Showcase: Vol 1: New Writings in Science Fiction and Fantasy (anth 1980),
Vol 2 (anth 1980), Vol 3 (anth 1981), Vol 4 (anth 1981), all ed Victoria
Schochet and John SILBERSACK, and Vol 5 (anth 1982), ed Schochet and
Melissa Singer. This shortlived but lively series published stories by
up-and-comers (Pat CADIGAN, Orson Scott CARD, John KESSEL, Howard WALDROP,
Connie WILLIS), established sf gurus (Thomas M. DISCH, R.A. LAFFERTY), and
a few surprises from almost outside the ballpark (Marge PIERCY, Eric VAN
LUSTBADER). Indeed, some of its work may have been too close to sf's
leading edge to be commercial. It was announced in the first issue,
unusually, that this "house" anthology did not expect to make money. [PN]
BERLYN, MICHAEL (STEVEN)
(1949- ) US writer and computer-game designer whose first novel, the sf
adventure Crystal Phoenix (1980), received some adverse comment for the
amount of female torture it contains. The Integrated Man (1980) projects a
DYSTOPIAN future for urbanized humanity, with a plot based on the shunting
of human consciousness into COMPUTER chips, reminiscent in this of John T.
SLADEK's The Muller-Fokker Effect (1970). Blight (1981), as by Mark
Sonders, is an sf/horror novel featuring mutated killer moths. During most
of the 1980s, MB restricted himself to the creation of interactive
fictions for computers ( GAME-WORLDS), including "Oo-Topos" (1982),
"Cyborg" (1982), "Suspended" (1983), "Infidel" (1984), "Cutthroats"
(1984), two titles in collaboration with his wife, Muffy McClung
Berlyn-"Tass Times in Tonetown" (1986) and "Dr Dumont's Wild P.A.R.T.I."
(1988) - and "Altered Destiny" (1990). He then returned to book sf with

The Eternal Enemy (1990), a tale whose dystopian undercurrents are
reminiscent of his second novel. Here an ALIEN race, almost magically
facile in its use of GENETIC-ENGINEERING techniques to change its members
at will, takes a moribund human and transforms him into a being who can
breed with them, and perhaps also carry over humanity's inbred capacities
as a killing-machine so that the aliens can defend themselves against an
insatiable enemy. As with many serious-minded sf writers, MB has some
tendency to hamper his effects through the use of generic plotting not
well designed to bear the burden of contemplation; but muscle may be felt
in his work, and greater focus hoped for. [JC]See also: ESCHATOLOGY;
REINCARNATION.
BERNARD, JOHN
Pseudonym of UK writer Anna O'Meara de Vic Beamish (1883-? ), whose The
New Race of Devils (1921) describes a NEAR-FUTURE German plan to create a
new race through artificial insemination. The King's Missal (1934) as by
Noel de Vic Beamish is a fantasy. [JC]
BERNARD, RAFE
(? -? ) UK writer whose first sf novel was The Wheel in the Sky (1954),
which datedly concerns itself with the construction of a pre-NASA-style,
privately financed space station. He also wrote a The INVADERS tie, The
Halo Highway * (1967; vt Army of the Undead 1967 US). [JC]
BERNAU, GEORGE (B.)
(1945- ) US writer whose two sf novels are both ALTERNATE-HISTORY
thrillers. In Promises to Keep (1988) John F. Kennedy recovers from the
attempt to assassinate him, and in Candle in the Wind (1990) Marilyn
Monroe survives her semi-accidental overdose. [JC]
BERRY, ADRIAN
(1937- ) UK science journalist (often in the London Daily Telegraph) and
occasional sf writer. His sf novels Koyama's Diamond (1982) and its sequel
Labyrinth of Lies (1984), set in a FAR-FUTURE planetary system with much
political intrigue, have some interesting ideas and plot turns, but are
written in a lurid style reminiscent of 1930s PULP MAGAZINES. His more
important service to sf has been the publication of a number of nonfiction
science books about the future ( FUTUROLOGY), including the bestselling
The Next Ten Thousand Years: A Vision of Man's Future in the Universe
(1974) as well as The Iron Sun: Crossing the Universe through Black Holes
(1977) and From Apes to Astronauts (coll 1980). The topics discussed in
these books - mostly to do with physics and speculative technology - are
among those much exploited by HARD-SF writers in the 1970s and since.
[PN]See also: BLACK HOLES; TERRAFORMING.
BERRY, BRYAN
(1930-1955) UK author who was active for only a few years. Along with
such writers as John Russell FEARN, E.C. TUBB and Kenneth BULMER, he
contributed many PULP-MAGAZINE-style sf novels to obscure paperback
houses, most notably the Venus trilogy as by Rolf Garner. And the Stars
Remain (1952) confronts men and Martians with a superior force. Born in
Captivity (1952) presents a rigid post-WWIII society. Other novels include
Return to Earth (1951), Dread Visitor (1952) and The Venom Seekers (1953).

The Venus trilogy - Resurgent Dust (1953), The Immortals (1953) and The
Indestructible (1954) - portrays in bold strokes mankind's fate on VENUS
after the destruction of life on Earth: the man who eventually eliminates
tyranny becomes Lord Kennet of Gryllaar. BB was closely associated with
AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION and also with TWO COMPLETE SCIENCE-ADVENTURE
BOOKS, both of which published some of his novel-length fiction.
"Aftermath" (1952) in the former became "Mission to Marakee" (1953) in the
latter; as in the first case the story occupied the space allotted to
fiction for an entire issue, it might better be listed as Aftermath
(1952). [JC]
BERRY, JAMES R.
(1933- ) US writer most noted for juveniles, beginning with Dar Tellum:
Stranger from a Distant Planet (1973) for younger children, in which the
eponymous ALIEN cures Earth of carbon-dioxide poisoning. The Galactic
Invaders (1976 Canada) and Quas Starbrite (1981) are sf-adventure novels,
and Magicians of Erianne (1988) is an Arthurian fantasy for older
children. [JC]
BERRY, STEPHEN AMES
(1947- ) US writer whose John Harrison sequence of space- WAR adventures
comprises The Biofab War (1984), The Battle for Terra Two (1986), The AI
War (1987) and Final Assault (1988); military engagements predominate
throughout. [JC]
BERRYMAN, JOHN
(c1919-1988) US writer and engineer, author of many stories in ASF and
elsewhere from the late 1930s to the mid-1980s. As Walter Bupp he also
wrote a series of linked telekinesis tales ( ESP) for ASF in the early
1960s. JB is not the poet John Berryman (1914-1972), and Walter Bupp is
not a pseudonym for Randall GARRETT, as often listed. [JC]See also:
LINGUISTICS.
BERTIN, EDDY
[r] BENELUX.
BERTIN, JACK
Pseudonym of Italian-born writer Giovanni Bertignono (1904-1963), who
early moved to the USA and who published frequently from the late 1920s in
various PULP MAGAZINES. His only sf novel, Brood of Helios (1966), is an
unremarkable adventure. The Pyramids from Space (1970) and The
Interplanetary Adventurers (1970), both signed JB and both likewise
unremarkable, were in fact written by the executor of his estate, Peter B.
Germano. [JC]
BERTRAM, NOEL
Pseudonym of Noel Boston (1910-1966), and not, as has often been thought,
of his friend R.L. FANTHORPE. NB privately published some supernatural
stories as Yesterday Knocks (coll 1954) and 10 tales 1960-62 in
Supernatural Stories, the BADGER BOOKS magazine whose contents were mostly
written by Fanthorpe. [SH]
BESANT, Sir WALTER
(1836-1901) UK writer known primarily for his work outside the sf field;

founder member of the Society of Authors; knighted 1895. His early novels
were written in collaboration with James Rice (1843-1882); their The Case
of Mr Lucraft and Other Tales (coll 1876) contains several fantasies,
including the bizarre title story about a man who leases out his appetite.
The Revolt of Man (1882 anon; 1897 as WB) is an anti-suffragette novel
depicting a female-dominated society of the future; it exemplifies the
sexual attitudes and imagination of the Victorian gentleman in a fashion
which modern readers might find unwittingly funny. The Inner House (1888)
is a significant early DYSTOPIA in which a technology of IMMORTALITY
results in social stagnation. The Doubts of Dives (1889; reprinted in
Verbena Camellia Stephanotis coll 1892) is an earnest identity-exchange
fantasy. Uncle Jack etc. (coll 1886) includes "Sir Jocelyn's Cap", an F.
ANSTEY-esque fantasy novella written in collaboration with Walter Herries
Pollock (1850-1926). A Five Years' Tryst (coll 1902) includes the sf story
"The Memory Cell". WB's abiding interests in social reform and abnormal
psychology bring a few of his other novels close to the sf borderline,
most notably the dual-personality story The Ivory Gate (1892); his
credulity concerning ESP is responsible for the introduction of (very
minor) fantastic elements into several others. [BS]See also: ANONYMOUS SF
AUTHORS; PSYCHOLOGY; SOCIOLOGY.
BESHER, ALEXANDER
(? - ) US writer whose first sf novel,Rim: A Novel of VirtualReality
(1994), recounts its complex, NEAR-FUTURE tale in asurprisingly
straightforward, non-gonzo manner. A university professor in California ondiscovering that his son is trapped in a VIRTUAL REALITY world no
longer,after anenormous earthquake in Tokyo, under the control of its
Japanese owners - becomes a kind ofprivate eye, and experiences in the raw
the technology/biology interfaces that govern the newcentury. A version of
the book was first published in Japanese in MacPower, a Tokyo magazine.
[JC]
BESSENYEI, GYORGY
[r] HUNGARY.
BES SHAHAR, ELUKI
(1956- ) US writer who also writes as Rosemary Edghill, and who began
publishing work of genre interest with "Casablanca" for Hydrospanner Zero
in 1981; the tale became part of her first novel, Hellflower (fixup 1991),
featuring Butterfly St Cyr, a female space pilot whose smuggling
activities embroil her in an interstellar plot involving dynasties and a
young prince. The second novel in the sequence, Darktraders (1992), is
less energetic, though complicated; the final volume, Archangel Blues
(1993), some VIRTUAL REALITY riffs are explored, and the enormously
complicated plot is wrapped up. Speak Daggers to Her (1994) as by Rosemary
Edghill, is a mystery with borderline sf elements. [JC]
BEST, (OSWALD) HERBERT
(1894-1981) UK author of an sf novel, The Twenty-Fifth Hour (1940), in
which, after a 1965 DISASTER, two survivors - a North American female and
a European male - come together to participate in a UTOPIA founded in
Alexandria, Egypt. [JC]See also: WAR.

BESTER, ALFRED
(1913-1987) US writer and editor, born into a Jewish family in New York,
a city with which he was always closely associated. Educated in both
humanities and sciences - including PSYCHOLOGY, perhaps the most important
"science" in his sf - at the University of Pennsylvania, AB entered sf
when he submitted a story to THRILLING WONDER STORIES. Mort WEISINGER, the
editor, helped AB to polish it, and then suggested he submit it for an
amateur story competition that TWS was running. AB did so and won. The
story was "The Broken Axiom" (Apr 1939 TWS).AB published another 13 sf
stories to 1942, and then followed his friend Weisinger, along with Otto
BINDER, Manly Wade WELLMAN and others, into the field of COMIC books,
working on such DC COMICS titles as SUPERMAN, The Green Lantern and
Batman. He worked successfully for four years on comics outlines and
dialogue, later working on CAPTAIN MARVEL, and then moved into radio,
scripting for such serials as Charlie Chan and The Shadow. After the
intensive course in action plotting this career had given him, AB returned
(part-time) to the sf magazines in 1950, by now more mature as a writer.
(His main job at the time was scripting the new tv series TOM CORBETT:
SPACE CADET.) There ensued over the next six years a series of stories and
novels which are considered to be among the greatest creations of genre
sf.AB was never prolific in sf, which was more of a hobby than a career
for him, publishing only 13 more short stories - mostly in FSF - before
1960. (One of the five "Quintets" in FSF Sep 1959 was by AB writing as
Sonny Powell.) But these alone would have secured him a place in the sf
pantheon. Most of his stories were originally issued in book form in two
collections, Starburst (coll 1958) and The Dark Side of the Earth (coll
1964). These collections were reassembled with 6 stories dropped, and one
older novella-"Hell is Forever" - and 3 quite recent stories added along
with the amusing autobiographical essay "My Affair with Science Fiction"
(1975), in two further collections, The Light Fantastic (coll 1976) and
Star Light, Star Bright (coll 1976), which were in turn reissued as an
omnibus volume, Starlight: The Great Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (omni
1976). This last is the best available collection.AB's talents were
evident from the beginning. At least three stories from his 1939-42 period
are memorable: "Adam and No Eve" (1941) ( ADAM AND EVE; END OF THE WORLD),
"The Push of a Finger" (1942) and "Hell is Forever" (1942). The latter, a
long novella for UNKNOWN, exhibits in a slightly sophomoric way the
qualities for which AB would later be celebrated: it is cynical, baroque
and aggressive, produces hard, bright images in quick succession, and
deals with obsessive states of mind. The most notable later story is
"Fondly Fahrenheit" (1954), a breathless story of a man and his ANDROID
servant whose personalities intermesh in a homicidal folie a deux. Also
memorable are "Of Time and Third Avenue" (1951), "Disappearing Act" (1953)
and "The Men who Murdered Mohammed" (1958), which is perhaps the most
concentratedly witty twist on the TIME-PARADOX story ever written. At
about the time of this story AB addressed an sf symposium at the
University of Chicago; his paper is one of the four reprinted in the
anonymously edited The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social
Criticism (anth 1959; intro by Basil DAVENPORT).AB's first two sf novels,
THE DEMOLISHED MAN (1953) and Tiger! Tiger! (1956 UK; rev vt The Stars My
Destination 1957 US), are among the few genuine classics of genre sf. They

are the sf equivalent of the Jacobean revenge drama: both feature
malcontent figures, outsiders from society bitterly cognizant of its
corruption, but themselves partly ruined by it, just as in The Revenger's
Tragedy or The Duchess of Malfi; like them, too, AB's novels blaze with a
sardonic imagery, mingling symbols of decay and new life - rebirth is a
recurrent theme of AB's - with a creative profligacy.THE DEMOLISHED MAN,
which won the first HUGO for Best Novel in 1953, tells a story which in
synopsis is straightforward: industrialist Ben Reich commits murder (in a
society where murder is almost unknown because telepathic ESPERS can
detect the idea before the act is carried out), almost gets away with it,
is ultimately caught by Esper detective Linc Powell, and is committed to
curative brainwashing, "demolition" ( CRIME AND PUNISHMENT). It is the
pace, the staccato style, the passion and the pyrotechnics that make the
novel extraordinary. The future society is evoked in marvellously
hard-edged details; the hero is a driven, resourceful man whose obsessions
are explained in Freudian terms that might seem too glib if they were
given straight, but are evoked with the same New Yorker's painful, ironic
scepticism that informs the whole novel. AB's mainstream novel Who He?
(1953; vt The Rat Race 1956), about the tv and advertising businesses,
sheds some light on the milieu of THE DEMOLISHED MAN.Tiger! Tiger! tells
the story of the now legendary Gully Foyle, whose passion for revenge
transforms him from an illiterate outcast to a transcendent, ambiguous,
quasi- SUPERMAN in "an age of freaks, monsters and grotesques". Like the
first novel, this one lives as much through the incidentals of the setting
- in a lurid, crumbling, 25th-century world-as in the plot itself, which
AB confesses, too modestly, was borrowed from Alexandre Dumas's The Count
of Monte Cristo (1844-5). The first vol of a GRAPHIC-NOVEL version by
Howard V. CHAYKIN (adaptation by Byron PREISS), was The Stars My
Destination Vol 1 (graph 1979); the second vol, though widely bruited, was
not in fact published until it appeared, with the first, in The Stars My
Destination (1992).In the late 1950s AB was taken on by Holiday magazine
as a feature writer, ultimately becoming senior literary editor, a post he
held until the magazine ceased publication in the 1970s, at which time he
returned to sf. "The Four-Hour Fugue" (1974) shows the old extraordinary
assurance and inventiveness, and just a trace of over-facility. Two
decades after his last, his new novel, The Computer Connection (1974 ASF
as "The Indian Giver"; 1975; vt Extro UK), while full of incidental
felicities, did not quite recapture the old drive in its ornate story of a
group of immortals and an omniscient COMPUTER; perhaps it lacked a natural
"Besterman" as focus. The pace and complexity were still there, but
somehow looking like self-parody.The next book, Golem(100) (1980), was
more ambitious, had a more authentic Bester flavour, and was regarded by
AB as his best novel. It expands "The Four-Hour Fugue" into an
extraordinary but overheated tale of the jungle of New York in AD2175,
with diabolism, depth psychology (a Monster from the Id), bee superwomen,
pheromones, perverse sex, and overall a miasma of death. But the
1960s-style radicalism now looked a little out of date, and what used to
be spare and sinewy in his work had begun to seem prolix; the craziness
looked like ornamentation rather than what it once was, structural. His
last sf novel was The Deceivers (1981), which features a Synergist hero
who can perceive patterns; sadly, but interestingly in the light of AB's

fame, the sf press almost unanimously failed to review this, presumably
out of respect for his feelings. It is not good. When he died six years
later, after a long period of ill health, he willed his house and literary
estate to his bartender. The posthumously published Tender Loving Rage
(1991), written more than 20 years earlier, is a mainstream novel set in
1959, and appropriately features a scientist adopted by the New York
advertising/tv people.AB's innovative, ferocious, magpie (his word) talent
has certainly been influential in GENRE SF, on writers as disparate as
James BLISH, Samuel R. DELANY and Michael MOORCOCK. In many respects his
work was a forerunner of CYBERPUNK. He is one of the very few genre-sf
writers to have bridged the chasm between the old and the NEW WAVE, by
becoming a legendary figure for both - perhaps because in his sf imagery
he conjured up, with bravura, both outer and INNER SPACE. [PN]See also:
CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; ESP; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; GOLDEN AGE OF
SF;
GOTHIC SF; HISTORY OF SF; HUMOUR; IMAGINARY SCIENCE; LINGUISTICS; The
MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION; NEBULA; OPTIMISM AND
PESSIMISM;
OUTER PLANETS; PERCEPTION; PSI POWERS; SF IN THE CLASSROOM;
SUPERNATURAL
CREATURES; TRANSPORTATION; VILLAINS.
BESTER REMEMBERS
Writers sometimes don't live up to the image that admiring readers have
of them, especially when readers may have carried those idealized images
from their teens.Writer Alfred Bester described his first and only meeting
with John W. Campbell in 1951. Summoned to the offices of Astounding
magazine in northern New Jersey, Bester found Campbell in an enormous
warehouse, where Campbell occupied a tiny space.Campbell told Bester that
a few references to psychiatry would have to be removed from a story he
submitted because, he said, "Psychiatry is dead."He then took Bester to
lunch. Over a pastrami sandwich and a coke in a cafeteria, Campbell
explained how one can recall memories from the womb and urged Bester to do
so. Bester pretended to comply and managed to get away as quickly as he
could.Later Bester said, "It reinforced my private opinion that a majority
of the science fiction crowd, despite their brilliance, were missing their
marbles."
BETANCOURT, JOHN GREGORY
(1963- ) US editor and writer who became involved in SMALL-PRESS
publishing in his teens, his first professional sf sale-"Vernon's Dragon"
for 100 Great Fantasy Short-Short Stories (anth 1984) ed Isaac ASIMOV,
Terry CARR and Martin H. GREENBERG - being a reprint from a fan magazine.
In the early 1980s he worked with editor George SCITHERS at AMZ, soon
founding a literary agency with Scithers and Darrell SCHWEITZER; in 1987
the three of them relaunched WEIRD TALES. In 1989 JGB became an editor for
Byron PREISS Visual Publications, Inc., an important sf packager. His
first novel, Starskimmer * (1986), is a game tie. Rogue Pirate (1987) is
fantasy, as is the more impressive The Blind Archer (1988), in whose
ornate venue - the vast city of Zelloque - the CLUB STORIESassembled in
Slab's Tavern and Other Uncanny Places (coll 1990 chap) are also set. His

first book of direct sf interest, Johnny Zed (1988), embeds a somewhat
desultory political analysis of revolutionary movements in a portrait of a
NEAR-FUTURE USA whose Congress has become a hereditary gift of the rich,
and whose populace has become lassitudinous. The sf devices of his second
novel of interest, Rememory (1990), include brain-scans and the
bio-engineering of humans into animal shapes, but the mystery plot that
sends the cat-person protagonist down the mean streets of a corrupt
government does not, in itself, generate much interest. JGB seems an
author of very ample skill but limited perspective - a sense of his career
which, given his clear intelligence and ambition, could change overnight.
[JC]Other works: A tied instalment in the Dr Bones enterprise, Dr Bones
#4: The Dragons of Komako * (1989).As Editor: Issues of Weird Tales, all
with George Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer, are Weird Tales: Spring 1988,
Weird Tales: Winter 1990 and Weird Tales #290 (1988) through Weird Tales
#299, Winter 1990/1991 (1991); contributions to the Bryon PREISS Ultimate
sequence, includingThe Ultimate Frankenstein (anth 1991) and The Ultimate
Werewolf (anth 1991), both with David Keller, Megan Miller and Byron
Preiss, and The Ultimate Zombie (anth 1993) and The Ultimate Witch (anth
1993), both with Preiss alone; Letters of the Alien Publisher (coll 1991)
with Charles C. RYAN; Performance Art (coll 1992 chap).As Jeremy Kingston:
A tied contribution to the Time Tours sequence, Robert Silverberg's Time
Tours #6: Caesar's Time Legions * (1991).
BETHKE, BRUCE
(1955- ) US writer best known for his short stories, in particular his
first professional publication, "Cyberpunk" (1983), which appeared in AMZ
after circulating in manuscript and almost certainly inspiring Gardner
DOZOIS's use of the term CYBERPUNK to designate the new movement. A novel
based on this story has been projected for some time under the title Def
Cyberpunk but BB's only book to date is a SHARECROP: Isaac Asimov's Robot
City: Robots and Aliens 5: Maverick * (1990). [JC]
BETHLEN, T.D.
[s] Robert SILVERBERG.
BETTAUER, HUGO
(1877-1925) Austrian writer whose sf novel, Die Stadt ohne Juden (1925;
trans Salomea Neumark Brainin as The City Without Jews: a Novel of our
Time 1926 US), hopefully predicts that Gentiles will comprehend the worth
of Jews to civilzation, and will revoke their blanket expulsion from civic
life. HB was murdered. [JC]
BETTER PUBLICATIONS
CAPTAIN FUTURE; Ned L. PINES; STARTLING STORIES; STRANGE STORIES;
THRILLING WONDER STORIES.
BEVAN, ALISTAIR
[s] Keith ROBERTS.
BEVERLEY, BARRINGTON
(? -? ) UK writer in whose sf novel The Space Raiders (1936) the League
of Nations defends the world from an alien invasion. [JC]Other work: The
Air Devil (1934).

BEVIS, H(ERBERT) U(RLIN)
(1902- ) US house-painter, author of a series of unremarkable sf
adventures including Space Stadium (1970), which features wargames in
space, The Time Winder (1970), whose protagonists escape killer ROBOTS by
TIME TRAVEL, The Star Rovers (1970), To Luna with Love (1971) and The
Alien Abductors (1972). [JC]
BEWARE THE BLOB
The BLOB.
BEYER, W(ILLIAM) G(RAY)
(? -? ) US writer, active before WWII in only one magazine, The Argosy,
where he published all his novels. Minions of the Moon (1939 Argosy;
1950), along with three further serials, "Minions of Mars" (1940),
"Minions of Mercury" (1940), and "Minions of the Shadow" (1941), make up
the Minions series of interplanetary SPACE-OPERA adventures involving
humans and aliens. [JC]
BEYNON, JOHN
John WYNDHAM.
BEYOND FANTASY FICTION
US DIGEST-size magazine. 10 issues, July 1953-Jan 1955, published by
Galaxy Publishing Corp., ed H.L. GOLD.A companion magazine to GALAXY
SCIENCE FICTION, BFF was a fantasy magazine conceived in the same spirit
as UNKNOWN (to which Gold had contributed). It began promisingly, its
first issue featuring such stories as Theodore STURGEON's ". . . And My
Fear is Great" and Damon KNIGHT's "Babel II", but could maintain this
standard only fitfully. #2 contained Theodore R. COGSWELL's classic "The
Wall Around the World". Notable later stories included "The Watchful Poker
Chip" by Ray BRADBURY (1954) and "The Green Magician", a Harold Shea story
by L. Sprague DE CAMP and Fletcher PRATT (1954). The first 8 issues were
bimonthly and dated; the last 2, undated, were titled Beyond Fiction. BFF
was drab in appearance with uninspired cover paintings. Beyond (anth
1963), no editor named, reprinted 9 stories. An abridged UK edition of the
first 4 issues was published by Strato Publications, 1953-4. [MJE]
BEYOND FICTION
BEYOND FANTASY FICTION.
BEYOND INFINITY
US DIGEST-size magazine. 1 issue, Dec 1967, published by I.D.
Publications, Hollywood; ed Doug Stapleton. The fantasy element was
stronger than the sf in this rapidly aborted and not very strong magazine.
[FHP]
BEYOND WESTWORLD
WESTWORLD.
"BIBLES"
SHARED WORLDS.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES
Until the academic acceptance of sf there was no profit in

bibliographies. Compiling them was a labour of love, very often carried
out by fans or sometimes by book and magazine dealers; the first, tiny sf
bibliography of all, Science Fiction Bibliography (1935 chap), was
produced by The Science Fiction Syndicate, a group of fans. Until recent
decades, few academically trained bibliographers paid any attention to
fantastic literature; it was only the proliferation of work from about
1975 onwards that justified the publication of Reference Guide to Science
Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (1992) by Michael Burgess (Robert REGINALD),
which annotates and comments upon more than 550 relevant studies.The
Checklist of Fantastic Literature: A Bibliography of Fantasy, Weird and
Science Fiction Books Published in the English Language (1948) by Everett
F. BLEILER, the earliest important bibliography in the field, made no
distinction between sf and fantasy, was incomplete and had inevitable
errors, and contained no information on contents. It was nevertheless
invaluable for researchers from the first, although to look at it in 1995
is to contemplate the distance traversed since, both by the field as a
whole and, in particular, by its author - who has since concentrated on
more specialized bibliographical work (see below). For many years the only
comparable general effort was "333": A Bibliography of the Science-Fantasy
Novel (1953 chap) by Joseph H. Crawford Jr (1932- ) assisted by James J.
Donahue and the publisher Donald M. Grant (1927- ); this, though
restricted to the titular total, provided valuable synopses of the 333
selected books, categorizing them with considerable acumen. Bleiler's
Checklist was first added to by Bradford M. DAY in his The Supplemental
Checklist of Fantastic Literature (1963), which contained 3000 additional
titles; Bleiler himself then thoroughly reworked his original research,
publishing the result as The Checklist of Science-Fiction and Supernatural
Fiction (1800-1948) (1978), which presented, alongside the corrected list,
a useful category coding for most books included. But Bleiler's interest
had by this point shifted to more specialized studies, and his checklist
had in any case been superseded.Research in a field like sf, the basic
texts of which are often elusive, depends initially on the existence of
one central tool: the comprehensive checklist. Bleiler's selective version
served well for nearly three decades, and Marshall B. TYMN, in American
Fantasy ?
United States, 1948-1973 (1979), gave selective coverage up to 1973. In
the same year, however, the definitive work was published: this was
Reginald's 2-vol Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature: A Checklist,
1700-1974, with Contemporary Science Fiction Authors II (1979), which
listed, according to fairly strict criteria of eligibility, three times
the number of titles Bleiler covered and included a biographical
dictionary based on Reginald's earlier Stella Nova: The Contemporary
Science Fiction Authors (1970) and Contemporary Science Fiction Authors
(1974). Reginald later supplemented the checklist portion of this work in
Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, 1975-1991: a Bibliography of
Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Fiction Books and Nonfiction
Monographs (1992) with Mary Wickizer Burgess (1938- ) and Daryl F.
MALLETT, which takes into account some errors (very few) and omissions
from the 1979 volumes while adding almost 22,000 new titles - more new
titles in 17 years, it might be noted, than had appeared in the previous
250. Although - unlike Bleiler's later work - the Reginald checklists do

not code cited texts according to the genres and subgenres contained
within the broad field of the fantastic, they now constitute the central
bibliographical resource for any sf/fantasy library.Also at the end of the
1970s appeared L.W. CURREY's Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors: A
Bibliography of First Printings of their Fiction (1979), a genuine
first-edition bibliography which covered about 200 of the principal genre
writers (a second volume is projected) and intensified Reginald's
coverage; and George LOCKE's remarkably accurate (and intriguingly
anecdotal) A Spectrum of Fantasy: The Bibliography and Biography of a
Collection of Fantastic Literature (1980), which suggested en passant
several titles that plausibly supplemented the Reginald Checklist; A
Spectrum of Fantasy: Volume 2: Acquisitions to a Collection of Fantastic
Literature, 1980-1993 (1994) continues the invaluable enterprise.Other
forms of extensive coverage were of varying use. The Dictionary Catalog of
the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature
(1982) in 3 vols is a photographic record of the 37,500 cards recording
the 20,000 items then in the J. LLOYD EATON COLLECTION (it is now badly
out of date). In 1988, Kurt Baty began to produce what was intended to
constitute a comprehensive index in loose-leaf form entitled The Whole
Science Fiction Data Base Quarterly; by the end of 1991 about a third of
the alphabet had been traversed, though only in draft form, with a vast
proportion of titles omitted or only partially ascribed, and the project
has become embarrassingly dormant.After gaining some control over the
field as a whole, the sf researcher would then find her/himself needing
more specialized aids as well. Sf was for many years a genre dominated, in
the USA at least, by the MAGAZINES, and magazine indexes are an essential
tool. The publication of an exhaustive index from Stephen T. Miller and
William G. CONTENTO has been projected for several years; but partial
indexes do exist, and have served well. They include: Bill EVANS's The
Gernsback Forerunners (1944 chap), which indexes sf in Modern Electrics
and other journals founded by Hugo GERNSBACK before AMZ;Index to the
Science Fiction Magazines 1926-50 (1952) by Donald B. DAY; The Index of
Science Fiction Magazines 1951-1965 (1968) by Norman METCALF or, for the
same period, The MIT Science Fiction Society's Index to the S-F Magazines
(1966) by Erwin S. STRAUSS; Index to the Science Fiction Magazines 1966-70
(1971) by the New England Science Fiction Association; and The N.E.S.F.A.
Index to the Science Fiction Magazines and Original Anthologies 1971-1972
(1973). Since then N.E.S.F.A. has brought out magazine indexes usually on
an annual basis and usually compiled by Anthony R. LEWIS, either alone or
in collaboration. More specialized productions include Monthly Terrors: An
Index to the Weird Fantasy Magazines Published in the United States and
Great Britain (1985) by Mike ASHLEY and Frank H. Parnell (1916), and
Mystery, Detective, and Espionage Fiction: A Checklist of Fiction in U.S.
Pulp Magazines, 1915-1974 (1988), in two vols, by Michael L. Cook and
Stephen T.Miller. Indexes to individual magazines - like The Complete
Index to Astounding/Analog (1981) by Ashley and Terry Jeeves (1922- ) are cited in this encyclopedia in the relevant magazine entries.Of course
stories are not published solely in magazines. In an ongoing project
complementary to his projected story index, Contento has produced, in
Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections (1978) and Index to
Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections, 1977-1983 (1984), a highly

usable reference source which, in addition to listing stories not
initially published in magazine form, also covers those published
originally in magazines and for one reason or another thought worthy of
being made more generally available in book form. His Indexes, therefore,
are an aid to the researcher, as the stories they catalogue are both
valued and available; but Contento should be used with caution in this
regard. He does not himself make any qualitative claims about the stories
he lists in this format, nor is he complete within his declared remit, and
no researcher should assume that unlisted stories are necessarily less
rewarding. Contento's indexes for coverage of the years after 1983 appear
in the LOCUS annuals (see below).From yet another angle of approach, Jack
L. CHALKER and Mark OWINGS (1945- ), in The Index to the Science-Fantasy
Publishers (1966; rev vt Index to the SF Publishers 1979; very much exp vt
The Science-Fantasy Publishers: A Critical and Bibliographic History
1991), provides a checklist of (and anecdotal commentary on) almost every
title released by the specialist sf houses, arranged by publisher. The
1991 version, 10 times the size of the first edition, gives its users an
invaluable grasp of the shape - though it is less secure on the detail of sf PUBLISHING through the 20th century; inconveniently, that first
edition has been several times revised in successive small unmarked
reprintings, with the result that readers cannot know the status of the
volume they have in front of them.Two ongoing index series by Hal W. HALL
are also essential. The first - comprising, the Science Fiction Book
Review Index, 1923-1973 (1975), Science Fiction Book Review Index,
1974-1979 (1981) and Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review Index,
1980-1984 (1985) - along with its annual supplements - released under the
full latter title, and covering, as of the volume published in 1994, the
years up to 1990 - functions as an accurate if incomplete bibliography of
sf criticism. And Hall's 2-vol Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference
Index, 1878-1985 (1987), which incorporates early reference guides, covers
non-review research and criticism in the field; supplemental volumes,
including Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Index, Volume 7 (1987),
covering 1986, and Volume 8 (1990), covering 1987 (and see below), were
incorporated into Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference Index, 1985-1991
(1993).In the late 1980s, perhaps following Contento's lead, Hall made a
significant publishing decision. Although his Book Review Index remained a
separate production, he incorporated further issues of his Reference Index
into Charles N. BROWN's and Contento's ongoing Locus annual Science
Fiction, Fantasy, ?
onwards. The Brown/Contento production - each annual volume being
subtitled A Comprehensive Bibliography of Books and Short Fiction
Published in the English Language - extends from coverage year 1984 to
coverage year 1991, the last year covered representing the end of the
sequence. Although it does not precisely replace comprehensive
bibliographies like Reginald's (see above), it has served to supply sf
readers and researchers with an enormous amount of information for the
years 1984-1991; it is unlikely (unless the series is restarted) that any
other period in sf history will ever be treated to as thorough and
convenient a coverage. Its main deficiency as a research resource lay for
several years in the fact that it was based on a localized books-received
(rather than a books-published) basis, only books received for review by

Brown's Locus magazine during a particular calendar year tending to be
entered in the Brown/Contento volume for that year. As there is a very
considerable difference between books received during a year by one
magazine and books actually published during that year, early volumes of
the series needed some getting used to. But in later volumes, a
considerable effort was made to search out books not actually received for
review, and, once the researcher understands this gradual change for the
better, Brown/Contento begins to seem even more irreplaceable.Moving from
comprehensive bibliographies whose remit is to encompass the field rather
than to evaluate it, we come to research aids which are designed to
provide a critical commentary. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and
Fantasy through 1968 in 3 vols (1974, 1978, 1982) by Donald H. TUCK
engagingly annotated a wide variety of texts, but its author frequently
cross-referred readers to Bleiler for fuller listings. The first edition
of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1979) ed Peter NICHOLLS attempted
to list or mention all sf or fantasy books published by the approximately
1700 fiction authors treated, but the ascriptions in that edition and in
this second edition (which treats about 3000 authors) are not arranged in
checklist form, and are not intended primarily for bibliographical
reference. Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers (1981; rev 1986; rev
1991), first 2 edns ed Curtis C. SMITH, 3rd edn ed Paul E. Schellinger
(1962- ) and Noelle Watson (1958- ), though valuable for its biographical
and critical sections, could not be recommended for its checklists, which
were eccentrically conceived, inaccurate, and which remained complacently
uncorrected from one edition to the next. The New Encyclopedia of Science
Fiction (1988) ed James E. GUNN lists without bibliographic detail
selected titles by those authors (about 500) given entries.Broadest in
scope of the non-encyclopedic projects are the three volumes ed Neil
BARRON. The most relevant of these is Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide
to Science Fiction (1976; exp 1981; further exp 1987; fourth edition
projected for 1995), which is a selective (but very broad) bibliography of
the field, complete with critical annotations on each volume chosen. The
other Barron productions, Fantasy Literature: A Reader's Guide (1990) and
Horror Literature: A Reader's Guide (1990), are smaller and less
definitive; but, it can be presumed, will also grow. Bibliography-based
studies of particular periods have begun to appear, to date concentrating
- very appropriately, considering the sf field's state of ignorance a
decade ago about its earlier years - on the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Darko SUVIN's Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of
Knowledge and of Power (1983) and Thomas D. CLARESON's Science Fiction in
America, 1870s-1930s: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources (1984)
supply complementary coverages from widely differing critical
perspectives. And Everett F. Bleiler, in his enormous Science-Fiction: The
Early Years (dated 1990 but 1991) provides what may be a definitive
coverage of the period up to 1930 in the form of story synopses.Some
thematic bibliographies had begun to appear before the end of the 1970s,
including Atlantean Chronicles (1971) by Henry M. Eichner, Voyages in
Space: A Bibliography of Interplanetary Fiction 1801-1914 (1975) by George
Locke, and Tale of the Future (1961; exp 1972; further exp 1978) by I.F.
CLARKE. More appeared in the 1980s, including Nuclear Holocaust: Atomic
War in Fiction, 1895-1984 (1987) by Paul Brians (1942- ), The First

Gothics: A Critical Guide to the English Gothic Novel (1987) by Frederick
S. Frank (1935- ), and Lyman Tower SARGENT's British and American Utopian
Literature, 1516-1985 (1988). But there remains room for much further work
of this sort.Specialized bibliographies of individual authors have
proliferated since the late 1970s (many are cited at the foot of the
relevant author entries in this encyclopedia), often being published by sf
houses like BORGO PRESS and STARMONT HOUSE, or by individuals like Phil
STEPHENSEN-PAYNE in collaboration with Gordon BENSON Jr and like Chris
DRUMM, or by academic presses like GARLAND, G.K. Hall and Meckler. Several
pseudonym guides specifically devoted to sf and fantasy writers have also
appeared, including James A. Rock's not entirely reliable but intriguing
Who Goes There (1979) and Roger ROBINSON's fuller Who's Hugh? (1987).
Interestingly, although the fan bibliographers in general exhibit a wide
variety of ascription techniques (some of these being of Rube Goldbergian
complexity), they have often accomplished the most interesting work, and
their productions are very much more likely to be up-to-date than those
which appear, sometimes years after completion, from the staider firms.No
volume like this encyclopedia could be properly written without the
benefit of original research on the part of its authors. But, equally, no
volume like this encyclopedia could hope to exist without the constant
support and reassurance of every book mentioned above, and of 10 times
again as many. The editors of this book are in debt to them all; specific
acknowledgements can be found in the Introduction. [JC/PN]
BICKHAM, JACK M(ILES)
(1930- ) US writer who began publishing sf with Kane's Odyssey (1976
Canada) as by Jeff Clinton, and who later wrote two sf novels under his
own name. ARIEL (1984) posits a COMPUTER whose AI is both alarming and
charming. Day Seven (1988) is a TECHNOTHRILLER. [JC]
BIEMILLER, CARL L(UDWIG Jr)
(1912-1979) US businessman, journalist and writer, of sf interest for his
two series of novels for older children: the Jonny sequence comprising The
Magic Ball from Mars (1953) and Starboy (1956); and, more interestingly,
the post- HOLOCAUST Hydronauts sequence - The Hydronauts (1970), Follow
the Whales: The Hydronauts Meet the Otter People (1973) and Escape from
the Crater (1974)-focusing on the aquatic adventures of a group of
trainees in the Ranger Service, which controls oceanic food production
after radiation has devastated land-based farming. [JC]
BIERBOWER, AUSTIN
(1844-1913) US writer whose anthropological ( ANTHROPOLOGY) sf novel,
From Monkey to Man, or Society in the Tertiary Age: A Story of the Missing
Link (1894), suggests the Ice Age as the effective cause of the Missing
Link's expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and struggles with snakes as the
basis for the symbol of the Serpent as evil. [JC]See also: EVOLUTION;
ORIGIN OF MAN.
BIERCE, AMBROSE (GWINETT)
(1842-c1914) US journalist and writer of short stories and SATIRES,
deeply affected by his experiences in the American Civil War (he was
breveted major for bravery and wounded twice). Like Bret Harte

(1836-1902), he went to California and became a journalist, and also like
Harte he soon went abroad, spending 1872-6 in the UK, publishing several
volumes of sketches as Dod Grile, most notably the savage little fables
assembled as Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (coll dated 1874 but 1873 UK; vt
Cobwebs: Being the Fables of Zambri, the Parsee c1873 UK); but afterwards
- unlike Harte, who had permanently departed the thin cultural pickings
there - he returned to California. At the close of 1913, after a hectic
career and some notably intemperate journalism, he disappeared into
Mexico, then in the middle of its own civil war. He is perhaps best known
for The Cynic's Word Book (coll 1906; vt The Devil's Dictionary 1911; exp
vt The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary 1967), a collection of brilliantly
cynical word "definitions". His numerous sketches and stories far more
closely approach the canons of FANTASY than of sf, though, like Mark
TWAIN's similar efforts, the speculative environment they create is often
sufficiently displaced to encourage the interest of sf readers. AB's
single most famous tale, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", in which a
condemned spy believes he has escaped the rope and returned to his wife
the instant after his fall from the bridge and before the noose tightens,
appears in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (coll 1891; vt In the Midst of
Life 1892 UK; exp under first title 1898 US). The early ROBOT story
"Moxon's Master", perhaps the closest thing to genuine sf he ever wrote,
in which a SCIENTIST's death is apparently caused by a chess-playing
automaton, appears in Can Such Things Be? (coll 1893). The same volume
contains the notable story of monstrous INVISIBILITY, "The Damned Thing",
which offers a scientific explanation of the phenomenon, and "Charles
Ashmore's Trail", the story of a man who vanishes, much as AB seemed to do
himself, into another DIMENSION. This and such similar volumes as
Fantastic Fables (coll 1899) have since been republished in a number of
forms. The Collected Writings of Ambrose Bierce (coll 1946) is valuable,
though not complete; Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce (coll
1964, ed Everett F. BLEILER) is probably the best single assemblage of his
works of interest to the reader of sf or fantasy. The Collected Short
Stories (coll 1970) and The Devil's Advocate: An Ambrose Bierce Reader
(coll 1987) are also of value. [JC/PN]Other works: The Fiend's Delight
(coll 1873 UK) and Nuggets and Dust Panned Out in California (coll 1873
UK), both as Dod Grile.About the author: Ambrose Bierce, the Devil's
Lexicographer (1951) by Paul Fatout; Ambrose Bierce (1970) by M.C.
Grenander.See also: GOTHIC SF; HORROR IN SF; HUMOUR; PARANOIA.
BIG DUMB OBJECTS
An unfailingly popular theme in sf is the discovery, usually by humans,
of vast enigmatic objects in space or on other planets. These have
normally been built by a mysterious, now-disappeared race of ALIEN
intellectual giants, and humans can only guess at their purpose, though
the very fact of being confronted by such artefacts regularly modifies or
confounds their mental programming and brings them that much closer to a
CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH into a more transcendent state of intellectual
awareness (see also SENSE OF WONDER).The enormous constructs described in
the titles and contents of Larry NIVEN's RINGWORLD (1970) and Bob SHAW's
Orbitsville (1975) are typical: artificial biospheres orbiting alien suns
(Shaw's is a DYSON SPHERE) and having a surface area millions of times

that of Earth. Not so big but every bit as enigmatic is the derelict
SPACESHIP Rama, a still-functioning technological artefact hugely in
advance of anything we could build, in Arthur C. CLARKE's RENDEZVOUS WITH
RAMA (1973). More recently Greg BEAR topped this with another space
habitat, bigger on the inside than the outside, one section of which is
infinite in extent, projecting through time as well as space, in EON
(1985) and Eternity (1988); exhausted by the sheer problems of scale he
paused in the hiatus between these books to write The Forge of God (1987)
in which we are visited by alien spacecraft modestly disguised as very
small mountains.John VARLEY's Gaean trilogy - Titan (1979), Wizard (1980)
and Demon (1984) - is also set in a space habitat, this one as large as a
medium-sized moon, containing a whole set of lesser, but still biggish,
dumb objects within, including the convenient staircases attached to its
600km (375-mile) spokes and at one point a 15m (50ft) Marilyn Monroe. The
habitat is owned by, and in effect is an extension of the body of, a
"goddess", Gaea, herself a construct (makers unknown) but sentient ( GODS
AND DEMONS). This makes her a LIVING WORLD and hence not truly dumb.
Self-awareness in BDOs, Varley correctly calculated, was the next logical
step.BDOs go back a long way in the history of written sf: the sun and
planets within the Earth in Ludvig HOLBERG's Nicolai Klimii iter
Subterraneum (1741 in Latin; trans as A Journey to the World Under-Ground
by Nicolas Klimius, 1742), not actually artificial but still awesome, are
proto-BDOs.BDOs have proved surprisingly difficult to create in film. The
difficulty is one of scale: the screen itself is not huge, so tiny humans
have to be superimposed on BDOs in order to create the apparent enormity
through contrast. Surprisingly, given the expertise of special-effects
crews through the 1980s and the nearly universal use of the wide-screen
format, one of the very best BDOs preceded all this (in a smaller format)
by decades. This was the enigmatic machinery of the Krel in FORBIDDEN
PLANET (1956), extending in a perspective to the vanishing point.BDOs can
also be plural in nature, and not restricted to orbiting a solitary star.
There are many of these, a good example, demonstrating the recent
popularity of grand-scale sentience, being "the swarm of the ten thousand
moon-brains of the Solid State Entity" in David ZINDELL's Neverness
(1988). (Many BDOs, as here, have been built by quasi-gods.) Charles
SHEFFIELD's dubious strategy in Summertide: Book One of the Heritage
Universe (1990), whose title gives fair warning, is to have 1200 or so
gigantic artefacts scattered through our spiral arm of the Galaxy,
necessitating a number of quotes from the "Lang Universal Artifact Catalog
Fourth Edition". This comes close to BDO self-parody. To be fair,
Sheffield concentrates on only one, a mildly spectacular bridge connecting
the two worlds of a double-planet system.The most endearing aspect of BDO
stories is the disjunction between the gigantic scale of the BDO and the
comparatively trite fictional events taking place on, in or about it. The
sf imagination usually, if charmingly, falls short at this point, and many
BDOs become backdrops for soap operas. For all that, they retain an
archetypal power, no matter what crudenesses they may encompass. Sf's much
vaunted SENSE OF WONDER is seldom more potently evoked than in a good BDO
story. The mystery, only to be explained by a new Carl Gustav Jung, is
why, even when these tales are awash with a bathetic failure to live up to
their own heroic ambitions, they nearly always work.The BDO story has

certainly become a new subgenre within sf, its parameters already clearly
defined. Newspaper critics of sf, in the face of the stupendous, have
shown a shameful failure of creativity in not having found an adequate
neologism to describe the BDO genre in a single, terse word. It is not
wholly certain which critic first used the phrase "Big Dumb Object" to
describe the subject of these tales - it may have been Roz KAVENEY in
"Science Fiction in the 1970s" in FOUNDATION #22, 1981 - but the term is
now commonplace in describing megalotropic sf. [PN]
BIGFOOT AND THE HENDERSONS
HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS.
BIGGLE, LLOYD Jr
(1923- ) US author and musicologist, with a PhD in musicology from the
University of Michigan. His interest in MUSIC and the other ARTS, perhaps
watered down more than necessary in an effort to make such concerns
palatable to his readers, appears throughout his sf, which began to appear
in 1956 with "Gypped", on a music theme, in Gal. His first novel, The
Angry Espers (1959 AMZ as "A Taste of Fire"; rev with cuts restored 1961
dos), features an Earthman involved in complicated adventures on an alien
planet, and sets the tone for much of his subsequent work in the field.
The Jan Darzek sequence - All the Colors of Darkness (1963), Watchers of
the Dark (1966), This Darkening Universe (1975), Silence is Deadly (1977)
and The Whirligig of Time (1979) - recounts the adventures of a
late-20th-century private eye who moves from investigating aliens to
chairing the Council of Supreme, which itself governs the home Galaxy; by
the third volume he is pitted against the inimical Udef, a Dark Force
destroying civilization after civilization in the Smaller Magellanic
Cloud. A similarly palatable Galaxy (LB's clearest affinity in his novels
is to writers like Murray LEINSTER) provides a backdrop and sounding board
for the Cultural Survey featured in The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets
(1961 ASF as "Still Small Voice"; exp 1968) and The World Menders (1971).
Monument (1962 ASF; exp 1974) is an effective (though ultimately amiable)
space-opera parable about imperialism. Selections of his stories, most of
which are competent but undemanding, appear in The Rule of the Door and
Other Fanciful Regulations (coll 1967; vt Out of the Silent Sky 1977; vt
The Silent Sky 1979 UK), The Metallic Muse (coll 1972), which contains
some of his best arts-related tales, and A Galaxy of Strangers (coll
1976). As a writer of SPACE OPERA, LB is seldom less than relaxed and
entertaining; it may be intellectual snobbery to ask for anything more,
but his stories often convey the sense of an unrealized greater potential,
and Orson Scott CARD argues his merits in his introduction to The
Tunesmith (1957 If; 1991 chap dos). LB has been an active member of the
SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA, and edited Nebula Award Stories Seven
(anth 1972). [JC]Other works: The Fury Out of Time (1965); The Light that
Never Was (1972); Alien Main (1985) with T.L. SHERRED (whom see for
details); two Sherlock Holmes pastiches - The Quailsford Inheritance: A
Memoir of Sherlock Holmes from the Papers of Edward Porter Jones, his Late
Assistant * (1986) and The Glendower Conspiracy: A Memoir of Sherlock
Holmes from the Papers of Edward Porter Jones, his Late Assistant *
(1990); Interface for Murder (1987) ,A Hazard of Losers (1991), and Where

Dead Soldiers Walk (1994), detective novels.See also: ESP EVOLUTION;
MATTER TRANSMISSION; NEBULA; PASTORAL; SOCIAL DARWINISM.
BIG HEART AWARD
AWARDS.
BIG MEAT EATER
Film (1982). BCD Entertainment. Dir Chris Windsor, starring George
Dawson, Big Miller, Howard Taylor, Andrew Gillies. Screenplay Windsor,
Laurence Keane. 82 mins. Colour.This Canadian musical pastiche of sf and
horror films - a sort of designer midnight movie about an INVASION by two
ALIENS of a small town in the 1950s - waves its low budget like a flag
and, despite incoherences, is cheerfully enjoyable. The aliens are played
by toy robots. The plot, which defies description, involves a tank of
disgusting waste from the butcher's shop in which is being formed
radioactive baloneum (much desired by the aliens), a huge, murderous
butcher's assistant who sings jolly songs like "Bagdad Boogie", the
reanimated corpse of Mayor Rigatoni, a universal language, a car turned
into a SPACESHIP, and other absurdities. The target audience appears
similar to that for The ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. Everyone in the film
seems to be having a very good time. [PN]See also: MUSIC.
BIG MESS, THE
Der GROSSE VERHAU.
BIG PULL, THE
UK tv serial (1962). BBC. Prod Terence Dudley. Written Robert Gould.
Starring William Dexter, June Tobin, Susan Purdie, Frederick Treves. 6
30-min episodes. B/w.This fondly remembered thriller about alien INVASION,
quite generously budgeted, has an astronaut returning to Earth after
contamination by something strange in the Van Allen belts. There follow a
series of strange "fusions" in which pairs of humans, one "dead" and one
disappeared, return as single, altered individuals. [PN]
BIG YEAR FOR ELLISON
Writer Harlan Ellison had a big year in 1967. In addition to editing
Dangerous Visions, perhaps the most famous anthology in the history of
science fiction, he published two of his most successful stories, "I Have
No Mouth and I Must Scream" and "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes."Even more
popular was his teleplay for "Star Trek, The Cityon the Edge of Forever."
Many people, including Ellison, felt that the manner in which the teleplay
was producedsimplified his complex and dark vision. But the programremains
- nearly thirty years later, the best-known - andbest - episode of Star
Trek.
BIJO TO EKITAI NINGEN
(vt The H-Man; vt Beautiful Women and the Hydrogen Man) Film (1958).
Toho. Dir Inoshiro Honda, starring Yumi Shirakawa, Kenji Sahara, Akihiko
Hirata, Koreya Senda. Screenplay Takeshi Kimura, based on a story by Hideo
Kaijo. 87 mins, cut to 79 mins. Colour.This Japanese film is,
coincidentally, similar to The BLOB (also 1958) but is more ingenious and
sinister. Fishermen examining a drifting freighter find only empty suits
of clothing - empty except for the captain's uniform, from which a pool of

green slime emerges and immediately runs up the leg of the nearest
fisherman to dissolve him on the spot. The freighter has entered a cloud
of fallout from an H-bomb and the crew has been transformed into a group
organism. The monster reaches Tokyo but, unlike Toho's typical prehistoric
MONSTERS (also awakened by radiation; GOJIRA), does not knock over
buildings; instead it slithers in and out of drains, under doors and
through windows, dissolving and absorbing anyone it can catch. There are
good special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya, moody photography in the sewers,
and rather too much attention paid to a subplot involving gangsters; all
in all, a good, slightly surreal film noir. [JB]
BILAL, ENKI
(1951- ) Yugoslav/French illustrator, a very distinctive, innovative and
original creator of sensuous, decadent futures. EB was born in Belgrade,
moving with his family to France in 1961. He attended the Academie des
Beaux Arts briefly in the early 1970s. In 1971 he won a competition to
create an sf COMIC-strip story run by the magazine Pilote, in which he
subsequently published a number of strips later collected in book form as
L'appel des etoiles ["The Call of the Stars"] (graph coll 1974; vt Le bol
maudit ["The Cursed Bowl"] 1982). A further collection was Memoires
d'outre espace (graph coll 1978; trans as Outer States 1990 US). In 1973
he met and teamed up with sf writer Pierre Christin (1938- ) to produce 5
graphic novels: La croisiere des oublies (graph 1975; trans in Heavy Metal
Apr-Nov 1982 as "The Voyage of Those Forgotten"), Le vaisseau de pierre
(graph 1976; trans in Heavy Metal July-Nov 1980 as "Progress"), La ville
qui n'existait pas (graph 1977; trans in Heavy Metal Mar-Sep 1983 as "The
City that Didn't Exist"), Les phalanges de l'ordre noir (graph 1979; trans
as The Ranks of the Black Order 1989 US) and Partie de chasse (graph 1982;
trans in Heavy Metal June 1984-Mar 1985 as "The Hunting Party"). He
collaborated with writer Pierre Dionnet to produce Exterminateur 17 (graph
1979; trans in Heavy Metal Oct 1977-Mar 1978 as Exterminator 17; 1986). In
1981 he began to write and draw an as yet unfinished trilogy, so far
consisting of La foire aux immortels (graph 1983; trans as Gods in Chaos
1985) and La femme piege (graph 1986; trans as The Woman Trap 1986). In
1989-90 he collaborated with Christin on a series of reportage fictions
from five different cities, under the series title Coeurs sanglants
["Bleeding Hearts"], for which his illustrations comprised photographs
with additional features drawn or painted in. Since then (until mid-1992)
he has published only a series of limited-edition prints.EB has
collaborated with French film-maker Alain Resnais, providing set designs
for La vie est un roman (1983; vt Life is a Bed of Roses), and contributed
design work to Michael Mann's film The Keep (1983) and to the film version
of The Name of the Rose (1986), based on the novel by Umberto ECO. He also
directed the sf movie Bunker Palace Hotel (1990), a thriller set in the
future and involving ROBOTS. [RT]See also: HEAVY METAL; ILLUSTRATION;
METAL HURLANT.
BILDERDIJK, WILLEM
(1756-1831) Dutch writer of poetry and nonfiction on many subjects. His
one work of fiction was the novella Kort verhaal van eene aanmerklijke
luchtreis en nieuwe planeetokdekking (1813 anon; trans Paul Vincent as A

Short Account of a Remarkable Aerial Voyage and Discovery of a New Planet
1989 UK), in which a balloonist is cast away on a small satellite orbiting
within the Earth's atmosphere. Its flora and fauna are described, and he
finds the remains of an earlier castaway before undertaking a perilous
homeward journey. The text acknowledges a debt to the satirical tradition
of FANTASTIC VOYAGES, but is authentic sf, and has good claims to be
considered the first such work. [BS]
BILENKIN, DMITRI (ALEKSANDROVICH)
(1933-1987) Russian geologist and author of both fiction and
popular-science books. For most of his career he concentrated on short
stories - assembled as Marsianskii Priboi ["The Surf of Mars"] (coll
1967), Notch Kontrabandoi ["Night of Contraband"] (coll 1971), Proverka NA
Razumonst' ["Test for a Reason"] (coll 1974), Snega Olimpa ["The Snows of
Olympus"] (coll 1980), Litso V Tolpe ["A Face in the Crowd"] (coll 1985)
and Sila sil'nykh ["The Power of Power"] (coll 1986) - which were
generally more scientific than fictional but never boring or ill written.
Some of his typical work was assembled as The Uncertainty Principle (coll
trans Antonina W. Bouis 1978 US); some stories also appeared in World's
Spring (anth 1981 US) ed Vladimir GAKOV. DB's longer works are Pustynia
Zhizni ["The Life Desert"] (1984), a provoking comparison of different
historical/cultural human types on a future Earth transformed by
mysterious "timequakes", and an intellectual SPACE OPERA, Prikliuchenia
Polynova ["Polynov's Adventures"] (1986). [VG]
BILL ?
BILL ?
BILL ?
Film (1989). Interscope Communications/Soisson-Murphey/De Laurentiis. Dir
Stephen Herek, starring Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter and George Carlin.
Screenplay Chris Matheson, Ed Solomon. 89 mins. Colour.Because the
tranquillity of future life depends on the cultural changes brought about
by a late-20th-century rock band, Wyld Stallyns, a TIME MACHINE is sent
back to help the two teenaged future band-leaders pass their history test,
thus ensuring their continuing partnership. The boys successfully collect
Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, Napoleon, etc., to give colour
to their history presentation. This charming, silly film, made by a
relative newcomer who had previously directed CRITTERS (1986), does not
strain for credibility, but within its own relaxed, adolescent terms is
done with great conviction. The running joke is linguistic: the boys speak
a Southern Californian argot, "Valley Speak", so that, for example, bad
things are "heinous" and "egregious", good things "excellent" and
"bodacious". Their innocence (and ignorance) enables them, with a simple
"Party on, dudes", to survive perilous situations. There is a bodacious
new twist on the TIME PARADOX, and a splendid scene where Napoleon
discovers the joys of water slides.The sequel, Bill and Ted's Bogus
Journey (1991), dir Pete Hewitt but with the same screenwriters, has the
two boys visiting Hell and Heaven and outwitting the Grim Reaper (William
Sadler) and a megalomaniac leader (Joss Ackland). Though amusing, it lacks
the freshness of its predecessor. [PN]See also: CINEMA.

BILLIAS, STEPHEN
(? - ) US writer whose first novel, The American Book of the Dead (1987),
makes use of Zen points of view to approach an understanding of holocaust.
Quest for the 36 (1988) rather similarly convokes the 36 just men from
Jewish folklore to see if, together again, they can save the world from
fantasy-tinged chaos. SB's third and fourth novels were ties: Deryni
Challenge: A Crossroads Adventure in the World of Katherine Kurtz's Deryni
* (1988), and Rune Sword #4: Horrible Humes * (1991). [JC]
BINDER, EANDO
Most famous of the joint pseudonyms used by the brothers Earl Andrew
Binder (1904-1965) and Otto Oscar Binder (1911-1975), though they both
used other pseudonyms as well; after about 1940, when Earl became inactive
as a writer, Otto continued to sign himself EB, so that some EB books are
collaborative and some by Otto alone. Together, the brothers also wrote 11
stories as John Coleridge and one as Dean D. O'Brien. Alone, Otto also
wrote as Gordon A. Giles and, later, as Ione Frances (or Ian Francis)
Turek, did some work under the house name Will GARTH, and finally
published a couple of novels under his own name. A third brother, Jack, an
illustrator, did much of the early drawing on CAPTAIN MARVEL, which was
regularly scripted by Otto.The two brothers' best-known works were all
published as by EB, beginning with "The First Martian" for AMZ in 1932.
The Adam Link series, by Otto alone, is EB's most important work in the sf
field: Adam Link, a sentient ROBOT, narrates his own tales, quite
feelingly. Most of his story appears in Adam Link - Robot (1939-42 AMZ;
fixup 1965); uncollected stories, also from AMZ, are "Adam Link Fights a
War" (1940), Adam Link in the Past (1941 AMZ; 1950 chap Australia) and
"Adam Link Faces a Revolt" (1941). Link is highly anthropomorphic; though
Isaac ASIMOV's somewhat more austere sense of the nature of robots and
robotics was soon to establish itself in the sf field as an almost
unbreakable convention, the Adam Link sequence is an important
predecessor, significantly treating its robot hero (and his wife, Eve
Link) with sympathy. The brothers' other main series, the Anton York
tales, all collected in book form as Anton York, Immortal (1937-40 TWS;
fixup 1965), tells how Anton and his wife achieve IMMORTALITY and live
with it. Also as EB, the brothers published less interesting magazine
serials in the 1930s which were only gradually to see book publication.
Notable among them are Enslaved Brains (1934 Wonder Stories; rev 1951
Fantastic Story Quarterly; 1965) and Lords of Creation (1939 Argosy;
1949); in the latter, Overlords rule Earth but are resisted with ultimate
success. As Gordon A. Giles, Otto wrote a series for TWS 1937-42 (the last
story as by EB) in which a spaceship from Earth explores the Solar System,
finding Martian pyramids on each planet; known as the Via series (after
their individual titles, which always begin with "Via"), these stories
were assembled as Puzzle of the Space Pyramids (fixup 1971) as by EB.
Alone and in collaboration, Otto wrote a large number of additional
stories that were not part of any sequence; appearing in the PULP
MAGAZINES 1933-42, these were typical of the field before the revolution
in quality symbolized (and in part caused) by the arrival of John W.
CAMPBELL Jr at ASF. After 1940, Otto did script work on both Captain
Marvel and SUPERMAN comics, and late in life he published under his own

name a graphic-novel version of Jules VERNE's The Mysterious Island (graph
1974). Though his fiction production decreased, he did considerable
nonfiction work as well as taking on editorial tasks. He became interested
in UFOS. He began publishing sf stories again, briefly, 1953-4, but a
significant proportion of the books published in the 1960s and 1970s
contain material from before WWII. [JC]Other works: The Cancer Machine
(1940 chap); Martian Martyrs (c1942 chap) and The New Life (c1942 chap),
both as by John Coleridge; The Three Eternals (1939 TWS; 1949 chap
Australia); Where Eternity Ends (1939 Science Fiction; 1950 chap
Australia); Dracula * (graph 1966) with Craig Tennis; The Avengers Battle
the Earth-Wrecker * (1967) as OOB; the Saucer series comprising Menace of
the Saucers (1969) and Night of the Saucers (1971); The Impossible World
(1939 Startling Stories; 1970); Five Steps to Tomorrow (1940 Startling
Stories; 1970); The Double Man (1971); Get Off My World (1971); Secret of
the Red Spot (1971); Terror in the Bay (1971) as Ione Frances Turek; The
Mind from Outer Space (1972); The Forgotten Colony (1972) as OOB; The
Hospital Horror (1973) as OOB; The Frontier's Secret (1973) as Ian Francis
Turek, associational.See also: ADAM AND EVE; COMICS; DC COMICS; EC COMICS;
THRILLING WONDER STORIES; TIME PARADOXES.
BINDER, EARL ANDREW
[r] Eando BINDER.
BINDER, JACK
[r] Eando BINDER.
BINDER, OTTO O.
[r] Eando BINDER.
BING, JON
[r] SCANDINAVIA.
BINGHAM, CARTER
Pseudonym of Bruce Bingham Cassiday (1920- ), US editor and writer, who
worked as editor with various PULP-MAGAZINE publishers before going
freelance in 1954. His three sf works are ties: Gorgo * (1960), Flash
Gordon 4: The Time Trap of Ming XIII * (1974), as by Con STEFFANSON, and
Flash Gordon 5: The Witch Queen of Mongo * (1974). The first, based on the
film GORGO (1959), is notable for the added sex scenes, a custom of
Monarch's film adaptations. [PN]See also: FLASH GORDON; Dean OWEN.
BIOLOGICAL ENGINEERING
GENETIC ENGINEERING.
BIOLOGY
The growth of knowledge in the biological sciences has lagged behind that
in the physical sciences; Newton's synthesis of PHYSICS and ASTRONOMY
anticipated the linking of biology and chemistry by 200 years. The age of
mechanical inventions began in the early 19th century, that of biological
inventions is only just beginning, in the wake of the elucidation (during
the 1960s) of the "genetic code" which controls naturally occurring
biological processes of manufacture. Writers of speculative fiction have
always been interested in biological hypotheses but, while the
fundamentals of the science still remained mysterious, their handling of

them was of necessity markedly different from their deployment of ideas
borrowed from physical science. It is only in the last 20-30 years that sf
writers have begun thinking seriously about biotechnology ( TECHNOLOGY),
and the prospect of a usurpation of those mechanisms of organic production
previously the sole prerogative of natural species has not been
universally welcomed. As speculative writers have awakened to the awesome
possibilities inherent in the notion of GENETIC ENGINEERING there has been
a compensating investment of concepts like ECOLOGY and the biosphere with
a quasireligious significance. James Lovelock's observations regarding the
existence of long-term homeostatic mechanisms in the biosphere have helped
to re-personify the biosphere as "Gaia", whose suitability as an object of
worship seems to be taken seriously by many. There is in modern sf an
evident dialectical tension between opposing trends towards the
demystification and remystification of biological ideas.Early works of
PROTO SCIENCE FICTION which feature biological speculations include
Johannes KEPLER's Somnium (1634), which concludes with an interesting
attempt to design a lunar biology, and Francis BACON's New Atlantis
(1629), which foresees significant advances in MEDICINE and agronomy. The
positive outlook of the latter was, however, rarely found in works more
obviously fictional. Even the anticipation of progress in medicine was
capable of generating a particularly intimate kind of anxiety. Where
experiments in physical science tended to be seen, even by cynics who
thought no good could come of them, as perfectly legitimate adventures of
human inquiry, those in human biology frequently seemed blasphemous. The
undeniable fascination which many writers found in the possibilities of
biological science is characteristically tinged with a sense of threat, if
not an attitude of horror. This is very evident in Mary SHELLEY's
Frankenstein (1818), whose eponymous hero is led to despair and
destruction by the monster he creates, and in several of Nathaniel
HAWTHORNE's allegorical stories, particularly "The Birthmark" (1843) and
"Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844), where experiments on people have tragic
results. Later examples of the same reactionary response include Robert
Louis STEVENSON's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Harriet
STARK's The Bacillus of Beauty (1900). This suggestion of blasphemy is one
of the reasons why envisaged technologies that produce such at least
superficially desirable effects as IMMORTALITY get such a bad press in
fiction.The biological idea most widely discussed in the late 19th century
was, of course, EVOLUTION, and the conflict of ideas provoked by that
subject was an important stimulus to the development of sf. The response
to the controversy took several forms. Evolutionary speculation turned
towards both the FAR FUTURE and the distant past ( ANTHROPOLOGY; ORIGIN OF
MAN). The notion of evolution as an adaptive process inspired several
attempts to imagine life adapted to circumstances different from those on
Earth ( ALIENS; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS). A rather more modest version of
this same inspiration encouraged a number of fantasies about exotic
Earthly creatures, of which the most notable are the sea stories of
William Hope HODGSON and the stories in In Search of the Unknown (coll
1904) by Robert W. CHAMBERS. Exotic survivals from prehistory (usually
dinosaurs) became a common feature of exploratory melodramas, most notably
in Jules VERNE's Voyage au centre de la terre (1864; trans as Journey to
the Centre of the Earth 1872) and Arthur Conan DOYLE's The Lost World

(1912). Other early sf writers who made prolific use of biological
speculations in their work include H.G. WELLS, J.H. ROSNY AiNe and J.D.
BERESFORD.Evolutionary fantasy remained the dominant species of biological
sf for many years, overshadowing fiction dealing with experimental
biology. Speculations related to medical science tended to engage
increasingly well defined CLICHES: new plagues and cures for all diseases.
The notion of biological engineering did appear in such novels as Wells's
The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), but the methods involved were either crude
or very vague. One real-world development which provoked a considerable
response was the discovery of the mutagenic properties of radiation. The
idea of mutation was implicitly intriguing ( MUTANTS), and was made
important by its crucial role in evolutionary theory. Sf writers were
already entranced with "rays" for a variety of melodramatic reasons (
POWER SOURCES; WEAPONS) and their recruitment to biological speculation
resulted in the swift growth of the "mutagenic romance". John TAINE was a
prolific author of such romances.Few of the early pulp-sf writers had any
knowledge of the biological sciences, and for the most part they handled
biological ideas - when they did at all - in a careless and cavalier
fashion. The principal exceptions were Taine, Stanley G. WEINBAUM, who
employed his expertise mainly in connection with designing exotic
life-systems for alien worlds, and David H. KELLER, a doctor who became a
psychiatrist yet whose medical training did nothing to render his accounts
of biological experiments - including the graphic eugenic fantasy
"Stenographer's Hands" (1928) - less negative. AMAZING STORIES reprinted
"The Tissue-Culture King" (1927) by biologist Julian Huxley (1887-1975),
but biological sf in the pulps very rarely transcended the deployment of
standardized cliches: loathsome alien invaders, man-eating plants, people
driven horribly mad by attempts to save them from death via
brain-transplantation. Contemporary UK material, though much more sober in
tone and serious in intent, was hardly less negative. The ideas in J.B.S.
HALDANE's prophetic manifesto for biotechnology, Daedalus, or Science and
the Future (1924) were transformed by Aldous HUXLEY into the nightmarishly
satirical substance of BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932), and there are several
horrific stories of the "no good will come of it all" school in S. Fowler
WRIGHT's The New Gods Lead (coll 1932). Neil BELL and John GLOAG also
dealt extensively with biological inventions in their sf, but their
approach was determinedly cautionary. UK scientific romance from the
period between the wars could find hope for the future only in a radical
transformation of human nature, but even Wells had lost whatever faith he
had had in the ability of 20th-century mankind to begin the work of
remaking its own nature in a planned and profitable manner. In the eyes of
the sf writers of the 1930s the real SUPERMAN-to-come was destined to be a
freak of benevolent nature; his time was not yet, and attempts to hurry it
by scientific endeavour were invariably disastrous. GENRE SF's handling of
biological ideas improved dramatically after WWII. Several new writers of
the 1940s were trained in biology, most notably Isaac ASIMOV, who held an
academic post in biochemistry, and (although he did not begin to publish
prolifically until the 1950s) James BLISH, who had studied zoology at
college and worked for a while as a medical technician. Blish was the
first genre-sf writer to import biological ideas on a considerable scale
and apply them with real ingenuity. A significant early attempt was "There

Shall Be No Darkness" (1950), about a kind of werewolf, one of a group of
stories which attempted to recruit biological ideas to the rationalization
of symbols borrowed from the supernatural imagination ( SUPERNATURAL
CREATURES); other examples include Jack WILLIAMSON's DARKER THAN YOU THINK
(1940; exp 1948) - more lycanthropy - and Richard MATHESON's I am Legend
(1954), about vampires. It was Blish's PANTROPY series, ultimately
collected in THE SEEDLING STARS (fixup 1957), which first treated the idea
of man-remade-by-Man seriously and sympathetically.As genre sf matured in
the 1950s there was a gradual increase in the sophistication of biological
analogies. ALIEN beings were still characteristically described and
defined by reference to the diversity of Earthly lifeforms, but the
subtlety with which this was done increased dramatically in the 1950s.
Many stories appeared which used the strange reproductive habits of the
lower organisms as models for the construction of exotic situations
involving humans and aliens. Authors who made fruitful use of this kind of
analogy included Philip Jose FARMER, notably in The Lovers (1952; exp
1961), "Open to Me, My Sister" (1960; vt "My Sister's Brother") and
"Strange Compulsion" (1953), and Theodore STURGEON, especially in "The
Perfect Host" (1948), "The Sex Opposite" (1952) and "The Wages of Synergy"
(1953). More recent users of the same strategy include James TIPTREE Jr,
in "Your Haploid Heart" (1969) and "A Momentary Taste of Being" (1975).
This kind of analogical device illustrates the manner in which biological
ideas are usually deployed in sf. In all these stories exotic biological
relationships are transformed into metaphors applicable to social
relationships (or vice versa), relationships between humans and other
intelligent beings or even, in a psychological sense, relationships
between humans and their environment. This is, of course, a totally
unscientific use of scientific ideas, but it can be very effective as a
literary device. It is applied not only to such hypothetical biological
ideas as LIVING WORLDS but also to such concepts as HIVE-MINDS, ECOLOGY
(see also COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS) and PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS.
Thus, for example, the hive-mind becomes in sf not so much a mode of
social organization pertaining to insect species as a metaphor for
considering possible states of human society. Similarly, symbiosis becomes
symbolic of an idealized relationship between humans, or between human and
other beings. This misapplication of ideas extends into the real world
where, in common usage as in much sf, terms like "ecology" have come to be
symbolic of some abstract and quasimetaphysical notion of harmony between
humanity and environment.This constant quest to find biological metaphors
has always tended to sidetrack or pervert realistic speculation about
likely developments in the biological sciences. Symbolism, metaphor and
crude analogical thinking dominate exploration in sf of such notions as
ANDROIDS, CLONES, CYBORGS, GENETIC ENGINEERING, IMMORTALITY and SEX.
Although much contemporary sf seems to be intimately concerned with
current trends in biology, hardly any of this speculation can be said to
be extrapolative in a purely rational fashion. These observations should
not be taken as altogether pejorative: this method of using ideas is
certainly not uninteresting and is often applied with considerable
artistry. But one can certainly argue that sf's enduring inability to get
to grips with the real possibilities of biotechnology, and to explore
those possibilities in a reasonably scrupulous fashion, is a lamentable

failure of the sciencefictional imagination.The last decade has produced a
number of attempts to be more positive about the possible rewards of
biotechnology (many are noted in the entry on IMMORTALITY), but there
remains an excessive reliance on the benevolence of chance. Such works as
Greg BEAR's Blood Music (1985), in which the apocalyptic consequences of a
biotechnologist's recklessness are declared by the author to be happy ones
(though many readers remain unconvinced), cannot reasonably be said to
constitute sensible apologias. Paul PREUSS's Human Error (1985) and
Charles SHEFFIELD's Sight of Proteus (fixup 1978) and Proteus Unbound
(1989) are other works which rely heavily on unplanned ecocatastrophes to
generate optimistic outcomes. Even an enthusiastic propagandist for
biotechnology like Brian M. STABLEFORD finds it easier to produce
sarcastic fantasies of biotechnological experiments gone awry than utopian
accounts of future humanity redeemed by careful effort, as evidenced by
Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution (coll 1991);
and even a calculatedly optimistic writer like David BRIN awards a minor
and relatively ineffectual role to biological science in describing
responses to ecological crisis in his bold and extravagant novel Earth
(1990).The recent boom in HORROR fiction has involved a massive borrowing
of ideas from sf, many of which involve extrapolations of biological
science; writers like Robin COOK and Dean R. KOONTZ have produced very
effective thrillers in this vein. The overwhelmingly negative image of
biological experimentation conveyed by such fiction is only to be
expected; it is the task of horror writers to horrify. It is perhaps
surprising, though, that so little genre sf counterbalances that negative
image with a more evenhanded investigation of the possible benefits of
such experiments. One horror novel which regards its depicted
biotechnological breakthrough - a potential cure for AIDS using a virus
found in vampires' blood - with optimism is Dan SIMMONS's Children of the
Night (1992).The use of biological ideas as metaphors to apply to
specifically human situations is inevitable, and the particular anxiety
which attends speculation about experiments in human biology is entirely
appropriate, but a too-ready acceptance of the horrified conviction that
all biological experimentation is a sin against God or Gaia which will
inevitably be punished by dire misfortune is a kind of intellectual
cowardice. In its handling of biological ideas, then, sf has not yet
attained a true maturity. [BS]
BIONICS
CYBERNETICS; CYBORGS.
BIONIC WOMAN, THE
US tv series (1976-8). Harve Bennett Productions and Universal for ABC.
Created and prod Kenneth Johnson, starring Lindsay Wagner. 3 seasons, 57
50 min episodes. Colour.In this spinoff from the successful series The SIX
MILLION DOLLAR MAN - its first episode being Part 2 of a story begun in
the parent series - Jaime Sommers is the former childhood sweetheart of
the bionic man, Steve Austin. After a serious accident she, too, has part
of her body artificially rebuilt and works for Oscar Goldman (Richard
Anderson), head of a government intelligence agency. Unlike Steve Austin,
who has a bionic eye, she has a bionic ear with which she can eavesdrop

from a mile away. There is a bionic dog called Max. Several episodes
involve ALIENS. The acting of the lead role is notably superior to that in
the parent series. Two book ties were published: The Bionic Woman #1:
Welcome Home Jaime * (1976 by Eileen LOTTMAN; vt Double Identity 1976 UK
as by Maud Willis) and #2: Extracurricular Activities * (1977 by Lottman;
vt A Question of Life 1977 UK as by Willis). [JB/PN]
BIOY CASARES, ADOLFO
(1914- ) Argentine writer, noted from his first book, Prologo
["Prologue"] (1929), for the surreal displacements of his work, which uses
sf or detective forms in an abstract, parodic fashion, and is generally
metaphysical in intent. La invencion de Morel (1940; trans Ruth I.C. Simms
in The Invention of Morel and Other Stories 1964 US), tells in this
fashion of its protagonist's eventually successful search through
appearances and realities for IMMORTALITY; it was filmed in Italy as
L'Invenzione di Morel, dir Emidio Greco, in 1974. Plan de evasion (1945;
trans Suzanne Jill Levine as A Plan for Escape 1975 US) had close thematic
links with the earlier novel. ABC's "El Perjurio de la Nieve" was filmed
by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson as El Crimen de Oribe (1950), and features a
house whose occupants are caught in a time-loop. ABC's most substantial
novel, El sueno del los heroes (1954; trans Diana Thorold as The Dream of
the Heroes 1987 US), features the saving of a workman from death by a
mysterious figure, possibly supernatural, and the repetition of the same
events years later, but without any intervention. Dormir al sol (1973;
trans Suzanne Jill Levine as Asleep in the Sun 1978 US), which has
soul-transplants, conflates the transformations of psychosurgery with
totalitarianism.ABC met Jorge Luis BORGES in 1932. They became close
literary friends, and under the shared pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq
published Seis problemas para Don Isidro Parodi (coll 1942; trans Norman
Thomas di Giovanni as Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi 1981 US), a set
of introvertive detections. Both authors, with ABC's wife Silvina Ocampo
(1903- ), collaborated in the editing of a fantasy collection, Antologia
de la Literatura Fantastica (anth 1940; rev 1976; trans as The Book of
Fantasy 1976 US). If ABC has for some years lived in the shadow of his
famous friend, the continuing translation of his work may rectify a
misprision. [JC]See also: ISLANDS; LATIN AMERICA; PARALLEL WORLDS.
BIRD, CORDWAINER
[s] Harlan ELLISON.
BIRD, WILLIAM HENRY FLEMING
(1896-1971) UK art lecturer and writer who published some magazine sf in
the 1950s under his own name, beginning with "Critical Age" for Futurist
Science Stories in 1953, and also as John Toucan and John Eagle, a house
name under which two novels almost certainly by WHFB appeared, Reckless
Journey (1947 chap) and Brief Interlude (c1947 chap); his later work was
almost exclusively written for the firm of CURTIS WARREN and was also
released under house names: War of Argos (1952) as by Rand LE PAGE; Two
Worlds (1952) as by Paul LORRAINE; Operation Orbit (1953) as by Kris LUNA;
Cosmic Conquest (1953) as by Adrian Blair and The Third Mutant (1953) as
by Lee ELLIOT. Most featured interstellar espionage agents fighting
revolutionary MUTANTS. The later Blast-off into Space (1966) - not a

Curtis Warren title - was written under a personal pseudonym, Harry
Fleming, and exhibits more character. [JC]
BIRDS, THE
Film (1963). Universal. Dir Alfred Hitchcock, starring Rod Taylor, Tippi
Hedren, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette. Screenplay Evan HUNTER, based on
"The Birds" (1952) by Daphne DU MAURIER. 119 mins. Colour.Ordinary birds
in a small seaside town suddenly and without explanation launch a series
of murderous attacks on people. The appearance of menace out of a clear
sky is paralleled, symbolically, by the eruption of strong feeling in the
too-perfectly groomed heroine of the Freudian love story that runs through
the film. It is the arrival of this woman which apparently precipitates
the bird attacks, and she herself is later imaged as a bird in a cage. The
attacks are set-pieces, and carry considerable conviction, achieved with
skilled editing and through use of a combination of real birds, models and
process work by the veteran animator Ub Iwerks (1900-1971), an early
colleague of Walt Disney and co-creator of Mickey Mouse. Although very
much more sophisticated than usual, this famous film belongs formally and
classically to the MONSTER-MOVIE genre, where the fragility of human
hegemony over Nature and the world is conventionally imaged by a tranquil
landscape ravaged without warning by some monstrous, inexplicable fury.
The film is not strictly sf, since interestingly it neither seeks nor
provides any rational explanation for its furies in terms of scientific
meddling, atomic radiation or anything else. But not only is its central
metaphor of human control vs natural disorder central to sf, historically
it was a focal point of the genre as the catalyst for a whole series of
revenge-of-Nature films over the next two decades. [PN]See also: CINEMA.
BISCHOFF, DAVID F(REDRICK)
(1951- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "The Sky's an Oyster; The
Stars are Pearls" in 1975, and who quickly established himself as a
versatile and adaptable novelist, though his practice of working in
collaboration has tended to muffle any sense that he has, in his own
right, either a distinctive style or concerns which could be thought of as
personal. His first novel, The Seeker (1976 Canada) with Chris LAMPTON, is
in a sense, therefore, typical, for there is nothing in particular to
remember about this competent sf adventure featuring a fugitive ALIEN on
Earth and a chase. Forbidden World (fixup 1978) with Ted WHITE is, in the
same way, efficiently anonymous; and the Dragonstar sequence - Day of the
Dragonstar (1983), Night of the Dragonstar (1985) and Dragonstar Destiny
(1989), all with Thomas F. MONTELEONE - explores with impersonal ingenuity
a giant artificial-world-cum-zoo in space (see BIG DUMB OBJECTS) full of
escaped menaces and a hidden agenda or two. The most memorable of his
collaborations are Tin Woodman (1979) with Dennis R. Bailey - a complex
adventure involving a telepathic human, a living alien starship, a
convincingly psychopathic villain, and a galactic chase - and The Selkie
(1982) with Charles SHEFFIELD, a fantasy.Much the same impression of a
genial but impersonal skilfulness is generated by some of DFB's solo
fiction, too, although Nightworld (1979) interestingly combines elements
of RECURSIVE SF - in the shape of an ancient ANDROID who replicates the
physique and personality of H.G. WELLS - and SCIENCE FANTASY as the

protagonist, Wells and a girl who must grow up combine to brave the
COMPUTER-generated vampires of the forgotten colony planet of Styx; but
the sequel, The Vampires of Nightworld (1981), merely exploits the
already-established venue. Set on a starship with a cosmic troubleshooting
mission, the Star Fall books - Star Fall: A Space Fantasy (1980) and Star
Spring: A Space Operetta (1982) - show an uneasy lightness of tone, though
the VIRTUAL-REALITY-like shuffling of pulp venues at its heart is
enjoyable. The Star Hounds sequence - The Infinite Battle (1985), Galactic
Warriors (1985) and The Macrocosmic Conflict (1986)-drifts dangerously
close to the routine. On the other hand the UFO Conspiracy sequence Abduction: The UFO Conspiracy (1990), Deception (1991) and Revelation
(1991) - is a gripping excursion into camp PARANOIA. Companionable and
chameleon, DFB seems at the time of writing (1992) to be a
jack-of-all-trades who might well, one day, speak out on his own.
[JC]Other works: Quest (anth 1977 chap); Strange Encounters (anth 1977
chap); The Phantom of the Opera * (1977), a juvenile version; Mandala
(1983 in Chrysalis 10, anth ed Roy Torgeson as "The Warmth of the Stars";
exp 1983); WarGames * (1983), a film tie; a Time Machine tie, Time Machine
#2: Search for Dinosaurs * (1984); The Crunch Bunch (1985); the Gaming
Magi fantasy sequence, comprising The Destiny Dice (1985), Wraith Board
(1985) and The Unicorn Gambit (1986); A Personal Demon (fixup 1985) with
Rich Brown (1942- ) and Linda Richardson (1944- ), comprising several
stories published in Fantastic as by Michael F.X. Milhaus; The Manhattan
Project * (1986), a film tie; Some Kind of Wonderer (1987); The Blob *
(1988), a film tie; Gremlins 2: The New Batch * (1990), a film tie; two
contributions to the sequence of Bill, the Galactic Hero tied sequels,
Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Tasteless Pleasures * (1991) and
Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Ten Thousand Bars * (1991; vt
Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of the Hippies from Hell 1993 UK),
both with Harry HARRISON; the Mutants Amok sequence, comprising Mutants
Amok (1991), #2: Mutant Hell (1991), #3: Rebel Attack (1991), #4:
Holocaust Horror (1991) and #5: Mutants Amok at Christmastime (1992), all
as by Mark Grant; Daniel M. Pinkwater's Melvinge of the Megaverse #1:
Night of the Living Shark! * (1991) ( Daniel M. PINKWATER); Star Trek, the
Next Generation: Grounded * (1993); the Dr. Dimension sequence of comic
science fantasies comprising Dr.Dimension (1993) and Dr. Dimension:
Masters of Spacetime (1994), both with John DECHANCIE; two Aliens ties:
Aliens: Genocide * (1993) and Aliens Vs. Predator: Hutner's Planet *
(1994); seaQuest DSV: The Ancient * (1994), tied to the televisions
series.See also: MONSTERS; UFOS.
BISHOP, MATTHEW
[r] M.H. ZOOL.
BISHOP, MICHAEL
(1945- ) US writer, much travelled in childhood, with an MA in English
from the University of Georgia, where he did a thesis on the poetry of
Dylan Thomas. He began publishing sf with "Pinon Fall" for Gal in 1970,
and in a short period established himself as one of the significant new
writers of the 1970s. Though his early stories and novels display
considerable intellectual complexity, and do not shirk the downbeat

implications of their anthropological ( ANTHROPOLOGY) treatment of ALIENS
and alienating milieux, there remained a sense in which MB could not be
treated as one of those writers, like Edward BRYANT, whose primary
influences could be seen as the US NEW WAVE of the 1960s combined with the
liberating influence of the numerous writing workshops of the succeeding
decade. MB's first novel, for instance, A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
(1975; rev vt Eyes of Fire 1980; under original title with revs retained
and new introduction 1989 UK), is written ostensibly within the terms of
HARD SF, though laced with splashy Gothicisms (most of them removed as
part of the extensive revision): on an alien planet, the protagonist must
perform wonders or be sent back to a despotic Earth. But, inter alia, MB
mounts the first of his complex and sometimes moving analyses of alien
cultures. The finest of these anthropology-based interrogatory tales is
TRANSFIGURATIONS (1973 Worlds of If as "Death and Designation among the
Asadi"; fixup 1979), where the colonizing impact of a "superior" culture
upon less technologically advanced natives is complexly contrasted - in a
story which owes much to Joseph CONRAD - with the recursive unknowableness
of the Other. And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees (1976; vt Beneath the
Shattered Moons 1977; vt as coll Beneath the Shattered Moons and The White
Otters of Childhood 1978 UK), is a somewhat less convincing FAR-FUTURE
tale dealing with a world most of whose people, long ago genetically
engineered ( GENETIC ENGINEERING) into stoicism, are now apparently
incapable of aggression or any other display of emotion. Stolen Faces
(1977), again set on an alien planet, darkly offers a culture so diseased
that its inhabitants must designate themselves through gross
mutilations.However, while publishing these novels and many of the stories
collected in Blooded on Arachne (coll 1982) and One Winter in Eden (coll
1984), MB was increasingly focusing his sharp, earnest, exploratory vision
upon the eerier provinces of the US South. In A Little Knowledge (1977)
and its sequel, Catacomb Years (fixup 1979), a theocratic regime
repressively dominates a NEAR-FUTURE Atlanta, Georgia, until the
conversion of some apparent aliens begins to destabilize society; the
vision of Atlanta as a domed city whose various levels and intersections
literally map the new social order may be cognitively daring, but it thins
out in the mind's eye when described. However, MB's most public success
soon followed. NO ENEMY BUT TIME (1982), which won a NEBULA, intensified
the movement of his imagination to a local habitat, and for the first time
introduced a protagonist of sufficient racial (and mental) complexity to
carry a storyline immured in the particular and haunted by the exotic. In
this case, dogged by dreams of the Pleistocene, the new MB protagonist who is not dissimilar to the Habiline who later featured in the less
successful and overextended tale of Atlanta and Haiti, Ancient of Days
(1985) ( APES AND CAVEMEN) - is enlisted into a TIME-TRAVEL project,
returns to the Africa of his vision, fathers a child in the dawn of time,
and returns with her to the battering world.Through the 1980s, MB
continued to strive for an adequate form to engage his humanist
sympathies, the sociological (and anthropological) eye which found in the
South perhaps all too much material, the lurking humorist within the
preacher. Who Made Stevie Crye? (1984) is a strangely unengaged horror
novel, with laughs; The Secret Ascension (1987; vt Philip K. Dick is Dead,
Alas 1988 UK), set in an ALTERNATE-WORLDS USA, homages and stars DICK (see

also RECURSIVE SF); Unicorn Mountain (1988), once again set partly in
Atlanta, is a fantasy in which the dying of unicorns from another
dimension and the problem of AIDS in this world intersect encouragingly;
and Count Geiger's Blues (1992), another fantasy - set in the Atlanta-like
Salonika, capital of the imaginary southern state of Oconee - was
similarly told in MB's uneasily humorous, highly individual voice. Though
full of energy and strongly willed, these novels do not feel entirely
comfortably in focus.On the other hand, Brittle Innings (1994) gives a
powerful sense of smoothly released energies; retelling the story of the
FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER within a GOTHIC SF frame - it is set in the American
South, and the Monster is a professional baseball player - it amply
confirms a sense that MB, having been in search of a strong world to
illuminate, had found one. [JC]Other works: Windows ?
of Poetry to Deep South Con XV (coll 1977 chap); Under Heaven's Bridge
(dated 1980 but 1981 UK) with Ian WATSON; Close Encounters with the Deity
(coll 1986); To a Chimp Held Captive for Purposes of Research (1986
broadsheet); Within the Walls of Tyre (1978 Weirdbook 13; rev as
screenplay 1989 chap UK); Apartheid, Superstrings, and Mordecai Thubana
(1989 chap); Emphatically Not Sf, Almost (coll 1991); The Quickening (1981
Universe 11; 1991 chap), which won a Nebula for 1981.As Editor: Changes:
Stories of Metamorphosis (anth 1983) with Ian Watson; Light Years and Dark
(anth 1984); Nebula Awards 23 (anth 1989); Nebula Awards 24 (anth 1990);
Nebula Awards 25 (anth 1991).About the author: Michael Bishop: A Working
Bibliography (1988 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr.See also: APES AND CAVEMEN
(IN THE HUMAN WORLD); ARKHAM HOUSE; BIG DUMB OBJECTS; COSMOLOGY;
DEVOLUTION; ORIGIN OF MAN; POETRY; RECURSIVE SF; SEX; SOCIOLOGY;
SUPERHEROES; TIMESCAPE BOOKS.
BISSON, TERRY (BALLANTINE)
(1942- ) US author who has also worked as a New York publishing
copy-writer. His first novel, Wyrldmaker (1981), is a too-rapidly told but
intermittently dazzling GENERATION STARSHIP tale told in the guise of an
heroic fantasy. With his second, Talking Man (1986), he comes into his
full powers as a novelist whose narrative voice is urgently and lucidly
that of a teller of tales. The figure at the heart of Talking Man - who
does not talk - seems at the story's beginning to be nothing more than a
bemusedly eccentric rural Kentuckian with a knack for repairing motors; as
the novel develops into a quest west and then north across a USA more and
more radically transformed the further the search proceeds, the talking
man takes on qualities of Trickster and Redeemer, and eventually seems to
contain the world's reality in his hands. The tale closes back home, but
home is now an American South changed magically into a clement UTOPIA. In
FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN (1988), which is in no ostensible sense a sequel,
this same utopia proves to be an ALTERNATE WORLD born from a different
course of US history. The enslaved Blacks of the Southern states had
successfully revolted during the course of the Civil War, founded an
independent Southern country, and by the late 20th century have
established an unracist, beneficent, courteous, livable comity. Those
parts of the tale set during this period are perhaps less convincing - and
certainly less moving - than the central passages of the book, which
represent the reminiscences of one of the Black revolutionaries; his

descriptions of the successful campaign to free his people intensely
invokes the haunted heartlands of the Civil War upriver from Washington,
though subtly and upliftingly transformed.TB's fourth novel, Voyage to the
Red Planet (1990), complicatedly combines spoof and elegy. In the 21st
century the USA has declined severely, and the Mary Poppins, an
umbrella-shaped spaceship once destined to take humanity to Mars, is in a
mothball orbit. But an entrepreneur decides that a good film could be made
of an actual trip to Mars, using the original ageing crew; and this is
done. The portrait of a spineless, privatized USA is scathing; but the
ship and the voyage - both described with considerable versimilitude evoke a powerful sense of genuine but wasted opportunity, while generating
at the same time a sense that humanity's dream of travelling outwards was
not yet, perhaps, over. TB wrote no stories during the 1980s, but
beginning in 1990 became a significant author of short fiction, with work
like "Bears Discover Fire" (1990), which won a NEBULA, a HUGO and a
THEODORE STURGEON MEMORIAL AWARD. The tale once again elegizes the land,
the loss of the dream of America; it is also very funny. TB's short work
is assembled as Bears Discover Fire (coll 1993). Fluent and moral and wry,
TB has become one of the writers whose sf speaks to the world. [JC]See
also: DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; EVOLUTION; FANTASY; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE
FICTION MAGAZINE; MARS.
BIXBY, (DREXEL) JEROME (LEWIS)
(1923- ) US writer and editor; an extremely prolific story-writer, though
relatively little of his work is sf. Pseudonyms used on magazine stories
include Jay B. Drexel, Harry Neal and Alger ROME, the last in
collaboration with Algis BUDRYS. His stories include many Westerns; he has
also written sf and horror screenplays and teleplays, including IT! THE
TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (1958), Curse of the Faceless Man (1958), the
original script, later rewritten, for FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966), and several
episodes of STAR TREK; he claims that Isaac ASIMOV's Fantastic Voyage II:
Destination Brain (1987) was based on a treatment by him. JB edited PLANET
STORIES Summer 1950-July 1951 and initiated its companion magazine, TWO
COMPLETE SCIENCE-ADVENTURE BOOKS, editing its first 3 issues; he also
worked on GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION, THRILLING WONDER STORIES, STARTLING
STORIES and several comics. He began publishing sf with "Tubemonkey" for
Planet Stories in 1949, and collected much of his output in this genre in
Space by the Tale (coll 1964). Devil's Scrapbook (coll 1964; vt Call for
an Exorcist 1974) is horror and fantasy. His widely anthologized and
best-known story is sf/horror: "It's a Good Life" (1953), about a
malignant superchild with PSI POWERS (see also CHILDREN IN SF); it was
dramatized on tv in The TWILIGHT ZONE, and later as an episode, directed
by Joe DANTE, of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983). His work is
professional, as evidenced by his perfectly competent Star Trek novel, Day
of the Dove * (1978), but not of great significance in the field. [JC]See
also: MUSIC; PSYCHOLOGY; SUPERMAN.
BIZARRE
US SEMIPROZINE. 1 issue (Jan 1941), ed Walter E. Marconette and J.
Chapman Miske, effectively a continuation of Marconette's earlier FANZINE
Scienti-Snaps. Professional in appearance, with a colour cover by Hannes

BOK, it is remembered mainly for publishing for the first time the
original but previously unused ending of A. MERRITT's novel Dwellers in
the Mirage (1932; rev 1953), which ending has been in use ever since. B
also ran a discussion by John W. CAMPBELL Jr about writing styles.
[PN/FHP]
BIZARRE! MYSTERY MAGAZINE
US DIGEST-size magazine. 3 issues (Oct and Nov 1965, Jan 1966), published
by Pamar Enterprises, ed John Poe. B!MM had a strong horror/sf element
overriding the ostensible mystery content, and included reprint work by
Pierre BOULLE and new stories by Thomas M. DISCH, Avram DAVIDSON, James H.
SCHMITZ and Arthur C. CLARKE. [FHP/PN]
BJAZIC, MLADEN
[r] YUGOSLAVIA.
BLACK, LADBROKE (LIONEL DAY)
(1877-1940) UK writer of much boys' fiction, often as Lionel Day or Paul
Urquhart. He began publishing novels in 1902. The Buried World (1928), as
by Lionel Day, is a LOST-WORLD juvenile; the head in The Gorgon's Head
(1932) turns modern Britons to stone for a while; and The Poison War
(1933) is a future- WAR novel in which the UK is attacked by chemical
weapons. LB was not an innovative writer. [JC]Other works: The Wager
(1927), a RURITANIAN tale.
BLACK, ROBERT
Robert P. HOLDSTOCK.
BLACK AFRICAN SF
Only a small amount of sf is published in the Black African nations. What
follows is more a sampler than a full survey, since very few researchers
have even looked at the topic.Much of what is published is in English, and
most of that is juvenile. Typical are the novelette Journey to Space (1980
chap), by the Nigerian Flora Nwapa, and a novel about a scientist who
discovers ANTIGRAVITY, The Adventures of Kapapa (1976) by the Ghanaian
J.O. Eshun. One of the rare sf books for adults, a play, is The Chosen
Ones (1969) by Azize Asgarally of Mauritius; it is set partly in the 30th
century.More common are adventure and spy novels for adults containing sf
elements, much in the style of the James Bond movies based on Ian
FLEMING's books. Such is The Mark of Cobra (1980), by Valentine Alily of
Nigeria, in which a secret agent fights against a multimillionaire seeking
world domination by use of a "solar weapon". David G. Maillu of Kenya is a
prolific writer of adventure novels, of which some are sf; in his The
Equatorial Assignment (1980), for example, a secret agent penetrates a
criminal conspiracy which is trying to control the whole of Africa by the
use of fantastic weapons. More sf can be found in the so-called Onitsha
market literature; a typical example is the Nigerian adaptation of George
ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) done by Bala Abdullahi Funtua in the
mid-1970s.Sf in other languages is rare. Sony Labou Tansi is Congolese;
his NEAR-FUTURE sf novel, set in a fictitious African country in 1995, is
in French: Conscience de tracteur ["Consciousness of the Tractor"] (1979).
Another adaptation of Orwell, this time of Animal Farm (1945), is Pitso ea
liphoofolo tsa hae ["The Meeting of the Domestic Animals"] (1956); this,

by Libakeng Maile, was published in the Southern Sotho language. A
children's sf book written in Hausa, one of the languages of Nigeria, is
Tauraruwa mai wutsiya ["The Comet"] (1969) by Umaru A. Dembo; it tells of
the travels in space of a small boy, and of his encounter with a friendly
ALIEN. [JO]
BLACKBURN, JOHN (FENWICK)
(1923-1993) UK writer and antiquarian book dealer, author of many novels
whose ambience of HORROR derives from a calculated use of material from
several genres, including sf. His early books, such as his first, A Scent
of New-Mown Hay (1958; a reported vt The Reluctant Spy 1966 US, is
possibly a ghost title), A Sour Apple Tree (1958), Broken Boy (1959) and A
Ring of Roses (1965; vt A Wreath of Roses 1965 US) tended to use themes
from espionage and thriller fiction to buttress and ultimately provide
explanations for tales whose effects were fundamentally GOTHIC horror and
fantasy. Ex-Nazis often cropped up in these books, as in the first, where
a German scientist spreads around the world a mutated plague-bearing
fungus with the eponymous aroma. Even in later stories, like The Face of
the Lion (1976), which again (characteristically) deals with abominable
disease, loathsome though by now rather elderly SS officers make their
dutiful bows. JFB's use of sf is usually borderline, though not in
Children of the Night (1966), one of his better works, where an
underground lost race ( LOST WORLDS) in northern England kills by
telepathic powers. Often what seem to be sf plot devices on introduction
are satisfactorily explained in terms of contemporary science by the
story's close, or are MCGUFFINS or red herrings like the atom-bomb
conspiracy in The Face of the Lion. Though his use of sf situations is
often ingenious, and though even his most straightforward novels are prone
to internal generic mutations from one form to another, it would be unduly
stretching matters to describe JFB as a genuine sf writer. [JC]Other
works: Dead Man Running (1960); The Gaunt Woman (1962); Blue Octavo (1963;
vt Bound to Kill 1963 US); Colonel Bogus (1964; vt Packed for Murder 1964
US); The Winds of Midnight (1964; vt Murder at Midnight 1964 US); The
Young Man from Lima (1968); Nothing But the Night (1968); Bury Him Darkly
(1969); Blow the House Down (1970); The Household Traitors (1971); For
Fear of Little Men (1972); Devil Daddy (1972); a series comprising Deep
among the Dead Men (1973), Mister Brown's Bodies (1975) and The Cyclops
Goblet (1977); Our Lady of Pain (1974); Dead Man's Handle (1978); The Sins
of the Father (1979); A Beastly Business (1982); A Book of the Dead (1984)
and The Bad Penny (1985).See also: GOTHIC SF; MYTHOLOGY.
BLACKFORD, RUSSELL (KENNETH)
(1954- ) Australian industrial advocate, writer and critic. The best of
his small output of sf may be "Glass Reptile Breakout" (1985), the title
story of Glass Reptile Breakout (anth 1990) ed Van Ikin, a CYBERPUNK tale
of self-healing teenagers. His only novel, The Tempting of the Witch King
(1983), is ironic fantasy. Co-editor of AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW:
SECOND SERIES, RB has two William Atheling Jr AWARDS for criticism. With
David King he edited Urban Fantasies (anth 1985), sf and fantasy stories,
and, with Jenny Blackford (1957- ), Lucy Sussex (1957- ) and Norman Talbot
(1936), Contrary Modes (anth 1985), essays on sf. [PN]

BLACK HOLE, THE
Film (1979). Walt Disney. Dir Gary Nelson, starring Maximilian Schell,
Anthony Perkins, Robert Forster, Joseph Bottoms, Yvette Mimieux, Ernest
Borgnine. Screenplay Jeb RoseBrook, Gerry Day, based on a story by
Rosebrook, Bob Barbash, Richard Landau. 98 mins. Colour.The disappointment
of its year in sf movies, this was a ludicrous though expensive reprise in
space of Disney's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (1954). Astronauts enter a
derelict survey vessel orbiting a BLACK HOLE (painted red so that we can
see it better); they find a Captain-Nemo-like figure (Schell) served by a
killer ROBOT and ANDROID henchmen, who turn out to be the original crew
evilly transformed by the mad SCIENTIST. His desire is to venture within
the hole. After adventures involving two post- STAR WARS cute robots and a
strike by a meteor (although the size of a house, it fails to bring about
the decompression of the spacecraft), all enter the hole, which appears to
Schell like DANTE ALIGHIERI's Inferno and to the good guys like a kitschy
cathedral. The screenwriters, who appear to have no knowledge of science
even to primary-school level, give all the fanatical oratory to Schell,
leaving the remainder of the cast quite wooden. The novelization is The
Black Hole * (1979) by Alan Dean FOSTER. [PN]
BLACK HOLES
Item of sf TERMINOLOGY borrowed from COSMOLOGY. The term was coined by
physicist John Wheeler (1911-) in 1969 and adopted immediately and
enthusiastically by sf writers. The concept of the black hole is quite
complex, and is best approached by the layman through a reliable book of
scientific popularization such as A Brief History of Time: From the Big
Bang to Black Holes (1988) by Stephen W. Hawking (1942- ), one of the
theoretical physicists to have done fundamental work on the concept. The
scientific element of the present discussion has been much simplified.The
possibility that a lump of matter might be compressible to the point at
which its surface gravity would be so powerful that not even light could
escape from it was first pointed out in the late 18th century by John
Michell (c1724-1793) and then by Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace
(1749-1827). It was resuscitated in the 20th century when the implications
of General Relativity became clear. It was not until the 1960s, however,
that physicists began to speculate as to whether a collapsing star of
sufficient mass, about three times that of the Sun, might pass beyond even
the NEUTRON-STAR state of collapsed matter to become a black hole of this
kind, centred on a singularity (a point where infinite gravity crushed
matter and energy entirely out of existence) and bounded by an event
horizon (defined by the distance from the singularity at which the escape
velocity is that of light; the name "event horizon" derives from the fact
that it is of course impossible to observe from outside any events
occurring closer to the singularity than this).Many early sf stories
dealing with the theme seized upon the extreme relativistic
time-dilatation effect associated with objects falling towards the event
horizons of such holes; examples include Poul ANDERSON's "Kyrie" (1968),
Brian W. ALDISS's "The Dark Soul of the Night" (1976) and Frederik POHL's
GATEWAY (1977). These stories make interesting metaphorical connections
between physics and psychology, perhaps helping to cast some light on the
intriguing question of why the black-hole concept has become one of the

most charismatic ideas in contemporary physics. Few other notions have had
such an immediate imaginative impact, or spawned so many exercises in
lyrical quasi-scientific philosophizing. John Taylor's Black Holes: The
End of the Universe? (1973), one of several books which helped to
popularize the notion in the 1970s, is a rather eccentric ideative
rhapsody built on the supposition that "the black hole requires a complete
rethinking of our attitudes to life".Further tense psychological
melodramas using black holes to develop analogies between extraordinary
physics and mental processes include Robert SILVERBERG's "To the Dark
Star" (1968), Barry N. MALZBERG's GALAXIES (1975) and John VARLEY's
"Lollipop and the Tar Baby" (1977) - which features an intelligent black
hole - but stories of this kind soon petered out. Familiarity bred
contentment if not contempt, and the black hole was soon domesticated by
sf writers into a standard image of no great moment. The idea proved,
however, to be surprisingly adaptable. At first it seemed that anything
falling into a black hole was destined for certain destruction, but this
narrative inconvenience was frequently sidestepped. It was independently
and for different reasons hypothesized by cosmologists and sf writers
alike that - supposing one could travel through a black hole - the point
of emergence might be far removed from the point of entry. Because this
property of black holes offered an apparent means of dodging the
relativistic limitations on getting around the Universe at
FASTER-THAN-LIGHT speeds, they quickly began to crop up as "star gates" rapid transit systems - as in Joan D. VINGE's THE SNOW QUEEN (1980). Early
examples of stories in which they perform this function tend, in order to
obscure the fundamental problem, to use fudge-names for them: George R.R.
MARTIN's "The Second Kind of Loneliness" (1972) speaks of a "nullspace
vortex" while Joe HALDEMAN's THE FOREVER WAR (1974) refers to
"collapsars". Obliging physicists soon began to speculate about the
possibility of avoiding destruction within a black hole. According to some
theoretical physicists, some solutions of the equations of General
Relativity as they apply to rotating (rather than static) black holes
offer the slim possibility that a spacecraft that entered such a hole
might be able to avoid the naked singularity and so, rather than being
crushed out of existence, might instantaneously re-emerge elsewhere in the
Universe (travelling via a hypothetical bridge or tunnel known as a
wormhole) - the word "elsewhere" referring to some other place, some other
time (which would create havoc with the principle of causality), or both.
Some physicists went further, proposing that the re-emergence might be
into a different universe. Sf writers gladly accepted the imaginative
warrant provided by these ideas, which were popularized by such bold works
of "speculative nonfiction" as Adrian BERRY's The Iron Sun: Crossing the
Universe through Black Holes (1977). Stories in which starships simply
dived into black holes and passed through wormholes to distant parts of
the Universe or to other universes began to appear in some profusion. The
popularity of the theme was further boosted by the film The BLACK HOLE
(1979), and quickly became so routine that recent writers have had to work
hard to sustain the melodramatic potential of the notion. A notable
example of conscientious work of this kind is Paul J. MCAULEY's Eternal
Light (1991), while a more casual approach is manifest in Roger MacBride
ALLEN's The Ring of Charon (1991), in which the Earth is kidnapped through

a wormhole. The idea of a return journey from a black hole is more
ingeniously deployed in Ian WALLACE's Heller's Leap (1979).Although black
holes formed through stellar collapse would have to be at least three
times the mass of the Sun, the concept of miniature black holes emerged in
the early 1970s, first in technical papers and then in sf. They were
featured in "The Hole Man" (1973) by Larry NIVEN and adapted for use in a
SPACESHIP drive in Arthur C. CLARKE's Imperial Earth (1975), but they
really came into their own when theorists attempting to figure out the
mechanics of the Big Bang decided that vast numbers of tiny black holes
might have been created at that time (along with even more peculiar
black-hole-like entities called cosmic strings). However, it was soon
theorized mathematically (Hawking described some of this work in a seminar
in 1973) that mini black holes would be unstable, slowly decaying as a
result of "quantum leakage" of radiation. (Such leakage would affect all
black holes, of course, but only in the case of mini black holes would it
be significant.) Any primordial black hole whose initial mass was less
than about a billion tons would already have disappeared, although more
massive (but still mini) primordial black holes might still exist.
However, sf writers have had little difficulty in imagining accessory
stabilizing methods, such as the one featured in Gregory BENFORD's
thriller Artifact (1985). David BRIN's Earth (1990) simply ties neat knots
in cosmic strings in order to make them available for mind-boggling high
jinks of various kinds; the knotting of cosmic strings had earlier been
examined less reverently by Rudy RUCKER in "The Man who was a Cosmic
String" (1987).Brin's Earth mentions an idea encountered elsewhere: that
even tiny black holes might qualify as entire universes in their own right
(thus, perhaps, re-opening some potential for the kind of microcosmic
romance that Ray CUMMINGS used to write; GREAT AND SMALL). Pohl, having
introduced black holes into GATEWAY, continued to explore their potential
in subsequent volumes of his Heechee series; the mysterious Heechee turn
out to be hiding inside one in Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980) and
venture forth again in Heechee Rendezvous (1984). Pohl's fascination with
the notion is further extended in The Singers of Time (1991), with Jack
WILLIAMSON, which involves interuniversal travel via wormholes and
includes a series of rhapsodic infodump chapters celebrating the wonders
of modern theoretical physics.A series of theoretical papers in the 1970s
suggested that for every black hole there must somewhere else (perhaps at
the end of a wormhole) be a corresponding white hole gushing energy out
into the Universe in the same way that a black hole would suck it in. The
idea was popularized by John GRIBBIN in his "speculative nonfiction" White
Holes: Cosmic Gushers in the Universe (1977), but suffered from the
disadvantage that, although white holes should be by definition among the
most visible objects in the Universe, none had (or has) been detected. One
pleasing notion, however, equated the Big Bang with a white hole. The
white-hole idea never had quite the same success in sf as its black-hole
counterpart, but the New Sun in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series
appears to be a white hole.Yet another variant on the black-hole theme is
based on the concept that a low-density black hole of enormous mass perhaps 100,000 times greater than that of the Sun - might commonly occur
at the centre of galaxies, our own included; there is considerable
astronomical evidence that this is indeed the case. The physics

constraining the properties of such low-density black holes seems to admit
the possibility that whole stars and planets could go on existing inside
them. Even more massive black holes, of perhaps 100,000,000 times solar
mass, might exist at the heart of those incredibly distant, highly
energetic galaxies known to astronomers as Seyfert galaxies and quasars.
(The term quasar derives from their earlier description as "quasi-stellar
radio sources".) The immense black hole at the galactic core has become
almost a CLICHE of contemporary SPACE OPERA.Other uses of black holes
continue to be found. They become ultimate weapons in David LANGFORD's The
Space Eater (1982) and others, and Gregory Benford, in Beyond the Fall of
Night (1990), his sequel to Arthur C. Clarke's classic Against the Fall of
Night (1948; 1953), uses one as a prison for the Mad Mind from the earlier
novel, where Clarke describes it as the "strange artificial star called
the Black Sun." It remains to be seen whether the changes have now been
comprehensively rung, or whether there is further narrative colour yet to
be discovered in the notion.It is disappointing to learn that, while there
is strong empirical and overwhelming theoretical evidence, there is as yet
no concrete proof that even a single black hole exists anywhere in the
real Universe. It is difficult to explain such phenomena as Seyfert
galaxies and quasars without invoking black holes, and the existence of
black holes seems inevitable in the light of our current understanding of
the ways in which matter/energy behaves, but such theorizing is no
substitute for proof. It is generally supposed by astronomers, however,
that by far the likeliest explanation for certain intense periodic X-ray
sources in our Galaxy (the first discovered being Cygnus X-1, in 1971) is
that the X-rays are being emitted from particles falling towards a black
hole which is in orbital partnership with a supergiant star. It is known
that the objects concerned are too massive to be white dwarfs or neutron
stars, and they seem to be invisible. [BS/PN]
BLACK MOON RISING
John CARPENTER.
BLACK SCORPION, THE
Film (1957). Warner Bros. Dir Edward Ludwig, starring Richard Denning,
Mara Corday. Screenplay David DUNCAN, Robert Blees. 88 mins. B/w. Giant
scorpions and a rather good spider emerge from a cavern under the Mexican
desert in this slow-moving, low-budget MONSTER MOVIE obviously inspired by
THEM! (1954). The stop-motion animation of the scorpions, supervised by
Willis H. O'BRIEN at the age of 70, is vivid but does not really redeem
the wooden performances and routine direction. [JB/PN]
BLACKS IN SF
POLITICS.
BLACKSTONE, JAMES
John BAXTER; John BROSNAN.
BLACK SUN, THE
TEMNE SLUNCE.
BLACKWOOD, ALGERNON
(1869-1951) UK writer who spent a decade in Canada and the USA from the

age of 20. His work is essentially fantasy, though his tales of occult
pantheism - best exemplified in The Centaur (1911), which builds on the
theories of Gustav Fechner (1801-1887) in its projections of a sentient
Mother Earth - tend to argue a logic of history which might seem
sufficiently rational for his work to count as sf. His novels tend to the
ponderous; his very numerous short stories, beginning with A Mysterious
House (1889 Belgravia; 1987 chap ed Richard Dalby), are his best work and,
though frequently overlong, often reach heights of morose lyricism. It is
in his short stories, too, that AB most often became explicitly
sciencefictional in his treatment of the concepts of time and of PARALLEL
WORLDS. He was a friend of J.W. DUNNE, whose theories about the Serial
Universe he espoused in stories like "The Willows" (1907), "Wayfarers"
(1912), "The Pikestaffe Case" (1923), "The Man who was Milligan" (1923),
"Full Circle" (1925) and "The Man who Lived Backwards" (1930). His short
work is collected in The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories (coll 1906),
The Listener and Other Stories (coll 1907), The Lost Valley and Other
Stories (coll 1910), Pan's Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories (coll 1910),
Incredible Adventures (coll 1914), Ten Minute Stories (coll 1914), Day and
Night Stories (coll 1917), The Wolves of God and Other Fey Stories (coll
1921), with Wilfred Wilson, and Tongues of Fire, and Other Sketches (coll
1924). With the exception of The Doll and One Other (coll 1946 US), later
collections rearranged earlier material (though AB in fact continued to
produce new work until the year before his death); the best of these are
Strange Stories (coll 1929), The Tales of Algernon Blackwood (coll 1938)
and Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural (coll 1949). In later years, AB
enjoyed a rebirth of fame on UK RADIO and tv. His occult detective John
Silence, some of whose adventures are collected in John Silence, Physician
Extraordinary (coll 1908), uses some PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC techniques. The
recurrent theme of REINCARNATION is developed most notably in Julius Le
Vallon: An Episode (1916) and its sequel The Bright Messenger (1921) and
in The Wave: An Egyptian Aftermath (1916) and Karma: A Re-incarnation Play
(1918) with Violet Pearn. [JC/MA]Other works: The Education of Uncle Paul
(1909) and its sequel, A Prisoner in Fairyland (1913); Jimbo (1909); The
Human Chord (1910); The Extra Day (1915); The Garden of Survival (1918);
The Promise of Air (1919); Dudley and Gilderoy (1928); The Fruit Stoners
(1934); Tales of the Supernatural (coll 1983) and The Magic Mirror: Lost
Tales and Mysteries (coll 1989), both ed Mike ASHLEY.About the author:
Algernon Blackwood: A Bio-Bibliography (1987) by Mike Ashley.See also:
DIMENSIONS; HORROR IN SF.
BLADE, ALEXANDER
One of the longest-lasting ZIFF-DAVIS house names, originally the
personal pseudonym of David Vern (David V. REED), whose contributions
under the name have not been identified, though probably "The Strange
Adventure of Victor MacLeigh" (1941 AMZ) is by him. The name was later
used by Howard BROWNE, Millen Cooke, Chester S. GEIER, Randall GARRETT
with Robert SILVERBERG (who also wrote solo under the name), Roger P.
Graham (Rog PHILLIPS), Edmond HAMILTON, Heinrich Hauser, Berkeley
LIVINGSTON, Herb Livingston, William P. McGivern, David Wright O'BRIEN,
Louis H. Sampliner, Richard S. SHAVER, Don WILCOX and Leroy YERXA.
Approximately 50 stories were published as by AB, most in AMZ and

Fantastic Adventures and some in Imagination, Imaginative Tales and
Science Fiction Adventures. [JC]
BLADE RUNNER
Film (1982). Blade Runner Partnership-Ladd Co.-Sir Run Run Shaw/Warner.
Dir Ridley SCOTT, starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Daryl
Hannah, William Sanderson. Screenplay Hampton Fancher, David Peoples,
based on DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (1968) by Philip K. DICK.
117 mins (US). Colour.In a future Los Angeles, Rick Deckard (Ford), whose
job it is to destroy renegade "replicants" ( ANDROIDS), has to hunt down a
particularly dangerous group of advanced androids designed as slaves;
their anger against humanity is all the greater because they have been
given only a very limited lifespan.The screenplay and the film itself went
through a number of stages, with Peoples radically rewriting Fancher's
original script only to see much of his filling-out material lost. The
first US cut released (preview audiences only) was much longer than the
117min final US cut, and then for the UK/Europe distribution the film was
hardened again with some of the more brutal sequences restored. Some
important themes from Dick's book survive in a mystifying way: it is never
explained in the film that most healthy humans have emigrated off a
pollution-ridden Earth - though the prematurely ageing robotics expert,
Sebastian (Sanderson), is meant to be one of the sick ones that stayed
home; nor is the destruction of nearly all animal life explained - most
surviving animals being artificial - though references to it are made
throughout, notably in the android empathy test, where lack of sensitivity
to animal life is a key clue to the androids' supposed lack of real
feeling. Strangest of all, the possibility that Deckard himself may be a
"replicant" exists in the final cut only as a subtext, unmistakable once
pointed out, but missed by almost all audiences except, Ridley Scott has
said, the French. Scott's own revisionist version, Blade Runner: The
Director's Cut (1992, 114 mins), makes the subtext a little clearer and
deletes the voice-over narration, though it was somewhat less changed from
the original than many people expected.BR has many narrative flaws,
including a happy ending tacked on allegedly against the director's
wishes, but remains one of the most important sf movies made. The density
of information given right across the screen in the future setting
(production designer Lawrence Paull, visual consultant Syd Mead,
special-photographic-effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull, with Scott
himself being primarily responsible for the look of the film) is
extraordinary, showing almost for the first time - though fans had spent
years hoping - how visually sophisticated sf in film form can be. BR's
film-noir mise-en-scene, with its ubiquitous advertisements (and rain),
its Los Angeles dominated by an oriental population, its punk female
android (Hannah), its high-tech traffic alongside bicycles, its steam and
smoke, its shabbiness and glitter cheek-by-jowl, is film's first (and
still best) precursor of the movement we now call CYBERPUNK. BR is even
better, particularly in the director's cut, and much more ambitious, than
Scott's previous sf film, ALIEN, and is especially interesting in its
treatment of the central theme: whether "humanity" is something innate or
whether it can be "programmed" in - or, indeed, out. [PN]See also: CINEMA;
HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; HUGO; MUSIC.

BLAINE, JOHN
Pseudonym of US writer Harold Leland Goodwin (1914-1990) who specialized
in sf-adventure novels for teenage readers. His books tended to emphasize
the nuts and bolts of science and technology, and were more carefully
written than most series books for teens. As Blake Savage he also wrote an
sf novel for teens, Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet (1952; vt Assignment
in Space with Rip Foster 1958; vt Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet
1969). Under his own name, Goodwin wrote some popular-science texts,
including The Real Book About Stars (1951), The Science Book of Space
Travel (1955) and Space: Frontier Unlimited (1962). He remains best known
for the long Rick Brant Science Adventure sequence, all as JB, a series of
tales - some incorporating EDISONADE elements - which feature a teenage
inventor on and off the planet: The Rocket's Shadow (1947) with Peter J.
Harkins writing together as JB; The Lost City (1947) with Harkins; Sea
Gold (1947) with Harkins; 100 Fathoms Under (1947); The Whispering Box
Mystery (1948); The Phantom Shark (1949); Smuggler's Reef (1950); The
Caves of Fear (1951); Stairway to Danger (1952); The Golden Skull (1954);
The Wailing Octopus (1956); The Electronic Mind Reader (1957); The Scarlet
Lake Mystery (1957); The Pirates of Shan (1958) (not to be confused with
Murray LEINSTER's The Pirates of Zan; 1959 dos); The Blue Ghost Mystery
(1960); The Egyptian Cat Mystery (1961); The Flaming Mountain (1963); The
Flying Stingaree (1963); The Ruby Ray Mystery (1964); The Veiled Raiders
(1965); The Rocket Jumper (1966); The Deadly Dutchman (1967); Danger
Below! (1968) with Philip Harkins (who may have been the same as Peter J.
Harkins, above) writing together as JB; The Magic Talisman (written 1969;
1990). [JC]
BLAIR, ANDREW
(? -1885) Scottish medical doctor and writer whose Annals of the
Twenty-Ninth Century, or The Autobiography of the Tenth President of the
World-Republic (1874) celebrates, at times ponderously, Earth-boring, the
complete ecospheric control of the planet, and interplanetary travels
during which the protagonist visits several worlds whose human inhabitants
demonstrate various levels of spiritual perfection. [BS/JC]See also:
ANONYMOUS SF AUTHORS; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS.
BLAIR, HAMISH
Pseudonym of Andrew James Frazer Blair (1872-1935), Scottish author,
journalist and editor, resident in India for many years. In 1957 (1930) he
described how air power overcomes the Second Indian Mutiny. In its sequel,
Governor Hardy (1931), he focused on the ensuing international intrigues
and WAR. A third futuristic novel, The Great Gesture (1931),
optimistically depicts the events leading to the founding in 1941 of a
United States of Europe. [JE]
BLAIR, JOHN (M.)
(1961- ) US writer and poet who began publishing sf with A Landscape of
Darkness (1990), an sf adventure in which a mercenary on a colony planet
must pit himself against an ALIEN who wears the guise of a Japanese
warrior. Though a plot of this sort offers many opportunities for action
routines, JB generally avoids the temptation. His second novel, Bright

Angel (1992), similarly concentrates upon the complex psychology of a
central figure invested with human responses and a planet-shaking burden;
in this case the protagonist must attempt to uncover a possible
correlation between his unwilled, sudden awakening in a DYSTOPIAN Earth
after surviving the onset of a fierce Ice Age on a colony planet and the
beginning of similar conditions in the Antarctic. At times, JB has
demonstrated a virtuoso control over complicated plot-lines and their
implications. [JC]
BLAKE, JUSTIN
John BOWEN.
BLAKE, KEN
Kenneth BULMER; Robert P. HOLDSTOCK.
BLAKE, ROBERT
[s] L.P. DAVIES.
BLAKENEY, JAY D.
Pseudonym of US writer Deborah A. Chester (1957- ), whose Anthi sequence
- The Children of Anthi(1985) and Requiem for Anthi (1990) - aroused some
interest. It is a far-reaching and moderately complex vision of humanity's
future EVOLUTION, guided by the eponymous AI, into a form that is
half-flesh and half-electronics. Set on a heavily populated galactic
stage, the sequence demonstrates JDB's sensitivity to the potential
differentness from 1990 of so multifarious a venue. Two singletons, The
Omcri Matrix (1987) and The Goda War (1989), are less remarkable. JDB
seemed to be a writer to watch with some interest, but the Operation
StarHawks sf adventures, all written as by Sean Dalton, were not
engrossing: Operation StarHawks #1: Space Hawks (1990), #2: Code Name
Peregrine (1990), #3: Beyond the Void (1991), #4: The Rostma Lure (1991),
#5: Destination: Mutiny (1991) and #6: The Salukan Gambit (1992). The
Time-Trap sequence - comprisingTime-Trap (1992), Showdown (1992), Pieces
of Eight (1992) and Restoration (1994) - begins with a man from the future
trapped in 14th-century Greece, and continues in other periods. [JC]
BLAKE'S SEVEN
UK tv series (1978-81). BBC TV. Created by Terry NATION. Prods David
Maloney (seasons 1-3), Vere Lorrimer (season 4). Script editor Chris
Boucher. Writers included Nation (all episodes in the first season),
Boucher, James FOLLETT, Robert Holmes, Tanith LEE. Starring Gareth Thomas
(Blake), Paul Darrow (Avon), Michael Keating (Vila), Jan Chappell (Cally),
Jacqueline Pearce (Servalan), Stephen Grief (Travis, season 1), Brian
Croucher (Travis, season 2), Steven Pacey (Tarrant). 52 50min episodes.
Colour.The series - whose title is given on-screen as Blakes Seven (sans
apostrophe) - began rather crudely with some hoary sf CLICHES (political
rebels against the totalitarian Federation are sent to a prison planet)
but picked up considerably in later episodes of the first season, where
Blake and his allies take part in spirited SPACE-OPERA adventures in a
miraculous spaceship (later to be operated by an ill tempered computer
called Orac) which they find conveniently abandoned in space.
Althoughfree-spirited-rebels-vs-oppressive-empire is a theme straight from
STAR WARS - coincidentally, since the UK premiere of both was on the same

day - the feeling is very different. Blake's crew are quarrelsome,
depressive, pessimistic and - especially Avon - cynical. Blake himself
disappeared at the end of the second season, to reappear, apparently now
on the wrong side, only at the very end. After the first season BS
degenerated into sub-DR WHO tackiness, with much popping off of ray-guns
in extraterrestrial quarries and poaching of secondhand plots (The Picture
of Dorian Gray, etc.). The fourth season wound up on a depressing note as
the bulk of the somewhat-changed cast were killed off by the villains.
Despite this falling off, the series was addictive, and notable for the
sense of doomed helplessness with which the rebels managed to inflict mere
pin-pricks on the seemingly indestructible Federation-no doubt a
reflection of the times, and seemingly not too off-putting for the
audience, for BS developed a large and passionate fan following, which it
still retains. [PN/KN]
BLANCHARD, H(ENRY) PERCY
(1862-1939) US writer whose sf novel, After the Cataclysm: A Romance of
the Age to Come (1909), features a SLEEPER AWAKENING into 1934 to find the
world become an electricity-run UTOPIA, founded after the near passage of
a small planet in 1914 destroyed socialism and ended a world war caused by
Zionists. [JC]
BLASTER
In sf TERMINOLOGY, the hand-gun that blasts had an early place of honour
along with the DEATH RAY, ray-gun and DISINTEGRATOR. Blasters were
standard-issue WEAPONS in early SPACE OPERA, like six-guns in Westerns.
[PN]
BLAYLOCK, JAMES P.
(1950- ) US writer, based in California, whose first published sf was
"The Red Planet" (1977) in UNEARTH #3. JPB's first books were two
fantasies in his Elfin series, The Elfin Ship (1982) and The Disappearing
Dwarf (1983). The series, which includes the later and more assured The
Stone Giant (1989), is remarkable for its geniality and quirkiness, and
the general likeability of most of the characters, even the unreliable
ones. Though dwarfs and elves are featured, it is difficult to imagine a
fantasy series less like J.R.R. TOLKIEN's in tone.A similar tone continued
in JPB's next two books, which more closely resemble sf: The Digging
Leviathan (1984) and HOMUNCULUS (1986), the latter being the winner of the
PHILIP K. DICK AWARD for best paperback original (coincidentally
appropriate, since JPB was a friend of Philip K. DICK during Dick's last
years). It was by now clear that JPB's talent was strong, but sufficiently
weird and literary as to be unlikely to attract a mass-market readership.
Among his obvious and acknowledged influences are Laurence Sterne's
Tristram Shandy (9 vols 1759-67), Robert Louis STEVENSON and Charles
DICKENS. His books feature grotesques and eccentrics viewed with whimsical
affection. These people often have crotchets and obsessions, and live in
mutable worlds subject to curiosities and wonders whose explications while sometimes earnestly scientific - are seen as hopelessly inadequate
in the face of their absolute strangeness. The events of JPB's books fall
into odd patterns rather than linear plots, though the later works have a
stronger narrative drive. The Digging Leviathan is set in a modern Los

Angeles, beneath which is a giant underground sea, and some of whose
inhabitants hope to penetrate the centre of the HOLLOW EARTH. HOMUNCULUS,
a kind of prequel to the previous work, is set in a Dickensian
19th-century London, and likewise features the spirit of scientific or
alchemical inquiry, along with space vehicles, zombies and the possibility
of IMMORTALITY through essence of carp; Lord Kelvin's Machine(1985 IASFM;
exp 1992), a sequel, carries on in the same vein. These spirited
concoctions are reminiscent of the work of JPB's good friend Tim POWERS,
though even more lunatic; they both write at times (as do others) a sort
of sf set in the 19th century, featuring knowing pastiche - or at least
reconstruction - of all sorts of early pulp-sf stereotypes. This has been
a sufficiently marked phenomenon that the neologism STEAMPUNK has been
coined for it. (JPB's books, in fact, could be regarded as belonging to
the same metaseries as Powers's; they feature certain characters in
common, including the 19th-century poet William Ashbless, who apparently
originated as a pseudonym used by JPB and Powers for poetry they published
while at college.) Like many of his POSTMODERNIST generation of writers,
including Powers and another of his friends, K.W. JETER, JPB has no
interest at all in generic purity, mixing tropes from FANTASY, HORROR, sf,
magic realism, adventure fiction and MAINSTREAM literature with great
aplomb, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. One could call
his stories FABULATIONS.JPB's next novel, Land of Dreams (1987), again
mingles fantasy and sf tropes (mostly fantasy) with something of a dying
fall, as does the more cheerful The Last Coin (1988), which features an
ex-travelling salesman who turns out to be the Wandering Jew, and is
anxious that the 30 pieces of silver used to betray Christ should be kept
from the hands of a Mr Pennyman, who will use them for apocalyptic
purposes. Land of Dreams is set in the same fantastic northern-Californian
coastal setting as JPB's excellent short story Paper Dragons (1985 in anth
Imaginary Lands ed Robin McKinley; 1992 chap), which won a World Fantasy
AWARD. The Paper Grail (1991) is a quest novel, also set in northern
California, mingling Arthurian Legend, Hokusai paintings, pre-Raphaelites
and goodness knows what else. A children's book, The Magic Spectacles
(1991 UK), containing a magic window, an ALTERNATE WORLD and goblins, is
less successfully childlike than some of his work for adults. It may be
that JPB's unquenchable relish for sheer oddity will inhibit his artistic
growth, but meanwhile he is among the most enjoyable genre writers to have
emerged from the 1980s. [PN]Other works: The Shadow on the Doorstep (1986
IASFM; 1987 chap dos with short stories by Edward BRYANT); Night Relics
(1994); Doughnuts (1994 chap).See also: DEL REY BOOKS; GOTHIC SF; GREAT
AND SMALL.
BLAYNE, HUGO
John Russell FEARN.
BLAYRE, CHRISTOPHER
Pseudonym of UK biologist and author Edward Heron-Allen (1861-1943) who,
under his own name, wrote The Princess Daphne (1885), a novel of psychic
vampirism, and A Fatal Fiddle (coll 1890), which includes a story centred
on telepathy ( ESP). After a long period away from fiction he returned as
CB with a series of short weird and sf stories set in the NEAR FUTURE in

the University of Cosmopoli. They appeared in The Purple Sapphire (coll
1921; vt with other stories added The Strange Papers of Dr Blayre 1932),
The Cheetah-Girl (1923) (a story deleted from the previous volume), and
Some Women of the University (coll 1932), the latter two titles being
privately published. All are of high quality, but they have had little
influence.Similarities in style, content and sense of humour have led to
speculation that CB was responsible for the weird fantasies appearing
under the pseudonyms DRYASDUST and M.Y. HALIDOM. Hard evidence is,
however, lacking. [JE]
BLEILER, EVERETT F(RANKLIN)
(1920- ) US editor and bibliographer who for many years remained best
known as the compiler of The Checklist of Fantastic Literature: A
Bibliography of Fantasy, Weird and Science Fiction Books Published in the
English Language (1948; rev vt The Checklist of Science-Fiction and
Supernatural Fiction 1978), which SHASTA PUBLISHERS was formed to produce,
and which soon became recognized as the cornerstone of modern sf
BIBLIOGRAPHY. The fact that other works - like R. REGINALD's Science
Fiction and Fantasy Literature (1979 edn) - have hugely expanded on its
coverage (5000 books listed from the period 1800-1948) does not diminish
the significance of EFB's original work. In two further books he has
himself expanded upon that work: The Guide to Supernatural Fiction (1983),
solo, and Science Fiction: The Early Years (dated 1990 but 1991), with the
assistance of his son, Richard BLEILER, bibliographies of the categories
designated, are both annotated with an extraordinary thoroughness; they
are essential reference sources for any student of the field; any
otherwise unsourced quotations from EFB to be found in this encyclopedia to which he has also contributed several entries - come from these two
volumes. Two large edited studies - Science Fiction Writers: Critical
Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the
Present Day (anth 1982) and Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and
Horror (anth in 2 vols 1985) - cover much the same area, again thoroughly.
In collaboration with T.E. DIKTY, EFB produced in the late 1940s the first
series of best-of-the-year ANTHOLOGIES: The Best Science Fiction Stories,
1949 (anth 1949) and The Best Science Fiction Stories, 1950 (anth 1950;
cut vt The Best Science Fiction Stories 1951 UK), both being assembled as
Science Fiction Omnibus (omni 1952); The Best Science Fiction Stories,
1951 (anth 1951; cut vt The Best Science Fiction Stories, Second Series
1952 UK; further cut vt The Mindworm 1967 UK); The Best Science-Fiction
Stories, 1952 (anth 1952; cut vt The Best Science Fiction Stories, Third
Series 1953 UK); The Best Science-Fiction Stories, 1953 (anth 1953; cut vt
The Best Science Fiction Stories, Fourth Series 1955 UK) and The Best
Science Fiction Stories, 1954 (anth 1954; cut vt The Best Science Fiction
Stories, Fifth Series 1956 UK) (the varying hyphenation of the titles is
sic). Frontiers in Space (anth 1955) presented a selection from the
second, third and fourth volumes. A second series presented a selection of
longer stories: Year's Best Science Fiction Novels, 1952 (anth 1952; cut
vt Year's Best Science Fiction Novels 1953 UK); Year's Best Science
Fiction Novels, 1953 (anth 1953; cut vt Category Phoenix 1955 UK) and
Year's Best Science Fiction Novels, 1954 (anth 1954; cut vt Year's Best
Science Fiction Novels, Second Series 1955 UK).EFB joined Dover

Publications in 1955, rising to Executive Vice-President in 1967, and
retiring in 1977. Beginning with Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose
Bierce (coll 1964), he edited for the firm a series of well produced,
cogently introduced and sometimes revelatory editions and anthologies of a
wide range of fantasy writers, some of whom had been forgotten. The
anthologies per se included Three Gothic Novels (omni 1960), Five
Victorian Ghost Novels (omni 1971), Three Supernatural Novels of the
Victorian Period (omni 1975) and A Treasury of Victorian Ghost Stories
(omni 1981). Of more original importance than any of these, perhaps, was
EFB's edition of The Frank Reade Library (omni 1979-86) in 10 vols, which
reprinted the complete sequence ( FRANK READE LIBRARY; Luis SENARENS). He
has also translated works from Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian,
Latin, Polish and Swedish; his Prophecies and Enigmas of Nostradamus
(trans 1979 US) as by Liberte E. LeVert (an anagram of Everett Bleiler)
was of some genre interest. EFB won the PILGRIM AWARD in 1984. [JC]Other
works: Imagination Unlimited (anth 1952) ed with T.E. Dikty; editions of
the work of Algernon BLACKWOOD, P. Busson, Robert W. CHAMBERS, Arthur
Conan DOYLE, Lord DUNSANY, M.R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu, H.P. LOVECRAFT,
G. MEYRINK, G.M.W. Reynolds, Mrs J.H. Riddell and H.G. WELLS.See also:
ANONYMOUS SF AUTHORS; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF;
DISCOVERY
AND INVENTION; HISTORY OF SF; LOST WORLDS; NEW ZEALAND; PREDICTION;
SLEEPER AWAKES.
BLEILER, RICHARD (JAMES)
(1959- ) US bibliographer whose The Index to Adventure Magazine (2 vols
1990) and The Annotated Index to The Thrill Book (1991) are invaluable
explorations into rich sources of pulp literature hitherto left generally
unexamined. Of more direct sf interest is his collaboration with his
father, Everett F. BLEILER (whom see for details), on the definitive
Science Fiction: The Early Years (dated 1990 but 1991). RB has contributed
several entries to this encyclopedia. [JC]
BLIJSTRA, REIN
[r] BENELUX.
BLIPVERTS
MAX HEADROOM.
BLISH, JAMES (BENJAMIN)
(1921-1975) US writer. JB's early career in sf followed the usual
pattern. He was a fan during the 1930s. His first short story, "Emergency
Refueling" (1940), was published in SUPER SCIENCE STORIES. He belonged to
the well known New York fan group the FUTURIANS, where he became friendly
with such writers as Damon KNIGHT and C.M. KORNBLUTH. He studied
microbiology at Rutgers, graduating in 1942, and was then drafted, serving
as a medical laboratory technician in the US Army. In 1945-6 he carried
out postgraduate work in zoology at Columbia University, abandoning this
to become a writer. He was married to Virginia KIDD 1947-63 and then, from
1964 until his death, to Judith Ann LAWRENCE. Three of his early short
stories, two of them collaborations, were written under the pseudonyms
Donald LAVERTY, John MACDOUGAL and Arthur Merlyn.JB worked hard to develop

his craft, but not until 1950, when the first of his Okie stories appeared
in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, did it became clear that he could become an
sf writer of unusual depth. The Okie stories featured flying CITIES,
powered by ANTIGRAVITY devices called SPINDIZZIES, moving through the
Galaxy looking for work, much as the Okies did in the 1930s when they
escaped from the dustbowl. The first Okie book, a coherent if episodic
novel, was Earthman, Come Home (1950-53 var mags; fixup 1955; cut 1958 ).
Three more followed: They Shall Have Stars (1952-4 ASF; fixup 1956UK; rev
vt Year 2018! 1957 US), The Triumph of Time (1958; vt A Clash of Cymbals
UK) and A Life for the Stars (1962). These four books were finally brought
together in a single volume, CITIES IN FLIGHT (omni 1970), where they
appeared in the order of their internal chronology: They Shall Have Stars,
A Life for the Stars, Earthman, Come Home and The Triumph of Time.
Underpinning the pulp-style plotting of much of this series is a serious
and pessimistic interest in the cyclic nature of HISTORY, partly derived
from JB's reading of Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), especially The Decline
of the West (1918-22). The cycle is carried, at the end of The Triumph of
Time, from the death of our Universe to the birth of the next, in a
memorable passage where Mayor Amalfi becomes, literally, the deep
structure of the new Universe.The years 1950-58 were extraordinarily
productive for JB, and many of his best short stories were published in
this period, including "Beanstalk" (1952), "Surface Tension" (1952),
"Common Time" (1953), which is probably his most praised story, "Beep"
(1954) and "A Work of Art" (1956). Several appear in his first collection,
Galactic Cluster (coll 1959; with 3 stories cut and "Beanstalk" added, rev
1960 UK). JB's own choice was published as Best Science Fiction Stories of
James Blish (coll 1965UK; with 1 story cut and 2 added, rev 1973 UK; rev
vt The Testament of AndrosUK). 6 of the 8 stories in this collection,
along with an introduction by Robert A.W. LOWNDES, appear with 6 new
stories in the posthumous THE BEST OF JAMES BLISH (coll 1979 US).These
years also saw the publication of his first novel in book form, Jack of
Eagles (TWS 1949 as "Let the Finder Beware"; rev 1952; cut 1953; full text
vt ESP-er 1958). It was followed by The Warriors of Day (1951 Two Complete
Science Adventure Books as "Sword of Xota"; 1953), THE SEEDLING STARS
(1952-6 var mags; coll of linked stories 1957), The Frozen Year (1957; vt
Fallen Star UK), A CASE OF CONSCIENCE (part 1 in If, 1953; 1958) and VOR
(part 1949 TWS with Damon Knight; exp 1958). Jack of Eagles contains one
of the few attempts in sf to give a scientific rationale for telepathy. A
CASE OF CONSCIENCE, which won the 1959 HUGO for Best Novel, was one of the
first serious attempts to deal with RELIGION in sf, and remains one of the
most sophisticated in its tale of a priest faced with a planet whose
inhabitants seem free of the concept of Original Sin. In THE SEEDLING
STARS and other stories of the period, JB introduced biological themes (
BIOLOGY). This area of science had previously been rather neglected in sf
in favour of the "harder" sciences - physics, astronomy, technology, etc.
THE SEEDLING STARS is an important roadmarker in the early development of
sf about GENETIC ENGINEERING.JB was interested in METAPHYSICS, and some
critics regard as his most important work the trilogy After Such
Knowledge: A CASE OF CONSCIENCE, Doctor Mirabilis (1964UK; rev 1971 US),
and Black Easter; or, Faust Aleph-Null (1968) and The Day after Judgment
(1971); he regarded the last two books as one novel, and indeed they were

so published in Black Easter and The Day After Judgement (omni 1980US; vt
The Devil's Day 1990 US) - hence his use of the term "trilogy". After Such
Knowledge poses a question once expressed by JB: "Is the desire for
secular knowledge, let alone the acquisition and use of it, a misuse of
the mind, and perhaps even actively evil?" This is one of the fundamental
themes of sf, and is painstakingly explored in Doctor Mirabilis, an
historical novel which treats the life of the 13th-century scientist and
theologian Roger Bacon (c1214-1292). It deals with the archetypal sf theme
of CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH from one intellectual model of the Universe to
another, more sophisticated model. Black Easter, a better and more unified
work than its sequel The Day After Judgment, is a strong fantasy in which
black MAGIC - treated here as a science or, as JB has it, a "scholium" releases Satan into the world again; Satan rules Heaven in the sequel. The
four books were collected in After Such Knowledge (omni 1991 UK).As a
writer, JB was thrifty - to the point of parsimony in his later years. He
returned to many of his best stories to revise and expand them, sometimes
into novel form. Apart from those already mentioned, he also used this
treatment on an early short story, "Sunken Universe" (1942 as by Arthur
Merlyn), and built it into another story, "Surface Tension" (1952 Gal),
which revised again became part of THE SEEDLING STARS; "Surface Tension"
was his most popular and most anthologized story. Other examples are
Titan's Daughter (1952, in Future Tense, ed Kendell Foster CROSSEN, as
"Beanstalk"; vt "Giants in the Earth" in The Original Science Fiction
Stories 1956; exp 1961) and The Quincunx of Time (1954 Gal as "Beep"; exp
1973).JB wrote two not very successful sf novels in collaboration: The
Duplicated Man (1953 Dynamic SF; 1959) with Robert A.W. LOWNDES and A
Torrent of Faces (fixup 1967) with Norman L. KNIGHT. The latter is a tale
of Earth suffering from, but to a degree coping with, OVERPOPULATION.JB's
later years were much preoccupied with the STAR TREK books. These are Star
Trek * (coll 1967), Star Trek 2 * (coll 1968), #3 * (coll 1969), #4 *
(coll 1971), #5 * (coll 1972), #6 * (coll 1972), #7 * (coll 1972), #8*
(coll 1972), #9 * (coll 1973), #10 * (coll 1974) and #11 * (coll 1975).
They are based on the original tv scripts, and hence are in fact
collaborations, but Spock Must Die * (1970) is an original work, the first
original adult Star Trek novel (it was preceded by Mack REYNOLDS's Mission
to Horatius * [1968], a juvenile). The posthumous Star Trek 12 (coll 1977)
contained two adaptations (out of five) completed by Judith Ann Lawrence,
who also completed some of the work in #11. Omnibus editions include: The
Star Trek Reader * (omni 1976), containing #2, #3 and #8; The Star Trek
Reader II * (omni 1977), containing #1, #4 and #9; The Star Trek Reader
III * (omni 1977), containing #5, #6 and #7; The Star Trek Reader IV *
(omni 1978), containing #10, #12 and Spock Must Die. Re-sorted in order of
tv appearance, they were reassembled as Star Trek: The Classic Episodes #1
* (coll 1991) with J.A. Lawrence, 27 first-season episodes, Star Trek: The
Classic Episodes #2 * (coll 1991), 25 second-season episodes, and Star
Trek: The Classic Episodes #3 * (coll 1991) with J.A. Lawrence, 24
third-season episodes.Aside from Spock Must Die and A Life for the Stars
(1962), the fourth of the Okie books, JB wrote four more juvenile novels,
none very successful. These are a short and rather didactic series - The
Star Dwellers (1961) and Mission to the Heart Stars (1965) - along with
Welcome to Mars! (1967) and, the weakest of them, The Vanished Jet (1968).

JB's output remained fairly steady during the 1960s and 1970s, but the
overall standard of his work had dropped, although his penultimate serious
work was interesting. This was Midsummer Century (1972US; with 2 stories
added, as coll 1974 US), in which the disembodied consciousness of a
scientist is cast forward into a FAR FUTURE where it meets different forms
of AI and intervenes in an evolutionary struggle. It is hard to read this
story of active mental life cut off from the physical world without
thinking of the frail JB's last years. He had a successful operation for
throat cancer in the 1960s but died from lung cancer in 1975,
characteristically turning out an essay on Spengler and sf on his deathbed
- its DEFINITION OF SF is "the internal (intracultural) form taken by
syncretism in the West". JB was also one of the earliest and most
influential of sf critics, under the pseudonym William Atheling Jr. Much
of his criticism was collected in two books, The Issue at Hand (coll 1964)
and More Issues at Hand (coll 1970). It is notably stern in many cases,
often pedantic, but intelligent and written from a much wider perspective
than was usual for fan criticism of his era. Further essays, including
that on Spengler noted above, appear in the posthumous, curate's egg
collection The Tale that Wags the God (coll 1987; published as by JB), ed
Cy Chauvin. As anthologist, JB edited New Dreams this Morning (anth 1966),
Nebula Award Stories 5 (anth 1970) and Thirteen O'Clock (coll 1972), a
collection of short stories by C.M. Kornbluth. He also edited the only
issue of the sf magazine VANGUARD SCIENCE FICTION (June 1958).JB did much
to encourage younger writers, and was one of the founders of the MILFORD
SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' CONFERENCE (he and J.A. Lawrence also founded the
UK Milford workshop), and an active charter member of the SCIENCE FICTION
WRITERS OF AMERICA. He also became, in 1970, one of the founder members of
the SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION in the UK. The latter organization named
the James Blish AWARD for excellence in sf criticism in honour of him
after his death. The first award went in 1977 to Brian W. ALDISS, but it
then lapsed for lack of funds.His dominant intellectual passions, which
often recur in his writing, were, aside from Spengler, the works of Ezra
Pound, James Joyce (he published papers on both of them) and James Branch
CABELL (he edited the Cabell Society magazine Kalki), the music of Richard
Strauss, and relativistic physics. JB was an interesting example of a
writer with an enquiring mind and a strong literary bent - with some of
the crotchets of the autodidact - who turned his attention to
fundamentally pulp GENRE-SF materials and in so doing transformed them.
His part in the transformation of pulp sf to something bigger is
historically of the first importance. Nonetheless, he was not a naturally
easy or harmonious writer; his style was often awkward, and in its
sometimes anomalous displays of erudition it could appear cold. On the
other hand, there was a visionary, romantic side to JB which, though
carefully controlled, is often visible below the surface.JB had a
scholastic temperament, and in 1969 emigrated to England to be close to
Oxford, where he is buried. His manuscripts and papers are in the Bodleian
Library. These include several unpublished works of both mainstream
fiction and sf. [PN]Other works: So Close to Home (coll 1961); The Night
Shapes (1962); Anywhen (coll 1970; with 1 story added, rev 1971 UK); . . .
And All the Stars a Stage (1960 AMZ; exp 1971); Get Out of My Sky, and
There Shall Be No Darkness (coll 1980 UK); The Seedling Stars/Galactic

Cluster (omni 1983).About the author: By far the most complete critical
and biographical account is Imprisoned in a Tesseract: The Life and Work
of James Blish (1988) by David KETTERER; also essential is A Clash of
Cymbals: The Triumph of James Blish (chap 1979) by Brian M. STABLEFORD;
relevant are "After Such Knowledge: James Blish's Tetralogy" by Bob
Rickard in A Multitude of Visions (anth 1975) ed Cy Chauvin, and the
special Blish issue of FSF (April 1972).See also: ADAM AND EVE; ALIENS;
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; ARTS; ASTEROIDS; CHILDREN'S SF; COLONIZATION
OF OTHER WORLDS; COMMUNICATIONS; COMPUTERS; COSMOLOGY; CRITICAL AND
HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; END OF THE WORLD;
EVOLUTION; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FASTER THAN LIGHT; GALACTIC EMPIRES;
GENERATION STARSHIPS; GOLDEN AGE OF SF; GOTHIC SF; GRAVITY; GREAT AND
SMALL; HISTORY OF SF; IMAGINARY SCIENCE; IMMORTALITY; JUPITER; LONGEVITY
(IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE
FICTION; MARS; MATHEMATICS; MESSIAHS; MONSTERS; MUSIC; ORIGIN OF MAN;
PANTROPY; PARANOIA; PERCEPTION; PHYSICS; POLITICS; POLLUTION;
REINCARNATION; SHARED WORLDS; SOCIOLOGY; SPACE FLIGHT; SPACE OPERA;
SUPERMAN; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES; TERRAFORMING; THRILLING WONDER
STORIES;
TRANSPORTATION; UNDER THE SEA; UTOPIAS; WEAPONS.
BLISS, REGINALD
H.G. WELLS.
BLOB, THE
1. Film (1958). Tonylyn/Paramount. Dir Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr, starring
Steve McQueen, Aneta Corseaut, Earl Rowe. Screenplay Theodore Simonson,
Kate Phillips. 85 mins. Colour.An ALIEN Blob which grows by absorbing
flesh reaches Earth in a hollow meteorite and begins to consume the
inhabitants of a small US town. Constantly enlarging, it is finally
defeated by a young man who discovers that extreme cold renders it
harmless. The special effects are by Barton Sloane. Simple, moderately
well made, TB is now affectionately remembered as one of the definitive
MONSTER MOVIES of the period. A 1971 sequel, Beware the Blob (vt Son of
Blob US), was dir Larry Hagman, better known as J.R. of the tv soap opera
Dallas. A black-comedy spoof, it is only mildly amusing.2. Film (1988).
Palisades California/TriStar. Dir Chuck Russell, starring Shawnee Smith,
Kevin Dillon, Donovan Leitch, Del Close. Screenplay Russell, Frank
Darabont. 95 mins. Colour.This remake, which nowhere credits its 1958
predecessor, follows the original story quite closely. Proficient and
exciting, with good and expensive state-of-the-art horror special effects
(imploding faces, a man sucked down a plughole) and a spunky heroine
(Smith), it is nonetheless rigidly formulaic. All the main changes (the
Blob is now the result of a US Government experiment in biological
warfare) are derived from other films, notably The CRAZIES (1973).
Distance may have lent too much charm to the original; this has none at
all. The novelization is The Blob * (1988) by David BISCHOFF. [PN]See
also: CINEMA.
BLOCH, ROBERT (ALBERT)
(1917-1994) US writer of FANTASY, HORROR, thrillers and a relatively
small amount of sf. Born in Chicago, RB was extremely active from 1935 in

his several areas of specialization, but is best known for Psycho (1959),
from which Alfred Hitchcock made the famous film (1960), and to which RB
wrote two sequels, Psycho II (1982) - not related to the 1983 film sequel
of the same name - and Psycho House (1990).RB began as a devotee of the
work of H.P. LOVECRAFT, who treated him with kindness. His first published
story was "Lilies" (1934) in the semi-professional MARVEL TALES; his first
important sale, "The Secret in the Tomb" (1935), appeared in Weird Tales,
the magazine which, along with Fantastic Adventures, published most of the
over 100 stories he wrote in the first decade of his career. Towards the
end of this period he contributed the 22 Lefty Feep fantasy stories to
Fantastic Adventures (1942-6); most were later assembled as Lost in Time
and Space with Lefty Feep (coll 1987). He published a booklet in the
AMERICAN FICTION series, Sea-Kissed (coll 1945 chap UK), the title story
of which was originally "The Black Kiss" (1937) by RB and Henry KUTTNER;
but his first book-length volume, collecting much of his best early
fantasy and horror and published by ARKHAM HOUSE, was The Opener of the
Way (coll 1945; in 2 vols as The Opener of the Way 1976 UK and House of
the Hatchet 1976 UK); confusingly, a US compilation volume was published
with a very similar UK vt, Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper (coll 1962; vt The
House of the Hatchet, and Other Tales of Horror 1965 UK), extracting a
different mix of stories from The Opener of the Way plus some from the
later Pleasant Dreams - Nightmares (coll 1960; cut vt Nightmares 1961;
with fewer cuts and some additions vt Pleasant Dreams 1979); Yours Truly,
Jack the Ripper was accompanied by More Nightmares (coll 1962), selected
from the same sources. These titles have fortunately been superseded as
overviews of his career by The Selected Stories of Robert Bloch (coll 1988
in 3 vols: Final Reckonings - which single volume is misleadingly vt The
Complete Stories of Robert Bloch, Volume 1: Final Reckonings 1990 - Bitter
Ends and Last Rites). During this period and afterwards, RB remained an
active sf and fantasy fan; a collection of fanzine articles, The Eighth
Stage of Fandom (coll 1962), ed Earl KEMP, was assembled for the 1962
World Science Fiction CONVENTION. It is quite likely that his use of the
term INNER SPACE, in his 1948 World Science Fiction Convention speech, was
the first formulation of the concept later articulated by J.B. PRIESTLEY
and J.G. BALLARD; the speech was printed in the Torcon Report, issued by
the convention committee. In the first decade of his career RB also turned
to radio work: Stay Tuned for Terror (1945), a 39-episode syndicated
programme of adapted RB stories, became popular. RB sometimes used the
pseudonym Tarleton Fiske during this period, and also contributed work to
sf and horror magazines under various house names, including E.K. JARVIS
and later Will Folke, Wilson KANE and John Sheldon. His best-known story
from this time was Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper (1943 Weird Tales; 1991
chap); much later he amplified his treatment of the fog-shrouded
phenomenon of 1888 in The Night of the Ripper (1984). After the 1940s he
continued to produce a wide variety of material, though less prolifically
than before. Much of his later work, after the success of Psycho, was in
Hollywood. His numerous collections published from 1960 combine old and
new work, so that much of his pre-WWII work has become available.His
output of sf proper has been comparatively slender; the stories assembled
in Atoms and Evil (coll 1962) are representative. A witty, polished
craftsman, he laced his horror with a wry humour which only occasionally

slips into whimsy. For half a century he was active as an sf fan and
patron, and his writing shows complete professional control over sf themes
when the need arises; Once Around the Bloch: an Unauthorized Autobiography
1993) reveals a humorous, self-deprecating person fully - but modestly aware of his wide competence. He was awarded a 1959 HUGO for Best Short
Story for "That Hell-Bound Train" (1958), though strictly speaking it is
fantasy, not sf; and was given a Special Award in 1984. [JC]Other works:
Terror in the Night and Other Stories (coll 1958); Blood Runs Cold (coll
1961; with 4 stories cut 1963 UK); Horror-7 (coll 1963); Bogey Men (coll
1963); Tales in a Jugular Vein (coll 1965); The Skull of the Marquis de
Sade (coll 1965), the title story of which was filmed as The Skull (1965)
and later published separately as The Skull of the Marquis de Sade (1945
Weird Tales; 1992 chap); Chamber of Horrors (coll 1966); The Living Demons
(coll 1967); This Crowded Earth (1958 AMZ; 1968 dos) and Ladies' Day (1968
dos), bound together; Dragons and Nightmares (coll 1968), humorous
fantasies; Bloch and Bradbury (anth 1969; vt Fever Dream and Other
Fantasies 1970 UK); Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow (coll 1971); It's All in
Your Mind (1955 Imaginative Tales as "The Big Binge"; 1971); Sneak Preview
(1959 AMZ; 1971); The King of Terrors (coll 1977); Cold Chills (coll
1977); The Best of Robert Bloch (coll 1977); Strange Eons (1978); Out of
the Mouths of Graves (coll 1978); Such Stuff as Screams are Made Of (coll
1979); Mysteries of the Worm: All the Cthulhu Mythos Stories of Robert
Bloch (coll 1981); The Twilight Zone: The Movie * (coll of linked stories
1983), screenplay adaptations; Out of my Head (coll 1986); Midnight
Pleasures (coll 1987); Fear and Trembling (coll 1989); Lori (1989),
horror; The Jekyll Legacy * (1990) with Andre NORTON, a sequel to the
Robert Louis STEVENSON novella; Psycho-Paths (anth 1991) and Monsters in
our Midst (anth 1993), both with (anon) Martin Harry GREENBERG; The Early
Fears (coll 1994), mostly early work reprinted elsewhere.Associational:
Two omnibuses conveniently assemble RB's most interesting non-genre
novels: Unholy Trinity: Three Novels of Suspense (omni 1986), which
contains The Scarf (1947; vt The Scarf of Passion 1949; rev 1966), The
Deadbeat (1960) and The Couch * (1962), from the 1962 film; and Screams:
Three Novels of Terror (omni 1989), which contains The Will to Kill
(1954), Firebug (1961) and The Star Stalker (1968). Further associational
titles of interest include The Kidnapper (1954), Spiderweb (1954),
Shooting Star (1958 dos), Terror (1962), The Todd Dossier (1969) as by
Collier Young, Night-World (1972), American Gothic (1974), There is a
Serpent in Eden (1979; vt The Cunning 1981).About the author: "Robert
Bloch" in Seekers of Tomorrow (1966) by Sam MOSKOWITZ; The Complete Robert
Bloch: An Illustrated, Comprehensive Bibliography (1987) by Randall D.
Larson.See also: FANTASY; MACHINES; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE
FICTION; RELIGION; ROBOTS; SF IN THE CLASSROOM; SEX; SOCIOLOGY.
BLOCK, THOMAS H(ARRIS)
(1945- ) US writer whose novels are often borderline TECHNOTHRILLERS,
especially Mayday (1980) and the NEAR-FUTURE ORBIT (1982), in which a
3900mph (6275kph) airliner is gimmicked by saboteurs into flying into
orbit. Airship Nine (1984) is a full-fledged post- HOLOCAUST tale, with
soldiers in Antarctica fending off nuclear winter and preparing to
repopulate the planet. [JC]

BLOOD BEAST FROM OUTER SPACE
The NIGHT CALLER.
BLOODSTONE, JOHN
J. Stuart BYRNE.
BLOOM, HAROLD
(1930- ) US academic and writer, best known for his Freudian analysis of
the relationship between strong male authors and predecessor authors over
the last several centuries of Western literature; The Anxiety of Influence
(1973) and its several increasingly talmudic sequels have become central
critical texts. His only novel, The Flight to Lucifer (1979), was
described as a Gnostic fantasy, accurately. Of the many anthologies of
critical pieces ed HB, several are of sf interest: Mary Shelley (anth
1985), Edgar Allan Poe (anth 1985), Ursula K. Le Guin (anth 1986) and
Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (anth 1987), Doris Lessing
(anth 1986), George Orwell (anth 1987) and George Orwell's 1984 (anth
1987), and Classic Horror Writers (anth 1993).
BLOT, THOMAS
Pseudonym of US writer William Simpson (? -? ). In his sf novel The Man
from Mars: His Morals, Politics and Religion (1891) the eponymous
telepathic traveller tells of his UTOPIAN world. Unfortunately - if his
desire was to communicate widely - the human he contacts is a hermit. [JC]
BLUE BOOK MAGAZINE, THE
US PULP MAGAZINE published by the Story-Press Corporation; ed Donald
Kennicott, Maxwell Hamilton and others. It first appeared May 1905 as The
Monthly Story Magazine, became The Monthly Story Blue Book Magazine Sep
1906, The Blue Book Magazine May 1907, and Bluebook Feb 1952. Later issues
had no sf content.This general-fiction pulp, a major competitor of the
Frank A. MUNSEY group, had a long history of publishing sf and fantasy,
with works by George Allan ENGLAND, William Hope HODGSON and others
appearing in its opening years. Its heyday came in the late 1920s and
early 1930s, when it published serializations of many novels by Edgar Rice
BURROUGHS as well as others by Edwin BALMER and Philip WYLIE, James
Francis DWYER and Edgar JEPSON, with additional short stories from Ray
CUMMINGS. Later Nelson BOND came into prominence with his Squaredeal Sam
(1943-51) and Pat Pending (1942-8) series. [JE]
BLUEJAY BOOKS
US publishing house founded by James R. FRENKEL, who had previously been
the editor of Dell's sf line. BB began publishing in 1983, their books
being distributed by St Martin's Press. Among their titles were Gardner
DOZOIS's best-of-the-year anthologies ( ANTHOLOGIES), books by Frenkel's
wife Joan D. VINGE, Dan SIMMONS's first novel The Song of Kali (1985),
Patti Perret's book of photographic studies The Faces of Science Fiction
(1984) and Greg BEAR's EON (1985). Other authors included Jack DANN, K.W.
JETER, Nancy KRESS, Rudy RUCKER, Theodore STURGEON, Vernor VINGE, Connie
WILLIS and Timothy ZAHN. It was a strong list, concentrating on hardcovers
and trade paperbacks, with over 50 new sf, fantasy and horror titles as
well as a number of reprints published during the company's short life;

but this attempt of a small specialist publisher to enter the
mass-marketing field, traditionally difficult especially as regards
distribution, was apparently undercapitalized. BB ceased trading in 1986.
[PN]
BLUE RIBBON MAGAZINES
FUTURE FICTION; SCIENCE FICTION.
BLUE SUNSHINE
Film (1977). Ellanby/Blue Sunshine Co. Written and dir Jeff Lieberman,
starring Zalman King, Deborah Winters, Mark Goddard, Robert Walden. 95
mins. Colour.Lieberman's first film was a witty (if disgusting) MONSTER
MOVIE, Squirm * (1976) - the last word on killer worms; its novelization
was Squirm (1976) by Richard A. CURTIS. BS, Lieberman's second feature, is
also unusually sharp and amusing for a low-budget exploitation movie.
Middle-class ex-hippies inexplicably lose their hair and turn homicidal.
The culprit turns out to be Blue Sunshine, an LSD variant - the bad acid
they dropped a decade earlier has taken its toll on their chromosomes. As
Kim NEWMAN puts it in Nightmare Movies (1984; rev 1988), "the flower
children have become the Living Dead". The dialogue is good, the metaphor
potent. BS is as pointed a film of sf social commentary as any that
appeared in its decade, though its theme of human metamorphosis through
corrupt TECHNOLOGY perhaps owes something to David CRONENBERG. [PN]
BLUE THUNDER
Film (1983). Rastar/Gordon Carroll Productions. Dir John BADHAM, starring
Roy Scheider, Warren Oates, Candy Clark, Daniel Stern, Malcolm McDowell.
Screenplay Dan O'Bannon, Don Jakoby. 110 mins. Colour.Borderline sf set in
a very NEAR-FUTURE Los Angeles, BT tells the story of Murphy (Scheider), a
helicopter-based police officer, asked to try out a new supercopter: it
can see through walls, fire missiles, fly at 200 knots and hear
conversations from far away. Murphy gradually unravels a government
conspiracy to create rioting among Blacks and Chicanos as a justification
for the introduction of new, draconian police methods of surveillance and
riot control. The post-Watergate, post-Vietnam PARANOIA of the plot is
rather unconvincing, in part because of McDowell's overacting as a
right-wing extremist, and there is much moral confusion between the overt
theme - the dangers of using new TECHNOLOGY as an instrument of oppression
- and the subtext, which says that this same technology is exciting and
beautiful. BT is well made, suspenseful and meretricious, and owes
altogether too much to FIREFOX. Columbia TV produced a disappointing tv
series of the same title, Blue Thunder, starring James Farentino, which
ran briefly for 11 episodes in 1984; in it the same supercopter becomes
merely a useful aid for stereotypical police work. [PN]See also: CINEMA.
BLUM, RALPH
(1932- ) US writer involved in early drug research, which is reflected in
his sf novel, The Simultaneous Man (1970). A convict's mind is erased and
the memories and identity of a research scientist are substituted, rather
as in Robert SILVERBERG's The Second Trip (1972). The relationship between
the scientist and his "twin" is complex, and ends tragically for him in
the USSR, where he himself becomes a subject for experimentation. Of

borderline interest is Old Glory and the Real-Time Freaks (1972). The Book
of Runes (1982) is nonfiction. [JC]
BLUMENFELD, F. YORICK
(1932- ) UK writer whose Jenny Ewing: My Diary (1981 chap; vt Jenny: My
Diary 1982 chap US) offers an exceedingly grim vision of the UK after a
nuclear HOLOCAUST, as seen by the reluctant survivor whose journal,
written in a shelter, makes up the text. The book was first published as
by Jenny herself. [JC]
BLUMLEIN, MICHAEL
(1948- ) US medical doctor and writer whose output in the latter
capacity, though still restricted to two published books, has had
considerable impact on the field. His first published story was "Tissue
Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report" for Interzone in 1984.
This tale remains one of the most astonishingly savage political assaults
ever published. The target is Ronald Reagan, whose living body is
eviscerated without anaesthetic by a team of doctors, partly to punish him
for the evils he has allowed to flourish in the world and partly to make
amends for those evils through the biologically engineered growth and
transformation of the ablated tissues into foodstuffs and other goods
ultimately derived from the flesh, which are then sent to the impoverished
of the Earth. "Tissue Ablation" and other remarkable tales including "The
Brains of Rats" (1986) and "The Wet Suit" (1989) were assembled as The
Brains of Rats (coll 1989), a publication that demonstrates the very
considerable thematic and stylistic range of modern sf, and shows how very
far from reassuring it can be.MB's only published novel, The Movement of
Mountains (1987), is told in a more immediately accessible style than some
of his short FABULATIONS, though at moments the narrative form of the text
- related by a doctor in the form of a confessional memoir - and some of
the ornate chill of the narrator's mind are reminiscent of the darker
tales of Gene WOLFE. The tale begins in a familiar, congested NEAR-FUTURE
California, moves to a colony planet mined by "mountainous", biologically
engineered, short-lived slaves - whom the doctor helps liberate while at
the same time analysing the plague which has killed his lover - and
finally returns to Earth, where the doctor, having discovered that the
plague has the effect of transforming humans into gestalt configurations,
disseminates it in secret in order to bring down a repressive government.
X,Y (1993) is horror.At his best, MB writes tales in which, with an air of
remote sang-froid, he makes unrelenting assaults on public issues (and
figures). He writes as though his aesthetic demands justice; as though, in
other words, beauty demands truth. [JC]See also: INTERZONE; MEDICINE.
BLYTH, JAMES
(1864-1933) UK writer, a fairly prolific author of popular fiction who is
best remembered in the field for The Tyranny (1907), a NEAR-FUTURE tale of
a UK dominated by a tyrant and at war with Germany. Ichabod (1910), which
is defaced by an antisemitism that seemed "robust" even for the UK of
1910, grants victory to the UK against an unholy alliance of Jews and
Germans through a MATTER TRANSMITTER and a machine which reads malign
thoughts. The Shadow of the Unseen (1907) with Barry PAIN, a tale of the
supernatural, was infused with JB's love of the motor car. [JC]Other

works: With a View to Matrimony and Other Stories (coll 1904); The Aerial
Burglars (1906), in which thieves use a flying motor car for nefarious
purposes; The Irrevocable and Other Stories (coll 1907); The Smallholder
(1908), a supernatural fiction;The Swoop of the Vulture (1909); A Haunted
Inheritance (1910); My Haunted Home (1914); The Weird Sisters (1919).
BOARDMAN, TOM
Working name of UK publisher and editor Thomas Volney Boardman (1930),
who went to work for the family publishing company, T.V. Boardman, in
1949, and stayed on as managing director when the company changed
ownership in 1954. The company published primarily mysteries, with some
sf. TB was sf adviser, successively, to GOLLANCZ, Four Square Books,
Macdonald and New English Library. He was business manager of SF Horizons.
He edited the anthologies Connoisseur's Science Fiction (anth 1964), The
Unfriendly Future (anth 1965), An ABC of Science Fiction (anth 1966),
Science Fiction Horizons 1 (anth 1968) and Science Fiction Stories (anth
1979), the latter for children. He then worked in educational publishing.
[MJE]
BODE, VAUGHN (FREDERICK)
(1941-1975) US COMICS artist and writer with a bold, loose line who
created a world of charming and whimsical - if somewhat cutesy - fantasy
characters; the most famous of these were Cheech Wizard - a strange figure
almost entirely engulfed in a star-spangled hat - a bevy of little busty
sexpots and a number of almost indistinguishable reptilian characters. VB
began by providing amateur material for FANZINES, and in 1969 won a HUGO
for Best Fan Artist. From 1970 until his premature death he worked
professionally for Cavalier and National Lampoon, and published his own
comic book, Junkwaffel (1972-4), creating a number of oddball joke strips
and short stories, plus a few longer ones. He won a Yellow Kid Award in
1975. His sf creations - apart from 14 covers for sf magazines (1967
onward), such as If and Gal-included the strips Zooks (1983), Sunpot
(1984; see also GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION) and Cobalt 60, the latter being
continued after VB's death, rather poorly, by his son Mark Bode in Epic.
[RT]See also: COMICS; HEAVY METAL; METAL HURLANT.
BODELSEN, ANDERS
(1937- ) Danish writer and journalist, author of several novels of
suspense. Villa Sunset ["Villa Sunset"] (1964) is a NEAR-FUTURE tale of
Fimbul-Winter and glacial transformation. Frysepunktet (1969; trans Joan
Tate as Freezing Point 1971 UK; vt Freezing Down 1971 US) is also sf. Its
protagonist is incurably sick, and is frozen until he can be cured (
CRYONICS). The world to which he awakens, complexly and satirically
described in AB's intense manner, offers him ambivalent (and restricted)
choices between an idle life (with death inevitable) and a life of
drudgery (with access to spare parts). It is a dark story, told urgently,
using a wide range of literary techniques. [JC]See also: DENMARK;
IMMORTALITY.
BODIN, FELIX
[r] P.K. ALKON; FRANCE; FUTUROLOGY.
BODY SNATCHERS

Film (1993). Warner Bros. Dir Abel Ferrara; screenplay Stuart Gordon,
Dennis Paoli, Nicholas St. John, based on a story by Raymond Cistheri and
Larry COHEN, based loosely in turn on the 1958 screenplay; starring Meg
Tilly, Gabrielle Anwar, Terry Kinney, Billy Wirth, Forest Whitaker. 90
mins. Colour.This low budget remake (the second remake, the first being
1978) of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1958) in most areas went straight
to video, which was unfortunate. The producer, Robert H. Solo, was
interestingly also the producer of the 1978 Kaufman version, from which
this differs considerably. Marti Malone (Anwar) is the teenage daughter of
an inspector from the Environmental Protection Agency who has been
seconded to a deep-south military base where toxic waste is suspected to
exist. It turns out that the base has been infiltrated by alien pod-people
who replace real humans by inserting tendrils into their orifices while
they are asleep. Marti is already estranged from her stepmother (Tilly)
and it is no surprise when the stepmother is the first to be zombified,
though terrifying for her little brother who knows it is not his mother;
this same child is in a military day-care centre where all the other
children, sinisterly, produce exactly the same finger paintings. Events
proceed with a chilling logic; there is little upbeat in the film, as
Marti's family is stripped away from her. Ferrara is a director whose
career has been built around tacky, low budget, remorseless thrillers of
considerable power, but this film is more accessible and less offensive
than most of them. The metaphoric examination here of both the military
and the nuclear family corrupting is biting and thoughtful. The siren-like
alarm calls of the pod-people-like a military klaxon-provide a memorable
touch. [PN]
BOEHM, HERB
[s] John VARLEY.
BOETZEL, ERIC
[r] Herbert CLOCK.
BOGATI, PETER
[r] HUNGARY.
BOGDANOV, ALEXANDER
Pseudonym of Russian writer and political thinker Alexander
(Alexandrovich) Malinovsky (1873-1928); he survived criticism from
Vladimir Lenin only to die in a blood-transfusion experiment. He is
remembered for a UTOPIAN sequence - Krasnaia Zvezda ["The Red Star"]
(1908) and Inzhener Menni ["Engineer Menni"] (1913), both assembled with a
1924 poem as The Red Star: The First Bolsehvik Utopia (omni trans Charles
Rougle 1984 US) - depicting the flight of its protagonist, a Russian
revolutionary, to Mars where a technocratic utopia, based on principles of
"rational management" is built. The first volume was reprinted just after
the Socialist Revolution in 1917, and perhaps for that reason was thought
of as the first authentic example of "Soviet" sf; however, it was not
again reprinted until 1977, when it was purged of episodes describing
"free love" in the utopia. The second volume includes interesting
speculations that adumbrated the relationship of CYBERNETICS to modern
management and also anticipated the need for a COMPUTER on SPACESHIPS,

describing the ship itself as being driven by atomic energy. [VG]See also:
RUSSIA.
BOGORAS, WALDEMAR
Vladimir Germanovitch BOGORAZ.
BOGORAZ, VLADIMIR GERMANOVITCH
(1865-1936) Soviet anthropologist whose novel Zhertvy drakona (1927;
trans Stephen Graham as Sons of the Mammoth 1929 US as by Waldemar
Bogoras) reflects his professional concerns in a prehistoric tale in which
Neanderthals encounter rising human stock and a "mysterious" beast that
turns out to be natural. [JC]See also: ORIGIN OF MAN.
BOISGILBERT, EDMUND
Ignatius DONNELLY.
BOK, HANNES
(1914-1964) US illustrator, author and astrologer, born Wayne Woodard. Sf
ILLUSTRATION has had very few mavericks: HB was possibly the most famous.
He did not let editors and publishers dictate the way he designed his
work, and thereby lost hundreds of commissions. He was a master of the
macabre, a stylist par excellence. He painted many covers and did hundreds
of black-and-white illustrations for such magazines as COSMIC STORIES,
FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES, FANTASTIC UNIVERSE, FUTURE FICTION,
IMAGINATION, PLANET STORIES, STIRRING SCIENCE STORIES, SUPER SCIENCE
STORIES and, especially, 7 covers for WEIRD TALES. He also did
book-jackets for ARKHAM HOUSE, FANTASY PRESS, GNOME PRESS and SHASTA
PUBLISHERS, among others. His style was unique, though the colours and
techniques he used were heavily influenced by Maxfield Parrish
(1870-1966); his black-and-white illustrations are highly stylized, his
human figures angular and almost Byzantine. HB was much stronger
illustrating fantasy and horror than sf.HB was also a writer. Two of his
colourful, moralizing fantasy novels were published in book form after his
death: The Sorcerer's Ship (1942 Unknown; 1969) and Beyond the Golden
Stair (1948 Startling Stories as "The Blue Flamingo"; rev 1970); his other
novel was "Starstone World" (1942 Science Fiction Quarterly). He also
wrote several short stories. An admirer of A. MERRITT, he completed and
illustrated two of the latter's novels after Merritt's death in 1943 - The
Black Wheel (1947) and The Fox Woman and The Blue Pagoda (1946) - being
credited in both books. "The Blue Pagoda" was an episode written by Bok to
complete The Fox Woman, on which Merritt had worked sporadically for 20
years before his death.HB did little illustration after about 1952,
turning to astrology, about which he wrote 13 articles for Mystic Magazine
(retitled Search in 1956). With Ed EMSHWILLER he shared the first HUGO in
1953 for Best Cover Artist. After his death, his friend Emil PETAJA became
chairman of the Bokanalia Foundation, founded 1967. This group has
published folios of HB's artwork, some of his poetry, and And Flights of
Angels: The Life and Legend of Hannes Bok (1968) by Petaja. [JG/PN]See
also: FANTASY; FUTURIANS.
BOLAND, (BERTRAM) JOHN
(1913-1976) UK author and journalist, a prolific story producer, although
rarely of sf. His sf novels, White August (1955) and No Refuge (1956), are

both set in frigid conditions. The first is a DISASTER tale, dealing with
the dire effects of a botched attempt at weather control. No Refuge
depicts an Arctic UTOPIA into which two criminals accidentally irrupt;
after a good deal of discussion they are dealt with properly. Holocaust
(1974) has a solar-cell satellite running amuck, spraying heat-rays, and
being lusted after by the great powers as a weapon. A further novel,
Operation Red Carpet (1959), has some borderline sf components. [JC]
BOLDIZSAR, IVAN
[r] HUNGARY.
BOLLAND, BRIAN (JOHN)
(1951- ) UK COMIC-book artist highly regarded for his smooth line and
meticulous, sculptural drawing style. His first strip work appeared in the
underground magazine Oz in 1971. In 1975-7 he drew Powerman, a Black
SUPERHERO, for the Nigerian market, his episodes alternating with those by
Dave GIBBONS, and then he began producing covers for 2,000 AD. His most
lasting contribution to date has been his development of JUDGE DREDD: BB's
first Judge Dredd strip appeared in 2,000 AD #41 (26 Nov 1977), and in all
he drew 40, the last appearing in #244 (26 Dec 1981); he also provided a
run of 40 covers for Eagle Comics's 2,000 AD and Judge Dredd reprints
1983-6.He began to produce cover artwork for DC COMICS with Green Lantern
#127 (Apr 1980). For DC he also drew a number of short sf strips as well
as a 12-issue series, Camelot 3,000, Dec 1982-Apr 1985. He produced Batman
- The Killing Joke (graph 1988), a very successful 48pp quality comic book
written by Alan MOORE. Since then he has concentrated on artwork for
covers, including 48 (to early 1992) for Animal Man and those for the
Titan Books editions of the WILD CARDS graphic novels in 1991.He has also
written and drawn 48 12-panel strips featuring Mr Mamoulian, a mournful
middle-aged man with a hangdog expression who seems to be permanently
seated on a park bench. These have been published in the UK in Escape as
well as in Spain (Cimoc), Sweden (Pox) and the USA (Cheval Noir). Of his
other strip, The Actress and the Bishop, written in rhyme, only two
sections have appeared (in A1). [RT]See also: ILLUSTRATION.
BOLTON, CHARLES E.
(1841-1901) US writer whose posthumously published sf novel, The
Harris-Ingram Experiment (1905), conflates capitalist accomplishments,
romantic love, a genius inventor and UTOPIAN experiments. [JC]
BOLTON, JOHANNA M.
(? - ) US writer whose first novel, The Alien Within (1988), carries its
revenge-seeking female protagonist through a crumbling Galactic
Federation, introducing her to a variety of ALIEN empires. JMB's second
novel, Mission: Tori (1990), also featuring a bereaved female protagonist,
addresses but does not solve the mysteries surrounding the mineral-rich
and much desired planet of Tori. [JC]
BOMB PREDICTION
The year was 1944 and a science fiction story called "Deadline" appeared
in Astounding magazine. Cleve Cartmill, the writer, described the
invention of an atomic bomb a year before the first nuclear explosion at
Alamagordo. FBI agents, suspecting security leaks in the top-secret

Manhattan Project, soon converged on the magazine's office. But Editor
John W. Campbell successfully convinced the agents that Cartmill's sources
were those available at the local public library. SF fans like to point to
this episode as an example of the fine art of SF prediction.
BONANATE, UGO
[r] ITALY.
BONANNO, MARGARET WANDER
(1950- ) US writer whose first books were volumes of poetry. After a
mainstream novel,A Certain Slant of Light (1979), she made her mark on sf
with a highly successful Star Trek tie, Dwellers in the Crucible * (1985).
Two others followed - Strangers from the Sky * (1987) and Probe * (1992),
which latter she claimed had been extensively rewritten, and disavowed but MWB's main achievement lay in The Others, a PLANETARY-ROMANCE sequence
comprising The Others (1990) ,Otherwhere (1991) and Otherwise (1993), in
which the eponymous aliens, stranded on an Earthlike world, must attempt,
through telepathy and intermittent bouts of interracial breeding, to
survive the onslaughts of jealous, inferior humanlike natives. MWB has
written two novels under the house name Rick North in the Young Astronauts
sequence: #4: Destination Mars * (1991) and #6: Citizens of Mars * (1991).
[JC]
BOND, J. HARVEY
Russ R. WINTERBOTHAM.
BOND, NELSON S(LADE)
(1908- ) US writer and in later years philatelist, publishing works in
that field. He began his career in public relations, coming to sf in 1937
with "Down the Dimensions" for ASF. Later in that year he published "Mr
Mergenthwirker's Lobblies" in Scribner's Magazine, a fantasy which became
a radio series, was made into a tv play (1957), and in its original form
was collected in Mr Mergenthwirker's Lobblies and Other Fantastic Tales
(coll 1946). It served as a model for the "nutty" fiction that NSB wrote
for Fantastic Adventures in the early 1940s, comic tales involving
implausible inventions and various pixillated doings, sometimes with an
effect of excessive coyness. He wrote only two stories under pseudonyms,
one as George Danzell (1940) and one as Hubert Mavity (1939).NSB's active
career in the magazines extended into the 1950s; his markets were not
restricted to the sf PULP MAGAZINES, and he became strongly associated
with The BLUE BOOK MAGAZINE for stories and series usually combining sf
and fantasy elements, often featuring trick endings reminiscent of O.
Henry. Further collections, assembling most of his best work, are The 31st
of February (coll 1949), No Time Like the Future (coll 1954) and
Nightmares and Daydreams (coll 1968). Since the early 1950s he has been
relatively inactive as a writer.His most famous single series, the
Lancelot Biggs stories concerning an eccentric space traveller, appeared
1939-43 in various magazines; it was published, with most stories revised,
as The Remarkable Exploits of Lancelot Biggs, Spaceman (coll of linked
stories 1950). A similar series, about Pat Pending and his peculiar
inventions, appeared 1942-57, all but the last in Bluebook; it remains
uncollected. The Squaredeal Sam McGhee stories, also in Bluebook

(1943-51), are tall tales, not sf. A series of three stories about Meg the
Priestess, a young girl who comes to lead a post- HOLOCAUST tribe,
appeared in various magazines, 1939-42; they remain uncollected, as do the
four Hank Horse-Sense stories, which appeared in AMZ 1940-42.NSB's only
novel in book form, Exiles of Time (1940 Blue Book Magazine; 1949) is a
darkly told story about the end of things in Mu ( DISASTER), told in a
sometimes allegorical fashion. Perhaps because of the number of his
markets, NSB established a less secure reputation in the sf/fantasy world
than less versatile writers; not dissimilar in his wit and fantasticality
to Robert BLOCH or Fredric BROWN, he is considerably less well known than
either, though his work is attractive and often memorable. [JC]Other
works: The Monster (coll 1953 chap Australia); State of Mind: A Comedy in
Three Acts (1958 chap), a comic fantasy play; Animal Farm: A Fable in Two
Acts (1964 chap), a play based on the 1945 novel by George ORWELL; and the
supplemental material to James N. Hall's James Branch Cabell: A Complete
Bibliography, with a Supplement of Current Values of Cabell Books
(1974).See also: ADAM AND EVE; AMAZING STORIES; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION;
LIVING WORLDS.
BONE, J(ESSE) F(RANKLIN)
(1916-1986) US writer and professor of veterinary medicine who began
publishing sf with "Survival Type" for Gal in 1957. His first sf novel,
The Lani People (1962), is his most memorable, later works being routine.
It deals with an ALIEN people whose suffering from human exploitation is
graphically related. His short fiction-about 30 stories in all - remains
uncollected. [JC]Other works: Legacy (1976); The Meddlers (1976); Gift of
the Manti (1977) with Ray Myers (an almost certainly unintended pseudonym
for Roy MEYERS); Confederation Matador (1978).See also: ARTS.
BONESTELL, CHESLEY
(1888-1986) US astronomical illustrator. CB studied as an architect in
San Francisco, his birthplace, but never graduated; he was employed by
many architectural firms and aided in the design of the Golden Gate
Bridge. He worked as a matte artist to produce special effects and
background paintings for 14 films, including Citizen Kane (1941),
DESTINATION MOON (1950), WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (1951), WAR OF THE WORLDS
(1953) and The CONQUEST OF SPACE (1955). In the early 1940s he began
astronomical painting on a major scale, much of his work being used in
Life magazine, and during 1949-72 completed astronomical artwork for 10
books, including the classic science-fact book The Conquest of Space
(1949), with text by Willy LEY. In 1950-51 CB painted for the Boston
Museum of Science a 10 x 40ft (about 3 x 12m) mural; it was transferred to
the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in 1976.
His space paintings were used as cover illustrations for ASF (12 covers)
and FSF (38 covers) from 1947 onwards; he became a favourite of sf fans in
this period. His style was a photographic realism, showing great attention
to correctness of perspective and scale in conformity with the scientific
knowledge of the day, and some of his Moon paintings, for example, were
truly prophetic in their accuracy. But, more than that, his work held
great beauty and drama in its stillness and depth. Many book lovers of the
post-WWII generation can trace back their fascination for space

exploration as much to CB's paintings as to their reading of either
science or sf. The recipient of many awards, he earned a Special
Achievement HUGO in 1974. [JG/PN]See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.
BONFIGLIOLI, KYRIL
[r] SCIENCE FANTASY.
BONHAM, FRANK
(1914-1988) US writer, most of whose adult novels were Westerns, and who
wrote in various modes for younger readers. The Missing Persons League
(1976), set in a starving DYSTOPIAN USA, presents its young protagonist
with the chance to find a better world. The Forever Formula (1979) is a
strong sf tale in which a young man awakens from SUSPENDED ANIMATION to
find himself torn between opposing factions: those who wish for his
father's IMMORTALITY formula, to which he has the secret, and those who
wish for normal mortality. Premonitions (1984) is a fantasy. [JC]
BOOTH, IRWIN
[s] Edward D. HOCH.
BOOTHBY, GUY (NEWELL)
(1867-1905) Australian-born writer, permanently in the UK from 1894, who
remains best known for his Dr Nikola sequence: A Bid for Fortune (1895;
rev vt Dr Nikola's Vendetta 1908 US; vt Enter Dr. Nikola! 1975 US), Doctor
Nikola (1896), The Lust of Hate(1898),Dr Nikola's Experiment (1899) and
"Farewell, Nikola" (1901). The heart of the series is devoted to the
Doctor's convoluted search for a Tibetan process that will resuscitate the
dead and ensure IMMORTALITY in the living, and there are some hints that unhampered by compunctions, armed with PSI POWERS, and blessed with a
powerful experimental intellect - he may have reached his goal. Of GB's 50
or so novels, several further titles were of fantasy interest. [JC]Other
works: Pharos, the Egyptian (1899); The Curse of the Snake (1902); Uncle
Joe's Legacy, and Other Stories (coll 1902); The Lady of the Island (coll
1904); A Crime of the Under-Seas (1905), a fantastic-invention tale.
BORDEN, MARY
(1886-1968) US-born writer and journalist, in the UK for the last
half-century of her life. After funding and running a field hospital in
WWI, she began to write novels and nonfiction, some of the latter being of
FEMINIST interest. Her sf novel, Jehovah's Day (1928), is a fable about
the emergence of humanity, carrying its narrative from the earliest times
to a NEAR-FUTURE catastrophe which destroys London. Throughout, the
mysterious figure of Eryops the Mud Puppy makes emblematic appearances.
[JC]
BORDEWIJK, F.
[r] BENELUX.
BORGES, JORGE LUIS
(1899-1986) Argentine short-story writer, poet, essayist and university
professor, known primarily for his work outside the sf field. Though much
of his fiction is local and drawn from Argentine history and events,
Borges is best known in the English-speaking world for his short
fantasies. Ficciones (coll 1944; rev 1961; trans Anthony Kerrigan 1962 US)

and El Aleph (coll 1949; rev 1952) contain his most important short
stories, including most of those considered closest to sf. Most of the
contents of these books, with some additional material, can be found in
English in Labyrinths (coll trans 1962; rev 1964). Another translated
collection - the author collaborating on the translation - is The Aleph
and Other Stories 1933-1969 (coll trans with Norman Thomas di Giovanni
1970 US), which is not a translation of El Aleph, containing a quite
different selection of stories.JLB has argued that "the compilation of
vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance" and claims to
have read few novels himself - and then only out of a "sense of duty". His
stories are accordingly brief, but contain a bewildering number of ideas.
Many are technically interesting, exploiting such forms as fictional
reviews and biographies to summarize complex and equally fictional books
and characters, or using the precise styles of the fable or the detective
story to encapsulate involved ideas.Among his most famous fantasies are:
"The Library of Babel" (1941), which describes a vast library or Universe
of books containing all possible combinations of the alphabet, and thus
all possible gibberish alongside all possible wisdom; "The Garden of
Forking Paths" (1941), which examines the potentials of ALTERNATE WORLDS;
"The Babylon Lottery", which details the history of a game of chance that
gradually becomes so complex and universal that it is indistinguishable
from real life; "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1941), which chronicles the
emergence in and takeover of everyday life by an entirely fictional and
fabricated world; "The Circular Ruins", which portrays a character
dreaming and giving life to a man, only to realize that he in turn is
another man's dream; and "Funes, the Memorious" (1942), which describes a
man with such perfect memory that the past is as accessible to him as the
present. (All the above appear in Ficciones.) The profound influence of
these - and other stories - on Gene WOLFE is reflected in The Book of the
New Sun (1980-83), where they are all made use of.JLB's interest in
METAPHYSICS is apparent in these stories, and his examination, through
FANTASY, of the nature of reality associates his fiction with that of many
modern US authors, such as Philip K. DICK, Thomas PYNCHON and Kurt
VONNEGUT Jr. He is an important influence on the more sophisticated recent
sf writers, especially those dealing with ABSURDIST themes and paradoxes
of PERCEPTION. His interest in puzzles and labyrinths is another stimulus
that has led him to fantasy and the detective story as media for
expressing his ideas in fiction.JLB has published other collections of
stories and sketches, some on the borderline of fantasy, as well as a
fantastic bestiary, Manual de zoologia fantastica (1957 Mexico; exp vt El
libro do los seres imaginarios 1967; the latter trans Norman Thomas di
Giovanni and JLB as The Book of Imaginary Beings 1969 US). With Silvina
Ocampo (1903- ) and Adolfo BIOY CASARES he also edited a fantasy
collection, Antologia de la Literatura Fantastica (1940; rev 1965; further
rev 1976; trans as The Book of Fantasy 1976 US; rev 1988 with intro by
Ursula K. LE GUIN), and revealed a first-hand (if inaccurate) knowledge of
sf by including H.P. LOVECRAFT, Robert A. HEINLEIN, A.E. VAN VOGT and Ray
BRADBURY in his Introduction to American Literature (1967; trans Keating
and Evans 1971). Translation of JLB's work into English is complex, and
there is no definitive collection. A number of his early works have been
reprinted in sf anthologies. [PR]Other works: Historia universal de la

infamia (coll 1935; trans Norman Thomas di Giovanni as A Universal History
of Infamy 1972 US); Seis problemas para Don Isidro Parodi (coll 1942;
trans Norman Thomas di Giovanni as Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi 1981
US) with Adolfo Bioy Casares; Cronicos de Busto Domecq (coll 1967; trans
Norman Thomas di Giovanni as Chronicles of Bustos Domecq 1976 US) with
Bioy Casares; El hacedor (coll 1960; trans M. Boyer and H. Morland as
Dreamtigers 1964 US); Antologia personal (coll 1961; trans Anthony
Kerrigan as A Personal Anthology 1961 US); El informe sobre Brodie (coll
1970; trans Norman Thomas di Giovanni as Doctor Brodie's Report 1972), his
last collection of original work; El libro del arena (coll 1975; trans
Norman Thomas di Giovanni as The Book of Sand 1977 US; exp 1979 UK);
Borges: A Reader (coll 1981); Atlas (coll 1984; trans Anthony Kerrigan
1985 US).About the author: Jorge Luis Borges (1970) by M.S. Stabb; Jorge
Luis Borges: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1984) by
D.W. Foster; A Dictionary of Borges (1990) by Evelyn Fishburn and Psiche
Hughes.See also: LATIN AMERICA.
BORGO PRESS
US publishing house, a SMALL PRESS with a fairly extensive list, based in
California, founded in 1975 by R. REGINALD, as publisher and editor, and
his wife, Mary Wickizer Burgess (1938- ), who played an increasingly large
role from the mid-1980s as co-publisher and managing editor. BP began by
publishing 35 64-page chapbooks on sf authors in the late 1970s in the The
Milford Series: Popular Writers of Today, which began with Robert A.
Heinlein: Stranger in his Own Land (1976 chap; rev 1977) by George Edgar
SLUSSER, as well as 10 full-length novels by Piers ANTHONY, D.G. COMPTON,
and others through 1979. In 1980 BP turned from the trade to the academic
market, moving to full-size books, and introducing other monographic
series of sf interest, including the I.O.Evans Studies in the Philosophy
and Criticism of Literature (from 1982),Bibliographies of Modern
Authors(from 1984, biblios of individual writers), Essays on Fantastic
Literature (from 1986) and Classics of Fantastic Literature (from 1994,
comprising original and reprint sf works). In 1991 BP purchased Brownstone
Books, Sidewinder Press, and St. Willibrord's Press, which it continued to
operate as separate imprints; and in 1993 acquired 100 titles of sf
interest from STARMONT HOUSE and FAX COLLECTOR'S EDITIONS when those lines
ceased operation, plus 30 unpublished manuscripts. New imprints were begun
in the 1990s, including Burgess ?
Unicorn ?
distributes over 1000 books from other lines, mostly not sf. The firm has
published 205 books through 1994, 2/3rds of sf relevance; and after a
period of slow releases now issues about 30-40 titles annually, making it
the largest single publisher (currently and cumulatively) of sf critical
works and bibliographies [JC/PN]See also: SF IN THE CLASSROOM.
BORIS
Boris VALLEJO.
BORN IN FLAMES
Film (1983). Lizzie Borden/Jerome Foundation/CAPS/Young Filmmakers.
Written, prod, ed and dir Lizzie Borden, starring Honey, Adele Bertei,
Jeanne Satterfield, Flo Kennedy, Kathryn Bigelow. 80 mins. Colour.This

underground movie, made over five years on 16mm film and video, was
deservedly given quite wide distribution. 10 years after a peaceful
social-democratic revolution in the USA, the Party is in power, the
position of women in society is still not much improved, and unemployment
(especially of women) is widespread. Radical FEMINIST groups (whose
differing political positions are shown with a sort of cartoon clarity)
are at first at odds; as disenchantment with the Party builds up they are
drawn together and a new revolution begins. Stereotyped conceptions of
feminists as humourless refugees from the middle classes are shaken (on
several grounds) by this pleasing and lively film, whose near-future
DYSTOPIA was imaginatively shot (out of low-budget necessity, a little as
with ALPHAVILLE) in contemporary New York. [PN]
BORODIN, GEORGE
Pseudonym of USSR-born surgeon and writer, George Alexis Milkomanovich
Milkomane (1903- ), who lived in the UK for many years from 1932; one of
his pseudonyms, George Alexis Bankoff, was for some time thought to be his
real name, but he himself has asserted the contrary. Other pseudonyms
include George Braddon, Peter Conway, Alec Redwood and - best known George Sava, under which name he wrote The Healing Knife (1938), a
bestseller about his profession, and many novels, none of sf interest, for
ROBERT HALE LIMITED. As GB he wrote a political tract, Peace in Nobody's
Time (1944), The Book of Joanna: A Fantasy Based on Historical Legend
(1947), in which a heavenly conclave attempts to determine the truth about
the legend of the 9th-century Pope Joan, and Spurious Sun (1948; vt The
Threatened People undated), a ponderously told but cogently meditated tale
about the effects of a nuclear explosion in Scotland; against the odds,
world peace comes closer. [JC]
BOSTON, BRUCE
(1943- ) US poet ( POETRY) and short-story writer whose early work tended
to the surreal, but who began - with stories like "Break" for New Worlds 7
(anth 1974) ed Hilary BAILEY and Charles PLATT - to invoke fantasy and sf
themes. His early poetry - much of it not genre at all, and almost all of
it couched in a classically lucid voice - can most easily be approached
through The Bruce Boston Omnibus (omni 1987), which assembles various
early chapbooks; titles of interest include Jackbird: Tales of Illusion ?
Identity (coll 1976 chap). Later poetry appears in The Nightmare Collector
(coll 1989 chap) ,Faces of the Beast (coll 1990 chap), Cybertexts (coll
1992 chap), the impressive Chronicles of the Mutant Rain Forest (coll
1992), this last volume with Robert FRAZIER, Accursed Wives (coll 1993
chap) and Specula: Selected Uncollected Poems (coll 1993 chap). Because
his prose fictions tend to the densely surreal and to FABULATION, it is
not easy to know when his work first began to merge with FANTASY and sf,
though "Break" (noted above) may come close to being his first of genre
interest. Collections and prose works include She Comes when You're
Leaving ?
Hypertales ?
dos), Houses ?
chap); independent tales include Der Flusternde Spiegel (1985 chap
Germany; trans and rev as After Magic 1990 chap) and All the Clocks are

Melting (1991 chap). [JC]
BOUCHER, ANTHONY
Generally used pseudonym of US editor and writer William Anthony Parker
White (1911-1968), who began to publish stories of genre interest with
"Snulbug" for UNKNOWN in 1941; he soon became a regular contributor to
this magazine and to ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION. Most of his 1940s tales
were humorous in approach ( HUMOUR); many are included in The Compleat
Werewolf (coll 1969), although Far and Away (coll 1955) provides a better
sense of his range. A notable TIME-TRAVEL story is "Barrier" (1942). AB
also used the pseudonym H.H. Holmes, publishing under this name the non-sf
detection Rocket to the Morgue (1942), in which several sf authors, thinly
disguised, appear in RECURSIVE roles; he went on to write several more
detective novels. In 1949 he became founding editor, with J. Francis
MCCOMAS, of The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION , which from its
inception showed a more sophisticated literary outlook than any previous
sf magazine, an accomplishment celebrated in The Eureka Years: Boucher and
McComas's The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1949-54 (anth 1982)
ed Annette Peltz McComas (1911-1994). After McComas left, AB was sole
editor from 1954 until his retirement, through ill health, in 1958; he won
the HUGO for Best Professional Magazine for the years 1957 and 1958. AB
occasionally published verse in FSF under the pseudonym Herman W. Mudgett.
(Mudgett was the real name and Holmes the nom de guerre of the USA's first
convicted serial murderer, hanged in 1896 after torture-murdering at least
27, possibly 200, young women.) AB wrote little sf after 1952. "The Quest
for Saint Aquin" (1951), on a theme of RELIGION, is generally considered
his best sf work. He was also a distinguished book reviewer, writing sf
columns for both the New York Times (as AB) and the New York Herald
Tribune (as Holmes); and he was influential in gaining for sf a certain
measure of respectability. He edited an annual anthology of stories from
FSF, beginning with The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction (anth 1952)
with J. Francis McComas; he also produced the notable 2-vol A Treasury of
Great Science Fiction (anth 1959). An able and perceptive editor, AB did
much to help raise the literary standards of sf in the 1950s. [MJE]Other
works: Exeunt Murderers: The Best Mystery Stories of Anthony Boucher (coll
1983), with bibliography; Anthony Boucher (omni 1984 UK), collecting 4 of
AB's detective novels, including Rocket to the Morgue, with intro by David
LANGFORD.As Editor: Remaining volumes of the Best from Fantasy and Science
Fiction sequence were The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Second
Series (anth 1953) and Third Series (anth 1954), both with J. Francis
McComas, Fourth Series (anth 1955), Fifth Series (anth 1956), Sixth Series
(anth 1957), Seventh Series (anth 1958) and Eighth Series (anth
1959).About the author: A Boucher Bibliography (1969 chap) by J.R.
Christopher, D.W. Dickensheet and R.E. Briney, bound with A Boucher
Portrait (anth 1969 chap) ed Lenore Glen Offord.See also: EC COMICS; GODS
AND DEMONS; LINGUISTICS; ROBOTS.
BOULLE, PIERRE
(1912-1994) French writer who trained as an electrical engineer and spent
eight years in Malaysia as a planter and soldier. His experience of the
Orient permeated much of his early work (generally not sf); Le pont sur la

riviere Kwai (1952; trans as The Bridge on the River Kwai 1954 US) remains
his best-known novel. PB uses moral fable to pinpoint human absurdities,
and his relatively large body of work in the sf genre is a good
illustration of this method. La planete des singes (1963; trans Xan
Fielding as Planet of the Apes 1963 US; vt Monkey Planet 1964 UK) is a
witty, philosophical tale a la VOLTAIRE , full of irony and compassion,
quite unlike the later film adaptation, PLANET OF THE APES (1968), which
used only the book's initial premise. [MJ]Other works: Contes de l'absurde
(coll 1953 France); E = mc2 (coll 1957 France) (stories from these
collections trans Xan Fielding as Time Out of Mind 1966 UK); Le jardin de
Kanashima (1964; trans Xan Fielding as The Garden on the Moon 1965 UK);
Histoires charitables ["Charitable Tales"] (coll 1965); Quia absurdum
(coll 1970).See also: COMPUTERS; DEVOLUTION; FRANCE; MOON; ROCKETS;
SCIENTISTS.
BOULT, S. KYE
William E. COCHRANE.
BOUNDS, SYDNEY J(AMES)
(1920- ) UK writer, active in various fields from the late 1940s,
publishing his first HORROR fantasy, "Strange Portrait", for Outlands in
1946. He built a considerable (and well respected) oeuvre of short fiction
in various genres, though he has never published a collection. Since the
beginning of the 1970s he has concentrated on horror. Under at least nine
pseudonyms (and house names like Peter SAXON, which he used for a Sexton
Blake tale), SJB has published over 30 novels, mostly Westerns. His sf
includes The Moon Raiders (1955), which features stolen U-235, human
agents shanghaied to the Moon, and alien invaders, and The World Wrecker
(1956), which stars a mad SCIENTIST who blows up cities by placing
phase-shifted rocks under them and returning these rocks to normal
spacetime, with calamitous effects. Of his numerous COMIC strips, "Jeff
Curtiss and the V3 Menace" (Combat Library #44 1960) is typical. [JC]Other
works: Dimension of Horror (1953); The Robot Brains (1956).
BOUSSENARD, LOUIS HENRI
(1847-1910) French writer. His popular scientific romances, which have
some speculative content, often appeared in Journal des Voyages. He is
best known for Les secrets de Monsieur Synthese ["The Secrets of Mr
Synthesis"] (1888-9), and Dix mille ans dans un bloc de glace (1889; trans
John Paret as 10,000 Years in a Block of Ice 1898 US), a SLEEPER-AWAKES
tale in which the hero discovers a unified world- UTOPIA peopled by small
men - Cerebrals - who are descended from Chinese and black Africans and
can fly by the power of thought. [JC]Other works: Les francais au pole
nord ["The French at the North Pole"] (1893); L'ile en feu ["Island
Ablaze"] (1898).See also: CRYONICS; FRANCE.
BOUVE, EDWARD T(RACY)
(? -? ) US writer. His sf novel, Centuries Apart (1894), deals with the
discovery of lost-race-like UK and French colonies in the verdant heart of
Antarctica. [JC]
BOVA, BEN(JAMIN WILLIAM)
(1932- ) US writer and editor. He worked as technical editor for Project

Vanguard 1956-8 and science writer for Avco Everett Research Laboratory
1960-71 before being appointed editor of Analog ( ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION) following the death of John W. CAMPBELL Jr in 1971. When
he took over at ASF it was a moribund magazine; although commercially
healthy, it had stagnated in the later years of Campbell's editorship. BB
maintained its orientation towards technophilic sf but considerably
broadened the magazine's horizons. In doing so he alienated some readers,
who shared Campbell's puritanism - such stories as "The Gold at the
Starbow's End" (1972) by Frederik POHL and "Hero" (1972) by Joe W.
HALDEMAN, inoffensive though they might seem in the outside world, brought
strong protests - but he revitalized the magazine. In recognition of this,
he received the HUGO for Best Editor every year 1973-7; although he missed
out in 1978 he gained it again in 1979 for his work during 1978, his final
year as editor. BB also involved the magazine's name in other activities,
producing Analog Annual (anth 1976) - an original anthology intended as a
13th issue of the magazine-initiating a series of records and inaugurating
a book-publishing programme. In 1978-82 he was editor of OMNI. From both
journals he extracted several anthologies (see listing below).BB was
active as a writer for many years before his stint at ASF, his first
published sf being a children's novel, The Star Conquerors (1959).
Considerable work in shorter forms followed over the next decades, the
best of it being assembled as Forward in Time (coll 1973), Viewpoint (coll
1977), Maxwell's Demons (coll 1979), Escape Plus (coll 1984), The Astral
Mirror (coll 1985), partly nonfiction, Prometheans (coll 1986) and Battle
Station (coll 1987). His best-known stories, those about Chet Kinsman, an
astronaut during the latter years of the 20th century, were assimilated
into the Kinsman Saga, whose internal ordering is Kinsman (fixup 1979) and
Millennium (1976), the two volumes being assembled as The Kinsman Saga
(omni 1987); Millennium, his best novel, is a tale of power- POLITICS in
the face of impending nuclear HOLOCAUST as the century ends. Colony
(1978), set in the same Universe, carries the story - and humanity further towards the stars, embodying the outward-looking stance BB has
held throughout his writing life, and about the necessity for which he has
been unfailingly eloquent. An earlier sequence, the Exiles series-Exiled
from Earth (1971), Flight of Exiles (1972) and End of Exile (1975), all
three being assembled as The Exiles Trilogy (omni 1980) - is children's
sf, as were all his novels before THX 1138 * (1971), based on the George
LUCAS filmscript. Other novels of interest include The Starcrossed (1975),
a humorous example of RECURSIVE SF whose protagonist is a thinly disguised
Harlan ELLISON ( The STARLOST ), The Multiple Man (1976), a
suspense-thriller built on the concept of CLONES, and Privateers (1985),
which - along with its sequel, Empire Builders (1993) - succumbs to an
assumption common to US sf: that governments will sooner or later fail to
conquer space, and that individual entrepreneurs (vast multinational
corporations exercising Japanese foresight need not apply) will take up
the slack.More tellingly, the Voyagers sequence - Voyagers (1981),
Voyagers II: The Alien Within (1982) and Voyagers III: Star Brothers
(1990) - treats humanity's expansion within a framework of SPACE-OPERA
romance, with technology-dispensing ALIENS establishing First Contact with
emergent humans, star-crossed lovers, biochips and a great deal more. The
Orion sequence - Orion (1984), Vengeance of Orion (1988) ,Orion in the

Dying Time (1990) and Orion and the Conqueror (1994) - puts into fantasy
idiom a similar expansive message. Triumph (1993), based on the somewhat
precarious premise that Winston Churchill poisons Stalin in 1943 with a
radioactive ceremonial sword, is an ALTERNATE HISTORY tale which posits a
more favourable outcome to World War 2. In his nonfiction and fiction
alike, BB is making it clear that survival for the race lies elsewhere
than on this planet alone, a thesis underlined in Mars (1992) by the
lovingly detailed verisimilitude with which he describes the first manned
flight to that planet. BB was president of the SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF
AMERICA 1990-92. [MJE/JC]Other works: Star Watchman (1964); The
Weathermakers (1967); Out of the Sun (1968), which was assembled with the
nonfiction The Amazing Laser (1971) as Out of the Sun (omni 1984); The
Dueling Machine (1963 ASF in collaboration with Myron R. Lewis; exp 1969),
assembled with Star Watchman as The Watchmen (omni 1994); Escape! (1970);
As on a Darkling Plain (fixup 1972); The Winds of Altair (1973; rev 1983);
When the Sky Burned (1973; rev vt Test of Fire 1982); Gremlins, Go Home!
(1974) with Gordon R. DICKSON; City of Darkness (1976); The Peacekeepers
(1988; vt Peacekeepers 1989 UK); Cyberbooks (1989); Future Crime (coll
1990), made up of City of Darkness and a number of short stories; The
Trikon Deception (1992) with Bill Pogue (1930- ); Sam Gunn, Unlimited
(fixup 1992), To Save the Sun (1992) and its sequel To Fear the Light
(1994), both with A. J. Austin; Challenges (coll 1993); Death Dream (1994
UK).As Editor: The Many Worlds of Science Fiction (anth 1971); Analog 9
(anth 1973); The Science Fiction Hall of Fame vols 2A and 2B (anths 1973;
vol 2B designated vol 3 in UK); The Analog Science Fact Reader (anth
1974); Closeup: New Worlds (anth 1977) with Trudy E. Bell; Analog Yearbook
(anth 1978); The Best of Analog (anth 1978); The Best of Omni (anth 1980)
with Don Myrus, and its sequels, all with Myrus, The Best of Omni Science
Fiction #2 (anth 1981), #3 (anth 1982) and #4 (anth 1982); Vision of the
Future: The Art of Robert McCall (anth 1982); The Best of the Nebulas
(anth 1989); First Contact: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
(anth 1990) with Byron PREISS, containing fiction and
nonfiction.Nonfiction: The Uses of Space (1965); In Quest of Quasars
(1970); The New Astronomies (1972); Starflight and Other Improbabilities
(1973); Workshops in Space (1974); Through the Eyes of Wonder: Science
Fiction and Science (1975); Notes to a Science Fiction Writer (coll 1975;
rev 1981); The Seeds of Tomorrow (1977); The High Road (1981), on the
space programme; Assured Survival: Putting the Star Defense Wars in
Perspective (1984); Welcome to Moonbase (1987).See also: AMAZING STORIES;
CHILDREN'S SF; ECONOMICS; HISTORY IN SF; JUPITER; MOON; NEBULA; OUTER
PLANETS; SF MAGAZINES; SPACE FLIGHT; WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST.
BOWEN, JOHN (GRIFFITH)
(1924- ) UK novelist and playwright active in tv and radio; he often
derives his novels from his plays, some of which, like the Year-King
fantasy "Robin Redbreast" (produced by the BBC 1970; in The Television
Dramatist [anth 1973] ed Robert Muller), are of strong genre interest.
Such was the case with his first, also a fantasy, The Truth Will not Help
Us (1956), in which an 18th-century piracy trial is depicted, with much
anachronistic verisimilitude, as an example of McCarthyism, and with his
first sf novel proper, After the Rain (1958), in which a lunatic inventor

starts a second Flood. Most of the novel takes place on a satirically
convenient raft of fools, where survivors of the DISASTER act out their
humanness and win through in the end only because of the dour fanaticism
of one person. The stage version was later published as After the Rain: A
Play in Three Acts (1967 chap). No Retreat (1994) is a classic HITLER WINS
tale, set in an ALTERNATE HISTORY 1990s United Kingdom governed by a
triumphant Germany; the plot involves an attempted revolution under the
auspices of the British government in exile, which is housed in the United
States. JB is a supple, subtle, sometimes profound writer. [JC]Other
works: Pegasus (1957) and The Mermaid and the Boy (1958), both juvenile
fantasies; as Justin Blake (with Jeremy Bullmore), the Garry Halliday
children's sf sequence comprising Garry Halliday and the Disappearing
Diamond (1960), Garry Halliday and the Ray of Death (1961), Garry Halliday
and the Kidnapped Five (1962), Garry Halliday and the Sands of Time (1963)
and Garry Halliday and the Flying Foxes (1964).See also: HOLOCAUST AND
AFTER; MCGUFFIN.
BOWEN, ROBERT SIDNEY
(1900-1977) US author of the Dusty Ayres sf-adventure series: Black
Lightning (1966), Crimson Doom (1966), Purple Tornado (1966), The Telsa
Raiders (1966) and Black Invaders vs. the Battle Birds (1966). [JC]
BOWERS, R.L.
John S. GLASBY.
BOWES, RICHARD (DIRRANE)
(1944- ) US writer whose novels evoke a congested, magically altered New
York. Warchild (1986) and its sequel, Goblin Market (1988), set in an
ALTERNATE-WORLD version of the city, follow the growth and adventures of a
telepathic teenager who finds himself involved in time wars with a variety
of exorbitant friends and foes. Feral Cell (1987), set at the end of the
20th century, carries its ageing hero into a millennial conflict between
Good and Evil, seen in fantasy terms that evoke the New York of writers
like John CROWLEY and Mark HELPRIN. RB's first books are, perhaps,
insufficiently well organized; more are awaited. [JC]
BOWKER, RICHARD (JOHN)
(1950- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Side Effect" for Unearth
in 1977. His first novel, Forbidden Sanctuary (1982), treats a ticklish
theological problem - whether an ALIEN whose possession of a soul is moot
can claim sanctuary in a church - with due regard for the likely Roman
Catholic view on the issue ( RELIGION). Replica (1986), a political
thriller also set in the NEAR FUTURE, is less engaging, but Marlborough
Street (1987), a FANTASY about a man with PSI POWERS, is of considerably
greater interest, and Dover Beach (1987), set in Boston and the UK a
generation or so after a nuclear HOLOCAUST, is yet more substantial. The
protagonist of the book - that he is a detective obsessed by genre
thrillers from before the holocaust does not seriously detract from the
tale - serves as an effective mirror of our state, reflecting the new
world complexly and with wit. The title - it is that of Matthew Arnold's
1867 poem about the loss of faith and a world which continues - strikes an
appropriate note. There is some sense that RB's liking for thriller modes

- his next novel, Summit (1989), is an espionage thriller involving yet
another psychic - consorts uneasily with his gift for the elegiac anatomy
of individuals and their worlds; at the time of writing it is not certain
which direction he will next take. [JC]See also: ANDROIDS.
BOYAJIAN, JERRY
Working name of US bibliographer Jerel Michael Boyajian (1953- ), whose
main work has been the Index to the Science Fiction Magazines 1977 (1982
chap) and its sequels through coverage year 1983, all with Ken JOHNSON
(whom see for details). JB produced solo A John Schoenherr SF Checklist
(1977 chap) and, with Anthony R. LEWIS and Andrew A. Whyte, The N.E.S.F.A.
Index: Science Fiction Magazines and Original Anthologies, 1976 (1977
chap). [JC]
BOY AND HIS DOG, A
Film (1975). LQJaf Productions. Dir L.Q. Jones, starring Don Johnson,
Susanne Benton, Jason Robards, Alvy Moore, Tim McIntire (as the dog's
voice). Screenplay Jones, based on "A Boy and his Dog" (1969) by Harlan
ELLISON. 89 mins. Colour.Set in AD2024, post- HOLOCAUST, this brutally
pragmatic film concerns two survivors, a young man and his dog; the latter
has high intelligence and the ability to communicate telepathically with
his partner. They move through a desolate landscape, inhabited by
dangerous scavengers, and find a girl from an underground society. She
lures the youth below to her home society, which is a venomous parody of
middle-class, small-town US values; here he is expected to become, in
effect, a convenient sperm bank to be mechanically milked. He rejects this
regimented existence and escapes back to the surface with the girl.
Finding his dog starving, he kills the girl to provide food, and the two
walk off into the menacing sunset, thus resolving an unusual love
triangle. The underground sequences are perhaps too stagey and share the
film uneasily with the gritty realism of the surface ones. Jones
(character-actor turned director) adapted the Ellison story honestly and
unfussily. This is one of the better small-budget sf films (it was the
recipient of a HUGO), once again showing small independent producers
taking risks that would horrify the big studios. [JB/PN]
BOYCE, CHRIS
Working name of (Joseph) Christopher Boyce (1943- ), Scottish writer and
newspaper research librarian who published his first sf, "Autodestruct",
in STORYTELLER #3 in 1964. In the mid-1960s he contributed to SF Impulse,
but his most important work to date is the sf novel Catchworld (1975),
joint winner (with Charles LOGAN's Shipwreck) of the GOLLANCZ/Sunday Times
SF Novel Award. Catchworld is an ornate, sometimes overcomplicated tale
combining sophisticated brain-computer interfaces ( COMPUTERS; CYBORGS)
and SPACE OPERA; the transcendental bravura of the book's climax is
memorable. In Brainfix (1980), a cautionary tale about social disorder in
the UK, CB had the misfortune of predicting a rise in unemployment to an
unheard-of three million in a fiction published just months before, in the
harsh reality of the first Thatcher recession, it actually reached four
million. [JC]Other work: Extraterrestrial Encounter (1979), a speculative
inquiry into XENOBIOLOGY and the search for extraterrestrial INTELLIGENCE
(SETI).See also: CYBERNETICS; GODS AND DEMONS.

BOYD, FELIX
[s] Harry HARRISON.
BOYD, JOHN
Pseudonym of Boyd Bradfield Upchurch (1919- ), US sf writer active in the
field for only a decade following publication of his first novel, THE LAST
STARSHIP FROM EARTH (1968), which received considerable critical acclaim;
it remains his most highly regarded work. A complex tale told with baroque
vigour, a DYSTOPIA, an ALTERNATE-WORLDS story, a SPACE OPERA with
TIME-TRAVEL components making it impossible to say which of various
spaceships actually is the last to leave Earth, and in what sense "last"
is intended, the book is a bravura and knowing traversal of sf protocols.
The protagonist, sent from a stratified dystopian Earth to the prison
planet Hell for machiavellian reasons, ends up travelling through time,
making sure Jesus terminates his career this time at the age of 33, which
will eliminate the dystopia by changing the future into ours; he becomes,
in the end, the Wandering Jew. None of JB's subsequent novels, some of
which are abundantly inventive, have made anything like the impression of
this first effort, though they are not inconsiderable. The Rakehells of
Heaven (1969), The Pollinators of Eden (1969) and Sex and the High Command
(1970) all deal amusingly and variously with sexual matters ( SEX), and
are full of rewarding hypotheses about the cultural forms human nature
might find itself involved in. Some later novels, like Andromeda Gun
(1974), a perfunctory comic novel involving a parasitic alien in the Old
West, show a reduction of creative energy, though Barnard's Planet (1975)
evinces a partial recovery, dealing with some of the same issues as his
first novel and with some of the same verve. The feeling remains that JB
has a larger talent than he allowed himself to reveal in his relatively
short career, and that carelessness about quality sometimes badly muffled
the effect of his wide inventiveness. [JC]Other works: The Slave Stealer
(1968), an historical novel under his real name; The Organ Bank Farm
(1970); The IQ Merchant (1972); The Gorgon Festival (1972); The Doomsday
Gene (1973); Scarborough Hall (1976), associational, under his real name;
The Girl with the Jade Green Eyes (1978; rev 1979 UK).See also: ECOLOGY;
UNDER THE SEA.
BOYE, KARIN
(1900-1941) Swedish writer known in translation for her DYSTOPIA,
Kallocain (1940; trans Gustav Lannestock 1966 US), a savagely
introspective narrative of a scientist who invents the eponymous truth
drug, and who suffers the consequences in his own being. [JC]
BOYER, ROBERT H.
[r] Marshall B. TYMN.
BOYETT, STEVEN R.
(1960- ) US writer whose first novel, Ariel (1983), is a fantasy, but
whose second, The Architect of Sleep (1986), is an sf tale set in a
PARALLEL WORLD occupied by an intricately and plausibly depicted species
which has evolved ( EVOLUTION) from raccoons. After crossing into this
world from a cavern in ours, the protagonist becomes involved in a complex
plot which is left incomplete, suggesting that sequels were intended or

indeed written. Their publication is still awaited. The Gnole (1991) with
Alan Aldridge (1943- ) is an ecological fantasy.[JC]
BOYS FROM BRAZIL, THE
Film (1978). Producer Circle. Dir Franklin J. Schaffner, starring Gregory
Peck, Laurence Olivier, James Mason, Jeremy Black. Screenplay Heywood
Gould, based on The Boys from Brazil (1976) by Ira LEVIN. 125 mins.
Colour.Like the novel on which it is based, this is an absurd but
entertaining concoction of pulp-thriller conventions with some rather
interesting scientific conjecture about environment and heredity. Joseph
Mengele (Peck), the notorious Nazi doctor, is discovered to be alive in
the Brazilian jungle, where he is manufacturing CLONES of Adolf Hitler.
Each of these is to be adopted by a family as close as possible to
Hitler's own - which means, among other things, the necessity of
engineering the deaths of 94 male civil servants as close as possible to
their 65th birthday - in the hope that Der Fuhrer will come again. Jewish
Nazi-hunter Lieberman (Olivier) slowly uncovers the truth. A main interest
of the film is that the arrow of narrative (genetic determinism) is turned
aside at the last minute, when the twitching young Adolf-clone turns out
to be his own man - or boy. [PN]
BOYS' PAPERS
Although boys' papers could easily be dismissed as being of negligible
literary value, perhaps unjustly since Upton SINCLAIR and other eminent
writers found their footing there, they played an important role in the
HISTORY OF SF in the last three decades of the 19th century and the early
years of the 20th century by creating a potential readership for the SF
MAGAZINES and by anticipating many GENRE-SF themes.The prevailing style of
US boys' papers was largely set in the 1870s and after by periodicals such
as The Boys of New York and Golden Hours, which published serialized
novels similar and often identical to those in dime-novel format (that is,
one single short novel per issue); these are discussed in detail under
DIME-NOVEL SF. Since US boys' papers were rare after WWI - American Boy
was an exception ( Carl CLAUDY) - the current discussion is
UK-oriented.Some sf did appear quite early in UK boys' papers. W.S.
HAYWARD's novel Up in the Air and Down in the Sea (1865) was serialized
c1863-5 in Henry Vickers's Boy's Journal, as were its sequels.
Nonetheless, the major impetus towards boys' sf in the UK came from
abroad. Jules VERNE appeared in UK periodicals with Hector Servadac (trans
1877 Good Things; 1878), The Steam House (trans 1880-81 Union Jack; 1881)
and 16 other serializations in The Boys' Own Paper. Andre LAURIE was
represented with "A Marvellous Conquest: A Tale of the Bayouda" (1888;
trans 1889 The Boys' Own Paper; vt The Conquest of the Moon: A Story of
the Bayouda, 1889), and US dime novels from the FRANK READE LIBRARY were
reprinted in The Aldine Romance of Invention, Travel and Adventure
Library.UK authors soon followed this lead with a variety of themes.
Several interplanetary adventures appeared in the mid-1890s in The Marvel
and elsewhere; e.g., "In Trackless Space" (1902 The Union Jack) by George
C. WALLIS, later a contributor to the sf pulps. LOST WORLDS were
prominent, notably Sidney Drew's Wings of Gold (1903-4 The Boy's Herald;
1908) and the works of Fenton Ash ( Frank AUBREY). World DISASTER appeared

in "Doom" (1912 The Dreadnought), a vehicle capable of travel through the
Earth in "Kiss, Kiss, the Beetle" (1913, Fun and Fiction), and an early
SUPERMAN in "Vengeance of Mars" (1912 Illustrated Chips).Overriding all
these themes was the future- WAR story, previously a minor genre - and
remaining so in US boys' fiction - but encouraged obsessively in the UK by
Lord Northcliffe, head of Amalgamated Press. Between 1901 and the outbreak
of WWI in 1914, numerous warnings of imminent INVASION were published,
foremost among them the works of John Tregellis, who contributed Britain
Invaded (1906 The Boy's Friend; 1910), Britain at Bay (1906-7 The Boy's
Friend; 1910), Kaiser or King? (1912 The Boy's Friend; 1913) and
others.When WWI did finally break out, many papers folded, but they were
replaced shortly after the Armistice by new periodicals firmly rooted in
the 20th century. Among these was Pluck; subtitled "The Boy's Wireless
Adventure Weekly", it published several sf stories linked by the common
theme of radio. Among its stories were Lester Bidston's The Radio Planet
(1923; 1926) and the first UK publication (1923) of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's
At the Earth's Core (1914 All-Story Weekly; 1922); the latter contributed
to the publication of Edgar WALLACE's Planetoid 127 (1924 The Mechanical
Boy; 1929) and adaptations of various stories in Sax ROHMER's Fu Manchu
series (1923-4 Chums). Notable among the many other stories published were
Leslie BERESFORD's "War of Revenge" (1922 The Champion), an account of a
German attack on the UK in 1956 using guided missiles, Frank H. Shaw's
world-catastrophe novel "When the Sea Rose Up" (1923-4 Chums) and Eric
Wood's DYSTOPIA The Jungle Men: A Tale of 2923 AD (1923-4 The Boy's
Friend; 1927).Most popular of all were the SPACE OPERAS then appearing in
Boy's Magazine (first published 1922). Typical was Raymond Quiex's "The
War in Space" (1926), which was very reminiscent of the 1930s PULP
MAGAZINES with its story of ASTEROIDS drawn from orbit and hurled as
missiles towards Earth, manmade webs of metal hanging in space, domed
cities on strange planets and giant insects stalking the surface of
hostile worlds. Many similar stories appeared: time machines, androids,
titanic war machines, robot armies and matter transmitters became
commonplace.When Boy's Magazine folded in 1934, its place was taken three
weeks later by SCOOPS, the first UK all-sf periodical. In spite of its
capable editor, Haydn Dimmock, and contributions by John Russell FEARN,
Maurice Hugi and A.M. LOW, Scoops folded after only 20 issues.Adult sf
magazines were available in the UK, both native and reprint, to fill the
temporary gap left by the demise of Scoops - and COMIC books made their
appearance in the later 1930s - but boys' papers continued to introduce
young readers to sf concepts: Modern Boy with the CAPTAIN JUSTICE series
that influenced a youthful Brian W. ALDISS, Modern Wonder with
serializations of John WYNDHAM and W.J. Passingham, and The Sexton Blake
Library, with pseudonymous contributions by E.C. TUBB and Michael
MOORCOCK, are among the titles of the next few decades.Sf continued until
more recently to play a role in boys' papers, with content modified to
suit the times. In 1976, for example, an anonymous adaptation - as "Kids
Rule, OK" - in Action of Dave WALLIS's Only Lovers Left Alive (1964)
proved so violent that public outcry led to temporary suspension of the
paper; in retrospect, the adaptation can be seen as a forerunner to such
modern favourites as JUDGE DREDD. [JE]

BPVP
Byron PREISS.
BRACK, VEKTIS
House name used on three sf novels by unidentified authors for Gannet
Press. The "X" People (1953) concerns an alien invasion, Castaway from
Space (1953) an alien crashlanding, and Odyssey in Space (1953)
(insecurely identified as being by Leslie Humphrys, who also wrote as
Bruno G. CONDRAY) space stations. [SH]
BRACKETT, LEIGH (DOUGLASS)
(1915-1978) US writer, for most of her career deeply involved in the
writing of fantasy and sf, for which she remains best known, though her
detective novels and her film scenarios have been justly praised. The
latter range from The Vampire's Ghost (1945) to The Long Goodbye (1973),
with memorable scripts for Howard Hawks, including The Big Sleep (1946)
and Rio Bravo (1958); her last effort, for The EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980),
for which she received posthumously a 1981 HUGO, was not typical of her
work in this form.She began publishing sf stories in 1940 with "Martian
Quest" for ASF, and although her first novel, No Good from a Corpse (1944)
was a detection the 1940s were her period of greatest activity in the sf
magazines; she appeared mostly in PLANET STORIES, THRILLING WONDER STORIES
and others that offered space for what rapidly became her speciality:
swashbuckling but literate PLANETARY ROMANCES, usually set on MARS, though
there is no series continuity joining her Martian venues.In 1946 she
married sf author Edmond HAMILTON, and may well have influenced his
writing, which improved sharply after WWII; but she continued to use the
name LB for her sf, for her other books, and for her film work. Some of
her work from this period can be found in The Coming of the Terrans (coll
of linked stories 1967) and The Halfling and Other Stories (coll 1973).
She approached all she wrote with economy and vigour: everything about her
early stories - their colour, their narrative speed, the brooding
forthrightness of their protagonists - made them an ideal and fertile
blend of traditional SPACE OPERA and SWORD AND SORCERY. She was a marked
influence upon the next generation of writers. One novelette, "Lorelei of
the Red Mist" (Planet Stories 1946), was written in collaboration with Ray
BRADBURY.From the mid-1940s LB tended to move into somewhat longer forms,
setting on her favourite neo- BURROUGHS Mars the first part of her Eric
John Stark series: The Secret of Sinharat (1949 Planet Stories as "Queen
of the Martian Catacombs"; rev 1964 dos), People of the Talisman (1951
Planet Stories as "Black Amazon of Mars"; rev 1964 dos) - both reportedly
expanded for book publication by Edmond Hamilton, and both later assembled
as Eric John Stark: Outlaw of Mars (omni 1982) - and "Enchantress of
Venus" (1949; vt "City of the Lost Ones"), the last being collected in The
Halfling. Stark concentrates all the virtues of the sword-and-sorcery hero
in his lean figure; along with Robert E. HOWARD's Conan, he has helped
spawn dozens of snarling, indomitable mesomorphs, though his attitude to
women is somewhat less utilitarian than that of his many successors. In
the 1970s the series was restarted, having been conveniently transferred
to an interstellar venue (as Mars and VENUS were no longer readily usable
for the sf-adventure writer), with The Ginger Star (1974), The Hounds of

Skaith (1974) and The Reavers of Skaith (1976), all three being assembled
as The Book of Skaith (omni 1976). Other novels involving Mars were Shadow
Over Mars (1944 Startling Stories; 1951 UK; vt The Nemesis from Terra 1961
dos US) and, perhaps the finest of them all, The Sword of Rhiannon (1949
TWS as "Sea-Kings of Mars"; 1953 dos), which is connected to "Sorcerer of
Rhiannon" (1942); it admirably combines adventure with a strongly romantic
vision of an ancient sea-girt Martian civilization. Where Burroughs's Mars
had been characterized by naive barbaric energy, LB's represents the last
gasp of a decadence endlessly nostalgic for the even more remote past.By
the 1950s, LB was beginning to concentrate more on interstellar space
operas, including The Starmen (1952; cut vt The Galactic Breed 1955 dos;
text restored vt The Starmen of Llyrdis 1976), The Big Jump (1955 dos) and
Alpha Centauri - or Die! (1953 Planet Stories as "Ark of Mars"; fixup 1963
dos). All three are efficient but seem somewhat routine when set beside
LB's best single work, The Long Tomorrow (1955), which is set in a
strictly controlled post- HOLOCAUST USA, many years after the destruction
of the CITIES and of the TECHNOLOGY that brought mankind to ruin. It is
the slow, impressively warm and detailed epic of two boys and their
finally successful attempts to find Bartorstown, where people are secretly
reestablishing science and technology. After 20 years, readers of the book
may be less hopeful than its author about Bartorstown's aspirations, but
on its own terms the novel is a glowing success.After 1955, LB generally
preferred to work in films and tv. She was a highly professional writer,
working with extreme competence within generic moulds that did not always,
perhaps, sufficiently stretch her. The Long Tomorrow and her film scripts
for Howard Hawks - whose positive attitude toward the creation of
Competent Women must have been a blessing to her for decades - did suggest
broader horizons for her work; but she declined to explore them fully. A
summatory collection, edited by her husband, The Best of Leigh Brackett
(coll 1977), confirms the muscular panache of her work and its refusal to
transcend competence. [JC]Other works: Stranger at Home (1946) as by the
actor George Sanders, An Eye for an Eye (1957), The Tiger Among Us (1957;
vt Fear No Evil 1960 UK; vt 13 West Street 1962) and Silent Partner
(1969), all crime novels; Rio Bravo * (1959), from the Hawks film, and
Follow the Free Wind (1963) are Westerns; The Jewel of Bas (1944; 1990
chap dos).As Editor: The Best of Planet Stories No 1 (anth 1974); The Best
of Edmond Hamilton (coll 1977).About the author: Leigh Brackett, Marion
Zimmer Bradley, Anne McCaffrey: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography
(1982) by Rosemarie Arbur; Leigh Brackett: American Writer (1986 chap) by
J.L. Carr; Leigh Douglass Brackett and Edmond Hamilton: A Working
Bibliography (1986 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr.See also: ALIENS;
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; FANTASY;
GALACTIC EMPIRES; GENERATION STARSHIPS; JUPITER; MERCURY; MYTHOLOGY;
PASTORAL; SPACESHIPS; WOMEN SF WRITERS.
BRADBURY, EDWARD P.
Michael MOORCOCK.
BRADBURY MASSES
Ray Bradbury is one of the few writers who made the leap from writing for
science fiction aficionados to writing for a mass audience. One reason for

the crossover may have been that his novels and stories translated easily
to television and film.Two early B-movies - It Came From Outer Space and
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms - were released in 1953. In 1966, the French
filmmaker Francois Truffaut directed a successful film adaptation of
Bradbury's novel, Fahrenheit 451. The Martian Chronicles became a
television miniseries in 1980, starring Rock Hudson. Adaptations of
Bradbury's work appeared on The Twilight Zone and on Ray Bradbury Theater.
And Bradbury himself plunged into the mainstream when he co-wrote the
screenplay for the 1956 film, Moby Dick.
BRADBURY, RAY(MOND) (DOUGLAS)
(1920- ) US writer, born in Waukegan, Illinois; in 1934 his father, a
power lineman who was having trouble gaining employment during the
Depression, moved with the family to Los Angeles, but images of the
small-town Midwest always remained important in RB's stories. RB
discovered sf FANDOM in 1937, meeting Ray HARRYHAUSEN, Forrest J. ACKERMAN
and Henry KUTTNER, and began publishing his FANZINE Futuria Fantasia in
1939. His first professional sale was "Pendulum" with Henry HASSE for
Super Science Stories in Nov 1941. In that year he met a number of sf
professionals, including Leigh BRACKETT, who generously coached him in
writing techniques. He later collaborated with her, completing her
"Lorelei of the Red Mist" (1946 Planet Stories).By 1943 RB's style was
beginning to jell: poetic, evocative, consciously symbolic, with strong
nostalgic elements and a leaning towards the macabre - his work has always
been more FANTASY and HORROR than sf. Many of RB's early stories, mostly
written 1943-7, were collected in his first book, Dark Carnival (coll
1947; cut 1948 UK; cut vt The Small Assassin 1962 UK); quite a few of them
had originally appeared in WEIRD TALES. All but 4 of the stories in the
later The October Country (coll 1955; 1956 UK edition drops 7 stories and
adds "The Traveller") had already appeared in Dark Carnival, but many were
revised for this new book. Although some of these stories had sf elements,
they could more accurately be described as weird fiction. RB used
occasional pseudonyms in those early years; in non-sf magazines he
appeared as Edward Banks, William Elliott, D.R. Banat, Leonard Douglas and
Leonard Spaulding, and he wrote one story, "Referent" (1948), in TWS under
the house name Brett STERLING. Much of his early sf was colourful SPACE
OPERA, and appeared in TWS and PLANET STORIES.One of these latter stories
was "The Million Year Picnic" (1946). Later it was to appear in his second
book, which remains RB's greatest work, THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (coll of
linked stories 1950; with "Usher II" cut and"The Fire Balloons"added, rev
vt The Silver Locusts 1951 UK; with"The Wilderness" added as well, rev
1953 UK). This book, which could be regarded as an episodic novel, made
RB's reputation. Almost at once he found a new market for short stories in
the "slicks", magazines such as Esquire, Saturday Evening Post, McCall's
and COLLIER'S WEEKLY. Of the more than 300 stories he has published since,
only a handful originally appeared in SF MAGAZINES. This was one of the
most significant breakthroughs into the general market made by any
GENRE-SF writer.THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES is an amazing work. Its closely
interwoven stories, linked by recurrent images and themes, tell of the
repeated attempts by humans to colonize Mars, of the way they bring their
old prejudices with them, and of their repeated, ambiguous meetings with

the shape-changing Martians. Despite the sf scenario, there is no hard
technology. The mood is of loneliness and nostalgia; a pensive regret
suffuses the book. Colonists find, in "The Third Expedition", a perfect
Midwest township waiting for them in the Martian desert; throughout the
book appearance and reality slip, dreamlike, from the one to the other;
desires and fantasy are reified but turn out to be tainted. At the
beginning, in a typical RB image, the warmth of rocket jets brings a
springlike thaw to the frozen Ohio landscape; at the end, human children
look into the canal to see the Martians, and find them in their own
reflections. All the RB themes that were later to be repeated, sometimes
too often, find their earliest shapes here: the anti-technological bias,
the celebration of simplicity and innocence as imaged in small-town life,
the sense of loss as youth changes to adulthood, and the danger and
attraction of masks, be they Hallowe'en, carnival or, as here, alien
mimicry. The book was dramatized as a tv miniseries, The MARTIAN
CHRONICLES (1980).For the next few years the evocative versatility of RB's
imagery kept a freshness and an ebullience unspoiled by occasional
overwriting; what later came to look like a too cosy heartland sentiment
was generally redeemed by the precision and strangeness of its expression.
RB's talents are very clear in the first of his few novels, FAHRENHEIT 451
(1951 Gal as "The Fireman"; with 2 short stories as coll 1953; most later
editions omit the short stories; rev 1979 with coda; rev 1982 with
afterword). In its DYSTOPIAN future, in which books are burned because
ideas are dangerous, we follow the painful spiritual growth of its
renegade hero, a book-burning "fireman" and secret reader who finally
flees, pursued by a Mechanical Hound attuned to his body chemistry, to a
pastoral society of book "memorizers". Francois Truffaut's interesting
film version, FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966), has as much of Truffaut as of
Bradbury.Two other books published as novels, neither of them sf, are
Dandelion Wine (1950-57 various mags; fixup 1957), in which an adolescent
life is recorded in terms of a single summer in a small town in a series
of vignettes, and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), an episodic,
rather heavily symbolic tale of GOTHIC transformations in a small town,
possibly written in homage to Charles G. FINNEY's The Circus of Dr Lao
(1935), which RB had already anthologized in The Circus of Dr Lao and
other Improbable Stories (anth 1956), a collection of fantasies.RB's
vintage years are normally thought to be 1946-55; his other short-story
collections of that period are certainly superior to those he produced
later. They began with The Illustrated Man (coll 1951; with 2 stories
added and 4 deleted, rev 1952 UK), in which the tales are given a linking
framework; they are all seen as magical tattoos which, springing from the
body of the protagonist, become living stories. Three were filmed as The
ILLUSTRATED MAN by Jack Smight in 1968. Later collections are The Golden
Apples of the Sun (coll 1953; with 2 stories deleted 1953 UK) and A
Medicine for Melancholy (coll 1959; vt with 4 stories removed and 5 added
The Day it Rained Forever 1959 UK). These last two books were combined as
Twice Twenty Two (omni 1966). No later RB collection approaches the above
in quality. The other important collection of early stories, drawing from
many of the books already listed, is The Vintage Bradbury (coll 1965),
which has now been superseded by the massive retrospective The Stories of
Ray Bradbury (coll 1980; UK paperback in 2 vols 1983).Yet in the late

1950s and 1960s RB's mainstream reputation continued to grow. He has
appeared in well over 800 anthologies. In the USA, at least, he is
regarded by many critics as a major literary talent. Sf as a genre can
take little credit for this: RB's themes are traditionally US and,
although early on he often chose to render them in sf imagery, it would be
mistaken to see RB as basically an sf writer. He is, in effect, a
fantasist, both whimsical and sombre, in an older, pastoral tradition. The
high regard in which he is held can indeed be justified on the basis of a
handful of works, with THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, FAHRENHEIT 451, and many
stories from the late 1940s and the 1950s among them; it is here, too,
that RB's small but very influential contribution to sf is located, which
had much to do with sf's ceasing to be regarded as belonging to a genre
ghetto.RB is a reasonably prolific writer, but some have found his work
from 1960s onwards to be increasingly disappointing, especially his plays
and poetry, which have often been described as both stiltedly rhetorical
and oversentimental. On the other hand, some of his theatrical work has
been well received ( THEATRE). Those of his subsequent collections to
include a substantial amount of previously uncollected work are The
Machineries of Joy (coll 1964; with 1 story cut, 1964 UK), I Sing the Body
Electric (coll 1969),Long After Midnight (coll 1976) and The Toynbee
Convector (coll 1988); it was I Sing the Body Electric that received the
most adverse criticism for its alleged soft-centredness.Just as it had
come to seem, in the 1980s, that RB was content to become a grand old man
(he won the NEBULA Grandmaster Award in 1989 for his lifetime
achievements), his career took a new turn. Like many sf writers in the
1940s he had published some crime fiction in the mystery pulps - some
collected in A Memory of Murder (coll 1984) - and now in the 1980s he
turned to crime fiction again. Death is a Lonely Business (1985) and its
sequel A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990) are his strongest work for many
years. Some of the old density and power return in their almost surreal
conflations of appearance and reality. They are of strong associational
interest for readers of his sf and fantasy (deliberately returning to many
of the key metaphors of his work in these fields, with the canals of
Venice, Los Angeles, standing perhaps for those of Mars), and are good
examples of RECURSIVE fiction, in that both are to a degree romans a clef,
with recognizable sf characters in them, not least a 1950s version of RB
himself. Ray HARRYHAUSEN, for example, appears thinly disguised in the
second, which revolves around the film world.RB's work in film has been
interesting. Two important early sf B-movies were loosely based on short
stories by him: IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953) and The BEAST FROM 20,000
FATHOMS (1953). Neither, however, has any perceptible Bradbury quality. By
far his best screenplay was that for Moby Dick (1956); RB shared credit on
this with John Huston. The 18min animated film Icarus Montgolfier Wright
(1962) was based on an RB story and screenplay, as was the made-for-tv
film Picasso Summer (1972), based on RB's "In a Season of Calm Weather"
(1957), on which he received a screenplay credit as Douglas Spaulding.
Several Russian films ( RUSSIA) have been based on Bradbury stories,
including VEL'D (1987), based on "The Veldt" (1950). Tv adaptations of his
work have appeared in The TWILGHT ZONE (both series) and, notably, on RAY
BRADBURY THEATRE (1985-6). Many of RB's stories have also received
COMIC-book adaptation. 16 can be found in two books: The Autumn People

(graph coll 1965) and Tomorrow Midnight (graph coll 1966). ( EC COMICS.)A
touching symbol of the high regard in which many of RB's peers hold him is
the interesting anthology of stories in Bradbury settings, The Bradbury
Chronicles: Stories in Honor of Ray Bradbury (anth 1991), ed William F.
NOLAN and Martin H. GREENBERG. [PN]Other works: Switch on the Night
(1955), a juvenile; Sun and Shadow (1953 Reporter; 1957 chap); The Essence
of Creative Writing (1962), nonfiction; R is for Rocket (coll 1962), all
but 2 stories having appeared in earlier collections; The Anthem
Sprinters, and Other Antics (coll 1963), short plays; The Pedestrian (1952
FSF; 1964 chap); The Day it Rained Forever: A Comedy in One Act (1966), a
play, not to be confused with the UK collection of the same title; The
Pedestrian: A Fantasy in One Act (1966), a play; S is for Space (coll
1966), all but 4 stories having appeared in earlier collections; Bloch and
Bradbury (anth 1969; vt Fever Dream and Other Fantasies 1970 UK),
collecting stories by RB and Robert BLOCH; Old Ahab's Friend, and Friend
to Noah, Speak his Piece (1971), verse; The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and
other Plays (coll 1972); Madrigals for the Space Age (coll 1972), words
with music by Lalo Schifrin; The Halloween Tree (1972), juvenile; Zen and
the Art of Writing (coll 1973; exp vt Zen in the Art of Writing 1990),
nonfiction essays; When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed (coll
1973), collected verse; Ray Bradbury (coll 1975 UK), retrospective
collection; Pillar of Fire, and Other Plays for Today, Tomorrow and Beyond
Tomorrow (coll 1975), plays; Long After Midnight (coll 1976); Where Robot
Mice and Robot Men Run Round in Robot Towns (coll 1977), verse; The
Mummies of Guanajuato (1978), illustrated version with photos by Archie
Lieberman of "The Next in Line" (1947);To Sing Strange Songs (coll 1979
UK); The Ghosts of Forever (coll 1981), a large-format illustrated book
with essays, stories, verse; The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope
(coll 1981), verse; The Complete Poems of Ray Bradbury (coll 1982);
Dinosaur Tales (coll 1983); Fahrenheit 451/The Illustrated Man/Dandelion
Wine/The Golden Apples of the Sun/The Martian Chronicles (omni 1987 UK);
Fever Dream (1948 Startling Stories; 1987 chap), juvenile illustrated by
Darrel Anderson; Classic Stories 1 (coll 1990), reprint anthology
containing all but 5 stories from The Golden Apples of the Sun and R is
for Rocket; Classic Stories 2 (coll 1990), reprinting most of A Medicine
for Melancholy and S is for Space, with 4 of the 5 stories omitted from
Classic Stories 1; On Stage: A Chrestomathy of His Plays (coll 1991), 10
one-act plays, being effectively an omnibus of The Anthem Sprinters, The
Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and Pillar of Fire; a series of stories put into
COMICS format: The Ray Bradbury Chronicles: Volume 1 (graph coll 1992), #2
(graph coll 1992), #3 (graph coll 1992), #4 (graph coll 1993), #5 (graph
coll 1994),#6 (graph coll 1994) and #7 (graph coll 1994).As Editor:
Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow (anth 1952).About the author: The
Ray Bradbury Companion: A Life and Career History, Photolog, and
Comprehensive Checklist of Writings (1975) by William F. Nolan,
supplemented by Bradbury Bits ?
1974-1988 (1991) by Donn Albright; The Bradbury Chronicles (1977 chap) by
George Edgar SLUSSER; Ray Bradbury (anth 1980) ed Martin H. Greenberg and
J.D. OLANDER; Ray Bradbury and the Poetics of Reverie (1984) and Ray
Bradbury (1989), both by William F. Touponce.See also: ALIENS;
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; ARKHAM HOUSE; ARTS; ASTEROIDS; CHILDREN IN

SF;
CLICHES; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; END OF
THE
WORLD; ESCHATOLOGY; FANZINE; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; GOLDEN AGE OF SF;
INVASION; LIVING WORLDS; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); The
MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MARS; MEDIA LANDSCAPE;
MESSIAHS;
MUSIC; MYTHOLOGY; PASTORAL; POETRY; POLITICS; PSYCHOLOGY; RADIO; RADIO
(USA); REINCARNATION; RELIGION; ROBOTS; ROCKETS; SEX; SPACE FLIGHT;
SUPERNATURAL CREATURES; TELEVISION; TERRAFORMING; THRILLING WONDER
STORIES; TIME PARADOXES; TIME TRAVEL; TRANSPORTATION; VENUS.
BRADDON, RUSSELL
(1921- ) Australian writer of biographies, many novels and some other
work; he is interested in experiments on ESP. He was imprisoned by the
Japanese in Changi, Singapore, during WWII. His first sf novel, The Year
of the Angry Rabbit (1964), unsurprisingly in view of his nationality, is
sensitive about the threat posed by giant rabbits to civilization as we
know it; by the end of the book, only a few Aborigines remain, and they
start a second Flood. A film, NIGHT OF THE LEPUS (1972), was made of it.
The Inseparables (1968) and When the Enemy is Tired (1968) are also sf.
[JC]
BRADFIELD, SCOTT (MICHAEL)
(1955- ) US writer and academic who has taught for the University of
Connecticut since 1989. His first sf story, the orthodox "What Makes a
Cage? Jamie Knows", published in Protostars (anth 1971) ed David GERROLD,
significantly fails to prefigure his mature works, the best of which
appear in The Secret Life of Houses (coll 1988 UK; exp vt Dream of the
Wolf 1990 US); further exp vt Greetings From Earth: New and Collected
Stories 1993 UK), where they apply the torque of FABULATION to Southern
Californian venues whose haunted inmates are trapped just this side of the
Pacific Rim. His first novel, The History of Luminous Motion (1989 UK),
trawls in the same waters, though without the use of sf protocols, as does
What's Wrong with America (1994 UK), comically. He wrote the entries on
MAGIC REALISM and OULIPO in this encyclopedia. [JC]See also: INTERZONE.
BRADFORD, J.S.
(? -? ) UK author of Even a Worm (1936), a novel similar in content to
Arthur MACHEN's The Terror: A Fantasy (1917; rev 1927): the animal kingdom
revolts against humanity's rule. What merit it has is diminished by the
concluding rationalization of the story as being just a game-hunter's
nightmare. [JE]
BRADFORD, MATTHEW C.
John W. JENNISON.
BRADLEY, MARION ZIMMER
(1930- ) US writer, initially of action sf with a good deal of
swashbuckling, often nearing SWORD AND SORCERY, though always with a
recognizably sf rationale; and of other routine work. But with the
increasing substance of her Darkover series, which she began in 1958, and
the great success of an Arthurian fantasy in 1983 (see below), she became

a major figure in the genre. She began publishing short stories
professionally in 1953 with"Women Only" and "Keyhole" for Vortex Science
Fiction #2; several are collected in The Dark Intruder and Other Stories
(coll 1964 dos). Her first novel, The Door through Space (1957 Venture as
"Bird of Prey"; exp 1961 dos), is SPACE OPERA, as is Seven From the Stars
(1962 dos), an intriguingly told adventure involving seven interstellar
castaways on Earth.This early work pales beside Darkover, a sequence of
novels (and latterly stories by MZB and others) set on the fringes of an
Earth-dominated GALACTIC EMPIRE and comprising perhaps the most
significant PLANETARY-ROMANCE sequence in modern sf. Darkover's
inhabitants - partially bred from human colonists of a previous age successfully resist the Empire's various attempts to integrate them into a
political and economic union. Darkovans have a complex though loosely
described anti-technological culture dominated by sects of telepaths
conjoined in potent "matrices" around which much of the action of the
series is focused. Increasingly, questions of sexual politics began
significantly to shape the sequence, and to cast an ambivalent light upon
the gender distortions forced primarily upon women (and the androgyny
required by all aspirants to a higher state) through the strange
exigencies of the Darkovan culture. It may be that some of these
distortions are embedded in the history of the series itself, which by
1995 had been developing for more than 35 years; certainly several early
volumes are highly discordant, and have been excluded from later versions
of the internal chronology of Darkover. In order to make some sense of a
most complex situation, the individual volumes of the series are here
listed first in order of publication and then according to the "official"
internal chronology established in the 1980s.In publication order (to
date): The Sword of Aldones (1962 dos) and The Planet Savers (1958 AMZ;
1962 dos; with "The Waterfall" added as coll 1976), both assembled as The
Planet Savers; The Sword of Aldones (omni 1980); The Bloody Sun (1964;
rev, with "To Keep the Oath" added, as coll 1979); Star of Danger (1965);
The Winds of Darkover (1970); The World Wreckers (1971); Darkover Landfall
(1972); The Spell Sword (1974); The Heritage of Hastur (1975); The
Shattered Chain (1976); The Forbidden Tower (1977); Stormqueen! (1978);
The Keeper's Price * (anth 1980); Two to Conquer (1980); Sharra's Exile
(fixup 1981), which incorporates, very much modified, The Sword of Aldones
plus other material; Sword of Chaos * (anth 1982); Hawkmistress! (1982);
Thendara House (1983); City of Sorcery (1984); Free Amazons of Darkover *
(anth 1985); The Other Side of the Mirror * (anth 1987); Red Sun of
Darkover * (anth 1987); Four Moons of Darkover * (anth 1988); The Heirs of
Hammerfell (1989), Domains of Darkover * (anth 1990), Renunciates of
Darkover * (anth 1991), Leroni of Darkover (anth 1991),Rediscovery (1993)
with Mercedes LACKEY, Towers of Darkover (anth 1993), Marion Zimmer
Bradley's Darkover (coll 1993) and Snows of Darkover (anth 1994). MZB's
first novel, The Door through Space (1961), and Falcons of Narabedla (1957
Other Worlds; 1964 dos) - a pastiche of The Dark World (1965) by Henry
KUTTNER and C.L. MOORE - are also marginally linked to the series.The
internal sequence is very different, beginning with Darkover Landfall
(1972), which describes the initial landing of Terran colonists. The
sequence then jumps an eon into the feudal turmoil of Stormqueen! (1978)
and Hawkmistress! (1982); balkanization and the growth of order in Two to

Conquer (1980) and The Heirs of Hammerfell (1989) finally evolve - after
The Shattered Chain (1976) and Thendara House (1983), both assembled as
Oath of the Renunciates (omni 1984), and City of Sorcery (1984) set up a
dubiously feminist Amazon sisterhood - into a sophisticated conflict with
the returning Terrans in The Spell Sword (1974), The Forbidden Tower
(1977), The Heritage of Hastur (1975) and Shaara's Exile (1981), the last
two of which are also assembled as Children of Hastur (omni 1982), and
Rediscovery (1993) with Lackey The various group anthologies are deemed to
infill.Shadowy, complex, confused, the world of Darkover is increasingly a
house of many mansions; a few (either writers or readers) seem to feel
unwelcome.Many other singletons and some series surround this central
sequence; but The Mists of Avalon (1983) far outstripped any other title
in its success in the marketplace and significance as a convincing
revision of the Arthurian cycle. In this book the Matter of Britain
revolves around a conflict between the sane but dying paganism of Morgan
le Fay and the patriarchal ascetics of ascendant Christianity, whose
victory in the war ensures eons of repression for women and the vital
principles they espouse. It is a rousing assault, and less governed by
genre demands than Darkover. There is, perhaps, something vulgar in MZB's
edgy progress into an eccentric FEMINISM- a charge not softened by the
insertion of the Great Goddess into first century CE Britain in The Forest
House (1993 UK) - but her work has had an electrifying effect on a very
large readership; and at her best she speaks with the rare transparency of
the true storyteller. [JC]Other works: The Colors of Space (1963; text
restored 1983), a juvenile; The Brass Dragon (1969); the Survivors
sequence comprising Hunters of the Red Moon (1973) and The Survivors
(1979), the latter with Paul Edwin ZIMMER; The Jewel of Arwen (1974 chap)
and its partner, The Parting of Arwen (1974 chap); Endless Voyage (1975;
rev vt Endless Universe 1979); Drums of Darkness: An Astrological Gothic
Novel (1976); The Maenads (1978 chap), a poem on Greek myths; The Ruins of
Isis (1978); The Catch Trap (1979), a circus novel about (male)
homosexuals; The House Between the Worlds (1980; rev 1981); Survey Ship
(1980); the Atlantis Chronicles, comprising Web of Light (1982) and Web of
Darkness (1984), both assembled as Web of Darkness (omni 1985 UK; vt The
Fall of Atlantis 1987 US); The Inheritor (1984) and its sequel, Witch Hill
(1972 as by Valerie Graves; rev 1990); Night's Daughter (1985); Warrior
Woman (1985); The Best of Marion Zimmer Bradley (coll 1985; rev 1988); rev
vt Jamie and Other Stories: The Best of Marion Zimmer Bradley 1993) ed
Martin H. GREENBERG; Lythande (coll 1986), with 1 story by Vonda N.
MCINTYRE; The Firebrand (1987); Black Trillium (1990) with Julian MAY and
Andre NORTON.Non-genre fiction: Many titles, including I am a Lesbian
(1962) as by Lee Chapman; others as by John Dexter, Miriam Gardner,
Valerie Graves, Morgan Ives; Bluebeard's Daughter (1968).Nonfiction: Men,
Halflings and Hero-Worship (1973); The Necessity for Beauty: Robert W.
Chambers and the Romantic Tradition (1974); Experiment Perilous: Three
Essays on Science Fiction (anth 1976) with Norman SPINRAD nd Alfred
BESTER.As Editor: Greyhaven (anth 1983); the Sword and Sorceress series,
comprising Sword and Sorceress I (anth 1984), II (anth 1985), III (anth
1986), IV (anth 1987), V (anth 1988), VI (anth 1990), VII (anth 1990),
VIII (anth 1991), IX (anth 1992) and XI (anth 1994) Spells of Wonder (anth
1989); The Best of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine (anth

1994).About the author: The Darkover Dilemma: Problems of the Darkover
Series (1976) by S. Wise; The Darkover Concordance: A Reader's Guide
(1979) by Walter Breen, MZB's husband; Leigh Brackett, Marion Zimmer
Bradley, Anne McCaffrey: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1982) by
Rosemarie Arbur; Marion Zimmer Bradley (1985) by Rosemarie Arbur; Marion
Zimmer Bradley, Mistress of Magic: A Working Bibliography (1991 chap) by
Gordon BENSON Jr and Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also: AMAZING STORIES;
ATLANTIS; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; DAW BOOKS; ESP; FANTASY;
MAGIC;
OPEN UNIVERSE; PLANETARY ROMANCE; SCIENCE FANTASY; SEX; SHARED
WORLDS;
WOMEN SF WRITERS.
BRADLEY, WILL
Brad STRICKLAND.
BRADSHAW, WILLIAM R(ICHARD)
(1851-1927) US writer whose The Goddess of Atvatabar: Being the History
of the Discovery of the Interior World and Conquest of Atvatabar (1892) is
set in a Symmesian HOLLOW EARTH with an interior sun. The chthonic culture
includes a love cult whose devotees regard mild sex without orgasm as
leading to perpetual youth. Catastrophic melodrama soon leads to trade
relations with the surface ( ANTHROPOLOGY; LOST WORLDS). The book is
heavily illustrated. [JC]
BRAID or BRAIDED
Term used to designate a SHARED-WORLD anthology or book-length tale whose
individual parts, written by different hands, are edited - generally by
the proprietor/editor of the shared world - so that their beginnings and
ends weave (or braid) into one another, and the whole tells a unified
story. When done properly, braids can generate a chronicle-like sense in
the reader - an effect attained also by successful FIXUPS, which can in
this sense be defined as one-handed braids. It is probable that Robert
Lynn ASPRIN created the first full-scale braid in sf or fantasy with his
Thieves' World sequence from 1979. A further example of a braided
anthology is the Merovingen Nights sequence created and presided over by
C.J. CHERRYH. [JC]
BRAIN, THE
VENGEANCE.
BRAIN DEAD
Film (1989). Concorde/New Horizons. Dir Adam Simon, starring Bill
Pullman, Bill Paxton, Patricia Charbonneau, Bud Cort, George Kennedy,
Nicholas Pryor. Screenplay Charles BEAUMONT. 81 mins. Colour.A
neurosurgeon (Pullman) is asked to examine a genius (Cort) who has gone
mad and killed his family. The surgeon soon finds that his own identity is
being alarmingly eaten away, his friends, colleagues and wife supporting
the process, gradually convincing him that he is the patient who needs
brain surgery; the boundaries between the sane neurosurgeon and insane
mathematician are gradually erased. Written for Roger CORMAN by Beaumont
in 1963, this was filmed 22 years after Beaumont's death. The surprise is
that so much of the writer's distinctive plotting - a mix of panicky

humour and PARANOIA - has survived rewrites which, for example, update him
by tapping into the species of gory medical humour exemplified by
RE-ANIMATOR (1985). Where recent horror films like the Nightmare on Elm
Street sequence domesticate the dream/reality uncertainty for irrelevant
shock scenes, BD allows the ambiguity itself to fragment and take over the
film. [KN]
BRAINSTORM
Film (1983). A JF Production/MGM/UA. Dir Douglas Trumbull, starring
Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher, Cliff Robertson.
Screenplay Robert Stitzel, Philip Frank Messina, based on a story by Bruce
Joel Rubin. 106 mins. Colour.A VIRTUAL-REALITY device is invented which
faithfully records human experiences (including the accompanying emotions)
and allows them to be re-experienced by another person. This promising
notion is frittered away - first because, despite Trumbull's
special-effects expertise, the cinematic equivalent of these experiences
is just like old-fashioned Cinerama and has no emotional content at all
(obviously); second because the device is largely used to reconcile
husband and wife by replaying the one's banal romantic feelings for the
other; third because, after a scientist (played by Louise Fletcher) dies,
thoughtfully recording her death experience en passant, we get to share
her experience. This playback, supposedly almost lethal to the viewer,
shows that the last great journey consists of cute bubbles with pictures
inside them. Natalie Wood, who plays the wife, drowned while filming was
still in progress, which necessitated a few last-minute rewrites that do
not work. Rubin, writer of the original story, was obviously obsessed by
afterlife experiences, and went on to script, among others, Ghost (1990)
and Jacob's Ladder (1991). [PN]
BRAMAH, ERNEST
Working name of UK writer Ernest Bramah Smith (1868-1942) for all his
writing. His series of tales in which the Chinese Kai Lung tells stories
to stave off punishment, like Scheherazade, contains some fantasy
elements. The Kai Lung series includes: The Wallet of Kai Lung (coll
1900), the first story in which was republished as The Transmutation of
Ling (1911 chap); Kai Lung's Golden Hours (coll 1922) with intro by
Hilaire BELLOC; Kai Lung Unrolls his Mat (coll 1928); The Story of Wan and
the Remarkable Shrub and The Story of Ching-Kwei and the Destinies (coll
1927 chap US), offering 2 stories from the previous volume, another story
from which appeared as Kin Weng and the Miraculous Tusk 1941 chap); The
Moon of Much Gladness (1932; vt The Return of Kai Lung 1937 US) and Kai
Lung Beneath the Mulberry Tree (coll 1940). The first three titles were
assembled as The Kai Lung Omnibus (omni 1936); The Celestial Omnibus (coll
1963) is a selection; Kai Lung: Six (coll 1974) assembles tales EB did not
himself collect. Of sf interest is What Might Have Been (1907 anon; with
new preface vt The Secret of the League 1909 as by EB), a somewhat tedious
anti-socialist melodrama, involving flight with belted-on mechanical
wings; the sequel, a future- WAR tale called "The War Hawks" (1908),
appeared in The Specimen Case (coll 1924). [JC]Other works: The Mirror of
Kong Ho (1905); the associational Max Carrados books about a blind
detective, comprising Max Carrados (coll 1914), The Eyes of Max Carrados

(coll 1923) and Max Carrados Mysteries (coll 1927); Ernest Bramah (coll
1929).
BRAND, MAX
Best-known pseudonym of US writer Frederick (Schiller) Faust (1892-1944),
who from before 1920 used many names and produced innumerable tales and
filmscripts in many genres, including the Western classic Destry Rides
Again (1930); it was first filmed in 1932, and became famous through the
1939 version, with James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich. The psychic
contortions that attend the discovery of a Missing Link in Africa ( APES
AND CAVEMEN) impart a lurid glow to "That Receding Brow" (1919 All-Story
Magazine), which may be his first tale of genre interest. MB began
publishing books in volume form with The Untamed (1919), the first volume
of the Dan Barry sequence of Westerns, whose protagonist, a "Pan of the
desert" and werewolf, enjoys a strangely intimate rapport with wild
animals; the series continued with The Night Horseman (1920), The Seventh
Man (1921) and Dan Barry's Daughter (1923). The Garden of Eden (1922) is a
LOST-WORLD tale, and The Smoking Land (1937 Argosy as by George Challis;
1980) stereotypically discloses another lost world, in the Arctic,
complete with futuristic aircraft and rumbustious action. Throughout MB's
work, illuminating the most pulp-like plots, can be discerned the voice of
a slyly civilized writer. [JC]About the author: Max Brand: Western Giant
(anth 1986) ed William F. NOLAN.
BRANDON, FRANK
[s] Kenneth BULMER.
BRAUN, JOHANNA
[r] and GUNTER [r] GERMANY.
BRAUTIGAN, RICHARD (GARY)
(1935-1984) US writer and poet, known primarily for his work outside the
sf field. Most of his whimsically surreal fiction - like A Confederate
General from Big Sur (1964) or Trout Fishing in America (1967) - lies on
the borderline of FANTASY. The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974),
which is sf, plays amusingly with the Frankenstein theme. In Watermelon
Sugar (1968), set in an indeterminate hippie-pastoral setting, echoes the
post- HOLOCAUST novels of conventional sf. RB committed suicide.
[PR/JC]See also: UTOPIAS.
BRAX, COLEMAN
[s] M. Coleman EASTON.
BRAY, JOHN FRANCIS
(1809-1897) US writer, mostly of (sometimes radical) economic tracts. He
was in the UK 1822-42 and there produced, among other works, A Voyage from
Utopia (written 1841; 1957 UK), which anticipated William Dean HOWELLS's
technique of presenting the views of a visitor from the UTOPIA. In JFB's
book the visitor's responses to the labour conditions and abiding
hypocrisies characteristic of the UK and USA are republican, satirical (
SATIRE) and outraged. JFB rightly thought the work unpublishable in his
time. [JC]
BRAZIL

LATIN AMERICA.
BRAZIL
Film (1985). Brazil/20th Century-Fox/Universal. Dir Terry Gilliam,
starring Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Bob Hoskins,
Peter Vaughan, Ian Holm, Michael Palin, Kim Greist. Screenplay Gilliam,
Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown. 142 mins. Colour.The US print of B was
initially cut by Universal because it was too long and depressing, but,
following a highly publicized squabble with Gilliam, Universal backed down
when the film won three LA Film Critics Awards. Universal's commercial
instincts, though condemned as philistine, were correct: the film is
indeed self-indulgently long, and has never won mass acceptance, though
gaining high cult status.This black comedy pits a shy, romantic file clerk
against a faceless, sinister, bureaucratic, all-powerful Ministry of
Information in an imaginary present derived equally from George ORWELL and
Franz KAFKA. Director Gilliam began his career as animation director of
the classic tv series Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-71), and B's
great strength is its stunning visual appearance, both in the prolonged
and surreal dream sequences (showing freedom and heroic action) and in the
slightly more realistic city of the main action, where
industrial-Victorian gloom (ducts and pneumatic tubes everywhere)
overshadows the futuristic (paste meals). The performances are unusually
good, especially Palin's yuppie torturer, but Pryce's one-note, hysterical
performance is tiringly unattractive. The satire veers arbitrarily in its
objects between the trivial and the horrible, plastic surgery and
paper-shuffling on the one hand, night raids by secret police and
state-endorsed murder on the other. The bitterness of the film's plea for
(unreachable) freedom is partly lost in the intellectual kitsch of its
designer DYSTOPIA. Gilliam's obsessive relationship to a cruelty he seems
to regard as inescapable has always been ambiguous: he both fears and uses
it, which here produces an involuntary but pervasive subtext of
collaboration with the torturers. [PN]
BREBNER, WINSTON
(1924?- ) US writer whose sf novel Doubting Thomas (1956) depicts a
computer-ruled DYSTOPIA. [JC]
BREDE, ARNOLD
Pseudonym of a UK writer who identity has not been discovered; he wrote 3
crime novels, and the unremarkable Sister Earth (1951), about a counter
Earth on the other side of the sun. [JC]
BREGGIN, PETER (ROGER)
(1936- ) US writer whose sf DYSTOPIA, After the Good War: A Love Story
(1972), excoriates meaningless SEX [JC]
BRENNERT, ALAN (MICHAEL)
(1954- ) US tv producer and scriptwriter, and also author, essentially of
fantasy and horror. His first genre publication was "Nostalgia Tripping"
for Infinity Five (anth 1973) ed Robert HOSKINS. In his first novel, City
of Masques (1978), actors scientifically programmed to become their roles
run amok. Time and Chance (1990) is a kind of sf/horror tale in which two
ALTERNATE WORLDS intersect, allowing two versions of the same person to

switch roles: the consequences of the switch are depicted with acumen and
passion. The title story of Her Pilgrim Soul and Other Stories (coll 1990)
is also sf, and the title story of Ma Qui and Other Phantoms (coll 1991)
won a 1992 NEBULA award for Best Short Story; but much of AB's genre work
lies in media other than the written word.He is very active in tv, his
sf/fantasy scripts including some for BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY
(1979-81) and WONDER WOMAN (1978-9), and more recently 13 scripts for the
second series of The TWILIGHT ZONE (1985-7). He is probably best known to
the world at large as a writer for, and producer of, the top-rating tv
series LA Law.AB has written occasionally for COMICS, mostly Batman,
through the 1980s; his small but impressive body of work in this medium
also makes much use of the PARALLEL-WORLDS concept. Some of these pieces
appear in DC COMICS's The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told (1989).
[JC/PN]Other work: Kindred Spirits (1984), a juvenile.
BRETNOR, (ALFRED) REGINALD
(1911-1992) US writer and anthologist, born Alfred Reginald Kahn - he
changed his name legally to Bretnor after WWII - in Vladivostok, Siberia,
but resident in the USA since 1919; active since WWII in a number of
genres as an author of both fiction and nonfiction. His interest in
military theory, which first generated articles and Decisive Warfare
(1969), later inspired the The Future at War series of anthologies: Thor's
Hammer (anth 1979), The Spear of Mars (anth 1980) and Orion's Sword (anth
1980).RB began publishing sf with "Maybe Just a Little One" for Harper's
Magazine in 1947, and many of his later stories appeared in the slick
magazines. His single most famous story is probably the hilarious "The
Gnurrs Come from the Voodvork Out" (1950), a tale that, on its first
publication in FSF, epitomized for many the wit and literacy of that
magazine's new broom. This was the first of a protracted series of stories
about Papa Schimmelhorn, assembled as The Schimmelhorn File (coll 1979)
and followed by Schimmelhorn's Gold (1986), a comic tale of alchemy which
brews sf and fantasy tropes in a pot of hornswoggling. The three critical
symposia he edited on sf-Modern Science Fiction, Its Meaning and Its
Future (anth 1953; slightly exp 1979), Science Fiction, Today and Tomorrow
(anth 1974) and The Craft of Science Fiction (anth 1976) - have proved
among the most substantial nonfiction contributions to the field. Each
contains articles by well known sf writers: the only critics represented
are those who also write sf. One Man's BEM: Thoughts on Science Fiction
(1992) vividly represents his own views.As Grendel Briarton, RB from 1956
contributed to FSF a series of joke vignettes whose punch-lines are as a
rule distorted or punning catch-phrases. They have become known, from
Ferdinand Feghoot, their continuing protagonist, as Feghoots, and can be
found assembled in Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot (coll
1962chap; exp vt The Compleat Feghoot 1975; further exp vt The (Even) More
Compleat Feghoot 1980; final exp vt The Collected Feghoot 1992). RB was
also a translator and lecturer. [JC]Other works: A Killing in Swords
(1978), associational, featuring RB's detective hero, Alastair Timoroff;
Gilpin's Space (1983 ASF as "Owl's Flight"; exp 1986); Of Force, Violence,
and Other Imponderables: Essays on War, Politics, and Government (coll
1993).About the author: The Work of Reginald Bretnor: An Annotated
Bibliography ?

CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DEFINITIONS OF SF; HUMOUR; The
MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; WAR.
BRETT, LEO
R.L. FANTHORPE.
BREUER, MILES J(OHN)
(1889-1947) US writer and physician who began publishing sf with "The Man
with the Strange Head" for AMZ in 1927. He published a number of notable
stories until about 1942. His solo work has not been collected in book
form, which makes it difficult now to find such stories as "The Appendix
and the Spectacles" (1928), "The Gostak and the Doshes" (1930), both in
AMZ and both since anthologized, and "Paradise and Iron" (1930 AMZ
Quarterly), a novel which strikes an early (for US GENRE SF) warning note
about the perils of the UTOPIAN technological fix. His only works to have
reached book form are The Girl from Mars (1929 chap) with Jack WILLIAMSON
and The Birth of a New Republic (1930 AMZ Quarterly; 1981 chap, but at
2000 words per page), also with Williamson, on whom MJB had a formative
influence; the latter tale is a political melodrama in which the working
residents of the Moon rebel against Earth. An intelligent though somewhat
crude writer, MJB was particularly strong in his articulation of fresh
ideas. [JC]See also: AMAZING STORIES; AUTOMATION; COLONIZATION OF OTHER
WORLDS; COMPUTERS; DIMENSIONS; DYSTOPIAS; HISTORY IN SF; LEISURE;
MATHEMATICS; MEDICINE; MOON; POLITICS; WAR.
BRIARTON, GRENDEL
[s] Reginald BRETNOR.
BRICK BRADFORD
US COMIC strip created by author William Ritt and artist Clarence Gray
for King Features Syndicate. BB appeared in 1933 as a Sunday page and
daily strip, with the Sunday strip the more fantastic and futuristic.
Gray's clean, economical style, together with Ritt's imaginative, purple
prose, made BB more than just an imitation of BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH
CENTURY, which probably inspired it. Ritt was fired in 1948 for failing to
keep deadlines, and Gray developed cancer in the 1950s. Artist Paul Norris
took over the daily strip in 1952, and the Sunday page in 1957, writing as
well as illustrating.Bradford was a red-haired hero with a lovely
sidekick, April Southern. The poetic imagery of BB was pure SPACE OPERA
(futuristic cities rise out of lush jungles, flying ships battle with
giant butterflies, etc.), while the scenarios were just as exotic as the
contemporary sf appearing in the magazines: the discovery of lost races, a
descent into the microcosmic universe within a coin, a journey by drilling
vehicle to the Earth's interior world, and travels through time and space
in the Time Top or "Chronosphere".BB appeared as a serial film (Columbia,
1947, 15 episodes, starring Kane Richmond), an sf comic book and a Big
Little Book ( JUVENILE SERIES). [JE/PN]
BRIDE, THE
The BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN .
BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, THE
Film (1935). Universal. Dir James Whale, starring Boris Karloff, Colin

Clive, Elsa Lanchester, Ernest Thesiger. Screenplay John Balderston,
William Hurlbut. 80 mins. B/w.This sequel to the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN, also
dir Whale, is the greatest of the many Frankenstein movies and one of the
greatest sf movies. Some watchers feel that the horror and pathos of the
story are a little overwhelmed by Whale's morbid sense of comedy, seen
here particularly in the bizarre figure of the gin-drinking, vain Dr
Praetorious, creator of homunculi, who blackmails Frankenstein into
constructing an artificial bride for the Monster. We learn immediately
from the prologue - in which Mary SHELLEY ("frightened of thunder, fearful
of the dark"), played by Lanchester, talks to Percy Shelley and Byron that the Monster was not killed at the end of the previous film after all;
later we see the Monster floundering through the forest, captured by
villagers, breaking free, and befriended by a blind hermit where, in a
scene of justly celebrated pathos, he is taught to smoke a cigarette. But
nothing prepares one for the extraordinary, protracted finale, the most
stylized scene in a stylized film, choreographed to perfection. Here the
Bride (Lanchester again, thus making a clear and interesting
identification of Mary Shelley with her sad, monstrous creation) comes to
life - as electrical equipment splutters and sparks - lurches not
ungracefully across the room, a white streak in her wild coiffure, screams
at her first sight of the Monster, shrinks from him, and finally hisses
like a maddened cat as the rejected Monster pulls the lever that will
destroy her and all the rest. It is an unforgettable tableau.Whale was too
theatrical for tragedy and perhaps too sceptical for true horror, with as
much of Oscar Wilde as Shakespeare in his sensibility. But nevertheless
his conservatism, his sophisticated, deeply un-American sense of irony,
and his bold sense of symbolism make this one of the strongest cinematic
statements ever made about, paradoxically, both the potency and the
impotence of science.A rather different story, although with deliberate
parallels, is told in the much later The Bride (1985) dir Franc Roddam,
starring Sting, Jennifer Beals, Clancy Brown, David Rappaport, Alexei
Sayle. 118 mins. Colour. Here the Bride (Beals) is initially repelled by
the Monster (Brown), who flees in dismay to wander afar in the company of
a dwarf (Rappaport). Frankenstein (a wooden Sting) becomes obsessed with
the Bride to the point of attempted rape; she is saved by the returned
Monster, whose love she now reciprocates. In one of the deliberately
humorous scenes the fleeing Monster encounters a blind man, who fondly
touches his face and then triumphantly yells "I've found him!" to the
pursuing mob. [PN/JGr]
BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR
RE-ANIMATOR.
BRIDE OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK
The INCREDIBLE HULK .
BRIDGEMAN, RICHARD
[s] L.P. DAVIES.
BRIDGES, T(HOMAS) C(HARLES)
(1868-1944) French-born UK writer, often in Florida. A prolific author of
boys' fiction from about 1902, he wrote some sf tales for the oldest

segment of his audience. Of greatest interest are Martin Crusoe: A Boy's
Adventure on Wizard Island (1920), which takes young Martin Vaile to the
eponymous island, a relic of ATLANTIS, and The Death Star (1940), a rather
grim tale set on a depopulated Earth. [JC]Other works: Men of the Mist
(1923); The Hidden City (1923); The City of No Escape (1925).As
Christopher Beck: The Crimson Airplane (1913); The Brigand of the Air
(1920); The People of the Chasm (1923).
BRIGGS, RAYMOND (REDVERS)
(1934- ) UK illustrator and writer, active in both capacities from about
1958, and best known for several tales told in COMIC-book format,
including Fungus the Bogeyman (graph 1977) and Fungus the Bogeyman Plop-Up
Book (graph 1982), both borderline sf, in which the meticulously
worked-out topsy-turvy world of the underground Bogeys, opposite to humans
in every way, serves to illuminate life on the surface, and The Snowman
(graph 1978), a fantasy. When the Wind Blows (graph 1982) is a singularly
unrelenting SATIRE on the true worth of civil defence in any genuine
nuclear HOLOCAUST. The two protagonists, naive and trusting "ordinary"
people, follow the instructions to the letter, as though it were the
Battle of Britain once again, and die slowly in horror and bewilderment.
[JC]
BRIN, (GLEN) DAVID
(1950- ) US writer with a BS in astronomy and an MS in applied physics,
who began publishing sf with his first novel, Sundiver (1980), which is
also the first volume in the ongoing Uplift sequence, for which he remains
best known: it continued with STARTIDE RISING (1983; rev 1985) and THE
UPLIFT WAR (1987), the two being assembled as Earthclan (omni 1987);
further volumes are projected. STARTIDE RISING won both the HUGO and the
NEBULA awards for best novel; THE UPLIFT WAR won a Hugo. As a whole, the
series established DB as the most popular and - with the exception of Greg
BEAR - the most important author of HARD SF to appear in the
1980s.However, despite their both being fairly characterized as hard-sf
writers, DB and Bear demonstrate through their fundamental differences of
approach something of the range of work which can be subsumed under that
rubric. Some exponents of hard sf speak as though it were a kind of
writing which adhered to rigorous models of scientific explanation and
extrapolation, eschewing both the doubletalk of SPACE OPERA "science" and
the psychobabble of "soft" disciplines like sociology; and it might be
argued that Bear attempts to convey in his work a sense that he is
carrying that form of discipline to its uttermost, and beyond. Not so with
DB. Despite his professional competence as a physicist - a level of
scientific qualification not shared by Bear - he writes tales in which the
physical constraints governing the knowable Universe are flouted with
high-handed panache, with the effect that - for instance - the Uplift
books are as compulsive reading as anything ever published in the genre.
The basic premise of the sequence is simple enough, though its
workings-out are increasingly complicated. All thinking life in the
Universe-or at least throughout the Five Galaxies encompassed in the three
books so far - takes part in a vast hierarchical drama of evolutionary
uplift, at the pinnacle of which are the Progenitors who - eons before

humanity's entry into the scene - established laws to govern the creation
and interaction of species. The Progenitors are now long gone - the
intergalactic search for relics of their presence shapes much of the
sequence - but before their departure they established five Patron Lines,
races which govern individual galaxies. On achieving Contact with the
local Patron Line, Homo sapiens (which uniquely among known races does not
belong to the family tree that descends from the Progenitors) then
replicates in small - by uplifting dolphins and chimpanzees to full
sentience and partnership - a central imperative of the galactic
ancestors. But problems arise.The secondary premise of the sequence - one
that breeds true from the GOLDEN-AGE assumptions that have tended to
govern space opera on this scale-generates most of the action. The human
race, according to this premise, is a kind of sport, more ambitious and
energetic and fast-moving than other galactic peoples. The local Patron
Line has become corrupt, and its rulers hope to batten on human vitality;
moreover, the Galactic Library Institute, supposedly autonomous, has
itself been corrupted, and the human race has begun to learn caution about
the technological data and other lessons supposedly passed down from the
Progenitors via this source. Sundiver plunges into the heart of all this.
A human expedition penetrates the Sun, where lifeforms are found which
impart secrets about the Universe and the Library. In STARTIDE RISING, one
of the most rousing space operas yet written, a starship crewed by
uplifted dolphins and a GENETICALLY ENGINEERED human find an ancient fleet
and an ancient cadaver, and must contrive somehow to escape an assortment
of Patron-led foes and get their prize of knowledge and power back to
Earth. THE UPLIFT WAR, seemingly an interlude, transfers the action to a
planet occupied by Earth humans and neo-chimps who may have some clue as
to the location of the Progenitors. The sequence is clearly intended to
extend into further volumes.Insofar as DB's singletons stay closer to
home, they are less successful. The Practice Effect (1984) reworks in
fantasy terms the oddly Lamarckian principles ( EVOLUTION) espoused in the
space operas. The Postman (1985), set in a worryingly PASTORAL
postHOLOCAUST USA, eulogizes Yankee decencies without much analysing the
hugely complex cultural matrix that shaped them. Heart of the Comet (1986)
with Gregory BENFORD is an uneasy marriage of two very different hard-sf
writers, Benford caught as usual in the coils of Stapledonian Sehnsucht (
Olaf STAPLEDON) and DB resolutely uplifting. In Earth (1990), a novel of
very considerable ambition about the NEAR-FUTURE death of the planet for
all the usual (and quite possibly valid) reasons, Gaia is rescued at the
last moment from a gnawing BLACK HOLE and other threats by an infusion of
PULP-MAGAZINE plotting that consorts ill with the pressing seriousness of
the issues raised. This is not to say that DB fails to raise those issues:
more than any of his earlier novels, Earth demonstrates his very
considerable cognitive grasp of issues, his omnivorousness as a
researcher, and the reasoning that lies behind his stubborn optimism. He
is, in other words, a taker of cognitive risks, and Glory Season (1993) which seems to require a sequel - demonstrates this attractive
characteristic in its compendious attempt to present a matriarchal culture
with virtues, warts, centres of inherent strength, and fault lines too.
The story takes place on a planet long isolated from "normal"
male-dominated human hegemony; its climax portends an ultimate clash

between the two ways of life. Like E.E. "Doc" SMITH before him, DB gives
joy and imparts a SENSE OF WONDER; but he also thinks about the near
world. It is to be hoped that he continues to do both. [JC]Other works:
The River of Time (coll 1986), which contains the Hugo-winning "The
Crystal Spheres" (1984); Dr Pak's Preschool (1988 chap); Project Solar
Sail (anth 1990) with Arthur C. CLARKE; Piecework (1991 chap);Otherness
(coll 1994 UK).See also: ALIENS; APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD);
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; BIOLOGY; DISASTER; ECOLOGY; GAMES AND
TOYS;
JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD; LINGUISTICS; LIVING WORLDS; MERCURY;
MONSTERS; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; POLLUTION; SCIENTISTS; SOCIAL
DARWINISM;
SUN; UNDER THE SEA.
BRINGSVAERD, TOR AGE
[r] SCANDINAVIA.
BRINTON, HENRY
(1901-1977) UK writer, variously engaged in social and political work,
whose sf novel Purple-6 (1962) describes a world at the verge of atomic
HOLOCAUST. [JC]
BRITAIN, DAN
Don PENDLETON.
BRITISH FANTASY SOCIETY
The BFS was formed in 1971 (as the British Weird Fantasy Society) for
"all devotees of fantasy, horror, and the supernatural". Catering now in
the main for horror fans, this active society - which sponsors an annual
CONVENTION, Fantasycon (1975-current) - has no direct relevance to sf
other than a substantial crossover of membership with sf groups. However,
an earlier British Fantasy Society (1942-6) was sf-based ( BRITISH SCIENCE
FICTION ASSOCIATION for further details). [PR]
BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION (BSFA)
Despite their names, the British Science Literary Association (1931),
organized by Walter GILLINGS, and the first British Science Fiction
Association (1933-5), organized by the Hayes SF Club, failed to become
much more than local groups. The UK's first truly national organizations the Science Fiction Association (1937-9), the first BRITISH FANTASY
SOCIETY (1942-6) and the Science Fantasy Society (1948-51) - were
short-lived. The BSFA was established at Easter 1958 in order to
counteract a decline in UK FANDOM by providing a central organization of
interest to casual sf readers. The association's principal attraction was
(and is) its journal, VECTOR, published intermittently since 1958. The
BSFA library has since the mid-1970s been held on indefinite loan as part
of the SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION's collection. The BSFA sponsored the
annual UK Easter sf CONVENTIONS 1959-67 and also initiated the British
Fantasy Award (first presented 1966; changed 1970 to the BRITISH SCIENCE
FICTION AWARD). Brian W. ALDISS was the BSFA's first president 1960-64,
being followed by Edmund CRISPIN, who retained the position until the BSFA
became a limited company in 1967.Other periodicals published by the BSFA
are Matrix (sf/fan news), Paperback Inferno (before 1980 titled Paperback

Parlour; paperback book reviews) and Focus (articles on writing and
selling sf). Paperback Inferno was merged into Vector in late 1992 (from
Vector # 169). Membership has been substantial for the past decade.
Despite occasional administrative slumps and only lukewarm support from
established fandom, the BSFA has a useful function in introducing new fans
to sf discussions and controversies, and in pointing them towards specific
local fan organizations. [RH/PR/PN]
BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD
This award developed from the British Fantasy Award, which was sponsored
by the BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION and made to a writer: John
BRUNNER won the first in 1966. It became the British Science Fiction Award
in 1970, and thereafter was for a book. From 1979 the number of categories
was increased, and decreased again in 1993. The eligibility rules have
occasionally changed; most early versions required UK authorship, but
later only UK publication was required. The Best Artist award was normally
given for a specific cover rather than for a body of work, and became
officially Best Artwork in 1992. Special awards have been made only three
times, in 1974, 1977 and 1994. In recent years the BSFA Awards, as they
are often known, have been voted on by BSFA members and members of the UK
national Easter CONVENTION, Eastercon, although often not by very many of
them; in some early years the adjudication was done by a small judging
panel. They are normally announced at Eastercon. Because the award has not
been well publicized and has a narrow voting base, it has never had the
hoped-for effect of acting as a counterweight to the US-dominated HUGOS
and NEBULAS. Although usually named for the year in which works became
eligible, the awards are listed below according to the year in which they
were actually made (i.e., the following year):1970: STAND ON ZANZIBAR by
John Brunner1971: The Jagged Orbit by John Brunner1972: The Moment of
Eclipse by Brian W. ALDISS1973: No award (insufficient votes)1974:
RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA by Arthur C. CLARKE; special award to Brian W. Aldiss
for Billion Year Spree1975: INVERTED WORLD by Christopher PRIEST1976:
Orbitsville by Bob SHAW1977: Brontomek! by Michael G. CONEY; special award
to David A. KYLE for A Pictorial History of Science Fiction1978: The Jonah
Kit by Ian WATSON1979: novel A SCANNER DARKLY by Philip K. DICK;
collection Deathbird Stories by Harlan ELLISON; media The HITCH HIKER'S
GUIDE TO THE GALAXY 1980: novel The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G.
BALLARD; short fiction "Palely Loitering" by Christopher Priest; media The
Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy record; artist Jim BURNS1981: novel
TIMESCAPE by Gregory BENFORD; short fiction "The Brave Little Toaster" by
Thomas M. DISCH; media The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy 2nd series;
artist Peter Jones1982: novel THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER by Gene WOLFE;
short fiction "Mythago Wood" by Robert P. HOLDSTOCK; media Time Bandits;
artist Bruce PENNINGTON1983: novel HELLICONIA SPRING by Brian W. Aldiss;
short fiction "Kitemaster" by Keith ROBERTS; media BLADE RUNNER; artist
Tim WHITE1984: novel Tik-Tok by John T. SLADEK; short fiction "After
Images" by Malcolm EDWARDS; media ANDROID; artist Bruce Pennington1985:
novel Mythago Wood by Robert P. Holdstock; short fiction "The Unconquered
Country" by Geoff RYMAN; media The Company of Wolves; artist Jim
Burns1986: novel Helliconia Winter by Brian W. Aldiss; short fiction "Cube
Root" by David LANGFORD; media BRAZIL; artist Jim Burns1987: novel THE

RAGGED ASTRONAUTS by Bob Shaw; short fiction "Kaeti and the Hangman" by
Keith Roberts; media ALIENS; artist Keith Roberts1988: novel Grainne by
Keith Roberts; short fiction "Love Sickness" by Geoff Ryman; media STAR
COPS; artist Jim Burns1989: novel Lavondyss by Robert P. Holdstock; short
fiction "Dark Night in Toyland" by Bob Shaw; media Who Framed Roger
Rabbit; artist Alan Lee1990: novel Pyramids by Terry PRATCHETT; short
fiction "In Translation" by Lisa TUTTLE; media RED DWARF; artist Jim
Burns1991: novel TAKE BACK PLENTY by Colin GREENLAND; short fiction "The
Original Doctor Shade" by Kim NEWMAN; media Twin Peaks; artist Ian
MILLER1992: novel The Fall of Hyperion by Dan SIMMONS; short fiction "Bad
Timing" by Molly Brown; media TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY; best artwork
Mark Harrison1993: novel, RED MARS by Kim Stanley ROBINSON; short fiction
"The Innocents" by Ian MCDONALD; artwork Jim Burns, cover for Hearts,
Hands and Voices by Ian McDonald.1994: novel Aztec Century by Christopher
EVANS; short fiction "The Ragthorn" by Robert Holdstock and Garry
KILWORTH; artwork Jim Burns, cover for Red Dust (Gollancz) byPaul J.
McAuley; special award The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction ed John CLUTE
and Peter NICHOLLS. [PN]
BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE
VARGO STATTEN SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE.
BRITISH SPACE FICTION MAGAZINE
VARGO STATTEN SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE.
BRITTON, DAVID
(1945- ) UK publisher and writer, founder with Michael BUTTERWORTH of
Savoy Books, whose list included works by Michael MOORCOCK, Charles PLATT
and Jack Trevor STORY. With Butterworth, he edited The Savoy Book (anth
1978) and Savoy Dreams (anth 1984), which attempted with some success to
demonstrate the anti-establishment ethos of the house, an ethos that
brought both DB and Butterworth into conflict with the UK obscenity laws,
as applied by the local police. Copies of DB's first novel, Lord Horror
(1989), a scatological examination of Nazism and the UK traitor Lord
Haw-Haw which made use of pornographic imagery upsetting to the Manchester
police, were seized. A GRAPHIC NOVEL version of some of the same material,
Lord Horror (graph in 5 parts 1990-91), was also produced. The novel which depicts the survival in Burma of Hitler and Lord Haw-Haw - was
clearly, if very offensively, a SATIRE; and the destruction order on
remaining copies of the text was duly and properly lifted by a UK court in
July 1992 - although the graphic novel remained banned. [JC]
BRITTON, LIONEL (ERSKINE NIMMO)
(1887-1971) UK writer who gained some prominence between the two world
wars for works of speculative political philosophy, the premises of which
were transformed into Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth (1930), a drama in
which a giant AI is set up in the Sahara to run human affairs, which it
does until nearly the end of time, when a wandering star collides with the
planet. Spacetime Inn (1932), also a play, expounds a vision of things
derived in part from the theories of J.W. DUNNE. [JC]
BROCKLEY, FENTON
Donald Sydney ROWLAND.

BROCKWAY, (ARCHIBALD) FENNER
(1888-1988) UK writer long active in socialist politics - he was made a
life peer in 1964 - and long respected for his humane views. His sf novel
Purple Plague: A Tale of Love and Revolution (1935) uses a liner stranded
at sea by a mysterious plague as a venue for egalitarian reversals of the
status quo. [JC]
BRODERICK, DAMIEN (FRANCIS)
(1944- ) Australian writer, editor and critic; he has a PhD in the
semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of
Samuel R. DELANY. He has edited three anthologies of Australian sf: The
Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1976), Strange Attractors (anth 1985) and Matilda
at the Speed of Light (anth 1988).DB's first professionally published sf,
"The Sea's Furthest End" in New Writings in SF 1 (anth 1964) ed John
CARNELL, much later formed the basis for his novel The Sea's Furthest End
(1993). He has written short stories intermittently ever since, some to be
found in A Man Returned (coll 1965) and The Dark Between the Stars (coll
1991). His first novel was Sorcerer's World (1970 US); however, he hit his
stride only with his second, The Dreaming Dragons: A Time Opera (1980),
followed by The Judas Mandala (1982 US; rev 1990 Australia). Both books
are crammed with ideas, and like The Black Grail (1986 US) - a far more
complex and sophisticated rewrite of Sorcerer's World - depend upon
elaborate plotting involving alternative timelines and temporal paradoxes.
His work is indebted to structural LINGUISTICS, and Noam Chomsky apparently venerated by DB as a political radical and a universal
grammarian - is offered explicit homage when DB names a future language in
The Judas Mandala and a planet in Valencies (1983, with Rory Barnes) after
him. The Judas Mandala is more explicitly influenced by French
structuralism. DB has since shown a cautious interest in literary
deconstruction, most obviously in his criticism and in his one mainstream
novel, Transmitters (1984), a formidable but surprisingly funny book about
sf fans ( RECURSIVE SF). Striped Holes (1988) reads like a comic version
of The Dreaming Dragons or The Judas Mandala, with familiar temporal
paradoxes and embedded plotting, but the style is classic sf comedy in the
vein of Robert SHECKLEY or, perhaps, Kurt VONNEGUT Jr in a good mood. His
1993 novel The Sea's Furthest End completed his Faustus Hexagram sequence,
comprising also The Dreaming Dragons, The Judas Mandala, Transmitters, The
Black Grail and Striped Holes. [RuB]See also: COMPUTERS; GENERATION
STARSHIPS; INTELLIGENCE; VIRTUAL REALITY.
BRONX WARRIORS
1990: I GUERRIERI DEL BRONX.
BRONX WARRIORS 2
1990: I GUERRIERI DEL BRONX.
BROOD, THE
Film (1979). Mutual Productions/Elgin International. Written and dir
David CRONENBERG, starring Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, Art Hindle, Cindy
Hinds. 91 mins. Colour.In this Canadian film, the Somafree Institute of
Psychoplasmics's pop psychologist Raglan (Reed), author of The Shape of
Rage, is regarded with suspicion by Carveth (Hindle), whose wife Nola

(Eggar) is a patient there. Gathering evidence against Raglan, Carveth
finds dreadful physical changes taking place in Raglan's ex-patients.
Meanwhile, Nola's parents are murdered by monsters shaped like deformed
children; these later kidnap Carveth's young daughter (Hinds). Confronting
Raglan, Carveth learns that, through bodily metamorphosis, monsters of the
mind are given literal shape as Raglan's therapy takes effect on his
patients. In the final sequence Carveth witnesses yet another of his
wife's "brood", the creatures of her rage, being born from a yolk sac
extruded close to her vagina. It takes an extraordinarily confident
film-maker to direct a farrago like this without faltering, but
Cronenberg's use of the body as metaphor - psychobabble made flesh - is
carried off with conviction and wit, and even, where lesser directors
would be content with evoking disgust, a compassion for the monstrous as
being, after all, only human. There is a subtext about children as
victims, suffering a pain transmitted through generations. All the events
are viewed with the unblinking, innocent gaze - itself childlike - that
characterizes Cronenberg's surreal style. [PN]See also: CINEMA; MONSTER
MOVIES; SEX.
BROOKE, (BERNARD) JOCELYN
(1908-1966) UK writer, most noted for psychological fantasias like The
Scapegoat (1949) and The Goose Cathedral (1950). The Image of a Drawn
Sword (1950) uses borderline sf devices to convey the dreamlike horror of
its protagonist's recruitment into a merciless army. The Crisis in
Bulgaria, or Ibsen to the Rescue! (1956), with the author's own collage
illustrations, combines Victorian fantasy and parody. [JC]
BROOKE, KEITH
(1966- ) UK writer who began publishing sf with "Adrenotropic Man" for
Interzone in 1989, and whose first novel, Keepers of the Peace (1990),
depicts in singularly gloomy terms the slow evisceration of a group of
soldiers sent down from near space to police a fragmented USA. The
Expatria sequence - Expatria (1991) and Expatria Incorporated (1992) - has
elements of the PLANETARY ROMANCE in that its story takes place upon,
although it does not materially affect, the eponymous colony planet; in
the first volume, the young protagonist must both defend himself against
the charge that he has murdered his father and attempt to prevent his
fellow colonists from descending into barbarism, while at the same time
awaiting a rescue ship (upon whose approach turns the plot of the second
volume). KB has already demonstrated ample talent and energy, but has yet
to focus them. [JC]
BROOKE-ROSE, CHRISTINE
(1923- ) UK novelist and academic, born in Switzerland, resident in the
UK in the 1950s and 1960s, thereafter lecturer and then professor of
American literature at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes) from 1969
until her retirement in 1988. She was married 1968-75 to Jerzy
PETERKIEWICZ. CB-R is widely known for critical works like A Grammar of
Metaphor (1958) and A Rhetoric of the Unreal (1981), which formally
assimilates the narrative strategies of sf and fantasy into those of
metafiction ( FABULATION) in terms compatible with Tzvetan TODOROV's
theory of the fantastic. As a novelist, she is perhaps best known for

early works outside the field like The Dear Deceit (1958), but has
increasingly produced texts whose displacements are more than
linguistic.The Middlemen: A Satire (1961) is a fantasticated NEAR-FUTURE
assault on the worlds of public relations. Out (1964), an sf novel, is set
in a post- HOLOCAUST Afro-Eurasia in which the colour barrier has been
reversed, ostensibly for medical reasons, as the "Colourless" seem to be
fatally ill. Such (1966) reanimates the dead astronomer Lazarus, who tells
of his experiences during death, interrogating the nature of language as
he does so. Out and Such were assembled with two non-genre novels, Between
(1968) and Thru (1975), as The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus (omni 1986).
Some fantasies, including the title story, were assembled in Go when You
See the Green Man Walking (coll 1969). Amalgamemnon (1984) addresses the
future through words which cannot be believed, as they come from Cassandra
(who also speaks as a woman). Xorandor (1986) and its sequel Verbivore
(1990), which make up a series designed ostensibly for older children,
feature a sentient rock, with a computer-like mentality, awakened by the
information-noise of humans; in the second volume Xorandor's children chips off the old block - shut down human communications systems to keep
sane. And Textermination (1991) is a discourse on textuality, in which a
large number of characters from famous novels come together in a campaign
to transcend their "texts" and become "real". CB-R, with dry cunning,
writes sf nouveaux romans, and challenges the genre to talk back. [JC]See
also: WOMEN SF WRITERS.
BROOKS, SAMUEL I.
George S. SCHUYLER.
BROSNAN, JOHN
(1947- ) Australian writer and journalist, resident for many years in the
UK, a one-time prominent member of RATFANDOM. He was known for his writing
on genre films some time before he began publishing sf in any quantity.
His five books on CINEMA are James Bond in the Cinema (1972), Movie Magic:
The Story of Special Effects in the Cinema (1974), The Horror People
(1976), Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (1978) and The Primal
Screen: A History of Science Fiction Film (1991); the first three relate
peripherally to sf, and the fifth is in effect a light-hearted update and
rewrite of the fourth. JB wrote most of the film entries in the first
edition of this volume; he has also contributed film columns to SCIENCE
FICTION MONTHLY and STARBURST and was for some time the lead book reviewer
for the UK horror magazine The Dark Side.JB's first sf was "Conversation
on a Starship in Warp-Drive" in Antigrav (anth 1975) ed Philip STRICK. His
books under his own name begin with the adventure novels Skyship (1981)
and The Midas Deep (1983). He then went on to publish the first of his
pseudonymous novels, most written in partnership with Leroy Kettle (1949); these written equivalents of exploitation movies are slightly
self-mocking but quite exciting as sf horror; all are variants on the
humans-being-destroyed-by-monstrous-things theme. Those as by Harry Adam
Knight include Slimer (1983), Carnosaur (1984) by JB alone, The Fungus
(1985; vt Death Spore US) and Bedlam (1992); those as by Simon Ian Childer
are Tendrils (1986) and, by JB alone, Worm (1987; 1988 US as by Harry Adam
Knight). The initials of the pseudonyms were no accident. Torched (1986)

with John BAXTER, both writing as James Blackstone, is about spontaneous
combustion.JB reserved his own name for a more ambitious work, the Sky
Lords trilogy: The Sky Lords (1988), War of the Sky Lords (1989) and The
Fall of the Sky Lords (1991). These consist of fast-moving adventure in a
post- HOLOCAUST society (after the Gene Wars), remorselessly evoking
another sf trope every time the action flags - everything from mile-long
dirigibles to computer guardians of ancient civilizations. The Opoponax
Invasion (1993) makes similar use of GENETIC ENGINEERING and
NANOTECHNOLOGY.[PN]See also: DISASTER.
BROSTER, D(OROTHY) K(ATHLEEN)
(1877-1950) UK writer of historical and weird fiction, noted within the
fantasy genre for Couching at the Door (coll 1942) and for "Clairvoyance"
in A Fire of Driftwood (coll 1932). Her evocatively titled World under
Snow (1935) with G. Forester is not sf, although sometimes listed as such,
but a murder mystery with a winter setting. [JE]
BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET, THE
Film (1984). A-Train Films. Dir John SAYLES, starring Joe Morton, Tom
Wright, Caroline Aaron, Dee Dee Bridgewater. Screenplay Sayles. 108 mins.
Colour.Where Sayles's exploitation-movie scripts are cynical and
hard-edged, the films he directs himself are gentler and also more overtly
political. TBFAP is the only sf film he has written and directed, and to a
degree it gets the best of both worlds, though it has a sentimental
streak. The Brother is an ALIEN, indistinguishable in appearance from a
Black American - apart from his clawed, three-toed feet and a detachable
eye - who arrives at deserted Ellis Island, traditional gateway for
immigrants to the USA, and goes to Harlem. There he is the clever innocent
abroad, unable to speak but understanding a lot, sharply observing social
attitudes of both Blacks and Whites, fixing machines (he is a healer),
getting tough with a drug trafficker, and being pursued by alien
bounty-hunters (one played by Sayles). Like a surprising amount of sf,
this is a "to see ourselves as others see us" social comedy. Morton is
excellent as an alien among the alienated; the meandering, episodic plot
of this low-budget movie is fun. [PN]
BROTHER THEODORE
[s] Marvin KAYE.
BROWN, ALEC (JOHN CHARLES)
(1900-1962) UK writer in whose sf novel, Angelo's Moon (1955), set in an
underground city in Africa called Hypolitania, a White scientist offers
some hope of countering the degeneration of our species. [JC]
BROWN, CARTER
Alan YATES.
BROWN, CHARLES N(IKKI)
(1937- ) US publisher and editor, an sf fan who began his involvement in
the field in the 1950s and who remains best known for founding the sf news
magazine LOCUS in 1968, and bringing it to pre-eminence: dispensing news,
reviews, bibliographical updates, interviews, obituaries, convention data
and reports, and some gossip, Locus is the central information forum of

the sf world, and has won 16 HUGO awards in its category. In 1995, with
the journal well past its 400th issue, CNB remains both editor and
publisher. In collaboration with William G. CONTENTO he began in the
mid-1980s to compile yearly bibliographical volumes which covered the
field with some thoroughness, through coverage year 1991, when the series
terminated, though their dependence on the monthly Books Received columns
in Locus - initially compiled from books received for review - somewhat
constricted their coverage ( Hyperlink to: BIBLIOGRAPHIES). But the
editing of the sequence grew in sophistication from year to year - Hal W.
HALL's ongoing Research Index from the 1988 volume onwards was a
significant addition-and later volumes were very nearly comprehensive. In
chronological order, the sequence comprises Science Fiction, Fantasy, ?
Horror: 1984 (1990), Science Fiction in Print: 1985 (1986), Science
Fiction, Fantasy, ?
Horror: 1987 (1988), Science Fiction, Fantasy, ?
Science Fiction, Fantasy, ?
?
BROWN, CHESTER
(?1960- ) Canadian creator of Yummy Fur, a fantasy comic whose stories
lurch from one comics TABOO to another: religion, homosexuality, vampires,
zombies, masturbation and a full spectrum of bodily excretions. Yummy Fur
began life as a series of tiny (A6) self-published pamphlets in the early
1980s. CB was eventually approached by Vortex Comics in 1986 to produce a
regular Yummy Fur. The first 3 issues of this reprinted all the
mini-comics and included characters and stories that were to feature in
the 15 issues that followed, notably "Adventures in Science" (1985), "The
Man who Couldn't Stop" (1985) and "Ed the Happy Clown" (1986); this last
story involved ghosts, pygmy cannibalism, a frightening religious
interpretation of vampirism, a gateway from another DIMENSION, and Ronald
Reagan's head on the end of a clown's penis. Inevitably the comic suffered
censorship, and distributors and retailers refused to stock it. The first
9 chapters plus relevant mini-comics stories were published as Ed the
Happy Clown (graph 1989). Issues of Yummy Fur (currently published by
Drawn ?
NOVEL.
BROWN, ERIC
(1960- ) UK writer who began publishing sf - after a children's play,
Noel's Ark (1982 chap) - with "Krash-Bangg Joe and the Pineal-Zen
Equation" for Interzone in 1987; like several further tales assembled in
The Time-Lapsed Man and Other Stories (coll 1990), it is set in a future
world dominated by the effects of bio-engineering and dense with
information. This marriage of Cordwainer SMITH to CYBERPUNK, though not in
itself original, has considerable potential as a focus for a complex
vision of things to come, as demonstrated by his second novel, Engineman
(1994), which is also set in what might be called the Nada Continuum
sequence, and which sustains a note of Smith-like elegy in its depiction
of an obsolescent form of space travel, that guided by "enginemen", one of
whom becomes involved in a complicated plot. EB's first novel, Meridan
Days (1992), set on a planet dominated by artists, is also - though

loosely - connected to the Nada Continuum universe.. [JC]See also: ARTS;
INTERZONE; PERCEPTION; TIME TRAVEL.
BROWN, FREDRIC (WILLIAM)
(1906-1972) US writer of detective novels and much sf, and for many years
active in journalism. He is perhaps best known for such detective novels
as The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947), but is also highly regarded for his sf,
which is noted for its elegance and HUMOUR, and for a polished slickness
not generally found in the field in 1941, the year he published his first
sf story, "Not Yet the End" for Captain Future. Many of his shorter works
are vignettes and extended jokes: of the 47 pieces collected in Nightmares
and Geezenstacks (coll 1961), 38 are vignettes of the sort he specialized
in (they feature sudden joke climaxes whose ironies are often cruel); this
collection was assembled with another, Honeymoon in Hell (coll 1958), as
And the Gods Laughed (omni 1987). Typical of somewhat longer works
utilizing the same professional economies of effect are "Placet is a Crazy
Place" (1946), "Etaoin Shrdlu" (1942) and "Arena" (1944). The latter was
among the sf stories selected by the SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA
for inclusion in SCIENCE FICTION HALL OF FAME (anth 1970) ed Robert
SILVERBERG. It tells of the settling of an interstellar WAR through single
combat between a human and an ALIEN. FB is possibly at his best in these
shorter forms, where his elegant and seemingly comfortable wit, its
iconoclasm carefully directed at targets whose defacing sf readers would
appreciate, had greatest scope.FB's sf novels are by no means without
merit, however. His first and most famous, WHAT MAD UNIVERSE (1948
Startling Stories; 1949), is a cleverly complex ALTERNATE-WORLDS story in
which various sf conventions turn out, absurdly, to be true history. The
Lights in the Sky are Stars (1953; vt Project Jupiter 1954 UK) depicts
mankind at the turn of the 21st century and on the verge of star travel;
the true subject of the tale might, movingly, be thought to be the SENSE
OF WONDER itself. Martians, Go Home (1955) describes the infestation of
Earth by little green men who drive everyone nearly crazy, until the sf
writer who has perhaps imagined them into existence imagines them gone
again; however, he is himself a figment of a larger imagination, so that
in the end it is reality itself that dissolves. In The Mind Thing (1961) a
stranded alien attempts to get back home using its ability to ride human
minds piggyback, even though the experience is fatal for those
possessed.None of these novels is negligible, but it is perhaps the case,
at least in his sf writing, that his short stories, with their natty
momentum and the sudden flushes of humane emotion that transfigure so many
of them, have proved more successful in the long run. The recent
publication of a very large number of previously uncollected stories (see
below) may intensify this sense of FB's central accomplishment. [JC]Other
works: Space on my Hands (coll 1951); Angels and Spaceships (coll 1954; vt
Star Shine 1956); Rogue in Space (1949 Super Science Stories; 1950 AMZ;
fixup 1957); Daymares (coll 1968); Mitkey Astromouse (1971), a juvenile;
Paradox Lost (coll 1973); The Best of Fredric Brown (coll 1977); The Best
Short Stories of Fredric Brown (coll 1982 UK); the Detective Pulps series
of collections, most of which contain some sf and fantasy, comprehensively
surveying FB's career and comprising Homicide Sanitarium (coll 1984),
Before She Kills (coll 1984), Madman's Holiday (coll 1984), The Case of

the Dancing Sandwiches (coll 1985), The Freak Show Murders (coll 1985),
Thirty Corpses Every Thursday (coll 1986), Pardon my Ghoulish Laughter
(coll 1986), Red is the Hue of Hell (coll 1986), Brother Monster (coll
1987), Sex Life on the Planet Mars (coll 1986), Nightmare in Darkness
(coll 1987), Who Was that Blonde I Saw You Kill Last Night? (coll 1988),
Three-Corpse Parlay (coll 1988), Selling Death Short (coll 1988),
Whispering Death (coll 1989), Happy Ending (coll 1990), The Water-Walker
(coll 1990), The Gibbering Night (coll 1991) and The Pickled Punks (coll
1991), which closed the series.As Editor: Science Fiction Carnival (anth
1953) with Mack REYNOLDS.About the author: A Key to Fredric Brown's
Wonderland: A Study and an Annotated Bibliographical Checklist (1981 chap)
by N.D. Baird; Martians and Misplaced Clues: The Life and Work of Fredric
Brown (1994) by Jack Seabrook.See also: COMPUTERS; EC COMICS; FASTER THAN
LIGHT; GAMES AND SPORTS; HIVE-MINDS; INVASION; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; NUCLEAR
POWER; PARANOIA; PASTORAL; PHYSICS; RECURSIVE SF; RELIGION; SPACE FLIGHT;
STARS.
BROWN, HARRISON (SCOTT)
(1917-1986) US scientist and writer whose nonfiction The Challenge of
Man's Future (1954) combines demographical, ecological and energy concerns
in a pioneering work of great admonitory influence. His sf novel, The
Cassiopeia Affair (1968) with Chloe ZERWICK, treats fictionally the same
problems through a story about a possibly bogus message from the stars
that may keep mankind from destroying itself in a terminal
conflagration.Other nonfiction:The Next Hundred Years (1957) with James
Bonner and John Weir.
BROWN, HOWARD V(ACHEL)
(1878-1945) US illustrator. Born in Lexington, Kentucky, HVB studied at
the Chicago Art Institute and became based in New York. He was cover
artist for Scientific American c1913-31, typically showing human figures
dwarfed by gigantic technological projects. His first cover for an SF
MAGAZINE proper was for ASF Oct 1933, although he had earlier (1919 on)
painted almost 50 covers for SCIENCE AND INVENTION. One of the Big Four sf
illustrators in the 1930s (with Leo MOREY, Frank R. PAUL and H.W. WESSO),
he helped soften the colours that appeared on magazine covers. Starting
with a simple, almost primitive style, HB rapidly developed into one of
the most dramatic cover illustrators of that era. Most closely associated
with ASF, he also appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling
Stories, for which he did his best work. He specialized in BEMs, which he
depicted with exciting vigour. He painted 90 sf covers in all to 1940,
even though he was in his late 50s before he started. [JG/PN]See also:
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; THRILLING WONDER STORIES.
BROWN, JAMES COOKE
(1921-1987) US writer in whose sf novel, The Troika Incident: A
Tetralogue in Two Parts (1970), astronauts from the USA, France and the
USSR are shot forward by a century. There they discover a UTOPIA - built
on lines hinted at by Edward BELLAMY - before returning to a disbelieving
present day. [JC]
BROWN, JERRY EARL

(1940- ) US writer in whose first sf novel, Under the City of Angels
(1981), a sunken California is delved by the haunted protagonist, who
finds powerful corporations and ALIENS at the root of things. Darkhold
(1985) depicts the consequences of cloning one's own lovers ( CLONES).
Earthfall (1990) unremarkably shows an Earth overrun by MUTANTS hungry for
flesh. [JC]
BROWN, JOHN MacMILLAN
[r] Godfrey SWEVEN.
BROWN, JOHN YOUNG
[r] SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS.
BROWN, PETER C(URRELL)
(1940?- ) UK writer whose first novel, Smallcreep's Day (1965), set in an
indeterminate future, is an extremely effective ABSURDIST quest into the
heart of a vast, palpably allegorical factory. The result of the quest for
meaning is another assembly line. [JC]
BROWN, RICH
[r] David F. BISCHOFF.
BROWN, ROSEL GEORGE
(1926-1967) US writer with an advanced degree in ancient Greek; for three
years she was a welfare visitor in Louisiana. She began publishing stories
in 1958 with "From an Unseen Censor" for Gal; some of her stories were
interplanetary, some more typical of "women's" fiction. A Handful of Time
(coll 1963) assembles much of her early work. Her Sibyl Sue Blue series Sibyl Sue Blue (1966; vt Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue 1968) and The Waters of
Centaurus (1970) - features a tough female cop who, with a teenage
daughter, engages in various interstellar adventures; she is more than
once required to defend herself (which she does more than adequately)
against aggressive males. With Keith LAUMER, RGB wrote an expansive SPACE
OPERA, Earthblood (1966), in which a lost Terran boy (rather like the
protagonist of Robert A. HEINLEIN's CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY [1957]) searches
through the stars for his heritage; the Earth he finds is a dire
disappointment, and he sets out, successfully, to upset the applecart.
RGB's career was taking off when she died at the early age of 41. [JC]See
also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; ECONOMICS.
BROWN, WENZEL
(1911-1981) US writer, mostly of mysteries, who published some sf in
magazines, most notably "Murderer's Chain" for Fantastic Universe in 1960.
His one sf novel, Possess ?
adventure. [JC]
BROWNE, GEORGE SHELDON
Dennis HUGHES.
BROWNE, HOWARD
(1908- ) US author and editor who worked 1942-7 for ZIFF-DAVIS where,
among other responsibilities, he was managing editor of AMAZING STORIES
and FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, then under Raymond A. PALMER's editorship. He
contributed stories to the magazines, two serials about the prehistoric

adventurer Tharn being published also in book form as Warrior of the Dawn
(1943) and The Return of Tharn (1948 AMZ; 1956). His work appeared under a
variety of pseudonyms and Ziff-Davis house names including Alexander
BLADE, Lawrence Chandler, Ivar JORGENSEN (stories only) and Lee Francis.
After a period in Hollywood, HB became in 1950 editor of AMZ - where he
rejected a mass of material by Richard S. SHAVER - and Fantastic
Adventures. He presided over AMZ's change from PULP to DIGEST format, and
over the demise of Fantastic Adventures in favour of the digest-sized
FANTASTIC. He returned to Hollywood in 1956. Primarily a mystery writer his work in that field being signed John Evans - HB is reported to have
detested sf. [MJE]See also: POLITICS.
BROWNING, CRAIG
[s] Rog PHILLIPS.
BROWNING, JOHN S.
[s] Robert Moore WILLIAMS.
BROWNJOHN, ALAN (CHARLES)
(1931- ) UK poet and anthologist, active from the early 1950s. In The Way
You Tell Them: A Yarn of the Nineties (1990), his first novel, the UK of
1999 is rendered as a Tory-dominated DYSTOPIA whose rulers have learned
well how to subvert and co-opt those who still retain their integrity,
political or artistic. [JC]
BROXON, MILDRED DOWNEY
[r] Poul ANDERSON.
BRUCKNER, KARL
(1906- ) German writer whose Nur zwei Roboter? (1963; trans anon as The
Hour of the Robots 1964 UK) depicts the pacifying effects of robot-love on
a quarrelling humanity. [JC]
BRUCKNER, WINFRIED
[r] AUSTRIA.
BRUMMELS, J.V.
(? - ) US writer, Poet-in-Residence at Wayne State College, and author of
Deus ex Machina (1989), a complexly literate rendering in
CYBERPUNK-influenced terms of an urban USA facing the death of the Sun.
There is a choice, for some, of escaping into space; but it is an option
JVB offers without any exuberance. [JC]
BRUNDAGE, MARGARET (JOHNSON)
(1900-1976) US illustrator, resident in Chicago. Best-known for her
erotic pastel covers for WEIRD TALES, MB was, as far as is known, the
first woman artist to work in the sf/ FANTASY field, and the first of
either sex whose covers featured nudes; they were generally of the
damsel-in-distress variety. Her first cover was for Weird Tales editor
Farnsworth WRIGHT's other magazine, Oriental Stories. The positive
response was immediate, proving once again that sex sells; MB was main
cover artist for Weird Tales from late 1932 to 1938, doing occasional
further covers to 1945. MB's soft colours were attractive, but her drawing
of faces and bodies only so-so. [JG/PN]

BRUNNER, JOHN (KILIAN HOUSTON)
(1934- ) UK writer, mostly of sf, though he has published several
thrillers, contemporary novels and volumes of poetry (see listing below).
He began very early to submit sf stories to periodicals, and when he was
17 published his first novel, Galactic Storm (1951) under the house name
Gill HUNT. Even in a field noted for its early starters, his precocity was
remarkable. His first US sale, "Thou Good and Faithful" as by John
Loxmith, was featured in ASF in early 1953, and in the same year he
published in a US magazine the first novel he would later choose to
acknowledge; it was eventually to appear in book form as The Space-Time
Juggler (1953 Two Complete Science-Adventure Books as "The Wanton of
Argus" as by Kilian Houston Brunner; 1963 chap dos US) which, with its
sequel, The Altar on Asconel (1965 dos US), plus an article on SPACE OPERA
and "The Man from the Big Dark" (1958), was much later assembled as
Interstellar Empire (omni 1976 US). This Interstellar Empire sequence
takes place in the twilight of a Galactic Empire - a time rather favoured
by JB in his space operas - when barbarism is general, though the
Rimworlds ( GALACTIC LENS) hold some hope for adventurers and mutants, who
may eventually rebuild civilization. But the series terminates abruptly,
before its various protagonists are able to begin their renaissance,
almost certainly reflecting JB's ultimate lack of interest in such
stories, which he has since registered in print - though certainly he
subsequently revised many of them, not necessarily to their betterment as
"naive" adventures.In any case, this lessening of interest evinced itself
only after very extensive publication of stories and novels describable as
literate space opera. From 1953 to about 1957 JB's activity was
intermittent, mainly through difficulty in making a living from full-time
writing, a problem about which he has always been bitterly articulate. In
the mid-1950s he was working full-time with a publishing house and
elsewhere, writing only occasionally. In 1955 he published one story under
the pseudonym Trevor Staines. A little later he sold two novels, again
first to magazines: Threshold of Eternity (1959 dos US) and The Hundredth
Millennium (1959 dos US; rev vt Catch a Falling Star 1968 US); they are
two of the first novels he placed with ACE BOOKS. With the signing of the
contract for the first, JB took up full-time freelancing once again.Over
the next six years he published under his own name and as Keith Woodcott a
total of 27 novels with Ace Books, in addition to work with other
publishers. For some readers, this spate of HARD-SF adventure stories
still represents JB's most relaxed and fluent work as a writer. Two from
1960 are typical of the storytelling enjoyment he was able to create by
applying to "modest" goals the formidable craft he had developed. The
Atlantic Abomination (1960 dos US) is a genuinely terrifying story about a
monstrous ALIEN, long buried beneath the Atlantic, who survives by
mentally enslaving "inferior" species, rather like the thrint in Larry
NIVEN's World of Ptavvs (1966). Sanctuary in the Sky (1960 dos US) is a
short and simple SENSE-OF-WONDER tale, set in the FAR FUTURE in a star
cluster very distant from Earth. Various conflicting planetary cultures
(all human) can meet in peace only on the mysterious Waystation, which is
a synthetic world. A ship full of squabbling passengers docks; with them
is a mild-mannered stranger who immediately disappears. Soon it turns out

that he's an Earthman, that Waystation is a colony ship owned by Earth,
and that he's come to retrieve it. Mankind needs the ship: though this
Galaxy is full, "there are other galaxies". Decades later, JB would rework
the thematic concerns of this short novel at much greater length in A Maze
of Stars (1991 US).The mass of Ace novels contains a second series, also
truncated, though its structure is more open-ended than that of the
earlier one. The Zarathustra Refugee Planets sequence, made up of
Castaways' World (1963 dos US; rev vt Polymath 1974 US), Secret Agent of
Terra (1962 dos US; rev vt The Avengers of Carrig 1969 US) and The
Repairmen of Cyclops (1965 dos US; rev 1981 US), all later assembled as
Victims of the Nova (omni 1989), deals over a long timescale with the
survivors of human-colonized Zarathustra; when the planet's sun goes nova,
3000 spaceships carry a few million survivors into exile on a variety of
uninhabited worlds. 700 years later, the Corps Galactic has the job of
maintaining the isolation of these various cultures, so that, having
reverted to barbarism, they can develop naturally; their separate
histories constitute an experiment in cultural evolution. Despite these
two series, and in contrast to some of his older peers, JB has only rarely
attempted to link individual items into series or fixups. Both his space
operas and his later, more ambitious works are generally initially
conceived in the versions which the reader sees on book publication.
Further Ace titles of interest include The Rites of Ohe (1963 dos US), To
Conquer Chaos (1964 US; rev 1981 US) and Day of the Star Cities (1965 US;
rev vt Age of Miracles 1973 US).As the 1960s progressed, more space operas
appeared as well as several story collections, including Out of My Mind
(coll 1967 US; the UK coll with the same name is a different selection,
1968) and Not Before Time (coll 1968), which include outstanding items
like "The Last Lonely Man" (1964) and "The Totally Rich" (1963). JB's
stories are generally free in form, sometimes experimental. By 1965, with
the publication of THE WHOLE MAN (1958-9 Science Fantasy; fixup 1964 US;
vt Telepathist 1965 UK) and The Squares of the City (1965 US), it was
evident that JB would not be content to go on indefinitely writing the sf
entertainments of which he had become master, and that he was determined
to transform his sf habitat. THE WHOLE MAN, comprising fundamentally
rewritten magazine stories and much new material, and generally considered
to be one of JB's most successful novels, is an attempt to draw a
psychological portrait of a deformed human with telepathic powers ( ESP)
who gradually learns how to use these powers in psychiatrically curative
ways (for to communicate is to be human). The Squares of the City is a
respectable try at a chess novel in which a chosen venue (in this case a
city) serves as the board and characters as the various players. The
stiffness of the resulting story may have been inevitable.JB's magnum
opus, STAND ON ZANZIBAR (1968 US), perhaps the longest GENRE-SF novel to
that date, came as the climax of the decade. The dystopian vision of this
complex novel rests on the assumption that Earth's population will
continue to expand uncontrollably; the intersecting stories of Norman
House, a Black executive on a mission to the Third World to facilitate
further economic penetration, and of Donald Hogan, a White "synthesist"
and government agent, whose mission involves gaining control of a eugenics
discovery, provide dominant strands in an assemblage of narrative
techniques whose function of providing a social and cultural context

points up their resemblance to the similar techniques used by John Dos
Passos in USA (1930-36), but which (as John P. Brennan has noted) fail to
conceal the underlying storytelling orthodoxy of the tale. It is perhaps
for this reason that the resulting vision has a cumulative, sometimes
overpowering effect, while at the same time the triumphalist logic of its
pulp plotting (which descends from HOMER) urgently conveys a sense that
answers will be forthcoming, and that the protagonists will win through.
Through its density of reference, and through JB's admirable (though
sometimes insecure) grasp of US idiom, the book's anti-Americanism has a
satisfyingly US ring to it, so that its tirades do not seem smug; it won
the 1968 HUGO and the 1970 BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD, and its French
translation won the Prix Apollo ( AWARDS) in 1973.Three further novels,
all with some of the the same pace and intensity, make together a kind of
thematic series of DYSTOPIAS. The Jagged Orbit (1969 US) conflates medical
and military industrial complexes with the Mafia in a rather too tightly
plotted, though occasionally powerful, narrative. The Sheep Look Up (1972
US), perhaps the most unrelenting and convincing dystopia of the four, and
depressingly well documented, deals scarifyingly with POLLUTION in a plot
whose relative looseness allows for an almost essayist exposition of the
horrors in store for us. THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER (1975 US) employs similar
reportage techniques in a story about a world enmeshed in a COMMUNICATIONS
explosion. Unsurprisingly (with hindsight), though these novels received
considerable critical attention, they in no way made JB's fortune. He has
always been extremely open about his finances and his hopes for the
future, and has made no secret of the let-down he felt on discovering
himself, after these culminating efforts, still in the position of being
forced to produce commercially to survive.In his decreasingly frequent
publications since 1972, JB has tended to return to a somewhat more
flamboyant version of the space-opera idiom he had used earlier. For some
years his health remained uncertain, with a consequent severe slowing down
of his once formidable writing speed. The relative lack of fluency and
enthusiasm of novels like Total Eclipse (1974 US), The Infinitive of Go
(1980 US) and Children of the Thunder (1989) cannot easily be denied.
There is a sense in these novels that skill wars with convictions, and
that, as a consequence, JB cannot any longer allow himself the orthodox
delights of pure storytelling. Even The Great Steamboat Race (1983), an
associational novel, set on the Mississippi River, which he devoted years
to writing, shows some signs of a nagging dis-ease. But JB has undeniably
made significant contributions to the sf space-opera redoubt, and has
written several intellectually formidable tract-novels about the state of
the world. The opinions extractable from these works are closer to
left-wing than usual with US sf writers of his generation (these opinions,
which he has articulated publicly many times, may be in part responsible
for his failure to acquire a secure US marketing niche, as well as
contributing to his loss of belief in the naive victories endemic to
generic fiction), and in the end he may claim to have constituted a
significant dissenting voice in the West's increasingly urgent debate
about humanity's condition as the 20th century draws to a close. [JC]Other
works: The Brink (1959); Echo in the Skull (1959 chap dos US; rev vt Give
Warning to the World 1974 US); The World Swappers (1959); The Skynappers
(1960 dos US); Slavers of Space (1960 dos US; rev vt Into the Slave Nebula

1968 US); Meeting at Infinity (1961 dos US); The Super Barbarians (1962
US); Times without Number (fixup 1962 dos US; rev 1969 US); No Future in
It (coll 1962); The Astronauts Must Not Land (1963 dos US; rev vt More
Things in Heaven 1973 US); The Dreaming Earth (1963 US); Listen! The
Stars! (1963 chap dos US; rev vt The Stardroppers 1972 US); Endless Shadow
(1964 chap dos US; rev vt Manshape 1982 US); Enigma from Tantalus (1965
dos US); The Long Result (1965); Now Then (coll 1965); A Planet of Your
Own (1966 chap dos US); No Other Gods but Me (coll 1966); Born under Mars
(1967 US); The Productions of Time (1967 US; text restored 1977 US);
Quicksand (1967 US); Bedlam Planet (1968 US); Father of Lies (1962 Science
Fantasy; 1968 chap dos US); Not Before Time (coll 1968); Double, Double
(1969 US); Timescoop (1969 US); The Evil that Men Do (1966 NW; 1969 chap
dos US); The Gaudy Shadows (1960 Science Fantasy; exp 1970), a
technofantasy about psychotropic drugs; The Dramaturges of Yan (1972 US);
The Wrong End of Time (1971 US); The Traveler in Black (coll of linked
stories 1971 US; with 1 story added vt The Compleat Traveler in Black 1986
US), his best fantasy; Entry to Elsewhen (coll 1972 US); From this Day
Forward (coll 1972); Time-Jump (coll 1973 US); The Stone that Never Came
Down (1973 US); Web of Everywhere (1974 US); The Book of John Brunner
(coll 1976 US); Foreign Constellations (coll 1980 US); Players at the Game
of People (1980 US); While There's Hope (1982 chap); a series comprising
The Crucible of Time (fixup 1983 US) and The Tides of Time (1984 US); The
Shift Key (1987); The Best of John Brunner (coll 1988 US); A Case of
Painter's Ear (1987 in Tales from the Forbidden Planet anth ed Roz
KAVENEY; 1991 chap US); Muddle Earth (1993 US). As Keith Woodcott:I Speak
for Earth (1961 dos US); The Ladder in the Sky (1962 dos US); The Psionic
Menace (1963 dos US); The Martian Sphinx (1965 dos US).Non-genre novels:
Of most interest are perhaps The Crutch of Memory (1964), A Plague on Both
your Causes (1969; vt Blacklash 1969 US), Black is the Color (1956 as
"This Rough Magic"; rev 1969 US), which is a thriller involving black
MAGIC, The Devil's Work (1970), and Honky in the Woodpile (1971).Poetry:
Trip: A Cycle of Poems (coll 1966 chap; rev 1971 chap); Life in an
Explosive Forming Press (coll 1970 chap); A Hastily Thrown-together Bit of
Zork (coll 1974 chap); Tomorrow May be Even Worse (coll 1978 chap US), an
"alphabet" of sf CLICHES; A New Settlement of Old Scores (coll 1983 chap
US).About the author: The Happening Worlds of John Brunner (critical anth
1975) ed Joseph W. de Bolt; John Brunner, Shockwave Writer: A Working
Bibliography (latest edn 1989 chap) Gordon BENSON Jr and Phil
STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; ANDROIDS; ARTS;
COLONIZATION
OF OTHER WORLDS; COMPUTERS; CYBERPUNK; DISASTER; FUTUROLOGY; GALACTIC
EMPIRES; GAMES AND SPORTS; GENERATION STARSHIPS; INVASION; MATTER
TRANSMISSION; MONEY; NEW WAVE; NEW WORLDS; OVERPOPULATION; POLITICS;
PSEUDO-SCIENCE; PSI POWERS; PSYCHOLOGY; SUPERMAN; TIME PARADOXES;
TRANSPORTATION.
BRUNNGRABER, RUDOLF
(1901-1960) German writer, active for many years. His sf novel Radium
(1936; trans Eden and Cedar Paul 1937) features a near-contemporary corner
on the radium market which causes troubles in a hospital using it to cure
cancer. [JC]Other works:Die Engel in Atlantis ["The Angel in Atlantis"]

(1938); Karl und das 20 Jahrhundert (1933; trans anon as Karl and the
Twentieth Century 1933).
BRUNT, SAMUEL
[r] MONEY; MOON.
BRUSSOLO, SERGE
[r] FRANCE.
BRUST, STEVEN (KARL ZOLTAN)
(1955- ) US writer, almost exclusively of fantasy, mentioned here for
Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille (1990), an intermittently comic spoof
about a saloon which dodges atomic HOLOCAUSTS by leaping through time and
space to other planets, where a mysterious enemy awaits. Some of SB's
novels, like The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars (1987), are more FABULATION
than fantasy. [JC]Other works: The Vlad Taltos fantasy series, comprising
Jhereg (1983), Yendi (1984) and Teckla (1986) - all three assembled as
Taltos the Assassin (omni 1991 UK) - Taltos (1988; vt Taltos and the Paths
of the Dead 1991 UK), Phoenix (1990and Athyra (1993)), plus The Phoenix
Guards (1991), set earlier in the Vlad Taltos universe, and Five Hundred
Years After (1994) To Reign in Hell (1984); Brokedown Palace (1986); Gypsy
(1992) with Megan Lindholm (1952- ); Agyar (1993).
BRYANT, ADRIAN
Adrian COLE.
BRYANT, EDWARD (WINSLOW Jr)
(1945- ) US writer, almost exclusively of short stories, beginning with
"They Come Only in Dreams" for Adam in 1970, since when he has made his
living as a freelance writer. EB was raised in Wyoming (and graduated with
an MA in English from the University of Wyoming in 1968), a circumstance
to which he pays his respects in Wyoming Sun (coll 1980), which assembles
fictions affected by that visually superb region. His early career was
assisted by Harlan ELLISON, whom he met at the CLARION SCIENCE FICTION
WRITERS' WORKSHOP in 1968 and 1969. His first book, Among the Dead and
Other Events Leading up to the Apocalypse (coll 1973; rev 1974), made a
considerable stir for the wide variety of stories included and the
technical facility they display. His conversational, apparently casual
style sometimes conceals the tight construction and density of his best
work, like "Shark" (1973), a complexly told love story whose darker
implications are brought to focus in the girl's decision to have her brain
transplanted into a shark's body, ostensibly as part of a research
project; in the story, symbol and surface reality mesh impeccably. The
setting for many of the stories in this collection is a California
transmuted by sf devices and milieux into an image, sometimes scarifying,
sometimes joyful, of the culmination of the American Dream, an image
further developed and intensified in Cinnabar (coll of linked stories
1976), whose eponymous city of the FAR FUTURE is a dreamlike re-enactment
of an essentialized DYING-EARTH California. The earlier stories of the
sequence intricately develop a strangely moving vision of the rococo,
many-shaped life by which mankind is ultimately destined to explicate
itself (see also LEISURE), though the end of the book presents stories
with a somewhat reductive plottiness. Later stories - collected in

Particle Theory (coll 1981), Trilobyte (coll 1987 chap) and Neon Twilight
(coll 1990) - continue slyly to urge sf into fable, horror and myth. EB
suggests that the face the genre should expect to see in the mirror is the
Minotaur's.With Ellison, EB began a GENERATION-STARSHIP series with
Phoenix without Ashes (1975), which works into novel form the pilot for
the abortive Ellison tv series The Starlost; the book is short and
perfunctory. Future volumes, long projected, have not appeared. EB has
also published stories as Lawrence Talbot. He is the editor of an
anthology of original stories and some poems, 2076: The American
Tricentennial (anth 1977; rev 1977). [JC]Other works: The Man of the
Future (1990 chap); The Cutter (1988 Silver Scream; 1991 chap); Fetish
(1991), horror; The Thermals of August (1981 FSF; 1992 chap); Darker
Passions (coll 1993 chap).See also: The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE
FICTION ; MESSIAHS; NEBULA; PERCEPTION; WILD CARDS.
BRYANT, PETER
Peter GEORGE.
BSFA
BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION.
BSFA AWARD
BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD.
BUCHAN, JOHN
J. W. DUNNE.
BUCHANAN, ROBERT WILLIAMS
(1848-1901) UK man of letters whose sf novel, The Rev. Annabel Lee: A
Tale of To-Morrow (1898), posits a 21st-century society whose rationalist
ideals leave a void in the bosom of the Christian Rev. Lee, who violates
eugenic taboos and by so doing manages to create in her banned choice of
husband a martyr to the new supernaturalism. [JC]
BUCKLEY, KATHLEEN
[r] Sharon JARVIS.
BUCKNER, BRADNOR
[s] Ed Earl REPP.
BUCK ROGERS
BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY.
BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY
1. US COMIC strip conceived by John Flint Dille for the National
Newspaper Syndicate Inc., written by Philip Francis NOWLAN, based on his
novel Armageddon 2419 AD (1928-29 AMZ: fixup 1962). BR appeared first in
1929 in daily newspapers, illustrated by Dick CALKINS, and in March 1930
the Sunday version began, signed by Calkins although the actual
illustrator was Russell Keaton (to 1933) and then Rick Yager (who also
took over the daily strip in 1951). Calkins - whose illustration was
embarrassingly inferior to that of his colleagues - was removed from the
strip in 1947; Murphy Anderson drew the daily strip 1947-9, followed by
Leonard Dworkins 1949-59, Yager 1951-8, and George Tuska, who took over

both strips in 1958 when Yager resigned. After Nowlan's death in 1940
various writers worked on continuity, including Calkins, Bob Barton and
Yager, with contributions after 1958 by Fritz LEIBER and Judith MERRIL.
The Sunday strip ended in June 1965, the daily in June 1967.BR was the
first US sf comic strip with a moderately adult and sophisticated
storyline, though both dialogue and artwork were crude and naive by
comparison with such imitators as BRICK BRADFORD and FLASH GORDON.
Nonetheless, it remained extremely popular for many years. Its scenario is
archetypal SPACE OPERA. Buck, a lieutenant in the USAF, is inadvertently
transported 500 years into the future, where he finds the USA overrun by
hordes of "Red Mongols". Accompanied by his perennial girl-friend, Wilma
Deering, Buck is constantly engaged in battle, on land and sea and in
space, with his mortal enemy Killer Kane. (The Sunday version, which was
much better drawn, also featured Wilma's younger brother Buddy and
Princess Alura of Mars.) All the standard accoutrements of space opera are
used: ANTIGRAVITY belts, DEATH RAYS, DISINTEGRATORS, domed cities and
space rockets. The strip became more sophisticated after 1958, with some
real sf writers brought in to spice things up.Although BR contributed
little to the artistic evolution of the comic strip, its storyline was
very influential. It was successfully translated into other media: in
addition to those discussed below, it appeared as a popular RADIO serial,
beginning 1932, and as a Big Little Book ( JUVENILE SERIES). Some of Buck
Rogers's adventures have been reissued in book form, including The
Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1969; rev 1977) ed
Robert C. Dille, which is in fact only a selection. [PN/JE]2. Serial film
(1939), titled simply Buck Rogers. Universal. Dir Ford Beebe, Saul A
Goodkind, starring Larry ("Buster") Crabbe, Constance Moore, C. Montague
Shaw, Jack Moran, Anthony Warde. Screenplay Norman S. Hall, Ray Trampe,
based on the comic strip. 12 episodes. B/w.After their success with FLASH
GORDON, also played by Crabbe, in two serials (1936 and 1938), Universal
cast him as Buck Rogers, the other famous SPACE-OPERA hero of the
newspaper comic strips. This serial, not as lavish or baroque as the first
Flash Gordon serial, concerns Buck's waking after a 500-year sleep (in the
Arctic) to discover that the Zuggs from Saturn have invaded Earth aided by
the villainous Killer Kane (Warde). He teams up with Wilma (Moore) and Dr
Huer (Shaw). The remaining episodes deal with their travels to Saturn to
face the Zuggs on their home ground, and their efforts to avoid the usual
hazards of crashing spaceships, ray-guns, robots and mind-control devices.
Edited episodes were later cobbled together as a feature film, Planet
Outlaws (1953), re-edited as Destination Saturn (1965). [JB/PN]3. US tv
serial (1950-51), titled simply Buck Rogers. ABC TV. Prod and dir Babette
Henry, starring Ken Dibbs (replaced after several months by Robert
Pastene) as Buck, Lou Prentis as Wilma, Harry Sothern as Dr Huer. Written
by Gene Wyckoff, based on the comic strip. One season. 25 mins per
episode. B/w.BR was one of the earliest of many space-opera juvenile tv
serials in the early 1950s. Its style was that of the Saturday matinee
cinema serials, but restrictions imposed by tv production necessitated its
being shot live on a cramped interior set, with the result that the cinema
serials seemed visually extravagant by comparison. Buck and his pals fight
against evil and tyranny from a base hidden behind Niagara Falls. [JB]4.
US tv series (1979-81). Glen A. Larson/Universal/NBC. Developed for tv by

Glen A. LARSON and Leslie Stevens. Prod Larson (season 1), John MANTLEY
(season 2). Dirs included Daniel Haller, Sig Neufeld, Larry Stewart, Jack
ARNOLD, Vincent McEveety. Writers included Alan BRENNERT, Anne Collins.
Starring Gil Gerard as Buck, Erin Gray as Wilma, Tim O'Connor as Dr Huer,
Felix Silla as Twiki, Thom Christopher as Hawk, Wilfred Hyde-White as Dr
Goodfellow. Two seasons. 100min pilot, 1 100min episode, 33 50min
episodes. Colour.In the year of his 50th anniversary a second Buck Rogers
tv series began, the brainchild of Glen A. Larson, whose BATTLESTAR
GALACTICA had aired the previous year. Buck is now a US astronaut who has
been frozen in a space-probe for 500 years. After the success of Batman
(1966-8), film and tv producers persisted for many years in believing,
against all evidence, that sf and fantastic genre material did best when
spoofed. BR was played rather too much for laughs, and the irritating STAR
WARS-derived robot Twiki was no help. The stories were very weak and
nobody much cared for Buck as a cocky, wise-cracking lout. The show
improved in the second season, with better scripts and a new alien
character called Hawk, but it was too late.5. Film (1979). Dir Daniel
Haller, screenplay Glen A. Larson, Leslie Stevens. Other credits as for tv
series above, plus Pamela Hensley. 89 mins. Colour.This is simply the
pilot episode of the tv series, edited down and given theatrical release.
It is not too bad in a frothy way. Buck returns to a post- HOLOCAUST Earth
where a semi-military sanctuary, once Chicago, exists in the
MUTANT-haunted wreckage of his old homeland. He is wooed by wicked
princess Ardala (pretty dresses; Pamela Hensley) and by Wilma (white
jumpsuit and lipgloss; Erin Gray), and is suspected of being a spy. Many
conventions of the genre are parodied. [PN]See also: AUSTRIA; CINEMA;
GAMES AND TOYS.
BUDRYS, ALGIS
Working name of writer and editor Algirdas Jonas Budrys (1931- ). He was
born in East Prussia, but has been in the USA since 1936. He early worked
as an assistant to his father, who was Consul General of Lithuania in New
York until his death in 1964; this experience has arguably shaped some of
AB's fiction. He began publishing sf in 1952 with "The High Purpose" for
ASF, and very rapidly gained a reputation as a leader of the 1950s sf
generation, along with Philip K. DICK, Robert SHECKLEY and others, all of
whom brought new literacy, mordancy and grace to the field; since 1965 he
has written regular, incisive book reviews for Gal and latterly for FSF,
but relatively little fiction.During his first decade as a writer AB used
a number of pseudonyms on magazine stories: David C. Hodgkins, Ivan
Janvier, Paul Janvier, Robert Marner, William Scarff, John A. Sentry,
Albert Stroud and (in collaboration with Jerome BIXBY) Alger ROME. He
wrote few series, though "The High Purpose" had two sequels: "A.I.D."
(1954) and "The War is Over" (1957), both in ASF. The Gus stories, as by
Paul Janvier, include "Nobody Bothers Gus" (1955) and "And Then She Found
Him" (1957).AB's first novel has a complex history. As False Night (1954)
it was published in a form abridged from the manuscript version; this
manuscript served as the basis for a reinstated text which, with
additional new material, was published as Some Will Not Die (1961; rev
1978). In both versions a post- HOLOCAUST story is set in a
plague-decimated USA and, through the lives of a series of protagonists, a

half century or so of upheaval and recovery is described. Some Will Not
Die is a much more coherent (and rather grimmer) novel than its
predecessor.His second novel, WHO? (1958), filmed as WHO? (1974), not
quite successfully grafts an abstract vision of the existential extremity
of mankind's condition onto an ostensibly orthodox sf plot, in which it
must be determined whether or not a prosthetically rebuilt and
impenetrably masked man ( CYBORGS) is in fact the scientist, vital to the
US defence effort, whom he claims to be. As AB is in part trying to write
an existential thriller about identity (rather similar to the later work
of Kobo ABE), not an sf novel about the perils of prosthesis, some of the
subsequent detective work seems a little misplaced; however, the
seriousness of purpose is never in doubt. Similarly, The Falling Torch
(1957-9 various mags; fixup 1959; text restored vt Falling Torch 1991)
presents a story which on the surface is straight sf, describing an Earth,
several centuries hence, dominated by an ALIEN oppressor; the son of an
exiled president returns to his own planet to liaise with the underground.
But the novel can also be read as an allegory of the Cold War in its
effects upon Eastern Europe (less awkward but more discursive in the
restored text), and therefore, like WHO?, asks of its generic structure
rather more significance than generic structures of this kind have perhaps
been designed to bear.Much more thoroughly successful is AB's next novel,
ROGUE MOON (1960), now something of an sf classic. A good deal has been
written about the highly integrated symbolic structure of this story,
whose perfectly competent surface narration deals with a HARD-SF solution
to the problem of an alien labyrinth, discovered on the MOON, which kills
anyone who tries to pass through it. At one level, the novel's description
of attempts to thread the labyrinth from Earth via MATTER TRANSMISSION
makes for excellent traditional sf; at another, it is a sustained rite de
passage, a doppelg-nger conundrum about the mind-body split, a
death-paean. There is no doubt that AB intends that both levels of reading
register, however any interpretation might run; in this novel the two
levels interact fruitfully. After some years away from fiction, AB
returned in the late 1970s with his most humanly complex and fully
realized novel to date. Michaelmas (1977) describes in considerable detail
a NEAR-FUTURE world whose information media have become even more
sophisticated and creative of news than at present - as depicted in Sidney
Lumet's film Network (1976) and as represented by such figures as CBS
broadcaster Walter Cronkite. Like Cronkite, though to a much greater
extent, the Michaelmas of the title is a moulder of news. Unusually,
however, the book does not attack this condition. Michaelmas is a highly
adult, responsible, complex individual, who with some cause feels himself
to be the world's Chief Executive; beyond his own talents, he is aided in
this task by an immensely sophisticated COMPUTER program named Domino,
with which he is in constant contact, and which itself (as in books like
Alfred BESTER's The Computer Connection [1975; vt Extro UK]) accesses all
the computers in the world-net. Although the plot - Michaelmas must
confront and defeat mysterious aliens who are manipulating mankind from
behind the scenes - is straight out of PULP-MAGAZINE fiction, Michaelmas
is a sustained, involving and peculiarly realistic novel.AB is that
rarity, an intellectual genre writer, as is also demonstrated by his three
collections of short stories, The Unexpected Dimension (coll 1960),

Budrys's Inferno (coll 1963; vt The Furious Future 1964 UK) and Blood and
Burning (coll 1978). From his genre origins stem both his strengths incisiveness, exemplary concision of effect - and his weaknesses - mainly
the habit, which he may have mastered, of overloading genre material with
mainstream resonances. His sf criticism, especially that from before the
mid-1980s, is almost unfailingly perceptive, and promulgates with a
convert's grim elan a view of the essential nature of the genre that
ferociously privileged the US magazine tradition. Non-Literary Influences
on Science Fiction (An Essay) (1983 chap) eloquently represents this view,
as do, more relaxedly, the reviews collected in Benchmarks: Galaxy
Bookshelf (coll 1985).In the 1980s, AB controversially associated himself
with a programme for new writers initiated (or at least inspired) by L.
Ron HUBBARD, arousing fears that Hubbard's Church of SCIENTOLOGY might
itself be the source for the apparent affluence of L. RON HUBBARD'S
WRITERS OF THE FUTURE. It was, nevertheless, evident by their
participation that many sf writers felt these worries to be trivial, and
the programme can claim to have introduced several authors of note (like
Karen Joy FOWLER and David ZINDELL) to the field. In pieces like Writing
Science Fiction and Fantasy (1990 chap), composed originally for the
enterprise, AB projected a detailedsense of what it meant to be a
professional. The Hubbard school absorbed most of his energies for the
remainder of the decade, although in 1991 he announced his semi-retirement
from Writers of the Future, and soon published, in Hard Landing (1993) his first novel since Michaelmas- a condensed, intricative, virtuoso
narrative following the lives - as resident aliens - of four crashed
extraterrestrials in America from the 1940s through the 1970s. [JC]Other
works: Man of Earth (1955 Satellite; rev 1958); The Amsirs and the Iron
Thorn (1967; vt The Iron Thorn 1968 UK); Cerberus (1967 FSF; 1989 chap).As
Editor: The L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future series: L. Ron
Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future (anth 1985; vt without title
reference to Hubbard 1986 UK); Vol II (anth 1986); Vol III (anth 1987);
Vol IV (anth 1988); Vol V (anth 1989); Vol VI (anth 1990); Vol VII (anth
1991); Vol VIII (anth 1992) with Dave WOLVERTON.About the author:More
Issues at Hand (coll 1970) by William Atheling Jr (James BLISH), Chapter
V; "Rite de Passage: A Reading of ROGUE MOON" by David KETTERER in
FOUNDATION 5, 1974; Visions of Tomorrow: Six Journeys from Outer to Inner
Space (1975) by David N. SAMUELSON; An Algis Budrys Checklist (1983 chap)
by Chris DRUMM; Conspiracy Theories (anth 1987 chap) ed Christopher EVANS,
providing a range of views on the Writers of the Future/Scientology
dispute and on AJB's role.See also: CHILDREN IN SF; COMMUNICATIONS;
CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF;
DISASTER;
GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; GOTHIC SF; INVASION; INVISIBILITY; The MAGAZINE OF
FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MARS; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; METAPHYSICS; NEW
WAVE; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; OUTER PLANETS; PANTROPY; PARANOIA; PHILIP
K.
DICK AWARD; PSYCHOLOGY; REINCARNATION; ROBOTS; SCIENTISTS; WRITERS OF
THE
FUTURE CONTEST.
BUFFALO BOOK CO.

HADLEY PUBLISHING COMPANY.
BUFFERY, JUDITH
(1943- ) UK writer known exclusively for her SPACE-OPERA Star Lord Saga:
The Sheeg (1979), Saffron (1979), The Iron Clog (dated 1979 but 1980) and
Gringol Weed (1980). [JC]
BUG
Film (1975). Paramount. Dir Jeannot Szwarc, starring Bradford Dillman,
Joanna Miles, Richard Gilliland. Screenplay William Castle (also prod),
Thomas PAGE, based on The Hephaestus Plague (1973) by Page. 100 mins.
Colour.After an earthquake near a small US town, strange insects appear
out of a fissure. Capable of producing fire by rubbing their rear
appendages together, they ignite countryside, cars, people and a cat. A
scientist whose wife has fallen victim to their incendiary activities
becomes bug-obsessed. Mating them with roaches, he produces a new
carnivorous species which can communicate, spelling out words by grouping
themselves in patterns. Finally, in the traditional Faustian manner, he
falls in flames into the fissure which conveniently closes behind him and
the bugs. B, like its source novel, appears unclear about what it is
trying to be - a straight MONSTER MOVIE or some kind of allegorical
revenge-of-Nature warning to mankind. The insect photography, by Ken
Middleham, is good. [JB]See also: PHASE IV.
BUG-EYED MONSTERS
Often known by their acronym, BEMs. BEM; MONSTERS.
BUJOLD, LOIS McMASTER
(1949- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Barter" for Twilight
Zone in 1985. Almost all her published work is part of a loose series of
humorous adventures set in a future of feuding galactic colonies connected
by FASTER-THAN-LIGHT "wormhole jumps". Most of these stories feature
members of the Vorkosigan family, part of an elite military caste from the
planet Barrayar, recently rediscovered by galactic civilization after
regressing into semifeudalism. Shards of Honor (1986) and its immediate
sequel BARRAYAR (1991) which won a 1992 HUGO, deal with the romance
between Lord Aral Vorkosigan and a sophisticated off-worlder; the child of
their marriage is Miles Vorkosigan, born with severe physical handicaps
due to a politically inspired attempt to poison his father. Miles grows up
to become a supremely charismatic, witty, compulsively driven military
genius who triumphantly transcends the difficulties caused by his brittle
bones and 4ft 9in (1.45m) stature. His complicated double life in the
Barrayaran Navy (as an ensign) and the Dendarii Mercenaries (of which he
accidentally becomes the founder and admiral) is followed, in order of
internal chronology, in The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)-assembled with
Shards of Honor as Test of Honor (omni 1987) - THE VOR GAME (1990), which
won a 1991 Hugo, Brothers in Arms (1989) and the ambitious Mirror Dance
(1994) The short stories in The Borders of Infinity (coll 1989) assembled with THE VOR GAME as Vorkosigan's Game (omni 1990) - including
the Hugo- and NEBULA-winning "The Mountains of Mourning" (1989), feature
Miles at various points in his career. Ethan of Athos (1986), set after
THE VOR GAME, focuses on Elli Quinn, who eventually becomes Miles's lover.

FALLING FREE (1988), LMMB's best known single novel and winner of the 1988
Nebula, is set 200 years before the start of the Vorkosigan tales and
tells the story of a rebellion-by humans genetically engineered to live in
zero GRAVITY - against the company which has created them and plans, once
their commercial value has expired, to dump them on a planetary
surface.LMMB is a writer whose books are both funny and humane. Her
characters have strong feeling for each other and, when compared to
similar military figures in the work of such male writers as Jerry
POURNELLE, are often remarkably (and perhaps unrealistically) gentle.
Though the ideas content in her work is generally low, her novels and
stories succeed on their own terms. [NT]Other Works:The Spirit Ring
(1992), a fantasy.See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; COLONIZATION OF
OTHER WORLDS; GENETIC ENGINEERING; SPACE OPERA; WAR.
BULGAKOV, MIKHAIL
(1891-1940) Soviet playwright and novelist whose fame in the West has
come only with the posthumous publication in translation of most of his
fiction, including Belaya gvardiya (1925; trans Michael Glenny as The
White Guard 1971 UK) and Cherny sneg (written late 1930s; trans Michael
Glenny as Black Snow 1967 UK), neither of which are sf/fantasy. A
collection of short stories, Dyaboliada (coll 1925; trans Carl R. Proffer
as Diaboliad and Other Stories 1972 US), includes "The Crimson Island: A
Novel by Comrade Jules Verne Translated from the French into the Aesopian"
(1924 Germany), a Jules VERNE-like fable made into a play (performed 1928)
with the same title, and "The Fatal Eggs" (1924), whose indictment of the
mechanizing hubris of science reflects the influence of H.G. WELLS's The
Food of the Gods (1904). A similar analysis shapes Sobacheye Serdste
(written 1925; trans Michael Glenny from the manuscript as Heart of a Dog
1968 UK and by Mirra GINSBURG 1968 US), a short sf novel in which a
scientist transforms a dog into a sort-of-man who proves incapable of the
fundamental transformation to civilized behaviour; eventually, the
scientist is forced to change him back into a dog (or allegorical peasant)
again. The tale reappeared in The Heart of a Dog and Other Stories (coll
trans Kathleen Cook-Horujy and Avril Pyman 1990 Russia), along with other
stories. Master i Margarita (written 1938; 1966-7 US; complete text trans
Michael Glenny as The Master and Margarita 1967 UK; cut text trans Mirra
Ginsburg 1967 US) is a fantasy in which the Devil appears in modern
Moscow, and Christ's crucifixion is re-enacted. It was filmed in 1972 and
adapted as a serial on BBC radio in 1992; the play within the novel was
made into a Polish film (English title Pilate and the Others) in 1971. In
"The Crimson Island" (written 1927), which appears in The Early Plays
(coll trans Carl R. Proffer and Ellendea Proffer 1972 US), and in "Adam
and Eve" (written 1931), "Bliss" (written 1934) and "Ivan Vasilievich"
(written 1935), MB mounted a series of profound assaults upon the
reality-distortions of ideology. MB was a powerful, often extremely funny,
ultimately very serious writer whose use of sf and fantasy forms was
tightly linked to the messages he laboured to produce about the state of
the SOVIET UNION, whose apparatchiks criticized him severely during his
life. [JC]See also: RUSSIA; THEATRE.
BULGARIA

The roots of Bulgarian sf can be found in the 1920s, when Svetoslav
MINKOV published three unusual collections of short stories: Siniata
Hrizantema ["The Blue Chrysanthemum"] (coll 1921), Tshasovnik ["Clock"]
(coll 1924) and Ognena Ptitza ["The Fire Bird"] (coll 1927). Minkov's work
noticeably resembles that of Edgar Allan POE, H.P. LOVECRAFT and the
German decadents of his period, and may be closer to the "diabolic"
fantasy of the German Romantics than to the main current of sf. A
collection in English of Minkov's work is The Lady with the X-Ray Eyes
(coll trans 1965 Bulgaria). Perhaps Georgi Iliev, author of the novels
O-Korse (1930) and Teut se Bountuva ["Teut Rebels"] (1933), should be
regarded as the real founding father of Bulgarian sf. These two books,
intended as serious works for serious readers, deal with cosmic DISASTERS
on the grand scale: the dying of the Sun; the cessation of our planet's
rotation.The promise of these early years was not followed up. No further
sf or fantasy works were published until about 10 years after WWII, when
Bulgarian sf's second period began. To understand the many paradoxes of
Bulgarian socialist publishing 1946-89 one should remember that all
publishing houses and printers were state property and poorly organized;
that there was a chronic shortage of paper and printing presses; and that
the whole publishing system was under strong ideological control. The soil
for raising Bulgarian sf was, therefore, less than fertile - certainly in
the 1950s - and much sf of the period was limited to tedious imitations of
the Soviet model, dealing with a bright, happy communist future and the
imminent destruction of all that capitalism stood for. Books of this
period are Zemiata Pred Gibel ["Earth on the Verge of Destruction"] (1957)
by Tsvetan Angelov, Raketata ne Otgovaria ["No Reply from the Rocketship"]
(1958) by Dimitar Peev, Gushterat ot Ledovete ["The Lizard from the Land
of Ice"] (1958) by Petar Bobev and Atomniat Tshovek ["The Atomic Man"]
(1958) by Ljuben Dilov.In the 1960s, when the winds of change were
detectable, a third and more interesting period began. The breakthrough
was made by Georgi Markov ( David ST GEORGE) - later assassinated in
London - with his important novel Pobeditelite na Aiax ["The Conquerors of
Ajax"] (1960), a space story about the meeting of three races who are at
different stages of cultural development. In 1962 the first Bulgarian sf
club, "Friends of the Future", was founded in Sofia. The most active sf
writer has been Ljuben Dilov (1927- ), whose Atomniat Tshovek is mentioned
above. His later works - often satirical-include Mnogoto Imena na Straha
["The Many Names of Fear"] (1967), Tejesta na Skafandara ["The Burden of
the Spacesuit"] (1969), about ALIENS, Moiat Stranen Priatel - Astronomat
["My Strange Friend the Astronomer"] (coll 1971), Patiat na Ikar ["The Way
of Icarus"] (1974), about a GENERATION STARSHIP, Da Nahranish Orela ["To
Feed the Eagle"] (coll 1977), and Jestokiat Eksperiment ["Cruel
Experiment"] (1985) about SEX. Other authors include Haim Oliver with
Heliopolis (1968), Emil Manov with Galacticheska Balada ["Galactic
Ballad"] (1971) and Patuvane do Uibrobia ["Journey to Wibrobia"] (1976) the latter a continuation of Jonathan SWIFT's Gulliver's Travels (1726;
rev 1735) - Svetoslav Slavshtev, Ljubomir Peevsky, and Pavel Vejinov with
Sinite Peperudi ["Blue Butterflies"] (coll 1968), Beliat Gushter ["The
White Lizard"] (coll 1977) and Barierata ["Barrier"] (coll 1977); Dimitar
Peev and Petar Bobev continue to publish.In the 1980s many more new sf
authors appeared, writing on the same - not outstanding - level. But

things began to look promising in the late 1980s. In 1988 the first
specialist sf magazine, F.E.P., was launched; the title has since been
changed to Fantastika. The great hope for Bulgarian sf came in 1989 with
the removal of the ban on privately owned publishing companies. A new sf
publishing house is Gemini, whose fortnightly sf magazine, Drugi Svetove
["Other Worlds"], began publication in 1991. The most active sf/fantasy
publishing house is Orphia. Other publishers, too, are intending to
publish sf, whose future in Bulgaria looks brighter. [AP]
BULL, EMMA
(1954- ) US writer who began as an author of fantasies, her first being
"Rending Dark" in Sword and Sorceress (anth 1984) ed Marion Zimmer
BRADLEY, and her best known being her first novel, War for the Oaks
(1987). Her second novel, Falcon (1989), is a remarkably well constructed
sf tale whose protagonist moves from the PLANETARY-ROMANCE setting of the
first half of the book into the hi-tech SPACE-OPERA environment that
dominates the second, where he has become an ace starship pilot;
eventually everything fits together in an extremely well ordered climax.
The subtitle of her third novel, BONE DANCE: A FANTASY FOR TECHNOPHILES
(1991), neatly demonstrates the difficulty - it is not uncommon for
writers of the 1980s to pose the problem - of generic placement, though
this particular book, which depicts a post- HOLOCAUST search for an
ancient weapon, is sufficiently sf-like not to distress taxonomists.
Finder: A Novel of the Borderlands * (1994) is, however, a fantasy novel
tied to the Borderlands world, and The Princess and the Lord of Night
(1994) is a pictorial fantasy for children. With her husband, the fantasy
writer Will Shetterly (1955- ), EB has published a collection of stories
(one collaborative), Double Feature(coll 1994), and edited the Liavek
sequence of SHARED-WORLD fantasy anthologies: Liavek * (anth 1985), The
Players of Luck * (anth 1986), Wizard's Row * (anth 1987), Spells of
Binding * (anth 1988) and Grand Festival * (anth 1990). [JC]See also:
FASTER THAN LIGHT; PHILIP K. DICK AWARD.
BULMER, H.K.
[r] Kenneth BULMER.
BULMER, KENNETH
(1921- ) UK writer, who also signs himself H.K. Bulmer, as well as using
a number of pseudonyms for his books, including Alan Burt Akers, Ken Blake
(not sf), Ernest Corley (not sf), Arthur Frazier (not sf), Adam Hardy (for
his successful Hornblower-like novels of the sea) Philip Kent, Bruno
Krauss (not sf), Neil Langholm (not sf), Manning Norvil, Charles R. Pike
(not sf), Dray Prescot, Andrew Quiller, Richard Silver (not sf), Tully
Zetford, the collaborative pseudonym Kenneth JOHNS (with John Newman) and
the house name Karl Maras, under which he wrote two novels; there have
also been several names restricted to magazine stories. After a career as
an active fan dating from before WWII (editing various fanzines from
1941), KB began publishing sf with Space Treason (1952) and Cybernetic
Controller (1952), both with A(ubrey) V(incent) Clarke (1922), and
Encounter in Space (1952), and was soon involved in producing material for
NW, Authentic and Nebula, the three major magazines among those
proliferating in the volatile UK sf scene of the first post-WWII decade,

though he sold few stories to US magazines. His first solo novels, like
Space Treason (1952) and Zhorani (Master of the Universe) (1953 as by Karl
Maras), and much of his ensuing work were either SPACE OPERAS or adventure
plots laid on simplified versions of future Earths. Notable among these
were several novels published in the USA from 1957, including City Under
the Sea (1957 dos US), The Secret of ZI (1958 dos US; vt The Patient Dark
1969 UK), The Earth Gods are Coming (1960 dos US; vt with one story added
as coll Of Earth Foretold 1961 UK), The Wizard of Starship Poseidon (1963
dos US), Demons' World (1964 dos US; vt The Demons 1965 UK), Worlds for
the Taking (1966 US), possibly the best of them, a relatively sustained
and dark-toned portrait of the costs of being a "competent man" in an
environment of interstellar corporate intrigue, and The Doomsday Men (1965
If; exp 1968 US).In the period of his most interesting work, approximately
1955-68, KB was notable for the adept use he made of a wide range of sf
themes, from underwater CITIES ( UNDER THE SEA) to giant ALIEN invaders (
GREAT AND SMALL) to TIME TRAVEL and MONSTERS - in Cycle of Nemesis (1967
US) - to PARALLEL WORLDS. The latter theme is the sustaining conceit of
the Keys to the Dimensions series: Land Beyond the Map (1961 Science
Fantasy as "The Map Country"; 1965); "The Seventh Stair" (1961 Science
Fantasy) and "Perilous Portal" (1962 Science Fantasy), both as by Frank
Brandon; The Key to Irunium (1967 US); The Key to Venudine (1968 US); The
Wizards of Senchuria (1969 US); The Ships of Durostorum (1970 US); The
Hunters of Jundagai (1971 US), The Chariots of Ra (1972 US) and The
Diamond Contessa (1983 US). Much of KB's later fiction under his own name
has seemed to flounder somewhat in attempts to handle a more
"contemporary" style and subject matter, as in The Ulcer Culture (1969; vt
Stained-Glass World 1976), On the Symb-Socket Circuit (1972) and Roller
Coaster World (1972 US). As the Dray Prescot series would show, KB's forte
lies in the transparency of the pulp tale truly told.It was with the Dray
Prescot sequence of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS pastiches - set in a
SCIENCE-FANTASY interstellar venue and written either as by Alan Burt
Akers or as told to Akers by Dray Prescot - that KB reached his largest
and most faithful audience. To date the series comprises: Transit to
Scorpio (1972 US), The Suns of Scorpio (1973 US), Warrior of Scorpio (1973
US), Swordships of Scorpio (1973 US), Prince of Scorpio (1974 US),
Manhounds of Antares (1974 US), Arena of Antares (1974 US), Fliers of
Antares (1975 US), Bladesman of Antares (1975 US), Avenger of Antares
(1975 US), Armada of Antares (1975 US), The Tides of Kregen (1976 US),
Renegades of Kregen (1976 US), Krozair of Kregen (1977 US), Secret Scorpio
(1977 US), Savage Scorpio (1977 US), Captive Scorpio (1977 US), Golden
Scorpio (1978 US), A Life for Kregen (1979 US), A Fortune for Kregen (1979
US), A Victory for Kregen (1979 US), Beasts of Antares (1980 US), Rebel of
Antares (1980 US), Legions of Antares (1981 US), Allies of Antares (1981
US), Mazes of Scorpio (1981 US), Delia of Vallia (1982 US), Fires of
Scorpio (1983 US), Talons of Scorpio (1983 US), Masks of Scorpio (1984
US), Seg the Bowman (1984 US), Werewolves of Kregen (1985 US), Witches of
Kregen (1985 US), Storm over Vallia (1985 US), Omens of Kregen (1985 US)
and Warlord of Antares (1988 US). The books are unfailing in their
delivery. With John CARNELL's death in 1972, KB took over the long-running
anthology series NEW WRITINGS IN SF from #22 (anth 1973), producing in
short order #23 (anth 1973), #24 (anth 1974), #25 (anth 1975), #26 (anth

1975), #27 (anth 1975), #28 (anth 1976) and #29 (anth 1976) before the
series was terminated, and maintaining the generally traditionalist
content of the books; some of the volumes under his editorship were later
assembled as New Writings in SF Special (1) (omni 1975), which included
#21 (ed Carnell), #22 and #23, New Writings in SF Special (2) (omni 1978),
which included #26 and #29, and New Writings in SF (3) (omni 1978), which
included #27 and #28. As fan, writer and editor, KB has been one of the
mainstays of UK sf for more than four decades; he served as a council
member of the SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION from its inception to 1988.
Though much of his work is routine, especially that written under
pseudonyms, he has consistently shown himself to be one of the most
competent, though not perhaps the most original, workers in the field.
[JC]Other works: Empire of Chaos (1953); Galactic Intrigue (1953); Space
Salvage (1953); The Stars are Ours (1953); Challenge (1954); World Aflame
(1954); The Changeling Worlds (1959 dos US); Beyond the Silver Sky (1961
dos US); No Man's World (1961 dos US; vt with 1 story added as coll
Earth's Long Shadow 1962 UK); The Fatal Fire (1962); The Wind of Liberty
(coll 1962); Defiance (coll of linked stories 1963); The Million Year Hunt
(fixup 1964 dos US); Behold the Stars (1965 dos US); To Outrun Doomsday
(1967 US); Kandar (1969 US); The Star Venturers (1969 dos US); Quench the
Burning Stars (1970; exp vt Blazon 1970 US); Star Trove (1970); Sword of
the Barbarians (1970); The Electric Sword-Swallowers (1971 dos US); The
Insane City (1971 US).As Philip Kent: Mission to the Stars (1953 chap);
Vassals of Venus (1953 chap); Home is the Martian (1954 chap); Slaves of
the Spectrum (1954 chap).As Karl Maras: Peril from Space (1954).As Manning
Norvil: A series starring Odan the Half-God and comprising Dream Chariots
(1977 US), Whetted Bronze (1978 US) and Crown of the Sword God (1980).As
Tully Zetford: The Hook sequence comprising Whirlpool of Stars (1974), The
Boosted Man (1974), Star City (1975) and The Virility Gene (1975).About
the author: The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (2nd edn 1984 chap) by
Roger ROBINSON.See also: ANTHOLOGIES; COMICS; DAW BOOKS; FASTER THAN
LIGHT; GALACTIC EMPIRES; NEW WORLDS.
BULWER, EDWARD
[r] First Baron LYTTON.
BULWER-LYTTON, Sir EDWARD
[r] First Baron LYTTON.
BULYCHEV, KIR(ILL)
Pseudonym of Russian historian and writer Igor (Vsevolodovich) Mozheiko
(1934- ), known also for books of popular science. He first gained
popularity through his light and intelligent stories, assembled in volumes
like Tchudesa v Gusliaro (coll 1972; trans Roger DeGaris, with differing
contents, as Gusliar Wonders 1983 US), Liudi Kak Liudi ["Men Who Are Like
Men"] (coll 1975), Letneie Utro ["A Summer Morning"] (coll 1979) and
Pereval ["The Pass"] (coll 1983). Some of these stories were assembled as
Half a Life (coll trans Helen Saltz Jacobson 1977 US). In the humorous
Gusliar cycle, the eponymous old Russian town is a place where miracles
occur on a routine basis - ALIENS land, for example, and fairy-tale Golden
Fishes, which grant wishes, are a sell-out in the local pet-store. KB's
only adult novel of note, Posledniaia Voina ["The Final War"] (1970),

depicts a long-dead post- HOLOCAUST planet which is visited by Earthmen
who have the technical means to resurrect it. A prolific writer of
CHILDREN'S SF, KB may become best known as the author of a very long
sequence of Alice tales about a futuristic young heroine, beginning with
Devotchka S Zemli ["Girl From Earth"] (1974). Juvenile singletons include
Sto Let Tomu Vpered ["One Hundred Years Ahead"] (1978), Million
Prikliuchenii ["A Million Adventures"] (1982) and Neposeda ["Fidget"]
(1985), which was successfully adapted for the screen. [VG]
BUNCH, CHRIS
[r] Allan COLE.
BUNCH, DAVID R(OOSEVELT)
(? - ) US writer of poetry and sf. He graduated as Bachelor of Science at
Central Missouri State College and as MA in English at Washington
University, worked as a civilian cartographer for the US Air Force
1954-73, and began publishing sf with "Routine Emergency" for If in 1957;
before that he had published about 200 non-sf stories. Much of his sf work
was assembled as Moderan (coll of linked stories 1971), a series of short,
narratively deranged, fable-like tales which describe in satirical terms (
SATIRE) a radically technologized future world where, after a nuclear
HOLOCAUST, humans have been transformed into CYBORGS, the surface of the
world is plastic, and thought and action are both solipsistic and deeply
melancholy. The book's portrait of a manufactured humanity works as an
arraignment of the late-20th-century slide into speed-lined rootlessness,
and demonstrate his heterodoxy in the world of sf. Some of his poetry was
assembled as We Have a Nervous Job (coll 1983 chap). Of the many
non-Moderan stories, "That High-Up Blue Day that Saw the Black Sky-Train
Come Spinning" (1968) has been described as an outstanding conflation of
moral seriousness and Grand Guignol. The relentlessness of his vision and
the "zany" extremity of his rendering of it ensure DRB's market
inconspicuousness, but suggest that, for his readers, he will remain a
vivid influence; and it may well be that, with the release of Bunch! (coll
1993), his considerable stature will be more widely understood. [JC]See
also: ABSURDIST SF; AMAZING STORIES; CYBERNETICS.
BUPP, WALTER
[s] John BERRYMAN.
BURDEKIN, KATHERINE P(ENELOPE)
(1896-1963) UK writer, who signed some of her work Kay Burdekin; in the
1930s she wrote as Murray Constantine. Her early work in particular took
the guise of FANTASY to express increasingly explicit FEMINIST interests.
The Burning Ring (1927) is a TIME-TRAVEL fantasy in which a self-centred
young man, having been given magic powers, visits various epochs in
various disguises, learning more about real life than he at first wished.
The 12th-century protagonist of The Rebel Passion (1929) is transported in
a vision from his monastery to a 21st-century UK where women are equal,
eugenic sterilization of the unfit is normal, and the Western world after a futuristic war with Asia - gradually turns to a William
MORRIS-style medievalism. Proud Man (1934), as Murray Constantine,
subjects a sample of contemporary humanity to the searching interrogation

of a visitor from the future whose hermaphroditism stands as a reproach to
our local muddle. The Devil, Poor Devil! (1934), as Constantine, confronts
the Devil with a killing spirit of secular sanity, against which He is
helpless. KB's last published novels were the most explicitly didactic.
Swastika Night (1937 as Constantine; 1985 as KB), her best known novel,
examines a Nazi-dominated Europe 500 years hence through the eyes of the
young German protagonist, who begins to understand that something is
perhaps awry in a world where women are breeding-animals and Hitler is
deified ( HITLER WINS). The posthumous publication of KB's feminist
UTOPIA, The End of This Day's Business (1990), apparently written before
Swastika Night, further helped to disinter from pseudonymous obscurity a
writer of considerable interest. Her work is at times surreptitiously
couched, and her message is too often found embedded in romance-fiction
plotting, but KB can now be seen as a figure of contemporary interest.
[JC]See also: DYSTOPIAS; GENRE SF; POLITICS.
BURDICK, EUGENE L(EONARD)
(1918-1965) US writer of several extremely popular novels, both alone and
in collaboration. His sf novel, Fail-Safe (1962) with Harvey WHEELER,
presents a NEAR-FUTURE US attack in error on the USSR, and the horrifying
tit-for-tat (the destruction of New York City) which the US President is
forced to offer. The book was filmed as FAIL SAFE (1964). [JC]
BURGEON, G.A.L.
Arthur Owen BARFIELD.
BURGER, DIONYS
The Anglicized form of the name of Dutch physicist lecturer and author
Dionijs Burger (1923- ). His Bolland: Een roman van gekromde ruimten en
uitdijend heelal (1957; trans Cornelia J. Rheinboldt as Sphereland: A
Fantasy about Curved Spaces and an Expanded Universe 1965 US) is a
MATHEMATICAL fable written as a sequel to Flatland (1884) by Edwin A.
ABBOTT. [PN]See also: BENELUX.
BURGESS, ANTHONY
Working name of UK writer and composer John Anthony Burgess Wilson
(1917-1993), known primarily for his work outside the sf field; as a
composer he has worked under his full name. Trained in English literature
and phonetics, AB taught at home and in Malaysia 1946-60, then returned to
the UK (though he has since moved to Monaco) and became a full-time
Protean man of letters, novelist, musician, composer and specialist in
Shakespeare and James Joyce. Devil of a State (1961), set in an imaginary
caliphate, skirts sf displacement, and several subsequent novels engage in
linguistic flirtations with modes of FABULATION, but AB remains best known
in the sf field for A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1962; with final chapter cut 1963
US), which was filmed by Stanley KUBRICK as A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971). A
compelling and often comic vision of the way violence comes to dominate
the mind, the novel is set in a future London and is told in a curious but
readable Russified argot by a juvenile delinquent whose brainwashing by
the authorities has destroyed not only his murderous aggression but also a
deeper-seated sense of humanity (typified by his compulsive love for the
music of Beethoven). It is an ironic novel in the tradition of Yevgeny

ZAMIATIN's and George ORWELL's anti- UTOPIAS; much later, AB adapted the
book as a play to be accompanied by his own music, publishing the result
as A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1987 chap). His other early sf novel is The Wanting
Seed (1962), a DYSTOPIAN investigation of the dilemmas facing men who wish
to curb the population explosion by every means possible (
OVERPOPULATION).The Eve of Saint Venus (1964), perhaps inspired by F.
ANSTEY's The Tinted Venus (1885), sympathetically brings the eponymous
goddess back to life. "The Muse" (1968), a story of altered PERCEPTION and
TIME TRAVEL, offers an alarming explanation for Shakespeare's never having
blotted a line. Beard's Roman Women (1976 US), a fantasy, is the
melancholy tale of a widowed writer haunted in Rome by the supernatural
presence (and insistent telephone calls) of his deceased wife. Two genuine
sf novels followed: 1985 (1978), which is divided into a competent essay
on Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) and a blustering sf tale set in a
1985 dominated by Arabs and left-wing unions; and The End of the World
News (1983), again a book divided but this time in three, with a short
life of Sigmund Freud jostling a Broadway musical (without the music)
about Leon Trotsky, both tales being filmed and viewed long afterwards
aboard a spaceship which - in the third segment of the main narrative has escaped the END OF THE WORLD just before a wandering planet strikes
the rest of us dead. These novels both give off a sense of underlying
sarcasm which has, perhaps, as much to do with AB's disdain for sf as with
the tales' ostensible targets. Any Old Iron (1989), a treatment of
Arthurian material in a contemporary context, was similarly distempered.
AB has written little short fiction; some of the stories in his first
collection, The Devil's Work (coll 1989), are of genre interest.
[MJ/JC]Other works: A Long Trip to Teatime (1976).About the author: The
Clockwork Universe of Anthony Burgess (1978 chap) by Richard Mathews;
Anthony Burgess: An Enumerative Bibliography (1980) by Jeutonne Brewer;
Anthony Burgess (1981) by Samuel Coale.See also: LINGUISTICS; MUSIC;
PSYCHOLOGY; QUEST FOR FIRE.
BURGESS, ERIC (ALEXANDER)
(1912- ) UK author, in collaboration with A(rthur Henry) Friggens (1920), of several sf novels for ROBERT HALE LIMITED. Though none are
remarkable in content, the Mortorio sequence - Mortorio (1973) and
Mortorio Two (1975)-stand out from the crowd. [JC]Other works: Anti-Zota
(1973); Mants of Myrmedon (1977); Hounds of Heaven (1979).
BURGESS, MARY WICKIZER
[r] Daryl F. MALLETT; Robert REGINALD.
BURGESS, MICHAEL
[r] Robert REGINALD.
BURKE, JONATHAN
Working name of UK writer and editor John Frederick Burke (1922- ) - who
had been active in FANDOM in the 1930s (The FUTURIAN ) - for much of the
sf he published in UK magazines in the mid-1950s, beginning with
"Chessboard" for NW in 1953, and for his earlier sf novels, which are all
routine; he also wrote several thrillers as JB. His first novel, Swift
Summer (1949) as by J.F. Burke, is a marginal fantasy of some slight

interest, as is The Outward Walls (1951). His sf deals with a variety of
themes, from PARALLEL WORLDS in The Echoing Worlds (1954) to EVOLUTION in
Twilight of Reason (1954), though without excessive energy; Deep Freeze
(1955) faces an all-female world with the return of the male. He has also
written as Robert Miall (see listing below). In more recent years, almost
always as John Burke, he has edited horror anthologies and novelized film
and tv productions. [JC]Other works: The Dark Gateway (1953); Hotel Cosmos
(1954); Pattern of Shadows (1954); Alien Landscapes (coll 1955), much of
whose contents, under different titles, were also assembled as Exodus from
Elysium (coll 1965 Australia); Revolt of the Humans (1955); Pursuit
through Time (1956); Dr Terror's House of Horrors * (1965) as John Burke,
novelizing the film; The Hammer Horror Omnibus * (coll 1966) and The
Second Hammer Horror Film Omnibus * (coll 1967), both as John Burke,
stories from films; Chitty Chitty Bang Bang * (1968) as John Burke,
novelizing the film of Ian FLEMING's tale; Moon Zero Two * (1969) as John
Burke, novelizing the film MOON ZERO TWO (1969); Expo 80 (1972) as John
Burke; the Dr Caspian, psychic investigator series comprising The Devil's
Footsteps (1976), The Black Charade (1977) and Ladygrove (1978); Privilege
* (1967), novelizing PRIVILEGE.As Robert Miall: UFO * (1970; vt UFO-1:
Flesh Hunters 1973 US) and UFO 2 * (1971; vt UFO-2: Sporting Blood 1973
US), novelizations of the tv series UFO.As Editor: Tales of Unease (anth
1966), More Tales of Unease (anth 1969) and New Tales of Unease (anth
1976), all as John Burke.
BURKE, RALPH
Pseudonym used primarily by Robert SILVERBERG alone, but three times in
collaboration with Randall GARRETT, in 1956-7. [JC]
BURKETT, WILLIAM R(AY) Jr
(1943- ) US author and journalist. His only published sf work, Sleeping
Planet (1964 ASF; 1965), very competently tells a hard-edged tale of
conflict between the small Terran Federation and the huge Llralan Empire.
The Llralans, having undeserved access to a toxic dust, spray the Earth,
putting all but a few humans to sleep ( INVASION); in the best ASF manner
- the book's resemblance to the work of Eric Frank RUSSELL is striking they are ultimately sent packing. [JC]
BURKHOLZ, HERBERT
[r] ESP.
BURKS, ARTHUR J.
(1898-1974) US military man and writer who, after some years in the US
Army, began publishing fantasy with "Thus Spake the Prophetess" for Weird
Tales in 1924 and sf with "Monsters of Moyen" for ASF in 1930. After two
decades of high productivity, he remained intermittently active into the
1960s, with time out for further service in WWII. Only one of his sf
novels, The Great Mirror (1942 Science Fiction Quarterly; 1952), has been
reprinted in book form. The others included "Earth, the Marauder" (1930
ASF), "The Mind Master" (1932 ASF), "Jason Sows Again" (1938 ASF),
"Survival" and its sequel "Exodus" (both 1938 Marvel Science Stories) and
"The Far Detour" (1942 Science Fiction Quarterly). Much of his best work
was fantasy, including The Great Amen (1938), Look Behind You! (coll 1954

chap), Black Medicine (coll 1966) and The Casket (1973). AJB was one of
the most prolific of all PULP-MAGAZINE writers: his sf and fantasy
constitute only a small fraction of his prodigious output. [JC/MJE]
BURLAND, HARRIS
J.B. HARRIS-BURLAND.
BURNS, ALAN
(1929- ) UK writer and academic long resident in the USA. Some of his
FABULATIONS, like Europe After the Rain (1965), Babel (1969) and
Dreamerika! (1972), utilize sf instruments to grapple with a surreal
vision of a modern world toppling jaggedly into chaos. His techniques on
occasion resemble those adopted by J.G. BALLARD during the 1960s. [JC]
BURNS, CHARLES
(1955- ) US COMIC-strip artist and writer, born in Washington DC and now
based in Philadelphia. The drawing of his FABULATIONS displays a strange,
heavily stylized vision; his work has been widely published in Italy
(notably in Vanity), Spain (El Vibora) and France ( METAL HURLANT) as well
as in his native USA (Heavy Metal, Village Voice, National Lampoon, Face
and Death Rattle). His famous El Borbah strips, collected as El Borbah
(graph coll 1985) and as Hard-Boiled Defective Stories (graph coll 1988),
feature an eponymous private eye who is not so much hard-boiled as
rock-hard-boiled. El Borbah has a black metal head with only rudimentary
features, and wears only a black shiny leotard and black boots; his
surreal adventures often contain sf elements. The series shows the
influence of Chester Gould (of Dick Tracy fame) in its heavy-line style
and its bizarre characters. Here, as in his serial Big Baby (collected as
Big Baby: Curse of the Molemen graph coll 1986) and his continuing
self-syndicated strip distributed to freesheets and street-level papers
throughout the USA, CB creates a world peopled by the inhabitants and
served by the machinery of US 1950s B-movies. [RT/SW]Other work: Teen
Plague (graph 1989), epic horror story; Skin Deep (graph 1992).
BURNS, JIM
(1948- ) Welsh illustrator, primarily of sf, born in Cardiff, with a
diploma from St Martin's School of Art, London. During 1973-9 his work was
exclusively for UK publishers, notably Sphere Books, and he was not really
known in the USA until publication of his illustrated book Planet Story
(1979), with story by Harry HARRISON. Since 1980 much of his book-cover
work has been for US publishers, including BANTAM BOOKS, ACE BOOKS,
Berkley and Byron PREISS, including the interior black-and-white
illustrations for the latter's Eye (coll 1985) by Frank HERBERT. JB's work
(in many media, but mostly acrylics) is realistic, subtly textured, well
known for its attractive women (sometimes attacked as sexist) and
constantly inventive, and gives ample evidence in its detail that JB somewhat unusually in this field - actually reads the books that he
illustrates. His work is spectacularly commercial (but not merely so) and,
along with that of Don MAITZ and Michael WHELAN, perhaps the most
proficient currently (1992) being produced in the field. More than 100 of
his covers may be seen in Lightship (coll 1985), with text by Christopher
EVANS. In 1987 JB became the first and so far only non-US winner of a HUGO

for Best Professional Artist. [PN]See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD;
ILLUSTRATION; TECHNOLOGY.
BURROUGHS, EDGAR RICE
(1875-1950) US writer. Educated at Michigan Military Academy, ERB served
briefly in the US Cavalry. His early life was marked by numerous false
starts and failures - at the time he started writing, aged 36, he was a
pencil-sharpener salesman - but it would seem that the impulse to create
psychically charged SCIENCE-FANTASY environments was deep-set and
powerful, for he began with a great rush of energy, and within two years
had initiated three of his four most important series.A PRINCESS OF MARS
(1912 All-Story Magazine as "Under the Moons of Mars" as by Norman Bean;
1917), a fantastic solution to mid-life frustrations, opens the long
Barsoom sequence of novels set on MARS (Barsoom), which established that
planet as a venue for dream-like and interminable sagas in which sf and
fantasy protocols mix indiscriminately as a sort of enabling gear. The
Gods of Mars (1913 All-Story; 1918) and The Warlord of Mars (1913-14
All-Story; 1919) further recount the exploits of John Carter as he battles
with various green, yellow and black men and wins the hand of the
red-skinned (and oviparous) princess Dejah Thoris. Starring different
central characters, the series continued in Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1916
All-Story Weekly; 1920), The Chessmen of Mars (1922), The Master Mind of
Mars (1928), A Fighting Man of Mars (1931), Swords of Mars (1936),
Synthetic Men of Mars (1940), Llana of Gathol (1941 AMZ; fixup 1948) and
John Carter of Mars (1941-3 AMZ; coll 1964). "John Carter and the Giant of
Mars", in the last volume, was originally written as a juvenile tale with
ERB's son, John Coleman BURROUGHS, and was later expanded by ERB. The
standard of storytelling and invention is high in the Barsoom books,
Chessmen and Swords being particularly fine; but critics tend not to
accept the series as good sf. Although Carter's adventures take place on
another planet, he travels there by magical means, and Barsoom itself is
inconsistent and scientifically implausible. It is clear, however, that
ERB's immense popularity has nothing to do with conventional sf virtues,
for it depends on storylines and venues as malleable as dreams, exotic and
dangerous and unending.The Tarzan saga is just as much sf (or non-sf) as
the Barsoom series. Much influenced by H. Rider HAGGARD, ERB did not
imitate one of that writer's prime virtues: his sense of reality. Tarzan's
Africa is far removed from Allan Quatermain's, and has to be accepted as
sheer fantasy, no more governed by the reality principle than Barsoom.
Tarzan of the Apes (1912 All-Story; 1914), the story of an English
aristocrat's son raised in the jungle by "great apes" (of a nonexistent
species), was immensely popular from the beginning, and ERB continued
producing sequels to the end of his career. In most of them Tarzan has
unashamedly fantastic adventures-discovering lost cities and live
dinosaurs, being reduced to 18in (46cm) in height, visiting the Earth's
core, etc. The early The Return of Tarzan (1913 New Story; 1915), The
Beasts of Tarzan (1914 All-Story Cavalier; 1916), The Son of Tarzan (1915
All-Story Cavalier; 1917) and Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (1916
All-Story Cavalier; 1918) are not among the best in the series, although
Jungle Tales of Tarzan (coll 1919; vt Tarzan's Jungle Tales 1961 UK) is
cleverly reminiscent of Rudyard KIPLING's two Jungle Books (1894, 1895).

The best Tarzan novels came in the middle period: Tarzan the Untamed (coll
of linked stories 1920), Tarzan the Terrible (1921), Tarzan and the Golden
Lion (1923), Tarzan and the Ant Men (1924; rev 1924), Tarzan, Lord of the
Jungle (1928), Tarzan and the Lost Empire (1929) and Tarzan at the Earth's
Core (1930). Later the series deteriorated, becoming ever more repetitive:
Tarzan the Invincible (1931), Tarzan Triumphant (1932), Tarzan and the
City of Gold (1931 Argosy; 1933; cut 1952), Tarzan and the Lion Man
(1934), Tarzan and the Leopard Men (1935), Tarzan's Quest (1936), Tarzan
and the Forbidden City (1938; cut vt Tarzan in the Forbidden City 1940),
Tarzan the Magnificent (fixup 1939) and Tarzan and the Foreign Legion
(1947). Two posthumous books are Tarzan and the Madman (1964) and Tarzan
and the Castaways (1939-41 various mags; coll 1965), neither of much
merit. Two mildly interesting offshoots of the main series were The Tarzan
Twins (1927; cut 1935; rev by other hands vt Tarzan and the Tarzan Twins
in the Jungle 1938) and its sequel, Tarzan and the Tarzan Twins with
Jad-Bal-Ja, the Golden Lion (1936), both being assembled as Tarzan and the
Tarzan Twins (omni 1963). Despite ERB's overproduction, Tarzan is a
remarkable creation, and possibly the best-known fictional character of
the century. Part of Tarzan's fame is due to the many film adaptations,
particularly those of the 1930s starring Johnny Weissmuller; none of these
are very faithful to the books.ERB's third major series, the Pellucidar
novels based on the HOLLOW-EARTH theory of John Cleves SYMMES, began with
At the Earth's Core (1914 All-Story Weekly; 1922) and continued in
Pellucidar (1915 All-Story; 1923), Tanar of Pellucidar (1930), Tarzan at
the Earth's Core (a notable "overlap" volume), Back to the Stone Age
(1937), Land of Terror (1944) and Savage Pellucidar (1942 AMZ; fixup,
incorporating 1 previously unpublished story, 1963). Pellucidar is perhaps
the best of ERB's locales - a world without time where dinosaurs and
beast-men roam circularly forever - and is a perfect setting for
bloodthirsty romantic adventure. The first of the series was filmed
disappointingly as AT THE EARTH'S CORE (1976).A fourth series, the Venus
sequence - created much later in ERB's career - concerns the exploits of
spaceman Carson Napier on VENUS, and consists of Pirates of Venus (1932
Argosy; 1934), Lost on Venus (1935), Carson of Venus (1939) and Escape on
Venus (1941-2 Fantastic Adventures; fixup 1946). These books are not as
stirring and vivid as the Barsoom series. A posthumous story, "The Wizard
of Venus", was published in Tales of Three Planets (coll 1964) and
subsequently as the title story of a separate paperback, The Wizard of
Venus (coll 1970; vt The Wizard of Venus and Pirate Blood 1984). Two of
the stories from Tales of Three Planets, "Beyond the Farthest Star" (1942)
and the posthumous "Tangor Returns", form the opening of a fifth series
which ERB abandoned. They are of interest because they are his only tales
with an interstellar setting. The two stories were subsequently
republished as a paperback entitled Beyond the Farthest Star (coll
1965).Of ERB's non-series tales, perhaps the finest is The Land that Time
Forgot (1918 Blue Book in 3 parts; fixup 1924; vt in 3 vols under original
part-titles: The Land that Time Forgot 1982, The People that Time Forgot
1982 and Out of Time's Abyss 1982), set in the lost world of Caspak near
the South Pole, and cunningly presenting in literal form - for animals
here metamorphose through evolutionary stages - the dictum that ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny. The book was loosely adapted into two films, The

LAND THAT TIME FORGOT (1975) and The PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT (1977). Also
of interest is The Moon Maid (1923-25 Argosy All-Story Weekly as "The Moon
Maid", "The Moon Men" and "The Red Hawk"; cut fixup 1926; vt The Moon Men
1962; vt in 2 vols and with text restored as The Moon Maid 1962 and The
Moon Men 1962), which describes a civilization in the hollow interior of
the MOON and a future INVASION of the Earth.Among ERB's other books, those
which can be claimed as sf are: The Eternal Lover (1914-15 All-Story
Weekly; fixup 1925; vt The Eternal Savage 1963), a prehistoric adventure
involving TIME TRAVEL and featuring a character, Barney Custer, who
reappears in the RURITANIAN The Mad King (1914-15 All-Story Weekly; fixup
1926); The Monster Men (1913 All-Story as "A Man without a Soul"; 1929), a
reworking of the FRANKENSTEIN theme which should not be confused with The
Man without a Soul (1916 All-Story Weekly as "The Return of the Mucker";
1922 UK; vt The Return of the Mucker 1974 US), which is not fantasy or sf;
Jungle Girl (1932; vt Land of Hidden Men 1963), about a lost civilization
in Cambodia; The Cave Girl (1913-17 All-Story Weekly; fixup 1925), another
prehistoric romance; and Beyond Thirty (1916 All Around Magazine;
circa1955chap; vt The Lost Continent 1963), a story set in the 22nd
century after the collapse of European civilization; along with The
Man-Eater (circa 1955 chap), it was reprinted as Beyond Thirty and the
Man-Eater (omni 1957).It has often been said that ERB's works have small
literary or intellectual merit. Nevertheless, because their lack of
realistic referents frees them from time, because their efficient
narrative style helps to compensate for their prudery and racism, and
because ERB had a genius for the literalization of the dream, they have
endured. His "rediscovery" during the 1960s was an astonishing publishing
phenomenon, with the majority of his books being reprinted regularly. ERB
has probably had more imitators than any other sf writer, ranging from
Otis Adlebert KLINE in the 1930s to Kenneth BULMER (writing as Alan Burt
Akers) in the 1970s, with even a much later writer like Terry BISSON
homaging him in Voyage to the Red Planet (1990). There have been no
"official" continuations of his series, however, with the exception of
Tarzan and the Valley of Gold * (1966) by Fritz LEIBER and Tarzan, King of
the Apes * (1983) by Joan D. VINGE, the latter being more accurately
described as a rewriting. When some UK paperback firms, like CURTIS WARREN
with Azan the Apeman ( Marco GARRON), attempted to capitalize on Tarzan,
the ERB estate obtained injunctions halting publication. Later US attempts
at similar series, like the New Tarzan books (1964-5) by Barton WERPER and
Tarzan at Mars' Core (1977) by Edward Hirschman (1950- ), were similarly
dealt with. Serious sf writers who owe a debt to ERB include Leigh
BRACKETT, Ray BRADBURY, Michael MOORCOCK (as Edward P. Bradbury) and,
above all, Philip Jose FARMER, whose Lord Grandrith and Ancient Opar
novels are among the most enjoyable latter-day Burroughsiana. [DP/JC]About
the author: Golden Anniversary Bibliography of Edgar Rice Burroughs (1962;
rev 1964) by H.H. Heins; Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure (1965;
rev 1968) by Richard A. LUPOFF; The Big Swingers (1967) by Robert W.
Fenton; "The Undisciplined Imagination: Edgar Rice Burroughs and Lowellian
Mars" by R.D. MULLEN in SF: The Other Side of Realism (1971) ed Thomas D.
CLARESON; Tarzan Alive (1972) by Philip Jose Farmer; Edgar Rice Burroughs:
The Man who Created Tarzan (1975) by Irwin Porges; A Guide to Barsoom
(1976) by J.F. Roy; Tarzan and Tradition: Classical Myth in Popular

Literature (1981) by E.B. Holtsmark.See also: ALIENS; AMAZING STORIES;
ANDROIDS; ANTHROPOLOGY; APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD); BOYS'
PAPERS; COLLECTIONS; COMICS; CRYONICS; DIME-NOVEL SF; ECOLOGY;
EVOLUTION;
FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FANTASY; GAMES AND SPORTS; GAMES AND TOYS; HEROES;
HISTORY OF SF; ISLANDS; JUPITER; LOST WORLDS; MUSIC; ORIGIN OF MAN;
PARALLEL WORLDS; PASTORAL; PLANETARY ROMANCE; PULP MAGAZINES;
RECURSIVE
SF; SCIENTIFIC ERRORS; SENSE OF WONDER; SERIES; SEX; SPACESHIPS; SUSPENDED
ANIMATION; SWORD AND SORCERY; TERRAFORMING; TRANSPORTATION; WAR;
WEAPONS.
BURROUGHS, JOHN COLEMAN
(1913-1979) US illustrator and writer, the younger son of Edgar Rice
BURROUGHS and actively involved in his father's productions. He
illustrated 13 of ERB's titles, and drew the weekly comic strip John
Carter of Mars from Dec 1941 to its termination in 1943. This strip has
been reproduced as John Carter of Mars (graph coll 1970). JCB's sf novel,
Treasure of the Black Falcon (1967), features undersea adventures and
ALIEN contact. [JC]
BURROUGHS, WILLIAM S(EWARD)
(1914- ) US writer. Born into a successful business family, WSB was a
Harvard graduate in English literature in 1936. A drop-out thereafter, he
lived in Mexico, North Africa and the UK, and for many years was a heroin
addict. He began writing in the late 1930s, but had no success until the
early 1950s when he wrote two confessional books: Junky (1953 as by
William Lee; rev vt as by WSB Junkie 1977) and Queer (written 1950s;
1985), which were respectively about drug-addiction and homosexuality,
themes that have continued to dominate WSB's work. Although largely
unpublished, WSB was immensely influential among the Beat writers of the
1950s - notably Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg - and already had an
underground reputation before the appearance of his first important book,
The Naked Lunch (1959 France; vt Naked Lunch 1962 US). This nightmarish
SATIRE, first published by the daring and influential Olympia Press in
Paris, contains large elements of sf - e.g., the DYSTOPIAS of "Freeland"
and "Interzone", and some outre biological fantasy. Brilliantly written,
funny and scatological, it is accepted as a modern classic; an inventive
adaptation was filmed as Naked Lunch (1992) by David CRONENBERG. WSB's
writings since are a bibliographer's despair, and no attempt can be made
here to list all the pamphlets issued by various underground publishers.
His major novels of this period, however, are The Soft Machine (1961
France; rev 1966 US), The Ticket that Exploded (1962 France; rev 1967 US),
Nova Express (1964), The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1971; rev 1979 UK)
and Exterminator! (1973). In these works, WSB experimented with "cut-up"
techniques, the importance of which has been overemphasized. More
significant is the vividness of the imagery and the urgency of the subject
matter. Much concerned with the abuses of power, WSB uses addiction as an
all-embracing metaphor for the ways in which our lives are controlled. He
has also brought into luridly exemplary perspective many sf metaphors;
e.g., the "Nova Mob", galactic gangsters who are taking over our planet.

Images of space travel and "biomorphic horror" (J.G. Ballard's phrase)
abound.Later work has retained the corrosiveness of the worldview, but in
narrations that verge, with some irony, towards the conventional. Port of
Saints (1973 Switzerland; rev 1980 US), Cities of the Red Night (1981) and
The Place of Dead Roads (1984) can together be thought of as a kind of
trilogy in which the genres of the West miscegenate, breed, and descry the
road ahead. Interzone (coll 1989) contains some surreal matter.WSB has
borrowed ideas from all areas of popular culture - films, COMICS,
Westerns, sf - and the resulting powerful melange has analogies with Pop
Art. His influence can be detected in the sf of J.G. BALLARD, Michael
MOORCOCK, John T. SLADEK, Norman SPINRAD and others. Overt pastiches of
his work by sf writers include Barrington J. BAYLEY's "The Four-Colour
Problem" (1971) and Philip Jose FARMER's "The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod"
(1968), the latter a Tarzan story in the manner of WSB rather than Edgar
Rice BURROUGHS. [DP/JC]Other works: Dead Fingers Talk (1963 UK), a kind of
alternative version of The Naked Lunch; The Last Words of Dutch Schultz
(1970 UK), a play; Bladerunner: A Movie (chap 1979), nothing to do with
the 1982 film BLADE RUNNER; The Cat Inside (1986 chap); The Letters of
William S. Burroughs, 1945-1959 (coll 1993).About the author: "Myth-Maker
of the 20th Century" by J.G. Ballard in NW 142, 1964; "The Paris Review
Interview" in Writers at Work (1968) ed George Plimpton; The Job:
Interview with William Burroughs (1969) by Daniel Odier (trans 1970); "Rub
Out the Word" in City of Words (1971) by Tony Tanner; Descriptive
Catalogue of the WSB Archive (1973) compiled by Miles Associates; William
Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (1977) by Eric Mottram; Literary Outlaw:
The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (1989) by Ted Morgan.See also:
CYBERPUNK; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MUSIC.
BURY, STEPHEN
Neal STEPHENSON.
BUSBY, F(RANCIS) M(ARION)
(1921- ) US writer and long-time sf fan, co-editor with his wife Elinor
Busby of the HUGO-winning FANZINECry, producing some of his early work as
by Renfrew Pemberton. He began publishing sf stories with "A Gun for
Grandfather" for Future Science Fiction in 1957, which appears in Getting
Home (coll 1987). He did not write any novels until much later, after
attending the CLARION SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' WORKSHOP in 1972, at which
point he went freelance as a writer. His books began with the SPACE-OPERA
Demu series about a hijacked human, Barton, and his war against the ALIEN
Demu: Cage a Man (1974) and The Proud Enemy (1975), both assembled with
the book-length "End of the Line" plus "The Learning of Eeshta" (1973) as
The Demu Trilogy (omni 1980). The first, superior, instalment is
particularly effective in its depiction of Barton's imprisonment and
eventual escape. FMB's second sequence, which has shifted tone and
protagonists over the years, began with Rissa Kerguelen (1976) and The
Long View (1976), which two were actually a single extremely long novel
and were republished as such, reset and with minor revisions, as Rissa
Kerguelen (1977; vt in 3 vols as Young Rissa [1984], Rissa and Tregare
[1984] and the original second volume, The Long View [1984]). Ambitious,
and featuring a rather diffuse character portrait of its female

protagonist to justify its length, the Rissa Kerguelen story is, in
essence, a stylistically awkward tale of bureaucratic oppression on Earth,
flight to the stars, interstellar conflict and eventual revenge. The
rhythm picks up somewhat but the portents of significance tend to fade in
later volumes, which sooner or later connect with the earlier tale: Zelde
M'Tana (1980), which is something of an offshoot, and the Bran Tregare
novels, about Rissa's eventual husband: The Star Rebel (1984) and Rebel's
Quest (1985), both assembled as The Rebel Dynasty, Volume I (omni 1987),
and Alien Debt (1985) and Rebel's Seed (1986), both assembled as The Rebel
Dynasty, Volume II (omni 1988). [JC]Other works: All These Earths (fixup
1978); The Breeds of Man (1988), about AIDS; Slow Freight (1991); If This
is Winnetka, You Must be Judy (1974 in Universe 5 ed Terry CARR; 1992
chap); The Singularity Project (1993); Islands of Tomorrow (1994).See
also: MEDICINE.
BUTLER, DAVID
(1941- ) UK writer whose first novel, The Man who Mastered Time (1986),
rather ponderously confronts its protagonist, via TIME TRAVEL, with some
revelations about the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. [JC]
BUTLER, JACK
(1944- ) US writer and college administrator. Most of JB's fiction - like
his first novel, Jujitsu for Christ (1986) - has dealt with his native US
South, but his second, Nightshade (1989), is a bravura and literate sf
novel combining an effective presentation of human settlements on MARS
with a scientific rationale for vampires - plus an examination of AI.
Although the book shows a sophisticated knowledge of contemporary sf, JB's
publishers marketed it for a non-genre audience; nor were they likely to
be mistaken in also addressing the vast Living in Little Rock With Miss
Little Rock (1993), which is narrated by the Holy Ghost, to the same
readership. [GF]
BUTLER, JOAN
Robert W. ALEXANDER.
BUTLER, NATHAN
Jerry SOHL.
BUTLER, OCTAVIA E(STELLE)
(1947- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Crossover" in Clarion
(anth 1971) ed Robin Scott WILSON, but who made no impact on the sf field
until the first appearance of tales in the Patternist series:
Patternmaster (1976), Mind of my Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), WILD SEED
(1980) and Clay's Ark (1984). The order of publication has little to do
with internal chronology; indeed, the first volume published stands last
in a sequence that runs from the late 17th century into the FAR FUTURE.
WILD SEED, which begins in 1690, demonstrates the very considerable
strength of OEB's imagination in being a prequel manifestly more
interesting than much of the material it adumbrates. The setting is
Africa. A 4000-year-old body-changer, Doro, who has been long engaged on a
breeding programme designed to produce a race of superior humans with whom
he can feel at home, selects for this purpose the "wild seed"
shape-changer Anwanyu; their graphically ambivalent relationship is

described in terms which potently evoke reflections on everything from
family romance and SEX and FEMINISM to slavery itself (OEB is herself
Black, and several of her novels directly and tellingly conflate this
range of issues). Doro and his son both breed with Anwanyu, and found with
her a sanctuary in New England and later in Louisiana where her MUTANT
children can grow to adulthood. Mind of my Mind, set in contemporary
California, focuses on the formal founding of the Patternist gestalt
community, which begins to articulate itself into the hierarchical social
organism of the final (though first-written) tale. Survivor takes place in
a moderately distant future when Earth has become dominated by
Patternists, whose hierarchies conflate family ties and a range of PSI
POWERS into a complex whole. The novel depicts a conflict between
star-travelling "mutes" - normal humans - and the ALIEN inhabitants of the
planet to which, in a kind of missionary endeavour, they have been sent.
Clay's Ark, set on Earth, depicts a conflict between those humans who have
been transfigured by an extraterrestrial virus into intensely aggressive
monsters and those, Patternist and mute, who have not been infected; an
odour of plague invests the extraordinarily savage telling of this tale.
In Patternmaster, Clayarks and Patternists continue what has become an
age-long conflict, now brought to a head by a family dispute as to the
proper inheritor of the role of Patternmaster: the one who wins will
exercise paranormal control over the entire scene, making a Heaven or a
Hell with his or her one voice. The strength of the Patternist books lies
not in the sometimes routine premises laid down in the first published
volume but in OEB's capacity to inhabit her venues with characters whose
often anguished lives strike the reader as anything but frivolous.One
singleton appeared while the larger series was being published, and did
not fail to be similarly harrowing. In KINDRED (1979) a contemporary Black
woman suffers a transition, by TIME TRAVEL, to the 19th-century South,
where she becomes a slave: the nightmarishness of the concept alone is
intensely educative in effect; the telling of the tale is just as
effective. OEB has written few shorter stories, but those she has
published are impressive. They include "Speech Sounds" (1983), which won a
HUGO, "Bloodchild" (1984), which won both Hugo and NEBULA, and The Evening
and the Morning and the Night (1987 Omni; 1991 chap).Her main work of the
1980s was contained in a second sequence, the Xenogenesis books: Dawn
(1987), Adulthood Rites (1987) and Imago (1989), all three being assembled
as Xenogenesis (omni 1989). Thematic likenesses with the previous series once again the human race is subjected to an intense breeding programme are evident, but prove of little importance, for the Xenogenesis books are
very differently told. The human race has managed to almost entirely
destroy itself and its planet, and only a few relics have survived in
SUSPENDED ANIMATION aboard the great interstellar ship of the visiting
three-sexed, exogamous, gene-trading Oankali, who reawake selected humans
in order to breed with them. Much of the plot takes place on a
rehabilitated segment of Earth, but the action there is arguably
peripheral to the exposition of the central concept: the presentation of a
convincingly alien species, and the marriage of that species to those
humans who can abandon the territoriality/aggression knot which has proven
to be a fatal evolutionary dead-end.OEB then wrote her second singleton,
Parable of the Sower (1993), which is set in the early 21st century, at a

period of systems collapse; the empath narrator escapes the collapsing
enclave where she was raised, while simultaneously creating a humanist
religion designed to focus humanity's attention on the stars. At times OEB
tends to succumb to the exigencies of GENRE-SF plotting, but again and
again, in both her main series and in her shorter work, clarity burns
through. [JC]See also: IMMORTALITY; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION
MAGAZINE; MEDICINE; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS.
BUTLER, SAMUEL
(1835-1902) UK writer, educated at Cambridge, never married, emigrated to
live in New Zealand 1859-64, best known for his posthumously published
autobiographical novel, The Way of all Flesh (1903), which describes the
conflict between SB and his minister father, the conflict that also
provided much of the force of the SATIRE on RELIGION in his two UTOPIAS,
Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872; rev 1872; rev 1901) and Erewhon
Revisited (1901), in which the Musical Banks closely resemble the
19th-century Established Church. Erewhon and its sequel are set in a New
Zealand utopia where MACHINES have been banned for many years, because (in
a harsh parody of Darwin's theory of EVOLUTION, which SB disliked) of
human fears that machines, in their rapid evolutionary progress, would
soon supplant Man. The visitor to this utopia - which mixes DYSTOPIAN
elements freely with its more attractive aspects - is named Higgs, and his
eventual escape from Erewhon in a balloon triggers a new religion in that
country, Sunchildism. The sequel is devoted mainly to this faith and
Higgs's effect upon it on his return, in an analogical satire on
Christianity's origins and growth and the legend of the Second Coming. SB
was a compulsive speculator in and chivvier at ideas, and his two utopias
are densely packed with parodic commentary on all aspects of 19th-century
civilization. The calibre of his mind is indicated by his suggested
modification to Darwin's theory - that more than chance was required to
explain the variations that make for survival. In this he prefigured some
of Darwin's own later thought, though generally his anti-Darwinian
propaganda displayed a cavalier attitude to scientific evidence.
[JC/DIM]See also: ANONYMOUS SF AUTHORS; AUTOMATION; HISTORY OF SF;
HUMOUR;
MUSIC; NEW ZEALAND; PROTO SCIENCE FICTION; TECHNOLOGY.
BUTLER, WILLIAM
(1929- ) US author best known for non-genre novels. The Butterfly
Revolution (1962), which is sf, depicts a 1960s-based nightmare of what
happens to the world in the absence of adults. [JC]Other works: The House
at Akiya (1963), a ghost story; Mr Three (1964).
BUTOR, MICHEL
(1926- ) French critic and novelist, principally known as a leading
exponent of the nouveau roman. MB was one of the first mainstream and
academic critics to consider sf seriously according to the same standards
as general literature. He published an invigorating analysis of Jules
VERNE as early as 1949, and examined the dilemmas and future potential of
the field in his penetrating study, "La crise de croissance de la SF"
(1953); this was first trans by Richard Howard as "SF: The Crisis of its
Growth" for Partisan Review in 1967, and, as "The Crisis in the Growth of

Science Fiction", appeared along with "The Golden Age in Jules Verne"
(trans by Patricia Dreyfus for Repertoire [coll 1960]) in Inventory (coll
trans 1968 US). MB has served on the jury panel of the Prix Apollo (
AWARDS). [MJ]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF.
BUTTERWORTH, MICHAEL
(1947- ) UK writer, editor - in the latter capacity initially of the
semiprofessional underground magazine Corridors, later called Wordworks and cofounder and codirector with David BRITTON of Savoy Books. He began
publishing sf with "Girl" for NW in 1966, and contributed regularly to the
magazine for the rest of its existence. He began publishing novels with
the first of the Hawklords sequence, The Time of the Hawklords (1976),
with Michael MOORCOCK credited on the title-page and cover as co-author,
though the "List of Credits" at the end of the volume lists Moorcock as
Producer/Director and MB as Writer; MB was fundamentally responsible for
the book, as well as for its sequel, Queens of Deliria (1977), with
Moorcock also credited (this time unwillingly). The sequence, based on the
real-life rock group Hawkwind, focuses on an electronic instrument that
allays all pain and tension. With Britton, MB co-edited two defiant
anthologies drawn from the world of Savoy Books, a firm which more than
once suffered in the Manchester police force's battle against "obscenity":
The Savoy Book (anth 1978) and Savoy Dreams (anth 1984). [JC]Other works:
A sequence tied to the second season of SPACE 1999, comprising: Planets of
Peril * (1977), Mind-Breaks of Space * (1977) with Jeff Jones, The
Space-Jackers * (1977), The Psychomorph * (1977), The Time Fighters *
(1977) and The Edge of the Infinite * (1977).
BUZZATI, DINO
(1906-1972) Italian writer and journalist. From his first unsettling
children's stories in the 1930s he was noted for the KAFKA-like anxiety
riddling his apparently simple plots. Catastrophe (original stories
1949-58; coll trans Judith Landry and Cynthia Jolly 1965 UK) is perhaps
the most fully successful volume issued during his life; many of its
stories are surrealist fables, always with a parable-like moral edge.
Later selections, which intensify a sense of the claustrophobia of worlds
about to collapse like eggshells into chaos, are Restless Nights: Selected
Stories (coll trans Lawrence Venuti 1983 US) and The Siren: A Selection
(coll trans Lawrence Venuti 1984 US). In Il Grande Ritratto (1960; trans
Henry Reed as Larger than Life 1962 UK), a full-length novel and rather
less successful, a not very convincingly described COMPUTER complex is
programmed with the personality of a woman. [JC]Other works: Il Deserto
dei Tartari (1940; trans S.C. Hood as The Tartar Steppe 1952 UK).See also:
ITALY.
BYRNE, STUART J(AMES)
(1913- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Music of the Spheres"
for AMZ in 1935. He was intermittently active after WWII in the magazines,
sometimes writing as John Bloodstone, a name he used also for some routine
sf adventures, including The Golden Gods (1957), Children of the
Chronotron (1966), Godman! (1970) and Thundar, Man of Two Worlds (1971).
As SJB he wrote The Metamorphs (1959), Starman (1969), The Alpha Trap
(1976) and Star Man: The Universe Builder (coll of linked stories 1980).

[JC]
BY ROCKET TO THE MOON
Die FRAU IM MOND.
BYRON PREISS VISUAL PUBLICATIONS INC
Byron PREISS.
BYWATER, HECTOR CHARLES
(1884-1940) US writer of works on the nature and history of sea-power,
and of a future- WAR novel on the same theme, The Great Pacific War: A
History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933 (1925), which quite
remarkably underestimates the Japanese. In his Bywater: The Man who
Invented the Pacific War (1990), William H. Honan suggests that Admiral
Yamamoto read The Great Pacific War in the 1920s and used it as a
blueprint for his eventual attack on Pearl Harbor. [JC]

SF?
CABELL, JAMES BRANCH
(1879-1958) US writer, mostly of mannered, witty and in later life
sometimes rather enervated fantasies set in a Land of Fable Europe and
elsewhere; in some cases long after they were first published, he
assimilated a large number of these fantasies as episodes in the Biography
of the Life of Manuel. The imaginary kingdom of Poictesme is a central
thread running through the more than 20 volumes of the series, and ties
the whole - however arbitrarily - into a consistent purview. The stated
(but not chronologically consistent) proper ordering of the sequence is:
Beyond Life (1919); Figures of Earth (1921); The Silver Stallion (1926);
The Music from Behind the Moon (1926) and The White Robe (1928), both
assembled along with The Way of Ecben (1928) as The Witch-Woman (omni
1948); The Soul of Melicent (1913; rev vt Domnei 1920); Chivalry (1909;
rev 1921); Jurgen (1919); The Line of Love (coll of linked stories 1905;
rev 1921); The High Place (1923); Gallantry (1907; rev 1928); Something
about Eve (1927); The Certain Hour (1916); The Cords of Vanity (1909; rev
1920); From the Hidden Way (1916; rev 1924); The Jewel Merchants (1921);
The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck (1915); The Eagle's Shadow (1904; rev
1923); The Cream of the Jest (1917); The Lineage of Lichfield (1922);
Straws and Prayer-Books (1924). A second series - Smirt (1934), Smith
(1935) and Smire (1937), assembled as The Nightmare has Triplets (omni
1972) - carries the eponym (who is three in one) ever downwards, through
universes and incarnations: the effect is ironical.JBC suffered from
over-attention after the prosecution of Jurgen (most implausibly) for
obscenity, and after his subsequent fame and neglect his more recent
advocates - like James BLISH, who was for some time editor of the Cabell
Society journal Kalki - perhaps argued too strenuously for his
rehabilitation. By now, however, his place in US fiction is secure though
not central. His relevance to sf proper derives from his engagingly
haughty use of sf tropes - alternate worlds, DYSTOPIAS and UTOPIAS, TIME
TRAVEL, and even the building of planets. [JC]Other works: Taboo (1921
chap); These Restless Heads (1932); The King was in his Counting House
(1938); Hamlet had an Uncle (1940); The First Gentleman of America (1942);

There Were Two Pirates (1946) and a linked tale, The Devil's Own Dear Son
(1949).About the author: James Branch Cabell (1962) by Joe Lee Davis;
James Branch Cabell: A Complete Bibliography (1974) by James N. Hall ,
which includes A Supplement of Current Values of Cabell Books by Nelson
BOND ; James Branch Cabell: Centennial Essays (anth 1983) ed M. Thomas
Inge and Edgar E. MacDonald.See also: FANTASY; GODS AND DEMONS; SWORD AND
SORCERY.
CABOT, JOHN YORK
[s] David Wright O'BRIEN.
CADIGAN, PAT
Working name of US writer Patricia Oren Kearney Cadigan (1953- ), who
began publishing sf with "Death from Exposure" for SHAYOL in 1978; this
SEMIPROZINE, which she edited throughout its existence (1977-85), was
remarkable both for the quality of stories it published and for its
production values. She later assembled much of her best shorter work in
Patterns (coll 1989), where its cumulative effect is very considerable;
later stories appear in Home by the Sea (coll 1992) and Dirty Work (coll
1993). From the beginning, PC has been a writer who makes use of her
venues - usually NEAR-FUTURE, usually urban, and usually Californian
though often intensified by a sense of windswept, prairie desolation - as
highly charged gauntlets which her protagonists do not so much run as
cling to, surviving somehow. It was an effect also to be found in the
stories assembled in Letters from Home (coll 1991 UK) with Karen Joy
FOWLER and Pat MURPHY, each contributing her own tales.Unfortunately PC's
first novel, Mindplayers (fixup 1987), failed to sustain the intensity of
her shorter work, treating in simplistic fashion a vision of the human
mind as constituted of sequences of internal psychodramas into which a
healer may literally enter, given the proper tools. The idea, which had
been intensely and punishingly examined by Roger ZELAZNY in THE DREAM
MASTER (1966), is not in any sense sophisticated by the can-do METAPHYSIC
underlying the premise as PC described it 20 years later. Her next novel,
Synners (1991), on the other hand, takes full advantage of its
considerable length to translate the street-wise, CYBERPUNK involvedness
of her best short fiction into a comprehensive vision-racingly told,
linguistically acute, simultaneously pell-mell and precise in its
detailing - of a world dominated by the intricacies of the human/ COMPUTER
interface; it won the ARTHUR C. CLARKE award in 1992. The plot, which is
extremely complicated, deals mainly with a disease of the interface, where
computer viruses which pass for AIs are beginning to cause numerous human
deaths. Like William GIBSON's cyberpunk novels - and unlike Bruce
STERLING's - Synners offers no sense that the CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGHS
that proliferate throughout the text will in any significant sense
transform the overwhelming urbanized world, though there is some hint that
the system may begin to fail through its own internal imbalances. But at
the heart of Synners is the burning presence of the future. PC's third
novel, Fools (1992) - which won the Arthur C. Clarke award in 1995, the
first time it has been awarded twice to one writer - exercises a virtuoso
concision on similar material, through examining a near future environment
in which memories are marketable and promiscuously insertable, and

individual brains become arenas in which various selves engage in
agonistic fugues with each other. One of the most acutely intelligent of
1980s writers, PC currently seems to be learning from everything.
[JC]Other works: My Brother's Keeper (1988 IASFM; 1992 chap).See also:
MACHINES; PSYCHOLOGY.
CADY, JACK (ANDREW)
(1932- ) US writer, almost exclusively of horror, although one novel, The
Man who Could Make Things Vanish (1982), is a genuine sf DYSTOPIA set in a
very bleakly conceived NEAR-FUTURE right-wing USA; and "The Night We
Buried Road Dog" (1992) won a NEBULA award for Best Novella. [JC]Other
works: The Well (1980); The Jonah Watch (1981); McDowell's Ghost (1981);
Inagehi (1994); Street (1994).
CAIDIN, MARTIN
(1927- ) US writer, pilot and aerospace specialist, who has written over
80 nonfiction books, some for the juvenile market, mostly on aviation and
space exploration, beginning with Jets, Rockets and Guided Missiles (1950;
rev vt Rockets and Missiles 1954) with David C. Cooke and continuing with
texts like War for the Moon (1959; vt Race for the Moon 1960 UK) and I am
Eagle (1962) with G.S. Titov, the Soviet astronaut. MC's own firm, Martin
Caidin Associates, was designed to provide information and other services
to radio and tv in the areas of his special knowledge; he founded the
American Astronautical Society in 1953. He began publishing sf with The
Long Night (1956), in which a US city is fire-bombed, and gained
considerable success with Marooned (1964), later filmed as MAROONED (1969)
with Gregory Peck. Like much of his fiction, Marooned deals with
realistically depicted NEAR-FUTURE crises in space, in this case the need
to rescue astronauts trapped in orbit; it has been credited with inspiring
the 1975 US-USSR Apollo-Soyuz joint mission. Four Came Back (1968) deals
with human difficulties (and a mysterious plague) aboard a space platform.
A series of CYBORG adventures - Cyborg (1972), Operation Nuke (1973), High
Crystal * (1974) and Cyborg IV (1975)-served as inspiration and basis for
the successful tv series The SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN and its spin-off The
BIONIC WOMAN ; a later story, ManFac (1981) also presents an enforced
intimacy between human and machine in unambiguously positive terms. MC's
stories combine considerable storytelling drive with expertly integrated
technical information, and tend to be rather more convincing, therefore,
than the tv and film derivations they have inspired. [JC]Other works: No
Man's World (1967); The Last Fathom (1967); The God Machine (1968); The
Mendelov Conspiracy (1969; vt Encounter Three 1978); Anytime, Anywhere
(1969); The Cape (1971); Almost Midnight (1971); Maryjane Tonight at
Angels Twelve (1972); Destination Mars (1972); When War Comes (1972);
Three Corners to Nowhere (1975); Whip (1976); Aquarius Mission (1978);
Jericho 52 (1979); Star Bright (1980); Killer Station (1985); The Messiah
Stone (1986) and its sequel, Dark Messiah (1990); Zoboa (1986); Exit Earth
(1987); Prison Ship (1989); Beamriders! (1989; vt Beamriders 1990 UK); and
two Indiana Jones ties: Indiana Jones and the Sky Pirates * (1994) and
Indiana Jones and the White Witch * (1994)See also: COMPUTERS;
CYBERNETICS; UFOS; UNDER THE SEA.
CAINE, [Sir] (THOMAS HENRY) HALL

(1853-1931) UK writer of what were enormously bestselling novels in the
late 19th century but were almost forgotten by his death. The Mahdi, or
Love and Race (1894) depicts a NEAR-FUTURE uprising at the behest of the
eponymous leader of the faithful. The Eternal City (1901), printed in a
first edition of 100,000, sets a complex near-future intrigue alight in a
Pope-dominated Rome. The White Prophet (1909), again marginally displaced
into the future, is set in Egypt, where intrigue is rife. A play, The
Prime Minister (written c1911; 1918), set in the future, depicts romance
threatening policy. [JC]
CALDER, RICHARD
(1956- ) UK-born writer, in Thailand from 1990, who began publishing sf
with "Toxine" in Interzone: The 4th Anthology (anth 1989) ed John CLUTE,
Simon Ounsley and David PRINGLE; his early short fiction, almost always
densely post- CYBERPUNK in idiom and setting, was assembled as "The
Allure" and published, trans Hisashi Asakura, in Japanese (coll 1991
Japan). His first 2 novels-Dead Girls (dated 1992 but 1993 UK) and Dead
Boys (1994 UK)-mix horror and sf in depicting a world, loosely connected
to that of "Toxine" and others of his stories, which has been transformed
by NANOTECHNOLOGY into an over-heated, inordinately complex dazzlement of
an environment. Dead Girls centres on a "nanotech doll" or gynoid who
generates an AIDs-like disease in the humans she bloodsucks for their
genes, and is herself invasively disrupted by a bio-weapon "dust" which
scrambles the fractal programmes that enable her to operate. The novel
continues with excursions into the "cyberspace" within her deranged brain,
and much else; it is funny, ornately erotic, and frequently inspired. Dead
Boys, perhaps less sustainedly, continues the examination of a
not-unlikely 21st century. [JC]
CALDWELL, (JANET MIRIAM) TAYLOR (HOLLAND)
(1900-1985) US popular novelist whose first sf novel, The Devil's
Advocate (1952), though set in 1970, is in effect a right-wing
denunciation of the New Deal of the 1930s. Her second effort, Your Sins
and Mine (1955), is fundamentally FANTASY, in that the devastating drought
inflicted by the Lord upon the world for its sins can be removed by
assiduous prayer. She was also responsible for fantasies like The Listener
(1960) and its sequel, No One Hears but Him (1966), and Dialogues with the
Devil (1967). The Romance of Atlantis (1975), with Jess Stearn, is based
on a novel she first wrote when aged 12; TC claimed that it in turn was
based on her childhood dreams of her previous incarnation ( REINCARNATION)
as an empress in ATLANTIS. [JC]
CALIFORNIA MAN
ENCINO MAN.
CALISHER, HORTENSE
(1911- ) US writer of several MAINSTREAM novels set mostly on the US East
Coast. After an sf allegory, "In the Absence of Angels" (1951), which
associates the military occupation of the USA with a poet's own
imprisonment, came her sf novel Journal from Ellipsia (1965), which
depicts a somewhat metaphysical ALTERNATE WORLD where everything - as in
E.M. FORSTER's famous dictum - connects with everything, especially the

transcendental sex that permeates the narrative. [JC]Other work: Mysteries
of Motion (1983).
CALKINS, DICK
Working name of US COMIC-strip illustrator Richard T. Calkins
(1895-1962), who was born in Grand Rapids and studied at the Art Institute
in Chicago. In 1929 Philip NOWLAN scripted and DC illustrated BUCK ROGERS
IN THE 25TH CENTURY, a comic strip based on Nowlan's "Armageddon: 2419 AD"
(1928 AMZ) and "The Airlords of Han" (1929 AMZ), later published together
as Armageddon - 2419 AD (1962). Though DC's style was stiff and amateurish
by today's standards, the strip was extremely popular in the 1930s and
1940s. Its quality improved when Rick Yager joined him in some of the
chores from the 1930s; Yager succeeded DC at his retirement in 1948. The
artwork was never sophisticated, but DC's strong, simple lines were well
suited to fast-paced narrative. A selection of Buck Rogers adventures has
been reissued as The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
(coll 1969; rev 1977) ed Robert C. Dille. [JG/PN]See also: ILLUSTRATION;
RADIO.
CALLAHAN, WILLIAM
Raymond Z. GALLUN.
CALLENBACH, ERNEST
(1929- ) US environmentalist and writer whose own Banyan Tree Books
published his first novel, Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William
Weston (1974 American Review as "First Days in Ecotopia"; exp 1975), after
it had been refused by several professional houses; it was reported in the
mid-1980s to have sold more than 300,000 copies, which should come as no
surprise given the reasoned seductiveness of the UTOPIA premised in its
pages. As of 1999, Washington, Oregon and Northern California have been in
secession from the rest of the USA for almost two decades. The reporter
William Weston is allowed within the borders to make contact with (and if
possible to subvert) the Ecotopians. He finds irresistible the balance of
life there, the manner in which the new state has tamed the juggernaut of
TECHNOLOGY, and the refusal of its citizens to cost the world more than
they give the world; and he, too, becomes an Ecotopian. Ecotopia Emerging
(1981) is both a prequel and a kind of sequel to the previous book - a
prequel in its long and persuasively detailed presentation of the
Ecotopian route to secession, and the enormous power engendered by the
(sf-like) discovery of a cheap solar-energy catalyst; but a "sequel" by
virtue of treating the earlier book as being itself the inspiration for
the emergence, in our world, of a "real" Ecotopia. Unfortunately for what
may be guessed to have been EC's real-life hopes, a decade has passed
since his second attempt at arousal.Nonfiction texts which elaborate on
some of the procedures and theories of the fiction include The Ecotopian
Encyclopedia for the 80s: A Survival Guide for the Age of Inflation (1980)
and A Citizen Legislature (1985). [JC]
CALVERT, THOMAS
[s] Thomas Calvert MCCLARY.
CALVERTON, V(ICTOR) F(RANCIS)
(1900-1940) US writer whose sf novel, The Man Inside: Being the Record of

the Strange Adventures of Allen Steele Among the Xulus (1936), describes
some strange hypnotic experiments conducted in darkest Africa. [JC]
CALVINO, ITALO
(1923-1985) Italian novelist, born in Cuba, active since the end of WWII,
at first with realist works but soon with GOTHIC, surrealist romances of
great vigour and impact like Il Visconte dimezzato (1952) and Il Cavaliere
inesistente (1959)-trans together by A. Colquhoun as The Non-Existent
Knight and The Cloven Viscount 1962 UK) - and Il Barone rampante (1957;
trans A. Colquhoun as Baron in the Trees 1959 UK), three thematically
linked fables later assembled as I nostri antenati (omni 1960; in the
Colquhoun trans as Our Ancestors 1980 US). A more recent venture in the
same idiom is Il Castello dei Destini incrociati (coll of linked stories
1973; trans William Weaver as The Castle of Crossed Destinies 1977 US).
Beneath the FABULATION-drenched protocols of these stories - the
nonexistent knight, for instance, being an empty suit of armour with a
"passion" for the formalities and ceremonies that keeps it "alive"- lies a
concern for fundamental problems of being. IC's works closest to sf are
the two linked volumes Le Cosmicomiche (coll of linked stories 1965; trans
William Weaver as COSMICOMICS 1968 US) and Ti con zero (coll of linked
stories 1967; trans William Weaver as t zero 1969 US; vt Time and the
Hunter 1970 UK); both volumes feature and are told by the presence called
Qfwfq, who is the same age as the Universe. The various stories express in
emblematic form speculations and fables about the nature of life,
EVOLUTION, reality and so forth; they are witty, moving and, after their
strange fashion, effectively didactic. One of the stories in The Watcher
and Other Stories (1952-63; coll trans William Weaver 1971 US), "Smog"
(1958), a remarkable POLLUTION tale, is sf. Le citta invisibili (1972;
trans William Weaver as Invisible Cities 1974 US) frames fragmented
versions of Marco Polo's narrative of his voyages with a remarkable set of
meditations ostensibly triggered by the distant, surrealistic CITIES he
visits. Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (1979; trans William Weaver
as If on a Winter's Night a Traveler 1981 US) stunningly transfigures the
conventions and momentums of narrative into a Bunuelesque labyrinth. IC's
powers of invention were formally ingenious; at the same time he was an
extremely lucid writer. His use of sf subjects and their intermixing with
a whole array of contemporary literary devices made him a figure of
considerable interest for the future of the genre. [JC]Marcovaldo ovvera
le stagioni in citta (1976; trans William Weaver as Marcovaldo; or the
Seasons in the City1983 US); Gli, amori difficili (coll 1984; trans
William Weaver and others as Difficult Loves 1984 US); Sotto il sole
giaguaro (coll 1986; trans William Weaver as Under the Jaguar Sun 1988
US).See also: COSMOLOGY; ITALY; ORIGIN OF MAN; OULIPO.
CAMERON, BERL
House name used for sf novels published by CURTIS WARREN and written by
John S. GLASBY, Brian HOLLOWAY, Dennis HUGHES, David O'BRIEN and Arthur
ROBERTS. [JC]
CAMERON, ELEANOR (BUTLER)
(1912- ) Canadian-born US writer whose career has been exclusively
devoted to children's literature, and who received the National Book Award

in 1974 for one of her finer fantasies, The Court of the Stone Children
(1973); its sequel was To the Green Mountains (1975). She remains perhaps
best known for the sf Mushroom Planet sequence with which she began her
career: The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet (1954), Stowaway to
the Mushroom Planet (1956), Mr Bass's Planetoid (1958), A Mystery for Mr
Bass (1960) and Time and Mr Bass (1967). At the heart of the series is Mr
Bass, whose mysterious filter permits his young friends - who have built
him a SPACESHIP for the purpose of travelling there - to perceive the
planet Basidium. Though perhaps slightly wholesome, the adventures of Bass
and his companions on Basidium became, with justice, extremely popular.
[JC]Other works: The Terrible Churnadryne (1959); The Mysterious Christmas
Shell (1961); The Beast with the Magical Horn (1963); A Spell is Cast
(1964); Beyond Silence (1980), a timeslip fantasy.
CAMERON, IAN
Pseudonym of UK writer Donald Gordon Payne (1924- ), author of The Lost
Ones (1961; vt The Island at the Top of the World 1974 US) and The
Mountains at the Bottom of the World (1972 US; vt Devil Country 1976 UK).
The former, under what became as a result the later UK vt, was filmed by
Disney in 1973. The mechanics of IC's plots derive from LOST-WORLD
conventions generally - and, in the case of the second novel, from Conan
DOYLE specifically. Star-Raker (1962), as by Donald Gordon, is a
straightforward adventure. With George Erskine, he wrote two Counter Force
tales, Beware the Tektrons (1988) and Find the Tektrons (1988). Payne has
also written mainstream fiction as James Vance Marshall. [JC/PN]Other
work: The White Ship (1975).
CAMERON, JAMES
(1956- ) US film-maker. Originally a special-effects man and art director
with Roger CORMAN's New World - where he worked on BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS
(1980), ANDROID (1982) and several others including ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK
(1981) for which New World did the special effects - JC made an
inauspicious debut as director with Piranha II: Flying Killers (1981; vt
Piranha II: The Spawning; PIRANHA). However, he made a major impression
with his second film, The TERMINATOR (1984), a TIME-TRAVEL thriller with a
killer ROBOT. This low-budget success secured JC - and his then wife and
producer-writer partner Gale Anne HURD - the plum assignment of ALIENS
(1986), the follow-up to Ridley SCOTT's ALIEN (1979). Having improved on
the original - especially in his 150min director's cut, later released on
video - with this humanistic action movie of alien warfare, JC achieved a
free hand with The ABYSS (1989), the most expensive of several underwater
sf movies released at that time, and managed four-fifths of an excellent
film before fumbling with a climactic deep-sea close encounter; it was a
box-office disappointment. The half-hour longer The Abyss: Special Edition
director's cut, (1992) is not notably superior. Following this JC
separated personally from Hurd - who had in the meantime produced ALIEN
NATION (1988) and TREMORS (1990) - although the couple stayed together to
direct and produce TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991), a huge-budgeted
box-office success, perhaps the most violent pacifist movie ever made.
Critical response to Cameron's comedy thriller True Lies (1994), not sf
but again starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, was mixed. [KN/PN]See also:

CINEMA; HORROR IN SF.
CAMERON, J.D.
A house name used by BPVP ( Byron PREISS) for the Omega Sub sequence of
post- HOLOCAUST military-sf adventures about the crew of a nuclear sub
which survives the final war. The series comprises Omega Sub #1: Omega Sub
* (1991) by Mike JAHN, #2: Command Decision * (1991) by David ROBBINS, #3:
City of Fear * (1991) by Jahn, #4: Blood Tide * (1991) and #5: Death Dive
* (1992) and Raven Rising (1992), all by Robbins. [JC]
CAMERON, JOHN
(1927- ) US writer. His borderline sf novel, The Astrologer (1972), like
The Child (1976) by John Symonds (1914- ), deals with a new Virgin Mary
and a new Virgin Birth, in this case discovered via astrological means (
ASTRONOMY; MESSIAHS). [JC]See also: PSEUDO-SCIENCE; RELIGION.
CAMERON, JULIE
Lou CAMERON.
CAMERON, LOU
(1924- ) US illustrator and writer, active in comic books in the 1950s.
His sf, which was unremarkable, included two Swinging Spy tales-The Spy
with the Blue Kazoo (1967) and The Sky who Came in from the Copa (1967) as by Dagmar, and Cybernia (1972), as LC, which expresses COMPUTER
paranoia through the tale of a town in the grips of a mad brain. The
Darklings (1975), as by Julie Cameron, is fantasy. [JC]
CAMPANELLA, TOMMASO
(1568-1639) Italian philosopher, admitted into the Dominican order at the
age of 15. Like Francis BACON he attacked the reliance of contemporary
science on the authority of Aristotle, advocating observation and
experiment as the proper routes to knowledge in Philosophia Sensibus
Demonstrata (1591; in Latin). His important UTOPIA, Civitas Solis (1st MS
1602; 2nd MS 1612; 1623 in Latin; 3rd MS 1637; cut trans Henry Morley as
The City of the Sun in Ideal Commonwealths, coll 1885, ed Morley) was
written while he was imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition, accused of
having led a revolt in his native Calabria, then under Spanish rule. The
book describes a city with seven concentric circular walls which is ruled
by a philosopher-king, the Hoh or Metaphysicus; property is held in common
and the elements of science are inscribed on the walls for educational
purposes; flying machines and ships without sails are mentioned in
passing. [BS]See also: CITIES; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; ITALY.
CAMPBELL, CLYDE CRANE
[s] H.L. GOLD.
CAMPBELL, DAVID
[s] Leonard G. FISH.
CAMPBELL, H(ERBERT) J.
(1925- ) UK research chemist, writer and editor. He was active during the
early 1950s as a fan. After writing some science articles he gradually
branched out into the world of sf, as well as selling line drawings to
many magazines, including Amateur Photographer and Television Weekly. He

scripted the Daily Herald cartoon series Captain Universe and served as
technical editor and then editor 1952-6 of AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION,
contributing many scientific articles to the magazine, which in general
improved under his editorship. He also edited Tomorrow's Universe (anth
1953), Sprague de Camp's New Anthology (coll 1953 UK), Authentic Science
Fiction Handbook (1954 chap), mostly containing definitions of scientific
terms, and Authentic Book of Space (anth 1954), which last was a mixture
of articles and stories. Increased pressure of research work forced him to
leave the field in 1956; he gained a PhD in Chemistry in 1957, and from
that point concentrated on writing textbooks.His own fiction was not,
perhaps, of substantial interest, but his work was never incompetent.
Novels published under his own name include The Last Mutation (1951), The
Moon is Heaven (1951), a RECURSIVE tale which includes a portrait of
Arthur C. CLARKE, World in a Test Tube (1951), Beyond the Visible (1952),
Chaos in Miniature (1952), Mice - Or Machines (1952), Another Space Another Time (1953), Brain Ultimate (1953), The Red Planet (1953) and Once
Upon a Space (1954). Under the house name Roy SHELDON he wrote the Magdah
sequence - Mammoth Man (1952), Two Days of Terror (1952), Moment out of
Time (1952) and The Menacing Sleep (1952) - and the Shiny Spear sequence Atoms in Action (1953) and House of Entropy (1953). It is probable, though
not certain, that he also wrote most or all of the remaining Roy Sheldon
novels (with the exception of The Metal Eater, 1954, which was by E.C.
TUBB): Gold Men of Aureus (1951), Phantom Moon (1951), Energy Alive
(1951), Beam of Terror (1951), Spacewarp (1952) and The Plastic Peril
(1952). [SH/MJE]See also: ENTROPY; GREAT AND SMALL.
CAMPBELL INSPIRES
John W. Campbell, the well-known editor of AstoundingStories and
Astounding Science Fiction, was also well-known for planting story ideas
in the minds of his authors.Isaac Asimov said that Campbell gave him the
idea for "Nightfall," one of the most famous stories in science fiction.
He also creditsCampbell with codifying the Three Laws of Robotics.
Campbell also gave Robert Heinlein some good advice. Heinlein's first
novel,Sixth Column, is based on an idea of Campbell's.After becoming
editor of Astounding in 1937, Campbell retired from his own writing
career. When asked why he didn’t continue to write his own science fiction
stories, Campbell replied that he had a dozen stories in progress all over
the world. They weren’t written by him but, in many ways, they were his.
CAMPBELL, JOHN W(OOD) Jr
(1910-1971) US writer and editor who took a degree in physics in 1932
from MIT and Duke University. JWC was a devotee of the SF MAGAZINES from
their inception, and sold his first stories while still a teenager,
beginning with "Invaders from the Infinite" to AMAZING STORIES; however,
the manuscript was lost by editor T. O'Conor SLOANE, so it was his second
sale, "When the Atoms Failed" (1930), that became his first published
story.In the early 1930s JWC quickly built a reputation as E.E. "Doc"
SMITH's chief rival in writing galactic epics of superscience. The most
popular of these was the Arcot, Morey and Wade series, in which the heroes
faced a succession of battles of ever-increasing size fought with a
succession of wonderful weapons of ever-decreasing likelihood. Initially

published in various magazines from 1930, they were put into book form as
The Black Star Passes (fixup 1953), Islands of Space (1931 Amazing Stories
Quarterly; 1957) and Invaders from the Infinite (not his first, lost
story) (1932 Amazing Stories Quarterly; 1961); all were assembled as A
John W. Campbell Anthology (omni 1973). Also well received was The
Mightiest Machine (1934 ASF; 1947), but three sequels featuring its hero
Aarn Munro were rejected by ASF's editor F. Orlin TREMAINE, eventually
appearing in The Incredible Planet (coll 1949).The second phase of JWC's
career as a writer began with "Twilight" (1934), a tale of the FAR FUTURE
written in a moody, "poetic" style, the first of a number of stories, far
more literary in tone and varied in mood, published under the pseudonym
Don A. Stuart. From now on, JWC wrote little sf under his own name,
preferring to concentrate on the highly popular Stuart stories; exceptions
included the Penton and Blake series published in TWS in 1936-8 and
collected in The Planeteers (coll 1966 dos), and, on one occasion, the use
of the name Karl Van Campen for a story in an issue of ASF that already
contained a Stuart story and part of a JWC novel. He was by now becoming
closely identified with Tremaine's ASF, where all the Stuart stories
appeared; these included the Machine series: "The Machine", "The Invaders"
and "Rebellion" (all 1935). In 1936 he began, under his own name, a series
of 18 monthly articles on the Solar System, and from 1937 he also
published a number of articles as Arthur McCann. The climax of his
popularity came with a Stuart effort, The Thing from Another World (1938
ASF as "Who Goes There?"; 1952 chap Australia), a classic sf horror story
about an Antarctic research station menaced by a shape-changing ALIEN
invader, which was first filmed, without the shape-changing, as The THING
(1951), and later, also as The THING (1982), with the basic premise
restored. Far more famous under its original title than under the
film-influenced book retitling, "Who Goes There?" was perhaps the climax
of his fiction-writing career, and close to its end; Don A. Stuart's last
stories appeared in 1939. Two collections were assembled to take advantage
of that fame: Who Goes There?(coll 1948; vt The Thing and Other Stories
1952 UK; vt The Thing from Outer Space 1966 UK) and - with differing
contents - Who Goes There? (coll 1955). In September 1937 JWC was
appointed editor of Astounding Stories, a post he would retain until his
death (the magazine being retitled ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION in 1938 and
Analog in 1960); henceforth he wrote almost no fiction.JWC brought to his
editorial post the fertility of ideas on which his writing success as both
JWC and Don A. Stuart had been based, together with a determination to
raise the standards of writing and thinking in MAGAZINE sf. New writers
were encouraged and fed with ideas, with remarkable success. By 1939, JWC
had discovered Isaac ASIMOV, Lester DEL REY, Robert A. HEINLEIN, Theodore
STURGEON and A.E. VAN VOGT, though the two latter writers had already been
publishing for some time in other genres. L. Sprague DE CAMP, L. Ron
HUBBARD, Clifford D. SIMAK and Jack WILLIAMSON, already established sf
writers, soon became part of JWC's "stable". Henry KUTTNER and C.L. MOORE
became regular contributors from 1942. These were the authors at the core
of JWC's " GOLDEN AGE OF SF" - a period corresponding roughly to WWII when ASF dominated the genre in a way no magazine before or since could
match. Most of these authors, and many others, acknowledged the profound
influence JWC had on their careers, and the number of acknowledged sf

classics which originated in ideas suggested by him would be impossible to
assess. Asimov persistently credited JWC with at least co-creating the
articulation of the Three Laws of Robotics ( Isaac ASIMOV; ROBOTS). A
startling example of the pervasiveness of his influence can be found in
The Space Beyond (coll 1976); it contains a hitherto unpublished JWC
novella, "All", which forms the basis of Robert A. Heinlein's Sixth Column
(1949).In addition to editing ASF, JWC initiated the fantasy magazine
UNKNOWN, which from its birth in 1939 to its premature death (caused by
paper shortages) in 1943 was equally influential in its field.Although the
writing had been on the wall ever since about 1945, the period of ASF's
dominance can be said to have ended, quite abruptly, with the appearance
of The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION in 1949 and GALAXY SCIENCE
FICTION in 1950. By this time JWC's domineering editorial presence had
become restricting rather than stimulating and several of his central
authors had left the stable (sometimes acrimoniously); comparatively few
major writers after 1950 began their careers in his magazine.
Nevertheless, between 1952 and 1964 he won 8 HUGO awards for Best Editor.
Much of his interest and energy became focused in his editorials, many of
which showed an essentially right-wing political stance. Some are
reprinted in Collected Editorials from Analog (coll 1966) ed Harry
HARRISON; and the characteristic flavour of his mind comes across, perhaps
even more clearly, in The John W. Campbell Letters, Volume 1 (anth 1986)
assembled by Perry A. CHAPDELAINE, Tony Chapedelaine and George HAY. He
flirted with various kinds of PSEUDO-SCIENCE, notably Hubbard's DIANETICS,
which was loosed on an unsuspecting world through an article in ASF. The
bellicose appetite for knowledge of his early years, and the revelation
that Competent Men might be able to figure the world's plumbing, narrowed
into an incapacity to brook dissent. However, the magazine remained
popular and commercially successful, winning 7 HUGO awards under JWC's
editorship. His death in 1971 was marked by an unprecedented wave of
commemorative activity: two awards were founded bearing his name (the JOHN
W. CAMPBELL AWARD and the JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD), a memorial
anthology was published - Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology
(anth 1974) ed Harry Harrison - and an Australian symposium about him John W. Campbell: An Australian Tribute (anth dated 1974 but 1972) ed John
Bangsund - appeared. Such a response was justified; although in later
years he had turned his back on most developments in sf, during the first
two decades of his career he had created two significant writing
reputations under two separate names, and had come to bestride the field
as an editor. More than any other individual, he helped to shape modern
sf. [MJE]Other works: The Moon is Hell! (coll 1951; later UK edns contain
only the title story); Cloak of Aesir (coll 1952); The Ultimate Weapon
(1936 ASF as "Uncertainty"; 1966 dos); The Best of John W. Campbell (coll
1973 UK) and - with different contents - The Best of John W. Campbell
(coll 1976).As Editor: From Unknown Worlds (anth 1948); The Astounding
Science Fiction Anthology (anth 1952; with 8 stories cut, vt in 2 vols as
The First Astounding Science Fiction Anthology 1954 UK and The Second
Astounding Science Fiction Anthology 1954 UK, these 2 vols being reissued
with all cuts restored, 1964 and 1965 UK; with 15 stories cut 1956 US,
this version being reissued, vt Selections from the Astounding Science
Fiction Anthology 1967; with 15 stories and an article cut, vt Astounding

Tales of Space and Time 1957 US); Prologue to Analog (anth 1962), Analog 1
(anth 1963) and Analog 2 (anth 1964), all three assembled as Analog
Anthology (omni 1965 UK); Analog 3 (anth 1965; vt A World by the Tale
1970); Analog 4 (anth 1966; vt The Permanent Implosion 1970); Analog 5
(anth 1967; vt Countercommandment and Other Stories 1970); Analog 6 (anth
1968); Analog 7 (anth 1969); Analog 8 (anth 1971).About the author: The
Magic That Works: John W.Campbell and the American Response to Technology
(1994) by Albert I.Berger.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; AUTOMATION; COMPUTERS;
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; DEFINITIONS OF SF; DISASTER; DISCOVERY AND
INVENTION; ECONOMICS; EDISONADE; END OF THE WORLD; ESP; EVOLUTION;
FASTER
THAN LIGHT; HEROES; HISTORY OF SF; HYPERSPACE; INVASION; JUPITER;
MACHINES; MARS; MONSTERS; MOON; NEAR FUTURE; NEW WORLDS; NUCLEAR
POWER;
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; OUTER PLANETS; PARANOIA; POLITICS; PSI POWERS;
RELIGION; SF MAGAZINES; SCIENTIFIC ERRORS; SEX; SOCIAL DARWINISM;
SOCIOLOGY; SPACE OPERA; STARS; STREET ? SUPERMAN; TABOOS;
TECHNOLOGY; THRILLING WONDER STORIES; UTOPIAS; VENUS; WAR; WEAPONS.
CANADA
1. Sf in English. The first serious Canadian sf work was James DE MILLE's
posthumously published A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder
(1888 US). In this UTOPIAN satire, set in a LOST WORLD, Western values are
inverted (criminals are regarded as diseased, the ill are imprisoned,
dying is deemed more desirable than living). Successors of De Mille were
Grant ALLEN and Robert BARR (the latter Scottish-born), expatriate
Canadian writers who published early sf in London and New York rather than
in Montreal or Toronto.Many major Canadian literary figures have written
some fantasy or sf. Sir Charles G.D. ROBERTS was the author of In the
Morning of Time (1919 UK), a well presented prehistoric romance. In "The
Great Feud", assembled in Titans, and Other Epics of the Pliocene (coll
1926 UK), E.J. Pratt (1882-1964) created a long narrative poem set in
prehistoric Australasia. The popular humorist Stephen LEACOCK included
short sf SATIRES in The Iron Man and the Tin Woman, with Other Such
Futurities (coll 1929 US) and Afternoons in Utopia (coll 1932 US). A
curious and powerful critique of modern society by Prairie novelist
Frederick Philip GROVE is Consider Her Ways (written 1913-23; 1947), which
describes the march of 10,000 worker ants across the North American
continent, including how they spend their last winter in the poetry
section of the New York Public Library.Among Canadian contributors to US
PULP MAGAZINES were H. BEDFORD-JONES, John L. Chapman, Leslie A. Croutch
(1915-1969), Chester D. Cuthbert, Francis FLAGG, Thomas P. KELLEY and
Cyril G. Wates. Import restrictions during WWII created a climate for the
so-called CanPulps - original and reprint pulp magazines with
idiosyncratic editorial features. A.E. VAN VOGT, the Manitoba-born
mainstay of the GOLDEN AGE OF SF, wrote 600,000 words of sf (notably
"Black Destroyer", the Weapon Shops stories and SLAN) in Canada before
moving to Los Angeles in 1944. Other notable expatriates are Laurence
MANNING and Gordon R. DICKSON.Contemporary MAINSTREAM authors have
contributed fantastic literature. Irish-born Brian MOORE published sf in
Catholics (1972 UK), fantasy in The Great Victorian Collection (1975) and

supernatural horror in The Mangan Inheritance (1979). William Weintraub
dramatized the plight of Montreal's Anglophone minority in a sovereign
Francophone Quebec in his biting satire The Underdogs (1979). Hugh
MACLENNAN's Voices in Time (1980) is an ambitious, impressive,
multi-levelled study of social breakdown in post- HOLOCAUST Montreal.
DISASTER remains the sole theme of Richard ROHMER, lawyer, commissioner,
general and author of fast-moving novels about near-future threats to
national sovereignty, ecology, etc.Gwendolyn MacEwen (1941-1987), Margaret
ATWOOD and Phyllis GOTLIEB, in addition to writing memorable prose, have
composed vivid sf poems ( POETRY) tinged with fantasy and horror; in
particular, MacEwen's poetry collection The Armies of the Moon (coll 1972)
deserves an international readership, as do her stories assembled in Noman
(coll 1972) and Noman's Land (coll 1985). Atwood's THE HANDMAID'S TALE
(1985), diffidently filmed by director Volker Schlondorff in 1990 ( The
HANDMAID'S TALE ), is the most influential and internationally known sf
novel written by a Canadian. But "Canada's premier sf novelist" during the
1960-80 formative period in the genre's growth, according to critic David
KETTERER, was Phyllis Gotlieb. Her first novel, Sunburst (1964 US),
appears on high-school curricula, and mainstream anthologists have
reprinted her short fictions, notably those in Son of the Morning and
Other Stories (coll 1983 US); yet she remains better known at home as a
poet. One reason is that her prose is demanding, intricate and
psychologically probing; it frequently focuses on the problems of
telepathic beings and intelligent animals.High artistic and professional
standards were set in the 1970s by immigrants to Canada: Michael G. CONEY,
Monica HUGHES and Edward LLEWELLYN from the UK, and William GIBSON,
Crawford KILIAN, Donald KINGSBURY, Judith MERRIL, Spider ROBINSON and
Robert Charles WILSON from the USA. Merril, the country's leading "sf
personality", has been active in promoting FEMINISM (a sense of gender)
and sf (a SENSE OF WONDER) among mainstream writers and educators (see
also MERRIL COLLECTION OF SCIENCE FICTION, SPECULATION AND FANTASY).The
first national sf anthology was Other Canadas (anth 1979) ed John Robert
COLOMBO; it gives historical representation to stories, novel excerpts,
poems, film scripts and criticism. John Bell and Lesley Choyce
anthologized past and present fiction from the Atlantic region in Visions
from the Edge (anth 1981). Merril edited Tesseracts (anth 1985), the first
collection of current Canadian sf writing in English with some
translations from French; Phyllis Gotlieb and Douglas BARBOUR compiled
Tesseracts(2) (anth 1987), and Candas Jane DORSEY and Gerry Truscott
Tesseracts(3) (anth 1990). In the main, Canadian sf in English is more
literary, concerned with COMMUNICATION, and less high-tech than most US
sf. Characters and settings specifically identified as Canadian began to
appear in genre fiction in the 1980s, a development notable in the novels
of fantasists like Charles DE LINT, Guy Gavriel Kay and Tanya Huff. The
Bunch of Seven, a Toronto-based group including Huff and expanded to nine
writers in all, is most notable for the fiction, including SHARED-WORLDS
fiction, of Shirley Meier, Karen Wehrstein and S.M. STIRLING. Among the
Toronto (and Ontario) sf writers of achievement are Wayland DREW, Terence
M. GREEN, Robert J. SAWYER and Andrew WEINER. Especially active in Alberta
are Candas Jane Dorsey and J. Brian Clarke. Among the critics in Montreal
who contribute to SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES are Darko SUVIN, David Ketterer,

Robert M. PHILMUS and Marc Angenot. Other influential critics include
Douglas Barbour of Edmonton, the late Susan WOOD of Vancouver and the
expatriate John CLUTE.Toronto has hosted two world sf CONVENTIONS, in 1948
and 1973. Each year the designated national convention hosts the Canadian
Science Fiction and Fantasy Achievement Awards, known as Caspers 1980-90
but then retitled the Auroras to avoid further association with Casper the
Friendly Ghost, a US cartoon character. The first Casper - nicknamed the
Coeurl because of its catlike appearance - was awarded to A.E. van Vogt,
in whose "Black Destroyer" (1939) the original Coeurl appeared. The
Speculative Writers Association of Canada, founded by Dorsey and others in
Edmonton in 1989, issues a bimonthly newsletter called SWACCESS.
Ketterer's Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy (1992 US) surveys the
field as a whole, covering both French- and English-language literatures.
In it he estimated that there were in all about 1200 works of Canadian sf
and fantasy. [JRC]2. Sf in French. The great majority of Francophone sf
authors live in Quebec; there are very few in other provinces. Quebec sf
can be divided into two periods. Before 1974 there was no sf published
under that label, although Jules-Paul TARDIVEL's Pour la Patrie (1895;
trans as For My Country 1975) was a UTOPIA set in a 1945 Quebec. Some
established MAINSTREAM authors (like Yves Theriault [1915- ] and Michel
Tremblay [1942- ]) occasionally touched on the themes of GENRE SF and
FANTASY. Such works ranged from 19th-century voyages extraordinaires in
the Jules- VERNE tradition to adventure novels with sf trappings; some
juvenile sf was also published in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite these, no
true sf tradition existed and no lasting sf FANDOM had been established.In
1974 Norbert Spehner began publishing the FANZINE Requiem, which rapidly
grew into a literary magazine centred on sf and fantasy, publishing
fiction as well as essays and reviews and becoming the focus for a nascent
sf milieu. In 1979 Requiem became SOLARIS, while another important
magazine, imagine . . ., was created by Jean-Marc Gouanvic, followed as
editor by Catherine Saouter, Gouanvic again and, in 1990, Marc Lemaire.
Meanwhile, in 1983, Spehner had passed SOLARIS on to a collective led by E
CANDAR PUBLISHING CO.
SATURN.
CANNING, VICTOR
(1911-1986) UK writer, two of whose many thrillers are borderline sf. In
The Finger of Saturn (1973) a group of individuals who claim to have come
from space attempt to return there. The Doomsday Carrier (1976) features
an escaped chimpanzee infected with an artificially induced contagion. The
Crimson Chalice, an Arthurian FANTASY sequence, comprises The Crimson
Chalice (1976), The Circle of the Gods (1977) and The Immortal Wound
(1978), all assembled as The Crimson Chalice (omni 1980). [JC]
CANTWELL, ASTON
Charles PLATT.
CANTY, THOMAS
(1952- ) US illustrator known for his pale, delicate style, for the
Art-Nouveau-inspired, ethereal women he often paints, and for his use of
stylized costume details. His fame is out of proportion to the amount of

work (mostly book covers) he has published, though he works also under
pseudonyms. Although he has often been nominated for the HUGO and
regularly scores highly in the LOCUS poll, his work is almost exclusively
FANTASY. [PN/JG]See also: ILLUSTRATION.
CAPEK, JOSEF
[r] Karel CAPEK.
CAPEK, KAREL
(1890-1938) Czech writer whose copious production included plays, novels,
stories, imaginative travel books and at least two volumes written to
publicize President Tomas Masaryk (1850-1937) of Czechoslovakia in his
formidable old age. After publishing several volumes of stories (not all
translated), including Trapne povidky (coll 1921; trans Francis P.
Marchant, Dora Round, F. P. Casey and O. Vocadloas as Money and Other
Stories 1929 UK), he began to produce the plays for which he remains
perhaps best known, in particular R.U.R. (1920; trans as R.U.R. (Rossum's
Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama by Paul Selver with Nigel
Playfair 1923 UK; US trans Paul Selver alone 1923 differs) and, with his
painter/writer brother Josef (who died in Belsen in 1945), Ze zivota hmyzu
(1921; trans Paul Selver as And So Ad Infinitum (The World of the Insects)
1923 UK; selected vt trans Owen Davis as The World We Live In 1933 US;
most commonly known as The Insect Play). R.U.R. introduced the word ROBOT
(at Josef's suggestion) to the world. In Czech it means something like
"serf labour", and in the play it applies not to robots made of metal, as
we have come to think of them, but to a worker-class of persecuted
ANDROIDS. The play itself, if understood as a lurchingly hilarious
vaudeville, can nearly transcend its portentous symbolism and the
neo-Tolstoyan bathos of its life-affirming conclusion. In The Insect Play,
which is far more adroit, various arthropods go through vaudeville
routines explicitly related to cognate activities on the part of humans,
to scathing effect. But it is only with the new translation by Tatian
Firkusny and Robert T. Jones of Act Two in unexpurgated form-in Toward the
Radical Center: A Karel Capek Reader (coll 1990 US) ed Peter Kussi - that
the reader can begin to assess the full impact of this extraordinary work.
A further play, Vec Makropulos (1922; unauthorized trans Randal C. Burrell
as The Makropoulos Secret 1925 US; authorized trans Paul Selver of rev
textThe Macropoulos Secret 1927 UK), similarly cloaks in comic routines
the terrifying story of the alluring, world-weary, 300-year-old
protagonist, the secret of her longevity, and her ambivalently conceived
death (a new translation, by Robert T. Jones and Yveta Synek Graff, also
in Toward the Radical Center, does something to reveal the frightening
pace of the play). The work is most familiar as the basis of an opera by
Leos Janacek (1854-1928). A later collaboration with Josef, Adam stvoritel
(1927; trans Dora Round as Adam the Creator 1927 UK), was less successful;
and Bila nemoc (1937; trans Paul Selver and Ralph Neale as Power and Glory
1938 UK; new trans Michael Henry Heim as "The White Plague" in Cross
Currents 7, 1988 US) has been available to an English-speaking readership
in anything like its original form only since 1988.Of greater interest to
the sf reader was the first of KC's sf novels, Tovarna na absolutno (1922;
trans Sarka B. Hrbkova as The Absolute at Large 1927 UK/US), like most of

his fiction a deceptively light-toned SATIRE. A scientist invents the
Karburator, an atomic device which produces almost free power through the
absolute conversion of energy, a process which unfortunately also releases
the essence of God, causing a spate of miracles and other effects;
ultimately there is a devastating religious WAR. Its immediate successor,
Krakatit (1924; trans Lawrence Hyde 1925 UK; vt An Atomic Phantasy:
Krakatit 1948), hearkens back to the fever-ridden brio of his stories and
plays from the early 1920s, and serves to culminate this first - and in
some ways most energetically dark - period of KC's creative life. Krakatit
is both a quasi-atomic explosive and - by analogy - the sexual abyss into
which its inventor, Prokop, topples. Neither the world nor Prokop emerges
unscathed from the consequent acid bath of reality - reality-to-excess.
These novels are set in middle Europe, and the teasing of apocalypse so
conspicuous in them works to transmit some sense of KC's sensitive
political consciousness, identifiably Central European in its inherent
assumptions about the precariousness of institutions and the dubiousness
of their claimed benevolence.This almost allergenic awareness of the
fragility of 20th-century civilization is perhaps best summed up in KC's
last sf novel, Valka s Mloky (1936; trans M. and R. Weatherall as WAR WITH
THE NEWTS 1937 UK; new trans Ewald Osers 1985 UK), in which a strange,
apparently exploitable sea-dwelling race of "newts" is discovered in the
South Pacific - where Rossum's robots also "lived". The newts are
immediately enslaved by human entrepreneurs; but the resulting dramas of
class struggle and social injustice are rendered with a high ashen
ambivalence, for the newts, having gained the necessary human
characteristics and a "newt Hitler" to guide them, turn against their
masters and flood the continents in order to acquire lebensraum. It is the
end for Homo sapiens. The book, told in the form of a chatty,
typographically experimental feuilleton, chills with its seeming levity
(and with its prefigurations of the end of Czechoslovakia two years
later).In the end, KC is perhaps less memorable for his sf innovations they are indeed slender - than for the heightened humaneness that so
illuminates his tales of displaced and ending worlds. [JC]Other works:
Though it has been listed as sf, Povetron (1934; trans as Meteor 1935 UK),
is neither sf nor fantasy; Tales from Two Pockets (coll cut trans 1932 UK;
full trans Norma Comrada 1994 US) assembles Povidky z jedne kapsy ["Tales
from One Pocket"] (coll 1929) and Povidky z druhe kapsy ["Tales from the
Other Pocket"] (coll 1929). Further stories are collected in Devatero
Pohadek (coll 1932; trans as Fairy Tales 1933 UK; new trans Dagmar
Herrmann, vt Nine Fairy Tales1990 US), for older children, and Kniha
apokryfu (coll 1945; trans Dora Round as Apocryphal Stories 1949 UK).About
the author: Karel Capek (1962) by William E. Harkins.See also: AUTOMATION;
CZECH AND SLOVAK SF; HISTORY OF SF; IMMORTALITY; MACHINES; MUSIC; POWER
SOURCES.
CAPEK'S ROBOTS
Machines that seem like humans....that's been a theme of science fiction
since its earliest days. But the word “robot” wasn’t coined until
1920.Karel Capek, a Czech writer, published a play called R.U.R., which
stands for "Rossum's Universal Robots." The word "robot" comes from
"robota," which means "work" in Czech. Although Capek's robots were

near-human creatures who were exploited for their labor value, "robot"
went on to signify machines in human form.The word didn't catch on in
English until the 1930s, and the first use of the word "robot" in the
United States was probably in Eando Binder's 1935 story, "The Robot
Aliens"... which may also be the first story in which the word "alien" is
used to describe an extraterrestrial.
CAPOBIANCO, MICHAEL
(1950- ) US writer whose most significant work has been in collaboration
with William BARTON (whom see for details). His solo novel, Burster
(1990), examines the stresses afflicting those aboard a GENERATION
STARSHIP which has left an Earth that was possibly at the brink of
destruction. [JC]
CAPON, (HARRY) PAUL
(1911-1969) UK writer who also worked for many years as an editor and
administrator in film and tv production, ending his career as head of the
Film Department of Independent Television News. From 1942 he wrote fairly
copiously in various genres, including detective stories. His first sf was
the Antigeos trilogy - The Other Side of the Sun (1950), The Other Half of
the Planet (1952) and Down to Earth (1954) - some parts of which were
serialized on BBC RADIO. The sequence deals with the discovery of an
Earth-like planet, hidden directly behind the Sun, whose UTOPIAN life
leaves itself open to exploitation by villainous humans. Into the Tenth
Millennium (1956) concerns three people who travel into the future
utilizing a drug which slows down body metabolism; they emerge into a
utopian world of great charm and interest - Capon's utopias are less
stuffy and preachy than most - but the woman cannot make the necessary
psychological adjustment. Most of PC's sf was for children, including The
World at Bay (1953), The Wonderbolt (1955), Phobos, the Robot Planet
(1955; vt Lost, a Moon 1956 US) and Flight of Time (1960). PC wrote well
and created unusually solid future worlds. [PN]See also: CHILDREN'S SF;
PHYSICS
CAPRICORN ONE
Film (1977). Capricorn One Associates/Associated General/ITC. Dir Peter
Hyams, starring Elliott Gould, James Brolin, Brenda Vaccaro, Sam
Waterston, O.J. Simpson, Hal Holbrook. Screenplay Hyams. 124 mins. Colour.
The premise of this PARANOIA movie - made at a time, in the wake of
Watergate, when secret-political-conspiracy films had become commonplace is that a supposedly manned mission to Mars cannot carry a crew because of
a malfunction in the life-support system. Fearing a public-relations
disaster and a cut in funding, NASA decides to fake the mission: an
unmanned craft is sent and a remote film-set is used in place of Mars, the
"astronauts" being blackmailed into taking part in the deception. But,
after the real spacecraft burns up in the atmosphere on its return to
Earth, the astronauts are officially "dead", and will probably be murdered
to keep them quiet. Escapes, desert chases and confusions follow. The
provocative theme of appearance vs reality in a media-dominated world
could have been interesting, but Hyams raises the issue only to ignore it
in favour of routine spectacle. That NASA should have cooperated in making
the film is mystifying. Unusually, the film was novelized twice: in the

USA as Capricorn One * (1977) by Ron GOULART, and in the UK as Capricorn
One * (1978) by Bernard L. Ross (Ken FOLLETT). [JB/PN]
CAPTAIN FUTURE
US PULP MAGAZINE, 17 issues Winter 1940-Spring 1944, quarterly (but Fall
1943 missing). Published by Better Publications; ed Leo MARGULIES with
Mort WEISINGER (1940-41) and Oscar J. FRIEND (1941-4). A companion
magazine to STARTLING STORIES and THRILLING WONDER STORIES, CF was an
attempt to establish a SPACE-OPERA equivalent to the popular SUPERHERO
pulps ( DOC SAVAGE MAGAZINE and the like). Each issue ran a complete novel
about tall, cheerful, red-headed Curt Newton, alias Captain Future,
"Wizard of Science" or "Man of Tomorrow" according to the magazine's
successive subtitles. With his trio of assistants, "Grag, the giant, metal
robot; Otho, the man-made, synthetic android; and aged Simon Wright, the
living Brain", he thwarted a succession of evil (and, more often than not,
green) foes. All but two of the novels were written by Edmond HAMILTON
(whom see for details), twice under the house name Brett STERLING. They
were later reprinted in paperback form. After CF had become a casualty of
WWII paper shortages, the character continued to appear intermittently in
Startling Stories to 1946, and again 1950-51. CF also serialized some
abridged reprints from WONDER STORIES and published a few short stories,
including Fredric BROWN's debut, "Not Yet the End" (1941). Like its
companion magazines at that period, CF was unabashedly juvenile in its
appeal. [MJE/PN]
CAPTAIN HAZZARD
US PULP MAGAZINE; 1 issue, May 1938, published by Ace Magazines; no
editor named. The (short) novel contained in this issue, "Python-Men of
the Lost City", was by Chester Hawks. Hazzard, an imitation of Doc Savage
( DOC SAVAGE MAGAZINE) with great mental powers and a similar group of
assistants, combats a master criminal. The lead novel was reprinted in
facsimile in 1974 by Robert E. WEINBERG. [FHP]
CAPTAIN JUSTICE
The hero of a long-running series of boy's stories ( BOY'S PAPERS)
written by Murray Roberts (the pseudonym of Robert Murray Graydon) and
published in Modern Boy, a weekly magazine published by Amalgamated Press
through the 1930s. Very British, CJ wore white ducks, smoked cigars and
worked out of Titanic Tower in the mid-Atlantic. In the course of battling
for good he survived robots, giant insects, runaway planets and an Earth
plunged into darkness. His exploits deeply affected the impressionable
mind of a young Brian W. ALDISS, among others of that generation. Some CJ
stories, including The World in Darkness (1935), were republished as
issues of the Boys' Friend Library. [PN]
CAPTAIN MARVEL
US COMIC-book character. Created and initially drawn by C.C. Beck, CM
first appeared in 1940 in Fawcett's Whiz Comics (1940-53) and then
contemporaneously in Fawcett's Captain Marvel Adventures (1941-53); Jack
KIRBY and Mac Raboy were among its many illustrators. Foremost among its
scriptwriters was Otto Binder ( Eando BINDER), who developed CM's
distinctive whimsical humour. Newsboy Billy Batson, on speaking the magic

word "Shazam!" - an acronym for Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles,
Mercury - becomes CM, an invincible SUPERHERO. CM was successful enough in
the late 1940s to be given a whole Marvel Family, including CM Jr, Mary
Marvel (CM's sister), Uncle Marvel and even Hoppy the Marvel Bunny.CM bore
some resemblance to SUPERMAN, and thus became the subject of a lawsuit
brought by National Periodical Publications (later DC COMICS); this was
contested until, for financial reasons, Fawcett capitulated in 1953. In
the UK the reprints of CM published by L. Miller had been sufficiently
successful to warrant continued independent publication under a new name,
Marvelman (346 issues, 1954-63), drawn by Mick Anglo Studios; the hero had
a new crew-cut hairstyle and a new magic word, "Kimota!" ("Atomik!"
backwards). The series was reprinted in the first 5 issues of Miracleman
(beginning 1985). Artists included Don Lawrence, Ron Embleton and George
Stokes. Under this new name, the character much later ran into
difficulties when Quality Communications obtained permission to resurrect
him in Warrior, with an adult script by Alan MOORE (1984). MARVEL COMICS
threatened legal action because of the use of the word "Marvel" in the
title. So Marvelman was renamed Miracleman, otherwise continuing unchanged
and subsequently appearing in the USA from Eclipse, for whom he is
currently (1991) scripted by Neil GAIMAN.Earlier a small company called
Lightning Comics had tried to revive the original CM character but, owing
to National's assumed ownership of the copyright, had found it necessary
to rework the concept, first as Todd Holton, Super Green-Beret (1967;
magic word turns boy into soldier) and then, more amazingly, as Fatman the
Human Flying Saucer (1967; magic word turns boy into UFO), this latter
being drawn by C.C. Beck, who had created the original CM. Neither
character lasted long; however, the incident served to apprise both DC
National and Marvel that there was a dilemma. Marvel quickly created
another Captain Marvel in Marvel Superheroes #12 (1968); this was a more
conventional superhero. As long as Marvel continued to publish the
exploits of this character, Marvel reasoned, DC could not revive their own
1940s CM without causing an undesirable confusion. However, this prospect
did not deter DC, who resurrected the original CM in a comic called
Shazam! (1972-8), later continued as Shazam: The New Beginning (1987).
Nevertheless, Marvel Comics continue to maintain a token CM simply in
order to stop DC publishing a comic book with the word "Marvel" in the
title; thus, even though Marvel's CM was killed off in the GRAPHIC NOVEL
The Death of Captain Marvel (graph 1982) written and drawn by Jim Starlin,
yet another CM was created to replace him.There was, very briefly, a
further CM. Captain Marvel Presents the Terrible 5 (MF Enterprises 1966)
was one of the worst comics of all time. This CM's magic word was
"Split!", the saying of which caused a part of his body to detach itself.
Needless to say, writs flew. [RT]
CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT
(vt Jet Jackson, Flying Commando) US tv series (1954-6). Screen Gems/CBS.
Prod George Bilson. Pilot episode dir D. Ross Lederman, written Dana
Slade. 25 mins per episode. B/w.Richard Webb played Captain Midnight (or
Jet Jackson, depending on where the series was shown) in this early
children's tv series; Sid Melton played his bumbling assistant, Ikky; Olan
Soule played his scientist friend Tut. Midnight was a super-scientific

crime-fighter who each week would zoom in his sleek jetplane from his
mountaintop HQ to combat a new evil. The first episode concerned the theft
of a powerful radioactive element by foreign agents; they are spotted by a
member of Midnight's network of juvenile helpers, the Secret Squadron, and
he tracks them down using a Geiger counter. The scripts were poor even by
the juvenile standards of the mid-1950s, and CM was visually ludicrous.
Storylines often featured atomic weapons and radioactivity, this being
very much a product of the Cold-War period. CM is not to be confused with
the 15-episode 1942 Columbia film serial (based on a RADIO serial) of the
same name; this too had sf elements. [JB]
CAPTAIN MORS
See Der LUFTPIRAT UND SEIN LENKBARES LUFTSCHIFF.
CAPTAIN NEMO AND THE UNDERWATER CITY
Film (1969). Omnia/MGM. Dir James Hill, starring Robert Ryan, Chuck
Connors, Nanette Newman, Luciana Paluzzi. Screenplay Pip and Jane Baker,
R. Wright Campbell, based on the character created by Jules VERNE. 106
mins. Colour.Towards the end of the 19th century a ship sinks in a violent
storm. A few survivors find themselves on board a mysterious underwater
vessel, the Nautilus, under the command of the legendary Captain Nemo.
They are taken to Nemo's underwater city (likeably Victorian in design),
where his oxygen-creator transmutes rocks into gold as a side-effect. A
morality tale about greed ensues. This UK film is distinctly inferior to
Disney's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (1954). [PN/JB]
CAPTAIN SCARLET AND THE MYSTERONS
UK tv series (1967-68). A Century 21 Production for ITC. Created Gerry
and Sylvia ANDERSON. Prod Reg Hill. Script ed Tony Barwick. Writers
included Barwick (most episodes), Shane Rimmer. Dirs included Brian
Burgess, Ken Turner, Alan Perry, Bob Lynn. One season, 32 25min episodes.
Colour.This was the 5th sf tv series made by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson in
SuperMarionation - i.e., with puppets. Not quite as good as THUNDERBIRDS,
report people who were 11 years old at the time, but pretty exciting all
the same, and the most sophisticated of all in terms of both narrative and
special-effects techniques. Captain Scarlet and his colour-coded Spectrum
agents fought against the Martian Mysterons, who could kill and then
resuscitate people as Martian agents. Captain Scarlet himself had, as a
result of an early brush with Mysterons, developed the ability to
regenerate after death. CSATM is rather darker than other Anderson series
because of the need to work a death into the plot each week. Eight
episodes were cobbled together to make two made-for-tv feature films,
Captain Scarlet vs The Mysterons (1967) and Revenge of the Mysterons from
Mars (1981). [PN]
CAPTAIN VIDEO
1. US tv serial (1949-53 and 1955-6). DuMont. Prod Larry Menkin. DuMont
was a New York tv company; in the early years of tv many programmes came
from New York. CV, a 30min children's programme that went out 5 nights a
week, was the first sf on tv. Written by Maurice Brockhauser, it starred
Richard Coogan (replaced in 1950 by Al Hodge) as Captain Video, who 300
years from now, with the aid of his Video Rangers, battled various threats

from outer space. Many early scripts were written by Damon KNIGHT, C.M.
KORNBLUTH and Robert SHECKLEY.CV was shot live in a small studio and on a
low budget, with the result that much of the spectacle had to be provided
by the imaginations of young viewers; it also incorporated filmed
material, such as short Westerns and cartoons, which were introduced by
the Captain himself. In 1953 the serial format was dropped; CV was
retitled The Secret Files of Captain Video and became a weekly adventure
with self-contained stories, but it folded that same year. In 1955 Hodge
returned as Captain Video in a weekly 60min children's show, which he also
produced. Though still wearing his uniform, which looked like a cross
between a marine's and a bus driver's, he merely acted as the show's host,
introducing stock adventure-film footage and undemanding shorts of an
"educational" nature which he would then discuss with the studio audience
of children. In 1956 CV ended his career with Captain Video's Cartoons,
the Master of Time and Space reduced to announcing the funnies. There was
a comic book based on CV.2. In 1951 Sam Katzman produced a cinema serial
of 15 parts based on the tv serial. Dir Spencer Bennet, Wallace A.
Grissell, written by Royal K. Cole, Sherman L. Lowe, Joseph F. Poland,
George H. Plympton, it starred Judd Holdren in the title role and
contained robots. [JB]
CAPTAIN ZERO
US PULP MAGAZINE; 3 bimonthly issues, Nov 1949-Mar 1950, published by
Recreational Reading Corp., Indiana, ed anon Alden H. Norton. Each issue
contained a novel written by prolific pulp author G.T. Fleming-Roberts. As
a result of a radiation overdose, Captain Zero (alias "The Master of
Midnight") becomes involuntarily invisible at night; he uses his unwanted
gift to operate against the underworld. When invisible he speaks in
italics. This, the last of the hero pulps, was closer to detective fiction
than sf. An almost identical edition was published simultaneously in
Canada. [FHP/MJE]
CARAKER, MARY
(? - ) US writer who began writing sf with, for ASF in 1983, "The
Vampires who Loved Beowulf", a story which makes up part of her first
novel, Seven Worlds (fixup 1986), whose protagonist, a tough female Space
Exploratory Forces agent, is entrusted with the task of improving
COMMUNICATIONS between humans and other species. The sequel, The Snows of
Jaspre (1989), written for young adults, places that protagonist into a
political and ecological crisis on the eponymous planet. Water Song (1987)
and The Faces of Ceti (1991), singletons, likewise examine planets in
crisis. I Remember, I Remember (1991 chap), a novella, recounts the
sensations of a woman who awakens on a "coldship" without any memory of
how she entered SUSPENDED ANIMATION. [JC]
CARAVAN OF COURAGE
The EWOK ADVENTURE.
CARD, ORSON SCOTT
(1951- ) US writer who exploded onto the sf scene with his first
published story, "Ender's Game" for ASF in 1977; it was nominated for a
HUGO and served as the germ for the Ender series, the first two volumes of

which, published 1985 and 1986, each won both Hugo and NEBULA, the first
time the two major prizes had been swept in successive years by one
author. After a highly promising start at the end of the 1970s - he won
the 1978 JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD - he entered a period during the early
1980s when his career seemed to be drifting; but by the end of 1986 he had
clearly established himself as one of the two or three dominant figures of
recent sf. That dominance remains (1992) unshaken.No secret lies behind
this success, for OSC has always been entirely explicit about the two
factors which have shaped his career. The first is Mormonism. The gift of
faith, in his case, has been a complex offering. Born and raised as a
Mormon, OSC came to adulthood in a family-oriented, tight-knit community
whose sense of historical uniqueness was confirmed in various ways: by
recurrent persecution from without, while being intermittently threatened
by scandal within; by The Book of Mormon, a holy book constructed as a
nest of mythopoeic, justificatory narratives through which are expounded a
pattern of truly unusual historical hypotheses rich in storytelling
potential, not least among these the belief that Native Americans are the
Lost Tribes of Israel; and by a tradition - both written and oral dominated by messiah-like figures of great charisma who lead their people
from exile into a promised land. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that
OSC's tales have concerned themselves from the first with matters of
family and community in narratives constructed so as to unfold a mythic
density at their hearts, and featuring lonely and manipulative
MESSIAH-figures who - if they die - die sacrificially. The second factor
behind OSC's career is the compulsion to tell stories. If he has a genius,
it is for that. (And, if he has a fatal flaw, it resides in that
compulsion.) Like Stephen KING, whose capacity for hard work he shares, he
is a maker of tales.Unlike King, however, OSC did not begin as a natural
writer of novels, most of his pre-sf work being in the form of short plays
for Mormon audiences and much of his early work at book length being
expansions of short stories. "Ender's Game" and the other stories
assembled in Unaccompanied Sonata (coll 1981) - not to be confused with
the release of the title story alone as Unaccompanied Sonata (1979 Omni;
1992 chap) - demonstrate a compulsive rightness of length (though at times
the chill cruelty of the telling unveils a sadism over which the author
seemed to have little control), but the first novels were incoherently
told, if absorbing in parts. Because of OSC's habitual reworking of his
early work, the bibliography of his first sequence, the Worthing
Chronicle, is complex. Some of the stories in Capitol: The Worthing
Chronicle (coll of linked stories 1979) are journeyman work, and appear
only in that first volume; both Capitol and its companion, Hot Sleep
(fixup 1979), were withdrawn from circulation only a few years later in
order to make market room for The Worthing Chronicle (1983), a text which
reworked beyond recognition the earlier material. Finally, in The Worthing
Saga (omni 1990), The Worthing Chronicle (apparently unchanged) was
assembled along with 6 of the 11 stories originally published in Capitol
plus 3 previously uncollected tales. Of all these versions, the most
unified is very clearly the 1983 novel, which presents the long epic of
Jason Worthing as a sequence of dreams - or scriptures - transmitted by
Jason himself to young Lared, who transcribes them for his fellow
colonists on a planet which, ages before, their ancestors settled under

Worthing's guidance. These dreams - which are in fact some of the contents
of the earlier versions of the long tale, here contoured and condensed
into myth-like parables - tell Lared of Jason Worthing's pain-racked and
interminable life as messiah and godling. Lared also learns why Jason
removed all capacity to experience deep pain from his "children", and why,
now, he has given them pain once more. Compact, multi-layered, mythopoeic
and ultimately very strange, The Worthing Chronicle of 1983 remains one of
OSC's finest and most revealing works.A Planet Called Treason (1979; rev
vt Treason 1988) is a much inferior singleton, though its protagonist is
illuminatingly similar to Jason Worthing; but Songmaster (fixup 1980; rev
1987) is a fine rite-of-passage tale whose protagonist, a typical OSC
child, is alienated from his family, is blessed with an extraordinary
talent (in this case MUSIC), and grows into a messianic role for which he
seems preordained.OSC's career then seemed to drift. Hart's Hope (1983)
was a FANTASY, obscurely published; The Worthing Chronicle appeared
without much notice; and A Woman of Destiny (1984; text restored vt Saints
1988) was a historical novel about the founding of Mormonism which, in the
cut 1984 version, seemed misshapen. Finally, however, the Ender books
began to appear. The series comprises ENDER'S GAME (1977 ASF; much exp
1985), Speaker for the Dead (1986), both volumes being assembled as
Ender's War (omni 1986), plus Xenocide (1991), with a fourth volume
projected. As the sequence begins, Ender Wiggin is a young boy who, along
with his siblings, is the result of an experiment in eugenics ( GENETIC
ENGINEERING) authorized by the government of Earth, which is apprehensive
that the ALIEN Buggers will return from interstellar space and continue
what seems a xenocidal assault upon humanity, and is convinced that only
humans with superior abilities will be capable of defeating the foe. Ender
is taken to a military academy, where he is subjected in the Battle Room
to an escalating sequence of challenges to his extraordinary tactical and
strategic abilities; eventually, at what seems to be a final game (the
tale does here prefigure much of the VIRTUAL-REALITY imagery brought to
the fore in the 1980s by writers under the influence of CYBERPUNK), Ender
defeats the "imaginary" foe only to find that he has in fact been guiding
genuine human space-fleets into enemy territory, and that by winning
absolutely he has committed xenocide on behalf of the human race.When it
is discovered that the Buggers had long comprehended that humans were
sentient beings and had had no intention of continuing any conflict, the
grounds for Speaker for the Dead are laid. In the company of his chaste
sister (his demagogic brother meanwhile takes over the government of
Earth), and carrying a cocooned Bugger Hive Queen (the last of all her
race), Ender travels from star to star for thousands of planetary years
(except in Xenocide OSC, unusually, obeys Einsteinian constraints on
interstellar travel) as a Speaker for the Dead, a person who sums up a
dead person's life in a terminal ceremony, and by so doing heals the
community of his or her death. The action takes place on the planet
Lusitania, and concentrates upon the local alien race, the Pequeninos,
whose strange BIOLOGY is not yet understood - its unravelling of which is
fascinatingly prolonged. The novel concludes with the Pequeninos seemingly
understood, the Hive Queen happy in a cave where she will breed Buggers,
and Ender seeming to have expiated xenocide and become a messiah; but the
human Galactic Federation is preparing to destroy Lusitania for fear of a

deadly plague. Xenocide carries the plot onwards, though not to a
conclusion, introducing many new characters, including a talkative AI in
love with Ender. The plot of these two novels is much complicated by OSC's
attempt, not fully successful, to envision a complex Lusitanian family for
Ender to transform, and has frequent recourse to PULP-MAGAZINE-style
highlighting of eccentricities to distinguish one sibling from another;
nor is his depiction of a Chinese world - run by MUTANTS dominated by
artificially induced obsessive-compulsive disorders - fully convincing.
But even incomplete, and despite its not infrequent dependence upon
trivializing tricks of plot, the Ender saga stands as one of the very few
serious moral tales set among the stars. It is also enthrallingly
readable.OSC's third sequence - the Tales of Alvin Maker comprising
Seventh Son (1987), Red Prophet (1988) and Prentice Alvin (1989), all
assembled as Hatrack River (omni 1989), and with at least three further
volumes projected - returns to Earth, to an ALTERNATE-WORLD version of the
USA. On the basis of the first three volumes, it seems to come as close as
humanly possible to the telling of an sf tale as Mormon parable, for the
life of Alvin Maker clearly encodes the life of Joseph Smith (1805-1844),
the founder of the Mormon Church. The early 19th-century USA in which he
grows up has never experienced a Revolution; certain forms of MAGIC are
efficacious; and Alvin may become a Maker, one who can delve to the heart
of things and transform them. As the sequence progresses, the Indian
Nations set up a demarcation line, which is observed, along the
Mississippi; and Alvin seems due to become a Maker. Of greater sf
relevance are Wyrms (1987), another rite-of-passage tale about the
assumption of role and set on a planet of some interest, The Folk of the
Fringe (coll of linked stories 1989), a moderately heterodox vision of a
Mormon post- HOLOCAUST civilization; The Abyss * (1989), which very
effectively novelizes The ABYSS (1989); the Homecoming sequence,
comprising The Memory of Earth (1992), The Call of Earth (1993), The Ships
of Earth (1994) - the first 3 vols being assembled as Homecoming: Harmony
(omni 1994) - Earthfall (1995) and Earthborn (1995). In its use of
religious motifs to characterize the start of its protagonists' return to
Earth 40,000,000 years after the last humans had left their home planet,
this latter is a tale whose Mormon subtext extends very close to the
surface. Later stories are collected in Cardography (coll 1987), and
almost all OSC's independent short work, some of it written as Byron
Walley, is assembled in MAPS IN A MIRROR: THE SHORT FICTION OF ORSON SCOTT
CARD (coll 1990; with the 5th section cut, vt in 4 vols asThe Changed Man
(coll 1992), Flux (coll 1992), Monkey Sonatas (coll 1993) and Cruel
Miracles (coll 1993).In a little less than 2 decades, OSC has written
enough work for a lifetime, has transformed pulp idioms into religious
myth with an intensity not previously witnessed in the sf field, and has
created a dozen worlds it would be impossible for any reader to forget. If
he has had a significant failing - beyond a cruel insistence upon the
moral strictures of his faith, writing at one point that adultery and
homosexuality were equal (and dreadful) sins - it resides in his
strengths. The surety of faith, the muscle of a honed storytelling urgency
which has led him to write at times as though he genuinely believed that
clarity and truth were identical, the bruising triumphalism of sf as a
mode of knowing: all have led this extraordinarily talented author to

sound, on occasion, as though he thought the fictions he wrote were
scooped from the mouth of a higher being. [JC]Other works: Eye for Eye
(1987 IASFM; 1991 chap dos); Lost Boys (1992); the proposed Mayflower
trilogy with Kathryn H. Kidd, of which Havelock (1994) has appeared.As
editor: Dragons of Light (anth 1980); Dragons of Darkness (anth 1981);
Future on Fire (anth 1991) with (anon) Martin H. GREENBERG.Nonfiction:
Characters and Viewpoints (1988); How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy
(1990) - winner of the 1991 Hugo for Best Nonfiction Book.About the
author: In the Image of God: Theme, Characterization and Landscape in the
Fiction of Orson Scott Card (1990) and The Work of Orson Scott Card: An
Annotated Bibliography ?
also: ARTS; CHILDREN IN SF; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; DESTINIES; GAMES AND
SPORTS; HEROES; HIVE-MINDS; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE;
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; PARANOIA; SLEEPER AWAKES; SUSPENDED ANIMATION;
UNDER THE SEA; WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST.
CAREY, DIANE (L.)
(1954- ) US author of several STAR TREK ties including Dreadnought! *
(1986) and its direct sequel Battlestations! * (1986), Final Frontier *
(1988) and Star Trek, the Next Generation: Ghost Ship * (1988). [JC]
CAREY, PETER
(1943- ) Australian writer, once in advertising, an experience that
pervades his work. PC's high reputation is mainly for mainstream novels
like Oscar and Lucinda (1988), which won the Booker Prize. However, a
streak of ironic FANTASY has run through his work from the beginning,
occasionally taking the form of sf. Bliss (1981) and Illywhacker (1985)
can both be regarded as fantasies (if you believe their unreliable
narrators), the first about a man who dies and goes to Hell (much like
Earth), the second a funny and touching picaresque which, although it is
told by a liar, may in part be true; he practises INVISIBILITY and claims
to span a century of Australian history, bits of which he recounts. And
both The Tax Inspector (1991) and The Unusual Life of Tristran Smith
(1994) - which is set in an imaginary country - are FABULATIONS. PC's sf
fabulations in short forms, droll, morbid and scarifying by turns, are
contained in two early collections, The Fat Man in History (coll 1974) and
War Crimes (coll 1979); a selection from both was published, confusingly,
as The Fat Man in History (coll 1980 UK; vt Exotic Pleasures 1981 UK).
Among them, "Do You Love Me?" has a world subject to reality leakages,
"The Chance" features a "Genetic Lottery" in which humans can get new
bodies while keeping their memories, and "Exotic Pleasures" has ALIEN
birdlife which transmits pleasure when touched and may destroy us all.
[PN]
CARLSEN, CHRIS
Robert P. HOLDSTOCK.
CARLSON, WILLIAM K.
(? - ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Dinner at Helen's" in
Strange Bed Fellows (anth 1972) ed Thomas N. SCORTIA. His first sf novel,
Sunrise West (1981), features an attempt by multispecies commune-dwellers
to survive in a post- HOLOCAUST USA. Elysium (1982), set thousands of

years later, expounds a moderately LIBERTARIAN view of the perils of
allowing ECOLOGY-minded liberals too long a hegemony. [JC]
CARLTON, ROGER
Donald Sydney ROWLAND.
CARMODY, ISOBELLE
(1958- ) Australian author of sf for adolescents. Her novels are set in
post- HOLOCAUST venues. The first two belong to the still unfolding
Obernewtyn Chronicles: Obernewtyn (1987) and The Farseekers (1990). The
third and most challenging is separate from this series: Scatterlings
(1991). IC writes vigorously and colourfully, but the sf ideas are all
very familiar: teenaged misfit heroines with PSI POWERS learn about
themselves while pitted against unfeeling, dictatorial societies. Each
story revolves around a CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH as the true nature of the
world unfolds. [PN]See also: CHILDREN'S SF; PASTORAL.
CARNAC, LEVIN
[s] George GRIFFITH.
CARNEIRO, ANDRE
[r] LATIN AMERICA.
CARNELL, (EDWARD) JOHN
(1912-1972) UK editor, anthologist and literary agent who worked usually
as John Carnell and sometimes as E.J. Carnell; he was known to his friends
as Ted. A prominent member of UK FANDOM, JC took over the editorship of
NOVAE TERRAE , an early FANZINE, in 1939, retitling his issues (#29-#33)
New Worlds. He began his professional career as editor in 1946 when NEW
WORLDS was revived as a professional SF MAGAZINE. After only 3 issues the
publisher failed, but JC with help from fandom was able to renew the title
in 1949 with his own company, Nova Publications; he also took over from
Walter GILLINGS as editor of the Nova Publications title SCIENCE FANTASY
from #3 onwards. The third Nova Publications title, also ed JC, was the UK
reprint edition of Larry SHAW's SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES. The first 5 UK
issues of this, Mar-Nov 1958, were all US reprints, but from the Jan 1959
issue it became an original UK magazine. It ceased publication with the
May 1963 issue, but the other two titles continued under JC until
mid-1964, when they were taken over by Roberts ?
JC then established a series of original ANTHOLOGIES, NEW WRITINGS IN SF,
comprising New Writings in SF 1 (anth 1964), #2 (anth 1964), #3 (anth
1965), #4 (anth 1965), #5 (anth 1965), #6 (anth 1965), #7 (anth 1966), #8
(anth 1966), #9 (anth 1966), #10 (anth 1967), #11 (anth 1967), #12 (anth
1968), #13 (anth 1968), #14 (anth 1969), #15 (anth 1969), #16 (anth 1970),
#17 (anth 1970), #18 (anth 1971), #19 (anth 1971), #20 (anth 1972), and
#21 (anth 1972), the last being published after his death. Nine volumes of
this series, with contents differing from those in the UK numeration, were
published in the USA by BANTAM BOOKS 1966-72. JC, who formally set up the
E.J. Carnell Literary Agency in 1964, was agent for most UK sf writers. He
was cofounder of the INTERNATIONAL FANTASY AWARD. He was scrupulous,
worked hard and profited little. His contribution to UK sf was enormous.
For over a quarter of a century he was an early and often first publisher
of an entire generation of UK and Irish sf writers. Although his own

preference was for conservative HARD SF and sf adventure - he published a
lot of it by writers such as John CHRISTOPHER and later Kenneth BULMER and
E.C. TUBB - he also gave active encouragement to many of the writers who
were later to become strongly associated with Michael MOORCOCK's NW,
writers of the NEW WAVE including Brian W. ALDISS, J.G. BALLARD, John
BRUNNER and Moorcock himself, whose succession to the editorship of NW JC
supported. JC also edited a handful of reprint anthologies: Jinn and
Jitters (anth 1946), No Place Like Earth (anth 1952), Gateway to Tomorrow
(anth 1954), Gateway to the Stars (anth 1955), The Best from New Worlds
Science Fiction (anth 1955), Lambda 1 ? with
1 story dropped and 2 added 1965 UK), Weird Shadows from Beyond (anth
1965) and Best of New Writings in SF (anth 1971). [PN]
CARNE PER FRANKENSTEIN
FRANKENSTEIN.
CARNOSAUR
JURASSIC PARK.
CARO, DENNIS R.
(1944- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Cantaloupes and
Kangaroos" in Clarion III (anth 1973) ed Robin Scott WILSON. His first sf
novel, The Man in the Darksuit: A Futuristic Mystery (1980), depicts with
concise and surrealistic hilarity a mean-streets urban future and a
mystery concerning the owner of the eponymous INVISIBILITY-conferring
outfit. Devine War (1986), set on a colony planet, even more complicatedly
spends considerable energy on interstellar POLITICS and on a malevolent AI
called Heathcliffe, as the eponymous female agent tries to bring her
husband's killer to justice. DRC is an author who does not deserve
obscurity, though the edgy, foregrounded cleverness of his work may
continue to limit his success. [JC]
CARPELAN, BO
[r] FINLAND.
CARPENTER, CHRISTOPHER
Christopher EVANS.
CARPENTER, ELMER J.
(1907-1988) US writer in whose Moonspin (1967) a foreign power gains
control of Earth's weather. An earlier novel, Nile Fever (1959), is not
sf. [JC]
CARPENTER, JOHN
(1948- ) US film-maker. At USC Film School JC collaborated with
writer-actor-director Dan O'Bannon on DARK STAR (1974), a student effort
expanded successfully into a feature that attracted attention for its
ABSURDIST humour and classical suspense, following the adventures of a
spaceship crewed by near-insane astronauts and dangerously unstable
sentient bombs. That calling card enabled JC to make Assault on Precinct
13 (1976), a very accomplished "urban Western", and to sell his
(eventually rewritten) script for The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978); this in
turn won him an assignment to write and direct Halloween (1978), an
enormously influential "stalk and slash" movie. JC is usually classed as a

HORROR director, his supernatural work including The Fog (1980), Christine
(1983) from Stephen KING's novel, and Big Trouble in Little China (1986),
but - perhaps influenced by Nigel KNEALE, who wrote HALLOWEEN III: SEASON
OF THE WITCH for JC - he often mixes elaborate sf concepts with GOTHIC
horror.JC's sf films as a director include: ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981), a
cynical futuristic adventure; The THING (1982), a remake of the 1951
Howard Hawks production that returns to John W. CAMPBELL's paranoid
original story for its creature-clogged theme; STARMAN (1984), a mellow
and impersonal mix of The Sugarland Express (1973) with The MAN WHO FELL
TO EARTH (1976), Jeff Bridges starring as a benign ALIEN visitor; PRINCE
OF DARKNESS (1978), a horror movie cross-breeding quantum physics and
demonology, whose credits acknowledge Kneale; THEY LIVE (1989), a witty
and socially conscious pastiche of 1950s alien-invader motifs; and MEMOIRS
OF AN INVISIBLE MAN (1992), from the 1987 novel by H.F. SAINT, a bland
comedy thriller in the mould of Starman, distinguished by state-of-the-art
INVISIBILITY effects. Since then JC has directed the first two parts of a
three-part tv horror anthology miniseries, Body Bags (1993). In 1994 a new
JC film,In the Mouth of Madness, was premiered at a film festival; this
horror film somewhat in the manner of H.P. LOVECRAFT is due for general
release in 1995. He is credited with contributions to The PHILADELPHIA
EXPERIMENT (1984) and Black Moon Rising (1986), both based on scripts he
wrote in the 1970s. A composer, JC has worked on the scores for most of
his films, some of them rather good. [KN]Further reading: Order in the
Universe: The Films of John Carpenter (1990) by Robert C. Cumbow.See also:
CINEMA; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MONSTER MOVIES.
CARR, CHARLES
(1905-1976) UK writer whose Colonists in Space (1954) and its sequel,
Salamander War (1955), routinely deal with colonizing humans and their
conflicts with the original salamander inhabitants of the planet Bel. [JC]
CARR, JAYGE
Pseudonym of US writer Marj Krueger (1941- ), a former nuclear physicist
for NASA who began to publish sf with "Alienation" for ASF in 1976, and
whose major work to date is probably her first novel, Leviathan's Deep
(1979), in which star-travelling Terrans (much like 1950s Americans,
particularly in their sexual politics) confront a female from a
technologically primitive but culturally sophisticated humanoid race whose
males are genuinely inferior. The ALIEN protagonist, in whose voice the
tale is told, is depicted with flair, sympathy and a sense of her real
differences from a human woman ( WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION).
The Rabelais sequence - Navigator's Sindrome (1983), The Treasure in the
Heart of the Maze (1985) and Rabelaisian Reprise (1988), with a fourth
volume, Knight of a Thousand Eyes, projected - begins with a mildly
humorous adventure, with added moral bite, about the search for a female
interstellar Navigator lost on the planet Rabelais, where the powerful
play out decadent fantasies on quasi-slaves bound to them by "contractual
obligation". The series continues in much the same vein. In the late
1980s, JC began to appear occasionally in best-of-the-year collections
with such stories as "Chimera" (1989), a hard-edged tale of revenge and
genetic manipulation set in a nightmarish future heavily influenced by

CYBERPUNK. While she is not the most inventive of recent writers, JC's
stories are solidly crafted, well characterized and readable. [NT]
CARR, JOHN DICKSON
(1906-1977) US writer, for long periods resident in the UK, where many of
his famous early detective novels, such as The Three Coffins (1935 US; vt
The Hollow Man 1935 UK), Death Watch (1935) and The Ten Teacups (1937) as
by Carter Dickson, and others are evocatively set (although a number of
his noteworthy early borderline-fantasy detections, such as The Waxworks
Murder [1932], are set in France). After his inspiration regarding
intricate locked-room mysteries and the like began to flag, and after a
pious biography of DOYLE, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1949), JDC
began to write mysteries of a fantastic coloration, in several of which
modern detectives are transferred (by a form of TIME TRAVEL) into the
England of an earlier era, where they are involved in murders. These books
are The Devil in Velvet (1951), set in the 17th century, Fear is the Same
(1956) as by Carter Dickson, set in the 18th, and Fire, Burn! (1956), set
in the 19th. An earlier novel, The Burning Court (1937 UK), does not
entirely rationalize the supposition that reincarnated beings lie at the
heart of the mystery. Some of the tales in The Department of Queer
Complaints (coll 1940) and The Door to Doom (coll 1980) are fantasies.
[JC]
CARR, JOHN F(RANCIS)
(1944- ) US writer who began publishing sf with The Ophidian Conspiracy
(1976), an unpretentious SPACE OPERA which demonstrated considerable
imagination but a stylistic gaucheness; both characteristics mark his
subsequent novels, The Pain Gain (1977) and Carnifax Mardi Gras (1982
Fantasy Book as "Dance of the Dwarfs"; exp 1982), though the latter shows
a saving exuberance. Memorial work on H. Beam PIPER resulted in his
editing The Worlds of H. Beam Piper (coll 1983) and writing a continuation
in novel form of Piper's Paratime Police/Lord Kalvan sequence, Great
King's War * (1985) with Roland J. GREEN.From the beginning of the 1980s,
most frequently in association with Jerry POURNELLE, JFC has been most
active as an editor. With Pournelle, he edited (not always with title-page
credit) Black Holes (anth 1978); the Endless Frontier sequence, comprising
The Endless Frontier (anth 1979), Volume 2 (anth 1985) and Cities in Space
(anth 1991); The Survival of Freedom (anth 1981); the There Will Be War
sequence of military ANTHOLOGIES, comprising There Will Be War (anth
1983), Vol II: Men of War (anth 1984), Vol III: Blood and Iron (anth
1984), Vol IV: Day of the Tyrant (anth 1985), Vol V: Warrior (anth 1986),
Vol VI: Guns of Darkness (anth 1987), Vol VII: Call to Battle (anth 1988),
Vol VIII: Armageddon! (anth 1989) and Vol IX: After Armageddon (anth
1990); The Science Fiction Yearbook (anth 1985) with Jim BAEN and
Pournelle; the Far Frontiers original anthology series, with Baen and
Pournelle (JFC uncredited), comprising Far Frontiers (anth 1985), #2 (anth
1985), #3 (anth 1985), #4 (anth 1986), #5 (anth 1986), #6 (anth 1986) and
#7 (anth 1986); and the Imperial Stars reprint anthologies, Imperial
Stars, Vol 1: The Stars at War (anth 1986), Vol 2: Republic and Empire
(anth 1987) and Vol 3: the Crash of Empire (anth 1989).Also with
Pournelle, JFC created and edited the War World sequence of SHARED-WORLD

anthologies: War World, Volume 1: The Burning Eye * (anth 1988) with
Roland J. Green, Volume 2: Death's Head Rebellion * (anth 1990) with
Green, and Volume 3: Sauron Dominion * (anth 1991); Codominium: Revolt on
War World * (anth 1992) is set prior to the main sequence. These volumes,
which carry Pournelle's CoDominium sequence into broader waters, have
proved one of the more effective examples of a shared-world enterprise. As
editor of the SFWA BULLETIN (1978-80), JFC devoted an entire issue (vol
14, #3) to a series of studies of "Science-Fiction Future Histories".
[JC]See also: HISTORY IN SF; WAR.
CARR, ROBERT SPENCER
(1909-1994) US writer, whose first (teenage) stories appeared in Weird
Tales, beginning with "The Composite Brain" (1925), which is sf. He is the
author of one fantasy novel filled with an erotic nostalgia for death, The
Room Beyond (1948), and of Beyond Infinity (coll 1951), four warmly
realized stories set on Earth in the mid-20th century but with sf content.
[JC]
CARR, TERRY (GENE)
(1937-1987) US writer and editor. He became an sf fan in 1949 and,
throughout the 1950s (and later), enjoyed a long and prolific career as
such; one of his fanzines, FANAC, co-edited with Ron ELLIK, won a HUGO in
1959, and TC eventually won his second Hugo as Best Fan Writer in 1973.
Some of this writing was assembled as Fandom Harvest (coll 1986) and
Between Two Worlds (coll 1986 chap dos), the latter being published with
similar material by Bob SHAW.In the early 1960s TC began to work as an
editor and to write fiction, his first story being "Who Sups with the
Devil" in 1962 for FSF, where most of his early stories appeared; most of
it was assembled in The Light at the End of the Universe (coll 1976). He
was never prolific as a fiction writer, but the stories in that collection
are thoughtful and distinctive. They include "Brown Robert" (1962), a neat
TIME-TRAVEL variant, "The Dance of the Changer and the Three" (1968), an
ambitious attempt to render an ALIEN culture by telling one of its myths,
and "Ozymandias" (1972), which draws an effective parallel between modern
CRYONICS techniques and the funeral practices of ancient Egypt. There were
also two minor novels - Invasion from 2500 (1964) with Ted WHITE under the
joint pseudonym Norman EDWARDS, and Warlord of Kor (1963 chap dos) - as
well as one ambitious and substantial work, Cirque (1977), a religious
allegory, elegiac in mood, set in the FAR FUTURE. Because he was not very
prolific, TC's writing is in general somewhat undervalued.It was as an
editor that he became and remained best known. In 1964-71 he worked with
Donald A. WOLLHEIM at ACE BOOKS, where he was responsible for the highly
successful Ace Special series, whose most famous original publications
were probably R.A. LAFFERTY's Past Master (1968) and Ursula K. LE GUIN's
THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (1969), and which included several further
titles of strong merit. He co-edited seven annual best-of-the-year
ANTHOLOGIES with Wollheim (whom see for titles), beginning with World's
Best Science Fiction: 1965 (anth 1965; vt World's Best Science Fiction:
First Series 1970 UK), and initiated the UNIVERSE series of original
anthologies (see listing below) with Universe 1 (anth 1971). After leaving
Ace and becoming a freelance editor, TC continued to produce a

best-of-the-year anthology on his own in competition with Wollheim's,
commencing with The Best Science Fiction of the Year (anth 1972) and
continuing through 1987 (see listing below); during its run, this series
was generally regarded as the best of the annual compilations. Universe
continued, although it changed publishers more than once; and with The
Year's Finest Fantasy (anth 1978) TC started a FANTASY annual (see listing
below), which was less successful. Of a wide variety of reprint and
original anthologies, the most notable was perhaps The Ides of Tomorrow
(anth 1976), with fine stories by Brian W. ALDISS, George R.R. MARTIN and
others.In the 1980s TC returned to Ace Books on a freelance basis to edit
a second series of Ace Specials, this time restricted to first novels. The
impact of this sequence was perhaps even greater than the first, for it
included in its first 18 months William GIBSON's NEUROMANCER (1984), Kim
Stanley ROBINSON's THE WILD SHORE (1984), Carter SCHOLZ's and Glenn
Harcourt's Palimpsests (1984), Lucius SHEPARD's Green Eyes (1984), Michael
SWANWICK's In the Drift (1985) and Howard WALDROP's Them Bones (1984). In
1985-6 he won his third and fourth Hugos, both as Best Editor. What
perhaps marked TC most distinctively was his quite extraordinary capacity
to commission or purchase work which, once published, seemed inevitable.
His authors seemed to speak to the heart of their times. [MJE/JC]Other
works as editor: Science Fiction for People who Hate Science Fiction (anth
1966); The Others (anth 1969); On Our Way to the Future (anth 1970); This
Side of Infinity (anth 1972); An Exaltation of Stars (anth 1973); Into the
Unknown (anth 1973); Worlds Near and Far (anth 1974); The Fellowship of
the Stars (anth 1974); Creatures from Beyond (anth 1975); Planets of
Wonder (anth 1976); The Infinite Arena (anth 1977); To Follow a Star: Nine
Science Fiction Stories about Christmas (anth 1977); Classic Science
Fiction: The First Golden Age (anth 1978); Beyond Reality (anth 1979);
Dream's Edge (anth 1980); A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (anth 1981) with
Martin H. GREENBERG; 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories (anth 1984)
with Isaac ASIMOV and Greenberg; The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume
4 (anth 1986).New Worlds of Fantasy: New Worlds of Fantasy (anth 1967; vt
Step Outside Your Mind 1969 UK); #2 (anth 1970); #3 (anth 1971).Universe:
The sequence continued with Universe 2 (anth 1972), #3 (anth 1973), #4
(anth 1974), #5 (anth 1975), #6 (anth 1976), #7 (anth 1977), #8 (anth
1978), #9 (anth 1979), #10 (anth 1980), #11 (anth 1981), #12 (anth 1982),
#13 (anth 1983), #14 (anth 1984), #15 (anth 1985), #16 (anth 1986) and #17
(anth 1987), plus The Best from Universe (anth 1984).Best Science Fiction
of the Year: The sequence continued with The Best Science Fiction of the
Year 2 (anth 1973), #3 (anth 1974), #4 (anth 1975), #5 (anth 1976), #6
(anth 1977), #7 (anth 1978), #8 (anth 1979), #9 (anth 1980), #10 (anth
1981), #11 (anth 1982), #12 (anth 1983), #13 (anth 1984; cut vt Best SF of
the Year #13 1984 UK), Terry Carr's Best Science Fiction of the Year #14
(anth 1985; vt Best SF of the Year #14 1985 UK), Terry Carr's Best Science
Fiction of the Year #15 (anth 1986; vt Best SF of the Year #15 1986 UK)
and #16 (anth 1987; vt Best SF of the Year #16 1987 UK).Finest Fantasy:
The sequence continued with The Year's Finest Fantasy #2 (anth 1979), #3
(anth 1981), #4 (anth 1981) and #5 (anth 1982).Best SF Novellas: The Best
Science Fiction Novellas of the Year #1 (anth 1979) and #2 (anth 1980).See
also: CITIES; INVASION; LINGUISTICS; MILFORD SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS'
CONFERENCE; MYTHOLOGY; RELIGION; SCI FI.

CARREL, FREDERIC
(1869-? ) UK writer, active as late as 1929. Paul le Maistre (1901) is
not sf, the invention at the heart of the book being an improved plough,
but 2010 (1914) is a racist and reactionary UTOPIA with high technologies
(amply described), a comet, a sterility-inducing plague and a future WAR
in which Oriental invaders are defeated when the plague is redirected at
their women. It was published anonymously. [JC]
CARREL, MARK
Lauran Bosworth PAINE.
CARRIE
Film (1976). Red Bank/United Artists. Dir Brian De Palma, starring Sissy
Spacek, Piper Laurie, John Travolta, Amy Irving, Nancy Allen. Screenplay
Lawrence D. Cohen, based on Carrie (1974) by Stephen KING. 98 mins.
Colour.This was the breakthrough film for a director who had worked with
fantastic subjects before, notably with Sisters (1972) and Phantom of the
Paradise (1974). Only borderline sf, more centrally a HORROR film, C tells
of a repressed and innocent child (Spacek), just entering puberty, whose
powers of TELEKINESIS awaken partly in response to the dreadful religious
bigotry of her mother and specifically to brutal teasing at high school.
Widely praised and commercially successful, C is pyrotechnically directed,
especially in those scenes where Carrie strikes back at her tormentors.
Undoubtedly impressive, the film is, however, more simplistic about its
fantasy of impotent-victim-becoming-potent-avenger than was its source
novel. De Palma went on to make another film about PSI POWERS, The FURY
(1978). [PN]See also: CINEMA.
CARRIGAN, RICHARD
(1939-1978) and NANCY (1933-? ) US writing team in whose sf novel, The
Siren Stars (1971), the first intelligent messages from another star
present a dire challenge. Rather ponderously, a clean-cut team of Earth
scientists deals with the problem. The book-length sequel was "Minotaur in
a Mushroom Maze" (1976 ASF). [JC]See also: CYBERNETICS.
CARRINGTON, GRANT
(1938- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Night-Eyed Prayer" for
AMZ in 1971, though his later "After You've Stood on the Log at the Center
of the Universe, What is There Left To Do?" (1974) was more notable.
Time's Fool (1981) is an unremarkable though moderately appealing sf
adventure. [JC]
CARROLL, LEWIS
Pseudonym of UK mathematician and writer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
(1832-1898), whose famous children's stories, Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There
(1871), an early example of the novel whose "moves" are based on a game of
chess, have had a profound impact on a wide range of writers. It has been
argued by Brian W. ALDISS, among others, that the underlying logic of
these "nonsense" adventures has provided a significant model for much of
sf's typical reorderings of reality - certainly in most sf novels whose
heroes' PARANOIA about reality turns out to be justified. Both novels were

assembled much later, and very usefully, as The Annotated Alice: Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (omni 1960 US; rev
vt More Annotated Alice 1990 US) ed Martin GARDNERGilbert Adair's Alice
Through the Needle's Eye * (1984) was, interestingly, not a Wonderland
parody but a genuine continuation.LC's mathematical and logical fantasies,
as found in A Tangled Tale (1886), have also had repercussions in sf.
[JC]Other works include: Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (coll 1869); The
Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits (1876 chap), Sylvie and Bruno
(1867 Aunt Judy's Magazine as "Bruno's Revenge"; exp 1889) and its sequel
(also derived from the story), Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893); The Wasp
in a Wig (1977 chap), a portion of Through the Looking-Glass cut at proof
stage and lost until 1977.About the author: The Life and Letters of Lewis
Carroll (1898) by Stuart Dodgson Collingwood; Victoria through the
Looking-Glass (1945; vt Lewis Carroll 1954 UK) by Derek Hudson; Aspects of
Alice (1971) ed Robert Phillips.See also: FANTASTIC VOYAGES; HOLLOW EARTH;
MATHEMATICS; VIRTUAL REALITY.
CARS THAT ATE PARIS, THE
Film (1974). Salt Pan/Australian Film Development Corp/Royce Smeal.
Written and dir Peter Weir, starring Terry Camilleri, John Meillon, Kevin
Miles. 88 mins. Colour.From a director who later made several impressive
fantasy films, including Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Last Wave
(1977), both of which edge close to sf at points, TCTAP is an
idiosyncratic exploitation movie about a small town in which young people
drive murderously redesigned cars (some covered in spikes) up and down the
roads at high speed, rapidly disposing of any visitors via crashes and
then cannibalizing the wreckage; any survivors are turned over to the
local mad doctor who uses them as experimental subjects. An air of
automotive apocalypse is produced, as in Jean-Luc Godard's otherwise very
different WEEKEND (1967). In TCTAP, a witty, smaller-scale work, the town
that lives by the car dies by the car. TCTAP points forward to the MAD MAX
movies, also Australian, which similarly feature killer cars, gladiatorial
sports and diseased societies. [PN]
CARTER, ANGELA (OLIVE STALKER)
(1940-1992) UK writer best known for her work outside the sf field,
though all her novels and tales are characterized by an expressionist
freedom of reference to everyday "reality" which often emerges as fantasy.
She won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize for her second novel, The
Magic Toyshop (1967), and the Somerset Maugham Award for Several
Perceptions (1968). Her first tale to engage in a recognizably sf
displacement of reality, HEROES AND VILLAINS (1969), does so with a
similar freedom, for AC was one of the few UK writers of genuine
FABULATIONS, of POSTMODERNIST works in which storytelling conventions are
mixed and examined, and in which the style of telling is strongly
language-oriented. HEROES AND VILLAINS is set in a post- HOLOCAUST England
inhabited by (a) dwellers in the ruins of cities, whose society is rigidly
stratified into Professors and the Soldiers who guard them and, (b)
Barbarians who live in the surreal mutated forests that cover the land.
Like much of her work, the novel uses GOTHIC images and conventions to
examine and to parody the concerns of its protagonists and the desolate

world they inhabit. In the story of Marianne, a Professor's daughter, who
leaves the ruined city for a Barbarian life where she undergoes a violent
erotic awakening, AC definitively entangles sex and decadence (or female
freedom).Erotic complexities, shamans and deliquescent urban landscapes
proliferate in such later novels as The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor
Hoffman (1972; vt The War of Dreams 1974 US), which is a quest into dream,
The Passion of New Eve (1977), which is a baroque picaresque through a
holocaust-enflamed USA, and Nights at the Circus (1984), in which a
grandly fabulated, densely conceived phantasmagorical world surrounds the
tale of a "deformed" woman performer whose wings are real, whose womanhood
is no deformity. AC's stories were collected as: Fireworks (coll 1974; rev
1987), assembled with the non-genre Love (1971; rev 1987) as Artificial
Fire (omni 1988 Canada); The Bloody Chamber (coll 1979), a series of
contes dissective of female sexuality; and Black Venus (coll 1985; rev vt
Saints and Strangers 1986 US), which includes Black Venus's Tale (1980
chap). Though she was never associated with the sf NEW WAVE, it was
perhaps through the widening of the gates of perception due to that
movement that readers of sf were induced to treat AC's difficult but
rewarding work as being of interest to a genre audience. She died very
much too young. [JC]Other works: Moonshadow (1982 chap) with Justin Todd,
a juvenile; Come unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays (coll 1985);
The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (anth 1990; vt The Old Wives' Fairy Tale
Book 1990 US); The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (anth 1992);
Expletives Deleted (coll 1992), nonfiction.As translator:The Fairy Tales
of Charles Perrault (trans 1977); Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite
Fairy Tales (trans and ed 1982).See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; DISASTER;
FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FANTASY; HISTORY OF SF; MYTHOLOGY; PERCEPTION;
PSYCHOLOGY; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES; WOMEN SF WRITERS.
CARTER, BRUCE
Pseudonym of UK military historian, novelist and editor Richard
(Alexander) Hough (1922- ) for his stories and nonfiction books for
juveniles, beginning with an sf title, The Perilous Descent into a Strange
Lost World (1952; vt Into a Strange Lost World 1953 US). Other sf novels
for older children have included The Deadly Freeze (1976) and Buzzbugs
(1977). Nightworld (1987) is an animal fantasy. [JC]
CARTER, CARMEN
(1954- ) US writer who has been primarily associated with STAR TREK,
writing one solo tie for Star Trek itself, Dreams of the Raven * (1987),
and three for Star Trek, the Next Generation, The Children of Hamelin *
(1988), with Michael Jan FRIEDMAN, Peter DAVID and Robert Greenberger,
Doomsday World * (1990) and Devil's Heart * (1993). Earlier she published
a short fantasy fable, The Shy Beast (1984 chap). [JC]
CARTER, DEE
Dennis HUGHES.
CARTER, LIN
Working name of US writer and editor Linwood Vrooman Carter (1930-1988),
most of whose work of any significance was done in the field of HEROIC
FANTASY, an area of concentration he went some way to define in his

critical study of relevant texts and techniques, Imaginary Worlds (1973).
Much of his own heroic fantasy derives, sometimes too mechanically, from
the precepts about its writing which he aired in this book. As an editor,
he was most active about 1969-72, when as consultant for BALLANTINE BOOKS
he conceived their adult FANTASY list and presented many titles under that
aegis, bringing to the contemporary paperback market writers such as James
Branch CABELL, Lord DUNSANY and Clark Ashton SMITH. With Cabell, he merely
reprinted some titles; but with H.P. LOVECRAFT, Dunsany and Smith he
reassembled material under his own titles (for details see their entries).
Most of his criticism has been closely linked to his strong interest in
fantasy of this sort; it includes Tolkien: A Look Behind "The Lord of the
Rings" (1969) and Lovecraft: A Look Behind the "Cthulhu Mythos" (1972). LC
began publishing sf with "Masters of the Metropolis" for FSF in 1957 with
Randall GARRETT; and with L. Sprague de Camp he adapted and expanded many
stories, especially Conan infills, like Conan the Swordsman * (1978) and
Conan the Liberator * (1979), which Robert E. Howard had left unpublished
or unrealized, and created others (for further details L. Sprague DE CAMP;
Robert E. HOWARD).As an author in his own right, LC tended to concentrate
on pastiches of the kind of heroic fantasy to which he was devoted. His
first novel, The Wizard of Lemuria (1965; rev vt Thongor and the Wizard of
Lemuria 1969), begins a long and (as it turned out) typical series of
fantasies about the exploits of Thongor in various venues, continuing with
Thongor of Lemuria (1966; rev vt Thongor and the Dragon City 1970),
Thongor Against the Gods (1967), Thongor in the City of Magicians (1968),
Thongor at the End of Time (1968) and Thongor Fights the Pirates of
Tarakus (1970). Like succeeding series (see listing below), the Thongor
tales represent a swift though somewhat exiguous fantasizing of routine
pulp protocols. Though these fantasies were often set (like Edgar Rice
BURROUGHS's) on various florid worlds, and could be thought of as
PLANETARY ROMANCES, they were not in any committed sense sf in tone; LC's
output of sf proper is relatively scant. The Great Imperium sequence - The
Star Magicians (1966 dos), The Man without a Planet (1966 dos), Tower of
the Medusa (1969), Star Rogue (1970) and Outworlder (1971) - comes
attractively closer; and the Mars series - The Man who Loved Mars (1973),
The Valley where Time Stood Still (1974), The City Outside the World
(1977) and Down to a Sunless Sea (1984) - has moments of poignance where
sf and SCIENCE FANTASY grant perspectives by overlapping. Overproduction
blurred LC's image (though illness slowed him down considerably in later
years), giving weight to the feeling that he sometimes paid inadequate
attention to the quality of his products or to assuring their
individuality. His work as an editor eclipses his own writings in
importance. [JC]Other works:Series: The Thoth sequence, comprising The
Thief of Thoth (1968 chap) and The Purloined Planet (1969 chap dos), which
is sf; the Chronicles of Kylix, comprising The Quest of Kadji (1971) and
The Wizard of Zao (1978); the Gondwana Epic, comprising The Warrior of
World's End, (1974), The Enchantress of World's End (1975), The Immortal
of World's End (1976), The Barbarian of World's End (1977), The Pirate of
World's End (1978) and, first published but the concluding volume, Giant
of World's End (1969); the Callisto sequence, comprising Jandar of
Callisto (1972), Black Legion of Callisto (1972), Sky Pirates of Callisto
(1973), Mad Empress of Callisto (1975), Mind Wizards of Callisto (1975),

Lankar of Callisto (1975), Ylana of Callisto (1977) and Renegade of
Callisto (1978); the Green Star Rises sequence, comprising Under the Green
Star (1972), When the Green Star Calls (1973), By the Light of the Green
Star (1974), As the Green Star Rises (1975), In the Green Star's Glow
(1976) and As the Green Star Rises (1983); the DOC SAVAGE-like Zarkon
sequence, comprising Zarkon, Lord of the Unknown, in The Nemesis of Evil
(1975; vt The Nemesis of Evil 1978), Zarkon, Lord of the Unknown, in
Invisible Death (1975; vt Zarkon, Lord of the Unknown and his Omega Crew:
Invisible Death 1978), Zarkon, Lord of the Unknown, in The Volcano Ogre
(1976; vt Zarkon, Lord of the Unknown and his Omega Crew: The Volcano Ogre
1978), Zarkon, Lord of the Unknown, in The Earth-Shaker (1982) and Horror
Wears Blue (1987); the Zanthodon sequence, comprising Journey to the
Underground World (1979), Zanthodon (1980), Hurok of the Stone Age (1981),
Darya of the Stone Age (1981) and Eric of Zanthodon (1982); the Terra
Magica sequence, comprising Kesrick (1982), Dragonrouge (1984),
Mandricardo (1986) and Callipygia (1988).Singletons: Destination Saturn
(1967) with David Grinnell (Donald A. WOLLHEIM); The Flame of Iridar (1967
chap dos); Tower at the Edge of Time (1968); Beyond the Gates of Dream
(coll 1969); Lost World of Time (1969); Outworlder (1971); The Black Star
(1973); Time War (1974); Dreams from R'lyeh (coll 1975 chap), poetry; Tara
of the Twilight (1979); Lost Worlds (coll 1980); Kellory the Warlock
(1984); Found Wanting (1985).As Editor: Dragons, Elves and Heroes (anth
1969); The Young Magicians (anth 1969); The Magic of Atlantis (anth 1970);
Golden Cities, Far (anth 1970); The Spawn of Cthulhu (anth 1971); New
Worlds for Old (anth 1971); Discoveries in Fantasy (anth 1972); Great
Short Novels of Adult Fantasy (anth 1972) and Great Short Novels of Adult
Fantasy II (anth 1973); the Flashing Swords series, comprising Flashing
Swords 1 (anth 1973), #2 (anth 1973), #3: Warriors and Wizards (anth
1976), #4: Barbarians and Black Magicians (anth 1977) and #5: Demons and
Daggers (anth 1981); the Year's Best Fantasy series, comprising The Year's
Best Fantasy Stories 1 (anth 1975), #2 (anth 1976), #3 (anth 1977), #4
(anth 1978), #5 (anth 1980) and #6 (anth 1980); Kingdoms of Sorcery (anth
1976); Realms of Wizardry (anth 1976); the Weird Tales series, comprising
Weird Tales 1 (anth 1980), #2 (anth 1980), #3 (anth 1981) and #4 (anth
1983).Nonfiction: Royal Armies of the Hyborean Age: A Wargamer's Guide to
the Age of Conan (1975 chap) both with Scott Bizar; Middle-Earth: The
World of Tolkien (1977) with David Wenzel (1950- ), pictures with
captions.See also: ATLANTIS; DAW BOOKS; SWORD AND SORCERY.
CARTER, NICK
Fictional sleuth, and house name for many of the titles in which he
appears. Created by John Russell Coryell (1848-1924) in The Old
Detective's Pupil, or The Mysterious Crime at Madison Square Garden (1886)
on the model of Allan Pinkerton (1819-1884), founder of the famous
detective agency, NC featured in many subsquent US dime novels, including
several of sf interest ( DIME-NOVEL SF) by Frederick Van Rensselaer Dey
(1861-1922) writing as Chickering Carter - the name of one of Carter's
numerous assistants - published in the New Nick Carter Weekly in 1907, the
most notable being "The Index of Seven Stars, or Nick Carter Finds the
Hidden City", "An Amazonian Queen, or Nick Carter Becomes a Gladiator" and
"The Seven-Headed Monster, or Nick Carter's Midnight Caller". Other

authors of Nick Carter tales before WWII included John Chambliss, Philip
Clark, William Wallace COOK, Frederick William Davis, George Charles Jenks
(1850-1929), whose normal pseudonym was W.B. Lawson, Johnston McCulley
(1883-1958) and Eugene Taylor Sawyer. Magazines such as the Nick Carter
Detective Library were supplemented by radio, film and tv incarnations,
over the course of which Carter himself became noticeably tougher and more
murderous, his resemblance to Sexton Blake being correspondingly less
marked in more recent years. The Nick Carter series of soft-porn thrillers
from the 1960s rarely slipped into sf, and never with much point; typical
of titles verging on sf were (all as by Nick Carter) The Human Time Bomb:
A Killmaster Spy Chiller (1969),The Red Rays (1969) by Manning Lee STOKES,
Living Death (1969) by Jon Messmann, Operation Moon Rocket (1970) and The
Death Strain (1971). It is understood that among the authors about this
time were, in addition to Messmann, Michael AVALLONE, Dennis LYNDS, Martin
Cruz SMITH and Richard WORMSER. A decade later, a further batch of sf
titles was produced, again all as by NC, including The Doomsday Spore
(1979) by George Warren, The Q-Man (1981) by John Stevenson, The Solar
Menace (1981) and Doctor DNA (1982), both by Robert E. VARDEMAN, The Last
Samurai (1982) by Bruce Algozin and Deathlight (1982) by Jerry AHERN. [JC]
CARTER, PAUL A(LLEN)
(1926- ) US social historian and writer who began publishing sf with "The
Last Objective" for ASF in 1946. His occasional stories over the next
decades showed that, had he wished, he could have made writing his primary
career. In The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science
Fiction (anth 1977) he demonstrated an intimate and sophisticated
knowledge of the field. With Gregory BENFORD he has published a short
novel, Iceborn (1989 in Synergy 3 ed George ZEBROWSKI, as "Proserpina's
Daughter"; exp 1989 chap dos). [JC]See also: POLITICS.
CARTER, R.M.H.
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
CARTIER, EDD
Working name of US illustrator Edward Daniel Cartier (1914- ). After
graduation in 1936 from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, EC was
hired by STREET ?
Shadow. His skills were noticed by John W. CAMPBELL Jr, who began using
him in the new magazine UNKNOWN, for which EC did many black-and-white
interiors from #1 onwards and, from Dec 1939, five covers. For many
readers EC's combination of whimsy and menace summed up the quality of
that magazine. He quickly became very popular, perhaps because the
humorous feel of his work was then so unusual in sf ILLUSTRATION. He left
in 1941 to fight in WWII, was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge, and
returned to illustration in 1946. Thereafter his main markets were
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, DOC SAVAGE MAGAZINE, OTHER WORLDS and the
SMALL PRESSES, like FANTASY PRESS and GNOME PRESS, which often reprinted
ASF material in book form. EC later went back to college, graduated in
fine arts, and left sf illustration around 1954 to work in graphic design.
He will be remembered for the wit and boldness of his black-and-white work
for the Street ? FANTASY.

CARTMILL, CLEVE
(1908-1964) US author and journalist; co-inventor of the Blackmill system
of high-speed typography. His early work appeared in Unknown, including
his first story, "Oscar" (1941), and several short FANTASY novels; one of
these, "Hell Hath Fury" (1943), was featured in the George HAY anthology
of the same title (1963). During the 1940s he was also active in US sf
magazines, publishing in all about 40 stories, including the Space Salvage
series in TWS, later collected as The Space Scavengers (coll of linked
stories 1975). He is remembered for a famous story in ASF, "Deadline"
(1944), which described the atomic bomb a year before it was dropped. US
Security subsequently descended on ASF but was persuaded (truthfully) by
John W. CAMPBELL Jr that CC had used for his research only material
available in public libraries. CC's prediction made sf fans enormously
proud, and the story was made a prime exhibit in the arguments about
PREDICTION in sf. In this NEAR-FUTURE fable the evil Sixa (i.e., Axis)
forces are prevented from dropping the Bomb, and the Seilla (Allies)
decline to do so, justly fearing its dread potential. [JC]About the
author: "The Manhattan Project's Confrontation with Science Fiction" (1984
ASF) by Albert Berger.See also: NUCLEAR POWER; RELIGION.
CARVER, JEFFREY A(LLAN)
(1949- ) US writer who began publishing sf with ". . . Of No Return" for
Fiction Magazine in 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976 Canada),
showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would
take him some time, and several novels, to control. Star Rigger's Way
(1978), for instance, combines quest routines, new starflight
technologies, various planets and transcendental ALIENS in a tale whose
final effect is incoherent, though promising; nor is Panglor (1980)
significantly better behaved. But The Infinity Link (1984) is a large and
ambitious recasting of his abiding material-space epic venues, striving
human protagonists in transcendental communion with aliens or AIs - into
the tale of a human woman telepathically linked with a passing
interstellar race. The Rapture Effect (1987) brought the ARTS into the
mix, suggesting in the end that a secret war between a human-built AI and
its distant alien counterpart might be resolved, finally, through the
mediation of some ambitious human artists. And in the Starstream sequence
- From a Changeling Star (1989) and Down the Stream of Stars (1990) - JAC
created at last a galactic environment of sufficient richness to contain a
still somewhat overexuberant imagination. In the first volume, a
"starstream" has opened up between Earth space and the centre of the
Galaxy, allowing for intercourse and settlement; the plot, which is
extremely complicated, involves its protagonist in a quest inwards to
regions where stars are numerous, by the end of which, killed and rekilled
and reborn, he is saved by the overseeing AI which narrates the second
volume. NANOTECHNOLOGIES are described; poetries and epiphanies and space
wars proliferate. Dragons in the Stars (1992), and its sequel Dragon
Rigger (1993), return to the Star Rigger universe; and a new series, the
Chaos Chronicles begins with Neptune Crossing (1994), in which another AI
enlists a lone human to save Earth from a comet whose course is only
predictable through the AI's use of Chaos Theory. JAC seems to be
thoroughly enjoying his worlds. [JC]Other work: Roger Zelazny's Alien

Speedway #1: Clypsis (1987).See also: MUSIC.
CASANOVA DE SEINGALT, GIACOMO
(1725-1798) Venetian writer, variously employed; best known for his
Memoires (posthumously published in 12 vols 1826-38), the
single-mindedness of which caused his name to pass into the language . He
wrote primarily in French, the language of his FANTASTIC-VOYAGE novel,
Icosameron, ou Histoire d'Edouard et d'Elizabeth Qui Passerent
Quatre-Vingte Un Ans chez les Megamicres Habitans Aborigenes du Protocosme
dans l'Interieur de Notre Globe (1788; cut trans Rachel Zurer as
Casanova's "Icosameron" or the Story of Edward and Elizabeth who Spent
Eighty-One Years in the Land of the Megamicres, Original Inhabitants of
Protocosmos in the Interior of the Globe 1986 US). The protagonists spend
81 years in a world in the HOLLOW EARTH inhabited by the androgynous and
oviparous Megamicres ("big/littles" - small in stature and large in
spirit), who have been there from before the Fall - this land being an
analogue of Eden - avoiding Original Sin, but soulless (cf James BLISH's A
CASE OF CONSCIENCE, 1958). They describe their society to the two
shipwrecked wanderers at some length (the novel occupies 5 vols, each
350pp or more), and the wanderers (brother and sister, though they mate in
the Eden they discover) in turn tell their tale, in dialogue form, to a
group of English aristocrats; they have left millions of descendants
inside the Earth, and transformed society there. The book is quite
realistic in tone, and contains a great deal of scientific speculation and
anticipation, notably about electricity, and a fair amount of social
SATIRE. It was probably influenced by VOLTAIRE's Micromegas (France 1752),
and more directly by Ludvig HOLBERG's Nicolaii Klimii Iter Subterraneum
(1741 in Latin; trans as A Journey to the World Underground 1742).
[JC/PN]See also: FRANCE; ITALY.
CASARES, ADOLFO BIOY
[r] Adolfo BIOY CASARES.
CASE, JOSEPHINE YOUNG
(1907-1990) US writer of a remarkable book-length sf poem, At Midnight on
the 31st of March (1938), set in a New England village suddenly isolated
by some unidentified DISASTER from the rest of the USA, and consequently
cast upon its own closely observed resources. What seemed, on its 1990
republication, to read as tocsin nostalgia for an impossible rapport with
mythic roots may have read in 1938 as a clarion call. [JC]
CASEWIT, CURTIS W(ERNER)
(1922- ) US writer born in Germany and educated in different countries
(hence multilingual), resident in the USA from 1948. He has published in
various fields, his first sf story, "The Mask" (1952), appearing in Weird
Tales. His sf novel, The Peacemakers (1960), depicts conflicting societies
after WWIII; a former soldier tries to become dictator. [JC]
CASEY, RICHARD
House name used on the ZIFF-DAVIS magazines 1943-8 by Leroy YERXA and
others.
CASPER

AWARDS; CANADA.
CASPER, SUSAN
(1947- ) US editor and writer, married to Gardner DOZOIS. She began
publishing sf with "Spring-Fingered Jack" for Fears (anth 1983) ed Charles
GRANT. Her fiction in collaboration with Dozois was assembled in Slow
Dancing through Time (coll 1990), which includes a collaboration with both
Dozois and Jack M. DANN. Also with Dozois, she edited Ripper! (anth 1988;
vt Jack the Ripper 1988 UK). [JC]See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.
CASSIDAY, BRUCE (BINGHAM)
(1920- ) US editor and writer, who worked as editor with various
PULP-MAGAZINE publishers before going freelance in 1954, usually
publishing under pseudonyms. His sf works are ties: "Gorgo" * (1960) as by
Carson Bingham, "Flash Gordon 4: The Time Trap of Ming XIII" * (1974), as
by Con STEFFANSON, "Flash Gordon 5: The Witch Queen of Mongo" * (1974) as
by Bingham and Flash Gordon: The War of the Cybernauts * (1975) as by
Bingham. The first, based on the film GORGO (1959), is notable for the
added sex scenes, a custom of Monarch's film adaptations. Additional
titles include Nightmare Hall (1973) as by Annie Laurie McMurdie, and
Queen of the Looking Glass (1978) as by Annie Laurie McAllister. Under his
own name, he adapted for the US market Dieter Wuckel's Science Fiction:
eine illustrierte literaturgeschichte (1986 Germany; trans Jenny Vowles as
The Illustrated History of Science Fiction 1989 US). His Modern Mystery,
Fantasy, and Science Fiction Writers (anth 1993), a compilation of
critical responses to 88 authors, was not very thorough. [PN/JC]
CASSUTT, MICHAEL
(1954- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "A Second Death" for AMZ
in 1974, and whose numerous tv credits include serving as staff writer for
The TWILIGHT ZONE in 1986 and story editor for MAX HEADROOM in 1987. His
sf novel, Star Country (1986), set in a balkanized post- HOLOCAUST USA,
competently dovetails two stories, one concerning an escaped ALIEN, the
other a commune which has attempted to turn its collective back on the
world. His Who's Who in Space: The First 25 Years (1987; exp vt Who's Who
in Space: The International Space Year Edition 1993) provides biographies
of a wide range of people involved in the first years of humanity's move
off-planet. Sacred Visions (anth 1991) with Andrew M. GREELEY is an
anthology, by no means pious, of sf about and/or reflecting RELIGION.
[JC]Other works: Dragon Season (1991), a fantasy.
CASTERET, NORBERT
(1897-1987) French speleologist and writer whose sf novel, Mission centre
terre (1964; trans Antonia Ridge and rev as Mission Underground 1968 UK),
sends explorers several miles into the Earth in a specially designed
craft. [JC]Other works: La terre ardente (1950); Muta, fille des
cavernes["Muta, Daughter of the Caverns"] (1965)and Dans la nuit des temps
["In the Night of Time"] (1966), two prehistoric romances.
CASTILLO, GABRIEL BERMUDEZ
[r] SPAIN.
CASTLE, DAMON

Richard REINSMITH.
CASTLE, J(EFFERY) LLOYD
(1898- ) UK writer whose first sf novel, Satellite E One (1954), deals
awkwardly with the scientific details surrounding the construction of a
space satellite. His second, Vanguard to Venus (1957), identifies UFOS as
the ships of descendants of spacefaring ancient Egyptians. [JC]
CASTLE, ROBERT
[s] Edmond HAMILTON.
CATASTROPHE
DISASTER; END OF THE WORLD; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER.
CAVALIER, THE
US general-fiction PULP MAGAZINE published by the Frank A. MUNSEY Co., ed
Robert H. Davis. It evolved from The SCRAP BOOK and appeared monthly Oct
1908-Jan 1912, became The Cavalier Weekly, 6 Jan 1912-9 May 1914, then
merged with All-Story Weekly to form All Story Cavalier Weekly ( The
ALL-STORY ). Although comparatively short-lived, TC published two
celebrated sf works: Garrett P. SERVISS's The Second Deluge (1911-12;
1912) and George Allan ENGLAND's Darkness and Dawn (1912-13 as 3 separate
novels; fixup 1914; in 5 vols with editorial changes 1964-7). Among the
numerous short stories were works by Edgar FRANKLIN, J.U. GIESY (with
Junius B. Smith) and John D. Swain. Several stories from TC were reprinted
in FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES and FANTASTIC NOVELS. [JE]
CAVALIER WEEKLY
The CAVALIER .
CAWTHORN, JAMES
(1929- ) UK illustrator, critic and writer. He entered sf around 1954,
early becoming friendly with Michael MOORCOCK through a shared interest in
Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, and working with him on Tarzan Adventures, a COMIC
book ed Moorcock. As Philip James he wrote The Distant Suns (1969 The
Illustrated Weekly of India; exp 1975) with Moorcock. As JC he wrote book
reviews for NW, but was best known as an illustrator, his work appearing
often in NW but also in comics and on occasional book covers. At his best
his naive, rough lines work vividly; sometimes they simply seem too crude.
His SWORD-AND-SORCERY illustration is uneven. Books in GRAPHIC-NOVEL form
are Stormbringer (graph 1975), The Jewel in the Skull (graph 1978), The
Crystal and the Amulet (graph 1986), all existing works by Moorcock
adapted by JC, the latter based on Sorcerer's Amulet (1968; rev 1977; vt
The Mad God's Amulet), the second of the Runestaff books. He co-scripted
with Moorcock the 1975 film The LAND THAT TIME FORGOT . The critical book
Fantasy: The 100 Best Books (1988) by JC and Moorcock is, according to
Moorcock's Introduction, mostly by JC, and is notable for the heavy
emphasis it places on early FANTASY, only 24 of the 100 works discussed
being post-1955. [PN]
CAXTON
[s] W.H. RHODES.
CECH, SVATOPLUK

[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
CHABER, M.E.
Kendell Foster CROSSEN.
CHADWICK, P(HILIP) G(EORGE)
(1893-1955) UK author whose only novel, The Death Guard (1939), was
virtually forgotten until its 1992 reissue. It describes the development
of the "Flesh Guard", a race of laboratory-created vegetal humanoids, at
the time of the emergence of a fascist dictatorship in the UK, and depicts
a future WAR as the Earth's major nations react to the horror of such an
army in the hands of an extremist government. The book contains several
themes later developed by L. Ron HUBBARD and James BLISH, and is at times
reminiscent of William Hope HODGSON. [JE]See also: POLITICS.
CHAIRMAN, THE
The MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN THE WORLD .
CHALKER, JACK L(AURENCE)
(1944- ) US writer and editor, though now very much better known for his
fiction. He was active as a fan from an early age, and producer of a
successful FANZINE, Mirage. As editor, he founded and edited the MIRAGE
PRESS, which specialized in sf scholarship. His own work in that area
began with The New H.P. Lovecraft Bibliography (1962 chap; rev vt The
Revised H. P. Lovecraft Bibliography 1974 chap with Mark OWINGS) and In
Memoriam: Clark Ashton Smith (anth 1963 chap), continuing with some
studies and guides with Owings, who is sometimes listed as a pseudonym of
JLC, a confusion arising from his sole crediting for The Necronomicon: A
Study (1967 chap), which was in fact collaborative. They also worked
together on Mirage on Lovecraft (1965 chap) and The Index to the Science
Fantasy Publishers (1966 chap; rev vt Index to the SF Publishers 1979
chap). After the solo An Informal Biography of $crooge McDuck (1971
Markings; 1974 chap), JLC moved his attention to fiction, only returning
to his earlier interest 20 years later with a new edition of his 1979
Index, which though technically a revision of the earlier work was in fact
10 times its length, and can logically be treated as either a vt or a new
title: The Science-Fantasy Publishers: A Critical and Bibliographic
History (1991; with subsequent various unascribed revs), still with
Owings; the similarly identified The Science-Fantasy Publishers:
Supplement One, July 1991-June 1992 (1992) and the Science-Fantasy
Publishers: Supplement One: July 1991- June 1993 (1993) continue the
coverage (see also BIBLIOGRAPHIES).His first novel, an ambitious singleton
SPACE OPERA, A Jungle of Stars (1976), proved typical in that its opposing
aliens (who are both ex-gods) represent in their conflict a form of
populist argument about alternative utopian worldviews, and in that its
plot concentrates on members of mortal races who have been recruited to do
the superbeings' fighting for them in a kind of world-arena. This
underlying articulacy and the plot-device of recruitment also mark his
most successful single novel, Dancers in the Afterglow (1978), a complex
and melancholy tale of oppression and enforced metamorphosis on a
conquered colony planet, in which questions of power and morality are
again asked with some ease, and the human need for freedom is answered

(and at the same time deeply assaulted) by transformation tropes out of
SCIENCE FANTASY and nightmare. Dancers contains in embryo almost all of
the next decade or so of JLC's prolific career, most of which has been
given over to the construction of large series. The first, the Well World
sequence, begins with his second fiction title, Midnight at the Well of
Souls (1977), and continues with The Wars of the Well - in 2 vols: Exiles
at the Well of Souls (1978) and Quest for the Well of Souls (1978)-The
Return of Nathan Brazil (1980), Twilight at the Well of Souls: The Legacy
of Nathan Brazil (1980), , Echoes of the Well of Souls (1993), Shadow of
the Well of Souls (1994) and Gods of the Well of Souls (1994). In this
series the dominant pattern of the JLC multi-volume tale can be seen. Into
a world which reveals itself in the shape of a game-board disguised as a
DYSTOPIA, recruited and metamorphosed mortals are introduced to find their
way, usually stark-naked, to the heart of the labyrinth, where wait the
godlings, and, perhaps, as a reward, the true form they have always
secretly wished to assume (the 1990s volumes of the sequence replicate
this pattern). It is a pattern open to facile abuse (several of JLC's
fantasy series, as listed below, exhibit a strange monotony) but which
remains exhilarating and innovative in his other major sf series, The Four
Lords of the Diamond (omni 1983), which assembles Lilith: A Snake in the
Grass (1981), Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold (1982), Charon: A Dragon at the
Gate (1982) and Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail (1983). The Quintara Marathon
sf series - Demons at Rainbow Bridge (1989), The Run to Chaos Keep (1991)
and The Ninety Trillion Fausts (1991) - further rehearses this material.
Of JLC's infrequent singletons, The Identity Matrix (1982) and Downtiming
the Night Side (1985) perhaps stand out; his short fiction, also
infrequent, is represented by Dance Band on the Titanic (coll 1988). JLC
is a novelist of considerable flair, with an ear acutely attuned to the
secret dreams of freedom mortals tend to dream, but is prone to gross and
compulsively repetitive overproduction. He will not be remembered for his
second thoughts. [JC]Other works: The Soul Rider science-fantasy sequence,
comprising Spirits of Flux and Anchor (1984), Empires of Flux and Anchor
(1984), Masters of Flux and Anchor (1985), The Birth of Flux and Anchor
(1985) - an sf prequel - and Children of Flux and Anchor (1986); the
Dancing Gods sequence, comprising The River of Dancing Gods (1984), Demons
of the Dancing Gods (1984), Vengeance of the Dancing Gods (1985) and Songs
of the Dancing Gods (1990); the Rings of the Master sequence, comprising
Lords of the Middle Dark (1986), Pirates of the Thunder (1987), Warriors
of the Storm (1987) and Masks of the Martyrs (1988); the Changewinds
fantasy sequence, comprising When the Changewinds Blow (1987), Riders of
the Winds (1988) and War of the Maelstrom (1988), which JLC claims make up
a single long novel; an ALTERNATE-WORLDS detective series, G.O.D. Inc,
comprising The Labyrinth of Dreams (1987), The Shadow Dancers (1987) and
The Maze in the Mirror (1989).Singletons: The Web of the Chozen (1978); A
War of Shadows (1979); And the Devil Will Drag You Under (1979); The
Devil's Voyage (1981), mainly about the ship that carried the A-bomb used
on Hiroshima to its rendezvous and which was subsequently sunk and its
crew eaten by sharks, but also about the security scare caused by Cleve
CARTMILL's "Deadline", published in 1944 in John W. CAMPBELL's ASF; The
Messiah Choice (1985); The Red Tape War: A Round-Robin Science Fiction
Novel (1991) with Michael RESNICK and George Alec EFFINGER; Hotel

Andromeda (anth 1994), as editor.See also: GODS AND DEMONS; INVASION;
PARANOIA; POCKET UNIVERSE; SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS; TIME
TRAVEL; VIRTUAL REALITY.
CHALLENGE
GAMES AND TOYS.
CHALLIS, GEORGE
Max BRAND.
CHALMERS, GARET
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
CHAMBERLAIN, HENRY RICHARDSON
(1859-1911) US writer and newspaper editor of considerable political
sophistication, which shows itself in the conclusion to his sf novel,
6,000 Tons of Gold (1894). After the eponymous treasure trove has
unbalanced the world's finances, and only dubiously assisted the needy, a
cabal of the wise decides to dump it into the deep sea. [JC]See also:
MONEY.
CHAMBERLAIN, WILLIAM
(1903-1969?) US writer whose two borderline sf novels, Red January (1964)
and China Strike (1967), both feature US pre-emptive strikes against the
enemy - in the first case Cuba, about to blackmail the USA, and in the
second China, on the verge of dropping a cobalt bomb on her. Neither gets
away with it. [JC]
CHAMBERS, ROBERT W(ILLIAM)
(1865-1933) Popular US writer, author of over 70 novels in various
genres, for the first decade or so of his career mostly fantasies,
thereafter mainly historical and romantic works. His first successful work
was The King in Yellow (coll 1895; cut vt The Mask 1929). The eponymous
"King in Yellow" is not a person but a verse play in book form, which (not
unlike several much discussed works of recent sf) drives its readers to
despair, madness and even suicide ( PSYCHOLOGY). Of the four King in
Yellow tales in the book, "The Repairer of Reputations" is of particular
sf interest, being set in 1920, after a war, in a USA that has legalized
suicide. Several other volumes featuring connected stories followed,
including The Maker of Moons (coll 1896; title story only 1954 chap) and
two sf collections, In Search of the Unknown (coll of linked stories 1904)
and its thematic sequel, Police!!! (coll of linked stories 1915), in each
of which a philandering zoologist searches for unknown beasts ( BIOLOGY),
finds them and loses them, along with various girls. The Gay Rebellion
(1911 Hampden Magazine; coll of linked stories 1913) consists of comical
SATIRES in which women revolt but reform and marry properly. RWC's use of
sf material is slick and casual, though nightmares sometimes intrude; a
teasing, tamed decadence that had marked RWC from the beginning became
routinized in his later work, which was presented with professional polish
but little conviction. [JC]Other works: The Mystery of Choice (coll 1897);
The Tracer of Lost Persons (coll of linked stories 1906); The Tree of
Heaven (coll 1907); Some Ladies in Haste (1908); The Green Mouse (1910);
The Hidden Children (1914); Quick Action (1914) and its sequel, Athalie

(1915); The Dark Star (1917); The Slayer of Souls (1920); The Talkers
(1923); The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories (coll 1970) ed with
intro by E.F. BLEILER.See also: ARTS; SUSPENDED ANIMATION.
CHANCE, JOHN NEWTON
[r] John LYMINGTON.
CHANCE, JONATHAN
John LYMINGTON.
CHANDLER, A(RTHUR) BERTRAM
(1912-1984) UK-born writer who served in the Merchant Navy from 1928; in
1956 he emigrated to Australia, where he commanded merchant ships under
Australian and New Zealand flags until his retirement in 1975. This long
professional experience permeated his writing, and many of his novels
feature SPACESHIPS and flotillas whose command structures are decidedly
naval. ABC began publishing stories in ASF in 1944, on John W. CAMPBELL's
invitation, with "This Means War", and concentrated on short fiction for
almost two decades, often under the pseudonym George Whitley (in the USA
and the UK), less frequently as Andrew Dunstan and S.H.M. (both only in
Australia). But he published no books during this time, and maybe for that
reason he was until the 1960s less well known than he perhaps deserved,
even though some of his best stories date from this period. For some time
he was known mainly as the author of "Giant Killer" (1945), a
POCKET-UNIVERSE tale which dominates the work posthumously assembled in
From Sea to Shining Star (coll 1990), and whose solitary prominence
suggests that - although he published nearly 200 stories - ABC was not
entirely comfortable in shorter forms.After reaching the rank of chief
officer, ABC stopped writing for some time. He began again with a spate of
tales in the late 1950s, and finally published his first novel at the
beginning of the new decade. Thereafter he concentrated on full-length,
albeit short, books, most of which have dealt, directly or indirectly,
with his central venue, the various Rim Worlds set like isolated islands
along the edge of the Galaxy ( GALACTIC LENS; RIMWORLD) during a period of
human expansion. Not all these novels are serially connected, though all
have a common background (which includes terminology and a set of
frequently mentioned planets, like Thule and Faraway); John Grimes, the
protagonist of the central sequence, appears also in some non-series
novels. The two Derek Calver books - The Rim of Space (1961 US), ABC's
first novel, and The Ship from Outside (1959 ASF as "The Outsiders" ; exp
1963 dos US) - make up a kind of trailer for the more numerous stories
grouped about the figure of Grimes. In these books, Calver, following
something like the same course Grimes will, comes to the Rim Worlds,
eventually becomes captain of his own starship, Lorn Lady, loses her,
sails on other star tramps, and engages in far-flung adventures.Grimes is
mentioned in this short series, and the John Grimes/Rim World series
massively expands upon a very similar career and life. Grimes himself
dominates two main sequences. The first chronologically (though most of it
was written later) traces his career in the Federation Survey Service up
to and beyond the point that he shifts loyalties to the Rim. Their
internal order is as follows: The Road to the Rim (1967 dos US); To Prime
the Pump (1971 US); The Hard Way Up (coll 1972 dos US), which also appears

with the first novel as The Road to the Rim (omni 1979 US); False
Fatherland (1968; vt Spartan Planet 1969 US); The Inheritors (1972 dos
US), which involves GENETIC ENGINEERING; The Broken Cycle (1975 UK); The
Big Black Mark (1975 US); The Far Traveller (1977 UK); Star Courier (1977
US); To Keep the Ship (1978 UK); Matilda's Stepchildren (1979 UK); Star
Loot (1980 US); The Anarch Lords (1981 US); The Last Amazon (1984 US); The
Wild Ones (1984); Catch the Star Winds (coll of 1 novel and 1 story 1969
US). The second sequence advances Grimes further into his second career
with the Rim Runners and the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve. Begun earlier and
not written with any internal order in mind, it includes, in order of
publication: Into the Alternate Universe (1964 dos US) and Contraband from
Other-Space (1967 dos US), both assembled as Into the Alternate Universe
(omni 1979 US); The Rim Gods (coll of linked stories 1969 dos US) and The
Dark Dimensions (1971 dos US), both assembled as The Dark Dimensions (omni
1978 US); Alternate Orbits (coll 1971 dos US), assembled with False
Fatherland as The Commodore at Sea (omni 1979 US); The Gateway to Never
(1972 dos US) - crudely reassembled out of sequence as The Inheritors
(omni 1978 US), having been originally published dos-a-dos with the novel
of that title-and The Way Back (1976 UK). Through these books Grimes's
somewhat melancholy temperament and con-sistent ingenuity often remind one
of C.S. FORESTER's Horatio Hornblower, an influence ABC acknowledged
(though Grimes's sexual forthrightness strikes a new note); but it is of
course more than Hornblower's character that is drawn from the earlier
genre. The Grimes/Rim World sequence is very clearly a transposition much more directly than is usually the case - of ships into spaceships,
seas into the blackness between the stars, and ports into home-planets.
Much of the warmth and detail of ABC's work derives from this direct
translation of venues, and Grimes himself establishes a loyalty in his
readers rather similar to that felt by readers of Hornblower. Indeed,
ABC's SPACE OPERAS are among the most likeable and well constructed in the
genre, and his vision of the Rim Worlds - cold, poor, at the antipodean
edge of intergalactic darkness, but full of all the pioneer virtues - are
the genre's homiest characterization of that corner of space opera's
galactic arena.Two singletons merit some notice. The Bitter Pill (1974)
sourly depicts a totalitarian DYSTOPIA on Earth, and the ultimately
successful attempts its leading characters make to wrest Mars free of
oppression; and Kelly Country (1976 Void; exp 1983) places a war for
Australian independence in a PARALLEL-WORLDS setting.ABC received the
Australian Ditmar ( AWARDS) in 1969, 1971, 1974 and 1976. [JC]Other works:
Bring Back Yesterday (1961 dos US); Rendezvous on a Lost World (1961 dos
US; vt When the Dream Dies 1981 UK); The Hamelin Plague (1963 US); Beyond
the Galactic Rim (coll 1963 dos US); the Christopher Wilkinson novels,
comprising The Coils of Time (1964 dos US) and The Alternate Martians
(1965 dos US); Glory Planet (1964 US); The Deep Reaches of Space (1946 ASF
as "Special Knowledge"; rev 1964 UK), whose protagonist is ABC's main
pseudonym, George Whitley; the Empress series of space operas, placed in
an ALTERNATE-WORLDS universe similar to Grimes's and comprising Empress of
Outer Space (1965 dos US), Space Mercenaries (1965 dos US) and Nebula
Alert (1967 dos US); The Sea Beasts (1971 US); Up to the Sky in Ships
(coll 1982 chap dos US); To Rule the Refugees (1983 Japan); Frontier of
the Dark (1984 US); Find the Lady (1984 Japan).About the author: Arthur

Bertram Chandler, Master Navigator of Space: A Working Bibliography
(latest edn 1989 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr.See also: AUSTRALIA;
COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; FASTER THAN LIGHT; GALACTIC EMPIRES;
GREAT
AND SMALL; ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
CHAPBOOK
In the early 19th century this term described a pamphlet on any of a wide
range of subjects - from sermons to sensational tales, often illustrated
with woodcuts - sold not through bookshops but by "chapmen", who hawked
their wares. In the later 19th century, the term began to acquire a
contrived antiquarian air, and was used to designate a small book or
pamphlet produced for collectors. Although the fake antiquarianism
attached to the term has since faded, chapbooks in the sf field are
usually produced by SMALL PRESSES as limited editions containing a short
story or novella - although the short stories produced as individual
volumes by PULPHOUSE PUBLISHING are clearly intended to appeal to a
readership beyond merely collectors. In this encyclopedia ( How to Use
this Book [pages xxxi-xxxiv] for further details) we have arbitrarily and
for the sake of convenience used the abbreviation "chap" to designate any
book of fewer than 100 pages. [JC]
CHAPDELAINE, PERRY A(NTHONY)
(1925- ) US writer, mathematician, research psychologist and director of
an author's publishing co-op. His first published sf was "To Serve the
Masters" for If in 1967. His first sf novel, Swampworld West (1974),
routinely explores a COLONIZATION scenario involving problems between
native ALIENS and Earth colonists. His more recent books, The Laughing
Terran (1977 UK) and Spork of the Ayor (1969 If; fixup 1978 UK), like
their predecessor, suffer from awkward prose and sf stereotypes. In the
1980s he began with George HAY an enormous project in The John W. Campbell
Letters; published to date is The John W. Campbell Letters, Volume 1 (coll
1986) and The John W. Campbell Letters with Isaac Asimov and A.E.Van Vogt
(coll 1993). [JC/PN]See also: DIANETICS.
CHAPIN, PAUL
[s] Philip Jose FARMER.
CHAPMAN, SAMUEL
(? -? ) US writer whose sf novel, Doctor Jones' Picnic (1898), published
in San Francisco, takes the doctor on a BALLOON trip to the North Pole; en
route he cures cancer. [JC]See also: DISCOVERY AND INVENTION.
CHARBONNEAU, LOUIS (HENRY)
(1924- ) US writer and journalist who, after writing some radio plays at
the end of the 1940s, took an MA at the University of Detroit and taught
there for some years before beginning to publish sf novels with No Place
on Earth (1958), about a coercive DYSTOPIA. He produced sf for several
years thereafter, publishing: Corpus Earthling (1960), about invading
telepathic Martian parasites who eventually pass on their ESP powers to
mankind; The Sentinel Stars (1963), another dystopia, this time about
doomed revolts in a regimented future; Psychedelic-40 (1965; vt The
Specials 1965 UK); and Antic Earth (1967 UK; vt Down to Earth 1967 US).In

all these novels LC tends towards claustrophobic situations in which his
rather conventional protagonists explore themselves through action
scenarios. LC has written novels in other genres, including Westerns (as
Carter Travis Young) and mysteries. [JC]Other works: The Sensitives *
(1968), from the filmscript by Deane ROMANO; Barrier World (1970); Embryo
* (1976), novelizing EMBRYO (1976); Intruder (1979), marginal sf.
CHARBY, JAY
[s] Harlan ELLISON.
CHARKIN, PAUL (SAMUEL)
(1907- ) UK writer, variously employed for many years before writing his
three routine sf novels, Light of Mars (1959), The Other Side of Night
(1960) and The Living Gem (1963). [JC]
CHARLES, NEIL
House name used by CURTIS WARREN for sf novels written by Brian HOLLOWAY,
Dennis HUGHES and John W. JENNISON. [JC]
CHARLES, ROBERT
Robert Charles SMITH.
CHARLES, STEVEN
Charles L. GRANT.
CHARLY
Film (1968). Selmur and Robertson Associates. Dir Ralph Nelson, starring
Cliff Robertson, Claire Bloom, Lilia Skala, Dick van Patten. Screenplay
Stirling Silliphant, based on FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (1966) by Daniel KEYES.
106 mins. Colour.Enthused with the idea of playing a character who goes
from subnormality to super-genius and then back again, Cliff Robertson
formed his own production company and, after setbacks, made C and won an
Academy Award for his excellent performance. Much of the pathos of the
original is evoked in 30-year-old Charly's progression, after experimental
surgery, from amiable idiocy to high INTELLIGENCE, his falling in love
with his teacher (Bloom), his further development to genius, and the
horror of his final regression. But it is a sentimental story to start
with, and Nelson milks it for all it is worth, both happiness (glamorized
like a tv commercial) and sadness, and Charly's genius phase is severely
marred by the platitudes about society that Silliphant's script requires
him to speak. Nonetheless, C seriously addresses ideas about intelligence
and feeling, and is more ambitious than most sf films of its time. [JB/PN]
CHARNAS, SUZY McKEE
(1939- ) US writer and former teacher, with an MA in that field. She
began publishing sf with a series the first two vols of which were later
assembled as Walk to the End of the World, and Motherlines (omni 1989 UK):
WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD (1974), Motherlines (1978) and The Furies
(1994). The first volume presents an elaborately structured, neurotic,
urban, post- HOLOCAUST, misogynist DYSTOPIA in which women ("fems") serve
as scapegoats for humanity's near self-destruction. The second offers a
feminist ( FEMINISM) alternative beyond the city, a matriarchal
high-plains world where women on horseback ride free and scapegrace. In
the third volume, the continuing protagonist of the sequence leads a band

of "free fems" back to the disintegrating dystopia, where revenges are
exacted, and a maturely ambivalent conclusion offers neither the solace of
easy forgiveness between the sexes, nor hope for any simplistic solution
to the problem of human violence between the sexes and in other spheres.
The books aroused considerable interest for the extreme clarity of the
positions argued. This extremity, it soon became clear, stemmed from an
habitual failure to repeat herself which perhaps cost SMC some market
security, though her next book was extremely successful: Vampire Tapestry
(coll of linked stories 1980) recounts the life and thoughts of a vampire
anthropologist whose experiences, in the end, lie within the human range;
the third of the stories thus assembled, "Unicorn Tapestry", won the 1980
NEBULA award. Dorothea Dreams (1986) is a ghost story in which modern
Albuquerque, New Mexico (where SMC lives), intersects with Revolutionary
France, bringing its protagonist sharply into an awareness of her human
obligations to the world. The Sorcery Hall trilogy - The Bronze King
(1985), The Silver Glove (1988) and The Golden Thread (1989) - features
juvenile protagonists banded together to protect mundane reality from the
malefic otherworld; it is a traditional theme, but crisply told, and
further underlines the clear lines of thought - and moral
persuasiveness-permeating her work. A short story, "Boobs", won the HUGO
for 1989. [JC]Other works: Listening to Brahms (1986 Omni; 1991 chap);
Moonstone and Tiger Eye (coll 1992 chap); The Kingdom of Kevin Malone
(1993), a complex fantasy for younger readers.About the author: "Utopia at
the End of a Male Chauvinist Dystopian World" by Marleen Barr in Women and
Utopia (anth 1983) ed Barr; Suzy McKee Charnas; Octavia Butler; Joan D.
Vinge (1986) by Marleen Barr.See also: ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION
MAGAZINE; MONSTERS; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES; UTOPIAS; WOMEN AS
PORTRAYED IN
SCIENCE FICTION; WOMEN SF WRITERS.
CHARTERIS, LESLIE
(1907-1993) US writer born as Leslie Charles Bowyer Yin in Singapore,
educated in the UK, legally changed his name to LC in 1928, and became a
US citizen in 1946. He remains known almost exclusively for the Saint
novels featuring Simon Templar, a long series which began - after a few
previous heroes had been discarded - with Meet the Tiger (1928 UK; vt The
Saint Meets the Tiger 1940 US). Of these only The Last Hero (1930 UK; vt
The Saint Closes the Case 1941 US) features any device or displacement of
an sf nature, though several short stories featuring Templar are sf; these
have been assembled as The Fantastic Saint (coll 1982) ed Martin Harry
GREENBERG and Charles G. WAUGH. LC edited The Saint's Choice of Impossible
Crime (anth 1945). [JC]About the author:The Saint: A Complete History in
Print, Radio, Film and Television of Leslie Charteris' Robin Hood of
Modern Crime, Simon Templar, 1928-1992 (1993) by Burl Barer.
CHARYN, JEROME
(1937- ) US writer who was born and educated in New York, which city he
gradually transformed in his fiction into a MAGIC-REALIST venue whose
mythopoeic resonances and exorbitant happenings hover at the edge of
generic displacements (and beyond), and strongly prefigure the fabulated
New Yorks of writers like John CROWLEY and Mark HELPRIN. Few of his 20 or

so books are actually fantasy or sf, though most are FABULATIONS; but
Darlin' Bill (1980) creates an almost totally imaginary West and
Pinocchio's Nose (1983) carries its stymied protagonist into the 21st
century, where he finally learns to relax, though the world itself is
battered. [JC]Other works: The Magician's Wife (graph 1986 Belgium; first
English version 1987 US) with Francois Boucq, a fantasy in GRAPHIC-NOVEL
form; Billy Budd, K.G.B. (graph trans Elizabeth Bell 1991) with Boucq.
CHASE, ADAM
Pseudonym used usually by Milton LESSER alone, but once in collaboration
with Paul W. FAIRMAN on The Golden Ape (1959), based on "The Quest of the
Golden Ape" (1957 AMZ) as by Adam Chase and Ivar JORGENSEN, the latter
being a house name associated in that spelling with Fairman. [JC]
CHASE, ROBERT R(EYNOLDS)
(1948- ) US writer initially associated with ASF for stories like his
first, "Seven Scenes from the Ultimate Monster Movie" in 1984. He began to
publish novels with the Game sequence of sf adventures set in a feudalized
interplanetary venue: The Game of Fox and Lion (1986) and Crucible (1991).
Intrigues, GENETIC ENGINEERING, and a dash of RELIGION generate a
moderately engaging narrative. Shapers (1989), about an amnesia victim who
awakens in a strange world, also invokes sf tradition. [JC]
CHAUCER, DANIEL
Ford Madox FORD.
CHAVIANO, DAINA
[r] LATIN AMERICA
CHAYEFSKY, PADDY
Working name of US writer Sidney Aaron Chayefsky (1923-1981), most famous
for his work as a tv dramatist; Marty (produced 1953) marks for many a
culmination (and a sign of the passing) of the Golden Age of US tv drama.
The Tenth Man (theatrical production, 1959) was a Dybbuk fantasy. His sf
novel, Altered States (1978) ( METAPHYSICS), propounds the highly dubious
Lamarckian concept ( EVOLUTION; PSEUDO-SCIENCE) that a person's altered
consciousness would alter her/his genetic makeup, in this case re-invoking
an inward primordial being (see also APES AND CAVEMEN); it was filmed in
1980 as ALTERED STATES. [JC]See also: DEVOLUTION.
CHAYKIN, HOWARD V(ICTOR)
(1950- ) US writer/illustrator, mainly of COMICS. HC's first professional
work (1973) was the art for MARVEL COMICS's War of the Worlds (a sequel to
H.G. WELLS's novel!) and DC COMICS's Sword of Sorcery (which featured
Fritz LEIBER's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser). Much of his work has been sf.
He was writer/artist on Cody Starbuck and Iron Wolf before drawing the
bestselling adaptation of STAR WARS for Marvel in 1976. HC teamed up with
Samuel R. DELANY to produce the GRAPHIC NOVEL Empire (graph 1978), and the
following year he worked with Michael MOORCOCK on The Swords of Heaven,
the Flowers of Hell (graph 1979), a story in Moorcock's Eternal Champion
series. The first vol of his graphic-novel version (adaptation by Byron
PREISS) of Alfred BESTER's Tiger! Tiger! (1956; vt The Stars My
Destination US) appeared as The Stars My Destination Vol 1 (graph 1979);

the second vol, though advertised, was not in fact published until it
appeared, with the contents of the first, in The Stars My Destination
(graph 1992). After working on Marvel's Micronauts, HC painted a number of
covers for sf and fantasy paperbacks, returning to comics in 1983 as
writer/artist for First Comics's AMERICAN FLAGG! - perhaps his major work
- and later on Time(2). He revitalized The Shadow for DC (some critics,
such as Harlan ELLISON, disapproving of his innovations) in 1986 and
Blackhawk in 1988. After the pornographic Black Kiss (1988-9) HC
increasingly concentrated on writing, as in Twilight for DC and Fafhrd and
the Gray Mouser for Marvel. Moorcock speaks of HC's "considerable
intelligence and . . . excellent eye". [RH]See also: HEAVY METAL.
CHEREZ TERNII - K ZVYOZDAM
(vt Per Aspera ad Astra) Film (1980). Maxim Gorki Studio. Dir Richard
Viktorov, starring Elena Metyolkina, Vadim Ledogorov, Uldis Lieldidzh,
Vatzlav Dvorzhetsky. Screenplay Kir BULYCHEV, Viktorov. In 2 parts, 40 min
and 78 min. Colour.This pretentious, rather naive, Soviet young-adult sf
movie typifies many of Bulychev's themes and approaches. It begins well,
with a "space Mowgli"-the alien girl Niia - being found by an Earth
expedition on a derelict space station; she is unexpectedly well played by
a nonprofessional, Metyolkina, a fashion model. Later we have the grim
story of her planet, Dessa, where ecological catastrophe has taken place.
The capitalist tyranny on the polluted planet is contrasted with a future
communist paradise on Earth, which sends a mission of help at the request
of Dessa's "progressive forces": the Ecological Space Ambulance team, very
specifically not an armed "brotherly" intervention, but peaceful. The high
points of the film are its relaxed humour, something Bulychev is good at,
and the impressively devastated landscapes of Dessa. [VG]See also: RUSSIA.
CHERRY, DAVID A.
(1949- ) US part-time lawyer, part-time illustrator, raised in Oklahoma,
brother of sf writer C.J. CHERRYH. Largely self-taught, DAC is a classic
realist, working with acrylics and alkyds. He has done a number of book
covers, especially for DAW BOOKS, including covers for his sister's work;
his art is regularly displayed at sf CONVENTIONS. In 1988 he became
President of the Association of Science Fiction/Fantasy Artists (ASFA),
and was instrumental in strengthening that struggling organization. He has
several times been nominated for a HUGO. A book of his work is
Imagination: The Art ?
CHERRYH, C.J.
Working name of US writer Carolyn Janice Cherry (1942- ), who taught for
some years (1965-76) before becoming a full-time writer; she is the sister
of David A. CHERRY. Since 1976 - when she won the JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD
for most promising writer - she has produced more novels than stories,
publishing several before her first story, "Cassandra" (1977). Her first
novel was Gate of Ivrel (1976), initiating the Morgaine series - continued
in Well of Shiuan (1978) and Fires of Azeroth (1979), the trilogy being
assembled as The Book of Morgaine (omni 1979; vt The Chronicles of
Morgaine 1985 UK), and the much later Exile's Gate (1988) - a romantic
HEROIC-FANTASY quest epic whose interplanetary venue and underlying
rationality prophetically underpin a hectic and perhaps rather florid

imagination.In all her work - which runs a gamut from SHARED-WORLD
fantasies to HARD SF - an almost unfailingly creative tension can be
sensed between argument and fantastication; and her underlying instinct
for construction has been confirmed in the late 1980s by a retroactive and
ongoing coordination of more and more of her work - singletons and series
both - under the aegis of her sf-grounded Union-Alliance Future HISTORY,
which embraces most of the home Galaxy through the third and fourth
millennia, during which period the Alliance, structured around the
Merchanter cultures which operate the huge interstellar freighters
necessary for trade, manages to survive at the heart of the more ruthless,
expansionist Union. A third force whose influence is felt throughout human
space is Earth itself, hugely populous, dominated by aggressive
supra-planetary corporations, still the heartland of Homo sapiens.
Unusually, the sequence is not planet-based, much of the significant
action of the central texts taking place in artificial environments,
including a wide variety of spaceships, Merchanter freighters (each huge
vessel housing an autonomous culture), satellites, waystations and
self-sufficient habitats. The "Gehenna Doctrine", which prohibits the
cultural contamination of newly discovered planets and therefore serves as
a vital structuring device for the series, justifies the focus of those
central texts while at the same time - for the Doctrine is often honoured
in the breach - providing an enormously malleable frame: thus highly
disparate tales may be fitted into the overarching sequence - almost to
the point where singletons with no apparent connection to the sequence,
including some PLANETARY ROMANCES, might still be thought to belong within
the whole because their isolation from any other book proves that the
Gehenna Doctrine is working.The Union-Alliance structure, rough at the
edges as it might be, serves primarily to hold and sort background
material - a necessary aid for an author whose better work almost
invariably offers too much material, too many ALIEN races intersecting too
complexly for easy comprehension, a stricture true even of early novels
like Hunter of Worlds (1977), in which three cultures express themselves
in harrowing detail in too few pages; a sense of bustling, impatient
cognition pervades the otherwise garish tale of an alien mercenary race
fatally involved with Homo sapiens. But with her second series - Kesrith
(1978), Shon'jir (1978) and Kutath (1979), all three assembled as The
Faded Sun Trilogy (omni 1987 UK) - the Union-Alliance dichotomy, here
presented late in its history when the antipathetic Union has begun to
seem more attractive, works to order the profusion of material. Unlike the
great majority of sf writers, the most consistent complaint about her work
must be that individual stories are too short, though the Merchanter
novels perhaps most central to the overall series use their galactic
space-based venues with considerable skill to articulate busy narrative
lines. Along with Heavy Time (1991) and Hellburner (1992), a 24th-century
pre-Alliance series that currently, in terms of internal chronology, kicks
the entire sequence off, these novels - Serpent's Reach (1980), DOWNBELOW
STATION (1981), which won the 1981 HUGO, Merchanter's Luck (1982), CYTEEN
(1988; vt in 3 vols as The Betrayal 1989, The Rebirth 1989 and The
Vindication 1989), which won the 1988 Hugo, and Rimrunners (1989)-are
perhaps her best and most central work, generating a remarkable sense of
the living density of space-born life. CYTEEN is a book of enormous girth

set on the intricate Union home planet and dense with speculative plays on
genetics ( CLONES), identity, family and power; while Rimrunners,
unusually for CJC, fits into its normal length a shapely closet drama
about life and survival below decks on an armed spaceship.Closely
associated with these books in tone and hard-edged complexity are
Union-Alliance novels like Hestia (1979), Wave without a Shore (1981),
Port Eternity (1982), Forty Thousand in Gehenna (1983) and Voyager in
Night (1984). The Chanur Saga, made up of The Pride of Chanur (1982; text
restored 1987), Chanur's Venture (1984), The Kif Strike Back (1985),
Chanur's Homecoming (1986) and Chanur's Legacy (1992), another deft and
crowded depiction of alien psyches in a complexly threatened interstellar
venue, has also been fitted into the overall series. As the years have
passed, individual stories within the structure have tended, very roughly,
to shift their concern from honour (a focus typical of the "shame
cultures" found in preliterate societies on Earth and endemic to much
SPACE OPERA) to the responsibities of power (a problem central to literate
"guilt cultures").The lineaments of the Union-Alliance series remain
unclear, but the sense grows that for CJC the Universe, and everything
imaginable within its particoloured quadrants, is both evanescent and full
of marvel; and that sentient species must revere whatever habitats remain
to them after the terrible years of species growth and species destruction
hinted at in those books set early in the Universe. It is a vision which,
after so many busy books, will take some time to settle, though within
terms she has already cued us to anticipate. [JC]Other works:Series: The
Arafel books, comprising Ealdwood (1981; rev vt The Dreamstone 1983) and
The Tree of Swords and Jewels (1983), both assembled as Arafel's Saga
(omni 1983; vt Ealdwood 1991 UK); the Merovingen Nights BRAIDED series
(several titles being shared-world BRAIDED anthologies ed CJC, and all
remotely connected to the Union-Alliance overview), comprising Angel with
the Sword (1985), Merovingen Nights #1: Festival Moon * (anth 1987), #2:
Fever Season * (anth 1987), #3: Troubled Waters * (anth 1988), #4:
Smuggler's Gold * (anth 1988), #5: Divine Right * (anth 1989), #6:
Floodtide * (anth 1990) and #7: Endgame * (anth 1991); the Heroes in Hell
SHARED-WORLD enterprise, co-created with Janet E. MORRIS and comprising
Heroes in Hell * (anth 1985), The Gates of Hell * (1986) and Kings in Hell
* (1987), both with Morris, and Legions of Hell * (fixup 1987); the Sword
of Knowledge shared-world enterprise (all vols in fact written by the
various "collaborators"), comprising A Dirge for Sabis (1989) with Leslie
Fish, Wizard Spawn (1989) with Nancy Asire (1945- ) and Reap the Whirlwind
(1989) with Mercedes Lackey; the Rusalka sequence, comprising Rusalka
(1989), Chernevog (1990) and Yvgenie (1991).Singletons: Brothers of Earth
(1976); Sunfall (coll of linked stories 1981); Cuckoo's Egg (1985);
Visible Light (coll 1986), which contains the 1978 Hugo-winning
"Cassandra"; Glass and Amber (coll 1987); The Paladin (1988).About the
author: C.J. Cherryh: A Working Bibliography (1992 chap) by Phil
STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also: ANDROIDS; CITIES; DAW BOOKS; ESP; GALACTIC
EMPIRES; GENETIC ENGINEERING; HIVE-MINDS; LINGUISTICS; The MAGAZINE OF
FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MONSTERS; WOMEN SF WRITERS.
CHESLEY AWARDS
AWARDS.

CHESNEY, Lt-Col. Sir GEORGE T(OMKYNS)
(1830-1895) UK officer, founder in 1868 of the Royal Indian Civil
Engineering College at Staines, Member of Parliament from 1892, and author
of some fiction, including the famous The Battle of Dorking (1871 chap;
principal vt The Fall of England? The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of
a Volunteer 1871 chap US) published anon. After great success in
Blackwood's Magazine, and publication as a small book the same year, this
tale virtually founded the future- WAR/ INVASION genre of stories which
attained great popularity in the UK as she neared the height of her
insecure Empire in the latter years of the 19th century - an earlier and
inferior tale, Alfred Bate RICHARDS's The Invasion of England (A Possible
Tale of Future Times) (1870 chap, privately printed), had had little
effect. GTC's story warns against UK military complacency and incompetence
in its bleak narrative of confusion and folly at home while the German
army mounts an efficient invasion by surprise attack. The Battle of
Dorking was remarkably successful, being immediately reprinted in Canada
and the USA, and translated into several European languages, including
German, each European nation soon developing its own version of the
invasion theme - which saw its greatest popularity, understandably, in the
years immediately preceding WWI. A second tale, The New Ordeal (1879),
which posited the obsolescence of war through innovations in weaponry and
its replacement by tournaments, proved less popular. [JC]About the author:
Voices Prophesying War 1763-1984 (1966) by I.F. CLARKE (Chapter 2).See
also: ANONYMOUS SF AUTHORS; GAMES AND SPORTS; HISTORY OF SF; NEAR
FUTURE;
PROTO SCIENCE FICTION; WEAPONS.
CHESNEY, WEATHERBY
C.J. Cutcliffe HYNE.
CHESTER, GEORGE RANDOLPH
(1869-1924) US writer whose The Jingo (1912) satirizes simultaneously the
lost-race ( LOST WORLDS) story and US know-how in a tale about a salesman
selling his modern products to an obscure Antarctic civilization.
[PN]Other works: The Cash Intrigue: A Fantastic Melodrama of Modern
Finance (1909); The Ball of Fire (1914) with Lillian Chester.
CHESTER, WILLIAM L.
(1907-? ) US writer known for his series about Kioga, a Tarzan-like
Native American raised by bears on an island within the Arctic Circle:
Hawk of the Wilderness (1935 Blue Book; 1936); Kioga of the Wilderness
(1936-7 Blue Book; 1976); One Against a Wilderness (1937 Blue Book; coll
of linked stories 1977) and Kioga of the Unknown Land (1938 Blue Book;
1978). [JC]
CHESTERTON, G(ILBERT) K(EITH)
(1874-1936) UK writer and illustrator of his own books and many by
Hilaire BELLOC - with whom he was long associated, to use George Bernard
SHAW's nickname, as The Chesterbelloc. A posthumous collection, Daylight
and Nightmare (coll 1986), which assembles fantasy and some sf stories
from 1897 through 1931, may demonstrate the range of his emblem-haunted
imagination as a teller of tales, but most of his numerous works fall into

various other categories - GKC in general exemplified the Edwardian man of
letters and wrote on almost everything, in every conceivable form, from
poetry through the famous Father Brown detective stories to Catholic
polemics on to "weekend" essays and literary criticism and history. His
first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), sets the nostalgic,
medievalizing, anti-Wellsian, surreally Merrie-Englande tone of most of
his sf novels, which tended, in one way or another, to idealize a
dreamlike England; in their arguments about its desirability they comprise
a series of UTOPIAS, though often only by implication.His finest novel,
The Man who was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908), is a fantasy set in the
Babylon-like London so alluring to writers of the fin de siecle: various
secret agents disguised as anarchists are shown to have been recruited to
man the frontiers of the world by their greatest foe, who turns out to be
not only their legitimate boss but in fact God. The book - dramatized by
his brother's widow, Mrs Cecil Chesterton, and Ralph Neale as The Man Who
Was Thursday (1926) - has been an acknowledged influence upon such
Catholic writers as R.A. L AFFERTY and Gene WOLFE; and the magic-carpet
London so lovingly created by GKC and his confreres arguably marks a
significant stepping-stone - along with Robert Louis STEVENSON's New
Arabian Nights (coll 1882) - between the world of Charles DICKENS and that
of STEAMPUNK. [JC]Other works: The Ball and the Cross (1909 US); The
Flying Inn (1914), featuring what seems a Turkish conspiracy (but is
actually the scheme of an English politician) to impose Prohibition on
England, attended by a Turkish INVASION; The Man who Knew too Much (coll
1922); The Return of Don Quixote (1927); Tales of the Long Bow (coll of
linked stories 1925), which culminates in a NEAR-FUTURE revolution; a
RURITANIAN novella, "The Loyal Traitor", in Four Faultless Felons (coll
1930); "The Three Horsemen of Apocalypse", in The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond
(coll 1937), which Jorge Luis BORGES admired; The Surprise (written c1930;
1952), a play.About the author: The literature on GKC is very extensive. A
bibliography is G.K. Chesterton: A Bibliography (1958) by John Sullivan; a
recent study is Gilbert: The Man who was G.K. Chesterton (1990) by Michael
G. Coren.See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; CLUB STORY; GODS AND DEMONS; TIME
TRAVEL.
CHETWODE, R.D.
(? -? ) UK writer active at the end of the 19th century. The Marble City:
Being the Strange Adventures of Three Boys (1895) features a South Pacific
LOST WORLD whose inhabitants boast high attainments. Nevertheless the
three heroes soon make their escape, enriched. [JC]
CHETWYND, BRIDGET
(1910-? ) UK writer in whose Future Imperfect (1946) women run the world,
leaving men behind, though romantic elements intervene. [JC]
CHEVALIER, HAAKON (MAURICE)
(1902-1985) US writer and translator from the French of many works. The
Man who Would be God (1959), meant as a self-defence against the
accusation (1953) that he had committed treason with Robert Oppenheimer
(1904-1967), the "father of the atomic bomb", almost inadvertently
addresses the unfortunate megalomania of a nuclear physicist who wishes to
save the world from itself. [JC]

CHIANG, TED
[r] NEBULA; PERCEPTION.
CHIKYU BOEIGUN
(vt The Mysterians; vt Earth Defense Force) Film (1957). Toho/MGM. Dir
Inoshiro Honda, starring Kenji Sahara, Akihiko Hirata, Yumi Shirakawa.
Screenplay Takeshi Kimura, based on a story by Jojiro Okami. 89 mins.
Colour.This Japanese sf pulp epic is about ALIEN invaders, their own
planet destroyed by nuclear holocaust, who land in Japan seeking women for
breeding purposes. Its memorable images, best observed at midnight in a
drive-in cinema, include a giant birdlike robot crashing out of a
mountainside, flying saucers, and lethal rays shooting in all directions.
The special-effects extravaganza is by Eiji Tsuburaya, creator of the
eponymous monster of GOJIRA (vt Godzilla). The story makes very little
sense. As Bill WARREN points out in Keep Watching the Skies! Volume II
(1986), Japanese special effects are not meant to be realistic, and they
certainly are not here, but in their lurid theatricality they are a
satisfying introduction to the world of SPACE OPERA. This was the first
Japanese sf film not to be a MONSTER MOVIE. [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA.
CHIKYU SAIDAI NO KESSAN
GOJIRA; RADON.
CHILDER, SIMON IAN
John BROSNAN.
CHILDERS, (ROBERT) ERSKINE
(1870-1922) Irish nationalist, military theoretican and author of The
Riddle of the Sands (1903), which describes an exploratory sea journey
along the German coast and the uncovering of the secret plans for a German
INVASION of the UK. The novel spawned many imitations, none meeting the
power of the original, and was made into a lacklustre film in 1979. His
warnings to the UK Government were continued later in two nonfiction works
which exposed the folly of reliance on cavalry as an effective force
against machine guns. EC was executed for treason (he was almost certainly
guiltless) by the fledgling Irish Free State. [JE]See also: WAR.
CHILDREN IN SF
In his essay "The Embarrassments of Science Fiction" (in Science Fiction
at Large ed Peter NICHOLLS anth 1976; vt Explorations of the Marvellous)
Thomas M. DISCH asserts, tongue only partly in cheek, that sf is a branch
of children's literature-because most lovers of the genre begin reading it
in their early teens, and because many sf stories are about children.
Whether or not sf is essentially juvenile in its appeal, there is no doubt
that many of its writers are fascinated by childhood and its thematic
corollaries: innocence and potentiality.There are many types of sf story
about children, but four particularly popular variants are of special
interest. The first is the story of children with benign PSI POWERS.
Examples are: A.E. VAN VOGT's SLAN (1940 ASF; 1946), about a nascent
community of telepathic SUPERMEN; Theodore STURGEON's The Dreaming Jewels
(1950; vt The Synthetic Man), about a strange boy adopted by a carnival,
and MORE THAN HUMAN (1953), about a gestalt consciousness composed of

children; Wilmar H. SHIRAS's Children of the Atom (fixup 1953); John
WYNDHAM's The Chrysalids (1955; vt Re-Birth US), about telepathic MUTANT
children after an atomic war; and such later works in a similar vein as
Richard COWPER's Kuldesak (1972) and "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn"
(1976). The abilities of these children seem benign because the stories
are usually narrated from the child's point of view. The societies
depicted in these tales may persecute the children, but the latter
generally win through and constitute their own, "higher" societies, with
the reader's approval.The second type is the reverse of the first: the
story of monstrous children, frequently with malign psychic powers.
Examples are: Ray BRADBURY's "The Small Assassin" (1946), about a baby
which murders its parents; Richard MATHESON's "Born of Man and Woman"
(1950), about a hideously mutated boy; and Jerome BIXBY's "It's a Good
Life" (1953), about an infant who terrorizes a whole community with his
awesome paranormal abilities. J.D. BERESFORD's The Hampdenshire Wonder
(1911; vt The Wonder US) is an early example of this sort of story, in
that the child prodigy is seen entirely from the outside and thus takes on
a frightening aspect. In tales of this type, society is usually threatened
by the child and the reader is encouraged to take society's side. Brain
Child (1991 US) by George TURNER is difficult to characterize, as its
superchildren, created by an INTELLIGENCE-enhancing experiment in
biological and psychological engineering, appear as both appalling and
attractive. The purely monstrous child became a CLICHE of HORROR fiction,
especially in the 1980s, a decade when, perhaps for some
as-yet-undiagnosed sociological reason, sf itself showed a distinct
falling off in the number of stories devoted to superchildren.The third
type, which overlaps the first two, concerns children in league with
aliens, to good or ill effect. Examples include Henry KUTTNER's "Mimsy
Were the Borogoves" (1943), in which alien educational toys provide two
children with an escape route from their parents; Ray Bradbury's "Zero
Hour" (1947), in which children side with alien invaders; Arthur C.
CLARKE's CHILDHOOD'S END (1953), in which the alien "Overlords" supervise
the growth of a new generation, whose capacities are unknowable by
ordinary humans and may be exercised among the stars; Edgar PANGBORN's A
MIRROR FOR OBSERVERS (1954), in which Martians compete for control of a
child's mind; and John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (1957; vt Village of
the Damned 1960 US), about the alien impregnation of Earthwomen and the
terrifying powers of the amoral children they bear, and his later novel
Chocky (1963 AMZ; exp 1968), about a boy with an alien "brother" living in
his head. Zenna HENDERSON's stories about the People, most of which are
collected in Pilgrimage (coll 1961) and The People: No Different Flesh
(coll 1966), belong here since they are largely concerned with sympathetic
aliens who appear to be normal human children (their alien parents usually
make only fleeting appearances). Jack WILLIAMSON's The Moon Children
(1972) and Gardner DOZOIS's "Chains of the Sea" (1973) also belong in this
category. Greg BEAR's Anvil of Stars (1992) features a community of
adolescent children - but no adults - on a starship, undergoing tuition by
aliens for making war against genocidal superbeings. This novel is
interesting in its creation of an all-adolescent culture.The fourth type
of story is concerned not so much with a conflict between the child and
adult society as with the child's attempts to prove himself worthy of

joining that society. Much of Robert A. HEINLEIN's relevant work falls
into this "initiation" category-e.g., his early story "Misfit" (1939),
about a boy whose prodigious mathematical ability enables him to save the
spaceship in which he is a very junior crew member. Most of Heinlein's
teenage novels, from Rocket Ship Galileo (1947) to Have Space-Suit - Will
Travel (1958), fit this pattern, as does the later Podkayne of Mars
(1963). Precocious children, adults before their time, also feature in
James H. SCHMITZ's Telzey stories, such as "Novice" (1962), in Alexei
PANSHIN's RITE OF PASSAGE (1968), and in much of Samuel R. DELANY's work.
Delany's novels - e.g., NOVA (1968) - are characteristically, in Algis
BUDRYS's words, about "the progress of the Magic Kid . . . the divine
innocent whose naive grace and intuitive deftness attract the close
attention of all". The "Magic Kid", who gains the acceptance of adult
society through sheer charm (rather than discipline in the manner of
Heinlein), has appeared in the work of other writers, as in John VARLEY's
"In the Bowl" (1975). More in the Heinlein tradition are a number of 1980s
novels by Orson Scott CARD, whose stories regularly feature the transition
from a troubled adolescence to a maturity forced by circumstance, most
famously in ENDER'S GAME (1977 ASF; exp 1985) and again in The Memory of
Earth (1992). However, many of the books listed above in this category
feature post-pubertal teenagers rather than children proper. Such
protagonists are so common in sf, their rite of passage being one of sf's
basic themes, that there is little point in prolonging the list, although
it is worth mentioning Doris PISERCHIA, who in books like Earthchild
(1977) seems to use sf imagery precisely because it provides objective
correlatives for pubertal anguish.As in literature generally, the child's
point of view has frequently been used by sf writers because it is a
convenient angle from which to see the world anew. Thus, Kingsley AMIS
makes good use of his choirboy hero in the ALTERNATE-WORLD novel The
Alteration (1976). Ray Bradbury transmutes his own childhood experience
into the nostalgic and horrific FANTASY of THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (1950;
vt The Silver Locusts 1951 UK) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962).
Gene WOLFE repeatedly uses a child's-eye view to haunting effect in such
tales as "The Island of Dr Death and Other Stories" (1970), "The Fifth
Head of Cerberus" (1972) and "The Death of Dr Island" (1973), and
childhood memories haunt and shape the memoir structure of several of his
novels such as Peace (1975) and The Book of the New Sun (1980-3). Harlan
ELLISON's fantasy "Jeffty is Five" (1977), about a boy who is perpetually
five years old, uses the child's viewpoint to make a statement about the
apparent decline in quality of US popular culture. William GIBSON's Mona
Lisa Overdrive (1988) is at its most successful and moving when filtering
the bewildering events of its voodoo-in- CYBERSPACE story through the
consciousness of the one of its four protagonists who is an actual child,
the Japanese girl Kumiko. There are numerous other examples.An interesting
subgenre is the story that opposes a world of childhood and a world of
adulthood as if they were, anthropologically, two different cultures whose
clash is bound to cause pain. This is the fundamental strategy of much of
Stephen KING's horror fiction and also his sf. It forms a particularly
grim element in James Patrick KELLY's "Home Front" (1988), in which kids
interact, eat hamburgers, and get drafted for an endless, meaningless war
occurring offstage.Although sf about children was not especially common in

the 1980s in book form, it was popular in the cinema. Obviously relevant
films include E.T.: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL (1982), EXPLORERS (1985),
D.A.R.Y.L. (1985), FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR (1986) and a variety of "teen"
movies, a number of which are listed in the CINEMA entry.Anthologies
devoted entirely to stories about children include Children of Wonder
(anth 1953; vt Outsiders: Children of Wonder 1954) ed William TENN,
Tomorrow's Children (anth 1966) ed Isaac ASIMOV, Demon Kind (anth 1973)
and Children of Infinity (anth 1973) ed Roger ELWOOD, Analog Anthology
Number 3: Children of the Future (anth 1982; vt Analog's Children of the
Future) ed Stanley SCHMIDT, and Children of the Future (anth 1984) ed
Asimov, Martin Harry GREENBERG and Charles G. WAUGH. [DP/PN]
CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED
(vt Horror!) Film (1963). MGM. Dir Anton M. Leader, starring Ian Hendry,
Alan Badel, Barbara Ferris, Bessie Love. Screenplay Jack Briley, based on
The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) by John WYNDHAM. 90 mins. B/w.This UK film is
not a sequel to the successful VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960); it is a
remake, though much more remotely based on Wyndham's novel. This time the
setting is urban. Once again, children are born with mysterious powers.
They are gathered in London for investigation from different parts of the
world. Where in the first film the children were malevolent, here they are
treated more sympathetically; they remain children despite their
superhuman qualities, and their destruction is a consequence of human fear
and ignorance, not any hostile actions of their own. Moody use is made of
the shadowy, ruined church where much of the action takes place. Though
low-key and made with almost too much UK restraint, COTD is sadder and
more pungent than its predecessor in its story of (literal) alienation.
[JB/PN]
CHILDREN'S SF
Sf written with a specifically juvenile audience in mind is almost as old
as the genre itself. The Voyages extraordinaires of Jules VERNE, over 60
novels published between 1863 and 1920, were largely marketed as for
adolescent boys, though they found an adult readership also.
Contemporaneous with Verne's works were the early DIME NOVELS in the USA,
also in the main written for children, and it was not long before BOYS'
PAPERS with a strong sf content came along, followed by such JUVENILE
SERIES as Victor APPLETON's TOM SWIFT stories. The juvenile series written
under the floating pseudonym Roy ROCKWOOD, The Great Marvel Series,
published much sf between 1906 and 1935. These topics are discussed in
greater detail under separate entries in this encyclopedia, as is
children's sf written for the COMICS.From 1890 to 1920 at least, and to
some extent later on, most children's sf was aimed at boys rather than
girls and was largely dedicated to the themes of the LOST WORLD, future
WAR and DISCOVERY AND INVENTION (see also EDISONADE). L. Frank BAUM,
writer of the celebrated Oz books, wrote an early work in the latter
category - The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale (1901) - but of course
fantastic inventions had already played an important role in the stories
featuring Frank Reade, Jr ( FRANK READE LIBRARY).Children's sf has been
and is written for a variety of age groups. Here we generally regard sf
written for children of 11 and under as outside our range, although

nostalgic reference must be made to the following: the splendidly bizarre
Doctor Dolittle in the Moon (1928) by Hugh Lofting; the Professor
Branestawm books by Norman HUNTER, beginning with The Incredible
Adventures of Professor Branestawm (1933), all featuring the ridiculous
adventures of the eponymous eccentric scientist; the minor children's
classic My Friend Mr Leakey (coll of linked stories 1937) by the biologist
J.B.S. HALDANE, a fantasy combining elements of magic and sf; a better
known classic series for younger children, the seven Narnia books by C.S.
LEWIS, beginning with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) and
ending with The Last Battle (1956) - these stories are basically religious
allegory cum FANTASY, but contain such sf elements as PARALLEL WORLDS and
TIME TRAVEL; and The Twenty-One Balloons (1946) by William Pene DU BOIS,
an amusing Pacific-island scientific UTOPIA.As noted, the above are
primarily for younger children, but they point up a difficulty which
exists also in sf stories for older children: the fact that there is
little generic purity in children's literature. Much children's fantasy
contains sf elements, and conversely much children's sf is written with a
disregard for scientific accuracy, whether from hauteur or from ignorance,
which effectively renders it fantasy. Time travel, for example, has long
been an important theme in children's literature, going back at least as
far as The Cuckoo Clock (1877) by Mrs Mary Molesworth (1839-1921), and
continuing to the present day, through A Traveller in Time (1939) by
Alison Uttley (1884-1976), several of the Green Knowe stories by Lucy
Boston (1892-1990) and, perhaps the greatest of such novels, Tom's
Midnight Garden (1958) by Philippa Pearce (1920- ); this latter is the
moving and subtle story of a boy who travels back in time, always to
slightly more recent periods, to find the 19th-century child with whom he
falls in love growing older, and away from him; finally, in an
overwhelming surprise ending, she meets him in the present day. But in all
these examples the time travel is an essentially magic device used in the
service of fantasy.Indeed, sadly for sf purists, most sf works of
distinction since the 1960s have been at the fantastic end of the sf
spectrum. A fine piece of such peripheral sf is Earthfasts (1966) by
William MAYNE, one of the best children's writers of the period, in which
an 18th-century drummer boy emerges from the ground to be met by a
sceptical, scientifically inclined present-day youth.There may be a
sociological reason for the comparative scarcity of good HARD SF for
children in the recent period, or it may simply be the arbitrary
preference of the handful of writers who led the renaissance of juvenile
fiction that has taken place since the 1960s. Certainly their creative
imagination has fed as fiercely on MYTHOLOGY as on 20th-century
breakthroughs in scientific understanding - breakthroughs that in the
period of the Cold War, with the ever-present threat of nuclear DISASTER,
seemed equivocal in their results. Signs of the renaissance are many:
children's books generally and books for adolescents specifically are less
patronizing; they more commonly contain a sardonic or even ironic realism;
they have become, overall, more subtle, more evocative, more various, more
original and more ready to confront problems of pain, or loss, or even
sexual love. The new realism is evident even with those writers of HEROIC
FANTASY who have followed in the footsteps of J.R.R. TOLKIEN; notable
among them are Joy Chant (1945- ) and especially Patricia MCKILLIP,

although the latter, whose spectacular debut years were devoted to
fantasy, seems to write better the further she keeps her distance from sf.
The key theme in children's sf is MAGIC, and several important children's
works are discussed in that entry. Sometimes the magic is given a kind of
pseudo-scientific rationale, with talk of dimensional gates and so on, as
in Andre NORTON's many Witch World books, some of which are among her best
work; e.g., Warlock of the Witch World (1967). (Norton has also written
many colourful books for adolescents which are towards the hard-sf end of
the spectrum, sometimes dealing with relations between ALIENS and humans.)
Ursula K. LE GUIN's Earthsea books, beginning with The Wizard of Earthsea
(1968), have combined sf and fantasy by making her magic obey such
rigorous laws that it may be seen as a kind of IMAGINARY SCIENCE; it
adheres, for example, to the law of conservation of energy.Many critics
regard the Earthsea books as the finest sf work for children of the
postwar period. Some of Alan GARNER's novels would also rank very high.
Apart from using teenage protagonists, Garner's Red Shift (1973) is an
adult book in every respect, narrating a battle against intellectual and
physical impotence considerably more demanding than would be found in most
supposedly adult romances. It qualifies as marginal sf through its
consistent use, from the title onwards, of scientific metaphor and because
it depends structurally on a form of psychic time travel (focused on a
neolithic stone axe).More recently the work of Diana Wynne JONES has also
been consistently distinguished, more playful than Le Guin's and more
ebullient than Garner's, but as fully aware as either of the difficulties
of life both for children and for grown-ups. Much of her work, which
treats generic boundaries with disdain, is more fantasy than sf. The more
sciencefictional books include The Homeward Bounders (1981), Archer's Goon
(1984) and A Tale of Time City (1987), which, with varying degrees of
sciencefictional rigour, all revolve around causal paradoxes and problems
created by travel through time or between alternate worlds, and often with
more narrative sophistication than is common in sf for adults. The
lunacies of book marketing have never been more clear than in the
consignment of such distinguished works as the above, and many others, to
what Le Guin has called "the kiddylit ghetto". The paradox is visible in
the fact that occasionally US editions of UK children's books have been
marketed as for adults, and vice versa.Other important children's sf
writers at the fantasy end of the spectrum whose works are discussed in
greater detail under their own entries are Susan COOPER, Peter DICKINSON,
Tanith LEE, Madeleine L'ENGLE and T.H. WHITE. Australia seems to produce
such writers more liberally than it does their counterparts for adults:
interesting work has been produced by Isobelle CARMODY, Lee HARDING,
Victor KELLEHER and Gillian RUBINSTEIN. Most Kelleher novels are
impossible to pigeonhole with any confidence as either sf or fantasy; they
have elements of both, and do not appear to suffer as a result.
Rubinstein's tone falters - it is a sadly common symptom of writers of
sf/fantasy for adolescents - when she approaches pure sf motifs, such as
the visiting ALIEN in Beyond the Labyrinth (1988), but her books remain
hard-edged and angry.When we turn to hard sf, most work for children has
been less distinguished. Carl CLAUDY wrote some exciting books in the
1930s. More recent writers of some quality whose production has been in
significant part for children are Paul CAPON, John CHRISTOPHER, John Keir

CROSS, Tom DE HAVEN, Sylvia Louise ENGDAHL, Nicholas FISK, Douglas HILL,
H.M. HOOVER, Monica HUGHES, Philip LATHAM, Alice LIGHTNER, M.E. PATCHETT,
Ludek PESEK, Donald SUDDABY, Jean and Jeff SUTTON, Hugh WALTERS, Robert
WESTALL, Leonard WIBBERLY and Cherry WILDER. Between them even these more
recent writers span close to 40 years of hard-sf adventure writing for
children. Christopher, Engdahl, Fisk, Hoover, Pesek, Westall and Wilder
are probably the most important names here, along with Andre Norton.
Between them they have written much thoughtful and stimulating work, but
the extent of the list is disappointing when set alongside the quantity,
range and variety of adult sf from the same period. The difficulty is, of
course, that the intellectual level of a book is not necessarily expressed
by a marketing label. Much adult sf - the works of E.E. "Doc" SMITH or
Isaac ASIMOV, for example - is of great appeal to older children, and is
to some extent directed at them. To the degree that older children are
able to enjoy adult sf that is well within their reading capacity, the
size of the potential market in sf specifically labelled as juvenile
obviously dwindles.By far the most celebrated case of the unreal
distinction between "juvenile" and "adult" concerns Robert A. HEINLEIN,
almost half of whose novels were originally marketed for children. They
have been re-released for many years now as if for adults. There are 13 in
all, among the best being Starman Jones (1953), The Star Beast (1954) and
CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY (1957). Heinlein's direct style, his solid science,
the naturalness and ease with which he creates a societal background with
just a few strokes, all help to make his juveniles among his best works;
but their basic strength comes from the repeated theme of the rite of
passage, the initiation ceremony, the growing into adulthood through the
taking of decisions and the assumption of a burden of moral
responsibility. This theme Heinlein made peculiarly and at times
brilliantly his own; his is the most consistently distinguished of all
hard sf written for young readers.Heinlein is exceptional in that there
was no falling-off in quality when he wrote for children. Other sf writers
could not quite manage the trick. Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr books are
well below his best; James BLISH's juveniles are generally disappointing,
with the exception of A Life for the Stars (1962), the second of the
Cities in Flight tetralogy; Ben BOVA, Arthur C. CLARKE, Gordon R. DICKSON,
Harry HARRISON, Evan HUNTER and Robert SILVERBERG all write better for
grown-ups, although Hunter's children's books are unusual and interesting.
Alan E. NOURSE, on the other hand, seems more relaxed when writing for
younger people, and some of his best work is in his future- MEDICINE
books.A more recent writer, Robert C. O'BRIEN, wrote two distinguished sf
works for children. The witty and sympathetic Mrs Frisby and the Rats of
NIMH (1971), about experimental rats which have developed superINTELLIGENCE, is for younger children, and in the talking-animal line is
preferred by some aficionados to Richard Adams's more celebrated Watership
Down (1972). O'Brien's Z for Zachariah (1975) is a post- HOLOCAUST novel
for older children; humane, touching and sometimes frightening. Also
excellent, and very funny, is the Book of the Nomes trilogy by Terry
PRATCHETT, beginning with Truckers (1989), about aliens trying to live
invisibly in a human world.Certain sf themes crop up again and again in
recent sf for adolescents. Post-holocaust stories and stories of rebellion
against totalitarian societies (which often practise degrading forms of

social engineering) are both very common, as in the work of John
Christopher, whose sf for children deservedly won him a new readership
when he ceased writing sf DISASTER novels for adults. Stories about
contact between humans and aliens are often used to impress on children an
attitude of cultural open-mindedness which has a clear bearing on problems
of racism, sexism and other isms of the real world. Cherry Wilder's Torin
series is of this kind, but Wilder knows better than to preach. This is
more than can be said of much modern juvenile sf, which has perhaps
become, from the mid-1970s, the most ethically intransigent and
propagandist since the juvenile fiction of the Victorian era. The familiar
voice of the children's author calling for universal harmony can,
paradoxically, come to seem hectoring; the list of "antis" is often and
easily extended by many children's authors - nostalgically looking back to
the seemingly more self-reliant lifestyles of a past age - to include
anti-technology and anti-science ( ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF).The theme
of PSI POWERS is often found in conjunction with work of this sort. It
appeals strongly to children, whose sense of weakness and entrapment in a
world where they are by and large subject to adult control, whether wisely
or not, can be eased by intimations of an inner superiority - and
sensitivity - that may be available to them. Typically psi powers (from
within) are seen as opposed, and morally preferable, to scientific and
technological powers (from without). Isobelle Carmody's Scatterlings
(1991), for example, has an urban scientific elite, remnants of those who
polluted and nearly destroyed Earth through greed, opposed to the rural,
tribalized but radiation-resistant and honest folk descended from the
greenies and working-class outcasts the original scientists exploited.
ECOLOGY-conscious people versus corrupted technocrats; country versus
town; psi powers versus science: these had, by 1990, become the dominant
themes of adolescent sf as a whole. The ecology theme now appears almost
as a religious motif in sf, and indeed, in the Gaea-worshipping form it
sometimes takes, it has already become a secular religion in the real
world.An important commercial area of sf publishing for juveniles is
series books, often based on films or tv shows. The STAR TREK books and
the DR WHO books are two of the longest-running and most successful (the
former series is not specifically marketed for children, but the latter
is); they contain less hackwork than most of their competition in this
sort of area.Some distinguished writers of juvenile fiction, like Philippa
Pearce, are not given separate entries in this volume, even though their
work may contain some sf imagery: we do not have the space to give
comprehensive coverage to children's writers, and our emphasis is on sf
rather than fantasy. But many writers of sf for adolescents do receive
entries, often because they have also written sf for adults or because,
like Alan Garner, their work is likely to have repercussions in adult sf.
[PN]
CHILE
LATIN AMERICA.
CHILSON, ROB
Working name of US writer Robert Dean Chilson (1945- ). His first sf
story was "The Mind Reader" (1968) in ASF.Of his novels, which generally

fail to step beyond the routine, As the Curtain Falls (1974) is a
FAR-FUTURE adventure with some highly coloured moments, The Star-Crowned
Kings (1975) is a SPACE OPERA about a member of a subject race who has
latent ESP powers, and Rounded with Sleep (1990) confronts its hero with
an Earth in the guise - and under the computerized control - of a
fantasy-role-playing game ( GAMES AND TOYS). The Shores of Kansas (1976),
perhaps (along with his first) RC's most interesting work, tells of a man
with a natural, consciously controlled talent for TIME TRAVEL and his
resulting psychological problems. [JC/PN]Other works: Isaac Asimov's Robot
City, Book 5: Refuge * (1988); Men like Rats (1989).
CHILTON, CHARLES (FREDERICK WILLIAM)
(1927- ) UK RADIO producer and scriptwriter whose three sf novels
comprise a juvenile trilogy based on his BBC radio serials about Jet
Morgan and his companions as they protect Earth against Martians and other
menaces ; the books are Journey Into Space * (1954), The Red Planet *
(1956) and The World in Peril * (1960). He also wrote further Jet Morgan
adventures for a COMIC strip in Express Weekly 1956-7. [JC]See also: MOON;
RADIO; SPACE FLIGHT.
CHILTON, H(ENRY) HERMAN
(1863-? ) Belgian-born UK writer, apparently active as late as 1943. His
first sf novel, Woman Unsexed (1892), melodramatically depicts a 1925
world ruined by women's right to work. The Lost Children (1931) visits the
LOST WORLD to which the children of Hamelin followed the Pied Piper; there
they have founded a UTOPIA. Talking Totem (1938) is a fantasy. [JC]
CHINA SYNDROME, THE
Film (1979). IPC Films. Dir James Bridges, starring Jane Fonda, Jack
Lemmon, Michael Douglas, Wilford Brimley. Screenplay Mike Gray, T.S. Cook,
Bridges. 122 mins. Colour.Made by the production company with which Jane
Fonda was associated (Indochina Peace Campaign), this is the first of two
crusading borderline-sf films starring her, the other being ROLLOVER
(1981). Here she plays a tv reporter hoping to do more "hard" news stories
who stumbles across an "event" (crisis) caused by cost-cutting engineering
in a nuclear power plant; this could (and almost does) lead to meltdown
and the radioactive pollution of Southern California. Corporate bosses
attempt, violently, to suppress the potential expose. What looked at first
like mere science fiction looked a lot more like science fact only weeks
later, with the nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island - an apposite if
unfortunate coincidence that made TCS a commercial hit. The subgenre of
the near-future technological-disaster film (see, for example, ENDANGERED
SPECIES and WARGAMES) is a kind of fringe sf, though usually made in the
manner of the conspiracy thriller. TCS is well crafted and well acted.
[PN]
CHINESE SF
Chinese literature has a long tradition of the fantastic that prepared
the way for, and leads up to, modern Chinese sf. It is believed that the
earliest actual sf publication in China was the serialization in 1904 in
the magazine Portrait Fiction of "Yueqiu zhimindi xiaoshuo" ["Tales of
Moon Colonization"] by Huangjiang Diaosuo. Around 130,000 Chinese words

long, this novel describes a group of Earthlings settling on the Moon.
Another important sf work of the early period is Xu Nianci's "Xinfalu
xiansheng tan" ["New Tales of Mr Absurdity"] (1905), which deals with the
separation of body and soul. Lao She's Maocheng ji ["Cat Country"] (1933;
reprinted 1947) remains one of the most significant Chinese sf novels;
this DYSTOPIA about catlike Martians is in fact a biting satire of the Old
China under its reactionary rule. Lao She wrote this novel without being
aware of the genre, but at much the same time Gu Junzheng was consciously
writing sf, even acknowledging the influence of Jules VERNE and H.G.
WELLS. His Heping de meng ["Dream of Peace"] (coll 1940) prints four of
his sf short stories. Like Hugo GERNSBACK, Gu Junzheng advocated the
popularization of science through sf, and all his stories try to stimulate
readers' interest in science and technology.The People's Republic of China
was founded in 1949. Soon after that, Soviet sf works were translated into
Chinese in great numbers. Also as a result of Soviet influence, the
Chinese Youth Press systematically published selections of Verne's sf
throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. From 1949 through the 1960s,
almost all Chinese sf stories were for juvenile readers. Representative
works include Zheng Wenguang's "Cong Diqiu dao Huxing" ["From Earth to
Mars"] (1954), Yu Zhi's "Shizong de gege" ["The Missing Elder Brother"]
(1957), Xiao Jianheng's "Buke de qiyu" ["Pup Buke's Adventures"] (1962)
and Liu Xinshi's "Beifang de yun" ["Northern Clouds"] (1962).During the 10
years of the notorious "Cultural Revolution" not a trace of sf could be
found in China. However, 1978-83 saw a remarkable resurgence of sf
creation. Among nearly 1000 titles are Jin Tao's "Yueguangdao" ["The
Moonlit Island"] (1980), Tong Enzheng's "Shanhudao shang de siguang"
["Death Ray on a Coral Island"] (1978), Zheng Wenguang's Feixiang Renmazuo
["Forward to Sagittarius"] (1979), Meng Weizai's Fangwen shizongzhe
["Calling on the Missing People"] (1981), Wang Xiaoda's "Shenmi de bo"
["The Mysterious Wave"] (1980), Wei Yahua's "Wenrou zhixiang de meng"
["Conjugal Happiness in the Arms of Morpheus"] (1981) and Ye Yonglie's
Heiying ["The Black Shadow"] (1981).Sf during this period also found
expression in other media, such as films, tv, radio broadcasts and comic
books. In films, Shanhudao shang de siguang ["Death Ray on a Coral
Island"], based on Tong Enzheng's story, was released in 1980, and Ji
Hongxu's Qianying ["The Hidden Shadow"] in 1982. On tv, "Zuihou yige
aizheng sizhe" ["The Last Man who Dies of Cancer"] by Zhou Yongnian, Zhang
Fengjiang and Jia Wanchao and "Yinxing ren " ["The Invisible Man"] by Wu
Boze were both dramatized in 1980. Xiongmao jihua ["The Panda Project"] by
Ye Yonglie was dramatized on tv in 1983. The same author's An dou ["Veiled
Strife"] (1981) and Mimi zhongdui ["The Secret Column"] (1981) were
broadcast on radio daily as serials in 1981. And in comic books, Ye
Yonglie's sf detective series, 12 booklets with 8 million copies printed,
was published by Popular Science Press in 1982 under the series title The
Scientific Sherlock Holmes.1978-83 also saw widespread publication of
foreign sf in China. Among the famous sf writers from many parts of the
world who were introduced to the Chinese reading public were Mary SHELLEY,
Robert A. HEINLEIN, Isaac ASIMOV, Jack WILLIAMSON, Poul ANDERSON, Michael
CRICHTON, Clifford D. SIMAK, Frederik POHL, Arthur C. CLARKE, Brian W.
ALDISS, Alexander BELYAEV and Sakyo KOMATSU.However, the 1983 political
drive against "spiritual pollution" hurt sf writers so badly that their

already small contingent quickly shrank. Since then Chinese sf has
developed only slowly. There is just one mainland magazine devoted to sf,
Kehuan Shijia ["SF World"]. In Taiwan there is the sf magazine Huanxiang
["Mirage"], ed and published by Dr Zhang Xiguo, a computer specialist who
teaches at the University of Pittsburgh in the USA but shows much concern
about the development of Chinese sf; there are about a dozen titles under
his name. Another major sf writer in Taiwan is Huang Hai, best known for
his high literary quality and for his scientific speculation. His first
publication, "Hangxiang wuya de lucheng" ["A Boundless Voyage"], appeared
in 1968. His best works are reckoned to be 10101 ["The Year 10101"] (1969)
and Xinshiji zhelu ["Voyage to a New Era"] (1972).The most productive sf
writer in Hong Kong is Ni Kuang, who often writes under the pseudonym Wei
Shili. His sf works number about 25 titles, but most are marginal, being
SWORD AND SORCERY - indeed, some critics doubt if his works belong to the
sf genre at all.There are 15 Chinese members of WORLD SF, whose 1991
annual meeting was held in Chengdu. An introduction to Chinese sf for
English readers is Science Fiction from China (anth 1989 US) ed WU DINGBO
and Patrick Murphy, which contains several of the stories mentioned above.
[WD]
CHOSEN SURVIVORS
Film (1974). Alpine-Churubusco/Metromedia. Dir Sutton Roley, starring
Jackie Cooper, Richard Jaeckel, Alex Cord, Bradford Dillman. Screenplay H.
B. Cross, Joe Reb Moffly, based on a story by Cross. 99 mins. Colour.This
US/Mexico coproduction is a small-scale, inventive little exploitation
movie whose plot-line is purest PARANOIA. In a government test on stress
reactions, 11 people are hoaxed into believing that nuclear war is
devastating the world. These "chosen survivors" are forced by the army
into an elaborate bomb-shelter deep beneath the desert. Once locked in,
they learn - this seems not to be part of the experiment - that lethal
vampire bats have been trapped inside with them. Character conflicts and
bat attacks ensue in an unpretentious piece from a director more commonly
associated with tv. [PN/JB]
CHOWN, MARCUS
(1959- ) UK writer, currently reviews editor for New Scientist, whose sf
novels, both in collaboration with John GRIBBIN, are Double Planet (1988),
a competent HARD-SF tale about a conflict of political interests over a
comet which may or may not be about to strike the Earth, and its remote
sequel, Reunion (1991), set 1000 years later, in which the lunar
population has come under the influence of a cult claiming to hold the
secret of how to replenish the MOON's atmosphere: the book is the story of
a woman's fight against this church. [MB]Other works: Stars and Planets
(1987), a children's book on astronomy.
CHRISTOPHER, JOHN
Working name of UK writer Christopher Samuel Youd (1922- ), active as an
sf fan before WWII, in which he served; he began publishing sf proper with
"Christmas Story" for ASF in 1949, writing as Christopher Youd. His first
novel, The Winter Swan (1949), again as by Youd, was a fantasy. His first
sf book, The Twenty-Second Century (coll 1954; with 1 story dropped and 1
added, rev 1962 US) as JC, assembles his early work; but, after the

success of his first sf novel, The Year of the Comet (1955; vt Planet in
Peril 1959 US), and the even greater impact of his second, The Death of
Grass (1956; vt No Blade of Grass 1957 US), he concentrated for some years
on adult novels, soon becoming perceived as John WYNDHAM's rival and
successor as the premier writer of the post-WWII UK DISASTER novel in the
decade 1955-65.The disaster which changes the face of England (and of the
world) in The Death of Grass (filmed in 1970 by Cornel Wilde as NO BLADE
OF GRASS) is, as the title makes clear, an upset in the balance of Nature
which causes the extinction of all grass and related food plants, with
catastrophic effects. Where Wyndham's novels featured protagonists whose
middle-class indomitability signalled to the reader that the crisis would
somehow come out right in the end, JC's characters - as witness John
Custance's gradual hardening and deterioration of personality in this
novel - inhabit and respond to a darker, less secure universe. It is a
harshness of perspective characteristic of most of his work at this time:
The World in Winter (1962; vt The Long Winter 1962 US), A Wrinkle in the
Skin (1965; vt The Ragged Edge 1966 US) and Pendulum (1968 US) all deal
decks similarly stacked against political or environmental complacency,
and their protagonists concentrate on the grim business of staying alive
and making a life fit to live in a post- HOLOCAUST world stripped of
culture and security.When JC turned to other kinds of stories his touch
was less assured, though Sweeney's Island (1964 US; vt Cloud on Silver
1964 UK) plausibly updates the traditional ISLAND theme as the eponymous
tycoon creates a DYSTOPIAN microcosm under stress. However, in 1967 JC
successfully inaugurated a fresh phase of his sf career, this time in the
juvenile market, with the Tripods sequence: The White Mountains (1967),
The City of Gold and Lead (1967) and The Pool of Fire (1968), assembled as
The Tripods Trilogy (omni 1980 US); a prequel, When the Tripods Came (1988
US), followed much later. In these books, the alien tripods control all
adults. However, the young protagonists avoid their thrall, discover their
secret and save Earth (whose adults revert to their distressing old ways).
Other juveniles followed: The Lotus Caves (1969), The Guardians (1970) which appropriately won the Guardian award for best children's book of the
year - Dom and Va (1973), much expanded from In the Beginning (1972 chap),
a tale for smaller children, Wild Jack (1974 US), Empty World (1977), the
Fireball trilogy - Fireball (1981), New Found Land (1983) and Dragon Dance
(1986) - set in a PARALLEL-WORLD version of Roman Britain and elsewhere
and A Dusk of Demons (1993), set in a post-holocaust Scotland. The Prince
in Waiting (1970), Beyond the Burning Lands (1971) and The Sword of the
Spirits (1972), assembled as The Swords of the Spirits Trilogy (omni 1980
US; vt The Prince in Waiting Trilogy 1983 UK), is FANTASY. As with his
adult sf, most of JC's juveniles are set in a post- DISASTER situation, in
which the romantic individualism of young protagonists finds itself pitted
against some kind of conformist or even brainwashed system, sometimes
symbolized as a struggle between the country and the city. They have been
remarkably and deservedly popular. [JC/PN]Other works: The Caves of Night
(1958 US), marginal; The Long Voyage (1960; vt The White Voyage 1961 US),
a juvenile; The Possessors (1964 US); The Little People (1966 US).About
the author: Christopher Samuel Youd, Master of All Genres: A Working
Bibliography (1990 chap) by Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also: CHILDREN'S SF;
ECOLOGY; GREAT AND SMALL; PASTORAL; PUBLISHING; RADIO; SUPERNATURAL

CREATURES.
CHRYSALIS
US original anthology series, 1977-83, 10 vols, ed Roy TORGESON. The
first 7 were paperback originals from Zebra Books; the remaining 3 had
hardcover first editions from DOUBLEDAY. They were Chrysalis 1 (anth
1977), #2 (anth 1978), #3 (anth 1978), #4 (anth 1979), #5 (anth 1979), #6
(anth 1980), #7 (anth 1980), #8 (anth 1980), #9 (anth 1981) and #10 (anth
1983). Torgeson's editorial policy was eclectic, perhaps too much so; he
published sf, fantasy and horror by a mixture of new and established
writers. The series title was intended to suggest something developing and
changing and about to give birth to beauty. Although C published a number
of interesting stories, including four each by Orson Scott CARD and
Australian writer Leanne Frahm, it never developed a very strong
personality, and it is perhaps surprising (though admirable) that it
lasted as long as it did. [PN]
CHURCHILL, JOYCE
[s] M. John HARRISON.
CHURCHILL, R(EGINALD) C(HARLES)
(1916- ) UK writer whose A Short History of the Future (1955), like John
ATKINS's Tomorrow Revealed (1955), is an imaginary HISTORY, in this case
set about AD7000, and similarly draws on genuine contemporary sources,
mainly George ORWELL, into an unusually witty accounting of the course of
history; in RCC's version, history comes in great cycles. [JC]
CICELLIS, KAY
Working name of Catherine Mathilda Cicellis (1926- ),French-born writer
of Greek descent who writes in English. Her sf novel The Day The Fish Came
Out * (1967), which novelizes The DAY THE FISH CAME OUT (1967), is about
an H-bomb and the consequences of its loss off a Greek island; it is not
up to the standard of her serious work. [JC]
CIDONCHA, CARLOS SAIZ
[r] SPAIN.
CINEFANTASTIQUE
US film magazine, specializing in sf, fantasy and horror CINEMA, and
occasionally tv; published and ed Frederick S. Clarke from Illinois. Fall
1970-current. It had reached Vol 26, no 4, by June 1995. Slick BEDSHEET
format, well illustrated in both colour and b/w. The production schedule
has varied from 4 to 6 numbers a year, currently bimonthly. This is by far
the most useful US fantastic-cinema magazine, being less juvenile in
orientation and (apparently) less dependent on the studios for pictorial
material, and thus more independent in its judgments, than magazines like
STARLOG. Critical standards range from merely eccentric to excellent.
Coverage is good on films with wide theatrical release, but patchy on
films that go straight to video release and on tv programmes, with good
coverage of tv STAR TREK programmes, rather weak coverage of most other tv
shows.. Features range from interviews through articles on production
problems and on how special effects are worked to occasional
retrospectives (usually good) on famous genre movies of the past. Reviews

became briefer and weaker in the 1990s, with many films and tv shows
omitted altogether (and many credits misspelled or simply not given), so
that C's usefulness as a comprehensive magazine of record was becoming
dubious. [PN]
CINEMA
The basis on which films and film-makers have been selected for inclusion
in this volume is discussed in the Introduction.From the outset, the
cinema specialized in illusion to a degree that had been impossible on the
stage. Sf itself takes as its subject matter that which does not exist,
now, in the real world (though it might one day), so it has a natural
affinity with the cinema: the illusory qualities of film are ideal for
presenting fictions about things that are not yet real. The first sf
film-maker of any consequence - indeed, one of the very first film-makers
- was Georges MELIES, who used trick photography to take his viewers to
the Moon in Le VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE (1902; vt A Trip to the Moon). What
they saw there - chorus girls and lobster-clawed Selenites - was not
exactly high art, but it was, for the time, wonderful. The ability of sf
cinema to evoke wonders, for which it is often criticized as being a
modern equivalent of a carnival freak show, is also its strength. Wonders
themselves may pall, or be dismissed as childish, but nevertheless they
are at the heart of sf; sf, no matter how sophisticated, by definition
must feature something new, some alteration from the world as we know it
(though of course newness can easily become mere novelty). Film, from this
viewpoint, is sf's ideal medium.But from another point of view film is far
from the ideal medium. Sf as literature is analytic and deals with ideas;
film is the opposite of analytic, and has trouble with ideas. The way film
deals with ideas is to give them visual shape, as images which may carry a
metaphoric charge, but metaphors are tricky things, and, while the ideas
of sf cinema may be potent, they are seldom precise. Also, film is a
popular artform which, its producers often believe, is unlikely to lose
money by underestimating the intelligence of the public. So, on its
surface, sf cinema has often been simplistic, even though complex currents
may trouble the depths where its subtexts glide.In fact, sf cinema in the
silent period did become surprisingly sophisticated, though to the modern
eye, which prefers the illusion of photographic realism, the theatrical
Expressionism of much early sf cinema - especially in Russia and Germany is as strange a convention as having people talk in blank verse. Two
important early sf films came from those countries and that convention,
AELITA (1924) from Russia and METROPOLIS (1926) from Germany. Nonetheless,
Metropolis - the first indubitable classic of sf cinema - is, for all the
apparent triteness of its story, striking even today, with its towering
city of the future, its cowed lines of shuffling workers, its chillingly
lovely female ROBOT. Fritz LANG, who made it, also made one of the first
space movies, Die FRAU IM MOND (1929; vt The Woman in the Moon). The debut
film of Rene Clair (1898-1981), one day to be a very famous director, was
also sf: PARIS QUI DORT (1923; vt The Crazy Ray), but this was an
altogether lighter piece, a charming story of Parisians frozen in
time.Many people remember the sf-movie booms of the 1950s and the late
1970s, but the first sf boom, that of the 1930s, is often forgotten.
Though some sf films were made in Europe at this time, it was in the USA

that the most influential were produced: JUST IMAGINE (1930), FRANKENSTEIN
(1931), ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932), DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE (1932), KING
KONG (1933), DELUGE (1933), The INVISIBLE MAN (1933), The BRIDE OF
FRANKENSTEIN (1935), Mad Love (1935; ORLACS HANDE) and LOST HORIZON
(1936). Just Imagine is a forgotten futuristic musical, and Deluge is a
DISASTER movie which, like the earlier French La FIN DU MONDE (1931; vt
The End of the World), is primarily interested in the effect of apocalypse
on human morals. King Kong is of course an early and classic monster
movie, with a sympathetic monster. Similarly, Lost Horizon is the most
famous LOST-WORLD film, though the theme has never been very important in
sf movies.It is interesting that the remainder - all six of them good
films, and mostly well remembered - have in common the over-reaching
scientist destroyed by his own creation. This theme, which could be called
the Promethean theme (after the hero who stole fire from the Gods - a
literal parallel in the case of the Frankenstein films, where scientists
steal lightning to create new life), remains a central theme in sf cinema
today; it is a familiar paradox that much sf cinema is anti-science, even
anti-intellectual ( ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF), and (especially in the
1930s) cast in the GOTHIC mode, which typically sees the limitation of
science as being its reliance on Reason in a world of mysteries not
susceptible to rational analysis - indeed, most of the SCIENTISTS who
appear in the above films are seen as literally mad. This is true also of
several European films of the time, including the archetypally Gothic
German film ALRAUNE (1930; vt Daughter of Evil). It is, of course, a
CLICHE of early sf generally and of sf in the cinema especially that
scientists are mad, so much so that we seldom pause to analyse the oddness
of this. It is as if these films were telling us that the brain, the seat
of reason, is so delicate an instrument that its overuse leads to the very
opposite, unreason. Although all these films are undeniably sf, they are
generally and rightly categorized as HORROR. Also archetypal of the sf
cinema is their clear Luddite subtext: the results of science are
terrifying. This pessimistic view gave way to OPTIMISM later in the 1930s,
but returned with new vigour when the real-world results of scientific
advance - the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki-proved to be so
terrifying. The Bomb was the image that was to loom behind the MONSTER
MOVIES of the 1950s, especially - not surprisingly - those made in
JAPAN.In the later 1930s few sf films were made, the most obvious new
theme being SPACE OPERA, though this was mainly confined to cheerful
juvenile serials such as FLASH GORDON (1936, with sequels in 1938 and
1940) and BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY (1939). The one adult film made
about the conquest of space, the hifalutin', rhetorical and romantic
THINGS TO COME (1936), was from the UK; although it flopped, with
hindsight we can see it as a milestone of sf film-making. While ultimately
optimistic, its vision of the future has many dark aspects, and in this
respect the movie is the inheritor of the DYSTOPIAN theme of
Metropolis.The 1940s, by contrast, were empty years for sf cinema, though
they started well with the sinister DR CYCLOPS (1940), whose villain
shrank people. Medical sf/horror was well represented by The LADY AND THE
MONSTER (1944), about a sinister excised brain kept alive by science. More
typical was comic sf, mostly weak, as in the ever more slapstick sequels
to the Frankenstein and Invisible Man movies, both unnatural beings

winding up as co-stars, in 1948 and 1951 respectively, with Bud Abbott and
Lou Costello. The PERFECT WOMAN (1949) is a UK comedy interesting in its
exploitation of sf to sexist ends: its underclothes fetishism would have
been unthinkable had its robot heroine, played by a real woman, been a
real woman. Prehistoric fantasy, which continues as a minor genre today,
had a good start with ONE MILLION B.C. (1940). There was not much else.The
sf-movie boom of the 1950s, which figures largely in our cultural
nostalgia today - even among viewers too young to have seen the originals
when they first came out - was largely made up of MONSTER MOVIES (which
see for details), but the theme of space exploration hit the screens even
earlier and was also popular. (There were few monster movies before 1954,
the first being The THING in 1951.) The first 1950s space film to be
released was ROCKETSHIP X-M, which was rushed out in 1950 to capitalize on
the pre-publicity for DESTINATION MOON; it was the latter, however, that
was successful. It was followed by such spacecraft-oriented films as The
DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951), WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (1951), INVADERS
FROM MARS (1953), IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953), WAR OF THE WORLDS
(1953), RIDERS TO THE STARS (1954), The CONQUEST OF SPACE (1955), THIS
ISLAND EARTH (1955), The QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955), FORBIDDEN PLANET
(1956), and EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956). In six of these, probably
more for budgetary than for ideological reasons, the spacecraft bring
ALIENS to Earth; all are monstrous except for the Christlike alien in The
Day the Earth Stood Still, who dies and rises again before (in a manner
more appropriate to the Old Testament than the New) threatening Earth with
destruction if it does not repent its sins. In the remainder the urge for
the conquest of space is apparent (as it was coming to be in the real
world, with the first orbital satellite, Sputnik 1, launched in 1957),
although the religious subtext of much 1950s sf cinema is found also in
When Worlds Collide (a Noah's space-ark is used to save a remnant of
humanity from God's wrath made manifest as cataclysm) and The Conquest of
Space (the captain of a spacecraft goes mad because he believes space
travel is an intrusion into the sphere of God). The only full-blooded
space operas of the period appeared moderately late on, with This Island
Earth and Forbidden Planet, but even in these tales the central image is
of the destruction that can be wrought by science.One of the most
memorable sf films of the 1950s boom is at first glance not sf at all: the
Mickey Spillane film noir KISS ME DEADLY (1955), dir Robert Aldrich
(1918-1983), in which the central object is a box which, when opened,
emits a fiery light and unleashes destruction on the world. The film
effortlessly and pessimistically links by metaphor the petty spites and
bestialities that disfigure individuals with the greater capacity for
destruction symbolized by the Pandora's Box which, in this case, appears
to unbind, like the Bomb, a cleansing radioactivity to greet the fallen
world.The monster movie, of course, is even more obviously fearful of
science: its text is "science breeds monsters". Political PARANOIA, a
quite different theme (and one to be developed further in the 1960s) also
found a niche in much 1950s sf, especially in those films in which
creatures that look just like us on the outside turn out on the inside to
be monsters or alien puppets (often identifiable as metaphoric stand-ins
for such other secret worms in the apple of Western society as communist
agents). Invaders from Mars (1953), one of the earliest and best of these

( MONSTER MOVIES and PARANOIA for other films on this theme), added a
touch of Freudian fear to the paranoid brew by making Mummy and Daddy
among the first humans to be rendered monstrous and emotionless by alien
control. The most famous example is INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956),
in which, as in most of its kind, the slightly diagrammatic fear of
communism is surely secondary to the fear of the loss of affect: the
monstrous quasi-humans have no emotions; they are like cogs in a
remorseless machine. It is interesting that, although with hindsight we
see the Eisenhower years precisely as years of conformity, it was fear of
that very conformity that played so prominent a role in the US popular
culture of those years.Where in the 1940s only a handful of sf films were
made, in the 1950s there were 150 to 200, their numbers increasing in
inverse proportion to their quality: although the years 1957-9 had more sf
movies than the years 1950-56, they were mostly B-movies from "Poverty
Row", which, despite the fact that they include such old favourites as
ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS, The INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN , QUATERMASS
II
and The MONOLITH MONSTERS (all 1957) and The FLY , The BLOB and I MARRIED
A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (all 1958), leave an overall impression of sf
cinema as both sensationalist and tacky. The year 1959, however, while
producing genre movies that were mostly forgettable exploitation material,
also produced three films which, while obviously intended for a mainstream
audience, had an sf theme: JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, The WORLD,
THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL and ON THE BEACH. At last some sf themes ( LOST
WORLDS, the HOLOCAUST AND AFTER and the END OF THE WORLD), it seemed, were
sufficiently familiar to general audiences to risk the involvement of
big-name stars: James Mason, Harry Belafonte and Gregory Peck. None of
these films was especially good, but as sociological signposts each has
some importance.Another phenomenon of the 1950s was the rise of Japanese
sf cinema, built largely on the success of GOJIRA (1954; vt Godzilla), a
monster movie. Many further monster movies followed, nearly all from Toho
studios, which began working in the space-opera and alien-invasion genres
later, as with CHIKYU BOIEGUN (1957; vt The Mysterians).By the later 1950s
the major studios were abandoning genre sf, and most memorable productions
of the period were made by such low-budget independent producers as Roger
CORMAN; the earlier 1950s, by contrast, had been dominated by studios like
Universal, Warner Bros. and Paramount, which had sometimes used specialist
producers like George PAL or even, in the case of Universal, developed
their own specialist sf director, Jack ARNOLD. For the decades since then
it has been arguable that much of the inventive energy of sf cinema has
continued to bubble up from the marshes of "Poverty Row".Sf films were
quite numerous through most of the 1960s, without many clear lines of
evolution being visible, although individual films sometimes showed real
creativity (but see below for developments in the cinema of paranoia, and
for the new wave of DYSTOPIAN films). Hollywood remained fairly uneventful
so far as sf was concerned through the years 1960-67, with silly,
colourful films like The TIME MACHINE (1960), The ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR
(1961) and FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966). Jerry Lewis made a surprisingly
effective sf campus comedy out of the Jekyll and Hyde theme, The NUTTY
PROFESSOR (1963). Roger Corman's low-budget, independent sf features
became less common, but one of the last was one of the best: X - THE MAN

WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963). By far the best commercial movie in the genre
belonged to it only marginally: Alfred Hitchcock's The BIRDS (1963). A
revenge-of-Nature film which began a whole trend, this is a particularly
surreal monster movie whose paranoid element - intimate sharers of our own
world becoming the monsters - showed that the paranoia theme was
continuing strongly in sf cinema, as it has ever since, but with a shift
in emphasis. In the 1950s the monster movie had been comparatively
innocent, and - not surprisingly with the Cold War being at its height and
Hollywood itself about to become subject to investigations designed to
weed out left-wingers - regularly featured monsters from outside normal
experience; foreigners, so to speak. These films often opened with scenes
of tranquillity - children playing, farmers hoeing, lovers strolling. The
subsequent violence was almost a metaphor for the irrational forces which
peaceful US citizens feared might enter their lives, forces beyond their
control, such as (in real life) the Bomb or invasion. By contrast, the
subtext of The Birds can, with hindsight, be seen as changing the focus of
unease away from the alien monster towards the domestic monster. In the
1960s, elements of decay and division in Western society, especially US
society, were becoming more obvious, and 1960s sf reflected this. Working
like Hitchcock on the margins of sf cinema, John FRANKENHEIMER was perhaps
the most distinguished Hollywood director of 1960s politically paranoid
sf, with The MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962), Seven Days in May (1964) and
SECONDS (1966). Conspiracy-theory paranoia of the most extreme kind is the
occasion for black comedy in Theodore Flicker's The PRESIDENT'S ANALYST
(1967), in which the Telephone Company is out to rule the world. Even
George Pal, of all people, had a very effective exercise in paranoia with
The POWER (1967), a story of amoral superhumans disguised as ordinary
people. Stanley KUBRICK, working outside the Hollywood system, made his
memorably black and funny sf debut with DR STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED
TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964), and Hollywood exile Joseph
Losey made his nightmare of alienation and radioactivity, The DAMNED
(1961), in the UK. In all of these, it is our own society that is
frightening, not some alien import.The 1960s were, famously, a decade of
radicalism and social change, but the English-speaking cinema was slow to
reflect this, being more interested in the miniskirt than in, say, the
growing power of young people as a political force. Movies of youth
revolution like PRIVILEGE [1967], WILD IN THE STREETS [1968] and GAS-S-S-S
[1970] came only at the end of the decade, in a perhaps cynical attempt to
cash in on the flower-power phenomenon, and there were never many of them.
Spy movies were immensely popular - a phenomenon perhaps reflecting the
idea of a society riddled with secrets and conspiracies - but there is
nothing remotely radical or even modern about the James Bond series of
films inaugurated with DR NO (1962) and going on to include many other
borderline-sf films like YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967); indeed, their central
image of mad SCIENTISTS out to rule the world derives from the pulp sf of
the 1920s and 1930s (see also CRIME AND PUNISHMENT). In Europe, however,
especially in France, the so-called New Wave cinema was indeed
revolutionizing the medium with lasting effect. Many New Wave directors
made marginal sf films, typically incorporating sf tropes into a
supposedly future but apparently contemporary setting. These included
Chris Marker with La JETEE (1963), Jean-Luc Godard with ALPHAVILLE (1965)

and WEEKEND (1968), Francois Truffaut with FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966) and Alain
Resnais with JE T'AIME, JE T'AIME (1967), all eccentric and interesting;
Truffaut was perhaps the odd man out, as the director least comfortable
with future scenarios. The exploitation cinema in Italy had no critical
agenda of reform like the New Wave in France, but it had plenty of
intelligence and inventiveness, though the results were often extremely
uneven; much of the Italian work was HORROR, but this often overlapped
with sf, as in Mario Bava's TERRORE NELLO SPAZIO (1965; vt Planet of the
Vampires). Further east, both RUSSIA and Czechoslovakia ( CZECH AND SLOVAK
SF) made quite a few sf films, including Russia's PLANETA BUR (1962; vt
Planet of Storms) and Czechoslovakia's IKARIE XB-1 (1963). The sf business
in the UK was normally a matter of low-budget B-movies, but some
respectable films emerged - e.g., The DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE (1961),
CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED (1963), QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1967) and Peter
WATKINS's The WAR GAME (1965). This last was made for tv but banned from
tv for giving too realistic a picture of nuclear HOLOCAUST; even today it
comes across at least as powerfully as The DAY AFTER (1983), made for US
tv two decades later.The single most important year in the history of sf
cinema is 1968. Before then sf was not taken very seriously either
artistically or commercially; since then it has remained, much of the
time, one of the most popular film genres, and has produced many more good
films. Simply to list the main sf films of 1968 gives some idea of the
year's significance: BARBARELLA, CHARLY, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, PLANET
OF THE APES and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. (Less important were COUNTDOWN, The
ILLUSTRATED MAN , The LOST CONTINENT and The MONITORS .) George A.
ROMERO's Night of the Living Dead is the exception here in being a
low-budget, independent production, but, while it was seen by some
contemporaries as being merely another milestone in making the cinema of
horror more luridly graphic and disgusting - a key moment in the evolution
of the SPLATTER MOVIE - its image of humans reduced to deranged,
cannibalistic zombies has an undeniable metaphoric power and even a dark
poetry, and it was revolutionary in its discomforting refusal to offer any
solace throughout, nor any happy ending. The other four films were
commercially reputable products, and interesting for different reasons.
Barbarella is second-generation, spoof sf, the sort of film that can be
made only when genre materials have already been thoroughly absorbed into
the cultural fabric. Charly won its financier and star, Cliff Robertson,
the first Oscar for Best Actor given to a performance in an sf movie, a
good measure of sf's increasing respectability; the film was based on
Daniel KEYES's FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (1959 FSF; exp 1966). Planet of the
Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey are good films - the latter arguably one of
the great classics of the genre - both notable for their commercial
success and for their use of nonpatronizing screenplays that demanded
thought from the audience. Though there were plenty of bad films still to
come, sf cinema now had to be taken seriously, definitely by the money-men
and to a degree by the critics.To jump ahead for a moment, it would be
another decade before the commercial potential of sf cinema was thoroughly
confirmed, partly in response to the technical developments in special
effects that took place during that period. In 1977 STAR WARS, a smash
hit, inaugurated a new boom in space-opera movies, and in the same year
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND also did very well with its blend of

sentiment and UFO mysticism, inaugurating the friendly- ALIEN theme which
the film's director, Steven SPIELBERG, was to exploit with even greater
effect in E.T.: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL (1982). Another money-maker that
began a trend was SUPERMAN (1978), which led to a succession of
ever-more-disappointing SUPERHERO movies. These films remain among the
most financially successful ever made. In 1971 the cinema of the fantastic
(sf, horror, fantasy, surrealism) accounted for about 5 per cent of US
box-office takings; by 1982 this figure had risen amazingly to approach 50
per cent, and it remained as high as about 30 per cent in 1990.Though
special effects were to usher in a period of sf cinema whose spectacle was
more overwhelming than its intelligence, in the late 1960s no vast teenage
audience had as yet accumulated to drag down the genre with the commercial
demand that it should remain always suitable for kids. A majority of the
sf films of 1969-79 were downbeat and even gloomy, and even in the
adventure films their heroes were hard pressed just to survive, let alone
survive cheerfully. The three main themes were the dystopian, the Luddite
and the post- HOLOCAUST.Luddite films included practically everything made
or written by Michael CRICHTON, notably WESTWORLD (1973), The TERMINAL MAN
(1974) and COMA (1978). He has a gift for cinematic narrative, but his
tireless replaying of the theme made him seem something of a one-note
director. (John BADHAM, in the 1980s, would be another director to make a
career out of Luddite sf movies, with WARGAMES [1983], BLUE THUNDER [1983]
and SHORT CIRCUIT [1986].) Other films about the triumph of technology and
the subsequent enslavement of humanity (whether actual or metaphorical)
included: COLOSSUS, THE FORBIN PROJECT (1969), computer takes over;
SLEEPER (1973), machines run amok; KILLDOZER (1974), a bulldozer goes mad;
FUTUREWORLD (1976), robots take over; DEMON SEED (1977), computer as
rapist and voyeur; The CHINA SYNDROME (1979), nuclear power station almost
blows up; La MORT EN DIRECT (1979), intrusive journalist whose eyes are
cameras. In DARK STAR (1974), the feature-film debut of John CARPENTER and
one of the wittiest sf films yet made, a computerized bomb undertakes
phenomenological arguments with the crew of a starship.Dystopian films
ranged from the terrible - SILENT RUNNING (1971), we've destroyed all
plant life; ROLLERBALL (1975), sport is the opium of the people; LOGAN'S
RUN (1976), everyone over 30 is killed - through the interesting if
exaggerated - SOYLENT GREEN (1973), overpopulation; The STEPFORD WIVES
(1974), robot wives replace human wives - to the excellent - THX 1138
(1970), the debut of George LUCAS; A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971),
brainwashing; The MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976), the corrupting influence
of human society on an alien; STALKER (1979 Russia), alien leavings turn
out to be fairy gold in a trash-heap world.Life after the holocaust had
been an occasional theme in sf cinema for some time. Stories of survivors
and the detritus they live among were becoming more numerous by the 1970s;
the iconography of disaster cinema regularly includes a few rusting or
ivy-clad ruins of 20th-century civilization, as in GLEN AND RANDA (1971),
Logan's Run (1976) or, with more bravura, A BOY AND HIS DOG (1975). The
ULTIMATE WARRIOR (1975) fights in the rubble, and BENEATH THE PLANET OF
THE APES (1970) mutants live in it. In ZARDOZ (1974) the greater part of
the population has reverted to superstitious barbarism. We see this
reversion taking place in MAD MAX (1979) and its two entertaining
designer-barbarism sequels. Other examples from the 1970s include The

BED-SITTING ROOM (1969), NO BLADE OF GRASS (1970), The OMEGA MAN (1971)
and DAMNATION ALLEY (1977). This is a theme that suits low-budget movies,
which nearly all these are, since the real world produces settings of
extraordinary dereliction in profusion.In the 1970s the low-budget,
independent exploitation-movie end of the film business was quite busy
making sf movies of other kinds, too, usually borderline-sf/ HORROR,
including SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN (1969), DEATH LINE (1972; vt RAW MEAT),
George A. Romero's The CRAZIES (1973), BLUE SUNSHINE (1977), PIRANHA
(1978) - a witty partnership between screenwriter John SAYLES and director
Joe DANTE - and PHANTASM (1979). But the two outstanding independent
directors of exploitation sf in the 1970s (and after) were Larry COHEN and
David CRONENBERG. The deeply eccentric social satirist Cohen is the
inventor of the monster baby, in IT'S ALIVE (1973), where it is played by
a doll pulled along by a string, and the Christ-figure, in GOD TOLD ME TO
(1976; vt DEMON), who is an alien-fathered hermaphrodite. Cronenberg,
whose biological metamorphoses almost constitute a new cinematic genre,
has become perhaps the most important director associated with sf cinema;
his work of the 1970s consists of chaotic, horrific comedies, including
The PARASITE MURDERS (1974; vt They Came from Within; vt Shivers), RABID
(1976) and The BROOD (1979).One of the most complex and moving sf films to
date is SOLARIS (1972), the first sf film of Andrei TARKOVSKY, with its
delicate meshing of images from inner and outer space. Other films of the
decade that at least stimulated discussion - none is outstanding-are
SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5 (1972), The DAY OF THE DOLPHIN (1973), The ROCKY HORROR
PICTURE SHOW (1975), The BOYS FROM BRAZIL (1978) and STAR TREK: THE MOTION
PICTURE (1979). More influential than any of these was the very successful
and much imitated ALIEN (1979), the first sf feature by Ridley SCOTT, but
this was part of the big-budget sf-feature boom of the late 1970s,
discussed above, and belongs in spirit more to the 1980s than the 1970s.An
interesting film of 1978, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, was a successful
remake of the classic 1956 film. Along with KING KONG (1976) this
introduced a series of sf remakes in the 1980s which, contrary to cliche,
contain a good deal of interesting work. The time was ripe for remakes
because, in the post Star Wars period, sf was proving such a hot area of
Hollywood movie-making. If you've had a success once, what more natural
than to try to repeat it? The two best remakes were probably John
Carpenter's The THING (1982) and David Cronenberg's The FLY (1986). Also
better than expected were The BLOB (1988) and The FLY II (1989). Others,
mostly poor, were BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY (1979), FLASH GORDON
(1980), GOJIRA 1985 (1985; vt Godzilla 1985), INVADERS FROM MARS (1986),
LORD OF THE FLIES (1990), NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1990) and NOT OF THIS
EARTH (1988).A less welcome phenomenon of the 1980s was the number of
successful films to which sequels were made almost as a matter of course,
almost never as good as their originals, an observation that spans a
variety of films including Critters 2: The Main Course, It's Alive III:
Island of the Alive, HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING, Bronx Warriors II,
2010, Phantasm II, Re-Animator 2, Robocop 2, Short Circuit 2, Toxic
Avenger 2 and Future Cop 2. Indeed, the list includes the most expensive
film ever made, TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991), which, though quite
good, is less uncompromising than its predecessor. Two sequels better than
their originals are MAD MAX 2 (1981; vt The Road Warrior) and PREDATOR 2

(1990). As of 1992 there have been five Planet of the Apes films, six Star
Trek films and four Superman films (plus SUPERGIRL, etc.) in the cycle
begun by Superman (1978). The Japanese, however, probably have the record
with their endless Gojira and Gamera films, two series that began in the
1950s ( GOJIRA; DAIKAIJU GAMERA).The disappointment of the 1980s and the
early 1990s was that, sf boom or no sf boom, many spectacular productions
were the filmic equivalent of fast food, offering no lasting satisfaction.
Also, too much US product seemed to more astringent foreign tastes to be
suffused with an oversweet sentimentality, especially following the
success of Spielberg's E.T. Films tainted in this way, some of them
otherwise quite good, included RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983), with its Ewoks,
STARMAN (1984), with its Christlike alien, COCOON (1985), with its
rejuvenated oldies, EXPLORERS (1985), with its cute alien kids, INNERSPACE
(1987), with a wimp finding true manhood with the help of a miniaturized
macho astronaut, * BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED (1987), with nauseating baby
flying saucers, STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER (1989), the nadir of the
geriatric-buddy movie, and The ABYSS (1989), whose threatening aliens turn
out to be real friendly Tinker Bells.At the very beginning of the 1980s,
films of some interest included ALTERED STATES (1980), BATTLE BEYOND THE
STARS (1980), especially The EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980), ESCAPE FROM NEW
YORK (1981), OUTLAND (1981) and MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR (1981). But by far
the most influential sf film was the superbly designed BLADE RUNNER
(1982), Ridley Scott's second sf feature, whose shabby, lively,
media-saturated city of the near future was an early manifestation of
CYBERPUNK; a more knowing Japanese version of the cyberpunk ethos - by
then almost an sf CLICHE - would be found years later in the animated film
AKIRA (1990). Curiously, not many commercial films between these two
partook full-bloodedly of cyberpunk thinking, though several small
independent productions (see below), including VIDEODROME (1982) and
HARDWARE (1990), did so. However, the cyberpunk theme of VIRTUAL REALITY the notion of consensual hallucination, or of humans entering CYBERNETIC
systems and reading their networks (or being read by them) not just as
maps but as the territory itself - became quite popular in cinema. A far
from comprehensive list includes the made-for-tv movie The LATHE OF HEAVEN
(1980; based on the 1971 novel by Ursula LE GUIN), TRON (1982), BRAINSTORM
(1983), DREAMSCAPE (1984) and The LAST STARFIGHTER (1984).There are many
other examples of thematic clusters in the 1980s. Hollywood (and other
film centres) had seldom been so narcissistically absorbed - often
stupidly - by its own previous productions, with each box-office
breakthrough spawning multiple imitations. Hundreds of films featured a
slow camera track along a giant spaceship (2001, Star Wars) or an alien
parasite bursting bloodily from a human body (Alien).A big hit, starting
at the beginning of the decade with SATURN 3 (1980), ANDROID (1982) and
RUNAWAY (1984), was the killer-robot movie, mostly after the success of
ROBOCOP (1987); examples are Hardware (1990), CLASS OF 1999 (1990),
ROBOCOP 2 (1990), ROBOT JOX (1990) and EVE OF DESTRUCTION (1991), but the
best by far was The TERMINATOR (1984), which in turn spawned Terminator 2:
Judgement Day (1991).More seriously gruesome, but not without soap-opera
elements, was the spate of nuclear-death films beginning with The DAY
AFTER , SPECIAL BULLETIN and TESTAMENT (all 1983), the first two made for
tv. They were followed by, among others, THREADS (1985), also made for tv,

and the cartoon feature WHEN THE WIND BLOWS (1986).A subgenre of the 1980s
was a bastard form, the teen-sf movie, of which the three best were
probably REAL GENIUS (1985), BILL ?
EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY (1988), along with the Back to the Future series (see
below). Others were DEAD KIDS (1981), CITY LIMITS (1984), NIGHT OF THE
COMET (1984), MY SCIENCE PROJECT (1985), WEIRD SCIENCE (1985), FLIGHT OF
THE NAVIGATOR (1986), SPACE CAMP (1986), YOUNG EINSTEIN (1988), MY
STEPMOTHER IS AN ALIEN (1988), HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS (1989) and SPACED
INVADERS (1989). TIME-TRAVEL movies made a big comeback in the 1980s, many
of them ( Introduction) being not technically sf since their means of time
travel was fantastic. Among the genuine sf the best are BACK TO THE FUTURE
(1985) and its two sequels, all directed by Robert Zemeckis. Bill ?
Excellent Adventure (1988) and its sequel, Bill ?
(1991), are both charming. Others are the entertaining The PHILADELPHIA
EXPERIMENT (1984) and two disappointments, The FINAL COUNTDOWN (1980) and
MILLENNIUM (1989).After the success of CARRIE (1976), based on Stephen
KING's 1974 novel about a persecuted schoolgirl with PSI POWERS, films
about paranormal abilities, though never becoming overwhelmingly popular,
nevertheless remained as a persistent subgenre. The best is probably
Cronenberg's remorseless SCANNERS (1980). Others include The FURY (1978),
The SENDER (1982), The DEAD ZONE (1983), also directed by Cronenberg, and
the dire FIRESTARTER (1984).The oddest subgenre was probably the
alien-human buddy movie. ENEMY MINE (1985), one of the earlier ones, is
set on another planet, but many examples are set on Earth. Not just two
but four of them feature partnerships between alien and Earth police:
ALIEN NATION (1988), The HIDDEN (1988), SOMETHING IS OUT THERE (1988; a tv
miniseries released on videotape as a feature film) and I COME IN PEACE
(1989; vt Dark Angel).Other 1980s and 1990s films of interest but not
fitting neatly into any of the above categories were HALLOWEEN III: SEASON
OF THE WITCH (1983), STRANGE INVADERS (1983), DUNE (1984), BRAZIL (1985),
ALIENS (1986), PREDATOR (1987), MONKEY SHINES (1988), TOTAL RECALL (1990)
and The ROCKETEER (1991). Aliens and Brazil are the most distinguished of
these, the former directed by James CAMERON, the most important sf
director to emerge during the 1980s, the latter a perhaps too lovingly
designed dystopia. Monkey Shines, also memorable, showed that George A.
Romero was still a director of real power.Once again, however, the lesson
of the 1970s was in the main repeated. If you want to see what the
commercial cinema will be doing next decade, take a good close look at
what the low-budget cinema, even the exploitation cinema, is doing right
now. For every film as inventive as Blade Runner produced by companies
with access to very large sums of money, there are half a dozen thrown up
by the shoestring independents. In the latter category, the 1980s produced
Scanners (1980), ALLIGATOR (1981), Android (1982), LIQUID SKY (1982),
Videodrome (1982), Der LIFT (1983), The BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET
(1984), The Terminator, REPO MAN (1984), TRANCERS (1984), The STUFF
(1985), RE-ANIMATOR (1985), FROM BEYOND (1986), MAKING MR RIGHT (1987),
THEY LIVE (1988) and SOCIETY (1989). If sf cinema were represented by
these films alone it would have to be diagnosed as in vigorous health,
though somewhat disreputable and threatening in appearance.But, alas, by
the late 1980s the increasingly floundering commercial film industries of
the USA and the UK seemed caught in a desperate spiral of attempting to

recapture past splendours by dint of colourful (and expensive) violence
while giving ideological offence to none. Thus even death and destruction
become anodyne. By 1990 the commercial sf cinema-especially in the USA seemed to have lost not just whatever integrity it had had but also its
common sense. As grave financial problems began to spread through
Hollywood, it seemed possible to predict that 1991 might prove to have
been the last year of insanely inflated film budgets. [PN]This indeed
proved to be the case. Even the big sf hit of the next few years, Steven
Spielberg's entertaining but silly dinosaur theme-park movie, JURASSIC
PARK (1993), did not have a stratospheric budget. There were few big sf
glamour spectaculars 1992-1994; others included the very watchable
STARGATE (1994), and, on a rather smaller scale, several movies about
future musclemen, DEMOLITION MAN (1993) with Stallone, TIMECOP (1994) with
Van Damme and - a smaller budget again - UNIVERSAL SOLDIER (1992) with Van
Damme and Lundgren. Cut-rate spectacle was also the order of the day with
Kirk's (William SHATNER's) presumptive last gasp in the STAR TREK movies:
STAR TREK: GENERATIONS (1994), and with the once adult Robocop series, now
aimed largely at a younger audience on the evidence of ROBOCOP 3
(1993).One continuing paranoiac rivulet of films deals with humans
kidnapped by aliens in UFOs; this theme received a shot in the arm back in
the 1980s with COMMUNION (1989), based on Whitley STRIEBER's supposedly
factual best-seller, and continued with a neat little film called FIRE IN
THE SKY (1993), but it was in tv, not movies, that this particular theme
had its apotheosis, with the cult success THE X-FILES (1993- ).Despite the
long history of failure in this sub-genre, producers insisted on making
yet more supposedly humorous sf movies, which included the dire ENCINO MAN
(1992, vt California Man), equally unfunny CONEHEADS (1994) and the
slightly better HONEY, I BLEW UP THE KID (1992); gentler and funnier than
any of these was THE METEOR MAN (1993); there was a slight sense of strain
about the mixture of comedy and drama in Joe DANTE'S MATINEE (1993), which
examines the cultural roots of sf/horror pics in scary real-life events,
in this case the Cuban missile crisis. A successful French black comedy
set after the HOLOCAUST was DELICATESSAN (1990).It became obvious in the
1990s that films spinning off from successes in other media, notably
GAMES, COMICS and TELEVISION - and even including RADIO - was a growing
part of the business, in part nostalgia driven, and unlikely to go away.
From radio and the PULPS came The Shadow (1994). From the world of games
came SUPER MARIO BROS(1993), and Double Dragon, Street Fighter and Mortal
Kombat are on the way. Comics - which had already fed into films with
movies like Flash Gordon, deeply influenced or begat many more films in
the 1990s, most of them fantasy rather than sf, including the two vastly
successful Batman movies, Timecop, The Mask (1994), The Crow, (1994), the
Japanese TETSUO (1989) and many Japanese anime, with JUDGE DREDD and Tank
Girl having film spin-offs in production as of 1995. From television
nostalgia came The Beverly Hillbillies(1993) and The Flintstones (1994),
among others; and also, of course, the continuing run of Star Trek movies.
One problem with most of these genres is that they have narrative
conventions (generally) as rigid and stagey as those of a Japanese noh
drama, and this static quality runs counter to what sf does best, which is
kinesis: opening out, dealing with change and transformation.Although the
exploitation-movie end of the market is often highly inventive, there was

not much evidence of this in cheap and bloody futuristic thrillers like
AMERICAN CYBORG: STEEL WARRIOR (1992), NEMESIS (1993) and MAN'S BEST
FRIEND, or two (rather better) future-prison escape movies, FORTRESS
(1993) and NO ESCAPE (1994 , vt Penal Colony, vt The Prison Colony, vt
Escape from Absalom).In this period remakes and spin-offs from earlier
films included the so-so tv movie ATTACK OF THE 50 FT. WOMAN (1993), the
rather good but black BODY SNATCHERS (1993), and for intellectuals who
like their action both bloody and operatic, the strange but
semi-successful Kenneth Branagh film, MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN
(1994).Time travel remained a popular theme - several titles belonging to
this category having already been mentioned - and while the weepie
melodrama FOREVER YOUNG (1992) may have disappointed, there were two small
gems in the period. The first was a small-scale but spirited time-paradox
film DISASTER IN TIME (1991, vt Grand Tour: Disaster in Time, vt
TIMESCAPE), which proved that not everything made for cable tv is awful.
The second was a comedy set in a small American town, GROUNDHOG DAY
(1993), an almost faultless and very amusing study in predestination vs
free will as mediated by a time-loop. [PN]Further reading: The following
reading list is highly selective. An early but still useful reference work
on sf cinema is the 3-vol Reference Guide to Fantastic Films: Science
Fiction, Fantasy ?
by Walt LEE. There is much information, with some rather brief and
disappointing capsule comments, in Horror and Science Fiction Films: A
Checklist (1972), Vol II (1982) and Vol III (1984) by Donald C. Willis.
Although it does not cover as many titles as these two, The Aurum Film
Encyclopedia: Science Fiction (1984; rev 1991) ; rev vt The Overlook Film
Encyclopedia: Science Fiction 1994 US) ed Phil HARDY is far more than a
listing with credits; the best 1-vol guide, it is the fullest coverage of
sf cinema to contain detailed description and critical analysis (generally
very good), and, with upwards of 1400 films described in the revised
editions, covers at least twice as many sf movies as any other critical
book on the subject. Even more useful to the researcher is a run of the
journal Monthly Film Bulletin, published by the British Film Institute,
which gives (even after its incorporation during 1991 into its sister
journal, Sight and Sound) full credits for all films it covers (all films
released in the UK), and normally more complete critical discussion than
anything available in book form; its sf critics include Kim NEWMAN, Philip
STRICK and Tom Milne. This was the secondary source most consulted for
films from the 1960s onwards in the compilation of this encyclopedia; its
critical appreciations of sf films from earlier periods are briefer and
far more conservative, and it does not cover the silent period (Hardy's
book does). One other reference work extraordinarily useful for its period
is Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction of the Fifties:
Volume I 1950-57 (1982) and Volume II 1958-62 (1986) by Bill WARREN.The
quality of most general discussions of sf cinema in books is not high;
many are coffee-table books of little value, or are aimed at a juvenile
fan market. An early study of some interest (despite irritating factual
errors) is the pioneering Science Fiction in the Cinema (1970) by John
BAXTER, the first book to attempt some kind of critical sorting of its
subject matter. Science Fiction Movies (1976) by Philip Strick is witty,
well informed and critically astute, but does not linger long enough on

individual films. John BROSNAN's Future Tense: The Cinema of Science
Fiction (1978; rev vt The Primal Screen: A History of Science Fiction Film
1991) contains judgments, albeit at greater length, that will already be
familiar to readers of the first edition of this volume, for which Brosnan
wrote many of the film entries. Peter NICHOLLS's Fantastic Cinema (1984
UK; vt The World of Fantastic Films US) is an illustrated survey, only
partially devoted to sf, which attempts to establish a critical canon for
fantastic films. Omni's Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies: The Future
According to Science Fiction Cinema (anth 1984) ed Danny Peary is probably
the best collection of essays and interviews on sf cinema. Harlan
Ellison's Watching (coll 1989) by Harlan ELLISON collects most of his film
criticism from 1965 on, much of it about sf movies. Academic and
theoretical books on sf cinema - there are not many - have generally
disappointed, and occasionally been crippled by a technical jargon that is
the reverse of precise, as in some of the essays in Alien Zone: Cultural
Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema (coll 1990) ed Annette
Kuhn; a rather more accessible collection of critical essays is Shadows of
the Magic Lamp: Fantasy and Science Fiction in Film (coll 1985) ed George
E. SLUSSER and Eric S. RABKIN. But of these academic books the most
challenging may be Vivian SOBCHACK's Screening Space: The American Science
Fiction Film (1986), a radical expansion of her earlier The Limits of
Infinity (1980); it is worth persevering with, jargon and all, for the
intellectual strength it brings to bear in its attempt to define sf cinema
in a POSTMODERNIST context. Finally An Illustrated History of the Horror
Film (1967) by Carlos Clarens and Nightmare Movies (1984; rev vt Nightmare
Movies: A Critical History of the Horror Film, 1968-88) by Kim Newman are
two stimulating books that have a good deal to say, en passant, about sf
films.
CITIES
The city is the focal point of our civilization, and images of the city
of the future bring into sharp relief the expectations and fears with
which we imagine the future of civilization. Disenchantment with
metropolitan life was evident even while UTOPIAN optimism remained strong,
and became remarkably exaggerated in DYSTOPIAN images of the future. The
growth of the cities during the Industrial Revolution created filthy slums
where crime, ill-health and vice flourished, and a new kind of poverty
reigned; thus even the most devoted disciples of progress can and do
lament the state of the industrial city, which has little in common with
such utopian city-states as Tommaso CAMPANELLA's City of the Sun (1637) or
the cities of L.S. MERCIER's Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred
(1771; trans 1772). Speculative thinkers who were not utopians found the
evolution of the great cities a powerful argument against progress - a
view strongly advanced in After London (1885) by Richard JEFFERIES, in
which the cities have died but their remains still poison the Earth.In
much early sf the city is the same place of contrasts that it was in
reality, with the rich and poor living in close but separate worlds,
architectural grandeur masking squalor. This is evident in Caesar's Column
(1890) by Ignatius DONNELLY, in "A Story of the Days to Come" (1897) and
When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) by H.G. WELLS, and in Fritz LANG's film
METROPOLIS (1926). Wells, the most determined prophet of technological

supercivilization, frequently imagined the destruction of the present-day
cities as a prelude to utopian rebuilding. (Many of the real-life urban
utopian schemes of the late 19th century demanded that cities be built
anew, cleansed of their manifest evils.) However, the splendid vision of
the city as an architectural miracle which had inspired early utopians was
a vision ever-present in early PULP MAGAZINE sf, thanks largely to the
artwork of Frank R. PAUL, who was far better at drawing wonderful cities
than human beings; his distinctive images contributed much to the flavour
of Gernsbackian sf.Modern sf has made extravagant use of three stereotyped
images of the future city: one exaggerates the contrast between the city
and a surrounding wilderness, often enclosing the city in a huge plastic
dome, polarizing the opposition between city life and rural life; a second
displays once-proud cities fallen into ruins, decaying and dying; and the
third presents a vivid characterization of the future-city environment in
which humans move in the shadow of awesomely impersonal and implicitly
hostile artefacts.The theme of stories of the first kind - for which E.M.
FORSTER's "The Machine Stops" (1909) provided a prototype - is usually
that of escape from the claustrophobic, initiative-killing comfort to the
wilderness, which offers evolutionary opportunity through the struggle to
survive. Simple expositions of the theme include The Hothouse World (1931;
1965) by Fred MACISAAC, The Adventure of Wyndham Smith (1938) by S. Fowler
WRIGHT, Beyond the Sealed World (1965) by Rena VALE, From Carthage then I
Came (1966; vt Eight against Utopia) by Douglas R. MASON, Magellan (1970)
by Colin ANDERSON, Wild Jack (1974) by John CHRISTOPHER, The Crack in the
Sky (1976) by Richard LUPOFF and Terrarium (1985) by Scott Russell
SANDERS. More sophisticated variants include The City and the Stars (1956;
exp from Against the Fall of Night [1948; 1953]) by Arthur C. CLARKE, The
World Inside (1971) by Robert SILVERBERG, The Eye of the Heron (1978;
1982) by Ursula K. LE GUIN and Out on Blue Six (1989) by Ian MCDONALD.
Interesting inversions of the schema can be found in Harlan ELLISON's "A
Boy and His Dog" (1969) and Greg BEAR's Strength of Stones (fixup
1981).Images of the ruined city are often remarkable for their exaggerated
romanticism. Early examples include Jefferies's After London, George Allan
ENGLAND's Darkness and Dawn (1914) and Stephen Vincent BENET's "By the
Waters of Babylon" (1937). The ruins themselves may become charismatic and
symbolic, as exemplified by the torch of the Statue of Liberty in The
Torch (1920; 1948) by Jack BECHDOLT. There is a surprisingly strong vein
of similar romanticism in GENRE SF. Much of Clifford D. SIMAK's work especially the episodic CITY (1944-51; fixup 1952) - rejoices in the
decline and decay of cities, as do Theodore STURGEON's "The Touch of Your
Hand" (1953), J.G. BALLARD's "Chronopolis" (1960) and "The Ultimate City"
(1976), Charles PLATT's The City Dwellers (1970 UK; vt Twilight of the
City 1977 US) and Samuel R. DELANY's DHALGREN (1975). This rejoicing is
not usually based on any naive glorification of living wild and free; more
often it reflects a hope that human beings will some day outgrow the need
for cities. The probable inescapability of city life is, however,
ironically reflected in two curious stories of nomadic cultures which must
carry their cities with them: Christopher PRIEST's INVERTED WORLD (1974)
and Drew MENDELSON's Pilgrimage (1981).The third stereotype involves not
merely the representation of city life as unpleasant or alienating but a
strategic exaggeration of the city's form and aspects to stress its

frightening and claustrophobic qualities. The "caves" of Isaac ASIMOV's
The Caves of Steel (1954) are literally as well as metaphorically
claustrophobic. Cities which cover the entire surface of planets are
commonplace: Asimov's Trantor, in the Foundation trilogy (1942-50;
1951-3), set an important example. The impersonality of the megalopolis is
ingeniously exaggerated in such stories as J.G. Ballard's "Build-Up"
(1957; vt "The Concentration City") and R.A. LAFFERTY's "The World as Will
and Wallpaper" (1973), and stories in this vein are often outrightly
surreal-examples are Fritz LEIBER's "You're All Alone" (1950; exp vt The
Sinful Ones 1953) and Ted WHITE's "It Could Be Anywhere" (1969). In
extreme cases the city may become personalized, as in Robert Abernathy's
"Single Combat" (1955), Robert SHECKLEY's "Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay"
(1968), Harlan Ellison's "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" (1973) and John
SHIRLEY's City Come a-Walkin' (1980).The stress of life in a crowded
environment is the subject of many stories of OVERPOPULATION, notably
Thomas M. DISCH's 334 (fixup 1972 UK) and Felix C. GOTSCHALK's Growing Up
in Tier 3000 (1975). Such novels tend to visualize the city of the future
as a conglomerate of vast tower-blocks. Silverberg dubs these urbmons;
Philip K. DICK calls them conapts; more recently the term "arcology" has
become widespread. Some writers, however, preserve a more optimistic view
of life in such edifices, notably Mack REYNOLDS in The Towers of Utopia
(1975) and Larry NIVEN and Jerry POURNELLE in Oath of Fealty
(1981).Outside the GENRE-SF establishment, attempts to characterize the
city and identify its alienating forces are mostly grimly realistic, but
some tend to the fabular; examples include Le citta invisibili (1972;
trans as Invisible Cities 1974) by Italo CALVINO, in which Marco Polo
offers Kublai Khan an account of the great range of the possible products
of civilization, Les geants (1973; trans as The Giants 1975) by J.M. LE
CLEZIO, in which the central image is that of the great shopping-centre
Hyperbolis, and Alasdair GRAY's stories "The Start of the Axletree" (1979;
vt "The Origin of the Axletree") and "The End of the Axletree" (1983).One
striking exception - in which the city becomes the symbol of escape and
freedom rather than the oppressive environment to be escaped - is in the
novels making up James BLISH's Cities in Flight series (omni 1970), in
which ANTIGRAVITY devices, SPINDIZZIES, lift whole cities from the Earth's
surface to roam the Universe (although even this dream comes to a dead end
in one section of Earthman Come Home [fixup 1955], the part first
published in 1953 as "Sargasso of Lost Cities"). And the charismatic
quality of cities is paid adequate homage in sf stories which celebrate
the sleazy decadent grandeur of various imaginary cities. These include:
the eponymous cities of Edward BRYANT's Cinnabar (coll 1976) and Terry
CARR's Cirque (1977); M. John HARRISON's fabulous city of Viriconium,
first glimpsed in The Pastel City (1971) but far more elaborately
portrayed in A STORM OF WINGS (1980), In Viriconium (1982; vt The Floating
Gods) and Viriconium Nights (coll 1985); and C.J. CHERRYH's Merovingen,
displayed in Angel with the Sword (1985). Brian W. ALDISS's The Malacia
Tapestry (1976) is similarly ambivalent about the splendour and sickness
of cities.The possible futures of specific real cities are sometimes
tracked by sf writers with interest and respect; examples include the
Chicago of The Time-Swept City (1977) by Thomas F. MONTELEONE and the New
York of Frederik POHL's Years of the City (1984). C.J. Cherryh's Sunfall

(coll 1981) sets stories in far-futuristic versions of six major cities.
Michael MOORCOCK's work - including his non-sf - uses many different
images of London.In both sf writing and sf art, the city is one of the
most important recurrent images, and carries with it one of the richest,
densest clusters of associations to be found in the whole sf iconography.
Relevant theme anthologies include Cities of Wonder (anth 1966) ed Damon
KNIGHT, Future City (anth 1973) ed Roger ELWOOD, and The City: 2000 A.D.
(anth 1976) ed Ralph Clem, Martin Harry GREENBERG and Joseph OLANDER.
[BS]See also: AUTOMATION; SOCIOLOGY.
CITY BENEATH THE SEA
(vt One Hour to Doomsday) 1. Made-for-tv film (1970). 20th Century-Fox TV
Productions for NBC TV. Dir Irwin ALLEN, starring Stuart Whitman, Robert
Wagner, Joseph Cotton, Rosemary Forsyth, Richard Basehart, Robert Colbert,
Sugar Ray Robinson. Screenplay John Meredyth Lucas from a story by Allen.
100 mins, cut to 93 mins. Colour.Released outside the USA as a feature
film called One Hour to Doomsday, this was a pilot for a tv series that
was never made. In an incoherent jumble of over-familiar sf situations,
the citizens of 21st-century Pacifica have to contend with a super-H-bomb
to be exploded somewhere within their underwater city, invasion by an
"unfriendly foreign power", a sea monster, rebellion, the theft of a
shipment of gold from Fort Knox, and imminent destruction by the impact of
a planetoid approaching Earth. This is Irwin-Allen plotting at its most
typical, foretelling the DISASTER movies which would become his
speciality. All ends happily. [JB/PN]2. UK tv serial for children (1962).
ABC TV. Written John Lucarotti. Prod Guy Verney. 7 25min episodes. B/w.
This told of a reporter and his young sidekick kidnapped to the underwater
base of a mad scientist intent on world control.CBTS was the sequel to
Plateau of Fear (1961). ABC TV. Written Malcolm Stuart Fellows, Sutherland
Ross. Prod Guy Verney. 6 25min episodes. B/w. Thriller set in the Andes
where a reporter and young sidekick investigate a strange beast thought
responsible for attacks on a nuclear power plant; the true villain is a
general who wants the plant for military purposes.The sequel to CBTS was
Secret Beneath the Sea (1963). ABC TV. Written John Lucarotti. Prod Guy
Verney. 6 25min episodes. B/w. Again in the undersea city of Aegira, the
plot revolves around an ex-U-boat commander (from the earlier story) and
rare metals vital for space research. [SH]
CITY LIMITS
Film (1984). Sho Films/Videoform/Island Alive. Dir Aaron Lipstadt,
starring John Stockwell, Darrell Larson, Kim Cattrall, Rae Dawn Chong.
Screenplay Don Opper, from a story by Lipstadt and James Reigle. 85 mins.
Colour.Disappointing exploitation movie from the writer and director of
the first-rate ANDROID (1982). Fifteen years after the USA has been almost
wiped out by plague, two biker gangs in the sort of trendy post- HOLOCAUST
fashions associated with the MAD MAX movies live in the City, basing their
culture on comic books. A manipulative quasigovernmental agency attempts
to murder the whole of one gang and conscript the other (the sociology of
this being wholly unbelievable), but the kids win out with the help of
kind old Black man James Earl Jones, so that the City is left safe in the
hands of comics-reading Youth. [PN]

CLAGETT, JOHN (HENRY)
(1916- ) US writer whose first sf novel, A World Unknown (1975), is of
some interest for its portrayal of an ALTERNATE-WORLD USA dominated by a
Latin civilization that has never been influenced by Christianity - Jesus
having never existed. In The Orange R (1978), mutants known as "Roberts"
are forced to live in the radioactive wastelands of a DYSTOPIAN future
America. [JC]
CLAREMONT, CHRIS
Working name of US writer Christopher Simon Claremont (1950- ). He first
became known through his revitalization from 1975 of MARVEL COMICS's
X-MEN, a title which had been temporarily retired but now became the
bestselling comic in the field; CC scripted the title until he left Marvel
in 1993 to begin work with Dark Horse comics. The series deals with a
constantly expanding group of mutant SUPERHEROES, several female, whose
relationships and conflicts are densely complicated, and who inspire
sympathy both because they are adolescents with typical family problems
and because society tends to reject them. CC's style, though consistent
with the Marvel Group's experimental house-style, is often rather clumsy,
and manifestly represents an earlier phase in the rapid evolution of the
comic book than that of GRAPHIC-NOVEL writers like Frank MILLER and Alan
MOORE. God Loves, Man Kills (graph 1982) was an original tale; The Uncanny
X-Men (graph 1987) was assembled from the comic. The three Nicole Shea
novels - FirstFlight (1987), Grounded! (1991; vt Grounded 1991 UK) - cover
much of the same emotional and stylistic territory, tracing the adventures
of a NASA astronaut in a NEAR-FUTURE Solar System. [NT/JC]Other works: As
with many writers and illustrators involved in the fast-moving and hectic
world of comics publishing, CC's bibliography is anything but easy to fix;
the following titles have been confirmed: Wolverine (1985; graph coll
1988) with Frank MILLER; The Savage Land (graph 1990); and various X-Men
graphic presentations, including X-Men: Asgardian Wars (graph 1990);
X-Men: From the Ashes (graph 1990); Dragon Moon (1994) with Beth Fleisher,
a fantasy.
CLARESON, THOMAS D(EAN)
(1926-1993) US editor, critic and professor of English. By the time he
took his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, (1956) he had published
his first sf criticism (Science Fiction Quarterly 1954). He was perhaps
best known for editing EXTRAPOLATION continuously from its founding in Dec
1959 to Winter 1989, at which point he handed over the reins to his then
co-editor, Donald M. HASSLER; the rare first 10 years' issues of this
journal, the oldest established academic journal about sf, were reprinted
in Extrapolation; A Science Fiction Newsletter, Vols 1-10 (anth 1978) ed
TDC; although inconveniently packaged - there are no running heads, and
pagination is not continuous - its contents remain valuable. He was also a
pioneer in editing ANTHOLOGIES of sf criticism in book form: SF: The Other
Side of Realism (anth 1971); Voices for the Future: Essays on Major
Science Fiction Writers Vol 1 (anth 1976) and its sequels Vol 2 (anth
1979) and Vol 3 (anth 1983), the latter with Thomas L. Wymer; and Many
Futures, Many Worlds: Theme and Form in Science Fiction (anth 1977). His
SF Criticism: An Annotated Checklist (1972) began a specialist research

series which would be continued by Marshall B. TYMN and Roger SCHLOBIN.
TDC also edited a story anthology with notes, intended to be used in
education: A Spectrum of Worlds (anth 1972).TDC's most important research
was in early US sf. He wrote the chapter "The Emergence of the Scientific
Romance" in Neil BARRON's Anatomy of Wonder: Science Fiction (1976; rev
1981; rev 1987), revised in later editions as "The Emergence of Science
Fiction: The Beginnings to the 1920s". He was general editor of GREENWOOD
PRESS's (somewhat incomplete) microfilm reprint series of sf PULP
MAGAZINES and, also from Greenwood, the large, wide-ranging collection
Early Science Fiction Novels: A Microfiche Collection (coll 1984). Perhaps
his two most important works are Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s:
An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources (1984) and Some Kind of
Paradise: The Emergence of American Science Fiction (dated 1985 but 1986).
The latter - a historical and thematic survey rather than a critical study
- is a breakthrough book in an area that was previously codified poorly
and erratically; one of TDC's strategies, perhaps necessary in so little
known a field, is the inclusion of much plot synopsis. This is precisely
the strength of the former book, too, whose annotations are of real use to
researchers who may find copies of the original works difficult to locate.
In TDC's more recent book, Understanding American Science Fiction: The
Formative Period, 1926-1970 (1990), the subject matter is much more
familiar.TDC was chairman of the first Modern Language Association Seminar
on sf in 1958, and first President of the SCIENCE FICTION RESEARCH
ASSOCIATION, 1970-76. In recognition of his services to the academic study
of sf he received the PILGRIM AWARD in 1977. [PN]Other works: SF: A Dream
of Other Worlds (chap 1973); Robert Silverberg (chap 1983); Robert
Silverberg: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1983); Frederik Pohl
(1987).See also: BIBLIOGRAPHIES; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CRITICAL AND
HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; FRANCE; HISTORY OF SF; LOST WORLDS.
CLARION SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' WORKSHOP
This long-standing workshop enrols beginning writers who are interested
in writing sf. It consists of intensive writing and discussion sessions
under the direction of known sf writers, who have included Orson Scott
CARD, Terry CARR, Samuel DELANY, Thomas M. DISCH, Harlan ELLISON, Karen
Joy FOWLER, John KESSEL, Damon KNIGHT, Ursula K. LE GUIN, Tim POWERS,
Lewis SHINER and Kate WILHELM. The first three sessions were held at
Clarion State College in Pennsylvania in the summers of 1968-70. In 1971
"Clarion East" was held in Tulane University and "Clarion West" in
Seattle. Clarion West soon folded, but was later re-established in Seattle
(8 sessions to 1991). In 1972 Clarion East moved to Michigan State
University, where it remains (as just Clarion; 24 sessions to 1991).
Clarion has been more successful than many writers' workshops and has
produced notable alumni, including Ed BRYANT, F.M. BUSBY, Octavia E.
BUTLER, Gerard F. CONWAY, George Alec EFFINGER, Vonda N. MCINTYRE, Kim
Stanley ROBINSON, Lucius SHEPARD and Lisa TUTTLE. The original director of
Clarion was Robin Scott WILSON, who also edited the first three
anthologies of students' and teachers' work: Clarion (anth 1971), #II
(anth 1972) and #III (anth 1973). Clarion SF (anth 1977) was ed Kate
Wilhelm; The Clarion Awards (anth 1984) ed Damon Knight covers the
previous six years of Clarion. [PN]

CLARK, CURT
Donald E. WESTLAKE.
CLARK, RONALD W(ILLIAM)
(1916-1987) UK writer and journalist, active mainly with nonfiction since
before WWII. He began publishing sf with "The Man who Went Back" for the
London Evening Standard in 1949, but has not been a prolific contributor
to the genre. His first sf novel, Queen Victoria's Bomb: The Disclosures
of Professor Franklin Huxtable, MA, Cantab. (1967), achieved some success,
and was one of the numerous contributions to the subgenre of sf works that
exhibit nostalgia for a previous generation's view of the future; it could
be regarded as a precursor to STEAMPUNK. The Bomb that Failed (1969; vt
The Last Year of the Old World 1970 UK) is a kind of sequel, in which a
failed nuclear test at Alamagordo changes history. [JC]Other works
(nonfiction): The Huxleys (1968); J.B.S.: The Life and Work of J.B.S.
Haldane (1968); Einstein: The Life and Times (1971); The Life of Bertrand
Russell (1975), all nonfiction.See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; NUCLEAR POWER.
CLARKE, ARTHUR C(HARLES)
(1917- ) UK author, resident since 1956 in Sri Lanka. Born in Minehead,
Somerset, after leaving school ACC came to London in 1936 to work as a
civil-servant auditor with HM Exchequer. He was active in fan circles
before WWII, in which he served (1941-6) as a radar instructor with the
RAF, rising to the rank of flight-lieutenant. After WWII he entered King's
College, London, in 1948 taking his BSc with first-class honours in
physics and mathematics.ACC's strong interest in the frontiers of science
was evident early. He was chairman of the British Interplanetary Society
1946-7, and again 1950-53. His first professionally published sf story was
"Loophole" for ASF in Apr 1946, though his first sale was "Rescue Party",
which appeared in ASF in May 1946. In his early years as a writer he three
times used the pseudonym Charles Willis, and wrote once as E.G. O'Brien.
These four stories all appeared in UK magazines 1947-51. Four of ACC's
early stories, written for FANZINES (1937-42), were reprinted in The Best
of Arthur C. Clarke 1937-71 (coll 1973 UK; reissued in 2 vols, 1977, the
first being inaccurately titled 1932-1955) ed Angus WELLS; a 1930s poem
and essay appear in The Fantastic Muse (coll 1992 chap). ACC also worked
as adviser for the comic DAN DARE - PILOT OF THE FUTURE for its first six
months in 1950.ACC's early stories are very much GENRE SF, neatly
constructed, usually turning on a single scientific point, often ending
with a sting in the tail. Some are rather ponderously humorous. His first
two novels were published in 1951: Prelude to Space (1951 US; rev 1953 UK;
rev 1954 US; vt Master of Space 1961 US; vt The Space Dreamers 1969 US),
being GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL #3, and The Sands of Mars (1951). Both
suffer from the rather wooden prose which ACC later fashioned into a more
flexible instrument, though he was never able to escape an occasional
stiffness in his writing. They are, in effect, works of optimistic
propaganda for science ( OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM), with human problems
rather mechanically worked out against a background of scientific
discovery. It was with the science that ACC's imagination flared into
life. Islands in the Sky (1952 US) followed the same pattern; it is a
juvenile about a boy in an orbital space station.A new note appeared in

Expedition to Earth (coll 1953 US). This includes the short story "The
Sentinel", which had appeared in 10 Story Fantasy in 1951 as "Sentinel of
Eternity". A simple but haunting story, it tells of the discovery of an
ALIEN artefact, created by an advanced race millions of years earlier,
standing enigmatically on top of a mountain on the Moon. Many years later
this story became the basis of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), for which ACC
wrote the script with Stanley KUBRICK. The novelization, 2001: A Space
Odyssey * (1968 US; with 2 related stories added, rev as coll 1990 UK),
was written by ACC alone on the basis of the script after the film had
been made. An account of ACC's connection with the film can be found in
his The Lost Worlds of 2001 (1972 US), which also prints alternative
script versions of key scenes.With "The Sentinel" came the first clear
appearance of the ACC paradox: the man who of all sf writers is most
closely identified with knowledgeable, technological HARD SF is strongly
attracted to the metaphysical, even to the mystical; the man who in sf is
often seen as standing for the boundless optimism of the soaring human
spirit, and for the idea (strongly presented in John W. CAMPBELL Jr's ASF)
that there is nothing humanity cannot accomplish, is best remembered for
the image of mankind being as children next to the ancient, inscrutable
wisdom of alien races. There is something attractive, even moving, in what
can be seen in Freudian terms as an unhappy mankind crying out for a lost
father; certainly it is the closest thing sf has yet produced to an
analogy for RELIGION, and the longing for God.Although this theme is well
seen in "The Sentinel", and even better seen in the iconography of the
film 2001: A Space Odyssey, at the end of which mankind is seen literally
as a foetus, ACC gave it its most potent literary expression in two more
books from 1953 which are still considered by many critics to be his
finest, and in which he comes closest to continuing the tradition of the
UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE. They are Against the Fall of Night (1948 Startling
Stories; 1953 US; exp and much rev vt The City and the Stars 1956 US) also assembled with "The Lion of Comarre" (1949 TWS) as The Lion of
Comarre and Against the Fall of Night (coll 1968 US) - and CHILDHOOD'S END
(1950 NW as "Guardian Angel"; exp 1953 US; rev 1990 UK).Both the original
and the longer versions of Against the Fall of Night are readily
available. Indeed, the shorter version was republished in Beyond the Fall
of Night (omni 1990 US misleadingly credited - since it appears from the
cover to be a single novel - to ACC and Gregory Benford; vt Arthur C
Clarke - Against the Fall of Night/Gregory Benford - Beyond the Fall of
Night UK 1991), along with a sequel, very different in tone and theme, by
Gregory BENFORD. The longer version, The City and the Stars, is one of the
strongest tales of CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH in genre sf. Alvin, a young man
in the enclosed utopian city of Diaspar, on Earth in the FAR FUTURE,
becomes impatient at the TECHNOLOGY-mediated stasis of the perfect life,
and after many adventures makes his way outside the city to Lys, another
UTOPIA but of a different kind, which stresses closeness to Nature.
Ultimately Alvin finds an alien spaceship left behind millennia ago,
visits the stars, and finally discovers the true nature of the cosmic
perspective which has been hidden from both Lys and Diaspar. The final
passages blend a sense of loss and of transcendence with an almost
mystical intensity. ACC began working on this story as early as 1937, and
it is clearly central to all his thinking and feeling; it is perhaps his

most memorable work, and distinctly superior to the more awkward earlier
version. It owes something to the evolutionary perspective of Olaf
STAPLEDON, whose works ACC greatly admired, as does CHILDHOOD'S END, in
which mankind reaches transcendence under the tutelage of satanic-seeming
aliens, eventually to fuse with a cosmic overmind which is an apotheosis
forever to be denied both to their parents, who are ordinary humans, and
to the alien tutors.ACC continued to publish sf with some frequency over
the next decade, with Earthlight (1951 TWS; exp 1955 US), Reach for
Tomorrow (coll 1956 US), The Deep Range (1954 Star SF #3; exp 1957 US),
Tales from the White Hart (coll of linked stories 1957 US), The Other Side
of the Sky (coll 1958 US), A Fall of Moondust (1961 US), Tales of Ten
Worlds (coll 1962 US), Dolphin Island (1963 US), a juvenile, and Glide
Path (1963 US), ACC's only non-sf novel, about the development of radar.
The most interesting of these are The Deep Range, about NEAR-FUTURE
farming UNDER THE SEA, containing some of ACC's most evocative writing,
and A Fall of Moondust, a realistic account - in the light of theories
about the Moon's surface now known to have been mistaken - of an accident
to a surface transport on a lightly colonized Moon. ACC's "The Star"
(1955), a short story of great pathos describing the discovery that the
star put in the sky by God to prefigure the Birth at Bethlehem was a
supernova that destroyed an entire alien race, won a HUGO.By the 1960s
most of ACC's creative energies had gone into writing nonfiction books and
articles, many of them - not listed here - about undersea exploration; he
was an enthusiastic skin-diver himself, one reason for his residence in
Sri Lanka. His popularizations of science, which won him the UNESCO
Kalinga Prize in 1962, are closely related to his fiction, in that the
stories often fictionalize specific ideas discussed in the factual pieces.
His most important nonfiction works, interesting still though some are
rather out-of-date, are: Interplanetary Flight (1950; rev 1960), The
Exploration of Space (1951; rev 1959; original text with new intro 1979),
The Exploration of the Moon (1954), The Young Traveller in Space (1954; vt
Going into Space US; vt The Scottie Book of Space Travel UK; rev with
Robert SILVERBERG vt Into Space 1971 US), The Making of a Moon: The Story
of the Earth Satellite Programme (1957; rev 1958 US), Voice Across the Sea
(coll 1958 UK; rev 1974 UK; much rev, vt How the World was One: Beyond the
Global Village 1992 UK), The Challenge of the Space Ship (coll 1959 US),
Profiles of the Future (coll 1962; rev 1973; rev 1984), Man and Space
(1964; with the Editors of Life), Voices From the Sky (coll 1965 US), The
Promise of Space (1968), Beyond Jupiter: The Worlds of Tomorrow (1972 US;
with Chesley BONESTELL), Report on Planet 3 and other Speculations (coll
1972), The View from Serendip (coll 1977 US), 1984: Spring: A Choice of
Futures (coll 1984 US) and Ascent to Orbit: A Scientific Autobiography:
The Technical Writings of Arthur C. Clarke (coll 1984 US). ACC's early
professional experience as assistant editor of Science Abstracts 1949-50,
before he became a full-time writer, has amply paid off. The Exploration
of Space won a nonfiction INTERNATIONAL FANTASY AWARD in 1952. His science
writing is lucid and interesting; his only rival as an sf writer of
significance who is also of importance as a scientific journalist is Isaac
ASIMOV. ACC became well known all over the world when he appeared as
commentator on CBS TV for the Apollo 11, 12 and 15 Moon missions.A good
retrospective collection of stories, all but one reprinted from

collections listed above, is The Nine Billion Names of God (coll 1967 US).
Since 1962 only a small amount of fiction by ACC has appeared in sf
magazines, though two of his most interesting stories date from this
period: "Sunjammer" (1965; vt "The Wind from the Sun"), which is about the
SOLAR WIND, and A Meeting with Medusa (1971 Playboy; 1988 chap dos US),
winner of a NEBULA in 1972 for Best Novella, the story of a CYBORG
explorer meeting ALIEN life in the atmosphere of JUPITER. Both stories are
reprinted in The Wind from the Sun (coll 1972 US; with 3 vignettes added
rev 1987 US), his sixth and most recent collection (not counting reprint
volumes). The most comprehensive, though by no means complete, selection
of ACC's short fiction is the misleadingly titled More than One Universe:
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (omni 1991 US), collecting Tales
of Ten Worlds, The Other Side of the Sky, The Nine Billion Names of God
and The Wind from the Sun, with several stories dropped.After the success
of 2001: A Space Odyssey, ACC became perhaps the best-known sf writer in
the world, and in the USA by far and away the most popular foreign sf
writer. A few years later he signed a contract, for a sum of money larger
than anything previously paid in sf publishing, to write three further
novels. These turned out to be Rendezvous with Rama (1973 UK), Imperial
Earth: A Fantasy of Love and Discord (cut 1975; with 10,000 words restored
1976 US) and The Fountains of Paradise (1979 UK; with exp afterword 1989).
All were bestsellers; all had a mixed critical reception, though
Rendezvous with Rama scooped the awards: the Hugo, Nebula, JOHN W.
CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD and BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD. To what extent
the book deserved it, and to what extent the awards merely celebrated the
return of a much loved figure to the field after many years' comparative
silence is unclear. All the old ACC themes are there in the story of a
huge, apparently derelict alien spaceship which enters the Solar System,
and its exploration by a party of humans. As an artefact, the spaceship is
a symbol of almost mythic significance, enigmatic, powerful and
fascinating ( BIG DUMB OBJECTS; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION), and the book
derives considerable power from its description. The human
characterization, on the other hand, is rather reminiscent of boys'
fiction from an earlier era. Imperial Earth tells of relations between
Earth and the OUTER PLANETS, and contains a rather meandering intrigue
involving CLONES; there are some interesting speculations about BLACK
HOLES. Fountains of Paradise, a much better book than Imperial Earth - it
won the 1980 Hugo for Best Novel - tells of the construction on Earth of a
space elevator 36,000km high, and combines ACC's favourite themes of
technological evolution and mankind's apotheosis with moving directness;
it is the most considerable work of the latter part of ACC's career.The
1980s and 1990s provided an astonishing coda to all of this. They have in terms of the number of books appearing with ACC's name on the
cover-been unexpectedly productive, unexpectedly because ACC was well into
his 60s, and had previously announced that Fountains of Paradise would be
his last work of fiction. However, soon there appeared 2010: Odyssey Two
(1982 US), a sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey. This was made into a film
directed by Peter Hyams, 2010 (1984). Neither book nor film is as
distinguished as the original, but the book is better than the film. It
was followed by 2061: Odyssey Three (1988 UK), which being open-ended
suggests that the Odyssey saga of alien intervention may not yet be

complete. A little earlier ACC had published The Songs of Distant Earth
(1986 US), which greatly expands on the story of the same title published
in If in 1958. Quietly and without much action it recounts the meeting of
an isolated human colony on a remote planet with one of the last
spaceships to leave a doomed Earth, and the cultural clashes that
follow.In the mid-1980s ACC had developed a debilitating and continuing
illness affecting the nervous system, but despite this he maintained
considerable literary activity. His illness meant that much of his work
was necessarily collaborative. While some of this was found disappointing
by the critics, and even reviled, there is considerable gallantry in his
having made the effort at all, more especially as the profit, it has been
said, is intended to shore up various charitable enterprises ACC has
founded, in order to render them financially secure after his death. The
collaborative enterprises have included Cradle (1988 UK) with Gentry LEE
and, also with Lee, three sequels to RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA: Rama II (1989
UK), The Garden of Rama (1991 US) and Rama Revealed (1993). Most of the
writing seems to have been Lee's, whose style is less compact and more
stereotyped than ACC's. All these books have moments of embarrassing prose
reminiscent of popular romance, though they are progressively more
confidently written. A more interesting partnership was that between
Gregory Benford and Clarke, the former (as noted above) writing a sequel
to the latter's 1948 novella Against the Fall of Night. ACC has also
franchised out ( SHARED WORLDS) the Venus Prime series to Paul PREUSS
(whom see for titles), each novel having some basis in an ACC short story.
The series begins with Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime, Volume 1: Breaking
Strain (1987), based on ACC's "Breaking Strain" (TWS 1949). The
fact-and-fiction anthology Project Solar Sail (anth 1990 US) has a cover
which says it is ed ACC, but a reading of the title page suggests the true
ed, here "Managing Editor", was David BRIN.During the period since 1988
there have been, moreover, two books by ACC alone. The first is Astounding
Days: A Science Fictional Autobiography (1989), consisting of enjoyable
reminiscences of his own literary life, with a good amount of material on
other writers, both these topics being often seen in relation to the
magazine ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION. The second, somewhat surprisingly
after all the collaborations, was another solo novel, The Ghost from the
Grand Banks (1990 UK), an interesting tale of an attempt to raise the
Titanic in the early 21st century; it is indubitably Clarkean, though
itself a little ghostlike, much of the story pared to the bone, though
typically containing a technical (and neatly symbolic) diversion into the
mathematics of the Mandelbrot set. The Hammer of God (1992 Time Magazine;
exp 1993), which hangs a number of speculations on a thin narrative
involving an asteroid bent on colliding with Earth, is also telegraphic in
effect.ACC is patron of the SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION, and at the
ceremony proclaiming the housing of its research collection with the
University of Liverpool, he received an honorary doctorate from the
University, by videolink. He has received many awards, including the
Association of Space Explorers' Special Achievement Award. He has
presented a number of tv programmes, including the series Arthur C.
Clarke's Mysterious World at the beginning of the 1980s. He received a
Nebula Grand Master Award in 1986.For many readers ACC is the very
personification of sf. Never a "literary" author, he nonetheless writes

always with lucidity and candour, often with grace, sometimes with a cold,
sharp evocativeness that has produced some of the most memorable images in
sf. He is deservedly seen as a central figure in the development of
post-WWII sf, especially in his liberal, optimistic view of the possible
benefits of technology (though one that is by no means unaware of its
dangers), and in his development of the Stapledonian theme of cosmic
perspective, in which mankind is seen as reaching out like a child to an
alien Universe which may treat us as a godlike father would, or may
respond with cool indifference. [PN]Other works: Across the Sea of Stars
(omni 1959 US of 18 short stories from previous colls and the novels
CHILDHOOD'S END and Earthlight); From the Ocean, From the Stars (omni 1961
US of The Deep Range, The Other Side of the Sky and The City and the
Stars); Prelude to Mars (omni 1965 US of 16 stories from previous
collections plus Prelude to Space and The Sands of Mars); An Arthur C.
Clarke Omnibus (omni 1965 UK of Childhood's End, Prelude to Space and
Expedition to Earth); An Arthur C. Clarke Second Omnibus (omni 1968 UK of
A Fall of Moondust, Earthlight and The Sands of Mars); Of Time and Stars
(coll 1972 UK), a collection for children, all reprinted from previous
collections; Four Great SF Novels (omni 1978 UK); The Sentinel (coll 1983
US), reprints; Tales From Planet Earth (coll 1989 UK) ed anon by Martin H.
GREENBERG, the only previously uncollected story being "On Golden Seas"
(1987 Omni).Nonfiction: Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World (1980) and
Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers (1985), both with Simon Welfare
and John Fairley, both tv-series spin-offs largely written by Welfare and
Fairley; The Odyssey File (1985 UK) with Peter Hyams, communications
exchanged between author and director about the making of the film 2010;
Arthur C. Clarke's July 20, 2019: A Day in the Life of the 21st Century
(1986 US), illustrated; Arthur C. Clarke's Chronicles of the Strange and
Mysterious (1987), again with Welfare and Fairley; The Fantastic Muse
(coll 1992 chap), fanzine material from the 1930s; How the World Was One:
Beyond the Global Village (coll 1992; vt How the World Was One: The
Turbulent History of Global Communications 1993), partially based on
Voices Across the Sea (1958 US); By Space Possessed: Essays on the
Exploration of Space (coll 1993), mostly assembled from previous books;
The Snows of Olympus: A Garden on Mars (1994), which advocates the
terraforming of Mars.As Editor: Time Probe (anth 1966 US); The Coming of
the Space Age (anth of nonfiction pieces 1967); Science Fiction Hall of
Fame, Vol 4 (anth 1981 as ed by ACC; vt Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol
III: Nebula Winners 1965-69 US 1981 as ed by ACC with Geo W. PROCTOR Proctor did the actual editing).About the author: Arthur C. Clarke (anth
1977) ed Joseph D. OLANDER and Martin Harry GREENBERG; Arthur C. Clarke:
Starmont Readers' Guide No 1 (chap 1979) by Eric S. RABKIN; Arthur C.
Clarke: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1984) by David N. SAMUELSON;
The Odyssey of Arthur C. Clarke: An Authorized Biography (1992) by Neil
McAleer.See also: ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD; ASTEROIDS; CHILDREN IN SF;
CHILDREN'S SF; CITIES; CLUB STORY; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS;
COMPUTERS; DEL REY BOOKS; DIMENSIONS; END OF THE WORLD; ESCHATOLOGY;
EVOLUTION; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FANTASY; FUTUROLOGY; GENERATION
STARSHIPS;
GODS AND DEMONS; GOLDEN AGE OF SF; GRAVITY; HISTORY OF SF; HIVE-MINDS;
HUMOUR; INVASION; LEISURE; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS);

MAGIC;
MARS; MATHEMATICS; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; METAPHYSICS; MOON; MUSIC;
MYTHOLOGY;
PASTORAL; PERCEPTION; PHYSICS; POWER SOURCES; PREDICTION; PSI POWERS;
RADIO; ROCKETS; SCIENTISTS; SPACE FLIGHT; SPACE HABITATS; SPACESHIPS;
STARS; SUN; SUPERMAN; TERRAFORMING; TIME TRAVEL; TRANSPORTATION;
VIRTUAL
REALITY.
CLARKE'S SATELLITE
For pulp SF writers of the early 20th century, global communication was
just a dream. Then in 1945, Arthur C. Clarke, a 28-year-old radar
instructor with the RAF, published a paper suggesting that satellites
orbiting the Earth could be used to relay radio signals around the
globe.He noted that a satellite orbiting 22,250 miles above the equator
would take exactly 24 hours to go around the Earth and would therefore
appear to hang motionless in the sky. A satellite in such an orbit could
create a communication link between continents and across oceans. Clarke's
paper proposed using manned satellites and radios powered by vacuum tubes,
although actual communications satellites today are unmanned and use
transistors - which were unknown when Clarke wrote his paper.Clarke's
imaginative powers were later directed to science fiction, and he went on
to become one of the best-known and best-loved writers in SF history.
Today he lives on the island of Sri Lanka, connected to the global village
through a communications satellite located in what is now called "Clarke
Orbit."
CLARKE, A(UBREY) V(INCENT)
[r] Kenneth BULMER.
CLARKE, BODEN
Robert REGINALD.
CLARKE, I(GNATIUS) F(REDERIC)
(1918- ) Intelligence officer and code-cracker during WWII, and retired
Professor of English (from 1964) at the University of Strathclyde in
Glasgow. His first major publication was the BIBLIOGRAPHY The Tale of the
Future: From the Beginning to the Present Day: A Checklist of those
Satires, Ideal States, Imaginary Wars and Invasions, Political Warnings
and Forecasts, Interplanetary Voyages and Scientific Romances - All
Located in an Imaginary Future Period - that have been Published in the UK
between 1644 and 1960 (1961; rev 1972; rev 1978); the third edition
carries the story to 1976. This work is very useful but not always
reliable, being occasionally weak on variant titles and plot summaries,
and is far from comprehensive. These weaknesses lie primarily in the
period from 1940 on, and IFC-whose work in the earlier period was
pioneering-has since publicly regretted the fact that he did not stop at
the year 1939.IFC's next important contribution to sf studies was Voices
Prophesying War 1763-1984 (1966; rev vt Voices Prophesying War: Future
Wars 1763-3749 1992), by a long way the most comprehensive account of the
future- WAR story. This was followed by The Pattern of Expectation:
1644-2001 (1979), which ranges widely through the literature of the future

from its earliest days to the most recent forecasts of FUTUROLOGY, and
takes in much work which tends to be ignored by historians of genre sf.
This book broke new ground in the history and sociology of ideas, focusing
on the interrelation between differing expectations and PREDICTIONS of the
future in different historical periods and the characteristic future
images they yielded, in pictures as well as in words. In most respects it
supersedes W.H.G. ARMYTAGE's Yesterday's Tomorrows (1967). [PN]See also:
CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DYSTOPIAS; HISTORY OF SF;
INVASION; NEAR FUTURE; PILGRIM AWARD; PROTO SCIENCE FICTION.
CLARKE, ROBERT
Charles PLATT.
CLARK PUBLISHING CO.
IMAGINATION; OTHER WORLDS SCIENCE STORIES.
CLARKSON, HELEN
Working name of Helen Worrell Clarkson McCloy (1904-1993), most of whose
works are detective novels written as Helen McCloy. Her sole sf work, The
Last Day: A Novel of the Day After Tomorrow (1959), tellingly describes a
nuclear HOLOCAUST from the viewpoint of an isolated woman, whose island
retreat proves in the end no refuge against the consequences of final war.
[JC]
CLASS OF 1999
Film (1990). Lightning/Original/Vestron. Prod and dir Mark L. Lester,
starring Bradley Gregg, Traci Lin, John P. Ryan, Pam Grier, Patrick
Kilpatrick, Stacy Keach, Malcolm McDowell. Screenplay C. Courtney Joyner,
based on a story by Lester. 98 mins. Colour. In the USA of 1999 most
CITIES have no-go "Free Fire" zones ruled by teenage gangs, and many
schools are closed. As an experiment, the Department of Educational
Defense uses ex-military ANDROIDS for teachers, re-opening a school in
Seattle. The androids - even the attractive Black "chemistry teacher from
Hell" (Grier) - revert to military conditioning and run amok with
disciplinary measures against the drug-taking, gang-warring students,
killing many. This violent, amusingly over-the-top exploitation movie
features every killer- ROBOT cliche found in movies from WESTWORLD (1973)
to The TERMINATOR (1984), but for a low-budget film Eric Allard's
mechanical effects are good, and the direction is capable. The sequel is
Class of 1999 II: The Substitute(1993), dir Spiro Razatos, screenplay Mark
Sevi, starring Sasha Mitchell, Nick Cassavetes, Caitlin Dulany, Jack
Knight and Rick Hill, 87 mins. This is a more modest film, quite well
made, with an interesting plot twist that calls into question the science
fictionality of the whole thing. The story tells, or appears to, of yet
another battle 'droid masquerading as a substitute teacher and wreaking
havoc among particularly unpleasant and violent high-school students. [PN]
CLASS OF 1999 II: THE SUBSTITUTE
CLASS OF 1999.
CLAUDY, CARL H(ARRY)
(1879-1957) US author of some 20 sf stories, all for the magazine
American Boy. Four were revised and expanded into a series of juvenile

novels with the general heading Adventures in the Unknown: The Mystery Men
of Mars (1933), A Thousand Years a Minute (1933), The Land of No Shadow
(1933) and The Blue Grotto Terror (1934). This was probably the most
vigorous and imaginative juvenile sf book series up to that time. Two of
these stories in their original magazine form, together with "Tongue of
the Beast" (1939), appeared in The Year after Tomorrow (anth 1954) ed
Lester DEL REY, Carl Carmer (1893-1976) and Cecile Matschat. [JE]See also:
BOYS' PAPERS; CHILDREN'S SF; JUVENILE SERIES.
CLAYTON, (PATRICIA) JO
(1939- ) US writer, most of whose work consists of a long series of
science-fantasy SPACE OPERAS of extended quests in highly coloured venues.
The sequence divides into the Diadem books - Diadem from the Stars (1977),
which romantically sets out the epic adventures of a young girl
electronically attached to the power-bestowing diadem of the title, as she
searches for the planet which is the home of her mother's
super-race,Lamarchos (1978), Irsud (1978), Maeve (1979), Star Hunters
(1980), The Nowhere Hunt (1981), Ghosthunt (1983), The Snares of Ibex
(1984) and Quester's Endgame (1986) - and the volumes dedicated to
Shadith's Quest: Shadowplay (1990), Shadowspeer (1990 and Shadowkill
(1991). The speculative element in these titles does not significantly
figure; but the differing venues, reminiscent of the worlds of Leigh
BRACKETT, are depicted with some richness. Shadow of the Warmaster (1988)
is an sf novel with thriller elements. [JC]Other works: The Duel of
Sorcery books, comprising Moongather (1982), Moonscatter (1983) and
Changer's Moon (1985), followed by the connected Dancer's sequence,
comprising Dancer's Rise (1993), Serpent Waltz (1994) and Dance Down the
Stars (1994); A Bait of Dreams: a Five-Summer Quest (fixup 1985); the
Skeen sequence, comprising Skeen's Leap (1986), Skeen's Return (1987) and
Skeen's Search (1987); Drinker of Souls (1986), Blue Magic (1988) and A
Gathering of Stones (1989), these three assembled as The Soul Drinker
(omni 1989), followed by the Wild Magic trilogy, comprising Wild Magic
(1991), Wildfire (1992) and The Magic Wars (1993).
CLAYTON MAGAZINES
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.
CLEMENS, BRIAN
[r] The AVENGERS .
CLEMENS, SAMUEL L.
[r] Mark TWAIN.
CLEMENT, HAL
Working name used for his sf by US writer Harry Clement Stubbs (1922- );
he uses his surname for science articles and paints as George Richard. He
holds degrees in astronomy, chemistry and education, and was long employed
as a highschool science teacher. From the beginning of his career HC was
associated with ASF, where his first story, "Proof", appeared in 1942, at
the peak of the GOLDEN AGE OF SF. His work has from the first been
characterized by the complexity and compelling interest of the scientific
(or at any rate scientifically literate) ideas which dominate each story.
He is not noted as a stylist, nor is his interest in character depiction

very strong. Many of his books can for pages read like a dramatized
exposition of ideas, absorbing though at times disconcerting for the novel
reader. This is certainly the case with Needle (1949 ASF; exp 1950; vt
From Outer Space 1957), his first novel, a rather ponderous alienINVASION story with detection elements and a juvenile protagonist in a
tale where the invader is a police-parasite chasing another (malign)
parasite that has possessed the boy's father; the boy, with the good alien
in tow, helps to drive the bad alien from his Dad. It is a highly loaded
theme, but is told without any of the necessary resonance, nor does its
sequel, Through the Eye of a Needle (1978), written as a juvenile, manage
to cope any better with the human implications of its material.HC's most
famous - and far better - work is contained in his main series, a loose
sequence consisting of MISSION OF GRAVITY (ASF 1953; cut 1954; text
restored with additions and 1 added story, as coll 1978), Close to
Critical (1958 ASF; 1964) and Star Light (1971). The third volume is a
direct sequel to the first, while some of the characters in the second
appear in the third as well, Elise ("Easy") Rich in Close to Critical
being the "Easy" Hoffman of Star Light, 25 years older. MISSION OF
GRAVITY, one of the best loved novels in sf, is set on the intriguingly
plausible high-gravity planet of Mesklin, inhabited by HC's most
interesting ALIENS. The plot concerns the efforts of the Mesklinite
Captain Barlennan and his crew to assist a human team in extracting a
vital component from a crashed space probe; the humans cannot perform the
feat, because Mesklin's GRAVITY varies from an equatorial 3g to a polar
700g. Barlennan's arduous trek is inherently fascinating, but perhaps even
more engaging is HC's presentation of the captain as a kind of Competent
Man in extremis, a born engineer, a lover of knowledge. These
characteristics permeate the texts of everything that HC writes, even
those stories whose protagonists are no more than pretexts for the
unfolding of the genuine text - which is the physical Universe itself.HC's
most successful novels apply the basic plot of MISSION OF GRAVITY to
fundamentally similar basic storylines - a character, usually human, must
cope with an alien environment, with or without the help of natives, as in
Iceworld (1953), Cycle of Fire (1957) and the stories assembled in Natives
of Space (coll 1965) and Small Changes (coll 1969; vt Space Lash 1969).
HC's only collaboration, "Planet for Plunder" (1957) with Sam MERWIN Jr,
demonstrates his fascination with alien environments and viewpoints, as he
initially wrote the story entirely from a nonhuman standpoint; Merwin,
acting for Satellite Magazine, where it appeared, wrote an additional
10,000 words from a human standpoint.HC brought a new seriousness to the
extrapolative HARD-SF physical-sciences story, and his vividness of
imagination - his sense that the Universe is wonderful - has generally
overcome the awkwardness of his narrative technique. He is a figure of
importance to the genre. [JC]Other works: Ranger Boys in Space (1956), a
juvenile; Some Notes on XI Bootis (1960 chap), a lecture; First Flights to
the Moon (anth 1970), nonfiction; Ocean on Top (1967 If; 1973); The Best
of Hal Clement (coll 1979); The Nitrogen Fix (1980); Intuit (coll of
linked stories 1987), four Laird Cunningham tales; Still River (1987);
Isaac's Universe: Fossil* (1993), tied to the works of Isaac ASIMOV.About
the author: Hal Clement (1982) by Donald M. HASSLER; Hal Clement,
Scientist with a Mission: A Working Bibliography (1989 chap) by Gordon

BENSON Jr.See also: CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT;
ECOLOGY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; ROBERT HALE
LIMITED;
SCIENTIFIC ERRORS; STARS; SUN; UNDER THE SEA.
CLEMENTS, DAVID
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
CLEVE, JOHN
Pseudonym used mainly by Andrew J. OFFUTT for several erotic sf novels
and for the first 6 vols of the 19-vol Spaceways sequence; most of the
rest were jointly authored. Offutt's collaborators included G.C.
EDMONDSON, Roland GREEN, Jack C. HALDEMAN, Robin Kincaid, Victor KOMAN,
Geo W. PROCTOR and Dwight V. SWAIN.
CLICHES
Sf cliches have developed, perhaps, partly out of a need for
identification of stories as genuine sf - readers know where they are with
a time-space warp - but mainly out of the lazy and parsimonious recycling
of ideas at every level. The most obvious are cliche gadgets ( BLASTER,
ANDROID, HYPERSPACE drive, CYBORG, TIME MACHINE, brain suspended in
aquarium, FORCE FIELD, food pill, ANTIGRAVITY shield, translating machine,
judiciary COMPUTER), but major sf cliche themes are also old friends
(daring conquest of the Galaxy; scientist goes too far; witch-hunt for
telepaths; post- HOLOCAUST barbarism; triumph of Yankee knowhow). A list
of sf cliche characters might begin with mad SCIENTISTS (Frankenstein to
Dr Strangelove), though scientists may also be either young, muscular and
idealistic or else elderly, absentminded and eccentric. Cliche WOMEN AS
PORTRAYED IN SF normally have no character above the neck ( SEX). Some are
sexy and helpless (often lab assistants or daughters of elderly
scientists, rescued from danger by young scientists), break into
hysterical laughter and need a slap, faint during critical fight scenes,
and twist their fragile ankles during the flight through the jungle.
Others are sexy and threatening (Amazon Queens from She to Wonder Woman)
or sexy but ignorant tomboys (as in FORBIDDEN PLANET). Since the advent of
FEMINISM, however, women are less commonly weak ("She flexed her mighty
thews"). Cliche CHILDREN IN SF are hardly more variable: some are MUTANT
geniuses, possess magical or PSI POWERS, or prove mankind's only link with
alien invaders by virtue of their innocence. With "The Small Assassin"
(1946), Ray BRADBURY began a new line of sf cliche kids who, after
menacing mankind in many of his stories, turned up to menace again in John
WYNDHAM's The Midwich Cuckoos (1957; vt Village of the Damned) and in the
film IT'S ALIVE! Sf cliche MACHINE characters must be comic (in many Isaac
ASIMOV stories), horrifying (from the GOLEM to the DALEKS) or sometimes
both (from Nathaniel HAWTHORNE's dancing partner in "The Artist of the
Beautiful" [1844] to HAL in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY [1968]); they are seldom
allowed as much thought or emotion as even BEMS or other minatory
extraterrestrials. Among MONSTERS, giantism, dwarfism, scales, hair,
slime, claws and tentacles prevail. H.G. WELLS first used octopuses in
"The Sea Raiders" (1897); other writers kept the loathsome tentacles
waving for half a century, up to and beyond IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA
[1955].Sf cliche plots and plot devices are so numerous that any list must

be incomplete. We have the feeble old nightwatchman left to guard the
smouldering meteorite crater overnight ("I'll be all right, yessirree");
the doomed society of lotus-eaters; civilization's future depending upon
the outcome of a chess game, the answer to a riddle, or the discovery of a
simple formula ("a one-in-a-million chance, but so crazy it just might
work!"); shapeshifting aliens ("one of us aboard this ship is not human");
invincible aliens ("the billion-megaton blast had no more effect than the
bite of a Sirian flea"); alien invaders finally stopped by ordinary water
(as in films of both The DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS [1963] and The Wizard of Oz
[1939]); the ANDROID spouse who cuts a finger and bleeds machine-oil; the
spouse possessed or hypnotized by aliens ("darling, you've been acting so
strangely since your trip to Ganymede"); the disguised alien sniffed out
by "his" pet dog, who never acted this way before; destruction of giant
computer brain by a simple paradox ("when is a door not a door?"); robot
rebellion ("yes, 'Master'"); a Doppelganger in the corridors of time ("it
was - himself!"); Montagues and Capulets living in PARALLEL WORLDS; evil
Master of the World stopping to smirk before killing hero; everyone
controlled by alien mind-rays except one man; Oedipus kills
great-great-grandad; world is saved by instant technology ("it may have
looked like just a hunk of breadboard, a few widgets and wires - but
wow!"); a youth elixir - but at what terrible price?; thick-headed
scientist tampers unwittingly with elemental forces better left in the
hands of the Deity; IMMORTALITY tempts Nature to a terrible revenge;
monster destroys its creator; dying alien race must breed with earthling
models and actresses; superior aliens step in to save mankind from
self-destruction (through H-bombs, POLLUTION, fluoridation, decadence); Dr
X's laboratory ( ISLAND, planet) goes up in flames ...Pulp can always be
recycled.But, then again, it is always possible to add new pulp to old, as
happened in the 1980s, when new cliches appeared while most of the old
ones continued. They were mostly found in films, but some were in books,
too: kids playing with computers start or wage actual wars without knowing
it; Japanese advertising appears everywhere from posters to retinas;
GENETIC ENGINEERING produces warring subcultures; expanding BLACK HOLES at
the galactic centre are the legacy of wars between superbeings; kids
TIME-TRAVEL into the past and invent rock'n'roll; alien cops buddy up with
Earth cops to nab alien criminals; unemotional teachers and scientists
turn out to be killer android/robots; vast alien artefacts prove to have
extensions infinite in time and/or space or to lead somewhere else ( BIG
DUMB OBJECTS); future people obsessed with 1950s rock'n'roll (Stephen
KING, Allen STEELE); God is an AI; an alien virus turns us all into
cannibalistic zombies; transplant technology leads to sex orgies (severed
heads have cunnilingus, penis grafts increase libido). An old cliche that
returns more regularly than Halley's Comet, but especially at around the
same time, has gigantic objects in space impacting with Earth. Two
promising new cliches that could not have been predicted are spacefaring
trees (Stephen BAXTER, Larry NIVEN, Dan SIMMONS) and romantic poets such
as Keats, Byron and Shelley meeting either separately or together with
monsters, AIs and so on (Brian W. ALDISS, William GIBSON, Tim POWERS, Dan
Simmons and others). [JS/PN]
CLIFTON, MARK

(1906-1963) US writer and businessman, for many years occupied in
personnel work, putting together many thousands of case histories from
which he extrapolated conclusions after the fashion of Kinsey and Sheldon;
these conclusions MC reportedly used to shape the arguments of his sf,
most of which was published in ASF, beginning with "What Have I Done?"
(1952).Much of his fiction is comprised of two series. The Bossy sequence
- "Crazy Joey" (1953) with Alex Apostolides (1924- ), "Hide! Hide! Witch!"
(1953) with Apostolides, and They'd Rather be Right (1954 ASF; edited
version 1957; vt The Forever Machine 1958; text restored under original
title 1982) with Frank RILEY - concerns an advanced COMPUTER named Bossy
who is almost made ineffective by the fears of mankind about her, even
though she is capable of conferring IMMORTALITY. They'd Rather be Right
won the 1955 HUGO award for Best Novel. MC's second series, the Ralph
Kennedy sequence - "What Thin Partitions" (1953) with Alex Apostolides,
"Sense from Thought Divide" (1955), "How Allied" (1957), "Remembrance and
Reflection" (1958) and When They Come from Space (1962) - is rather
lighter in tone, focusing initially on Kennedy's dealings with psi
phenomena ( PSI POWERS) in his role as the investigative personnel
director for a cybernetics firm, and moving on in the novel which
concludes the series to deal with a typical ASF target, inflated Federal
bureaucracy. The long-suffering Kennedy is appointed "extraterrestrial
psychologist" and is forced to cope with a team of aliens which is
mounting hoax INVASIONS.MC's only out-of-series novel is Eight Keys to
Eden (1960), in which an E-man, or Extrapolator, is sent to the colony
planet of Eden to extricate it from an apparently insuperable problem: the
problem turns out to be normal human civilization, not the paradise.
Despite a slightly awkward prose style and an occasionally heavy wit, MC's
novels and stories - a convenient selection is The Science Fiction of Mark
Clifton (coll 1980) under the editorship and advocacy of Barry N. MALZBERG
- convey a comfortable lucidity and optimism about the relation between
technology and progress; his attempts to apply the tone of HARD SF to
subjects derived from the SOFT SCIENCES reflect ASF's philosophical bent
in the 1950s under John W. CAMPBELL Jr's editorial guidance. [JC]See also:
AUTOMATION; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; DIMENSIONS; ECOLOGY;
INTELLIGENCE; PASTORAL.
CLINE, C(HARLES) TERRY, Jr
(1935- ) US writer of, among others, three borderline-sf novels - Damon
(1975), about MUTANT superchildren, Death Knell (1977), which deals
interestingly with REINCARNATION, and Cross Current (1979), and one sf
tale, Mindreader (1981), whose protagonist, while in hiding, unremarkably
uses ESP to save the rest of us. [JC]See also: REINCARNATION.
CLINGERMAN, MILDRED (McELROY)
(1918- ) US writer and book-collector who never worked as a full-time
author. Since beginning to publish her shapely stories in 1952 with
"Minister without Portfolio" for FSF she was as strongly associated with
that magazine as was Zenna HENDERSON. A Cupful of Space (coll 1961)
reflects this association in the frequency of stories included which wed a
literate tone to a sometimes sentimental cuteness. [JC]See also: WOMEN SF
WRITERS.

CLINTON, DIRK
[s] Robert SILVERBERG.
CLINTON, JEFF
Jack M. BICKHAM.
CLIVE, DENNIS
John Russell FEARN.
CLOCK, HERBERT
(1890-1979) US writer, apparently the senior collaborator with Eric
Boetzel on The Light in the Sky (1929), an sf tale set in a LOST WORLD
under Mexico, where Aztecs retreated after the genocidal onslaught of the
Spanish and have constructed, over the centuries, a culture dominated by
high science, telepathy, and - apparently - human sacrifice. The immortal
Aztec genius behind the throne is in fact benevolent, and plans to benefit
humankind; but the usual terminal DISASTER puts an end to this. [JC]
CLOCKWORK ORANGE, A
Film (1971). Polaris/Warner Bros. Dir Stanley KUBRICK, starring Malcolm
McDowell, Patrick Magee, Warren Clarke, Michael Bates, Aubrey Morris.
Screenplay Kubrick, based on A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1962) by Anthony BURGESS.
137 mins. Colour.This controversial adaptation of Burgess's novel about
mind control tells of Alex (McDowell), a teenage thug in a tawdry NEAR
FUTURE - dehumanizing and luridly presented - who is cured of his violent
ways by a sadistic form of aversion therapy. It was the (arguable)
glamorizing of Alex's anarchic sex and violence (in contrast to the book)
that provoked so much angry reaction in the media, though otherwise
Kubrick's adaptation is moderately faithful. The film is not in fact
amoral, though its moral is controversial: ACO is a religious allegory
with a FRANKENSTEIN theme - it warns humankind not to try to compete with
God - but Burgess reverses the theme, showing it to be as evil to unmake a
monster, by removing his free will, as to make one. ACO is an intensely
visual tour de force, deploying clinically a spectrum of powerful
cinematic effects. As in Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, some sequences
were rendered even more disturbing by the use of MUSIC contrasting wildly
with the visual content, most famously in Alex's rendition of "Singing in
the Rain" while kicking in the ribs of the husband of a woman he is about
to rape.ACO received the 1972 HUGO for Best Dramatic Presentation. [JB/PN]
CLONES
A clone is a group of individuals comprising the asexually produced
offspring of a single individual. A pair of identical twins is a clone
because the twin cells are produced by the asexual fission of the
fertilized ovum. Asexual reproduction is very common among protozoa and
some groups of invertebrates, but is much rarer in vertebrates. The
possibility of cloning humans by transplanting the nucleus of a somatic
cell from a donor into an ovum which can then be replaced in a host womb
has attracted much attention, although no such operation has yet been
performed in the real world.Clones of various kinds have long been common
in sf, though not always recognized or labelled as such. The replication
of individuals by matter-duplicator ( MATTER TRANSMISSION), as in William
F. TEMPLE's Four-Sided Triangle (1949), Fletcher PRATT's Double Jeopardy

(1952) and Primo LEVI's "Some Applications of the Mimer" (1966; trans
1990), is a kind of cloning, as is replication via TIME PARADOX, as in
Robert A. HEINLEIN's "By His Bootstraps" (1941) and David GERROLD's The
Man who Folded Himself (1973). The mechanism by which Gilbert Gosseyn was
given so many genetically identical bodies in A.E. VAN VOGT's The World of
A (1945; 1948; vt The World of Null-A) is unclear, but a series of clone
members is the result. All-female societies whose members reproduce by
parthenogenesis, as in Poul ANDERSON's Virgin Planet (1959) and Charles
Eric MAINE's World without Men (1958; rev vt Alph 1972), also consist of
clones. Ironically, the first sf story prominently to display the term The Clone (1965) by Theodore L. THOMAS and Kate WILHELM - is irrelevant to
the theme, the eponymous monster being an all-consuming cell-mass produced
by pollution-induced mutation.Long before the word "clone" became popular,
sf writers had considered the possibility of duplicating people for
eugenic purposes. Poul Anderson's "UN-Man" (1953) refers to its cloning
process as "exogenesis". Here and in John Russell FEARN's The Multi-Man
(1954 as by Vargo Statten) the idea is used as a gimmick, and the possible
consequences of such technological development are left unexplored. A more
ambitious application of the notion is found in "When You Care, When You
Love" (1962) by Theodore STURGEON, in which a rich woman attempts to
reproduce her dead lover by growing him anew from one of the cancer cells
which have destroyed him. Among the nonfiction books that popularized the
term was Gordon Rattray Taylor's The Biological Time-Bomb (1968), which
commented on the implications of experiments carried out by F.C. Steward
in the early 1960s on the cloning of plants: "It is not mere
sensationalism to ask whether the members of human clones may feel
particularly united, and be able to cooperate better, even if they are not
in actual supersensory communication with one another." This possibility
has been widely explored in such stories as Ursula K. LE GUIN's "Nine
Lives" (1969), Pamela SARGENT's Cloned Lives (1976), Kate Wilhelm's WHERE
LATE THE SWEET BIRDS SANG (1976) and Fay WELDON's The Cloning of Joanna
May (1989), in which intimate human relations are explored in depth and
with some sensitivity. Stories of this kind often exaggerate the probable
psychological effects of growing up as one of a clone (after all,
identical twins have been doing it for centuries!). Even though clones are
genetically identical, each member inhabits from the moment of
implantation an environment subtly different from its fellows; it is a
very naive kind of genetic determinism that leads writers occasionally to
argue that an adult donor and his or her environmentally differentiated
clone-offspring may be reckoned "identical". One of the few sf novels
fully to recognize this is Ira LEVIN's The Boys from Brazil (1976), in
which neo-Nazis raise a batch of clones derived from Hitler but can make
only absurdly inadequate attempts to reproduce the kind of environment
that made Hitler what he was.The concept of clone-identity in the stories
cited above is best considered as a metaphor, enabling the authors to pose
questions about the nature of individuality and the narcissistic aspects
of intimate relationships. Other works which employ the notion in such a
fashion include Gene WOLFE's THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS (1972), Jeremy
LEVEN's Creator (1980) and C.J. CHERRYH's extraordinarily elaborate CYTEEN
(1988). This kind of theme seems to be particularly attractive to female
writers; others to have written significant clone stories include Naomi

MITCHISON, author of the DYSTOPIAN Solution Three (1975), Nancy FREEDMAN,
whose Joshua, Son of None (1973) is about the cloning of John F. Kennedy,
and Anna Wilson, whose Hatching Stones (1991) suggests that human males
might lose all interest in ordinary sexual reproduction if they were able
to raise clone-duplicates of themselves instead.Male authors have tended
to use cloning in more conventional action-adventure stories, exploiting
its potential for establishing dramatic confrontations. Richard COWPER's
Clone (1972) is a satirical account of events following a child's recovery
of his memory of being one of a batch of superpowered clones. In Norman
SPINRAD's The Iron Dream (1972) the narcissistic aspect of clonal
reproduction is recruited by Hitler in his sf power-fantasy "Lord of the
Swastika"; as the Earth dies, ships blast off for the stars to populate
the Galaxy with duplicates of the pure-bred Aryan members of the SS.
Cloning is used in Arthur C. CLARKE's Imperial Earth (1975) to perpetuate
a dynasty of space pioneers. Ben BOVA's The Multiple Man (1976) is a
thriller in which the clonal duplicates of the US President keep turning
up dead - a murder mystery recalling Maurice RENARD's and Albert Jean's Le
singe (1925; trans as Blind Circle 1928). John VARLEY's "The Phantom of
Kansas" (1976) is another clone-based murder mystery; his THE OPHIUCHI
HOTLINE (1977) deploys the idea more ingeniously. Michael WEAVER's
Mercedes Nights (1987) features a conspiracy devoted to the cloning of a
famous sex-object; the conspirators in Wolfgang JESCHKE's Midas (trans
1990) stick mostly to cloning famous scientists.The idea of another self an alter ego or Doppelganger - has always been a profoundly fascinating
one, and recurs insistently in occult FANTASY and PSYCHOLOGY. Recent
speculation about the cloning of humans has made the notion available to
sf writers for detailed and intensive examination, and the stories thus
inspired are of considerable psychological interest. [BS]See also:
BIOLOGY; CHILDREN IN SF; GENETIC ENGINEERING; MEDICINE.
CLONING OF JOANNA MAY, THE
UK tv miniseries (1991). Granada/ITV. Prod Gub Neal, dir Philip Saville,
screenplay Ted Whitehead, from The Cloning of Joanna May (1989) by Fay
WELDON. Starring Patricia Hodge as Joanna May, Brian Cox as Carl May,
Billie Whitelaw as Mavis, Siri Neal as Bethany, and Emma Hardy, Helen Adie
and Laura Eddy as the three clones.Weldon's comic-romantic melodrama about
an obsessive business tycoon who effectively clones his wife, then
repudiates her when she is unfaithful - with the aim of taking one of the
three clones as his new wife when they have grown up - is already painted
in broad strokes. The three-hour tv dramatization is even broader, though
not unwitty, with finely over-the-top performances all round. [PN]
CLOSED UNIVERSE
This term is in no sense a synonym for POCKET UNIVERSE, a literary term
which describes a particular kind of story; nor is it here used in its
cosmological sense. A closed universe is a work or series whose characters
and venues remain strictly under its author's control, and which is not
open to fans or others to make uncopyrighted use of in FANZINES. In this
sense, a SHARED-WORLD enterprise may still be a closed universe, if its
owners restrict its use to other professionals on a contractual
basis-indeed, most are. It should perhaps be assumed by sf readers that

any work of art is a closed universe unless otherwise signposted. [JC]See
also: OPEN UNIVERSE.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND
Film (1977). Columbia. Dir Steven SPIELBERG, starring Richard Dreyfuss,
Francois Truffaut, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, Cary Guffey, Bob Balaban.
Screenplay Spielberg. 135 mins. Colour.After STAR WARS came the second
major sf film production of 1977, at over twice the cost but with a story
which, while lacking the comic-book appeal of Star Wars, perhaps cuts
deeper in its evocation, rare in sf CINEMA, of a SENSE OF WONDER. A power
company technician (Dreyfuss) witnesses a series of UFO appearances and
develops an obsession with them which is almost religious in its nature
and intensity. He becomes convinced that aliens plan to land one of their
craft on an oddly shaped mountain in Wyoming. A parallel plot concerns a
secret group of scientific and military experts also engaged in uncovering
the secret of the UFOs. The film ends in a barrage of special effects when
the spacecraft arrives; communication between the two species is achieved
by means of bursts of light and music. The hero enters the mother ship,
much as Tam Lin once entered the Fairy Mound, and is taken to the Heavens
in a glowing apotheosis; the elfishness of the slim aliens supports a
reading in which UFO occupants are mythically equivalent to fairies.
CEOTTK has flaws, but remains an intensely evocative work, certainly one
of the half dozen best sf films to date. Despite the pressure from
Columbia to produce a financial blockbuster, Spielberg did not take the
easy way out but made an intelligent and relatively complex film,
maintaining the high standards he had set himself in Duel (1971) and Jaws
(1978). The special effects are excellent. A different version, CLOSE
ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND - THE SPECIAL EDITION, was released in
1980.The novelization, Close Encounters of the Third Kind * (1977), is as
by Spielberg. [JB]See also: HISTORY OF SF; LINGUISTICS; MUSIC.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND - THE SPECIAL EDITION
Film (1980). Credits as for CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. 132 mins.
This slightly shorter, re-edited version of SPIELBERG's huge 1977 success,
which contains some new footage, represents a curious piece of cinematic
history. Many critics saw it as inferior to the original, though the idea
was that Spielberg now had so much commercial clout that he could, at
last, release the film exactly as he had always wanted it. New material
includes a scene where Neary, the UFO-obsessed power worker, makes his
family hysterical; a surrealistic shot of an ocean liner left stranded by
puckish aliens in the Gobi Desert; and a sequence inside the mother ship
(so-so special effects) with an ill-judged soundtrack of "When You Wish
Upon a Star" from Walt Disney's Pinocchio (1940). The new Neary sequences
darken the film; the new ending, in contrast, lightens it by emphasizing
its fairy-tale aspect. Whatever, the new version, which is the one now
normally shown, made a lot of money. [PN]
CLOUD OF ANDROMEDA, THE
TUMANNOST ANDROMEDY.
CLOUSTON, J(OSEPH) STORER
(1870-1944) Scottish magistrate and usually humorous author. JSC began

writing works of genre interest with Tales of King Fido (coll 1909), a
Graustarkian fantasy ( RURITANIA). His books of genre interest include
Two's Two (1916), an F. ANSTEY-like fantasy about an embodied alter ego;
Button Brains (1933), about a ROBOT that is taken for the human upon which
it was modelled, with comic consequences; The Chemical Baby (1934),
marginal as the baby turns out to be natural; Not Since Genesis (1938), a
satirical look at the European nations faced by a meteoritic DISASTER; and
The Man in Steel (1939), a TIME-TRAVEL tale. [JE/JC]See also: ANDROIDS;
HUMOUR.
CLUB STORY
It is almost certainly no coincidence that volumes of club stories should
have become popular in the UK towards the end of the 19th century. The
classic club story may be described as a tall tale told by one man to
other men in a sanctum restricted to those of similar outlook, who agree
to believe in the story for their mutual comfort; and it was precisely
during the fin de siecle, and the years leading up to WWI, that the great
march of history began to seem problematical to socially dominant white UK
males, whose sense of reality now began to fray under the assault of
women, and Darwin, and dark rumours of Freud, and Marx, and Zola, and
Flaubert . . . and Henry James. Though it is no more a true club story
than Joseph CONRAD's "Heart of Darkness" (1902) or Chance (1914), James's
"The Turn of the Screw" (1898) is indeed a tale told at a club, and it is
indeed a tall tale. But James uses the convention of the story told within
a frame to underline the unreliability of his narrator, and to make
forever problematical the "true" reading of his tale; "The Turn of the
Screw" is a preview of the epistemological insecurities of the dawning new
world. The conventional club story, on the other hand, by foregrounding
the security of the sanctum itself, sidesteps the question of the
believability of the tall tale (and sidesteps most of the 20th century as
well). In the conventional club story, that tale is accepted by the males
to whom it is addressed not for its intrinsic plausibility but as part of
a shared conspiracy to maintain an inward-looking, mutually supportive
consensus.The great counterexample to this model is - perhaps inevitably the work of H.G. WELLS, who often imitated popular modes of storytelling
in his early writings, but almost always to subversive effect. THE TIME
MACHINE (1895 USA; exp 1895 UK) does certainly exhibit some club-story
features - a group of men gather together to hear the Time Traveller tell
his tall tale - but in this case the ambience is far from consolatory, and
the Traveller's dark report from the future seems all the darker when it
is evident that his hearers may be forced to believe it. Some of Wells's
early short stories, too, are club tales - notably "The Truth about
Pyecraft" (1903) - though in name only. It should come as no surprise that
the most typical club stories were composed by men of a very different
cast of mind than Wells's, and that most club stories are conservative in
both style and content. Though precursors to the convention can be adduced
almost indefinitely - from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's
Decameron to Charles Dickens's Master Humphrey's Clock (1840-41) - the
first collection to express the ambience of the genuine club story is
perhaps Robert Louis STEVENSON's New Arabian Nights (coll 1882 in 2 vols;
1st vol only vt The Suicide Club, and The Rajah's Diamond 1894) and its

successor, More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (coll 1885) with Fanny
Van de Grift Stevenson. As early a work as Jerome K. Jerome's After Supper
Ghost Stories (coll 1891), although set not in a club but around the table
after Christmas Eve dinner, parodies the club-story format and the tales
told therein. Some of the exploits recounted in Andrew LANG's The
Disentanglers (coll of linked stories 1902) are of sf interest, though
more frequently - as in G.K. CHESTERTON's The Club of Queer Trades (coll
1905) - early examples of the form read more like lubricated SATIRE than
fantasy. Alfred NOYES's Tales of the Mermaid Tavern (coll 1914) is a set
of narrative poems told in Shakespeare's pub; while sequences like P.G.
WODEHOUSE's Mulliner books (from 1927) heavily emphasize the tall-tale
element, and The Salzburg Tales (coll 1934) by Christina Stead (1902-1983)
evoke Boccaccio. Of greater genre interest are SAKI's The Chronicles of
Clovis (coll 1907), John Buchan's The Runagates' Club (coll 1928), the
five Jorkens books by Lord DUNSANY, beginning with The Travel Tales of Mr
Joseph Jorkens (coll 1931) and continuing for two decades, and T.H.
WHITE's Gone to Ground (coll of linked stories 1935), which - as these
tales are told by survivors of a final HOLOCAUST - stretches to its limit
the capacity of the form to comfort.In "Sites for Sore Souls: Some
Science-Fictional Saloons" (1991 Extrapolation), Fred Erisman suggests
that sf club stories - or in his terms saloon stories - respond to a human
need for venues in which an "informal public life" can be led. Although
Erisman assumes that the paucity of such venues in the USA is reflected in
the UK, and therefore significantly undervalues the unspoken but clearly
felt ambience of the pub in Arthur C. CLARKE's cosily RECURSIVE Tales from
the White Hart (coll 1957 US), his comments are clearly helpful in
understanding the persistence of the club story in US sf. Beginning with
L. Sprague DE CAMP's and Fletcher PRATT's Tales from Gavagan's Bar (coll
1953; exp 1978), it has been a feature of magazine sf for nearly half a
century - perhaps partly because imaginary US saloons and the genuine
affinity groups that generate and consume US sf are similar kinds of
informal public space. Further examples of the club story in the USA are
assembled in Isaac ASIMOV's several volumes of Black Widowers tales,
starting with Tales of the Black Widowers (coll 1974), Sterling LANIER's
The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes (coll 1972) and The Curious
Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes (coll 1986), Larry NIVEN's Draco Tavern
tales, which appear mostly in Convergent Series (coll 1979) and Limits
(coll 1985), and Spider ROBINSON's Callahan books, starting with
Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (coll 1977). There are many others; some
individual stories are assembled in Darrell SCHWEITZER's and George
SCITHERS's Tales from the Spaceport Bar (anth 1987) and Another Round at
the Spaceport Bar (anth 1989). [JC]
CLUTE, JOHN (FREDERICK)
(1940- ) Canadian novelist and sf critic; in the UK from 1969. His first
professional publication, a long sf-tinged poem called "Carcajou Lament",
appeared in Triquarterly in 1959. He began publishing sf proper with "A
Man Must Die" for NW (1966), where much of his earlier criticism also
appeared; further criticism and reviews have appeared in FSF, Washington
Post, Omni, Times Literary Supplement, New York Times, NEW YORK REVIEW OF
SCIENCE FICTION, INTERZONE, Los Angeles Times, Observer and elsewhere.

Selections from this work appear in Strokes: Essays and Reviews 1966-1986
(coll 1988 US) and Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews (coll 1995).
In 1960 he was Associate Editor of Collage, an ill fated Chicago-based
"slick" magazine which in its 2 issues did manage to publish early work by
Harlan ELLISON and R.A. LAFFERTY. He served as Reviews Editor of
FOUNDATION 1980-90, and was a founder of Interzone in 1982; he remains
Advisory Editor of that magazine and since 1986 has contributed a review
column. JC's criticism, despite some studiously flamboyant obscurities,
remains essentially practical; it has appeared mostly in the form of
reviews, some of considerable length. He was the Associate Editor of the
first edition of this encyclopedia (1979) and is Co-Editor of the current
version, for which he shared a 1994 HUGO with Peter NICHOLLS. In 1994 he
also received a PILGRIM AWARD. SF: The Illustrated Encyclopedia (1995) is
a narrative survey unconnected to this encyclopedia. His novel, The
Disinheriting Party (1973 NW; exp 1977), is not sf. [JC]Other works as
editor: The Aspen Poetry Handbill (portfolio 1965 chap US), associational;
Interzone: The 1st Anthology (anth 1985) with Colin GREENLAND and David
PRINGLE; Interzone: The 2nd Anthology (anth 1987) with Greenland and
Pringle; Interzone: The 3rd Anthology (anth 1988) with Pringle and Simon
Ounsley; Interzone: The 4th Anthology (anth 1989) with Pringle and Simon
Ounsley; Interzone V (anth 1991) with Lee Montgomerie and Pringle.See
also: CANADA; COLLECTIONS; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF;
DEFINITIONS OF SF; HISTORY OF SF; MUSIC; NEW WORLDS; SENSE OF WONDER.
COATES, ROBERT M(YRON)
(1897-1973) US writer, primarily associated throughout his career with
the New Yorker, on which he worked, and to which he contributed many
stories. He is primarily of interest to the sf field for his first novel,
The Eater of Darkness (1926 France), which, written before he had fully
assimilated the sometimes restrictive urbanity of New Yorker style, quite
brilliantly applies a wide arsenal of literary devices, some of them
surrealistic, to the exaggeratedly spoof-like tale of a master criminal
and his absurd super- WEAPON, which sees through solids and applies
remote-control heat to kill people invisibly; beneath the spoofing and the
cosmopolitan style lies a sense of horror. The Hour after Westerly and
Other Stories (coll 1957) contains some fantasy of interest, though in
general his later work lacks some of the fire of his first book. [JC]Other
works: The Farther Shore (1955).See also: MATHEMATICS.
COBB, WELDON J.
(? -? ) US businessman and writer who specialized in dime novels (
DIME-NOVEL SF), working mainly c1866-c1902. Tales of sf interest include A
Wonder Worker, or The Search for the Splendid City (1894 Golden Hours;
1907), which combines travel and invention after a fashion typical of the
genre, and two EDISONADES, At War With Mars, or The Boys who Won (1897),
and To Mars With Tesla, or The Mystery of Hidden Worlds (1901), the latter
featuring, in place of Thomas Alva Edison, his great rival Nikola Tesla
(1856-1943). Amusingly, the lad who carries most of the action goes by the
name of Young Edison. [EFB/JC]
COBBAN, J(AMES) MacLAREN
(1849-1903) UK writer, of some interest for Master of his Fate (1890),

whose protagonist, tortured by the need to drain the life energy of others
to maintain his own IMMORTALITY, confesses all to an expert in the field
of animal magnetism; and then kills himself. The Tyrants of Kool-Sim
(1896) is a LOST-WORLD tale featuring dwarfs with poisonous blood and
brave British lads who prevail. [JC]
COBLENTZ, STANTON A(RTHUR)
(1896-1982) US novelist and polemically traditionalist poet. He began his
career in the early 1920s, after gaining an MA in English literature, with
book reviews for New York papers and a volume of poems, The Thinker and
Other Poems (coll 1923); he also wrote considerable nonfiction. He began
publishing sf with The Sunken World (1928 AMZ Quarterly; 1948), a UTOPIA
set in a glass-domed ATLANTIS, in which satirical points are made against
both the egalitarian Atlanteans and the contemporary USA, though the
obtuse narrator (of the sort found in most utopias) tends to blur some of
these issues. SAC was never a smooth stylist, nor an imaginative plotter,
as all his five novels for AMZ Quarterly tend to show, though at the same
time he had a strong gift for the description of ingeniously conceived
ALIEN environments, so that he was often regarded as one of the writers
best capable of conveying the SENSE OF WONDER so rightly valued by the
readers of US PULP-MAGAZINE sf between the two world wars. The Sunken
World was followed by After 12,000 Years (1929 AMZ Quarterly; 1950),
"Reclaimers of the Ice" (1930 AMZ Quarterly), The Blue Barbarians (1931
AMZ Quarterly; 1958) and "The Man from Tomorrow" (1933 AMZ Quarterly).
Other novels from the same general period, like The Wonder Stick (1929), a
prehistoric tale, and Hidden World (1935 Wonder Stories as "In Caverns
Below"; 1957; vt "In Caverns Below" 1975), share similar virtues and
faults. Hidden World, for instance, is another SATIRE, set in an
underground venue, with fascinating descriptions but cardboard characters.
Later novels, like Under the Triple Suns (1955), failed to show much
stylistic development, and were not successful. [JC]Other works: The
Pageant of Man (1936); Youth Madness (c1944 chap); When the Birds Fly
South (1945); Into Plutonian Depths (1931 Wonder Stories Quarterly; 1950);
The Planet of Youth (1932 Wonder Stories; 1952 chap); Next Door to the Sun
(1960); The Runaway World (1961); The Moon People (1964) and its sequel,
The Crimson Capsule (1967; rev vt The Animal People 1970); The Last of the
Great Race (1964) and The Lost Comet (1930 AMZ as "Reclaimers of the Ice";
cut 1964), both apparently severely edited; The Lizard Lords (1964); Lord
of Tranerica (1939 Dynamic Science Stories; 1966); The Day the World
Stopped (1968); The Island People (1971).About the author:Adventures of a
Freelancer: the Literary Exploits and Autobiography of Stanton A. Coblentz
(1993) by SAC with Dr. Jeffrey M. ELLIOT.See also: ASTEROIDS; FANTASTIC
VOYAGES; LOST WORLDS; OUTER PLANETS; POLITICS; SOCIOLOGY; UNDER THE SEA;
VENUS.
COCHRAN, MOLLY
[r] Warren B. MURPHY.
COCHRANE, WILLIAM E(UGENE)
(1926- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "How High on the Ladder"
for Fantasy Book in 1950, writing as Leo Paige. As S. Kye Boult from 1971,
and also under his own name from 1973, he began to publish in Analog the

hard-edged sf adventures, like "Whalekiller Grey" (1973) as WEC, for which
he became known. After Solo Kill (1972 Analog; exp 1977) as by Boult, he
used his own name exclusively. Class Six Climb (1980), told from the
viewpoint of a giant god-tree, is perhaps his most sustained effort. He
was inactive during the 1980s, but new work is (1992) projected. [JC]
COCOON
Film (1985). Fox-Zanuck-Brown. Dir Ron Howard, starring Don Ameche,
Wilford Brimley, Hume Cronyn, Jack Gilford, Steve Guttenberg, Maureen
Stapleton, Jessica Tandy, Gwen Verdon, Tahnee Welch. Screenplay Tom
Benedek from a story by David Saperstein. 117 mins. Colour. ALIENS
disguised as humans come to Earth to revive their kinfolk who were
abandoned millennia ago in cocoons on the ocean floor; the swimming pool
prepared for their revival is discovered and used by occupants of a
neighbouring old people's home, who are (to a degree) rejuvenated by it.
Some leave Earth for a new life with the aliens. C was aptly described by
critic Tom Milne as "Peter Pan for the senior citizen". Directed with
intermittent panache, it oscillates between the whimsical, the genuinely
touching and the merely vulgar. A saccharine sequel with a soap-opera
plot, Cocoon: The Return (1988), dir Daniel Petrie, is dispiriting. [PN]
COCOON: THE RETURN
COCOON.
CODE NAME TRIXIE
The CRAZIES.
COEURL AWARD
CANADA.
COFFEY, BRIAN
Dean R. KOONTZ.
COGSWELL, THEODORE R(OSE)
(1918-1987) US writer and academic, an ambulance driver on the Republican
side in the Spanish Civil War. He began publishing sf in 1952 with what
proved to be one of his most successful stories, "The Specter General" for
ASF. In this long, amusing tale - much in the vein Keith LAUMER was later
to make his own - a long-forgotten maintenance division of the Galactic
Protectorate reinvigorates a decadent Space Navy. In 1959, he founded and
edited a FANZINE for professional writers called Publications of the
Institute of Twenty-First Century Studies but universally pronounced
PITFCS; it ran through 1962, with a final number in 1979; became quickly
famed for the informative frankness of its contents; and was assembled as
PITFCS: Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies
(anth 1992). TRC's two volumes of stories, The Wall around the World (coll
1962) and The Third Eye (coll 1968), contain most of his fiction; his work
is polished, enjoyable and, though it sticks closely to fantasy and sf
genre formats, gives off a sense that it was written for pleasure. "The
Wall around the World" (1953) was one of TRC's most popular stories; the
tale of a boy who lives in a place where MAGIC seems to work, and
discovers the true, POCKET-UNIVERSE nature of his world, is an archetypal
rendering of the experience of CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH. [JC/PN]Other

works:Spock, Messiah! * (1976) with Charles A. Spano, a STAR TREK
novel.See also: SHARED WORLDS.
COHEN, BARNEY
(? - ) US writer whose first novel of genre interest was The Night of the
Toy Dragons (1977). His The Taking of Satcon Station (1982) with Jim BAEN
is an engagingly over-the-top application of private-eye idioms and plots
(Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon [1930] being much in evidence) to
the NEAR FUTURE and near space, the eponymous satellite being the focus
for the climax. Blood on the Moon (1984) is similar but grimmer. [JC]
COHEN, LARRY
(1938- ) US film-maker. A cult figure as much for the wildness of his
ideas as for the sporadic brilliance of his direction, LC has never tried
to graduate to the mainstream in the way contemporaries like David
CRONENBERG or Brian De Palma have, and turns out as many curate's eggs as
low-budget masterpieces. Originally a tv writer, he early discovered
PARANOIA in his creation of the Western show Branded (1965-6) and the sf
show The INVADERS (1967-8), both featuring on-the-run protagonists,
perhaps modelled on The Fugitive (1963-7). He continued to write for tv,
including prestigious series like The Defenders and Columbo, turning also
to film writing with Westerns and suspense dramas. He made his directorial
debut with the ABSURDIST thriller Bone (1972; vt Dial Rat for Terror; vt
Beverly Hills Nightmare). Nearly all his films are written, prod and dir
by LC and made by his own production company, Larco, which he founded in
1965.He made the superior Black action movies Black Caesar (1973; vt The
Godfather of Harlem) and Hell up in Harlem (1973) before discovering the
sf MONSTER MOVIE with IT'S ALIVE (1974), a compound of ecological,
familial and 1950s sf ideas about a mutant killer baby on the loose in Los
Angeles. LC has subsequently developed the theme in two sequels, IT LIVES
AGAIN (1978; vt It's Alive II) and It's Alive III: Island of the Alive
(1986), and alternated between sf, HORROR and suspense in a series of
gritty, oddball pictures: GOD TOLD ME TO (1976; vt Demon), in which a
modern "Jesus" is shown to have been a hermaphrodite homicidal maniac from
outer space; The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1976), a fascinating
political-psychological autopsy of Hoover's USA; Full Moon High (1982), a
werewolf comedy; Q (1983; vt The Winged Serpent; vt Q: The Winged
Serpent), an ingenious different take on the giant-monster theme; Blind
Alley (1984), a Hitchcockian thriller; Special Effects (1984), a
psycho-horror drama in a film milieu; The STUFF (1985), a sloppy but
amiable parody of The BLOB (1958) in which the formless monster disguises
itself as an addictive fast food; Return to Salem's Lot (1987), a clever
variant on the village-of-vampires concept; Wicked Stepmother (1989), a
farcical witch story; and The Ambulance (1990), a striking slice of
medical paranoia and urban nightmare.Energetic and often lopsided, LC's
films benefit from unusual characterizations, wayward plotting, cleverly
cast familiar faces and a determination not to do things the accepted way.
[KN]See also: CINEMA; HUMOUR.
COHEN, MATT
Working name of Canadian novelist Matthew Cohen (1942- ), best known for
short stories and novels set among disturbed urbandwellers in contemporary

Ontario. Too Bad Galahad (1972 chap), however, is an Arthurian FABULATION,
and several of the stories assembled in Columbus and the Fat Lady (coll
1972) and Night Flights (coll 1978) are fantasy. The Colours of War (1977)
is a NEAR-FUTURE tale of civil strife for which the Ontario countryside
serves as a not ungrim backdrop. [JC]
COLD NIGHT'S DEATH, A
Made-for-tv film (1973). Spelling Goldberg/ABC. Dir Jerrold Freedman,
starring Eli Wallach, Robert Culp. Teleplay Christopher Knopf. 73 mins.
Colour.Interesting, atmospheric but ponderous yarn with a bizarre premise
about two quarrelsome scientists, one emotional (Wallach) and one
dispassionately rational (Culp), in a remote Arctic station. Their
experimental chimpanzees ( APES AND CAVEMEN) turn the tables and start
conducting stress tests on the scientists themselves. [PN]
COLE, ADRIAN (CHRISTOPHER SYNNOT)
(1949- ) UK writer, most of whose books lace fantasy and horror venues
with sf devices, but which in the final analysis read essentially as
fantasies. He began publishing work of genre interest with "Wired Tales"
for Dark Horizons in 1973, and several stories soon followed about a not
entirely unusual Cursed Warrior named The Voidal, culminating perhaps in
The Coming of the Voidal (1977 chap). The quasi-sf Dream Lords FANTASY
sequence - A Plague of Nightmares (1975 US), Lord of the Nightmares (1975
US) and Bane of Nightmares (1976 US) - was followed by the fantasy Omaran
Saga - A Place among the Fallen (1986), Throne of Fools (1987), The King
of Light and Shadows (1988) and The Gods in Anger (1988). The Star Requiem
sequence, which is sf - Mother of Storms (1989), Thief of Dreams (1989),
Warlord of Heaven (1990) and Labyrinth of Worlds (1990) - demonstrates in
a PLANETARY-ROMANCE setting AC's moderate familiarity with sf tropes (like
the flight of a remnant of humanity from genocide, and the relentless
search for that remnant by genocidal aliens) and a smooth style broken by
intermittent moments of inattention. For collaborative stories he has also
signed himself Adrian Bryant. [JC]Other works: Madness Emerging (1976),
which combines sf and horror, as does Paths in Darkness (1977); Longborn
the Inexhaustible (1978 chap); The LUCIFER Experiment (1981); Wargods of
Ludorbis (1981); Moorstones (1982) and The Sleep of Giants (1983), both
juveniles; Blood Red Angel (1993).See also: ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
COLE, ALLAN
(1943- ) US tv scriptwriter and journalist. His sf sequence featuring
Sten, a rebel who becomes a military hero in the defence of a GALACTIC
EMPIRE under threat, comprises Sten (1982), The Wolf Worlds (1984), Court
of a Thousand Suns (1985), Fleet of the Damned (1988), Revenge of the
Damned (1989), The Return of the Emperor (1990),Vortex (1993) and Empire's
End (1993), all written with Chris Bunch. The Far Kingdoms (1993), and its
sequel, The Warrior's Tale(1994), both also with Bunch, are fantasy. [JC]
COLE, BURT
Pseudonym of US writer Thomas Dixon (1930- ), author of The Funco File
(1969), in which a world-dominating COMPUTER is pitted against anarchic
opposing forces. His other titles of genre interest are Subi: The Volcano
(1957), a savage tale set in an Asia dominated by a WAR much like that in

Vietnam a decade later, and Blood Knot (1980). The Quick (1989) is an
extremely expert and iconoclastic exercise in military sf. [JC]
COLE, CYRUS
(? -? ) US author. In his eccentrically interesting The Auroraphone: A
Romance (1890), messages from Saturn are received on the eponymous
instrument; life there is UTOPIAN in many ways, although a ROBOT revolt is
under way. A later message includes recordings, for the benefit of the
enthralled terrestrial listeners, of famous events on Earth, including the
Battle of Gettysburg. [PN]
COLE, EVERETT B.
(1910-1977) US writer, formerly a professional soldier. He began
publishing sf in 1951 with the first of a series, "Philosophical Corps",
in ASF, which ceased there in 1956 before reappearing much later with
"Here, There Be Witches" (1970 ASF) and "Philosophical Corps!" (1970 ASF).
The Philosophical Corps (1951-5 ASF: fixup 1961) is based on the first
story and two others; the remaining stories are "These Shall Not Be Lost"
(1953), "Exile" (1954), "Millennium" (1955), "Final Weapon" (1955) and
"The Missionaries" (1956). The philosopher protagonist of the series,
Commander A-Riman, brooks no nonsense from aliens and the like, whom he
re-educates in course of his SPACE-OPERA adventures. A second novel, "The
Best Made Plans" (ASF 1959), has not reached book form. [JC]
COLE, ROBERT W(ILLIAM)
(? -? ) UK author. His first novel, The Struggle for Empire: A Story of
the Year 2236 (1900), took the future- WAR novel to its logical
conclusion. In a UTOPIAN future the Anglo-Saxon Federation has expanded
into other solar systems when interstellar warfare breaks out between
Earth and a superior race from the Sirius system. The descriptions of
space battles, and of an Earth surrounded by a barrage of space torpedoes
and mines while scientists struggle to perfect the ultimate weapon, make
it the equal of many of the SPACE-OPERA stories of the 1930s. RWC's later
novels are anticlimactic. His Other Self (1906) is a mildly humorous tale
of a physical alter ego; The Death Trap (1907) is a mundane though harsh
account of an invasion of the UK; The Artificial Girl (1908) is not of
genre interest. [JC]See also: COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; FANTASTIC
VOYAGES; GALACTIC EMPIRES; STARS.
COLE, WALTER R(ANDALL)
(1933- ) US sf fan and bibliographer, compiler of A Checklist of
Science-Fiction Anthologies (1964), reissued in facsimile - it was
originally stencilled - by ARNO PRESS in 1975. It has now been superseded
and updated by William CONTENTO's indexes of ANTHOLOGIES. [PN]
COLEMAN, CLARE
Clare BELL.
COLEMAN, JAMES NELSON
(? -? ) US writer of two sf novels, Seeker from the Stars (1967) and The
Null-Frequency Impulser (1969), both routine adventure stories with ALIENS
and superscience providing much of the action. [JC]
COLERIDGE, JOHN

Eando BINDER.
COLEY, ROBERT
[s] Donald WANDREI.
COLLABORATIONS
Science fiction writers love to collaborate. Some have collaborated for
fun, some as a creative experiment, and there is a strong possibility that
some writers did it to sell books or to reduce their workload.The teenaged
Futurians wrote stories together in the late 1930s, a practice that came
naturally because they lived together. Other kinds of collaborations
included transatlantic ones - like the anthology written by Ian Watson in
southern England and Michael Bishop in Georgia...or a transmedia
collaboration, as when Piers Anthony wrote the novelization for the film
Total Recall, which was based on a Phillip K. Dick story.Most
collaborations are between colleagues who are essentially peers, like
Stephen King and Peter Straub's work on The Talisman. So the 1995
collaboration by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and SF writer William
Forstchen on the novel 1945 is just a continuation of a well-established
practice.
COLLAPSARS
BLACK HOLES; NEUTRON STARS.
COLLAZO, MIGUEL
[r] LATIN AMERICA
COLLECTIONS
With sf/fantasy now a subject for academic study, especially in the USA,
many major institutional collections have been built up, a process which
has supplemented but in no sense supplanted the large number of private
collections amassed by fans and scholars. From the first, GENRE SF has
tended to be published in formats significantly (and foolishly) slighted
in the accession policies of every category of institutional library from university libraries to libraries of record like the Library of
Congress and the British Library; and without private collections much of
the research undertaken in recent years would have been impossible to
conduct successfully. Some private collections - notably those of Forrest
J. ACKERMAN in Los Angeles and Sam MOSKOWITZ in Newark - are extremely
well known, extremely large, and accessible to visitors, but they tend not
to be thoroughly catalogued. Individual researchers in sf and fantasy
almost invariably maintain their own store of material, on a scale rather
larger than probably necessary in cognate fields. Entirely typical of such
research collections are those held, for instance, by the editors of this
volume: John CLUTE with 12,000 items, Peter NICHOLLS with 7000 items, and
Associate Editor Brian STABLEFORD with 15,000 items.The strongest library
collection in the USA is the J. LLOYD EATON COLLECTION. For important
library holdings in other countries, MAISON D'AILLEURS (Switzerland,
extremely strong on French sf), MERRIL COLLECTION OF SCIENCE FICTION,
SPECULATION AND FANTASY, formerly the Spaced Out Library (Canada), SCIENCE
FICTION FOUNDATION (UK) and UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY LIBRARY (Australia). A
number of other large institutional collections exist. In the USA these
include: the University of Arizona Library; California State University

Library at Fullerton (which holds important research material on Philip K.
DICK); Dallas Public Library; Louisiana State University Library;
University of Louisville Library (very large Edgar Rice BURROUGHS
collection); MIT Science Fiction Society Library at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology; San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Library; Texas
A?
libraries of record, such as the US Library of Congress (which,
shortsightedly, does not normally catalogue its separately warehoused,
inaccessible mass-market paperback fiction) and, in the UK, the British
Library and the Bodleian Library. These, however, tend to be weak on
ephemera (fanzines, comics, pulp magazines); in some cases their book and
magazine collections have suffered depredation through theft.Further data
on large sf collections can be found in Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical
Guide to Science Fiction: Third Edition (1987) ed Neil BARRON and in
Science/Fiction Collections: Fantasy, Supernatural and Weird Tales (1983)
ed Hal W. HALL. [PN/JC]
COLLIER, JOHN (HENRY NOYES)
(1901-1980) UK novelist, poet and short-story writer who also spent time
in the USA writing filmscripts. He was known mainly for his sophisticated
though sometimes rather precious short stories, generally featuring
acerbic snap endings; many of these stories have strong elements of
fantasy or sf, in particular No Traveller Returns (1931 chap), whose
protagonist visits a DYSTOPIAN future, and The Devil and All (coll 1934),
whose contents are exclusively FANTASY. His best-known title, Fancies and
Goodnights (coll 1951 US; cut vt Of Demons and Darkness 1965 UK),
assembles new material plus a selection of tales from Presenting Moonshine
(coll 1941) and The Touch of Nutmeg (coll 1943 US)-itself a compendium
drawn from the previous volume and from The Devil and All; until the
release of The John Collier Reader (coll 1972 US; cut vt The Best of John
Collier 1975 US), Fancies and Goodnights remained the handiest
presentation of the kind of short fiction with which JC has been
identified: highly polished magazine stories, adroit, world-weary,
waspish, often insubstantial. It won the first INTERNATIONAL FANTASY
AWARD.Radically dissimilar to his most familiar work is Tom's A-Cold
(1933; vt Full Circle 1933 US), a remarkably effective post- HOLOCAUST
novel set in the 1990s, long after an unexplained disaster has decimated
England's (and presumably the world's) population and thrust mankind back
into rural barbarism, a condition out of which the eldest survivors, who
remember civilization, are trying to educate the young third generation.
The simple plot plays no tricks on the reader: the young protagonist, a
born leader, rises through raids and conflict to the chieftainship,
undergoes a tragedy, and reconciles himself at the novel's close to the
burdens of a government which will improve the lot of his people.
Throughout the novel, very movingly, JC renders the reborn, circumambient
natural world with a hallucinatory visual intensity found nowhere else in
his work. Along with Alun LLEWELLYN's The Strange Invaders (1934), Tom's
A-Cold can be seen, in its atmosphere of almost loving conviction, as a
genuine successor to Richard JEFFERIES's After London (1885); and it
contrasts markedly with JC's earlier No Traveller Returns (1931 chap), a
harsh dystopian novella set in a deadened world. [JC]Other works: His

Monkey Wife, or Married to a Chimp (1930), a fantasy; Green Thoughts (1932
chap) and Variation on a Theme (1935 chap), both assembled with other
stories in Green Thoughts and Other Strange Tales (coll 1943 US); Witch's
Money (1940 chap US); Pictures in the Fire (coll 1958); Milton's "Paradise
Lost": Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind * (1973).See also: APES AND
CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD); DISASTER; EC COMICS; HISTORY OF SF;
HUMOUR;
SATIRE.
COLLIER'S WEEKLY
US "slick" magazine published by Crowell-Collier Publishing Co, ed
William L. Chenery, Walter Davenport and others. Weekly from 28 Apr 1888
as Collier's Once A Week, became CW in Dec 1904, continuing weekly to 25
Jul 1953, then biweekly to 4 Jan 1957.CW published sf - e.g., H.G. WELLS's
"A Moonlight Fable" (1909) and George Allan ENGLAND's "June 6, 2016"
(1916) - only intermittently until the 1920s and 1930s, when numerous
serializations of works by Sax ROHMER appeared. Later well remembered sf
publications were: "There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950), "A Sound of
Thunder" (1952) and other stories by Ray BRADBURY; The Day of the Triffids
(1951) by John WYNDHAM; and many early stories by Jack FINNEY from 1951,
including his most famous novel The Body Snatchers (1954 Collier's; 1955;
vt Invasion of the Body Snatchers). [JE/PN]
COLLINGS, MICHAEL R(OBERT)
(1947- ) US poet, story writer and author of a number of nonfiction
studies of sf and fantasy writers, including several on various aspects of
the work of Stephen KING. In Naked to the Sun: Dark Visions of Apocalypse
(coll 1986 chap) and Dark Transformations: Deadly Visions of Change (coll
1990 chap), he published POETRY which tended to use sf and fantasy motifs
as premises for metamorphic brooding. His nonfiction includes Piers
Anthony (1984 chap), Brian W. Aldiss (1986) and In the Image of God:
Theme, Characterization, and Landscape in the Fiction of Orson Scott Card
(1990), plus the various books on King: Stephen King as Richard Bachman
(1985), The Shorter Works of Stephen King (1985) with David Engebretson,
The Many Facets of Stephen King (1986), The Films of Stephen King (1986),
The Stephen King Phenomenon (1987) and The Work of Stephen King: An
Annotated Bibliography and Guide (1992). His criticism tends to be
theme-oriented. He edited Reflections on the Fantastic: Selected Essays
from the Fourth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts
(anth 1987). [JC]
COLLINGWOOD, HARRY
Pseudonym of UK writer William Joseph Cosens Lancaster (1851-1922), most
of whose fiction was for boys and featured nautical settings. He remains
best known for his "Flying Fish" sequence of sf tales: The Log of the
"Flying Fish": A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure (1887),
With Airship and Submarine (1907) and The Cruise of the "Flying Fish": The
Air-Ship-Submarine (1924). The eponymous vehicle is a ship which operates
in the air, on the surface and UNDER THE SEA, and which takes the tales'
protagonists back and forth across the Earth, leading them to a LOST
WORLD, to inner Africa and elsewhere. The third volume, in which a
dreadnought successor to the ship fails to be built in time to affect WWI,

is anticlimactic. Other HC tales include Geoffrey Harrington's Adventures
(1907), Harry Escombe: A Tale of Adventure in Peru (1910) and A Pair of
Adventurers in Search of El Dorado (1915; vt In Search of El Dorado 1925).
[JC]
COLLINS, CLARK
[s] Mack REYNOLDS.
COLLINS, GILBERT
(1900-? ) UK writer in various genres, whose two LOST-WORLD novels are of
sf interest. The Valley of Eyes Unseen (1923) finds a Tibetan hidden
valley inhabited by scientifically advanced descendants of Alexander the
Great's Greeks, from whom the protagonist eventually escapes using
purloined mechanical wings. In The Starkenden Quest (1925) the valley is
located in Indochina, the primordial dwarf inhabitants are enthralled by
an immortal blonde priestess (who nevertheless dies), and a great flood
ends the tale. [JC]Other works: Flower of Asia: A Novel of Nihon (1922), a
fantasy of Japan.
COLLINS, HELEN
(1935 - ) US biologist and writer whose first novel, Mutagenesis (1993),
packs a wide range of material into its moderate compass. The frame
premise-an expedition from ecologically-devastated Earth rediscovers an
old colony planet, where some original plant species still survive-soon
expands into a quest-saga in PLANETARY ROMANCE style as the female
protagonist, accompanied by some escaped unusually independent native
women (see FEMINISM), has various adventures in search of the mysterious
"doctors" who have manipulated the genetic stock of the colonists,
apparently for eugenic reasons. The cast is full, and includes an
interesting presentation of the "geneslave" concept (the term comes from
Elizabeth HAND's Winterlong sequence); and the plot embodies a number of
Twice-Told fairy tales. HC's future work is eagerly awaited. [JC]
COLLINS, HUNT
Evan HUNTER.
COLLINS, MICHAEL
Dennis LYNDS.
COLLINS, PAUL
(1954- ) Australian editor, publisher, writer and bookseller. At an early
age he began publishing and editing a SEMIPROZINE, VOID SCIENCE FICTION
AND FANTASY (1975-81), which in due course transmuted into a series of
original ANTHOLOGIES, including Envisaged Worlds (anth 1978), Ron Graham
Presents Other Worlds (anth 1978), Alien Worlds (anth 1979), Distant
Worlds (anth 1981) and Frontier Worlds (anth 1983); a later anthology is
Metaworlds: Best Australian Science Fiction (anth 1994). His debut novel,
Hot Lead - Cold Sweat (1975), not sf, was published by his own SMALL
PRESS, Void Publications. With Peter Wilfert he edited Sf aus Australien
["Australian SF"] (anth 1982 Germany). In 1980 he set up a second small
press, Cory ?
production standards, this was of some importance in providing a platform
for Australian sf and fantasy novelists - authors included Russell

BLACKFORD, A. Bertram CHANDLER, David LAKE, Wynne N. WHITEFORD and Jack
WODHAMS - but the venture ceased in 1985 after 14 books. PC's sf-writing
career began with "The Test" for Weirdbook 12 in 1977, and he has since
been remarkably prolific, with over 50 sf stories published, mostly in
Australia but some overseas, though even in Australia he has not made the
impression on sf readers that his craftsmanlike work may at its best
deserve. [PN]See also: AUSTRALIA.
COLOMBIA
LATIN AMERICA.
COLOMBO, JOHN ROBERT
(1936- ) Canadian author and editor of over 80 books, notably anthologies
of Canadiana and works of popular reference. Books with sf relevance
include: CDN SF?
(1979 chap) with Michael Richardson, Alexandre L. Amprimoz and John Bell;
Blackwood's Books: A Bibliography (1981); Years of Light: a Celebration of
Leslie A. Croutch (1982); and Mostly Monsters (coll 1977), fantastic
POETRY. Other Canadas (anth 1979) was the first anthology of Canadian sf,
and Not to be Taken at Night (anth 1981) likewise for Canadian HORROR
fiction. [PN]Other works as editor: Friendly Aliens (anth 1981); Windigo
(anth 1982).Nonfiction: Colombo's Book of Marvels (1979; exp vt Mysterious
Canada 1988); Extraordinary Experiences (1989); Mysterious Encounters
(1990); Mackenzie King's Ghost (1991); UFOs over Canada (1991).See also:
CANADA.
COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS
The idea of colonizing the other worlds of the Solar System has had an
uncertain history because the optimism of sf writers has constantly been
subverted and contradicted by the discoveries of ASTRONOMY. The
attractions of the idea have, however, always overridden cautionary
pessimism, and the reluctant acceptance of the inhospitability of local
planets has served only to increase interest in colonizing the worlds of
other stars ( GALACTIC EMPIRES).The example of the British Empire was
insufficient to inspire many early UK sf writers to speculate about its
extension into space. The most important of those who did was Andrew
BLAIR, whose Annals of the Twenty-Ninth Century (1874) was the most
extravagant of early future HISTORIES. H.G. WELLS used the example of the
UK's colonial history as an analogy for the Martians' conduct in THE WAR
OF THE WORLDS (1898) but never considered the idea of mankind's colonizing
MARS, although Robert W. COLE did in The Struggle for Empire (1900). Later
writers of SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE were almost completely uninterested in the
conquest of space; both J.B.S. HALDANE in "The Last Judgement" (1927) and
Olaf STAPLEDON in LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930) imagined mankind migrating to
other worlds but only under extreme duress, as Earth became uninhabitable.
The avoidance of the notion may be connected with a sense of shame about
the methods employed in colonizing terrestrial lands; the parallel which
Wells drew between the European invasion of Tasmania and the Martian
invasion of Earth is a harsh one, and the brutality of the POLITICS of
colonization has always been a key issue in sf stories, even in the US
PULP-MAGAZINE sf that made the conquest of space its central myth. Early
cautionary allegories include Edmond HAMILTON's "Conquest of Two Worlds"

(1932) and Robert A. HEINLEIN's grim "Logic of Empire" (1941), although it
was not until the 1950s that such lurid polemics as Avram DAVIDSON's "Now
Let Us Sleep" (1957) and Robert SILVERBERG's Invaders from Earth (1958
dos) could be published, and not until the 1970s that mature and effective
moral tales like Silverberg's Downward to the Earth (1970) and Ursula K.
LE GUIN's THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST (1972; 1976) became commonplace.
These stories of genocide, slavery and exploitation are the harshest
critiques of human behaviour found in US sf; they often embody a strong
sense of guilt regarding the fate of the inhabitants of pre-Columbian
North America. Mike RESNICK's bitter study of spoliation in Paradise
(1989) is an effective transfiguration of the history of Kenya.Political
issues are at the heart of another recurrent colonization theme, which
deals with the relationship between colonies and the mother world. Here
history provides - at least for US writers - much more attractive
parallels, and the War of Independence has frequently been refought, from
the early "Birth of a New Republic" (1930) by Miles J. BREUER and Jack
WILLIAMSON to Isaac ASIMOV's "The Martian Way" (1952), Robert A.
Heinlein's THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS (1966) and Poul ANDERSON's Tales
of the Flying Mountains (coll 1970). UK writers have been less
enthusiastic about the notion of colonial defection, and sometimes develop
images of a very uneasy relationship between Earth and its colonies;
examples include Arthur C. CLARKE's The Songs of Distant Earth (1986) and
Paul J. MCAULEY's Of the Fall (1989; vt Secret Harmonies).The pioneer
spirit is something much celebrated in sf at all levels. The mythology of
the conquest of the Old West is often transcribed into sf so literally
that even the covered wagon is retained. AMAZING STORIES once published a
novel - "Outlaw in the Sky" (1953) by Guy Archette (Chester S. GEIER) - in
which only half a dozen words had been modified in making the
transposition from Western to sf; a more recent example is the "pioneer"
sequence of Heinlein's Time Enough for Love (1973). Celebrations of the
heroism of colonists fighting tremendous odds to tame hostile environments
include Henry KUTTNER's Fury (1950; vt Destination: Infinity), Walter M.
MILLER's "Crucifixus Etiam" (1953), E.C. TUBB's Alien Dust (1955) and
Harry HARRISON's Deathworld (1960). It is often difficult to offer a
convincing motivation for the colonists, and so various reasons are
commonly devised to compel colonization, as in The Survivors (1958; vt
Space Prison) by Tom GODWIN, Orbit Unlimited (coll 1961) by Poul Anderson,
Mutiny in Space (1964) by Avram Davidson, Castaways' World (1963 dos; rev
as Polymath 1974) by John BRUNNER and Farewell, Earth's Bliss (1966) by D.
G. COMPTON. A frequent subtheme deals with native populations that resist
colonization, sometimes consciously and sometimes by virtue of the fact
that the ECOLOGY of the planet has no suitable niche for the colonists.
Many stories by Poul Anderson fall into this category, as do "You'll Never
Go Home Again" (1951; vt "Beachhead") and "Drop Dead" (1956) by Clifford
D. SIMAK and "Colony" (1953) by Philip K. DICK.One of the most significant
uses which sf writers have found for human colonies on alien worlds is in
building distorted societies, sometimes for SATIRE and sometimes for
thought experiments in SOCIOLOGY. Notable satirical exercises include
Search the Sky (1954) by Frederik POHL and C.M. KORNBLUTH, The Perfect
Planet (1962) by Evelyn E. SMITH, A Planet for Texans (1958) by H. Beam
PIPER and John J. MCGUIRE, and many short stories by Eric Frank RUSSELL,

including the justly celebrated ". . . And Then There Were None" (1951).
More straightforward sociological treatments include Poul Anderson's
Virgin Planet (1959), John JAKES's Mask of Chaos (1970), Harry Harrison's
Planet of the Damned (1962; vt Sense of Obligation) and such remarkable
novels as THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin, THE FIFTH
HEAD OF CERBERUS (1972) by Gene WOLFE and AND CHAOS DIED (1970) by Joanna
RUSS. In many of these stories the colonies are isolated worlds within a
GALACTIC EMPIRE. The notion of an extended chain of remote colony worlds
is used in A. Bertram CHANDLER's Rim Worlds novels and Murray LEINSTER's
Med Ship stories.Two fundamental classes of colonization story can be
easily distinguished: the "romantic" and the "realistic". The first
derives from a tradition which makes much of the exotic qualities of alien
environments. Here the alien worlds are exotic Earths, little different
from the distant lands of travellers' tales. Human and humanoid alien
co-exist. The politics of exploitation is not the focal point of the story
but may serve to turn the wheels of the plot as the hero, alienated from
his or her own kind, champions the downtrodden natives against the horrors
of vulgar commercialism. Women writers have been particularly prolific in
this vein: Leigh BRACKETT often used it, as has Marion Zimmer BRADLEY in
her Darkover novels. Anne MCCAFFREY's Pern novels likewise belong to the
romantic school, and Jack VANCE has written many novels featuring a less
stylized romanticism. Some of the most impressive works in the romantic
vein are Cordwainer SMITH's stories of Old North Australia and his Quest
of the Three Worlds (fixup 1966). Recent examples often emphasize
quasimystical processes of adaptation to the alien environment: a
reharmonization of mankind and nature that often covertly echoes the Eden
myth ( ECOLOGY; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; PASTORAL). A simple example is
Outpost Mars (1952; vt Sin in Space) by Cyril Judd (C.M. Kornbluth and
Judith MERRIL); a more complex one is Eight Keys to Eden (1960) by Mark
CLIFTON. The archetype of the species is Ray BRADBURY's "The Million-Year
Picnic" (1946). The image of a lost Eden plays an important part in many
of the otherwise realistic colonization novels of Michael G. CONEY,
tingeing them with a peculiar nostalgia; examples include Mirror Image
(1972), Syzygy (1973) and Brontomek! (1976).The "realistic" school, whose
authors concentrate on blood, sweat and tears rather than glamorous
exotica, developed in the post-WWII era, although Edmond Hamilton's
archetypal "What's it Like out There?" (1952) was written in the 1930s.
This school won its early successes outside the sf magazines, being
extensively developed by Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke in stories
published in general-fiction magazines and in (often juvenile) novels.
Heinlein's contributions include Red Planet (1949), Farmer in the Sky
(1950) and many of the stories in The Green Hills of Earth (coll 1951).
Clarke's include the Venture to the Moon series of vignettes in the London
Evening Standard and the novels The Sands of Mars (1951) and Earthlight
(1955). Patrick MOORE's series of juveniles, including Domes of Mars
(1956) and Voices of Mars (1957), also belongs to this tradition. These
juvenile novels take great pains to achieve some kind of authenticity, but
"realism" in the magazines was much more a matter of literary posturing,
consisting mainly of ultra-tough novels with a strong seasoning of
cynicism: Police Your Planet (1956 as by Erik van Lhin; rev 1975) by
Lester DEL REY is a cardinal example. Realistic treatment of colonization

methods remains a common theme in sf; it plays a subsidiary but important
role in, for example, Mindbridge (1976) by Joe HALDEMAN and GATEWAY (1977)
by Frederik Pohl. The realistic school has suffered somewhat where it has
conscientiously remained within the boundaries of a Solar System whose
hostility has become increasingly apparent, but it has been saved from
extinction not only by the idea of domed colonies with self-enclosed
ecologies but also by the notion of TERRAFORMING, significantly treated in
such works as Kim Stanley ROBINSON's RED MARS (1992 UK), Pamela SARGENT's
VENUS OF DREAMS (1986) and Venus of Shadows (1988), and Ian MCDONALD's
Desolation Road (1988), which features a remarkable juxtaposition of the
ultra-romantic and cynically realistic modes. Other writers have favoured
the idea that colonists need not bother with worlds at all; Konstantin
TSIOLKOVSKY, the pioneer of ROCKET research, proposed that we might build
artificial satellites to contain orbital colonies, and this notion of
SPACE HABITATS has been sophisticated in recent times by such nonfiction
writers as Gerard K. O'Neill. Sf stories displaying such ideas include a
series of novels by Mack Reynolds begun with Lagrange Five (1979; later
novels in the series are ed Dean ING), Lois McMaster BUJOLD's FALLING FREE
(1988), and the satellite-tv soap opera Jupiter Moon (1990).Terraforming
adapts worlds to colonists, but one might logically expect it to be much
easier to adapt colonists to worlds. Relatively little attention has been
given to this approach. Biological-engineering methods were applied to the
business of colonization by James BLISH in the stories making up THE
SEEDLING STARS (fixup 1957) ( PANTROPY) and by Poul Anderson in "Call Me
Joe" (1957), and were investigated in more detail by Frederik Pohl in MAN
PLUS (1976), but increasing interest in GENETIC ENGINEERING has yet to
bring forth prolific speculation in this vein.Theme anthologies concerning
colonization include The Petrified Planet (anth 1952) ed anon Fletcher
PRATT and Medea: Harlan's World (anth 1985) ed Harlan ELLISON. [BS]See
also: GENERATION STARSHIPS; LIVING WORLDS.
COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK, THE
Film (1958). William Alland Productions/Paramount. Dir Eugene Lourie,
starring John Baragrey, Mala Powers, Otto Kruger, Charles Herbert, Ed
Wolff. Screenplay Thelma Schnee, based on a story by Willis Goldbeck. 70
mins. B/w.A curious little film about a man killed in an accident whose
brain is transferred by his scientist father into an 8ft (2.4m) ROBOT
body. Without a human body his mind both loses all compassion and resents
it in others; hence he decides to destroy good guys at the UN. But his
lingering humanity asserts itself and he asks his son (who doesn't know
who he is) to turn him off. TCONY has been praised, but most see it as a
routine potboiler. Shooting took eight days, and its director claims he
can barely remember making it. [PN]
COLOSSUS, THE FORBIN PROJECT
(vt The Forbin Project) Film (1969). Universal. Dir Joseph Sargent,
starring Eric Braeden, Susan Clark, Gordon Pinsent, William Schallert.
Screenplay James Bridges, based on Colossus (1966) by D.F. JONES. 100
mins. Colour.A supercomputer, Colossus, is designed by Dr Forbin to take
control of the US defence network but, once activated, develops ambitions
of its own and ignores all commands. Unlike the neurotic HAL in 2001: A

SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), Colossus is a COMPUTER of the old school emotionless, arrogant and practically omnipotent. It forms an alliance
with its Russian equivalent and the film ends with the two computers in
charge and likely to stay that way. The subtext is the usual one: better
to be human and idiotic, even at the risk of nuclear WAR, than to
surrender our autonomy to machines. The scenes showing Colossus in vast
caverns beneath the Rocky Mountains have a powerful admonitory charge.
This is a neat, well made film. [JB/PN]
COLUMBIA PUBLICATIONS
DYNAMIC SCIENCE FICTION; FUTURE FICTION; ORIGINAL SCIENCE FICTION
STORIES; SCIENCE FICTION; SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY.
COLVIN, IAN (GOODHOPE)
(1912-1975) UK writer and journalist whose sf novel is Domesday Village
(1948), set in a NEAR-FUTURE UK with a socialist regime. [JC]
COLVIN, JAMES
House name used primarily by Michael MOORCOCK for book reviews and
stories in NW (and for one independent collection of stories), and
occasionally by others for book reviews. Moorcock has also written at
least one story as Warwick Colvin Jr, who is identified as JC's nephew.
[JC]
COLVIN, WARWICK Jr
[s] James COLVIN.
COMA
Film (1978). MGM. Dir Michael CRICHTON, starring Genevieve Bujold,
Michael Douglas, Rip Torn, Richard Widmark. Screenplay Crichton, based on
Coma (1977) by Robin COOK. 113 mins. Colour.Crichton's most commercially
successful film, C is a present-day thriller with one sf element: the use
of hospital patients, deliberately put into irreversible coma by using
poisoned anaesthetic, as living repositories of body parts which are
profitably sold for use in transplant surgery - a scheme, it has been
alleged, that by the 1980s had real-life counterparts. Bujold is good as
the resourceful young woman doctor - the film was praised at the time by
the Women's Movement - who uncovers the plot in this stylish but wholly
implausible paranoid melodrama. Crude but effective visual symbolism
equates medicine with the meat trade, which cannot have pleased those of
Dr Crichton's old colleagues still in practice. [PN]See also: CINEMA.
COMET
US PULP MAGAZINE; 5 issues, Dec 1940-July 1941, bimonthly after Jan 1941.
Published by H-K Publications; ed F. Orlin TREMAINE. Tremaine, former
editor of ASF, made a brief and undistinguished return to sf-magazine
editing with this title. Contributors included Eando BINDER, Frank Belknap
LONG and Harl VINCENT. The last issue contained "The Vortex Blaster", the
first story of E.E. SMITH's series of that name. A continuing feature was
"The Spacean", an imaginary future newspaper which betrayed the magazine's
juvenile slant. C had little visual appeal; its cover layout was
particularly ungainly. [MJE]
COMFORT, ALEX(ANDER)

(1920- ) UK writer and medical doctor who has published significant
popular work in the fields of sexology and gerontology, being perhaps best
known for The Joy of Sex (1972). Before WWII he established an extremely
precocious reputation for poetry, fiction and a pacifism he espoused
rigorously during the years of conflict. One early novel, No Such Liberty
(1941), edges into parable in its description of the wartime internment of
Germans; Cities of the Plain (1943) is an anti-capitalist DYSTOPIAN play;
Tetrarch (1980 US), a fantasy, takes its protagonists magically into a
political and sexual UTOPIA named Los, where they must find their true
shapes; and Imperial Patient (1987) infuses a tale of the emperor Nero
with mythical elements. His first genuine sf novel, Come Out to Play
(1961), is a near-future SATIRE on scientism narrated by a smug
sexologist. The Philosophers (1989), set in a NEAR-FUTURE UK, savages a
decrepit Tory hegemony. [JC]
COMICS
This rubric covers the comic strip in daily and Sunday newspapers,
European comic papers and the US-style comic book; it does not cover the
GRAPHIC NOVEL per se, although clearly there is overlap between the two
categories. Strip-cartoon stories use some interaction of text and
picture, as opposed to the established "storybook" use of words plus
illustrations of the words. Design, drawing style, caption and
word-balloon continuity all serve to make the strip cartoon a medium with
its own syntax and frame of reference, one which may have been best
defined by Scott McCloud (1960- ) - in his seminal Understanding Comics:
The Invisible Art (graph 1993) - as "Juxtaposed pictorial and other images
in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce
an aesthetic response in the viewer."Like the history of sf, the history
of the comic strip is far more complex, and extends much further into the
past, than had been assumed until recent decades, when researchers (see
Further Reading list below) began properly to examine the record, and to
establish a continuity between the graphic work of the 18th century and
the comic papers and Sunday newspaper supplements which flourished so
conspicuously in the USA a century later. Sf comic strips as such,
however, were slow to develop. By the end of the 19th century, though the
comic strip had achieved very considerable sophistication and was capable
of treating very widely varied subject matter, there was virtually no sf
presented in a credible manner, nor would there be for another 30 years.
Prior to this, the emphasis on humour in the comic strips had relegated sf
to the realms of fantasy, as in Our Office Boy's Fairy Tales (1895 The
Funny Wonder), an anonymous UK series depicting a family on Mars facing
totally impossible hardships and jubilations. More mature in its approach
was Winsor MCCAY's fantasy Little Nemo in Slumberland (1st series 1905-11
New York Herald), which depicted the dream adventures of a young boy and
an ever-increasing array of characters from the court of King Morpheus.
McCay's manipulation of the size, shape and position of each panel,
together with his use of perspective, gave added emphasis to the narrative
and indicated how artistic technique could augment the text. (This
attribute of the comic strip was sometimes itself used to create the
fantasy element, as in Krazy Kat [1911-44] by George Herriman [1880-1944],
where the scenic background, changing from panel to panel, created a

surrealistically alien environment, or in Felix The Cat [1923 onwards] by
Otto Messmer [1892-1983], where the eponymous feline gave substance to his
imagination by treating the contents of his thought balloons as physical
realities.) McCay's fantasies were perhaps topped only by the
expressionist whimsy of his contemporary, Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956), in
Wee Willy Winky's World and The Kin-Der Kids.In the 1920s, when economic
depression brought about a change in public outlook, a demand was created
for action-adventure strips, making publication of outright sf comic
strips feasible. The transition came with BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY
(1929-67), an adult comic strip inspired by a novel in AMAZING STORIES; it
spawned several rivals, among them BRICK BRADFORD (1933 onwards), FLASH
GORDON (1934 onwards), Speed Spaulding (1939), adapted from Edwin BALMER's
and Philip WYLIE's When Worlds Collide (1933) and illustrated by Marvin
Bradley, and not forgetting Frank Godwin's CONNIE (1927-44), which in the
mid-1930s abandoned its everyday terrestrial setting for outer-space
intrigue. These all drew their plots extensively from the epics of
classical literature, modernized by the inclusion of SPACESHIPS and
ray-guns, and distanced from reality by being located in the far future or
remote past.Similar innovations occurred in Europe following the
reprintings there of the major US comic strips. High points were the
appearances of: in France, Futuropolis (1937-8 Junior) and Electropolis
(1939 Jean-Pierre), both written and illustrated by Rene Pellos; in Italy,
Saturno Contro la Terra (1937-43), written by F. Pedrocchi and illustrated
by G. Scolari; and, in the UK, GARTH (1943 onwards).The growth in the
number of sf comic strips was, however, largely a reflection of the
increased number of comic strips in general; they were now so popular in
the USA that new methods of packaging them were being explored. Out of
this experimentation developed the comic book. Initially comic books
contained merely reprints of the newspaper strips-e.g., Buck Rogers in
Famous Funnies (1934-55) and Flash Gordon and Brick Bradford in King
Comics (1936-51)-but soon the available existing strips were used up, and
comic books featuring original strips were the inevitable second stage. In
the first issue of one of these new titles, Action Comics (1938 onwards;
DC COMICS), SUPERMAN appeared. Featuring a larger-than-life figure,
omnipotent (mostly) in the face of all adversity, Superman (1939 onwards)
proved so popular that numerous imitation SUPERHEROES appeared, from
Batman through CAPTAIN MARVEL to the many heroes featured by the modern
MARVEL COMICS group, all being variations on the same basic theme.In many
of these comic books a central sf story was backed up by strips from
outside the genre, but some comics were entirely devoted to sf. The first
sf comic book was Amazing Mystery Funnies (1938-40), which contained a
pot-pourri of superhero and SPACE-OPERA strips, its artists including Bill
Everett (1917-1973), Will Eisner (1917-) and Basil Wolverton (1909-1979).
Hugo GERNSBACK briefly entered the field with Superworld Comics (1939).
Buck Rogers (1940-43) and Flash Gordon (intermittently 1943-53) also
appeared as titles. Most successful was Planet Comics (1940-54), a
companion to PLANET STORIES, which featured Star Pirate by Murphy Anderson
(1926- ), Lost World by George Evans (1920- ), Auro, Lord of Jupiter by
Graham Ingels (1915-1991) and other memorable strips.In such a competitive
market it was inevitable that publishers would turn to the sf PULP
MAGAZINES for help. National Periodicals (DC Comics) offered Mort

WEISINGER, then editor of THRILLING WONDER STORIES, an editorial post.
Accepting it, he worked initially on Superman, using authors of the
calibre of Alfred BESTER, Edmond HAMILTON, Henry KUTTNER and Manly Wade
WELLMAN to help compete with the rival publication, Captain Marvel,
scripted by Otto Binder ( Eando BINDER). Well known artists from the sf
magazines were also used. Alex SCHOMBURG appeared in Startling Comics
(1940-51), Edd CARTIER in Shadow Comics (1940-50) and Red Dragon, 2nd
series (1947-8), and Virgil FINLAY in Real Fact Comics (1946-9).
Similarly, in the UK Serge Drigin, artist on SCOOPS and FANTASY,
illustrated Space Police (1940 Everyday Novels and Comics).By the early
1950s numerous sf comic books were appearing, among them: Lars of Mars
(1951) and Space Patrol (1952), both issued by ZIFF-DAVIS, publishers of
AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC ADVENTURES; and Rocket to the Moon (1951)
and An Earthman on Venus (1952), both published by Avon and featuring
adaptations of, respectively, Otis Adelbert KLINE's Maza of the Moon
(1930) and Ralph Milne FARLEY's The Radio Man (1924 Argosy All-Story
Weekly; 1948; vt An Earthman on Venus 1950); and an anti-communist
propaganda sf comic book, Is This Tomorrow? (1947). More durable were
Mystery in Space (1951-66) and Strange Adventures (1950-73), both from DC,
Harvey's Race for the Moon (1956) and Richard E. Hughes's Forbidden Worlds
(1951-67), all of which managed some consistency, albeit of a distinctly
juvenile nature. Distinguished artwork came from the likes of Sid Greene,
Carmine Infantino, (1925- ), Gil Kane (1926- ), Jack KIRBY, Mike Sekowsky,
Al Williamson (1931- ) and sometime Buck Rogers illustrator Murphy
Anderson (1926- ). All the while, new sf comic strips were appearing in
newspapers, two of the better titles being Beyond Mars (1951-3 New York
Sunday News), scripted by Jack WILLIAMSON from his two novels Seetee Shock
(1950) and Seetee Ship (1951), with illustrations by Lee Elias (1920- ),
and Twin Earths (1951-4), a counter-Earth story created and written by
Oskar Lebeck illustrated by Alden McWilliams (1916- ) - not to forget Sky
Masters (1959-61), drawn by Kirby and written by Bob and Dick Wood, doing
their best to second-guess a space programme that still lay 10 years in
the future.The most important of this period, however, were the sf comic
books published by EC COMICS. Appearing initially at the suggestion of
Harry HARRISON, who had been working in comics as artist and scriptwriter
since 1946, Weird Science (1950-53) and Weird Fantasy (1950-53) - which
later merged to form Weird Science Fantasy (1953-5) before being finally
renamed Incredible Science Fiction (1955-6) - published the most
sophisticated sf stories yet to appear in the comic books, often featuring
wry endings in the manner of Philip K. DICK. Illustrated by such well
known sf artists as George Evans, Frank FRAZETTA, Roy G. KRENKEL, Bernard
Krigstein (1919-1990), Al Williamson and Wallace WOOD, they often included
adaptations of stories by popular sf authors, in particular Ray BRADBURY.
With the imposition of the Comics Code in 1955, these and many other
titles ceased, and comics then went through a period of restraint and
unoriginality.A similar boom in sf comic books was taking place in Europe.
Included in these titles were Super Science Thrills (1945), Tit-Bits
Science Fiction Comics (1953) and The Jet Comic (1953), a companion to
AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION, which appeared in the UK, and Espace (1953-54)
and L'An 2,000 (1953-4), in France. Also of interest was Tarzan Adventures
(1953-9) which, under Michael MOORCOCK's editorship from 1957, published

several sf comic strips, including James CAWTHORN's Peril Planet. It was
in the weekly comic papers, however, that the best-drawn and -plotted sf
comic strips were to appear. Foremost was DAN DARE (1950-67 Eagle). With
its clean linework by Frank HAMPSON, this became the UK's most influential
sf comic strip, inspiring several rivals - including JEFF HAWKE, Captain
Condor (1952-5 Lion), at one time illustrated by Brian LEWIS (who also did
many NEW WORLDS covers), and Jet-Ace Logan (1956-9 Comet; 1959-60 Tiger),
written by Frank S. Pepper (1910-1988) and, later, by Moorcock (who also
scripted Rick Random, Space Ace, drawn by Rowland [Ron] Turner (1922- )
for Thriller Picture Library). Equally notable was Rocket (1956), an sf
comic paper which featured US reprints and others, including Escape from
Earth, Seabed Citadel and Captain Falcon; it ran to 32 issues. More
successful was Boy's World (1963-4) which, prior to its merger with Eagle,
published Wrath of the Gods, initially written by Moorcock and illustrated
by Ron Embleton (1930-1988), then by John M. Burns (1938- ), Ghost World,
illustrated by Frank Bellamy (1917-1976), and The Angry Planet, an
adaptation of Harry Harrison's Deathworld (1960) plotted by Harrison and
scripted by Kenneth BULMER. Mention should also be made of TV Century 21
(1965-9), which published material based on Gerry ANDERSON's tv puppet
shows STINGRAY, FIREBALL XL5, THUNDERBIRDS and CAPTAIN SCARLET AND THE
MYSTERONS and on Terry NATION's horrors, the DALEKS. In 1977 the first
truly UK sf comic arrived in the shape of 2,000 AD, starring the
quasi-fascist supercop JUDGE DREDD.A turning point was the publication by
MARVEL COMICS - which had published innumerable horror, fantasy and sf
anthology titles throughout the 1950s and early 1960s - of The Fantastic
Four (1961 onwards), whose success heralded a new wave of superhero
comics, starring new characters and heroes (like Captain America and
Sub-Mariner) resuscitated from Marvel productions of the period during and
immediately after WWII. National Periodicals (DC Comics), publishers of
Superman, was already in the process of expanding its superhero list, so
DC and Marvel very soon became established as the "Big Two" in the field.
Another trend was the growing number of adaptations of sf TELEVISION
series, notably STAR TREK and DR WHO, which both appeared in a variety of
publications. Innovations appeared in the "underground" comics, where sf
supplied an ideal framework for scatological examinations of society's
neuroses and phobias; original artistic styles were developed by Richard
CORBEN, Vaughn BODE and others. Roger ELWOOD edited Starstream Comics
(1976) in an attempt to introduce adaptations of work by Poul ANDERSON,
Larry NIVEN, Robert SILVERBERG and others, but this venture apparently
failed to attract any substantial readership. A similar fate befell a
slightly earlier series, Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction (1975) ed Roy
Thomas, which adapted stories by Moorcock, Bob SHAW, Stanley G. WEINBAUM
and others. Published by the Marvel Comics group and with the byline "Stan
Lee Presents" ( Stan LEE), it ran for 6 issues in 1975. Several other sf
comics appeared in the mid-1970s, notably Charlton Comics's Space 1999
Magazine (a companion to the Gerry Anderson tv series SPACE 1999), the
apocalyptic colour comic Doomsday Plus 1 (recently reprinted, due to the
popularity of artist John Byrne [1950- ], by Fantagraphics) and Marvel's
Planet of the Apes magazine (based on the 1968 movie PLANET OF THE APES
and its sequels), which was immensely popular in the UK in 1975. Mike
Friedrich's titles Star Reach (1975-8) and Imagine (1976-8), which

graduated in 1977 from underground comics to small-magazine format, had a
heavy sf and fantasy bias. Friedrich's list of contributors reads like a
who's who of comics experimenters and stars: Howard V. CHAYKIN, Michael T.
Gilbert, Lee Marrs, P. Craig Russell (1950- ) (well remembered for his
work on Marvel's Killraven space opera - see below - which ran in Amazing
Adventures 1975-6 and was republished as a graphic novella, 1983), Jim
Starlin (1949- ). . . the list is a long one. Mention should also be made
of Marvel's 1977 adaptation of the 1968 film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, done
by Jack Kirby, who also had a 100pp novella, The Silver Surfer (graph
1977), co-authored with Stan LEE, published in that year.In the UK
interest in Jeff Hawke had waned sufficiently for the London Daily
Express, the national newspaper in which it had appeared, to discontinue
the strip - although the Express's sister newspaper, the Scottish Daily
Record, missed Jeff Hawke enough that it commissioned a new and
exceptionally similar strip from Sidney Jordan: this was Lance McLane,
which ran from 1976 until the mid-1980s. Earlier, in 1973, writer Richard
O'Neill and artist John M. Burns had created a Philip Jose FARMER-style
fantasy, Danielle (1973-4; brief revival in 1978; graph coll as Danielle
1984), for the London Evening News. In the USA Gil Kane and Ron GOULART
embarked on a daily space-adventure strip, Star Hawks (1977-81), cleverly
jumping in before the release, later that year, of the movie space opera
STAR WARS.With the success of that film came a renewed interest in sf
proper, rather than the fringe-sf of the superhero adventure. The 1970s
had seen their fair share of interesting though often short-lived
features, such as: Mike Kaluta's elegant adaptation of Edgar Rice
BURROUGHS's Carson of Venus adventures in Korak (1972-4); Killraven
(Amazing Adventures 1973-6) by Don MacGregor, initially drawn by Howard V.
Chaykin and after 1975 by Russell, which was an attempt at a sequel to
H.G. WELLS's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898); Monark Starstalker by Chaykin;
Deathlok; Star Hunters; Warlock and CAPTAIN MARVEL, both these latter by
Jim Starlin; Guardians of the Galaxy (written by Steve Gerber); Starfire
and The Eternals (inspired by the notions of Erich von DANIKEN) - as well
as the many excellent stories published by James Warren in his
black-and-white magazines Eerie (1965-83), Creepy (1965-83), 1984
(1978-80) and Comix International (1974-7). Baronet Books issued The
Illustrated Roger Zelazny (graph 1978) by Gray MORROW and followed up with
The Illustrated Harlan Ellison. HEAVY METAL - a US avatar of France's
METAL HURLANT - opened many eyes to European comics stars such as Moebius
(Jean GIRAUD), later creator of The Airtight Garage (graph coll trans
1987), and Philippe DRUILLET, with Lone Sloane (graph 1967) and Delirius
(graph 1973). Star Wars and, to a lesser extent, LOGAN'S RUN (1976) began
the deluge of late 1970s/early 1980s sf on film and tv. ALIEN, BATTLESTAR
GALACTICA, BLADE RUNNER, BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY, OUTLAND, 2010
and UFO all had comics adaptations. Star Wars's own comic series ran for
10 years (1977-86); and, despite its having to change publishers several
times, there has been a Star Trek comic book running continuously right
through the 1970s and 1980s to today's Star Trek: The Next Generation. In
the UK at this time it was the tv-related magazines that produced the best
comic-strip sf. Countdown (later renamed TV Action 1970-74) ran a Dr Who
strip and another based loosely on 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Look In had
some excellent stories ranging from The TOMORROW PEOPLE through Buck

Rogers in the 25th Century to The SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN .Smaller
independent companies like First Comics brought us items such as: Mars
(1984) by Marc Hempel (1957- ) and Mark Wheatley (1954- ), a tale of Earth
science and colonists versus Martian Mother Nature; NEXUS (1981-91) by
Mike Baron (1949- ) and Steve Rude (1956- ), possibly the ultimate mixture
of HARD SF and superhero genres; AMERICAN FLAGG! (1983-8; 2nd series
1988-9), Chaykin's DYSTOPIAN masterpiece (there were 3 collections: Hard
Times [graph 1984], Southern Comfort [graph 1986] and State of the Union
[graph 1987]), followed by his two stylish Time (2) novellas, The Epiphany
(graph 1986) and The Satisfaction of Black Mariah (graph 1987). First
Comics also continued the comics adaptations of Michael Moorcock's Elric
books after Pacific Comics had expired - Elric of Melnibone (1984), Sailor
on the Seas of Fate (1985-6), Weird of the White Wolf (1986-7), The
Vanishing Tower (1987-8) and Bane of the Black Sword (1988-9) - as well as
initiating further Moorcock series: Hawkmoon (5 series, 1986-9) and Corum
(1987-9). Marvel Comics brought out a glossy magazine in the Heavy Metal
mould called Epic Illustrated (1980-86; rev 1992), and this led Marvel to
set up in 1984 a separate imprint, Epic Comics, which has put out some
excellent material: Starstruck (1985-6; graph exp vt Starstruck: The
Expanding Universe 1990-91); also adapted as a stage play) by Elaine Lee
and Mike Kaluta; Void Indigo (1984-5) by Steve Gerber, which dealt with a
few too many TABOOS and was left unfinished; Alien Legion (1984-current);
and Plastic Forks (1990), a Philip K. Dick-style adventure by Ted
McKeever. Epic Comics is currently publishing McKeever's apocalyptic story
Metropol (1991-current). Other items of interest include: Frank MILLER
Inc.'s story Ronin (1983-4; graph coll 1987), a fascinating mixture in
which post- HOLOCAUST techno-principality (New York) meets Samurai drama;
and comics's answer to Fritz LANG's METROPOLIS (1926), MR X (1984-91) by
Dean Motter and Paul Rivoche, issued by Canadian publisher Vortex and
produced briefly by the LOVE AND ROCKETS creators Gilbert (1957- ), Jaime
(1959- ) and Mario Hernandez, with a collection published as The Return of
Mr X (graph coll 1985). The comic-book company Innovation has recently
published several sf and fantasy adaptations based on work by (among
others) Piers ANTHONY, Terry PRATCHETT, Anne Rice (1941- ) and Gene WOLFE.
JAPAN - home of martial-arts epics, GOJIRA and gargantuan ROBOTS deserves special discussion. The robots usually have an initial manga
(comic-strip) incarnation. The ancestor of them all is Osamu TEZUKA's
Tetsuwan Atom (vt Astroboy). This diminutive hero's comic-strip adventures
date back to 1952, and his tv cartoon show, first aired in 1963, marked
the birth of tv animation in Japan. As well as robo-colossi such as
Mazinger X and The Shogun Warriors, space operas like Space Cruiser Yamato
and Galaxy Express 999 and the space piracy of by Masamune Shirow, the
closely-guarded pseudonym of a Japanese writer/artist (1962- ) Captain
Harlock (all created by Reiji Matsumoto) were very popular in 1970s manga
and on tv. More recently speculative manga have been given a chance to
diversify a little as evidenced by Mai the Psychic Girl (trans graph coll
1990 UK); Rumiko Takahashi's Lum (1989-90), a sort of sf farce; the serene
HARD SF of Yukinobu Hoshino's 2001 Nights (trans graph 1990);Appleseed
(trans graph coll, vol 1 1990, vol 2 1991, vol 3 1992)by Masamune Shirow,
the closely-guarded pseudonym of a Japanese writer/artist (1962- ); and
Katsuhiro OTOMO's phenomenally successful Akira (1982 onwards), filmed as

AKIRA (1987), whose nearly 2000 pages are being published in colour in
English by Epic Comics (1989 onwards).In the 1990s the "adult" cartoon
strip has finally begun to find its way into bookshops and away from the
"funnies" sections of the newspapers. Reading V for Vendetta (graph 1990)
by Alan MOORE and artist David Lloyd (1950- ) is not the simple,
lowest-common-denominator entertainment that was once the norm for comic
books; reading the Luther Arkwright trilogy (graph coll 1989) by Bryan
Talbot (1952- ) involves an understanding of the language of comics,
especially in layout; reading Matthias Schultheiss's Bell's Theorem (graph
in 3 vols 1989) really does hinge on an understanding of the eponym. Of
course, there is no shortage of trashy adventure comics and fatuous
newspaper strips, just like 50 years ago. The difference is that now there
are intelligent comic strips, comic books and graphic novels as well.For a
list of all comics and comics-related entries Introduction.
[JE/SW/SH/JC]Further reading: The best studies of the comic strip before
the end of the 19th century are, both by David Kunzle, The Early Comic
Strip (1974) and The History of the Comic Strips: The 19th Century (1992),
the first 2 vols of an extended and intensive overview; and The American
Comic Book Catalogue: The Evolutionary Era, 1884-1939 (1990) by Denis
Gifford (1927- ), which lists nearly 500 separate titles and series, is an
important aid. For later periods, see The Comics (1947; reissued 1990) by
Coulton Waugh; The Penguin Book of Comics (1967; rev 1971; rev 1990) by
George Perry and Alan Aldridge; A History of the Comic Strip (1968) by P.
Couperie and Maurice Horn; The World Encyclopedia of Comics (1967) by
Maurice Horn; The Adventurous Decade: Comic Strips in the Thirties (1976)
by Ron GOULART; The World Encyclopedia of Comics (1976) ed M. Horn;
Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (1977) ed Bill Blackbeard and
Martin Williams; Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Comics (1979) ed
Blackbeard; The International Book of Comics (1984) by Denis Gifford;
Encyclopedia of Comic Characters (1987) by Denis Gifford;Comics: Ideology,
Power and the Critics (1989) by Martin Barker; The Encyclopedia of Comic
Books (1991) by Ron Goulart; Adult Comics: An Introduction (1993) by Roger
Sabin; The Comic Book: The One Essential Guide for Comic Book Fans
Everywhere (1994) by Paul Sassienie; the important annual bibliography The
Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide by Robert M. Overstreet.
COMMANDO CODY - SKY MARSHAL OF THE UNIVERSE
US tv series (1955). Republic Studios/Hollywood Television Service for
NBC TV. Prod Mel Tucker, Franklyn Adreon, dir Fred Bannon, Harry Keller.
Written by Ronald Davidson, Barry Shipman. Weekly. 25 mins per episode.
B/w.Despite the title, the hero of this short-lived children's tv series
was more likely to be found riding in a four-door sedan than travelling
around the Universe. A cross between the Lone Ranger and Captain Midnight
(his rival crime-fighter on CBS), Cody wore a costume that looked as if
its previous owner had been in the German High Command and a mask whose
function was unclear. Cody (here played by Judd Holdren) and his sidekick
Joan (Aline Towne) had previously appeared in two Republic Studios film
serials, Radar Men from the Moon (1952; 12 episodes), in which Cody was
played by George Wallace, and Commando Cody (1953; 12 episodes), starring
Holdren. Equipped with several secret laboratories, a spaceship and an
ordinary revolver, Cody fought conventional gangsters and, occasionally,

the Ruler, an evil genius from outer space. Unsurprisingly reminiscent of
the absurdities of the movie serials, CC was more entertaining than the
slicker CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT. [JB/PN]
COMMUNICATIONS
Many aspects of communication in sf are dealt with under separate entries
in this volume. The most familiar form of communication is through
language, for a discussion of which LINGUISTICS. Direct mental
communication, or telepathy, is discussed under ESP. For communication in
the sense of travel MATTER TRANSMISSION and TRANSPORTATION. For
communications networks COMPUTERS, CYBERPUNK and MEDIA LANDSCAPE.Once the
implications of Relativity were absorbed by GENRE SF it was realized that
most SPACE OPERAS and any story involving a GALACTIC EMPIRE faced the
problem that messages from one star system to another might take many
lifetimes to deliver. The issues raised here are discussed under FASTER
THAN LIGHT (see also HYPERSPACE), and two of the best known sf devices
invented by writers to cope with it are discussed under ANSIBLE and DIRAC
COMMUNICATOR. Communication within our Solar System has been dealt with in
many stories, mostly earlier, notably those collected in Venus Equilateral
(coll of linked stories 1947) by George O. SMITH.Messages can be sent
forwards in time using time capsules. Sending them backwards in time is
trickier, but the apparent prohibition against sending such messages
implied by Relativity may be sidestepped by using the (theoretical)
elementary particle called the TACHYON, which can travel only faster than
light. Sending messages to the past in this way (see also TIME TRAVEL) is
central to TIMESCAPE (1980) by Gregory BENFORD. Indeed, messages from the
future to the past are not uncommon in sf, a recent example, with
bewilderingly rococo detail, being provided by Dan SIMMONS's Hyperion
books, HYPERION (1989) and The Fall of Hyperion (1990), in which a titanic
struggle across the ages by different but ultimate AIs involves such
sometimes contradictory time messages as the lethal Shrike (a God of
Pain), mysterious Time Tombs, and Moneta, the goddess of backwards memory
who lives backwards in time, along with what appears to be reversed
predestination where the future determines the past. All such stories
worryingly violate the Principle of Causality which states, to put it
simply, that causes precede effects.The most common communications
scenario in sf-often but not always linguistic - involves the meeting of
humans with ALIENS. These are often called first-contact stories, and
perhaps the best known of them is "First Contact" (1945) by Murray
LEINSTER; an anthology of such stories is First Contact (anth 1971) ed
Damon KNIGHT. Among some of the alien-contact stories most relevant to
communication are "A Martian Odyssey" (1934) by Stanley G. WEINBAUM, "The
Big Front Yard" (1958) by Clifford D. SIMAK and THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE
(1974) by Larry NIVEN and Jerry POURNELLE.Aside from the areas of
communications which are dealt with in greater detail elsewhere in this
volume, there remains that of nonlinguistic communication, though the
distinction is merely semantic, in that many writers would take
linguistics to include, for example, mathematical symbology and sign
language ( MATHEMATICS). In many nonfiction works - an early example, for
the lay reader, being We Are Not Alone (1964) by Walter Sullivan - there
is discussion of the possibility of using universal mathematical symbols

to communicate with aliens, and this idea is by no means restricted to sf:
it was used, for example, as the basis for the symbols inscribed on the
first space capsule whose course would take it outside the Solar System.
The best of all stories about talking to aliens via mathematics may be
Neverness (1988) by David ZINDELL, in which the Solid State Entity, a
godlike consciousness formed by an ordering of space and matter
comprehending thousands of star systems, is talked to - at length and very
convincingly, even movingly - in this manner.There was not much emphasis
on communication problems in early sf. Most nonlinguistic communication
stories are post-WWII, by which time there had already been much
discussion of information theory, especially in the context of
CYBERNETICS. Any message consists of coded information: whether in the
form of words, mathematical symbols, signs, modulated electromagnetic
waves, intermittent laser beams or even the chemical pheromones used for
communication by animals. A number of sf communication stories, then, have
been in effect code-cracking stories. In James BLISH's VOR (1958) an alien
communicates by changing the colours of a patch on his head (VOR stands
for violet, orange, red). Jack VANCE's "The Gift of Gab" (1955) turns on
whether a squid-like alien creature is intelligent; his intelligence is
proven when he learns to use a semaphore language - invented for the
purpose - by waving his tentacles. Vance's stories persistently invent new
communication systems, usually linked with the nature of alien cultures.
Messages in various of his stories are passed by masks, music, smells,
colours or signs. (A number of stories of this general type are discussed
under ANTHROPOLOGY.) Suzette Haden ELGIN is another writer whose stories
blend cultural anthropology with communication problems; she has a PhD in
linguistics. Naomi MITCHISON has written a notable book in this area,
MEMOIRS OF A SPACEWOMAN (1962), centred on a research worker whose job it
is to understand and if possible communicate with alien species;
Mitchison's aliens are more vivid and convincing than usual, perhaps
because of her background in BIOLOGY. Communication with aliens is, of
course, a popular theme in sf, and many books, such as Conscience
Interplanetary (1972) by Joseph GREEN, have dealt with it at a less
demanding level.Fred HOYLE has several times tackled the problem of
decoding alien messages, most interestingly in The Black Cloud (1957) but
also in A for Andromeda (1962), written with John ELLIOT. The latter story
tells of the cracking of a binary code picked up on a radio telescope and
its interpretation as instructions for building an artificial person. One
of the purest stories of this kind is James E. GUNN's The Listeners
(1972), which concentrates on the motivation behind attempts to pick up
messages from the stars, and brings in many questions of human
communication as well. Decoding alien communication also occurs in Michael
P. KUBE-MCDOWELL's debut novel Emprise (1985), a first-contact story, in
Carl SAGAN's bestselling Contact (1985) and in Jack MCDEVITT's The
Hercules Text (1986). Sagan's book has some good detail on the physics of
communication and contains the entertaining notion that hidden within the
number pi, with its endless succession of apparently random numbers after
the decimal point, is a message from the original geometers of the
Universe. This outdoes Kurt VONNEGUT Jr who, in THE SIRENS OF TITAN
(1959), reports the discovery that many great human events and artefacts
are in fact coded messages from the alien Tralfamadorians. Stonehenge,

when viewed from above and decoded, means "Replacement part being rushed
with all possible speed".Much closer to home, a popular theme has been
attempts to communicate with species on our own planet, notably in The Day
of the Dolphin (1967; trans 1969) by Robert MERLE and Clickwhistle (1973)
by William Jon WATKINS. Both of these owe much to the well known work
carried out by the scientist John Cunningham Lilly, author of The Mind of
the Dolphin: A Nonhuman Intelligence (1968). Ian WATSON adopts a rather
different method of cetacean communication in The Jonah Kit (1975) indeed, most of Watson's books dramatize methods of transcending the
limitations of spoken human communication.There are plenty of
communication problems in our own society, even without aliens. D.G.
COMPTON makes one of the best uses of a familiar idea in SYNTHAJOY (1968),
a well written and serious story about what happens when a machine is
built which records emotional experiences and can be plugged into other
minds. And, of course, there are many stories, both in the mainstream and
in sf - too many to list here - about the effect of DRUGS in assisting (or
militating against) genuine human communication.Some of the most
interesting sf communication stories are those which stress the ambiguity
that may be involved in interspecies communication. Three particularly
enigmatic novels on this theme are ROGUE MOON (1960) by Algis BUDRYS,
SOLARIS (1961 Poland; trans 1970) by Stanislaw LEM and Whipping Star
(1970) by Frank HERBERT. The Stanley KUBRICK film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
(1968) also comes into this group. In ROGUE MOON a labyrinthine artefact,
apparently meaningful, is found on the Moon's surface. However, those who
walk through it, some penetrating further than others, have all died.
These slaughters may in one sense be acts of communication also; they are
given a number of human analogies by Budrys, who seems to see all
communication as fraught with difficulty. (Alien-artefact stories are
further discussed under BIG DUMB OBJECTS and DISCOVERY AND INVENTION.)
Lem's SOLARIS tells of the living planet of Solaris; humans in an orbital
laboratory hope to communicate with the (hypothetical) planetary
intelligence; when communication arrives it takes the form of replicating
figures from the scientists' subconscious minds. All efforts at
communication are thwarted by the anthropomorphism of the observers, and
the novel asks the pessimistic question: will it ever be possible to
transcend our human-centred view of the Universe, or is communication with
the alien a contradiction in terms? Herbert's Whipping Star is frivolous
by comparison, but its ingenious array of semantic confusions - as humans
attempt to communicate with entities whose corporeal form, it turns out,
is as stars - poses some sharp questions. Kubrick ducked the question
altogether in what has become the most famous sequence in sf CINEMA; when
the mysterious alien intelligence of 2001 does communicate, the audience
is given only an enigmatic and incomprehensible collage of lights,
fragmentary landscapes, an unexpected 18th-century room and a foetus. We
are given to understand that communication is achieved, but we receive
only the static that surrounds it. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND
(1977) is another film which ends on a comparable note, the communication
here being between humans and the occupants of a UFO by means of lights
and musical notes; the climax is a kaleidoscope of colour and sound.
COMMUNION

Film (1989). Pheasantry Films in association with Allied Vision, The
Picture Property Company. Coprod Philippe Mora, Whitley STRIEBER and Dan
Allingham; dir Mora; screenplay Strieber based on his own book Communion:
A True Story(1987); starring Christopher Walken, Lindsay Crouse, Joel
Carlson, Frances Sternhagen, Andreas Katsulas and Terri Hanauer. 101 mins.
Colour.This interesting film which tells of the abduction by ALIENS of
fantasy writer Whitley Strieber has little of the documentary about it,
and while based on a book that purported to be factual, is only
distinguishable from science fiction in one obvious respect. Although we
actually witness the alien abduction, at first in jerky neurotic
flashbacks, later as a more continuous narrative, the film always allows,
even encourages, an alternative reading. This is that fantasist Strieber,
suffering from writers' block, and shown in the film to behave in an
increasingly unstable manner, has experienced a mental breakdown with a
component of paranoid hallucination. (Another theoretical alternative
scenario, that Strieber invented the whole story in a cynical and
successful attempt to break into the best-seller market, is not
considered.) Nonetheless, the dual reading offered gives the film an edgy,
captivating quality, much assisted by the brio of Mora's direction and a
ruthlessly committed performance from Walken, who in some films appears to
drift through his roles. Mora (from an Australian family much involved
with art) sets almost every scene with ambiguous paintings and sculptures
in the background, and this too adds to the teasing (documentary fact or
postmodernist fiction?) quality of the film. The film's most celebratedly
surreal scene is that in which Strieber during an examination by aliens is
sodomised by something resembling a petrol pump. But the aliens themselves
are disappointing, some resembling blue orcs, some resembling the
big-eyed, etiolated, elf-like figures we originally saw in CLOSE
ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), and in both incarnations filmic
stereotypes. (Though if the paranoid reading is correct, then the aliens
indeed "should" be stereotypes.) [PN]See also: UFOS, for a discussion of
various abducted-by-flying-saucer books and films.
COMPTON, D(AVID) G(UY)
(1930- ) UK writer, born of parents who were both in the theatre; he has
lived in the USA since 1981. DGC's novels are almost always set in the
NEAR FUTURE, and each presents a moral dilemma. The future is used as a
device for bringing contemporary trends into a clearer focus. Most of the
interest lies in personal relationships and the behaviour of people under
stress; minor characters are observed with humour which frequently arises
from class differences. Endings are ambiguous or deliberately
inconclusive. Later novels have varying modes of narrative technique.
DGC's rare public utterances confirm the impression that he is not
interested in the staple concerns of GENRE SF.DGC's first sf novel was The
Quality of Mercy (1965; rev 1970 US), concerning a genocidal plot, using a
biological weapon, to combat OVERPOPULATION. In The Silent Multitude
(1967) the crumbling of a cathedral city reflects a disintegration in the
human spirit. Farewell, Earth's Bliss (1966; rev 1971 US) shows the plight
of social misfits transported to MARS. SYNTHAJOY (1968), a more complex
novel, brought DGC wider notice, particularly in the USA. A surgeon and an
electronics engineer develop tapes which enable unremarkable people to

enjoy the experiences of those who are more gifted or fortunate. This
basic idea is a premise for the exploration of a moral problem and the
observation of human beings in extreme situations. The Steel Crocodile
(1970 US; vt The Electric Crocodile 1970 UK) presents the danger of new
knowledge and its application. Chronocules (1970; vt Hot Wireless Sets,
Aspirin Tablets, the Sandpaper Sides of Used Matchboxes, and Something
that Might have been Castor Oil 1971 UK; a further apparent vt, as
Chronicules 1976 UK, is almost certainly a publisher's misspelling) is a
TIME-TRAVEL story. The Missionaries (1972 US) describes the efforts of
some evangelizing aliens with a good deal of social comedy.DGC's strengths
as a writer are all displayed in the much admired The Continuous Katherine
Mortenhoe (1974; edited version vt The Unsleeping Eye 1974 US; vt Death
Watch 1981 UK). A woman in her 40s is given four weeks to live. A reporter
with eyes replaced by tv cameras has the job of watching her decline for
the entertainment of a pain-starved public in a world where illness is
almost unknown. The reporter sees one of the transmissions and realizes
that the camera cannot tell the truth; the recorded film is without mind
and therefore without compassion. The sequel, Windows (1979 US), depicts
the consequences of the reporter's decision to opt for the oxymoron of
literal blindness; neither character in the end is allowed to escape into
solitude. The former novel was filmed as La MORT EN DIRECT (1979). In
DGC's most recent solo novel of real interest, Ascendencies (1980 US),
manna-like free energy begins to fall from space, but the side-effects
include profound displacements, both physical and in the domestic psyches
whose traumas have always inspired his best work. Ragnarok (1991) with
John GRIBBIN shows DGC's grasp of character depiction, but its near-future
plot - a scientist brings on a nuclear winter in an attempt to enforce
disarmament - owes much to his collaborator's grasp of scientific process.
But Nomansland (1993) and Justice City (1994) each increasingly
demonstrates his recapture of the humane smoothness with which, in earlier
books, he so eloquently anatomized the near future. [MA/JC]Other works:
The Palace (1969); A Dangerous Malice (1978) as by Frances Lynch; A Usual
Lunacy (1978 US); Scudder's Game (1985 Germany, in German; English text
1988); Radio Plays (coll 1988 chap).See also: COLONIZATION OF OTHER
WORLDS; COMMUNICATIONS; COMPUTERS; CYBERNETICS; CYBORGS; DISASTER;
MEDIA
LANDSCAPE; OVERPOPULATION; POWER SOURCES; PSYCHOLOGY; RELIGION;
SCIENTISTS.
COMPTON CROOK/STEPHEN TALL MEMORIAL AWARD
AWARDS.
COMPTON-RICKETT, Sir JOSEPH
Joseph Compton RICKETT.
COMPUTERS
The computer revolution in the real world has been so recent and so rapid
that sf has had to struggle hard to keep up with actual developments.
Although Charles BABBAGE's attempts to develop a mechanical computer have
lately attracted attention in such STEAMPUNK novels as THE DIFFERENCE
ENGINE (1990 UK) by William GIBSON and Bruce STERLING, they failed to
inspire the 19th-century literary imagination. In fiction the notion of

"mechanical brains" first evolved as a corollary to that of mechanical men
( ROBOTS) - an early one is featured in Edward Page MITCHELL's "The Ablest
Man in the World" (1879) - but this tacit acceptance of the notion of
powerful skull-sized computers contrasts oddly with the tendency to
imagine advanced computers as huge machines the size of buildings, cities
or even planets. Sf writers who had been awakened to the advent of
computers by the building of ENIAC in the late 1940s failed utterly to
foresee the eventual development of the microprocessor. A partial
exception is Howard FAST's "The Martian Shop" (1959), which features a
computer that fits into a 6in (15cm) cube; however, the point made is that
such tininess (which anyway does not seem so tiny today) could not be
achieved using foreseeable human technology.In the early sf PULP
MAGAZINES, artificial brains, like robots, showed a distinct tendency to
go mad and turn against their creators; examples include "The Metal
Giants" (1926) by Edmond HAMILTON and "Paradise and Iron" (1930) by Miles
J. BREUER. But clever machines featured in more sympathetic roles in
several stories by John W. CAMPBELL Jr, who went on from "The Metal Horde"
(1930) to write such stories as the series begun with "The Machine" (1935
as by Don A. Stuart), in which a benevolently inclined machine
intelligence finally bids farewell to the human race in order to prevent
mankind from stagnating through dependence upon its generosity.
Revolutions against a mechanical mind which rules society more-or-less
benignly have long been commonplace in sf; examples include Francis G.
RAYER's Tomorrow Sometimes Comes (1951), Philip K. DICK's Vulcan's Hammer
(1960 dos) and Ira LEVIN's This Perfect Day (1970). The New York Times
commissioned Isaac ASIMOV's satirical explication of the theme, "The Life
and Times of MULTIVAC" (1975), which questions whether such a rebellion
would be desirable or necessary; Asimov had been consistently favourable
towards the idea of a machine-run society ever since his early advocacy in
"The Evitable Conflict" (1950). Another strongly pro-computer story from
the 1950s, redolent of the conflict and confrontation typical of the
period, is They'd Rather Be Right (1957; vt The Forever Machine) by Mark
CLIFTON and Frank RILEY. Hysterical fear of computers is satirized in "The
Man who Hated Machines" (1957) by Pierre BOULLE.The idea that machine
intelligence might be reckoned the logical end product of EVOLUTION on
Earth has a long history in sf, extending from Campbell's "The Last
Evolution" (1930) to Sagan om den stora datamaskinin (1966; trans as The
Tale of the Big Computer 1968; vt The Great Computer; vt The End of Man?)
by Olof JOHANNESSON. The notion of computers evolving to become literally
Godlike is featured in Fredric BROWN's "Answer" (1954), Isaac Asimov's
"The Last Question" (1956), Dino BUZZATI's Il Grande Ritratto (1960; trans
as Larger than Life 1962) and Frank HERBERT's Destination: Void (1966).
Other accounts of huge computers with delusions of grandeur and the power
to back them up include The God Machine (1968) by Martin CAIDIN, Colossus
(1966) and its sequels by D.F. JONES, Mayflies (1979) by Kevin O'DONNELL
Jr, The Judas Mandala (1982) by Damien BRODERICK and The Venetian Court
(1984) by Charles L. HARNESS. The computer incarnation of the Father of
Lies in Jeremy LEVEN's Satan (1982) is, by contrast, humble and
unassuming. The notion that the computer might be the answer to all our
problems is ironically encapsulated in Arthur C. CLARKE's fantasy "The
Nine Billion Names of God" (1953), in which a computer rapidly and easily

completes the task for which God created mankind.The idea that computers
might one day be endowed with - or spontaneously evolve - self-awareness
has generated a whole series of speculative exercises in machine
existentialism, which inevitably tend to the anthropocentric. Notable
examples include "Mike" in THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS (1966) by Robert
A. HEINLEIN and the central characters of When Harlie was One (1972) by
David GERROLD, The Adolescence of P-1 by Thomas J. RYAN (1977), and
Valentina: Soul in Sapphire (1984) by Joseph H. DELANEY and Marc STIEGLER.
In recent years the notion has become so commonplace as to be intensively
recomplicated in such novels as Rudy RUCKER's Software (1982) and Wetware
(1988), although Rucker earlier treated the notion sceptically in
Spacetime Donuts (1981). William Gibson's eponymous Neuromancer (1984)
kicked off a new trend in sentient software, carried forward by other
CYBERPUNK writers and fellow-travellers, including Kim NEWMAN in The Night
Mayor (1989). Autobiographical statements are offered by nascently
sentient machines in "Going Down Smooth" (1968) by Robert SILVERBERG,
Arrive at Easterwine (1971) by R.A. LAFFERTY and - most impressively Queen of Angels (1990) by Greg BEAR.The fear of computers "taking over"
our lives remains a powerful influence, manifest across a broad spectrum
of story types. These range from straightforward foul-up stories - e.g.,
"Computers Don't Argue" (1965) by Gordon R. DICKSON - to surreal
extravaganzas like "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" (1967) by Harlan
ELLISON. D.G. COMPTON's The Steel Crocodile (1970; vt The Electric
Crocodile) and John BRUNNER's The Shockwave Rider (1975) offer striking
examples of computers being used, with good intentions but repressively,
by NEAR-FUTURE politico-technocratic elites. On the other hand, Man Plus
(1976) by Frederik POHL presents a secret computer take-over as not
necessarily a bad thing, and Michaelmas (1977) by Algis BUDRYS proposes
that the dictatorship of the machine-based system might in the end be
benevolent. A metaphysical ( METAPHYSICS) species of take-over is
displayed in stories in which computers literally absorb human
personalities. Interesting examples are The Ring of Ritornel (1968) by
Charles L. HARNESS, Midsummer Century (1972) by James BLISH and Catchworld
(1975) by Chris BOYCE. In recent years the idea of "downloading" human
personalities into machinery has been used very promiscuously indeed,
being one of the key corollaries of the notion of "cyberspace"; it is
featured in Vernor VINGE's proto-cyberpunk story True Names (1981; 1981
dos), and had become a virtual cliche by the time Frederik Pohl's Heechee
Rendezvous (1984) and Greg BEAR's Eon (1985) proposed that software
afterlives might one day be universally on offer. The attractions of this
possibility are obvious, if slightly dubious.Real-world developments in
computer games have had a considerable influence on sf ( GAMES AND SPORTS;
GAMES AND TOYS); Rob SWIGART's novel Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval (1988)
is eccentrically modelled on such a game. Computer SCIENTISTS are nowadays
common characters in sf stories and, despite the late start made by sf
writers in getting in on the computer boom, it now seems that ideas
developed by William Gibson and those who have followed his example are
proving a significant inspiration to real computer scientists.Relevant
theme anthologies include Science Fiction Thinking Machines (anth 1954) ed
Groff CONKLIN; Computers, Computers, Computers: In Fiction and in Verse
(anth 1977) ed D. Van Tassel; Machines that Think (anth 1984) ed Isaac

Asimov, Patricia S. WARRICK and Martin H. GREENBERG; Computer Crimes and
Capers (anth 1985) ed Asimov, Greenberg and Charles G. WAUGH; Microworlds:
SF Stories of the Computer Age (anth 1984) ed Thomas F. MONTELEONE; and
Digital Dreams (anth 1990) ed David V. Barrett. [BS]See also: AUTOMATION;
CYBERNETICS; CYBORGS; INTELLIGENCE.
COMSTOCK, JARROD
Sharon JARVIS.
COMYNS, BARBARA
Working name of UK writer Barbara Comyns-Carr (1909-1992), whose style's
transfixed faux-naive simplicity urged much of her work into a tone of
pregnant magic realism ( FABULATION). The Vet's Daughter (1959) describes
the emotional distress of its doomed narrator, Alice Rowlands, in such a
deadpan fashion that the violent scene of fatal levitation which
culminates the tale seems totally unfantasticated. The Juniper Tree (1985)
is a retelling, in hallucinated modern garb, of a fable from the Brothers
Grimm. [JC]
CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH
The legends of Prometheus and of Dr Faustus contain a central image which
is still vigorous in sf: the hero in his lust for knowledge goes against
the will of God and, though he succeeds in his quest, he is finally
punished for his overweening pride and disobedience. Adam eating the
forbidden apple is another version of the legend. Its reverberations
resonate throughout the whole of literature.Of all the forms which the
quest for knowledge takes in modern sf, by far the most important, in
terms of both the quality and the quantity of the work that dramatizes it,
is conceptual breakthrough. It is amazing that the importance and
centrality of this idea in sf has had so little in the way of critical
recognition, though an essay by Gary K. WOLFE, "The Known and the Unknown:
Structure and Image in Science Fiction" (in Many Futures, Many Worlds
[anth 1977] ed Thomas D. CLARESON), points towards it.Conceptual
breakthrough can best be explained in terms of "paradigms", as that term
is used by philosophers of science. A paradigm is a generally held way of
looking at and interpreting the world; it consists of a set of often
unspoken and unargued assumptions - for example, before Nicolas Copernicus
(1473-1543) the paradigm saw Earth as the centre of the Universe. All the
most exciting scientific revolutions have taken the form of breaking down
a paradigm and substituting another. Often the old paradigm is eroded
slowly at first, through discovery of lots of little puzzling anomalies,
before the new paradigm can take over. Such an altered perception of the
world, sometimes in terms of science and sometimes in terms of society, is
what sf is most commonly about, and few sf stories do not have at least
some element of conceptual breakthrough.An important subset of
conceptual-breakthrough stories consists of those in which the world is
not what it seems. The structure of such stories is often that of a quest
in which an intellectual nonconformist questions apparent certainties.
Quite a number have been stories in which the world turns out to be a
GENERATION STARSHIP, as in "Universe" (1941) by Robert A. HEINLEIN,
Non-Stop (1958; vt Starship US-the US title giving the game away) by Brian
W. ALDISS, and Captive Universe (1969) by Harry HARRISON. In "The Pit"

(1975) by D. West the world turns out to be inside an artificial asteroid.
In "Outside" (1955), by Aldiss, a suburban house turns out to be an
experimental laboratory in which shape-changing aliens are incarcerated.
In several stories the world is artificial, either literally or because
its inhabitants have been brainwashed into seeing it wrongly, as in Time
out of Joint (1959) by Philip K. DICK. Philip Jose FARMER's Riverworld
books deal throughout with conceptual breakthrough; the first breakthrough
is the realization that, despite all the resurrected dead who populate it,
Riverworld is not Heaven; the second is the recognition that the
inhabitants are being manipulated. There is a touch of PARANOIA here ("we
are property"), quite common in conceptual-breakthrough stories, as in
those where the world turns out to be a construct to aid market research;
e.g., "The Tunnel Under the World" (1955) by Frederik POHL and Counterfeit
World (1964; vt Simulacron-3 US) by Daniel F. GALOUYE.Closely allied to
the above are stories where information about the world turns out to be
not so much wrong as incomplete. The classic example here is "Nightfall"
(1941) by Isaac ASIMOV, in which the constant presence of suns in the sky
of another planet has prevented knowledge of the stars, and everyone
panics every 21,049 years when five suns set and the sixth is eclipsed.
Arthur C. CLARKE's The City and the Stars (1956) has two breakthroughs,
the first out of a beautiful but static utopian city into the greater
world, and the second into a knowledge of civilizations in the stars.
Another post-WWII classic is "Surface Tension" (1952) by Blish, in which
the hero breaks out of his underwater microcosm to discover a great world
arching over his puddle. (Blish always recognized the shift from one
paradigm to another as the essence of sf, and said as much in "The Science
in Science Fiction" [1971; reprinted in The Tale that Wags the God coll
1987 ed Cy Chauvin]. His novel about Roger Bacon, Doctor Mirabilis [1964],
which takes conceptual breakthrough as its theme, has, therefore, the
flavour of sf even though based on historical fact.) Daniel F. Galouye's
Dark Universe (1961) is perhaps the best of many stories in which an
underground community has lost its memory of the surface. In LORD OF LIGHT
(1967) by Roger ZELAZNY the breakthrough is into an understanding of the
true nature of an artificial heaven.All stories where the apparently
complete world of the story's beginning, whether a generation starship or
an underground community, turns out to be only part of a greater whole can
be termed pocket-universe stories. ( POCKET UNIVERSE, where the case is
made that many conceptual-breakthrough stories of this sort can be linked
with the passage from the constrictions of childhood to the freedoms of
adulthood.) The archetype of all such stories is The History of Rasselas
(1759) by Samuel JOHNSON, in which the hero, walled into a tranquil
Abyssinian valley by mountains, finds his yearning for knowledge of the
outside world obsessing him, not letting him enjoy the happiness he sees
all around him. He escapes; the world outside is less happy than his own,
but it is interesting. Rasselas provides the template for the whole
subgenre; moreover, the intellectual discontent and formless yearnings of
its hero are among the commonest qualities of sf HEROES, and Johnson's
mild pessimism - which recognizes that, even though the new world-picture
may be uglier than the old, we need to know about it - captures exactly
the accepting tone which was to permeate so much sf. It is a romantic, if
often melancholy, form of striving, and sf never reveals its romantic

origins more clearly than when it uses the tropes of conceptual
breakthrough.Sometimes the breakthrough is transcendent, and can be given
to the reader only by analogy, inasmuch as the new state cannot be
described in a terminology which itself belongs to the old paradigm. Such
a state is commonly attained by the heroes of A.E. VAN VOGT and Alfred
BESTER, and more recently those of Ian WATSON, all of whose works centre
on a conceptual breakthrough of some kind. Such, too, are the end of the
film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), where kaleidoscopic imagery of
hypnagogic intensity is an emblem of the incomprehensible, and the vastly
superior INTELLIGENCE attained by the hero of CAMP CONCENTRATION (1968) by
Thomas M. DISCH, a book which alludes with some subtlety to every
celebrated literary variant of the Faust myth. In Algis BUDRYS's
extraordinary novel ROGUE MOON (1960) conceptual breakthrough (in the
attempt to understand a labyrinthine artefact on the Moon) seems
invariably accompanied by death, and this too recalls the Faustian theme,
transcendence being linked to mortality. A similar consequence occurs in
The Black Cloud (1957) by Fred HOYLE.Sometimes conceptual breakthrough is
ambiguous: the objective nature of the new paradigm cannot be understood
because of the subjective nature of PERCEPTION. A joke version of this
occurs in "The Yellow Pill" (1958) by Rog PHILLIPS, where one character
believes himself to be in a room, the other in a spaceship, and both are
tempted to break down the other's version of reality; one walks, fatally,
through what he believes to be a door. Paradoxes of this kind were enjoyed
by Philip K. Dick, as in "Impostor" (1953) - where a man who believes
himself unjustly persecuted as a machine breaks through to the realization
that he is indeed a robot with a bomb in his belly - and also in, among
others, Eye in the Sky (1957), Martian Time-Slip (1964), Ubik (1969) and A
Maze of Death (1970). A subjective, disturbing form of conceptual
breakthrough is the basis for many of J.G. BALLARD's stories, such as
"Build-Up" (1957; vt "The Concentration City"), "Manhole 69" (1959),
"Thirteen to Centaurus" (1962) and even "The Drowned Giant" (1964; vt
"Souvenir"). One of the most remarkable conceptual-breakthrough stories of
recent years - whose author, Christopher PRIEST, saw the work as in part a
homage to Aldiss's Non-Stop - is INVERTED WORLD (1974). In this book a
city is constantly and painfully pushed forward on rails because the
world-picture of its inhabitants is of a hyperboloid where time and space
are progressively distorted both north and south of an always moving
optimum line. The probable truth turns out to be very different. As in
many such stories, the breakthrough is inner as well as outer; the book
adopts the Berkeleyan view that the world is what we see it as being;
changes in objective truth are changes in perception; there is no such
thing as pure scientific truth.The forms taken by conceptual breakthrough
in sf are almost impossible to enumerate. David LINDSAY's A VOYAGE TO
ARCTURUS (1920) is structurally an ironic series of such breakthroughs,
with each new truth seen in turn to be as inadequate as the previous one,
until the grim, rather nihilistic and ultimate reality is revealed at the
end. John FOWLES's The Magus (1965; rev 1977) achieves a similar effect in
a non-sf context. C.S. LEWIS's Perelandra (1944; vt Voyage to Venus) has
some moments of startling beauty when the hero tries to accommodate his
perceptions to the alien configurations of Venus. William GOLDING's The
Inheritors (1955) has the breakthrough symbolized in the confrontation

between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon. Many of Ray CUMMINGS's PULP-MAGAZINE
stories deal with the realization (based, ironically, on a now discredited
paradigm) that an infinite series of worlds can exist, each within the
atoms of the next higher in the series. Various conceptual leaps take
place in most of Samuel R. DELANY's stories, notably "The Star Pit" (1967)
and BABEL-17 (1966). In the latter story the breakthrough, ultimately
conceptual, is initially LINGUISTIC. Delany sees paradigms as actually
existing within, and created by, language itself, a common view in
linguistic sf and one found also in Ian Watson's THE EMBEDDING (1973). In
Theodore STURGEON's "Who?" (1955; vt "Bulkhead") a spaceship pilot,
frightened of the unknown outside his ship, is cheered by the voice of his
unreachable companion beyond the bulkhead; only at the end does he find
that the other crewman is a mental projection of his own younger self, and
that the bulkhead is, metaphorically, in his own mind. Hal CLEMENT's
Mission of Gravity (1954) takes place on a high-gravity planet whose
natives are forced to understand their world through human eyes, and vice
versa. The SWORD-AND-SORCERY milieu of John CROWLEY's The Deep (1975),
accepted by the reader as a literary convention, turns out to have a quite
different explanation, necessitating a wrench to the reader's view of the
novel as well as the hero's view of his world. Ursula K. LE GUIN's The
Dispossessed (1974) is structured around parallel breakthroughs in
political understanding and fundamental physics; the crossing of walls is
the book's central image. The hero of Daniel KEYES's Flowers for Algernon
(1959 FSF; exp 1966) begins as a moron, comes to understand the nature of
the world as no other human can, then tragically has the gift of
intelligence taken away. The breakthrough in "Strangers" (1974) by Gardner
DOZOIS is in cultural understanding, and is accomplished only after the
death of the protagonist's alien lover. The breakthrough at the end of
Orbitsville (1975) by Bob SHAW takes place in an almost unimaginably huge
DYSON SPHERE, whose nature puts human evolutionary struggle into a new
perspective.Examples could be multiplied endlessly, and have been given
extensively to demonstrate how all-pervasive the theme is in sf; no
adequate DEFINITION OF SF can be formulated that does not somehow take it
into account. It is present, regardless of the usual boundaries, in old
wave and NEW WAVE, HEROIC FANTASY and HARD SF, GENRE SF and sf by
MAINSTREAM writers. It recurs so compulsively, and so much of the feeling
and passion of sf is generated by it, that it must be seen as springing
from a deep-rooted human need: to reach out, escape mental traps, prefer
movement to stasis; to understand. Sf is pre-eminently the literature of
the intellectually discontented, those who need to feel there must be more
to life than this; and therein lies its maturity, which by a paradox can
be seen as a perpetual adolescent yearning.The breakthrough is often
merely implicit in the text, and sometimes easy enough to miss. In these
cases it is the readers themselves whose perceptions are shifted through
their reading of clues. An extreme case is that of Gene WOLFE, whose Book
of the New Sun series is set in a quasimedieval-seeming heroic-fantasy
milieu, but the readers' genre expectations are rudely broken as they
realize that the book is pure sf, not fantasy; that the time is the far
future, not the distant past; that the tower in which apprentice torturers
are educated is in fact a derelict spaceship. Wolfe enjoys such coded
jolts, as in The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972), in which the narrator who

at the outset was a human anthropologist has towards the end been
supplanted by a shape-shifting native of the planet. The exact textual
point of the breakthrough can be identified, but only by a careful reader.
Thus conceptual breakthrough is not just the subject of much sf: it is
also, quite often, its designed effect.Conceptual breakthrough remained as
popular a theme as ever in the 1980s and 1990s, though seldom provoking
quite the same shock of surprise. The breakthrough in recent sf is often
catalysed by confrontation with alien artefacts ( BIG DUMB OBJECTS;
DISCOVERY AND INVENTION). The pre-eminent conceptual-breakthrough writer
of the 1980s is Greg BEAR, notably in BLOOD MUSIC (1985), a story of
evolutionary transcendence mediated by a new form of microorganism. Nancy
KRESS's AN ALIEN LIGHT (1988) contains a whole string of conceptual
breakthroughs as two rival human cultures and one alien culture make a
series of discoveries about each other's initially incomprehensible modes
of thinking and patterns of behaviour.Robert SILVERBERG is an interesting
case of a writer who - often - no sooner evokes a conceptual breakthrough
than he morosely contemplates its drawbacks for people who just want to be
ordinary human beings. Such is his The Face of the Waters (1991), in which
the revelation that all native life on a planet is linked in a single,
godlike, transcendent organism is followed by angst on the part of the
humans who may be allowed to join it. One feels that had Silverberg
overheard Galileo muttering "Eppur si muove" ["And yet it moves"] he would
have responded: "Yes, I agree, but I wish it didn't." [PN]
CONDE NAST
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.
CONDON, RICHARD (THOMAS)
(1915- ) US writer, formerly in advertising, best-known for works outside
the sf field such as Money is Love (1975), a rococo fantasy, though many,
including most notably The Manchurian Candidate (1959), employ some sf
elements in the complex generic mix characteristic of his fiction. Later
made into a well known film, The MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962), this novel
combines a superior kind of brainwashing and elements of the political
thriller ( POLITICS) in a story of the attempted assassination of the US
President. So extreme is RC's rendering (and rending) of the US political
scene that it is fair to think of much of his work as occupying a series
of ALTERNATE WORLDS, as in the savage Winter Kills (1974), which features
the assassination of a JFK-like US President at the behest of his own
father; in Mile High (1969), which argues the premise that Prohibition was
created as the Mafia's answer to market insecurity; in The Star Spangled
Crunch (1974), in which a 142-year-old tycoon manipulates the world
through oil crises; in The Whisper of the Axe (1976), which augurs a
successful overturning of the US Government, as does The Emperor of
America (1990); in Death of a Politician (1978), which castigates unto
death with Swiftian ( Jonathan SWIFT) vigour a Nixon-like figure; and in
The Final Addiction (1991), which is set in a grotesquely corrupt NEAR
FUTURE. All presume a USA subtly but distinctly other than our own. In all
of RC's work, an almost magic-realist intensity of attention to the turns
of plot combines with an unerring eye for the hypnotic surface of things
to gloss over his profound cynicism about the human animal. But the abyss

beneath never shelves. [JC]About the author: "Fantastic Non-Fantastic:
Richard Condon's Waking Nightmares" by Joe Sanders, Extrapolation 25.2
(1984).See also: FANTASY; PARANOIA.
CONDRAY, BRUNO G.
Pseudonym of UK writer Leslie George Humphrys (1921- ), known only as the
possible author of Odyssey in Space (1953), as by Vektis BRACK, and of The
Dissentizens (1954 chap) and Exile from Jupiter (1955 chap). [JC]
CONEHEADS
Film (1993). Paramount. Dir Steve Barron, prod Lorne Michaels, starring
Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman and Michael McKean. Screenplay
Tom Davis ?
gentle and very lightweight SATIRE, an intermittently amusing comedy, is
based on sketches first performed on the US tv show Saturday Night Live.
Two aliens (Aykroyd and Curtin), humanoids with conical heads who are
married to one another, crashland in New York when plans to spearhead an
alien invasion of Earth go wrong. Since a rescue expedition will not pick
them up for many years, they are compelled to live as humans. Upwardly
socially mobile, the male begins working in a repair shop, then (dressed
in a turban) drives a taxi, and eventually becomes a middle-class
suburbanite, father of a typical American cone-headed teenage daughter
(Newman), who excels at golf. Apart from an over-the-top performance by
McKean, who plays the obsessive immigration officer determined to track
them down for working as illegal immigrants, there is little pungency in
either script or performances, and the film lacks the bite of the somewhat
similar MEET THE APPLEGATES. The best running gag is the fact that almost
nobody picks them as aliens, despite the giveaway huge heads. [PN]
CONEY, MICHAEL G(REATREX)
(1932- ) UK-born writer, resident in Canada since 1973, working for the
British Columbia Forest Service until his retirement in 1989. He was the
manager of the Jabberwock Hotel in Antigua when he published his first
story, "Sixth Sense" for Visions of Tomorrow in 1969; several more
followed rapidly. His first novel, Mirror Image (1972 US) features ALIEN
"amorphs" who can so perfectly mimic humans that, when they have done so,
they believe themselves to be in fact human; the amorphs reappear in
Brontomek! (1976 UK), which won the BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD. The
ecological ( ECOLOGY) puzzle story Syzygy (1973 US) is set on the same
world. Another novel loosely connected to these is Charisma (1975 UK), a
PARALLEL-WORLDS story whose chief locale is a Cornish fishing village;
similar seaside towns, often transplanted to other planets, commonly
feature in his work. The Hero of Downways (1973 US) is a more stereotyped
action-adventure story, but Friends Come in Boxes (fixup 1973 US; rev 1974
UK) is a fascinatingly grim account of an unorthodox solution to the
problem of OVERPOPULATION. Perhaps the best of his early books are
Winter's Children (1974 UK), a post- HOLOCAUST novel, and Hello Summer,
Goodbye (1975 UK; vt Rax 1975 US; vt Pallahaxi Tide 1990 Canada), a
wistful story of adolescent love in an alien environment. A series of
stories somewhat reminiscent in their setting of J.G. BALLARD's Vermilion
Sands includes several which were amalgamated into The Girl with a
Symphony in her Fingers (fixup 1975 UK; vt The Jaws that Bite, the Claws

that Catch 1975 US).After Brontomek! there was a considerable gap in MGC's
writing career, the two books published during the hiatus, the DYSTOPIAN
The Ultimate Jungle (1979 UK) and the UNDER-THE-SEA adventure Neptune's
Children (1981 US), being books written earlier that had not sold on first
submission. His more recent work is bound together by a FAR-FUTURE
background developed in the two-decker novel The Song of Earth: The
Celestial Steam Locomotive (1983 US) and Gods of the Greataway (1984 US).
Here humans co-exist with other humanoid species, living out a kind of
languid dream thanks to the manipulation by a COMPUTER, Rainbow, of the
Ifalong (a multiverse of ALTERNATE WORLDS) despite the interference of the
godlike alien Starquin. Publication of this was preceded by the spinoff
novel Cat Karina (1982 US). MGC then employed the highly flexible
metaphysical context to frame two eccentric Arthurian fantasies, Fang the
Gnome (1988 US) and its sequel King of the Scepter'd Isle (1989 US).
[MJE/BS]Other works: Monitor Found in Orbit (coll 1974 US); the British
Columbiasequence comprising A Tomcat Called Sabrina (1992) and No Place
for a Sealion (1992), each containing fantasy elements.See also: ARTS;
COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; GAMES AND SPORTS; PLANETARY ROMANCE;
REINCARNATION; UNDER THE SEA.
CONKLIN, (EDWARD) GROFF
(1904-1968) US editor who began his career as manager of Doubleday Book
Stores 1930-34, and who intermittently held various editing positions, in
and out of commercial publishing, for the rest of his life; he was,
however, primarily a freelance. The first of his many sf ANTHOLOGIES was
The Best of Science Fiction (anth 1946), a huge compendium which vied in
size and potential influence with Raymond J. HEALY's and J. Francis
MCCOMAS's Adventures in Time and Space (1946), although the latter book
was contracted earlier and had first pick of the material. Nevertheless,
The Best of Science Fiction and its successors from the same publisher - A
Treasury of Science Fiction (anth 1948; much cut 1957), The Big Book of
Science Fiction (anth 1950; much cut 1957) and The Omnibus of Science
Fiction (anth 1952; much cut vt Science Fiction Omnibus 1952; much cut vt
Strange Travels in Science Fiction 1953; much cut vt Strange Adventures in
Science Fiction 1954 UK; cut 1986 - all cut versions differing in their
excisions) - are rewarding compilations. GC wrote a book-review column for
GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION from #1 (Oct 1950) until Oct 1955. He also edited
for Grosset ?
with novels by A.E. VAN VOGT, Jack WILLIAMSON and others. The series
included the first book publication of Henry KUTTNER's Fury (1947 ASF as
Lawrence O'Donnell; 1950) with an introduction by GC which has been
reprinted in subsequent editions. GC produced anthologies on various
themes, including INVASION in Invaders of Earth (anth 1952; much cut 1953
UK; much cut 1955 US; much cut 1962 US; much cut in 2 vols vt Invaders of
Earth 1962 UK and Enemies in Space 1962 UK - all cut versions differing in
their excisions), TIME TRAVEL and PARALLEL WORLDS in Science Fiction
Adventures in Dimension (anth 1953; cut vt Adventures in Dimension 1955
UK; cut under original title 1965 US), ROBOTS, ANDROIDS and COMPUTERS in
Science Fiction Thinking Machines (anth 1954; cut vt Selections from
Science Fiction Thinking Machines 1955) and MUTANTS in Science Fiction
Adventures in Mutation (anth 1955; cut 1955). Later GC became consultant

sf editor to Collier Books, for whom he produced the notable anthologies
Great Science Fiction by Scientists (anth 1962) and Fifty Short Science
Fiction Tales (anth 1963), the latter with Isaac ASIMOV. GC's anthologies
were never definitive but were always considered and capable.
[MJE/JC]Other works as editor: The Science Fiction Galaxy (anth 1950);
Possible Worlds of Science Fiction (anth 1951); In the Grip of Terror
(anth 1951); Crossroads in Time (anth 1953); The Supernatural Reader (anth
1953) with Lucy Conklin; 6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction (anth
1954), not the same collection as Six Great Short Science Fiction Novels
(anth 1960), though both are from the same publisher; Science Fiction
Terror Tales (anth 1955); Operation Future (anth 1955); The Graveyard
Reader (anth 1958); 4 for the Future (anth 1959); Br-r-r-! (anth 1959); 13
Great Stories of Science Fiction (anth 1960); Twisted (anth 1962); Worlds
of When (anth 1962); 12 Great Classics of Science Fiction (anth 1963); 17
x Infinity (anth 1963); Dimenson 4 (anth 1964); Five-Odd (anth 1964; vt
Possible Tomorrows 1972 UK); 5 Unearthly Visions (anth 1965); Giants
Unleashed (anth 1965; vt Minds Unleashed 1970); 13 Above the Night (anth
1965); Another Part of the Galaxy (anth 1966); Seven Come Infinity (anth
1966); Science Fiction Oddities (anth 1966; cut vt Science Fiction
Oddities, Second Series 1969 UK); Elsewhere and Elsewhen (anth 1968; vt in
2 vols Science Fiction Elsewhen 1970 UK and Science Fiction Elsewhere 1970
UK); Seven Trips through Time and Space (anth 1968).See also: ALIENS;
CYBERNETICS; PUBLISHING.
CONLY, JANE LESLIE
[r] Robert C. O'BRIEN.
CONNER, MIKE
Working name of US writer Michael Conner (1951- ), who used his full name
for the first half decade or so of his career, beginning to publish work
of genre interest with "Extinction of Confidence, the Exercise of Honesty"
in New Constellations (anth 1976) ed Thomas M. DISCH and Charles Naylor.
His first novel, I am Not the Other Houdini (1978; vt The Houdini
Directive 1989), is a burlesque flirtation with apocalypse set in
California in the 21st century. Groupmind (1984) is less eccentric; but
Eye of the Sun (1988), told with the genre-mixing abundance of many
PLANETARY ROMANCES, follows the careening adolescence of three royal
children as their FAR-FUTURE world totters into a religious crisis which
threatens a long-sustained matriarchy. He won a 1992 NEBULA for "Guide
Dog" (1991). [JC]
CONNIE
US sf COMIC strip, written and drawn by Frank Godwin (1889-1959) from its
beginnings in 1927 until 1944, when it was terminated after several years
of dwindling success. The early years of the strip, which featured
throughout the madcap adventures of its eponymous flapper heroine, were
relatively mundane, but by the mid-1930s Connie had become involved in
LOST-WORLDS tales, encounters with mad SCIENTISTS, interplanetary missions
and TIME TRAVEL. Godwin was not much admired for his writing, but his
complex illustrations, both painterly and draughtsmanlike, made the strip
memorable. [JC]

CONNINGTON, J.J.
Pseudonym for all his fiction of UK writer and chemistry professor Alfred
Walter Stewart (1880-1947), best known for his detective novels. His one
sf novel was Nordenholt's Million (1923). A prototype story of worldDISASTER being surmounted, it is realistic, reasoned, sociologically
observed and credible. Fireball-mutated denitrifying bacteria destroy the
world's vegetation, then die out. A multimillionaire secures the
dictatorship of the UK, selects five million people, segregates them in
the Clyde valley with supplies, and engineers the collapse of the rest of
the country. On the Clyde, nitrogen is synthesized, moral crises take
place, there is an atomic-energy breakthrough at the cost of lives, and
the exhausted dictator dies. New cities are built. JJC's intellect tackles
the scenario seriously and with feeling; though he is occasionally
over-"literary", his imagination is firmly anchored in reality. Under his
own name he wrote publications on chemistry and, about himself, Alias J.J.
Connington (1947). [DIM]See also: END OF THE WORLD; HISTORY OF SF;
HOLOCAUST AND AFTER.
CONNOLLY, ROY
(? - ) UK writer of whom nothing is known beyond his collaboration with
the equally diffident Frank McIlraith on one sf novel, Invasion from the
Air: A Prophetic Novel (1934), which depicts with some vividness the
effects on London of raids using poison gas and incendiaries. The
consequences, it is suggested, will include revolution ( WAR). [JC]
CONQUEST, JOAN
(?1883-1941) UK writer of floridly euphemistic novels of high romance,
typical of which are Leonie of the Jungle (1921), whose eponymous heroine
escapes the hypnotic thrall of the goddess Kali in the nick of time, and
Love's Curse (1936), in which the spirit of an Egyptian pharaoh curses two
20th-century lovers. Her two sf novels are The Reckoning (1931), in which
it is presumed that artificial insemination will result in females lacking
both morality and reproductive organs, and With the Lid Off (1936), a
future- UTOPIA in which a benevolent Christian dictatorship holds sway.
[JC]
CONQUEST, (GEORGE) ROBERT (ACWORTH)
(1917- ) UK writer, poet, critic and editor, most active as an sf figure
in the latter capacity, editing with Kingsley AMIS (whom see for details)
the Spectrum ANTHOLOGIES , though some sf essays and reviews of interest
appear in The Abomination of Moab (coll 1979), a non- fiction collection.
RC was educated at Oxford (DLitt), was a member of the Diplomatic Corps
1946-56, and was later literary editor of the Spectator. He has an OBE. In
addition to much poetry, political history and a non-sf novel, The
Egyptologists (1965) with Amis, he published A World of Difference (1955),
an sf tale whose complicated and discursive plot combines poltical (
POLITICS) speculation with a remotely told scientific adventure centred on
a new space drive destined to give humanity a chance to reach beyond the
Solar System. [JC]Other work as editor: The Robert Sheckley Omnibus (coll
1973).
CONQUEST OF SPACE, THE

Film (1955). Paramount. Prod George PAL, dir Byron HASKIN, starring
Walter Brooke, Eric Fleming, Ross Martin, Mickey Shaughnessy. Screenplay
James O'Hanlon, based remotely on Weltraumfahrt (1952; trans H.J. White as
The Mars Project 1953 US), by Wernher von Braun (1912-1977). 80 mins.
Colour.The title of this film is taken from the popular-science book The
Conquest of Space (1949) by Chesley BONESTELL and Willy LEY. Though
supposedly based on a work of science fact by von Braun, the story, set in
the 1980s, of a military research expedition to Mars and back is riddled
with implausibilities, both scientific (an asteroid burning in the vacuum
of space) and human (the commander, regarded as the only person capable of
sustaining the mission, becomes a twitching religious fanatic - at one
point uttering the celebrated line: "There are some things that Man is not
meant to do"). There is a strange but irrelevant Oedipal conflict, ending
with the son killing his father, the commander, when the latter tries to
sabotage the ship. The special effects are quite ambitious but clumsily
executed, in particular the matte work. A truly awful film, TCOS is
probably Pal's worst production; it was his last for Paramount. [JB/PN]See
also: SPACE HABITATS.
CONQUEST OF THE EARTH
GALACTICA: 1980.
CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES
Film (1972). Apjac/20th Century-Fox. Dir J. Lee Thompson, starring Roddy
McDowall, Don Murray, Natalie Trundy, Hari Rhodes. Screenplay Paul Dehn,
based on characters created by Pierre BOULLE. 86 mins. Colour.This was the
fourth in the ever-weakening series of films beginning in 1968 with PLANET
OF THE APES. Caesar (McDowall), the ape born in ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF
THE APES (1971), is being kept in a circus but comes to resent the human
exploitation of apes so much that, with the help of a sympathetic and all
too symbolic Black man (Rhodes), he incites his fellow primates to revolt.
The film ends with apes victorious over humans after a bloody battle, thus
laying the ground for the future situation (there has been a time-warp) of
Planet of the Apes. All this is crudely simplistic. The novelization is
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes * (1974) by John JAKES. [JB]
CONRAD, EARL
(1912-1986) US writer, fairly prolific and sometimes controversial. His
sf comprises a NEAR-FUTURE novel, The Premier (1963), and a collection of
short stories, The Da Vinci Machine: Tales of the Population Explosion
(coll 1969). [JC]
CONRAD, GREGG
[s] Rog PHILLIPS.
CONRAD, JOSEPH
(1857-1924) Naturalized UK writer, born in Poland. His full name was
Josef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski. For most of his life he laboured
under the misprision of his early reputation as a teller of"mere" sea
tales; but posthumously he has received due attention for more complex
later works like Nostromo (1904) and The Secret Agent (1907). Though it is
not sf, "Heart of Darkness" (1902), a dense and potently shaped allegory
of guilt, colonialism, alienation and false epiphany in the abyss of

Africa, has more than once served as a model for modern sf writers, like
Michael BISHOP and Lucius SHEPARD, obsessed by similar concerns: whenever
an sf explorer comes across a ravaged cod-godling "white man" in the
tropical heart of an alien planet, JC's memory has shaped the tale.
Another story, "The Secret Sharer" (1912), has similarly been embraced by
Robert SILVERBERG in The Secret Sharer (1988). With Ford Madox FORD JC
wrote The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (1901); the people of the title
represent a future race, the "Dimensionists", who will come to supersede
ordinary mankind. Though the novel is primarily political SATIRE in its
projection of the cold, practical, manipulative future humans, it is
genuine sf in its use of themes of other DIMENSIONS and EVOLUTION.
[JC/PN]About the author: "Joseph Conrad's Forgotten Role in the Emergence
of Science Fiction" by Elaine L. Kleiner, in EXTRAPOLATION, Dec 1973.See
also: CLUB STORY.
CONRAD, M.G.
[r] GERMANY.
CONRAD, PAUL
Preferred pseudonym of UK writer and journalist Albert King (1924- ), an
extremely prolific writer in various genres under a series of names: for
his ROBERT HALE LIMITED sf he has used PC, his own name, Mark Bannon,
Floyd Gibson, Scott Howell, Christopher King and Paul Muller. Born in
Northern Ireland, he left school at the age of 14. He is the author of
about 120 Westerns, 44 thrillers and 29 romances in addition to his
production of 16 sf titles (over 2 years), of which the most notable are
perhaps Ex Minus (1974), as by PC, and The World of Jonah Klee (1976), as
by Christopher King. Most of his work is routine adventure. [JC]Other
works as PC: Last Man on Kluth V (1975); The Slave Bug (1975).As Albert
King: Stage Two (1974).As Mark Bannon: The Wayward Robot (1974); The
Assimilator (1974); The Tomorrow Station (1975).As Floyd Gibson: A Slip of
Time (1974); A Shadow of Gastor (1975); The Manufactured People (1975).As
Scott Howell: Menace from Magor (1974); Passage to Oblivion (1975).As
Christopher King: Operation Mora (1974).As Paul Muller: The Man from Ger
(1974); Brother Gib (1975).
CONROY, RICK
Working name of UK writer Richard Conroy (? - ), best known for his
Westerns as by Duke Montana, and for historical Westerns as Scott
Jefferson. He was also active around 1950 as an author of routine sf
novels, almost certainly being responsible for 3 titles as by Lee Stanton:
Mushroom Men of Mars (1951), Seven to the Moon (1951) and Report from
Mandazo (1951). Under his own name he wrote Mission to Mars (1952) and
Martians in a Frozen World (1952); they are unconnected. [JC]
CONSTANTINE, MURRAY
Katherine BURDEKIN.
CONSTANTINE, STORM
(1956- ) UK writer whose name, initially a pseudonym, is now her name for
all purposes. Her most successful work to date is probably the Wraeththu
trilogy which began her career: The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit
(1987), The Bewitchments of Love and Hate (1988) and The Fulfilments of

Fate and Desire (1989), all three assembled as Wraeththu (omni 1993). The
sequence follows the rise of a hermaphroditic race from men (not, at least
initially, from women), who take possession of a post- HOLOCAUST Earth
devastated by war and pollution. The books focus on the question of
whether the Wraeththu, mystically aware and symbolically balanced between
male and female yet frequently fascinated by violence and destruction,
will prove to be any better than the humans they replace. The Monstrous
Regiment (dated 1989 but 1990) is set on a colony world where FEMINISM has
gone disastrously wrong and the psychotic ruler - the Dominatrix - plans
to confine all men to compounds and milk them for semen to produce
children. The sequel, Aleph (1991), is less inflamed. In Hermetech (1991)
a woman saves an ecologically damaged Earth by means of a sexual coupling,
the energies from which are technologically redirected into the planet's
"consciousness". SC's novels, which are not really set within an sf
framework, give equal weight to the underlying assumptions of science and
modern pagan magick. They are all fundamentally concerned with sex and
gender (especially androgyny), approached through the realities and
potentials of both the male and female experience, a technique very
considerably sophisticated in Calenture (1994), whose immortal protagonist
( IMMORTALITY) traces - in his imagination, and ultimately in truth - two
characters he has in a sense created as they trek through a world of
CITIES whose wild divergences offer considerable scope for loose but
invigorating SATIRE. Her writing continues to be vigorous, erotic, highly
visual, aesthetically informed by a late punk/Goth sensibility,
occasionally somewhat crudely executed, and linguistically shaped by an
unusual fusion of intensely contemporary slang and ritualistic "High
Style". [NT]Other works: Burying the Shadow (1992); When the Angels Came
(1992 chap); Sign for the Sacred (1993).See also: CYBERPUNK; ESP; GAMES
WORKSHOP; INTERZONE; NEW WORLDS.
CONTAMINATION
CONTAMINATION: ALIEN ARRIVA SULLA TERRA.
CONTAMINATION: ALIEN ARRIVA SULLA TERRA
(vt Contamination; vt Alien Contamination) Film (1981). Cannon. Dir Luigi
Cozzi, starring Ian McCulloch, Louise Marleau, Siegfried Rauch, Martin
Mase, Lisa Hahn. Screenplay Cozzi. 85 mins. Colour."In Italy," says Cozzi,
"when you bring your script to a producer, the first question he asks is .
. . What film is your film like?" This is one of several competing Italian
attempts to exploit the success of ALIEN (1979). Its opening imitates
Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 (1979) (mysteriously deserted ship with monstrous
cargo docked in New York, and the use of actor McCulloch); and a lot is
borrowed from QUATERMASS II (1957). A tolerably lively effort, which
repeats too often its image of an alien parasite making characters'
stomachs explode in a flurry of guts and blood, this has a Martian MONSTER
and a hypnotized astronaut disseminating alien seed-pods around the globe.
There's a loud score by Goblin, and some well staged action as resourceful
heroes take on zombified alien slaves and an especially ridiculous
last-reel monster. [KN]
CONTENTO, WILLIAM G(UY)
(1947- ) US hardware technical support engineer for Cray Research at

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and bibliographer. His books,
beginning with Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections (1978)
and Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections: 1977-1983
(1984), are essential tools of reference. Researchers wishing to know
where to locate short stories in collections and ANTHOLOGIES (and also
what books of or about sf were published in a given year) after this
period would normally then turn to the annual series compiled by Charles
N. BROWN and WGC, and published by LOCUS Press, beginning, in terms of
coverage year, with Science Fiction, Fantasy, ?
going on through Science Fiction in Print: 1985 (1986), Science Fiction,
Fantasy, ?
(1988), Science Fiction, Fantasy, ?
Fantasy, ?
1990 (1991) and Science Fiction, Fantasy, ?
of the series. Despite very occasional omissions, these are still by far
the most comprehensive annual BIBLIOGRAPHIES available, containing useful
comment about the nature of each title. They are even more useful from
1988 (1989) onwards, as the later volumes contain a Research Index by Hal
W. HALL. WGC has also compiled, with Martin H. GREENBERG, Index to Crime
and Mystery Anthologies (1990). [PN]
CONTINENTAL PUBLICATIONS
WONDER STORIES.
CONVENTIONS
One of the principal features of sf FANDOM, conventions are usually
weekend gatherings of fans and authors, frequently with a programme of sf
discussion and events. In FAN LANGUAGE conventions are usually referred to
as cons. They are informal, not professionally organized, and with no
delegated attendants or, usually, paid speakers. Typical activities
include talks, auctions, films, panel discussions, masquerades and
banquets.Although some US sf fans date the first convention to 1936, when
a group of fans from New York spent a day with a group from Philadelphia
(including Oswald TRAIN), the first formally planned sf convention took
place in Leeds, UK, in 1937. Since then regular conventions have been
established around the world. In the UK the major annual convention is
known as Eastercon (inaugurated 1948), though it was held at Whitsun until
1955 (except 1950, when there was no convention), and has had up to 900
attending; recent venues have included Liverpool, Leeds, Glasgow, Jersey
and Blackpool. A second convention, Novacon, was added to the calendar in
1971; it takes place every November in Birmingham and attracts some 300
people. Since the late 1970s there has been an explosion in the number of
small conventions held in the UK.The first US convention was held in New
York in 1938 and the first Worldcon, now the premier sf convention, took
place there in 1939 (though it was originally so-named because of the
World's Fair in New York that year). Worldcon, at which the HUGO Awards
are presented, is held annually, usually in the USA, where it has
attracted as many as 8000 attending. It has also gone once each to Germany
(1970) and Holland (1990), twice each to Canada (1948 and 1973) and
Australia (1975 and 1985), and four times to the UK (1957, 1965, 1979 and
1987). Annual regional conventions have also been long established in

North America: major events include Westercon (inaugurated 1948),
Midwestcon (inaugurated 1950), Deepsouthcon (inaugurated 1963), Disclave
(Washington; inaugurated 1950), Lunacon (New York; inaugurated 1957),
Boskone (Boston; inaugurated 1964) and Windycon (Chicago; inaugurated
1974). There are also national conventions in AUSTRALIA, JAPAN and several
European countries, including FINLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, ITALY, the
NETHERLANDS and NORWAY. In 1976 one of the international Eurocons
(inaugurated 1971) was held in POLAND, the first sf convention in what was
then the communist bloc.Sf conventions are now very numerous, especially
in the USA: taking the whole world into account, there are about 150 a
year. There are similarities and a degree of overlap between sf cons and
those held by fans of COMICS, FANTASY and horror, and also the specialist
conventions held by fans of, for example, STAR TREK and DR WHO. [PR/RH]
CONWAY, GERARD F.
(1952- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Through the Dark Glass"
for AMZ in 1970. His first sf novel was The Midnight Dancers (1971).
Mindship (1971 Universe; exp 1974) is a SPACE OPERA: the mindships of the
title are spaceships coordinated by the PSI POWERS of specially trained
"corks". Not untypically of sf novels of the time, by the end of the book
a gestalt state has been achieved between one cork and his captain. As
Wallace Moore, GFC wrote the Balzan of the Cat People series: The
Bloodstone (1974), The Caves of Madness (1975) and The Lights of Zetar
(1975). [JC]See also: FASTER THAN LIGHT.
CONWAY, TROY
Michael AVALLONE.
COOK, GLEN (CHARLES)
(1944- ) US writer who began his sf career with orthodox stories like his
first, "Song from a Forgotten Hill", in Clarion (anth 1971), and with the
sf novel The Heirs of Babylon (1972), in which an authoritarian religious
government takes over after the HOLOCAUST. However, he soon became best
known for his high FANTASY, especially the Dread Empire series, which was
notable for its concerted military set-pieces, moderately complex
plotting, violence, and a sense of undue haste - he has been exceedingly
prolific. The series includes: A Shadow of All Night Falling (1979);
October's Baby (1980); All Darkness Met (1980); "Soldier of an Empire
Unacquainted with Defeat" (1980); a 2-vol subsequence made up of The Fire
in his Hands (1984) and With Mercy Toward None (1985); Reap the East Wind
(1987); An Ill Fate Marshalling; (1988). A further, similar series, the
Chronicles of the Black Company, perhaps stands out; the first 3 vols The Black Company (1984), Shadows Linger (1984) and The White Rose (1985)
- were assembled as Annals of the Black Company (omni 1986), and were
followed by a second sequence, the Book of the South, comprising Shadow
Games (1989) and Dreams of Steel (1990); The Silver Spike (1989) is set in
the same world. A series of humorous fantasies, starring a Chandleresque
private eye named Garrett, provides a somewhat relentless light relief,
with titles derivative of John D. MACDONALD: Sweet Silver Blues (1987),
Bitter Gold Hearts (1988), Cold Copper Tears (1988) - all three assembled
as The Garrett Files (omni 1988) - Old Tin Sorrows (1989), Dread Brass
Shadows (1990), Red Iron Nights (1991) and Deadly Quicksilver Lies (1994).

Of his singletons, A Matter of Time (1985), a TIME-TRAVEL tale starring
detective figures, and The Tower of Fear (1989), a strongly plotted
fantasy, are the most notable. GC is a writer of considerable energy but
little patience. [JC]Other works: The Swap Academy (1970) as by Greg
Stevens, GC's first novel, a non-genre erotica title; The Swordbearer
(1982); the Starfishers sequence, comprising Shadowline (1982),
Starfishers (1982) and Stars' End (1982), which is related to Passage at
Arms (1985); the Darkwar trilogy: Doomstalker (1985), Warlock (1985) and
Ceremony (1986); The Dragon Never Sleeps (1988), a SPACE OPERA; Sung in
Blood (1990), a fantasy.About the author: A Glen Cook Bibliography (1983
chap) by Cook and Roger C. SCHLOBIN.
COOK, HUGH (MURRAY WILLIAM)
(1957- ) NEW ZEALAND author, known primarily for his mildly competent and
sometimes inventive fantasy series, Chronicles of an Age of Darkness,
which seems intended for a young-adult readership. His only sf novel, The
Shift (1986 UK), a finalist in the 1985 Young Writers' Competition run by
The Times (London) with publishers Jonathan Cape, is a confused tale of
deeply undergraduate humour about an alien INVASION and a machine that
selectively alters human history. [PN]Other works: Plague Summer (1980),
not sf; the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness fantasy series, comprising
#1: The Wizards and the Warriors (1986 UK; vt Wizard War 1987 US), #2: The
Wordsmiths and the Warguild, or The Questing Hero (1987 UK; in 2 vols vt
The Questing Hero 1987 US and The Hero's Return 1988 US), #3: The Women
and the Warlords (1987 UK; vt The Oracle 1987 US), #4: The Walrus and the
Warwolf (1988 UK; cut vt Lords of the Sword 1991 US), #5: The Wicked and
the Witless (1989 UK), #6: The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers (1990 UK),
#7: The Wazir and the Witch (1990 UK), #8: The Werewolf and the Wormlord
(1991), #9: The Worshippers and the Way (1992)and #10: The Witchlord and
the Weaponmaster(1992).
COOK, PAUL H(ARLIN)
(1950- ) US poet and novelist whose infrequent sf stories began with "The
Character Assassin" in Other Worlds #1 (anth 1979) ed Roy TORGESON. In his
first novel, Tintagel (1981), a virus transports its victims, by
actualizing their response to MUSIC, into fantasy worlds from which the
immune protagonist must rescue them. Duende Meadow (1985) depicts the
post- HOLOCAUST return of North Americans to the surface of the world,
where they find Russian farmers. The lure of transcendence marks PHC's
books; if their focus sharpens, they may become substantial. [JC]Other
works: The Alejandra Variations (1984); HALO (1986); On the Rim of the
Mandala (1987), a congested SPACE OPERA.See also: EVOLUTION; MUSIC.
COOK, ROBIN
1.Working name of UK writer Robert William Arthur Cook (1931-1994),
resident for some years in France (in order, he intimated, to put distance
between himself and gangland acquaintances) before returning to the UK a
year or so before his death . He wrote thrillers as Derek Raymond, a name
he began to use when his career was flagging and his own name was eclipsed
by 2. His last novel as RC, A State of Denmark, or A Warning to the
Incurious (1970), is a savage and scatological depiction of a NEAR-FUTURE
welfare DYSTOPIA in the UK.2. (1940- ) US writer of medical horror

thrillers whose premises are often extracted from sf. His best-known novel
is his first, Coma (1977), filmed as COMA (1978) by his medical- HORROR
confrere Michael CRICHTON. Others include Brain (1981), Fever (1982),
Godplayer (1983), Mindbend (1985), Outbreak (1987), Mortal Fear (1988),
Mutation (1989), Harmful Intent(1990) and Terminal (1993). [JC]See also:
BIOLOGY; GENETIC ENGINEERING; MEDICINE; TECHNOTHRILLER.
COOK, WILLIAM WALLACE
(1867-1933) US writer, reportedly pseudonymous, much of whose production
appeared after the turn of the century in such magazines as The ARGOSY,
and only later in book form, in a stapled format reminiscent of DIME-NOVEL
SF. Noteworthy among these books are A Round Trip to the Year 2000, or A
Flight Through Time (1903 The Argosy; 1925), in which various contemporary
writers travel by SUSPENDED ANIMATION to AD2000, where they observe social
conditions, and find themselves popular, and Adrift in the Unknown, or
Adventures in a Queer Realm (1904-5 The Argosy; 1925), a satire on US
capitalism in which a burglar goes along for the ride with a reformist
scientist in his spaceship to MERCURY, where he teaches the kidnapped
capitalists he has brought with him some lessons in social justice. WWC
was a crude writer, but is of interest in his attempts to combine
adventure plots and SATIRE. [JC]Other works: Castaway at the Pole (1904
The Argosy; 1926); Marooned in 1492, or Under Fortune's Flag (1905 The
Argosy; 1925); The Eighth Wonder, or Working for Miracles (1906-7 The
Argosy; 1925); Around the World in Eighty Hours (1925).See also: DISCOVERY
AND INVENTION; HISTORY OF SF; ROBOTS; TIME TRAVEL.
COOKE, ARTHUR
Collaborative pseudonym used on "The Psychological Regulator" (1941) by
C.M. KORNBLUTH, Robert LOWNDES, John Michell (1917-1969), Elsie Balter and
Donald A. WOLLHEIM. [JC]
COOKE, JOHN ESTES
L. Frank BAUM.
COON, HORACE
(1897-1961) US writer in whose 43,000 Years Later (1958) ALIENS come to a
post- HOLOCAUST Earth, become intrigued by the civilization that had gone
before, and, through records, explore the 20th-century world to satirical
effect. [JC]
COON, SUSAN
Pseudonym of US writer Susan Plunkett (1945- ), whose Living Planet
sequence - Rahne (1980), Cassilee (1980), The Virgin (1981) and Chiy-Une
(1982) - skids rather loosely about a GALACTIC-EMPIRE setting, only to
terminate in an abrupt and complicated coming-together of humans and
ALIENS on the sentient world which gave its name to the final volume. [JC]
COOPER, C. EVERETT
R. REGINALD.
COOPER, COLIN (SYMONS)
(1926- ) UK writer, active as a scriptwriter for TELEVISION and RADIO.
His first sf was a 6-part BBC serial, "Host Planet Earth" (1967). His
somewhat downbeat sf novels, The Thunder and Lightning Man (1968) and

Outcrop (1970), have not had a strong impact on the field. Dargason (1977)
is a story of the NEAR FUTURE in which, for mysterious reasons, listeners
to MUSIC become severely affected by a variety of psychologically extreme
states; it was perhaps the only sf thriller before Paul H. COOK's Tintagel
(1981) to posit music as a WEAPON. [JC/PN]Other works: The Epping Pyramid
(1978).
COOPER, EDMUND
(1926-1982) UK writer who served in the British Merchant Navy 1939-45 and
who began to publish stories of genre interest with "The Unicorn" (1951),
producing a considerable amount of short fiction in the 1950s, much of it
assembled (with considerable overlap) in Tomorrow's Gift (coll 1958 US),
Voices in the Dark (coll 1960) and Tomorrow Came (coll 1963). His early
pseudonyms included Martin Lester; George Kinley, under which name he
published his first sf novel, Ferry Rocket (1954); and Broderick Quain.
For a later sf adventure series (see listing below) he used the name
Richard Avery.It was as a novelist that EC became most highly regarded,
and it was for his earlier novels that he was most appreciated, though
later works like The Overman Culture (1971) showed a continuing (if
reluctant) facility in newer modes; in his persistent use of post-nuclearHOLOCAUST settings he was probably expressing his own conviction about the
future course of events. His first novel under his own name, The Uncertain
Midnight (1958; vt Deadly Image 1958 US), describes a post-holocaust world
in which ANDROIDS are gradually threatening to supplant humankind. Seed of
Light (1959) is a GENERATION-STARSHIP novel in which a small group manages
to escape from a devastated Earth. Other novels to incorporate the basic
premise that the planet has been rendered to a greater or lesser degree
uninhabitable include The Last Continent (1969 US), The Tenth Planet (1973
US) and The Cloud Walker (1973), which was his best received novel
(certainly in the USA) and the last to be much praised. Its message was
perhaps conventional, but was competently delivered: even though two
nuclear holocausts have afflicted England, the Luddite response of a new
church is inappropriate, and the young protagonist properly wins the day
with an invention which he uses to defend his village from assailants. As
the novel closes, the march of progress is seen to resume.In general,
however, EC's later work lacked much joie de vivre, while an antiFEMINIST point of view - he was quoted as saying of women: "Let them
compete against men, they'll see that they can't make it"-became explicit
in his novels Five to Twelve (1968) and Who Needs Men? (1972; vt Gender
Genocide 1973 US), and implicit elsewhere. These attitudes were neither
politic, in the heightened atmosphere of the 1970s, nor in fact
intrinsically becoming. The stories assembled in Merry Christmas, Ms
Minerva! (coll 1978) failed to help. EC died with his reputation at a low
ebb; but he was a competent and prolific writer, and a better balance may
some day be reached. [MJE/JC]Other works: Wish Goes to Slumberland (1960
chap), a fantasy for children; Transit (1964); All Fools' Day (1966); A
Far Sunset (1967); News from Elsewhere (coll 1968); Sea-Horse in the Sky
(1969); Son of Kronk (1970; vt Kronk 1971 US); The Square Root of Tomorrow
(coll 1970); Unborn Tomorrow (coll 1971); The Slaves of Heaven (1974 US);
Prisoner of Fire (1974); Jupiter Laughs (coll 1980); A World of Difference
(coll 1980).As Richard Avery: The Expendables sequence of SPACE OPERAS,

comprising The Deathworms of Kratos (1975), The Rings of Tantalus (1975),
The War Games of Zelos (1975) and The Venom of Argus (1976).About the
author: "Hope for the Future: The Science Fiction Novels of Edmund Cooper"
and "An Interview with Edmund Cooper" both by James Goddard, in Science
Fiction Monthly vol 2 #4.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; DISASTER; OUTER PLANETS;
SCIENCE FICTION BOOK CLUB; SEX; SOCIOLOGY.
COOPER, JAMES FENIMORE
(1789-1851) US writer, best known for the Leather-Stocking Tales sequence
in a gentlemanly frontier-adventure tale style, which includes The Last of
the Mohicans (1826) and many other widely read novels featuring the
woodsman Natty Bumppo. In JFC's sf novel, The Monikins (1835), an English
gentleman purchases several captured specimens from an articulate monkey
civilization located in a LOST WORLD in the Antarctic, which they describe
to him so vividly that he returns there with them, only to find that the
monkey civilization parodies 19th-century human politics. As in many
PROTO-SCIENCE-FICTION tales of this sort, the protagonist then awakens.
The Crater, or Vulcan's Peak (1847; vt Man's Reef, or The Crater 1868 UK)
is a UTOPIA set on an ISLAND, which sinks. [JC]See also: APES AND CAVEMEN
(IN THE HUMAN WORLD).
COOPER, SUSAN (MARY)
(1935- ) UK writer, a graduate in English studies from Oxford, for some
time a journalist; now resident in the USA. In her sf novel Mandrake
(1964) the eponymous politician takes over a distressed NEAR-FUTURE
England and, in mystical league with the forces of Nature, begins the
process of cleansing the Earth of Man, but is stopped just in time. Her
juvenile FANTASY series, The Dark is Rising, is made up of Over Sea, Under
Stone (1965), The Dark is Rising (1973 US), Greenwitch (1974 US), The Grey
King (1975 US) and Silver on the Tree (1977 US). It is thought by many
critics to be one of the most distinguished of the mythological fantasy
series which, following the success of J.R.R. TOLKIEN's work, were
published in a spate during the 1960s and 1970s. The hero of the series,
Will Stanton, is at once a small boy and a vessel of ancient powers, and
SC shows great skill in blending in him a perfectly natural,
unsentimentalized, childish innocence and the sophistication of a mage.
The series owed much to Anglo-Saxon and Celtic MYTHOLOGY, but also uses
such sf tropes as ALTERNATE WORLDS, TIME PARADOXES and time stasis. The
Grey King won the 1976 Newbery Award. Seaward (1983 US) once again
utilizes Celtic material, this time in a dark hegira into the world of
death. [JC/PN]Other works: J.B. Priestley: Portrait of an Author (1970)
and Stars in our Hands (1977 chap Canada), both nonfiction; Jethro and the
Jumbie (1979 chap) and The Silver Cow (1983), both fantasies for young
children; The Boggart(1993 US).See also: CHILDREN'S SF.
COOVER, ROBERT (LOWELL)
(1932- ) US writer who has established a considerable reputation with his
novels, in which FABULATION and political scatology mix fruitfully. His
work might be seen to represent a POSTMODERNIST intensification of the
same milieu excoriated by Richard CONDON. The Origin of the Brunists
(1965) subverts the millennial fantasy tropes at its heart. The Universal
Baseball Association Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968) also denatures its

FANTASY premise, the eponymous dreamer's creation of a baseball world to
be safe in. The Public Burning (1977) can be read as an alternate history
( ALTERNATE WORLDS) of the early 1950s, taking in the death of the
Rosenbergs and examining Richard Nixon - a figure RC also anatomized in
Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? (1987). A Night at
the Movies, or You Must Remember This (1987) is a Hollywood fantasia. In
Pinocchio in Venice (1991) the Pinocchio of human flesh, slowly reverting
to wood in his old age, returns to his origins. Pricksongs and Descants
(coll 1969) contains some stories of sf interest. [JC]Other works: Aesop's
Forest (1986 chap dos); A Political Fable (1968 New American Review as
"The Cat in the Hat for President"; rev 1980 chap).
COPLEY, FRANK BARKLEY
(? -? ) US writer in whose The Impeachment of President Israels (1912) a
future Jewish US president is impeached for refusing on ethical grounds to
make war on Germany, but is vindicated. [JC]
COPPEL, ALFRED (JOSE Jr)
(1921- ) Prolific US author (and wartime fighter pilot) who has written
also as Robert Cham Gilman and Sol Galaxan (for 1 story only, 1953). He
began publishing sf with "Age of Unreason" for ASF in 1947, and published
a good deal of magazine fiction in the next decade, though he was in fact
producing considerably more in other genres with such action novels as
Hero Driver (1954). His first sf novel was Dark December(1960), an
extremely effective post- HOLOCAUST quest story set in a
nuclear-war-devastated USA and featuring the protagonist's search for his
lost family. As Gilman, AC published the Rhada SPACE-OPERA sequence for
tough, older children: The Rebel of Rhada (1968), The Navigator of Rhada
(1969) and The Starkahn of Rhada (1970) are not easy reading, and neither
is the prequel The Warlock of Rhada (1985). The Burning Mountain: A Novel
of the Invasion of Japan (1983) embodies an orthodox alternate-history (
ALTERNATE WORLDS) premise in thriller dress, told grippingly: the A-bomb
fizzles, necessitating a land invasion of Japan to end WWII; after some
delay, a rejuvenated bomb stops the mayhem in 1946. Although AC's energies
have been, for most of his career, focused on non-sf projects, the recent
and ongoing Goldenwing Cycle- comprising Glory (1993) and Glory's War
(1995), with further volumes projected - is a series of glowingly mature
space opera tales structured around the travels of the eponymous FTL ship,
itself intricately realized. AC's return to sf has been revelatory.
[JC]Other works: Four marginal political thrillers set in the immediate
future: Thirty-Four East (1974) The Dragon (1977); The Hastings Conspiracy
(1980); The Apocalypse Brigade (1981).See also: GALACTIC EMPIRES.
CORBEN, RICHARD
(1940- ) US illustrator and film animator. He attended the Kansas City
Art Institute, and worked for almost a decade with a Kansas City animation
company, doing sf illustration (a cover for FSF in 1967 was his first
sale) and underground COMICS on the side. He became a full-time freelance
illustrator in 1972. Better known as a comic-book artist than as an sf
illustrator, RC in fact combines the fields in his work: his sf art can
look cartoonish, while his comics art has the solid feel of sf
illustration. While his men tend to look like "sacks filled with potatoes"

and his women are ridiculously huge-breasted, he has a genius for surface
texture and for three-dimensional solidity achieved with shading. Much of
his best work in sf has been for the SCIENCE FICTION BOOK CLUB and
DOUBLEDAY, and, in comics, for METAL HURLANT, especially his two series
Den and Rowlff. He contributed a sequence to the animated film Heavy Metal
(1981), published the GRAPHIC NOVEL Bloodstar (1976) and, with Jan Strnad,
produced New Tales of the Arabian Nights (1979). A somewhat fannish study,
with 80 pages of colour illustration and many more in b/w, is Richard
Corben: Flights into Fantasy (1982) by Fershid Bharuch. Richard Corben's
Art Book (graph coll 1990) is useful. Richard Corben's Art Book (graph
coll 1990) is useful. [PN/JG]Other works: Vic and Blood (graph coll 1989)
with Harlan ELLISON.
CORBETT, CHAN
[s] Nat SCHACHNER.
CORBETT, JAMES
(? -? ) UK author of popular thrillers specifically written for the
lending-library market. His The Devil Man from Mars (1935) is an
interplanetary novel with a poor scientific background (or perhaps it was
intended as a parody) in which a Martian, equipped with death rays and
hypnotic powers, travels to Earth with, literally, the wind at his back
all the way. More sophisticated in content is The Man who Saw the Devil
(1934), a rewrite of Robert Louis STEVENSON's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde (1886), in which neither personality is aware of the other's
existence. Many of his other works contain some elements of sf and the
weird-Vampire of the Skies (1932), The Monster of Dagenham Hall (1935),
The Death Pool (1936), The Man They Could not Kill (1936), The Man with
Nine Lives (1938) The Moon Killer (1938) and The Ghost Plane (1939) - but
none has any real importance. [JE]
CORELLI, MARIE
(1855-1924) UK writer, almost certainly born Mary (nicknamed "Minnie")
Mackay, though she was secretive about her birth, which may have been
illegitimate. She wrote extremely popular bestsellers (selling, in her
prime, 100,000-copy editions), although her first novel, A Romance of Two
Worlds (1886; rev 1887) - in which interstellar travel is accomplished at
about the turn of the century, through "personal electricity" - and its
sequel, Ardath: The Story of a Dead Self (1889), were only moderately
successful. The Sorrows of Satan (1895), in which a Corelli-like
protagonist charismatically cures the Devil of evil, reaches perhaps her
peculiar peak. By 1900 her odd brand of sublimated sex, heated
religiosity, self-absorbed "female frailty" and unctuous fantasy had begun
to lose its appeal; by her death she had been virtually forgotten. Most of
her early work can be read as fantasy, though careful explication of the
texts may derive a form of religious ( RELIGION) explanation for the most
extraordinary events. Also of sf interest are The Young Diana: An
Experiment of the Future (1918), about a scientific experiment to make a
woman (and hence Woman in general) beautiful, and The Secret Power: A
Romance of the Present (1921), featuring a huge airship and a secret power
that triggers a great earthquake in California. [JC]Other works: The Soul
of Lilith (1892); Barabbas: A Dream of the World's Tragedy (1893); Ziska

(1897); Song of Miriam and Other Stories (coll 1898); The Master-Christian
(1900); The Strange Visitation of Josiah McNason: A Christmas Ghost Story
(1904 chap; vt The Strange Visitation 1912 chap); The Devil's Motor (in A
Christmas Greeting, coll 1901;1910 chap); The Life Everlasting
(1911).About the author: Now Barabbas was a Rotter (1978) by Brian
Masters; "Yesterday's Bestsellers, 1: Marie Corelli" by Brian STABLEFORD
in Million, #1 (1991).See also: GODS AND DEMONS.
COREY, PAUL (FREDERICK)
(1903-1992) US writer in various genres, active from as early as 1934,
though his first sf story, "Operation Survival" for NW, did not appear
until 1962. Most of his early novels are set on farms in the US Middle
West; the title of one of them, Acres of Antaeus (1946), deceptively
suggests sf content. His sf novel, The Planet of the Blind (1968), written
for ROBERT HALE LIMITED, is a variation on the theme of the one-eyed man
in the country of the blind inaugurated (for sf) by H.G. WELLS in "The
Country of the Blind" (1904). [JC]
CORLETT, WILLIAM
(1938- ) UK actor, playwright and novelist, in the latter capacity mostly
for older children. He is of sf interest mainly for the Gate trilogy - The
Gate of Eden (1974), The Land Beyond (1975) and Return to the Gate (1975)
- set in a bleak DYSTOPIAN UK of the NEAR FUTURE: social disintegration
prefigures the moments of hope and rebuilding in the final volume. The
Dark Side of the Moon (1976) ingeniously parallels the experiences of a
kidnapped child with those of an astronaut spiritually adrift in deep
space. The Magician's House sequence-comprising The Steps up the Chimney
(1990),The Door in the Tree(1991), The Tunnel behind the Waterfall (1991)
and The Bridge in the Clouds (1993) - is fantasy. [JC]Other works: The
Summer of the Haunting (1993).
CORLEY, EDWIN
(1931-1981) US writer whose Siege (1969) resembles several other US
novels of the period in its depiction of a Black revolution centred-as in
John WILLIAMS's Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light (1969) - on Manhattan. His
other novels of sf interest include The Jesus Factor (1970) - which factor
prevents the detonation of nuclear weapons, Hiroshima being a hoax
intended to prevent future wars - Acapulco Gold (1972), Sargasso (1977),
and The Genesis Rock (1980, which foresees a NEAR-FUTURE volcanic eruption
under New York. [JC]
CORLEY, JAMES
(1947- ) UK writer and computer programmer whose first novel, Benedict's
Planet (1976), combines SPACE OPERA and some rather technical speculations
about the possibility of FASTER-THAN-LIGHT travel in a somewhat
overcrowded tale in which the discoverer of a new source of fuel runs into
complex trouble. Neither Orsini Godbase (1978) nor Sundrinker (1980),
written for ROBERT HALE LIMITED, proved significantly more ambitious as
novels. [JC]
CORMAN, ROGER
(1926- ) US film-maker, a number of whose films are sf. Born in Los
Angeles, he graduated in engineering from Stanford University in 1947, and

spent a period in the US Navy and a term at Oxford University before going
to Hollywood, where he began to write screenplays; his first sale was
Highway Dragnet (1954), a picture he coproduced. He soon formed his own
company and launched his spectacularly low-budget career. From 1956 he was
regularly associated with American International Pictures, a distribution
company specializing in cheap exploitation films, often made to fit an
already-planned advertising campaign. In 1959 he founded Filmgroup, which
distributed its own product, but he returned to AIP in the 1960s for his
Edgar Allan POE movies (discussed below). In 1970, with brother Gene and
Larry Woolner, Corman founded New World Pictures, which soon overtook AIP
as the leading producer and distributor of exploitation films; he sold his
share of the company in 1983.RC's B-movies - mainly Westerns and sf/horror
stories at first, later also thrillers, road movies and drugs and
rock'n'roll movies, most aimed specifically at teenagers - did much to
redefine the various exploitation-movie genres, but only by the 1970s did
they begin to attract attention from radical film critics. At first he
served only as a producer, but in 1955 he began directing. Sf films he has
directed - the dates are those of first release - include The DAY THE
WORLD ENDED (1956), IT CONQUERED THE WORLD (1956), NOT OF THIS EARTH
(1957), ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS (1957), War of the Satellites (1958),
Teenage Caveman (1958; vt Prehistoric World; vt Out of the Darkness), The
WASP WOMAN (1959), LAST WOMAN ON EARTH (1960), The Little Shop of Horrors
(1960), Creature From the Haunted Sea (1961), X - THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY
EYES (1963), GAS-S-S-S, OR IT BECAME NECESSARY TO DESTROY THE WORLD IN
ORDER TO SAVE IT (1970) and FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND (1990). The boom for sf
films which had begun in the 1950s was dying out by 1963, after which year
RC and other quickie-producers made far fewer of them. RC-directed films
are rare after 1970; throughout the 1970s and 1980s he concentrated on
producing because directing had stopped being fun.Sf-oriented films he has
produced, sometimes only as executive producer, include Monster from the
Ocean Floor (1954; vt Monster Maker), Beast with a Million Eyes (1955),
NIGHT OF THE BLOOD BEAST (1958), Beast from Haunted Cave (1959;
uncredited), Attack of the Giant Leeches (1960; vt Demons of the Swamp),
DEATH RACE 2000 (1975), PIRANHA (1978), Deathsport (1978), Humanoids from
the Deep (1980; vt Monster), BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS (1980), Galaxy of
Terror (1981; vt Mindwarp: An Infinity of Terror ; vt Planet of Horrors),
FORBIDDEN WORLD (1982; vt MUTANT), Space Raiders (1983), NOT OF THIS EARTH
(1988 remake), Crime Zone (1988), Lords of the Deep (1989), Time Trackers
(1989), BRAIN DEAD (1989) and Welcome to Oblivion (1990).In the 1960s, RC
furthered the practice (pioneered by the 1956 US release of GOJIRA) of
buying up foreign-language films with spectacular effects and reshooting
inserts with well-known US performers to create wholly new films, often
farming out the revision jobs to up-and-coming young talent. This explains
the presence in the filmographies of Francis Ford Coppola, Peter
Bogdanovich and Curtis Harrington of, respectively, Battle Beyond the Sun
(1963), Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1966; vt Gill Woman)
and Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965); Harrington also made Queen of
Blood (1966; vt Planet of Blood) in this way. These four films drew on
footage from the Soviet films Niebo Zowiet (1959; vt The Sky Calls; vt The
Heavens Call) and PLANETA BUR (1962; vt Planet of Storms; vt Storm Planet;
vt Cosmonauts on Venus). Throughout his career, indeed, RC has been known

for his fostering of young film-makers: as well as Coppola, Bogdanovich
and Harrington there have been Martin Scorsese, Monte Hellman, Jonathan
Demme, Paul Bartel and Jonathan Kaplan; in the sf-film world specifically
he was mentor to James CAMERON, Joe DANTE, Irvin Kershner and John SAYLES.
During his proprietorship of New World, RC became known also as the US
distributor of prestigious films by Kurosawa, Bergman, Fellini and
Truffaut, but he was up to his old tricks with the US release of NIPPON
CHINBOTSU (1973; vt The Submersion of Japan) as a truncated travesty,
Tidal Wave (1974). However, he presided over an inspired re-use of miles
of New World footage in Hollywood Boulevard (1976), dir Joe Dante and
Allan Arkush; this is a skit on low-budget film-making revolving round the
production of an sf exploitationer called Atomic War Brides.As a director,
RC also worked in the field of supernatural HORROR. The Undead (1957) has
a TIME-TRAVEL theme in its tale of a prostitute, the REINCARNATION of an
executed medieval witch, travelling back into the past but refusing to
intervene in her own earlier death because by so doing she would destroy
many futures. Later, RC attracted much critical praise with his series of
films based (often insecurely) on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, beginning
with House of Usher (1960) and mostly starring Vincent Price, of which one
of the finest is The Tomb of Ligeia (1964), written by Robert Towne, later
one of Hollywood's major screenwriters. Only The Haunted Palace
(1963)-actually based on a story by H.P. LOVECRAFT despite the Poe title has sf elements: deformed MUTANTS. RC also produced a second Lovecraft
adaptation, The Dunwich Horror (1969), which was mediocre.The argument
over RC's true worth as a film-maker continues. It is clear that by the
1970s he was mostly pursuing rather than setting trends. His work has
attracted a cult following and considerable attention from that school of
film critics which holds that there is often a freshness and inventiveness
in B-grade films lacking from more "respectable" Hollywood productions. In
an interview he said of his sf films: "I was never really satisfied with
my work in this field." His autobiography is How I Made a Hundred Movies
in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime (1990). He played a bit part (as FBI
Director Hayden Burke) in the 1991 hit film The Silence of the Lambs.
[PN/KN]Further reading: The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget
(1982) by Ed NAHA; Roger Corman (1985) by Gary Morris; Roger Corman: The
Best of the Cheap Acts (1988) by Mark McGee.See also: CINEMA; MONSTER
MOVIES.
CORNETT, ROBERT
[r] Kevin D. RANDLE.
CORNWALLIS-WEST, G(EORGE FREDERICK MYDDLETON)
(1874-1951) UK writer in whose sf novel, The Woman who Stopped War
(1935), the eponymous heroine sacrifices her virtue in order to gain money
to fund the Women's Save the Race League as another WAR approaches. War is
halted. But was it worth the cost? [JC]
CORPSICLE
One of the wittiest items of sf TERMINOLOGY. The coinage, credited to
Frederik POHL by Larry NIVEN in his essay "The Words in Science Fiction"
(in The Craft of Science Fiction [anth 1976] ed Reginald BRETNOR), was
first used by Niven in "Rammer" (1971). Formed on the analogy of

"popsicle", a US ice-lolly, the word refers to a frozen dead person,
preserved in the hope of resuscitation in a medically advanced future (
CRYONICS). [PN]
CORREA, HUGO
[r] LATIN AMERICA.
CORREN, GRACE
Robert HOSKINS.
CORREY, LEE
G. Harry STINE.
CORSTON, (MICHAEL) GEORGE
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
CORWIN, CECIL
[s] C.M. KORNBLUTH.
CORY, HOWARD L.
Collaborative writing name of Jack Owen Jardine (1931- ) and Julie Ann
Jardine (1926- ), then married; the name was taken from her stage name,
Corrie Howard. The Sword of Lankor (1966), in which natives of a highGRAVITY planet unknowingly extract valuable crystals for genially
manipulative spacefarers, is swashbuckling. In The Mind Monsters (1966
dos) a crash-landed Terran takes over a peculiar alien planet. Jack Owen
Jardine's solo sf was written as by Larry MADDOCK. [JC]
CORY ?
Paul COLLINS.
CORYELL, JOHN RUSSELL
[r] Nick CARTER; Bernarr MACFADDEN.
COSGROVE, RACHEL
[r] E.L. ARCH.
COSMIC MONSTER, THE
The STRANGE WORLD OF PLANET X .
COSMIC SCIENCE FICTION
COSMIC STORIES.
COSMIC SCIENCE STORIES
UK PULP MAGAZINE. 1 undated issue, cJune 1950, published by Popular
Press, London; an abridged reprint of the Sep 1949 issue of SUPER SCIENCE
STORIES. The lead novelette was "Minions of Chaos" by John D. MACDONALD.
[FHP]
COSMIC STORIES
US PULP MAGAZINE. 3 bimonthly issues, Mar-July 1941. Published by Albing
Publications; ed Donald A. WOLLHEIM. CS was one of 2 companion magazines
(the other being STIRRING SCIENCE STORIES) started by Wollheim in 1941. It
was cheaply produced (lacking full-colour covers) and had a microscopic
editorial budget - most of the stories were not paid for at all, being
solicited by Wollheim from his fellow FUTURIANS. The first issue contained

a story by Isaac ASIMOV, "The Secret Sense"; C.M. KORNBLUTH contributed a
number of stories under various pseudonyms. The title changed with the
second issue to Cosmic Science Fiction, but the whole venture proved
abortive and the magazine was dead within 6 months. [MJE]
COSMIC STRINGS
BLACK HOLES.
COSMOLOGY
Cosmology is the study of the Universe as a whole, its nature and its
origins. It is a speculative science (there being little opportunity for
experiment) and in discussing past writings on the subject it is
occasionally difficult to distinguish essays and fictions. Johannes
KEPLER's Somnium (1634) is basically an essay inspired by the heliocentric
theory of the Universe, opposing the Aristotelian system then favoured by
the Church ( PROTO SCIENCE FICTION). Works of a similar nature include
Gabriel DANIEL's Voyage du monde de Descartes (1690; trans as A Voyage to
the World of Cartesius 1692), which popularized the cosmological (and
other) theories of Rene Descartes (1596-1650), and Bernard le Bovyer de
FONTENELLE's Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes habites (1686; trans
as The Plurality of Worlds 1929). An early attempt to describe an infinite
Universe with habitable worlds surrounding all the stars was presented as
a revelation by Emanuel SWEDENBORG in De Telluribus (1758; trans as (short
title) The Earths in Our Solar System and the Earths in the Starry Heavens
1787). There are several important 19th-century works belonging to this
tradition of "semi-fiction". Edgar Allan POE's Eureka (1848), elaborating
ideas first laid out in "A Mesmeric Revelation" (1844), is a poetic vision
embodying intuitive hypotheses about the nature and origins of the
Universe; Camille FLAMMARION's Lumen (1887; trans 1897) combines religious
notions with a powerful scientifically inspired imagination, and J.H.
ROSNY aine's La legende sceptique ["The Sceptical Legend"] (1889) belongs
to the same class of works. Edgar FAWCETT's The Ghost of Guy Thyrle (1895)
includes a cosmic vision, and H.G. WELLS offered a brief - and somewhat
ironic - account of a cosmic vision in "Under the Knife" (1896).In the
20th century this tradition petered out. William Hope HODGSON's The House
on the Borderland (1908) is better regarded as a late addition to the
19th-century corpus, combining a curious moral allegory with a spectacular
vision of the END OF THE WORLD. R.A. KENNEDY's curious philosophical
fantasia, The Triuneverse (1912), introduced the microcosm and the
macrocosm to speculative fiction ( GREAT AND SMALL) but is far too absurd
to be taken seriously. There is only one cosmic-vision story comparable in
scope and ambition to Eureka and La legende sceptique: Olaf STAPLEDON's
classic STAR MAKER (1937; part of discarded first draft published as
Nebula Maker, 1976).The early GENRE-SF sf writers were highly ambitious in
the scope and scale of their fantasies, but their attitude was
conspicuously different from that of the cosmic visionaries. They were
interested in adventure, and the viewpoints of their stories remained tied
to the experience of their characters. Protagonists sometimes caught brief
visionary glimpses of the cosmos, but these were rarely extrapolated at
any length. There is a curious narrowness about the tales of the infinite
Universe pioneered by E.E. "Doc" SMITH's Skylark of Space (1928; 1946),

and even such macrocosmic romances as Donald WANDREI's "Colossus" (1934).
The bathetic quality of attempts by pulp writers to tune in to the
infinite is amply illustrated by the first pulp sf story to develop the
idea of the expanding Universe: Edmond HAMILTON's "The Accursed Galaxy"
(1935). Hamilton "explained" the expansion by proposing that all the other
galaxies might be fleeing in horror from our own, because ours is
afflicted with a terrible disease (life). A.E. VAN VOGT's "The Seesaw"
(1941; incorporated into THE WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER fixup 1951), in which
the formation of the Solar System results from an unfortunate accident
whereby a man is caught in a temporal "seesaw", is another example of the
tendency of sf writers to minimize the issues of cosmology; ironically, a
parodic version of this in Earthdoom! (1987) by David LANGFORD and John
Grant ( Paul BARNETT), in which the Big Bang is "triggered" by an
unwitting time traveller, has a far more plausible scientific grounding.
The kind of joke embodied in L. Ron HUBBARD's "Beyond the Black Nebula"
(1949 as by Rene Lafayette), in which it is discovered that our Universe
is somewhere in the alimentary tract of a macrocosmic worm, is echoed in
several other works, including Damon KNIGHT's "God's Nose" (1964) and
Robert RANKIN's Armageddon - The Musical (1990).More earnest cosmological
visions have been inserted into a number of sf novels, sometimes by means
of unusual literary devices. Examples include James BLISH's The Triumph of
Time (1958; vt A Clash of Cymbals), Poul ANDERSON's Tau Zero (1970) and an
episode in Bob SHAW's Ship of Strangers (fixup 1978). Ian WATSON's The
Jonah Kit (1975) casually suggests that the actual cosmos might be a mere
shadowy echo of the original creation, while dramatic and symbolic use of
the steady-state theory is made in THE RING OF RITORNEL (1968) by Charles
L. HARNESS. Eccentric cosmological speculations are used to good effect in
Philip Jose FARMER's The Unreasoning Mask (1981) and in several novels by
Barrington J. BAYLEY, including The Pillars of Eternity (1982) and The Zen
Gun (1983).Among cosmologists who have dabbled in sf are George GAMOW, who
included some cosmological fantasies in his book of didactic fictions Mr
Tomkins in Wonderland (1939), and Fred HOYLE, who incorporated visionary
moments into The Black Cloud (1957) and The Inferno (1973, with Geoffrey
HOYLE).An avant-garde story featuring a juxtaposition between the minutiae
of everyday existence and cosmological notions is Pamela ZOLINE's "The
Heat-Death of the Universe" (1967). Italo CALVINO produced several
eccentric cosmological fantasies, some of which are in Le Cosmicomiche
(coll of linked stories 1965; trans as COSMICOMICS 1968). Surreal
exercises in "alternative cosmology" include Lester DEL REY's The Sky is
Falling (1963), which deals with a pseudo-Aristotelian closed Universe,
and two stories in which the Universe is mostly solid, with habitable
lacunae: Barrington J. Bayley's "Me and My Antronoscope" (1973) and David
LAKE's The Ring of Truth (1982).20th-century ASTRONOMY has, of course,
gradually revealed the true strangeness of the cosmos; it has popularized
such notions as ENTROPY and the Big Bang, and has produced such curious
images as that of a hyperspherical Universe which is finite in dimension
but infinite in extent. The idea that the Universe may contain vast
numbers of BLACK HOLES which themselves may contain universes-in-miniature
has lent a new respectability to microcosmic romance, while the notion of
PARALLEL WORLDS is thought by some modern physicists to be a likely
consequence of quantum theory. The kind of visionary extravagance found in

Poe's and Flammarion's cosmological essays pales into insignificance
beside such modern popular essays on cosmology as Steven Weinberg's The
First Three Minutes (1977), Paul DAVIES's Other Worlds (1980) and Stephen
Hawking's A Brief History of Time (1988). The discoveries and speculations
reported in such books as these have posed a challenge to contemporary sf
writers, several of whom have made interesting attempts to devise
fantasies which can contain and do justice to a distinctively modern
cosmic perspective. Worthy attempts include George ZEBROWSKI's Macrolife
(1979), Charles SHEFFIELD's Between the Strokes of Night (1985) and Greg
BEAR's Eternity (1988). The inspiration provided by modern cosmology has
been adequate to bring about something of a renaissance in the
cosmic-vision story; further examples include Michael BISHOP's "Close
Encounter with the Deity" (1986), the visionary sequences in Brian M.
STABLEFORD's The Centre Cannot Hold (1990) and The Angel of Pain (1991)
and David Langford's "Waiting for the Iron Age" (1991). [BS]See also:
ASTRONOMY; BLACK HOLES; ESCHATOLOGY; FASTER THAN LIGHT; METAPHYSICS;
PHYSICS.
COSMONAUTS ON VENUS
PLANETA BUR.
COSMOS
Fanzine. FANTASY REVIEW.
COSMOS SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY MAGAZINE
1. US DIGEST-size magazine. 4 issues, irregular, Sep 1953-July 1954,
published by Star Publications; ed L.B. Cole. This was an unremarkable
magazine of moderate standard which published no memorable fiction; the
actual editing was done by Laurence M. JANIFER. There was a scoop in #2,
"Visitor from Nowhere", an sf story by the mysterious writer of Westerns,
B. Traven (?1882-1969).2. US BEDSHEET-size magazine. 4 issues, bimonthly,
May-Nov 1977. Published by Baronet Publishing Co.; ed David G. HARTWELL.
CSFFM contained a sophisticated mixture of sf and fantasy in an elegant
format which included full-colour interior illustration. It serialized a
short novel in Fritz LEIBER's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, "Rime
Isle"; ran Michael BISHOP's "The House of Compassionate Sharers"; and
featured a number of other major authors; there was a book-review column
by Robert SILVERBERG. CSFAFM had one of the most promising launches of the
decade but, undercapitalized and suffering distribution problems, it
folded. [FHP/MJE/PN]
COSTA RICA
LATIN AMERICA.
COSTELLO, P.F.
One of the many ZIFF-DAVIS house names, this appeared on over 40 magazine
stories 1941-58, but until the late 1940s exclusively for stories by
William P. McGivern (1921-1982). It was then sometimes used by Chester S.
GEIER, later by Roger P. Graham (Rog PHILLIPS) and probably others still
unidentified. "Secret of the Flaming Ring" (1951) and "Space is for
Suckers" (1958) have both been attributed to Graham. [PN]
COSY CATASTROPHE

A term coined by Brian W. ALDISS in Billion Year Spree (1973) to describe
the comforting ambience shed by the sort of DISASTER tale told by UK
writers like John WYNDHAM (see also HOLOCAUST AND AFTER). [JC]
COTE, DENIS
(1954- ) Canadian author whose first two novels, marketed like their
successors as juveniles, were Les Hockeyeurs cybernetiques (1983; trans
Jane Brierley as Shooting for the Stars 1990), a tale marked by a high
degree of invention, and Les Paralleles celestes ["The Celestial
Parallels"] (1983), which demonstrates considerable literary ambition and
talent. The former book begins the Inactifs sequence, further volumes
including L'idole des inactifs ["A Star for the Idle Masses"] (1989), La
Revolte des inactifs ["The Rebellion of the Idle Masses"] (1990) and Le
Retour des inactifs ["The Return of the Idle Masses"] (1991). DC won the
1984 Canada Council Award and the Grand prix de la science-fiction et du
Fantastique Quebecois. Some of DC's short stories are non-juvenile.
[LP]Other works: Les Geants de blizzard ["The Giants in the Blizzard"]
(1985); La Penombre jaune ["Yellow Shadow"] (1986); Nocturnes pour Jessie
["Nocturnes for Jessie"] (1987); Les Prisonniers du zoo ["Prisoners of the
Zoo"] (1988); Terminus cauchemar ["Terminus Nightmare"] (1991); Les Yeux
d'emeraude ["Eyes of Emerald"] (1991).
COTES, MAY
Grant ALLEN.
COTTON, JOHN
[s] John Russell FEARN.
COULSON, JUANITA (RUTH WELLONS)
(1933- ) US writer, briefly a schoolteacher, who began publishing sf with
"Another Rib" in FSF in 1963 with Marion Zimmer BRADLEY under the shared
pseudonym John Jay Wells. With her husband, Robert COULSON, she won the
1965 Best Amateur Publication HUGO for their long-running fanzine YANDRO.
JC's first novel, Crisis on Cheiron (1967 dos), like her second, The
Singing Stones (1968 dos), is set on a primitive planet in a
human-dominated Galaxy; the oppressed species of each planet needs help to
survive the inimical influence of large corporations and the like. Unto
the Last Generation 1975 Canada) deals negatively with population control;
Space Trap (1976 Canada) is a First-Contact tale. The romantic coloration
of her work is more evident in the Children of the Stars family saga of
exploration and survival: Tomorrow's Heritage (1981), Outward Bound
(1982), Legacy of Earth (1989) and The Past of Forever (1989). Star Sister
(1990) continues in the same mode. She has also written FANTASY and Gothic
novels. [JC]Other works: The Secret of Seven Oaks (1972), Door into Terror
(1972), Stone of Blood (1975) and Fear Stalks the Bayou (1976), Gothics;
the Krantin fantasy series, comprising The Web of Wizardry (1978) and The
Death-God's Citadel (1980); Dark Priestess (1977), historical and
marginal.
COULSON, ROBERT (STRATTON)
(1928- ) US writer, a long-time fan who edited, with his wife Juanita
COULSON, the fanzine YANDRO, winner of a 1965 HUGO. With the exception of
To Renew the Ages (1976 Canada), a mildly anti- FEMINISM post- HOLOCAUST

adventure, and the less interesting High Spy (1987), his sf novels have
been written with Gene DEWEESE. They include Gates of the Universe (1975
Canada; rev vt Nightmare Universe 1985 US), a mildly amusing SPACE OPERA,
but more notably the Joe Karns sequence of RECURSIVE tales spoofing sf and
sf CONVENTIONS, Now You See It/Him/Them (1975) and Charles Fort Never
Mentioned Wombats (1977). His revision of But What of Earth? (1976 Canada)
from the Piers ANTHONY manuscript, published as a collaboration, proved
controversial. Anthony (see his entry) has argued his sense of the matter
at great length; neither author, in fact, approved of the final editing by
LASER BOOKS. [JC]Other works: Two Man from U.N.C.L.E. novelizations with
DeWeese, writing together as Thomas Stratton: The Invisibility Affair *
(1967) and The Mind-Twisters Affair * (1967).
COUNTDOWN
Film (1968). William Conrad Productions. Dir Robert Altman, starring
Robert Duvall, James Caan. Screenplay Loren Mandel, based on The Pilgrim
Project (1964) by Hank SEARLS. 101 mins cut to 73 mins for UK. Colour.A
year later, C would have looked like documentary, for it concerns the
first landing on the Moon, which actually took place in 1969. The film's
struggle between the USSR and USA to be first to reach the Moon strays
from the real-life facts (Searls's original novel was published in 1964),
but the behind-the-scenes planning on which the film focuses is gripping.
The idiosyncratic, vivid view of personal relationships - here among
astronauts and technicians - that typifies Altman's work brings life to
the soap-opera elements (astronaut's wife takes to drink, etc.). C's
climax is authentically exciting. This is early Altman, and he had no way
of preventing a clumsy re-edit or the butchery of the UK print. A number
of the later films of Robert Altman (1925- ) were fantasy or sf: Brewster
McCloud (1970), 3 Women (1977), QUINTET (1979) and Popeye (1980) most
obviously. [PN]
COUPER, STEPHEN
Stephen GALLAGHER.
COUPLING, J.J.
[s] John R. PIERCE.
COURTENEY, LUKE
Alfred Taylor SCHOFIELD.
COURTIER, S(IDNEY) H(OBSON)
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
COUTINHO, ALBINO
[r] LATIN AMERICA.
COVER, ARTHUR BYRON
(1950- ) US writer. He was involved in the CLARION SCIENCE FICTION
WRITERS' WORKSHOP in 1971-2, and began publishing sf with "Gee, Isn't He
the Cutest Little Thing?" in Stephen GOLDIN's Alien Condition (anth 1973).
His first novel, Autumn Angels (1975), with intro by Harlan ELLISON,
depicts in hallucinated language a FAR-FUTURE Earth, with LINGUISTIC and
cultural jokes proliferating rather exhaustingly. The sequel, An East Wind
Coming (1979), continues to introduce to the end of time cultural icons in

pastiche. The stories in Platypus of Doom and Other Nihilists (coll of
linked stories 1976) similarly - though with a modest induction of calm features a sequence of somewhat unhinged parodies of popular figures. Of
these early books, only The Sound of Winter (1976), a love story set in a
mutation-riddled post- DISASTER wonderland, attempts to create a more
humanly moving outcome. Parody is technically not far removed from
novelization, and ABC's next novel, Flash Gordon * (1980), novelizing the
film of that name, was thus perhaps a logical move. Subsequently ABC has
written for Byron PREISS some Time Machine sharecrops - The Rings of
Saturn * (1985), American Revolutionary * (1985) and Blade of the
Guillotine * (1986) - as well as two sharecrops -Planetfall * (1988) and
Stationfall * (1989) - derived from computer games. Other sharecrops
include Isaac Asimov's Robot City, Book 4: Prodigy * (1987) and Robert
Silverberg's Time Tours #5: The Dinosaur Trackers * (1992). [JC]
COVILLE, BRUCE
(1950- ) US writer of sf and fantasy, almost exclusively juveniles. Of
some interest are: Murder in Orbit (1987 UK; vt Space Station ICE-3 1987);
My Teacher is an Alien (1989) and its sequels, My Teacher Fried my Brains
(1991), My Teacher Glows in the Dark(1991) and My Teacher Flunked the
Planet (1992); Philip Jose Farmer's The Dungeon #2: The Dark Abyss *
(1989), a tie; and the A.I. Gang sequence for children - Operation
Sherlock (1986), Robot Trouble (1986) and Forever Begins Tomorrow (1986).
[JC]Other works: Eyes of the Tarot (1983); Spirits and Spells (1983);
Waiting Spirits (1984); Amulet of Doom (1985); The Monster's Ring (1987);
The Ghost in the Third Row (1987); The Ghost Wore Gray (1988); The Unicorn
Treasury (anth 1988); How I Survived my Summer Vacation (1988); Some of my
Best Friends are Monsters (1988); Monster of the Year (1989); Jeremy
Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher (1991); The Ghost in the Big Brass Bed (1991);
Jennifer Murdley's Toad (1992); Space Brat (1992); Aliens Ate my Homework
(1993); The Dragonslayers (1994); I Left my Sneakers in Dimension X
(1994); Oddly Enough (coll 1994); Bruce Coville's Book of Monsters: Tales
to Give you the Creeps (anth 1994); Bruce Coville's Book of Aliens: Tales
to Warp your Mind (anth 1994); the Unicorn Chronicles sequence beginning
with Into the Land of Unicorns (1994).
COWAN, FRANK
(1844-1905) US writer whose Revi-Lona: A Romance of Love in a Marvelous
Land (1879), is a parody of the lost-race ( LOST WORLDS) novels so popular
in the late 19th century. It is set, like many of them, in Antarctica,
where a council of matriarchs falls under the narrator's sexual sway. The
results are syphilis and suicide, death and disaster, and the escape of
the hero. Some sharp points are made about UTOPIAS. [JC]
COWAN, JAMES
(1870-1943) US writer whose sf novel, Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World
(1896), features an ambulatory MOON which deposits upon MARS a balloon
whose passengers discover there a new defence of Christianity in the form
of parallel EVOLUTION and the multiple incarnation of Christ. [JC]
COWIE, DONALD (JOHN)
(1911- ) UK writer (blind since 1984), long resident in Switzerland,

author of several crabbed visions of a century in decay. Prose ?
(coll 1945) with Julian Mountain contains some fantasy stories; of sf
interest are The Indiscretions of an Infant, or The Baby's Revenge (1945)
and The Rape of Man, or The Zoo Let Loose (1947), in which the other
mammals of the world shake off the human yoke. [JC]
COWPER, RICHARD
Pseudonym of UK writer John Middleton Murry Jr (1926- ), son of the
famous critic; RC also published four non-sf novels under the name Colin
Murry, beginning with The Golden Valley (1958); and, as Colin Middleton
Murry - Colin being a nickname - two autobiographical volumes, One Hand
Clapping (1975; vt I at the Keyhole 1975 US), which deals mainly with his
relationship with his father, and Shadows on the Grass (1977).After
working for some years as a teacher, and finding his non-sf novels to be
only moderately successful, he adopted the Cowper pseudonym for
Breakthrough (1967). Not conventional GENRE SF, being more richly
characterized and romantic than is usual, its story of ESP and a kind of
reverse REINCARNATION is sensitively told and given unusual reverberations
by its use of a leitmotif from Keats. It remains one of RC's finest works,
and its romantic theme - of the power of the mind to sense ALTERNATE
WORLDS, and of the flimsiness and limitations of this one's reality, crops
up often in his work, sometimes in images of deja vu; as does its venue, a
NEAR-FUTURE Southern England on the cusp of transformation. These
characteristics feature in many of the short stories assembled in The
Custodians (coll 1976), The Web of the Magi (coll 1980) and The Tithonian
Factor (coll 1984), the title story of the first of these collections
being much praised in the USA and nominated for several awards. They also
inform what is generally considered his best singleton, The Twilight of
Briareus (1974); in this tale England has been transformed, through a
disruption in world weather caused by a supernova explosion, into a
snowbound Arcadia; from the same apparent source later come psychic
influences which lead to complex interaction between humans and ALIENS.
The story - like all of RC's best work - is charged with a strange,
expectant vibrancy. Its explorations of human PERCEPTION demonstrate an
openness not unlike that described in John Keats's remarks about "negative
capability" - remarks that RC has quoted in print. Keats's plea was for a
kind of waiting expectancy of the mind, which should be kept free of
preconceptions. RC does not usually link telepathy with the idea of the
SUPERMAN, as is more normally found in US sf uses of the convention;
instead, it can be seen in his work as an analogue of "negative
capability".Although the air and style of RC's sf is a long way from
traditional HARD SF, its content uses traditional themes. Kuldesak (1972)
deals with an underground society on a post- HOLOCAUST Earth ( POCKET
UNIVERSE), and one man who finds the surface against the will of an
all-powerful COMPUTER. Clone (1972), which saw RC's first real
breakthrough into the US market, is an amusing near-future SATIRE. Time
out of Mind (1973), like the earlier Domino (1971), rather mechanically
applies psi tropes ( PSI POWERS) to thriller-like plots involving TIME
TRAVEL and the rescue of a future UK from the totalitarian implications of
the 20th century. Worlds Apart (1974) is a not wholly successful comedy,
burlesquing several sf CLICHES in a story of an alien world on which an sf

novel is being written about Urth, while back on Earth an sf writer writes
about the alien world. Profundis (1979) places RC's now-expected
mild-mannered telepathic Christ-figure in a huge submarine which has
survived nuclear holocaust and is being led around the world by dolphins
anxious to keep human violence at bay.RC remains best known for his Corlay
trilogy - THE ROAD TO CORLAY (1978; with "Piper at the Gates of Dawn"1976
added, as coll 1979 US), A Dream of Kinship (1981) and A Tapestry of Time
(1982) - in which what might be called the pathos of expectancy typical of
his best work is finally resolved, for the essential parts of the sequence
take place in an England 1000 years after changing sea-levels have
inundated much low-lying country, creating an archipelago-like venue which
hearkens - perhaps consciously - back to Richard JEFFERIES's After London,
or Wild England (1885), and which also clearly resembles the West Country
featured in Christopher PRIEST's coeval A Dream of Wessex (1977). In this
land, an oppressive theocracy is threatened by the solace offered through
a young lad's redemptive visions of a new faith, whose emblem is the White
Bird of Kinship. The sequence proceeds through the establishment of a new
church, its stiffening into its own repressive rituals, and its rebirth.
Throughout, a sweet serenity of image and storytelling instinct - RC has
always been a gripping teller of tales - transfigure conventional
plot-patterns into testament. The Corlay books so clearly sum up RC's
imaginative sense of a redeemed England that it is perhaps unsurprising
that he has written relatively little since. [PN/JC]Other works: Phoenix
(1968); Domino (1971); Out There Where the Big Ships Go (coll 1980 US);
The Story of Pepita and Corindo (1982 chap US); The Young Student (1982
chap US); The Unhappy Princess (1982 chap US); The Missing Heart (1982
chap US); Shades of Darkness (1986); The Magic Spectacles, and Other Tales
(coll 1986 chap).As Colin Murry: Recollections of a Ghost (1960); A Path
to the Sea (1961); Private View (1972), written at the same time as the
other non-sf novels.About the author:"Backwards Across the Frontier" by RC
in FOUNDATION 9, 1975.See also: CHILDREN IN SF; CLONES; DISASTER;
ESCHATOLOGY; GOTHIC SF; IMMORTALITY; METAPHYSICS; MILFORD SCIENCE
FICTION
WRITERS' CONFERENCE; MUSIC; PARALLEL WORLDS; PARANOIA; RELIGION; UNDER
THE
SEA.
COX, ADRIAN
[r] M.H. ZOOL.
COX, ERLE
(1873-1950) Australian novelist and journalist who reviewed for The Argus
and the Australasian 1918-46. His best-known sf novel is Out of the
Silence (1919 The Argus; 1925; cut 1947), about the attempt by a
representative of an otherwise extinct super-race to rule first Australia
and then the world. The novel exhibits some racist overtones. Fool's
Harvest (1939) warned against a future INVASION of AUSTRALIA. The Missing
Angel (1947) is a fantasy about foxing the Devil. [JC]See also: SUSPENDED
ANIMATION.
COX, JOAN (IRENE)
(1942- ) US rancher and author whose first sf novel, Mindsong (1979),

features a planet terraformed into a Hellenic Eden. Her second, Star Web
(1980), is somewhat less engaging. [JC]See also: FASTER THAN LIGHT.
CRACKEN, JAEL
[s] Brian W. ALDISS.
CRACK IN THE WORLD
Film (1965). Security Pictures/Paramount. Dir Andrew Marton, starring
Dana Andrews, Janette Scott, Kieron Moore, Alexander Knox. Screenplay J.M.
White, Julian Halevy. 96 mins. Colour.An attempt to tap the energy at the
Earth's core causes a large and ever increasing crack in the crust. A bid
to halt the process with a nuclear explosion sends into space a large
chunk of the Earth, which forms a new moon. This ambitious DISASTER movie,
filmed in Spain, is undermined by too small a budget, but is suspensefully
directed. [JB/PN]
CRAIG, A.A.
[s] Poul ANDERSON.
CRAIG, ALEXANDER
(? -? ) Author of the lost-race ( LOST WORLDS) novel Ionia: Land of Wise
Men and Fair Women (1898). Ionia is a singularly pious and anti-Semitic
Greek colony in the Himalayas boasting prohibition, eugenics and
communism. He is not to be confused with Alexander George Craig (1897- ),
author of The Voice of Merlin (1946) as Alec Craig, a book-length poem on
Arthurian themes. [JC]
CRAIG, BRIAN
Brian M. STABLEFORD.
CRAIG, DAVID
Pseudonym of UK writer and journalist Allan James Tucker (1929- ), whose
Roy Rickman series - The Alias Man (1968), Message Ends (1969) and Contact
Lost (1970) - a mundane jeremiad about the coming 1970s world crisis, with
the UK becoming a Soviet satellite, is sufficiently displaced into sf to
be of some interest. [JC]
CRAIG, RANDOLPH
[s] Norvell W. PAGE.
CRAIG, WEBSTER
[s] Eric Frank RUSSELL.
CRAIG, WILLIAM
Working name of UK writer Charles William Thurlow-Craig (1901- ), whose
two NEAR-FUTURE sf novels, Plague Over London (1939) and The Tashkent
Crisis (1971), demonstrate a fine consistency of mind through three
decades, for in each the Russians are the villains who, with secret
weapons and unflagging spite, threaten the world. [JC]
CRAIGIE, DAVID
Pseudonym used by illustrator and writer Dorothy M. Craigie (1908- ) on
her books for young adults. As Dorothy Craigie, she wrote numerous stories
for younger children, from Summersalts Circus (1947) to Nicky and Nigger
Join the Circus (1960); also as Dorothy Craigie she illustrated children's

books, including Graham Greene's four in the genre.As DC, she wrote two sf
novels with young protagonists. In The Voyage of the Luna 1 (1948), which
she illustrated under her real name, the two children of famous explorers
more or less hijack a Moon-bound rocket and encounter various strange
species there. Dark Atlantis (1951) takes its protagonist three miles down
to an ATLANTIS inhabited by intelligent reptiles. [JC]
CRAMER, JOHN G(LEASON)
(1934- ) US experimental physicist (Professor of Physics at the
University of Washington) and writer; father of Kathryn CRAMER; author of
the Alternate View series of science articles in ASF from the 1980s
onwards. His HARD-SF novel, Twistor(1989), engagingly describes the
eponymous invention, which sends folk into other DIMENSIONS, where they
find copious supplies of food, while a villainous corporation attempts in the end unsuccessfully - to corner the device for its own ends. As the
novel closes, several new and virgin worlds stand at the brink of being
used by humans. [JC]
CRAMER, KATHRYN (ELIZABETH)
(1962- ) US critic and editor; daughter of John CRAMER. She has been
involved in various capacities with the NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION
since it began in 1988, where she has published some spiky, erudite
criticism. She has become deeply involved in arguing the aesthetic case
for - and writing - fiction designed for hypertext, including "In Small ?
Large Pieces" (1994 The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext). Her
anthologies include two volumes in the Christmas series, both with David
HARTWELL: Christmas Ghosts (anth 1987) and Spirits of Christmas (anth
1989); The Architecture of Fear (anth 1987) with Peter D. Pautz (1952- );
Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment (anth 1988) with Hartwell;
Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder (anth 1989) with Hartwell; Walls of
Fear (anth 1990); The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard Science
Fiction (anth 1994) with Hartwell, a huge and ambitious attempt to
delineate, and to represent by examples, the scope of HARD SF. [JC]
CRAMER, MILES
[s] Thomas Calvert MCCLARY.
CRANE, ROBERT
Pseudonym of Bernard Glemser (1908-1990), UK novelist who worked for his
government in the USA after WWII, remaining there after his resignation.
Under his own name he wrote several non-genre novels, at least two of
which feature a protagonist named Robert Crane. As RC he began to write sf
with "The Purple Fields" in 1953, but is best remembered for Hero's Walk
(1954) - the basis for a tv play, "The Voices" (1954) - an intelligent and
realistically conceived tale in which superior ALIENS quarantine a
militaristic Earth and eventually bomb it to rubble. There is some hope at
the novel's close that humanity will be permitted to survive and mature.
[JC]
CRANK!
US SEMIPROZINE, from 1993, current, quarterly, four issues to Fall 1994,
trade paperback format, ed and pub Bryan Cholfin from Cambridge,
Massachusetts.The uncompromising style of Cholfin's Broken Mirrors Press

(which has published worthy though uncommercial projects by writers such
as David R. BUNCH and R.A. L LAFFERTY) informs this attractive SMALL PRESS
fiction quarterly, which enjoys a remarkably high level of editorial
quality. Its first issues have included new fiction by Ursula K. LE GUIN,
Gwyneth JONES, Brian W. ALDISS, and R.A. LAFFERTY, as well as publishing
Gene WOLFE's novella "Empire of Foliage and Flower", previously available
only in a de luxe edition. Le Guin's novelette "The Matter of Seggri" was
nominated for the 1994 Nebula Award C's high standards, however, may
militate against its success; its recent publication schedule has become
uncertain. [GF]
CRAWFORD, NED
(? - ) UK writer whose Naming the Animals: A Haunting (1980) congestedly
depicts a DYSTOPIAN future, out of which, freighted in symbol, a new Eden
implausibly emerges. [JC]
CRAWFORD, WILLIAM L(EVI)
(1911-1984) US publisher and editor, one of the first sf fans to become a
publisher, editing and producing two SEMIPROZINES: UNUSUAL STORIES ambitiously announced in 1933 but more or less still-born - and MARVEL
TALES, which came out in 1934. At about the same time, after a chapbook
anthology assembling "Men of Avalon" by David H. KELLER and "The White
Sybil" by Clark Ashton SMITH, he published, in Mars Mountain (coll 1935)
by Eugene George KEY, one of the first US GENRE-SF books to be produced by
a US SMALL PRESS founded for that purpose, and the first to be released
with any expectation that copies would be sold to buyers who did not know
the author personally. A second novel, which would have been Andre
NORTON's first published sf, was accepted for publication in 1934 but
stayed in manuscript - except for a few excerpts - until WLC finally
released it 38 years later as Garan the Eternal (1972). This first press,
Fantasy Publications, was followed by Visionary Press, which published The
Shadow over Innsmouth (1936) by H.P. LOVECRAFT; but various projects then
foundered, and WLC became successfully active again only in 1945, when as
Crawford Publications he released some booklets, including Clifford D.
SIMAK's The Creator 1946 chap) and an anthology, The Garden of Fear (anth
1945 chap); 2 further anthologies, Griffin Booklet One (anth 1949) and The
Machine-God Laughs (anth 1949), both ed WLC, were under the Griffin
Publishing Co. imprint. These enterprises all proved less significant than
FANTASY PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC. (or FPCI), which WLC was instrumental in
founding in 1947, along with the magazine FANTASY BOOK (editing the latter
under the pseudonym Garrett Ford). FPCI was one of the central fan presses
of the era, publishing L. Sprague DE CAMP's The Undesired Princess (1951),
L. Ron HUBBARD's Death's Deputy (1948), A.E. VAN VOGT's and E. Mayne
HULL's Out of the Unknown (coll 1948) and other titles of importance; it
failed in the end only through incompetent management.WLC soldiered on
through the 1950s and afterwards, hand to mouth, always hopeful and full
of projects, some of which were at least partially realized. He edited
Science and Sorcery (anth 1953) as Garrett Ford; launched the magazine
SPACEWAY in 1953; became publisher of the magazine Witchcraft ?
(formerly Coven 13) in the 1970s; and became in the mid-1970s a
CONVENTIONS entrepreneur. Also, various stray pamphlets appeared. WLC's

diverse projects included the publishing of some scarce and interesting
material, and it may well have been the unattractive, amateurish
production values which characterized all his work that caused his general
lack of commercial success; certainly he knew sf, and loved it. [JC/MJE]
CRAWLING EYE, THE
The TROLLENBERG TERROR .
CRAZIES, THE
(vt Code Name Trixie) Film (1973). Cambist Films. Dir George ROMERO,
starring Lane Carroll, W.G. McMillan, Harold Wayne Jones. Screenplay
Romero, based on a story by Paul McCollough. 104 mins. Colour.A plane
carrying germ-warfare material crashes near a small US town and pollutes
the drinking-water, causing an epidemic of homicidal and psychopathic
behaviour in the inhabitants. The army moves in and the crazed brutality
of the soldiers as they shoot victims of the virus (or trapped innocents)
is as bad as the lunacy of their targets. There are strong similarities
between this and Romero's best-known film, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
(1968), in that both involve a small group of trapped "normal" people
surrounded by nightmare. Romero's exploitation movies are more ambitious
than most - wittier, too - and this, as usual, has, half-visible through
the blood, a political/cultural subtext about an uncaring society. [JB/PN]
CRAZY RAY, THE
PARIS QUI DORT.
CREASEY, JOHN
(1908-1973) UK author, publisher and literary agent who began writing for
the BOYS' PAPERS in 1926, turning to adult thrillers in 1932. He wrote 564
books under (it is widely reported) 28 pseudonyms, but it is doubtful if
all were exclusively by him (Michael MOORCOCK was at one time approached
to do writing for JC). Like George GRIFFITH with his future- WAR novels,
JC exploited contemporary fears of organized crime and of terrorist and
revolutionary activities, often including sf elements as an additional
horror-for example, his first novel, Seven Times Seven (1932; rev 1970),
depicts a criminal gang equipped with "freezing gas". In later works,
beginning with Dangerous Quest (1943; rev 1965), a futuristic novel about
an underground Gestapo group in liberated Yugoslavia, and continuing in
his Dr Palfrey series (see listing below), sf themes came to the fore.
Midget aircraft piloted by zombie-like children attack the world's cities
in The Children of Hate (1952; rev vt The Children of Despair 1958 UK; vt
The Killers of Innocence 1971 US). Human-induced world DISASTER was
imminent in The Flood (1955) and others, while an alien INVASION was
defeated in The Unbegotten (1971). All were sensational in nature,
contributing nothing to the genre, and were influential only on the
cheap-thriller market. [JE]Other works include: The Death Miser (1932; rev
1965); Men, Maids and Murder (1933; rev 1972); The Mark of the Crescent
(1935; rev 1967); Death Round the Corner (1935); The Mystery Plane (1936);
Thunder in Europe (1936; rev 1968); The Air Marauders (1937); Carriers of
Death (1937; rev 1968); Days of Danger (1937; rev 1968); The S.O.S. Flight
(1937); Death Stands By (1938; rev 1966); The Fighting Fliers (1938);
Menace! (1938; rev 1971); Panic! (1939; rev 1969); Death by Night (1940);

The Island of Peril (1940; rev 1968); The Peril Ahead (1940; rev 1964);
Death in Flames (1943; rev 1973 as by Gordon Ashe); Dark Peril (1944; rev
1958); The League of Dark Men (1947; rev 1965); Department of Death
(1951); Four of the Best (coll 1955); The Black Spiders (1957); A Shadow
of Death (1968); A Blast of Trumpets (1975). Dr Palfrey stories: Traitors'
Doom (1942), The Valley of Fear (1943; vt The Perilous Country 1949), The
Legion of the Lost (1943), The Hounds of Vengeance (1945; rev 1967), Death
in the Rising Sun (1945), Shadow of Doom (1946), The House of the Bears
(1946; rev 1962), Dark Harvest (1947; rev 1962), Sons of Satan (1948; rev
1970), The Wings of Peace (1948; rev 1964), The Dawn of Darkness (1949),
The League of Light (1949; rev 1963), The Man who Shook the World (1950;
rev 1958), The Prophet of Fire (1951), The Touch of Death (1954), The
Mists of Fear (1955), The Plague of Silence (1958), The Drought (1959; vt
Dry Spell 1967 UK), The Terror (1962; rev 1970), The Depths (1963), The
Sleep (1964), The Inferno (1965), The Famine (1967), The Blight (1968),
The Oasis (1969), The Smog (1970), The Insulators (1972), The Voiceless
Ones (1973), The Thunder-Maker (1976) and The Whirlwind (1979). [JE]See
also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.
CREATURE FROM ANOTHER WORLD, THE
The TROLLENBERG TERROR .
CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, THE
Film (1954). Universal. Dir Jack ARNOLD, starring Richard Carlson, Julia
Adams, Richard Denning. Screenplay Harry Essex, Arthur Ross, from a story
by Maurice Zimm. 3-D. 79 mins. B/w.A humanoid creature with gills
successfully resists attempts by three scientists - attracted to the area
by the discovery of a fossilized hand with fins - to take him from his
native lagoon in the upper Amazon. One (Denning) is ready to kill it;
another (Carlson) hopes to keep it alive. The Gill-Man - lumbering on land
but remarkably graceful in the underwater sequences - became one of the
icons of Universal's MONSTER MOVIES. Shot in 3-D, the film is richly
atmospheric despite its routine script. It became an archetype of the
genre through the bizarre eroticism of the Creature's fascination with the
third scientist (Adams), especially in the balletic sequence where he
swims unseen beneath her in a sensuous mime of intercourse. In some
respects Steven SPIELBERG's successful Jaws (1975) was a remake of TCFTBL.
The film had two sequels: REVENGE OF THE CREATURE (1954) and The CREATURE
WALKS AMONG US (1956).The novelization is Creature from the Black Lagoon *
(1954) by Vargo Statten ( John Russell FEARN). [PN/JB]
CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA
Roger CORMAN.
CREATURE WALKS AMONG US, THE
Film (1956). Universal. Dir John Sherwood, starring Jeff Morrow, Rex
Reason, Leigh Snowden. Screenplay Arthur Ross. 78 mins. B/w.This is the
second, inferior sequel to The CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954) - the
first being REVENGE OF THE CREATURE (1954); it was not shot in 3-D, and
had a new director. Here the Creature is transformed by fire into a land
monster, complete with lungs (and, later, clothes), thereby depriving him
of precisely the qualities that made him popular. There is a ludicrous

plot about an exploitative scientist (Morrow) making money out of the
space programme by building up the Creature's red corpuscles and thus (!)
altering his gene structure. [PN/JB]
CREDITS
In sf TERMINOLOGY, a credit is a unit of MONEY. Credits are used widely
in tales of the future. [PN]
CREEPING UNKNOWN, THE
The QUATERMASS XPERIMENT .
CRICHTON, MICHAEL
(1942- ) US writer and film director; he graduated with an MD from
Harvard Medical School. He began publishing sf under the pseudonym John
Lange with Drug of Choice (1968). Most of the Lange books are thrillers; A
Case of Need (1968), published as by Jeffery Hudson, won an Edgar Award
for Best Mystery Novel of the year. Some of MC's Lange books, like Zero
Cool (1969) and Binary (1972), make perfunctory use of sf devices in a way
typical of the modern post-James-Bond thriller. Binary was filmed for tv
in MC's directorial debut as PURSUIT (1972). Of greater interest are the
novels he has written under his own name, many of which are sf or fantasy,
beginning with The Andromeda Strain (1969), an immediate bestseller soon
filmed as The ANDROMEDA STRAIN (1971), in which microscopic spores from
space attack the US West ( DISASTER). MC's medical background is evident
in much of his work ( MEDICINE). The Terminal Man (1972) speculates
fascinatingly on the morality and effects of electronic brain implants as
a control device, and was the basis of the film The TERMINAL MAN (1974),
dir Mike Hodges. Eaters of the Dead (1976) recounts a savage conflict
between Vikings and strange Neolithic people; it is in fact a retelling of
the Beowulf legend. Congo (1980) is a LOST-WORLD story set in Africa, and
reads like updated H. Rider HAGGARD. Sphere (1987) is an UNDER-THE-SEA
thriller about the discovery of a long-sunken spacecraft, anticipating The
ABYSS (1989). JURASSIC PARK (1990) is a return to the theme of WESTWORLD
(discussed below): it effectively argues the risks inherent in
uncontrolled GENETIC ENGINEERING, "done in secret, and in haste, and for
profit", though the plot itself - dinosaurs reconstituted from genetic
scraps cause havoc in the theme park they have been created to stock - is
little more than a MCGUFFIN; it was filmed as JURASSIC PARK (1993) by
Steven SPIELBERG. All of these novels read a little like film
treatments.After Pursuit, MC determined to exercise artistic control over
screen adaptations of his work and though he did not do so in the case of
The Terminal Man, he both scripted and directed WESTWORLD (1973), an
intelligent and cleverly commercial film about a ROBOT-manned
reconstruction of the Old West (see also LEISURE) that falls apart at the
seams when a robot gunslinger runs amuck; the screenplay was published as
Westworld (1974). He scored his biggest commercial hit as a director with
COMA (1978), based on Robin COOK's marginally sf novel, a further
exploration of MC's technophobic, PARANOID vision, drawing on his medical
background for a conspiracy thriller about a high-tech organ-transplant
business that draws its raw material from hospital beds. After a
meticulous and underrated period re-creation, The Great Train Robbery
(1979; vt The First Great Train Robbery), adapted from his own novel - not

sf - of the same title, MC has rather lost ground as a director, with
LOOKER (1981) and RUNAWAY (1984) both failing at the box-office. However,
these films, for all their plot failings, are interesting explorations of
his fascination with and distrust of an increasingly mechanized society.
Looker deals with image-generation technology, while Runaway casts Tom
Selleck as a future policeman whose speciality is tackling dangerously
malfunctional household robots. Physical Evidence (1989), a non-sf
thriller, is his least interesting or personal film to date.An efficient
and intelligent writer and director, MC is capable of producing remarkable
work. [JC/PN/KN]See also: APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD); CINEMA;
HORROR IN SF; MYTHOLOGY; VILLAINS.
CRICHTON, NEIL
(1932- ) Canadian photographer and writer in whose sf novel, Rerun
(1976), a man from 1990 goes back 15 years into his own life of the
mid-1970s but does not ultimately profit from his foreknowledge. [JC]
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Genre fiction concerned with crime may be roughly divided into detections
and thrillers. The former are problem stories; the latter exploit the
melodramatic potential of the conflicts inherent in criminal
deviation.Detective stories depend very heavily on ingenuity and generally
require very fine distinctions between what is possible and what is not.
It is not easy to combine sf and the detective story because in sf the
boundary between the possible and the impossible is so flexible, but
futuristic detective stories can work, given a sufficiently rigid set of
ground rules; thus Isaac ASIMOV was able to create intriguing detections
based on the restrictions of his three laws of robotics, most notably The
Naked Sun (1957), and Randall GARRETT was able to write his ingenious Lord
D'Arcy stories about an ALTERNATE-WORLD detective who must use his powers
of ratiocination to solve crimes in which rigorously defined magical laws
feature, often being used forensically. There was also a subgenre of early
detective stories featuring "scientific detectives" armed not only with
the scientific methods of thought made famous by Sherlock Holmes but also
with the equipment and arcane knowledge of advanced science; notable works
in this vein include The Achievements of Luther Trant (coll 1910) by Edwin
BALMER and William MacHarg and the many Craig Kennedy adventures
chronicled by Arthur B. REEVE, including The Poisoned Pen (coll 1911) and
The Dream Doctor (fixup 1914). Hugo GERNSBACK's short-lived SCIENTIFIC
DETECTIVE MONTHLY published fiction of this sort, but the speculative
aspects of the stories are understandably tentative.Crime is much more
commonly and effectively exploited in sf for its melodramatic potential;
the imaginative freedom of sf allows both criminals and crime-fighters to
become exotic, and their schemes grandiose, a pattern which underlies
Jules VERNE's great creations: Captain Nemo, who features in Vingt mille
lieues sous les mers (1870; trans as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the
Seas 1872 UK) and its sequel L'ile mysterieuse (1874-5; trans as The
Mysterious Island 1875 UK); and Robur the Conqueror, who features in Robur
le conquerant (1886; trans as The Clipper of the Clouds 1887 UK; vt Robur
the Conqueror 1887 US) and its sequel Maitre du monde (1904; trans anon as
Master of the World 1914 UK). PULP-MAGAZINE sf grew up alongside

increasingly exotic detective pulps which featured the prototypes of the
SUPERHEROES who would ultimately come into their own in COMIC books, most
notably DOC SAVAGE. In the early days of scientific romance the scientific
supercriminal (often embittered by the world's failure to recognize and
reward his genius) was a common character, frequently holding the world
(or large parts of it) to ransom. Robert CROMIE's The Crack of Doom (1895)
and Fred T. JANE's The Violet Flame (1899) feature early examples of
world-threatening superscientists. There was a glut of such stories in the
1930s, including Power (1931) by S. Fowler WRIGHT, The One Sane Man (1934)
by Francis BEEDING and I'll Blackmail the World (1935) by S. Andrew WOOD.
Few apocalyptic threats were fully carried out in such novels, although
Neil BELL's The Lord of Life (1933) is a flamboyant exception. (The
tradition is kept alive today by, among others, the plots of the many
James Bond movies.) Disenchantment with the state of the world allowed
many writers of the 1930s to sympathize with world-blackmailers whose
demands were humanitarian; C.S. FORESTER's The Peacemaker (1934) is a
notable example, and C.J. Cutcliffe HYNE's Man's Understanding (coll 1933)
includes two black comedies suggesting that even the most destructive and
unreasonable mad SCIENTIST would be no worse than the actual rulers of the
world. Later examples include the atom-bomb story The Maniac's Dream
(1946) by F. Horace ROSE and the Dr Palfrey novels by John CREASEY.Among
the early GENRE-SF writers to make use of the stereotyped supercriminal
was Murray LEINSTER, whose many versions of it include "A Thousand Degrees
Below Zero" (1919), "Darkness on Fifth Avenue" (1929), "The Racketeer Ray"
(1932) and "The Earth-Shaker" (1933). John W. CAMPBELL Jr used the formula
in "Piracy Preferred" (1930), but he armed his heroes as well as his
villain (who reformed and joined the heroes for several sequels). The game
of interplanetary super-cops vs super-robbers was pioneered by Edmond
HAMILTON in the Interstellar Patrol stories, some of which were reprinted
in Outside the Universe (1929; 1964) and Crashing Suns (1928-30; coll
1965), and extravagantly carried forward by E.E. "Doc" SMITH in the
Skylark series and Spacehounds of IPC (1934; 1947). The conflict in the
Skylark of Space books, between Richard Seaton and the impressively
villainous Blackie DuQuesne, was vigorously sustained; and the later
Lensmen series (in book form 1948-54), featured perhaps the most famous
genre-sf criminal organization of all: the Eddorian-run interstellar
cartel known as Boskone.Pulp sf writers imagined that future crime would
follow much the same pattern as crime today, although they were happy to
imagine that romantic crimes like piracy might come back into fashion in
outer space - or even in time, as in Ross ROCKLYNNE's "Pirates of the Time
Trail" (1943). Retribution, too, tended to follow well established tracks,
although one or two writers used sealed time-loops and other gimmicks to
design punishments to fit particular crimes; Lester DEL REY's "My Name is
Legion" (1942) suggests an appropriate fate for Hitler. One magazine story
of the 1940s which attempts to make a significant statement about deviancy
and penology is Robert A. HEINLEIN's "Coventry" (1940), which imagines a
curious kind of exile, then proceeds to develop one of the most annoying
of sf CLICHES: the idea that selfish deviants might be harassed as a kind
of test to prove their suitability for recruitment into the social elite
of a stable society.When sf writers took to building all kinds of
eccentric totalitarian societies for their future scenarios in the 1940s

and 1950s, the rectitude of deviancy became a much more open question. As
forms of conformity became stranger, so did forms of nonconformity. In
Fritz LEIBER's GATHER, DARKNESS! (1943; 1950) the establishment's
superscience masquerades as RELIGION, leading the rebels to disguise their
own superscience as witchcraft. More sophisticated studies of odd forms of
deviancy in warped societies include Wyman GUIN's "Beyond Bedlam" (1951),
whose heroine rebels against the obligation to share tenancy of her body
with her split personality's alter ego, Ray BRADBURY's FAHRENHEIT 451
(1953), whose meek rebels learn books by heart to save them from would-be
burners, and Philip Jose FARMER's Dayworld (1985) and its sequels, in
which "daybreakers" exceed their allotted active time in an overcrowded
world.In the 1950s, new ideas regarding the treatment of deviants began to
appear in some profusion. In "Two-Handed Engine" (1955), by Henry KUTTNER
and C.L. MOORE, criminals are attended by robot "furies" to monitor their
actions and symbolize their guilt. In Damon KNIGHT's "The Country of the
Kind" (1956) criminals are outcast, free to do as they will but utterly
lonely - an idea explored with greater intensity in Robert SILVERBERG's
"To See the Invisible Man" (1963). Robert SHECKLEY's The Status
Civilization (1960) is a satirical extrapolation of the penal-colony
theme, imagining the kind of society which criminals might establish in
reaction against the one which exiles them. The notion of the prison
colony is taken to a terrible extreme in Cordwainer SMITH's "A Planet
Named Shayol" (1961), in which criminals are made to grow extra limbs and
organs for harvesting and use in transplants. A much more humane view of
the issues involved in crime and punishment is featured in Alfred BESTER's
classic sf novel based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment
(1866), THE DEMOLISHED MAN (1953), in which the obsessed villain
ultimately fails to avoid detection by a telepathic policeman, but finds
the prospect of punitive "demolition" less terrible than its name implies.
Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit" (1954) is another forceful study in homicidal
psychology. New fashions in the real-world treatment of prisoners especially the notion of "brainwashing" - were extensively featured in
borderline-sf thrillers, and taken to surreal lengths in the tv series The
PRISONER , whose theme was sensitively novelized by Thomas M. DISCH in The
Prisoner * (1969).Exotic police forces were featured in heroic roles in
many sf stories and series in the 1950s. An alien policeman pursues a
criminal to Earth in Needle (1950) by Hal CLEMENT, requiring to inhabit
the body of an earthly host in order to do so. Time police - patrolling
and protecting history - became commonplace, as in The End of Eternity
(1955) by Isaac Asimov, Guardians of Time (1955-60; fixup 1960) by Poul
ANDERSON, and H. Beam PIPER's Paratime Police series. Asimov's first sf
detective story, The Caves of Steel (1954), was followed a few years later
by the first murder mystery in which Earth is the corpse: Poul Anderson's
After Doomsday (1962). Realistic futuristic police-procedural stories were
pioneered by Rick RAPHAEL in an effective series of stories dealing with
road-traffic law enforcement in the near future, Code Three (fixup 1966),
and were carried forward by such novels as Lee KILLOUGH's The Doppelganger
Gambit (1979), but law enforcers of a rather less conventional kind have
understandably remained dominant. Joe Clifford FAUST's A Death of Honour
(1987) imagines that the 21st-century police might be simply too busy to
investigate a murder. The vast majority of the novels of Ron GOULART

feature crime and detectives in some quirky fashion or other; most notable
among them are the Chameleon Corps books. (John E. STITH is another writer
who mixes HUMOUR, crime and sf, but with less accent on the humour than
Goulart.) Although the world of sf crime has remained male-dominated,
female detectives have made significant appearances in Rosel George
BROWN's Sibyl Sue Blue (1966; vt Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue) and the St Cyr
Interplanetary Detective series begun by Ian WALLACE in Deathstar Voyage
(1969). SUPERHERO crime-fighters made relatively little impact in written
sf until the advent of George R.R. MARTIN's SHARED-WORLD anthology series
begun with Wild Cards (anth 1986), but an interesting precursor was
featured in Doris PISERCHIA's Mister Justice 1973); Temps (anth 1991),
"created by" Neil GAIMAN and Alex Stewart, was the first of a series of
shared-world anthologies featuring the crime-fighting escapades of
part-time and/or limited-ability superheroes.A more romantic view of crime
is preserved by picaresque sf stories. Although muted for a long time by
editorial TABOOS, a considerable body of sf makes heroes of social
outsiders and deviants. An early example is Charles L. HARNESS's Flight
into Yesterday (1949; 1953; vt The Paradox Men), and much of Harness's
work features similar heroic outsiders, who tend to be artists when they
are not rogues, and are often both. Much of the work of Jack VANCE falls
into a similar category. Far less romantic is the eponymous antihero of
Harry HARRISON's The Stainless Steel Rat (1957-60; fixup 1961) and its
sequels. Philip Jose Farmer wrote a series featuring John Carmody, a
criminal who reformed to become a priest, the most notable being Night of
Light (1966). As the taboos eased there appeared criminal heroes who
remained both unrepentant and charismatic, including the protagonist of
Roger ZELAZNY's Jack of Shadows (1971) and the narrator of Samuel R.
DELANY's "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" (1968);
Delany is another writer who almost invariably uses miscreant artists as
heroes. The most extravagant example of a charismatic criminal in sf is
probably the protagonist of Mike RESNICK's Santiago (1986), who is pursued
across the Galaxy by assorted exotic bounty-hunters, most of whom are
certainly no better than he turns out to be.The relativity of crime and
the idea of evil in societies which have very different values is widely
featured. Earnest variants can be found in such stories as "The Sharing of
Flesh" (1968) by Poul Anderson and Speaker for the Dead (1986) by Orson
Scott CARD, in which alien societies license or compel acts which seem to
us utterly horrific. Robert Sheckley often addresses the question
ironically, as in "Watchbird" (1953), a moral fable about a mechanical
law-enforcer's tendency to exceed its brief, and "The Monsters" (1953),
which features an alien society in which wife-murder is a moral act. The
blackest sf comedy in this vein is probably Piers ANTHONY's "On the Uses
of Torture" (1981).Despite the welter of criminal activity in sf there are
very few new crimes, although such DYSTOPIAS as Yegevny ZAMIATIN's My
(written 1920; trans as We 1924) and George ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
(1949) have taken the rooting-out of political deviance to new extremes in
making "thoughtcrimes" detectable and remediable. Crimes of nonconformity
often take bizarre forms, as in such J.G. BALLARD stories as "Billenium"
(1961), in which the existence of an empty room is wickedly but futilely
concealed, and "Chronopolis" (1960), in which the hero illegally winds
clocks. Tampering with history is a crime which features only in sf -

matched by the singularly appropriate punishment of historical erasure in
Robert Silverberg's Up the Line (1969) - but even this is no more than an
extreme of subversive activity. A more original crime is committed by the
protagonist of Piers Anthony's Chthon (1967), although the extremely nasty
prison colony to which he is condemned for it is ordinary in kind. The
same situation pertains in the design of punishments, and has done ever
since Arthur Conan DOYLE's "The Los Amigos Fiasco" (1892), which
anticipated the use of the world's first electric chair but made the
consequences of its use exaggeratedly melodramatic. Numerous sf stories
have anticipated the use of "electronic tagging", although usually the
tags are capable of administering on-the-spot punishment. An early example
(although here the "tags" are created by mental conditioning) is featured
in "The Analogues" (1952) by Damon Knight; others are in The Reefs of
Space (1964) by Frederik POHL and Jack WILLIAMSON and The Ring (1968) by
Piers Anthony and Robert E. MARGROFF. When the merits of punitive,
retributive and rehabilitative theories of penology are compared in sf,
the extremism of plausible examples often makes the argument starkly
dramatic; examples of Swiftian "modest proposals" abound. An interesting
polemical work on penological theory is John J. MCGUIRE's "Take the Reason
Prisoner" (1963), and a macabre combination of the punitive and
retributive theories is featured in those of Larry NIVEN's stories in
which the crime of "organlegging" co-exists with a new penal code whereby
criminals are broken up for bodily spare parts. Several of Niven's stories
on these lines are among the best examples of the sf detective story; some
are collected in The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton (coll 1976).Since Sherlock
Holmes fell into the public domain he has been a popular character in sf
stories, appearing in key roles in Morlock Night (1979) by K.W. JETER,
Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds (1975) by Manly Wade and Wade WELLMAN,
Dr Jekyll and Mr Holmes (1979) by Loren D. Estleman and Time for Sherlock
Holmes (1983) by David DVORKIN. Another Victorian figure, from the
opposite end of the moral spectrum, who has exerted a similar fascination
upon modern writers is the prototypical serial killer Jack the Ripper;
several of the stories in the centenary anthology Ripper! (anth 1988; vt
Jack the Ripper UK) ed Susan CASPER and Gardner DOZOIS are sf.Theme
anthologies concerned with sf crime stories include Space Police (anth
1956) ed Andre NORTON; Space, Time and Crime (anth 1964) ed Miriam Allen
DEFORD; and Computer Crimes and Capers (anth 1985) ed Isaac Asimov, Martin
H. GREENBERG and Charles G. WAUGH. [BS]See also: SOCIOLOGY; UTOPIAS.
CRIMES OF THE FUTURE
Film (1970). Emergent Films. Prod, dir, written and photographed David
CRONENBERG, starring Ronald Mlodzik, Tania Zolty, Jon Lidolt, Jack
Messinger. 70 mins. Colour.This cheaply made, inventive Canadian film,
something between an underground and a commercial movie, is chiefly of
interest as ushering in - along with Stereo (1969) - Cronenberg's
distinguished, eccentric and (according to some) disgusting career in sf
cinema. With hindsight, we can see many Cronenberg strategies and themes
here in embryo: deliberately tasteless SATIRE, the moral corruption of
society, human metamorphosis created by irresponsible TECHNOLOGY, sexual
metaphor at the heart of the argument, and the contrast of sterile
settings with ravages and mutations of the flesh. The film is set in a

NEAR FUTURE where humans are devolving ( DEVOLUTION) and all women of
child-bearing age have been killed by an epidemic spread through a
cosmetics additive created by a mad dermatologist (in the House of Skin),
thus making procreative pedophilia a likely "crime of the future" and
putting a 5-year-old girl (Zolty) at the centre of the barely
comprehensible plot. [PN]
CRIME ZONE
Roger CORMAN.
CRISP, FRANK R(OBSON)
(1915- ) UK writer, at one time in the Merchant Navy. His sf novels, The
Ape of London (1959) and The Night Callers (1960), are routine adventures
deploying thriller and horror elements; their sf displacement is
inconsiderable. The latter, involving an alien INVASION, was filmed as The
NIGHT CALLER (1965). [JC]See also: ASTRONOMY; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS.
CRISPIN, A(NN) C(AROL)
(1950- ) US writer who was first known as a competent author of ties,
including three for the Star Trek enterprise - Yesterday's Son * (1983)
and its direct sequel Time for Yesterday * (1988), along with Star Trek,
The Next Generation #13: The Eyes of the Beholder * (1990) - and three for
the "V" sequence - "V" * (1984), East Coast Crisis * (1984) with Howard
WEINSTEIN and Death Tide * (1985) with Deborah A. Marshall ( "V"). She
also collaborated with Andre NORTON on a Witch World novel, Gryphon's
Eyrie (1984), before embarking on her first independent work of
significance, the StarBridge sequence for older children: StarBridge
(1989), Silent Dances (1990) with Kathleen O'MALLEY and Shadow World
(1991) with Jannean (L.) Elliott. The first volume of the series
(projected to contain at least5 vols) follows the exploits of an extremely
bright teenaged girl who becomes involved in problems of galactic scope,
and participates in the founding of an Academy for youngsters like
herself. The second, rather more interestingly, puts a deaf Academy member
of Native American background on an ominous planet where only she can read
the signs of ALIEN intelligence. In the third, an alienated male Academy
member finds, in a short-lived alien race, challenges that are precisely
adapted to his needs. Through these well planned if not strikingly
original tales ACC has demonstrated a consistent professionalism about her
trade, and considerable generosity about giving good value. [JC]
CRISPIN, EDMUND
Pseudonym for his literary work of UK composer, writer and editor Robert
Bruce Montgomery (1921-1978), who remains best known for his nine Gervase
Fen detective novels. He also reviewed crime fiction for the Sunday Times
and, as a composer, under his real name wrote the music for many UK films
of the 1950s and 1960s, including several of the Carry On series. EC did
not write sf, but his work as an sf anthologist was of great influence.
When Best SF (anth 1955) appeared it was unique in several ways: its
editor was a respected literary figure; its publisher (Faber ?
a prestigious one; and it made no apologies or excuses for presenting sf
as a legitimate form of writing. Moreover, EC's selection of stories
showed him to be thoroughly familiar with sf in both magazine and book

form, and his introductions to this and succeeding volumes were informed
and illuminating. Best SF was followed by Best SF Two (anth 1956), Three
(anth 1958), Four (anth 1961), Five (anth 1963), Six (anth 1966) and Seven
(anth 1970). It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the
early volumes in this series in establishing sf in the UK as a respectable
branch of literature. EC also edited two sf ANTHOLOGIES for schools, The
Stars and Under (anth 1968) and Outwards from Earth (anth 1974), as well
as Best Tales of Terror (anth 1962) and Best Tales of Terror Two (anth
1965). [MJE]See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION; LONGEVITY (IN
WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); MUSIC.
CRISTABEL
Pseudonym of US nurse, professor of nursing, and author Christine
Elizabeth Abrahamsen (1916- ), who wrote at least one Gothic as Kathleen
Westcott. She began publishing sf with the florid Veltakin sequence of sf
adventures: Manalacor of Veltakin (1970) and The Cruachan and the Killane
(1970). Her singletons were The Mortal Immortals (1971) and The Golden
Olive (1972). All are written in a style that crosses the romance genre
with boys' fiction. [PN/JC]
CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF
This entry restricts itself to works which generalize about sf, and only
in passing mentions books or articles about specific authors or themes
(for which see relevant entries).The range and sophistication of sf
studies have expanded greatly. Before 1970 very little useful material was
available, but since then, and especially during the 1980s, the
publication of secondary materials on sf has become an industry. The first
work of criticism devoted to US sf is Hammer and Tongs (coll 1937 chap) by
Clyde F. Beck (? -1985), which collects still-readable essays from a
fanzine, The Science Fiction Critic; the first important study, Pilgrims
through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian
Fiction (1947), by J.O. BAILEY, is historical and thematic, dealing mostly
with work published decades previously; value judgments are almost absent,
and trivia are discussed alongside works of lasting interest. Despite its
limitations, this was a valuable pioneering work. The PILGRIM AWARD for
excellence in sf studies was named after it.Bailey was an academic, but
for the next several decades most books about sf were written by fans
rather than academic critics. While this meant that their scholarly and
critical procedures were often eccentric, and sometimes of indifferent
quality, it also introduced considerable vigour into the early days of
debate about sf, along with a willingness to plunge into areas of research
(ephemeral publications-magazines and FANZINES - as well as books, along
with the recording of reminiscences by authors, editors and publishers)
avoided by academia; such knowledge of the HISTORY OF SF as is now
available to us is very much a product of their initial work. Research is
still shallow in many areas of sf's past, and no consensus history yet
exists.The next serious study after Bailey's was New Maps of Hell (1960
US) by Kingsley AMIS, a celebrated novelist with an academic background
but, so far as sf was concerned, a fan. Brief and unscholarly, it is
nevertheless witty, critical and suggestive; Amis regarded the essential
aspects of modern sf as satirical and dystopian ( DYSTOPIAS; SATIRE).

Unlike Bailey, he took most of his examples from contemporary GENRE SF.
Less literary in their approach, and more sober though passionate in their
way, were the historical studies of sf by Sam MOSKOWITZ, which, while
adopting simplistic critical criteria and not always accurate in detail,
were nevertheless important in the huge amount of research they codified
for the first time, especially regarding sf in early magazines, but going
well beyond that. Three collections of his essays which are often taken to
be models of fan scholarship are Explorers of the Infinite (coll 1963),
Seekers of Tomorrow (coll 1966) and Strange Horizons (coll 1976); also of
note are his Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of
Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines 1891-1911 (anth 1968) and Under
the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "The Scientific Romance" in
the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 (anth 1970), with their long, informative
introductions.Two well known writers of sf, Damon KNIGHT and James BLISH,
often took time out to write shrewd, well informed criticism, the latter
under the pseudonym William Atheling Jr. Much of Knight's critical work
was collected in In Search of Wonder (coll 1956; exp 1967) and of
Atheling's in The Issue at Hand (coll 1964) and More Issues at Hand (coll
1970). These books were published by ADVENT: PUBLISHERS, a SMALL PRESS
specifically set up to publish books about sf by fan scholars. It was with
Knight and Blish that some sort of critical consensus began to emerge
about what constituted sf and who were its most influential writers. The
first of three critical symposia ed Reginald BRETNOR, also featuring the
critical views of sf writers themselves, appeared very early: Modern
Science Fiction: Its Meaning and its Future (anth 1953; rev 1979). It was
followed by his Science Fiction, Today and Tomorrow (anth 1974) and The
Craft of Science Fiction (anth 1976).The cautious interest being shown in
sf by the US academic world bore its first fruits in 1959, in the shape of
the critical journal EXTRAPOLATION. For many years this was stencilled,
not printed, which suggested that the financial support it was receiving
from academia at large was small; nevertheless it lived on. Two further
academic magazines about sf followed, both (in different ways) a little
livelier: FOUNDATION: THE REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION in the UK (1972) and
SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES in the USA (1973). The former - as much fannish as
academic - emphasized reviews and critical and sociological studies of
contemporary and post-WWII sf; the latter - more strictly academic concentrated on writers of sf's past plus only the more academically
acceptable of the present, with good coverage of European sf and some
interesting and, to many, unexpected Marxist criticism. A newcomer has
been JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS (1988).Some of the best critical
writing about sf has appeared in these journals, and also in a great many
FANZINES. Unfortunately, fanzines tend to be produced cheaply (and as a
result often disintegrate rapidly) and have low circulations; back copies
are usually therefore extremely difficult to obtain. Some of the more
interesting critical fanzines and SEMIPROZINES from the 1940s through the
1980s were (and in many cases still are) ALGOL, AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE FICTION
REVIEW, FANTASY COMMENTATOR, FANTASY NEWSLETTER, FANTASY REVIEW,
JANUS/AURORA, LOCUS, LUNA MONTHLY, NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE
FICTION,
QUARBER MERKUR, RIVERSIDE QUARTERLY, SCIENCE FICTION ?
REVIEW, SF COMMENTARY, SCIENCE FICTION EYE, SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW,

SCIENCE FICTION TIMES, SFRA NEWSLETTER, SPECULATION, THRUST, VECTOR and
WARHOON. The professional sf magazines, too, have regularly published sf
criticism, that of FSF in particular often being of a high quality, as has
been (beginning much later) that of INTERZONE.By the 1970s a large body of
sf criticism had been built up, though much of it was and is difficult to
get hold of. The earlier notion that sf should be judged by criteria
different from those normally applied to conventional literature began
steadily to lose ground in the 1970s to the view that sf is strong enough
to be gauged by the same standards that prevail elsewhere in literary
criticism. Very naturally, however, the literary analysis of sf tends to
this day to be argued thematically and structurally, and to eschew a
criticism grounded in concepts of psychological realism on the one hand or
metaphorical power on the other. Although this is inevitable, mimetic
realism and good characterization being qualities somewhat marginalized by
the very nature of sf, it does help explain why even now sf criticism has
not generally developed a vocabulary enabling judgmental distinctions to
be well made; that is, when explaining why some books and stories are
worse than others (an explanation that sf criticism feels called upon to
make more seldom than is healthy), it does not usually do the job with
much conviction.The trickle of sf criticism in book form became a small
spate around the mid-1970s and something of a torrent later on, but
already by 1974 a number of new books had appeared, including studies by
Sam J. LUNDWALL and Donald A. WOLLHEIM in the USA. A major tributary
joined the river with Billion Year Spree (1973) by Brian W. ALDISS; Aldiss
later revised and updated this work with David WINGROVE as Trillion Year
Spree (1986), a version that won them both a HUGO. The book is
idiosyncratic in some respects, with genuine scholarship of an autodidact
kind, although not remotely academic. Many reviewers observed that, in the
earlier version of the book, Aldiss's account of the post-WWII period was
hurried and not very informative, but this remains an important book,
especially in the literary and cultural context it gives for sf ever since
the days of Mary SHELLEY, who is Aldiss's candidate for the position of
the first bona fide sf writer. His cheerful, informal raconteur's tone
enlivens without cheapening his many serious points, and comes as a relief
after the ponderousness of some previous studies of sf and the defensive
fannish enthusiasm of others.The next important book on sf for the general
reader was also by a professional writer from the genre: James E. GUNN's
Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction (1975), a
balanced and intelligent survey (although coverage of later writers tends
to be confined to long lists) which strongly emphasizes the Campbellian
tradition of magazine sf in the USA. This book was part of a sudden rush
of handsome, illustrated books about sf, some of which are listed under
ILLUSTRATION.A collection of essays by Alexei and Cory PANSHIN, SF in
Dimension (coll 1976), argued a coherent if controversial viewpoint.
Alexei Panshin had earlier published an interesting study of Robert A.
HEINLEIN, and he and his wife would later publish The World Beyond the
Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (1989), a long book
full of incidental insights but whose overall thesis is open to argument.
It elicited a devastating review from John CLUTE, always a pungent critic
of sf, in New York Review of Science Fiction (July 1991), which in turn
prompted a correspondence whose overall implication may be that the

US-centred, magazine-centred, somewhat inbred and sentimental view of the
development of the genre which had dominated sf historians for decades was
now being rejected by a new generation of sf critics and scholars. Clute's
own book of sf criticism, Strokes: Essays and Reviews 1966-1986 (coll 1988
US), was an example of the development of a wider perspective on sf,
dealing as it does with sf's concerns in terms of their metaphoric
resonance - their subtexts - as well as their literal meaning. A sometimes
thuddingly literal-minded reading of sf themes, from robots to the
colonization of other worlds, had characterized many of the books and
articles published on sf prior to the 1980s.Numerous sf writers apart from
those already mentioned have also written well informed and lively sf
criticism and essays in sf scholarship; many of these, like Thomas M.
DISCH, Gardner DOZOIS, Joanna RUSS, Robert SILVERBERG and Ian WATSON, have
not yet had their critical pieces collected in book form. Among those who
have are: Algis BUDRYS, with Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf (coll 1985);
Samuel R. DELANY, with The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of
Science Fiction (1977) and Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of
Science Fiction (coll 1984), whose structuralist and sometimes
POSTMODERNIST criticism is dense and difficult, irritating and
interesting; Ursula K. LE GUIN, with The Language of the Night: Essays on
Fantasy and Science Fiction (coll 1979; rev 1989 UK); Barry N. MALZBERG,
whose The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties (1982) may
not have had the attention it deserves; Norman SPINRAD, with Science
Fiction in the Real World (coll 1990), which collects many of his critical
columns from ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; and Brian M.
STABLEFORD, whose several well researched books on the subject, including
Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950 (1985), have done much to dispel
the view that sf was primarily a product of PULP MAGAZINES and specialist
SF MAGAZINES.A phenomenon largely of the 1980s was the production of
large, multi-author reference works containing critical assessments of sf,
of which one of the earliest was the first edition of this encyclopedia
(1979). The first edition of Neil BARRON's Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical
Guide to Science Fiction (1976; rev 1981; rev 1987) was earlier still, and
the book remains one of the best and most accessible critical guides.
Others include: the desperately uneven 5-vol Survey of Science Fiction
Literature (anth 1979) ed Frank N. Magill, though the actual editing and
organization was largely the work of associate editor Keith NEILSON; the
largely excellent Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major
Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day (anth 1982)
ed E.F. BLEILER; the 2-vol Twentieth-Century American Science-Fiction
Writers (anth 1981) ed David Cowart and Thomas L. Wymer; and
Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers (anth 1981; rev 1986; rev 1991)
first two edns ed Curtis C. SMITH, with its useful essays badly
compromised by poor presentation of bibliographical data. Most of these
books are reference works from specialist publishers at prices that may
deter lay sf readers, but they are readily located in academic
libraries.None of these books is purely academic in its authorship, but in
most of them many of the essays are by academic specialists - for
honourable reasons but also, naturally enough, because the
publish-or-perish syndrome will always ensure academic contributors
willing to work for little or nothing - and it is in the field of academic

books on sf that the largest expansion of book publishing on sf has taken
place, especially in the 1980s. Long before that there were, aside from
Bailey's, two other important early works of academic sf scholarship: The
Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction: A History of its Criticism and a Guide
for its Study, with an Annotated Check List of 215 Imaginary Voyages from
1700 to 1800 (1941) by Philip Babcock GOVE, and Voyages to the Moon (1948)
by Marjorie Hope NICOLSON. After a long gap, the next academic works of
importance (apart from studies of single authors such as of H.G. WELLS and
Aldous HUXLEY) were Voices Prophesying War 1763-1984 (1966) by I.F.
CLARKE, who followed this work with other studies of sf, and Yesterday's
Tomorrows (1968) by W.H.G. ARMYTAGE. Running concurrently with all these
publications, and beginning much earlier, have been the many books on
literary UTOPIAS.Next in the academic line came Into the Unknown: The
Evolution of Science Fiction from Francis Godwin to H.G. Wells (1970) by
Robert M. PHILMUS. In the 1970s Darko SUVIN came to the fore as an
influential academic critic of sf, his earliest full-scale book being
first published in French: Pour une poetique de la science-fiction (1977
Canada; exp in English as Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics
and History of a Literary Genre 1979 US). Two important later books by
Suvin are Victorian Science Fiction in the U.K.: The Discourses of
Knowledge and of Power (1983 US) and Positions and Presuppositions in
Science Fiction (coll 1988 US).After 1974 the pace of academic publishing
increased. The most important studies of the mid-1970s were New Worlds for
Old (1974) by David KETTERER, Visions of Tomorrow (coll 1975) by David
SAMUELSON and Structural Fabulation (1975) by Robert SCHOLES. Scholes went
on to collaborate with Eric S. RABKIN on Science Fiction: History,
Science, Vision (1977), one of the best semi-popular accounts of the
genre. Rabkin has since published widely in the field.Scholes's work was
much influenced by Introduction a la litterature fantastique (1970 France;
trans as The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre 1973) by
Tzvetan TODOROV, a work which has aroused controversy and much interest.
Sf criticism, primarily Marxist, structuralist or both, is flourishing in
Europe. Other notable European critics are Michel BUTOR, Boris Eizykman
(1949- ), Vladimir GAKOV, Jorg Hienger (1927- ), Jean-Henri Holmberg (
SCANDINAVIA), Julius KAGARLITSKI, Gerard KLEIN, Stanislaw LEM, Carlo
PAGETTI, Franz ROTTENSTEINER, Martin Schwonke (1923- ), Jacques van Herp
(1923- ) and Pierre VERSINS. Rottensteiner, who also publishes in English,
is one of the most renowned European critics; unfortunately, his
best-known book in English, The Science Fiction Book: An Illustrated
History (1975), is not quite up to his own usually high standard. Some
exceptionally controversial criticism by Stanislaw LEM has been published
in English, although his much-discussed Fantastyka i futurologia (1970
Poland), a full-length study of sf, has yet to be translated in full; a
small part appeared, with other work, in Microworlds (coll trans 1985 US).
Back in the USA, the appearance in the 1970s of many academic courses
about sf ( SF IN THE CLASSROOM) had repercussions in the publication of
anthologies of critical essays. A pioneer editor in this field was Thomas
D. CLARESON with SF: The Other Side of Realism (anth 1971), Voices for the
Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers Vol. 1 (anth 1976) and its
two sequels, and Many Futures, Many Worlds: Theme and Form in Science
Fiction (anth 1977). Clareson has also published books of his own, his

most important work being on the early HISTORY OF SF, as in Some Kind of
Paradise: The Emergence of American Science Fiction (1985), which is more
a historical and thematic survey than a critical study. Two critical
anthologies about sf aimed at the general reader rather than at the
student or teacher are Science Fiction at Large (anth 1976; vt
Explorations of the Marvellous) ed Peter NICHOLLS and Turning Points:
Essays on the Art of Science Fiction (anth 1977) ed Damon Knight. The
former book contains several essays which, in their readiness to see
shortcomings in sf, may be a particular example of a general lessening of
the rather tedious boosterism in many earlier books about the field.
Another good, academic critical anthology of the 1970s was Science
Fiction: A Critical Guide (anth 1979) ed Patrick PARRINDER.In the 1980s a
great many critical anthologies about sf were published, often choosing
their contents from the proceedings of academic conferences or from
academic-track programming at sf CONVENTIONS. A number of these are listed
in the entries of such individual editors as Martin H. GREENBERG, Donald
HASSLER, Eric S. RABKIN and George E. SLUSSER. Many of the academics who
have edited such books have also written studies of their own. Among them
are perhaps the two most stimulating US academic theoreticians about sf to
have risen to prominence in the 1980s: Mark ROSE and Gary K. WOLFE. Rose
is the author of Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction (1981),
which in its discussion of what he sees as the central paradigms in sf
breaks new ground, if controversially. Wolfe is the author of many
articles and several books, including The Known and the Unknown: The
Iconography of Science Fiction (1979), perhaps the major study of sf in
the recent period, and comes as close as any critic ever has to defining,
in useful and quite rigorous theoretical terms, the SENSE OF WONDER that
fans so often use to describe what they seek for and find in sf. Unlike
many of his academic colleagues, Wolfe writes with clarity, grace and wit,
and avoids the jargon that makes so much recent academic analysis of sf so
inaccessible to the ordinary reader - and so boring, sometimes, to even
the academically trained reader.The books of two other academic critics of
considerable interest have been more narrowly focused than most of the
above: H. Bruce FRANKLIN and W. Warren WAGAR. Both write well. Franklin
has written, from a Marxist perspective unusual in US criticism, Robert A.
Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (1980) and War Stars: The Superweapon
and the American Imagination (1988). Wagar is the author of a book which
is as much a contribution to the history of ideas as it is an analysis of
sf specifically: Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things (1982).In
the early 1970s anybody interested in the history and criticism of sf
could have found very little to read on the subject. Now there is too much
to cope with, and the difficulty is in locating what might be available
and interesting. The "interesting" criterion remains a lottery, but the
"availability" criterion can be helped considerably. Here the Science
Fiction and Fantasy Reference Indexes of Hal W. HALL are very useful, as
is The Year's Scholarship in Science Fiction and Fantasy series compiled
by Marshall B. TYMN and Roger C. SCHLOBIN (see their entries for details).
An earlier reference is Science Fiction Criticism: An Annotated Checklist
(1972) compiled by Clareson.Further discussion of secondary materials for
the sf researcher will be found in BIBLIOGRAPHIES, CINEMA, DEFINITIONS OF
SF and POSTMODERNISM AND SF, and in selected author and theme entries

throughout. [PN]
CRITICAL WAVE
UK SEMIPROZINE (1987-current) ed Martin Tudor and Steve Green. CW is a
bimonthly sf and fantasy newsletter - the schedule often slips by a month
- with reviews plus news items covering fantasy, horror and comics as well
as sf; it also features interviews and articles. Originally a mimeographed
FANZINE, CW became professionally printed with #9 and is said to have a
circulation above 1000. The editors clearly want it to become the UK
equivalent of LOCUS; as of 1992, it still had some way to go. [RH]
CRITTERS
Film (1986). New Line/Smart Egg/Sho films. Dir Stephen Herek, starring
Dee Wallace Stone, M. Emmet Walsh, Billy Green Bush, Scott Grimes, Don
Opper. Screenplay Herek, Dominic Muir, with additions by Opper. 86 mins,
cut to 85 mins. Colour.Small furry carnivorous aliens with voracious
appetites and large teeth (very clearly modelled on the creatures in Joe
DANTE's Gremlins [1984]) besiege a farmhouse in Kansas and are driven off
with the help of alien bounty-hunters. This wholly derivative film has
some charm and competence, however, and was a not disastrous debut for
director Herek, who went on to make BILL ?
(1989). The sequel, Critters 2: The Main Course (1988; vt Critters 2), dir
Mick Garris, has all the sparkle of a second-generation photocopy, and
demonstrates nicely how the 1980s video market had such an insatiable
appetite for teenage horror movies that even imitations bred imitations.
It was Garris's first film as director, though he was already known as a
writer on the tv series AMAZING STORIES. Two further straight-to-video
sequels followed. Critters 3 (1991), dir Kristine Peterson, 81 mins,
reprises the beasties in an apartment block setting. Critters 4: Critters
in Space (1992), dir Rupert Harvey, screenplay Joseph Lyle and David
Schow, 90 mins, continues to star Opper as chief critter-hunter, and also
stars Brad Dourif. This last instalment, still low-budget, takes place on
a spaceship, and can claim to be the most genuine sf episode of the
series, but is in other respects only slightly superior to the second and
third. The usual homages to ALIEN occur. [PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES.
CRITTERS 2: THE MAIN COURSE
CRITTERS.
CRITTERS 3
CRITTERS.
CRITTERS 4: CRITTERS IN SPACE
CRITTERS.
CROHMALNICEANU, OVID S.
[r] ROMANIA.
CROLY, [Reverend] GEORGE
(1780-1860) UK clergyman whose novel of IMMORTALITY Salathiel: A Story of
the Past, the Present and the Future (1826; vt Salathiel the Wandering Jew
1843 US; vt Salathiel the Immortal 1855 UK; vt Tarry Thou Till I Come 1901
US) was published anon but soon acknowledged. [JC]

CROMIE, ROBERT
(1856-1907) Irish author of the well known interplanetary sf novel A
Plunge Into Space (1890) in which visitors travel by ANTIGRAVITY to MARS,
where they discover humans living under UTOPIAN conditions and a fatal
romance ensues; the 1891 edition includes a preface by Jules VERNE. In The
Crack of Doom (1895) something very like atomic energy rather intriguingly
threatens the world (the first test of the substance, thousands of years
earlier, destroyed the fifth planet to create the ASTEROIDS); though
hazily described, RC's use in this novel of a nuclear device to shake
civilization marks the first occurrence of a theme which would dominate
the next century. Two volumes of a cluttered future HISTORY - For
England's Sake (1889) and The Next Crusade (1897) - fail, like his
remaining works, to retain much interest. [JC]Other works: The King's Oak
and Other Stories (coll 1897); A New Messiah (1902); El Dorado (1904; vt
From the Cliffs of Croaghaun 1904 US).See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; END
OF THE WORLD; HISTORY OF SF; POWER SOURCES; SPACESHIPS.
CRONENBERG, DAVID
(1943- ) Canadian film-maker. Crucially a writer as well as a director,
DC can be claimed as one of the most important practitioners of sf, in any
medium, of the last quarter of the 20th century. From his early student
and underground films - Transfer (1966), From the Drain (1967), Stereo
(1969) and CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (1970), the tv short Secret Weapons (1972)
- through his gutsy, increasingly surreal exploitation movies - The
PARASITE MURDERS (1974; vt They Came From Within; vt Shivers), RABID
(1976), The BROOD (1979), SCANNERS (1980) and VIDEODROME (1982) - to his
more mainstream ventures - The DEAD ZONE (1983; from Stephen KING's
novel), The FLY (1986; a remake of the 1958 MONSTER MOVIE), Dead Ringers
(1989), The Naked Lunch368992; based on William S. BURROUGHS's 1959
novel), and his projected film of J.G. BALLARD's Crash (1973) - DC has
shown a remarkably consistent visual and intellectual style, dealing with
the mind-body divide, near-future social, religious and chemical taboos,
the MEDIA LANDSCAPE, and the extremes of experience. DC has also worked as
an actor, in John Landis's Into the Night (1985) and, more notably, Clive
Barker's Nightbreed (1990). The odd man out in his own filmography is Fast
Company (1977), an efficient but nondescript movie about drag racing. The
highly bizarre violence and mutation, often sexual in nature, of
mid-period DC - especially the phallic parasites of The Parasite Murders
and the sadomasochist visions of Videodrome - won him a reputation as the
most uncompromising genre auteur of his generation, but The Brood, an
interior-directed family-trauma drama, revealed a vein of icy sensitivity
that later yielded The Fly, an extraordinarily moving rereading of its
hackneyed premise which abjures monster-on-the-loose melodrama for a
quietly affecting study of the process of physical change, and Dead
Ringers, an entirely psychological and non-sf variation on DC's habitual
themes that demonstrates how he has created his own category - the
Cronenberg Movie - rather than inhabited the sf or HORROR genres in the
way that contemporaries like George A. ROMERO and Wes Craven have done. On
being hailed as "the King of Venereal Horror", DC commented: "It's a small
field, Venereal Horror, but at least I'm king of it." Although DC is
reported to have said around 1993 that he will no longer be working in

horror or science fiction, his films are likely to retain the very
distinctive DC tone, as could be said of his film - an adaptation of Henry
David Hwang's successful play - M. Butterfly (1993), about a diplomat who
falls in love with an apparently female Chinese opera singer, not
realizing she is actually male. An interesting book of interviews is
Cronenberg on Cronenberg (coll 1991) ed Chris Rodley. [KN]See also:
CINEMA; CYBERPUNK; HUMOUR; MONSTERS; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS;
PSEUDO-SCIENCE; SEX.
CRONIN, CHARLES BERNARD
[r] Eric NORTH.
CROOK, COMPTON N.
[r] Stephen TALL.
CROSBY, HARRY C.
[r] Christopher ANVIL.
CROSS, JOHN KEIR
(1914-1967) UK writer of RADIO scripts before WWII, and later of novels
and tv adaptations (one of them being of John WYNDHAM's The Kraken Wakes)
for the BBC. Some of his books for younger children, written as Stephen
MacFarlane, are fantasies; Lucy Maroon, the Car that Loved a Policeman
(1944) and Mr Bosanko and Other Stories (coll 1944) are typical. All his
sf novels are for older children; they include The Angry Planet (1945) and
its sequel, SOS from Mars (1954; vt The Red Journey Back 1954 US), both of
which represent JKC's transcription of manuscripts "by Stephen MacFarlane"
encompassing the first three expeditions to Mars, which discover the
vegetable life there to have suffered a Manichaean EVOLUTION into
alternative races. The Owl and the Pussycat (1946; vt The Other Side of
Green Hills 1947 US) is a fantasy, while The Flying Fortunes in an
Encounter with Rubberface! (1952; vt The Stolen Sphere 1953 US) has an
orbital satellite as a MCGUFFIN. Though he wrote several novels as JKC,
including The White Magic (1947) - not a fantasy, although often recorded
as such - his best-known work under his own name is The Other Passenger
(coll 1944; cut vt Stories from The Other Passenger 1961 US), a collection
of subtle fantasy tales for adults. He edited Best Horror Stories (anth
1956), Best Black Magic Stories (anth 1960) and Best Horror Stories 2
(anth 1965). [JC]See also: CHILDREN'S SF.
CROSS, POLTON
John Russell FEARN.
CROSS, RONALD ANTHONY
(1937- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "The Story of Three
Cities" in New Worlds 6 (anth 1973) ed Michael MOORCOCK and Charles PLATT;
the tale's steely moroseness characterizes much of his work in shorter
forms. His first novel, Prisoners of Paradise (1988), bleakly generates a
sense that the Fantasy-Island-type trap it depicts is not to be escaped
from. The Eternal Guardians sequence - comprising The Fourth Guardian
(1994) and The Lost Guardian (1995), with further volumes projected - is a
fantasy of history. [JC]
CROSS, VICTORIA

Pseudonym under which UK novelist Annie Sophie ("Vivian") Cory
(1868-?1952) published all her work, using the spelling "Crosse" until the
death of Queen Victoria; she was briefly notorious for The Woman who
Didn't (1895), written in response to Grant ALLEN's The Woman who Did
(1895). Her only known sf is Marty Brown, M.P.: A Girl of Tomorrow (1935),
which depicts relationships in a 30th-century UK ruled by women:
unemployment, war and pollution do not exist, nor is meat eaten, and there
is no prostitution because love is free. [RB]
CROSSEN, KENDELL FOSTER
(1910-1981) US writer and editor, active under various names in various
PULP-MAGAZINE markets, perhaps most notably as an author of detective
stories, his best work being published under his own name and as M.E.
Chaber. Though the Green Lama series of early 1940s thrillers, published
in Double Detective as by Richard Foster, and Murder Out of Mind (1945) as
by Ken Crossen, slip close to the fantastic, he only began publishing sf
proper with two stories in Feb 1951: "The Boy who Cried Wolf 359" in AMZ
and "Restricted Clientele" in TWS. Towards the end of their existences he
published a large amount of material with Startling Stories and TWS; much
of this material is intendedly comic, in particular the Manning Draco
series about an interstellar salesman and his amusing experiences with
ALIENS: Once Upon a Star (1951-2 TWS, fixup 1953) plus 4 additional
stories, "Assignment to Aldebaran" (1953), "Whistle Stop in Space" (1953),
"Mission to Mizar" (1953) and "The Agile Algolian" (1954). Year of Consent
(1952), about a COMPUTER that controls the West, expressively conveys the
PARANOIA of much US fiction of the period. The Rest Must Die (1959), as by
Foster, follows the story of those who have survived a nuclear attack on
New York by happening to be underground in subways or cellars: conflicts
ensue. KFC's ANTHOLOGIES - Adventures in Tomorrow (anth 1951; UK edn omits
2 stories) and Future Tense (anth 1952; UK edn omits 7 stories) - include
some original stories, are competently selected, and were influential in
their time. [JC]
CROW, LEVI
[s] Manly Wade WELLMAN.
CROWCROFT, (WILLIAM) PETER
(1925- ) UK writer whose The Fallen Sky (1954) describes a postHOLOCAUST London reverted to barbarism and a sociologist's attempt to cure
himself of violence while simultaneously founding a new civilization.
Monster (1980 US) is a horror tale. [JC]
CROWLEY, JOHN
(1942- ) US writer who has also worked in documentary films and tv since
1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his
fantasies have established him as a figure whose work markedly stretches
the boundaries of genre literature.His first sf novel, The Deep (1975), is
set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond
measurement into the circumambient Deep, in which very few stars are
visible. On this disc complex feudal conflicts, which seem interminably to
repeat a bad year from the Wars of the Roses, are regulated, maintained
and when necessary fomented for its own pleasure by the mysterious Being

who originally transported to this strange new domain its present
inhabitants - humans whose own world was dying. Though the story is told
from various points of view, the reader's main perspective is through the
eyes of a damaged ANDROID with memory problems sent to record events by
the disc's peculiar God. Using sources as widely divergent as James Branch
CABELL's Biography of the Life of Manuel, Philip Jose FARMER's World of
Tiers novels and E.R. EDDISON's The Worm Ouroboros (1922), JC constructed
a story whose free and supple use of numerous generic conventions marks it
as the sort of tale possible only late in the life of any genre.Beasts
(1976) somewhat more conventionally depicts a balkanized USA, but with a
complex deployment of sf themes, notable among which are the uses made of
biologically transformed animals and of the potential for genuine
interspecies empathy. The chilly belatedness of these two books - like all
his work they depict worlds caught in the iron claws of a prior authority
or Author - warms very considerably in the third, ENGINE SUMMER (1979),
whose title neatly epitomizes JC's abiding central concerns and whose plot
- its protagonist finds that his life in a dying post- HOLOCAUST pastoral
USA is nothing but a memory interminably replayed, and that he himself is
no more than a crystal device replaying those memories on command - exudes
a cruel melancholy. But the story which Rush That Speaks represents in his
being (and tells) is powerfully moving; and his sleep at the close (though
he will soon be turned on again to play himself) is earned.A similar grave
cruelty infuses the TIME TRAVEL cul-de-sacs uncovered in Great Work of
Time (1991), a tale which depicts the desolate consequences of attempting
to control history; it first appeared in NOVELTY (coll 1989), along with
some shorter fantasies and "In Blue" a DYSTOPIAN parable. Further short
work is assembled in Antiquities: Seven Stories (coll 1993).His major
single novel, the grave and eloquent Little, Big (1981), is primarily a
fantasy; partly set in a NEAR-FUTURE USA, this large work puts into
definitive form JC's steely nostalgia for the long arm of immortal law.
The title itself - which condenses a message repeated throughout the text:
"The further in you go, the bigger it gets" - is a restatement in fantasy
terms of the process of CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH central to much sf. The
story embeds in the centrifugal world of US fantasy a UK tale of harrowing
centripetal inwardness; Smoky Barnable's book-long attempt to enter the
world of faerie ends, as it must, in something like death. In the
meantime, as the century itself closes, a reborn Barbarossa ravages an
unsavable USA. The Renaissance Art of Memory-later utilized by Gene WOLFE,
Mary GENTLE and Michael SWANWICK, among others - significantly shapes the
geography of the book, with the result that the metamorphoses suffered by
its protagonists seem both mathematically foreordained (Lewis CARROLL is a
constant presence in the text) and symbolically potent. Little, Big has
permeated the field. As much cannot be said, perhaps, for AEGYPT (1987)
and Love ?
examining Renaissance neoplatonism with hallucinated concentration, and
seemingly moving towards a millennial shift in the reality-determining
Story of the world; but even the torso of this sequence confirms JC's very
considerable shaping power, which is his most significant gift to genre
literature. The novelty of his work is less important than the magnetism
of the synthesis it represents. [JC]Other work: Beasts/Engine
Summer/Little, Big (omni 1991).See also: ADAM AND EVE; ALTERNATE WORLDS;

FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FANTASY; FAR FUTURE; GODS AND DEMONS; GREAT AND
SMALL;
MAGIC; METAPHYSICS; MYTHOLOGY; OMNI; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; PASTORAL;
PERCEPTION; POCKET UNIVERSE; SCIENCE FANTASY; SWORD AND SORCERY; TIME
PARADOXES.
CROWNPOINT PUBLICATIONS
NEBULA SCIENCE FICTION.
CRULS, GASTA~O
[r] LATIN AMERICA.
CRUMP, C(HARLES) G(EORGE)
(1862-1935) UK writer whose sf novel, The Red King Dreams, 1946-1948
(1931), rather demurely satirizes the university life of the NEAR FUTURE.
[JC]
CRUMP, (JAMES) IRVING
(1887-1979) US writer known almost exclusively for his sequence of
prehistoric-sf novels for older children, set in Europe and featuring the
resourceful Og, who introduces fire to his tribe, fights off giant
reptiles and comports himself with commendable dignity throughout: Og Son of Fire (1922), Og - Boy of Battle (1925), Og of the Cave People
(1935) and Og, Son of Og (1965). The series was extended into graphic
form, in Og, Son of Fire (graph 1937), a Big Little Book; and as in COMICS
form from 1936 in The Funnies (1936-1942). Mog the Mound Builder (1931) is
set in the Americas. [JC]
CRYOGENICS
From a Greek root meaning "cold-producing", this word is used in physics
to mean the production of extremely low temperatures and the study of
phenomena at those temperatures. The shorter word CRYONICS is more
commonly used in sf TERMINOLOGY, especially when, as is usual, it is
people or other organic materials that are frozen. [PN]
CRYONICS
A term coined in the 1960s by Karl Werner, referring to techniques for
preserving the human body by supercooling. R.C.W. Ettinger's The Prospect
of Immortality (1964) popularized the idea that the corpses of terminally
ill people might be "frozen down" in order to preserve them until such a
time as medical science would discover cures for all ills and a method of
resurrecting the dead. Many sf stories have extrapolated the notion.The
preservative effects of low temperatures have been known for a long time.
The notion of reviving human beings accidentally entombed in ice was first
developed as a fictional device by W. Clark RUSSELL in The Frozen Pirate
(1887). In Louis BOUSSENARD's Dix mille ans dans un bloc de glace (1889;
trans as 10,000 Years in a Block of Ice 1898) a contemporary man visits
the future as a result of a similar accident. Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's "The
Resurrection of Jimber Jaw" (1937) is a satirical account of the revival
of a prehistoric man and his experiences in the civilized world; Richard
Ben SAPIR's The Far Arena (1978) is a modern variant involving a Roman
gladiator. Freezing is still sf's most popular means of achieving
SUSPENDED ANIMATION (see also SLEEPER AWAKES), but recent debate about

cryonics relates also to the themes of REINCARNATION and IMMORTALITY. The
Cryonics Society of California began freezing newly dead people in 1967,
and the movement seems to have survived the setback it suffered when a
power failure caused a number of frozen bodies to thaw out in 1981,
sparking off a chain of lawsuits. The rumour that Walt Disney's body is in
a deep-freeze somewhere remains unconfirmed. Interest in the theme is by
no means confined to the USA, and two of the major fictional examinations
of the prospect are European: Nikolai AMOSOV's Zapiski iz budushchego
(1967; trans as Notes from the Future 1970) and Anders BODELSEN's
Frysepunktet (1969; trans as Freezing Point 1971; vt Freezing Down US).
Cryonic preservation is still used in stories of TIME TRAVEL into the
future, including Frederik POHL's The Age of the Pussyfoot (1969), Mack
REYNOLDS's UTOPIAN Looking Backward, from the Year 2000 (1973) and the
Woody Allen film SLEEPER (1973). It is also a common device in stories of
slower-than-light SPACE TRAVEL: in E.C. TUBB's Dumarest series
interstellar travel may by "high" or "low", depending upon whether time is
absorbed by the use of drugs or more hazardous cryonic procedures, while
James WHITE's The Dream Millennium (1974) explores hypothetical
psychological effects of long-term freezing.The possible social problems
associated with large-scale cryonic projects are explored in various sf
stories. Clifford D. SIMAK's Why Call Them Back from Heaven? (1967)
imagines a time when a person can be tried for delaying the freezing of a
corpse, permitting "ultimate death", and the financial estates of the
frozen have become a political power-bloc, inviting criminal manipulation.
A cynical account of the politics of dealing with the dead is offered in
Larry NIVEN's "The Defenseless Dead" (1973), which points out that the
living have all the votes and that the dead might be an exploitable
resource; it was Niven who first used in print Pohl's term CORPSICLES to
denote the deep-frozen dead. Ernest TIDYMAN's satirical thriller Absolute
Zero (1971), about a financier who builds up a vast cryonics industry, is
similarly cynical. As might be expected, most stories depicting people who
try to "cheat" death by having themselves frozen down find suitably ironic
ways to thwart them. In "Ozymandias" (1972) by Terry CARR people who take
to the cryonic vaults in order to avoid a war fall victim, like the
mummified pharaohs of ancient Egypt before them, to professional
"tomb-robbers". In Gregory BENFORD's now-anachronistic "Doing Lennon"
(1975) an unfrozen John Lennon turns out not to be what he appears or
aspires to be; much more ambitiously, Benford's Chiller (1993) as by
Sterling Blake comprehensively (and very sympathetically) describes a
near-future development of the cryonics movement under threat from a
psychotic anti-freezer campaign conducted by a serial killer. And in ". .
. And He not Busy Being Born" (1987) by Brian M. STABLEFORD a bold
entrepreneur who succeeds against the odds in delivering himself into a
world of immortals find that he still cannot evade his destiny. [BS]
CSERNA, JOZSEF
[r] HUNGARY.
CSERNAI, ZOLTAN
[r] HUNGARY.
CUBA

LATIN AMERICA.
CUISCARD, HENRI
[s] Charles DE LINT.
CULBREATH, MYRNA
(1938- ) US writer known almost exclusively for her collaborations with
Sondra MARSHAK as a producer of ties for STAR TREK, including Star Trek:
The New Voyages * (coll 1976) and its direct sequel Star Trek: The New
Voyages 2 * (anth 1978), The Price of the Phoenix * (1977) and its direct
sequel The Fate of the Phoenix * (1979), The Prometheus Design * (1982)
and Triangle * (1983), as well as Shatner: Where No Man . . . : The
Authorized Biography of William Shatner (1979) with William SHATNER. [JC]
CULLINGWORTH, N(ICHOLAS) J(OHN)
ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
CULTURAL ENGINEERING
A phrase not especially common in sf TERMINOLOGY, although what it refers
to is fundamental to the genre. The idea of humans deliberately altering
the nature of alien cultures (or of aliens doing it to us), or indeed of
doing the same to isolated cultures on Earth, is often evoked in sf,
sometimes approvingly, more often disapprovingly. This is especially so in
stories in which ANTHROPOLOGY, COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS and SOCIOLOGY
are dominant themes. A common form of cultural engineering in sf is the
TIME-TRAVEL or PARALLEL-WORLDS story (often both at once) in which some
sort of time-police force attempts to engineer past, future or ALTERNATE
WORLDS into the most stable and productive conformations. Sf itself can be
seen as a form of sublimated cultural engineering in its persistent
modelling of societies that differ from our own. [PN]
CULVER, TIMOTHY J.
Donald E. WESTLAKE.
CUMMINGS, M(ONETTE) A.
(1914- ) US writer of short stories in various genres who began
publishing sf with "The Bridges of Ool" in Planet Stories in 1955. Her
collection is Exile and Other Tales of Fantasy (coll 1968). [JC]
CUMMINGS, RAY
Working name of US writer Raymond King Cummings (1887-1957), author of
over 750 stories under various names in various genres; he was one of the
few writers active during the heyday of US PULP-MAGAZINE sf (1930-50) to
have begun his career before Hugo GERNSBACK launched AMZ in 1926. His
first sf of any note is also his best-known story, "The Girl in the Golden
Atom" (1919), which appeared, as did much of his early work, in All-Story
Weekly ( The ALL-STORY ); with its sequel, "People of the Golden Atom",
serialized in the same magazine in 1920, this famous story - about a young
man who takes a size-diminishing drug and has extraordinary adventures on
a microscopic world-became The Girl in the Golden Atom (fixup 1922 UK; exp
1923 US) and proved the cornerstone both of RC's reputation and of much of
his work from this time on, for he used the idea of the size-diminishing
drug and the microscopic world, with many variations, for the rest of his
long career ( GREAT AND SMALL). The Girl in the Golden Atom also

constitutes the "Matter" segment of RC's Matter, Space and Time trilogy;
the "Space" segment contains The Princess of the Atom (1929 The Argosy;
1950) and "The Fire People" (1922 The Argosy); the "Time" segment takes in
The Man who Mastered Time (1924 The Argosy; 1929), The Shadow Girl (1929
The Argosy; 1946 UK) and The Exile of Time (1931 ASF; 1964).After the
successes of his early years, RC remained prolific, but his mechanical
style and the general rigidity of his stories gradually lost him
popularity until, in the 1960s, some of his books were nostalgically
revived. Typical of his journeyman prose and uneven quality are the Tama
novels: Tama of the Light Country (1930 The Argosy; 1965) and Tama,
Princess of Mercury (1931 The Argosy; 1966), the heroine of which does
very well after being kidnapped from Earth to MERCURY. Brigands of the
Moon (1931), later published in Canada with a mistaken attribution to John
W. CAMPBELL Jr, and its sequel Wandl the Invader (1932 ASF; 1961 dos) are
examples of his SPACE-OPERA output, in which space pirates tend to
proliferate and humans to defeat terrifying alien monsters.RC was
fundamentally a pulp writer; unlike some of those only a little younger for example, Murray LEINSTER and Edmond HAMILTON - he was never capable of
adapting himself to the changing times, either scientifically or
stylistically. His later works could be interchanged with his earliest
with very little adjustment. [JC]Other works: The Sea Girl (1930); Tarrano
the Conqueror (1925 Science and Invention; 1930); Into the Fourth
Dimension (1926 Science and Invention; anth 1943 UK), made up of the title
novel plus stories by other hands, and not to be confused with Into the
4th Dimension (1981 chap), which reprints only the 1926 tale; The Man on
the Meteor (1924 Science and Invention; 1944 UK); Beyond the Vanishing
Point (1931 ASF; 1958 chap dos); Beyond the Stars (1928 The Argosy; 1963);
A Brand New World (1928 The Argosy; 1964); Explorers into Infinity (1927-8
Weird Tales; fixup 1965); The Insect Invasion (1932 The Argosy; 1967);
"The Snow Girl" (1929 The Argosy; in Famous Fantastic Classics No 1 [anth
1974]); Tales of the Scientific Crime Club (1925 The Sketch; coll
1979).See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; BLACK HOLES; CONCEPTUAL
BREAKTHROUGH; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; HISTORY OF SF; PUBLISHING; ROBOTS;
SCIENTIFIC ERRORS; TIME TRAVEL.
CUMMINS, HARLE OWEN
US writer who has not been traced with any security, but if precocious
was almost certainly the HOC whose dates are (1884-1973). Of those stories
collected in Welsh Rarebit Tales (coll 1902) at least 4, including "The
Man who Made a Man" and "The Space Annihilator", have considerable sf
interest. In the latter story a MATTER TRANSMITTER is introduced. Other
tales are generally FANTASY, some showing the influence of Ambrose BIERCE.
[JC]
CUNHA, FAUSTO
[r] LATIN AMERICA.
CUNNINGHAM, E.V.
Howard FAST.
CURREY, L(LOYD) W(ESLEY)
(1942- ) US specialist bookseller (since 1968) and bibliographer. With

David G. HARTWELL he published SF-I: A Selective Bibliography (1971 chap),
both writing as Kilgore TROUT; with Hartwell founded (1973) and operated
Dragon Press, a SMALL PRESS publishing books about sf, fantasy and horror;
the partnership was dissolved in 1979, leaving Hartwell sole owner. Also
with Hartwell, he co-edited the GREGG PRESSScience Fiction Reprint series
1975-81; alone he edited the Gregg Press Masters of Science Fiction and
Fantasy author BIBLIOGRAPHIES 1980-83. LWC's books are: A Research Guide
to Science Fiction Studies: An Annotated Checklist of Primary and
Secondary Sources for Fantasy and Science Fiction(1977) with Marshall B.
TYMN and Roger SCHLOBIN; Index to Stories in Thematic Anthologies of
Science Fiction (1978) with Tymn, Martin H. GREENBERG and Joseph D.
OLANDER; and Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors: A Bibliography of their
Fiction and Selected Nonfiction (1979). This last is his most important
work, a standard text which brought new standards of accuracy and
scholarship to sf bibliography. Listings for newly covered authors are
often published in NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION. A second edition of
the bibliography is in preparationScience Fiction, Utopian, Fantasy ?
Horror Literature (1705-1938) (1993), offered as his antiquarian
bookseller's catalogue #94, is an extensively annotated checklist of
almost 1000 texts from the library of Donald A. WOLLHEIM. [PN]See also: SF
IN THE CLASSROOM.
CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN
FRANKENSTEIN.
CURSE OF THE FLY
Film (1965). Lippert. Dir Don Sharp, starring Brian Donlevy, George
Baker, Carole Gray. Screenplay Harry Spalding, based on characters created
by George LANGELAAN. 86 mins. Colour.This UK film is the sequel to the two
US films The FLY (1958) and RETURN OF THE FLY (1959). The confused script
is largely a rehash of them, but Sharp's direction, which concentrates on
the mental disintegration of the mad SCIENTIST's wife (Gray), is occasionally - visually powerful. The results of failed MATTER
TRANSMISSION experiments, kept in outhouses in the garden, provide a nice
touch. The critical consensus that this is the worst of the three films
probably needs revision. [PN]
CURTIES, [Captain] HENRY
(1860-? ) UK writer whose first sf novel, Tears of Angels (1907),
features its protagonist's conveyance to Alpha Centauri on an angel, who
is perhaps weeping; from the star he gains a perspective on Earth, then
returns home to find himself in an ALTERNATE-WORLD version of the future.
Out of the Shadows (1908) is a detection with occult elements. When
England Slept (1909) is a future- WAR tale. [JC]
CURTIS, JEAN-LOUIS
Pseudonym of French writer Louis Lafitte (1917- ). His collection of five
satirical sf stories, Un saint au neon(coll 1956; trans Humphrey Hare as
The Neon Halo: The Face of the Future 1958 UK), very sharply depicts a
NEAR-FUTURE world whose centre cannot hold. The tone is vivacious,
didactic, circumstantial; its wit is distanced in the recit fashion long
favoured by French satirists. [JC]

CURTIS, RICHARD A(LAN)
(1937- ) US editor, literary agent and writer, known mainly in the first
capacity for his anthology Future Tense (anth 1968), which is not to be
confused with Kendell Foster CROSSEN's Future Tense (anth 1952). He has
also published short work, beginning with "Introduction to 'The Saint'"
for Cavalier in 1968, as well as Squirm (1976), an sf film novelization (
BLUE SUNSHINE). He wrote 1980-92 the Agent's Corner column in LOCUS, which
has been adapted into book form as Beyond the Bestseller (coll 1989).
[JC]Other works: How to Prosper in the Coming Apocalypse (1981); How to be
Your Own Literary Agent (coll 1983; exp 1984); A Fool for an Agent:
Publishing Satires and Verses (coll 1992 chap).
CURTIS, WADE
Jerry POURNELLE.
CURTIS, WARDON ALLAN
(1867-1940) US writer, a contributor to several pre-sf fiction magazines.
His most important sf is a short story about a brain transplant, "The
Monster of Lake LaMetrie" (1899 The Windsor Magazine), in which the brain
is human and the recipient body that of a prehistoric survival from a
bottomless lake that may lead into a HOLLOW EARTH. WAC also wrote an
Arabian-Nights fantasy, "The Seal of Solomon the Great" (1901 Argosy) and
The Strange Adventures of Mr Middleton (coll 1903), which contains a
mixture of Oriental fantasy and bizarre mystery. [JE]
CURTIS WARREN
Founded in 1948, one of several UK publishing firms which flourished in
the decade after WWII by releasing dozens of purpose-written paperback
originals in various popular genres. Before it foundered in 1954, CW had
published over 500 novels, 98 of them sf, all of them composed strictly
according to length restrictions: in 1948-50, CW books were of 24 or 32pp;
in 1950-53, they were of 112 or 128pp; from 1953, 160pp volumes were the
rule. CW gained some posthumous fame for having published John BRUNNER's
first novel, Galactic Storm (1951) under the house name Gill HUNT; but
their most reliable and prolific author was Dennis HUGHES: as with some of
his stablemates, little is known about this author beyond the titles he
wrote, mostly under CW house names. Other authors associated with CW (see
their entries for personal pseudonyms) included William Henry Fleming
BIRD, Kenneth BULMER, John Russell FEARN, John S. GLASBY, David GRIFFITHS,
Brian HOLLOWAY, John W. JENNISON and E.C. TUBB. As well as Gill Hunt,
house names used for CW sf titles included Berl CAMERON, Neil CHARLES, Lee
ELLIOT, Brad KENT, King LANG, Rand LE PAGE, Paul LORRAINE, Kris LUNA, Van
REED and Brian SHAW.It cannot be assumed that all books published by CW
were written on hire as SHARECROPS; but almost certainly almost all of
them were. It remains a possibility that some of the 98 titles might have
some intrinsic interest, the most likely candidates being those by Fearn,
Glasby and Tubb. [JC]About the publisher: Curtis Warren and Grant Hughes
(1985 chap) by Stephen HOLLAND.
CURTONI, VITTORIO
[r] ITALY.
CURVAL, PHILIPPE

Pseudonym used by journalist Philippe Tronche (1929- ), French writer. PC
has since the 1950s been associated with the growth of sf in France as
bookseller, magazine editor, photographer, chronicler and author. He is a
fine stylist whose work is exemplified by a sensual, poetic mood and great
affection for his characters. He has written over 20 stories, the first
appearing in 1955. Cette Chere Humanite (1976; trans Steve Cox as Brave
Old World 1981 UK), which won the 1977 Prix Apollo ( AWARDS), conflates
the personal extension of lifespans with the artificial isolation of a
future EEC. Le ressac de l'espace ["The Breakers of Space"] (1962) won the
Prix Jules Verne in 1963 and L'homme a rebours ["Backwards Man"] (1974)
was selected as Best French SF Novel of 1974. [MJ/JC]Other works:Les
fleurs de Venus ["Flowers of Venus"] (1960); La fortresse de coton ["The
Cotton Fortress"] (1967); Les sables de Falun ["The Sands of Falun"]
(1970); Attention les yeux["Watch Out!"] (1972);Un souvenir de Pierre
Loti"In Remembrance of Pierre Loti"(1975); Un soupcon de neant ["A Hint of
Nothingness"] (1977)La Face cachee du desir ["The Dark Side of Desire"]
(1978); Y a quelqu'un? ["Anybody Home?"] (1979); Le dormeur
s'eveillera-t-il? ["Will the Sleeper Awake?"] (1979); Rut aux etoiles
["The Astral Mating Season"] (1979); Regarde, fiston, s'il y a un extraterrestre derriere la bouteille de vin ["Take a Look, Boy, If There's an
Alien Behind the Wine Bottle"] (coll 1980); Le Livre d'or de la science
fiction: Philippe Curval ["The Golden Book of Science Fiction: Philippe
Curval"] (coll 1980); L'Odeur de la bete ["The Scent of the Beast"]
(1981); Tous vers l'exstase ["All Together to Ecstasy"] (1981); En
souvenir du futur ["Remembrance of Time to Come"] (1982); Ah! Que c'est
beau New York! ["Ah! New York is so Beautiful!"] (1982); Debout les morts,
le train fantome entre la gare ["On your Feet, Dead Men, the Phantom Train
is Pulling in"] (coll 1984); Comment jouer a L'Homme invisible en Trois
Lecons ["How to Play The Invisible Man in Three Lessons"] (1986);
Akiloe(1988); Habite-t-on reellement quelque part? ["Do we Really Live
Somewhere?"] (coll 1990).See also: FRANCE.
CUSH, GEOFFREY
(1956- ) New Zealand-born writer and journalist, in the UK from the late
1970s. His first novel, God Help the Queen (1987), was an sf SATIRE about
the UK of AD2003, which is in such lamentable condition that only Queen
Britannia herself can save it from doublethink and Yankees. [JC]
CUSSLER, CLIVE (ERIC)
(1931- ) US writer, some titles in whose Dirk Pitt sequence of
TECHNOTHRILLERS are of sf interest. Supremely competent, irresistible to
women, slightly sadistic, Pitt is Special Projects Director for the
(fictional) American National Underwater and Marine Agency, which engages
in spectacular underwater salvage operations involving exotic
technologies. Relevant titles include Raise the Titanic! (1976), filmed in
1980 as Raise the Titanic! dir Jerry Jameson, Vixen 03 (1978), which deals
with the hunt for a "Doomsday virus", Night Probe! (1981), Pacific Vortex!
(1983), which features human divers with artificial gills,Deep Six (1984),
Cyclops (1986), in which a secret MOON colony figures, Treasure (1988), a
tale of NEAR-FUTURE political manoeuvrings, Dragon(1990), Sahara(1992) and
Inca Gold(1994).[NT]

CYBERNETICS
In sf TERMINOLOGY this is a word so often misused that its real meaning
is in danger of being devalued or forgotten.The term "cybernetics",
derived from a Greek word meaning helmsman or controller, was coined by
the distinguished mathematician Norbert WIENER in 1947 to describe a new
science on which he and others had been working since 1942. The word first
passed into general usage with the publication of his Cybernetics (1948;
rev 1961), subtitled "Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine". Cybernetics was cross-disciplinary from the beginning; it
developed when Wiener and others noticed that certain parallel problems
persistently arose in scientific disciplines normally regarded as
separate: statistical mechanics, information theory, electrical
engineering and neurophysiology were four of the most
important.Cybernetics has much in common with the parallel study of
General Systems Theory, founded by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in 1940. It is
concerned with the way systems work, the way they govern themselves, the
way they process information (often through a process known as "feedback")
in order to govern themselves, and the way they can best be designed. The
system in question can be a machine or, equally, a human body. The
trouble, Wiener found, was that the terminology with which engineers
discussed machines led to a very mechanistic approach when applied to
human systems, and, conversely, biological terminology led to an
over-anthropomorphic approach in discussion of machines (or economic or
ecological systems, two other areas where cybernetics is useful). The
trick was to construct a new science which would not be biased towards
either the mechanical or the biological. In his An Introduction to
Cybernetics (1956), W. Ross Ashby remarked that "cybernetics stands to the
real machine - electronic, mechanical, neural or economic - much as
geometry stands to a real object in our terrestrial space"; that is,
cybernetics is an abstracting, generalizing science. However, science
being what it is, always tending towards specialization, the original idea
of cybernetics as a cross-disciplinary study is in danger of being
forgotten, and now we have specialists in, for example, engineering
cybernetics and biological cybernetics. The latter is usually called
"bionics", although this word, coined in 1960, is actually a contraction
of "biological electronics".If we use the broad, scientifically accepted
definition of "cybernetics", it cannot be delimited as a separate theme in
this encyclopedia. Most of the stories discussed under the entries
ANDROIDS, AUTOMATION, COMMUNICATION, COMPUTERS, CYBORGS,
INTELLIGENCE and
ROBOTS will, by definition, be cybernetics stories also. For example, Kurt
VONNEGUT Jr's PLAYER PIANO (1952) has at its heart an image of humans
incorporated in and subject to an impersonal, machine-like system (
AUTOMATION); they effectively become components or "bits" in a cybernetic
system.However, in sf the term "cybernetics" is most often used to mean
something narrower - generally the creation of artificial intelligence, or
AI. This is indeed a central problem in real-world cybernetics, but by no
means the only one. Some cyberneticians hope that analysis of neural
systems (i.e., the brain) might lead to the synthesis of simulated
intelligences which begin as machines but go on to become
self-programming, or even, as in Greg BEAR's Queen of Angels (1990),

self-aware. The first step towards AI in real life is the computer, which
is why all computer stories are cybernetics stories also.Cybernetics also
enters sf in the form of the word "cyborg", a contraction of "cybernetic
organism". This usage is taken from an area of cybernetics not necessarily
related to AI: a person with a wooden leg is a kind of very simple cyborg,
because the melding of mechanical and human parts necessitates, whether
consciously or not, the use of feedback devices (i.e., it is cybernetic).
The study of cybernetics is, at bottom, the study of just such devices,
whether they be servo-mechanisms or the messages that travel between eye
and hand when we pick up a book from a table.Surprisingly few sf stories
attack the problem of AI directly; far more commonly, the problem is
sidetracked by conjuring up a magic word from the air. Isaac ASIMOV said
his robots were POSITRONIC, and left it at that. One of the most
comprehensive (if not always comprehensible) cybernetics works in sf is
Destination: Void (1966) by Frank HERBERT, in which the problem is that of
building not just a very complex computer but a machine that could be said
to be conscious. Herbert actually spells out some of the steps through
which this might conceivably be possible, and also goes on to ask those
philosophical questions about autonomy and free will which must inevitably
hover in the background of any cybernetics story of this kind. Much of the
book's terminology is borrowed from Wiener's nonfiction God ?
(1964). Interestingly, the question "In what respect can a machine be said
to have free will?" engenders a parallel question about humans themselves,
at least for readers and writers who take the materialist view that the
human mind is itself no more than a complex cybernetics system; this
"anti-vitalist" view of humanity is common among cybernetics writers. The
whole thrust of cybernetics as a study is to point up the resemblances
between sciences superficially dissimilar, and the attempt by
neurocyberneticians to analyse the mind as a system has led to impassioned
attack from people who believe that humanness mystically transcends its
own physical constituents.In real life, attempts to simulate INTELLIGENCE
in machines have mainly taken the route of the heuristic programming of
computers. This is a way of showing a computer how to solve a problem not
by painstakingly going through every possible combination that might lead
to a solution - this would take a computer billions of years in an
ordinary chess game - but by programming short-cuts into the machine, so
that it can gauge the most likely or fruitful directions for analysis.
Humans do it automatically; machines have to be taught, but this teaching
is the first step towards training a machine how to make choices, a vital
step towards consciousness.The first important sf work to use the
terminology of cybernetics was Bernard WOLFE's LIMBO (1952; vt Limbo '90
UK); he used its basic ideas (sometimes with hostility) in the wide sense,
as they relate to computers, war-games, industrial management and the
workings of the brain. Cybernetics terminology is used very loosely by
Raymond F. JONES in The Cybernetic Brains (1950 Startling Stories; 1962),
which tells of human brains integrated with computers. Although Jones
probably used the term more because it was fine-sounding than for any
other reason, this is nonetheless a legitimate cybernetics subject, and is
also deployed notably in Wolfbane (1959) by Frederik POHL and C.M.
KORNBLUTH, Catchworld (1975) by Chris BOYCE and many other stories.A
number of stories about the development of consciousness in computers

carry cybernetic implications, though few as far-ranging as those in
Destination: Void. Some early examples can be found in Science Fiction
Thinking Machines (anth 1954) ed Groff CONKLIN; also relevant are The God
Machine (1968) by Martin CAIDIN, Vulcan's Hammer (1960) by Philip K. DICK,
Sagan om den stora datamaskin (1966 Sweden; trans as The Tale of the Big
Computer 1966; vt The Great Computer, A Vision 1968 UK; vt The End of Man?
) by Olof JOHANNESSON, THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS (1966) by Robert A.
HEINLEIN, When Harlie Was One (1972) by David GERROLD and "Synth" (1966)
by Keith ROBERTS. The reverse progression, of human into machine, occurs
in the vignettes of Moderan (coll of linked stories 1971) by David R.
BUNCH.Already-developed machine consciousnesses appear in Roger ZELAZNY's
story "For a Breath I Tarry" (1966), Cyberiada (coll of linked stories
1967 Poland; trans as The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age 1974 US)
by Stanislaw LEM, all the Berserker stories by Fred SABERHAGEN, The Siren
Stars (1971) by Richard and Nancy CARRIGAN and The Cybernetic Samurai
(1985) by Victor MILAN. Of these - and they are only a tiny proportion of
the total - Lem's fables are the ones that most directly confront the
various philosophical paradoxes that machine intelligence involves. A
particularly vast, Galaxy-spanning machine consciousness, literally a deus
ex machina, features in Dan SIMMONS's HYPERION (1989) and its sequel.The
Steel Crocodile (1970; vt The Electric Crocodile UK) by D.G. COMPTON is
interesting from a cybernetics viewpoint; it is about computer systems,
but also analyses the nature of human social systems and examines how the
two kinds intermesh. Gray Matters (1971) by William HJORTSBERG examines
disembodied human brain systems linked up in a network. Spacetime Donuts
(1981) by Rudy RUCKER is one of many variants on the theme of a human
society controlled repressively by a benevolent computer. The Black Cloud
(1957) by Fred HOYLE dramatizes communication between a human mind and an
inorganic intelligence in space; it also raises a number of cybernetic
issues. The Jonah Kit (1975) by Ian WATSON asks cybernetic questions in
that part of the story dealing with the imprinting of a human
consciousness onto the mind of a whale.Various compound words have been
formed, with dubious etymological exactness, from "cybernetics" - we have
already met"cyborg" . There are the "Cybermen" and "Cybernauts" - two
varieties of dangerous ROBOTS - in the tv series DR WHO and The AVENGERS ,
respectively; here the "cyber" component is merely a buzzword synonym for
robot. Two terms where the "cyber" component has considerably more force,
CYBERPUNK and CYBERSPACE, warrant their own entries.The only book that
analyses cybernetics issues from an sf perspective is The Cybernetic
Imagination in Science Fiction (1980) by Patricia S. WARRICK, interesting
when talking about cybernetic ideas as they are used in sf - often
inaccurately in her view - but on less sure ground when discussing the
literary quality of the results. "Cyborgs and Cybernetic Intertexts: On
Postmodern Phantasms of Body and Mind" by Gabriele Schwab in
Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction (anth 1989), ed Patrick
O'Donnell, is an academic essay on the subject. [PN]
CYBERPUNK
Term used to describe a school of sf writing that developed and became
popular during the 1980s. The word was almost certainly coined by Bruce
BETHKE in his story "Cyberpunk" (1983 AMZ), which had for some time before

publication been circulating in manuscript. The term was picked up, either
directly or indirectly, by writer and editor Gardner DOZOIS and used by
him to characterize a literary movement whose main exponents, at first in stories from about 1981-2 onwards - were seen as being Bruce STERLING
and William GIBSON, along with Rudy RUCKER, Lewis SHINER and perhaps John
SHIRLEY. It was not long after the publication of Gibson's first novel,
NEUROMANCER (1984), that the term began to come into general use, and
NEUROMANCER was the book that definitively shaped our sense of the
subgenre to which "cyberpunk" refers.The "cyber" part of the word relates
to CYBERNETICS: to a future where industrial and political blocs may be
global (or centred in SPACE HABITATS) rather than national, and controlled
through information networks; a future in which machine augmentations of
the human body are commonplace, as are mind and body changes brought about
by DRUGS and biological engineering. Central to cyberpunk fictions is the
concept of VIRTUAL REALITY, as in Gibson's Neuromancer sequence, where the
world's data networks form a kind of machine environment into which a
human can enter by jacking into a cyberspace deck and projecting "his
disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the
matrix" ( CYBERSPACE). The "punk" part of the word comes from the
rock'n'roll terminology of the 1970s, "punk" meaning in this context
young, streetwise, aggressive, alienated and offensive to the
Establishment. A punk disillusion, often multiple - with progressive
layers of illusion being peeled away - is a major component of these
works.Data networks are more than just a part of cyberpunk's subject
matter. Density of information, often slipped into stories by
near-subliminal means, has from the outset strongly characterized
cyberpunk's actual style. An important cyberpunk forebear was the film
BLADE RUNNER (1982), whose NEAR-FUTURE milieu - mean, drizzling, populous
streets lit up by enormous advertisements for Japanese products,
alternating street junk with hi-tech - is, in the intensity of its visual
infodumps, like a template for a cyberpunk scenario. Even more central to
the cyberpunk ethos, however, are the films of David CRONENBERG, whose
VIDEODROME (1982) in particular is a central cyberpunk document in its
emphasis on bodily metamorphosis, media overload and destructive
sex.Cyberpunk did not spring full-grown from Gibson's forehead, of course.
Indeed, unfriendly critics have rejoiced in locating cyberpunk ancestors,
as if this somehow devalued the entire movement; obviously cyberpunk can
be read as the apotheosis of various idea-clusters that appeared earlier,
but this seems neither surprising nor damaging. Ancestral texts include
Bernard WOLFE's LIMBO (1952; vt Limbo 90 UK), with its prosthetic ironies,
Alfred BESTER's Tiger! Tiger! (1956 UK; rev vt The Stars My Destination
1957 US), with its protopunk antihero, William S. BURROUGHS's The Soft
Machine (1961 France; rev 1966 US) and its various quasi-sequels, with
their drug and biological fantasias, Samuel R. DELANY's NOVA (1968), with
its streetwise CYBORGS, James TIPTREE Jr's "The Girl who was Plugged In"
(1973), with its painful ironies about altered body-image, and Ted
MOONEY's Easy Travel to Other Planets (1981), with its interspecies sex
and its information sickness. Other forebears would include J.G. BALLARD,
John BRUNNER - notably with THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER (1975) - Norman SPINRAD,
John VARLEY and perhaps even Thomas PYNCHON.Cyberpunk is often seen as a
variety of Postmodernist fiction, a point made by the title of Storming

the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction
(anth 1992) ed Larry McCaffery. Many of POSTMODERNISM's allegedly
principal qualities fit cyberpunk like a glove.The sense that cyberpunk
was almost a political movement, not just a form of fiction, came in part
from outside the fictions themselves. There had been nothing like it in
the sf world since the NEW-WAVE arguments of the 1960s. In convention
panels, in magazines (especially from 1987 in a critical semiprozine,
SCIENCE FICTION EYE ed Stephen P. Brown) - in all sorts of media passionate and sometimes heated arguments took place from about 1985
affirming the cyberpunks as shapers and movers in the sluggish, complacent
world of sf publishing. Bruce Sterling's fervour in polemic of this sort
was messianic, and it was he who edited the first influential anthology of
the movement: MIRRORSHADES: THE CYBERPUNK ANTHOLOGY (anth 1986), whose
preface resembles a manifesto. The arguments of Sterling and various of
his colleagues have been not merely vigorous but also intelligent about
the changing shape of our world (particularly as regards information
technology and biological engineering), and many readers must have been
attracted by the sense that here was a bunch of writers doing what sf
authors are supposed to do best, surf-riding on the big breakers of change
and the future. On the other hand, some of the cyberpunk propaganda was so
aggressive that it irresistibly reminded older observers of the
mid-century politics of the extreme international-socialist left:
enjoyable, but tiring to watch.Some other sf writers, not part of the
movement, were a bit taken aback by all the fuss - as well they might have
been given the comparatively small amount of published fiction that was
receiving such vast hype (the media picked up on cyberpunk in a big way
around 1988). On the whole, cyberpunk received a friendly reception,
although several of these outside writers seemed to see it as a matter
more of tone than of content. Orson Scott CARD wrote a cyberpunk pastiche,
"Dogwalker" (1989), that was apparently intended to make a point about
this. In his comment on this story when it appeared in his Maps in a
Mirror (coll 1990), Card wrote: "But the worst thing about cyberpunk was
the shallowness of those who imitated it. Splash some drugs onto
brain-and-microchip interface, mix it up with some vague sixties-style
counterculture, and then use really self-conscious, affected language, and
you've got cyberpunk." This was unfair to much of it, though certainly
cyberpunk produced instant CLICHEES, as in books like Hardwired (1986) by
Walter Jon WILLIAMS (although he rendered them rather well, and is by no
means the most cynical-seeming of those who climbed or were hauled onto
the bandwagon).In a magazine piece, "The Neuromantics" (1986; reprinted in
Science Fiction in the Real World coll 1990), Norman Spinrad argued
cogently that the "romance" component of Gibson's triple-punning title
NEUROMANCER ("neuro" as in nervous system; "necromancer"; "new romancer")
is basic to the cyberpunk form. Spinrad proposed ingeniously that the
cyberpunk authors should in fact be called "neuromantics" (nobody seems to
have taken him up on this), for their fiction is "a fusion of the romantic
impulse with science and technology". (Spinrad sees romanticism and
science as having been damagingly split during the New Wave vs HARD SF
debates of the 1960s; only with cyberpunk, he argues, did they fuse
together again.) He also argues, correctly, that Greg BEAR is - despite
his denials - a cyberpunk writer, and an important one. Certainly the

romance element is strong in Bear's work, as is the cyberpunk theme of
literally remaking humanity. Gibson is not just mildly romantic: he is
deeply so, as affirmed by the continuing homage his earlier work paid to
the detective fiction of Raymond Chandler (1888-1959). On the other hand,
Sterling's work - notably his Shaper/Mechanist stories - is not very
romantic at all. Sterling's cool fictions are perhaps the strangest and
most estranging of the cyberpunk stories in that their embracing of the
future leaves remarkably few lifelines whereby readers might connect
themselves back to the present; his prose, too, is more machine-like than
Gibson's (which is notably stylish). All this, while making Sterling's
work rather formidable for the reader, goes to show that Spinrad's
definition, like most definitions of literary movements, has major
exceptions to its rule ( DEFINITIONS OF SF).Cyberpunk has been accused of
being a phallocratic movement, and certainly only one woman writer, Pat
CADIGAN, is regularly associated with it in the public mind. But surely
cyberpunk influence can be seen in the work of, for example, Candas Jane
DORSEY, especially in her fine "(Learning About) Machine Sex" (1988),
Elizabeth HAND, in WINTERLONG (1990), and even perhaps Kathy ACKER,
although arguably she influenced cyberpunk more than it influenced her.
Other candidates might be Storm CONSTANTINE and MISHA.Many further writers
have been associated with cyberpunk, centrally so in the instances of Tom
MADDOX and Richard KADREY, perhaps more marginally so with George Alec
EFFINGER, K.W. JETER, Michael SWANWICK and Jack WOMACK; this is far from a
fully comprehensive list. These authors, however, along with the others
cited above, are by and large sufficiently distinguished to make it clear
why cyberpunk made such a splash. To contemplate them all is certainly to
evoke a sense of where some of the most exciting US sf action was during
the 1980s.Towards the end of that decade, however, it became clear that
the term "cyberpunk" no longer pleased all those whose work it had come to
envelop. Perhaps it had begun to represent too many cliches, too many
literary constraints, too big a readership wanting more and more of the
same. If cyberpunk is dead in the 1990s - as several critics have claimed
- it is as a result of euthanasia from within the family. Certainly the
effects of cyberpunk, both within sf and in the world at large, have been
invigorating; and, since most of its authors still continue to write - if
not necessarily under that label - we can safely assume that the spirit of
cyberpunk lives on. [PN]
CYBERSPACE
An item of sf TERMINOLOGY introduced by William GIBSON in his novel
NEUROMANCER (1984). He takes quite an old sf idea, also much discussed by
scientists, in imagining a NEAR-FUTURE era in which the human brain and
nervous system (biological) can interface directly with the global
information network (electrical) by jacking neurally implanted electrodes
directly into a networked COMPUTER (or "cyberdeck"). The network then
entered by the human mind is perceived by it, Gibson tells us, as if it
were an actual territory, almost a landscape, the "consensual
hallucination that was the matrix". This is cyberspace. Gibson goes on to
imagine that cyberspace might contain not only human minds but also human
or godlike simulacra, artefacts of the system created, perhaps
accidentally, by AIs. The term "cyberspace" has since been used by other

writers. It refers in fact to an imaginary but not wholly impossible
special case of VIRTUAL REALITY, which is in our contemporary world a more
commonly used term for machine-generated scenarios perceived, in varying
degrees, as "real" by those who watch or "enter" them. [PN]See also: GODS
AND DEMONS.
CYBERSPACE
The word "Cyberspace" has become ubiquitous. It was first coined by
William Gibson in his 1984 novel, Neuromancer. But the concept of
cyberspace - that an electronic interface exists between the human nervous
system and a computer - has its roots in cybernetics, a term coined in the
early 1940s by mathematician Norbert Wiener.In 1948, Wiener published a
paper titled "Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine." In it he discusses the relationship between statistics,
information theory, electronics, and the brain.Almost thirty-five years
later, Wiener's ideas inspired the vision of cyberspace. From that vision
came "cyberpunk:" - a literary style that has affected lifestyles...And
what will happen in Cyberspace will most likely change the way we humans
communicate in the future.
CYBORGS
The term "cyborg" is a contraction of "cybernetic organism" and refers to
the product of human/machine hybridization. David Rorvik popularized the
idea in As Man Becomes Machine (1971), writing of the "melding" of human
and machine and of a "new era of participant evolution". Elementary
medical cyborgs - people with prosthetic limbs or pacemakers - are already
familiar, and have been extrapolated in fiction in such works as Bernard
WOLFE's LIMBO (1952; vt Limbo '90 UK) and Martin CAIDIN's Cyborg (1972);
the tv series The SIX-MILLION DOLLAR MAN - which popularized the term
"bionic man" - was based on the latter. A more recent example of the
cyborg SUPERMAN can be found in Richard LUPOFF's Sun's End (1984) and
Galaxy's End (1988).There are two other common classes of cyborg in sf:
functional cyborgs are people modified mechanically to perform specific
tasks, usually a job of work; adaptive cyborgs are people redesigned to
operate in an alien environment, sometimes so completely that their
humanity becomes problematic. The subject of the earliest major cyborg
novel, The Clockwork Man (1923) by E.V. ODLE, belongs to the latter
category, featuring a man of the future who has a clockwork mechanism
built into his head which is supposed to regulate his whole being, and
which gives him access to a multidimensional world ( DIMENSIONS). The most
common form of cyborg portrayed in the early sf PULP MAGAZINES was an
extreme version of the medical cyborg ( MEDICINE), consisting of a human
brain in a mechanical envelope. These are featured in Edmond HAMILTON's
"The Comet Doom" (1928) and CAPTAIN FUTURE series, in Neil R. JONES's
Professor Jameson series, and in Raymond F. JONES's The Cybernetic Brains
(1950; 1962). Brains immortalized by mechanical preservation often became
monstrous, like the ones in Lloyd Arthur ESHBACH's "The Time Conqueror"
(1932; vt "Tyrant of Time") and Curt SIODMAK's much-filmed Donovan's Brain
(1943). Some later writers approached the existential situation of humans
in mechanized bodies in a much more careful and sophisticated manner;
outstanding examples include C.L. MOORE's "No Woman Born" (1944) and Algis

BUDRYS's WHO? (1958), both of which focus on the problems of
re-establishing identity once the familiar emblems are gone. Existential
problems are also to the fore in The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1974;
vt The Unsleeping Eye) by D.G. COMPTON, which features a man with tv
cameras implanted in his eyes.An early example of the functional cyborg is
strikingly displayed in "Scanners Live in Vain" (1950) by Cordwainer
SMITH, which features cyborgs designed for SPACE FLIGHT; this particular
theme dominates stories of both functional and adaptive cyborgs. Cyborg
spaceships are central to Thomas N. SCORTIA's "Sea Change" (1956), Anne
MCCAFFREY's The Ship who Sang (coll of linked stories 1969), Kevin
O'DONNELL Jr's Mayflies (1979) and Gordon R. DICKSON's The Forever Man
(1986), while Vonda MCINTYRE's Superluminal (1983) features space pilots
who require mechanical replacement hearts. Stories dealing with the use of
adaptive cyborgs to explore other worlds include Arthur C. CLARKE's "A
Meeting with Medusa" (1971), Frederik POHL's MAN PLUS (1976) and Paul J.
MCAULEY's "Transcendence" (1988). Barrington J. BAYLEY's The Garments of
Caean (1976) has two races of cyborgs adapted to the environment of outer
space. Another major theme in stories dealing with functional cyborgs
concerns their adaptation to the needs of espionage and war; examples
include "I-C-a-BEM" (1961) by Jack VANCE, "Kings who Die" (1962) by Poul
ANDERSON and A Plague of Demons (1965) by Keith LAUMER. Relatively few
stories treat more mundane manipulative functions, although Samuel R.
DELANY's NOVA (1968) makes significant observations en passant. Many
recent stories feature humans modified in such a way as to be able to plug
in directly to COMPUTERS, sometimes working in harness with them to do
many kinds of work. Particularly graphic images of this kind can be found
in ORA:CLE (1984) by Kevin O'Donnell Jr, SCHISMATRIX (1985) by Bruce
STERLING, Hardwired (1986) by Walter Jon WILLIAMS and Escape Plans (1986)
by Gwyneth JONES; the notion is a staple background element of CYBERPUNK.
Not all functional cyborgs involve human flesh: The Godwhale (1974) by
T.J. BASS features a massive food-collecting cetacean cyborg.Sf in the
cinema and on tv has often used the cyborg as a convenient figure of
menace; examples include the DALEKS and Cybermen of DR WHO. Images of
cyborg evil in written sf include the Cyclan in E.C. TUBB's Dumarest
novels and Palmer Eldritch in Philip K. DICK's THE THREE STIGMATA OF
PALMER ELDRITCH (1964). A more sympathetic cyborg is featured in Dick's Dr
Bloodmoney (1965), and tv has presented at least one memorable sympathetic
image in Harlan ELLISON's The OUTER LIMITS script "Demon with a Glass
Hand" (1964).One work which transcends categorization to deal in
semi-allegorical fashion with the relationship between human and machine
via the symbol of the cyborg is David R. BUNCH's Moderan (1959-70; fixup
1971), an assemblage of vignettes about a world where machine-men
gradually forsake their "fleshstrips" and retire into mechanized
"strongholds" to plot the destruction of their fellows.A relevant theme
anthology is Human Machines (anth 1976) ed Thomas N. Scortia and George
ZEBROWSKI. [BS]See also: CYBERNETICS; ROBOTS.
CYBORG 2087
Made-for-tv film (1966). Feature Film Corp. Dir Franklin Adreon, starring
Michael Rennie, Karen Steele, Wendell Corey, Warren Stevens, Eduard Franz.
Screenplay Arthur C. Pierce. 86 mins. Colour.This film, which though made

for tv achieved theatrical release, has a renegade CYBORG (Rennie) from
AD2087 going back to 1966 to prevent a scientist (Franz) from creating a
device that will later be used by a totalitarian government for a
mind-control programme to which the cyborgs themselves are central. He is
followed back in time by two government agents, both cyborgs, but he
overcomes them and persuades the scientist to destroy his invention,
though he knows that by doing so he will eliminate the possibility of his
own existence. When the device is indeed destroyed, he disappears along
with everybody's memories of his visit. The narrative has a better grasp
of TIME PARADOXES than usual for tv, but the performances are weak. The
plot bears a similarity to that of the much later film TERMINATOR 2:
JUDGMENT DAY (1991). [JB]
CYRANO de BERGERAC
The form of his name under which French soldier and writer Savinien
Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) is best known. He is famous as the hero of
a play by Edmond Rostand (1868-1918), Cyrano de Bergerac (1898 UK), which
made legends of his swordsmanship and the size of his nose. He fought with
the Gascon Guard but retired after sustaining bad wounds. Only parts of
his major work of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION, L'autre monde, were published in
posthumous versions, censored (to tone down their heretical elements) by
CdB's friend Henri le Bret. Histoire comique, par Monsieur de Cyrano
Bergerac, contenant les etats et empires de la lune (1657 France; trans
Tho. St Serf as Selenarchia: The Government of the World in the Moon 1659)
is complete, but the text of Fragment d'Histoire comique par Monsieur de
Cyrano Bergerac, contenant les etats et empires du soleil (1662 France;
trans A. Lovell together with the former item as The Comical History of
the States and Empires of the Moon and Sun, coll 1687) is partial. Some of
the censored text is restored in a French edition of Cyrano's complete
works (Oeuvres [coll 1957], and both books - Moon and Sun - are translated
from that edition in Other Worlds: The Comical History of the States and
Empires of the Moon and Sun (trans Geoffrey Strachan omni 1965). It is
possible that the remainder of the second part and the third part (The
History of the Stars) were written but subsequently lost or destroyed.The
hero of the comic histories attempts SPACE FLIGHT by several absurd
methods, including ROCKET power. His adventures are SATIRES interrupted by
discourses and dialogues regarding contemporary issues in natural
philosophy. A classic sequence in the second history has the hero tried
for the crimes of humanity by a court of birds. The histories influenced
several later satirists, including Jonathan SWIFT and VOLTAIRE. The first
part borrows Domingo Gonsales from Francis GODWIN's The Man in the Moone
(1638), and in the second part Tommaso CAMPANELLA appears as the hero's
guide. [BS]See also: FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FRANCE; HISTORY OF SF; MOON;
RELIGION.
CZECH AND SLOVAK SF
In Czechoslovakia there are two main groups, the Czechs and the Slovaks,
speaking different languages. Sf is written in both.The history of Czech
sf begins in the 19th century, with the first true sf work probably being
Zivot na Mesici ["Life on the Moon"] (1881) by Karel Pleskac. Also of
interest are some of the works of the famous mainstream author Svatopluk

Cech; for example, Hanuman (1884; trans W.W. Strickland 1894 UK),
depicting a civil war between two factions of apes ( APES AND CAVEMEN),
and Pravy vylet pana Broucka do Mesice ["The True Trip of Mr Broucek to
the Moon"] (1888). Another important ancestral figure was Jakub Arbes, who
wrote a series of romanetos (short novels) on fantastic themes, including
Newtonuv mozek (1877; trans Jiri Kral as "Newton's Brain" in Poet's Lore
[anth 1982 US]), which prefigures the theme of TIME TRAVEL.The first
author to write sf systematically was Karel Hloucha, author of seven
novels and story collections, including Zakleta zeme ["Enchanted Country"]
(1910) and Slunecni vuz ["The Solar Waggon"] (1921). Aliens that can take
the shape of human beings play an important role in Metod Suchdolsky's
novel Rusove na Martu ["Russians on Mars"] (1907).In 1920, the first sf
book by Karel CAPEK was published: the play R.U.R. (1920; trans 1923)
introduced the word ROBOT into the genre. The 1920s and 1930s were rich in
sf novels; each year several titles appeared, with a variety of themes
from technological inventions to the political and social aspects of
future societies. Among the writers active in this period were Tomas
Hruby, Jiri Haussmann, Marie Grubhofferova, J.M. Troska (the pseudonym of
Jan Matzal) and others. Troska was the most influential, especially with
his SPACE OPERA trilogy Zapas s nebem ["Struggle With the Skies"]
(1940-41). At the opposite pole stood Jan Weiss (1890-1972) with his
dreamlike mainstream sf novel Dum o 1000 patrech ["The Thousand-Storey
House"] (1929).After WWII (and especially after the communist coup in
1948) the production of Czech sf decreased, and those few, mainly juvenile
works which were published described a more "realistic" NEAR FUTURE.
Frantisek Behounek, a well known scientist, wrote seven HARD-SF novels
about the apotheosis of science in a communist future, examples being Akce
L ["Operation L"] (1956) and Robinsoni vesmiru ["The Space Family
Robinson"] (1958).The leading figure of the 1960s, and the symbol of the
rebirth of sf, was Josef NESVADBA, whose work is well known also in the
English-speaking world. Perhaps the most popular writer of this period,
however, was Ludvik Soucek (1926-1978), author of nine witty sf-adventure
novels and a few story collections, often with elements of the detective
story. The first and most popular were the trilogy Cesta slepych ptaku
["Voyage of the Blind Birds"] (1964) and the collection Bratri cerne
planety ["Brethren of the Black Planet"] (coll 1969); his last novel,
Blazni z Hepteridy ["The Madmen from Hepteris"] (1980), was published
posthumously. Two DYSTOPIAS by mainstream writers are of interest: Jiri
Marek's Blazeny vek ["Cheerful Era"] (1967) and Cestmir Vejdelek's Navrat
z Raje ["Return from Paradise"] (1961). The latter is a complex novel of
high literary standard describing the inhabitants of a computer-ruled
society who are unaware of their status as slaves. Other interesting
writers of the period were Josef Koenigsmark, Vaclav Kajdos and Ivan
Foustka.After the heightened activity of the 1960s, the so-called
"normalization" of Czech culture following the invasion of Czechoslovakia
by the Warsaw Pact countries in 1968 meant that there was another decrease
in Czech sf in the first half of the 1970s. At the end of that decade,
however, a new wave of writers appeared. The most significant authors of
short fiction are Jaroslav Veis (1946), Zdenek Volny and Ondrej Neff
(1945- ); each has published several books. Veis's Pandorina skrinka
["Pandora's Box"] (coll 1979) is very widely admired. Neff, after the

success of his first collection, Vejce naruby ["An Inside-Out Egg"] (coll
1985), turned to novels: his Mesic meho zivota ["The Moon of My Life"]
(1988), set in a colony of Moon-miners, is among the best Czech sf.
Another fine book from the period, from the usually mainstream writer
(although he has also produced four sf novels) Vladimir Paral, is the
dystopian Zeme zen ["The Country of Women"] (1987). The most important
publications for this generation of sf writers were the twin anthologies
Lide ze souhvezdi Lva ["People from the Constellation of Leo"] (anth 1983)
and Zelezo prichazi z hvezd ["Iron Comes from the Stars"] (anth 1983),
both ed Vojtech Kantor.The establishment in 1982 of the Karel Capek AWARD
for the best sf work by new authors encouraged the arrival of a still
younger generation of writers - Josef Pecinovsky, Frantisek Novotny,
Eduard Martin and Jan Hlavicka are the most significant. Although they
have published collections, this group's work primarily attained
popularity through anthologies: Navrat na planetu Zemi ["Return to Planet
Earth"] (anth 1985) and Stalo se zitra ["It Happened Tomorrow"] (anth
1985), both ed Ivo Zelezny.A few sf works have been written by Czech
authors in exile, an example being Maso ["Meat"] (coll 1981 Canada), a
collection of two novellas by Martin Harnicek. Another author in exile,
Ludek PESEK, is published in German and sometimes in English, although he
writes in Czech. One novel by Ivo DUKA (pseudonym of Ivo Duchacek and
Helena Koldova) was published in English: Martin and his Friend from Outer
Space (1955). Pavel KOHOUT, who left Czechoslovakia in 1968, later
published an sf novel (see his entry for its long title).Sf written in
Slovak does not have as continuous a tradition, and there are noticeably
fewer works. Sf featuring social comment and adventure was published in
the 1930s and 1940s by Peter Suchansky, Dezo S. Turcan and Jan
Kresanek-Ladcan. After WWII the production of Slovak sf was sporadic and
its nature naive, as in Luna 2 neodpoveda ["Luna 2 Doesn't Answer"]
(1958), one of the three sf novels written by Jan Bajla. Only one author
from the 1960s stands out: Jozef Tallo, whose collection is Vlasy Bereniky
["The Hair of Berenice"] (coll 1962). Many more writers emerged in the
1980s: Alta Vasova, Jan Fekete, Jozef Repko and others; they write mainly
juvenile fiction. The most successful may be the post- HOLOCAUST novel Po
["After"] (1979) by Vasova and three juvenile novels by Jozef Zarnay,
including Kolumbovia zo zakladne Ganymedes ["Columbuses from Ganymede
Space Station"] (1983).More than 50 sf films have been made in
Czechoslovakia, the first of them in the early 1920s. The earliest of real
interest are adaptations of stories by Karel Capek; they are Bila nemoc
["The White Plague"] (1937; vt Skeleton on Horseback), dir Hugo Haas, and
Krakatit (1948), dir Otakar Vavra. From the mid-1950s to 1970, several sf
films with animation and live action combined, based loosely on novels by
Jules VERNE and using original drawings from French editions of his books,
were made by director and animator Karel Zeman: Cesta do praveku (1955; vt
Journey to the Beginning of Time), VYNALEZ ZKAZY (1958; vt Weapons of
Destruction), Baron Prasil (1961; vt Baron Munchhausen), Ukradena
vzducholod (1966; vt The Stolen Airship) and Na komete (1970; vt On the
Comet). A completely animated Czech/French coproduction was La PLANETE
SAUVAGE (1973; vt Fantastic Planet).The tradition of Czech sf comedies was
launched by Oldrich Lipsky with a comedy set in "the 5th century after
Sputnik": Muz z prvniho stoleti ["Man from the First Century"] (1961; vt

Man in Outer Space). Lipsky's other sf films include: a TIME-TRAVEL
comedy, Zabil jsem Einsteina, panove! (1969; vt I Killed Einstein,
Gentlemen!); a parody of pre-WWII pulp detective fiction involving Nick
CARTER and a carnivorous plant, perhaps his best film, Adela jeste
nevecerela (1977; vt Adele Hasn't Eaten Yet); a Jules VERNE adaptation,
Tajemstvi hradu v Karpatech ["Mystery of the Carpathian Castle"] (1981);
and Srdecny pozdrav ze Zemekoule ["Cordial Greetings from Earth"] (1982).
Milos Macourek has had a hand in several good sf comedies, notably KDO
CHCE ZABIT JESSII? (1965; vt Who Would Kill Jessie?) and Coz takhle dat si
spenat (1976; vt What Would You Say to Some Spinach?), and also cowrote
the screenplay of ZITRA VSTANU A OPARIM SE CAJEM (1977; vt Tomorrow I'll
Wake up and Scald Myself with Tea), one of a number of Czech sf films,
several of them comedies, based on Josef Nesvadba's stories and novels.Not
many Czech films are "serious" sf, or even straight sf, but those that are
include: the space opera IKARIE XB-1 (1963; vt Voyage to the End of the
Universe); the post- HOLOCAUST story KONEC SRPNA V HOTELU OZON (1966; vt
The End of August at the Hotel Ozone); a film about a visit from deep
space, Akce Bororo ["Operation Bororo"] (1972), dir Otakar Fuka; a
children's film about First Contact with ALIENS, Odysseus a hvezdy
["Odysseus and the Stars"] (1974), dir Ludvik Raza; a free adaptation of
Capek's Krakatit (1924), TEMNE SLUNCE (1980; vt The Black Sun); and, from
Slovakia, ecological space sf in Treti Sarkan ["The Third Dragon"] (1985),
dir Peter Hledik.Sf dramas are quite frequent on Czech tv, especially for
children. One of the better serials has beenNavstevnici ["The Visitors"]
(1984), in which an expedition from AD2484, when Earth is endangered by a
comet, returns to 1984 to seek help; it was dir Jindrich Polak.Sf is very
popular in Czechoslovakia. It has a wide readership, and print-runs of
books by well known authors have been up to 100,000; however, the
worsening economic situation in the early 1990s is likely to change that
figure dramatically for the worse. On the positive side, a monthly sf
magazine, Ikarie, was launched in June 1990 under the editorship of Ondrej
Neff, who has also edited, with Jaroslav OLSA jr, Encyklopedie science
fiction ["Encyclopedia of Science Fiction"] (1992). [IA/JO]
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
Da CRUZ, DANIEL
(1921-1991) US writer, formerly known for numerous men's action-adventure
tales, who began publishing sf with The Grotto of the Formigans (1980), a
novel about African grotto MONSTERS, and who came to more general notice
with his Republic of Texas or Forte Family sequence: The Ayes of Texas
(1982), Texas on the Rocks (1986) and Texas Triumphant (1987). The
political premises underlying the series - in the late 1990s the USSR,
having hoodwinked the supinely liberal US media, has come to dominate the
world - have dated, but the exuberance of the tales themselves remains
winning. The protagonist, a triple-amputee WWII veteran from the newly
free Republic of Texas, arms an old battleship (itself called Texas), and
sails off to fight the Russians. Much blood is spilt, and a good time is
had by all. F-Cubed (1989) is a less entrancing TECHNOTHRILLER; but Mixed
Doubles (1989) enjoyably depicts the attempts of a contemporary failed
composer who travels back in time to steal MUSIC from those more talented

than himself. [JC]

SF?
DAGMAR
Lou CAMERON.
DAGMAR, PETER
Frank J. PINCHIN.
DAGNOL, JULES N.
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
DAHL, ROALD
(1916-1990) Welsh-born writer of Norwegian parents who spent periods of
his life in the USA, but lived in the UK in his later years; married to
the actress Patricia Neal 1953-83. Though his enormous success as an
author of children's stories tended to dominate perceptions of his career,
he was in fact long best known for his eerie, exquisitely crafted,
somewhat poisonous adult tales, many of them fantasies, assembled in
Someone Like You (coll 1953 US; exp 1961 UK), Kiss Kiss (coll 1960 US),
Switch Bitch (coll 1974 US) and several later collections which often
included previous material: The Best of Roald Dahl (coll 1978 US); Tales
of the Unexpected (coll 1979) and More Roald Dahl Tales of the Unexpected
(coll 1980; vt More Tales of the Unexpected 1980; vt Further Tales of the
Unexpected 1981), both assembled as Roald Dahl's Completely Unexpected
Tales (omni 1986); Two Fables (coll 1986 chap); Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life
(coll 1989); and the posthumous The Collected Short Stories (coll 1991),
which includes further work. Not infrequently these stories make use of
borderline sf images, such as the unpleasant metamorphosis of human into
bee in "Royal Jelly" (1960); but more generally it is the threat of sf or
supernatural displacement that powers them.RD's first title was a
children's fantasy, The Gremlins (1943 chap US), a short story that became
famous because Walt Disney dickered for a time with making an animated
film of it (there is no connection with the much later Joe DANTE film
Gremlins). His only sf novel, Some Time Never: A Fable for Supermen (1948
US), by some margin his worst book, recasts the tale for an adult
audience. After attempting to sabotage humanity during WWII, the
long-submerged gremlins see that we ourselves are doing the job quite
adequately; they take back control of the planet after the nuclear WWIV,
but then become extinct in a world bare of humanity. The strained and sour
whimsy of this "fable" might be seen - according to RD's critics - as
passing directly into his juvenile fantasies, though it would probably be
fairer to acknowledge a world of difference between adult spitefulness and
the exuberant child's-eye view of grown-ups and the meting of justice unto
them presented in James and the Giant Peach (1961 US) and all its
successors, the most famous being Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964
US), filmed as Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971); it was
assembled with its sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972 US),
as The Complete Adventures of Charlie and Mr Willy Wonka (omni 1987). RD
also wrote the screenplay for the James Bond film YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
(1967). One late novel for adults followed, the quasi-historical,

borderline- STEAMPUNK My Uncle Oswald (1979), which plays with the notion
of "tapping" geniuses such as Freud and Shaw for purposes of artificial
insemination - spermpunk, in short.But the adult work was, in the end,
miserly; the stories for children were, in the end, generously wicked
gifts of fable. [JC]Other works for adults: Over to You (coll 1946 US),
associational; Twenty-Nine Kisses from Roald Dahl (coll 1969), a
compilation; Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984) and Going Solo (1986),
autobiographical; Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories (anth 1983).For
children: The Magic Finger (1966 chap US); Fantastic Mr Fox (1970 chap);
Danny, the Champion of the World (1975); The Wonderful Story of Henry
Sugar and Six More (coll 1977; vt The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar 1977
US); The Enormous Crocodile (1978); The Twits (1980 chap); George's
Marvellous Medicine (1981); The BFG (1982); The Witches (1983); The
Giraffe and the Pelly and Me (1985); Matilda (1988); Esio Trot (1990
chap), associational; The Minipins (1991 chap).About the author: Roald
Dahl (1983) by Chris Dowling.See also: HUMOUR; SATIRE.
DAIBER, ALBERT
[r] GERMANY.
DAIKAIJU GAMERA
(vt Gamera) Film (1966). Daiei. Dir Noriaki Yuasa, starring Eiji
Funakoshi, Harumi Kiritachi (and, in the US version, Brian Donlevy, Albert
Dekker, Diane Findlay). Screenplay Fumi Takahashi. 88 mins. Colour.This
was Daiei Studios' answer to the enormously successful GOJIRA ["Godzilla"]
films from Toho Studios. Gamera is a giant prehistoric turtle, restored to
life by nuclear testing. It attacks Tokyo, naturally, but is captured and
sent into space. The US version had extra footage showing Americans, not
Japanese, discovering how to eliminate Gamera! The Gamera films were,
apart from the Gojira films, Japan's most successful MONSTER MOVIES. The 6
sequels, all dir Yuasa except the first (for which he did the special
effects), are: Gamera Tai Barugon (1966), dir Shigeo Tanaka, released in
English as Gamera vs. Barugon, in which Gamera returns from space, now
apparently jet-propelled, and fights a giant lizard that has a lethal
rainbow field around it; Gamera Tai Gaos (1967; vt Daikaiju Kuchusen),
released in English as Gamera vs. Gaos (vt The Return of the Giant
Monsters), in which Gaos is a bad scaly monster that hates sunlight and
Gamera (like Godzilla, he rapidly became a good monster) saves children;
Gamera Tai Viras (1968; vt Gamera Tai Uchukaiju Bairasu), released in
English as Gamera vs. Viras (vt Gamera Versus Outer Space Monster Viras;
vt Destroy All Planets), in which two boy scouts save Gamera from alien
control; Gamera Tai Guiron (1969), released in English as Gamera vs.
Guiron (vt Attack of the Monsters), in which Gamera saves children from
brain-eating female aliens and their knife-headed monster; Gamera Tai
Daimaju Jaiga (1970), released in English as Gamera vs. Jiger (vt Gamera
vs. Monster X; vt Monsters Invade Expo 70), in which nasty Jiger lays an
egg inside Gamera, a parasite hatches and starts sucking his blood, and
children in a mini-submarine enter his veins to help out; and Gamera Tai
Shinkai Kaiju Jigura (1971), released in English as Gamera vs. Zigra (vt
Gamera Versus the Deep Sea Monster Zigra), in which there is an
anti-pollution theme, bad aliens, and a very bad script. [PN]See also:

CINEMA.
DAIKAIJU KUCHUSEN
DAIKAIJU GAMERA.
DAIL, C(HARLES) C(URTIS)
(1851-1902) US writer and lawyer whose Willmoth the Wanderer, or The Man
from Saturn (1890; rev c1891) is a real oddity. Though told with no great
skill, its narrative, purporting to be that of Willmoth the Saturnian as
told towards the end of his several-million-year lifespan, is an eventful
affair. Willmoth proceeds from Saturn to Venus (travel via ANTIGRAVITY)
and, late in the book, to a prehistoric Earth, whose primitive inhabitants
he breeds into Homo sapiens. CCD's episodic second novel, The Stone Giant:
A Story of the Mammoth Cave (1898), lies within the overarching context of
the first book. It is presented as a translation (by Willmoth) of memoirs
by the prehistoric ruler Wymorian, an 8ft (2.4m) giant and founder of
ATLANTIS, who is given (by ancient descendants of Willmoth) an elixir of
life. There is much talk about the ethics of the IMMORTALITY experiment,
which on the whole is a failure - as, notoriously, was Atlantis. [PN/JC]
DAIN, ALEX
Pseudonym of Alex Lukeman (? -? ), US writer whose sf novel is The Bane
of Kanthos (1969 dos), a SPACE OPERA. [JC]
DAKE, CHARLES ROMYN
(? -? ) US writer whose lost-race ( LOST WORLDS) novel, A Strange
Discovery (1899), features a Roman colony in the Antarctic and is notable
in that it continues the story of Edgar Allan POE's Gordon Pym. [JC]
DALE, ADAM
Brian HOLLOWAY.
DALE, FLOYD D.
(? - ) US writer whose first work, A Hunter's Fire (1989), is a postHOLOCAUST military-sf adventure. [JC]
DALEKS
These sinister ALIENS, bent on universal conquest, mutated and rendered
immobile by radioactivity, inhabit metal transporters to become CYBORGS.
They were introduced in the tv series DOCTOR WHO by writer Terry NATION in
The Dead Planet (1963-4), the long-running programme's second story, later
filmed as DR WHO AND THE DALEKS (1965); another 1964 tv story was filmed
as DALEKS: INVASION EARTH 2150 A.D. (1966). The Daleks returned in many Dr
Who tv episodes, being the most popular feature of its first decade; only
in 1975 did we learn, in Genesis of the Daleks, that they had been created
by an evil, crippled genius, Davros. [PN]
DALEKS: INVASION EARTH 2150 A.D.
(vt Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.) Film (1966). AARU. Dir Gordon Flemyng,
starring Peter Cushing, Bernard Cribbins, Roberta Tovey, Jill Curzon.
Screenplay Milton Subotsky, based on a 6-episode DR WHO tv story by Terry
NATION, The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964). 84 mins. Colour.This was the
second movie made by coproducers Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg to
cash in on the popularity of the Dr Who tv series, the first being DR WHO

AND THE DALEKS (1965). The DALEKS, almost 200 years on, have invaded Earth
(largely unchanged since the 1960s) intending to empty its core and use it
as a giant spaceship, but Dr Who and his colleagues, who include a London
bobby (Cribbins) from 1966, thwart their plan in a story devoid of
dramatic tension or science: Earth's north and south magnetic fields, we
are told, meet below Bedfordshire, and can be used to suck the Daleks into
oblivion at Earth's centre. The greatest ineptness of the screenplay is
its failure to give Dr Who, here played as a doddery old gent by Cushing,
anything at all to do. [PN]
DALEY, BRIAN C.
(1947- ) US writer whose first novels were the SCIENCE-FANTASY Coramonde
sequence - The Doomfarers of Coramonde (1977) and The Starfollowers of
Coramonde (1979) - which puts into an ALTERNATE-WORLD setting a tale of
MAGIC, court politics and quest, starring a Vietnam veteran who helps his
friend, the rightful ruler, fight off an evil sorcerer. Of slightly
greater sf interest is the Alacrity FitzHugh sequence - Requiem for a
Ruler of Worlds (1985), Jinx on a Terran Inheritance (1985) and Fall of
the White Ship Avatar (1986) - whose hero, Alacrity, hurtles through sf
adventures on a galactic scale. BCD's best single novel has perhaps been A
Tapestry of Magics (1983), a fantasy whose central conceit - a tapestry
which is also a magical singularity - recursively recruits into the tale,
from various eons and realities, characters both real and fictional,
including some of Robert A. HEINLEIN's, perhaps in acknowledgement of
Heinlein's own RECURSIVE later fiction.BCD remains best known, however,
for his highly competent and colourful Star Wars ties, Han Solo at Star's
End * (1979), Han Solo's Revenge * (1979) and Han Solo and the Lost Legacy
* (1980), which admirably set out to infill Solo's pre-saga life, and
which were assembled as Star Wars: The Han Solo Adventures (omni 1992);
Star Wars: The NPR Radio Dramatization *(1994) is a radio play. Other ties
include Tron * (1982) ( TRON) and the two sequences of Robotech tv ties
with James Luceno, writing together as Jack McKinney: the first comprises
Robotech #1: Genesis * (1987), #2: Battle Cry * (1987), #3: Homecoming *
(1987), #4: Battlehymn * (1987), #5: Force of Arms * (1987), #6: Doomsday
* (1987), #7: Southern Cross * (1987), #8: Metal Fire * (1987), #9: The
Final Nightmare * (1987), #10: Invid Invasion * (1987), #11: Metamorphosis
* (1987) and #12: Symphony of Light * (1987); the second sequence, the
Sentinels books, comprises The Sentinels #1: The Devil's Hand * (1988),
#2: Dark Powers * (1988), #3: Death Dance * (1988), #4: World Killers *
(1988) and #5: Rubicon * (1988); both sequences conclude with Robotech:
The End of the Circle * (1990). Luceno and BCD, both still writing as Jack
McKinney, continued with some independent titles: Kaduna Memories (1990),
about a detective in 21st-century Manhattan, and the first volumes of the
Black Hole Travel Agency sequence, Event Horizon (1991),Artifact of the
System (1991),The Big Empty (1993) and The Shadow * (1994), a film tie. It
could not be argued that BCD has much built upon the promise of his first
books, but nor could it be said that he has ever given bad value. He has
become one of the necessary journeymen. [JC]
DALGAARD, NIELS
(1956- ) Danish academic and sf critic whose PhD research into Danish sf

is the first on such a topic to be funded by the Danish Research Council
for the Humanities. ND is sf reviewer for the newspaper Politiken and
editor of the critical journal Proxima (since 1981). He wrote the DENMARK
entry in this volume. [PN]
DALMAS, JOHN
Pseudonym for all his fiction of US writer John R(obert) Jones (1926- ),
whose first career was as a research ecologist for the US Forest Service.
He began publishing with The Yngling (1969 ASF; fixup 1971; rev 1984),
which, with its prequel, Homecoming (1984) - both assembled as The Orc
Wars (omni 1992) - depicts a barbarian future whose history echoes that of
the eponymous Norse kings of legend; eventually the hero of the saga leads
his neo-Vikings south from the encroaching ice, though their ideal
community is soon under threat; The Yngling and the Circle of Power (1992)
is a prequel. In the Fanglith series - Fanglith (1985) and Return to
Fanglith (1987) - the planet to which criminals are exiled turns out to be
Earth; much of JD's work similarly transforms SPACE-OPERA venues into
arenas where ironies (or the gods) have free play. In both The Reality
Matrix (1986) and, with Rod Martin (1928- ), The Playmasters (1986) this
drift of implication becomes explicit. The Regiment sequence comprisingThe Regiment (1987), The White Regiment (1990) and The
Regiment's War (1993) - tells, a group of mercenaries from a military
planet sent off to fight until they all die - characters, once again, who
are players in others' games. The General's President (1988) interestingly
assumes that a US civilian puppet-leader might convincingly fox his
military backers. Though his work is teasingly close to routine, JD is too
various and lively to dismiss.Other works: The Varkaus Conspiracy (1983);
Touch the Stars: Emergence (1983) with Carl Martin (1950- ); The Scroll of
Man (1985); The Walkaway Clause (1986); The Lantern of God (1989); The
Lizard War (1989); The Khalif's War (1991).
DALOS, GYORGY (ALFRED)
(1943- ) Hungarian writer, who suffered the usual persecutions (he was
expelled from theCommunist Party in 1968 as a "dissident") before writing
1985: A Historical Report(Hongkong 2036) from the Hungarian of * * *
(trans Stuart Hood and Estella Schmid1983 UK), a tale which did not appear
in his native land, or in its original language, duringthe period of
Soviet hegemony. It is an extremely sprightly SATIRE on conditions inhis
native land, in the form of a sequel to George ORWELL's NINETEEN
EIGHTY-FOUR(1949), recounting the death of Big Brother, aninterval of
thaw, and once again a clenching of the iron fist. [JC]
DALTON, HENRY ROBERT S(AMUEL)
(1835-? ) UK writer, active to about 1890, whose sf novel Lesbia Newman
(1889) depicts a profound change in UK social attitudes after a disastrous
1890s loss of territory to European powers and the USA, as a consequence
of which the eponymous female manages to seduce the Ecumenical Council of
1900 into proclaiming the worship of women. [JC]
DALTON, SEAN
Jay D. BLAKENEY.
DALY, HAMLIN

[s] E. Hoffmann PRICE.
DAMNATION ALLEY
Film (1977). Landers-Roberts/Zeitman/20th Century-Fox. Dir Jack Smight,
starring Jan-Michael Vincent, George Peppard, Dominique Sanda. Screenplay
Alan Sharp, Lukas Heller, based on Damnation Alley (1969) by Roger
ZELAZNY. 95 mins cut to 91 mins. Colour.In this travesty the solitary,
snarling, Hell's Angel protagonist of Zelazny's novel has become four
fairly decent Air Force officers. There are almost no survivors of WWIII.
The officers set out from the western USA to cross the country eastwards
in "land-mobiles", seeking viable communities. The HOLOCAUST has tilted
Earth's axis, turning the sky into a display of glowing radiation and
electrical storms, represented by astonishingly garish and inadequate
process work from an obviously low-budget special-effects department. The
encounter with mutated, carnivorous cockroaches stands out in an otherwise
wholly laughable and random series of stereotyped adventures with
murderous hillbillies, floods, a girl, a feral boy and several deaths.
[PN]
DAMNED, THE
(vt These Are the Damned) Film (1961). Hammer/Swallow. Dir Joseph Losey,
starring MacDonald Carey, Oliver Reed, Shirley Ann Field, Viveca Lindfors,
Alexander Knox. Screenplay Evan Jones, based on The Children of Light
(1960) by Henry L. LAWRENCE. 96 mins, cut to 87 mins (UK) and to 77 mins
(US). B/w.Made in the UK by expatriate US director Losey, this film so
dismayed the distributors, Columbia, that they kept it on the shelf for
two years before releasing it, and then with major cuts. A US visitor to
an English seaside town (Carey) becomes involved with the sister (Field)
of the leader of some tough, local bikers. The pair accidentally learn of
a secret, illegal military project to irradiate children kept in
underground isolation, thereby rendering them capable of surviving nuclear
HOLOCAUST. (The otherwise powerful film is partly devalued by Losey's
casual approach to science; gaffes include the belief that the irradiated
children would have abnormally low body temperatures but be otherwise
healthy!) Ironically, Carey and Field are fatally contaminated by the very
children they seek to free. Losey's moral indignation has a paranoid
streak, but the film's evocative, allusive imagery is strong, in
particular when the children communicate with their obsessed, scientist
"father" (Knox) by tv and in the final shots, showing a helicopter
hovering like a giant carrion bird over the small boat carrying the dying
couple - echoing the grotesque, sometimes bird-like sculptures executed by
the scientist's lover (in reality by distinguished sculptress Elisabeth
Frink), which stand on the clifftops nearby. TD is one of the most
memorable sf films of a period when few really good directors would come
within miles of the genre. [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA; PARANOIA.
DAMRON, HILLEL
[r] ISRAEL.
DAN DARE - PILOT OF THE FUTURE
UK sf COMIC-strip character, distinguished in appearance by his long chin
and by the zigzag on the outer end of each eyebrow. DD was created by

Frank HAMPSON for the weekly boys' comic Eagle, in which - with the
sobriquet "Pilot of the Future" - he appeared with his Lancastrian batman
Digby from 1950 until the comic's demise in 1969. Hampson supervised a
team of writers, artists, model-makers and photographers to create a
totally convincing scenario of the future, as governed by the United
Nations Organization. Writers included Eric Eden, David Motton, Alan
Stranks and Chad Varah; artists included Frank Bellamy, Bruce Cornwell,
Eric Eden, Donald Harley, Harold Johns, Desmond Walduck and Keith Watson.
DD stories generally dealt with the exploration of the Solar System,
individual stories often centring on conflicts between DD and the Mekon, a
green-skinned, dome-headed Venusian despot. Under Hampson's firm control,
pictorial authenticity was achieved through the use of scale models, and
characters were drawn from photographs of real people; stories were
scrutinized for scientific accuracy (Arthur C. CLARKE was adviser for the
first six months).After Hampson's departure in 1959 the writers extended
their themes beyond the limitations of the original conception in a series
of less convincing adventures across the Galaxy. Continuity became
strained and, despite a period of revitalization at the hands of Keith
Watson, the strip declined, no new material being published after Jan
1967. A DD newspaper strip of 7 frames per week was published in the UK
Sunday newspaper The People 3 May-26 Nov 1964.Written by Tom Tulley and
drawn at first by Massimo Belardinelli and subsequently by Dave GIBBONS,
the character was revived in name only in 2,000 AD (from #1, 26 Feb 1977).
The voluble adverse reaction to this from fans of the original strip,
along with news of plans for a nostalgic DD tv series (to be produced by
Paul de Savary), persuaded IPC, Eagle's erstwhile publisher, to relaunch
Eagle in 1982 as a weekly pulp comic with new DD stories featuring the
"great grandson" of the original DD. At first top-line artists were used Gerry Embleton (although he quickly became disillusioned by inconsistent
editorial directives and left) and then Ian Kennedy (until 1984) - but the
series failed to recreate the credibility of the original, and for a time
IPC used less able artists on it until, for a six-week period in 1989,
they returned once more to Hampson's original conception (with Keith
Watson as artist). The new incarnation of Eagle failed to achieve
significant sales and became a monthly, reprinting earlier strips
alongside new DD stories written by Tom Tulley and drawn by David Pugh; it
still (early 1992) survives.In 1982 de Savary's tv series was abandoned
unfinished, although a different DD tv series is (early 1992) in the
process of production by Zenith Films. There have been two RADIO
adaptations: the first, starring Noel Johnson, ran continuously on Radio
Luxembourg 2 July 1951-25 May 1956; the second, starring Nick Ward,
adapted Eagle's original DD story and was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in
1990. Book-length reprints of Hampson's DD stories have been published by
Dragon's Dream - The Man from Nowhere (graph 1979), Rogue Planet (graph
1980) and Reign of the Robots (graph 1981) - and by Hawk Books - Pilot of
the Future (graph 1987), Red Moon Mystery ?
omni 1988), Operation Saturn (graph 1989), Prisoners of Space (graph 1990)
and The Man from Nowhere (graph 1991). DD also starred in a politicalSATIRE comic strip written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Rian Hughes,
which appeared 1990-91 in Revolver and Crisis and was published in book
form as Dare (graph 1991). A comic-strip parody of DD, lampooning

contemporary UK politics, ran as Dan Dire - Pilot of the Future in 1991 in
the satirical magazine Private Eye. There have also been two novels: Dan
Dare on Mars * (1956) by Basil Dawson and Dan Dare - Pilot of the Future *
(1977) by Angus Allen, the latter a novelization of the original Eagle
story.For more on DD's creator read The Man who Drew Tomorrow (1985) by
Alastair Crompton, and for more on the character read The Dan Dare Dossier
(1990). [RT/ABP/JE]
DANE, CLEMENCE
Pseudonym of UK playwright and novelist Winifred Ashton (1888-1965), best
remembered for Broome Stages (1931), a tale of the theatre. She became
known to the sf world late in life when she edited the Novels of Tomorrow
series in 1955-6 for Michael Joseph Ltd, publishing work by John
CHRISTOPHER, Harold MEAD and Arthur SELLINGS. Some of her own fiction was
of genre interest. Legend (1919) concerns a supernatural relationship
between a dead writer and her biographer. The Babyons (1927) traces a
curse through four generations. The Arrogant History of White Ben (1939),
set in a beleaguered NEAR FUTURE, gives an animate scarecrow the task of
leading the UK out of trouble. In The Saviours (coll of linked plays 1942)
Merlin attempts to revitalize Britain by giving Arthur's heirs good
advice. Some of the stories assembled in Fate Cries Out (coll 1935) are of
genre interest. [JC]
DANGER: DIABOLIK
DIABOLIK.
DANGERFIELD, PAUL
Victor NORWOOD.
DANGEROUS VISIONS
Original ANTHOLOGY ed Harlan ELLISON. DV (1967) was a massive and
influential anthology of 33 stories and copious prefatory material; it
became strongly identified with the NEW WAVE in the USA. Among its
stories, "Aye, and Gomorrah . . ." by Samuel R. DELANY, "Gonna Roll the
Bones" by Fritz LEIBER and "Riders of the Purple Wage" by Philip Jose
FARMER won major awards. DV was followed by Again, Dangerous Visions (anth
1972), which was larger still, although it created less stir. It contained
two more major-award winners, "When It Changed" by Joanna RUSS and THE
WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST (1972; 1976) by Ursula K. LE GUIN, among its 46
stories. ADV used only authors who had not appeared in DV. A third and
still unpublished instalment, again with wholly new authors - The Last
Dangerous Visions - has become legendary for its many postponements over
19 years (to 1992), although Ellison is on record (1979) as saying that
over 100 stories were bought for it. One sternly adversarial account of
its history is the widely discussed The Last Deadloss Visions (1987 chap;
rev 1987) compiled/written and published by Christopher PRIEST.
[MJE/PN]See also: TABOOS.
DANIEL, GABRIEL
(1649-1728) French writer whose Voyage du Monde de Descartes (1690; trans
T. Taylor as A Voyage to the World of Cartesius 1692 UK) is a FANTASTIC
VOYAGE whose purpose was to popularize the ideas of the philosopher Rene
Descartes (1596-1650) on COSMOLOGY and other matters. [PN]See also: PROTO

SCIENCE FICTION; SPACE FLIGHT.
DANIEL, TONY
(1963- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "For the Killed
Astronauts" for IASFM in 1990, and who has been fairly prolific in the
1990s. His first novel, Warpath (1991 IASFM as "Candle"; exp 1993), was
admired for its ambitious scope, though it seems at points overloaded with
material, and slides (at points uncontrolledly) from sf to MAGIC REALISM
to myth (mostly based on Native American material) to and outright
fantasy. The premise is romantic: centuries past, Mississippi Native
Americans have learned to convey their canoes on interstellar voyages, and
have settled the planet Candle. The inevitable arrival of
technology-dominated human civilizations provides the engine of a plot
which incorporates god-like bear-shaped companions, demon-like sorcerers,
weather-manipulation governed the sentience of a dead lover, and much
else. None of it works as a whole; but the parts are enough to establish
TD as a significant new writer of the 1990s. [JC]
DANIEL, YULI (MARKOVICH)
(1925-1988) Russian author who wrote as Nikolai Arzhak; he lived in exile
after having been imprisoned in 1966 along with his dissident friend,
Andrey SINYAVSKY (Abram Tertz), for the writings translated as This is
Moscow Speaking, and Other Stories (written before 1966; trans Stuart Hood
and others 1968 UK). The title story is of sf interest: 10 August 1960 is
declared to be Public Murder Day; the point is satirical. The eponymous
character in "The Man from MINAP" has the power of predetermining the sex
of any child from his loins. [JC]See also: TABOOS.
DANIELS, LOUIS G.
[s] Daniel F. GALOUYE.
DANIELS, MAX
Pseudonym of US writer Roberta Leah Jacobs Gellis (1927- ), who wrote
non-sf as Leah Jacobs. As MD she published two unremarkable sf adventures,
The Space Guardian (1978) and Offworld (1979). [JC]
DANN, JACK (MAYO)
(1945- ) US writer and anthologist, with a BA in social/political
science, who began publishing sf in 1970 with two stories for Worlds of If
with George ZEBROWSKI, "Dark, Dark the Dead Star" and "Traps". Among his
best and most revealing stories of this period was Junction (1973 Fantasy;
exp 1981), a NEBULA-award finalist in its early form; its young
protagonist must leave the eponymous village, the last place on Earth to
remain physically stable, to explore the "Hell" of mutability outside. The
expansion cogently dramatizes what Gregory FEELEY has suggested is JD's
central theme: the rousing of a young man from disaffected solipsism into
awareness of the marvels of the noosphere. Starhiker (fixup 1977), set in
a heightened SPACE-OPERA venue, similarly puts a young human singer-bard
escapee from alien-occupied Earth into an alien spaceship, where he
undergoes a series of revelatory experiences (including near
self-transcendence on a sentient planet) before returning to his depressed
home. The stories assembled in Timetipping (coll 1980) reiterate this
basic pattern. Only with THE MAN WHO MELTED (1984) did JD expand his

canvas by introducing a human subject - his lost wife - for whom the
protagonist must search through a baroque world rendered savagely mutable
through collective psychoses which have a binding effect on
reality.Despite the clear though strait attainments of his fiction, JD
soon became - and has remained - best known as an editor of several strong
anthologies: Wandering Stars (anth 1974) and More Wandering Stars (anth
1981) feature sf about Jews; Faster than Light (anth 1976), with George
Zebrowski; Future Power (anth 1976), with Gardner DOZOIS, the first of
many collaborations with Dozois (see listing below), Immortals: Short
Novels of the Transhuman Future (anth 1980); the impressive In the Field
of Fire (anth 1987) with Jeanne Van Buren Dann, about Vietnam. Much of his
effort in the 1980s was devoted to a long non-genre novel, with
MAGIC-REALIST elements, Counting Coup, which remained unpublished because
of the collapse of BLUEJAY BOOKS. Echoes of Thunder (1991 chap dos) with
Jack C. HALDEMAN II - a TOR BOOKS Double originally designed for DOS
publication, but ultimately released in the format of a conventional
two-item anthology - was much expanded as High Steel (1993), a virtuoso
NEAR FUTURE tale which begins with its American Indian protagonist's
experiences as a shanghaied worker constructing a space station, but soon
expands in various directions, as the hero evolves into a SUPERMAN,
apocalyptic hallucinations afflict Earth's normals, and an enigmatic
message left by ALIENS promises the secret of FTL travel. But with the
exception of this remarkable exercise, it seems that, after climaxing his
genre career with the creation of a rich and humanized world in THE MAN
WHO MELTED, JD has lost his need to write sf. [JC]Other works: JD also
collaborated with Gardner Dozois on seven of the stories assembled in the
latter's Slow Dancing through Time (coll 1990).Other works as editor: An
exclamatory series, all with Dozois: Aliens! (anth 1980), Unicorns! (anth
1982), Magicats! (anth 1984), Bestiary! (anth 1985), Mermaids! (anth
1985), Sorcerers! (anth 1986), Demons! (anth 1987), Dogtales! (anth 1988),
Seaserpents! (anth 1989), Magicats II (anth 1991),Little People! (anth
1991), Invaders! (anth 1993) and Horses! (anth 1994).About the author: The
Work of Jack Dann: An Annotated Bibliography ?
ELLIOT.See also: ESP; GENERATION STARSHIPS; PSYCHOLOGY; RELIGION; WAR.
DANTE, JOE
(1947- ) US film-maker. Originally a fan writer, JD entered the film
industry working for Roger CORMAN's New World in the trailers department,
making Filipino movies look more exciting by inserting stock shots of
exploding helicopters. His first feature, codirected with Allan Arkush,
was Hollywood Boulevard (1976), a brisk and breezy SATIRE on low-budget
schlock movies featuring many cameo roles, ranging from Dick Miller to
Godzilla ( GOJIRA), inaugurating JD's tradition of movie-buff
in-jokes.With writer John SAYLES, JD made PIRANHA (1978) and The Howling
(1981), a pair of effective MONSTER MOVIES with amusing satirical twists
(the latter not really sf), and then he gravitated into the orbit of
Steven SPIELBERG to direct an episode of Twilight Zone: The Movie (adapted
from "It's a Good Life" [1953] by Jerome BIXBY) and more famously Gremlins
(1984), a nasty anecdote in which anarchic monsters chew away at the
foundations of a Spielberg-cum-Capra small town.Following the box-office
disappointment of his most personal film, EXPLORERS (1985), a meditation

on the SENSE OF WONDER informed by the cultural legacy of Forrest J.
ACKERMAN, JD has had less independent control, but has nevertheless
delivered a lively, self-aware run of comedies with an edge: INNERSPACE
(1987) is a feature-length parody of FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966), The 'burbs
(1989) a psychotic neighbourhood comedy, and Gremlins II: The New Batch
(1990). JD has also contributed episodes to the omnibus film of sf skits,
Amazon Women on the Moon (1987), and to the tv series AMAZING STORIES
(1985-7), The TWILIGHT ZONE (2nd series, 1985-7) and Police Squad (1982).
In 1991 JD became creative consultant for, and directed 5 episodes of,
Eerie, Indiana (1991), an NBC tv series about a Tom-Sawyer-type kid and
his sidekick who conduct supernatural investigations in a seemingly
average but actually weird town. ]JD's next feature was the amusing
MATINEE (1993), a coming-of-age film set in Key West, 1962, during the
Cuban missile crisis, in which much of the action is connected to a new sf
exploitation movie premiering in town, "Mant", about a man who becomes a
giant ant creature. Matinee is a kind of critique of early 1960s MONSTER
MOVIES and their cultural background. [KN/PN]See also: CINEMA; FEMINISM;
HORROR IN SF.
DANTE ALIGHIERI
(1265-1321) Italian poet. His La divina commedia (c1304-21 in manuscript;
many translations as The Divine Comedy) is an epic poem of 100 cantos in 3
books, each of 33 cantos, with an introduction; the books are Inferno,
Purgatorio and Paradiso. It has profoundly affected not only the religious
imagination but all subsequent allegorical creation of imaginary worlds in
literature generally. For that reason it can (with hindsight) be said to
be a work of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION (although it stands at the head of
other traditions much older than the sciencefictional); indeed, it is sf
in the strict sense, albeit the science is medieval. Its subject is
cosmological ( COSMOLOGY) - it offers us in its worlds of Hell, Purgatory
and Heaven (and Earth, Sun and stars) a picture of the way the Universe is
structured. The obvious objection to such a view is that the work is
theological and philosophical in intent; this is so, but there was no
distinction between science and RELIGION when Dante wrote, and he did so
with the eye of a scientist, transcending the rational but not deserting
it. The tradition that led to sf has The Divine Comedy as an ancestor.
[PN]See also: GODS AND DEMONS; ITALY; MUSIC.
DANVERS, JACK
Writing name of Camille Auguste Marie Caseleyr (1909- ), a Belgian who,
after WWII, emigrated to Australia, where he set his sf novel, The End of
it All (1962 UK). The tale depicts a nuclear WAR and climaxes in doomed
Australian attempts to cope with epidemics unleashed by the opposing
forces. In the end extinction is total. [JC]
DANZELL, GEORGE
[s] Nelson S. BOND.
DARE, ALAN
George GOODCHILD.
D'ARGENTEUIL, PAUL
Pseudonym of unidentified US author of The Trembling of Borealis (1899),

set in the USA after a war with Cuba and featuring a revolt of the working
classes which brings about a welfare state and the disenfranchisement of
Blacks. Given the socialist - albeit racist - bent of the tale, the
author's pseudonym can be read as linking wealth to work. [JC]
d'ARGYRE, GILLES
Gerard KLEIN.
DARIU, AL. N.
[r] ROMANIA.
DARK ANGEL
I COME IN PEACE.
DARKE, JAMES
Laurence JAMES.
DARKMAN
Film (1990). Universal. Dir Sam Raimi, starring Liam Neeson, Frances
McDormand, Colin Friels, Larry Drake. Screenplay Chuck Pfarrer, Sam Raimi,
Ivan Raimi, Daniel Goldin, Joshua Goldin, from a story by Raimi. 91 mins.
Colour.In its violence and simple, over-the-top characterization this is
essentially the film equivalent of a comic-book, an "origin of a
SUPERHERO" story of sadism and revenge. Darkman, patterned on the Phantom
of the Opera (with visual quotes reminding us of other early Universal
HORROR films), has had his face and hands horribly mutilated in a gangster
attack, and the nerves that transmit pain and pleasure have been severed
in hospital. He returns as a half-mad avenger. The sf element - synthetic
skin that lasts exactly 99 mins and permits Darkman to duplicate exactly
his gangster enemies or appear as briefly normal to his girlfriend - is
borrowed from the old sf movie DOCTOR X (1932). There are bravura opening
and closing sequences, but D is badly constructed (too many writers?) and
uninvolving, lacking the insane vigour of Raimi's debut film, The Evil
Dead (1982). [PN]
DARK STAR
Film (1974). Jack H. Harris Enterprises. Dir John CARPENTER, starring
Brian Narelle, Dan O'Bannon, Joe Saunders, Dre Pahich. Screenplay
Carpenter, O'Bannon. 83 mins. Colour.This cult success, Carpenter's debut,
was originally a 45min film shot on 16mm by students at the University of
Southern California for $6000, but producer Jack H. Harris provided cash
for new footage and for transfer to 35mm film stock. DS is a SATIRE on
space films: the Dark Star is a SPACESHIP in which four men are endlessly
roaming the Universe on a tedious mission to locate "unstable" worlds and
destroy them with thermostellar bombs. Conditions have deteriorated - the
COMPUTER is malfunctioning, the life-support systems acting up, the crew
in various stages of psychosis, the cryonically maintained captain "dead"
but still partly conscious, the ship's mascot (an ALIEN like a beach ball
with claws) increasingly belligerent and, worst of all, one of the
sentient thermostellar bombs has to be continually coaxed out of exploding
prematurely by debates about phenomenology. DS ends apocalyptically ("Let
there be light!" the bomb decides), with each crew member reaching his
desired apotheosis, one board-riding through space and a second undergoing

ecstatic union with the stars in an asteroid shower.Described by one
critic as "a Waiting for Godot in outer space", DS is a sophisticated
mixture of black comedy and genuine sf. Technically quite good, its sets
and effects are superior to those of sf films costing 10 times its
(eventual) $60,000 budget. The novelization is Dark Star * (1974) by Alan
Dean FOSTER. [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA; SATIRE.
DARLTON, CLARK
Pseudonym of German writer, translator and editor Walter Ernsting (1920); he has also written as F. MacPatterson. In the 1950s he edited the
German Utopia-Magazin (launched 1955), providing it with much original and
translated material. In 1957 he began a series of sf publications,
Terra-Sonderband, and was one of the founding editors and writers, with K.
-H. SCHEER, of the PERRY RHODAN series of SPACE OPERAS from 1961. Over
1600 of these booklets had appeared, on a weekly basis, by mid-1992; a
slightly expurgated series of English-language translations began with
Enterprise Stardust (trans 1969 US) and continued through 141 further
instalments to Phantom Horde (trans 1979 US). [JC/PN]See also: GERMANY.
DARNAY, ARSEN (JULIUS)
(1936- ) Hungarian-born writer, in the USA from 1953 and a US citizen
from 1961. His first sf story, "Such is Fate", appeared in If in 1974; his
first novel, A Hostage for Hinterland (1976), set the pattern for much of
his work: in a post- HOLOCAUST USA, where floating CITIES depend upon
land-dwelling ecofreak tribesmen for the helium that cools their reactors,
crisis erupts into a bleak and somewhat metaphysical confrontation, at the
end of which the cities die. A similarly abstract dichotomy, set on a
RIMWORLD, is destabilized in The Siege of Faltara (1978). The Splendid
Freedom (coll of linked stories 1980) carries its protagonists, who are
linked through REINCARNATION, into a variety of DYSTOPIAS. AD has not
published fiction since 1981. [JC]Other works: Karma: A Novel of
Retribution and Transcendence (1978; vt The Karma Affair 1979); The
Purgatory Zone (1981).
DARRINGTON, HUGH
(1940- ) UK writer whose sf novels are The God Killers (1970) with Tony
Halliwell, both authors signing as James Ross, and Gravitor (1971), which
features an oppressed world and a scientific plot to increase GRAVITY,
causing chaos . . . to the advantage of the plotters. [JC]
DARWIN, ERASMUS
(1731-1802) UK physician, philosopher and poet; grandfather of Charles
Darwin (1809-1882). It is for his poetry that ED is of interest to the sf
field; in particular, The Botanic Garden: A Poem, in Two Parts; Part 1:
The Economy of Vegetation; Part II: The Loves of the Plants (as separate
poems 1792 and 1789; 1795) conveys through its wooden but occasionally
powerful couplets a serious speculative message about the chronological
depth of EVOLUTION, for which he argued in abominable rhyme - examples of
his verse can be found in The Stuffed Owl (anth 1930), ed D.B. Wyndham
Lewis (1894-1969) and Charles Lee - clearly presaging the revolutionary
thoughts of his grandson.ED's prose work Zoonomia: Of the Laws of Organic
Life (1796) and the posthumously published poem The Temple of Nature

(1802) both extend the argument, with a wealth of technological and
scientific imagery. The extent to which science fired ED's imagination,
together with his contemporary popularity, make him an important figure in
PROTO SCIENCE FICTION and his work an early outstanding success in terms
of sf PREDICTION. He belonged to the period when the imagery of science
first entered the consciousness of laymen in general. [JC/PN]About the
author: Erasmus Darwin (1963) by Desmond King-Hele; Brian W. ALDISS
discusses ED at length in Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science
Fiction (1986) with David WINGROVE.
D.A.R.Y.L.
Film (1985). World Film Services/Columbia. Dir Simon Wincer, starring
Mary Beth Hurt, Michael McKean, Kathryn Walker, Josef Sommer, Barret
Oliver. Screenplay David Ambrose, Allan Scott, Jeffrey Ellis. 100 mins.
Colour.D.A.R.Y.L. is a Data Analysing Robot Youth Lifeform but, when "he"
(Oliver) wakes up amnesiac in the woods, he thinks he is just a small boy,
Daryl. Adopted by a pleasant family, he learns not to show his
superintelligence and coordination too obviously and makes local friends,
but then is located by the scientists who made him, almost terminated by
the military, escapes . . . and so forth. There is a happy ending. This
film is fairly obviously aimed at children and is competently and even
engagingly made, but it never ignites; even those sf riffs proven
successful by Steven SPIELBERG and here borrowed from him (most obviously
- E.T. - the alien being sheltered in suburbia who undergoes death and
resurrection) remain comparatively inert. [PN]
DATLOW, ELLEN (SUE)
(1949- ) US editor, fiction editor of Omni from Oct 1981, and editor of
two sequences of spin-off anthologies from that magazine 1983-9 ( OMNI for
details); Omni Visions One (anth 1993) and Omni Visions Two (anth 1994),
on the other hand, contain mostly original stories. The combination of a
decent budget and good critical taste have made ED one of the more
influential US sf (and fantasy) editors, and she has by no means
restricted her story-buying to work from already established writers.
Aside from the Omni anthologies she has edited Blood is Not Enough: 17
Stories of Vampirism (anth 1989)Alien Sex (anth 1990), a strong collection
of both sf and fantasy ( SEX); A Whisper of Blood (anth 1991) and Little
Deaths: 24 Tales of Sex and Horror (anth 1994 UK; cut 1995 US). With Terri
WINDLING ED has edited the Year's Best Fantasy anthology series: The
Year's Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection (anth 1988; vt Demons and
Dreams: The Best Fantasy and Horror 1 UK), The Year's Best Fantasy: Second
Annual Collection (anth 1989; vt Demons and Dreams 2 UK), #3 (anth 1990),
#4 (anth 1991),#5 (1992), #6 (anth 1993) and #7 (anth 1994). These are
certainly the best of their kind - the first two won World Fantasy AWARDS
- being very big, very wide-ranging and intelligently selected; ED mainly
looks after the horror, Windling the fantasy. This division of
responsibilities is less apparent in Snow White, Blood Red (anth 1993) and
Black Thorn, White Rose (anth 1994), two linked anthologies comprising
original stories, all twice-told re-visions of traditional folk material.
[PN]
DAUDET, LEON

[r] FRANCE.
DAUGHTER OF DESTINY
ALRAUNE.
DAVENPORT, BASIL
(1905-1966) US academic and anthologist. His connection with sf began
with An Introduction to Islandia, its History, Custom, Laws, Language, and
Geography, as Prepared by Basil Davenport from Islandia (1942 chap), a
book about Islandia (1942) by Austin Tappan WRIGHT. Then came a short
critical and historical study, Inquiry into Science Fiction (1955chap). BD
also introduced the anonymously edited critical anthology The Science
Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism (anth 1959; rev 1964),
which contains lectures delivered by Alfred BESTER, Robert BLOCH, Robert
A. HEINLEIN and C.M. KORNBLUTH at a 1957 symposium at the University of
Chicago. His anthologies are in the main fantasy rather than sf. Three
were compiled with the aid of Albert Paul Blaustein (Allen DE GRAEFF),
uncredited: Deals with the Devil (anth 1958; cut vt Twelve Stories from
Deals with the Devil: An Anthology 1959), Invisible Men (anth 1960) and
Famous Monster Tales (anth 1967). His other anthologies are Ghostly Tales
to be Told (anth 1950), Tales to be Told in the Dark (anth 1953; cut vt
Horror Stories from Tales to be Told in the Dark 1960) and 13 Ways to
Dispose of a Body (anth 1966). [PN]See also: SF IN THE CLASSROOM.
DAVENPORT, BENJAMIN RUSH
(? -? ) US writer whose best-known novel is the future- WAR tale
Anglo-Saxons, Onward! A Romance of the Future (1898), in which, led by the
US president, Anglo-Saxons dominate the world, including Spain - cf the
contemporaneous Spanish-US War. [JC]Other works: "Uncle Sam's" Cabins: A
Story of American Life, Looking Forward a Century (1895); Blood Will Tell:
The Strange Story of a Son of Ham (1902).
DAVENPORT, GUY (MATTISON)
(1927- ) US academic, translator and short-story writer, long a teacher
at the University of Kentucky, known for his translations from the Greek,
his poetry, his literary essays - collected primarily in The Geography of
the Imagination (coll 1981) and Every Force Evolves a Form (coll 1987) and for the FABULATIONS assembled in Tatlin! (coll 1974), Da Vinci's
Bicycle (coll 1979), Trois Caprices (coll 1981 chap), Eclogues (coll
1981), The Bowmen of Shu (1983 chap), which also appears in Apples and
Pears (coll 1984), The Bicycle Rider (1985 chap), which also appears in
The Jules Verne Steam Balloon (coll 1987) and The Drummer of the Eleventh
North Devonshire Fusiliers (coll 1990). Although J.G. BALLARD and others
had insinuated a fascination with French Surrealism into their NEW-WAVE
tales, GD's own collaged and hallucinated conflations of data and visuals
and Sehnsucht - as in "Tatlin!" (1974), the novel-length "The Dawn in
Erewhon" (1974), "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" (1975), "The Richard
Nixon Freischutz Rag" (1976) and "Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta"
(1980) - mediate neatly between the solitary despair of the 1960s work of
Ballard and others and the more broadly socialized and nostalgic vision of
sf writers like Howard WALDROP. Indeed GD's work can be seen as an
important adumbration of the sudden late 1980s growth in alternate-history

tales ( ALTERNATE WORLDS) which plunder the earlier 20th century for icons
and protagonists and for moments of haunting significance. [JC]
DAVENTRY, LEONARD (JOHN)
(1915- ) UK writer whose first sf novel, A Man of Double Deed (1965),
began the Claus Coman series of tales set on an Earth partly recovered
from nuclear DISASTER and run by telepaths, one of whom, the protagonist,
is assigned the task of solving various problems. The sequel is
Reflections in a Mirage, and The Ticking is in Your Head (coll 1969 US),
two book-length stories, published separately as Reflections in a Mirage
(1969) and The Ticking is in Your Head (1970). Terminus (1971) is a grim
DYSTOPIA. [JC]Other works: Twenty-One Billionth Paradox (1971 US); Degree
XII (1972); You Must Remember Us - ? (1980).
DAVEY, (HENRY) NORMAN
(1888-? ) UK writer whose Yesterday: A Tory Fairy-Tale (1924) describes
the NEAR-FUTURE secession of the Isle of Wight. Although proof copies of
the novel exist entitled Perhaps and dated 1914, there is no evidence of
the text having actually been published then. ND's other genre works are
fantasies; they include the Matthew Sumner books: The Pilgrim of a Smile
(1921) and The Penultimate Adventure (1924 chap) - both assembled as The
Pilgrim of a Smile (omni 1933) - Judgment Day (1928) and Pagan Parable: an
Allegory in Four Acts (1936). [JC]
DAVID, PETER (ALLEN)
(1956- ) US writer, many of whose books are signed David Peters. As PD he
has concentrated on fantasies like Knight Life (1987), a tale in which
Arthur is put into the modern world, and Howling Mad: A Tale of Relenting
Horror (1989); on film ties like The Return of Swamp Thing * (1989),The
Rocketeer * (1991) and Alien Nation: Body and Soul * (1993), tied to a
cancelled tv series; and on Star Trek ties, STAR TREK novels includingThe
Rift * (1991), The Disinherited * (1992) with Michael Jan FRIEDMAN and
Robert Greenberger, and Who Killed Captain Kirk? * (graph 1993) illus Tom
Sutton and Gordon Purcell; several STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION tales:
Strike Zone * (1989), A Rock and a Hard Place * (1990), Vendetta * (1991),
Q-in-Law * (1991), Imzadi * (1992), Starfleet Academy: Whorf's First
Adventure * (1993), Starfleet Academy: Line of Fire * (1993), Starfleet
Academy: Survival *(1993) and Q-Squared * (1994).As David Peters, he is
responsible for two sequences: the Photon game-tie series - Photon: For
the Glory * (1987), #2: High Stakes * (1987), #3: In Search of Mom *
(1987), #4: This is Your Life, Bhodi Li * (1987), #5: Exile * (1987) and
#6: Skin Deep * (1988) - and the Psi-Man series - Psi-Man (1990), Psi-Man:
Deathscape (1991), #3: Main Street D.O.A. (1991), #4: The Chaos Kid
(1991), #5: Stalker (1991) and #6: Haven (1991). [JC]
DAVIDSON, AVRAM (JAMES)
(1923-1993) US writer and editor, born in Yonkers, New York; he served in
the US Navy 1941-5 and with the Israeli forces in the 1948-9 Arab-Israeli
War. An orthodox Jew, though his faith found direct expression very rarely
in his stories, he began publishing sf with "My Boy Friend's Name is
Jello" (1954) in FSF, and early established a reputation for a sometimes
obtrusive literacy and considerable wit. "Or All the Seas with Oysters"

(1958) won a HUGO. Much of his early fiction appeared in FSF, which he
edited 1962-4 - it won a Hugo in 1963 - and producing as part of his job
The Best of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 12th Series (anth 1963), 13th
Series (anth 1964) and 14th Series (anth 1965). His first novel was Joyleg
(1962) with Ward MOORE (whom see for details).AD's first solo novel,
Mutiny in Space (1964), immediately established his credentials as a
writer of superior SPACE OPERA rather in contrast to the manner and style
of his short works. Other novels with a similarly straightforward effect
include Rork! (1965), The Enemy of My Enemy (1966) and, most notably,
Masters of the Maze (1965), an intricate PARALLEL-WORLDS adventure with
sharply characterized humans involved in barring interdimensional transit
to a remarkably vivid ALIEN race. The Kar-Chee Reign (1966 dos) and Rogue
Dragon (1965) share a relaxedly pan-Galactic FAR-FUTURE perspective on
their Earthly venue; Clash of Star-Kings (1966 dos), which along with
Rogue Dragon was nominated for a NEBULA, is set in a richly realized
Mexico which becomes a venue for a game of war amongst returning alien
"gods". But even these relatively active tales tend to subordinate plot to
the play of language and a visible affection for the phenomenal world,
characteristics increasingly found in his later fiction, where an air of
combined flamboyance and meditative calm enriches - but does not always
manage to enliven - ornate fantasies like The Phoenix and the Mirror, or
The Enigmatic Speculum (1966 AMZ; 1969), which opens the Vergil Magus
sequence in a medieval ALTERNATE WORLD whose universal scholastic
worldview, encompassing everything from geography to alchemy, turns out to
be literally accurate (AD has always been fascinated by PSEUDO-SCIENCE).
Vergil goes through a number of adventures in this ornately humanized
environment in search of a "virgin mirror" to trade for his stolen
virility, but the novel closes without coming to a satisfactory climax,
nor does Vergil in Averno (1987), published as a sequel but in fact set
prior to the earlier novel, bring things to a close. This tale, set in a
factory town inside a volcano, is a rich and wry parable of the birth of
the Renaissance mentality (with the magus himself rather jumping the gun).
The Peregrine series - Peregrine: Primus (1971) and Peregrine: Secundus
(1981) - even more relaxedly conveys its protagonist through a wide and
intriguing world reminiscent of Classical Rome. The Island Under the Earth
(1969) began a series not yet continued.AD's notable short fiction has
been assembled in several volumes: Or All the Seas with Oysters (coll
1962), What Strange Stars and Skies (coll 1965), Strange Seas and Shores
(coll 1971), The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy (coll of linked stories
1975; exp vt The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy 1990), set in an
ALTERNATE-WORLD, RURITANIAN version of late-19th-century Europe, and The
Redward Edward Papers (coll 1978), re-sorted in THE BEST OF AVRAM DAVIDSON
(coll 1979) ed Michael KURLAND, and Avram Davidson: Collected Fantasies
(coll 1982) ed John SILBERSACK. AD's wit and bookish allusiveness - he is
perhaps sf's most explicitly literary author - shine most persuasively in
his shorter works, where constraints in length seem to keep him from
floundering or self-indulgence and the narrative thread stays in view; the
focus supplied by length constraints also has a concentrating effect on
the disquisitory 1980s essays, published in IASFM and elsewhere, and
assembled as Adventures in Unhistory: Conjectures on the Factual
Foundations of Several Ancient Legends (coll 1993). Working in short

compass seems, too, to excite his extraordinary sense of humour. It is
hard to imagine the genre that could encompass him; it is even more
difficult to imagine fantasy or sf without him. [JC]Other works: And on
the Eighth Day (1964) and The Fourth Side of the Triangle (1965), both as
by Ellery Queen, both detections; Ursus of Ultima Thule (fixup 1973);
Polly Charms the Sleeping Woman (1975 FSF; 1977 chap), an Eszterhazy tale;
Magic for Sale (anth 1983); And Don't Forget the One Red Rose (1975
Playboy; 1986 chap); Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty (1988) with Grania
(Eve) Davis (1943- ).See also: ATLANTIS; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS;
FANTASY; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE
FICTION ; PASTORAL.
DAVIDSON, HUGH
[s] Edmond HAMILTON.
DAVIDSON, JOHN
(1857-1909) UK poet, playwright and story-writer, best known in the first
capacity for Fleet Street Eclogues (coll 1893). Miss Armstrong's and Other
Circumstances (coll 1896) contains "An Interregnum in Fairyland", a
fantasy tale. "Eagle's Shadow", a future- WAR story, and "The Salvation of
Nature", a spoof tale ending in worldwide DISASTER, both feature in the
The Great Men cycle of CLUB-STORIES collected in The Great Men, and A
Practical Novelist (omni 1891), the second title not being of genre
interest; both these stories also appear in The Pilgrimage of Strongsoul
and Other Stories (coll 1896). A Full and True Account of the Wonderful
Mission of Earl Lavender (1895) is a SATIRE about a self-appointed
Nietzschean overman; and the Testaments series of poems - especially The
Testament of a Vivisector (1901) - also make use of Nietzsche. [JC/BS]See
also: END OF THE WORLD.
DAVIDSON, LIONEL
(1922- ) UK-born writer, resident in Israel, best known for his
thrillers, beginning with The Night of Wenceslas (1960). His second, The
Rose of Tibet (1962), has a lost-race ( LOST WORLDS) plot-line. The Sun
Chemist (1976) is borderline sf: the lost formula of Israeli scientist and
president Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) uses the sweet potato as a means of
tapping the Sun's power; there is an adventurous quest to find it. Under
Plum Lake (1980) is a fantasy for children with a trip to Paradise under
sea and in outer space. [PN]
DAVIDSON, MICHAEL
(?1944- ) US author of two sf novels: The Karma Machine (1975), a
dystopian vision of a COMPUTER-dominated world, and Daughter of Is: A
Science Fiction Epic: An "Else-when"Parable (1978), an ALTERNATE-WORLD
tale. [JC]
DAVIES, FREDRIC
Ron ELLIK.
DAVIES, HUGH SYKES
(1909-1984) UK writer and academic whose surrealist novel Petron (1935)
is, at least retroactively, of some value to sf writers and readers as an
early model for contemporary attempts at the rendering of INNER SPACE. The

Papers of Andrew Melmoth (1960) is an interesting story about the
EVOLUTION of INTELLIGENCE in rats, quite different, in its quiet literary
tone, from the Gothic treatment such subjects normally evoke. [JC/PN]
DAVIES, L(ESLIE) P(URNELL)
(1914- ) UK writer who has worked also as a pharmacist and as a painter;
he now lives in the Canary Isles. His consistently borderline sf often
permits a delusional-frame interpretation of the events it depicts, so
that frequently it is difficult to distinguish among the genres he
utilizes, which include horror, fantasy, suspense thriller and sf. Along
with John BLACKBURN and John LYMINGTON, both of whose writing his
sometimes resembles, LPD has in a sense founded a new generic amalgam:
tales whose slippage among various genres is in itself a characteristic
point of narrative interest, with the reader kept constantly in suspense
about the generic nature of any climaxes or explanations to be
presented.LPD began publishing sf with "The Wall of Time" for London
Mystery Magazine in 1960, and published fiction under a number of
pseudonyms, including Leo Barne, Robert Blake, Richard Bridgeman, Morgan
Evans, Ian Jefferson, Lawrence Peters, Thomas Phillips, G.K. Thomas,
Leslie Vardre and Rowland Welch.His first novel, The Paper Dolls (1964),
televised in 1968, sets a mystery involving telepathy and murder in the
depths of the English countryside, a venue he uses frequently. Man out of
Nowhere (1965; vt Who is Lewis Pinder? 1966 US) and The Artificial Man
(1965) can both be read as delusional-frame tales; the latter, about a
NEAR-FUTURE secret agent immured in a "fake" English village while his
unconscious is probed, was made into the film Project X (1968), not to be
confused with PROJECT X (1987). LPD's subsequent novels have been, as to
genre, variously marketed, but they share an ambivalence in the way they
can be read, an occasional glibness of effect, and narrative skill.
[JC]Other works: Psychogeist (1966); The Lampton Dreamers (1966); Tell it
to the Dead (1966 as by Leslie Vardre in UK; vt The Reluctant Medium 1967
US); Twilight Journey (1967); The Nameless Ones (1967 as by Leslie Vardre
in UK; vt A Grave Matter 1968 US); The Alien (1968; vt The Groundstar
Conspiracy 1972), filmed as The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972); Stranger to
Town (1969); Dimension A (1969); Genesis Two (1969); The White Room
(1969); The Shadow Before (1970); Give Me Back Myself (1971); What Did I
Do Tomorrow? (1972); Assignment Abacus (1975); Possession (1976); The Land
of Leys (1979 US).See also: PSYCHOLOGY.
DAVIES, PAUL (CHARLES WILLIAMS)
(1946- ) UK physicist (currently [1992] Professor of Mathematical Physics
at the University of Adelaide in Australia), science writer and sf author
whose scientific nonfiction is perhaps more distinguished than his sf. His
novel Fireball (1987) has ANTIMATTER pellets impacting Earth and creating
chaos; although their actual source is an ALIEN spacecraft, they are
interpreted by the USA as a Soviet weapon. The ideas are interesting, the
thriller elements routine. However, his academic science books, signed
P.C.W. Davies, and his popular science books, signed Paul Davies, are very
good. In the former category are Space and Time in the Modern Universe
(1977), The Forces of Nature (1979), The Search for Gravity Waves (1980)
and The Accidental Universe (1982), among others. In the latter category

are The Runaway Universe (1978; vt Stardoom 1979 UK), Other Worlds (1980),
The Edge of Infinity (1981), God and the New Physics (1983), The Matter
Myth (1991) with John GRIBBIN, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a
Rational World (1992), The Last Three Minutes: Latest Thinking About the
Ultimate Fate of the Universe (1994) and Are We Alone?: Philosophical
Implications of the discovery of Extraterrestrial Life (1995), among
others. The speculations tend more towards the theological in the later
works. The pungency of his theological/cosmological writings is confirmed
by the award to PD in 1995 of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion
worth over one million US dollars, a prize in its field comparable to the
Nobel. [PN]See also: COSMOLOGY; METAPHYSICS; PARALLEL WORLDS; SCIENTISTS.
DAVIES, PETE
(1959- ) UK writer whose first novel, The Last Election (1986), depicts
with singular ferocity a NEAR-FUTURE UK ruled by the Money Party and its
senile Nanny; OVERPOPULATION and the total loss of a manufacturing base
lead to the government's dissemination of a painkiller which causes
premature ageing in the poor. The final election, won by Nanny with the
aid of a powerful advertising agency, is soon over. In Dollarville (1989
US), refocusing his Swiftian rage on less local targets, PD constructs an
impressively surreal though unspecific venue, a world polluted beyond
redemption in which the rich are inconceivably corrupt; in this
environment, a decent-hearted advertising man attempts to save a woman
ecologist from a porno king; but the world ends. [JC]
DAVIES, WALTER C.
[s] C.M. KORNBLUTH.
DAVIES, W.X.
Pseudonym of the unidentified US author of the Countdown WWIII sequence
of military-sf adventures: Countdown WWIII: Operation North Africa (1984),
#2: Operation Black Sea (1984), #3: Operation Choke Point (1984) and #4:
Operation Persian Gulf (1984). [JC]
DAVIS, ELLIS JAMES
[r] ANONYMOUS SF AUTHORS.
DAVIS, FREDERICK C(LYDE)
(1902-1977) US writer of pulp fiction, sometimes under pseudonyms. His
first book was The Smiling Killer (coll c1935 chap UK). His most
interesting early work was the Moon Man sequence, first published from
1933 in Ten Detective Aces; after the publication, decades later, of one
tale as The Moon Man (1974 chap), the sequence began to be released in
book form with The Night Nemesis: The Complete Adventures of the Moon Man,
Volume One (coll 1985) ed Gary Hoppenstand and Garyn G. Roberts; however,
no further volumes appeared. Under the house name Curtis STEELE, FCD was
responsible for the lead novels in the magazine OPERATOR # 5 from Apr 1934
to Nov 1935. 13 of these appeared in book form in 3 separate paperback
series: (a) Legions of the Death Master (1966), The Army of the Dead
(1966), The Invisible Empire (1966; vt Operator 5 #2: The Invisible Empire
1974), Master of Broken Men (1966), Hosts of the Flaming Death (1966),
Blood Reign of the Dictator (1966), March of the Flame Marauders (1966),
and Invasion of the Yellow Warlords (1966); (b) the original first 3

magazine novels republished in chronological order as The Masked Invasion
(1974), The Invisible Empire (see above) and The Yellow Scourge (1974);
(c) Cavern of the Damned (1980), Legions of Starvation (1980) and Scourge
of the Invisible Death (1980). [JC/PN]Other work: The Mole Men Want Your
Eyes (1976 chap).
DAVIS, GERRY
(1930-1991) UK writer, primarily for tv, who collaborated with Kit PEDLER
on three sf novels: Mutant 59: The Plastic-Eater * (1971), derived from
their DOOMWATCH tv series, Brainrack (1974) and The Dynostar Menace
(1975). GD also wrote children's novelizations tied to the DR WHO tv
series. [JC]See also: DISASTER; GENETIC ENGINEERING; POLLUTION.
DAVIS, GRANIA
[r] Avram DAVIDSON.
DAVIS AWARDS
AWARDS.
DAVIS PUBLICATIONS
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE.
DAW BOOKS
New York publishing imprint started by Donald A. WOLLHEIM in 1972 (after
his departure from ACE BOOKS) with assistance from New American Library.
DB (the name derived from Wollheim's initials) publishes only sf and
FANTASY, producing 4-5 titles per month. The editorial policy is similar
to that followed by Wollheim at Ace: mostly adventure fiction, with a
sprinkling of serious works. There has been much series fiction,
particularly fantasy and SWORD AND SORCERY, by such authors as Alan Burt
Akers (Kenneth BULMER), Marion Zimmer BRADLEY, Lin CARTER, Michael
MOORCOCK, John NORMAN and E.C. TUBB, many of whom had followed Wollheim
from Ace Books. Major discoveries were C.J. CHERRYH and the fantasy writer
Tad Williams (1957- ), and DB also did much to promote the career of
Tanith LEE. An anthology series was Annual World's Best SF ( WOLLHEIM for
details). Wollheim's daughter Betsy Wollheim became president in 1985,
when her father was seriously ill; by the time of his death in 1990 the
number of books published annually by DB was rather lower than it had been
early in the 1980s. [PN/MJE]Further reading: Future and Fantastic Worlds:
A Bibliographic Retrospective of DAW Books (1972-1987) (dated 1987 but
1988) by Sheldon JAFFERY; An Index to DAW Books (1989 chap) by Ian Covell.
DAWN OF THE DEAD
(vt Zombie Italy; vt Zombies UK) Film (1978). Laurel. Dir George ROMERO,
starring David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H. Reininger, Gaylen Ross.
Screenplay Romero, with Dario Argento (who also cowrote the music) as
script consultant. 127 mins, cut to 125 mins. Colour.The first of two
sequels to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) - the other was DAY OF THE DEAD
(1985) - this was (unusually) premiered in Italy, under the title Zombie.
DOTD is true sf, not just because of the pseudo-scientific explanation for
zombiism but because Romero is interested in zombies not only as occasions
for horror - though DOTD remains primarily a HORROR film - but also as
phenomena (their sociology, their possible intelligence) in the way that

an sf writer might be interested in ALIENS. Where the first film was
unremittingly black, this has a comic-strip and satirical humour about it,
as four survivors hole up in a shopping mall besieged by zombies and
bikers. Jokes about the death of capitalism, even while the capitalist
instinct survives, are focused on the many goods displayed in the spotless
temple of consumerism. The subtext (we, the working class, are, or could
be, the zombies) is spirited though unsubtle, and the film is remembered
by most for its violent, brilliantly choreographed action. [PN]See also:
SATIRE.
DAY, BRADFORD M(ARSHALL)
(1916- ) US sf collector and book-dealer whose bibliographical work is
one of the foundations on which modern sf scholarship has been built (
BIBLIOGRAPHIES). His The Complete Checklist of Science-Fiction Magazines
(1961 chap) defines sf widely and lists a number of hero-villain, fantasy
and foreign magazines. The Supplemental Checklist of Fantastic Literature
(1963) is a compilation of many titles omitted by or published after the
period covered by Everett F. BLEILER's The Checklist of Fantastic
Literature (1948), itself widely revised in 1978. Other works by BMD are
The Checklist of Fantastic Literature in Paperbound Books (1965),
Bibliography of Adventure: Mundy, Burroughs, Rohmer, Haggard (1964) and An
Index on the Weird and Fantastica in Magazines (1953), which indexes most
of the Frank A. MUNSEY pulps and many other general-fiction PULP
MAGAZINES. All the above were originally published in stencilled format by
BMD himself; several have been republished since. [PN]See also: ANONYMOUS
SF AUTHORS.
DAY, DONALD B(YRNE)
(1909-1978) Pioneer sf indexer, resident in Oregon. His Index to the
Science Fiction Magazines 1926-1950 (1952), since reissued, has become,
along with its successors compiled by other hands ( BIBLIOGRAPHIES), an
essential tool for sf research. [PN]
DAY, (GERALD WILLIAM) LANGSTON
(1894-? ) UK writer whose Magic Casements (coll 1951) assembles
mythological fantasies, and whose The Deep Blue Ice (1960) features the
experiences of a Victorian mountaineer who is frozen in ice for half a
century, and on revival ( SLEEPER AWAKES) must face the present day. [JC]
DAY, LIONEL
Ladbroke BLACK.
DAY AFTER, THE
Made-for-tv film (1983). ABC. Dir Nicholas Meyer, starring Jason Robards,
Jo-Beth Williams, Steven Guttenberg, John Lithgow, Lori Lethin, William
Allen Young and a dozen others. Screenplay Edward Hume. 121 mins.
Colour.Set in Lawrence, Kansas, the film tells of a massive nuclear
exchange between the USA and USSR. Many of the missiles hit Kansas and
Missouri, targeted because of their numerous Minuteman silos. TDA opens a
week before nuclear war begins, and ends around six weeks later. The film
instantly became a media event, and was hugely publicized and discussed.
It was widely - justly but irrelevantly - criticized, especially abroad,
for its soap-opera treatment. Meyer's purpose was to bring home a

propaganda message to ordinary people, which is precisely what soap-opera
characters are perceived to be by most viewers. The film, as the final
titles tell us, does give a remarkably mild account of the consequences of
atomic war, gruelling though it is. Nevertheless, it was an act of courage
for ABC to make this expensive film at all, since nuclear issues at that
time were barely touched on by US tv, being unattractive to advertisers,
and the nuclear debate was probably quite foreign to many viewers. Also,
TDA could hardly be seen as apolitical (despite disclaimers by ABC
executives): Meyer himself said "the movie tells you that civil defence is
useless", and observed that ABC gave him "millions of dollars to go on
prime-time tv and call Ronald Reagan a liar". Much of the film is routine
in treatment if not subject matter, but it contains several outstanding
sequences: the housewife who won't go into the cellar until she finishes
cleaning the house; the lecture to increasingly furious farmers about
implausible methods of "decontaminating soil"; a street packed with
radiation victims on makeshift mattresses as far as the eye can see.
[PN]See also: CINEMA.
DAY MARS INVADED EARTH, THE
Film (1962). API/20th Century-Fox. Dir Maury Dexter, starring Kent
Taylor, Marie Windsor, William Mims, Betty Beall. Screenplay Harry
Spalding. 70 mins. B/w.In this mediocre B-movie, Martians - who consist of
pure energy - travel to Earth via radio beam. As in INVASION OF THE BODY
SNATCHERS (1956), from which this clearly borrows, they duplicate human
beings, killing off the originals, to the horror of a scientist who
returns from vacation to find alien minds in the apparent bodies of
friends and family and human-shaped ashes in the swimming pool. Unusually,
the film ends with the Martians triumphant. [PN/JB]
DAY OF THE DEAD
Film (1985). Laurel. Dir George ROMERO, starring Lori Cardille, Terry
Alexander, Joseph Pilato, Richard Liberty, Howard Sherman. Screenplay
Romero. 101 mins, cut to 100 mins. Colour.Romero's plan, after showing the
initial zombie attacks ( NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD [1968]) and the total
breakdown of society ( DAWN OF THE DEAD [1978]), was to complete the
trilogy with a film showing a new coalition between humans and controlled
zombies. Partly for budgetary reasons, he settled for something less
ambitious. An underground military/storage base is used by a small company
of scientists and soldiers in their desperately rushed study of zombie
behaviour. Can they be controlled? What causes the infection? The
behaviour of both groups becomes increasingly psychotic, with one
scientist (Liberty) profaning the military dead by using their bodies to
reward zombies in a B.F. SKINNER-style attempt at conditioning, and the
senior military officer (Pilato) treating the scientists with insane
violence and contempt. One almost likeable zombie, well played by Sherman,
shows signs of human memory. Only three people, including the intelligent
woman scientist (Cardille) who is the point-of-view character, escape to
uncertain sanctuary in this small-scale, beautifully paced, claustrophobic
film. DOTD, copiously illustrated with scenes of dismemberment and
cannibalism, is sickening, but as ever Romero contrives to give metaphoric
resonance to his exploitation-movie images. [PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES.

DAY OF THE DOLPHIN, THE
Film (1973). Avco-Embassy. Dir Mike Nichols, starring George C. Scott,
Trish Van Devere, Paul Sorvino, Fritz Weaver. Screenplay Buck Henry, based
on Un animal doue de raison (1967; trans as The Day of the Dolphin 1969)
by Robert MERLE. 105 mins. Colour.This above-average film, from a director
well known for social comedy but new to sf, concerns a marine biologist
who succeeds in teaching dolphins to speak English. The first half deals
seriously and convincingly with this historic contact between two
intelligent species, and conveys the genuine SENSE OF WONDER found in the
best sf, but the rest of the story concentrates less interestingly on an
attempt by a right-wing group to betray the innocent human-dolphin
relationship and use the dolphins to plant mines to assassinate the US
President. [JB]
DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, THE
1. Film (1963). Security Pictures/Allied Artists. Dir Steve Sekely
(uncredited), Freddie Francis, starring Howard Keel, Nicole Maurey,
Janette Scott, Kieron Moore. Screenplay Philip Yordan, based on The Day of
the Triffids (1951) by John WYNDHAM. 94 mins. Colour.This unsuccessful
version of a good novel had a moderately generous budget, but no sense
whatever of how sf works. Thus there is plenty of preaching, lots of
florid love interest, but only intermittent attention paid to the basic
situation, which, while silly, should have been interesting: most of
England's population blinded by light from a meteor shower, and a small
group, still sighted, trying to cope with attacks from lethal 7ft (2.1m)
mobile vegetables. The triffids are more absurd than frightening.2. UK tv
serial (1981). BBC. Dir Ken Hannam, adapted from Wyndham's novel by
Douglas Livingstone, starring John Duttine, Emma Relph. 6 30min episodes
(aired outside the UK as a 2-part miniseries). Colour. This was a low-key
but successful dramatization of the story, much better than the film.
[JB/PN]
DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE, THE
Film (1961). British Lion/Pax/Universal. Prod and dir Val Guest, starring
Edward Judd, Janet Munro, Leo McKern. Screenplay Wolf Mankowitz, Guest. 99
mins, cut to 90 mins (US). B/w.Val Guest, who had made The QUATERMASS
XPERIMENT (1956) and other sf/horror films for Hammer in the 1950s,
excelled himself with this intelligent DISASTER movie about the Earth
falling into the Sun after a reckless series of H-bomb tests have knocked
it out of orbit. Only more nuclear explosions, properly placed, can save
it. The film is made in a crisp, low-key, pseudo-documentary manner, with
much of the action set in the offices of the London Daily Express
newspaper (with former editor Arthur Christiansen playing himself). Les
Bowie's low-budget special effects are surprisingly good, including shots
of the Thames completely evaporating in the heat. The novelization is The
Day the Earth Caught Fire * (1961) by Barry Wells. [JB/PN]
DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, THE
Film (1951). 20th Century-Fox. Dir Robert WISE, starring Michael Rennie,
Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, Sam Jaffe. Screenplay Edmund H. North, based
on "Farewell to the Master" (1940) by Harry BATES. 92 mins. B/w.Produced
at the beginning of the sf boom of the 1950s, this is generally regarded

as a classic, though its ethics might be regarded as intemperate; it is,
however, directed with pace and impressive economy. An emissary from outer
space arrives by flying saucer in Washington, accompanied by an 8ft (2.4m)
ROBOT. The military gets very excited. The soft-spoken, human-seeming
ALIEN, Klaatu, has come to warn Earth that his people will not tolerate an
extension of human violence into space, but before he can deliver the
message he is wounded by a soldier, escapes, and takes a room in a
boarding house, where he learns about ordinary people. Later he arranges a
demonstration of his powers - the stopping of all electrical equipment,
all over the world. Then, his warning still undelivered, he is again shot,
this time fatally. But like Christ - the parallel seems deliberate - he
rises again and gives his message: unless human violence is curbed the
true masters, who are in fact the robots, will "reduce this Earth of yours
to a burnt-out cinder". Submission to the rule of implacable,
disinterested robots is an authoritarian proposal for a supposedly liberal
film. [PN/JB]
DAY THE FISH CAME OUT, THE
Film (1967). Michael Cacoyannis Productions/20th Century-Fox. Dir Michael
Cacoyannis, starring Tom Courtenay, Sam Wanamaker, Colin Blakely, Candice
Bergen, Ian Ogilvy. Screenplay Michael Cacoyannis. 109 mins. Colour.This
NEAR-FUTURE Greek/UK film takes off from a real-life incident in which the
US Air Force accidentally lost two H-bombs off the coast of Spain. A NATO
bomber crashes into the sea near a small Greek island, losing two H-bombs
and a "Doomsday weapon". To keep a low profile, the NATO recovery team
arrives disguised as holiday-makers, but this creates the impression that
the island is the "in" place to visit, and soon it is swarming with real
tourists. Then lethal viruses are released from a metal box found by a
fisherman. A strange mixture of slapstick and grim satire, TDTFCO is not
very coherent, but the final scenes, showing dead fish floating in the
black sea while all the tourists, already doomed themselves, dance with
frenzied abandon on the beach, are forceful. The novelization is The Day
the Fish Came Out * (1967) by Kay CICELLIS. [JB]
DAY THE WORLD ENDED, THE
Film (1956). Golden State/ARC. Prod and dir Roger CORMAN, starring
Richard Denning, Adele Jergens, Lori Nelson, Touch (Mike) Connors.
Screenplay Lou Rusoff. 81 mins, cut to 79 mins. B/w.The first sf/horror
film to be directed by Corman (although in 1954 he had produced Monster
from the Ocean Floor), this was, like most of his 1950s films, shot fast
(less than a week) on an amazingly small budget (c$40,000). TDTWE tells of
a small group of atomic-war survivors menaced by a MUTANT (created by the
radiation) with a bulbous head, three eyes and a taste for human flesh.
Corman later improved as a director. [JB/PN]
DC COMICS
US COMIC-book publishing company, based in New York, owing much of its
commercial success to its ownership of the copyrights in the SUPERHEROES
Batman, who is not quite an sf figure, and SUPERMAN, who is.In Feb 1935
Major Malcolm WHEELER-NICHOLSON published the first US comic book to
contain all-new material rather than reprints from newspaper comics
sections. His comic book, New Fun, ran for 5 issues Feb-Oct 1935, and was

reborn in 1936 as More Fun (June 1936-Dec 1947). By 1938 Nicholson was
publishing New Adventure Comics and Detective Comics; these were the first
comic books to feature regular characters in a series of adventures.
However, they didn't pay the bills, and Nicholson eventually settled his
debts by handing his company, National Comics, over to his printers, Harry
Donenfeld and Jack Leibowitz. Its next publication was Action Comics, #1
of which (June 1938) featured the first appearance of the character
Superman, created by Jerry SIEGEL and Joe Shuster. In May 1939 Detective
Comics #27 saw the debut of The Batman, drawn by Bob Kane and written by
Bill Finger. The future of the company was assured.Detective Comics was
the first all-new comic book of which each issue was devoted to a single
theme. This approach was an instant success, and so the company adopted
the initials DC as a trademark, featuring it boldly on (eventually) all of
its covers. It bought up Max Gaines's All American Comics in 1945.
Donenfeld pioneered the distribution of comic books in the USA, and his
efforts were backed up by those of National's stable of editors, writers
and artists, who included Alfred BESTER, Otto Binder ( Eando BINDER),
Gardner FOX, Edmond HAMILTON and Mort WEISINGER. These produced a flood of
memorable characters and series including Aquaman, Enemy Ace, The Flash,
Green Lantern, Hawkman, Sgt Rock, Sugar ?
Mystery in Space, Rex the Wonder Dog, Robin the Boy Wonder and Strange
Adventures.The 1950s saw a change of name to National Periodical
Publications and the introduction of romance titles (Girls Love), sf
(Strange Adventures), Westerns (Hopalong Cassidy) and licensed character
humour (Bob Hope, Jackie Gleason and Dean Martin ?
mid-1950s there was a resurgence in the popularity of superheroes, and
many characters abandoned in the previous decade were revived and
revamped. This popularity burgeoned in the 1960s and 1970s, and such
material constituted a substantial proportion of the company's output,
even though there were new titles in the horror, gothic romance and
SWORD-AND-SORCERY genres. In 1968 the company was taken over by Warner
Bros., and in the early 1980s its official name finally became DC Comics
Inc.The 1980s saw a great expansion of new publishing formats, including
limited-series books, softcover and hardcover collections, and
GRAPHIC-NOVEL adaptations of the works of leading sf writers such as Larry
NIVEN and Robert SILVERBERG. A major contributing factor to the company's
recent success has been its exploitations of The Batman (now usually known
just as Batman), allowing artists and writers - including Frank MILLER,
and Alan MOORE and Brian BOLLAND - to evolve a number of highly individual
interpretations of his character and milieu. Batman's popularity has, of
course, benefited from the films Batman (1966), Batman (1989) and Batman
Returns (1992). [RT/SW]
DEAD KIDS
(vt Strange Behavior) Film (1981). Endeavour/Bannon Glenn/Hemdale. Dir
Michael Laughlin, starring Michael Murphy, Louise Fletcher, Dan Shor,
Fiona Lewis, Arthur Dignam. Screenplay Laughlin, William Condon. 99 mins,
cut to 93 mins. Colour.This Australian/New Zealand exploitation sf/ HORROR
movie is set in the US Midwest and has a largely US cast, but was actually
shot in New Zealand. It is the first of a projected trilogy (linked by
theme only) of which the second is STRANGE INVADERS (1983). At a research

centre teenage kids are acting as guinea pigs in experiments in
behavioural conditioning (the film is consciously anti-B.F. SKINNER) via a
drug injected into the brain - on one occasion, through the eyeball. Some
of them become homicidal and murder the children of a now-dead mad
SCIENTIST's old enemies. The mad scientist is revealed to be not dead
after all. The film - part of the teenage SPLATTER-MOVIE subgenre of the
time - has plenty of gore but also wit and intelligence, as well as a
rather 1950s style that would be featured again in Strange Invaders. [PN]
DEADLY INVENTION, THE
VYNALEZ ZKAZY.
DEADLY RAY FROM MARS, THE
FLASH GORDON.
DEAD ZONE, THE
Film (1983). Dino De Laurentiis/Lorimar. Dir David CRONENBERG, starring
Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lom, Anthony
Zerbe, Martin Sheen. Screenplay Jeffrey Boam, based on The Dead Zone
(1979) by Stephen KING. 103 mins. Colour.Borderline-sf movie about John
Smith (Walken), who has an accident, spends five years in a coma, and
wakes to learn he has developed a PSI POWER, precognition. The "dead zone"
is a blank spot in his visions which may represent the possibility of the
future being changed. The more Smith uses his powers, which he is loath to
do because of the cargo of pain his visions often carry (and because they
age him), the more cut off he becomes from ordinary humanity. He performs
several minor miracles, solves an ugly murder mystery, and ultimately
prevents WWIII by thwarting the election of a smooth, narcissistic
politician (Sheen) who might otherwise, in the future, have plunged the
world into holocaust. Cronenberg's least typical and most commercial work,
perhaps because King's sprawling novel is a long way removed from the
personal material he normally uses, TDZ is nevertheless a good and
powerful film, notable for its sad, insistent images of winter,
correlating with Smith's retreat from life and also with the dead zone of
the title. Walken's performance in the main role is admirably lost and
icy. [PN]
DEAMER, (MARY ELIZABETH KATHLEEN) DULCIE
(1890-1972) New Zealand-born writer, in Australia from about 1922, where
in association with Norman Lindsay (1879-1969) and others she ruffled some
provincial dovecotes. Some of the content of In the Beginning: Six Studies
of the Stone Age and Other Stories (coll 1909) reappears in As It Was in
the Beginning (1929), an exercise in prehistoric sf set in Australia,
illus Lindsay. The Devil's Saint (1924 UK) is a historical novel with
greater elements of FANTASY than normal in her work. Holiday (1940) is a
fantasy of REINCARNATION. [JC]
DEAN, MAL
(1941-1974) UK illustrator who died young, of cancer. MD was well known
in the jazz world (he illustrated for Melody Maker) and in sf for the work
he did for NEW WORLDS in the late 1960s and early 1970s; it was especially
associated with the Jerry Cornelius stories by Michael MOORCOCK and
others. His work was mainly in black-and-white with a broad line and much

cross-hatching; it was strong, often deliberately unpolished, but the
reverse of artless. He favoured surreal juxtapositions, and often worked
in the grotesque satirical tradition of Hogarth. [PN]
DEAN, MARTYN
[r] Roger DEAN; Christopher EVANS.
DEAN, ROGER
(1944- ) UK illustrator. Primarily a commercial designer, especially of
record-album covers, RD has done some sf and fantasy ILLUSTRATION, and his
album and poster art shows a strong fantasy influence. His style is
strong, romantic and mannered; he contrasts very finely detailed figures
and machines against loosely structured backgrounds. His book Views (1975)
shows his development from a student at the Canterbury School of Art
onwards. Views was published by Dragon's Dream, a specialist publishing
house devoted primarily to UK fantasy illustrators, founded by RD and his
brother Martyn Dean; it also publishes under the Paper Tiger imprint. The
book Magnetic Storm (1984), ed Roger and Martyn Dean, details many of the
design and publishing projects - often fantastic or sciencefictional with which they have been associated. RD has been an important influence
on UK fantasy illustration, as has his brother, who is more closely
associated with book publishing than RD. [JG/PN]Other Works: The Flights
of Icarus (1987) with Donald Lehmkuhl
DEARMER, GEOFFREY
(1893- ) UK writer, and a WWI poet of some note. His Saint on Holiday
(1933) presents a NEAR-FUTURE UK in which the government is dominated by
ministries designed to be of benefit to citizens; it was couched as a
topsy-turvydom SATIRE. In They Chose to be Birds (1935) a preacher of
closed mind is unsettlingly duped into "becoming" a bird, and as such
learns some Wellsian lessons about the true nature of the world. [JC]Other
works: Three Short Plays (coll 1928), two of which are fantasies.
DEATH LINE
(vt Raw Meat US) Film (1972). K-L Productions. Dir Gary Sherman, starring
Donald Pleasence, Hugh Armstrong, Norman Rossington, David Ladd, Sharon
Gurney. Screenplay Ceri Jones, from a story by Sherman. 87 mins. Colour.In
the late 19th century a group of construction workers building an
extension to London's underground railway system are buried in a cave-in.
In the present, late-night travellers at Russell Square tube station are
being murdered (and eaten) by, we slowly learn, troglodytic descendants of
the entombed workers who have found their way up, and are now
supplementing their diet of rats with human meat. What raises this
exploitation movie out of the ordinary is its unexpected shift of
perspective - the dawning sympathy we are made to feel for the troglodytes
(nearly all of whom have died of a leprosy-like disease): they have almost
lost the use of language, but are still able to feel grief and love.
[PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES.
DEATH OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK
The INCREDIBLE HULK .
DEATH RACE 2000

Film (1975). New World. Prod Roger CORMAN. Dir Paul Bartel, starring
David Carradine, Simone Griffith, Louisa Moritz, Sylvester Stallone, Mary
Woronov. Screenplay Robert Thom, Charles Griffith, based on a story by Ib
Melchior. 80 mins. Colour.In this low-budget black SATIRE about a car race
across the USA in the year 2000, the winner is the driver who kills the
most pedestrians. "Frankenstein" (Carradine) - who has supposedly been in
so many crashes that most of his body has been replaced with artificial
parts - is the nation's favourite driver, and surprises everyone at the
end by running over the US President as a political gesture. The film's
fast pace and lively ironies led many critics to judge it superior to
ROLLERBALL (1975), a much more expensive production about the use of
brutal sports as an opiate for the masses. A cult classic, DR2000 has been
much imitated. [JB/PN]
DEATH RAYS
Rays that could kill, whether by heat or by disintegration, were the
staple WEAPONS of pulp sf in the 1920s and 1930s and became a central item
of sf TERMINOLOGY. At about the time death rays became old-fashioned in
sf, scientists in the real world saw fit to invent the laser, thus
retroactively justifying one of sf's fantasies. The death ray always,
however, had a basis in historical fact. After the well publicized
discoveries of X-rays by Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen (1845-1923) in 1895 and
of radioactive emissions by Antoine Henri Becquerel (1852-1908) - he too
called them rays - in 1896, the word "ray" entered the popular
imagination. One of the earliest literary examples is the "heat ray" used
by the Martians in H.G. WELLS's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898). [PN]
DEATHSPORT
Roger CORMAN.
DEATH WATCH
Le MORT EN DIRECT .
de BERGERAC, CYRANO
CYRANO DE BERGERAC.
De CAMP, CATHERINE A. CROOK
[r] L. Sprague DE CAMP.
De CAMP, L(YON) SPRAGUE
(1907- ) US writer, married from 1939 to Catherine A(delaide) Crook
(1907- ), who has collaborated on a number of his books, sometimes without
printed credit, although always freely acknowledged by LSDC; the two are
increasingly seen to have been a creative team for many years (she is
referred to below as CACDC). LSDC was educated at the California Institute
of Technology, where he studied aeronautical engineering, and at Stevens
Institute of Technology, where he gained a master's degree in 1933. He
went to work for a company dealing with patenting, and his first published
work was a cowritten textbook on the subject. He then met P. Schuyler
MILLER, with whom he collaborated on a novel, Genus Homo (1941 Super
Science Stories; 1950), which failed to find a publisher for several
years. His first published story was "The Isolinguals" (1937) in ASF; this
was before the arrival of John W. CAMPBELL Jr as editor, but when that

happened the two men proved highly compatible, and LSDC soon became a
central figure of the GOLDEN AGE OF SF, writing prolifically for ASF over
the next few years (on one occasion using the pseudonym Lyman R. Lyon),
his contributions including the Johnny Black series about an intelligent
bear: "The Command" (1938), "The Incorrigible" (1939), "The Emancipated"
(1940) and "The Exalted" (1940). Some of the better stories from this
period were collected in The Best of L. Sprague de Camp (coll 1978).It
was, however, the appearance in 1939 of ASF's fantasy companion UNKNOWN
which stimulated his most notable early work, including LEST DARKNESS FALL
(1939 Unknown; 1941; rev 1949), in which an involuntary time-traveller to
6th-century Rome attempts to prevent the onset of the Dark Ages; this was
the most accomplished early excursion into HISTORY in magazine sf, and is
regarded as a classic. Other contributions to Unknown included "None but
Lucifer" (1939) with H.L. GOLD, Solomon's Stone (1942 Unknown; 1956) and
the long title stories of Divide and Rule (coll 1948) - the title story
alone being republished as Divide and Rule (1939 ASF; 1990 chap dos) - The
Wheels of If (coll 1948), an ALTERNATE-WORLDS story, also cited below in
reissued form, and The Undesired Princess (coll 1951), the title story
alone being republished in The Undesired Princess and The Enchanted Bunny
(anth 1990), the second story being by David A. DRAKE. LSDC was most
successful in his collaborations with Fletcher PRATT, whom he met in 1939.
Pratt conceived the idea behind their successful Incomplete Enchanter
series of humorous fantasies in which the protagonist, Harold Shea, is
transported into a series of ALTERNATE WORLDS based on various myths and
legends. As usual with LSDC, the publication sequence is complex. The main
titles are: The Incomplete Enchanter (1940 Unknown; 1941; vt The
Incompleat Enchanter 1979 UK), The Castle of Iron (1941 Unknown; 1950) and
The Wall of Serpents (fixup 1960; vt The Enchanter Compleated 1980 UK).
The first two titles were then assembled as The Compleat Enchanter: The
Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea (omni 1975), and all three were
eventually put together as The Intrepid Enchanter (omni 1988 UK; vt The
Complete Compleat Enchanter 1989 US); Sir Harold and the Gnome King (1991
chap) was subsequently added to the Enchanter canon. Other collaborations
with Pratt were The Land of Unreason (1942) and The Carnelian Cube (1948),
the latter being published several years after it was written. In 1950,
LSDC and Pratt (whom see for details) began their Gavagan's Bar series of
CLUB STORIES, assembled in Tales From Gavagan's Bar (coll 1953; exp 1978).
LSDC joined the US Naval Reserve in 1942, spending the war working in the
Philadelphia Naval Yard alongside Isaac ASIMOV and Robert A. HEINLEIN.
Afterwards he published a few articles, but hardly any new fiction until
"The Animal Cracker Plot" (1949) introduced his Viagens Interplanetarias
stories, a loosely linked series set in a future where Brazil has become
the dominant world power, the stories themselves being sited mainly on
three worlds which circle the star Tau Ceti and are named after the Hindu
gods Vishnu, Ganesha and Krishna; the planet Krishna was a romantically
barbarian world on which LSDC could set, as sf, the kind of PLANETARY
ROMANCES he had previously written as fantasy, the market for pure fantasy
having disappeared with Unknown in 1943. Other planets circling other
stars included Osiris, Isis and Thoth. Many of the short stories in the
series were included in The Continent Makers and Other Tales of the
Viagens (coll 1953); others appeared in Sprague de Camp's New Anthology of

Science Fiction (coll 1953 UK), and "The Virgin of Zesh" (1953) was
assembled together with The Wheels of If (1940 Unknown; 1990 chap dos) in
The Virgin and the Wheels (coll 1976). Rogue Queen (1951), a novel in the
series, depicts a matriarchal humanoid society based on a hive structure;
it is, with LEST DARKNESS FALL, LSDC's most highly regarded sf work. The
remaining novels, an internal series all set on Krishna, were Cosmic
Manhunt (1949 ASF as "The Queen of Zamba"; 1954 dos; vt A Planet Called
Krishna 1966 UK; with restored text and with "Perpetual Motion" added, rev
vt as coll The Queen of Zamba 1977 US); The Search for Zei (1950 ASF as
the first half of "The Hand of Zei"; 1962; vt The Floating Continent 1966
UK) and The Hand of Zei (1950 ASF as the second half of "The Hand of Zei";
1963; cut 1963), both titles finally being superseded by publication of
the full original novel, The Hand of Zei (1950 ASF; 1982); The Tower of
Zanid (1958 Science Fiction Stories; cut 1958; with "The Virgin of Zesh"
added, vt as coll The Virgin of Zesh/The Tower of Zanid 1983); The Hostage
of Zir (1977); The Bones of Zora (1983) with CACDC; and The Swords of
Zinjaban (1991) with CACDC. They contain a blend of intelligent, exotic
adventure and wry humour characteristic of LSDC's better work, though they
do not explore any too deeply either the romantic or the human-condition
ironies available to aspiring authors of the planetary romance.LSDC was in
any case not to write much more sf, his later career increasingly being
devoted to outright fantasy and to SWORD AND SORCERY. He had gained an
interest in the latter category through reading Robert E. HOWARD's Conan
stories, and worked extensively on editing and adding to that series.
Tales of Conan (coll 1955; vt The Flame Knife 1981) consists of unfinished
Howard manuscripts converted into Conan stories and completed by LSDC (for
remaining titles, see listing below). His nonfiction writings on the
sword-and-sorcery genre have been published as The Conan Reader (coll
1968), Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers (1976) and Blond Barbarians and
Noble Savages (1975 chap). He also edited the anthologies Swords and
Sorcery (anth 1963), The Spell of Seven (anth 1965), The Fantastic
Swordsmen (anth 1967) and Warlocks and Warriors (anth 1970), and co-edited
the critical anthologies The Conan Swordbook (anth 1969) and The Conan
Grimoire (anth 1972), both with George H. SCITHERS. LSDC's own first
sword-and-sorcery effort was the Pusadian sequence of tales assembled as
The Tritonian Ring and Other Pusadian Tales (coll 1953); the title novel
was later published alone as The Tritonian Ring (1951 Two Complete
Science-Fiction Adventure Books; 1968). Later he wrote several stories set
in the imaginary world of Novaria: The Goblin Tower (1968), which is his
most substantial novel of this type, The Clocks of Iraz (1971), The
Fallible Fiend (1973), The Unbeheaded King (1983) and The Honorable
Barbarian (1989) - the first, second and fourth of these five being
assembled as The Reluctant King (omni 1984).LSDC's most notable sf
writings after about 1950 were stories like The Glory that Was (1952
Startling Stories; 1960) and the 1956 title story of A Gun for Dinosaur
(coll 1963), which also included "Aristotle and the Gun" (1958). The first
and third of these tales use history themes, in the case of the third
combined with TIME TRAVEL, in a manner similar to LEST DARKNESS FALL; the
second is a straightforward time-travel story. LSDC produced one of the
earliest books about modern sf, Science Fiction Handbook (1953; rev 1975)
with CACDC; a useful compendium of information and advice for aspiring

writers in its original edition, it gained little from its subsequent
revision - indeed, the revised version omitted some material of interest.
Otherwise he wrote historical novels and nonfiction works, including a
book on MAGIC with CACDC: Spirits, Stars and Spells (1966). His opinions
about the nature of FANTASY and the appropriate decorum necessary to write
within the genre were expressed in an energetic, if sometimes reactionary,
fashion in his many articles. He also wrote definitive lives of H.P.
LOVECRAFT - Lovecraft: A Biography (1975; cut 1976) - and of Robert E.
Howard - Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard (1983) with
CCDC and Jane Whittington Griffin, the latter book having been preceded by
The Miscast Barbarian (1975 chap). In the 1980s, and into his own ninth
decade, more and more often in explicit collaboration with CACDC, he
maintained a remarkable reputation for consistency of output. He was given
the Gandalf (Grand Master) Award for 1976 and the Nebula Grand Master
Award for 1978. His recent work seems agelessly smiling. [MJE/JC]Other
works: Lands Beyond (1952) with Willy LEY, nonfiction, awarded an
INTERNATIONAL FANTASY AWARD; Lost Continents (1954), nonfiction about
ATLANTIS and others; Demons and Dinosaurs (1970), poetry; The Reluctant
Shaman and Other Fantastic Tales (coll 1970); 3000 Years of Fantasy and
Science Fiction (anth 1972) with CACDC; Scribblings (coll 1972); Tales
beyond Time (anth 1973) with CACDC; The Great Fetish (1978); The Purple
Pterodactyls: The Adventures of W. Wilson Newbury, Ensorcelled Financier
(coll of linked stories 1979); The Ragged Edge of Science (1980),
nonfiction; Footprints on Sand (coll 1981) with CACDC; Heroes and
Hobgoblins (coll 1981); The Incorporated Knight (fixup 1987) and its
sequel, The Pixilated Peeress (1991), both with CACDC; The Stones of
Nomuru (1988) with CACDC; The Venom Trees of Sunga (1992); Rivers of Time
(coll 1993).Conan: In terms of internal chronology: Conan (coll 1967) with
Lin CARTER and Robert E. Howard, Conan of Cimmeria (coll 1969) with Carter
and Howard andConan the Freebooter (coll 1968) with Howard, all three
being assembled as The Conan Chronicles (omni 1989 UK);Conan the Wanderer
(coll 1968) with Carter and Howard, Conan the Adventurer (coll 1966) with
Howard, and Conan the Buccaneer (1971) with Carter, all three being
assembled as The Conan Chronicles (omni 1990 UK); Conan the Warrior (anth
1967); Conan the Usurper (coll 1967) with Howard; Howard's own Conan the
Conqueror (1967 edn) ed LSDP; The Return of Conan (1957; vt Conan the
Avenger 1968) with Howard and Bjorn Nyberg; Conan of Aquilonia (coll
1977); Conan of the Isles (1968) with Carter; Conan the Swordsman (coll
1978) with Carter and Nyberg; Conan the Liberator (1979) with Carter; The
Blade of Conan (anth 1979); The Spell of Conan (anth 1980); Conan and the
Spider God (1980); Treasure of Tranicos (1980) with Howard; Conan the
Barbarian * (1982) with Carter, a film tie. (For other Conan books, Robert
E. HOWARD.)About the author: "Neomythology" by Lin Carter (introduction to
LSDC's Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers); Seekers of Tomorrow (1965) by
Sam MOSKOWITZ, Chapter 9; De Camp: An L. Sprague de Camp Bibliography
(1983) by Charlotte Laughlin and Daniel J.H. LEVACK.See also: APES AND
CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD); DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; EDISONADE; END
OF
THE WORLD; EVOLUTION; FINLAND; HIVE-MINDS; HUMOUR; LINGUISTICS;
LONGEVITY
(IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); MATHEMATICS; NEBULA; NUCLEAR POWER;

PARALLEL WORLDS; POLITICS; PUBLISHING; SCIENCE FANTASY; SOCIOLOGY; TIME
PARADOXES.
De CHAIR, SOMERSET (STRUBEN)
(1911-1995) UK writer whose sf novel, The Teetotalitarian State (1947),
is a not particularly bad-tempered SATIRE set in the NEAR FUTURE and
directed at the Labour Party, then in power in the UK. The contemporary
researcher obsessed by the life of Julian, in Bring Back the Gods: The
Epic Career of the Emperor Julian the Great (1962), eventually comes to
share the experiences of the Roman. [JC]
DeCHANCIE, JOHN
(1946- ) US writer who worked in tv in various capacities before
beginning to publish sf with his Skyway Trilogy: Starrigger (1983), Red
Limit Freeway (1984) and Paradox Alley (1986). Based on a
truckers-in-space premise with some comic potential, the already crowded
tale is complicated by TIME PARADOXES, godlings and much more; the ensuing
epic is at points extremely funny. A second comic sf sequence, the USS
Recluse stories, began with The Kruton Interface (1993); and a third, the
Dr. Dimension series in collaboration with David BISCHOFF, began with Dr.
Dimension (1993) and Dr. Dimension: Masters of Spacetime (1994), both
containing RECURSIVE SF elements.Crooked House (1987) with Thomas F.
MONTELEONE is a horror novel, and the Zelaznyesque Castle Perilous
sequence - Castle Perilous (1988), Castle for Rent (1989), Castle
Kidnapped (1989), Castle War! (1990), Castle Murders (1991),Castle Dreams
(1992) and Castle Spellbound (1992) - is fantasy, as is MagicNet (1993).
JDC has also written two biographies: Peron (1987) and Nasser (1987). [JC]
DECIMA VITTIMA, LA
(vt The Tenth Victim) Film (1965). Champion/Concordia. Dir Elio Petri,
starring Marcello Mastroianni, Ursula Andress, Elsa Martinelli, Massimo
Serato. Screenplay Petri, Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra, Giorgio Salvione,
based on "The Seventh Victim" (1953) by Robert SHECKLEY. 92 mins.
Colour.This French-Italian coproduction is based loosely on Sheckley's
story about a future world where, as a safety valve for latent aggression,
the government has legalized duels to the death. In the film two
participants (Mastroianni and Andress) are highly trained individuals
alternating as "hunter" and "victim", each aiming for the 10-kill score
that will bring unlimited privileges. The DYSTOPIAN possibilities are
neglected in favour of the then-fashionable James Bond/thriller approach,
with black jokes and posturing in extravagant costumes. The novelization
is The Tenth Victim * (1966) by Robert Sheckley. [JB]See also: LEISURE.
DEE, ROGER
Working name of US writer Roger Dee Aycock (1914- ) for his fiction,
which he began writing with "The Wheel is Death" for Planet Stories in
1949; he was a prolific contributor to the sf magazines of the early
1950s. His sf novel, An Earth Gone Mad (1954 dos), is a routine adventure.
[JC]
DEEGAN, JON J.
House name created by Gordon Landsborough, editor of AUTHENTIC SCIENCE
FICTION, and used almost exclusively by UK writer Robert (George) Sharp (?

-? ) for novels published in that journal, which for some time early in
its run filled each issue with one long story. The Old Growler series,
beginning with "Reconnoitre Krellig II" in 1951, was signed as by JJD, and
three of its sequels (all by Sharp) were published in book form as
Amateurs in Alchemy (1952), Antro, the Life-Giver (1953) and The Great
Ones (1953). Sharp wrote also a TIME-TRAVEL trilogy, Corridors of Time
(1953), Beyond the Fourth Door (1954) and Exiles in Time (1954). Of
further JJD titles, Underworld of Zello (1952) is by Sharp; authorship of
The Singing Spheres (1952) is unconfirmed. The much earlier Horror Castle
(1936) was published under Sharp's own name, which he generally used for
his crime thrillers. [JC]
DEEPING, (GEORGE) WARWICK
(1877-1950) UK popular novelist, the first of whose many books, Uther ?
Igraine (1903), was an Arthurian fantasy, as were The Man on the White
Horse (1934); The Man who Went Back (1940), the latter being a timeslip
epic which takes its protagonist from the 20th-century UK to the time of
the Romans, and returns him wiser and better able to cope with the Nazis;
and The Sword and the Cross (1957). I Live Again (1942) is a REINCARNATION
fantasy that likewise terminates heroically in the Blitz. [JC]
DEEP SPACE NINE
STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE.
DEEPSTAR SIX
Film (1988). Carolco/Tri-Star. Dir and coprod Sean S. Cunningham,
starring Joyce Collins, Greg Evigan, Taurean Blacque, Miguel Ferrer.
Screenplay Lewis Abernathy, Geof Miller, based on a story by Abernathy. 99
mins. Colour.A deep-sea missile base is being installed by underwater
station DeepStar Six. Explosives open a vast cavern under the ocean floor,
in which dwells a monstrous arthropod; it destroys two submersibles,
enters the station, and kills most of the crew one by one. This
no-better-than-competent MONSTER MOVIE was the first of the
strange-things-in-the-ocean sf films of the period, others being Lords of
the Deep (1989), LEVIATHAN (1989) and The ABYSS (1989). Once revealed, the
crayfish-thing is anticlimactic. [PN]
DEER, M.J.
George H. SMITH.
DEFINITIONS OF SF
The term "science fiction" came into general use in the 1930s, an early
appearance being in Hugo GERNSBACK's editorial to #1 of SCIENCE WONDER
STORIES (June 1929). Long before, however, several writers ( Edgar
FAWCETT; Edgar Allan POE; William WILSON) had made attempts to define
species of literary production similar to sf, and other early speculative
writers had their own manifestos. Only since the founding of the
specialist sf PULP MAGAZINES in the USA has there been any measure of
agreement.The category first referred to by Gernsback as SCIENTIFICTION
was described by him thus in the editorial to #1 of AMAZING STORIES (Apr
1926): "By 'scientifiction' I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar
Allan Poe type of story - a charming romance intermingled with scientific
fact and prophetic vision . . . Not only do these amazing tales make

tremendously interesting reading - they are always instructive. They
supply knowledge . . . in a very palatable form . . . New adventures
pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible
of realization tomorrow . . . Many great science stories destined to be of
historical interest are still to be written . . . Posterity will point to
them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but
progress as well."This notion of sf as a didactic and progressive
literature with a solid basis in contemporary knowledge was soon revised
as other pulp editors abandoned some of Gernsback's pretensions, but the
emphasis on science remained. A new manifesto was drawn up by John W.
CAMPBELL Jr for Astounding Stories, which, as ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION,
would dominate the field in the 1940s. He proposed that sf should be
regarded as a literary medium akin to science itself: "Scientific
methodology involves the proposition that a well-constructed theory will
not only explain away known phenomena, but will also predict new and still
undiscovered phenomena. Science fiction tries to do much the same - and
write up, in story form, what the results look like when applied not only
to machines, but to human society as well."Within a few years of the
creation of the term "science fiction" a subculture had evolved composed
of writers, magazine editors (and, later, book editors), reviewers and
fans; stories and novels written within this subculture shared certain
assumptions, linguistic and thematic codes which were embedded in the
growing literature, and a sense of isolation from the external "mundane"
world for which those codes remained cryptic. This whole living matrix,
not just the fictional texts that had initially occasioned it, came to be
called "science fiction" ( GENRE SF).Once the publishing category had been
established, readers and critics began using the term with reference to
older works, bringing together all stories which seemed to fit the
specifications. However, the first major study of the field's ancestry was
undertaken by a person from outside it, the academic J.O. BAILEY in
Pilgrims through Space and Time (1947). He identified his material thus:
"A piece of scientific fiction is a narrative of an imaginary invention or
discovery in the natural sciences and consequent adventures and
experiences . . . It must be a scientific discovery - something that the
author at least rationalizes as possible to science."Many further sf
researchers and writers attempted to generate definitions of the form
which would demarcate the contemporary genre and assimilate any
theoretically eligible earlier work. These definitions included attempts
by James BLISH, Reginald BRETNOR, Robert A. HEINLEIN, Damon KNIGHT and
Theodore STURGEON, from within the field, and, from scholars and critics
more or less closely associated it, by Kingsley AMIS and Sam MOSKOWITZ.
Judith MERRIL echoed Campbell's prospectus while borrowing Heinlein's
preferred terminology, which replaced the term "science fiction" by
"speculative fiction": "Speculative fiction: stories whose objective is to
explore, to discover, to learn, by means of projection, extrapolation,
analogue,hypothesis-and-paper-experimentation, something about the nature
of the universe, of man, or 'reality' . . . I use the term 'speculative
fiction' here specifically to describe the mode which makes use of the
traditional 'scientific method' (observation, hypothesis, experiment) to
examine some postulated approximation of reality, by introducing a given
set of changes - imaginary or inventive - into the common background of

'known facts', creating an environment in which the responses and
perceptions of the characters will reveal something about the inventions,
the characters, or both."The emphasis in all of these earlier definitions
falls on the presence of "science", or at least scientific method, as a
necessary part of the fiction. The Merril definition, however, clearly (by
shifting from science itself to the idea of extrapolation) is rather
wider, since it would include stories which depict social change without
necessarily making much fuss over scientific development; and indeed such
stories were becoming very popular in the magazines during the 1950s and
1960s, the period during which Merril did most of her writing and editing.
Oddly enough, the most obvious element in the magazine sf that is the
initial focus of nearly all of these earlier definitions is not much
mentioned in them: the overwhelming majority of the sf of this period especially in the USA - was set in the future. (By contrast, most 19thand early-20th-century sf was displaced from the normal world through
space rather than time.) With an enjoyable lack of responsibility about
using the future to teach us about the present, writers like E.E. "Doc"
SMITH, in his Lensman series, freed the future for "itself", and the
effect of this new freedom was, in literary terms, explosive. From this
the characteristic (and addictive) flavour of US sf derives: its relaxed
embracing of scale and technology, its narrative fluency and, perhaps, its
secret impatience with reason. Most descriptive definitions of sf from the
period 1940-70 look with hindsight surprisingly unsatisfactory and rather
constricting - damagingly indifferent, in fact, to the actual shape of sf
texts.In the 1960s a new line of thought, stemming in large part from the
UK, saw sf re-emphasized as a global literature with 19th-century roots
rather than as a purely US phenomenon nurtured in the pulp magazines from
the 1920s onwards. This wider perspective on sf tends to de-emphasize its
science/technology component. The term "science fiction" itself came in
for criticism from Brian W. ALDISS, who commented that sf is no more
written for scientists than ghost stories are for ghosts. J.G. BALLARD
remarked in 1969 that "the idea that a magazine like Astounding, or Analog
as it's now called, has anything to do with the sciences is ludicrous. You
have only to pick up a journal like Nature, say, or any scientific
journal, and you can see that science belongs in a completely different
world." In Billion Year Spree (1973; rev vt Trillion Year Spree 1986 by
Aldiss and David WINGROVE) Aldiss offered the remark - it seems more an
observation describing a philosophical outlook than a definition - that
"science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in
the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of
knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or
post-Gothic mode" ( GOTHIC SF). By placing Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein
(1818) at the head of this tradition, Aldiss effectively (and
influentially) argued that sf was a child begotten upon Gothic Romance by
the Industrial and Scientific Revolution of the early 19th century. More
recent critics, like Brian M. STABLEFORD in Scientific Romance in Britain
1890-1950 (1985), have likewise somewhat undercut those definitions that
appear to fit most closely an idea of sf as a genre first cultured in US
magazines ( SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE).The 1970s as a whole witnessed a great
upsurge of academic interest in sf ( SF IN THE CLASSROOM), especially in
the USA, and with it, naturally enough, came more rigorous and formal

attempts to define sf. To teach a subject you need to know what it is;
and, especially in the case of sf (which blurs so easily into FANTASY on
one side and POSTMODERNIST fictions- FABULATIONS - on another,
TECHNOTHRILLERS and political thrillers on a third, mainstream works about
scientific discovery on a fourth, not to mention LOST-WORLD stories or
UTOPIAS or future- WAR stories or stories set in the prehistoric past),
you also need to know what it isn't. Thus in academic definitions there
was a new emphasis on drawing the boundaries of sf more precisely, in
terms of its literary strategies as well as its ideational content,
sometimes using a vocabulary already developed in different spheres of
literary criticism by structuralist and other critics.In 1972 Darko SUVIN
defined sf as "a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions
are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose
main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's
empirical environment". By "cognition" Suvin appears to mean the seeking
of rational understanding, and by "estrangement" something akin to Bertolt
Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, defined in 1948 thus: "A representation which
estranges is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same
time make it seem unfamiliar." Perhaps the most important part of Suvin's
definition, and the easiest with which to agree, is the emphasis he puts
on what he and others have called a "novum", a new thing - some difference
between the world of the fiction and what Suvin calls the "empirical
environment", the real world outside. The presence of a novum is
insufficient in itself, of course, to define sf, since the different and
older tradition of fantasy likewise depends on the novum. Peter NICHOLLS,
pointing to this particularly blurred demarcation line, argues that sf
must by definition follow natural law whereas fantasy may and mostly does
suspend it. Fantasy need not be susceptible to "natural" or cognitive
explanation; indeed, supernatural explanation is at fantasy's heart.
(Suvin claims that the commercial linking of sf and fantasy is "a
rampantly pathological phenomenon". This dividing line is further
discussed under MAGIC.) As to estrangement, it arguably has little to do
with at least the US tradition of sf (although a great deal to do with
European traditions of SATIRE), in which an important component is
nostalgia for the familiar - even the familiarly new ( CLICHES) - and
estrangement is significantly absent. John CLUTE has argued that much sf
seeks to create the exact opposite of estrangement; that is, it works to
make the incredible seem plausible and familiar. Nonetheless, while
Suvin's definition would find few who agreed with all of it, it is
challenging and has perhaps been the most useful of all in catalysing
debate on the issue.It is to be expected that disagreements of this sort
should take place, since sf itself is not homogeneous, and at different
times - sometimes both at once - its strategy is either to comment on our
own world through the use of metaphor and extrapolation or to create
genuine imaginative alternatives to our own world.The first of these
alternatives is the one emphasized in Structural Fabulation (1975) by
Robert SCHOLES, who defines FABULATION as "fiction that offers us a world
clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to
confront that known world in some cognitive way". Unqualified, the
definition would fit not only GENRE SF but also the fabulations of John
BARTH, Richard BRAUTIGAN, Jorge Luis BORGES and Thomas PYNCHON, works

which are quite often annexed to sf though having a different
characteristic flavour. Scholes recognizes this when he goes on to the
specific case of "structural fabulation" (yet another term substituting
for "science fiction" and sharing the initials "sf") in which "the
tradition of speculative fiction is modified by an awareness of the
universe as a system of systems, a structure of structures, and the
insights of the past century of science are accepted as fictional points
of departure. Yet structural fabulation is neither scientific in its
methods nor a substitute for actual science. It is a fictional exploration
of human situations made perceptible by the implications of recent
science. Its favourite themes involve the impact of developments or
revelations derived from the human or physical sciences upon the people
who must live with those revelations or developments."All definitions of
sf have a component of prescription (what sf writers ought to do, and what
their motives, purposes and philosophies ought to be) as well as
description (what they habitually do do, and what kind of things tend to
accumulate under the label). It is, however, only in the later academic
definitions by authors like Suvin and Scholes, who are noticeably reticent
as regards what sf is actually about, that we find prescription getting
the upper hand. It is possible with almost all definitions, especially of
the prescriptive sort, to find examples which do not fit the prescription.
No one has yet emerged with a prescription sufficiently inclusive to
satisfy all or even most readers. (If the editors of this encyclopedia
have erred, it has been on the side of inclusiveness.)Some other academic
definitions have been less inclusive than Suvin's or Scholes's. Leslie
FIEDLER, for example, argues (in Partisan Review Fall 1965) that the myth
of sf is the dream of apocalypse, "the myth of the end of man, of the
transcendence or transformation of the human - a vision quite different
from that of the extinction of our species by the Bomb, which seems
stereotype rather than archetype". In his New Worlds for Old: The
Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction and American Literature (1974)
David KETTERER expands on Fiedler's point at length, dividing sf into
three categories (according to the type of extrapolation involved) and
concentrating on the third: "Philosophically oriented science fiction,
extrapolating on what we know in the context of our vaster ignorance,
comes up with a startling donnee, or rationale, that puts humanity in a
radically new perspective." This he sees as a subcategory of "apocalyptic
literature" which, by "the creation of other worlds", causes a
"metaphorical destruction of [the] 'real' world in the reader's
head".Alvin TOFFLER, author of Future Shock (1970), a study of the
increasing rate of change in the real world, wrote in 1974 that sf, "by
dealing with possibilities not ordinarily considered - alternative worlds,
alternative visions - widens our repertoire of possible responses to
change". Here is the beginning of a definition of sf in terms of its
social function rather than of its intrinsic nature, a little more
sophisticated than Marshall McLuhan's earlier comment in The Medium and
the Massage (1967): "Science fiction writing today presents situations
that enable us to perceive the potential of new technologies."In 1987 Kim
Stanley ROBINSON wrote in FOUNDATION: THE REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION that
sf was "an historical literature . . . In every sf narrative, there is an
explicit or implicit fictional history that connects the period depicted

to our present moment, or to some moment of our past." Commenting in 1992
in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION on this formulation, John Clute
suggested that it underlined the sense US sf conveyed of being connected
to the linear, time-bound logic of the Western World.Unfortunately, the
clearest (or most aggressive) definitions are often the least definitive,
although many sceptics have been attracted to Damon Knight's "Science
fiction is what we point to when we say it" or Norman SPINRAD's "Science
fiction is anything published as science fiction". Both these
"definitions" have a serious point, of course: that, whatever else sf may
be, it is certainly a publishing category, and in the real world this is
of more pragmatic importance than anything the theorists may have to say
about it. On the other hand, the label "sf" on a book is wholly subject to
the whims of publishers and editors, and the label has certainly appeared
on some very unlikely books. An additional complication arises because
some writers fight hard to avoid the label, perhaps feeling that it might
deleteriously affect their sales and/or reputations (e.g., Kurt VONNEGUT
Jr, John WYNDHAM). Publishers apply similar cautionary measures to
potential bestsellers, which are seldom labelled as sf even when that is
exactly what they are (although this has been less true in the post- STAR
WARS period than in, say, the 1970s), on the grounds that genre sf when so
labelled, while normally selling steadily, rarely enters the bestseller
class.There is really no good reason to expect that a workable definition
of sf will ever be established. None has been, so far. In practice, there
is much consensus about what sf looks like in its centre; it is only at
the fringes that most of the fights take place. And it is still not
possible to describe sf as a homogeneous form of writing. Sf is arguably
not a genre in the strict sense at all - and why should it be?
Historically, it grew from the merging of many distinct genres, from
utopias to space adventures. Instinctively, however, we may feel that, if
sf ever loses its sense of the fluidity of the future and the excitement
of our scientific attempts to understand our Universe - in short, as more
conservative fans would put it with enthusiasm though conceptual
vagueness, its SENSE OF WONDER - then it may no longer be worth fighting
over. If things fall apart and the centre cannot hold, mere structural
fabulation may be loosed upon the world!For a listing of many definitions,
including some of those referred to but not actually quoted above, a good
source is the "Science Fiction" entry in Critical Terms for Science
Fiction and Fantasy (1986) by Gary K. WOLFE. [BS/JC/PN]
DEFOE, DANIEL
(1660-1731) UK merchant, professional spy and writer, extremely prolific
author of many works of various kinds, though the huge canon of unsigned
works attributed to him has in recent years been convincingly diminished.
He is best known today for his novel The Life and Strange Surprizing
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (1719) and its sequels,
which, while not sf, provided a fundamental model for many sf stories (
ROBINSONADE). Of interest to students of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION is The
Consolidator, or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World of the Moon
(1705; various savagely cut edns under vts 1705-41), in which a mechanical
spirit-driven flying machine, the Consolidator, enables various satirical
( SATIRE) observations to be made from a lunar viewpoint. A Journal of the

Plague Year (1722), in effect a historical novel set in 1665, a year DD
could presumably barely remember, is a prototype of the DISASTER novel.
Some associational short work can be found in Tales of Piracy, Crime, and
Ghosts (coll 1945 US). [JC/PN]See also: MACHINES; MOON; SPACE FLIGHT.
DEFONTENAY, C(HARLEMAGNE) I(SCHIR)
(1814-1856) French writer whose Star, ou Psi de Cassiopee (1854; trans P.
J. Sokolowski as Star 1975 US, with intro by Pierre VERSINS) describes the
discovery in the Himalayas of a box full of information about life on
another planet. The biological and anthropological speculation is
interesting; the translation lacks the inventive fluency of the original.
[JC/PN]See also: STARS.
deFORD, MIRIAM ALLEN
(1888-1975) US writer, a newspaper reporter for many years; probably
known better for her many mystery stories (some award-winning) than for
the sf of her later years. Her publications also include such nonfiction
as The Real Bonnie and Clyde (1968) and her work as contributing editor to
The Humanist. She edited Space, Time and Crime (anth 1964), a collection
of sf stories with mystery elements. As an author of sf stories in her own
right, she published over 30 items - beginning with "Last Generation" in
1946 for Harper's Magazine - in various magazines, though most of the
stories in her two collections, Xenogenesis (coll 1969) and Elsewhere,
Elsewhen, Elsehow (coll 1971), had first appeared in FSF. Her examinations
of themes such as nuclear devastation and sexual roles is conducted in a
crisp, clearcut style that sometimes lacks grace but never vigour. [JC]See
also: WOMEN SF WRITERS.
DEGAL, ALDION
[r] YUGOSLAVIA.
De GRAEFF, ALLEN
Pseudonym of Albert Paul Blaustein (1921- ), professor of law at Rutgers
from 1955, under which he edited Human and Other Beings (anth 1963). He
was uncredited co-compiler of three anthologies with his friend Basil
DAVENPORT: Deals with the Devil (anth 1958), Invisible Men (anth 1960) and
Famous Monster Tales (anth 1967). [PN]
De HAVEN, TOM
(1949- ) US writer who began publishing sf with his first novel, Freaks'
Amour (1979), set in 1988 among a group of MUTANTS created by an atomic
mishap, and following their lives as itinerant performers. A similar
inclination to place a large connected cast in a surreally threatening
world impels the otherwise very different Funny Papers (1985), a kind of
urban fantasy/alternate history set at the end of the 19th century in a
magic-realist New York ( ALTERNATE WORLDS; FABULATION) and concentrating
on the newspaper business at the point when COMIC strips were first
becoming widely popular. In the long third section of Sunburn Lake (coll
of linked stories 1988), TDH applied his easy fabulistic manner to
21st-century New Jersey. Towards the end of the 1980s, however, TDH gave
some sense that he was dissipating his energies, producing a sharp but
unremarkable tie in U.S.S.A. Book 1 * (1987), a juvenile, Joe Gosh (1988),
which may have been SHARECROPPED, and Neuromancer: The Graphic Novel:

Volume 1 * (graph 1989) illus Bruce Jensen. But the fantasy sequence
Chronicles of the King's Tramp represented a significant return of energy:
Walker of Worlds (1990),The End-of-Everything Man (1991), and The Last
Human (1992) traverse familiar territory - a sequence of PARALLEL WORLDS
nested into an ontological hierarchy - with panache and knowing clarity.
[JC]Other works: Jersey Luck (1980), associational.See also: CHILDREN'S
SF.
DEIGHTON, LEN
Working name of Leonard Cyril Deighton (1929- ), UK writer of spy novels,
cookery books and some other nonfiction, still perhaps best known for his
early espionage thrillers, such as The Ipcress File (1962), several of
which feature the same undisciplined secret agent. The fourth volume of
the series, Billion-Dollar Brain (1966), is set in an indeterminate NEAR
FUTURE and deals with a super- COMPUTER and a private preventive war
launched on Russia across the ice from Finland by a mad tycoon; it was
filmed as Billion Dollar Brain (1967) dir Ken Russell. In SS-GB (1978) the
UK suffers German occupation from 1941 ( HITLER WINS). [JC]
DELAIRE, JEAN
Pseudonym of Mrs Muirson Blake (? -? ), whose date of birth has been
listed as an improbably late 1888, editor of Christian Theosophist. JD's
Around a Distant Star (1904) has two young fellows travelling on an
electrically propelled FASTER-THAN-LIGHT spacecraft to a planet about 1900
light years away, so that, after avoiding carnivorous plants, they can
witness through a supertelescope the death and resurrection of Christ.
[PN]Other works: A Pixie's Adventures in Humanland (1926).
DELANEY, JOSEPH H(ENRY)
(1932- ) US lawyer and writer, associated through most of his career with
ASF, for which magazine he began publishing sf with "Brainchild" in 1982 (
APES AND CAVEMEN). He made considerable impact with his second story, "In
the Face of My Enemy"(1983), which became part of his first solo novel, In
the Face of my Enemy (fixup 1985), a SPACE OPERA featuring an immortal
shape-changer. His first novel, Valentina: Soul in Sapphire (fixup 1984)
with Marc STIEGLER, rather more grippingly depicts the efforts of the
eponymous AI to gain memory space in networked mainframes across the
world, and to prove her selfhood. Lords Temporal (1987) is a TIME-TRAVEL
tale of some ingenuity. [JC]See also: COMPUTERS.
DELANY, SAMUEL R(AY)
(1942- ) US author and critic, one of the most influential and most
discussed within the genre; he has taught at several universities from
1975, and from 1988 has been professor of Comparative Literature at the
University of Massachusetts. He has a somewhat mixed cultural background:
he is Black, born and raised in Harlem, New York, and therefore familiar
with the Black ghetto; but his father, a wealthy funeral-parlour
proprietor, had the family brought up in privileged, upper-middle-class
circumstances - SRD was educated at the prestigious Bronx High School of
Science (although he left college after only one term). This double
background is evident in all his writing.He became famous as one of the
youthful prodigies of sf. Unusually, his first published sf was a novel,

published when he was 20: The Jewels of Aptor (1962 dos; restored 1968;
rev 1971 UK); the later versions restore the third of the book which had
originally been excised at ACE BOOKS. This was followed by the The Fall of
the Towers trilogy: Captives of the Flame (1963 dos; rev vt Out of the
Dead City 1968 UK), The Towers of Toron (1964 dos; rev 1968 UK) and City
of a Thousand Suns (1965; rev 1969 UK), all assembled as The Fall of the
Towers (omni of rev texts 1970). Another early novel was The Ballad of
Beta-2 (1965 dos; text corrected 1977).The early novels had certain
similarities, and some of the themes initiated in them have recurred
regularly in SRD's work. The plot structure is almost invariably that of a
quest, or some form of FANTASTIC VOYAGE. Physically and psychologically
damaged participants are common. An economical use of colourful detail,
often initially surprising but logical when considered, is used to flesh
out the social background of the stories. There is an interest in
MYTHOLOGY, taking the form of metaphorical allusion to existing myths or
of an investigation of the way new myths are formed; this is central to
The Ballad of Beta-2, in which a student anthropologist investigates the
facts behind a folk song garnered from a primitive Earth culture which has
gone voyaging in a fleet of GENERATION STARSHIPS. This novel also shows an
interest in problems of COMMUNICATIONS and LINGUISTICS which was to become
central to SRD's work. The Fall of the Towers, too, is full of colourful
cultural speculation, although its melodramatic story of war, mutations,
mad computers and a malign cosmic intelligence is moderately conventional.
The original three volumes of The Fall of the Towers were set in the same
post- HOLOCAUST Earth as The Jewels of Aptor; however, the linking
references were removed in the revised edition.SRD published two more
novels in 1966: Empire Star (1966 dos; text corrected 1977) and BABEL-17
(1966; rev 1969 UK). Both, especially the latter, which won a NEBULA,
reveal a notable advance in sophistication. BABEL-17, whose chapters carry
epigraphs from the work of SRD's wife (1961-80), the poet Marilyn Hacker
(1942- ), is about language, and has a poet heroine. In a future galactic
society, radio broadcasts in an apparently alien language are received;
they are thought to be connected with sabotage and alien invasion. Much of
the novel is to do with cracking the language. SRD believes that our
PERCEPTION of reality is partly formed by our languages; the invention of
different societies in this novel, more intense and imaginative than his
previous work, is mostly rendered in terms of thought- and
speech-patterns.In 1967 he began publishing short stories also. Algis
BUDRYS (Gal Jan 1969) called him "the best science-fiction writer in the
world". He was generally seen as being in the forefront of the NEW WAVE,
emphasizing cultural speculation, the soft sciences, psychology and
mythology over technology and HARD SF. The short story "Aye, and Gomorrah
. . ." (1967) won a Nebula, and the novelette "Time Considered as a Helix
of Semi-Precious Stones" (1969) won both HUGO and Nebula. These two, with
BABEL-17 and THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION, his other Nebula-winning novel,
can be found in his The Complete Nebula Award-Winning Fiction (omni 1986).
It can be argued that THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION (1967; 1 chapter restored
1968 UK) is his most satisfying work, along with the next novel, NOVA
(1968; text corrected 1969) and the novella The Star Pit (1967; 1988 chap
dos). The latter can be found in SRD's excellent first collection
DRIFTGLASS (coll 1971) together with all of his best shorter work of the

period. THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION is remarkably compressed and densely
patterned with allusive imagery. Earth has lost its humans (how is never
made clear) and their corporeal form has been taken on by a race of aliens
who, in an attempt to make coherent sense of the human artefacts among
which they live, take on human traditions, too. Avatars of Ringo Starr,
Billy the Kid and Christ appear; the hero, a Black musician who plays
tunes on his murderous machete, is Orpheus and Theseus. The book is a tour
de force, though a cryptic one, since the bafflement of the protagonists
trying to make sense of their transformed lives tends to transfer to the
reader. SRD's own diaries provide part of the text of the novel. NOVA is
the Prometheus story and the Grail story combined in an ebulliently
inventive space opera/quest; the fire from the heavens, the glowing heart
of the Grail, is found only at the heart of an exploding nova. Passages of
high rhetoric are mingled (as they often are, too, in the work of SRD's
contemporary Roger ZELAZNY) with relaxed slang and thieves' argot. The
book features a characteristic SRD protagonist,
thecriminal/outcast/musician/artist whose literary genealogy goes back
through Jean Genet (1910-1986) all the way to Francois Villon (1431-1485).
The variety of cultures in these and other novels by SRD has the effect of
making morality and ethics seem relative, pluralistic. Divers forms of
bizarre human behaviour, many of which would have been seen as antisocial
in US society of the time, emerge as natural in the circumstances created.
The Star Pit, too, is a highly structured work; its central image is that
of ant-colony/cage/trap/micro-ecology, and escape is seen to be intimately
linked with emotional mutilation, even psychosis.SRD's next novel - not
sf, though with elements of the fantastic - was the pornographic The Tides
of Lust (1973; vt Equinox 1994); the title was not his. (A second
pornographic novel, Hogg, remains unpublished, though The Mad Man (1994),
which continues in the same vein, has seen print.) It is likely to shock
most readers in its evocation of extreme sado-masochism in imagery which
is sometimes poetic and often disgusting - and so intended - perhaps as a
Baudelairean ritual of passage. It was, indeed, in the mid-1970s that it
became generally known that SRD was bisexual. Certainly, all his later
work is deeply concerned with the cultural mechanisms - actual,
theoretical and sometimes labyrinthine - of eroticism and love. Much light
is thrown on the relationship between SRD's own sexuality and the sf he
wrote in the 1960s by his much later book, The Motion of Light in Water:
Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village 1957-65 (1988; exp vt
The Motion of Light in Water: East Village Sex and Science Fiction
Writing: 1960-65; with The Column at the Market's Edge 1990 UK). This
book, frank and priapic to the verge of the scabrous, won a Hugo for Best
Non-Fiction.SRD's next two novels were DHALGREN (1975; 6th impression has
many typographical errors rectified; text further corrected 1977) and
Triton (1976). After a six-year gap in which SRD had published little or
no sf, DHALGREN was controversial. It is very long, and his critics see it
as perilously self-indulgent and flabby, lacking the old economy of
effect. It became a bestseller, however, and other critics saw it as his
most successfully ambitious work to date. An anonymous youth, the Kid,
comes to the violent, nihilist city of Bellona, where order has fled and
there are two moons in the sky, though the rest of the NEAR-FUTURE USA is
apparently normal. He becomes an artist, couples and fights, and writes a

book that might be DHALGREN before leaving the city. The opening sentence
completes the unfinished final sentence and an enigmatic circle. It is a
book primarily about the possibilities and difficulties of a youth
culture, and partly about being a writer. Triton is more traditionally
structured, but in some ways more sophisticated. It presents a series of
future societies differentiated mainly along sexual lines; the male
protagonist, who begins by displaying a rather insensitive, traditional
machismo, ultimately chooses to become a woman, but remains alienated.
Triton (a moon of Neptune) is an "ambiguous heterotopia" with a
bewildering variety of available lifestyles. The book poses interesting
questions about sexuality, and also about freedom of choice.Since then SRD
has published one singleton novel, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
(1984), and four books in the Neveryon series, which masquerades as
SWORD-AND-SORCERY fantasy: Tales of Neveryon (coll of linked stories 1979;
rev 1988); Neveryona (1983; rev 1989 UK); Flight from Neveryon (coll of
linked stories 1985; rev 1989 UK) and The Bridge of Lost Desire (coll of
linked stories 1987; rev vt Return to Neveryon 1989 UK). Stars in My
Pocket Like Grains of Sand, the first volume of a projected diptych, is an
exotic piece set in a galactic civilization. A complex narrative again
asks questions about the arbitrary and parochial nature of our ethical
expectations, using various forms of enjoyed degradation to make the
point. It is probably SRD's most important work of the 1980s. The Neveryon
books adopt a similar strategy of culture-building, and play both with and
against the readers' expectations. They are, in fact, sf in the sense that
they invent alien societies, though technically they are FANTASY, being
set in a distant, fantastic, pre-industrial past, and to a degree act as
both critique and re-creation of the Mighty-Thewed Barbarian genre. SRD's
treatment of the idea of bondage, for example, is infinitely more
sophisticated, and somewhat more elusive, than that of, say, John NORMAN
in the Gor books. Many ideas are explored, from the erotic to the
economic, the concept of slavery appearing in both these idea-sets, and
the slave-collar itself coming to be the prime erotically charged symbol;
the later volumes make clear reference to the AIDS epidemic. Though
allusive, ambitious, self-reflexive, seriously intended books, they do
return in style to something reminiscent of the wittier, more economic,
more playful SRD of the 1960s, and are among the more accessible works of
his past two decades.During the six-year hiatus (from about 1969) in his
own fiction, SRD began to pay more attention to other people's. Much of
the resulting critical and semiotic writing has been collected in four
books: The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction
(coll 1977), The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction
by Thomas M. Disch - Angouleme (1978), Starboard Wine: More Notes on the
Language of Science Fiction (coll 1984) and The Straits of Messina (coll
1989). Delany's criticism is often post-structuralist and to a degree
POSTMODERNIST, very aware of a contemporary literary context that goes
well beyond sf, sometimes very wordy, but important in its persistent
attempt to describe sf in terms of the protocols required for reading it.
As SRD said in his acceptance speech after receiving the 1985 PILGRIM
AWARD for excellence in sf criticism, "We must learn to read science
fiction as science fiction." The second of the four books, an analysis of
the structure and images of the short story "Angouleme" (1971; later

incorporated in 334 [fixup 1972]) by Thomas M. DISCH, is written with a
spectacularly microscopic fastidiousness. The Straits of Messina collects
mostly pieces by SRD that were originally published as by K. Leslie
Steiner, a pseudonym he uses when writing about his own work. The first
and third books, essays on the language of sf, are perhaps of the most
general interest. A fifth critical book, Wagner/Artaud: A Play of 19th and
20th Century Critical Fictions (1988 chap), does not bear directly on sf;
though a sixth, Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science
Fiction, and Some Comics (coll 1994) contained material of genre interest;
With Marilyn Hacker SRD edited a series of original anthologies, QUARK,
preferring the term "speculative fiction" to "science fiction", and
emphasizing experimental writing. There were 4 vols 1970-71.With hindsight
it can be hypothesized that SRD has had different audiences at different
points of his career: a very wide, traditional sf readership up to and
including DHALGREN, which sold nearly a million copies in the USA alone;
and a narrower, perhaps more intellectual, campus-based readership
thereafter. There is no doubt that by the 1980s his fiction (and
criticism) had become less accessible, and the real debate about his
career must be whether or not he gained more than he lost with his
adoption of a denser style towards the later 1970s. At this point his
fiction also began to include more passages of obviously polemical intent,
some of whose thrust, especially in their icons of abasement, did not
carry conviction for all readers. But, though admirers of SRD's earlier
work tend to be heavily polarized in their views of his later work, he by
no means disappeared from popular notice. The first two volumes of the
Neveryon series sold around quarter of a million each. Lower sales on
subsequent editions may have been partly due to resistance in the
publishing and book-distribution worlds to his increasingly and explicitly
controversial texts. [PN]Other works: Empire: A Visual Novel (graph 1978),
a GRAPHIC NOVEL written by SRD and executed by Howard V. CHAYKIN; Heavenly
Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love (1979), autobiographical, about
life in a commune in New York; Distant Stars (coll 1981), which includes
Empire Star and contains 3 stories not included in DRIFTGLASS; We in Some
Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line (1968 FSF; 1990 chap dos);
They Fly at Ciron (fixup 1993), a text based on "They Fly at Ciron" (1971
FSF) with James SALLIS, plus other material by SRD alone, all thoroughly
revised.As Editor: Nebula Award Winners 13 (anth 1980).About the author:
The Delany Intersection: Samuel R. Delany Considered as a Writer of
Semi-Precious Words (1977 chap) by George Edgar SLUSSER; Worlds out of
Words: The SF Novels of Samuel R. Delany (1979) by Douglas BARBOUR; Samuel
R. Delany: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, 1962-1979 (1980) by
Michale W. Peplow and Robert S. Bravard; Samuel R. Delany (1982 chap) by
J.B. Weedman; Samuel R. Delany (1985) by Seth MCEVOY.See also: ARTS;
CHILDREN IN SF; CITIES; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT;
CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; CYBERPUNK; CYBORGS;
DEVOLUTION;
FABULATION; FANTASY; FAR FUTURE; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GAMES AND SPORTS;
GENETICENGINEERING; GOTHIC SF; HEROES; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND
SCIENCE
FICTION ; MILFORD SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' CONFERENCE; MUSIC; MUTANTS;
NEW

WORLDS; OUTER PLANETS; PARANOIA; PSYCHOLOGY; SCIENCE FANTASY; SEX;
SOCIOLOGY; SPACE OPERA; SPECULATIVE FICTION; UTOPIAS; WOMEN AS
PORTRAYED
IN SCIENCE FICTION.
DELAP, RICHARD
(1942-1987) US editor, reviewer and writer who entered the sf world as a
fan and soon began to publish book reviews, beginning with pieces in the
FANZINE Granfalloon and moving on to a column in AMAZING STORIES during
the 1960s. In Delap's Fantasy and Science Fiction Review Magazine he
created a valuable review organ, whose folding was regretted. He co-edited
with Terry DOWLING and Gil Lamont The Essential Ellison (coll 1987). His
first novel, Shapes (1987) with Walt LEE, is a horror tale about an
extraterrestrial shape-changer. [JC]
DELICATESSAN
Film (1990). Constellation/UCG/Hachette Premiere with the collaboration
of Sofinergie/Sofinergie 2/Investimage 2/Investimage 3. Directed and
written by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro; starring Dominique Pinon,
Marie-Laure Dougnac, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Karin Viard, Ticky Holgado,
Anne-Marie Pisani, Jacques Mathou, Rufus. 99 mins. Colour.This French film
is an ABSURDIST fable about life after the HOLOCAUST in a small, decrepit
town. The setting is enclosed; little is intimated about life outside, or
the nature of the apocalypse that must have occurred. The local butcher
(Dreyfus) does not let his various eccentric tenants-one of whom builds
gracefully cranky suicide machines - starve; he hires transients as
handymen then kills them for the meat; but the new handyman, a one-time
circus clown Louison (Pinon), is attractive to the butcher's short-sighted
daughter (Dougnac).She intervenes, as do the local underground vegetarian
terrorists, the Troglodists. The film is surreal, grotesque, but, given
its subject matter, amazingly gentle and forgiving, and curiously
accepting of the fact that society is running down completely and there
seems no way, or even desire, to wind it up again. Owing much to French
pop culture (its more intellect facets,including up-market comics like
METAL HURLANT) this film soon became a cult favourite,overseas as well as
in France. [PN]
DeLILLO, DON
(1936- ) US writer who very rapidly established a reputation for
brilliance and seriousness. His fourth novel, Ratner's Star (1976),
subjects its sf material - it examines the personal and cognitive cruces
surrounding the decipherment of a message from the star of the title - to
a formidable array of contemporary intellectual procedures, while
presenting its numerous characters as in-depth portraits of the
fundamental obsessions at the heart of contemporary US intellectual life.
The book stands as a model (a rather humbling one for GENRE SF) of the
extraordinary complexity of response that any genuine message from the
stars would (it is reasonable to assume) elicit. Several DD novels - like
Great Jones Street (1973) and White Noise (1985) - subject their
protagonists to sf-like revelations of the nature of reality through
psychotopic drugs and devices; and the game of terror played in The Names
(1982) smacks of OULIPO. Throughout his career, DD has been an author of

FABULATIONS, the burden of which has been to expose his characters to
unbearable images of the world we live in. [JC]About the author:
Introducing Don DeLillo (anth 1991) ed Frank Lentricchia.
De LINT, CHARLES (HENRI DIEDERICK HOEFSMIT)
(1951- ) Canadian musician and writer, born in the Netherlands, who
established himself during the 1980s as a prolific FANTASY author and as a
significant and original contributor to the subgenre of contemporary
fantasy, beginning with "The Fane of the Grey Rose" in Swords Against
Darkness IV (anth 1979) ed Andrew J. OFFUTT. Some of CDL's short work has
appeared as by Tanuki Aki, Henri Cuiscard, Jan Penalurick, Cerin
Songweaver and Wendelessen, and one horror novel, Angel of Darkness (1990
US), was as by Samuel M. Key. CDL's output (see list below), which is both
various and polished, merits extended consideration; and the urban fantasy
sequence centred on the imaginary city of Newford (which resembles Ottawa)
is of interest, and includes Uncle Dobbin's Parrot Fair (1987 IASFM; 1991
chap US), The Stone Drum (1989 chap), Ghosts of Wind and Shadow (1990
chap), Paperjack (1991 chap US) and Our Lady of the Harbour (1991 chap US)
all assembled with other work as Dreams Underfoot: The Newford Collection
(omni 1993 US); Mr.Truepenny's Book Emporium and Gallery (1992 chap US),
The Bone Woman (1992 chap), The Wishing Well (1993 chap US) and Coyote
Stories (1993 chap), all assembled with other work as The Ivory and the
Horn: A Newford Collection (omni 1995 US); and Memory and Dream (1994 US).
But he is mentioned here primarily for his one sf novel, Svaha (1989 US),
a NEAR-FUTURE tale set in enclaves established by high-tech Native
Americans to fend off the barbarian world outside. A kind of sweetish
simplicity sometimes overloads his fantasy tales, especially the earlier
ones; it might be surmised that a writer of CDL's energy and ambition may
increasingly find that genre-crossing provides him with a necessary
stimulus and threat. [JC]Other works: The Oak King's Daughter (1979 chap),
published, like several other short texts here listed, by CDL's own
Triskell Press; The Moon is a Meadow (1980 chap); De Grijze Roose ["The
Grey Rose"] (coll trans Johan Vanhecke et al. 1983 Netherlands); The
Calendar of the Trees (1984 chap); Moonheart: A Romance (1984 US) and its
sequels Ascian in Rose (1987 chap US), Westlin Wind (1989 chap
US),Ghostwood (1990) and Merlin Dreams in Moondream Wood (1992 chap), all
four sequels assembled as Spiritwalk (omni 1992 US); The Riddle of the
Wren (1984 US); The Three Plushketeers and the Garden Slugs (1985 chap); A
Pattern of Silver Strings (1981 chap), the first volume in the projected
Legend of Cerin Songweaver sequence which continues withGlass Eyes and
Cotton Strings (1982 chap), In Mask and Motley (1983 chap), Laughter in
the Leaves (1984 chap), The Badger in the Bag (1985 chap), The Harp of the
Grey Rose (1979 as "The Fane of The Gray Rose"; exp 1985 US), And the
Rafters Were Ringing (1986 chap) and The Lark in the Morning (1987 chap);
Mulengro: A Romany Tale (1985 US); Yarrow: An Autumn Tale (1986 US); The
Lark in the Morning (1987 chap); Jack, the Giant-Killer: The Jack of
Kinrowan: A Novel of Urban Faerie (1987 US); The Drowned Man's Reel (1988
chap); Greenmantle (1988 US); Wolf Moon (1988 US); a contribution to the
SHARED-WORLD Borderland enterprise run by Terri WINDLING, Berlin * (1989
chap); two ties - Philip Jose Farmer's The Dungeon, #3: The Valley of
Thunder * (1989 US) and #5: The Hidden City * (1990 US); The Fair in Emain

Macha (1985 Space ? exp 1990 dos US); The Dreaming Place (1990
US); Drink Down the Moon: A Novel of Urban Faerie (1990 US); The Little
Country (1991 US); Cafe Purgatorium (coll 1991 US) with stories,
separately, by Dana Anderson and Ray Garton; Hedgework and Guessery (coll
1991 US); ; Into the Green (1993); The Wild WoodSee also: CANADA.
de l'ISLE ADAM, VILLIERS
[r] VILLIERS DE L'ISLE ADAM.
DELIUS, ANTHONY (RONALD ST. MARTIN)
(1916- ) South African poet who eventually moved to the UK. His SATIRE on
South African POLITICS and apartheid, The Last Division (1959), sends a
1980s Union Parliament to a Hell and Devil closely resembling those in
Wyndham LEWIS's The Childermass (1928), where they re-create, under their
Premier's inspiration, the social system they left behind. The swingeing
satirical power of this book-length poem is remarkable. Its views on South
Africa's future contrast markedly with those expressed by Garry ALLIGHAM
and are comparable with those of Arthur KEPPEL-JONES, though sharper. Less
interestingly, The Day Natal Took Off (1963) depicts that state's
secession from South Africa. [JC]
DELL, DUDLEY
[s] Horace L. GOLD.
DEL MARTIA, ASTRON
House name invented by publisher Stephen FRANCES for his own publishing
house, and used there by John Russell FEARN on The Trembling World (1949).
The name was then sold on to Gaywood Press, which used it for three more
tales: Dawn of Darkness (1951 chap), Space Pirates (1951) and Interstellar
Espionage (1952 chap). The latter story features a security officer called
Dog who appears also in Spawn of Space (1951) by Franz Harkon, an
unattributed pseudonym. A fifth ADM story was advertised but never
published, although the name was revived by Frances in a reprint of his
One Against Time (1954 as by Hank JANSON; 1969 as by ADM). [SH/PN]
DELMONT, JOSEPH
Pseudonym of German writer Karl Pick (1873-1935), whose Die Stadt unter
dem Meer (1925; trans anon as The Submarine City 1930 UK) features the
construction by U-boat crews of an UNDER-THE-SEA city from which it is
intended to conquer the world. Some of the stories assembled in English as
The Dead City (coll trans anon 1932 UK) are sf, as is Der Ritt auf dem
Funken (1928; trans anon as Mistress of the Skies 1932 UK). The
protagonists of The Rock in the Sea (trans 1934) - the German original has
not been identified - discover unknown forms of life on a volcanic island
which has risen from the sea. [JC]
del PICCHIA, MENOTTI
[r] LATIN AMERICA.
DELRAY, CHESTER
Francis G. RAYER.
del REY, JUDY-LYNN
(1943-1986) US editor. She began her career in 1965 with GALAXY SCIENCE

FICTION, becoming associate editor in 1969. Her predecessor was Lester DEL
REY; they married in 1971. She moved to BALLANTINE BOOKS in 1973, bringing
her husband in on the operation in 1974, and in 1977 was instrumental in
forming the Del Rey imprint - named for her - of Ballantine (itself owned
by Random House). As editor-in-chief of DEL REY BOOKS, she demonstrated an
extraordinary gift for marketing sf and fantasy to an unprecedentedly
large audience, and her releases often hit the US bestseller lists. At the
time of her death, she had become the dominant figure in US sf and fantasy
publishing. Given her physically taxing genetic disability - she was an
achondroplastic dwarf, and frequently in pain - the range of her
accomplishments in the driven world of New York publishing seemed all the
more remarkable.J-LDR was also responsible for the STELLAR original
anthology series: Stellar 1 (anth 1974), Stellar Short Novels (anth 1976),
Stellar Science-Fiction Stories #2 (anth 1976), #3 (anth 1977), #4 (anth
1978), #5 (anth 1980), #6 (anth 1981) and #7 (anth 1981). [JC]See also:
HUGO; PUBLISHING.
del REY, LESTER
Working name of US writer Ramon Felipe San Juan Mario Silvio Enrico Smith
Heathcourt-Brace Sierra y Alvarez-del Rey y de los Verdes (1915-1993). His
father was a poor sharecropper of part-Spanish extraction, and LDR's
education proceeded in fits and starts before dwindling away after two
years in college. After holding a variety of temporary jobs he began to
write in the late 1930s, his first published work being "The Faithful" for
ASF in 1938. This was rapidly followed by his classic ROBOT story, "Helen
O'Loy" (1938). Many of his early stories are remarkable for their
sentimentality, but the best was the unsentimental suspense story Nerves
(1942 ASF; exp 1956; rev 1976), about an accident in a NUCLEAR-POWER plant
and the struggle to avert a major catastrophe. He stepped up his output
after becoming a full-time professional writer in 1950, but this was
accompanied by a decline in average quality. He produced several juvenile
novels, some as Philip St John (a name he first used in 1939). He wrote
also as Erik van Lhin, John Alvarez, Marion Henry, Philip James, Charles
SATTERFIELD and Edson MCCANN (the last two pseudonyms being used on
collaborations with Frederik POHL, who also used Satterfield on some solo
stories). LDR's most notable works of the 1950s and 1960s were: Preferred
Risk (1955 with Pohl, writing together as McCann; reprinted 1980 as by
Pohl and LDR); the ultra-tough novel of COLONIZATION Police Your Planet
(1953 Science Fiction Adventures; cut 1956 as by Erik van Lhin; rev 1975
as by LDR and Erik van Lhin); and an early novel on the theme of
OVERPOPULATION, The Eleventh Commandment (1962); rev 1970). The second of
the short-lived "Galaxy Magabooks" ( GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS), The
Sky is Falling/Badge of Infamy (1963 dos), featured revised versions of
two magazine novellas: The Sky is Falling (1954 Beyond as "No More Stars"
with Pohl, writing together as Charles Satterfield; rev 1963 for the
Magabook; 1974 dos) and Badge of Infamy (1959 Satellite; rev 1963 for the
Magabook; 1973 dos). Some novels which appeared under his name in 1966-8
were actually written, from LDR's extensive outlines, by Paul W. FAIRMAN;
these include The Runaway Robot (1965), Rocket from Infinity (1966), The
Infinite Worlds of Maybe (1966), The Scheme of Things (1966), Tunnel
through Time (1966), Siege Perilous (1966; vt The Man without a Planet

1969) and Prisoners of Space (1968). His most recent solo novel was
Pstalemate (1971), about the predicament of a man who discovers that he
has PSI POWERS, in the knowledge that all psi-powered individuals go
insane. Weeping May Tarry (1978), as by LDR with Raymond F. JONES, is a
novel by Jones extrapolating the theme of LDR'S "For I Am a Jealous
People" (Star Short Novels anth 1954 ed Frederik Pohl).From the late
1940s, as well as doing a considerable amount of writing, LDR was actively
involved with various business and editorial projects. In the early 1950s
he was editor of FANTASY MAGAZINE, ROCKET STORIES (under the house name
Wade KAEMPFERT), SPACE SCIENCE FICTION and, for a time, SCIENCE FICTION
ADVENTURES, leaving all these positions after a dispute in 1953. He edited
an anthology of juvenile sf, The Year After Tomorrow (anth 1954) with
Cecile Matschat and Carl Carmer, and one of the many series of The Best
Science Fiction Stories of the Year - #1 (anth 1972), #2 (anth 1973), #3
(anth 1974), #4 (anth 1975) and #5 (anth 1976). He selected the GARLAND
Library of Science Fiction reprint series (45 vols, all 1975) and compiled
Fantastic Science Fiction Art (1975). After the death of P. Schuyler
MILLER in 1974 he took over ASF's book-review column (he had previously
written reviews for Rocket Stories under the pseudonym Kenneth Wright, and
had done occasional reviews for other magazines under his own name,
notably IF in 1968-73). His fourth wife, Judy-Lynn DEL REY (nee Benjamin),
was for some time on the staff of Gal and its companions - where he served
as features editor 1969-74 - and became sf editor for BALLANTINE BOOKS in
the mid-1970s; LDR joined the company in 1977, when it began issuing its
sf and fantasy lines under the imprint DEL REY BOOKS - named in honour of
her - and he continued to operate these lines alone after his wife's death
in 1986 until his retirement at the end of 1991. His history of sf, The
World of Science Fiction: 1926-1976 - The History of a Subculture (1979),
focuses narrowly on the US pulp tradition.LDR was a versatile but rather
erratic writer who never fulfilled his early promise. His best work
appears in the collections . . . And Some Were Human (coll 1948; with
"Nerves" cut, rev vt Tales of Soaring Science Fiction from . . . And Some
Were Human 1961) and Gods and Golems (coll 1973); much of this is
reprinted in The Best of Lester del Rey (coll 1978). There is an
interesting autobiographical commentary in The Early del Rey (coll 1975).
LDR was given the NEBULA Grand Master award for 1990. [BS]Other works:
Marooned on Mars (1952 juvenile); Rocket Jockey (1952 juvenile, as by
Philip St John; vt Rocket Pilot UK; reprinted 1978 as by LDR); Attack from
Atlantis (1953), a juvenile; Battle on Mercury (1953) as by Erik van Lhin,
a juvenile; the Moon sequence of juvenile tales, comprising Step to the
Stars (1954), Mission to the Moon (1956) and Moon of Mutiny (1961);
Rockets to Nowhere (1954) as by Philip St John, a juvenile; Robots and
Changelings (coll 1957); The Cave of Spears (1957); Day of the Giants
(1950 Fantastic Adventures as "When the World Tottered"; 1959); Outpost of
Jupiter (1963), a juvenile; Mortals and Monsters (coll 1965); The Best of
Hal Clement (coll 1979), ed; Once Upon a Time: A Collection of Modern
Fairy Tales (anth 1991) with Risa Kessler.About the author: "Lester del
Rey" in Seekers of Tomorrow (1967) by Sam MOSKOWITZ.See also: ALIENS;
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; COSMOLOGY; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT;
DISCOVERY AND
INVENTION; DYSTOPIAS; ESP; EVOLUTION; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; GAMES AND

SPORTS; GOLDEN AGE OF SF; HUGO; MARS; MERCURY; MOON; MUTANTS; ORIGIN OF
MAN; PREDICTION; PUBLISHING; RELIGION; SATIRE; SOCIAL DARWINISM;
SPACESHIPS; VENUS.
DEL REY BOOKS
US paperback imprint, founded 1977, a subsidiary of BALLANTINE BOOKS,
itself a part of Random House. The imprint was named by then-Ballantine
editor Judy-Lynn DEL REY for her husband Lester DEL REY; the original
Ballantine imprint is now little used for sf. Judy-Lynn, who died in 1986,
was editor-in-chief and, from 1982, publisher; Lester, the very successful
fantasy editor, retired from the company in 1991 at the age of 76. DRB is
an sf/fantasy imprint, though it is in fantasy that it has had the
majority of its commercial successes, which have been very substantial.
Its fantasy authors, some of whom began their career with DRB, have
included Piers ANTHONY, James P. BLAYLOCK, Terry Brooks, Stephen
DONALDSON, David Eddings, Barbara HAMBLY and Katherine KURTZ. Its sf
authors have included Arthur C. CLARKE, Anne MCCAFFREY, Larry NIVEN,
Frederik POHL and Charles SHEFFIELD. DRB is an important sf/fantasy
publisher in terms of big-selling books; it has also published a number of
good books. The two categories overlap. [PN]
DELUGE
Film (1933). RKO. Dir Felix E. Feist, starring Sidney Blackmer, Peggy
Shannon, Lois Wilson. Screenplay John Goodrich, Warren B. Duff, based on
Deluge (1928) by S. Fowler WRIGHT. 70 mins. B/w.One of the first DISASTER
movies, this is an impressive spectacle showing the destruction of New
York by a series of earthquakes and tidal waves. There are good special
effects by Ned Mann, who later designed and supervised the effects in
THINGS TO COME (1936), but the survivors' melodramatic love story is
disappointing, and less shocking than the one in the book. The disaster
sequence was later used as stock footage, continuing to show up in other
films for decades. [JB/PN]
de MADARIAGA (Y ROJO), SALVADOR
[r] Salvador de MADARIAGA.
DeMARINIS, RICK
(1934- ) US writer whose first novel, A Lovely Monster: The Adventures of
Claude Rains and Dr Tellenbeck (1975), applies a sharply fabulistic eye (
FABULATION) to Southern California and to the FRANKENSTEIN myth. Scimitar
(1977), set in a similar region, satirically anatomizes the panicky
responses of an urban USA to the imploding NEAR FUTURE. Cinder (1978),
contrastingly, celebrates an old man's last days, which he spends (in
every sense) in the company of a genie, also ageing and also determined to
seize the day. The stories assembled in Jack ?
the edge of sf, as do some of the contents of both Under the Wheat (coll
1986) - notably the terrifying title story and "Weeds" - and The Coming
Triumph of the Free World (coll 1988). RDM's later novels, The Burning
Women of Far Cry (1986) and The Year of the Zinc Penny (1989), do not
venture into the fantastic. [JC]
DEMIJOHN, THOM
Collaborative pseudonym of Thomas M. DISCH and John T. SLADEK on the

first edition of their mystery novel (not sf) Black Alice (1968). The
subsequent edition used their real names.
De MILLE, JAMES
(1833-1880) Canadian writer and academic, author of much signed fiction
and an anonymous, posthumous, Antarctic UTOPIA, A Strange Manuscript Found
in a Copper Cylinder (1888), one of the best 19th-century lost-race ( LOST
WORLDS) novels. The cylinder's contents describe a shipwreck survivor's
discovery of a lost valley at the South Pole, where the climate is
temperate, prehistoric animals wander about, and a Semitic people, the
Kosekin, has evolved a kindly, cannibalistic society which values
darkness, poverty and clement death. [JC]See also: CANADA.
DEMOLITION MAN
Film (1993). Silver Pictures/Warner Bros. Dir. Marco Brambilla;
screenplay Daniel Waters, Robert Reneau, Peter M. Lenkov, based on a story
by Lenkov and Reneau; starring Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra
Bullock, Nigel Hawthorne, Bob Gunton and Denis Leary. 115 mins. Colour.In
1997 Los Angeles, macho cop John Spartan (Stallone)-nicknamed "the
demolition man"- is framed by his most recent arrestee, malicious
supercriminal Simon Phoenix (Snipes), for the inadvertent manslaughter of
a large group of hostages. Policeman and criminal are both sentenced to a
cryoprison where they are frozen, and their frozen brains, in theory at
least, are subjected to rehabilitation programs. About 35 years later an
obviously unrehabilitated Phoenix is woken up for a parole hearing,
escapes (through mysteriously knowing the code word that will unshackle
him), and commits a series of murders in the peaceful utopia that Los
Angeles, now San Angeles, has apparently become. Spartan is also brought
back to life, by the meek and spineless future police force that can't
cope with actual homicide. Spartan quickly discovers that Phoenix has been
deliberately released by Cocteau (Hawthorne), the much loved dictator of
this utopia, in order brutally to dispose of those rebels against the
peace-and-love regime who eke out a life in the sewers. Spartan triumphs,
and in so doing proves to be the mediator between the false tranquillity
of the "eloi" style utopia (see H.G. WELLS), and the all too human grunge
of the (rather handsome) morlocks.This is a strange blend of mildly
sophisticated comedy, mainly satire at the expense of Californian new-age
utopianism, and straightforward shoot-em-up action adventure. Screenwriter
Waters was previously responsible for the black comedy Heathers (1989),
and most of the often amusing if tasteless jokes (like a machine-mediated
orgasm sequence, one of many borrowings from SLEEPER, 1973) are presumably
his. But unlike The Last Action Hero, a Schwarzenegger action FANTASY also
made in 1993, this is no thoroughgoing deconstruction of the action movie,
despite Stallone taking to knitting. Indeed, the film is disappointing in
its refusal to take future utopian possibilities even remotely seriously,
and in its easy assumption, familiar in LIBERTARIAN philosophy, that any
attempt to channel or remove human violence will result in a doomed and
static civilisation. The film's moral is that social engineering must
always be evil, and it takes a tough cop to prove it. [PN]
DEMON
Film. GOD TOLD ME TO.

DEMONS
GODS AND DEMONS; MAGIC; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
DEMON SEED
Film (1977). MGM. Dir Donald Cammell, starring Julie Christie, Fritz
Weaver, Gerrit Graham, Berry Kroeger. Screenplay Robert Jaffe, Roger O.
Hirson, based on Demon Seed (1973) by Dean R. KOONTZ. 95 mins. Colour.When
the supercomputer Proteus IV is switched on it refuses to obey
instructions, in the time-honoured tradition (for examples COLOSSUS, THE
FORBIN PROJECT; 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY). All its terminals are shut down
with the inadvertent exception of one, located in its creator's own
automated home, which also contains a primitive one-armed robot and the
scientist's estranged wife. The COMPUTER takes control of the house,
trapping the woman inside and subjecting her to a terrifying (and
calculatedly fetishistic) ordeal culminating in its raping her in order to
create a new super-race melding human and MACHINE. This up-to-date Luddite
variation of the FRANKENSTEIN theme, more HORROR than sf, can perhaps be
admired for its bravado in putting its tasteless subtext up there on the
surface where everyone can see it. There is indeed a baby. [JB/PN]See
also: PARANOIA.
DEMONS OF THE SWAMP
Roger CORMAN.
De MORGAN, JOHN
(1848-c1920) US writer of fantastic fiction, miscellaneous works and dime
novels; said to have been of UK birth. He drew very heavily on the work of
H. Rider HAGGARD for models and sources. His adult fantastic fiction
included: He (1887), involving a search for Kallikrates, an immortal who
lives on Easter Island; "It" (1887), with characters from King Solomon's
Mines (1886) like Allan Quatermain, describing further adventures in East
Africa seeking the immortal woman, culminating in the discovery of the
Missing Link and a clear statement about mutations; and King Solomon's
Treasures (1887), which invokes a surviving pterodactyl and the immortal
Macrobi. These works embodied an impressive background of accurate
classical and ethnographic data. King Solomon's Wives (1887) as by Hyder
Ragged, sometimes erroneously attributed to JDM, was written by UK legal
scholar Sir Henry Chartres Biron (1863-1940).JDM later became a staff
writer for Norman L. Munro ( DIME-NOVEL SF) and wrote conventional dime
novels. The Strange Adventures of Two New York Boys in the Realm of the
Polar North (1890) describes a lost race ( LOST WORLDS) of Old Norse near
the North Pole, while Into the Maelstrom (1894) is concerned with a
UTOPIAN society (without crime or evil passions) in a cave world filled
with breathable water under the Maelstrom. In Unknown Worlds (1896), In
Search of the Gold of Ophir (1899) and Bringing Home the Gold (1899) all
deal with Missing Links. [EFB]
DEMPSEY, HANK
[s] Harry HARRISON.
DENMARK
Although one cannot really speak of a Danish sf tradition prior to the

1950s, quite a few Danish authors did write occasional sf works before
then. The first such book was Ludvig HOLBERG's Nicolai Klimii iter
Subterraneum (1741 in Latin; trans as A Journey to the World Underground
by Nicolas Klimius 1742; reprinted 1974), which was among the earliest
works in any language to feature a journey inside a HOLLOW EARTH. The 18th
century saw a few other satirical and fantastical sf-like works, such as
the play Anno 7603 ["The Year 7603"] (1785), a gender-reversal SATIRE, by
Johan Hermann Wessel (1742-1785).The early 19th century saw little Danish
sf and fantasy, although Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), in addition
to his fantasies, wrote a few sf stories, most notably"Om
Aartusinder"(1853; trans as"In a Thousand Years" in The Hans Andersen
Library 1869). With the arrival of a new rationalism around 1870, the
ground was laid for renewed activity in sf, but not much was actually
published. A very interesting work from this time is Vilhelm Bergsoe's
novella "En reise med Flyvefisken 'Prometheus'" ["A Journey on the Flying
Fish 'Prometheus'"] (1869), which tells of a transatlantic journey on a
vessel which alternately flies above the water and dives beneath the
surface. Authors who worked with UTOPIAN themes included C.F. Sibbern with
Meddelelser af Indholdet af et skrift fra Aaret 2135 ["Report on the
Content of Papers from the Year 2135"] (2 vols, 1858 and 1872) and Otto
Moller with Guld og AEre ["Gold and Honour"] (1900).The early 20th century
saw a number of action-oriented juveniles, chiefly from Niels Meyn
(1891-1957), who wrote racist and imperialistic SPACE OPERAS in imitation
of Hans Dominik ( GERMANY) and various US authors. Satire and social
criticism, mostly of a conservative bent, were produced by other
contemporary authors, such as Aage Heinberg with Himmelstormerne ["Young
Titans"] (1919).After WWII and Hiroshima, Danish literature reflected a
mixture of fear and enthusiasm towards technology. This, together with the
growing US cultural and economic dominance, made for a new trend in Danish
sf. Chief among its practitioners was Niels E. Nielsen (1924- ), whose sf
debut was in 1952 and who has since written about 40 sf novels. He began
as an imitator of Ray BRADBURY, and still harbours a cautious attitude
towards TECHNOLOGY, his books usually warning against humankind's
usurpation of the powers of the Creator. Among his motifs are nuclear and
ecological catastrophe; as early as 1970 he wrote a novel about GENETIC
ENGINEERING, Herskerne ["The Rulers"] (1970).The 1960s saw increased
interest in sf as a result of two principal factors: one was the
enthusiasm generated by the US space programme, the other the
indefatigable Jannick Storm (1939- ), who, as editor and translator,
introduced a lot of US, UK and Scandinavian sf. Storm was a proponent of
the NEW WAVE but also introduced such "classical" writers as Isaac ASIMOV,
James BLISH and Frederik POHL.From the late 1960s onwards this increased
interest in the genre led to a number of Danish authors writing occasional
sf books. These may be grouped in several ways. Chiefly inspired by the
New Wave and COMICS, the "flower children" of the late 1960s saw sf as a
new way of telling wondrous tales, as with Knud Holten in Suma-X (1969).
The realists, on the other hand, saw in sf a continuation of realism by
other means and created NEAR-FUTURE scenarios; examples are Anders
BODELSEN's Frysepunktet (1969; trans as Freezing Point 1971; vt Freezing
Down) and Henrik STANGERUP's Manden der ville vaere skyldig (1973; trans
as The Man who Wanted to be Guilty 1982). Experimental modernists took

from the genre part of its inventory and used it for other purposes, as in
Liget og Lysten ["Corpse and Desire"] (1968) by Svendge Madsen, which
contains sf elements without really being sf. Occultists and ufologists
published a number of sf works, best among them being Erwin
Neutzsky-Wulff's Anno Domini (1975) and Gud ["God"] (1976). Finally,
politically conscious writers used near-future scenarios to debate
POLLUTION and NUCLEAR POWER. One author who has managed this without his
fiction suffering from the politics is Jorgen Lindgreen, whose Atomer pa
Naesset ["Nuclear Plant on the Promontory"] (1975) is an effective
TECHNOTHRILLER. In the late 1970s and early 1980s a rather disparate group
of WOMEN SF WRITERS appeared, ranging from the modernist Dorrit Willumsen,
with Programmeret ti kaerlighed ["Programmed for Love"] (1981), to the
utopianist Vibeke Gronfeldt, with Det fantastike barn ["The Fantastic
Child"] (1982).With two exceptions, the authors mentioned above do not
consider themselves sf writers, and nor has any of them written more than
a single recognizably sf work. Those exceptions - the writers who really
know sf - are Bodelsen and Madsen: Bodelsen has published a number of sf
short stories, and Madsen has developed his own unique kind of sf with
such works as Tugt og utugt i mellemtiden ["Virtue and Depravity in the
Middle Period"] (1976), Se dagens lys ["Face the Light of Dawn"] (1980)
and Lad tiden ga ["Let Time Flow"] (1985). Later, Inge Eriksen joined them
with a very ambitious tetralogy, Rummet uden tid ["Space without Time"]
(1983-9). If a distinctly Danish sf is to develop, it will have to build
upon the works of these three. [ND]
DENMARK, HARRISON
[s] Roger ZELAZNY.
DENNIS, BRUCE
[s] David Wright O'BRIEN.
DENNIS, GEOFFREY (POMEROY)
(1892-1963) UK writer whose Harvest in Poland (1925; rev 1931) deals with
augurs of a grim future for Europe in supernatural terms. The End of the
World (1930), despite its sf title, is a nonfiction discourse on the ways
in which the world might in fact end. It has been suggested by Brian M.
STABLEFORD that GD may have also written under the name Guy DENT. [JC]
DENNIS, NIGEL (FORBES)
(1912-1989) UK writer whose second novel, Cards of Identity (1955), is a
FABULATION about a post-WWII England whose citizens are so bereft of
security that any identity can be imposed on anyone (see also PARANOIA);
the final section, entitled "The Prince of Antioch, or An Old Way to New
Identity", constitutes an entire (and entirely fraudulent) Shakespeare
play, hilariously couched. In A House in Order (1966) identity is again
imperilled as the protagonist, under increasingly surreal assault,
attempts to act as though WWIII were not happening around him. [JC]
DENT, GUY
(? - ) Pseudonymous UK writer whose one original contribution to sf,
Emperor of the If (1926), describes two of the possible universes created
by a disembodied brain in a laboratory. In the first part the past is
superimposed on the present, with vivid descriptions of London being

overrun by prehistoric flora and fauna; in the second the locale is a
future DYSTOPIA where humans exist under the domination of
self-reproducing MACHINES. It has been suggested by Brian M. STABLEFORD
that GD was in fact Geoffrey DENNIS. [JE]See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS;
EVOLUTION; FAR FUTURE; SUPERMAN.
DENT, LESTER
(1905-1959) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with
"Pirate Cay" for Top Notch Magazine in 1929; best known for his Doc Savage
novels, which he wrote for DOC SAVAGE MAGAZINE under the house name
Kenneth ROBESON (which see for details); LD wrote all but 43 of the 181
issues. He also wrote stories under his own name and other crime stories
under the pseudonym Tim Ryan. Lester Dent, the Man Behind Doc Savage
(1974) is a study by Robert E. WEINBERG; information about LD and about
his work appears also in Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973) by Philip
Jose FARMER. The most complete study is Bigger than Life: The Creator of
Doc Savage (1990) by Marilyn Cannaday. LD was famous in PULP-MAGAZINE
circles for his Master Plot: the action-suspense formula he claimed never
failed. His prose was described by James STERANKO as "bravura frenzy".
[PN/JC]
DENTINGER, STEPHEN
[s] Edward D. HOCH.
DENTON, BRADLEY (CLAYTON)
(1958- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Music of the Spheres" in
FSF in 1984, and who caused some impact in the field with his first novel,
Wrack and Roll (1986), a contemporary ALTERNATE-WORLD tale which portrays
heavy-metal musicians as the HEROES they might dream of being in a world
absolutely divided between the "straight" majority and the
anti-authoritarian "wrackers", who are defined by their MUSIC. BD displays
an impressive feel for the sustaining myths of heavy metal in his
depiction of the wrackers, whose random violence and passion for life are
set against the sterility and genocidal tendencies of the straight world
as nuclear war approaches. BUDDY HOLLY IS ALIVE AND WELL ON GANYMEDE
(1991) deploys the same range of knowledge with more feeling, deeper
nostalgia, and an improved control of narrative; and Blackburn (1993), a
horror novel featuring a serial killer with whom it is possible to
empathize (though not to defend), is a maturely controlled fable of
America. BD's short stories are generally contemporary fantasies with a
moral twist, like the 1988 title story of The Calvin Coolidge Home for
Dead Comedians(coll 1994) in 2 vols, a fable which attacks the sterile
blindness of many Christian conceptions of heaven. [NT]
de PEDROLO, MANUEL
[r] SPAIN.
De POLNAY, PETER
(1906-1984) Hungarian-born writer, in the UK from before WWII. Of his
very many novels, only The Stuffed Dog (1977), a TIME-TRAVEL tale, is of
genre interest. [JC]
De REYNA, JORGE

Diane DETZER.
DERLETH, AUGUST W(ILLIAM)
(1909-1971) US writer and editor, born in Sauk City, Wisconsin, where he
spent his life. A correspondent with and devout admirer of H.P. LOVECRAFT,
he devoted much of his life to projects aimed at preserving Lovecraft's
memory. The most important of these projects was of course the founding,
with Donald WANDREI, of the publishing company ARKHAM HOUSE in Sauk City
in order to publish Lovecraft's stories; Wandrei later resigned his
interest, but AWD carried on until his death, publishing a wide range of
weird fiction, including some of his own otherwise very widely published
work. He completed a number of unfinished Lovecraft stories and fragments:
The Lurker at the Threshold (1945), The Survivor and Others (coll 1957)
and The Watchers Out of Time and Others (coll 1974). In addition, he wrote
two volumes of Lovecraft pastiches, The Mask of Cthulhu (coll 1958) and
The Trail of Cthulhu (coll 1962), and edited anthologies of such stories
by various writers like The Shuttered Room, and Other Pieces (anth 1959) a title not to be confused with either of the Lovecraft collections
likewise entitled (one 1970 UK and one 1971 US, contents differing) Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (anth 1969; vt in 2 vols as Tales of the
Cthulhu Mythos #1 1971 and #2) 1971). AWD edited Lovecraft's writings for
publication, including his letters (in collaboration with Wandrei) and The
Dark Brotherhood, and Other Pieces (anth 1966) - a coll of Lovecraft
stories, solo and in collaboration - and also wrote H.P.L.: A Memoir
(1945) and Some Notes on H.P. Lovecraft (1959 chap).But AWD's literary
activities were by no means dominated by his interest in Lovecraft. He was
a prolific and successful writer of regional novels, receiving a
Guggenheim Fellowship for this work, and of detective fiction, starting
with Murder Stalks the Wakely Family (1934; vt Death Stalks the Wakely
Family 1937 UK); he published a series of Sherlock Holmes pastiches about
the character Solar Pons, beginning with "In Re: Sherlock Holmes" - The
Adventures of Solar Pons (coll 1945; vt Regarding Sherlock Holmes 1974; vt
The Adventures of Solar Pons 1975 UK). His very first story, however "Bat's Belfry" for Weird Tales in 1926 - was of genre interest, and he
remained for many years a prolific contributor to WEIRD TALES, mainly
under his own name and the pseudonym Stephen Grendon, and to other
magazines, including STRANGE STORIES (where he used the name Tally Mason).
His best work was assembled in Someone in the Dark (coll 1941), Something
Near (coll 1945), Not Long for This World (coll 1948; with 11 stories cut,
vt Tales from Not Long for This World 1961), Lonesome Places (coll 1962),
Mr George and Other Odd Persons (coll 1963 as Stephen Grendon; 1964 as
AWD; vt When Graveyards Yawn 1965 UK as AWD), Colonel Markesan and Less
Pleasant People (coll 1966) with the US critic and writer Mark Schorer
(1908-1977), and Dwellers in Darkness (coll 1976). He wrote little sf, but
his Tex Harrigan series was about a newspaperman constantly running across
zany sf inventions and the like; it was included in Harrigan's File (coll
1975).AWD edited a great many anthologies, both sf and weird. His sf
anthologies include several large volumes: Strange Ports of Call (anth
1948; much cut 1958), The Other Side of the Moon (anth 1949; cut 1956 UK;
much cut 1959 US) and Beyond Time and Space (anth 1950; much cut 1958).
His weird anthologies include Sleep No More (anth 1944; cut 1964 UK; much

cut vt Stories From Sleep No More 1967 US), Who Knocks? (anth 1946; much
cut 1964 UK) and The Sleeping ? vt in 2 vols as The
Sleeping and the Dead 1964 UK and The Unquiet Grave 1964 UK). AWD was one
of the pioneering anthologists in the genre.The history of Arkham House
was chronicled in AWD's Arkham House: The First 20 Years (1959 chap) and
Thirty Years of Arkham House, 1939-1969: A History and Bibliography (1970
chap). In 1948-9 the company published a magazine, ARKHAM SAMPLER, ed AWD.
Competent and literate and highly energetic, AWD was the central figure in
bringing lasting popularity to Lovecraft and to other authors such as
Clark Ashton SMITH. His own extremely various output awaits comprehensive
appraisal. [MJE]Other works: 100 Books by August Derleth (1962),
nonfiction; The Beast in Holger's Woods (1968).As Editor: The Night Side
(anth 1947); Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre (anth
1947); Far Boundaries (anth 1951; cut 1967); The Outer Reaches (anth 1951;
cut 1958; vt in 2 vols as The Outer Reaches 1963 UK and The Time of
Infinity 1963 UK); Night's Yawning Peal (anth 1952; much cut 1974);
Beachheads in Space (anth 1952; cut 1954 UK; cut 1957 US; with 1 story
cut, vt in 2 vols as Beachheads in Space 1964 UK and From Other Worlds
1964 UK); Worlds of Tomorrow (anth 1953; cut 1954 UK; cut 1958 US; vt in 2
vols as Worlds of Tomorrow 1963 UK and New Worlds for Old 1963 UK); Time
to Come (anth 1954; cut 1959); Portals of Tomorrow (anth 1954); Fire and
Sleet and Candlelight (anth 1961), poetry; Dark Mind, Dark Heart (anth
1962); When Evil Wakes (anth 1963 UK); Over the Edge (anth 1964);
Travelers by Night (anth 1967); Dark Things (anth 1971).About the author:
August Derleth: A Bibliography (1983) by Alison M. Wilson.See also:
PUBLISHING; SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS.
DERNIER COMBAT, LE
(vt The Last Battle) Film (1983). Films du Loup. Dir Luc Besson, starring
Pierre Jolivet, Jean Bouise, Jean Reno. Screenplay Besson, Jolivet. 92
mins. B/w.Made by Besson (later one of the best-known French directors of
his generation) when only 23, the arty but vigorous LDC is low-budget and
photographed in black-and-white Cinemascope, and has no dialogue at all. A
young man (Jolivet) in an unspeaking post- HOLOCAUST world - holocaust and
speechlessness remain unexplained - flies in a restored plane, meets an
old doctor, matures, fights a swordsman, conquers a tribal leader and gets
a girl. A dwarf lives in a locked car trunk; the tops of high-rise
buildings project from the sand; fish fall from the sky; Samurai lurch and
scuttle; women are imprisoned. [PN]
De ROUEN, REED R(ANDOLPH)
(1917-1986) US writer of half Native American (Oneida) extraction. His sf
novel Split Image (1955 UK) mixes SPACE OPERA and speculation on POLITICS
and RELIGION in its story of a space flight culminating in a landing on an
exact duplicate of Earth. [PN/JC]
DESART, THE EARL OF
Working name of UK writer W.U.O'C. Cuffe (1845-1898), whose The Raid of
the "Detrimental" (1897) describes a LOST WORLD in the South Atlantic
transformed by its UK inhabitants into an advanced UTOPIA. [JC]
DESMOND, SHAW

(1877-1960) Irish novelist, poet, founder of the International Institute
for Psychical Research (1934), and author of many works on the afterlife
and several sf novels. Democracy (1919) predicts a revolution in the UK.
The DYSTOPIAN Ragnarok (1926) envisages the destruction of civilization
through a world WAR fought by armies equipped with radio-controlled planes
and poisonous gases, the narrative concentrating on the derring-do of
futuristic fighter pilots. His pessimism continued in Chaos (1938), which
prophesies a future war between the UK and Germany. World-Birth (1938),
possibly stimulated by the works of Olaf STAPLEDON, describes the troubled
future history of mankind and the eventual development of an ideal state.
This concluding optimism surfaces again in Black Dawn (1944), where world
peace is the dream. His earlier works include two fantasies: Echo (1927)
is a memory of past incarnation ( REINCARNATION) and Gods (1921) centres
on industrial exploitation. Tales of the Little Sisters Of Saint Francis
(coll 1929) includes some fantasy. [JE]See also: WEAPONS.
DESTINATION MOON
Up until the 1950s, science fiction films were few and far between.
Destination Moon changed all that. Based on Robert Heinlein's successful
book, Rocket Ship Galileo, Destination Moon started a major sci-fi movie
boom.But unlike many of the creature features that followed, this film was
relatively accurate. This was probably because the screenplay was written
by Heinlein himself, and he and German rocket expert Hermann Oberth were
technical advisors.The only thing that the team got wrong was not a
scientific error. In the screenplay for Destination Moon, the moon project
was paid for by private enterprise. Taxpayer dollars for space programs
was a thing of the future.
DESTINATION MOON
Film (1950). A George Pal Production/Eagle-Lion. Dir Irving Pichel,
starring John Archer, Warner Anderson, Dick Wesson, Tom Powers. Screenplay
Robert A. HEINLEIN, "Rip" Van Ronkel, James O'Hanlon, based loosely on
Rocket Ship Galileo (1947) by Heinlein. 92 mins. Colour.DM, the first of
George PAL's many sf productions, has great historical importance: its
commercial success initiated the sf film boom of the 1950s after a decade
that had contained almost no sf CINEMA at all. It has interest in
hindsight, too, in the partial accuracy with which it anticipated the
actual Moon landing of 1969. To this day, DM stands as a film obviously
made by people who knew about science: along with the German rocket expert
Hermann Oberth (1894-1989), Heinlein himself acted as technical advisor.
The special effects are relatively convincing: astronomical artist Chesley
BONESTELL provided the backgrounds for the scenes on the Moon, working
with art director Ernst Fegte. The film's biggest predictive error was
political, not scientific: it predicted that the first Moon landing,
described as "the greatest challenge ever hurled at American industry",
would be a truly capitalist affair conducted by private enterprise. DM is
an austere film, semidocumentary in nature and, aside from a sequence
about fuel shortage near the end, rather placid and unexciting. But,
despite its colourless script and its low-key performances (except for
some ill judged comic relief from the blue-collar radio operator, played
by Wesson), DM is a film with considerable dignity and, in a quiet way, a

genuine SENSE OF WONDER. Its final message - THIS IS THE END OF THE
BEGINNING in big block letters - can be seen, in retrospect, as an
entirely justified claim. [PN]See also: MOON; ROCKETS; SPACE FLIGHT.
DESTINATION MOONBASE-ALPHA
SPACE 1999.
DESTINATION SATURN
BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY.
DESTINIES
US "magazine" in paperback-book format published by ACE BOOKS, ed James
BAEN, 11 issues, Nov 1978-Aug 1981, last issue undated. The list of
contributors to all sections of the magazine - which could equally be
thought of as an original- ANTHOLOGY series - was impressive. Book reviews
were by Spider ROBINSON, with Orson Scott CARD and Norman SPINRAD taking
over from #6. Science-fact articles came from Jerry POURNELLE, among
others, and included a five-part series by Poul ANDERSON on the
interaction between sf and science. The fiction was mainly short stories
and novelettes, many from well known authors like Gregory BENFORD, Card,
Larry NIVEN (with Pournelle), Clifford D. SIMAK and Roger ZELAZNY. "Lost
Dorsai" by Gordon R. DICKSON won the 1981 HUGO for Best Novella. The
emphasis was on HARD SF. The series died when Baen left Ace. However, some
time after Baen formed his publishing company Baen Books in 1983, and
having published a very similar paperback magazine series, FAR FRONTIERS
(1985-6), he resuscitated Destinies as New Destinies, beginning with New
Destinies, Vol I: Spring 1987 ed Baen, apparently current (1992) though
irregular, with 8 issues up to New Destinies Vol IX (anth 1990); there was
no New Destinies Vol V. The mixture was, as before, of scientific articles
and hard-sf stories by authors like Dean ING, Spider Robinson, Charles
SHEFFIELD and Harry TURTLEDOVE, as well as pieces from several of the
contributors to the original Destinies. [RR/PN]
DESTROY ALL MONSTERS
GOJIRA; RADON.
DESTROY ALL PLANETS
DAIKAIJU GAMERA.
De TARDE, JEAN GABRIEL
[r] Gabriel TARDE.
DETECTIVES
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.
De TIMMS, GRAEME
A probable pseudonym. GDT's pulp-style paperback sf novels are Three
Quarters (1963) and Split (1963). [JC]
DETZER, DIANE
Working name used by US writer Diane Detzer de Reyna (1930- ) for some of
her sf, though she has also published much material as Adam Lukens, and
some as Jorge de Reyna. She began publishing sf with "The Tomb" for
Science Fiction Stories in 1958, and soon released a number of novels,

from The Sea People (1959) to Eevalu (1963), as Adam Lukens. These are
varied in subject matter but are generally routine SPACE OPERA. As Jorge
de Reyna she published The Return of the Starships (1968), and under her
own name The Planet of Fear (1968). [JC]Other works as Adam Lukens:
Conquest of Life (1960); Sons of the Wolf (1961); The Glass Cage (1962);
The World Within (1962); Alien World (1963).
DEVER, JOE
[r] Paul BARNETT; GAMES AND TOYS.
DEVEREUX, EVE
Paul BARNETT.
De VET, CHARLES V(INCENT)
(1911- ) US writer, mostly of short stories, of which he has written over
50 for sf magazines, beginning with "The Unexpected Weapon" for AMZ in
1950. In his first sf novel, Cosmic Checkmate (1958 ASF as "The Second
Game"; exp 1962 chap dos; exp vt Second Game 1981) with Katherine MACLEAN,
an Earthman is sent to investigate a hostile planet whose inhabitants'
social advancement depends on proficiency at the national chess-like game
( GAMES AND SPORTS). His second novel, Special Feature (1958 ASF; exp
1975), rather flatly depicts media involvement in the filming of the
depredations of an ALIEN monster in St Louis. After some years of silence,
CVDV became active once again in the late 1980s. [JC]
DEVIL-DOLL, THE
Film (1936). MGM. Dir Tod Browning, starring Lionel Barrymore, Maureen
O'Sullivan, Frank Lawton. Screenplay Browning, Garrett Fort, S. Guy
ENDORE, Erich von Stroheim, based on Burn, Witch, Burn! (1933) by A.
MERRITT and "The Witch of Timbuctoo" by Browning. 79 mins. B/w.In this
film by the director of Dracula (1931) and Freaks (1932) a man (Barrymore)
wrongly convicted and sent to Devil's Island returns to Paris, where he
uses miniaturized people for revenge. He disguises himself as an old-lady
toymaker and sends his 6in (15cm) humans as toys to the homes of his
enemies; in the middle of the night the "toys" come to life and carry out
his telepathic instructions. The illusion of miniaturization is perfectly
created by the use of giant sets and skilfully executed travelling mattes
- the work of the MGM special-effects department, then headed by A. Arnold
Gillespie. Though the original novel used alchemy for miniaturization,
this uses a supposedly scientific electrical device. [JB/PN]
DEVLIN, ROY P.
[s] Thomas P. KELLEY.
DEVOLUTION
Sf is usually an optimistic genre, and stories of EVOLUTION on the whole
envisage humanity as slowly progressing to higher states. However, a
persistent pessimistic note in GENRE SF generally, and to a degree in
mainstream sf too, has been to imagine the opposite, the devolution or
degeneration of mankind. The note was sounded most famously in H.G.
WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE (1895), in which humankind evolves into two
races, one physically degenerate, the other with few mental resources. At
the end of the book humankind is gone, the Sun is cooling, and a solitary

football-shaped creature is seen flopping in the last shallow sea. In
George Allan ENGLAND's Darkness and Dawn (1914) a couple wake after
SUSPENDED ANIMATION to find a desolate Earth peopled by subhuman
descendants of the survivors of a natural DISASTER. The rhetoric is lurid.
To this day, stories of the HOLOCAUST AND AFTER are often peopled by
tribal savages and monstrous MUTANTS, though here the devolution tends to
be social rather than biological in emphasis, as in Russell HOBAN's
RIDDLEY WALKER (1980), which is unusual in its foregrounding of a devolved
(but vivid) language ( LINGUISTICS). The possibility of biological
devolution was mooted in pseudo-scientific circles a good deal in the
early part of the century - it was a favourite notion of the Nazis - and
H.P. LOVECRAFT often saw the adherents of his various disgusting cults as
devolved into froglike or apelike creatures. The idea that humanity could
revert to apedom was almost a CLICHE of pulp sf; it is central to, for
example, The Iron Star (1930) by John TAINE, in which rays from a meteor
are the mutagenic agent. La planete des singes (1963; trans as Planet of
the Apes 1963 US; vt Monkey Planet 1964 UK) by Pierre BOULLE, filmed as
PLANET OF THE APES (1968), put a later slant on the theme for satirical
purposes by having the evolution of apes paralleled by the devolution of
humans. The hero of Edmond HAMILTON's "The Man who Evolved" (1931)
regresses finally to a blob. Hamilton enjoyed the cosmic pointlessness
suggested by ideas of devolution, and often used the theme. On a more
serious level, the idea comes up several times in LAST AND FIRST MEN
(1930) by Olaf STAPLEDON, in which the upwards progression of the
evolutionary thrust is several times interrupted by devolutionary
sequences, rather like someone climbing a slippery hill and occasionally
backsliding.Paddy CHAYEFSKY's Altered States (1978) gives a new twist to
the idea in its interesting if absurd notion that altered states of
consciousness (as in a sensory-deprivation tank) may lead to instant
alteration of the way our genetic heritage is manifest, our oldest DNA
finding bodily expression to produce, in this case, first an apeman and
later a blob. This was filmed as ALTERED STATES (1980). Chayefsky admits
that his inspiration was Robert Louis STEVENSON's Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), a novel whose protagonist, after experimenting
with chemicals, alternates between two states: the highly evolved doctor
and the amoral, bestial Hyde. In Stevenson's book what is a subtext in
most earlier devolution stories is almost overt: that devolution is a
metaphorical equivalent of the Fall of Man.Social devolution was always a
popular theme in genre sf, partly because it gave writers a chance to
exploit colourful primitive societies and partly in deference to the
cyclic view of HISTORY popularized by Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975). The
theme is also common in stories of GALACTIC EMPIRES, where commonly a
social breakdown at the centre leads to cultural devolution on the
fringes, much as in the Roman Empire. This is the theme of Isaac ASIMOV's
Foundation trilogy.The theme of ENTROPY became popular in the 1960s, and
with it came a new lease of life for devolution stories. Evolution ever
upwards is an example of negentropy, or reverse entropy, and is counter to
the general running-down of the cosmos, which in obedience to the laws of
thermodynamics moves towards ever decreasing order, ever increasing
randomness. (The pessimism of the 1950s and 1960s probably had more to do
with the Vietnam War and problems of OVERPOPULATION and starvation than

with any revelation from physics, but entropy provided a convenient
metaphor for all this.) 1960s writers often envisaged increasing disorder
in terms of biological devolution. The theme was touched on by Samuel R.
DELANY in The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965), but an earlier and more substantial
work was The Long Afternoon of Earth (1962 US; exp vt Hothouse 1962 UK) by
Brian W. ALDISS, in which a devolved and jungle-like Earth, whose shrunken
humans have taken to the trees again, is given a kind of weird charm; life
continues fecund even while INTELLIGENCE is lost and the Galaxy subsides
towards its heat-death.Devolution occurs in the work of other writers of
FABULATIONS and NEW-WAVE sf, and nowhere are its attractions for the
overintellectualized 20th century more clearly shown than in the works of
J.G. BALLARD, whose most central and recurring theme this is. Its first
clear expression was in his story "The Voices of Time" (1960), in which
the countdown to the end of the Universe is accompanied by a series of
baroque degenerate mutations and the hero's need for more and more sleep.
The tone is as much celebratory as tragic. Ballard's The Drowned World
(1962) has a hero ever more ready to slough off such human qualities as
ambition or even self-preservation as he listens to the insistent call of
his bloodstream, whose saltiness recalls a time before life had left the
oceans. These inner changes are mirrored in the Earth itself, which has
catastrophically reverted to the luxuriance of a new Carboniferous
era.Tales of devolution from the 1970s and 1980s are often curiously close
in feeling to their apparent opposite: the stories of evolutionary
transcendence that we associate with, for example, Greg BEAR and Ian
WATSON. Where we envisage an upwards there must necessarily be a
downwards, too; this is an idea that has haunted many sf writers, notably
Michael BISHOP, sometimes metaphorically and sometimes literally. It is
close to the latter in his NO ENEMY BUT TIME (1982), in which a modern man
travels back in time to find marriage and a home with hominids. Which
evolutionary direction is upwards, which downwards, and which better,
seems to several contemporary writers to be all a matter of perspective,
as can be seen in the main 1980s variant on the theme: a devolution that
is deliberately biologically (or psychologically) engineered. Several of
the CYBERPUNK writers have envisaged such an operation as a means of
simplifying the self to a creature who is less prone, perhaps, to the
angst induced by information overload. A similar idea is found in David
ZINDELL's Neverness (1988), a large part of which deals with the fierce,
brave, ice-age Alaloi, a race which "because they wanted to live what they
thought of as a natural life . . . back mutated some of their chromosomes,
the better to grow strong, primitive children to live on the pristine
worlds they hoped to discover". An interesting and even more ferocious
devolution, more psychic than physical, is that envisaged in Robert P.
HOLDSTOCK's Mythago Wood (1984) and its sequels, in which the human
hind-brain conspires with the power of an ancient woodland to strip the
minds of those who walk there down to the blood and bone of their
Neolithic forebears and further, back into the days of ice. Most writers
of the last few decades who have like Holdstock dealt with this theme have
exhibited a strong if ambiguous attraction to the idea, though to an
earlier generation devolution appeared straightforwardly repugnant.The
class of stories in which primitive primates confront evolved primates in
the present day is discussed under APES AND CAVEMEN; these stories, too,

have a bearing on the devolution theme. [PN]
DEWDNEY, A(LEXANDER) K(EEWATIN)
(1941- ) Canadian writer whose sf novel, The Planiverse: ComputerContact
with a Two-Dimensional World (1984 US), intriguingly updatesEdwin A.
ABBOTT's Flatland(1884); its flatland protagonist, Yndrd,attempts to
penetrate from his world of Arde into anepiphanous "reality beyond
reality,"making contact as he does with a roundworld COMPUTER programmed
to simulate2-dimensional existence. The portrayal of 2-dimensional life
provided by AKD is remarkablysustained, and is an education in the
understanding of mathematics. [JC]
DeWEESE, GENE
Working name of US technical writer and author Thomas Eugene DeWeese
(1934- ), who began writing sf with two Man from U.N.C.L.E. ties, The
Invisibility Affair * (1967) and The Mind-Twisters Affair * (1967), both
with Robert COULSON and signed, collaboratively, Thomas Stratton. Other
novels with Coulson, both authors now signing their own names, include a
routine sf adventure for LASER BOOKS, Gates of the Universe (1975 Canada;
rev vt Nightmare Universe 1985 US) and two spoof RECURSIVE novels about
reporter Joe Karns, who gets into all kinds of trouble at sf CONVENTIONS;
the large number of in-group references made it unlikely that either Now
You See It/Him/Them (1975) and Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats (1977)
would gain many readers outside the genre. In the 1980s, GDW concentrated
on lively juveniles (see listing below) and on several equally lively Star
Trek ties: for STAR TREK itself, Chain of Attack * (1987), its direct
sequel The Final Nexus * (1988), and Renegade * (1991); and, for STAR
TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, The Peacekeepers * (1988). [JC/PN]Other works:
Jeremy Case (1976 Canada); The Wanting Factor (1980); Something Answered
(1983).For children: Major Corby and the Unidentified Flapping Object
(1979); Nightmares from Space (1981); The Adventures of a Two-Minute
Werewolf (1983); the Calvin Willeford sequence, comprising Black Suits
from Outer Space (1985; vt Beepers from Outer Space 1985), The Dandelion
Caper (1986) and The Calvin Nullifier (1987); Whatever Became of Aunt
Margaret? (1990).As Jean DeWeese: Various Gothics, of which The Reimann
Curse (1975; vt A Different Darkness 1982 as GDW), The Moonstone Spirit
(1975), The Carnelian Cat (1975) and Nightmare in Pewter (1978) have been
registered as containing material of genre interest.
DeWEESE, JEAN
Gene DEWEESE.
De WREDER, PAUL
John HEMING.
DEXTER, J.B.
John S. GLASBY.
DEXTER, WILLIAM
Pseudonym of UK writer William Thomas Pritchard (1909- ), whose two sf
novels make up a short series. In World of Eclipse (1954) humans return
from internment on the planet of the Vulcanids to repopulate a devastated
Earth; Children of the Void (1955) brings in a runaway world, nuclear

conflicts in space, and communication with ethereal descendants of
humanity. [JC]
DEY, FREDERICK VAN RENSSELAER
[r] Nick CARTER; DIME-NOVEL SF; " NONAME".
DIABOLICAL DR MABUSE, THE
Die TAUSEND AUGEN DES DR MABUSE .
DIABOLIC INVENTION, THE
VYNALEZ ZKAZY.
DIABOLIK
(vt Danger: Diabolik) Film (1967). Dino De Laurentiis/Marianne. Dir Mario
Bava, starring John Phillip Law, Marisa Mell, Michel Piccoli, Adolfo Celi,
Terry-Thomas. Screenplay Bava, Dino Maiuri, Adriano Baracco, Brian Degas,
Tudor Gates, based on fumetti by Luciana and Angela Giussani. 105 mins,
cut to 88 mins. Colour.This Italian/French coproduction is one of Di
Laurentiis's several attempts to film sf COMIC strips, others being
BARBARELLA (1967) and FLASH GORDON (1980). Law plays a stylish
supercriminal, after the style of Fantomas, the fictional antihero of
several thrillers, beginning with Fantomas (1913-14); he attempts to steal
the entire gold reserves and destroy all the tax records of his country.
He is caught at the denouement in a shower of radiactive molten gold,
becoming his own memorial. Directed with visual panache and a sense of fun
by Bava, D is futuristic but only marginally sf. [PN]
DIAMOND, JOHN
[s] Barrington J. BAYLEY.
DIANETICS
According to its adherents a science, according to its disbelievers a
PSEUDO-SCIENCE, founded by L. Ron HUBBARD, at the time a pulp writer whose
main market was the sf magazines. Hubbard's sf had always emphasized the
powers of the mind and deployed protagonists who maintained to the end a
heroic stance against a corrupt Universe. The former interest was
translated into real-life terms in the late 1940s, and the latter vision
may be what sustained Hubbard against the widespread execration he and his
movement received from some quarters, both outside and inside sf.The
editor of ASF, John W. CAMPBELL Jr, began experimenting with Hubbard's
ideas in 1949 and believed them valid. In May 1950 ASF (after much prior
publicity) published a long article on Dianetics, seen as a form of
psychotherapy that could achieve miraculous results in sweeping away the
dross that encumbers ordinary minds, to leave uncovered the SUPERMAN
latent in us all. Follow-up publicity went well beyond the sf magazines.
Hubbard's Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950) was
published in the same year, and immediately became a bestseller. The
attractions of Dianetics were manifold: it could be practised after mere
hours of training, with no formal education necessary; it proposed an
apparently simple and coherent model of the mind; it offered an
explanation of why so many people feel themselves to be unappreciated
failures - and, better than that, it offered a cure.In Dianetics an
"auditor" (the therapist) encourages the patient to babble out his/her

fantasies. The E-meter, a form of lie-detector, early on came to be an
essential item of equipment. In theory, the needle on the meter swings
over whenever a traumatic area of memory is uncovered, and the auditor
then disposes of the trauma by revealing its meaning. So far, this is
rather like an sf version of conventional psychoanalysis. However, Hubbard
also taught that traumas could be pre-natal, and eventually that they
could have been suffered during previous incarnations ( REINCARNATION)
right back to the dawn of time. A "clear" - a person who had successfully
rid himself/herself of aberrations - would possess radically increased
intelligence, powers of telepathy, the ability to move outside the body
and to control such somatic processes as growing new teeth, and a
photographic memory. Here was the superman figure of so much contemporary
pulp sf made flesh - at least if Dianetics worked ( EDISONADE).Film stars
took up Dianetics; centres were opened all over the USA; many thousands
were converted, including A.E. VAN VOGT, whose own sf had produced many
protagonists not unlike Dianetics's "clears". One of Hubbard's assistants
was Perry CHAPDELAINE, who later became an sf writer himself. In 1952,
after an organizational rift, Hubbard left the Dianetic Foundation and
soon advertised his new advance on Dianetics, SCIENTOLOGY, in the entry
for which this story is continued. [PN]See also: PARANOIA.
DIBELL, ANSEN
Pseudonym of US writer Ann Dibble (1942- ) whose sf sequence, the Strange
and Fantastic History of the King of Kantmorie, comprises 3 PLANETARY
ROMANCE tales-Pursuit of the Screamer (1978), Circle, Crescent, Star
(1981) and Summerfair (1982)-set in a world inhabited by GENETICALLY
ENGINEERED races in exile from a forgotten galactic civilization, along
with a dying group of CLONES; and intimately affected by an organic
COMPUTER named Shai which (or who) eventually offers the protagonist the
opportunity of space flight. The outcome of the sequence is unclear, as is
its ultimate success as a work of art; the release of its 2 final volumes,
Tidestorm Limit and The Sun of Return, might resolve these issues, and
help establish the Fantastic History as a significant contribution to the
genre. [JC]
DICK, KAY
(1915- ) UK writer and editor whose novel, They: A Sequence of Unease
(1977), resembles thematically and in its experimental structure much of
her previous fiction, but is set in a NEAR-FUTURE England where freedom of
travel is restricted and cultural activities are actively persecuted.
Constructed as a set of linked stories that mirror one another, They
relates ENTROPY and the youth-culture as enemies of creative values (and
middle-class individualism); in relating these levels of meaning, KD sets
up a very moving, though abstract, model of humanistic response to a
straitened future. [JC]Other works as editor: The Mandrake Root (anth
1946) as Jeremy Scott, At Close of Eve (anth 1947) as Scott and The
Uncertain Element (anth 1950), all fantasy anthologies.
DICK, PHILIP K(INDRED)
(1928-1982) US writer, one of the two or three most important figures in
20th-century US sf and an author of general significance. He lived most of
his life in California, where most of his fiction was set, either

literally or by displacing sf protocols into a nightmare of the Pacific
Rim. He attended college for one year at Berkeley, operated a record store
and ran a classical-music programme for a local radio station; he was
married five times, and had three children. From 1950 to 1970 he was
intensely and constantly productive - a circumstance only posthumously
made clear by the publication of several mainstream novels written during
the first years of his career. The order in which he wrote his many novels
is of importance in assessing their interrelation, and so the relevant
dates are indicated in the discussion below.He began his career with short
magazine fiction-his first published story was "Beyond Lies the Wub"
(1952) - and over the next few years came a number of ironic and
idiosyncratic short stories, some of which were collected in A Handful of
Darkness (written 1952-4; coll 1955 UK; with 2 stories cut 1966 UK), The
Variable Man and Other Stories (written 1952-4; coll 1957) and The Book of
Philip K. Dick (written 1952-5; coll 1973; vt The Turning Wheel and Other
Stories 1977 UK). The first three and a half volumes of THE COLLECTED
STORIES OF PHILIP K. DICK are devoted to these early years. This set,
which is definitive, consists of 5 separate titles, all of which suffer
from a singularly unhelpful array of vts: Beyond Lies the Wub (coll 1987;
vt The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford 1990); Second Variety (coll
1987; vt We Can Remember it for You Wholesale, with "Second Variety"
dropped and the new title story added, 1990); The Father-Thing (coll 1987;
rev with "Second Variety" added, vt Second Variety 1991); The Days of
Perky Pat (coll 1987; vt The Minority Report 1991) and The Little Black
Box (coll 1987; vt We Can Remember it for you Wholesale 1991 UK; vt The
Eye of the Sibyl 1992 US).PKD's first novels - The Cosmic Puppets (written
1953; 1956 Satellite as "A Glass of Darkness"; exp 1957 dos) and Dr
Futurity (written 1953; 1954 TWS as "Time Pawn"; exp 1959 dos) - were
professional expansions of magazine tales and reveal his fingerprints to
hindsight; the former interestingly returns a man to his home-town which,
overlaid by manufactured illusion, serves as a battleground for two
warring forces who bear the aspects of Ormazd and Ahriman (the opposing
principles of Zoroastrian cosmology). PKD's PARANOIA about godlike
manipulations of consensual reality marks a theme he would obsessively
repeat in less crude form, just as the confusion of humans and mechanical
simulacra adumbrated in the second book might be considered one particular
variant of the major theme which runs right through PKD's work: the
juxtaposition of two "levels of reality" - one "objectively" determined,
the other a world of appearances imposed upon characters by various means
and processes.His first published book, SOLAR LOTTERY (written 1953-541955
dos; rev vt World of Chance 1955 UK - each text printing some material the
other excludes), has an immediate impact; it is a story belonging to, if
not rather dominating, a category prevalent in the early 1950s-the tale in
which future society is distorted by some particular set of idiosyncratic
priorities: in this case social opportunity is governed by lottery. The
plot of the novel is reminiscent of A.E. VAN VOGT, and juxtaposes
political intrigues with the utopian quest of the disciples of an
eccentric MESSIAH. This interest in messianic figures runs throughout
PKD's work as an important subsidiary theme. There are versions of it in
The World Jones Made (written 1954; 1956 dos), Vulcan's Hammer (1956
Future Science Fiction; exp 1960), and in his sf of the 1960s.But, after

writing The World Jones Made, a heated authoritarian DYSTOPIA, Eye in the
Sky (written 1955; 1957), which sophisticates the reality diseases of his
first novel, and the routine The Man who Japed (written 1955; 1956 dos),
PKD began an exceedingly ambitious - and totally unsuccessful - attempt to
break into the mainstream-novel market. From this period came Mary and the
Giant (written 1953-5; 1987), The Broken Bubble (written 1956; 1988),
Puttering About in a Small Land (written 1957; 1985), In Milton Lumky
Territory (written 1958-9; 1985), Confessions of a Crap Artist (written
1959; 1975), The Man whose Teeth were All Exactly Alike (written 1960;
1984) and Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (written 1960; 1986 UK). Graceful, wry,
vulnerable, pessimistic and wise, they are novels less good only than the
best of PKD's intense prime, which began immediately.Time Out of Joint
(written 1958; 1959) is a bridge novel: its central character, who lives
in a peaceful POCKET-UNIVERSE enclave created for him by a war-torn
society so that it can exploit his precognitive talents, retains the
desire and capacity to defeat illusion and regain objective reality. In
later books the author became more and more fascinated by the various
unreal worlds he created. In the first of these, the HUGO-winning THE MAN
IN THE HIGH CASTLE (written 1961; 1962), his best-known single book, the
characters live in an ALTERNATE WORLD in which the Allies lost WWII (
HITLER WINS), but one of them eventually learns from the I-Ching that the
real world - manifest in the alternate through the pages of a novel - is
one in which the Allies won (though it is not our world). After this major
novel came, in close succession, the writing of three further books which
together constitute his finest achievement. Martian Time-Slip (written
1962; 1963 Worlds of Tomorrow as "All We Marsmen"; exp 1964) creates a
world irradiated by schizophrenic ( PARANOIA) perceptions, and moves with
frightening intensity - and hilarity - to an elegant transcendental
finale. Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (written 1963;
1965), is built more intricately than any other PKD novel upon a
plot-structure whose interconnections and layers themselves work as a
portrayal of the world - in this case a post- HOLOCAUST USA. THE THREE
STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH (written 1964; 1965), more extremely than any
previous PKD book, inhabits the badlands within which the real and the
ersatz interpenetrate: suppliers of a hallucinogenic drug which makes life
tolerable for Martian colonists face opposition from the sinister
Eldritch, whose own new drug (imaged in language which recalls the
Communion wafer) pre-empts reality entirely.The complexity and stature of
these four books were perhaps muffled in the 1960s through their being
outnumbered by the less achieved PKD works that were being composed or
released at this same time - We Can Build You (written 1962; 1969 AMZ as
"A. Lincoln, Simulacrum", with last chapter added by Ted WHITE; text
restored 1972), The Game-Players of Titan (written 1963; 1963), The
Simulacra (written 1963; 1964), Now Wait for Last Year (written 1963;
1966), Clans of the Alphane Moon (written 1963-4; 1964), The Crack in
Space (written 1963-4; 1966), The Zap Gun (written 1964; 1967), The
Penultimate Truth (written 1964; 1964), The Unteleported Man (written
1964-5; first half only 1966 dos; both halves rev 1983; with short inserts
by John T. SLADEK rev vt Lies, Inc 1984 UK) and Counter-Clock World
(written 1965; 1967). None of these stories quite jell in the end - though
much happens of considerable interest - and none lack moments of

extraordinary cultural and psychological insight, sometimes presented in a
language singularly familiar with the large repertory of mind-states
accessible through the use of drugs. It was only with a late novel, A
SCANNER DARKLY (written 1973; 1977), that he would explore the more
negative human implications of drug-taking, though with an almost
hallucinated vehemence.In his next major novel, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF
ELECTRIC SHEEP? (written 1966; 1968; vt Blade Runner 1982), filmed in 1982
by Ridley SCOTT as BLADE RUNNER, PKD effectively climaxed the series of
novels in which mechanical simulacra of human beings - sometimes eminent figure as agents of illusion. In this tale, which became much more widely
known after the film, android animals are marketed to help expiate the
guilt people experience because real ones have been virtually
exterminated; simultaneously the protagonist must hunt down androids
illegally imported from MARS. In so doing, he learns that the society's
new MESSIAH may also be a fake; and that the landscapes of decay and
imposture may in fact only mirror his own condition. As with so many of
PKD's best books - like Martian-Time Slip, Dr Bloodmoney and THE THREE
STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH - the story takes place in a depleted
environment, with a small population existing in a derelict world. This
sense of a shrinking world intensifies in PKD's last two "untroubled"
works of genius: Ubik (written 1966; 1969), which features the creation of
a subjective world by a group of people killed in an accident but restored
to a kind of consciousness within a preservative machine, though any final
determination of what is real in the book is made superbly problematical;
and A Maze of Death (written 1968; 1970), a bleak poisoned exercise in
theology which has been described as his single finest work.From this
point in PKD's life, metaphysical questions began to dominate. GALACTIC
POT-HEALER (written 1967-8; 1969) begins almost as a parody, but soon
becomes involved in questions of predetermination and the Dualistic
conflict between darkness and light. Theological issues are paramount also
in the novelette "Faith of Our Fathers" (1967) and in Our Friends From
Frolix 8 (written 1968-9; 1970), the composition of which is illuminated
by Outline for Our Friends from Frolix 8 (written 1968; 1989 chap).As the
1970s began, theology gradually segued in PKD's own life into episodes of
paranoia and epiphany, climaxing in a religious experience in March 1974
which he spent much of the rest of his life analysing in the form of an
"Exegesis", of which a small, integral portion has been published as
Cosmogony and Cosmology (written 1978; 1987 chap UK); a large selection
from this material has been assembled as In Pursuit of VALIS: Selections
from the Exegesis (1991). The Selected Letters of Philip K.Dick: 1972-1973
(coll 1993), The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick: 1974 (coll 1991)
andThe Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick: 1975-76 (coll 1992) focus on
the same material; further volumes are projected.And, after 20 years, the
stream of novels became intermittent. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
(written 1970-73; 1974), which won the JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD,
mainly retreads old ground. It was followed by a rather unsatisfactory
collaboration with Roger ZELAZNY, Deus Irae (written 1964-75; fixup 1976).
Radio Free Albemuth (written 1976; 1985), which began to deal in "healthy"
fictional terms with the Exegesis material, was published only after PKD's
death.This latter novel is, in any case, a kind of draft of the finest
book of PKD's last years, VALIS (written 1978; 1981), a fragile but deeply

valiant self-analysis - he is two characters in the novel, a man who is
mad and a man who is not - conducted within the framework of a longing
search for the structure of meaning, the Vast Active Living Intelligence
System. The Divine Invasion (written 1980; 1981) and The Transmigration of
Timothy Archer (written 1981; 1982), which were assembled with their
predecessor as The VALIS Trilogy (omni 1989), share obsessional
search-patterns but little else. They were the books of a finished writer,
in every sense.The earlier PKD often lost control of his material in
ideative mazes and, sidetracked, was unable to find any resolution; but,
when he found the tale within his grasp, he was brilliantly inventive,
gaining access to imaginative realms which no other writer of sf had
reached. His sympathy for the plight of his characters - often
far-from-heroic, small, ordinary people trapped in difficult existential
circumstances - was unfailing, and his work had a human interest absent
from that of writers engaged by complexity and convolution for their own
sake. Even the most perilous metaphysical terrors of his finest novels
wore a complaining, vulnerable, human face. In all his work he was
astonishingly intimate, self-exposed, and very dangerous. He was the
funniest sf writer of his time, and perhaps the most terrifying. His
dreads were our own, spoken as we could not have spoken them. [BS/JC]Other
works: The Ganymede Takeover (written 1964-6; 1967) with Ray (R.F.)
NELSON; The Preserving Machine (written 1953-66; coll 1969; with 1 story
dropped 1971 UK); The Best of Philip K. Dick (written 1952-73; coll 1977)
ed John BRUNNER; A Letter from Philip K. Dick (written 1960; 1983 chap);
Nazism and the High Castle (written 1964?; 1964 Niekas; 1987 chap dos),
published with Schizophrenia and the Book of Changes (written 1965?; 1965
Niekas; 1987 chap dos); We Can Remember it for You Wholesale (written
1965; 1966 FSF; 1990 chap), filmed as TOTAL RECALL (1990); Nick and the
Glimmung (written 1966; 1988 UK), for children; Warning: We Are Your
Police (written 1967; 1985 chap); The Golden Man (written 1952-73; coll
1980); The Dark-Haired Girl (written 1972-5; coll 1988), mostly
nonfiction; Ubik: The Screenplay (written 1974; 1985).About the author:
The literature on PKD is enormous and daily growing. Here are a few
representative volumes: Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd (anth 1975) ed
Bruce GILLESPIE; Science-Fiction Studies, Mar 1975 and July 1988, 2
special issues devoted to PKD; The Novels of Philip K. Dick (1984) by Kim
Stanley ROBINSON; Only Apparently Real: The World of Philip K. Dick (1986)
by Paul WILLIAMS; Mind in Motion: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick
(1987) by Patricia WARRICK; To the High Castle: Philip K. Dick: A Life
1928-1962 (1989) by Gregg Rickman; Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K.
Dick (1989) by Lawrence Sutin, perhaps the most clear-sighted of the
biographical studies; Philip Kindred Dick, Metaphysical Conjurer: A
Working Bibliography (latest edn 1990) by Gordon BENSON Jr and Phil
STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also: ACE BOOKS; ALIENS; ANDROIDS; AUTOMATION;
BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; CITIES; COLLECTIONS; COLONIZATION OF
OTHER
WORLDS; COMICS; COMPUTERS; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CYBERNETICS;
CYBORGS;
ENTROPY; ESP; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FRANCE; GAMES AND SPORTS; GENETIC
ENGINEERING; GODS AND DEMONS; GOTHIC SF; GREAT AND SMALL; HISTORY OF
SF;

HUMOUR; INVASION; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); MACHINES;
MATTER TRANSMISSION; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; METAPHYSICS; MUSIC; NEW WAVE;
NEW
WORLDS; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; OUTER PLANETS; PERCEPTION; PHILIP K. DICK
AWARD; POLITICS; PSYCHOLOGY; RECURSIVE SF; REINCARNATION; RELIGION;
ROBOTS; SATIRE; TIMESCAPE BOOKS; TIME TRAVEL; VIRTUAL REALITY; WEAPONS.
DICKENS, CHARLES (JOHN HUFFHAM)
(1812-1870) UK writer, almost certainly the greatest novelist in the
English language. CD wrote considerable fantasy - including most famously
A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (1843) - but
no sf proper. However, it has been argued, most recently by John CLUTE in
Horror: 100 Best Books (anth 1988; rev 1992) ed Stephen Jones and Kim
NEWMAN, that the nightmarish, almost futuristic London which figures in
several of his later novels, from Bleak House (1853) through Our Mutual
Friend (1865), was a central influence - via G.K. CHESTERTON, Robert Louis
STEVENSON and others - in the creation of 19th-century urban England as a
stamping-ground for STEAMPUNK. Like William MORRIS, Lord DUNSANY and
J.R.R. TOLKIEN after him, CD is central to the geography of sf.It is also
arguable that Mugby Junction (anth 1866 chap), a self-contained volume
published as an extra Christmas number of CD's magazine All the Year
Round, may constitute the first SHARED-WORLD anthology of genre interest.
[JC]Other works: The Chimes (dated 1845 but 1844); The Cricket on the
Hearth (dated 1846 but 1845); The Haunted Man, and The Ghost's Bargain
(coll 1848).See also: ENTROPY.
DICKINSON, PETER (MALCOLM de BRISSAC)
(1927- ) UK writer, born in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), educated at
Eton and King's College, Cambridge; for 17 years assistant editor of the
humorous magazine Punch. PD is best known for his detective stories, but
he has written one adult sf novel, The Green Gene (1973), an amusing
SATIRE on many issues including racial prejudice, set in an
ALTERNATE-WORLD UK, where all Celts possess a gene that gives them green
skin. It was runner-up for the JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD. An adult
detective novel, King and Joker (1976), is set in an alternate England
where George V's elder brother Clarence did not die of pneumonia but lived
to become King Victor I; its belated sequel was Skeleton-in-Waiting
(1989). Two other adult thrillers have ambiguously fantastic elements,
Sleep and his Brother (1971) and Walking Dead (1977).PD's most important
contribution to sf is his Changes trilogy for children: in order of
internal chronology the novels are The Devil's Children (1971), Heartsease
(1970) and THE WEATHERMONGER (1968; with chapters 10 and 11 rev, 1969 US),
all assembled as The Changes (omni 1975; vt The Changes Trilogy 1985; vt
The Changes: A Trilogy 1991 US). They deal with an inexplicable change in
English life when the population suddenly turns against MACHINES and
adopts medieval superstitions. The Devil's Children, where a 12-year-old
girl is adopted by a band of travelling Sikhs, is the most sensitive, and
THE WEATHERMONGER, which features Merlin, the most fantastic and baroque.
There are minor inconsistencies in the world picture from book to book.In
1972 the BBC presented a six-episode sf serial for children, Man Dog,
written by PD, and novelized as Mandog * (1972) by Lois LAMPLUGH. Escapees

from the 26th century transfer their leader's mind into a dog belonging to
one of a group of children in the present. They are pursued by future
police.Many of PD's other juveniles have fantastic elements: Emma Tupper's
Diary (1971) is a Loch Ness Monster story; The Dancing Bear (1972) is a
fantasy set in the 5th century; The Gift (1973) has a telepathic boy in a
thriller with mythic overtones; The Blue Hawk (1976), which won the
Guardian Award for Best Children's Book of the year, is set in an
imaginary ancient kingdom, where the gods are withdrawing their magic from
the world; Chance, Luck and Destiny (coll 1975) contains an sf story, "Mr
Monnow"; Annerton Pit (1977) features an ambiguous presence - it may be
sciencefictional rather than fantastic - lurking in a mineshaft of ill
repute; Tulku (1979) has fantastic happenings in Tibet; Healer (1983; vt
The Healer 1985 US) has a girl with special powers; and Eva (1988) has a
girl's personality transferred to a chimpanzee after a car accident - much
social adjustment is necessary.PD's juveniles are uneven, but at their
best they are among the finest in the genre: various, nonconformist and
vivid, often giving old themes new life by thinking them through afresh
from the beginning, rather than accepting them as givens. [PN]Other works
(all juveniles): The Iron Lion (1972 chap US; rev 1983 chap UK); The
Flight of Dragons (1979), nonfiction; The Seventh Raven (1983); Giant Cold
(1984 chap); Hundreds and Hundreds (anth 1984);A Box of Nothing (1985);
Merlin Dreams (coll of linked stories 1988); AK (1990); A Bone from a Dry
Sea (1992); Time and the Clockmice, Etcetera (1993); Shadow of a Hero
(1994).See also: APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD); CHILDREN'S SF;
MAGIC.
DICK-LAUDER, [Sir] GEORGE (ANDREW)
(1917-1981) British Army officer who began a writing career after his
retirement from the service. His two sf novels, Our Man for Ganymede
(1969) and A Skull and Two Crystals (1972), though not innovative, do
explore the conventions of SPACE OPERA in a manner both literate and
alert. [JC]
DICKSON, CARTER
John Dickson CARR.
DICKSON, GORDON R(UPERT)
(1923- ) Canadian-born writer, resident in the USA since age 13 and long
a US citizen. He was educated (along with Poul ANDERSON) at the University
of Minnesota, taking his BA in English in 1948, and remains in Minnesota.
Through the Minneapolis Fantasy Society, which he re-established after
WWII, he became friends with Anderson, with whom he later collaborated on
the Hoka series - Earthman's Burden (coll 1957), Star Prince Charlie
(1975) and Hoka! (coll 1982) - and with Clifford D. SIMAK. Along with
these writers, GRD has shown a liking, often indulged, for hinterland
settings peopled by solid farming or small-town stock whose ideologies,
when expressed, violate any simple, conservative-liberal polarity, though
urban readers and critics tend to respond to them as right-wing. As late
as Wolf and Iron (1974 FSF as "In Iron Years"; much exp 1990) - which
embodies a SURVIVALIST plot considerably deepened by the author's detailed
and compassionate attachment to the kind of hero who understands and loves
the physical world - he was still mining this fertile venue.GRD began

publishing sf in 1950 with "Trespass" for Fantastic Story Quarterly,
written with Anderson, and he has since been a prolific and consistent
short-story author; much of this material was assembled in the 1980s in
volumes like The Man from Earth (coll 1983), Dickson! (coll 1984; rev vt
Steel Brother 1985) and Forward! (coll 1985), the latter ed Sandra MIESEL,
long an advocate of his works.GRD's first novel, Alien from Arcturus (1956
dos; rev vt Arcturus Landing 1979), established from an early date the
tone of underlying and rather relentless seriousness which became so
marked in later works, while at the same time succumbing to a tendency to
displace emotional intensities from human relations between the sexes to
those obtaining between human and dependent ALIEN (or, as in Wolf and
Iron, Terran mammal). The aliens in Alien from Arcturus are decidedly
cuddly, with shining black noses, and much resemble those who appear in
Space Winners (1965), a juvenile, and The Alien Way (1965), about an
Earthman's telepathic rapport with the representative of a species that
may invade. But the strong narrative skills deployed in these
comparatively rudimentary SPACE-OPERA tales, along with an idiomatic
capacity to write novel-length fiction, has ensured the survival of these
relatively unambitious works. Some later singletons - like Sleepwalker's
World (1971), a dystopian vision of OVERPOPULATION, and The R-Master
(1973; rev vt The Last Master 1983), in which a society is ambiguously
guided by a saviour whose origins lie more in PULP-MAGAZINE ideas than in
philosophy-failed to maintain the elation of the earlier books.While
continuing to produce prolifically in the 1950s and 1960s, GRD
simultaneously engaged upon a sequence of novels which was to occupy much
of his energy for decades. The ongoing Childe Cycle - the sf volumes of
which are often known as the Dorsai series - is intended to present an
evolutionary blueprint, in highly dramatized fictional terms, for
humanity's ultimate expansion through the Galaxy, as an inherently ethical
species. "In order to make this type of story work effectively," GRD has
said, "I developed by the late 1950s a new fictional pattern that I have
called the 'consciously thematic story'. This was specifically designed to
create an unconscious involvement of the reader with the philosophical
thematic argument that the story action renders and demonstrates. Because
this new type of story has represented a pattern hitherto unknown to
readers and writers, my work has historically been criticized in terms
that do not apply to it - primarily as if it were drama alone." However,
though GRD originally planned to present his thesis through a phased
publication of the entire sequence - to include at least three historical
titles and three contemporary novels as well as the several books set in
the future - only the Dorsai books have yet been released, and the full
integrity of GRD's argument remains, therefore, undemonstrated.In rough
order of internal chronology, the Childe Cycle comprises (1995):
Necromancer (1962; vt No Room for Man 1963), The Tactics of Mistake
(1971), Soldier, Ask Not (1964 Gal; exp 1967), the short form of which won
a HUGO for 1964, and The Genetic General (1959 ASF as "Dorsai!"; cut 1960
dos; text restored vt DORSAI! 1976), all but Soldier, Ask Not being
assembled as Three to Dorsai! (omni 1975); The Spirit of Dorsai (coll of
linked stories 1979) and Lost Dorsai (coll of linked stories 1980; rev
1988 UK), whose title story won a 1981 Hugo, most of both volumes being
reassembled with some material preceding The Genetic General as The Dorsai

Companion (coll of linked stories 1986); and a final grouping of texts,
all set about 100 years further into the future: the overlong Young Bleys
(1991), Other (1994),The Final Encyclopedia (1984) and The Chantry Guild
(1988), the last volume - GRD claimed as early as 1983 - being hived off
from a projected final volume to be called Childe. As the sequence
develops, human space is divided into four spheres plus Old Earth herself,
with her vast genetic pool; Dorsai, whose inhabitants are bred as
professional soldiers; the Exotic worlds, whose inhabitants are bred to
creative (sometimes sybaritic) mind-arts; the worlds (like Newton) which
emphasize physical science; and the God-haunted Friendly worlds, where
folk are bred for faith. The task of mankind's genetic elite is somehow to
merge these variant strains, and the philosophical burden of the sequence
tends to be conveyed through plots whose origins lie unabashedly in the
SUPERMAN tales of earlier sf. The Genetic General, which in its restored
form remains the most arousing of these, features Donal Graeme, the
central incarnation of a triune evolutionary superman whose earlier life
is told in Necromancer, and who is reborn as Hal Mayne to climax the
series - and the genetic elitism it promulgates - through its final (to
date) volumes. The terms GRD uses to describe his superman's capacities Graeme, for instance, being capable of a potent sort of cognitive
intuition - are perhaps best appreciated within the massive, ongoing
rhythm of the series; for it is as a novelist, not as a philosopher, that
GRD reveals his strength.Very little of GRD's later fiction, however
hastily written some of it may seem, fails to pose questions and arguments
about humankind's fundamental nature. From 1960 much of his work has
specifically reflected his preoccupation with the concept that humankind
is inevitably driven to higher evolutionary states, a notion often
expressed, however, in tales - like None But Man (1969; with 1 story
added, as coll 1989) or Hour of the Horde (1970) - that contrast
humankind's indomitable spirit with that of ALIENS whose lack of
comparable elan makes them into straw horses for Homo sapiens to defeat.
More serious presentations of material - from the fine Timestorm (fixup
1977) on to ponderous later tales like Way of the Pilgrim (1980 ASF as
"The Cloak and the Staff"; much exp 1987) - do generally avoid the graver
pitfalls of pulp. Though his sometimes unremitting use of genre
conventions to provide solutions to serious arguments has undoubtedly
retarded full recognition of his talent and seriousness, the later volumes
of the Childe Cycle series increasingly enforce a more measured response
to his life work.GRD won the NEBULA for Best Novelette with "Call Him
Lord" (1966). He was President of the SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA
1969-71. In 1981, he won Hugos not only for "Lost Dorsai" but also for a
short story, "The Cloak and the Staff". [JC]Other works: Mankind on the
Run (1956 dos; vt On the Run 1979); Time to Teleport (1955 Science Fiction
Stories as "No More Barriers"; 1960 chap dos) and Delusion World (1955
Science Fiction Stories as "Perfectly Adjusted"; exp 1961 dos), both later
published in omnibus format (omni 1981); the Dilbia series, comprising
Spacial Delivery (1961 dos) and Spacepaw (1969); Naked to the Stars
(1961); the Underseas series, later assembled as Secrets of the Deep (omni
1985) and comprising Secret Under the Sea (1960), Secret Under Antarctica
(1963) and Secret Under the Caribbean (1964); Mission to Universe (1965;
rev 1977); Planet Run (1967; rev as coll with 2 stories added, vt Planet

Run, Plus Two Bonus Stories 1982) with Keith LAUMER; The Space Swimmers
(1967), which serves as a sequel to Home from the Shore (1963 Gal; exp
1978); Wolfling (1969); Mutants: A Science Fiction Adventure (coll 1970),
in which the stories are linked thematically; Danger-Human (coll 1970; vt
The Book of Gordon R. Dickson 1973); The Pritcher Mass (1972); The
Outposter (1972); The Day the Sun Stood Still (anth 1972), a common-theme
anthology with Poul Anderson and Robert SILVERBERG; The Star Road (coll
1973); Alien Art (1973), a juvenile, later assembled with Arcturus Landing
as Alien Art; Arcturus Landing (omni 1978); Ancient, My Enemy (coll 1974);
Gremlins, Go Home! (1974), a juvenile with Ben BOVA; The Lifeship (1976;
vt Lifeboat 1978 UK) with Harry HARRISON; the Dragon and the George
fantasy sequence comprising The Dragon and the George (as "St Dragon and
the George" FSF 1957; exp 1976), The Dragon Knight (1990), The Dragon on
the Border (1992), The Dragon at War (1993) and The Dragon, the Earl and
the Troll (1994) Gordon R. Dickson's SF Best (coll 1978; exp vt In the
Bone 1987); The Far Call (1978), a rare NEAR-FUTURE tale of the space
programme; Pro (1978); Masters of Everon (1979); In Iron Years (coll
1980); Love Not Human (coll 1981); Survival! (coll 1984); Jamie the Red
(1984) with Roland GREEN; Beyond the Dar al-Harb (coll 1985); Invaders!
(coll 1985); The Man the Worlds Rejected (coll 1986); The Last Dream (coll
1986); Mindspan (coll 1986) ed Sandra Miesel; The Forever Man (1986);
Stranger (coll 1986); Guided Tour (coll 1988); Beginnings (coll 1988);
Ends (coll 1988); The Earth Lords (1989).As Editor: Rod Serling's Triple
W: Witches, Warlocks and Werewolves (anth 1963); Rod Serling's Devils and
Demons (anth 1967); Combat SF (anth 1975); Nebula Winners Twelve (anth
1978); the War and Honor sequence of SHARED-WORLD anthologies, beginning
with The Harriers * (anth 1991) and The Harriers #2: Blood and Honor *
(anth 1993); Robot Warriors (anth 1991).About the author: Gordon R.
Dickson: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1983) by Raymond H.
Thompson; Gordon Rupert Dickson, First Dorsai: A Working Bibliography
(latest edn 1990 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr and Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See
also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; CANADA; CHILDREN'S SF; COMPUTERS;
CYBORGS; ECOLOGY; ECONOMICS; EVOLUTION; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GALAXY
SCIENCE
FICTION; HUMOUR; INVASION; LINGUISTICS; MATHEMATICS; PARALLEL WORLDS;
POLITICS; PSI POWERS; ROBERT HALE LIMITED; SPACESHIPS; TIME TRAVEL; UNDER
THE SEA; WAR; WEAPONS.
DIETZ, WILLIAM C(OREY)
(1945- ) US writer who began to publish sf with War World (1986), the
first volume of his Sam McCade sequence of sf adventures about an
interstellar bounty hunter, which continued with Imperial Bounty (1988),
Alien Bounty (1990) and McCade's Bounty (1990). The galactic venue of the
series exhibits some interesting kinks, and McCade himself gradually gains
individuality. Singletons include Freehold (1987), military sf; Prison
Planet (1989); Cluster Command (1989) with David A. DRAKE, - one of the
latter's Crisis of Empire sequence; Matrix Man (1990), a complicated,
fast-moving tale set in a NEAR-FUTURE Earth whose seas and population are
continuing to rise, and where a nefarious peace foundation (run in fact by
a huge corporation) opposes attempts by the Exodus Society to foment
emigration; Mars Prime (1992); Legion of the Damned (1993) and Bodyguard

(1994) As in his work in general, the right side wins. As an author of
entertainments, WCD stands out for his thorough grasp of the devices of
sf. [JC]
DIEUDONNE, FLORENCE (LUCINDA) CARPENTER
(1850-? ) US writer. In her Rondah, or Thirty-Three Years in a Star
(1887) the tale's several protagonists travel through the Solar System in
a large ASTEROID (not a star). Transported to this asteroid by a
pre-arranged explosion, the central figure of the tale becomes king of the
native bird-people, in fact of vegetable origin, who are replaced by
ferocious elves when the worldlet cools down. Much happens. In the end,
the protagonist, with his woman, seems destined to rule the Universe. The
book is a cacophony of irreconcilable elements, but the author's extremely
fertile imagination, when harnessed, manages to create a tale which
significantly prefigures 20th-century cosmological SPACE OPERA. Xartella
(1891), self-published, is fantasy. [JC]
Di FATE, VINCENT
(1945- ) US sf illustrator (name sometimes rendered DiFate). He was born
in Yonkers, New York, and like many other sf illustrators attended the New
York-Phoenix Institute. He began his career doing tv animation for Ralph
Bakshi; his first professional sf illustration was for Analog (Aug 1969)
and most of his magazine work has been for ASF. Many of his paintings have
been for paperback book covers. His artwork, suprisingly impressionistic
for someone who frequently works with technological subjects like
spacecraft, is often moody and sombre. He was one of the NASA artists for
the Apollo/Soyuz programme in 1975 and has worked for NASA since. He won
the HUGO for Best Professional Artist in 1979 and has been nominated many
other times. VDF lectures on art and is also well known for his
occasional, interesting, long-running column about sf illustration,
Sketches, from 1976 in the semiprozine ALGOL and in its surviving sister
magazine SF CHRONICLE. A book of his work is Di Fate's Catalog of Science
Fiction Hardware (1980) by VDF and Ian Summers. [JG/PN]See also:
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.
DIGEST
A term used to describe a magazine format, in contrast to, for example,
BEDSHEET and pulp ( PULP MAGAZINES), which are both larger. The page size
of a digest is approximately 5.5 x 7.5in (about 140 x 190mm), though it
can vary slightly; for example, Gal was normally a little smaller than
ASF. ASF was the first important sf magazine to turn digest, in 1943, and
by the mid-1950s almost all SF MAGAZINES had followed suit, the
pulp-magazine format disappearing. By the 1980s, however, many sf
magazines had turned to a small-bedsheet, stapled, "slick" format. The
digest format is just a little larger than that of the normal paperback
book, which averages 4.5 x 7in (about 115 x 180mm); the paperback format
has also been used for some magazines, notably NW in the mid-1960s. [PN]
DIKTY, T(HADDEUS MAXIM) E(UGENE)
(1920-1991) US editor and publisher, married from 1953 to Julian MAY,
about whose work he compiled The Work of Julian May: An Annotated
Bibliography ?

an sf checklist on index cards with the collector Frederick Shoyer in
1939, but the cards were lost in WWII. After the war, with Erle Korshak
and Mark Reinsberg, he became a bookseller and passed the partially
reassembled checklist on to Everett F. BLEILER, who used it to compile The
Checklist of Fantastic Literature (1948) - the first comprehensive
BIBLIOGRAPHY in the sf field - which TED and Korshak founded SHASTA
PUBLISHERS to put into print. TED was also associated with the setting-up
of the publishers Carcosa House. With Bleiler, TED edited an annual
ANTHOLOGY series - the first "year's-best" series to appear in the field:
The Best Science Fiction Stories, 1949 (anth 1949) and The Best Science
Fiction Stories, 1950 (anth 1950; cut vt The Best Science Fiction Stories
1951 UK), both assembled as Science Fiction Omnibus (omni 1952); The Best
Science Fiction Stories, 1951 (anth 1951; cut vt The Best Science Fiction
Stories, Second Series 1952 UK; further cut vt The Mindworm 1967 UK); The
Best Science-Fiction Stories, 1952 (anth 1952; cut vt The Best Science
Fiction Stories, Third Series 1953 UK); The Best Science-Fiction Stories,
1953 (anth 1953; cut vt The Best Science Fiction Stories, Fourth Series
1955 UK); The Best Science Fiction Stories, 1954 (anth 1954; cut vt The
Best Science Fiction Stories, Fifth Series 1956 UK). Frontiers in Space
(anth 1955) contains a selection from the second, third and fourth
volumes. A second series, Year's Best Science Fiction Novels, presented a
selection of longer stories: Year's Best Science Fiction Novels, 1952
(anth 1952; cut vt Year's Best Science Fiction Novels 1953 UK), 1953 (anth
1953; cut vt Category Phoenix 1955 UK) and 1954 (anth 1954; cut vt Year's
Best Science Fiction Novels, Second Series 1955 UK). Together they also
edited Imagination Unlimited (anth 1952; cut vt Men of Space and Time 1953
UK), which contains stories on each of 15 sciences.After the collaboration
with Bleiler ended, TED went on to produce three further "best" volumes as
sole editor: The Best Science-Fiction Stories and Novels, 1955 (anth 1955;
cut vt 5 Tales from Tomorrow 1957), The Best Science-Fiction Stories and
Novels, 1956 (anth 1956; cut vt 6 from Worlds Beyond 1958) and The Best
Science-Fiction Stories and Novels, Ninth Series (anth 1958). He also
edited Every Boy's Book of Outer Space Stories (anth 1960) and two theme
anthologies about MARS and the MOON: Great Science Fiction about Mars
(anth 1966) and Great Science Fiction Stories about the Moon (anth
1967).In the 1950s, after Shasta had collapsed in ignominy, TED formed
Publication Associates with Julian May, and worked closely with her on
various projects for the rest of his life, acting as her agent and editor
on all her mature work. In 1972, with Darrell C. Richardson, he founded
and, with the added help of Robert E. WEINBERG, ran FAX COLLECTOR'S
EDITIONS, a publishing enterprise aimed at reprinting material, often in
facsimile, from old magazines; at about the same time (though its first
title did not appear until 1976), and also with Weinberg (who dropped out
after a year), he founded STARMONT HOUSE to produce monographs on
individual sf writers, along with some bibliographies and fiction,
anonymously editing for the firm one anthology, Worlds Within Worlds: Four
Classic Argosy Tales of Science Fiction (anth 1991). Two of his and Julian
May's children carried on with the firm after his death. [JC/MJE]See also:
SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS.
DILLARD, J(EANNE) M.

(1954- ) US writer. Most of her works are STAR TREK ties, including
Mindshadow * (1986), Demons * (1986), Bloodthirst * (1987), Star Trek V:
The Final Frontier * (1989), which novelizes the 1989 film, The Lost Years
* (1989), The Undiscovered Country * (1992), which novelizes STAR TREK VI:
THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY (1991), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Emissary *
(1993), and the non- fictionStar Trek: Where No Man Has Gone Before: A
History in Pictures (1994). JMD has also written War of the Worlds: The
Resurrection * (1988), tied to the tv series, and Specters (1991), a
horror novel. [JC]
DILLON, LEO
(1933- ) and DIANE (1933- ) US illustrators, the only team (married in
1957) ever to win a HUGO for Best Professional Artist, which they did in
1971. They have been freelancing since 1958, at first working separately.
Together their work has covered many fields: record album covers,
advertising art, Christmas cards, children's books and movie posters among
them; they are among the most respected commercial artists in the USA.
Their sf work for ACE BOOKS in the late 1960s (notably for the Ace
Specials) was particularly good, though perhaps their most celebrated work
has been for children's books, winning them Caldecott Medals for Why
Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears (1976) and Ashanti to Zulu (1977). They
have designed especially strong covers for books by Harlan ELLISON. Their
sf production has been only occasional since about 1972. Their work is
often similar to wood-block prints: rough, sometimes semi-abstract shapes
powerfully assembled. They are, however, extremely versatile and work in a
variety of styles and media, notably an Art Nouveau-derived look
reminiscent of Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), as can be seen in The Art of Leo
and Diane Dillon (1981) ed Byron PREISS. Richard M. POWERS was one of the
first to show that semi-abstract images of some sophistication could sell
sf; the Dillons went on to prove the point incontrovertibly. [JG/PN]See
also: FANTASY; ILLUSTRATION.
DILOV, LJUBEN
[r] BULGARIA.
DIME-NOVEL SF
Dime-novel sf, which was almost wholly boys' fiction, appeared in two
media: serially in such BOYS' PAPERS as Golden Hours, Happy Days, The Boys
of New York and Young Men of America, or as complete stories in series
publications like The Wide Awake Weekly, The Boy's Star Library, New York
Five Cent Library, the FRANK READE LIBRARY and The Nugget Library. The
most important publishers were Frank Tousey, Publisher, Norman L. Munro
and STREET ?
to 9 x 121/2in (about 230 x 320mm) saddle-wired (saddle-stitched)
pamphlets, but from the turn of the century most dime novels were either
saddle-wired single-signature pamphlets of around 81/2 x 11in (about 215 x
280mm) or 5 x 7in (about 125 x 180mm) side-stapled paperbound books of
several signatures. (All of these formats are rendered here in the US
style; i.e., width followed by height.) It is the 81/2 x 11in pamphlet similar in dimension to BEDSHEET-format - that is usually, though not very
logically, described as "dime-novel format", but then the term "dime
novel" itself is inaccurate, since most commonly they cost a nickel

(5cents) or 6cents, rather than a dime (10cents). All dime novels were
printed on cheap paper - sometimes very poor indeed - and it is therefore
now difficult to locate examples in good condition.Almost all dime-novel
sf falls into three basic categories: the invention story ( DISCOVERY AND
INVENTION), the lost-race story ( LOST WORLDS) and the marvel story. These
types occasionally overlap in minor ways.The invention story originated
with Edward S. ELLIS's The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), in which
Ellis, a prolific and popular writer, adapted the historical Newark Steam
Man into a conventional Western story. This first publication seems to
have been without influence, but one of the later reprintings (as The Huge
Hunter, 1876) came to the attention of Frank Tousey, a rival publisher,
who commissioned a similar work, Frank Reade and His Steam Man of the
Plains (The Boys of New York 1876 as "The Steam Man of the Plains"; 1892
as by "Noname"), from Harry Enton (pseudonym of Harold Cohen [1854-1927]).
This initiated the important series about the Frank Reade family of
inventors ( FRANK READE LIBRARY). Enton followed this with two sequels
about Frank Reade, with steam engines shaped into horses.These stories,
together with Ellis's work, set the pattern for future invention stories.
The initial model was the dime-novel Western. Stress was on iron
technology, with little or no science; narratives contained random,
thrilling incidents, often presented in a disjointed and puerile way.
Typical social patterns were: a conscious attempt to capitalize on age
conflict, with boy inventors outdoing their elders ( EDISONADE);
aggressive, exploitative capitalism, particularly at the expense of
"primitive" peoples; the frontier mentality, with slaughter of
"primitives" (in the first Frank Reade, Jr. story Frank kills about 250
Native Americans, to say nothing of destroying an inhabited village);
strong elements of sadism; ethnic rancour focused on Native Americans,
Blacks, Irish and, later, Mexicans and Jews.After Enton's three stories
and a fourth of unknown authorship, the invention dime novel was taken
over by Luis SENARENS, who (with anonymous associates) wrote a long series
of Frank Reade, Jr. stories 1882-98, culminating in the Frank Reade
Library. In this series the type of invention shifted to electric air
vessels, land rovers and submarines, all showing the strong influence of
Jules VERNE. The narrative more typically became one of (frequently
inaccurate) geographical exploration and adventure, sometimes
incorporating minor lost-race episodes.The Frank Reade, Jr. stories were
historically the most important invention stories, but other story chains
existed, as did individual stories about other boy inventors with airships
or submarines. When the sales of the Frank Reade Library languished,
Tousey issued a companion series, the Jack Wright stories, again by
Senarens. Competing boy-inventor series from Street ?
doings of Tom Edison, Jr., written mostly by Philip READE, and Electric
Bob, written by Robert Toombes. Both series are much superior to the Frank
Reade, Jr. stories in content and writing, and both are morally less
offensive, but neither of them had the cultural impact of Tousey's Frank
Reade Library.The dime-novel lost-race story did not necessarily follow
the full pattern of its adult counterpart (colonial exploitation, mythic
elements, sacred-vs-secular clashes, exotic sex partners, destruction of
the land, etc.), but was often a frank chronicle of smugly justified
looting. As Senarens said in Jack Wright and his Prairie Engine (The Boys'

Star Library 1892; 1908), Jack having "liberated" an enormous diamond:
"There was no crime in taking it. It was part of an idol, worshipped in
lieu of heaven, and wresting such an object from infidels is no crime in
the eyes of the Almighty." Typical lost-race dime novels are: Frank Reade,
Jr., and His Electric Coach (The Boys of New York 1890-91; 1893) by
"Noname", with Ancient Hebrews; The Missing Island (1894) by "Noname",
with Aztecs; A Trip to the Center of the Earth (New York Boys' Weekly
1878; 1894) by Howard De Vere (pseudonym of Howard Van Orden), which has
acculturated early Americans with interesting speech changes; The Lost
Captain (1880; 1906) by Frederick Whittaker, with Old Norse at the North
Pole; Lost at the South Pole (The Boys of New York 1888 as by J.G.
Bradley; 1899 as by Capt. Thomas H. Wilson), with strange races; Among the
Fire Worshipers (The Boys of New York 1880 as by Berton Bertrew; 1902 as
by Howard Austin), with Aztecs; "Underground" (Golden Hours May-July 1890)
by Thomas P. Montfort, with Toltecs in Australia; and Across the Frozen
Sea (1894) by "Noname", again with Old Norse at the North Pole. An unusual
dime novel for adults is El Rubio Bravo, King of the Swordsmen (1881) by
Col. Thomas Hoyer Monstery, about Aztecs.Lost-race stories turned up
unexpectedly elsewhere. The detective stories about Nick CARTER written by
Frederic Rensselaer Dey (1861-1922) under the pseudonym Chickering Carter
provide several examples. In The Index of Seven Stars (1907) and An
Amazonian Queen (1907) Nick has adventures among a lost race of mixed Old
Norse and Indian origin, ruled by women, and excels in the gladiatorial
arena. A 7-vol series beginning with Facing an Unseen Terror (1907) and
ending with The Seven-Headed Monster (1907) describes a supercivilization
hidden in the foothills of the Himalayas, with flying machines lofted by a
new radioactive element: the hidden race has also mastered electricity,
vibration and the lifeforce. This time the mighty Nick meets his superior
in the wicked scientist Zanabayah.Lost-race incidents of a more marginal
kind frequently occur in invention and geographical-adventure dime novels.
In most cases they are concerned with Pre-Columbian American peoples,
based loosely on popular American archaeology, and sometimes influenced by
the work of H. Rider HAGGARD. In "marvel" dime novels lost-race situations
are also common, usually concerning themselves with imaginary peoples
possessing high civilizations.This third group of dime novels, stressing
"marvel" elements, emerged in the late 1880s and reached its fullest
development in the 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century. The
"marvel" tale was no longer a Vernean yarn of geographical adventure or
one of Wild West thrills and high jinks, but frankly set its protagonist
into extremely fantastic circumstances, often seemingly supernatural,
which were almost always rationalized. Instead of savage Indians, Western
badmen, malicious "Greasers", pirates, bears, giant snakes, sea serpents,
frenzied whales and giant octopuses, it utilized dwarfs, giants, strangely
teratological races, outlandish customs, mammoths, magical gems and
crystals, bobbing and ducking islands, wonderful cavern worlds and
mysterious appearances and disappearances. Inventions, when they appeared,
were more likely to be the product of alien races than the brainchildren
of boy inventors. Instead of operating steam or electric land rovers,
flying ship-hulls and Nautilus-like submarines, heroes might encounter
bizarre means of transportation: ANTIGRAVITY airships or vehicles powered
by fantastic new energies, sometimes suggested by Bulwer LYTTON's "vril".

The purportedly realistic geography of the Vernean dime novel yielded to
outlandish ambiences in Antarctica, inside the HOLLOW EARTH or even on
other planets.The central theme of the "marvel" story was no longer
mechanical exploitation or destruction of the environment (and weaker
peoples), as in the Frank Reade, Jr. stories, but encounter with the
strange, grotesque, magical and inexplicable. The note of sadism and
ethnic rancour that permeated the earlier invention stories was usually
lacking, or at least much toned down.Some marvel elements appeared in the
later Frank Reade, Jr. stories, but they were found in much finer form in
the sometimes very imaginative work of Francis W. DOUGHTY, Fred THORPE and
Cornelius SHEA. Other significant marvel stories included Six Weeks in the
Moon (1896) by "Noname" (perhaps Senarens), Under the World (Golden Hours
as "Into the Maelstrom" 1894; 1906) by John DE MORGAN and "Three Boys from
the Moon" (Happy Days Aug-Sep 1901) as by Gaston Garne (a Norman L. Munro
house name).Apart from the work of Verne and Haggard, contemporary adult
sf had almost no influence on dime-novel sf. Imaginary- WAR stories are
rare, the only significant one being "Holland, the Destroyer" (Golden
Hours 1900-1) by Hal Harkaway (house name used here by Edward T.
STRATEMEYER), in which the USA, at war with almost the entire world, is
saved by a supersubmarine. Interplanetary elements enter the last Frank
Reade, Jr. stories and Doughty's pseudonymous Two Boys on a Trip to an
Unknown Planet (The Boys of New York 1989 as by Albert J. Booth; 1901 as
by Richard R. Montgomery), but they are fantastic and show no knowledge of
contemporary adult work. Weldon J. COBB, a Chicago author, presumably read
a US newspaper adaptation of H.G. WELLS's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (Pearson's
Magazine 1897; 1898): his At War with Mars (Golden Hours Sep-Nov 1897;
1907) reads as near-plagiarism, with Martian cylinders striking in the USA
- as an original element, the Martians have fitted out Phobos as an armed
space station for the attack on Earth. Cobb's "To Mars with Tesla" (New
Golden Hours Mar-May 1901) contains an abortive space flight - the landing
point proves to be the Southwest desert, not MARS as planned.The sf dime
novel has had a larger influence on later sf than has been generally
recognized. The invention story of the Frank Reade, Jr. sort led directly,
through the Stratemeyer Syndicate, to such boys' fiction as TOM SWIFT (see
also JUVENILE SERIES). Many early PULP-MAGAZINE sf-adventure stories are
simply dime novels translated for an older readership, while individual
points of influence are common enough. The situations in Edgar Rice
BURROUGHS's Opar and A. MERRITT's Muria ("The Conquest of the Moon Pool"
1919) seem to be indebted to dime novels, while Rex STOUT's Under the
Andes (All-Story 1914; 1984) is simply a Cornelius Shea sort of story with
modifications. A. Conan DOYLE's The Lost World (1912) was probably
influenced by "Noname"'s The Island in the Air (1896), and David LINDSAY's
A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920) possibly by Doughty's Two Boys on a Trip to an
Unknown Planet. One can also link the episodic structure and strange races
in L. Frank BAUM's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) with "marvel" dime
novels.There were European equivalents and near-equivalents of Dime
Novels, one of the most interesting being the German periodical Der
LUFTPIRAT UND SEIN LENKBARES LUFTSCHIFF , featuring Captain Mors, which
was a pure SPACE-OPERA series, the earliest known. (For UK equivalents
BOYS' PAPERS.) [EFB]

DIMENSION 5
(vt Dimension Four US) Film (1966). United Pictures and Harold Goldman
Associates. Dir Franklin Adreon, starring Jeffrey Hunter, France Nuyen,
Harold Sakata, Donald Woods. Screenplay Arthur C. Pierce. 92 mins, cut to
88 mins. Colour.Adreon and Pierce were the team that made CYBORG 2087
(also 1966). This equally cheap production has Sakata, who played the
villain Oddjob in the James Bond movie Goldfinger (1964), as one of the
Chinese communists who plan to blow up Los Angeles by planting an H-bomb.
They are foiled by a US secret agent who can go back and forth in time by
pressing a button on his belt. [JB]
DIMENSION FOUR
DIMENSION 5.
DIMENSIONS
We perceive three spatial dimensions, but theoretical MATHEMATICS is
easily capable of dealing with many more. Conventional graphical analysis
frequently represents time as a dimension, encouraging consideration of it
as the "fourth dimension". The possible existence of PARALLEL WORLDS
displaced from ours along a fourth spatial dimension (in the same way that
a series of two-dimensional universes might lie next to one another like
the pages of a book) is a popular hypothesis in sf, and such worlds are
frequently referred to as "other dimensions". The COSMOLOGY of Einstein's
General Theory of Relativity (1916), which proposes a four-dimensional
model of the Universe in which the notions of space and time are collapsed
into a single "spacetime continuum", offered considerable encouragement to
sf notions of a multidimensional Universe (or "multiverse"). Many modern
occultists and pseudoscientists have followed in the tracks of Johann
Zollner (1834-1882), author of Transcendental Physics (1865), who borrowed
mathematical notions to "justify" the idea of the "astral plane" beloved
by spiritualists and Theosophists. J.W. DUNNE used the notion to explain
prophetic dreams, eventually constructing a theory of the "Serial
Universe", and P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947) built a more complex model of
the Universe in which time"moves" in a spiral and there are six spatial
dimensions.The possible dimensional limitations of human existence and
perception were dramatized by Edwin A. ABBOTT in Flatland (1884) as by "A
Square", which describes a world of two-dimensional beings, one of whom is
challenged to imagine our three-dimensional world - encouraging readers,
by analogy, to attempt to imagine a four-dimensional world. The challenge
was taken up by C.H. HINTON, whose many essays on the subject attempt to
"explain" ghosts and to imagine a four-dimensional God from whom nothing
in the human world can be hidden. In his story "An Unfinished
Communication" (1895) the afterlife involves freedom to move along the
time dimension ( TIME TRAVEL) to relive and reassess moments of life; he
also wrote a Flatland novel, An Episode of Flatland (1907). H.G. WELLS
borrowed Hintonian arguments to "explain" the working of the device in THE
TIME MACHINE (1895). The eponymous figure of E.V. ODLE's The Clockwork Man
(1923) could perceive many dimensions when working properly, but while
malfunctioning could do no more than flutter back and forth in time,
offering the merest hint of the quality of multidimensional life. Algernon
BLACKWOOD's "The Pikestaffe Case" (1924) attempts to evoke the

non-Euclidean geometry of a dimensional trap lurking within a mirror.Early
GENRE-SF writers who found the notion of dimensions fascinating included
Miles J. BREUER, most notably in "The Appendix and the Spectacles" (1928)
and"The Captured Cross-Section" (1929), and Donald WANDREI, notably in
"The Monster from Nowhere" (1935) and"Infinity Zero" (1936). In E.E."Doc"
SMITH's Skylark of Valeron (1934; 1949) the heroes briefly enter a
four-dimensional reality, and in Clifford D. SIMAK's "Hellhounds of the
Cosmos" (1932), 99 men enter the fourth dimension in a single grotesque
body to fight a four-dimensional monster. Henry KUTTNER's and C.L. MOORE's
classic "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" (1943 as by Lewis Padgett) features
toys from the future which educate children into four-dimensional habits
of thought, but, like most stories of the period, this uses dimensional
trickery casually to tie up its plot with a neat knot.The mathematical
discipline of topology inspired several dimensional fantasies: Moebius
strips feature in Martin GARDNER's "No-Sided Professor" (1946) and "The
Island of Five Colours" (1952), Theodore STURGEON's "What Dead Men Tell"
(1949), Arthur C. CLARKE's "Wall of Darkness" (1949) and Homer NEARING
Jr's "The Hermeneutical Doughnut" (1954); Klein bottles and tesseracts
feature in "The Last Magician" (1951) by Bruce ELLIOTT, "And He Built a
Crooked House" (1941) by Robert A. HEINLEIN and "Star, Bright" (1952) by
Mark CLIFTON. Occam's Razor by David DUNCAN (1957) also deploys
topological jargon to shore up its dimensional speculations. George
GAMOW's popularization of ideas in modern physics, Mr Tompkins in
Wonderland (coll 1939), dramatizes certain odd situations very well
(although its contents are didactic essays rather than stories).The notion
that spaceships might make use of a fourth-dimensional HYPERSPACE in order
to evade the limiting velocity of light is very common in sf, having been
initially popularized by Isaac ASIMOV among others, but few stories
actually attempt to describe it; it is usually imagined as a chaotic
environment which utterly confuses the senses, as in Frederik POHL's "The
Mapmakers" (1955) and Clifford D. Simak's "All the Traps of Earth" (1960).
The dimensional chaos that might be associated with BLACK HOLES has
received closer attention, though these too are most often used as
"wormholes" permitting very long journeys to be taken more or less
instantaneously. Among the more effective representations of experience in
dimensionally distorted environments are Norman KAGAN's "The Mathenauts"
(1964), David I. MASSON's "Traveller's Rest" (1965) and Christopher
PRIEST's INVERTED WORLD (1974; vt The Inverted World US).In recent years
C.H. Hinton's ideas have been revived by Rudy RUCKER, who has used
dimensional mathematics very extravagantly in a number of his novels and
short stories, including the afterlife fantasy WHITE LIGHT (1980), the
comedy of fourth-dimensional intrusions The Sex Sphere (1983) and many of
the shorter pieces first published in The 57th Franz Kafka (coll 1983) and
reprinted, with others, in Transreal! (coll 1991). Rucker is the only
modern author to have answered "A Square's" challenge with authentic verve
and authority, but A.J. Dewdney's The Planiverse (1984) is an interesting
drama-documentary about a two-dimensional world whose topography recalls
Hinton's Flatland more than Abbott's.Relevant theme anthologies include
Fantasia Mathematica (anth 1958) and The Mathematical Magpie (anth 1962),
both ed Clifton Fadiman, and Science Fiction Adventures in Dimension (anth
1953) ed Groff CONKLIN. [BS]See also: INVASION.

DIOMEDE, JOHN K.
[s] George Alec EFFINGER.
DIOSCORIDES, Dr
Pieter HARTING.
DIRAC COMMUNICATOR
A device invented by James BLISH for the story "Beep" (1954; exp as The
Quincunx of Time 1973), and used by him also in other stories. It is an
instantaneous communicator, named after the great theoretical physicist
Paul Dirac (1902-1984). Others have since borrowed the device, but more
recently Ursula K. LE GUIN's ANSIBLE has been the communicator of
preference for sf writers. [PN]See also: FASTER THAN LIGHT.
DISASTER
Cataclysm, natural or manmade, is one of the most popular themes in sf.
Tales of future WAR and INVASION belong here, but for convenience are
dealt with under those separate headings. Stories which emphasize the
nature of the societies which spring up after a great disaster are dealt
with under HOLOCAUST AND AFTER.Central to the disaster tradition are
stories of vast biospheric changes which drastically affect human life.
Tales of universal floods are at least as old as The Epic of Gilgamesh
(c2000BC), and other motifs, such as plagues, fires and famines, have an
obvious source in the Bible, particularly the Revelation of St John (also
known as the Apocalypse, whence the adjective "apocalyptic", frequently
applied to this form of sf). Disaster stories appeal because they
represent everything we most fear and at the same time, perhaps, secretly
desire: a depopulated world, escape from the constraints of a highly
organized industrial society, the opportunity to prove one's ability as a
survivor. Perhaps because they represent a punishment meted out for the
hubris of technological Man, such stories have not been particularly
popular in the US sf magazines. The ideology of disaster stories runs
counter to the optimistic and expansionist attitudes associated with
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION and its long-time editor, John W. CAMPBELL Jr.
In fact, most examples of the type are from the UK, and it has been
suggested that this may be associated with the UK's decline as a world
power throughout the 20th century.However, some of the earliest examples
were written at the height of Empire. H.G. WELLS's "The Star" (1897) and
M.P. SHIEL's The Purple Cloud (1901; rev 1929) are both tales of
cataclysm. In the first a runaway star collides with the Earth, and in the
second a mysterious gas kills all but two people, a new Adam and Eve.
Arthur Conan DOYLE's The Poison Belt (1913) also features a gas, but in
this case it turns out not to be fatal. After WWI the disaster theme
became more common. J.J. CONNINGTON's Nordenholt's Million (1923) portrays
the social chaos following an agricultural blight caused by a mutation in
nitrogen-fixing bacteria. S. Fowler WRIGHT's Deluge (1928) and Dawn (1929)
depict the destruction of civilization by earthquakes and floods, and
subsequent attempts to build a new society. John COLLIER's Tom's A-Cold
(1933; vt Full Circle US) and Alun LLEWELLYN's The Strange Invaders (1934)
both deal effectively with survival in a post-holocaust world. R.C.
SHERRIFF's The Hopkins Manuscript (1939; rev vt The Cataclysm) depicts the

Moon's collision with Earth, and is a SATIRE on UK complacency in the face
of impending war.After WWII there was a resurgence, to an even higher
level, of the disaster theme. John WYNDHAM's The Day of the Triffids
(1951) is an enjoyable tale of a world in which all but a few have been
blinded and everyone is menaced by huge, poisonous plants. His The Kraken
Wakes (1953; vt Out of the Deeps US) is also a successful blend of
invasion and catastrophe themes: sea-dwelling aliens melt Earth's icecaps
and cause the inundation of the civilized world. The success of Wyndham's
novels inspired many emulators. The most distinguished was John
CHRISTOPHER, whose The Death of Grass (1956; vt No Blade of Grass US) is a
fine study of the breakdown of civilized values when a virus kills all
crops. The same author's The World in Winter (1962; vt The Long Winter US)
and A Wrinkle in the Skin (1965; vt The Ragged Edge US) are also
above-average works: one concerns a new Ice Age and the other features
earthquakes. Many other UK novelists have dealt in similar catastrophes;
e.g., J.T. MCINTOSH in One in Three Hundred (1954), John BOLAND in White
August (1955), Charles Eric MAINE in The Tide Went Out (1958; rev vt
Thirst! 1977), Edmund COOPER in All Fools' Day (1966), D.F. JONES in Don't
Pick the Flowers (1971; vt Denver is Missing US) and Kit PEDLER and Gerry
DAVIS in Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters * (1972). Keith ROBERTS's The
Furies (1966), D.G. COMPTON's The Silent Multitude (1966) and Richard
COWPER's The Twilight of Briareus (1974) combine disaster and invasion
themes in the Wyndham manner. Fred and Geoffrey HOYLE's The Inferno (1973)
deals with humanity's attempts to survive devastating cosmic
radiation.There have been several more personal uses of the disaster theme
by UK writers - studies in character and psychology rather than adventure
stories. An early example was John BOWEN's After the Rain (1958). More
impressive are J.G. BALLARD's examinations of human "collaborations" with
natural disasters: The Drowned World (1962 US), The Burning World (1964
US; rev vt The Drought UK) and THE CRYSTAL WORLD (1966), which concern the
psychological attractions of flooded, arid and crystalline landscapes.
Brian W. ALDISS's Greybeard (1964) is a well written tale of universal
sterility and the impending death of the human race. Several younger UK
writers, influenced by Aldiss and Ballard, have produced variations on the
cataclysmic theme: Charles PLATT in "The Disaster Story" (1966) and The
City Dwellers (1970), M. John HARRISON in The Committed Men (1971) and
Christopher PRIEST in Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972). John BRUNNER
has made strong admonitory use of the form in his novel of ecological
catastrophe, The Sheep Look Up (1972). Angela CARTER's HEROES AND VILLAINS
(1969) is a powerful love story set in the aftermath of a disaster, and
Doris LESSING's Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) is about a passive woman who
observes society's collapse from her window.US disaster novels are fewer
in number. Oddly enough, where UK writers reveal an obsession with the
weather, US writers show a strong concern for disease. Disastrous
epidemics feature in Jack LONDON's The Scarlet Plague (1915), George R.
STEWART's EARTH ABIDES (1949), Richard MATHESON's I Am Legend (1954),
Algis BUDRYS's Some Will Not Die (1961), Michael CRICHTON's The Andromeda
Strain (1969), Chelsea Quinn YARBRO's Time of the Fourth Horseman (1976)
and Stephen KING's THE STAND (cut from manuscript 1978; text largely
restored and rev 1990). Of these, Stewart's EARTH ABIDES is the
outstanding work, containing much sensitive description of landscape and

of the moral problems of the survivors. Other notable disaster stories by
US writers include The Second Deluge (1912) by Garrett P. SERVISS,
Darkness and Dawn (1914) by George Allan ENGLAND, When Worlds Collide
(1933) by Edwin BALMER and Philip WYLIE, Greener Than You Think (1947) by
Ward MOORE, "The XI Effect" (1950) by Philip LATHAM, Cat's Cradle (1963)
by Kurt VONNEGUT Jr, The Genocides (1965) by Thomas M. DISCH, "And Us,
Too, I Guess" (1973) by George Alec EFFINGER, The Swarm (1974) by Arthur
HERZOG and Lucifer's Hammer (1977) by Larry NIVEN and Jerry
POURNELLE.Japanese sf seems to have a leaning towards disaster themes. Two
notable examples are Kobo A BE's Dai-Yon Kampyoki (1959; trans as Inter
Ice Age 4 1970 US) and Sakyo KOMATSU's Nippon Chinbotsu (1973; cut trans
as Japan Sinks 1976). The latter was filmed in 1973 as NIPPON CHINBOTSU
(vt The Submersion of Japan; vt Tidal Wave).Disaster is a popular motif in
sf in the CINEMA and on TELEVISION. Examples are the US film EARTHQUAKE
(1975) and the UK tv series SURVIVORS (1975-7). The disaster-movie boom in
the US took place in the 1960s and 1970s, and featured disasters both
domestic and sciencefictional; a producer associated with films of both
kinds was Irwin ALLEN. Another form is the MONSTER MOVIE (which
see).Curiously enough, although the 1980s were generally regarded as a
pessimistic decade, the disaster theme in sf seemed largely played out,
with only occasional books of any consequence. Among them were The Birth
of the People's Republic of Antarctica (1983) by John Calvin BATCHELOR,
which is an ironic account of civilization's collapse, James MORROW's THIS
IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS (1986), which puts survivors of a global
holocaust on trial, Greg BEAR's The Forge of God (1987), which has Earth
destroyed by alien machines, and David BRIN's Earth (1990), which has
Earth in danger of being swallowed up by a small BLACK HOLE at its core.
[DP/PN]See also: COSY CATASTROPHE; DYSTOPIAS; ECOLOGY; END OF THE WORLD;
ENTROPY; MUTANTS; NUCLEAR POWER; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM.
DISASTER IN TIME
(vt Grand Tour: Disaster in Time, vt Timescape) Made-for-tv movie (1991).
Channel Communications presents a Wild Street Pictures Production. Dir
David N.Twohy; prod John A. O'Connor; screenplay by Twohy, based on
"Vintage Season" (1946 ASF) by Lawrence O'Donnell (probably C.L. MOORE
writing solo); starring Jeff Daniels,Ariana Richards, Emilia Crow, George
Murdock. 99 mins (cut to 90). Colour.This is a classy little movie, quite
without pretension, based on the famous story of time-travelling tourists
from a future suffering from ennui, who stimulate themselves by attending
great disasters in the past. Daniels plays an innkeeper (he has lost his
wife in tragic circumstances) in a small New England town who is baffled
by his unusual guests; disaster (a meteor) strikes the nearby town, his
daughter Hilary (Ariana Richards) is subsequently killed,but his access to
the tourists' time-travelling device enables a replay of history during
which there are two innkeepers in the same time frame, and after which
things end well, maybe more than once. Adroit and intelligent, with a
pleasant sting in the tail. [PN]
DISCH, THOMAS M(ICHAEL)
(1940- ) US writer, raised in Minnesota but for many years intermittently
resident in New York where, before becoming a full-time writer in the

mid-1960s, he worked in an advertising agency and in a bank; he has
subsequently lived (and set several tales) in the UK, Turkey, Italy and
Mexico. He began publishing sf with "The Double-Timer" for Fantastic in
1962; much of his early work appears in One Hundred and Two H Bombs (coll
1966 UK; with 2 stories omitted and 2 added 1971 USA; with those 2 new
stories omitted along with 2 previous stories, and 7 new stories added vt
White Fang Goes Dingo and Other Funny SF Stories 1971 UK). "White Fang
Goes Dingo", which appears only in the first and third versions of the
collection, soon became TMD's second (and rather minor) novel, Mankind
Under the Leash (1965 Worlds of If as "White Fang Goes Dingo"; exp 1966
dos; vt The Puppies of Terra 1978 UK); in it ALIENS take over Earth and
make pets of mankind for aesthetic reasons. The hero, White Fang,
eventually drives the aliens off, but his feelings towards his period of
effortless slavery as a dancing pet remain ambivalent. The first version
of One Hundred and Two H Bombs, plus one of the stories added to the
second edition, plus Mankind Under the Leash under its vt The Puppies of
Terra, all appear in The Early Science Fiction Stories of Thomas M. Disch
(coll 1977) ed David G. HARTWELL.TMD's first novel, The Genocides (1965),
his most formidable early work, also involves alien manipulation of Earth
from a perspective indifferent (this time chillingly) to any human values
or priorities or conventions of storytelling; this sense of the
indifference of society or the Universe pervades his work, helping to
distinguish it from US sf in general, which remained fundamentally
optimistic about the relevance of human values through the 1960s. In The
Genocides the aliens seed Earth with enormous plants, in effect
transforming the planet into a monoculture agribusiness, an environment in
which it gradually becomes impossible for humans to survive. When groups
attempt to fight back, the aliens treat them as vermin, worms in the apple
of the planet; and, in one of the most chilling conclusions to any sf
novel published in the USA, fumigate them.Echo Round his Bones (1967) later assembled with The Genocides and Mankind Under the Leash as
Triplicity (omni 1980) - is another minor work, but CAMP CONCENTRATION
(1967 NW; 1968 UK) is TMD's most sustained sf invention, and represents
the highwater mark of his involvement with the UK NEW WAVE (he was one of
several Americans, including John T. SLADEK, to be strongly associated
with UK rather than US sf in the late 1960s). Told entirely in journal
form, CAMP CONCENTRATION recounts its narrator's experiences as an inmate
in a NEAR-FUTURE US concentration camp where the military has treated him
with Pallidine, a wonder drug which heightens human INTELLIGENCE but
causes death within months. Along with his fellow-inmates, the narrator
understands he is being used as a kind of self-destructing think tank,
experiencing the ecstasy of enhanced intelligence and the agonies of
"retribution" - the analogies with Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (1947
Sweden; trans 1948 US) are explicit - but his death is averted by a
trope-quoting sf climax which has been sharply criticized as a begging of
the issues raised.The next books were less weighty. Black Alice (1968)
with Sladek, writing together as Thom DEMIJOHN, though not sf is
reminiscent of both writers. The Prisoner * (1969) is a tie to the tv
series The PRISONER . Much of TMD's best work in the years around CAMP
CONCENTRATION is in shorter forms, most of the stories being assembled in
Under Compulsion (coll 1968 UK; vt Fun with Your New Head 1971 US) and

Getting into Death (coll 1973 UK), a title superseded by the superior US
edition, Getting into Death and Other Stories (coll 1976), which deletes 5
stories and adds 4. TMD's most famous single story, "The Asian Shore"
(1970), which appears in both versions of the collection, renders with
gripping verisimilitude the transmutation of a bourgeois Western man into
a lower-class urban Turk with family, through a process of possession.
Other notable stories from this period include "The Master of the Milford
Altarpiece" (1968), "Displaying the Flag" (1973) and "The Jocelyn Shrager
Story" (1975). Increasingly, during the 1970s, TMD's best work made use of
sf components (if at all) as background to stories of character; in much
of this work his protagonists are directly involved, whether or not
successfully, in the making of ART, and he increasingly devoted himself to
studies of the nature of the artist and of the world s/he attempts to
mould but which generally, crushingly, moulds her/him. From this period
date his first volumes of poetry (he writes much of his POETRY as "Tom
Disch"), the contents of which evince a sharp speculative clarity whose
roots are almost certainly generic. After Highway Sandwiches (coll 1970
chap), with Marilyn Hacker (1942- ) and Charles PLATT, and The Best Way to
Figure Plumbing (coll 1972), further work appeared in ABCDEFG HIJKLM
NPOQRST UVWXYZ (coll 1981 chap UK) (the ordering NPOQRST being sic), Burn
This (coll 1982 chap UK), Here I Am, There You Are, Where Were We? (coll
1984 chap UK), Yes, Let's: New and Selected Poems (coll 1989), and Dark
Verses and Light (coll 1991). Tom Disch is for many readers primarily a
poet whose connection with sf, if known, seems secondary.TMD's most
enduring single work of the 1970s is, however, sf. 334 (coll of linked
stories 1972 UK), possibly his best book, is set in a near-future
Manhattan; the stories, whose linkings are so subtle and elaborate that it
is possible - and probably desirable - to read the book as a novel, pivot
about the apartment building whose address (334 East 11th Street) is the
title of the book (the numbers 3,3,4 also serve as an arithmetical base [
OULIPO] for the design and proportions of the text). 334 comprises a
social portrait of urban life in about AD2025 in a New York where
existence has become even more difficult, intense and straitened than it
is now, and where the authorities treat humans no better than TMD's aliens
do; but the essence of the book lies in the patterns of survival achieved
by its numerous characters, whose aspirations and successes and failures
in this darkened urban world do not step over the bounds of what we may
expect will become normal experience. ON WINGS OF SONG (1979 UK) is
likewise set mainly in a near-future New York, and thematically sums up
most of the abiding concerns of TMD's career, as well as presenting an
exemplary portrait of the pleasures and miseries of art in a world made
barbarous by material scarcities and spiritual lassitude; in the final
analysis, however, it lacks the complex, energetic denseness of the
earlier book.By this point, he had in any case begun significantly to
lessen his production of sf. Neither his massive Gothic novel Clara Reeve
(1975) as by Leonie Hargrave - earlier, with Sladek, he had collaborated
on a more routine Gothic, The House that Fear Built (1966), the two
writing together as Cassandra Knye - nor Neighboring Lives (1981) with
Charles Naylor (1941- ), an historical analysis in fictional terms of
mid-19th-century English literary life, has any genre content. There
followed two collections of literate but significantly less engaged genre

work - FUNDAMENTAL DISCH (coll 1980; cut 1981 UK) and The Man who Had No
Idea (coll 1982 UK) - as well as The Businessman: A Tale of Terror (1984),
an intricately metaphysical horror novel. Its thematic partners - The MD:
A Horror Story (1991), a massive and ambitious exercise in the
supernatural whose conclusion takes place in a complexly devastated near
future; and The Priest: A Gothic Romance (1994 UK), which savagely
satirizes the sexual hypocrises and obsessions of the modern Roman
Catholic Church through a plot involving pedophilia and doppelgangers mark only a partial return to the instrumental sf of his early work;
however, as a requiem for and an ethical indictment of the US this
century, it is as punishing as any of the more conspicuously radical works
from the beginning of his career. Amnesia (written and programed 1986) is
an engaging piece of interactive software. He is the author of two plays,
Ben Hur (produced 1989) and The Cardinal Detoxes (produced 1990; 1993
chap), the latter being the subject of a controversy instigated by the
Roman Catholic Church. TMD has been theatre critic for The Nation for
several years, with an intermission in 1991-2.His virtual departure from
sf may be not unconnected to the nature of the field's response to him.
Because of his intellectual audacity, the chillingly distanced mannerism
of his narrative art, the austerity of the pleasures he affords, and the
fine cruelty of his wit, TMD has been perhaps the most respected, least
trusted, most envied and least read of all modern first-rank sf writers.
He received the JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD for ON WINGS OF SONG in
1980, but has otherwise gone relatively unhonoured by a field normally
over-generous with its kudos. [JC]Other works: Alfred the Great * (1969)
as by Victor Hastings, an associational film tie; Orders of the Retina
(coll 1982 chap), poetry; Ringtime: A Story (1983 chap); Torturing Mr
Amberwell (1985 chap); The Tale of Dan de Lion (1986 chap), a tale in
verse; The Brave Little Toaster (1981 Fantasy Annual IV; 1986 chap) and
The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars (1988 chap), juveniles; The Silver
Pillow: A Tale of Witchcraft (dated 1987 but 1988).As Editor: A series of
incisive theme anthologies of unusually high calibre, comprising The Ruins
of Earth (anth 1973), Bad Moon Rising (original anth 1973) and The New
Improved Sun: An Anthology of Utopian Science Fiction (anth 1975); two
additional anthologies with Charles Naylor, New Constellations (anth 1976)
and Strangeness (anth 1977).About the author: The American Shore:
Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch - Angouleme
(1978) by Samuel R. DELANY; A Tom Disch Checklist: Notes Toward a
Bibliography (1983 chap) by Chris DRUMM.See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION
AWARD; CHILDREN IN SF; CITIES; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CRIME AND
PUNISHMENT; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DISASTER;
DYSTOPIAS;
END OF THE WORLD; ENTROPY; ESCHATOLOGY; FANTASY; GOTHIC SF; HORROR IN
SF;
HUMOUR; INVASION; MATTER TRANSMISSION; MESSIAHS; MUSIC; MYTHOLOGY;
NEW
WORLDS; OMNI; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; OVERPOPULATION; PHILIP K. DICK
AWARD; POLLUTION; PSYCHOLOGY; SEX; SUPERMAN; UTOPIAS; VENUS.
DISCOVERY AND INVENTION
These two topics are dealt with together because it is difficult to

separate them, the discovery of a new principle usually being followed by
the invention of a means of exploiting it. The discovery of new places is
dealt with in COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS and LOST WORLDS. Invention,
too, is discussed in other entries, including IMAGINARY SCIENCE, MACHINES,
POWER SOURCES, PREDICTION, TECHNOLOGY and TRANSPORTATION.The invention
story was prominent in 19th-century sf, notably in the works of Jules
VERNE, who could almost be said to have invented it. Vernean inventions,
particularly of new kinds of transport, were a feature of DIME-NOVEL SF.
Yankee knowhow and inventiveness were carried into the past with Mark
TWAIN's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). (A modern
version of Twain's story, with a more sophisticated view of HISTORY, is
LEST DARKNESS FALL [1941] by L. Sprague DE CAMP.) Edward Everett HALE
invented orbital satellites in "The Brick Moon" (1869). Later in the
century the US inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) became a hero
figure; his exploits were much imitated in sf, and his name often borrowed
( EDISONADE); some of these stories are also described under SCIENTISTS.
Rudyard KIPLING invented the transatlantic airmail postal service in "With
the Night Mail" (1905). H.G. WELLS invented a huge number of devices some fantastic, as in THE TIME MACHINE (1895), and some realistic, as with
the tanks in "The Land Ironclads" (1903) and atomic war in The World Set
Free (1914). Samuel CHAPMAN's Doctor Jones' Picnic (1898) features a busy
inventor who creates a huge aluminium BALLOON and a homoeopathic cure for
cancer. The index of Everett F. BLEILER's Science-Fiction: The Early Years
(1990) lists 134 stories and novels according to their particular
inventions, those for "g" being "gasoline substitute, ghost condensor,
gravity storage apparatus, gunpowder engine"; other letters of the
alphabet produce examples just as eccentric.The invention story had an
especially strong vogue in the early PULP MAGAZINES, where it was equalled
in popularity as an sf subject only by the future- WAR story and the
lost-race story. Examples are: George Allan ENGLAND's The Golden Blight
(1912 Cavalier; 1916), in which a gold-disintegrator effects economic
revolution; William Wallace COOK's The Eighth Wonder (1906-7 Argosy;
1925), in which an eccentric inventor threatens to steal the world's
electricity supply with a huge electromagnet; and Garrett P. SERVISS's The
Moon Metal (1900), in which a MATTER TRANSMITTER is invented to obtain
artemisium, a rare valuable metal, from the Moon.The years 1900-30 were
largely those of scientific OPTIMISM, and in the pulps Hugo GERNSBACK was
one of its prophets. Before founding AMAZING STORIES he did well with his
magazine SCIENCE AND INVENTION, which featured much technological fiction.
His own Ralph 124C 41+ (1911-12 Modern Electrics; fixup 1925) is one of
the most celebrated of those novels whose raison d'etre is to catalogue
the inventions of the future; they include tv.The discovery/invention
story continued to pop up every now and then outside GENRE SF, as in C.S.
FORESTER's The Peacemaker (1934), in which a pacifist invents a magnetic
disrupter which stops machinery; E.C. LARGE's Sugar in the Air (1937), in
which a process for artificial photosynthesis is discovered; and William
GOLDING's play The Brass Butterfly (1956 as "Envoy Extraordinary"; 1958),
in which a brilliant inventor in ancient Greece is given short shrift by
his ruler, who sees the new inventions as an unpleasing threat to the
status quo. But it was inside genre sf that the invention story found its
true home, though tending to become more sombre when the central metaphor

of Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein (1818) - the inventor being destroyed by
his creation - was given contemporary relevance by the dropping of the
atom bomb over Hiroshima. Even before that, stories featuring NUCLEAR
POWER, such as Lester DEL REY's "Nerves" (1942), had been very much aware
of the dangers of such inventions. John W. CAMPBELL Jr, both as a writer
and as editor of ASF, was taking a gloomier view of technological advance
by the late 1930s, although his own The Mightiest Machine (1934 ASF; 1947)
had been a jolly romp, featuring the invention of a SPACESHIP which can
take its energy direct from the stars. Campbell's ASF continued through
the 1940s to publish a number of invention stories, in which scientific
plausibility was emphasized as never before in genre sf. The results
included Robert A. HEINLEIN's "Waldo" (1942 ASF as by Anson MacDonald; vt
Waldo: Genius in Orbit 1958). This is a gripping, optimistic invention
story; the term WALDO is still used today for remote-control devices.
George O. SMITH's Venus Equilateral stories (ASF 1942-5; coll as Venus
Equilateral 1947) feature much inventive work in radio COMMUNICATIONS
across the Solar System. ASF's invention syndrome was given a boost by
James BLISH's Okie stories, which feature the SPINDIZZY, one of the most
attractive of all sf inventions; they appeared 1950-54, and in book form
as the first 2 vols of the Cities in Flight tetralogy: Earthman, Come Home
(1955) and They Shall Have Stars (1956 UK; vt Year 2018! US). ASF
sometimes struck a lighter note vis-a-vis inventions, notably in the
Galloway Gallegher stories (1943-8) by Lewis Padgett (Henry KUTTNER).
These feature an inventor whose creative faculties are released by the
intake of large quantities of alcohol, and his irritating robot sidekick;
they were collected as Robots Have No Tails (coll of linked stories 1952)
as by Kuttner. Meanwhile ASF's competitors were also featuring
lighthearted invention stories alongside the more doom-laden variety. A
notable example of the former was the Lancelot Biggs series of SPACE
OPERAS by Nelson S. BOND, which appeared mostly in Fantastic Adventures
(1939-40) and were collected in revised form as Lancelot Biggs: Spaceman
(coll of linked stories 1950). Biggs, the thin genius who bumbles around
but gets there in the end, is typical of sf's more stereotyped inventors.
Many other relevant genre-sf stories are collected in Science Fiction
Inventions (anth 1967) ed Damon KNIGHT.Many famous sf discoveries have
been made through a process of CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH, and about 40 of
them are discussed under that rubric. One in particular is worthy of
attention here: "Noise Level" (1952) by Raymond F. JONES. In this tale,
which in its emphasis on the potential power of the human mind sums up the
whole ethos of Campbell's ASF, a counterfeit invention is the occasion of
conceptual breakthrough. A group of scientists are shown an apparently
bona fide film of an ANTIGRAVITY device, the inventor of which has been
killed. In their attempt to duplicate it they break through to a new
understanding of physics, only to discover that the original was a fraud,
the stratagem having been devised to exert psychological pressure on them
to rethink their worldviews.Discovery/invention themes still proliferate
in sf, as by the nature of the genre they always will. Important examples
from the 1950s onward have been: Fred HOYLE's Ossian's Ride (1959), in
which a sinister-seeming cartel has cordoned off southwest Ireland as an
invention-producing area; Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's Cat's Cradle (1963), in which
havoc is wreaked by a newly discovered form of ice which freezes

everything it touches; Isaac ASIMOV's THE GODS THEMSELVES (1972), in which
a new energy source, the positron pump, is invented with a great show of
plausibility; and Bob SHAW's Other Days, Other Eyes (fixup 1972), based on
his short story "Light of Other Days" (1966), which features "slow glass",
one of the most convincing and original inventions of sf (it slows down
light, thus effectively allowing events to be viewed after a time-lapse;
the privacy-invading social consequences are intriguingly explored).
Arthur C. CLARKE's Fountains of Paradise (1979), a classically optimistic
work of technological invention, envisages the building in a NEAR-FUTURE
Earth of a 36,000km (22,400 mile) tower to be used as a space elevator.One
of the most interesting subthemes, which has persisted strongly into the
1990s, is found in stories relating the discoveries of ALIEN artefacts,
very often with a subsequent desire to exploit them. Some, such as A.E.
VAN VOGT's "A Can of Paint" (1944) and Robert SHECKLEY's "One Man's
Poison" (1953; vt "Untouched by Human Hands") and "Hands Off" (1954), are
basically comedies about the dangers of the incomprehensible ("One Man's
Poison" contains the line "I don't eat anything that giggles"). But the
theme has serious ramifications, too. Such stories often create a tension
between the longing and wonder aroused by the thought that we are not
alone, together with a sense of despair at the ambiguity of such objects
and the doubt whether they will ever be understood. Such is Arthur C.
Clarke's "Sentinel of Eternity" (1951; vt "The Sentinel"), the basis for
the film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968); the story tells of the discovery of
a strange monolith on the Moon. Clarke's RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA (1973) is
entirely devoted to the exploration of, and failure to fully comprehend, a
vast, apparently unmanned spaceship which enters the Solar System ( BIG
DUMB OBJECTS). The psychological repercussions of Man's inability to
comprehend the alien are well explored in Frederik POHL's GATEWAY (1977),
where abandoned alien spaceships are discovered and used, but not
understood; the reaching out so symbolized is obsessive, seductive and
murderous.GATEWAY and the subsequent novels in Pohl's Heechee series are
sociologically almost the reverse of the ASF stories referred to above,
perhaps reflecting the lowering of self-esteem and morale in the West from
the late 1960s onward. Whereas ASF published tales of human ingenuity
conquering the unknown, Pohl's stories envisage humanity as bewildered by
the discovery of superior technology in much the same way as Bushmen in
our own world might be baffled by the products of the industrial West. The
metaphor for this in Arkady and Boris STRUGATSKI's novella "Piknik na
obochine" (1972; trans as "Roadside Picnic" in Roadside Picnic/Tale of the
Troika, coll 1977) is of humans discovering enigma as they scrabble like
rats through trash left by alien picnickers. The theme, not always so
pessimistically expressed, is common in the sophisticated new wave of
1980s space opera as represented by authors like Greg BEAR and Paul J.
MCAULEY, and also by Charles SHEFFIELD's Divergence (1991). A GOTHIC-SF
variant of the theme appears in the malign consequences of the discovery
of a long-buried alien spacecraft on Earth in Stephen KING's The
Tommyknockers (1987). [PN]
DiSILVESTRO, ROGER L.
(1949- ) US writer whose first novel of genre interest was Ursula's Gift
(1988), a humorous fantasy. His second, Living with the Reptiles (1990),

spoofs the ethical tomfooleries of that form of the TIME-TRAVEL tale in
which the protagonist changes history to save/destroy/play with the
future. In this case the protagonists, after acquiring the necessary
equipment in what remains of the Amazon jungle, pass into the 9th century,
where shenanigans are soon afoot. [JC]
DISINTEGRATOR
In sf TERMINOLOGY, one of the commonest items of the sf armoury (
WEAPONS), especially in SPACE OPERA of the 1930s and 1940s. The device may
have been a product of squeamishness-or perhaps just neatness - since it
creates a maximum of destruction with a minimum of bleeding pieces left to
sweep up afterwards. The disintegrator first reached a wide audience with
the COMIC strip BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY in 1935, as a result of
which toy disintegrators were very popular with kids in the late 1930s.
[PN]
DISRAELI, BENJAMIN
(1804-1881) UK novelist and statesman, MP from 1837 and, in 1868 and
again 1874-80, Prime Minister. He became Lord Beaconsfield. His
almost-forgotten youthful novel The Voyage of Captain Popanilla (1828;
published anon) has an innocent savage from a South Seas UTOPIA voyaging
to an imaginary country closely resembling a satirized England. Modern sf
normally uses actual ALIENS rather than savages as their innocent
observers in books of this kind, but the principle is the same. BD
features RECURSIVELY in THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (1990 UK) by Bruce STERLING
and William GIBSON. [PN]
DITMAR AWARDS
AWARDS.
DIXIE, [Lady] FLORENCE (CAROLINE)
(1855-1905) UK traveller and writer whose nonfiction Across Patagonia
(1880) captures something of her FEMINIST urgency. In Gloriana, or The
Revolution of 1900 (1890) a woman disguised as a man is elected Prime
Minister of the UK and, though unmasked, establishes full equality between
the sexes; by 1999, a woman-ruled UK beneficently dominates its Federated
Empire. Isola, or The Disinherited: A Revolt for Women and All the
Disinherited (1903), a play, depicts the coming to UTOPIAN plenitude of
the society of Saxcoberland on the planet Erth, which is similar but not
identical to Earth. [JC]About the author: Victorian Women Travel Writers
(1982) by Catherine Barnes Stevenson.
DIXON, CHARLES
UK writer, problematically identified as Charles Dixon (1858-1926), an
ornithologist of some renown. The sf novel written by him or some other CD
is Fifteen Hundred Miles an Hour (1895), a boys' tale featuring the
interplanetary exploits of some young protagonists who travel to MARS via
an electric SPACESHIP. [JC]
DIXON, DOUGAL
(1947- ) UK writer whose After Man: A Zoology of the Future (1981) and
Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future (1990) provide quasifactual
views of a FAR-FUTURE Earth in which Homo sapiens, having exhausted the

planet, soon becomes extinct, giving way (in a fashion reminiscent of the
work of Olaf STAPLEDON) to succeeding forms of life. Similarly couched in
a TIME-TRAVEL framework, but less taxing in its assumptions, is a Byron
PREISS tie, Time Machine #7: Ice Age Explorer * (1985). [JC]See also:
EVOLUTION.
DIXON, FRANKLIN W.
Harriet S. ADAMS.
DIXON, ROGER
(1930- ) UK accountant and writer whose epic adventure about humankind's
future fate, Noah II (1970 US; rev 1975 UK), is based on a story idea by
RD and his agent, Basil Bova, and began the aborted Quest series. A second
novel, The Cain Factor (1975) as by Charles Lewis, mixes SEX and
apocalypse as a man and a woman escape a post- HOLOCAUST Earth to become
the ADAM AND EVE of a new planet. [JC]See also: GENERATION STARSHIPS;
SPACESHIPS.
DIXON, THOMAS
(1864-1946) US writer whose The Fall of the Nation (1915-16 National
Sunday Magazine; 1916) graphically depicts the conquest of the USA by the
Imperial Confederation of Europe, dominated by Germany. After years of
occupation, a singularly ferocious US womanhood helps the men of the USA
expel the enemy. [JC]See also: INVASION.
DOBLIN, ALFRED
[r] GERMANY.
DOCKWEILER, JOSEPH H.
[r] Dirk WYLIE.
DOC SAVAGE
US PULP MAGAZINE, pulp-size Mar 1933-Dec 1943, DIGEST-size Jan
1944-Sep/Oct 1948, pulp-size Winter 1948-Summer 1949. 181 issues Mar
1933-Summer 1949. Monthly until Feb 1947, then 4 bimonthly issues, then
quarterly from Winter 1948. Published by STREET ? ed John NANOVIC
1933-43. DS was perhaps the best of the sf-oriented pulp-hero magazines.
Each issue had a novel published under the pseudonym Kenneth Robeson, and
many contained short adventure stories as well; a considerable majority of
the novels were the work of Lester DENT (whom see, and especially ROBESON
for further Doc Savage details). The most usual sf elements were
superscientific WEAPONS and visits to LOST WORLDS; TELEPORTATION featured
once. A master SCIENTIST, almost superhuman in intelligence and strength,
Doc Savage was actually Clark Savage, the "Man of Bronze"- the surname is
a Street ?
contributor to the firm's journals; the given name is from Clark Gable.
The success of the series led to imitations, most notably SUPERMAN, whose
debt to DS is evident in his name - Clark Kent, the "Man of Steel".
[FHP/MJE]
DOC SAVAGE: THE MAN OF BRONZE
Film (1975). Warner Bros. Dir Michael Anderson, starring Ron Ely, Paul
Wexler. Screenplay George PAL, Joseph Morheim based on "The Man of Bronze"
(1933) by Kenneth ROBESON. 100 mins. Colour.There were 181 novels in DOC

SAVAGE MAGAZINE, and at one point producer George Pal announced that he
hoped to film them all, but this, based on the first of them, was a flop.
Muscular superscientist hero Doc fights with a villain over a fountain of
liquid gold owned by a remote tribe in South America. The sf elements are
very marginal. The film is treated in a joky manner reminiscent of the
1966-8 Batman tv series, but Anderson, who later made the disappointing
LOGAN'S RUN (1976), is too ponderous a director to carry off this sort of
camp nostalgia with flair. It was not until Steven SPIELBERG's Raiders of
the Lost Ark (1981) that the ambience of the sf/adventure pulps was
recreated with the right mixture of respect and amusement. [PN/JB]
DR CYCLOPS
Film (1940). Paramount. Dir Ernest B. Schoedsack, starring Albert Dekker,
Janice Logan, Thomas Coley, Charles Halton. Screenplay Tom Kilpatrick. 75
mins. Colour.A mad scientist in the Peruvian jungle is using radioactivity
to miniaturize living things, and shrinks some US explorers who find his
laboratory to an average height of 12in (30cm). Made by the director of
KING KONG (1933), DC is a fast-paced, visually inventive film (though the
dialogue is leaden), largely taken up by desperate efforts to survive a
series of perils. Dekker's portrayal of the ruthless Dr Thorkel - shaven
head, bulky body, thick-lensed glasses - as the "god" toying sadistically
with his little creations before casually destroying them is truly
menacing; whether by design or accident, he resembles what was to become
the caricature of the "beastly Jap" during WWII. The illusion of
miniaturization-supervised by Farciot Edouart, one of the innovators in
that area of trick photography - is very convincing. The novelization, Dr
Cyclops * (1940), was published under the house name Will GARTH, and was
probably the work of Alexander SAMALMAN. [JB/PN]See also: GREAT AND SMALL.
DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE
1. Film (1932). Paramount. Prod and dir Rouben Mamoulian, starring
Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, Rose Hobart. Screenplay Samuel Hoffenstein,
Percy Heath, based on Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by
Robert Louis STEVENSON. 98 mins, cut to 90 mins, cut to 81 mins. B/w.While
Stevenson's suggestion is that civilization may be only skin-deep, his
tale of a decent, prim society doctor, Dr Jekyll, who transforms himself
with a new drug into the brutal libertine, Mr Hyde, does not exactly
abandon the religious concept of original sin; it does, however, reconcile
it with 19th-century scientific thought, calling on Darwin (humanity's
animal heritage) and prefiguring Freud (the id sometimes overwhelming the
ego). Silent film versions (made in 1908, 1910, 1912, 1913 and three in
1920) were usually taken from one of the several melodramatic stage
productions rather than directly from the original novel, and tended to
present Hyde (as in the 1920 version played by John Barrymore) as a
caricature of evil - that is, as a victim of his own Original Sin.In
Mamoulian's 1932 version, which remains the most interesting, Hyde's
appearance is almost that of Neanderthal Man ( APES AND CAVEMEN), and his
joyfully ferocious behaviour results not from inherent evil but from
uncontrollable primitive drives. The most compelling of these is sexual this is one of the classic loci of the theme of SEX in sf - though as the
film progresses it is accompanied by an increasing capacity for cruelty.

All this comments, apparently deliberately, on the repressed society in
which Jekyll has been reared. The film, atmospheric and convincing, is an
acknowledged classic, especially famous for the heartbeats on the
soundtrack and the convincing transformation scenes. When re-released
after the Hollywood Production Code was established in 1934, it had 10
minutes cut (sexual censorship), seldom restored since.2. Film (1941).
MGM. Dir Victor Fleming, starring Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman.
Screenplay John Lee Mahin. 127 mins. B/w.Growing pressures of censorship
took some of the sexual edge from this glossy remake and, although the
film is still gripping - largely because of Bergman's appealing
vulnerability as the tart - it seems bland after the raw energy of
Mamoulian's version.3. Subsequent film versions - including The Two Faces
of Dr Jekyll (1960; vt House of Fright US), which had a plain Jekyll
turning into a handsome Hyde, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1967), a made-for-tv film, I, Monster (1970), Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde
(1971), where Martine Beswick plays Hyde as a woman in a film seemingly
designed for fetishists, The Man with Two Heads (1972; vt Dr Jekyll and Mr
Blood), Dr Black and Mr Hyde (1975) and Docteur Jekyll et les femmes
(1981; vt The Blood of Dr Jekyll), a particularly perverse version dir
Walerian Borowczyk - have simply been variations of the formula, some more
ingenious than others, but none with the impact of the 1932 production.
[PN/JB]
DR. M
Film (1989). NEF Filmproduktion/Ellepi Film/Clea Productions. Dir Claude
Chabrol, starring Alan Bates, Jennifer Beals, Jan Niklas, Hanns Zischler.
Screenplay Sollace Mitchell from a story by Thomas Bauermeister, inspired
by Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler (1920 ; trans Lilian A. Clare as Dr.Mabuse,
Master of Mystery1923 UK) by Norbert Jacques (1880-1954). 116 mins.
Colour.Although in clear homage to Fritz LANG's three Dr Mabuse films ( DR
MABUSE, DER SPIELER), this German, Italian and French coproduction is not
Langian in style. An epidemic of suicides in a NEAR-FUTURE Berlin,
investigated by detectives from both East (Zischler) and West (Niklas), is
connected to the Theratos holiday camps whose mysterious owner (the
"Mabuse" figure, Marsfeldt, played by Bates) has been conditioning
holiday-makers by hypnosis to kill themselves, his thesis being that death
is fundamentally what we all crave. Marsfeldt, a perversely charming
philosopher surviving thanks to a life-support system, has wide media
holdings and intends to brainwash the whole of Berlin into oblivion via a
tv broadcast. This sophisticated film focuses on the dream-like quality of
a world dominated by media images and on the difficulty of locating any
firm reality within it. [PN]
DR MABUSE, DER SPIELER
(vt Dr Mabuse, the Gambler) Film (1922). Ullstein/UCO Film/Decla
Bioscop/UFA. Dir Fritz LANG, starring Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Alfred Abel, Aud
Egede Nissen, Gertrud Welcker, Bernhard Goetzke. Screenplay Thea VON
HARBOU, loosely based onDoktor Mabuse, der Spieler (1920; trans Lilian A.
Clare as Dr.Mabuse, Master of Mystery). In 2 parts, 95 mins and 100 mins.
B/W.Although on the face of it just a sensational melodrama about a
ruthless businessman/scientist intent on world gangsterism, this film

anticipates several 20th-century sf themes, both written and filmed. It
pictures a Germany sinking into anarchy and corruption, ready to be
exploited by a man-more of an evil genius - to whom chaos is almost an end
in itself. Mabuse (Klein-Rogge) has strong hypnotic powers and can summon
visions to control the weak. The DYSTOPIA depicted looks forward to any
number of sf books and films. The chaos-lover whose weapons are as much
psychological as technological seems to anticipate, for example, the
novels of Alfred BESTER. The idea of a decaying society controlled and
exploited by a secret group - the essence of cultural PARANOIA - appears
throughout sf, often in the early novels of C.M. KORNBLUTH and Frederik
POHL, for example. The film shows how artistically potent the themes of
pulp fiction can be when distilled and concentrated, and imaged with such
ferocity. In Part One, Ein Bild der Zeit ["An Image of our Time"], Mabuse
and his web of henchmen penetrate and corrupt society at all levels. In
Part Two, Inferno - Menschen der Zeit ["Inferno - Men of our Time"],
Mabuse becomes wholly mad and is incarcerated in an asylum. Lang, who went
on to make the sf films METROPOLIS (1926) and Die FRAU IM MOND (1929; vt
The Woman in the Moon), also made two Mabuse sequels, Das Testament des Dr
Mabuse (1933; vt The Testament of Dr Mabuse) and Die TAUSEND AUGEN DES DR
MABUSE (1960; vt The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse; vt The Diabolical Dr
Mabuse). In the early 1960s five further Mabuse films were made in
Germany, not by Lang. [PN]See also: DR. M.
DR MABUSE THE GAMBLER
DR MABUSE, DER SPIELER.
DR NO
Film (1962). Eon/United Artists. Dir Terence Young, starring Sean
Connery, Ursula Andress, Joseph Wiseman, Jack Lord. Screenplay Richard
Maibaum, Johanna Harwood, Berkely Mather, based on Dr No (1958) by Ian
FLEMING. 105 mins. Colour.This UK film was the first in the hugely
successful James Bond series, at first loosely based on Fleming's novels
and later featuring original stories. The villain, whose cinematic
forebears include Fu Manchu, Captain Nemo and METROPOLIS's Rotwang - like
Rotwang, Dr No possesses mechanical hands - attempts to blackmail the USA,
working from a remote Caribbean island, by deflecting its Cape Canaveral
rockets off course. UK secret agent Bond brings his plans to an end by
boiling him in a pool containing an atomic reactor. DN's mordant humour,
its sexism, its visual flashiness and the foiled attempt by a supervillain
to rule the world with a superscientific device set the pattern for the
entire series, most of which are marginally sf in the pulp-adventure
manner of Doc Savage ( DOC SAVAGE MAGAZINE). The two most obviously
sciencefictional sequels are YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967) and MOONRAKER
(1979). [JB]See also: CINEMA.
DOCTOROW, E(DGAR) L(AURENCE)
(1931- ) US writer who remains best known for Ragtime (1975), a novel
that evokes the past with an hallucinatory power which edges its real-life
and fictional characters into a fable-like milieu ( FABULATION). His first
sf novel, Big as Life (1966), depicts satirically what happens in New York
when enormous beings suddenly appear in the city streets; The Waterworks
(1994), set in a STEAMPUNK version of the 19th century city, is an

intricate tale of conspiracy and SUSPENDED ANIMATION [JC]
DR STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING...
Full title: Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
the Bomb Film (1963). Hawk/Columbia. Prod and dir Stanley KUBRICK,
starring Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn,
Slim Pickens. Screenplay Kubrick, Terry Southern (1924- ), Peter GEORGE,
based on Two Hours to Doom (1958; vt Red Alert US) by Peter Bryant
(pseudonym of Peter George). 94 mins. B/w.This, the first of Kubrick's
three sf films, has worn well, with its curious blend of black comedy,
documentary realism and almost poetic homage to the very machines (B-52s
and their nuclear cargo) that he shows as destroying the world. The
original novel was a serious story about an insane US general who launches
a pre-emptive attack on Russia without presidential authority, but Kubrick
opted for a grotesquely satirical and very funny treatment, helped by a
strong cast including Peter Sellers, who plays three roles: one is Dr
Strangelove, a sinister ex-Nazi, generally seen as burlesquing a
distinguished real-life SCIENTIST. The appalling point of the film is the
way the vision of Armageddon attracts the very protagonists whose job it
is to prevent it: Strangelove is sexually aroused by the idea of cleansing
HOLOCAUST, and it excites the lunatic general and even the bomber pilot
(Pickens), who rides his own bomb down with Texan whoops of triumph. At
the end of the movie Vera Lynn's voice rises plangently into "We'll Meet
Again" as the screen is covered with mushroom clouds. The novelization is
Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb *
(1963) by Peter George.The film received the 1965 HUGO for Best Dramatic
Presentation. [PN/JB]See also: CINEMA; PARANOIA.
DOCTOR WHO
UK tv series (1963- ). BBC TV. Created by Sydney Newman, Donald Wilson.
1st-season prod Verity Lambert, story editor David Whitaker; the Doctor
played by William Hartnell Nov 1963-Oct 1966. 26 seasons to date, 695
episodes to Dec 1989, mostly 25 mins per episode. Seasons 1-6 b/w;
subsequent seasons colour.In this longest-running UK sf tv series for
children, the Doctor, generally known as Dr Who because of the show's
enigmatic title (it is not actually his name), eventually revealed as a
Time Lord, travels back and forth in time and space; he is accompanied by
various people (sometimes children, sometimes men, usually young women),
in his TIME MACHINE, the TARDIS, an acronym for Time and Relative
Dimensions in Space. Stories have varied in length from 1 to 14 episodes,
the most common length through 1974 being 6 episodes, and subsequently
4.The first episode (Nov 1963) concerned a young girl who puzzles two of
her schoolteachers with her unusual knowledge of history. They follow her
into what appears to be a police telephone box but is in fact a time
machine (whose interior is many times larger than its exterior) owned by
her irritable and eccentric grandfather, the Doctor. As the machine cannot
be properly controlled they are all whisked off to the Stone Age, where
they remain for the following 3 episodes.The series had a modest following
at first; it was not until the second story, The Dead Planet, written by
Terry NATION, that it achieved mass popularity, mainly because of the
introduction of the DALEKS. Until 1990 the series returned to UK tv every

year; it was not introduced to US tv until the Tom Baker episodes that
were played there in 1982, when it quickly developed a cult following.(A
previous attempt in the 1970s to export the programme to the USA - a
package of the Jon Pertwee episodes - had flopped.)Because the Doctor has
the ability periodically to regenerate his entire body, the series has
been able to outlast its original star, the crusty William Hartnell, and
to introduce a succession of new leading men: Patrick Troughton (Nov
1966-June 1969), Jon Pertwee (Jan 1970-June 1974), Tom Baker (Dec 1974-Mar
1981), Peter Davison (Jan 1982-Mar 1984), Colin Baker (Mar 1984-Dec 1986)
and Sylvester McCoy (Sep 1987 onwards). Peter Cushing took the role in two
films, DR WHO AND THE DALEKS (1965) and DALEKS: INVASION EARTH 2150 A.D.
(1966); Richard Hurndall took the place of the late Hartnell in The Five
Doctors (1983); and Michael Jayston played the Doctor's evil incarnation
from the future in the 14-episode The Trial of a Time Lord (1986).While
the b/w episodes featuring Hartnell and Troughton are spikier and
stranger, the show probably hit its peak between the Pertwee and Davison
versions, with Tom Baker's long-lived, Harpo-Marxish Time Lord the most
popular of all and the writers of the 1970s gradually revealing more of
the secrets of the Time Lords that had been hinted at since the first. In
the late 1980s the show lost direction (some say thanks to the tiredness
of John Nathan-Turner's regime as producer, begun Aug 1980) and the BBC
experimented with it - lengthening it, moving it from its long-established
Saturday teatime slot to a weekday, and, finally, putting it on an
indefinite suspension where, neither cancelled nor renewed, it remains as
of 1994.A 30th anniversary tv programme planned for 1993 was shelved at
the last minute, though there was a Doctor Who radio drama in 1993. While
early seasons were 10 months long, in the 1970s most seasons were 6-7
months, and from 1982 they were 3 months.Although the programme has long
since settled into a pattern, with stories usually featuring at least one
monster, there has been plenty of room for experiment. The authors have
unblushingly pirated hundreds of ideas from PULP-MAGAZINE sf, but often
make intelligent and sometimes quite complex use of them. It seems
probable that, certainly in the 1970s, the programme attracted as many
adult viewers as children. With the increasing sophistication of the
scripts and the expertise of the special effects and make-up - from which
many other programmes could learn a great deal about what can be done on a
low budget - DW became a notably self-confident series, juggling expertly
with many of the great tropes and images of the genre. It is the most
successful SPACE OPERA in the history of tv, not excluding STAR TREK.
Storylines often feature political SATIRE. At its worst merely silly, at
its best it has been spellbinding.Other notable cast members over the
years have included Carole Ann Ford (the Doctor's granddaughter), Frazer
Hines (Jamie), Anneke Wills (Polly), Michael Craze (Ben), Deborah Watling
(Victoria), Wendy Padbury (Zoe), Nicholas Courtney (the Brigadier), Katy
Manning (Jo), Roger Delgado (the Doctor's great enemy, the Master),
Elizabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane), Louise Jameson (Leela), John Leeson (the
voice of K-9, the Doctor's robot dog, one of the most successful of the
media's cute ROBOTS), Mary Tamm (Romana), Lalla Ward (the regenerated
Romana), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa), Janet Fielding (Tegan), Nicola Bryant
(Peri), Anthony Ainley (the Master again), Bonnie Langford (Mel) and
Sophie Aldred (Ace). Producers of the series after Verity Lambert (who

lasted into the 3rd season) have included Innes Lloyd, Peter Bryant, Barry
Letts, Philip Hinchcliffe, Graham Williams and John Nathan-Turner. Story
editors, all of whom have written episodes, have included Dennis Spooner,
Gerry DAVIS, Derrick Sherwin, Terrance Dicks (1968-74), Robert Holmes,
Anthony Read, Douglas ADAMS, Christopher H. Bidmead, Eric Saward (1982-6)
and Andrew Cartmell. Other writers have included Terry Nation, David
Whitaker, John Lucarotti, Brian Hayles, Kit PEDLER, Malcolm Hulke, Don
Houghton, Robert Sloman, Bob Baker and Dave Martin, Robert Banks Stewart,
David Fisher, Stephen GALLAGHER, Johnny Byrne, Terence Dudley, Peter
Grimwade, Pip and Jane Baker, and Ben Aaronovitch.There are now very many
spin-off books from the series, ranging from episode guides through
annuals, encyclopedias, scholarly studies and published scripts to a
TARDIS cookbook. There is a magazine, Dr Who Monthly, with more than 160
issues. All but four stories have now been novelized, with 151 titles
published from the 1970s through late 1990. (The un-novelized scripts are
"The Pirate Planet"by Douglas Adams, "City of Death" by Douglas Adams and
Graham Williams writing as David Agnew, "Resurrection of the Daleks" by
Eric Saward and "Revelation of the Daleks"by Eric Saward. In 1991, most
existing scripts having been novelized, a post-tv sequence of releases,
The New Doctor Who Adventures, was instituted, the first sequence being
the Timewyrm series: Timewyrm: Genesys * (1991) by John Peel, Exodus *
(1991) by Terrance Dicks, Apocalypse * (1991) by Nigel Robinson and
Revelation * (1991) by Paul Cornell. A comprehensive Doctor Who
bibliography would itself be book-size. [JB/PN/KN]See also: SHARED WORLDS;
STEAMPUNK.
DR WHO AND THE DALEKS
Film (1965). AARU. Dir Gordon Flemyng, starring Peter Cushing, Roy
Castle, Jenny Linden, Roberta Tovey. Screenplay Milton Subotsky, based on
the second DR WHO tv story, 1963-4, the 7-episode The Dead Planet by Terry
NATION. 85 mins. Colour.Dr Who - played colourlessly by Cushing as a
polite old man - is inadvertently taken to a dying planet with his
granddaughters and an accident-prone young man (Castle) as a result of the
latter falling onto the controls of the Doctor's time-and-space machine,
the Tardis. They find a city occupied by DALEKS about to wipe out their
ancient human enemies, the Thals, with a neutron bomb; despite their
fierceness the Daleks prove ridiculously easy to immobilize. DWATD shows
something about the 1960s in having Dr Who, famous in later incarnations
as a crafty expert in nonviolent resolution of conflict, hawkishly urging
the pacifist Thals to war. This crudely made children's-film remake of the
early tv story in which the Daleks made their debut is of interest mainly
to Dr Who completists wishing to see Cushing in the role, which he never
played on tv; though inferior to its original, it is at least superior to
the even more tepid film sequel, DALEKS: INVASION EARTH 2150 A.D. (1966).
[PN]
DOCTOR X
Film (1932). First National/Warner Bros. Dir Michael Curtiz (1888-1962),
starring Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Lee Tracy, Preston Foster. Screenplay
Robert Tasker, Earl Baldwin, based on a play by Howard W. Comstock and
Allen C. Miller. 77 mins. Original prints two-strip Technicolor, later

b/w.A series of cannibalistic murders committed when the Moon is full
prove, in this blend of sf, HORROR and the whodunnit, to have been
committed by a SCIENTIST maddened by the effect of his newly invented
synthetic flesh, from which he can grow a temporary artificial arm.
Curtiz's customary hard-edged direction enlivens this early, low-budget
potboiler. A more sophisticated version of the central idea is found in
DARKMAN (1990). [JB/PN]
DR. YEN SIN
US PULP MAGAZINE. 3 bimonthly issues, May/June-Sep/Oct 1936. Published by
Popular Publications; ed Rogers Terrill. DYS was a follow-up to an earlier
Popular title, The MYSTERIOUS WU FANG , itself intended to capitalize on
the popularity of Sax ROHMER's Fu Manchu; in fact the cover of #1 had
originally been painted for the previous title. All issues featured lead
novels by Donald E. Keyhoe (1897-1988), whose several books on flying
saucers later helped foment the UFO craze of the early 1950s. Yen Sin was
a conventional yellow-peril supervillain, intent on world conquest with
the aid of superscience. His opponent, Michael Traile, had been
accidentally deprived of the ability to sleep, so read a lot. The lead
novel of #1 was reprinted by Robert E. WEINBERG as Pulp Classics No. 9
(1976). [MJE/PN]
DODD, ANNA BOWMAN
(1855-1929) US writer whose anti-socialist sf novel, The Republic of the
Future, or Socialism a Reality (1887), set in AD2050, offers a scathing
and comical portrait of egalitarianism brought to the uttermost, resulting
in a technologically advanced antlike society. The tale actively
deprecates FEMINISM. [JC]
DODDERIDGE, ESME
(1916- ) US writer whose The New Gulliver, or The Adventures of Lemuel
Gulliver, Jr. in Capovolta (1979) brings its protagonist into a
matriarchal society, dystopian to its male visitor, in which by an ironic
role reversal all the men, who are subservient to women, carry out the
child-rearing and sexual-object functions which in the real USA at the
time the book was written were generally the roles of women. [JC/PN]
DOENIM, SUSAN
[s] George Alec EFFINGER.
DOLAN, BILL
Tom WILLARD.
DOLD, DOUGLAS (MERIWETHER)
(c1890-1932/6) US editor and writer, elder brother of Elliott DOLD, with
whom in 1915 he joined the Serbian army. As a result of injuries sustained
in combat, he gradually became blind, but this affliction did not prevent
him from editing The Danger Trail magazine, presiding over Clues,
Incorporated (which published Clues: A Magazine of Detective Stories), or
publishing several borderline sf/adventure tales. The last of these
appears to have been "Valley of Sin" in Miracle Science and Fantasy
Stories (which he also helped edit) in 1931. According to Murray LEINSTER,
DD died of pneumonia after his house caught fire and the firemen sprayed

him with water. [RB]See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.
DOLD, (WILLIAM) ELLIOTT (Jr)
(1892-1957) US illustrator, son of noted psychiatrist William Elliott
Dold (1856-1942) and younger brother of Douglas DOLD. ED studied art at
the College of William and Mary in Virginia to 1912, and with his brother
joined the Serbian army in 1915. Although his 44 Art Deco drawings for
Harold HERSEY's Night (1923) are perhaps his finest work, ED is now best
remembered for his interior ILLUSTRATIONS for the early sf PULP MAGAZINES,
also in an Art Deco idiom. Using only black and white (with virtually no
greys), he was a master at depicting looming, massive, superbly detailed
and intricate MACHINES that dwarfed their human operators, whom he
depicted with relative indifference. ED contributed to ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION 1934-8, and was one of that magazine's finest interior
illustrators; his illustrations for its serialization of E.E. "Doc"
SMITH's Skylark of Valeron (1934 ASF; 1949) are considered classics. He
edited, did colour covers and wrote a lead story for Hersey's short-lived
MIRACLE SCIENCE AND FANTASY STORIES (1931). His last sf appearances were
in 1941, when he painted covers for COSMIC STORIES and STIRRING SCIENCE
STORIES. [RB/JG]See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.
DOLEZAL, ERICH
[r] AUSTRIA.
DOLINSKY, MIKE
Working name used by US screenwriter Meyer Dolinsky (1923-1993?) for his
sf novel, Mind One (1972), in which two psychiatrists discover that a drug
meant to treat psychosis actually engenders TELEPATHY (see also ESP), and
find themselves relating warmly to each other (they are of opposite
sexes); as one of them is a Jesuit priest, an element of RELIGION soon
enriches the tale. As Meyer Dolinsky, MD wrote 3 episodes for the tv
series The OUTER LIMITS . [JC]
DOLPIN, REX
[r] Peter SAXON.
DOMECQ, H. BUSTOS
Adolfo BIOY CASARES; Jorge Luis BORGES.
DOMINIK, HANS
[r] GERMANY.
DONALDSON, STEPHEN R(EEDER)
(1947- ) US writer who remains best known for the two formidably
ambitious Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever high-fantasy
sequences. Although he was a FANTASY writer of central importance in the
1970s and 1980s, and winner of the JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for most
promising writer in 1979, and although characters in Mordant's Need (see
listing below) shift worlds via gates which arguably work according to sf
conventions governing MATTER TRANSMISSION, SRD did not become of strong sf
interest until the publication of the first volumes of his ongoing Gap
sequence of Galaxy-spanning SPACE OPERAS: The Gap into Conflict: The Real
Story (1990 UK), The Gap into Vision: Forbidden Knowledge (1991), The Gap
into Power: A Dark and Hungry God Arises (1992) and The Gap into Madness:

Chaos and Order (1994), with at least one further volume, projected. The
volumes to date are characterized by a pounding bluntness of prose, a
plot-pattern which makes some superficial homage to traditional space
opera, and an underlying extremism in the creation of character (both the
villain and the seeming hero are almost supernaturally monstrous) and in
the expression of sexual violence. It is hard to predict what dark climax
is being mounted. [JC]Other works: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the
Unbeliever, comprising Lord Foul's Bane (1977), The Illearth War (1977)
and The Power that Preserves (1977); its sequel, the Second Chronicles of
Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, comprising The Wounded Land (1980), The
One Tree (1982) and White Gold Wielder (1983); a slim pendant to the
sequences, Gilden-Fire (1981 chap); Daughter of Regals and Other Tales
(coll 1984), not to be confused with Daughter of Regals (1984), which
prints only the title story of the previous volume; Epic Fantasy in the
Modern World: A Few Observations (1986 chap), nonfiction; the Mordant's
Need books, in effect one novel published in 2 vols as The Mirror of Her
Dreams (1986 UK) and A Man Rides Through (1987).As Reed Stephens: An
associational detective-novel sequence comprising The Man who Killed his
Brother (1980), The Man who Risked his Partner (1984) and The Man who
Tried to Get Away (1990).See also: DEL REY BOOKS; SWORD AND SORCERY.
DONNE, MAXIM
Madelaine DUKE.
DONNELLY, IGNATIUS
(1831-1901) US writer and politician, famous for his study Atlantis: The
Antediluvian World (1882), which was responsible for a considerable
resurgence of interest in the legend of ATLANTIS, and for The Great
Cryptogram (1888), in which he attempted to prove by cryptographic
analysis that Francis BACON wrote Shakespeare's early plays. His most
important sf novel was Caesar's Column (1890; early editions under the
pseudonym Edmund Boisgilbert), which countered the UTOPIAN optimism of
Edward BELLAMY with the argument that society was evolving towards greater
inequality and catastrophic WAR rather than towards peace and plenty. ID
wrote two other fantasies of social criticism: Doctor Huguet (1891), in
which the racist protagonist exchanges bodies with a Black man, and The
Golden Bottle (1892), in which a gold-making device is instrumental in the
overthrow of capitalism. [BS]See also: CITIES; LOST WORLDS; POLITICS;
SOCIAL DARWINISM.
DONOVAN, DICK
J.E. Preston MUDDOCK.
DONOVAN'S BRAIN
Film (1953). Dowling Productions/United Artists. Dir Felix Feist,
starring Lew Ayres, Gene Evans, Nancy Davis. Screenplay Feist, based on
Donovan's Brain (1943) by Curt SIODMAK. 83 mins. B/w.One of three films
based on Siodmak's novel of the same name, the others being The LADY AND
THE MONSTER (1944) and VENGEANCE (vt The Brain) (1963). A scientist keeps
a dead businessman's brain artificially alive, but it has an evil,
telepathic influence over him. Feist, whose previous sf film was DELUGE
(1933), directs unspectacularly, but gets a good performance from Ayres,

who accomplishes the transitions from his natural to his possessed state
very well. The female lead later married Ronald Reagan. Despite its sf
elements, the film is more GOTHIC than scientific - the brain itself is
ludicrous. DB was parodied in The MAN WITH TWO BRAINS (1983). [JB]
DONSON, CYRIL
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
DOOMWATCH
1. UK tv series (1970-72). BBC TV. Prod Terence Dudley. Series devised by
Kit PEDLER, Gerry DAVIS. Starring John Paul, Simon Oates, Robert Powell,
Wendy Hall, Joby Blanchard. Writers included Dudley, Pedler, Davis, Dennis
Spooner, Don Shaw, Martin Worth, Brian Hayles, John Gould. Dirs included
Dudley, Jonathan Alwyn, David Proudfoot, Lennie Mayne, Eric Hills, Darrol
Blake. 3 seasons, 57 50min episodes. Colour.In this drama series, the
first about dangers to Earth's ECOLOGY, a group of scientists aggressively ready to take on the Establishment and headed by caustic Dr
Quist (John Paul) - is set up as a watchdog over the rest of the
scientific community. Stronger safeguards in the use of everything from
chemical weapons and pesticides to new drugs and in vitro fertilization
are urged, while some lines of research should be abandoned altogether;
the not too deeply hidden subtext appeared to be that scientific research
is dangerous per se. Pedler and Davis departed before the 3rd season,
repudiating what they claimed was D's increasing lack of seriousness, but
in fact from the beginning the hoariest sf CLICHES had appeared beneath
the display of social conscience; apart from its overbearingly moralizing
tone there was little difference between D and the mad- SCIENTIST movies
of the 1930s and 1940s.2. Film (1972). Tigon. Dir Peter Sasdy, starring
Ian Bannen, Judy Geeson, John Paul, Simon Oates, George Sanders.
Screenplay Clive Exton, based on the BBC TV series. 92 mins. Colour.A
familiar horror-film plot is given a fashionable rationale, in what is
effectively a feature-film episode of the tv series. Visitors to a fishing
village on a remote offshore island are met with hostility; grossly
malformed people are being hidden away. The distortions - in fact,
acromegaly - have resulted not from the workings of Hell but from the
dumping of pituitary growth hormone (intended as an additive to animal
feed) in the sea nearby, although the horror stereotypes suggest the two
possible causes are topologically identical. Sasdy directed with style but
was handicapped by a banal script. [JB/PN]
DOONER, PIERTON W.
(1844-?1907) US writer whose Last Days of the Republic (1880) was the
first US Yellow Peril novel, and demonstrates the terribly common dynamic
by which a guilty party, or nation, feels compelled to transfer its guilt
to the victim or victim-nation: in 1880, the year of the book's
publication, the USA had been using Chinese coolies for some time as
forced labour, and in terms of this dynamic it was high time to accuse
them of being a menace. In the novel, the coolies nefariously gain civil
rights from cowardly Whites, and use their ill gotten power to gain
control of the Pacific coastal states, from which point the collapse of
Washington is only a matter of time. [JC]

DOPPELGANGER
(vt Journey to the Far Side of the Sun) Film (1969). Century 21
Productions/Universal. Prods Gerry and Sylvia ANDERSON. Dir Robert
Parrish, starring Ian Hendry, Roy Thinnes, Patrick Wymark, Lyn Loring,
Herbert Lom. Screenplay by the Andersons, Donald James. 101 mins, cut to
94 mins (US). Colour.The first live-action feature from the Anderson
production team responsible for a number of tv series featuring puppets in
sf adventure scenarios, D, though panned by most critics, displays its
illogical plot with some style. Scientists discover a counter-Earth, an
exact duplicate of Earth that is always hidden on the opposite side of the
Sun - a centuries-old idea that popped up occasionally in pulp sf, as in
Split Image (1955) by Reed DE ROUEN. An expedition is mounted to reach the
counter-Earth, and the confusions of the subsequent story, involving
sabotage, characters meeting themselves and apparent conspiracy between
the two planets, are compounded by the fact that the story is told in
flashbacks by a scientist in a mental asylum, giving a Dr Caligari-like
ambiguity to the whole film. [JB/PN]
DORER, FRANCES (CATHERINE)
(? - ) US writer, always with Nancy Dorer, who began to publish work of
genre interest with When Next I Wake (dated 1978 but 1979) as by Frank
Dorn, and whose most ambitious effort was the Eagle sequence of sf
adventures, all dated 1979 but published 1980: By Daybreak the Eagle
(1980), Wings of the Eagle (1980) and Return of the Eagle (1980).
Singletons include Appointment with Yesterday (dated 1978 but 1979) as by
Dorn, Sunwatch (1979) as by Dorn, Where No Man has Trod (dated 1979 but
1980) and Two Came Calling (dated 1979 but 1980). [JC]
DORER, NANCY (JANE)
[r] Frances DORER.
DORMAN, SONYA (HESS)
(1924- ) US writer who began publishing sf in 1963 with "The Putnam
Tradition" for AMZ, and who established a reputation in the field for
intensely written, sometimes highly metaphorical stories. They are
surprisingly unlike her rather straightforward POETRY, for which she is
generally best known; the first of her verse collections was Poems (coll
1970). Planet Patrol (fixup 1978), a juvenile, is sf. [JC]
DORN, FRANK
Frances DORER.
DORRINGTON, ALBERT
(1871-? ) UK writer whose death-date is undetermined: he may have been
the AD who died in Australia in 1953. He was best known for The Radium
Terrors (1912), which combines Yellow Peril fears with the then widespread
fascination for the powers of radium. The plot unmemorably details a
conspiracy on the part of the former to use the latter. The Half-God
(1933) features super-radium. [JC]Other works: Our Lady of the Leopards
(1911), a fantasy.
DORSEY, CANDAS JANE
(1952- ) Canadian writer, arts journalist and social worker, author of

three early volumes of poetry and co-editor of Tesseracts(3) (anth 1991)
with Gerry Truscott (1955- ). CJD began publishing work of genre interest
with "Columbus Hits the Shoreline Rag" in Getting Here (anth 1977) ed Rudy
Weibe; her terse, complex stories, assembled in Machine Sex (coll 1988),
polemically re-use and rework sf and fantasy tropes from a FEMINIST
perspective, engaging most memorably, and fascinatedly, in the title
story, "(Learning About) Machine Sex", with the phallocentrisms of much
CYBERPUNK. The protagonist of the tale, a computer-design prodigy and
occasional hooker, debuted in CJD's first novel, the undistinguished
Hardwired Angel (1987), written with Nora Abercrombie (1960- ). [RK]See
also: CANADA.
DOS(-a-DOS)
When two books are bound together so that they share one spine, but with
their texts printed upside-down in respect to each other, the composite
volume is described in the publishing trade as being bound dos-a-dos
(literally "back-to-back"). Such a volume has two front covers and two
title pages, which the reader can confirm by turning any example
upside-down, revealing a second front cover, right way up, and a second
text, likewise. Almost always - though not invariably - the format has
been used in sf for paperback originals, the two best known mass-market
publishers to have done this being ACE BOOKS in their Ace Doubles series
and TOR BOOKS in their Tor Doubles series; some SMALL PRESSES have also
engaged in the practice. For the convenience of readers and collectors we
use the word "dos" in our book ascriptions in this encyclopedia to
designate any edition of a title making up one half of a dos-a-dos twin.A
problem arises. Towards the end of their existence as a line, Tor Doubles
began to appear with the 2 titles presented sequentially; in strict
bibliographical terms these late issues were, in fact, anthologies, just
as two earlier series - the Belmont Doubles and the Dell Binary Stars were, strictly speaking, anthologies. If - as was almost never the case any of the individual titles reprinted in these series had been originally
published as books, the resulting volume would have then been technically
describable as an omnibus. But readers do not tend to think of the volumes
in these series as being either anthologies or omnibuses; readers (and we)
tend to think of them as two titles bound together. We have therefore - in
deliberate violation of bibliographical protocol - extended the use of the
word "dos" in our book ascriptions to include all titles of publishers'
series which "feel" "dos"-like.In this encyclopedia we designate as "dos"
all genuine dos-a-dos bindings; we also designate as "dos" all other
series-linked bindings that contain two but no more than two titles, each
title being named on the cover. [JC/PN]
DOUBLEDAY
US general publisher which in the 1950s was one of the first US hardcover
houses to institute an sf line, an early title being Pebble in the Sky
(1950), which was Isaac ASIMOV'S first novel. (The Doubleday imprint,
Doubleday ?
associated company, Nelson Doubleday, Inc., publishers of the US SCIENCE
FICTION BOOK CLUB.) Once the Doubleday line was established it published
about 30 titles a year, its authors in due course including many who at

the time were comparatively unknown, such as George Alec EFFINGER, Octavia
BUTLER, John CROWLEY, M. John HARRISON, Stephen KING, Josephine SAXTON and
Kate WILHELM. D also published many established authors, some of whom had
previously published mainly in paperback: they included Avram DAVIDSON,
Philip K. DICK, Harry HARRISON, Robert A. HEINLEIN, C.M. KORNBLUTH, Barry
MALZBERG, Bob SHAW and Roger ZELAZNY. D's anthology series have included
CHRYSALIS, UNIVERSE and Nebula Award Stories ( NEBULA). D was both loved
and loathed by sf authors: loved because it was a reliable market not
afraid to take risks with innovative material that was not obviously
commercial, loathed because its advances were small, its book production
often cheap, and its book promotion negligible. In 1981 D (whose sf editor
for the difficult years 1977-89 was Pat LoBrutto) halved the size of the
list. In 1986 it and associated companies, including Dell/Delacorte and
the Science Fiction Book Club (but not the New York Mets) were sold for
$475 million to the German company Bertelsmann, which already owned BANTAM
BOOKS and which thereby became one of the largest sf/fantasy publishers in
the USA, with around 170 titles a year.In 1987 the old Doubleday line was
revamped, the imprint now being called Doubleday Foundation after Isaac
Asimov's Foundation books (they had not initially been published by
Doubleday, but Asimov had treated the firm as his main publisher from
1950, and remained faithful to it until his death). The new list was very
much more consciously innovative than its predecessors, and ambitious
novels by authors like Dan SIMMONS and Sheri S. TEPPER soon began to
appear; books under this imprint often went on to be paperbacked by Bantam
Spectra. During 1991, however, Doubleday Foundation was merged into Bantam
Spectra, and the Doubleday name ceased to be relevant to sf publishing.
[PN]
DOUGHTY, CHARLES M(ONTAGU)
(1843-1926) UK explorer and writer whose Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888)
profoundly influenced T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935), among others. The
difficult, archaic language of CMD's later work, a series of book-length
poems, has kept them from wide circulation. Two are of some sf interest:
The Cliffs (1909) features an airborne "Persanian" invasion of England,
which is successfully repelled; in The Clouds (1912) a similar invasion is
successful, and England occupied. Both poems are designed as warnings to
complacent Britons, and share many of the characteristics of the INVASION
stories popular before WWI. [JC]
DOUGHTY, FRANCIS W(ORCESTER)
(1850-1917) US numismatist, scholar and miscellaneous writer whose well
written, ingenious and original dime novels ( DIME-NOVEL SF) have often
been considered the finest examples of the category. His better stories
present a succession of highly imaginative strokes, often with good
historical backgrounds. "I" (1887) describes a double quest, for a
beautiful She Who Is Never Seen and for a remarkable manuscript hidden by
Saint Cyprian. The Cavern of Fire (1888) uses as its departure points (a)
the theory that the Mound Builders were ancient Greeks and (b) a HOLLOW
EARTH filled with teratological peoples. Two Boys' Trip to an Unknown
Planet (1889) is an astronomical fantasy, often on a mythic level, set on
a planet circling Sirius; it may have been a source of motifs for David

LINDSAY's A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920). "Where?" (1889-90) takes place in a
strange Antarctica filled with grotesque peoples and superscientific
devices reminiscent of Bulwer LYTTON's vril. 3,000 Miles through the
Clouds (1892), which takes elements from Jules VERNE's The Mysterious
Island (trans 1875), puts three comrades into wildly imaginative
situations in an Arctic crater. Perhaps also by Doughty is Al and his
Air-Ship (1903) as by Gaston Garne, which describes scientifically
advanced giants in Antarctica, remarkable flying machines powered by a
vril-like source, and other marvels. An adult sf novel, Mirrikh (1892),
although highly imaginative, was not especially successful. [EFB]
DOUGLAS, CAROLE NELSON
(1944- ) US writer who began her career as a feature writer 1967-84 for
the St Paul Pioneer Press. Her first novels, like Amberleigh (1980), were
historical romances. She has become best known for energetic, layered
high-fantasy tales like Six of Swords (1982), the first volume in her
Kendric and Irissa sequence, which continues with Exiles of the Rynth
(1984), Keepers of Edanvant (1987), Heir of Rengarth (1988) and Seven of
Swords (1989). Though she has been an infrequent author of sf, the Probe
sequence - Probe (1985) and Counterprobe (1988) - is of some interest for
its slow unfolding of the mystery behind the amnesia afflicting a young
woman who has PSI POWERS and who turns out to be what the title says she
is: a probe inserted by ALIENS into the human world to gather data. But
love intervenes. It may be the case that CND will never wish to shake
herself completely free of romance idioms and plotlines; but, if she does
so, she might become one of the significant genre writers of the 1990s.
[JC]Other works:Fair Wind, Fiery Star (1981; much exp restored text 1994),
pirate tale set partly in the Bermuda Triangle; The Crystal books, Crystal
Days (1990) and Crystal Nights (coll 1990), associational, with some of
the same cast appearing in the Midnight Louie fantasy sequence comprising
Catnap: A Midnight Louie Mystery (1992) Pussyfoo (1993) and Cat on a Blue
Monday (1994); Good Night, Mr Holmes * (1990), Good Morning, Irene *
(1991) and Irene at Large (1993), associational pastiches of Sherlock
Holmes; the projected Taliswoman Trilogy, beginning with Cup of Clay
(1991) and Seed Upon the Wind (1992).See also: SUPERMAN.
DOUGLAS, GARRY
Garry KILWORTH.
DOUGLAS, IAIN
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
DOUGLAS, JEFF
Andrew J. OFFUTT.
DOUGLAS, (GEORGE) NORMAN
(1868-1952) UK writer of superb meditative travel books and some fiction,
his best known novel being South Wind (1917). Unprofessional Tales (coll
1901), as by Normyx, consists mainly of fantasies; but in two novels of
his late maturity he dramatized his strongly misogynist and persuasively
"pagan" views in venues familiar to the reader of sf. They Went (1920; rev
1921) subversively promulgates a UTOPIAN aestheticism in a land much like
doomed Lyonesse. Through the tale of half-divine Linus and his imposition

of a rigid civilization upon the world, In the Beginning (1927 Italy), an
example of prehistoric sf, expresses - with a more vigorous loathing than
Thomas Burnett SWANN could muster 40 years later - the sense that
humanity's rise entailed the destruction of Eden, and of the sentient,
pagan, amoral creatures who dwelt there. [JC]Other works: Nerinda (1929
Italy).
DOUGLASS, ELLSWORTH
Probably the pseudonym of Elmer Dwiggins (? -? ), about whom little is
known. ED wrote "The Wheels of Dr Ginochio Gyves" (1899 Cassell's
Magazine), about a gyroscopically controlled space vessel, with Edwin
PALLANDER. His sf novel, Pharoah's Broker: Being the Very Remarkable
Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner (Written by Himself) (1899
UK), is an interplanetary romance set on MARS, where parallel EVOLUTION
has resulted in a society almost identical to that of Egypt in the time of
Joseph. In the end the hero, having been a grain-broker in Chicago, is
able to take on Joseph's role. [PN/JC]
DOWDING, HENRY WALLACE
(?1888-?1967) US writer who was most active in the 1920s. His sf novel,
The Man from Mars, or Service, for Service's Sake (1910), is occupied for
much of its length with its protagonist's search for a MCGUFFIN document,
but shifts in its later moments to be a long description, on the part of
the protagonist's employer, of his time on MARS, which planet is small,
quite close to Earth, and UTOPIAN. [JC]
DOWLING, TERRY
(1947- ) Australian lecturer in English, tv performer, songwriter and
writer. One of the most interesting new voices in local sf, TD is
beginning to glean international praise as well. His master's thesis was,
unusually for AUSTRALIA, about sf - its topic was J.G. BALLARD and the
Surrealists. "The Man who Walks Away behind the Eyes" (1982 OMEGA SCIENCE
DIGEST) inaugurated an sf career that has so far been devoted exclusively
to short fiction (over 30 stories to date); his work was at first too
obviously indebted to Cordwainer SMITH and Jack VANCE, but later developed
an individual voice. TD's idiosyncratic but vivid between-the-lines style
is perhaps best displayed in his Tyson stories, some of which are
collected in Rynosseros (coll of linked stories 1990), Wormwood (coll of
linked stories 1991), Blue Tyson (coll 1992)and Twilight Beach (coll of
linked stories 1993): though many characters are featured, they tell
centrally : of Tom Tyson, captain of the sandship Rynosseros, in which he
roams the strange, high-tech Ab'o societies of a future Australia's
outback, occasionally undergoing mystical epiphanies. With Richard DELAP
and Gil Lamont (1947- ) he edited The Essential Ellison (coll 1987) by
Harlan ELLISONand with Van Ikin he put together in Mortal Fire: Best
Australian SF (anth 1993), which presents the sf of his native land as
evolving its own characteristic themes and timbre. [PN]
DOWNING, PAULA E.
Working name of US attorney, municipal judge and writer Paula Elaine
Downing King (1951- ), who writes also as Paula King; she is married to T.
Jackson KING. PED began publishing work of genre interest with "Loni's

Promise" for Discoveries in 1989. Her first novel, Mad Roy's Light (1990)
as Paula King, is an sf adventure featuring a human woman who must come to
terms with her life within an interstellar trade guild while at the same
time striving to comprehend the ALIEN Li Fawn, who mercilessly use
biological engineering ( GENETIC ENGINEERING) to modify other species for
their own purposes. Her second, Rinn's Star (1990), plays something of a
game of words with its title, as the telepathic protagonist Rinn, who
lives on an interesting planet and travels between the stars, also sees
her own personal star wax and wane erratically as she shoots from one
culture to another, each having a different attitude towards her
background and her gift. In Flare Star (1992) a colony planet is
devastated when its sun flares; Fallway (1993) treated similar material;
and A Whisper of Time (1994) set up a complex First Contact plot (
COMMUNICATIONS) involving an alien orphan who, brought up on Earth, has
fantasies about Mayan ruins, which resemble her own deepest memories of
some other place. [JC]
DOWNMAN, FRANCIS
Ernest OLDMEADOW.
DOYLE, [Sir] ARTHUR CONAN
(1859-1930) UK writer known primarily for his work outside the sf field
and in particular for his Sherlock Holmes stories. Born in Edinburgh and
educated by Jesuits, he studied medicine at Edinburgh University and
initiated his own practice in Portsmouth in 1882, supplementing his income
by writing. The first Holmes novel was A Study in Scarlet (1887). His
historical novels, Micah Clarke (1889) and The White Company (1891), were
relatively unsuccessful, but the first series of Holmes short stories in
The STRAND MAGAZINE (1891-2) secured his popularity. His interest in
subjects on the borderline between science and mysticism is evident in a
potboiler about supernatural vengeance from the mysterious East, The
Mystery of Cloomber (1889), and in a short novel of telepathic vampirism,
The Parasite (1895). Although the Holmes stories suggest an incisively
analytical and determinedly rationalistic mind, ACD was fascinated by all
manner of occult disciplines, including hypnotism, Theosophy and oriental
mysticism; following the death of his son he became an ardent convert to
Spiritualism.ACD's first SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE, The Doings of Raffles Haw
(1891), is a hurriedly written account of a gold-maker who becomes
disenchanted with the fruits of his philanthropy. His early sf short
stories include "The Los Amigos Fiasco" (1892), in which an experimental
electric chair "supercharges" a criminal instead of killing him, and the
personality-exchange story "The Great Keinplatz Experiment" (1894). ACD
abandoned sf during the early decades of his literary success but returned
before WWI to make his most important contribution to the genre: following
"The Terror of Blue John Gap" (1910) - about a monstrous visitor from an
underground world - and a satirical account of "The Great Brown-Pericord
Motor" (1911) came The Lost World (1912), a classic LOST-WORLD novel in
which the redoubtable Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a
plateau in South America where dinosaurs still survive. In a sequel, The
Poison Belt (1913), the Earth faces disaster as a result of atmospheric
poisoning. "The Horror of the Heights" (1913) is an account of strange

forms of life inhabiting the upper atmosphere. The novelette "Danger!"
(1914; reprinted in Danger!, and Other Stories, coll 1918) is Doyle's
contribution to the imminent- WAR genre, anticipating submarine attacks on
shipping - a prophecy received sceptically by the Admiralty but validated
within months.ACD's post-WWI passion for the paranormal, which led him to
such excesses as the endorsement of Elsie Wright's and Frances Griffiths's
clumsily faked photographs of the "Cottingley fairies" in The Coming of
the Fairies (1922), strongly infects his later sf. In The Land of Mist
(1926) Challenger is converted to spiritualism; the remaining stories in
the series-which can be found alongside the titular occult romance in The
Maracot Deep and Other Stories (coll 1929) as well as in The Professor
Challenger Stories (omni 1952; vt The Complete Professor Challenger) - are
weak, though "When the World Screamed" (1929) is a striking early
LIVING-WORLD tale.ACD's earlier short stories, including numerous
fantasies and a few trivial sf stories not mentioned above, exist in many
collections, including The Captain of the Polestar and Other Tales (coll
1890), The Great Keinplatz Experiment, and Other Stories (coll 1894 US;
rev vt The Great Keinplatz Experiment, and Other Tales of Twilight and the
Unseen 1919 US), and Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of
Medical Life (coll 1894), most of whose contents are reprinted in The
Conan Doyle Stories (coll 1929). The Best Science Fiction of Arthur Conan
Doyle (coll 1981), ed Charles G. WAUGH and Martin H. GREENBERG, collects
almost all of his shorter sf; one notable exception is an interesting
essay in alternative history ( ALTERNATE WORLDS), "The Death Voyage" (The
Strand 1929).Since Sherlock Holmes fell into the public domain the
character has been popular in sf stories, appearing in key roles in, among
others, Morlock Night * (1979) by K.W. JETER, Sherlock Holmes' War of the
Worlds * (1975) by Manly Wade and Wade WELLMAN, Exit Sherlock Holmes *
(1977) by Robert Lee HALL, Dr Jekyll and Mr Holmes * (1979) by Loren D.
Estleman and Time for Sherlock Holmes * (1983) by David DVORKIN. Druid's
Blood (1988) by Esther M. Friesner features Holmes (here called Brihtric
Donne) in an alternate world where MAGIC works; ACD himself appears as
Arthur Elric Boyle. The first novel of this "revival", The Seven-Per-Cent
Solution (1974) by Nicholas Meyer is of sf interest in that it involves
early psychoanalysis ( PSYCHOLOGY) and the father of psychoanalysis
himself, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). A relevant anthology is Sherlock
Holmes through Time and Space (anth 1984) ed Isaac ASIMOV, Martin H.
GREENBERG and Charles G. WAUGH. [BS]Other works: The Best Supernatural
Tales of Arthur Conan Doyle (coll 1979 US) ed E.F. BLEILER; The
Supernatural Tales of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (anth 1987) ed Peter Haining.
See also: ATLANTIS; BIOLOGY; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; DIME-NOVEL SF;
DISASTER; ESCHATOLOGY; HISTORY OF SF; HORROR IN SF; MACHINES; MEDICINE;
MONEY; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; POWER SOURCES; PSI POWERS; RADIO;
SCIENTISTS; SERIES; UNDER THE SEA.
DOYLE, DEBRA
(1952- ) US writer who began publishing work of genre interest with "Bad
Blood" in Werewolves (anth 1988) ed Jane YOLEN and Martin H. GREENBERG,
which was expanded into a novel (see Bad Blood below); all her books have
been written with James D(ouglas) MacDonald (1954- ), and we follow the
alphabet-and make no estimate of seniority in this partnership-in treating

all their joint work under DD. Most of this work has been fantasy (see
Other Works below), and some has been TIES such as their 2 titles in the
Planet Builders sequence, Night of Ghosts and Lightning * (1989) and
Zero-Sum Games * (1989), both as by Robyn Tallis; Horror High: Pep Rally *
(1991) as by Nicholas Adams; and their 2 titles in the 4th Tom Swift
sequence (see TOM SWIFT): Monster Machine * (1991) and Aquatech Warriors *
(1991), both as by Victor APPLETON. Robert Silverberg's Time Tours #3:
Timecrime, Inc * (1991) and Daniel M. Pinkwater's Melvinge of the
Megaverse #2: Night of the Living Rat * (1992) are also ties.Their first
novel in their own right, Knight's Wyrd (1992), is fantasy; but the
Mageworlds series-comprising The Price of the Stars (1992), Starpilot's
Grave (1993) and By Honor Betray'd (1994)-moves into space opera with some
flair, though not without recourse to fantasy outcomes when the going gets
tough for the exile princess who becomes a space pilot and stirs up
trouble, hither and yon, around the galaxy. Bad Blood (1993)-which
incorporates DD's solo first story-and Hunter's Moon (1994) make up a
children's series about werewolves and vampires. [JC]Other Works: the
Circle of Magic sequence, comprising School of Wizardry (1990), Tournament
and Tower (1990), City by the Sea (1990), The Prince's Players (1990), The
Prisoners of Bell Castle (1990) and The High King's Daughter (1990).
DOZOIS, GARDNER (RAYMOND)
(1947- ) US writer, anthologist and, from 1985 (with the Jan 1986 issue),
editor of ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, winning 5 HUGOS between
1988 and 1992; he is married to Susan CASPER. He began publishing sf in
1966 with "The Empty Man" for If, but it was not until after military
service (in which he worked as a military journalist) that he began
producing such stories as "A Special Kind of Morning" (1971) and "Chains
of the Sea" (1972), which made him a figure of some note in the latter-day
US NEW WAVE, causing some misapplied criticism of his "pessimism" and
general lack of interest in storytelling; both stories are included in The
Visible Man (coll 1977), which assembles his best early work, and reappear
inGeodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois (coll
1992).His first novel, Nightmare Blue (1975) with George Alec EFFINGER, a
fast-paced adventure, demonstrates a dangerous facility on both authors'
parts. Much more important - and less "professional" - is his first solo
novel, STRANGERS (1974 New Dimensions; exp 1978), an intense and well told
love story between a human male and an ALIEN female, set on her home
planet, in a Galaxy humans signally do not dominate; her death from
bearing his child is biologically inevitable (the plot's derivation from
Philip Jose FARMER's THE LOVERS [1961] can be seen as homage) and stems
from a mutual incomprehension rooted in culture and the intrinsic solitude
of beings (see also SEX). Never a prolific author, though fluently capable
as an editor, GD has collaborated frequently with associates in the
writing of stories, many of which are assembled in Slow Dancing through
Time (coll 1990) with Susan CASPER, Jack DANN, Jack C. HALDEMAN II and
Michael SWANWICK. The Peacemaker (1983 IASFM; 1991 chap) won a NEBULA for
1983 and "Morning Child" a Nebula for 1984.GD has written considerable sf
criticism, and in The Fiction of James Tiptree, Jr (1977 chap) he
constructed an analysis which was not to be disqualified by Alice
Sheldon's revelation that she was TIPTREE. An anthology, Writing Science

Fiction and Fantasy: Twenty Dynamic Essays by Today's Top Professionals
(anth 1991) co-edited with Tina Lee, Stanley Schmidt, Ian Randal Strock
and Sheila Williams, extols dynamic professionalism. His first fiction
anthologies, intelligently edited and of continuing interest, are A Day in
the Life (anth 1972), Future Power (anth 1976) with Dann, and Another
World (anth 1977). Subsequent anthologies, all ed with Dann (except as
noted), are Aliens! (anth 1980), Unicorns! (anth 1982), Magicats! (anth
1984), Bestiary! (anth 1985), Mermaids! (anth 1985), Sorcerers! (anth
1986), Demons! (anth 1987), Dogtales! (anth 1988), Ripper! (anth 1988; vt
Jack the Ripper 1988 UK) with Casper, Seaserpents! (anth 1989), Dinosaurs!
(anth 1990), Magicats II (anth 1991), Little People! (anth 1991) and
Horses! (anth 1994). Later singleton anthologies were The Best of Isaac
Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (anth 1988), Time Travelers (anth 1989),
Transcendental Tales from Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (anth
1989), Isaac Asimov's Aliens (anth 1991), Isaac Asimov's Robots (anth
1991) with Sheila Williams, and The Legend Book of Science Fiction (anth
1991 UK; vt Modern Classics of Science Fiction 1992 US), Isaac Asimov's SF
Lite (anth 1993), Isaac Asimov's War (anth 1993), Modern Classic Short
Novels of Science Fiction (anth 1994) and Isaac Asimov's Cyberdreams (anth
1994).In 1977 GD took over an ongoing year's-best anthology from Lester
DEL REY and edited several Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year
ANTHOLOGIES: Sixth Annual Collection (anth 1977), Seventh Annual
Collection (anth 1978), Eighth Annual Collection (anth (1979), Ninth
Annual Collection (anth 1980) and Tenth Annual Collection (anth 1981).
After the termination of this series, he launched a further ongoing
sequence, The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection (anth
1984), Second Annual Collection (anth 1985), Third Annual Collection (anth
1986), Fourth Annual Collection (anth 1987; vt The Mammoth Book of Best
New Science Fiction 1987 UK), Fifth Annual Collection (anth 1988; vt Best
New SF 2 1988 UK), Sixth Annual Collection (anth 1989; vt Best New SF 3
1989 UK) Seventh Annual Collection (anth 1990; vt Best New SF 4 1990 UK),
Eighth Annual Collection (anth 1991; vt Best New SF 5 1991 UK), Ninth
Annual Collection (anth 1992), Tenth Annual Collection (anth 1993; vt Best
New SF 7 1993 UK) and Eleventh Annual Collection (anth 1994). [JC]See
also: CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF;
CYBERPUNK; HISTORY OF SF; INVISIBILITY; OMNI; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS;
POLLUTION; SHARECROP.
DR
In this encyclopedia's alphabetical listing, "Dr" is, as is conventional,
treated as if spelled out in full-i.e., as "Doctor".
DRAGON
GAMES AND TOYS.
DRAGON PUBLICATIONS
VARGO STATTEN SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE.
DRAGONS
SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
DRAKE, DAVID A(LLEN)
(1945- ) US lawyer and writer who served as the Assistant Town Attorney

in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1972-80. He became a full-time writer in
1981, although his first story, the H.P. LOVECR AFT pastiche "Denkirch",
had appeared much earlier, in Travellers by Night (anth 1967) ed August W.
DERLETH. Though the wide success of his various military-sf novels and
series and SHARED-WORLD enterprises has perhaps had a simplifying effect
on his reputation, DAD has, in fact, from the beginning of his career
written a wide variety of work, both stories and novels, a range perhaps
best encapsulated in his first collection of unconnected stories, From the
Heart of Darkness (coll 1983), which assembles sf, fantasy and horror
tales written from 1974 onwards and set in the past, present and future.
From early in his career, his prose has been spare and telling though
occasionally, in some of the more routine sf adventures, seemingly no more
than cost-efficient.DAD first came to wide notice with his Hammer's
Slammers sequence of military-sf tales set in a SPACE-OPERA Galaxy:
Hammer's Slammers (coll 1979; exp 1987), #2: Cross the Stars (1984), #3:
At Any Price (1985), #4: Counting the Cost (1987), #5: Rolling Hot (1989),
#6: The Warrior (1991), #7: The Sharp End (1993), and The Voyage (1994),
set in the Hammer universe and retellilng the tale of Jason and the
Argonauts. It is very noticeable that the mercenaries involved in this
sequence, and in most of DAD's other military sf, are (as it were)
soldiers on the ground, and that representatives of the officer class
generally merit the suspicion with which they are greeted. Though its
general political vision could not be described as anarchist, DAD's work
lacks-possibly as a consequence of his indifference to the loquacious cod
stoicism ascribed by other writers to officer classes in general - a sense
of philosophizing import, gaining much thereby, so that he can concentrate
on the moment-to-moment exigencies of honorable mercenary soldiering. The
Fleet sequence of SHARED-WORLD anthologies, created and ed by DAD and Bill
FAWCETT - The Fleet * (anth 1988), #2: Counter Attack * (anth 1988), #3:
Breakthrough * (anth 1989), #4: Sworn Allies * (anth 1990), #5: Total War
* (anth 1990) and #6: Crisis * (anth 1991) - does not depart markedly from
this mature restraint, which is further manifested in a sequel series, the
Battlestation sequence comprising Battlestation * (anth 1992) and Vanguard
* (anth 1993). The Crisis of Empire sequence, essentially written as TIES
by his collaborators - Crisis of Empire #1: An Honorable Defense * (1988)
with Thomas T. THOMAS, #2: Cluster Command * (1989) with William C. DIETZ
and #3: The War Machine * (1989) with Roger MacBride ALLEN - rather more
flamboyantly follows the plummeting career of a captain who reaches bottom
in the third volume but whom we expect, in projected continuations, to
save the Empire. The Northworld sequence - Northworld (1990), #2:
Vengeance (1991) and #3: Justice (1992) - sets its military operations on
a world which operates as a gateway to several ALTERNATE-WORLD settings.
The General sequence with S.M. STIRLING - expected to run several volumes
beyond The Forge (1991), The Hammer1992 - features yet another military
officer, befriended on his far-off planetary home by a battle COMPUTER
planning to re-establish a Galactic Federation.With The Dragon Lord
(1979), an exercise in Arthurian SWORD AND SORCERY, DAD began to publish
singletons set in various venues and times, and of varying quality. Time
Safari (coll of linked stories 1982); exp vt Tyrannosaur 1994 makes one of
the hoary CLICHES of TIME-TRAVEL tales -the dinosaur hunt - vividly
present to the mind's eye through the well researched verisimilitude of

the telling. Birds of Prey (1984) brings Ancient Rome, again through time
travel, vividly to life, as does Killer (1974 Midnight Sun #1; 1985) with
Karl Edward Wagner (1945- ). Bridgehead (1986) combines time travel with
interstellar military action and intrigue. Dagger * (1988) is a tied
contribution to the Thieves' World enterprise, and Explorers in Hell *
(1989) with Janet E. MORRIS is part of the Heroes in Hell enterprise. Old
Nathan (coll of linked stories 1991), set in a traditional USA,
nostalgically tells tales of a crabby but lovable ghost-hunter. Today
there seems very little to stop DAD from writing exactly what he wishes to
write. [JC]Other works: Skyripper (1983); The Forlorn Hope (1984); Active
Measures (1985), Kill Ratio (1987) and Target (1989), all three with Janet
E. Morris; Fortress (1986); Lacey and his Friends (coll of linked stories
1986); the World of Crystal Walls fantasy sequence, beginning with The Sea
Hag (1988), further volumes projected; Ranks of Bronze (1986); Vettius and
his Friends (coll of linked stories 1989); Surface Action (1990); The
Hunter Returns (1991), adapted from Fire-Hunter (1951) by Jim Kjelgaard
(1910-1959); The Military Dimension (coll 1991); The Jungle * (1991),
based on (and printed with) "Clash by Night" (1943) as by Lawrence
O'Donnell, a joint pseudonym of Henry KUTTNER and C.L. MOORE, and here
ascribed, some think erroneously, to Kuttner alone; Starliner (1992); Car
Warriors TM: The Square Deal * (1992); High Strangeness (1992); Igniting
the Reaches (1994).As Editor: The Starhunters sequence of reprint stories,
comprising Men Hunting Things (anth 1988), Things Hunting Men (anth 1988)
and Bluebloods (anth 1990); the Space sequence, all with Martin H.
GREENBERG and Charles G. WAUGH, comprising Space Gladiators (anth 1989),
Space Infantry (anth 1989) and Space Dreadnoughts (anth 1990); A Separate
Star (anth 1989) and Heads to the Storm (anth 1989), both with Sandra
MIESEL and both constituting a tribute to Rudyard KIPLING; The Eternal
City (anth 1990) with Greenberg and Waugh.See also: ALIENS; GAMES AND
SPORTS; VENUS; WAR; WEAPONS.
DRAYTON, HENRY S(HIPMAN)
(1840-1923) US writer whose lost-race ( LOST WORLDS) novel, In Oudemon:
Reminiscences of an Unknown People (1900), features a 100-year-old English
colony in South America which is technologically advanced, telepathic,
socialist and Christian. [JC]
DREAMSCAPE
Film (1984). Bella Productions/Zupnik-Curtis Enterprises. Dir Joseph
Ruben, starring Dennis Quaid, Max Von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Eddie
Albert, Kate Capshaw, David Patrick Kelly. Screenplay David Loughery,
Chuck Russell, Ruben, based on a story by Loughery. 99 mins. Colour.A
gambler with psychic powers (Quaid) is persuaded to take part in
experiments in "dreamlinking" at a research centre. He learns how to enter
other people's dreams and interact with them. There is a plot to murder
the President, who has been having dreams of nuclear holocaust, by using
an evil psychic to assassinate him during a nightmare, but the Quaid
character intervenes in the dream. The theme can be traced back at least
to "Dreams are Sacred" (1948 ASF) by Peter Phillips, and a similar notion
would later be the focus of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. In D the
penny-dreadful thriller plot is so ludicrous that it is only the dreams

themselves that have much entertainment value. The effects are lively,
especially in the climactic vision of Washington in flames after the Bomb.
[PN]See also: VIRTUAL REALITY.
DREAM WORLD
US DIGEST-size magazine. 3 quarterly issues, Feb-Aug 1957; published by
ZIFF-DAVIS; ed Paul W. FAIRMAN. Subtitled "Stories of Incredible Powers",
DW was initiated as a response to the success of similar issues of
FANTASTIC, with stories of wish-fulfilment sometimes featuring PSI POWERS.
#1 reprinted stories by Thorne Smith and P.G. WODEHOUSE, but the magazine
included little fiction of note, although Harlan ELLISON and Robert
SILVERBERG contributed amusing stories. [FHP/MJE]
DREW, WAYLAND
(1932- ) Canadian teacher and writer who began publishing sf with The
Wabeno Feast (1973), a complex tale about HOLOCAUST and its roots, in
which three narrative strands all tangibly cohere-the 18th-century journal
of an early entrepreneur who confronts the heart of darkness in the pale
wabeno (an Indian shaman), the canoe trip of a Canadian couple through the
wilderness upon which the earlier visitor has already stamped the seal of
the civilized world, and a NEAR-FUTURE flight into the same but now
savaged wilderness on the part of escapees from a DISASTER directly tied
to the spoliation of the planet. After Dragonslayer * (1981 US), a film
tie, WD composed in The Erthring Cycle another post-holocaust narrative The Memoirs of Alcheringia (1984 US), The Gaian Experiment (1985 US) and
The Master of Norriya (1986 US) - which describes the founding of a secret
underground society, the Yggdrasil Project, via which it is hoped to
surmount inevitable planetary catastrophe. But, as the final volume moves
to a quiet, sombre close, the reader will perhaps be reminded of the dying
fall which concludes George R. STEWART's EARTH ABIDES (1949). [JC]Other
works: * batteries not included * (1987 US), novelizing * BATTERIES NOT
INCLUDED (1987); Willow * (1988 US), another film tie; Halfway Man *
(1989).
DREXEL, JAY B.
[s] Jerome BIXBY.
DRUERY, CHARLES THOMAS
(1843-1917) UK writer, often on UK flora, whose didactic novel, The New
Gulliver, or Travels in Athomia (1897), presents its shrunken narrator
with strange new perspectives on the natural world. [JC]
DRUGS
The use of drugs, both real and imaginary, is a common theme in sf,
notably in CYBERPUNK. The topic is discussed in detail under PERCEPTION,
and a little under NEW WAVE and PSYCHOLOGY. Film and tv treatments of the
theme include ALTERED STATES, DOOMWATCH, LIQUID SKY and THX 1138. A small
selection of the many sf authors who have used drug themes is: Brian W.
ALDISS, Ralph BLUM, Karin BOYE, William S. BURROUGHS, Don DELILLO, Philip
K. DICK, Charles DUFF, Mick FARREN, William GIBSON, Evan HUNTER, Aldous
HUXLEY, K.W. JETER, Richard KADREY, Irwin LEWIS, Talbot MUNDY, Geoff
RYMAN, Lucius SHEPARD, Norman SPINRAD, Bruce STERLING, Robert Louis
STEVENSON and Ian WATSON. [PN]

DRUILLET, PHILIPPE
(1944- ) Innovative French artist with an epic imagination and an
astringent pen-line style who cofounded with Moebius (Jean GIRAUD) and
others the publishing company Les Humanoides Associes and the imaginative
graphic-fiction magazine METAL HURLANT in 1975; much of the content of the
latter has been published in English in the US magazine HEAVY METAL.
Brought up in Spain, PD was a photographer until the publication of his
first strip Lone Sloane (graph coll 1967; intro by Maxim JAKUBOWSKI), a
bawdy SPACE OPERA influenced by US CINEMA and HEROIC FANTASY. A unique
illustrator, often clumsy in his portrayal of the human face, PD has
enlarged the graphic structures of the sf COMIC strip and created a wild,
flamboyant, morally ambiguous universe of crazed architectures and
monstrous ALIENS. The increasingly obsessive Lone Sloane adventures were
continued in Les 6 voyages de Lone Sloane ["The Six Journeys of Lone
Sloane"] (graph coll 1972) and, with script by Jacques Lob, Delirius
(graph coll 1973) - together collected in English as Lone Sloane Delirius (graph omni trans 1975 UK) - followed by Yragael (graph coll 1974
with script by Michel Demuth) and Urm le fou (graph coll 1975) - together
collected in English as Yragael - Urm (graph omni trans Pauline Tennant
1976 UK). PD tackled SWORD AND SORCERY in his adaptation of Michael
MOORCOCK's Elric of Melnibone with script by Jakubowski and Demuth as
Elrick (graph 1973; with script by Moorcock as Elric 1973 UK). La nuit
["The Night"] (graph 1977), a sombre panorama of urban warfare, was
completed after the traumatic experience of his wife's dying from cancer
in 1975. His other works include Vuzz (graph 1974), Retour a Bakaam
["Return to Bakaam"] (graph 1975) with script by Francois Truchaud,
Mirages (graph 1976), Salammbo (graph 1983) and Nosferatu (graph coll
1982; trans 1991 US), the last being a collection of black-and-white
strips first published in the magazine Pilote. During the mid-1980s PD was
commissioned to create the internal decor for the Paris Metro station at
Porte de la Villette; he has also produced sculpture and created a
children's sf animated tv series, Bleu (52 26min episodes, 1989-current).
[MJ/RT]See also: FANTASY; ILLUSTRATION.
DRUMM, CHRIS
(1949- ) US bookseller, publisher and bibliographer who has published
under the imprint Chris Drumm Booklets a large number of chapbooks
containing stories and other work by R.A. L AFFERTY and others. Beginning
in 1983, his BIBLIOGRAPHIES, all arranged with an economic practicality
sometimes missing from this field, include works on Algis BUDRYS, Hal
CLEMENT, Thomas M. DISCH, James E. GUNN, Lafferty, Larry NIVEN, Mack
REYNOLDS, John T. SLADEK and Richard WILSON; in this encyclopedia they are
listed under the authors treated (whom see). [JC]
DRUMM, D.B.
House pseudonym used on Dell Books' post- HOLOCAUST Traveler series of
SURVIVALIST FICTION, initiated by Ed Naha, with most of the novels thought
to be the work of John SHIRLEY. ( Ed NAHA for details.) [PN]
DRURY, ALLEN (STUART)
(1918- ) US writer of a sequence of novels depicting US political (

POLITICS) life from a point roughly similar to real-life 1960 and growing
into a full-fledged history of the NEAR FUTURE. The bent is conservatively
anti-communist, and the satirical effects are often telling, though
sometimes tendentious. The series comprises Advise and Consent (1959),
which won a Pulitzer, A Shade of Difference (1962), Capable of Honor
(1966), Preserve and Protect (1968), Come Nineveh, Come Tyre: The
Presidency of Edward M. Jason (1973), in which world communism topples an
unready USA into chaos, and The Promise of Joy (The Presidency of Orrin
Knox) (1975), in which a war between the USSR and China further challenges
the pacifist- and liberal-ridden republic. The Throne of Saturn (1971), in
which the Russians attempt to sabotage the USA's first manned expedition
to MARS, is similar in tone but otherwise unconnected to the series. Two
later books, The Hill of Summer: A Novel of the Soviet Conquest (1981) and
its sequel, The Roads of Earth (1984), break no new ground. [JC]
DRYASDUST
M.Y. HALIDOM.
DUANE, DIANE E(LIZABETH)
(1952- ) US writer, most respected for her work in fantasy. She is
married to fantasy author Peter Morwood (1956- ), with whom she has
collaborated on three books. She began writing fantasies with the Epic
Tale of the Five sequence - The Door into Fire (1979) and The Door into
Shadow (1984), later extended with The Door into Sunset (1992) - and
continued with the Wizard sequence: So You Want to Be a Wizard? (1983),
Deep Wizardry (1985) and High Wizardry (1990), all three being assembled
as Support Your Local Wizard (omni 1990), plus A Wizard Abroad (1993). Of
more direct sf interest are several successful STAR TREK ties: The Wounded
Sky * (1983), My Enemy, My Ally * (1984), The Romulan Way * (1987) with
Morwood, Spock's World * (1988), Doctor's Orders * (1990)and Star Trek,
the Next Generation: Dark Mirror * (1993). Though the smooth power of her
best fantasies does not transmit perfectly to her sf ties, the Star Trek
examples are by no means negligible. Other ties include Guardians of the
Three #2: Keeper of the City * (anth 1989) and Space Cops: Mindblast *
(1991), both with Morwood, and Space Cops: Kill Station * (1992), seaQuest
DSV: The Novel * (1993) with Morwood, based on the pilot for the seaQuest
tv series, and Spider-Man: The Venom Factor * (1994). [JC]
Du BOIS, THEODORA (McCORMICK)
(1890-1986) US writer best known for her many detective novels, though
The Devil's Spoon (1930), featuring visitors from other worlds, and Sarah
Hall's Sea God (1952) are fantasies. In her sf novel, Solution T-25
(1951), the USSR wages successful nuclear war against the USA. An
underground resistance, faking collaboration with the occupation forces,
develops Solution T-25, which dissolves the Soviet leadership's
authoritarian personality structures, turning them into benign humorists
incapable of commanding their forces. [JC]Other works: Armed with a New
Terror (1936) and Murder Strikes an Atomic Unit (1946), both
associational.
Du BOIS, WILLIAM PENE
(1916-1993) US writer, illustrator and art editor and designer for Paris

Review. His own novels, which he illustrates himself (he also illustrates
other writers' books), are usually juveniles, though the illustrations are
of general interest. He began publishing with stories like Elizabeth, the
Cow Ghost (1936), Giant Otto (1936), and The Flying Locomotive (1941), and
much of his work employs fantasy elements. The ANTIGRAVITY device featured
in Peter Graves (1950) verges on sf, and The Twenty-One Balloons (1947) is
a full-fledged sf novel: a retired professor, travelling across the
Pacific by BALLOON in 1883, is forced down on Krakatoa, where he finds a
UTOPIA in full swing, financed by its inhabitants' secret trips to
civilization to sell diamonds, which they have in plenty. The famous
eruption of that year finishes the experiment, but everyone escapes by
balloon. [JC]See also: CHILDREN'S SF.
DUDGEON, ROBERT ELLIS
(1820-1904) UK homeopathic doctor, author of the UTOPIAN novel Colymbia
(1873, published anon). Written in a spirit of competition with Erewhon
(1872; rev 1903) by Samuel BUTLER, who was RED's patient, it is set on an
equatorial archipelago in the Pacific and tells of a lost race ( LOST
WORLDS) of Englishmen interbred with Oceanic natives; their submarine city
is powered by tidal energy. Their remarkably free sexual practices allow
RED to satirize those of Victorian England. Colymbia is livelier and more
original than most of its kind. [PN]See also: ANONYMOUS SF AUTHORS.
DUDINTSEV, VLADIMIR
(1918- ) Russian writer whose novel Not by Bread Alone (1956 Novy Mir;
trans 1957 US) seemed at first to proclaim the Soviet thaw, but he was
publicly reprimanded for it soon after its publication. Novogodniaia
skazka (1956 Novy Mir; trans Gabriella Azrael as A New Year's Tale 1960
chap US; vt A New Year's Fable 1960 chap US; first book publication in
USSR 1965) is a kind of sf morality tale in which the protagonist, by
composing himself for his expected death, discovers a new source of cheap
light and heat. [JC]
DUDLEY-SMITH, TREVOR
[r] Elleston TREVOR.
DUFF
AWARDS.
DUFF, CHARLES (St LAWRENCE)
(1894-1966) Irish translator and writer whose sf play, Mind Products
Limited: A Melodrama of the Future in Three Acts and an Epilogue (1932
Netherlands), though breezily deprecatory of the 1960 world it depicts,
introduces an inventive range of extrapolatory material, including mind
control (and X-ray vision) through drugs, carplanes and tv phones, all
contributing to a CAPEK-like vision of totalitarianism in a world gone
mad. [JC]
DUFF, DOUGLAS V(ALDER)
(1901- ) UK writer, usually of adventure novels for older boys, though
several of his titles are clearly addressed to an adult audience. Not all
his sf or fantasy has been traced; those that have include The Horned
Crescent (1936), Jack Harding's Quest (1939), Peril on the Amazon (1946),

Atomic Valley (1947), The Man from Outer Space (1953) and The Nuclear
Castle Story (1958). Of these, perhaps the most interesting in Jack
Harding's Quest, a LOST WORLD story set in the Middle East, where a Lost
Tribe of Israel has been hoarding the Seven Horns of Joshua; the eponymous
young protagonist, with the aid of some scientific boffins, establishes
the reality of the Horns, which have the effect of disrupting matter at
the molecular level. This effect is acoustically recorded; and the Horns
are then unilaterally destroyed by the British, to keep the secret from
the German foe. The Lost Tribe knuckles under. [JC]
DUFFY, MAUREEN (PATRICIA)
(1933- ) UK writer whose novels tend to explore marginalized figures,
many of them women viewed from a FEMINIST angle; typical is the
protagonist of Gor Saga (1981) - televised as First Born in 1988 - who is
the child of a gorilla mother fertilized by human semen ( Hyperlink to:
APES AND CAVEMEN), and who grows into articulate adulthood in an
alienating NEAR-FUTURE UK. MD's nonfictional The Erotic World of Faery
(1972) takes a determinedly Freudian view of that subject. [JC]See also:
ANTHROPOLOGY; GENETIC ENGINEERING; WOMEN SF WRITERS.
DUKA, IVO
Joint pseudonym of emigre Czech writers Ivo Duchac
DUKE, MADELAINE (ELIZABETH)
(1925- ) UK writer and physician, born in Switzerland of Dutch parents,
active under her own name and at least two pseudonyms in a variety of
genres including sf novels (which she describes as "cartoons"). Claret,
Sandwiches and Sin: A Cartoon (1964 as by Maxim Donne; 1966 as by MED)
depicts a world insecurely amalgamated, after a nuclear conflict, into two
political divisions: Africa and the Rest of the World. Any politician who
risks war is eliminated by an underground organization. The protagonist of
the sequel, This Business of Bomfog: A Cartoon (1967), is "Maxim Donne" author of Claret, Sandwiches and Sin, a successful novel that has inspired
the assassination of a number of world leaders. In 1989, Bomfog
(Brotherhood-of-Man-Fatherhood-of-God), the organization responsible, now
runs the UK in a fashion MED depicts in somewhat hectic language as
DYSTOPIAN. Flashpoint (1982) features a scientist who plans to use a new
nuclear power system to enforce global sanity. [JC]
Du MAURIER, DAPHNE
(1907-1989) UK writer, granddaughter of George DU MAURIER, famous for
dark-hued romances (like Rebecca [1938]), usually set in Cornwall and
often - like her first, The Loving Spirit (1931), a ghost story - tinged
with the supernatural; drugs send the protagonist of The House on the
Strand (1969) into medieval Cornwall. Her one sf novel, Rule Britannia
(1972), subjects a NEAR-FUTURE Cornwall to US INVASION, during which the
natives rebel against the tasteless Yankees. Among DDM's short stories are
"The Birds", from The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Some Stories (coll
1952; vt Kiss Me Again, Stranger 1953 US; vt The Birds and Other Stories
1963 UK), which was made by Alfred Hitchcock into The BIRDS (1963), and
"Don't Look Now", from Not After Midnight (coll 1971; vt Don't Look Now
1971 US), which Nicholas Roeg filmed as Don't Look Now (1973). [JC]Other

works include: The Breaking Point: Eight Stories (coll 1959; vt The Blue
Lenses, and Other Stories 1970); Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories
(coll 1976); Classics of the Macabre (coll 1987; vt Daphne Du Maurier's
Classics of the Macabre 1987 US).
Du MAURIER, GEORGE (LOUIS PALMELLA BUSSON)
(1834-1896) UK illustrator, cartoonist and writer, known almost
exclusively today as the author of Trilby (1894), whose famous villain,
Svengali, is a preternaturally competent mesmerist. The progatonists of
GDM's first novel, Peter Ibbetson (1891), share each other's dreams, in
which they return to their idyllic childhood. His last novel, The Martian
(1897 US), lackadaisically tells through hindsight the life story of a
sensitive but mysterious Spiritualist who turns out to have been a Martian
all her life. [JC]Other works: A Legend of Camelot (coll 1898), whose
title poem is mildly fantasticated.See also: PSI POWERS.
DUNCAN, BRUCE
Irving A. GREENFIELD.
DUNCAN, DAVE
Working name of Scottish-born petroleum geologist and writer David John
Duncan (1933- ), in Canada from 1955. His singleton novels have divided
fairly evenly between fantasy and sf. The first, A Rose-Red City (1987
US), complicatedly puts its 20th-century protagonist into a walled UTOPIA,
where demons (and the Minotaur) oppose his attempts to extract Ariadne
from the world. Shadow (1987 US) is a SCIENCE-FANTASY tale of dynasties in
trouble on a strange planet "light-years hence". West of January (1989 US)
is a crowded PLANETARY ROMANCE set on a world whose day and orbit are of
approximately the same duration and in which a not particularly attractive
hero - his name is Knobil and, as the book is at times comical in intent,
the K can be assumed silent - has adventures all day long, some of which
carry subtle stings in their tails. Strings (1990 US), also sf, features a
significantly naive protagonist caught up in events the book's readers
understand better than he, as a desperately terminal Earth must be
escaped, via superstring transport, and a princess must be succoured. DD's
work has all the flamboyance of tales written strictly for escape, but (as
has been noted by critics) never for long allows his readers to forget
what kind of problems he is inviting them to dodge. His most virtuoso
passages seem almost brazenly to dance with despair. [JC]Other works: The
Seventh Sword fantasy sequence, comprising The Reluctant Swordsman (1988
US), The Coming of Wisdom (1988 US) and The Destiny of the Sword (1988
US); the Man of his Word fantasy sequence, comprising Magic Casement (1990
US), Faery Lands Forlorn (1991 US), Perilous Seas (1991 US) and Emperor
and Clown (1992); Hero! (1991 US), an sf juvenile; The Reaver Road (1992),
a fantasy.
DUNCAN, DAVID
(1913- ) US writer of popular fiction in several genres, perhaps as well
known for his few sf novels as for any other work, though his first novel
with an sf content, The Shade of Time (1946), which deals with "atomic
displacement", was (as he records) accepted for publication only after
Hiroshima. His books of the 1950s, more widely distributed within the sf

markets, have been better remembered, though he also scripted several
films, including The TIME MACHINE (1960), and wrote a screenplay for The
OUTER LIMITS . Dark Dominion (1954) is a well told melodrama concerning a
new element, magellanium, which varies in weight according to the position
of the star Sirius, and which is finally used to power a spaceship. Beyond
Eden (1955; vt Another Tree in Eden 1956 UK) contrasts different routes
towards fulfilment - materially, through a vast water-making project, and
spiritually, via crystals that expand humankind's nature in the direction
of gestalt empathy. Occam's Razor (1957) explores, within the context of a
threatening nuclear war, the impact of the arrival of two humans - though
one is horned-from a PARALLEL WORLD. DD has since fallen silent. [JC]Other
work: The Madrone Tree (1949), a fantasy.See also: DIMENSIONS;
MATHEMATICS.
DUNCAN, RONALD (FREDERICK HENRY)
(1914-1982) UK novelist, poet and playwright; Benjamin Britten's
librettist for the opera The Rape of Lucretia (1946). He was generally
best known for works outside the sf field. The Dull Ass's Hoof (coll 1941)
contains some fantasy plays. Some of the stories in The Perfect Mistress
and Other Stories (coll 1969), A Kettle of Fish (coll 1971), The Tale of
Tails (coll 1975) and The Uninvited Guest (coll 1981) are fables with sf
components. RD's sf novella, The Last Adam (1952 chap), features a last
man who, being something of a misogynist, comes across the last woman and
leaves her. [JC]Other works: This Way to the Tomb (1946) and The Death of
Satan (1955), fantasy plays; Mr and Mrs Mouse (1977), a fairy tale.
DUNE
Film (1984). Dino De Laurentiis/Universal. Dir David Lynch, starring Kyle
MacLachlan, Francesca Annis, Kenneth McMillan, Sting, Sean Young, many
others. Screenplay Lynch, based on DUNE (fixup 1965) by Frank HERBERT. 137
mins. Colour.Seldom has a big-budget genre film been so execrated by fans
and film critics alike. Certainly its narrative is confused to the point
of incoherence, showing signs of last-minute, lunatic cutting. Certainly
the many-layered story of Herbert's original, with its complex
intellectual structure (occasionally also vague), is here largely reduced
to melodrama. Certainly the distilled grotesquerie with which Baron
Harkonnen and his nephew Feyd Rautha (McMillan and Sting) are envisaged
belongs to a world more disgusting than anything invented by Herbert.
Certainly the final three-quarters of a long novel is reduced to a
ludicrously fast-moving half-hour or so. Yet the film was, after all, made
by David Lynch, master of weirdness, whose previous films had been
Eraserhead (1976) and The Elephant Man (1980), and whose subsequent works
would include Blue Velvet (1986) and the pilot of Twin Peaks (1989) remarkable movies all. It may be time to reappraise D, which Lynch clearly
conceived in terms of emblematic tableaux, like scenes from some stately,
hieratic pageant. Much of the production design - but not the sandworms was wonderfully original and exotic; the camerawork (by Freddie Francis)
made confident, artistic use of light and shade, glowing golds and deep
shadows. However bad the film may have been in some respects, the
neo-Baroque of the whole thing, not least in the Harkonnen sequences, is
one of the most interesting attempts yet to capture a look and a feeling

for sf that does not simply depend (as Herbert's original did not) on
technological gimmickry. Bits of this bad film are close to masterful.
[PN]See also: STEAMPUNK.
DUNE DIES
Fans were waiting for the movie version of Frank Herbert's novel, Dune,
for years. Finally, in 1984, the film opened. It was written and directed
by David Lynch. The general consensus of critics and fans - and certainly
the studio - was that Dune bombed. Why did it fail? Most people blame the
film's producer, Dino De Laurentis, better known for his 1976 remake of
King Kong. De Laurentis insisted that the film be cut from about three
hours to two hours and seventeen minutes, making its last half almost
incoherent.But many science fiction fans had their doubts about Dune's
metamorphosis anyway. Big budget films typically thrive on action and
adventure. And Frank Herbert's popular novel may have just been too dark
and too complex to translate well into film.
DUNN, J.R.
(? - ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Long Knives" for L. Ron
Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future (anth 1987) ed A.J. BUDRYS; a later
story, "Crux Gammata" (1992) is an interesting HITLER WINS tale. This Side
of Judgment (1994), JRD's first novel, posits a CYBERPUNK-colored future
America whose pyrrhic military victory over a cabal of South American drug
dealers and Leftist dictators has driven the country even further down the
road to ENTROPY and social despair. Exploiters and victims of this
scenario are the "imps", humans with chip-implants who (while themselves
suffering ineradicable information overload) manage (while attempting to
take over the government) to scare Federal agencies into a violent
showdown. In the end, action dominates; but JRD gives a sense of being
prepared to continue speculating. [JC]
DUNN, KATHERINE (KAREN)
(1945- ) US writer, teacher and radio personality whose third novel, Geek
Love (1989), is a densely told tale of a family which breeds its own
freaks through a kind of GENETIC ENGINEERING; in the end the book reads,
however, not as sf, but as an extremely expert FABULATION on the
primordial theme of the family romance. KD's novel is not to be confused
with The Geek (1969) by Alice Louise Ramirez, which is narrated by a
chicken. [JC]
DUNN, PHILIP M.
[r] Saul DUNN.
DUNN, SAUL
Pseudonym used by UK writer and publisher Philip M. Dunn (1946- ) for the
original publication of his books in the UK, though he used his own name
for their US release; he was also the director of Pierrot Publishing, a
packaging-cum-publishing firm which became insolvent in 1981, owing large
sums. SD was reported to have moved to India for religious reasons.
Releases generated by the company included Brian W. ALDISS's Brothers of
the Head (1977), Peter DICKINSON's The Flight of Dragons (1979) and Harry
HARRISON's Great Balls of Fire! A History of Sex in Science Fiction
Illustration (1977); all were heavily illustrated. SD wrote two

SPACE-OPERA sequences, the Steeleye books - The Coming of Steeleye (1976),
Steeleye - The Wideways (1976) and Steeleye-Waterspace (1976) - and the
Cabal tales - The Cabal (1978; 1981 US under his own name), The Black Moon
(1978; 1982 US under his own name) and The Evangelist (1979; 1982 US under
his own name). [JC]
DUNNE, J(OHN) W(ILLIAM)
(1875-1949) UK writer and engineer, responsible for designing the first
UK military aeroplane c1907. Though his two fantasies-The Jumping Lions of
Borneo (1937 chap) and the more ambitious An Experiment with St George
(1939) - are of some mild interest, JWD is now remembered almost
exclusively for his theories about the nature of time, which he developed
in order to explain his sense that dreams are often precognitive. In An
Experiment with Time (1927; rev 1929; rev 1934) he began to articulate his
appealing thesis that time was not a linear flow but a sort of geography,
accessible to the dreaming mind. In later books, such as The Serial
Universe (1934), The New Immortality (1938), Nothing Dies (1940) and the
posthumous Intrusions? (1955), he ludicrously sophisticated the theory,
postulating various numbered levels of Time leading by an infinite regress
to God; but his early work resonated perfectly with the time-hauntedness
of interbellum UK writers from E.F. BENSON to the children's author Alison
Uttley (1884-1976) to - most famously - John Buchan (1875-1940), whose
time-travel novel, The Gap in the Curtain (1932), is clearly argued in
JWD's terms; and J.B. PRIESTLEY, whose Time Plays are indebted to JWD, and
whose nonfictional Over the Long High Wall: Some Reflections and
Speculations on Life, Death and Time (1972) guardedly advocates JWD's more
fruitful intuitions. [JC]See also: DIMENSIONS; TIME TRAVEL.
DUNSANY, LORD
Working name of Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878-1957), 18th Baron
Dunsany, prolific Irish author of stories, novels, essays and plays.
Though primarily a writer of FANTASY, he is of sf interest through the
widespread influence of his language and imagery. Late in life he wrote
one sf novel, The Last Revolution (1951), about MACHINES in revolt. His
influence, especially on writers of HEROIC FANTASY, was strong from almost
the beginning of his long career, when he published a series of FANTASY
collections whose contents are linked by imagery and reference: The Gods
of Pegana (coll of linked stories 1905), Time and the Gods (coll 1906),
The Sword of Welleran (coll 1908), which contains the famous The Fortress
Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth (1910 chap), A Dreamer's Tales (coll
1910), The Book of Wonder: A Chronicle of Little Adventures at the Edge of
the World (coll 1912), Fifty-One Tales (coll 1915; vt The Food of Death:
Fifty-One Tales 1974 US), and Tales of Wonder (coll 1916: vt The Last Book
of Wonder 1916 US). The stories in these intermittently brilliant volumes
made creative use of influences from Wilde and Yeats through William
MORRIS - along with the very specific effect of the play The Darling of
the Gods (1902) by David Belasco (1859-1931) and John L. Long (1861-1927),
with its misty fake-oriental setting. Through their sustained
otherworldliness and their muscular delicacy, these stories in turn
exerted a potent influence on later writers.In his second phase as a
fantasist - after a rather ostentatious spurning of the genre during WWI -

LD turned to novels like The Chronicles of Don Rodriguez (1922; vt Don
Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley 1922 US), The King of Elfland's
Daughter (1924) and The Charwoman's Shadow (1926); the second of these did
much to give geographical reality to the secondary universe ( J.R.R.
TOLKIEN) of high fantasy. His third phase consists of the Jorkens CLUB
STORIES: The Travel Tales of Mr Joseph Jorkens (coll 1931), Jorkens
Remembers Africa (coll 1934 US; vt Mr Jorkens Remembers Africa 1934 UK),
Jorkens Has a Large Whiskey (coll 1940), The Fourth Book of Jorkens (coll
1947) and Jorkens Borrows Another Whiskey (coll 1954). Along with works by
Robert Louis STEVENSON and G.K. CHESTERTON, these tales focused the
attention of sf and fantasy writers upon the late Victorian and Edwardian
club story as a suggestive mode for storytelling; Arthur C. CLARKE,
Sterling LANIER and Spider ROBINSON are among the many who have written in
it. LD's work as a fantasist is of high intrinsic merit, and his influence
is pervasive. [JC]Other works: Tales of War (coll 1918); Unhappy Far-Off
Things (coll 1919); Tales of Three Hemispheres (coll 1919 US); two macabre
novels, The Blessing of Pan (1927) and The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933);
My Talks with Dean Spanley (1936 ), in which the Dean recalls a past life;
The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders (1950), in which a man's mind is
transferred into an animal's body;Rory and Bran (1936), a protagonist of
which is a dog; The Man who Ate the Phoenix (coll 1949); The Little Tales
of Smethers (coll 1952); The Sword of Welleran and Other Tales of
Enchantment (coll 1954; contents differ from the 1908 vol); 3 compilations
ed Lin CARTER, At the Edge of the World (coll 1970), Beyond the Fields We
Know (coll 1972) and Over the Hills and Far Away (coll 1974); Gods, Men
and Ghosts (coll 1972) ed E.F. BLEILER; The Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer
and Other Fantasms (coll 1980 US); also numerous pamphlets and plays.About
the author: Lord Dunsany: A Biography (1972) by Mark Amory; Lord Dunsany:
King of Dreams (1959) by Hazel Littlefield; Literary Swordsmen and
Sorcerers (1976) by L. Sprague DE CAMP; Pathways to Elfland: The Writings
of Lord Dunsany (1989) by Darrell SCHWEITZER; "Lord Dunsany: The Career of
a Fantaisiste"by S.T. Joshi in his The Weird Tale (1990);Pathways to
Elfland (1989) by Darrell SCHWEITZER; Lord Dunsany: A Bibliograpy (1993)
by J.T. Joshi and Schweitzer..See also: SWORD AND SORCERY.
DUNSTAN, ANDREW
[s] A. Bertram CHANDLER.
DURRELL, LAWRENCE (GEORGE)
(1912-1990) UK poet and novelist best known for the Alexandria Quartet
(1957-60). His sf novel sequence, Tunc (1968) and Nunquam (1970),
assembled as The Revolt of Aphrodite (omni 1974), subjects sf material to
intensely literary scrutiny. In the first volume, Merlin, a burgeoning
multinational corporation, co-opts the protagonist, Felix Charlock, into
constructing a super- COMPUTER, which can predict the future and which
drives him to madness; in the second volume, Felix is cured in order to
create an ANDROID lady - echoing an LD obsession - perfectly duplicating a
destroyed lover of the boss of Merlin; but the android is also destroyed
in a NEAR-FUTURE world choked with evil and images of corruption. [JC]See
also: MYTHOLOGY.
DUSTY AYRES AND HIS BATTLE BIRDS

US PULP MAGAZINE. 12 issues, July 1934-July 1935; published by Popular
Publications; ed Rogers Terrill. Each issue contained a novel by Robert
Sidney BOWEN Jr in which Dusty and his sidekicks fought off the menace of
the Black Invaders, led by an Asian warlord bent on world domination. The
magazine, genuine NEAR-FUTURE sf, was a revival of a more conventional
aviation pulp, Battle Birds, in an attempt to pull in the readership of
the previous title for what was in fact a brand new magazine with a new
hero and a new, futuristic storyline. It continued the numeration of
Battle Birds, beginning with vol 5 #4 and ending with vol 8 #3. Five of
the stories were reprinted as paperbacks in 1966 (for details BOWEN).
[FHP/MJE]
DVORKIN, DANIEL
[r] David DVORKIN.
DVORKIN, DAVID
(1943- ) UK-born author, long in the USA, whose first novel of strong
interest, after the unremarkable The Children of Shiny Mountain (1977; vt
Shiny Mountain 1978 UK) and The Green God (1979), was Time for Sherlock
Holmes * (1983). This RECURSIVE tale takes the detective, who has found
the secret of eternal youth, through a tortuous plot (much TIME TRAVEL is
involved) from the time of H.G. WELLS (concerned at Professor Moriarty's
theft of the Time Machine to seesaw through the eons, doing evil) to a
Martian future where, after a DYSTOPIAN interlude, he prepares to lead
humanity to the stars. Unfortunately, the telling is somewhat flat, an
ailment of style which afflicted DD through the next several books. Budspy
(1987), set in an ALTERNATE WORLD featuring a victorious Germany ( HITLER
WINS), is greyly half-convincing; and The Seekers (1988) and Central Heat
(1988), both set in the same universe, again lack a sense of full
conviction, though much of the detail-work is, as usual, applied with
considerable intelligence. Central Heat is plotted with all DD's love of
intricacy: ALIENS have decided that Earth has failed to breed decent
citizens and so abduct the Sun, although ensuring that our planet
ricochets into an orbit around Jupiter and Saturn, which have been thrown
together; properly instructed as to how to go about igniting the joined
gas giants into a tiny new sun, the remnants of humanity begin to learn
how to cope. With Ursus (1989) and Insatiable (1993), DD shifted into
horror. [JC]Other works: Three STAR TREK ties: The Trellisane
Confrontation * (1984), Timetrap * (1988) and Star Trek: The Next
Generation #8: The Captain's Honor * (1989) with Daniel Dvorkin (1969- ),
his son.See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.
DWIGGINS, W(ILLIAM) A(DDISON)
(1880-1956) US writer on typography and, through his association with the
Mergenthaler Linotype Company, designer of several well known typefaces,
including Electra and Caledonia. He is known within the sf field for
designing and illustrating the luxurious 1931 edition of H.G. WELLS's THE
TIME MACHINE. His sf play, Millennium 1 (1945) - published in an edition
he designed and illustrated - depicts an ambiguous UTOPIA in which
machines have revolted and humans must fight to recover their hegemony.
[JC]

DWYER, DEANNE
Dean R. KOONTZ.
DWYER, JAMES FRANCIS
(1874-1952) US writer, most of whose books - like The White Waterfall
(1912), The Spotted Panther (1913) and the stories assembled in "Breath of
the Jungle" (coll 1915) - are Oriental fantasies of little interest,
though Evelyn: Something More than a Story (1929) translates the prurient
primitivism of the earlier books into the future, and Hespamora (1935 UK)
combines elements of DYSTOPIAN satire with an incursion of pagan deities.
The Spillane series, The Lady with Feet of Gold (1937 UK) and The City of
Cobras (1938 UK), returned to JFD's old haunts. [JC]Other works: Cold-Eyes
(1934).
DWYER, K.R.
Dean R. KOONTZ.
DYE, CHARLES
(1927-1955) US writer who began publishing sf with "The Last Orbit" for
AMZ in 1950. He was active for the next half-decade, soon publishing his
only sf novel, Prisoner in the Skull (1952), in which ordinary Homo
sapiens and a form of SUPERMAN engage in thriller-like confrontations. He
was married briefly (1951-3) to Katherine MACLEAN, who wrote "The Man who
Staked the Stars" (1952) and "Syndrome Johnny" (1951) under his name. The
latter story contains an amazingly early account of a
genetic-recombination technique (gene splicing), in which a "piggyback"
virus transports genetic material (a silicon-using gene) into human cells.
[JC/PN]
DYER, ALFRED
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
DYING EARTH
A not uncommon category of sf story which has now developed its own
melancholy mythology. FAR FUTURE. [JC]
DYNAMIC SCIENCE FICTION
US PULP MAGAZINE published by Columbia Publications; ed R.A.W. LOWNDES. 6
issues, Dec 1952-Jan 1954. Much of the fiction DSF printed was mediocre,
but it published 2 2-part critical articles of some note by James E. GUNN:
"The Philosophy of SF" (Mar-June 1953) and "The Plot-Forms of SF" (Oct
1953-Jan 1954). 3 numbered issues were reprinted in the UK in 1953. [BS]
DYNAMIC SCIENCE STORIES
US PULP MAGAZINE, a short-lived companion to MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES. 2
issues, Feb 1939 and Apr/May 1939, published by Western Fiction Publishing
Corp.; ed Robert O. Erisman. #1 featured the novel Lord of Tranerica
(1966) by Stanton A. COBLENTZ; #2 included stories by L. Sprague DE CAMP
and Manly Wade WELLMAN. DSS was an average pulp magazine with no
distinctive qualities. #1 appeared as a UK reprint in 1939. [MJE]
DYSON, FREEMAN J(OHN)
(1923- ) UK-born theoretical physicist and FRS; professor at the
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, since 1953, and now a US citizen.

FJD's main work has been in quantum field theory, but he is well known in
sf for the concept of the DYSON SPHERE, which he introduced in a short
paper for Science in 1960 (vol 131 p1667). In this paper, which was
concerned with locating and communicating with extraterrestrial
civilizations, Dyson argued that any such civilization would probably be
millions of years old and that Malthusian pressure would have led to its
energy requirements being equal to the total output of radiation from its
star. It would therefore reconstruct its solar system so as to form an
artificial biosphere completely enclosing its sun. This and related
schemes, like the basic notion behind his RINGWORLD (1970), are discussed
by Larry NIVEN in his article "Bigger than Worlds" (1974; reprinted in A
Hole in Space coll 1974). An sf novel which makes use of an actual Dyson
Sphere is Bob SHAW's Orbitsville (1975). The "Cuckoo "inFarthest Star
(1975) by Frederik POHL and Jack WILLIAMSON is revealed in the sequel,
Wall Around a Star (1983), to be a Dyson Sphere.FJD's theorizing has many
times gone beyond his own speciality to cover topics as diverse as the
Greenhouse Effect, galactic COLONIZATION, GENETIC ENGINEERING and the use
of the SOLAR WIND for space-sailing. His many essays are a treasure trove
for sf writers, some being collected in Infinite in All Directions (coll
1988 US). His set of autobiographical sketches, Disturbing the Universe
(1979 US), tells entertaining tales of intellectual adventure. It was a
student of Dyson's who made headlines in 1976 by designing a workable
nuclear weapon using only published sources. [TSu/PN]See also: ENTROPY;
XENOBIOLOGY.
DYSON SPHERE
Item of sf TERMINOLOGY; named for a concept put forward by the physicist
Freeman J. DYSON.
DYSTOPIAS
The word "dystopia" is the commonly used antonym of "eutopia" ( UTOPIAS)
and denotes that class of hypothetical societies containing images of
worlds worse than our own. An early user of the term was John Stuart Mill
(1806-1873), in a parliamentary speech in 1868, but its recent
fashionableness probably stems from its use in Quest for Utopia (1952) by
Glenn Negley (1907-1988) and J. Max Patrick (1908- ). Anthony BURGESS
argued in 1985 (1978) that "cacotopia" would be a more apt term.Dystopian
images are almost invariably images of future society, pointing fearfully
at the way the world is supposedly going in order to provide urgent
propaganda for a change in direction. As hope for a better future grows,
the fear of disappointment inevitably grows with it, and when any vision
of a future utopia incorporates a manifesto for political action or
belief, opponents of that action or belief will inevitably attempt to show
that its consequences are not utopian but horrible. The very first work
listed in I.F. CLARKE's bibliography of The Tale of the Future (3rd edn
1978) is a tract of 1644 warning of the terrible disaster which would
follow were the monarchy to be restored.Dystopian images began to
proliferate in the last decades of the 19th century. Utopian and dystopian
images are contrasted in the rival cities of Frankville and Stahlstadt in
The Begum's Fortune (1879; trans 1880) by Jules VERNE. The greedy
materialism which has created Stahlstadt is also the underlying ideology

of H.C. MARRIOTT-WATSON's Erchomenon (1879). Walter BESANT produced two
significant early dystopias in The Revolt of Man (1882), in which women (
WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION) rule with disastrous consequences,
and The Inner House (1888), in which IMMORTALITY has led to social
stagnation. The great utopian H.G. WELLS produced his images of dystopia,
too - forecasts of what the world must be like if the forces of socialism
did not triumph - in "A Story of the Days to Come" (1897) and When the
Sleeper Wakes (1899; rev vt The Sleeper Awakes, 1910). He also produced
the first ALIEN dystopia in his description of Selenite society in THE
FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901). Robert Hugh BENSON's Lord of the World
(1907) is a hysterical protest against secularism, humanism and socialism
which ends with the apocalypse.The single most prolific stimulus to the
production of dystopian visions has been the political polarization of
capitalism and socialism. Anti-capitalist dystopias include The Iron Heel
(1907) by Jack LONDON, The Air Trust (1915) by George Allan ENGLAND, and
Useless Hands (1920; trans 1926) by Claude FARRERE. Anti-socialist
dystopias, which are more numerous, include The Unknown Tomorrow (1910) by
William LE QUEUX, Crucible Island (1919) by Conde B. PALLEN, Unborn
Tomorrow (1933) by John KENDALL, Anthem (1938) by Ayn RAND and The Great
Idea (1951; vt Time Will Run Back) by Henry HAZLITT. Anti-fascist
dystopias include Land under England (1935) by Joseph O'NEILL, The Wild
Goose Chase (1937) by Rex WARNER and The Lost Traveller (1943) by Ruthven
TODD. Anti-German dystopias from before and after the rise of the Nazi
Party include Owen GREGORY's Meccania (1918), Milo HASTINGS's City of
Endless Night (1920) and Swastika Night (1937) by Murray Constantine (
Katharine BURDEKIN) (see also HITLER WINS).Although these works are
emotional reactions against ideas which seem various, the basic fears
which they express are very similar. The emphasis may differ, but the
central features of dystopia are ever present: the oppression of the
majority by a ruling elite (which varies only in the manner of its
characterization, not in its actions), and the regimentation of society as
a whole (which varies only in its declared ends, not in its actual
processes). In his attempt to imagine the "rationalized" state of the
Selenites, Wells took as his dystopian model the ant-nest ( HIVE-MINDS)
and this has seemed the epitome of dystopian organization to many other
writers. J.D. BERESFORD's and Esme Wynne-Tyson's The Riddle of the Tower
(1944) suggests that the fundamental danger facing society is "Automatism"
- the trend toward the victory of organic society over the individual whatever political philosophy is invoked to justify it. The most detailed
analysis of this anxiety, and perhaps the most impressively ruthless of
all dystopias, is My (trans as We 1924) by Yevgeny ZAMIATIN, and the most
luridly horrible development of it is to be found in George ORWELL's
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949), which in part expressed Orwell's despair of
the UK working class and its capacity to revolt (or even be
revolted).Because animosity against specific political programmes was the
most important force provoking early dystopian visions, the tradition did
not immediately engage in contradictory argument the main basis for
utopian optimism, which is a more generalized faith in the idea of
progress, both social and technological. It was not long, though, before
there appeared dystopian images reflecting an emotional reaction against
technological advance. The world of E.M. FORSTER's "The Machine Stops"

(1909) is perhaps the first dystopia created by technological
sophistication; the story's argument is halfhearted, concentrating on the
question of what would happen when the MACHINES broke down rather than on
the horrors of living with them while they were still functioning. A
confident assertion that scientific progress would make the world a worse
place to live in because it would allow society's power groups more
effectively to oppress others was made by Bertrand RUSSELL in Icarus, or
The Future of Science (1924), his reply to J.B.S. HALDANE's optimistic
Daedalus (1924). Aldous HUXLEY's satirical dystopia BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932)
is also an ideological reply to Daedalus, raising awkward questions about
the quality of life in a LEISURE society. S. Fowler WRIGHT's The New Gods
Lead (coll 1932) is a scathing indictment of the values of technocracy and
"the utopia of comforts". The general pessimism of the UK SCIENTIFIC
ROMANCE in this period was countered mainly by hopes of transcendence (via
the evolution of a new and better species of mankind) rather than by faith
in political reform.This suspicion of technology, though running directly
counter to Hugo GERNSBACK's optimism for an "Age of Power Freedom", is
surprisingly widespread in early GENRE SF. In "Paradise and Iron" (1930)
by Miles J. BREUER a mechanical brain established to coordinate a
mechanistic utopia becomes a tyrant. In "City of the Living Dead" (1930)
by Laurence MANNING and Fletcher PRATT, machines that simulate real
experience allow people to live in dream worlds, sustained by mechanical
"wombs", and thereby bring about the total stagnation of society.
Scepticism in regard to technological miracles is a hallmark of the work
of David H. KELLER, whose dystopian fantasies include "The Revolt of the
Pedestrians" (1928), in which automobilists who have lost the power of
self-locomotion rule oppressively over mere pedestrians. Most stories of
this kind feature some kind of rebellion against the adverse circumstances
described. The reversion to a simpler way of life is celebrated by Keller
in "The Metal Doom" (1932) as enthusiastically as it is in the
hysterically technophobic Gay Hunter (1934) by J. Leslie
MITCHELL.Revolution against a dystopian regime was to become a staple plot
of GENRE SF, partly because such a formula offered far more melodramatic
potential than utopian planning. The standard scenario involves an
oppressive totalitarian state which maintains its dominance and stability
by means of futuristic technology, but which is in the end toppled by
newer technologies exploited by revolutionaries. The standard genre-sf
answer to the problem posed by Russell in Icarus is, therefore, that
elites empowered by technology will lose their interest in further
technological progress, and will probably try to suppress it - with the
result that its clandestinely developed fruits will become the instruments
of their overthrow. Examples from the 1940s of this formula are "If This
Goes On ..." (1940) and Sixth Column (1941; 1949) by Robert A. HEINLEIN,
GATHER, DARKNESS! (1943; 1950) by Fritz LEIBER, Tarnished Utopia (1943;
1956) by Malcolm JAMESON and Renaissance (1944; 1951; vt Man of Two
Worlds) by Raymond F. JONES. In the SF MAGAZINES of the 1950s this formula
became more refined and increasingly stylized. There appeared a whole
generation of sf novels in which individual power groups come to dominate
society, shaping it to their special interests. Advertising executives run
the world in the archetype of this subspecies, THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1953)
by Frederik POHL and C.M. KORNBLUTH; insurance companies are in charge in

Preferred Risk (1955) by Edson McCann (Pohl and Lester DEL REY);
supermarkets in HELL'S PAVEMENT (1955; vt Analogue Men) by Damon KNIGHT;
racketeers in The Syndic (1953) by Kornbluth; doctors in Caduceus Wild
(1959; rev 1978) by Ward MOORE and Robert Bradford; and a cult of
hedonists in The Joy Makers (fixup 1961) by James E. GUNN. All these
novels are, in a sense, gaudy fakes that use dystopian images for
melodramatic convenience; they select their villains with a vigorous
disregard for plausibility and a cheerful animus against some personal
bete noire. They tend to be ABSURDIST exaggerations rather than serious
political statements. In this period genre sf produced only one genuine
dystopian novel, the classic FAHRENHEIT 451 (1953) by Ray BRADBURY, which
leaves its ruling elite anonymous in order to concentrate on the means by
which oppression and regimentation are facilitated, with the powerful key
image of the firemen whose job is to burn books. In many of the lesser
genre-sf novels of the 1950s, revolution against an oppressive and
stagnant society is seen as a difficult irrelevance, escape by SPACESHIP
becoming a key image.Outside the sf magazines the post-WWII period
produced a remarkable series of very varied dystopian novels - remarkable
not only for their diversity and characteristic intensity but also for a
tendency to black comedy. Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence (1948) is an
anti-scientific polemic; Evelyn WAUGH's Love among the Ruins (1953) is a
vitriolic political satire; Bernard WOLFE's LIMBO (1952) plays in macabre
fashion with the idea of (literal) "disarmament". Even the more earnest
works, like Gerald HEARD's enigmatic Doppelgangers (1947), SARBAN's THE
SOUND OF HIS HORN (1952), David KARP's One (1953), L.P. HARTLEY's Facial
Justice (1960) and Anthony Burgess's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1962), possess a
curious surreal quality. Many of these novels are neither accusations
directed at particular social forces nor attempts to analyse the nature of
the dystopian state, but seem to be products of a new kind of incipient
despair; only a few-notably Doppelgangers - offer a significant note of
hope in their account of rebellion against evil circumstance. This, it
appears, was a period of history in which US-UK society lost its faith in
the probability of a better future, and the dystopian image was
established as an actual pattern of expectation rather than as a literary
warning device.Genre sf soon followed this lead - and so prominent was the
dystopian image in magazine sf that the transition from fakery to
"realism" was very easily achieved. During the 1960s a whole series of
reasons for believing in a dystopian future were discovered-to justify
rather than to cause the pessimistic outlook typical of the time.
OVERPOPULATION - a theme ignored since the days of Malthus - began to
inspire dystopian horror stories, most impressively in MAKE ROOM! MAKE
ROOM! (1966) by Harry HARRISON, STAND ON ZANZIBAR (1968) by John BRUNNER
and The World Inside (1971) by Robert SILVERBERG. The awful prospects of
POLLUTION and the destruction of the environment were extravagantly
detailed in Brunner's The Sheep Look Up (1972) and Philip WYLIE's The End
of the Dream (1972). When Alvin TOFFLER proposed in Future Shock (1970)
that the sheer pace of change threatened to make everyday life
unendurable, Brunner was able to complete a kind of "dystopian tetralogy",
following the two books cited above and The Jagged Orbit (1969) with THE
SHOCKWAVE RIDER (1975). Thomas M. DISCH's 334 (fixup 1972) is a dark
vision of the NEAR FUTURE in which human resilience is tested to the limit

by the stresses and strains of everyday life.Perhaps strangely, MAINSTREAM
dystopias of the late 1960s and 1970s seem rather weak-kneed compared to
those of the preceding decades. Michael FRAYN's A Very Private Life
(1968), Adrian MITCHELL's The Bodyguard (1970), Ira LEVIN's This Perfect
Day (1970) and Lawrence SANDERS's The Tomorrow File (1975) all seem
stereotyped. Perhaps there was little scope left for originality once the
most all-inclusive and ruthless image of a horrible and degenerate future
had been provided by William S. BURROUGHS in Nova Express (1964), or
perhaps it was simply that dystopian imagery came to be taken for granted
to such an extent that it could be deployed only in an almost flippant
manner - as by the CYBERPUNK writers of the 1980s. It is arguable that the
only new ground broken by literary dystopias of the 1970s and 1980s,
whether in the mainstream or in genre sf, related to FEMINIST images of
oppressive masculinity; notable examples include WALK TO THE END OF THE
WORLD (1974) by Suzy McKee CHARNAS, Woman at the Edge of Time (1976) by
Marge PIERCY, THE HANDMAID'S TALE (1985) by Margaret ATWOOD, and Bulldozer
Rising (1988) by ANNA LIVIA.The significance of the firm establishment of
a dystopian image of the future in literature should not be
underestimated. Literary images of the future are among the most
significant expressions of the beliefs and expectations we apply in real
life to the organization of our attitudes and actions. Notable studies of
dystopian fiction include From Utopia to Nightmare (1962) by Chad Walsh,
The Future as Nightmare (1967) by Mark R. HILLEGAS, and Science Fiction
and the New Dark Age by Harold L. Berger (1976). In New Maps of Hell
(1960) Kingsley AMIS argues that the dystopian tradition is the most
important strand in the tapestry of modern sf. A relevant theme anthology
is Bad Moon Rising (anth 1973) ed Thomas M. Disch. [BS]See also: DISASTER;
MEDIA LANDSCAPE; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; SOCIOLOGY.

SF?
EARNSHAW, BRIAN
(1929- ) UK author of the fine chase thriller And Mistress Pursuing
(1966) and a complex sf thriller, Planet in the Eye of Time (1968), which
encompasses, via TIME TRAVEL, the period of the crucifixion ( MESSIAHS;
RELIGION) and addresses the problems of a dying Galaxy. His later work
within the genre has all been for children. The Dragonfall series includes
Dragonfall Five and the Space Cowboys (1972), Dragonfall Five and the
Royal Beast (1972), Dragonfall Five and the Empty Planet (1973),
Dragonfall Five and the Hijackers (1974), Dragonfall Five and the Master
Mind (1975), Dragonfall Five and the Super Horse (1977) and Dragonfall
Five and the Haunted World (1979). The Star Jam Pack series, featuring an
interstellar rock group, includes Starclipper and the Song Wars (1985),
Starclipper and the Snowstone (1986) and Starclipper and the Galactic
Final (1987). [JC]Other works: The Rock Dog Gang (1987); Planet of the
Jumping Beans (1990 chap).
EARTH DEFENSE FORCE
CHIKYU BOEIGUN.
EARTH DIES SCREAMING, THE

Film (1964). Lippert/Planet. Dir Terence Fisher, starring Willard Parker,
Virginia Field, Dennis Price. Screenplay Henry Cross, from a story by
Harry Spalding. 62 mins. B/w.This is the first of three sf films that
Terence Fisher (best known for his Hammer Horror films) made during the
1960s; the others were ISLAND OF TERROR (1966) and NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT
(1967). The UK has been invaded by alien-controlled robots. Survivors are
besieged by corpses animated by the robots, so that the film is an
inferior forerunner to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). Like the other
films in the series, all similar in theme, TEDS is handicapped by a clumsy
script, a tiny budget and a director uninterested in sf. [JB]
EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY
Film (1988). De Laurentiis/Kestrel. Dir Julien Temple, starring Geena
Davis, Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey, Damon Wayans, Julie Brown. Screenplay
Brown, Charlie Coffey, Terrence E. McNally. 100 mins. Colour.Three
fur-covered humanoid aliens crash their spaceship in a swimming pool in
the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles. They meet a Valley girl (Davis), who
arranges for them to be shaved and trendily dressed. They learn about
local customs. This very light comedy with songs (good words, so-so tunes)
was made by a UK director who downplayed the alienness of the aliens (they
are good at dancing, piano playing and sex) in favour of the alienness of
the San Fernando Valley, photographed in lurid primary colours and
observed with all the astonished voyeurism of some tyro anthropologist
confronted by pygmy headhunters. EGAE is slight, but much funnier than MY
STEPMOTHER IS AN ALIEN (1988), on a very similar theme. [PN]See also:
CINEMA.
EARTHQUAKE
Film (1974). Universal. Dir Mark Robson, starring Charlton Heston, Ava
Gardner, George Kennedy, Lorne Greene, Genevieve Bujold. Screenplay George
Fox, Mario Puzo. 123 mins. Colour.We include this as a representative
member of a class of marginally sf films, DISASTER movies, which normally
deal with events that, while they have not yet happened, plausibly might
in the NEAR FUTURE. In practice the feeling of most disaster films is not
sciencefictional, their point being to generate an emotional thrill
through the disaster itself rather than to investigate causes and effects.
This example, commercially very successful, shows the destruction of Los
Angeles by a major earthquake, and as usual focuses on a small group who
struggle to survive. Technically the film is adroit, though the human
relationships are stilted and stereotyped. It is a showcase for some of
Hollywood's best special-effects men, many of whom were persuaded to come
out of retirement to work on it; one of them, Clifford Stine, had created
the effects in Universal's series of sf/horror films in the 1950s,
including The INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957). The film's gimmick was the
introduction of "Sensurround", a system intended to disturb audiences with
low-frequency vibrations generated by powerful electro-acoustic horns
placed at the front and rear of the theatre. [JB]
EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS
(vt Invasion of the Flying Saucers) Film (1956). Clover/Columbia. Prod
Charles H. Schneer. Dir Fred F. Sears, starring Hugh Marlowe, Joan Taylor.
Screenplay George Worthing Yates, Raymond T. Marcus, based on a story by

Curt SIODMAK. 83 mins. B/w.This film was suggested by Flying Saucers from
Outer Space (1953) by Donald E. Keyhoe (1897-1988), and was made to cash
in on the UFO mania of the period. After a simple misunderstanding, there
are spectacular scenes of destruction as aliens in saucers attempt to
defeat Earth using ray-guns. The militaristic story is ill written and
badly paced. Though done on a small budget, Ray HARRYHAUSEN's elegant
special effects - the only reason for watching the film - are impressive,
particularly in the climactic battle sequence, when flying saucers drop
out of the sky and crash into famous Washington landmarks. [JB]
EASTERLEY, ROBERT
Robert POTTER.
EAST GERMANY
GERMANY.
EASTON, EDWARD
Pseudonym of US writer Edward P. Malerich (1940- ), author of The Miscast
Gentleman (1978), a mildly intriguing TIME-TRAVEL tale, and The Pirate of
Hitchfield (1978). [JC]
EASTON, M(ALCOLM) COLEMAN
(1942- ) US writer who is also employed in computer science and
engineering research. He began publishing sf with "Superflare" as Coleman
Brax for FSF in 1980, using that pseudonym for some further magazine
stories; with Clare BELL, with whom he lives, both writing as Clare
Coleman, he has collaborated in the Ancient Pacific sequence ( Clare
BELL). His early novels - like the sequence comprising Masters of Glass
(1985), Iskiir (1986) and The Fisherman's Curse (1987) - are fantasy.
Swimmers Beneath the Night (1987), set on a water-covered planet and
critical of the science which has populated it with bioengineered
settlers, is sf. With Spirits of Cavern and Hearth (1988) he reverted to
fantasy and to his favourite venue, a world vibrant with spirits. [JC]
EASTON, THOMAS A(TWOOD)
(1944- ) US critic, writer and biology teacher (he holds a PhD in
theoretical biology) who is best known for the Reference Library
book-review column he has written for ASF since 1979, where he covers a
wide range of titles with strict fairness, though not often granted the
room to delve deep. His first story was "Next" for Adam in 1974, and he
has since published at least 50 tales in magazines, sometimes as Sam
Atwood. His sf novels Sparrowhawk (1990), Greenhouse (1991), Woodsman
(1992), A Tower of the Gods (1993) and Seeds of Destiny (1994) all focus
on an Earth rather mechanically dominated by a biological revolution, with
genimals - genetically engineered animals - replacing cars and indeed
almost anything imaginable; by the fifth volume, the bioengineering
Gypsies have been driven into space by the Engineers, who are
machine-oriented, and a conflict between the two principles - it is one
common to late-century sf - begins to wage throughout the galaxy.
Reversals of this sort are generally effected for purposes of SATIRE, but
it is clear that for TAE the perils and pleasures of the invention have
been sufficient. [JC]

EATON COLLECTION
J. LLOYD EATON COLLECTION.
EBIRAH, HORROR OF THE DEEP
GOJIRA.
EC COMICS
Company founded in 1945 by M.C. Gaines (1896-1947), creator of the format
of the modern COMIC book and original partner in DC COMICS. The initials
stood for both Educational and Entertaining Comics. After Gaines's death
the company passed to his son, William M. Gaines (1922-1992), who revamped
the line to his own taste. Educational Comics was wound down and
Entertaining Comics was transformed into a line of anthology titles that
included two sf comic books - Weird Science and Weird Fantasy - which were
the poorest sellers, but which survived because of his personal support.
Various artists drew the sf stories, which ranged from the cliched and
absurd to the surprisingly good; most were written by editor Albert B.
Feldstein, though some were by Otto Binder ( Eando BINDER). Feldstein also
"borrowed" stories from authors such as Anthony BOUCHER, Ray BRADBURY,
Fredric BROWN, John COLLIER and Richard MATHESON. In 1952 Bradbury noted
the unauthorized adaptations but, enjoying them, simply wrote and
requested payment, which Gaines forwarded. This led to official
adaptations of Bradbury stories.In 1954 increasing concern about juvenile
delinquency and the "harmful influence" of comic books led to the two sf
titles combining as Weird Science-Fantasy. Such minor measures failed to
stem the flow of criticism, and EC abandoned its entire comic-book line in
1955 to concentrate on MAD Magazine.EC influenced various creators,
including the underground comics artists of the 1960s and several writers,
notably Stephen KING, but the main influence was from EC's horror titles,
not their sf titles. A number of collections of EC material have appeared,
including two collections of Bradbury adaptations by Albert B. Feldstein:
The Autumn People (coll 1965), horror, and Tomorrow Midnight (coll 1966),
sf.Russ Cochran's The Complete EC Library reprints the entire run in large
hardcovers, and Gladstone Comics are reissuing most of the titles as
monthly reprints. [ZB/BF]
ECKERT, ALLAN W(ESLEY)
(1931- ) US writer, mainly of works of natural history, for which he has
five times been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His sf novel, The HAB
Theory (1976), is based on the neo-Velikovskian idea of poleshift (
PESUDO-SCIENCE; Immanuel VELIKOVSKY): lay theoreticians realize that the
Earth is about to flip over on its axis with the obvious catastrophic
consequences, but of course the ivory-tower bastions of Orthodox Science
refuse to listen. The HOLOCAUST duly afflicts an underprepared humanity.
The Mesmerian Annals - The Dark Green Tunnel (1984) and The Wand (1986) are juvenile fantasies. [JC/JGr]
ECO, UMBERTO
(1932- ) Italian academic and writer, famed for his work in history,
philosophy, literary criticism and semiotics. While his novels are not
explicitly sf, he shares with much of the best of the genre a central
concern with both the nature of ideas and the moral significance of the

methods by which we determine what is true. Il Nome della Rosa (1980;
trans William Weaver as The Name of the Rose 1983 US/UK) is a medieval
detective story (and a story about detection), an exploration of the
detective's empirical approach to the world and the importance of humour,
set against the fanatical certainties of medieval Christianity. Il Pendolo
di Foucault (1988; trans William Weaver as Foucault's Pendulum 1989 US)
tells the story of a group of Italian intellectuals who, appalled by the
stupidity of the books on mysticism and occult history that they publish
for a living, decide to construct their own conspiracy theory of history,
and discover that the human PERCEPTION of reality is more subtle than they
had anticipated ( FABULATION). UE's fiction is remarkably inventive,
sophisticated and humorous, expressive of a profound love for life over
sterile abstraction. [NT/PhR]Other works: Travels in Hyperreality (coll
trans William Weaver et al 1987 US), journalism and essays.See also:
ITALY.
ECOLOGY
Ecology is the study of organisms in relation to their environment. It is
a relatively new discipline, the first notable work on the subject being
Animal Ecology (1927) by Charles Elton (1900-1990). The complexity of the
environmental relationships which determine the success, or even the
survival, of populations has been realized only within the last
half-century. The same period has seen a dramatic increase in the world's
population and the virtual destruction of the natural environment in many
populous areas, and such issues as the protection of food chains and
increasing the efficiency of ecological systems have become extremely
important.As is to be expected with respect to a scientific discipline no
older than GENRE SF, there are very few early stories with ecological
themes. W.H. HUDSON's fantasies of a mode of human life harmonized with
Nature - particularly A Crystal Age (1887) - can be seen, with hindsight,
as related to the theme, but their inspiration was mystical rather than
scientific. An early story on an ecological theme is J.D. BERESFORD's "The
Man who Hated Flies" (1929), a parable about a perfect insecticide which
precipitates an ecocatastrophe by obliterating the pollinators of many
plant species. Early sf writers were often oblivious to the simplest
matters of ecology in their pictures of LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS, providing
abundant carnivorous species without the herbivore populations required to
sustain them; Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's image of Mars is a cardinal example.
The only early PULP-MAGAZINE writer whose work showed anything more than a
rudimentary consciousness of the subject was Stanley G. WEINBAUM. After
WWII, however, writers began to use a good deal more ingenuity in their
representations of ALIEN ecology, and produced numerous puzzle stories in
which explorers on other worlds have to figure out peculiar relationships
in the local fauna and flora. Examples are William TENN's "The Ionian
Cycle" (1948), several stories by Clifford D. SIMAK - notably "You'll
Never Go Home Again" (1951; vt "Beachhead") and "Drop Dead" (1956) - James
H. SCHMITZ's "Grandpa" (1955), Brian W. ALDISS's PEST (Planetary
Ecological Survey Team) series (1958-62) and a series by Jack SHARKEY
begun with "Arcturus Times Three" (1961). More sophisticated examples are
Richard MCKENNA's "Hunter Come Home" (1963), Neal BARRETT's Highwood
(1972) and John BOYD's The Pollinators of Eden (1969). Jack VANCE's

"Winner Loses All" (1951) is an interesting oddity with no human
characters. Michael G. CONEY has deployed ecological puzzles in a number
of novels, including Syzygy (1973) and Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975; vt
Rex).Inevitably, the COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS has come to be seen more
and more in ecological terms. Ecological planning is necessarily of
central concern in stories dealing with TERRAFORMING. Thus an elementary
strategy of ecological control is the key to the invasion of the land
areas of VENUS in Fury (1950; vt Destination Infinity) by Henry KUTTNER,
and in many novels about the colonization of MARS - e.g., Kim Stanley
ROBINSON's RED MARS (1992 UK). The great majority of ecological-problem
stories involving colonization derive their problems through slight
distortion of ecological systems on Earth, or through simple analogy.
Relatively few authors have been willing to take on the job of attempting
to construct an alien ecology in some detail, although Johannes KEPLER
made some interesting observations about the ways in which life might
adapt to a lunar habitat in his Somnium (1634). Notable modern examples
include numerous stories by Hal CLEMENT, including Cycle of Fire (1957)
and Close to Critical (1958; 1964), Brian W. Aldiss's The Long Afternoon
of Earth (fixup 1962 US; exp vt Hothouse UK), Poul ANDERSON's Fire Time
(1974), Alan Dean FOSTER's Midworld (1975), Gordon R. DICKSON's Masters of
Everon (1979), Aldiss's Helliconia trilogy (1982-5), Donald KINGSBURY's
COURTSHIP RITE (1982), Larry NIVEN's The Integral Trees (1983) and its
sequel The Smoke Ring (1987), Paul J. MCAULEY's FOUR HUNDRED BILLION STARS
(1988) and Sheri S. TEPPER's Grass (1989).The precariousness of the human
ecological situation has gradually but inevitably become one of the major
themes of sf. The possibility of a worldwide DISASTER caused by
soil-exhaustion is explored in A.G. Street's Already Walks Tomorrow (1938)
and Edward S. HYAMS's The Astrologer (1950), both of which 2point out that
ecological planning will be made difficult by the tendency of politicians
to think about only the short term. Significant cautionary tales about
ecological catastrophes include Ward MOORE's Greener than You Think
(1947), in which a species of grass out-competes all other plant life, and
John CHRISTOPHER's The Death of Grass (1956; vt No Blade of Grass), in
which a blight affecting grass species destroys most of the world's crops.
Early magazine sf stories which focus on mankind's future ecological
problems include Damon KNIGHT's "Natural State" (1954; vt Masters of
Evolution 1959) and C.M. KORNBLUTH's "Shark Ship" (1958).Ecocatastrophe
stories picked up considerable impetus in the 1960s from a number of
nonfictional warnings that things could only get worse as a result of
OVERPOPULATION and POLLUTION. The alarmist Paul Ehrlich (1932- ), author
of The Population Bomb (1968), used a quasidocumentary fictional framework
for a brief summary of his predictions in "Ecocatastrophe" (1969). The
greenhouse effect was later added to the list, followed by the decay of
the ozone layer, leading to such extreme ecocatastrophe stories as
Ecodeath (1972) by William Jon WATKINS and E.V. (Gene) SNYDER, The
Nitrogen Fix (1980) by Hal Clement and Nature's End (1986) by Whitley
STRIEBER and James Kunetka, and such all-inclusive ones as David BRIN's
Earth (1990). Many ecocatastrophe stories are notable for their bitter
irony - most sf writers who use the theme seem to feel that we will get no
more than we deserve if we destroy our environment and poison ourselves but even writers who are neither angry nor despairing tend to accept that

an ongoing ecological crisis will be one of the most obvious features of
the NEAR FUTURE.Intensification of ecological awareness helped to lend a
new subtlety and sophistication to the disaster story, which spawned a new
subspecies dealing with the delicate aesthetics of corrosive changes in
mankind's physiological and psychological relationship with the
environment. Gerald HEARD's "The Great Fog" (1944) is an early example;
others are The Year of the Cloud (1970) by Theodore L. THOMAS and Kate
WILHELM, George Alec EFFINGER's "And Us, Too, I Guess" (1973) and George
TURNER's The Sea and Summer (1987; vt Drowning Towers). The most detailed
exploration of such possibilities has been carried out by J.G. BALLARD in
such novels as The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962), The
Burning World (1964; vt The Drought) and THE CRYSTAL WORLD (1966).Stories
concerned with the ecology of alien worlds have recently tended to take on
a strong element of mysticism. In the real world the word "ecology" has
acquired quasicharismatic status, encouraged by vulgarizations of the
"Gaia hypothesis" enunciated by James Lovelock (1919- ); this points out
that the ecosphere has certain built-in homeostatic mechanisms and that
evolving earthly life created the atmospheric environment in which it now
exists. For many people "ecology" has come to symbolize a lost sense of
harmony with the world at large, and various commune movements have tried
to make ecological awareness an antidote to alienation. The word
"symbiosis" ( PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS) is often invoked in this context.
In sf, ecological mysticism is very obvious in such parables as Robert F.
YOUNG's The Last Yggdrasil (1959 as "To Fell a Tree"; exp 1982), such
evocations of the Eden myth as Mark CLIFTON's Eight Keys to Eden (1960)
and such curious biological allegories as Jacqueline LICHTENBERG's Dushau
(1985) and its sequels. It is central to the mystical ritualization of
water relations featured in Robert A. HEINLEIN's STRANGER IN A STRANGE
LAND (1961) and Frank HERBERT's DUNE (1965). In Piers ANTHONY's Omnivore
(1968) ecological relationships themselves are transformed into a mystical
pattern. This mysticism is evident also in many stories set on Earth,
including Frank Herbert's The Green Brain (1966), Hilbert SCHENCK's At the
Eye of the Ocean (1980), Norman SPINRAD's Songs from the Stars (1980),
Somtow Sucharitkul's ( S.P. SOMTOW) Starship and Haiku (1984) and Scott
Russell SANDERS's Terrarium (1985).Two anthologies featuring
ecocatastrophe stories are Saving Worlds (anth 1973; vt The Wounded
Planet) ed Roger ELWOOD and Virginia KIDD, and The Ruins of Earth (anth
1971) ed Thomas M. DISCH. [BS]
ECONOMICS
The word "economics" derives from a Greek word signifying the art of
household management. Its modern usage has been extended by analogy to
pertain to the management of the industry and finances of nations.
Medieval economic "theory" was dominated by ethical considerations, and
evaluative judgments still remain entangled with the science; economics
thus has the capacity to arouse powerful passions in spite of its frequent
designation as "the dismal science". This is very evident in fiction
dealing with economic systems. Thomas MORE's Utopia (1516; trans 1551) is
largely a treatise on economic matters, and much subsequent UTOPIAN
literature has been concerned with economic theory's relationships with
political power and social justice.The idea that economics should attempt

to shed its ethical entanglements and be reformulated in terms of "natural
laws" was popularized by "The Grumbling Hive", the poem which formed the
headpiece of The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits
(1714) by Bernard de Mandeville (1670-1733). The poem and the tract
advanced the thesis that, if the market were allowed to find its own
equilibrium while individuals attempted to maximize their profits in open
competition (no matter how greedily), the community as a whole would
benefit. This notion was later taken up by Adam Smith (1723-1790) in The
Wealth of Nations (1776). In the 19th century the rise of various
socialist movements, latterly armed with their own Marxist theory of
economics, brought a good deal of ideological conflict into economic
thought at both academic and popular levels. This conflict is very evident
in a great deal of 19th-century utopian fiction. Voyage en Icarie (1840)
by Etienne Cabet (1788-1856) and The Happy Colony (1856) by Robert
Pemberton were among the earliest socialist utopias, although their
arguments are moral rather than scientific. Theodore HERTZKA's Freiland
(1890; trans 1891) and its sequel were among several novels exploring the
pros and cons of a mixed economy, but there are relatively few
19th-century laissez-faire utopias. By the end of the century the argument
was becoming confused by the interest which utopian novelists were taking
in AUTOMATION and TECHNOLOGY, but economic egalitarianism remained a
central issue in such technological utopias as Edward BELLAMY's Looking
Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) and the many ideological replies produced in
its wake. Like many other US socialists, Bellamy took more inspiration
from Henry George (1839-1897) - author of Progress and Poverty (1879) than from Marx. (George's influence is also very strong in the works of M.
P. SHIEL, and his ideas can still be found echoing in the writings of
Barrington J. BAYLEY.) Despite Marx's 20th-century status as a figurehead
there are surprisingly few outrightly Marxian utopias; the best example is
Sur la pierre blanche (1905; trans as The White Stone1910) by Anatole
FRANCE.Relatively few 20th-century utopias give more priority to economic
considerations than to political or technological issues; notable
exceptions are Robert ARDREY's World's Beginning (1944) and Henry
HAZLITT's The Great Idea (1951; vt Time Will Run Back). The longest and
most extravagant economic tract cast as fiction this century is Ayn RAND's
Atlas Shrugged (1957), a pioneering work of Libertarian apologetics in
which the world's capitalists go on strike in protest against the forces
of creeping socialism ( LIBERTARIANISM). Marxist economic theory is more
prominently featured in DYSTOPIAS like Jack LONDON's The Iron Heel (1907)
and in SATIRES like Upton SINCLAIR's The Millennium (1924). Sharper and
more flamboyant economic satire can be found in Archibald MARSHALL's
Upsidonia (1915), about a world where the profit motive operates in
reverse, and in Leon STOVER's The Shaving of Karl Marx (1982), which slyly
suggests that the policies which Lenin instituted after the Russian
Revolution have far more in common with the ideas of H.G. WELLS than with
those of Marx.The early PULP-MAGAZINE sf writers were not much concerned
with economics, tending to take the historical continuity of the American
Dream for granted, although Fred MACISAAC's "World Brigands" (1928) is an
interesting story from the nonspecialist pulps in which the burden of WAR
debt leads to a war between the USA and its former allies. When John W.
CAMPBELL Jr took over ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, economic issues were

returned to the sf agenda. They were taken up by Robert A. HEINLEIN, whose
"The Roads Must Roll" (1940) is about a strike called by "Functionalists"
- proponents of the theory that the greatest economic rewards should go to
the people with the most vital jobs. Heinlein's "Let There be Light . . ."
(1940 as by Lyle Monroe) includes cynical asides about the suppression of
innovations by power groups who have a heavy investment in existing
technologies - a notion whose variants include items of modern folklore as
well as the themes of stories; "Logic of Empire" (1941) has some similarly
cynical comments on the economics of slavery; and "The Man who Sold the
Moon" (1950) concerns the struggle to finance the first Moon voyage.
Heinlein's economic theorizing was comprehensively updated in THE MOON IS
A HARSH MISTRESS (1966), which helped to popularize the acronym tanstaafl
("there ain't no such thing as a free lunch"); his uncompromising
Libertarianism - which has echoes of SOCIAL DARWINISM - set an important
example within the genre, instituting a tradition vigorously carried
forward by Poul ANDERSON, Jerry POURNELLE, G.C. EDMONDSON and L. Neil
SMITH, among others, and led to the founding of the Prometheus AWARD.Other
pulp stories in which the emphasis on economic considerations is central
include "The Iron Standard" (1943) by Lewis Padgett (Henry KUTTNER and
C.L. MOORE), in which Earthmen force reluctant aliens to help them by
disrupting their economy and threatening the power structure of a static
society, and "The Helping Hand" (1950) by Poul Anderson, a neat parable
about the economics of "foreign aid". Economic issues are also to the fore
in Anderson's series about interstellar trader Nicholas van Rijn and his
associates, notably "Margin of Profit" (1956) and the novelettes collected
as Trader to the Stars (coll 1964). Oddly enough, the other writer of the
1950s strongly associated with Campbell who showed a very strong interest
in economics was Mack REYNOLDS, whose parents were devout socialists and
whose ideas were strongly influenced by the three-times socialist
candidate for the US Presidency Eugene Debs (1855-1926). Reynolds's
efforts range from the wry "Subversive" (1962), the satirical Tomorrow
Might Be Different (1960 as "Russkies, Go Home!"; exp 1975) and the
melodramatic "Ultima Thule" (1961; in fixup Planetary Agent X 1965) to the
fascinating thought-experiment described in The Rival Rigelians (1961 as
"Adaptation"; exp 1967), in which visiting Earthmen divide an alien
world's nations in order to compare the power of free enterprise and
Marxist planning as forces of social evolution. Reynolds went on to write
a series of utopian novels cast in a Bellamyesque mould, beginning with
Looking Backward, from the Year 2000 (1973) and Equality in the Year 2000
(1977).A rather different approach to economic issues was manifest in the
magazine GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION, where the emphasis was on satirical
irony. The author who best embodied the outlook of the magazine - and who
eventually became its editor-was Frederik POHL, whose economic fantasies
stand in sharp contrast to those of Heinlein, Anderson and Reynolds. In
his collaboration with C.M. KORNBLUTH, THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1953), the
economy of the USA has been driven to extremes of conspicuous consumption
in order to maintain economic growth, and the advertising industry has
become the linchpin of government. In "The Midas Plague" (1954) the
situation is further exaggerated, every citizen having a burdensome
consumption quota as the nation strives to cope with the abundance of
machine-produced goods. In "The Tunnel under the World" (1955) an

artificial world exists only to test advertising pitches. In another
collaboration with Kornbluth, Gladiator-at-Law (1955), the stock market is
supreme, manipulated by corporations run by reclusive super-geriatrics. A
further notable Gal satire is "Cost of Living" (1952) by Robert SHECKLEY,
in which the middle class can maintain its standard of living only by
mortgaging the future income of its children. Satirical economic fantasies
are seen also in the work of Damon KNIGHT, whose HELL'S PAVEMENT (fixup
1955; vt Analogue Men) features consumption quotas in a future USA ruled
by commercial interests, and whose The People Maker (1957 as "A for
Anything"; exp 1959; rev vt A for Anything 1961 UK) explores the
socio-economic consequences of the invention of a matter-duplicator. The
latter makes an interesting contrast with two other stories on the same
theme: George O. SMITH's "Pandora's Millions" (1945), in which
civilization collapses as a result, and Ralph Williams' "Business As
Usual, During Alterations" (1958), in which it doesn't. The manipulation
of consumers in pursuit of economic stability is investigated also in more
impressionistic stories, including Rosel George BROWN's "Signs of the
Times" (1959) and J.G. BALLARD's "The Subliminal Man" (1963).Although the
satirical tradition has been carried forward by such novels as Pohl's solo
sequel to THE SPACE MERCHANTS, The Merchants' War (1984), the dominant
species of economic speculation in contemporary US sf is Libertarian
polemic, as seen in such novels as G.C. Edmondson's The Man who Corrupted
Earth (1980) and Ben BOVA's Privateers (1985), both of which imagine
entrepreneurs boldly taking charge of the conquest of space after
pusillanimous US governments have given up on it. The vulnerability of the
modern world to economic catastrophe is a minor theme in several sf
novels, including The Visitors (1980) by Clifford D. SIMAK, in which
generous aliens do the damage, and Wolf and Iron (1990) by Gordon R.
DICKSON, in which we have done it to ourselves. Stories of ecocatastrophe
( ECOLOGY) often include commentaries on the economic problems associated
with OVERPOPULATION and "underdevelopment"; The Sea and Summer (1987 vt
Drowning Towers) by George TURNER is a notable example. The evolving
economic problems of the Third World have also been brought into sharp
focus by Bruce STERLING in "Green Days in Brunei" (1985) and Islands in
the Net (1988). Now that communism seems on the wane, Libertarian polemics
will presumably become less strident and alarmist, and the problems
involved in the economic rescue of formerly communist nations may begin to
attract as much attention from those writers seriously interested in the
NEAR FUTURE as the problems of Third World poverty.A relevant anthology is
Tomorrow, Inc.: SF Stories about Big Business (anth 1976) ed Martin Harry
GREENBERG and Joseph D. OLANDER. [BS]See also: MONEY; POLITICS; SOCIOLOGY.
ECUADOR
LATIN AMERICA.
EDDISON, E(RIC) R(UCKER)
(1882-1945) UK civil servant, writer and scholar of Old Norse. His first
work of fiction and most considerable single work, The Worm Ouroboros
(1922), is an erudite HEROIC FANTASY written in archaic English; the
initial protagonist, Lessingham, is transported from Earth to a fantasy
MERCURY, where it will be his function to observe mighty conflicts,

heraldic battles and quests, and magical turns of plot, all destined to
recur forever, as the title implies. The Zimiamvian trilogy, whose
internal chronology reverses that of publication, is made up of The
Mezentian Gate (1958), posthumously assembled, A Fish Dinner in Memison
(1941 US) and Mistress of Mistresses: A Vision of Zimiamvia (1935). Beyond
the presence of Lessingham, who has become (like all the cast) an avatar
of the divine, the sequence's main connection with The Worm Ouroboros is
that it is set in the (Platonic) heaven of the earlier novel. The tales
are discursive, metaphysical, learned, linguistically adventurous and
engrossing. ERE's influence on the sf genre, as with writers like Lord
DUNSANY and J.R.R. TOLKIEN, lies mainly in the powerful example of his
language and the sustained "otherness" of his creation. [JC]Other works:
Styrbiorn the Strong (1926); Egil's Saga: Done into English Out of the
Icelandic with an Introduction, Notes, and an Essay on Some Principles of
Translation (trans 1930).About the author: "Superman in a Bowler: E.R.
Eddison" in Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy
(1976) by L. Sprague DE CAMP; "The Zimiamvian Trilogy" by Brian Attebery
in Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature (anth 1983) ed Frank Magill.See
also: FANTASY; PLANETARY ROMANCE; SWORD AND SORCERY.
EDISONADE
Daedalus was the first inventor hero, but he was also a bureaucrat; and
when he built the labyrinth he did so as a wage-slave or sharecropper, on
hire to the king. For that reason this entry, which is about a US dream of
freelance heroism, cannot be spent defining the "daedalusade". As used
here the term "edisonade"-derived from Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) in
the same way that " ROBINSONADE" is derived from Robinson Crusoe - can be
understood to describe any story which features a young US male inventor
hero who uses his ingenuity to extricate himself from tight spots and who,
by so doing, saves himself from defeat and corruption and his friends and
nation from foreign oppressors. The invention by which he typically
accomplishes this feat is not, however, simply a WEAPON, though it will
almost certainly prove to be invincible against the foe and may also make
the hero's fortune; it is also a means of TRANSPORTATION - for the
edisonade is not only about saving the country (or planet) through
personal spunk and native wit, it is also about lighting out for the
Territory. Once the hero reaches that virgin Territory, he will find yet a
further use for his invention: it will serve as a certificate of
ownership. Magically, the barefoot boy with cheek of tan will discover
that he has been made CEO of a compliant world; for a single, revelatory
maxim can be discerned fueling the motor heart of the edisonade: the
conviction that to tinker with is to own.Daedalus could never, therefore,
have starred in an edisonade. Could Thomas Alva Edison himself have done
so? Why should we head this entry with his name, rather than that of
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), who inspired Weldon COBB's To Mars with Tesla
(1901), or Hiram Maxim (1840-1916), who inspired George GRIFFITH's The
Outlaws of the Air (1895)? It certainly might be claimed that Edison was
no more inventive than either of these figures; and he certainly worked
for hire. Edison's life and career, when examined, hardly add up to an
appropriate model for E.E. "Doc" SMITH's Richard Seaton, the inventor-hero
of the Skylark series, who seems almost definitively to embody the dream

we are attempting to describe. In his early years, true enough, Edison was
a practical professional, a tinkerer of genius, and the inventor (or
inspired improver) of a wide range of implements, most of them electrical,
from the phonograph to the lightbulb. But, beginning in the 1880s, he
transformed himself into an advertiser of genius whose main subject was
himself, and from this point the mythopoeic power of the Edison name
outstripped that of his rivals, no mean publicists themselves. For nearly
half a century, the senatorial Sage of Menlo Park waxed ever greater in
the public imagination, writing articles, making speeches, chairing
commissions, granting oracular interviews whose subject was, very
frequently, weapons he claimed to be about to unveil which would make the
USA utterly invincible and war impossible. From 1890 he claimed more than
once - or those whom he may have hired to ghost some of his articles
claimed - that he had invented devices of war which did not, in fact,
exist outside his imagination, or which had been created by others
(perhaps his employees). It may be of interest to note that the language
in which these claims were made bore a strong resemblance to the urgent
telegraphese Mark TWAIN fell into whenever he was expounding a technical
notion; much of A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889) is so
couched, and the resemblance between the Boss protagonist of that novel
and the self-image of Edison expressed in his writings is most striking.
In his later years Edison was, in short, something of a fraud; he may have
served as a model when L. Frank BAUM was creating the Wizard of Oz. But
this, one might argue, could be precisely the point. It might be relevant
to note that not only are edisonades dreams which come true for the
protagonist but they also embody the shaping fantasies of that
protagonist, who is not in the end as innocent as he seems. Like Edison
himself, the hero of the edisonade is at some level, conscious or
unconscious, an impostor or confidence-man.The first proto-edisonade was
probably the first dime novel ( DIME-NOVEL SF) to feature a boy inventor,
Edward S. ELLIS's The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), and the first
edisonade proper was the Tom Edison, Jr. sequence of dime novels (1891-2)
by Philip READE. Young orphan Tom (ostensibly unrelated to Thomas Alva)
responds to the challenge of his enemies by inventing a succession of ever
more impressive devices, most of which double as weapons and forms of
self-propelling transport. In these and other similar tales, the presence
of the US frontier as a barrier to be penetrated is nearly always evident,
though sometimes only subliminally; and the topological similarity between
penetrating a frontier and penetrating knowledge through CONCEPTUAL
BREAKTHROUGH is nowhere more clearly expressed than in the boys'
edisonades written at a time when the USA's literal frontiers were only
just snapping shut.Oddly enough, however, the first adult novel to make
use of Edison was not by a US author at all. VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM's
L'Eve future (1886; trans as The Eve of the Future 1981 US; new trans as
Tomorrow's Eve 1982 US) introduces a character, Thomas Alva Edison, who
rescues a handsome young lord from despair at his fiancee's crassness by
providing an impeccable ANDROID duplicate. It may be that Edison the
"electrician" was given so significant a role in this tale because
electricity itself had an almost occult significance for late-19th-century
romantics like Villiers, who in a sense created a decadent version of the
edisonade before any adult edisonades had in fact been written. The first

adult US example did not, in fact, appear for over a decade. It was not
until the newspaper publication of Garrett P. SERVISS's Edison's Conquest
of Mars (1898 The New York Journal; 1947), a tale of quite extraordinary
thematic clarity, that the native edisonade took on its mature shape - in
complete ignorance of Villiers' oblique use of the fabulous inventor.
Written as a direct - and consciously US - response to the defeatist
implications of H.G. WELLS's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898), the tale
depicts Edison himself inventing weapons of great power in an unfettered
and spunky response to the continuing threat from the external enemies.
Armed with a disintegrating weapon and ANTIGRAVITY, and accompanied by
most of the world's best SCIENTISTS, Thomas Alva heads to Mars, where he
commits triumphant genocide before granting the survivors colonial status.
It should be noted that Edison's inventions and his conquest of Mars are
both consequences of the actions of others: he and the USA he represents
are innocents; they are forced to respond to a wicked world with the
Trickster effrontery of their native genius; and afterwards they are
forced to become owners of what their genius has conquered.Between Serviss
and E.E. Smith, many edisonades repeated the basic story in plots which
often represented a US version of the European future- WAR novel. Three
can stand as examples. In J.S. BARNEY's L.P.M.: The End of the Great War
(1915) a US scientist called Edestone invents enough weapons to defeat the
corrupt and aggressive nations of Europe, and to establish a world
government; in J.U. GIESY's All for His Country (1915) a young US
inventor's gravity-defying airplane is sufficient to defeat Japanese
aggressors; and in Cleveland Langston MOFFETT's The Conquest of America
(1916) Edison himself reappears as a repository of anti-socialist US
virtue and the creator of an invention sufficient to see off the
aggressive Germans. In all cases, the aggression is from without; the
weapons are invented by a free spirit who is not on hire to a corrupt
government; and in the end the world is passed into the ownership of
innocent Americans who had wished only to be left alone to enjoy their
virgin paradise.This basic story has been an essential shaper of US
realpolitik for more than a century, and its manifestations are far
broader than those encompassed by the relatively simple edisonade, whose
precarious concentration on a tangibly implausible model hero seemed to
guarantee its early death as a literary form, though the most famous
juvenile edisonade sequence of al - the Tom Swift stories, extending
through four series from 1910 into the 1990s - demonstrates how
long-lasting and evocative the model has been. But the 43 Doctor Hackensaw
stories (1921-5) by Clement FEZANDIE, though amusingly varied in their
presentation of the Doctor's scientific feats, seemed more an epilogue
than a way forward. As a form suitable for adult reading, the seemingly
moribund edisonade was saved by SPACE OPERA. E.E. Smith's Skylark sequence
gave Edison the Galaxy as playground and estate, provided an infinity of
frontiers to penetrate, territories to stumble into and to claim, and
entrepreneurial empires to build in all innocence. The Smithian edisonade
remains central to entertainment space opera to this day.It might seem,
however, that GENRE SF as a whole outgrew the edisonade by about 1940,
when John W. CAMPBELL Jr's GOLDEN AGE OF SF was at its height, and for a
few years at least it looked as though hillbilly Tricksters with the Touch
had become comic turns whose proper place was in the less serious pages of

Unknown and in the light-fingered grasp of such writers as L. Sprague DE
CAMP. But a glance at the central male role model promulgated by the core
authors of the Golden Age might disabuse readers of this assumption, for
the Competent Man is Thomas Alva Edison in sheep's clothing, disguised
mainly by his genuine proficiency (because writers like Robert A. HEINLEIN
were the first sf authors able actually to convey the feel and describe
the process of Higher Tinkering) and by his ability to explain himself.
But, in being able to explain himself, the Competent Man of the 1940s, as
created by Heinlein and his followers, soon began to advocate his line of
thought; as soon as this happened, innocence fled.For, the moment the
frank lad of the primitive edisonade begins to have to justify himself,
Huck Finn the Trickster becomes a flim-flam man or, even worse, a prophet.
L. Ron HUBBARD's Church of Scientology is in truth the Church of Edison.
The overbearing protagonist of Heinlein's later novels is in truth the
Sage of Menlo Park after one too many interviews. Only the unexamined
edisonade is worth reading. Once looked at with an eye to the main chance,
it turns sour, self-serving and entrepreneurial, and we find ourselves in
the land of some HARD-SF writers of the 1980s, whose protagonists are
never poor, and never lose, and never give; nor would it perhaps be
stretching the term too far to find in the ruthless protagonists of much
SURVIVALIST FICTION ghostly and solipsistic echoes of the edisonades of a
more innocent time - when the hero did not have to understand the
consequences of his triumphs. Much worse than a Thomas Alva Edison who
doesn't know the score is a Thomas Alva Edison who does. [JC]Further
reading: War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (1988) by
H. Bruce FRANKLIN.
EDMONDS, HARRY (MORETON SOUTHEY)
(1891-1989) UK writer of several adventure novels and of some NEAR-FUTURE
sf novels, beginning with The North Sea Mystery (1930), which features
land-launched torpedoes which threaten to sink the entire Royal Navy. In
The Riddle of the Straits (1931), a WAR story set in 1935, the UK and
Japan find themselves pitted against the USSR and the USA; a Channel
Tunnel saves the UK from embargo. In Red Invader (1933), Russia and
Germany are once again involved, this time in intrigues against the UK. In
The Professor's Last Experiment (1935; rev vt The Secret Voyage 1946) a
vast war is halted when the protagonist broadcasts a "radiation" wave
which stops all the engines of conflict. After WWII, HE continued in the
same vein with The Clockmaker of Heidelberg (1949), featuring a new form
of submarine propulsion, as well as a neo-Nazi germ-warfare plot centred
in Brazil. A sequel, The Rockets (Operation Manhattan) (1951), hints at
the violent end of all civilization. [JC]Other works: Wind in the East
(1933); The Death Ship, or The Tragedy of the "Valmiera" as Related by
Chief Officer James Stanley (1933).
EDMONDS, PAUL
[s] Henry KUTTNER.
EDMONDSON, G.C.
Working name of Mexican-born US writer and translator Jose Mario Garry
Ordonez Edmondson y Cotton (1922- ) for all his writing except his
Westerns, which are as by Kelly P. Gast, J.B. Masterson and Jake Logan. He

published his first sf, "Blessed are the Meek", in ASF in 1955, and was
active in the magazines for the next decade, particularly in FSF, where
his Mad Friend stories appeared. Assembled as Stranger than You Think
(coll of linked stories 1965 chap dos), they describe the effects their
narrator's mad friend manages to elicit from the world about him, and his
explanations thereof. GCE's first novel, The Ship that Sailed the Time
Stream (1965 dos; rev 1978) and its sequel, To Sail the Century Sea
(1981), are amusingly and graphically told FANTASTIC-VOYAGE tales
involving a US ship and its inadvertent TIME TRAVELS. They remain his most
successful books.Chapayeca (1971; vt Blue Face 1972), set in Mexico, and
T.H.E.M. (1974), are both fluently written but less exhilarating to read.
More impressively, The Aluminum Man (1975) confronts some Native Americans
- depicted with great sympathy, as always in GCE's work - with a
crash-landed ALIEN looking for fuel. The Man who Corrupted Earth (1980)
fails to carry over the complex cynicism of Mark TWAIN's "The Man that
Corrupted Hadleyburg" but is in its own right an amusing presentation of
the notion that free enterprise can conquer space when governments falter
at the task ( ECONOMICS; LIBERTARIANISM). After writing a paranoid
singleton, The Takeover (1984) with C.M. Kotlan, in which Russians briefly
conquer the USA through nuclear blackmail, GCE produced, also with Kotlan,
a complex sf sequence - The Cunningham Equations (1986), The Black
Magician (1986) and Maximum Effort (1987). The entangled thriller
conventions dominant in this trilogy feverishly pit genetic
transformations of the human species against the dubious intercession of
AIs in the long process of growth, amid constant references to Yaqui
Indian culture. The mix is perhaps too rich for coherence. In the end, it
is his constant engagement with the region and the people of his early
years that lifts GCE's work above routine entertainment. [JC]Other works:
#12 in the Spaceways sequence: Star Slaver (1982) as John CLEVE (with
Andrew J. OFFUTT).See also: POLITICS; SPACE FLIGHT.
EDMONDSON, WALLACE
[s] Harlan ELLISON.
EDUCATION
SF IN THE CLASSROOM.
EDUCATION, LACK OF
The Futurians, a group of writers who grew up during the Depression, were
mostly poor and few of them went to college. In fact, many SF writers have
been self-educated.Frederik Pohl, who never attended college, enjoyed a
career as both an editor and an authority on numerous subjects. In fact,
he wrote the entry on the Roman Emperor Tiberius for the Encyclopedia
Britannica.Jack Dann, as a young writer n the 1970s, appeared more
impressive as an SF writer than as a potential student. He was turned down
for Cornell's summer school program but ended up teaching there
instead.Most publishing companies don't hire non-college graduates for
their editorial positions. But Tor Books, one of SF's biggest publishers,
has as one of its Senior Editors Patrick Nielsen Hayden, a high-school
dropout.
EDWARDS, DAVID

(?1945 - ) US writer whose Next Stop - Mars! (1960) sends another first
space flight to that planet; the stories assembled in Dreams, Tales, ?
Lullabies: Stories from my Grandfather's House (coll 1985) are
unremarkable. [JC]
EDWARDS, F.E.
[s] William F. NOLAN.
EDWARDS, GAWAIN
Edward PENDRAY.
EDWARDS, MALCOLM (JOHN)
(1949- ) UK editor and critic, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated
in anthropology. Long active in UK sf FANDOM, he edited the BRITISH
SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION journal VECTOR 1972-4, worked as sf editor for
GOLLANCZ 1976-7, and was administrator of the SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION
1978-80 and editor of its journal FOUNDATION: THE REVIEW OF SCIENCE
FICTION #13-#19; he was a contributing editor to the first (1979) edition
of this encyclopedia. He was one of the two principal members of the board
which founded and for some time edited INTERZONE; though he became less
active after the fourth issue, he remains an Advisory Editor.
Constellations (anth 1980) assembled juvenile sf; Gollancz/Sunday Times SF
Competition Stories (anth 1985), which he edited anonymously, assembled
the best material from that competition. In the early 1980s he returned to
Gollancz, whose sf list he improved and where he rose rapidly in
influence, becoming Publishing Director. He left Gollancz in 1989 to join
Grafton Books, a division of HarperCollins, of which he remains Publishing
Director, Trade Fiction, responsible among other things for the sf/fantasy
list. MJE was President of WORLD SF in 1990-1991.In the late 1970s MJE
began work, always in collaboration, on the text of a series of books mostly picture-books - about sf and fantasy. With Robert P. HOLDSTOCK he
produced a series of sf and fantasy coffee-table books with fairly brief
texts: Alien Landscapes (1979), Tour of the Universe: The Journey of a
Lifetime - The Recorded Diaries of Leio Scott and Caroline Luranski
(1980), Magician: The Lost Journals of the Magus Geoffrey Carlyle (1982),
Realms of Fantasy (1983) and Lost Realms (1985). None of these could be
taken very seriously, though the first has interesting artwork. Another
collaborative illustrated book was Spacecraft in Fact and Fiction (1979)
with Harry HARRISON. MJE's most interesting book, a collaboration with
Maxim JAKUBOWSKI and this time not a picture-book, is The Complete Book of
Science Fiction and Fantasy Lists (1983; rev vt The SF Book of Lists 1983
US), compiled for the trivia buff and often very funny, but also
containing - if the reader can cope with the absence of an index - a great
deal of solid information about sf not easily found elsewhere. [PN]See
also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; INTERZONE.
EDWARDS, NORMAN
Collaborative pseudonym of Terry CARR and Ted WHITE, used on one minor
novel, Invasion from 2500 (1964). [JC]
EDWARDS, PETER
(1946- ) UK writer and civil servant whose sf novel, Terminus (1976),
rather ponderously sets in motion a political conflict in a 22nd-century,

post- HOLOCAUST Eurafrica which a sado-masochist secret society is
attempting to dominate. The hero's discovery of an ancient city on MARS
confuses all issues. [JC]
EFFINGER, GEORGE ALEC
(1947- ) US writer long resident in New Orleans. He entered sf writing
via the 1970 CLARION SCIENCE FICTION WRITER'S WORKSHOP, having 3 stories
in the workshop's first anthology, Clarion (anth 1971), ed Robin Scott
WILSON. His first published story was "The Eight-Thirty to Nine Slot" for
Fantastic in 1971. Some early work was written as by John K. Diomede or
Susan Doenim. Within a very short time GAE established himself as a writer
of stylish, surrealistic sf stories, becoming a regular contributor to
such series anthologies as ORBIT, NEW DIMENSIONS and UNIVERSE as well as
the major magazines; and, despite a steady production of novels, he was
for at least a decade most admired for this work, much of which was
assembled in Mixed Feelings (coll 1974), Irrational Numbers (coll 1976),
Dirty Tricks (coll 1978), Idle Pleasures (coll 1983) and The Old Funny
Stuff (coll 1989); "Schrodinger's Kitten" (1988), not yet collected, won
both HUGO and NEBULA for Best Novelette.At the same time, What Entropy
Means to Me (1972), GAE's first novel, did gain praise from Theodore
STURGEON and Robert SILVERBERG among others, and was nominated for a
Nebula. It is an elaborate, multi-layered work, combining elements of
SPACE OPERA, family romance and quest fable within a self-referential
discourse about the impulsions and restraints of creation. Relatives
(fixup 1973), less well received, fails to unify its disparate parts,
which tell of one man in three PARALLEL WORLDS. Nightmare Blue (1975) with
Gardner DOZOIS and Those Gentle Voices: A Promethean Romance of the
Spaceways (1976) were dithering attempts to disguise a lack of creative
impetus through demonstrations of professional skill. For some time, it
seemed that he would always remain a better short-story writer than
novelist, the knowledgeable, witty master of a sly tone and unlikely
subject matter, with a particular interest in various kinds of games (
GAMES AND SPORTS), but failing to fulfil his promise. His very
considerable capacity to dazzle - and an adroit use of parallel-world
conventions, with characters dodging into changed identities with
frivolous inevitability - led undoubtedly to a body of work unduly packed
with exercises."Many of my stories interlock," he once said, "and some day
I will figure out a kind of chronology and key to the business." Perhaps
fortunately, he has never published anything of the sort, and the wise
absurdities ( FABULATION) of his best work have never been tampered with.
After two moderately successful novels - Death in Florence (1978; vt
Utopia 3 1980) and Heroics (1979) - he began the 1980s with the darkly
DYSTOPIAN The Wolves of Memory (1981), whose surreal mise-en-scene
effortlessly draws the book's brooding hero into the depths. In the
self-referential dance of motif and character of The Nick of Time (1985)
and its sequel, The Bird of Time (1986), he at last successfully
manifested at novel length his long-felt need to present TIME TRAVEL as a
form of play. Appalling ill health and other disasters severely afflicted
him during these years, but When Gravity Fails (1987), A Fire in the Sun
(1989) and The Exile Kiss (1991), the first three books of the Marid
Audran sequence, are perhaps his most successful books to date. In these

novels, the technological and electronic complexities of the 21st-century
Middle East are fully as dazzling as the dervish of alternating realities
so dominant in GAE's previous work. In attempting to flourish in this
CYBERPUNK hive, the protagonist of the series becomes an
Everyman-survivor, an example for those of GAE's readers who expect
someday to live there. A career that seemed underachieving has become one
of major interest. [JC/DP]Other works: Novelizations of scripts from the
tv series PLANET OF THE APES: Man the Fugitive * (1974), Escape to
Tomorrow * (1975), Journey into Terror * (1975) and Lord of the Apes *
(1976); Felicia (1976) and Shadow Money (1988), both non-genre; Look Away
(1990 chap); The Zork Chronicles * (1990), humorous novelization of a
fantasy game; The Red Tape War: A Round-Robin Science Fiction Novel (1991)
with Jack L. CHALKER and Michael D. RESNICK; Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian
Swordsperson: The Complete Stories (coll 1993).See also: DISASTER;
ECOLOGY; ENTROPY; GAME-WORLDS; OMNI; PHYSICS; THEODORE STURGEON
MEMORIAL
AWARD.
EFREMOV, IVAN ANTONOVICH
[r] Ivan Antonovich YEFREMOV.
EGAN, DORIS
(? - ) US writer in whose Ivory sequence - comprising TheGate of Ivory
(1989), Two-BitHeroes (1992) and Guilt-Edged Ivory(1992) - various
quasi-independent stories,some of them fantasy, take placein the PLANETARY
ROMANCE setting provided by the planet Ivory. [JC]
EGAN, GREG
(1961- ) Australian writer who began publishing work of genre interest
with his first novel, An Unusual Angle (1983), a fantasy, and whose first
short stories were also fantasy. From the mid-1980s, however, he has
increasingly concentrated on sharply written sf with an emphasis on
BIOLOGY and CYBERNETICS, assembled in 2 collections, Axiomatic (coll 1995
UK) and Our Lady of Chernobyl (coll 1995); the best of them - tales like
"The Caress" (1990) and "Learning to Be Me" (1990) - raised considerable
expectations for his first sf novel, Quarantine (1992 UK), which
effectively, and literally, encapsules a near-future private-eye plot, of
the sort familiar to readers of CYPERPUNK, within a solar system enclosed
by a vast enigmatic Bubble. The unfoldings of the plot, and of its
implications about human identity in a world (or worlds) controllable at
the quantum level through COMPUTER-augmented brain functions, is extremely
intricate; this multifacetedness also marks Permutation City (1994 UK),
which searchingly examines the implications - in terms involving
mathematics, computer science and cosmology - behind the construction of
binding VIRTUAL REALITIES. GE has become a dauntingly successful
investigator of the new worlds-microscopic and macrocosmic - with which sf
increasingly finds itself required to deal. [JC]See also: INTERZONE.
EGAN, KEVIN
(? - ) US writer whose sf novel, The Perseus Breed (1988), features the
mysterious disappearance of certain women over a number of years. [JC]
EGBERT, H.M.

Victor ROUSSEAU.
EGGLETON, BOB
(1960- ) US illustrator who has worked in the sf field since 1984 when he
did his first book cover, for BAEN BOOKS. He has worked for a number of
publishers since then. For his paintings he normally uses acrylic. He has
quite a wide range - fantasy and horror as well as sf - but is especially
known for his space and spaceship paintings, which are at once
interestingly detailed and sweepingly romantic. His popularity has been
growing since the late 1980s, and he has received several nominations for
the Best Professional Artist category of the HUGO AWARDS (beginning in
1988); he won his first Hugo in 1994. He is one of a number of artists now
publishing electronically. Event Horizons (1994) is a disk containing 22
images by BE. [PN]
EGLETON, CLIVE (FREDERICK)
(1927- ) UK soldier and writer who began to publish novels with the
Garnett sequence - A Piece of Resistance (1970), Last Post for a Partisan
(1971) and The Judas Mandate (1972) - about UK post-nuclear- HOLOCAUST
resistance to the Russians who occupy the islands; in the end, a
government-in-exile is formed and the invaders, drained by a China war,
retreat. State Visit (1976) is about the assassination of the Queen in
order to prevent German reunification. CE specializes in spy thrillers.
[JC]
EGREMONT, MICHAEL
Michael HARRISON.
EHRLICH, MAX (SIMON)
(1909-1983) US writer initially active as an author of RADIO plays for
various series, including The Shadow. His first novel, The Big Eye (1949),
which was the first release in DOUBLEDAY's sf line, concerns an attempt by
astronomers to terrify humanity into world peace by announcing that a
visiting planet is due to hit Earth; the planet misses narrowly. The Edict
(1971) is based on ME's own screenplay for the film Z.P.G. and deals with
an embargo on births. The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1974), filmed in
1974 to his own screenplay, is a quest novel whose protagonist attempts to
track down information about his former self, the murder of whom recurs in
his dreams; his adventures continue in Reincarnation in Venice (1979; vt
The Bond 1980 UK). ME was a proficient writer who tended to use sf
protocols as much to alarm as to illuminate. [JC]Other works: Dead is the
Blue (1964), a borderline-sf nuclear-submarine story; The Savage is Loose
* (1974), for which film (1974; dir George C. Scott) he also wrote the
screenplay; Shaitan (1981), fantasy.
EIDLITZ, WALTHER
TRANSPORTATION.
EIDOLON
Australian SEMIPROZINE, published from North Perth, Western Australia, by
Eidolon Publications, quarterly (but later somewhat irregular) from #1,
Autumn 1990 (published in May 1990), current, 16 issues to early 1995, ed
Jeremy G. Byrne, Keira McKenzie, Robin Pen, Richard Scriven, Jonathan

Strahan, Chris Stronach to #6 (Oct 1991), thereafter only Byrne, Scriven
and Strahan.This elegant, A5 desk-top published perfect-bound magazine has
the appearance of an academic critical journal, but in fact publishes
mainly sf/fantasy fiction, with some articles and reviews. It is available
through subscription rather than from newsstands. E has had surprising
success, with fiction on the whole superior to that of its east-coast
rival, AUREALIS, and won a 1991 Ditmar ( AWARDS) for Best
Fanzine/Semiprozine. It has published stories by Harlan ELLISON, George
TURNER, Terry DOWLING, Greg EGAN, Leanne Frahm, Rosaleen LOVE, Philippa
Maddern and Sean MCMULLEN, among others. [PN]
EINSTEIN, CHARLES
(1926- ) US writer who published his first sf story, "Tunnel 1971", in
Saturn in 1957. His NEAR-FUTURE novel The Day New York Went Dry (1964)
depicts a water shortage in that city which comes to a crisis in the
drought of 1967. A hurricane then saves the city and its politicians. [JC]
EISENBERG, LARRY
(1919- ) US writer and for many years Co-Director of the Electronics
Laboratory at Rockefeller University. He began publishing sf with "The
Mynah Matter" as Lawrence Eisenberg for Fantastic Stories in 1962, and
became known for his comic sequence of stories about Emmett Duckworth;
many of these were assembled in his only collection, The Best Laid Schemes
(coll 1971). As an inventor whose devices crucially misfire, Duckworth
might seem a cheap target, but LE presents his recurring disasters with
winning sympathy. The stories describing the relationship of humans to the
ALIEN Sentients were very much darker in import, though never
unrelentingly so. After the beginning of the 1980s, LE became relatively
inactive. [JC]
EISENSTEIN, ALEX
(1945- ) US writer whose work has been exclusively in collaboration with
his wife, Phyllis EISENSTEIN, beginning with "The Trouble with the Past"
for New Dimensions 1 (anth 1971) ed Robert SILVERBERG; although only about
5 stories are bylined with both names, their collaborative efforts extend
throughout her work. [JC]
EISENSTEIN, PHYLLIS (LEAH KLEINSTEIN)
(1946- ) US writer, whose first sf was "The Trouble with the Past"
(1971), written in collaboration with her husband, Alex EISENSTEIN, in New
Dimensions 1 (anth 1971) ed Robert SILVERBERG. She and her husband have
written other stories together, and he is influential also on work signed
only by PE. Her first novel, Born to Exile (1971-4 FSF; fixup 1978), is a
deft, romantic, episodic fantasy about a witch minstrel who can teleport.
There followed perhaps her best work, Sorcerer's Son (1979), also fantasy,
an oedipal quest involving magical apprenticeship. Her next two books were
sf romances, Shadow of Earth (1979) and In the Hands of Glory (1981). The
former is a racy ALTERNATE-WORLD story in which the heroine has to cope
with the male chauvinism of a US Midwest belonging to a world in which the
Spanish Armada won. PE's praiseworthy narrative facility in this
productive period may have left her other capacities as a writer somewhat
unstretched. She slowed down, for a time publishing only short fiction and

in no great quantity, then returned seven years later with two fantasy
sequels: The Crystal Palace (1988), sequel to Sorcerer's Son, and In the
Red Lord's Reach (1989), sequel to Born to Exile. Both were marked by a
change of pace to something almost languid, more reflective and metaphoric
than before, with some gain and some loss. [PN]See also: MAGIC.
EISFA
YANDRO.
EISLER, STEVEN
Robert P. HOLDSTOCK.
EKLUND, GORDON
(1945- ) US writer, born in Seattle, where he now lives. He published his
first sf, "Dear Aunt Annie", a NEBULA nominee, with Fantastic in 1970. In
the early and productive years of his career he published dozens of
stories in sf magazines (none have been collected), writing as Wendell
Stewart once; until his work as E.E. SMITH (see below), he published all
his books under his own name. His work was initially various though
uneven. Both his first novel, The Eclipse of Dawn (1971), and his fourth
and best solo effort, All Times Possible (1974), anatomize with
pessimistic force the US political landscape and share an interest in the
psychology and tactics of leadership. The sf elements in the first mainly some intrusive ALIENS - tend to jar, but the PARALLEL-WORLDS
structure of All Times Possible intensifies and darkens the picture of
political realities at work through the second quarter of the 20th
century. Although a sometimes careless writing style and a tendency to
prolixity mar these books, they are still significant contributions to the
theme of POLITICS in sf. A Trace of Dreams (1972) is also a novel of some
weight, but some other modestly exploratory works are comparatively
commonplace: Inheritors of Earth (1951 Future Combined with Science
Fiction Stories as "Incomplete Superman"; exp 1974), with Poul ANDERSON,
stumblingly expands the latter's original story; Beyond the Resurrection
(1973) and The Grayspace Beast (1976) lack the eloquence necessary to give
full life to the concepts they present.GE collaborated with Gregory
BENFORD (whom see for details) on the series of stories which eventually
became If the Stars Are Gods (fixup 1977), the title story of which, in
its original form, won a 1974 Nebula for Best Novelette; it is GE's most
sustained work (and one of Benford's finest as well). Find the Changeling
(1980), also with Benford, less impressively recounts the hunt on a
colony-world for a shape-changing alien. Subsequent novels show a
lessening of energy. The Lord Tedric series of SPACE OPERAS is not
remarkably successful. The first volume, Lord Tedric (1954 Universe
Science Fiction; exp 1978) - was expanded from an original story by E.E.
"Doc" Smith and was published as a collaboration, though GE was not
credited in the UK edition; Space Pirates (1979) and Black Knight of the
Iron Sphere (1979; vt The Black Knight of the Iron Sphere 1979 UK), both
entirely by GE, were published as collaborations in the USA and as by
Smith alone in the UK; the final volume, Alien Realms (1980), appeared
under the Smith name in both countries. After The Garden of Winter (1980)
GE fell silent for some years, returning to the scene with a juvenile, A
Thunder on Neptune (1989). [JC]Other works: Serving in Time (1975 Canada);

Falling toward Forever (1975 Canada); Dance of the Apocalypse (1976
Canada); two Star Trek ties, The Starless World * (1978) and Devil World *
(1979); The Twilight River (1979 dos).See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; GODS AND
DEMONS; HITLER WINS; JUPITER; LIVING WORLDS; OUTER PLANETS; RELIGION;
ROBOTS; STARS; SUN.
ELDER, MICHAEL (AIKEN)
(1931- ) Scottish actor and writer in various genres, some of whose
earlier novels, written in the 1950s, deal with theatrical themes. He
began writing sf with Paradise is Not Enough (1970) for ROBERT HALE
LIMITED, and thereafter produced a number of fairly routine adventures for
that firm. Most notable are the Barclay SPACE-OPERA adventures involving
COLONIZATION and its perils: Nowhere On Earth (1972), which also deals
with problems of OVERPOPULATION, and its sequels The Perfumed Planet
(1973; vt Flight to Terror 1973 US), Down to Earth (1973), The Seeds of
Frenzy (1974) and The Island of the Dead (1975). His other connected books
are Mindslip (1976) and its sequel Mindquest (1978) and Oil-Seeker (1977)
and its sequel Oil-Planet (1978). ME's ambitions do not generally extend
beyond entertainment, though a dour DYSTOPIAN bent of thought is sometimes
allowed to surface. [JC]Other works: The Alien Earth (1971); The
Everlasting Man (1972); A Different World (1974); Centaurian Quest (1975);
Double Time (1976).
ELDERSHAW, M. BARNARD
Collaborative pseudonym used by Australian writers and critics Marjorie
Faith Barnard (1897-1987) and Flora Sydney Patricia Eldershaw (1897-1956)
for four well regarded mainstream novels 1929-37; nearly all the writing
was done by Barnard - who had published a solo book as early as 1920 with Eldershaw being the critical editorial eye. A fifth novel, also
published as by MBE and the most distinguished work under this pseudonym,
was by Barnard alone: Tomorrow and Tomorrow (cut 1947; text restored vt
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow 1983 UK) is a political novel whose
framing story is set in the 24th century, where a historical novelist
living in the Tenth Commune (once the Riverina) has written a book about
Australia from 1924 to c1950, the years of Depression and WWII. The novel
within a novel, entitled Little World Left Behind, is a striking picture
of an Australia well known to Barnard, seen as if from a future
perspective. As she had finished writing the book by 1944, the later
events of WWII and its supposed aftermath - including the burning of
Sydney by its anguished inhabitants - are pure sf, as is the future in
which the novelist lives, a blighted, indifferent UTOPIA. Indeed the whole
novel is very sophisticated, very unusual sf, part of whose subject is the
elusiveness of HISTORY and its relation to fiction.The book's publisher,
unknown to Barnard, submitted it before publication to the censor, who saw
it as politically subversive and therefore mutilated the latter part, thus
bearing witness to the same repressive forces that give the novel its
theme; later editions have the text restored. [PN]See also: AUSTRALIA.
ELDRIDGE, PAUL
(1888-1982) US languages teacher and writer, best known for the
sf-fantasy trilogy he wrote with George S. VIERECK (whom see for details):
My First Two Thousand Years: The Autobiography of the Wandering Jew

(1928), Salome: The Wandering Jewess (1930; cut vt Salome: 2000 Years of
Love 1954) and The Invincible Adam (1932). Prince Pax (1933 UK), also with
Viereck, provides an idealistic RURITANIAN king with a high-tech WEAPON:
world peace, on his terms, ensues. [JC]See also: ADAM AND EVE;
IMMORTALITY; ORIGIN OF MAN; POCKET UNIVERSE.
ELDRIDGE, ROGER
(? - ) UK writer whose first sf book was a juvenile, The Shadow of the
Gloom-World (1977). His second, The Fishers of Darksea (1982), is an
ambitious adult tale set in an Eskimo culture with a tradition of
shamanism; the visions endured by the protagonist are ironically revealed
to be merely circumstantial, for the tribe has been genetically adapted to
handle radioactive ore, and the MONSTERS seen in shamanic trance are
merely human overseers, suitably shielded. [JC]
ELECTRICAL EXPERIMENTER
SCIENCE AND INVENTION.
ELEK, ISTVAN
[r] HUNGARY.
ELGIN, SUZETTE HADEN
Working name of US poet, author and teacher Patricia Anne Suzette Wilkins
Elgin (1936- ) for her sf. She combines writing with a professional
specialization in LINGUISTICS, having a PhD in linguistics from the
University of California, San Diego; she was a professor of linguistics at
San Diego State University 1972-80, now emeritus, and has published widely
in her specialist field. Her sf began in 1969 with "For the Sake of Grace"
in FSF, which was incorporated into At the Seventh Level (1972), part of
an ongoing series featuring the interstellar adventures of Trigalactic
Intelligence Service agent Coyote Jones; with The Communipaths (1970 dos)
and Furthest (1971), it was assembled as Communipath Worlds (omni 1980).
Further titles, Star-Anchored, Star-Angered (1979) and Yonder Comes the
Other End of Time (1986), did little to lessen the somewhat distressing
discrepancy between the ramshackleness of the Coyote Jones plots and the
terse eloquence of their descriptions of the meaning-systems of and
COMMUNICATION with alien cultures, in which the condition of women
(particularly in Furthest) is described with sufficient point that the
books are used as FEMINIST texts.A second series, the Ozark trilogy Twelve Fair Kingdoms (1981), The Grand Jubilee (1981) and And then
There'll be Fireworks (1981), assembled as The Ozark Trilogy (omni 1982) cannot be said to solve her inability to find plots of a sufficient
knottiness to hold her attention (the young heroine of the series, whose
magic secretly rules the planet Ozark, is in a coma for much of the final
volume); but SHE's linguistic inventiveness, and her light-hearted
detailing of the magic-based Ozark culture, give the books a charm they do
not convey in synopsis. (Yonder Comes the Other End of Time is also set in
this milieu.) Far more interesting, though still fumblingly plotted, is
SHE's third series, the Native Tongue trilogy, comprising Native Tongue
(1984), The Judas Rose (1987) and Earthsong (1994), which is based on a
lame initial premise - a 1991 Amendment to the US Constitution declares
women inferior to men on the basis of "scientific" evidence - which fails

to significantly hamstring the heart of the book: tightly narrated tales
of the creation of a "womanlanguage" for self-protection (though the
tongue itself is only fleetingly presented). The caricatured
unpleasantness of almost all men, which both heightens and trivializes the
first volume, becomes less significant in the second; superior ALIENS have
arrived, and the fragile carapace of male superiority gets short shrift;
and in the third volume, women are forced by an alien quarantine - Earth
has been sealed off because the human species is so violent - to work out
an end to the "hunger" which leads to typical male behaviour. But the
pleasures and lessons of SHE's texts continue to lie more in texture than
in premise.In 1978, SHE founded the SCIENCE FICTION POETRY ASSOCIATION.
[JC]See also: POETRY.
ELIADE, MIRCEA
[r] ROMANIA.
ELIMINATORS
Film (1986). Altar/Empire. Prod Charles BAND. Dir Peter Manoogian,
starring Andrew Prine, Denise Crosby, Patrick Reynolds, Conan Lee, Roy
Dotrice. Screenplay Paul DeMeo, Danny Bilson. 96 mins, cut to 91 mins.
Colour.Enjoyable exploitation frolic whose plot defies precis, but
involves a mad SCIENTIST (he wants to be a Roman emperor) in the jungle
with a TIME MACHINE, the weary CYBORG Mandroid (his unhappy creation), the
tough heroine Colonel Nora, the ROBOT SPOT (a dead ringer for R2D2), the
martial artist Kuji, riverboats, prehistoric humans and a FORCE FIELD.
Screenwriters Bilson and DeMeo also wrote producer Band's two best films,
TRANCERS (1984) and ZONE TROOPERS (1985). [PN]
ELIOTT, E.C.
Pseudonym of UK writer Reginald Alec Martin (1900- ), whose Kemlo
sequence of CHILDREN'S SF novels had a powerful emotional impact on many
of their youthful UK readers, shaping the thoughts towards sf of an entire
generation of them. The sequence is: Kemlo and the Crazy Planet (1954),
Kemlo and the Zones of Silence (1954), Kemlo and the Sky Horse (1954),
Kemlo and the Martian Ghosts (1954), Kemlo and the Craters of the Moon
(1955), Kemlo and the Space Lanes (1955), Kemlo and the Star Men (1955),
Kemlo and the Gravity Rays (1956), Kemlo and the Purple Dawn (1957), Kemlo
and the End of Time (1957), Kemlo and the Zombie Men (1958), Kemlo and the
Space Men (1959), Kemlo and the Satellite Builders (1960), Kemlo and the
Space Invaders (1961) and Kemlo and the Masters of Space (1963). Kemlo and
his friends, living with their parents in SPACE HABITATS, are young
adolescents of the first generation to be born in space, and can therefore
breathe vacuum. Despite this implausibility, the tales of the children's
adventures are surprisingly enjoyable for their type and vintage - the
space-station settings, with families and above all children routinely Up
There, were innovative (at least in children's sf); the characters seemed
real, rather than being grim-jawed adult male heroes or indestructible
precocious superbrats; and the books as a whole compare favourably with
those being produced at about the same time by, for example, Captain W.E.
JOHNS. A second, much shorter series, the Tas books, stopped after Tas and
the Space Machine (1955) and Tas and the Postal Rocket (1955). [JC/DRL]See
also: JUVENILE SERIES.

ELITE
GAMES AND TOYS.
ELIVAS, KNARF
Frank SAVILE.
ELLERMAN, GENE
[s] Basil WELLS.
ELLERN, WILLIAM B.
[r] E.E. SMITH.
ELLIK, RON(ALD)
(1938-1968) US computer programmer, author and well known sf fan,
co-editor with Terry CARR of a HUGO-winning FANZINE, FANAC (1958-61). RE
was co-author of The Universes of E.E. Smith (1966) with Bill EVANS (whom
see for details). Under the joint pseudonym Fredric Davies he wrote with
Steve Tolliver The Man From U.N.C.L.E. #14: The Cross of Gold Affair *
(1968). RE died in a car accident the day before he was to have been
married. [PN]
ELLIOT, JEFFREY M.
(1947- ) US academic-professor of political science at North Carolina
Central University - and writer who has published prolifically in several
areas. Much of his work in sf has been in collaboration with Robert
REGINALD, including the second version of Reginald's The Attempted
Assassination of John F. Kennedy (1977 chap) as by Lucas Webb, which JME
helped to revise into a format designed to be used in teaching, retitling
it If J.F.K. Had Lived: A Political Scenario (exp 1978 chap). Also with
Reginald (the latter as Michael Burgess) JME compiled The Work of R.
Reginald: An Annotated Bibliography ?
BIBLIOGRAPHIES include The Work of George Zebrowski: An Annotated
Bibliography ? exp 1990) with Reginald, The Work of Jack
Dann: An Annotated Bibliography ?
Sargent: An Annotated Bibliography ?
Starclimber: The Literary Adventures and Autobiography of Raymond Z.
Gallun (1991), and collaborated in Adventures of a Freelancer: The
Literary Exploits and Autobiography of Stanton A.Coblentz (1993).
[JC]Other works: A sequence of interview books comprising Science Fiction
Voices #2: Interviews with Science Fiction Writers (coll 1979 chap), #3
(coll 1980 chap) and #4 (coll 1982 chap); Literary Voices #1 (coll 1980
chap); The Future of the Space Program: Large Corporations ?
Discussions with 22 Science-Fiction Writers (coll 1981 chap) and Fantasy
Voices: Interviews with American Fantasy Writers (coll 1982 chap); also
Kindred Spirits: An Anthology of Gay and Lesbian Science Fiction Stories
(anth 1984).About the author: The Work of Jeffrey M. Elliot: An Annotated
Bibliography ?
ELLIOT, JOHN
(1918- ) UK writer, primarily for tv, who collaborated with Fred HOYLE on
two serials, A FOR ANDROMEDA and The ANDROMEDA BREAKTHROUGH, and the
subsequent novelizations under the same titles (1962 and 1964
respectively). He is not to be confused with the John Elliott (note

spelling) who wrote the anti-Chinese/Soviet political thriller Dragon's
Feast (1970), itself a work of borderline sf. [JC]
ELLIOT, LEE
House name used for three sf novels published by CURTIS WARREN, one each
by William Henry Fleming BIRD and Dennis HUGHES and one - Overlord New
York (1953) - by an as yet unidentified author. [JC]
ELLIOTT, BRUCE (WALTER GARDNER LIVELY STACY)
(1914-1973) US writer and editor, active mainly in the sf field in the
early 1950s, beginning with "Fearsome Fable" for FSF in 1951. His sf
novels - Asylum Earth (1952 Startling Stories; 1968) and The Rivet in
Grandfather's Neck (1970) - are routine adventures. [JC]See also:
DIMENSIONS.
ELLIOTT, DAN
[r] Robert SILVERBERG.
ELLIOTT, ELTON P.
[r] Richard E. GEIS.
ELLIOTT, GEORGE P(AUL)
(1918-1980) US writer and academic, many of whose short stories were sf
or fantasy. He is best remembered for the title story in Among the Dangs
(coll 1960), which deals with an imaginary South American tribe and has
been widely reprinted within and outside the genre; his essay "Discovering
the Dangs", in Conversions: Literature and the Modernist Deviation (coll
1971), discusses, biographically and theoretically, the creation of an sf
text. Two other stories from that collection, including the anti-racist
parable "The NRACP", and five of those assembled in An Hour of Last Things
(coll 1968), most notably "Into the Cone of Cold", are also sf. Although
it has been listed in sf bibliographies, David Knudson (1962) is in fact
an associational novel dealing with nuclear guilt and the aftereffects of
radiation poisoning. [JC/GF]
ELLIOTT, H(ARRY) CHANDLER
(1910-1978) Canadian-born US physician, university teacher of medicine
and writer, in whose sf novel, Reprieve from Paradise (1955), Polynesians
have established a worldwide culture after an atomic HOLOCAUST. Their
civilization is described in sometimes amusing detail, though an enforced
breeding plan soon sours the picture. The introduction of an Antarctic
UTOPIA then complicates matters further. [JC]See also: GAMES AND SPORTS;
TRANSPORTATION.
ELLIOTT, JANICE
(1931- ) UK writer since 1962 of sophisticated novels of domestic
passion. Her sf novel, The Summer People (1980), places in a NEAR-FUTURE
world one of her typical casts, who decide it would be a good idea, while
society collapses off-stage, to remain ensconced in their holiday resort
for the time being. An Arthurian sequence for older children - The King
Awakes (1987) and The Empty Throne (1988) - arouses the once and future
king into a post- HOLOCAUST UK. The Sadness of Witches (1987) is a tale of
the occult. City of Gates (1992) is set in a Jerusalem guest-house which
exists, via time-loops, in every relevant epoch. [JC]

ELLIOTT, KATE
Alis A. RASMUSSEN.
ELLIOTT, NATHAN
Christopher EVANS.
ELLIOTT, RICHARD
Richard E. GEIS.
ELLIOTT, SUMNER LOCKE
(1917-1991) Australian-born playwright, tv scriptwriter and novelist,
resident in the USA from 1948, becoming a US citizen. Several of his
novels, many of which have Australian settings, have been televised. His
novel Fairyland (1988) is about growing up gay in Australia. His only sf
is Going (1975), about life and love in a slightly DYSTOPIAN future in
which euthanasia at age 65 is compulsory. The heroine, close to this age,
reflects on her life. [PN]
ELLIS, ALBERT C(HARLES)
(1947- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Fire in the Sky" in
Vertex in 1974, and who subsequently wrote two modest but readable sf
adventures, Death Jag (dated 1979 but 1980) with Jeff Slaten, and
Worldmaker (1985). [JC]
ELLIS, CRAIG
House name used 1940-43 in AMZ by David Vern ( David V. REED) and Lee
Rogow. [JC]
ELLIS, D.E.
(? - ) UK writer briefly active in the early 1960s with "Stress" for NW
in 1961 and the routine A Thousand Ages (1961). [JC]
ELLIS, EDWARD S(YLVESTER)
(1840-1916) US teacher, editor and author of boys' books, popular
history, miscellaneous work and a very large number of US dime novels,
mainly Westerns, under his own name and many pseudonyms. His enormous
bibliography, though studied exhaustively by Denis Rogers (in various
issues of Dime Novel Round-Up), remains unsettled. ESE established the
dime novel as a commercial field with Seth Jones (1860), and instigated
DIME-NOVEL SF through his adaptation of the historical Newark Steam Man
into a Western: The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868; vt The Huge Hunter,
or The Steam Man of the Prairies 1876; vt Baldy's Boy Partner, or Young
Brainerd's Steam Man 1888); sf soon became one of the popular dime-novel
genres. ESE's use of the Steam Man (not a ROBOT, simply a man-shaped
mobile steam engine which cannot go into reverse) was uninspired, with
little recognition of the potential of the device. The Steam Man has been
conveniently reprinted in E.F. BLEILER's Eight Dime Novels (anth 1974)
with a full introduction to the field. Of ESE's huge body of work, a few
others are of some interest: Land of Mystery (1889), a lost-race ( LOST
WORLDS) tale, The Monarch of the Air (1907), a fantastic aeronautics story
as by Seward D. Lisle (an anagram pseudonym), and The Dragon of the Skies
(1915 UK). [EFB/JC]See also: EDISONADE; HISTORY OF SF.

ELLIS, T(HOMAS) MULLETT
(1850-1919) UK poet and writer whose sf novel, Zalma (1895), features the
protracted NEAR-FUTURE attempts of the eponymous wrong-side-of-the-bed
Russian-Spanish princess to revenge herself on the heir to the throne of
England, who has for unclear reasons swiftly annulled their morganatic
marriage. Anthrax-bearing balloons are brought into play, and the tale
closes on a possible Europe-wide socialist upheaval. [JC]See also:
WEAPONS.
ELLISON, HARLAN (JAY)
(1934- ) US writer, the most controversial and among the finest of those
writers associated with sf whose careers began in the 1950s. He was born
and raised in Ohio, attending Ohio State University for 18 months before
being asked to leave, one of the reasons for his dismissal being rudeness
to a creative-writing professor who told him he had no talent. HE had
already become deeply involved in Cleveland fandom, producing material for
and later taking over the Cleveland SF Society's magazine, Science-Fantasy
Bulletin (later Dimensions). In a profile contributed to the FSF Special
Harlan Ellison Issue (July 1977), Robert SILVERBERG, his near
contemporary, vividly portrayed the young HE as insecure, physically
fearless, extraordinarily ambitious and hyperkinetic, dominating any room
he entered. Much the same could be said about the short stories which made
him famous (initially in sf circles, later outside them) and won him a
remarkable number of awards - 7 HUGOS and 3 NEBULAS - for these tales have
almost unfailingly reflected and magnified their author's character and
concerns.By 1955 HE was in New York, living in the same rooming house as
Silverberg and producing numerous stories. His first professional sf
appearance came early in 1956 with "Glowworm" for Infinity Science
Fiction, and he soon began to publish very prolifically indeed, with well
over 150 stories and pieces in a variety of genres by the end of 1958.
Much of this initial production is coarse and derivative, mixing strong
early influences like Nelson Algren (1909-1981) with models derived from
successful magazine writers of the time. In these years, HE used a number
of pseudonyms: in fanzines, Nalrah Nosille; for short stories in crime,
sex and other genre magazines, Sley Harson (in collaboration with Henry
SLESAR), Landon Ellis, Derry Tiger, Price Curtis and Paul Merchant; in sf
magazines the house names Lee ARCHER (one story), E.K. JARVIS (one story)
and Clyde MITCHELL (one story) and the personal pseudonyms Jay Charby,
Wallace Edmondson, Ellis Hart, Jay Solo and, from 1957, Cordwainer Bird, a
name which after 1964 he used to designate material that (generally
through conflict with tv producers) he partially disclaimed.Not long after
reaching New York, HE assumed a false identity and ran as a member of a
gang from Red Hook, Brooklyn, called the Barons. This 10-week stint gained
him material which he used directly in the first of his infrequent novels,
Rumble (1958; vt Web of the City 1975), which early demonstrated, in the
vigour and violence of its urban imagery, the ambivalent hold of the city
on his imagination. HE is one of the relatively few writers of his
generation to deal constantly and impassionedly with the turbulent
complexities of the modern US city (an engagement furthered in sf, decades
later, by the CYBERPUNK movement). More material drawn from contemporary
urban life may be found in The Deadly Streets (coll 1958; exp 1975), The

Juvies (coll 1961), Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-up
Generation (coll 1961; rev 1975) and Rockabilly (1961; rev vt Spider Kiss
1975), as well as in the autobiographical street-gang study Memos from
Purgatory: Two Journeys of Our Times (1961). None of this material is
technically sf, but HE has consistently deprecated the making of
distinctions between generic and non-generic writing in his own
works.After serving in the US Army, HE moved to Chicago in 1959 as editor
of Rogue Magazine, where later he was also involved in the creation of
Regency Books. By 1962 he was in Los Angeles, where he has remained.
During this time, while continuing to write for many markets, he was
beginning to establish a maverick reputation within sf, though his first
sf books - The Man with Nine Lives (fixup 1960 dos) and A Touch of
Infinity (coll 1960 dos) - display an uneasy conformity to the constraints
of late-1950s magazine sf. Ellison Wonderland (coll 1962; vt Earthman, Go
Home 1964; with new introduction and with "The Forces that Crush" deleted
and "Back to the Drawing Boards" added, rev 1974; rev 1984) is likewise
uneasy, containing stories whose conventional premises are shaken apart by
the violent rhetoric of their telling. HE was still very much feeling his
way; of major sf writers, he was among the earliest to find his voice-raw
thrusts of emotion rattle even the most "commercial" of his early stories
- but among the slowest to find forms and markets through which to project
it.After much struggle, by 1963 HE had established himself as a successful
tv writer, contributing scripts to such series as Route 66, The Alfred
Hitchcock Hour and The Untouchables, with considerable work for Burke's
Law as well as two scripts for The OUTER LIMITS in 1964 - one of these,
"Demon with a Glass Hand" (1964), won the Writers' Guild of America Award
for Outstanding Script - two scripts for The MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. in
1966-7, and a STAR TREK episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever" (1967),
which won a Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1967 and a Writers'
Guild of America Award for Most Outstanding Script, Dramatic Episode, of
1967-8. A later foray into tv - his attempt to create a series based on
the concept of a GENERATION STARSHIP - was something of a fiasco. The
series, The STARLOST, was Canadian-made and lasted only one season, 1973;
and so many changes were made to HE's original concept that he disowned
the programme, signing the pilot episode Cordwainer Bird. The original
script (not the one filmed) received a Writers' Guild of America Award for
Best Dramatic Episode Script (HE is the only scenarist to have won the
award three times), and was later novelized as Phoenix without Ashes *
(1975) with Edward BRYANT. A thinly disguised account of the whole affair
formed the plot of a roman a clef by Ben BOVA, The Starcrossed (1975).
More recently, HE served as creative consultant for the first season of
the revived The TWILIGHT ZONE. In the introduction and ancillary material
appended to I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay (1987 IASFM; rev 1994)
with Isaac ASIMOV, he recounts in considerable detail a later imbroglio
with Holywood filmmakers, though the screenplay itself makes clear how
difficult it would have been to translate Asimov's archaic concepts including the exploration of the solar system by mannish though obedient
robots - onto the contemporary screen.At around the same time that he
began his tv career, HE began publishing the short stories that have made
his name. Many of them appear in his books of the late 1960s: Paingod and
Other Delusions (coll 1965; with "Sleeping Dogs" added exp 1975) and I

Have No Mouth ? rev 1983), both assembled as The
Fantasies of Harlan Ellison (omni 1979); From the Land of Fear (coll
1967); Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled (coll 1968; with 9 stories
removed and an intro, 1 story and 2 articles added 1976), which mixes sf
and non-sf, though the 2nd edn retains mainly non-genre material; The
Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World (coll 1969; with "Along
the Scenic Route", "The Place with no Name" and "Shattered Like a Glass
Goblin" cut 1976 UK), the US edition being a corrupt text; and Over the
Edge: Stories from Somewhere Else (coll 1970). Alone Against Tomorrow:
Stories of Alienation in Speculative Fiction (coll 1971; UK edn in 2 vols
as All the Sounds of Fear 1973 and The Time of the Eye 1974, the latter
containing new intro) represents HE's first attempt (of several) to
re-sort his material, and provides a good summary of his best 1960s work.
Further attempts at sorting include Approaching Oblivion: Road Signs on
the Treadmill toward Tomorrow (coll 1974), which contains a moving
autobiographical analysis of the roots of his writing; and the superb
Deathbird Stories: A Pantheon of Modern Gods (coll 1975; rev 1984), which
reassembles many of his best stories into a kind of cycle about Man's
relation to the GODS and horrors within and without him. ("Pretty Maggie
Moneyeyes", maybe his most moving tale, is again reprinted here, finding
at last a fit context. This story of the quasidelusional rapport between a
gambler and a female spirit trapped within a slot machine definitively
expresses what might be called an Ellisonian pathos about the sadness and
rage of men and women, lovers, victims, users: solitaries all, in a gashed
world.) But Deathbird Stories was not a true retrospective, and the
confusion caused by the release of many and frequently revised titles,
often with overlapping contents, was cleared up only with the publication
of THE ESSENTIAL ELLISON: A 35-YEAR RETROSPECTIVE (coll 1987; rev 1991), a
huge and gripping overview of his entire career.From the mid-1960s on, HE
began to amass a large number of Hugos and Nebulas: both were awarded in
1966 for "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" (1965), later
published with James STERANKO as "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman
(graph 1978 chap); a 1968 Hugo (Short Story) for "I Have No Mouth, and I
Must Scream" (1967), a most scarifying expression of the true dehumanizing
consequences of nuclear war; a 1969 Hugo (Short Story) for "The Beast that
Shouted Love at the Heart of the World" (1968); a 1974 Hugo (Best
Novelette) for "The Deathbird" (1973); and a 1969 Nebula (Best Novella)
for "A Boy and his Dog" (1969). This last was made into a successful film
( A BOY AND HIS DOG), itself awarded a 1976 Hugo, shared by HE, for Best
Dramatic Presentation. He also won a 1975 Hugo for Best Novelette for
"Adrift Just off the Islets of Langerhans, Latitude 38deg 54' N, Longitude
77deg 00' 13" W", an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for "The
Whimper of Whipped Dogs" (1973), a 1978 Nebula and Hugo for Best Short
Story for "Jeffty is Five" and a 1986 Hugo for Best Novelette for "Paladin
of the Lost Hour" (1985).It was during these prime years that HE also
began editing his famous series of NEW-WAVE sf ANTHOLOGIES with DANGEROUS
VISIONS (anth 1967; vt in 3 vols Dangerous Visions #1 1969, #2 1969 and #3
1969) and Again, Dangerous Visions (anth 1972; vt in 2 vols Again,
Dangerous Visions I 1973 and II 1973); these books were striking for the
general excellence of their contents and for the extensive, deeply
personal annotations supplied by HE. For this success - and self-exposure

- he was to pay. A third volume, The Last Dangerous Visions, was announced
at the start of the 1970s but still (1995) awaits publication. A series of
illnesses impaired HE's fitness for the huge task of annotating what had
soon become an enormous project; and an inherent stubbornness seemed to
prevent him from closing the enterprise down after its time - the high
tide of the 1960s New Wave movement, created in part by the first volume
of the series - had inevitably passed.For several years, HE had in
addition to his fiction and his screenwriting activities begun to produce
a considerable body of nonfiction - essays, reviews, polemics, culture
cartoons, memoirs. Much of this material has now been published in book
form. The Glass Teat: Essays of Opinion on the Subject of Television (coll
1970) and The Other Glass Teat (coll 1975) engage trenchantly with their
subject; Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed (coll 1984) collects
general essays, as does An Edge in My Voice (coll 1985), both containing
severe assaults on hypocrisies of government (and individuals); Harlan
Ellison's Watching (coll 1989) contains film criticism; and The Harlan
Ellison Hornbook (coll 1990) is a sequence of sometimes fairly ratty
confessional essays.From about 1970, though the quality of his work was by
no means inferior, HE began to publish markedly fewer stories; and from
about 1980 an understandable inclination to cultural melancholia began to
be noticed. New titles, some as distinguished as anything from earlier
decades, were assembled in Strange Wine (coll 1978), Shatterday (coll
1980), Stalking the Nightmare (coll 1982), Angry Candy (coll 1988) and
Mind Fields: The Art of Jacek Yerka/The Fiction of Harlan Ellison (coll
1994), generating a sense of the painful maturity of an author
passionately engaged not only with himself - an engagement whose dangerous
allure he has never denied - but with the essential gestures of rage and
love and self-betrayal that mark our species. He has increasingly engaged
his large energies as a writer in creating parable after parable - only
some of them couched in anything like a conventional sf idiom - that
illuminate the late years of the century, sometimes luridly, always with a
genuine and redeeming pain. For all the scattershot rawness of his wilder
work, at the end of the day - as All the Lies that Are My Life (1980) and
Mefisto in Onyx (1993) tormentedly expose - HE is a representative speaker
of the things that count. [JC]Other works: Sex Gang (1959) as by Paul
Merchant; Doomsman (1958 Imagination Science Fiction as "The Assassin";
1967 chap dos); Partners in Wonder: Harlan Ellison in Collaboration with .
. . (coll 1971), collaborations with various writers; No Doors, No Windows
(coll 1975); The City at the Edge of Forever * (graph 1977), a Star Trek
fotonovel; The Illustrated Harlan Ellison (graph coll 1978); The Book of
Ellison (anth 1978) with Andrew PORTER, publication of which HE claims was
"unauthorized"; Medea: Harlan's World (anth 1985), one of the earlier
SHARED-WORLD anthologies, and perhaps the best; Night and the Enemy (graph
1987) with Ken Steacy; Eidolons (1988 chap); Footsteps (1989 chap); Vic
and Blood: The Chronicles of a Boy and His Dog (graph coll of linked
stories 1989) with Richard CORBEN; Run for the Stars (1957 Science Fiction
Adventures; rev 1991 chap dos), in a TOR BOOKS Double published in
anthology format; Dreams with Sharp Teeth (omni 1991) containing I Have No
Mouth and I Must Scream, Deathbird Stories and Shatterday, all texts
corrected.About the author: FSF Special Harlan Ellison Issue (July 1977);
Harlan Ellison: Unrepentant Harlequin by George Edgar SLUSSER (1977);

Harlan Ellison: A Bibliographical Checklist (1973; 2nd edn in Fantasy
Research ?
the latter title is unusually thorough and comprehensive and, given its
coverage of HE's intensely productive early years, remains useful.See
also: AMAZING STORIES; AUTOMATION; BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD;
CHILDREN
IN SF; CINEMA; COMICS; COMPUTERS; CYBORGS; ESCHATOLOGY; FANTASY;
GALAXY
SCIENCE FICTION; GAMES AND SPORTS; HITLER WINS; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER;
INVISIBILITY; MACHINES; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION;
MESSIAHS; MILFORD SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' CONFERENCE; MUSIC;
MYTHOLOGY;
NEW WORLDS; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; RELIGION; SEX; TABOOS; The
TERMINATOR;
TRANSPORTATION; WOMEN SF WRITERS.
ELMORE, ERNEST (CARPENTER)
(1901-1957) UK actor and writer, author of about 30 detective novels as
John Bude. In The Steel Grubs (1928) a Dartmoor convict finds some ALIEN
eggs, which hatch into ferrophage grubs that eat first the iron bars of
his cell and then much of First Industrial Revolution England. This Siren
Song (1930) features some MCGUFFIN inventions. The Lumpton Gobbelings
(1954), his most famous title, describes an invasion by Little People of
the village of Lumpton, scandalizing the villagers. [JC]
ELOUS, MARV
Robert E. VARDEMAN.
ELPHINSTONE, MARGARET
(1948- ) Scottish writer of at least two gardening books who began
publishing sf with "Spinning the Green" in Despatches from the Frontiers
of the Female Mind (anth 1985) ed Jen Green and Sarah LEFANU. Her sf
sequence, the Incomer series - The Incomer (1987) and A Sparrow's Flight
(1989) - applies a FEMINIST perspective to the post- HOLOCAUST story of
the arrival of a wandering musician in a far-northern village and his
winter-long residence there, and to further examinations of the
post-patriarchal, post-technological world that is slowly revealed.
[JC]Other Works: An Apple from a Tree (coll 1991), fantasies.
EL SALVADOR
LATIN AMERICA.
ELSTAR, DOW
[s] Raymond Z. GALLUN.
ELTON, BEN
Working name of UK tv comedian, playwright and novelist Benjamin Charles
Elton (1959- ), well known for the contumely of his stand-up verbal
SATIRE. His first sf novel, Stark (1989), is set in a NEAR-FUTURE
Australia threatened by a typical late-20th-century entrepreneur, and by
the END OF THE WORLD through POLLUTION, which the industrialists
responsible hope to evade by leaving the planet to its victims - us. In
"Gasping: the Play" (1990), a UK corporation, after oxygen is privatized,

sells "designer air." Gridlock (1991) less successfully dramatizes a
sudden UK-wide traffic jam; This Other Eden (1993), also set in the near
future, tends to recapitulate earlier themes. [JC]See also:
TRANSPORTATION.
ELWOOD, ROGER
(1933- ) US editor who produced a number of reprint ANTHOLOGIES in the
1960s, mostly in collaboration with Vic Ghidalia (1926- ) or Sam
MOSKOWITZ, and who burst into prominence in the early 1970s when, with
indefatigable salesmanship, he sold a huge number of ORIGINAL ANTHOLOGIES
-about 80 in all (including a number of short books for young children),
according to his claim - to a variety of publishers. At one time it was
estimated that RE alone constituted about a quarter of the total market
for sf short stories, and such dominance led to criticism of his
restrictions on the free use of SEX and RELIGION as themes. Notable among
his many anthologies were: Future City (anth 1973); Saving Worlds (anth
1973; vt The Wounded Planet 1974) with Virginia KIDD; the Continuum
sequence, whose 4 vols -Continuum #1 (anth 1974), #2 (anth 1974), #3 (anth
1974) and #4 (anth 1975) - featured 8 different 4-part series; and Epoch
(anth 1975) with Robert SILVERBERG. Collections ed RE included The Many
Worlds of Poul Anderson (coll 1974) and The Many Worlds of Andre Norton
(coll 1974). RE was also responsible for the short-lived magazine ODYSSEY,
the LASER BOOKS series of sf adventures from Canada, and Starstream Comics
(1976). Later, as the oversaturated anthology market contracted, he
diversified into editing the sf lines of various publishers Bobbs-Merrill, Pinnacle and Pyramid, in addition to Laser. As a devout
Christian, RE also wrote evangelical and inspirational works, and in the
late 1980s several novels that were similarly inspirational, including the
Angelwalk sequence - Angelwalk: A Modern Fable (1988) and Fallen Angel
(1990) - and some singletons: The Christening (1989), The Frankenstein
Project (1991), Wise One (1991) and Darien: Guardian Angel of Jesus
(1994). [MJE/JC]Other works (as editor): Alien Worlds (anth 1964) and
Invasion of the Robots (anth 1964), both ghost-edited by Sam Moskowitz;
Strange Signposts (anth 1966); The Human Zero (anth 1967) with Moskowitz;
The Time Curve (anth 1968); Alien Earth (anth 1969) with Moskowitz; Other
Worlds, Other Times (anth 1969) with Moskowitz; The Little Monsters (anth
1969) and More Little Monsters (anth 1973), both with Vic Ghidalia; Beware
the Beasts (anth 1970) with Ghidalia; The Horror Hunters (anth 1971) with
Ghidalia; Young Demons (anth 1971) with Ghidalia; Signs and Wonders (anth
1972); And Walk Now Gently through the Fire (anth 1972); The Venus Factor
(anth 1972) with Ghidalia; Androids, Time Machines and Blue Giraffes (anth
1973) with Ghidalia; Demon Kind (anth 1973); Frontiers I: Tomorrow's
Alternatives (anth 1973) and Frontiers II: The New Mind (anth 1973);
Monster Tales: Vampires, Werewolves and Things (anth 1973); Omega (anth
1973); The Other Side of Tomorrow (anth 1973); Science Fiction Adventures
from Way Out (anth 1973); Science Fiction Tales: Invaders, Creatures and
Alien Worlds (anth 1973); Showcase (anth 1973); Strange Things Happening
(anth 1973); Children of Infinity (anth 1973); Future Quest (anth 1973);
Flame Tree Planet: An Anthology of Religious Science-Fantasy (anth 1973);
Ten Tomorrows (anth 1973); The Berserkers (anth 1974); Chronicles of a
Comer (anth 1974); Crisis (anth 1974); The Extraterrestrials (anth 1974);

Future Kin (anth 1974); Horror Tales: Spirits, Spells and the Unknown
(anth 1974); The Graduated Robot and Other Stories (anth 1974); The
Learning Maze (anth 1974); More Science Fiction Tales: Crystal Creatures,
Bird-Things and other Weirdies (anth 1974); Survival from Infinity (anth
1974); The Far Side of Time (anth 1974); The Long Night of Waiting (anth
1974); Strange Gods (anth 1974); Vampires, Werewolves, and Other Monsters
(anth 1974); Beware More Beasts (anth 1975) with Ghidalia; Dystopian
Visions (anth 1975); Future Corruption (anth 1975); The Gifts of Asti
(anth 1975); In the Wake of Man (anth 1975); Tomorrow: New Worlds of
Science Fiction (anth 1975); The 50-Meter Monsters and Other Horrors (anth
1976); Visions of Tomorrow (anth 1976); Futurelove (anth 1977) ed anon,
perhaps because it dealt in part with sexual matters; A World Named
Cleopatra (anth 1977); Spine-Chillers: Unforgettable Tales of Terror (anth
1978) with Howard GOLDSMITHFor younger children (ed anon): The Graduated
Robot (anth 1973 chap); Adrift in Space (anth 1974 chap); Journey to
Another Star (anth 1974 chap); The Killer Plants (anth 1974 chap); The
Mind Angel (anth 1974 chap); The Missing World (anth 1974 chap); Night of
the Sphinx and Other Stories (anth 1974 chap); The Tunnel (anth 1974
chap).See also: CHILDREN IN SF; COMICS; SHARED WORLDS; TABOOS; THEATRE.
ELY, DAVID
Working name of US journalist and writer David Eli Lilienthal (1927- ),
perhaps best known for such psychological thrillers as The Tour(1967).
Some of the stories in Time Out (coll 1968) contain fantasy elements. His
first sf novel, Seconds (1963), had some initial success and was made into
the John FRANKENHEIMER film SECONDS (1966), financed by and starring Rock
Hudson (1925-1985). Both book and film revolve around an organization
which transforms middle-aged men into young, Rock-Hudson-like he-men. At
first the change is exciting, but soon the nightmares start. The
protagonist of DE's second sf novel, A Journal of the Flood Year (1992),
discovers that a huge wall designed to reclaim part of the American
continental shelf from the Atlantic has begun to leak, but the rigidly
stratified world, of which the wall is a potently rendered symbol,
attempts to block any awareness of the oncoming and inevitable DISASTER.
[JC]See also: PSYCHOLOGY.
EMBRYO
Film (1976). Cine Artists. Dir Ralph Nelson, starring Rock Hudson, Diane
Ladd, Barbara Carrera, Roddy McDowall. Screenplay Anita Doohan, Jack W.
Thomas, based on a story by Thomas. 105 mins. Colour.In this variation on
the FRANKENSTEIN theme, a scientist (Hudson), while experimenting on a
premature foetus with a growth hormone, creates in weeks a fully developed
25-year-old woman (Carrera). She has a virtually blank mind, and the
scientist, like Pygmalion, moulds her personality and introduces her into
society. The result is an intelligent but morally crippled creature whom
he ultimately destroys. Despite its modern hardware, the film is really a
reworking of the old GOTHIC theme - as in the German silent films
HOMUNCULUS (1916) and ALRAUNE (1928) - about the basic evil of beings who
are created by unnatural means and are therefore without souls. It is not
a good film. The novelization is Embryo * (1976) by Louis CHARBONNEAU.
[JB/PN]

EMECHETA, (FLORENCE ONYE) BUCHI
(1944- ) Nigerian-born writer, in the UK from 1962, author of a number of
semi-autobiographical novels which vividly describe the lives of African
women in the industrial UK during the years of its decline. The Rape of
Shavi (1983), set in the NEAR FUTURE, describes the effect upon the
African country of Shavi when a horde of refugees from a European nuclear
HOLOCAUST descends like locusts. Kehinde (1994) is a fantasy. [JC]
EMERSON, WILLIS GEORGE
(1856-1918) US writer, mostly of Westerns, whose lost-race ( LOST WORLDS)
novel The Smoky God, or A Voyage to the Inner World (1908) is set in a
HOLLOW-EARTH Eden, on the John Cleves SYMMES model, where a race of
long-lived giants worships the interior sun.[JC]
EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, THE
Film (1980). Lucasfilm/20th Century-Fox. Executive prod George LUCAS. Dir
Irvin Kershner, starring Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Billy
Dee Williams, Frank Oz. Screenplay Leigh BRACKETT, Lawrence Kasdan, based
on a story by Lucas. 124 mins. Colour.A first viewing of this blockbuster
sequel to STAR WARS (1977) sweeps the viewer along with the colour and
spectacle of its various space-opera venues: frozen and swampy planets,
hide-and-seek among asteroids, and a climax in the sky station of Cloud
City. A repeated screening reveals its weakly episodic nature, where
heroic freedom fighters struggle repetitively against the Galactic Empire.
Luke Skywalker (Hamill) is coached in spiritual control by a green puppet,
Yoda, operated by Frank Oz of tv's Muppets, in a sequence more banal than
metaphysical. After too much pointless action and not enough character
exploration, a genuine mythic (and Freudian) charge is belatedly evoked
when evil Darth Vader reveals himself during a duel with good Luke to be
his father, and in one or two scenes we are allowed to recognize in Luke a
potential for harm, lending the film a much needed moral complexity.
Brackett was dying of cancer as she drafted the script (she received a
posthumous HUGO for it), which was heavily revised by Kasdan, but
nevertheless and despite its faults TESB retains distant echoes of the
florid and witty grandeur of her own SPACE OPERAS. The Star Wars trilogy
was completed with The RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983). A book about the film is
Once Upon a Galaxy: A Journal of the Making of The Empire Strikes Back
(1980) by Alan Arnold (1922- ). The novelization is The Empire Strikes
Back * (1980) by Donald F. GLUT. [PN]
EMSH, ED
Ed EMSHWILLER.
EMSHWILLER, CAROL (FRIES)
(1921- ) US writer who began to publish sf with "This Thing Called Love"
for Future in 1955. She was married from 1949 to Ed EMSHWILLER, with whom
she occasionally collaborated; but from the beginning of her career the
razor-sharp exactness of her language and the subversive power of the
themes she expressed with such dangerous precision have marked her as a
unique voice. Though she published much of her early work in FSF, and
later in Damon KNIGHT's ORBIT and similar anthologies, she has never been
identified as a GENRE-SF writer. Her language is too much in the

foreground for that; and the unrelenting clarity with which she
deconstructs the narrative and thematic conventions central to the genre (
FABULATION) has disqualified almost all of her stories from being read
simply as tales. In her hands, sf conventions become models of our deep
estrangement from ourselves (especially women; WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN
SCIENCE FICTION) and from the world. Early stories can be found in Joy in
Our Cause (coll 1974). Verging on the Pertinent (coll 1989) assembles
corrosively elegant non-genre work. THE START OF THE END OF IT ALL (coll
1990 UK; rev 1991 US) collects stories as close to sf or fantasy as she is
likely to compose. CE's first novel, Carmen Dog (1988 UK), is a FEMINIST
fable which draws obvious but very deftly pointed lessons from the
transformation of women into dogs and dogs into women. [JC]Other works:
Venus Rising (1992 chap).
EMSHWILLER, ED
Working name of US illustrator and film-maker Edmund Alexander Emshwiller
(1925-1990); he often signed his sf artwork "Emsh". He studied art at the
University of Michigan, the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, and the Art
Students League in New York. Astonishingly prolific, Emsh did cover and
interior art, beginning with Gal in 1951, for more than two dozen
magazines including AMZ, FSF (which he dominated through the 1950s) and
Startling Stories, along with hundreds of book covers, both hardback and
paperback; his work for ACE BOOKS alone would have made his reputation. He
and Frank Kelly FREAS were the undisputed rulers of the sf-art realm
during the 1950s and early 1960s, and among the few sf artists of the time
able to make a decent living from their work. EE shared the first HUGO for
Best Cover Artist with Hannes BOK in 1953; he won further Hugos in 1960,
1961, 1962 and 1964; the only other cover artists to win Hugos in that
period were Freas and Roy G. KRENKEL.EE also painted abstract
expressionist canvases for gallery exhibition and worked in experimental
16mm movie-making. Dance Chromatic (1959), his first film, and Thanatopsis
(1962) are still remembered. He turned to full time moviemaking in 1964,
thereafter doing only occasional sf artwork as a favour to friends. His
38min Relativity (1966) is regarded by many critics as one of the greatest
short films ever made. This second career was notably distinguished, the
Museum of Modern Art being one of many bodies to recognize its importance.
In 1971 he began working with videotape, then a very new medium; and he
was artist-in-residence at the Television Laboratory, WNET/13 in New York,
winning yet more awards. He later (1981-6) became provost of the School of
Film and Video at the California Institute of the Arts. EE was married to
Carol EMSHWILLER.As an sf artist, EE worked fast and skilfully, seeming
equally at home in every sf illustrative mode, whether dramatic, symbolic
or humorous. His style was vigorous but polished-seeming, though his
actual lines (especially in interior artwork) tended to be rough, assured
and full of character. While there is no denying his talent, he may have
worked too speedily: from the perspective of the 1990s, little of his sf
artwork seems especially memorable, and nobody then or now seems to have
bothered to produce a book of his work. But in the 1950s he represented a
definite step up from the colourful crudeness of most ILLUSTRATION for the
PULP MAGAZINES. [JG/PN]See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; GALAXY
SCIENCE FICTION.

EMTSEV, MIKHAIL (TIKHONOVICH)
(1930- ) Russian scientist and writer whose most significant work has
been accomplished in collaboration with Eremei PARNOV, also a trained
scientist. They began their career with HARD-SF stories in 1961,
publishing titles like Uravneniie s Blednogo Neptuna (coll 1964; title
story trans Helen Saltz Jacobson as "The Pale Neptune Equation" in New
Soviet Sf, anth 1979 US), Padeniie Sverkhnovoi ["The Fall of the
Supernova"] (1964), Zelenaia Krevetka ["The Green Shrimp"] (1965), Tri
Kvarka ["Three Quarks"] (1969) and others. "'Vozvratite Liubov'!" (1966;
trans Arthur Shkarovsky as "Bring Back Love" in Everything but Love anth
1973 Russia) was a remarkable first (and accurate) prediction of the
neutron bomb. In More Diraka ["The Dirac Sea"] (1967) the scientist's
moral responsibility is discussed, while Dusha Mira (1964; trans Antonina
W. Bouis as World Soul 1978 US) combines Frankensteinian horrors with
detailed speculation on the collective consciousness. Their most
sophisticated novel, Klotchia T'my Na Igle Vremeni ["Turfs of Darkness on
the Needle of Time"] (1970), is a TIME-TRAVEL fantasy with, as
protagonist, a historian engaged in the study of all "reincarnations" of
fascism through the ages. EP and Parnov discontinued their partnership in
1970. [VG]See also: HIVE-MINDS.
ENCINO MAN
Film (1992; vt California Man). Hollywood Pictures/Touchwood Pacific
Partners I/Warner Bros. Prod George Zaloom, dir Les Mayfield, starring
Sean Astin, Brendan Fraser and Pauly Shore. Screenplay Shawn Schepps,
based on a story by Schepps and Zaloom. 88 mins. Colour.Limp version of
the old story of the caveman who is dug up and resuscitated, as previously
seen in TROG (1970), SCHLOCK (1973) and ICEMAN (1984) among others; see
also APES AND CAVEMEN. This made-for-teenagers movie, clearly calculated
to appeal to the same audience as that for BILL ?
ADVENTURE (1989) and Wayne's World(1992), portrays two high-school nerds
who dig up a frozen cave man (Fraser) after an earthquake disturbs the
soil in a swimming-pool excavation, thaw him, and enrol him at their
school (after a wash and haircut) as a "Lithuanian" friend. The cave man's
simple high spirits win him many friends, and the high-school hard man is
publicly humiliated by him. The film's various attempts at satire are
uninventive. The second nerd (Shore), however, is always amusing, largely
because of the vigour of his esoteric teen vocabulary. [PN]
ENCOUNTER AT RAVEN'S GATE
INCIDENT AT RAVEN'S GATE.
ENDANGERED SPECIES
Film (1982) Alive Enterprises/MGM-UA. Dir Alan Rudolph, starring Robert
Urich, JoBeth Williams, Paul Dooley, Hoyt Axton, Peter Coyote. Screenplay
Rudolph, John Binder, from a story by Judson Klinger, Richard Woods. 92
mins. Colour.This exploitation movie, made in the wake of sensationalist
reports emerging from rural areas of the US Midwest about mutilated
cattle, features a vacationing New York detective (Urich) uneasily teaming
with a local woman sheriff in Colorado (Williams), first to investigate
dead cattle falling from the sky and later to probe the roles of local

conservative extremists and a paramilitary group. The explanation is
nerve-gas testing, part of a rightwing conspiracy with implied official
backing. This is a post-Watergate PARANOIA movie made by a well regarded
director who did rather better in other films. [PN]
END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE, THE
KONEC SRPNA V HOTELU OZON.
END OF THE WORLD
Together with UTOPIAS and cautionary tales, apocalyptic visions form one
of the three principal traditions of pre-20th-century futuristic fantasy.
Visions inspired by the religious imagination go back into antiquity (
MYTHOLOGY; RELIGION), but the influence of the scientific imagination did
not make itself felt in literature until the late 19th century, and the
end-of-the-world theme maintained many of its religious overtones until
very recently. The phrase itself has become looser in meaning; once the
Comte du Buffon (1707-1788) had in Epochs of Nature (1780) popularized the
notion that a whole series of "worlds" had occupied the Earth's surface,
the finality of any particular end of the world became dubious. A wide
spectrum, within which no firm dividing line can be drawn, extends from
authentically apocalyptic visions to accounts of large-scale DISASTER; it
would therefore be over-pedantic in this discussion to construe "world" as
"planet".The earliest SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES of world's end were the products
of Romanticism: the anti-progressive The Last Man, or Omegarus and Syderia
(1806) by Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville (1746-1805) and Mary
SHELLEY's gloomy Great Plague story The Last Man (1826). Thomas Campbell
(1777-1844) also wrote a poem on the "Last Man" theme, and Thomas Hood
(1799-1845) parodied it. Plagues were to remain one of the standard
literary means of depopulating the world and destroying society, but the
cosmic-disaster story rapidly became a particular favourite of scientific
romance. Edgar Allan POE's "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (1839)
is an early comet-strike story, but many more followed Camille
FLAMMARION's popularization of the idea in various magazine articles of
the 1890s. Notable examples include George GRIFFITH's Olga Romanoff (1894)
and H.G. WELLS's "The Star" (1897). These are NEAR-FUTURE stories, but
FAR-FUTURE stories of the ultimate end of life on Earth began to appear in
the same period. Flammarion's own apocalyptic fantasy La fin du monde
(1893-4; trans as Omega:The Last Days of the World 1897 US) allows the
Earth to survive its brush with a comet, but leaps ahead to describe the
freezing of the world when the Sun cools. Wells did likewise in THE TIME
MACHINE (1895), and Gabriel TARDE's Underground Man (1896; trans 1905)
imagines a much more rapid cooling. A similarly long-range view is taken
in George C. WALLIS's "The Last Days of Earth" (1901). The visionary
sequence in William Hope HODGSON's The House on the Borderland (1908)
makes the death of the Earth a minor incident in a grander scheme - an
implication of irrelevance which is also used with telling effect in J.D.
BERESFORD's "A Negligible Experiment" (1921) and Olaf STAPLEDON's STAR
MAKER (1937).End-of-the-world stories are frequently ambivalent, their
writers often taking delight in contemplation of the destruction of
everything that they hate. Robert CROMIE's The Crack of Doom (1895) - one
of many tales of threatened apocalypses which are aborted in the nick of

time - gives the scientist who wants to put an end to the human story
abundant space to present his case. Wells thought that large-scale
destruction was a necessary prelude to utopian regeneration, and M.P.
SHIEL's The Purple Cloud (1901), in which Earth is depopulated by a cloud
of cyanogen gas, contrives nevertheless to end with a triumphant
affirmation of the progressiveness of EVOLUTION. John DAVIDSON's "The
Salvation of Nature" (1887) is far more cynical, as is James Elroy
FLECKER's "The Last Generation" (1908), in which mankind accepts
extinction voluntarily. 20th-century religious apocalyptic
fantasies-notable among them R.H. BENSON's Lord of the World (1907) - tend
to revel in the expectation that an imminent end of the world will put a
well deserved end to apostasy and decadence. There was a dramatic
resurgence of apocalyptic scientific romance after WWI, among them many
bitter parables arguing that modern men and women thoroughly deserved to
lose all the gifts of civilization because of their stupid inability to
refrain from warfare. Notable examples include Edward SHANKS's The People
of the Ruins (1920), Cicely HAMILTON's Theodore Savage (1922; rev vt Lest
Ye Die 1928), Neil BELL's The Seventh Bowl (1930 as by Miles), John
GLOAG's Tomorrow's Yesterday (1932) and J. Leslie MITCHELL's Gay Hunter
(1934).In fictions of this subgenre the impending end of the world is
often foreseen (sometimes mistakenly) by the characters involved, and
there are many stories in which those armed with foresight set out to make
what preparations they can (usually derided by their neighbours - but they
laughed at Noah, too). Examples include The Second Deluge (1912) by
Garrett P. SERVISS, Nordenholt's Million (1923) by J.J. CONNINGTON, When
Worlds Collide (1933) by Philip WYLIE and Edwin BALMER and "Ark of Fire"
(1937-8) by John Hawkins. There are many stories in which only a few
people are able to escape atomic war, in shelters, or to escape into space
when the Sun goes nova; examples include Death of a World (1948) by J.
Jefferson FARJEON and One in Three Hundred (1954) by J.T. MCINTOSH. A more
subtle version explores the effect on various characters of the knowledge
(again sometimes mistaken) that the world will end. Early examples are
William MINTO's The Crack of Doom (1886) and Hugh KINGSMILL's "The End of
the World" (1924); more recent ones are "The Last Night of the World"
(1951) by Ray BRADBURY, "The Last Day" (1953) by Richard MATHESON and On
the Beach (1957) by Nevil SHUTE.The early sf PULP MAGAZINES featured
numerous luridly bleak visions of the end of the human race, and of the
Earth itself, including Donald WANDREI's "The Red Brain" (1927), Amelia
Long's "Omega" (1932) and L.H. Morrow's "Omega - The Man" (1933), but such
stories appeared alongside others which were confident that mankind could
outlast the Earth, if necessary, and need not be unduly troubled by the
prospect of its end - a notion rarely met outside the magazines, although
a notable exception is J.B.S. HALDANE's "The Last Judgment" (1927).
Humanity lives on beyond the death of Earth in John W. CAMPBELL Jr's
"Voice of the Void" (1930) and Arthur C. CLARKE's supremely smug "Rescue
Party" (1946) - but Campbell also wrote stories in which mankind became
extinct and Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God" (1953) makes an
apocalyptic joke out of the smugness of Western Man. The theme continued
to evoke mixed emotions no matter what new twists were given to it. Edmond
HAMILTON's "Requiem" (1962) is a poignant story which regrets the
commercial exploitation of the Earth's death as a spectacular tv show for

a Galaxy-wide audience.The idea that we might easily destroy ourselves and
our world as our WEAPONS of war become ever more powerful gained ground
steadily throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The atomic bomb in H.G. Wells's
The World Set Free (1914) is fairly feeble, but the one in Harold
NICOLSON's Public Faces (1932) is more like the real thing. The "ultimate
deterrent" or "Doomsday weapon" was introduced (and used) in The Last Man
(1940; vt No Other Man) by Alfred NOYES. Such anxiety became extreme in
Alfred BESTER's "Adam and No Eve" (1941), in which atomic destruction
requires evolution to begin all over again in the sea. After Hiroshima the
possibility of imminent atomic holocaust was clear to everyone, and lent
new pertinence to apocalyptic thinking. It seemed entirely likely that the
world would end with a bang and not a whimper after all, despite the broad
sexual pun in the title of Damon KNIGHT's last-man-meets-last-woman story,
"Not with a Bang" (1950). Notable examples of atomic- HOLOCAUST stories
include Shadow on the Hearth (1950) by Judith MERRIL, The Long Loud
Silence (1952) by Wilson TUCKER and Level 7 (1959) by Mordecai ROSHWALD.
The depth of the anxiety is perhaps better reflected by SATIRES and black
comedies than by earnest speculation; notable examples of bitterly ironic
apocalypses include Ward MOORE's Greener than You Think (1947), L. Sprague
DE CAMP's "Judgment Day" (1955), Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's Cat's Cradle (1963)
and Peter GEORGE's Dr Strangelove (1963). Fritz LEIBER's ironically
despairing vignettes, including "A Pail of Air" (1951), "The Moon is
Green" (1952) and "A Bad Day for Sales" (1953), are particularly effective
in combining poignancy with irony. The urgency of the anxiety is reflected
also in bleakly downbeat stories whose nihilistic temper is most unusual
for a pulp-descended genre; examples include Robert A. HEINLEIN's "Year of
the Jackpot" (1952), E.C. TUBB's "Tomorrow" (1954) and Robert SILVERBERG's
"Road to Nightfall" (1958). The post-WWII decade also produced sf's
boldest novel about the end of the Universe: James BLISH's The Triumph of
Time (1958; vt A Clash of Cymbals).This pattern of ironic despair, bitter
satire and grimly pessimistic "realism" extended into the 1960s and 1970s,
when many more causes for the sense of imminent doom were popularized,
including OVERPOPULATION and POLLUTION. Notable apocalyptic black comedies
from this period include The Genocides (1965) by Thomas M. DISCH and "The
Big Flash" (1969) by Norman SPINRAD. "When We Went to See the End of the
World" (1972) by Robert Silverberg is more slickly ironic. A savage sense
of despair is evident in "We All Die Naked" (1969) by James Blish and in
The End of the Dream (1972) by Philip Wylie. A note of ironic innovation
was struck by Poul ANDERSON's After Doomsday (1962), the first ever
whodunnit in which the Earth itself is the murder victim; equally ironic
in its own way is the ingenious "Inconstant Moon" (1971) by Larry NIVEN,
in which a sudden increase in the Moon's brightness reveals to those who
can deduce its meaning that the Sun has gone nova and that dawn will bring
destruction.The increasing familiarity and plausibility of the idea of an
imminent apocalypse has promoted the production of surreal apocalyptic
visions both inside and outside the genre. Examples include the title
story of Up and Out (coll 1957) by John Cowper POWYS, Ice (1967) by Anna
KAVAN, both stories in Apocalypses (coll 1977) by R.A. LAFFERTY, God's
Grace (1982) by Bernard MALAMUD and Galapagos (1985) by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
A similar spirit is detectable in those CYBERPUNK stories which use the
obliteration or radical metamorphosis of Earthly civilization almost as a

throwaway idea; examples include Bruce STERLING's SCHISMATRIX (1985) and
Michael SWANWICK's Vacuum Flowers (1987). The end of the Universe is
similarly relegated to throwaway status in Charles SHEFFIELD's Between the
Strokes of Night (1985). An authentic emotional depth is, however,
conserved by such poignantly bitter accounts as Hilbert SCHENCK's A ROSE
FOR ARMAGEDDON (1982), Frederik POHL's "Fermi and Frost" (1985) and James
K. MORROW's heart-rending THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS (1986).The end of
the Cold War may soothe anxieties about nuclear war, and the anticipated
hysteria which forms the basis of such sardonic millenarian fantasies as
Russell M. GRIFFIN's Century's End (1981) and John KESSEL's GOOD NEWS FROM
OUTER SPACE (1989) is not to be taken seriously, but there has recently
been a boom in cosmic-disaster stories occasioned by the fashionability of
the celebrated question: "If we're not alone in the Universe, where are
they?" Apocalyptic "explanations" of this presumed enigma include Across
the Sea of Suns (1984) by Gregory BENFORD and The Forge of God (1987) by
Greg BEAR.A theme anthology is The End of the World (anth 1956) ed Donald
A. WOLLHEIM. A notable collection of essays on apocalyptic literature is
The End of the World (anth 1983) ed Eric S. RABKIN, Martin H. GREENBERG
and Joseph D. OLANDER. [BS]See also: ENTROPY; FAR FUTURE.
END OF THE WORLD
Film. PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!
END OF THE WORLD, THE
Film. La FIN DU MONDE.
ENDORE, S(AMUEL) GUY
(1901-1970) US writer and translator, some of whose realistic FANTASY
novels can in a marginal sense be considered as sf ( PSYCHOLOGY). The best
known is The Werewolf of Paris (1933), set in the shambles of 1871 Paris,
where a French soldier is succumbing to lycanthropy; this represents on a
human scale the civic trauma of the body politic as the Commune falls.
Methinks the Lady (1945), a courtroom drama, explains its central female
Jekyll-and-Hyde character in Freudian terms. Though having relatively
little influence on the sf field, SGE was a highly effective purveyor of
sexual fantasies; he did not mince words. He collaborated on the scripts
of the films The DEVIL-DOLL and Mad Love (a version of ORLACS HANDE).
[JC]Other works: The Man from Limbo (1930).See also: GOTHIC SF;
SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
ENEMY FROM SPACE
QUATERMASS II.
ENEMY MINE
Film (1985). Kings Road Entertainment/20th Century-Fox. Dir Wolfgang
Petersen, starring Dennis Quaid, Louis Gossett Jr. Screenplay Edward
Khmara, based on Enemy Mine (1979 IASFM; 1989 chap dos) by Barry B.
LONGYEAR. 108 mins, cut to 93 mins. Colour.During a space battle between
humans and the reptilian (and hermaphroditic) Dracs, two pilots, one from
each species, crashland on an inimical planet. The human (Quaid) and the
Drac (Gossett) first try to kill one another, but soon reach an uneasy
rapprochement, which warms into mutual respect and affection. When the
Drac dies giving birth, the man raises the infant. It is later captured by

illegal slaver/miners, its adoptive father being left for dead. However,
he returns with assistance, the miners are defeated, and the child is
saved. This uneven film works quite well on the intimate level, with
excellent small moments of culture clash and mutual education; Gosset's
performance is memorably good. On the larger scale, the effects creating
the planetary surface and, at the end, the Drac planet are striking. But
the film's earnest liberalism is both preachy and slickly sentimental,
with too many scenes designed to evoke tearful, kneejerk responses; and
overall it seems more selfconscious than the much earlier ROBINSON CRUSOE
ON MARS (1964), the Crusoe-Friday parts of which its plot somewhat
resembles. The novelization is Enemy Mine * (1985) by Barry B. Longyear
and David GERROLD. [PN]See also: CINEMA.
ENERGY
COSMOLOGY; ENTROPY; NUCLEAR POWER; POWER SOURCES; PHYSICS; SUN.
ENGDAHL, SYLVIA LOUISE
(1933- ) US writer, employed in the field of computer programming
1957-67. Her novels, though marketed as juveniles, appeal as well to
adults for their intelligence and humanity. Enchantress from the Stars
(1970) and its sequel The Far Side of Evil (1971) are perhaps her
best-known works. The first describes, with suggestive analogues between
traditional and technological versions of crucial events (to a savage, all
technology is MAGIC), the early career of Elena, who is in the
Anthropological Service and must protect the "primitive" culture of one
planet from a technologically more advanced culture from a neighbouring
world. The second continues her career on another planet, which SLE
describes as a totalitarian DYSTOPIA. A second series consists of This
Star Shall Abide (1972; vt Heritage of the Star 1973 UK), Beyond the
Tomorrow Mountains (1973) and The Doors of the Universe (1981). The
societal design in these books, set on a planet with an imposed RELIGION,
takes, not unusually, the shape of a pyramid, with benign but hidden
representatives of an alien race ruling the world; more surprising is
SLE's refusal to dismantle - after the time-honoured pattern - this
hierarchy. [JC/PN]Other works: Journey Between Worlds (1970).As Editor:
The Universe Ahead: Stories of the Future (anth 1975) with Rick Roberson;
Anywhere, Anywhere: Stories of Tomorrow (anth 1976).Nonfiction: The
Planet-Girded Suns: Man's View of the Other Solar Systems (1974); The
Subnuclear Zoo: New Discoveries in High Energy Physics (1977) with Rick
Roberson.See also: CHILDREN'S SF.
ENGEL, LEONARD
(1916-1964) US author, with Emanuel S. PILLER, of one of the very first
Cold War dreadful-warning nuclear- WAR novels, The World Aflame: The
Russian-American War of 1950 (1947), in which the USA's monopoly of the
A-bomb - and use of it in a first strike - proves insufficient to crush
the Red hordes; a despairing humaneness invests the final pages. LE also
edited a nonfiction anthology, New Worlds of Modern Science (anth 1956).
[JC]
ENGEL, LYLE KENYON
(1915-1986) Canadian editor, book packager and writer; he edited UNCANNY

TALES 1940-43 in Canada, and SPACE SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE and Tales of
the Frightened in 1957. He also produced the Richard Blade
SWORD-AND-SORCERY sequence, writing an unknown number of the titles under
the house name Jeffrey Lord (most were by Roland J. GREEN). Through his
packaging firm, Book Creations Inc., LKE created the Kent Family
Chronicles, which made their author, John JAKES, famous. [JC]
ENGELHARDT, FREDERICK
[s] L. Ron HUBBARD.
ENGH, M(ARY) J(ANE)
(1933- ) US librarian and writer whose first sf novel, ARSLAN (1976; vt A
Wind from Bukhara 1979 UK), established a strong underground reputation in
its first incarnation as a paperback original; a hardbound edition has
since been released. Arslan, a young warlord from NEAR-FUTURE Turkestan,
has enigmatically conquered both the USA and the USSR. He personally
occupies the small Illinois town of Kraftsville, mentally and physically
seducing a teenage boy while at the same time driving the book's
protagonist into a state of powerful ambivalence about the cunning rape of
his land. The book is subtle, seductive and very frightening. The House in
the Snow (1987) is a juvenile of marginal interest. Wheel of the Winds
(1988), a complex tale set on an alien planet and told from an alien
perspective, perhaps inevitably lacks the hypnotic grip of ARSLAN, but the
deadpan narrative "face" of this superficially cold novel conceals layers
of passion. The main CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGHS offered by the novel will be
those experienced by the reader. Rainbow Man (1993) incorporates a sharp
SATIRE on RELIGION into a tale whose star-hopping female protagonist
displays an implausible and incorrigible innocence in the face of
extremely clear warnings; but in the end does manage to escape the
fundamentalist planet. [JC]
ENGINEERING
DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; MACHINES; TECHNOLOGY; TRANSPORTATION.
ENGLAND, GEORGE ALLAN
(1877-1936) US explorer and author of, inter alia, 5 sf novels and over a
dozen magazine serials and short stories from 1905 on; these appeared
predominantly in Frank A. MUNSEY's magazines, where he was one of the more
popular writers of the pre-1926 period, ranking as the closest rival in sf
to Edgar Rice BURROUGHS. His stories were occasionally derivative: his
serial "The House of Transformation" (1909) and his short story "The Thing
from - Outside" (1923) are reminiscent of, respectively, H.G. WELLS's The
Island of Dr Moreau (1896) and Algernon BLACKWOOD's "The Willows"
(1907).Several themes recur in his writings. IMMORTALITY and the elixir of
youth appear in his LOST-WORLD serial "Beyond White Seas" (1909-10) and in
another serial, "The Elixir of Hate" (1911), which presents more
sophisticated characterization and ethical analysis than appears elsewhere
in his PULP-MAGAZINE work. Socialist thought, in the mode of Jack LONDON,
shapes the anticapitalist stances of The Air Trust (1915) and The Golden
Blight (1912 Cavalier; 1916); the first centres on a monopoly on air, the
second on a ray that temporarily changes gold to ash. The latter has
strong racist overtones, as does his most popular work, a long post-

HOLOCAUST novel set in a devastated USA about 1000 years hence, Darkness
and Dawn (1912-13 Cavalier as 3 separate serials, "Darkness and Dawn",
"Beyond the Great Oblivion" and "The Afterglow"; fixup 1914; rev in 5 vols
as Darkness and Dawn 1964, Beyond the Great Oblivion 1965, The People of
the Abyss 1966, Out of the Abyss 1967, and The Afterglow 1967).Other works
of interest include "The Empire of the Air" (1914), a serialized novel of
INVASION by immaterial beings from the fourth DIMENSION, and "June 6,
2016" (1916), a short story with elaborate future gadgetry and a feminist
twist. The Flying Legion (1920) is a heist story of the NEAR FUTURE
involving advanced weaponry and the theft from Mecca of Islam's most
sacred relic. "The Fatal Gift" (1915), a serial, deals with the production
of a superwoman by plastic surgery. Lesser works are: "The Time Reflector"
(1905), about an invention for viewing the past; "A Message from the Moon"
(1907), in which advertising matter is projected onto the Moon; "My Time
Annihilator" (1909), ostensibly about TIME TRAVEL to the past but really
about madness; "He of the Glass Heart" (1911), featuring an artificial
heart; and "Drops of Death" (1922), a scientific detective story. "The
Tenth Question" (1916), a mathematical puzzle story ( MATHEMATICS), was
later rewritten by Stanley G. WEINBAUM as "Brink of Infinity" (1936).
[JE/EFB]Other works: Keep Off the Grass (1919).See also: CITIES;
DEVOLUTION; DISASTER; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; DYSTOPIAS; EVOLUTION;
HISTORY OF SF; INVISIBILITY; MONEY; MONSTERS; POLITICS; VILLAINS.
ENGLAND, JAMES
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
ENGLING, RICHARD (DAVID GEORGE PATRICK)
(1952- ) US writer whose NEAR-FUTURE sf novel, Body Mortgage (1989),
tells in a CYBERPUNK idiom the tale of a Chicago private eye on the track
of a body-parts scam in the immediate run-up to the millennium. RE's
obvious competence would show more clearly, perhaps, in a more fully
original setting. [JC]See also: MEDICINE.
ENGLISH, CHARLES
[s] Charles NUETZEL.
ENSTROM, ROBERT (WILLIAM)
(1946- ) US industrial chemist and writer whose first novel, Encounter
Program (1977), attempts to deal with a late-century sf problem - how to
cope with ALIENS when we encounter them - in the language of SPACE OPERAS
published 50 years earlier, when the problem was easier to solve. Beta
Colony (1980) commits similar errors of register. [JC]
ENTON, HARRY
[r] DIME-NOVEL SF; FRANK READE LIBRARY; "NONAME".
ENTROPY
In its strict meaning, "entropy" is a thermodynamics term, first used by
the German physicist Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888) in 1850 to describe the
amount of heat that must be put into a closed system to bring it to a
given state. The Second Law of Thermodynamics - often stated in terms of
work as "it is impossible to produce work by transferring heat from a cold
body to a hot body in any self-sustaining process" - can alternatively be

rendered: "Entropy always increases in any closed system not in
equilibrium, and remains constant for a system that is in equilibrium."To
put it less technically: whenever there is a flow of energy some is always
lost as low-level heat. For example, in a steam engine, the friction of
the piston is manifested in non-useful heat, and hence some of the energy
put into it is not turned into work. There is no such thing as a
friction-free system, and for that reason no such thing as a perfect
machine. Entropy is a measure of this loss. In a broader sense we can
refer to entropy as a measure of the order of a system: the higher the
entropy, the lower the order. There is more energy, for example, tied up
in complex molecules than in simple ones (they are more "ordered"); the
Second Law can therefore be loosely rephrased as "systems tend to become
less complex". Heat flows, so ultimately everything will tend to stabilize
at the same temperature. When this happens to literally everything - in
what is often called the heat-death of the Universe - entropy will have
reached its maximum, with no order left, total randomness, no life, the
end. (There is, however, an argument about whether the concept of entropy
can properly be related to the Universe as a whole.) Of course, the amount
of usable energy in the Universe, primarily supplied by the stars, is
unimaginably huge, and the heat-death of the Universe is billions of years
away. Isaac ASIMOV's amusing "The Last Question" (1956) has a
supercomputer, which for aeons has been worrying about the heat-death,
reversing entropy at the last possible moment. The scientist Freeman
DYSON, in "Time Without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe"
(Review of Modern Physics July 1979), confronts the same question with a
similar optimism and, one must assume, rather better mathematics. Local
images of entropy, like the huge red Sun at the end of H.G. WELLS's THE
TIME MACHINE (1895), long antedate the general use of the word; indeed,
dying-Earth stories generally ( END OF THE WORLD) can be seen as entropy
stories, both literally and metaphorically.Although "entropy" has been a
technical term for a long time, it is only since the early 1960s that it
has, in its extended meaning, become a fashionable concept (although the
word sometimes popped up in sf earlier, as in House of Entropy [1953] by
H.J. CAMPBELL as Roy SHELDON). Since the 1960s, to the annoyance of some
scientifically minded people, the extended concept of increasing entropy
includes holes wearing in socks, refrigerators breaking down, coalminers
going on strike, and death. These are indeed all examples of increasing
disorder in a technical though not necessarily a moral sense. Life itself
is a highly ordered state, and in its very existence is an example of
negative entropy (negentropy). It is as if, though the Universe is running
down, there are whirlpools of local activity where things are winding up.
All forms of information, whether in the form of the DNA code or the
contents of this encyclopedia, can be seen as examples of negentropy. It
is natural, then, that a popular variant on the entropy story is the
DEVOLUTION story.Entropy has become a potent metaphor. It is uncertain who
first introduced the term into sf, but it is likely that Philip K. DICK,
who makes much of the concept in nearly all his work, was the first to
popularize it. He spells it out in DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?
(1968), where entropy, or increasing disorder, is imaged as "kipple":
"Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use
the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's

around, kipple reproduces itself . . . the entire universe is moving
towards a final state of total, absolute kippleization."It was, however,
in NEW-WAVE writing, especially that associated with the magazine NEW
WORLDS, that the concept of entropy made its greatest inroads into sf.
J.G. BALLARD has used it a great deal, and did so as early as "The Voices
of Time" (1960), in which a count-down to the end of the Universe is
accompanied by more localized entropic happenings, including the
increasing sleepiness of the protagonist. Pamela ZOLINE's "The Heat Death
of the Universe" (1967), about the life of a housewife, is often quoted as
an example of the metaphoric use of entropy. Another example is "Running
Down" (1975) by M. John HARRISON, whose protagonist, a shabby man who
perishes in earthquake and storm, "carried his own entropy around with
him". The concept appears in the work of Thomas M. DISCH, Barry N.
MALZBERG, Robert SILVERBERG, Norman SPINRAD and James TIPTREE Jr as a
leitmotiv, and also in nearly all the work of Brian W. ALDISS, which
typically displays a tension between entropy and negentropy, between
fecundity and life on the one hand, stasis, decay and death on the other.
Outside GENRE SF, Thomas PYNCHON has used images of entropy many times,
especially in GRAVITY'S RAINBOW (1973). George Alec EFFINGER's What
Entropy Means to Me (1972) is not in fact a hardcore entropy story at all
(apart from a tendency for things to go wrong), but Robert Silverberg's
"In Entropy's Jaws" (1971) is a real entropy story and a fine one,
exploring the metaphysics of the subject with care. Although it was in the
1960s and 1970s that the entropy-story peaked, the image is still used, as
in Dan SIMMONS's Entropy's Bed at Midnight (1990 chap).Colin GREENLAND
once wrote a critical book called The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock
and the UK "New Wave" (1983), and it is indeed Moorcock who has perhaps
made more complex use of entropy and negentropy than any other sf writer,
and not just in The Entropy Tango (fixup 1981); the two concepts run right
through his Dancers at the End of Time and Jerry Cornelius sequences.
Jerry Cornelius seems for a long time proof against entropy, and keeps
slipping into alternate realities as if in hope of finding one whose
vitality outlives its decay, but like a Typhoid Mary he carries the plague
of entropy with him, and ultimately, especially after the death of his
formidably vital and vulgar mother, succumbs to it himself, becoming
touchingly more human, though diminished.In all of these works, entropy is
a symbol or metaphor through which the fate of the macrocosm, the
Universe, can be linked to the fate of societies and of the individual - a
very proper subject for sf. Negentropy versus entropy is usually seen as
an unequal battle, David against Goliath, but sickness, sorrow, rusting,
cooling and death contrive to be held at bay, locally and occasionally, by
passion and movement and love. Looked at from this perspective, entropy is
one of the oldest themes in literature, the central concern, for example,
of Shakespeare, Donne, Milton and - especially - Charles DICKENS. [PN]
ERDMAN, PAUL E(MIL)
(1932- ) Canadian writer, formerly consulting economist to the European
Coal and Steel Community and a senior banker in Switzerland. Some of his
thrillers are genuine NEAR-FUTURE sf of an interesting kind. Sf writers
usually imagine future changes that are technological or political, seldom
ECONOMIC. Like the CYBERPUNK authors, though more "bestseller" than

cyberpunk in style, PEE recognizes the supra-national importance of giant
cartels in the world of tomorrow (and today). His thrillers involve the
manipulation of financial institutions; they portray a financial world of
frightening instability in which economic collapse followed by global
disorder and war could be catalysed by the actions of only a few
unscrupulous persons. After the success of The Billion Dollar Killing
(1973) and The Silver Bears (1974), both set more or less in the present,
PEE wrote three NEAR-FUTURE novels: The Crash of '79 (1976), The Last Days
of America (1981) and The Panic of '89 (1986), in each of which world
catastrophe is only a year or two ahead. In the first, oil money
destabilizes the US banking system and then the world's, and there are
prophetic observations about Iran. [PN]Other works: The Palace (1987).See
also: HISTORY OF SF.
ERICKSON, STEVE
Working name of US writer Stephen Michael Erickson (1950- ), active as a
journalist for some years before his first novel, Days Between Stations
(1985), quickly established his reputation as an author of dark,
journey-haunted, surreal FABULATIONS about the USA and the 20th century.
Labyrinthine figurations of apocalypse dominate his grey and hyperbolic
landscapes; but a powerful sense of geography, notable also in the first
Surrealists, gives each of his novels a local habitation. Days Between
Stations, set mainly on an allegorically split river, features the
attempts of two sensually linked people to make sense of their pasts;
Rubicon Beach (1986) is a more specific allegory of the USA, as are Tours
of the Black Clock (1989) and the semidocumentary Leap Year (1989). Arc
d'X (1993) traces the consequences of the relationship between Thomas
Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a black slave who becomes his mistress,
through a variety of ALTERNATE WORLDS, at least one of which is described
through scenes set in 1999. Although sf instruments sometime protrude
through the texture of these tales, they are in no telling sense works of
genre. [JC]
ERIKSEN, INGE
[r] DENMARK.
ERMAN, JACQUES DeFOREST
[s] Forrest J. ACKERMAN.
ERNSBERGER, GEORGE
[r] AVON FANTASY READER.
ERNST, PAUL (FREDERICK)
(1899-1985) US writer, mostly of short fiction for pulp markets,
sometimes under his own name and sometimes (once in Weird Tales) under the
pseudonym Paul Frederick Stern; he should not be confused with the Paul
Ernst (1886-? ) who wrote 1930s detective novels. His first published
story may have been "The Temple of Serpents" for Weird Tales in 1928, and
he remained extremely active throughout the 1930s, writing for sf, fantasy
and hero magazines. In the last capacity, under the house name Kenneth
ROBESON, he was responsible for much of the contents of The Avenger,
writing all 23 novel-length stories for that magazine in 1939, each
featuring The Avenger, a SUPERHERO who fought a wide range of villains;

the Robeson house name had already been made popular by Lester DENT in DOC
SAVAGE MAGAZINE, and it was in an attempt to cash in on the success of the
name that it was offered for PE's use.These tales all appeared in book
form in the 1970s as Justice, Inc * (1972), The Yellow Hoard * (1972), The
Sky Walker * (1972), The Devil's Horns * (1972), The Frosted Death *
(1972), The Blood Ring * (1972), Stockholders in Death * (1972), The Glass
Mountain * (1973), Tuned for Murder * (1973), The Smiling Dogs * (1973),
River of Ice * (1973), The Flame Breathers * (1973), Murder on Wheels *
(1973), Three Gold Crowns * (1973), House of Death * (1973), The Hate
Master * (1973), Nevlo * (1973), Death in Slow Motion* (1973), Pictures of
Death * (1973), The Green Killer * (1974), The Happy Killers * (1974), The
Black Death * (1974), The Wilder Curse * (1974) and Midnight Murder *
(1974), the last being from 1940. (Subsequent The Avenger novels in the
1970s series were originals written by Ron GOULART, also as Robeson.) PE's
Doctor Satan series in Weird Tales is fantasy along conventional
hero-villain lines; five of these stories were reprinted as Dr Satan (coll
1974 chap) ed Robert E. WEINBERG. His sf stories - the first of which were
"The Black Monarch" (1930 Weird Tales) and "Marooned under the Sea" (1930
ASF)-include "The Microscopic Giants" (1936) and "Nothing Happens on the
Moon" (1939). PE was less prolific after the 1930s. [PN/JC]See also:
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.
ERNSTING, WALTER
[r] Clark DARLTON; GERMANY.
ERSKINE, GEORGE
[r] Ian CAMERON.
ERSKINE, THOMAS
(1788-1870) UK writer, mostly of religious texts, whose anonymously
published SATIRES, Armata: A Fragment (1816 or 1817 - the date is
controversial) and The Second Part of Armata(1817) - the two texts are
most commonly found bound together in various printings which are,
however, all dated 1817 - describes a society on another planet rather
similar to Earth and reachable via our South Pole, to which it is
attached. [JC]
ERTZ, SUSAN
(1894-1985) UK popular novelist, active for much of the century, whose
one sf novel, Woman Alive (1935), flips the more usual last-man-alive
theme in a story of the last woman alive, after all other females have
died of a post-war plague in 1985. [JC]
ESCAPE FROM ABSALOM
NO ESCAPE.
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK
Film (1981). Avco Embassy/International Film Investors/Goldcrest. Dir
John CARPENTER, prod Larry Franco and Debra Hill, starring Kurt Russell,
Lee Van Cleef, Donald Pleasence, Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton,
Adrienne Barbeau, Isaac Hayes. Screenplay Carpenter, Nick Castle. 99 mins.
Colour.The idea is wonderful. In 1997 the whole of Manhattan Island is a
penal colony, surrounded by minefields and unscalable walls and inhabited

by criminal scum and crazies. In this inferno lands the US President (a
creepy performance from Pleasence) after a plane crash. War-hero and
criminal Snake Plissken (Russell), implanted with 24-hour-fused explosives
to ensure his voluntary return, is sent in to get the President out.
Looking like an attempt to recapture some of the brilliance of Carpenter's
first major thriller, Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), the film instead
loses itself in routine though colourful macho confrontations; it is a
little reminiscent of the exploitation formula of the MAD MAX sequence,
and is not helped by Russell's inexpressive performance. [PN]
ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES
Film (1971). Apjac/20th Century-Fox. Dir Don Taylor, starring Roddy
McDowall, Kim Hunter, Bradford Dillman, Natalie Trundy, William Windom.
Screenplay Paul Dehn, based on characters created by Pierre BOULLE. 97
mins. Colour.This is the third of the five PLANET OF THE APES films. When
the late UK screenwriter Paul Dehn - author of Quake, Quake, Quake (coll
1961), a series of parody verses, illustrated by Edward Gorey, on the
aftermaths of the nuclear age - had been working on the second ( BENEATH
THE PLANET OF THE APES [1970]) he had been told it would be the last, so
he decided to end the film by destroying the whole world with an atomic
explosion. Four months later he received a telegram from Fox saying: "Apes
exist, sequel required." His ingenious answer was to send three of the
apes by TIME TRAVEL back to before the world exploded. They arrive in the
contemporary USA and immediately become the centre of a violent
controversy which results in their deaths, but not before the female who
featured in the first two films has given birth to a baby ape. This
mixture of SATIRE and action/adventure is much more sentimental than its
hard-edged predecessors, but more entertaining than those that followed.
The novelization is Escape from the Planet of the Apes * (1974) by Jerry
POURNELLE. [JB/PN]
ESCAPE OF MEGAGODZILLA, THE
GOJIRA.
ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN
Alexander KEY.
ESCHATOLOGY
Eschatology is the class of theological doctrine pertaining to death and
the subsequent fate of the soul, and to the ultimate fate of the world.
Stories of the FAR FUTURE and the END OF THE WORLD can be categorized as
eschatological, but are considered separately; this section deals mainly
with the idea of personal survival after death.Ancient Egyptian RELIGION
included an inordinately complex set of eschatological beliefs (explored
in sf in Roger ZELAZNY's Creatures of Light and Darkness [1969]) which
influenced most subsequent eschatologies. Christian eschatology is, of
course, basically dualistic, contrasting Heaven and Hell, but it has
variants which are more complex, incorporating Purgatory and Limbo, and
including an involved demonology. A common strategy employed by sf writers
writing pure FANTASY (as for instance in the magazine UNKNOWN) is to
import a judicious measure of common sense into settings derived from
classical MYTHOLOGY or the Christian demonological schema, usually with

comic results - although unorthodox horror stories sometimes result.The
growth of the SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE in the late 19th century coincided with
the growth of the Spiritualist movement. The Spiritualists popularized an
eroded version of Christian eschatology with some added jargon involving
the "astral plane" and like concepts. Spiritualist beliefs influenced
several early sf writers, including Camille FLAMMARION and Arthur Conan
DOYLE; Doyle's later works - particularly The Land of Mist (1926) and "The
Maracot Deep" (in The Maracot Deep and Other Stories coll 1929) - are
markedly affected. There is an abundance of Spiritualist fiction, but
whether any of this can be considered sf is dubious, despite the
pseudo-scientific endeavours of Johann Zollner (1834-1882), author of
Transcendental Physics (1865), and other psychic theorists. The most
heavily sciencefictionalized of these Spiritualist fantasies is Allen
UPWARD's The Discovery of the Dead (1910), which recounts the revelations
of a "necroscope". An early pulp-sf writer who dabbled in Spiritualist
fiction was Ralph Milne FARLEY, as in Dangerous Love (1931; 1946). More
interesting is David LINDSAY's interstellar fantasy A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS
(1920), which inverts conventional Spiritualist ideas and routine
eschatological aspirations, imagining an intrinsically painful destiny.The
idea that scientists might one day prove the existence of the elusive soul
and build traps for it is featured in Charles B. STILSON's curious
"Liberty or Death!" (1917; vt "The Soul Trap"), and is developed more
ambitiously in The Weigher of Souls (1931) by Andre MAUROIS. Maurois may
have borrowed his inspiration from the fantasy Spirite (1865; trans 1877)
by Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), and his example inspired in its turn
Romain GARY's satirical soul-trapping story The Gasp (1973), in which the
inexhaustible energy of the soul is quickly exploited as an industrial
resource. In all these examples, as in most stories in which people
supposedly trespass on divine prerogatives, no good comes of it all. Nor
does it in Maurice RENARD's Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (1908; trans as
New Bodies for Old 1923 US), when an experiment in metempsychosis ends
with the imprisonment of a person's soul in the engine of a motor car. An
experiment in communication with the dead ends tragically in The Edge of
Running Water (1939; vt The Unquiet Corpse) by William M. SLOANE. A
curious corollary of the conviction that "there are things Man is not
meant to know" is the profusion of afterlife fantasies in which characters
realize only at the story's end that they have been dead since its
beginning; two which transcend the banality of the plot are Ray BRADBURY's
"Pillar of Fire" (1948) and Flann O'BRIEN's The Third Policeman
(1967).C.S. LEWIS's theological fantasy The Great Divorce (1945)
acknowledges that some of the ideas used in formulating its image of
Heaven are borrowed from sf, but sf writers were slow to develop the
hypothesis that future TECHNOLOGY might succeed in securing the life after
death that God and Nature had failed to provide. Robert SHECKLEY's
melodrama of technological REINCARNATION, Immortality Delivered (1958; exp
vt Immortality, Inc. 1959), is an early example which skates lightly over
the experience of disembodied existence and the question of ultimate
destiny. Thomas M. DISCH's ON WINGS OF SONG (1979) features a technology
which grants out-of-body experiences to almost everyone, but Disch is
likewise coy about the possibility of universal life after death. A
similar hesitancy is seen in the many stories which Philip Jose FARMER has

devoted to eschatological matters, including Inside Outside (1964),
Traitor to the Living (1973) and the Riverworld series. More ambitious and
more convincing stories of technological afterlife include Robert
SILVERBERG's "Born with the Dead" (1974), Lisa TUTTLE's "The Hollow Man"
(1979) and Lucius SHEPARD's account of biotechnological zombies, Green
Eyes (1984). Silverberg had earlier written To Live Again (1969) on a less
interesting eschatological theme; here the personas of living persons are
regularly "recorded" so that, after the death of the body, the most recent
recording can be introduced into the mind of a host. Similar recording
processes are featured - without the consequent overcrowding of skulls on
which Silverberg focuses - in other stories of reincarnation, including
John VARLEY's THE OPHIUCHI HOTLINE (1977) and Michael BERLYN's
nasty-minded Crystal Phoenix (1980).Some writers have sciencefictionalized
the Christian notion of the soul, imagining it as an alien symbiont (
PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS) which invests living beings and survives their
deaths. Clifford D. SIMAK, in Time and Again (1951; vt First He Died
1953), makes no attempt to describe the life led by such symbionts when
apart from their hosts, but Bob SHAW, in The Palace of Eternity (1969), is
more ambitious, equating the pseudoastral plane with the extradimensional
HYPERSPACE employed by the starships to transcend Einsteinian limitations.
In Deane ROMANO's Flight from Time One (1972) the astral plane is no
sooner discovered by science than exploited, but the novel follows the
exploits of "astralnauts" without saying anything about the spirits of the
departed. Rudy RUCKER's WHITE LIGHT (1980) is much more courageous and
ingenious in following the venerable example of C.H. HINTON by recruiting
mathematical speculations about infinity (and Cantor's extrapolated
hierarchy of infinities on infinities) to construct a metaphysics which
includes an afterlife. Harlan ELLISON's "The Region Between" (1970) is a
bold surreal melodrama featuring soul-predation. A particularly poignant
story in which science ultimately reveals that human personalities do live
on after death is Richard COWPER's "The Tithonian Factor" (1983), which
considers the plight of those who have already accepted an inferior
technology of IMMORTALITY. Special eschatologies are sometimes devised for
individual characters: death as metamorphosis is often featured in the
work of Charles L. HARNESS and the later work of Robert A. HEINLEIN, and
is notable in Thomas M. DISCH's CAMP CONCENTRATION (1968). ALIENS often
fare better than humans in this breed of sf, having some kind of afterlife
built into their BIOLOGY; examples can be found in Poul ANDERSON's "The
Martyr" (1960), George R.R. MARTIN's "A Song for Lya" (1974) and Nicholas
Yermakov's The Last Communion (1981) and its sequels. Some writers have
developed this line of thought on a grander scale, moving eschatological
speculation to a level which takes in entire species, or even the entire
Universe. Arthur C. CLARKE's CHILDHOOD'S END (1953) features the
transcendent "apotheosis" of mankind's superior descendants, producing an
image very similar to that evoked by the heretical Jesuit and evolutionist
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955); Teilhard's ideas are overtly
invoked in George ZEBROWSKI's The Omega Point Trilogy (omni 1983).Although
they are not sf, mention must be made of a recent group of quasi-Dantean
fantasies by sf writers. Inferno (1975) by Larry NIVEN and Jerry POURNELLE
was the apparent inspiration for a series of SHARED-WORLD anthologies and
novels "created" by Janet E. MORRIS, begun with Heroes in Hell (anth 1986)

and The Gates of Hell (1986); Robert Silverberg's contributions featuring
Gilgamesh were subsequently reassembled in To the Land of the Living
(fixup 1989). A much more earnest and varied theme anthology - one of the
best of its kind - is Afterlives (anth 1986) ed Pamela SARGENT and Ian
WATSON, whose contributions, mostly original to the volume, range over the
entire spectrum of eschatological fantasy and sf. Outstanding among the sf
stories are Gregory BENFORD's "Of Space-Time and the River", Rudy Rucker's
"In Frozen Time" and Watson's own "The Rooms of Paradise"; Watson is also
the author of the very eschatological novel Deathhunter (1981). [BS]See
also: COSMOLOGY; ENTROPY; GODS AND DEMONS; METAPHYSICS.
ESENWEIN, J(OSEPH) BERG
ANTHOLOGIES.
ESHBACH, LLOYD ARTHUR
(1910- ) US writer and publisher, and an sf enthusiast from an early age.
Though his work as a publisher has always - and probably rightly - been
deemed his main contribution to the field, a splurge of novels in the
1980s, after he had been inactive as a writer for many years, has focused
some attention on his auctorial work. He began publishing sf with "The Man
with the Silver Disc" for Scientific Detective in 1930, and for some years
wrote fairly prolifically for the PULP MAGAZINES; the best of this early
work was assembled in The Tyrant of Time (coll 1955), a volume published
by his own FANTASY PRESS, which he had formed in 1946; it was probably the
best of the SMALL PRESSES founded after the war to put into book form the
novels and stories that had been accumulating in magazines since the
founding of AMAZING STORIES in 1926. In 1952 he began a short-lived
companion imprint, Polaris Press. For Fantasy Press LAE edited the first
published book about modern sf: Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science
Fiction Writing (anth 1947), a symposium of essays by such authors as John
W. CAMPBELL Jr, Robert A. HEINLEIN and A.E. VAN VOGT. Over My Shoulder:
Reflections on a Science Fiction Era (1983), told in memoir form, is a
history of the sf specialist presses from the 1930s to the 1950s.In the
1980s LAE turned again to fiction. He edited P. Schuyler MILLER's Alice in
Wonderland parody, Alicia in Blunderland (1933 Science Fiction Digest as
by Nihil; 1983), and he sorted out and completed a manuscript left by his
old friend E.E. "Doc" SMITH, publishing it as Subspace Encounter (1983) by
Smith, ed LAE. His major work of the decade, the Gates of Lucifer sequence
- The Land Beyond the Gate (1984), The Armlet of the Gods (1986), The
Sorceress of Scath (1988) and The Scroll of Lucifer (1990) - does not
forge its way into new territory, though the facility which LAE displays
in putting his protagonist through various paces in various mythic venues
is notable in an author so long inactive. Like Jack WILLIAMSON's, his
career has extended throughout almost the entire history of the modern
GENRE SF, which he continues to grace in his supporting role. [JC/MJE]See
also: CYBORGS; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); SPECULATIVE
FICTION.
ESP
An acronym (for extra-sensory perception) popularized by the pioneering
exercise in parapsychology Extra-Sensory Perception (1934) by J.B. Rhine
(1895-1980), which attempted to repackage folkloristic notions of "second

sight" or a "sixth sense" in scientific jargon. Definitions of the term
"ESP" vary, but it may be taken to include clairvoyance, telepathy and
precognition; many modern sf stories deal also with a restricted kind of
telepathy, empathy, in which only feelings and not thoughts may be
perceived. Stories about new senses and eccentric augmentations of
existing ones are covered in the article on PERCEPTION. Rhine's
investigations of ESP eventually broadened out to take in a fuller
spectrum of wild talents; for stories about psychokinesis, teleportation
and mental fire-raising PSI POWERS.The late 19th century saw a boom in
occult romances featuring various kinds of extra-sensory perceptions;
attempts by the Society for Psychical Research and other bodies to account
for such phenomena in scientific terms helped bring many such romances
close to the sf borderline, and encouraged more thoughtful consideration
of the implications of possessing these powers. A Seventh Child (1894) by
"John Strange Winter" (Henrietta Stannard [1856-1911]), Kark Grier: The
Strange Story of a Man with a Sixth Sense (1906) by Louis TRACY and The
Sixth Sense (1915) by Stephen McKenna (1885-1967) are trivial, but they
helped pave the way for Muriel JAEGER's The Man with Six Senses (1927),
the first attempt to extrapolate such a hypothesis carefully and
painstakingly - and to conclude that it might better be reckoned a curse
than a blessing. Some early pulp-sf stories were also cautionary tales,
including Edmond HAMILTON's "The Man who Saw the Future" (1930) and "The
Man with X-Ray Eyes" (1933).The notion that new powers of ESP might be
developed in the course of humankind's future EVOLUTION, although treated
sceptically by H.G. WELLS, was developed by several of the UK writers he
influenced, including J.D. BERESFORD in The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911) and
Olaf STAPLEDON in LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930). It also became a standard
theme in GENRE SF, where in the late 1930s Rhine's work began to attract
interest along with that of Charles FORT, whose Wild Talents (1932) had
dealt extensively with ESP. ESP quickly became part of the standard
repertoire of the pulp SUPERMAN, much encouraged by A.E. VAN VOGT's SLAN
(1940 ASF; 1946), in which a new race of telepaths struggles against the
prejudices of ordinary mortals - a theme further explored in such later
novels as Henry KUTTNER's MUTANT (1945-52 ASF; fixup 1953) and George O.
SMITH's Highways in Hiding (1956). John W. CAMPBELL Jr, the editor of
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, was eventually to become a fervent admirer of
Rhine, and ESP stories featured very prominently in the post-war
"psi-boom" which he engineered. Important products of this boom included
James BLISH's Jack of Eagles (1952; vt ESP-er 1958), Wilson TUCKER's Wild
Talent (1954) and Frank M. ROBINSON's The Power (1956). The variant title
of the first-named is a significant use of the term ESPER (found also in
Lloyd BIGGLE Jr's The Angry Espers [1961 dos]), which had first been
popularized in THE DEMOLISHED MAN (1953) by Alfred BESTER, a bold
pioneering attempt to depict a society into which espers are fully
integrated. Because the psi-boom years coincided with the early years of
the Cold War, Campbell's writers paid a good deal of attention to the
utility of telepathy in espionage - a frequent theme in the solo and
collaborative works of Randall GARRETT. Telepaths still occasionally find
such employment in such works as Stephen GOLDIN's Mindflight (1978),
Daniel Keys MORAN's Emerald Eyes (1988) and especially the Sensitives
series by Herbert Burkholz (1932- ) - The Sensitives (1987) and Strange

Bedfellows (1988) - but probably do more socially useful work as
psychotherapists, like those in John BRUNNER's THE WHOLE MAN (1958-9
Science Fantasy; fixup 1964; vt Telepathist UK) and Roger ZELAZNY's THE
DREAM MASTER (1966). ESP is sometimes invoked as a solution to the problem
of COMMUNICATION with ALIENS, although the logic of this is somewhat
suspect (thought is largely couched in language); one of the more
intelligent exercises in this vein is Edward LLEWELLYN's Word-Bringer
(1986).Sf writers, ever on the side of progress, usually side with
ESP-powered supermen against those who hate and fear them. Theodore
STURGEON's work includes many stories in which an ESP-based psychological
community is seen as a possible and highly desirable solution to ordinary
human alienation; examples include The Dreaming Jewels (1950; vt The
Synthetic Man), MORE THAN HUMAN (fixup 1953) and ". . . And My Fear is
Great" (1953). Other genre-sf writers who showed a consistently thoughtful
and positive interest in ESP-talented characters while the psi-boom
gradually lost its impetus included Zenna HENDERSON, in the long-running
People series collected in Pilgrimage (coll of linked stories 1961) and
The People: No Different Flesh (coll of linked stories 1966), James H.
SCHMITZ, in the Telzey Amberdon series and Agent of Vega (coll 1960),
Arthur SELLINGS, most notably in Telepath (1962) and The Uncensored Man
(1964), Frank HERBERT, especially in the series begun with DUNE (1965),
Marion Zimmer BRADLEY in the Darkover series, and Dan MORGAN in the
trilogy begun with The New Minds (1967).In Sturgeon's stories ESP often
compensates for other inadequacies - a common theme strikingly displayed
in such stories as Gene WOLFE's "The Eyeflash Miracles" (1976) and John
VARLEY's "The Persistence of Vision" (1978). In more extreme Sturgeon
stories, particularly MORE THAN HUMAN and The Cosmic Rape (1958), the
acquisition of telepathic powers becomes a kind of transcendental
breakthrough. Similarly transcendental ideas of psionic "cosmic community"
cropped up occasionally in the work of Clifford D. SIMAK, notably in Time
is the Simplest Thing (1961). Not all sf stories, however, place ESP in a
positive light. The kind of telepathic "gestalt-mind" featured in MORE
THAN HUMAN is given more sceptical treatment in The Inner Wheel (1970) by
Keith ROBERTS. The possible embarrassments of telepathy are pointed out in
Walter M. MILLER's "Command Performance" (1952; vt "Anybody Else Like
Me?"). Such novels as Andra MAUROIS's La machine a lire les pensees (1937;
trans as The Thought-Reading Machine 1938 UK) suggest that ESP abilities
might be utterly insignificant (though the Emotional Registers in the
latter book are purely mechanical devices), but other stories tend to an
opposite extreme; even Sturgeon, in his empath story "Need" (1961),
recognized that an ability to sense other people's pain might constitute
an appalling burden. Numerous tales, notably Lester DEL REY's Pstalemate
(1971) and Jack DANN's THE MAN WHO MELTED (1984), propose that people
endowed with ESP might very readily become insane, and the well adjusted
esper generally has to be credited with an ability to screen out unwanted
images, thoughts and feelings lest he or she should lose his or her true
self, as the hero of Roger ZELAZNY's Bridge of Ashes (1976) routinely
does. Unfortunate consequences of ESP endowment are elaborately described
in such novels as Joanna RUSS's AND CHAOS DIED (1970), Mike DOLINSKY's
Mind One (1972), Robert SILVERBERG's Dying Inside (1972) and Leigh
KENNEDY's The Journal of Nicholas the American (1986). Partly as a result

of these sceptical analyses, the idea that ESP might play a crucial role
in future human evolution has lost much of its fashionableness, although
it is a subsidiary element in Storm CONSTANTINE's not-altogether-earnest
Wraeththu trilogy (1987-9).Sf stories which isolate some aspect of ESP for
specific consideration usually deal (as do most of the above examples)
with telepathy, but there is also a notable tradition of stories dealing
specifically with precognition, and with the apparent paradoxes which
arise from having knowledge of the future. Characters whose foresight of
the future is perversely impotent extend from the hero of J.D. Beresford's
"Young Strickland's Career" (1921) to the heroine of C.J. CHERRYH's aptly
titled "Cassandra" (1978); and Philip K. DICK's "precogs", including the
one in The World Jones Made (1956), rarely get much joy out of their
abilities. Brian M. STABLEFORD's "The Oedipus Effect" (1991) borrows Karl
Popper's term for the effects which predictions have on the outcome of
situations in order to examine the paradoxicality of precognitive talents.
Robert Silverberg's The Stochastic Man (1975) considers precognition in
much the same sceptical way that his Dying Inside had examined telepathy.
Precognition of a patchy and teasingly perverse kind is a common element
in thrillers on the sf borderline; a notable example is Stephen KING's The
Dead Zone (1979).Despite the inconsistency displayed by supposedly
talented subjects and the fact that several of his best performers were
ultimately exposed as frauds, Rhine's intellectual descendants have
managed to cling to sufficient credibility to support the production of
numerous thrillers which deploy ESP without admitting to being sf;
examples include Mind out of Time (1958) by Angela TONKS and The Mind
Readers (1965) by Margery Allingham (1904-1966), though the latter uses a
mechanical device for mind-reading rather than ESP proper.
Parapsychological research labs are a common setting for stories on this
borderline. Lifestyle fantasists who pass themselves off as clairvoyants
or "psychics" are sometimes avid to help the police solve crimes; their
negligible success rate is, of course, much improved by their fictional
counterparts. Barry N. MALZBERG's and Bill PRONZINI's Night Screams (1979)
is an ironic reflection of the phenomenon, which remains a popular theme
in the CINEMA and TELEVISION.Two theme anthologies are 14 Great Tales of
ESP (anth 1969) ed Idella Purnell Stone and Frontiers II: The New Mind
(anth 1973) ed Roger ELWOOD. [PN/BS]
ESPER
In sf TERMINOLOGY, a person who is able to use one or other of the powers
of ESP; ESP is usually regarded as including such "passive" powers as
telepathy (mind-reading) and perhaps precognition and clairvoyance; and
occasionally also the "active" psychic abilities - those that interact
with the world of matter, such as TELEKINESIS. However, most sf writers
reserve the terms PSIONICS or PSI POWERS for the full spectrum of such
abilities, reserving "ESP" for telepathy. James BLISH's novel Jack of
Eagles (1952) was given the variant title ESP-er in a 1958 reprint. [PN]
ESSEX HOUSE
A short-lived (1968-9) Los Angeles publishing imprint, a subsidiary of
Milton Luros's Parliament News, Inc., specializing in highbrow erotica.
Many Essex House novelists were young serious writers (several of them

poets), and some used scenarios drawn from sf and fantasy, including
future DYSTOPIAS, as settings for their pornography. About half the 42
titles published by EH were sf/fantasy; they included novels by Philip
Jose FARMER, Richard E. GEIS, David MELTZER (perhaps the most
distinguished), Michael Perkins (1942- ) and Hank STINE, of which a number
were ambitious, some literary, and most somewhat joyless - even emetic-and
redolent of 1960s radicalism. The unusual aspirations of this imprint are
generally attributed to its young editor, Brian Kirby, who also edited the
pornographic books of the sister imprint, Brandon House. [PN]Further
reading: "Essex House: The Rise and Fall of Speculative Erotica" by Maxim
JAKUBOWSKI in Foundation #14 (1978); The Secret Record: Modern Erotic
Literature (1976 US) by Michael Perkins.See also: SEX.
ET
EXTRATERRESTRIAL.
ETCHEMENDY, NANCY H.
(1952- ) US writer whose three sf novels - The Watchers of Space (1980),
Stranger from the Stars (1983) and The Crystal City (1985) - are
juveniles, but whose stories, beginning with "Clotaire's Balloon" (1984),
tend to be richly coloured, wry fantasies. She has also written some sf
and fantasy POETRY. [JC]
ETERNITY SCIENCE FICTION
US BEDSHEET-size SEMIPROZINE. 4 issues July 1972-1975, 2 issues 1979-80;
published and ed Stephen Gregg from South Carolina. ESF was well produced
(two covers by Stephen FABIAN) and contributors included David R. BUNCH,
Barry N. MALZBERG and Roger ZELAZNY, as well as early work by Ed BRYANT
and Glen COOK, with some emphasis on experimental fiction and poetry. Like
most such magazines it seems to have been undercapitalized and to have had
inadequate distribution. [FHP/PN]
ETRANGE AVENTURE DE LEMMY CAUTION, UNE
ALPHAVILLE.
E.T.: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL
Film (1982). Universal. Dir and coprod Steven SPIELBERG, starring Dee
Wallace, Henry Thomas, Peter Coyote, Robert McNaughton, Drew Barrymore.
Screenplay Melissa Mathison. 115 mins. Colour.10-year-old Elliott (Thomas)
meets an alien, "E.T.", who has been accidentally left outside Los Angeles
when his spacecraft and its crew - which we infer includes his parents is forced to depart rapidly to avoid a search party sent out by a human
task force. Elliott and E.T., who demonstrates various PSI POWERS, become
friends. E.T. wants to "phone home", and builds a communications device
out of household objects. But he soon begins to sicken in our fallen
world, as does Elliott, now emotionally linked to E.T. As the task force
finally targets the alien traces they are searching, and invades Elliott's
home (where he lives with his two siblings and his mother: the father has
left home for good), E.T. becomes terminally ill. After the apparent death
of the alien child, Elliott recovers and discovers that, like Jesus, E.T.
is not in fact dead (or is resurrected). With the help of Elliott and his
friends, and proving in the nick of time that he can still levitate
bicycles, E.T. escapes the adults, returns to the rendezvous, is reunited

with his kind; and leaves.Almost certainly the most commercially
successful film ever made, E.T. confidently alternates finely controlled
sentiment and humour, the choreography of all this being almost flawless.
But for some it is not a film that grows in the memory; for them the
loneliness of the lizard-like but soft-eyed E.T., whose parents have left
him, and of Elliott (another E...T), remains merely sad in a curiously
unreverberant way. Countering this response, however, is the luminosity of
the film, and a sense that its presentation of the epiphanies of childhood
is truly joyful. The careful structuring of emotional release can be seen
in the handling of adult males. They are first seen (only from the waist
down) as hulking and affectless, but turn out to be concerned and
sympathetic as E.T. sickens drastically; and the most empathetic of them
is clearly destined to marry the deserted mother. Elliott's elder brother
undergoes a similar transformation earlier in the film. There are echoes
throughout of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1904), as envisioned in the Walt
Disney film Peter Pan (1953); this was also to be the source of
Spielberg's later Hook (1991). [JC]See also: CINEMA; HISTORY OF SF.
EUGENICS
GENETIC ENGINEERING.
EUROPEAN SCIENCE FICTION AWARDS
AWARDS.
EVANS, BILL
Working name of US chemist and writer William Harrington Evans
(1921-1985) for his sf studies, which began with bibliographical and other
work in the 1940s and 1950s, mostly in The Fanzine Index, a journal he
published with Bob Pavlat through 1952, and which was later assembled into
a single volume, Fanzine Index: Listing Most Fanzines from the Beginning
through 1952, including Titles, Editors' Names, and Data on Each Issue
(1965). With Francis T. Laney he published the early Howard Philips
Lovecraft (1890-1937): A Tentative Bibliography (1943 chap). BE's work in
the sf field culminated in an extensive introduction to E.E. "Doc" SMITH,
The Universes of E.E. Smith (1966), on which he collaborated with Ron
ELLIK. Most of the book is a concordance of themes and characters, though
there is some critical content. BE did the Skylark series, Ellik the
Lensman books. [JC]
EVANS, CHRISTOPHER (D.)
(1951- ) Welsh-born UK teacher and writer who has published sf and
fantasy novels under his own name and as Christopher Carpenter, Nathan
Elliott, Robert Knight and John Lyon, and some non-genre fiction as by
Evan Christie and Alwyn Davies. His first publications, released more or
less simultaneously, were the rather bad Plasmid * (1980) as by Robert
Knight, a film tie to an untraceable (and perhaps unmade) movie, and the
impressive Capella's Golden Eyes (1980), an extremely English version of a
CONCEPTUAL-BREAKTHROUGH tale, set on a colony planet inhabited also by
reclusive ALIENS - English because of the mundane detailing of life on
Gaia, because the protagonist has no real access to the roots of power or
change, and because any chances for conceptual breakthrough are in any
case co-opted by a plot in which Gaia's first masters are simply replaced

by a Chinese management team from Earth. The Insider (1981), set in a
NEAR-FUTURE UK, depicts the plight of an alien symbiont forced to
transform its new human host into an "alienated" outcast from society. In
Limbo (1985) further intensifies CE's characteristic insistence on the
isolation of human beings in a world they can neither comprehend nor
control, an insistence not significantly modified by the more intensive
use of local colour and expansive plotting in Chimeras (coll of linked
stories 1992), about an artist's complex and ambiguous relationship to the
eponymous new art form ( ARTS). Aztec Century (1993) It remains to be seen
whether CE will be able to accommodate his desolate visions within GENRE
SF, which is characteristically outward-thrusting, or whether - as seems
may be the case - he will find it increasingly uncongenial.With Robert P.
HOLDSTOCK, CE has edited OTHER EDENS, a strong anthology series comprising
Other Edens (anth 1987), #II (anth 1988) and #III (anth 1989). He
responded to the controversy surrounding the extensive presence of
organizations linked to SCIENTOLOGY at the 1987 World Science Fiction
Convention (held in Brighton, UK) by editing Conspiracy Theories (anth
1987 chap), in which a variety of views were expressed, most of them
critical of that presence. [JC]Other works:As Christopher Carpenter: The
Twilight Realm (1985).As Nathan Elliott: The Hood Army Trilogy, comprising
Earth Invaded (1986), Slaveworld (1986) and The Liberators (1986),
juvenile sf; the Star Pirates sequence, also juveniles, comprising Kidnap
in Space (1987), Plague Moon (1987) and Treasure Planet (1987).As John
Lyon: The Summoning (1985).Nonfiction: Science Fiction as Religion (1981
chap) with Stan Gooch (1932- ); The Guide to Fantasy Art Techniques (1984)
with Martyn Dean, a picture book; Lightship (1985), text to visuals by Jim
BURNS; Writing Science Fiction (1988 chap US); Dream Makers: Six Fantasy
Artists at Work (1988) with Martyn Dean, a picture book; Airshow (graph
coll 1989), text to visuals by Philip Castle.See also: PARASITISM AND
SYMBIOSIS.
EVANS, E(DWARD) EVERETT
(1893-1958) US sf fan and writer. He began in the latter capacity late in
life and had mixed success, though there is no doubt of the affection in
which other Californian sf writers and fans held him, as evinced in the
many tributes to him from writers such as E.E. "Doc" SMITH and A.E. VAN
VOGT included in a compilation of his macabre fantasy stories, Food for
Demons (coll 1971). This was originally conceived as a homage to the man,
and set up and printed, though not bound, as early as 1959; it contains
his best work. EEE's novels were digestible but routine. The adventures of
ESPER spy George Hanlan in Man of Many Minds (1953) and its sequel, Alien
Minds (1955), are without much bite; and EEE's juvenile, The Planet
Mappers (1955), is also very mild. He collaborated with E.E. Smith, whom
he admired greatly, on one story, which Smith expanded into the novel
Masters of Space (1961-2 If; 1976). [JC]
EVANS, GERALD
(1910- ) UK writer, born in Wales, who began publishing sf with "Pebbles
of Dread" for TWS in 1940, and who wrote one sf adventure, The Black
Sphere (1952) as by Victor LA SALLE. A later collection, Shadows in
Landore (coll 1979), was self-published. [SH]

EVANS, IAN
Angus WELLS.
EVANS, I(DRISYN) O(LIVER)
(1894-1977) South-African-born UK civil servant and, especially after his
retirement in 1956, editor and writer. His first book of sf relevance was
the nonfiction The World of Tomorrow (1933), about possible future
inventions, partly illustrated with reproductions of artwork from sf
magazines, and thus - almost accidentally - the first anthology of sf
ILLUSTRATION. He later specialized in the works of Jules VERNE, many of
which he translated and edited for the Fitzroy edition of Verne's work in
translation, beginning in 1958; some of these were reprinted by ACE BOOKS.
Unfortunately, in editing Verne IOE occasionally abridged him cruelly,
rendering him more of a simple boys'-action writer than was in fact the
case. IOE wrote Jules Verne and his Work (1965) and edited Science Fiction
through the Ages 1 (anth 1966) and Science Fiction through the Ages 2
(anth 1966), the first volume of which is restricted to pre-20th-century
sf. He also edited Jules Verne - Master of Science Fiction (coll 1956),
which assembles extracts from Verne's novels. [PN]
EVANS, MORGAN
L.P. DAVIES.
EVE OF DESTRUCTION
Film (1991). Orion. Dir Duncan Gibbons, starring Gregory Hines, Renee
Soutendijk. Screenplay Gibbons, Yale Udoff. 98 mins. Colour.Soutendijk is
good, both as Eve, a Defense Department scientist, and as Eve VIII, the
military ROBOT that she creates in her own image. Armed with endless
firepower and a nuclear bomb, the robot destroys the men Eve secretly
hates, several male chauvinists and the police who try to stop her. Some
critics see Eve VIII as a female "terminator" ( The TERMINATOR [1984]),
but she also recalls the Id Monster of FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956). EOD's
supposed FEMINISM is unsubtle and suspect: a scene in which Eve VIII first
teases and then castrates a loutish man is so extreme that it may in fact
be intentionally misogynist. Nevertheless, Eve VIII - beautiful, elegant,
stony-faced, murderous and bulletproof - is one of the most effective
villains of recent years. Hines's performance as a military troubleshooter
is mediocre. [MK]
EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX...
Full title: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (but Were
Afraid to Ask)Film (1972). Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe
Productions/United Artists. Dir Woody Allen, starring Allen, Gene Wilder,
Louise Lasser, John Carradine, Burt Reynolds, Tony Randall. Screenplay
Allen, suggested by the nonfiction Everything You Always Wanted to Know
about Sex, but Were Afraid to Ask by David Reuben. 88 mins. Colour.This
engaging collection of filmed anecdotes satirizes various sexual
obsessions and movie genres; two episodes can charitably be defined as sf.
One involves a giant, mobile female breast that breaks out of a mad
SCIENTIST's laboratory and ravages the countryside, in the manner of a
1950s MONSTER MOVIE. The other dramatizes a seduction attempt by comparing
the interior processes of the human body to those of a mechanized

production line, with white-suited technocrats running things from the
"Brain Room" while brawny, hard-hatted workers cope with the heavy
equipment of the penis. Allen plays one of a group of sperm cells
nervously waiting to go into action in the manner of paratroopers about to
be dropped into enemy territory. Allen soon returned to sf satire with
SLEEPER (1973). [JB]
EVIL FORCE, THE
4D MAN.
EVOLUTION
There is, inevitably, an intimate connection between the development of
evolutionary philosophy and the history of sf. In a culture without an
evolutionary philosophy most of the kinds of fiction we categorize as sf
could not develop. Like the idea of progress, evolutionary philosophy
flourished in late-18th-century France, and it was first significantly
represented in literature by RESTIF DE LA BRETONNE's evolutionary fantasy
La decouverte Australe par un homme volant ["The Southern-Hemisphere
Discovery by a Flying Man"] (1781), an allegorical treatment of ideas
partly derived from the Comte du Buffon (1707-1788). In the
early-19th-century Philosophie zoologique (1809), the Chevalier de Lamarck
(1744-1829) developed a more elaborate evolutionary philosophy,
introducing the key notion of adaptation, and paved the way for Charles
Darwin (1809-1882) and his theory of natural selection, promulgated in The
Origin of Species (1859). Because we have fallen into the habit of
labelling various theoretical heresies "Lamarckian", it is easy to forget
that for most of the 19th century Lamarck was the more influential writer,
especially in France. In the UK, Darwin was ardently championed by T.H.
Huxley (1825-1895) and the sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), and
his ideas took much firmer hold in the UK than elsewhere. Thus there was a
sharp divergence of emphasis between French and UK evolutionary sf, and
this lasted well into the 20th century. The writers who pioneered the
tradition of French evolutionary fantasy were Camille FLAMMARION, most
notably in Lumen (1887; trans 1897) and Omega (trans 1894), and J.H. ROSNY
aine in his many prehistoric fantasies, in "Les Xipehuz" (1887; trans as
"The Shapes" 1968) and in "La mort de la terre" (1910; trans as "The Death
of the Earth" 1978). Jules VERNE's only evolutionary fantasy, La grande
foret, le village aerien (1901; trans I.O. Evans as The Village in the
Treetops 1964 UK), is also Lamarckian.Lamarck's successor, Henri Bergson
(1859-1941), whose theory of "creative evolution" made much of the notion
of the elan vital - which Lamarck had rejected - seems to have provided
the seed of one of the most important UK evolutionary fantasies, J.D.
BERESFORD's The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911), but for the most part UK
writing was dominated by the implications of Darwinian theory and the
catch-phrases by which it was vulgarized: "the survival of the fittest"
and "the struggle for existence". H.G. WELLS was taught by T.H. Huxley in
the early 1890s, and remained ever-anxious that the qualities which had
shaped human nature for survival in the struggle for existence might
prevent our ever achieving a just society - a fear powerfully reflected,
in different ways, in THE TIME MACHINE (1895), The Island of Dr Moreau
(1896), The War of the Worlds (1898) and The Croquet Player (1936 chap).

(An interesting antidote to Wellsian pessimism is administered in one of
the several sequels to The Time Machine: David LAKE's The Man who Loved
Morlocks * [1981].) The ominous spectres arising from the harsher versions
of Darwinian philosophy also feature strongly in Erewhon (1872) by Samuel
BUTLER (who also wrote several anti-Darwinian tracts) and intrude upon
most of the speculative fiction of Grant ALLEN (who wrote several
pro-Darwinian tracts). The political implications of the careless
transplantation of Darwinian ideas into theories of social evolution (
SOCIAL DARWINISM) were such that Wells's one-time fellow-Fabian George
Bernard SHAW renounced Darwinism in favour of neo-Lamarckism on political
grounds, and his play Back to Methuselah (1921) was published with a long
introductory essay explaining this renunciation. Similar steps were taken
by T.D. Lysenko (1898-1976), in the name of Soviet communism, and Luther
Burbank (1849-1926), in the name of US fundamentalism. It was not widely
realized that the implications of Darwinism were not necessarily as harsh
as vulgar Darwinians tended to assume. An interesting allegorical
popularization of a more humane Darwinism is Gerald HEARD's Gabriel and
the Creatures (1952; vt Wishing Well 1953). The influence of Darwinian
ideas can be seen in such US works as Edgar FAWCETT's The Ghost of Guy
Thyrle (1895) and Austin BIERBOWER's From Monkey to Man (1894); the latter
is an early attempt to present Genesis as an allegory of evolution.Human
evolution was explored by writers in terms of its probable past (
ANTHROPOLOGY; ORIGIN OF MAN) and possible future. Wells's classic essay,
"The Man of the Year Million" (1893), imagined mankind as evolution might
remake us, with an enormous head and reduced body, eyes enlarged but ears
and nose vestigial - an image which became a stereotype adopted by many
other writers. It became a cliche in early PULP-MAGAZINE sf, although most
writers took a dim view of the "fitness" of such individuals, and usually
represented them as effete entities doomed to extinction; "Alas, All
Thinking!" (1935) by Harry BATES is a graphic example. Few pulp writers,
though, had much idea of the actual implications of Darwinism, and they
produced very few extrapolations which could stand up to rigorous
examination - a state of affairs which still persists. Most sf writers
contemplating the evolutionary future of mankind have been inordinately
taken with the idea of sudden, large-scale mutations of a kind in which
modern Darwinians do not believe ( MUTANTS). Many stories appeared in
which mutagenic radiation accelerated evolution to a perceptible pace,
including John TAINE's The Iron Star (1930) and Seeds of Life (1931; 1951)
and Edmond HAMILTON's "Evolution Island" (1927). Hamilton's fiction also
showed a persistent interest in the pseudo-scientific notion of retrograde
evolution ( DEVOLUTION), which had earlier been luridly featured in George
Allan ENGLAND's Darkness and Dawn (1914) and which crops up also in Olaf
STAPLEDON's curiously un-Darwinian Last and First Men (1930). In
Hamilton's "The Man who Evolved" (1931) a man who bathes himself in
mutagenic radiation first turns into the man-of-the-year-million
stereotype and then regresses, ending up as a blob of undifferentiated
protoplasm. Equally pseudo-scientific, though more interesting, is Edgar
Rice BURROUGHS's "extrapolation" of Haeckel's law ("ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny") in The Land that Time Forgot (1918; 1924); in this romance the
recapitulation takes place during active life rather than embryonically.
Similar schemes are credited to alien life-systems in Theodore STURGEON's

"The Golden Helix" (1954) and James BLISH's A Case of Conscience (1958).Sf
of the 1920s and 1930s was frequently pessimistic about the long-term
evolutionary prospects of mankind, but bold success stories are featured
in J.B.S. HALDANE's "The Last Judgment" (1927) and Laurence MANNING's The
Man who Awoke (1933; fixup 1975). The former influenced and the latter was
influenced by the most detailed and most extravagant of all evolutionary
fantasies, Stapledon's Last and First Men. This extraordinary study of
mankind's many descendant species, extending over a timespan of billions
of years, exhibits an odd combination of optimism and pessimism further
extrapolated on the grander stage of Star Maker (1937), whose
experimentally inclined God-figure is working His way through an evolving
series of Creations. Those sf stories in which the human evolutionary
story does not end with eventual extinction or with the acquisition of a
stabilizing IMMORTALITY usually propose, like Shaw in Back to Methuselah,
that there will eventually be a transcendence that frees human
intelligence from its association with frail flesh, and that our ultimate
descendants will be more-or-less godlike entities of "pure thought" - an
idea which echoes continually through E.E. "Doc" SMITH's work and crops up
briefly but rather disturbingly in Robert A. HEINLEIN's Methuselah's
Children (1941; rev 1958). A particularly memorable pulp sf evocation of
this sort of motif is Eric Frank RUSSELL's "Metamorphosite" (1946). Even
when mankind fails to stay the distance - as in John W. CAMPBELL Jr's "The
Last Evolution" (1932), where it is our machines, not their creators,
which ultimately achieve the state of "pure consciousness"-this is
conventionally seen as the logical end-point of evolution, as it still is
in such novels as The Singers of Time (1990) by Frederik POHL and Jack
WILLIAMSON and Eternal Light (1991) by Paul J. MCAULEY. Given that images
of the next stage in human evolution ( SUPERMAN) usually invoke
pseudo-scientific notions about mental powers ( ESP) based on Cartesian
illusions about mental ghosts in bodily machines, the idea that evolution
tends towards disembodiment is a natural and psychologically plausible
extrapolation, though arguably rather silly. The post-WWII boom in stories
of human mental evolution produced a number of stories which invoked the
notion of a universal evolutionary schema. The most notable were Arthur C.
CLARKE's Childhood's End (1953), which shows a whole generation of Earthly
children undergoing a kind of metamorphic apotheosis to fuse with the
"cosmic mind", and two stories by Theodore Sturgeon: More than Human
(fixup 1953) and The Cosmic Rape (1958), which deploy similar imagery on a
smaller scale, using the idea of collective mental gestalts. Another
interesting example of such a schema is to be found in the material
linking the short stories in Galaxies like Grains of Sand (1959; full text
restored 1979) by Brian W. ALDISS, which proposes that the next step in
human evolution might be complete somatic awareness and control. A more
modest schema of human evolution, past and future, underlies Gordon R.
DICKSON's Childe Cycle novels, and is elaborated in some detail in his The
Final Encyclopedia (1984). A remarkable philosophical allegory surreally
re-examining many ideas about mankind's possible future evolution is
Robert SILVERBERG's Son of Man (1971). The most widely seen (but by no
means most widely understood) symbolic representation of evolutionary
apotheosis is that contained in the final frames of the film 2001: A SPACE
ODYSSEY (1968).Last and First Men also includes in its multifaceted

discussion of future human evolution the possibility - first raised in
Haldane's essay Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1923) - that humans
might take charge of their own physical evolution by means of what is
nowadays termed GENETIC ENGINEERING, but this line of inquiry was not
widely explored until much later. Damon KNIGHT's Masters of Evolution
(1954 as "Natural State"; exp 1959) features the anti-technological
"muckfeet", who have allegedly progressed beyond the need for machines and
cities in acquiring biological control of their environment, but stories
of this kind, inspired by a growing interest in ECOLOGY and a corollary
antipathy towards CITIES (see also DYSTOPIAS; MACHINES), have been heavily
outnumbered by those which - following Aldous HUXLEY's example in Brave
New World (1932) - consider the idea of tampering with human nature
implicitly horrific. Examples include Frank HERBERT's The Eyes of
Heisenberg (1966) and T.J. BASS's Half Past Human (1971), the latter
featuring a "human hive" - an image invoked in many stories as a highly
unfortunate but nevertheless probable destiny for evolving human society (
HIVE-MINDS), most notably in J.D. BERESFORD's and Esme Wynne-Tyson's The
Riddle of the Tower (1944). The idea that our future evolution might
involve turning ourselves into CYBORGS - memorably pioneered by E.V.
ODLE's remarkable The Clockwork Man (1923)-has usually been treated with
similar unenthusiasm. The idea of any future metamorphosis of the human
species, however modest, is repugnant to many whose aesthetic standards
are not unnaturally defined by our present ideals: even to those who abhor
anything that might smack of Nazism, the desirable notion of "men like
gods" inevitably conjures up an image of serried ranks of Aryan matinee
idols. One sf writer who has tried particularly hard to escape this
imaginative straitjacket is Ian WATSON, whose exuberant adventures in
evolutionary possibility extend to bizarre extremes in The Gardens of
Delight (1980) and Converts (1984).A surprising number of sf stories look
forward-often with a curious inverted nostalgia - to the time when
mankind's day is done and we must pass on our legacy to the inheritors of
Earth (or of the Universe). Usually the inheritors are machines, as in
Lester DEL REY's "Though Dreamers Die" (1944) and Edmond Hamilton's "After
a Judgment Day" (1963), but sometimes they are animals, as in Del Rey's
"The Faithful" (1938), Clifford D. SIMAK's City (1944-51; fixup 1952) and
Terry BISSON's "Bears Discover Fire" (1990). Olof JOHANESSON, in The Tale
of the Big Computer (1966; trans 1968; vt The Great Computer), plots an
evolutionary schema in which the function of mankind is simply to be the
means of facilitating machine evolution; while L. Sprague DE CAMP's and P.
Schuyler MILLER's ironic Genus Homo (1941; 1950), Neal BARRETT Jr's
puzzle-story Aldair in Albion (1976), Dougal DIXON's fascinating
picture-book After Man: A Zoology of the Future (1981) and Kurt VONNEGUT
Jr's Jeremiad Galapagos (1985) all describe new species which take up the
torch of evolutionary progress after mankind's demise. Such stories have
strong ideative links with extravagant ALTERNATE-WORLD stories which
contemplate alternative patterns of earthly evolution, notably Guy DENT's
Emperor of the If (1926), Harry HARRISON's West of Eden (1984) and its
sequels - in which primitive men must compete with intelligent descendants
of the dinosaurs - and Stephen R. BOYETT's The Architect of Sleep (1986),
in which it is raccoons rather than apes that have given rise to sentient
descendants.Accounts of ALIEN evolution are separately considered in the

section on LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS, but mention must be made here of the
frequent recruitment of the ideas of convergent evolution and parallel
evolution to excuse the dramatically convenient deployment of humanoid
aliens. Writers conscientious enough to construct a jargon of apology for
such a situation often argue that the logic of natural selection permits
intelligence to arise only in upright bipeds with binocular vision and
clever hands, and that, had such bipeds not evolved from lemurs, they
might instead have evolved from catlike or even lizardlike ancestors.
There are, however, relatively few stories which actually turn on
hypotheses of this kind; examples include Philip LATHAM's "Simpson"
(1954), one of several stories about humanlike aliens who are not as
similar to us as they seem, and Lloyd BIGGLE's The Light that Never Was
(1972), which addresses the question of whether "animaloid" species are
necessarily inferior to "humanoid" ones.Alternative life-systems capable
of Lamarckian evolution are featured in a few stories, including
Barrington J. BAYLEY's "Mutation Planet" (1973) and Brian M. STABLEFORD's
"The Engineer and the Executioner" (1975; rev 1991).The Butlerian idea
that machines may eventually begin to evolve independently of their makers
has become increasingly popular as real-world COMPUTERS have become more
sophisticated; images of such evolutionary sequences have become more
complex, as in James P. HOGAN's Code of the Lifemaker (1983). Several
recent images of universal evolutionary schemas - notably the one featured
in Gregory BENFORD's Across the Sea of Suns (1984) and the trilogy begun
with Great Sky River (1988) - imagine a fundamental ongoing struggle for
existence between organic and inorganic life-systems. The beginnings of
such a division are evident in Bruce STERLING's series of stories
featuring the Shapers and the Mechanists, which culminates in Schismatrix
(1985). A related but somewhat different Universe-wide struggle for
existence is revealed in the concluding volume of Stableford's Asgard
trilogy, The Centre Cannot Hold (1990), and an even stranger one is first
glimpsed in The Angel of Pain (1991), the second volume of another
Stableford trilogy.Mutational miracles still abound in modern sf, in such
apocalyptic stories of future evolution as Greg BEAR's Blood Music (1985),
and there is a strong tendency to mystify evolution-related concepts such
as " ECOLOGY" and "symbiosis" ( PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS) in a fashion
which is at best interestingly metaphorical and at worst hazily
metaphysical. Patterns of evolution on alien worlds ( LIFE ON OTHER
WORLDS) are often placed in the service of some kind of Edenic mythology,
and this is true even in the work of writers well versed in the biological
sciences. Perhaps this is not unduly surprising in an era when religious
fundamentalists are still trying to fight the teaching of Darwinism in US
schools, and to have equal time given to "Creation Science". Some
evolutionary philosophers have not yet given up hope of producing a
crucial modification of the Darwinian account of evolution which is more
aesthetically appealing; the latest to attempt it has been Rupert
Sheldrake in The Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation
(1981), an idea adapted to sf use by Paul H. COOK in Duende Meadow (1985).
Given the continued success of Darwinism as a source of explanations,
however, it is lamentably unfortunate that so few sf stories have deployed
the theory in any reasonably rigorous fashion. [BS]See also: BIOLOGY.

EWALD, CARL
(1856-1908) Danish writer whose Two-Legs (trans Alexander Teixeira de
Mattos 1906 US) narrates the rise of Man from the significantly jaundiced
viewpoint of the animals over which he would soon have dominion. Two other
books of genre interest have not been translated into English. [JC]
EWERS, HANNS HEINZ
(1871-1943) German writer, spy in Mexico and the USA in WWI, and early
member of the Nazi Party. SUPERMEN predominate in his fiction, much of
which remains untranslated. He is noted mainly for a series of novels
about Frank Braun - anthropologist and Ubermensch - some of which are sf.
The young hero of Der Zauberlehrling (1907; trans Ludwig Lewisohn as The
Sorcerer's Apprentice 1927 US) hypnotizes his "inferior" Italian mistress
into a spurious sainthood - complete with stigmata - which in the end he
makes real by helping crucify her. In Alraune (1911; trans S. Guy ENDORE
1929 US), which was filmed 5 times 1918-52 ( ALRAUNE), Braun uses
artificial insemination to breed from the dregs of society - a sex
criminal and a prostitute - the soulless eponymous female whose name
reflects in German her likeness to a mandrake root, and whose vampirical
powers prove almost fatal to him. In Vampir (1921; trans Fritz Sallagher
as Vampire 1934 US; vt Vampire's Prey 1937 UK) Braun appears as a macabre
alter ego of the author, spying in Mexico during WWI while at the same
time becoming a vampire. [JC]Other works: Blood (coll trans Erich Posselt
and Sinclair Dombrow 1930 US), contes cruels.
EWING, FREDERICK R.
Theodore STURGEON.
EWING, JENNY
F. Yorick BLUMENFELD.
EWOK ADVENTURE, THE
(vt Caravan of Courage) Made-for-tv film (1984). Lucasfilm/Korty Films
for ABC TV. Executive prod George LUCAS. Dir John Korty, starring Eric
Walker, Aubree Miller. Screenplay Lucas. 120 mins, cut to 97 mins. Colour.
When the family spaceship crashes on an alien moon, the parents are
captured by a monster and their two children cared for by Ewoks, the
teddy-bear aliens first seen in RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983). After a long
trek, the children and Ewoks save the parents. TEA is disappointing by
adult standards, but children like it - and it is a children's film. The
special effects are surprisingly poor considering Lucasfilm's STAR WARS
experience. Lucas's story is vestigial and the Ewoks, though clearly
intended to be cute, are charmless; Philip STRICK described their faces as
"a fixed, unblinking mask set in a rictus of amiability". TEA was released
theatrically overseas as Caravan of Courage. A second tv movie, Ewoks: The
Battle for Endor (1985), though slightly better, had no theatrical
release. [PN]
EWOKS AND DROIDS
George LUCAS.
EWOKS: THE BATTLE FOR ENDOR
The EWOK ADVENTURE.

EXOBIOLOGY
XENOBIOLOGY.
EXPANSE
US SEMIPROZINE, possibly current, pub and ed quarterly from Baltimore by
Steven E. Fick, small- BEDSHEET format, three issues published through
Summer 1994. Epublishes fiction mostly by newer writers, but including
some well-known figures such as John BRUNNER, as well as non-fiction
features. A professionally produced magazine with eclectoic design (each
story set in a different font) and an announced print run high for a
semiprozine, E began intrepidly, proclaiming in advertisements: "Tired of
the liberal bias in the stories you read? Expanse doesn't hug trees, isn't
afraid to use a raygun and boldly promotes human imperialism." Despite its
energetic debut, its fourth issue had not appeared by April 1995. [GF/PN]
EXPEDITION MOON
ROCKETSHIP X-M.
EXPERIMENTER PUBLISHING CO.
AMAZING STORIES; Hugo GERNSBACK.
"EXPLORABILIS"
Eliza HAYWOOD.
EXPLORERS
Film (1985). Edward S. Feldman/Paramount. Dir Joe DANTE, starring Ethan
Hawke, River Phoenix, Jason Presson. Screenplay Eric Luke. 109 mins.
Colour.Three schoolboys, tipped off by a dream, employ a computer to help
create a sphere that can move very quickly and is impervious to gravity;
they use it to power a spacecraft they build out of junk. Far above Earth
they find a spaceship with, inside it, two aliens - their view of humanity
entirely gleaned from old tv programmes - who turn out likewise to be kids
on a joyride. This strange film was apparently aimed at pre-teens, but the
grotesque aliens (more like cartoons than extraterrestrials) and their
tv/radio obsession seem directed far more at adults. Perhaps because of
this uncertainty about the audience, E, the most personal of Dante's
films, was a box-office failure. Despite its self-indulgence it has
wonderful moments, captures well that sense of dream and yearning in
children known to sf fans of whatever age as the SENSE OF WONDER, and
deftly pinpoints many points of collision between the child's world and
the adult's. [PN]See also: CINEMA.
EXTRAPOLATION
PREDICTION.
EXTRAPOLATION
Critical magazine, ed Thomas D. CLARESON from its inception in Dec 1959;
Clareson was joined by Donald M. HASSLER from the Winter 1987 issue, and
Hassler became sole editor from the Spring 1990 issue; 2 numbers a year at
first, quarterly since Spring 1979; current. It had reached Vol. 35, no 4,
by the Winter 1994 issue. It began as The Newsletter of the Conference on
Science-Fiction of the MLA (the MLA being the Modern Languages
Association). E was first published from the English Department of the
College of Wooster, Ohio, and since Spring 1979 has been published by the

Kent State University Press, Ohio.E was very much the product of one
person, Clareson (although it had a large editorial board), without whose
enthusiasm it might not have survived. He continued as Emeritus Editor
until his death in 1993. It was the first of the academic journals about
sf; its successors have included FOUNDATION: THE REVIEW OF SCIENCE
FICTION, then SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES and, much more recently, JOURNAL OF
THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS. E is a journal more notable for feature
articles than for reviews, polemics or ongoing debate. While its standard
has been variable - there have certainly been flat spots - the same can be
said of the other critical magazines. In its long career it has published
articles of all kinds, though generally concentrating more on scholarship
than on criticism. A long-running feature (until 1981) was the annual
survey, "The Year's Scholarship in Science Fiction and Fantasy", compiled
first by Clareson and later by Marshall B. TYMN and Roger C. SCHLOBIN; it
continued as a separate publication from Kent State from 1982. E's
existence as the earliest public platform for sf studies significantly
advanced them; historically important, E continues to be relevant and
sometimes stimulating, although too few of its articles are of interest
outside a rather narrow academic community. E's rare first 10 years'
issues - constituting vols 1-10 - were reprinted in book form by GREGG
PRESS as Extrapolation: a Science-Fiction Newsletter, Vols 1-10 (anth
1978) ed Clareson, and vols 11-13, covering 1969-1972, were reprinted by
Johnson Reprint Corporation as Extrapolation: A Science-Fiction Newsletter
(anth 1973), also ed Clareson. [PN]
EXTRA-SENSORY PERCEPTION
In sf TERMINOLOGY, usually known by its acronym, ESP (which see for
details). [PN]
EXTRATERRESTRIAL
In sf TERMINOLOGY, a creature (usually intelligent) from beyond TERRA.
When used as a noun, and occasionally in its adjectival mode, the word may
be shortened to "et" or "ET" (pronounced "eetee"). ALIENS; LIFE ON OTHER
WORLDS. [PN]
EXTRO
Northern Irish magazine, A4 format, Feb-July 1982, 3 issues, published
bimonthly by Specifi Publications, ed Paul Campbell. During its brief
existence - terminated when its bank manager dishonoured an overdraft
arrangement - E published fiction by Brian W. ALDISS, Garry KILWORTH,
Christopher PRIEST, Bob SHAW, John T. SLADEK, Ian WATSON, James WHITE and
others (notably Ian MCDONALD's first story), along with interviews, essays
and book reviews. [RH]
EYES WITHOUT A FACE
Les YEUX SANS VISAGE.
EYRAUD, ACHILLE
VENUS.

SF?
FABIAN, STEPHEN E.

(1930- ) US illustrator who worked in electronics until 1973.
Self-trained as a freelance sf illustrator, he worked as a fan artist in
the late 1960s. At the age of 43 he graduated to the professional SF
MAGAZINES, mostly AMZ and Fantastic, with both cover art and interiors; he
was less active in the 1980s than the 1970s. His art is distinctive, with
a strong sense of formal design; it is for his dramatic interior
black-and-white work, reminiscent of Virgil FINLAY's and prepared on
textured coquille board, that he is best known. Book covers and interior
illustrations include work for SMALL PRESSES such as Donald M. Grant,
Byron PREISS and UNDERWOOD-MILLER. Books devoted to SEF's work include
Letters Lovecraftian: An Alphabet of Illuminated Letters Inspired by the
Works of the Late Master of the Weird Tale, Howard Phillips Lovecraft
(1974), Fantastic Nudes (1976) and Fantastic Nudes: 2nd Series (1976),
which are collected with other material in Fantasy by Fabian (1978), The
Best of Stephen Fabian (1976), More Fantasy by Fabian (1979) and Fabian in
Color (1980). Many of these are ed and published Gerry de la Ree (?
-1993), who also published much of Virgil Finlay's work. SEF has seven
times been nominated for a HUGO. [PN/JG]See also: FANTASY.
FABULATION
We do not intend to make here - or to quote - any sustained theoretical
argument about the nature of fabulation as the term was conceived by
Robert SCHOLES in The Fabulators (1967) and amplified in his Structural
Fabulation (1975). Our starting point must be GENRE SF, our central
concern throughout this encyclopedia. In the entry on MAINSTREAM WRITERS
OF SF we contrast the writers of genre sf, and the circumstances under
which they write, with writers and their circumstances in what has come to
be known as the mainstream. Here, we contrast the inherent nature of genre
sf with the inherent nature of the central literature of the postmodern
world ( POSTMODERNISM AND SF for a more sharply focused view of
Postmodernism as a movement and a condition of mind). In using the single
term "fabulation" instead of several - over and beyond Postmodernism, a
critical roster might include ABSURDIST SF, Fictionality, MAGIC REALISM,
SLIPSTREAM SF and Surfiction - we know we are offering a grossly
oversimplified snapshot of the modern literary environment (or nests of
environments). But the alternative would be to make a thousand individual
choices, often inevitably controversial, as we attempted to label each
non-"realistic" non-genre sf novel according to its precise place in an
ever-shifting mosaic of prescriptive definitions. One term will have to
do.Over the course of the 20th century, sf readers have grown used to
thinking of genre sf as substantially different (in manner, in substance
and in intention) from the great stream of realistic novels which
increasingly dominated the English-speaking literary since the middle of
the 18th century, a dominance which was challenged only in the first
decades of our own era. Helped along by critics from within the genre,
like Alexei and Cory PANSHIN in their contentious The World Beyond the
Hill (1989), sf readers have further grown accustomed to thinking that it
was genre sf itself that dethroned the mimetic novel from its position of
dominance in 1926, and that the continued popularity of "realistic"
fiction has been a kind of confidence game. We feel that something like
the reverse is true: that genre sf - which we repeat is our central

concern throughout this encyclopedia - is essentially a continuation of
the mimetic novel, which it may have streamlined but certainly did not
supplant; and that the onslaught of Modernism (and its successors) on the
mimetic novel was also an onslaught upon the two essential assumptions
governing genre sf.The first assumption is that both the "world" and the
human beings who inhabit it can be seen whole, and described accurately,
in words. The writers who created the great novels of the 19th century
wrote in that assumption, and their novels were written as though they
opened omniscient windows into reality. What the novel said and what was
true were the same thing. Writers of genre sf have never abandoned this
assumption. The explorations of Henry James (1843-1916) in the inherent
unreliability of words - and the consequent unreliability of narrators awoke no appreciative response in the mind of Hugo GERNSBACK, and it was
not until the 1970s and 1980s that sf or fantasy was published (by writers
like Jonathan Carroll, Samuel R. DELANY and Gene WOLFE) which accepted, 70
years late, the Jamesian intuition. In the world outside, however, after
WWI, serious literary critics and readers almost universally granted the
case of Modernist writers - nearly all of them the spiritual children of
Henry James - that the "real" world could never be grasped whole, but that
it was the high and difficult task of writers to forge fallen words into a
semblance of the world, and to take an artificer's joy in the task of
construction.The second assumption is that the "world"-whether or not it
can be seen whole through the distorting glass of words - does in the end
have a story which can be told. That story might be the knotty and
problematical revelation of the truth of the Christian faith as unfolded
in the later work of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965); or the March of Progress that
Alexei and Cory Panshin claim to have traced, beginning with the
planet-bound storytellers of the 19th century whose descendants bounded
ever upwards toward the GOLDEN AGE OF SF, exploring the Galaxy en passant.
What underlying story is being told is less important than the fact that,
for writers of genre sf, some form of "meta-narrative" lies beneath the
tale, ensuring the connectivity of things. The huge proliferation of
future HISTORIES and novel sequences in genre sf does not simply reflect
market strategies; it also represents a belief that the world is tellable.
It is that belief, whether held by Modernists like T.S. Eliot (and Gene
Wolfe) or pure genre writers like E.E. "Doc" SMITH, that has been called
into question by the various Postmodernist movements, and which lies at
the heart of most fabulations.We can now say what we mean in this
encyclopedia by a "fabulation": a fabulation is any story which challenges
the two main assumptions of genre sf: that the world can be seen; and that
it can be told. We have chosen to use the term "fabulation" because it
seems to us the best blanket description of the techniques employed by
those writers who use sf devices to underline that double challenge, and
whose work is thus at heart profoundly antipathetic to genre sf. A typical
fabulation, then, is a tale whose telling is foregrounded in a way which
emphasizes the inherent arbitrariness of the words we use, the stories we
tell (Magic Realism, for instance, can be seen as a subversion of the
"official" stories which are told by "rational" means and authorities),
the characters whose true nature we can never plumb, the worlds we can
never step into. (An unfriendly critic might say that fabulations are all
means and no substance; but that is perhaps to miss the Postmodernist

point that all previous stories were likewise, albeit secretly, all means
and no "substance".) By foregrounding the means of telling a tale,
fabulations articulate what might be called the fableness of things: the
fableness of the world itself in some Magic Realism; the fableness of the
political and social world in some Absurdist sf; the fableness of the
aesthetic object in Postmodernism as a whole; and - finally - the
fableness of fables in Fabulation itself.Authors whose works (or some of
whose works) are, in our terms, fabulations include Paul ABLEMAN, Paul
AUSTER, John BARTH, Donald BARTHELME, Adolfo BIOY CASARES, Michael
BLUMLEIN, Jorge Luis BORGES, Bruce BOSTON, Scott BRADFIELD, Richard
BRAUTIGAN, Christine BROOKE-ROSE, Ed BRYANT, David R. BUNCH, Anthony
BURGESS, William BURROUGHS, Dino BUZZATI, Italo CALVINO, Angela CARTER,
Jerome CHARYN, Barbara COMYNS, Robert COOVER, Arthur Byron COVER, Tom DE
HAVEN, Don DELILLO, Rick DEMARINIS, Thomas M. DISCH, E.L. DOCTOROW,
Katherine DUNN, Umberto ECO, George Alec EFFINGER, Carol EMSHWILLER, Steve
ERICKSON, Karen Joy FOWLER, Carlos FUENTES, Felix GOTSCHALK, Alasdair
GRAY, MacDonald HARRIS, M. John HARRISON, Carol HILL, William HJORTSBERG,
Russell HOBAN, Trevor HOYLE, Harvey JACOBS, Langdon JONES, Franz KAFKA,
Robert KELLY, Jerzy KOSINSKI, William KOTZWINKLE, Joseph MCELROY, Sheila
MACLEOD, Michael MOORCOCK, Haruki MURAKAMI, Vladimir NABOKOV, Flann
O'BRIEN, John Cowper POWYS, Christopher PRIEST, Thomas PYNCHON, Peter
REDGROVE, Philip ROTH, Salman RUSHDIE, James SALLIS, Josephine SAXTON,
Arno SCHMIDT, Lucius SHEPARD, John T. SLADEK, Norman SPINRAD, Stefan
THEMERSON, David THOMSON, Boris VIAN, Gore VIDAL, William T. VOLLMANN,
Alice WALKER, Rex WARNER, William WHARTON, Gene WOLFE, Stephen WRIGHT,
Rudolf WURLITZER and Pamela ZOLINE. [JC]See also: OULIPO.
FABULOUS WORLD OF JULES VERNE, THE
VYNALEZ ZKAZY.
FACE OF FU MANCHU, THE
Film (1965). Anglo-Amalgamated. Dir Don Sharp, starring Christopher Lee,
Nigel Green, Tsai Chin, Howard Marion-Crawford, James Robertson Justice.
Screenplay Harry Alan Towers, based on the characters created by Sax
ROHMER. 96 mins. Colour.The first of a series of films produced by Harry
Alan Towers in which Christopher Lee portrayed the oriental master-fiend,
Tsai Chin played Fu's insidious daughter (renamed Lin Tang from Rohmer's
Fah Lo Suee) and a succession of square-jawed heroes-Nigel Green, Douglas
Wilmer, Richard Greene-played Sir Denis Nayland Smith of Scotland Yard.
This first entry is by far the best of the batch, shot imaginatively on
Irish locations which stand in for England and Tibet in the 1920s, and
with devices reminiscent of the old movie serials, such as a gas which
kills an entire village and a superexplosive, both deployed in Fu's scheme
to control the world. Sharp's direction is fast-paced, with full rein
given to the mild sadomasochism of the originals as victims are whipped or
confined to cabinets which slowly fill with Thames water. This is a richly
entertaining pastiche of the old style, although less delirious than The
MASK OF FU MANCHU (1932), in which Fu was played by Boris Karloff. Sharp
stayed with the series for Brides of Fu Manchu (1966), which was almost up
to standard, but after the inferior Vengeance of Fu Manchu (1967), dir
Jeremy Summers, the series was turned over to international hack Jesus

Franco for the disastrous Castle of Fu Manchu (1968) and Blood of Fu
Manchu (1968; vt Kiss and Kill). [KN]
FAGAN, H(ENRY) A(LLAN)
(1889-1963) South African judge and writer, Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court of South Africa 1956-9. In his sf novel Ninya (1956 UK) survivors of
a crash landing on the Moon encounter many strange adventures. [JC]
FAHRENHEIT 451
Film (1966). Anglo-Enterprise and Vineyard/Universal. Dir Francois
Truffaut, starring Julie Christie, Oscar Werner, Cyril Cusack, Anton
Diffring. Screenplay Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard, based on FAHRENHEIT 451
(1953) by Ray BRADBURY. 112 mins. Colour.Bradbury's angry parable is about
a future in which all books are banned. The hero (Werner) is a member of
the Fire Brigade, whose function is not to put out fires but to burn
books. He first questions the regime and then rebels totally, incinerating
the fire chief instead of the books, escaping from the city and joining a
rural community whose members are each memorizing a book, word for word,
in order to preserve it. The film is more ambiguous than the book and, so
to speak, lacks its fire; Truffaut seems not altogether to accept
Bradbury's moral simplicity. This is particularly evident at the end, with
the book people murmuring aloud the words they are committing to memory,
while plodding about the snow-covered landscape like zombies. The words
may be saved but literature itself seems dead. The film is well
photographed by Nicolas Roeg, later the celebrated director of, among
others, The MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976). [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA;
COMMUNICATIONS.
FAIL SAFE
Film (1964). Max E. Youngstein-Sidney Lumet. Dir Sidney Lumet, starring
Henry Fonda, Dan O'Herlihy, Walter Matthau, Frank Overton, Fritz Weaver.
Screenplay Walter Bernstein, based on Fail-Safe (1962) by Eugene L.
BURDICK and Harvey WHEELER. 111 mins. Colour.A mistaken US nuclear attack
on Moscow nearly initiates WWIII, a quandary resolved only by the US
President's decision to bomb New York as an apologetic gesture. FS had the
misfortune to be released soon after DR STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO
STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1963), and the public preferred the
vigorous black farce of Stanley KUBRICK's film to the wordy, low-key
documentary style of Lumet's. The unlikely premise is lent conviction by
some good performances, but this "message" film is at once too
diagrammatic and too like soap opera in such simplistic portrayals as
Hawkish Professor, Liberal President and Conscience-Stricken Air-Force
General. [PN]
FAIRBAIRNS, ZOE (ANN)
(1948- ) UK writer and FEMINIST whose one sf novel, Benefits (1979),
presents a DYSTOPIAN vision of the fate of women in the 21st century, as
advances in reproductive technologies permit greater male control, in fear
and loathing, over the female half of the race. [JC]See also: WOMEN SF
WRITERS.
FAIRMAN, PAUL W.
(1916-1977) US editor and writer in several genres, including crime

stories and erotica. His first published sf story was "No Teeth for the
Tiger" for AMZ in 1950, and for some years thereafter he was a regular
contributor to the ZIFF-DAVIS magazines under his own name, the pseudonyms
Robert Lee and Mallory Storm, and various house pseudonyms, including E.K.
JARVIS, Clee GARSON and Paul LOHRMAN; he also published books as by
F.W.Paul (see below). He was the first editor of IF, Mar-Nov 1952, but
departed after 4 issues to join the Ziff-Davis staff. He left Ziff-Davis
in 1954 but returned in Dec 1955 and became editor of AMAZING STORIES and
FANTASTIC from May 1956, a position he held until Sep 1958. He launched
the short-lived DREAM WORLD in 1957. He was the principal user of the Ivar
JORGENSEN pseudonym, publishing under that name Ten from Infinity (1963;
vt The Deadly Sky 1970; vt Ten Deadly Men 1975), Rest in Agony (1963; vt
rev 1967 as PWF;The Diabolist 1973 as PWF) and Whom the Gods Would Slay
(1951 Fantastic Adventures; 1968). Two of his magazine stories were
filmed: "Deadly City" (1953 If as Jorgensen) as TARGET EARTH! (1954) and
"The Cosmic Frame" (1953 AMZ) as Invasion of the Saucer Men (1955; vt
Invasion of the Hell Creatures). Several of his books were novelizations
of tv scripts, including The World Grabbers * (1964), based on an episode
from One Step Beyond, and City under the Sea * (1965), based on the film
City under the Sea (1965; vt War Gods of the Deep). Other books issued
under his own name were the sf novel I, the Machine (1968) and the
horror-story collection The Doomsday Exhibit (coll 1971). He wrote one
pseudonymous novel in collaboration with Milton LESSER, The Golden Ape
(1957 AMZ as "Quest of the Golden Ape" as by Adam CHASE and Ivar
Jorgensen; 1959 as by Chase).PWF wrote several juvenile novels based on
outlines by Lester DEL REY and published under del Rey's byline, including
The Runaway Robot (1965), Tunnel through Time (1966), Siege Perilous
(1966; vt The Man without a Planet 1969) and Prisoners of Space (1968).
Rocket from Infinity (1966), The Infinite Worlds of Maybe (1966) and The
Scheme of Things (1966) may also have been by PWF but have not been
acknowledged as such. He wrote one juvenile, The Forgetful Robot (1968),
under his own name. [BS]Other works: A Study in Terror * (1966; vt
Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper 1967 UK) as by Ellery Queen; The
Frankenstein Wheel (1972); The Girl With Something Extra* (1973), a tv
tie.As by F.W.Paul: novels in the Man from S.T.U.D. sequence: The Orgy at
Madame Dracula's (1968) (#2), Sock it to me, Zombie! (1968) (#3), Rape is
a No-No (1969) (#6), The Planned Planethood Caper (1969) (#7) and The Lay
of the Land (1969) (#8), with #s 2,3 and 8 assembled as The Man from
S.T.U.D. vs the Mafia (omni 1972).See also: UNDER THE SEA.
FALCONER, KENNETH
[s] C.M. KORNBLUTH.
FALCONER, LEE N.
Julian MAY.
FALCONER, SOVEREIGN
Craig STRETE.
FALDBAKKEN, KNUT
[r] SCANDINAVIA.
FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES

US PULP MAGAZINE which published 81 issues, Sep/Oct 1939 (vol 1 #1)-June
1953 (vol 14 #4). It was originally part of the Frank A. MUNSEY chain but
was sold to Popular Publications, which published it from Mar 1943. Mary
GNAEDINGER was editor throughout.Although it published a few original
stories, FFM was basically a reprint magazine - perhaps the most
distinguished; it was originally founded to reprint science fantasy from
the Munsey pulps. After the sale to Popular it switched to the reprinting
of novels and stories not previously published in magazines. The first few
monthly issues used much short material, with novels serialized, but,
after going bimonthly in Aug 1940, FFM presented a complete novel in every
issue. The early issues featured novels by such Munsey regulars as Ray
CUMMINGS, George Allan ENGLAND, A. MERRITT and Francis STEVENS. Novels
reprinted from original hardback editions included several by H. Rider
HAGGARD, William Hope HODGSON, John TAINE, E. Charles VIVIAN, H.G. WELLS
and S. Fowler WRIGHT. Through offering access to such material FFM allowed
many pulp-sf fans to broaden their acquaintance with non-pulp material extending even to such authors as G.K. CHESTERTON and Franz KAFKA. The
quality of illustration was also exceptionally high - Virgil FINLAY did
much of his best work for the magazine, including 27 covers; 26 covers
were by Lawrence Sterne STEVENS. During the WWII years publication was
sometimes irregular.A Canadian reprint edition ran Feb 1948-Aug 1952; this
was the second Canadian reprinting of FFM, the first being the Canadian
SUPER SCIENCE STORIES. [BS]
FAMOUS SCIENCE FICTION
US DIGEST-size magazine. 9 issues, Winter 1966 (vol 1 #1) to Spring 1969
(vol 2 #3). One of the reprint magazines ed R.A.W. LOWNDES for Health
Knowledge Inc., it used material from the PULP MAGAZINES of the 1930s plus
16 original short stories by Greg BEAR, Miriam Allen DEFORD, Philip K.
DICK and others. The most notable of its reprints was Lawrence MANNING's
The Man who Awoke series (1933 Wonder Stories; Summer 1967-Summer 1968).
To issues 2-6 Lowndes contributed a series of editorials, Standards in
Science Fiction, later reprinted as Three Faces of Science Fiction (1973).
[BS]
FANAC
US FANZINE, ed from Berkeley by Terry CARR and Ron ELLIK (1958-61) and
subsequently (1961-3) by Walter Breen. Fanac was a small but frequent
publication carrying information on sf writers and events and news of sf
fans and their activities. Its informal and humorous style was popular and
became a model for later fanzines. Contributors included well known fans
and professional writers. Fanac won the HUGO for Best Fanzine in 1959.
[PR]
FANCHER, JANE S(UZANNE)
(1952- ) US writer who began publishing genre material with two GRAPHIC
NOVELS based on the work of C.J. CHERRYH: Gate of Ivrel: Claiming Rites *
(graph 1987) and Gate of Ivrel: Fever Dreams * (graph 1988). In her own
right JSF wrote the Cantrell sequence of SPACE OPERAS set in a
Cherryhesque habitat-dominated Galaxy - Groundties (1991),Uplink (1992)
and Harmonies of the 'Net (1992) - and featuring the protagonist's
attempts to deal with a COMPUTER-generated crisis on a colony planet

inhabited by the descendants of Native Americans. The tales are
high-pitched in tone, complex and promising. JSF was credited with artwork
on #13-#16 of the Elfquest comic-book series by Wendy and Richard Pini,
published by Donning Starblaze; her name was removed from the credits of
the revised graphic-novel version issued by Marvel Epic. [JC]
FANCIFUL TALES OF TIME AND SPACE
US DIGEST-size magazine. 1 issue, Fall 1936, published by Shepard ?
Wollheim; ed Donald A. WOLLHEIM. FTOTAS contained a mixture of weird, sf
and fantasy stories, including work by August DERLETH, David KELLER and H.
P. LOVECRAFT, as well as the first publication of Robert E. HOWARD's poem
"Solomon Kane's Homecoming". FTOTAS was, strictly speaking, a SEMIPROZINE,
rather like the earlier MARVEL TALES - which is to say that, despite the
print run being only 200, the magazine was for sale - although it seems to
have found no adequate distribution. [FHP/MJE]
FANDOM
The active readership of sf and fantasy, maintaining contacts through
FANZINES and CONVENTIONS. Fandom originated in the late 1920s, shortly
after the appearance of the first SF MAGAZINES. Readers contacted each
other, formed local groups (some of which, notably the SCIENCE FICTION
LEAGUE, were professionally sponsored), and soon began publication of APAS
and other amateur magazines, which came to be known collectively as
fanzines. The first organized convention was held in Leeds, UK, in 1937
and the first World SF Convention in New York in 1939 (although it gained
its name from the holding in that year of the World's Fair in New York).
From the 1920s to the 1950s, when sf was a minority interest, the number
of people in fandom was small, probably no more than 500 at any one time.
Since the 1960s, however, the number has steadily increased to over 10,000
- though this figure, of course, represents no more than a tiny fraction
of the wider sf readership. Fandom is, like GENRE SF, primarily a US
phenomenon, though other English-speaking countries quickly adopted the
concept. Continental Europe, Japan and elsewhere followed much later; but
increasing translation of and interest in sf has now spread fandom to some
30 countries, from Mexico to Norway. It is made up of both readers and
writers of sf; many authors started as fans and many fans have written sf,
so there is no absolute distinction between the two groups. Fans
themselves are mainly young and male with higher education and a
scientific or technical background, but exceptions are numerous and the
stereotype is becoming less pronounced. Many more women entered fandom in
the 1970s and 1980s.Fandom is not a normal hobbyist group. It has been
suggested that, if sf ceased to exist, fandom would continue to function
quite happily without it. That is an exaggeration; but it indicates the
difference between sf fans and ostensibly similar groups devoted to
Westerns, romances, detective fiction, etc. The reason may lie in the fact
that sf is a speculative literature and consequently attractive to readers
actively interested in new ideas and concepts, in addition to those idly
seeking entertainment. Early fans took part in rocketry, radical politics
and quasi-utopian experiments; later fans seem to find fanzines,
conventions and the interaction of fandom itself a sufficient outlet for
their energies and ideas. Though fandom has a tradition and history, even

a FAN LANGUAGE, fans are notably independent; relatively few belong to
national organizations such as N3F or the BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION
ASSOCIATION, and many publish individual and independent fanzines, a fact
that at least one outside sociologist - Fredric Wertham (1895-1981) in The
World of Fanzines (1973)-has found remarkable and even "unique".There is a
fannish word "fiawol", an acronym for "fandom is a way of life": the joke
is not altogether untrue. Just as sf is unrestricted in the scope of its
interests, so too are fans and fandom. Fandom is thus a collection of
people with a common background in sf and a common interest in
communication, whether through discussion, chatter, correspondence or
fanzine publishing. The result is more nearly a group of friends, or even
a subculture, than a simple fan club or a literary society.There have
always been divergent interest groups within fandom, and during the 1980s
these tended to split more obviously. The most basic division, perhaps, is
between those fans whose main love is written sf and the so-called media
fans, who prefer sf in the form of CINEMA, TELEVISION or COMICS. Even
among fans of written sf, fanzine fans and convention fans have become
separate groups, though there is substantial overlap; comics fans have
their own conventions, and there are other special-interest groups in
media fandom who may be primarily interested in, for example, STAR TREK
(the "Trekkies") or DR WHO; there is even a games fandom, with a
particular interest in role-playing games ( GAMES AND TOYS).Various
aspects of US fan history are covered in, among others, The Immortal Storm
(1954) by Sam MOSKOWITZ, All our Yesterdays (1969) and A Wealth of Fable
(1976 in mimeo form) by Harry WARNER Jr, The Futurians (1977) by Damon
KNIGHT and The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (1978) by Frederik POHL. The
fullest history of UK fandom takes the form of a fanzine, Then, written
and published by Rob Hansen: the 180pp of #1, #2 and #3 (1988-91) cover
the story to the end of the 1960s; more are projected. [PR/PN]See also:
FAPA; FUTURIANS; OMPA; RATFANDOM.
FANE, BRON
R.L. FANTHORPE.
FANE, JULIAN (CHARLES)
(1927- ) UK writer of literary bent whose DYSTOPIA, Revolution Island
(1979), was one of the last UK visions of a union-dominated left-wing
future. It was published just before the incoming administration of
Margaret Thatcher (1979-90) put an end, for this century, to the relevance
of this sort of warning. [JC]
FAN LANGUAGE
Sf enthusiasts, in common with other groups, have evolved their own
terminology and usage. This language comprises words and phrases used in
the writing of sf itself and also the more arcane and whimsical jargon of
FANDOM and FANZINES.Most sf readers are familiar with the shorthand of
their literature, and words like "spaceship", "robot", "time-machine" and
even "ftl drive", "spacewarp" and "ray-gun" need little or no glossing.
These words, however, originated in sf and required explanation when first
coined ( TERMINOLOGY). Only the growth in popularity of sf has led to the
acceptance of such terms as part of everyday English. The language of
fandom, however, has a more restricted use and thus is less familiar. Much

of it was initially associated with fanzines, including the specialized
art of duplicating them, and much of it resulted from simple contraction:
"corflu", for example, was nothing stranger than correcting fluid (for
stencils). It is a sign of the march of time - and of the very widespread
use of COMPUTER networks in fandom-that terms like "corflu" have gained an
air of ancient quaintness; another sign of the times is that contemporary
fans tend to accept neologisms from the world of computing rather than to
generate their own. Of more general interest are words which describe fan
attitudes and behaviour. Examples are: "egoboo" (from "ego-boost"), the
satisfaction gained from praise or recognition, such as seeing one's name
in print; "mundane", a non-fan; "slash fiction", fan-generated stories
about sexual intimacy between famed fictional characters, almost always
male, the best known examples being the Kirk/Spock slash tales; and
acronym- based terms like "to gafiate"(from Get Away From It All - to
leave fandom; the phrase originally meant to get away from mundane reality
and to enter fandom). Some of these contractions, acronyms and neologisms
fill a linguistic need ("slash fiction" describes a phenomenon not
otherwhere comprehended); others simply enrich the sense of affinity that
fandom - like any other grouping of this sort - was partly created to
foster. In general, fan argot is anything but freemasonical, and never
amounts to anything like a secret code to baffle outsiders. For fans,
outsiders are identifiable not so much by their failure to use certain
terms as by their tendency to misuse others. The best example of this is
perhaps "sf", the usual contraction used by sf fans; journalists and other
nonsympathetic outsiders can readily be identified by their use of the
repugnant "SCI-FI"; older fans sometimes use the contracted adjective
stfnal, short for "scientifictional" ( SCIENTIFICTION).Various guides to
fan language have been published (by fans) in the USA and UK. Wilson
TUCKER's Neofan's Guide (1955; rev 1973; rev 1984) is a useful
introduction, and Roberta Rogow's Futurespeak: A Fan's Guide to the
Language of Science Fiction (1991), though erratic, covers much new
ground. [PR/JC]
FANTAST
The FUTURIAN .
FANTASTIC
US DIGEST-size magazine, companion to AMAZING STORIES; published by
ZIFF-DAVIS (Summer 1952-June 1965), Ultimate Publishing Co. (Sep 1965-Oct
1980); ed Howard BROWNE (Summer 1952-Aug 1956), Paul W. FAIRMAN (Oct
1956-Nov 1958), Cele GOLDSMITH (Dec 1958-June 1965; as Cele G. Lalli from
July 1964), Joseph ROSS (Sep 1965-Nov 1967), Harry HARRISON (Jan-Oct
1968), Barry N. MALZBERG (Dec 1968-Apr 1969), Ted WHITE (June 1969-Jan
1979), Elinor Mavor (Apr 1979-Oct 1980; initially under the pseudonym Omar
Gohagen). From Nov 1980 Fantastic was merged with AMZ. After the title was
bought by Sol Cohen's Ultimate Publishing Co. in 1965 it mainly published
reprints until mid-1968; the reprint policy was finally phased out
completely under White soon after he took over from Malzberg. For much of
its early life F was bimonthly, but at its height - in the Goldsmith
period - it went monthly, beginning with Feb 1957. The Ultimate Publishing
version began in Sep 1965 as a bimonthly, but the magazine went onto a

quarterly schedule in 1976. The title underwent numerous minor changes,
appearing as Fantastic Science Fiction (Apr 1955-Feb 1958), Fantastic
Science Fiction Stories (Sep 1959-Sep 1960), Fantastic Stories of
Imagination (Oct 1960-June 1965) and Fantastic Stories at various periods.
Browne originally intended F to attract a wider audience than AMZ, and
published tales under bylines famous outside the sf field, including
Raymond Chandler, Truman Capote, Mickey Spillane and Evelyn WAUGH (the
Spillane byline was probably not authentic). After 1953, when it absorbed
the much older FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, F deteriorated to become a downmarket
sf magazine indistinguishable from AMZ. But from 1958, under the more
adventurous editorship of Goldsmith, it improved dramatically, becoming
arguably the best fantasy magazine existing. Fritz LEIBER revived his
Fafhrd and Gray Mouser for an issue containing only his stories (Nov
1959), and the series remained an irregular feature. Authors whose first
published stories appeared in F include Thomas M. DISCH, Ursula K. LE GUIN
and Roger ZELAZNY. David BUNCH was a regular (and controversial)
contributor. Following a bad period in the mid-1960s after the magazine
was sold, F improved again under White, featuring a notable series of
articles by Alexei and Cory PANSHIN, Science Fiction in Dimension
(1970-73), publishing much early work by Gordon EKLUND and some excellent
covers by Stephen FABIAN. New Conan stories by L. Sprague DE CAMP and Lin
CARTER helped to boost circulation a little, but the magazine's situation
remained financially precarious despite the fact that "adult fantasy" had
been spectacularly revived as a paperback genre. Its deterioration after
White quit was rapid and deservedly terminal.Although the words "science
fiction" appeared on the cover at different times for four or five years,
F was always mainly known for fantasy, being particularly strong in SWORD
AND SORCERY.An undated bimonthly UK reprint ran for 8 issues, published by
Strato Publications Dec 1953-Feb 1955. An anthology of stories from F is
The Best from Fantastic (anth 1973) ed Ted White. [BS]
FANTASTIC ADVENTURES
US PULP MAGAZINE published by ZIFF-DAVIS as a companion to AMAZING
STORIES. 128 issues May 1939-Mar 1953. FA began as a bimonthly,
BEDSHEET-size, but maintained a monthly schedule from vol 2 #1 (Jan 1940)
for most of its existence, shrinking to PULP-MAGAZINE size in June 1940.
To Dec 1949 it was ed Raymond A. PALMER, and from then until May/June 1953
(when it merged with the one-year-old Ziff-Davis DIGEST magazine
FANTASTIC) by Howard V. BROWNE. William L. HAMLING was managing editor Nov
1947-Feb 1951.The bulk of FA's contents were provided by a small stable of
Chicago writers using a variety of house pseudonyms, although Palmer did
publish several stories by Edgar Rice BURROUGHS 1939-42 and some material
by established sf and fantasy writers-Robert BLOCH was a frequent
contributor. The magazine was at its best under Browne's editorship in
1950-51, when it published Theodore STURGEON's first novel, The Dreaming
Jewels (Feb 1950; 1950), and notable long stories by Lester DEL REY,
Walter M. MILLER and William TENN. FA hardly bears comparison with its
rival ASF's short-lived but excellent companion UNKNOWN, but sf writers
given carte blanche to write pure fantasy for FA did often produce
readable fiction with a distinctive whimsical and ironic flavour. The
mass-produced material it published was of quite negligible interest.In

1941-3 and 1948-51 unsold issues were bound up in threes and sold as
Fantastic Adventures Quarterly, there being 8 such in the first series,
Winter 1941-Fall 1943, and 11 in the second, Summer 1948-Spring 1951.
There were 2 UK editions: the first released 2 short (32pp) numbered
issues in 1946, the second reprinted 24 numbered issues 1950-54, abridged
from US issues dated Mar 1950-Jan 1953. [BS]
FANTASTIC ADVENTURES QUARTERLY
FANTASTIC ADVENTURES.
FANTASTIC ADVENTURES YEARBOOK
One of the many reprint DIGEST-size magazines issued by Sol Cohen's
Ultimate Publishing Co., which in 1965 had bought rights to the ZIFF-DAVIS
sf magazines. Its only issue, containing stories reprinted from FANTASTIC
ADVENTURES 1949-52, was released in 1970. [BS/PN]
FANTASTIC JOURNEY, THE
US tv series (1977). Bruce Lansbury Productions/Columbia Pictures TV/NBC.
Prod Leonard Katzman. Writers included Michael Michaelian, Kathryn
Michaelian Powers and the story editor, D.C. FONTANA. Dirs included Andrew
V. McLaglen (pilot episode), Vincent McEveety. Starring Carl Franklin,
Roddy McDowall, Jared Martin. One season, pilot episode of 75 mins plus 9
50min episodes. Colour.The pilot episode has explorers entering the
Bermuda Triangle, an ocean area in which planes and ships are reputed to
disappear; but, after an effectively eerie opening in which their boat is
consumed by a pulsating green cloud, it becomes evident that they are
still within the borders of tv-formula-land. Reaching an island that
"isn't on the map", they meet a 23rd-century human, Varian (Martin), and
discover that the landscape consists of segments of past and future time
and space, an idea perhaps inspired by Fred HOYLE's October the First is
Too Late (1966). This concept allows the protagonists to encounter a new
(stereotyped) culture every week, each within walking distance. Silly and
somewhat repetitive adventures take place. The series was quickly dropped.
[JB/PN]
FANTASTIC NOVELS
US bimonthly reprint PULP MAGAZINE, companion to FAMOUS FANTASTIC
MYSTERIES, which it somewhat resembled. 5 issues July 1940-Apr 1941,
published by the Frank A. MUNSEY Corp.; it was revived by Popular
Publications to publish 20 more issues Mar 1948-June 1951, with the
numeration of the second series following directly on from that of the
first. It was ed in both incarnations by Mary GNAEDINGER.FN used a great
deal of material by A. MERRITT. #1 featured The Blind Spot (1921; 1951) by
Austin HALL and Homer Eon FLINT, serialization of which had begun in
Famous Fantastic Mysteries, and all subsequent issues except the last
featured a complete novel. Other authors whose work was reprinted included
Ray CUMMINGS and George Allan ENGLAND.2 issues of a UK edition appeared in
1950 and 1951, the second (undated) issue confusingly appearing as #1.
There were 17 issues of a Canadian reprint, Sep 1948-June 1951, identical
to the US issues. [BS/PN]
FANTASTIC PLANET
La PLANETE SAUVAGE .

FANTASTIC SCIENCE FICTION
US BEDSHEET-size magazine, ed Walter B. GIBSON, the prolific pulp writer
and creator of The Shadow. Only 2 issues appeared, #1 (Aug 1952) published
by Super Science Fiction Publications, #2 (Dec 1952) by Capitol Stories,
both of Connecticut.This inferior magazine, whose stories featured
simplistic and chauvinistic adventure, should not be confused with
FANTASTIC, also begun in 1952, which for Apr 1955-Feb 1958 was likewise
titled Fantastic Science Fiction. [BS/PN]
FANTASTIC SCIENCE FICTION STORIES
FANTASTIC.
FANTASTIC SCIENCE THRILLER
UK juvenile pocketbook series published by Stanley Baker Ltd. There were
6 issues, all in 1954. [BS]
FANTASTIC STORIES
FANTASTIC.
FANTASTIC STORIES OF IMAGINATION
FANTASTIC.
FANTASTIC STORY MAGAZINE
FANTASTIC STORY QUARTERLY.
FANTASTIC STORY QUARTERLY
US reprint PULP MAGAZINE, 23 issues Spring 1950-Spring 1955, the title
changing after #4 to Fantastic Story Magazine; published by Best Books, a
subsidiary of Standard Magazines. Sam MERWIN Jr was editor until Fall
1951, being succeeded by Samuel MINES and then by Alexander SAMALMAN for
the last 2 issues.Most of the reprints were from STARTLING STORIES and
THRILLING WONDER STORIES; early issues carried a good deal of material
from Hugo GERNSBACK's WONDER STORIES. FSQ used a few original stories,
including Gordon R. DICKSON's first, "Trespass!" (1950), written with Poul
ANDERSON, and occasionally went outside the chain for reprints - e.g.,
publishing A.E. VAN VOGT's SLAN (1940 ASF; 1946; rev 1951) in the Summer
1952 issue. Most issues carried a complete novel. There was a Canadian
edition of the first 4 numbers. [BS]
FANTASTIC UNIVERSE
US DIGEST-size magazine, last 6 issues PULP-MAGAZINE size. 69 issues
June/July 1953-Mar 1960, published by Leo MARGULIES's King-Size
Publications to July 1959, then by Great American Publications. FU began
as a bimonthly, but went monthly in Sep 1954 and held to that schedule for
most of its life except Nov 1958-Sep 1959, when it was again bimonthly. Ed
Sam MERWIN Jr June-Nov 1953; Beatrice Jones Jan-Mar 1954; Leo Margulies
May 1954-Aug 1956; Hans Stefan SANTESSON Sep 1956-Mar 1960.FU's material
spanned the entire fantasy spectrum; in effect it became the poor man's
MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION. There was no interior artwork
until July 1959. Two important stories were "Who?" (1955) by Algis BUDRYS,
which formed the basis of his WHO? (1958), and "Curative Telepath" (1959)
by John BRUNNER, which formed the basis of his THE WHOLE MAN (1964; vt
Telepathist UK). 16 of the best stories from its pages were published in

The Fantastic Universe Omnibus (anth 1960) ed Santesson. [BS/PN]
FANTASTIC VOYAGE
Film (1966). 20th Century-Fox. Dir Richard Fleischer, starring Stephen
Boyd, Raquel Welch, Edmund O'Brien, Donald Pleasence. Screenplay Harry
Kleiner, based on a story by Otto Clement and J. Lewis (i.e., Jerome)
BIXBY. 100 mins. Colour.A submarine and its crew of medical experts - plus
a double-agent saboteur (Pleasence) - are miniaturized and injected into
the bloodstream of an important scientist in order to remove by laser a
blood-clot from his brain. In the finale - a race to escape before they
revert to full size while still inside the body-they exit via a tear duct
with only seconds to spare. The special effects by L.B. Abbott, Art
Cruickshank and Emil Kosa Jr are impressive, as are the sets-duplicating
in giant size various organs of the body, such as the heart, lungs and
brain - designed by art director Dale Hennesy with spectacular
histological surrealism. This vivid spectacle, however, does not
compensate for the ham acting, the irrelevance of Ms Welch's lingered-on
breasts, and the puerile melodrama. The novelization was Fantastic Voyage
* (1966) by Isaac ASIMOV. A film using a very similar theme is Joe DANTE's
INNERSPACE (1987). [PN/JB]See also: GREAT AND SMALL.
FANTASTIC VOYAGES
The fantastic voyage is one of the oldest literary forms, and remains one
of the basic frameworks for the casting of literary fantasies. Of the
prose forms extant before the development of the novel in the 18th
century, the fantastic voyage is the most important in the ancestry of sf
( PROTO SCIENCE FICTION). Among others, Johannes KEPLER's Somnium (1634),
Francis BACON's New Atlantis (1627), Tommaso CAMPANELLA's City of the Sun
(1623) and CYRANO DE BERGERAC's Other Worlds (1657-62) all take this form,
as do the oldest of all works which can be claimed as ancestors of sf: the
Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, from the third millennium BC, and HOMER's
Odyssey, from the first.The fantastic voyage continued to dominate
speculative fiction and the SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE long after the rise of the
novel, whose basic pretence was the painstaking imitation of experience
(what the critic Ian Watt calls "formal realism"). It is partly because of
this formal separation of speculative literature from the development of
19th-century social literature that there remains something of a gulf
between speculative fiction and the literary MAINSTREAM today. The first
sf story cast in the form of a novel was Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein
(1818), but there were very few comparable works written in the succeeding
century. The bulk of Jules VERNE's imaginative work falls in the category
of voyages imaginaires, and many of H.G. WELLS's scientific romances adopt
a similar form. Among the important fantastic voyages which today may be
classified as sf are: The Man in the Moone (1638) by Francis GODWIN,
Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan SWIFT, Nicolai Klimii iter
subterraneum (1741 in Latin; exp 1745; trans as A Journey to the World
Under-Ground 1742 UK) by Ludwig HOLBERG, A Short Account of a Remarkable
Aerial Voyage and Discovery of a New Planet (1813) by Willem BILDERDIJK,
Symzonia (1820) by Adam SEABORN, A Voyage to the Moon (1827) by Joseph
ATTERLEY, Voyage au centre de la terre (1863; exp 1867; trans as Journey
to the Centre of the Earth 1872 UK) and Vingt mille lieues sous les mers

(1870; trans as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea 1872 UK) by Jules
Verne, and Across the Zodiac (1880) by Percy GREG. These voyages took
their heroes over the Earth's surface, into worlds underground and beneath
the sea, to the Moon and to other planets. Important new scope for the
fantastic voyage was revealed in the last few years of the 19th century by
H.G. Wells in THE TIME MACHINE (1895), which opened up the limitless
vistas of the future to planned tourism, and by Robert W. COLE in The
Struggle for Empire (1900), the first major interstellar adventure story.
These new imaginative territories were to prove immensely significant for
20th-century imaginative literature. The fantastic voyage has, of course,
also remained central within the literature of the supernatural
imagination, much of which was also ill adapted to the form of the novel.
As supernatural fantasy has been influenced and infiltrated by the
scientific imagination it has been the fantastic voyage, far more than any
other narrative form, that has provided a suitable medium for "hybrid"
works; thus a considerable number of 20th-century fantastic voyages are
difficult to classify by means of the standard genre borderlines. In this
no-man's-land within the territories of imaginative literature exist
virtually all the works of writers such as William Hope HODGSON, Edgar
Rice BURROUGHS and A. MERRITT, and various individual novels of note:
Frigyes KARINTHY's Gulliverian Voyage to Faremido and Capillaria (1916 and
1922; trans omni 1966), David LINDSAY's A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920),
Ruthven TODD's The Lost Traveller (1943), the title story of John Cowper
POWYS's Up and Out (coll 1957), The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) by Norton
Juster (1929- ) and Michel Bernanos's The Other Side of the Mountain
(1967; trans 1968).When Hugo GERNSBACK first demarcated sf as a genre in
the 1920s he co-opted Verne, Wells and Merritt, and also Ray CUMMINGS,
author of fantastic voyages into the atomic microcosm ( GREAT AND SMALL).
It was not long before E.E. "Doc" SMITH's The Skylark of Space (1928;
1946) took PULP-MAGAZINE sf, at FASTER-THAN-LIGHT speeds, into the greater
Universe beyond the limits of the Solar System. Other milieux were quickly
introduced. Edmond HAMILTON's "Locked Worlds" (1929) adapted the notion of
PARALLEL WORLDS from supernatural fantasy, and the first pulp sf voyages
into a future replete with ALTERNATE WORLDS were undertaken in Jack
WILLIAMSON's THE LEGION OF TIME (1938; 1952). A significant refinement in
the interstellar fantastic voyage, the GENERATION STARSHIP, was introduced
a few years later, most significantly in Robert A. HEINLEIN's "Universe"
(1941).Voyages into the "inner spaces" of the human mind had also long
been commonplace in supernatural fantasy, but a sciencefictional jargon of
support for such adventures was slow in arriving. Notable early examples
are "Dreams are Sacred" (1948) by Peter Phillips and "The Mental
Assassins" (1950) by Gregg Conrad (Rog PHILLIPS).Most of these milieux
were reachable only by means of literary devices whose practicability was
highly dubious if not flatly impossible. Space travel was the one
hypothetical variant of the fantastic voyage into which it was possible to
introduce rigorous attempts at realism ( SPACESHIPS), although the
technologies involved have inevitably became dated with the passage of
time. Notable attempts from various periods include Verne's De la terre a
la lune (1865) and Autour de la lune (1870), Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY's
Beyond the Planet Earth (1920 Russia; trans 1960), Laurence MANNING's
"Voyage of the Asteroid" (1932) and Arthur C. CLARKE's Prelude to Space

(1951). The purely facilitative character of devices like TIME MACHINES
and interdimensional portals should not, however, be deemed to disqualify
them as means to be deployed in serious speculative fictions; indeed, they
are vitally necessary.The opening up of these vast imaginary territories
gave sf writers limitless scope for invention. There is no speculation whether physical, biological, social or metaphysical - that cannot somehow
be made incarnate and given a space of its own within the conventions of
sf. Voyages into fluid worlds where anything and everything may happen where the characters become helpless victims of chaos or godlike creators
- may be envisaged, as in M.K. JOSEPH's The Hole in the Zero (1967), as
may voyages into mathematical abstraction like "The Mathenauts" (1964) by
Norman KAGAN. Sf has drawn up a framework of conventions and a vocabulary
of literary devices which not only makes such adventures conceivable but
renders them relatively comfortable. It is a potential that sf writers
have, for various reasons, been greatly inhibited from exploiting to the
full, but they have - whatever their failings-established significant
signposts within all these hypothetical realms.At its simplest the
fantastic voyage is a set of episodes whose function is simply to present
a series of dramatic encounters, but it is rare to find the form used with
no higher ambition than to offer a pleasant distraction. Many voyages
which pretend to be doing that - like Lewis CARROLL's Alice books actually present worlds whose bizarre aspects reflect the real world
ironically and subversively. The same is true even of many relatively
crude pulp sf stories like Francis STEVENS's The Heads of Cerberus (1919;
1952), Garret SMITH's Between Worlds (1919; 1929), John TAINE's The Time
Stream (1931; 1946) and Stanton A. COBLENTZ's Hidden World (1935 as "In
Caverns Below"; 1957), and in such unconvincing films as VOYAGE TO THE
BOTTOM OF THE SEA (1961) and FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966). In very many cases
the fantastic voyage has allegorical implications, which are most obvious
when the voyage is also a quest, as it very often is in modern genre
fantasy, which tends to follow the paradigm of J.R.R. TOLKIEN's The Lord
of the Rings (3 vols 1954-5). The quest may be for a person, an object or
a place, but the movement through a hypothetical landscape is usually
paralleled by a growth towards some kind of maturity or acceptance in the
protagonist's mind. The growth is towards self-knowledge or CONCEPTUAL
BREAKTHROUGH in the psychologically oriented variants which lie within or
close to the borders of sf; examples include Rasselas (1759) by Samuel
JOHNSON, Non-Stop (1958; vt Starship US) by Brian W. ALDISS, The Drowned
World (1962) by J.G. BALLARD and INVERTED WORLD (1974) by Christopher
PRIEST. In stories of this kind the relationship between the environment
of the story and the inner space of the protagonists's psyche is often
complex and subtle; in the work of Philip K. DICK, from Eye in the Sky
(1957) to A SCANNER DARKLY (1977), characters are continually forced to
undertake nightmarish journeys into milieux where the distinction between
real and unreal is hopelessly blurred and their personal inadequacies are
painfully exposed.Any list of notable fantastic voyages in modern sf is
necessarily highly selective, but some of the most important and
interesting which have appeared since 1926 are as follows: The World Below
(1929) by S. Fowler WRIGHT, OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET (1938) by C.S. LEWIS,
The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1939-50; fixup 1950) by A.E. VAN VOGT, Big
Planet (1952; 1957) by Jack VANCE, "Surface Tension" (1952) by James

BLISH, MISSION OF GRAVITY (1954) by Hal CLEMENT, The City and the Stars
(1956) by Arthur C. CLARKE, THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION (1967) and NOVA
(1968) by Samuel R. DELANY, Picnic on Paradise (1968) by Joanna RUSS,
Space Chantey (1968) by R.A. LAFFERTY, Tau Zero (1970) by Poul ANDERSON,
Downward to the Earth (1970) and Son of Man (1971) by Robert SILVERBERG,
RINGWORLD (1970) by Larry NIVEN, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr
Hoffman (1972; vt War of Dreams) by Angela CARTER, Hiero's Journey (1973)
by Sterling E. LANIER, Orbitsville (1975) by Bob SHAW, GALAXIES (1975) by
Barry N. MALZBERG, ENGINE SUMMER (1979) by John CROWLEY, The Hitch Hiker's
Guide to the Galaxy (1979) and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
(1980) by Douglas ADAMS, The Book of the New Sun (1980-83) by Gene WOLFE,
The Void Captain's Tale (1983) and Child of Fortune (1985) by Norman
SPINRAD, The Travails of Jane Saint (1986) by Josephine SAXTON and
HYPERION (1989) by Dan SIMMONS. [BS]
FANTASY
There is no DEFINITION OF SF that excludes fantasy, other than
prescriptive definitions so narrow that, were they applied, this
encyclopedia would be reduced to 10 per cent of its present length. We are
talking about problems of definition raised by not a minority but a
majority of all genre writings. Among the GENRE-SF writers at least some
of whose work would be excluded are Terry BISSON, Ray BRADBURY, Orson
Scott CARD, John CROWLEY, Avram DAVIDSON, Samuel R. DELANY, Thomas M.
DISCH, Harlan ELLISON, Philip Jose FARMER, Ursula K. LE GUIN, Fritz
LEIBER, Michael MOORCOCK, Andre NORTON, Tim POWERS, Keith ROBERTS, Geoff
RYMAN, Lucius SHEPARD, Dan SIMMONS, Jack VANCE, John VARLEY, Gene WOLFE
and Roger ZELAZNY - many of the ablest and most popular writers in the sf
field. Most or all of these writers (and several hundred more names could
easily be added) have written occasional works that would be accepted by
almost all readers as fantasy, but that is not the point; rather it is
that any definition of sf that insists upon limiting true sf to scientific
or "cognitive" modes of thought, and extrapolation from known realities,
would exclude the whole body of their work. It is not that Delany or Le
Guin are unscientific; indeed, they are not. But the science is not the
whole story; their work is deeply imbued with fantasy motifs, fantastic
modes of thought, narrative connections deriving from the logic of myth,
metaphors from magical or religious belief, narrative resonances evoking a
backward corridor of time long preceding the ages of science and
technology. Certainly most of us can and do accept nearly all the above as
true sf writers, but that is because most of us are not wedded to
prescriptive definitions of sf. In the real world, we recognize that both
sf and fantasy, if genres at all, are impure genres. They are not
homogeneous. Their fruit may be sf but the roots are fantasy, and the
flowers and leaves, perhaps, something else again.It is, of course, quite
simple to erect a theoretical system that distinguishes the genres, though
in practice it is not especially helpful, for the reasons given above. The
usual way is to regard fantasy as a subset of fiction, a circle within a
circle. (The bit between inner and outer circles is mimetic fiction, which
cleaves to known reality. Mimetic or "realistic" fiction is itself fairly
recent; the distinctions being made here could not have been made before
the 18th century.) Within the inner circle of fantasy - the fiction of the

presently unreal - is a smaller circle still, a subset of a subset, and
this is sf. It shares with fantasy the idea of a novum: some new element,
something that distinguishes the fiction from reality as presently
constituted. A novum could be a vampire or a colonized planet. The
sub-subset that is sf insists that the novum be explicable in terms that
adhere to conventionally formulated natural law; the remainder, fantasy,
has no such requirement.To cut the definition to an irreducible minimum:
mimetic fiction is real, fantasy is unreal (but FABULATION); sf is unreal
but natural, as opposed to the remainder of fantasy, which is unreal and
supernatural. (Or, simpler still, sf could happen, fantasy
couldn't.)Several things follow from this sort of argument. The first is
that all sf is fantasy, but not all fantasy is sf. The second is that,
because natural law is something we come to understand only gradually,
over centuries, and which we continue to rewrite, the sf of one period
regularly becomes the fantasy of the next. What we regard as natural or
possible depends upon the consensus reality of a given culture; but the
idea of consensus reality itself is an ideal, not an absolute: in practice
there are as many realities as there are human consciousnesses. A reader
who believes in astrology will allow certain fictions to be sf that an
astronomer would exclude. Although the point is seldom made, it could be
said that the particular consensus reality to which sf aspires is that of
the scientific community.In this encyclopedia we do not use the word
"fantasy" in the sense suggested in the previous three paragraphs: that
is, as a supergenre which includes sf. This is because we have practical
problems to contend with: the hardest part in determining which authors
should and should not be given entries in this encyclopedia was deciding
which fantasy authors were sufficiently sf-like to be included (see
Introduction for further discussion). To make any sort of distinction at
all, we had to regard "fantasy" as the contents of the middle circle
excluding the sf circle, in which the novum is supernatural; in other
words, "fantasy", as we use the word throughout this book, is fiction
about the impossible. Even then, the distinction is quite extraordinarily
difficult; again and again the sf fruit has roots of fantasy; even HARD SF
regularly uses fantastic or IMAGINARY SCIENCE.Although academics,
especially those specializing in genre studies, have written many volumes
attempting to make the sort of distinction we speak of, the sf community
has been decidedly pragmatic and has generally ducked the issue. To take
two major AWARDS, the HUGO and the NEBULA, and one less known, the PHILIP
K. DICK AWARD, it is sometimes not realized that there is nothing in their
constitutions to prevent them being given to works of fantasy rather than
sf; indeed, they often are. Hugo-winners include Fritz Leiber's "Ill Met
in Lankhmar" (1970) and Robert BLOCH's "That Hell-Bound Train" (1958);
Nebula-winners include Pat MURPHY's The Falling Woman (1986) and Ursula K.
Le Guin's Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990); Philip K. Dick
award-winners include Tim Powers' THE ANUBIS GATES (1983) and Patricia
Geary's Strange Toys (1987). There are many more such.Or take the genre
magazines, and consider how many have titles deliberately including both
genres: FANTASTIC SCIENCE FICTION STORIES, The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND
SCIENCE FICTION , SCIENCE FANTASY, and a number of others. Or consider
that the genre newspaper LOCUS, along with the annual bibliographies it
publishes, gives full coverage to sf, fantasy and horror and makes no

clear distinction between them. Consider that the most recent academic
journal about sf deliberately titles itself to include fantasy also:
JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS. (We do not wish to start any hares
about whatever differences may be discernible between Fantasy and the
Fantastic.) Or consider the Italian word for sf, "fantascienza", which
combines the two genres in the word itself; the Russian word is
"fantastika". Indeed, consider that the general thrust of the European
(though not UK) literary tradition is to regard fantasy and sf as two
aspects of the same phenomenon; it is notable that several European
authors of such entries in this encyclopedia as ROMANIA are more inclusive
about what constitutes sf than this encyclopedia is as a whole. (European
theoretical critics, however, can be very exclusive in their definitions;
Tzvetan TODOROV muddied the waters in Introduction a la litterature
fantastique [1970; trans as The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a
Literary Genre 1973], which sees the fantastic, not very helpfully, as
occupying the area where the reader hesitates between imputing a rational
or a supernatural explanation to the events described, which would exclude
most fantasy from "the fantastic"; and another celebrated European critic,
Darko SUVIN, has claimed that the commercial linking of sf and fantasy,
whether in marketing or in critical terms, is "a rampantly pathological
phenomenon". Suvin is the best known of those critics who have offered the
kind of prescriptive definition of sf noted above.)In the face of this
widespread conspiracy to ignore generic boundaries wherever possible (a
conspiracy to which most bookshops belong) it may seem quixotic to attempt
distinctions at all. Yet we feel that a book calling itself The
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction must make at least some attempt to prevent
"sf proper" from being wholly swamped by the necessarily much larger
number of entries (especially author entries) that a wholly inclusive
policy about fantasy would entail.The task is not impossible, though
necessarily subjective. The most important thing perhaps - difficult to
pin down because it involves style as well as content - is to regard
fantasy as sf-like when it adopts a cognitive approach to its subject
matter, even if that subject matter is MAGIC. Although both are given
entries in this book, most people would agree that Ursula Le Guin's
Earthsea books are more sciencefictional in tone - even though set in
worlds where magic works and where dragons exist - than, say, H.P.
LOVECRAFT's stories of the Cthulhu Mythos, though the latter are in fact
explicable in sf terms where the former are not; that is, Lovecraft's
Elder Gods, spawned in space or in other worlds, can be seen as enormously
powerful ALIEN invaders. In practice, though, Lovecraft's readers seldom
give his work an sf reading of this sort, because his tone is
fundamentally and unmistakably GOTHIC and anti-rational: Le Guin is an
explainer, Lovecraft prefers the weird, the sinister and the inexplicable.
In other words, supernatural fantasy approaches the condition of science
fiction when its narrative voice implies a post-scientific consciousness.
Conversely, sf (like, for example, much of that by Andre Norton or, in a
different way, by Ray Bradbury) approaches the condition of fantasy when
its narrative voice implies a mystical or even anti-scientific
consciousness.Authors who use fantasy elements in sf regularly rationalize
their fundamentally GOTHIC motifs, Anne MCCAFFREY's dragons being an
excellent example: many further examples are given in the entries on GODS

AND DEMONS, GOLEM, MAGIC, MONSTERS, MYTHOLOGY and SUPERNATURAL
CREATURES,
these all being areas where sf and fantasy commonly collide. Conversely,
when writers of HARD SF like Robert A. HEINLEIN, Poul ANDERSON and Larry
NIVEN write fantasy, as they often have done, it is amusing to note how
the old habits persist; they regard the marvellous and the magical with a
rationalist scrutiny, treating MAGIC (which see) rather as Le Guin does,
as if it were a science. The distinction between magic and science is not
wholly clear at the best of times; Arthur C. CLARKE has commented that any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Larry
Niven and David " GERROLD's The Flying Sorcerers (1971) is constructed
around this precept.A story parodying the transmutation of fantasy into sf
by use of scientific jargon is Isaac ASIMOV's "Pate de Foie Gras" (1956),
an sf version of "The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs". When the
rationalization of fantasy elements is merely cursory (substituting, say,
an ALTERNATE WORLD reached through a Dimensional Gate for something
resembling what Alice found down the rabbit burrow) we would be inclined
to call the result fantasy still, though others would call it sf. This
kind of fiction perhaps began with Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's Barsoom books in
the early decades of this century, in which an unexplained superscience
tends to stand in for magic. A convenient term for these stories is
SCIENCE FANTASY, and they are discussed under that rubric; many "science
fantasy" stories are also PLANETARY ROMANCES (which see).One reason why so
much fantasy rather resembles sf is its use of many sciencefictional
motifs (though it has to be said that the range of motifs is much narrower
than that found in sf proper, since not much fantasy contains anything
other than occult technology; there are few ROBOTS and CYBORGS and
SPACESHIPS). Theme entries in this book representing the most notable sf
and borderline-sf motifs of this sort are ALTERNATE WORLDS, ATLANTIS,
DIMENSIONS, ESP, FANTASTIC VOYAGES, IMMORTALITY, PSI POWERS,
REINCARNATION, SUSPENDED ANIMATION and TIME TRAVEL. All of these are
commonplace in fantasy, most of them commonplace in sf also. Indeed, sf
set in worlds where psi powers work can often be read as it if were
fantasy; such, towards the sf end of the spectrum, are Marion Zimmer
BRADLEY's Darkover novels and, towards the fantasy end, Christopher
STASHEFF's The Warlock in Spite of Himself (1969) and its sequels. A
sophisticated variant is The Deep (1975) by John CROWLEY, which adroitly
plays upon the generic expectations of the reader in such a way that what
appears to be HEROIC FANTASY comes to seem, retrospectively, pure
sf.Fantasy itself is not homogeneous; various terms are used, often not
very precisely, to characterize its various kinds. An interesting
distinction, made by Marshall B. TYMN, Kenneth J. Zahorski and Robert H.
Boyer in the introduction to Fantasy Literature: A Core Collection and
Reference Guide (1979), is between high fantasy, set in a fully realized
secondary world, and low fantasy, which features supernatural intrusions
into our own world. Most HORROR fiction takes the latter form; most SWORD
AND SORCERY (or HEROIC FANTASY) takes the former. Although this
encyclopedia contains many examples of both high and low fantasy, it is
probably high fantasy (in this definition) that is the closest to sf: high
fantasy and sf typically create imaginary worlds (alternate to our own).
Thus Frank HERBERT's DUNE (1965) and J.R.R. TOLKIEN's The Lord of the

Rings (1954-5), though the one is sf and the other high fantasy, have in
the imaginative intensity of their detailed world-creation a great deal in
common (but PLANETARY ROMANCE for an argument that the two styles of
fiction differ essentially in that one is set on a planet, the other in a
landscape). The kind of fantasy which creates such detailed,
self-consistent alternate worlds, whatever we call it, is certainly the
kind most written by sf writers "on vacation". Such is Poul Anderson's
Three Hearts and Three Lions (1953; exp 1961) and Jack Vance's THE DYING
EARTH (coll 1950). Such worlds were never peculiar to sf writers, however.
Further back, many of the works of Lord DUNSANY are effectively set in a
coherent, alternate universe, as are those of E.R. EDDISON and James
Branch CABELL, all three being quite unconnected to genre sf when they
wrote, though all three have since had repercussions in sf that go beyond
the merely stylistic. An even more notable work of fantasy is the
Gormenghast sequence (1946-59) by Mervyn PEAKE; this may not be set in a
fully fledged alternate world, but it does contain all the conceptual
creativity that another writer might have lavished on an entire planet
focused upon one emblematic building and its occupants.In its marketing,
sword-and-sorcery fiction was for some time sold very much as if it were a
form of sf - perhaps in part because many of the same writers have been
involved in both genres, like L. Sprague DE CAMP, C.L. MOORE, Henry
KUTTNER, Leigh BRACKETT, Jack Vance and Fritz Leiber; the term "sword and
sorcery" is said to have been coined by Leiber. The archetypal
sword-and-sorcery writer at the pulp end of the spectrum was Robert E.
HOWARD in his Conan series of the 1930s, mostly in Weird Tales (1932-6);
while not sf, these stories were set in a coherent and quite carefully
imagined world (presented as an enormously archaic version of our own).
Sword and sorcery (the term is often used in a derogatory manner, which
partly explains its gradual displacement by the term HEROIC FANTASY) is
generally a form of high fantasy.The overlap of supernatural-horror
fiction with sf is rather smaller than the overlap of high fantasy with
sf, though still very substantial indeed; this area of overlap is
discussed under the rubrics GOTHIC SF and HORROR IN SF.In children's
fiction ( CHILDREN'S SF) the interweaving of sf with fantasy motifs is
intrinsic and can seldom be untwined, as is especially obvious in UK and
Australian work, such as that of Alan GARNER, Diana Wynne JONES, Victor
KELLEHER, William MAYNE and Robert WESTALL.So far we have stressed the
ways in which sf and fantasy get mixed up together. In fact the position
of the genre analyst is by no means hopeless, for distinctions between
high fantasy (or even fantasy generally) and sf are quite real, however
elusive, and they extend very much further than fantasy-equals-impossible
versus sf-equals-possible. Such distinctions always work better, of
course, at the ends of the spectrum rather than at its centre, where
apparent opposites become merged (or balanced) together. At the extreme
fantasy end of the spectrum the imaginary worlds tend, strongly, to be
conceptually static; history is cyclical; the narrative form is almost
always the quest for an emblematic object or person; the characters are
emblematic too, most commonly of a dualistic (even Manichean) system where
good confronts evil; most fundamentally of all, the protagonists are
trapped in pattern. They live in a determinist world, they fulfil destiny,
they move through the steps of an ancient dance. At the extreme sf end of

the spectrum the stories are set in kinetic venues that register the
existence of change, history is evolutionary and free will operates in a
possibly arbitrary universe whose patterns, if they exist at all, may be
only those imposed upon it (or, according to some quantum theorists,
created in it) by its human observers. If there is truth in this argument,
then it follows that the important distinction between fantasy and sf is
more philosophical than technological, a matter of METAPHYSICS.There is
one final group of fantasists, the fabulators ( FABULATION), who create
fantastic changes (often quite minor) in everyday reality, often
ironically or for purposes of SATIRE, rather than for the creation of
frissons of horror or romantic adventure. Such a work is Franz KAFKA's Die
Verwandlung (1916; trans as The Metamorphosis 1937), in which a man is
turned into a beetle. Many such works stem from traditions of fable and
ABSURDIST literature, sometimes taking the form of MAGIC REALISM. John
BARTH, Angela CARTER, Richard CONDON and Thomas PYNCHON are only four of
the several hundred such writers who receive entries in this encyclopedia,
including some whose associations with genre sf have been rather closer,
like Barry N. MALZBERG, Kurt VONNEGUT Jr, and Robert SHEA and Robert Anton
WILSON, whose Illuminatus trilogy (1975) puts a range of fantasy and sf
devices to absurdist ends in a black comedy proposing PARANOIA as the most
fully appropriate response to modern life.In the 1970s fantasy (and its
variant labels like Epic Fantasy, Heroic Fantasy and so forth) became an
important area of book marketing. Some alarmist observers believed that
the density of fantasy publication was such that sf as a viable, separate
marketing category was doomed. In fact, sf has proved able to weather the
storm, but fantasy publishing continues strongly into the 1990s, only
slightly abated, especially in the area of trilogies and series whose
points of reference (sometimes approaching plagiarism) continue in the
main to be Robert E. Howard and, especially, J.R.R. Tolkien. One effect of
fantasy's publishing success (and to a lesser degree that of horror) may
have been to make genre-crossing, which was always common, even more
popular. K.W. JETER and George R.R. MARTIN move from sf to horror; Terry
PRATCHETT, Michael Scott ROHAN, Robert HOLDSTOCK and others from sf to
fantasy; Stephen KING, contrariwise, moves sometimes from horror to sf;
James P. BLAYLOCK contrives, dizzyingly, to occupy all such worlds
simultaneously, as do John Crowley and arguably Gene Wolfe; fantasy
writers like John M. FORD or Barbara HAMBLY or David GEMMELL invent
sf-like worlds; supposedly hard-sf writer Orson Scott Card is repeatedly
drawn to PASTORAL fantasy; William GIBSON, Elizabeth HAND, even Greg BEAR,
put GODS AND DEMONS into CYBERPUNK worlds; R.A. MACAVOY, Patricia MCKILLIP
and Sheri S. TEPPER turn from high fantasy to sf; Brian M. STABLEFORD
turns to SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES about vampires and werewolves. In the face of
this insouciance on the part of the makers of sf and fantasy, the wise
critic will eschew rigid prescription. Beyond the very various
distinctions already suggested, no consistent demarcation-line between sf
and fantasy should be extractable from a reading of this encyclopedia.
Certainly none was intended. [PN]
FANTASY
Title used on two early UK sf magazines. The first was a PULP magazine
published by George Newnes Ltd., ed T. Stanhope Sprigg. It produced 3

issues 1938-9. The second, subtitled "The Magazine of Science Fiction",
was a saddle-stapled DIGEST issued by the Temple Bar Publishing Co., ed
Walter GILLINGS. It too lasted 3 issues, Dec 1946 and Apr and Aug 1947.
Eric Frank RUSSELL and John Russell FEARN were featured in both series,
and the second magazine featured 3 early stories by Arthur C. CLARKE (2
pseudonymous, as by E.G. O'Brien and Charles Willis). The second magazine
was killed by paper restrictions, but Gillings was able to use some of his
backlog of stories when he became the first editor of SCIENCE FANTASY in
1950. [BS/PN]
FANTASY AMATEUR PRESS ASSOCIATION
FAPA.
FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION
The often-used short form of the title of The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND
SCIENCE FICTION , often referred to, in this encyclopedia and elsewhere,
as FSF. [PN]
FANTASY BOOK
1. Magazine, BEDSHEET-format for 2 issues, then various DIGEST-size
formats. 8 issues July 1947-Jan 1951; irregular. Published by FANTASY
PUBLISHING COMPANY INC.; ed Garrett Ford (pseudonym of William L.
CRAWFORD). FB was generally an undistinguished and erratic magazine. Some
issues appeared in three different editions with different covers. FB is
best remembered for publishing in #1 The People of the Crater", the first
sf story by Andre " NORTON (as Andrew North) and, in #6 (Jan 1950), Paul
Linebarger's first story as Cordwainer SMITH, "Scanners Live in Vain".
When it ceased publication it left incomplete a Murray LEINSTER serial,
"Journey to Barkut"; this later appeared in full in STARTLING STORIES (Jan
1952), and in book form as Gateway to Elsewhere (1954).2. US SEMIPROZINE,
BEDSHEET-format. 23 issues Oct 1981-Mar 1987, ed Dennis Mallonee and Nick
Smith from California, bimonthly, then quarterly from #4. Unlike the first
FB, to which it was unconnected, this published almost no sf,
concentrating on fantasy and horror. Its authors included R.A. L AFFERTY,
Alan Dean FOSTER and Ian WATSON. Circulation seldom rose above 3000.
[MJE/PN]
FANTASY COMMENTATOR
US FANZINE (1943-current), ed from New York by A. Langley SEARLES The
Winter 1993-94 issue, no 45/46, was called "50th Anniversary Double
Issue". The original run of 26 issues, 1943-53 - quarterly before 1950 and
then irregular - featured well written, scholarly articles about
contemporary fantasy writers and an impressive series of bibliographies.
FC was notable at this time for publishing the series of articles about
FANDOM by Sam MOSKOWITZ that later became The Immortal Storm (1954) and
for the original material it carried by A. MERRITT, Henry KUTTNER, David
H. KELLER, H.P. LOVECRAFT and William Hope HODGSON. FC was suspended in
1953 but revived in 1978 with #29 (facsimiles of #27-#28, which had been
set up in 1953 but not published, were released in 1986). Up to 1950 FC
appeared quarterly, thereafter irregularly. Its current incarnation was
annual to 1990, semiannual thereafter. Regular contributors to the current
version include Moskowitz and Mike ASHLEY. FC remains strong in

scholarship about early sf and fantasy. [RH]
FANTASY FICTION/FANTASY STORIES
US DIGEST-size magazine. 2 issues, May and Nov 1950, published by
Magabook, ed Curtis Mitchell. "Old and New Fantasy Stories but Always the
Best" was the slogan of this shortlived magazine, whose stories were
largely reprinted from general PULP MAGAZINES of the 1930s and early
1940s. It also offered prizes for reports of true fantastic experiences
and of haunted houses. #2 was retitled Fantasy Stories, carried a lengthy
UFO feature ("Flying Saucer Secrets Blabbed by Mad Pilot", as the cover
put it), and was three months late. #3 never materialized.The final 3
issues of the 1950s FANTASY MAGAZINE, an unconnected publication, were
also titled Fantasy Fiction. [MJE]
FANTASY HOUSE
VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION.
FANTASY MAGAZINE/FANTASY FICTION
1. US DIGEST-size magazine. 4 issues, Feb, June, Aug, Nov 1953, all but
#1 under the latter title, published by Future Publications, New York, ed
Lester DEL REY, under his own name for #1-#3 and under the house name
Cameron Hall for #4. All issues had covers by Hannes BOK. #1 featured a
Conan novelette revised by L. Sprague DE CAMP from Robert E. HOWARD's
unpublished "The Black Stranger". The contents, of quite good quality,
were almost exclusively fantasy, much of it rather in the style of
UNKNOWN.2. Fantasy Magazine was a vt 1934-7 of a celebrated FANZINE,
Science Fiction Digest, founded 1932, of which Julius SCHWARTZ was one of
the editors. This in turn had incorporated The Time Traveller, often
regarded as the first true fanzine (#1, Jan 1932), which Schwartz had
published with Mort WEISINGER. FM published original fiction, factual
articles, reviews, gossip and biographical pieces. [BS/PN]
FANTASY NEWSLETTER
FANTASY REVIEW.
FANTASY PRESS
An early US SMALL PRESS specializing in sf/fantasy, historically
important in the growth of genre-sf PUBLISHING before sf was discovered by
mass-market book houses. It was founded by Lloyd Arthur ESHBACH in 1946,
based in Reading, Pennsylvania. It published a number of works in
hardcover by such authors as John W. CAMPBELL Jr, L. Sprague DE CAMP, E.E.
"Doc" SMITH, Stanley G. WEINBAUM and Jack WILLIAMSON. It folded in 1958 at
a time when small-press publishing was in crisis. Eshbach sold the company
and its stock to Donald M. Grant Publisher. [MJE/PN]
FANTASY PUBLISHING COMPANY INC.
US SMALL PRESS based in Los Angeles and specializing in sf/fantasy,
generally known by its initials FPCI. One of the many semiprofessional
publishing enterprises of William L. CRAWFORD, FPCI was one of the less
notable companies to start issuing magazine sf in book form in the late
1940s and the 1950s. Its authors included L. Sprague DE CAMP, L. Ron
HUBBARD, Olaf STAPLEDON, John TAINE and A.E. VAN VOGT, but only lesser
works of theirs. Crawford also published the magazines FANTASY BOOK and

later SPACEWAY and Witchcraft and Sorcery (formerly Coven 13) under the
FPCI imprint, in addition to various occult titles and books by Emil
PETAJA and others.The pre-WWII incarnation of the company, then known just
as Fantasy Publishers, had brought out the magazines MARVEL TALES and
UNUSUAL STORIES; and an associated company, Visionary Publishing Co., had
published The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936) by H.P. LOVECRAFT. [MJE/PN]
FANTASY REVIEW
1. UK FANZINE, ed Walter GILLINGS. 18 issues 1947-50. Gillings,
previously editor of several UK SF MAGAZINES - TALES OF WONDER (1937-42),
STRANGE TALES (1946) and FANTASY (1946-7) - found himself needing an
outlet for his energies after the demise of the latter title and began FR,
which was almost identical in format and content to his earlier fanzine
Scientifiction (7 issues 1937-8) and later fanzine Cosmos (3 issues 1969).
It carried reviews and sf news items, and was professional in appearance.
For its last 3 numbers the title changed to Science-Fantasy Review. When
in 1950 Gillings was given the editorship of SCIENCE FANTASY, the new
sister magazine to Nova Publications' NEW WORLDS, he incorporated
Science-Fantasy Review into its first 2 issues as a news-chat section;
this disappeared when John CARNELL assumed the editorship of Science
Fantasy with #3.2. US monthly critical SEMIPROZINE, founded as Fantasy
Newsletter by Paul C. Allen in Rochester, NY, as, literally, an 8pp
newsletter in June 1978, but becoming a magazine in Jan 1980, ceasing
publication in Oct 1981. It was revived at once, however, by Robert
Collins, director of the International Conference on the Fantastic in the
Arts at Florida Atlantic University. The magazine, which had always
published interesting features, gained much strength when amalgamated at
the beginning of 1984 with SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY BOOK REVIEW (Neil
BARRON, editor of the latter, becoming review editor) with a new title,
Fantasy Review, but a continuation of the previous numeration. (The logo
showed SF ?
it was soon dropped.) FR had the widest (though not necessarily deepest)
sf-book-review coverage in the US and probably the world, covering fantasy
and horror as well as sf. Later review editors were Carol McGuirk and Rob
Latham. Quite handsomely produced, FR had the usual difficulty in finding
a commercially viable market for a magazine of the standard desired by the
editor, and folded with #103, July/Aug 1987. The review section lives on
less usefully in annual form, beginning 1988, as SCIENCE FICTION AND
FANTASY BOOK REVIEW ANNUAL, with Collins and Latham co-editors. [PN]
FANTASY STORIES
FANTASY FICTION.
FANTASY TIMES
US FANZINE (1941-69) ed James V. Taurasi Sr (1917-1991), briefly by Sam
MOSKOWITZ during WWII, Taurasi again, and Frank Prieto Jr from 1966.
Published erratically until 1946, FT thereafter established itself as a
straightforward sf and fantasy newsletter containing news, notes and
reviews. In 1957 its title changed to Science Fiction Times, and
publication continued under this title until #465, in 1969. Though its
contents were mostly routine records of events, the magazine did attract
some attention from publishers and authors; James BLISH was its book

reviewer for a time (c1956). FT won the HUGO for Best Fanzine in 1955 and
1957. Its news-reporting function was effectively taken over by LOCUS. A
short-lived Spanish edition, Tiempo de Fantasia, was published in 1949,
and a successful German version, SF Times, began publication in 1958, at
first as a straight translation, later - especially under the editorship
of Hans Joachim ALPERS - as a serious German fanzine in its own right (
GERMANY). [PR/PN]
FANTAZIA 2000
ISRAEL.
FANTHORPE, R(OBERT) L(IONEL)
(1935- ) UK writer who became a schoolteacher and preacher. From 1954 to
1965 RLF was an sf writer of remarkable productivity, towards the end of
that period producing novels on a weekly schedule for BADGER BOOKS and
associated imprints, for which he was paid ps25 a volume, dictating his
tales into a battery of tape-recorders for transcription by members of his
family or by friends. The rushed endings of many of his novels were a
result of this practice, as he often did not know how close he was to his
allotted word-length until batches of typing had been completed; if a tale
had reached its length while still in mid-plot, it would be truncated
forthwith. It has been claimed of RLF that he was the world's most
prolific writer in the genre. His first story, written at the age of 16,
was "Worlds without End" as by Lionel Roberts for FUTURISTIC SCIENCE
STORIES in 1952. His first novel, Menace from Mercury (1954), was
published under the house name Victor LA SALLE; other house names under
which he would work were John E. MULLER and Karl ZEIGFREID. Within a few
years he was responsible for the vast majority of Badger's sf and
supernatural output, both novels and collections of stories, some of the
former and all of the latter being included in the numbered series
Supernatural Stories. (RLF's practice with stories was generally to
provide all the contents of a particular issue, using several pseudonyms
in addition to his own name, creating in effect a series of collections.
It is as collections that these titles are listed in this entry, under the
title and name story listed on the cover, though in fact this title might
not actually appear within, and pseudonymous work by other authors
occasionally appears in collections otherwise by RLF; we have here
violated our normal practice of designating such books as anthologies.)
After Badger Books folded, RLF fell silent, though he made a brief
comeback as a fiction writer with The Black Lion (1979), written in
collaboration with his wife, Patricia Fanthorpe (1938- ); it is a
not-unsuccessful fantasy, the first of a projected (but still incomplete)
trilogy.One series of some interest, published under the Bron Fane
pseudonym, chronicles the adventures of the Bulldog Drummond-like Val
Stearman and the immortal La Noire: "The Seance" (1958), "The Secret Room"
(1958), "Valley of the Vampire" (1958), "The Silent Stranger" (1959), "The
Other Line" (1959), "The Green Cloud" (1959), "Pursuit" (1959), "Jungle of
Death" (1959), "The Crawling Fiend" (1960), "Curtain Up" (1960), "The
Secret of the Lake" (1960), "The Loch Ness Terror" (1961), "The Deathless
Wings" (1961), "The Green Sarcophagus" (1961), "Black Abyss" (1961),
"Forbidden City" (1961), "The Secret of the Pyramid" (1961), "Something at

the Door" (1961), "Forbidden Island" (1962), "Storm God's Fury" (1962),
"Vengeance of the Poltergeist" (1962), "The Persian Cavern" (1962), "The
Chasm of Time" (1962), "The Voice in the Wall" (1962), "Cry in the Night"
(1962), "The Nine Green Men" (1963), "The Man who Never Smiled" (1963),
"Return Ticket" (1963), "The Room that Never Was" (1963), "The Walker"
(1963), Softly By Moonlight (1963), "The Thing from Sheol" (1963), "The
Man who Knew" (1963), Unknown Destiny (1964), "The Warlock" (1964), The
Macabre Ones (1964), "The Troll" (1964), "The Walking Shadow" (1964), "The
Lake Thing" (as Pel Torro, 1964), "The Accursed" (1965), "The Prodigy"
(1965), U.F.O. 517 (1965), "Girdle of Fear" (1965), "Repeat Programme"
(1966) and "The Resurrected Enemy" (1966).Apart from those listed below in
connection with book titles, RLF's pseudonyms included Neil Balfort,
Othello Baron, Oben Lerteth, Elton T. Neef, Peter O'Flinn, Rene Rolant,
Robin Tate and Deutero Spartacus. All but the last are partial anagrams of
his name. [MJE]Other works:As R.L. Fanthorpe: Resurgam (coll 1957); Secret
of the Snows (coll 1957); The Flight of the Valkyries (coll 1958); The
Waiting World (1958); Watchers of the Forest (coll 1958); Call of the
Werewolf (coll 1958); The Death Note (coll 1958); Mermaid Reef (coll
1959); Alien from the Stars (1959); Fiends (1959); Space-Borne (1959); The
Ghost Rider (coll 1959); Hyperspace (1959); Doomed World (1960); The Man
who Couldn't Die (coll 1960); Out of the Darkness (1960); Satellite
(1960); Asteroid Man (1960); Werewolf at Large (coll 1960); Hand of Doom
(1960); Whirlwind of Death (coll 1960); Flame Mass (1961); Fingers of
Darkness (coll 1961); Face in the Dark (coll 1961); Devil from the Depths
(coll 1961); Centurion's Vengeance (coll 1961); The Golden Chalice (1961);
The Grip of Fear (coll 1961); Chariot of Apollo (coll 1962); Hell has
Wings (coll 1962); Graveyard of the Damned (coll 1962); The Darker Drink
(coll 1962); Curse of the Totem (coll 1962); Space Fury (1962); Goddess of
the Night (coll 1963); Moon Wolf (coll 1963); Avenging Goddess (coll
1964); Death has Two Faces (coll 1964); The Shrouded Abbot (coll 1964);
Bitter Reflection (coll 1965); Neuron World (1965); The Triple Man (1965);
Call of the Wild (coll 1965); Vision of the Damned (coll 1965); The Sealed
Sarcophagus (coll 1965); The Unconfined (1966); Stranger in the Shadow
(coll 1966); Curse of the Khan (coll 1966); Watching World (1966); The
Story of St Francis of Assisi (1989), nonfiction; Three of the Earliest SF
Stories by Lionel Fanthorpe (coll 1991 chap); Collection of Documents
Referring to Lionel Fanthorpe's Early Writings (coll 1991 chap).As Erle
Barton: The Planet Seekers (1964).As Lee Barton: The Unseen (1963); The
Shadow Man (1966).As Thornton Bell: Space Trap (1964); Chaos (1964).As Leo
Brett: The Drud (coll 1959); The Return (coll 1959); Exit Humanity (1960);
The Microscopic Ones (1960); The Faceless Planet (1960); March of the
Robots (1961); Black Infinity (1961); Mind Force (1961); Nightmare (1962);
Face in the Night (1962); The Immortals (1962); The Frozen Tomb (coll
1962); They Never Come Back (1963); The Forbidden (1963); From Realms
Beyond (1963); Phantom Crusader (coll 1963); The Alien Ones (1963); Power
Sphere (1963).As Bron Fane: The Crawling Fiend (coll 1960); Juggernaut
(1960; vt Blue Juggernaut 1965 US); Last Man on Earth (1960); Rodent
Mutation (1961); Storm God's Fury (coll 1962); The Intruders (1963);
Somewhere Out There (1963); The Thing from Sheol (coll 1963); Nemesis
(1964); Suspension (1964); The Walking Shadow (coll 1964).As L.P. Kenton:
Destination Moon (1959).As Victor La Salle (house name): Victor LA

SALLE.As John E. Muller (house name): A 1000 Years On (1961); The Mind
Makers (1961); The Ultimate Man (1961); Forbidden Planet (1961); The
Uninvited (1961); Crimson Planet (1961); The Venus Venture (1961; 1965 US
as by Marston Johns); The Return of Zeus (1962); Perilous Galaxy (1962);
The Eye of Karnak (1962); Infinity Machine (1962); Uranium 235 (1962); The
Man who Conquered Time (1962); Orbit One (1962; 1966 US as by Mel Jay);
Micro Infinity (1962); Beyond Time (1962; 1966 US as by Marston Johns);
Vengeance of Siva (1962); The Day the World Died (1962); The X-Machine
(1962); Reactor XK9 (1963); Special Mission (1963); Dark Continuum (1964);
Mark of the Beast (1964); The Exorcists (1965); The Negative Ones (1965);
The Man from Beyond (1965); Spectre of Darkness (1965); Beyond the Void
(1965); Out of the Night (1965); Phenomena X (1966) and Survival Project
(1966).As Phil Nobel: The Hand from Gehenna (coll 1964).As Lionel Roberts:
The Incredulist (coll 1954); Guardians of the Tomb (coll 1958); The Golden
Warrior (coll 1958); Dawn of the Mutants (1959); Time Echo (1959; 1964 US
as by Robert Lionel); Cyclops in the Sky (1960); The In-World (1960); The
Face of X (1960; 1965 US as by Robert Lionel); The Last Valkyrie (1961);
The Synthetic Ones (1961); Flame Goddess (1961).As Neil Thanet: Beyond the
Veil (1964); The Man who Came Back (1964).As Trebor Thorpe: The Haunted
Pool (coll 1958); Five Faces of Fear (1960); Lightning World (1960);
Voodoo Hell Drums (coll 1961).As Pel Torro: Frozen Planet (1960); World of
the Gods (1960); The Phantom Ones (1961); Legion of the Lost (1962); The
Strange Ones (1963); Galaxy 666 (1963); Formula 29X (1963; vt Beyond the
Barrier of Space 1969 US); The Timeless Ones (1963); Through the Barrier
(1963); The Last Astronaut (1963); The Face of Fear (1963); The Return
(1964; vt Exiled in Space 1969 US); Space No Barrier (1964; vt Man of
Metal 1969 US); Force 97X (1965).As Olaf Trent: Roman Twilight (coll
1963).As Karl Zeigfreid (house name): Gods of Darkness (1962); Walk
through Tomorrow (1963); Android (1962); Atomic Nemesis (1962); Zero Minus
X (1962); Escape to Infinity (1963); Radar Alert (1963); World of Tomorrow
(1963; vt World of the Future 1964 US); The World that Never Was (1963);
Projection Infinity (1964); No Way Back (1964); Barrier 346 (1965); The
Girl from Tomorrow (1965).
FANZINE
A fanzine is an amateur magazine produced by sf fans. The term "fanzine",
coined by Russ Chauvenet in 1941, has been borrowed and used by comics
collectors, wargamers, "underground" publishers and other non-sf
enthusiasts. The fastest-growing category in the mid-1980s was the soccer
fanzine.The first known fanzine was The Comet (May 1930) ed Raymond A.
PALMER for the Science Correspondence Club, followed by The Planet (July
1930) ed Allen Glasser for the New York Scienceers. However, both of these
were mainly about science, although the second did include reviews of the
professional sf magazines. Some regard the first true fanzine-certainly
the first major one - as The Time Traveller (#1, Jan 1932) ed Julius
SCHWARTZ and Mort WEISINGER. Schwartz, with others, went on to publish
Science Fiction Digest ( FANTASY MAGAZINE). These and other early fanzines
were straightforward publications dealing exclusively with sf or amateur
science, and were produced by local fan groups founded in the USA by the
more active readers of contemporary professional SF MAGAZINES. However, as
interest grew and sf fans formed closer contacts and friendships,

individual fans began publishing for their own amusement, so that fanzines
became more diverse and their contents more capricious; fan editors also
began to exchange fanzines and to send out free copies to contributors and
letter-writers. Thus fanzines abandoned any professional aspirations in
exchange for informality and an active readership-characteristics that
persist to the present and distinguish fanzines from conventional hobbyist
publications. From the USA the idea spread to the UK, where Maurice Hanson
and Dennis Jacques started NOVAE TERRAE (later ed E.J. CARNELL as the
forerunner of NEW WORLDS) in 1936. Since then fanzine publishing has
proliferated and many thousands of titles have appeared. Probably 500-600
fanzines are currently in production, the majority in North America but
with substantial numbers from the UK, Australia and Western Europe, and
occasional items from Japan, South America, South Africa, New Zealand,
Turkey and Eastern Europe.Many modern sf writers started their careers in
FANDOM and published their own fanzines; Ray BRADBURY, for example,
produced 4 issues of Futuria Fantasia (1939-41), which contained inter
alia his first published stories. Other former fanzine editors include
James BLISH, Kenneth BULMER, John CHRISTOPHER, Harlan ELLISON, Damon
KNIGHT, C.M. KORNBLUTH, Charles Eric MAINE, Michael MOORCOCK, Frederik
POHL, Robert SILVERBERG and Ted WHITE. Some still find time to publish:
Wilson TUCKER, for example, has continued to produce Le Zombie since 1938.
Fan editors are of course free to produce whatever they like, and so
fanzines vary dramatically in production, style and content. Normally they
are duplicated, photocopied or printed, consisting of anything from a
single sheet to 100+ pages, and with a circulation of from 5 to 5000
copies, though the tendency in the 1980s has been to call fanzines with a
circulation of over 1000 SEMIPROZINES. The smaller fanzines are often
written entirely by the editor and serve simply as letter substitutes sent
out to friends; others have limited distribution within amateur press
associations such as FAPA and OMPA. The larger fanzines, with an average
circulation of 200-500, fall into three main categories, with considerable
overlap: those dealing with sf (containing reviews, interviews, articles
and discussions); those dealing with sf fans and fandom (containing
esoteric humour); and those dealing with general material (containing
anything from sf to Biblical engineering). (A further category consists of
fanzines exclusively publishing amateur fiction; these are not listed in
this volume unless widely enough circulated to be regarded as
semiprozines.) On the fringe there are specialist fanzines catering for
FANTASY and SWORD-AND-SORCERY fans, others devoted to cult authors such as
J.R.R. TOLKIEN, H.P. LOVECRAFT and Robert E. HOWARD, and yet others which
deal with sf films or tv series such as STAR TREK. Since 1955 there has
been a Best Fanzine category in the HUGO Awards, and since 1984 a Best
Semiprozine category also.A selection of 36 important fanzines - some now
regarded as semiprozines - from different periods of fandom receive full
entries in this volume: ALGOL, The ALIEN CRITIC , ANSIBLE, AUSTRALIAN SF
REVIEW, AUSTRALIAN SF REVIEW: SECOND SERIES, BIZARRE, CRITICAL WAVE,
FANAC, FANTASY COMMENTATOR, FANTASY MAGAZINE, FANTASY REVIEW,
FANTASY
TIMES, FILE 770, The FUTURIAN, HYPHEN, JANUS/AURORA, LOCUS, LUNA MONTHLY,
NIEKAS, NOVAE TERRAE , PSYCHOTIC, QUANDRY, QUARBER MERKUR, RIVERSIDE
QUARTERLY, SCIENCE FICTION: A REVIEW OF SPECULATIVE FICTION, SF

CHRONICLE,
SF COMMENTARY, SCIENCE FICTION EYE, SLANT, SPECULATION, THRUST, VECTOR,
The VORTEX, WARHOON, XERO and YANDRO. Data on another dozen or so fanzine
titles are available by following up cross-references. The majority of the
above are critical magazines, and many are listed again under CRITICAL AND
HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF. [PR/PN]
FAPA
The commonly used acronym for the Fantasy Amateur Press Association,
formed in 1937 in the USA by Donald A. WOLLHEIM to facilitate distribution
on an APA basis of FANZINES published by and for members; it was the first
of many such groups. Early contributors included E.J. CARNELL, Robert A.W.
LOWNDES, Sam MOSKOWITZ, Frederik POHL, Wilson TUCKER and Richard WILSON.
Current members include Moskowitz, F.M. BUSBY and Robert SILVERBERG. [PR]
FARCA, MARIE C.
(1935- ) US writer whose first sf novel, Earth (1972), is a competent
adventure. Her second, Complex Man (1973), is a sequel set on another
planet. [JC]
FAR FRONTIERS
US "magazine" in paperback-book format; it could also be regarded as an
original anthology series. Quarterly, published by Baen Books, ed Jerry
POURNELLE and Jim BAEN and (uncredited) John F. CARR; 7 issues, from Far
Frontiers (anth 1985) at the very beginning of that year to Far Frontiers
Vol VII (anth Winter 1986). At this point Baen revived (as solo editor)
his very similar Destinies series of magazines/anthologies as New
Destinies with #1 in Spring 1987 ( DESTINIES), and Far Frontiers came to
an end. Something of a shop-window for upcoming Baen Book publications, FF
featured several book excerpts. Its emphasis was on HARD SF, sometimes
militaristic, and on good science-fact articles; authors of the latter
included Robert L. FORWARD, John GRIBBIN, Pournelle and G. Harry STINE.
Authors of stories included Greg BEAR, David BRIN, John DALMAS, Dean ING,
Vernor VINGE and Timothy ZAHN. [PN]
FAR FUTURE
Fred Polak's The Image of the Future (1973) identifies two distinct
categories of images of the distant future, which he called the "future of
prophecy" and the "future of destiny". Prophets, although they refer to
the future, are primarily concerned with the present: they issue warnings
about the consequences of present actions and demand that other courses of
action be adopted. Their images are images of the historical future which
will grow out of human action in the present day ( NEAR FUTURE). To the
second category of images, however, present concerns are usually
irrelevant; these are images of the ultimate future, taking the
imagination as far as it can reach. Such visions are related to
ESCHATOLOGY and often feature the END OF THE WORLD; others depict a world
where everything has so changed as to have become virtually
incomprehensible, or a world which has attained some ultimate UTOPIAN
state of perfection.Scientifically inspired images of the far future could
not come into being until the true age of the Earth and therefore the
scope of possible change were understood - an understanding first

popularized by Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875) in Principles of Geology
(1830). Even then it was not until the establishment of the theory of
EVOLUTION that writers found a conceptual tool which made it possible for
them to imagine the kinds of changes which might plausibly take place.
W.H. HUDSON's A Crystal Age (1887), which belongs to the utopian school,
embraces an evolutionary philosophy of a curiously mystical kind, and such
traces of mysticism are retained by very many representations of the far
future. Most early images of the far future accepted estimates of the
likely age of the Sun based on the tacit, natural but false assumption
that its heat was produced by combustion; the far-future Earth is thus
represented as a cold, dark and desolate place from which life is slowly
disappearing. We find such imagery in H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE
(1895), George C. WALLIS's "The Last Days of Earth" (1901) and William
Hope HODGSON's The House on the Borderland (1908). Hodgson's The Night
Land (1912) is bizarre as well as bleak, offering a phantasmagorical
vision of a decaying world inherited by frightful monsters. The optimistic
far-future vision which concludes George Bernard SHAW's Back to Methuselah
(1921) is predicated on the assumption that mind can and will cast off the
confining shackles of matter. More elaborate but no less striking imagery
is featured in the concluding section of Guy DENT's Emperor of the If
(1926), in which our insane descendants are no longer human in form or
ability but remain all too human in psychological terms. S. Fowler
WRIGHT's The World Below (incorporating The Amphibians [1924]; 1929) is
equally ambitious, and contrives to transcend the images of decay and
desolation associated with so many other visions. These works were quickly
followed by Olaf STAPLEDON's monumental attempt to track the entire
evolutionary future of mankind, LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930), partly based on
a blueprint provided by J.B.S. HALDANE in "The Last Judgment" (1927).
Other than millenarian fantasies, which claim that the future of destiny
is imminent, very few novels link the two images of the future defined by
Polak within a coherent historical narrative; LAST AND FIRST MEN is by far
the most outstanding example, although Camille FLAMMARION's Omega (trans
1894) had earlier brought the two into rather awkward juxtaposition.The
early sf PULP MAGAZINES featured several far-future visions of the end of
the world, but had little to compare with the imagery of the UK SCIENTIFIC
ROMANCES. One notable story that presents the extinction of mankind's
remote descendants as one more stage in a continuing process of change is
"Seeds of the Dusk" (1938) by Raymond Z. GALLUN, in which a much-changed
Earth is "invaded" and "conquered" by spores from another world. Gallun's
"When Earth is Old" (1951) has time travellers negotiating with sentient
plants to assure the rebirth of the species. The quest for some such
rebirth is a common motif in far-future stories, and time travellers from
the present frequently contrive to turn the evolutionary tide that is
sweeping humanity towards extinction, as in such stories as John W.
CAMPBELL Jr's "Twilight" (1934 as by Don A. Stuart). The idea of
reigniting a senescent Sun in order to give Earth and mankind a new lease
of life is poignantly deployed in Clark Ashton SMITH's "Phoenix" (1954)
and extravagantly developed in Gene WOLFE's Book of the New Sun tetralogy
(1980-83). Such notions arise from false analogies drawn between the life
of an individual and that of a species, alleging that species may "age"
and become "senescent". The popularity of such ideas in sf is not

surprising, given the influence of similar analogies between individuals
and cultures in the work of philosophers of history like Oswald Spengler
(1880-1936). Spengler's ideas were a strong influence on James BLISH,
whose most memorable accounts of the far future are "Watershed" (1957) and
Midsummer Century (1972). Images of an aged world that has returned to its
"second childhood" are sometimes as affectionate as rose-tinted images of
human retirement; the classic example is John CROWLEY's ENGINE SUMMER
(1979).Clark Ashton Smith set the most lushly exotic of all his series in
Zothique, the "last continent" - a bizarre and decadent world in which
magic flourishes. The stories, all written in the 1930s, were eventually
collected in Zothique (coll 1970). Zothique offered Smith more imaginative
freedom than his distant-past scenario Hyperborea precisely because it was
irredeemably decadent. A similar but less fervent series of fantasies is
Jack VANCE's THE DYING EARTH (coll 1950), whose later sequels include The
Eyes of the Overworld (fixup 1966), which contains a stronger strain of
picaresque comedy. A. MERRITT never used the far future as a setting, but
his lavish descriptions of exotic landscapes influenced a number of
far-future fantasies; Henry KUTTNER and C.L. MOORE, who wrote a series of
Merritt-influenced novels in the 1940s, offered a Merrittesque far future
in Earth's Last Citadel (1943; 1964).The classic pulp sf story of the far
future is Arthur C. CLARKE's Stapledon-influenced Against the Fall of
Night (1948; 1953; rev vt The City and the Stars 1956). Its imagery is
stereotyped - a bleak, derelict Earth with cities whose handsome,
incurious inhabitants are parasitic upon their machines - but its
perspectives widen dramatically to take in the whole cosmos, where mankind
may yet seek a further and more glorious destiny. This was to become a
central myth of sf, and many images of GALACTIC EMPIRE include nostalgic
portraits of stagnant backwater Earth. These are not, of course, images of
the future of destiny but rather attempts to perpetuate and magnify the
historical image - as is obvious in the many epics which construct
galactic history by analogy with Earthly history.Images of far-future
Earth became more varied in the sf of the 1950s; notable examples include
a number of highly stylized and semi-allegorical vignettes by Fritz
LEIBER, including "When the Last Gods Die" (1951) and "The Big Trek"
(1957), as well as many fine stories by Brian W. ALDISS, including the
later items in The Canopy of Time (coll 1959; rev vt Galaxies Like Grains
of Sand), "Old Hundredth" (1960), the stories making up The Long Afternoon
of Earth (fixup 1962 US; exp vt Hothouse UK), "A Kind of Artistry" (1962)
and "The Worm that Flies" (1968). As with all the stories in this
category, these tend towards FANTASY, and some controversy was stirred up
by a particularly memorable image in The Long Afternoon of Earth, in which
gigantic cobwebs stretch between the Earth and the Moon, whose faces are
now perpetually turned to one another. Other innovative uses of far-future
settings can be seen in John BRUNNER's elegiac adventure story The 100th
Millennium (1959; rev vt Catch a Falling Star 1968), Samuel R. DELANY's
exotic romance The Jewels of Aptor (1962), Jack Vance's elegant political
allegory THE LAST CASTLE (1966), Michael MOORCOCK's angst-ridden The
Twilight Man (1966; vt The Shores of Death) and Crawford KILIAN's exotic
romance of maturation Eyas (1982).Michael Moorcock's fondness for
far-future settings encouraged him to break new ground in his Dancers at
the End of Time trilogy (1972-6) and various other works associated with

it. In this series, whose tone ranges from extravagant SATIRE to perverse
sentimentality, the ultimate future is inhabited by humans with godlike
powers who must perpetually seek diversion from the tedium of their
limitless existence. Other writers who have made frequent and significant
use of far-future imagery in recent times include Robert SILVERBERG, in
such works as the surreal Son of Man (1971) and "This is the Road" (1973),
Doris PISERCHIA, in such works as A Billion Days of Earth (1976) and Earth
in Twilight (1981), and Michael G. CONEY in The Celestial Steam Locomotive
(1983), Gods of the Greataway (1984) and other associated works.There are
no anthologies dealing specifically with this theme, and it is worth
noting that Harry HARRISON's attempt to compile a companion volume to his
near-future anthology The Year 2000 (anth 1970), to be entitled The Year
2,000,000, failed to attract sufficient suitable submissions. The theme
does not lend itself readily to conventional plot and character
development. [BS]See also: DEVOLUTION; ENTROPY; MYTHOLOGY.
FARJEON, J(OSEPH) JEFFERSON
(1883-1955) UK writer, prolific (often as Anthony Swift) in the detective
genre and as a playwright. The RURITANIAN Mountain Mystery (1935) depicts
the small country of Weldheim, which loses itself to history after WWI,
becoming a kind of LOST WORLD. Death of a World (1948) depicts the arrival
of aliens on a dead Earth and their reading of the diary (which makes up
the bulk of the text) kept by a last survivor of the nuclear DISASTER that
ended all life ( END OF THE WORLD). [JC]Other works: The Invisible
Companion and Other Stories (coll 1946 chap), fantasies.
FARLEY, RALPH MILNE
Pseudonym of US writer and teacher Roger Sherman Hoar (1887-1963) for all
his sf work except two 1938 stories published in AMZ as by Lt John Pease.
He was educated at Harvard and had a remarkably varied career, which
included teaching such subjects as mathematics and engineering, inventing
a system of aiming large guns by the stars, and serving as a Massachusetts
state senator. His early work in the pulp-sf field was written in obvious
imitation of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS and was contributed to The ARGOSY notably his most famous series, the Radio Man series, featuring Miles
Cabot, which began with The Radio Man (1924 Argosy; 1948; vt An Earthman
on Venus 1950) and continued with The Radio Beasts (1925 Argosy; 1964),
The Radio Planet (1926 Argosy; 1964), "The Radio Man Returns" (1939 AMZ)
and "The Radio Minds of Mars" (1955 Spaceway, part 1 only; part 2 in
Spaceway 1969). Other "radio" stories - including novels which did not
reach book form, such as "The Radio Flyers" (1929 Argosy) and "The Radio
Gun-Runners" (1930 Argosy) - are out of series. The tales, at first
absurdly boosted by The Argosy as scientifically accurate, are devoted to
the adventures of Cabot, mostly on VENUS, the Radio Planet, and still have
admirers. Along with another novel, The Hidden Universe (1939 AMZ; with
"We, the Mist" as coll 1950), The Radio Man was later assembled as Strange
Worlds (omni 1953). RMF was a rough-hewn, traditional SENSE-OF-WONDER
writer, and as a consequence became relatively inactive with the greater
sophistication of the genre after WWII. [JC/PN]Other works: Dangerous Love
(fixup 1946 chap UK); The Immortals (1934 Argosy; 1947 chap UK); The
Omnibus of Time (coll 1950).See also: ALIENS; COMICS; ESCHATOLOGY; HISTORY

OF SF; HIVE-MINDS; MATTER TRANSMISSION; PLANETARY ROMANCE; PULP
MAGAZINES;
TIME PARADOXES; TIME TRAVEL.
FARMER, PHILIP JOSE
(1918- ) US writer. Although a voracious reader of sf in his youth, PJF
was a comparatively late starter as an author, and his first story,
"O'Brien and Obrenov" for Adventure in 1946, promised little. A part-time
student at Bradley University, he gained a BA in English in 1950, and two
years later burst onto the sf scene with his novella THE LOVERS (1952
Startling Stories; exp 1961; rev 1979). Although originally rejected by
John W. CAMPBELL Jr of ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION and H.L. GOLD of GALAXY
SCIENCE FICTION, it gained instant acclaim and won PJF a 1953 HUGO for
Most Promising New Author. It concerned XENOBIOLOGY, PARASITISM and SEX,
an explosive mixture which was to feature repeatedly in PJF's best work.
After writing such excellent short stories as "Sail On! Sail On!" (1952)
and "Mother" (1953), PJF became a full-time writer. His second short
novel, A Woman a Day (1953 Startling Stories; rev 1960; vt The Day of
Timestop 1968; vt Timestop! 1970), was billed as a sequel to THE LOVERS
but bore little relation to the earlier story. "Rastignac the Devil"
(1954) was a further sequel. PJF then produced two novels, both of which
were accepted for publication but neither of which actually saw print at
the time, the first due to the folding of STARTLING STORIES (it eventually
appeared as Dare [1965]). The second, I Owe for the Flesh, won a contest
held by SHASTA PRESS and Pocket Books, but the Pocket Books prize money
was used by Shasta founder Melvin Korshak to pay bills, Shasta foundered,
and the manuscript was lost (the idea eventually formed the basis of the
Riverworld series; see below). This double disaster forced PJF to abandon
full-time authorship, a status to which he did not return until
1969.Nevertheless, he produced many interesting stories over the next few
years, such as the Father Carmody series in The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND
SCIENCE FICTION , published in book form as Night of Light (1957 FSF; exp
1966) and Father to the Stars (coll of linked stories 1981), featuring a
murderous priest who becomes ambiguously involved in various theological
puzzles on several planets. The best of the sequence is Night of Light, a
nightmarish story of a world where the figments of the unconscious become
tangible. Other notable stories of this period include "The God Business"
(1954), "The Alley Man" (1959) and "Open to Me, My Sister" (1960; vt "My
Sister's Brother"). The last named is the best of PJF's biological
fantasies ( BIOLOGY); like THE LOVERS, it was repeatedly rejected as
"disgusting" before its acceptance by FSF.PJF's first novel in book form
was The Green Odyssey (1957), a picaresque tale of an Earthman escaping
from captivity on an alien planet; the intricately colourful medieval
culture of this planet, the high libido of its women, the mysteries buried
within the sands of the desert over which the hero must flee, and the
admixture of rapture and disgust with which the hero treats the venue all go to make this novel, along with Jack VANCE's Big Planet (1952
Startling Stories; cut 1957; full text 1978), a model for the flowering of
the PLANETARY ROMANCE from the 1960s on. It was the first of many
entertainments PJF has written over the years. Later novels in a not
dissimilar vein include The Gate of Time (1966; exp vt Two Hawks from

Earth 1979), The Stone God Awakens (1970) and The Wind Whales of Ishmael
(1971), the last-named being an sf sequel to Herman MELVILLE's Moby-Dick
(1851). Flesh (1960; rev 1968) is more ambitious: a dramatization of the
ideas which Robert GRAVES put forward in The White Goddess (1947 US), it
presents a matriarchal, orgiastic society of the future. Rather
heavy-handed in its humour, it was considered a "shocking" novel on first
publication. Inside Outside (1964), a novel about a scientifically
sustained afterlife, also contains some extraordinary images and grotesque
ideas which resonate in the mind, though the book suffers from a lack of
resolution. The novella "Riders of the Purple Wage" (1967) - later
collected in The Purple Book (coll 1982) and Riders of the Purple Wage
(coll 1992) - won PJF a 1968 Hugo; written in a wild and punning style, it
is one of his most original works. It concerns the tribulations of a young
artist in a UTOPIAN society, and has a more explicit sexual and
scatological content than anything PJF had written before. "The Oogenesis
of Bird City" (1970) is a related story.The novels assembled as The World
of Tiers (omni in 2 vols 1981; vt World of Tiers #1 1986 UK and #2 1986
UK) show PJF in a lighter vein, though the architectural elaborateness of
the universe in which they are set prefigures Riverworld. The original
volumes are The Maker of Universes (1965; rev 1980), The Gates of Creation
(1966; rev 1981), A Private Cosmos (1968; rev 1981), Behind the Walls of
Terra (1970; rev 1982) and The Lavalite World (1977; rev 1983). The
sequence unfolds within a series of POCKET UNIVERSES, playgrounds built by
the masters - who are perhaps gods, originally humanoid - whose technology
is unimaginable. The most notable character is the present-day Earthman
Paul Janus Finnegan (his initials, PJF, show that this ironic observer
serves as a stand-in for the author: it is a signal repeated often in
later work); he is also called Kickaha, under which significantly Native
American name he acts out the role of a trickster hero indulging in merry,
if bloodthirsty, exploits. The books sag in places, but have moments of
high invention; and the Jungian models upon which the main characters are
constructed supply one key to the understanding of Red Orc's Rage (1991),
a novel which RECURSIVELY dramatizes the use of the previous titles in the
series as tools in role-playing therapy for disturbed adolescents. In a
late addition to the primary sequence, More Than Fire (1993), some of the
cosmological puzzles are resolved, and the conflict between Kickaha and
Red Orc takes on an increasingly Jungian air, with each being seen as the
other's shadow.At about the same time, ESSEX HOUSE, publishers of
pornography, commissioned PJF to write three erotic fantasy novels, taking
full advantage of the new freedoms of the late 1960s. The Image of the
Beast (1968), the first of the Exorcism trilogy, is an effective parody of
the private eye and Gothic horror genres. It was followed by a perfunctory
sequel, Blown, or Sketches Among the Ruins of my Mind (1969), both being
run together into one novel as The Image of the Beast (omni 1979); the
third Exorcism volume, Traitor to the Living (1973), was not published by
Essex House. The Essex House contract was completed with A Feast Unknown:
Volume IX of the Memoirs of Lord Grandrith (1969), the first volume of the
Lord Grandrith/Doc Caliban series, followed by Lord of the Trees (1970
dos) and The Mad Goblin (1970; vt Keepers of the Secrets 1985 UK), the
latter two being assembled as The Empire of the Nine (omni 1988 UK). A
Feast Unknown is a brilliant exploration of the sado-masochistic fantasies

latent in much heroic fiction, and succeeds as SATIRE, as sf and as a
tribute to the creations of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS and Lester DENT. It
concerns the struggle of Lord Grandrith (Tarzan) and Doc Caliban (Doc
Savage) against the Nine, a secret society of immortals. It is a narrative
tour de force.All three books point to an abiding concern (or game) that
would occupy much of PJF's later career: the tying of his own fiction (and
that of many other authors) into one vast, playful mythology. Much of this
is worked out in the loose conglomeration of works which has been termed
the Wold Newton Family series, all united under the premise that a
meteorite which landed near Wold Newton in 18th-century Yorkshire
irradiated a number of pregnant women and thus gave rise to a family of
mutant SUPERMEN. This family includes the characters involved in the Lord
Grandrith/Doc Caliban books, as well as several other texts devoted to
Tarzan, though excluding Lord Tyger (1970), which is about a millionaire's
attempt to create his own ape-man and is possibly the best written of
PJF's novels ( APES AND CAVEMEN). Central to Wold Newton is Tarzan Alive:
A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke (1972), a spoof biography in
which PJF uses Joseph Campbell's ideas (from The Hero With a Thousand
Faces [1949]) to explore the nature of the HERO's appeal. The appendices
and genealogy, which link Tarzan with many other heroes of popular
fiction, are at once a satire on scholarship and a serious exercise in
"creative mythography". Tarzan appears again in Time's Last Gift (1972;
rev 1977), a preliminary novel for a subseries about Ancient Africa,
employing settings from Burroughs and H. Rider HAGGARD. Hadon of Ancient
Opar (1974) and Flight to Opar (1976) continue the series. Other works
which contain Wold Newton material include "Tarzan Lives: An Exclusive
Interview with Lord Greystoke" (1972), "The Obscure Life and Hard Times of
Kilgore Trout" (1973), Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973; rev 1975),
The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (1973), "Extracts from the Memoirs of 'Lord
Greystoke'" (1974), "After King Kong Fell" (1974), The Adventure of the
Peerless Peer (1974), Ironcastle (1976), a liberally rewritten version of
J.H. ROSNY aine's L'etonnant voyage de Hareton Ironcastle (1922), and Doc
Savage: Escape from Loki: Doc Savage's First Adventure (1991). Other
characters incorporated into the sequence include Sherlock Holmes, Jack
the Ripper, James Bond and Kilgore Trout, a Kurt VONNEGUT character under
whose name PJF also published Venus on the Half-Shell (1975). As a whole,
the series parlays its conventions of "explanation" into something close
to chaos.Though these various books perhaps best express his playfully
serious manipulations of popular material to express a sense of the
Universe as chaotically fable-like, PJF gained greatest popular acclaim
with his Riverworld series, set on a planet where a godlike race has
resurrected the whole of humanity along the banks of a multi-million-mile
river. The series is made up of TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO (1965-6 Worlds
of Tomorrow; fixup 1971), The Fabulous Riverboat (1967-71 If; fixup 1971),
The Dark Design (1977), Riverworld and Other Stories (coll 1979), The
Magic Labyrinth (1980), Riverworld War: The Suppressed Fiction of Philip
Jose Farmer (coll 1980), The Gods of Riverworld (1983) and River of
Eternity (1983), the last being a rediscovered rewrite of the lost I Owe
for the Flesh. The first of these won a 1972 Hugo. Such historical
personages as Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890), Samuel Clemens (Mark TWAIN)
and Jack LONDON explore the terrain and relate to one another in their

search to understand, in terms mundane and metaphysical, the new universe
which has tied them together. As surviving characters begin to overdose on
the freedoms (or powers) they have discovered in themselves, the plots of
the later volumes become increasingly chaotic, perhaps deliberately, a
tendency not reversed in two late anthologies of work by other authors set
in the Riverworld universe: Tales of Riverworld *(anth 1992) and Quest to
Riverworld* (anth 1993), both ed PJF.After The Unreasoning Mask (1981), an
extremely well constructed SPACE OPERA about a search for God, who
comprises the Universe but is still a vulnerable child, PJF embarked on
the Dayworld series, whose premise derives from "The Sliced-Crossways
Only-on-Tuesday World" (1971): in a vastly overcrowded world, the
population is divided into seven, each cohort spending one day of the week
awake and the rest of the time in "stoned" immobility. In Dayworld (1985),
Dayworld Rebel (1987) and Dayworld Breakup (1990), this premise becomes
increasingly peripheral in a tale whose complications invoke A.E. VAN
VOGT. Here, as in all his work, PJF is governed by an instinct for
extremity. Of all sf writers of the first or second rank, he is perhaps
the most threateningly impish, and the most anarchic. [DP/JC]Other works:
Strange Relations (coll 1960); The Alley God (coll 1962); Fire and the
Night (1962), associational; Cache from Outer Space (1962 dos; rev as coll
with "Rastignac the Devil" and "They Twinkled like Angels" vt The Cache
1981); The Celestial Blueprint and Other Stories (coll 1962 dos); Tongues
of the Moon (1961 AMZ; exp 1964); Reap: The Baycon Guest-of-Honor Speech
(1968 chap); Love Song (1970), associational; Down in the Black Gang, and
Others (coll 1971); The Book of Philip Jose Farmer, or The Wares of Simple
Simon's Custard Pie and Space Man (coll 1973; rev 1982); Dark is the Sun
(1979); Jesus on Mars (1979); Flesh, and Lord Tyger (omni 1981);
Greatheart Silver (coll of linked stories 1982); A Barnstormer in Oz
(1982); Stations of the Nightmare (1974-5 in Continuum #1-#4 ed Roger
ELWOOD; coll of linked stories 1982); The Classic Philip Jose Farmer (coll
1984 in 2 vols); The Grand Adventure (coll 1984).As Editor: Mother Was a
Lovely Beast: A Feral Man Anthology of Fiction and Fact about Humans
Raised by Animals (anth 1974).About the author: "Philip Jose Farmer" by
Sam MOSKOWITZ, in Seekers of Tomorrow (1966); "Thanks for the Feast" by
Leslie A. Fiedler, in The Book of Philip Jose Farmer (1973); Philip Jose
Farmer (1980) by Mary T. Brizzi; Magic Labyrinth of Philip Jose Farmer
(1984 chap) by E.L. Chapman; Philip Jose Farmer: Good-Natured Ground
Breaker: A Working Bibliography (2nd edn 1990 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr
and Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also: ALIENS; COMICS; CONCEPTUAL
BREAKTHROUGH; COSMOLOGY; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; ESCHATOLOGY;
FANTASY; GAMES
AND TOYS; GAME-WORLDS; GODS AND DEMONS; GOTHIC SF; MARS; MESSIAHS;
MYTHOLOGY; OVERPOPULATION; PARANOIA; PSYCHOLOGY; REINCARNATION;
RELIGION;
SOCIOLOGY; TABOOS; THRILLING WONDER STORIES; VILLAINS.
FARNSWORTH, DUNCAN
[s] David Wright O'BRIEN.
FAR OUT!
Australian sf magazine (1985), DIGEST-format, 3 issues, published from

Western Australia by Far Out Enterprises, ed anon Pamela Klacar. Subtitled
"Australia's own sf/fantasy magazine", FO! published fiction of an
amateurish nature by unknown writers. Though (astonishingly) given
national distribution, it soon silently disappeared. [PN]
FARRELL, JOHN WADE
[s] John D. MACDONALD.
FARREN, MICK
(1943- ) UK writer and ex-rock musician, first active in a band, the
Deviants, 1967-70; he then edited the underground paper IT 1970-73 and
founded the underground comic Nasty Tales-prosecuted for obscenity in a
well known trial - in which, with Chris Rowley and Chris Welch, he
produced a comic strip with sf content, Ogoth the Wasted. His first sf
novel was The Texts of Festival (1973), set in a surrealistic postHOLOCAUST England; this novel and his subsequent Jeb Stuart Ho trilogy The Quest of the DNA Cowboys (1976), Synaptic Manhunt (1976) and The
Neural Atrocity (1977)-radiate a late-1960s aura of apocalyptic, hip
hyperbole, sometimes effectively. The Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys (1989)
is a loose sequel. The world of the trilogy especially is almost
deliriously polymorphic, full of images out of Westerns and other genres
and references to dope, rock and the hippy subculture generally, and can
be seen as a clear precursor of CYBERPUNK, though without COMPUTERS, and
laced throughout with the kind of drug use which later writers like
William GIBSON were able to avoid through the various delights of
CYBERSPACE.MF's next novels were similar in texture. Both The Feelies
(1978; rev 1990 US), a left-oriented SATIRE whose premise resembles that
of John D. MACDONALD's "Spectator Sport" (1950), and the dithery The Song
of Phaid the Gambler (1981; rev vt in 2 vols as Phaid the Gambler 1986 US
and Citizen Phaid 1987 US) seemed paralysed by their 1960s provenance.
After Protectorate (1984) his work began to seem derivative of the
cyberpunk writers who had followed him. Corpse (1986; vt Vickers 1988 US),
The Long Orbit (1988 US; vt Exit Funtopia 1989 UK) and Armageddon Crazy
(1989 US) have in common violent action, desolate NEAR-FUTURE venues and
spiritual malaise. Their Master's War (1988 US) concerns the ruthless use
of helpless species in an unending interstellar conflict. [JC]Other works:
Mars - The Red Planet (1990 US); Necrom (1991).
FARRERE, CLAUDE
Pseudonym of French writer Frederic Charles Pierre Edouard Bargone
(1876-1957), author mainly of "colonial" novels after the model of Pierre
Loti (1850-1923). His sf books are La maison des hommes vivants (1911;
trans Arthur Livingston as The House of the Secret 1923 US) and, more
notably, Les condamnes a mort (1920; trans Elisabeth Abbott as Useless
Hands 1926 US; 1973 US as by Charles Bargone), whose harsh
social-Darwinist terms render a 1990s workers' revolt as bleakly pathetic:
when the "useless hands" go on strike, they are disintegrated by a new
weapon and machines take over their jobs. [JC]Other works: Black Opium
(coll trans Samuel Putnam 1929 US), tales linked by reference to opium.See
also: AUTOMATION; DYSTOPIAS; SOCIAL DARWINISM.
FAST, HOWARD (MELVIN)

(1914- ) US writer best known for his work outside the sf field:
historical novels under his own name and detective novels and thrillers as
E.V. Cunningham. The Unvanquished (1942) and Spartacus (1951), both as HF,
are perhaps his most familiar titles. He began publishing sf with "Wrath
of the Purple" for AMZ in 1932, but did not actively produce sf until the
later 1950s, when he started a long association with FSF. His sf and
fantasy stories have been collected in The Edge of Tomorrow (coll 1961),
The General Zapped an Angel (coll 1970) and A Touch of Infinity (coll
1973); all the stories in the latter two volumes were reassembled as Time
and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (coll 1975). His work is sharply
political in implication - he was a member of the Communist Party 1943-56,
being imprisoned for contempt of Congress in 1947 - and eschews most of
the cruder satisfactions of genre fiction. Harlan ELLISON, among others,
has expressed high praise for HF's stories, but admiration, though
widespread, is not universal. Some critics have seen their occasionally
religiose moralizing as cloying and their ideative content as trite.
Phyllis (1962), as by E.V. Cunningham, is a borderline novel in which a US
and a Soviet scientist come together to try to force their governments to
ban the bomb by threatening to explode two themselves. In "The Trap", a
novel-length tale which occupies most of The Hunter and The Trap (coll
1967), the US Government secretly attempts to raise exceptional children
in a monitored environment; when the Department of Defense attempts to
view the results the children, now telepathic, close themselves off from
the world to breed Homo superior. [JC]Other works: Tony and the Wonderful
Door (1968; vt The Magic Door 1980), a juvenile.See also: SATIRE.
FAST, JONATHAN (DAVID)
(1948- ) US composer and writer, son of Howard FAST, who wrote music
before coming to sf with "Decay" for FSF in 1975. His first novel, The
Secrets of Synchronicity (1977; vt Prisoner of the Planets 1980 UK), is a
complex SPACE OPERA which, unusually for the form, treats an expanding
capitalism as inherently repressive of true freedom. In Mortal Gods (1978)
a similar enemy maintains control over a culture shaped by the
possibilities of GENETIC ENGINEERING. The tone of his writing, which is
generally light, and his plotting, which is contrived, tend to obscure the
political arguments underlying his work. [JC]Other works: The Inner Circle
(1979); The Beast (1981), a fantasy.
FASTER THAN LIGHT
According to Relativity the velocity of light is limiting: no matter how
objects alter their velocity relative to one another, the sum of their
velocities can never exceed the ultimate constant c (the velocity of light
in a vacuum); moreover, the measurement of c is unaffected by the velocity
of the measurer. The apparently paradoxical implications of this statement
are avoided because objects travelling at high velocities relative to one
another are subject to different frames of measurement, by which each
appears to the other to be subject to a distortion of time. As a
consequence, SPACESHIPS which make interstellar journeys at velocities
close to light-speed relative to their points of origin are subject to a
time-dilatation whereby the travellers age more slowly than the people
they left at home. A good popularization of such ideas can be found in

George GAMOW's book of scientific fables Mr Tompkins in Wonderland (coll
1939 chap).Some "relativistic" effects of FTL travel are described in
Camille FLAMMARION's pre-Einsteinian cosmic fantasy Lumen (1887; trans
1897), but other early sf writers, including the pioneers of pulp
SPACE-OPERA, ignored such matters, even after Relativity theory had come
into being. As the intellectual respectability of such ignorance declined,
however, the limiting velocity of light increasingly became an awkward
inconvenience to writers of interstellar adventure stories, necessitating
the development of a series of facilitating devices - often involving
"space-warps", interdimensional dodges into HYPERSPACE or "subspace", or,
more recently, TACHYON drives or BLACK-HOLE-related "wormholes" - to
enable the sciencefictional imagination to retain GALACTIC EMPIRES and
their effectively infinite supply of earthlike ALIEN worlds ripe for
COLONIZATION. Faster-than-light communication systems like James BLISH's
DIRAC transmitter and Ursula K. LE GUIN's ANSIBLE require similar
justificatory fudges. Such literary devices cannot, in fact, succeed in
setting aside the logical difficulties which arise if Einstein's theory is
true, but FTL drives of various kinds are so very useful in avoiding the
inconveniences of GENERATION STARSHIPS that many writers of HARD SF insist
on clinging to the hope that the theory may be imperfect in such a way as
to permit an exploitable loophole. Faster than Light (anth 1976), a theme
anthology ed Jack DANN and George ZEBROWSKI, includes, as well as the
stories, several essays combatively arguing the case. Other writers,
however, have found the time-dilatation effects associated with
relativistic star-travel a rich source of plot ideas.John W. CAMPBELL Jr
was the writer who laid the groundwork for such facilitating devices as
the space-warp (in Islands of Space, 1931; 1957) and hyperspace (in The
Mightiest Machine, 1934; 1947), where the term made its debut; where he
led legions followed. Stories which work harder than most to make such
notions plausible include Robert A. HEINLEIN's Starman Jones (1953),
Murray LEINSTER's The Other Side of Nowhere (1964), A. Bertram CHANDLER's
Catch the Star Winds (1969) and David ZINDELL's Neverness (1988).
Memorable imagery relating to hypothetical means of FTL travel can be
found in James Blish's tales of cities-become-starships by courtesy of the
SPINDIZZY, CITIES IN FLIGHT (omni 1970), and in Kenneth BULMER's "Strange
Highway" (1960) and Bob SHAW's The Palace of Eternity (1969). Some
memorable imagery attempting (mistakenly, as it later turned out) to
envisage real relativistic visual effects can be found in Frederik POHL's
"The Gold at the Starbow's End" (1972; exp as Starburst 1982). Many sf
stories suggest that the pilots of FTL spaceships may have to be specially
adapted to the task, sometimes by cyborgization ( CYBORGS), becoming
more-or-less alienated from their own kind; notable examples include
Cordwainer SMITH's "Scanners Live in Vain" (1950), Gerard F. CONWAY's
Mindship (1974), Joan COX's Star Web (1980), Vonda MCINTYRE's Superluminal
(1984), Melissa SCOTT's trilogy begun with Five Twelfths of Heaven (1985),
and Emma BULL's Falcon (1989). Norman SPINRAD's The Void-Captain's Tale
(1983) deals ironically with sf symbolism of this general kind, featuring
a phallic spaceship powered by a libidinous "psychological drive".Sf
stories which play with time-dilatation effects include Fredric BROWN's
flippant "Placet is a Crazy Place" (1946), L. Ron HUBBARD's earnest Return
to Tomorrow (1950; 1954), Blish's "Common Time" (1953), Heinlein's Time

for the Stars (1956), which deploys, literally, the celebrated "twins
paradox", Vladislav Krapivin's "Meeting my Brother" (trans 1966), Joe
HALDEMAN's THE FOREVER WAR (fixup 1975), Larry NIVEN's A World Out of Time
(fixup 1976), Tom Allen's "Not Absolute" (1978) and George TURNER's
Beloved Son (1978). Such effects are taken to spectacular extremes in Poul
ANDERSON's Tau Zero (1970), whose protagonists are permitted to outlive
the Universe, and in Pohl's and Jack WILLIAMSON's even more expansive The
Singers of Time (1991).The elementary changes have now been rung, but
there is probably further scope for intriguing time-dilatation plots. One
such is Redshift Rendezvous (1990) by John E. STITH, set on a starship in
a version of hyperspace in which the velocity of light is so low
(22mph/35kph) that its passage is visible, and relativistic phenomena are
obvious at walking speed. In the mean time, FTL facilitating devices will
undoubtedly continue to do sterling work for the extravagantly inclined sf
writer. [BS]
FATHERLAND
Made-for-tv film (1994). Home Box Office. Prod Frederick Muller and Ilene
Kahn, dir Christopher Menaul, screenplay Stanley Weiser and Ron
Hutchinson, based on the novel Fatherland (1992) by Robert Harris, Staring
Rutger Hauer and Miranda Richardson. 106 mins. Colour.The year is 1964,
the place Berlin, in an ALTERNATE WORLD in which HITLER WINS the Second
World War. The USA, which stayed out of the war against Germany and is now
led by President Joseph Kennedy senior, is holding talks about detente
with Adolf Hitler on the day of Hitler's 75th birthday, April 20th. Hitler
needs American friendship, because Germania's (sic) guerilla war with
Russia (still led by Stalin) is dragging on. The SS now act as a police
force. SS officer March (Hauer) and German-born American journalist
Charlie (Richardson) have separately stumbled across a series of murders
designed to keep a dreadful wartime secret concealed, and after a time
they work together to solve the mystery, in constant danger from the
virulent Gestapo. The secret turns out to be the Holocaust. If the mass
murder of the Jews (and Gypsies) is revealed, detente will crumble. Apart
from the fundamental (and perhaps tasteless) absurdity of the film
supposing that so abominable a happening, known to many thousands, should
have remained a secret for more than twenty years, this is a well-staged
and well-performed political thriller, interesting in its examination of
the ways in which a police state can contrive to show the world an
apparently acceptable face. The film was shot in Prague. [PN]
FAUCETTE, JOHN M(ATTHEW) Jr
(1943- ) US writer whose sf novels, including Crown of Infinity (1968)
and The Age of Ruin (1968), are routine works, the first a SPACE OPERA,
the second a post- DISASTER odyssey. The Peacemakers series, in which
alien invaders are fought to a negotiated truce, comprises The Warriors of
Terra (1970) and Siege of Earth (1971). [JC]
FAULCON, ROBERT
Robert P. HOLDSTOCK.
FAUST, JOE CLIFFORD
(1957- ) US copywriter and author who began publishing sf with "The

Jackalope's Tale" for Wyoming Rural Electric News in 1983. His first
novel, A Death of Honor (1987), is an sf mystery set in a 21st century
moderately displaced in the direction of CYBERPUNK, where a Constitutional
Amendment has entitled victims of crime to pursue the perpetrators; the
mystery itself is worked out with extremely satisfying care. His second
novel, The Company Man (1988), enters even more familiar cyberpunk
territory by featuring a protagonist who steals data for a large
corporation which partially runs the decaying world, and who soon faces a
moral crisis. In the Angel's Luck trilogy - Desperate Measures (1989),
Precious Cargo (1990) and The Essence of Evil (1990) - JCF created a
romping SPACE OPERA whose spiralling intricacies of plot, as the freelance
protagonists who run the starship Angel's Luck get into deeper and deeper
waters, are recounted with the rigorous plot-control for which he has
become known and with a sly sustaining humour. As a professing Christian,
JCF has an avowed allegiance to what he has called "old-fashioned
virtues"; so far, however, his tales show no signs of doctrinal purpose.
[JC]See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.
FAWCETT, BILL
Working name of US anthologist, packager and writer William Brian Fawcett
(1947- ). His fiction has generally been collaborative: examples include
Cold Cash Warrior (1989) with Robert ASPRIN and Lord of Cragslaw * (1989)
with Neil Randall, a novel tied to the Guardians of the Three sequence,
Lord of Cragslaw * (1989) (for details of books with David A. DRAKE and
Christopher STASHEFF, see their entries). Solo, BF has been responsible
for the SwordQuest fantasy sequence: Quest for the Unicorn's Horn (1985),
Quest for the Dragon's Eye (1985), Quest for the Demon Gate (1986) and
Quest for the Elf King (1987). As anthologist, he created the War Years
sequence of ties, including War Years #1: The Far Stars War * (anth 1990),
#2: The Siege of Arista * (anth 1991) with Stasheff, and #3: The Jupiter
War * (anth 1991). Also with Stasheff, he ed The Crafters (anth 1991) and
The Crafters #2: Bellsings and Curses (anth 1992), and with Robert
SILVERBERG he ed Time Gate (anth 1989) Further solo anthologies include
Cats in Space (anth 1992) and the Bolo sequence set in the universe
created by Keith LAUMER: Bolos: Honor of the Regiment * (anth 1993) and
Bolos #2: The Unconquerable (anth 1994). [JC]See also: SHARED WORLDS.
FAWCETT, EDGAR
(1847-1904) US writer, known primarily for his work outside the sf field.
Most of his 40 or so novels belong to the realist school associated with
his contemporary William Dean HOWELLS, but (like Howells) BF also wrote
imaginative works. He provided a manifesto for a species of fiction which
he called "realistic romance", which is very similar to some DEFINITIONS
OF SF: "Stories where the astonishing and peculiar are blent with the
possible and accountable. They may be as wonderful as you will, but they
must not touch on the mere flimsiness of miracle. They can be excessively
improbable, but their improbability must be based upon scientific fact,
and not upon fantastic, emotional and purely imaginative groundwork." This
statement is from the introduction to The Ghost of Guy Thyrle (1895), a
novel whose hero discovers a drug which separates his soul from his body
and must undertake a voyage into the further reaches of the cosmos when

his uninhabited body is cremated. Earlier and more modest works in the
same vein are Douglas Duane (1887), a personality-exchange story, Solarion
(1889), a novel about a dog with artificially augmented intelligence, and
The Romance of Two Brothers (1891), which features a problematic elixir of
life. The New Nero (1893), a study in abnormal psychology concerning a man
who believes himself to be a mass murderer, is of borderline interest.
Some of EF's POETRY is also relevant, most notably "In the Year Ten
Thousand" in Songs of Doubt and Dream (coll 1891). An early supernatural
story of some note is "He, She and It" (1871). He copyrighted several
unpublished manuscripts, some of which appear to have been sf. [BS]About
the author: "The Realistic Romances of Edgar Fawcett" by Brian M.
STABLEFORD, Foundation #24 (Feb 1982).See also: COSMOLOGY; EVOLUTION;
MOON; RELIGION.
FAWCETT, E(DWARD) DOUGLAS
(1866-1960) UK writer and mystical thinker, long resident in Switzerland.
His first (and best-known) sf novel, Hartmann the Anarchist, or The Doom
of the Great City (1893), illustrated by Fred T. JANE, features a 1920s
anarchist revolution against a wicked, capitalist UK, with London being
destroyed by airships; but, in the face of opposition and gripped by
guilt, the rebel Hartmann eventually destroys himself and the Attila, his
fearsome airship, and all is well. The HOLLOW EARTH featured in Swallowed
by an Earthquake (1894), a juvenile, is non-Symmesian ( John Cleves
SYMMES) and uncompellingly cluttered with prehistoric reptiles. The Secret
of the Desert, or How We Crossed Arabia in the "Antelope" (1895) is about
a secret amphibious tank which crosses Arabia, finding there a lost race (
LOST WORLDS) of Phoenicians. [JC]
FAWCETT, FAUSTO
[r] LATIN AMERICA.
FAWCETT, F(RANK) DUBREZ
(1891-1968) UK writer active in various genres under his own name and
several others from 1923; non-sf pseudonyms included Cass Borelli, Henri
Dupres, Madame E. Farra, "GRIFF", Eugene Glen, Duke Linton, Coolidge
McCann, Elmer Eliot Saks, Ben Sarto and Hank Spencer. Much of his output
consisted of such thrillers as Miss Otis Comes to Piccadilly (1946), as by
Ben Sarto, and its many quite popular successors. The Wonderful Isle of
Ulla-Gapoo (1946) is a mild fantasy. FDF's only known sf novel proper is
Hole in Heaven (1954), about a human body possessed by an
other-dimensional ALIEN. Air-Gods' Parade (1935), as by Simpson Stokes,
and The Dubious Adventures of Baron Munchhausen (1948) may be of some
interest. [JC]
FAX COLLECTOR'S EDITIONS
US SMALL PRESS established by T.E. DIKTY with Darrell C. Richardson in
1972, and devoted to publishing material from and about PULP MAGAZINES.
Its publications include several collections of obscure Robert E. HOWARD
stories, two anthology series in facsimile under the titles Famous
Fantastic Classics and Famous Pulp Classics, and The Weird Tales Story
(1977), a large volume written and ed Robert E. WEINBERG. An associated
and more prolific company, also founded by Dikty, is STARMONT HOUSE. [MJE]

FAYETTE, J.B.
JUPITER; OUTER PLANETS.
FEARING, KENNETH
(1902-1961) US poet and novelist, known mainly for mysteries like The Big
Clock (1946), a tale whose atmosphere adumbrates the film-noir tonality of
later US fantasy. Within a mystery frame, The Loneliest Girl in the World
(1951) is borderline sf. KG's only sf novel proper is Clark Gifford's Body
(1942), which gravely and literately portrays a future US civil war. [JC]
FEARN, JOHN (FRANCIS) RUSSELL
(1908-1960) UK writer; extremely prolific, he used many pseudonyms.
During the 1930s he wrote for magazines, including the US PULP MAGAZINES,
but during WWII he switched to books. He became a central figure in the
post-WWII paperback boom, writing numerous Westerns, crime stories and
probably some romances as well as his sf, most of which appeared under the
names Vargo Statten and Volsted GRIDBAN (the latter pseudonym being taken
over from E.C. TUBB). In the pulps he wrote many stories as Thornton Ayre
and Polton Cross, and also used the names Geoffrey Armstrong, Dennis
Clive, John Cotton and Ephriam Winiki; his sf books and crime stories with
sf elements include items signed with the personal pseudonyms Spike
Gordon, Conrad G. Holt, Laurence F. Rose, John Russell and Earl Titan, and
the house names Astron DEL MARTIA, "GRIFF", Paul LORRAINE and Brian
SHAW.JRF's first GENRE-SF work was the early SUPERMAN story The
Intelligence Gigantic (1933 AMZ; 1943). It was followed by the extravagant
Liners of Time (1935 AMZ; 1947) and its sequel "Zagribud" (1937 AMZ; cut
vt Science Metropolis by Vargo Statten 1952); he subsequently wrote a good
deal for ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION while it was edited by F. Orlin
TREMAINE, contributing numerous "thought-variant" stories, some of which
he later expanded into Vargo Statten novels, including Nebula X (1946 as
"The Multillionth Chance" by JRF; rev 1950), The Sun Makers (1937 as
"Metamorphosis" by JRF; rev 1950), The Avenging Martian (1938 as "Red
Heritage" by JRF; rev 1951), The Renegade Star (1935 as "The Blue
Infinity" by JRF; rev 1951), The Inner Cosmos (1937 as "Worlds Within" by
JRF; rev 1952), To the Ultimate (1936 as "Mathematica" and "Mathematica
Plus" by JRF; rev 1952) and The Dust Destroyer (1934 as "The Man who
Stopped the Dust" by JRF; rev 1953).Four Thornton Ayre novelettes in
FANTASTIC ADVENTURES featuring the superwoman - or Golden Amazon - Violet
Ray were extensively revised into the novel The Golden Amazon (1939-43;
1944), which was reprinted in the Toronto Star Weekly to such acclaim that
23 sequels followed, the last appearing posthumously there in 1961. Those
which have subsequently appeared in book form are: The Golden Amazon
Returns (1945; 1949; vt The Deathless Amazon 1953 Canada), The Golden
Amazon's Triumph (1946; 1953), The Amazon's Diamond Quest (1947 as
"Diamond Quest"; 1953), The Amazon Strikes Again (1948; 1954), Twin of the
Amazon (1948; 1954), Conquest of the Amazon (1949; 1973 chap) and Lord of
Atlantis (1949; 1991 chap). Two other series are Edgar Rice BURROUGHS
imitations: the Clayton Drew interplanetary romances Emperor of Mars
(1950), Warrior of Mars (1950), Red Men of Mars (1950) and Goddess of Mars
(1950); and the Anjani sequence of Tarzan imitations signed Earl Titan:
The Gold of Akada (1951) and Anjani, the Mighty (1951). JFR also wrote the

book of the notable 1954 schlock-horror film The CREATURE FROM THE BLACK
LAGOON , The Creature from the Black Lagoon * (1954) as Vargo
Statten.Scion, publishers of Vargo Statten, created the VARGO STATTEN
SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, although JRF did not become its editor
immediately; it underwent several title changes in the course of its short
life.JRF's writing was unpolished and his use of ideas imaginatively
reckless, but his best work is vigorous and occasionally vivid. His works
have sometimes proved popular in translation; he enjoyed something of a
boom in Italy in the 1970s. [BS]Other works as JRF: Slaves of Ijax (1947
chap); Operation Venus (1950); From Afar (1982 chap); No Grave Need I
(1984 chap); The Slitherers (1984 chap).As Hugo Blayn: What Happened to
Hammond? (1951).As Dennis Clive: Valley of Pretenders (c1942 chap US); The
Voice Commands (c1942 chap US).As Polton Cross: Other Eyes Watching
(1946).As Astron del Martia (house name): The Trembling World (1949).As
Spike Gordon: Don't Touch Me (1953).As Volsted Gridban: The
Dyno-Depressant (1953); Magnetic Brain (1953); Moons for Sale (1953);
Scourge of the Atom (1948 as "After the Atom" by JRF; rev 1953); the
Herbert sequence, comprising A Thing of the Past (1953) and The Genial
Dinosaur 1954); Exit Life (1941 as "The World in Wilderness" by Thornton
Ayre; rev 1953); the Adam Quirke sequence, comprising The Master Must Die
(1953) and The Lonely Astronomer (partly based on "Death at the
Observatory" 1938 by JRF; 1954); The Purple Wizard (1953); The Frozen
Limit (1954); I Came - I Saw - I Wondered (1954).As "Griff" (house name):
Liquid Death (1953).As Conrad G. Holt: Cosmic Exodus (1953 chap).As Paul
Lorraine (house name): Dark Boundaries (1953).As Laurence F. Rose: The
Hell-Fruit (1953 chap).As John Russell: Account Settled (1949).As Brian
Shaw (house name): Z-Formations (1953).As Vargo Statten: Annihilation
(1950); The Micro-Men (1950); Wanderer of Space (1950); 2000 Years On
(1950); Inferno! (1950); The Cosmic Flame (1950); Cataclysm (1944 as "The
Devouring Tide" by Polton Cross; rev 1951); The Red Insects (1951); The
New Satellite (1951); Deadline to Pluto (1951); The Petrified Planet
(1951); Born of Luna (1951); The Devouring Fire (1951); The Catalyst
(1951); The Space Warp (1952); The Eclipse Express (1952); The Time Bridge
(1942 as "Prisoner of Time" by Polton Cross; rev 1952); The Man from
Tomorrow (1950 as "Stranger in our Midst" by JRF; rev 1952); The G-Bomb
(1941 as "The Last Secret Weapon" by Polton Cross; rev 1952); Laughter in
Space (1939 as "Laughter out of Space" by Dennis Clive; rev 1952); Across
the Ages (1952 as "Glimpse" by JRF; 1952 chap); The Last Martian (1952
chap); Worlds to Conquer (1952 chap); De-Creation (1952 chap); The Time
Trap (1952 chap); Ultra Spectrum (1953); Black-Wing of Mars (1953 as
"Winged Pestilence" by JRF; 1953); Man in Duplicate (1953); Zero Hour
(1952 as "Deadline" by JRF; 1953); The Black Avengers (1953); Odyssey of
Nine (1953); Pioneer 1990 (1940 as "He Conquered Venus" by JRF; rev 1953);
The Interloper (1953); Man of Two Worlds (1953); The Lie Destroyer (1953);
Black Bargain (1953); The Grand Illusion (1953); Wealth of the Void
(1954); A Time Appointed (1954); I Spy (1954); The Multi-Man (1954); 1,000
Year Voyage (1954); Earth 2 (1955).About the author: The Multi-Man (1968
chap) by Philip HARBOTTLE.See also: BOYS' PAPERS; CLONES; TIME TRAVEL.
FEELEY, GREGORY
(1955- ) US critic and writer whose essays and book reviews have appeared

throughout the 1980s in various journals from the Washington Post to
FOUNDATION. Sometimes adversarial, unfailingly intelligent, they represent
a cold-eyed view of a genre he loves by a critic immersed in its material.
Although he began publishing sf with "The Light at the End of the
Penumbra" in Ascents of Wonder (anth 1977) ed David GERROLD, GF did not
become active as an author of fiction for about a decade. His first novel,
The Oxygen Barons (1990), served therefore as a sort of debut, surprising
some by turning out to be a HARD-SF tale of a terraformed Moon (
TERRAFORMING). In what seems a perfectly standard fashion, colonists and a
giant corporation are at loggerheads; it is only the labyrinth of the plot
that exposes the novel as other than orthodox. [JC]
FEGHOOTS
Reginald BRETNOR; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION .
FEINTUCH, DAVID
(? - ) US writer whose Nick Seafort series, beginning with Midshipman's
Hope (1994), depicts the life and adventures of a young cadet on a
spaceship whose rituals are extremely like that of a planet-bound, even
19th century, navy: specifically the navy in which C.S. FORESTER's Horatio
Hornblower serves. Three further volumes are expected. [JC]
FEKETE, GYULA
[r] HUNGARY.
FELDSTEIN, ALBERT B.
[r] EC COMICS.
FELICE, CYNTHIA (LINDGREN)
(1942- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Longshanks" for Galileo
2 in 1976. Her first novel, Godsfire (1978), depicts an ALIEN planet
inhabited by felines who dominate the local humans but who have never seen
their sun because of the unending rain. Almost too well constructed almost facile in its zestful plotting - the book demonstrated CF's
technical skill, her romantic inclinations and a tendency to slough off
hard solutions. Her next book, The Sunbound (1981), for instance, failed
to produce a protagonist capable of hewing to CF's intricate plot demands
without seeming an arbitrary creation, yet the family romance at the
tale's heart required characters who could be intrinsically believed in.
Of her later solo singletons, Downtime (1985) interestingly combined a
longevity intrigue in a distant solar system, aliens, and romance, but The
Khan's Persuasion (1991) once again demonstrated a gap between the quality
of her sf perceptions and the easy flow of the plotty romance idiom
through which she presents characters. CF's two collaborations with Connie
WILLIS, Water Witch (1982) and Light Raid (1989), benefit from Willis's
significantly harsher mind but are still somewhat heavily plotted.
[JC]Other works: Eclipses (1983); Double Nocturne (1986); Iceman
(1991).See also: WEAPONS.
FEMINISM
Although a genre defined and long dominated by men, sf has a particular
affinity with feminism. This became clear in the 1970s with the
publication of such challenging books as THE FEMALE MAN (1975) by Joanna

RUSS, WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD (1974) and Motherlines (1978) by Suzy
McKee CHARNAS and WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME (1976) by Marge PIERCY.One of
the most obvious attractions of sf to women writers - feminist or not - is
the possibilities it offers for the creation of a female HERO. The demands
of realism in the contemporary or historical novel set limits which do not
bind the universes available to sf. Although the history of sf reveals few
heroic, realistic, or even original images of women ( WOMEN AS PORTRAYED
IN SCIENCE FICTION), the genre had a potential recognized by the women
writers drawn to it in the 1960s and 1970s. The desire to write (or read)
about women who wield swords, pilot spaceships or simply lead lives from
which the threat of male violence is absent might be seen as escapist, but
such imaginings can also be read as part of a political agenda. As Pamela
SARGENT wrote in a letter to Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Fall
1977, "Science-fiction writers are limited only by human potential, not
human actualities. Sf can serve to show women, and men, how large that
potential can be." And Suzy McKee Charnas remarked in the same journal:
"Women's realities are still highly circumscribed by various forms of
oppression . . . One place for us to imagine new strengths, goals, and
ways of being human is in the world of fantasy, where we can work around
our present limitations in ways that may help to point us . . . out of and
beyond those limitations."Despite the reputation sf has as a
mind-expanding, possibly subversive, always questioning form, these
strengths were seldom brought to bear on the subject of male/female
relationships, sexual roles or the idea of "woman's place" prior to the
rise of the Women's Liberation Movement. As Kingsley AMIS pointed out in
New Maps of Hell (1960 US), "Though it may go against the grain to admit
it, science-fiction writers are evidently satisfied with the sexual status
quo." He was referring, of course, to male sf writers. With a very few
exceptions (e.g., Philip WYLIE's The Disappearance [1951], Theodore
STURGEON's Venus Plus X [1960] and John WYNDHAM's "Consider Her Ways"
[1956]), the men who tried to imagine alternatives to patriarchy did so
only to "prove" how nasty and impossible life would be without the
"natural" dominance of woman by man. (For more novels featuring
women-ruled societies SOCIOLOGY.)One of the major challenges of modern
feminism has been to the idea that gender roles and relations are in some
way permanent, arising from a natural and immutable law. In The Dialectic
of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) Shulasmith Firestone
located the site of women's oppression in their role as child-bearers and
-rearers, and argued that feminist revolution would not be possible until
women were freed not only from the sole responsibility for child-rearing
(which should be taken by society as a whole) but also, by technology,
from the tyranny of reproduction. Although the idea that women might have
to give up the physical act of child-bearing in order to achieve a truly
egalitarian society has never achieved wide popularity, the force of
Firestone's argument is powerfully illustrated in Marge Piercy's WOMAN ON
THE EDGE OF TIME, and its influence can be traced also in the writings of
Charnas, Russ and Sally Miller GEARHART.Not all work by women writers is
feminist - not even when it concentrates on the "woman question" - and
there are different interpretations of what comprises feminist sf. The
only specifically labelled feminist sf list from any publisher is the one
established by The Women's Press in the UK under the direction of Sarah

LEFANU in 1985. Anything published by The Women's Press, sf included, is
considered, by definition, feminist, and is often ghettoized in bookshops.
Yet many of the books on this list were first published in the USA and
even in the UK by nonfeminist houses either as straightforward sf, as for
example A Door into Ocean (1986) by Joan SLONCZEWSKI, or as mainstream
literature, like The Book of the Night (1984) by Rhoda Lerman (1936- ).
The Women's Press list also includes books by writers who had not
previously been seen as, and would not define themselves as, feminist
writers, such as Josephine SAXTON and Tanith LEE.Diane Martin, an editor
of the fanzine Aurora (where sf stands for "speculative feminism" JANUS/AURORA), in 1990 proposed, with tongue slightly in cheek, "The
Martin Scale" as a tool for measuring the feminist content of a work of sf
or fantasy:Level One: Doubts about patriarchy/women escaping victimization
(e.g., most Andre NORTON novels)Level Two: Men and women as equals (e.g.,
DREAMSNAKE [1978] by Vonda MCINTYRE)Level Three: Women are better than men
on some levels (e.g., FrostFlower and Thorn [1980] by Phyllis Ann
Karr)Level Four: Women are uniformly better than men (e.g., Jessica Amanda
Salmonson's Tomoe Gozen saga)Level Five: Can't live with 'em/can't live
without 'em (e.g., "The Women Men Don't See" [1973] by James TIPTREE
Jr)Level Six: Men are tragically flawed and pitiable (e.g., Native Tongue
[1984] by Suzette Haden ELGIN)Level Seven: Men as slaves (e.g., B-movies
like Amazon Women on the Moon [1987]; Joe DANTE)Level Eight: Separatism is
necessary for survival (e.g., THE GATE TO WOMEN'S COUNTRY [1988] by Sheri
S. TEPPER)Level Nine: Positive depiction of lesbian/feminist utopias (e.g.
, The Shore of Women [1986] by Pamela Sargent)Level Ten: Parthenogenesis
and/or scenes of actual castration (e.g., Motherlines [1978] by Suzy McKee
Charnas)In what is probably the most thoughtful and accessible survey of
the topic, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science
Fiction (1988; vt Feminism and Science Fiction 1989 US) by Sarah Lefanu,
the author makes a distinction between feminist sf and "feminized sf". The
latter, she argues, while it challenges established sexism by valuing
women and feminine values over men and masculinity, and has been an
important influence on the development of sf as a whole, does not dispute
the man/woman paradigm or question the construction of gender as more
radical feminist writings do. Feminist ideas are able to flourish within
sf despite reader resistance because, she claims, sf at its best "deploys
a sceptical rationalism as its subtext" and "feminism is based upon a
profound scepticism: of the 'naturalness' of the patriarchal world and the
belief in male superiority on which it is founded".A forerunner to modern
feminist sf can be seen in the spate of utopian stories written by women
as part of the movement for women's rights which began in the 19th
century. Unlike the utopias of male writers, these fictions always
question the sexual status quo and foreground the position of women,
sometimes - as in Mary E. Bradley LANE's Mizora (1890) and Charlotte
Perkins GILMAN's Herland (1914; 1979) - by depicting an all-women society
and showing its superiority to societies in which men rule.The utopian
tradition in women's writing was forgotten in subsequent decades until its
rediscovery by feminist scholars in the 1970s, and there is some worry
that, however well established women writers may seem now, the same fate
may befall feminist sf. Russ has described many of the ways in which
women's work is discounted in How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983); and,

in "An Open Letter to Joanna Russ" in Aurora 25 (1987), Jeanne Gomoll
expressed her feeling that her own experiences of FANDOM and sf in the
1970s were being rewritten by men choosing to ignore the impact of
feminism and characterize a whole decade as "boring" because their
personal interests were not always given priority. To many, women as well
as men, the revolution is over, equality has been won, and we are living
in a post-feminist age. In addition, the label "feminist" has never been
either safe or comfortable; while it had in the 1970s - particularly in
the USA - a certain novelty value, by the mid-1980s to be called a
feminist writer was to be announced as writing for a limited audience of
like-minded readers.On the positive side, the impact of feminism can be
seen even in much nonfeminist sf. Men as well as women writers are more
interested in creating believable female characters; and, as a ground for
"thought experiments" relating to gender, social relations and new ways of
being human - topics central to feminism - sf is extremely fertile.
[LT]Further reading: Future Females: A Critical Anthology (anth 1981) ed
Marlene S. Barr; Feminist Futures: Contemporary Women's Speculative
Fiction (1984) by Natalie M. Rosinski; Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions
of Science Fiction and Fantasy (anth 1985) ed Jane B. Weedman; Writing
Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers
(1985) by Rachel Blau DuPlessis; Feminist Utopias (1989) by Francis
Bartkowski.
FENDALL, PERCY
(? -? ) UK author known solely for his sf novel Lady Ermyntrude and the
Plumber: A Love Tale of MCMXX (1912). After the passage of the Great
Compulsory Work Act and the suppression of the House of Lords, everybody
must work to live. [JC]
FENN, LIONEL
Charles L. GRANT.
FERGUSON, BRAD
Working name of US writer Bradley Michael Ferguson (1953- ). His two Star
Trek ties are Crisis on Centaurus * (1986) and A Flag Full of Stars *
(1991). He has also written one independent title, The World Next Door
(1990), in which a post- HOLOCAUST Earth is set as an ALTERNATE WORLD to
our own. [JC]
FERGUSON, HELEN
Anna KAVAN.
FERGUSON, NEIL
(1947- ) UK writer who began publishing sf with "The Monroe Doctrine" for
Interzone in 1983, and through the 1980s released several sharply
conceived tales, revealing more than once a deep interest in US life.His
first book, Bars of America (coll 1986), not sf, is a collection of tales
and musings set in the heart of that country. His first sf novel, Putting
Out (1988), presents a NEAR-FUTURE US political race in terms of the
semiotics of dressing, with all the sensitivity to signs so often found in
exiles, voluntary or forced. Double Helix Fall (1990), also linguistically
inventive and darkly obsessed with the USA's visions of its own demise,
presents - in the guise of a homage to the world and style of Philip K.

DICK - an original rendering of that sense of demise, for in the USA of
this novel it has become a matter of political and religious orthodoxy
that to be born is to die, and that the world into which one dies is a
stratified Hell. A ROBOT detective helps, in the nick of time, to loosen
the death-grip. [JC]
FERMAN, EDWARD L(EWIS)
(1937- ) US editor, son of Joseph W. FERMAN; ELF formally took over the
editorship of The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION in Jan 1966, a
post in which he remained until June 1991, having previously been managing
editor since Apr 1962 under Avram DAVIDSON and then his father. Under
ELF's editorship FSF generally prospered: for many years it was one of
only two sf magazines - ASF being the other, with both now being joined by
ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE - to have maintained a regular
schedule, and its circulation has remained fairly stable. FSF won the HUGO
for Best Magazine five years in succession (1969-72) under ELF and, after
that category was dropped, ELF won the replacement Hugo for Best Editor in
1981, 1982 and 1983. It would be fair to say that, although the magazine
has lost much of its distinctive flavour of the 1950s, larger market
forces and changes in the nature of the genre have had much to do with
that diminution of specialness. In 1991 ELF appointed Kristine Kathryn
RUSCH as editor, retaining the post of publisher.During his long stay at
the helm, ELF edited various anthologies drawn from the magazine,
including several volumes of the Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction
series (see listing below). There were also four anniversary volumes:
Twenty Years of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (anth 1970)
with Robert P. MILLS, The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: A Special
25th Anniversary Anthology (anth 1974), The Magazine of Fantasy and
Science Fiction: A 30-Year Retrospective (anth 1980) ,The Best from
Fantasy ?
The Best from Fantasy ?
(anth 1994), the last with Rusch. With Barry N. MALZBERG ELF collaborated
on a notable original anthology, Final Stage (anth 1974; rev 1975), a
reprint collection, Arena: Sports SF (anth 1976) and Graven Images: Three
Original Novellas of Science Fiction (anth 1977). [MJE/JC]Other works:
Once and Future Tales from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
(anth 1968); The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1965 (anth
1981) with Martin H. GREENBERG; The Best Fantasy Stories from the Magazine
of Fantasy ? The Best Horror Stories from the
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (anth 1988; in 2 vols US 1989; vt
The Best of Modern Horror: Twenty-Four Tales from the Magazine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction 1989 UK) ed with Anne Devereaux Jordan.The Best from
Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction:
15th Series (anth 1966); 16th Series (anth 1967); 17th Series (anth 1968);
18th Series (anth 1969); 19th Series (anth 1971); 20th Series (anth 1973);
22nd Series (anth 1977); 23th Series (anth 1980); 24th Series (anth 1982).
FERMAN, JOSEPH W(OLFE)
(1906-1974) US publisher and editor, born in Lithuania. After a long
career with the magazine American Mercury, JWF became involved with The
MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION from its inception, was listed Aug

1954-Oct 1970 as Publisher and Dec 1964-Dec 1965 as Editor, a position to
which his son, Edward L. FERMAN, succeeded him. He also founded VENTURE
SCIENCE FICTION as a companion to FSF; it ran 1957-8 under the editorship
of Robert P. MILLS, with a second series being published 1969-70 under the
editorship of Edward L. Ferman. JWF edited an anthology of stories from
Venture: No Limits (anth 1964). [MJE/PN]
FERRING, DAVID
David S. GARNETT.
FEZANDIE, (ERNEST) CLEMENT
(1865-1959) US writer and playwright based initially in New York, though
he lived and travelled in the Middle East in later life, and died in
Belgium. His sf novel, Through the Earth (1898), is about a
transportation-tube through the planet from New York to Australia, which
gives its first passenger an experience in free fall but suffers from
melting at the Earth's core and must be abandoned. The sequel, A Trip to
Venus, still awaits publication. It is likely that CF's early work, with
its didactic bias, was appreciated by Hugo GERNSBACK, and his Dr Hackensaw
series ( EDISONADE) appeared first in Gernsback's SCIENCE AND INVENTION in
43 instalments, from "The Secret of Artificial Respiration" (1921) to the
novel "A Journey to the Center of the Earth" (1925), with two concluding
stories published the next year in AMZ. [JC]See also: APES AND CAVEMEN (IN
THE HUMAN WORLD); HOLLOW EARTH; MATTER TRANSMISSION; SERIES.
FIALKO, NATHAN
(1881-? ) Soviet writer, resident in the USA, who translated his own
uneven sf novel into English as The New City: A Story of the Future (1925;
trans and rev 1937). It depicts first Soviet then US society with strongly
DYSTOPIAN views of both. [JC]
FICHMAN, FRED(ERICK)
(? - ) US writer whose SETI (1990) pits its teenaged hero against both US
and Soviet governments in the race to make First Contact. He does
surprisingly well. [JC]See also: ALIENS.
FICKS, R. SNOWDEN
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
FICTIONEERS, INC.
ASTONISHING STORIES; SUPER SCIENCE STORIES.
FIEDLER, LESLIE A(ARON)
(1917- ) US critic whose piercing and mythopoeic views on the
relationship between US culture and literature were first expressed in
Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), where he describes sf as a
"typically Anglo-Saxon" form, although later, in Waiting for the End (coll
1964), he states that "Even in its particulars, the universe of science
fiction is Jewish". He has long espoused the work of such sf writers as
Samuel R. DELANY. In Dreams Awake (anth 1975) assembles material of
interest, and Olaf Stapledon: A Man Divided (1983) is an invigorating if
sometimes eccentric examination of STAPLEDON. His fiction, like The
Messengers will Come no More (1974), tends to FABULATION. [JC]See also:
DEFINITIONS OF SF.

FIELD, GANS T.
Manly Wade WELLMAN.
FIEND WITHOUT A FACE
Film (1957). Amalgamated/MGM. Dir Arthur Crabtree, starring Marshall
Thompson, Terence Kilburn, Kim Parker, Peter Madden, Kynaston Reeves.
Screenplay Herbert J. Leder, based on "The Thought-Monster" (Weird Tales
1930) by Amelia Reynolds Long. 74 mins. B/w.This is one of the two sf/
HORROR films made by Amalgamated in the UK (the other was FIRST MAN INTO
SPACE [1958], also starring Marshall Thompson) but set in North America.
FWAF is much more interesting than the other, despite the absurdity of its
basic premise. An elderly SCIENTIST (Reeves) accidentally creates, with
his new thought-wave amplifier, a number of creatures consisting of pure
energy. Invisible at first, they commit a series of murders by sucking out
their victim's brains through holes made at the base of the neck; but in
the final sequences, when the creatures have trapped the protagonists in a
remote house, they gradually materialize as disembodied brains with
trailing spinal cords and twitching tendrils. The lunatic climax has a
quality of genuine nightmare, with the brains - animated in imaginative
stop-motion photography by Florenz von Nordhoff and K.L. Ruppel - leaping
and plopping about like demonic frogs. This is the ultimate in
anti-intellectual movies. [JB/PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES.
FIGGIS, N.P.
(1939- ) Irish archaeologist and writer whose fourth novel, The Fourth
Mode (1989), sensitively depicts a small town and the natural life
surrounding it as a nuclear holocaust first threatens, then arrives. [JC]
FILE 770
US FANZINE of the 1980s, ed from Los Angeles by Mike Glyer, bimonthly for
most of its life. A newsletter covering FANDOM, with emphasis on North
America, it was begun when the previous US "newszine" (fanzine devoted to
items of news), Karass, ed Linda Bushyager, folded. The focus of F770,
much of whose contents are written in Glyer's no-nonsense style, is
convention news and reports. It won HUGOS for Best Fanzine in 1984, 1985
and 1989, and Glyer won the Hugo for Best Fan Writer in 1984, 1986 and
1988. [RH]
FILM
CINEMA.
FINAL COUNTDOWN, THE
Film (1980). Bryna Company/United Artists. Dir Don Taylor, starring Kirk
Douglas, Martin Sheen, Katharine Ross, James Farentino. Screenplay David
Ambrose, Gerry DAVIS, Thomas Hunter, Peter Powell, based on a story by
Hunter, Powell, Ambrose. 105 mins. Colour.An aircraft carrier on
manoeuvres off Hawaii in 1980 is caught in a strange storm which turns out
to be a time-warp. The vessel is deposited in the same spot in 1941, just
before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Action is eschewed for interminable
ethical debate about altering history, as the captain (Douglas) agonizes
whether or not to shoot down the Japanese planes which will shortly bomb
the US naval base; a second time-warp renders decision unnecessary. The

film is wholly pointless, ill acted, and a complete waste of a perfectly
good ship, the Nimitz, which the US Navy had allowed the production
company (Kirk Douglas and family) to use. [PN]
FINAL PROGRAMME, THE
(vt The Last Days of Man on Earth) Film (1973). Goodtimes
Enterprises/Gladiole Films/MGM-EMI. Dir Robert Fuest, starring Jon Finch,
Jenny Runacre, Sterling Hayden, Harry Andrews, Hugh Griffith, Julie Ege,
Patrick Magee, Derrick O'Connor. Screenplay Fuest, based on The Final
Programme (1968) by Michael MOORCOCK. 89 mins. Colour.In this first film
to feature Moorcock's polymorph protagonist, Jerry Cornelius, style
triumphs over content. Originally a set-designer, Fuest is best known for
The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971), an extravagantly theatrical horror-film
spoof, and for the many episodes that he directed of The AVENGERS . TFP
looks impressive, but not much of Moorcock's creation remains. Cornelius's
father has died, leaving a hidden microfilm on which is the final
(computer) programme of the title. Those involved in the hunt for the film
include Jerry (Finch), his evil brother (O'Connor), and the awesome Miss
Brunner (Runacre), who has a tendency to consume her lovers, bones and
all. The Moorcock original was not as strong as the other three books of
his Jerry Cornelius tetralogy, but none the less was sophisticated in its
ironies, which Fuest here reduces (literally in one case) to a series of
knowing winks. When Moorcock defines his characters in terms of their
personal style, this is often a form of criticism; for Fuest, by contrast,
strong style is apparently to be admired. The apotheosis of the book is
rendered farcical in the film, which substitutes a grinning Neanderthal
for Moorcock's original hermaphroditic MESSIAH. [PN/JB]
FINCH, SHEILA (ROSEMARY)
(1935- ) UK-born writer, in the USA from 1962 or earlier, who began
publishing sf with "The Confession of Melakos" for Sou-wester in 1977. Her
first novel, Infinity's Web (1985), rather confusedly describes the lives
of five versions of one protagonist who live in various ALTERNATE WORLDS,
and who gradually gain a sense of the mutual web they inhabit. Though far
more devoted to generic pleasures than Joanna RUSS in THE FEMALE MAN
(1975), whose structure is superificially similar, the novel still
generates a clear and telling FEMINIST perspective. Her professional
training in linguistics permeates her second novel, Triad (1986), another
very full story, involving a woman-run Earth government, a female mission
to a planet where several ALIEN races seem to congregate, and pirates. She
is now, perhaps unfairly, best known for the Shaper Exile sequence - The
Garden of the Shaped (1987), Shaper's Legacy (1989) and Shaping the Dawn
(1989) - as the first volume at least of this PLANETARY ROMANCE is
awkwardly written, dumping three separate genetic versions of human stock
upon a new planet, and sorting them out in terms of an unconvincing
biological determinism. The second volume is more toughly argued, but the
third moves too easily into the plot arabesques common to this subgenre.
SF is still (1992) in the wings, but gives the impression she is capable
of stepping into full view at any time. [JC]See also: GENETIC ENGINEERING.
FIN DU MONDE, LA
(vt The End of the World) Film (1931). L'Ecran d'Art. Dir Abel Gance,

starring Gance, Victor Francen, Colette Darfeuil, Sylvie Grenade, Jeanne
Brindeau, Samson Fainsilber. Screenplay Gance, suggested by a story by
Camille FLAMMARION. 105 mins, cut to 91 mins, cut to 54 mins. B/w.This
tells of a comet's approach to Earth and of the upheavals (natural and
cultural) that ensue. There are orgies, and the rise of a totalitarian
leader (Francen), obviously approved by the director, who would soon prove
sympathetic to fascism. As with most of Gance's films, which were usually
independently produced, it took many years to complete. LFDM was made as a
silent film, but sound effects were later added by the producers, who
sacked Gance and cut the film's length. (Gance was still working on one
version in 1949.) A shortened 54min English version, repudiated by Gance,
was released in 1934; it was supervised by V. Ivanoff and the script was
adapted by H.S. Kraft. The film is extravagant, and fits one description
of Gance's work as hovering "between the ludicrous and the majestic"; a
more unkind critic might see it as somewhere between the grandiose and the
banal. [PN/JB]
FINE, STEPHEN
(1949- ) US author whose first novel, Molly Dear: The Autobiography of an
Android, or How I Came to my Senses, Was Repaired, Escaped my Master, and
Was Educated in the Ways of the World (1988), rewrites Daniel DEFOE's Moll
Flanders (1722) as the memoirs of a 21st-century ANDROID to satirical
effect. Her innocence - assisted by memory wipes - resembles that of
VOLTAIRE's Candide, or almost any of John T. SLADEK's child ROBOTS in a
cruel world. Some of the points about Molly's legal enslavement are
sharply made. [JC]
FINE PRESSES
SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS.
FINLAND
Sf in Finland, now over a century old, has been diverse, with few
clear-cut lines of development. The earliest story was the serial
"Muistelmia matkaltani Ruskealan pappilaan uuden vuoden aikoina vuonna
1983" ["Memoirs of My Trip to the Vicarage of Ruskeala around New Year
1983"] (1883, in the newspaper Aura) by Evald Ferdinand Jahnsson. Apart
from a few children's stories, early Finnish sf took the form of future,
sometimes socialist, UTOPIAS. The Moon was reached by an icy ball in
"Matka kuuhun" ["Voyage to the Moon"] (1887) by Tyko Hagman, but the first
true sf was the novella "Tahtien tarhoissa" ["Among the Stars"] (1912) by
Arvid Lydecken, which was about Helsinki in AD2140, a Martian attack, a
voyage to Mars and the beginning of peaceful coexistence on Earth after
Mars has been destroyed by impacting asteroids.Fear of Bolshevism during
WWI produced several imaginary- WAR novels, the first being the excellent
Ylos helvetista ["Up from Hell"] (1917) by Konrad Lehtimaki. In
Suur-Isanmaa ["The Great Fatherland"] (1918) by Kapteeni Ter-s, Finland
defeats Russia, forces the UK's surrender and becomes a superpower.
Kohtalon kolmas hetki ["Fate's Third Moment"] (1926) by Aarno Karimo tells
about a war in 1967-8 between Finland and the Soviet Union, which nation
(in a defence union with the Mongols) is totally devastated by strange
Finnish inventions. A typical hero of the period would be a
scientist-inventor. The most curious of these "engineer novels" is

Neljannen ulottuvuuden mies ["Man of the Fourth Dimension"] (1919) by H.R.
Halli, in which a new chemical substance enables its users to see and walk
through solid objects. The best book of this period, Viimeisella hetkella
["At the Last Moment"] (1922), also by Halli, creates a daring time
perspective into Earth's distant future.There were fewer sf books in the
1930s. Among the more notable are The Diamondking of Sahara (1935),
written in English by Sigurd Wettenhovi-Aspa, and Undred fran krateron
["The Wonder of Crater Island"] (1939), written in Swedish by Ole Eklund.
There were 30 sf books published in the 1940s. The most popular were the
Atorox series by Outsider (pseudonym of Aarne Haapakoski) whose eponymous
character was a ROBOT: Atorox, ihmisten valtias ["Atorox, Lord of Humans"]
(1947), Atorox kuussa ["Atorox on the Moon"] (1947), Atorox Marsissa
["Atorox on Mars"] (1947), Atorox Venuksessa ["Atorox on Venus"] (1947),
Atorox Merkuriuksessa ["Atorox on Mercury"] (1948) and Atoroxin paluu v.
2948 ["The Return of Atorox in AD2948"] (1948). The most remarkable book
of the period, however, was Volter Kilpi's Gulliverin matka Fantomimian
mantereelle ["Gulliver's Travel to the Continent of Fantomimia"] (1944),
where Gulliver leaves the 18th century for the 20th.The term"science
fiction" itself came to Finland in 1953 with translations of US books, and
the 1950s saw growing enthusiasm for sf; the publisher Otava held a
competition, "Adventures in the World of Technology", whose winner was
Armas J. Pulla with Lentavalautanen sieppasi pojat ["The Boys Were
Snatched by a Flying Saucer"] (1954), in which antlike Martians intend to
invade Earth. Other books of the decade were juvenile adventures. Sf
writers of the 1950s, each with several books, include Osmo Ilmari and
Antero Harju, and Ralf Parland (who wrote in Swedish).The 1960s were poor
years for Finnish sf. The only notable novel of the period was Paikka
nimelta Plaston ["A Place Called Plaston"] (1968) by Erkki Ahonen, set on
a planet whose devolved inhabitants live in herds, controlled by
COMPUTERS. Ahonen's subsequent books, Tietokonelapsi ["The Computer
Child"] (1972), about a human embryo's excised brain interfaced with a
computer, and Syva matka ["Deep Voyage"] (1976), about the evolution of
consciousness on another planet, are Finland's most important sf novels.
Further books worth mentioning from the 1970s are: Viimeinen uutinen ["The
Last News"] (1970) by Risto Kavanne, about NEAR-FUTURE power politics;
Rosterna i den sena timmen ["Voices in the Late Hours"] (1971) by Bo
Carpelan, about the feelings of people under the threat of nuclear war;
and Aurinkotuuli ["Wind from the Sun"] (1975) by Kullervo Kukkasjarvi
(1938- ).The first Finnish sf magazine, Spin, began as a FANZINE in 1977.
It was followed by Aikakone ["Time Machine"] (1981), Portti ["The Gate"]
(1982), Tahtivaeltaja ["Star Wanderer"] (1982) and Ikaros (1986). Besides
translations, these magazines publish short fiction by Finnish writers,
who before had had to be content with occasional publication in mainstream
periodicals. Aikakone has grown to the point that it singlehandedly
supports its own fandom and sf milieu, with new young authors appearing.Of
these Portti is the largest, followed by Tahtivaeltaja and then by
Aikakone.Recent Finnish sf is represented by Auruksen tapaus ["The Case of
Aurus"] (1980) by Jukka Pakkanen, a vision of the future; Amos ja
saarelaiset ["Amos and the Island People"] (1987) by the well known
MAINSTREAM writer Hannu Salama, telling in a stylistically compact way of
the world after a nuclear WAR; Katajanukke ["The Juniper Doll"] (1988), a

first novel by Pekka Virtanen; and Messias ["Messiah"] (1989) by Kari
Nenonen, the story of Christ's cloning from the Shroud of Turin and of the
consequences. The anthologies Jainen vaeltaja ["The Ice Wanderer"] (anth
1986), Atoroxin perilliset ["The Heirs of Atorox"] (anth 1988) and
Tahtipuu ["Startree"] (anth 1990) contain mainly short stories by new
Finnish writers - among the best of whom are Johanna Sinisalo, Ari
Tervonen and Eeva-Liisa Tenhunen - selected from magazines and writing
competitions. The annual Finnish award for best short story is the Atorox
. AWARD, whose winners up to 1993 included four wins by Johanna Sinisalo.
Finnish FANDOM is quite active; there have been four national conventions,
known as "Finncons", all in Helsinki, held in 1986, 1989, 1991 and
1993.Tales from Finnish mythology, as collected from legends and ballads
to form the epic poem Kalevala from 1828 to 1849, have not only nourished
Finnish writers - as in Pekka Virtanen's "Kanavat" ["Canals"] (1985),
Veikko Rekunen's "Viimeinen laulaja" ["The Last Singer"] (1985) and Ernst
Lampen's Taivaallisia tarinoita ["Heavenly Stories"] (coll 1918) - but
have also influenced the works of writers abroad, as for example Emil
PETAJA's four-novel Kalevala sequence - Saga of Lost Earths (1966), The
Star Mill (1966), The Stolen Sun (1967) and Tramontane (1967) - as well as
his The Time Twister (1968) and, by L. Sprague DE CAMP and Fletcher PRATT,
Wall of Serpents (1953-4; 1960). [JI]See also: SCANDINAVIA.
FINLAY, VIRGIL (WARDEN)
(1914-1971) US illustrator. VF worked in both colour and black-and-white,
but is best known for the latter, where his unique, painstaking stippling
gained him fame although, because of the slow process involved, not
fortune. Nonetheless he was prolific. His earliest work was an interior
illustration for Weird Tales in 1935. Though it was in black-and-white
interior work that he excelled - several thousand pieces - he also painted
many covers, including 16 for Weird Tales and 24 for Famous Fantastic
Mysteries. His work appeared also in A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine,
Fantastic Novels, Fantastic Story Quarterly and about 27 other sf/fantasy
magazines. He often added sparkling bubbles to his illustrations, partly
as a decorative device and partly to modestly conceal parts of naked
women. He was stronger in fantasy than sf, excelling (it was a common
paradox) in the two extremes of the glamorous and the macabre, both
meticulously executed. His early work was more abstractly stylized than
the later, and suggested a toughness which later became smoothed under an
expert commercial veneer. Possibly the greatest craftsman in the history
of sf ILLUSTRATION, VF revolutionized its quality. The HUGO system arrived
a little late for VF; though he was nominated 7 times, he won only once,
in the very first year, 1953 - the only award ever given for Best Interior
Illustration. He had only small success doing book covers, mostly 1949-58,
which his style did not really suit. Sadly, the collapse in SF-MAGAZINE
publishing in the mid-1950s - with the surviving magazines being DIGESTS
rather than PULP MAGAZINES and so having fewer illustrations - forced VF
away from sf as his main market, and through the late 1950s and the 1960s
he worked largely on astrological illustrations. Many portfolios and books
of his work have been published, the first being A Portfolio of
Illustrations by Virgil Finlay (coll 1941) published by Famous Fantastic
Mysteries. Books include Virgil Finlay (1971) ed Donald M. GRANT, and The

Book of Virgil Finlay (1975) and Virgil Finlay Remembered (1981) ed Gerry
de la Ree (1924 -1993), these latter being 2 out of 12 books of and about
Finlay's art ed de la Ree. [JG/PN]See also: COMICS; FANTASY; SEX;
SPACESHIPS.
FINN, RALPH L(ESLIE)
(1912- ) UK novelist and journalist who published widely. Of some sf
interest are three novels based on the time theories of J.W. DUNNE: The
Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet (1948), Twenty-Seven Stairs (1949) and
Time Marches Sideways (1950), the latter a love story set in London.
Captive on the Flying Saucers (c1950) and Freaks against Supermen (c1951),
both conventional sf stories, gain some interest from their mild erotic
content. [JC]See also: TIME TRAVEL.
FINNEY, CHARLES G(RANDISON)
(1905-1984) US newspaperman and writer, based in Arizona, who spent the
years 1927-9 with the US infantry in Tientsin, China; an oriental
influence pervades most of his work. His novels and stories, though
FANTASY rather than sf, have been influential throughout the field,
especially his famous The Circus of Dr Lao (1935), filmed insensitively as
The Seven Faces of Dr Lao (1963). CGF's work was a strong influence on Ray
BRADBURY in particular, as the latter's anthology, The Circus of Dr Lao
and Other Improbable Stories (anth 1956), demonstrates. The novel depicts
the effect upon a small Arizona town of Dr Lao's circus, which is full of
mythical beasts and demigods, all of whom actually live within his tents:
they are simultaneously pathetic and awe-inspiring, and the townspeople
soon find themselves acquiring unwanted self-knowledge as they confront
the caged GODS. The erotic intensity of these confrontations is
remarkable. The Magician out of Manchuria (1976 UK) - which first appeared
under that title in The Unholy City (omni 1968) along with a revised
version of The Unholy City (1937) - is set in China, and agreeably
lightens the message of Lao. The Unholy City itself is a somewhat unwieldy
allegory. The Ghosts of Manacle (coll 1964) assembles much of CGF's short
fiction. [JC]Other works: Past the End of the Pavement (1939),
associational.See also: MYTHOLOGY.
FINNEY, JACK
Working name of US author Walter Braden Finney (1911- ), whose career
began when he was 35; he published his first work in the genre, "Such
Interesting Neighbors" for COLLIER'S WEEKLY, in 1951. Although he is as
well known for sf as for anything else, he did not specialize in the
field, adapting his highly professional skills to mysteries and general
fiction as well. Stories from his first years as a writer of sf can be
found in The Third Level (coll 1957; vt The Clock of Time 1958 UK) and
later ones in I Love Galesburg in the Springtime: Fantasy and Time Stories
(coll 1963) - both asembled as About Time: Twelve Stories (omni 1986) and Forgotten News: The Crime of the Century and Other Lost Stories (coll
1983). Many are evocative tales of escape from an ugly present into a
tranquil past, or into a PARALLEL WORLD, or wistful variants of the theme
when the escape fails. His best-known work is The Body Snatchers (1955; vt
Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1973; rev 1978), twice filmed as INVASION
OF THE BODY SNATCHERS: in 1956 by Don Siegel and in 1978 by Philip

Kaufman. The book - perhaps less plausibly than the film
versions-horrifyingly depicts the INVASION of a small town by interstellar
spores that duplicate human beings, reducing them to dust in the process.
The menacing spore-people who remain symbolize, it has been argued, the
loss of freedom in a 1950s USA obsessed by the problems of "conformism".
JF's further books were smoothly told, more involving, perhaps less
pertinent. The Woodrow Wilson Dime (1960 Saturday Evening Post; exp 1968)
is a PARALLEL-WORLDS novel. Time and Again (1970) sets a time traveller in
the New York of 1882, which is meticulously evoked. Marion's Wall (1973)
movingly displaces the ghost of a 1926 film star into the present day.
Generally, in a JF story, sf or fantasy devices open the door into new
worlds and are then forgotten. The worlds thus made available are, all the
same, engrossing. [JC]Other works: Both The Woodrow Wilson Dime and
Marion's Wall appear with The Night People (1977) in 3 by Finney (omni
1987).See also: TIME TRAVEL; UTOPIAS.
FIREBALL XL5
UK tv series (1962-3). AP Films for ATV/ITC. Created by Gerry and Sylvia
ANDERSON; prod Gerry Anderson. Dirs included Alan Pattillo, John Kelly,
Bill Harris. Writers included the Andersons, Alan Fennell, Anthony
Marriott, Dennis Spooner. 1 full season and 1 part season. 39 25min
episodes. B/w.This was the second of the Andersons' "SuperMarionation"
animated-puppet sf series for children, the first being SUPERCAR and the
third being STINGRAY; it was the last made in black-and-white and the
first to be networked in full in the USA (on NBC). Steve Zodiac is a space
pilot, part of World Space Fleet (based in the Pacific Ocean); his
spacecraft XL5 patrols other star systems. This is a true SPACE OPERA, in
its way a predecessor of STAR TREK. Sidekicks include Venus, a glamorous
blonde space doctor, Professor Mat Matic, a Genius, and Robert the Robot.
Stories involved, inter alia, space pirates, a glass-surfaced planet and
Ice Men. Planetary transport was by jetmobile. Derek Meddings's special
effects, mostly achieved through use of clever models, are good. [PN]
FIREFOX
Film (1982). Warner Bros. Dir Clint Eastwood, starring Eastwood, Freddie
Jones, Nigel Hawthorne, Warren Clarke. Screenplay Alex Lasker, Wendell
Wellman, based on Firefox (1977) by Craig THOMAS. 136 mins. Colour.The sf
aspect of the film is a new Russian fighter, the MIG 31 or "Firefox",
which can fly at Mach-5 and operates through electronic translation of the
pilot's brain patterns (thought control). Eastwood is the US pilot
smuggled into the USSR to steal it and fly it out. The movie is split in
two, the difficult voyage in disguise to the Soviet air base being tense
and well accomplished, the flight back out (with a STAR WARS-style
dogfight) merely silly, especially since the much-discussed thought
control turns out to have no real plot function at all. The film never
even considers that such a raid might precipitate WWIII. [PN]
FIRE IN THE SKY
Film (1993). Paramount. Dir Robert Lieberman, screenplay Tracy Torme
based on The Walton Experience by Travis Walton, starring D.B. Sweeney,
Robert Patrick, Craig Sheffer and James Garner. 109 mins. Colour.Based on
a supposedly non-fictional account of the abduction by aliens of one

member of a six-man forest-clearing team in Arizona, the film concentrates
on local suspicions that the other five may have murdered him, and the
inability of anyone to believe their fantastic story. When the kidnapped
man is found a week later, naked and traumatised, it is now generally
believed that a hoax has taken place. A lie-detector test proves
inconclusive. However, by showing staccato flash-back memories of the
partly-amnesiac victim, the film removes any ambiguity: aliens were indeed
involved, we are given to believe. The flash-back scenes set on the alien
spacecraft are well achieved, and in their way as good as those in
COMMUNION (1989), an earlier abduction movie of which this is a sort of
blue-collar reprise. The film's low-key documentary style gives an
impression of honesty, despite the implausibility of the basic premise.
[PN]
FIRESTARTER
Film (1984). Universal. Dir Mark L. Lester, starring David Keith, Drew
Barrymore, Freddie Jones, Heather Locklear, Martin Sheen, George C. Scott.
Screenplay Stanley Mann, based on Firestarter (1980) by Stephen KING. 114
mins. Colour.The novel is not one of King's best, but it hardly deserved
this messy adaptation. A young girl, Charlie (Barrymore), has pyrotic
powers and can start fires by mental concentration alone. Naturally, a
CIA-like organization ("the Shop") wishes to exploit her powers as a new
WEAPON, and just as naturally she incinerates them in a final (rather
small) holocaust. Scott plays the evil Native-American assassin who wishes
to absorb Charlie's powers. The film is pure CLICHE from beginning to end,
and not very competent at that level. Far superior in the teenage PSI
POWERS line is the very similar The FURY (1978) and, of course, CARRIE
(1976), both dir Brian De Palma, and the latter also based on a King
novel. [PN]
FIRST COMICS
COMICS.
FIRST CONTACT
COMMUNICATIONS.
FIRST FANDOM AWARDS
AWARDS.
FIRST MAN INTO SPACE
Film (1958). Amalgamated/MGM. Dir Robert Day, starring Marshall Thompson,
Marla Landi, Robert Ayres, Bill Edwards. Screenplay John C. Cooper, Lance
Z. Hargreaves, from "Satellite of Blood" by Wyott Ordung. 77 mins.
B/w.This is the second of two sf films made by Amalgamated in the UK that
pretend to be set in the USA (the other was FIEND WITHOUT A FACE [1957]).
FMIS seems to imitate The QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955; vt The Creeping
Unknown): a test pilot ejects from his high-flying aeroplane and returns
to Earth enveloped in a repulsive, crusty substance that turns him into an
inhuman, blood-drinking monster (the blood giving him the oxygen he needs!
). As in the Quatermass film, there are moments of pathos, but FMIS is
generally derivative and routine. Released around the time of the first
orbital satellites, FMIS, with its deceptive title, must have lured
audiences expecting something scientific and quasidocumentary; indeed,

despite its lurid content, it is soberly and stiffly directed. [JB/PN]
FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
Film (1964). Columbia. Prod Charles H. Schneer. Dir Nathan Juran,
starring Edward Judd, Martha Hyer, Lionel Jeffries. Screenplay Nigel
KNEALE, Jan Read, from THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901) by H.G. WELLS. 107
mins, cut to 103 mins. Colour.This watered-down version of Wells's classic
novel is for the most part low farce, with too much random slaughtering of
Selenite aliens, but still contrives to be entertaining. An eccentric
Victorian inventor who has developed an ANTIGRAVITY material flies to the
Moon in a spherical "spaceship". He and his companions are captured by
insect-like Moon people but eventually escape, inadvertently leaving
behind cold-germs which destroy the Moon's population. Ray HARRYHAUSEN's
Moon creatures are rather good, as are the sets.A previous version of
FMITM was made in 1919 by British Gaumont, dir J.V. Leigh. [JB/PN]
FIRST ROCKETS
When early writers wanted their characters to explore space, the idea of
rockets just never came up. Even Jules Verne had his heroes blasted out of
giant cannons, the sudden acceleration of which would have flattened them
into jelly.It was the Russian scientist and science fiction writer
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky who first realized how space flight would actually
work. The year was 1883 and Tsiolkovsky was 26 years old when he first
proposed the radical idea that jet propulsion could send a vehicle into
space.Tsiolkovsky also came up with the concept of liquid propulsion.
Until then, rockets had been filled with gunpowder. He even imagined the
multiple stages of a rocket's liftoff.Way ahead of his time, Tsiolkovsky’s
SF work is virtuallyunknown today. But his importance to the history of
spacetravel - and to science fiction - is clear.
FIRTH, N. WESLEY
Working name of UK writer Norman Firth (1920-1949), who began his career
during WWII writing pulp Westerns and thrillers. He wrote stories
variously as Rice Ackman, Earl Ellison, Leslie Halward and perhaps other
names; his first sf publication was almost certainly "Obscene Parade"
(1946 Weird Story Magazine). His first novel, Terror Strikes (1946 chap),
is of some interest through its extremely close resemblance to H.G.
WELLS's The Invisible Man (1897). Spawn of the Vampire (1946 chap) is a
hastily concocted horror tale. NF wrote the entire contents of FUTURISTIC
STORIES (1946) and STRANGE ADVENTURES (1946-7). He was a writer of
potential worth, but died (of TB) at the age of 29 before proving it. [SH]
FISCHER, LEONARD
(?1903-?1974) Canadian writer whose Let Out the Beast (1950) is a postHOLOCAUST-reversion-to-savagery book in which it is the protagonist who unusually - becomes the feared enemy of those engaged in trying to rebuild
civilization. [JC]
FISH, LEONARD G.
(1923? - ) UK author of some short fiction under his own name and as by
David Campbell, and of several minor sf adventures: Planet War (1952) as
by Fysh, After the Atom (1953) as by Victor LA SALLE, and Beyond the Solar
System (1954) as by Claude Haley. [SH]

FISHER, JAMES P.
(? - ) US writer whose sf novel The Great Brain Robbery (1970) is a
rather lightweight adventure in which an ALIEN tries to steal a student's
unusual brain. [JC]
FISHER, LOU
(1940- ) US writer. During a 20 year career writing IBM computer manuals,
he began publishing sf with "Triggerman" for Gal in 1973. His first novel,
Sunstop 8 (1978), is a SPACE OPERA; his second, The Blue Ice Pilot (1986),
features a space war made possible by developments in CRYONICS. [JC]
FISHER, VARDIS (ALVERO)
(1895-1968) US writer, raised in a Mormon family; his best-known single
novel, Children of God (1939), is about the Mormons. His Testament of Man
sequence covers the whole of human history, extending into many volumes
the basic strategy which shapes several novels by F. Britten AUSTIN, the 6
vols of Johannes V. JENSEN's The Long Journey (1922-4) and other
early-20th-century celebrations of the drama of EVOLUTION. Of sf interest
in the Testament are the first 5 titles, which deal with prehistory:
Darkness and the Deep (1943), The Golden Rooms (1944), Intimations of Eve
(1946), Adam and the Serpent (1947) and The Divine Passion (1948), which
comprise a formidable attempt at sustained anthropological sf. [JC]See
also: ADAM AND EVE; ORIGIN OF MAN.
FISK, NICHOLAS
Pseudonym of UK author David Higginbottom (1923- ), who writes
exclusively for children. His first sf tale was Space Hostages (1967), in
which his tastes for HARD-SF backgrounds and realistically flawed
protagonists were competently expressed. The former reaches full
expression in tales like Trillions (1971) and Antigrav (1978). A Rag, a
Bone, and a Hank of Hair (1980), on the other hand, gravely and movingly
concentrates on its emotionally torn protagonist, a young genius in an
arid far-future DYSTOPIA commanded to observe a small family of
reconstructed "primitives", who have been drugged into repeating the same
fake 1940 day over and over again, so that he may garner experimental data
about raw humans. In the end, both family and protagonist are killed by
the masters of the terrible world. NF is a smooth writer, but the world he
envisages - as demonstrated in A Hole in the Head (1991), a harrowing tale
of the Earth at the brink of ecological catastrophe - is fraught.
[JC]Other works: Grinny (1973); High Way Home (1973); Little Green
Spacemen (1974 chap); The Witches of Wimmering (1976); Wheelie in the
Stars (1976 chap); Time Trap (1976); Escape from Splatterbang (1978 chap;
vt Flamers 1979 chap); Monster Maker (1979); the Starstormers sequence,
comprising Starstormers (1980), Sunburst (1980), Catfang (1981), Evil Eye
(1982) and Volcano (1983); Robot Revolt (1981); Sweets from a Stranger
(coll 1982); On the Flip Side (1983); You Remember Me! (1984); Dark Sun,
Bright Sun (1986); Living Fire (coll 1987); Mindbenders (1987); Backlash
(1988); The Talking Car (1988 chap); The Telly is Watching You (1989); The
Worm Charmers (1989); The Back-Yard War (1990 chap); The Model Village
(1990); Extraterrestrial Tales (omni 1991) assembling Space Hostages,
Trillions and On the Flip Side; Pig Ignorant (1991); The Puffin Book of

Science Fiction (anth 1993).See also: CHILDREN'S SF; RADIO.
FISKE, TARLETON
[s] Robert BLOCH.
FITZGERALD, HUGH
L. Frank BAUM.
FITZGERALD, WILLIAM
[s] Murray LEINSTER.
FITZGIBBON, (ROBERT LOUIS) CONSTANTINE (LEE-DILLON)
(1919-1983) US writer of politically oriented fiction and other works who
became a naturalized Irish citizen. His first sf novel, The Iron Hoop
(1949), describes an occupied city in WWIII. When the Kissing Had to Stop
(1960) depicts in Anglophobe terms the self-destruction of a UK dominated
by a Communist-inspired government. Less known but more remarkable, The
Golden Age (1975) treats the post- HOLOCAUST recuperation of the UK in
terms of the myth of Orpheus. [JC]Other works: The Rat Report (1980).
FITZ-GIBBON, RALPH EDGERTON
(c1904- ) US writer, long active as a journalist. His sf novel, The Man
with Two Bodies (1952), offers parapsychological explanations for the
mysteries suggested by the title. [JC]
FIVE
Film (1951). Columbia. Prod, written, dir Arch Oboler, starring Susan
Douglas, William Phipps, James Anderson, Charles Lampkin, Earl Lee. 93
mins, cut to 89 mins (UK). B/w.The first "after the bomb" film, F concerns
five US survivors - a mountaineer, a pregnant girl, a token Black, a
cashier and an adventurer. This is a gloomy art film with low-budget,
grainy photography, a scientifically bogus explanation for the five's
survival, much talking, a racial murder and two deaths from radiation, but
the theme itself retains some power. Oboler had worked extensively in
radio before entering the film industry in 1945 with Strange Holiday and
Bewitched, both based on his own radio plays. F is basically a sermon
against the prejudices and insanities that may lead to atomic war. [JB/PN]
FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH
QUATERMASS AND THE PIT.
FIXUP
A term first used by A.E. VAN VOGT to describe a book made up of
previously published stories fitted together - usually with the addition
of newly written or published cementing material - so that they read as a
novel. Aware that fixups are immensely more common in GENRE SF than in any
other literature in the world, we borrowed the term for the 1979 edition
of this encyclopedia, and continue to use it now; an example is van Vogt's
own THE WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER (fixup 1951). We do, however, recognize that
it is not always an easy description to apply with accuracy. It is, for
instance, sometimes impossible to know whether or not a series of
connected stories has in fact been extracted from an already-written book,
which for some would make it impossible to describe that book as a fixup;
some readers and authors, in other words, feel that the term can be

applied only to novels assembled from previously existing work.We
disagree. A book which is written so as to be broken up for prior magazine
publication may well, in our view, constitute a perfectly legitimate
example of the form, though we do recognize that when we call such a text
a fixup we are making a critical judgment as to the internal nature - the
feel - of that text. We should perhaps emphasize, therefore, that the term
is not, for us, derogatory. In fact, the fixup form may arguably be ideal
for tales of epic sweep through time and space. It is perhaps no accident
that Robert A HEINLEIN's seminal GENERATION-STARSHIP tale, "Universe"
(1941), ultimately became part of Orphans of the Sky (fixup 1963 UK). [JC]
FLACKES, B
Working name of Irish writer William David Flackes (1921-1993), who spent
much of his career as a journalist reporting on Irish matters; he won an
OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 1981. His sf was a sideline, and not
of much interest. It includes (almost certainly) 2 novels as by Clem
Macartney: Ten Years of Oblivion (1951) and Dark Side of Venus (1951).
Under his own name, he wrote Duel in Nightmare Worlds (1952). [JC]
FLAGG, FRANCIS
Pseudonym of US writer George Henry Weiss (?1898-1946), who appeared in
Weird Tales and then began publishing sf with "The Machine Man of
Ardathia" for AMZ in 1927. He published 20 or so typical pulp-sf stories
over the next decade, some of his later work being in collaboration with
Forrest J. ACKERMAN. He was a comparatively careful writer. In his
posthumously published sf tale, The Night People (1947 chap), an escaped
convict takes a drug-induced trip to another planet. [JC]See also:
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; CANADA.
FLAMMARION, (NICHOLAS) CAMILLE
(1842-1925) French astronomer and writer. One of the first major
popularizers of ASTRONOMY, he took great delight in the flights of
imagination to which his studies in COSMOLOGY inspired him. In 1858, the
year he entered the Paris Observatory as a student, he wrote an
unpublished scientific romance, Voyage extatique aux reegions lunaires,
correspondence d'un philosophe adolescent. His two major fascinations were
the possibilities of LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS and of life after death, and
these interests are reflected by his earliest major works: La pluralite
des mondes habites ["The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds"] (1862) and Les
habitants de l'autre monde ["The Inhabitants of the Other World"] (1862),
the latter being "revelations" transmitted by the medium Mlle Huet. His
most important work in the popularization of science was Astronomie
populaire (1880; trans as Popular Astronomy 1894). He dramatized ideas
from his earlier nonfiction book Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes
reels (1864; trans as Real and Imaginary Worlds 1865 US) in three of his
Recits de l'infini (coll 1872; trans S.R. Crocker as Stories of Infinity
1874 US): "The History of a Comet", "Lumen" and "In Infinity". The second,
consisting of a series of dialogues between a man and a disembodied spirit
which is free to roam the Universe at will, includes observations about
the implications of the finite velocity of light and many images of
otherworldly life adapted to ALIEN circumstances. These stories were
revised and expanded for separate publication as Lumen (1887; trans A.M.

and R.M., with some new material, 1897 US). Notions taken from these
dialogues were embodied in the REINCARNATION romances Stella (1877 France)
and Uranie (1889; trans Mary Serrano as Uranie 1890 US; new trans Augusta
Rice Stetson as Urania 1891 US). CF's boldest SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE, however,
is La fin du monde (1893-4; trans anon as Omega: The Last Days of the
World 1897 US), an epic of the future. Although it is as much essay as
story, this is a notable work, akin to H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE
(1895) and William Hope HODGSON's The House on the Borderland (1908) in
presenting a striking vision of the END OF THE WORLD. CF's scientific
reputation was injured by his passionate interest in Spiritualism (in
later life he was an intimate of Arthur Conan DOYLE), but his was a major
contribution to the popularization of science and to the literature of the
scientific imagination. [BS]See also: ESCHATOLOGY; EVOLUTION; FAR FUTURE;
FASTER THAN LIGHT; FRANCE; HISTORY OF SF; MARS; RELIGION; STARS; SUN.
FLASH GORDON
1. US COMIC strip created by artist Alex RAYMOND for King Features
Syndicate. FG appeared in 1934, at first in Sunday, later in daily
newspapers. Its elaborately shaded style and exotic storyline made it one
of the most influential sf strips. It was taken over in 1944 by Austin
Briggs, then in 1948 by Mac Raboy, and since then has been drawn by Dan
Barry (with contributions from artists Harvey Kurtzman and Wally WOOD and
writer Harry HARRISON) and Al Williamson, and more recently written by
Bruce Jones and illustrated by Gray MORROW. Various episodes have been
released in comic-book form - including a 9-part series from DC COMICS
written and drawn by Dan Jurgens (1988) - and also in book form. It
continues today.The scenario of FG is archetypal SPACE OPERA. Most
episodes feature Flash locked in combat with the villain, Ming the
Merciless of the planet Mongo. Flash's perpetual fiancee, Dale Arden, and
the mad SCIENTIST Hans Zarkov play prominent roles. (In later episodes
Zarkov's craziness was played down and he became a straightforward
sidekick to Flash.) The decor shifts between the futuristic ( DEATH RAYS,
rocketships) and the archaic (dinosaurs, jungles, swordplay) with a fine
contempt for plausibility, rather in the manner of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's
romances. Although begun quite cynically in conscious opposition to the
earlier BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY, FG quickly developed its own
individuality, emphasizing a romantic baroque against the cool
technological classicism of its predecessor, to which it is artistically
very much superior.The strip was widely syndicated in Europe. When, during
WWII, the arrival of various episodes was delayed, the strip was often
written and drawn by Europeans. One such writer was Federico Fellini
(1920- ).The FG comic strip has had many repercussions in other media. It
led to a popular radio serial, to a short-lived pulp magazine ( FLASH
GORDON STRANGE ADVENTURE MAGAZINE), and in the late 1930s to several film
serials starring Buster Crabbe; later came a tv series and a film (see
below). A full-length film parody, FLESH GORDON, appeared in 1974.The
radio serial exactly paralleled the Sunday comic strip, so you could see
in the paper the monsters you'd heard on the radio.An early FG novel was
Flash Gordon in the Caverns of Mongo (1937) by Raymond. A paperback series
of five FG short novels, based on the original strips, with Alex Raymond
credited, consisted of Flash Gordon 1: The Lion Men of Mongo * (1974),

Flash Gordon 2: The Plague of Sound * (1974), Flash Gordon 3: The Space
Circus * (1974), Flash Gordon 4: The Time Trap of Ming XIII * (1974) and
Flash Gordon 5: The Witch Queen of Mongo * (1974). The first four were
"adapted by Con Steffanson", a house name; #1-#3 were the work of Ron
GOULART; #4 was by Carson Bingham (Bruce Bingham CASSIDAY) and #5, also by
Bingham, was published under his name.2. Serial film. 13 2-reel episodes
(1936). Universal. Dir Frederick Stephani, starring Buster Crabbe, Jean
Rogers, Charles Middleton, Frank Shannon, Priscilla Lawson. Screenplay
Stephani, George Plympton, Basil Dickey, Ella O'Neill, based on the comic
strip. B/w.The film FG was the nearest thing to PULP-MAGAZINE space opera
to appear on the screen during the 1930s. Flash, Dale and Zarkov go to the
planet Mongo in Zarkov's backyard-built spaceship to find the cause of an
outbreak of volcanic activity on Earth. Ming the Merciless (a wonderfully
hammy performance from Middleton) is behind it all and plans to invade
Earth. Our heroes spend the next 12 episodes surviving various exotic
hazards before outwitting Ming in the final reel. Though more lavish than
the average serial (the budget was a record $350,000), FG has the cheap
appearance of most: unconvincing special effects, sets and costumes
borrowed from a variety of other films, and plenty of stock footage.
However, it remains great fun, romantic and fantastical. Ill edited
versions of the first and second halves were released theatrically as
Spaceship to the Unknown (1936) (97 mins) and Perils from the Planet Mongo
(1936) (91 mins).The follow-up was Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938),
dirs Ford Beebe, Robert F. Hill, with the same leading actors - Ming is
back again - and Beatrice Roberts as the evil queen who turns humans to
"clay people". 15 two-reel episodes. Screenplay Ray Trampe, Norman S.
Hall, Wyndham Gittens, Herbert Dolmas. The setting is changed from Mongo
to Mars. The 99min edited-down version was The Deadly Ray from Mars
(1938).The final FG movie serial was Flash Gordon Conquers the
Universe(1940; vt Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers Conquer the Universe), dir
Ford Beebe, Ray Taylor, with the same leadingactors except that Carol
Hughes replaced Jean Rogers as Dale Arden.12 two-reel episodes. Screenplay
George H. Plympton, Basil Dickey, Barry Shipman. This, the weakest of the
three, kills off Ming (again) at the end. According to one account the
true title shown on the original episodes was Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers
Conquer the Universe; the soldiers would have been Ming's, and Flash is
trying to stop him. This would explain the oddity of the usually accepted
title, since Flash was not a universe-conqueror by disposition.The 87min
edited-down version was Purple Death From Outer Space (1940).The three FG
film serials continue to have a cult following and are regularly revived
on tv and in the cinema.3. US tv series (1951) from DuMont, starring Steve
Holland. It was low-budget and universally execrated, lasting only one
season.4. Film (1980). Columbia/EMI/Warner. Prod Dino De Laurentiis. Dir
Michael Hodges, starring Sam J. Jones, Melody Anderson, Topol, Max Von
Sydow, Brian Blessed, Timothy Dalton. Screenplay Lorenzo Semple Jr, based
on the early episodes of the comic strip by Raymond. 115 mins. Colour.As a
producer, De Laurentiis has always had a weakness for over-the-top,
fantastic parodies (sometimes successful, as in DIABOLIK [1967] and
BARBARELLA [1967]) but here his instincts let him down badly. Apart from
the fetishistic costumes (leather, spikes, etc.) there is little of
interest in this tongue-in-cheek, lurid fantasy, which tries to make a

comic-strip virtue of wooden acting. The plot is largely derived from the
1936 film serial, and the rushed special effects similarly recall the
ludicrousness of that film. The romantic elements are subjugated to a
rather listless kinkiness. [PN/JB]See also: CINEMA.
FLASH GORDON CONQUERS THE UNIVERSE
FLASH GORDON.
FLASH GORDON STRANGE ADVENTURE MAGAZINE
US BEDSHEET-size PULP MAGAZINE. 1 issue, Dec 1936, published by C.J.H.
Publications; ed Harold HERSEY. The featured novel was "The Master of
Mars" by James E. Northfield. FGSAM, intended to be a monthly juvenile
magazine, was notable for its coloured interior illustrations in a
comic-strip format. A failed attempt to cash in on the popularity of the
comic strip FLASH GORDON, its sole issue is now a rare collector's item.
[FHP/MJE]
FLASH GORDON'S TRIP TO MARS
FLASH GORDON.
FLECKER, (HERMAN) JAMES ELROY
(1884-1915) UK poet, playwright and novelist best known for Hassan
(1922), a fantasy play with an Arabian Nights flavour. His only novel, The
King of Alsander (1914), was also a fantasy. He is of sf interest for The
Last Generation: A Story of the Future (1908 chap), whose narrator is
spirited into times moderately close to the present where he witnesses the
self-willed extinction of the human race through a refusal to breed more
children into this vale of tears. The narrator is then taken much further
forward, where he discovers that apes (see APES AND CAVEMEN) are destined
to become the masters of the planet and "try again". This tale was later
collected along with some fantasies in Collected Prose (coll 1920).
[JC]See also: END OF THE WORLD.
FLEHR, PAUL
[s] Frederik POHL.
FLEMING, HARRY
William Henry Fleming BIRD.
FLEMING, IAN (LANCASTER)
(1908-1964) UK writer, brother of Peter FLEMING. Neither the use of
advanced technological gadgetry nor the fantastic plots of his enormously
successful James Bond sequence of thrillers makes them genuine sf. The
closest any of them comes to an sf plot is Moonraker (1955), whose
eponymous rocket is rather ahead of its time. Many of IF's novels have
been filmed, usually with additional sf-like gadgetry and completely
reworked plots. The first of these films was DR NO (1962); YOU ONLY LIVE
TWICE (1967) featured Bond crushing an attempt at world domination which
involved the kidnapping of orbital satellites. MOONRAKER (1979) involves
an orbital satellite and the Space Shuttle. [JC/PN]See also: ISLANDS;
TECHNOTHRILLER; VILLAINS.
FLEMING, (ROBERT) PETER
(1907-1971) UK travel writer and novelist, brother of Ian FLEMING. He is

known mainly for such travel books as Brazilian Adventure (1933). In his
spoof sf novel, The Flying Visit (1940), Adolf Hitler parachutes into the
UK with amusing results. The tale was reprinted, along with a fantasy,
"The Man with Two Hands", in With the Guards to Mexico! and Other
Excursions (coll 1957). The Sixth Column: A Singular Tale of our Time
(1951), a satirical political thriller set in an implied NEAR FUTURE,
verges on sf. [JC]Other works: Some of the tales in A Story to Tell (coll
1942) are fantasies; Invasion 1940 (1957; vt Operation Sea Lion 1957 US),
a nonfiction study of German preparations to invade the UK, speculatively
presents a successful assault ( HITLER WINS).
FLEMING, STUART
[s] Damon KNIGHT.
FLESCH, HANS
[r] GERMANY.
FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN
FRANKENSTEIN.
FLESH GORDON
Film (1974). Mammoth/Graffiti. Dir Michael Benveniste, Howard Ziehm,
starring Jason Williams, Suzanne Fields, John Hoyt. Screenplay Benveniste,
William Hunt. 90 mins, cut to 84 mins, cut to 78 mins. Colour.This
burlesque of FLASH GORDON began as a cheap soft-porn film, but became
relatively expensive as the special effects became more elaborate. Work on
it continued for nearly two years and many special-effects technicians
were involved, some uncredited; they included Jim Danforth, Dave Allen,
Rick Baker, Greg Jein, George Barr and Dennis Muren. Several of the
effects sequences include model animation of a high standard, in
particular the climax, when a monster, the Great God Porno, clutching the
heroine, scales a building in the manner of KING KONG while muttering a
series of surly asides. A duel with an animated insect-creature rivals the
best of Ray HARRYHAUSEN's work. The makers were so pleased with the
effects that they cleaned it up a bit, and it was released without the
feared X-rating. Most of the jokes are variants on the undergraduate ploy
of inserting sexual references - e.g., there is a penisaurus - into a
context that was originally downright puritanical. [JB]
FLETCHER, GEORGE U.
Fletcher PRATT.
FLETCHER, JOSEPH SMITH
(1863-1935) UK writer of popular fiction, much of it for boys. The
Wonderful City (1894), for instance, carries its youthful protagonist to a
doomed lost race ( LOST WORLDS) in Central America. Morrison's Machine
(1900), an adult tale, analyses the relationship of scientific Man to the
MACHINES he was creating at the turn of the century ( SCIENTISTS). The
Three Days' Terror (1901), like The Ransom for London (1914), deals with
NEAR-FUTURE threats to the stability of the UK. [JC]Other works: The
Air-Ship, and Other Stories (coll 1903); The Wheatstack, and Other Stories
(coll 1909); Many Engagements (coll 1923); The Matheson Formula (1929 US);
The House in Tuesday Market (1930); The Man in No. 3, and Other Stories of

Crime, Love and Mystery (coll 1931).
FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR
Film (1986). Producers Sales/New Star Entertainment/Walt Disney. Dir
Randal Kleiser, starring Joey Cramer, Veronica Cartwright, Cliff De Young,
Howard Hesseman, Paul Mall. Screenplay Michael Burton, Matt MacManus,
based on a story by Mark H. Baker. 89 mins. Colour.Made for children, this
might - one would think - be rather disturbing for them. A 12-year-old
(Cramer) returns home after a fall and finds the wrong people living
there. The police take him to where his family now live, where he learns
that it is eight years later, that he has been missing, presumed dead, and
that his kid brother has become his post-pubertal big brother. Tests
reveal that our hero has strange brainwaves, some of which are read by a
computer as a picture of a flying saucer, just like one that has recently
been found but has proved unopenable. The boy locates the saucer and meets
inside it the robotic alien Max (Mall), who clearly recognizes him,
addressing him as The Navigator, an aspect of his recent past which is
news to him, since he lost his memory after the saucer's crashlanding.
Because he has been travelling at FASTER-THAN-LIGHT speeds to the alien's
planet and back, the boy has not grown noticeably older. Unhappy at his
role in this unnerving future, he persuades Max to return him (normality
comfortingly restored) back through time to 1978. This film presents what
is actually rather a nightmare scenario, and carries it off with
considerable aplomb for the first half; but it sinks quickly into routine
post- E.T.: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL scenes once the flying saucer and alien
have been introduced. [PN]
FLIGHT UNLIMITED
SHAYOL.
FLINT, HOMER EON
(1892-1924) US writer (born Flindt) whose work appeared mainly in the
Frank A. MUNSEY magazines from the teens of the century. His first sf
story was "The Planeteer" for All-Story Weekly in 1918; it deals with
sexual rivalry and personal ambition in a Bellamistic ( Edward BELLAMY)
society. Its sequel, "The King of Conserve Island" (1918), describes the
corruption and collapse of the socialist world under the propaganda
attacks of a reactionary, capitalist society. The Dr Kinney stories
examine the implications of various political ideas: "The Lord of Death"
(1919) describes the ultimate Spencerian survival of the fittest on
MERCURY; "The Queen of Life" (1919) is based on the opposite point of
view, preservation of life for its own sake and Malthusianism on a VENUS
characterized by superscience; "The Devolutionist" (1921) covers the
ambivalences of an efficient, more or less benevolent dictatorship and a
bumblingly anarchistic or democratic underground; and the final story,
"The Emancipatrix" (1921), contrasts a hive world and primitive humans on
a ring-shaped planet. In the last two stories, the alien contact takes
place by means of an apparatus acquired from Venus. HEF's writing style
and PULP-MAGAZINE habits did not always adequately express his deep
interest in the emergence of behavioural and historical patterns from
various political and social philosophies. The series was much later
assembled as The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix (1921 Argosy; coll of

linked stories 1965) and The Lord of Death and The Queen of Life (1919
All-Story Weekly; coll of linked stories 1965).HEF is remembered in part
for the mystery of his death (having picked up a hitchhiker - who turned
out to have had a criminal record - he was found dead in his crashed car)
and rather more for his sf novel with Austin HALL (whom see for details),
The Blind Spot (1921 Argosy; 1951). However, the Dr Kinney stories are his
real legacy. [EFB/JC]See also: HISTORY OF SF; PARALLEL WORLDS; PLANETARY
ROMANCE.
FLIPSIDE OF DOMINICK HIDE, THE
Made-for-tv film (1980). BBC TV. Dir Alan Gibson, starring Peter Firth,
Caroline Langrishe, Pippa Guard, Patrick Magee. Teleplay Gibson, Jeremy
Paul. 95 mins. Colour.This was an unexpected success, winning several
awards. Hide (Firth) travels back in a flying saucer ( UFOS) from the
somewhat austere AD2130 to contemporary London to do historical research.
A Candide-figure, he is confused but cheerful about what he finds, falls
in love, and (of course) becomes his own great-great-great-grandfather.
This film is unusual in not being pessimistic about modern life, and uses
its future perspective cleverly to provide a sort of instant nostalgia for
the present day. The sequel, Another Flip for Dominick (1982), 85 mins,
made by and starring the same people, has Hide revisiting the past in
search of a missing colleague; it is less memorable. [PN]
FLOOD, ELOISE
Bill MCCAY.
FLUTE, MOLLY
Eileen LOTTMAN.
FLY, THE
1. Film (1958). 20th Century-Fox. Dir Kurt Neumann, starring Al (David)
Hedison, Patricia Owens, Vincent Price. Screenplay James Clavell, based on
"The Fly" (1957) by George LANGELAAN. 94 mins. Colour.A scientist
experimenting with MATTER TRANSMISSION accidentally gets mixed with a fly
and ends up with its head and arm (or leg). He has retained his own brain,
however, and with the help of his wife tries to reverse the procedure. But
the complementarily deformed fly refuses to be caught, and the scientist
is driven to commit suicide by putting his head in a steam press. The
final sequence shows the fly, with tiny scientist's head and arm, trapped
in a spider's web and screaming "Help me!" (which makes one wonder where
the fly's brain ended up). An absurd film whose ludicrous excesses are
amusing, and lavishly produced for a horror/ MONSTER movie, it was a
financial success and spawned two low-budget sequels, RETURN OF THE FLY
(1959) and CURSE OF THE FLY (1965). [JB]2. Film (1986). Brooksfilms/20th
Century-Fox. Dir David CRONENBERG, starring Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis,
John Getz. Screenplay Charles Edward Pogue, Cronenberg, based on the
Langelaan story. 100 mins, cut to 96 mins. Colour.This blackly comic
remake is radically more sophisticated and more horrific than its
original. In this version the (this time unmarried) scientist's accident
leads to a melding of genetic material, and his transformation into fly is
gradual and protracted. With it comes a sexual and creative potency and a
capacity for destruction hitherto only latent in the idealistic, repressed

Seth Brundle, movingly acted by Goldblum. As usual Cronenberg confronts
the vulnerable and ephemeral nature of the human body by imagining it
metamorphosed; where other people use words to create metaphor, Cronenberg
uses the flesh, ambiguously evoking exultation and disgust, the grotesque
and the beautiful. [PN]See also: CINEMA; SEX.
FLY II, THE
Film (1989). Brooksfilms/20th Century-Fox. Dir Chris Walas, starring Eric
Stoltz, Daphne Zuniga, Lee Richardson. Screenplay Mick Garris, Jim Wheat,
Ken Wheat, Frank Darabont, based on a story by Garris. 104 mins.
Colour.This is a genuine sequel to the 1986 remake of The FLY , not just a
lame excuse for more horrific "fly" effects. Chris Walas, the skilled
technician who created those effects for the earlier film, here made his
directorial debut, and surprised many by doing so assured a job of it.
Seth Brundle's girlfriend, made pregnant by him in the previous film, dies
after giving birth to a "monster"; beneath the larva-like casing is an
apparently normal baby. At age 5, however, the child has a near-adult
appearance and superintelligence. His adoptive father, head of Bartok
Industries, is secretly determined to exploit both Brundle's son and his
MATTER-TRANSMISSION device, realizing that the genetic melding the device
allows gives him a handle for controlling "the form and function of all
life". The subtext is more reassuring than in CRONENBERG's earlier film,
and TFII becomes a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, with a crude but
satisfying comeuppance for Bartok at the end. Though Cronenberg is the one
popularly supposed to show disgust for the flesh, it is Walas whose more
conventional affection for normality has the effect of reducing the son's
metamorphosis to a mere occasion for horror. This deeply conservative film
is less subtle than its predecessor, though it has interesting Freudian
reverberations, and many people will prefer Walas's emphasis on the
corruption of an external agency (Industry) to Cronenberg's emphasis on
the tragic divisions of the Self. [PN]See also: CINEMA; MONSTER MOVIES.
FLYING SAUCERS
UFOS.
FLYING SAUCERS
In 1947, U.S. businessman Kenneth Arnold was flying his plane near Mt.
Rainier in Washington when he reported a strange sight - nine "discs" in
the sky. He described their pattern as being "like a saucer would be if
you skipped it across the water." And that's how the term "flying saucer"
was born.The flying saucer craze was to become a part of 1950s culture.
More recently, tales of Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, pop up
everywhere. Some viewers have claimed that they were prodded and poked by
the aliens within. SF writers, for the most part, find such stories
unbelievable. What interests them is the public’s obsession with the
phenomenon of spaceship sightings and first contact experiences.
FLYING SAUCERS FROM OTHER WORLDS
OTHER WORLDS.
FLYNN, MICHAEL F(RANCIS)
(1947- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Slan Libh" in ASF in
1984, and who soon became identified as one of the most sophisticated and

stylistically acute 1980s Analog regulars, some of his work appearing as
by Rowland Shew. His first novel, In the Country of the Blind (1990), is
an alternate-history thriller based on the premise that Charles BABBAGE's
early-19th-century COMPUTER did in fact work, and is being used by a
secret society to predict (and therefore to control) events. A
20th-century woman hacker discovers the conspiracy and exposes its
databases by use of a computer worm. Babbage's computer, by coincidence,
features similarly in THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (1990 UK) by William GIBSON
and Bruce STERLING. MFF's second novel was Fallen Angels (1991) with Larry
NIVEN (whom see for details) and Jerry POURNELLE. His third, The Nanotech
Chronicles (1991), presents, with all MFF's engagingly lurid competence, a
tale which exploits current speculations about the future of molecular
engineering. MFF is on the verge of becoming a central creator of HARD SF.
[JC]See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; MACHINES; STEAMPUNK.
FOLDES, PETER
[r] HUNGARY.
FOLINGSBY, KENNETH
A possible pseudonym of a probable Scotsman whose Meda: A Tale of the
Future (1891), though the events it recounts turn out to be a dream,
remains of interest for the imaginative scope of the AD5575 depicted, in
which large-headed brainy "Scotonians" are fed by ambient electricity,
possess ANTIGRAVITY, and represent the end of a long (and detailed)
world-history, including a comet HOLOCAUST. The protagonist begins to have
erotic longings, and awakens. [JC]
FOLLETT, JAMES
(1939- ) UK writer of fiction and technical material; most of his sf work
has been for BBC TV or BBC RADIO. His sf work, which is not remarkable,
includes: The Doomsday Ultimatum (1976); Ice (1978); Earth Search (1981),
based on his BBC radio serial; Torus (1990); Trojan (1991), about a
computer virus from Mars. [JC]
FOLLETT, KEN
Working name of UK writer Kenneth Martin Follett (1949- ), most famous
for thrillers like Storm Island (1978; vt The Eye of the Needle 1978 US),
but who, under pseudonyms, has also written some sf. The Power Twins and
the Worm Puzzle: A Science Fantasy for Young People (1976) as by Martin
Martinsen was a juvenile; Amok: King of Legend (1976) as by Bernard L.
Ross was marginal fantasy; Capricorn One * (1978) as by Ross was one of
two novelizations - the other being by Ron GOULART - of the film CAPRICORN
ONE (1978). [JC]
FONTANA, D(OROTHY) C(ATHERINE)
(1939- ) US writer, primarily for tv; she was associated with STAR TREK
as its story editor, eventually writing Vulcan's Glory * (1989) for the
series of novelizations. She was later involved with the two tv series The
FANTASTIC JOURNEY and LOGAN'S RUN. The Questor Tapes * (1974) is based on
a series pilot written by Gene RODDENBERRY and Gene L. Coon, who created
Star Trek, and released as The QUESTOR TAPES. It tells of the creation of
an ANDROID who eventually plans to combat evil in secret. The pilot did
not lead to a series. DCF has written a number of tv episodes in addition

to her work as a story editor. [JC]See also: WAR OF THE WORLDS.
FONTENAY, CHARLES L(OUIS)
(1917- ) US newspaperman and writer, born in Brazil and raised in
Tennessee, spending his life there. He was a member of the If stable from
the publication of his first story, "Disqualified", in 1954, and wrote
three somewhat routine sf novels: Twice Upon a Time (1958 dos), Rebels of
the Red Planet (1961 dos), an intrigue set on Mars, and The Day the Oceans
Overflowed (1964), in which the manner of their doing so is scientifically
ill motivated. Epistle to the Babylonians (1969), nonfiction, deals in
part with the philosophy of science. [JC]
FONTENELLE, BERNARD LE BOVYER DE
(1657-1757) French man of letters whose work pointed forward to the Age
of Reason; nephew of the dramatist Corneille. He wrote much, and one of
his most important books became a seminal influence on PROTO SCIENCE
FICTION: Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes habites (1686; trans J.
Glanvill as The Plurality of Worlds 1929). This is one of the earliest
works ever written popularizing science, notably ASTRONOMY, for the
layman, which it does by wittily presenting its speculations - many about
the possibility of LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS - in the form of conversations
after dinner between the author and a marquise. In 1697 he became
permanent secretary of the the Academie des Sciences, a post he held for
44 years. [PN]See also: COSMOLOGY; FRANCE; STARS; VENUS.
FOOD OF THE GODS
Film (1976). AIP. Prod and dir Bert I. Gordon, starring Marjoe Gortner,
Pamela Franklin, Ralph Meeker, Ida Lupino. Screenplay Gordon, based on a
"portion" of The Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth (1904) by H.G.
WELLS. 88 mins. Colour.Set on an island off the coast of British Columbia,
FOTG tells of a miraculous foodstuff which oozes from the ground and
causes gigantism in all infant creatures that eat it ( GREAT AND SMALL).
Animated wasps, plastic caterpillars and out-of-focus chickens (all huge)
are wholly unconvincing, but the giant rats (ordinary rats shot in
miniature sets) are marginally plausible - which is more than can be said
for most of the actors and all of the script, though Meeker is effectively
creepy as the wicked industrialist out to exploit the Food. Nothing of the
Wells novel survives in this rat-drowning epic, which purports to be a
revenge-of-Nature film - like so many from its ECOLOGY-conscious period.
[PN]
FORBES, ALEXANDER
(1882-? ) US writer whose sf novel, The Radio Gunner (1924), depicts a
future WAR set in 1937 between Northern Europe, in alliance with the USA,
and the Constantinople Coalition. AF's predictive powers were poor and his
eponymous hero, who knows how to locate radios, fails to enthrall. [JC]
FORBIDDEN PLANET
Film (1956). MGM. Dir Fred McLeod Wilcox, starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne
Francis, Leslie Nielsen, Warren Stevens. Screenplay Cyril Hume, based on a
story by Irving Block and Allen ADLER. 98 mins. Colour.Although Wilcox was
new to sf cinema (his best-known film was Lassie Come Home, [1943]), FP is
one of the most attractive movies in the genre. Some of the more

interesting resonances of FP stem from its being an updated version of
Shakespeare's The Tempest (c1611). Prospero is Morbius, an obsessive
scientist living alone with his daughter Altaira (the virginal Miranda
figure) on the planet Altair IV. Ariel is a charming metal creature, Robby
the Robot (who became so popular - the first ROBOT star since METROPOLIS that another film, The INVISIBLE BOY [1957], was made as a special vehicle
for him). The film opens with a spaceship landing to investigate the fate
of a colony whose sole survivors are Morbius and Altaira. The crew is
menaced by an invisible Caliban, which proves to be a "Monster from the
Id" and eventually destroys its unwitting creator, Morbius; holocaust
follows. Altaira is saved.The plot, mixing the tawdry and the potent, is
very sophisticated for the time - astonishingly so for a film originally
designed for a juvenile audience, especially in the intimations of
incestuous feelings of the father for the daughter. The dialogue is slick
and unmemorable. The best sequences involve a tour of the
still-functioning artefacts, spectacular and mysterious, dwarfing the
humans passing among them, of an awesomely powerful vanished race, the
Krel. The visual treatment of FP was unsurpassed until 2001: A SPACE
ODYSSEY, made 12 years later. Despite its flaws, it remains one of the few
masterpieces of sf cinema.Forbidden Planet * (1956), based on the film,
was by W. J. Stuart (Philip MACDONALD). [PN]See also: INTELLIGENCE;
MONSTER MOVIES; MUSIC; PARANOIA; VILLAINS.
FORBIDDEN WORLD
(vt MUTANT) Film (1982). New World. Dir Allan Holzman, starring Jesse
Vint, June Chadwick, Dawn Dunlap, Linden Chiles, Fox Harris, Raymond
Oliver. Screenplay Tim Curnen. 86 mins. Colour.This cheap imitation of
ALIEN (1979), from Roger CORMAN's New World exploitation factory, is
distinguished by its gleefully sleazy nature and amusing cynicism. An
outer-space troubleshooter (Vint) is awakened from cryo-sleep ( CRYONICS),
casually informed that he is now younger than his son, and despatched to a
remote planet where a genetically engineered organism has run amok.
Although generally predictable, this is fast-paced and does produce one
astonishing coup by having its MONSTER, which replicates the cell
structure of anything it devours, defeated when a terminally ill scientist
feeds it his own cancerous liver, an organ he has removed during
anaesthetic-free self-surgery. Vint's grimy hero imports a bit of welcome
humour, and the film makes good use of the generically required
exploitation elements, intercutting a formulaic sex scene with oddly
poignant vignettes of the space-station staff whiling away the time at the
end of the Universe. Some of FW's sets and effects crop up again in
ANDROID (1982). [KN]
FORBIN PROJECT, THE
COLOSSUS, THE FORBIN PROJECT.
FORCE FIELD
In sf TERMINOLOGY - unlike physics, where it has a different meaning - a
force field (sometimes a force shield) is usually an invisible protective
sphere or wall of force. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s the force field
performed sterling service, notably in E.E. "Doc" SMITH's Skylark and
Lensmen series, where force fields under attack glow red and orange and

then all the way up through the spectrum until they reach violet and black
and break down. Force fields are also a sovereign remedy against DEATH
RAYS and usually bullets, too, though not against swords in Charles L.
HARNESS's Flight into Yesterday (1953; vt The Paradox Men dos), in which
the efficacy of the shield is directly proportional to the momentum of the
object it resists; this property of force fields gives Harness a good
excuse to introduce swordplay (where the momentums are relatively small)
into a technologically advanced society - an example that other writers
were not slow to follow. Robert SHECKLEY's "Early Model" (1956) tells of a
force field so efficient that it renders its wearer almost incapable of
carrying out any action at all that might conceivably endanger him. The
eponymous device in Poul ANDERSON's Shield (1963) can recharge its
batteries by soaking up the kinetic energy of the bullets it stops. But
these are comparatively late examples, when the concept was sufficiently
familiar in sf to allow parody and sophisticated variations.It is the
essence of an sf force field that by a kind of judo it converts the energy
of an attacking force and repels it back on itself. Few writers, however,
were able to give - or concerned to try to give - a convincing rationale
for forces being conveniently able to curve themselves around an object
and to take on some of the properties of hard, resistant matter. A well
ground mirror might more plausibly carry out the same function, at least
against death rays. The true rationale for the force field and for its
close relations, the tractor beam (which pulls objects towards the beamer)
and the pressor beam (which pushes them away), is that - like FASTER THAN
LIGHT travel - they help tell stories. [PN]
FORD, ASHTON
Don PENDLETON.
FORD, DOUGLAS MORET
(? -? ) UK writer whose A Time of Terror: The Story of a Great Revenge
(A.D. 1910) (1906; vt A Time of Terror: The Story of a Great Revenge (A.D.
1912) 1908) pits the UK, aided by a valiant underground organization,
against the Kaiser's invading forces. The Raid of Dover: A Romance of the
Reign of Woman, A.D. 1940 (1910) was fairly mild-mannered. [JC]
FORD, FORD MADOX
(1873-1939) UK writer and editor, born (Joseph Leonard) Ford (Hermann)
Madox Hueffer into a literary family of German descent. In protest at
German behaviour in WWI he changed his name to FMF, though typically he
refrained from doing so until hostilities had ended; both original books
and reprints after 1919 are signed FMF. A versatile man of letters,
founder/editor of the English Review and the Transatlantic Review, he is
best known for The Good Soldier (1915) and the four Tietjens novels
assembled as Parade's End (omni 1950 US). His first book, The Brown Owl
(1892), was a children's fantasy. The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story
(1901) with Joseph CONRAD (whom see for details) is sf. Fantasies include
Mr Apollo (1908), The "Half Moon": A Romance of the Old World and the New
(1909), a complex story of 17th-century witchcraft, and Ladies whose
Bright Eyes (1911), a TIME-TRAVEL tale. The Simple Life Limited (1911), as
by Daniel Chaucer, attacks utopianism. FMF inserted into the murkily
RURITANIAN The New Humpty-Dumpty (1912), also as by Daniel Chaucer, a

rather savage caricature of H.G. WELLS, who appears as Herbert Pett, a
"cockney" Great Thinker and philanderer, with a high-pitched voice, who
fatally intermixes sex and revolution. Vive le Roy (1936 US) delineates a
struggle for power in a future monarchical France. [JC]
FORD, GARRETT
William L. CRAWFORD.
FORD, JOHN M(ILO)
(1957- ) US writer. He is author of some children's fiction under an
unrevealed pseudonym. He began publishing sf under his own name with
"This, Too, We Reconcile" for ASF in 1976. His Alternities Corporation
sequence appeared in magazines 1979-81. His first novel, Web of Angels
(1980), can be seen in retrospect as a quite remarkable rendering of the
basic venues exploited by CYBERPUNK some years later, though its
traditional rite-of-passage plot bears little resemblance to the
quest-for-Nirvana structure given definitive form by William GIBSON in
NEUROMANCER (1984). Beyond that basic distinction in dynamic thrust,
however, and beyond JMF's failure (or disinclination) to make use of
film-noir icons and the hegemony of corporate Japan, the eponymous
commmunication/data web much resembles CYBERSPACE, though intergalactic in
scope; the cowboy hacker protagonist hired out to a merchant prince is
also familiar, as are the Web's automatic defence systems - Geisthounds which hunt him remorselessly. JMF's second novel, The Princes of the Air
(1982), is a florid SPACE OPERA whose detail is more enthralling than its
span. The Dragon Waiting (1983) is an ALTERNATE-WORLD fantasy set in an
unChristianized (and dragonless) medieval Europe; it won the 1984 World
Fantasy AWARD. The Final Reflection * (1984), Star Trek: Voyage to
Adventure * (1984) (as Michael J. Dodge) and How Much for Just the Planet?
* (1987) are STAR TREK ties; The Scholars of Night (1988) is an
associational thriller; Casting Fortune * (coll 1989), set in the Liavek
SHARED-WORLD enterprise, contains in "The Illusionist" a book-length tale
of theatrical MAGIC; and Fugue State (1987 in Under the Wheel ed Elizabeth
Mitchell; rev1990 dos) is a complex sf exploration of an imprisoned
psyche. GROWING UP WEIGHTLESS (1993) - which tied for the 1994 PHILIP K.
DICK AWARD with Jack WOMACK's Elvissey (1993) - depicts life on the Moon
in terms that seem realistic, for the human settlement there lives under
strait conditions, and has a difficult relationship with Earth; but the
rite of passage into adulthood at the tale's centre is not innovative. Two
decades into his career, there remains some sense that JMF remains
unwilling or unable to create a definitive style or mode; but his
originality is evident, a shifting feisty energy informs almost everything
he writes, and that career is still young. [JC]Other works: On Writing
Science Fiction (The Editors Strike Back!) (anth 1981) with Darrell
SCHWEITZER and George H. SCITHERS.See also: FANTASY; GAMES AND TOYS;
POETRY; TIMESCAPE BOOKS.
FOREST, JEAN-CLAUDE
[r] BARBARELLA.
FORESTER, C(ECIL) S(COTT)
(1899-1966) UK writer best known for his work outside the sf field,

especially the Horatio Hornblower novels (from 1937). In addition to
several sf stories - including the substantial HITLER-WINS novella, "If
Hitler had Invaded England" (1960), which was posthumously collected in
Gold from Crete (coll 1971) - he published a novel, The Peacemaker (1934
US), about a pacifist mathematician and schoolteacher who tries to force
peace on the world through his invention of a magnetic disruptor that
stops machinery. He fails. [JC]Other works: Poo-Poo and the Dragons (1942
US), a juvenile fantasy.See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; DISCOVERY AND
INVENTION.
FOREVER YOUNG
Film (1992). Warner Bros. Exec prods Edward S. Feldman and Jeffrey
Abrams, prod Bruce Davey, dir Steve Miner, starring Mel Gibson, Jamie Lee
Curtis, Elijah Wood, Isabel Glasser and George Wendt. Screenplay Abrams.
101 mins. Colour.In 1939, when his girl friend (Glasser) lapses into
apparently terminal coma after being hit by a car, grief-stricken test
pilot McCormick (Gibson) volunteers for a one-year experiment in CRYONICS
conducted, conveniently, by his best friend (Wendt). The friend dies, and
the secret experiment sits unnoticed in a military warehouse until 1992,
when two small boys accidentally open the cryonic chamber, and McCormick
revives, apparently still a sexy youngish man. He copes well with life 53
years on, and while being pursued by federal agents he forms a
relationship with a feisty but somewhat depressed nurse (Curtis). Soon,
however, it becomes clear that McCormick is ageing very rapidly.
Fortunately he has previously taught the nurse's small son (Wood) to fly
old bombers, since he becomes too old to operate the one he steals to
elude the feds. The boy lands them safely at the house of his one-time
girl friend, who, it transpires, has recovered from her coma but is now
aged around eighty. The two wrinkled old persons embrace, in a culminating
scene that elicits embarrassment rather than the intended tears. A
romantic weepie, a thriller, a comedy, a boys' adventure film: the mix is
ill judged. The sf elements are among the better things, especially the
reversal of the usual stereotype, where McCormick is able, quite
plausibly, to adjust rapidly to a much changed world. [PN]
FORGOTTEN FANTASY
US DIGEST-size magazine. 5 issues Oct 1970-June 1971, published by Nectar
Press, Hollywood, ed Douglas MENVILLE. FF reprinted some ancient fantasy
stories, but the long novel serialized in #1-#4, The Goddess of Atvatabar
(1892) by William R. BRADSHAW, was probably too dated to be successful
even in the nostalgia market. A second serial, Hartmann, the Anarchist
(1893), by E. Douglas FAWCETT, began in #5. With his associate editor, R.
REGINALD, Menville went on to publish in book form the Forgotten Fantasy
Library (1973-80), 24 vols of reprint material. [FHP/PN]
FORMAN, JAMES D(OUGLAS)
(1932- ) US writer whose sf novels are for a young-adult audience. They
began with Call Back Yesterday (1981) and its sequel, Doomsday Plus Twelve
(1984), a studiedly and effectively admonitory presentation of nuclear
HOLOCAUST as an event having little to do - contra much wish-fulfilment
SURVIVALIST FICTION - with post-Bomb opportunities for self-fulfilment. In
the first volume, a teenaged US girl's flirtation in the Middle East sets

off, through a chain of stupidities, the final war; in the second, 12
years later, a young girl persuades the remnants of the US Army not to try
to attack a benevolent Japan, which has had nothing to do with the war.
Cry Havoc (1988), somewhat less interestingly, features the creation of
killer dogs through GENETIC ENGINEERING gone awry. [JC]
FORREST, HENRY J.
(? -? ) UK writer known only for the early sf UTOPIA, A Dream of Reform
(1848), which tamely introduces the usual visitor to a mildly socialist
planet designed on anti-industrial lines. The book is thus a vague
precursor to the work of William MORRIS. [JC]
FORREST, MARYANN
Pseudonym of an unidentified Australian writer in whose Here (Away from
it All) (1969 UK; vt Here 1970 US) the residents of a Mediterranean island
must deal with the consequences of the HOLOCAUST. [JC]
FORSTCHEN, WILLIAM R.
(1950- ) US writer who has generally concentrated on series, beginning
with the Ice Prophet sequence - Ice Prophet (1983), The Flame upon the Ice
(1984) and A Darkness upon the Ice (1985) - set on Earth at some point in
the future after an ecological disaster has caused the planet to become
icebound. In this world technology has, according to the orthodox sf
assumptions, been foolishly banned, and the eponymous prophet heralds a
revival of science; but the intricacies of the realpolitik which doom him
personally, and the beauties of the ice world itself, go some way to keep
the sequence from being unduly familiar. The Gamester War novels - The
Alexandrian Ring (1987), The Assassin Gambit (1988) and The Napoleon Wager
(1993) - show a similar competence and a whole-hearted involvement in the
most far-reaching dictates that SPACE OPERA can demand on those who treat
its premises seriously, featuring a race of intergalactic overlords who
permit the citizens of Earth and many other planets to engage in vast
GAME-WORLD-like conflicts and to import, through TIME TRAVEL, figures like
Alexander the Great to fight wagered wars on the enormous ringworld that
serves as arena. The Crystal series, written with Greg Morrison - The
Crystal Warriors (1988) and The Crystal Sorcerers (1991) - is fantasy. The
Lost Regiment sequence - Rally Cry! (1990), Union Forever (1991),Terrible
Swift Sword (1992) and Fateful Lightning (1993) - reworks the basic
structure of the Gamester War books, this time from the perspective of a
Civil War Union troop transported through time to a medieval planet
secretly dominated by remote aliens. Into the Sea of Stars (1986) is a
singleton, as is Star Voyager Academy (1994); Wing Commander III: Fleet
Action* (1994) is part of a multi-author series tied to a computer game,
and Magic: The Gathering Arena* (1994) is tied to a trading-card game. WRF
is a genre writer of shining efficiency, and is technically capable of the
most ambitious work. [JC]See also: GAMES AND SPORTS.
FORSTER, E(DWARD) M(ORGAN)
(1879-1970) UK writer of essays and novels, the best known being A
Passage to India (1924). The Celestial Omnibus, and Other Stories (coll
1911) assembles several fantasies of interest, but EMF's importance to sf
lies wholly in his short story "The Machine Stops" (1909), collected in

The Eternal Moment (coll 1928), which includes further fantasies. Both
books were assembled as Collected Short Stories (coll 1947; vt Collected
Tales 1974 US). Cast in the form of a warning look at the distant future,
rather in the mode of H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE (1895), "The Machine
Stops" directly attacks, as many critics noted and as EMF himself
acknowledged, the rational World State that Wells promulgated in A Modern
Utopia (1905). In the hivelike underground society EMF envisions, freedom
and (paramountly) the value of the individual human's personal relations
with others of his kind have been eliminated. When the state collapses when the machine stops - the depersonalized ciphers underground perish,
while above, on the surface, a few genuine humans survive. In any study of
the relation of DYSTOPIA to UTOPIA, the story is of vital interest.
[JC]See also: AUTOMATION; CITIES; HISTORY OF SF; LEISURE; TECHNOLOGY;
VIRTUAL REALITY.
FORSYTH, FREDERICK
(1938- ) UK writer who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the
Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The
Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental timeslip fantasy about a
WWII pilot, and both The Devil's Alternative (1979) and The Negotiator
(1989) are NEAR-FUTURE thrillers, the first predicting the failure of the
Russian harvest, the second predicting (wrongly) a Soviet-generated
crisis. [JC]
FORT, CHARLES (HOY)
(1874-1932) US journalist and author. Working from extensive notes
collected mainly from newspapers, magazines and scientific journals, CF
compiled a series of books containing information on "inexplicable"
incidents and phenomena. Though characterized as an anti-scientist, CF
reserved his attacks for the "scientific priestcraft" and their dogmatic
"damning" of unconventional or unwanted observations. CF's own belief was
simply a monistic faith in the unity of all things, and this forms the
principal connection between his apparently unrelated groups of data. His
books are written in an eccentric style and are interspersed with wilfully
absurd theories and ideas. The first two, both still (1992) unpublished,
were called simply X and Y; X proposes that Earth is controlled from MARS
and Y supports the HOLLOW-EARTH hypothesis. The Book of the Damned (1919)
and New Lands (1923) are largely concerned with astronomical and
meteorological events, while Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932) are more
interested in human and animal phenomena. The four published books are
crammed with data, and the sheer bulk of information is impressive;
however, there is no attempt to evaluate the numerous reports cited, so
that silly-season urban legends and hoax stories are jumbled in with a
too-sparse leavening of more reliable accounts. Reading CF therefore feels
much like eating a stew of dubious provenance: the taste is good but one
worries about what went into it. CF himself was perfectly aware that much
of his data was, to say the least, doubtful; of The Book of the Damned he
wrote: "This book is fiction, like Gulliver's Travels, The Origin of
Species, Newton's Principia, and every history of the United States."
Moreover, he was reluctant to invent theories (other than whimsical ones)
to account for his data - a humility that distances his books from the

sketchy fantasies of later writers such as Erich VON DANIKEN.After CF's
death, compilation of data was continued by the Fortean Society, founded
in 1931 by a group that included Ben HECHT, John Cowper POWYS, Alexander
Woollcott (1887-1943) and Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945), and in the
journals Doubt (US) and Lo! (UK). Information is currently collected by
the International Fortean Organization, who publish INFO Journal, and by
the UK publication Fortean Times. Prominent modern Forteans include
William F. Corliss, John Michell and Robert J.M. Rickard.CF's list of
bizarre observations and events (from astronomical heresies to
teleportation cases), together with his demand for original and undogmatic
interpretation, influenced and stimulated many sf writers. CF's most
enthusiastic sf follower was Eric Frank RUSSELL, who considered him "the
only real genius sf ever had"; Russell's Sinister Barrier (1943) and
Dreadful Sanctuary (1951) are based on Fortean ideas. Damon KNIGHT,
another author influenced by CF, published a standard biography, Charles
Fort, Prophet of the Unexplained (1970). The influence of CF's ideas on sf
was particularly strong in the magazines ed John W. CAMPBELL Jr, Unknown
and ASF. Fortean elements rarely appear in more recent written sf, though
Patrick TILLEY's Fade-Out (1975) is one exception, and films such as CLOSE
ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), with its discovery of the famous
"lost" Flight 19, maintain the tradition. [PR/JGr]See also: ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION; ESP; Vol MOLESWORTH; PARANOIA; PSEUDO-SCIENCE; PSI
POWERS; TELEKINESIS; TELEPORTATION.
FORTRESS
Film (1992, but released 1993). Fortress Films/Village Roadshow
Pictures/Davis Entertainment Production. Dir Stuart Gordon; screenplay
Steve Feinberg, Troy Neighbors; starring Christopher Lambert, Kurtwood
Smith, Loryn Locklin, Lincoln Kilpatrick, Clifton Gonzalez Gonzalez,
Jeffrey Combs, Tom Towles, Vernon Wells. 95 mins. Colour.In a near-future
and apparently semi-fascist USA it is illegal to have more than one child,
and ex "Black Beret" soldier John Brennick (Lambert) and his pregnant wife
(Locklin), having lost one child, get caught attempting to cross the
border into Mexico. Both are imprisoned (in different areas) in the
Fortress, a privately run 30-storey, futuristic, underground prison in the
desert. The director is a demented cyborg, the gaolers are androids grown
from redundant babies, the prisoners carry explosive balls in their
stomach which explode during escape attempts and things look bad. In an
escalating series of exploitation-movie over-the-top lunacies, a breakout
is achieved, but not before pregnant Mrs Brennick is threatened with fatal
Caesarean by circular saw. The film has only one redeeming feature, a
sense that exploitation sf-cinema is fun, and its various unpleasantnesses
are achieved with commendable vigour and bad taste. Lambert's performance
is dire. This Australian/American co-production was the first of two sf
future-prison break-out movies with military heroes to be made in
Australia within two years, the other being No Escape, a more humane but
less watchable film. [PN]
FORWARD, ROBERT L(ULL)
(1932- ) US physicist and writer, senior scientist at Hughes Research
Laboratories and one of the most devoted HARD-SF authors of the 1980s. He

began publishing sf with "The Singing Diamond" in Omni (1979), and made a
very considerable impact with his first novel, DRAGON'S EGG (1980), which,
along with its sequel Starquake! (1985), is set in a most intriguing venue
- a NEUTRON STAR whose surface GRAVITY is 67,000,000,000 gees - and
concentrates on the immensely enjoyable ALIEN cheela who inhabit this
venue, living and evolving at an enormous rate (a generation passes in 37
minutes). The human scientists who visit the cheela of Dragon's Egg
inadvertently civilize them over a 24-hour period. In the sequel the
cheela, now evolved far beyond their glacial human teachers, very quickly
explore the entire Galaxy, though the catastrophe of the title soon
complicates the plot, leading to further rapid-fire EVOLUTION, invention
and mind-play.RLF's second successful novel, The Flight of the Dragonfly
(1982-3 ASF as "Rocheworld"; exp 1984; exp 1985; orig full version
restored, vt Rocheworld 1990), posited a second world of almost equal
fascination. On the eponymous dumb-bell-shaped double-planet is placed an
alien race whose individuals are characterized more strongly than are the
humans involved in an exploratory mission there. (Despite the striking
resemblance in storylines and the titles, this novel is unrelated to the
earlier series.) Once again the self-confident articulacy of RLF's
scientific mind dominates proceedings, and the novel concludes (as did his
first) with a symposium which analyses the ideas underlying the book.
However, the unfortunate corollary to this style of novel-writing is that,
when no scientific conceit governs the structure of the tale, character
and plot can prove, as in RLF's case, a poor substitute. Martian Rainbow
(1991), which has no such central world-building conceit to govern it,
consequently fails to convince in its simplistic rendering of a Russian-US
conflict on Mars, or in the cardboard triumphalism of its human cast. More
than almost any other hard-sf writer, RLF dazzles within his bailiwick and
embarrasses outside it. [JC]Other works: Timemaster (1992), a LIBERTARIAN
tale.Nonfiction: Future Magic (1988); Mirror Matter: Pioneering Antimatter
Physics (1988 ) with Joel Davis.See also: ASTRONOMY; PLANETARY ROMANCE;
SCIENTISTS; STARS.
FOSS, CHRIS(TOPHER)
(1946- ) UK illustrator. CF studied architecture at Cambridge University,
and has worked in sf ILLUSTRATION since 1970, primarily as a cover artist;
he uses brush and airbrush to excellent effect. He is best known in sf
circles for his hardware, particularly his SPACESHIPS: intricate,
asymmetrical, almost Gothic, these have been deeply influential not only
on other UK illustrators but also on film designers. Ever since STAR WARS
(1977), most movie spacecraft look as if they have been designed by CF,
even though they have not - although he did work as a concept artist on
ALIEN (1979). (Paradoxically, outside sf, CF is better known in commercial
illustration for his detailed figure studies; he did the many romantically
erotic drawings for Alex COMFORT's The Joy of Sex [1972] and More Joy of
Sex [1973].) CF's smooth, airbrushed, representational style, demonstrated
on hundreds of covers, spearheaded a revolution in UK sf paperback design
in the 1970s, and had many imitators. It was what the market wanted, and
after a decade had become almost tedious in its predictability - though
that was the publishers' fault, not CF's. His sf work is often a
celebration of technology - monstrous spaceships or vast robots, beautiful

and deadly, rear up over landscapes and skyscapes where humans are absent
or tiny - yet the effect is bracing. Science Fiction Art (1976), with an
introduction by Brian W. ALDISS, is a portfolio of his work; others are
21st Century Foss (1978) and The Chris Foss Portfolio (1990). Diary of a
Spaceperson (1990) is unusual and not wholly successful in combining the
erotic with the scientific in what purports to be the illustrated diary
(written by CF) of a spacewoman who has sexual congress with an alien
plant. [PN] See also: TECHNOLOGY.
FOSTER, ALAN DEAN
(1946- ) US writer, raised in Los Angeles; interestingly, he has listed
Carl Barks (1901- ), the long-unacknowledged creator of the best COMIC
strips and books in the Disney stable, as one of his formative influences
(on his depiction of older characters). ADF began publishing sf with "Some
Notes Concerning a Green Box" for The Arkham Collector in 1971, and has
collected short stories in With Friends Like These . . . (coll 1977), its
companion, . . . Who Needs Enemies? (coll 1984), and The Metrognome and
Other Stories (coll 1990). ADF is best known, however, for a prolific and
generally competent output of novels and novelizations.Several of his best
books fit into a loose double sequence of novels set in a multifarious
Galaxy dominated by the Humanx Commonwealth, a venue well suited as an
arena for SPACE OPERAS and encounters with ALIEN races. The central
sequence follows the life of young Flinx, an orphan with PSI POWERS and
the friendship of a highly potent pet alien named Pip, and comprises (in
order of internal chronology): For Love of Mother-Not (1983); a connected
trilogy made up of ADF's first novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang (1972), Orphan
Star (1977) and The End of the Matter (1977); Bloodhype (1973); and Flinx
in Flux (1988). A second, looser sequence consists of Nor Crystal Tears
(1982); Midworld (1975); a connected trilogy made up of Icerigger (1974),
Mission to Moulokin (1979) and The Deluge Drivers (1987), the three
comprising his best work to date; Voyage to the City of the Dead (1984);
and Sentenced to Prism (1985). Sometimes reminiscent of the earlier work
of Poul ANDERSON, the sequence is expansive and colourful, though tending
to melodrama and prone to the fable-like use of such sf and fantasy
elements as ESP and dragons.Individual novels have tended more to a
clear-headed commercial exploitation of various genre categories, though
Cachalot (1980), whose whale-like aliens are of interest, The Man who Used
the Universe (1983) and Cyber Way (1990) perhaps stand out.Of ADF's
numerous novelizations, the most notable are possibly Dark Star * (1974),
based on DARK STAR (1974), Star Wars * (1976), as by George LUCAS, the
director of STAR WARS (1977), Alien * (1979), based on ALIEN (1979),
Aliens: A Novelization * (1986), based on ALIENS (1986), and Alien
FOSTER, GEORGE C(ECIL)
(1893-? ) UK writer whose first novel of genre interest, The Lost Garden
(1930), is a fantasy in which survivors of ATLANTIS experience world
history up to the present. In Full Fathom Five (1930) prehistoric episodes
are linked by REINCARNATION to scenes set in the present. Awakening (1932)
subjects the contemporary (and the future) world to the perspective of a
soldier awakening from suspended animation. Cats in the Coffee (1938),
under the nom de plume Seaforth, presents through reincarnation a

retrospective vision of prehistory, and We Band of Brothers (1939), also
as by Seaforth, combines future- WAR events and elucidatory conversations
between a man of the deep future and a man of the deep past. The Change
(1963) is routine. In almost all his work, conventional plots are twisted
to make room for perspectives on the nature of human history; in this
sense, GCF illuminates a central strategy of the UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE.
[JC/PN]See also: IMMORTALITY.
FOSTER, M(ICHAEL) A(NTHONY)
(1939- ) US writer, former data-systems analyst and sequentially a
Russian linguist and ICBM launch-crew commander to the US Air Force; he is
also a semiprofessional photographer. After some poetry, published
privately as Shards from Byzantium (coll 1969 chap) and The Vaseline
Dreams of Hundifer Jones (coll 1970 chap), he began to publish sf with the
ambitious Ler trilogy about a race of genetically created SUPERMEN. The
Gameplayers of Zan (1977), a very long novel formally constructed on the
model of an Elizabethan tragedy, describes a period of climactic tension
between the ler and the rest of humanity, and is set on Earth. The
Warriors of Dawn (1975), published first but set later, is a more
conventional SPACE OPERA in which a human male and a ler female are forced
to team up to try to solve a complexly ramifying problem of interstellar
piracy. The Day of the Klesh (1979) brings the ler and the eponymous race
of humans together on a planet where they must solve their differences.
The books are slow in the telling, but impressively detailed in their
construction of ler culture and language. The Morphodite sequence which
followed comprises The Morphodite (1981), Transformer (1983) and Preserver
(1985), and similarly uses devices of genetic manipulation to buttress
complex plots, though in this case the shape-changing,
revolution-fomenting protagonist dominates the tale as trickster and
superman. Waves (1980) rather sluggishly recalls Stanislaw LEM's SOLARIS
(1961) in a tale of political intrigue on a planet whose ocean is
intelligent. The four novellas collected in Owl Time (coll 1985) are told
in challengingly various modes, and derive strength from their mutual
contrast. MAF's career to date could be seen as a prelude to the major
book which should bring him the acclaim he merits. [JC]See also: GENETIC
ENGINEERING; LIVING WORLDS; PLANETARY ROMANCE.
FOSTER, RICHARD
Kendell Foster CROSSEN.
FOSTER, W(ALTER) BERT(RAM)
(1869-1929) US author of two borderline sf novels, The Eve of War (1904)
and The Lost Expedition (1905). [JC]
FOUNDATION: THE REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION
UK semi-academic journal, published by the SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION of
North East London Polytechnic (now known as the University of East London)
from Mar 1972, and more recently, since 1993 when the SFF moved, of the
University of Liverpool, current, 61 numbers to summer 1994, 3 numbers a
year. #1-#4 ed Charles BARREN, #5-#13 ed Peter NICHOLLS, #14-#19 ed
Malcolm EDWARDS, #20-#36 ed David PRINGLE, #37 onwards ed Edward JAMES.
Much of the journal's flavour has resulted from the work of long-running

features editor Ian WATSON, who held that position from #10 (1976) to #51
(1991). The most influential reviews editors have perhaps been John CLUTE
(#20-#47) followed by Colin GREENLAND (from #47). Other members of the
editorial board have included Kenneth BULMER, George HAY and Christopher
PRIEST. Under James's editorship the editorial address has been the
University of York, where he teaches.F:TROSF has a distinctive flavour
regarded by US readers as typically UK, though in fact some of its editors
have been foreigners. After a shaky beginning, it soon became perhaps the
liveliest and indeed the most critical of the big three critical journals
- the others being EXTRAPOLATION in the USA and SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES in
Canada - though lacking the academic authority of at least the latter.
Since there is very little formal use of sf in UK universities, there is
no academic base to provide a rigidly scholarly features section. The real
strengths of F:TROSF have always been its book reviews and its willingness
to publish articles about current sf; it has been weaker in theoretical
and historical studies. Nevertheless, it has provided a platform for
serious sf criticism in the UK. Its contributors - often professional
writers of fiction rather than academics - have tended to be more
aggressively judgmental, and more intent upon defining a critical canon
for sf, than their politer US colleagues. All of this may explain why its
readership appears to be less academic than that of the other scholarly
journals, consisting more of fans and sf writers. The US scholar Gary K.
WOLFE sees F:TROSF, not wholly unadmiringly (and only in part
incorrectly), as partaking of "certain traditions of fan scholarship".
From the beginning a feature of F:TROSF has been the Profession of Science
Fiction series (45 to date) of autobiographical pieces by sf writers; a
selection of Profession essays appeared later as The Profession of Science
Fiction (anth 1992) ed Edward James and Maxim JAKUBOWSKI. The first 8
issues of F:TROSF were republished in book form as Foundation, Numbers 1
to 8: March 1972-March 1975 (1978) with intro by Peter Nicholls. [PN]
4D MAN
(vt The Evil Force UK; vt Master of Terror US) Film (1959).
Fairview/Universal. Coproduced and dir Irwin Shortess Yeaworth Jr,
starring Robert Lansing, Lee Meriwether, James Congdon. Screenplay
Theodore Simonson, Cy Chermak, from an idea by Jack H. Harris. 85 mins.
Colour.A small, interesting film made by the same producer/director team,
Jack H. Harris and Yeaworth, that had already made The BLOB (1958).
Lansing plays a scientist who uses his brother's research on the
amplification of brainwaves and finds that as a result he can
interpenetrate with solid matter - walk through walls, etc. The
unfortunate side-effect is that he draws on the lifeforce of others (an
idea used again in LIFEFORCE [1985]), which renders them instantly dead of
old age. There is a love triangle, and some brooding angst from Lansing,
who oscillates between delight in his new power and guilt. [PN]
FOUR-SIDED TRIANGLE
Film (1952). Hammer. Dir Terence Fisher, starring Barbara Payton, Stephen
Murray, John Van Eyssen. Screenplay Paul TABORI, Fisher, based on The
Four-Sided Triangle (1939 AMZ; exp 1949) by William F. TEMPLE. 81 mins,
cut to 71 mins. B/w.A scientist builds a machine capable of duplicating

human beings. He duplicates the woman he loves but who is in love with
another man, only to have the duplicate, too, fall in love with that other
man. This is a low-budget film and suffers from it; there appear to be no
prints now in circulation. [JB]
FOURTH DIMENSION
DIMENSIONS.
FOWLER, KAREN JOY
(1950- ) US writer with degrees in political science and north Asian
studies. She began publishing sf with "Recalling Cinderella" in L. Ron
Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Vol I (anth 1985) ed Algis BUDRYS,
and caused considerable stir in the sf field with the quality of the work
assembled in her first collection, ARTIFICIAL THINGS (coll 1986), which
helped gain her the 1987 JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for Best New Writer. Her
short stories - later collections are Peripheral Vision (coll 1990 chap)
and Letters from Home (anth 1991 UK), which contains separate tales by
her, Pat CADIGAN and Pat MURPHY - gave a first and entirely deceptive
appearance of reticence, but soon revealed steely ironies, an insistence
on the essential solitude of her protagonists (which evoked FEMINIST
arguments about alienation but did not dwell upon the specifics of
oppression or male-female discord) and an urgent hilarity. Some stories,
like "Face Values", are pure sf; others shift into fantasy or FABULATION,
giving ambiguous cues as to any "proper" reading.This sure-footed refusal
to give her readers much epistemological security - much sense that her
worlds could be firmly apprehended - also governed the telling of KJF's
first novel, the remarkable SARAH CANARY (1991), which - along with John
FOWLES's A Maggot (1985) - may be the finest First Contact novel (
COMMUNICATIONS) yet written. A strange female figure - woman or alien, no
one knows, or can even formulate the question - arrives in the state of
Washington in 1873 and is dubbed Sarah Canary, because of the birdlike
sounds she makes. In attempting to deal with her, the Chinese worker to
whom she has attached herself is exposed to a long array of those living
beings that the sciences of the 19th century have attempted to control
through "knowledge": Indians, Blacks, the insane, immigrants, women,
animals, artists, confidence men. Sarah Canary, who stands for them all in
the indescribable melody of her Being, finally disappears, never having
said a word. As an emblem of the enigma behind the idea of First Contact
she is perhaps definitive. As a dramatization of the self-deluding
imperialisms of knowledge, SARAH CANARY is equally convincing. [JC]Other
work: The War of the Roses (1985 IASFM; 1991 chap).See also: INTERZONE;
SOCIOLOGY; WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST.
FOWLER, SYDNEY
S. Fowler WRIGHT.
FOWLES, JOHN (ROBERT)
(1926- ) UK writer who remains perhaps most famous for his first novel,
The Collector (1963), but whose second novel, The Magus (1965 US; rev 1977
UK), especially in the conciser revised version, more powerfully explores
the labyrinths of obsession and manipulation underlying, in all of JF's
work, the rigmaroles of daylight reality. In this novel a series of

seemingly supernatural contrivances separates the unpleasant protagonist
from his love and from any security, causing him to learn something about
himself before happiness is allowed to reign; rational explanations in the
end from the Daedalus-like magus do little to attenuate a sense of
magic-realist entrapment. Of JF's other novels, A Maggot (1985) is sf. Set
in the 18th century, it superlatively explores the epistemology of First
Contact - the study of the possible nature of human PERCEPTIONS of
something genuinely ALIEN, genuinely Other - by telling a version of the
life-story of the mother of Ann Lee (1736-1784), historical founder of the
Shaker religion; the woman's response to the insoluble knot of PERCEPTIONS
visited upon her when she inadvertently stumbles upon some time
travellers, possibly from Earth's future, is a literal seed-bed (she is
pregnant at the time) for Enthusiasm. [JC]Other works: Mantissa (1982).
FOX, GARDNER F(RANCIS)
(1911-1986) US lawyer and author, who began writing in 1937 for DC
COMICS, including SUPERMAN. Arguably his most important work was for
COMICS: though it is claimed that he published at least 160 books under
various names, this pales beside his 4000 or more comic-book stories; he
created The Flash as well as the first SUPERHERO team, the Justice Society
of America, in 1940. In the 1960s he was one of those responsible for
reviving many of the superheroes from the 1940s and also created new
characters, like The Atom and Adam Strange. He began publishing sf/fantasy
in non-graphic form with "The Weirds of the Woodcarver" for Weird Tales in
1944. He used several pseudonyms at this time, including Jefferson Cooper,
Jeffrey Gardner and James Kendricks, though not for sf. He was an active
contributor to Planet Stories from 1945, and soon established a reputation
for historical romances like The Borgia Blade (1953), not beginning to
publish sf novels, either under his own name or under his later pseudonyms
Rod Gray, Simon Majors and Bart Somers, until Five Weeks in a Balloon* **
(1962), which novelizes the film of the Jules VERNE novel. GFF's first sf
novel proper is Escape Across the Cosmos (1964), in which a man fights a
menace from another DIMENSION; it was plagiarized as Titans of the
Universe in various 1978 editions, variously as by Brian James Royal,
James Harvey and Moonchild. His best is probably The Arsenal of Miracles
(1964 dos), which combines SPACE OPERA, GALACTIC EMPIRES and a
romantically conceived hero who prefigures the interest in HEROIC FANTASY
which dominated GFF's later output. His sf series are the two fantasy-like
Alan Morgan adventures - Warrior of Llarn (1964) and Thief of Llarn (1966)
- and, as by Bart Somers, the Commander Craig space operas: Beyond the
Black Enigma (1965) and Abandon Galaxy! (1967). GFF was an efficient
storyteller with no visible pretensions to significance or thematic
originality. [JC/PN]Other works: The Hunter out of Time (1965); The Druid
Stone (1967), as by Simon Majors; the Kothar series of heroic-fantasy
novels, comprising Kothar - Barbarian Swordsman (coll of linked stories
1969), Kothar of the Magic Sword! (1969), Kothar and the Demon Queen
(1969), Kothar and the Conjuror's Curse (1970) and Kothar and the Wizard
Slayer (1970); Conehead (1973); the Kyrik heroic-fantasy series,
comprising Kyrik: Warlock Warrior (1975), Kyrik Fights the Demon World
(1975), Kyrik and the Wizard's Sword (1976) and Kyrik and the Lost Queen
(1976); Carty (1977).As Rod Gray (house name): Of the soft-porn Lady from

L.U.S.T. sequence, those by GFF and of some sf interest are The Poisoned
Pussy (1969), Laid in the Future (1969), Blow my Mind (1970) and The
Copulation Explosion (1970).
FOX, SAMUEL MIDDLETON
(1856-1941) UK writer whose sf novel, Our Own Pompeii: A Romance of
Tomorrow (1887), a fairly mild-mannered SATIRE of high society, features a
pleasure city on the Riviera which proves too expensive to run. [JC]
FPCI
FANTASY PUBLISHING COMPANY INC.
F.P.1 ANTWORTET NICHT
Film (1932). UFA. Dir Karl Hartl, starring Hans Albers, Sybille Schmitz,
Paul Hartmann, Peter Lorre. Screenplay Walter Reisch, Kurt SIODMAK, based
on F.P.1 Antwortet Nicht (1932) by Siodmak. 111 mins. B/w.F.P.1 has been
described as being in the tradition of METROPOLIS (1926) and Die FRAU IM
MOND (1929), but Karl Hartl was no Fritz LANG. It is a slow-moving film
about the construction of a giant floating runway (Flugzeug Platform 1) to
be moored in mid-Atlantic for refuelling transatlantic flights, but is
actually more concerned with a tedious love triangle. The story is about
an intrepid aviator who sees flight as a near-mystical experience, and
about sabotage and noble renunciations - all pulp materials, but with none
of the slickness or verve of similar Hollywood films of the period. At
great expense a flying platform was actually built for the film, on the
island of Oie. The same production team made GOLD (1934).An English
version ( FP1 DOESN'T ANSWER) and a French one, starring Charles Boyer,
were made of F.P.1 at the same time as the German version. [JB/PN]
F.P.1 DOESN'T ANSWER
Film (1932). UFA. Technical credits as for FP1 ANTWORTET NICHT, but
starring Conrad Veidt, Jill Esmond and Leslie Fenton. 90 mins. B/w.This is
the shorter English-language version of the German film, and was shot at
the same time. The acting is better than in the German version. [PN]
FRAME, JANET (PATTERSON)
(1924- ) New Zealand writer , some of whose stories - especially those
assembled in Snowman, Snowman: Fables and Fantasies (coll 1963 US) and You
Are Entering the Human Heart (coll 1983) - are fantasy. The most intense
of her several novels explore the world through the telling perceptions of
protagonists categorized as psychiatrically disturbed, situations
frequently described in terms that utilize the languages of the fantastic.
Intensive Care (1970 US) is told in part through the eyes of a young woman
defined as mentally deficient in a post- HOLOCAUST world where those so
described are killed after being experimented upon. The Carpathians (1988
UK) is a fantasy set in an imaginary country. [JC]
FRANCE
The history of France's relationship with sf is one of long flirtation,
marked through the centuries by episodic outbursts of passion and, in
recent times, by an increasing shift from authorship to readership, from
the active to the passive role, as more and more people become avid
consumers of the US/UK sf tradition. A few remarkable French writers of sf

have emerged, but, although the 1970s were an active period for French sf,
no truly indigenous school of writing has yet taken shape.A quest for
"great ancestors" in the corpus of French literature would be endless.
Many texts-some vintage classics, some long-forgotten oddities-show that
FANTASTIC VOYAGES, the search for UTOPIA, and speculation about other
worlds and alien forms of society were constant preoccupations. People
tend to overlook the fact that the last parts of Francois RABELAIS's
Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-64; trans 1653-94), especially L'isle
sonante ["The Ringing Island"] (1562), are clearly set in the future and
almost constitute an early style of SPACE OPERA with their processing of
foreign languages, customs and landscapes.One century later, interest in
the otherworldly asserted itself in works such as CYRANO DE BERGERAC's
Histoire comique contenant les etats et empires de la lune (1657; trans as
A Voyage to the Moon 1659) and Bernard le Bovyer de FONTENELLE's
Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes habites (1686; trans J. Glanvill as
The Plurality of Worlds 1929), but it is in the 18th century that we
encounter the most direct forerunner of sf in its modern sense, in the
form of the conte philosophique, or philosophical tale. Conditions were
then ideal for the emergence of something akin to sf: the Siecle des
Lumieres was one of universal curiosity, of philosophical audacity and
political revolution; it gave birth to all-encompassing spirits such as
that of Denis Diderot (1713-1784) and saw the writing of the Encyclopedie
(1751-2), which merged the two aspects of culture, literary and
scientific, the divorce of which would be one of the main sources of the
decline of French sf in our time.The conventions of the conte
philosophique - which generally takes the shape of a fantastic voyage are predecessors to those of sf: the voyage to the far island symbolizes
what we now imagine in interplanetary travel, and the islanders themselves
stand for what are now aliens, while the study of their civilizations
serves as a mirror/criticism of our institutions. Conversely, the satire
of French (= European) society as seen through foreign eyes was a device
that had already been used by Charles Montesquieu (1689-1755) in his
Lettres persanes ["Persian Letters"] (1721).The genre could be illustrated
by numerous stories (Pierre VERSINS states that "at the beginning of the
18th century, at least one speculative work was published each year"), but
among its landmarks were VOLTAIRE's Micromegas (Berlin 1750; France 1752),
Louis-Sebastien MERCIER's L'an deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771;
trans as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred 1772), RESTIF DE LA
BRETONNE's La decouverte australe ["The Southern-Hemisphere Discovery"]
(1781) and Giacomo CASANOVA di Seingalt's Isocameron (1788), an early
story of travel to the centre of the Earth. Such was the vogue of
speculation that in 1787 a publisher started a list of Voyages imaginaires
which ran to 36 volumes and may be considered the first sf series
ever.Perhaps the most significant sf figure of the early 19th century was
Felix Bodin, whose Le Roman de l'avenir ["The Romance of the Future"]
(1834) consists of a long theoretical discussion of the nature of
futuristic fiction, this being a preface to a fragmentary or unfinished
novel about a future, in which mechanized warfare appears. As Paul K.
ALKON demonstrates in Origins of Futuristic Fiction (1987), Bodin's book
presents an aesthetic which - significantly for sf - refers not only to a
genre which takes the future as its subject but to one that itself will

exist only in the future. The remainder of the 19th century would seem to
be entirely dominated by the formidable silhouette of Jules VERNE, but it
was a very active period in other respects too, carrying on the elan of
the preceding era. Scientific achievements and the Industrial Revolution
gave birth to popular novels in the same way that philosophical turmoil
had produced its share of contes. Verne himself stands apart because he
was the first writer to be systematic about it and build his whole work
according to a vast design, as described by his publisher Hetzel in 1867:
"His aim is to sum up all knowledge gathered by modern science in the
fields of geography, geology, physics, astronomy, and to remake, in his
own attractive and picturesque way, the history of our Universe." From
then to his death in 1905, Verne gave Hetzel the 64 books which make up
his Voyages extraordinaires, subtitled "Voyages dans les mondes connus et
inconnus" ["Voyages into the Known and Unknown Worlds"]. Jacques Van Herp
(1923- ), who himself wrote a large number of works of CHILDREN'S SF as
Michel Jansen, has argued that the huge success Verne enjoyed, basically
among adolescents, drove serious critics and historians away from him, so
that - in France anyway - one may trace back to Verne the lame academic
quarrel about whether sf, or "anticipation", is high literature or not.
Indeed, that question had never been raised before; it took a bourgeois
system of education (see below) to institute class-struggle among books.
Verne's work went the way of Robinson Crusoe or Treasure Island: that of a
sort of universal reputation which does not preclude underestimation or
misunderstanding. Until recently, Verne was ignored by the universities,
but fascinated such diverse minds as those of Raymond Roussel (who called
him "le plus grand genie litteraire de tous les siecles" ["the greatest
literary genius of all time"]), Michel BUTOR and Michel Foucault
(1926-1984).Among Verne's contemporaries in the field, one should at least
mention the astronomer Camille FLAMMARION and his Recits de l'infini
(1872; trans as Stories of Infinity: Lumen - History of a Comet in
Infinity 1874) and the novelist cum draftsman Albert ROBIDA, who was no
less prolific than Verne, whom he parodied in his Voyages tres
extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul (1879; for book publication ROBIDA)
which purportedly took their hero "into all the countries known and even
unknown to Mr Jules Verne". Robida proved himself a visionary as well as a
humorist in his Le vingtieme siecle ["The Twentieth Century"] (1882), La
vie electrique ["The Electric Life"] (1883) and "La guerre au vingtieme
siecle" ["War in the 20th Century"] (La caricature 1883).By the turn of
the century, however, the one name Verne had to contend with was that of
J.H. ROSNY aine, a writer who possibly deserves as much consideration. The
Rosnys, two brothers of Belgian extraction, started together a writing
career that was eventually to win them seats in the Academie Goncourt, but
we are concerned only with the numerous stories and the 17 novels of Rosny
aine (the elder brother), which run from the prehistoric, such as La
guerre du feu ["The War of Fire"] (1909), through the cataclysmic La mort
de la terre ["Death of the Earth"] (1910) to the futuristic Les
navigateurs de l'infini ["Navigators of the Infinite"] (1925). Rosny aine
consistently brought to the field, besides a solid scientific culture, a
breadth of vision at times worthy of Olaf STAPLEDON.The period ranging
from the 1880s to the 1930s, largely predating the US boom of the 1920s,
was the true golden age of French sf: we might call it France's pulp era.

Not that there ever existed any specific sf magazines, but
wide-circulation periodicals such as Journal des voyages and La science
illustree - and, later, Je sais tout, L'Intrepide and the very important
Sciences et voyages - regularly ran stories and serialized novels of
"anticipation". Sf was thus lent a degree of respectability by being
introduced as an extension of travel and adventure stories. In the general
title given to his work, Jules Verne had proceeded similarly from "known"
to "unknown" worlds.Apart from isolated works by nonspecialists such as
L'Eve future (1886; trans as The Eve of the Future 1981 US; new trans as
Tomorrow's Eve 1982 US) by VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM, L'ile des pingouins
(1908; trans as Penguin Island 1909) by Anatole FRANCE and Le Napus, fleau
de l'an 2227 ["The 'Disappearance': Scourge of the Year 2227"] (1927) by
Leon Daudet (1868-1942), this period gave birth to a host of popular
writers: Paul d'Ivoi, Louis BOUSSENARD, then Gustave Le Rouge, Jean de La
Hire, Andre Couvreur, Jose Moselli, Rene Thevenin, etc. All were not of
equal worth, but three names are outstanding: Maurice RENARD, author of
the amazing Le docteur Lerne (1908; trans as New Bodies for Old 1923),
which he dedicated to H.G. WELLS; Jacques SPITZ, whose best novel was
L'oeil du purgatoire ["The Eye of Purgatory"] (1945) and whose earlier
L'agonie du globe (1935; trans as Save the Earth 1936) was given a UK
edition; and Regis Messac (1893-1943), whose Quinzinzinzili (1935) and La
cite des asphyxies ["City of the Suffocated"] (1934) exhibit a sinister
mood and grim humour that deserve to gain him a new audience today.WWII
put an end to this thriving period, and during the 1940s only one writer
of note appeared: Rene BARJAVEL, with Ravage (1943; trans as Ashes, Ashes
1967) and Le voyageur imprudent (1944; trans as Future Times Three 1971).
At the end of WWII two factors were to bear heavily on the future of sf in
France. The first was the growing separation, at school, in the
universities and in all thinking circles, between les litteraires and les
scientifiques. This made for a lack of curiosity on the part of aspiring
novelists about science and its possible effects on the shapes of our
lives, and drove many talents away from the genre, which was definitely
viewed as teenager-fodder. France had, as it were, ceased to dream about
its own future - and about the future generally. Second, whatever interest
in these matters existed was satisfied from another source, the USA. In
the years following WWII the French public discovered all at once jazz, US
films, thrillers and the US GOLDEN AGE OF SF. One key personality of the
period was Boris VIAN, novelist, songwriter, film buff and jazz musician,
who translated both Raymond Chandler and A.E. VAN VOGT. This was the time
of the creation of Le club des savanturiers by Michel Pilotin, Vian,
Raymond Queneau and Audiberti. In 1951, Queneau wrote an introductory
essay in Critique: "Un nouveau genre litteraire: les sciences-fictions"
["A New Literary Genre: SF"], followed two years later by Michel Butor,
with "La crise de croissance de la science-fiction" (1953 Cahiers du Sud;
trans as "SF: The Crisis of its Growth", Partisan Review 1967; reprinted
in SF: The Other Side of Realism [anth 1971] ed T. CLARESON).Sf was again
fashionable but mainly in translated form. Between 1951 and 1964, the
Rayon fantastique series published 119 titles, mostly US; it was followed
in 1954 by Presence du Futur, which still exists today. By the end of the
decade some French names were appearing on the list of the former (Francis
Carsac [pseudonym of Francois Bordes (1919-1977)], Philippe CURVAL and

Albert Higon, pseudonym of Michel Jeury [1934- ]) and the latter (Jacques
STERNBERG, Jean Hougron), but for the most part French authors were
published, often under pseudonyms, in the less prestigious Fleuve noir
series, created in 1951. The best of these were Stefan WUL, B.R. Bruss
(Roger Blondel), Kurt Steiner (Andre Ruellan) and Gilles d'Argyre (Gerard
KLEIN).In 1953 Editions Opta launched the French editions of Gal and FSF,
Galaxie and Fiction, whose contents differ notably from those of their US
models. These two would remain for many years the principal outlet for US
stories and a springboard for new French talents, including critics. But
such were few and far between. The initial impetus given by the discovery
of US sf in the 1950s slowed down during the following decade. One
magazine which devoted more space to indigenous authors, Satellite, had a
brief life. Among the new writers, Michel Demuth, Alain Doremieux and
Gerard Klein were soon absorbed by editorial responsibilities and their
output consequently became irregular.The most personal voice during this
period and the succeeding years has been that of Philippe Curval who, from
Le ressac de l'espace ["The Breakers of Space"] (1962) through Cette chere
humanite ["This Dear Humanity"] (1976), has consistently maintained a high
standard while never imitating the US model. Beside him we should again
mention Michel Jeury, who resumed writing (under his own name) with Le
temps incertain (1973; trans Maxim Jakubowski as Chronolysis 1980 US), and
Daniel Drode (1932-1984), whose only novel was Surface de la planete
["Surface of the Planet"] (1959). Mainstream writers occasionally tackled
sf: Pierre BOULLE with La planete des singes (1963; trans as Planet of the
Apes 1963; vt Monkey Planet UK); Robert MERLE with Un animal doue de
raison (1967; trans as The Day of the Dolphin 1969) and Malevil (1972;
trans 1974); and Claude Ollier, an adept of the nouveau roman, with La vie
sur Epsilon ["Life on Epsilon"] (1972).In the 1970s the situation
underwent new changes, once more due to a definite influence: that of the
UK NEW WAVE and in particular post- NEW-WORLDS sf. J.G. BALLARD's later
work, along with that of such US writers as Thomas M. DISCH, Harlan
ELLISON, Norman SPINRAD and, above all, Philip K. DICK, had a tremendous
impact on the new generation of readers who lived through the 1968 student
uprising and saw the possibilities of making powerful political statements
in speculative form. Several young authors who began writing in the
mid-1960s (Daniel WALTHER, Jean-Pierre Andrevon, Jean-Pierre Hubert)
readily took that route, and were followed by a batch of newcomers, with
Dominique Douay, Pierre Pelot and Philippe Goy the best among
them.Nevertheless, the effervescence of the late 1970s did not survive
into the 1980s. Lack of enthusiasm on the part of the public?
Overabundance of books? Difficulties linked to general publishing
problems? It was the beginning of a critical period in which the number of
sf imprints, about 40 during the late 1970s, diminished to a half-dozen.
The so-called "New French SF", sometimes inordinately politicized, was the
first victim of this crisis. Partly because of its excesses, readers and
editors grew weary of French sf authors, who then tried to explore
different paths and attract recognition through other means. Some, mostly
newcomers, reacted by turning to a form-oriented sf - that is, to a
greater preoccupation with style, poetry and experimental writing
(Emmanuel Jouanne, Antoine Volodine) - to the point where they sometimes
forgot the true nature of the genre. Others were tempted into expressing

their personal universes, often powerfully fantastic in kind. Among these
were Jean-Marc Ligny, Jacques Barberi, Francis Berthelot and particularly
Serge Brussolo who, in less than 10 years, made his mark with some 40
novels - including such definite masterpieces as Aussi lourd que le vent
["As Heavy as the Wind"] (1981), Carnaval de fer ["Iron Carnival"] (1983)
and La nuit du bombardier ["Night of the Bomber"] (1989) - and became the
most original and most popular sf writer of his generation. Finally, a
third category of authors put their craft into the service of a
"neo-classical" sf which invited the reader to reflect upon contemporary
issues ( ECOLOGY, the media, COMPUTERS, genetics, cultural intermingling)
though without giving up the traditional lures of exoticism and adventure.
They include G.-J. Arnaud and his long series La compagnie des glaces
["The Ice Company"], which has run since 1981, Bernard Simonay with Phenix
(1986) and Joel Houssin with Les Vautours ["The Vultures"] (1986) and
Argentine (1989), all books which have found a large audience and won
awards.Today French sf shows a paradoxical face: it includes many talented
writers, usually well detached from the UK-US influence, whether
long-established authors or newcomers to the genre such as Richard Canal,
Pierre Stolze, Raymond Milesi and Colette Fayard. But, on the other hand,
the dwindling of publishing imprints, magazines and columns - or their
outright disappearance (Fiction ceased in 1989) - gives the unfortunate
impression that the domain is definitely in peril. Thus, the best French
authors - notably those with a long career behind them - are now inclined
to abandon sf and turn to horror ( HORROR IN SF) which, courtesy of
Stephen KING, has become increasingly popular (Andrevon, Brussolo), or to
mainstream literature (Sternberg, Jeury, Pelot, Andrevon, Curval,
Volodine), or to screenplays (Ruellan, Pelot, Houssin), a far more
lucrative field.One would think that the existence of an active,
passionate FANDOM - thanks to which the French sf milieu has been holding
its own CONVENTIONS since 1974 - would have given a boost to the national
production, but such is not the case. French fandom remains self-centred,
and is more devoted to its own byzantine arguments than to the task of
working efficiently to enlarge sf's public recognition. In other words,
fans complain about their preferred literature being locked up in a
ghetto, but never do anything really helpful to change that. Only a
handful of critics - sometimes translators, editors or writers themselves
(Curval, Jeury, Klein) - have tried and are still trying to publish in
mainstream magazines or newspapers regular columns or interviews meant to
defend and exemplify sf (French or not) to the general public, who are
often ill informed about the genre. [RL/JCh]Further reading: Encyclopedie
de l'utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science-fiction (1972
Switzerland) by Pierre Versins; Histoire de la science-fiction moderne
(1973) by Jacques SADOUL; Panorama de la science-fiction (1973 Belgium) by
Jacques Van Herp; the preface by Gerard KLEIN to Sur l'autre face du monde
?
Valerie; Malaise dans la science-fiction (1977) by Klein; also useful are
4 anthologies of French sf short stories, Les Mondes francs, L'Hexagone
hallucine, La Frontiere eclatee and Les Mosaiques du temps (1988-90) ed
Klein, Ellen Herzfeld and Dominique Martel.
FRANCE, ANATOLE

Working name of Anatole-Francois Thibault (1844-1924), French writer
active from the early 1860s until his death. His essayistic "pagan"
SATIRES seem perhaps less relevant now than formerly, their amused
rationality failing to bite with sufficient savagery into targets like
official religion and sexual prudery. Of sf interest are Sur la pierre
blanche (1905; trans Charles E. Roche as The White Stone 1910), in which a
group of intellectuals prognosticates a White Peril (the Yellow races
being at risk) and the rise of Socialism; and L'ile des pingouins (1908;
trans A.W. Evans as Penguin Island 1909 UK), in which humanity's
evolutionary course is allegorized satirically through the transformation
into humans - after they have been baptised in error - of a race of
penguins, who repeat human history. In La revolte des anges (1914; trans
Mrs Wilfrid Jackson as The Revolt of the Angels 1914 UK), a fantasy and
AF's finest novel, an angel - corrupted by the world of books - realizes
that his fallen brethren were in the right. AF won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1921. [JC]Other works: Thais (1890; trans, almost certainly
by Charles Carrington, 1901 France); L'Etui de Nacre (coll 1892; trans
Henry Pene du Bois as Tales from a Mother-of-Pearl Casket 1896 US; vt
Mother of Pearl 1908 UK); Le Puits de Sainte Clare (coll 1895; trans,
almost certainly by Charles Carrington, as The Well of St Clare 1903
France); Honey-Bee (trans Mrs John Lane 1911 UK), a tale first published
with other fantasies in Balthazar (coll 1889; trans Mrs John Lane 1909
UK); Les Sept Femmes de la Barbe-Bleu, et autres contes merveilleux (coll
1909; trans Mrs D.B. Stewart as The Seven Wives of Bluebeard, and Other
Marvellous Tales 1920 UK).See also: ECONOMICS; FRANCE; UTOPIAS.
FRANCES, STEPHEN (DANIEL)
(1917-1989) UK publisher and pulp writer who lived in Spain from the
early 1950s. In the mid-1940s he founded his own publishing company,
Pendulum Publications, which released a variety of genre fiction,
including sf. The editor of his sf line, Frank ARNOLD, introduced SDF to
John CARNELL, a meeting that led to the birth of NEW WORLDS in 1946; but
after only 3 issues the company was sold (and liquidated).SDF then founded
his own self-named company. For it he penned a series of fast-moving
US-style thrillers as by Hank JANSON; they achieved remarkable success at
the time. Also for it he created the house name Astron DEL MARTIA (which
see), but soon sold the name to Gaywood Press to help finance his move to
Spain. Later he wrote three sf novels as by Hank Janson: The Unseen
Assassin (1953), a routine tale in which an alien disease threatens to
wipe out humanity, Tomorrow and a Day (1955), a stronger post- HOLOCAUST
tale, and One Against Time (1956 as by Janson; 1969 as by Del Martia), a
TIME-TRAVEL tale pitting a mathematician against the World Council from a
future threatened by his genius. SDF's later novel, The Disorientated Man
(1966; vt Scream and Scream Again 1967 US) as by Peter SAXON, a madSCIENTIST tale filmed in 1969 as SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN, was heavily
revised by W. Howard BAKER. [SH]About the author: The Trials of Hank
Janson (1991) by Stephen HOLLAND.
FRANCHISE
SHARECROP.
FRANCIS, RICHARD H.

Working name of UK author and academic Richard Francis (1945- ), who
added a fictitious "H" to distinguish himself from Dick Francis, the
thriller writer. RHF's first novel, Blackpool Vanishes (1979), tells the
quirky, extremely English story of what happens when microscopic ALIENS
kidnap the town of Blackpool. In Whispering Gallery (1984) the discovery
of a "missing link" between bacteria and viruses becomes complicated when
it turns out that the new strain can serve - defectively - as a weapon,
and - all too efficiently - as a fuel.Swansong (1986) is a mildly
fantastic SATIRE on Margaret Thatcher's UK, the Falklands War and the
brutally unexpected disasters of both personal and political history.
[NT]See also: UFOS.
FRANK, PAT (HARRY HART)
(1907-1964) US journalist and author; a government official during WWII,
he later served with the UN. Though his three sf novels are well known
within the field, PF was not generally identified as an sf author. His
first novel, Mr Adam (1946), exploits the fears of contamination felt in
the USA after Hiroshima. All men but one are sterilized by a nuclear
DISASTER; the experiences of the sole fertile male are rather feebly
rendered as comical, providing grounds for a SATIRE on government
procedures. Forbidden Area (1956; vt Seven Days to Never 1957 UK) also
deals - more grimly - with the atomic question, in a thriller plot
involving sabotage and near- HOLOCAUST. In his most famous novel, Alas,
Babylon (1959), the disaster is again nuclear, but this time it is not
averted. In a part of Florida that has survived the holocaust, the
inhabitants of a small town manage, perhaps rather implausibly, to cope (
PASTORAL; ROBINSONADE) and modestly to flourish; domestic verisimilitude
and apocalypse mingle here attractively, and the book was both made into a
play and televised. PF's work draws its clear emotional force from the
deep fears of nuclear devastation many Americans suffered, with some
cause, during the 1950s. [JC]
FRANKAU, GILBERT
(1884-1952) UK writer known mainly for his work outside the sf field,
most notably his Byronesque verse novel One of Us (1912) and dozens of
popular romances. The Seeds of Enchantment (1921) is a lost-race ( LOST
WORLDS) fantasy which features contrasting UTOPIAS in the wilds of
Indochina. His posthumous sf novel, Unborn Tomorrow: A Last Story (1953),
depicts a 50th-century Roman Catholic world where a beam which destroys
all explosives has enforced a happy return to a pre-industrial lifestyle.
[JC]Other work: Son of the Morning (1949).
FRANKE, HERBERT W(ERNER)
(1927- ) Austrian-born writer and scientist who, after receiving a
doctorate in Vienna in 1950, moved to Munich, where he taught cybernetic
aesthetics at the University of Munich. After publishing considerable
nonfiction in the 1950s, mostly on either speleology or computer graphics,
he also began publishing sf, at first speculative short stories like those
assembled in Der grune Komet ["The Green Comet"] (coll 1960), Fahrt zum
Licht: Utopische Kurzgeschichten ["Journey to Light: Utopian Short
Stories"] (coll 1963), Einsteins Erben ["Einstein's Heirs"] (coll 1972)
and Zarathustra kehrt zuruck ["Zarathustra Returns"] (coll 1977). He has

also published several novels beginning with Das Gedankennetz (1961; trans
Christine Priest as The Mind Net 1974 US). Der Orchideenkafig (1961; trans
Christine Priest as The Orchid Cage 1973 US) complexly depicts, in HWF's
typically speculative, somewhat dry manner, the profound transformative
effects of a mysterious planet on its human explorers. Zone Null (1970;
trans 1974 US) sets up between a future Free World and an apparently
defeated and deserted Zone Null a metaphysical questioning of the true
aims of society and of the intermingled values of both opposed sides. In
Transpluto (1982), which is typical of his later work, a mysterious planet
hornswoggles a team of Earthmen, keeping them from leaving the Solar
System. HWF is one of the first contemporary German sf writers whose work
ranks with that in English and other European languages. [JC]Other works:
Die Glasfalle ["The Glass Trap"] (1961); Die Stahlwuste ["The Steel
Desert"] (1962); Planet der Verlorenen ["Planet of the Lost"] (1963) as by
Sergius Both; Der Elfenbeinturm ["The Ivory Tower"] (1965); Ypsilon Minus
(1976); Ein Kyborg namens Joe ["A Cyborg Named Joe"] (coll 1978); Sirius
Transit (1979) as by Sergius Both;Schule fur Ubermenschen ["School for
Supermen"] (1980); Paradies 3000 ["Paradise 3000"] (coll1981); Keine Spur
vom Leben ["No Trace of Life"] (coll 1982), collecting radio plays; Die
Kalte des Weltraums ["The Coldness of Space"] (1982); Tod eines
Unsterblichen ["Death of an Immortal"] (1982); Endzeit ["End of Time"]
(1985); Der Atem der Sonne ["The Breath of the Sun"] (1986); Zentrum der
Milchstrasse ["The Centre of the Milky Way"] (1990); Spiegel der Gedanken
["Mirror of Thought"] (coll 1990).See also: AUSTRIA; GERMANY.
FRANKENHEIMER, JOHN
(1930- ) US film director. A graduate of the 1950s school of live tv
drama, JF first attracted attention as a film-maker with melodramas
centred on youth and social issues: The Young Stranger (1956), The Young
Savages (1961), All Fall Down (1961) and The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962).
However, in his direction of The MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962), Seven Days
in May (1964) and SECONDS (1966), all based on successful novels, JF
revealed a distinctive fantastic vision, rooted in the realities of the
USA of the 1950s and 1960s, which would be a great influence on the 1970s
run of post-Watergate conspiracy movies, like Alan J. Pakula's The
Parallax View (1974) and William Richert's Winter Kills (1979). Seven Days
in May, in which the USA is threatened by a military coup, and The
Manchurian Candidate are political fantasies focusing on the
precariousness of the presidency, while Seconds, one of the scariest films
of the 1960s, is a nightmare about rejuvenation. These exercises in unease
are confidently shot in black-and-white with the Expressionist imagination
of a top-drawer TWILIGHT ZONE episode, and feature a brilliant oddball
casting of his stars. JF's films at this stage are a vision of a
grey-suited corporate USA gone wrong, with recurrent themes of
brainwashing, surveillance, assassination and Kafkaesque bureaucracies,
many of which returned in his still-underrated comic-book gangster fantasy
99 ? vt Call Harry Crown) and the large-scale
terrorist thriller Black Sunday (1977). He had a commercial success with
The French Connection II (1975), but his return to sf with PROPHECY
(1979), a hokey, expensive MONSTER MOVIE, was a major disappointment, and
his more recent films have tended to be bland adaptations of best-selling

thrillers. [KN]See also: CINEMA; PARANOIA.
FRANKENSTEIN
Film (1931). Universal. Dir James Whale, starring Boris Karloff, Colin
Clive, Mae Clarke, Edward van Sloan, Dwight Frye. Screenplay Garrett Fort,
Robert Florey, Francis Edward Faragoh, based on an adaptation by Florey
and John L. Balderston of the play by Peggy Webling, based in turn on
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary SHELLEY. 71 mins.
B/w.This remains the most famous of the Frankenstein films, although it
was not the first. (The Edison Company made a 16min version in 1910; it
was dir J. Searle Dawley and starred Charles Ogle as the Monster. A second
version, also US, was the 70min Life without Soul in 1915, dir Joseph W.
Smiley.) Dr Frankenstein is a SCIENTIST who builds an artificial man using
parts from stolen bodies. He succeeds, with the aid of an electrical
storm, in bringing the creature to life but, because his assistant has
provided the brain of a criminal rather than that of a "normal" man (a
clumsy plot device which has nothing to do with Shelley's novel), the
creation proves difficult to control. Eventually the FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER
escapes, accidentally kills a small girl, and is pursued and apparently
slain by angry villagers (originally the Monster killed Frankenstein, too,
but the studio substituted a happy ending).The film remains a semi-classic
today. With his atmospheric lighting, smooth tracking shots and numerous
low-angle shots that were never obtrusive but made effective use of the
high-ceilinged sets - particularly Frankenstein's laboratory - Whale
succeeded in making a HORROR film of some grandeur, with an undertone of
ironic humour. Much of the credit must go to Karloff for his fine
(unspeaking) performance as the pathetic Monster, considerably helped by
Jack Pierce's famous make-up; Karloff's success here doomed him to horror
roles for the rest of his life.There have been numerous sequels and
remakes. The sequel BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), also dir Whale, is the
best film he ever made. Other, increasingly awful, sequels from Universal
were Son of Frankenstein (1939), Ghost of Frankenstein (1942),
Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943), House of Frankenstein (1945) and
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). In 1957 the UK company
Hammer Films remade the original, calling it Curse of Frankenstein (vt
Birth of Frankenstein), and then made The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958),
The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), Frankenstein Created Woman (1966),
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) and The Horror of Frankenstein
(1970), ending with Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973). Five of
these were dir Terence Fisher, and nearly all featured Peter Cushing's
interestingly tense and upright performance as Baron von Frankenstein.
Andy Warhol produced in Italy a 3-D SPLATTER-MOVIE pornographic version
(remarkably tasteless on all counts) dir Paul Morrissey (or possibly an
uncredited Antonio Margheriti): Carne per Frankenstein (1973; vt Flesh for
Frankenstein; vt Andy Warhol's Frankenstein). A successful parody/homage
movie was Young Frankenstein (1974), dir Mel Brooks. Other versions of the
story, mostly exploitation films, were made in Italy and Spain. Two more
US titles are Frankenstein 1970 (1958), dir Howard W. Koch and starring an
ageing Boris Karloff, and Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965; vt
Mars Invades Puerto Rico), which is not about Frankenstein at all. There
are many more.An interesting attempt to recreate Mary Shelley's original

novel, including its finale in the Arctic (all previous films had changed
the story), is the 3-hour made-for-tv film Frankenstein: The True Story
(1973), Universal/NBC, dir Jack Smight, from a script by Christopher
Isherwood and Don Bachardy, starring James Mason, David McCallum and
Michael Sarrazin. It was theatrically released, cut to 123 mins. The
teleplay was published as Frankenstein: The True Story * (1973), by
Isherwood and Bachardy. FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND (1990) is based on the 1973
RECURSIVE SF book by Brian ALDISS, but it does incorporate much of
Shelley's original, including interesting Arctic scenes. Another tv movie
version, made for cable tv, and moderately true to the book, though not
very interestingly so, is Frankenstein (1993), 150 mins, dir David Wickes,
with Randy Quaid as the creature. By far the most distinguished of any
version from the last two decades of the 20th century is MARY SHELLEY'S
FRANKENSTEIN (1994), dir Kenneth Branagh, which is sensitive to the nature
of the original yet prepared to use somewhat more modern metaphors to
illuminate it, but even this is an uneven work.A book about versions of
the story is Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from Mary
Shelley to the Present (1990) by Steven Earl Forry. [JB/PN]See also:
GOTHIC SF; MONSTER MOVIES; SEX.
FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER
The term is in general use, not only in sf TERMINOLOGY but in common
parlance, to mean a MONSTER that ultimately turns and rends its
irresponsible creator. Note that in the original novel Frankenstein was
the name of the creator and not of the monster, though in popular usage it
is often assumed that the monster itself is Frankenstein. In critical
talk, Frankenstein is often equated with Prometheus and Dr Faustus, two
other legendary figures who were guilty of hubris in their quest for
knowledge, and struck down. [PN]See also: FRANKENSTEIN; HORROR IN SF;
MONSTER MOVIES; Mary SHELLEY.
FRANKENSTEIN: THE TRUE STORY
FRANKENSTEIN.
FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND
(vt Roger Corman's Frankenstein Unbound) Film (1990). Warner Brothers.
Dir Roger CORMAN, starring John Hurt, Raul Julia, Bridget Fonda, Nick
Brimble, Katherine Rabett, Jason Patric, Michael Hutchence. Screenplay
Corman, F.X. Feeney, based on Frankenstein Unbound (1973) by Brian W.
ALDISS. 85 mins. Colour.This philosophical (about the dangers of the
Promethean impulse) TIME-TRAVEL horror/fantasy was the first film directed
by Corman for 20 years. A 21st-century scientist (Hurt) is time-warped
into 19th-century Switzerland. On one side of Lake Geneva the
Byron/Shelley menage is living; on the other the plot of Mary SHELLEY's
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) is being played out. Hurt
gets involved with both sets of characters and winds up whisking MONSTER
and maker off to an ice-age future for a splattery plot resolution, laced
with conservative lectures about the evils of science. Some of the
plentiful laughs may be intended, given that Aldiss's playful novel is in
part a comedy, though Fonda is ridiculous as the dainty but promiscuous
Mary. There are some cheapskate effects, but Raul Julia is good as the mad
visionary; the angry-at-the-world FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER (Brimble) comes

with impressive details like scarred eyeballs; and the GOTHIC horror
set-pieces are directed with unselfconscious panache. [KN]
FRANKLIN, EDGAR
Working name used for his publications by US writer Edgar Franklin
Stearns (1879-1958), whose Mr Hawkins' Humorous Inventions (coll of linked
stories 1904), all reprinted from The ARGOSY , features the eponymous
inventor/scientist comically failing to make a series of devices, such as
the pumpless pump, work properly; the series continued to 1915 in various
of the Frank A. MUNSEY magazines. [JC]See also: HUMOUR.
FRANKLIN, H(OWARD) BRUCE
(1934- ) US critic, John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American
Studies at Rutgers. In 1961 HBF gave at Stanford one of the earliest
university courses in sf in the USA. In 1972 he was dismissed by Stanford
for giving speeches protesting the university's involvement in the Vietnam
War - a case well known to those interested in questions of academic
freedom. His Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth
Century (anth 1966; rev 1968; exp and rev 1978) has been one of the most
influential of sf ANTHOLOGIES, in drawing attention to the sheer volume of
19th-century sf. A later HBF anthology, containing sf about nuclear
weapons, is Countdown to Midnight (anth 1984). HBF's two other books about
sf are Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (1980) and War
Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (1988). The former
relates HEINLEIN's career to contemporary US history from a Marxist
perspective; the latter is a pungent and important study about the US
preoccupation with super- WEAPONS in fact and fiction, and the way in
which the fact has been influenced by the fiction. HBF has published many
other critical articles on sf and is among the genre's most respected
commentators. He received the PILGRIM AWARD in 1983. He has been a
consulting editor of SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES since its inception. [PN]See
also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; SF IN THE CLASSROOM; WAR.
FRANKOWSKI, LEO A.
(1943- ) US writer known principally for his ALTERNATE-WORLD series, the
Adventures of Conrad Stargard: The Cross-Time Engineer (1986), The
High-Tech Knight (1989), The Radiant Warrior (1989), The Flying Warlord
(1989) and Lord Conrad's Lady (1990), with further volumes projected. The
series features a Polish-US engineer, Stargard, who in the first volume is
transported to medieval Poland via TIME TRAVEL. He settles down quite
happily to the task of reshaping his native land into a country capable of
surviving the next perilous decades, being overseen all the while by the
time-travellers who have mistakenly conveyed him there. By changing the
technology of medieval Poland, Stargard is of course changing timelines in perfectly orthodox sf-adventure fashion - but the author's clear
indifference to the plotting rigours expected in tales of this sort
increasingly detracts from the flow of the story. Copernick's Rebellion
(1987) deals with GENETIC ENGINEERING in a NEAR-FUTURE Polish setting,
where LAF's inability to create women (though he is strong on breasts) is
seriously irritating. [JC]
FRANK READE LIBRARY

US DIME-NOVEL SF series, BEDSHEET size. 191 issues (#188-#191 are
reprints of #1-#4) 24 Sep 1892-8 Aug 1898, weekly to 8 June 1894 (#82),
biweekly from then on. Cost 5cents. Published by Frank Tousey, Publisher,
New York. (Partial reissue 1902-4, partial UK reprint.) All issues were
printed on very poor paper and seldom survive in good condition; the
1902-4 reissue, with coloured covers, is sometimes considered more
desirable than the first printing.This was the earliest serial publication
devoted solely to sf, with more issues than all of Hugo GERNSBACK's sf
magazines put together, each containing a single or a half story about
Frank Reade (4 stories) or Frank Reade, Jr. (179 stories). All but the
last were attributed to"NONAME" on their appearance in the FRL. About
one-quarter of the stories were reprints from other Tousey BOYS' PAPERS
(The Boys of New York, The Five Cent Wide Awake Library, Happy Days); the
remainder were originals. As a whole, they comprise the most significant
US dime-novel series, and in their exuberance (and stereotyped action),
their humour (and their racism), their inventiveness (and the merciless
repetition of similar inventions and WEAPONS), they represent the best and
worst of the tradition.It is impossible to attain final bibliographical
certainty about a series of this sort, but E.F. BLEILER's The Frank Reade
Library (omni 10 vols 1979-86), which reprints the entire sequence, casts
as much light as can ever be hoped for. It is not known, for instance, how
many authors wrote as "Noname", a house pseudonym used for mysteries and
Westerns as well as sf, though it is certain that the first Frank Reade
story - Frank Reade and his Steam Man of the Plains (1876 The Boys of New
York as by Harry Enton; 1892 as Frank Reade Library #12 as by "Noname") was by Harold Cohen (1854-1927), who normally wrote as Enton. The tale was
almost certainly commissioned by Frank Tousey in emulation of Edward S.
ELLIS's The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868). Three more Frank Reade
episodes followed (the first two written by Cohen), all involving
steam-driven TRANSPORTATION devices whose main use (it is one of the less
attractive features of the sequence, many of whose episodes were set in
the US West) seemed to be that of slaughtering large numbers of Native
Americans.In 1882, Frank Reade, Jr., son of Frank Reade, took over the
action, beginning with Frank Reade, Jr., and his Steam Wonder (1882 The
Boys of New York; 1893 as Frank Reade Libary #20). The popularity of these
stories presumably inspired Tousey to institute The Frank Reade Library
itself in 1892. The first 50 issues or so generally reprinted tales from
1880s Tousey magazines; the remaining issues, beginning 1893, were mostly
original titles. It is probable that most of the Frank Reade, Jr. stories
were written by Luis SENARENS, and en masse they suffered visibly from
this hugely prolific author's carelessness, cheap jingoism, racist
stereotyping and lackadaisical plotting. But, tedious or not, the sequence
managed to make use of most of the sf venues and devices available at the
close of the 19th century; in particular, airships and submarines and
various other means of TRANSPORTATION - which served simultaneously as
devastating weapons and means of near-magical travel ( EDISONADE) - almost
always featured prominently in the adventures of the indefatigable boy
inventor. Significant issues include #48, Frank Reade, Jr., Exploring a
River of Mystery (1890 Five Cent Wide Awake Library; 1893), not by
Senarens, which has fantastic geography and travels in Africa and is based
on Henry Stanley's books or newspaper dispatches, and #133: The Island in

the Air (1896), probably by Senarens, perhaps the first consideration of
Roraima (in British Guiana) as a LOST WORLD, almost certainly a source for
The Lost World (1912) by A. Conan DOYLE. More typical, however, is the
long episodic novel Frank Reade, Jr., and his Queen Clipper of the Clouds
(1889 The Boys of New York; 1893) by Senarens.The Frank Reade Library,
however, does not contain all the adventures of the inventive Reade
family. There are at least two uncollected stories about Frank Reade, Jr.
and one about Frank Reade (Sr.). The last, Franke Reade, the Inventor,
Chasing the James Boys with his Steam Team (1890), stands apart from the
series and is the only Frank Reade story not attributed to "Noname". The
third member of the Reade family, Frank Reade, III, stars in Young Frank
Reade and his Electric Air Ship (1899) and perhaps in other unlocated
stories. [EFB/JC]
FRASER, Sir RONALD (ARTHUR)
(1888-1974) UK writer and civil servant. Most of his work, like his first
novel, The Flying Draper (1924; rev 1931), utilizes fantasy or sf devices
- in the initial case self-levitation - to create allegorical or
philosophical arguments; the unmistakably Wellsian draper, for instance,
finds that the ability to fly enforces "higher" thoughts. In Flower
Phantoms (1926) an orchid responds to the protagonist's nubility by
showing her the secrets of sex. In Beetle's Career (1951), which is sf, a
super-weapon is shown to have beneficial side-effects. In the Venus
quartet - A Visit from Venus (1958), Jupiter in the Chair (1958), Trout's
Testament (1960) and City of the Sun (1961) - various inhabitants of the
Solar System confer about a number of mildly pressing topics. In an
elegant, generally painless manner, RF concentrated throughout his career
on novels of controlled wit, mild SATIRE and admissible sentiment; only
occasionally would these entertainments move into the darker regions.
[JC]Other works: Landscape with Figures (1925), an oriental fantasy; Miss
Lucifer (1939); The Fiery Gate (1943); Sun in Scorpio (1949); A Work of
Imagination: (The Pen - the Brush - the Well) (1974), a novel of
occultism.See also: PSYCHOLOGY.
FRATZ, D(ONALD) DOUGLAS
(1952- ) US editor who founded the energetic sf news and reviews journal
THRUST in 1973, renaming it Quantum with #36 (1990), and remaining its
editor and (from #5) its publisher until the double issue #43/44, when he
voluntarily terminated the journal by merging it with SCIENCE FICTION EYE.
[JC]
FRAU IM MOND, DIE
(vt By Rocket to the Moon; vt The Girl in the Moon; vt The Woman in the
Moon) Film (1929). UFA. Dir Fritz LANG, starring Gerda Maurus, Willy
Fritsch, Gustav von Wangenheim, Fritz Rasp, Klaus Pohl. Screenplay Lang,
Thea VON HARBOU, based on Frau im Mond (1928; trans as The Girl in the
Moon 1930 UK; cut vt The Rocket to the Moon 1930 US) by von Harbou. 156
mins, cut to 107 mins, cut to 97 mins. B/w.After the success of
METROPOLIS, Fritz Lang's next sf film was a disappointment. Overlong (in
its original form) and melodramatic, it concerns an ill matched group of
people travelling to a MOON which seems little different from the Swiss
Alps, airlessness and low gravity being ignored: the explorers are able to

amble about picking up chunks of precious metal and jewels (the trip
having been arranged by industrialists who believe, correctly, that the
Moon is rich in gold). The build-up to the take-off, however, is much more
convincing; Lang used rocket experts Hermann Oberth (1894-1989) and Willy
LEY as technical advisers, and the model rocket they produced was
prophetic in its design - it was even constructed in two stages. The
blast-off itself was also impressive, with good camera-work by Oskar
Fischinger and effects by Konstantin Tschetwerikoff. Later the Nazis
withdrew the film from distribution and destroyed the rocket model, afraid
that its accuracy would give away secrets about their own development of
military ROCKETS. [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA; GERMANY.
FRAYN, MICHAEL
(1933- ) UK novelist, journalist and playwright, best known for such work
outside the sf field as the novel Towards the End of the Morning (1967; vt
Against Entropy 1967 US), which despite its vt is not sf. The Tin Men
(1965) is a SATIRE on the computerization of human consciousness. A Very
Private Life (1968) describes a sanitized Earth with mankind divided into
those who live inside germ-free enclaves and those who live outdoors; some
ambivalence is expressed throughout as to whether what is being described
is a DYSTOPIA or simply a mise en scene: MF lacks, in other words, the
ready animus so often found in MAINSTREAM WRITERS when they appropriate sf
tropes - almost always imprudently - for satirical purposes. [JC]Other
works: Sweet Dreams (1973), an afterlife fantasy.See also: AUTOMATION;
LINGUISTICS.
FRAZER, SHAMUS
Pseudonym of UK writer James Ian Arbuthnot Frazer (1912-1966), whose
first sf novel, Acorned Hog (1933), satirizes a socialist NEAR FUTURE
United Kingdom, and whose second, A Shroud as Well as a Shirt (1935),
describes a succession of political conflicts which lead finally to a
world war. Blow, Blow Your Trumpets (1945) is a comic satirical fantasy
set in the time of Noah, and explains the necessity of the Flood. [JC]
FRAZETTA, FRANK
(1928- ) US illustrator, born Frank Frazzetta. A New Yorker, he studied
at the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts and was then active almost
exclusively in COMICS 1944-63, working on both BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH
CENTURY and FLASH GORDON and spending 9 years on Li'l Abner. By the time
he came to prominence as a comics illustrator, working on Creepy for
Warren Publications (from 1965) and later Vampirella, he had already been
introduced (in 1964) to paperback-book-cover ILLUSTRATION by his friend
Roy G. KRENKEL, first for ACE BOOKS and then for Lancer Books. He quickly
became known (like Krenkel) for HEROIC-FANTASY illustrations, especially
(from 1966) for his covers for Lancer's reissue of Robert E. HOWARD's
Conan books. Some of his work was sf. He won his only HUGO for Best
Professional Artist in 1966, but the lack of further Hugos did not imply a
diminution in popularity - on the contrary, although his following was
largely, presumably, among FANTASY rather than sf fans. Around this time
FF set up, with his wife, a company to sell posters he had designed; later
he also painted for a number of calendars. Portfolios produced at this
time included the two volumes entitled Burroughs Artist Frank Frazetta

(portfolio 1968 and 1973). A further breakthrough was the publication of
The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta (1975), which was followed by Frank
Frazetta Book Two (1977) and then Three (1978), Four (1980) and Five
(1985). Later volumes include Small Wonders: the Funny Animal Art of Frank
Frazetta (1992) and Illustrations Arcanum (1994). By the 1980s, however,
FF's fame extended well beyond narrow genres: his work was spread over
many commercial areas, and his output of specifically fantasy/sf
illustration became very small - although it did include the Death Dealer
novels by James R. Silke with FF, from 1988, based on an idea (and covers)
by FF, as well as covers for the L. RON HUBBARD PRESENTS WRITERS OF THE
FUTURE series of original anthologies. Film work by FF includes Fire and
Ice (1982), an animated SWORD-AND-SORCERY feature film, produced by Ralph
Bakshi and FF, partly designed by FF.FF's vigorous paintings of heavily
muscled heroes, often fighting, are notable for their dynamic sense of
movement (in contrast, perhaps, to work by Boris VALLEJO and other later,
smoother illustrators who are often referred to as having inherited FF's
mantle); he is famous, too, for his lush wide-hipped women, often chained
or menaced but equally often shown as threatening Amazon Queens. His work
has been accused of sexism and criticized as cheaply melodramatic, but at
its best it is undeniably spirited and powerful. In the heroic-fantasy
mode, FF has been one of the most influential illustrators of the century.
[PN]See also: SEX.
FRAZIER, ROBERT (ALEXANDER)
(1951- ) US editor and writer, most active as a poet, whose several
published volumes include Peregrine (coll 1978), Perception Barriers (coll
1987),Co-Orbital Moons (coll 1988) and, perhaps most notably, Chronicles
of the Mutant Rain Forest (coll 1992 chap) with Bruce BOSTON. He has
edited 2 vols of sf POETRY, The Rhysling Anthology: Best Science Fiction
Poetry of 1982 (anth 1983 chap) and Burning with a Vision: Poetry of
Science and the Fantastic (anth 1984), and is a past editor of Star*Line,
the newsletter of the SCIENCE FICTION POETRY ASSOCIATION. As an author of
fiction, he began relatively late, his first sf story, "Across Those
Endless Skies", appearing in In the Field of Fire (anth 1987) ed Jack DANN
and Jeanne Dann. He is perhaps most noted for the extended "The Summer
People", his contribution to Nantucket Slayrides (coll 1989), the other
stories in which are by Lucius SHEPARD. RF wrote the POETRY entry in this
encyclopedia. [JC]See also: ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; SF IN
THE CLASSROOM.
FREAS, (FRANK) KELLY
(1922- ) US illustrator, the most popular sf artist in the history of the
field; the list of his accomplishments is staggering. Since he entered the
field in 1950 he has painted hundreds of covers for 28 magazines, most
famously for ASF from 1953 (interior work also) but including also FSF,
Planet Stories and If, as well as for many book publishers, including ACE
BOOKS, GNOME PRESS, DAW BOOKS and all the covers for LASER BOOKS. The
gritty realism of his and Ed EMSHWILLER's work in the 1950s redefined sf
art during that period. He also painted many covers for Mad Magazine and
designed the astronauts' shoulder patch for the Skylab 1 mission. His art
has been collected in a portfolio from ADVENT: PUBLISHERS, Frank Kelly

Freas (portfolio 1957), and in 3 books, Frank Kelly Freas: The Art of
Science Fiction (1977), Frank Kelly Freas: A Separate Star (1984) and The
Astounding Fifties (1971) (1990). Much of his work, sometimes reminiscent
of that of Edd CARTIER, is relaxedly humorous, featuring vigorous
vagabonds, amiable aliens and a selection of jaunty scoundrels. He has won
numerous awards, including 10 HUGOS for Best Professional Artist.
[JG/PN]See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; ILLUSTRATION.
FREEDMAN, NANCY
(1920- ) US actress and writer whose sf novel, Joshua Son of None (1973),
one of the earliest novels to deal with cloning ( CLONES), depicts the
intrigue surrounding the childhood and adolescence of Joshua Francis
Kellogg, cloned in 1963 from the body of John F. Kennedy. [JC]Other works:
The Immortals (1976), borderline sf.
FREEDOM: THE VOICE FROM EIN HAROD
ISRAEL.
FREEJACK
Film (1992). Morgan Creek/Ronald Shusett/Warner Bros. Dir Geoff Murphy,
starring Emilio Estevez, Mick Jagger, Rene Russo, Anthony Hopkins,
Jonathan Banks. Screenplay Steven Pressfield, Ronald Shusett, Dan Gilroy,
based on Immortality, Inc. (1958; exp 1959) by Robert SHECKLEY. 108 mins.
Colour.From the producers of TOTAL RECALL (1990) and the New Zealand
director of The QUIET EARTH (1985), this disappointing adaptation
jettisons much that was interesting in the original book, including the
metaphysical speculation about the relation of mind to body and the
"scientific" explanations of ghosts, zombies and a technological
IMMORTALITY. This is a thriller set 20 years in the future, when rich
people with ailing bodies transfer their personalities into healthy bodies
hijacked from the past (including our present). Jagger is rather good as
the sinister and ubiquitous bodysnatcher who grabs a racing-car driver
(Estevez) just as he is about to die violently. Joe Alves's mildly
CYBERPUNK production design owes a lot to BLADE RUNNER (1982). [PN]
FREKSA, FRIEDRICH
[r] GERMANY.
FRENCH, PAUL
Isaac ASIMOV.
FRENKEL, JAMES R.
(1948- ) US editor, married to Joan D. VINGE since 1980. In the late
1970s and early 1980s he was with Dell Books, where he ed anon the Binary
Star books, each comprising two titles bound sequentially ( DOS): Binary
Star #1 containing Destiny Times Three (1978 dos) by Fritz LEIBER and
Riding the Torch (1978 dos) by Norman SPINRAD, #2 containing The Twilight
River (1979 dos) by Gordon EKLUND and The Tery (1979 dos) by F. Paul
WILSON, #3 containing Dr Scofflaw (1979 dos) by Ron GOULART and Outerworld
(1979 dos) by Isidore HAIBLUM, #4 containing Legacy (1980 dos) by Joan D.
VINGE and The Janus Equation (1980 dos) by Steven G. SPRUILL, and #5
containing Nightflyers (1981 dos) by George R.R. MARTIN and TRUE NAMES
(1981 dos) by Vernor VINGE. In 1983 he founded BLUEJAY BOOKS, whose strong

but underfunded list was forced to cease trading in 1986. [JC]
FREWIN, ANTHONY
(1947- ) UK publisher and writer, who also worked for five years as an
assistant to the film director Stanley KUBRICK. His One Hundred Years of
Science Fiction Illustration: 1840-1940 (1974) has a well chosen selection
of sf ILLUSTRATIONS, many - unusually - from the 19th century, with a full
chapter on Albert ROBIDA. [PN]
FREY, JAMES N(ORBERT)
(1943- ) US writer whose The Elixir (1986) was a GOTHIC-SF/fantasy story
of Nazi Germany, where Hitler's secret weapon is the eponymous aid to
IMMORTALITY. His U.S.S.A.: a Novel (1987) is unrelated to the shared-world
sequence with the same overall title. [JC] Other works: Circle of Death
(1988). [JC]
FREZZA, ROBERT
(1956- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Max Weber's War" for AMZ
in 1987. His sf novel, A Small Colonial War (1990) which, along with its
sequel, Fire in a Faraway Place (1993), replays the Boer War on a colony
planet, although without Kaffirs. The Imperial military forces,
predictably, find the transplanted post- HOLOCAUST Afrikaners tough
meat.McLendon's Syndrome (1994) is a space opera featuring a vampire whose
allergies - sunlight, for instance - replicate the conventions of
supernatural fictions about vampires. [JC]
FRIEDBERG, GERTRUDE (TONKONOGY)
(1908-1989) US writer who also taught. Her career as a playwright began
early, with Three Cornered Moon (1933), which was later filmed, but she
began publishing sf only in 1963, with "The Short and Happy Death of
George Frumkin" for FSF. Her fine sf novel The Revolving Boy (1966)
strikingly tells the story of a child sensitive from his unique birth in
free fall to signals, possibly intelligent in origin, from beyond the
Solar System. He reveals his sensitivity by being forced to adjust himself
- revolving balletically - so that his body is aligned in the direction
from which the signals come. [JC]
FRIEDELL, EGON
(1878-1938) Austrian writer best known for his seminal Cultural History
of Modern Times (1927-32), a text which effectively inaugurated the
discipline of cultural history. As a Jew, his position became intolerable
when the Nazis invaded Austria, and he committed suicide. His wry homage
to H.G. WELLS, Die Ruckkehr mit der Zeitmaschine (apparently written
c1935; 1946 Germany; trans Eddy C. Bertin as The Return of the Time
Machine 1972 US), complete with a spoof correspondence between himself as
narrator and Wells's secretary, purports to reprint the Time Traveller's
narrative of his later journeys. The story, told with a literate wit
reminiscent of some of Karel CAPEK's lighter work, depends on complex
mathematical doubletalk for its demonstration of the ultimate futility of
TIME TRAVEL. [JC]
FRIEDMAN, MICHAEL JAN
(1955- ) US writer, mostly notably of STAR TREK and STAR TREK: THE NEXT

GENERATION ties, though he has also written a singleton, The Glove of
Maiden's Hair (1987), a fantasy set in contemporary New York, and the
Vidar fantasy sequence about a son of Odin: The Hammer and the Horn
(1985), The Seekers and the Sword (1985) and The Fortress and the Fire
(1988). MJF's Star Trek novels are Double, Double * (1989), Legacy *
(1991),Faces of Fire * (1992), The Disinherited * (1992) with Robert
GREENBERGER and Peter DAVID, and Shadows on the Sun * (1993). His Star
Trek: The Next Generation novels are A Call to Darkness * (1989), Doomsday
World * (1990) with Carmen CARTER, Peter DAVID and Robert Greenberger,
Fortune's Light * (1991),Reunion * (1991) Relics*(1992), All Things Good .
. . *(1994) and Requiem * (1994). [JC]
FRIEL, ARTHUR O(LNEY)
(1885-1959) US writer and explorer, most of whose work appeared in PULP
MAGAZINES, including the McKay, Knoulton and Ryan sequence of lost-race
(see LOST WORLD) tales set in South America and featuring the exploits of
Americans, who eventually establish a kingdom somewhere close to Peru.
Those published as books - The Pathless Trail (1922), Tiger River (1923),
in which men are transformed into beasts by a strange Circean wine, The
King of No Man's Land (1924) and Mountains of Mystery (1925) - were
marginal as sf; but "In the Year 2000" (1928 Adventure), which never
reached book form, is set after a world war in which White men have
triumphed. [JC]
FRIEND, ED
Richard WORMSER.
FRIEND, OSCAR J(EROME)
(1897-1963) US writer and editor who worked for the Standard Magazine
chain on CAPTAIN FUTURE, STARTLING STORIES and THRILLING WONDER STORIES
during 1941-4, a period when these magazines were most specifically aimed
at adolescents. The editorial director at the time was Leo MARGULIES, with
whom OJF later edited 3 anthologies (see below). After the death of Otis
Adelbert KLINE in 1946, OJF became head of Kline's literary agency. He was
intermittently active as a writer from before 1920, concentrating on
horror, Western and detective tales, sometimes as Owen Fox Jerome, his
first sf story proper being "Of Jovian Build" for Thrilling Wonder Stories
in 1938. His first novel, The Hand of Horror (1927) as by Jerome, was a
horror tale involving hynotism. His sf books - The Kid from Mars (1940
Startling Stories; 1949), Roar of the Rocket (1940 TWS; 1950 chap
Australia) and The Star Men (1963) - are unremarkable but entertaining.
[MJE/JC]Other works: From Off this World (anth 1949), My Best Science
Fiction Story (anth 1949) and The Giant Anthology of Science Fiction (anth
1954; cut vt Race to the Stars 1958), all with Leo Margulies.See also:
ALIENS.
FRIGGENS, A.
[r] Eric BURGESS.
FRITCH, CHARLES E(DWARD)
(1927- ) US writer and editor who began publishing sf with "The
Wallpaper" for Other Worlds in 1951. He edited the magazine GAMMA 1963-5.
His stories, written for a variety of markets but sharing a certain

glibness and snappiness of effect, are collected in Crazy Mixed-Up Planet
(coll 1969) and Horses' Asteroid (coll 1970). Many are spoofs. [JC]
FROESE, ROBERT
(1945- ) US academic and writer whose sf novel, The Hour of Blue (1990),
presents the strangely consoling notion that Gaia herself is beginning to
respond defensively to humanity's rape of the planet, and that the forests
in Maine (the state where RF himself teaches) are transforming themselves.
[JC]
FROGS
Film (1972). American International. Dir George McCowan, starring Ray
Milland, Sam Elliott, Joan van Ark, Lynn Borden. Screenplay Robert
Hutchison, Robert Blees. 90 mins. Colour.A cheerful exploitation movie,
its director's debut and part of the 1970s Revenge-of-Nature boom (
MONSTER MOVIES), F is a rather well made ecological fable in which
upper-crust layabouts living on a bayou are disposed of by frogs, spiders,
leeches, snakes and snapping turtles (all normal size, but in large
numbers), apparently as a payback for Mankind's ill treatment of Nature: a
sort of amphibian The BIRDS (1963). [PN]
FROM BEYOND
Film (1986). Taryn/Empire. Executive prod Charles BAND. Dir Stuart
Gordon, starring Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken Foree, Ted Sorel,
Carolyn Purdy-Gordon. Screenplay Dennis Paoli, based on "From Beyond"
(1934) by H.P. LOVECRAFT. 85 mins. Colour.With three of the same leading
players, the same production team, and one of Lovecraft's fringe sf
stories as its original, this is effectively a sequel to RE-ANIMATOR
(1985), and was made as a direct result of that film's success.
Lovecraft's idea was that stimulating the pineal gland might open a window
to another DIMENSION peopled by MONSTERS. The film adds an element of
sexual stimulation to that (psychiatrists in bondage gear, etc.), a not
unreasonable reading of Lovecraft's lurid but repressed imaginings, but
the main variation is the glee and (occasional) wit with which the
disgusting monsters from beyond are set into action. Though an
undergraduate-style exercise in SPLATTER-MOVIE bad taste, FB is less gory
than Re-Animator. [PN]
FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON
Film (1958). Waverly/RKO. Dir Byron HASKIN, starring Joseph Cotton,
George Sanders, Deborah Paget. Screenplay Robert Blees, James Leicester,
adapted from Jules VERNE's De la terre a la lune (1865) and Autour de la
lune (1870), the two published together in English translation as From the
Earth to the Moon (1873). 100 mins. Colour.Using a new explosive, a
projectile carrying human passengers is fired at the Moon from a huge
cannon. Paget plays a pretty stowaway. The film, shot in Mexico, is
slow-moving and has painful dialogue; it is perhaps the dullest sf movie
ever made. There are no scenes on the Moon. A comic version, bearing no
relation to Verne's novel, was the UK Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon
(1967; vt Those Fantastic Flying Fools) dir Don Sharp, in which a series
of farcical misadventures - the rocket lands in Russia, not on the Moon keeps the story effectively Earthbound. [PN/JB]

FROST, GREGORY (DEE)
(1951- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Rubbish" for FSF in
1984, and most ofwhose work for a decade was governed by its fantasy tone,
including his first novel, Lyrec (1984), which does evoke PARALLEL WORLDS
but within a structure of story that does not permit an sf reading; his
later sequence,based on Celtic mythology and comprising Tain(1986) and
Remscela(1988), is pure fantasy. The Pure Cold Light(1993), on the other
hand,is sf, though its plot does play on after-death experiences in
amanner peculiarly stretching of the sf frame; overall,though, the book is
a remarkably ingenious tale of government and corporation conspiracies
involving possible ALIENS, CYBERPUNKriffs in the wastes of NEAR-FUTURE
Philadelphia, a femaleprivate investigator, and a drug - Orbitol - whose
reality-challenging effects are reminiscent ofsome passages in the work of
Philip K. DICK. Literary allusions abound, and wit,and excesses of
narrative energy; but because the basic tale veers into the incredible and
thecamp, it seems clear that what GF needs in future is a premise capable
of taxing hisinventiveness. [JC]
FROST, JASON
Zebra Books house name, used almost exclusively by US writer Raymond
Obstfeld (1952- ) for the Warlord sequence of post- HOLOCAUST sf
adventures with a survivalist message: The Warlord (1983), The Warlord #2:
The Cutthroat (1984), #3: Badland (1984), #4: Prisonland (1985) and #5:
Terminal Island (1985). #6: Killer's Keep (1987) was written as JF by Rich
Rainey. A singleton film tie, Invasion U.S.A. * (1985), was by Obstfeld.
[JC]
FTL
Acronym, often used in sf TERMINOLOGY, for FASTER THAN LIGHT.
FUENTES, CARLOS
(1929- ) Mexican diplomat and writer whose acerbic MAGIC REALISM - a more
worldly version of that idiom than found in the works of his coeval,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928- ) - has featured in stories and novels from
the 1950s on. They include: Aura (1962; trans Lysander Kemp1965 chap US),
a ghost story which incorporates elements of vampirism; La Cabeza de la
Hidra (1978; trans Margaret Sayers Peden as The Hydra Head 1978 US), set
just before the outbreak of WWIII in Mexico; Terra Nostra (1975; trans
Margaret Sayers Peden 1976 US), a vast FABULATION about the entire Earth
(though centred in an ALTERNATE-WORLD Paris); Cristobal nonato (1987;
trans Alfred MacAdam and CF as Christopher Unborn 1989 US), a NEAR-FUTURE
lament for Mexico and the world narrated by a child still in the womb; and
Constancia y otras novelas para virgenes (coll 1989; trans Thomas
Christensen as Costancia; and Other Stories for Virgins 1990 UK/US), a
series of complexly elaborate fables. [JC]See also: LATIN AMERICA.
FUENTES, ROBERTO
[r] Piers ANTHONY.
FUGA DAL BRONX
1990: I GUERRIERI DAL BRONX.
FUKKATSO NO HI

(vt Virus) Film (1981). Haruki Kadokawa Films. Dir Kinji Fukasaku,
starring Masao Kusakari, Chuck Connors, Glenn Ford, Olivia Hussey, George
Kennedy, Henry Silva, Robert Vaughn. Screenplay Koji Takada, Gregory
Knapp, Fukasaku, from Fukkatsu No Hi (1964) by Sakyo KOMATSU. 155 mins,
cut to 108 mins. Colour.It is difficult to judge this reputedly expensive
Japanese DISASTER film, which was very successful in Japan, because the
export version was severely cut - but one cannot believe it was ever very
good. A germ-warfare virus is stolen and accidentally released; only those
in very cold areas survive. Then the crazed US Chief of Staff (Silva) sets
off a nuclear strike. In the Antarctic, 864 shivering male survivors share
8 women. The story is told as flashback, with a Japanese (Kusakari)
looking like a bearded scarecrow about to walk, implausibly, from
Washington DC to the Antarctic. (In the Japanese version he makes it.) The
characters are appallingly stereotyped. This is a simplistic melodrama
with nothing serious to say. [PN]
FULLER, ALVARADO M(ORTIMER)
(1851-? ) US writer whose sf novel, A.D. 2000 (1890; vt Back to Life A.D.
2000 1911), wakes its protagonist ( SLEEPER AWAKES) in the UTOPIAN culture
of AD2000. A single party rules North America, and electrical inventions
(after a great disaster with "aluminum bronze", electricity has become the
chief source of power) dominate the exiguous storyline. [JC]
FULL SPECTRUM
US ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series published by BANTAM BOOKS since 1988,
created by Lou ARONICA, 3 issues to date (Spring 1992): Full Spectrum
(anth 1988), ed Aronica with Shawna MCCARTHY, #2 (anth 1989), ed Aronica
with Pat Lobrutto, McCarthy and Amy Stout, and #3 (anth 1991), ed Aronica
with Betsy Mitchell and Stout. These are fat, prestigious volumes - an
unusual publishing ploy at a time when conventional wisdom says sf
ANTHOLOGIES sell badly - presumably designed to publicize the Bantam
Spectra sf line and to announce that Bantam remains a leader in the sf
market. To date their only major award-winner has been "Bible Stories for
Adults, No. 17: The Deluge" (1988) by James MORROW, which won a NEBULA,
but a high count of FS stories have been shortlisted for awards, and FS
itself won a Locus Award for Best Anthology in its first year. FS
publishes a fairly high proportion of "literary" stories and a low
proportion of HARD SF, and mixes well known authors with promising
unknowns. [PN]
FU MANCHU
For a listing of some of the films in which Sax ROHMER's oriental
supervillain, armed with the weapons of superscience, appeared, The FACE
OF FU MANCHU . [PN]
FUNNELL, AUGUSTINE
(1952- ) Canadian writer whose two sf novels, Brandyjack (1976) and its
sequel, Rebels of Merka (1976) - the only titles published by LASER BOOKS
actually to have been written by a Canadian - were unremarkable SPACE
OPERAS. In the 1980s AF began to publish short fiction in US magazines.
[JC]
FUQUA, ROBERT

Pseudonym of Chicago-based US illustrator Joseph Wirt Tillotson (? - ),
used by him on sf cover paintings (although some of his black-and-white
work appeared under his own name). For some time a staff artist for
ZIFF-DAVIS magazines, RF painted 25 covers for AMZ 1938-44 and 7 for
Fantastic Adventures. In the 1950s, away from Ziff-Davis, he contributed
to the Chicago magazines Imagination and Other Worlds. He might have been
better known had he worked also for New York-based publishers, but he
always restricted himself to Chicago. One of the more prominent sf
illustrators of the 1930s and 1940s, RF used very bright colours to
compensate for poor reproduction processes. His melodramatic style - the
very essence of PULP-MAGAZINE sf - perfectly complemented the lurid
Ziff-Davis fiction. [JG/PN]
FUREY, MICHAEL
Sax ROHMER.
FURTINGER, ZVONIMIR
[r] YUGOSLAVIA.
FURY, THE
Film (1978). Frank Yablans Presentations/20th Century-Fox. Dir Brian De
Palma, starring Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, Charles Durning, Amy
Irving, Fiona Lewis, Andrew Stevens. Screenplay John Farris, based on his
The Fury (1976). 118 mins. Colour.After his success with CARRIE (1976), it
seems cynical of director De Palma to have made another film about
destructive teenage PSI POWERS so quickly. This one has an intricate plot
with standard ingredients: the secret government agency experimenting with
WEAPONS (in this case, human weapons), the paranoid ( PARANOIA) sense that
everything is manipulated by this agency, the FRANKENSTEIN theme of the
monster that turns on its creator, and (a Frankenstein subtheme) Freudian
hostility between children and parents. The two teenagers who can
telekinetically cause blood to spurt from every available orifice of those
they attack (or even to explode them) are both corrupted by their power,
one deeply, one mildly. The film is a vivid string of fireworks, with De
Palma as usual manipulating audience response with bravura, but not
creating anything that is more than the sum of its exploitative parts.
[PN]
FUTRELLE, JACQUES
(1875-1912) US writer and theatrical manager, on the editorial staff of
the Boston American; he went down with the Titanic. The stories assembled
in his Thinking Machine books about the scientific detective Augustus S.F.
X. Van Dusen - The Thinking Machine (coll 1907; vt The Problem of Cell 13
1917) and The Thinking Machine on the Case (coll 1908) - are properly
detections, though Van Dusen's methods verge on sf. The Thinking Machine
(coll 1959) ed Tony Simon contains "The Problem of Cell 13" and 2 other
stories. Larger selections have been ed E.F. BLEILER as Best "Thinking
Machine"Detective Stories (coll 1973) and Great Cases of the Thinking
Machine (coll 1976). The Diamond Master (1909; exp with "The Haunted Bell"
as coll c1912), which is sf, revolves melodramatically around the
artificial manufacture of diamonds; the added novella is a supernatural
tale involving Van Dusen. [JC]

FUTURE, THE
There are relevant entries throughout, but especially CYBERPUNK; END OF
THE WORLD; FAR FUTURE; FUTUROLOGY; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; NEAR FUTURE;
PREDICTION.
FUTURE COMBINED WITH SCIENCE FICTION
FUTURE FICTION.
FUTURE COMBINED WITH SCIENCE FICTION STORIES
FUTURE FICTION.
FUTURE COP
TRANCERS.
FUTURE COP 2
TRANCERS.
FUTURE FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION
FUTURE FICTION; SWAN AMERICAN MAGAZINE.
FUTURE FICTION
US magazine. 17 issues Nov 1939-July 1943, 48 further issues May/June
1950-Apr 1960. Published by Blue Ribbon Magazines, later Double Action
Magazines and (from Apr 1941) Columbia Publications; ed Charles D. HORNIG
(Nov 1939-Nov 1940) and Robert A.W. LOWNDES (Apr 1941-Apr 1960). FF began
as a companion magazine to SCIENCE FICTION, with similar editorial
policies. It absorbed its parent magazine in Oct 1941, changing its title
to Future Combined with Science Fiction. Under Lowndes's editorship it
began to feature stories by such fellow FUTURIANS as James BLISH, C.M.
KORNBLUTH and Donald A. WOLLHEIM, often under pseudonyms. It also carried
some of the earliest magazine covers done by Hannes BOK. The title changed
again to Future Fantasy and Science Fiction in Oct 1942, and finally to
Science Fiction Stories in Apr 1943. The 2 issues of this final wartime
incarnation are virtually identical in appearance to Science Fiction, but
as they continue the numbering of FF they are considered part of its
run.FF was one of the many magazines to fall victim to wartime paper
shortages, but it was revived under the same editor in 1950 as Future
Combined with Science Fiction Stories, which became Future Science Fiction
Stories in Jan 1952 and, finally, Future Science Fiction in May 1952. It
changed from PULP to DIGEST size in June 1954. It was one of several
respectable but mediocre magazines edited on shoestring budgets by Lowndes
during the 1950s. The volume numbering was taken over by The ORIGINAL
SCIENCE FICTION STORIES with its Jan 1955 issue (vol 5 #4), suggesting the
death of Future Science Fiction; however, the latter reappeared a little
later in 1955, apparently unhurt, with #28. (The numeration of Columbia's
magazines has baffled generations of collectors.) There were 2 UK reprint
runs of FF, 14 issues 1951-4 in pulp format, and 11 digest issues 1957-60.
[MJE/PN]
FUTURE HISTORIES
especially GALACTIC EMPIRES; HISTORY IN SF; NEAR FUTURE; PREDICTION; WAR.
FUTURE PUBLICATIONS
FANTASY MAGAZINE/FANTASY FICTION; SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES.

FUTURE SCIENCE FICTION
1. Variant title of FUTURE FICTION in its 1950s incarnation.2. Australian
DIGEST-size magazine. 6 numbered, undated issues (2 in 1953, 3 in 1954, 1
in 1955) published by Frew Publications, Sydney, plus 2 (1967) published
by Page Publications, NSW; ed anon. The Frew series used a mixture of US
reprints, 13 new US stories and 4 new Australasian stories; the Page
series reprinted #4 and #6 from the Frew publications, renumbering them #1
and #2. A companion magazine to both versions was POPULAR SCIENCE FICTION.
[FHP/PN]
FUTURE SCIENCE FICTION STORIES
FUTURE FICTION.
FUTURE WAR
HISTORY OF SF; INVASION; WAR.
FUTURES PAST
US historical SEMIPROZINE, three issues in 1992, ed Jim Emerson, pub Jim
Mladenovic from Convoy, Ohio, small- BEDSHEET format, saddle-stapled. This
ambitious venture was sadly soon aborted. Subtitled "A Visual Guidebook To
Science Fiction History", each issue was to cover the history of one year
in sf; this began in the first issue with 1926, and ended in the third
with 1928. Thus about 65 issues never came out. Articles,bios, checklists,
movie lists, chronologies - all well researched - were interspersed with
magazine illos and photographs somewhat smudgily reproduced. [PN]
FUTUREWORLD
Film (1976). AIP. Dir Richard T. Heffron, starring Peter Fonda, Blythe
Danner, Arthur Hill. Screenplay Mayo Simon, George Schenck. 104 mins.
Colour.An inferior sequel to WESTWORLD (1973), set in the same theme park,
Delos, F lacks the unity and impact of Michael CRICHTON's original film.
In a newly built area of Delos, devoted to dramatizing the future, there
are several diverting scenes irrelevant to the main plot, which is one of
PULP-MAGAZINE sf's oldest: a mad SCIENTIST (revealed at the end to be
himself a ROBOT) creates robot duplicates of influential people to enable
him to rule the world. His plan is uncovered by two journalists reporting
the grand opening. F is rather ill organized and crude. The novel
Futureworld * (1976) was adapted by John Ryder Hall (William ROTSLER) from
the screenplay. [JB]
FUTURIAN, THE
UK FANZINE (1938-40), ed from Leeds by J. Michael Rosenblum. A
continuation of the Leeds SCIENCE FICTION LEAGUE's Bulletin (1937), The
Futurian was a small printed publication featuring fiction, poems and
articles by leading sf fans of the day, including Arthur C. CLARKE, Ralph
Milne FARLEY, John Russell FEARN, David H. KELLER, Frederik POHL and
William F. TEMPLE. Other important pre-WWII UK fanzines were John
CHRISTOPHER's The Fantast, Jonathan BURKE's and Charles Eric MAINE's
Satellite, Donald Mayer's Tomorrow (incorporating Walter GILLINGS's
SCIENTIFICTION) and Maurice K. Hanson's NOVAE TERRAE (later NEW WORLDS).
Under the title Futurian War Digest (1940-45), Rosenblum's fanzine became
a focal point for UK fandom during the WWII years when sf and amateur

publishing faced considerable difficulties. It was revived as The New
Futurian 1954-8. [PR]
FUTURIANS
A New York sf group active 1938-45, notable for radical politics and the
conviction that sf fans should be forward-looking and constructive; the
name came from J. Michael Rosenblum's UK fanzine, The FUTURIAN . Though
deeply involved in FANZINE publishing and internal fan politics, The
Futurians also brought together many young fans who hoped to become sf
writers. Members included Isaac ASIMOV, James BLISH, C.M. KORNBLUTH, David
KYLE, Robert A.W. LOWNDES, Frederik POHL - who describes this period in
The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (1978) - Richard WILSON and Donald A.
WOLLHEIM; also associated with the group were Hannes BOK, Damon KNIGHT who in The Futurians (1977) published an informal history of the group Judith MERRIL and Larry T. SHAW. [PR/PN]
FUTURIANS, THE
The Futurians sounds like a group of aliens who were transmitted through
Time. But, in fact, they were teenagers who shared a house in 1939 and who
also shared a love of science fiction. Their ranks eventually included
Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Damon Knight, and James Blish.The Secret
Service raided their Brooklyn home one night after neighbors, suspicious
of their mimeograph machines and strange visitors, reported them as
counterfeitors. What they found were law-abiding, if slightly obsessed, SF
fans.
FUTURIAN WAR DIGEST
The FUTURIAN .
FUTURISTIC SCIENCE STORIES
UK pocketbook-size magazine. 16 issues, numbered, undated, 1950-58,
published by John Spencer, London; ed John S. Manning (pseudonym of
publishers Sol Assael and Michael Nahum). FSS was one of 4 almost
identical low-quality juvenile sf magazines - all of minimal interest published by Spencer; the others were TALES OF TOMORROW, WONDERS OF THE
SPACEWAYS and WORLDS OF FANTASY. #1-#15 appeared 1950-54; #16 did not
appear until 1958. (For more information on Spencer's publications BADGER
BOOKS.) [FHP]
FUTURISTIC STORIES
UK pulp-size magazine. 2 undated issues, 1946, published by Hamilton ?
Co., Stafford; ed anon. FS was poor-quality, juvenile, and of little
interest. As with its companion magazine, STRANGE ADVENTURES, the Entire
contents were written by Norman FIRTH. [FHP]
FUTUROLOGY
The word "futurology" is a neologism coined in 1943 by a refugee German
professor of sociology, Ossip K. Flechtheim, then teaching in a US
college. He argued for a concerted effort by sociologists, historians,
psychologists, economists and political scientists to examine social and
technological trends as a means of learning the true shape of coming
things. He sent his proposals to Aldous HUXLEY, who took them up with
enthusiasm, and thereby conveyed the word into the language. Now

futurologists are everywhere except perhaps in the very poorest countries.
History shows that human beings are ab origine future-directed animals.
Ever since Homo erectus began the long trek out of Africa and into
Eurasia, the horizon-watchers have known that their survival might well
depend on what they found over the hill, in the no-man's time of the day
after. But the literature of proposals and projections about future things
appears as a mere blip at the end of civilization's 10,000-year record. It
is strange, too, that UTOPIAS, DYSTOPIAS, forecasts, projections and sf
are in origin, and still largely, a Western intellectual activity. All
these future-oriented activities may have begun with the first modern
utopias to present the other-history of the better society. Thomas MORE's
Utopia (Part Two 1516 in Latin; trans Ralphe Robynson with the later Part
One 1551) and Francis BACON's New Atlantis (1627; 1629) contained
ideologies which had already worked their benign effects in the could-be
of imagined lands, and might serve as guides for achieving a more perfect
way of life in the real world of a reformed England. In the beginning,
then, the future was another place, and the VIRTUAL REALITY of
word-generated social systems and behaviour patterns in the utopias made
for a most effective connection between today and tomorrow.There was still
a long way to go before considered forecasts. The world had to wait for
the new ideas about the progress of mankind that, in the mid-18th century,
were to mark out the base for a calculus of probabilities. In his very
influential Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human
Mind (1750) Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727-1781), then a student at the
Sorbonne, provided the historical evidence that allowed him to indicate
the main lines of human progress. Since, he argued, mankind had advanced
from primitive beginnings to the glorious days of Louis XV, it followed
that the human race would "go on advancing, although at a slow pace,
towards greater perfection". The details of this march forward awaited the
work of men like Adam Smith (1723-1790), who in his Wealth of Nations
(1776) reduced the entirety of ECONOMICS, industry and commerce to a
Newtonian universe of actions and reactions.At around this time the great
divide between fiction and prediction began to narrow, as the first tales
of the future spread their message of the centuries ahead. The most
important was Louis-Sebastien MERCIER's L'an 2440 (1771; trans as Memoirs
of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred 1772), which described a better
future world in which the social ideals of the Enlightenment had
prevailed: constitutional monarchs, deism the universal religion,
education for all. The most telling register of expected change was in the
technology of the future: a Suez Canal, rapid BALLOON transportation
between continents, and "all sorts of machines for the relief of Man in
laborious works".Still the would-be predictors awaited the theories and
techniques that would help them provide for the whole of society what Adam
Smith had provided for a part. New means of assessment and measurement
swiftly arrived. In 1798 Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) published his
notorious Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he
pessimistically linked the future of humanity to the potentially
geometrical growth of population and the merely arithmetical growth of the
rations that sustained it, a situation that could be balanced only if vast
numbers died. A tremendous debate about humankind's future followed,
partly because this early example of Future Shock had coincided with the

publication by Edward Jenner (1749-1823) of his paper on the Causes and
Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, which provided the first marvellous
promise that the future would be different. By that time James Watt's
steam engine was providing power on an unprecedented scale, and the
Industrial Revolution was on the point of transforming the world.It seems
strange, with change so rapidly manifesting itself, that it was almost a
century before straightforward forecasts like Dans cent ans ["In 100
Years"] (1892) by Charles Richet (1850-1935) came to be published. But in
the 19th century the "certainty factor" persuaded everyone that change and
technological development could be accommodated within the known social
system. The same, but better, was the slogan - or, in the Tennysonian
phrase, the great world would "spin for ever down the ringing grooves of
change". So people invented new methods to measure the changes they
considered most important. The first decennial census of 1801 began the
continuing measure of population; the Belgian mathematician Lambert
Quetelet (1796-1874) adopted the Laplace probability theory to produce the
crucial concept of the Average Man. Also significant was the first attempt
to analyse the new literature of the future in Le roman de l'avenir ["The
Novel of the Future"] (1834) by Felix Bodin ( FRANCE). Another sign was
the inauguration of the British Association for the Advancement of Science
in 1831.The flood of forecasting literature did not take place until
around 1890, beginning with sustained discussion about the next great WAR
(a discussion catalysed by the War of 1870). Its first major prediction
was the work of Polish banker and statistician Ivan Gottlieb de Bloch
(1836-1902), who produced the classic analysis in The War of the Future in
its Technical, Economic and Political Relations (1897). His findings,
ignored by the generals, led him to forecast a great war of entrenchment.
Soon forecasts became part of popular writing: weekly magazines
occasionally featured articles with illustrations of flying machines,
motor cars and television. Some two dozen books were published at this
time about the future, including George Ermann on the imperial German
future in Deutschland im Jahre 2000 ["Germany in the Year 2000"] (1891),
the influential Esquisse de l'organisation politique et economique de la
societe future (1899; trans P.H. Lee Warner as The Society of To-Morrow
1904) by Gustave de Molinari (1819-1911), and the collection by Edward
Carpenter (1844-1929) of the expectations of 10 eminent socialists in
Forecasts of the Coming Century (coll 1897). The most widely read of them
all in the Anglo-Saxon world was the series of articles by H.G. WELLS in
Fortnightly Review in 1900, published as Anticipations (1901).The next
advances in the investigation of the future followed two major innovations
between the two world wars. In the 1920s the publishing house Kegan Paul,
Trench ?
Tomorrow series, in which scientists, sociologists, philosophers,
theologians and others set down their expectations of the future. One was
J.B.S. HALDANE's Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1924), which
accurately forecast advances in biology that gave Aldous Huxley important
ideas for BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932). The series was widely reported and did
much to publicize thinking about the future. More important, however, was
the first major state initative in this regard. The US President, Herbert
Hoover, in 1930 appointed a National Resources Committee "to examine and
report upon recent social trends in the United States with a view to

providing such a review as might supply a basis for the formulation of
large national policies looking to the next phase in the nation's
development". The committee, drawing on the resources of field-survey
techniques formulated at the University of Chicago, presented their
conclusions in their report Recent Social Trends (1932), which provided a
model for the USA and an example to the rest of the world.The development
of techniques for investigating the future accelerated during WWII,
especially the Operational Research procedures borrowed from the UK by the
US Army Air Force. These proved so successful in the air war that General
Henry Arnold established a research centre to investigate possible
developments in warfare. This had the codename RAND (Research and
Development), and in 1948 the project team set up an independent
non-profit organization known as the RAND Corporation. It had immense
influence on military planning and on presidential decisions about the
manufacture of nuclear weapons; it was the first "think tank", and from it
came the System Development Institute and the Hudson Institute. The latter
gained world notoriety when Herman Kahn (1922-1983) published books such
as On Escalation (1968) that took the hardest of looks into the future.
Indeed, this was a period of rapid growth in futurology, with a great many
books and journals published on the subject. Kahn's books were among the
best-known, but futurology's limitations as a science can be seen very
clearly in his Things to Come (1972), a book about what to expect in the
1970s and 1980s. The index has no entries for oil, gasoline, energy,
resources or power; Kahn's only remark about the Arabs is to say that,
because the West is their only market, we need expect no problems of
supply. Sf writers, too, were unsuccessful in predicting the energy
crisis, but few as blandly and so close to the time when it happened as
this.A very influential, albeit flawed, work of futurology was the report
of the Club of Rome on OVERPOPULATION and diminishing resources, excerpts
from which were published as The Limits to Growth (1972). Alvin TOFFLER's
book Future Shock (1970) was a bestselling work of SOCIOLOGY rather than
futurology; it documented the increasing rate of change in the 20th
century, but was comparatively cautious in making specific predictions
about the future. At the other extreme were books of popularization like
The Next Ten Thousand Years (1974) by Adrian BERRY, a work of
technological optimism packed with "what-ifs" and predictions rather than
futurology per se. There are many of these.The modern "science" of
futurology is the forecasting of the future (usually the NEAR FUTURE) by
projection and extrapolation from current trends, statistics, population
figures, political groupings, availability of resources, economic data,
etc. It cannot be called a science proper, since too many of the factors
involved are imponderable (and often unknown), but its tools are
statistical analysis and the computer simulation of various models.It may
seem that the futurologist and the sf writer are involved in the same
trade, but they share a certain unease about one another. Futurologists
work primarily on what can be quantified, and to a large degree their
projections depend on the future being the same as the past. Population
projections for the UK, for example, were for a long time too high because
demographers were unable to quantify the factors that persuade people to
have fewer children. Sf writers are not actually in the prediction
business, but when they deal with the near future they normally write a

"what-if?" scenario, which may involve discontinuities with the past. In
practice, this is only to say that the factors sf writers deal with
include a good deal of guesswork and invention. What makes sf writers
unreliable as predictors is the nature of that "what if?". It may appeal
to the writer because of its intrinsic interest or its function as a
warning symbol, rather than for its likelihood. Writers often do not
believe in it themselves; they are writing stories, not prophecies. Also,
the sf writer is often ignorant of the mechanisms, such as those of
ECONOMICS, which must play an important role in any realistic story of
future cause and effect.Where sf writers have an advantage is in the
ability to adopt a multidisciplinary approach; they are often good at what
is sometimes known as lateral thinking. In a sense the advantage sf
writers have is their very irresponsibility: they cannot be held
accountable for the nature of their scenarios; the details do not have to
be justified. This allows sf writers to survey a far greater range of
possibility than the comparatively restricted futurologist. The writer can
take the unexpected into account, and history tells us that the unexpected
does indeed often happen. Sf itself may give direction to change, through
a process of self-fulfilling prophecy, by presenting images of the future
which grip people's minds; e.g., the US space programme, which could not
have been funded without popular support, or the multistorey apartment
blocks that were built by local authorities in such disastrously great
numbers in the UK after WWII, designed by a generation of architects
reared on the utopian-sf visual imagery of the 1920s.Neither futurologists
nor sf writers have done very well at PREDICTION, though perhaps the
writers' emphasis on the lives of individuals seems more humane than the
futurologists' statistical projections about the masses. Many examples of
sf about the general area also covered by futurology can be found under
TECHNOLOGY, ECOLOGY, NEAR FUTURE, OVERPOPULATION and WAR. John
BRUNNER is
one notable writer who has written novels of this kind. Often, of course,
Brunner and others are not so much predicting as trying to avert; they
hope their ghastly scenarios will be influential as a kind of
early-warning system. Arthur C. CLARKE, on the other hand, has used much
optimistic futurological speculation in both his factual books and his
fiction.Sf itself has also produced futurologists as characters, the best
known being the exponents of PSYCHOHISTORY in Isaac ASIMOV's Foundation
series. [IFC/PN]
FYFE, H(ORACE) B(OWNE)
(1918- ) US writer whose first sf story, "Locked Out", appeared in ASF in
1940 but who became active, mainly with stories in ASF, only after WWII
army service. By 1967, when he became inactive, he had published nearly 60
stories. His Bureau of Slick Tricks tales (ASF 1948-52) are typical of
John W. CAMPBELL's need for stories in which humans inevitably outwit
thick-skulled (often bureaucratic) ALIENS. In his novel, D-99 (fixup
1962), which continues the series, Department 99 of the Terran government
has the job of finagling citizens out of jams on other planets and
flummoxing thicker species. The tone is fortunately light. [JC]
FYSH

Leonard G. FISH.

SF?
GADALLAH, LESLIE
(1939- ) Canadian writer best known for her Cat's Pawn sequence - Cat's
Pawn (1987 US) and Cat's Gambit (1990 US) - in which a human protagonist
becomes involved with the eponymous catlike alien Orioni, themselves
involved in a desperate war against the invading Kazi, who dominate much
of the Galaxy by the end of the second volume, which ends on an unusual
downbeat, suggesting that further volumes may be projected. The
Loremasters (1988 US), a singleton, less impressively pits a civilized
enclave against a horde of barbarians on an energy-starved future Earth.
[JC]
GADE, HENRY
[s] Raymond A. PALMER.
GAIL, OTTO WILLI
(1896-1956) German writer of popular fiction, two of whose astronautical
novels were published in Hugo GERNSBACK's Science Wonder Quarterly: Der
Schuss ins All (1925; trans Francis Currier 1929 as The Shot into
Infinity; 1975 US) and its sequel, Der Stein vom Mond (1926 trans Francis
Currier 1930 as "The Stone from the Moon"). Hans Hardts Mondfahrt: Eines
abenteuerliche Erzahlung (1928; trans anon as By Rocket to the Moon: The
Story of Hans Hardt's Miraculous Flight 1931 US) is a juvenile. All three
aim at a technical realism unusual for the time. [JC]See also: GERMANY;
SPACESHIPS.
GAIMAN, NEIL (RICHARD)
(1960- ) UK writer, in the USA from 1992, who has specialized in the
scripting of fantasy and sf comics and GRAPHIC NOVELS, but who began
publishing work of genre interest with a story, "Featherquest", for
Imagine in 1984. His first book, Ghastly Beyond Belief (anth 1985) with
Kim NEWMAN, presents various kinds of bad writing to be found in sf and
fantasy. His first visual book was Violent Cases (graph 1987) with Dave
MCKEAN, a dark urban fantasy in graphic-novel form. He then began to write
comics in earnest, with extended stints as scripter for The Sandman
(1988-current) and Miracle Man (1990-current), the latter being a genuine
sf comic with a UTOPIAN turn ( CAPTAIN MARVEL). The Sandman stories - one
of which, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1990), won a 1991 World Fantasy
Award for Best Short Story-have been published in book form as The
Sandman: The Doll's House (graph coll 1990) with Mike Dringenberg and
Malcolm Jones III, The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes (graph coll 1991)
with Dringenberg, Jones and Sam Kieth, and The Sandman: Dream Country
(graph coll 1991) with various artists; a long tale, which transmutes
dark-fantasy material evocative of the work of Jonathan Carroll (1949- ),
was contained in 6 further issues (1991-2) of the comic and is projected
for book release as A Game of You (graph 1992) with Shawn McManus and
Colleen Doran. His further graphic novels are Black Orchid (graph 1991)
and Signal to Noise (1989-90 The Face; rev as graph 1992), both with Dave
McKean, and The Books of Magic (graph coll 1993 US) with various artists.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (1990;
rev 1991 US) with Terry PRATCHETT is a comic fantasy novel about the Four
Horsemen, who do not quite end the world. Unlike graphic novelists such as
Alan MOORE, NG has tended to combine draconian verbal economy with an
ample romanticism, so that his tales carry, sometimes effortlessly, a
burden of half-uttered resonances. He cowrote the entry on the GRAPHIC
NOVEL for this encyclopedia. [JC]Other works: Don't Panic: The Official
Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion (1988; rev 1992); Now We Are
Sick: A Sampler (anth 1986 chap) ed with Stephen Jones (1953- ), booklet
produced to publicize and sell rights in the next book; Now We Are Sick
(anth 1991 chap) ed with Stephen Jones, assembling original poems; Temps
Volume l (anth 1991) ed with Alex Stewart (1958- ).See also: CRIME AND
PUNISHMENT; SHARED WORLDS; SUPERMAN.
GAKOV, VLADIMIR
Originally the collective pseudonym of Russian writers Vladimir Gopman,
Andrei Gavrilov and Mikhail Kovalchuk (VLADIMIR Gopman, Andrei GAvrilov,
and Mikhail KOValchuk). For the purposes of this encyclopedia, in which he
has revised or written many of the entries on Russian sf, including
RUSSIA, this is the pseudonym of Kovalchuk writing solo. Russian critic
and editor Mikhail (Andreevich) Kovalchuk (1951- ) is a trained physicist
who began publishing sf criticism in 1976, soon giving up his science
career for professional journalism. His three critical works on sf are
Vitok Spirali["The Curve of a Spiral"] (1980) which was written by all
three authors,Tchetyre Puteshestviiaa Na Mashine Vremeni ["Four Trips in
the Time Machine"] (1983) and Ultimatum ["The Ultimatum"] (1989), the last
being an historical study of the relationship between fact and fiction in
the nuclear arms race. Among his various anthologies, of interest to
English-speaking readers is World's Spring (anth 1979 Sweden). A
contributor to various English-language reference editions, he has revised
or written many of the entries on Russian sf in this encyclopedia.
[VG/JC]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; RUSSIA.
GALACTICA: 1980
US tv series (1980). Universal MCA/ABC-TV. Creator, executive prod Glen
A. LARSON. Most episodes written by Larson. Regular cast included Lorne
Greene, Kent McCord, Barry Van Dyke, Robyn Douglass. 3 pilot 50min
episodes followed by 7 50min episodes.The pilot, Galactica Discovers
Earth, a three-part made-for-tv film sequel to the tv series BATTLESTAR
GALACTICA, was successful enough to convince ABC-TV to commission a new
series. Rushed into production, aimed at an early-evening time slot where
special rules applied about what children can watch, and underrehearsed,
it flopped badly and was soon jettisoned. In the pilot, Galactica finds
Earth too undeveloped to fight off the Cylons and attempts are made via
TIME TRAVEL to improve the situation. The remaining episodes are all set
on Earth and feature Cylon attacks. The pilot, dir Sidney Hayers, with
sections of 2 further episodes, was theatrically released as Conquest of
the Earth (1980). Generally the series was shown on tv abroad as if part
of Battlestar Galactica. [PN]
GALACTIC EMPIRES
In The Universe Makers (1971) Donald A. WOLLHEIM attempts to distil from

the range of futuristic visions presented by magazine sf a basic pattern a "cosmogony of the future" - in which stages 3-5 (there are 8 in all)
describe "the rise and fall of the Galactic Empire", which is thus
enshrined as the central myth of GENRE SF. ("Empire" is here used with a
general, almost metaphorical meaning, rather than in its politically
definitive sense.) The galactic empire was a necessary invention: an
imaginative framework which could accommodate any number of "Earth-clone"
worlds on which writers might deploy ordinary human characters in
confrontation with any imaginable social and biological system. Very many
modern sf stories are designed to fit into such a framework, taking
advantage of the fact that it has become established as a convention which
needs no explanation.Much of the credit for the establishment of the
convention must go to Isaac ASIMOV, whose Foundation series (1942-50;
fixups 1951-3) set the most influential example, although it is possible
to trace the idea back to earlier roots. As long ago as 1900 Robert W.
COLE had imagined Victoria's glorious British Empire extending its
dominion to the stars, so that ours should not be the only sun never to
set upon it. Confederations of worlds within the Solar System were common
in pulp sf from its inception, and these were extended into the Galaxy in
such novels as Galactic Patrol (1937-8; 1950) by E.E. "Doc" SMITH. Asimov,
however, was the writer who provided the essential historical framework
for such a concept. He did so by relatively straightforward analogy with
past empires, reversing the analytical historical perspective of such
works as The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88)
by Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) to produce the predictive science of
PSYCHOHISTORY. With a single flourish, a whole prospectus for the future
of the human race-allowing virtually limitless possibilities so far as
events on a finer scale were concerned - was established. Asimov used the
convenient historical pattern himself as a background for other works,
including The Stars Like Dust (1951) and The Currents of Space (1952).
Robert A. HEINLEIN's painstaking attempt to develop a future HISTORY step
by step became an empty endeavour after the Foundation series, and later
efforts seem distinctly half-hearted. James BLISH's Cities in Flight
(1955-62) succeeds more through its key image of the star-travelling
CITIES than through its framework, derived from the philosophy of cyclic
history developed by Oswald Spengler (1880-1936). Poul ANDERSON, who
developed his own scheme for use in his Technic History series and many
other stories and novels, was able to take a great deal for granted
because Asimov had prepared the way.Writers of the 1940s who employed the
galactic-empire framework include C.L. MOORE, in Judgment Night (1943;
1952), Edmond HAMILTON, in The Star Kings (1947; 1949 vt Beyond the Moon)
and - most extravagantly - A.E. VAN VOGT in such stories as "Recruiting
Station" (1942; in Masters of Time coll 1950). Van Vogt was not at all
hesitant about borrowing the entire apparatus of historical empires, and
replayed the most melodramatic phase of Roman history - presumably
borrowed via Robert GRAVES's I, Claudius (1934) - in his Linn series,
Empire of the Atom (1946-7; fixup 1957) and The Wizard of Linn (1950;
1962). The background proved particularly useful in the colourful brand of
adventure sf featured by PLANET STORIES, and it was very extensively used
therein, notably by Leigh BRACKETT, Alfred COPPEL and Poul Anderson (in
his early SPACE OPERAS). During the 1950s SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES, the

magazine closest in editorial philosophy to Planet Stories, likewise made
extensive use of it, particularly in stories written for the US version by
Robert SILVERBERG and for the UK version by Kenneth BULMER.In addition to
Anderson, several other post-WWII writers have made consistent and
elaborate use of a galactic civilization as a reservoir for unusual
worlds. These include Jack VANCE, notably in The Languages of Pao (1958),
THE DRAGON MASTERS (1963) and in virtually all of his work during the
1960s and 1970s, John BRUNNER, notably in Endless Shadow (1964) and The
World Swappers (1959), Cordwainer SMITH, in his Instrumentality series,
and E.C. TUBB, in his Dumarest series. Few writers have, however,
concerned themselves in any but the most superficial way with the
sociopolitical structure of the galactic community. Anderson has done
significant work in this vein, and so has Gordon R. DICKSON, notably in
the Dorsai series, but most are prepared to leave the community in a state
of disorganization or nebulous harmony. Only rarely do works appear in
which there actually is a powerful, autocratic, imperial system of
government - the most conspicuous modern example is the film STAR WARS
(1977) and its sequels - and the word "empire" is often substituted by
"league", "federation" or some other such variant. Most works of this kind
are either US or (like the German PERRY RHODAN series) products of
cultural coca-colonization, and the political model employed for galactic
civilization is very often the US system writ large - an ideal summed up
by the final line of Asimov's The Stars Like Dust and conscientiously
supported by innumerable episodes of STAR TREK. It is interesting to note
the relative unwillingness of genre-sf writers, even when they take the
entire Galaxy for their setting, to create new political or economic
modes, although Iain M. BANKS's galactic culture in Consider Phlebas
(1987), The Player of Games (1988) and USE OF WEAPONS (1990) is
refreshingly alien to the US model. Galactic empires are almost always
ruled by humans, and human empires are often at war with ALIEN empires. An
amusing antidote to this conventional human chauvinism is The Zen Gun
(1983) by Barrington J. BAYLEY, in which men become so effetely decadent
that their erstwhile underlings, the pigs, take over.It is more or less
taken for granted in post-WWII works that any galactic federation will
have a relatively untamed frontier, almost always called "the rim" (
GALACTIC LENS). First popularized by A. Bertram CHANDLER's long-running
Rim Worlds series, the galactic empire's equivalent of the Wild West
features fairly prominently in modern SPACE OPERA, notably in C.J.
CHERRYH's relatively sophisticated stories of that type, which include
Merchanter's Luck (1982) and Rimrunners (1989). In such stories freelance
starship pilots take the place of cowboy gunfighters; in recent years such
roles have very frequently been filled by female characters, partly as a
result of the influence of Star Trek in recruiting female readers and
writers into the sf community.Any list of post-WWII sf novels using the
galactic-empire framework is bound to be highly selective, but some of the
more notable stories which actually deal with issues relating to the
community rather than to specific worlds within it are: Star Bridge (1955)
by Jack WILLIAMSON and James E. GUNN, CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY (1957) by
Heinlein, Starmaster's Gambit (1957 France; trans 1973) by Gerard KLEIN,
WAY STATION (1963) by Clifford D. SIMAK, Empire Star (1966) by Samuel R.
DELANY, THE RING OF RITORNEL (1968) by Charles L. HARNESS, RITE OF PASSAGE

(1968) by Alexei PANSHIN, Voyage to Dari (1974) by Ian WALLACE, Beyond
Heaven's River (1980) by Greg BEAR, Light on the Sound (1982) by S.P.
SOMTOW, Star of Gypsies (1986) by Silverberg, and the Hyperion books
(1989-90) by Dan SIMMONS.The definitive theme anthology is Galactic
Empires (anth 2 vols 1976) ed Brian W. ALDISS. [BS]See also: COLONIZATION
OF OTHER WORLDS; COMMUNICATIONS; SOCIOLOGY.
GALACTIC LENS
This term, from ASTRONOMY, makes frequent appearance in sf. It refers to
the fact that our Galaxy is (like many others) approximately lens-shaped it is a disc containing spiral arms, but like a lens it has a central
bulge. Our own position in the Galaxy is quite a long way from the core;
when we look towards the centre of the "lens", the direction in which the
stars are clustered most thickly, we see the so-called Milky Way. Towards
the outer rim of the "lens", stars are comparatively sparse, not only in
terms of the numbers lying in our line of sight but also in fact. Many sf
writers have set stories on planets circling such stars. Such worlds were
dubbed Rim Worlds by A. Bertram CHANDLER, and the term (often as
"Rimworld") has since become commonplace in sf. [PN]
GALAXAN, SOL
[s] Alfred COPPEL.
GALAXY
GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION.
GALAXY MAGABOOKS
GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS.
GALAXY MAGAZINE
GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION.
GALAXY OF TERROR
Roger CORMAN.
GALAXY PUBLISHING CORPORATION
BEYOND FANTASY FICTION; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION.
GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION
US DIGEST-size magazine, Oct 1950 to a single undated issue in 1980.
Published by World Editions (Oct 1950-Sep 1951), Galaxy Publishing Corp.
(Oct 1951-May 1969), Universal Publishing and Distributing Corp. (July
1969-Sep/Oct 1979), Avenue Victor Hugo (1980); ed H.L. GOLD (Oct 1950-Oct
1961), Frederik POHL (Dec 1961-May 1969), Ejler JAKOBSSON (July 1969-May
1974), James BAEN (June 1974-Oct 1977), John J. PIERCE (Nov 1977-Mar/Apr
1979), Hank STINE (June/July-Sep/Oct 1979), Floyd Kemske (1980). The
monthly schedule from the beginning to Dec 1958 was broken only by the
omission of Dec 1955. It was bimonthly Feb 1959-Apr 1968. June 1968-Apr
1971 the schedule was monthly, except that June 1969 and Jan 1970 were
omitted, and Aug/Sep 1970 and Oct/Nov 1970 were single issues. May/June
1971-July/Aug 1973 the schedule was bimonthly, returning to a shaky
monthly schedule Sep 1973-June 1978, the issues for May, Nov and Dec 1975
being omitted, as were those for Apr, June, Aug 1976; Dec 1977-Jan 1978
was a single issue. After June 1978, the final issues were Sep 1978,

Nov/Dec 1978, Mar/Apr 1979, June/July 1979, Sep/Oct 1979 and one 1980
issue released in summer. Curiously, the title was revived in 1994 by E.J.
Gold, son of the original editor. The new Galaxy, ed Gold, published by
the Institute for the Development of the Harmonious Being, Inc., Nevada
City, California, published six bimonthly issues in 1994 in small-bedsheet
(A4) format, and two more to Mar/Apr 1995. Volume numeration started again
at the beginning.The first publisher of Gal was an Italian company which,
having incurred heavy losses trying to launch another magazine in the USA,
approached H.L. Gold for alternative suggestions. He proposed an sf
magazine, and Gal came into existence. From the outset, Gal's payment
rates equalled the best in the field - a minimum of three cents a word and it adopted the digest format already taken by its most successful
contemporaries, ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION and The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND
SCIENCE FICTION . These two with Gal were the most important sf magazines
of the 1950s through to the mid-1970s.The new magazine was an immediate
success. ASF was at this time following John W. CAMPBELL Jr's new-found
obsession with DIANETICS and was otherwise more oriented towards
TECHNOLOGY. Gold's editorial policy was comparatively free-ranging: he was
interested in PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY and SATIRE and other HUMOUR, and the
magazine reflected this. Like Campbell, he worked closely with his writers
(mostly by telephone, as he was confined to his apartment by acute
agoraphobia) and is said to have had a hand in the conception of many of
the famous stories he published, notably Alfred BESTER's THE DEMOLISHED
MAN (Jan-Mar 1952; 1953). In its first year Gal included such stories as:
Clifford D. SIMAK's "Time Quarry" (Oct-Dec 1950), in book form Time and
Again (1951); Fritz LEIBER's "Coming Attraction" (Nov 1950); Damon
KNIGHT's "To Serve Man" (Nov 1950); Isaac ASIMOV's "Tyrann" (Jan-Mar
1951), in book form The Stars Like Dust (1951); Ray BRADBURY's "The
Fireman" (Feb 1951), in book form FAHRENHEIT 451 (exp 1953); C.M.
KORNBLUTH's "The Marching Morons" (Apr 1951); Edgar PANGBORN's "Angel's
Egg" (June 1951); Wyman GUIN's "Beyond Bedlam" (Aug 1951); and Robert A.
HEINLEIN's The Puppet Masters (Sep-Nov 1951; 1951).The magazine maintained
a comparable quality through its early years, and in 1953 shared the first
HUGO for Best Magazine with ASF, while Bester's THE DEMOLISHED MAN, in its
Gal version, won the first Hugo for Best Novel. Although the magazine's
fiction encompassed a considerable variety of styles and preoccupations,
the approach most identified with Gold's magazine is the irony and social
satire of such authors as Knight, Leiber, Pohl and Robert SHECKLEY. With
the Mar 1952 issue, Willy LEY began his science column, For Your
Information, which he continued until his death in 1969. Groff CONKLIN was
book reviewer from the beginning to Oct 1955.A weakness of the early Gal
was that the cover art was mainly crude and undistinguished. The June 1951
issue, however, featured the first cover by Emsh (Ed EMSHWILLER), whose
humorous approach was well suited to the magazine's contents and became
identified with it. Further stories which appeared in Gold's Gal included:
Pohl and Kornbluth's "Gravy Planet" (June-Aug 1952), in book form THE
SPACE MERCHANTS (1953); Theodore STURGEON's "Baby is Three" (Oct 1952),
part of MORE THAN HUMAN (fixup 1953); Asimov's The Caves of Steel (Oct-Dec
1953; 1954); Pohl and Kornbluth's Gladiator-at-Law (June-Aug 1954; 1955);
Bester's The Stars My Destination (Oct 1956-Jan 1957; 1956; vt Tiger!
Tiger! UK); Pohl and Kornbluth's Wolfbane (Oct-Nov 1957; 1959); Leiber's

Hugo-winning THE BIG TIME (Mar-Apr 1958; 1961); Avram DAVIDSON's
Hugo-winning "Or All the Sea with Oysters" (May 1958); and Sheckley's
"Time-Killer" (Oct 1958-Feb 1959), in book form Immortality Delivered
(1958; exp vt Immortality, Inc. 1959). A prize contest sponsored by Gal
drew no worthwhile entries, so Frederik Pohl and Lester DEL REY were
prevailed upon to collaborate on a "prize-winning" novel, which appeared
as Preferred Risk (June-Sep 1955; 1955:) by Edson MCCANN. Gal had a
short-lived fantasy companion, BEYOND FANTASY FICTION, in 1953-5, and in
1959 its publishers acquired IF, which Gold also edited. In Sep 1958 the
title changed to Galaxy Magazine, after which it varied between the two
(with a period when it was called simply Galaxy). Beginning with the Feb
1959 issue it changed to bimonthly publication, with more pages per issue.
In 1961 Gold was forced to retire following a car accident. He was
succeeded as editor of Gal and If by Frederik Pohl. Pohl widened the
magazine's policy still further, to include more fantasy-oriented
material. Jack VANCE and Cordwainer SMITH became regular contributors,
Vance with such stories as THE DRAGON MASTERS (Aug 1962; 1963), which won
a Hugo, The Star King (Dec 1963-Feb 1964; 1964) and THE LAST CASTLE (Apr
1966; 1966), which also won a Hugo, and Smith with "The Boy who Bought Old
Earth" (Apr 1964; exp vt The Planet Buyer 1964), "The Dead Lady of Clown
Town" (Aug 1964) and many others. Larry NIVEN was one of Pohl's
discoveries, and Frank HERBERT and Robert SILVERBERG became further
regular contributors. Other notable stories from his editorship include:
Simak's "Here Gather the Stars" (June-Aug 1963), in book form Way Station
(1963); Gordon R. DICKSON's "Soldier, Ask Not" (Oct 1964), which won a
Hugo; Harlan ELLISON's "'Repent, Harlequin,' Said the Ticktockman" (Dec
1965) and "The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World" (June
1968), both of which won Hugos and the former also a NEBULA; Poul
ANDERSON's "To Outlive Eternity" (June-Aug 1967), in book form Tau Zero
(1970); and Silverberg's "Hawksbill Station" (Aug 1967) and "Nightwings"
(Sep 1968), which won a Hugo. As Gold was notorious for unnecessary
editorial tampering with the stories he published, so was Pohl famed for
indiscriminately altering their titles. Algis BUDRYS began a notable
book-review column in 1965.Pohl's Gal was consistently an interesting
magazine, but it was less successful, with sf fans at least, than his If,
which under Pohl won three consecutive Hugos. Pohl also commenced three
companion magazines: WORLDS OF FANTASY and INTERNATIONAL SCIENCE FICTION
came and went swiftly; WORLDS OF TOMORROW was more durable.In June 1968
Gal resumed monthly publication. The following year it changed ownership
and editorship again. Ejler Jakobsson gave Gal the subtitle "The Best in
Pertinent Science Fiction", and the appearance was revamped in a seeming
attempt to give the magazine more contemporary appeal; for a time it
included a comic strip, Sunpot, by Vaughn BODE. One notable occurrence
during Jakobsson's editorship was the featuring of two consecutive serials
by Robert Silverberg: Downward to the Earth (Nov 1969-Mar 1970; 1970) and
Tower of Glass (Apr-June 1970; 1970). Theodore Sturgeon took over as book
reviewer (Jan 1972-July 1975), his column proving less lively than might
have been expected. On the whole, the magazine failed to develop under
Jakobsson's editorship, and it reverted to a bimonthly schedule with the
May/June 1971 issue, though a patchy monthly schedule began again Sep
1973. In June 1974 he was succeeded by James Baen.In Jan 1975, Gal

absorbed If. After a period in the doldrums, 1976 saw a revival in the
magazine's fortunes. Contributors included Niven, John VARLEY and Roger
ZELAZNY. Pohl's Gateway (Nov 1976-Mar 1977; 1977) was a notable serial
which won both Hugo and Nebula. The magazine featured book reviews by
Spider ROBINSON (from Aug 1975) and a science column by Jerry POURNELLE.
However, despite the strength of the fiction, distribution faltered, and
the monthly schedule was adhered to only patchily in 1975, 1976 and
1977.Baen left in 1977 to become sf editor of ACE BOOKS, and was succeeded
by John J. Pierce, who sadly presided over Gal's slow collapse - payment
rate dropping, good authors hard to find except for the ever-loyal Pohl to be followed briefly by Hank Stine (2 issues). Then Gal was sold to the
publishers of GALILEO; ed Floyd Kemske, it lasted for only 1 more issue
(in large format). The mess is witnessed by the fact that Pohl's
serialized novel Jem (Nov-Dec 1978-1980; 1979) took two years to
serialize, under three editors, finishing long after the book had been
published.The new Galaxy Magazine founded in 1994 by E.J. Gold, son of the
original editor, and published by a SMALL PRESS, publishes New Age
non-fiction material, reprint sf stories and new sf stories in what may be
a commercial mix. There is reprint artwork, and most of the fiction is
very short; much of the new fiction by little-known writers.There have
been numerous anthologies of stories from Gal, for details of which see
the entries for its first four editors. Galaxy Magazine: The Dark and the
Light Years (1986) by David L. Rosheim is good on hard facts about the
magazine but very restricted on interpretation and context.A UK edition,
from Strato Publications, began in Jan 1953 (reprinting the Oct 1952 US
edition). It was labelled vol 3 #1. #2 reprinted the preceding US issue
(Sep 1952). The UK edition continued to follow the original, erratically
at first, and from #7 began to shorten the US edition. It continued to be
numbered continuously (dropping the "vol 3" after #12) until #94 (Feb
1961). From #72 (Feb 1959) it was an exact reprint of the US edition with
a different title page. From Dec 1961 only the cover was different, and
from Dec 1962 the US edition was imported. A second UK edition, published
by Gold Star Publications, ran for 5 issues in 1967, reprinting six months
after the US original (Jan/Feb 1967 UK was June 1966 US), printing US
editions complete apart from the changed date. Then, again, the US edition
was distributed. In 1972 a third UK edition began, from Universal-Tandem
Publishing Co., who overprinted the US edition with price and issue
number: the May/Jun 1972 issue was #1, and a total of 25 numbered issues
were published, ending with #25, Jan 1975. However, the numbering was not
continuous; it ran #1-#10, #11, #11, #12, #12, #12, #14, #17-#25.
Thereafter the US edition was distributed. [MJE/PN]See also: GOLDEN AGE OF
SF.
GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS
A companion series to GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION. The first 31 issues of
these numbered books, which resembled magazines, were published
irregularly, 1950-57, in DIGEST format, and a further 4, 1957-9, were
issued in standard paperback format. #1-#7 (1950-51) were published by
World Editions, #9-#35 (1952-9) by Galaxy Publishing Corp. The series was
then taken over by Beacon Books, a publisher specializing in mild
pornography, which brought out 11 further issues, #36-#46 (1959-61), still

in paperback format, usually with lurid covers and suggestive titles.The
original series featured several classics of magazine sf, including
Sinister Barrier (1939 Unknown; 1943) by Eric Frank RUSSELL (#1), Legion
of Space (1934 ASF; 1947) by Jack WILLIAMSON (#2) and LEST DARKNESS FALL
(1939 Unknown; 1941) by L. Sprague DE CAMP (#24). Notable novels from
outside the genre, often abridged, included The Amphibians (1924) and The
World Below (1929) by S. Fowler WRIGHT (#4 and #5) and Odd John (1935) by
Olaf STAPLEDON (#8). There were also some original novels, including
Prelude to Space (1951) by Arthur C. CLARKE (#3) and Empire (1951) by
Clifford D. SIMAK (#7). Original novels with a sexy slant published in the
Beacon Books series include Flesh (1960) by Philip Jose FARMER (#41) and
The Male Response (1961) by Brian W. ALDISS (#45), while such innocuous
works as A.E. VAN VOGT's The House that Stood Still (1950) and Cyril
JUDD's Outpost Mars (1952) were retitled, respectively, The Mating Cry
(rev vt 1960) (#44) and Sin in Space (rev vt 1961) (#46).In 1963 there
appeared a second companion series to Gal, Galaxy Magabooks, each volume
consisting of two short novels by a single author. There were only 3
issues: #1 and #2 came in 1963; the later #3 was And My Fear is Great/Baby
is Three (1965 dos) by Theodore STURGEON. Award Books issued a number of
paperbacks as "Galaxy Science Fiction Novels" in the early 1970s, but
these did not constitute a series. [BS]
GALILEO
US BEDSHEET-size magazine. 16 issues Sep 1976-Jan 1980, with #11/12, May
1979, being a double issue. Planned as quarterly, but bimonthly to Sep
1978, then irregular, with the last 4 issues bimonthly. Published by
Avenue Victor Hugo, Boston, Massachusetts; ed Charles C. RYAN.Published on
a small budget, G hoped to survive through subscription sales rather than
newsstand distribution. 8000 copies of #1 were printed and sold. In
magazine terms this is small, but the circulation steadily increased, at
least initially. Printed on cheap newsprint, and using a number of stories
by little-known writers, G began quietly but showed signs of improvement
by #3. The great Renaissance scientist was evoked in the title because G
was planned to emulate his "indomitable spirit . . . [and] undying quest
for knowledge". Almost half of G, like most 1970s sf magazines, was
devoted to science-fact articles, reviews, interviews etc. Contributors
included Brian W. ALDISS, Ray BRADBURY (poetry), Robert CHILSON, Hal
CLEMENT (science fact), John KESSEL, Connie WILLIS and Larry NIVEN, the
latter with a serialization of The Ringworld Engineers (1979; 1980). G
became quite a good magazine, but perished because of distribution
problems. [PN]
GALLAGHER, STEPHEN
(1954- ) UK scriptwriter and author who first came to prominence with sf
scripts, notably the RADIO series "The Last Rose of Summer", which he
adapted as his first novel, The Last Rose of Summer (1978) - from which
derived Dying of Paradise (1982) and its sequel, The Ice Belt (1983), both
as by Stephen Couper - and episodes for DR WHO, two of which he novelized:
Doctor Who and Warrior's Gate * (1982) and Doctor Who - Terminus * (1983),
both as by John Lydecker. In the 1980s SG began to establish a reputation
as one of the UK's most successful HORROR writers, though some of his

books have strong sf overtones. Chimera (1982) is a variation on the
Frankenstein myth in which the monster is a hybrid apeman ( APES AND
CAVEMEN) created by a government research project in DNA manipulation (
GENETIC ENGINEERING); it was serialized on UK tv in 1991. Oktober (1988)
is about an experimental drug that allows the protagonist to control other
people's nightmares. While often lacking originality of ideas, SG's work
is marked by strong characterization, good plotting and extensive
background detail, particularly when police-procedural material is being
presented. [AC/PR]Other works: Saturn 3 * (1980), novelizing the movie
SATURN 3 (1980), and based on its screenplay by Martin AMIS; Follower
(1984); Valley of Lights (1987); Down River (1989); Rain (1990); The Boat
House (1991) and Nightmare, With Angel (1992).
GALLICO, PAUL (WILLIAM)
(1897-1976) US journalist, screenwriter and novelist, sports editor of
the New York Daily News for 12 years, known mainly for such works outside
the sf field as The Snow Goose (1941 chap), a sentimental novella
extremely popular in the wartime UK. The Foolish Immortals (1953) is an
eternal-youth novel. [JC]Other works: The Abandoned (1950); Love of Seven
Dolls (1954); Ludmila: A Story of Liechstenstein (1954 chap
Liechtenstein); Thomasina: The Cat who Thought She was God (1957); The
Silent Miau (1964); The Man who was Magic: A Tale of Innocence (1967); The
Manxmouse (1968);The House that Wouldn't Go Away (1979 UK); The Best of
Paul Gallico (coll 1988).
GALLUN, RAYMOND Z(INKE)
(1911-1994) US author and technical writer, now retired. He was born and
educated in Wisconsin, and has been a considerable traveller since. He
began publishing sf stories at the age of 19 in 1929 with "The Space
Dwellers" in Science Wonder Stories and "The Crystal Ray" in Air Wonder
Stories. In the 1930s he published frequently in F. Orlin TREMAINE's ASF,
his most famous contributions being the Old Faithful series: "Old
Faithful" (1934), "The Son of Old Faithful" (1935) and "Child of the
Stars" (1936), the first of these novelettes featuring a sympathetically
conceived Martian - much in contrast to the then dominant sf convention
that ALIENS were to be depicted as monstrous - and the other two featuring
that Martian's descendants. Along with other stories, the three were
collected in The Best of Raymond Z. Gallun (coll 1978). During his
prolific years - he published most of his 120 plus stories during 1929-42
- RZG also used the pseudonyms Arthur Allport, Dow Elstar, E.V. Raymond
and William Callahan in his magazine fiction, publishing his first book,
The Machine that Thought (1939 Science Fiction Stories; c1940-42 chap) as
Callahan. His style was rough-hewn, but he plotted his work with vigour
and packed it with ideas, often decidedly original: from a very early
date, many of his stories show an interest in BIOLOGY and GENETIC
ENGINEERING not widely shared by his contemporaries. He became inactive in
the 1940s and, though he has published again since about 1950, he has
never regained the popularity of his early years, although one of his
finest stories, reprinted in the Best volume, was "The Restless Tide"
(1951 Marvel Science Fiction). He published nothing 1961-74, but remained
intermittently active through the 1980s.RZG's first novel, "Passport to

Jupiter" (1950 Startling Stories), never appeared as a book. The style of
the first to do so, People Minus X (roughly based on "Avalanche", 1935 ASF
as by Dow Elstar; 1957), continued to reflect his many years of writing in
a four-square idea-oriented style for the PULP MAGAZINES, and
unsurprisingly derives its energy from the concepts which flood it,
including body-miniaturization, body-recording, the transfiguration of
human volunteers into space-resistant ANDROIDS, and much more. The Planet
Strappers (1961) is more routine, but The Eden Cycle (1974) is a carefully
written, slow-moving study of humans who, having received from aliens the
gift of IMMORTALITY and a capacity to reinhabit imaginatively - through a
kind of VIRTUAL REALITY - various epochs of world history ( HISTORY IN
SF), find themselves less and less capable of responding to their
experiences.RZG is a writer - along with Edmond HAMILTON and Stanley G.
WEINBAUM - whose writing reflected the expectations of magazine readers of
the early 1930s; and like Hamilton (Weinbaum died early) his development
after 1945 was tied, for good and for ill, to those early days. Late
novels, like Skyclimber (1981), set on MARS, and Bioblast (1985), about
the early years of a mutant SUPERMAN, may therefore lack some essential
degree of appeal to today's audiences because they are crude, because they
avoid sex, because their protagonists are unsubtle. But the sense of
purpose persists, as does a humane vigour - as a late memoir, Starclimber:
The Literary Adventures and Autobiography of Raymond Z. Gallun (1991) ed
Jeffrey M. ELLIOT, amply conveys. RZG is the best of those pre-1939 sf
writers who failed to remain well known into the current nostalgic period.
[JC]About the author: The Work of Raymond Z. Gallun: An Annotated
Bibliography ?
SCIENCE-FICTION; FAR FUTURE; JUPITER; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND
PUBLICATIONS); OUTER PLANETS; SOCIAL DARWINISM.
GALOUYE, DANIEL F(RANCIS)
(1920-1976) US writer who was born and died in New Orleans, Louisiana; a
naval test pilot during WWII, he subsequently worked as a journalist,
though the delayed effect of war injuries forced him to retire in 1965. He
began to publish sf with "Rebirth" for Imagination in 1952, and appeared
frequently in the magazines for about a decade with such tales as "Tonight
the Sky Will Fall" (1952) and "The City of Force" (1959), characterized by
a combination of a strong HARD-SF structure and a treatment of
psychological concerns that was sometimes a touch uneasy. Twice he wrote
(1953-4) as Louis G. Daniels. Stories from this period are collected in
The Last Leap and Other Stories of the Super-Mind (coll 1964 UK) and
Project Barrier (coll 1968 UK); neither volume appeared in the USA.DFG's
first novel, Dark Universe (1961), a POCKET-UNIVERSE tale (see also
CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH), remains his most popular and is probably his
best (it was nominated for a HUGO). Long after a nuclear HOLOCAUST, the
survivors' descendants live sightless far underground. Their culture from daily routine through cosmological concerns - is grippingly and
originally conceived, though the book closes with a somewhat anticlimactic
escape from darkness into a new age of "enlightenment". His next novels,
Lords of the Psychon (1963), based roughly on "City of Force" (1959),
Counterfeit World (1964 UK; vt Simulacron-3 1964 US) and The Lost
Perception (1966 UK; vt A Scourge of Screamers 1968 US), share the same

technical ingenuity and a continuing interest in worlds where the
PERCEPTION of reality is controlled and restricted, where indeed the
worlds themselves are arbitrary constructs, Counterfeit World being
particularly interesting in this respect. In a sense it is a novel-length
reworking of Frederik POHL's "The Tunnel Under the World" (1954), both
being about construct-worlds designed for market research; it was filmed
for tv in Germany in 1973 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder as WELT AM DRAHT
(1973; vt World on a Wire). DFG's last novel, The Infinite Man (1973), was
less successful.DPG was never really able to capitalize on the promising
beginning he had made as an sf writer. It may be that his war injuries
kept him from a longer and more fruitful career. [JC]See also: GREAT AND
SMALL; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; PSYCHOLOGY; VIRTUAL REALITY.
GAMBI PUBLICATIONS
ODYSSEY.
GAMERA
A giant prehistoric turtle who starred in a number of MONSTER MOVIES from
the Daiei Studios. The first of these was DAIKAIJU GAMERA (1966), in the
entry for which are detailed also the other Gamera films. [JGr]
GAMES AND SPORTS
This entry deals with games as a theme within sf. Games based on sf are
treated under GAMES AND TOYS.Just as sf's concern with the ARTS has been
dominated by stories about the decline of artistry in a mechanized mass
society, so its concern with sports has been much involved with
representing the decline of sportsmanship. There is a marked tendency in
contemporary sf to assume that the audience-appeal of futuristic sports
will be measured by their rendering of violence in terms of spectacle: the
film ROLLERBALL (1975) is perhaps the clearest expression of this
notion.There are two forms of stereotyped competitive violence which are
common in sf: the gladiatorial circus and the hunt. The arena is part of
the standard apparatus of romances in the Edgar Rice BURROUGHS tradition,
and extends throughout the history of sf to such modern variants as that
found in the Dumarest series by E.C. TUBB (1967 onwards). Combat between
human and ALIEN is the basis of Fredric BROWN's popular "Arena" (1944) and
a host of similar stories, while many visions of a corrupt future society
foresee the return of bloody games in the Roman tradition-Frederik POHL's
and C.M. KORNBLUTH's Gladiator-at-Law (1955) is a notable example. The
BattleTech SHARED-WORLD series (see also Robert THURSTON) moves the
formula on to a galactic stage. Ordinary hunting is extrapolated to take
in alien prey in such stories as the Gerry Carlyle series by Arthur K.
BARNES (1937-46; coll 1956 as Interplanetary Hunter), and a familiar
variant has mankind as the victim rather than the hunter; examples include
THE SOUND OF HIS HORN (1952) by SARBAN, Come, Hunt an Earthman (1973) by
Philip E. HIGH and many works by Robert SHECKLEY, ranging from "Seventh
Victim" (1953) and "The Prize of Peril" (1958) to such recent novels as
Victim Prime (1986 UK) and Hunter/Victim (1987 UK). A notable series of
relevant theme anthologies is the 3-vol Starhunters series (1988-90) ed
David A. DRAKE. The oft-presumed equivalence between the spectator-appeal
of sport and that of dramatized violence reached its peak in Norman
SPINRAD's "The National Pastime" (1973) and the film DEATH RACE 2000

(1975).An opposing trend is one which suggests that the people of the
future might substitute rule-bound war games for actual wars, thus
avoiding large-scale slaughter of civilians. The idea was first mooted by
George T. CHESNEY in The New Ordeal (1879); sf versions of it include
"Mercenary" (1962; exp vt Mercenary from Tomorrow 1968) and its sequel The
Earth War (1963) by Mack REYNOLDS and the Gamester War series begun with
The Alexandrian Ring (1987) by William R. FORSTCHEN, and also a number of
films, including GLADIATORERNA (1968) and ROBOT JOX (1990).The sf sports
story is almost entirely a post-WWII phenomenon, although the pre-WWII
pulps did feature Clifford D. SIMAK's "Rule 18" (1938) - in which one of
the ever-popular "all-time great" teams is actually assembled - and one or
two rocket-racing stories, such as Lester DEL REY's "Habit" (1939); and
much earlier van Tassel SUTPHEN had included a couple of golfing-sf
stories in his The Nineteenth Hole: Second Series (coll 1901). Many early
post-WWII stories are accounts of man/machine confrontation ( MACHINES;
ROBOTS). Examples include the golf story "Open Warfare" (1954) by James E.
GUNN, the boxing stories "Title Fight" (1956) by William Campbell Gault
and "Steel" (1956) by Richard MATHESON, the chess story "The 64-Square
Madhouse" (1962) by Fritz LEIBER, and the motor-racing story "The Ultimate
Racer" (1964) by Gary Wright, who also wrote a fine bobsled-racing sf
story in "Mirror of Ice" (1967). The changing role of the automobile in
post-WWII society provoked a number of bizarre extrapolations, including
H. Chandler ELLIOTT's violent "A Day on Death Highway" (1963), Roger
ZELAZNY's story about a car-fighting matador, "Auto-da-Fe" (1967), and
Harlan ELLISON's "Along the Scenic Route" (1969). Other popular sf themes
are often combined with sf sports stories. Gambling of various kinds
appears in many ESP stories, for obvious reasons, and superhuman powers
are occasionally employed on the sports field, as in Irwin Shaw's
"Whispers in Bedlam" (1973) and George Alec EFFINGER's "Naked to the
Invisible Eye" (1975). Stories which examine the possible impact of
biotechnology on future sports include Howard V. Hendrix's "The Farm
System" (1988) and Ian MCDONALD's "Winning" (1990). Full-length novels
about future sport are relatively rare; examples include The Mind-Riders
(1976) by Brian M. STABLEFORD, about boxing, and The New Atoms Bombshell
(1980) by Robert Browne (Marvin Karlins [1941- ]), about baseball.Games
are used as a key to social advancement and control in a number of
stories, including The Heads of Cerberus (1919; 1952) by Francis STEVENS,
World out of Mind (1953) by J.T. MCINTOSH, SOLAR LOTTERY (1955; vt World
of Chance) by Philip K. DICK and Cosmic Checkmate (1962) by Katherine
MACLEAN and Charles V. DE VET. Some sf stories produce future or alternate
worlds where games are fundamental to the social fabric, as in Hermann
HESSE's Das Glasperlenspiel (1943; trans M. Savill as Magister Ludi 1949
US; preferred trans Richard and Clara Winston as The Glass Bead Game 1969
US) and Gerald MURNANE's The Plains (1982); a vicious games-based culture
is successfully attacked by the protagonist of Iain M. BANKS's space opera
The Player of Games (1988). In other novels by Philip K. Dick, including
The Game-Players of Titan (1963) and THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH
(1965), games function as levels of pseudo-reality. Sf writers who have
shown a particular and continuing interest in games or sports include
Barry N. MALZBERG, who often uses surreal games to symbolize frustrating
and ultimately unbeatable alienating forces - as in the apocalyptic

Overlay (1972) and Tactics of Conquest (1974), and in the
quasi-allegorical The Gamesman (1975) - George Alec EFFINGER, who also
uses game situations as symbols of the limitations of rationality and
freedom, notably in "Lydectes: On the Nature of Sport" (1975) and "25
Crunch Split Right on Two" (1975), and Piers ANTHONY, who often uses games
to reflect the structures of his plots, notably in MACROSCOPE (1969), Ox
(1976), Steppe (1976) and Ghost (1988). The game which has most frequently
fascinated sf writers is chess, featured in Charles L. HARNESS's "The
Chessplayers" (1953) and Poul ANDERSON's "The Immortal Game" (1954) as
well as Malzberg's Tactics of Conquest. John BRUNNER's The Squares of the
City (1965) has a plot based on a real chess game, and Ian WATSON's
Queenmagic, Kingmagic (1986) includes a world structured as one (as well
as worlds structured according to other games, including Snakes and
Ladders!). Gerard KLEIN built the mystique of the game into Starmaster's
Gambit (1958; trans 1973). A version of chess crops up in the work of
Edgar Rice Burroughs - in The Chessmen of Mars (1922) - and a rather more
exotic variant plays an important role in The Fairy Chessmen (1951; vt
Chessboard Planet; vt The Far Reality) by Lewis Padgett (Henry KUTTNER and
C.L. MOORE). An anthology of chess stories is Pawn to Infinity (anth 1982)
ed Fred SABERHAGEN.In recent years the rapid real-world evolution of
electronic arcade games and home-computer games has sparked off a boom in
stories where such games become too real for comfort. Notable examples
include "Dogfight" (1985) by Michael SWANWICK and William GIBSON, Octagon
(1981) by Saberhagen, TRUE NAMES (1981; 1984) by Vernor VINGE, ENDER'S
GAME (1978; exp 1985) by Orson Scott CARD, God Game (1986) by Andrew M.
GREELEY and Only You Can Save Mankind (1992) by Terry PRATCHETT (see also
VIRTUAL REALITY). Stories of space battles whose protagonists are revealed
in the last line to be icons in a computer-game "shoot 'em up" may have
succeeded Shaggy God stories ( ADAM AND EVE) as the archetypal folly
perpetrated by novice writers (although Fredric Brown's similarly plotted
"Recessional" [1960], where the protagonists are chessmen, has been much
anthologized). Many computer-game scenarios are, of course,
sciencefictional, as are many of the scenarios used in fantasy
role-playing games ( GAMES AND TOYS; GAME-WORLDS).When it comes to
inventing new games, sf writers have had very limited success. There have
been one or two interesting descriptions of sports played in gravity-free
conditions, but these are usually incidental to the real concerns of the
stories in which they occur; stories set in SPACE HABITATS frequently
include descriptions of "flying" games played in the vicinity of the
rotational axis. Sling-gliding, in which glides are accelerated by massive
steel whips, is a plausible and dangerous sport featured in The Jaws that
Bite, the Claws that Catch (1975; vt The Girl with a Symphony in her
Fingers) by Michael G. CONEY. The sport of hussade, which plays a major
part in Jack VANCE's Trullion: Alastor 2262 (1973), is unconvincing. The
board-game vlet in Samuel R. DELANY's Triton (1976) is cleverly presented,
but the details of play are necessarily vague. This game was first written
about by Joanna RUSS in "A Game of Vlet" (1974).Games and sports are also
very common in FANTASY and SCIENCE FANTASY, especially that set in postHOLOCAUST or primitive worlds, as in Piers Anthony's early trilogy
(1968-75) collected as Battle Circle (omni 1977), or Eclipse of the Kai *
(1989) by Joe Dever and John Grant ( Paul BARNETT), which features

vtovlry, a rugby analogue played triangularly and with throwing-axes.
Indeed, the metaphoric nuances of games enliven fantasy of all sorts, from
the croquet and card games in Lewis CARROLL's Alice books to Sheri S.
TEPPER's True Game series; in both cases the arbitrary and obsessive
nature of games-playing becomes an image of life itself.A relevant theme
anthology is Arena: Sports SF (anth 1976) ed Barry N. Malzberg and Ed
FERMAN. [BS/PN]See also: LEISURE.
GAMES AND TOYS
For games as a theme within sf GAMES AND SPORTS. This entry deals with
games and toys based on sf.Sf games have quite a long history. The first,
fairly quiet, phase comprised board games or card games based on a
successful film, tv series or comic strip. The second phase, the
commercial explosion in sf and fantasy games (and toys), dates back only
to the 1970s, and came about as a consequence of three factors: the
introduction in 1974 of Dungeons and Dragons (D?
role-playing game (RPG); the introduction of the home computer, which only
at the very end of the 1970s developed any real market penetration (though
an early sf computer strategy game, Star Trek, was on display at the
Worldcon in Australia in 1975) and the increasing realization by business
people of the fortunes to be made by marketing products associated with
successful films and tv shows, everything from bars of soap through books
and comics to games and toys. The first massive campaign of this sort in
the sf field was associated with the film STAR WARS (1977). (However, sf
computer games played on the huge, old, cumbersome mainframes of the
period, antedate by a decade or more the sf games played on home
computers. The game Spacewarwas invented at MIT - Massachusetts Institute
of Technology - in the 1960s, and was the subject of an article by Albert
W. Kuhfeld in ASF, July 1971.)The first phase. Sf scenarios lend
themselves readily to strategy games or war games (the latter being a
specialized case of the former), often played on boards marked out in
various grid patterns. Board games of this sort can be traced back to
chess and Wei-ch'i, but miniature wargaming effectively began with H.G.
WELLS, as described in his books Floor Games (1911) and Little Wars: A
Game for Boys (1913); he was probably, despite his denials, influenced by
Kriegspiel, a military training tool then used in Germany. The immediate
ancestor of sf games is Gettysburg (1958), designed by Charles Roberts,
the first board game dedicated to simulating a single military event. It
led to a plethora of such games, including simulations of imaginary
events.Once speculative warfare was admitted by gamers to be legitimate,
the field was open to games like Lensman (1971), based on E.E. "Doc"
SMITH's series of novels. Featuring space combat, it was largely a variant
on existing naval simulations, with the addition of such sf tropes as
FORCE FIELDS and tractor beams. Later games include: Robert Heinlein's
Starship Troopers (1976), a clever and complex development from Robert A.
HEINLEIN's original scenario, John Carter of Mars (1979), based on Edgar
Rice BURROUGHS's Barsoom books, and DUNE (1979), based on Frank HERBERT's
novel. One of the earlier sf games - though probably not the first - with
an original scenario (that is, not based on a book or film) was Cosmic
Encounter (1977), a strategy card game in which players, as alien species
with differing powers, competed to extend their "sphere of influence". An

early fantasy board game was War of the Ring (1978), based on J.R.R.
TOLKIEN's The Lord of the Rings (1954-5).The second phase. Until the
mid-1970s most games inspired by sf and fantasy were essentially glosses
on existing forms, substituting Mars for Mayfair or Nazgul for Nazis. Then
new game-forms appeared, notably role-playing games, which took their
inspiration from fantasy and sf at a much more fundamental level. Dungeons
and Dragons (1974), the first published RPG, inspired by Tolkien's books
and other fantasy sources, was created by Gary Gygax (1938- ) and Dave
Arneson. D?
company, TSR Inc., was earning $20 million a year. In RPGs a referee (or
"dungeon master") acts as story-teller, prepares - or describes according
to parameters set out by the games company - an environment through which
the players move, and presents the players with a series of problems such
as monsters, booby traps and complicated puzzles. The players control
"characters", defined in terms of various ratings, and roll dice to see
whether they have succeeded or failed. Players tend to feel intense
identification with their characters.Other companies saw the potential of
the market and launched their own fantasy RPGs, but the earliest were
little more than variations on the D?
by Chaosium, was the first really innovative successor, providing a
detailed and consistent fantasy GAME-WORLD, complete with history, human
and nonhuman races, religions and politics. Meanwhile sf RPGs were being
launched, such as Traveller (1977), published by GDW Inc., and it too
later added its own detailed background; its predecessors were
Metamorphosis: Alpha, Flying Buffalo's Starfaring, Space Quest and Space
Patrol. Set in a SPACE-OPERA universe, Traveller would feel familiar to
readers of such writers of HARD SF as Poul ANDERSON and Jerry POURNELLE.By
now it was clear that game referees were prepared to buy accessory
materials, such as rules supplements, prepared adventures, pads for
recording details of characters, etc., and would buy more material for an
existing game in preference to a new game. Games not supported by such
accessories soon stopped selling. An early RPG trend was increasing
complexity of rules. Chivalry and Sorcery (1977), published by Fantasy
Games Unlimited, tried to simulate every detail of medieval life, and play
slowed to a crawl under the burden of dice rolling and rules consultation
needed for every action. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (1978-9), published
by TSR, much more successfully added several hundred thousand words to the
D?
backgrounds vague, but in the 1980s many RPGs were licensed from popular
sf and fantasy works. Among these were Call of Cthulhu (1981), published
by Chaosium, based on H.P. LOVECRAFT's horror stories, Stormbringer
(1981), published by Chaosium, based on Michael MOORCOCK's novels, Star
Trek (1983), published by FASA, based on the tv series, Marvel Super
Heroes (1984), published by TSR, based on MARVEL COMICS, RINGWORLD (1984),
published by Chaosium, based on Larry NIVEN's novel, Star Wars (1987),
published by West End Games, based on STAR WARS, Buck Rogers XXVc: The
25th Century (1988), published by TSR, based on the comic strip BUCK
ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY, Humanx Commonwealth (1989), published by Steve
Jackson Games, based on the series of books by Alan Dean FOSTER, Uplift
(1990), published by Steve Jackson Games, based on the novel by David
BRIN, and Aliens (1991), published by Leading Edge Games, based on the

film ALIENS.Sf games in original settings range from the Wellsian
STEAMPUNK Space 1889 (1989), published by GDW, through the humorously
DYSTOPIAN Paranoia (1984), published by West End Games, through space
opera such as Spacemaster (1986), published by Iron Crown Enterprises, to
the increasingly popular CYBERPUNK setting: Shadowrun (1989), published by
FASA, Dark Conspiracy (1991), published by GDW, and Cyberpunk (1991),
published by R. Talsorian.The first mass-market UK RPGs also appeared in
the 1980s, all from GAMES WORKSHOP. Golden Heroes (1984) was an
unsuccessful SUPERHERO RPG. Judge Dredd (1985), based on JUDGE DREDD, did
better, as did Warhammer Fantasy (1986). No other UK RPG manufacturer has
achieved much success. All the most important RPG companies are US,
notably TSR, Chaosium, FASA, Steve Jackson Games, GDW and West End Games.
TSR probably sells more RPG material than all the others combined.Some
RPGs are PBM (play by mail); these may be administered and refereed by
commercial organizations, which charge a fee and often use a computer
database.However, PBM is not well suited to role-playing games; most PBM
games are strategic war games.Many RPG manufacturers use a core game
system for several genres, so that players need learn only one set of
rules. By far the most prolific is GURPS (1988; Generic Universal Role
Playing System), from Steve Jackson Games, which has supplements in every
genre from fantasy, sf and horror to Wild West, pirates and modern
warfare, and leases rights from a range of sources, including Witch World
(1988), based on the novels by Andre NORTON, Riverworld (1989), based on
the novels by Philip Jose FARMER, Wild Cards (1989), based on the WILD
CARDS original anthologies, themselves inspired by an RPG played by
several of the authors, and The Prisoner (1991), based on The PRISONER .
(This company gained considerable notoriety when computers, manuscripts
and materials for Cyberpunk were seized by the FBI, who believed that the
company was preparing "a handbook for computer crime".) Similarly
Chaosium's Runequest system was modified for Call of Cthulhu,
Stormbringer, RINGWORLD and other RPGs. GDW's near-future war RPG Twilight
2000 (1987) was the basis for their hard-sf 2300 AD (1989) and other
games. West End Games also have a generic system, TORG (1990).It seems
likely that the early 1990s will see a major shake-out of RPG
manufacturers, since there are too many games chasing too few customers;
there are currently at least 10 horror RPGs and six cyberpunk variants. At
any given time there are likely to be several RPG magazines in production,
but they tend to be short-lived. The oldest and most regular are Dragon
from TSR, White Dwarf from Games Workshop and Challenge from GDW. Dragon
and Challenge often publish fiction.An important RPG variant is the Live
Role-Playing Game, in which players dress as their characters, fight with
blunt or padded weapons, and explore real caves or fake ruins. Numerous
groups are involved in these activities.A growing branch of publishing,
especially for children, is the role-playing gamebook, the book itself
being the game. Such books, often part of series like the Fighting Fantasy
Gamebook series, offer branching narratives where at various points the
reader is invited to make a choice, as between, say, "Go left" and "Go
right", with a different scenario following according to the choice made.
Usually the reader has first defined, by rolling dice or otherwise. the
various attributes (skill, stamina, good fortune, etc.) that s/he carries
to the game. Successful authors in the field include Steve Jackson (1951-

; not the US Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games), Ian Livingstone and
Joe Dever (1956- ). Although most such books are fantasy, some are sf, as
for example Dever's Freeway Warrior series.In the 1970s, at the same time
as the rise of RPGs, the COMPUTER game Adventure (vt Colossal Cave),
designed by Crowther and Wood, was the prototype for computer games that
used simple typed commands to explore the secrets and eliminate the
obstacles of a "world" described in lively detail by the computer. At
first the only players were computer professionals and students who had
access to the mainframe computers then required for play, but the games
became much more widely popular in the early 1980s as the first
mass-market personal computers appeared. The original Adventure was easily
converted to most machines, and soon new games added larger vocabularies,
better parsing (conversion of typed input into game instructions) and more
complicated worlds. Zork (1982), published by Infocom, typified these
adventures early on, but more recent "adventure games" of this sort are
very much more sophisticated. In the USA, Infocom produced a number of
good adventure games with sf scenarios, including Planetfall (1984),
Starcross (1984), the dystopian A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985) and-based
on Douglas ADAMS's best-selling novel - THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE
GALAXY (1984). Also notable was the sf Silicon Dream trilogy from Level 9
in the UK, beginning with Snowball (1983). Several multiple-player games
appeared, the most successful being MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) (1982),
played over computer networks or via modem.By the late 1980s many of the
concepts used in RPGs had found their way into computer adventures, which
were beginning to use animated graphics, sound and more flexible control
methods. Several RPGs were converted to computer form, notably Advanced
Dungeons and Dragons, in Pool of Radiance (1989) published by SST, and
later games. Computer adventures of the late 1980s and the 1990s often
involve as many as 4-6 characters, much like those in RPGs, and these
sometimes act independently of the player's instructions.While most RPGs
stay in production for several years, the shelf life of most computer
games is measured in months, and they become obsolete as systems evolve.
Despite complaints from the minority of players who had enjoyed the
language-oriented input and output of earlier computer adventure games,
almost all computer adventures now rely on highly detailed graphics, and
often include music and electronically generated speech. Unfortunately,
these embellishments mean that a game which runs on one type of computer
must be completely rewritten to run on another. Conversion is usually
expensive and difficult, and a game which is famous on one or two systems
may be unknown elsewhere. A new trend is rapid growth in the sheer size of
programs: some adventures are supplied on seven or more floppy disks. The
huge King's Quest 5 (1990), published by Sierra, is most conveniently
purchased as a CD-ROM disk.While sf scenarios are at their most
interesting (and their closest to written sf) in these so-called
"adventure" games, they are even more common in "arcade" games. Where
adventure games require skill at problem-solving (and sometimes language
skills), arcade games put a premium on the dexterity of the player or
players with joystick or pushbutton controls, and often involve
manoeuvring small screen figures on moving platforms or around various
moving threats, and shooting down moving obstacles (which in early arcade
classics were space invaders or asteroids). Such scenarios - though

visually much more elaborate - are still common in the arcade games
produced, for example, by the Japanese computer-games company Nintendo. A
classic game mixing strategy (trading between planetary systems) and
arcade skills (space combat) is Elite (1984 UK), originally published by
Acornsoft and now available in diverse versions, including Nintendo. The
modern computer adventure game commonly contains elements of play
(requiring timing and dexterity) taken from arcade games; sometimes these
games are known as "arcade adventures".Games presently under development
will present their players with a VIRTUAL-REALITY scenario; their players
will wear helmets, gloves, etc., in which visual display units and WALDO
sensors will be incorporated. The subjective experience approximates the
feeling of being placed in and able to interact with a real alternate
world. Such developments are still at comparatively early stages (although
of course they have been commonplace in sf since the 1940s).There has
naturally been considerable cross-fertilization between RPGs and computer
adventures on the one hand, and sf and fantasy in other media on the
other. While many RPGs are based either on literary sources or on tv or
film, it is now not unusual for the fiction to be based on the game.
Several sf games have appeared with novels set in the worlds they present
as part of the games package. TSR's games have spawned numerous novels,
comics and a tv cartoon series. Novel TIES have been based on RPGs,
especially D?
authors have emerged from hobby writing, including John M. FORD. For more
on this aspect of publishing GAME-WORLDS, themselves a specialized aspect
of SHARED WORLDS.Games playing itself has become a common activity in sf
scenarios in films and books (it is used to conscript a space pilot in The
LAST STARFIGHTER [1984], for example), especially those directed at
adolescents. Space Demons (1986) by Gillian RUBINSTEIN is not untypical in
sucking its protagonists into a ruthless computer-games world, much as in
the film TRON (1982). (See also CYBERSPACE.)There are many active RPG
fans, and this group has a considerable overlap with sf and fantasy FANDOM
generally. Annual CONVENTIONS include Origins and Gencon, in the USA, and
the UK's Gamesfair, and are usually commercially organized (unlike most sf
conventions). FANZINES tend to be short-lived and irregular. There is not
nearly so much fan activity among computer-games enthusiasts.RPGs have
frequently come under fire from religious fundamentalists and other
pressure groups, who appear to believe that their depictions of MAGIC and
SUPERNATURAL CREATURES are likely to deprave and corrupt. Any suicide by
an RPG player may be blamed on the genre, despite evidence suggesting that
suicide rates among RPG players are lower than average. It can be argued
that such games are psychologically disruptive, sometimes distracting
their players from education and other matters which should take a higher
priority, but this is true of most hobbies. It can equally be argued,
especially with some of the sf games (which may require, for example, a
good working knowledge of physics and chemistry), that games-playing can
be educational.From a commercial point of view, sf toys are more important
than sf games, and they have at least as long a history. Wind-up toy
robots had become popular by the mid-1950s, but they can be regarded as
simply the latest incarnation of the "automata" that were being built as
toys as early as the 18th century and celebrated in PROTO-SCIENCE-FICTION
stories such as "Der Sandmann" (1816; trans as "The Sandman") by E.T.A.

HOFFMANN and "The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844) by Nathaniel
HAWTHORNE.Marketing campaigns for toys connected to hit movies like Star
Wars made many millions of dollars and became the target of angry
opposition from parents and educators when, in the 1980s, they became
connected to the sort of tv shows often viewed by children on a Saturday
morning - usually animated cartoons or animated puppet programmes. Three
notable offenders were the sf tv programmes Transformers, He-Man and
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, all of which, whatever their virtues as
entertainment, could be seen as 25-minute advertisements designed to
encourage children to put pressure on their parents to buy toys which
would enable them, in play, to reproduce the on-screen adventures (see
also The TRANSFORMERS - THE MOVIE, MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE and TEENAGE
MUTANT NINJA TURTLES). An additional criticism, perhaps less securely
based, is that many such programmes, including these three, encourage
childen to indulge in fantasies of violence. The commercial clout of these
product-advertising programmes - not all of them sf (Care Bears is a
non-sf example) - can be enormous, spawning major industries. The USA and
Australia are among the worst offenders; the UK has some regulations
designed to minimize this sort of
advertising-masquerading-as-entertainment to a captive audience of
children, and some European countries have banned such programmes
altogether. [MR/BF/ZB/PN]Further reading: On games, Heroic Worlds: A
History and Guide to Role-Playing Games (1991) by Lawrence Schick, and
Adventure Games for Microcomputers: An Annotated Directory of Interactive
Fiction (1991) by Patrick R. Dewey; on toys, Zap! Ray Gun Classics (1991)
by Leslie Singer.
GAMES WORKSHOP
UK company specializing in fantasy-adventure role-playing games and
models ( GAMES AND TOYS) whose subsidiary, GW Books, under the editorship
of David PRINGLE (with Neil Jones 1990-91), between 1989 and 1991 produced
a range of novels and story collections in three series relating to three
of the company's games: Warhammer ( HEROIC FANTASY), Warhammer 40,000
(heroic fantasy/ SPACE OPERA) and Dark Future( ALTERNATE-WORLD/
CYBERPUNK/car action). Writers who contributed novels included Brian Craig
(Brian M. STABLEFORD), David Ferring (David S. GARNETT), Ian WATSON and
Jack Yeovil (Kim NEWMAN), while the collections, ed Pringle (one with Neil
Jones), featured work by these authors and, among others, S.M. Baxter,
Myles Burnham (Eugene Byrne), Ralph T. Castle (Charles PLATT), Storm
CONSTANTINE, Charles Davidson (Charles Stross), Sean Flynn (Paul J.
MCAULEY), Nicola Griffith, Neil Jones and William King. Ranging from the
conventional to the very offbeat, GW Books' output was superior to the
highly successful stream of games-related fictions from the TSR stable (
GAME-WORLDS), perhaps because Pringle, editor of INTERZONE, drew on the
contributors to that magazine. In 1992 it was announced that rights in
these works had been bought by Box Tree Books. GW has also published many
games manuals and two art books, one featuring Les Edwards, the other John
Blanche and Ian MILLER. [KN]
GAME-WORLDS
These are worlds designed by the manufacturers of games, almost always

role-playing games (or gamebooks) or computer adventure games ( GAMES AND
TOYS). In the case of RPGs the parameters of the "world" (the fictional
setting in which the game takes place) will be set out in the handbooks
which form the central part of the game package; in the latter, much of
the world's setting is described on screen by the computer program itself,
and additional information may be given in the associated printed
material. Since the mid-1980s it has been common for the more successful
games of either sort to generate associational material, which may include
stories, novels and COMIC books set in the world of the game. Thus George
Alec EFFINGER's The Zork Chronicles * (1990) is set in a world first
described in the computer adventure game Zork (1982 US), published by
Infocom, and subsequently the setting for several other Infocom games.The
US games company TSR Inc. has been especially prolific in commissioning
books associated with their role-playing games, though these are usually
fantasy rather than sf - as books set in game-worlds tend generally to be.
An example is TSR's Forgotten Realms Fantasy Adventure: Pool of Radiance *
(1989) by James M. Ward and Jane Cooper Hong. The role-playing game
Shadowrun (1989 US), published by FASA, has generated a game-worlds
series, set in a world where fantasy and CYBERPUNK elements are uneasily
married, of which one is Secrets of Power: Volume 2: Shadowrun: Choose
Your Enemies Carefully * (1991) by Robert N. Charrette. The BattleTech
novels by Robert THURSTON are more straightforwardly sf, specifically
SPACE OPERA. These are merely arbitrary examples of what is now a
widespread phenomenon: it constitutes, for example, a sizeable proportion
of the Roc sf/fantasy list of Penguin Books. Since game-worlds series
books are often written by a variety of authors who are seldom the same
people who invented the world in the first place, the game-world can be
seen as a special case of the SHARED WORLD.Authors whose book publications
are solely set in game-worlds do not necessarily receive entries in this
volume; many are absent. Nonetheless, though much fiction set in
game-worlds is hack work, some is not. For example, the novels in the
Demon Download subseries by Jack Yeovil (Kim NEWMAN), set in GAMES
WORKSHOP's Dark Future world, are good, original works in the CYBERPUNK
mode.Many games are set in worlds previously established in book form, as
with Riverworld (1989), published by Steve Jackson Games, based on the
novels by Philip Jose FARMER. This volume does not accept such settings as
true game-worlds, which must have originated in a games format. [PN]
GAMMA
US DIGEST-size magazine. 5 issues 1963-5, published by Star Press, N.
Hollywood; ed William F. NOLAN for 3 issues, then Jack Matcha and Charles
E. FRITCH. The fiction in this magazine - a blend of sf and fantasy - was
of good quality, many stories being by Californian writers with film
connections, like Charles BEAUMONT and Richard MATHESON, and there were
some fine covers by Morris Scott Dollens and John Healey. Its irregularity
of publication sped its demise. [FHP/PN]
GAMOW, GEORGE
(1904-1968) Russian-born physicist involved in the development of quantum
theory at Gottingen and later a colleague of Niels Bohr (1885-1962) and
Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937). After 1935 he lived in the USA, holding the

chair of theoretical physics at George Washington University. After
important work on stellar evolution, he turned to investigating the Big
Bang, becoming the most ardent proselytizer for that theory of the
Universe's origins, in contradiction to the then important Steady State
theory advocated by, notably, Fred HOYLE. Beyond his technical work, GG is
known for his 10 or more scientific popularizations, beginning with The
Birth and Death of the Sun (1940) and including One Two Three . . .
Infinity (1947; rev 1960). His three books about Mr Tompkins are
particularly attractive: Mr Tompkins in Wonderland (coll 1939 chap UK) and
Mr Tompkins Explores the Atom (coll 1944 chap UK), both being assembled as
Mr Tompkins in Paperback (omni 1965 UK), and Mr Tompkins Learns the Facts
of Life (coll 1953 chap UK; exp with Martynas Ycas vt Mr Tompkins inside
Himself 1967). Couched in narrative form, these books gracefully and
intelligently explore the wonders of science, with Tompkins magically
visiting embodied demonstrations of the scientific world, and even
exploring his own body. Though technically juvenile, the books have a wide
appeal. GG also wrote at least one sf story for adults, "The Heart on the
Other Side" (1931), written to celebrate Bohr's 70th birthday and later
published in The Expert Dreamers (anth 1963) ed Frederik POHL. [JC]See
also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; COSMOLOGY; DIMENSIONS; FASTER THAN LIGHT; GREAT
AND SMALL.
GANICK, NICHOLAS
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
GANDON, YVES
(1899-? ) French novelist. His Le dernier Blanc (1945; trans A.M. as The
Last White Man 1948 UK) depicts, on familiar lines, the chemical warfare
of the future featuring a toxin deadly only to whites. Other borderline sf
works include Apres les hommes ["After Men"] (1963), involving an ethical
ferromagnetic race, and La ville invisible ["The Invisible Town"] (1953).
En pays singulier ["In a Remarkable Country"] (coll 1949) contains some
sf. [JC/PN]
GANN, ERNEST K(ELLOGG)
(1910-1991) US writer, usually of thrillers, whose Brain 2000 (1980) is
an sf spoof in which the extraction of oil from parts of the world causes
gravitational and orbital disturbances. A smart child solves all our
problems. [JC]
GANN, WILLIAM D.
(1878-1955) US businessman and writer whose sf novel, The Tunnel Thru the
Air, or Looking Back from 1940 (1927), features a protagonist whose
Fundamentalist belief in the Bible gives him sufficient predictive prowess
to dodge a great depression (which WDG dates 1928-32), while at the same
time impelling him to invent various superweapons, which are used to
defend the USA against her external enemies. New York is then renamed the
City of the Lord. All ends happily. [JC]
GANSOVSKY, SEVER (FELIKSOVICH)
(1918-1990) Russian writer, a dominant figure of the 1960s and 1970s,
well known for his radio plays, some of them sf, and also well regarded
for his HARD-SF short stories and novellas, which were assembled in Shagi

V Neizvestnoie ["Steps into the Unknown"] (coll 1963), Shest' Geniev ["Six
Geniuses"] (coll 1965), Tri Shaga K Opasnosti ["Three Steps towards
Danger"] (coll 1969), Idyot Tchelovek ["Man is Coming"] (coll 1971) and
Tchelovek, Kotoryi Sdelal Baltiiskoie More ["The Man who Made the Baltic
Sea"] (coll 1981). Some of his better stories appear in World's Spring
(anth 1979 Sweden) ed Vladimir GAKOV, and further stories were assembled
as The Day of Wrath (coll trans Alexander Repyev 1989 Russia). A novel,
Vinsent Van-Gog ["Vincent Van Gogh"] (1971) is a TIME-TRAVEL tale raising
general philosophical questions about the artist's destiny. [VG]
GANTZ, KENNETH F(RANKLIN)
(1908-1980) US writer, mostly of nonfiction, and USAF editor. His sf
novel, Not in Solitude (1959; rev 1961), fictionalizes a first voyage to
MARS and describes the probable environment faced by the travellers. [JC]
GARBO, NORMAN
(1919- ) US writer in whose borderline sf novel, The Movement (1969),
exaggerated late-1960s-style confrontations between US students and police
lead to a full-scale uprising with retaliatory bombing by the government.
[JC]
GARBY, Mrs LEE HAWKINS
(1890-? ) The wife of a school-friend of E.E. "Doc" SMITH, with whom she
collaborated on The Skylark of Space: The Tale of the First Inter-Stellar
Cruise (written 1915-20; 1928 AMZ; 1946; cut rev 1958), for which she was
credited. The 1958 abridgement of this famous SPACE OPERA may have
eliminated most and perhaps all of her contribution, as she was no longer
listed as co-author. [JC]
GARDEN, DONALD J.
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
GARDNER, ERLE STANLEY
(1889-1970) US lawyer and writer, most famous for the Perry Mason
detective novels, beginning with The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933). He
was extremely prolific and, although he spent almost no time at all on sf,
managed to produce enough fiction to fill The Human Zero: The Science
Fiction Stories of Erle Stanley Gardner (coll 1981) ed Martin H. GREENBERG
and Charles G. WAUGH. The tales, which first appeared in The Argosy around
1930, are efficient but unmemorable pulp sf, and now seem both dim and
mechanical. [JC]See also: APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD).
GARDNER, JEROME
ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
GARDNER, JOHN
1. (1926- ) UK writer who was a minister for several years before
becoming an agnostic, a drama critic, and the creator of the Boysie Oakes
sequence of spy thrillers spoofing Ian FLEMING's James Bond books, most
famously in The Liquidator (1964); one Boysie Oakes tale, Founder Member
(1969), involves its hero in a SEX experiment in space. More recently, JG
has written a number of novels continuing the James Bond saga itself.
Among his many other novels, mostly thrillers, Golgotha (1980; vt The Last
Trump 1980 US), is a NEAR-FUTURE thriller whose apocalyptic imagery may

owe something to JG's early theological training. [JC]2. Full name John
Champlin Gardner (1933-1982), US writer and academic who achieved
popularity with his large contemporary novel, The Sunlight Dialogues
(1972). His third work of fiction, Grendel (1971), is a mordant retelling
of the Beowulf legend from the MONSTER's point of view, and renders - more
pointedly than Thomas Burnett SWANN's similar elegies - Anglo-Saxon Man's
triumphs as allegorical of the rise of the cruel, modern, industrial
world. Further works that contain fantastic elements include Jason and
Medeia (1973), a fantasy novel in verse, several tales assembled in The
King's Indian: Stories and Tales (coll 1974), In the Suicide Mountains
(1977), a juvenile based on Russian folk themes, and Freddy's Book (1980).
Mickelsson's Ghosts (1982) attempts to subsume the ghost story and other
narrative conventions into a mundane frame. Though clearly attracted to
various supernatural and classical traditions, JG had little apparent
interest in the sf or fantasy genres, which are scantly treated in On
Moral Fiction (1978), in which he argued for a traditional viewpoint,
abjuring what he saw as POSTMODERNIST nihilism. He died in a motorcycle
accident. [GF/JC]About 2: World of Order and Light: The Fiction of John
Gardner (1984) by G.L. Morris.See also: MYTHOLOGY.
GARDNER, MARTIN
(1914- ) US mathematician, conjurer, journalist and author; his BA is in
philosophy from the University of Chicago. His In the Name of Science
(1952; rev vt Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science 1957) is an
iconoclastic and amusing nonfiction book about PSEUDO-SCIENCE: cults, fads
and hoaxes existing on the fringes of science, with chapters on
HOLLOW-EARTH and flat-Earth theories, pyramidology, UFOS and other
subjects. Of particular interest to sf readers may be its references to
Sir Arthur Conan DOYLE, Charles FORT, L. Ron HUBBARD, Richard SHAVER. More
recent works in the same debunking line are Science: Good, Bad and Bogus
(coll 1981) and Notes of a Fringe-Watcher (1988). MG's The Ambidextrous
Universe (1964; exp 1979; rev 1982), on the other hand, concerns serious
science; moving from simple questions of symmetry to profound problems of
physical philosophy, it is one of the finest works of scientific
popularization.From 1956 until 1981 MG wrote the Mathematical Games column
in Scientific American, and a number of collections of these pieces have
been published in book form, including The Unexpected Hanging and Other
Mathematical Diversions (1969) and Mathematical Carnival (1975). His The
Numerology of Dr Matrix (coll 197?; exp vt The Incredible Dr Matrix 1976;
exp vt The Magic Numbers of Dr Matrix 1985) brings together a number of
spoof stories from that column about the eponymous numerologist and rogue,
a practitioner of several of the shady cults described in MG's earlier
book. Also of note are his The Annotated Alice (1960), a densely glossed
edition of Lewis CARROLL's two Alice books - it is supplemented by More
Annotated Alice (1990) - and The Annotated Snark (1962), a similar
treatment of Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark (1876 chap).From the
launching of ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE (1977) MG had a
MATHEMATICS column there, with puzzles often posed in the form of sf
stories; many of these have been collected as Science Fiction Puzzle Tales
(coll 1981) and Puzzles from Other Worlds (coll 1984). A further volume
collecting sf, fantasy and other stories (not simply puzzle stories) is

The No-Sided Professor (coll 1987). Collections of essays, some with an sf
connection, are Order and Surprise (coll 1983) and Gardner's Whys and
Wherefores (coll 1989). Logic Machines and Diagrams (1958; rev 1982) also
refers to sf. [PN/JE]See also: DIMENSIONS; PARANOIA.
GARDNER, NOEL
[s] Henry KUTTNER.
GARIS, HOWARD R(OGER)
(1873-1962) US writer known mainly for such work outside the sf field as
his Uncle Wiggily series, whose 15,000 episodes were widely syndicated.
For the Edward STRATEMEYER Syndicate he wrote, under the house pseudonym
Roy ROCKWOOD and according to plot outlines from Stratemeyer, the first 6
vols of the Great Marvel series: Through the Air to the North Pole (1906),
Under the Ocean to the South Pole (1907), Five Thousand Miles Underground
(1908), Through Space to Mars (1910), Lost on the Moon (1911) and On a
Torn-Away World (1913); 3 later volumes are of unknown authorship. These
tales were of considerable imaginative power, not emulated by his
contributions to the TOM SWIFT series, for which he wrote - again to
Stratemeyer synopses - the first 35 (of 38) episodes under the house name
Victor APPLETON, from Tom Swift and his Motor-Cycle, or Fun and Adventure
on the Road (1910) to HRG's last, Tom Swift and his Giant Magnet, or
Bringing up the Lost Submarine (1932). (R. REGINALD's Science Fiction and
Fantasy Literature: A Checklist, 1700-1974 [1979] gives all 35 titles.)
[JC/EFB]Other works: Many juveniles, including Tom of the Fire Cave
(1927); the Rocket Riders books, Rocket Riders Across the Ice, or Racing
against Time (1933), Rocket Riders over the Desert, or Seeking the Lost
City (1933), Rocket Riders in Stormy Seas, or Trailing the Treasure Divers
(1933) and Rocket Riders in the Air, or A Chase in the Clouds (1934).
GARLAND
Garland Publishing, Inc., New York, is a US specialist publisher of a
wide range of reference works and facsimile reprints, only some of which
are related to sf. In 1975 G published the Garland Library of Science
Fiction: 45 titles, selected by Lester DEL REY, issued in durable
editions. The series was criticized, partly for some idiosyncratic
choices-unexceptional novels by Stanton A. COBLENTZ, H. Beam PIPER and
George O. SMITH - but chiefly for choosing inferior versions of the books
to reproduce. Intended as an accompanying critical history by Del Rey was
The World of Science Fiction: 1926-1976: The History of a Subculture
(1979), which in the event appeared from DEL REY BOOKS first and then from
G in 1980. Among G's very occasional books of genre interest since that
time have been The Literature of Fantasy: A Comprehensive, Annotated
Bibliography of Modern Fantasy Fiction (1979) by Roger C. SCHLOBIN,
Science Fiction and Fantasy Series and Sequels: A Bibliography, Volume 1:
Books (1986) by Tim Cottrill, Martin H. GREENBERG and Charles D. WAUGH,
and Horror Literature: A Reader's Guide (1990) and Fantasy Literature: A
Reader's Guide (1990), both ed Neil BARRON. [MJE/PN]
GARNE, GASTON
Francis W. DOUGHTY.
GARNER, ALAN

(1934- ) UK writer, primarily for children; he has lived all his life
near Alderley Edge, Cheshire, the setting for nearly all his fiction. AG
is widely thought one of the finest, though most difficult, children's
writers of his generation. Most of his work is FANTASY, rooted in his
knowledge of local archaeology and MYTHOLOGY. His first two books form a
short series for younger children: The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960; vt
The Weirdstone 1961 US) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963); his third, Elidor
(1965), which has been assembled with the first two as Alan Garner Omnibus
(omni 1994), can be read as borderline sf. The mood here darkens in a
story of teenagers faced with a threat (and a quest) from an ALTERNATE
WORLD, which impinges menacingly on their own. AG's first fully mature
work is The Owl Service (1967), in which a bitter Welsh legend re-enacts
itself among modern children, faced with fully adult problems of love,
jealousy and death. AG's theme has always been a kind of TIME TRAVEL, but
the time is inner and psychic; his stories rework archetypal patterns,
usually involving pain, loss, desire, rage and the need for an almost
unattainable courage.AG's next book, Red Shift (1973), is in no
conventional sense a children's book (see also CHILDREN'S SF). In
compressed, elliptical prose, primarily dialogue, he reverts to the theme
of the past working out its problems in the present, as a time shift,
focused on a Neolithic axe-head, moves the protagonist backwards and
forwards in a choppy and wrenching way between alter egos in the twilight
of the Roman Empire in Britain, the Civil War of the 17th century and now.
AG's last fiction of note is a sparely written, quasi-autobiographical
tetralogy for rather younger children: The Stone Book (1976 chap), Tom
Fobble's Day (1977 chap), Granny Reardun (1977 chap) and The Aimer Gate
(1978 chap), later published together as The Stone Book Quartet (omni
1983; vt The Stone Quartet US). Though these books are neither sf nor
fantasy, the old themes recur. [PN]Other works: The Breadhorse (1975
chap), for younger children;The Lad of the Gad (1981).Retold folktales:
The Hamish Hamilton Book of Goblins (coll 1969); Alan Garner's Fairy Tales
of Gold (coll 1980; rev vt Fairytales of Gold 1989 illus Michael Foreman);
Alan Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales (coll 1984); A Bag of Moonshine
(coll 1986).As Editor: The Guizer: A Book of Fools (anth 1975), which in
addition to tales by others contains many folktales retold by AG.About the
author: A Fine Anger: A Critical Introduction to the Work of Alan Garner
(1981) by Neil Philip; "Inner Time" by Alan Garner in Science Fiction at
Large (anth 1976; vt Explorations of the Marvellous) ed Peter NICHOLLS.See
also: FANTASY; RADIO.
GARNER, GRAHAM
Donald Sydney ROWLAND.
GARNER, ROLF
Bryan BERRY.
GARNETT, DAVID
(1892-1981) UK writer, member of the famous Garnett family which includes
his grandfather, Richard GARNETT, his father, Edward GARNETT, and his
mother, the translator Constance Garnett (1862-1946); DG was also an
intimate member of the Bloomsbury Group. His first novel under his own
name is also his most famous, the fantasy Lady into Fox (1922 chap); like

its inferior successor, VERCORS' Sylva (1961; trans 1962), this is an
allegory of metamorphosis, in this instance from demure wife into vixen,
with tragic results. A FEMINIST reading of the book is both elucidating
and inescapable; it was famously parodied by Christopher Ward (1868-1943)
in Gentleman into Goose (1924 chap). A Man in the Zoo (1924) is also
fantasy. The Grasshoppers Come (1931) fascinatingly combines aviation and
allegory in a borderline-sf tale. Two by Two: A Story of Survival (1963)
retells the story of Noah (quite possibly a portrait of DG's friend T.H.
WHITE) and the Flood. DG translated Andre MAUROIS's A Voyage to the Island
of the Articoles (1927; trans 1928 UK). The White/Garnett Letters (coll
1968), which he edited, are of great value to students of both his work
and White's. [JC]Other works: A Terrible Day (1932); Purl and Plain, and
Other Stories (coll 1973); The Master Cat: The True and Unexpurgated Story
of Puss in Boots (1974).
GARNETT, DAVID S.
(1947- ) UK writer with a BSc in economics, author of more than 50 books,
many of them novels, in various genres and under various names. To
differentiate himself from the elder David GARNETT he created a middle
initial, and in the USA signed his early books Dav Garnett; he has
published novels also as David Lee and David Ferring. Though his sf has
always been action-oriented and dominated by SPACE-OPERA conventions, his
first book, Mirror in the Sky (1969 US), guys those traditions with
disillusioned but moderate spite; Stargonauts (1994) enjoyably broadens
the assault into slapstick. His third novel, Time in Eclipse (1974) written like its 1970s successors for ROBERT HALE LIMITED - is a
comparatively ambitious effort set on a war-torn Earth whose guardian is
an amnesiac obscurely bound to a vast COMPUTER. Much of his work is marred
by haste, so that the anarchic subtexts pervading his most routine tales
can seem unintended. Their subversiveness, however, is certainly
deliberate. As editor, DSG was responsible for an original story anthology
series, Zenith: The Best in New British Science Fiction (anth 1989) and
Zenith 2: The Best in New British Science Fiction (anth 1990); when the
sequence was terminated, he initiated - with the approval of Michael
MOORCOCK - a new incarnation of NEW WORLDS, this time in anthology form,
the sequence comprising New Worlds (anth 1991),New Worlds 2 (anth 1992),
#3 (anth 1993) and #4 (anth 1994); further installments are unlikely. DSG
also ed The Orbit Science Fiction Yearbook 1 (anth 1988), #2 (anth 1989)
and #3 (anth 1990), distinguished from other year's-best anthologies by
its smaller size and greater concentration on critical material, each
volume including essays on the sf scene by Brian W. ALDISS, John CLUTE and
DSG himself. [JC]Other works: The Starseekers (1971 US); The Forgotten
Dimension (1975); Phantom Universe (1975); Cosmic Carousel (coll 1976).As
David Lee: Destiny Past (1974).As David Ferring: The Hills Have Eyes Part
2 * (1984), novelizing a horror film; the Konrad trilogy set in the
Warhammer fantasy gaming world ( GAMES WORKSHOP), comprising Konrad *
(1990), Shadowbreed * (1991) and Warblade *(1993).See also: ANTHOLOGIES;
GAME-WORLDS.
GARNETT, EDWARD
(1868-1936) UK writer and man of letters, son of Richard GARNETT, husband

of Constance Garnett, father of David GARNETT. His greatest fame was as an
enormously influential publishers' reader for several UK firms; among the
writers whose careers he significantly helped were Joseph CONRAD, E.M.
FORSTER and W.H. HUDSON. The sf SATIRES assembled in Papa's War (coll
dated 1918 but probably 1919) reveal a freethinking, controversial,
clear-headed teller of tales and allegories. [JC]
GARNETT, RICHARD
(1835-1906) UK librarian and writer, Chief Keeper at the British Museum,
father of Edward GARNETT, grandfather of David GARNETT. His The Twilight
of the Gods and Other Tales (coll 1888; exp 1903) is a well known
collection of fables and other fantasies, some of which touch on sf
themes. [JC]
GARON, MARCO
Marco GARRON; Dennis HUGHES.
GARRETT, (GORDON) RANDALL (PHILLIP DAVID)
(1927-1987) US writer whose first publication was a Probability Zero
vignette in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION in 1944. He went on to become a
prolific writer for that magazine in the 1950s and early 1960s. He was at
one time part of the ZIFF-DAVIS stable writing for AMAZING STORIES and
FANTASTIC, when he and his sometime collaborator Robert SILVERBERG ran a
"fiction factory" together. He used the pseudonyms David Gordon and Darrel
T. Langart as well as numerous house names; he has frequently been listed
as having written the ASF stories signed Walter Bupp, although these are
now known to have been by John BERRYMAN. His most notable collaborations
with Silverberg were the Nidor series, The Shrouded Planet (fixup 1957)
and The Dawning Light (1958), which appeared as by Robert Randall; other
collaborations were signed Gordon Aghill and Ralph BURKE, and some stories
signed under house names Alexander BLADE, Richard GREER, Ivar JORGENSEN,
Clyde MITCHELL, Leonard G. SPENCER, S.M. TENNESHAW and Gerald VANCE may be
further RG/Silverberg collaborations. He also collaborated with Laurence
M. JANIFER, usually as Mark PHILLIPS, under which name they produced a
trilogy of PSI-POWER stories: Brain Twister (1959 ASF as "That Sweet
Little Old Lady"; 1962), The Impossibles (1960 ASF as "Out Like a Light";
1963), and Supermind (1960-61 ASF as "Occasion for Disaster"; 1963).RG's
most impressive solo work is the series of stories first published in ASF
between 1964 and 1976 - reprinted in Too Many Magicians (1967), Murder and
Magic (coll 1979) and Lord Darcy Investigates (coll 1981), and finally
assembled in Lord Darcy (omni 1983) - featuring the exploits of the
detective Darcy in an ALTERNATE WORLD where MAGIC works according to
Frazerian laws whose implications are being gradually unravelled by the
scientific method. RG's earlier sf books were Unwise Child (1962; vt
Starship Death 1982), about a sentient machine, and Anything You Can Do .
. . (1963) as by Darrel T. Langart, about a battle between a superhuman
and an ALIEN. RG was fond of producing parodies in verse and prose: he
wrote comic verse for The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION and
"Parodies Tossed" (1956) for SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY, and he guyed the
Feghoot shaggy-dog stories (written for FSF by Reginald BRETNOR as Grendel
Briarton) in the adventures of Benedict Breadfruit, written for AMZ as
Grandall Barretton. With Janifer he wrote a bawdy comic fantasy in which

the deities of Classical MYTHOLOGY return to preside over a high-tech
future, Pagan Passions (1959). His best humorous work was collected in
Takeoff! (coll 1980) and Takeoff Too (coll 1987); a more eclectic
selection was assembled in The Best of Randall Garrett (coll 1982) ed
Silverberg. Always a devout man - despite the occasional wildness of his
lifestyle - RG virtually dropped out of sf writing for a long period in
the 1970s, and took Holy Orders for a while. He eventually abandoned the
priesthood and married his third wife, Vicki Ann Heydron, with whom he
plotted the Gandalara series of heroic fantasies; these appeared as
collaborations, although in fact Heydron wrote them while RG was
hospitalized in the wake of a serious attack of viral meningitis. The
series comprises The Steel of Raithskar (1981), The Glass of Dyskornis
(1982), The Bronze of Eddarta (1983), The Well of Darkness (1983), The
Search for Ka (1984), Return to Eddarta (1985) and The River Wall (1986).
The first 3 were assembled as The Gandalara Cycle, Volume 1 (omni 1986)
and the second 3 as The Gandalara Cycle, Volume 2 (omni 1986). [BS]See
also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; ESP.
GARRON, MARCO
A CURTIS WARREN house name used exclusively for jungle novels derived
from Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's Tarzan of the Apes sequence; most were sf or
fantasy. Under the spelling Marco Garron appeared the Azan the Apeman
series - The Lost City (1950), The Missing Safari (1950), Tribal War
(1951), White Fangs (1951), King Hunters (1951) and Jungle Fever (1951) which so closely mimicked Tarzan that after the first 6 releases the
Burroughs estate was able to gain an injunction banning any further
publications; it is possible they were written by D.A. GRIFFITHS. Writing
as Marco Garon (note spelling), Dennis HUGHES (whom see for details)
published a second series, the Rex Brandon novels, sufficiently remote
from Tarzan to avoid further legal action. [JC]
GARSON, CLEE
House name used on the ZIFF-DAVIS magazines by Paul W. FAIRMAN (1 story,
"Nine Worlds West", Fantastic Adventures Apr 1951), David Wright O'BRIEN
and perhaps others. In all, there were 13 CG stories 1942-55. [PN]
GARSON, PAUL
(1946- ) US teacher and writer whose The Great Quill (1973) is set in a
baroquely degenerate post- HOLOCAUST England; there are satirical effects.
[JC]
GARTH
Blond, square-jawed, musclebound, time-travelling COMIC-strip character
created for the London Daily Mirror by artist Steve Dowling (1904-1986)
and BBC producer Gordon Boshell as the UK's answer to FLASH GORDON.
Scripted by Don Freeman, G first appeared, floating ashore on a raft, on
24 July 1943, and soon became a kind of fantasy troubleshooter. In The
Seven Ages of Garth (Sep 1944-Jan 1946) Freeman introduced G's
Doctor-Zarkov equivalent, Professor Lumiere, whose magic word "karma"
allowed G to jump bodies (and episodes) at the point of death.The finest
scripts were written 1953-66 by Peter O'Donnell (1920- ), who introduced
G's eternal lover Astra in The Last Goddess (1965). Jim Edgar provided

moderately imaginative scripts throughout the next two decades on three
basic themes: TIME TRAVEL, journeys to distant planets, and earthbound
adventures that usually had sf elements. Angus Allan provided a few
scripts in the late 1980s.Steve Dowling retired in 1969 and his assistant,
John Allard, took over as artist. In 1971 the Daily Mirror secured the
services of Frank Bellamy (1919-1976), one of the finest strip
illustrators of his day, whose beautifully rendered drawings made G the
most attractive-looking UK newspaper strip then published. On Bellamy's
sudden death the art chores were taken on by Martin Asbury; for some years
Asbury's art was polished, enthusiastic and inventive, but it suddenly
deteriorated in the mid-1980s and today seems hurried and shoddy. Tim
Quinn has recently started to do the scripting.The Daily Mirror published
several collections, including The Last Goddess (graph coll 1966), The
"Daily Mirror" Book of Garth 1975 (graph coll 1975) and 1976 (graph coll
1976). Other early books were Garth - Man of Mystery (graph 1946) and
Garth (1958 graph dos). Single-story collections were published by John
Dakin/The Newspaper Strip Society: Bride of Jenghiz Khan (graph 1979), The
Spanish Lady (graph 1980), Sapphire (graph 1980), Night of the Knives
(graph 1980), The Doomsmen (graph 1981) and Mr Rubio Calls (graph 1981). 2
collections of Bellamy stories were published by Titan: The Cloud of
Balthus (graph coll 1985) and The Women of Galba (graph coll 1985).
[RT/SW]
GARTH, WILL
House name used on Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories and
CAPTAIN FUTURE 1937-41 by Otto BINDER, Edmond HAMILTON, Henry KUTTNER,
Mort WEISINGER and possibly others. The film novelization of DR CYCLOPS,
Dr Cyclops * (1940) as by WG, has been attributed to Kuttner, who
confusingly wrote a TWS short story of that title in the same year, and to
Manly Wade WELLMAN, who did not write it. It was almost certainly by
Alexander SAMALMAN. [PN/JC]
GARVIN, RICHARD M(cCLELLAN)
(1934-1980) US writer whose career has been in advertising. His two sf
novels with Edmond G. Addeo (1907-1980) are The FORTEC Conspiracy (1968)
and The Talbot Agreement (1968). In the former, a crashlanded alien ship
infects Earth with a deadly disease; the latter novel is borderline sf
with espionage elements.The Crystal Skull (1974) is a non-fiction work
about the occult. [JC]
GARY, ROMAIN
Pseudonym of French writer and diplomat Romain Kacewgari (later changed
to Kassevgari) (1914-1980) born in Tiflis, Georgia, of Polish parents. In
WWII he was active in the French Resistance. RG was much praised for such
novels outside the sf field as Les racines du ciel (1956; trans Jonathan
Griffin as The Roots of Heaven 1958 US), for which he was awarded the Prix
Goncourt. An early and untranslated sf novel, Tulipe (1946), is about the
Blacks taking over Earth. In his later work he utilizes generic material
usually to point up ethical issues, and La danse de Gengis Cohn (1967;
trans by RG as The Dance of Genghis Cohn 1968 US), with its sequel, La
tete coupable (1968 trans by RG as The Guilty Head 1969 US), are certainly
FABULATIONS. Rather similar to the inferior On A Dark Night (1949) by

Anthony WEST, they depict a supernatural transference of a victim's
personality into the body of a Nazi. In Genghis Cohn it is Cohn himself, a
Yiddish comedian, who, as a dybbuk, enters the mind of the SS officer who
ordered the massacre in which Cohn was shot. The novel takes place in the
late 1960s, with the former officer, now a police superintendent, obsessed
by his dybbuk, who torments him, and with Germany itself tormented by an
incursion of allegorical figures representative of her spiritual plight.
Gloire a nos illustres pionniers (coll 1962; trans Richard Howard as
Hissing Tales 1964 US) contains some sf, notably the title story. In The
Gasp (1973 US; in French as Charge d'ame 1978 France) it turns out that
the elan vital which escapes from the body at the moment of death can be
used in warfare. RG was a sharp, clear-headed and passionate novelist of
considerable stature. [JC]Other work: The Talent Scout (ms? trans John
Markham Beach 1961 US).See also: ESCHATOLOGY; HISTORY OF SF; POWER
SOURCES; RELIGION.
GAS GIANT
Item of sf TERMINOLOGY invented by James BLISH; it proved so useful that
it is now often used by astronomers. It refers to the fact that four of
the planets of our Solar System are not comparatively small and dense,
like Earth and MARS, but extremely large, and consist mainly of substances
like hydrogen, helium, methane and ammonia. Even in the cold at the outer
edge of our Solar System, these planets are of low density, being
essentially globes of gas and liquid. The four gas giants - often called
the Jovian Planets - in our Solar System are JUPITER, Saturn, Uranus and
Neptune ( OUTER PLANETS). The fact that there are two kinds of planet in
the Solar System is of great interest to scientists constructing theories
of its evolution; it is believed that gas-giant planets have been detected
orbiting a few nearby stars. [PN]
GASKELL, JANE
Working name of UK writer Jane Gaskell Lynch (1941- ), whose dozen books
include Strange Evil (1957), herfirst, written when she was 14; it
features fairies from another world, claustrophobic conflicts in that
world, and an aura of Gothic pubescence throughout. King's Daughter (1958)
is set in ancient ATLANTIS, where a cache of even more ancient nerve gas
is discovered; the book is remotely connected, through a shared character,
with the Cija sequence of Atlantean tales - The Serpent (1963; vt in 2
vols The Serpent 1975 and The Dragon 1975), Atlan (1965), The City (1966)
and Some Summer Lands (1977). The non-Atlantean Princess Cija is involved,
via forced marriage, in complex conflicts between northern forces and the
quasihuman dwellers of the island state. As things fall apart, sex and
sorcery abound, but the princess eventually reaches home again. In genre
terms the series uneasily marries sf and the popular romance; it is full
of vigorous and exuberant invention and occasionally overheated prose. The
Shiny Narrow Grin (1964) is a comedy about vampires. A Sweet Sweet Summer
(1969) scathingly exposes an anarchic NEAR-FUTURE England to the gaze of
invading extraterrestrials. Sun Bubble (1990) has elements of fantasy.
[JC]
GASPAR, LASZLO
[r] HITLER WINS; HUNGARY.

GAS-S-S-S, OR IT BECAME NECESSARY TO DESTROY THE WORLD...
Full title: Gas-s-s, or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order
to Save It(vt Gas! or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to
Save It) Film (1970). San Jacinto/AIP. Prod and dir Roger CORMAN, starring
Robert Corff, Elaine Giftos, Bud Cort, Talia Coppola. Screenplay George
Armitage. 79 mins cut to 77 mins. Colour.In Corman's belated attempt to
cash in on the hippy/counterculture movements of the 1960s, a poison gas
makes everyone over 25 die of old age and the young inherit the USA. There
is topsy-turvy chaos in this black comedy, with conservative Middle
Americans going on a rampage of destruction while Hell's Angels attempt to
protect the old way of life (golf links, etc.), but a cheerfully workable
society begins to emerge. Edgar Allan POE occasionally appears on a
motorcycle, with the Raven perched on his shoulder and Lenore on pillion.
The film was made with Corman's legendary speed and cheapness, and with a
general sense of expansive euphoria. AIP disliked it, re-editing it
drastically without Corman's knowledge, so he went on to set up his own
production/distribution company, New World. [JB]See also: CINEMA.
GATE, THE
UK SEMIPROZINE, irregular, 3 issues to date, published by Richard
Newcombe, #1 1989 in paperback book format ed Maureen Porter, subsequent
issues (1990 and 1991) A4 format ed Paul Cox, no publication dates given.
TG is primarily a fiction magazine (stories by son and father Sean and
Barrington J. BAYLEY, Storm CONSTANTINE, Kim NEWMAN, Andy Sawyer, Brian M.
STABLEFORD, Ian WATSON, James WHITE and others), but carries a regular
film column by Newman. [RH]
GAUGER, RICK
Working name of US writer Richard C. Gauger (? - ), who began publishing
sf with "The Vacuum-Packed Picnic" for Omni in 1979. His sf novel,
Charon's Ark (1987), pleasingly depicts the hijacking of a 747 full of
students, who are taken to the moon of Pluto. Charon turns out to be an
Ark, its function being to carry life across the Galaxy: it needs new crew
members. [JC]
GAUGHAN, JACK
Working name of US illustrator John Brian Francis Gaughan (1930-1985). JG
made his first professional sale while still in school at the Dayton Art
Institute; he went full-time in the mid-1950s. Prolific in both covers and
interior art, he was most closely associated with GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION,
for which he was Art Editor 1969-72 and painted 38 covers over the years;
he also did 29 covers for If, 11 covers for FSF, 7 for IASFM and others
for many other magazines. But, although his cover work was more than
competent, it was his spare, often nearly abstract black-and-white
interior ILLUSTRATIONS that dominated the field in the 1960s. He worked
for paperback and hardcover book publishers, too, most notably ACE BOOKS.
Famous for his generosity in donating artwork to FANZINES, he is the only
illustrator to have won HUGOS for both Best Fan Artist and Best
Professional Artist in the same year (1967); he won the Professional
Artist award again in 1968 and 1969. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s his
work became less in demand and he was in increasingly poor health, as a

result producing very little sf work. [JG]See also: ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION.
GAWRON, JEAN MARK
(1953- ) French-born US writer whose first sf novel, An Apology for Rain
(1974), traces the travels of a woman in search of her brother through a
surreal USA. It was followed by Algorithm (1978), a further linguistic
allegorizing of quest motifs, and the more conventionally framed Dream of
Glass (1993). [JC]
GAWSWORTH, JOHN
Pseudonym of UK editor and writer (Terence Ian) Fytton Armstrong
(1912-1970) for most of his work of genre interest, though he signed some
work with his real name. He was a close colleague of M.P. SHIEL, creating
a Shiel checklist in the bibliographical Ten Contemporaries (1932) and
editing The Best Short Stories of M.P. Shiel (coll 1948; a John COLLIER
checklist appears in Ten Contemporaries (Second Series) (1933). His poetry
was traditional, and his occasional stories are of relatively little
interest; his importance to sf and fantasy lies primarily in the large
anthologies he assembled in the 1930s, including Strange Assembly (anth
1932), Full Score (anth 1933) as Fytton Armstrong, New Tales of Horror by
Eminent Authors (anth 1934), Thrills, Crimes and Mysteries (anth 1935),
Thrills (anth 1936), Crimes, Creeps and Thrills (anth 1936) and
Masterpiece of Thrills (anth 1936). [JC]
GAY, ANNE
(1952- ) UK teacher and writer who began publishing sf with "Wishbone" in
Gollancz-Sunday Times Best SF Stories (anth 1987) ed anon. Her first
novel, Mindsail (1990), very promisingly describes an alien planet to
which the passengers of a crashed human starship have had to adjust,
gradually evolving into fragmented and warring societies in the process.
Romance elements - the female protagonist's rather prolonged search for a
husband - interfere to some extent with the revelations, but the book
leaves a vivid memory trace.The Brooch of Azure Midnight (1991), an sf
tale with some of the tone of the "gate romance" common to FANTASY from
the time of H.P. LOVECRAFT, confronts an expanding Terran culture with the
challenge and opportunity of wormhole access to the stars. Dancing on the
Volcano(1993) less successfully. [JC]
GAY, J. DREW
L. Edgar WELCH.
GAYLE, HENRY K.
(1910- ) Canadian writer and civil servant whose horror/sf novel, Spawn
of the Vortex (1957), plays on the nuclear-testing PARANOIA of the 1950s.
Underwater tests activate a horde of MONSTERS who advance upon the USA.
[JC]
GAYTON, BERTRAM
(? -? ) UK writer whose sf novel, The Gland Stealers (1922), deals
lightly with physical rejuvenation achieved - apparently - by
transplanting glands from apes into the bodies of elderly humans. [JC]See
also: MEDICINE.

GEAR, KATHLEEN O'NEAL
(1954- ) US writer with extensive training in American prehistory;
married to W. Michael GEAR. Her first sf, the Powers of Light trilogy - An
Abyss of Light (1990), Treasure of Light (1991) and Redemption of Light
(1991) - was published as by Kathleen M. O'Neal. With an occasionally
oppressive relentlessness about the moral and theological issues involved,
it presents an intergalactic conflict between humans and the ALIEN
Magistrates who have established a coercive "peace" in terms inescapably
evocative of the Jewish experience during the 20th century; moments of
awkwardness failed to muffle the impressive intensity of the long tale.
With W. Michael Gear (whom see for details), and writing now as KO'NG, she
has begun the Ancient Americans sequence, projected to cover the entire
prehistory of North America. Sand in the Wind (1990), solo, is an
historical novel. [JC]
GEAR, W. MICHAEL
(1955- ) US writer with extensive training in American archaeology;
married to Kathleen O'Neal GEAR. He began publishing sf with the competent
Spider sequence - The Warriors of Spider (1988), The Way of Spider (1989)
and The Web of Spider (1989), plus The Artifact (1990), which serves as a
prequel - about the conflict between a newly discovered lost-colony
offshoot of humanity and the reactionary Directorate which attempts to
control human space. The former, who are of Native American stock and
worship a god called Spider, are sexually and culturally irresistible to
the women who first discover them, but WMG fortunately has too many
complex interstellar doings to present for sentimental romancing to
dominate the proceedings. The Ancient Americans sequence, all written with
Kathleen O'Neal Gear - People of the Wolf (1990), People of the Fire
(1991),People of the Earth (1992), People of the River (1992), People of
the Sea (1993) and People of the Lakes (1994), with 4 further volumes
planned - has, because of its carefully plausible venue, little fantasy or
sf content beyond occasional reference to true visions derived from proper
shamanistic practice; but of course the prehistoric-sf subgenre was always
likely, as our knowledge of the past gained definition, to be transformed
into fictionalized history. Other sf novels include Starstrike (1990) and
the Forbidden Borders sequence - Forbidden Borders: Requiem for the
Conqueror (1991),#2: Relic of Empire (1992) and Countermeasures (1993) about an Earth prevented by a GRAVITY barrier from reaching more than a
few nearby star systems. [JC]
GEARHART, SALLY MILLER
(1931- ) US author of lesbian- FEMINIST works - including A Feminist
Tarot (1976) with Susan Rennie - and Professor of Speech and Communication
Studies at San Francisco State University. Her sf book, one of the most
extreme of those that envisage men and women as effectively different
races, is The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women (coll of linked
stories 1980). It is set in the outlaw, all-women, UTOPIAN hill
communities of a future when men are restricted to the CITIES and
dependent on TECHNOLOGY, while women (in a somewhat New Age manner) have
developed PSI POWERS through harmony with Nature. Even the Gentles, men no
longer driven by violence, know that "maleness touched women only with the

accumulated hatred of centuries". [PN]See also: PASTORAL.
GEE, MAGGIE
(1948- ) UK writer whose first published novel, Dying in Other Words
(1981), is a morbid experimental work which could be interpreted as having
ghostly elements. In The Burning Book (1983) an ordinary contemporary
family's problems are overshadowed by auctorial asides reminding the
reader of the fragility of human life, as demonstrated by Hiroshima,
Nagasaki and the HOLOCAUST that will occur at the end of the novel. Where
are the Snows? (1991) takes her protagonists from the early 1980s through
to a pessimistically drawn 21st century. [PH]Other works: Light Years
(1985); Grace (1989).
GEE, MAURICE (GOUGH)
(1931- ) NEW ZEALAND writer best known for a trilogy of non-genre novels:
Plumb (1978 UK), Meg (1981 UK) and Sole Survivor (1983 UK). His juvenile
fantasies - Under the Mountain (1979), later a tv series, and The World
Around the Corner (1980) - are routine quests. More complex is the World
of O trilogy - The Halfmen of O (1982), The Priests of Ferris (1984) and
Motherstone (1985) - which moves from unquestioning use of sf/fantasy
conventions to a less certain view of morality: the human saviours of the
ALTERNATE WORLD of O realize that its inhabitants must discover their own
solution to the problem of good and evil, even at the price of their
sentience. MG's virtues include a strong sense of character and place.
[MMacL]
GEIER, CHESTER S.
(1921-1991) US writer and editor, very active in the ZIFF-DAVIS stable
(for AMZ and Fantastic Adventures) in the 1940s, where he published a
large amount of routine material under his own name and pseudonyms
including Guy Archette and the house names Alexander BLADE, P.F. COSTELLO,
Warren KASTEL, S.M. TENNESHAW, Gerald VANCE and Peter WORTH. "Forever is
too Long" (1947 Fantastic Adventures) is book-length, as is "Outlaw in the
Sky" (1953 AMZ) as by Archette, which is essentially a Western with a few
sf transpositions. CSG was an advocate of the Richard SHAVER "mystery" and
founded a club in his honour, editing the Shaver Mystery Magazine on its
behalf. Although he was one of the most prolific of PULP-MAGAZINE writers,
his stories have never been collected in book form, and only one,
"Environment" (1944), has been anthologized. [JC]See also: COLONIZATION OF
OTHER WORLDS.
G-8 AND HIS BATTLE ACES
US PULP MAGAZINE. 110 issues Oct 1933-June 1944. Monthly to Apr 1941,
bimonthly thereafter. Published by Popular Publications; ed Rogers Terrill
and, later, Alden H. Norton (1903-1987). All the novels were the work of
one of the most prolific of all pulp authors, Robert J. Hogan (1897-1963),
who also wrote under pseudonyms the short stories which filled out each
issue. Hogan, who wrote The MYSTERIOUS WU FANG and other magazines as
well, was under editorial instruction to send in his material as he wrote
it, without any revision; the amount of editing subsequently necessary is
described by Damon KNIGHT in Hell's Cartographers (anth 1975), ed Brian W.
ALDISS and Harry HARRISON. G-8 is the leader of a US fighter squadron in

WWI, which combats a wide variety of fantastic enemy menaces. Only some of
the novels were sf, and the magazine was not as futuristic as its
companion, DUSTY AYRES AND HIS BATTLE BIRDS. [MJE/PN]
GEIS, RICHARD E(RWIN)
(1927- ) US writer, editor and sf fan, best known since 1953 for
producing and contributing significantly to a fanzine, PSYCHOTIC, and
later a semiprozine, The ALIEN CRITIC , both of which were, confusingly,
at different times known as Science Fiction Review. He has published other
FANZINES. His vigorously anti-highbrow judgements were for a long time
influential in the sf field; between 1969 and 1983 he 6 times won a HUGO
for Best Fanzine and a further 7 times for Best Fan Writer.His first
published story was "Flight Game" for Adam in 1959. He concentrated
thereafter on pornographic fiction, with well over 100 titles, both soft
and hardcore. Not many had sf or fantastic themes. Exceptions are the Roi
Kunzer books - The Sex Machine (1967) and The Endless Orgy (1968) - and
the singletons Raw Meat (1969), The Arena Women (1972) and, as by Peggy
Swenson, A Girl Possessed (1973). Three further erotic sf novels by REG
were self-published, mimeographed limited editions: Canned Meat (1978),
Star Whores (1980) and The Corporation Strikes Back (1981). More recently,
writing with Elton P. Elliott as Richard Elliott, he wrote the John Norris
thrillers set on a NEAR-FUTURE Earth suffering from sun-flares caused by a
star-wars snafu - Sword of Allah (1984) and The Burnt Lands (1985) - as
well as the singletons The Master File (1986) and The Einstein Legacy
(1987). [JC/PN]See also: SEX.
GEMINI MAN
The INVISIBLE MAN .
GEMMELL, DAVID A.
(1948- ) UK journalist and then full-time author, primarily of HEROIC
FANTASY. His first FANTASY series, The Drenai Saga, consists of Legend
(1984; vt Against the Horde 1988 US), The King Beyond the Gate (1985),
Waylander (1986),Quest for Lost Heroes (1990), Waylander II: In the Realm
of the Wolf (1992) and The First Chronicles of Druss the Legend (coll
1993), the first 3 being collected, along with an additional story, as The
Drenai Tales (omni 1991). DAG's inclusion in this volume is largely due to
his second series, the Sipstrassi novels, which are SCIENCE FANTASY: Wolf
in Shadow (1987; vt The Jerusalem Man 1988 US), Ghost King (1988), Last
Sword of Power (1988) and The Last Guardian (1989), all 4 being assembled
as Stones of Power: The Sipstrassi Omnibus (omni 1992). The components of
the series are linked by the Sipstrassi stones of healing and/or
destruction, whose source is ATLANTIS. The middle two volumes, which have
Arthurian resonances, are set in Britain during and after the Roman
occupation, but the framing works are set in a post- HOLOCAUST venue 300
years after Earth's axis has been tilted by an Immanuel VELIKOVSKY-style
DISASTER; echoes of Erich VON DANIKEN's PSEUDO-SCIENCE books also abound.
The Dying Earth setting ( FAR FUTURE) is well achieved; there is TIME
TRAVEL between Atlantis and its future; ESP, GENETIC ENGINEERING and
IMMORTALITY are other themes.DAG's subsequent works have been: Knights of
Dark Renown (1989), featuring PARALLEL WORLDS; the Macedon sequence of
historical fantasies set in an ALTERNATE-WORLD Greece at the time of

Alexander, to date comprising Lion of Macedon (1990) and Dark Prince
(1991), in the second of which Aristotle (who else?) knows the secret of
portals through time and space that lead to parallel worlds; Morningstar
(1992), which introduces a bard and an ambiguous hero faced with
necromancy and Vampyre Kings; and Bloodstone (1994). DAG is accomplished
and tough-minded, and interestingly varies (but not too much)
stereotypical generic situations. [PN]See also: HISTORY OF SF; MAGIC.
GENERAL SEMANTICS
A quasiphilosophical movement founded in Chicago in 1938 by Count Alfred
KORZYBSKI, whose Science and Sanity (1933) was the basic handbook of the
movement. GS had a surprising success, peaking in the 1940s and 1950s. It
teaches that first unsanity and later insanity are caused by adherence to
an Aristotelian worldview, by which is meant the use of the two-valued
either-or logic which Korzybski saw as being built into Indo-European
language structures. From this simple beginning - with much of which
linguistic philosophers, including Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), would
be unlikely to differ very profoundly - was developed a confused and
confusing psychotherapeutic system which, like L. Ron HUBBARD's DIANETICS,
promised to focus the latent abilities of the mind. It may have seemed to
its more naive adherents that GS held out the promise of turning Man into
SUPERMAN by teaching non-Aristotelian (null-A or A) habits of thought. The
movement, whose critics saw it as a PSEUDO-SCIENCE, probably had some
influence on the development of Dianetics, but its best-known repercussion
in sf was the composition of two novels by A.E. VAN VOGT featuring a
non-Aristotelian superman hero, Gilbert Gosseyn (often read as a pun on
"go sane"): The World of A (1945 ASF; rev 1948; rev with intro 1970; vt
The World of Null-A) and The Pawns of Null-A (1948-9 ASF as "The Players
of A"; 1956; vt The Players of Null-A UK). [PN]
GENERATION STARSHIPS
For writers unwilling to power their starships with FASTER-THAN-LIGHT
drives or to make use of a relativistic time contraction, there is a real
problem in sending ships between the stars: the length of the voyage,
which would normally span many human lifetimes. The usual answers are to
put the crew into SUSPENDED ANIMATION, as in James WHITE's The Dream
Millennium (1974), to send germ cells only, as in Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's "The
Big Space Fuck" (1972), or to use a generation starship, whereby the human
beings who reached the destination would be the remote descendants of the
original, long-dead crew, intervening generations having lived and died
aboard the journeying vessel.It was probably Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY who
first saw the necessity for using generation starships in the COLONIZATION
OF OTHER WORLDS; he presented the idea in "The Future of Earth and
Mankind", which was published in a Russian anthology of scientific essays
in 1928 but may have been conceived even earlier. Tsiolkovsky here argued
for the construction in the future of space-going "Noah's Arks": he
envisaged such journeys as taking many thousands of years.The first
GENRE-SF use of the notion was probably Don WILCOX's "The Voyage that
Lasted 600 Years" (1940) in AMZ. Here the captain of the ship is in
hibernation, but wakes every 100 years to check on progress. Each time he
wakes he finds great social changes among the successive descendants of

the crew, and a sinking into brutality accompanied by plague. His
successive appearances render him an object of superstitious awe to the
tribesmen on board. The theme of social change and degeneration
inaugurated by Wilcox was to become the dominant motif of such stories.
(In Seekers of Tomorrow [1966] Sam MOSKOWITZ claims the first
generation-starship story to be Laurence MANNING's "The Living Galaxy"
[1934], which is set in a small, self-powered world and so does not fully
embody the concept.)The other dominant theme was presented in the
following year in an altogether more famous story, "Universe" (1941) by
Robert A. HEINLEIN, and in its sequel in ASF the following month, "Common
Sense" (1941); the two were published in book form as Orphans of the Sky
(fixup 1963 UK). In this classic generation-starship story the crew have
forgotten that they are on a ship and have descended to a state of rigidly
stratified and superstitious social organization; the unusually
intelligent hero discovers the truth in a traumatic CONCEPTUAL
BREAKTHROUGH. Indeed generation-starship stories remained paradigmatic for
the conceptual-breakthrough theme, and are important, too, in
rite-of-passage stories showing the growth from puberty to adulthood (
POCKET UNIVERSES). Brian W. ALDISS, who loved the idea but thought it
crudely developed by Heinlein, devoted his first novel, Non-Stop (1958; vt
Starship US), to a very successful reworking of the same theme. Other
stories in which surviving generations think of the ship as a world and
not a mode of transport are "Spacebred Generations" (1953; vt "Target
Generation") by Clifford D. SIMAK, "Ship of Shadows" (1969) by Fritz
LEIBER, in which the ship is not strictly a starship, though the
degenerated society is similar, and Harry HARRISON's amazing Captive
Universe (1969), in which the crew and colonists have been transformed, in
an act of insane CULTURAL ENGINEERING, into medieval monks and Aztec
peasants.Some stories begin at the outset of or after the end of a
generation-starship voyage. Arthur C. CLARKE's early story "Rescue Party"
(1946) has Earth evacuated in the face of a coming nova, the evacuees
heading confidently towards the stars in a giant fleet of primitive
generation rocketships. Brian M. STABLEFORD's Promised Land (1974) tells
of a society of colonists whose social structure is based on that
developed over generations in the starship on which they arrived.An
interesting variant which appears in several stories, most notably John
BRUNNER's "Lungfish" (1957; vt "Rendezvous with Destiny" USA), has the
ship itself taking on the role in its occupants' minds of surrogate
mother; even on reaching their destination they will not leave the womb.
This theme is also prominent in the Simak story mentioned above.The
generation-starship idea has been used little outside genre sf, though a
spectacular exception is the epic poem Aniara (1956; trans 1963) by the
Nobel Prize-winning Swedish poet Harry MARTINSON. An opera by Karl-Birger
Blomdahl (1916-1968), Aniara, based on the poem, was performed in 1959.
The story pits human values against inhuman technology on a generation
starship.Among the more interesting stories about social changes on
generation starships are the Aldiss, Harrison, Heinlein, Leiber and Simak
tales already cited, along with: The Space-Born (1956) by E.C. TUBB; RITE
OF PASSAGE (1968) by Alexei PANSHIN (though, since the starship in
question can travel also through HYPERSPACE, this is not a pure example of
the subgenre); The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965) by Samuel R. DELANY; Rogue Ship

(1947-63; fixup 1965) by A.E. VAN VOGT; Seed of Light (1959) by Edmund
COOPER; The Star Seekers (1953) by Milton LESSER, which features a
four-way division of society in a hollowed-out asteroid; Alpha Centauri or Die! (1953 Planet Stories as "Ark of Mars"; fixup 1963 dos) by Leigh
BRACKETT; 200 Years to Christmas (1961) by J.T. MCINTOSH, which features a
competently thought-out but conventional cyclic history within the ship;
"Bliss" (1962) by David ROME; and Noah II (1970 US; rev 1975 UK) by Roger
DIXON.Some enterprising variants on the theme are found. In Arthur
SELLINGS's "A Start in Life" (1951) a plague decimates the ship, leaving
two 5-year-old survivors to be raised by ROBOTS. Judith MERRIL's "Wish
Upon a Star" (1958) features a ship originally crewed by 20 women and four
men, with a resultant matriarchal society. Chad OLIVER's "The Wind Blows
Free" (1957) takes the birth-trauma theme to its logical conclusion with a
story about a man who, goaded to near-madness by the claustrophobic
society of the ship, opens an airlock only to find that the ship landed on
a planet some centuries back.Harlan ELLISON wrote the script for a
generation-starship tv series, The STARLOST , made in Canada,
disastrously, in 1973. Ellison repudiated the series as it stood, and used
his derisive pseudonym Cordwainer Bird in the credits; his original script
for the pilot episode appears as "Phoenix without Ashes" in Faster than
Light (anth 1976) ed Jack DANN and George ZEBROWSKI, and was also
novelized as Phoenix without Ashes * (1975) with Edward BRYANT.From the
mid-1970s the theme has been used only sparsely. An interesting variation
is found in Damien BRODERICK's idea-packed The Dreaming Dragons (1980), in
which a generation TIME MACHINE is uncovered beneath Ayers Rock in the
Australian desert. In Pamela SARGENT's juvenile novel Earthseed (1983) the
generation starship is a hollowed-out asteroid occupied by teenagers. In
Kevin O'DONNELL Jr's Mayflies (1979) the lives of humans seem ephemeral
(hence the title) by contrast with the near-immortal human brain, embedded
in the ship's computer, which (only partially) controls those lives; and
the voyage accomplished in Frank M. ROBINSON's The Dark Beyond the Stars
(1991) is ultimately circular. The most ambitious recent attempt to invest
the theme with new energy is contained in Gene WOLFE's Book of the Long
Sun, whose first 3 vols - Nightside the Long Sun (1993), Lake of the Long
Sun (1994) and Calde of the Long Sun (1994) - are set entirely within a
generation starship called the Whorl. [PN]
GENESIS II
Made-for-tv film (1973). CBS-TV. Dir John Llewellyn Moxey, starring Alex
Cord, Mariette Hartley, Percy Rodriguez, Ted Cassidy. Screenplay Gene
RODDENBERRY. 90 mins. Colour.Produced by Roddenberry, the creator of STAR
TREK, this was a pilot for a tv series that was never made. After a
SUSPENDED-ANIMATION experiment goes wrong, a scientist wakes in a future
world which is suffering from the aftermath of a nuclear HOLOCAUST.
Ordinary humans are ruled tyrannously by MUTANTS. Aided by his primitive
vitality, the hero helps overcome the rulers. A similar format was used by
Roddenberry in two further attempts to launch series; these were released
as PLANET EARTH and STRANGE NEW WORLD. [JB]
GENETIC ENGINEERING
In his remarkable prophetic essay Daedalus, or Science and the Future

(1924) J.B.S. HALDANE looked forward optimistically to a day when
biologists have "invented" a new species of alga to solve the world's food
problem, and in which "ectogenetic" children born from artificial wombs
can be strategically modified by eugenic selection. Nothing was known in
1924 about the biochemistry of genetics, so Haldane spoke mainly in terms
of "selective breeding", but he nevertheless anticipated not merely some
of the possible practical applications of direct genetic manipulation but
also the likely response of the popular imagination. He observed that
there is always extreme resistance against "biological inventions" because
they are initially perceived as blasphemous perversions. Following the
decipherment, in the late 1950s, of the genetic code carried by DNA
molecules, the genetic engineering of bacteria has become commonplace, and
contemporary sf reflects the strength of this resistance in no uncertain
terms. Despite the strong tradition of technophilia which exists in HARD
SF, there is still relatively little sf championing the cause of genetic
engineering.The careful "engineering" of living creatures by surgery is
featured in a few early sf stories, most notably H.G. WELLS's The Island
of Dr Moreau (1896), but it was not until Haldane wrote his essay that
more ambitious projects of human engineering were featured - in Olaf
STAPLEDON's LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930), and in Aldous HUXLEY's satirical
development of ideas from Daedalus in BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932), in which
ectogenetic embryos are nutritionally and environmentally controlled to
fit them for life as "alphas", "betas" or "gammas". Julian Huxley
(1887-1975), brother of Aldous and friend of Haldane and Wells, wrote a
notable horror-sf story along the same lines: "The Tissue-Culture King"
(1927). Haldane's sister, Naomi MITCHISON, later extrapolated ideas from
Daedalus in a sceptical way in Not by Bread Alone (1983). In the early sf
PULP MAGAZINES David H. KELLER wrote several stories about
quasiblasphemous tampering with human form and nature, most notably
"Stenographer's Hands" (1928), about a eugenic experiment to breed the
perfect typist, with reduced initiative and a wasted body but jolly
capable hands. An early pulp-sf story involving true genetic engineering
was "Proteus Island" (1936) by Stanley G. WEINBAUM, which echoes its
model, The Island of Dr Moreau, in presuming that "the nature of the
beast" cannot be changed as easily as its physical form. Artificial
organisms designed for particular purposes appear in minor roles in
several stories, a notable example being the "familiars" employed by the
fake witches in Fritz LEIBER's GATHER, DARKNESS! (1943 ASF; 1950), and,
once A.E. VAN VOGT had used "gene transformation" to create superhumans in
SLAN (1940 ASF; 1946), vague and unspecified forms of genetic engineering
became standard methods of creating the pulp-sf SUPERMAN. The most
adventurous use of genetic engineering in 1940s sf was in Robert A.
HEINLEIN's BEYOND THIS HORIZON (1942 ASF as by Anson MacDonald; 1948), the
first story to describe (not altogether convincingly) a society which
routinely uses eugenics and genetic engineering to ensure the physical and
mental fitness of the population, and to address the moral questions thus
raised.The first sf writer to cultivate a more accurate understanding of
possible genetic engineering techniques, and the first to confront these
possibilities with a far-reaching but disciplined imagination, was James
BLISH. Titan's Daughter (1952 in Future Tense as "Beanstalk"; exp 1961)
features a race of giant humans created by stimulated polyploidy

(spontaneous polyploidy - doubling of the chromosome complement - is not
uncommon in plants, and usually results in giantism) and echoes Wells's
The Food of the Gods (1904). Blish moved on to consider the possible
utility of genetic engineering in adapting humans for the COLONIZATION OF
OTHER WORLDS in his PANTROPY series, written around the novelette "Surface
Tension" (1952) - about microscopic humans engineered for life in small
pools of water - and collected in THE SEEDLING STARS (fixup 1956). The
final section of the book looks forward to the day when Earth, much
changed by time, will itself become an alien environment to be re-seeded
with "adapted men". This idea, of specially engineering individuals to
"conquer" alien worlds, was taken up by other writers of the period,
including Philip K. DICK in The World Jones Made (1956) and Poul ANDERSON
in "Call me Joe" (1957). The idea that an engineered race might be
necessary to undertake SPACE FLIGHT itself was later developed by Samuel
R. DELANY in "Aye, and Gomorrah . . ." (1967). Other stories from the
1950s dealing with experiments in genetic engineering are Masters of
Evolution (1954 as "Natural State"; exp 1959) by Damon KNIGHT and "They
Shall Inherit" (1958) by Brian W. ALDISS. The notion of modifying animals
into human form was developed extensively by Cordwainer SMITH in his
stories of the Underpeople, who cannot breed true, having been modified by
somatic engineering - a modification of the genes in the specialized cells
of a differentiated embryo or an adult organism which does not affect the
germ plasm. (The different implications of somatic engineering and the
engineering of egg cells are not always appreciated by users of the theme.
)Interest in genetic engineering was inevitably renewed in the 1960s,
although many early stories concentrated on the very modest notion of
producing CLONES. Alarmism was rife: the UK tv series DOOMWATCH, whose
purpose was overtly propagandistic, helped to awaken many people to some
of the implications of biological engineering. Its first episode became
the basis for the novel Mutant-59 * (1972) by Kit PEDLER and Gerry DAVIS,
about the "escape" of a bacterium engineered to metabolize plastic, and
many other episodes also featured biological engineering of various kinds.
The idiosyncratic note of horror struck by many of the scripts recurs in
many subsequent tv plays, including two about the possibility of creating
"transgenic" hybrids of human and ape ( APES AND CAVEMEN): First Born
(1989), notionally based on Maureen DUFFY's satire Gor Saga 1981), and
Chimera (1991), adapted by Stephen GALLAGHER from his own novel Chimera
(1982).The first attempts to use genetic-engineering techniques to cure
genetic deficiency diseases have already been made, and the possibility of
eliminating such diseases has become a commonplace background element in
sf. The notion that a radiation-affected world might desperately require
such processes of repair is ironically developed in David J. SKAL's When
We were Good (1981) and Christopher HODDER-WILLIAMS's post- HOLOCAUST The
Chromosome Game (1984). The use of somatic engineering for cosmetic
purposes is the focus of such stories as "Cinderella's Sisters" (1989) and
"Skin Deep" (1991) by Brian M. STABLEFORD. The possibility of further
altering the human condition by genetic engineering remains much more
controversial. The plight of ordinary humans growing old in a world
already inherited by their engineered superchildren is explored in Anvil
of the Heart (1983) by Bruce T. HOLMES. Other alarmist tales in a similar
vein include Robin COOK's Mutation (1989) and Geoff RYMAN's The Child

Garden (1989), which feature very different developments of the assumption
that programmes of improvement involving genetic-engineering techniques
might have unforeseen and unfortunate side-effects. Relatively modest
functional modifications of humans include adaptation for aquatic life and
for life in low gravity: Inter Ice Age 4 (1959; trans 1970) by Kobo ABE is
the most notable novel dealing with the former theme, Lois McMaster
BUJOLD's FALLING FREE (1988) the most notable dealing with the latter (and
also raises interesting questions about the obsolescence of functional
modifications). Frank HERBERT was consistently interested in the more
bizarre variations of the theme, as displayed in The Eyes of Heisenberg
(1966) and Hellstrom's Hive (1973), although the superman-breeding
programme in DUNE (1965) is a pedestrian affair of long-range eugenics.
Genetic-engineering techniques are fundamental to the Protean futures of
many stories by John VARLEY, including THE OPHIUCHI HOTLINE (1977) and
"Options" (1979), a story of promiscuous sex-changes. The widespread use
of such techniques is also a premise of Bruce STERLING's Shaper ?
Mechanist stories, culminating in the novel Schismatrix (1985), and of
C.J. CHERRYH's monumental Cyteen (1988). Charles SHEFFIELD's series begun
with Sight of Proteus (1978) is more extravagant, and the technology
involved is highly fanciful.Exotically engineered human societies
established on other worlds are featured in several sf novels, the most
notable being the hermaphrodite society in Ursula K. LE GUIN's THE LEFT
HAND OF DARKNESS (1969). More recent COLONIZATION stories involving
genetic engineering include The Warriors of Dawn (1975) and The
Gameplayers of Zan (1977) by M.A. FOSTER, Manseed (1982) by Jack
WILLIAMSON, and The Garden of the Shaped (1987) by Sheila FINCH.As
real-world genetic engineering makes rapid progress, sf writers have
acquired a better sense of what actually goes on in the laboratory,
reflected in such stories as Richard S. Weinstein's "Oceans Away" (1976),
which deals with the creation of intelligent cephalopods, and John
GRIBBIN's Father to the Man (1989), one of the most intelligent stories
about an artificial half-human being. There is still, however, a marked
tendency for the strategic endeavours of scientists to be unceremoniously
set aside in favour of the miracles of MUTATION, as they are in Greg
BEAR's BLOOD MUSIC (1985). It cannot be said that sf writers have as yet
explored the real potential which genetic-engineering technologies hold
for the radical remaking of the human world, but a beginning of sorts is
made by the speculative future history The Third Millennium (1985) by
Brian Stableford and David LANGFORD, and by Stableford's various spinoff
short stories, some of which are collected in Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic
Tales of the Genetic Revolution (coll 1991). [BS]See also: BIOLOGY;
MEDICINE.
GENONE, HUDOR
Pseudonym of US writer William James Roe (1843-1915) for his sf and
fantasy; he also produced some non-genre work under his own name and as G.
I. Cervus. He was a freethinker - a disposition of mind found with
surprising infrequency among 19th-century sf writers - and in Inquirendo
Island (1886) he dramatized in unmistakable terms his negative feelings
about Christianity. The protagonist, shipwrecked on the eponymous
mid-Atlantic ISLAND, discovers that its inhabitants have constructed a

topsy-turvy RELIGION, which they follow with pious zeal, out of their
ancestors' bad memories of their own shipwreck and out of idolatry
directed towards the arithmetic text which is the only printed book to
have survived. Bellona's Husband (1887) takes its protagonists via
spaceship to MARS, where they find a humanlike society distinguished from
ours mainly by the fact that Martians live backwards in time; this may be
the earliest example of the notion of time reversal being given
full-fledged narrative form. Both novels stand out by virtue of the
pungency of their thought and their story-telling clarity. [JC]Other
works: The Last Tenet Imposed upon the Khan of Thomathoz (1892), a
fantasy.
GENRE SF
By this term, used widely in this encyclopedia, we mean sf that is either
labelled science fiction or is instantly recognized by its readership as
belonging to that category - or (usually) both. The implication is that
any author of genre sf is conscious of working within a genre with certain
habits of thought, certain "conventions" - some might even say "rules" of storytelling. These conventions are embedded primarily in a set of
texts which are generally agreed to contain them. This might seem to be a
circular definition, as though one were saying that genre sf is a set of
conventions located in genre-sf stories; but it is in fact a spiral. A
text published in 1930 may describe something - say a form of MATTER
TRANSMISSION - so well that in 1935 the description has become recognized
as a model or convention; and in 1940 a second text may be published which
shows its agreement with the convention by repeating it, with variations
which themselves enrich it. Partly this spiral is created by sf readers,
and partly it governs the expectations of those who so define themselves,
and who establish their sense of the true nature of genre sf from many
sources: from the spiral of books and stories certainly, but also from
film, tv and personal interactions ( FANDOM; CONVENTIONS), and finally
from an abiding sense shared by most members of the sf "community" that
genre sf is an intrinsic part of US history and literature. In its
narrowest sense, then, a genre-sf tale will be a story written after 1926,
published (or theoretically publishable) in a US SF MAGAZINE or specialist
sf press ( PUBLISHING; SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITEDEDITIONS), and conspicuous
for its signals that it is honouring the compact between writers and
readers to respect the protocols embedded in the texts which make up the
canon. (The term "protocols" has been used in this way by several scholars
of sf, notably Samuel R. DELANY and Mark ROSE.)To work variations on these
protocols is clever (and indeed required); but to abandon them is to leave
home. For many years, leaving home in this fashion (as, for instance, Kurt
VONNEGUT Jr was deemed to have done) was considered a form of treason; for
some writers and readers, this attitude remains. Similarly, works of
fiction which use sf themes in seeming ignorance or contempt of the
protocols-often works from so-called MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF - frequently
go unread by those immersed in genre sf; and, if they are read, tend to be
treated as invasive and alien . . . and incompetent. This snobbery (which
reverses that very frequently expressed about genre sf by the mainstream)
is perhaps unfortunate as a general rule, though in many particular
instances it is fully justified.Though this encyclopedia focuses primarily

on genre sf, and though genre sf is central to our sense of the nature of
sf as a whole, we also conceive non-genre sf as an essential part of the
picture. This encyclopedia therefore includes much of it; other works,
such as The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1988) ed James E. GUNN,
have been unwilling to trespass far in this direction, and have proved in
practice (and occasionally by precept) unwilling to accord genuine sf
status to work written outside the protocols and outside North America.
The question as to whether or not international non-genre-based sf is true
sf has, moreover, become inflamed and politicized; and to discuss
non-genre sf in an encyclopedia of sf has at times been regarded by some
critics, especially in the USA, as a radical ideological decision. The
editors of this volume are content to pay as much attention to these views
as they warrant, and agree that if it is ideological to regard, say,
Murray Constantine ( Katharine BURDEKIN) and George R. STEWART (non-genre
sf) as being just as important to the HISTORY OF SF as, for example,
Arthur Leo ZAGAT and Miles J. BREUER (genre sf), then this is indeed an
ideological encyclopedia.In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s literary academics
have very often talked about genre. By "genre" they almost invariably
refer, as Gary K. WOLFE puts it in Critical Terms for Science Fiction and
Fantasy (1986), to "a group of literary works with common defining
characteristics" and "major formal, technical or even thematic elements
that unite groups of works". This academic approach, which rightly tends
to draw very heavily upon genre sf for examples, is likely to generate
formal DEFINITIONS OF SF which fairly closely resemble the sets of
protocols for writing genre sf. It is almost certainly right that this is
so. But it seems no partially satisfactory definition of sf (there is no
fully satisfactory definition of sf) has yet been written so as to include
only genre sf. Some critics - like, famously, Darko SUVIN - have attempted
to define the genre of sf in terms which would in fact logically exclude
most genre sf from serious consideration. The point we would make here is
this: when we use the term "genre sf" in this encyclopedia, we are not
making a short-cut definition of the genre of sf; we are referring to
those sf works which honour the contract.This topic is raised, directly
and by implication, at many points in this volume, including the entries
mentioned above, and in the article on PULP MAGAZINES. [PN/JC]
GENTLE, MARY
(1956- ) UK writer who began publishing with a fantasy for young adults,
A Hawk in Silver (1977; rev 1985 US), and who came to general notice with
her Orthe sequence - GOLDEN WITCHBREED (1983) and Ancient Light (1987) which, despite the fantasy ring of the first title, is sf. The protagonist
of both volumes, a woman diplomat/entrepreneur in the complexly defined
employ of an Earth dominated by vast corporations, comes to Orthe in an
attempt to open the planet to exploitation, but discovers the densely
described humanoid Orthean culture a seeming match for the desires of her
masters. Her trek across Orthe, which takes much of GOLDEN WITCHBREED and
which is replicated in feel in Ancient Light, gives the sequence the
typical plot-structure and landscape of PLANETARY ROMANCE, though MG is,
in fact, far less entranced by scene-setting than are the creators of the
modern form (e.g., Jack VANCE). The final import of the sequence - despite
the sf pleasures entailed in the discovery of an ancient race whose

technological hubris once seared the world, and of a huge ancient artifact
( BIG DUMB OBJECTS) - is anything but conducive to any sense that Orthe is
a planetary Secret Garden. The protagonist is older in the second volume,
Orthean culture has been fatally touched by the allure of human
TECHNOLOGY, disturbances transform the old comity, which is now torn by
ethnic conflicts, and the revanchist descendants of the ancient Golden
Witchbreed do finally use the secret weapon which gives that second volume
its title. The Secret Garden - which lies at the heart of the true
planetary romance - becomes, in MG's hands, the Third World.Some of the
stories assembled in Scholars and Soldiers (coll 1989) are sf, but in the
late 1980s MG turned to FANTASY, and in the White Crow sequence - Rats and
Gargoyles (1990),The Architecture of Desire (1991) and Left to his own
Devices (coll 1994) - created an ALTERNATE WORLD or multiverse whose
scenery and idiom were superficially reminiscent of Michael MOORCOCK's
metaphysical romances; but MG was far more interested than Moorcock in the
arguments that might sustain such a universe, deriving a rationale to
sustain them - like John CROWLEY before her - from Renaissance
Neoplatonism. In the first novel, it is seen that the world is sustained
in the memory of a cabal of gods. In the second, set in an alternate
England which mirrors Cromwellian times, the female protagonist begins, at
great cost to herself and others, to outgrow the toys of MAGIC; MG has
always been an author of FEMINIST inclinations, and she presents the sins
committed by the White Crow in this novel as non-gender hubris and
complacency. Less urgently, the third volume - whose long title story is
set in a NEAR FUTURE but decidedly alternate London - expands the scope
but comes fairly close to treating the Temporal Adventuress exploits of
the heroine as self-justifying. It still may be hoped that the harsh,
flexible urgency of MG's fantasies will shape an equally complex new sf
vision. [JC]Other works: The Weerde #1 * (anth 1992) ed with Roz KAVENEY;
Villains! * (anth 1992) ed with Kaveney; Grunts! (1992), a parodic
sf/fantasy.See also: GODS AND DEMONS; MILFORD SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS'
CONFERENCE; PSEUDO-SCIENCE; SHARED WORLDS.
GENTRY, CURT
(1931- ) US writer whose NEAR-FUTURE sf novel, The Last Days of the Late,
Great State of California (1968), vividly depicts a San Andreas Fault
DISASTER, though its ecological arguments, blaming Man for the destruction
of the state, are somewhat laboured. [JC]
GEORGE, EDWARD E.
Robert E. VARDEMAN.
GEORGE, F. FREDERICK
Neal STEPHENSON.
GEORGE, PETER (BRYAN)
(1924-1966) UK writer and ex-RAF officer whose life and career seem to
have been obsessed by nuclear WAR and its consequences. His best-known sf
novel, Two Hours to Doom (1958; vt Red Alert 1958 US) as by Peter Bryant,
was a straightforward story in which a preventive war, inaugurated by a
general, almost leads to worldwide HOLOCAUST, and he may have had some
mixed feelings about its satirical transmogrification into Stanley

KUBRICK's brilliant DR STRANGELOVE: OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND
LOVE THE BOMB (1963), in which doomsday is neither averted at the last
moment nor entirely unwelcomed. Dr Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Bomb * (1963) was credited solely to PG, though the
influence of Terry Southern (1924- ), who co-wrote the filmscript, is
everywhere evident. A further sf novel, Commander-1 (1965), follows the
desperate struggles of survivors after a nuclear war. PG's suicide
followed soon after, during the composition of yet another novel on the
same theme, to have been entitled Nuclear Survivors. [JC]See also: END OF
THE WORLD; SCIENTISTS.
GERGELY, MIHALY
[r] HUNGARY.
GERHARDI, WILLIAM
Legal name during his publishing career of UK writer William Gaerhardie
(1895-1977); he partially reverted to Gaerhardie in his later, inactive
years. He is best known for works outside the sf field like Futility
(1922). His END-OF-THE-WORLD novel Jazz and Jasper: The Story of Adam and
Eva (1928; vt Eva's Apple: A Story of Jazz and Jasper 1928 US; vt My
Sinful Earth 1947 UK; vt Doom 1974) depicts a Lord Beaverbrook figure and
his entourage in their complex lives and later, after a huge cataclysm,
hurtling through space on a chip of rock which is all that remains of
Earth. The Memoirs of Satan (1932) with Brian Lunn (Hugh KINGSMILL's
brother) is fantasy. [JC]
GERMANO, PETER B.
[r] Jack BERTIN.
GERMANY
This entry covers the whole of Germany, including the former GDR (East
Germany). There is a separate entry for AUSTRIA, with which there is a
small and inevitable overlap: many books by Austrian writers were in fact
published in Germany, and many Austrians have lived in Germany - some,
indeed, working in the German publishing industry.The roots of German sf
can be traced back to the 17th century, when the astronomer Johannes
KEPLER's Somnium (1634 in Latin; trans into German as Traum von Mond 1898;
trans E. Rosen as Kepler's "Somnium" 1967) reflected, in semifictional
form, on life on the Moon. Considered a masterpiece of its time is the
picaresque novel Der abenteuerliche Simplizissimus (1669; trans A.T.S.
Goodricke as The Adventurous Simplicissimus 1912 UK; retrans H.
Weissenborn and L. Macdonald 1963 UK) by Johann Jakob Christoffel von
Grimmelshausen (1622-1676), which contains, inter alia, episodes about
utopian societies and plans as well as a journey to the Moon.The 18th
century saw publication of Wunderliche Fata einiger Seefahrer (4 parts
1741-43), usually known as Insel Felsenburg ["Felsenburg Island"], by
Johann Gottfried Schnabel (1692-1752). This book, very popular at the
time, combined elements of the UTOPIA, the ROBINSONADE and the episodic
adventure novel, and could be regarded as the earliest German forerunner
of adventure sf. Further utopian novels of the 18th and early 19th century
are Dreyerley Wirkungen: Eine Geschichte aus der Planetenwelt ["Triple
Effects: A Story from the World of Planets"] (1789) and Urani: Konigin von

Sardanopalien im Planneten Sirius ["Urania: Queen of Sardanopolis in the
Planet Sirius"] (1790) - both by Johann Friedrich Ernst Albrecht
(1752-1814), who normally wrote "knight-and-robber" novels - and Die
schwarzen Bruder ["The Black Brotherhood"] (1791-5) by Heinrich Zschokke
(1771-1848), a sensationalist trilogy about a secret society; its third
novel is set in the 24th century, when humanity is used as a kind of
livestock for ALIENS. Another early work is Ini: Ein Roman aus dem 21.
Jahrhundert ["Ini: A Novel from the 21st Century"] (1810) by Julius von
Voss (1768-1832). Important to the development of German sf is the story
"Der Sandmann" (1816; trans as "The Sandman") by E.T.A. HOFFMANN, the most
important author of the Schwarze Romantik ["Black Romantic"] movement in
Germany. The story, which has been reprinted innumerable times, tells of
Dr Coppelius, who constructs an automaton in the shape of a human being;
it is one of the first ROBOT stories.But the real pioneer of German sf was
Kurd LASSWITZ, a teacher at the Gymnasium Ernestinum in Gotha, who wrote
the most important classical German sf novel, Auf zwei Planeten (1897; cut
1948; cut again 1969; trans Hans J. Rudnick, much cut, as Two Planets 1971
US). It is the story of a confrontation of human and Martian cultures, the
latter being technically and ethically superior. Lasswitz, who regarded
ethical development as dependent on scientific and technological
development, included impressive technical predictions: a
spokewheel-shaped space station, rolling roadways, synthetic materials,
solar cells and much more. Influenced by the German idealist philosopher
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), his work was didactic and focused on
philosophical conceptions for the future. He published a number of short
stories and novellas, several of which have been translated into English,
and two further sf novels, less popular, which remain untranslated. These
are Aspira (1906) and Sternentau ["Star Dew"] (1909).Wholly different, but
no less remarkable, are the many works of sf by the scurrilous visionary
Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915), who in Lesabendio (1913) and the story
collection Astrale Noveletten ["Astral Novelettes"] (coll 1912), for
example, populated the cosmos with grotesque and tremendously imaginative
beings reminiscent of the creations of the later writer Olaf STAPLEDON.
Much of Scheerbart's work has been reissued in Germany. This is not the
case with the interesting In Purpurner Finsternis ["In Purple Darkness"]
(1895) by M(ichael) G(eorg) Conrad (1846-1927), an sf utopia mainly set in
a labyrinth of caves, and critical of Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm.German
FANTASTIC VOYAGES and adventures of the Jules VERNE type arrived with the
novels of Robert Kraft (1869-1916) and F.W. MADER. Kraft, touted by his
publishers as "the German Jules Verne", wrote in addition to countless
adventure novels and sea novels the 10-issue dime-novel series Aus dem
Reiche der Phantasie ["From the Realms of Imagination"] (1901), whose
protagonist's adventures include trips to the Stone Age and the Moon. (It
was probably the first DIME-NOVEL SF series in Germany. This form of
publication, Groschenhefte, saddle-stapled booklets very similar to one of
the several popular dime-novel formats in the USA, continued very much
longer in Germany than it did in the USA - see below.) Typical of Kraft's
book publications are Im Panzermobil um die Erde ["Round the World in a
Tank"] (1906), Im Aeroplan um die Erde ["Round the World in a Plane"]
(1908), Der Herr der Lufte ["Lord of the Air"] (1909), Die
Nihilit-Expedition ["The Nihilit Expedition"] (1909) - a lost-race ( LOST

WORLDS) novel - and Die neue Erde ["The New Earth"] (1910), a postHOLOCAUST novel. F.W. Mader wrote juvenile adventure novels, often set in
Africa and reminiscent of H. Rider HAGGARD, and sometimes, as in Die
Messingstadt ["City of Brass"] (1924), with utopian as well as fantastic
elements. His space adventure Wunderwelten (1911; trans Max Shachtman as
Distant Worlds: The Story of a Voyage to the Planets 1932 US) is one of
the most important sf novels of the Kaiser's period.Other German sf
writers popular in the first two decades of the 20th century include: Carl
Grunert (1865-1918), author of Der Marsspion und andere Novellen ["The
Martian Spy and Other Novelettes"] (coll 1908); Albert Daiber, author of
Vom Mars zur Erde ["From Mars to Earth"] (1910); Oskar Hoffmann (1866-? ),
whose many works included the dime-novel series MacMilfords Reisen im
Universum ["MacMilford's Voyages into the Universe"] (1902-3); and Robert
Heymann (1879-? ), author of Der unsichtbare Mensch vom Jahr 2111 ["The
Invisible Man of the Year 2111"] (1909). Finally, there was the classic
novel Der Tunnel (1913; trans anon as The Tunnel 1915) by Bernhard
KELLERMANN (rendered Bernard Kellerman in the English translation), about
the building of a tunnel between England and the Continent; it was filmed
as Der TUNNEL (1933).One of the most successful sf series of the time in
the field of dime novels/pulp adventures, and one of the earliest purely
sf periodicals anywhere, was Der LUFTPIRAT UND SEIN LENKBARES LUFTSCHIFF
(1908-11), totalling 165 adventures.Between the two World Wars an
especially German type of sf came into being, namely the
scientific-technical Zukunftsroman (future novel), a term which gave its
name to the genre, being only gradually replaced, from the early 1950s
onward, by the foreign designation "science fiction", which was eventually
naturalized. By far the most popular author of the Zukunftsroman - the
spectrum of whose themes was fixed much more strictly than that of US-UK
"science fiction" - was unquestionably Hans Dominik (1872-1945), whose
nearly 20 books - his first novel was Die Macht der Drei ["The Power of
the Three"] (1922)-sold several million copies in total. Dominik's books
are clumsy and badly written, but they survive on the frisson given by
their technically oriented adventure, and were probably also successful
because their distinctly nationalistic overtones - the German engineer
being seen as superior to all others in the world - suited the spirit of a
Germany in which National Socialism was on the rise. Other representatives
of the Zukunftsroman were Rudolf H(einrich) Daumann (1896-1957),
St(anislaw) Bialkowski (1897-? ), Karl August von Laffert (1872-1938),
Hans Richter (1889-1941) and Walther Kegel (1907-1945). A further popular
author in this line was Freder van Holk, a pseudonym of Paul Alfred Muller
(1901-1970), who also published as Lok Myler; under these pseudonyms he
wrote the successful dime-novel series Sun Koh, der Erbe von Atlantis
["Sun Koh: Heir of Atlantis"] (1933-6), with 150 issues, and Jan Mayen
(1935-9), with 120 issues. The former deals with an Atlantean in modern
London, planning, with supertechnology, to control ATLANTIS when it
reappears. Sf of this type had great influence on the first postwar
generation of German sf authors.Among the more interesting novels of
prewar German sf are those of Otto Willi GAIL, whose works include Hans
Hardts Mondfahrt (1928; trans anon as By Rocket to the Moon: The Story of
Hans Hardt's Miraculous Flight 1931). Before writing, he consulted the
German rocket pioneer Max Valier and was able to give a technically exact

(according to the knowledge of the time) description of a flight to the
Moon and of other space plans since realized. Another writer who like Gail
had some of his work translated into English and published in Hugo
GERNSBACK's sf magazines was Otfried von Hanstein (1869-1959). The five
novels concerned included Mond-Rak 1: Eine Fahrt inns Weltall (1929; trans
Francis Currier as "Between Earth and Moon" 1930 Wonder Stories
Quarterly).But perhaps the sf writer of the period best known abroad was
Thea VON HARBOU, who had collaborated with her husband, film director
Fritz LANG, on the screenplays of several sf films including the great
classic METROPOLIS (1926) and also Die FRAU IM MOND (1929). Von Harbou's
turgid novelizations were Metropolis * (1926; trans anon 1927 UK) and Frau
im Mond * (1928; trans Baroness von Hutten as The Girl in the Moon 1930
UK; cut vt The Rocket to the Moon, from the Novel, The Girl in the Moon
1930 US), the latter being published in Germany before the film was
released. An unusual theme is dealt with in Druso: Oder die gestohlene
Menschheit ["Druso, or The Stolen Mankind"] (1931; trans Fletcher PRATT as
"Druso" 1934 Wonder Stories) by Friedrich Freksa (1882-1955), a novel
about superhumans that reaches far into the future, but which is sadly
marred by racist and fascist undertones. This is almost opposite,
politically, to Utopolis (1930) by Werner Illing (1895-1979), which is a
socialist utopia in which workers defeat rebellious capitalists.Utopolis,
however, is at the more literary end of the spectrum. It was one of
several impressive sf novels published by non-genre authors between the
wars. Among the others were Tuzub 37 (1935) by Paul Gurk (1880-1953), a
strange "green" dystopia in which a flayed and totally concreted Nature
rises up against the mankind who did this, and Balthasar Tipho (1919) by
Hans Flesch (1895-1981), a strong apocalyptic novel. The most celebrated
of the writers who occasionally experimented with sf themes was Alfred
Doblin (1878-1957), who went into exile in France in 1933 and then the USA
in 1941. Two of his books are surreal, metamorphic sf of very considerable
power: Wadzek's Kampf mit der Dampfturbine ["Wadzek's Struggle with the
Steam-Machine"] (1918) and Berge, Meere und Giganten ["Mountains, Seas and
Giants"] (1924; rev vt Giganten ["Giants"] 1931). In the latter, somewhat
earlier than Olaf Stapledon, with whom he has been compared, Doblin deals
with GENETIC ENGINEERING as a means of evolving the capacities of a future
race of humans. His work was a potent influence on Cordwainer SMITH's sf.
All of these works, however, stand somewhat outside what most readers
would regard as sf proper.There were further stories of the future from
more "literary" German writers after WWII, though the one best known in
the English-speaking world was in fact by an Austrian, Franz WERFEL: Stern
der Ungeborenen (1946 Austria; trans Gustave O. Arlt as Star of the Unborn
1946). Others were Die Stadt hinter dem Strom (1947; trans P. de
Mendelssohn as The City Beyond the River 1953) by Hermann Kasack
(1896-1966), a political satire with futuristic sequences, which was made
into an opera; Heliopolis (1949) by Ernst JUNGER; and Nein: Die Welt der
Angeklagten ["No: The World of the Accused"] (1950) by Walter Jens (1923), set in a totalitarian DYSTOPIA reminiscent of George ORWELL's NINETEEN
EIGHTY-FOUR (1939). In a much less solemn vein is Die Gelehrtenrepublik
(1957; trans Michael Horovitz as The Egghead Republic: A Short Novel from
the Horse Latitudes 1979 UK) by Arno SCHMIDT, with its MUTANTS and its
language games. Several German writers, much affected by the horrors of

WWII and especially the shock of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, wrote
post- HOLOCAUST novels; these included Wir fanden Menschen ["We Found
Men"] (1948) by Hans Worner (1903- ), Blumen wachsen im Himmel ["Flowers
Grow in the Heavens"] (1948) by Hellmuth Lange (1903- ), Helium (1949) by
Ernst von Khuon (1915- ) and Die Kinder des Saturn ["The Children of
Saturn"] (1959) by Jens Rehn, whose real name was Otto Jens Luther
(1918-1983).The world of GENRE SF began changing after WWII. The first US
sf in translation was issued from 1951 onwards by the publishers Gebruder
Weiss in their hardcover line, Die Welt von Morgen, whose first
publications, from 1949 on, had been reprints of Hans Dominik; later on,
and importantly, they published the juveniles of Robert A. HEINLEIN and
Arthur C. CLARKE. The first adult HARD SF bound in hard covers was in the
short-lived Rauchs Weltraum-Bucher series, all 1953, from Karl Rauch
publishers, ed Gotthard Gunther (1900-1985), one being an anthology ed
Gunther, Uberwindung von Raum und Zeit ["Conquest of Space and Time"]
(anth 1953), and the other three being books by John W. CAMPBELL Jr, Jack
WILLIAMSON and Isaac ASIMOV. Each had a long, critical afterword by
Gunther. This line made the term "science fiction" known to German readers
for the first time, and is now legendary to fans and collectors. In terms
of copies sold at the time, it was a flop.The division of Germany into
East and West after WWII also influenced the development of genre sf.
While in the GDR literature generally, and therefore sf, had to serve
socialism, in the FRG sf publishing at first saw itself in terms of the
traditional Zukunftsroman. Thus reprints were issued of Dominik's work and
of dime-novel series by Freder van Holk/Lok Myler.A specialized form of
publishing turned out to be significant for sf: cheaply produced hardbacks
with millboard covers, issued in small print runs for commercial
circulating libraries. Before the circulating libraries fell victim in the
late 1950s and early 1960s to the altered leisure-time behaviour of the
readership, more than 500 sf novels were published in this format. Even
though most of them were trash, they nevertheless prepared the way for a
growing generation of native German authors, as well as publishing
translations into German for the first time of books by E.E. "Doc" SMITH,
A.E. VAN VOGT, Philip K. DICK, Clifford D. SIMAK and others.The second and
more important pathway into postwar German sf writing was provided by the
publishers of pulp adventures. The long and continuous German tradition of
publishing dime-novel booklets is only now, in the 1990s, fading away.
Some reprints of prewar sf of this kind have already been mentioned, but
it was above all the three publishers Pabel, Lehning and Moewig who
dominated in this field. In 1953 Pabel started the pulp line
Utopia-Zukunftsromane, later supplemented by Utopia-Grossband,
Utopia-Kriminal and the first German sf magazine, Utopia-Magazin. In 1956
Lehning followed up with reprints of circulating-library titles in its
pulp line Luna-Utopia-Roman, and in 1957 Moewig joined the scene with
Terra, followed by Terra-Sonderband and Galaxis, a German edition of
GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION. It was Pabel which succeeded in popularizing the
term "science fiction" in Germany. At the beginning of the
Utopia-Zukunftsromane line the stories consisted of serial adventures in
the Jim Parker series, but later they shifted to novels independent of
series, and from 1955 on also translations (mostly short novels) of Murray
LEINSTER, Eric Frank RUSSELL and many others. Quite a number of the best

and most popular US sf novels and novellas appeared amid all this material
published by Pabel and the other companies, but most were translated
rather badly and, as the format was limited to a fixed number of pages,
often drastically cut, a practice that continued in German sf translations
for a long time, since early paperbacks, too, had a rigidly restricted
page count.It was Walter Ernsting (1920- ), first at Pabel and later at
Moewig, who could be regarded as the engine that propelled the growing sf
industry. He wrote sf adventures under the pseudonym Clark DARLTON; along
with K.H. SCHEER he soon became the most popular author of German
adventure sf, and as an editor he was responsible for altering publishers'
policies (in part towards the publication of more of the UK-US type of
sf), editing both Utopia-Magazin and the pulp publishing lines (the
immediate predecessors of paperback publishing as understood in the
English-speaking world) Utopia-Grossband and Terra-Sonderband, the latter
continuing as the paperback line Terra-Taschenbuch. Ernsting is, of
course, most famous for founding Perry Rhodan with Scheer in 1961. It is
the most popular pulp-adventure sf series in the HISTORY OF SF; to 1991
more than 1600 short novels had been published in it, not to mention
numerous reprints, paperbacks, hardcovers and the spin-off Atlan series,
which itself has published a massive number of titles. The Perry Rhodan
print-run - it is published weekly - is around 200,000 copies for the
first edition. The series was and still is written by a team ( PERRY
RHODAN for further details).Another important editor was Gunther M.
Schelwokat (1929-1992), who edited much of the sf production of Moewig and
(after they had both come under the same ownership) Pabel. Because of the
power he had in selecting new authors for the various lines and series, he
has been called the John W. Campbell of the German pulps.Further pulp
series include Mark Powers, Ad Astra, Ren Dhark, Rex Corda, Raumschiff
Promet, Die Terranauten and Zeitkugel, all coming and going in the past
few decades, most of them trying (and failing) to repeat the success of
Perry Rhodan with similar concepts. However, on a smaller scale, the Orion
series is still thriving, originally in the pulp format but now in
paperback reprints; its novelizations and ongoing novels, about 145 of
them, many by Hans Kneifel (1936- ), are based on the successful German tv
SPACE OPERA series Raumpatrouille - Die phantastichen Abenteuer des
Raumschiffes Orion ["Space Patrol - The Fantastic Adventures of the Space
Ship Orion"], which began, like STAR TREK, in 1966, and which, also like
Star Trek, slowly built up a considerable fan following.Until the 1960s,
paperbacks were the exception rather than the rule in German publishing,
being brought out only by smaller publishers. Genre sf mainly remained a
feature of the pulp scene and seemed to be unsaleable outside that milieu.
This changed when, in 1960, the publishing house Goldmann began a
hardcover sf line (with the Austrian-born Herbert W. FRANKE as consulting
editor) and then, from 1962, a paperback line that continues today. In
1960, too, the publisher Heyne began, at first sporadically but then
vigorously, to publish sf. Heyne developed into one of the bestselling
publishers of paperbacks generally, not just in sf; but sf remained a
central part of its publishing programme and today, with Wolfgang JESCHKE
as editor, it is undisputed leader of the sf market, publishing over 100
paperbacks a year, mostly translations. Just as Ernsting and Schelwokat
forced the pace of sf pulp-adventure publishing in Germany, so Jeschke was

the person most responsible for sf's development as a paperback literature
in Germany. With his line of sf paperbacks, including sub-lines like
Classics and Bibliothek der Science Fiction, and his ability to select the
best work, Jeschke fulfilled his intention of presenting the whole
spectrum of sf from all over the world. Another notable paperback line was
Fischer Orbit (1972-4), based on Damon KNIGHT's ORBIT anthologies and
extended to include novels and collections, mainly of US origin, but
including the first collection of new and classic German sf stories,
Science Fiction aus Deutschland ["Science Fiction from Germany"] (anth
1974), ed H.J. ALPERS and Ronald M. Hahn (1948- ).In the late 1960s and
the 1970s, publishers like Marion von Schroder, Lichtenberg, Insel and
Hohenheim began hardcover or quality paperback sf lines, but all were
finally cancelled, including Hohenheim's project to publish a 15-vol
hardcover series, ed H.J. Alpers and Werner Fuchs (1949- ), to chronicle
sf history with the best stories of the best authors; only 6 vols
appeared. Indeed, after the boom that lasted from the late 1970s to the
early 1980s, during which Bastei-Lubbe, Knaur, Moewig, Pabel and Ullstein
all began new paperback lines or extended existing ones, there was a
severe contraction. Today only Heyne, Goldmann and Bastei-Lubbe remain
competitive.Unlike the English-language countries, Germany has no
magazine-based tradition of short-story publication. There had been a
magazine of the fantastic, Der Orchideengarten ["The Garden of Orchids"]
(1919-21), but it was only in the 1950s, with Utopia-Magazin (1955-9; 26
issues) and Galaxis (1958-59; 15 issues), that the first sf magazines were
published. Later attempts to establish magazines, mostly from smaller
publishers, failed. Perry Rhodan did not successfully make the transition
from pulp weekly booklet to magazine in Perry Rhodan Magazin. Other
publications in magazine format were Comet, 2001, Star SF and a German
edition of OMNI, but all finally failed. However, forums for short stories
do remain, mainly occasional anthologies from Heyne, ed Wolfgang Jeschke.
Earlier there had been the Kopernikus series, a kind of magazine in
paperback (1980-88; 15 vols) ed H.J. Alpers from Moewig; the Polaris
series from Insel/Suhrkamp (1973-85; 8 vols) ed Franz ROTTENSTEINER; and a
series of paperbacks (1980-84) from Goldmann, ed Thomas LeBlanc (1951).Let us turn from publishing to writing, and look at the major German sf
authors since WWII. We can start in the 1950s in the field of pulp
adventure with the work of Walter Ernsting (writing as Clark Darlton) and
K.H. Scheer. The former reached Erich VON DANIKEN territory before von
D-niken did with his tales of past extraterrestrial visits to Earth, and
was best known for his TIME-TRAVEL stories. Scheer specialized in
military-technological space opera. In the 1960s Herbert FRANKE came to
prominence as the first German-language sf writer to tackle really
ambitious themes. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, he was joined (at first
just in the field of short stories) by Jeschke. Also of interest is Otto
BASIL, who like Franke was an Austrian, with his ALTERNATE-WORLD novel
Wenn das der Fuhrer wuste (1966; cut trans Thomas Weyr as The Twilight Man
1968 US). This story of Nazi Germany's victory in WWII, followed by a
postwar decay of the Third Reich after Hitler's death as his heirs
struggle for power, can be compared to The Man in the High Castle (1962)
by Philip K. DICK.In the 1970s Carl Amery (1922- ), a leading German
MAINSTREAM WRITER, turned his attention to sf themes, inspired by Walter

M. MILLER's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960). With 3 excellent books,
original in both their idiom (Bavarian) and their concepts, he played
variations on the themes of time travel, the fall of Western culture, and
alternate worlds; these were Das Konigsprojekt ["The King Project"]
(1974), the short novel Der Untergang der Stadt Passau ["The Fall of the
City of Passau"] (1975), and An den Feuern der Leyermark ["At the Fires of
the Leyermark"] (1979), Leyermark being an old name for Bavaria. Franke
wrote further remarkable novels, notably Zone Null (1970; trans 1974 US)
and Ypsilon Minus (1976).In the 1980s Wolfgang Jeschke raised his profile,
proving himself an excellent novelist with Der letzte Tag der Schopfung
(1981; trans Gertrud Mander as The Last Day of Creation 1981 US) and Midas
(1989; trans 1990 US). Thomas R.P. Mielke (1940- ), up to then an almost
unnoticed pulp writer, surprised everybody with the thematically bizarre
novel Das Sakriversum ["The Vestryverse"] (1983), in which he described
how two mutated tribes, who for centuries have kept themselves hidden in
the roof-vault of a cathedral, survive a war waged with neutron bombs.
With Die Parzelle ["The Piece of Land"] (1984) Werner Zillig (1949- )
wrote a remarkable novel about countercultures which realize their utopian
and radical ideas in protected areas. Die Enkel der Raketenbauer
["Grandchildren of the Rocket-Builders"] (1980) by Georg Zauner (1920- )
is a cutting, ironic novel about a postnuclear Bavaria. A notable
dystopian novel is Erwins Badezimmer oder Die Gef-hrlichkeit der Sprache
["Erwin's Bathroom, or The Perilousness of Language"] (1984) by Hans
Bemmann (1922- ); and Richard Hey (1926- ) published in Im Jahr 95 nach
Hiroshima ["In the Year 95 after Hiroshima"] (1982) an outstanding
post-holocaust novel dealing with a new ice age and the vanishing of
European culture. Other authors worth notice include Rainer Erler (1933),
mainly a tv screenwriter and director, Reinmar Cunis (1933-1989) and
Michael Weisser (1948- ). Known primarily for short stories are Thomas
Ziegler (the pen-name of Rainer Zubeil [1956- ]), Karl Michael Armer
(1950- ), Horst Pukallus (1949- ), Gerd Maximovic (1944- ), Peter
Schattschneider (1950- ) ( AUSTRIA) and Ronald M. Hahn, the latter mostly
with SATIRES.In the postwar GDR, sf was expected to serve socialism and to
be subordinate to the concepts of party functionaries, and was anyway for
a long time regarded with suspicion. The first East German sf novel was
Die goldene Kugel ["The Golden Ball"] (1949) by Ludwig Turek (1898-1975).
During the whole of the 1950s in the GDR only 11 sf books, plus 50 or so
short stories scattered here and there, were published. In the 1950s and
1960s authors like Eberhard Del'Antonio (1926- ), the Brazilian-born
Carlos Rasch (1932- ), Gunther Krupkat (1905- ) and Karl-Heinz Tuschel
(1928- ), and in the 1970s and 1980s Klaus Fruhauf (1933- ), Rainer
Fuhrmann (1940- ), Peter Lorenz (1944- ), Michael Szameit (1950- ) and
others wrote an upright, arid, often didactic sf that was miles away,
thematically and in literary quality, from all international standards.
But from the 1970s onward the GDR also began to produce weightier voices,
with Heiner Rank (1931- ), Gerhard Branstner (1927- ), Gert Prokop (1932), Erik Simon (1950- ) and several collaborative teams: Alfred Leman
(1925- ) and Hans Taubert (1928- ); Johanna (1929- ) and Gunter (1928- )
Braun; and Karlheinz (1950- ) and Angela (1941- ) Steinmuller. Die
Ohnmacht der Allm-chtigen ["The Impotence of the Omnipotent Ones"] (1973)
by Heiner Rank, Der Irrtum des Grossen Zauberers ["The Error of the Great

Sorcerer"] (1972) and Unheimliche Erscheinungsformen auf Omega XI
["Strangely Shaped Apparitions on Omega XI"] (1974), both by Johanna and
Gunter Braun, and Andymon (1982) and Pulaster (1986), both by Karlheinz
and Angela Steinmuller, are examples of sf books that are full of ideas
and well written, and need not fear international comparison.In the GDR,
translated sf was very largely from RUSSIA and other socialist countries;
Western sf was seldom published and Western adult fantasy never. There
were few East German sf paperbacks; most books were hardcovers from Das
Neue Berlin and Neues Leben, as well as pulp booklets from the Das neue
Abenteuer and kap lines. Only in recent years has the term "science
fiction" been used, and it appeared on only one line of books, a
short-running paperback series. Ekkehard Redlin (1919- ), as editor of Das
Neue Berlin, was an important influence on East German sf, and later both
Olaf R. Spittel (1953- ) and especially Erik Simon had a huge influence on
the scene. With Die Science-fiction der DDR: Autoren und Werke: Ein
Lexicon ["Sf in the GDR: Authors and Works: A Dictionary"] (1988), these
two wrote what is effectively a small encyclopedia of East German sf (a
shorter version had appeared earlier, in 1982). Simon, who also edits for
Das Neue Berlin, has edited an annual, with stories and critical essays,
entitled Lichtjahr ["Lightyear"] (5 vols 1980-86).Sf publishing in the
united Germany of today has few book lines, is dominated by Heyne, and is
in general the domain of US-UK authors. Outside the Perry Rhodan pulps, no
German sf author is able to earn his or her living from sf alone; the one
marginal exception is Wolfgang E. Hohlbein (1953- ), a bestselling author
of, primarily, fantasy. In recent years some SMALL PRESSES have published
sf, either in limited editions or in attempts to break into the upmarket
area of hardcovers and quality paperbacks. Among them are Corian, Fantasy
Productions, Fabylon, Laurin and Edition Phantasia. Besides the book
market, sf writers can look to a small market for high-quality radio
plays, which has been supported over the years by radio editors and
directors like Horst Krautkr-mer, Andreas Weber-Sch-fer and, above all,
Dieter Hasselblatt (1926- ).There has been quite a lot of critical and
scholarly literature about sf in Germany. The SEMIPROZINE Science Fiction
Times, which began in 1958 as a straight translation of the US Science
Fiction Times, itself a variant title of FANTASY TIMES, began to publish
original German material in the early 1960s. It is now the longest-lasting
critical journal in Germany; also important in this respect is Franz
Rottensteiner's QUARBER MERKUR. There have been several academic studies
of sf, sometimes written from a sociological or political viewpoint. Begun
in 1985, Phantastichen Literatur, ed Joachim Korber, is a continuously
updated bibliographical resource for both sf and fantasy from Corian.
Standard references include Lexicon der Science Fiction Literatur (1980;
rev 1988; new edn projected for 1992) and Reclams Science Fiction Fuhrer
(1982), the former from Heyne, the latter from Reclam, both ed Hans
Joachim Alpers, Werner Fuchs and Ronald M. Hahn, with Wolfgang Jeschke as
a further editor of the Heyne books.Sf cinema had a good start in Germany
in the silent period with the serial HOMUNCULUS (1916), Fritz LANG's DR
MABUSE, DER SPIELER (1922) and METROPOLIS (1926), and Robert Wiene's
ORLACS HANDE (1925). Indeed, the German film industry continued strongly
into the early 1930s, with sf and fantastic themes quite popular. Other sf
films of this period are ALRAUNE (1928), Die FRAU IM MOND (1929), F.P.1

ANTWORTET NICHT (1932), Die HERRIN VON ATLANTIS (1932; vt Lost Atlantis),
Der TUNNEL (1933), and GOLD (1934). German sf cinema in the postwar period
has been, on the whole, disappointing, and the films deserving of entries
are comparatively few: Die TAUSEND AUGEN DES DR MABUSE (1960), Der GROSSE
VERHAU (1970; vt The Big Mess), Rainer Erler's OPERATION GANYMED (1977),
and KAMIKAZE 1989 (1982). Fassbinder's made-for-tv movie WELT AM DRAHT
(1973; vt World on a Wire) is also of substantial interest. [HJA]
GERNSBACK, HUGO
(1884-1967) Luxembourg-born writer and editor who emigrated to the USA in
1904. Intensely interested in electricity and radio, he designed batteries
and by 1906 was marketing a home radio set. In 1908 he launched his first
magazine, Modern Electrics, where he later published his novel Ralph 124C
41+ (1911-12 Modern Electrics; fixup 1925). While deficient as fiction,
the tale clearly shows his overriding interest in sf as a vehicle of
PREDICTION, being a catalogue of the marvellous TECHNOLOGY of the 27th
century. Modern Electrics later became Electrical Experimenter, for which
he wrote a series of apocryphal scientific adventures of Baron Munchausen
(sic): "How to Make a Wireless Acquaintance" (1915), "How Munchausen and
the Allies Took Berlin" (1915), "Munchausen on the Moon" (1915), "The
Earth as Viewed from the Moon" (1915), "Munchausen Departs for the Planet
Mars" (1915),"Munchausen Lands on Mars" (1915),"Munchausen is Taught
Martian" (1915), "Thought Transmission on Mars" (1916), "Cities of Mars"
(1916), "The Planets at Close Range" (1916), "Martian Amusements" (1916),
"How the Martian Canals are Built" (1916) and "Martian Atmosphere Plants"
(1917). The series was reprinted in AMZ in 1928. In 1920 another
title-change brought into being SCIENCE AND INVENTION, in which HG
regularly printed sf. The Aug 1923 issue was devoted to what he then
termed "scientific fiction". The following year HG solicited subscriptions
for an sf magazine to be called Scientifiction; but it was not until April
1926 that there appeared the first issue of AMAZING STORIES, the first
true sf magazine in English. HG was publisher and editor, although much of
the actual editorial work was done by T. O'Conor SLOANE, his elderly
associate editor. AMZ was an immediate commercial success, and in 1927 HG
published AMAZING STORIES ANNUAL, which in turn spawned AMAZING STORIES
QUARTERLY. In 1929, however, his Experimenter Publishing Company was
forced into bankruptcy, almost certainly by Bernarr MACFADDEN, and HG lost
control of the journals he had founded, though he immediately bounced back
by founding another company and starting 4 more magazines: AIR WONDER
STORIES, SCIENCE WONDER STORIES, Science Wonder Quarterly and SCIENTIFIC
DETECTIVE MONTHLY, the first 2 being amalgamated the following year as
WONDER STORIES. His empire declined through the 1930s (though other
projects prospered), with Scientific Detective Monthly (which changed its
name to Amazing Detective Tales) lasting less than a year, WONDER STORIES
QUARTERLY (as Science Wonder Quarterly had become) ceasing publication in
1933, and Wonder Stories being sold in 1936 to become THRILLING WONDER
STORIES. In 1939 he published 3 issues of an early sf COMIC, Superworld
Comics, and in 1953 he published his last sf magazine, SCIENCE FICTION
PLUS, with HG named as editor but with Sam MOSKOWITZ as managing editor;
it ran for 7 issues. A rather different HG publication, Sexology, enjoyed
more lasting success.Opinions vary on the beneficence of HG's influence on

GENRE SF. Moskowitz has termed him the "Father of Science Fiction" (in
"Hugo Gernsback: 'Father of Science Fiction'" in Explorers of the Infinite
[1963]), while Brian W. ALDISS said of his emphasis on supposed scientific
accuracy that it had "the effect of introducing a deadening literalism"
into the field (in Trillion Year Spree by Aldiss and David WINGROVE
[1986]). HG gave the genre a local habitation and a name; but he bestowed
upon his creation a provincial dogmatism and an illiteracy that bedevilled
US sf for years. The Science Fiction Achievement Awards are named the
HUGOS in his honour; and he himself was given a special Hugo in 1960.
[MJE]Other works: Ultimate World (1971).See also: ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION; AUTOMATION; BENELUX; CITIES; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT;
DEFINITIONS OF SF; DYSTOPIAS; FABULATION; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GOLDEN AGE
OF
SF; HEROES; HISTORY OF SF; ILLUSTRATION; MACHINES; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; NEAR
FUTURE; NUCLEAR POWER; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; ORIGIN OF MAN; POLITICS;
POWER SOURCES; PROTO SCIENCE FICTION; PSYCHOLOGY; PULP MAGAZINES;
ROCKETS;
SCIENTISTS; SPACE FLIGHT; SPACE OPERA; TRANSPORTATION; UTOPIAS; WEAPONS.
GERNSBACK PUBLICATIONS
Publishing company. SCIENCE FICTION PLUS.
GERRARE, WIRT
Pseudonym of UK writer William Oliver Greener (1862-? ) for most of his
work, both fiction and nonfiction, though at least one thriller appeared
under his real name. His first novel of any interest, Rufin's Legacy: A
Theosophical Romance (1892), features a Russian female spy who uses her
astral body nefariously. Phantasms: Original Stories Illustrating
Posthumous Personality and Character (coll 1895) assembles fantasies about
a psychic investigator. The Warstock: A Tale of To-Morrow (1898) is a
genuine sf novel in which a group of brilliant inventors establishes in
Morocco an advanced city-state called Cristalia, seemingly armoured
against invasion. But Germany, using fifth-columnists, takes over, though
without reckoning on the eponymous weapon, a device which randomly
triggers ammunition dumps worldwide. The scientists then reoccupy the city
and prepare to rule the world from their technological meritocracy. [JC]
GERROLD, DAVID
Pseudonym of US author and scriptwriter Jerrold David Friedman (1944- ),
who was raised in Southern California, gaining a BA in theatre arts there.
His earliest commercial sales were tv scripts, the first of them a well
known STAR TREK episode, "The Trouble with Tribbles" (1967), which became
the subject of one of his two books about the series, The Trouble with
Tribbles (1973), which includes the script plus a nonfiction narrative.
The other, The World of Star Trek (1973; rev and co-credited to "The
Editors of Starlog Magazine" 1984), perceptively analyses the strengths
and weaknesses of the show, and recounts its travails in the world of
network tv; he also wrote one Star Trek tie, The Galactic Whirlpool *
(1980). A contribution to the Star Trek: The Next Generation book
sequence, Encounter at Farpoint * (1987), followed after several years; he
briefly worked on the tv series STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION.DG's first
novel, The Flying Sorcerers (1971) with Larry NIVEN, is a lively attempt

to give a scientific rationale to a variety of incidents - which to the
observers seem like MAGIC - when an explorer is stranded on a primitive
planet. His first solo novel, Space Skimmer (1972), deals with a man's
search for a vanished GALACTIC EMPIRE and its spaceships, described in the
title. Perhaps his best-known work is When Harlie was One (fixup 1972; rev
vt When H.A.R.L.I.E. was One (Release 2.0) 1988), which deals with the
evolution of artificial INTELLIGENCE in a COMPUTER, discussing many of the
problems of life with an air of profundity not wholly justified by the
content (the revised version improves the telling, but does not
significantly sophisticate DG's rendering of AI). With a Finger in my I
(coll 1972) assembles some of his occasionally precious short stories; the
title story (1972) is a fantasy about solipsism and PERCEPTION showing a
strong if slightly undergraduate sense of verbal play. Yesterday's
Children (1972; exp 1980; vt Starhunt 1987) is a SPACE OPERA, with
conflict between a captain and first officer on a starship. The Man who
Folded Himself (1973) deals in jerky, short-sentenced prose with a hero
who meets other versions of himself, doubled through TIME PARADOX, and
makes love to several of them in an orgy of reciprocal narcissism.
Moonstar Odyssey (1977) deals with an extraterrestrial hermaphroditic
society whose members do not have to settle into one sex until after
adolescence. In both books, a superficial obedience to "Californian"
concepts of the free lifestyle revert to more traditional readings of
human morality.In the 1980s - a decade during which he did extensive work
for tv - DG's writings lost some of their freshness, and his dependency on
earlier sf models for inspiration became more burdensome. The War Against
the Chtorr sequence - A Matter for Men (1983; rev 1989), A Day for
Damnation (1984; exp 1989) and A Rage for Revenge (1989), with the first
versions of the first 2 titles assembled as The War Against the Chtorr:
Invasion (omni 1984) - mixes countercultural personal empowerment riffs a
la HEINLEIN with violent action scenes as the worm-like Chtorr continue to
assault Earth, with no end in sight. Other novels, like The Galactic
Whirlpool (1980) and Enemy Mine * (1985) with Barry B. LONGYEAR - the
novelization of ENEMY MINE, a film based on a Longyear story - show a
rapid-fire competence but are not innovative. Chess with a Dragon (1987)
is an amusing but conceptually flimsy juvenile. There is a growing sense
that DG might never write the major novel he once seemed capable of - not
because he has lost the knack, but because he refuses to. [JC]Other works:
Battle for the Planet of the Apes * (1973); Deathbeast (1978); Voyage of
the Star Wolf (1990).As Editor: Several 1970s anthologies with Stephen
GOLDIN (uncredited): Protostars (anth 1971), Generation: An Anthology of
Speculative Fiction (anth 1972), Science Fiction Emphasis 1 (anth 1974),
Alternities (anth 1974) and Ascents of Wonder (anth 1977); Norman Jacobs ?
Kerry O'Quinn Present Starlog's Science Fiction Yearbook, Vol 1 (anth
1979) with Dave Truesdale.See also: CLONES; CYBERNETICS; FANTASY; GRAVITY;
TERRAFORMING.
GESTON, MARK S(YMINGTON)
(1946- ) US writer and attorney whose remarkable first novel Lords of the
Starship (1967) was published while he was still a student at Kenyon
College. This work, which establishes the dark mood of all his fiction and
is like its immediate successors set in a weary, war-torn FAR-FUTURE

Earth, describes a dilapidated, decadent, centuries-long attempt to
construct an enormous SPACESHIP whose completion would transform the
fortunes of everyone involved and mark a phase of rebirth. The project is,
however, a shambles and a sham, and the novel closes in ENTROPY and
despair. Out of the Mouth of the Dragon (1969) conveys the same mood,
introducing prosthetic weaponry that turns many of his characters
virtually into CYBORGS without making them any more capable of
transforming ancient ways, ancient obsessions. Cultures, weapons, ideas
and their embodiments in doom-ridden characters and decaying cities also
permeate his third novel, The Day Star (1972), and his fourth, The Siege
of Wonder (1976), in which all the themes of his previous books are
wrapped up in the perversion and death of a magical unicorn. MSG then fell
silent for nearly 20 years: Mirror to the Sky (1992)Mirror to the Sky
(1992) - a rare sf examination of the ARTS, in which certain paintings
crafted by visiting ALIENS enforce their vision on human viewers - may
mark, however, his welcome return to active work. [JC]See also: MAGIC;
MYTHOLOGY.
GHIDORAH SANDAI KAIJU CHIKYU SAIDAI NO KESSAN
GOJIRA; RADON.
GHIDRAH, THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER
GOJIRA; RADON.
GHOSTS
ESCHATOLOGY; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
GIANT BEHEMOTH, THE
BEHEMOTH, THE SEA MONSTER.
GIANT CLAW, THE
Film (1957). Clover/Columbia. Dir Fred F. Sears, starring Jeff Morrow,
Mara Corday, Morris Ankrum. Screenplay Samuel Newman, Paul Gangelin. 76
mins. B/w.A giant bird from outer space decides to build a nest on Earth.
It is conveniently protected by an ANTIMATTER shield, so that attempts to
kill it at first prove futile, but eventually the field is nullified by
scientists shooting mu-mesons and all ends happily - though not for the
bird. This is a much-loved terrible film, mainly because of the bird:
quite appallingly designed, it is possibly the most laughter-provoking
creature in the history of MONSTER MOVIES. [JB/PN]
GIANTS
GREAT AND SMALL.
GIANT SPIDER INVASION, THE
Film (1975). Group 75/Transcentury. Dir Bill Rebane, starring Steve
Brodie, Barbara Hale, Alan Hale, Leslie Parrish. Screenplay Robert Easton,
Richard L. Huff. 76 mins. Colour.Noted by one critic, Michael Weldon, as
the MONSTER MOVIE with the worst special effects since The GIANT CLAW
(1957), this is fondly remembered as the one where the giant spider was
built out of a modified Volkswagen. The spiders, whose eggs are mistaken
for diamonds by a greedy farmer, emerge from a BLACK HOLE (yes) near a
small Midwest town, which they terrorize. The script has wonderfully
highbrow moments. "It all fits - Einstein's general theory of relativity -

everything!" cries Steve Brodie, the tough guy who laconically copes with
the situation. The best spider movie of the period was KINGDOM OF THE
SPIDERS (1977), and the best since then has been ARACHNOPHOBIA (1990).
[PN]
GIBBARD, T.S.J.
ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
GIBBON, LEWIS GRASSIC
J. Leslie MITCHELL.
GIBBONS, DAVE
Working name of prolific, award-winning UK COMIC-strip artist David
Chester Gibbons (1949- ); using a bold, firm line style, he specializes in
the SUPERHERO genre. Born in St Albans, Hertfordshire, he trained as a
surveyor and began his artistic career providing ILLUSTRATIONS and strips
for fanzines. He turned professional in 1973, drawing The Wriggling
Wrecker for the D.C. Thompson comic Wizard. Further strips with an sf
flavour followed until, in 1975, he began work on the Nigerian superhero
Powerman, his monthly 16pp episodes alternating with those by Brian
BOLLAND to produce a fortnightly publication schedule. DG was one of the
initial team of artists on 2,000 AD, drawing Harlem Heroes and Robusters
and co-creating Rogue Trooper with writer Gerry Finley-Day. DG drew a
number of DR WHO episodes for the UK division of MARVEL COMICS, and in
1981 began a long association with the US publisher DC COMICS, drawing The
Creeper, 12 issues of Green Lantern and a SUPERMAN tale called "For the
Man who Has Everything", written by Alan MOORE. His greatest achievement
to date, also written by Moore, has been the phenomenally successful
WATCHMEN (12-vol series 1986-7; graph 1987 US; with additional material
1988 US); this ALTERNATE-WORLD superhero story, rich in semiotics, won a
special category for Best Other Forms in the 1988 Hugo Awards ( HUGO for
discussion of this category). DG's next major project was Give Me Liberty
(graph 1990), written by Frank MILLER. DG has recently begun to establish
himself as a writer with a Superman/Batman team-up (1991), a Batman vs
Predator comic book (1992) and World's Finest (1993), all for DC. [RT]See
also: DAN DARE - PILOT OF THE FUTURE; GRAPHIC NOVEL.
GIBBONS, (RAPHAEL) FLOYD (PHILLIPS)
(1886-1939) US writer, mostly of war stories; well known as a war
correspondent. The Red Napoleon (1929) is a future- WAR tale featuring a
modern-day Mongol dictator, Karakhan, who conquers much of the world,
miscegenating as he goes in a deliberate onslaught upon the racist White
nations. He is eventually defeated by the USA. In 1941, in Bermudan exile
with the dying Karakhan, Gibbons - who appears as his journalist self
throughout - recounts these events with some sympathy. [JC]See also:
INVASION; VILLAINS.
GIBBS, LEWIS
Pseudonym of Joseph Walter Cove (1891-? ), a UK writer whose sf novel,
Late Final (1951), deals with a post-WWIII England. [JC]Other works:
Parable for Lovers (1934).
GIBSON, COLIN

(? - ) NEW ZEALAND writer whose second novel, The Pepper Leaf (1971), is
a NEAR-FUTURE sf tale set in New Zealand. Fearful of nuclear catastrophe,
a small group of vegetarian nudists expose themselves to survival
conditions, and their cruel interactions, described in a tense, allusive
style, provide a model for, or allegory of, the human condition in
extremis. [JC]
GIBSON, EDWARD
(1936- ) US Skylab astronaut whose sf novel, Reach (1989), set in the
more remote NEAR FUTURE, argues for a continuation of the space programme
via the story of an expedition sent to discover the nature of an ALIEN
lifeform. This proves unfriendly; but the case for human exploration of
our potential domain is presented with commendable clarity. In the Wrong
Hands (1992), set on the 21st century Moon, describes a GENETIC
ENGINEERING initiative gone awry, due to the rather old-fashioned lunacy
of the scientist involved. [JC]
GIBSON, FLOYD
Paul CONRAD.
GIBSON, WALTER B(ROWN)
(1897-1985) US newspaper journalist, editor and writer who founded and
ran Tales of Magic and Mystery (1927-8) - where he published his first
piece of genre interest, "The Miracle Man of Benares", in 1927 - as well
as True Strange Stories (1929) for Bernarr MACFADDEN, and FANTASTIC
SCIENCE FICTION (1952); this latter lasted only 2 issues, and is not to be
confused with FANTASTIC, also founded 1952. Variously prolific, he remains
best known under the house name Maxwell Grant - though "pseudonym" would
perhaps be a more accurate term, as WBG wrote almost 300 novels as Grant,
most for the celebrated pulp magazine The Shadow(325 issues 1931-49),
whose hero - originating in a 1930 radio series - is a mysterious
vigilante who often walks by night. WBG wrote most (not all) of these, but
only 25 or so contain sf themes, those later republished as books being
Charge, Monster (1934; 1977), The Silent Death (1978) and The Death Giver
(1978). Other Shadow episodes republished in book form include The Living
Shadow (1933), The Shadow and the Voice of Murder (1940), Return of the
Shadow (1963) as WBG, The Weird Adventures of the Shadow (coll 1966) as
WBG, and (all first published in The Shadow) The Weird Adventures of the
Shadow: Grove of Doom (1933; 1969), The Eyes of the Shadow (1931; 1969),
The Shadow Laughs! (1931; 1969), The Death Tower (1932; 1969), The Ghost
Makers (1932; 1970), Hidden Death (1932; 1970), Gangdom's Doom (1931;
1970), The Black Master (1932; 1974), The Mobsmen on the Spot (1932;
1974), Red Menace (1931; 1975), Silent Seven (1932; 1975), Hands in the
Dark (1932; 1975), Double "Z" (1932; 1975), The Crime Cult (1932; 1975),
The Romanoff Jewels (1932; 1975), The Crime Oracle (1936; 1975), Teeth of
the Dragon (1937; 1975), Kings of Crime (1932; 1976), Shadowed Millions
(1933; 1976), Green Eyes (1932; 1977), The Creeping Death (1933; 1977),
The Shadow's Shadow (1933; 1977), Fingers of Death (1933; 1977), Murder
Trail (1933; 1977), Grey Fist (1934; 1977), Charg, Monster (1934; 1977)
and Zemba (1935; 1977). The Shadow titles published as by WBG include The
Mask of Mephisto and Murder by Magic (coll 1975), A Quarter of Eight and
The Freak Show Murders (coll 1978), Crime Over Casco and The Mother Goose

Murders (coll 1979), The Shadow Scrapbook (coll 1979), Jade Dragon and
House of Ghosts (coll 1981) and The Shadow and the Golden Master (coll of
linked stories 1984). WBG also wrote Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone *
(coll 1963; cut vt Chilling Stories from Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone
1965) and Twilight Zone Revisited * (coll 1964). [JC]
GIBSON, WILLIAM (FORD)
(1948- ) US-born writer, in Canada since 1968, when he moved north after
being rejected by his draft-board. After some time in Toronto - where a
significant proportion of his fellow expatriates had come to Canada in
protest against the Vietnam War - he moved in 1972 to Vancouver, a Pacific
Rim city where attention was uneasily focused upon increasingly dominant
Japan across the waters. (It could be argued that the Vancouver attitude
toward imperial Japan, and to its Hong Kong "sidekick", provides a model
for the numb, colonized acquiescence to a new world order so
characteristic of occidentals in the Neuromancer trilogy which made WG
famous.) WG began publishing sf with "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" for
Unearth in 1977, and by 1983 had produced most of the fiction later
assembled in BURNING CHROME (coll 1986 US); some of these tales, like
"Johnny Mnemonic" (1981) and the 1982 title story, were set in the
Neuromancer universe, and were, therefore, early examples of what would
soon become known as CYBERPUNK (which see for detailed examination of the
movement).WG did not invent cyberpunk, nor has he ever claimed to have
done so. Bruce BETHKE's "Cyberpunk" (1983) supplied the name, and Gardner
DOZOIS, in a 1983 article, defined the movement by applying the term to
works set in COMPUTER-driven, high-tech NEAR-FUTURE venues inhabited by a
slum-bound streetwise citizenry for whom the new world is an environment,
not a project. In terms of traditional US sf, this was heresy, and WG's
enormous success as an sf writer must have seemed an ominous harbinger of
the death of traditional sf. His novels treat traditional sf instruments
and themes as unforegrounded figures in the complex mosaic of urban life;
he shifts the grounds of sf displacement inwards from cyber (as it were)
to punk; the world his novels describe is old, and whether or not it can
be understood - in WG's work it generally cannot - its inhabitants are
consumers, not makers. The essential displacement from which they suffer like so many protagonists of Modernist and POSTMODERNIST literature - is
the loss of an integrated self. For the inhabitants of WG's world,
selfhood has emptied itself into the instruments of the world, and in book
after book - like cases of flesh - his characters are found hacking the
wilderness for Cargo.Canadian sf - from A.E. VAN VOGT down through Gordon
R. DICKSON and beyond - has always tended to lock its protagonists into
grey wilderness environments impenetrable to CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH,
where they survive as displaced souls, longing for transcendence. As a
Canadian writer, therefore - through his own displacing act of emigration
- WG was well placed to write the definitive cyberpunk book. All he needed
to add to the new territory he had embraced was - in his remarkably fluent
and attentive prose - gear, brand-names, Japanese corporations and mean
streets. But in the end the void of the wilderness interpenetrates the
things of the world, and generates a sense that they are ultimately vain.
The Neuromancer trilogy - NEUROMANCER (1984 US), Count Zero (1986 UK) and
Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988 UK) - is all about escaping the flesh.The

protagonist of NEUROMANCER - which won the HUGO, NEBULA, and PHILIP K.
DICK AWARDS - is a matrix cowboy or outlaw hired to link a digital version
of his mind into CYBERSPACE itself (cyberspace being a worldwide computer
matrix of information experienced by any plugged-in sentience as an
infinitely complex and chambered VIRTUAL-REALITY labyrinth) and, once
"inside", to steal data. The "outside" world of the book is a near-future
USA (although never named as such) dominated by Japanese corporations, one
of which may be his employer. The plot itself harks back, as does much of
the imagery, to the classic mean-streets California thrillers of Raymond
Chandler (1888-1959) and Ross Macdonald (pseudonym of Kenneth Millar
[1915-1983]); and, true to those models - and to what might be called WG's
Canadian pessimism about changing the world - none of the characters of
NEUROMANCER have anything but an eavesdropping relationship to the true
roots of power. The story eventually moves from Earth into near space,
where complex orbiting arcologies house the AIs which, perhaps, secretly
run the world; but the protagonist does not covertly long to run the world
in their stead. His longing is to transcend the flesh which pulls him back
from the bliss of cyberspace. The second and third volumes of the
sequence, though more sophisticated as novels, inevitably fail to advance
much further - in traditional sf terms-towards working out the
implications of the Neuromancer world, which remains a wilderness. The AIs
of the first volume have suffered a traumatized, cataclysmic coming to
self-awareness, and now haunt cyberspace in the guise of voodoo godlings.
A wide range of characters appears throughout Count Zero and Mona Lisa
Overdrive, but they share an underlying paralysis; and, as a novelist
burdened with the task of creating new tales, WG inevitably pays a price
for his refusal to countenance any normal sf sorting-out of the world.
Hints given at the end of the last volume of a sudden interstellar growth
of perspective singularly fail to convince.Cyberpunk in WG's hands, then,
was an assault on future HISTORY. Neuromancer in particular was treated by
much of its huge readership as a manual for surviving in style. That WG is
uncannily sensitive to manners and idioms may have, for many of his
readers, obscured the underlying bleakness of his vision. After spending
some time writing filmscripts in Hollywood, however, he allowed that
bleakness to come unmistakably to the fore in THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (1990
UK) with Bruce STERLING. The book is a sustained work of RECURSIVE SF Benjamin DISRAELI and characters from his work appear throughout - a
STEAMPUNK evocation of an ALTERNATE WORLD 19th-century UK dominated by the
supposition that in about 1820 Charles BABBAGE succeeded in his attempt to
construct the title's COMPUTER. The world that explodes into reality as a
consequence of Babbage's triumph is, in THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE, a cruel and
polluted DYSTOPIA, a land dominated by calculation, measurement and
severely "practical" reason. Vast arterial roads ransack a choking London;
huge masonical edifices house the new totalitarian bureaucracy which
operates the Engines; and a conscious AI is a-borning. Though the book is
at points unduly narrow in conception, and congested as a tale, its
ultimate effect is very considerable.Virtual Light (1993), though entirely
competent, is a markedly less ambitious portrait of NEAR FUTURE
California, viewed through the lens of a thriller plot complete with
MCGUFFIN; the vision of the Oakland Bay Bridge transformed into a niche
colony for social rejects and rebels is, however, enthralling. In the

sense that he tells tales involving human choices within
world-encompassing frameworks overwhelming beyond their capacity to
transform, WG could plausibly be seen as a paradigm moralist for the new
age of sf. [JC]See also: ACE BOOKS; CANADA; CHILDREN IN SF; CLICHES;
FANTASY; GAMES AND SPORTS; GODS AND DEMONS; GOTHIC SF; HISTORY OF SF;
MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MUSIC; OMNI; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; PARANOIA; SPACE
HABITATS; TECHNOLOGY; VILLAINS.
GIESY, J(OHN) U(LRICH)
(1877-1948) US physiotherapist and PULP-MAGAZINE writer, author of many
stories, most not sf, in Argosy and All-Story Weekly 1914-34. All for His
Country (1914 Cavalier; 1915), which combines plot-material from the
future- WAR genre and from the EDISONADE, pits a young inventor's
radium-powered gravity-defying plane against the treacherous Japanese;
ominously, JUG also accuses Japanese-Americans from California of
betrayal. The Jason Croft or Palos trilogy - Palos of the Dog Star Pack
(1918 All-Story Weekly; cut 1965), The Mouthpiece of Zitu (1919 All-Story
Weekly; cut 1965) and Jason, Son of Jason (1921 Argosy; cut 1966) features Croft's adventures on Palos, a planet of Sirius. Derivative of
Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's Martian stories, these novels are also highly
practical, for Croft triumphs not through his own strength but because of
an encyclopedic knowledge of Earth's technologies of destruction. JUG's
further sf includes a UTOPIA, "In 2112" (1912 Cavalier), written with his
frequent collaborator, the Utah lawyer Junius Smith (1883-1945), and a
number of humorous stories about the eccentric Dr Xenophon Xerxes Zapt.
JUG's sf - tempered as it is by a devout belief in astrology - has dated
and is now of merely historical interest, but for years he was considered
second only to Burroughs as an author of interplanetary romances. [RB/JC]
GIGAMESH AWARD
AWARDS.
GIGANTIS
GOJIRA.
GIGANTIS THE FIRE MONSTER
GOJIRA.
GIGER, H.R.
Working name of Swiss artist and theatre and film designer - but not
illustrator - Hansruedi Giger (1940- ). He began developing his
distinctive style in the early 1970s. Strikingly grotesque, morbid,
necrophile, it draws heavily on the Surreal and the decadent traditions,
his acknowledged influences including Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901),
Hieronymus Bosch (1460-1516), Salvador Dali (1904-1989) and Antonio Gaudi
(1852-1926), and there are clear resemblances also to the paintings of Max
Ernst (1891-1976). It is perhaps from Ernst and Gaudi that he first took
his main trademark, the combination of organic with machine-like forms,
which has been termed "biomechanoid". The first two books of his work were
A Rh+ (1971) and H.R. Giger (1976), but it was the third, H.R. Giger's
Necronomicon (1977; trans 1978 UK; exp 1991) - the title pays appropriate
homage to H.P. LOVECRAFT - which drew the attention of the US and UK
public to his work.Among these readers were the producers of the film

ALIEN (1979), who invited HRG to help in the alien designs. (They had also
heard of his weird 1975 designs for the unmade Jodorowski version of DUNE.
) The spectacular results, done from working drawings subsequently
published as a portfolio, Alien (portfolio 1978), and in H.R. Giger's
Alien (1979; rev vt Giger's Alien Film Design 1989), revolutionized the
look of sf cinema to a degree it would be difficult to overstate; it has
since been much imitated in many films, including SATURN 3 (1980),
LIFEFORCE (1985) and even VIDEODROME (1982), though it is doubtful if HRG
has profited from this. The idea that alien MACHINES might not look like
ours - along with the very idea of the organic machine - was inventive,
and in sf-cinema terms an important step away from anthropomorphism.
(Some, though, would argue that the incorporation into HRG's aliens and
their artefacts of penis and vagina shapes is as anthropomorphic as you
can get.) HRG was unhappy with the execution of his designs for the film
Poltergeist II (1986). Considering the fame of his film work, it is
surprising he has done so little.He continued through the 1980s with very
much the same kind of airbrushed painting in ink and acrylics:
death/sex/machine imagery of staggering banality according to some,
shocking Surrealism according to others; and his seminal influence in the
sf field now seems to have been almost accidental, though it is not the
first time Surrealism has influenced sf. His 1980s work can be seen in
H.R. Giger: N.Y. City (1981 chap), H.R. Giger: Retrospektive, 1964-1984
(1984), Giger's Necronomicon Two (1986),H.R. Giger's Biomechanics (1988;
trans Clara H-richt Frame 1990 US) and ARh+ (1991; text trans Karen
Williams 1992US). [PN]Other works: Portfolios of interest include: Ein
Fressen fur de Psychiater (portfolio 1966); Biomechanoid (portfolio 1969);
Trip- Tychon (portfolio 1970); Passagen (portfolio 1971); Second
Celebration of the Four (portfolio 1977); Erotomechanics (portfolio 1980);
N.Y.City (portfolio1982), not the same as the book.See also: FANTASY;
ILLUSTRATION.
GIJSEN, WIM
[r] BENELUX.
GILBERT, JOHN
(1926- ) US writer whose sf novel, Aiki (1986), sets a gladiatorial
martial-arts tale in 21st-century New York. [JC]
GILBERT, (WILLIAM) STEPHEN
(1912- ) UK writer whose first novel, The Landslide (1943), is a
PARALLEL-WORLDS fantasy of some complexity in which primeval eggs, exposed
by the titular slide, begin to hatch. His second, Monkeyface (1948),
movingly explores the familiar territory of the self-aware ape ( APES AND
CAVEMEN). His best-known sf novel, Ratman's Notebooks (1968; vt Willard
1971 US), is fundamentally a horror tale. Ratman conceives a special
relationship with rats, comes precariously to dominate and commune with
them, and leads their vengeful incursions on the world at large; but there
is a comeuppance. The book was filmed as Willard (1971). [JC]
GILCHRIST, JOHN
ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
GILES, BAXTER

[s] Andrew J. OFFUTT.
GILES, GEOFFREY
[s] Walter GILLINGS.
GILES, GORDON A.
[s] Eando BINDER.
GILFORD, C(HARLES) B(ERNARD)
(1920- ) US teacher and writer whose sf novel, The Liquid Man (1969),
features a scientist and a problem in undesired metamorphosis, the nature
of which is clear from the title. In The Crooked Shamrock (1969), the heir
to the British throne is abducted by an Irish gang, and raised to
adulthood by them before becoming king. [JC]
GILLESPIE, BRUCE
(1947- ) Australian educational-books editor, critic and from 1969
publisher of a FANZINE (current), SF COMMENTARY, where much of his writing
on sf has appeared. Some of this was reprinted in Philip K. Dick: Electric
Shepherd (critical anth 1975) ed BG, published by Norstrilia Press, a
SMALL PRESS named in honour of Cordwainer SMITH and founded by BG with
Carey Handfield and Rob Gerrand; Norstrilia, now long silent, published
more than 20 books, many of sf relevance. A later fanzine (from 1984) is
The Metaphysical Review, which also carries occasional critical pieces. BG
has received 9 Ditmar AWARDS for fan writing and publishing and 2 William
Atheling Jr Awards for criticism. [PN]See also: AUSTRALIA.
GILLIATT, PENELOPE (ANN DOUGLAS)
(1932-1993) UK writer best known for her work outside the sf field,
including the esteemed screenplay for Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971). Her sf
novel, One by One (1965), depicts a NEAR-FUTURE London hit by a
devastating plague. [JC]
GILLILAND, ALEXIS A(RNALDUS)
(1931- ) US cartoonist and writer who won HUGOS as Best Fan Artist in
1980, 1983, 1984 and 1985; he also won the JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for Best
New Writer of 1982. As an official in the US Federal Government 1956-82,
serving mainly as a chemist and specification writer, AAG was well
situated to spoof bureaucracy, though his first sf books, the Rosinante
trilogy - The Revolution from Rosinante (1981), Long Shot for Rosinante
(1981) and The Pirates of Rosinante (1982) - significantly stop short of
depicting all forms of government as intrusion. Set on a space station
chafing at bureaucratic interference from faraway Earth, the sequence
amusedly depicts first the successful revolt, then the dawning realization
of the occupants that their COMPUTERS have taken control. The End of the
Empire (1983) features, contrastingly, a protagonist who works to defend a
GALACTIC EMPIRE against a comically conceived LIBERTARIANISM, on the
grounds that too little government is no less damaging than too much.
AAG's second series, the Wizenbeak sequence - Wizenbeak (1986),The Shadow
Shaia (1990 and The Lord of the Troll-Bats (1992) - is fantasy, featuring
a comical wizard who had appeared in cartoon form in previous years. AAG's
books of cartoons, where Wizenbeak can also be found, include The Iron Law
of Bureaucracy (graph coll 1979), Who Says Paranoia Isn't "In" Anymore

(graph coll 1985) and The Waltzing Wizard (graph coll 1990). [JC]
GILLINGS, WALTER (HERBERT)
(1912-1979) UK journalist and editor, active in FANDOM from the early
1930s; he published (1937-8) 7 issues of an historic FANZINE,
Scientifiction. This activity led to his editing the first true UK sf
magazine, TALES OF WONDER (1937-42). Immediately after WWII he joined the
author Benson HERBERT to create the Utopian Publications imprint, which
issued sf, fantasy and some soft-core pornography in cheap paperback
format; this included the AMERICAN FICTION and STRANGE TALES series. WG
then edited the 3 issues of FANTASY (1946-7). After its demise he produced
the professional-looking fanzine FANTASY REVIEW (1947-50); when, in 1950,
he was given the editorship of the new professional magazine SCIENCE
FANTASY, the fanzine was incorporated as a section of the first 2 issues.
John CARNELL took over editorship of Science Fantasy with #3 (Winter
1951/2), and WG dropped out of sf activities for some years. He then
produced another fanzine, Cosmos, for 3 issues in 1969, and also appeared
regularly in VISION OF TOMORROW (1969-70) with a series about the HISTORY
OF SF in the UK, and again as a columnist in SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY
(1974-6), where he also had a column as Thomas Sheridan - the pseudonym
under which he had years earlier published the first of his 3 sf stories,
"The Midget from Mars" for Tales of Wonder in 1938. Another story, "Lost
Planet" (Fantasy 1946), was published as by Geoffrey Giles. [PN]See also:
BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION; SF MAGAZINES.
GILLMORE, INEZ HAYNES
Pseudonym of US writer Inez Haynes Irwin (1873-1970), whose sf novel,
Angel Island (1914), conveys an almost surreal FEMINIST message with
considerable competence. After five men are shipwrecked on the eponymous
island (in the ROBINSONADE tradition) and tame the beautiful winged women
who inhabit it by clipping their wings and breeding with them, the tale
gradually makes explicit a kind of consciousness of outrage on the part of
the caged beings. [JC]
GILLMORE, PARKER
(? -? ) UK writer, mostly of travel books published 1869-93. His sf
novel, The Amphibion's [sic] Voyage (1885), is a tale shaped suspiciously
like a travelogue, but manages to evoke some interest for the eponymous
land-and-sea vehicle, which carries its passengers into encounters with a
sea monster or two. [JC]
GILL WOMAN
Roger CORMAN; PLANETA BUR.
GILMAN, CHARLOTTE PERKINS
(1860-1935) US editor, writer and lecturer, and an important figure in
the history of US FEMINISM. Although by no means negligible, her later
fiction was clearly dedicated to the promulgation of a copious flow of
radical thought. However, her first story, The Yellow Wall Paper (1892 New
England Magazine; 1899 chap) as by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, was long
read as a relatively straightforward tale of horror; it took no
substantial task of decoding for later readers to understand that the
powerful delusional imagery of the tale reflects the intolerable stress

felt by its autobiographical protagonist at being forced to act out the
role of a compliant and sequestrated female. CPG divorced her husband in
1894, after having moved to California; she then spent half a decade
lecturing before remarrying. The rest of her life was productive. She
founded, edited, and wrote almost the entire contents of The Forerunner,
an issues-oriented journal which ran 1909-16; here first appeared many of
the stories assembled decades later as The Yellow Wallpaper and Other
Writings (coll 1989). This volume does not include the book-length
feminist UTOPIA "Moving the Mountain" (1911 The Forerunner), set in 1940
after women have decided that enough is enough and have taken over running
the USA on a basis of humane, socialist equality. More famously, Herland
(1914 The Forerunner; 1979), along with its sequel "With Her in Ourland"
(1916 The Forerunner), depicts an isolated parthenogenetic society 2000
years hence. Three men stumble into this gentle, humorous, wise utopian
venue; one idolatrously reveres women, one is a male chauvinist, and the
third narrates. In the sequel, a woman from Herland visits the USA, which
she finds worthy of very considerable comment. An autobiography, The
Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935), was published after CPG, aged
75, had discovered she had cancer and committed suicide. [JC]About the
author: To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman (1990) by Ann J. Lane.See also: POLITICS.
GILMAN, ROBERT CHAM
Alfred COPPEL.
GILMORE, ANTHONY
Collaborative pseudonym used in Astounding Stories of Super-Science by
Harry BATES and Desmond W. HALL, respectively editor and assistant editor
of that magazine, for the enthusiastically received Hawk Carse series, put
into book form as Space Hawk (1931-2 ASF; fixup 1952). Carse and his Black
assistant, Friday, are intrepid space adventurers dedicated to driving the
Yellow Peril, in the form of the evil Dr Ku Sui, from the spaceways. Bates
later revived the character, without Hall, in "The Return of Hawk Carse"
(1942). [MJE]See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.
GILSON, BARBARA
Charles GILSON.
GILSON, CHARLES (JAMES LOUIS)
(1878-1943) UK writer, best known for fantasies like The Cat and the
Curate (1934 US), in which a cat is transformed into a seductive Middle
Eastern lady, and for LOST-WORLD tales like The Lost Island (1910) and, as
by Barbara Gilson, Queen of the Andes (1935). Other novels with sf
elements, generally for a juvenile market, include The Pirate Aeroplane
(1913), The Realm of the Wizard King (1922) and The City of the Sorcerer
(1934). [JC]
GINSBURG, MIRRA
(1919- ) Russian-born US editor, writer and translator. She began her
translating career with a version of Mikhail BULGAKOV's "The Fatal Eggs"
for FSF in 1964, and later translated an abridged version of his Master i
Margarita as The Master and Margarita (1967). Other translations include a
collection of stories by Yevgeny ZAMIATIN, The Dragon: Fifteen Stories by

Yevgeny Zamyatin (coll trans from various sources 1967), a new version of
his We (1920; 1972), and a juvenile sf novel by Lydia OBUKHOVA, Lilit
(trans as Daughter of Night 1974). She has edited and translated the
stories for 3 collections of Soviet sf ( RUSSIA; SOVIET UNION): Last Door
to Aiya (anth 1968), The Ultimate Threshold (anth 1970) and The Air of
Mars and Other Stories of Time and Space (juvenile anth 1976). MG also
edited The Fatal Eggs and Other Soviet Satire (anth 1965), which contains
several fantasies. She has written books for very young children. [JC/PN]
GIPE, GEORGE
(1933-1986) US writer known within the sf field for several competent
film ties: Resurrection * (1980), Gremlins * (1984) ( Joe DANTE),
Explorers * (1985) ( EXPLORERS) and Back to the Future * (1985) ( BACK TO
THE FUTURE). [JC]
GIR
Jean GIRAUD.
GIRAUD, JEAN
(1938- ) French artist (now resident in the USA); staggeringly prolific,
remarkably inventive and influential, he is better known in the sf field
as Moebius. With his loose, eloquent line style, JG is considered one of
Europe's major talents, and his work has influenced an entire generation
of fantasy and sf artists. Born in Fontenoy-sous-Bois, near Paris, he
displayed from childhood a love of illustration. His early influences were
classic US COMIC strips and the engravings of Gustave Dore (1833-1883). He
attended the Ecole des Arts Appliques 1954-6, and then wrote and drew a
Western comic strip before being drafted into the French army. On
discharge in 1960 he worked as an assistant to the Belgian comics artist
Joseph Gillain (1914-1980) and later illustrated a series of
encyclopedia-like books. It was at this time that he created the sobriquet
Moebius, which he first attached to a series of dark-humoured comic
strips. In 1963 he met writer Jean-Michel Charlier (1924-1989), and
together they created the Western series Lieutenant Blueberry for the
magazine Pilote; this work was collected in 29 vols (1965-90; 1977-9 UK),
of which 26 were drawn by JG as "Gir".In the late 1960s he began
illustrating, as Moebius, a line of French sf books and magazines and
created a number of groundbreaking sf strips. In 1975 he cofounded the
magazine METAL HURLANT ["Screaming Metal"] with fellow-artist Philippe
DRUILLET and writer Jean-Pierre Dionnet (1947- ). For this magazine he
created Le bandard fou ["The Horny Goof"] (1975), Le garage hermetique de
Jerry Cornelius ["The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius"] (from 1975),
Arzach (1976), The Long Tomorrow (1976), scripted by Dan O'Bannon, and Les
aventures de John Difool ["The Adventures of John Difool"] (1982-9), a
multi-part epic written by film-maker Alejandro Jodorowski: L'Incal noir
["The Dark Incal"] (graph 1982), L'Incal lumiere ["The Bright Incal"]
(coll 1983), Ce qui est en bas ["What's Below"] (graph 1984), Ce qui est
en haut ["What's Above"] (graph 1985), Le cinquieme essence I ["The Fifth
Essence: I"] (graph 1987), Le cinquieme essence II (graph 1988) and Les
mysteres de l'Incal ["The Mysteries of the Incal"] (graph 1989). The Incal
stories have been translated into English as Incal #1 (1988 UK/US), #2
(1988 UK/US) and #3 (1988 UK/US).Keeping track of JG's Moebius material is

a bibliographer's nightmare. Books in French include Gir 30 x 40 (graph
1974), Le bandard fou ["The Horny Goof"] (graph 1975), Arzach (graph
1976), John Watercolor et sa redingote qui tue ["John Watercolor and his
Killer Overcoat"] (graph 1976), L'homme, est il bon? ["Is Man Good?"]
(graph 1977), Cauchemar blanc ["White Nightmare"] (graph 1978), Le garage
hermetique ["The Airtight Garage"] (graph 1979), Tueur des mondes ["World
Killer"] (graph 1979), Moebius 30 x 30 (graph 1979), Double evasion (graph
1981), L'Homme programme ["The Programmed Man"] (graph 1981), Le
disintegre reintegre ["The Disintegrated Reintegrated"] (graph 1982),
Memoire du futur ["Memory of the Future"] (graph 1983), Sur l'etoile
["Upon a Star"] (graph 1983), Venise celeste ["Heavenly Venice"] (graph
1984), L'Univers de Gir ["Gir's Universe"] (graph 1985), Starwatcher
(graph 1986), Le saga du crystal ["Crystal Saga"] (graph 1987), Les
jardins d'Aedena ["The Gardens of Aedena"] (graph 1987), Made in LA (graph
1988), La citadel aveugle ["The Blind Citadel"] (graph 1989), Nineteen
Eighty-eight (graph 1990), Les vacances du Major ["Major's Holiday"]
(graph 1990) and La deesse ["The Goddess"] (graph 1990). Collected works
in English include Moebius 1: Upon a Star (graph coll 1986 US), #2: Arzach
and Other Fantasy Stories (graph coll 1986 US), #3: The Airtight Garage
(graph coll 1987 US), #4: The Long Tomorrow and Other Science Fiction
Stories (graph coll 1988 US), #5: The Gardens of Aedena (graph coll 1988
US), 6: Pharagonesia and Other Strange Stories (graph coll 1988 US), #7:
The Goddess (graph coll 1989 US) and a collection of graphics,
illustrations and sketches under the title The Art of Moebius (graph coll
1989 US).In 1985 JG relocated to Santa Monica, California, and set up
Starwatcher Graphics to publish his posters, graphics and other fine-art
pieces, and to promote himself as a conceptual designer. He illustrated
one two-episode Silver Surfer story, in a surprise team-up with Stan LEE:
Parable (1988-9 US). He also illustrated an ecological story for a special
"Earth Day" issue of Concrete (1991 US). Meanwhile spin-off series in
comic-strip form from his creations such as The Airtight Garage and Incal
have been published as collaborative ventures with other artists and
writers; these contribute, from a fabric of interlocking themes, to the
creation of a Moebius universe. They include The Elsewhere Prince (1990
US), The Man from Ciguri (1990-91 US), The Onyx Overlord (4-issue
comic-book series beginning 1992 US) and Legends of Arzach (6-issue series
of short stories accompanied by colour artwork commissioned from leading
artists in the comics medium, beginning 1992 US).JG has also been
influential in designing for and storyboarding films. Alejandro Jodorowski
hired him in 1976 to storyboard his projected film adaptation of Frank
HERBERT's novel DUNE (fixup 1965), a venture eventually abandoned through
lack of funding. JG designed spacesuits and uniforms for Ridley SCOTT's
ALIEN (1979). He designed the animated feature Les maitres du temps ["The
Time Masters"] (1982) dir Rene Laloux, based on L'orphelin de Perdide
["The Orphan from Perdide"] (1958), the novel by Stefan WUL, and worked on
Disney's TRON (1982) and on Nemo, a Japanese animated film (based on
Winsor MCCAY's Little Nemo in Slumberland), in production in 1992. He
designed the creature for James CAMERON's 1989 film The ABYSS .A French
postage stamp designed by and in honour of JG was issued in 1988.
[RT/MJ]See also: HEAVY METAL.

GIRL FROM U.N.C.L.E., THE
The MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.
GIRL IN THE MOON, THE
Die FRAU IM MOND .
GIVINS, ROBERT C(ARTWRIGHT)
(1845-1915) US writer whose sf novel, A Thousand Miles an Hour (1913),
might stand as a compendium of misunderstood science; examples are the
concept of an airplane whose vertical screw allows it to remain still
while the world turns, and the notion that gravity stops 40 miles up. [JC]
GLADIATORERNA
(vt The Peace Game; vt The Gladiators) Film (1968). Sandrews/New Line.
Dir Peter WATKINS, starring Arthur Pentelow, Frederick Danner, Kenneth Lo,
Bjorn Franzen. Screenplay Nicholas Gosling, Watkins. 105 mins, cut to 91
mins. Colour.Watkins uses his customary cinema-verite approach in this
Swedish film about a NEAR FUTURE in which, as a surrogate for full-scale
war, small teams of soldiers fight it out under the guidance of a
COMPUTER. He generates considerable righteous indignation over this,
rather pointlessly in that such a system does not exist in reality and is
unlikely ever to do so. The battle games are not well staged and the film
lacks the impact of Watkins's other sf films, which include The WAR GAME
(1965), PRIVILEGE (1966) and PUNISHMENT PARK (1971). A very similar theme
was much later used in ROBOT JOX (1990). [JB/PN]
GLADIATORS, THE
GLADIATORERNA.
GLAMIS, WALTER
[s] Nat SCHACHNER.
GLASBY, JOHN S(TEPHEN)
(1928- ) UK writer, chemist and astronomer, Fellow of the Royal Society
of Astronomy, author of popularizing texts in that field and of a large
number of stories and novels in various genres for pulp publishers of the
1950s and 1960s. Like R.L. FANTHORPE - alongside whom he supplied BADGER
BOOKS with most of their sf and fantasy titles - and Dennis HUGHES, he
severely curtailed his production when market conditions changed,
publishing only one sf novel, Project Jove (1971 US), after 1970, although
in about 1990 he began to publish short stories once again. Like his
colleagues, JSG wrote mainly under a range of pseudonyms and house names,
beginning with Satellite B.C. (1952), Time and Space (1952) and Zero Point
(1952), all these titles being collaborations with Arthur ROBERTS, sharing
the house name Rand LE PAGE; JSG's most frequently used personal pseudonym
was A.J. Merak. Though much of his work, either solo or in collaboration,
was hasty and unremarkable, JSG was entirely capable of more memorable
work, especially perhaps in some early stories which showed the influence
of A.E. VAN VOGT. [JC] Other works:As John Adams: When the Gods Came
(1960).As R.L. Bowers: This Second Earth (1967). As Berl CAMERON(house
name): Cosmic Echelon (1952) with Arthur Roberts; Sphero Nova (1952) with
Roberts.As J.B. Dexter: The Time Kings 1958). As Victor LA SALLE (house
name): Dawn of the Half-Gods (1953); Twilight Zone (1954).As Rand Le Page:

See above.As Paul LORRAINE (house name): Zenith-D (1952) with Arthur
Roberts.As John C. Maxwell: The Time Kings (1958).As A.J. Merak: Dark
Andromeda (1954); Dark Conflict (1959); The Dark Millennium (1959); No
Dawn and No Horizon (1959; vt The Frozen Planet 1969 US); Barrier Unknown
(1960); Hydrosphere (1960).As John E. MULLER (house name): Alien (1961);
Day of the Beasts (1961); The Unpossessed (1961).As J.L. Powers: Black
Abyss (1960).As Karl ZEIGFREID (house name): The Uranium Seekers (1953);
Dark Centauri (1954).
GLASKIN, G(ERALD) M(ARCUS)
(1923- ) Australian writer whose sf novel A Change of Mind (1959 UK)
concerns a hypnotic mind-transference between two men, with much emotional
activity - and melodrama - consequent upon the changeover. GM has also
written a series of nonfiction books, beginning with Windows of the Mind:
The Christos Experiment (1974), describing experiments purporting to
involve a form of psychic TIME TRAVEL a la J.W. DUNNE. [JC]See also:
PSEUDO-SCIENCE.
GLASSER, ALLEN
(? - ) US writer and sf fan, briefly active in the 1930s, and who is now
remembered as the author of The Cavemen of Venus (1932 chap), a story in
pamphlet form which seems to have been the first independent fiction
published by the soon-to-be-active fan press. It was published by Conrad
H. Ruppert (see SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS). [JC]
GLASSFORD, WILFRED
Wilfred Glassford MCNEILLY.
GLEN AND RANDA
Film (1971). UMC. Dir Jim McBride, starring Steven Curry, Shelley
Plimpton, Woodrow Chambliss, Garry Goodrow. Screenplay Lorenzo Mans,
Rudolf WURLITZER, McBride. 94 mins. Colour.The film opens with a shot of a
naked man and woman walking hand-in-hand through a dreamlike setting, but
it soon becomes clear that this is not the Garden of Eden but a postHOLOCAUST USA. The young couple drift through the shattered debris of
civilization in a search for the mythical city of Metropolis, encountering
other survivors along the way; Randa (Plimpton) dies in childbirth, but
Glen (Curry) continues his quest. Though made independently for very
little money (shot on 16mm and later blown up to 35mm), GAR is more
interesting than most of its kind due to McBride's ingenuity in creating
an evocatively desolate and sometimes beautiful setting out of existing
landscapes; the film is austere but hopeful. McBride has not done much
commercial work, but he did go on to make the excellent thriller The Big
Easy (1986). [JB/PN]
GLOAG, JOHN
(1896-1981) UK writer, primarily in the fields of social history,
architecture and design. His first sf novel, Tomorrow's Yesterday (1932),
strongly influenced by H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE (1895) and Olaf
STAPLEDON's LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930), is a satirical criticism of
contemporary society as viewed by our successors, a race of cat people who
have mastered TIME TRAVEL. Time manipulation featured prominently in
several of JG's short stories and, through a drug capable of unlocking

ancestral memories, in the novel 99% (1944). His other novels, again with
strong satirical overtones, are chiefly concerned with the effect of new
discoveries on society. In The New Pleasure (1933) a chemical is used to
heighten the sense of smell; in Winter's Youth (1934) a rejuvenation
process adds 30 years to one's life; and in Manna (1940) a fungus that
appeases hunger creates a lethargic population. Tomorrow's Yesterday was
reprinted, with slight revisions, in First One and Twenty (coll 1946),
which also incorporates 10 stories from It Makes a Nice Change (coll
1938). Other fantasy stories appear in Take One a Week (coll 1950).After a
long period away from the field, JG published a series of historical
fantasy novels, Caesar of the Narrow Seas (1969), The Eagles Depart (1973)
and Artorius Rex (1977), which attracted comparison with the works of
Susan COOPER. [JE]Other works: Artifex, or The Future of Craftsmanship
(1926 chap), nonfiction; Sacred Edifice (1937); Slow (1954).About the
author: "The Future Between the Wars: The Speculative Fiction of John
Gloag" by Brian M. STABLEFORD in Foundation (1980).See also: BIOLOGY; END
OF THE WORLD; HISTORY IN SF; HISTORY OF SF; POLITICS; REINCARNATION; WAR;
WEAPONS.
GLOSSOP, [Captain] REGINALD
(1880-? ) UK writer, long resident in France, remembered almost
exclusively for The Orphan of Space (1926), which lamely prefigures C.S.
LEWIS's Ransom trilogy in the conceit that Earth is a diseased planet
barred from the higher spheres. The plot concerns the collaboration of a
kind of spirit of Gaia with the ghost of a long-dead Chinese scientist to
pass the secret of atomic energy on to the protagonists in 1935, so that
they can cleanse the planet of its ailment. Some of RG's other novels were
vanity-published. [JC]Other works: The Coming Invasion (1903 chap); The
Crystal Globe (1922); The Magic Mirror (1923); Burning Sands (1928
France); The Ghastly Dew (1932), a future- WAR tale in which the Channel
Tunnel is a threat; The Egyptian Venus (1946).
GLUT, DONALD F(RANK)
(1944- ) US writer whose first publications of interest were nonfiction
studies like The Frankenstein Legend (1973) and The Dracula Book (1975),
and who also wrote filmscripts. His first novel, Bugged (1974), is
fantasy; his second, Spawn (1976 Canada), is an sf tale featuring
intelligent dinosaurs. What seems to have been an extensive interest in
the subject led to the New Adventures of Frankenstein sequence Frankenstein Lives Again (1977; exp 1981), Terror of Frankenstein (1977),
Bones of Frankenstein (1977 UK) and Frankenstein Meets Dracula (1978 UK) as well as to a further nonfiction title, The Frankenstein Catalog (1984),
a useful bibliographical companion to the subject. DFG has also written a
tie, The Empire Strikes Back * (1980), novelizing The EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
; this text was also published as The Empire Strikes Back: The Illustrated
Edition * (1980) and assembled in The Star Wars Trilogy * (omni 1987)
along with the two other relevant novelizations, by Alan Dean FOSTER
(writing as George LUCAS) and James KAHN. [JC]
GLYN JONES, RICHARD
(1946- ) UK illustrator and publisher. He graduated from Sheffield
University and went on to postgraduate work in experimental psychology.

With no formal art training, he began illustrating with underground COMIC
strips and became, along with Mal DEAN, the most important illustrator for
NEW WORLDS under the editorship of Michael MOORCOCK. He was designer for
the last few issues, and also for the succeeding paperback book series.
His work shows surprising and inventive contrasts between dark and light
spaces, and a striking sense of design. He has also done book covers. In
the 1980s he set up a SMALL PRESS in London, Xanadu Publishing, which
produced Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (1985) by David PRINGLE and
other genre-related titles. [PN]
GLYNN, A(NTHONY) A(RTHUR)
(1929- ) UK journalist and writer whose sf novels - both routine pulp
productions typical of UK publishing at the time - are Search the Dark
Stars (1961), under the BADGER BOOKS house name John E. MULLER, and Plan
for Conquest (1963). Though he preferred sf, AAG wrote mostly Westerns.
[JC]
GNAEDINGER, MARY
(1898-1976) US editor who, as an employee of the Frank A. MUNSEY chain of
PULP MAGAZINES, was made editor in 1939 of the new magazine FAMOUS
FANTASTIC MYSTERIES. She edited all 81 issues of the magazine, which
eventually ceased publication in 1953, as well as two companion magazines:
FANTASTIC NOVELS, published 1940-41 and again 1948-51, and A. MERRITT'S
FANTASY MAGAZINE, published 1949-50. All three were devoted to reprinting
old stories. [MJE]
GNOME PRESS
US specialist SMALL PRESS founded in 1948 by Martin GREENBERG and David
A. KYLE. It was the most eminent of the fan publishers of sf, and produced
more than 50 books, surviving into the early 1960s. It published many of
the major sf authors, and in some cases, as with Robert E. HOWARD's Conan
series (published in 6 books 1950-55) and Isaac ASIMOV's Foundation series
(published in 3 books 1951-3), was responsible for the manner in which
their stories were collected into book form. Other authors included Arthur
C. CLARKE, Robert A. HEINLEIN and C.L. MOORE. An associated imprint was
Greenberg: Publisher, and in 1958 GP bought out the stock of FANTASY
PRESS. Most of GP's books were hardcover, but some saw simultaneous
softcover editions. GP was important in the transitional period between
GENRE SF as a magazine phenomenon and its arrival in mass-market book
PUBLISHING. [MJE/PN]
GOBLE, NEIL
(1933- ) US Air Force officer, technical writer, and author of a
borderline-sf novel, Condition Green: Tokyo (1967). His first published sf
was "Master of None" (ASF 1962). Asimov Analyzed (1972), published by
MIRAGE PRESS, is perhaps too respectful toward its subject, and is now out
of date. [PN]
GODBER, NOEL (LAMBERT)
(1881-? ) UK writer of several light novels, the first of which, Amazing
Spectacles (1931), boasts some sf content: a pair of spectacles allows its
wearer to see through clothing. [JC]Other works: Keep it Dark! (1932).

GODFREY, HOLLIS
(1874-1936) US writer in whose sf novel, The Man who Ended War (1908),
the inventor of a radioactive metal-disintegrating beam (a nuclear weapon
of sorts, probably the first in world literature) threatens to destroy the
world's warships, one by one, if the great powers refuse to disarm. They
resist and he carries out his threat, finally killing himself with his own
beam, thereby protecting the secret of its manufacture. [JC]Other works:
Dave Morrell's Battery (1912).
GODFREY, MARTYN N.
(1949- ) Canadian writer whose sf, mostly aimed at the young-adult
market, includes The Vandarian Incident (1981), Alien War Games (1984),
The Last War (1986) - a post- HOLOCAUST tale - More than Weird (1987) and
I Spent my Summer Vacation Kidnapped into Space (1990 US). To date none
has markedly striven to stand out from the routine. [JC]
GODS AND DEMONS
The word "God" (or "Gods") is one of the commonest of all nouns in sf
story and novel titles. Although this frequency is partly fuelled by the
interest in RELIGION that has characterized sf from its earliest days, we
must seek further to explain the sheer scale of the phenomenon.The sf
writer is a creator of imaginary worlds; in that sense his activity is
godlike. It is, then, natural that he or she should especially enjoy
fantasies (some might say delusions of grandeur) about superbeings with
the ability to create and manipulate whole worlds. But it is not only
power fantasies that feed into sf stories about gods; just as important
are fantasies of impotence (sf's fascination with the uses of power
extending as often to the manipulated as to the manipulators) in which we
ourselves are the puppets of (or have even been created by) godlike
beings. The idea that we are property - a favourite notion of Charles
FORT's - feeds strongly into sf tales of PARANOIA, which are often stories
of gods to whom we are subject; one of the commonest forms of METAPHYSICS
in sf is to ask whether the universe is wholly arbitrary, or whether its
patterns of meaning are somehow planned (though not by us), which brings
us full circle back to religion again.A particularly common form of the
"we are property" story tale is the retelling of the story of ADAM AND EVE
(which see for examples) in terms of what Brian W. ALDISS has termed
"Shaggy God" stories: recastings of biblical myth into an sf framework. A
common variant is that in which some sort of alien power or god seeds
Earth with mankind (Adam and Eve in the first instance), or transmutes the
existing ape-people, as in the film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, where the
alien/god takes the form of a black monolith. Such stories were given a
new lease of life during the 1970s and early 1980s by the enormous
popularity of PSEUDO-SCIENCE books by Erich VON DANIKEN, who saw ancient
alien astronauts as having visited Earth eons ago, bearing technological
gifts, and now remembered in race memory as gods. The modern sf version of
this motif has strange, enormous alien artefacts ( BIG DUMB OBJECTS) made
- often in space - by a now forgotten race of alien Builders for their own
godlike purposes, but seeming to us like incomprehensible sacred
relics.Although sf analogues to the One God are comparatively rare in
GENRE SF, even in its early days, quite a few works of earlier borderline

sf consider the nature of the Christian God. Marie CORELLI apparently
considered religious experience to be electric in nature, and in A Romance
of Two Worlds (1886; rev 1887) postulated a God who manifests himself
electrically. In A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920), David LINDSAY created
analogues of the more conventional Christian and Jewish images of God,
only to dismiss them in every case as false and cheap in a universe where
only pain and personal striving are meaningful. (Analogues of Christ are
very much more common in sf than those of God the Father, and are
discussed under MESSIAHS.)God-stories in sf are nearly always
rationalized, seldom mystical. Many stories are based on the notion that a
highly advanced society might seem godlike to a more primitive one, and in
many tales of COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS the narrative turns on the
difficulties and responsibilities of being seen in this light; an example
is Trudno byt' bogom (1964; trans as Hard to be a God 1973) by the
brothers STRUGATSKI. Conversely, other stories present humans as
confronted by some form of galactic intelligence which is so high in the
order of life as to seem godlike. A very early work by Clifford D. SIMAK,
The Creator (1935; 1946), features a world-creating alien; the same
author's A Choice of Gods (1972) proposes a godlike galactic principle.
Eric Frank RUSSELL's "Hobbyist" (1947) envisages a god who created life in
the Galaxy for mere aesthetic pleasure. A benevolent being does the same
thing in Olaf STAPLEDON's STAR MAKER (1937) in an altogether more serious
treatment of the theme; like several sf writers Stapledon wished to
dispense with the anthropomorphic aspects of Christianity while preserving
a sense of cosmic meaning and pattern. Not all galactic intelligences are
benevolent; James TIPTREE Jr has a godlike galaxy-destroyer in Up the
Walls of the World (1978). Arthur C. CLARKE proposes a ravening "mad mind"
in The City and the Stars (1948; exp 1956), but that was created by
Man.The Clarke novel raises an interesting notion that recurs quite often,
in many forms, from the technological to the quasi-mystical: that a lower
form of life might be able to create a higher. A number of stories concern
computers that attain godlike powers (see COMPUTERS for a list), sometimes
alone and sometimes through a transcendental fusion with their operators,
as in Catchworld (1975) by Chris BOYCE. A recent example of the
computer-god story on an epic scale is Dan SIMMONS's 2-vol Hyperion Cantos
sequence - HYPERION (1989) and The Fall of Hyperion (1990) - in which
human-created AI networks become the secret manipulators of all things,
among their tools being other god-avatars (including the paingod Shrike);
the books' titles (and structures) reflect Keats's famous poems about the
fall of the old gods and the rise of the new. Indeed the Hyperion sequence
became overnight the definitive "gods in sf" story, playing almost every
imaginable variant on the theme.More metaphysical methods of god-creation
are just as common. A.E. VAN VOGT, whose career has largely been devoted
to creating SUPERMAN figures, devised the ultimate (though not the most
interesting) variant in The Book of Ptath (1943; 1947; vt Two Hundred
Million A.D. 1964; vt Ptath 1976), in which a god is created through the
force of his followers' prayers, his power being proportional to their
number - a vision which governs the most serious of Terry PRATCHETT's
Discworld novels, Small Gods (1992). Gods are created in the flesh in
Philip Jose FARMER's Night of Light (1957; exp 1966) through the
transcendental union of very good (or very bad) men once every seven

years, when the local sun emits a mysterious radiation. In Frank HERBERT's
The God Makers (1972) humans deliberately create a god using a blend of
mystical, psychological and technological means. In this case Herbert's
writing was not equal to his theme; and, indeed, god-stories generally
meet severe literary problems in attempting to render transcendental
experience through GENRE-SF stereotypes. One of the most interesting
variants on the theme of the artificially created god is found in Philip
K. DICK's A Maze of Death (1970), in which a series of mystifying false
realities are created, ultimately involving salvation through a godlike
Intercessor; only late in the novel is it revealed that the realities and
their god are all part of a construct imposed by the computer of a
crippled starship.The focus of interest in most sf god-stories is,
paradoxically, not religious, though, in the case of Dick and some others,
metaphysical questions about reality are certainly raised. More common are
god-stories about the exercise of power or the burden of responsibility,
or both. The theme is an old one, for the work of the SCIENTIST has been
seen by many as a usurpation of powers that are properly God's; such is
the case in Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein (1818; rev 1831), where a
scientist creates life but cannot create a soul to go with it. A number of
variants have been sardonic. James Branch CABELL features several
demiurges (world-makers) in his Poictesme fantasies - notably The Silver
Stallion (1926), where Creation occurs through the boredom of a god whose
cosmic perspective leads readily to a detachment seen by its victims as
sadistic. This image of less-than-perfect god-creators became almost a
CLICHE in genre sf. Robert SHECKLEY, for example, has often proposed
rather harassed and incompetent gods, overworked and put upon, as in
Dimension of Miracles (1968), and Douglas ADAMS echoed this in his Hitch
Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy books. More seriously, in "Microcosmic God"
(1941) Theodore STURGEON has an irresponsible scientist playing god to a
miniature world, whose inhabitants he cruelly goads into accelerated
technological development. Ursula K. LE GUIN examines the metaphysical
aspects of the fallible-god theme, in a manner reminiscent of Dick's work,
in The Lathe of Heaven (1971). All these works emphasize questions of
responsibility.The "delusions of grandeur" aspect of god stories became,
starting in the 1960s, the speciality of two very notable sf writers:
Philip Jose Farmer and Roger ZELAZNY. Zelazny's "gods" are often, in fact,
technologically advanced superhumans, who for not always explained reasons
are able to take on "aspects" of godhood, often analogous to those of the
gods of legend; the Greek myths in THIS IMMORTAL (1966), the Hindu
pantheon in LORD OF LIGHT (1967) and the Egyptian pantheon in Creatures of
Light and Darkness (1969). His Isle of the Dead (1969) features a feud
between gods, and his Amber series features reality changes brought about
by quasi-gods in worlds which are constantly changing copies of some
Platonic original, beyond which some more ultimate god-figure might be
hidden. Many (if not most) of Farmer's books deal with gods, notably the
two series set on artificial worlds: the Tierworld series and the
Riverworld series. The latter series is the archetype of the "we are
property" theme, in which resuscitated humans are the playthings of the
gods, and the former emphasizes the all-too-human qualities of the gods
that do the manipulating. Artificial worlds of this type can usefully be
called POCKET UNIVERSES (which see for further examples), and have become

an sf staple. Farmer and Zelazny regularly and ironically undercut their
god-themes with the use of a colloquial and streetwise tone, juxtaposing
the sublime with the ridiculous, and this habit has permeated many
subsequent examples of the pocket-universe novel. Two writers who have
adopted this sort of tone in pocket-universe stories, in which
protagonists are manipulated by god figures like pieces on a games board
(or perhaps are gods without knowing it), are Piers ANTHONY (sometimes)
and Jack L. CHALKER, the latter so devoted to the theme that it embraces
almost the whole of his massive output.One pocket-universe variant is the
novel set in a VIRTUAL REALITY (which see for examples) generated by human
or artificial intelligences. In the last two books of his Neuromancer
trilogy (1986-88) William GIBSON has the virtual reality of CYBERSPACE
actually occupied by gods within the machine itself, these taking the form
of voodoo deities. (The sf voodoo theme, in which archetypal aspects of
human behaviour are incarnate - somewhere in the hindbrain? - as gods, may
well become a new cliche, one of its more interesting manifestations being
in Greg BEAR's Queen of Angels [1990].)Philip K. Dick's obsession with
godhood runs through much of his work, and indeed entered his life. Our
Friends from Frolix 8 (1970) and GALACTIC POT-HEALER (1969) both feature
alien quasi-gods and their effect on humans. The Three Stigmata of Palmer
Eldritch (1965), as the title suggests, is about a god-being, once a
businessman but now inhuman and metallic, who is able to bring about
menacing reality-changes that seem almost to be beyond good and evil.
Dick's nightmares of ordinary people being cosmically manipulated carry an
emotional charge much more intense than genre sf is normally able to
produce. Towards the end of his career, theology became his over-riding
theme to an extravagant degree, as in The Divine Invasion (1982).Much more
straightforward gods appear in that small group of books whose genesis
goes back to the idea in medieval astrology that each of the planets has a
tutelary spirit. Such is the case in C.S. LEWIS's trilogy about Ransom,
whose inspiration is directly Christian. The aliens in the novella "If the
Stars are Gods" (1974), the title story of the fixup novel of the same
name (1977) by Gordon EKLUND and Gregory BENFORD, believe that the
universe is controlled by gods located in suns (an idea to be found in
William Blake's poetry); the amusing Dogsbody (1975) by Diana Wynne JONES
is another to make use of the notion. A more sciencefictional version of
the same theme is in the living stars of Frank Herbert's Whipping Star
(1970) and its sequel The Dosadi Experiment (1977). Indeed Herbert is,
like Dick, a writer for whom godlike figures are the central theme in a
majority of his work, most celebratedly in the figures of Paul Atreides
(something of a maimed god) in the Dune Messiah (1969) and his son Leto,
who is transformed in Children of Dune (1976) and further in God-Emperor
of Dune (1981).Further sf god-novels of note include (some at the fantasy
end of the spectrum): The Man who was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908) by G.K.
CHESTERTON, in which a recruiter of secret agents turns out to be God; The
Circus of Dr Lao (1935) by Charles FINNEY, in which demigods are caged in
a circus; most novels by Thomas Burnett SWANN and (though sometimes
obscurely) most novels by Gene WOLFE, including There are Doors (1988);
Harlan ELLISON's Deathbird Stories: A Pantheon of Modern Gods (coll 1975;
rev 1984); STRATA (1981) by Terry Pratchett, as well as his Discworld
sequence; Courtship Rite (1982) by Donald KINGSBURY; Winterking (1984) by

Paul HAZEL; Planet of Whispers (1984) by James Patrick KELLY, in which
whispers from the right side of the brain are interpreted as the voice of
God; Waiting for the Galactic Bus (1988) by Parke GODWIN, in which aliens
take the roles of God and the Devil; The Ring (1988) by Daniel Keys MORAN,
a Wagner-pastiche in which the gods are genetically engineered
superbeings; Neverness (1988) by David ZINDELL, which has a godlike entity
whose being is made up of many star systems and who can be reached only by
solving mathematical theorems; Rats and Gargoyles (1990) by Mary GENTLE;
The Werewolves of London (1990) by Brian M. STABLEFORD; and The Face of
the Waters (1991) by Robert SILVERBERG (who has written earlier
god-novels, too), in which God is a planetary consciousness.Gods are
comparatively rare in sf CINEMA, two exceptions being the appalling RED
PLANET MARS (1952), where God turns out to be real and in charge of Mars,
and GOD TOLD ME TO (1976; vt Demon), where God the son is reincarnated as
a hermaphrodite who tells his subjects to commit mass murder.The concept
of demons and devils is equally common in sf, but usually at a quite
trivial level: they tend, as in non-horror FANTASY generally, to be seen
simply as frightening and malicious entities derived from medieval
Christian ideas of Hell, and are quite often played for laughs. There are
many demonology stories with sf elements, such as the time-warping demon
in Anthony BOUCHER's "Snulbug" (1941) and the other-dimensional alien
blood-drinker in Henry KUTTNER's "Call Him Demon" (1946). Norvell W.
PAGE's "But without Horns" (1940) uses demonic imagery in a story of a
telepathic MUTANT. Demons proper often appear in SWORD AND SORCERY;
demonic creatures of darkness were all in a day's work to Robert E.
HOWARD's Conan. Particularly unpleasant aliens are often given demonic
form (sometimes with talk about racial memory) in genre-sf stories, as in
van Vogt's second published story, "Discord in Scarlet" (1939; in The
Voyage of the Space Beagle fixup 1950) - which may have been the
(unacknowledged) source of the film ALIEN - and Keith LAUMER's A Plague of
Demons (1965), both truly nasty creations. A famous twist on the theme is
found in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1950; exp 1953), in which
mankind is confronted by aliens shaped exactly like the Devil (racial
precognition of their arrival explains his bat-winged image in Christian
mythology) but turn out to have mournfully paternalistic natures. Several
sf-oriented fantasies by HARD-SF writers have imagined that Hell and its
demons are real, and created a kind of quasi-scientific rationale for
them. An early example is Robert A. HEINLEIN's "The Devil Makes the Law"
(1940; with vt as 2nd title story of Waldo and Magic, Inc. coll 1950);
more recent examples are Operation Chaos (1956-9 FSF; fixup 1971) by Poul
ANDERSON and the DANTE ALIGHIERI pastiche Inferno (1975) by Larry NIVEN
and Jerry POURNELLE. Demons are, of course, by no means peculiar to
Christianity, though in some other mythologies they are hardly to be
distinguished from malign or death-dealing gods, as in the demonic
green-eyed boy god who haunts the degenerate CYBERPUNK future of Elizabeth
HAND's Winterlong (1990).The strong prevalence of god (and devil) themes
in sf strongly suggests that, as a genre, sf is not quite the hard-headed,
extrapolative literature its proponents sometimes claim. On the other
hand, at a time when many actual physicists publish books attempting to
reconcile COSMOLOGY or quantum mechanics with the idea of God, it is
hardly surprising if sf writers do the same. [PN]See also: GOTHIC SF;

MAGIC; MONSTERS; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
GOD TOLD ME TO
(vt Demon) Film (1976). Larco. Prod and dir Larry Cohen, starring Tony Lo
Bianco, Deborah Raffin, Sandy Dennis, Richard Lynch. Screenplay Cohen. 89
mins. Colour.It is as well that Larry COHEN has his own production
company, Larco, since it is impossible to imagine any other company taking
on so eccentric a project. This is perhaps the most baroque sf movie ever
made. A devout Catholic detective (Lo Bianco) investigates separate
instances of mass murder linked by the assassins' confessions that God had
told them to do it. Another link is the enigmatic Bernard (Lynch),
revealed only at the end to be the hermaphroditic product of a virgin
birth - he has a vagina - fathered by a sort of cross between an alien
from a flying saucer ( UFOS) and a pentecostal fire. Now a MESSIAH, he is
responsible for the various murders, having used PSI POWERS to programme
the murderers. He offers to bear a child to the (childless) detective, who
has only recently learned, to his dismay, that he himself is also the
product of an alien-fathered virgin birth. Other directors faced with this
bizarre material would have concentrated on the monstrous Bernard; Cohen
typically turns it around into a study of the detective's feelings of
religious guilt. For all its sophisticated religious symbolism, the film
is structured as if it were a conventional policier. [PN]See also: CINEMA;
GODS AND DEMONS.
GODWIN, FRANCIS
(1562-1633) English bishop and writer, most noted for his striking
description of a lunar UTOPIA in the posthumously and anonymously
published The Man in the Moone, or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither by
Domingo Gonsales, the Speedy Messenger (1638). The flight to the
low-gravity MOON, accomplished in a flying machine drawn by "gansas" (wild
geese) who winter there, is described with some realism; FG cautiously
allows that Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) may have been right in some of
his theories. (Domingo Gonsales reappears as a character in sf in work by
CYRANO DE BERGERAC.) FG's book was reprinted many times in the following
centuries - apparently often cut - and was perhaps the most influential
work of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION. It is available in The Man in the Moone: An
Anthology of Antique Science Fiction (anth 1971) ed Faith K. Pizor and T.
Allan Comp. [PN]See also: FANTASTIC VOYAGES.
GODWIN, FRANK
[r] CONNIE.
GODWIN, PARKE
(1929- ) US writer who began publishing work of genre interest with
"Unsigned Original" for Brother Theodore's Chamber of Horrors (anth 1977)
ed Marvin KAYE "and Brother Theodore". PG has since been more or less
equally associated with fantasy and sf, though most of the stories
assembled in The Fire when it Comes (coll 1984) are the former, the title
novella winning a 1982 World Fantasy Award. As an sf writer, PG remains
best known for the first two volumes of the Masters of Solitude sequence,
both with Marvin Kaye: Masters of Solitude (1978) and Wintermind (1982); a
projected third volume has yet to appear. Set in a post- HOLOCAUST USA,

the first volume depicts a conflict between rural followers of a diseased
mutant form of Christianity and a city in which a science-based worldview
is encapsulated; in the second, a personal drama and an interesting
half-breed protagonist intensify the grain of narrative, but peculiarly
diminish the sense, given off by the earlier book, of a large sf occasion.
A Cold Blue Light (1983), also with Kaye (whom see for the sequel), is a
ghost story which confusingly mixes sf and supernatural rationales. PG's
second sf sequence, written solo, the Snake Oil series - Waiting for the
Galactic Bus (1988), The Snake Oil Wars, or Scheherazade Ginzberg Strikes
Again (1989) - is an erratically amusing but ultimately very
dark-complected SATIRE on RELIGION and US society at large, refracted
through the behaviour of the two ALIENS who were responsible for breeding
Homo sapiens in the first place, and have now taken on the roles of God
and Devil; the assault on Christian fundamentalism is explicit. Though a
writer whose flamboyance sometimes unhinges his plots, PG remains a figure
whose relative obscurity is fully undeserved. [JC]Other works: The
Firelord Arthurian fantasy sequence, comprising Firelord (1980), Beloved
Exile (1984) and The Last Rainbow (1985); A Memory of Lions (1983),
associational; A Truce with Time (1988), contemporary fantasy; Invitation
to Camelot (anth 1988); Sherwood (1991) and Robin and the King (1993), two
Robin Hood fantasies.See also: GODS AND DEMONS.
GODWIN, TOM
Working name of US writer Thomas William Godwin (1915-1980), whose life
and career were afflicted by disease and misfortune: family tragedies
caused him to leave school after third grade, kyphosis misshaped his spine
and truncated his military career, and he was an alcoholic. He published
the first of approximately 30 sf stories, "The Gulf Between", in ASF in
1953, and soon after wrote his most famous tale, "The Cold Equations"
(1954), in which a girl stowaway on a precisely payloaded spaceship must
be jettisoned by the one-man crew because to transport her extra mass
would require more fuel than the starship carries, so making disaster
inevitable and dooming also the colony to which the ship is heading. TG's
first two novels, The Survivors (1958; vt Space Prison 1960) and its
sequel The Space Barbarians (1964), tell of the abandoned human survivors
of an alien prison planet who wait 200 years for revenge, then undergo
SPACE-OPERA adventures involving a demoralized Earth and telepathic allies
but ultimately demonstrating - in the approved ASF fashion - humanity's
inextinguishable spirit. A similar bias governs Beyond Another Sun (1971),
an anthropological sf novel in which aliens observe Man on another planet.
TG wrote relatively little, and almost always within the expansionist
tradition fostered by John W. CAMPBELL. What he did write, however,
exhibited a fine clarity of conception and considerable narrative verve,
though his characterizations were sometimes sentimental. [JC]About the
author: "Tom Godwin: A Personal Memory" (1990) by Diane Godwin Sullivan,
in Quantum #37.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; ANTIGRAVITY; COLONIZATION OF OTHER
WORLDS; MOON; PHYSICS; PROTO SCIENCE FICTION; RELIGION; SPACE FLIGHT.
GODZILLA
The anglicized version of GOJIRA.
GOG

Film (1954). Ivan Tors/United Artists. Dir and ed Herbert L. Strock,
starring Richard Egan, Constance Dowling, Herbert Marshall. Screenplay Tom
Taggart, from a story by Tors. 85 mins. 3-D. Colour.In this slow-moving
film, originally in 3-D, experiments are being carried out on human
subjects in a secret underground laboratory to determine whether manned
space flight is possible. Various pieces of equipment start to behave in a
lethal fashion: a man loses his life in a centrifuge, another is frozen to
death in a high-altitude chamber, a third is killed by high-frequency
sound. Finally two experimental ROBOTS, Gog and Magog, go berserk. These
accidents turn out to be the work of a foreign power which has taken over
the lab's COMPUTER by means of instructions transmitted from a high-flying
aircraft. The film's style is similar to that of the tv series SCIENCE
FICTION THEATRE (1955-7), also produced by Tors. [JB/PN]
GOGOL, NIKOLAI
RUSSIA.
GOHAGEN, OMAR
AMAZING STORIES; FANTASTIC.
GOJIRA
(vt Godzilla, King of the Monsters; vt Godzilla) Film (1954 Japan; exp
with new footage 1956 US). Toho/Embassy. Dir Inoshiro Honda, starring
Takashi Shimura, Akira Takarada, Akihiko Hirata (and Raymond Burr in US
version). Screenplay Takeo Murata, Honda, based on a story by Shigeru
Kayama. 98 mins cut to 81 mins for US release. B/w.This was the first of a
long series of Japanese ( JAPAN) films featuring Gojira (anglicized as
Godzilla), a 400ft (120m) amphibious dinosaur that breathes fire; the name
is a portmanteau word from "gorilla" and "kujira" ["whale"]. The film was
bought by a US company which released it internationally in 1956 as
Godzilla, King of the Monsters (vt Godzilla), replacing segments featuring
a Japanese reporter by footage starring Raymond Burr. This first Gojira
film was basically a conventional MONSTER MOVIE (nuclear radiation revives
a prehistoric monster in the Pacific Ocean and it proceeds to devastate
Tokyo), but over the years the sequels have become increasingly esoteric,
not to say silly. Originally Toho Studio's special effects (supervised
until his death in 1970 by Eiji Tsuburaya) for the Gojira series were
fairly impressive, but they became more perfunctory. Unlike Willis H.
O'BRIEN's and Ray HARRYHAUSEN's monsters - achieved with stop-motion
animation of puppets - Gojira was created using either a man in a suit or
small mechanized models.Between Gojira and GOJIRA 1985 (1985) there were
14 other Gojira films: Gigantis (1955; vt Gojira No Gyakushu) released in
English as Gigantis the Fire Monster (1959; vt Godzilla Raids Again; vt
The Return of Godzilla), with the monster's name changed; King Kong Tai
Gojira (1962), released in English as King Kong vs. Godzilla, very
successful financially; Mosura Tai Gojira (1964; vt Gojira Tai Mothra),
released in English as Godzilla vs. The Thing (vt Godzilla vs. Mothra),
featuring the likeable giant moth from MOSURA (1961) and thought by some
to be the best of the series; Kaiju Daisenso (1965), released in English
as Invasion of Astro-Monster (vt Battle of the Astros; vt Monster Zero; vt
Invasion of Planet X), in which Gojira and RADON for the first time are
weapons of rather than threateners of Earth; Ghidorah Sandai Kaiju Chikyu

Saidai No Kessan (1965; vt Chikyu Saidai No Kessan), released in English
as Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster, in which Gojira, Radon and Mosura
defend Earth from the nastiest of Toho's monsters, previously introduced
in Kaiju Daisenso; Nankai No Daiketto (1966), dir Jun Fukuda, released in
English as Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (vt Godzilla vs. the Sea-Monster),
in which giant crab Ebirah is defeated, the first of the series not to be
directed by Honda; Gojira No Musuko (1967), dir Fukuda, released in
English as Son of Godzilla, a comical children's film; Kaiju Soshingeki
(1968), dir Honda, released in English as Destroy All Monsters (vt
Operation Monsterland; vt The March of the Monsters), in which all 11 Toho
monsters to date are feebly on display; Oru Kaiju Daishingeki (1969), dir
Honda, released in English as Godzilla's Revenge, too much a rerun of old
footage; Gojira Tai Hedora (1971), dir Yoshimitsu Banno, released in
English as Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster (vt Godzilla Versus Hedora), in
which the emphasis changes from anti-nuclear-weaponry-and-radiation to
anti-pollution, and Gojira has become an undignified, friendly buffoon;
Gojira Tai Gaigan (1972), dir Fukuda, released in English as War of the
Monsters (vt Godzilla on Monster Island), in which pollution-ridden aliens
try to take over Earth; Gojira Tai Megaron (1973), dir Fukuda, released in
English as Godzilla vs. Megalon, in which Megalon is a giant cockroach;
Gojira Tai Mekagojira (1974), dir Fukuda, released in English as Godzilla
vs. the Bionic Monster (vt Godzilla vs. the Cosmic Monster), in which
Gojira battles his alien-controlled cyborg double; Mekagojira No Gyakushu
(1975), dir Honda to celebrate Gojira's 20th birthday, released in English
as Terror of Mechagodzilla (vt The Escape of Megagodzilla; vt Monsters
from the Unknown Planet), a partial return to form, in which aliens again
use bad monsters in an invasion of Earth fought off by good monsters.
[PN]See also: CINEMA; COMICS; GREAT AND SMALL.
GOJIRA 1985
(vt Godzilla 1985) Film (1985). Toho/New World. Dir Kohji Hashimoto, R.J.
Kizer, starring Raymond Burr (in US version), Keiju Kobayashi, Ken Tanaka.
Screenplay Shuichi Nagahara, Lisa Tomei, from a story by Tomoyuki Tanaka.
120 mins, cut to 91 mins USA and 87 mins UK. Colour.The original
screenplay from GOJIRA (1954) is not credited, but this is effectively a
remake of the first film; although it purports to be a sequel, it ignores
the other 14 sequels as if they had never happened. Again the radioactive
giant dinosaur attacks ships, then destroys Tokyo. Again footage starring
Burr as a reporter is spliced in for the US market (the US/UK versions are
half an hour shorter than the Japanese). The plotting is dire; its main
genuflection to modernity is the Japanese opposition to US and Russian
insistence that Gojira should be nuked. The dialogue and characterization
of this MONSTER MOVIE are laughable; but the special effects are better
than the first time around. [PN]
GOLD
(vt L'Or) Film (1934). UFA. Dir Karl Hartl, starring Hans Albers,
Friedrich Kayssler, Lien Deyers, Michael Bohnen, Brigitte Helm. Screenplay
Rolf E. Vanloo. 120 mins. B/w.This German film was made by much the same
team that had made F.P.1 ANTWORTET NICHT two years earlier, but is more
spectacular and also more nationalistic. German scientists are hired by a

megalomaniac Scottish tycoon who wishes to build a nuclear reactor to
transmute base metal into gold. The ethics of the heroes eventually
prevail, and the successful prototype is destroyed. The laboratory
sequences, with dazzling electrical effects, are impressive, but the film
as a whole is somewhat leaden.A French-language version, L'or, dir Serge
de Poligny, was made at the same time with a different cast, though
Brigitte Helm, the love interest, appeared in both. [JB/PN]
GOLD, H(ORACE) L(EONARD)
(1914- ) Canadian-born writer and editor, in the USA from an early age,
though retaining dual nationality. HLG began his sf career with several
sales to Astounding Stories in the mid-1930s, the first being "Inflexure"
(1934). At that time he wrote under the pseudonyms Clyde Crane Campbell
and Leigh Keith, a gambit necessitated, he has said, by antisemitism on
the part of the publishers. After a hiatus, he returned to the magazine
under his own name with "A Matter of Form" (1938), becoming a regular
contributor to UNKNOWN with such stories as "Trouble with Water" (1939),
an enjoyable humorous MAGIC story, and "None but Lucifer" (1939), a
collaboration with L. Sprague DE CAMP. He was later assistant to Mort
WEISINGER on the magazines CAPTAIN FUTURE, STARTLING STORIES and THRILLING
WONDER STORIES (1939-41), from which he moved on to true-detective
magazines, COMICS and radio scripts. During these years he occasionally
used two further pseudonyms, Richard Storey in 1943 and Dudley Dell in
1951.In 1950 he started GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION, which from the outset he
made one of the leading sf magazines, and for the editing of which he
remains best known - indeed, notorious. Afflicted with acute agoraphobia
as a result of his wartime experiences, HLG worked from his apartment,
doing much of his work by telephone. The emphasis of Gal reflected his
interests in PSYCHOLOGY and SOCIOLOGY, as well as HUMOUR, and like John W.
CAMPBELL Jr - with whom in 1953 he shared the first HUGO to be given for
editing a professional magazine - he was credited with suggesting many
ideas which his contributors turned into famous stories; he also earned a
reputation for overediting. An interesting companion magazine, BEYOND
FANTASY FICTION, which he also edited, lasted 10 issues 1953-5. He edited
GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS, an sf and fantasy reprint series of
variable quality, in the same format as Gal. Later still he became editor
of IF when it was taken over by Gal's owner. He retired from editing both
Gal and If in 1961.Over the period of his editorship, HLG compiled a
number of anthologies from the pages of Gal: Galaxy Reader of Science
Fiction (anth 1952; cut to 13 out of 33 stories 1953 UK), Second Galaxy
Reader of Science Fiction (anth 1954; with 11 stories removed, cut vt The
Galaxy Science Fiction Omnibus 1955 UK), The Third Galaxy Reader (anth
1958), Five Galaxy Short Novels (anth 1958), The Fourth Galaxy Reader
(anth 1959), The World that Couldn't Be and 8 Other Novelets from Galaxy
(anth 1959), Bodyguard, and Four Other Short Novels from Galaxy (anth
1960), The Fifth Galaxy Reader (anth 1961), Mind Partner and 8 Other
Novelets from Galaxy (anth 1961) and The Sixth Galaxy Reader (anth 1962).
He also edited one independent anthology, The Weird Ones (anth 1962).Some
of HLG's stories were collected in The Old Die Rich (coll 1955). What Will
They Think of Last? (1976) is a selection of his editorials from Gal with
an autobiographical postscript. [MJE]See also: QUESTAR.

GOLDEN AGE OF SF
It has been said, cynically, that the Golden Age of sf is 14.Certainly
there is no objective measure by which we can say that the sf of any one
period was notably superior to that of any other. Nonetheless, in
conventional usage (at least within FANDOM) older readers regularly refer
quite precisely to the years 1938-46 as sf's Golden Age, and younger
readers, though not necessarily convinced, had not yet jettisoned the term
when the first edition of this encyclopedia was published in 1979. In 1992
it is not a term so often used, though books like The World Beyond the
Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (1989) by Alexei and
Cory PANSHIN still argue for the primacy of this period as a peak in sf's
development.There is little argument about when the Golden Age began. The
term is nearly always used of genre magazine sf ( GENRE SF), and it is
almost always seen as referring to the period ushered in by John W.
CAMPBELL Jr's assumption of the editorship of ASTOUNDING STORIES in Oct
1937. (By 1938 he had altered the title to Astounding Science-Fiction.)
Within a few years Campbell had managed to take over not only many of the
best (and youngest) working writers of the period, such as L. Ron HUBBARD,
Clifford D. SIMAK, Jack WILLIAMSON, L. Sprague DE CAMP, Henry KUTTNER and
C.L. MOORE (the last three often in his companion magazine UNKNOWN), but
to develop such new writers as Lester DEL REY, Eric Frank RUSSELL (who had
a couple of stories in ASF before Campbell arrived), Theodore STURGEON and
especially the big three, Robert A. HEINLEIN, Isaac ASIMOV and A.E. VAN
VOGT. These writers dominated genre sf until their younger contemporaries
Alfred BESTER, James BLISH, Ray BRADBURY, Arthur C. CLARKE, C.M. KORNBLUTH
and Frederik POHL, after sometimes protracted apprenticeships, emerged as
new forces in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But, as soon as these new
names are evoked, it becomes clear that it is difficult to say in what
sense the Golden Age could be said to have stopped in 1946, or anywhere in
the 1940s. Certainly Campbell's ASF was in the latter 1940s receiving
quite high-class competition from STARTLING STORIES, and a few years later
from GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION and the MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE
FICTION, and by the 1950s it was coming to be seen as a force for
conservatism in magazine sf rather than its spearhead. The "end" of the
Golden Age may have had more reality, then, for devotees of ASF than for
sf readers in general.Certainly 1938-46 was a period of astonishing
activity (among comparatively few writers), the time when most of the
themes and motifs of sf were taking their modern shape, which in some
cases proved almost definitive and in others continued to be reworked and
modified, as is the way of genres. It was also the great age of the PULP
MAGAZINES (most of which were dead or transfigured into DIGESTS by early
in the 1950s), the period in which genre sf belonged primarily to
magazines rather than books, which gave the magazine readers something of
a sense of belonging to a kind of secret brotherhood (not a sisterhood:
the Golden Age stories were by and large written by men for young male
readers.)A balanced reading of genre sf since Campbell would probably see
it as becoming progressively more mature; it would also see (as sf became
more popular) much mechanical reworking of the Golden Age themes by hack
writers, whose increasing numbers may have partly obscured the steady
improvement in the upper echelons of the genre. Certainly there were slack

periods, the late 1950s being one such and the late 1970s another, but
only with tunnel vision and nostalgia could the claim seriously be made
that the period of WWII marked a high point in sf that has never been
reached again. Indeed, by the 1980s the Golden Age "classics" of sf, which
until then had been reprinted constantly, began to drift quietly from the
marketplace as they proved less and less accessible to succeeding
generations of readers.It is interesting to turn to one of the anthologies
of the Golden Age period - perhaps Adventures in Time and Space (anth
1946) ed Raymond J. HEALY and Francis MCCOMAS, or the relevant sections of
The Astounding-Analog Reader (anth in 2 vols 1973) ed Harry HARRISON and
Brian W. ALDISS, or The Science Fiction Hall of Fame (anth 1970) ed Robert
SILVERBERG-and see how banal the writing and retrospectively creaky the
plot devices even of the supposed classics often seem. Isaac Asimov's
"Nightfall" (1941) retains the potency of its original idea, but the
working out is laboured; Lester del Rey's "Helen O'Loy" (1938) is
sentimental and patronizingly sexist. The soaring ideas of Golden Age sf
were all too often clad in an impoverished pulp vocabulary aimed at the
lowest common denominator of a mass market. It would not hurt to remember,
also, that the Golden Age was an almost purely US phenomenon, restricted
to the not very large readership of a tiny handful of ephemeral magazines.
This is not to devalue it; but to keep things in proportion we should
remember that elsewhere (in the UK, and in the USA outside the magazines)
non-genre sf books of real literary quality were being published and had
already been published which had nothing to do at all with what Campbell
was offering.But, when all the caveats have been stated-including the
almost undeniable counterclaim that sf now is by and large better written
than it was then-there is a residue of truth in the Golden Age myth. For
older readers, certainly, there has been nothing since then to give quite
the same adrenalin charge (not too far removed from the SENSE OF WONDER).
It may be a matter of context. Today we expect sf to present us with
amazing concepts (as it still, sometimes, does), but in the 1940s this
stuff seemed (except for unusually sophisticated readers, which the pulps
were not aimed at anyway) to spring miraculously from nowhere at all. In
the years 1938-46 the wild and yearning imaginations of a handful of genre
writers - who were mostly very young, and conceptually very energetic
indeed - laid down entire strata of sf motifs which enriched the field
greatly. In those years the science component of sf became spectacularly
more scientific and the fiction component more assured. It was a quantum
jump in quality, perhaps the greatest in the history of the genre, and, in
gratitude to that, perhaps the term Golden Age should be enshrined.As,
indeed, it has been by the authors of many histories and commentaries on
the genre, from James E. GUNN to Donald A. WOLLHEIM: the Golden Age does
not lack defenders. [PN]
GOLDEN ARGOSY, THE
The ARGOSY .
GOLDIN, STEPHEN
(1947- ) US writer, married to Kathleen SKY 1972-82. He began publishing
sf with "The Girls on USSF 193" for If in 1965 and was runner-up for a
NEBULA for Best Short Story with "The Last Ghost" (1971). His early novels

- his first, Herds (1975 Canada), was like its immediate successors
written for LASER BOOKS - were stereotyped adventures, and he was better
known for an ongoing series of E.E. "Doc" SMITH spin-offs, the Family
D'Alembert sequence. The first volume, The Imperial Stars * (1964 If; exp
1976) was directly based on a Smith story about the members of a large
family who spend their lives saving the Galaxy from a variety of threats;
subsequent volumes - Stranglers' Moon * (1976), The Clockwork Traitor
(1977), Getaway World * (1977), Appointment at Bloodstar * (1978; vt The
Bloodstar Conspiracy 1978 UK), The Purity Plot * (1978), Planet of
Treachery * (1982), Eclipsing Binaries * (1983), The Omicron Invasion *
(1984) and Revolt of the Galaxy * (1985) - were derived from the initial
premise. Aside from these, his later work is more varied. The Eternity
Brigade (1980) is an interestingly nightmarish vision of warfare among
various mercenary soldiers whose personalities have been reincarnated (
REINCARNATION). A World Called Solitude (1981) is a somewhat overburdened
drama of identity. The light Rehumanization of Jade Darcy sequence, with
Mary Mason, begins in Jade Darcy and the Affair of Honor (1988) at a cafe
called Rix's on an entrepot planet much like, one supposes, Morocco in
1942; the series continues with Jade Darcy and the Zen Pirates (1990). SG
cannot be called an original force in sf, but he seldom violates his brief
of providing well crafted entertainments. He has been editor of SFWA
BULLETIN. [JC]Other works: Caravan (1975 Canada); Scavenger Hunt (1976
Canada) and its sequel, Finish Line (1976 Canada); Assault on the Gods
(1977); Mindflight (1978); a Star Trek novel: Trek to Madworld * (1978);
And Not Make Dreams Your Master (1981); The Business of Being a Writer
(1982) with Kathleen SKY, nonfiction; the Parsina Saga, comprising Shrine
of the Desert Mage (1988), The Storyteller and the Jann (1988) and
Crystals of Air and Water (1989), fantasy.As Editor: SG anonymously
collaborated with David GERROLD on several 1970s anthologies - Protostars
(anth 1971), Generation: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction (anth 1972),
Science Fiction Emphasis 1 (anth 1974), Alternities (anth 1974) and
Ascents of Wonder (anth 1977). He also edited The Alien Condition
(1973).See also: ALIENS; ESP; SPACE OPERA.
GOLDING, LOUIS
(1895-1958) UK writer, several of whose popular novels are on Jewish
themes. The Doomington Wanderer (coll 1934; vt This Wanderer 1935 US; cut
in 2 vols vt The Call of the Hand and Other Stories 1944 chap UK and The
Vicar of Dunkerly Briggs 1944 chap UK) contains several romantically
couched fantasy tales. The Pursuer (1936) sets a psychological parable of
a man obsessed by his Conradian "shadow" in an ALTERNATE WORLD very
similar to our own, while Honey for the Ghost (1949) tells a similar tale
of possession as a ghost story. [JC]Other works: The Miracle Boy (1927), a
religious fantasy; Pale Blue Nightgown: A Book of Tales (coll 1944),
fantasies; The Frightening Talent (1973).
GOLDING, WILLIAM (GERALD)
(1911-1993) UK writer, awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize for Literature. He
wrote a pre-WWII book of Poems (coll 1934), but remained a provincial
schoolmaster until the publication of his first and best-known novel, Lord
of the Flies (1954), later filmed twice as LORD OF THE FLIES (1963, 1990),

a superficially simple story about a group of schoolchildren trapped on an
ISLAND when their plane is shot down while evacuating them from a nuclear
HOLOCAUST. Left alone, the boys - who bear the same names as the schoolboy
heroes in R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1858) - soon revert (
DEVOLUTION) to tribal savagery. Beyond its obvious allegorizing
repudiation of its model, the novel constitutes a complex utterance about
the darkness of the human condition and the shapes human nature takes when
"free" to do so.WG's second novel, The Inheritors (1955), written in part
as a reaction to H.G. WELLS's "The Grisly Folk" (1921), could be seen as
anthropological sf ( ANTHROPOLOGY; ORIGIN OF MAN); it views through the
eyes of a Neanderthal the morally ambiguous triumph of Cro-Magnon Man.
Pincher Martin (1956; vt The Two Deaths of Pincher Martin 1957 US) is as
much sf as Ambrose BIERCE's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", with
which it has frequently been compared. A castaway on a tiny rock in the
ocean, Pincher seems to be surviving with desperate defiance; but, as the
ending makes clear, the rock he clings to is the same shape as a diseased
tooth he touches constantly with his tongue, and his "survival" may well
be no more than a last flicker of pre-purgatorial consciousness. WG's
contribution to Sometime, Never (anth 1956) ed anon, a book including also
stories by John WYNDHAM and Mervyn PEAKE, is "Envoy Extraordinary", a long
tale subsequently made into a play, The Brass Butterfly (1957 US; rev 1958
UK), about Alexandrian Greek inventor Phanocles' attempts to get his steam
engine, gun, pressure-cooker and printing-press accepted by the Roman
emperor, who in refusing these gifts proves philosophically wiser than the
inventor. The story also appears in The Scorpion God (coll 1971) along
with two fantasies.WG's relation to sf is as tangential as his relation to
the conventional mainstream novel; especially in his early works, he
treads the line between allegory and novel with astonishingly fruitful
results. [JC]About the author: Critical literature on WG is extensive and
widely available.See also: CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; DISCOVERY AND
INVENTION; HISTORY IN SF; HISTORY OF SF; SOCIOLOGY.
GOLDMAN, STEPHEN H.
James E. GUNN.
GOLDSMITH, CELE
(1933- ) US editor of SF MAGAZINES who in 1956-8 was assistant editor and
then managing editor of AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC under Paul W.
FAIRMAN, becoming editor of both in Dec 1958; she held this position until
June 1965, when the magazines were sold and ceased for a time to publish
original stories. Under her editorship the quality of both improved
markedly; she was prepared to encourage experiment and was particularly
sensitive to new writers. Among the authors whose first published stories
appeared in her magazines were Thomas M. DISCH, Roger ZELAZNY and Ursula
K. LE GUIN; the latter said of CG, in THE WIND'S TWELVE QUARTERS (coll
1975), that she was "as enterprising and perceptive an editor as the
science fiction magazines ever had". CG married in 1964, becoming Cele G.
Lalli. [MJE]See also: WOMEN SF WRITERS; ZIFF-DAVIS.
GOLDSMITH, HOWARD
(1943- ) US research psychologist and writer whose fiction - including
The Whispering Sea (1976), The Shadow, and Other Strange Tales (coll 1977

chap), Terror by Night, and Other Strange Tales (coll 1977) and Invasion:
2200 A.D. (1979) - was designed for "reluctant readers". With Roger ELWOOD
he produced the anthology Spine-Chillers: Unforgettable Tales of Terror
(anth 1978). [JC]
GOLDSTEIN, LISA
(1953- ) US writer who began writing work of genre interest with The Red
Magician (1982), a fantasy based on Hungarian motifs and venues and set
during the Holocaust; it won the American Book Award for that year. With
considerable intensity, and in a style which treats sf and fantasy
material through a MAGIC-REALIST looking-glass, LG has since then
consistently submitted her protagonists - who are in any case generally
alienated from mainstream life - to deeply alienating venues which are
themselves threatened with radical transformation. The Dream Years (1985)
- alternating sequences of which are set in a 1920s Paris succumbing to
the tenets of Surrealism, and at the crisis point of the Events of 1968 is a timeslip romance which conflates the artistic movement for a
transformed reality with the later moment in history when it seemed, for
an instant, that the world might shift. A Mask for the General (1987), set
in a DYSTOPIAN 21st-century USA, depicts an opposition between the General
who rules the land and the mask-makers who tap tribal depths, who create
totem visages for their friends and enemies, and who wish to transform the
General into one of them, human again, no longer alienated. The alienation
suffered by the protagonists of Tourists (1989; rev 1994) - which is
unconnected to an early short story, "Tourists" (1984 IASFM) - is
superficially more conventional, for the land of Amaz in which they find
themselves caught - as emissaries of a USA which represents a version of
reality no longer valid in this new world - seems at first glance no more
than a typical Middle Eastern backdrop. But the US family's search for a
1000-year-old document of seeming archaeological interest swerves
dizzyingly into an attempt to trace a course between two converging
topologies of reality, and to survive the clash. Though readable in sf
terms, Tourists displays much of the same feel for the labyrinth of the
Orient that found more fantastic expression in The Arabian Nightmare
(1983) by Robert Irwin (1946- ). Some of LG's relatively few short sf
stories were assembled in Daily Voices (coll 1989), and her short fantasy
stories were assembled in Travelers in Magic (coll 1994). Her 1990s work
has in fact been heavily concentrated in that genre; both Strange Devices
of the Sun and Moon (1993) and Summer King, Winter Fool (1994) are
fantasies, both being impressively original. [JC]See also: ARTS; TIME
TRAVEL.
GOLEM
The medieval Jewish legend of the Golem comprises a set of
PROTO-SCIENCE-FICTION stories about the maker and the made. Several well
known rabbis and Judaic scholars of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance
had Golem stories ascribed to them, the most elaborate cycle being that
connected with Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (1512-1609), the Maharal of
Prague, a controversial and admired sage and community leader. "His"
version of the Golem, Joseph, is an automaton made from the sand and mud
lining the Vltava River. To animate him, the rabbi orders one of his

assistants to make a circuit of the figure 7 times, entrusting him with
combinations of letters to utter as he does so; subsequently the rabbi and
his assistants recite Genesis ii.7, which refers to the creation of Man as
a single entity, and the Golem comes to "life". This Prague version of the
legend contains explicit discussions of the Golem as artificial human
being and as human instrument: a being without past or future. Three
uniquely human faculties are denied it: inclination, either to good or
evil; the soul associated with language; and the power to engender. It is
used to inspect the streets of the Prague ghetto.The tale of the Golem is
important to sf not because of any primacy it might claim regarding the
concept of an artificial creature but because it is a narrative, and
because it centrally concerns the making of the most complex tool
imaginable: something (or someone) who looks, and superficially acts, like
us. It is a study in how we shape the environment to meet our needs, and
how we relate to that changed environment while dead labour assists in the
structuring of live labour. It augments Joanna RUSS's curiously neglected
suggestion that work is one of the central concerns of sf.Several earlier
tales and fragments of tales, including some Talmudic references, have
survived. One significant version of the legend is associated with a rabbi
of Chelm near Lublin in Poland; in this variant there is a fear that the
creature may grow, and it is destroyed. The Chelm version gave rise to
Christian developments of the material into what might be called the
Promethean GOTHIC: tales in which a nameless rabbi manages to deactivate
the creature, but is himself smothered in its fall.Of 20th-century
responses to the fable, the most famous is probably Gustav MEYRINK's Der
Golem (1914; cut trans Madge Pemberton as The Golem 1928 US; full version
of trans 1976 US). In He, She and It (1991; vt Body of Glass 1992 UK)
Marge PIERCY retells the tale to enforce an analogy between the Golem and
CYBORGS. [EMP]
GOLIGORSKI, EDUARDO
LATIN AMERICA.
GOLLANCZ
UK publishing house, properly styled Victor Gollancz Ltd, famous (until
its sale to the US company Houghton Mifflin in 1990) as one of the last
family companies in UK publishing; in 1992 Houghton Mifflin sold the firm
to the Cassell group of companies, where it became an imprint. Its early
strength was in political polemic; its main postwar strengths were
detective fiction and sf: from the early 1960s to the late 1980s it was
the premier UK publisher of sf books in hardcover, both native and US. In
the past half decade it has faced greater competition, but it is still
(1995) one of the market leaders. Its earlier history as a publisher, with
some gripping stuff from the files, is told in Gollancz: The Story of a
Publishing House: 1929-1978 (1978) by Sheila Hodges.Victor Gollancz
(1893-1967), the firm's founder in 1928, had always been interested in the
fantastic; though he was never to publish any sf by H.G. WELLS, one of his
inaugural books was Wells's The Open Conspiracy (1928), and within a year
he was publishing reissues of several works by M.P. SHIEL and a new novel
by E.H. VISIAK. In the 1930s came Charles FORT's Lo! (1931), which flopped
badly, the first translation of Franz KAFKA's Der Prozess (written

1914-15; 1925; trans Willa and Edwin Muir as The Trial 1937), sf novels by
Murray Constantine (Katharine BURDEKIN), Andrew MARVELL, Joseph O'NEILL,
R.C. SHERRIFF, Francis STUART and others, and five novels by Charles
WILLIAMS. One of G's most valued authors was George ORWELL, but in 1944
Victor Gollancz turned down Animal Farm (1945), seeing its anti-Stalinism
as inappropriate at a time when Russia, the UK's ally, was suffering
during the war. Later he also rejected Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
(1949).Though this was an unpromising beginning to the postwar period, G
did publish a number of good sf titles in the 1950s, both non-genre and
GENRE SF, the latter including a 1954 edition of Theodore STURGEON's MORE
THAN HUMAN (1953); none, however, was labelled as "science fiction". This
term and the sf list proper (20 or so books a year) were introduced by
Hilary Rubinstein, Victor Gollancz's nephew, after Gollancz had in 1961
published Kingsley AMIS's study of sf, New Maps of Hell (1960 US). Most of
the early big names were US: Hal CLEMENT, Harry HARRISON, Robert A.
HEINLEIN, Frederik POHL, Robert SHECKLEY, Clifford D. SIMAK and others.
The first important UK writer to be added was J.G. BALLARD, with The
Drowned World (1962). For the next two decades Gollancz's plain yellow
jackets with black typography came to seem almost synonymous with
UK-published hardcover sf. (Since the mid-1980s pictorial jackets have
been phased in for most of the major sf and fantasy authors.) Other
important UK writers joining Gollancz were Arthur C. CLARKE, Richard
COWPER, Keith ROBERTS, Bob SHAW and Ian WATSON, with later additions
including Robert P. HOLDSTOCK, Paul J. MCAULEY, Phillip MANN and Terry
PRATCHETT, several of whom made their debuts with Gollancz. Subsequent US
authors included Philip K. DICK, William GIBSON, Ursula K. LE GUIN and
Robert SILVERBERG. The children's list included Peter DICKINSON. After
Rubinstein left in 1963, John Bush took over the list until the early
1980s, when Malcolm EDWARDS took over (spending larger sums on books than
Gollancz had previously allowed), being followed by Richard Evans in 1989.
Gollancz sf editors have normally held very senior positions in the
company, sf providing a major contribution to the company's profit. [PN]
GOOCH, STAN
[r] Christopher EVANS.
GOODCHILD, GEORGE
(1885-1969) UK thriller and adventure writer and playwright. His first sf
novel, The Eye of Abu (1927) as by Alan Dare, was an Atlantean ( ATLANTIS)
LOST-WORLD novel relating the discovery of the Fountain of Youth. As GG he
followed this with The Monster of Grammont (1927), marginally sf, The
Emperor of Hallelujah Island (1930), about a kingdom of criminals, A
Message from Space (1931) and Doctor Zil's Experiment (1953), in which
survivors of a world-destroying DISASTER undergo various tribulations.
[JE/BS]
GOONAN, KATHLEEN ANN
(1952- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Wanting to Talk to You"
for IASFM in 1991, and whose first novel, Queen City Jazz (1994), is a
sophisticated and explosively inventive variation on the post- HOLOCAUST
tale central to American sf since World War 2. The protagonist is-unknown
to herself-a CLONE who leaves her isolated, fundamentalist community in a

quest to restore to life her murdered boyfriend and her telepathic dog.
She goes to Cincinnati, Ohio, one of several
GORDON, BERT I.
The AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN; FOOD OF THE GODS.
GORDON, DAVID
[s] Randall GARRETT.
GORDON, DONALD
Ian CAMERON.
GORDON, MILLARD VERNE
[s] Donald A. WOLLHEIM.
GORDON, NEIL
A.G. MACDONELL.
GORDON, REX
Most frequently used pseudonym of UK writer S(tanley) B(ennett) Hough
(1917- ) for his sf work, although under his own name he has published
Mission in Guemo (1953), the borderline-sf thriller Extinction Bomber
(1956) and Beyond the Eleventh Hour (1961), a story of nuclear HOLCOAUST
in which all the major nations of the world except the UK and India
destroy themselves. As RG, he began publishing sf with Utopia 239 (1955),
whose protagonists escape a nuclear holocaust by TIME TRAVEL into the
future, where a sexually liberated UTOPIA uses its high technology to
survive the consequences of the final war. No Man Friday (1956; vt First
on Mars 1957 US), a ROBINSONSADE which is perhaps RG's strongest book,
retells Crusoe's adventures on MARS, in quietly convincing terms, though
the science is sometimes shaky; the film ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS (1964)
does not credit RG, though the storyline bears notable resemblances. First
to the Stars (1959 US; vt The Worlds of Eclos 1961 UK) is thematically
similar: a crash-landed man and woman try to survive and breed without any
cultural aids at all. First Through Time (1962 US; vt The Time Factor 1964
UK) is a time-travel thriller that asks most of the standard questions
about predestination. Throughout his career RG showed a strong grasp of
human motivation that jarred against a rather superficial use of sf themes
and scientific knowledge in general; his underlying pessimism about
humanity has seemed as a consequence rather underargued. [JC]Other works:
Utopia Minus X (1966 US; vt The Paw of God 1967 UK); The Yellow Fraction
(1969 US); Creative Writing (nd but c1983 chap) as by S.B. Hough,
nonfiction.
GORDON, RICHARD A.
[s] Stuart GORDON.
GORDON, SPIKE
[s] John Russell FEARN.
GORDON, STUART
Pseudonym of Scottish writer Richard Gordon (1947- ), who also writes as
Alex R. Stuart and published his first sf story -"A Light in the Sky" for
NW in 1965 - as Richard A. Gordon. His first sf novel, Time Story (1972),

describes a criminal's attempt to flee retribution via TIME TRAVEL. In his
Eyes books - One-Eye (1973 US), Two-Eyes (1974 US) and Three-Eyes (1975
US), assembled as The Eyes Trilogy (omni 1978) - the MUTANT One-Eye
triggers the forces of chaos in an apocalyptic post- HOLOCAUST land where
humanity fights a losing battle against genetic decay; in increasingly
elaborated prose (SG's main fault as a writer is an inadequate control
over imagery) the trilogy proceeds to a complex self-confrontation of
mankind. Smile on the Void: The Mythhistory of Ralph M'Botu Kitaj (1981
US) ponderously guys late-20th-century susceptibilities in the "biography"
of an almost certainly fake MESSIAH. Fire in the Abyss (1983 US), though
terribly overcrowded, impressively plants the Elizabethan sailor Sir
Humphrey Gilbert (1537-1583) via time travel into an apocalyptically
dissolving present-day. The Watchers trilogy - Archon (1987), The Hidden
World (1988) and The Mask (1988) - is another extremely complex
time-travel fantasy, in the opposite direction, as 20th-century personal
traumas intersect, in medieval and Reformation France, with the cultural
ills of the present and the NEAR FUTURE. SG's language has baroque vigour
and his plots are increasingly inventive; he lacks mainly a capacity to
moderate and therefore give verisimilitude to the rush of notions.
[JC]Other works: Suaine ?
novels, of which The Outlaws (1972), The Devil's Rider (1973) and The Bike
from Hell (1973) have fantasy/sf components.
GORER, GEOFFREY (EDGAR)
(1905-1985) UK anthropologist and writer whose Nobody Talks Politics
(1936) is a SATIRE on UK POLITICS of the 1930s as seen through the eyes of
a young man woken from a 10-year trance. Its Epilogue is set in the NEAR
FUTURE. [JC]
GORGO
Film (1960). King Bros/MGM. Dir Eugene Lourie, starring Bill Travers,
William Sylvester, Vincent Winter. Screenplay John Loring, Daniel Hyatt,
based on a story by Lourie and Hyatt. 78 mins. Colour.A prehistoric
reptile is captured off a small island in the Irish Sea, taken to London
and put on show. But the 65ft (20m) creature turns out to be a mere
infant, as everyone discovers when its 150ft (45m) mother comes to collect
it, demolishing bits of London in the process. We are allowed to
sympathize with the monsters and cheer their escape. Good use is made of
locations, and there are interesting special effects by Tom Howard. The
monsters are achieved by the cheap man-in-a-suit technique, but are
effective nonetheless. Lourie had once worked as an art director for Jean
Renoir, and his latter-day reputation as director of sea-going MONSTER
MOVIES was a sad come-down ( The BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS ; BEHEMOTH, THE
SEA MONSTER), but G is atmospheric and crisply made. The novelization,
with wholly irrelevant soft-core pornographic additions, is Gorgo * (1960)
by Carter BINGHAM. [JB/PN]
GORODISCHER, ANGELICA
[r] LATIN AMERICA.
GOTHIC SF
In current usage a "Gothic" is a romantic novel which has a strong

element of the mysterious or the supernatural and which usually features
the persecution of a woman in an isolated locale; but this restricted and
specialized use of the word has nothing to do with sf. The term "Gothic"
entered critical terminology with the publication of The Castle of Otranto
(1765), subtitled "A Gothic Story", by Horace Walpole (1717-1797). As in
architecture, the word originally referred to a medieval style. Although
the Middle Ages had for much of the 18th century been thought of as
barbaric, a nostalgia had now developed for the romantic splendours of an
idealized Middle Ages that never existed. Gothic novels in imitation of
Walpole's ghostly tale became quite common as the century drew to a close;
indeed their popularity was closely allied to the growth of Romantic
literature generally.The Gothic may be seen as a reaction to the emphasis
on reason which prevailed in the Enlightenment, the intellectual world of
the 18th century. In a world ruled by Order, where Isaac Newton
(1642-1727) had explained the mechanics of the Solar System, Carolus
Linnaeus (1707-1778) had shown how plants and animals could be logically
classified, Adam Smith (1723-1790) had written of the apparently immutable
laws of ECONOMICS, and sermons in church regularly pictured God as a kind
of master watchmaker who had wound the Universe up and left it to tick
like a perfectly regulated mechanism, some room needed to be left for
mystery, the marvellous, the evil, the inexplicable. The movement was
probably given impetus at the beginning of the 19th century by science
itself becoming remystified through all the work being done on the strange
forces of electromagnetism, and also by a crumbling social stability, as
signalled by many political revolutions across the Western World.Such is
the background against which Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein (1818; rev 1831)
should be read. With this book, along with the contemporary works of
E.T.A. HOFFMANN and a little later Edgar Allan POE, the use of science in
fiction was becoming assimilated into a literary movement which emphasized
mystery over knowledge, and the dangers of Man trespassing in a territory
rightfully God's. The linking of science with the Gothic may have been
partly a historical accident, and the balance was soon to be partly
rectified by the sometimes laboured common sense of Jules VERNE (even he
produced a Gothic hero, in Captain Nemo), but it certainly had
repercussions in sf which have by no means died away. Brian W. ALDISS, in
his critical work Billion Year Spree (1973; rev with David WINGROVE as
Trillion Year Spree 1986), argues that sf "is characteristically cast in
the Gothic or post-Gothic mould". That may be putting it too strongly, but
Aldiss's view is certainly a useful antidote to the commoner views that sf
is a literature either of technology or of UTOPIAS and
anti-utopias.Certainly from Mary Shelley's day to now, much sf has been
devoted to secrets, to inexplicable violence and wildness lurking beneath
the veneer of civilization and to the ALIEN and the monstrous bursting in
on us from the outside; Gothic sf emphasizes danger, and attacks the
complacency of those of us who imagine the world to be well lit and
comfortable while ignoring that outside all is darkness. Gothic sf
characteristically clothes these fears in quasiscientific talk, but in
spirit it is quite opposed to the outlook of the SCIENTIST. The prototype
is perhaps Robert Louis STEVENSON's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886) - which, in its story of a respectable doctor whose alter ego is a
brutish sensualist and a living monument to the reality of Original Sin,

can be read as an allegory of the violent subconscious struggling with the
conscious mind - for the archetypal Gothic story is the tale of the Thing
in the Cellar, in which an everyday world of surface conceals the menacing
depths (and subtexts). Other sf writers of the 19th century who worked in
the Gothic mode were Bulwer LYTTON, Ambrose BIERCE and Arthur MACHEN.In
the 20th century, the Gothic mode was largely hived off into the genre of
occult/horror, but it never lost its kinship with sf. WEIRD TALES was the
archetypally Gothic PULP MAGAZINE, and several of its authors wrote sf
too. H.P. LOVECRAFT, of course, is as pure an instance of the Gothic
writer as can be found in this century, but some of the same qualities can
be found in writers who were much more closely associated with sf than
Lovecraft ever was. About two-thirds of all sf films ( CINEMA), especially
MONSTER MOVIES, are pure Gothic. PARANOIA in sf nearly always falls into
the Gothic mode.The Gothic idea of the Promethean or Faustian mad
scientist ( CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; SCIENTISTS) punished for assuming the
creative powers belonging to the gods or God (sometimes for creating
artificial life without a soul) was central to sf early in this century,
as in the films ALRAUNE (1928) and FRANKENSTEIN (1931). Other sf variants
of Gothic images are the renegade ROBOT (along with all
ghost-in-the-machine stories), most Luddite stories, most stories of
manipulation by beings who may be GODS AND DEMONS, nearly all stories
rationalizing SUPERNATURAL CREATURES, most stories about ambiguous ALIEN
artefacts; indeed, to put it more widely still, most stories in which the
Universe proves unamenable to rational (or "cognitive") understanding.It
is so easy to find Gothic elements in even the most celebrated writers of
sf that there is little point in listing actual books containing them. Sf
writers whose work is consistently Gothic are, among many others: John
BLACKBURN, James P. BLAYLOCK, Ray BRADBURY, S. Guy ENDORE, Robert P.
HOLDSTOCK, K.W. JETER, Stephen KING, Nigel KNEALE, Dean R. KOONTZ, Richard
MATHESON, Kim NEWMAN, Tim POWERS, Maurice RENARD, Sax ROHMER, Dan
SIMMONS,
Curt SIODMAK, Lisa TUTTLE and Chelsea Quinn YARBRO; it is no coincidence
that nearly all of these have written HORROR fiction as well. But there
are strong Gothic elements in other sf writers whose work is considered
less borderline. These include - again, among a hundred others - Brian W.
Aldiss, Alfred BESTER, James BLISH, Algis BUDRYS, Richard COWPER, Samuel
R. DELANY, Philip K. DICK, Thomas M. DISCH, Philip Jose FARMER, William
GIBSON, George R.R. MARTIN, Michael MOORCOCK, Geoff RYMAN, Fred
SABERHAGEN, Hilbert SCHENCK, Lucius SHEPARD, Lew SHINER, Michael SWANWICK,
Sheri S. TEPPER, Jack VANCE, Howard WALDROP, Gene WOLFE, John WYNDHAM and
Roger ZELAZNY. If the case for the prevalence of Gothic sf is correct,
then we must see it as so deeply engrained that it cannot be considered a
mere sport or mutant form of the genre.There has always been a tension in
sf between the Classical desire for order and understanding - for the
Universe that can be known - and the Romantic desire (which fits the
observable facts to date) that the Universe should continue to surprise
us, hold secrets and malignities. This latter desire (or fear, or both) is
the Gothic, and its coexistence with the Classical or cognitive, in most
major sf writers of our century, is not a paradox; the place where the two
forces meet (Classical and Romantic, cognitive and Gothic) might almost be
described as the central place where sf happens, the seeding-ground for

its fertility. If this is the case, then Brian Aldiss's above-noted
comment ( DEFINITIONS OF SF) is not as eccentric as some have found it;
moreover, those definitions that see sf as exclusively cognitive (like
Darko SUVIN's) are missing the point; they are prescriptive, not
descriptive. Sf remains a Romance literature. Its vaunted SENSE OF WONDER
arises as much from its Gothic as from its scientific elements, and will
continue to do so as long as the Thing in the Cellar keeps lashing its
tail. [PN]See also: FANTASY; HISTORY OF SF.
GOTLIEB, PHYLLIS (FAY)
(1926- ) Canadian writer probably best known for her POETRY. She took an
MA with the University of Toronto in English language and literature, and
married a professor of computer science, whom she credits for assistance
on her second sf novel. She began publishing sf with "A Grain of Manhood"
for Fantastic in 1959 and gained considerable praise for her first novel,
Sunburst (1964 US), which treats feelingly of the growth of a connected
group of MUTANT children, of their harrowing difficulties, of the gestalt
concord they arrive at, and of their coming to (a somewhat overplotted)
accord with the surrounding world. Complexities of kinship and identity
also pervade her Sven Dahlgren books - O Master Caliban! (1976 US) and
Heart of Red Iron (1989 US) - which take place on a planet set aside for
environmental experiments. In the first the young four-armed Dhalgren must
confront and defeat the sentient ROBOTS which have seized power from his
scientist father; in the second he must calibrate the needs of various
ALIEN races and come to terms with his own humanity. PG's stories - some
of the best are assembled in Son of the Morning and Other Stories (coll
1983 US) - also tend to investigate questions of human nature through sf
tropes, like PSI POWERS, that are congenial to that sort of exploration. A
second series, the Starcats books - A Judgement of Dragons (1980 US),
Emperor, Swords, Pentacles (1982 US) and The Kingdom of the Cats (1985 US)
- features interstellar travel and other sf trappings attuned to SCIENCE
FANTASY needs. With Douglas BARBOUR she edited Tesseracts(2) (anth 1987),
a series - #1 ed Judith MERRIL - designed to showcase Canadian sf. [JC]See
also: CANADA.
GOTSCHALK, FELIX C.
(1929- ) US writer and psychologist who began publishing sf with "Outer
Concentric" and "The Examination" for New Dimensions 4 (anth 1974) ed
Robert SILVERBERG. In a relatively short time he established a reputation
as an author of high linguistic energy whose stories emoted a ruthless
savvy about the future. Many of his tales are narrated through stunning
linguistic displays of the emotional and physiological ways of being that
humans display in isolation and in their relations to the social world;
these ways of being are constantly articulated by the protagonists in a
flow of brilliant jargon, with the result that existence and the
LINGUISTIC perception of existence become identical. The effect is
exhilarating and also rather terrifying. FCG's first novel, Growing Up in
Tier 3000 (1975), is set in a world very similar to that of many of the
tales, and deploys a similarly searching sense of the surface of events
and of identities, though its plot moves with some difficulty: in an
energy-quarantined, savagely competitive, complexly automated DYSTOPIAN

future society, young children show their readiness to take over from
their elders (in a reductio ad absurdum of the Whorfian hypothesis that
language structure determines our conceptualization of the world) by
understanding the languages necessary for survival in the hyperkinetic
new. At least two further novels have been written and await publication;
but the aggressive ingenuity of his style, and the oddly high-strung
gallantry of his attitude to the futures in store for the human race that they are to be endured with grace, but never "won" - make his work
unlikely to reach a wide market. [JC]See also: CITIES; FABULATION; TABOOS.
GOTTESMAN, S.D.
Pseudonym used on magazine stories by C.M. KORNBLUTH 1940-42, once solo,
5 times with Frederik POHL, and twice with both Pohl and Robert A.W.
LOWNDES. [PN]
GOTTLIEB, HINKO
(1886-1948) Yugoslav writer, editor and lawyer whose sf novel, The Key to
the Great Gate(manuscript trans Fred Bolman and Ruth Morris from the
Serbo-Croat 1947 US), was first composed in an Italian concentration camp
(the manuscript was destroyed and had to be reconstructed later). An
imprisoned SCIENTIST, having learned how to expand and contract the
Einsteinian spacetime continuum, dazzles and befuddles his Nazi guards,
gradually becoming an effective symbol of human dignity and the freedom of
the spirit. The book is also funny, in a fashion possibly evocative, for
readers not familiar with Serbo-Croat literature, of writers like Karel
CAPEK. [JC]
GOULART, RON(ALD JOSEPH)
(1933- ) US writer, born in California, where he lived until the late
1960s and which he has made the setting (whether or not literally so) for
much of his sf. After graduation he worked in an advertising agency; he
has put on record the influence of this experience on the forming of his
concise, polished style. He published his first sf, "Letters to the
Editor", in FSF in 1952, and wrote many stories before the appearance of
his first sf novel, The Sword Swallower (1968), which features the
Chameleon Corps of shapeshifting agents; the book - like much of his
ensuing work - is set in a SPACE-OPERA venue called the Barnum System
which much resembles Southern California: urbanized, helter-skelter,
crazed and balkanized, the planets of this system, where the Corps
originates, are populated in large part by traditional comic stereotypes
or humours, deftly drawn. Again like many of its successors, the novel
features a gangly detective on the trail of a complex crime ( CRIME AND
PUNISHMENT); his need to search out clues and suspects takes him
(conveniently) through a wide spectrum of scenes and characters.
Similarities of plot and setting (and numerous cross-references) dog any
anatomizer of series in the RG universe, but other books specifically
connected to the Barnum System include The Fire-Eater (1970), Death Cell
(1971), The Chamelon Corps and Other Shape Changers (coll 1972), Plunder
(1972), Shaggy Planet (1973), Flux (1974), Spacehawk, Inc. (1974), A Whiff
of Madness (1976), The Wicked Cyborg (1978), Daredevils, Ltd (1987),
Starpirate's Brain (1987) and Everybody Comes to Cosmo's (1988); the Star
Hawk sequence of novels - Empire 99 (1980) and The Cyborg King (1981),

based on the COMIC strip illustrated by Gil Kane - are also set in Barnum.
Along with the remarkable AFTER THINGS FELL APART (1970), these books
share a swiftness of telling, a constant hilariousness and a cogency;
elsewhere, jokes sometimes seem to guide the storylines, which can be
flimsy.Much of RG's work is, in fact, journeyman, though even in the most
desultory tale his smooth dialogue-driven style is always recognizable. In
the mid-1970s and 1980s he wrote under various pseudonyms (including the
house names Kenneth ROBESON and Con Steffanson, as well as personal
pseudonyms like Chad Calhoun, R.T. Edwards, Ian R. Jamieson, Josephine
Kains, Jillian Kearny, Howard Lee, Zeke Masters, Frank S. Shawn and Joseph
Silva) a large number of novelizations and other routine work (see listing
below for titles of genre interest). As RG, his Vampirella series Bloodstalk * (1975), On Alien Wings * (1975), Deadwalk * (1976), Blood
Wedding * (1976), Deathgame * (1976) and Snakegod * (1976) - put a
character derived from stories published in Vampirella, a comic book which
ran from 1969 to 1983; his versions were thinly humorous. The Wild Talents
sequence, which includes A Talent for the Invisible (1973 and Hello,
Lemuria, Hello (1979), and the Gypsy sequence about an identity-quest,
which includes Quest of the Gypsy (1976) and Eye of the Vulture (1977),
similarly lacked their author's full attention.A darker, sharper, more
attentive aspect of the RG vision of California-as-Barnum can be seen in
those of his novels - Wildsmith (1972), among others - which feature the
highly humanized, eccentric, wilful ROBOTS which are perhaps his most
enduring creation. Quite remarkably comic in their deadpan obsessiveness
and pernickety sang-froid, they serve also as genuinely effective icons of
a time - the NEAR FUTURE - and a place - either Southern California itself
or the world which it portends - caught in the throes of convulsive
change.The slightness of RG's plotting does at times make his satirical
intent difficult to perceive; an underlying saliency can be detected more
clearly, perhaps, in collections like What's Become of Screwloose? and
Other Inquiries (coll 1971), Broke Down Engine and Other Troubles with
Machines (coll 1971), Nutzenbolts and More Troubles with Machines (coll
1975) and Skyrocket Steele Conquers the Universe and Other Media Tales
(coll 1990) - the last being connected with the novel Skyrocket Steele
(1980). Odd Job No. 101 and Other Future Crimes and Intrigues (coll 1975),
Calling Dr Patchwork (1978), Big Bang (1982) and Brainz, Inc. (1985) make
up the Odd Jobs sequence, whose interest diminishes with extension.Though
he is prolific and acute, it can still be said of RG that his dark wit and
adroit handling of plot and theme have not yet been directed to a project
of a scope sufficient to give those talents full play. [JC]Other works:
Gadget Man (1971); Clockwork's Pirates (1971 dos); Ghost Breaker (coll
1971 dos); Hawkshaw (1972); The Tin Angel (1973), later assembled with
Flux as Flux and The Tin Angel (omni 1978 UK); Shaggy Planet (1973); When
the Waker Sleeps (1975); The Hellhound Project (1975); The Enormous
Hourglass (1976); Challengers of the Unknown * (1977); Crackpot (1977);
The Emperor of the Last Days (1977); The Panchronicon Plot (1977); Nemo
(1977); Capricorn One * (1978) ( CAPRICORN ONE); Dr Scofflaw (1979 dos);
Hail Hibbler (1980); The Robot in the Closet (1981); Brinkman (1981);
Upside Downside (1982); 3 Battlestar Galactica novels, all with Glen A.
LARSON, Greetings from Earth * (1983), Experiment in Terra * (1984) and
The Long Patrol * (1984); Hellquad (1984); The Prisoner of Blackwood

Castle (1984); Suicide, Inc. (1985); Galaxy Jane (1986); The Curse of the
Obelisk (1987); The Tijuana Bible (1989). The introduction to William
SHATNER's extremely Goulart-like TekWar (1989) thanks RG for his help;
this book and its two sequels, TekLords (1991) and TekLab (1991), have
been attributed to RG.As Josephine Kains: The Devil Mask Mystery (1978);
The Curse of the Golden Skull (1978); The Green Lama Mystery (1979); The
Whispering Cat Mystery (1979); The Witch's Tower Mystery (1979); The
Laughing Dragon Mystery (1980);The Witch's Tower Mystery (1980), a non-sf
tale with RECURSIVE elements.As Howard Lee: Two Kung Fu novels: Chains
(1973) and Superstition (1973).As Frank S. Shawn: Books in the Phantom
series: The Veiled Lady * (1973); The Golden Circle * (1973); The Mystery
of the Sea Horse * (1973); The Hydra Monster * (1973); The Goggle-Eyed
Pirates * (1974); The Swamp Rats * (1974).As Kenneth Robeson (house name):
Books in the The Avenger series: The Man from Atlantis * (1974); Red Moon
* (1974); The Purple Zombie * (1974); Dr Time * (1974); The Nightwitch
Devil * (1974); Black Chariots * (1974); The Cartoon Crimes * (1974); The
Death Machine * (1974); The Blood Countess * (1975); The Glass Man *
(1975); The Iron Skull * (1975); Demon Island * (1975).As Con Steffanson
(house name): Books in the Flash Gordon series: The Lion Men of Mongo *
(1974); The Plague of Sound * (1974); The Space Circus * (1974).As Joseph
Silva: The Island of Dr Moreau * (1977) ( The ISLAND OF DR MOREAU );
Stalker from the Stars * (1977) with Lein Wein and Mary Wolfman; Holocaust
for Hire * (1979), a Captain America novel. The pseudonym plays on the
name of one of RG's many private eyes, Jose Silvera.As Editor: The
Hardboiled Dicks (anth 1965); Lineup Tough Guys (anth 1966); The Great
British Detective (1982); The Encyclopedia of American Comics (1990), for
which he also wrote about half the entries.Nonfiction: The Assault on
Childhood (1972); Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines
(1972); An American Family (1973); The Adventurous Decade: Comic Strips in
the Thirties (1976); Focus on Jack Cole (1986 chap); The Great Comic Book
Artists (1986) and The Great Comic Book Artists Volume 2 (1988); Ron
Goulart's Great History of Comic Books (1986); The Dime Detectives (1988).
See also: HUMOUR; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; ROBERT HALE LIMITED; SATIRE; TIME
TRAVEL.
GOULD, ALAN
[s] Michael A. BANKS.
GOULD, F(RANCIS) CARRUTHERS
(1844-1925) UK illustrator and writer, creator of a large number of
sharply satirical political cartoons in the decades before WWI. "Who
Killed Cock Robin?", and Other Stories for Children Young and Old (coll
1896) assembled various parodic animal fables, among which "The Great
Beetle War" comes closest to sf. Explorations in the Sit-tee Desert, Being
a Comic Account of the Supposed Discovery of the Ruins of the London Stock
Exchange some 2000 Years Hence (1899 chap) is a surprisingly effective and
pointed SATIRE written from a post- HOLOCAUST viewpoint. [JC]
GOULD, F(REDERICK) J(AMES)
(1855-1938) UK writer of numerous works in which he espoused an agnostic
philosophy. His sf novel, The Agnostic Island (1891), exposes some
Christian missionaries to a society which threatens their beliefs. [JC]

GOVE, PHILIP BABCOCK
(1902-1972) US academic, author of The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction:
A History of its Criticism and a Guide for its Study, with an Annotated
Check List of 215 Imaginary Voyages from 1700 to 1800 (1941; reissued by
ARNO PRESS 1975). Though in no sense a book about sf per se, it is one of
the most important and reliable tools for the researcher into 18th-century
FANTASTIC VOYAGES, about which few books have been written. [PN]See also:
CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF.
GOWLAND, JOHN STAFFORD
(1898-? ) UK writer whose sf novel, Beyond Mars (1956), treats, perhaps
rather primitively, space travel to the Moon and beyond by use of
ANTIGRAVITY. [JC]
GRABIEN, DEBORAH
(1954- ) US writer. Her first novel, Woman of Fire (1988; vt Eyes in the
Fire 1989 US), is fantasy. Her second, the post- HOLOCAUST Plainsong (1990
US), is an unsentimental PASTORAL tale about the arrival of a new Messiah
in a plague-devastated land. Her third novel is Fire Queen (1990); her
fourth, And Then Put Out the Light (1993), is a ghost story. [JC]
GRAEME, BRUCE
[r] Anthony ARMSTRONG.
GRAHAM, DAVID
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
GRAHAM, J(OHN) M(ICHAEL)
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
GRAHAM, P(ETER) ANDERSON
(? -1925) UK writer on rural themes whose post- HOLOCAUST novel, The
Collapse of Homo Sapiens (1923), written in the apocalypse-obsessed
aftermath of WWI, identifies the fall of mankind with the defeat of the UK
by an alliance of coloured powers, which themselves soon disintegrate,
leaving the world to shrink and degenerate. The traveller who is moved
through time to witness this disaster puts much of the blame for the UK's
unreadiness upon trade-union nihilists. [JC]
GRAHAM, ROBERT
Joe HALDEMAN.
GRAHAM, ROGER PHILLIPS
[r] Rog PHILLIPS.
GRAHAM, TOM
Sinclair LEWIS.
GRAHAME-WHITE, CLAUDE
(1879-1959) UK author of two sf juveniles with Harry HARPER (whom see for
details): The Air-King's Treasure (1913) and The Invisible War-Plane: A
Tale of Air Adventure in the Great Campaign(1915). [JC]
GRAND TOUR: DISASTER IN TIME
DISASTER IN TIME.

GRANT, ANTHONY
ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
GRANT, CHARLES L(EWIS)
(1942- ) US writer who has restricted himself since the late 1970s almost
exclusively to horror and fantasy fiction (see listing below), mainly
under his own name (sometimes in the form C.L. Grant), though he has
written books as by Felicia Andrews, Steven Charles, Simon Lake, Lionel
Fenn and Geoffrey Marsh. He began publishing work of genre interest with
"The House of Evil" for FSF in 1968, but really became active only after
the mid-1970s with the release of his first novels, the Parric family
series of post- HOLOCAUST tales: The Shadow of Alpha (1976), Ascension
(1977) and Legion (1979). Set in a balkanized USA ravaged by a PlagueWind
and beset with petty dictators and crazed ANDROIDS, all three novels they form part of a much longer, uncompleted sequence - are told in a
somewhat heated style possibly derived from the example of Samuel R.
DELANY, and perhaps more suitably applied, as CLG has seemingly decided,
to other genres. Further novels containing sf elements include The Ravens
of the Moon (1979), but the precepts of horror fiction are generally
dominant. Of his horror, the best known titles fit into the Oxrun Station
sequence. He has edited two notable series - Shadows and two of the Night
Visions anthologies - and a useful manual, Writing and Selling Science
Fiction (anth 1976). His "A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn's Eye" won the 1978
Best Novelette NEBULA. [JC]Fantasy and horror titles:Oxrun Station: The
Hour of the Oxrun Dead (1977); The Sound of Midnight (1978); The Last Call
of Mourning (1979); The Grave (1981); The Bloodwind (1982); a 19th-century
trilogy internal to the Oxrun sequence and comprising The Soft Whisper of
the Dead (1982), The Dark Cry of the Moon (1986) and The Long Night of the
Grave (1986); Nightmare Seasons (fixup 1982); The Orchard (1986); Dialing
the Wind (1989).Singletons: A Quiet Night of Fear (1981); Tales from the
Nightside (coll 1981); A Glow of Candles and Other Stories (coll 1981);
The Nestling (1982); Night Songs (1984); The Teaparty (1985); The Pet
(1986); For Fear of the Night (1988); In a Dark Dream (1989); Stunts
(1990); Fire Mask (1991); Something Stirs (1991); Raven (1993); Jackals
(1994); The X Files: Goblins *(1994), tied to the tv series.As Felicia
Andrews: Mountainwitch (1980).As Steven Charles: The Private Academy
sequence of sf/horror novels for a young-adult audience, comprising
Nightmare Session (1986), Academy of Terror (1986), Witch's Eye (1986),
Skeleton Key (1986), The Enemy Within (1987) and The Last Alien (1987).As
Lionel Fenn: The Quest for the White Duck sequence of comic fantasies,
comprising Blood River Down (1986), Web of Defeat (1987), Agnes Day (1987)
and The Seven Spears of the W'dch'ck (1988); the Kent Montana series of
comic sf tales, which invoke Hollywood icons through the adventures of a
failed actor, comprising Kent Montana and the Really Ugly Thing from Mars
(1990), Kent Montana and the Reasonably Invisible Man (1991);Kent Montana
and the Once and Future Thing (1991), The Mark of the Moderately Vicious
Vampire (1992) and 668: The Neighbor of the Beast (1992); the Diego
series, featuring a gunslinger who travels through time, and comprising
Once Upon a Time in the East (1993), By the Time I Get to Nashville (1994)
and The Semi-Final Frontier (1994).As Simon Lake: The Midnight Place

sequence comprising Midnight Place: Daughter of Darkness (1992), #2:
Something's Watching (1992), #3: Death Cycle (1993) and #4: He Told Me To
(1993).As Geoffrey Marsh: The Lincoln Blackthorne thrillers, The King of
Satan's Eyes (1984), The Tale of the Arabian, Knight (1986), The Patch of
the Odin Soldier (1987) and The Fangs of the Hooded Demon (1988).As editor
(series): The Shadows anthologies, comprising Shadows (anth 1978; vt
Shadows II 1987 UK), #2 (anth 1979), #3 (anth 1980), #4 (anth 1981; vt
Shadows 1987 UK), #5 (anth 1982), #6 (anth 1983), #7 (anth 1984), #8 (anth
1985), #9 (anth 1986) and #10 (anth 1987), the entire series being
showcased in The Best of Shadows (anth 1988) and Final Shadows (anth
1991); of the Night Visions anthologies, Night Visions 2 (anth 1985; vt
Night Visions: Dead Image 1987; vt Night Terrors 1989 UK) and Night
Visions 4 (anth 1987; vt Night Fears 1989 UK) uncredited for the UK
versions; the Greystone Bay anthologies, comprising The First Chronicles
of Greystone Bay * (anth 1985), Doom City * (anth 1987),The SeaHarp Hotel
* (anth 1990) and In the Fog: the Final Chronicle of Greystone Bay (anth
1993).As editor (singletons): Nightmares (anth 1979); Horrors (anth 1981);
Terrors (anth 1983); The Dodd, Mead Gallery of Horror (anth 1983); vt
Gallery of Horror 1983 UK; Midnight (anth 1985); After Midnight (anth
1986).
GRANT, DAVID
Craig THOMAS.
GRANT, JOHN
Paul BARNETT.
GRANT, MARK
David F. BISCHOFF.
GRANT, MAXWELL
STREET ?
details) wrote some 300 novels, usually about The Shadow. He was followed
by Dennis LYNDS (whom also see). [JC]
GRANT, RICHARD
(1952- ) US writer; he lives with Elizabeth HAND. RG began writing work
of genre interest with "Drode's Equations" for New Dimensions 12 (anth
1981) ed Marta RANDALL, and came to rapid prominence with three novels of
mixed sf/fantasy provenance, set in the same post- HOLOCAUST land, almost
certainly the USA, but transfigured by time and events. The first,
Saraband of Lost Time (1985), is set much the deepest into this venue, so
far into the future that the rather shambling plot mainly serves the
PLANETARY-ROMANCE function of guiding the reader through the world, whose
contours have reminded some critics of M. John HARRISON's Viriconium. The
rich array of protagonists featured in Rumours of Spring (1987) is
reminiscent of the same source, though RG seems quite visibly to have
taken more pleasure in creating characters than Harrison ever has; the
plot involves a quest, hampered by spiritual ENTROPY, for the Gaian spirit
of the forest which is beginning to assault the desultory evening cultures
of humankind. Beyond Harrison, authors freely used as models by RG include
James P. BLAYLOCK and John CROWLEY; but the amalgam has a recognizable
flavour of its own. View from the Oldest House (1989) casts its net even

more widely, bringing in allusions to figures from Milton to James Joyce
to Archibald MacLeish to Thomas PYNCHON, in addition to all the above; the
story itself, set in a NEAR-FUTURE, HOLOCAUST-haunted version of the same
domain, tends to founder in these labyrinths of reference, just as its
protagonist founders in his search for a self. A fourth novel, Through the
Heart (1992), sharpens in sf terms RG's abiding venue: North America after
the Fall, and won the 1993 PHILIP K. DICK AWARD. [JC]See also:
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; PHILIP K. DICK AWARD.
GRANT, ROBERT
(1852-1940) US novelist chiefly remembered for Unleavened Bread (1900).
With John Boyle O'REILLY (1844-1890), an Irish writer who escaped
Australian exile to live in the USA, J.S. of Dale (a pseudonym of US
lawyer Frederick Jessup Stimson [1855-1943]) and J.T. Wheelwright
(1856-1925), also a New England lawyer, RG wrote The King's Men: A Tale of
To-morrow (1884), set in a republican UK around the 1940s, during a period
of Royalist rebellion (like that of Bonnie Prince Charlie 200 years
earlier). There is a great deal of tangled action, and some sf artillery.
Republicanism triumphs. [JC]
GRANVILLE, AUSTYN
(? -? ) 19th-century US author, resident for some years in Australia. His
racy, bigoted lost-race ( LOST WORLDS) novel The Fallen Race (1892), one
of the earliest sf books set in Australia, shares the belief in a great
inland sea which in real life led to the disappointment or death of many
explorers. Stranded in the desert, a doctor finds a lost race developed,
absurdly, from the primeval union of aboriginals and kangaroos; its
people, almost spherical in shape, are ruled by a White (human) queen. The
protagonist outwits a palace revolution, survives the amorous attentions
of a female spheroid, establishes - through technological knowhow and
CULTURAL ENGINEERING - a middle-class UTOPIA, and marries the queen.
[PN]Other works: If the Devil Came to Chicago (1894) with W. Wilson Knott,
a reformist fantasy about vice.See also: SEX.
GRAPHIC NOVEL
To speak of the graphic novel is to speak of a particular kind of COMIC
book, but to do so after about 1985 is to risk applying what has become a
marketing term to questions of definition, transforming a practical
distinction into what looks superficially like a separate genre.The
graphic novel proper is a self-contained narrative in comic-book form. It
is almost never, in other words, part of an ongoing series like Fantastic
Four (from 1961), though there are exceptions, like Dave SIM's Cerebus the
Aardvark (from 1977), a connected series of stories projected to extend to
300 issues. It should be noted, too, that many graphic novels are
initially published episodically in comic-book format, whether or not
originally conceived as a single narrative, only subsequently reaching the
state which readers tend to recognize as that of a graphic novel; that is,
a large (often quarto-sized), usually perfect-bound volume of anywhere
from 50 to 300 pages.Through the 20th century, many books have been
published which present a fictional tale primarily or solely through a
sequence of pictures; the first important artist to become involved in
graphic storytelling was probably Frans Masereel (1889-1972), whose

nonverbal narratives in woodcut - culminating in Die Stadt (1925; as The
City 1988 UK) - vividly encapsulated a 1920s sense of the new century in
imagery reminiscent of the medieval Dance of Death. Books like Szegeti
Szuts's My War (1931), might also seem to constitute part of a tradition
which led directly to the graphic novels of the 1970s, but this is almost
certainly misleading. Though many graphic-novel writers and illustrators
are clearly aware of various forms of visual narrative - including recent
painterly experiments in visual narration like A Humument: A Treated
Victorian Novel (1980) by Tom Phillips (1937- ) - the graphic novel itself
derives from the very specific conventions of the comic, in particular
from the extraordinarily sophisticated, cinema-derived narrative
techniques which have been developed over the decades by comic-book
artists, and which distinguish the comic from all other forms of visual
storytelling. Masereel may have collaborated on film work (with directors
like Abel Gance [1889-1981]), but only after having created his novels in
terms which were cognate with but which did not borrow directly from the
early CINEMA. No more is a recent figure like Glen Baxter a graphic
novelist, as we are using the term. His The Billiard Table Murders: A
Gladys Babbington Morton Mystery (1990) is certainly a visual novel; but
Baxter is a cartoonist rather than a comic-book artist, and his visual
pages are frozen images which highlight and comment upon the narrative
action, whereas in a true graphic novel the images carry the action. The
difference is as between night and day.Though comic-derived tales - like
He Done Her Wrong: The Great American Novel: And Not a Word in it - No
Music, Too (1930) by Milt Gross (1895-1953) - were not uncommon from an
early date, the term "graphic novel" was coined, possibly by the author
himself, to describe what was itself in fact a collection of linked
stories, A Contract with God (graph 1978) by Will Eisner (1917- ), but it
did not become a widely used label until the release of a strangely ill
matched trio - Maus (1980-85 Raw; graph 1987) by Art Spiegelman (1948- ),
WATCHMEN (1986-7; graph 1987) by Alan MOORE and Dave GIBBONS, and Batman:
The Dark Knight Returns (1986; graph 1986) by Frank MILLER - raised the
profile of the serious narrative comic book and, in large part because of
the low prestige of the comic-book medium, instigated a commercial need
for a distinguishing term ("Adult Comic" had already been taken by comics
with explicit sexual content).Today, however, many so-called graphic
novels are no more than costly collections of entirely routine SUPERHERO
tales and the like. Among titles that, by contrast, deserve to be noticed
are Ed the Happy Clown (1986; graph 1989) by Chester BROWN, The Magician's
Wife (1986 France; graph 1987 US) by Jerome CHARYN and Francois Boucq,
Violent Cases (graph 1987) by Neil GAIMAN and Dave MCKEAN, the various
graphic novels serialized in LOVE AND ROCKETS - including Human
Diastrophism (graph 1989) by Gilbert Hernandez (1957- ) and Ape Sex (graph
1989) by Jaime Hernandez - Elektra: Assassin (1986-7; graph 1987) by Frank
Miller and Bill SIENKIEWICZ, V for Vendetta (1982-5; graph 1990) by Alan
Moore and David Lloyd, A Small Killing (graph 1991) by Moore and Oscar
Zarate and The Complete New Statesmen (graph 1990) by John Smith (1967- )
with Jim Baikie, Duncan Fegredo and Sean Phillips.The term may have become
a commercial tag, but its very existence represented an opportunity for
ambitious comic-book artists and writers to begin to test the boundaries
of their medium, to demonstrate the organized complexity possible in the

interplay between the conventions of written narrative and visual
storytelling. The best graphic novels are more than the sum of their
parts; they are visions of the world which cannot be paraphrased into any
other medium. [NG/JC]
GRATACAP, LOUIS POPE
(1851-1917) US naturalist and writer whose first sf novel, The Certainty
of a Future Life on Mars: Being the Posthumous Papers of Bradford Torrey
Dodd (1903), remains his best known. Dying in the conviction that dead
humans transcendentally ascend to a Martian REINCARNATION as embodied
spirits, the narrator's father is soon communicating from there by radio
with his son. Martian society, he reports, is UTOPIAN - with natives of
the planet as servants - and Mars itself has canals; an essay on MARS by
the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) closes the
volume. A Woman of the Ice Age (1906) is a turgid prehistoric romance. The
Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream (1908) pins its
expectations of catastrophe on the completion of the Panama Canal; the
ensuing mini Ice Age persuades the UK monarchy to transplant itself to
Australia. The Mayor of New York: A Romance of the Days to Come (1910) is
set in AD2000, when "suicidariums" gently gas the willing and anarchism
threatens the independent state of New York. In The New Northland (1915) a
lost race ( LOST WORLDS) of Hebrew-speaking dwarfs inhabits a clement
hollow in the Arctic, where their possession of vast amounts of radium
seals their fate, for the protagonist decides that these riches must be
exploited. LPG's range was wide, incorporating much material which has
become central to sf, but his books are overlong, choked by his compulsive
didacticism, and consequently unreadable today. [JC]Other works: The End:
How the Great War was Stopped (1917), a fantasy in which the risen dead
terrify the living into stopping the war.
GRAUSTARK
RURITANIA.
GRAUTOFF, FERDINAND HEINRICH
(1871-1935) German historian and writer, known in English for two
pseudonymous works of fiction. In "1906" - Der Zusammenbruch der alten
Welt (1905; trans G. Herring as Armageddon 190- 1907 UK) as by Seestern,
the USA instigates a future WAR with Germany which is catastrophic for
Europe but beneficial for Russia and the USA. Bansai! (1908; trans anon as
Banzai! 1908 Canada) as by Parabellum pits the USA against the Japanese,
with results initially disastrous for the USA, though the invading armies
of the East are eventually driven all the way back past the Rocky
Mountains to the sea. [JC]See also: INVASION.
GRAVEL, GEARY
(1951- ) US writer and (since 1978) a Certified Sign Language
Interpreter. He began publishing sf with The Alchemists (1984); it and its
sequel, The Pathfinders (1986), make up the first 2 volumes of the
Autumnworld Mosaic sequence, set in a Galaxy abandoned by superior ALIENS
after they have passed their technologies on to the human race, which
proceeds to conquer the neighbouring planetary systems, sometimes to the
detriment of existing inhabitants. The first novel describes an attempt on

the part of a human group to thwart the "expansionists" on a planet
occupied by nonsentient humanoids; the second involves a damaging plunge
into the "dark beyond space" where as-yet-unrevealed mysteries of
cosmogony reside. Further volumes are projected. The Fading Worlds series
- A Key for the Nonesuch (1990) and Return of the Breakneck Boys (1991) is a SCIENCE-FANTASY adventure set in a mysterious GAME-WORLD-like arena,
into which the protagonist initially stumbles when he uses a borrowed key
to gain access to, as he thinks, a toilet. Further volumes of this series,
too, are projected. GG continues to seem a polished writer who has not
quite yet unleashed what seems a considerable talent. [JC]Other works:
Hook *(1992), a version of the film for young adults; various ties to
Batman, the Animated Series, including Batman, the Animated Movie: Mask of
the Phantasm * (1994), and 4 linked texts: Batman, the Animated Series:
Shadows of the Past* (1993), #2: Duel to the Death * (1994) and #3: The
Dragon and the Bat *(1994).
GRAVES, C(HARLES) L(ARCOM)
[r] E.V. LUCAS.
GRAVES, ROBERT (VON RANKE)
(1895-1985) UK poet, novelist and critic, best known for an active poetic
career, extending from the beginning of WWI into the 1970s, and for such
novels as I, Claudius (1934). His tendentious claim that he wrote fiction
solely for commercial reasons does little to explain the high quality of
all but his first novel, the RURITANIAN extravaganza No Decency Left
(1932) with Laura Riding (1901-1991), together writing as Barbara Rich.
The Golden Fleece (1944; vt Hercules, My Shipmate 1945 US) is an erudite
fantasy of considerable power. His UTOPIAN sf novel Watch the North Wind
Rise (1949 US; vt Seven Days in New Crete 1949 UK) complexly dramatizes
some ideas concerning the nature of POETRY and its ideal relation to the
world that he had earlier expounded in The White Goddess (1947 US), a
nonfiction study. Seven Days is framed as a possible dream of its
protagonist, a poet called into the future by the Poet-Magicians who rule
utopian New Crete, and whose worship of the White Goddess benefits from
her literal existence; but the book provides no clear-cut advocacy of the
utopia it describes, and indeed it becomes clear that the Goddess has
arranged for the poet's intrusion precisely so that he may - like so many
visitors to utopias - unbalance what has become a sterile society. The
escapist, timeless nature of New Crete, and the mediocre poetry it
produces, are depicted with considerable ambivalence by RG, who allows no
"winners" in his quest for a view of the world that will appropriately
balance the opposing forces of whole-witted time-fulness and half-witted
utopia. [JC]Other works: The Shout (1929 chap).About the author: There is
much critical literature about RG in general. On Seven Days in New Crete
the following are useful: Fritz LEIBER's "Utopia for Poets and Witches" in
RIVERSIDE QUARTERLY 4 (1970), Robert H. Canary's "Utopian and Fantastic
Dualities in Robert Graves's Watch the North Wind Rise" in SCIENCE-FICTION
STUDIES 4 (1974) and Peter Briggs's "Watch the North Wind Rise" in Survey
of Modern Fantasy Literature (anth 1983) ed Frank N. Magill.See also:
ANTHROPOLOGY; GALACTIC EMPIRES; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE
FICTION ; MYTHOLOGY.

GRAVES, VALERIE
Marion Zimmer BRADLEY.
GRAVITY
The force of gravity is the most inescapable and unvarying fact of
terrestrial life, and when writers first sent characters into SPACESHIPS
and on to other planets the phenomenon of low gravity, or of no gravity at
all, figured prominently among the wonders of space. Many early authors
did not realize that complete weightlessness is a consequence of free
fall, but this soon became a fact to be taken for granted in describing
SPACE FLIGHT, and now few writers bother to emphasize it. A delightful
account of the attractions of weightlessness was given by Fritz LEIBER in
"The Beat Cluster" (1961); a more straightforward introduction is
contained in Arthur C. CLARKE's Islands in the Sky (1952). In Bob SHAW's
THE RAGGED ASTRONAUTS (1986) the most difficult part of interplanetary
travel by BALLOON (no free fall here) between two mutually orbiting
planets only 5000 miles (8000km) or so apart, and with a common
atmosphere, is the transition of the weightless zone where the two
gravitic pulls cancel out.Weightlessness in practice is more likely to be
a nuisance than anything else. The favoured method of providing
"artificial gravity" in a spaceship or SPACE HABITAT is to spin the ship
about an axis to generate a centrifugal force acting outward from the
axis, so that the vessel's wall becomes the "floor". The visual paradoxes
associated with a "gravity" that acts outwards on the inside of a hollow
object were exploited in the film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), in Arthur
C. CLARKE's Rendezvous with Rama (1973), and in Harry HARRISON's Captive
Universe (1969). Few writers apart from Clarke mention the Coriolis force,
a sideways force on a moving object which also results from a spinning
system, and makes things tend to move in circles; it might be a severe
disadvantage in a very large spinning spaceship. The Coriolis force is not
encountered if the gravity is provided by a constant linear acceleration,
nor if the problem is solved outside known science by having recourse to
gravity generators such as SPINDIZZIES.Centrifugal force also comes into
play on rapidly rotating planets, where it combines with the force of
gravity to define the direction of the vertical. Since the surface of a
planet tends to be generally at right angles to the combined centrifugal
and gravitational forces, the centrifugal force can be treated for most
practical purposes as a part of the gravity, having the effect of
decreasing the gravity at the equator (where it is already likely to be
lower because of the shape of the planet), as in Hal CLEMENT's Mission of
Gravity (1954). This novel tells of the very high gravity on the massive,
rapidly rotating, discus-shaped planet of Mesklin, and of the effect of
these conditions on the psychology of the planet's intelligent lifeforms.
In our Solar System high gravity, nowhere near as extreme as Mesklin's,
can be found on JUPITER; this is described in Poul ANDERSON's "Call Me
Joe" (1957), James BLISH's "Bridge" (1952) - the story which describes the
development of spindizzies - and Arthur C. Clarke's "A Meeting with
Medusa" (1971), from which was developed The Medusa Encounter (1990) by
Clarke and Paul PREUSS.Much stronger gravitational forces than these can
be expected near the very massive but small objects composed of collapsed
matter ( NEUTRON STARS; PHYSICS). Not just the gravitational field's

overall strength is important: the variations in its strength between
different locations can exert forces even on an object in free fall. These
are called "tidal forces" (the tides on Earth, caused by the difference
between the Moon's gravitational pull on opposite sides of Earth, provide
the most familiar example). Tidal forces feature in Larry NIVEN's "Neutron
Star" (1966) and "There is a Tide" (1968). A collapsing star of sufficient
mass (about three times that of the Sun) would pass through the
neutron-star stage to become a BLACK HOLE - some high-gravity stories of
the 1970s and 1980s are discussed under that heading - and there has been
a large amount of sf set around (or even within) such venues.The wish for
a method of manipulating gravity has been a rich source of IMAGINARY
SCIENCE, indeed ANTIGRAVITY has been something of a philosopher's stone to
sf writers, and is discussed in some detail in that entry. The attraction
of antigravitational themes grows from a kind of resentment at the
inescapable restraints gravity imposes on us in the real world. Cecelia
HOLLAND deals in rather cavalier manner with gravity in Floating Worlds
(1976), the worlds of the title being cities floating above Saturn and
Uranus. David GERROLD's Space Skimmers (1972) exploits an imaginary
gravitic effect (using gravity as a kind of point applied to a surface)
which yields an attractive spaceship designed as if by M.C. Escher.
Walkers on the Sky (1976) by David J. LAKE owes more to wish fulfilment
than to science, but does offer a technological explanation for the
behaviour summarized in the title.Gravity as a theme has naturally been in
the main the province of HARD-SF writers like Hal Clement and Larry Niven.
Working very much in their tradition are the physicist Robert L. FORWARD,
who has written two interesting novels about a lifeform living in
intensely high-gravity conditions on the surface of a neutron star Dragon's Egg (1980) and its sequel Starquake! (1985) - and Stephen BAXTER,
whose Raft (1991) is set in an ALTERNATE UNIVERSE where gravity, instead
of being (to simplify) the weakest of the fundamental forces, as it is in
our Universe, is one of the strongest; the results are described with
elan. [TSu/PN]
GRAY, ALASDAIR (JAMES)
(1934- ) Scottish painter, playwright and author who began publishing
work of genre interest with "The Yellow Dream" for Collins Magazine for
Girls and Boys in 1950; this tale was gathered, along with a wide variety
of sf fables and FABULATIONS, in Unlikely Stories, Mostly (coll 1983). His
first and most substantial novel was Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981),
a vast tale whose burly narrative voice shoulders aside questions of genre
as impertinences; the protagonist is born, lives and dies in Glasgow,
whence, transformed into an alter ego named Lanark, he is transported to
the regimented subterranean DYSTOPIA of Unthank, which is of course Hell
but which also - as he enters the "Epilogue" - becomes the text of Lanark,
through which he wages his way. 1982 Janine (1984) is a metaphysical
fantasy, with some of the same embedded entwinings of life and book. The
Fall of Kelvin Walker: A Fable of the Sixties (1985) and Something Leather
(1990) are associational, as are the tales assembled in Lean Tales (coll
1985), which also includes work by James Kelman and Agnes Owens. McGrotty
and Ludmilla, or The Harbinger Report (1975 as BBC radio play; 1990) is a
mildly poisonous SATIRE of UK life and politics set in a moderately

displaced ALTERNATE WORLD, and Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life
of Archibald McCandless M.D. Scottish Public Health Offices (1992; rev
1993) fabulates the Frankenstein story ( FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER) and
FEMINISM. A History Maker (1994) sets an eccentric tale of border warfare
with England in the Scotland of the 23rd century. Though published by
mainstream houses, most of AG's books have been designed by him in his own
unmistakable style, so that his oeuvre is unique inside and out. [JC]See
also: CITIES.
GRAY, CURME
(1910-1980) US writer in whose complex sf novel Murder in Millennium VI
(1951) a homicide case shakes a matriarchal DYSTOPIA thousands of years
hence - murder being inexplicable to the inhabitants of this world. The
focus of interest in the novel is the gradual unveiling of the fact that a
gradual transition - not back to patriarchy but to some synthesis - is
under way. There is a detailed analysis in In Search of Wonder (1956) by
Damon KNIGHT, the admiring tone of which has not been universally shared.
[JC]
GRAY, ROD
Gardner F. FOX.
GRAZIER, JAMES
(1902-1975) US writer in whose awkwardly written Runts of 61 Cygni C
(1970) humans encounter approximately humanoid aliens and lots of kinky
sex on the planet 61 Cygni C. [JC]Other works: Hydra (1969) as by James A.
Grazier, a juvenile.
GREAT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS
FANTASTIC UNIVERSE.
GREAT AND SMALL
One of the commonest fantastic devices in literature and legend is the
alteration of scale. MYTHOLOGY and folklore abound with giants and
miniature humans, and different perspectives dependent upon changes of
scale are central to many of the SATIRES recognized today as works of
PROTO SCIENCE FICTION, most notably Jonathan SWIFT's Gulliver's Travels
(1726) and VOLTAIRE's Micromegas (1750 Berlin; 1752 France; trans 1753).
Mark TWAIN's uncompleted works include "Three Thousand Years among the
Microbes" (written 1905; 1967), in which a germ called Huck inhabits the
body of a tramp, recalling Morgan ROBERTSON's earnest medical fantasy "The
Battle of the Monsters" (1899). Modern satires using distortion of scale
in other ways include Joe Orton's Head to Toe (1971), J.G. BALLARD's "The
Drowned Giant" (1965; vt "Souvenir") and Jessamyn WEST's The Chilekings
(1967). The first SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE of the microcosm was "The Diamond
Lens" (1858) by Fitz-James O'BRIEN, in which a scientist discovers a tiny
humanoid woman in a water-drop. The tactic of shrinking human beings to
insect-size in order that they may observe the small-scale wonders of the
natural world is common in didactic sf, ranging from Alfred Taylor
SCHOFIELDEN's Travels in the Interior (1887; as by Luke Courteney) through
Edwin PALLANDER's The Adventures of a Micro-Man (1902) and Bob OLSEN's
"The Ant with the Human Soul" (1932) to Donald SUDDABY's Lost Men in the
Grass (1940) as by Alan Griff. More ambitious didactic microcosmic

fantasies can be found in George GAMOW's Mr Tompkins Explores the Atom
(1944). Adventure stories in which humans are pitted against giant insects
and monstrous spiders are commonplace, ranging from Sara Coleridge's
curious fantasy Phantasmion (1837) through the stories assembled in Murray
LEINSTER's The Forgotten Planet (1920-53; fixup 1954) to the series begun
with Spider World: The Tower (1987) by Colin WILSON; a duel with a spider
is the high-point of the film The INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) based on
Richard MATHESON's The Shrinking Man (1956).The idea that there might be
worlds within worlds was popularized by the Rutherford-Bohr model of the
atom as a tiny "solar system" with electrons orbiting the nucleus. The
notion that all the atoms of our Universe might be solar systems in their
own right, and all of our Universe's solar systems themselves atoms in a
macrocosm, was developed by several writers, appearing first in The
Triuneverse (1912) by R.A. KENNEDY. The PULP-MAGAZINE writer who made the
theme his own was Ray CUMMINGS, whose works in this vein include the
microcosmic romances The Girl in the Golden Atom (1919-20; fixup 1921),
The Princess of the Atom (1929; 1950) and Beyond the Vanishing Point
(1931; 1958) and the macrocosmic romance Explorers into Infinity (1927-8;
1965). Other pulp writers who borrowed the theme from Cummings include
Harl VINCENT, for "The Microcosmic Buccaneers" (1929), S.P. MEEK for
"Submicroscopic" (1931), Donald WANDREI for "Colossus" (1934), Jack
WILLIAMSON for "The Galactic Circle" (1935) and Festus PRAGNELL for The
Green Man of Kilsona (1935 as "The Green Man of Graypec"; 1936; vt The
Green Man of Graypec 1950 US). Numerous other pulp-sf stories featured
miniaturized men, including "A Matter of Size" (1934) by Harry BATES, "He
who Shrank" (1936) by Henry L. HASSE, whose protagonist is both giant and
miniature man while shrinking through a whole series of
worlds-within-worlds, "Fury from Lilliput" (1949) by Murray LEINSTER,
"Chaos in Miniature" (1952) by H.J. CAMPBELL, and the classic "Surface
Tension" (1952) by James BLISH. Despite the inherent logical flaws in the
notion (to do with the relationships between mass, strength and organic
complexity) the idea of human miniaturization has retained sufficient
fascination to encourage writers to continue to fudge the issue; it crops
up in such novels as Atta (1953) by Francis Rufus BELLAMY, Cold War in a
Country Garden (1971) by Lindsay GUTTERIDGE and The Men Inside (1973) by
Barry N. MALZBERG, and in such films as DR CYCLOPS (1940), The Incredible
Shrinking Man, FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966) and INNERSPACE (1987). The process
of fudging can be ingenious, sometimes recruiting the notion of the
expanding Universe, as in the playful "Prominent Author" (1954) by Philip
K. DICK and Land of Dreams (1987) by James P. BLAYLOCK. An interesting
attempt to accommodate the microcosmic romance to more modern atomic
theory is "Nor Iron Bars" (1957) by James Blish. An intriguing
recomplication of the theme involves the depiction of miniature worlds
whose time-flow is more rapid than ours, as in "Pygmy Planet" (1932) by
Jack Williamson, "Microcosmic God" (1941) by Theodore STURGEON, Edge of
Time (1958) by David Grinnell (Donald A. WOLLHEIM) and DRAGON'S EGG (1980)
by Robert L. FORWARD, which is set on a NEUTRON STAR, the rapid time-flow
being a relativistic consequence of the huge surface GRAVITY. Miniature
worlds constructed for specific purposes are featured in "The Tunnel under
the World" (1954) by Frederik POHL and Counterfeit World (1964 UK; vt
Simulacron-3 1964 US) by Daniel F. GALOUYE.Giants are usually treated less

sympathetically than very tiny characters, for obvious reasons; the
oversized heroes of The Food of the Gods (1904) by H.G. WELLS and Titan's
Daughter (1961) by James Blish are notable exceptions. The giant ALIENS in
Raymond F. JONES's The Alien (1951) and Blish's The Warriors of Day (1953)
are menacing, although the one in Joseph L. GREEN's Gold the Man (1971; vt
The Mind Behind the Eye) isn't. In films which invert the theme of The
Incredible Shrinking Man, including The AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (1957) and
Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958), the central characters become figures
of menace, although the charismatically gargantuan star of KING KONG
(1933) has always generated sympathy, as has his one-time saurian rival
GOJIRA. When human beings must live as scavengers in worlds populated by
alien giants, as in Kenneth BULMER's Demon's World (1964; vt The Demons),
William TENN's OF MEN AND MONSTERS) (1963 Gal as "The Men in the Walls";
exp 1968) and the tv series LAND OF THE GIANTS, they are the obvious
heroes, but when humans are the giants sympathy usually attaches to the
tiny aliens, even when - as in A. Bertram CHANDLER's "Giant Killer" (1945)
- they are not humanoid. The notion of social stratification based on more
moderate differences of size is cleverly developed in the fantasies of
Sharon Baker (1938-1991) set on the planet Naphar, including Quarrelling,
They Met the Dragon (1984).John CHRISTOPHER's The Little People (1967) is
the most sciencefictional of the many notable juvenile fantasies which
feature tiny races living fugitive lives in the human world; others
include T.H. WHITE's Mistress Masham's Repose (1946) and the two series
begun with The Borrowers (1952) by Mary Norton (1903-1992) and Truckers
(1989) by Terry PRATCHETT. By far the best modern fantasy to include
aspects of microcosmic romance is John CROWLEY's Little, Big (1981), and
it is to the realms of FANTASY that most of the themes dealing with
microcosms and macrocosms really belong. [BS]See also: COSMOLOGY;
FANTASTIC VOYAGES.
GREATOREX, WILFRED
1990.
GREAT SCIENCE FICTION / SCIENCE FICTION GREATS
One of the many reprint DIGEST-size magazines published by Sol Cohen's
Ultimate Publishing Co. employing the reprint rights acquired when Cohen
bought AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC. 21 issues were released, quarterly
Oct 1965-Spring 1971, the first 12 under the title Great Science Fiction,
#13-#16 as Science Fiction Greats and #17-#21 as SF Greats.The contents
were mostly short stories by well known authors, reprinted from the period
when Cele GOLDSMITH edited AMZ and Fantastic. #13 was devoted entirely to
Robert SILVERBERG and #14 entirely to Harlan ELLISON. This was one of
Cohen's better publications, for he was selecting from an interesting
period in the history of his source magazines. [BS]
GREAT SCIENCE FICTION STORIES
TREASURY OF GREAT SCIENCE FICTION STORIES.
GREELEY, ANDREW M(ORAN)
(1928- ) US Roman Catholic priest and writer, several of whose books have
been nonfiction texts on matters of faith; among the rest are detective
novels (sometimes with paranormal elements) and some fantasy and sf,

beginning with Nora Maeve and Sebi (1976 chap), a short fantasy tale, and
The Magic Cup (1979), a fantasy set in medieval Ireland. God Game (1986)
depicts a priest introduced by COMPUTER to a fantasy GAME-WORLD. The Final
Planet (1987) features the Irish Catholic captain of a desperately
wandering starship called Iona from the planet Tara, who must descend to a
very secular planet to see if colonists are admissible, almost (but never
quite) bedding a female scientist en passant. Angel Fire (1988) is a
SCIENCE-FANTASY novel about an Irish-descended Nobel Prize-winning
scientist - he has been honoured for the already discredited "punctuated
equilibrium" theory of EVOLUTION - blessed with a literal guardian angel,
who protects him very well. Sacred Visions (anth 1991) ed with Michael
CASSUTT (and Martin H. GREENBERG anon) assembles a wide range of stories
about RELIGION. [JC]See also: GAMES AND SPORTS; VIRTUAL REALITY.
GREEN, HENRY
Pseudonym of UK industrialist and writer Henry Vincent Yorke (1905-1973),
author of several laconic but richly thought-through novels from Blindness
(1926) to Doting (1952). His one sf tale, Concluding (1948), set 50 years
hence in a DYSTOPIAN socialist UK, presents through imagery and dialogue a
complex vision of a world in which humanity and Nature are irretrievably
dissevered. [JC]
GREEN, HILARY
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
GREEN, I.G.
Pseudonym of US writer Ira Greenblatt (? - ), in whose Time Beyond Time
(1971) the hero is either killed by lightning or caught in a "time-nexus"
and cast into a disease-free ATLANTIS, where he finds himself immortal and
becomes embroiled in many exciting adventures. [JC]
GREEN, JEN
[r] Sarah LEFANU.
GREEN, JOSEPH (LEE)
(1931- ) US writer of sf and technical journalism who began publishing sf
in 1962 with "The Engineer" in NW. An Affair with Genius (coll 1969 UK)
assembles some of his better early work. Although many of his 70 stories
to date (not all sf) have appeared in the USA - along with popular-science
articles in ASF that demonstrate the lucid gift of exposition visible also
in his fiction - it was in the UK that he first established his name, and
there that most of his books were first published. The Loafers of Refuge
(1962-3 NW; fixup 1965 UK), his first novel, chronicles the gradual coming
together, to their mutual benefit, of colonizing humans and humanlike
natives on the planet Refuge, mainly through the mediation of the
protagonist ( COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS). JG's best novel to date is
probably his second, Gold the Man (1971 UK; vt The Mind Behind the Eye
1972 US), which deals very competently (though not in depth) with a
variety of themes from SUPERMAN to ALIENS and INTELLIGENCE. Gold is Homo
sapiens born with about 4oz (120g) of extra association neocortex. As an
adult he is asked to "operate" a brain-damaged giant invader from inside
its head ( GREAT AND SMALL). Returning, thus incorporated, to the alien's
blandly UTOPIAN home planet, he works out the reason for the imminent

destruction of its sun: sentient sunspots. All ends well. Further novels
include Conscience Interplanetary (1965-71 var mags, fixup 1972 UK), the
uneven story of a Conscience whose job it is - in an unhappy replay of the
protagonist's role in The Loafers of Refuge - to adjudicate as to the
INTELLIGENCE of alien species before allowing human beings to exploit
their planets. [JC]Other works: Star Probe (1976 UK); The Horde (1976
Canada).See also: COMMUNICATIONS; MATTER TRANSMISSION.
GREEN, MARTIN (BURGESS)
(1927- ) UK academic and writer, long resident in the USA. Some of his
early studies of the linkages between culture and literature, like
"Science and Sensibility" (in Science and the Shabby Curate of Poetry coll
1964) and Children of the Sun (1976), express a remote interest in GENRE
SF; later works, like The Robinson Crusoe Story (1990) and Seven Types of
Adventure Tale: An Etiology of a Major Genre (1991), though their interest
remains mainly associational, show a mind increasingly sensitive to the
structures underlying genre writing. His one attempt at fiction, The Earth
Again Redeemed: May 26 to July 1, 1984, on This Earth of Ours and its
Alter Ego: A Science Fiction Novel (1977), uneasily posits an ALTERNATE
WORLD where the Roman Catholic Church has blocked the development of
science, and where a visiting CYBORG from our own ruined timeline detects
clear signs of coming disaster. [JC]See also: ANTIMATTER.
GREEN, NUNSOWE
Pseudonym of unidentified UK writer of the sf discussion novel, A
Thousand Years Hence; Being Personal Experiences as Narrated by . . .
(1882). Though the featured tour of the future turns out to have been a
dream, the novel invokes a wide range of sf notions, from ESP to
TERRAFORMING. [JC]
GREEN, ROBERT
(? - ) Canadian writer and musician whose The Great Leap Backwards (1968)
depicts a future where COMPUTERS have taken over the cities, leaving the
countryside in a natural state. [JC]
GREEN, ROGER (GILBERT) LANCELYN
(1918-1987) UK author, scholar, critic and translator (from classical
Greek), with a special interest in FANTASY. Among his many works those
most relevant to sf studies are C.S. Lewis (1963), C.S. Lewis: A Biography
(1974) with Walter Hooper, and Into Other Worlds: Space-Flight in Fiction,
from Lucian to Lewis (1957). The latter is one of the earlier books on sf,
but is primarily pitched at a rather anecdotal and trivial level. His
Andrew Lang (1946) throws light on an author whose relationship to sf has
been almost forgotten ( Andrew LANG); a later study, Andrew Lang (1962
chap), is less thorough. RLG's allegorical and old-fashioned fantasy, From
the World's End (1948), is about visionary dreams in an old house. The
Land Beyond the North (1958) carries Jason and the Argonauts ultimately to
a sacrifice at Stonehenge. [PN]Other works (nonfiction): Tellers of Tales
(1946); The Story of Lewis Carroll (1949); Fifty Years of Peter Pan
(1954); J.M. Barrie (1960 chap). As Editor: The Diaries of Lewis Carroll
(2 vols 1953); Modern Fairy Stories (anth 1955); Fairy Stories (coll 1958)
by Mary Molesworth; Thirteen Uncanny Tales (anth 1970); A Book of

Magicians (anth 1973; vt A Cavalcade of Magicians US); Strange Adventures
in Time (anth 1974); The Complete Fairy Tales of George MacDonald (coll
1977); The Unknown Conan Doyle (coll 1984) with John Michael Gibson. This
list is selective; RLG as editor and reteller produced almost 100 books
for children.See also: PROTO SCIENCE FICTION.
GREEN, ROLAND J(AMES)
(1944- ) US writer whose first sale was the first volume in the Wandor
SWORD-AND-SORCERY sequence (see listing below), though his first published
work was a volume in the similar Richard Blade sequence (see listing
below) under the house name Jeffrey Lord. His sf has generally been
written in collaboration, notably 2 vols in the Janissaries sequence of
military novels with Jerry POURNELLE, Janissaries: Clan and Crown (1982)
and Janissaries III: Storms of Victory (1988). Others include: Jamie the
Red (1984) with Gordon R. DICKSON; a continuation of H. Beam PIPER's
Paratime Police/Lord Kalvan books with John F. CARR, Great King's War *
(1985); and The Book of Kantela (1985) with Frieda Murray (RJG's wife).
The Peace Company series of military sf novels - Peace Company (1985),
These Green Foreign Hills (1987) and The Mountain Walks (1989) - are by
RJG alone, as is the Starcruiser Shenandoah sequence, comprising Squadron
Alert (1989), Division of the Spoils (1990), The Sum of Things (1991),
Vain Command (1992), The Painful Field (1993) and Warriors for the Working
Day (1994). In these works it is difficult to pin down any strongly
individual tone. [JC]Other works: The Wandor books, comprising Wandor's
Ride (1973), Wandor's Journey (1975), Wandor's Voyage (1979) and Wandor's
Flight (1981); Throne of Sherran: The Book of Kanetal (1985); novels tied
to Robert E. HOWARD's Conan, Conan the Valiant * (1988), Conan the
Guardian * (1991),Conan the Relentless * (1992), Conan and the Gods of the
Mountain * (1993) and Conan at the Demon's Gate * (1994).As Jeffery
Lord,#9 through #37 of the -#1 through #8 were by Manning Lee STOKES; #30
was by Ray NELSON- Richard Blade series, Kingdom of Royth (1974), Ice
Dragon (1974), Dimension of Dreams (1974), King of Zunga (1975), The
Golden Steed (1975), The Temples of Ayocan (1975), The Towers of Melnon
(1975), The Crystal Seas (1975), The Mountains of Brega (1976), Warlords
of Gaikon (1976), Looters of Tharn (1976), Guardians of the Coral Throne
(1976),Champion of the Gods (1976), The Forests of Gleor (1977), Empire of
Blood (1977), The Dragons of Englor (1977), The Torian Pearls (1977), City
of the Living Dead (1978), Master of the Hashomi (1978), Wizard of Rentoro
(1978), Treasure of the Stars (1978), Gladiators of Hapanu (1979), Pirates
of Gohar (1979), Killer Plants of Binaark (1980), The Ruins of Kaldac
(1981), The Lords of the Crimson River (1981), Return to Kaldac (1983) and
Warriors of Laittan (1984).As John CLEVE: Spaceways #15: Starship Sapphire
(1984) with Andrew J. OFFUTT, writing together as Cleve.As Editor: 2 vols
in the War World SHARED-WORLD anthologies created by Jerry Pournelle: The
Burning Eye * (anth 1988) and Death's Head Rebellion * (anth 1990), both
with John F. Carr.
GREEN, SHARON
(1942- ) US writer who came to notice for her Terrilian Sequence of
sadomasochistic novels in the manner of John NORMAN, with which the
advertising copy explicitly linked them. The sequence is The Warrior

Within (1982), The Warrior Enchained (1983), The Warrior Rearmed (1984),
The Warrior Challenged (1986) and The Warrior Victorious (1988); they
differ from Norman's in being set on a more plausible planet. Other series
directed to the same market include the Jalav/Amazon Warrior sequence The Crystals of Mida (1982), An Oath to Mida (1983), Chosen of Mida
(1984), The Will of the Gods (1985) and To Battle the Gods (1986) - and
the Diana Santee, Spaceways Agent sequence: Mind Guest (1984) and Gateway
to Xanadu (1985). The Far Side of Forever sequence - The Far Side of
Forever (1987) and Hellhound Magic (1989) - is more traditional fantasy.
Other titles include Lady Blade, Lord Fighter (1987), projected to
initiate a series, The Revel Prince (1987), Mists of the Ages (1988), also
projected to start a series, and Dawn Song (1990), No Haven for the Guilty
(1990), Silver Princess, Golden Knight (1993) and The Hidden Realms
(1993). [JC]
GREEN, STEPHEN
Neil BELL.
GREEN, TERENCE M(ICHAEL)
(1947- ) Canadian teacher and writer who began publishing work of genre
interest with "Of Children in the Foliage" in Aurora: New Canadian Writing
1979 (anth 1979) ed Morris Wolfe; the story was gathered with further lean
and subtle tales in The Woman who is the Midnight Wind (coll 1987). In his
short fiction TMG, like many Canadian writers, tenders a vision which
might be called melancholy humanism. His first novel, Barking Dogs (1988
US), on the other hand, opens that vision out but, to do so, forcibly
transforms Toronto into a mean-streets venue suitable for displays of
high-tech weaponry displays by a vengeful cop. In Children of the Rainbow
(1992) a descendant of the Bounty mutineers undergoes TIME-TRAVEL stress
and imprisonment. [JC]See also: CANADA.
GREENBERG, MARTIN
(1918- ) US publisher and anthologist, not to be confused with Martin H.
GREENBERG. In 1948 he cofounded with David A. KYLE and others GNOME PRESS,
one of the small but important early publishers of GENRE SF in hardcover
format. MG edited 7 anthologies for Gnome, of which Coming Attractions
(anth 1957) consisted of sf-related nonfiction articles. The others were
Men Against the Stars (anth 1950; cut vt 9 Stories from Men Against the
Stars 1963), Travelers of Space (anth 1951), with 16 illustrations by Edd
CARTIER, Journey to Infinity (anth 1951), Five Science Fiction Novels
(anth 1952; with novels by Fritz LEIBER and A.E. VAN VOGT omitted, cut vt
The Crucible of Power 1953 UK), The Robot and the Man (anth 1953) and All
About the Future (anth 1955). Most are loosely thematic. [PN]See also:
SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS.
GREENBERG, MARTIN H(ARRY)
(1941- ) US anthologist and academic, not to be confused with Martin
GREENBERG. He has a doctorate in Political Science (1969) and has taught
at the University of Wisconsin - Green Bay since 1975, currently holding
the position of Professor of Regional Analysis, Political Science, and
Literature and Language. Most of his own writing, like Bureaucracy and
Development: A Mexican Case Study (1970), has been in the field of

political science; his sf writing has been restricted to two reference
tools, Index to Stories in the Thematic Anthologies of Science Fiction
(1978) with Joseph D. OLANDER and Marshall B. TYMN, and Science Fiction
and Fantasy Series and Sequels: A Bibliography - Volume 1: Books (1986)
with Tim Cottrill (1958- ) and Charles G. WAUGH.It is as an anthologist primarily of sf and fantasy, although he has also edited many anthologies
in other genres - that MHG has become a dominant figure, working both solo
and with colleagues, usually Olander and Waugh, either separately or
together, and with the occasional collaboration of MHG's wife, Rosalind M.
Greenberg. Team anthologies - anthologies put together by two or more
professional anthologists who divide up the various tasks involved, which
include everything from story research and selection through copyright
searches down to selling the actual book - were not unknown before MHG
began to work, but he very quickly established himself in a commanding
position, and by 1995 had published well in excess of 450 anthologies,
primarily assembling reprint and original material of interest to sf and
fantasy readers; in many recent titles his contribution has been
anonymous, and it is increasingly difficult to maintain an accurate
checklist of his output. His efficiency as an anthologist is self-evident,
and the quality of the product is rarely negligible, though some titles
show a lack of daring in their selection of contents: this flatness stands
in odd contrast to the imaginativeness of most of the concepts presented,
for it is clear that MHG has a high talent for conceiving hook themes and
titles.Most of the huge array is made up of fiction anthologies, but
several nonfiction titles have appeared, including the Writers of the
Twenty-First Century series of anthologies reprinting critical articles on
major writers, all ed with Olander: Isaac Asimov (anth 1977), Ray Bradbury
(anth 1980), Arthur C. Clarke (anth 1977), Philip K. Dick (anth 1983),
Robert A. Heinlein (anth 1978) and Ursula K. Le Guin (anth 1979). Other
nonfiction anthologies include Fantastic Lives: Autobiographical Essays by
Notable Science Fiction Writers (anth 1981), The End of the World (anth
1983) with Olander and Eric S. RABKIN, The Legacy of Olaf Stapledon (anth
1989) with Charles Elkins and Patrick A. McCarthy, and No Place Else:
Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (anth 1983) with Olander and
Rabkin.Of the fiction anthologies, many have been edited by MHG either
alone or with his team (by which term we refer not to contractual
relationships - about which we claim no knowledge - but to the text
partnerships so clearly in evidence), but in addition a large number also
credit as co-editor a "name" writer - often a fiction author associated
with the subject of the book in question. Although it is probable that
some of these "name" editors did little more than approve contents
assembled by the team, most of the MHG/"name" anthologies are genuine
collaborative efforts. For this reason, and because there is little profit
in duplicating long ranks of titles, we list all MHG/"name" anthologies
(of which there are nearly 200) in the entries for the "name" writers
involved rather than below. Of MHG's collaborators (some are academics who
are not part of the MHG team) we treat the following as "name" writers:
Robert ADAMS (6 titles), Poul ANDERSON (5, MHG anon in 1), Piers ANTHONY
(1), Isaac ASIMOV (127+), Gregory BENFORD (6), Robert BLOCH (1; MHG anon),
Orson Scott CARD (1; MHG anon), Terry CARR (1), Arthur C. CLARKE (1; MHG
anon), David A. DRAKE (4), Alan Dean FOSTER (1), Andrew M. GREELEY (1,

with Michael CASSUTT, MHG anon), Damon KNIGHT (1), Barry N. MALZBERG (2),
Richard MATHESON (1), Walter M. MILLER (1), William F. NOLAN (3), Andre
NORTON (2), Frederik POHL (4), Bill PRONZINI (1), Fred SABERHAGEN (1),
Robert SILVERBERG (10), S.M. STIRLING (2), Robert E. WEINBERG (1), Connie
WILLIS (1) and Jane YOLEN (5), of which only the Yolen titles are listed
below.The first MHG anthologies, beginning with Political Science Fiction
(anth 1974) with Patricia WARRICK, were clearly designed to appeal to
teachers; opinions were strongly divided about the usefulness of some of
their accompanying critical apparatus. The Through Science Fiction
educational sequence includes: Introductory Psychology Through Science
Fiction (anth 1974; exp 1977) with Harvey Katz and Warrick; Anthropology
Through Science Fiction (anth 1974) with Carol Mason and Warrick;
Sociology Through Science Fiction (anth 1974) with Joseph D. Olander and
Warrick; School and Society Through Science Fiction (anth 1974) with
Olander and Warrick; American Government Through Science Fiction (anth
1974) with Olander and Warrick; The New Awareness: Religion Through
Science Fiction (anth 1975) with Warrick; Run to Starlight: Sports Through
Science Fiction (anth 1975) with Olander and Warrick; Social Problems
Through Science Fiction (anth 1975) with John Milstead, Olander and
Warrick; The City: 2000 A.D.: Urban Life Through Science Fiction (anth
1976) with Ralph S. Clem and Olander; Marriage and the Family Through
Science Fiction (anth 1976) with Val Clear, Olander and Warrick; Criminal
Justice Through Science Fiction (anth 1977) with Olander; No Room For Man:
Population and the Future Through Science Fiction (anth 1979) with Ralph
S. Clem and Olander; Dawn of Time: Prehistory Through Science Fiction
(anth 1979) with Silverberg and Olander. They were not addressed to a wide
audience.Later titles, which tended to appeal to more general markets,
lacked pedagogical aids and began to feature the name collaborators listed
above. The topical range of these anthologies is enormous, and many of
them are cited in relevant theme entries throughout this encyclopedia. We
list them below in the following order: first, MHG alone; next, MHG with
non-team collaborators; finally, MHG with team collaborators (sometimes
plus non-team collaborators). Each subdivision of the listing is in
chronological order. [JC]Other works:MHG alone: The Classic Philip Jose
Farmer 1952-1964 (coll 1984) and The Classic Philip Jose Farmer 1964-1973
(coll 1984); The Best of Margaret St Clair (coll 1985); The Best of Marion
Zimmer Bradley (coll 1985; cut 1990 UK); Ursula K. Le Guin: Five Complete
Novels (omni 1985) ed anon; Amazing Stories: Visions of Other Worlds (anth
1986); The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (coll 1986) ed anon;
Amazing Science Fiction Anthology: The Wonderful Years, 1926-1935 (anth
1987), The War Years, 1936-1945 (anth 1987) and The Wild Years, 1946-1955
(anth 1987); The Best of Pamela Sargent (coll 1987); Bart Science Fiction
Triplet #1 (anth 1988), only vol published; Foundation's Friends: Stories
in Honor of Isaac Asimov (anth 1989); The Asimov Chronicles: Fifty Years
of Isaac Asimov (coll 1989; vt in 6 vols as The Asimov Chronicles #1 1990,
#2 1990, #3 1990, #4 1991, #5 1991 and #6 1991); The Further Adventures of
Batman * (anth 1989), The Further Adventures of Batman #2: Featuring the
Penguin (anth 1992) and #3: Featuring Catwoman (anth 1993), and The
Further Adventures of the Joker * (anth 1990); Mummy Stories (anth 1990);
The Diplomacy Guild (anth 1990); Christmas on Ganymede, and Other Stories
(anth 1990); The Leiber Chronicles (coll 1990); The Fantastic Adventures

of Robin Hood (anth 1991); Fantastic Chicago (anth 1991); Isaac's Universe
#1: The Diplomacy Guild * (anth 1991) and #2: Phases in Chaos * (anth
1991); New Stories from The Twilight Zone * (anth 1991); Nightmares on Elm
Street: Freddy Krueger's Seven Sweetest Dreams * (anth 1991); After the
King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien (anth 1992); Dracula, Prince of
Darkness (anth1992); The Super Hugos (anth 1992); The Further Adventures
of Superman (anth 1993); A Newbery Halloween (anth 1993); Frankenstein:
the Monster Wakes (anth 1993); Nebula Award Winning Novellas (anth
1994).MHG with non-team collaborators:MHG with John L. Apostolou: The Best
Japanese Science Fiction Stories (anth 1989).MHG (anon) with Barbara
Brenner, Seymour Reit and Howard Zimmerman: The Bank Street Book of
Science Fiction (anth 1989); The Bank Street Book of Fantasy (anth
1989).MHG with Alan BRENNERT (anon): Stories from the New Twilight Zone *
(anth 1991).MHG with John W. CAMPBELL Jr: Astounding Science Fiction, July
1939 (anth 1981) - the July 1939 issue of ASF in facsimile.MHG with Edward
L. FERMAN: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1965 (anth
1981) - the Apr 1965 issue of FSF in facsimile.MHG with Ed Gorman:
Stalkers: All New Tales of Terror and Suspense (anth 1989); Solved (anth
1991); The Dean Koontz Companion (anth 1994) with Gorman and Bill Munster.
MHG (anon) with Robert McCammon: Under the Fang (anth 1991).MHG with
Francis M. Nevins: Hitchcock in Prime Time (anth 1985).MHG (anon) with
Byron PREISS: The Ultimate Werewolf (anth 1991); The Ultimate Dracula
(anth 1991); The Ultimate Frankenstein (anth 1991).MHG with Patrick L.
Price: Fantastic Stories: Tales of the Weird ?
with Stanley SCHMIDT: Unknown Worlds: Tales from Beyond (anth 1988).MHG
and Robert E. WEINBERG with Stefan R. Dziemianowicz: Weird Tales: 32
Unearthed Terrors (anth 1988); Rivals of Weird Tales: 30 Great Fantasy ?
Horror Stories from the Weird Fiction Pulps (anth 1990); Famous Fantastic
Mysteries: 30 Great Tales of Fantasy and Horror from the Classic Pulp
Magazines Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Fantastic Novels (anth 1991); A
Taste for Blood (anth 1993) with Dziemianowicz alone; Sea-Cursed (anth
1994) with Dziemianowicz and T Liam McDonald.MHG with Jane Yolen:
Werewolves (anth 1988); Things that Go Bump in the Night (anth 1989);
Vampires (anth 1991).MHG with team collaborators:MHG with Rosalind M.
Greenberg: Phantoms (anth 1989); Horse Fantastic (anth 1991); Christmas
Bestiary (anth 1992).MHG and R.M. Greenberg with Charles G. Waugh: 14
Vicious Valentines (anth 1988).MHG with Joseph D. Olander: Tomorrow, Inc.:
SF Stories about Business (anth 1976); The Best of John Jakes (coll 1977);
Time of Passage (anth 1978); Science Fiction of the Fifties (anth
1979).MHG and Olander with Patricia Warrick: Science Fiction: Contemporary
Mythology: The SFWA-SFRA Anthology (anth 1978).MHG and Olander with
Charles G. Waugh: Mysterious Visions: Great Science Fiction by Masters of
the Mystery (anth 1979).MHG with Charles G. Waugh: Love, 3000 (anth 1980);
The Human Zero: The Science Fiction Stories of Erle Stanley Gardner (coll
1981); The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich (coll 1981); The Best
Science Fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle (coll 1981); Hollywood Unreel:
Fantasies about Hollywood and the Movies (anth 1982); The Fantastic Saint
(coll 1982); The Arbor House Celebrity Book of Horror Stories (anth 1982);
Cults! An Anthology of Secret Societies, Sects, and the Supernatural (anth
1983); Alternative Histories: Eleven Stories of the World as it Might Have
Been (anth 1986); The Alternate Asimovs (coll 1986) ed anon; Baker's

Dozen: 13 Short Horror Novels (anth 1987); Battlefields beyond Tomorrow:
Science Fiction War Stories (anth 1987); House Shudders: An Anthology of
Haunted House Stories (anth 1987); Vamps: An Anthology of Female Vampire
Stories (anth 1987); East Coast Ghosts (anth 1989); Cults of Horror (anth
1990); Devil Worshippers (anth 1990); Back from the Dead (anth 1991);
Robot Warriors (anth 1991); A Newbery Christmas (anth 1991); Animal
Brigade 3000 (anth 1994); Commando Brigade 2000 (anth 1994).MHG and Waugh
with Frank D(avid) McSherry Jr (1927- ): Baseball 3000 (anth 1981);
Treasury of American Horror Stories (anth 1985); Strange Maine (anth
1986); Cinemonsters (anth 1987); Nightmare in Dixie (anth 1987); Pirate
Ghosts of the American Coast (anth 1988); Red Jack (anth 1988); Yankee
Witches (anth 1988); the Haunting, Spine-Chilling Stories sequence,
comprising Dixie Ghosts (anth 1988), Eastern Ghosts (anth 1990), New
England Ghosts (anth 1990), Western Ghosts (anth 1990) and Ghosts of the
Heartland (anth 1990); Haunted New England (anth 1988); Fantastic World
War II (anth 1990) with MHG and Waugh anon; Civil War Ghosts (1991);
Hollywood Ghosts (anth 1991); Great American Ghost Stories (anth 1991);
The Fantastic Civil War (anth 1991) with MHG and Waugh anon.MHG and Waugh
with Carol Serling: Rod Serling's Night Gallery Reader * (anth 1987).MHG
and Waugh with Jenny-Lynn Waugh: 101 Science Fiction Stories (anth
1986).MHG and Waugh with Jane Yolen: Dragons and Dreams (anth 1986);
Spaceships and Spells (anth 1987).See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; AMAZING
STORIES; ANTHOLOGIES; ANTHROPOLOGY; CHILDREN IN SF; COMPUTERS; CRITICAL
AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS ANDPUBLICATIONS);
The
MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION; SHARED WORLDS; SOCIOLOGY.
GREENBERGER, ROBERT
[r] Michael Jan FRIEDMAN.
GREENBERG: PUBLISHER
GNOME PRESS; Martin GREENBERG.
GREENFIELD, IRVING A.
(1928- ) US writer in various genres, noted for expansive historical
fantasies. Waters of Death (1967), Succubus (1970; as by Campo Verde 1977)
and The Stars Will Judge (1974; vt Star Trial 1977) apply a lush though
highly readable psychologizing style to routine sf matters. As Bruce
Duncan he wrote Mirror Image (1968 chap dos), a minor work. [JC]Other
works: The UFO Report (1967), nonfiction; The Others (1969); The Ancient
of Days (1973); A Play of Darkness (1974); To Savor the Past (1975); Aton
(1975); The Face of Him (1976);Julius Caesar is Alive and Well (1977); The
Gods' Temptress (1978), a fantasy; The Fate of an Eagle (1990); the Depth
Force series of military-sf novels, comprising Depth Force(1984), Depth
Force #2: Death Dive (1984), #3: Bloody Seas (1985), #4: Battle Stations
(1985), #5: Torpedo Tomb (1986), #6: Sea of Flames (1986), #7: Deep Kill
(1986), #8: Suicide Run (1987), #9: Project Discovery (1988), #10: Death
Cruise (1988), #11: Ice Island (1988), #12: Harbor of Doom (1989), #13:
Warmonger (1989), #14: Deep Rescue (1990) and #15: Torpedo Treasure
(1991).
GREENHOUGH, TERRY

Working name of UK writer Terence Greenhough (1944- ) for most of his
fiction, though he used the pseudonym Andrew Lester for the routine novel
The Thrice-Born (1976), about persecuted hermaphrodites on a distant
planet. TG began publishing sf with "The Tree in the Forest" for Science
Fiction Monthly in 1974. His first novel, Time and Timothy Grenville
(1975), typically of this writer somewhat discursively exploits an uneasy,
oppressive relation between the world at large and its protagonist in a
story of complex TIME TRAVEL and ALIENS, in which Earth itself proves to
be at stake. [JC]Other works: The Wandering Worlds (1976); Thoughtworld
(1977); The Alien Contract (1980).
GREENLAND, COLIN
(1954- ) UK writer and academic who took a PhD in sf at Oxford,
publishing his thesis in revised form as The Entropy Exhibition: Michael
Moorcock and the UK "New Wave" (1983). This text also includes extensive
examinations of the works of Brian W. ALDISS and J.G. BALLARD and gives
competent readings of these and other authors, though it (understandably)
fails to provide anything like a definitive modelling of the notoriously
portable field and slippery topic of the NEW WAVE and its prime organ, NEW
WORLDS. CG later edited, with Eric S. RABKIN and George E. SLUSSER, Storm
Warnings: Science Fiction Confronts the Future (anth 1987 US). Beyond some
further critical pieces - and Death is no Obstacle (1992), a book-length
interview with Michael MOORCOCK, mostly about the latter's work - his
interest had by this point shifted towards fiction, though he was to take
on the position of Reviews Editor for FOUNDATION: THE REVIEW OF SCIENCE
FICTION in 1990.CG began publishing works of genre interest with "Miss
Otis Regrets" for Fiction Magazine in 1982. His first novel, Daybreak on a
Different Mountain (1984), a fantasy, wrestles mildly with an
ENTROPY-laden plot and venue, and with a range of New Wave influences
forgivable in a book coming from a scholar's loaded mind. Two further
fantasies set in different parts of the same world, The Hour of the Thin
Ox (1987) and Other Voices (1988), gradually demonstrated a sharpening,
meticulously intelligent, cold, quiet narrative voice, and plots which
carefully picked at some of the unthinking assumptions, general to
FANTASY, about war and peace, prejudice and love. Of much greater sf
interest was his fourth novel, TAKE BACK PLENTY (1990), a devotedly
exuberant SPACE OPERA and the first of the Plenty sequence, which won the
ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD and the BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD. The story
involves much tried-and-true material - from the MARS where the tale
begins to the tough female space-tramp who runs her own ship and is in all
sorts of trouble, and on to the ALIENS who dominate human space - and
indeed there are moments when CG seems all too knowing. But the neatly
calipered parodies are accomplished with love, lacking any trace of the
disdain that has tended to disfigure much UK space opera; and the high
jinks are genuinely earned. In the Garden: The Secret Origin of the Zodiac
Twins (1991 chap) is a short prequel, and Seasons of Plenty (1995) is the
projected sequel. Harm's Way (1993) approaches STEAMPUNK in its depiction
of an ALTERNATE WORLD solar system bathed in a sea of Aether, so that
great sailing ships dominate the spacelanes; but is, in the end, more
satisfactorily to be read as fantasy. CG has become, quite suddenly, one
of the dominant figures of his generation of sf writers. He contributed

the entry on Bruce STERLING to this encyclopedia. [JC]Other works:
Magnetic Storm (graph 1984) with Martyn Dean and Roger DEAN; Interzone:
The First Anthology (anth 1985) ed with John CLUTE and David PRINGLE.See
also: INTERZONE; MILFORD SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' CONFERENCE; OUTER
PLANETS; SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION; SPACE FLIGHT; WOMEN AS PORTRAYED
IN
SCIENCE FICTION.
GREENLEAF, WILLIAM
(?1917- ) US writer who began publishing sf with his first novel,
Timejumper (1980), an adventure incorporating an unusually subtle
presentation of the rite of passage central to the sf genre. His further
novels share a common galactic background, though it is clear he is
interested in that background not to challenge it with cosmogonies and
alarums but in order to add verisimilitude to tales of humans caught
off-balance in the vast Universe, and attempting to cope. The Tartarus
Incident (1983) lovingly describes an accident which dumps an untrained
group of humans on the planet of the title. The Pandora Stone (1984) is a
tale of detection involving an AI and a return to an almost deserted
Earth, where wisdom still resides. Starjacked! (1987) and Clarion (1988)
cover similar ground, perhaps rather hurriedly. [JC]
GREENLEAF PUBLISHING
IMAGINATION; IMAGINATIVE TALES.
GREENLEE, SAM
(1930- ) US writer whose NEAR-FUTURE sf novel, The Spook who Sat by the
Door (1969), features a Black uprising in a near-contemporary USA. [JC]See
also: POLITICS.
GREENWALD, HARRY J.
ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
GREENWOOD PRESS
US specialist publishing house, based in Westport, Connecticut, whose
books are largely academic and sometimes bibliographical; it has a special
interest in sf, and is one of the major academic publishers in this area.
GP has published commentaries on sf by Martha A. Bartter (1989), Thomas D.
CLARESON (1984), Bud Foote (1990), Donald M. HASSLER (1982), John J.
PIERCE (1987 and 1989), Gary K. WOLFE (1986) and others, and anthologies
of critical essays on sf ed Michael R. COLLINGS, Thomas P. Dunn and
Richard D. Erlich, Martin H. GREENBERG, Robert E. Myers, Donald Palumbo,
Robert Reilly, Carl B. YOKE and others, many in GP's Contributions to the
Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy series, which began in 1982 and has
(by 1992) published over 40 volumes. Some of the anthologies have been
selected from conference proceedings of the annual International
Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Other GP books are the splendid
Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Magazines (1985) ed Marshall
B. TYMN and Mike ASHLEY, and A Biographical Dictionary of Science Fiction
and Fantasy Artists (1988) by Robert E. WEINBERG, both standard
references. GP has also published complete runs of many famous sf
magazines (mostly PULP MAGAZINES) in microfiche, including AMZ, Planet
Stories and Startling Stories. [PN]See also: SF IN THE CLASSROOM.

GREER, RICHARD
ZIFF-DAVIS house name used once by Robert SILVERBERG and Randall GARRETT,
on the story "The Great Klandar Race" (AMZ 1956), and twice during 1956-7
by others (unidentified). [PN]
GREER, TOM
Working name of Irish surgeon Thomas Greer (1846/7-1904) for his writing;
he lived in the UK from about 1880. In his A Modern Daedalus (1885) an
Irish lad invents a one-man flying device which straps to the shoulders.
The UK Government attempts to persuade him to use it against Ireland.
Though he longs simply for peace, UK military action forces him onto the
side of the revolutionaries, and a squadron of Irish fliers gains
independence for their oppressed island home. [JC]
GREG, PERCY
(1836-1889) UK poet, novelist and historian, son of the prolific essayist
William Rathbone Greg (1809-1881); PG also wrote as Lionel G. Holdreth.
His first work of genre interest was "Guy Neville's Ghost" for Blackwood's
in 1865; the nonfiction The Devil's Advocate (1878) contains some
speculative material. He was author of an important early sf novel, Across
the Zodiac: The Story of a Wrecked Record (1880) ( FANTASTIC VOYAGES),
which is perhaps most significant for its detailed depiction of the
protagonist's journey to MARS through the use of apergy, an ANTIGRAVITY
force (the concept provided a model for many later novels) which he uses
to propel his SPACESHIP, whose construction is carefully described. Once
on Mars, a more orthodox detailing of UTOPIA ensues: the Martians'
version, though technologically advanced and benignly monarchical, suffers
from scientific literalism (wrong thoughts are criminal) and dubious
sexual morality (women are bought and sold). Finding himself allied to an
opposing group of telepaths who believe in family life, the protagonist is
embroiled in a final conflict and loses friends and wife, though the
telepaths win the war. He escapes to his spaceship and the novel ends
abruptly. Across the Zodiac remains readable. [JC/BS]See also: HISTORY OF
SF; POWER SOURCES.
GREGG PRESS
US publisher of reprints in hardcover, a subsidiary of G.K. Hall ?
The Gregg Press Science Fiction Reprint Series, ed David G. HARTWELL with
Lloyd W. CURREY as associate editor, included a variety of novels and
collections dating from the 18th century until recent times. Among them
were several new volumes, including ALYX (coll 1976; vt The Adventures of
Alyx 1985 UK) by Joanna RUSS. GP also published books of critical material
about sf drawn from such academic journals as SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES and
FOUNDATION. The GP reprints - many of which represented the first
hardcover editions of out-of-print paperback originals - were regarded by
critics as the best of the several sf reprint hardcover series, all aimed
primarily at libraries; new and often lengthy introductions to the fiction
reprints, by leading critics and authors, were a useful feature. 1978 was
a peak year for the series, with 61 titles published. In 1980 it became
clear that the backlist inventory was too large, and the roster of new
publications was radically cut down. During 1980-84 Currey alone edited

the GP Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy author bibliographies, which
covered 18 writers in 14 volumes. GP stopped publishing sf in 1984, and
disappeared on being absorbed into Macmillan in Spring 1991. [PN/MJE]
GREGOR, LEE
[s] Tony ROTHMAN.
GREGORY, JOHN
Robert HOSKINS.
GREGORY, OWEN
(? - ) Pseudonym of the UK author of Meccania, the Super State (1918), a
futuristic DYSTOPIA describing a German mechanical and totalitarian
society taken to its logical extreme. It contrasts interestingly with the
portrait of a dystopian Germany in Milo HASTINGS' City of Endless Night
(1920). [JE]See also: HISTORY OF SF; POLITICS.
GREMLINS
Film. Joe DANTE.
GRENDON, STEPHEN
August W. DERLETH.
GREY, CAROL
[s] Robert A.W. LOWNDES.
GREY, CHARLES
E.C. TUBB.
GRIBBIN, JOHN
(1946- ) UK writer known mostly for his very numerous science
popularizations. Most of his novels have been in collaboration and have
tended to a certain narrative predictability, though the science content
has always been impressively presented. Sixth Winter(1979) with Douglas
(William) Orgill (1922-1984) is a HARD-SF tale dealing with the coming of
a new ice age. Brother Esau (1982), again with Orgill, charts the events
following the discovery of the Yeti. Double Planet (1988) and its remote
sequel Reunion (1991), both with Marcus CHOWN, are set in the same
universe, though 1000 years apart. In the first, astronauts must intercept
a comet thought to be on collision course with Earth; in the second the
lunar population comes under the influence of a cult claiming to hold the
secret to the replenishment of the MOON's atmosphere. JG's only solo
novel, Father to the Man (1989), arguably his best book, is a readable and
witty tale of a geneticist hero pitted against a world of spreading
religious fundamentalism. Ragnarok (1991) with D.G. COMPTON is a
NEAR-FUTURE cautionary tale in a traditional vein: a SCIENTIST threatens
to end human civilization unless peace is declared; almost inadvertantly,
Ragnarok does indeed occur. Innervisions (1993) is a weak POCKET UNIVERSE
tale. [MB]Other works: Very many science books, including: The Jupiter
Effect (1974) and Beyond the Jupiter Effect (1983), both with Stephen
Plagemann ( Immanuel VELIKOVSKY); White Holes: Cosmic Gushers in the
Universe (1977); In Search of Schrodinger's Cat (1984); Blinded by the
Light (1991).See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN
WORLD); BLACK HOLES; GENETIC ENGINEERING; PARALLEL WORLDS.

GRIDBAN, VOLSTED
Pseudonym initially used by E.C. TUBB for 3 novels written for Scion
Publications: Alien Universe (1952), Reverse Universe (1952) and Debracy's
Drug (1953). Tubb then used the name on 2 novels for the Milestone Press Planetoid Disposals, Ltd (1953) and Fugitive of Time (1953) - but Scion
objected and reclaimed the name, which was used thereafter by John Russell
FEARN (whom see for titles). [BS]
"GRIFF"
House name of Modern Publications, used by John Russell FEARN on the sf
novel Liquid Death (1953) and on non-sf works by F. Dubrez FAWCETT. [JC]
GRIFF, ALAN
Donald SUDDABY.
GRIFFIN, BRIAN
(1941- ) UK writer who published two unremarkable sf novels for ROBERT
HALE LIMITED, The Nucleation (1977) and The OMEGA Project (1978). He is
better remembered for the competent Apertures: A Study of the Writings of
Brian Aldiss (1984) with David WINGROVE. [JC]
GRIFFIN, P(AULINE) M(ARGARET)
(1947- ) US writer known initially as the author of the untaxing Star
Commandos military-sf sequence set in an interstellar venue: Star
Commandos (1986), Star Commandos #2: Colony in Peril(1987), #3: Mission
Underground (1988), #4: Death Planet (1989), #5: Mind Slaver (1990), #6:
Return to War (1990), #7: Fire Planet (1990), #8: Jungle Assault (1991)
and #9: Call to Arms (1991). PMG has also published several fantasy
stories, including material contributed to Andre NORTON's Witch World
sequence, such as "Oath-Bound" in Tales of the Witch World *(anth 1987) ed
Norton and Witch World: The Turning: Storms of Victory * (1991) with
Norton; of greater sf interest was Redline the Stars (1993) with Norton,
which revisits the latter's Solar Queen sequence. [JC]
GRIFFIN, RUSSELL M(ORGAN)
(1943-1986) US academic and writer who began publishing sf with his first
novel, The Makeshift God (1979), an overwritten and overlong but notably
intelligent romance of origins, set initially in a drab Arab-dominated
marginally pre- CYBERPUNK USA, and then on a planet which houses
mysteriously significant data about the deep human past. Century's End
(1981) takes another blackly satirical look at the NEAR FUTURE of Earth,
generating comparisons between RMG and writers like Kurt VONNEGUT Jr and more relevantly - John T. SLADEK. In The Blind Man and the Elephant (1982)
RMG tackled a theme dear to Sladek, the consequences of thrusting a
tabula-rasa personality into a meat-grinder world - in Sladek's case it is
usually a young ROBOT that loses its innocence; in RMG's it is a
fast-maturing and monstrous experiment in cloning. The novel closes, after
some very funny passages, in a state of utter despair. RMG's final novel,
The Timeservers (1985), returns to the relative extroversion of his first
in the story of a young soldier's confrontation with CLONES, far stars and
telepathic ALIENS. RMG's premature death halted a career which could have
soared. [JC]See also: END OF THE WORLD; MONSTERS.

GRIFFITH, GEORGE
Working name of UK traveller, journalist and writer George Chetwynd
Griffith-Jones (1857-1906), the son of a clergyman and one of the most
influential sf writers of his time. He appeared frequently in the pre-sf
MAGAZINES and PULP MAGAZINES, particularly PEARSON'S WEEKLY and PEARSON'S
MAGAZINE, writing as GG or, for some short stories, as Levin Carnac. He
was instrumental in the transformation of the future- WAR novel to a more
sensational form, capitalizing on contemporary political anxiety; and he
helped make up a literary coterie, including William LE QUEUX, M.P. SHIEL
and Louis TRACY, which specialized in the genre.GG first established
himself with The Angel of the Revolution (1893 Pearson's Weekly; rev 1893)
and its sequel Olga Romanoff (1893-4 Pearson's Weekly as "The Syren of the
Skies"; rev 1894). In the first a revolutionary organization equipped with
aerial battleships creates a reformed society under the government of a
world federation; the second, set 125 years later, describes the upheaval
which transforms this UTOPIAN state to one of total anarchy. Both are
remarkable for their foresight of battle tactics in air warfare and for
their anticipation of radar, sonar and nuclear weapons. They include
elements which would only later become commonplace, notably the struggle
by international cartels for world domination and the apocalyptic visions
of Armageddon on Earth and of DISASTER from the heavens by comet. These
elements can be found also in The Outlaws of the Air (1894-5 Short
Stories; rev 1895), Gambles with Destiny (coll 1898), The Great Pirate
Syndicate (1898 Pick-Me-Up; rev 1899), The Lake of Gold (1903), A Woman
Against the World (1903), The World Masters (1903), The Stolen Submarine
(1904), The Great Weather Syndicate (1906), The World Peril of 1910 (1907)
and The Lord of Labour (1911).From early in his career GG was overshadowed
by H.G. WELLS, a fact which caused him to diversify his work, in search of
critical acclaim. Such praise never came, although he produced notable
examples of several themes: IMMORTALITY featured in Valdar the Oft-Born
(1895 Pearson's Weekly; rev 1895) and Captain Ishmael (1901), the latter
also being an early example of the PARALLEL-WORLDS theme; the LOST-WORLD
theme in The Romance of Golden Star (1895 Short Stories as "Golden Star";
rev 1897), The Virgin of the Sun (1898) and A Criminal Croesus (1904);
SPACE FLIGHT in A Honeymoon in Space (1900 Pearson's Magazine as "Stories
of Other Worlds"; exp 1901); the fourth DIMENSION in The Mummy and Miss
Nitrocris (fixup 1906; vt The Mummy and the Girl UK); telepathy in A
Mayfair Magician (1905; vt The Man with Three Eyes UK); RELIGION in The
Missionary (1902); and the supernatural in Denver's Double (1901), The
White Witch of Mayfair (1902) and The Destined Maid (1908).GG's influence
on contemporary UK sf was extensive, from E. Douglas FAWCETT's Hartmann
the Anarchist (1893) through to Cyril Seymour's Comet Chaos (1906) and
John MASTIN's The Stolen Planet (1906), and can still be seen today, as in
Michael MOORCOCK's 19th-century pastiches. (Since GG's anti-US stance
precluded US publication of many of his works, his influence there has
been negligible.) Several of his novels have been reprinted in recent
times, as well as a collection of unreprinted stories, The Raid of "Le
Vengeur" (coll 1974) ed George LOCKE. [JE]Other works: Briton or Boer?
(1897); The Gold Finder (1898); The Justice of Revenge (1901); The Sacred
Skull (1908).About the author: "War: Warriors of If" in Strange Horizons:
The Spectrum of Science Fiction (1976) by Sam MOSKOWITZ.See also:

EDISONADE; END OF THE WORLD; HISTORY OF SF; MARS; MERCURY; MOON; NEAR
FUTURE; NUCLEAR POWER; POLITICS; PROTO SCIENCE FICTION; REINCARNATION;
TECHNOLOGY; TRANSPORTATION; VENUS; WEAPONS.
GRIFFITH, MARY
(?1800-1877) US horticultural writer and novelist whose early futuristic
UTOPIA, Three Hundred Years Hence (1950), originally appeared as one of
the stories in Camperdown, or News from our Neighbourhood (coll 1836),
published as by An Author of our Neighbourhood. In an extremely early use
of the SLEEPER-AWAKES convention, the tale takes its protagonist 200 years
forward into an automated, urban world where women are emancipated,
slavery is abolished, drunkards are pilloried, good hygiene is enforced,
dogs are extinct and Shakespeare is expurgated. It is a bluestocking
world, but one created with a substantial force of imagination. [JC/PN]See
also: SUSPENDED ANIMATION.
GRIFFITH, NICOLA
(1960- ) UK writer resident in the US from 1989 who began publishing work
of genre interest with "An Other Winter's Tale" for Network in 1987, and
who attracted wide attention with her first novel, Ammonite (1993), a late
and sophisticated traversal of the themes-and the venues through which
those themes have typically been expressed-of FEMINISM in sf. Her female
protagonist, who is both agent and victim of an interstellar, imperialist,
capitalistic, male-dominated government, is charged to investigate a
planet inhabited only by women, because a mysterious virus kills off any
males who land there. The protagonist gradually comes to understand the
lesbian culture of the planet Jeep-which at points resembles the culture
of Whileaway used by Joanna RUSS in more than one work-and her own
sexuality. While men do occupy the background (ie surrounding space) and
threaten to sterilize Jeep for fear of the virus, the overall feel of
Ammonite is that of lessons about human nature learned, and taught,
without grievance. [JC]
GRIFFITHS, DAVID ARTHUR
(? - ) UK writer whose obscurity is only marginally lessened by the
knowledge that, while working for CURTIS WARREN, he invited E.C. TUBB to
write his first novels. Under the house name Gill HUNT DAG wrote Vega
(1951) and Fission (1952); under the house name King LANG he wrote Gyrator
Control (1951), Astro-Race (1951), Task Flight (1951), Rocket Invasion
(1951) and Projectile War (1951); and under the house name David Shaw he
wrote Laboratory "X" (1950), Planet Federation (1950) and Space Men
(1951). Though unconfirmed, there is a strong possibility that DAG was the
author of 6 Tarzan-derived novels under the house name Marco GARRON. [JC]
GRIFFITHS, JOHN (C.)
(1934- ) UK writer in whose sf novel, The Survivors (1965), an assorted
group of folk hang on in a Cornish cave after China starts WWIII. A
nonfiction (and significantly unliterary) study, Three Tomorrows:
American, British and Soviet Science Fiction (1980), treats the genre as a
forum, defined according to the sociological principles of Karl Mannheim
(1893-1947), for predictive utterances that illustrate national
characters. [JC]

GRILE, DOD
Ambrose BIERCE.
GRIN, ALEXANDER
[r] RUSSIA.
GRINNELL, DAVID
Donald A. WOLLHEIM.
GRIP
L. Edgar WELCH.
GROGAN, GERALD
(1884-1918) UK writer, killed in WWI. His sf novel, A Drop in Infinity
(1915), carries its unwilling protagonists via a mad SCIENTIST's device
into an empty but congenial PARALLEL WORLD. A lengthy ROBINSONADE evolves
during which the protagonists become reconciled to their lot, have
children, survive a crisis and find themselves finally isolated from
Earth. [JC]
GRONFELDT, VIBEKE
DENMARK.
GROOM, (ARTHUR JOHN) PELHAM
(? - ) UK writer whose long series of Peter Mohune novels were mostly
crime stories; the last two, however, concern themselves with the
implications of nuclear power. In The Fourth Seal (c1947) Mohune comes
across a secret society which has privately developed atomic fission. In
The Purple Twilight (1948) he travels to MARS in search of the descendents
of ATLANTIS, finding instead telepathic members of a dying Martian race,
who tell him they themselves destroyed Atlantis in self-defence, but later
fell into an arms race leading to the nuclear civil war that sterilized
them all. When Mohune returns to Earth he finds a similar arms race
developing, with similar sterilizing weapons. He tells of his experiences
- in vain. [JC]
GROSSE VERHAU, DER
(vt The Big Mess) Film (1970). Kairos Film. Prod and dir Alexander Kluge,
starring Siegfried Graue, Vincenz Starr, Maria Sterr, Silvia Forsthofer.
Screenplay Kluge, Wolfgang Mai. 86 mins. B/w and colour.This West German
comedy is by a director - a leading light of the German New Wave - whose
apprenticeship was with Fritz LANG. It is an amusing DYSTOPIA set in
AD2034, when the Galaxy has been opened up to entrepreneurs, and monopoly
capitalism - in this case the Suez Canal Company - is rampant. DGV focuses
on two not especially bright astronauts caught in the muddle of the
system, who smuggle, wreck spaceships for scrap or do deals with insurance
companies. The imagery of working stiffs in ramshackle spacecraft points
forward to ALIEN (1979). [PN]
GROUNDHOG DAY
Film (1993). Columbia. Dir and co-prod Harold Ramis; screenplay Danny
Rubin and Ramis, based on a story by Rubin; starring Bill Murray, Andie
MacDowell,Chris Elliott. 101 mins. Colour.Phil Connors (Murray) is a
cynical and unhappy tv weatherman, dejected at having to cover for the

fifth time the annual Groundhog Day ceremony in the small town of
Punxsutawney. The groundhog predicts six more weeks of winter, and indeed
the tv crew is snowed in that night. When Connors wakes next morning, it
is for him the same day - Groundhog Day - in Punxsutawney all over again.
And again, after he has gone to bed, the next day. And again for a very
long time. Although most people take the film as fantasy, the idea of a
day endlessly repeated in a time loop is actually quite familiar in genre
sf. The difference here is that Connors has free will, and can do with the
day what he likes. At first he is irresponsible, later suicidal. He
oscillates between nasty and smarmy nice. He attempts (unsuccessfully) to
seduce his idealistic producer Rita Hanson (MacDowell) by learning all
about what she likes and dislikes over a long series of the same day. What
makes the film wonderful is the absolute integrity with which the
ramifications of the simple idea are explored, and the crispness of the
editing and performances throughout. It becomes clear that the day will go
on forever unless, perhaps, Connors learns how to get the day right. It is
quite astonishingly well made, for it could so easily have gone wrong; the
subtle differences-all catalysed by Connors-from day to day are superbly
rendered and quite gripping. Ideas of death darkly interpose themselves
between Connors and his infinitely slow learning process,itself a kind of
metaphor for real life. It is not even a simple story of redemption, for
some of Connors' unpleasantness remains, mercifully, intact at the end,
and it is arguable that he finally gets the day right more out of the
pressure of tedium than because he has learned to love this simple (but
kind of boring) town. No one will ever make a better-or funnier-time loop
film than this. It should have won a HUGO, but it was JURASSIC PARK year.
[PN]
GROUSSET, PASCHAL
Andre LAURIE.
GROVE, FREDERICK PHILIP
(1897-1948) German-born Canadian writer, born Felix Paul Greve. His
output included realistic novels, rural studies and the sf SATIRE Consider
Her Ways (written 1913-23; 1947), which presents the notes of an amateur
scientist in telepathic contact with three ants, members of an exploratory
team from South America. Their comments on the nature of Man and human
society are pointed, and the picture of ant society is remarkably
detailed. The novel has never received due attention. [JC]See also:
CANADA.
GROVE, PETER J.
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
GROVE, W.
(? -? ) UK writer of whom nothing is known except that he was the author
of A Mexican Mystery (1888) and its sequel, The Wreck of a World (1889),
which trace the coming to a kind of consciousness of the MACHINES of
Earth; they then breed other machines and revolt, driving humanity from
the continental USA by about 1950. [JC]
GROVES, J(OHN) W(ILLIAM)
(1910- ) UK writer, variously employed, who began publishing sf with "The

Sphere of Death" for AMZ in 1931, but whose career consisted mainly of
desultory magazine publications until his first novel for ROBERT HALE
LIMITED, Shellbreak (1968), in which a man awakens in AD2505 armed with
knowledge that helps him to topple a corrupt dictatorship. The Heels of
Achilles (1969) presents a world in which the dead have come mysteriously
to life. [JC]
GRUBER, MARIANNE
[r] AUSTRIA.
GRUNERT, CARL
[r] GERMANY.
GUERARD, ALBERT JOSEPH
(1914- ) Influential US critic and novelist, who has taught at Amherst
College, Harvard University and Stanford University. He has long been an
advocate of US experimentalist fiction. His sf novel Night Journey(1950)
depicts an idealistic soldier against the background of a useless
NEAR-FUTURE European WAR. The loss of his illusions is rendered with
psychological acuity. [JC]
GUERNSEY, H.W.
[s] Donald WANDREI.
GUERRE PLANETARI
Il PIANETA DEGLI UOMINI SPENTI.
GUIN, WYMAN (WOODS)
(1915-1989) US pharmacologist, advertising executive and writer who began
publishing sf with "Trigger Tide" as Norman Menasco for ASF in 1950,
though his career can be said really to have begun with "Beyond Bedlam"
(1951) which, like most of his best work of the 1950s and early 1960s,
appeared first in Gal and was subsequently included in Living Way Out
(coll 1967; exp vt Beyond Bedlam 1973 UK). "Beyond Bedlam" is a brilliant
novelette describing an Earth about 1000 years hence where drugs enforce a
strictly regulated schizophrenia ( PARANOIA) in every human being in a
five-days-on, five-days-off routine, each body being inhabited alternately
by two personalities, the balance between whom nullifies Man's
subconscious aggressions, thus eliminating the "paranoid wars" of the
"ancient Moderns". But passion and art likewise disappear. The good and
evil of this system are explored with a literacy and verisimilitude that
make it a genuinely interesting variation on Aldous HUXLEY's vision of
drug-enforced stability in BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932). Similar hyperbolic
distortions of the "normal" world govern stories like "My Darling Hecate"
(1953) and "The Delegate from Guapanga" (1964). The Standing Joy (1969), a
PARALLEL-WORLDS story set in a nostalgically rendered other Earth,
features a SUPERMAN, a good deal of harmless SEX and a general sense of
missed focus. WG will be remembered for the power of his early stories.
[JC]See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; PSYCHOLOGY;
SOCIOLOGY.
GU JUNZHENG
CHINESE SF.

GULL, RANGER
Guy THORNE.
GUNN, JAMES E(DWIN)
(1923- ) US writer, critic and teacher, born in Kansas City and educated
at the University of Kansas, where he is now a professor of English and
journalism and Director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction. He
began publishing sf with "Communications" for Startling Stories in 1949 as
Edwin James, a disguise he dropped for good in 1952 after 10 stories.
Throughout his career, JEG's favoured form has been the short story or
novelette; his best book-length fictions have been either collaborations
or assemblages of shorter material. He has also published considerable sf
criticism, beginning with excerpts from his MA thesis in Dynamic Science
Fiction (1953-4) and continuing with the brief The Discovery of the
Future: The Ways Science Fiction Developed (1975). More notable is a
competent illustrated survey of sf, Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated
History of Science Fiction (1975), although it inevitably suffers from
superficiality in its attempt at comprehensive coverage of later years,
with many writers appearing only as names in paragraph-long lists. For
this critical work JEG won the 1976 PILGRIM AWARD. More recently, he
edited The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1988), a shortish and
film-dominated text which is in no way a sequel to or otherwise connected
with the first edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1979) ed
Peter NICHOLLS.JEG's first two books were SPACE OPERAS. This Fortress
World (1955) pits its protagonist against a repressive future religion.
Star Bridge (1955), with Jack WILLIAMSON, shows through a sometimes
pixilated intricacy of plotting the mark of its senior collaborator's
grasp of the nature of good space opera. Everyone, it turns out, is being
manipulated, for the salvation of mankind, by an immortal Chinese with a
parrot. Station in Space (coll of linked stories 1958) assembles several
uninteresting early tales about how Man is tricked into space exploration
for his own good. The Joy Makers (fixup 1961) describes, in JEG's dark,
ponderous, cumulatively impressive manner, a society whose members are
controlled by synthetic forms of release that corrode their sense of
reality. In The Immortals (fixup 1962), JEG's best known work, a mutation
confers IMMORTALITY upon a group of people who become collectively known
as Cartwrights; as their condition is transmissible to others by blood
transfusion, they are forced underground by the understandable desire of
mortal men to attain immortality. The hospital setting of the book adds
verisimilitude. As The IMMORTAL (1969), it became a made-for-tv series,
which JEG novelized as The Immortal * (1970).JEG's second novel to gain
general esteem, The Listeners (fixup 1972), makes productive use of its
episodic structure in depicting the installation of an electronic
listening post to scan for radio messages from the stars, and the 100-year
wait that ensues. JEG's somewhat morose style (in his better moments he
evokes a kind of sense of the melancholy of wonder) nicely underlines the
complex institutional frustrations and rewards of this long search.
Indeed, his forte seems to lie in the narrative analysis of stress-ridden
administrations and their administrators; and his best work is usually set
in organizations or among groups of people forced to cooperate. Women (
WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION), however, tend to be excluded from

the higher purposes of such organizations, and are sometimes depicted
balking at the sacrifices men must make to reach the stars. Nevertheless,
JEG has made a considerable success of his chosen length and venue, and
his later works - particularly Crisis! (fixup 1986) - can ruminate
absorbingly on the administration of humanity's problems to come.
[JC]Other works: Future Imperfect (coll 1964); The Witching Hour (coll
1970); The Burning (fixup 1972); Breaking Point (coll 1972); Some Dreams
are Nightmares (coll 1974), containing short stories from Station in
Space, The Joy Makers and The Immortals; The End of the Dreams: Three
Short Novels About Space, Happiness and Immortality (coll 1975),
containing long stories from Station in Space, The Joy Makers and The
Immortals; The Magicians (1954 Beyond as "Sine of the Magus"; exp 1976);
Kampus (1977); The Dreamers (1977 in Triax ed Robert SILVERBERG as "If I
Forget Thee"; exp 1980; vt The Mind Master 1982); Tiger! Tiger! (written
1952; 1984 chap); The Unpublished Gunn (coll 1992 chap).Nonfiction:
Teacher's Manual: The Road to Science Fiction (1980 chap) with Stephen H.
Goldman (1943-1991), who also served as Associate Editor for JEG's New
Encyclopedia and was its major contributor; Isaac Asimov: The Foundations
of Science Fiction (1982), for which he received a 1983 HUGO; Inside
Science Fiction: Essays on Fantastic Literature (coll 1992).As Editor: The
4 vols of The Road to Science Fiction sequence, comprising From Gilgamesh
to Wells (anth 1977), From Wells to Heinlein (anth 1979), From Heinlein to
Here (anth 1979) and From Here to Forever (anth 1982).About the author: A
James Gunn Checklist (1984 chap) by Chris DRUMM.See also: ALIENS;
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; ASTRONOMY; BIBLIOGRAPHIES; COMMUNICATIONS;
CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DYSTOPIAS; GALACTIC EMPIRES;
GAMES
AND SPORTS; GENRE SF; GOLDEN AGE OF SF; HUGO; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE
FICTION MAGAZINE; JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD; LEISURE; MAGIC;
MEDICINE; NEBULA; PSYCHOLOGY; RELIGION; SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF
AMERICA; SOCIOLOGY; UTOPIAS.
GUNN, NEIL M(ILLER)
(1891-1973) Scottish writer and civil servant, author of many novels, the
first being Grey Coast (1926). It and some others - like Morning Tide
(1931), The Last Glen (1932), Second Sight (1940) and The Silver Bough
(1948) - contain fantasy elements of interest. The Green Isle of the Great
Deep (1944), a sequel to Young Art and Old Hector (1942), describes the
experiences of an old man and a young boy in an underground realm which
turns out to be a sterile and totalitarian land of the dead: their
protests to God are successful. The Well at World's End (1951), whose
title acknowledges a debt to William MORRIS, sums up NMG's style, which is
rich and sometimes sentimental, and his abiding concern, which is the
evocation of an idealized Scotland. [JC]
GUNNARSSON, THORARINN
(1957- ) US writer who has been strongly identified with FANTASY because
of Song of the Dwarves (1988), its sequel Revenge of the Valkyrie (1989),
plus Make Way for Dragons! (1990), sequelled by Human, Beware! (1990) and
Dragons on the Town (1992), both sequences humorous. The Starwolves
sequence - The Starwolves (1988), Starwolves: Battle of the Ring

(1989),Starwolves: Tactical Error (1991) and Starwolves: Dreadnought
(1992) - is rousing SPACE OPERA, opposing human warriors to a sentient
space fortress. Dragonlord of Mystara * (1994) is tied to a game. [JC]
GUNTHER, GOTTHARD
[r] GERMANY.
GURK, PAUL
[r] GERMANY.
GURNEY, DAVID
Patrick BAIR.
GURNEY, JAMES
(1958- ) US illustrator, raised in California, studied at the Art Center
College of Design in Pasadena. JG made his sf debut with a cover for FSF
in 1982, but his real baptism of fire that year was working as one of only
two background painters on the animated SWORD-AND-SORCERY film Fire and
Ice (1982). JG, who works in oils, primarily paints book covers; he has
also done historic and prehistoric paintings for National Geographic. His
style is one of the most painterly in sf since the retirement of John
SCHOENHERR; in a field that emphasizes surface slickness, JG is
refreshing. His influences are eclectic, but include Norman Rockwell
(1894-1978). His popular Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time (1992) is an
art book, with text also by JG, telling of a 19th-century LOST WORLD in
which humans coexist with intelligent dinosaurs. See also:
ILLUSTRATION.
GUTTERIDGE, LINDSAY
(1923- ) UK writer. His sf series featuring Matthew Dilke - Cold War in a
Country Garden (1971), Killer Pine (1973) and Fratricide is a Gas (1975) calls upon themes from espionage to ECOLOGY to buttress far-fetched tales
of a government agent miniaturized with some companions ( GREAT AND SMALL)
to test the chances of counteracting OVERPOPULATION by resettling the
world with a miniaturized mankind. [JC]
GYERTYAN, ERVIN
[r] HUNGARY.

SF?
HABER, KAREN
Working name of Karen Lee Haber Silverberg (1955- ), US writer and
anthologist, married to Robert SILVERBERG since 1987. She began publishing
work of genre interest with "Madre de Dios" for FSF in 1988, and came to
general notice with the Fire in Winter sequence, which traces the fortunes
of a family of PSI-POWERED mutants and their threatened subculture in a
21st-century USA: The Mutant Season (1989) with Silverberg, The Mutant
Prime (1990), Mutant Star (1992) and Mutant Legacy(1993). Silverberg's
influence was initially evident - the first volume was derived from his
"The Mutant Season" (1973) - but KH soon established her own identity as a
sharp, warm teller of tales. A singleton, Thieves Carnival (1990 chap
dos), prequels Leigh BRACKETT's The Jewel of Bas (1944 Planet Stories;

1990 dos), with which it was paired as a TOR BOOKS Double. With
Silverberg, KH co-edited the new sequence of UNIVERSE anthologies,
carrying on from Terry CARR's original series: Universe 1 (anth 1990),
Universe 2 (anth 1992) and Universe 3(anth 1994). [JC]
HABIBI, AMIL
ARABIC SF.
HACKETT, [General Sir] JOHN (WINTHROP)
(1910- ) British Army officer (retired) and writer, whose The Third World
War: August 1985 (1978; rev 1982) and The Third World War: The Untold
Story (coll 1982), both written with the help of a think-tank of soldiers,
journalists and diplomats, together describe the course of a (largely)
conventional war betweeen (mostly) NATO and the Warsaw Pact in a mock
historical style. The books represent an attempt to alert the public to
the dangers posed by war against the Soviet bloc, and remain interesting
largely because of the authenticity and detail of their descriptions of
what such a conflict might actually have been like. [NT]
HADLEY, ARTHUR T(WINING)
(1923-1977) US journalist and writer whose successful novel, The Joy
Wagon (1958), uses a borderline-sf treatment of COMPUTERS in a sharply
comic send-up of the US electoral system. The computer runs for President
and almost wins. [JC]See also: POLITICS.
HADLEY, FRANKLIN
Russ R. WINTERBOTHAM.
HADLEY PUBLISHING COMPANY
US specialist SMALL PRESS, 1947-8, based in Providence, Rhode Island,
owned by Thomas P. Hadley. It grew out of (or was a renaming of) Buffalo
Book Co., under which name it published The Time Stream (1931 Wonder
Stories; 1946) by John TAINE and The Skylark of Space (1928 AMZ; 1946) by
E.E. "Doc" SMITH. A very short-lived company, HPC was notable for
publishing John W. CAMPBELL Jr's first book, The Mightiest Machine (1934-5
ASF; 1947), A.E. VAN VOGT's The Weapon Makers (1943 ASF; 1947; rev vt One
Against Eternity 1952) and L. Ron HUBBARD's Final Blackout (1940 ASF;
1948). The company was bought out by Donald M. Grant (1927- ) and became
the Grandon Company; later, under his own name, Grant became an important
small-press publisher of fantasy. [MJE/PN]
HAGGARD, [Sir] H(ENRY) RIDER
(1856-1925) UK civil servant, lawyer, agricultural expert and writer. HRH
spent the years 1875-81 in the Colonial Service in South Africa, where he
gained much of the material for his fiction. On his return to the UK he
read for the bar while at the same time beginning to produce novels and
other work. With his third and fourth novels, King Solomon's Mines (1885)
and the even more successful She: A History of Adventure (1886-7 The
Graphic; cut 1886 US; text restored 1887 UK; The Annotated She [1991 US]
ed Norman Etherington is a variorum text with erratic additional notes),
HRH was catapulted into fame, and soon left the bar; he was knighted in
1912. These novels of anthropological sf remain his most famous; they
established a pattern he would follow for the rest of his career. That

pattern might be described as a central model for Edgar Rice BURROUGHS and
the SCIENCE-FANTASY subgenre whose popularity attended the latter's
revival in the 1960s: it is a pattern in which realistic portraits of the
contemporary world (in HRH's case South Africa) are combined with
backward-looking displacements (in his case invoking LOST WORLDS,
IMMORTALITY and REINCARNATION) to give a general effect of deep nostalgia.
HRH was fascinated by ruins, ancient civilizations and primitive customs.
His allied interest in the PSEUDO-SCIENCE of Spiritualism link him to such
contemporaries as Bulwer LYTTON and Marie CORELLI, though in fact his
central literary friendships were with Andrew LANG and Rudyard KIPLING; he
shared with the latter a fin de siecle sense - which proved entirely
accurate - that the British Empire was on the wane. His prose was
sometimes overblown, but he was a gifted storyteller with a powerful
imagination and the ability to create memorable heroic figures, like the
Zulu Umslopogaas, whose early life is the subject of the remarkable Nada
the Lily (1892 US).Umslopogaas appears also in HRH's principal sequence,
the novels about white hunter Allan Quatermain which gave Africa to the
world as a haven in the mind's eye. Here the Quatermain books are given in
order of internal chronology, the dates of their settings preceding the
titles: 1835-8 Marie (1912); 1842-69 Allan's Wife (1887), which was
incorporated into Allan's Wife and Other Tales (coll 1889); 1854-6 Child
of Storm (1913); 1859 Maiwa's Revenge (1888); 1870 The Holy Flower (1915;
vt Allan and the Holy Flower 1915 US); 1871 Heu-Heu, or The Monster
(1924); 1872 She and Allan (1921 US); 1873 The Treasure of the Lake (1926
US); 1874 The Ivory Child (1916); 1879 Finished (1916 US); 1879 "Magepa
the Buck" in Smith and the Pharaohs and Other Tales (coll 1920); 1880 King
Solomon's Mines; 1882 The Ancient Allan (1920); 1883 Allan and the Ice
Gods: A Tale of Beginnings (1927); 1884-5 Allan Quatermain: Being an
Account of his Further Adventures and Discoveries in Company with Sir
Henry Curtis, Bart., Commander John Good, and one Umslopogaas (1887; cut
vt Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold * 1986, the text being
shaped into a film novelization). A heavily cut version of She was
published a decade later (1896 UK); the abridgement may have been done by
W(illiam) T(homas) Stead (1849-1912), who edited the series in which it
appeared.Not all these books could be described as science fantasy, but
all project that sense of desiderium - the longing for that which is lost
- that lies at the heart of true science fantasy; and those titles written
late in HRH's career - like The Ancient Allan, a tale of love-death set in
Egypt, and Allan and the Ice Gods, in which Quatermain is thrown back in
time by means of a drug and inhabits the body of a paleolithic man - tend
to express their author's potent (but submerged) sexuality in venues so
remote that a suppressed libidinousness can become, occasionally, almost
explicit.It is, however, in the Ayesha sequence that HRH's Victorian
libido found easiest release from the chains of the present. In She: A
History of Adventure (rewritten for the movies by Don Ward as She: The
Story Retold * 1949 US), Ayesha: The Return of She (1905; vt The Return of
She: Ayesha 1967 US), She and Allan, which provides a link with the
Quatermain series, and Wisdom's Daughter: The Life and Love Story of
She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (1923), HRH created, in the immortal and subversive
Ayesha, what has come to seem an abiding emblem of that longing for
"primitive" transcendence that typically marks the end of eras. The sudden

ageing of Ayesha in the first volume of the sequence (later volumes dally
inconsequentially with her earlier life) has an effect both tragic and
petty. The World's Desire (1890), with Andrew Lang, a pendant to the main
series, carries Odysseus into new adventures, during which he discovers
that Helen of Troy and Ayesha are one. A knotted eroticism also infuses
When the World Shook: Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin,
Bickley, and Arbuthnot (1919), a novel plotted in part by Kipling (who
later helped HRH with Allan and the Ice Gods): the three eponymous
Victorians find the high priest of ATLANTIS in SUSPENDED ANIMATION; having
caused the first Flood, he is about to start another; his daughter,
likewise discovered, causes ructions in the hearts of the three.HRH can
seem both heated and evasive to modern readers, but read in context he is
a figure of very considerable power, a stirrer in deep waters.
[DP/JC]Other works: Cleopatra: Being an Account of the Fall and Vengeance
of Harmachis, the Royal Egyptian, as Set Forth by his Own Hand (1889 US);
Beatrice (1890); Eric Brighteyes (1891); Montezuma's Daughter (1893); The
People of the Mist (1894); Heart of the World (1895); The Wizard (1896);
Swallow: A Tale of the Great Trek (1899 US); Elissa, the Doom of Zimbabwe:
Black Heart ? rev vt Black Heart and White
Heart and Other Stories; title story of US edition only, vt Elissa, or The
Doom of Zimbabwe 1917 UK); Lysbeth: A Tale of the Dutch (1901 US); Stella
Fregelius: A Tale of Three Destinies (1903 US); Pearl-Maiden: A Tale of
the Fall of Jerusalem (1903); The Brethren (1903); Benita (1906; vt The
Spirit of Bambatse 1906 US); The Yellow God: An Idol of Africa (1908 US);
The Ghost Kings (1908; vt The Lady of the Heavens 1908 US); The Lady of
Blossholme (1909); Morning Star (1910); Queen Sheba's Ring (1910); Red Eve
(1911); The Mahatma and the Hare: A Dream Story (1911); The Wanderer's
Necklace (1914); Moon of Israel: A Tale of the Exodus (1918); The
Missionary and the Witch-Doctor (1920 chap US); The Virgin of the Sun
(1922); Queen of the Dawn: A Love Tale of Old Egypt (1925); Mary of Marion
Isle (1929; vt Marion Isle 1929 US); Belshazzar (1930). There are various
omnibuses.About the author: Bibliography of the Works of H. Rider Haggard
(1947) by J.E. Scott; The Cloak that I Left (1951) by Lilias Rider
Haggard; Rider Haggard: His Life and Work (1960) by Morton Cohen; The
Wheel of Empire (1967) by Alan Sandison; Rider Haggard (1984) by Norman
Etherington.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; DIME-NOVEL SF; HISTORY OF SF; ORIGIN
OF MAN; PULP MAGAZINES; RADIO (USA); SERIES; SEX.
HAGGARD, WILLIAM
Pseudonym of Richard Clayton (1907- ), UK civil servant whose political
thrillers, usually featuring Colonel Russell (retired in later volumes) of
the Secret Service, sometimes extrapolate on current political trends,
after the fashion of their genre. Slow Burner (1958) has some sf content
relating to the atomic-power process described by the title. The
skulduggery in Venetian Blind (1959) concerns Negative Gravity, "a prize
beyond price. The conquest of space, the ultimate weapon"; it proves
chimerical. The Bitter Harvest (1971) deals with germ warfare. [JC]
HAHN, RONALD M.
[r] GERMANY.
HAHN, STEVE

Stephen ROBINETT.
HAIBLUM, ISIDORE
(1935- ) US writer, born, educated and based in New York, where he has
set much of his fiction. The humour expressed in his novels is Yiddish in
style (IH is himself a Jew), especially in his first sf novel, The Tsaddik
of the Seven Wonders (1971). IH writes a fluent though sometimes rather
disarranged kind of comic sf, of which The Wilk are Among Us (1975; rev
1979) is a representative example, with its amusingly overcomplicated
plot, its frenetic spoofing of the ALIENS-in-our-midst theme, and its
general failure to take hold of its materials. Nightmare Express (1979), a
comparatively ambitious ALTERNATE-WORLD detective novel, and a later
mystery series set in the 21st century - The Mutants are Coming (1984) and
Out of Sync (1990) - maintain a similar tone. His attempts to amalgamate
Yiddish humour and sf themes are of technical interest. [JC]Other works:
The Return (1973); Transfer to Yesterday (1973); three novels featuring a
detective named Dunjer, being Interworld (1977), Outerworld (1979 dos) and
Specterworld (1991); two novels featuring the Siscoe and Block detective
team, being The Identity Plunderers (1984) and The Hand of Ganz (1985).
HAIGH, RICHARD
1. Richard (Douglas) Haigh (1924-1991). UK civil servant and author of
one routine SPACE OPERA for ROBERT HALE LIMITED, The Golden Astronauts
(1980). 2. Richard Haigh. UK author (probably pseudonymous) of a series of
horror novels,The Farm (1984) and The City (1986), both featuring
man-eating pigs. [JC]
HAILE, TERENCE J.
(1921-1979) UK author of two sf novels remarkable for their clumsiness
and their apparent ignorance of basic physical laws. In Space Train (1962)
a farmer builds a rocket-powered train which, as a consequence of
sabotage, takes off into space. There he encounters interplanetary crabs
before returning to Earth. Galaxies Ahead (1963) is similarly implausible.
[NT]
HAILEY, JOHANNA
Sharon JARVIS.
al-HAKIM, TAWFIQ
(1898-1986) Regarded along with Nobel-prize winning author Najib Mahfuz
as the most important modern Egyptian writer, author of over 50 books of
short stories, novels, dramas and essays, some of sf interest. In 1947 he
published his first sf short story, "Fi sana malyun" ["In the Year
Million"]. His most interesting sf works are plays. In Rihla ila al-ghad
(1950; trans as "Voyage to Tomorrow" 1981) he uses relativistic TIME
TRAVEL during interstellar flight, in something of a homage to H.G. WELLS.
Two one-act plays have sf themes: Shair ala al-qamar (1972; trans as "Poet
on the Moon" 1981) and Taqrir qamari["Moon Account"] (1972). The first
uses sf metaphor in a story about the struggle of Art to assert its place
in society; the second tells of two extraterrestrials writing a report
about life on Earth. English translations of "Voyage to Tomorrow" and
"Poet on the Moon" can be found in Plays, Prefaces and Postscripts (2
vols, coll 1981). His essays about the future in Hadith maa al-kawkab

["Conversation with the Planet"] (coll 1974) have sf relevance, as do some
other works. [JO]See also: ARABIC SF; THEATRE.
HALAM, ANN
Gwyneth JONES.
HALBERSTAM, MICHAEL J(OSEPH)
(1932-1980) US medical doctor and writer whose The Wanting of Levine
(1978) depicts a 1988 US presidential campaign which ends in the election
of the Jewish politician Levine, whose wry wisdom may bring the nation
back from the violent civil strife that has already begun to balkanize the
land. [JC]
HALDANE, CHARLOTTE (FRANKEN)
(1894-1969) UK writer, married to J.B.S. HALDANE and sister-in-law of
Naomi MITCHISON. Her sf novel, Man's World (1926), set in a 21st-century
society which divides women into whores and sainted breeders ( Hyperlink
to: WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION), takes an ambivalent attitude
towards the eugenic thinking ( GENETIC ENGINEERING) responsible for such a
state, but eventually seems to suggest that the social cost of improving
the human stock by fiat has been too high. The racism delineated - Whites
have risen to new biological heights while Blacks are systematically
poisoned - is also ambivalent in the telling. Two fantasies are Melusine,
or Devil Take Her! (1936), about the survival of witches in Christian
Europe, and The Shadow of a Dream (1952). [JC]
HALDANE, J(OHN) B(URDON) S(ANDERSON)
(1892-1964) UK biologist, brother of Naomi MITCHISON. He dabbled in sf in
an incomplete and posthumously published novel, The Man with Two Memories
(1976), about a man's mental link with an inhabitant of another world.
JBSH's bold speculative essays heavily influenced significant works by
other writers. Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1924), the first of
the long-running series of Today ?
anticipation of GENETIC ENGINEERING, and provided the image of the future
sarcastically extrapolated by Aldous HUXLEY in BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932). The
semifictional "The Last Judgment" in Possible Worlds (coll 1927) provides
an evolutionary prospectus for the human race which was extensively
elaborated by Olaf STAPLEDON in LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930). JBSH's wife
Charlotte HALDANE drew heavily on his ideas for Man's World (1926). "On
Being the Right Size", also from Possible Worlds, discusses problems of
scale in sf (e.g., giants 10 times human size but with - unworkably - the
same proportions). My Friend Mr Leakey (coll of linked stories 1937) is a
book of fantasies for children. [BS]About the author: J.B.S.: The Life and
Work of J.B.S. Haldane (1968) by Ronald W. CLARK.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY;
BIOLOGY; CHILDREN'S SF; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; DYSTOPIAS; END OF
THE WORLD; EVOLUTION; FAR FUTURE; FUTUROLOGY; SUN; UTOPIAS; VENUS.
HALDEMAN, JACK C(ARROLL) II
(1941- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Garden of Eden" for
Fantastic in 1971. His 50 or so stories have tended to avoid the more
serious SPACE-OPERA themes, sticking generally to GAMES-AND-SPORTS tales
about ROBOT football players, precognitive STARS, and the like. His first
novel, Vector Analysis (1978), sets problems in space and sees them

solved. His second, Perry's Planet * (1980), is a Star Trek tie, and his
third, with his wife Vol Haldeman and Andrew J. OFFUTT, all signing as
John CLEVE, is Spaceways #11: The Iceworld Connection (1983). There is No
Darkness (fixup 1983) with his brother Joe HALDEMAN, amusedly pits a hick
from the hinterlands of a colony planet against some interstellar
difficulties, leading picaresquely to the saving of the Universe. Bill,
the Galactic Hero on the Planet of the Zombie Vampires * (1991) with Harry
HARRISON is slapstick. But not all JCH's work has been determinedly light;
some of his earlier stories - like "Songs of Dying Swans" (1976), about
the death of some genetically altered humans - show genuine aesthetic
skills, a sense of bluff cunning which came more and more to the fore in
the 1980s. He remains perhaps most at ease in collaborations; his
contributions to Slow Dancing Through Time (coll 1990), an assembly of
stories written by various authors in collaboration with Gardner DOZOIS,
are among his best work. Echoes of Thunder (1991 chap dos) with Jack DANN
is also of interest. [JC]See also: MATHEMATICS.
HALDEMAN, JOE (WILLIAM)
(1943- ) US writer who took a BS in physics and astronomy before serving
as a combat engineer in Vietnam (1968-9), where he was severely wounded,
earning a Purple Heart; later, in 1975, he took an MFA. The range of
degrees was an early demonstration of the complexity of his interest in
the HARD SF with which he has sometimes been identified; and his
experiences in Vietnam have marked everything he has since written,
including his first book, War Year (1972), a non-sf novel set there. He
began publishing sf with "Out of Phase" for Gal in 1969, and came to
sudden prominence with the critical and popular success of his first sf
novel, THE FOREVER WAR (1972-4 ASF; fixup 1974), which, with "You Can
Never Go Back" (1975), makes up a series whose description of the life of
soldiers in a future WAR counterpoints and in some ways rebuts Robert A.
HEINLEIN's vision in STARSHIP TROOPERS (1959). In THE FOREVER WAR
interstellar travel is effected by "collapsar jumps", which are
subjectively instantaneous but which in fact take many years to
accomplish, so that they work as a kind of one-way TIME TRAVEL; sent by
this means to fight in engagement after engagement on different planets,
soldiers are doomed to total alienation from the civilization for which
they are fighting, and if they make too large a jump face the risk of
coming into battle with antiquated weaponry. Their deracination is savage,
their camaraderie cynically manipulated. As a portrait of the experience
of Vietnam the book is remarkable. It won a Ditmar ( AWARDS), a NEBULA and
a HUGO; the first volumes of a GRAPHIC-NOVEL version are The Forever War 1
(graph 1991) and The Forever War 2 (graph 1991), both illustrated by
Marvano.Mindbridge (1976), a novel whose narrative techniques are
suggested by its dedication to John Dos Passos (1896-1970) and John
BRUNNER, is composed in alternating sequences of straight narration,
reportage, excerpts from books (some written long after the events
depicted), graphs and other devices. The story itself is a not
unconventional space epic, with MATTER TRANSMISSION, telepathy-inducing
"toys"-actually small aquatic animals - abandoned by an extinct race of
godlike aliens, and so forth. All My Sins Remembered (fixup 1977) returns
to the existential chaos of Earth, and introduces an enduring model of the

JH protagonist: a competent hero whose identity is threatened from
without, by the manipulations of worldly powers, and from within, by the
need to make sense of an existence without ultimate meaning. In JH's
novels, making sense of things is itself an act of heroism. As his most
typical books revolve around this task - and are resolved in its often
ambiguous accomplishment - it is not surprising that he has rarely written
sequels. Once the goal has been reached, the story ends.The only exception
to this pattern is the Worlds sequence comprising WORLDS (1981), Worlds
Apart (1983) and Worlds Enough and Time (1992). These books, which also
differ from his typical work in featuring a female protagonist, are
distinguished by the broad compass of their portrayal of a NEAR-FUTURE
Earth under the threat of nuclear HOLOCAUST, which is soon realized. In
the surviving SPACE HABITATS-each a small world representative of a
different kind of civilization - some sense must be made of the human
enterprise: the relict planet must be preserved and, in the third volume,
humanity must attempt to reach the stars. JH's other novels of the 1980s
are only intermittently successful. Tool of the Trade (1987), a
TECHNOTHRILLER, repeats in a damagingly affectless manner the themes of
earlier books; and Buying Time (1989; vt The Long Habit of Living 1989 UK)
weakens a central tale about the purchasing of IMMORTALITY by a
displeasing failure to address the kind of society in which this might be
acceptable, or the kind of human who might pursue the goal. But THE
HEMINGWAY HOAX (1990), the magazine version of which won a Nebula as Best
Novella, movingly entangles its typical JH protagonist in a complex set of
dilemmas (and ALTERNATE WORLDS) which test to the utmost his capacity to
retain moral choice, to remain even approximately whole.JH's stories,
assembled in Infinite Dreams (coll 1979) and Dealing in Futures (coll
1985), are of subsidiary interest to his novels - though "Tricentennial
"(1976) won a Hugo, and "Graves" (1993) won a Nebula - but sometimes
illustrate with clarity the themes which drive them. Throughout his career
there has been a sense - not usual in US sf - that JH thinks of his novels
as necessary acts in a lifelong enterprise, a moral theatre whose meaning
will be defined only when he finishes. It is perhaps for this reason that
he is not good at repeating himself, that those books in which he attempts
to do so are surprisingly bad, and that after two decades his readers
continue to await each new title - each new act in the existential drama with very substantial interest. [JC]Other works: Two borderline sf Attar
spy novels, Attar's Revenge (1975) and War of Nerves (1975), under a
Pocket Books house name, Robert Graham; two Star Trek novels, Planet of
Judgment * (1977) and World without End * (1979); There is No Darkness
(1983) with his brother Jack C. HALDEMAN II (whom see for details); More
than the Sum of his Parts (1985 Playboy; 1991 chap).As Editor: Cosmic
Laughter (anth 1974); Study War No More (anth 1977); Nebula Award Stories
Seventeen (anth 1983); three anthologies with Martin Harry GREENBERG and
Charles G. WAUGH, being Body Armor: 2000 (anth 1986), Supertanks (anth
1987) and Space-Fighters (anth 1988).About the author: Joe Haldeman (1980)
by Joan Gordon.See also: ALIENS; ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; BLACK HOLES;
COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; FASTER THAN LIGHT; HIVE-MINDS; ISAAC
ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; MEDICINE; POETRY.
HALE, EDWARD EVERETT

(1822-1909) Prolific US writer, contributing editor to The Atlantic
Monthly, Unitarian preacher and abolitionist; he is best known today for
the title story (1863) of The Man without a Country and Other Tales (coll
1868). Sybaris and Other Homes (coll 1869), describing a UTOPIAN colony of
Sybarites uncovered on an ISLAND off the coast of Italy, is of sf
interest. A second utopian fiction, Ten Times One is Ten: The Possible
Reformation (1871), as by Frederick Ingham, is constructed as a fantasy of
socially beneficial haunting; it first appeared (1870) in EEH's own
journal Old and New, which he founded to espouse the ideals embodied in
the tale. Hands Off (1881 Harper's New Monthly Magazine; 1895 chap)
interestingly places two time-travelling spirits in Biblical Egypt, where
as an experiment they construct an ALTERNATE WORLD in which the patriarch
Joseph excapes captivity, with disastrous results. Of primary interest to
sf readers are "The Brick Moon" (1869) and its short sequel, "Life in the
Brick Moon" (1870)-both revised into one story in His Level Best and Other
Stories (coll 1872), later reprinted in The Brick Moon and Other Stories
(coll 1899), and published independently as The Brick Moon (1971 chap) which comprise probably the first attempt to describe an artificial Earth
satellite, along with its accidental launching into orbit and the attempts
of those stranded upon it to survive. [JC]Other works: Back to Back: A
Story of Today (1878; exp vt How They Lived in Hampton: A Study of
Practical Christianity Applied in the Manufacture of Woollens 1888), a
utopian speculation in story form.About the author: "The Real Earth
Satellite Story" in Explorers of the Infinite (1963) by Sam MOSKOWITZ.See
also: DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; HISTORY OF SF; SPACE HABITATS.
HALE, ROBERT, LIMITED
ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
HALEY, CLAUDE
Leonard G. FISH.
HALIBUT, EDWARD
[s] Richard WILSON.
HALIDOM, M.Y.
Pseudonym of an unidentified UK writer who wrote also as Dryasdust, under
which name he is perhaps best known for the 3-vol Tales of the Wonder Club
(coll 1899-90; each vol subsequently published as by MYH vt Tales of the
Wonder Club: First Series 1903; Second Series 1904; Third Series 1905).
Most of the stories assembled are supernatural. The Wizard's Mantle (1890;
rev 1903 as by MYH) also appeared initially as by Dryasdust. Further
titles, all as by MYH, and some including suggestions of sf, were The
Spirit Lovers (coll 1903), A Weird Transformation (1904), about a
reanimated corpse, The Woman in Black (1906), Zoe's Revenge (1908), The
Poet's Curse (1911) and The Poison Ring (1912). [JC]
HALL, AUSTIN
(c1885-1933) US writer who claimed to have written over 600 stories in
various pulp genres, mainly Westerns. He began publishing sf and fantasy
with "Almost Immortal" for All-Story Weekly in 1916. "The Rebel Soul"
(1917 All-Story Weekly) and its sequel, the book-length "Into the
Infinite" (1919 All-Story Weekly), typically infuse

immortality-through-vampirism and TIME TRAVEL with pulp cliches, not
always ineffectively; in their concern with the nature of human
personality all three are derivative of Robert Louis STEVENSON's Strange
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886 chap). Possibly confused by the
collaborative process, The Blind Spot (1921 Argosy; 1951) with Homer Eon
FLINT cloaks a central plot-involving an interdimensional gateway into a
PARALLEL WORLD - in layers of unresolved melodrama. Cruelly, Damon KNIGHT
quoted extensively from it in a critical piece (reprinted as part of
Chapter 3 of In Search of Wonder [coll 1956; exp 1967]) to demonstrate its
infelicities. A sequel, The Spot of Life (1932 Argosy; 1964), was by AH
alone; it offers scientific explanations for the gateway (or blind spot)
plus doses of dynastic politicking in the parallel world. People of the
Comet (1923 Weird Tales; 1948), a weaker tale, is a variant on the theme
of solar-system-as-atom in a greater macrocosm ( GREAT AND SMALL). [JC]See
also: HISTORY OF SF; MARS.
HALL, DESMOND W(INTER)
(1909-1992) US writer and editor who served as assistant editor of
Astounding Stories of Super Science ( ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION) under
Harry BATES 1930-33, also collaborating with Bates as a writer under the
pseudonyms H.G. WINTER and, more famously, Anthony GILMORE; as Gilmore
they produced the popular Hawk Carse series, which reached book form as
Space Hawk (coll of linked stories 1952). DWH also wrote some stories
under his own name as well as one under an unidentified pseudonym for
Weird Tales. After F. Orlin TREMAINE took over from Bates, DWH continued
as assistant editor for a time before being promoted to the editorship of
the magazine Mademoiselle. In "Gold on Gold", in What Will They Think of
Last? (1976), H.L. GOLD claimed that it was DWH rather than Tremaine who
actually ran ASF. [MJE]
HALL, FRANCES
(? - ) US writer, author of Pretender (1979) with Piers ANTHONY. [JC]
HALL, HAL(BERT) W(ELDON)
(1941- ) US bibliographer, Special Formats Librarian at Texas A ?
University Library. His useful series of BIBLIOGRAPHIES began with SFBRI:
Science Fiction Book Review Index, 1970 (1971 chap), and volumes relating
to each year have been published in each succeeding year up to Vol 15,
1984 (1985 chap); since then, each volume now titled Science Fiction and
Fantasy Book Review Index, there have been Vol 16, 1985 (1988 chap), Vol
17, 1986 (1988 chap) and Vol 18, 1987 1990 chap). Three retrospective
books collecting and revising these are Science Fiction Book Review Index
1923-1973 (1975), Science Fiction Book Review Index 1974-1979 (1981) and
Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review Index 1980-1984 (1985), the last
with Geraldine L. Hutchins. All are most useful to the researcher:
comprehensive and accurate, they contain also a great deal of data about
sf magazine publication. On this latter subject HWH has published A
Checklist of Science Fiction Magazines (1972 chap) and The Science Fiction
Magazines: A Bibliographical Checklist of Titles and Issues through 1982
(1983 chap).A second series of reference works began with Science Fiction
Research Index, Vol 1 (1979 chap) and Vol 2 (1982 chap), running to date
to Vol 7 (1987) and Vol 8 (1990 chap). A collection of the first 6 vols

plus additions is the monumental Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference
Index, 1878-1985: An International Author and Subject Index to History and
Criticism (2 vols 1987), to which vols 7 and 8, which bring the story up
to 1987, are the initial supplements. Subsequent supplements are included
in the annual bibliographies ed Charles N. BROWN and William G. CONTENTO:
Science Fiction, Fantasy, ?
and 1991 (1992). There are, of course, omissions - it is not possible to
examine the review pages of every newspaper in the world - but these works
are the best available for determining the location of reviews and
articles on anything from CYBERPUNK through NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD to
TOLKIEN.The continually expanding computer database in which HWH has
stored all this material also contains information on the location of
important sf/fantasy book and magazine COLLECTIONS, and HWH has published
various articles on this subject - one written with Neil BARRON in Anatomy
of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction, Third Edition (1987) ed
Barron - and one book, Science/Fiction Collections: Fantasy, Supernatural
?
[PN]Other works: Chad Oliver: A Preliminary Bibliography (1985 chap; rev
vt The Work of Chad Oliver 1990); The Work of Louis L'Amour: An Annotated
Bibliography and Guide (1991).See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS
ABOUT SF.
HALL, JAMES
[s] Henry KUTTNER.
HALL, JOHN RYDER
William ROTSLER.
HALL, NORMAN
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
HALL, ROBERT LEE
(1941- ) US writer and high-school teacher whose first novel, Exit
Sherlock Holmes (1977; rev 1977 UK), purports to be a lost Watson
manuscript telling more about the relationship of Holmes and Moriarty. As
in David DVORKIN's later Time for Sherlock Holmes (1983), TIME TRAVEL
fuels the plot. [JC]
HALL, RODNEY
(1935- ) Australian poet and writer, Chairperson since 1991 of the
Australia Council, a body responsible for government arts policy and
funding. His long, vivid, humorous, baroque fourth novel, Kisses of the
Enemy (1987), is set in the NEAR FUTURE in an Australia now a republic. A
campaign of cultural subversion unsettles a nation that has hitherto
offered little resistance to its rape by foreign opportunists. Several of
his other novels - including Just Relations (1982), The Second Bridegroom
(1989) and The Grisly Wife (1993)- contain fantasy elements. [PN]
HALL, RONALD
(1929- ) UK writer in whose sf novel, The Open Cage (1970), an escaped
con returns to a violently altered and apocalyptic world. [JC]
HALL, SANDI
(1942- ) UK-born writer, journalist and feminist activist, resident

variously in Canada, Zambia, NEW ZEALAND, Australia, the USA and Mexico.
In New Zealand she belonged to the "Broadsheet" collective, founded the NZ
Women's Party, and publicly announced her lesbianism. In the NEAR-FUTURE
The Godmothers (1982 UK), her first novel, two groups of women in a well
realized feminist AD2095 oppose patriarchal oppression. Wingwomen of Hera
(1987 US), the first volume of the projected Cosmic Botanists sequence, is
less didactic: the collision of patriarchal and feminist values is
background for a strong plot with convincing societies and characters. SH
writes well; and refreshingly believes that a feminist future does not
necessarily imply UTOPIA. [MMacL]
HALLE, LOUIS J(OSEPH)
(1913-1984) US academic and writer whose UTOPIA, Sedge (1963), contrasts
a community which isolates itself from civilization for hundreds of years
with the increasingly frenetic world beyond the gates. [JC]
HALLEN, A.L.
(? -? ) UK writer whose Angilin: A Venite King (1907) is among several
novels by early writers that prefigure the PLANETARY ROMANCES of Edgar
Rice BURROUGHS, though without the flair. The planet in question is VENUS;
the protagonist is an Earthman who transports his psyche there in an
attempt to find his dead love; the plot is ornate and dynastic, and
features airships. [JC]
HALLI, H.R.
[r] FINLAND.
HALLIWELL, TONY
Hugh DARRINGTON.
HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH
Film (1983). Dino De Laurentiis. Prod Debra Hill, John CARPENTER. Dir
Tommy Lee Wallace, starring Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin, Dan O'Herlihy.
Screenplay Wallace (but primarily by Nigel KNEALE, uncredited). 98 mins.
Colour.Not at all a true sequel to the "stalk and slash" Halloween films,
this is a horror film with an sf rationale. Crazed Irish entrepreneur
Cochran (O'Herlihy), infuriated by Halloween's commercial degradation,
plans to restore to it its proper mystical significance. Using microchips
manufactured from a stolen Stonehenge monolith, he manufactures and sells
huge numbers of Halloween masks that will hideously destroy their child
wearers when triggered by an electronic pulse relayed through tv
advertisements. Kneale had his name taken off the credits, disgusted at
this becoming more and more like a SPLATTER MOVIE, but a true eeriness
remains to balance the physical horrors (not all of which are merely
arbitrary), especially in the dark-suited, polite ANDROID killers and in
the menacing sleepy streets of the company town. Directed by a Carpenter
protege, this film has the enjoyably grisly flavour of Carpenter's own.
[PN]
HALLUS, TAK
Stephen ROBINETT.
HALSBURY, EARL OF
Working name of UK writer Hardinge Goulburn Giffard, Second Earl of

Halsbury (1880-1943). His future- WAR novel, 1944 (1926), depicts a
cataclysmic conflict in which the USSR attacks the UK from the air,
leaving only a few survivors. The protagonist, a modern Noah, prepares to
leave the shattered island by ark, but is told that the USSR has been
itself obliterated, and returns to build a new UK. [JC]
HAM, BOB
(? - ) US author of the Overload sequence of post- HOLOCAUST series of
military-sf adventures comprising Overload #1: Personal War (1989), #2:
The Wrath (1989), #3: Highway Warriors (1989), #4: Tennessee Terror
(1989), #5: Atlanta Burn (1990), #6: Nebraska Nightmare (1990), #7:
Rolling Vengeance (1990), #8: Ozark Payback (1991), #9: Huntsville Horror
(1991), #10: Michigan Madness (1991), #11: Alabama Bloodbath (1991) and
#12: Vegas Gamble (1991). [JC]
HAMBLY, BARBARA
(1951- ) US author, primarily of FANTASY, based in Southern California.
She entered genre publishing with the Darwath Trilogy fantasy sequence,
published by DEL REY BOOKS: The Time of the Dark (1982), The Walls of Air
(1983) and The Armies of Daylight (1983). In these a historian and a biker
from Los Angeles find themselves in a struggle between Good and Evil in a
PARALLEL WORLD where MAGIC works; the conventional fantasy situation is
invigorated to a degree by the lively treatment. Her Sun Wolf fantasy
sequence, to date open-ended, is more original in both style and matter:
The Ladies of Mandrigyn (1984), The Witches of Wenshar (1987)-reissued
together as The Unschooled Wizard (omni 1987) - and The Dark Hand of Magic
(1990). These novels have, without preaching, an attractive element of
FEMINISM in their depiction of the women in their medieval fantasy world,
some of whom are mercenaries, others at least potentially self-reliant.In
the Windrose series - The Silent Tower (1986) and The Silicon Mage (1988),
and Dog Wizard (1993), the first two assembled as Darkmage (omni 1988) BH, who had previously used occasional sf ideas in her fantasy, produced a
true genre-bending sequence in its apposition of science and magic by
placing two parallel worlds (one ours) in phase in a story involving an
evil sorcerer's consciousness embedded in a COMPUTER as "a series of
subroutines". BH's sole pure sf novel to date is Those who Hunt the Night
(1988; vt Immortal Blood UK 1988), which was marketed as HORROR. It is a
good whodunnit in the STEAMPUNK manner, set in Victorian England, about a
skilled investigator hired to protect vampires - rationalized as a race
parallel to humanity but with somewhat different ethics - from whoever is
murdering them. Magicians (persecuted) behave once again rather as
displaced SCIENTISTS in the initial world of the projected Sun-Cross
sequence: The Rainbow Abyss (1991 UK) and The Magicians of Night (1992),
both volumes being assembled as Sun-Cross (omni 1992) The second book,
with savage irony, transports one of these true magicians into our own
world among the occultists and pseudo-scientists clustered around Hitler
in Nazi Germany.BH has created her own corner of the FANTASY market,
characteristically pressing occasional sf ideas into the service of her
fundamentally fantastic themes, but without pushing too hard against
fantasy/sf genre constraints. Her books - by no means potboilers, and
sometimes painful - are normally vigorous, interesting and alert within

her self-imposed format. [PN]Other works: The Quirinal Hill Affair (1983;
vt Search the Seven Hills 1987), an historical whodunnit; Ishmael *
(1985), Ghost Walker * (1991) and Crossroad * (1994), all STAR TREK ties;
Dragonsbane (1986), fantasy; Beauty and the Beast * (1989) and Beauty and
the Beast: Song of Orpheus * (1990), novelizing tv episodes from BEAUTY
AND THE BEAST; Stranger at the Wedding (1994; vt Sorcerer's War 1994 UK);
Bride of the Rat God (1994).See also: HISTORY OF SF.
HAMILTON, CICELY
Pseudonym under which UK novelist, playwright, actress and feminist
Cicely Mary Hamill (1872-1952) published all her adult work, though her
children's fiction, including some stories for the Sexton Blake series,
was written as by Scott Rae and by Max Hamilton. Her best-known plays are
eloquently suffragist; they include How the Vote was Won (1909 chap) with
Christopher St John (circa 1875-1960), in which the outcome predicted by
the title is achieved when those women without means go on strike. Her sf
novel, Theodore Savage: A Story of the Past or the Future (1922; rev vt
Lest Ye Die 1928), bitterly depicts a future WAR in whose aftermath the
people of the UK, driven out of the cities, revert to superstitious
barbarism. The ironically named protagonist lives to a great age in a
small village full of savages who think of pre-collapse artifacts as
obscene. CH is one of the first - and among the darkest - of those UK sf
novelists whose vision of things was shaped by WWI, which they saw as
foretelling the end of civilization. [JC]Other works:Little Arthur's
History of the Twentieth Century (1933).See also: END OF THE WORLD;
HISTORY IN SF.
HAMILTON, CLIVE
C.S. LEWIS.
HAMILTON, EDMOND (MOORE)
(1904-1977) US writer, married to Leigh BRACKETT from 1946. With E.E.
"Doc" SMITH and Jack WILLIAMSON, he was one of the prime movers in the
development of US sf, sharing with those writers in the creation and
popularization of classic SPACE OPERA as it first appeared in PULP
MAGAZINES from about 1928. His first story, "The Monster-God of Mamurth"
for Weird Tales in 1926, which vulgarized the florid weird-science world
of Abraham MERRITT, only hinted at the exploits to come, though EH found
SCIENCE FANTASY a fertile vein, collecting this story and others in his
first book, The Horror on the Asteroid ?
(coll 1936 UK). Only two years later, with the publication of "Crashing
Suns" (1928 Weird Tales), he was writing genuine space opera of the sort
with which he soon became identified: the Universe-spanning tale in which
an Earthman and his comrades (not necessarily human) discover a cosmic
threat to the home Galaxy and successfully - either alone, or with the aid
of a space armada, or both-combat the ALIENS responsible for the threat.
Science or pseudo-science served as a magically enabling doubletalk for
the easier presentation of interstellar action, and the scope, colour and
dynamic clarity of this liberated action did much to define the SENSE OF
WONDER for a generation of readers, who rewarded EH with several nicknames
in recognition of his gift, variously "World-Destroyer", "The World
Wrecker", or "World-Saver Hamilton".Though not technically part of the

series, "Crashing Suns" is structurally identical to the six Interstellar
Patrol stories, which followed immediately; when they were (with the
exception of "The Sun People" [1930]) finally reprinted in the 1960s, this
story was properly included, giving its title to the second volume.
Outside the Universe (1929 Weird Tales; 1964) and Crashing Suns (coll
1965) represent, with faults and virtues grandly magnified, the heart of
EH's early work - and the heart, therefore, of space opera. Others of his
works contributing to the creation of the form include The Metal Giants
(1926 Weird Tales; 1932 chap), "The Comet Doom" (1928) and "The Universe
Wreckers" (1930). The main failure of EH's work is a lack of cohesion,
through the lack of any sense of strategic plotting; that lack would of
course be remedied in the work of E.E. Smith. EH persisted with the format
through the 1930s, with gradually diminishing success, occasionally under
pseudonyms including Robert Castle, Hugh Davidson, Robert Wentworth and
the house name Will GARTH; and-dangerously for his career - occupied much
of his time in the early 1940s with the smoother but significantly less
lively Captain Future series, published 1940-50 by Standard Magazines in
CAPTAIN FUTURE (1940-44) and afterwards in Startling Stories (1945-6 and
1950-51).Not all the Captain Future stories were by EH. Five were signed
with the house name Brett STERLING, of which two were by EH and three "Worlds to Come" (1943), "Days of Creation" (1944) and The Tenth Planet
(1944 CF; 1969) - were by Joseph SAMACHSON, with one further title - The
Solar Invasion (1946 Startling Stories; 1969) - being by Manly Wade
WELLMAN. Each tale was written to a rigorous formula in which the
super-scientist protagonist, backed by three aides (one ROBOT, one ANDROID
and one brain in a box), brings an interstellar villain to justice. EH's
Captain Future titles eventually released in book form are Danger Planet
(1945 Startling Stories as "Red Sun of Danger"; 1968, as by Sterling),
Outlaw World (1946 Startling Stories; 1969), Quest Beyond the Stars (1942
Captain Future; 1969), Outlaws of the Moon (1942 Captain Future; 1969),
The Comet Kings (1942 Captain Future; 1969) - which was probably the
outstanding tale among them - Planets in Peril (1942 Captain Future;
1969), Calling Captain Future (1940 Captain Future; 1969), Captain
Future's Challenge (1940 Captain Future; 1969), Galaxy Mission (1940
Captain Future as "The Triumph of Captain Future"; 1969), The Tenth Planet
(1944 Captain Future as "Magic Moon"; 1969, as by Sterling), The Magician
of Mars (1941 Captain Future; 1969) and Captain Future and the Space
Emperor (1940 Captain Future; 1969). 11 further novels remain in magazine
form: "Captain Future and the Seven Space Stones" (1941), "Star Trail to
Glory" (1941), "The Lost World of Time" (1941), "The Face of the Deep"
(1943), "The Return of Captain Future" (1950), "Children of the Sun"
(1950), "The Harpers of Titan" (1950), "Pardon My Iron Nerves" (1950),
"Moon of the Unforgotten" (1951), "Earthmen no More" (1951) and
"Birthplace of Creation" (1951). From "The Return of Captain Future"
(1950) onwards these tales were novelettes, usually around 10,000 words.
The original idea for Captain Future had come from Mort WEISINGER, a
senior editor with the Standard Magazines group. Later, in 1941, Weisinger
shifted over to DC COMICS, and took many of his top writers with him,
including EH, who worked for some time in the mid-1940s as a staff writer
on SUPERMAN, along with Henry KUTTNER and others.Unfortunately for EH, his
work in comics and his involvement with Captain Future (which was aimed

primarily at teenaged boys) made it initially somewhat difficult for him
to be accepted after WWII as the competent and versatile professional he
had in fact been for years, a writer with a much wider range than was
generally realized, one who had already produced several stories whose
comparatively sober verisimilitude prefigured post-WWII requirements.
After his marriage to Brackett in 1946 his output diminished, but its
quality increased, a fact obscured by the publication in book form over
the next years of material from his early career - like Tharkol, Lord of
the Unknown (1939 Startling Stories; 1950 UK), in which Martians invade
Earth for its water - and by his habitual rehashing of space-opera
conventions in old-fashioned epics like The Sun Smasher (1954 Universe;
1959 dos), Battle for the Stars (1956 Imagination as by Alexander BLADE;
exp 1961) and Fugitive of the Stars (1957 Imagination; rev 1965 dos). His
final series, the Starwolf tales about tough interstellar adventurer
Morgan Chane, is similarly antiquated in premise, but told in a clean-cut
trimmed-down language which has won it supporters. The sequence comprises
The Weapon from Beyond (1967), The Closed Worlds (1968) and World of the
Starwolves (1968), all three being assembled as Starwolf (omni 1982).At
the same time, however, EH was writing novels which, though in the
space-opera tradition, were more carefully composed and darker in texture.
It is for these novels, plus The Monsters of Juntonheim (1941 Startling
Stories as "A Yank at Valhalla"; 1950 UK; vt A Yank at Valhalla 1973 dos
US), that he is now mainly remembered. The best is probably The Haunted
Stars (1960), in which well characterized humans face a shattering mystery
on the MOON: the secret of star travel left by long-dead ALIENS, along
with dark warnings. The Star Kings (1949; vt Beyond the Moon 1950), whose
plot reflects The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) by Anthony Hope (1863-1933) (
RURITANIA), is grander in scope but less impressively written; its sequels
are collected in Return to the Stars (coll of linked stories 1970), and
both volumes are assembled as Chronicles of the Star Kings (omni 1986 UK).
Other titles of interest from this flourishing period are City at World's
End (1951), The Star of Life (1947 Startling Stories; rev 1959) and The
Valley of Creation (1948 Startling Stories; rev 1964), a strongly written
SWORD-AND-SORCERY tale with an sf denouement.EH shared with his long-time
colleague Jack Williamson a capable and flexible attitude towards the
post-WWII genre and its markets (in contrast to the third great originator
of US space opera, E.E. Smith, who was a generation older). Through his
ability to evolve a cleaner and more literate style to meet these new
demands, and to apply this style to his old generic loves, EH wrote novels
at the end of his career that read perfectly idiomatically as novels of
the 1960s, as evidenced also in two compendiums of his shorter work:
What's It Like Out There? and Other Stories (coll 1974) and the posthumous
The Best of Edmond Hamilton (coll 1977) ed Leigh Brackett. In the end, it
can be said of EH that he took space opera seriously enough to make it
good. [JC]Other works: Tiger Girl (1945 chap UK); Murder in the Clinic
(coll 1946 chap UK); Doomstar (1966); The Lake of Life (1937 Weird Tales;
1978 chap).As Editor: The Best of Leigh Brackett (anth 1977).About the
author: Leigh Douglass Brackett and Edmond Hamilton: A Working
Bibliography (1988 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr.See also: AIR WONDER STORIES;
AMAZING STORIES; ASTEROIDS; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; COMICS;
COMPUTERS; COSMOLOGY; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; CYBORGS; DEVOLUTION;

END OF
THE WORLD; ESP; EVOLUTION; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GALACTIC EMPIRES; HEROES;
HISTORY OF SF; INVASION; INVISIBILITY; ISLANDS; JUPITER; LIVING WORLDS;
MARS; MATTER TRANSMISSION; MUTANTS; MYTHOLOGY; PARALLEL WORLDS;
PARANOIA;
PUBLISHING; RELIGION; SPACE FLIGHT; STARS; SUN; WAR; WEAPONS.
HAMILTON, (ANTHONY WALTER) PATRICK
(1904-1962) UK writer best known for plays like Rope (1929) and for
several acute and supple novels of hopelessness in the UK of the 1930s.
His sf novel Impromptu in Moribundia (1939) further explores this milieu
through its dreamlike exploration of another planet where Earth's customs
are seen inverted, as in a distorting mirror. Hangover Square (1941) is a
split-personality murder mystery. [JC]
HAMILTON, TODD CAMERON
[r] P.J. BEESE.
HAMILTON, VIRGINIA (ESTHER)
(1936- ) US writer, mostly of juveniles, and of very considerable
interest in that field for the exploratory intensity of her work, from
Zeely (1967) on, and for the depth of her presentation of the complex
experience of being Black in the USA. Several of her early tales, like
M.C. Higgins, the Great (1974) and Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982),
are fantasies. Of particular sf interest is the Justice Cycle - Justice
and her Brothers (1978), Dustland (1980) and The Gathering (1981) describing the slow growth of a sibling gestalt into an entity which may
well prefigure a higher form of humanity. The relationship between the
siblings, as Justice begins to realize that she must take control over her
identical-twin elder brothers, is developed with great skill. [JC]Other
works: The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl (1983); The People Could
Fly: American Black Folk-Tales (coll 1985); The Dark Way: Stories from the
Spirit World (coll 1990).See also: SUPERMAN.
HAMILTON ?
AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION.
HAMLET, OVA
[s] Richard A. LUPOFF.
HAMLING, WILLIAM L(AWRENCE)
(1921- ) US writer and editor. Active as an sf fan in the late 1930s and
early 1940s, he published a number of stories, the first of which, "War
with Jupiter" with Mark Reinsberg, appeared in AMAZING STORIES in 1939.
WLH later went to work for ZIFF-DAVIS under Raymond A. PALMER, and was
managing editor of AMZ and FANTASTIC ADVENTURES 1948-50. In 1951 he became
editor and publisher of IMAGINATION, having bought the title from Palmer.
He added a companion, IMAGINATIVE TALES, and continued both until late
1958. In 1955 he started an early men's magazine, Rogue. In the late 1960s
his publishing company Greenleaf Classics, which specialized in erotic
novels, ran badly foul of US pornography laws for publishing an
illustrated edition of a Congressional investigation of pornography, an
offence for which he was imprisoned along with his co-publisher Earl Kemp

(1929- ), compiler of the pamphlets Who Killed Science Fiction?: An
Affectionate Autopsy (anth 1960 chap) and Why is a Fan? (anth 1961 chap).
Greenleaf Classics and its associated imprints (Adult Books, Candid
Reader, Companion Books, Ember Library, Idle Hour Books, Late House
Library, Leisure Books, Nightstand Books, Pleasure Readers and Regency
Books) published over 50 titles of sf pornography; they are listed in The
Science Fiction Collector 4 (1977) ed J. Grant Thiessen and in Donald H.
TUCK's The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy through 1968,
Volume 3: Miscellaneous (1982). Greenleaf published several of the early
works of Harlan ELLISON. [MJE/PN]
HAMMOND, KEITH
Henry KUTTNER.
HAMMURA, RYO
[r] JAPAN.
HAMPSON, FRANK
(1918-1985) UK artist who almost singlehandedly brought the UK COMIC
strip into the scientific age. When the Rev. Marcus Morris and FH
originated the Eagle comic in 1949-50, FH created the sf strip DAN DARE PILOT OF THE FUTURE for its full-colour front pages. What made the strip
so revolutionary was FH's genius for colour, draughtsmanship and
characterization, and his ability to create authentic future technology.
He brought the comic strip closer to the CINEMA than any other UK artist
before him, with panoramas, close-ups and a great feeling for movement and
sequence. Until 1959, together with a team of artists, scriptwriters and
scientific advisers, FH controlled the cult spaceman on his adventures
across the Solar System. He abandoned Dan Dare to draw an impressive life
of Christ in comic-strip form, The Road of Courage (1959-60; graph 1981);
apart from a short stint on Lady Penelope for TV21 in 1964, this was his
last comic strip. Indeed, dogged by ill health and bitter about his shabby
treatment by Eagle's publishers, he produced very little published work at
all after this, although he illustrated seven books for very young
children for the publisher Ladybird Books and produced two sf spreads for
MARVEL COMICS's UK Spider-Man title in 1976. He received the Italian
Yellow Kid award in 1975. [ABP/RT]See also: RADIO.
HANCOCK, H(ARRIE) IRVING
(1868-1922) US martial arts specialist and writer, mostly for boys, who
remains of sf interest for the Conquest of the United States sequence The Invasion of the United States, or Uncle Sam's Boys at the Capture of
Boston (1916), In the Battle for New York, or Uncle Sam's Boys in the
Desperate Struggle for the Metropolis (1916), At the Defense of
Pittsburgh, or The Struggle to Save America's "Fighting Steel" Supply
(1916) and Making the Stand for Old Glory, or Uncle Sam's Boys in the Last
Frantic Drive (1916) - set around 1920 and depicting the invasion of the
USA by a Germany already victorious in Europe. Slightly advanced airplanes
are in evidence, as is much action. Germany loses. [JC]
HAND, ELIZABETH
(1957- ) US writer and critic who began publishing fiction with "Prince
of Flowers" for Twilight Zone Magazine in 1988. Her first novel,

WINTERLONG (1990), set on Earth some hundreds or thousands of years hence,
combines sf and fantasy materials in a way made familiar by writers of
PLANETARY ROMANCES from Jack VANCE through Gene WOLFE to Richard GRANT
(with whom she lives). The tale features baroque bioengineering, mythical
resonances and ornate psychopathologies intensely glimpsed; the prose is
occasionally very powerful, but the book is rather too long. A second
volume set in the same universe, Aestival Tide (1992), showed a formidable
improvement in its pacing , though necessarily abjuring some of the
interwoven density of mood in the previous volume; the central city where
the action occurs is superbly decadent, and the artificial woman,
manufactured of glass and metal as a storage vehicle for human culture, is
well-conceived. In the third volume, Icarus Descending (1993), the baroque
superstructure of the dying world continues to collapse, accompanied by a
revolt of the "geneslaves" who have been present throughout.EH's fourth
novel, Waking the Moon (1994 UK; cut 1995 US), is a fantasy of history.
[JC]See also: CYBERPUNK; FANTASY; GODS AND DEMONS; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER.
HANDLEY, MAX (ADRIAN ROBERT)
(1945- ) UK writer known in the sf world only for Meanwhile (1977), an
intricately comic FABULATION crammed to bursting point with devices from
the whole spectrum of sf and fantasy, all introduced by a sharply
knowledgeable hand. [JC]
HANDMAID'S TALE, THE
Film (1990). Cinecom/Bioskop. Dir Volker Schlondorff, starring Natasha
Richardson, Faye Dunaway, Aidan Quinn, Elizabeth McGovern, Victoria
Tennant, Robert Duvall. Screenplay Harold Pinter (1930- ), based on THE
HANDMAID'S TALE (1985) by Margaret ATWOOD. 108 mins. Colour.A near-future
USA, some time after a right-wing coup, is now a patriarchal,
fundamentalist, totalitarian state, suppressive of all liberal thought and
especially of women, who have no rights at all. The heroine is a
"handmaid", one of the few women whose reproductive systems have survived
the (very vaguely specified) ravages of chemical pollution and radiation
from power-plants. A handmaid's duty is to bear children to important men,
conception taking place at ceremonies where she is sandwiched between
piously thrusting husband and demure wife; the baby is taken by the wife.
This US/German adaptation was perhaps doomed to failure. The believability
of Atwood's original novel depends largely on texture, on irony, on the
watchful but partially submissive consciousness through which its events
are filtered: novels of this kind are notoriously difficult to film.
Stripped of this fineness of observation, THT's lurid future is so
diagrammatic - despite excellent performances - that suspension of
disbelief becomes impossible. The most terrifying aspect of the novel, the
wounded complicity with which many of its women consent to their own
dehumanization, is weakened by making the film's heroine (Richardson) an
active revolutionary who finally cuts the throat of her owner, played by
Duvall, whose portrayal of nearly unconscious hypocrisy - he sees himself
as a kind man - is the best thing in the film. [PN]
HANDS OF A STRANGER
ORLACS HANDE.

HANDS OF A STRANGLER
ORLACS HANDE.
HANDS OF ORLAC, THE
ORLACS HANDE.
HANLEY, JAMES
(1901-1985) Irish writer, in the UK from around the time he began - with
Drift (1930) - to publish his many novels and collections. His only sf,
What Farrar Saw (1946; rev as coll, vt What Farrar Saw and Other Stories
1984), set in a NEAR-FUTURE land much like war-depleted England, presents
a country choked by both an invidious class system and huge traffic jams,
which serve as a metaphor for social sclerosis. The jams are cleared with
bombs, but the system seems intact. [JC]
HANNA, W.C.
(?1910- ) US writer in whose The Tandar Saga (1964) the natives of Tandar
cruise space looking for habitable planets. [JC]
HANNAN, ROBERT CHARLES
(? -? ) UK writer whose first sf novel, The Betrothal of James (1898),
attempts to extract some humour from the fact that female cats must be
sacrificed in the production of a rejuvenation pill. Thuka of the Moon
(1906), a fantasy in which lunar deities amuse themselves by creating
various humanlike beings, awkwardly prefigures Philip Jose FARMER's World
of Tiers POCKET-UNIVERSE sequence. In The Electric Man (performed 1906;
1910 chap), a play, a primitive ROBOT is mistaken for the hero, with
farcical consequences. [JC]
HANSEN, KARL
(1950- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "A Red, White and Blue
Fourth of July" in 2076: The American Tricentennial (anth 1976) ed Edward
BRYANT, and who published stories fairly frequently in the late 1970s. His
first novel, War Games (1980 as "Sergeant Pepper" in The Berkley Showcase
#5 ed Victoria Schochet; exp 1981), is a surprisingly searing military-sf
vision; it is set in the loose Hybrid universe, as is his second, Dream
Games (1985 Omni as "Dreams Unwind"; exp 1985), which less interestingly
describes a rebellion against a COMPUTER-controlled DYSTOPIA. Further
volumes of the Hybrid series are anticipated. [JC]
HANSEN, L(OUISE) TAYLOR
(? - ) US writer who published numerous sf stories and popular science
articles in the PULP MAGAZINES from 1929 to at least 1948, beginning with
"The Undersea Tube" for AMZ in 1928; this details the failure of a subway
under the Atlantic. She probably attended the University of California Los
Angeles for graduate work in science. Her stories, which revolve around
hard-science explanations or technological problems, tend to include many
diagrams. The Ancient Atlantic (1969), nonfiction, deals with the
geological and mythic history of the Atlantic Ocean. [JD]
HANSON, VERN
Working name of UK writer Victor Joseph Hanson (1920- ), author of a
number of some routine sf published over a brief span:The Twisters (coll
1963), Creatures of the Mist (1963), Claws of the Night (1964) and The

Grip of Fear (coll 1964). [JC]
HAPNA!
SCANDINAVIA.
HARBEN, WILL(IAM) N(ATHANIEL)
(1858-1919) US writer, most of whose novels variously depict life in the
South. "In the Year Ten Thousand" (1892 Arena) is a UTOPIAN sketch
espousing vegetarianism. His sf novel, The Land of the Changing Sun
(1894), is a LOST-WORLD tale featuring an underground utopia/dystopia,
Alpha, founded 200 years earlier under the Arctic by a group of inventive
Englishmen, who espouse a rigid eugenic regime, and who heat and light
their habitat with an artificial sun, which moves on tracks and changes
colour pleasingly. Intruding magma threatens their world, and they decide
to evacuate Alpha in advanced submarines. [JC]See also: HISTORY OF SF.
HARBINSON, W(ILLIAM) ALLEN
(1941- ) UK writer who has concentrated on the sf of PARANOIA, generally
rooted in the notion that ALIENS are either investigating our planet or
governing us, or both. The Projekt Saucer sequence - in order of internal
chronology, Projekt Saucer #1: Inception (1991 US), Phoenix: Projekt
Saucer #2 (1995) and Genesis (1980; vt Projekt Saucer #2: Genesis 1991 US;
vt Genesis: Projekt Saucer #3 1995 UK) - connects UFOS and superscience in
a global conspiracy. Otherworld (1984) collapses under the burden of
attempting to make stylistic bricks out of material of this sort, but The
Light of Eden (1987; vt Eden 1987 US) more successfully follows the
psychiatric examination of some humans who gradually make it clear that
they are not in fact hallucinating an alien presence in the land. Dream
Maker (1991) suggests that UFOs in need of energy from human minds are
sucking holes in the ozone layer. [JC]
HARBOTTLE, PHILIP (JAMES)
(1941- ) UK local government officer and sf researcher. PH is the world
authority on the works of John Russell FEARN, whose literary estate he
represents and with whom he has posthumously collaborated, completing
several stories. His bibliographical study of Fearn is The Multi-Man (1968
chap). PH is an expert in publishing data relating to UK GENRE SF,
especially in magazine form, and has contributed research to several UK
books about sf. He edited the magazine VISION OF TOMORROW for its 12
issues, Aug 1969-Sep 1970, as well as, anon, 3 anthologies: Eternal
Rediffusion (anth 1973 chap), Flight on Titan (anth 1973 chap) and Passage
to Saturn (anth 1973 chap). His work as a whole has been summarized in 2
linked volumes, Vultures of the Void: A History of British Science
Fiction, 1946-1956 (1992 US) and British Science Fiction Paperbacks,
1949-1956 (1992 US), both with Steve HOLLAND. [PN/JC]
HARCOURT, GLENN
[r] Carter SCHOLZ.
HARDING, LEE (JOHN)
(1937- ) Australian freelance photographer and writer who began
publishing sf with "Displaced Person" for Science Fantasy in 1961; he
eventually expanded this story as Displaced Person (1979; rev vt Misplaced

Persons 1979 US). Aimed - like The Weeping Sky (1977) and Waiting for the
End of the World (1983), which are equally impressive - at a teenage
audience, it memorably imprisons its protagonist in a world turning to
grey just as the grim solitude of his own life becomes painfully manifest.
This use of sf plots to explore character became a kind of trademark of
the LH novel. During the 1960s, sometimes writing as Harold G. Nye, he
concentrated on magazine work, twice winning a Ditmar AWARD, in 1970 for
"Dancing Gerontius" (1969) and in 1972 for the magazine version of his
first novel, Fallen Spaceman (1971 If; rev 1973; rev 1980 US), a juvenile.
His adult novels - A World of Shadows (1975 UK) and Future Sanctuary (1976
Canada) - have been perhaps less notable than his juveniles, though the
last impressively anatomizes a desolate NEAR-FUTURE Australia. His other
juveniles include The Children of Atlantis (1976), The Frozen Sky (1976),
Return to Tomorrow (1977) and The Web of Time (1980 UK); they are sombre
and clear. LH has edited Beyond Tomorrow: An Anthology of Modern Science
Fiction (anth 1976; cut 1977 UK), The Altered I: An Encounter with Science
Fiction (anth 1976), which presents some of the productions of an sf
workshop in Australia presided over by Ursula K. LE GUIN, and Rooms of
Paradise (anth 1978). [JC]See also: CHILDREN'S SF; PSYCHOLOGY.
HARDING, RICHARD
Pseudonym of US writer Robert Tine (? - ), author of the Outrider
SURVIVALIST sequence: The Outrider (1984), #2: Fire and Steel (1984), #3:
Blood Highway (1984), #4: Bay City Burnout (1985) and #5: Built to Kill
(1985). As usual, the HOLOCAUST is vengefully enjoyed. [JC]
HARD SF
Item of sf terminology coined by P. Schuyler MILLER in ASF (Nov 1957) and
since then widely used by sf FANDOM and readers; it has sometimes
overlapped in meaning with "hardcore sf", often used in the 1960s and
1970s to mean the kind of sf that repeats the themes and (to a degree) the
style of the GENRE SF written during the so-called GOLDEN AGE OF SF.
Though still sometimes used in a way that implies the element of nostalgia
associated with "hardcore sf", the term"hard sf" now seems to refer to
something rather simpler, as summarized by Allen STEELE (in "Hard Again"
in NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION, June 1992): "Hard sf is the form of
imaginative literature that uses either established or carefully
extrapolated science as its backbone." Steele goes on to regret the
association in many readers' minds of hard sf with "a particular political
territory - usually located somewhere on the far right", an association
which, while certainly sometimes justifiable, has cultural origins that
cannot easily be elucidated. The commonly used distinction between hard
and SOFT SCIENCES runs parallel to that between hard and SOFT SF. Theme
entries in this volume which deal with the so-called hard sciences
include, but are not restricted to, ASTRONOMY, BLACK HOLES, COMPUTERS;
COSMOLOGY, CYBERNETICS, FASTER THAN LIGHT, GRAVITY, MATHEMATICS,
NUCLEAR
POWER, PHYSICS, POWER SOURCES, ROCKETS, SPACE FLIGHT, SPACE SHIPS,
TECHNOLOGY and WEAPONS. All but the most puristic reader would probably
accept also BIOLOGY, GENETIC ENGINEERING and TERRAFORMING as appropriate
material for hard sf. But it is possible to write a kind of hard sf about

almost anything, as can be exemplified by Brian M. STABLEFORD's
rationalizing treatment of vampires in The Empire of Fear (1988). Hard sf
should not, however, wilfully ignore or break known scientific principles,
yet stories classified as "hard sf" often contain, for example, ESP,
SUPERMAN, FASTER-THAN-LIGHT and TIME-TRAVEL themes (see also IMAGINARY
SCIENCE). While a rigorous definition of "hard sf" may be impossible,
perhaps the most important thing about it is, not that it should include
real science in any great detail, but that it should respect the
scientific spirit; it should seek to provide natural rather than
supernatural or transcendental explanations for the events and phenomena
it describes. [PN]
HARD TO BE A GOD
TRUDNO BYT' BOGOM.
HARDWARE
Film (1990). Palace/Millimeter/A Wicked Films Production. Dir Richard
Stanley, starring Stacey Travis, Dylan McDermott, John Lynch, William
Hootkins. Screenplay Stanley, based (it was admitted after a threatened
lawsuit) on a 1980 JUDGE DREDD story. 94 mins, but many prints shortened
to avoid adults-only rating. Colour.In a radioactive city in an apparently
post- HOLOCAUST near future, a dope-smoking sculptress is given a military
robot's head to incorporate into a steel sculpture. It reincorporates
itself using pieces of the sculpture, thereby taking the film from the
technopunk- DYSTOPIA genre into the Luddite killer- ROBOT genre. The
24-year-old director, Stanley, had a track record in so-called Industrial
Music rock videos, and the eclectic, pack-rat junk sensibility which this
suggests (a bit of Andrei TARKOVSKY here, a bit of Dario Argento there, a
bit of CYBERPUNK everywhere) surprisingly transcends cliche in the images
if not the script. Though H is basically a simple low-budget SPLATTER
MOVIE, it is unusually inventive in its design and in several of the
characters, notably Hootkins as a rotund sadistic voyeur. The crazed robot
is a Mark 13, and the film's epigraph is adapted from (where else?) the
Gospel According to St Mark, Chapter 13: "No flesh shall be spared."
[PN]See also: CINEMA.
HARDY, DAVID A(NDREWS)
(1936- ) UK illustrator, known as much for his astronomical paintings in
the accurate tradition of Chesley BONESTELL as for his sf work. DH learned
his craft at the Margaret Street College of Art in Birmingham, and was
soon painting for the British Interplanetary Society. Some of his best
early work was to illustrate a nonfiction book by Patrick MOORE, Sun,
Myth, and Men (1954); DAH later illustrated and cowrote with Moore
Challenge of the Stars (1972). His work has appeared on magazine and book
covers, most notably (beginning 1971) many covers for FSF, the magazine
for which he developed his famous "Space Gumby", a green alien which lent
humour to his vivid astronomical scenes. He was an important artist for
VISION OF TOMORROW, and worked also for Science Fiction Monthly, If and
Gal. Other book credits include Galactic Tours (1981) with Bob SHAW and
artwork for Atlas of the Solar System (1982) and Visions of Space (1989).
[JG/PN]

HARDY, PHIL(IPPE)
(1945- ) UK expert on rock music and film, on both of which subjects he
has published widely, having been founding editor of Studio Vista's
Rockbooks series and of the magazine Music Business. Among his notable
books on film those most relevant to sf are The Aurum Film Encyclopedia:
Science Fiction (1984; vt Science Fiction: The Complete Film Sourcebook
1985 US; vt The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies 1986 ; rev 1991)
and The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror (1985; vt The Encyclopedia of
Horror Movies 1987 US; rev projected 1993), both of which he edited and
partly wrote. Well edited, containing detailed credits and critical
annotations on well over 1000 films each, these books are-despite
inevitable small errors and on rare occasion weird judgments - about the
most readable and useful reference works in book form on their subjects (
CINEMA). There are more comprehensive filmographies available, but PH's
are much the most comprehensive to contain critical comment. The Science
Fiction volume - whose 1991 updating was largely the work of Kim NEWMAN is the only current (1992) book to be more comprehensive in the field than
this encyclopedia. [PN]
HARGRAVE, JOHN (GORDON)
(1894-1982) UK writer and illustrator. At age 17 he became the chief
cartoonist for the London Evening News; he also illustrated several books
of interest, including a 1909 edition of Jonathan SWIFT's Gulliver's
Travels (1726) and Black Tales for White Children (coll 1914) by C.H.
Stigland. His work was all in black-and-white, with effects that ran from
the forceful to the jagged. He became involved in the Boy Scout movement
during WWI, then left it to found a rival organization, the Kibbo Kift,
whose principles he advocated in a quasi- UTOPIAN novel, Young Winkle
(1925); he invented an automatic aircraft navigator; and he was involved
in Social Credit, a theory that advocated the redistribution of resources
to increase purchasing power. Of his nonfiction, The Life and Death of
Paracelsus (1951) is of note. His sf novel, The Imitation Man (1931),
depicts the life of an artificially created homunculus with the power of
ESP who causes a good deal of furore but soon dies. [JC]See also:
SUPERMAN.
HARGRAVE, LEONIE
Thomas M. DISCH.
HARKER, KENNETH
(1927- ) UK author with a training in physics. His sf novels - The
Symmetrians (1966), which concerns a DYSTOPIAN response to nuclear
HOLOCAUST, and The Flowers of February (1970) - are straightforward but
uninspired. [JC]
HARMON, H.H.
[s] Robert Moore WILLIAMS.
HARMON, JIM
Working name of US writer and RADIO producer James Judson Harmon (1933), who began publishing sf with "The Smuggler" for Spaceway in 1954, and
who became active in the magazine field. A nonfiction book, The Great
Radio Heroes (1967), discusses SUPERMAN and other programmes and

characters of sf interest. A similarly well documented nostalgic study is
The Great Movie Serials: Their Sound and Fury (1972) by JH and Donald F.
GLUT. JH also contributed a number of articles to RIVERSIDE QUARTERLY.
[JC/PN]
HARNESS, CHARLES (LEONARD)
(1915- ) US patent attorney and writer, born in Texas. His first
published story was "Time Trap" for ASF in 1948, a convoluted time-loop
story involving the working of tremendous forces off-stage and a
quasitranscendental experience as the hero goes back in time to remake the
world. His subsequent output shows a remarkable consistency in echoing and
developing these themes. His first two novels, Flight into Yesterday (1949
Startling Stories; exp 1953; vt The Paradox Men) and THE RING OF RITORNEL
(1968), feature cycles in time and HEROES who undergo transcendental
metamorphoses in order to manipulate their own destinies and that of the
human race; both novels are shamelessly melodramatic, and have an obvious
kinship with the work of A.E. VAN VOGT. Shorter works in the same vein
include "The New Reality" (1950) - sf's best ADAM AND EVE story - and
"Stalemate in Space" (1949; vt "Stalemate in Time"). The first phase of
his career (1948-53) may well have ended because of his failure to sell
the remarkable novella "The Rose" (1953 AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION; title
story of The Rose [coll 1966 UK], which also includes "The New Reality"
and "The Chessplayers") to a US market. This striking allegory of the
opposed worldviews of science and the ARTS is a memorable exemplar of the
particular kind of SUPERMAN story which represents future human EVOLUTION
in metamorphic terms. Its reprinting in the 1960s was the result of the
interest in CLH's work of Michael MOORCOCK, who reprinted several CLH
stories in NEW WORLDS, and this may have been responsible for Harness's
second burst of creativity, which produced THE RING OF RITORNEL and
several shorter works drawing on his experience as a lawyer, including "An
Ornament to his Profession" (1966) and "The Alchemist" (1966). (CLH had
earlier drawn on this experience in writing whimsical articles and stories
for ASF as Leonard Lockhard, sometimes working in collaboration with
Theodore L. THOMAS.)CLH returned to sf writing for a third time with the
futuristic infernal romance Wolfhead (1977-8 FSF; 1978), one of several sf
novels to borrow heavily from DANTE ALIGHIERI and to recast the myth of
Orpheus and Eurydice. He has been moderately prolific since then, aided by
his retirement from legal work in 1981. The Catalyst (1980) is one of
several CLH stories featuring quasimiraculous scientific discoveries made
in frank defiance of supposedly rational procedures. The transcendental
time-looping of his earlier novels is reiterated in Firebird (1981), Krono
(1988), and - in an un-space-operatic fashion - in Lurid Dreams (1990),
whose out-of-body time traveller meets up with Edgar Allan POE. Redworld
(1986) is an eccentric Bildungsroman set on a peculiar alien world, which
may be in part a transfiguration of the author's early life. His fondness
for outrageously melodramatic courtroom dramas in which absolutely
everything is rigged against the defendant, first displayed in "Probable
Cause" (1968), is echoed in The Venetian Court (1982) and Lunar Justice
(1991).CLH is an original, stylish and imaginatively audacious writer
whose relative neglect is difficult to understand. His most recent books
may not have quite the scope and exuberant panache of his earlier efforts,

but it is nevertheless unfortunate that the works of such a colourful and
highly readable writer should still be condemned, with one recent
exception, to appear only as ephemeral paperback originals. Despite his
one-time fashionability in the UK, none of his recent works has been
published there. [BS]About the author: Charles L. Harness: Attorney in
Space: A Working Bibliography (1992 chap) by Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See
also: COMPUTERS; COSMOLOGY; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; ESCHATOLOGY; FORCE
FIELD; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GAMES AND SPORTS; HISTORY IN SF; JUPITER;
MEDICINE; METAPHYSICS; MOON; MUSIC; MYTHOLOGY; RECURSIVE SF; SCIENTISTS;
SUN; TIME PARADOXES; WEAPONS.
HARNICEK, MARTIN
[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
HARPER, GEORGE W(ILLIAM)
(1927- ) US volcanologist and writer, often of nonfiction pieces for
journals like ASF. His only sf novel, Gypsy Earth (1982), is a full-flung
SPACE OPERA in the manner of the pre-WWII masters of that form, pitting
valiant Terrans against vast invading spacefleets, which they initially
destroy. The modernity of the tale was perhaps revealed by the destruction
of Earth partway through; but survivors in the eponymous hollow ASTEROIDS
wreak revenge, and humanity survives. [JC]
HARPER, HARRY
(1880-1960) UK author with Claude GRAHAME-WHITE of two sf juveniles, The
Air-King's Treasure (1913) and The Invisible War-Plane: A Tale of Air
Adventure in the Great Campaign (1915). In the latter an airship is
concealed by paint which (it is claimed) neither absorbs nor reflects
light. Much later HH wrote two solo works of semifictional FUTUROLOGY,
Winged World (1946) and Dawn of the Space Age (1946). [PN]
HARPER, RORY
(? - ) US writer who began publishing sf with Petrogypsies (1985 in Far
Frontiers ed John F. CARR and Jerry POURNELLE; exp 1989), an essentially
comic novel set in what seems to be an ALTERNATE WORLD where oil
exploration is done by bio-constructs piloted by "gypsies", whose skills
dominate the venue. [JC]See also: POWER SOURCES.
HARPER, VINCENT
(? -? ) US writer whose sf novel, The Mortgage on the Brain, Being the
Confessions of the late Ethelbert Craft, MD (1905), describes an
electric-shock treatment which alters personality beneficially and
undermines many then-conventional views of the nature of the mind. The
story is a melodramatic hotchpotch, but is of interest in its reference to
the ego, which is described (as in the title) as holding no more than a
mortgage on its habitat: this idea has found sophisticated support in
late-20th-century studies of the workings of the mind. [JC]See also:
PSYCHOLOGY.
HARRINGTON, ALAN
(1919- ) US writer, author of The Immortalist (1969), a work of
speculative nonfiction. His sf novel, Paradise 1 (1977), set in the 21st
century, tells of potential IMMORTALITY and of a continuing struggle to

wrest humanity free of its contract with death. [JC]
HARRIS, CLARE WINGER
(1891-1968) US writer (known also as Mrs F.C. Harris), the first woman to
publish sf in the specialized 1920s PULP MAGAZINES, beginning with "A
Runaway World" for Weird Tales in 1926. "The Fate of the Poseidonia"
(1927) won third prize in an AMZ contest. She experimented with a female
point of view in "The Fifth Dimension" (1928), and her stories generally
feature strong women, most notably Sylvia, airplane pilot and mechanic in
"The Ape Cycle" (1930). Her work often dealt with beings on the borders of
humanity - CYBORGS and ape-people ( APES AND CAVEMEN) in particular. She
assembled her work in Away from Here and Now (coll 1947). [JD]
HARRIS, FRANK
Working name of UK writer and editor James Thomas Harris (1856-1931), who
spent some years as a lawyer in the USA and who is now best known for his
erotic autobiography, My Life and Loves (1922-7), which first appeared in
5 privately published volumes. In Pantopia (in Undream'd of Shores [coll
1924] as "The Temple of the Forgotten Dead"; much exp 1930 US) a young man
is shipwrecked somewhere in the South Atlantic, finding himself on a
utopian ISLAND whose Spanish-speaking socialist inhabitants make use of
radar, lasers and atomic power, and who as a matter of course do what is
good for their race in a natural fashion. Unfortunately, also as a matter
of course, they execute strangers. Luckily the hero is saved by a
privileged maiden, and both eventually escape. [JC]
HARRIS, J. HENRY
(? -? ) UK writer whose uneasily fin-de-siecle sf novel, A Romance in
Radium (1906), follows the investigative journey to Earth of a feathered
female ALIEN, a member of an angel-like species from 100,000,000 miles
away; her people are confused as to why earlier visitors stayed on our
planet and became mortal. The answer is SEX - or, as JHH puts it,
marriage. Angels, it seems, cannot get enough of marriage. [JC]
HARRIS, JOHN BEYNON
[r] John WYNDHAM.
HARRIS, JOHNSON
John WYNDHAM.
HARRIS, LARRY M(ARK)
[r] Laurence M. JANIFER.
HARRIS, MACDONALD
Pseudonym used by US writer and academic Donald William Heiney (19211993) for all his fiction which, though composed in a smooth and
accessible style, tends significantly to foreground any elements of
fantasy ( FABULATION) with which it may deal. Bull Fever (1973) treats a
modern family romance in terms of the myth of the Minotaur. The Balloonist
(1976) recounts a failed 1897 BALLOON expedition to the North Pole in
terms reminiscent of Jules VERNE's Voyages extraordinaires; indeed, the
book is dedicated to Verne. The Little People (1986) takes its title from
the myth of faerie, though in a delusional frame. Glowstone (1987) posits
a kind of ALTERNATE WORLD in which a woman strongly reminiscent of Marie

Curie (1867-1934) makes identical scientific discoveries. Screenplay
(1982), a TIME-TRAVEL tale, deposits its hero in a film-noir dream of
1920s Hollywood. Several of the stories assembled in The Cathay Stories
and Other Fictions (coll 1988) carry a contemporary Marco Polo backwards
in time to the increasingly fabulous world of the original (1254-1324).
[JC/GF]
HARRIS, RAYMOND
(1953- ) US writer who began publishing sf with his first novel, The
Broken Worlds (1986), an attractive picaresque adventure. Shadows of the
White Sun (1988) seems at first assessment almost too complex - it is set
in a FAR-FUTURE Solar System dominated by revenant star-sailors whose
descendents occupy seven SPACE HABITATS called the Hypaethra, orbiting the
Sun, while a computer-created ANDROID race occupies the planet Veii in
exchange for ritual tribute paid to the Despot who dominates the habitats.
But embedded within this surround are a convincing murder mystery, a trek
and an examination of character. Echoes of both Frank HERBERT and Gene
WOLFE are detectable, not to RH's discredit. Complications of venue and
plot affect The Schizogenic Man (1990) more seriously, with a 21st-century
balkanized, computer-run, city-state USA where lives change according to
periodic lotteries, and a TIME-TRAVEL plot that further shuffles the
reality cards; the novel was the 1991 runner-up for the PHILIP K. DICK
AWARD. RH's work has yet to come fully into focus, but there is a sense
that this may happen very soon. [JC]
HARRIS, ROGER
[r] Michael MOORCOCK
HARRIS-BURLAND, J(OHN) B(URLAND)
(1870-1926) UK writer whose first novels of sf interest, Dacobra, or The
White Priests of Ahriman (1903) and The Princess of Thora (1904 US; vt Dr
Silex 1905 UK as JBH-B), were signed Harris Burland. The first tale sets
in an occult frame a wide range of supernatural subjects including
IMMORTALITY; the second, a LOST-WORLD novel, features a race of lost
Normans who have developed into SUPERMEN in an enclave at the North Pole.
The Gold Worshipers (1906 US), as JBH-B, returns to one of the subjects of
the first novel - the transubstantiation of metals - in a congested tale
of greed, gold-making and amply reimbursed remorse. [JC]Other works:
Workers in Darkness (1908), borderline.
HARRISON, CRAIG
(1942- ) UK-born NEW ZEALAND playwright and writer whose work embodies
consistently anti-racist themes. Broken October: New Zealand 1985 (1976)
posits political terrorism and racial conflict resulting in a US-backed
military takeover. In The Quiet Earth (1981), filmed as The QUIET EARTH
(1985), a GENETIC-ENGINEERING disaster depopulates the planet. The insane
protagonist realizes, in a moment of CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH that
vindicates his PARANOIA, that he has caused the DISASTER. Days of
Starlight (1988) pits scientists against the US military after a
holographic recorder of Earth's history is discovered. Technically
excellent, CH's work is sometimes uninvolving. [MMacL]
HARRISON, HARRY

(1925- ) US writer, born Henry Maxwell Dempsey (though his father changed
his name to Harrison soon after HH's birth), now usually resident, after
many years of travelling, in Ireland. HH began his career as a commercial
artist about 1946, working chiefly in comics as an illustrator and writer,
often in collaboration with Wallace A. WOOD, supplying illustrations as
well to magazines like GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION and eventually having a
stint as art director of Picture Week. At the same time - being from an
early age an sf enthusiast and friendly with many writers through his
membership of the Hydra Club, a New York group of sf professionals - he
began to think about writing. Damon KNIGHT, then editor of WORLDS BEYOND
and one of the Hydra Club members, commissioned some illustrations from HH
for that magazine; he then - far more importantly - bought HH's first
story, "Rock Diver", which appeared in Worlds Beyond in 1951. HH's short
fiction appeared regularly from then, sometimes as by Felix Boyd or Hank
Dempsey. In 1953 HH served as editor of ROCKET STORIES for 1 issue (#3)
under the house name Wade KAEMPFERT. In later years, HH was also for short
periods in charge of the magazines Impulse ( SCIENCE FANTASY), AMAZING
STORIES and FANTASTIC.In 1957, from Mexico, HH sold his first story to
John W. CAMPBELL Jr for ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, thereby initiating a
long and close relationship with both editor and magazine. This was his
first tale featuring the interstellar-criminal-turned-law-enforcer
Slippery Jim DiGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, HERO of a set of fast-moving
adventures with a broad leavening of HUMOUR: The Stainless Steel Rat
(fixup 1961 US), The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge (1970 US) and The
Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World (1972 US) - all assembled as The
Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat (omni 1977) - plus The Stainless
Steel Rat Wants You! (1979 US), The Stainless Steel Rat for President
(1982 US), A Stainless Steel Rat is Born (1985 US) and The Stainless Steel
Rat Gets Drafted (1987 UK). (HH did the jacket illustrations for the UK
hardcover editions of the second and third books.) HH always remained a
stout defender of Campbell, even though as editor and critic his attitude
often seemed diametrically opposed to Campbell's increasingly stiff-necked
social and political views. He edited Campbell's Collected Editorials from
Analog (coll 1966), was filmed at a working lunch with Campbell and Gordon
R. DICKSON, a session which resulted in the Harrison-Dickson collaborative
novel The Lifeship (1976 US; vt Lifeboat 1978 UK), and after Campbell's
death edited a memorial anthology, Astounding (anth 1973; vt The John W.
Campbell Memorial Anthology 1974 UK).HH's first published novel appeared a
year before The Stainless Steel Rat: Deathworld (1960 US; vt Deathworld 1
1973 UK). Its highly kinetic description of the COLONIZATION of a planet
crammed with hostile life established him as a vigorous writer of
intelligent action adventures. Further volumes in the Deathworld series
are Deathworld 2 (1964 US; vt The Ethical Engineer 1964 UK) and Deathworld
3 (1968 US), all three being assembled as The Deathworld Trilogy (omni
1974 US); "The Mothballed Spaceship" (1973) was an associated short story.
The third series begun by HH in his early years (though the second volume
was not to appear for three decades) was the Bill, the Galactic Hero
sequence, starting with Bill, the Galactic Hero (1965 US), a sharp
extended lampoon of aspects of stories by Robert A. HEINLEIN, Isaac ASIMOV
and even HH himself. The later volumes of the series declined,
unfortunately, into undirected slapstick: Bill, the Galactic Hero: The

Planet of the Robot Slaves (1989 US; vt Bill, the Galactic Hero on the
Planet of Robot Slaves 1989 UK), Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of
Bottled Brains (1990 US) with Robert SHECKLEY, Bill, the Galactic Hero on
the Planet of Tasteless Pleasure (1991) with David F. BISCHOFF, Bill, the
Galactic Hero on the Planet of the Zombie Vampires (1991) with Jack C.
HALDEMAN II, and Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Ten Thousand
Bars (1991; vt Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of the Hippies from
Hell 1992 UK) with Bischoff.Most of HH's singletons are also of interest.
They include: a group of stories exploring the ROBOT theme, War with the
Robots (coll 1962 US); the examination of MATTER TRANSMISSION in One Step
From Earth (coll 1970 US); a parody of E.E. SMITH in Star Smashers of the
Galaxy Rangers (1973 US); Captive Universe (1969 US), an unusual
GENERATION-STARSHIP story using a background of Aztec culture ( CONCEPTUAL
BREAKTHROUGH; POCKET UNIVERSE); Tunnel through the Deeps (1972 US; vt A
Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! 1972 UK), a PARALLEL-WORLD novel in which
the American Revolution failed and the British Empire still flourishes;
and Skyfall (1976 UK), a fairly conventional DISASTER novel. Some,
however, like Invasion: Earth (1982 US), seem to parody nothing but their
author's own attempts to parody bad SPACE OPERA. In contrast, MAKE ROOM!
MAKE ROOM! (1966 US) is a serious - indeed, impassioned - novel of
OVERPOPULATION, gravely told and well formed. It formed the basis of the
film SOYLENT GREEN (1973), though much of its substance was lost in
transition; the film nevertheless won the 1973 NEBULA for Best Dramatic
Presentation.Later series of interest include the To the Stars sequence Homeworld (1980 US), Wheelworld (1981 US) and Starworld (1981 US), all
three being assembled as To the Stars (omni 1981) - which combine muscular
sf-adventure plotting with sharp narrative analyses of UK and US life. Far
more important, however, is the Eden series - West of Eden (1984 US),
Winter in Eden (1986 US) and Return to Eden (1988 US) - an ambitiously
conceived ALTERNATE-WORLD sequence based on the assumption that the
dinosaurs did not suffer extinction and, in the due course of time, have
evolved into saurians skilled at biotechnology. Their encounter with a
savage humanity, and the irreconcilable differences between two
intelligent species warring for Lebensraum, is intrinsically interesting,
tightly and informatively told, and dramatically gripping as the slowly
approaching Ice Age adds intensity to the strife and the sense of peril.
Along with his earliest sf adventures and Make Room! Make Room!, the Eden
books are by a considerable margin HH's best work.For many years HH's
close professional association with Campbell was balanced by his even
closer personal and professional association with Brian W. ALDISS, a
figure dauntingly averse to the Campbellian vision. Together they founded
the critical magazine SF Horizons, whose two issues served as a litmus
test for sf criticism; they edited an annual Best SF anthology (see
listing below); they collaborated on other anthologies, such as Nebula
Award Stories Two (anth 1967 US),All About Venus (anth 1968 US; exp vt)
Farewell, Fantastic Venus! A History of the Planet Venus in Fact and
Fiction (anth 1968 UK; cut vt 1968 US), The Astounding-Analog Reader,
Volume One (anth 1972 US; vt in 2 vols as The Astounding-Analog Reader,
Volume One 1973 UK and The Astounding-Analog Reader, Volume Two 1973 UK)
and The Astounding-Analog Reader, Volume Two (anth 1973 US); and they
assembled the Decade series - Decade: The 1940s (anth 1975), Decade: The

1950s (anth 1976) and Decade: The 1960s (anth 1977).HH has been hard to
pin down. He has lived everywhere. He was an author of the hardest of
hard-sf adventure novels while at the same time mercilessly spoofing the
conventions - and politics - of that literature. He is deeply American,
and deeply expatriate. He might spend the rest of his career writing
bad-joke spin-offs from his own earlier work, or he might compose his
masterpiece. After 40 years, there is still no knowing. [MJE/JC]Other
works: Planet of the Damned (1962 US; vt Sense of Obligation 1967 UK) and
its sequel, Planet of No Return (1981 US); Vendetta for the Saint * (1964
US) as Leslie CHARTERIS; Plague from Space (1965 US; vt The Jupiter Legacy
1970 US); Two Tales and 8 Tomorrows (coll 1965 UK); The Technicolor Time
Machine (1967); The Man from P.I.G. (1968 US; with additional story as
coll vt The Men from P.I.G. and R.O.B.O.T. 1974 UK), a juvenile; The
Daleth Effect (1970 US; vt In Our Hands, the Stars 1970 UK); Prime Number
(coll 1970 US); Spaceship Medic (1970 UK); Stonehenge (1972 US; exp vt
Stonehenge: Where Atlantis Died 1983 US) with Leon E. STOVER; Montezuma's
Revenge (1972 US) and Queen Victoria's Revenge (1974 US), linked
associational novels; The California Iceberg (1975 UK); The Best of Harry
Harrison (coll 1976 US; rev 1976 UK); Great Balls of Fire: A History of
Sex in Science Fiction Illustration (1977 UK), nonfiction; Spacecraft in
Fact and Fiction (1979) with Malcolm EDWARDS, nonfiction; Mechanismo
(1978), nonfiction; Planet Story (1979 UK); The QE II is Missing (1980
UK), associational; A Rebel in Time (1983 US).As Editor: Apeman, Spaceman:
Anthropological Science Fiction (anth 1968 US) with Leon E. Stover; the
Author's Choice anthologies, in which authors chose their own favourites
and said why, comprising Backdrop of Stars (anth 1968 UK; vt SF: Authors'
Choice 1968 US), SF: Author's Choice 2 (anth 1970 US), #3 (anth 1971 US)
and #4 (anth 1974 US); the Best SF annual series, all with Brian W.
Aldiss, comprising Best SF: 1967 (1968 US; vt The Year's Best Science
Fiction No 1 1968 UK), The Year's Best Science Fiction No 2 (anth 1969 UK;
exp vt Best SF: 1968 1969 US), The Year's Best Science Fiction No 3 (anth
1970 UK; vt Best SF: 1969 1970 US), The Year's Best Science Fiction No 4
(anth 1971 UK; vt Best SF: 1970 1971 US), The Year's Best Science Fiction
No 5 (anth 1972 UK; vt Best SF: 1971 1972 US), Best SF: 1972 (anth 1973
US; vt The Year's Best Science Fiction No 6 1973 UK), Best SF: 1973 (anth
1974 US; cut vt The Year's Best Science Fiction No 7 1974 UK), Best SF
1974 (anth 1975 US; cut vt The Year's Best Science Fiction No 8 1975 UK)
and The Year's Best Science Fiction No 9 (anth 1976 US; vt Best SF: 1975
1976 US); Blast Off: S.F. for Boys (anth 1969 UK; rev vt Worlds of Wonder
1969 US); Four for the Future: An Anthology on the Themes of Sacrifice and
Redemption (anth 1969 UK); the Nova series of original sf stories,
comprising Nova 1 (anth 1970), #2 (anth 1972 US), #3 (anth 1973 US; vt The
Outdated Man 1975 US) and #4 (anth dated 1974 but 1975 US); The Year 2000
(anth 1970 US); The Light Fantastic (anth 1971 US) and Ahead of Time (anth
1972 US), the latter with Theodore J. Gordon; A Science Fiction Reader
(anth 1973 US) with Carol Pugner; Science Fiction Novellas (anth 1975 US)
with Willis E. MCNELLY; Hell's Cartographers (anth 1975 UK) with Brian W.
Aldiss; There Won't Be War (anth 1991) with Bruce MCALLISTER.About the
author: Harry Harrison (last rev 1985 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr; Harry
Harrison (1990) by Leon STOVER.See also: ANTHOLOGIES; ANTHROPOLOGY; ARTS;
ATLANTIS; AUTOMATION; CHILDREN'S SF; COMICS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT;

DYSTOPIAS; EVOLUTION; FAR FUTURE; GOLDEN AGE OF SF; GRAVITY; JOHN W.
CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD; MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF; MEDIA LANDSCAPE;
MEDICINE; MESSIAHS; MYTHOLOGY; POLLUTION; RADIO; RELIGION; ROBERT HALE
LIMITED; SATIRE; SEX; TABOOS; TRANSPORTATION; UNDER THE SEA.
HARRISON, HELGA (SUSAN BARBARA)
(1923- ) UK writer whose sf novel, The Catacombs (1962), depicts with
some irony a post- HOLOCAUST world in which "Crishuns", having persuaded
themselves that they warrant special attention, await salvation. [JC]
HARRISON, MICHAEL
(1907-1991) UK writer in various genres, mostly not sf. He wrote an early
film novelization, The Bride of Frankenstein * (1936) as Michael Egremont,
and some of the stories assembled in Transit of Venus (coll 1936) are of
fantasy interest. His first and most interesting sf novel, Higher Things
(1945), is clearly influenced by H.G. WELLS. An impoverished young man,
caught in the trammels of a clerical position but with dreams of higher
things, finds in himself the power to levitate, which he does at crucial
moments in his rather melancholy life to escape his and the world's
muddles. He then makes a long (probably delusional) flight to confront the
Dictator (Hitler) and to discuss with him the world's fate, a
middle-period Wellsian excursion which is succeeded by a Wellsian quietus:
the protagonist, haunted by PARANOIA, decides to escape the world entirely
in a levitated, airtight gondola. The Darkened Room: An Arabesque (1951)
is like Higher Things set in the mythical town of Rowcester; it features a
cat kept artificially alive to further a blackmail scheme. The Brain
(1953) devotes itself to a mushroom cloud which becomes sentient.
[JC]Other works: The Exploits of the Chevalier Dupin (coll 1968 US) and
Murder in the Rue Royale (coll 1972) are collections of mystery stories
extending the canon of Edgar Allan POE's seminal detective.See also: PSI
POWERS.
HARRISON, M(ICHAEL) JOHN
(1945- ) UK writer and rock-climber, closely identified in the 1960s with
NEW WORLDS, where he published his first sf story, "Baa Baa Blocksheep",
in 1968, and for which he later wrote some of the best tales using the
Jerry Cornelius template, or icon, from the series created by Michael
MOORCOCK. He also wrote considerable criticism for NW, usually as Joyce
Churchill, and served for some time as its literary editor. Typical work
from this period was assembled in The Machine in Shaft Ten and Other
Stories (coll 1975), which reveals its NEW-WAVE provenance in narrative
discontinuities and subheads after the fashion of J.G. BALLARD. His first
novel, The Committed Men (1971; rev 1971 US), is an impressive postHOLOCAUST story set in a fractured England, centring physically on the
ruins of the motorways, and generating a powerful sense of entropic
dismantlement. His third, The Centauri Device (1974 US), is a
significantly disgruntled SPACE OPERA, perhaps his least successful book,
and one which demonstrates MJH's persistent discomfort with the escapist
conventions of this sort of sf. Unsurprisingly, the doomsday device of the
title duly blows up the Galaxy.As the first volume of his Viriconium
sequence, though much simpler than later instalments, his second novel,
The Pastel City (1971), is of greater interest. It is a FAR-FUTURE science

fantasy set on a bleak Dying Earth, whose description plays on
SWORD-AND-SORCERY imagery, though nothing happens of a magical nature.
Viriconium itself is both the land - conveyed with a growing capacity to
portray in words the physical world - and the city at the end of time
which dominates it. The second volume of the sequence, A STORM OF WINGS
(1980 US), rewrites its predecessor in language whose intensity is both
surreal and topographically exact, so that an orthodox tale of alien
INVASION becomes a series of bleak tableaux vivants as witnessed through
the insectoid perceptions of the invaders. In Viriconium (1982; vt The
Floating Gods 1983 US), the final novel of the sequence, is far more
abstract, rendering the fin de siecle transports of its plot in language
of a fixating painterly density. The UK versions of the stories assembled
as Viriconium Nights (coll 1984 US; much rev 1985 UK) - and later brought
together with In Viriconium as Viriconium (omni 1988) - focus even more
intensely upon the task of seeing their dying landscapes with utter
exactitude, so that the inhabitants of the city present their failed
artistries in terms less and less reassuring to any sense that they are
able to inhabit a fantasy world; this sense of the closing of the world
was intensified in The Luck in the Head (1983 Interzone text alone, as
MJH; text rev as graph 1991) with Ian MILLER, which darkly re-viewed a
tale from the UK collection. The reality of things seen comes, in the end,
to be the only reality to which MJH will give allegiance in the sequence;
all else is unearned.The central lesson to be extracted from his work that any personal escape from the world must be earned by attending to
that very world, for only when self and city and rockface are seen with
true sight do we know what it is we wish to leave - is reiterated in most
of the stories assembled in The Ice Monkey and Other Stories (coll 1983),
some of which are sf tales of a striking and obdurate coldness, and in The
Course of the Heart (1992), where a partial fulfilment of the longing
enacts a stringent penalty. In Climbers (1989), an associational novel
about rock-climbing, the lesson is driven home with something like
ferocity. The protagonists of this book are losers and obsessives, and the
land they climb is dreadful with the weight of being; in a sense,
therefore, the book truly defines the end of the Viriconium sequence and
the preceding sf tales, because for MJH the only difference between the
lords and ladies in science fantasy and climbers clinging to a rock in the
real world is that the latter know where they are. [JC]Other works:
Fawcett on Rock (1987) as by Ron Fawcett, nonfiction.See also: CITIES;
ENTROPY; DISASTER; NEW WRITINGS IN SF; PERCEPTION.
HARRISON AWARD
WORLD SF.
HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS
(vt Bigfoot and the Hendersons UK) Film (1987). Amblin/Universal. Dir
William Dear, starring John Lithgow, Melinda Dillon, Joshua Rudoy, David
Suchet, Don Ameche, Kevin Peter Hall. Screenplay Dear, William E. Martin,
Ezra D. Rappaport. 111 mins. Colour.This amiable, well made film is sf
only in that it deals with a lost race ( LOST WORLDS). Harry is a Bigfoot,
an 8ft (2.4m) intelligent hairy anthropoid, a shy native of the US
Northwest. He is knocked down by the car of and then temporarily adopted

by the Henderson family of Seattle. Made by Steven SPIELBERG's production
company, Amblin Entertainment, HATH is effectively a variation on the
theme of his E.T.: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL (1982), in which the innocent
ALIEN, healer of human hurt, pursued by the unthinking mob, is this time a
father - rather than a child-figure. The occasional tartness of the film's
wit compensates for the its almost excessive sweetness; this proved to be
a commercial miscalculation.The novelization is Harry and the Hendersons *
(1987; vt Bigfoot and the Hendersons 1987 UK) by Joyce THOMPSON. There has
also been a tv sitcom based on the film. [PN]See also: APES AND CAVEMEN
(IN THE MODERN WORLD).
HARRYHAUSEN, RAY
(1920- ) US special-effects supervisor, long based in the UK, associated
with many sf and fantasy films. As a boy his main interests were sculpture
and palaeontology. The desire to see his own clay figures move on the
screen, aroused by KING KONG (1933), stimulated his interest in
photography and special effects. While Willis H. O'BRIEN, who had animated
King Kong, was preparing to make MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949), RH approached
him, showed sample footage of his work on 16mm, and was hired as his
assistant on this film and on the subsequent abortive project El Toro
Estrella, about a boy, a bull and a dinosaur. RH and O'Brien then went
their separate ways, though they later teamed up briefly to work on the
dinosaur sequences in the pseudo-documentary Animal World (1956).RH
supervised the effects in The BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953), which was
a success. He then formed a partnership with producer Charles H. Schneer
that continued through his active career. Their first film together was IT
CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (1955); it was followed by EARTH VS. THE FLYING
SAUCERS (1956) and 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957). By then the sf film
boom was in decline and they decided that their next project would be a
mythic fantasy. In 1958 they made The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, the first
animation film of its type in colour. It proved a huge financial success
and similar fantasies followed: The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1960),
MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Then there
was a shift back to sf with FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1964), ONE MILLION
YEARS BC (1966) and The VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969).In the 1970s and 1980s
their output fell and they returned to the format of their best-loved
films, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts. Their
three further films in the same vein were The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
(1973), Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) and Clash of the Titans
(1981). In the latter (an adaptation of the Perseus legend) they
attempted, by using distinguished actors in supporting roles, to counter
criticisms that their films had become 5min dollops of monster-fighting
stitched together with 15min stretches of pointless running about and bad
acting. It remained a relative disappointment, not helped by the inclusion
of an insufferable mechanical owl patterned on LucasFilm's R2D2 in STAR
WARS (1977) - a film which, ironically, was deeply influenced by RH's
earlier fantasies. The alien craft of Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and the
Ymir of 20 Million Miles to Earth probably stand as RH's best animation,
and Jason and the Argonauts as his best film. While his effects were very
influential state-of-the-art stuff in the 1950s and 1960s, he proved
reluctant to adapt to the 1980s and 1990s boom in computer-assisted

animation; Film Fantasy Scrapbook (1972; rev1974; further rev 1981)
expresses his sense of things. He has gracefully retired, now sculpting
figures from his films and acting as spiritual godfather to his
pupils-cum-successors, Jim Danforth, David Allen and Phil Tippett. He
appears, thinly disguised, as "Roy Holdstrom" in Ray BRADBURY's A
Graveyard for Lunatics (1990). [JB/KN]
HARSH MISTRESS
ABSOLUTE MAGNITUDE.
HART, ELLIS
[s] Harlan ELLISON.
HARTING, PIETER
(1812-1885) Dutch polymath, immensely prolific in scientific fields such
as biology, medicine and geology. His one sf novel, Anno 2065 (1865 as by
Dr Dioscorides; trans anon as Anno Domini 2071 1871 UK), posits a liberal
world 200 years hence which is at peace, has new sources of power, and is
highly industrious. [JC]
HARTLEY, L(ESLIE) P(OLES)
(1895-1972) UK novelist and short-story writer known mainly for his works
outside the sf field, especially for The Go-Between (1953) and for the
trilogy comprising The Shrimp and the Anemone (1944), The Sixth Heaven
(1946), which has some slight fantasy content, and Eustace and Hilda
(1947). His ghost stories - some of the finest from this century - were
variously collected in Night Fears and Other Stories (coll 1924), The
Killing Bottle (coll 1932), The Travelling Grave and Other Stories (coll
1948 US), The White Wand (coll 1954), Two for the River (coll 1961) and
Miss Carteret Receives and Other Stories (coll 1971); these and more were
assembled in The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley (coll 1973 in 2
vols). His sf novel, Facial Justice (1960), deals sourly but sensitively
with personal dilemmas after humanity has re-emerged from underground
after a nuclear DISASTER. Many of the precepts of the subsequent DYSTOPIA
satirize the welfare state and English socialism. For women, true equality
involves a literal equality of physical appearance, with poignant effects.
It has been argued that, when the female protagonist unmasks the dictator
responsible, showing her to be an ancient and envious hag, the author
reveals a fundamental misogyny; the point is moot. [JC]See also: HISTORY
OF SF; POLITICS.
HARTLIB, SAMUEL
(c1600-1660) Polish-born scientist, chemist and writer, in the UK from
about 1625. SH was the author of a Royalist UTOPIA, A Description of the
Famous Kingdome of Macaria (1641). A facsimile edition was published in
1961 in the USA. [JC]
HARTMAN, EMERSON B.
(1887-1969) US writer whose Lunarchia: That Strange World Beneath the
Moon's Crust (1937) began a projected interplanetary sequence in the Edgar
Rice BURROUGHS vein with the discovery of a colourful civilization within
the Moon. No further volumes appeared. [JC] Other work: The Giant of the
Sierras (1945), which may be a non-fiction study.

HARTRIDGE, JON
(1934- ) UK writer associated, like Brian W. ALDISS, with the Oxford
Mail, of which he was features editor. His sf novels, Binary Divine (1969)
and Earthjacket (1970), take a dark view of Earth's crowded, DYSTOPIAN,
urbanized future. [JC]
HARTWELL, DAVID G(EDDES)
(1941- ) US editor, publisher and critic, with a PhD from Columbia in
Comparative Medieval Literature. His first publication of genre interest
is SF-I: A Selective Bibliography (1971 chap) with L.W. CURREY, both
writing as Kilgore TROUT; he also assisted Currey in the latter's seminal
Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors: a Bibliography of First Printings of
their Fiction and Selected Nonfiction(1979). He published and edited The
Little Magazine (1965-88), a literary magazine, and since 1988 has been
reviews editor of The NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION , published by
Dragon Press, the SMALL PRESS of which he was partner 1973-8 and is now
proprietor. He edited the short-lived COSMOS SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY
MAGAZINE 1977-8.His substantial influence in the sf world has been mainly,
however, as an editor and/or advisor for various commercial sf publishers,
including Signet (1971-3), Berkley/Putnam (1973-8), GREGG PRESS (1975-86)
- an academic publisher of important sf reprints - Pocket Books/Simon ?
Schuster (1978-83), where he was responsible for their important TIMESCAPE
BOOKS sf imprint, TOR BOOKS (1984-current), where he is consulting sf
editor, Arbor House (1984-8) and William Morrow (1988-91). His career - a
tightrope walk - testifies to the difficulties DGH has partly conquered in
reconciling the conflicting demands of art and commerce, especially during
his tenure with Pocket Books' Timescape programme, where he published many
distinguished titles, including Gene WOLFE's Book of the New Sun tetralogy
(1980-3).The anthologies DGH has edited include: The Battle of the
Monsters and Other Stories (anth 1976) with L.W. CURREY, 19th-century sf;
the Christmas sequence of ghost and other supernatural stories,
comprisingChristmas Ghosts (anth 1987) with Kathryn CRAMER, Spirits of
Christmas (anth 1989) with Cramer, Christmas Stars(anth 1992), Christmas
Forever (anth 1993) and Christmas Magic(anth 1994) The Dark Descent (anth
1987; vt in 3 vols , The Dark Descent #1: The Colour of Evil 1990 UK; #2:
The Medusa in the Shield 1990 UK and #3: A Fabulous, Formless Darkness
1991 UK), horror stories; Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment (anth
1988) and Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder (anth 1989), both with
Cramer; The World Treasury of Science Fiction (anth 1989); Foundations of
Fear: an Exploration of Horror (anth 1992), The Ascent of Wonder: The
Evolution of Hard Science Fiction (anth 1994) with Cramer, which contains
intriguingly contrasting definitions of HARD SF in the editors' comments
and in the introduction by Gregory BENFORD; and Northern Stars: The
Anthology of Canadian Science Fiction (anth 1994; exp 1985) with Glenn
Grant. DGH won a World Fantasy AWARD in the Special Award/Professional
category in 1988, and has 7 times been nominated for a HUGO as Best
Editor. He has written a number of critical essays on sf; and his Age of
Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (1984) is wide-ranging,
informal and anecdotal, treating sf and FANDOM as both a literary and a
sociological phenomenon. [PN]See also: PHILIP K. DICK AWARD.

HARVEY, FRANK (LAIRD)
(1913-1981) US writer whose collection of stories, Air Force! (coll
1959), concentrates on that branch of the armed services, but with a
NEAR-FUTURE setting which includes manned satellites and the like. [JC]
HARVEY, JAMES
Gardner F. FOX.
HARVEY, M(ARY) ELAYN
(1945- ) US writer whose sf novel, Warhaven (1987), the first volume of a
projected trilogy, puts its young protagonist through a series of trials,
at the end of which he has clearly prepared himself to become one of the
Guardians who covertly supervise a variety of spacefaring races.
Throughout, his solutions to problems tend, unusually, to dodge the use of
force. [JC]
HASKIN, BYRON
(1899-1984) US film director. His film career began in 1919 when he
became an assistant cameraman for Louis J. Selznick. He directed 4 films
in 1927, but later worked mostly as a cinematographer; he supervised the
special-effects department for Warner Bros. 1936-47. In 1947 he began
directing again with I Walk Alone, a Hal Wallis production. In 1952 he
formed a creative partnership with producer George PAL, directing several
films for him. The first of these was WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953); it was
followed by The Naked Jungle (1954), CONQUEST OF SPACE (1955) and The
POWER (1968), the latter codirected with Pal. Other sf movies directed by
BH were FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON (1958) and ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS
(1964). He also directed many tv episodes, including several in The OUTER
LIMITS . BH's background in special effects meant that he never neglected
them in his films, unlike many other sf film-makers of the 1950s. His work
as a director was likable - as in Disney's Treasure Island (1950) - but
uninspired: War of the Worlds derives impact from its spectacle, but most
of his other sf films are merely competent. Probably his most interesting
and personal film, on which he had a fair degree of control, was Robinson
Crusoe on Mars. He retired in 1967. [JB]
HASSE, HENRY L.
(1913-1977) US fan and sf writer who frequently worked in collaboration
with others, notably A. Fedor (with whom he published his first story,
"The End of Tyme" for Wonder Stories in 1933), Emil PETAJA, whose
pseudonym E. Theodore Pine he once shared, and Ray BRADBURY, with whom he
collaborated on Bradbury's first professional story, "Pendulum" (1941).
His best-known story is the novelette "He who Shrank" (1936) ( GREAT AND
SMALL). An sf novel, The Stars Will Wait (1968), is unremarkable. [JC]
HASSLER, DONALD M(ACKEY II)
(1937- ) US academic and scholar of sf, based at Kent State University,
Ohio. DMH was President of the SCIENCE FICTION RESEARCH ASSOCIATION
1985-6, and became managing editor of the journal EXTRAPOLATION with the
Summer 1986 issue, co-editor with the Winter 1987 issue, and editor with
the Spring 1990 issue. He was a pioneer in the early 1980s of "academic
tracks" in world sf- CONVENTION programming. Books by DMH relating to sf
are Erasmus Darwin (1973 chap), The Comedian as the Letter D: Erasmus

Darwin's Comic Materialism (1973 Netherlands), Comic Tones in Science
Fiction: The Art of Compromise with Nature (1982), Hal Clement, Reader's
Guide 11 (1982 chap) and Isaac Asimov, Reader's Guide 40 (1991 chap).
Collections of critical essays ed DMH are Patterns of the Fantastic:
Academic Programming at Chicon IV (anth 1983), Patterns of the Fantastic
II (anth 1984) and, with Carl B. YOKE, Death and the Serpent: Immortality
in Science Fiction and Fantasy (anth 1985). With Sue Strong Hassler (1938), he also edited Arthur Machen ?
Friendship, 1923-1947 (coll 1994). [PN]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL
WORKS ABOUT SF; IMMORTALITY.
HASSLER, KENNETH W(AYNE)
(1932- ) US personnel specialist and writer whose routine sf novels are
The Glass Cage (1969), Destination: Terra (1970), The Dream Squad (1970),
A Message from Earth (1970), Intergalac Agent (1971) and The Multiple Man
(1972). [JC]
HASTINGS, GEORGE GORDON
(? -? ) US writer whose sf novel, The First American King (1904), carries
two protagonists - the more important being a brilliant inventor - by
SUSPENDED ANIMATION to the USA of AD1975. They find it to be a RURITANIAN
empire assaulted from within by Federated Nihilists, who eventually take
power and establish - in singularly unstrict accordance with their name a benevolent welfare state. Rather unusually, GGH approves, and the novel
ends peacefully. [JC]
HASTINGS, HUDSON
[s] Henry KUTTNER.
HASTINGS, MILO (MILTON)
(1884-1957) US nutritionist, editor and writer, sometimes on agricultural
subjects - The Dollar Hen (1909) is a nonfiction text about hens. With
striking accuracy, his future- WAR sf centres on conflict between either
Japan or Germany and the rest of the world. Set around 1950, "In the
Clutch of the War-God: The Tale of the Orient's Invasion of the Occident"
(1911 Physical Culture) effectively espouses the cause of eugenical Japan
against a bigoted USA, which loses the war but becomes healthy. Set around
AD2150, and far more impressive, City of Endless Night (1919 True Story as
"Children of 'Kultur'"; rev 1920) describes a Germany partly defeated
after centuries of warfare, but remaining impregnable underground within a
great dome which shelters Berlin. Here a proto-Nazi DYSTOPIA has taken
shape, with under-races genetically distinguished from one another (and
from the sybaritic ruling class) by a ruthless breeding programme;
thought-control is universal. The imagery of this striking novel links it
with the German Expressionist cinema and films like Fritz LANG's
METROPOLIS (1926), as well as to dystopian fictions like HUXLEY's BRAVE
NEW WORLD (1932). [JC]See also: HISTORY OF SF; POLITICS.
HATCH, GERALD
Pseudonym of US writer Dave Foley (1910-1973), whose sf novel, The Day
the Earth Froze (1963), was one of a series published by Monarch Books on
similar themes, including Charles FONTENAY's The Day the Oceans Overflowed
(1964) and Christopher ANVIL's The Day the Machines Stopped (1964). [JC]

HAUNTED PALACE, THE
Roger CORMAN.
HAUPTMANN, GERHART (JOHANN ROBERT)
(1862-1946) German playwright and novelist, winner of the 1912 Nobel
Prize for Literature, whose greatest plays were performed before the turn
of the century and whose novels were written later. Of sf interest is Die
Insel der grossen Mutter, oder Das Wunder von Ile des Dames: Eine
Geschichte aus dem Utopischen Archipelagus (1924; trans Willa and Edwin
Muir as The Island of the Great Mother 1925 US). The subtitle - "The
Miracle of the Ile des Dames: A Tale from the Utopian Archipelago" fairly describes the complex mood of GH's ROBINSONADE, which portrays a
matriarchal ISLAND society founded after a shipwreck, and follows the
young men who, upon being exiled to another part of the Isle of Women,
soon revolt, ending an ideal world. [JC]Other works:Hanneles Himmelfahrt
(1893; trans 1894 UK) and Die versunkene Glocke (1896; trans C.H. Meltzer
as The Sunken Bell 1898 UK) and Till Eulenspiegel (1928), fantasy
playsAtlantis (1912; trans Adele and Thomas Seltzer 1912 US), which has
nothing to do with Atlantis, but contains supernatural elements.
HAUSER'S MEMORY
Made-for-tv film (1970). Universal/NBC TV. Dir Boris Sagal, starring
David McCallum, Susan Strasberg, Lilli Palmer, Robert Webber, Leslie
Nielsen. Screenplay Adrian Spies, based on Hauser's Memory (1968) by Curt
SIODMAK. 100 mins. Colour.Siodmak's 1968 novel is an updated but equally
absurd variation on the theme of his novel Donovan's Brain (1943), which
was filmed three times ( DONOVAN'S BRAIN; The LADY AND THE MONSTER ;
VENGEANCE): a dead man's mind somehow exerts influence on the living. This
time DNA material taken from the brain of a dead German Nazi scientist in
order to preserve his scientific knowledge is injected into a young US
Jewish scientist (McCallum). The conflicts created within the hero's mind
by this experiment in memory-transfer have dramatic potential, mostly
wasted as the film degenerates into a conventional thriller about the CIA
versus the Russians. At the end, Hauser's memory now dominating the hero,
a melodramatic revenge takes place. [JB]
HAWEL, RUDOLF
[r] AUSTRIA.
HAWKES, JACQUETTA
(1910- ) UK archaeologist and writer, known mainly for such works outside
the sf field as The Land (1951). She was married to J.B. PRIESTLEY. Fables
(coll 1953; vt A Woman as Great as the World and Other Fables 1953 US)
includes "The Unites", a long exemplary tale which combines fantasy and
DYSTOPIAN sf: God sends down an investigative angel to find out why humans
have grown silent. The angel reports that, although Homo sapiens has
degenerated into a breed of hive-dwelling automata through too sedulous a
striving after equality, dissidents have begun to recreate human conflict
and difference. God seems pleased. Providence Island: An Archaeological
Tale (1959) is a fairly late example of anthropological sf (
ANTHROPOLOGY), in which an expedition comes across survivors from the
Magdalenian culture of the late Paleolithic living within an extinct

volcano on a Pacific ISLAND. They have highly developed empathic and PSI
POWERS, developed as a kind of cultural alternative to technological
prowess; they use these powers to fend off US nuclear tests. A Quest for
Love (1980) is a REINCARNATION fantasy. [JC]See also: LOST WORLDS.
HAWKIN, MARTIN
Working name of UK writer Martin Hawkins (? - ) for his INVASION novel,
When Adolph Came (1943), featuring an ALTERNATE WORLD in which the Germans
conquer the UK ( HITLER WINS). An underground movement soon begins to turn
the tables. [JC]
HAWKINS, WARD
(1912-1990) US writer who spent most of his career producing Westerns,
usually in collaboration with his elder brother, John Hawkins. In the
1980s WH wrote tv scripts and the Borg and Guss sequence of humorous sf
adventures - Red Flame Burning (1985), Sword of Fire (1985), Blaze of
Wrath (1986) and Torch of Fear (1987) - starring Harry Borg and his
sidekick Guss the lizard-man in an alternate-universe ( ALTERNATE WORLDS)
Galaxy. [JC]
HAWKWOOD, ALLAN
H. BEDFORD-JONES.
HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL
(1804-1864) US writer known primarily for his work outside the sf field.
One of the formative figures in US literature, NH was intrigued throughout
his writing career by themes we would now call sf. His extensive notebooks
outline dozens of projected sf works, some of which he was able to
complete, while others he worked on unsuccessfully until his death. A long
line of doctors, chemists, botanists, mesmerists, physicists and inventors
parade their marvellously creative and destructive skills through his
fiction, even the most apparently fantastic events being given
naturalistic explanations. Thus much of his writing at least borders on
sf.In three of his four major romances, sf elements run as a main
undercurrent. A secret medical experiment controls the plot of The Scarlet
Letter (1850); the main action of The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
derives from hypnotism ( PSYCHOLOGY) and a strange inherited disease; all
the major events in The Blithedale Romance (1852) flow from a major topic
of 19th-century sf, mesmeric control. A SCIENTIST's quest for the elixir
of life is the subject of Dr Heidegger's Experiment (1837 Salem Gazette;
1883 chap) and two unfinished, posthumously published romances, all
possibly differing draft attempts at the same basic story: the title story
of The Dolliver Romance and Other Pieces (1864 The Atlantic Monthly as
"The Dolliver Romance"; coll 1876), and Septimius: A Romance (1872 UK; vt
Septimius Felton, or The Elixir of Life 1872 US). Some stories, such as
"The Man from Adamant" (1837), come directly from pseudo-scientific
curiosities NH encountered as editor of The American Magazine of Useful
and Entertaining Knowledge.NH's short work of interest appeared in
Twice-Told Tales (coll 1837; exp in 2 vols 1842), Mosses from an Old Manse
(coll 1846) and The Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales (coll 1852).
Three of his early stories had profound influences on subsequent
19th-century sf, and all three still stand as masterpieces of the genre.

In "The Birthmark" (1843) a lone genius who has invented numerous
scientific marvels commits the fatal error of attempting to remove the one
blemish which keeps his wife from being perfect, a tiny birthmark which
makes this lovely woman disgusting to him. "The Artist of the Beautiful"
(1844) describes the creation of an automaton butterfly which, for another
lone inventive genius, substitutes for love, sex and biological
procreation. In "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844) a scientist attempts to
make his only child impervious to the evils of the world by filling her
with secret poisons, but is foiled by his arch-rival. Part of the enduring
power of these three tales comes from their deep penetration into the
psychology of a group of men emerging in NH's society, the
technical-scientific elite. NH's sf extends the achievements of Mary
SHELLEY's Frankenstein (1818) into the dawn of the age of modern science
and the literature that is part of that age's culture, modern sf.
[HBF]Other works: Doctor Grimshawe's Secret (1883); The Ancestral Footstep
(1883); The Ghost of Doctor Harris (1900 chap); The Dolliver Romance, and
Kindred Tales (coll 1900); The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel
Hawthorne (coll 1959), assembling 72 tales; The Snow Image and Uncollected
Tales (coll 1974) ed E.F. BLEILER; Young Goodman Brown and Other Short
Stories (coll 1992).See also: ARTS; BIOLOGY; CLICHES; GAMES AND TOYS;
HISTORY OF SF; HORROR IN SF; MACHINES; MEDICINE.
HAWTON, HECTOR
(1901- ) UK writer and Humanist, at one time managing director of the
Rationalist Press Association. The Col. Max Masterson sequence - Tower of
Darkness (1950), Blue-Eyed Buddha (1951), Black Emperor (1952) and The
Lost Valley (1953) - verges on sf, the final volume being a lost-race (
LOST WORLDS) tale. Operation Superman (1951) is an old-fashioned yarn
about a man whose INTELLIGENCE has been much heightened by shock-treatment
experiments in a Nazi concentration camp. As John Sylvester, he wrote two
sf novels for adolescents, Master of the World (1949) and The Flying
Saucer (1952).As John Sylvester, he wrote two sf novels for adolescents,
Master of the World (1949) and The Flying Saucer (1952). [JC/PN]
HAY, GEORGE
Working name of UK writer, editor and sf enthusiast Oswyn Robert
Tregonwell Hay (1922- ), who began publishing sf in the early 1950s with
Flight of the "Hesper" (1951), Man, Woman and Android (1951), This Planet
For Sale (1952) and, as by King LANG, Terra! (1953). Turning to editing,
he produced Hell Hath Fury (anth 1963), a collection of stories from
UNKNOWN; The Disappearing Future (anth 1970); Stopwatch (anth 1974), an
original anthology with stories by John BRUNNER, Ursula K. LE GUIN,
Christopher PRIEST, A.E. VAN VOGT and others; The Edward De Bono Science
Fiction Collection (anth 1976), a selection of stories chosen to
illustrate De Bono's theories of "lateral thinking"; The Necronomicon
(anth 1978), a hoax assemblage of texts, dominated by Colin WILSON,
arguing that a certain manuscript was passed obscurely from the
Renaissance alchemist John Dee on down to H.P. LOVECRAFT, with The R'lyeh
Text (anth 1993) projected to continue in the same vein; and the Pulsar
sequence of original anthologies, Pulsar 1 (anth 1978) and Pulsar 2 (anth
1979), with stories from Robert HOLDSTOCK and Ian WATSON as well as older

figures like van Vogt. The first volume of a long-meditated collection,
The John W. Campbell Letters, Volume One (coll 1986 US) ed Perry A.
CHAPDELAINE, Tony Chapdelaine and GH, was welcomed for the light it shed
on numerous moments of sf history; a second volume is projected ( John W.
CAMPBELL Jr). From the end of the 1960s, GH worked to establish some
formal organization to promote sf in the UK, and was instrumental in the
establishment of the SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION, espousing in that role
his continuing sense that sf provides an armamentarium of tools for coping
with the future. [MJE/JC]
HAY, JACOB
(1920-1976) US writer whose sf novel, Autopsy for a Cosmonaut (1969; vt
Death of a Cosmonaut 1970 UK), with John M. KESHISHIAN, describes a
NEAR-FUTURE space crisis in which NASA attempts a space rendezvous with a
Soviet satellite suspected of harbouring a nuclear warhead. [JC]
HAY, JOHN
Working name of Australian writer and farmer John Warwick Dalrymple-Hay
(1928- ). In his sf novel, The Invasion (1968 UK), a NEAR-FUTURE war
begins after a US test missile devastates China, whose retaliation
includes the waging of atomic WAR on the coastal cities of Australia.
Inland survivors band together to resist the invaders. [JC]
HAY, W(ILLIAM) DELISLE
(? -? ) UK writer and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, known for
his writings on New Zealand matters. His first sf novel, The Doom of the
Great City, Being the Narrative of a Survivor, written A.D. 1942 (1880),
retains interest for the vividness with which it depicts the collapse of
London through the onslaught of a poisonous fog ( POLLUTION), though the
piety of the reportage is vicious. Three Hundred Years Hence, or A Voice
from Posterity (1881), which is more substantial (but even less pleasant),
is a future HISTORY told as a series of smug lectures delivered in AD2180,
long after the White races have committed genocide on all Blacks and
Orientals, and created a technological and political paradise on Earth.
[JC]
HAYES, FREDERICK WILLIAM
(1848-1918) UK painter, playwright and writer whose sf novel, The Great
Revolution of 1905, or The Story of the Phalanx (1893), describes from a
1930s perspective the successful efforts of the socialist middle-class
"Phalanx" to take over the UK. [JC]
HAYNES, JOHN ROBERT
Philip WILDING.
HAYWARD, WILLIAM STEPHENS
(? -? ) UK writer, prolific author of adventure novels for three decades
after about 1860, whose sf novel, The Cloud King, or Up in the Air and
Down in the Sea (1865), features a balloon trip to an African LOST WORLD
in which low gravity seems to help keep the natives from ageing. [JC]See
also: BOYS' PAPERS.
HAYWOOD, ELIZA (FOWLER)
(?1693-1756) UK actress, publisher and most prolific female writer of her

time. Much of her work was scandalous, containing thinly veiled
characterizations of notable contemporaries. The Adventures of Eovaai,
Princess of Ijavea: A Pre-Adamitical History (1736; vt The Unfortunate
Princess 1741) is an allegorical political SATIRE set before the
destruction of Earth's second moon and featuring, among many accounts of
sorcery, the visitation by mechanical means of an extraterrestrial (this
was several years before the appearance of VOLTAIRE's Micromegas [1751]).
EH also wrote Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of
Utopia (2 vols 1725-6), an anonymously published allegorical UTOPIA built
around a series of sexual scandals, and The Invisible Spy (1755) as by
"Explorabilis", in which an INVISIBILITY belt is used to eavesdrop on
society gossip. The anonymous satirical LOST-WORLD novel Memoirs of the
Court of Lilliput (1727) was (perhaps wrongly) attributed to her by
Alexander Pope in 1729. [JE]About the author: The Life and Romances of Mrs
Eliza Haywood (1915) by G.F. Whicker.
HAZEL, PAUL
(1944- ) US writer whose Finnbranch Trilogy makes use of some sf devices,
though primarily a Celtic fantasy about a hero - and underworld god named Finn, told in a dense, difficult style which nevertheless has very
considerable power. The first 2 vols, Yearwood (1980) and Undersea (1982),
are moderately orthodox, though recounted with unconventional intensity,
but the third, Winterking (1985), is set in an ALTERNATE-WORLD version of
a contemporary USA riven by the numinous presence of gods and threatened
by terminal transformation; in this respect the book resembles John
CROWLEY's Little, Big (1981). All 3 vols have been assembled as The
Finnbranch (omni 1986 UK). The Wealdwife's Tale (1993) is fantasy. [JC]See
also: GODS AND DEMONS.
HAZLITT, HENRY
(1894-1993) US journalist and author in whose sf novel, The Great Idea
(1951; vt Time Will Run Back 1952 UK), the communist Wonworld society of
the future is transformed back into a free-market capitalist society, the
agent of change being the dictator's son. The communism of this society is
more Soviet than Marxist. [JC]See also: DYSTOPIAS; ECONOMICS.
HAZZARD, WILTON
[s] Margaret ST CLAIR.
HEADLINE PUBLICATIONS
SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION.
HEAL, PENELOPE
[r] M.H. ZOOL.
HEALY, RAYMOND J(OHN)
(1907-?1969) US editor who, in collaboration with J. Francis MCCOMAS,
compiled the 35-story, 1000pp Adventures in Time and Space (anth 1946; cut
vt Selections from Adventures in Time and Space 1954; recut vt More
Adventures in Time and Space 1955; text restored, vt Famous
Science-Fiction Stories 1957), which remains a definitive anthology of
magazine sf up to 1945 and is credited with considerable influence in
helping to give GENRE SF literary respectability. RJH later pioneered the

original sf ANTHOLOGY with New Tales of Space and Time (anth 1951) and 9
Tales of Space and Time (anth 1954), which included notable stories by
such writers as Isaac ASIMOV, Anthony BOUCHER and Ray BRADBURY.
[MJE/JC]See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; GOLDEN AGE OF SF.
HEARD, GERALD
Working name of UK author and speculative journalist H(enry) F(itzgerald)
Heard (1889-1971), which he used for both fiction and nonfiction in the
UK; in the USA, where he lived after 1937, he wrote his fiction as H.F.
Heard. He is perhaps best remembered for his association with Aldous
HUXLEY in investigations of the Vedanta cult and for such speculative
studies as The Ascent of Humanity (1929) and The Third Morality (1937).
His UFO popularization The Riddle of the Flying Saucers: Is Another World
Watching? (1950; rev 1953), was well received, although time has passed it
by. Some of his detective and horror fictions featuring Mr Mycroft-A Taste
for Honey (1941; vt A Taste for Murder 1955), Reply Paid (1942) and The
Notched Hairpin (1949) - are borderline-sf pastiches of Arthur Conan
DOYLE's Sherlock Holmes stories; Murder by Reflection (1942) features a
killing done by radiation poisoning. The title story of The Great Fog and
Other Weird Tales (coll 1944; vt The Great Fog: Weird Tales of Terror and
Detection 1946; with 2 stories added and 1 dropped, rev under first title
1947 UK) is a DISASTER tale, the mould-derived Great Fog destroying all
civilization. In the title story of The Lost Cavern (coll 1948) a man is
held captive by intelligent bats. Set in the 19th century, The Black Fox:
A Novel of the 'Seventies (1950 UK) is a supernatural tale, the fox being
Anubis. Doppelgangers: An Episode of the Fourth, the Psychological,
Revolution, 1997 (1947), which is sf, rather laboriously sets up a
conflict among three factions, each of whose philosophies is in didactic
opposition to the others'. Gabriel and the Creatures (1952; vt Wishing
Well 1953 UK) recasts some of GH's evolutionary speculation in sf form for
children. [JC]See also: DYSTOPIAS; ECOLOGY; EVOLUTION; The MAGAZINE OF
FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION .
HEARD, H.F.
[r] Gerald HEARD.
HEARTBEEPS
Film (1981). Universal. Dir Allan Arkush, starring Bernadette Peters,
Andy Kaufman, Randy Quaid. Screenplay John Hill. 79 mins. Colour.Obviously
disliked by its distributors, who trimmed it by 10 minutes before release
(not enough action) and then allowed it to sink almost without trace, this
film is a mildly amusing, perhaps over-cute, extremely silly comedy about
two domestic ROBOTS (male and female) who escape from the repair shop and
fall in love. It oscillates between gentle SATIRE and over-the-top
sentimentality. The robots (Peters and Kaufman in all-over plastic) are
well realized. [PN]
HEATH, PETER
Pseudonym of US writer Peter Fine (1938- ), whose novels The Mind
Brothers (1967), Assassins from Tomorrow (1967) and Men who Die Twice
(1968) comprise the routine thriller-like Mind Brothers sf series. [JC]
HEATH, ROYSTON

George C. WALLIS.
HEAVY METAL
Glossy BEDSHEET-size US colour COMIC-strip magazine inspired by the
French magazine METAL HURLANT and reprinting English-language versions of
mainly sf and fantasy material from this and other French, Italian and
Spanish sources alongside similar matter by select US contributors.
Published monthly Apr 1977-Dec 1985, quarterly from the Winter (i.e.,
January) 1986 issue and then bimonthly from Mar 1989, HM has built a
reputation for high quality in both presentation and content; in an
editorial during 1985 it claimed a readership of over 2 million. Monthly
issues carried serialized material in episodes of varying length, causing
an often uncomfortable segmentation of some stories; the change to
quarterly publication introduced a policy of presenting only complete
stories and full-length GRAPHIC NOVELS. HM's list of contributors reads
like a roster of the world's best artists and writers of comic-strip sf,
and the following is only a selection: Enki BILAL, Vaughn BODE, Caza,
Howard V. CHAYKIN, Richard CORBEN, Guido Crepax, Philippe DRUILLET,
Fernando Fernandez, Juan Giminez, Jean GIRAUD (Moebius), Jeff Jones, Rod
Kierkegaard, Tanino Liberatore, Milo Manara, Georges Pichard, Jose Ribera,
Aleuteri Serpieri, Jacques Tardi, Daniel Torres and Berni Wrightson. In
addition to the regular issues there have been several "Specials",
including Son of Heavy Metal (1983), Heavy Metal's Even Heavier Metal
(1984), Bride of Heavy Metal (1986) and Best of Heavy Metal (1986). HM has
also published a line of graphic novels, most of which previously appeared
as serials in the magazine.The animated film Heavy Metal (1981) dir Gerald
Potterton displayed animated improvisations on themes and characters
featured in HM. A live-action sequel, Heavy Metal's Burning Chrome, was
planned but never realized. [RT]
HECHT, BEN
(1894-1964) US journalist, novelist, playwright, film scriptwriter and
publisher, associated with Bohemian literary circles before becoming
prominent in Hollywood night-life in the early 1930s. His writings are
particularly notable for their cynicism, iconoclasm and irony. Many of his
short stories border on SCIENCE FANTASY, most vividly "The Adventures of
Professor Emmett" (in A Book of Miracles coll 1939) ( HIVE-MINDS); some
were influenced by the works of Charles FORT. BH is best known in the sf
field for Fantazius Mallare (1922) and its sequel The Kingdom of Evil
(1924), an erotic and supposedly decadent account of a descent into
madness; the first volume was successfully prosecuted for obscenity on the
grounds of its illustrations (by Wallace Smith). [JE]Other works: Eleven
Selected Great Stories (coll 1943); Miracle in the Rain (1943); The
Collected Stories of Ben Hecht (coll 1945).
HECHT, FRIEDRICH
[r] AUSTRIA.
HEINBERG, AAGE
[r] DENMARK.
HEINE, IRVING
Dennis HUGHES.

HEINE, WILLIAM C(OLBOURNE)
(1919- ) Canadian writer in whose NEAR-FUTURE The Last Canadian (1974; vt
Death Wind 1976 US; vt The Last American 1986 Canada) a plague survivor
flees northwards into ice and snow. [JC]
HEINLEIN, ROBERT A(NSON)
(1907-1988) US writer, educated at the University of Missouri and the US
Naval Academy, Annapolis. After serving as a naval officer for five years,
he retired due to ill-health in 1934, studied physics at UCLA for a time,
then took a variety of jobs before beginning to publish sf in 1939 with
"Lifeline" for ASF, a magazine whose GOLDEN AGE he would profoundly shape,
just as he rewrote US sf as a whole in his own image. RAH may have been
the all-time most important writer of GENRE SF, though not its finest sf
writer in strictly literary terms; his pre-eminence from 1940 to 1960 was
both earned and unassailable. For half a century he was the father loved, resisted, emulated - of the dominant US form of the genre.He came
to the role naturally. Unlike most of John W. CAMPBELL Jr's pre-WWII
recruits to ASF, he entered the field as a mature man, already in his 30s,
with one genuine career (the military) honourably behind him. He was
smart, aggressive, collegial, competent and highly inventive. And he
worked fast. By 1942 - when he stopped writing to do his WWII service as
an engineer at the Naval Air Experimental Station, Philadelphia - he had
already published almost 30 stories, including three novels which would
only later be released in book form. Moreover, it had soon been made clear
that those stories published under his own name - like "Requiem" (1940),
"The Roads Must Roll" (1940), "Blowups Happen" (1940) and the short novel
"If This Goes On . . ." (1940; rev 1953) - fitted into a loose Future
History, the schema for which Campbell published in ASF in 1941. As a
device for tying together otherwise disparate stories, and for
establishing a privileged (and loyal) group of readers familiar with the
overall structure into which individual units were magically inserted,
RAH's outline of the future was an extraordinarily acute idea. It was
imitated by many other writers (with considerable success by Poul ANDERSON
and Larry NIVEN, to name but two), but for many years only RAH's and
perhaps Isaac ASIMOV's similar scheme - by priority, and by claiming
imaginative copyright on the imagined future - were able to generate a
sense of genuine CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH. RAH himself largely abandoned
his Future History after 1950 (if the RECURSIVE novels of his last years
are discounted for the moment); all the short stories in the sequence were
soon assembled in book form as The Man who Sold the Moon (coll 1950; with
2 stories cut 1951), The Green Hills of Earth (coll 1951) and Revolt in
2100 (coll 1953). Two early novels also belonged to the series:
Methuselah's Children (1941 ASF; rev 1958), which concerns an extended
family of near-immortals, and Orphans of the Sky (fixup 1963 UK) assembling Universe (1941 ASF; 1951 chap) and "Common Sense" (1941 ASF) which contains an innovative presentation of the GENERATION STARSHIP
concept. With Methuselah's Children, the three collections were
republished - "Let There Be Light" (1950) being omitted and "Searchlight"
(1962) and "The Menace from Earth" (1957) added - in THE PAST THROUGH
TOMORROW (omni 1967; with Methuselah's Children omitted, cut 1977 UK).Not

all of RAH's early writing consisted of Future History stories, although
most of his non-series work was initially published under the pseudonyms
Anson MacDonald, Lyle Monroe, John Riverside and Caleb Saunders, including
the novels Sixth Column (1941 ASF as MacDonald; 1949 as RAH; vt The Day
After Tomorrow 1951) and BEYOND THIS HORIZON (1942 ASF as MacDonald; 1948
as RAH). In Sixth Column an Asiatic INVASION of the USA is defeated by a
resistance - disguised as a RELIGION - which uses superscientific gadgets
to accomplish "miracles". The original idea came from Campbell, who had
incorporated it in the then unpublished novella "All" (in Campbell's The
Space Beyond [coll 1976]). BEYOND THIS HORIZON describes a future society
of material plenty where people spend their time seeking the meaning of
life ( GENETIC ENGINEERING). Some of RAH's best stories belong to this
period: "And He Built a Crooked House" (1941), about an architect who
inadvertently builds into another dimension; "By His Bootstraps" (1941 as
by MacDonald), a superb TIME-PARADOX fantasia; and "They" (1941), a
fantasy about solipsism. "Waldo" (1942 as by MacDonald), about a crippled
inventor who lives in a satellite, gave rise to a significant item of
TERMINOLOGY, the real-life equivalents of the protagonist's remote-control
lifting devices subsequently being known as WALDOES. These stories, and
the later non-series stories, are collected in various volumes: Waldo and
Magic, Inc. (coll 1950; vt Waldo: Genius in Orbit 1958), Assignment in
Eternity (coll 1953; in 2 vols, vt Assignment in Eternity 1960 UK and Lost
Legacy 1960 UK), The Menace from Earth (coll 1959), The Unpleasant
Profession of Jonathan Hoag (coll 1959; vt 6 X H 1961), The Worlds of
Robert A. Heinlein (coll 1966) and Requiem: New Collected Works (coll
1992) ed Eric KOTANI.In a style which exuded assurance and savvy, RAH's
early writing blended slang, folk aphorism, technical jargon, clever
understatement, apparent casualness, a concentration on people rather than
gadgets, and a sense that the world described was real; it was a kind of
writing able to incorporate the great mass of necessary sf data necessary
without recourse to the long descriptive passages and deadening
explanations common to earlier sf, so that his stories spoke with a
smoothness and authority which came to seem the very tone of things to
come. His characters were competent men of action, equally at home with
their fists and a slide-rule ( EDISONADE) and actively involved in the
processes and procedures (political, legal, military, industrial, etc.)
which make the world turn. Described in tales whose apparent openness
concealed very considerable narrative craft, these characters seemed
genuinely to inhabit the worlds of tomorrow. By the end of his first three
years of writing, RAH had domesticated the future.In the years 1943-6 RAH
published no fiction, but in 1947 he expanded his career - and the
potential reach of genre sf as a marketable literature - in two new
directions: he sold a number of short stories to the Saturday Evening Post
and other "slick" magazines; and he published - with Scribner's, a highly
respectable mainstream firm - the first US juvenile sf novel to reflect
the new levels of characterization, style and scientific plausibility now
expected in the field. Rocket Ship Galileo (1947) is not an outstanding
work (its young heroes confront and defeat a gaggle of conspiring Nazis on
the Moon) but it was the first in a series that represents the most
important contribution any single writer has made to CHILDRENS' SF. (It
also formed the basis of a film, DESTINATION MOON [1950], scripted by RAH.

) Space Cadet (1948), the second in the series, renders RAH's own
experiences at Annapolis in sf terms. With the third, Red Planet: A
Colonial Boy on Mars (1949; text restored 1989), which recounts the
adventures of two young colonists and their Martian "pet", RAH came fully
into his own as a writer of sf for teenagers. A strong narrative line,
carefully worked-out technical detail, realistic characters and brisk
dialogue are the leading virtues of this and most of his later juveniles,
which include Farmer in the Sky (1950), Between Planets (1951), THE
ROLLING STONES (1952; vt Space Family Stone 1969 UK), Starman Jones
(1953), The Star Beast (1954), Tunnel in the Sky (1955), Time for the
Stars (1956), CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY (1957) and Have Space Suit - Will
Travel (1958). The last three of these, along with Starman Jones and The
Star Beast, rank among the very best juvenile sf ever written; their
compulsive narrative drive, their shapeliness and their relative freedom
from the didactic rancour RAH was beginning to show when addressing adults
in the later 1950s all make these books arguably his finest works.After
1950 RAH wrote very little short fiction - the most notable piece is the
time-paradox tale "All You Zombies" (1959) - concentrating for some years
on the highly successful stream of juveniles, although never abandoning
the adult novel. The Puppet Masters (1951; text restored 1989) is an
effective if rather hysterical INVASION story, and a prime example of
PARANOIA in 1950s sf. Double Star (1956), about a failed actor who
impersonates a galactic politician ( RURITANIA), won a HUGO, and is
probably his best adult novel of the 1950s, although the mellow and
charming The Door into Summer (1957), a TIME-TRAVEL story, is also much
admired; all three books were assembled as A Heinlein Trio (omni 1980).His
next novel, however, was something else entirely. STARSHIP TROOPERS
(1959), originally written as a juvenile but rejected by Scribner's
because of its violence, is the first title in which RAH expressed his
opinions with unfettered vigour. A tale of interstellar WAR, it won a 1960
Hugo but also gained RAH the reputation of being a militarist, even a
"fascist". The plot as usual confers an earned adulthood upon its young
protagonist, but in this case by transforming him from a pacifist into a
professional soldier. This transformation, in itself dubious, is rendered
exceedingly unpleasant (for those who might demur from its implications)
by the hectoring didacticism of RAH's presentation of his case.
Father-figures, always important in his fiction, tended from this point on
to utter unstoppable monologues in their author's voice, and dialogue and
action become traps in which any opposing versions of reality were
hamstrung by the author's aggrieved partiality.But this, for good and for
ill, was the fully unleashed Heinlein. His next novel, STRANGER IN A
STRANGE LAND (1961; text restored 1990), a stronger work which won him
another Hugo, is even more radical. Valentine Michael Smith, of human
stock but raised on Mars, returns to Earth armed with his innocence and
the PSI POWERS bequeathed to him by the Martians. After meeting Jubal
Harshaw and being tutored by this ultimate surrogate-father and know-all
voicebox for RAH himself, Valentine begins his transformation into a
MESSIAH-figure, demonstrates the nature of grokking - a term which RAH
created for this book, and which can be defined as gaining, more or less
instantly, deep spiritual understanding - and eventually "discorporates",
a form of dying which is painless and which can be freely imposed upon

others. This costless discorporation of human beings marks the book as a
FANTASY, and not, perhaps, as one very markedly adult; and it was
unfortunate for Sharon Tate that its dreamlike smoothness (a smoothness
even more winningly evident in the much longer restored version) could, if
his claims are to be credited, be translated into this-worldly action by
the sociopathic murderer Charles Manson. However, among those capable of
understanding the nature of a fiction, it has proved to be RAH's most
popular novel, in the later 1960s becoming a cult-book among students (who
were drawn to it, presumably, by its iconoclasm and by RAH's apparent
espousal of free love and mysticism), and remains by far the best of the
books he wrote in his late manner.There followed 2 minor works, Podkayne
of Mars: Her Life and Times (1963), an inferior juvenile which proved to
be his last, and Glory Road (1963), a largely unsuccessful attempt at
SWORD AND SORCERY. Farnham's Freehold (1964), another long and opinionated
novel of ideas, invokes rather unpleasantly a Black despotism in the USA
of the FAR FUTURE (see also POLITICS; SURVIVALIST FICTION), and begins to
fully articulate a theme that obsessed the late RAH: the notion of the
family as utterly central. From this time onward, hugely extended
father-dominated families, sustained by incest and enlarged by mating
patterns whose complex ramifications required an increasing use of time
travel and ALTERNATE WORLDS, would tend to generate the plots of his
novels. Before he plunged fully into this final phase, however, RAH
published THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS (1966), which won a 1967 Hugo and
marked a partial return to his best form. About a revolution among
Moon-colonists - many historical parallels being made evident with the War
of Independence - it is of value partly because it shows the nature of
RAH's political views very clearly. Rather than being a fascist, he was a
right-wing anarchist, or "libertarian" ( LIBERTARIANISM), much influenced
by SOCIAL DARWINISM.But the fact that RAH's politics are a prime concern
in discussions of his later novels points to the sad decline in the
quality of dramatization in his sf. As Alexei PANSHIN, his most astute
earlier critic, pointed out, RAH once dealt in "facts" but latterly he
dealt only in "opinions-as-facts". And as these opinions-as-facts were
uttered in RAH's voice by domineering monologuists, his last novels
increasingly conveyed a sense of flouncing solitude, and were frequently
described - with justice - as exercises in solipsism; for, no matter how
many characters filled the foreground of the tale, his casts ultimately
proved either cruelly disposable or members of the one enormous
intertwined family whose begetter bore the countenance, and spieled the
tracts, of the author. I Will Fear No Evil (1970) is an interminable novel
about a rich centenarian who has his mind transferred to the body of his
young secretary; it brought into the open the espousal of free sex (and
inevitable babies begat upon wisecracking women who long to become gravid)
first evident in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. Time Enough for Love, or The
Lives of Lazarus Long (1973), a late coda to the Future History series,
was perhaps the most important of the late books in that it established
the immortal Long, a central character in Methuselah's Children, as RAH's
final - and most enduring - alter ego. Other novels which revolve around
Lazarus Long include "The Number of the Beast" (1980 UK), The Cat who
Walks through Walls (1985) and To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987). FRIDAY
(1982) and Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984) similarly gathered other works

from RAH's prime into the late fold. The final effect of these novels - in
direct contrast to their joke-saturated telling - was one of embitterment.
By devaluing everything in the Universe except for the one polymorphic
family, RAH effectively repudiated the genre whose mature tone he had
himself almost singlehandedly established, and the USA whose complex
populism he had so vividly expressed. In the end, the father of sf
abandoned his children.RAH was guest of honour at three World SF
Conventions, in 1941, 1961 and 1976. His works remained constantly in
print. He has repeatedly been voted "best all-time author" in readers'
polls such as those held by LOCUS in 1973 and 1977, and in 1975 he was
recipient of the First Grand Master NEBULA. His death in 1988 was deeply
felt. [DP/JC]Other works: The Discovery of the Future . . . Speech
Delivered by Guest of Honor at 3d World Science Fiction Convention (1941
chap); Tomorrow, the Stars (anth 1951); The Robert Heinlein Omnibus (omni
1958 UK), containing The Man who Sold the Moon and The Green Hills of
Earth, which is not to be confused with A Robert Heinlein Omnibus (omni
1966 UK), containing BEYOND THIS HORIZON, The Man who Sold the Moon and
The Green Hills of Earth; Three by Heinlein (omni 1965; vt A Heinlein
Triad 1966 UK), containing The Puppet Masters and Waldo and Magic, Inc.;
The Best of Robert Heinlein (coll 1973 UK; vt in 2 vols as The Best of
Robert Heinlein 1939-1942 1977 UK and The Best of Robert Heinlein
1947-1959 1977 UK); The Notebooks of Lazarus Long (1978 chap), being
extracts from Time Enough for Love; Expanded Universe (coll 1980),
including much nonfiction; Grumbles from the Grave (coll 1989) ed Virginia
Heinlein, a first selection of letters with other material; Starship
Troopers/The Moon is a Harsh Mistress/Time Enough for Love (omni 1991);
Tramp Royale (written 1953-4; 1992), travel memoir; Take Back Your
Government: A Practical Handbook for the Private Citizen Who Wants
Democracy to Work (1992), a pragmatic nonfiction text written in the
1940s.About the author: "One Sane Man: Robert A. Heinlein" by Damon
KNIGHT, in In Search of Wonder (1956; rev 1967); "Robert A. Heinlein" by
Sam MOSKOWITZ, in Seekers of Tomorrow (1966); Heinlein in Dimension (1968)
by Alexei Panshin; "First Person Singular: Heinlein, Son of Heinlein" by
James BLISH, in More Issues at Hand (1970); Robert A. Heinlein: A
Bibliography (1973 chap) by Mark OWINGS; Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in
his Own Land (1976; much rev 1977) by George Edgar SLUSSER; The Classic
Years of Robert A. Heinlein (1977) by Slusser; Robert A. Heinlein (anth
1978) ed J.D. OLANDER and Martin H. GREENBERG; Robert A. Heinlein: America
as Science Fiction (1980) by H. Bruce FRANKLIN; "Robert A. Heinlein" by
Peter NICHOLLS, in Science Fiction Writers (1982) ed E.F. BLEILER; A
Robert A. Heinlein Cyclopedia: A Guide to the Persons, Places, and Things
in the Fiction of America's Most Popular Science Fiction Author(1992) by
Nancy Bailey Downing. A. Heinlein.See also: ALIENS; ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM
IN SF; ARTS; ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; AUTOMATION; CHILDREN IN SF;
CLONES; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; COMPUTERS; CRIME AND
PUNISHMENT;
CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; CYBERNETICS; DEFINITIONS OF SF;
DIMENSIONS; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; DYSTOPIAS; ECOLOGY; ECONOMICS;
END OF
THE WORLD; ESCHATOLOGY; EVOLUTION; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FASTER THAN
LIGHT;

GALACTIC EMPIRES; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; GAMES AND TOYS; GODS AND
DEMONS;
HISTORY IN SF; HISTORY OF SF; HIVE-MINDS; IMMORTALITY; JUPITER; JUVENILE
SERIES; LINGUISTICS; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); MACHINES;
The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MAGIC; MARS; MATHEMATICS;
MONSTERS; MOON; MUSIC; MUTANTS; NEAR FUTURE; NUCLEAR POWER; OPTIMISM
AND
PESSIMISM; PARALLEL WORLDS; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; PASTORAL; PHYSICS;
POCKET UNIVERSE; PREDICTION; PSYCHOLOGY; PUBLISHING; RADIO; ROCKETS; SF
IN
THE CLASSROOM; SEX; SOCIOLOGY; SPACE FLIGHT; SPACESHIPS; SPECULATIVE
FICTION; SUPERMAN; TECHNOLOGY; TERRAFORMING; TRANSPORTATION; UFOS;
VENUS;
VILLAINS; WEAPONS; WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION.
HEINLEIN'S CAREER
Robert A. Heinlein was such a successful science fiction writer that many
people don’t realize he got a very late start in his field.Heinlein’s
first job was as a Navy officer, but that career ended when he contracted
tuberculosis. In the five years between Heinlein's discharge and the start
of his writing career in 1939, at age 32, he engaged in many colorful and
apparently unsuccessful business ventures. At the height of the
Depression, he became a mining speculator and found himself the owner of a
silver mine in Colorado. He later tried to sell the mine, but a
prospective buyer was machine-gunned to death before the deal could close.
Luckily for his public, Heinlein managed to extricate himself from his
business deals. And he went on to become one of the most important science
fiction writers of his generation.
HEINLEIN'S EDITOR
Robert Heinlein did some of his best work in the 1940s and 50s. His
enormous success moved him from writing for pulp magazines to writing for
high-class publishers like Scribners.Heinlein recommended a cover artist
named Hubert Rogers to his editor at Scribners, Alice Dalgliesh. Dalgliesh
said that Rogers was "too closely associated with a cheap magazine" meaning Astounding, which published many of Heinlein’s stories.To prove
her point, Dalgliesh showed him a story from the magazine, which happened
to be written by Heinlein himself and published under a pseudonym. "I
chuckled and said nothing," said Heinlein later." It was not my place to
educate her."
HELLFIRE
Film (1986). Manley. Written and dir William Murray, starring Kenneth
McGregor, Sharon Mason, Julie Miller, Jon Maurice, Joseph White. 89 mins.
Colour.In 1997 a revolutionary power source, Hellfire, is a controversial
issue. Terrorists destroy a space station in an attempt to stop the
project which, while it could produce pollution-free energy, also - as in
Fire Pattern (1984) by Bob SHAW and Torched (1986) by James Blackstone
(John BROSNAN) - tends to produce spontaneous human combustion. A private
eye (McGregor) is hired by a cool blonde (Miller) to investigate her
murderous tycoon brother, who controls Hellfire. Stereotyped hardboiled
underworld events are foregrounded, while an understated but quite

effective future vision serves as background. Director Murray is clumsy
with actors and action scenes alike, and, while the sparkly combustion
trick is quite impressive, the futuristic vehicles are unconvincing.
[KN]See also: SPACE HABITATS.
HELPRIN, MARK
(1947- ) US writer who served in the British Merchant Navy and the
Israeli armed forces, experiences transmuted in A Dove of the East and
Other Stories (coll 1975), which contains some fantasies. He is best known
for his only genre work, Winter's Tale (1983), an epic fable set in an
imaginary New York. The novel attempts to be a fantastic history of the
city in the 20th century, celebrating the forces which gave birth to it,
and catapulting it towards an ambiguously redemptive apocalypse at the end
of the century. MH employs sf images and ideas (such as extraordinary
MACHINES and TIME TRAVEL), but at heart the book remains a fairytale,
concerned more with MAGIC than with science. [PR]Other works: Swan Lake
(1989 chap), fantasy based on the ballet.
HEMING, JOHN W(INTON)
(1900-1953) Extremely prolific Australian writer who began publishing sf
novels with The Living Dead (1942) and was associated during WWII with the
Australian firm Currawong Publishers in the release of native sf, US
imports being banned at the time. He wrote one novel, Time Marches Off
(1942 chap), as Paul de Wreder. [JC]Other works: Subterranean City (1942
chap); King of the Underseas (1942 chap); Other Worlds (1942 chap); From
Earth to Mars (1943 chap); In Aztec Hands (1944 chap); The Weird House
(1951).
HEMINGWAY, AMANDA
(1955- ) UK writer who began publishing work of genre interest with "The
Alchemist" in 1981 for that year's issue of the Faber ?
series of anthologies. Her first novel, Pzyche (1982), places an
uncomfortable and virginal female protagonist on a mineral-rich,
art-obsessed planet, where she unappreciatively undergoes a series of
adventures. [JC]
HEMYNG, (SAMUEL) BRACEBRIDGE
(1841-1901) UK writer best known in the USA for the Jack Harkaway boys'
stories from 1871, but responsible for many other tales. His sf novel, The
Commune in London, or Thirty Years Hence (1871 chap), is an anti-Communard
version of the 1871 uprising in Paris as translated into a shocked UK.
[JC]
HENDERSON, ZENNA
(1917-1983) US writer and schoolteacher who frequently used her teaching
experience in Arizona and elsewhere as a base for her stories; perhaps
significantly, given her treatment of ALIENS as emblems of our better
selves, during WWII she taught interned Japanese-Americans in a relocation
camp. Her first story was "Come on, Wagon!" for FSF - the magazine with
which she is mostly strongly associated - in 1951; soon after, with
"Ararat" (1952), she began publishing in FSF the series of stories about
The People which comprises her central achievement. Put together with
framing devices as PILGRIMAGE: THE BOOK OF THE PEOPLE (fixup 1961) and The

People: No Different Flesh (coll of linked stories 1966) - and assembled
as The People Collection (omni 1991 UK) - the sequence recounts over a
long timespan the arduous experiences of a group of aliens with PSI POWERS
who have been shipwrecked on Earth and must try to survive as well and
fully as possible; although outwardly indistinguishable from humans, they
are morally superior. A further story, "The Indelible Kind" (1968),
appears with unconnected stories in Holding Wonder (coll 1971); this
collection, along with The Anything Box (coll 1965), assembles most of
ZH's stories independent of The People. The same decorous warmth infuses
all her work, sometimes overly reducing tensions and contrasts, but
usually demonstrating her humane talent to advantage, though her
wholesomeness can be vitiating. [JC]See also: CHILDREN IN SF; ESP; The
MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; PASTORAL; SUPERMAN; WOMEN
SF
WRITERS.
HENHAM, ERNEST G(EORGE)
(1870-? ) UK writer whose first novel of genre interest, Tenebrae (1898),
features the depredations of a monstrous spider. Bonanza: A Story of the
Outside (1901) is a tale of the Arctic Gold Rush in which prospectors
stumble across a valley protected by a magnetic FORCE FIELD. The Feast of
Bacchus (1907) is a horror fantasy. As John Trevena, EGH wrote two novels
of interest: Furze the Cruel (1907), a fantasy, and The Reign of the
Saints (1911), an sf tale set 200-300 years in the future at a point when
an internally divided UK is threatened by revolutionary strife. [JC]
HENRY, MARION
[s] Lester DEL REY.
HENSLEY, JOE L(OUIS)
(1926- ) US writer and Indiana Judicial Circuit Court judge 1975-88,
active as an author of suspense novels, one of which, The Poison Summer
(1974), was named in the New York Times Best of the Year List in 1974. He
began publishing sf with "Treasure City" for Planet Stories in 1952, and
appeared with some frequency in the field, sometimes as J.L. Hensley and
once, in collaboration with Alexei PANSHIN, as Louis J.A. Adams. Much of
his best work appears in Final Doors (coll 1981), including two
collaborations with Harlan ELLISON. His work is vigorous and
action-oriented, possibly to a fault in his only sf novel, The Black Roads
(1976 Canada), a chase story set in a post- HOLOCAUST USA whose integral
web of roads is dominated by a tyrannous organization; a rebellion is in
the works. [JC]
HERBERT, [Sir] A(LAN) P(ATRICK)
(1890-1971) UK humorist, writer and politician, prolific for 60 years
after he began publishing light verse in Punch, some of it fantastic,
around 1910. The Red Pen (1927 chap), the libretto for a radio opera with
music (not included) by Geoffrey Toye (1889-1942), is a NEAR-FUTURE story
in which artists arrange for the nationalization of the arts. Number Nine,
or The Mind-Sweepers (1951) and its loose sequel, Made for Man (1958),
also set in the near future, are political SATIRES, good-tempered except
on the matter of divorce, in which area APH's liberal instincts caused him

to disagree profoundly with Church of England doctrines. A late example of
his long-extended Misleading Cases sequence, "Reign of Error?" in Bardot
M.P.? (coll 1964), addresses the legal question of the criminal
responsibility of a COMPUTER. [JC]
HERBERT, BENSON
(1912-1991) UK writer with a master's degree in science who began
publishing sf in US magazines with "The World Without" for Wonder Stories
in 1931 and was fairly active in the 1930s. Crisis! - 1992 (1935 Wonder
Stories as "The Perfect World"; 1936) deals with the ominous passage of
another planet close to Earth's orbit, and with what humans discover when
they land on it: the planet is actually a giant SPACESHIP. The book was
prefaced by M.P. SHIEL. During WWII BH wrote several very short,
moderately exuberant SPACE OPERAS: Hand of Glory: Strange Adventures in
the Pennines (?1943 chap); Thieves of the Air (?1943 chap) with Festus
PRAGNELL; Strange Romance (1943 chap) and The Red-Haired Girl (1944 chap).
With Walter GILLINGS as director, BH financed and founded Utopia
Publications, which published some sf, including the AMERICAN FICTION
series and STRANGE TALES. [JC/PN]
HERBERT, BRIAN (PATRICK)
(1947- ) US writer, son of Frank HERBERT, who began publishing sf with
his third book and first novel, Sidney's Comet (1983), a comic SATIRE the eponymous comet being composed of human garbage - set in the 27th
century; the sequel, The Garbage Chronicles (1985), is also perhaps
somewhat desultory. Both feature, inter alia, amusing parodies of his
father's stylistic quirks. Sudanna, Sudanna (1985), set on a surreally
conceived planetoid, describes the lives of its resident
bureaucracy-ridden ALIENS in a tone that determinedly shifts from HUMOUR
to gravity and back. Man of Two Worlds (1986), with Frank Herbert, frolics
rather cumbrously with reality games, and its presentation of ALIENS who
dream us up is not always coherent, though the final pages, when humans
dream back, are more exhilarating. Prisoners of Arionn (1987) again
juxtaposes aliens (conceived with an elaborate though somewhat skittish
lightness of touch) and human society (in this case San Francisco) in a
plot which uneasily details the former's kidnapping of the latter, while
at the same time examining with genuine insight some family relationships.
If BH was in fact wrestling with genres in an attempt to intermingle them
fruitfully, an inadequate control over narrative structure was proving
detrimental to the attempt. This sense of virtuous effort and only partial
success persists through The Race for God (1990) and Memorymakers (1991)
with Marie Landis (?1935- ). It is, all the same, of continuing interest
to follow his career; he is an author who, at any point it seemed, might
get the note right. [JC]Other work: The Notebooks of Frank Herbert's Dune
(1988), ed; Songs of Muad'Dib: The Poetry of Frank Herbert (coll 1992),
ed.See also: TRANSPORTATION.
HERBERT, FRANK
[s] Bill RANSOM.
HERBERT, FRANK (PATRICK)
(1920-1986) US writer born in Tacoma, Washington, and educated at the

University of Washington, Seattle. FH worked as a reporter and editor on a
number of West Coast newspapers before becoming a full-time writer. He
lived in Washington State.He began publishing sf with "Looking for
Something?" for Startling Stories in 1952. During the next decade he was
an infrequent contributor to the sf magazines, producing fewer than 20
short stories (which nevertheless constituted a majority of his short
fiction; he never made a significant impact with work below novel length).
At this time he also wrote one novel, THE DRAGON IN THE SEA (1955 ASF as
"Under Pressure"; 1956; vt 21st Century Sub 1956; vt Under Pressure 1974),
a much praised sf thriller containing complex psychological investigations
aboard a submarine of the future. His emergence as a writer of major
stature commenced with the publication in ASF in 1963-4 of "Dune World",
the first part of his Dune series. It was followed in 1965 by "The Prophet
of Dune"; the two were amalgamated into DUNE (fixup 1965), which won the
first NEBULA for Best Novel, shared the HUGO, and became one of the most
famous of all sf novels.DUNE is a novel of extraordinary complexity. It
encompasses intergalactic POLITICS of a decidedly feudal nature, the
development of PSI POWERS, RELIGION - specifically the reluctant but
inevitable evolution of its protagonist into a MESSIAH - and WAR. Its
primary impact, however, lay in its treatment of ECOLOGY, a theme which it
brought into the forefront of modern sf readers' and writers' awareness.
The desert planet Arrakis, with its giant sandworms and its Bedouin-like
human inhabitants, the Fremen, clinging to the most precarious of
ecological niches through fanatical scrupulousness in water conservation,
is possibly the most convincing PLANETARY-ROMANCE environment created by
any sf writer. With its blend (or sometimes clash) of complex intellectual
discourse and Byzantine intrigue, DUNE provided a template for FH's more
significant later work. Sequels soon began to appear which carried on the
arguments of the original in testingly various manners and with an
intensity of discourse seldom encountered in the sf field. Dune Messiah
(1969) elaborates the intrigue at the cost of other elements, but Children
of Dune (1976) recaptures much of the strength of the original work and
addresses another recurrent theme in FH's work - the EVOLUTION of Man, in
this case into SUPERMAN; both these novels, along with the original, were
assembled as The Great Dune Trilogy (omni 1979 UK). God Emperor of Dune
(1981) followed, then Heretics of Dune (1984 UK) and Chapter House Dune
(1985 UK; vt Chapterhouse: Dune 1985 US), these three being assembled as
The Second Great Dune Trilogy (omni 1987 UK). The last volume of the
sequence is comparatively desultory, but God Emperor of Dune and Heretics
of Dune, like the enormously extended development section in the first
movement of a great symphony, work and rework the initial material into
more and more elaborate presentations of the initial themes. As a whole,
the sequence almost fully justified FH's decision - certainly astute in
marketing terms - to so comprehensively draw out his original inspiration.
Although Dune dominated his career from 1965-much later a film based on
it, DUNE (1984), was released - FH began in the mid-1960s to publish other
novels and series with admirable regularity. The Green Brain (1966)
features mutated insects which achieve corporate intelligence (
HIVE-MINDS). Destination: Void (1966; rev 1978), a clotted novel on a
CYBERNETICS theme, concentrates on the construction of an AI aboard a
starship, where it comes to the conclusion that it is God ( GODS AND

DEMONS). The Pandora sequence, all written with Bill RANSOM - The Jesus
Incident (1979), The Lazarus Effect (1983) and The Ascension Factor (1988)
- follows on from Destination: Void, exploring in exhaustive detail the
implications of the earlier book while placing in a PLANETARY-ROMANCE
frame the complex and developing relationship between God-"protected"
human stock and the natives of Pandora. The Eyes of Heisenberg (1966) is
about GENETIC ENGINEERING and IMMORTALITY, and The Heaven Makers (1968;
rev 1977) again copes with immortality. The Santaroga Barrier (1968),
describing a higher order of INTELLIGENCE evolved within an isolated,
near- UTOPIAN community, served to emphasize the thematic centrality of
intelligence throughout FH's work, in which consistent attempts are made
not only to suggest different, or evolved, types of intelligence but to
describe them in detail. Among contemporary sf writers only Ian WATSON has
addressed this theme as frequently and as convincingly. ALIEN intelligence
(see also LIVING WORLDS) is examined in Whipping Star (1970; rev 1977)
and, more searchingly, in its sequel The Dosadi Experiment (1977) which,
while orchestrating a plot of multi-levelled intrigue, describes several
different alien species in detail, examines the effect of an experiment in
extreme OVERPOPULATION, and gifts its hero and heroine with advanced PSI
POWERS, including total mind transference.FH's other sf novels include:
The God Makers (1960 Fantastic as "The Priests of Psi"; exp 1972), in
which a god is reified through human endeavours; the rather surly The
White Plague (1982), in which a man driven into mad misogyny destroys the
women of the world; and the minor Man of Two Worlds (1986) with his son
Brian HERBERT. More important than any of these, however, is Hellstrom's
Hive (1973), which derives its title from the film The Hellstrom Chronicle
(1971) but otherwise has little connection with it. Arguably FH's most
successful novel after DUNE, this presents in persuasive detail an
underground colony of humans selectively bred, on insect-hive principles,
into various specializations. In this society the individual's existence
is of minor importance; the continuation of the hive as a functioning
entity is paramount. The novel points up the contradictions of a society
which in its own terms is a successful utopia, but which from an outside
human viewpoint is horrific.Much of FH's work makes difficult reading. His
ideas were genuinely developed concepts, not merely decorative notions,
but they were sometimes embodied in excessively complicated plots and
articulated in prose which did not always match the level of thinking, so
that much of his writing seemed dense and opaque. His best novels,
however, were the work of a speculative intellect with few rivals in
modern sf. [MJE/JC]Other works: The Worlds of Frank Herbert (coll 1970 UK;
with 1 story added 1971 US); Soul Catcher (1972), a non-sf novel; The Book
of Frank Herbert (coll 1973); The Best of Frank Herbert (coll 1975 UK; cut
vt The Best of Frank Herbert: 1952-1970 1976 UK; text restored vt in 2
vols as The Best of Frank Herbert 1952-1964 1977 UK and The Best of Frank
Herbert 1965-1970 1977 UK); Direct Descent (fixup 1980); The Priests of
Psi (coll 1980 UK); Eye (coll 1985).Nonfiction: Survival and the Atom
(coll 1952); New World or No World (anth 1970), an environmental
anthology; Threshold: The Blue Angels Experience (1973); Without Me,
You're Nothing: The Essential Guide to Home Computers (1980) with Max
Barnard; The Maker of Dune: Insights of a Master of Science Fiction: Frank
Herbert (coll 1987) ed Tim O'Reilly; The Notebooks of Frank Herbert's Dune

(1988) ed Brian Herbert; Songs of Muad'Dib: The Poetry of Frank Herbert
(coll 1992), ed.About the author: Frank Herbert (1980) by David M. Miller;
Frank Herbert (1981) by Timothy O'Reilly; The Dune Encyclopedia (anth
1984) ed Willis E. MCNELLY; Dune Master: A Frank Herbert Bibliography
(1988) by Daniel J.H. Levack.See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION;
COMMUNICATIONS; COMPUTERS; ESP; FANTASY; FORCE FIELD; GALAXY SCIENCE
FICTION; GAMES AND TOYS; HISTORY IN SF; LINGUISTICS; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS
AND PUBLICATIONS); MUSIC; PARANOIA; SPACESHIPS; UNDER THE SEA.
HERBERT, WILLIAM
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author of The World Grown Young (1891),
a placidly tendentious record of NEAR-FUTURE reforms imposed benevolently
from above upon a grateful UK by its richest citizen. Attacks by Russia
and the USA are routinely defeated. [JC]
HERCK, PAUL van
[r] Paul VAN HERCK.
HERNADI, GYULA
[r] HUNGARY.
HERNAMAN-JOHNSON, FRANCIS
(1879-1949) UK medical researcher and author of The Polyphemes: A Story
of Strange Adventures Among Strange Beings (1906). The beings, giant
intelligent Moon-worshipping ants from a Pacific island, just fail to
conquer the world, despite their use of "X Magnetism" to power flying
machines which bomb Europe. [JC]
HEROES
Sf began to produce a distinctive kind of hero well before the beginning
of the 20th century. As might be expected, sf writers - most of whom
expressed interest (sometimes monitory) in the advancement of science soon found models for heroic action in SCIENTISTS (or, perhaps more
accurately, inventors). From early in its history, the US dime novel (
DIME-NOVEL SF) featured young protagonists who invented their way out of
dire straits in a thousand tales, and who soon took on many of the
advertised characteristics of the most charismatic US inventor/scientist
of the 19th century, Thomas Alva Edison ( EDISONADE for details); well
into the 20th century, heroes on the edisonade model figured large in
GENRE SF, generally in SPACE OPERA between the World Wars, although the
influence of the Edison myth can be detected also in Robert A. HEINLEIN's
Competent Man.At the same time, it cannot be denied that in much sf the
figure of the scientist remained far too remote and enigmatic to stand as
a hero, and it was only rarely - as in H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE
(1895) - that adult sf featured scientists in roles that gave them the
opportunity to assume protagonist burdens of heroism. Over against the
heroes of the edisonade, sf very frequently featured young heroes who had
become entangled with matters of superscience entirely by accident: a
certain bewildered astonishment was a constant feature of the role. FLASH
GORDON and BUCK ROGERS are heroes of this type, as is John Star, hero of
Jack WILLIAMSON's The Legion of Space (1934; 1947). And whether or not
their creators deemed them to be inventor/scientist heroes - as C.M.
KORNBLUTH argued in "The Failure of the Science Fiction Novel as Social

Criticism" (1959) - the worldview of E.E. SMITH's heroes and all their
kind is that of small children, and their adventures are daydreams which
proceed according to the pattern of make-believe games. This pattern,
common to almost all action-adventure fiction, stands out particularly
clearly in PULP-MAGAZINE sf simply because the scope of the make-believe
is so great. Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's Barsoom novels are perhaps the
ultimate in literary daydreams, and the enduring attraction of such
fantasies is shown by the constant proliferation of their imitators.
Edmond HAMILTON's CAPTAIN FUTURE stories and the PERRY RHODAN adventures
are examples of more strictly sciencefictional variants.In the 1940s John
W. CAMPBELL Jr used his influence as editor of ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION
to urge sf writers to modify the standard pulp hero by putting much
greater emphasis on problem-solving aptitude and engineering skill.
Archetypes of this new image included the staff of George O. SMITH's Venus
Equilateral (1942-5 ASF; fixup 1947), who were forever scribbling
equations and designs on the tablecloths in Joe's Bar. It might be argued
that this was very limited progress, and that the new image appealed to
the worldview of the adolescent in the process of learning, upgrading
mental competence at the expense of physical prowess, but really coming no
nearer to genuine characterization. Certainly there is a great deal of sf
which is attractive to the adolescent - and particularly to the alienated
adolescent, bound more closely to a private mental world - and, just as E.
E. Smith's Lensmen relate to their Arisian mentors in the same way that
children relate to adults, a similar relationship, but at a later stage,
is reflected in Poul ANDERSON's Flandry series, in which the hero's
flamboyant behaviour and contempt for imperial decadence relates very well
to the mood of adolescent rebellion. The conscientiously unorthodox
Campbell had a particular fondness for scientist-heroes who were
determined paradigm-breakers, and this was shared by many of his writers.
Even nonscientist heroes are frequently portrayed in magazine sf as
diehard rebels against stultifying orthodoxy, and the iconoclast who
demonstrates by his delinquency that he is fit for membership in the
social elite is an annoying sf CLICHE. Although there were few true
antiheroes in sf before, say, the emergence of Michael MOORCOCK's Jerry
Cornelius in The Final Programme (1965-7 NW; 1968) - Harry HARRISON's
Stainless Steel Rat (in The Stainless Steel Rat [1961] and its sequels)
being too lovable a rogue to qualify, though there is a good case to be
made that the evolution of E.E. SMITH's Blackie DuQuesne from Skylark of
Space (1928) to Skylark DuQuesne (1966) neatly encapsulates the growth of
the concept - there was a long pre-existent tradition of heroic
bloody-mindedness in magazine sf.As a more mature approach to
characterization began to appear in sf during the 1940s, the heroic
stature of its protagonists inevitably began to be compromised. True
heroes are implicitly unrealistic characters of more-than-human
dimensions, and the pulp SUPERHEROES who had existed on the fringe of sf,
like DOC SAVAGE, were largely diverted into the world of the COMICS, where
SUPERMAN became the archetype of a vast legion of caped crusaders. In the
sf pulps, too, superhumans became heroes, following a prototype
established by A.E. VAN VOGT in SLAN (1940 ASF; 1946). The vanVogtian hero
is always adrift in a hostile world whose circumstances are beyond his
understanding, but he is possessed of awesome, temporarily dormant powers

whose ultimate flowering will enable him spectacularly to prevail. This
slightly schizoid stereotype became increasingly common, and also more
elaborate and extravagant. Later works in this vein frequently feature
heroes who exhibit an odd combination of vulnerability and godlikeness;
several examples can be found in the work of Roger ZELAZNY (see also
PARANOIA). It is, of course, the function of heroes to appease the
psychological forces within us that must necessarily be repressed in the
day-to-day routine of adult intercourse with the world, and there is
really no need to worry - as the psychoanalyst Fredric Wertham (1895-1981)
did in The Seduction of the Innocent (1954) - that the fascination of
children and sf fans with superheroes might be perverted or fascistic. The
utility of social outsiders in heroic roles is also, inevitably, reflected
in the increasingly common use of ALIENS as heroes, and sometimes MACHINES
(although ROBOTS and sentient COMPUTERS pose problems when employed as
foci for reader-identification). These trends too began in the 1940s but
became more pronounced in subsequent decades. The most extreme cases of
"outsider" heroes are perhaps to be found in CYBORG stories which use
brains-in-boxes as viewpoint characters.Despite the processes of
sophistication which have reduced many of its protagonists to a more human
scale, modern sf has carried forward the trends which were set in the
1940s, albeit in more selfconscious - and often frankly humorous - ways.
The noble rebel against oppressive authority remains commonplace, his
activities celebrated with awesome sentimentality in such novels as
Michael D. RESNICK's Santiago (1986). The oppressed child-become-superhero
has also been provided with a striking new archetype in Orson Scott CARD's
ENDER'S GAME (1977 ASF; exp 1985), although Card's anxiety about the
propriety of this genocidal power-fantasy led him to pad out the expanded
version with much philosophical debate and to produce sequels in which
Ender becomes a kind of saintly redeemer. Comic-book superhero fantasy has
moved back into a closer alliance with written fiction, reflected in such
projects as George R.R. MARTIN's WILD CARDS series of multi-authored
"mosaic novels" or BRAIDS. It is noticeable that modern comic-book
superheroes are very often social outsiders, the TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA
TURTLES providing a striking example. The market-encouraged overlap
between sf and HEROIC FANTASY has helped to maintain much older kinds of
hero despite acute problems of plausibility. Sciencefictional
transfigurations of Greek and other hero-myths are surprisingly numerous,
most notable among them R.A. LAFFERTY's Space Chantey (1968) and Tim
POWERS's Dinner at Deviant's Palace (1985), and Grail Quests are also
featured in such novels as Samuel R. DELANY's NOVA (1968). Antiheroes have
been very much in fashion in recent times thanks to the CYBERPUNK
movement, but the parallel fashionability of militaristic sf ( WAR) has
resulted in a wide spectrum of heroic types which ranges from steadfastly
honourable soldiers through mercenaries to determined followers of a
SURVIVALIST ethos. Female heroes were almost unknown in sf before 1960,
although sweet-natured "heroines" were to be found in abundance, but as
more and more female writers have moved into sf this imbalance has been
spectacularly redressed; a great deal of contemporary sf has now taken on
the burden of appeasing the frustrations of women in much the same way
that 1940s sf appeased the frustrations of adolescent boys. Although the
path of progress was first mapped by feminist writers like Joanna RUSS,

creator of the troubled-but-competent Alyx, female heroes are now so
numerous in certain roles - notably that of starship pilot - that such
assignments no longer seem propagandistic. SCIENTISTS, for the most part,
are still out in the cold, rarely afforded even moderate heroic status: an
accurate but sad reflection of contemporary social attitudes. [BS/JC]See
also: ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; VILLAINS.
HEROIC FANTASY
In the TERMINOLOGY of sf/fantasy readers, this term began in the late
1970s to overtake SWORD AND SORCERY as the name of the subgenre which we
choose - perhaps arbitrarily - to discuss under the latter head. The two
terms (which both continue in common but diminished usage into the 1990s)
are close but not identical in meaning. However, the nuances that
distinguish them differ according to the writer (or blurb-writer) who uses
them, though perhaps "Heroic Fantasy" comprehends a greater range of
possible fictions. There is probably no argument about the twin poles of
Heroic Fantasy (or Sword and Sorcery) being the gentlemanly works of
J.R.R. TOLKIEN and the far-from-gentlemanly works of Robert E. HOWARD,
especially his Conan series. Other terms applied both critically and
commercially to fantasy have proliferated; they include Adult Fantasy,
High Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Quest Fantasy and SCIENCE FANTASY, but none
are susceptible to any rigorous definition that would correspond to the
variations in actual usage. By the 1990s the compulsion felt by publishers
to label their books generically had slackened - it may have proved
counterproductive - and many works of Heroic Fantasy now have merely the
word FANTASY on the cover, or no descriptive word at all. [PN]See also:
MAGIC; PLANETARY ROMANCE.
HERON-ALLEN, EDWARD
[r] Christopher BLAYRE.
HERRICK, ROBERT
(1868-1938) US academic and writer best known for The Master of the Inn
(1908), whose eponymous hero cures the mentally ill by making them work
hard and contemplate, too. His one sf novel, Sometime (1933), set 1000
years hence, describes the visit of some Africans to a post-ice-age North
America, where the races have finally bred together, sexual prudishness
has been cast off at last, and the CITIES have been abandoned. RH clearly
approves all these changes. [JC]
HERRIN VON ATLANTIS, DIE
(vt L'Atlantide; vt Lost Atlantis; vt The Mistress of Atlantis) Film
(1932). Nero Film. Dir G.W. Pabst (1885-1967), starring Brigitte Helm and
(German version) Gustav Diessl, (French version) Jean Angelo, (English
version) John Stuart. Screenplay Ladislaus Vajda, Hermann Oberlander,
based on L'Atlantide (1919) by Pierre BENOIT. 87 mins. B/w.This German
film is based on Benoit's lurid popular novel about Antinea, the Queen of
ATLANTIS (in this case a city beneath the North African desert), who lures
a succession of men to their doom and displays their mummified bodies in a
bizarre trophy room. The similarities between this and H. Rider HAGGARD's
She (1887) are obvious.L'Atlantide has been filmed several other times:
the first was a tedious 1921 French version dir Jacques Feyder; in 1948 a

kitsch US version, Siren of Atlantis (vt Atlantis; vt Queen of Atlantis),
was dir Arthur Ripley, Greg R. Tallas, Douglas Sirk and John Brahm,
starring Maria Montez; and in 1961 a French/Italian coproduction, Antinea,
L'Amante della Citta Sepolta (vt Atlantis, the Lost Kingdom) - not to be
confused with ATLANTIS, THE LOST CONTINENT prod George PAL in 1960 - was
dir Edgar G. Ulmer and Giuseppe Masini. The Pabst film is superior to
these others, not only for its visual flair but also for Brigitte Helm's
striking performance as the queen (she is also remembered for her dual
role as heroine and evil robot in METROPOLIS [1926]). It is, however,
slow-moving, and no one could take this pulp romance seriously.Three
versions, in German, French and English, were made simultaneously with
Helm starring in all, although otherwise the casts were different. [JB/PN]
HERSEY, HAROLD (BRAINERD)
(1893-1956) US editor, publisher, story writer and poet. A man of great
energy and relatively little talent, HH edited such sf PULP MAGAZINES as
THRILL BOOK, MIRACLE SCIENCE AND FANTASY STORIES and Mystery Adventures,
though most of his editorial work was not sf-related. His early writing,
all negligible, appeared under various pseudonyms; but Night (coll 1923),
a POETRY collection, has superb artwork by Elliott DOLD, and Pulpwood
Editor (1937) is an informative (albeit anecdotal) look at the
pulp-magazine world. [RB]See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; INTELLIGENCE;
OVERPOPULATION; THEATRE.
HERSEY, JOHN
(1914-1993) US novelist and journalist, perhaps best known for his early
report, Hiroshima (1946). His White Lotus (1965) is an ALTERNATE-WORLDS
story in which China conquers the USA and makes slaves of White Americans,
including the teenager renamed White Lotus. The Child Buyer (1960) is a
NEAR-FUTURE story - told in the form of a courtroom drama - in which
corporations bid for effective ownership of child prodigies. My Petition
for More Space (1974) is a radically DYSTOPIAN rendering of an enormously
regimented Earth bedevilled by OVERPOPULATION problems - the protagonist
lives in a tiny cubicle and petitions, vainly, for an extra foot in each
direction. [JC]
HERSHMAN, MORRIS
(1920- ) US writer whose sf novel, Shareworld (1972; vt The Crash of 2086
1976), takes a DYSTOPIAN view of the stock market dominating the entire
world and anticipates a final and definitive Crash. [JC]
HERTZKA, THEODOR
(1845-1924) Austrian economist and author of the influential socialist
UTOPIA, Freiland: Ein Sociales Zukunftsbild (1890; trans Arthur Ransom not Arthur Ransome [1884-1967] - as Freeland: A Social Anticipation 1891
UK) and its sequel, Eine Reise nach Freiland1893; trans anon as A Visit to
Freeland, or The New Paradise Regained 1894 UK; vt A Trip to Freeland 1905
US). These offer little in the way of fictional pleasures in the bland
portrayal of their African setting, but most unusually manage to depict an
ideal society in terms that sound genuinely livable. It may be the case
that they fail satisfactorily to suggest a convincing relationship between
private and public control of production ( ECONOMICS), but all the same

the books inspired a Freeland Society in the USA, and some local colonies
were actually established. [JC]See also: AUSTRIA.
HERVEY, MAURICE H.
(? -? ) UK writer active at the end of the 19th century. The protagonist
of his sf novel, David Dimsdale, M.D.: A Story of Past and Future (1897),
awakens in 1920 ( SLEEPER AWAKES) to find ubiquitous electrical advances
plus the daughter of the woman he'd loved in 1895. He ends up marrying the
daughter. [JC]
HERVEY, MICHAEL
(1920-1979 ) UK writer who moved to Australia in 1951; he is author of an
estimated 3500 short stories in various genres. His sf work is minor; it
includes a future- UTOPIA tale, Strange Hunger (1946), and some of the
stories assembled in The Queer-Looking Box (coll 1944 chap), Murder Medley
(coll 1945 chap), Horror Medley (coll 1946 chap) and Creeps Medley (coll
1946 chap). [SH]
HERZL, THEODOR
[r] AUSTRIA; ISRAEL.
HERZOG, ARTHUR (III)
(1927- ) US writer and editor who has also worked with the Peace Corps
and as a political manager. His first sf novel, The Swarm (1974),
convincingly posits an ecological catastrophe when the African honey-bee
mutates and invades North America ( ECOLOGY; HIVE-MINDS). Partly based on
fact (African bees have indeed bred with South American bees to form a
large and belligerent hybrid), the novel is well researched and written,
as are Earthsound (1975), in which a seismologist attempts to warn
sceptical New Englanders of an approaching earthquake and is thought to be
merely hysterical, and Heat (1977; rev 1989), which is an early attempt to
deal with the greenhouse effect. In later novels, AH moved less
convincingly towards SATIRE. In IQ 83 (1978) an attempt to retune DNA
predictably backfires, and the America series - Make Us Happy (1978) and
Glad to Be Here (1979) - takes him shakily into the realms of DYSTOPIA.
[PN/JC]Other works: Aries Rising (1980); The Craving (1982).See also:
DISASTER.
HERZOG, EMILE
[r] Andre MAUROIS.
HESKY, OLGA (LYNFORD)
(1912-1974) UK editor and writer in whose wry and somewhat Surrealist sf
novel, The Purple Armchair (1961), the ALIEN who resembles an armchair and
is purple must decide whether or not the human race - caught in a
near-future DYSTOPIA dominated by COMPUTERS - should survive. Eventually
the "chair" says no. [JC]
HESSE, HERMANN
(1877-1962) German-born writer, a Swiss citizen from 1923. His long
career culminated with the publication of his largest novel, Das
Glasperlenspiel (1943; trans M. Savill as Magister Ludi 1949 US; preferred
trans Richard and Clara Winston as The Glass Bead Game 1969 US); it was
largely as a result of this novel that HH was awarded the 1946 Nobel Prize

for Literature. Set in a future land closely resembling Europe, it is a
complex UTOPIA whose structure revolves around the eponymous game. For the
inhabitants of the community of Castilia, under the guidance of Joseph
Knecht, their Magister Ludi (or Master of Games), the undescribed
aesthetic and intellectual disciplines of the game culminate in
experiences that - by analogy with the music of J.S. Bach - serenely
resolve the dissonances of the outside world. Knecht's biography
constitutes the bulk of the novel, and his poems and essays are published
in an appendix. Through these texts, which are suffused with allusions to
and renderings of the world-transcending subtleties and graces of the
Castilian mind-plays, Knecht's life has a sometimes exalting effect on the
reader, though Knecht himself must eventually repudiate the game for a
more humane vision of utopia.HH's great popularity in translation in the
1960s and 1970s derives more directly, however, from earlier and more
accessible works, like Siddharta (1922; trans Hilda Rosner 1954 UK) and
Der Steppenwolf (1927; trans Basil Creighton as Steppenwolf 1929 UK; trans
rev 1963), in which Jungian depth psychology, Indian mysticism and
Weltschmerz are perhaps overpalatably combined; these and others of his
novels can be read - unwisely - to emphasize any fantasy elements, for at
their core they are meditations on transcendence. [JC]Other works: Demian
(1919; trans W.J. Strachan 1958 UK); Die Morgenlandfahrt (1932; trans
Hilda Rosner as The Journey to the East 1956 chap UK); Strange News from
Another Star (coll trans 1972 US) and Pictor's Metamorphoses and Other
Fantasies (coll trans Rika Lesser 1982 US), collecting his fantasies, some
of which are sf.See also: ARTS.
HETZEL, JULES
[r] Jules VERNE.
HEVESI, LUDWIG
[r] AUSTRIA.
HEXT, HARRINGTON
Eden PHILLPOTTS.
HEY, RICHARD
[r] GERMANY.
HEYDON, J(OSEPH) K(ENTIGERN)
(? -? ) UK writer whose World D (1935), as told to him by "Hal P.
Trevarthen, Official Historian of the Superficies", describes the creation
of an UNDER-THE-SEA culture, Helioxenon; the detail is considerable,
sometimes Catholic. On the jacket the novel was credited to Trevarthen.
[JC]
HEYDRON, VICKI ANN
[r] Randall GARRETT.
HEYMANN, ROBERT
[r] GERMANY.
HICKS, GRANVILLE
(1901-1982) US writer, editor and broadcaster, most of whose significant
work lay in the field of cultural studies, initially from a Marxist

standpoint, though from 1939 he became disillusioned with any form of
communism. His first novel, The First to Awaken (1940) with Richard M.
Bennett, was a SLEEPER-AWAKES tale whose protagonist reaches the year
AD2040 via SUSPENDED ANIMATION and finds there a literately described and
mutedly sane socialist UTOPIA. [JC]
HIDDEN, THE
Film (1988). New Line-Heron Joint Venture/Third Elm Street Venture. Dir
Jack Sholder, starring Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Nouri, William Boyett.
Screenplay Bob Hunt. 97 mins. Colour.A quiet stockbroker goes on a
homicidal spree. We learn his body is temporarily occupied by a homicidal
slug-like ALIEN, which moves from body to body but is soon recognizable
from its behaviour. Police detective Beck (Nouri) works with an FBI man
(MacLachlan) who turns out to be an alien cop in a human body. Finally,
after six body changes, the Ferrari-driving alien killer is defeated. TH
is a fast-moving, violent, well made formula film with no intellectual
ambitions but an interesting, ambiguous ending. The story is sufficiently
close to that of Hal CLEMENT's Needle (1950; vt From Outer Space 1957) as
to make one wonder why he received no screen credit. The oddly coupled
human/alien cop team was to become an instant film cliche: ALIEN NATION
and I COME IN PEACE. The sequel, The Hidden II (1993), went straight to
video; dir and written Seth Pinsker, starring Raphael Sbarge and Kate
Hodge, 90 mins, it reprises ten minutes of the original before moving to a
time 15 years later, with Hodge playing the daughter of Detective Beck and
more evil alien spawning to be prevented. [PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES.
HIDDEN WORLD, THE
US magazine PULP MAGAZINE-size, 16 issues, Spring 1961-Winter 1964,
published and ed Raymond A. PALMER. This was a quarterly publication,
handling SHAVER-Mystery and flying-saucer ( UFOS) material, and purporting
to be science fact rather than science fiction. #1 elaborated on the
Shaverian "Mantongue" language. Circulation had by the end dropped from
10,000 to 2000; the issue marked Winter 1964 was in fact released in 1966.
[FHP/PN]
HIGH, PHILIP E(MPSON)
(1914- ) UK writer, variously employed for a number of years before
beginning to publish sf in 1955 with "The Statics" for Authentic Science
Fiction; he contributed to UK magazines, especially NEBULA SCIENCE
FICTION, for several years before publishing his first sf novel The
Prodigal Sun (1964 US), which set the model for most of those to follow.
His sense of the world is pessimistic, but he overlays that sense with
plots of an epic cast. In this first novel, characteristically, an
Earthman possessing powers enhanced through his upbringing by an ALIEN
race returns to his grim home planet, rousing it. Other novels combining
social comment and adventure include No Truce with Terra (1964 dos US),
The Mad Metropolis (1966 dos US; vt Double Illusion 1970 UK) and These
Savage Futurians (1967 dos US). The Time Mercenaries (1968 dos US)
interestingly places a 20th-century submarine into a time when mankind has
lost its genetic capacity to fight; the resurrected crew (having been
artificially preserved) dutifully saves mankind from aliens. Though
constrained by his dystopian sense of the possibilities of Man's future,

PEH has been capable of writing enjoyable adventures, though without fully
stretching his dark imagination. His later work, written largely for
ROBERT HALE LIMITED, was less engaging. [JC]Other works: Reality Forbidden
(1967 dos US); Twin Planets (1967 US); Invader on my Back (1968);
Butterfly Planet (1971); Come, Hunt an Earthman (1973); Sold-For a
Spaceship (1973); Speaking of Dinosaurs (1974); Fugitive from Time (1978);
Blindfold from the Stars (1979).See also: SUN.
HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING
Film (1990). Davis-Panzer/Lamb Bear Entertainment. Dir Russell Mulcahy,
starring Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery, Virginia Madsen, Michael
Ironside, Allan Rich. Screenplay Peter Bellwood, from a story by Brian
Clemens and William Panzer, based on characters created by Gregory Widen.
100 mins. Colour.This is a sequel to Highlander (1986), which was a pure
fantasy about two immortals, one good (with amnesia) and one bad, who
battle through the centuries. The sequel begins in 1999 with the
sword-wielding immortal Scotsman (Lambert again) saving humanity by
building a shield to replace the destroyed ozone layer. Moving forward to
AD2034 we find a corporate DYSTOPIA in the subtropical twilight (shot in
Argentina) beneath the shield, which is now maintained only for corporate
profit, the ozone layer being in much better condition, though this is
kept secret. The protagonist - who turns out to be an ALIEN - oscillates
unnervingly between youth and age, mortality and IMMORTALITY, before
disposing of the shield and the alien warlord (Ironside) who has
temporarily become a partner of the corporate villains. Rumoured
production problems and budget cuts may explain the incoherence of what
could have been much more fun. [PN]
HIGH TREASON
Film (1929). Gaumont. Dir Maurice Elvey, starring Benita Hume, Jameson
Thomas, Basil Gill, James Carew. Screenplay L'Estrange Fawcett, based on a
play by Noel Pemberton-Billing. 95 mins, cut to 69 mins. B/w.This
forgotten curiosity, one of the earliest UK sound movies, was quite a big
film in its day, when it was seen as a kind of English METROPOLIS (1926)-a
comparison that does not for an instant hold water. Set in the world of
1940 (a Channel tunnel, tv, aeroplanes landing on London skyscrapers), it
envisages a tense political situation between United Europe, to which
England belongs, and a United America. The Peace League saves the world
from war by assassinating the leader of United Europe. The production
design is singularly unstriking and the story absurd. [PN]
HIGHWAYMAN, THE
Glen A. LARSON.
HILL, CAROL (DeCHELLIS)
(1942- ) US writer whose first novel, Jeremiah 8:20 (1970), is a raucous
FABULATION about the Apocalypse. Her second, Let's Fall in Love (1975),
spoofs sex, pornography and politics in a vaguely fantastic 1970s milieu.
The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer (1985; vt Amanda and the Eleven
Million Mile High Dancer 1988 UK), equally flamboyant in diction, carries
its female astronaut protagonist into metaphysical (and
Theory-of-Indeterminacy-and-Zen-evoking) contact with the eponymous

representation of the nature of the Universe. [JC]
HILL, DOUGLAS (ARTHUR)
(1935- ) Canadian-born writer and editor, in the UK from 1959. Most of
his early books were nonfiction, The Supernatural (1965) with Pat
Williams, and Magic and Superstition (1968) being of interest to a genre
audience. His involvement in sf and fantasy began through his editing of
anthologies like Window on the Future (anth 1966) and Way of the Werewolf
(anth 1966); he served as Associate Editor of NW in 1967-8. He began a
long sequence of novels for younger and older children ( CHILDREN'S SF)
with Coyote the Trickster (1975) with Gail Robinson. Several series
ensued: the Last Legionary sequence of SPACE OPERAS - Galactic Warlord
(1979), Deathwing over Veynaa (1980), Day of the Starwind (1980), Planet
of the Warlord (1982) and Young Legionary: The Earlier Adventures of Keill
Randor (1982), all but the last (a prequel) being assembled as The Last
Legionary Quartet (omni 1985) - which builds effectively on an
interplanetary revenge quest; the Huntsman sequence - The Huntsman (1982),
Warriors of the Wasteland (1983) and Alien Citadel (1984) - set on an
Earth enslaved by alien invaders; and the ColSec sequence - Exiles of
ColSec (1984), The Caves of Klydor (1984) and ColSec Rebellion (1985) whose young protagonists strive for freedom after being shipwrecked on an
unknown planet. His only adult sf novels, The Fraxilly Fracas (1989) and
its sequel, The Colloghi Conspiracy (1990), are also space opera - as is
the ongoing Apotheosis Trilogy, comprising The Lightless Dome (1993) and
The Leafless Forest (1994) - and share with his juveniles an engaging
briskness, though psychological depths tend to remain unplumbed. [JC]Other
works: The Exploits of Hercules (1978); Have Your Own Extra-Terrestrial
Adventure (1983 chap); the Talents series of fantasies, comprising Blade
of the Poisoner (1987) and Master of Fiends (1987); Penelope's Pendant
(1990); World of the Stiks (1994).For younger children: Moon Monsters
(1984 chap); How Jennifer (and Speckle) Saved the Earth (1986 chap);
Goblin Party (1988 chap); Penelope's Pendant (1990); The Tale of Trellie
the Troog (1991 chap).As Editor: The Devil his Due (anth 1967); Warlocks
and Warriors (anth 1971); Tribune 40 (anth 1977), not sf or fantasy; The
Shape of Sex to Come (anth 1978), sf stories about SEX; Alien Worlds (anth
1981); Planetfall (anth 1986).
HILL, ERNEST
(1915- ) UK writer who began publishing sf with "The Last Generation" for
NW in 1954, and who published some stories of interest, most notably the
DYSTOPIAN "Atrophy" (1965 in New Writings in SF #6, ed John CARNELL). His
novels - the rather desultory SPACE OPERA Pity about Earth (1968 dos US),
The GC Radiation (1971) and The Quark Invasion (1978), the latter two
being written for ROBERT HALE LIMITED - are of less interest. [JC]
HILL, H. HAVERSTOCK
J.M. WALSH.
HILL, JOHN
Dean R. KOONTZ.
HILL, ROGER
[r] Glen A. LARSON.

HILL, RUSSELL
(? - ) US writer whose sf novel, Cold Creek Cash Store (1986), presents
an unremarkable vision of a post- HOLOCAUST refuge in California. [JC]
HILL, WILLIAM BOYLE
(? - ) Writer, probably UK, whose novel A New Earth and a New Heaven
(1936) is of exceedingly moderate sf interest for its advocacy of a
garden-city subtopian future, but which comes somewhat to life on its
protagonists' visit to a LOST WORLD - in the heart of Australia - whose
inhabitants are in touch with MARS. [JC]
HILLEGAS, MARK R.
(1926- ) US sf critic and professor of English who has been based at
Southern Illinois University. In 1961 he gave, at Colgate, one of the
first university-level classes in sf in the USA ( SF IN THE CLASSROOM).
His academic study The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the
Anti-Utopians (1967) deals primarily with such MAINSTREAM WRITERS of
DYSTOPIAS as Karel CAPEK, Aldous HUXLEY, C.S. LEWIS, George ORWELL and
Yevgeny ZAMIATIN; it has become a standard reference. A later work ed MRH
is Shadows of Imagination: The Fantasies of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and
Charles Williams (anth 1969). His sf criticism, which includes a number of
essays, was all published in the 1960s and 1970s. He won the PILGRIM AWARD
in 1992. [PN]
HILLMAN PERIODICALS
WORLDS BEYOND.
HILTON, JAMES
(1900-1954) UK writer, in the USA from 1935, known mainly for slightly
sentimental mainstream novels like Good-bye Mr Chips (1934). His romantic
LOST-WORLD novel, Lost Horizon (1933), is set in the hidden Tibetan valley
of Shangri-La (his coinage), and deals with IMMORTALITY. The book is
emotionally moving, and was extremely popular; it has been filmed twice (
LOST HORIZON). [JC]Other works: Nothing So Strange (1947 US),
associational, about an experimental scientist and the Manhattan
Project.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; UTOPIAS.
HINE, MURIEL
(? - ) UK writer whose The Island Forbidden to Man (1946) seemed to
espouse the feminist UTOPIA hinted at in the title ( FEMINISM), but did
not give it long for this world. [JC]
HINGLEY, RONALD (FRANCIS)
(1920- ) UK lecturer in Russian studies and writer whose sf novel Up
Jenkins! (1956) satirically presents a UK split in two, the northern half
remaining more or less free, the southern half, People's Britain, being
ruled in totalitarian fashion. The SATIRE of People's Britain is deft.
[JC]
HINTON, C(HARLES) H(OWARD)
(1853-1907) UK author whose many essays about the fourth and other
DIMENSIONS in space and time are collected along with some works of
fiction in Scientific Romances (coll 1886) and Scientific Romances: Second

Series (coll 1902). His interest was partly inspired by Edwin ABBOTT's
Flatland (1885), and he wrote a novel of his own set on a circular
two-dimensional world, An Episode of Flatland (1907). His other sf story
is "Stella", in Stella and An Unfinished Communication (coll 1895;
reprinted as part of Scientific Romances: Second Series), a short novel
about an invisible girl which antedated H.G. WELLS's The Invisible Man
(1896). "An Unfinished Communication" is a metaphysical fantasy which
represents life after death as freedom to move in the fourth dimension
(time) through the moments of life, "unlearning" and re-evaluating. "The
Persian King", in Scientific Romances, is a curious allegory applying
mathematical logic to Christian ideas of atonement. Interest in CHH's work
has recently been revived by virtue of the attention paid to it in stories
and essays by Rudy RUCKER. [BS]See also: ESCHATOLOGY; INVISIBILITY;
MATHEMATICS; RELIGION.
HINZ, CHRISTOPHER
(1951- ) US writer who made a considerable impact with the Paratwa
sequence: Liege-Killer (1987) - which won the Compton Crook/Stephen Tall
AWARD for Best First Novel - Ash Ock (1989) and The Paratwa (1991). From
the first, the sequence has given off a sense of professional polish and
hurry, densely packing a wide variety of 1980s adventure-sf conventions
into an intensely realized post- HOLOCAUST setting dominated by SPACE
HABITATS which contain those who escaped before the end of life on Earth.
Technology is controlled, but pressure is building; and when the Paratwa pre-holocaust, genetically primed assassins - begin to reappear, CH soon
engages a large cast in violent action, as the villains are hunted down
and their masters (the Ash Ock) are exposed. It could not be claimed that
the second and third volumes of the sequence show any deep originality,
but the impersonal vigour of the narrative strikes a responsive note. A
singleton, Anachronisms (1988), also demonstrates CH's canny adherence to
demanding genre models in the tale of a corporation-owned survey ship packed with CYBORGS, ESPERS, obsessed SCIENTISTS, a paramilitary cadre,
and Realpolitik-driven AIs - which must face the threat of a seemingly
undefeatable ALIEN which assaults them from an about-to-be-exploited
planet. The parallels with the movies ALIEN (1979) and ALIENS (1986) are
too explicit not to have been meant as a homage, and demonstrate that the
sophisticated models of action in space deployed by those films had become
necessary to high-quality, cutting-edge written adventure sf. CH is an
alert follower. [JC]
HIRD, JAMES DENNIS
(1850-?1920) UK writer involved in 19th-century temperance movements and
Christian socialism. His Toddle Island; Being the Diary of Lord Bottsford
(1894), an Erewhonian UTOPIA set on an ISLAND in the Pacific, rather
effectively satirizes much of UK intellectual life. [JC]
HIRSCHMAN, EDWARD
[r] Edgar Rice BURROUGHS.
HISTORY IN SF
The real history of the world and the many alternative histories which
might have replaced it ( ALTERNATE WORLDS) are extensively featured in sf

stories of TIME TRAVEL and PARALLEL WORLDS, but sf writers have also drawn
much inspiration from history in designing hypothetical futures.
Sometimes, like Charles L. HARNESS in Flight into Yesterday (1949
Startling Stories; exp 1953; vt The Paradox Men) and James BLISH in CITIES
IN FLIGHT (1950-62 var mags; omni 1970), they have made use of actual
theories-from Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) in the former case, Oswald
Spengler (1880-1936) in the latter - which have claimed to detect
authentic cyclic patterns in history; more commonly, though, they have
simply borrowed the past as a convenient template. Thus Miles J. BREUER
and Jack WILLIAMSON replayed the story of the American Revolution as the
story of the revolt of the MOON's colony against its Earthly masters in
The Birth of a New Republic (1930 AMZ; 1981); Robert A. HEINLEIN later did
this more convincingly in THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS (1966). Isaac
ASIMOV gave to this process of borrowing a new gloss of sophistication in
the first phase of his Foundation series (1942-50 ASF; in 3 vols 1951-3;
as THE FOUNDATION TRILOGY omni 1963) by inventing his own futuristic
science of PSYCHOHISTORY, by which Edward Gibbon's retrospective analysis
of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is transmuted into Hari
Seldon's prophetic analysis of the decline and fall of the GALACTIC
EMPIRE. Seldon's Plan, however, can change these deterministic prophecies
by social engineering. Interestingly, a later novel by Asimov, The End of
Eternity (1955), argues as strongly against social engineering as the
Foundation series argued for it.Toynbee eventually recanted the cyclic
theory outlined in A Study of History (12 vols 1934-61), and the earlier
quasideterministic theories of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) and
Spengler's Decline of the West (1918-22) never quite attained academic
respectability, but the attractions of such theories to sf writers are
obvious. Blish's fascination with Spengler became deep, respectful and
altogether serious, and A.E. VAN VOGT drew inspiration from Spengler in
The Voyage of the Space Beagle (fixup 1950). Toynbeean ideas continued to
echo various writers' works, including Frederik POHL's and C.M.
KORNBLUTH's "Critical Mass" (1961), in which they are quoted directly,
Frank HERBERT's DUNE (fixup 1965), which seems to draw on Toynbee's
picture of the Janissary-supported Turkish courts of the later Middle
Ages, and Larry NIVEN's A World out of Time (1967), which uses the
Toynbee-derived notion of "water-monopoly empires" - i.e., empires founded
on irrigation control. Philosophers of history who dealt in NEAR-FUTURE
climaxes rather than recurrent cycles - G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) and Karl
Marx (1818-1883) are the most obvious examples - have naturally been of
less interest to sf writers.The PULP MAGAZINES inherited from the dime
novels ( DIME-NOVEL SF) a striking "mythologized" version of the USA's
recent past in the Western genre, which glorified the "frontier spirit".
This myth (see also SOCIAL DARWINISM) was transferred to sf, where it
became the animating force of countless stories about the exploration of
the Solar System and the COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS. The reflection of
this mythical version of US history has maintained a tenacious hold over
the images of the future contained in GENRE SF, and has been elaborated in
various ways, sometimes painfully naive and sometimes quite extraordinary.
(The phenomenon is not, of course, restricted to fiction; the idea of
space as a "high frontier" requiring conquest by bold pioneers informs
much actual political rhetoric, and may be regarded as NASA's guiding

myth.) It is not only US history per se which is reflected in stories of
space pioneering; US writers have been perfectly willing to adapt
"relevant" bits of more distant history, producing such images as those in
Poul ANDERSON's The High Crusade (1960), H. Beam PIPER's Space Viking
(1963) and Ben BOVA's Privateers (1985). Anderson has been a particularly
prolific and artful borrower of entrepreneurial models from the past,
taking in explorers, privateers, merchant princes and all manner of
military empire-builders.Unlike US genre sf, UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE was
heavily influenced by more pessimistic metaphysical notions of eternal
recurrence. As citizens of an empire in decline rather than descendants of
mythical pioneers, UK writers inherited a rather different attitude to the
past, reflected in such elegiac and defeatist fantasies of cyclic history
as Edward SHANKS's The People of the Ruins (1920), Cicely HAMILTON's
Theodore Savage (1922) and John GLOAG's "Pendulum" (c1930) and Tomorrow's
Yesterday (1932). J.B. PRIESTLEY's Time plays dealt more delicately and
not quite so darkly with similar philosophical ideas. Olaf STAPLEDON
adopted a more robust view of future history in his classic LAST AND FIRST
MEN (1930), toying with cyclicity but eventually discarding it in favour
of a more open-ended philosophy of progress, but even he could not shake
off a pessimistic conviction that whatever civilizations rise up must
ultimately decline and fall. The pulp-sf writers were sometimes suspicious
of the idea of progress, but in general they had much more faith in the
notion that contemporary civilization was destined to thrive and expand
for some considerable time; such future histories as Laurence MANNING's in
The Man who Awoke (1933 Wonder Stories; fixup 1975) and the far more
elaborate patterns drawn in the future-history series of Heinlein and
Anderson are conspicuously open-ended. Relatively few pulp visionaries
imagined that any significant and irreversible rot was likely to set in
before the Galactic Empire had attained a glorious zenith. ( GALACTIC
EMPIRES for the argument that the open framework supplied by Asimov's
Foundation series proved so comprehensive as to render unnecessary the
sort of future history worked out with such pains by Heinlein and in
rather less detail by later writers.)In somewhat similar fashion, UK
writers of scientific romance have often tended to see the past as
something inelastically resistant to change. William GOLDING's inventor in
"Envoy Extraordinary" (1956; play version The Brass Butterfly 1958) fails
ignominiously to interest the Roman Empire in gunpowder, the steam engine
and the printing press, just as the scientist in Ronald W. CLARK's Queen
Victoria's Bomb (1967) finds that his invention arouses little excitement
in Victorian England. (It was, of course, the UK that produced Herbert
Butterfield [1900-1979], the historian who wrote the clever satire The
Whig Interpretation of History [1931] in an attempt to expose the
absurdity of belief in progress, and also the folly of that kind of
history written, perhaps unwittingly, to flatter a society's image of
itself; many works of sf, even though set in the future, are open to the
criticism of "whiggery".) In sharp contrast, the hero of L. Sprague DE
CAMP's classic pulp timeslip story LEST DARKNESS FALL (1939 Unknown
Worlds; 1941; rev 1949) averts the Dark Ages by means of a series of small
and subtle technological fixes, and many genre writers felt it necessary
to set up corps of "time police" to protect history from casual spoliation
by careless or evil-minded time-travellers. Examples include Anderson's

The Guardians of Time (fixup 1960) and The Corridors of Time (1965),
Barrington J. BAYLEY's The Fall of Chronopolis (1974) and Diana Wynne
JONES's A Tale of Time City (1987); however, Fritz LEIBER's Change War
series includes one story, "Try and Change the Past" (1958), whose basic
point is the impossibility of changing history at all.It was not until the
spectre of the Bomb caught up with US sf writers that tragic images of
historical recurrence - like that in Walter M. MILLER's classic A CANTICLE
FOR LEIBOWITZ (1955-7 FSF; fixup 1960), which portrays a future Dark Age
in which learning has once more retreated to the monasteries - began to
appear in some quantity. More pessimistic philosophies of history, like
the one deployed in Kornbluth's "The Only Thing We Learn" (1949) and the
one detected by John F. CARR in the stories he collected for H. Beam
PIPER's posthumous Empire (coll 1981), also began to infect genre sf in
this period. More recently, the aftermath of world-scale HOLOCAUST has
been much more widely exploited as a setting for historical "replays" in
such novels as Paul O. WILLIAMS's Pelbar Cycle, begun with The Breaking of
Northwall (1981), and Kim Stanley ROBINSON's THE WILD SHORE (1984).
However, the progressive optimism of US sf has generally been maintained,
being unrepentantly and exuberantly displayed in such fantasies of history
as D.R. BENSEN's ironic And Having Writ . . . (1978) and Poul Anderson's
THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS (1989). Anderson and other US writers in the
same vein have always taken it for granted that liberal democracy is the
evolutionary ideal of all political systems.Although UK sf has absorbed
much of the imaginative drive of US sf since the importation of the genre
label, its more thoughtful exponents have always maintained a relatively
modest and sceptical attitude to the dynamics of history, as displayed in
such novels as Brian W. ALDISS's An Age (1967; vt Cryptozoic! US and later
UK edns), Andrew STEPHENSON's The Wall of Years (1979) and Ian WATSON's
Chekhov's Journey (1983). [TS/BS]
HISTORY OF SF
Sf is an impure genre ( DEFINITIONS OF SF) which did not finally take
shape until the late 19th century, although all its separate elements
existed earlier. If the labelling of any earlier story as sf depended only
on the presence of sf elements there would be many such. The Babylonian
Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, has a FANTASTIC VOYAGE and a great
world-flood, and in those respects it qualifies; but such retrospective
labelling is not very useful, since there is no sense at all in which we
can regard sf as a genre conscious of being a genre before the 19th
century. Sf proper requires a consciousness of the scientific outlook, and
it probably also requires a sense of the possibilities of change, whether
social or technological. A cognitive, scientific way of viewing the world
did not emerge until the 17th century, and did not percolate into society
at large ( FUTUROLOGY) until the 18th (partly) and the 19th (to a large
extent); a sense of the fragility of social structures and their potential
for change did not really become widespread until the political
revolutions of the late 18th century. These questions are discussed
further under PROTO SCIENCE FICTION, in which entry a number of early
scientific fictions, from Johannes KEPLER through CYRANO DE BERGERAC and
Jonathan SWIFT, along with even earlier writers, are treated.The main
elements which eventually, in varying proportions, became melded into sf

are as follows: (1) the FANTASTIC VOYAGE; (2) the UTOPIA (along with the
Anti-Utopia and the DYSTOPIA); (3) the conte philosophique, or
Philosophical Tale ( SATIRE); (4) the GOTHIC; (5) the TECHNOLOGICAL and
SOCIOLOGICAL Anticipation, especially as it developed into the US
tradition of the tale of DISCOVERY AND INVENTION in the dime novels (
DIME-NOVEL SF; EDISONADE). As with sf, these constituent genres are not
generically pure: for instance, the Fantastic Voyage is combined with the
Dystopia in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726; rev 1735); the
Gothic is combined with the Anticipation in The Mummy! (1827) by Jane
LOUDON.The two figures most important to sf in the early 19th century were
Mary SHELLEY and Edgar Allan POE, both of whom wrote Gothic romances
informed with a degree of scientific speculation, standing out in this
respect from isolated, freakish speculations such as Captain Adam
SEABORN's Symzonia (1820), one of the earliest of the many novels based on
the idea of a HOLLOW EARTH, and A Voyage to the Moon (1827) by Joseph
ATTERLEY. By the middle of the century a number of US writers, in
particular, were making use of sf elements in their work, notably
Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, Herman MELVILLE and Fitz-James O'BRIEN, as was Lord
LYTTON in the UK. In the 1860s Jules VERNE began to publish something more
strongly resembling modern sf than anything written by his predecessors.
His books were described as "Extraordinary Voyages" by his publisher; many
of them deal directly with the impact of NEAR-FUTURE technology. After
Verne, and to some extent because of his success, the sf trickle became a
torrent.The next figure whose work had a truly transformative impact on
early sf was H.G. WELLS, in many of whose stories which began to be
published in the 1890s the Gothic, the Utopia and the Anticipation are
closely bound together and reworked into a form which all readers today
recognize as inarguably sf. Most sf since Wells's has adhered more or less
closely to the Wellsian balances between abstract speculation and
characterization and between scientific and sociological
speculation.Though Wells's achievement was great, it is too simple by far
to imagine as earlier accounts of the genre did to a greater or lesser
extent that sf jumped straight from Verne to Wells and then exploded into
the form we know today. Wells had many contemporaries who wrote sf, and
many predecessors; between the publication of Verne's first sf novel, Cinq
semaines en ballon (1863; trans as Five Weeks in a Balloon, or Journeys
and Discoveries in Africa, by Three Englishmen 1869 US), and Wells's
first, THE TIME MACHINE (1895 US; rev 1895 UK), the genre had been
consolidating and expanding. Notable titles from the period are, in
chronological order: The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868) by Edward S.
ELLIS, "The Brick Moon" (1869) by Edward Everett HALE, The Battle of
Dorking (1871 chap) by George T. CHESNEY, The Coming Race (1871) by
Lytton, Erewhon (1872) by Samuel BUTLER, Recits de l'infini (1872 France;
trans as Stories of Infinity: Lumen 1873) by Camille FLAMMARION, Frank
Reade and his Steam Man of the Plains (as "The Steam Man of the Plains"
1876; 1892) by Harry Enton ( FRANK READE LIBRARY), She (1887) by H. Rider
HAGGARD, Across the Zodiac (1880) by Percy GREG, Flatland (1884) by Edwin
A. ABBOTT, After London (1885) by Richard JEFFERIES, L'Eve future (1886;
trans as The Eve of the Future 1981 US) by VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM,
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis STEVENSON,
"Les xiphuz" (1887; trans as "The Shapes") by J.H. ROSNY an, A Crystal Age

(1887) by W.H. HUDSON, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) by Edward
BELLAMY, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) by Mark TWAIN,
A Plunge into Space (1890) by Robert CROMIE, News from Nowhere (1890) by
William MORRIS, Olga Romanoff (1894) by George GRIFFITH, A Journey to Mars
(1894) by Gustavus POPE, and The Call of the Cosmos (1895 Russia; trans
1963) by Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY. The above list is highly selective; it is
only as a result of recent bibliographical research carried out by many
scholars including Tom CLARESON, I.F. CLARKE, Lyman Tower SARGENT, Darko
SUVIN and pre-eminently Everett F. BLEILER in Science-Fiction: The Early
Years (dated 1990 but 1991) that we have become able to see how radically
incomplete it is. Bleiler lists 618 sf works (stories and novels) for this
same period 1863-95. Despite the comparative lack of well remembered names
among the authors of sf in that period, it is now clear that the last
three decades of the 19th century were the seed-bed for the modern genre.
Wells did not spring from nowhere; he refined an existing tradition.In the
1880s and after, many new and inexpensive MAGAZINES appeared, and quite a
few of them published sf stories, as did the dime novels ( DIME-NOVEL SF)
in the USA and the BOYS' PAPERS in the UK a little later, and with the
advent of the PULP MAGAZINES (as opposed to the "slicks") in the late
1890s the market for magazine sf expanded still more. These changes meant
that sf was for the first time finding a truly popular audience, but one
whose expectations of literature were often crude; the prime demand was
for an action-packed story. By Wells's time a rift between the SCIENTIFIC
ROMANCE and pulp sf was beginning to open.Several of the pre-Wells titles
listed above initiated subgenres which were to prove popular. The Steam
Man of the Prairies inaugurated sf in dime-novel format, usually featuring
boys involved in the creation and use of marvellous inventions (these were
the years when Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931] was becoming a national hero
in the USA; EDISONADE). Sf dime novels continued until the 1900s, at which
time they were gradually replaced by such JUVENILE SERIES as TOM SWIFT and
by the stories in the new PULP MAGAZINES. H. Rider Haggard's She, a great
success, led to the massive popularity of the LOST-WORLD romance; this
continued with some vitality into the 1930s, and is not quite extinct even
today. George T. Chesney's The Battle of Dorking ushered in the era of the
future- WAR story, which often featured INVASION, perhaps the most popular
of all the fringe sf genres in the late 19th century. Wells's THE WAR OF
THE WORLDS (1898) popularized the extraterrestrial invasion. Future-war
stories remain popular today, especially in interstellar venues, but their
great era ended with the start of WWI, which so devastatingly failed to
fulfil future-war writers' expectations of a vivid and rapidly concluded
conflict.The earlier potted histories of sf that jumped from Verne (1863)
to Wells (1895) tended to do the same for the years between Wells and AMZ
(1926), as if the intervening years were comparatively empty. Yet the
period 1895-1926 is considerably more packed than even 1863-95. There is
not space here to give titles; authors whose sf largely appeared in the
first instance in magazines include Frank AUBREY, Edgar Rice BURROUGHS,
William Wallace COOK, Ray CUMMINGS, George Allan ENGLAND, Ralph Milne
FARLEY, Homer Eon FLINT, Austin HALL, Murray LEINSTER, A. MERRITT, Victor
ROUSSEAU and Garrett P. SERVISS; those primarily remembered for book
publication include Edwin Lester ARNOLD, J.D. BERESFORD, Karel CAPEK, J.J.
CONNINGTON, Arthur Conan DOYLE, E.M. FORSTER, Owen GREGORY, Will N.

HARBEN, Milo HASTINGS, William Hope HODGSON, Fred T. JANE, Rudyard
KIPLING, Kurd LASSWITZ, David LINDSAY, Jack LONDON, John MASTIN, E.V.
ODLE, Max PEMBERTON, Maurice RENARD, M.P. SHIEL, Guy THORNE, E. Charles
VIVIAN, Edgar WALLACE, S. Fowler WRIGHT and Yevgeny ZAMIATIN.From an sf
point of view, the most important magazines before the arrival of the
specialist sf magazines were those published by Frank A. MUNSEY in the USA
and, in the UK, PEARSON'S MAGAZINE and PEARSON'S WEEKLY. Many reputations
were made in the magazines, the most influential being that of Edgar Rice
Burroughs; his first work was "Under the Moons of Mars", which appeared in
1912 in Munsey's ALL-STORY MAGAZINE as by Norman Bean and later in book
form, expanded as A PRINCESS OF MARS (1917), under his own name.
Burroughs's great popularity did much to skew magazine sf away from
scientific and social speculation towards the PLANETARY ROMANCE adventures
in colourful and usually primitive other-worldly landscapes in effect
creating the genre which would later become known as SCIENCE FANTASY.By
1926 the split between mainstream and genre sf was becoming pronounced;
mainstream sf is explained in detail in MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF, but here
we can briefly say that it is sf by writers (often already established as
authors of non-sf novels and stories) working outside the traditions of
magazine sf, and who often (though not always) appear to be ignorant of
the very existence of those traditions. At worst, this leads to an
inordinate amount of re-inventing the wheel; at best, writers like Olaf
STAPLEDON or John GLOAG or Aldous HUXLEY or Andr MAUROIS have been free to
write serious books for adults without the constrictions imposed by
PULP-MAGAZINE editors aiming at a predominantly juvenile and not
especially literate readership. But it is only with hindsight that we can
refer to these authors as mainstream: because "science fiction"as a
marketing label was not a term widely used in the USA in the 1930s and was
hardly used at all in the UK before the 1950s, we can hardly be surprised
if writers in the UK failed to adhere to sf's generic protocols. Is there
any point in calling a river the main stream before the tributary
exists?However, Olaf Stapledon did not write in a vacuum, any more than
had his predecessor H.G. Wells. Brian M. STABLEFORD, in Scientific Romance
in Britain 1890-1950 (1985), makes a powerful case for the Scientific
Romance, tales characterized by a moderate gloom ( OPTIMISM AND
PESSIMISM), long temporal perspectives ( EVOLUTION) and a paucity of
HEROES. Arguably many Scientific-Romance authors-who tend to be regarded
by modern critics (especially in the USA) as mainstreamwere in fact
conscious of writing in an sf tradition, but one rather different from
that developing in the US magazines: it was UK-based, and it was nurtured
in hardcover books rather than magazines, but for all practical purposes
it was indeed an sf tradition. In the UK it is only since the 1940s that
the magazine GENRE-SF tradition and the Scientific Romance tradition have
really merged, in the work of Arthur C. CLARKE, John WYNDHAM and others.
GENRE SF was usually published in the first instance in magazine format
(at least until the paperback book revolution of the 1950s). The first
English-language magazine devoted wholly to sf was AMAZING STORIES,
founded in 1926 by Hugo GERNSBACK; it was subtitled "The Magazine of
Scientifiction" ( SCIENTIFICTION). Many SF MAGAZINES followed, although
not in large numbers before the 1940s. The usual modern term "science
fiction" was hardly used before the early 1930s, and did not pass into

general parlance before John W. CAMPBELL Jr took over the editorship of
ASF. But genre sf was becoming readily distinguishable as a separate
entity. Until the 1960s the perception of middle-class readers was that sf
by authors like Aldous HUXLEY, George ORWELL and George R. STEWART was
"respectable" (they would probably not have described it as sf) while
genre sf was not. Perhaps to rectify this sort of prejudice, most of the
earlier books about sf heavily emphasized genre sf, and in so doing
distorted the history of sf as a whole. A high proportion (although less
than half) of the authors represented in this volume are not genre-sf
writers, and those who published before, say, 1955, might not even have
understood the "sf" label had it been applied to their work, which it
almost invariably was not (and in many cases is not today). The standard
histories usually give a passing nod to Huxley and Orwell, but the sheer
scale of sf publication outside the magazine tradition is still not
generally realized-works by writers as diverse as John COLLIER and L.P.
HARTLEY, William GOLDING, C.S. LEWIS, Oscar LEWIS, Sinclair LEWIS and
Wyndham LEWIS, Vladimir NABOKOV and Rex WARNER and Herman WOUK.In the
1930s, indeed, magazine sf was at rather a low ebb, though at this time
the new subgenre of SPACE OPERA was being developed almost entirely within
the magazines. The extraordinary growth in sf publishing since WWII has
caused us to forget its relative unimportance up to the end of the 1930s.
Out of many hundreds of specialized pulp magazines, only a few were
devoted to sf; it is unlikely that, in those days, sf had more than 2-3
per cent of the pulp market. Many magazine-sf writers turned their hand to
any of half a dozen pulp genres. It was not until a generation of sf
specialists began publishing in the magazines at the end of the decade
that the so-called Golden Age of (magazine) sf began. There were
specialist forerunners of course, notable among them being John W.
CAMPBELL Jr (often writing as Don A. Stuart), Edmond HAMILTON, E.E. "Doc"
SMITH, John TAINE, Stanley G. WEINBAUM and Jack WILLIAMSON; but little of
it is as enjoyable to read now as once it was. Magazine sf of the 1930s is
important mainly for what it led to, especially when Campbell took over
the editorship of ASF in Oct 1937 (for the detailed story ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION and GOLDEN AGE OF SF), and magazine sf began to become
mature; during 1938-46 many of its most celebrated writers Isaac ASIMOV,
Alfred BESTER, James BLISH, Arthur C. CLARKE, Robert A. HEINLEIN, Frederik
POHL, A.E. VAN VOGT and many others made their dbuts.The sf that was
published in the magazines during the Golden Age was to be the basis of
the sf book-publishing boom which in both hardcovers and paperback, first
by specialist SMALL PRESSES and then by mass-market publishers was a
phenomenon of the 1950s and has continued unabated ever since. At first
the majority of these sf books reprinted their material directly from the
magazines. The gradual shift of emphasis from magazine to book publication
(until the late 1960s, unlike the case in any other branch of literature,
prior publication in a magazine was still the rule rather than the
exception) won genre sf a much larger readership than ever before; by the
1970s sf constituted around 10 per cent of all English-language fiction
published, and with the growing readership came a greater public
acceptance of sf as "respectable". Sf book publishing is discussed under
the rubrics SF PUBLISHING and ANTHOLOGIES.The increase in maturity of
genre sf during the 1940s was only relative. Most sf publishers from 1926

seem to have assumed that their main readership was made up of teenage
boys, as is obvious in both editorial and advertising material right
through the era of the sf PULP MAGAZINES at least to 1950 and after. The
publisher Donald A. WOLLHEIM is on record as believing this, and we can
see confirmation in the remarkable but adventure-story-oriented sf lists
he edited from the 1950s, first at ACE BOOKS and later at DAW BOOKS. A
similar targeting of the young readership has been adopted successfully by
DEL REY BOOKS. On the other hand, Jim BAEN, editor of GALAXY SCIENCE
FICTION in the mid-1970s, believes surveys support him in showing that the
readership reaches its median age in the mid-20s. No market surveys yet
carried out have been extensive or reliable enough to prove the point one
way or the other, though it has long been obvious that there is actually
more than one sf market. Whatever the truth of the matter, the belief that
the readership was young and primarily male was sufficient to discourage
genre sf from including complex or experimental writing; the vocabulary of
the pulp magazines, while vigorous, was mostly undemanding. Before the
cultural shifts of the 1960s, which affected all fiction publishing, genre
sf normally observed TABOOS about SEX, bad language and RELIGION. Even in
the 1970s these taboos were ingrained deeply enough to cause some able
writers to abandon sf altogether, or to talk publishers into printing
their books without the ghetto-izing "sf" label on the cover.The
domination of Campbellian sf within the genre began to falter with the
inauguration of two important new magazines, The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND
SCIENCE FICTION in 1949 and GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION in 1950. The former
emphasized literacy and style to an extent unprecedented in sf-magazine
publishing, and the latter specialized in witty SATIRE, often sociological
rather than technological, written by such important writers as Alfred
BESTER, C.M. KORNBLUTH and Frederik POHL, Robert SHECKLEY, William TENN
and, occasionally, Philip K. DICK. During the 1950s and 1960s, the
emphasis of genre sf shifted from the hard sciences (engineering,
astronomy, physics, etc.) to the SOFT SCIENCES (sociology, psychology,
etc.). Stories of PSI POWERS and ESP had been popular ever since the first
appearance of A.E. van Vogt's SLAN (1940 ASF; 1946; rev 1951), but they
absolutely boomed in the 1950s; the market eventually became saturated (as
it did at about the same time with flying-saucer stories; UFOS), and the
psi story subsided to a lower though constant level in the 1960s. The
1950s were also notable for the first real sf boom in the movies ( CINEMA;
MONSTER MOVIES), though the films were rather different from most written
sf of the period. The most obvious change in 1950s sf is surprisingly
seldom discussed: the shift in protagonists from highly trained,
self-reliant and in control of events to baffled, ordinary and subject to
manipulation by the powerful in society.As worries about POLITICS, ECOLOGY
and OVERPOPULATION grew in the 1960s, an already perceptible shift away
from simple optimism began to accelerate ( OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM). This
move is much connected in readers' minds with the advent of the NEW WAVE,
though this was never an easily definable movement indeed, it was not an
organized movement at all and its outward signs lay as much in a greater
willingness to adopt more complex narrative strategies as in any generally
downbeat attitude. But pessimism in sf certainly did increase in the late
1960s, reflecting massive cultural changes taking place in Europe and the
USA, as did left-wing political attitudes; most previous genre sf had

either been dead to POLITICS or had adopted a stance interpreted by many
as right-wing ( LIBERTARIANISM; SOCIAL DARWINISM). The late 1960s were
also notable for seizing on the idea of ENTROPY as a useful all-purpose
metaphor.Isaac Asimov, looking back from 1981, described magazine sf of
1926-38 as "adventure dominant", that of 1939-50 as "technology dominant",
and that of 1950 on as "sociology dominant". James E. Gunn preferred to
describe the Campbell years as "science-dominant", and added a fourth
category, "style dominant", for the period beginning in the mid-1960s.
John CLUTE's shorthand account, given in 1992, is rather different: "In
1942 . . . the inner tale of sf was a tale of empire . . . in 1952, it was
hubris . . . in 1962, solipsism . . . in 1972, retribution . . . in 1982,
memory . . . in 1992, the inner tale of sf is a tale of exogamy." This,
though an initially cryptic-seeming formulation, is one for which most
readers would find it surprisingly simple to provide supporting
examples.By the 1960s sf was being read so much more widely than before
that its ideas, and its iconography generally, had begun dramatically to
feed back into mainstream fiction previously the intellectual traffic had
been mostly the other way. While some writers, such as Kurt VONNEGUT Jr,
J.G. BALLARD and Michael MOORCOCK, succeeded (to varying degrees) in
shrugging off the sf taint, other writers were embracing sf, so that,
although it might be controversial to claim some of the works of Angela
CARTER, Romain GARY, Russell HOBAN, Thomas PYNCHON and Angus WILSON (and
many others) as pure sf, there is little question that their thrillers,
romances or fabulations drew on sf among their more obvious sources.Since
1960 there has been a complex cross-fertilization of genres. While, at the
intellectual end of the spectrum, FABULATIONS have been making more and
more use of sf images and themes, at the popular end fantasy, horror and
DISASTER novels have borrowed heavily from sf, as has the bestseller
(itself now a definable genre). As an example of the latter, The Crash of
'79 (1976) by Paul E. ERDMAN is pure sf extrapolation, though it uses the
conventional narrative strategies of the bestseller in its tale of
NEAR-FUTURE disaster in POLITICS and ECONOMICS. Barbara HAMBLY and David
GEMMELL are only two of the writers who import sf elements into their
fantasies. At the beginning of the 1990s, generic labelling is less
insistent than it was a decade earlier, and bookshops regularly place sf
on the same shelves as fantasy and horror (as, indeed, they have for a
long time); in some cases the books are by the same authors.With
hindsight, it might seem that sf as a separate, definable genre was a
phenomenon of, say, 1926-65. By the 1990s hard sf, arguably the heart of
the genre in an earlier era, had shrunk to a comparatively small section
of the overall sf market. A significant cultural change took place in 1992
when the SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA officially agreed to admit
fantasy and horror writers to their ranks (in practice, many had been
there for years), the organization changing its name to the Science
Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Many of the stories in Gardner
DOZOIS's Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies are so far removed from
their generic roots that they would not appear out of place in, say, The
New Yorker. At the same time, a Postmodernist ( POSTMODERNISM AND SF)
nostalgia for sf of an earlier, simpler period became apparent from the
number of pastiche works published by sf writers in the 1980s and 1990s
that referred selfconsciously and often to the genre's own history. (Three

early examples are Michael MOORCOCK's Dancers at the End of Time sequence,
Brian W. ALDISS's Frankenstein Unbound [1973] and Christopher PRIEST's The
Space Machine [1976].) The ages of development and consolidation have
passed, it sometimes seems, to be replaced by an age of rococo decoration.
While these developments have been more obvious since the late 1980s, they
are no more than a culmination of a genre-mixing process that has been
continuing since the New Wave of the 1960s. An important strand in this
has been the commercial success of sf, largely catalysed by films, notably
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), STAR WARS (1977), and Steven SPIELBERG's
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977) and E.T.: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL
(1982). The result of this success was a much greater awareness in the
1980s of sf as a commercial "product" to be packaged like any other, and
aimed at the juvenile end of the market. The 1980s rapidly became a
bibliographer's nightmare, with the proliferation of various BRAIDS and
TIES, many of them SHARECROPS: tv and film novelizations and spin-offs,
SERIES, SHARED WORLDS, GAME-WORLDS and so on. Most of these categories had
existed earlier, but never on the massive scale of the 1980s and the
present. Though patient readers could find good work within them, the
commercial imperatives generating them led all too obviously to an
absolute deluge of hack work, far greater than had been visible in sf book
publishing previously. Many sf authors have argued that this mass of
"product" is drowning out the individuality of what publishers call the
midlist: that portion of their booklist that sells reliably if not in huge
numbers, and without much in the way of promotionthe portion to which
books by most of the better sf authors belong. Fortunately, apocalyptic
premonitions of sf's imminent death by drowning seem (as usual) premature;
if anything, greater numbers of exciting sf writers emerged in the 1980s
than in the 1970s. Sf, by marrying outside the genre (one of the meanings
of "exogamy" in Clute's terms), is more likely to disappear by a
generalized cultural absorption than through neglect. At the beginning of
the 1980s LOCUS was listing about 180 new English-language genre-sf novels
each year; by the end of the decade the figure was about 280 (the Locus
figures are likely to be on the low side). This is not necessarily a proof
of the genre's health, but it certainly does not look like a symptom of
terminal illness.By the end of the 1980s the sf-film boom was wavering
and, as ever, sf on tv was still not having the good fortune that eager
producers intending to ride on the film boom of the early 1980s kept (and
still keep) hoping for, generally destroying all hope of real success by
playing it safe and producing programmes of staggering banality. The few
surviving professional sf magazines had dwindling circulations, even ISAAC
ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE (founded 1977), which could be regarded
as the only new US sf magazine to approach the high quality of what had
been the big three: ASF, FSF and Galaxy. In another part of the sf
landscape the news was more cheerful: as desktop publishing, using
comparatively cheap home computers, became possible, there was in the
mid-1980s a proliferation of SEMIPROZINES, some containing fiction, some
containing criticism, and some both. These magazines, even though usually
of quite small circulation, soon proved something of a nursery and a
debating ground for many young writers; this compensated, to a degree, for
the shrinking of the professional-magazine market.The most exciting sf
event of the 1980s was the advent of CYBERPUNK (with William GIBSON and

Bruce STERLING cast as its prophets); despite the obvious hyperbole with
which it was greeted by the media publicity machines, cyberpunk certainly
represented a real invigoration of the genre and came closer than anything
else in the period to revitalizing hard sf as well. [PN]Further reading: A
very much fuller account of sf's history can be gained by following up the
various cross-references in the above entry. Many ANTHOLOGIES of sf from
specific periods are available, and book reprint series have brought older
works back into the light. Numerous books on the history of sf are
discussed under CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF.
HITCHCOCK, RAYMOND (JOHN)
(1922- ) Indian-born UK writer and cartoonist whose Percy books - Percy
(1969) (filmed in 1971 as Percy) and Percy's Progress * (1972), filmed in
1974 - find mirth in penis transplantation. Venus 13: A Cautionary Space
Tale (1972) also deals lightly with sex, depicting the complications that
surround a eugenic mating in a space satellite. [JC]
HITCH HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, THE
Tv series (1981). BBC TV. Written and created by Douglas ADAMS, prod Alan
J.W. Bell, associate prod John Lloyd, starring Simon Jones as Arthur Dent,
David Dixon as Ford Prefect, Mark Wing-Davey as Zaphod Beeblebrox and
Sandra Dickinson as Trillian. 6 35min episodes, re-edited to 7 episodes
for first US release. Colour.This tv serial began life in 1978 as a
6-episode radio series (officially numbered Fit the First through Sixth)
followed the same year by a one-off Fit the Seventh, with 5 more episodes
in 1980 (2 cowritten with its producer John Lloyd, who also received a
production credit on the tv series). This had built up a massive (for
radio) cult following; commercially released recordings of the radio
broadcasts sold widely. Adams then turned his scripts into the bestselling
novels The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) and The Restaurant at
the End of the Universe (1980), with two further volumes later. The tv
version was largely based on the first 6 radio episodes, only slightly on
the subsequent 6; many scenes from the radio series were not included in
the books. Adams had substantial tv experience, having been a script
editor on DR WHO. The tv series was very funny indeed (although less liked
by many aficionados than the original radio version) and was notable for
the sophisticated graphics with which the eponymous talking Guidebook
itself was animated. The series belongs to a very English school of
comparatively deadpan (and somewhat cruel) absurd humour, based on the
implicit premise that the Universe is arbitrary and unkind, especially to
the English, and suffers from galloping ENTROPY. Although US tv seldom
produces work of this sort, the programme was successful there also,
although not to the same extent as in the UK. It is often replayed, and is
available on video, slightly expanded, with average episodes of 40 rather
than 35 mins. [PN]
HITLER WINS
For nearly half a century it has been an enjoyable creative exercise to
imagine what kind of ALTERNATE WORLD might have evolved had Germany won
WWII, and many novels and stories have been written to explore that
assumption. But the first Hitler-wins tales were not exercises in
reconstructing history; Swastika Night (1937) by Murray Constantine (

Katharine BURDEKIN), was not set in an alternate world, and nor were the
several others published 1939-45. Any Hitler-wins story published before
the end of WWII falls under the general category of the future- WAR or
INVASION tale, and was almost certainly designed as a dreadful warning of
the consequences of defeat. Examples include Loss of Eden (1940; vt If
Hitler Comes 1941) by Douglas Brown (1907- ) and Christopher Serpell, Then
We Shall Hear Singing (1942) by Storm JAMESON, Grand Canyon (1942) by Vita
SACKVILLE-WEST, When the Bells Rang (1943) by Anthony ARMSTRONG and Bruce
Graeme (1900-1982), and When Adolf Came (1943) by Martin HAWKIN. A
subcategory - novels in which Hitler seems about to win, but loses an
important battle or secret at the last moment - includes many borderline
tales of warfare and espionage; among the serious examples are detailed
fictional prognoses like Fred ALLHOFF's Lightning in the Night (1939
Liberty; 1979), which predicts a US readiness to use nuclear weapons
against Germany as a final resort.The death of Hitler in 1945 marked the
end of the real WWII in Europe, but for any number of reasons - the
astonishing intensity of the evil he represented; the dreadful clarity of
the consequences had the Allies failed; the melodramatic intensity of the
conflict itself, with the whole war seeming (then and later) to turn on
linchpin decisions and events; and (shamingly) the cheap aesthetic appeal
of Nazism, with its Art Deco gear, its brutal elites, its Blitzes and
Panzer strikes, its secrecy and paranoia - WWII very soon became a focus
for speculative thought, and it was only a few months before the first
alternate-world Hitler-wins tale was published (in HUNGARY): Laszlo
Gaspar's Mi, I. Adolf ["We, Adolf 1"] (1945). The first significant
example in English was SARBAN's THE SOUND OF HIS HORN (1952), which
sinuously intertwines sadism and aesthetics into a vision of decadence
with roots in Germany's mythic past. This book may have influenced - and
certainly served as a tonal precedent for - several works both within the
field, like Keith ROBERTS's "Weihnachtsabend" (1972), and outside it, as
in non-alternate-history novels of Germany like Gabriel Fielding's The
Birthday King (1962) and Michel Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes (1970; trans
Barbara Bray as The Erl-King 1972 UK).The most famous single Hitler-wins
sf tale is probably Philip K. DICK's THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE (1962), in
which Hitler's victory becomes a kind of poisonous backdrop for a complex
tale; and the most telling commentary on the moral underside of the
subgenre is Norman SPINRAD's The Iron Dream (1972), in which the young
Hitler, a failure at politics, becomes a pulp novelist whose tale Lord of
the Swastika exploits, to savagely ironic effect, some of the responses of
many readers to tales of "genuine" Nazi triumph.Half a century after the
end of WWII, new Hitler-wins stories are less common, but the number
written during this intervening period has been remarkable. They include
Hilary BAILEY's "The Fall of Frenchy Steiner" (1964), Otto BASIL's Wenn
das der Fuhrer wusste (1966; cut trans Thomas Weyr as The Twilight Men
1968 US), Greg BEAR's "Though Road No Whither" (1985), David BRIN's "Thor
Meets Captain America" (1986), Len DEIGHTON's SS-GB (1978), J.R. DUNN's
"Crux Gammata" (1992), David DVORKIN's Budspy (1987), Gordon EKLUND's "Red
Skins" (1981), Harlan ELLISON's STAR TREK teleplay "The City on the Edge
of Forever" (shown 1967), Gary Gygax's and Terry Stafford's Victorious
German Arms: An Alternate Military History of World War II (1973 chap),
Robert Harris's Fatherland (1992), James P. HOGAN's The Proteus Operation

(1985), Trevor HOYLE's Q: Through the Eye of Time (1977), the film IT
HAPPENED HERE (1966), C.M. KORNBLUTH's "Two Dooms" (1958), Fritz LEIBER's
THE BIG TIME (1961), Brad LINAWEAVER's Moon of Ice (1988), Norman
Longmate's (1931- ) If Britain had Fallen * (1974), based on a 1972 BBC
programme, Kenneth Macksey's Invasion: The German Invasion of England,
July 1940 (1980), Richard MEREDITH's Run, Come See Jerusalem (1976), in
which the Nazis do eventually lose, though only after nuking Chicago,
Frederic MULLALLY's Hitler has Won (1975), Eric NORDEN's The Ultimate
Solution (1973), Andre NORTON's The Crossroads of Time (1956)and And All
the King's Men (1990) by Gordon Stevens (1945- ).An interesting theme
anthology is Hitler Victorious (anth 1986) ed Gregory BENFORD and Martin
Harry GREENBERG, which contains several of the stories listed above. Peter
FLEMING's Invasion 1940 (1957; vt Operation Sea Lion 1957 US) describes in
great detail the preparations Germany made to invade the UK in 1940,
speculating in the last chapter on what might have happened had a
successful invasion occurred. WWII, Fleming suggests, might in that event
have been won by Hitler. [JC]
HIVE-MINDS
A hive-mind is the organizing principle of the community in those insect
species of which the basic reproductive unit is the hive, organized around
a single fertile female, the queen. The term is used more loosely in some
sf stories, often referring to any situation in which minds are linked in
such a way that the whole becomes dominant over the parts.Because the
organization of social-insect communities is so very different from that
of mammal communities, while showing a degree of structural complexity
comparable only to human societies, ants and their kindred have always
held a particular fascination for sf writers, and the ant-nest is the most
obvious model for an ALIEN society. Early expressions of this fascination
include "The Empire of the Ants" (1905) by H.G. WELLS, "The Adventures of
Professor Emmett" (1939) by Ben HECHT, "The Ant with the Human Soul"
(1932) by Bob OLSEN, "Doomsday Deferred" (1949) by Will F. Jenkins (Murray
LEINSTER) and "Come and Go Mad" (1949) by Fredric BROWN. Wells's THE FIRST
MEN IN THE MOON (1901) was the first of many to depict an alien
hive-society. Giant ants and wasps are among the standard figures of
menace employed by sf writers; notable examples are found in Ralph Milne
FARLEY's The Radio Man (1924 Argosy; 1948), Frank A. RIDLEY's The Green
Machine (1926), Alfred Gordon BENNETT's The Demigods (1939), the film
THEM! (1954) and Keith ROBERTS's The Furies (1966). Real-world scares
concerning "killer bees" have been reflected in such novels as Arthur
HERZOG's The Swarm (1974) and the associated Irwin ALLEN film. "The Empire
of the Ants" and other stories portray hive-insects as serious contenders
to end human domination of Earth, but Frank HERBERT's The Green Brain
(1966) imagines a multispecies insect hive evolving in order to protect
the world's ecological balance against the short-sighted policies of
humankind.Most sf novels which imagine hivelike human societies find the
idea repugnant, and it is often cited as the ultimate totalitarian
DYSTOPIA; examples include The Human Termites (1929 AMZ: 1979) by David H.
KELLER, The Riddle of the Tower (1944) by J.D. BERESFORD and Esme
Wynne-Tyson and Morrow's Ants (1975) by Edward HYAMS. L. Sprague DE CAMP's
wry Rogue Queen (1951) features the revolutionary overthrow of a hivelike

state. Some recent sf writers have been more conscientiously ambivalent examples include T.J. BASS's Half Past Human (1971), Frank Herbert's
Hellstrom's Hive (1973) and Robert SILVERBERG's The Queen of Springtime
(1989) - but their eventual verdict remains negative. Less hivelike
group-minds are not uncommon in sf stories dealing with ESP, and the idea
that some kind of group-mind represents the evolutionary destiny of the
species crops up frequently; it figures extensively as an image of
transcendental social harmony in Olaf STAPLEDON's Last and First Men
(1930) and Star Maker (1937), and is memorably developed in Theodore
STURGEON's More than Human (1953) and "To Marry Medusa" (1958; exp vt The
Cosmic Rape 1958) and in Arthur C. CLARKE's Childhood's End (1953). The
loss of individuality is, however, still seen as a horrific prospect in
such novels as Enemies of the System (1978) by Brian W. ALDISS and Dusha
Mira (1964; trans Antonina W. Bouis as World Soul 1978 US) by Mikhail
EMTSEV and Eremei PARNOV.The ambivalence with which many recent sf stories
regard hive-minds derives mainly from the association of group-minds with
the notion of transcendent EVOLUTION, but there has also been a tendency
for recent sf writers calculatedly to question the assumptions made by
their forerunners. Thus, whereas in Starship Troopers (1959) Robert A.
HEINLEIN was content to assume that human individualism and alien
hive-organization must fight a fundamental Darwinian struggle for
existence, Joe HALDEMAN was prepared to suggest in The Forever War (1974)
that mankind might be greatly enriched by making peace with the aliens.
The alien hive-minds in Barrington J. BAYLEY's "The Bees of Knowledge"
(1975) and Keith LAUMER's Star Colony (1981) are treated with some
respect, and Orson Scott CARD followed up the genocidal Ender's Game (1977
ASF; exp 1985) with Speaker for the Dead (1986), in which the
guilt-stricken hero searches for a suitable home for the last surviving
alien queen. The most detailed and sympathetic sf image of an alien
hive-society is that in Serpent's Reach (1982) by C.J. CHERRYH; another
clever deployment is in Linda STEELE's Ibis (1985), an ironic account of a
love affair between an alien female and a human male. The actual genetic
politics of hive-organization - revelation of which has been the greatest
triumph of the sociobiology of Edmund O. Wilson (1929- ) - whereby the
misnamed "queen" stands revealed as a helpless sex-slave forced to work to
the genetic advantage of her sisters, has not yet found significant
reflection in sf. [BS]See also: COMMUNICATION; LIVING WORLDS; POLITICS;
SUPERMAN.
HJORTSBERG, WILLIAM (REINHOLD)
(1941- ) US writer, much of whose work - like his first novel, Alp
(1969), or his third, Toro! Toro! Toro! (1974) - is FABULATION. Gray
Matters (1971), which is sf, grounds its fantastic episodes in a future
UTOPIA where people are reborn ( REINCARNATION) from entombment as
"Cerebromorphs" within an enormous CYBERNETIC complex only when they have
achieved some transcendence of their personal identities. Falling Angel
(1978), filmed as Angel Heart (1987), grippingly marries detection and
horror in a secret-sharer tale of striking grimness. [JC]Other works:
Symbiography (1973); Tales and Fables (coll 1985 chap).
H-K PUBLICATIONS

COMET.
HLOUCHA, KAREL
[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
H-MAN, THE
BIJO TO EKITAI NINGEN.
HOAXES
Most people know what happened when Orson Welles read The War of the
Worlds on radio in 1938. Hearing of an invasion by Martians, many
listeners headed for the hills. But this wasn’t the first time that the
public fell for a science fiction tale.In 1838 the New York Sun published
a series of articles about the eminent astronomer, Sir John Herschel.
Using a new and powerful telescope, one article said, Herschel could see
that the moon was populated by humanoid figures with batlike wings. The
reports caused a sensation. Eventually the newspaper admitted that one of
its reporters had fabricated what became known as "The Moon Hoax."Nine
years later, the New York Sun published as true Edgar Allen Poe’s story
about a hot air balloon that had blown across the Atlantic Ocean. Although
the "Balloon Hoax" was exposed as false in less than one day, the story
influenced French writer Jules Verne when he wrote Five Weeks in a Balloon
and Around the World in Eighty Days.
HOBAN, RUSSELL (CONWELL)
(1925- ) US-born writer and illustrator, in the UK from 1969. After
serving in WWII, he worked in advertising and tv until the mid-1960s,
becoming a full-time writer in 1967. Most of his many titles are
children's books, about 50 of them being illustrated texts for younger
children, like the first, What Does It Do and How Does It Work? (1959),
and (to mention only one of many stunning fables) La Corona and the Tin
Frog (1974 Puffin Annual; 1979 chap). Although not sf, his early
masterpiece for children cannot go unnoticed: the potent allegorical
burden of The Mouse and his Child (1967) may in fact have hampered its
acceptance by the younger readers for whom it was ostensibly written, for
the epic quest of a clockwork mouse and his son for a secure haven - where
they will no longer need to undergo the existential trauma of needing to
be rewound - is metaphorically dense and abidingly melancholy, and the
Dolls' House they eventually reach does not absolve them from their own
form of mortality. In other words, The Mouse and his Child, like all the
greatest children's books, is best read twice: as a child, and again
later.It was not until the 1970s that RH began to write the adult novels
for which he has become best known, beginning with The Lion of Boaz-Jachin
and Jachin-Boaz (1973), a FABULATION in which the raw Being of the
long-dead lion of the world is embraced by the eponymous father and son in
a moment of unity. Both Kleinzeit (1974) and Turtle Diary (1976) offer
worlds displaced by language, though not on analysis literally fantastic.
But RH's next novel, RIDDLEY WALKER (1980), for which he received the JOHN
W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD in 1982, is a genuine-and quite extraordinary sf novel, set 2000 or so years after the HOLOCAUST in southern England,
just as the barbarian societies of the land have rediscovered the use of
gunpowder. It is a situation much explored in the sf of the latter half of

the 20th century, and RH's penetration of the moral and cultural
complexities involved is acute; but what distinguishes the book from other
attempts to represent something like a full sense of how it might actually
seem to inhabit such a world is its language ( LINGUISTICS), a remarkably
inventive and internally consistent presentation of an evolved and living
tongue. The often-quoted first sentence of the novel gives something of
the flavour: "On my naming day when I come 12 I to gone front spear and
kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any
how there hadnt ben none for a long befor him nor I aint looking to see
none agen." In this tongue, legends - like the tale of the "Littl Shynin
Man the Addom" - seem told in a timeless present tense, and Riddley
Walker's own groping progress towards an understanding of the dangers of a
return to the old ways also seems told for the first time.Subsequent
novels have been fabulations of intriguing complexity, while some of the
tales assembled in The Moment under the Moment (coll 1992) are of moderate
genre interest. Pilgermann (1983) allows its 11th-century protagonist to
inhabit various eras in a kind of ghost form. The Medusa Frequency (1987)
heavily foregrounds the myths of Orpheus and Medusa in the tale of a
20th-century novelist who, like the twinned parent and son of RH's first
adult novel, strives to find the moment, or the tongue, or the tale, that
will join together in Being all that is asunder. But the later novel stops
short of finding that Story. Only in RIDDLEY WALKER do the levels seem, at
moments, to inhabit one another - do story and the world trick the eye
into seeming one. [JC]See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; DEVOLUTION; HISTORY OF SF.
HOBANA, ION
[r] ROMANIA.
HOCH, EDWARD D(ENTINGER)
(1930- ) US writer best known for his crime novels and stories. With the
short story "Co-Incidence" (1956), as by Irwin Booth, he began publishing
detection-oriented sf, later using as well the pseudonyms Stephen
Dentinger, Pat McMahon and R.L. Stevens. The numerous stories featuring
detective Simon Ark, who claims to be 2000 years old - some collected in
The Judges of Hades and Other Simon Ark Stories (coll 1971), City of Brass
and Other Simon Ark Stories (coll 1971) and The Quests of Simon Ark (1984)
- are marginal sf or fantasy. EDH's sf series featuring Earl Jazine of the
Computer Cops mixes sf and detection in action tales of 21st-century
crises involving computer crimes. The series includes "Computer Cops"
(1969), The Transvection Machine (1971), The Fellowship of the HAND (1973)
and The Frankenstein Factory (1975). Within his range, EDH is a briskly
competent storyteller. [JC]
HODDER-WILLIAMS, (JOHN) CHRISTOPHER (GLAZEBROOK)
(1926- ) UK writer, pilot, composer and sound engineer. His first novel,
The Cummings Report (1957) as by James Brogan, was not sf. He began
publishing sf with Chain Reaction (1959), which concerns itself, as does
almost all of his fiction, with the relationship between Man and the
machine technology he has created, in this case through a mystery plot
about radiation sickness spread by food. His next three novels were
aviation stories, sharing the same general theme, but since The Main
Experiment (1964) he has written only sf, almost always in the form of

novels with NEAR-FUTURE scenarios. These include Fistful of Digits (1968),
which introduces self-programming computers to an obsessive tale about
loss of individuality, and The Silent Voice (1977), about the human
brain's capacity to receive radio waves directly - to potentially ominous
effect. The Chromosome Game (1984), set 200 years after a nuclear
HOLOCAUST, grimly argues that human nature will soon, once again,
disastrously express itself in the old way. CH-W's novels combine social
and cultural concerns typical of UK post-WWII writers with somewhat
melodramatic plotting and stiff characterization of a rather
male-chauvinist variety; the effect is sometimes sharp, but more often
uneasy. [JC]Other works: The Egg-Shaped Thing (1967; the UK hardcover
edition is definitive); 98.4 (1969); Panic O'Clock (1973); Cowards'
Paradise (1974; UK paperback slightly rev); The Prayer Machine (1976); The
Thinktank that Leaked (1979).See also: GENETIC ENGINEERING; PARANOIA.
HODGART, MATTHEW (JOHN CALDWELL)
(1916- ) UK academic, Professor of English at Sussex University from
1964. His continuation of Jonathan SWIFT's Gulliver's Travels (1727), A
New Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms (1969 chap), is a SATIRE on
the 1960s upheavals in higher education in the UK. [JC]
HODGE, T. SHIRBY
Pseudonym of US writer Roger Sherman Tracy (1841-1926). His sf novel, The
White Man's Burden: A Satirical Forecast (1915), is set in AD5000, by
which period the warlike and primitive White races have been restricted to
North America while, in Black-dominated Africa, anarchism and scientific
genius have generated a UTOPIAN world. A White invasion suffers
ignominious defeat, and the narrator - a (White) interloper from the 20th
century - returns to his own time. Considering its period, the book is
remarkable for declining to treat Blacks as inherently inferior to Whites.
[JC]See also: POLITICS.
HODGKINS, DAVID C.
[s] Algis BUDRYS.
HODGSON, WILLIAM HOPE
(1877-1918) UK writer who ran away to sea in his youth and was deeply
affected by his experiences aboard ship: he never lost a profound
fascination, reflected in all his poetry and most of his stories and
essays, for the mysteries of the sea. His fantastic sea stories - the
first was "From the Tideless Sea" (1906 The London Magazine) - owe an
obvious debt to the traditions of supernatural fiction, but he derived his
horrific imagery mainly from the scientific imagination; notable examples
are "The Voice in the Night" (1907), in which castaways are transformed by
a fungus they have been obliged to eat, and "The Stone Ship" (1914), in
which an ancient wreck is raised to the surface by a volcanic eruption,
bringing many weird creatures with it. In his first novel, The Boats of
the "Glen Carrig" (1907), a ship's crew is marooned on an island near a
land of floating seaweed inhabited by bizarre and terrible lifeforms. His
second, The House on the Borderland (1908; recent paperback edns cut), is
a remarkable visionary fantasy in which a man living in a house which
apparently co-exists in two worlds undertakes an allegorical spiritual

odyssey through time and space, witnessing the destruction of the Solar
System. The Ghost Pirates (1909) also juxtaposes the known world with an
alien counterpart as a ship "slips" into intermediacy and its crew witness
strange and frightening manifestations. His last-published novel, The
Night Land (1912), describes in a peculiar mock-archaic style an epic
FAR-FUTURE journey across the face of a much altered and monstrously
populated Earth. The allegorical aspect of WHH's novels embodies a
conviction that horrid evil forces move beneath the surface of reality,
sometimes becoming vilely manifest in creatures such as the spirit which
possesses the SCIENTIST in the blasphemous fantasy "Eloi, Eloi, Lama
Sabachthani" (written 1912; 1919 as "The Baumoff Explosion") and the
entity manifested in "The Hog", the last of his Carnacki series of stories
featuring an occult detective, gathered as Carnacki the Ghost-Finder (coll
1913; exp 1947).Some of his short stories were collected in Men of the
Deep Waters (coll 1914), The Luck of the Strong (coll 1916) and Captain
Gault (coll 1917), though the last has no fantastic material. The best
were reprinted in the ARKHAM HOUSE collection Deep Waters (coll 1967 US);
Arkham had earlier reprinted all four of his novels in The House on the
Borderland and Other Novels (omni 1946 US). Some of his stories were
further reprinted in Masters of Terror, Volume One: William Hope Hodgson
(coll 1977), and some unreprinted stories were assembled in Out of the
Storm (coll 1975), which features also a biography of WHH by Sam MOSKOWITZ
that draws heavily on research conducted by R. Alain Everts, whose Strange
Company issued in 1988 a set of 15 booklets containing stories by WHH in
their magazine versions (some had been revised for book publication).
Other booklets containing previously unreprinted stories are the British
Fantasy Society's William Hope Hodgson: A Centenary Tribute 1877-1977
(coll 1977 chap) and Demons of the Sea (coll 1992 chap) ed Sam Gafford;
the latter also contains 3 of WHH's essays, including the futuristic
SATIRE "Date 1965: Modern Warfare" (1908).For some reason, possibly
involving US copyright protection, WHH arranged for privately printed
editions of drastically condensed versions of several of his books. The
short version of The Night Land, initially issued in Poems and The Dream
of X (coll 1912 chap), has been separately reprinted as The Dream of X
(1977 chap), while the abridgement of three Carnacki stories in Carnacki,
the Ghost Finder, and a Poem (coll 1910 chap) is reprinted alongside the
condensed novel from The Ghost Pirates, a Chaunty and Another Story (coll
1909 chap) in Spectral Manifestations (coll 1984 chap). Ian Bell, the
compiler of Spectral Manifestations, has also edited a collection of
essays about WHH, Voyages and Visions (anth 1987 chap). [BS]See also:
BIOLOGY; COSMOLOGY; END OF THE WORLD; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; HISTORY OF
SF;
HORROR IN SF; ISLANDS; MESSIAHS; MONSTERS; PARALLEL WORLDS; PULP
MAGAZINES; RELIGION; STARS; SUN.
HOFFMAN, LEE
Working name of US sf fan and writer Shirley Bell Hoffman (1932- ); she
was married for a time to Larry T. SHAW. LH is probably better known for
her Westerns than for her sf, which she began publishing with a short
novel, Telepower (1967 chap), following it with The Caves of Karst (1969),
Always the Black Knight (1970) and Change Song (1972). The last-named is,

typically of her work, a polished, unpretentious adventure in which a
juvenile protagonist on an unspecified planet, similar to but probably not
Earth, succeeds in acquiring self-knowledge along with adult power. In and
Out of Quandry (coll 1982 chap dos) is a short collection of essays and
tales, mostly humorous ( QUANDRY). [JC]See also: UNDER THE SEA.
HOFFMANN, E(RNST) T(HEODOR) A(MADEUS)
(1776-1822) German composer, painter, lawyer, judge and writer. About
1808 he changed his third given name from Wilhelm to Amadeus in homage to
Mozart, and for many years he thought of himself primarily as a musician,
being intensely involved in all aspects of MUSIC from composition to
criticism. His first story, "Gluck", was not written until 1809, so that
it was only in the last 15 years of his life that he turned to the artform
in which he did his most significant work: his tales. These expressed a
grotesque Romanticism more effectively than those of any other writer of
his time and, variously translated and assembled, have strongly influenced
European literature. His only completed novel, Die Elixiere des Teufels
(1813-16; trans R.P. Gillies as The Devil's Elixir 1824 UK; vt The Devil's
Elixirs 1963), typically concerns itself with a monk seduced by the Devil.
Collections of his shorter works are Fantasiestucke ["Fantasy Pieces"]
(coll 1814-15), Nachtstucke ["Night Pieces"] (coll 1816-17) and Die
Serapionsbruder (coll 1818-21; trans Alexander Ewing in 2 vols as The
Serapion Brethren 1886 and 1892, both UK); early English translations from
various sources include Hoffman's Strange Stories (coll trans anon 1855
US), Hoffmann's Fairy Tales (coll trans L. Burnham 1857 US) and Weird
Tales of E.T.W. [sic] Hoffmann (coll trans T.J. Bealby in 2 vols 1885 UK);
convenient recent assemblies include E.F. BLEILER's The Best Tales of
Hoffmann (coll of old trans 1967 US), Selected Writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann
(coll trans Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight in 2 vols 1969 US) and
Three Marchen of E.T.A. Hoffmann (coll trans Charles E. Passage 1971 US).
Three of ETAH's stories formed the basis of the opera Tales of Hoffmann
(1881) by Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880), which was filmed in 1951.ETAH,
like his celebrated successor in the GOTHIC, Edgar Allan POE, was
interested in contemporary science, and especially in the psychological
theories of Emanuel SWEDENBORG and the animal magnetism espoused by Franz
Mesmer (1734-1815); his stories in this vein have influenced later sf. His
best-known story, "Der Sandmann" ["The Sandman"] (1816), features the
sinister spectacle-maker Dr Coppelius and the beautiful automaton he
builds, with which the hero falls in love. Predating Mary SHELLEY's
Frankenstein (1818), this story is an important forerunner of ROBOT and
ANDROID stories. It formed the basis of the ballet Coppelia (1870) by Leo
Delibes (1836-1891). [JC/PN]See also: GAMES AND TOYS; GERMANY; HORROR IN
SF; MACHINES; SCIENTISTS; THEATRE.
HOFFMANN, OSKAR
[r] GERMANY; Der LUFTPIRAT UND SEIN LENKBARES LUFTSCHIFF .
HOGAN, ERNEST
(1955- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "The Rape of Things to
Come" for AMZ in 1982. His first novel, Cortez on Jupiter (1990), uses the
subversive tone of CYBERPUNK to tell the tale of a countercultural street
artist looking for fulfilment, travelling from the usual hyperbolic

NEAR-FUTURE Southern California by jagged stages to JUPITER, where he
confronts without blinking an ALIEN species with whom it has been death
for more mundane souls to speak. High Aztech (1992) is set in the
Tenochtitlan (aka Mexico City) of AD2045. There is an explosiveness about
the tale, and about EH's short fiction, which marks him as a figure of
interest for the 1990s. [JC]
HOGAN, JAMES P(ATRICK)
(1941- ) UK-born systems-design engineer and writer, in the USA from 1977
and a full-time author from 1979. His first novel (and first publication),
Inherit the Stars (1977), aroused interest for the exhilarating sense it
conveys of scientific minds at work on real problems and for the genuinely
exciting scope of the sf imagination it deploys. The book turned out to be
the first volume in the Minervan Experiment sequence, being followed by
The Gentle Giants of Ganymede (1978) and Giants' Star (1981), all three
being assembled as The Minervan Experiment (omni 1981; vt The Giants
Omnibus 1991). Much later, the sequence continued with Entoverse (1991), a
tale that laboriously expands the initial premise through the use of a
parallel universe in which, rather oddly for a writer pugnaciously
associated with the HARD-SF wing of the genre, only MAGIC can cope with
the strangeness of the physical world - in the earlier volumes of the
sequence the reader was safely in the hands of an author who brooked no
such nonsense. The sequence is in fact a hard-sf fable of humanity's
origins - we are the direct descendants of the highly aggressive
inhabitants of the destroyed fifth planet, who would have conquered the
Galaxy had they not blown themselves up - and espouses a vision of the
Universe in which other species must learn to cope with the knowledge that
we will, some day, come into our inheritance. Although JPH could not
maintain the flow of speculative thought that drove the first volumes, the
sequence stands as his best work.Other novels variously succeed in
presenting HEROES - generally clumped into male-bonded affinity groups and scientific problems of a similar nature. In The Genesis Machine (1978)
one of these heroes averts the END OF THE WORLD. In Voyage from Yesteryear
(1982) a colony world, governed according to the kind of Trickster
Libertarianism of old and honoured ASF writers like Eric Frank RUSSELL,
effortlessly faces down and flummoxes an attempt by Earth to re-establish
control. In Code of the Lifemaker (1983) a ROBOT civilization on Titan is
saved from similarly corrupt Earth corporations. But in Endgame Enigma
(1987) a NEAR-FUTURE Russian threat to dominate the world via armed
satellite is recounted with leaden flippancy, and this brought to the fore
a problem JPH has presented to his readers from the first. Though most of
them either share or accept his right-wing POLITICS, and tolerate his
editorial intrusions about personal betes-noires like the ECOLOGY
movement, JPH's extreme awkwardness as a stylist and creator of character
has made his books difficult, at times, actually to read. When he abandons
his strengths - his hard-edged sense of how SCIENTISTS think, and his
joyful capacity to stretch the terms of SPACE OPERA - this gaucheness is
difficult to ignore. It is to be hoped that he will return to the game of
thought. [JC]Other works: The Two Faces of Tomorrow (1979); Thrice Upon a
Time (1980); The Proteus Operation (1985), a HITLER-WINS story; Minds,
Machines ? The Mirror Maze (1989); The Infinity

Gambit (1991).See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; AUTOMATION; EVOLUTION;
LIBERTARIAN SF; MOON; NUCLEAR POWER; UTOPIAS.
HOGAN, ROBERT J.
[r] G-8 AND HIS BATTLE ACES; The MYSTERIOUS WU FANG .
HOLBERG, LUDVIG, [Baron]
(1684-1754) Danish playwright, essayist and historian. Born in Bergen,
Norway, LH studied at Copenhagen and settled permanently in Denmark, where
he was appointed professor at Copenhagen University, first of philosophy,
later of metaphysics and of Latin rhetoric, and finally of history (1730).
A prolific author, he published several voluminous poems, 32 comedies and
the satirical novel Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum (1741 in Latin; exp
1745; trans anon as A Journey to the World Under-Ground. By Nicolas
Klimius 1742 UK; vt The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground
1960 US; vt A Journey to the World Underground 1974 US). This is a
satirical UTOPIAN novel, deriding LH's contemporary world and inspired
primarily by Jonathan SWIFT's Gulliver's Travels (1726; rev 1735), Thomas
MORE's Utopia (Part 2 1516 in Latin; both parts 1551 in English) and
Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721). One of the most influential
18th-century SATIRES, it describes the FANTASTIC VOYAGE of Niels Klim
through a hole in a mountain (the name Holberg can be translated as
"hollow mountain") into a HOLLOW EARTH, where he finds a minute sun
circled by the planet Nazar, whose inhabitants show a societal pattern
diametrically opposed to that of the contemporary stereotype: WOMEN are
the dominant sex and males perform only menial tasks. It is notable that
Holberg's novel was considered dangerously radical in Denmark; the English
translation preceded publication in Danish by 47 years. [J-HH]See also:
BIG DUMB OBJECTS; DENMARK.
HOLBROOK, JOHN
[s] Jack VANCE.
HOLDSTOCK, ROBERT P(AUL)
(1948- ) UK writer with an MSc in medical zoology from the London School
of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He spent 1971-4 in medical research
before becoming a full-time writer, though he had published his first
story, "Pauper's Plot", for NW as early as 1968. He wrote much of his
short fiction in the following years. Among the more notable stories are
the novelettes "Travellers" (1976), a TIME-TRAVEL tale, and "The Time
Beyond Age" (1976); others are collected in In the Valley of the Statues
(coll 1982). After the mid-1970s his writing broke into two superficially
incompatible categories. Under the house names Ken BLAKE and Richard KIRK,
and as Robert Black, Chris Carlsen, Steven Eisler and notably Robert
Faulcon, he published (see listing below) at least 20 novels,
novelizations and works of popular sf "nonfiction", almost all of them
hasty commercial efforts but infused, nevertheless, with a black intensity
of action that gave even cliched SWORD-AND-SORCERY plots something of a
mythic intonation. At the same time, under his own name, he began to
publish sf novels like Eye Among the Blind (1976) and Earthwind (1977), in
both of which he uneasily attempted to accommodate the compulsive
mythologizing of his dark fantasies to "normal" sf worlds. The result was

a series of books whose narrative energies seem hampered by decorum: the
interplay between ALIENS and alienation in Eye Among the Blind is
effective but ponderously expressed; Earthwind utters slow-moving hints at
the powers of a "chthonic" atavism; and Where Time Winds Blow (1981), the
best of these early books, ornately but without much movement posits an
environment suffering arbitrary transfigurations through time-shifts.With
the publication of Mythago Wood (1984), however, RH's two careers suddenly
and thankfully converged in a tale whose elaborate proprieties of
rationale are driven by narrative energies and an exuberance of language
previously restricted in crude form to his Berserker novels, written as
Chris Carlsen. Much expanded from his short 1981 fantasy of the same
title, Mythago Wood is FANTASY rather than sf only if it is wrong to
consider the creation of a rational model for conceiving racial archetypes
a proper subject for sf. The frame of the tale is indeed obdurately
rational, and the "mythagoes" discovered - and transmuted - by the
contemporary protagonist are appropriate expressions of what might be
called the unconscious tale of the race: they are that tale made animate,
and each mythago bears a name or names - and enacts the nature - of those
archetypes that embody, for Britons, the permutations of that tale. The
wood from which they come - like the interior lands for which the
protagonists of much UK fantasy long - is huger inside than out, and in
describing it RH engages in language of a metaphoric density rarely
encountered in marketable fiction. The book won the 1986 World Fantasy
AWARD. Its sequel, Lavondyss: Journey to an Unknown Region (1988), only
increases the intensity of the cooperation between rational discourse and
Sehnsucht (a term C.S. LEWIS employed to describe the melancholy longing
for "something that has never actually appeared in our experience", and by
which he meant to designate the impulse behind certain kinds of fantasy).
The longing of the protagonists of Lavondyss to enter the "unknown region"
where archetypes shape themselves into the human story is absolute, and it
gives the book much of its potency as an explication of mythopoeisis.
Several of the stories assembled in The Bone Forest (coll 1991) serve as
pendants to the central novels; and The Fetch (1991), a fantasy, traverses
similar terrain. In transforming the Matter of Britain into archetypal sf,
RH has re-assembled old material, and old generic devices, into a new
territory for fiction. [JC]Other works: Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
(1978), Consultant Editor; Necromancer (1978), paranormal horror; Elite:
The Dark Wheel * (1984 chap), novella based on a computer game; Bulman *
(1984) and One of Our Pigeons is Missing * (1984), associational tv
novelizations; The Emerald Forest * (1985), novelizing the John Boorman
film.As Ken Blake (house name): Cry Wolf * (1981), The Untouchables *
(1982), Operation Susie * (1982) and You'll be All Right * (1982),
associational titles in the The Professionals series.As Robert Black:
Legend of the Werewolf * (1976) and The Satanists * (1977), both
novelizing films.As Chris Carlsen: The Berserker series, comprising Shadow
of the Wolf (1977), The Bull Chief (1977) and The Horned Warrior (1979).As
Steven Eisler: The linking texts for 2 vols of reprinted illustrations,
being Space Wars Worlds and Weapons (1979) and The Alien World (1980).As
Robert Faulcon: The Night Hunter sequence, comprising The Stalking (1983)
and The Talisman (1983), both assembled as The Stalking (omni 1987), The
Ghost Dance (1984) and The Shrine (1984), both assembled as The Ghost

Dance (omni 1987), and The Hexing (1984) and The Labyrinth (1987), both
assembled as The Hexing (omni 1988).As Richard Kirk (house name):
Swordsmistress of Chaos * (1978) with Angus WELLS, writing together as
Kirk, A Time of Ghosts * (1978) and Lords of the Shadows * (1979), being
titles in the Raven series.Nonfiction: Alien Landscapes (1979), Tour of
the Universe: The Journey of a Lifetime - The Recorded Diaries of Leio
Scott and Caroline Luranski (1980), Magician: The Lost Journals of the
Magus Geoffrey Carlyle (1982), Realms of Fantasy (1983) and Lost Realms
(1985), all written with Malcolm EDWARDS, all primarily picture books.As
Editor: Stars of Albion (anth 1979) with Christopher PRIEST; the Other
Edens series of original anthologies, all with Christopher EVANS,
comprising Other Edens (anth 1987), Other Edens II (anth 1988) and Other
Edens III (anth 1989).See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; DEVOLUTION;
GOTHIC SF; MYTHOLOGY; NEW WRITINGS IN SF.
HOLKAR, MO
[r] M.H. ZOOL.
HOLLAND
BENELUX.
HOLLAND, CECELIA
(1943- ) US writer whose numerous historical novels, beginning with The
Firedrake (1966), have explored with striking vividness many of the
genuine "alternate worlds" on Earth. One of these, still-born as a tale
set in Mongol China, became the sf novel Floating Worlds (1976), a
formidably long and complex SPACE OPERA involving conflict in the Solar
System between Inner and Outer Planets. A wide range of contrasting
societies, on an anarchist Earth and on the OUTER PLANETS themselves,
provide a convincing background for the presentation of characters of
unusual complexity. The protagonist is a woman, subtly drawn, ambivalent
in her motivations, highly believable; on the Outer Planets, the
description of the floating cities ( GRAVITY) is likewise believable, and
involving.Though not sf, Home Ground (1981), which puts an sf writer into
a UTOPIAN commune, makes its points in the RECURSIVE mode which has become
familiar within the genre. Pillar of the Sky (1985) combines historical
research and fantasy in a story centred on Stonehenge. [JC]See also: WOMEN
SF WRITERS.
HOLLAND, STEPHEN
(1962- ) UK bibliographer and critic who has also scripted some COMICS,
including a 1989 story for The Cursed Land and a 1990 story for Computer
Killer. His main work has been in the almost infinitely perplexing field
of post-WWII UK paperback publishers and authors, and he has done much to
clarify the two decades after 1945, a period rife with pseudonymous
titles, ephemeral publications, fly-by-night publishers and reticent
authors. His bibliographical studies, most of them short but illuminating,
include Scion and Dragon Books (1984 chap), Modern Fiction (1984 chap),
Curtis Warren and Grant Hughes (1985 chap), John Spencer and Badger Books
(1985 chap), Gaywood Press, Compact Books and Hank Janson Publishers (1986
chap), Piccadilly Novels (1986 chap), Digit Books (1986 chap), Brown
Watson (1986 chap), R. ?

Viking/WDL/Consul (1987 chap), Hamilton ?
Blake Library (1988 chap), Paul Renin: A Bibliographical Checklist (1990
chap), The Gramol Group (1990 chap) and The Mike Western Story (1990
chap). The Trials of Hank Janson (1991) and The Fleetway Companion (anth
in 2 vols 1992) were more commodious presentations of this material. His
work as a whole has been summarized in two linked volumes, Vultures of the
Void: A History of British Science Fiction, 1946-1956 (1992 US) and
British Science Fiction Paperbacks, 1949-1956 (1992 US), both with Philip
HARBOTTLE. He has contributed several entries to this encyclopedia. [JC]
HOLLOWAY, BRIAN
(? - ) UK writer of whom nothing is known beyond the fact that he wrote
sf novels under a number of CURTIS WARREN house names: Destination Alpha
(1952) as Berl CAMERON, Titan's Moon (1952) as Neil CHARLES, Southern
Exploration (1953) as Adam Dale, Trans-Mercurian (1952) as King LANG, "A"
Men (1952) as Rand LE PAGE, Beyond Geo (1953) as Arn ROMILUS, and Lost
World (1953) as Brian SHAW. He also wrote two sf novels for the firm under
personal pseudonyms: The Mortals of Reni (1953) as Von Gruen and Red Storm
(1952) as Brian Storm. [JC]
HOLLOW EARTH
The concept of the Earth as a hollow, spherical shell with a habitable,
internal concave surface accessible through polar openings or caves, or by
mechanical bores, has long been a significant motif in sf. The idea's dual
origins, from RELIGION and PSEUDO-SCIENCE, are still potent. Traditionally
Hell was sited inside the Earth, a notion that persisted at least until
the 18th century, when a theologian proposed that Earth's rotation was
caused by the damned scrambling to escape from Hell. In pseudo-science the
astronomer Edmond Halley (1656-1742), to account for magnetic phenomena,
suggested in a paper published by the Royal Society in 1692 that Earth
(and the other planets) consisted of concentric, nested spheres
surrounding a small central sun, with, possibly, openings at the poles.The
first important use of Halley's concept came in Ludvig HOLBERG's Nicolaii
Klimii iter subterraneum (1741 in Latin; exp 1745; trans anon as A Journey
to the World Under-Ground. By Nicolas Klimius 1742 UK; vt The Journey of
Niels Klim to the World Underground 1960 US; vt A Journey to the World
Underground 1974 US), in which a young Norwegian falls through the Earth's
crust to the hollow interior, where he has adventures on an inner planet
and on the concave shell among nonhuman intelligent beings. Derivative
from Holberg's work is Giacomo CASANOVA's Icosameron (1788; cut trans
Rachel Zurer as Casanova's 'Icosameron' 1986 US), which is concerned,
inter alia, with ALIEN lifeforms inside the Earth.The largest impetus to
modern hollow-Earth fiction came from a persuasive US soldier, John Cleves
SYMMES, who revitalized and publicized Halley's theory of concentric
spheres and polar openings. Symzonia (1820) by Adam SEABORN (an
unidentified pseudonym), a pleasant early IMAGINARY VOYAGE, satirizes
Symmes's ideas; it also comments, a clef, on the political structures of
Europe and the USA. It has been suggested that Edgar Allan POE's "MS Found
in a Bottle" (1833) and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) are
indebted to Symmes and Symzonia, but it is more probable that Poe had in
mind the caves and water engine involved in the traditional Abyss of

Waters.Much the best known hollow-Earth stories are Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's
Pellucidar novels: At the Earth's Core (1914 All-Story; 1922), Pellucidar
(1915 All-Story-Cavalier; 1923) and several sequels. Based loosely on
Symmes, these stories develop Burroughs's usual themes: Gibson-girl
romance, frustrated sexual assaults and dominance (here empire-building
among naive natives) against a background of palaeontological survivals.
While the earlier stories are rational in their assumptions, later ones
slip into supernaturalism involving REINCARNATION and Hell. For Burroughs
the Moon, too, is hollow, as in The Moon Maid (1923-25 Argosy-All-Story;
1925).The concept of the hollow Earth has otherwise been used for the most
varied fictional purposes. In a dystopian attack on FEMINISM, Pantaletta
(1882 US) by "Mrs J. Wood" (probably a man), the world within is run by
arrogant dominant woman who have changed even personal pronouns to avoid
sexism. "Vera Zarovitch"'s ( Mary E. Bradley LANE) Mizora (1880-81
Cincinatti Commercial; 1890 US), on the other hand, posits a feminist,
socialist UTOPIA, where males are no longer biologically necessary. In
Nequa (1900) by Jack ADAMS the themes are sexual equality, altruism and
socialism. The "single tax" proposed by the US economist Henry George
(1839-1897) offers the leitmotif for Byron Welcome's From Earth's Centre
(1894 US), and an odd mixture of occultism, anarchism and Fourierist
socialism supports the story thread of M. Louise Moore's Al Modad (1892
US). John Uri LLOYD's Etidorhpa (1895) describes occult advancement as the
narrator progresses to the centre; George W. Bell's Mr Oseba's Last
Discovery (1904 New Zealand) promotes New Zealand real estate by comparing
that country to the edenic interior; and "My Bride from Another World"
(1904 Physical Culture) by "Rev. E.C. Atkins" plugs for Bernarr
MACFADDEN's hygienics - nudism, vegetarianism and back-to-Nature.
Plutoniia (1915; 1924; trans as Plutonia 1957) by the great Russian
geologist Vladimir Afanasevich OBRUCHEV is frankly written as a simple
introduction to palaeontology. Obruchev adds a new supposition: the Earth
solidified hollow, and a comet knocked a hole in the shell, permitting
access.Fantastic adventure with less message characterizes Charles Willing
BEALE's The Secret of the Earth (1899), William R. BRADSHAW's occult The
Goddess of Atvatabar (1892), Frank Powell's lurid boys' thriller The
Wolf-Men (1905 UK), Roy ROCKWOOD's boys' book Five Thousand Miles
Underground (1908), William J. Shaw's Under the Auroras (1888 US), Fred
THORPE's serialized DIME NOVEL "In The World Below" (1897 Golden Hours)
and Park Winthrop's "The Land of the Central Sun" (1903 Argosy).A
religious note is not uncommon. In the later stories of the paranoid
Shaver mystery ( Richard S. SHAVER) the inner world is a Hell; however,
edenic stories, in which creation took place inside the Earth, like
Casanova's Icosameron, are more frequent. There is an internal city called
Eden in Willis George EMERSON's The Smoky God or, A Voyage to the Inner
World (1908). In William A. Miller's The Sovereign Guide (1989 US) Eden
still exists, though overgrown, as does the tomb of ADAM AND EVE.
Seaborn's Symzonia and Beale's The Secret of the Earth both consider
surface humans as descendants of exiles from the interior.The
gravitational peculiarities of a hollow Earth are seldom utilized.
Exceptions are Clement FEZANDIE's "A Journey to the Center of the Earth"
(1925 Science and Invention) and Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY's "Dreams of Earth
and Sky" (1895; trans in The Call of the Cosmos coll 1963).In most cases

the writers cited do not take the hollow-Earth concept seriously. On the
whole, the hollow Earth is simply a convenient alien place for odd
adventures or panaceas, but it would be easy enough to work out a
psychoanalytic or other metaphoric interpretation of the motif.True
hollow-Earth stories should not be confused with stories set in deep
cave-systems, another very common theme. Two of the most famous
underground stories of this type are LYTTON's The Coming Race (1871; vt
Vril: The Power of the Coming Race 1972 US) and Jules VERNE's Voyage au
centre de la terre (1863; exp 1867; trans anon as Journey to the Centre of
the Earth 1872 UK). A third example, not often thought of as being such,
and especially prone to the psychoanalytic interpretation, is Lewis
CARROLL's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865).Hollow-Earth stories
still show up occasionally in the modern period. Among the more
interesting are "Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole" (1977 New Dimensions
7) by Howard WALDROP and Steven UTLEY, Richard A. LUPOFF's Circumpolar!
(1984) and Rudy RUCKER's The Hollow Earth (1990). Nothing is ever crystal
clear in a novel by James P. BLAYLOCK, but The Digging Leviathan (1984)
appears also to be marginally a hollow-Earth story. It is interesting that
all these tales are couched as nostalgic pastiche (and often close to
MAGIC REALISM), as if merely to mention a hollow Earth today were to evoke
a wondrous past time. [EFB]
HOLLY, JOAN HUNTER
A late working name of US writer Joan Carol Holly (1932-1982), who before
1970 signed herself J. Hunter Holly. JHH had a degree in psychology and
conducted creative-writing workshops as well as doing her own work; a
benign brain tumour, removed in 1970, interrupted her career 1966-70, and
she later suffered further ill health. She began publishing sf with a
novel, Encounter (1959), in which Man and inimical ALIEN confront one
another. Much of her work - including The Flying Eyes (1962), The Dark
Planet (1962) and The Time Twisters (1964)-involves melodramatic alien
INVASIONS and other traumatic encounters. Among her better stories,
written after her illness, are "The Gift of Nothing" (1973) and "Psi
Clone" (1977). Keeper (1976 Canada) and Shepherd (1977 Canada) make up a
short DYSTOPIAN series in which one man opposes an oppressive regime. JHH
wrote straightforward adventure novels whose dark undertones were of
interest. [JC]Other works: The Green Planet (1960); The Gray Aliens (1963;
vt The Grey Aliens 1964 UK); The Running Man (1963); The Dark Enemy
(1965); The Mind Traders (1966); The Assassination Affair * (1967), #10 in
the MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. series; Death Dolls of Lyra (1977).See also: WOMEN
SF WRITERS.
HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD
Roger CORMAN; Joe DANTE.
HOLM, SVEN
(1940- ) Danish novelist who works in various modes, from realism to
KAFKA-inspired modernism. His one sf work, Termush, Atlanterhavskysten
(1967; trans Sylvia Clayton as Termush 1969 UK), tells of the
psychological problems encountered by a group of rich survivors dwelling
in their luxury shelter after a nuclear HOLOCAUST. While bona fide sf,
Termush is also a parable of the alienation of modern, materialistic Man.

[DN/JC]
HOLMBERG, JOHN-HENRI
[r] SCANDINAVIA.
HOLMES, A.R.
[s] Harry BATES.
HOLMES, BRUCE T.
(? - ) US writer whose sf novel, Anvil of the Heart (1983), presents with
some poignance one of the potential nightmares attendant upon the
successful GENETIC ENGINEERING of the human species: the slow death of the
last pre-altered humans as their children confront a new world. [JC]
HOLMES, H.H.
[s] Anthony BOUCHER.
HOLOCAUST AND AFTER
This is part of a giant cluster of themes which has always played a
central role in sf, both GENRE SF and MAINSTREAM. It is impossible to
dissect out the different aspects of this cluster so that they are
mutually exclusive; hence there is some overlap between this entry and
ADAM AND EVE (many sf tales deal with a second genesis after catastrophe),
ANTHROPOLOGY (the emphasis is often on tribal patterns forming in a
brutalized and diminished population), EVOLUTION and DEVOLUTION
(evolutionary change has since the 18th century been linked with natural
catastrophe), ENTROPY (holocaust is one of the more dramatic aspects of
everything running down), HISTORY IN SF (human-inspired disasters are
often seen as part of a Toynbeean or Spenglerian process of historical
cycles), the END OF THE WORLD (holocaust on a major scale), ECOLOGY
(interference with nature is often seen as the bringer of disaster),
MEDICINE (the agent of holocaust is often plague), MUTANTS (the use of
nuclear weapons is often seen as leading to massive mutation in plants,
animals and humans), NUCLEAR POWER (the most popular agent of holocaust in
fiction since WWII), OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM and SURVIVALIST FICTION (which
is all too often written by men for men, featuring men shooting other men
after civilization's convenient collapse). The catastrophe variants are
summarized under DISASTER; particular aspects of catastrophe are discussed
in most of the above entries. Here we concentrate on the many stories
whose focus is not so much the disaster itself but the kind of world in
which the survivors live, and which they make for themselves.The aftermath
of holocaust may be the most popular theme in sf; this encyclopedia
mentions at least 400 examples at novel length. The genre is as old as sf
itself: a convenient starting point is Mary SHELLEY's second sf novel, The
Last Man (1826), in which plague crosses Europe from the Middle East,
leaving one survivor in Rome who is possibly the last man. Natural
catastrophe, too, strikes in Herrmann LANG's The Air Battle: A Vision of
the Future (1859), in which European civilization is destroyed by flood
and earthquake, but a benevolent North-African federation brings peace to
the world, Black leading White back to social order.The novel in which the
post-holocaust story takes on its distinctive modern form is Richard
JEFFERIES's After London (1885), in which the author's strategy is to set
the novel thousands of years after the catastrophe has taken place; in

this way an interesting, alienating perspective is gained. The hero takes
his own society (as in most later stories in this vein it is
quasimedieval) for granted; he endeavours to reconstruct the nature of the
fallen civilization that preceded it, and also the intervening years of
barbarism. Ever since Jefferies's time the post-holocaust story has tended
to follow this pattern; for every book whose hero lived through the
holocaust itself - John CHRISTOPHER's The Death of Grass (1956; vt No
Blade of Grass US), filmed as NO BLADE OF GRASS (1970), and Robert MERLE's
Malevil (1972 France; trans 1974), filmed as MALEVIL (1981), being
examples - there are several whose story begins long after the disaster is
over but while its effects are still making themselves felt. Though such
stories continue to fascinate, there has been surprisingly little
variation in the basic plot: disaster is, in the average scenario, seen as
being followed by savage barbarism and a bitter struggle for survival,
with rape and murder commonplace; such an era is often succeeded by a
rigidly hierarchical feudalism based very much on medieval models. When
the emphasis falls on struggle and brutality, as it very often does, we
have in effect an awful-warning story. But often the new world is seen as
more peaceful and ordered, more in harmony with Nature, than the bustle
and strife of civilization. Such stories are often quasi- UTOPIAs in
feeling and PASTORAL in their values. There is no denying the attraction
of such scenarios: they tempt us with a kind of life in which the
individual controls his or her own destiny and in which moral issues are
clear-cut.In mature versions of the post-holocaust story there is usually
an emotional resonance developed from a tension between loss and gain,
with the simplicities of the new order not wholly compensating for the
half-remembered glories and comforts of the past. This is the case with
George R. STEWART's EARTH ABIDES (1949), and may explain why, despite its
occasionally fulsome prose, that novel has attained classic status.The
first two decades of the 20th century saw no particular boom in the genre,
but at least two works are still well remembered: Jack LONDON's The
Scarlet Plague (1914) and S. Fowler WRIGHT's Deluge (1928) (sequelled by
Dawn [1929]); in both cases the catastrophe is natural. This was so of
most holocaust stories in those days of comparative innocence. Even after
WWI, mankind's capacity for self-destruction was seldom seen as efficient
enough to operate on a global scale. Other relevant stories of the period
are Garrett P. SERVISS's The Second Deluge (1912), George Allan ENGLAND's
Darkness and Dawn (1914), an unusually optimistic story of reconstruction,
J.J. CONNINGTON's Nordenholt's Million (1923) and P. Anderson GRAHAM's
cranky racist The Collapse of Homo Sapiens (1923).Connington's book made
much of the reconstruction of TECHNOLOGY; from this point on the
relationship of technology to the post-holocaust world, and the often
ambiguous feelings of the latter towards it, became prominent. Thomas
Calvert MCCLARY's Rebirth (1934 ASF; 1944) is a casually callous account
of a SCIENTIST so disgusted by what he self-righteously regards as the
decadence of modern civilization that he invents a ray which causes
everyone to forget all acquired knowledge, including how to talk: starting
from instinct, the smartest and toughest re-educate themselves in
technology in about 10 years; most die. Edwin BALMER's and Philip WYLIE's
When Worlds Collide (1933), with its reconstruction sequel After Worlds
Collide (1934), has a scientific elite escaping a doomed Earth in a giant

rocket and rebuilding on a new planet, at the same time fighting off
communists; it was filmed as WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (1951). Stephen Vincent
BENET's "The Place of the Gods" (1937; vt "By the Waters of Babylon")
blends superstitious fear and plangent nostalgia in telling of a barbarian
boy's response to the technological wonders of a ruined city; its
sentimentality was to become a recurrent note in many such tales after
WWII: it ends, "We must build again." Many of the authors cited have not
been closely connected with GENRE SF. The post-holocaust theme,
particularly in the UK, has had a strong attraction for MAINSTREAM
writers, perhaps because it offers such a powerful metaphor for exploring
Man's relation with his social structures: it pits art against Nature. Two
strong UK examples from the 1930s are Alun LLEWELLYN's The Strange
Invaders (1934) and John COLLIER's Tom's A-Cold (1933; vt Full Circle
USA); both evoke the atmosphere of a fallen society with considerable
intensity of feeling. An interesting French novel published during WWII
was Ravage (1943; trans Damon KNIGHT as Ashes, Ashes 1967 US) by Rene
BARJAVEL, in which the disappearance of electricity turns France
rural.After the Hiroshima bombing a new period began in which,
unsurprisingly, the post-holocaust story came to seem less fantastic; it
also became more popular, and developed a distinctively apocalyptic
atmosphere, a heavy emphasis on a supposed antitechnological bias among
the survivors, and a concentration on the results of nuclear power in
general and radiation in particular. The mood was darker in that imagined
catastrophes were now primarily manmade. Man became pictured as a kind of
lemming bent on racial suicide - through nuclear, biological and chemical
warfare in stories of the 1940s and 1950s, and through POLLUTION,
OVERPOPULATION and destruction of Earth's ecosphere in many stories since
the 1960s.Among the darker scenarios set after nuclear war are: Judith
MERRIL's Shadow on the Hearth (1950); Wilson TUCKER's The Long Loud
Silence (1952); Ward MOORE's "Lot" (1953) with its sardonic sequel "Lot's
Daughter" (1954), the uncredited bases for PANIC IN YEAR ZERO (1962);
Mordecai ROSHWALD's Level 7 (1959); Pat FRANK's Alas, Babylon (1959), more
optimistic than the others about the possibility of re-ordering society;
Alfred COPPEL's Dark December (1960); and Fritz LEIBER's extremely savage
"Night of the Long Knives" (1960; vt "The Wolf Pair"), which can be found
in The Night of the Wolf (coll 1966). Novels which place a greater
emphasis on the kinds of society developed after the holocaust are: Algis
BUDRYS's False Night (1954; text reinstated and exp, vt Some Will not Die
1961; rev 1978), a very grim book; Margot BENNETT's The Long Way Back
(1954), in which civilized Africans send a colonizing expedition to
legendary Great Britain, where they find Whites still living in caves;
Dark Universe (1961) by Daniel F. GALOUYE, set in an underground POCKET
UNIVERSE; Edgar PANGBORN's DAVY (1964), The Judgment of Eve (1966) and The
Company of Glory (1975); Brian W. ALDISS's Non-Stop (1958; vt Starship
USA) and Greybeard (1964), the latter dealing with life after mass
sterility has struck humanity; Philip K. DICK's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF
ELECTRIC SHEEP? (1968), where pollution has destroyed the animal kingdom,
and which, much changed, was the basis of the film BLADE RUNNER (1982);
and John BOWEN's After the Rain (1958), dealing with the psychology of the
survivors of a great flood.Paramount among such books is Walter M.
MILLER's A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ (fixup 1960), an ironic black comedy

about the ways in which a post-holocaust civilization's history
recapitulates the errors of its predecessor. The story is set largely in
an abbey, where fragments of half-understood technological knowledge have
been kept alive by the Church. The book is vivid, morose and ebulliently
inventive; it has been very influential.Miller's vision of technology as
being (though morally neutral) at once saviour and destroyer is echoed in
several books, including some already cited, in which an antitechnological
majority, usually medieval in social structure and rigidly conservative in
outlook, is unable to suppress the scientific curiosity of young
malcontents; two good examples are Leigh BRACKETT's The Long Tomorrow
(1955) and John WYNDHAM's Re-Birth (1955 US; rev vt The Chrysalids UK).
(The English disaster novel at this time was dominated by Wyndham and by
John CHRISTOPHER, both writing several post-holocaust novels.) At a more
popular, adventure-story level, several writers have picked up the idea
(found also in the Brackett and Wyndham novels) of a secret enclave of
scientifically advanced technocrats in an otherwise primitive world. Such
is the situation in Piers ANTHONY's trilogy collected as Battle Circle
(omni 1977), which began with Sos the Rope (1968). A film pitting
barbarians against an island of technology is ZARDOZ (1973), where the
sympathy, as often happens, is with the barbarian. In stories of this type
technology is generally feared, since it was through technology that
mankind almost destroyed itself; a furtive technology is pitted against
MAGIC in a FAR-FUTURE post-holocaust venue in Fred SABERHAGEN's trilogy
consisting of The Broken Lands (1968), The Black Mountains (1971) and
Changeling Earth (1973), but here, despite a tenuous rationale, the tone
of the story is more that of SWORD AND SORCERY than of sf proper. Indeed,
many sword-and-sorcery stories are set in a post-holocaust period when
mankind has taken the route of magic rather than science; the rather silly
idea is presumably that if we give up depending on technology we may be
able to work miracles instead. In one of the commonest variants the magic
is rationalized: the post-holocaust society develops PSI POWERS.With the
increased publicity given to the so-called counterculture in the late
1960s (reflected in sf by the NEW WAVE), post-holocaust stories of rather
a different kind became popular. Hell's-Angels-style motorcycle gangs roam
a ruined world in two colourful romances, Roger ZELAZNY's Damnation Alley
(1969), badly filmed with many changes as DAMNATION ALLEY (1977), and
Steve WILSON's The Lost Traveller (1976); the same idea is used more
subtly in a grimmer work, Brian W. Aldiss's Barefoot in the Head (fixup
1969), as motorcyclists roll through the debris of a Europe half-destroyed
by the use of psychedelic drugs as weapons. J.G. BALLARD's oeuvre is made
up largely of post-holocaust stories; he has evoked catastrophes of all
sorts, manmade and natural, sudden and protracted, and often his
protagonists act in psychic collaboration with the forces that threaten
humanity's security. Scarred motorways continue to link up the decaying
communities of M. John HARRISON's forceful first novel, The Committed Men
(1971), which has something of a Ballardian bleakness but a rather tougher
survival mentality in the protagonists. Other notable post-holocaust
stories of the late 1960s and the 1970s are HEROES AND VILLAINS (1969) by
Angela CARTER, "The Snows are Melted, the Snows are Gone" (1969) by James
TIPTREE Jr, "The Lost Continent" (1970) by Norman SPINRAD, The End of the
Dream (1972) by Philip Wylie, returning to a theme he first worked with 40

years earlier, Hiero's Journey (1973) by Sterling LANIER, Winter's
Children (1974 UK) by Michael CONEY, Earthwreck! (1974) by Thomas N.
SCORTIA, WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD (1974) by Suzy McKee CHARNAS, WHERE
LATE THE SWEET BIRDS SANG (fixup 1976) by Kate WILHELM, THE STAND (cut
1978, text largely restored and rev 1990 UK) by Stephen KING, and
DREAMSNAKE (fixup 1978) by Vonda N. MCINTYRE.A fine story from this period
was "A Boy and his Dog" (1969) by Harlan ELLISON, interestingly filmed as
A BOY AND HIS DOG (1975). Indeed, the 1960s, and more prolifically the
1970s, saw many variations on the post-holocaust theme in the CINEMA aside
from those already mentioned, including ON THE BEACH (1959), The WORLD,
THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1959), The DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (1963), L' ULTIMO
UOMO DELLA TERRA (1964; vt The Last Man on Earth); KONEC SRPNA V HOTELU
OZON (1966; vt The End of August at the Hotel Ozone), NIGHT OF THE LIVING
DEAD (1968), The BED-SITTING ROOM (1969), GAS-S-S-S (1970), GLEN AND RANDA
(1970), The OMEGA MAN (1971), NIPPON CHINBOTSU (1973; vt The Submersion of
Japan; vt Tidal Wave), The ULTIMATE WARRIOR (1975), JUBILEE (1978),
QUINTET (1979) and MAD MAX (1979); UK tv took up the idea with SURVIVORS
(1975-7). The success of Mad Max not only produced two sequels but began a
whole cycle of post-holocaust colourful-barbarian action thriller films
that continued right through the 1980s, including 1990: I GUERRIERI DEL
BRONX (1982; vt Bronx Warriors) and CITY LIMITS (1984). In fact the 1980s
was a period in which the post-holocaust venue became primarily used as a
conveniently barbaric backdrop for feats of romantic adventure and,
perhaps more worryingly, for the macho acts of rapine and savagery that
characterize SURVIVALIST FICTION, which became very popular at this time.
Although the post-holocaust genre remained popular in the 1980s film
industry, and produced a strange variety of films, it produced no great
ones, perhaps the most telling being George A. ROMERO's DAY OF THE DEAD
(1985). Others were FUKKATSO NO HI (1980; vt Virus), MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR
(1981), Le DERNIER COMBAT (1983; vt The Last Battle), RED DAWN (1984),
NIGHT OF THE COMET (1984), The QUIET EARTH (1985), SLIPSTREAM (1989) and
HARDWARE (1990).Earlier, post-holocaust venues had by the 1970s become
popular in CHILDREN'S SF, a particularly good book being Z for Zachariah
(1975) by Robert C. O'BRIEN. Too often, however, such books were designed
to teach moral lessons of the currently approved kind, often
simplistically; the typical holocaust of 1980s children's books features
ecological spoliation brought about by evil capitalists, one of the
livelier examples being Scatterlings (1991) by Isobelle CARMODY.While
post-holocaust scenarios in films (and in COMICS, where they became
extremely popular) were tending to trivialize the genre, it remained an
important and still very popular element in serious sf in book form.
Interesting and rather admirable are the 7 Pelbar books of Paul O.
WILLIAMS, beginning with The Breaking of Northwall (1981), in which
fragmented societies in a rural post-holocaust USA begin slowly to knit
themselves together. Another good series was Richard COWPER's Corlay
trilogy (1976-82), a contemplative PASTORAL work set in England centuries
after low-lying areas have been covered by the rising sea. William
BARNWELL's Blessing trilogy (1980-81) features a fantastic quest in a
world recovering after a holocaust deliberately brought about for
metaphysical reasons. Storm CONSTANTINE's Wraeththu trilogy (1987-9)
presents luridly but with some flair a hermaphroditic race arising in a

devastated world. Notable single novels from the 1980s and since include
Voices in Time (1980) by Hugh MACLENNAN, In the Drift (fixup 1984) by
Michael SWANWICK, The Postman (1985) by David BRIN, Wolf in Shadow (1987;
vt The Jerusalem Man 1988 US) by David GEMMELL, The Sea and Summer (1987;
vt Drowning Towers 1988 US) by George TURNER, The Wall around Eden (1989)
by Joan SLONCZEWSKI, WINTERLONG (1990) by Elizabeth HAND and BONE DANCE: A
FANTASY FOR TECHNOPHILES (1991) by Emma BULL. But the outstanding
post-holocaust novel of the decade was probably RIDDLEY WALKER (1980) by
Russell HOBAN, in which the nature of the future civilization is vividly
evoked through its devolved language ( LINGUISTICS).Life after the
holocaust is a theme that continues to grip the imagination. The idea of
destroying our crowded, bureaucratic world and then rebuilding afresh
offers an exciting psychic freedom. The rusting symbols of a technological
past protruding into a more primitive, natural, future landscape are among
the most potent of sf's icons. [PN]
HOLT, CONRAD G.
John Russell FEARN.
HOLTBY, WINIFRED
(1898-1935) UK writer who espoused, in South Riding (1936) and other
novels and essays, the informed, complex FEMINISM which was also reflected
in her near-future SATIRE, The Astonishing Island (1933): the island
satirized is not Tristan da Cunha, from which the bewildered protagonist
hails, but the UK. [JC]
HOLTEN, KNUD
[r] DENMARK.
HOLT-WHITE, W(ILLIAM EDWARD BRADDEN)
(1878-? ) UK writer in various genres, author of 7 novels of sf interest.
In The Earthquake: A Romance of London in 1907 (1906) the ruined capital
is taken in hand by an aristocratic Prime Minister. In The Man who Stole
the Earth (1909), which begins as a RURITANIAN pot pourri of politics and
romance, a love-lorn inventor bombs most of Europe into submission in his
drive to wed the daughter of the King of Balkania, forcing the world, en
passant, into a state of peace. The Prime Minister's Secret (1910) is
marginal sf. Helen of All Time (1910) rather remarkably compresses into
one volume an advanced airship ( TRANSPORTATION) and the REINCARNATION of
Helen of Troy. The Man who Dreamed Right (1910), though suffering from
WH-W's general tendency to overpack his tales to the point of parody,
rather movingly depicts an innocent man whose dreams predict the future,
and who is destroyed at the hands of the world's rulers (including Teddy
Roosevelt), all desperate to corner his power. The World Stood Still
(1912) not entirely plausibly describes the catastrophic effect on the
world when its financiers go on strike; and The Woman who Saved the World
(1914) concerns NEAR-FUTURE terrorism. [JC]
HOLZHAUSEN, CARL JOHAN
[r] SCANDINAVIA.
HOME-GALL, EDWARD REGINALD
[r] William Benjamin HOME-GALL.

HOME-GALL, WILLIAM BENJAMIN
(1861-1936) UK writer, much of whose work was boys' fiction, including
Beyond the Northern Lights (1903) as by Reginald Wray, a LOST-WORLD tale
set near the North Pole. The Dweller in the Half-Light (1923), also as by
Wray, is fantasy for adults. WBH-G's son, Edward Reginald Home-Gall
(1899-1975), was the most prolific of all authors of boys' stories next to
Frank Richards (usual pseudonym of Charles Hamilton [1876-1961]), and was
responsible for two Human Bat tales: "Caught in the Spider's Web" (1950)
and The Human Bat v. the Robot Gangster (1950). [JC]
HOMER
(c800BC) The most famous of early Greek poets, generally supposed to be
the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey; these were probably not written
down until the 6th century BC, and come to us in much later versions. The
Odyssey is not, of course, sf, but stands paradigmatically at the head of
the PROTO-SCIENCE-FICTION genre of the FANTASTIC VOYAGE. In Homer's day
the Mediterranean was a tabula rasa, just as the worlds of outer space are
today; to say that the Odyssey is a kind of first-millennium-BC template
for PLANETARY ROMANCE may be to confuse the sublime with the ridiculous,
but its aspiring spirit, always seeking to learn what is over the next
horizon, testifies to the longevity of those human feelings which today
are fed into the reading and writing of sf. [PN]See also: MUSIC;
MYTHOLOGY.
HOMUNCULUS
(vt Homunculus der Fuhrer) Serial film (1916). Deutsche Bioscop. Dir Otto
Rippert, starring Olaf Fonss, Friedrich Kuhne. Script Otto and Robert
Neuss, based on a story by Robert Reinert. 6 episodes; total length 401
mins. B/w.This 6-part silent German serial, the most popular of the WWI
period, tells of an artificial man created by a scientist (Kuhne) who
wants to make a perfect creature of pure reason. But the result,
Homunculus (the Danish actor Fonss), resents the fact that he is not a
real human being (and has no soul); after being driven from country to
country he becomes the dictator of a large, unnamed nation and plans to
conquer the world, being finally destroyed by a convenient bolt of
lightning. H contains seminal themes of the GOTHIC variety, foreshadowing
many sf/ HORROR films: the archetypal mad SCIENTIST, the inherent evil of
TECHNOLOGY and scientific progress, superhuman ANDROIDS, conquest of the
world and a fiery, apocalyptic climax. [JB]
HOMUNCULUS DER FUHRER
HOMUNCULUS.
HONEY, I BLEW UP THE KID
Film (1992). Walt Disney. Exec prods Albert Band, Stuart Gordon; dir
Randal Kleiser; screenplay Thom Eberhardt, Peter Elbling, Garry
Goodrow,based on a story by Goodrow, based on characters created by
Gordon, Brian Yuzna and Ed NAHA; starring Rick Moranis, Marcia Strassman,
Robert Oliveri, Daniel and Joshua Shalikar, Lloyd Bridges, John Shea, Keri
Russell. 89 mins. Colour.The sequel to the good and successful HONEY, I
SHRUNK THE KIDS (1989), this has the same family, headed by nutty inventor
Wayne Szalinski (Moranis) in more trouble. Or the same trouble reversed.

Two-year old son Adam (played with some charm by the Shalikar twins) is
accidentally subjected to a growth ray; he grows first to seven feet, then
to 14 feet,then to 50 feet. Soon he has a tantrum, and is on his way to
trample Las Vegas. Depressingly formulaic and one-note, though with
several funny moments, the film has nothing like the metaphoric and
psychological resonance of its predecessor, and its larger budget seems to
have persuaded all concerned to be too careful, notably Moranis, who tones
down the madness as if he expects to be taken as a role model for good
fatherhood. It is a case of small is beautiful rather than bigger is
better. The film, perhaps grudgingly, gives a credit-buried in the end
titles-to Kit REED, whose "Attack of the Giant Baby" (1976 FSF) could be
said to have got there first. [PN]
HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS
Film (1989). Walt Disney. Dir Joe Johnston, starring Rick Moranis, Matt
Frewer, Thomas Brown, Amy O'Neill, Robert Oliveri. Screenplay Ed NAHA, Tom
Schulman, from a story by Stuart Gordon, Brian Yuzna and Ed Naha. 93 mins.
Colour.Eccentric inventor Szalinski (Moranis) builds a miniaturizing
machine which is accidentally activated, shrinking his own two children
and those of his macho next-door neighbour. Swept up in the trash they
emerge in the garden, have adventures, fall tentatively in love (the two
eldest), return, almost get eaten in a bowl of breakfast cereal, and are
ultimately regrown. There is some timid metaphor about kids whose parents
make them feel small, and about the jungle of suburbia (in this case the
untidy lawn literally becomes a jungle), but it is not so disturbing a
film as INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN. The special effects sequences are well
done and the film is fun. [PN]
HONG KONG
CHINESE SF.
HOOBLER, THOMAS
(?1944- ) US writer of an sf adventure, The Hunters (1978) with Burt
WETANSON, and of Dr Chill's Project (1987; vt Dr Chill 1989 UK), an sf
juvenile involving PSI POWERS. [JC]
HOOVER, H(ELEN) M(ARY)
(1935- ) US writer, all of whose novels of sf interest have been
juveniles for older children. First were Children of Morrow (1973) and its
sequel, Treasures of Morrow (1976), a post- HOLOCAUST sequence which, in
describing a reactionary state and its pro- TECHNOLOGY successor, plumps
cautiously for the latter; the books demonstrate a smoothly searching
style and a grasp of character. HMH soon showed her competence with a wide
range of venues and themes. The Delikon (1977), again set on Earth,
investigates a political revolution. The protagonist of The Rains of
Eridan (1978), set on an ALIEN world where scientific stations are
assaulted by waves of seemingly unnatural fear, uncovers the mystery
without betraying the methods and goals of science. Return to Earth
(1980), set a millennium hence on Earth, humanizes a thriller plot through
its close portrayal of a growing friendship between an old man and a young
girl - friendship between generations being unusually evident in HMH's
work. The two young protagonists of This Time of Darkness (1980) transcend

the bleak POCKET-UNIVERSE society in which they have been raised. Another
Heaven, Another Earth (1981) intriguingly presents a complex vision of
human limitations on a colony planet which is demonstrably inimical to
life. Throughout, HMH shows a deft attentiveness to the problem of
engaging her readership in tales of worlds whose solidity precludes easy
triumphs for young protagonists, but which gives them a chance to achieve
an enlightened freedom; always there is a sense that in the end the
lessons awaiting readers in her texts are unequivocally meant to be
learned. Her novels are, in the best sense, didactic. [JC]Other works: The
Lost Star (1979); This Time of Darkness (1980); The Bell Tree (1982); The
Shepherd Moon: A Novel of the Future (1984); Orvis (1987; vt Journey
through the Empty 1990 UK); The Dawn Palace: The Story of Medea (1988);
Away is a Strange Place to Be (1990); Only Child (1992).See also:
CHILDREN'S SF.
HOPE, LAURA LEE
Harriet S. ADAMS.
HOPKINS, JAMES
[r] William F. NOLAN; Robert REGINALD.
HORACE GOLD: ECCENTRIC
Some say that science fiction writers and editors are strong
individualists; others call them eccentrics. There is no doubt that Horace
Gold was one of the latter.Gold founded Galaxy magazine in 1950. Because
he was profoundly agoraphobic, he conducted all of this business from his
apartment. Isaac Asimov remembers that the first time he visited him, Gold
left the room abruptly in the middle of a conversation. Asimov was
perplexed and started to leave.On the way out, the phone rang. When Asimov
was called to the phone, he discovered that Gold was on the line. Since
Gold couldn’t stand the company of a stranger, he decided to call Asimov
from his bedroom. And that’s how the meeting proceeded.Besides his
penchant for odd meetings, Gold was also known for writing very insulting
rejection letters, even to writers he liked. In his collection Earth is
Room Enough, Asimov published a parody of Gold in one of three poems
entitled Rejection Slips.
HORLAK, E.E.
Sheri S. TEPPER.
HORLER, SYDNEY
(1888-1954) UK writer, most of whose 150 novels are thrillers, some
importing sf devices in the form of fantastic inventions and/or MCGUFFINS.
Some of the Paul Vivanti sequence - specifically The Mystery of No. 1
(1925; vt The Order of the Octopus 1926 US), The Screaming Skull, and
Other Stories (coll 1930; cut c1945), The Worst Man in the World (1930),
Lord of Terror (1935) and Virus X (1945) - are of interest in their
admixture of occult and fragmentary superscience elements, with DEATH RAYS
making an appearance or two. The title story in The Man who Shook the
Earth (coll 1933) features an attempt to blackmail the world by a
SCIENTIST who has discovered the secret of atomic energy. [JC]Other works:
The Formula: A Novel of Harley Street (1933; vt The Charlatan 1934 US);
The Vampire (1935); The Evil Messenger (1938); The House with the Light

(1948); The House of the Uneasy Dead (1950); The Face of Stone (1952).
HORN, PETER
House name used in ZIFF-DAVIS magazines by Henry KUTTNER once, for "50
Miles Down" (Fantastic Adventures 1940), and by David Vern ( David V.
REED) twice, also in 1940. [JC/PN]
HORNE, R. HENGIST
[s] Richard Henry HORNE.
HORNE, RICHARD HENRY
(1803-1884) UK writer credited by William WILSON as the author of what
is, according to Wilson's DEFINITION OF SF, an exemplary work of
"Science-Fiction": The Poor Artist, or Seven Eye-sights and One Object
(1871), a didactic novella in which a struggling artist achieves success
by reproducing seven different images of a coin as perceived by various
woodland creatures. RHH signed some of his other work R. Hengist Horne.
[BS]See also: PERCEPTION.
HORNER, DONALD W(ILLIAM)
(1874-? ) UK astronomer, meteorologist and writer who specialized in
popular-science texts. Though published as boys' fiction, By Aeroplane to
the Sun: Being the Adventures of a Daring Aviator and his Friends (1910)
offers a numerate and complex vision of a high-tech NEAR FUTURE, featuring
picturephones, tv and electric cars, and describing the protagonists'
usual tour of the Solar System with prescient realism. The ship operates
by a kind of ION DRIVE; its inhabitants, some of whom are women, use
pressure suits when necessary; and the planets themselves, as well as the
cool SUN, offer a wide range of challenges. Their Winged Destiny: Being a
Tale of Two Planets (1912; vt The World's Double: Being a Tale of Two
Planets 1913) expands the scope of the earlier book, sending its
astronauts from a possibly doomed Earth to its double in orbit around
Alpha Centauri. Both novels demonstrate the speed with which the advance
of science - DWH was of course no amateur - was engendering radical
changes in the venues and plotting conventions that went to make up GENRE
SF long before the founding of AMAZING STORIES in 1926. [JC]
HORNIG, CHARLES D.
(1916- ) US editor whose career began in 1933 when, as a young sf fan, he
started a FANZINE called The Fantasy Fan and happened to send a copy of it
to Hugo GERNSBACK. By coincidence, Gernsback was at that time looking for
a new managing editor for WONDER STORIES, and was so impressed by CDH's
editorial that he decided to offer him the post. At 17, CDH became the
youngest-ever sf magazine editor, attending evening classes at the same
time until he finished high school. He edited Wonder Stories Nov 1933-Apr
1936, when the magazine was sold to another publisher and became THRILLING
WONDER STORIES. CDH did not give up his fan activities, continuing The
Fantasy Fan on a monthly basis until early 1935. At Gernsback's
instigation he began the SCIENCE FICTION LEAGUE, a club centred on Wonder
Stories. CDH initiated a "new-story" policy in an attempt to emulate the
"thought-variant" stories published by F. Orlin TREMAINE in ASF; but this
did not achieve many notable results-although he did publish Stanley G.
WEINBAUM's first story, "A Martian Odyssey" (1934), to great acclaim. He

published one story of his own under the pseudonym Derwin Lesser, used
again in articles he contributed to the magazine SCIENCE FICTION, which he
edited from its inception in Mar 1939. He also edited two companion
magazines: FUTURE FICTION and SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY. None of these
magazines achieved any distinction; they were taken over (and the first 2
titles amalgamated) by Robert A.W. LOWNDES in 1941. A convinced pacifist,
CDH was a conscientious objector to WWII, and in 1942 was assigned to a
public-service forestry camp. He left in 1943 and was imprisoned later the
same year as an absolute objector to all forms of wartime service. [MJE]
HORROR!
CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED.
HORROR CHAMBER OF DR FAUSTUS, THE
Les YEUX SANS VISAGE .
HORROR EXPRESS
PANICO EN EL TRANSIBERIANO.
HORROR IN SF
The often propounded notion that sf is a literature of rational,
scientifically based extrapolation is in most instances false. Much sf is
anti-science, for reasons partly historic and perhaps partly intrinsic.
The famous remark of the Spanish painter Goya (1746-1828) that the Sleep
of Reason breeds Monsters is inarguable in its most obvious meaning: when
rationality is in abeyance, terrible things happen. But the phrase seems
to allow a rather different interpretation, one of great significance to
sf: that it is science itself which, when it dreams, dreams monsters; in
other words, the link between the bright light of science and the darkness
of monstrousness is a link of blood and kinship. Certainly much sf might
lead us to suppose that this apparent paradox is true.Brian W. ALDISS
argued in Billion Year Spree (1973) that sf "was born from the Gothic
mode" in the 19th century ( GOTHIC SF), and that was also one of the
birthplaces of horror fiction; certainly many of sf's early manifestations
were horrible indeed, with E.T.A. HOFFMANN's malign ROBOT-maker Coppelius,
Mary SHELLEY's FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER, Robert Louis STEVENSON's Jekyll and
Hyde, Nathaniel HAWTHORNE's poison-saturated daughter of the scientist
Rappaccini, and Edgar Allan POE's rotting M. Valdemar being celebrated but
not untypical examples.In the flurry of fantastic fiction published in
magazines and PULP MAGAZINES between, say, 1880 and 1930, occult and
supernatural fiction and sf were so closely related as to be disentangled
only with the greatest difficulty, and sometimes not very convincingly.
Ambrose BIERCE, Algernon BLACKWOOD, Arthur Conan DOYLE, William Hope
HODGSON, Arthur MACHEN and A. MERRITT are only a few of the very many
writers of that half-century whose work hovered between sf's light and
horror's darkness. Even during and after the 1930s, when pulp fiction was
being more and more categorized into separate groups, we find that it was
not just the sf magazines like AMZ and ASF that published sf: much sf, of
an often horrific kind, continued to appear in WEIRD TALES, a magazine
largely devoted to supernatural fiction. Even H.P. LOVECRAFT wrote some
borderline sf. In the ordinary world, science, then as now, came in two
guises: on the one hand it offered a gleaming, safe future; on the other

it carried us to the brink of apocalypse. Its medical research might
unleash new diseases, its robots run amok, its intellectualism generate a
race with huge brains and withered bodies, its physics create death rays
or atomic bombs. Science was ungodly; it might even awaken the dead.Sf is,
even now, by and large written by ordinary people rather than scientists.
This was almost exclusively so in the 1930s, and it is no wonder that much
of the sf of those early years gave science a bad press. Many people agree
that sf should be about science, but that has never meant that sf should
like science. The anti-scientism of much 1930s sf (also visible at the
more reputable end of the spectrum in the work of writers like C.S. LEWIS)
did no more than reflect the fears of the 1930s, fears that are in no wise
abated in the 1990s. Public anxieties aroused by science and technology
are bound to manifest themselves in fiction, especially horror fiction;
this is natural and unsurprising. The only surprising thing about it is
that so many commentators on the genre are surprised by it. These
commentators have, of course, endeavoured to banish sf/horror from the sf
genre, and some have actually contrived DEFINITIONS OF SF intended to do
just this. Wishing, however, does not make it so; and the fact is that the
supposed splitting in the 1920s and 1930s of the fantastic-fiction
tradition into separate genres of sf, horror and FANTASY never really took
place - or, at least, that the process was never completed.This failure to
exorcise the demons from sf is most visible in sf CINEMA. To this day
maybe half of all sf movies are horror movies. Of the 250 or so films
given entries in this encyclopedia that could be cited to demonstrate the
case, a few dozen or so of the most prominent should be sufficient. In the
1920s we had DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE, METROPOLIS, ALRAUNE (vt Unholy Love;
vt Daughter of Destiny) and ORLACS HANDE (vt The Hands of Orlac); in the
1930s we had FRANKENSTEIN, MAD LOVE, The INVISIBLE MAN , KING KONG and
ISLAND OF LOST SOULS; in the 1940s (when there was almost no sf cinema at
all) we had DR CYCLOPS and The LADY AND THE MONSTER ; the 1950s offered
rich pickings with The THING , The BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS , INVADERS
FROM MARS, THEM!, The QUATERMASS XPERIMENT , TARANTULA, INVASION OF THE
BODY SNATCHERS, The BLOB and I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE, among
very many others; things slowed down a little in the 1960s with VILLAGE OF
THE DAMNED, The DAMNED , The BIRDS , X - THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES, DR
STRANGELOVE: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB,
TERRORE
NELLO SPAZIO (vt Planet of the Vampires), SECONDS, WEEKEND, QUATERMASS AND
THE PIT, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN; in the
1970s we saw A CLOCKWORK ORANGE , FROGS, The CRAZIES , IT'S ALIVE!,
WESTWORLD, The PARASITE MURDERS , The STEPFORD WIVES , BUG, DEMON SEED,
COMA, PIRANHA, The BROOD and, most notably of all, ALIEN; in the 1980s
there were ALTERED STATES, SATURN 3, SCANNERS, The THING , VIDEODROME, Der
LIFT , The TERMINATOR , RE-ANIMATOR, The FLY , PREDATOR, MONKEY SHINES,
THEY LIVE, SOCIETY, TREMORS, HARDWARE, DARKMAN and ALIENS; already in the
1990s we have had TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY and ALIEN3. All of these are
sf. All of these can be described as horror.There is something going on
here beyond anxieties about science. It is the theme (discussed in detail
under GOTHIC SF and again under MONSTER MOVIES) of the incursion of the
irrational into an apparently calm and ordered venue - an intrusion that
in the real world we all fear with good reason; for this fear (which is

for some an active desire) we may need a catharsis in harmless fictional
form. It is a theme for which the metaphoric flexibility of sf is
peculiarly well adapted to cater. The worldview of PARANOIA is one that sf
has often adopted.Horror itself, as a separate genre, has roots older than
those of sf, and had begun to develop its distinctive patterns by the time
of the Romantic movement in the very early 19th century - a little earlier
than sf. Like sf it was by the 1930s widely if incorrectly considered as
distinct from other literary genres. Horror did not, however, become a
major genre in the mass market until the late 1970s and early 1980s - a
boom that partly resulted from Stephen KING's popularity - and later in
the 1980s it began to seem as if the horror wave had already crested. It
is a genre defined not by its content but by its presumptive effect - this
is why it so readily overlaps with other genres which are identified by
their content; we know that horror-sf is common, and lately there has been
a mini-boom in horror Westerns. Various critical attempts have been made,
seldom very convincingly, to distinguish between horror and weird fiction,
or horror and terror, or even horror and the New Gothic. (The term horror
is regarded by some as an unpleasant lowest-common-denominator word for
the genre, hence the occasional search for something that sounds more
respectable, such as "dark fantasy"; but some contrary writers glory in
even less attractive terms, like the current "splatterpunk" [see also
SPLATTER MOVIES]. Regardless of what terms critics use, the predominant
marketing term remains "horror".) Horror fiction can be either
psychological horror - often psychopaths cutting up women with sharp
instruments, sometimes the inner landscapes of maimed minds - or
supernatural horror, or very often both, stories in the second category
being (perhaps) no more than an externalization of the demons conjured up
within the first.When sf collides with horror it is, curiously enough,
usually via the supernatural category, though very often in a rationalized
format ( GODS AND DEMONS; GOLEM; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES) where some kind
of quasiscientific explanation is given - as in Richard MATHESON's I Am
Legend (1954) and Brian M. STABLEFORD's The Empire of Fear (1988), both
vampire novels - for apparently unnatural, and often horrible,
manifestations. (The term MONSTER is sometimes reserved for more overtly
sciencefictional horrors, like the carnivorous killer in Alien.) Just as
sf often uses horror motifs, so too does horror sometimes use sf motifs,
as in Joe R. Lansdale's The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels
(1989), in which a "big red comet" causes carnivorous dinosaurs to
manifest in a metamorphosed Texas. Lansdale is one of the many interesting
writers lacking entries in this encyclopedia because their use (if any) of
sf tropes is so inexplicable; but his borderline case does serve to show
up the insecurity any scholar must feel in attempting to dissect horror,
fantasy and sf out from each other.There seems little point in listing
here sf authors whose work contains major horror components; such a list
would be not only unmanageably long but also rather arbitrary, for such
genre-crossing occurs in work of very varied literary ambition and for a
variety of purposes, some horror-sf stories being admonitory fables,
others exercises in the provision of rollercoaster thrills, still others
tales of mental breakdown and the hallucinatory worlds such illness can
produce. As argued above, horror cannot easily be defined by content, only
by its desired effect, which may be a matter of auctorial tone, or of

lethal subtext. Coagulations of horror with sf have come from authors as
various as Ray BRADBURY and Thomas M. DISCH, Charles BEAUMONT and Dan
SIMMONS, Clark Ashton SMITH and L. Ron HUBBARD, Frank Belknap LONG and
Dean R. KOONTZ, Gerald KERSH and K.W. JETER. The theme of CHILDREN IN SF,
in particular, is a hothouse for such crossovers.With sf cinema it is
possible to be very much more specific: the auteur directors who have
specialized in blending sf with horror are first and foremost David
CRONENBERG and then, still importantly, Larry COHEN, Roger CORMAN, George
A. ROMERO and Ridley SCOTT, in turn followed perhaps by Charles BAND,
James CAMERON, John CARPENTER, Michael CRICHTON and Joe DANTE, along with
the important film-writer Nigel KNEALE.There are many books and magazines
about horror. A particularly useful quarterly magazine that sometimes
considers horror-sf crossover books - and a better informed and more
intelligent review than many magazines in the field - is Necrofile: The
Review of Horror Fiction ed Stefan Dziemianowicz, S.T. Joshi and Michael
Morrison, published by Necronomicon Press, Rhode Island, USA, since Summer
1991. [PN]
HORSNELL, HORACE
(1882-1949) UK drama critic and novelist whose Man Alone (1940) describes
the experiences of the last man on Earth as he wanders through London
after the final DISASTER. Castle Cottage (1940) is a ghost story and The
Cool of the Evening (1942) a rather gentle ADAM-AND-EVE fable set at the
close of Adam's life. [JC]
HORTON, GORDON T.
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
HOSHI, SHIN'ICHI
(1926- ) One of the pioneers of Japanese sf. SH, who has specialized in
the short-short story, became the first full-time sf writer in JAPAN. His
stories were influential on the younger generation, and he was largely
responsible for the popularization of sf and its way of thinking. He has
developed a writing style that gives an sf flavour even to his non-sf
works, and which is appropriate to his attacks on everyday values.
Although he is sometimes called the Japanese Ray BRADBURY, his writings
are more satirical than poetic: comparison with Fredric BROWN might be
closer to the mark. A graduate of Tokyo University, he helped Takumi
SHIBANO found Uchujin, the first Japanese FANZINE, in 1957; his first
professional sale, "Sekisutora" ["Sextra"] (1957), had originally been
published in Uchujin #2. His best known story is "Bokkochan" (1958; trans
under same title FSF 1963); it also appeared in Jinzo Bijin ["A Man-Made
Beauty"] (coll 1961). By 1983 he had published over 1000 stories,
including two sf/fantasy novels: Muma No Hyoteki ["Target of Nightmare"]
(1964), in which a ventriloquist is controlled by his doll, and Koe No Ami
["Net of the Voice"] (1970), in which a telephone network becomes
conscious and takes control of human society. Other works have included
historical novellas, collections of unconventional short essays, and
fictionalized documentaries including biographies of his father and
grandfather. An important multivolume retrospective is Hoshi Shin'ichi No
Sakuhinshu ["The Complete Works of Shin'ichi Hoshi"] (coll 1974). Two
books of English translations are The Spiteful Planet and Other Stories

(coll trans 1978 Tokyo) and There was a Knock (coll trans 1984 Tokyo), the
latter collecting short-short stories. [TSh]
HOSKINS, ROBERT
(1933- ) US writer and editor. RH began publishing sf with "Feet of Clay"
for If in 1958 as by Phillip Hoskins. He worked as a literary agent
1967-8, and served as senior editor with Lancer Books 1969-1972. His first
published novel, Evil in the Family (1972) as by Grace Corren, is a
TIME-TRAVEL fantasy. The Shattered People (1975) is FAR-FUTURE sf, pitting
a primitive culture against a technological civilization which has been
exploiting it. The Stars sequence - Master of the Stars (1976 Canada), To
Control the Stars (1977) and To Escape the Stars (1978) - is based loosely
on RH's "The Problem Makers" (1963), and describes a cluster of galactic
civilizations, connected by a system of ancient stargates, over a period
of eons. Legacy of the Stars (1979) as by John Gregory is an sf adventure
unconnected to the sequence. RH's books make no claims to be anything more
than entertaining action adventures.As an anthologist, RH is of primary
importance as editor of the INFINITY series of original anthologies:
Infinity #1 (anth 1970), #2 (anth 1971), #3 (anth 1972), #4 (anth 1972)
and #5 (anth 1973). [PN/JC]Other works: Tomorrow's Son (1977);
Jack-in-the-Box Planet (1978), juvenile sf; The Attic Child (1979) as by
Grace Corren; The Night Runner: The Gemini Run * (1979) as by Michael
Kerr.Other works as editor: First Step Forward (anth 1969); The Stars
Around Us (anth 1970); Swords against Tomorrow (anth 1970); The Far-Out
People (anth 1971); Tomorrow One (anth 1971); Wondermakers (anth 1972);
Strange Tomorrows (anth 1972); The Edge of Never (anth 1973), fantasy;
Wondermakers 2 (anth 1974); The Liberated Future (anth 1974); The Future
Now: Saving Tomorrow (anth 1977); Against Tomorrow (anth 1979).
HOUGH, S(TAN) B.
[r] Rex GORDON.
HOUGHTON, CLAUDE
Pseudonym of Claude Houghton Oldfield (1889-1961), a UK writer known
primarily outside the sf field. He declared that all his work was based on
the thesis that modern civilization must collapse "because it no longer
believes it has a destiny"; thus his novels of ideas occasionally stray
into the surreal, the supernatural or the sciencefictional. His one
borderline-sf novel is This was Ivor Trent (1935), which examines the
effect upon a writer of a vision which reveals to him a man of the future.
His first novel, Neighbours (1926), is an intriguing study in abnormal
PSYCHOLOGY whose narrator makes an obsessive study of his "next-door
neighbour", unaware of the fact that he is merely an alienated facet of
his subject's mind. Some of CH's later works also feature eccentric
psychologies, but their fantastic elements are minimal. Julian Grant Loses
his Way (1933) is a bitterly misanthropic character-study cast in the form
of a posthumous fantasy. Three Fantastic Tales (coll 1934 chap) contains 3
brief philosophical fantasies. [BS]See also: SUPERMAN.
HOUSE, [Colonel] EDWARD MANDELL
(1858-1938) US political figure - in his refusal of official duties
rather like an earlier Bernard Baruch (1870-1965)-involved with President

Woodrow Wilson in setting up the League of Nations. Philip Dru,
Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935 (1912) is a surprisingly
wide-ranging exercise in political sf. After a cartel of corrupt business
tycoons attempts to suborn the US Government, Dru instigates a new Civil
War, wins, and in place of the old US Government establishes a radical
UTOPIA that features universal suffrage and other "socialist" innovations.
He then saves the rest of the world. [JC]
HOUSEHOLD, GEOFFREY
(1900-1988) UK writer who remains best known for Rogue Male (1938), the
first of a run of thrillers whose intensely stoic lone protagonists
condemn the political world, seeking authenticity in the soil and in
autonomous acts, like the attempted assassination of Hitler which forms
the premise of this book. GH's first novel, The Terror of Villadonga
(1936; rev vt The Spanish Cave 1936 US), for older children, describes the
discovery of a prehistoric sea-beast. The Third Hour (1937) sends its
protagonist to South America in search of UTOPIA. The Dance of the Dwarfs
(1968) is set in the Amazon basin, where feral prehistoric survivals cause
some horrific damage. The Cats to Come (1975) is a fantasy about a future
Earth ruled by cats. Hostage: London; The Diary of Julian Despard (1977)
is a NEAR-FUTURE thriller. The Sending (1980) is a dark fantasy. Summon
the Bright Water (1981) is a SCIENCE-FANTASY tale invoking ATLANTIS.
Arrows of Desire (1985), set in a crumbling post- HOLOCAUST UK, expresses
once again, and for the final time, GH's profound doubt that humanity
could ever govern itself with dignity. [JC]
HOUSE NAMES
PSEUDONYMS.
HOUSMAN, LAURENCE
(1865-1959) UK writer, brother of the poet A.E. Housman (1859-1936) and
best known for his plays and for several volumes of fantasy stories,
including Gods and their Makers (coll 1897; with stories added, vt Gods
and Their Makers and Other Stories coll 1920), What Next? Provocative
Tales of Faith and Morals (coll 1938),Strange Ends and Discoveries (coll
1948) and The Kind and the Foolish: Short Tales of Myth, Magic and Miracle
(coll 1952). Some of his work for children, such as his first book, A Farm
in Fairyland (coll 1894), and some of his plays, such as Possession
(1921), are also of fantasy interest, as is his novel Trimblerigg (1924).
Closer to an sf interest are his two RURITANIAN tales, John of Jingalo:
The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties (1912; vt King John of Jingalo 1912
US) and its sequel The Royal Runaway, and Jingalo in Revolution (1914); in
both novels there is a running commentary on UTOPIAN social solutions,
particularly with regard to WOMEN's rights. [JC]Other works: All-Fellows:
Seven Legends of Lower Redemption (coll 1896) and The Cloak of Friendship
(coll 1905), both assembled with 1 additional story as All-Fellows and the
Cloak of Friendship (omni 1924); The House of Joy (coll 1895) and The
Field of Clover (coll 1898), both recast, with A Farm in Fairyland, as
Moonshine and Clover (coll 1922) and A Doorway to Fairyland (coll 1923);
The Blue Moon (coll 1904); Ironical Tales (coll 1926); What O'Clock Tales
(coll 1932), juvenile fables.

HOUSTON, DAVID
Pseudonym of US writer Houston Force Lumpkin III (1938- ), who produced
sf books with some intensity for a few years. Generally unremarkable,
though competent, his works began with Alien Perspective (1978) and an
sf-adventure sequence comprising Gods in a Vortex (1979) and Wingmaster
(1981). He then wrote a series of novels tied to the TALES OF TOMORROW tv
series: Tales of Tomorrow #1: Invaders at Ground Zero * (1981), #2: Red
Dust * (1981), #3: Substance X * (1981) and #4: Ice from Space * (1982).
He was also responsible for Swamp Thing * (1982) with Len Wein, a SWAMP
THING film tie. [JC]
HOVORKA, ROBERT L(EO) Jr
(1955- ) US writer whose first sf novel, the SPACE OPERA Derelict (1988),
is reminiscent of ALIEN (1979). [JC]
HOWARD, (JOHN) HAYDEN
(1913-1987) US writer who began publishing sf with "It" for Planet
Stories in 1952. His sf novel, The Eskimo Invasion (fixup 1967), set
(rather unusually) in Canada, comprises a speculative view of
OVERPOPULATION problems through a story about a group of Eskimos
transformed into an apparently benign, fast-breeding new species. [JC]
HOWARD, IVAN
(? - ) US editor who produced 7 anthologies 1962-4 for Belmont books, and
nothing since: The Weird Ones (anth 1962; IH uncredited), Escape to Earth
(anth 1963), Novelets of Science Fiction (anth 1963), Rare Science Fiction
(anth 1963), 6 and the Silent Scream (anth 1963), Way Out (anth 1963) and
Things (anth 1964). [PN]
HOWARD, ROBERT E(RVIN)
(1906-1936) US writer. REH wrote no sf - although Almuric (1939 Weird
Tales; 1964) is a PLANETARY ROMANCE in the manner of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS
- but his association with H.P. LOVECRAFT and WEIRD TALES helped to
maintain the sf community's interest in his extravagant SWORD-AND-SORCERY
stories. His few contributions to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos do not bring
out the sf elements. He was the real parent and inspiration of the
sword-and-sorcery (or HEROIC FANTASY) genre (although earlier writers have
been retrospectively recruited to it by historians), which existed as an
enclave of the sf marketplace until FANTASY became a marketing category in
the late 1960s, after which REH's work enjoyed a spectacular posthumous
boom. His first professionally published story was "Spear and Fang" for
Weird Tales in 1925; he quickly became an amazingly prolific writer of
vigorous adventure fiction in several pulp genres.REH's most celebrated
works are those which comprise the Conan the Barbarian series; 17 of these
appeared in Weird Tales 1932-6, and 4 more were published posthumously.
The series has been extended vastly, first by the fan Bjorn Nyberg (1929), whose pastiche novel was edited by L. Sprague DE CAMP; then De Camp
turned several other unpublished REH stories into Conan stories, and he
and Lin CARTER wrote many more around fragments and outlines as well as
creating pastiches of their own. Further adventures have been produced by
Andrew J. OFFUTT, Robert Jordan (1948- ) and Steve PERRY, among others.
The popularity of the series was further enhanced by the film Conan the

Barbarian (1981) starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, although it de-emphasized
the fantasy element. The bibliography of the series is inordinately
complicated, but the whole of the authentic canon can be found in 5 GNOME
PRESS vols: in order of internal chronology, The Coming of Conan (coll
1953; includes 2 non-series stories, 2 revisions and some supplementary
material), Conan the Barbarian (coll 1955), The Sword of Conan (coll
1952), King Conan (coll 1953) and Conan the Conqueror (1935 Weird Tales as
"The Hour of the Dragon"; 1950; rev vt The Hour of the Dragon 1977). Gnome
also issued the De Camp/Nyberg The Return of Conan (1957; vt Conan the
Avenger1978) and the De Camp revisions in Tales of Conan (coll 1955).
Lancer published 11 vols of a 12-vol set, later completed and reissued by
ACE BOOKS: again in order of internal chronology, these are Conan (coll
1967), Conan of Cimmeria (coll 1969), Conan the Freebooter (coll 1968),
Conan the Wanderer (coll 1968), Conan the Adventurer (coll 1966), Conan
the Buccaneer (1971; by De Camp and Carter), Conan the Warrior (coll
1967), Conan the Usurper (coll 1967), Conan the Conqueror (1967), Conan
the Avenger (1968), Conan of Aquilonia (coll 1977; by De Camp and Carter)
and Conan of the Isles (1968 by De Camp and Carter). Two omnibuses -The
Conan Chronicles (omni 1989UK) and The Conan Chronicles 2 (omni 1990 UK) assemble the first 6 titles of this sequence. Using the original magazine
texts, Donald M. Grant issued handsome illustrated editions of many of the
REH stories including The People of the Black Circle (1974), A Witch Shall
Be Born (1975), The Tower of the Elephant (coll 1975), Red Nails (1975),
Rogues in the House (coll 1976), The Devil in Iron (coll 1976), Queen of
the Black Coast (coll 1978), Pool of the Black One (coll 1986) and The
Hour of the Dragon (1989). A Berkley paperback series advertised as "the
authorized edition" and ed Karl Edward Wagner includes The Hour of the
Dragon (1977), The People of the Black Circle (coll 1977) and Red Nails
(coll 1977). The Conan Chronicles (omni 1989). Two MARVEL COMICS based on
the character are Conan the Barbarian and The Savage Sword of Conan.Other
REH sword-and-sorcery series include one set in Conan's imaginary
prehistoric world, collected in King Kull (coll 1967, ed and with
additional material by Lin Carter. Others are collected in Bran Mak Morn
(coll 1969; cut vt Worms of the Earth 1987) and Red Shadows (coll 1968; vt
in 3 vols as The Moon of Skulls 1969, The Hand of Kane 1970 and Solomon
Kane 1971).REH wrote at high speed and his work is unsophisticated, but it
is vigorous, fast-paced and easy to read. His suicide - after learning of
his mother's imminent death - brought to a premature end what might have
been an extraordinarily productive career. [MJE/BS]Other works: Skull-Face
and Others (coll 1946; vt in 3 vols as Skull-Face and Others 1976 UK, The
Valley of the Worms, and Others 1976 UK and The Shadow Kingdom 1976 UK);
Always Comes Evening (coll 1957), poetry; The Dark Man and Others (coll
1963; cut vt Pigeons from Hell 1976); Wolfshead (coll 1968); Tigers of the
Sea (coll 1976); The Book of Robert E. Howard (coll 1976); The Second Book
of Robert E. Howard (coll 1976); The Robert E. Howard Omnibus (coll 1977);
Sword Woman (coll 1977); Black Canaan (coll 1978); The Gods of Bal-Sagoth
(coll 1979); Lord of the Dead (coll 1981); Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred
Horrors (coll 1987) ed David A. DRAKE; Shadows of Dreams (coll 1989),
poetry.About the author: The Last Celt (1976) by Glenn Lord,
bio-bibliography by the agent of REH's estate; The Annotated Guide to
Robert E. Howard's Sword ? The

Ultimate Guide to Howardia 1925-1975 (1976) ed Wayne Warfield; Dark Valley
Destiny: The Life of Robert E.Howard (1983) by L. Sprague De Camp; The
Dark Barbarian: The Writings of Robert E. Howard: A Critical Anthology
(1984) ed Don Herron.See also: ARKHAM HOUSE; ATLANTIS; FANZINE; GODS AND
DEMONS; MAGIC; PUBLISHING; SEX; SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS.
HOWARD, TROY
Lauran Bosworth PAINE.
HOWARD, WARREN F.
[s] Frederik POHL.
HOWELL, SCOTT
Paul CONRAD.
HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN
(1837-1920) US writer, best known for his many realist novels from 1870
onwards. His UTOPIAN sequence, A Traveler from Altruria (1892-3
Cosmopolitan; 1894) and Through the Eye of the Needle (Part One 1894
Cosmopolitan; exp 1907), is a deceptively mild-mannered assault on the
pretensions of late-19th-century US democracy and culture, seen from the
perspective of a dreamlike visitor from Altruria, a land where the
principles of Christianity and of the US Constitution, taken literally,
result in an ethical form of socialism. In the second volume the visitor
returns to Altruria with his US bride, and both send letters back
describing that land, whose nature is somewhat influenced by the work of
Edward BELLAMY, more so by that of William MORRIS. Capitalism has been
replaced by a genuine altruistic "neighbourliness", and the two books
attack hypocrisy and the more ruthless forms of capitalism in a manner
both unmistakable and highly telling, even though gently put. Letters of
an Altrurian Traveler (1893-4 Cosmopolitan; 1961) assembles bridging
material WDH published only in magazine form; The Altrurian Romances (omni
1968) reprints everything. Much the same narrative technique reappears
movingly in The Seen and Unseen at Stratford-on-Avon (1914), whose revived
but ghostly Shakespeare, addressing the 20th-century narrator, sweetly
defends his right to be considered the author of his own plays; the book
is an answer to Mark TWAIN's Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909) which, after the
fashion of the time, argues Francis BACON's authorship. Questionable
Shapes (coll 1903) and Between the Dark and the Daylight (coll 1907),
neither sf, assemble (along with other work) CLUB STORIES in which the
psychologist Wanhope scientifically debunks the ghost stories of his
fellow members. [JC]Other works: The Undiscovered Country 1880); The
Leatherwood God (1916).As Editor: Shapes that Haunt the Dusk (anth 1907)
with Henry Mills Alden.
HOWES, JANE
Wilmar H. SHIRAS.
HOWL, MARCIA YVONNE
[r] Sharon JARVIS.
HOWLING, THE
Joe DANTE.

HOYLE, [Sir] FRED
(1915- ) UK astronomer and writer, famed in the former capacity for his
maverick views on many subjects, including a long-held advocacy of the
Steady State theory of the creation of the Universe, a concept replaced
after much acrimony by the currently orthodox Big Bang theory. A possible
consequence of his combative attitude towards theory and his colleagues
was the apparent weariness which afflicted him in 1973, the year of his
knighthood, when he resigned his posts at Cambridge University as Plumian
professor of ASTRONOMY and experimental philosophy, and as director of the
Cambridge Institute of Theoretical Astronomy, which he had founded. He
subsequently much increased the rate of his writing, both fiction and
nonfiction. The first in the latter category, and his first book, The
Nature of the Universe (1950), had eloquently popularized his COSMOLOGY in
1950s terms, as had what is possibly his most important popularization,
Frontiers of Astronomy (1955); later works, like Astronomy and Cosmology
(1975 US), Astronomy Today (1975; vt Highlights in Astronomy 1975 US) and
The Universe According to Hoyle (1982 US), aggressively updated those
arguments. More unusual postulates about the nature of the Universe were
presented - with Chandra Wickramasinghe (1939- ) - in books such as
Lifecloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe (1979), Diseases from Space
(1979), Evolution from Space (1981) and Cosmic Life-Force (1988), which
argue that complex organic molecules, including viruses, form in the
nuclei of comets and are deposited on Earth during close encounters or
impacts; they join the gene pool, making EVOLUTION possible. Ice: The
Ultimate Human Catastrophe (1981) argues that a new Ice Age is imminent.It
could be argued that FH's formidable reputation and powers as a scientific
intellect have obscured the true nature of his sf, none of which is told
with anything like a strict adherence to scientific principles, plausible
or speculative. His first novel, The Black Cloud (1957) postulates the
arrival of a sentient cloud of gas from space which - in a manner
reminiscent of the work of Edmond HAMILTON- proceeds to blot off the Sun's
rays from Earth, killing the scientists who attempt full-scale
COMMUNICATION with it, because such an intense exposure to the cloud's
mentality overwhelmingly displaces their human conception of reality. In
later novels offers of transcendence would affect FH's SCIENTISTS like
catnip, giving them the chance both to escape "orthodox" science and to
demonstrate an impatient contempt for civilian dealings: his books, which
typically read as mystical romps into the transcendental, are of absorbing
interest for their aggressive presentation of the argument that
science-educated people are more fit to govern than arts-educated people,
partly because numeracy is a necessary qualification for rulers but also
because civilians face life through a tangle of disenabling emotions. FH's
work, therefore, when it is not expressive of a holiday escapism, is
consistently political ( POLITICS) in orientation.Ossian's Ride (1959),
his second novel, is told initially in a manner reminiscent of John Buchan
(1875-1940) or Geoffrey HOUSEHOLD: a protagonist, on the run in
rough-and-tumble Ireland from a posse of incompetent agents, gradually
uncovers an underlying sf plot - at which point the book changes course
utterly. Stranded ALIENS plan to transform Earth into a rationalized,
high-tech, skyscraper-packed UTOPIA, by force if necessary: they offer to
recruit the protagonist, who joins them gladly. With John ELLIOT, FH next

published A for Andromeda * (1962) and Andromeda Breakthrough * (1964),
adapted from their tv serials with those titles (which see). With the
exception of one further solo novel, October the First is Too Late (1966),
an emotionally disjointing excursion through time-slipped areas of Earth,
and a collection of stories, Element 79 (coll 1967), FH for some 20 years
concentrated exclusively on collaborative work; Comet Halley (1985)
noticeably lacked the drive of his collaborations. The obvious power of
his personality is reflected in the fact that the novels written with
Elliot, and the more important ones with his son Geoffrey HOYLE, differ in
no significant way from the early solo efforts.In the first novel with
Geoffrey, Fifth Planet (1963), an alien intelligence offers, as usual, a
challenge-and an ultimate marriage of minds - to a scientist who must
attempt to make sense of events on Achilles, a grassy, wandering planet.
Rockets in Ursa Major (1962 as unpublished children's play by FH; rev
1969) and its sequel, Into Deepest Space (1974 US), are spasmodic SPACE
OPERAS involving an ALIEN-guided trip through a BLACK HOLE. The
protagonist of The Incandescent Ones (1977 US), trapped on a DYSTOPIAN
Earth, finds to his relief that he is an ANDROID, and thus entitled to
discorporate into the higher consciousnesses who inhabit Jupiter. The
Westminster Disaster (1978) welcomes a terrorist-inspired nuclear
destruction of London, with the buildings of Whitehall coming "down like
so many rotten fruit". But most interesting perhaps is The Inferno (1973),
in which an explosion at the galactic core wipes out all human life except
for small groups, mainly in Scotland, which an impatient scientist comes
to rule: as wish-fulfilment, the tale is perhaps more self-revealing than
many "civilian" authors would dare to pen; the power of the book,
nevertheless, is very considerable. By this point, FH and his son had
become adept at a style whose apparent disjointedness concealed an
intensity which scathed the mundane world. In his best work, FH
demonstrates not the power of scientific method but the personal allure of
transcendental intoxication. His appeal is straightforward. In his hands,
sf does not explain. It releases. [JC/PN]Other works: The Small World of
Fred Hoyle: An Autobiography (1986).With Geoffrey Hoyle: Seven Steps to
the Sun (1970); The Molecule Men and The Monster of Loch Ness: Two Short
Novels (coll 1971); the Professor Gamma series of juvenile novels,
comprising The Energy Pirate (1982 chap), The Frozen Planet of Azuron
(1982 chap), The Giants of Universal Park (1982 chap) and The Planet of
Death (1982 chap).See also: ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; CONCEPTUAL
BREAKTHROUGH; CYBERNETICS; DISASTER; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION;
INTELLIGENCE; LIVING WORLDS; MATHEMATICS; PARALLEL WORLDS; PHYSICS.
HOYLE, GEOFFREY
(1941- ) UK writer, author of several sf novels with his father, Fred
HOYLE (whom see for details). 2010: Living in the Future (1972) is a
nonfiction exercise in FUTUROLOGY for children. [JC]
HOYLE, TREVOR
(1940- ) UK writer who has, most unusually, been able to apply an erudite
surrealism to works directed towards a mass market. He had not, however,
yet mastered this technique for his first novel, The Relatively Constant
Copywriter (1972), a dourly joky FABULATION which he self-published. He

remains best known for his Q series-Q: Seeking the Mythical Future (1977),
Q: Through the Eye of Time (1977) and Q: The Gods Look Down (1977)-set in
a variety of ALTERNATE WORLDS and detailing the work and crises of its
overall protagonist, a Myth Technologist who, in the second volume, must
cope with the re-creation, on an alternate world, of an experimental Adolf
Hitler whose existence threatens to leak into our own familiar Earth (
HITLER WINS). TH's mature range was demonstrated by the publication in the
same year, 1979, of This Sentient Earth (1979 US; vt Earth Cult 1979 UK),
an unremarkable sf adventure, and The Man who Travelled on Motorways
(1979), an intensely crafted hegira through the apocalyptic inscapes of a
UK approaching the end. The Last Gasp (1983 US; rev 1990) is a salutary
dreadful-warning tale about terminal POLLUTION, implying very clearly that
humanity's behaviour could be described as lemming-like. Vail (1984), once
again focusing on motorways, presents a NEAR-FUTURE UK in DYSTOPIAN terms.
K.I.D.S. (1987; vt Kids 1990 US) is a horror tale which climaxes in
nuclear HOLOCAUST. It may be that, in finding several audiences, TH has
failed to find any one audience that properly recognizes him; but he still
has readers, and they continue to look for his work. [JC]Other works:
Three BLAKE'S SEVEN tv ties, being Blake's Seven * (1977; vt Terry
Nation's Blake's 7: Their First Adventure 1988 US), #2: Project Avalon *
(1979; vt Terry Nation's Blake's 7: Project Avalon 1988 US) and #3:
Scorpio Attack * (1971; vt Terry Nation's Blake's 7: Scorpio Attack 1988
US); The Rock Fix (1977); The Stigma (1980).
HOYNE, THOMAS TEMPLE
(1875-1946) US writer, a popularizer of ECONOMICS topics and author of
Intrigue on the Upper Level: A Story of Crime, Love, Adventure and Revolt
in 2050 A.D. (1934), in which a primitive, hierarchical, gangster-run
capitalist society is riven by discontent among the lower orders, and is
eventually overthrown. [JC]
HRUSKA, ALAN
(1933- ) US writer whose sf novel, Borrowed Time (1984), attempts with
some success to suggest analogies and crossings between various ALTERNATE
WORLDS and the bicameral human brain. [JC]
HUANG HAI
[r] CHINESE SF.
HUBBARD, L(AFAYETTE) RON(ALD)
(1911-1986) US writer in many genres, including sf and fantasy, and
subsequent quasireligious figure whose founding of DIANETICS and in 1952
the Church of SCIENTOLOGY led to much controversy, which continues. He
began publishing sf with "The Dangerous Dimension" for ASF in 1938, and
remained active until, more than a decade later, he transferred his
creative gifts to the RELIGION he founded. He wrote under his own name and
as Kurt von Rachen, Rene Lafayette and Frederick Engelhardt; other names
remain unrevealed. Though there is no hard and fast line, his fantasy,
much of it published in Unknown, was frequently as by LRH, and his sf,
mostly in ASF, was frequently pseudonymous (although at least 12 items,
some of them full-length though yet-unreprinted novels, appeared in ASF as
by LRH). Certainly LRH was for John W. CAMPBELL Jr, in the throes of

creating his GOLDEN AGE OF SF, a worthwhile and prolific contributor to
the two journals, though he was not a member of that small group - L.
Sprague DE CAMP, Robert A. HEINLEIN and Isaac ASIMOV being the prime
movers-who were rewriting the rules of generic plausibility in terms which
survived for many years. Retrospective attempts to elect LRH to that
central role are best seen as gestures of loyalty from those sympathethic
to his later career.His best-known early sf novel, Final Blackout (1940
ASF; 1948), grimly describes a world devastated by many wars in which a
young army officer becomes dictator of the UK, which he organizes to fend
off a decadent USA. It cannot be denied that the book veers extremely
close to the fascism its text explicitly disavows. But sf was clearly not
LRH's forte, and most of his work in the genre reads as tendentious or
laboured or both. As a writer of fantasy, however, he wrote with an
occasionally pixilated fervour that is still pleasing, and sometimes
reminiscent of the screwball comedies popular in the 1930s cinema. Slaves
of Sleep (1939 Unknown; 1948), with its sequel "The Masters of Sleep"
(1950), his best-known fantasy, is laid in the Arabian Nights environment
set aside for him by Campbell as his exclusive bailiwick in Unknown. The
darkly PARANOID Fear (1940 Unknown; 1957) was perhaps rather stronger and
more original, and demonstrated a powerful capacity to hook the reader
into worlds where normal logic is distressingly maladaptive; it appeared
also as one of the 2 novellas in Typewriter in the Sky/Fear (1940 Unknown
for "Typewriter in the Sky"; coll 1951) and as one of the 2 novellas in
Fear ?
coll 1970). "Typewriter in the Sky", a slyly effective self-referential
FABULATION, may be his most permanently memorable work. Return to Tomorrow
(1950 ASF as "To the Stars"; 1954) is a remarkably ruthless SPACE OPERA (
SOCIAL DARWINISM). The Ole Doc Methuselah stories, as by Rene Lafayette,
have been assembled as Ole Doc Methuselah (1947-50 ASF; coll 1970). He
wrote other series, too, notably the Conquest of Space series (as
Lafayette) in Startling Stories, all but the last story in 1949:
"Forbidden Voyage", "The Magnificent Failure", "The Incredible
Destination", "The Unwilling Hero", "Beyond the Black Nebula", "The
Emperor of the Universe" and "The Last Admiral" (1950). As Kurt von Rachen
he wrote the Kilkenny Cats series, all in ASF: "The Idealists" (1940),
"The Kilkenny Cats" (1940), "The Traitor" (1941), "The Mutineers" (1941)
and "The Rebels" (1942). In general his early work, though composed with
delirious speed, often came to haunt his readership, and its canny
utilization of SUPERMAN protagonists came to tantalize them with visions
of transcendental power.The vulnerability of the sf community - from
Campbell and A.E. VAN VOGT down to the naivest teenage fans - to this lure
of transcendence may help account for the otherwise puzzling success first
of Dianetics, then of Scientology itself, which gained many early recruits
from sf; for, both as technique and as religion, these very US bodies of
doctrine centrally posited a technology of self-improvement, a set of
instructions to follow in order to liberate the transcendent power within
one ( EDISONADE). LRH became very wealthy on the proceeds of his intuition
concerning "spiritual technology", and departed the sf field for many
years, not to return until the publication of Battlefield Earth: A Saga of
the Year 3000 (1982), an enormously long space opera composed in an idiom
that seemed embarrassingly archaic. This was followed by the Mission Earth

"dekalogy", a 10-vol sequence whose farcical overemphases fail to disguise
an overblown tale that would have been more at home in the dawn of the
PULP MAGAZINES; it comprises The Invaders Plan (1985), Black Genesis
(1986), The Enemy Within (1986), An Alien Affair (1986), Fortune of Fear
(1986), Death Quest (1987), Voyage of Vengeance (1987), Disaster (1987),
Villainy Victorious (1987) and The Doomed Planet (1987). The posthumous
publication of some of these books has led to speculation as to their true
authorship. The sequence was released by LRH's own firm, Bridge
Publications, and was heavily promoted, reflecting LRH's - and his
intellectual heirs' - apparent desire to re-establish his reputation in
the sf world. At the same time, he inaugurated the WRITERS OF THE FUTURE
CONTEST and the Writers of the Future workshops for new authors, some of
whom have reported benefits ( Algis BUDRYS for further discussion); the
associated anthology series is L. RON HUBBARD PRESENTS WRITERS OF THE
FUTURE. In the early 1990s, much of LRH's early work was scheduled for
reissue from Bridge Publications; and in 1992 it was announced that an
underground crypt had been constructed near Petrolia, California, by an
arm of the Church of Scientology known as the Church of Spiritual
Technology, to house "the religious works of L. Ron Hubbard and other key
religious works of mankind". [JC/PN]Other works: Buckskin Brigades (1937;
rev 1987; further rev 1987), associational; Death's Deputy (1940 Unknown;
1948) and The Kingslayer (coll 1949; vt Seven Steps to the Arbiter 1975),
also bound together as From Death to the Stars (omni 1953); Triton and
Battle of Wizards ("Triton" 1940 Unknown; "Battle of Wizards" 1949 Fantasy
Book; coll 1949), also bound with Ed Earl REPP's The Radium Pool (coll
1949) as Science Fantasy Quintet (anth 1953); The Case of the Friendly
Corpse (1941 Unknown; 1991); The Automagic Horse (1994 chap).Nonfiction:
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950) and very many others
of this type, including This is Scientology: The Science of Certainty
(1955 UK), Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought (1956 UK) and The
Phoenix Lectures (1968 UK). See also: ALIENS; ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION;
COSMOLOGY; FASTER THAN LIGHT; HORROR IN SF; MEDICINE; MESSIAHS; MUSIC;
POLITICS; PSI POWERS; PSYCHOLOGY; SPACESHIPS; VIRTUAL REALITY; WAR.
HUBSCHMAN, THOMAS
(? - ) US author of two unremarkable sf adventures, Alpha-II (dated 1979
but 1980) and Space Ark (1981). [JC]
HUDSON, JAN
George H. SMITH.
HUDSON, MICHAEL
Michael KUBE-MCDOWELL.
HUDSON, W(ILLIAM) H(ENRY)
(1841-1922) UK naturalist and writer, born in Argentina. His fine quasiUTOPIAN novel of the FAR FUTURE, A Crystal Age (1887 anon; signed, with a
new preface, 1906) depicts small, self-sufficient, matriarchally organized
households living in harmony with Nature. The protagonist, tragically,
cannot adapt to their PASTORAL way of life. A similar quasisupernatural
harmony with the Amazonian forest is enjoyed by the wild girl Rima - the
last of her race - in the affectingly powerful novel Green Mansions

(1904); she is ultimately destroyed by the local Indians, who are no more
in tune with Nature than is the unhappy civilized protagonist. Both
stories are remarkable anticipations of modern ecological mysticism (
ECOLOGY). "Marta Riquelme", in El Ombu (coll 1902), is an equally feverish
fantasy in which the eponymous woman undergoes sorrow-induced
metamorphosis into a bird. A Little Boy Lost (1905) is a children's
fantasy which further develops Hudson's peculiar fascination with maternal
figures. [BS]See also: ANONYMOUS SF AUTHORS; HISTORY OF SF; SLEEPER
AWAKES.
HUEFFER, FORD MADOX
[r] Ford Madox FORD.
HUGHES, DENNIS (TALBOT)
(? - ) UK writer, one of several authors of paperback originals for
obscure houses in the late 1940s and 1950s who have remained reticent - or
indifferent - about revealing much about themselves as individuals. DH was
among the most prolific, producing some 60 known sf novels in less than
half a decade. Like John S. GLASBY and the even more prolific R.L.
FANTHORPE, DH made use of a wide range of sf themes with considerable
invention, especially on some of his later fantasy stories, which often
feature allegorical and/or dream sequences; but the books themselves were
slackly written, albeit with some improvement over the years. This
carelessness was entirely understandable given the sweat-shop conditions
of his employment. [JC]Works include:As Dennis (or Denis) Hughes: The
Earth Invasion Battalion (1950); Murder by Telecopter (1950); Formula 695
(1950); War Lords of Space (1950); Moon War (1951).As Marvin Ashton:
People of Asa (1953).As Ray Barry: Death Dimension (1952); Blue Peril
(1952); Gamma Product (1952); Humanoid Puppets (1952); Ominous Folly
(1952).As George Sheldon Browne (or Brown): Destination Mars (1951); The
Planetoid Peril (1952); The Yellow Planet (1954).As Berl CAMERON (house
name): Maid of Thuro (1952); Lost Aeons (1953).As Dee Carter: Blue Cordon
(1952); Chloroplasm (1952); Purple Islands (1953).As Neil CHARLES (house
name): Twenty-Four Hours (1952); The Land of Esa (1953); Beyond Zoaster
(1953); Pre-Gargantua (1953); World of Gol (1953); Research Opta (1953).As
Lee ELLIOT(house name): Bio-Muton (1952).As Marco Garon (house name): The
Rex Brandon jungle fantasies, loosely derived from Tarzan, comprising
Jungle Allies (1951), Death Warriors (1951), Black Fury (1951), White Gold
(1951), Black Sport (1951), Bush Claws (1951), Silent River (1951), Veldt
Warriors (1951), Leopard God (1952), Snake Valley (1952), Fire Tribes
(1952) and Mountain Gold (1952) ( Marco GARRON).As Irving Heine: Dimension
of Illion (1955 chap).As Gill HUNT (house name): Elektron Union (1951);
Hostile Worlds (1951); Planet X (1951); Space Flight (1951); Spacial Ray
(1951).As Von KELLAR (house name): Ionic Barrier (1953).As Brad KENT
(house name): Biology "A" (1952); The Fatal Law (1952); Catalyst (1952).As
John Lane: Maid of Thuro (1952); Mammalia (1953).As Rand LE PAGE (house
name): Asteroid Forma (1953).As Grant Malcolm: The Green Mandarin Mystery
(1950).As G.R. Melde: Pacific Advance (1954).As Van REED (house name):
House of Many Changes (1952).As Russell Rey: The Queen People (1952);
Valley of Terror (1953).As William Rogersohn: North Dimension (1954);
Amiro (1954).As Arn ROMILUS (house name): Brain Paleo (1953); Organic

Destiny (1954).As E.R. Royce: Experiment in Telepathy (1954).
HUGHES, EDWARD P.
(? - ) US writer who began publishing sf with "In the Name of the Father"
for FSF in 1980. His first novel, The Long Mynd (1985), depicts a postHOLOCAUST world which has been brought into being by PSI POWERS. Master of
the Fist (coll of linked stories 1989) repeats significant elements of the
first venue. [JC]
HUGHES, MONICA
(1925- ) UK-born writer, from 1952 in CANADA, where she has won several
awards in recognition of her novels for older children, including the
Canada Council Children's Literature Prize in 1982 and 1983. Her first sf
novels, Crisis on Conshelf Ten (1975) and its sequel, Earthdark (1977 UK),
utilize an UNDER-THE-SEA and a Lunar setting to explore in a humane
fashion the crises of adolescents in venues which, typically of her work
in general, encompassingly keep them alive, but at a cost. This irony of
survival - it is an irony likely to evoke an acute response from young
readers - is very much sharpened in the Isis sequence, for which MH
remains best known: The Keeper of the Isis Light (1980 UK), The Guardian
of Isis (1981 UK) and The Isis Pedlar (1982 UK). The protagonist of the
sequence, a deeply isolated orphan teenager, is initially alone on the
planet Isis except for a guardian ROBOT. It is only when human settlers
arrive that she discovers that she has been bio-engineered into a kind of
reptile for survival purposes, and must from this point adjust to her job
as warden and to her solitude. Other series include the DYSTOPIAN Arc One
sequence - Devil on My Back (1984 UK) and The Dream Catcher (1986 UK) and Sandwriter (1985 UK) and its sequel, The Promise (1989).Singletons of
interest include: The Tomorrow City (1978 UK), which again demonstrates
the costs of survival through the story of a young girl who is blinded by
the great COMPUTER designed by her father to protect her environment;
Beyond the Dark River (1979 UK), a post- HOLOCAUST tale set in the
prairies of northern Canada; Ring-Rise, Ring-Set (1982 UK), again set in a
threatened Canada; and Invitation to the Game (1990), in which the
implicit PARANOIA of some of MH's earlier work becomes frighteningly
articulate, as a seemingly benevolent 21st-century government transports
unemployable adolescents to an unknown destination, where they will be
very happy. [JC]Other works: The Beckoning Lights (1982); Space Trap
(1983); The Crystal Drop (1992).See also: CHILDREN'S SF.
HUGHES, TED
(1930- ) Working name of UK poet Edward James Hughes for all his writing.
Best known for volumes of dark, violent verse such as Crow (coll 1970; rev
1971), which like all his work features representations of other species
in terms hinting at mythic metamorphoses, he has been Poet Laureate since
1984. Of sf interest is his children's sequence, comprisingin The Iron
Man: A Story in Five Nights (1968; vt The Iron Giant 1968 US), and The
Iron Woman (1993 chap), in the first volume a frightening but friendly
iron man defends the world against a dragon from space, ultimately
persuading it to sing the music of the spheres, a sound which soothes
humanity's terrible lust for war and causes peace; it was made into a
musical ( MUSIC), The Iron Man (1989) by Pete Townshend (1945- ). Also for

children, What is the Truth? A Farmyard Fable for the Young (1984 chap)
and Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth (1986 chap), both written
in a style that intermingles verse and prose, are complex tales mixing
didactic concerns with flights of sf hyperbole. Much of his verse for
children, variously collected in volumes like Moon-Whales (coll 1976 US;
rev 1988 UK), is fantasy. [JC]
HUGHES, ZACH
Working name of US writer Hugh Zachary (1928- ) for almost all his sf; he
uses his real name for other work, and has written as well under various
pseudonyms, including Evan Innes, Peter Kanto, Pablo Kane and Marcus Van
Heller. His novels in the sf field are expertly devised and readable and
frequently surprisingly dark in their implications. The Book of Rack the
Healer (1973) and its sequel Thunderworld (1982) explore with some
complexity first a post- HOLOCAUST USA, then a planet whose ALIEN
population renders humanity's survival problematic. The Legend of Miaree
(1974) again subjects alien races to a reading which is pessimistic about
the chances of species survival. Tide (1974) and The St Francis Effect
(1976) are more routine but Seed of the Gods (1974) sharply parodies the
Erich VON DANIKEN books. Other novels, like The Stork Factor (1975), For
Texas and Zed (1976) and Tiger in the Stars (1976 Canada), variously
exploit SPACE-OPERA themes, sharing with his first books an inventive
knack for aliens. Without undue emphasis, elements of a shared background
link several of these titles - Killbird (1980), for instance, is clearly
set in the same universe as The Legend of Miaree - and ZH's work gives a
general sense of only casually developed potential, along with very
considerable unevenness: Sundrinker (1987), another tale of aliens,
features as protagonist a mobile plant, arguing the plausibility of the
premise with some force; while The Dark Side (1987) is a conventional
space opera. In the end, ZH gives the air of being a professional writer
less than fully attentive to the genre. [JC]Other works: Pressure Man
(1980); Gold Star (1983); Closed System (1986); Life Force (1988); Mother
Lode (1991); Deep Freeze (1992); The Omnificence Factor (1994).As Evan
Innes: The America 2040 sequence of SPACE-OPERA adventure SHARECROPS
comprising America 2040 (1986), #2: The Golden World (1986), #3: The City
in the Mist (1987), #4: The Return (1988) and #5: The Star Explorer
(1988).As Pablo Kane: A Dick for All Seasons (1970).As Peter Kanto: Of his
numerous sex novels under this name, The World where Sex was Born (1969),
Rosy Cheeks (1969), Taste of Evil (1969) and Unnatural Urges (1969) are of
some interest.As Marcus Van Heller: The Ring (1968).As Hugh Zachary: Gwen,
in Green (1974); The Revenant (1988).
HUGI, MAURICE G.
[r] INVASION; Brad KENT.
HUGIN
SCANDINAVIA.
HUGO
The almost invariably used term, in honour of Hugo GERNSBACK, for the
Science Fiction Achievement Award; it has been an official variant of the
formal title since 1958. Hugos were first awarded at the 1953 World SF

CONVENTION; the idea was then dropped for a year (1954), but since 1955
the awards have been annual. They have always been the amateur or fan
awards as opposed to, say, the NEBULA or PHILIP K. DICK AWARD, which are
voted on by different categories of professional reader. The original
idea, from fan Hal Lynch, was based on the National Film Academy Awards
(Oscars). The award takes the form of a rocketship mounted upright on
fins. The first model was designed and produced by Jack McKnight; from
1955 a similar design by Ben Jason has normally been used. The rockets
have been cast since 1984 (except 1991) in Birmingham, UK, at the foundry
of prominent fan Peter WESTON; in 1992 they were gold-plated to celebrate
the 50th Worldcon.Awards are made in several classes, which have varied in
definition and number from year to year. They are given primarily for
fiction, but classes for editing, artwork, film and tv, fan writing and
illustration have also been included; moreover, occasional unclassified
special awards have been given. The rules governing awards are made, and
often remade, at Worldcon business meetings, held annually. Winners in
each class are chosen by ballot; since 1960 the voters have been limited
annually to members of the forthcoming Worldcon (anyone can buy membership
without actually attending the convention). The occasional special awards,
however, are made by Worldcon committees. Voting on Hugos is always
carried out postally before the convention begins; counting is done using
the single transferable ballot, often known as the Australian ballot
(after the system used in Australian lower-house elections), the least
successful contender's votes being redistributed, using second or
subsequent preferences, after each count, until one candidate has a clear
majority. There was no nominating procedure up to 1958. Since 1959 there
have been ballots for nominations, distributed to fans generally until
1963, when they were limited to the membership of the current and previous
year's Worldcon, except in 1965 and 1967.World conventions are held over
Labor Day Weekend in September, and Hugos are given for publication or
activity in the preceding calendar year. Hence, for example, a novel which
wins a 1998 Hugo will have been published in 1997 (though, if it also wins
a Nebula, the latter will be known confusingly as the 1997 Nebula). "No
award" votes have for many years been permitted, and have resulted
occasionally in void classes. Since 1963, story series and tv series have
been excluded from the short-fiction and drama classes; thus in 1968 five
individual STAR TREK episodes were nominated for the drama award, while in
1962 Brian W. ALDISS was able to win the short-fiction award with a
series, the Hothouse stories.The definitions of the various categories of
short fiction have varied. There was no short-fiction award in 1953. In
the years 1955-9 there were only two classes of short fiction: novelette
and short story. These were amalgamated 1960-66 as "short fiction"; few
short stories were nominated during this period. In 1967 the novelette
class was reintroduced, and a new class, novella, was included from 1968.
In 1970-72 the only two classes were short story and novella. Since 1973
there have again been three classes of short fiction. Since the early
1970s a novella has been defined as being 17,500-40,000 words, a novelette
as 7500-17,500 words, a short story as any fiction shorter than a
novelette and a novel as any fiction longer than a novella.Since 1971, the
drama category has included recordings. In 1973 the professional-magazine
class changed to a professional-editor class, to acknowledge the

increasing importance of original ANTHOLOGIES. In 1980 the new category of
nonfiction book was added, the first award being given to the first
edition of this encyclopedia, and subsequent awards have gone to books of
criticism, scholarship, artwork, reminiscence and science fact: a category
in which GRAPHIC NOVELS compete with encyclopedias is perhaps too much of
a grab-bag; the 1989 Worldcon committee did choose specifically to exclude
A Brief History of Time (1988 US) by Stephen Hawking (1942- ), causing
some slight controversy. Since 1984 the new category of SEMIPROZINE has
been included, for publications midway between FANZINES and professional
magazines.The Hugos have for many years been subject to criticism on the
grounds that awards made by a small, self-selected group of hardcore fans
do not necessarily reflect either literary merit or the preferences of the
sf reading public generally; hardcore FANDOM probably makes up less than 1
per cent of the general sf readership. Certainly Hugos have tended to be
given to traditional HARD SF, and have seldom been awarded to experimental
work, but they have been, on the whole, surprisingly eclectic. While many
awards have gone to (good but) conservative writers like Poul ANDERSON,
Robert A. HEINLEIN, Clifford D. SIMAK and Larry NIVEN, they have also been
given to such doyens of the NEW WAVE as Harlan ELLISON, Roger ZELAZNY and
James TIPTREE Jr, and to a number of works of literary excellence which
quite fail to conform to the standard patterns of genre expectation, such
as Walter M. MILLER Jr's A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ (1959) and Ursula K. LE
GUIN's The Dispossessed (1974). Neither was Fritz LEIBER's eccentric THE
BIG TIME (1958; 1961), which won the award before going into book format,
a traditionalist selection. The rival award, the NEBULA, is chosen by
professional writers, but there is no evidence that they have consistently
selected works of superior literary merit; indeed, some critics would
argue the contrary case, that the Hugo voters have proved themselves
marginally the more reliable judges. Though good books are often ignored,
and in some years individual awards have seemed strange, the track record
of the Hugos has been, on the whole, quite honourable. Another cavil is
that both Hugo and Nebula, being US-centred, are notably chauvinistic, and
awards to non-US writers have been rare. Nevertheless, despite all the
criticisms to which both awards are readily subject, they are of real
value to their recipients in increasing book sales.Up-to-date listings of
the rules under which Hugo awards are made can be found in the programme
booklets for each Worldcon, as Article II of the Constitution of the World
Science Fiction Society. Much of the Hugo-winning short fiction is
available in a series of anthologies edited by Isaac ASIMOV (whom see for
details). [PN]Novels:1953: Alfred BESTER, THE DEMOLISHED MAN1955: Mark
CLIFTON and Frank RILEY, They'd Rather be Right1956: Robert A. HEINLEIN,
Double Star1957: no award1958: Fritz LEIBER, THE BIG TIME1959: James
BLISH, A CASE OF CONSCIENCE1960: Robert A. Heinlein, STARSHIP
TROOPERS1961: Walter M. MILLER Jr, A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ1962: Robert A.
Heinlein, STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND1963: Philip K. DICK, THE MAN IN THE
HIGH CASTLE1964: Clifford D. SIMAK, WAY STATION1965: Fritz Leiber, THE
WANDERER1966: Roger ZELAZNY, ". . . And Call Me Conrad" and Frank HERBERT,
DUNE (tie)1967: Robert A. Heinlein, THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS1968:
Roger Zelazny, LORD OF LIGHT1969: John BRUNNER, STAND ON ZANZIBAR1970:
Ursula K. LE GUIN, THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS1971: Larry NIVEN,
RINGWORLD1972: Philip Jose FARMER, TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO1973: Isaac

ASIMOV, THE GODS THEMSELVES1974: Arthur C. CLARKE, RENDEZVOUS WITH
RAMA1975: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed1976: Joe HALDEMAN, The
Forever War1977: Kate WILHELM, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang1978:
Frederik POHL, GATEWAY1979: Vonda N. MCINTYRE, Dreamsnake1980: Arthur C.
CLARKE, THE FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE1981: Joan D. VINGE, The Snow Queen1982:
C.J. CHERRYH, Downbelow Station1983: Isaac Asimov, Foundation's Edge1984:
David BRIN, Startide Rising1985: William GIBSON, Neuromancer1986: Orson
Scott CARD, Ender's Game1987: Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead1988:
David Brin, The Uplift War1989: C.J. Cherryh, CYTEEN1990: Dan SIMMONS,
Hyperion1991: Lois McMaster BUJOLD, The Vor Game1992: Lois McMaster
Bujold, Barrayar1993:Vernor VINGE, A FIRE UPON THE DEEP and Connie WILLIS,
DOOMSDAY BOOK*1994: Kim Stanley ROBINSON, Green MarsShort fiction to
1972:1955Novelette: Walter M. Miller Jr, "The Darfstellar"Short Story:
Eric Frank RUSSELL, "Allamagoosa"1956Novelette: Murray LEINSTER,
"Exploration Team"Short Story: Arthur C. Clarke, "The Star"1957No
award1958Short Story: Avram DAVIDSON, "Or All the Seas with
Oysters"1959Novelette: Clifford D. Simak, "The Big Front Yard"Short Story:
Robert BLOCH, "That Hell-Bound Train"1960Short Fiction: Daniel KEYES,
"Flowers for Algernon"1961Short Story: Poul ANDERSON, "The Longest
Voyage"1962Short Fiction: Brian W. ALDISS, the Hothouse series1963Short
Fiction: Jack VANCE, "The Dragon Masters"1964Short Story: Poul Anderson,
"No Truce with Kings"1965Short Fiction: Gordon R. DICKSON, "Soldier, Ask
Not"1966Short Fiction: Harlan ELLISON, "'Repent, Harlequin!' said the
Ticktockman"1967Novelette: Jack Vance, "The Last Castle"Short Story: Larry
Niven, "Neutron Star"1968Novella: Anne MCCAFFREY, "Weyr Search" and Philip
Jose Farmer, "Riders of the Purple Wage" (tie)Novelette: Fritz Leiber,
"Gonna Roll Those Bones"Short Story: Harlan Ellison, "I Have no Mouth and
I Must Scream"1969Novella: Robert SILVERBERG, "Nightwings"Novelette: Poul
Anderson, "The Sharing of Flesh"Short Story: Harlan Ellison, "The Beast
that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World"1970Novella: Fritz Leiber,
"Ship of Shadows"Short Story: Samuel R. DELANY, "Time Considered as a
Helix of Semi-Precious Stones"1971Novella: Fritz Leiber, "Ill Met in
Lankhmar"Short Story: Theodore STURGEON, "Slow Sculpture"1972Novella: Poul
Anderson, "The Queen of Air and Darkness"Short Story: Larry Niven,
"Inconstant Moon"Novellas from 1973:1973: Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Word for
World is Forest"1974: James TIPTREE Jr, "The Girl who Was Plugged In"1975:
George R.R. MARTIN, "A Song for Lya"1976: Roger Zelazny, "Home is the
Hangman"1977: Spider ROBINSON, "By Any Other Name" and James Tiptree Jr,
"Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (tie)1978: Spider and Jeanne ROBINSON,
"Stardance"1979: John VARLEY, "The Persistence of Vision"1980: Barry B.
LONGYEAR, "Enemy Mine"1981: Gordon R. Dickson, "Lost Dorsai"1982: Poul
Anderson, "The Saturn Game"1983: Joanna RUSS, "Souls"1984: Timothy ZAHN,
"Cascade Point"1985: John Varley, "PRESS ENTER "1986: Roger Zelazny,
"Twenty-four Views of Mount Fuji, by Hokusai"1987: Robert Silverberg,
"Gilgamesh in the Outback"1988: Orson Scott Card, "Eye for Eye"1989:
Connie WILLIS, "The Last of the Winnebagos"1990: Lois McMaster Bujold,
"The Mountains of Mourning"1991: Joe Haldeman, "The Hemingway Hoax"1992:
Nancy KRESS, "Beggars in Spain"1993: Lucius SHEPARD, "Barnacle Bill the
Spacer"1994: Harry TURTLEDOVE, "Down in the Bottomlands"Novelettes from
1973:1973: Poul Anderson, "Goat Song" 1974: Harlan Ellison, "The
Deathbird"1975: Harlan Ellison, "Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans:

Latitude 38deg 54' N, Longitude 77deg 00' 13" W"1976: Larry Niven, "The
Borderland of Sol"1977: Isaac Asimov, "The Bicentennial Man"1978: Joan D.
Vinge, "Eyes of Amber"1979: Poul Anderson, "Hunter's Moon"1980: George
R.R. Martin, "Sandkings"1981: Gordon R. Dickson, "The Cloak and the
Staff"1982: Roger Zelazny, "Unicorn Variation"1983: Connie Willis, "Fire
Watch"1984: Greg BEAR, "Blood Music"1985: Octavia E. BUTLER,
"Bloodchild"1986: Harlan Ellison, "Paladin of the Lost Hour"1987: Roger
Zelazny, "Permafrost"1988: Ursula K. Le Guin, "Buffalo Gals, Won't You
Come Out Tonight"1989: George Alec EFFINGER, "Schrodinger's Kitten"1990:
Robert Silverberg, "Enter a Soldier. Later, Enter Another"1991: Michael D.
RESNICK, "The Manamouki"1992: Isaac Asimov, "Gold"1993: Janet KAGAN, "The
Nutcracker Coup"1994: Charles SHEFFIELD, "Georgia on my Mind"Short Stories
from 1973:1973: R.A. LAFFERTY, "Eurema's Dam", and Frederik Pohl and C.M.
KORNBLUTH, "The Meeting" (tie)1974: Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Ones who Walk
Away from Omelas"1975: Larry Niven, "The Hole Man"1976: Fritz Leiber,
"Catch that Zeppelin"1977: Joe Haldeman, "Tricentennial"1978: Harlan
Ellison, "Jeffty is Five"1979: C.J. Cherryh, "Cassandra"1980: George R.R.
Martin, "The Way of Cross and Dragon"1981: Clifford D. Simak, "Grotto of
the Dancing Deer"1982: John Varley, "The Pusher"1983: Spider Robinson,
"Melancholy Elephants"1984: Octavia E. Butler, "Speech Sounds"1985: David
Brin, "The Crystal Spheres"1986: Frederik Pohl, "Fermi and Frost"1987:
Greg Bear, "Tangents"1988: Lawrence WATT-EVANS, "Why I Left Harry's
All-Night Hamburgers"1989: Michael D. Resnick, "Kirinyaga"1990: Suzy McKee
CHARNAS, "Boobs"1991: Terry BISSON, "Bears Discover Fire"1992: Geoffrey
Landis, "A Walk in the Sun"1993: Connie Willis, "Even the Queen"1994:
Connie Willis, "Death on the Nile"Nonfiction book:1980: Peter NICHOLLS,
editor, The Science Fiction Encyclopedia1981: Carl SAGAN, Cosmos1982:
Stephen KING, Danse Macabre1983: James E. GUNN, Isaac Asimov: The
Foundations of Science Fiction1984: Donald H. TUCK, The Encyclopedia of
Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 3: Miscellaneous1985: Jack WILLIAMSON,
"Wonder's Child: My Life in Science Fiction"1986: Tom Weller, Science Made
Stupid1987: Brian W. Aldiss with David WINGROVE, Trillion Year Spree1988:
Michael WHELAN, Michael Whelan's Works of Wonder1989: Samuel R. Delany,
The Motion of Light in Water1990: Alexei and Cory PANSHIN, The World
Beyond the Hill1991: Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction and
Fantasy1992: The World of Charles Addams1993: Harry WARNER, Jr., A Wealth
of Fable: An Informal History of Science Fiction Fandom in the 1950s (this
was a professional edition of a mimeographed work dated 1976)1994: John
CLUTEand Peter Nicholls, editors, The Encyclopedia of Science
FictionDramatic presentation:1958: Outstanding movie, The INCREDIBLE
SHRINKING MAN 1960: The TWILIGHT ZONE 1961: The Twilight Zone1962: The
Twilight Zone1963: no award1965: Special drama, DR STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I
LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB1967: "The Menagerie" ( STAR
TREK)1968: "City on the Edge of Forever" (Star Trek)1969: Drama, 2001: A
SPACE ODYSSEY1970: Dramatic, news coverage of Apollo XI1971: no award1972:
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE1973: SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE1974: SLEEPER1975: Young
Frankenstein1976: A BOY AND HIS DOG1977: no award1978: STAR WARS1979:
SUPERMAN1980: ALIEN1981: The EMPIRE STRIKES BACK 1982: Raiders of the Lost
Ark 1983: BLADE RUNNER1984: RETURN OF THE JEDI1985: 20101986: BACK TO THE
FUTURE1987: ALIENS1988: The Princess Bride1989: Who Framed Roger
Rabbit1990: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade1991: Edward

Scissorhands1992: TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY1993: "The Inner Light" ( STAR
TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION)1994: JURASSIC PARKProfessional magazine:1953:
GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION and ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION (tie)1955: ASF1956:
ASF1957: US, ASF; UK, NEW WORLDS1958: FSF1959: FSF1960: FSF1961: ASF1962:
ASF1963: FSF1964: ASF1965: ASF1966: IF1967: If1968: If1969: FSF1970:
FSF1971: FSF 1972: FSFProfessional editor:1973: Ben BOVA1974: Ben
Bova1975: Ben Bova1976: Ben Bova1977: Ben Bova1978: George H.
SCITHERS1979: Ben Bova1980: George H. Scithers1981: Edward L. FERMAN1982:
Edward L. Ferman1983: Edward L. Ferman1984: Shawna MCCARTHY1985: Terry
CARR1986: Judy-Lynn DEL REY (declined by Lester DEL REY)1987: Terry
Carr1988: Gardner DOZOIS1989: Gardner Dozois1990: Gardner Dozois1991:
Gardner Dozois1992: Gardner Dozois1993: Gardner Dozois1994:Kristine
Kathryn RUSCHPublisher:1964: ACE BOOKS1965: BALLANTINE BOOKSProfessional
artist (early awards differently named): 1953 Interior Illustrator: Virgil
FINLAY Cover Artist: Ed EMSHWILLER and Hannes BOK (tie)1955Illustrator:
Frank Kelly FREAS 1956 Illustrator: Frank Kelly Freas 1957 No
award 1958 Illustrator: Frank Kelly Freas 1959 Illustrator: Frank Kelly
Freas 1960 Illustrator: Ed Emshwiller 1961 Illustrator: Ed Emshwiller
1962: Ed Emshwiller 1963: Roy G. KRENKEL 1964: Ed Emshwiller 1965: John
SCHOENHERR 1966: Frank FRAZETTA 1967: Jack GAUGHAN 1968: Jack Gaughan 1969:
Jack Gaughan1970: Frank Kelly Freas1971: Leo and Diane DILLON1972: Frank
Kelly Freas1973: Frank Kelly Freas1974: Frank Kelly Freas1975: Frank Kelly
Freas1976: Frank Kelly Freas1977: Rick STERNBACH1978: Rick Sternbach1979:
Vincent DI FATE1980: Michael WHELAN1981: Michael Whelan1982: Michael
Whelan1983: Michael Whelan1984: Michael Whelan1985: Michael Whelan1986:
Michael Whelan1987: Jim BURNS1988: Michael Whelan1989: Michael Whelan1990:
Don MAITZ1991: Michael Whelan1992: Michael Whelan1993: Don Maitz1994: Bob
EGGLETONOriginal artwork (new category from 1992):1992: Michael Whelan,
cover for The Summer Queen(1991) by Joan D. Vinge, published by Warner
Questar1993: James GURNEY, Dinotopia (1992), published by Turner1994:
Stephen Hickman, Space Fantasy Commemorative Stamp Booklet, published by
US Postal ServiceSemiprozine:1984: Charles N. BROWN, ed LOCUS1985: Charles
N. Brown, ed Locus1986: Charles N. Brown, ed Locus1987: Charles N. Brown,
ed Locus1988: Charles N. Brown, ed Locus1989: Charles N. Brown, ed
Locus1990: Charles N. Brown, ed Locus1991: Charles N. Brown, ed Locus1992:
Charles N. Brown, ed Locus1993: Andrew Porter, ed SCIENCE FICTION
CHRONICLE1994: Andrew Porter, ed Science Fiction ChronicleFan
magazine/amateur publication/fanzine:1955: James V. Taurasi and Ray Van
Houten, eds FANTASY TIMES1956: Ron Smith, ed Inside and Science Fiction
Advertiser1957: James V. Taurasi, Ray Van Houten and Frank Prieto, eds
Science Fiction Times ( FANTASY TIMES)1959: Terry Carr and Ron ELLIK, eds
FANAC1960: F.M. and Elinor BUSBY, Burnett Toskey and Wally Weber, eds Cry
of the Nameless1961: Earl KEMP, "Who Killed Science Fiction?"1962: Richard
Bergeron, ed WARHOON1963: Richard and Pat LUPOFF, eds XERO1964: George
SCITHERS, ed Amra1965: Robert and Juanita COULSON, eds YANDRO1966: Camille
Cazedessus Jr, ed ERB-dom1967: Ed Meskys and Felice Rolfe, eds NIEKAS1968:
George Scithers, ed Amra1969: Richard E. GEIS, ed SCIENCE FICTION
REVIEW1970: Richard E. Geis, ed Science Fiction Review1971: Charlie and
Dena Brown, eds Locus1972: Charlie and Dena Brown, eds Locus1973: Michael
Glicksohn and Susan WOOD Glicksohn, eds Energumen1974: Andy Porter, ed
ALGOL, and Richard E. Geis, ed The ALIEN CRITIC (tie)1975: Richard E.

Geis, ed The Alien Critic1976: Charlie and Dena Brown, eds Locus1977:
Richard E. Geis, ed Science Fiction Review1978: Charlie and Dena Brown,
eds Locus 1979: Richard E. Geis, ed Science Fiction Review1980: Charlie
and Dena Brown, eds Locus1981: Charlie and Dena Brown, eds Locus1982:
Charlie and Dena Brown, eds Locus1983: Charlie and Dena Brown, eds
Locus1984: Mike Glyer, ed FILE 7701985: Mike Glyer, ed File 7701986:
George "Lan" Laskowski, ed Lan's Lantern1987: David LANGFORD, ed
ANSIBLE1988: Pat Mueller, ed Texas SF Enquirer1989: Mike Glyer, ed File
7701990: Leslie Turek, ed The Mad 3 Party1991: George "Lan" Laskowski, ed
Lan's Lantern1992: Dick and Nicki Lynch, eds Mimosa1993: Dick and Nicki
Lynch, eds Mimosa1994:Dick and Nicki Lynch, eds MimosaFan writer:1967:
Alexei PANSHIN1968: Ted WHITE1969: Harry WARNER, Jr1970: Bob (Wilson)
TUCKER1971: Richard E. Geis1972: Harry Warner, Jr1973: Terry Carr1974:
Susan WOOD1975: Richard E. Geis1976: Richard E. Geis1977: Richard E. Geis
and Susan Wood (tie)1978: Richard E. Geis1979: Bob SHAW 1980: Bob
Shaw1981: Susan Wood1982: Richard E. Geis1983: Richard E. Geis1984: Mike
Glyer1985: David Langford1986: Mike Glyer1987: David Langford1988: Mike
Glyer1989: David Langford1990: David Langford1991: David Langford1992:
David Langford1993: David Langford1994: David LangfordFan artist:1967:
Jack GAUGHAN1968: George BARR1969: Vaughn BODE1970: Tim Kirk1971: Alicia
Austin1972: Tim Kirk1973: Tim Kirk1974: Tim Kirk1975: William ROTSLER1976:
Tim Kirk1977: Phil Foglio1978: Phil Foglio1979: William Rotsler1980:
Alexis GILLILAND1981: Victoria Poyser1982: Victoria Poyser1983: Alexis
Gilliland1984: Alexis Gilliland1985: Alexis Gilliland1986: joan
hanke-woods1987: Brad Foster1988: Brad Foster1989: Brad Foster and Diana
Gallagher Wu (tie)1990: Stu Shiffman1991: Teddy Harvia1992: Brad
Foster1993: Peggy Ranson1994: Brad FosterOther Hugo awards:1953#1 Fan
personality: Forrest J. ACKERMANExcellence in fact articles: Willy LEYNew
sf author or artist: Philip Jose Farmer1956Feature writer: Willy LeyMost
promising new author: Robert SilverbergBook reviewer: Damon KNIGHT1958Most
outstanding actifan (active fan): Walter A. Willis1966Best all-time
series: Isaac Asimov, Foundation seriesBest Other Forms:A category added
by the Committee in 1988 and voted on, so it was not a Special Committee
Award (see below). It was won by Alan MOORE and Dave GIBBONS for a GRAPHIC
NOVEL, WATCHMEN. However, this particular award has mysteriously
disappeared from subsequent official lists of past Hugo Winners, so its
status is not clear.Special Committee Awards:Not strictly Hugo awards,
these have been given from time to time to people as various as Hugo
Gernsback for being "The Father of Science Fiction" in 1960, Pierre
VERSINS for his L'Encyclopedie de l'Utopie et de la science fiction in
1973 and Chesley BONESTELL for his illustrations in 1974. We do not list
them in full.See also: JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD; SF MAGAZINES; WOMEN SF
WRITERS.
HULL, E(DNA) MAYNE
(1905-1975) Canadian-born US writer, married from 1939 to A.E. VAN VOGT,
who collaborated with her on most of her work, either in its original
magazine form or by expanding it for book publication. She began
publishing sf with "The Flight that Failed" for ASF in 1942, and made her
greatest impact with the Arthur Blord series, later assembled by van Vogt
as Planets for Sale (1943-6 ASF; fixup 1954) with EMH alone credited; the

1965 ed credits both authors; and with the magazine version of The Winged
Man (1944 ASF; exp van Vogt 1966 with both authors credited). The
collection Out of the Unknown (coll 1948) was credited to both writers,
and consisted of 6 stories, 3 each, according to their original bylines.
EMH ceased writing sf and fantasy when she became involved in DIANETICS.
[JC]
HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP
Roger CORMAN; L' ISOLA DEGLI UOMINI PESCE.
HUME, FERGUS(ON WRIGHT)
(1859-1932) UK writer raised in New Zealand, and who may have been born
there; he lived in the UK at least from 1886, when The Mystery of a Hansom
Cab (1886) made his name. It was followed by about 140 further books, most
of them novels, some being fantasy and a few sf, including The Year of
Miracle: A Tale of the Year One Thousand Nine Hundred (1891), a DISASTER
novel in which the UK is depopulated by a plague. The Island of Fantasy
(1892) is a marginal UTOPIA set on a Mediterranean island. The Nameless
City: A Romany Romance (1893), The Expedition of Captain Flick (1896) and
The Mother of Emeralds (1901) are LOST-WORLD novels, the first featuring a
secret Gypsy land, the second set in the Indian Ocean and featuring
ancient Greeks, and the third set in Peru, where Incans have developed an
underground civilization based on electricity. [JC]Other works: The
Gentleman who Vanished: A Psychological Phantasy (1890; vt The Man who
Vanished 1892 US); Aladdin in London (1892); Chronicles of Faeryland (coll
1892); The Harlequin Opal (1893); The Dwarf's Chamber, and Other Stories
(coll 1896); For the Defense (1898 US); The Devil-Stick (1898); The
Scarlet Bat (1905); The Green Mummy (1908);The Sacred Herb (1908); The
Blue Talisman (1912); A Son of Perdition: An Occult Romance (1912); Mother
Mandarin (1912).
HUMOUR
There is a false belief that sf and humour do not mix. Certainly sf has
produced many bad jokes - Arthur C. CLARKE's Tales From the White Hart
(coll of linked stories 1957) is entirely devoted to them - but from the
beginning it has also produced many good ones. Much sf humour takes the
form of social SATIRE, and stories of this kind are discussed mainly in
that entry. While the discussion below naturally includes satires also, it
focuses on sf that elicits laughter rather than a wry smile.The wittiest
sf writers of the late 19th century were probably Mark TWAIN, Samuel
BUTLER, Ambrose BIERCE and H.G. WELLS. The humour of Twain's A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), like so much humour generally, is
rooted in self-confident prejudice: Twain clearly found the bumbling
incompetence of the Middle Ages irresistibly funny. Butler's satire in
Erewhon (1872) often consists of topsy-turvy analogies, as in the
comparison between UK churches and Erewhonian banks, pointing up the
self-interest Butler supposed to be the motive for religious devotion.
Bierce's short stories often have a grim and macabre humour. Wells's, on
the other hand, are often jolly, as in "The Truth about Pyecraft" (1903).
Other early works of sf humour are Mr Hawkins' Humorous Inventions (coll
of linked stories 1904) by Edgar FRANKLIN and Button Brains (1933) by J.
Storer CLOUSTON, a novel that introduced several ROBOT jokes which have

since been overused.Also working in the 1930s was John COLLIER, whose
short stories amuse through the sometimes poisonous sharpness of their
language and a cruel sense of the ironies of life. Roald DAHL and - to a
degree - Gerald KERSH were to write rather similar stories later on, but
these writers, working in the tradition of VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM's
Contes cruels ["Cruel Stories"] (coll 1883), were primarily fantasists who
used sf themes only occasionally.Occasional humorists have consistently
popped up in GENRE SF, and with the advent of the magazine UNKNOWN in 1939
they had a platform. Unknown specialized in whimsical fantasy, sometimes
dealing with SUPERNATURAL CREATURES, very often set in ALTERNATE WORLDS.
Anthony BOUCHER was an important contributor, and many of his stories of
this type are collected in The Compleat Werewolf (coll 1969). Even better
remembered are the Harold Shea stories by L. Sprague DE CAMP and Fletcher
PRATT, later collected as The Complete Enchanter (coll 1975): propelled
back into versions of a mythic or literary past, Shea has a terrible time
coming to terms with the local customs in worlds where MAGIC works. The
early 1940s also saw a whole series of broad but accomplished jokes by
Eric Frank RUSSELL, usually featuring cunning protagonists who deflate the
pretensions of the brutal, the stupid and the pompous in various
interplanetary venues. Examples from a slightly later period, when Russell
had perfected his wisecracking style, are ". . . And Then There Were None"
(1951), Wasp (1957) and The Space Willies (1956 ASF; exp 1958; vt Next of
Kin UK). From the same period come many of Fredric BROWN's amusing
stories, like "Placet is a Crazy Place" (1946), in which the eponymous
planet meets itself during its orbit, creates hallucinations, is
undermined by heavy-matter widgie birds and becomes the locale for
horrendous puns. Brown's outrageous inventions have appeared in many
collections, including Angels and Spaceships (coll 1954; vt Star Shine)
and Nightmares and Geezenstacks (coll 1961). A less well known funny sf
book of that period is The Sinister Researches of C.P. Ransom (coll of
linked stories 1954) by Homer NEARING Jr.Humorous genre sf is more common
in short stories than at novel length. Three of sf's premier humorists
worked commonly and perhaps at their best in this form, with the result
that, perhaps, their full stature has not been generally recognized: Henry
KUTTNER, William TENN and Robert SHECKLEY. Kuttner's humour may have dated
the most quickly, but "The Twonky" (1942 as by Lewis Padgett) is a classic
(filmed in 1952 as The TWONKY), as are his Hogben stories (1947-9) and the
Galloway Gallegher series, collected as Robots Have No Tails (1943-8 ASF;
coll 1952). Tenn's style is more polished; but it is Sheckley who for many
years remained the most consistent humorist of them all. Nothing is ever
quite what it seems in Sheckley's urbane stories, and, with an
inventiveness that lasted through the 1950s and 1960s, he depicted the
naive but sometimes successful struggles of little men against an
unimaginably absurd and rather menacing cosmos. Philip K. DICK, although a
fundamentally more serious writer, had something of the same quality, and
most of his novels have a rich sense of the various comic ways in which
the life of the future might thwart us; he is especially well known for
robots that talk back.Both Dick and Sheckley often published in GALAXY
SCIENCE FICTION, a magazine that, notably under Horace GOLD, encouraged
wit, satire and a moderately demanding literacy in its writers, who also
included Frederik POHL and Alfred BESTER, both of whom were as much at

home with the humorous story as with the serious sf for which they are
best remembered. Bester's "The Men who Murdered Mohammed" (1958), a wry
and funny TIME-PARADOX story, appeared in FSF, the home of Reginald
BRETNOR's appalling Ferdinand Feghoot series of vignettes with punning
punch-lines.Most well known sf authors have tried their hand at humour at
one time or another, sometimes rather heavy-handedly, as in Keith LAUMER's
Retief series or Gordon R. DICKSON's and Poul ANDERSON's Hoka series. More
successful in this line has been Harry HARRISON, who has often amusingly
parodied the excesses of genre sf, as in the Stainless Steel Rat stories
and in Bill, the Galactic Hero (1965). A wry, Irish humour of sharp
observation comes often from Bob SHAW, who also has a good line in
pastiche; his comic novel Who Goes Here? (1977) straight-facedly produces
a spaceship which has a matter transmitter at each end, and thus can be
driven by being repeatedly transmitted through its own length.Comic sf of
the 1960s and 1970s tended strongly towards satire, and its comedy especially that of the NEW WAVE - was often black. Nearly all of John T.
SLADEK's work is of this sort; it tends more towards irony than farce
(although he has also written raucously funny farce, notably in parody),
blending comedy with nightmare in tales that often deal with technology
running amok and mankind being manipulated. His one-time collaborator
Thomas M. DISCH is one of the most formidable of sf's wits and stylists,
though again it is the wry smile rather than the outright laugh that is
evoked. Michael MOORCOCK often deals in a comedy of unexpected
juxtapositions, as in his Dancers at the End of Time series, where
time-travellers constantly misunderstand one another's customs. In the
same period, however, Ron GOULART became known for knockabout, satiric
farce. Gaining notoriety late in the 1960s, R.A. LAFFERTY is offbeat in
quite another way. His bizarre, quasi-surrealist humour depends strongly
on the exuberant idiosyncracy of his language; his flamboyantly tall
stories are seen by some as morally stringent, dismissed by others as
empty games. His work has never fitted the conventions of genre sf,
floating somewhere between sf and fantasy. The same could be said of the
Illuminatustrilogy (1975) by Robert SHEA and Robert Anton WILSON, a
rambling story of conflicting conspiracies and secret cults which
persuasively argues for the accuracy of a paranoid ( PARANOIA) view of
POLITICS; a sometimes bloodshot view of the vagaries of human behaviour is
expressed through farce, wisecracks and general lunacy.One of the least
plausible of all comic sf novels is Piers ANTHONY's Prostho Plus (1971),
featuring a kidnapped Earth dentist forced to practise on a hideous
variety of alien teeth; it is carried off, against all the odds, with
verve. Anthony subsequently became known for comic fantasy rather than
comic sf, his tone being in the tradition set by De Camp and Pratt in
their Unknown stories. Along with Christopher STASHEFF's Warlockseries,
Anthony's novels set a trend, in the 1970s and 1980s, for novels sited in
alternate fantasy worlds featuring slapstick, agonizing puns, and a
Twain-like juxtaposition of modernisms with archaisms. Alan Dean FOSTER,
Craig Shaw Gardner, Robert ASPRIN and many others have worked in this
subgenre, which has proved commercially very successful, though it
includes more dire undergraduate humour than is digestible for grown-up
readers. The first great success story of written sf humour in the 1980s a decade not generally notable for funny sf - was Douglas ADAMS. Other

producers, on a much smaller scale, were Rudy RUCKER and Howard WALDROP in
the USA and (more recently) Robert RANKIN in the UK.Humour notoriously
translates badly, and the wit of Stanislaw LEM in such works as Cyberiada
(coll 1965; trans as The Cyberiad 1974) and "Kongres Futurologiczny"
(1971; trans as The Futurological Congress 1974), while attested by his
Polish readership as being full of subtle ironies and linguistic
fireworks, appears rather crude in the English-language versions.Sf humour
has been a mainstay of both the small and large screens. In the USA,
humorous tv series have included MY FAVORITE MARTIAN, MY LIVING DOLL, MORK
AND MINDY and ALF, most of these being sitcoms in which human foibles
become all too clear when seen from an alien perspective. A very selective
list of humorous sf movies from the USA would include The ABSENT-MINDED
PROFESSOR, ANDROID, BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE, DARK STAR, DR
STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB;
EARTH
GIRLS ARE EASY , FLESH GORDON, The ICE PIRATES, The MAN WITH TWO BRAINS,
MEET THE APPLEGATES, MONKEY BUSINESS, The NUTTY PROFESSOR, The
PRESIDENT'S
ANALYST, REAL GENIUS, The ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, SCHLOCK, SHORT
CIRCUIT, SLEEPER, SPACED INVADERS, TERRORVISION and WEIRD SCIENCE, a list
which should, perhaps, include as well the films of Larry COHEN and David
CRONENBERG which, though mostly sf/horror, are also shot through with dark
humour, as are some SPLATTER MOVIES, like RE-ANIMATOR. No clear conclusion
can be drawn from the list, which contains few really good films and few
really bad. It does contain a notable amount of pastiche and parody,
something that normally occurs fairly late in the history of any genre,
and it is interesting to note that the majority of the films listed are
quite recent; many are aimed at a younger audience.The story is a little
different in the UK, where sf humour for the big screen is rare and, when
it does appear, usually poor, as in MORONS FROM OUTER SPACE. But there is
a long tradition of light-hearted humour in UK tv, which bubbled up
strongly in much of the long-running DR WHO series. It did not, however,
reach cult proportions until the tv version of the radio success The HITCH
HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY appeared in 1981. This was written by Douglas
Adams, whose Hitch Hiker books, developed from the radio series, became
bestsellers. Behind the extremely funny absurdity of the series there
seems to be a mournfully nihilist view of life on Earth (and in the
cosmos), where nothing means very much at all, and we are all shuttlecocks
racketed around by fate or, if it comes to that, ENTROPY. A similar view
of the soft white underbelly of human existence reappeared in 1988 in the
(also very successful) tv series RED DWARF, a SPACE OPERA with an
unbelievably small cast, only one of them indubitably both human and
alive.There is one line of development visible among the variety of
authors named in this entry: sf humour has by and large been pessimistic.
The ordinary guy battered by circumstance, trying to find meaning or
justice in a Universe where these commodities may be nonexistent, is a
character running through from Collier via Sheckley, Dick and Sladek to
reach perhaps its apotheosis in Adams. Indeed Kurt VONNEGUT Jr, probably
the most famous of all sf humorists, fits squarely into this tradition.
In, for example, THE SIRENS OF TITAN (1959) and Cat's Cradle (1963) - and
with a somewhat more brittle and fatalistic air in Slaughterhouse-5 (1969)

- Vonnegut contrives scenarios at once witty, sardonic and nihilistic,
though in the earlier books the nihilism is softened by the affection he
shows for the absurd and doomed ambitions of his protagonists. Some see
Vonnegut as a fierce wit in the tradition of Jonathan SWIFT; others find
his black comedies increasingly facile, repetitive, and disfigured by the
literary equivalent of nervous tics. So it goes.David LANGFORD's parodic
bent infiltrates much of his fiction, though it is most clearly expressed
in The Dragonhiker's Guide to Battlefield Covenant at Dune's Edge: Odyssey
Two (coll 1988), which assembles parodies of various writers and
tendencies. But the great UK comic success of the 1980s is Terry
PRATCHETT, whose Discworld books climb to the top of bestseller lists with
satisfying regularity, and who writes work both joyful and delightful,
allowing the little man his triumphs as well as his agonies. Most readers
would call these books fantasies, but they are, after all, set on a planet
other than Earth. It is, one must confess, a very flat planet, and perched
on the back of a giant turtle . . . [PN]
HUNGARY
Sf in the modern sense evolved tentatively in Hungary in the 1870s,
although it had had forerunners. The end of the 18th century was
characterized by the popularity of FANTASTIC VOYAGES and UTOPIAS. French
and other sources inspired Tarimenes utazasa ["The Voyage of Tarimenes"]
(1804) by Gyorgy Bessenyei (1747-1811). The hero, who gets to an unknown
country, not only describes the perfect order of the state but also
presents a copy of its constitution. Another important fantastic utopia
was Utazas a Holdba ["Voyage to the Moon"] (1836) by Ferenc Ney
(1814-1899), a novel in which travellers find that the Moon has everything
they miss on Earth: the possibility of happiness and the happiness of
equality. Janos Munkacsy (1802-1841), in his Hogy all a vilag a jovo
szazadban? ["How Stands the World in the Next Century?"] (1838), describes
the wonderful future development of TRANSPORTATION and many social
changes: deadly WEAPONS are put aside and conflicts between states are
settled by competitive poetry recitals. The first Hungarian SPACE OPERA
was Vegnapok ["The Final Days"] (1847) by Miklos Josika (1794-1865). This
apocalyptic novel had an immense success. The story takes place on Earth
in a FAR-FUTURE ice age.Mor JOKAI is justly regarded as the greatest
author produced by Hungary. He was very prolific - his collected works run
to several hundred volumes. His most important works of fantasy and sf are
Oceania about a romantic ATLANTIS, Fekete gyemantok (1870; trans A. Gerard
as Black Diamonds 1896), set in a North Polar sea, Egesz az eszaki polusig
["All the Way to the North Pole"] (1876), in which ancient patriarchs and
fairy-like ladies are revived from frozen hibernation to facilitate the
author's criticism of contemporary society, and Ahol a penz nem Isten
["Where Money is not a God"] (1904), describing the life of a happy island
community, and hinting at the possibility of the fall of the
Austro-Hungarian empire. Along with these sometimes Edgar Allan POE-like
fantasies comes Jokai's most significant sf novel, A jovo szazad regenye
["The Novel of the Next Century"] (1872), whose story is founded in the
invention of a marvellous new material, "ichor". Airplanes made of ichor
serve the heroes, who dominate global communications and trade; declaring
war on anarchistic Russia, they fight the last war of mankind and create

eternal peace. The novel then moves onto the cosmic scale: a comet menaces
Earth but is fought off by mankind, the Moon is colonized and the Solar
System is conquered.Jokai's disciple Titusz Tovolgyi (1838-1918) wrote a
surprisingly interesting novel about the future socialist state: Az uj
vilag ["The New World"] (1888). Elsewhere, besides sociopolitical novels
there were fantasies of markedly scientific foundation, like Repulogepen a
Holdba ["On an Airplane to the Moon"] (1899) by Istvan Makay (1870-1935),
another Jokai disciple, which, antedating H.G. WELLS, describes a society
of cave-dwelling Selenites. Barna Arthur ["Arthur Barna"] (1880) by
Gusztav Beksics (1847-1906) has an African volcano spreading flowing gold
over the country, with the consequent bankruptcy of trusts, banks and
states.In the first half of the 20th century the authors gathering around
the journal Nyugat ["West"] were attracted almost without exception to the
fantastic, and with them sf reached artistic heights once more; they
include Dezso Kosztolanyi (1885-1935), Geza Csath (1888-1919), Geza Laczko
(1884-1953), Gyula Szini (1876-1932), Laszlo Cholnoky (1879-1929), Bela
Balazs (1884-1949) and Margit Kaffka (1880-1918). Unfortunately, only two
names are known in the English-speaking world: Frigyes KARINTHY and Mihaly
BABITS.Karinthy wrote a good many stories about TIME TRAVEL, DISASTER, PSI
POWERS and so on, but these are surpassed by his philosophical novels.
Utazas Faremidoba (1916) and Capillaria (1921), which have been assembled
as Voyage to Faremido/Capillaria (omni trans Paul TABORI 1965 Hungary;
1966 US), are sardonic sequels to Jonathan SWIFT's stories of Gulliver and
his travels. The former deals with problems of AI and the latter describes
the conflict between men and women in an UNDER-THE-SEA empire. Mennyei
riport ["A Report from the Heavens"] (1937), the surprising story of a
journey to the next world, is an important precursor of modern sf.The
novels of the poet Mihaly Babits stand out for their literary merit and
for the interest of their ideas. In Golyakalifa ["Storks' Caliph"] (1916;
trans as King's Stork 1948 Hungary; retrans anon as The Nightmare 1966),
his first novel, he created a world of pure fantasy; the protagonist is a
young man living a surreal double life. Another novel, Elza pilota, avagy
a tokeletes tarsadalom ["The Pilot Elza, or The Perfect Society"] (1933),
is a description of an episode in an age of eternal war, its protest
against fascism being pointed at a time when fascism was spreading
rapidly.Utazas Kazohiniaban ["A Voyage in Kazohinia"] (1941 censored; text
restored 1946) by Sandor Szathmary (1897-1974) is a bitter, Swiftian (and
Karinthyan) SATIRE describing a new journey of Gulliver. Kazohinia is
divided into two parts, one where exaggerated rationalism prevails, the
other ruled by the uncontrolled power of the instincts.In the Fall of 1945
Laszlo Gaspar (? - ) produced his short novel Mi, I. Adolf ["We, Adolf 1"]
(1945), subtitled "If the Germans had Won". In this postwar nightmare,
fascism rules by terror and weaponry, and all peoples are slaves of the
Germans ( HITLER WINS).The two decades after WWII did not favour Hungarian
sf - Soviet sf, along with the theoretical views it espoused, dominated
the sf published in Hungary-and only one item from this period is
memorable: Az ibolyaszinu feny ["The Violet Light"] (1956) by Peter Foldes
(1916- ), a juvenile adventure that presents interesting ideas. In 1968,
however, the publishing house Mora began a paperback sf series under the
imprint Kozmosz Fantasztikus Konyvek. In 1972 Mora followed this with the
magazine Galaktika, ed Peter KUCZKA, which started as a quarterly and is

now a monthly, with a circulation of 50,000. Its younger stablemate (since
1985) is Robur, a bimonthly sf magazine for juvenile readers, with a
circulation of 80,000-100,000. Other publishers now publish sf, though the
Mora book series, also long under the editorship of Kuczka, remains the
most significant.Today 25-30 authors in Hungary are engaged in sf,
although many of them work also in other genres. Among the older authors
is Maria Szepes (1908- ), who in Tukorajto a tengerben ["Mirror Door in
the Sea"] (1976), Surayana elo szobrai ["Living Statues of Surayana"]
(1971) and Napszel ["Sunwind"] (1983) draws her figures of fantasy with
great psychological force. She introduced ESP motifs to Hungarian sf,
mainly through her first and most influential novel, A voros oroszlan
["The Red Lion"] (1946), the story of an alchemist living through the
centuries and from sin to redemption. Ivan Boldizsar (1912-1988) belonged
to the same generation; his Szuletesnap ["Birthday"] (1959) is a
TIME-TRAVEL novel. The most famous book of Istvan Elek (1915- ) is a
juvenile adventure, Merenylet a vilagurben ["An Attempt in Space"] (1967).
Jozsef Cserna (1899-1975) wrote a number of admonitory stories about
nuclear WAR, the destruction of the ECOLOGY and other dangers menacing
mankind.Next comes the generation of writers now in their 50s and 60s,
like Gyula Fekete (1922- ), an excellent novelist in the realistic
tradition. His sf works are all utopian and educational, whether set on
unknown islands or on distant planets. In A szerelmesek bolygoja ["Planet
of Lovers"] (1964) he deals satirically with juvenile morals and
life-values; in Triszex ["Trisex"] (1974) he predicts changes in family
life and in human relationships. His most famous work is A kek sziget
["The Blue Island"] (1976), a harmonious UTOPIA. Gyula Hernadi (1926- ) is
a restless, experimenting author; he blends surrealism with real and
fictitious documents. His significant novels are Az erod ["The Fortress"]
(1971), Az elnokasszony ["Madame President"] (1978) and Hasfelmetszo Jack
["Jack the Ripper"] (1982). Zoltan Csernai (1925- ) is one of the most
popular sf writers. His main focus is on encounters between ALIENS and
humans in the past and present; this provides the background to his
trilogy Titok a vilag tetejen ["Secret on the Top of the World"] (1961),
Az ozonviz balladaja ["The Ballad of the Flood"] (1964) and Atlantisz
["Atlantis"] (1968). His Boldogsagcsinalok ["Producers of Happiness"]
(1974) is an interesting psychological novel. Among his several short
stories, "Kovek" ["Stones"] (1974) is perhaps the best of all Hungarian sf
short stories; it has been much translated. Peter Zsoldos (1930- ) is an
sf author in the US-UK tradition, his recurrent subjects being SPACE
FLIGHT and ROBOTS. His best novels are Feladat ["The Task"] (1971),
Ellenpont ["Counterpoint"] (1973), Tavoli tuz ["A Distant Fire"] (1969), A
Viking visszater ["Return of the Viking"] (1967) and A holtak nem vetnek
arnyekot ["The Dead Cast No Shadows"] (1983). Ervin Gyertyan (1925- )
prefers a humorous, satirical attitude Kibernerosz ["Cyberneros"] (1963)
and Isten ovd az elnokot! ["God Save the President!"] (1971), paying
special attention to the differences between Man and MACHINE, and also to
the nature of identity. Two sf works by Miklos Ronaszegi (1930- ), A
rovarok lazadasa ["Revolt of the Insects"] (1969) and Ordogi liquor
["Liquor of the Devil"] (1972), were published as juveniles, although
there is nothing juvenile about their themes: the first analyses the
mechanisms of fascism and the second unveils ways in which modern society

dehumanizes and manipulates.Novels of adventure and scientific inspiration
have been written also by Klara Feher (1922- ), Laszlo Nemes (1920- ) and
Tibor Dane (1923-). Dezso Kemeny (1925- ) melds sf with the crime story.
Az utolso ember ["The Last Man"] (1982) by Peter Bogati (1924-), a
ROBINSONADE about the last survivor of world HOLOCAUST, bears comparison
with better-known treatments of the subject. Laszlo Andras (1919-1988),
Gyorgy Nemes (1910- ), Andras Kurti (1922- ) and Rudolf Weinbrenner
(1923-1987) are all writers who have enriched Hungarian sf with one or two
books. A rather different coloration can be found in A Kozmosz tizenotodik
torvenye ["The Fifteenth Law of the Cosmos"] (1984) by Mihaly Gergely
(1921- ), a novel in which alien visitors try to force humanity into peace
and intelligent cooperation.Perhaps the most important member of the
younger generation is Peter Szentmihalyi Szabo (1945- ). His collection of
short stories A sebezhetetlen ["The Invulnerable"] (coll 1978) tries out
every voice and technique of sf; A tokeletes valtozat ["The Perfect
Variety"] (1983) is a DYSTOPIA about contradictory social systems in the
distant future. Two very prolific younger authors are Laszlo L. Lorincz
(1939- ) and Istvan Nemere (1944- ). Lorincz's collection of short stories
A nagy kupola szegyene ["The Shame of the Great Dome"] (coll 1982) deals
with CRIME AND PUNISHMENT and with problems of social isolation. His
novels, such as A hosszu szafari ["The Long Safari"] (1984) and A
foldalatti piramis ["The Underground Pyramid"] (1986), are much
appreciated for their exciting plots, richness of ideas and beautiful
style. Nemere's most successful novels (out of about 60) are A kozmosz
korbacsa ["The Whip of the Cosmos"] (1982), Az acelcapa ["The Steel
Shark"] (1982) and A neutron akcio ["The Neutron Project"] (1982).One
MAINSTREAM WRITER who has occasionally turned to sf is Peter Lengyel, who
wrote the prizewinning Ogg masodik bolygoja ["Ogg's Second Planet"]
(1969). [PK]
HUNGER, ANNA
R. DeWitt MILLER.
HUNT, GILL
House name used 1950-52 by the UK paperback publisher Curtis Warren. The
authors who have used the name (for titles see their entries) are John
BRUNNER, David GRIFFITHS, Dennis HUGHES, John JENNISON and E.C. TUBB.
Because it was Brunner's first book, Galactic Storm (1951) has become the
best-known of the GH titles; it is not, however, significantly less
routine than its stablemates. [JC]
HUNTER, EVAN
Once the main pseudonym and now the adopted legal name of the US writer
born S.A. Lombino (1926- ), who remains best known as Ed McBain, under
which byline he has written at least 50 laconic police procedurals as well
as some action-detections in the John D. MACDONALD mould. As EH he is most
famous for novels like The Blackboard Jungle (1954), and his later career
has had little to do with sf, most of his work in the genre appearing under his own name and as Richard Marsten and Hunt Collins - in the 1950s.
This early output included a number of magazine sf stories, published
1953-6-some of which were assembled in The Last Spin (coll 1960 UK) and
Happy New Year, Herbie (coll 1963) - and the screenplay for Alfred

Hitchcock's The BIRDS (1963). His first three sf novels were juveniles:
the protagonist in Find the Feathered Serpent (1952) utilizes his father's
TIME-TRAVEL device to return to - and to participate in - the founding of
the Mayan empire; Rocket to Luna (1953), as by Richard Marsten, puts
students on the first trip to the Moon; and Danger: Dinosaurs! (1953), as
by Marsten, again takes its heroes by time-travel into an exciting era.
His first adult sf novel, Tomorrow's World (1954 If as "Malice in
Wonderland" as by EH; exp 1956; vt Tomorrow and Tomorrow 1956), as by Hunt
Collins, takes a somewhat satirical look at a future dominated by
organized DRUG addicts. In a marketing decision somewhat at odds with EH's
normal practice, the book was later published unchanged (1979 UK) as by Ed
McBain: it is certainly not in the McBain style. Nobody Knew They Were
There (1971) is set in 1974, but is a tale of campus violence only
marginally displaced into sf. The plot of Ghosts (1980), one of his
extensive series of 87th Precinct police-procedural novels as by Ed
McBain, surprisingly hinges on parapsychological manifestations ( ESP), to
the detriment of its merit as a detection. EH's long inactivity as an sf
writer has been the genre's loss. [JC]See also: LEISURE; PULP MAGAZINES.
HUNTER, E. WALDO
[s] Theodore STURGEON.
HUNTER, NORMAN (GEORGE LORIMER)
(1899- ) UK writer first active before WWII, his publishing career having
begun with Simplified Conjuring for All (1923); he was in fact a
professional conjuror. A humorous fairy tale, "The Bad Barons of
Crashbania", appeared with Gertrude Monro Higgins's "Kings and Queens" as
half a chapbook (coll 1932 chap). He lived in South Africa 1949-70, a
period during which he published nothing. His classic CHILDREN'S SF series
about Professor Branestawm and his inventions - The Incredible Adventures
of Professor Branestawm (coll 1933), Professor Branestawm's Treasure Hunt
(coll 1937), Stories of Professor Branestawm (coll 1939), The Peculiar
Triumph of Professor Branestawm (coll 1970), Professor Branestawm up the
Pole (coll 1972), Professor Branestawm's Great Revolution (coll 1974),
Professor Branestawn 'round the Bend (coll 1977) and Professor
Branestawm's Perilous Pudding (coll 1979) - delightfully involves the
professor and his extraordinary devices in various exploits and
entanglements. There followed a compilation, The Best of Branestawm (coll
1980), and a series of booklets: Professor Branestawm and the Wild Letters
(1981 chap), Professor Branestawm's Pocket Motor Car (1982 chap),
Professor Branestawm's Mouse War (1982 chap), Professor Branestawm's
Crunchy Crockery (1983 chap) and Professor Branestawm's Hair-Raising Idea
(1983 chap). The initial titles inspired a 1969 UK tv series. NH also
wrote a number of tales for younger children, many of them revolving
around the King and Queen of Incrediblania. [JC]
HUNTING, (HENRY) GARDNER
(1872-1958) US writer whose sf novel The Vicarion (1926; exp 1927)
features a device which gives sight of the past. As a consequence, murders
can be solved, politics cleaned up and the true events of history
understood at last. [JC]See also: MACHINES.

HURD, DOUGLAS (RICHARD)
(1930- ) UK Conservative politician and writer, in the former capacity
serving his government for an extended period at Cabinet level. His sf
novels are, perhaps understandably, NEAR-FUTURE thrillers in which the UK
must survive threats from within and without ( POLITICS). Send Him
Victorious (1968) with Andrew Osmond (1938- ) features threats of
political upheaval from within. The Smile on the Face of the Tiger (1969)
sees China demanding Hong Kong back from her imperial masters (a plot
which has, of course, become part of history). Scotch on the Rocks (1971)
describes a Scottish liberation movement (and may be prophetic). [JC]Other
works: Truth Game (1972).
HURD, GALE ANNE
(1955- ) US film producer who cut her teeth on Roger CORMAN's New World
Pictures' exploitation movies; she was production manager on BATTLE BEYOND
THE STARS (1980) and coproduced the car-chase movie Smokey Bites the Dust
(1981) with Corman. She came to prominence with the excellent low-budget
independent film The TERMINATOR (1984), whose screenplay was cowritten by
her and her then husband James CAMERON (also a graduate of the Corman
school of low-budget film-making skills): both were in their 20s; he
directed and she produced. This was sufficient to get them the high-status
job of producing and directing ALIENS (1986), which they did with panache.
They next worked together on The ABYSS (1989), whose screenplay (by
Cameron) contained roman a clef elements in its story of the break-up of a
marriage between two highflying professionals; they had separated
personally by then, and to a degree professionally, although GAH worked as
executive producer on TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991), perhaps the most
expensive film ever made. (The actual producer was B.J. Rack.) GAH's
expertise with genre movies was underwritten by two sf films she produced
apart from Cameron, ALIEN NATION (1988) and TREMORS (1990), the latter
being an especially craftsmanlike work. Among the non-sf and marginal sf
features she has produced are Bad Dreams (1988), horror; The Waterdance
(1992), drama about paraplegics; Raising Cain (1992), confused Brian de
Palma thriller of some sf interest with its strange experiments in the
PSYCHOLOGY of child-raising. More recently GAH returned to sf to produce
the disappointing NO ESCAPE (1994), a future prison movie set on a
tropical island. Although it is difficult to gauge the creative influence
of producers as opposed to directors, GAH's track record is impressive;
most of her films (even the low-budget ones) are polished and look good,
and she seems to have an affinity with sf subjects. [PN]
HURWOOD, BERNHARDT J(ACKSON)
(1926-1987) US writer who wrote occult books for younger readers - like
Strange Curses (coll 1975) and By Blood Alone (1979) - the Man from T.O.M.
C.A.T. soft-porn quasithriller sequence as by Mallory T. Knight,
comprising The Man from T.O.M.C.A.T. #1: The Dozen Deadly Dragons of Joy
(1967), #2: The Million Missing Maidens (1978), #3: The Terrible Ten
(1967), #4: The Dirty Rotten Depriving Boy (1967), #5: Tsimmis in Tangier
(1968), #6: The Malignant Metaphysical Menace (1968), #7: The Ominous Orgy
(1969), #10: The Peking Pornographer * (1969) and The Bra-Burner's Brigade
(1971). The Invisibles sequence, comprising The Invisibles (1971) and The

Mind Master (1973), were sf stories about a mad SCIENTIST who conducts
experiments on human subjects. Kingdom of the Spiders * (1977) was a film
tie ( KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS). [JC]
HUTCHINSON, DAVID (CHRISTOPHER)
(1960- ) UK writer who published 4 volumes of stories at a very early age
- Thumbprints (coll 1978), Fools' Gold (coll 1979), Torn Air (coll 1980)
and The Paradise Equation (coll 1981) - and then moved into journalism.
The deftness and quiet humaneness of his work seemed better than
precocious, and it came as welcome news in the late 1980s that he was
turning his attention again to sf. [JC]
HUXLEY, ALDOUS
(1894-1963) UK novelist and man of letters whose fame was freshest in the
1920s, a decade which his work, conveying as it did an overwhelming sense
of psychic aftermath, captured precisely; his best fiction, like Point
Counter Point (1928), was written then. From 1937 he lived in the USA. He
is today almost certainly remembered most widely for his seminal DYSTOPIA,
BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932), a book which established such words as "soma"
(originally from Sir Thomas MORE's Utopia [1517]) and "feelie" in the
English language, and which contributed to social and literary thought a
definite model of pharmacological totalitarianism. (Soma is a kind of
psychedelic drug used as a social control; the feelies are multisense - or
" VIRTUAL REALITY" - movies, developed for the same reason.) BRAVE NEW
WORLD depicts a future Earth in which the expression of dissonant emotions
and acts is rigorously controlled from above, ostensibly for the
betterment of all, though in fact the motives of those in power are, as
always, self-serving. Babies, prior to being decanted, are chemically
adjusted to grow to assume the body-type and intelligence required at that
moment by society, and as a result enter into the appropriate castes, from
Alpha to Epsilon ( GENETIC ENGINEERING). Sex and all other relationships
are casual, without dissonance or affect. As in any dystopia, the story
both illustrates and exposes this plastic paradise, and presents
opportunities for discussion about it. One protagonist goes to a Savage
Reservation (where, as a kind of control, a few old-style humans are
permitted their exemplary culture) and there rescues a woman in trouble;
he returns with her and her Savage son to the central society. To this she
proves unable to adjust: after causing general disgust through her display
of visible diseases and her horrifying descent into age, she overdoses
despairingly on soma. Her son does little better, though the fracas he
causes gains him and two discontented citizens an interview with Mustapha
Mond, one of the 10 World Controllers, who argumentatively justifies the
price paid for stability. When the unconvinced Savage attempts to live
alone and so to replicate the conditions necessary for the creation of
high art, he is soon driven by the mass MEDIA into committing suicide.As
argument and as SATIRE, BRAVE NEW WORLD is a compendium of usable points
and quotable jibes - the substitution of Ford for God being merely the
best known - and has provided material for much subsequent fiction. Its
pessimistic accounting of the sterility and human emptiness of utopian
communities shaped by a reductive scientism has caused the book to be read
as a decisive refutation of those UTOPIAS of H.G. WELLS - e.g., Men Like

Gods (1923)-whose strident OPTIMISM about scientific utopianism even Wells
himself could not manage to support with much imaginative conviction.
Brave New World Revisited (coll 1958), later assembled with its
predecessor (omni 1960), is a nonfiction series of essays on the themes of
the novel from the perspective of 25 years later.After moving to the USA,
AH wrote two novels in which utopia/dystopia debates are continued. Ape
and Essence (1948), powerfully dystopian, is set in AD2108 after an atomic
and bacteriological final WAR. From New Zealand, which has been left
untouched, a researcher visits the USA, where he discovers a literally
devilish society: human nature and science have gone savagely wrong, and
females - now contemptuously known as "vessels" - come into oestrus for
only two weeks in the year, after Belial Day. The pessimism of the book is
unalleviated, and its presentation, as a kind of ideal filmscript,
horrific and disgusted. Island (1962) presents a utopian alternative to
the previous books, though without much energy. Pala - the ISLAND in
question - is set safely in the Indian Ocean, and has long enjoyed a
mildly euphoric existence, sustained spiritually by religious practices
derived from Tantric Buddhism, and physically by moksha, a sort of benign
soma, whose psychedelic effects smooth the rough edges of the world. But
the book itself is powerless to convince.Of AH's other work, After Many a
Summer Dies the Swan (1939; vt After Many a Summer 1939 UK), in which a
Californian oil magnate rediscovers an 18th-century longevity compound and
its macabre consequences ( APES AND CAVEMEN for other tales that evoke
images of DEVOLUTION), and Time Must Have a Stop (1944), one of whose
protagonists undergoes posthumous experiences, are both of genre interest.
AH was at his most striking in those of his novels, some technically sf,
which treated their fictional content as subservient to the matters being
discussed and illuminated. The literacy of his style, and the apparent
sophistication of his transcendental thought, have perhaps impressed
traditional sf readers and critics more than he deserved. There is no
denying, however, the extreme importance of the example of his thought in
the intellectual development of the genre. [JC]About the author: There are
many critical studies. Lilly Zahner's Demon and Saint in the Novels of
Aldous Huxley (1975) provides clear analysis and an adequate bibliography.
Other studies include Aldous Huxley: A Study of the Major Novels (1968) by
Peter Bowering, and Aldous Huxley, Satire and Structure (1969) by Jerome
Meckier.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; AUTOMATION; BIOLOGY; CRITICAL AND
HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; EVOLUTION; FUTUROLOGY; HISTORY OF SF;
IMMORTALITY; LEISURE; MACHINES; MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF; MUSIC;
PERCEPTION; SOCIOLOGY; TECHNOLOGY; THEATRE.
HYAMS, EDWARD S(OLOMON)
(1910-1975) UK writer, prolific in various genres, fiction and
nonfiction, from before WWII; he was also active as a translator. Although
not widely known as a writer of sf or fantasy, he published several novels
of sf interest. Not in Our Stars (1949) depicts the discovery of a fungus
of use in biological warfare. The Astrologer (1950) is an early novel on
the ecological theme of soil exhaustion, and the DISASTER its protagonist
tries to avert by denying men sex, like Lysistrata. The Final Agenda
(1973) places a worldwide organization of anarchists in power in a
NEAR-FUTURE venue, and traces with considerable sympathy their attempts to

found an ecological UTOPIA. Morrow's Ants (1975) is about the creation of
a HIVE-MIND. Typically of writers not identified with the genre, ESH tends
to use sf components in a didactic fashion, although in his case to
considerable effect. [JC]Other works: The Wings of the Morning (1939), a
Wellsian discursive novel set just before a future WAR; Sylvester (1951;
vt 998 1952 US); The Last Poor Man (1966); The Death Lottery (1971);
Prince Habib's Iceberg (1974).See also: ASTRONOMY; ECOLOGY; SCIENTISTS.
HYDE, CHRISTOPHER
(1949- ) Canadian writer, generally of TECHNOTHRILLERS, beginning with
The Wave (1979 US) and continuing with titles like Styx (1982 US), Jericho
Falls (1988 UK), Crestwood Hills (1988 US), Egypt Green (1989 US) and
White Lies (1990 US). The last features a mentally suspect NEAR-FUTURE US
President who puts out a contract on himself. [JC]
HYDE, SHELLEY
Kit REED.
HYDER, ALAN
(? -? ) UK writer known only for the remarkable Vampires Overhead (1935),
in which comet-hopping vampires invade Earth, causing general devastation;
the tale is told with very considerable vigour. It was included in a list
prepared in 1983 by Karl Edward Wagner for Twilight Zone of the 13 best sf
HORROR novels. [JC]
HYMAN, MIRANDA
Miranda MILLER.
HYNE, C(HARLES) J(OHN) CUTCLIFFE (WRIGHT)
(1866-1944) UK writer. He utilized his ample travelling experience in
creating the popular Captain Kettle series which appeared in PEARSON'S
MAGAZINE, in book form beginning with Honour of Thieves (1895; vt The
Little Red Captain 1902), and later in the cinema; Captain Kettle on the
Warpath (coll 1916), The Rev. Captain Kettle (coll 1925), Mr Kettle, Third
Mate (1931) and Ivory Valley (1938) are the only volumes to contain sf
elements. He is best known for The Lost Continent (1900), set in ATLANTIS
at the time of its destruction. CJCH began writing sf with Beneath Your
Very Boots (1889), a LOST-WORLD tale set in caves under England, following
it up with a ROBINSONADE, The New Eden (1892), later turning to future WAR
with Empire of the World (1910; vt Emperor of the World 1915) and to the
Wandering-Jew theme with Abbs, His Story through Many Ages (1929). This
diversity of ideas was even more prevalent in his short stories,
particularly The Adventures of a Solicitor (coll of linked stories 1898)
as by Weatherby Chesney, which contains stories about INVISIBILITY,
ROBOTS, SPACE FLIGHT and rejuvenation, together with several GOTHIC and
weird fantasies. CJCH, one of the most prolific writers of early magazine
sf, is now almost forgotten. [JE]Other works: The Recipe for Diamonds
(1893); The Stronger Hand (coll 1896); The Adventures of an Engineer (coll
of linked stories 1898) as by Weatherby Chesney; The Foundered Galleon
(1898-9 Scraps as by Weatherby Chesney and Alick Jones;1902) as by
Weatherby Chesney; Atoms of Empire (coll 1904); Red Herrings (coll 1918);
West Highland Spirits (coll 1932); Man's Understanding (coll 1933), some
sf; Wishing Smith (1939).See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; WEAPONS.

HYPERION PRESS
US publisher based in Westport, Connecticut. HP's relevance to sf is
through its photographically reproduced reprint series, Classics of
Science Fiction; HP was the first publisher to undertake such a series,
preceding ARNO PRESS, GARLAND and GREGG PRESS. The series editor was Sam
MOSKOWITZ, who also provided introductions to many of the volumes; the
books selected were primarily drawn from the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. The first series, published 1974, had 23 vols; the second,
published 1976, had 19 vols. HP also brought back into print 6 anthologies
and collections of criticism by Moskowitz. [MJE/PN]
HYPERSPACE
In sf TERMINOLOGY, a kind of specialized space through which SPACESHIPS
can take a short cut in order to get rapidly from one point in "normal"
space to another far distant. The term was probably invented by John W.
CAMPBELL Jr in Islands of Space (1931 Amazing Stories Quarterly; 1957). It
is now so thoroughly incorporated into the conventions of GENRE SF that
few sf writers feel called upon to explain its meaning, although Robert A.
HEINLEIN gave a particularly clear account in Starman Jones (1953).
Hyperspace is often seen as a space of higher DIMENSION through which our
three-dimensional space can be folded or crumpled, so that two apparently
distant points may almost come into contact. Sometimes, as in Frederik
POHL's "The Mapmakers" (1955), hyperspace is seen as a POCKET UNIVERSE, a
kind of visitable map with a one-to-one correspondence to our own Universe
(with all points hopefully arranged in the same order). In "FTA" (1974) by
George R.R. MARTIN, although hyperspace exists, travel by it takes longer.
In Redshift Rendezvous (1990) by John E. STITH a starship has to cope with
the fact that the velocity of light in hyperspace is 22mph (35kph);
relativistic effects thus occur at very modest velocities.The prohibitions
in Relativity theory against travelling FASTER THAN LIGHT are not really
circumvented with devices like SPACE WARPS or hyperspace, since it is
actually FTL journeys and not FTL velocities that are prohibited, a point
often not appreciated by sf writers; if an FTL journey takes place via
hyperspace, the fact remains that the arrival might be witnessed by
observers elsewhere in the Universe as preceding the take-off, and
Relativity prohibits the principle of causality being broken by the
reversal of cause and effect.A relevant article is "Hyperspace" by David
LANGFORD in The Science in Science Fiction (1982) by Peter NICHOLLS, Brian
M. STABLEFORD and Langford. More recently, a scientific book on the
subject is Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes,
Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension (1994) by Michio Kaku, professor of
theoretical physics at the City College of the City University of New
York. [PN/TSu]
HYPHEN
Northern Irish FANZINE (1952-65) ed from Belfast by Walt Willis, with
Chuck Harris and later Ian McAuley; probably the most famous of humorous
fanzines. The quality and style of H's writing made it not only one of the
most admired fanzines of its time but also gave it considerable prestige
and influence in FANDOM. Contributors included Robert BLOCH, Damon KNIGHT,
Bob SHAW, William F. TEMPLE and James WHITE. There was a single-issue

revival in 1987. [PR/RH]
HYPNOSIS
PSYCHOLOGY.

SF?
ICARUS XB-1
IKARIE XB-1.
ICEMAN
Film (1984). Universal. Prod Norman Jewison. Dir Fred Schepisi, starring
Timothy Hutton, John Lone, Lindsay Crouse. Screenplay Chip Proser, John
Drimmer, from a story by Drimmer. 99 mins. Colour.Set in the Arctic (shot
in Canada), I tells of a Neanderthal dug out of the ice, thawed,
resuscitated and studied. Eschewing the caveman cliches ( APES AND
CAVEMEN) of films like TROG (1970), it adopts a sensitive and supposedly
realistic manner, much being made of Neanderthal LINGUISTICS. But the
story is so thin as to be almost invisible, and the film sags tediously as
eco-cliches of the period lead to predictable clashes between the
anthropologist, on the side of life, and the female scientist, on the side
of cold-blooded research. The scientific methods on display are laughably
inept and unlikely. [PN]
ICE PIRATES, THE
Film (1984). MGM/United Artists. Dir Stewart Raffill, starring Robert
Urich, Mary Crosby, Michael D. Roberts, Anjelica Huston, John Matuszak,
Ron Perlman. Screenplay Raffill, Stanford Sherman. 94 mins. Colour.Sf
parodies have seldom worked well in the cinema, but this is an exception.
Jason (Urich) is a pirate captain of a spaceship (he and his crew carry
cutlasses and wear high boots) who raids merchant ships for ice (the
planets in this area being arid), meets a princess and has adventures. The
film's success depends on the script's real knowledge (unusual in the
movies) of written sf's dafter conventions as well as the CLICHES of sf
cinema; both are neatly caricatured. Particularly lunatic is the final
battle in a time warp, with the heroic contenders visibly ageing, the day
being saved by the hero's baby who grows rapidly into a man and repels the
elderly boarders. There is a small, irritating, chest-bursting ALIEN
scuttling around, and Anjelica Huston buckles an expert swash. The farce
is played straight enough to work, and the whole thing, though sometimes
too broad, is agreeably genial. Raffill went on to direct The PHILADELPHIA
EXPERIMENT (1984). [PN]
I COME IN PEACE
(vt Dark Angel US) Film (1989). Vision. Dir Craig R. Baxley, starring
Dolph Lundgren, Brian Benben, Matthias Hues. Screenplay Jonathan Tydor and
Leonard Maas Jr. 91 mins. Colour.Good cop (Lundgren) and silly FBI man
(Benben) go up against ALIEN drug dealer in Houston, with brief assistance
from alien cop. ICIP is rather like a downmarket ALIEN NATION and also
borrows from The HIDDEN . The alien, who is collecting human endorphins,
is big and uses a razor-edged self-propelled compact disc as a weapon.
This formula action movie is only partially redeemed by Mark Helfrich's

brisk editing. It ends thus: Alien: "I come in peace." Lundgren: "And you
go in pieces, asshole!" [PN]
IDLER, THE
UK magazine published monthly by Chatto ?
and others), ed Jerome K. Jerome and Robert BARR - both jointly and
separately - and by Arthur Lawrence, Sidney H. Sime, and others, Feb
1892-Mar 1911.Although comparatively short-lived, TI published much sf,
mainly through the leanings of its founding editors, both (at times)
fantasy authors and both of whom contributed sf stories to its pages.
Other notable contributors in its early days were Edwin Lester ARNOLD,
Arthur Conan DOYLE, Mark TWAIN and H.G. WELLS. TI continued to publish
fantasy and sf from writers such as Patrick Vaux, William Hope HODGSON and
Paul Bo'ld until its demise. Many stories from TI were reprinted in
MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE. [JE]
IDRIS, YUSUF
ARABIC SF.
IF
US DIGEST-size magazine. 175 issues Mar 1952-Nov/Dec 1974. It was founded
by the Quinn Publishing Co. with Paul W. FAIRMAN as editor, but James L.
QUINN quickly assumed the editorial chair himself, in Nov 1952, holding it
until Damon KNIGHT took over Oct 1958-Feb 1959. There were no issues
Feb-July 1959 because the title was sold during that year to Digest
Productions and became a companion to GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION under the
editorship of Gal's editor H.L. GOLD, who stayed in the post July 1959-Sep
1961. Frederik POHL assumed the editorship Nov 1961. From July 1963 the
publisher operated as Galaxy Publishing Corp. Gal and If were both sold in
1969 to the Universal Publishing and Distributing Co., and Ejler JAKOBSSON
took over as editor of both in July 1969. James BAEN became editor with
the Mar/Apr issue in 1974, shortly before the magazine folded. For most of
its life it was bimonthly, but Mar 1954-June 1955, and again July 1964-May
1970, it was monthly. The latter period was its heyday; it won HUGOS for
Best Magazine in 1966, 1967 and 1968. If was at first merely subtitled
Worlds of Science Fiction, but in Nov 1961 the cover logo - though not the
spine - was altered to Worlds of If Science Fiction. If absorbed its
bimonthly companion, WORLDS OF TOMORROW, in 1967. The title was
resurrected for one issue by Clifford R. Hong in 1986 (Sep-Nov 1986, vol.
23, number 1, issue 176) and immediately disappeared again.The most
notable story appearing in If during the Quinn period - during one year of
which, 1953-4, Larry SHAW did most of the actual editing - was James
BLISH's classic A CASE OF CONSCIENCE (Sep 1953; exp 1958). At its height,
under Pohl, the magazine featured several Hugo-winning stories, including
Robert A. HEINLEIN's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Dec 1965-Apr 1966;
1966), Larry NIVEN's "Neutron Star" (Oct 1966) and Harlan ELLISON's "I
Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" (Mar 1967); other stories included Samuel
R. DELANY's "Driftglass" (June 1967). In this period the magazine also
featured A.E. VAN VOGT's return to sf-writing after a long absence, and
the fourth volume of E.E. "Doc" SMITH's Skylark series, nearly 30 years
after the third - Skylark Du Quesne (June-Oct 1965; 1966). Under
Jakobsson's editorship the magazine resumed playing second fiddle to Gal

and gradually declined until it was merged with its companion as of Jan
1975. It had been, overall, one of the more distinguished sf magazines.
Writers who made their debuts in If include David R. BUNCH, Larry Niven,
William F. NOLAN, Andrew OFFUTT and Alexei PANSHIN.Artwork was quite good
from early on. Ed VALIGURSKY was the first art editor - replaced by Mel
Hunter in 1955 - and introduced Kelly FREAS's and Kenneth Fagg's work to
the magazine. Later artists included Jack GAUGHAN, Gray MORROW and Wally
WOOD.The history of If's UK editions is inordinately complex. Strato
Publications reprinted 15 numbered issues from the 1953-4 period, and a
further 18 (beginning again at #1) in 1959-62. Gold Star Publications
marketed a UK edition Jan-Nov 1967 whose issues were dated 10 months later
than the otherwise identical US editions. Copies of the UPD version were
imported 1972-4 and numbered for UK release, the numbers running #1-#9 and
then, astonishingly, #11, #1, #13, #3, #4 and #5! The last issue of If was
never distributed in the UK.Two anthologies of stories from If, in
magazine format, were released as The First World of If (anth 1957) and
The Second World of If (anth 1958), both ed Quinn. There followed The If
Reader of Science Fiction (anth 1966) and The Second If Reader of Science
Fiction (anth 1968), both ed Pohl. More recent collections have been The
Best from If (anth 1973) ed anon, The Best from If Vol II (anth 1974) ed
The Editors of If Magazine, and The Best from If Vol III (anth 1976) ed
James Baen. [BS/PN]
IGGULDEN, JOHN
(1917- ) Australian author whose sf work is restricted to an unremarkable
DYSTOPIAN novel, Breakthrough (1960 UK), in which a dictator uses
implanted radio-controlled devices for purposes of repression. [JC]
IGNOTUS, CORONEL
[r] SPAIN.
IJAS, JYRKI (NIILO JUHANI)
(1943- ) Finnish film editor, translator and journalist, the first of
whose (few) sf stories was "Koekaniini" ["Guinea Pig"] in 1968. One of the
founders of Aikakone magazine ( FINLAND), he is also publisher and editor
of Ikaros magazine, winner of the Finnish Kosmoskyna award in 1988, editor
of Ensimmainen yhteys ["First Contact"] (anth 1988) and an sf critic. He
wrote the entry on FINLAND for this encyclopedia. [PN]
IKARIE
CZECH AND SLOVAK SF; Jaroslav OLSA.
IKARIE XB-1
(vt Voyage to the End of the Universe; vt Icarus XB-1) Film (1963).
Filmove studio Barrandov. Dir Jindrich Polak, starring Zdenek Stepanek,
Radovan Lukavsky, Dana Medricka. Screenplay Pavel Juracek, Polak. 81 mins,
cut to 65 mins. Colour.This interesting Czech film is set in a giant
spaceship (with elaborate interiors designed by Jan Zazvorka) on a long
exploratory mission. The shipboard routines, coolly observed, create the
impression of a culture alien to ours. The stock situations of comparable
US-UK films and tv series ( STAR TREK and SPACE 1999, for example) are
mostly avoided by the Czech writers, although the build-up of suspense
when the spaceship encounters a wreck floating in space adds a touch of

SPACE OPERA. The ending - the spaceship reaches a planet that we realize
is contemporary Earth - is a US addition to the otherwise savagely cut
print used for US and UK release. [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA.
IKIN, VAN (GEORGE)
(1951- ) Australian editor and writer who began publishing sf stories
with "The Lecherous Leech" for Void in 1977, just before that journal
became an anthology series. As editor,he published Australian Science
Fiction(anth1982), which includes a long historical survey; Glass
ReptielBreakout; and Other Australian Speculative Stories(anth 1990);
andMortal Fire: Best Australian SF (anth 1993) withTerry DOWLING. [JC]
ILIC, DRAGUTIN
[r] YUGOSLAVIA.
ILIEV, GEORGI
[r] BULGARIA.
ILLING, WERNER
[r] GERMANY.
ILLUSTRATED MAN, THE
Film (1968). SKM Productions/Warner-Seven Arts. Dir Jack Smight, starring
Rod Steiger, Claire Bloom, Robert Drivas, Don Dubbins, Jason Evers.
Screenplay Howard B. Kreitsek, based on The Illustrated Man (coll 1951) by
Ray BRADBURY. 103 mins. Colour.Bradbury's idea of a man whose various
tattoos each represent a different tale did not completely work as an
afterthought framework to link the stories of his collection, and it is
even less successful in the film, which Bradbury hated. The stories are
"The Long Rains" (astronauts lost on Venus), "The Veldt" and "The Last
Night of the World"; only "The Veldt" ( VIRTUAL-REALITY nursery animals
come to life and are used by future children to dispose of parents) is
anything other than limp and literal-minded. The same actors appear in
each episode; apparently Smight, the director, was aiming at an atmosphere
of downbeat enigma and malign destiny, with Steiger, the tattooed man, as
a constantly reincarnated loser. Another Bradbury anthology film is VEL'D
(1987). [PN/JB]
ILLUSTRATION
1. From the Beginnings to 1978 The historical function of art in sf has
been to illustrate rather than interpret; this reflects the hard-edged
nature of early GENRE SF itself, which portrayed technics-dominated
society rather than interpreting its raisons d'etre; just as this kind of
sf was popular science plus human- or wonder-interest, so the
illustrations were there to provide page-interest. When these functional
attitudes weakened, sf illustrations became freer, aspiring to
illumination rather than diagram. Today their relationship to text is
often generic rather than specific.Before the SF MAGAZINES, there is
little that can be regarded as pure generic sf illustration, though the
art history of that early period of sf publication awaits research.
Inspiration was derived on the one hand from black-and-white masters of
graphic pun, such as Jean Ignace Grandville (1803-1847), Richard ("Dicky")
Doyle (1824-1883) and the astonishing Albert ROBIDA, or specialists in

futuristic WAR like Fred T. JANE, and on the other hand from more
"serious" artists, such as Gustave Dore (1832-1883) and John Martin
(1789-1854). The latter in particular, the first artist of the immense,
has had great influence; his mighty visions were natural material for
Hollywood, and echoes of them abound in, for instance, the original KING
KONG (1933).The other matter upon which the first generation of sf
illustrators could rely was the spate of pictures of scientific and
engineering marvels appearing in the press; a later generation turned to
NASA handouts. Many drawings in Hugo GERNSBACK's early magazines in
particular can be traced directly to sawn-down or blown-up versions of the
Eiffel Tower and the thermionic valve or tube. Such illustrations
accompanied stories which were often cautionary in nature: scientific
experiments could result in DISASTER; interstellar gas and renegade
planets were hazards in Earth's path; ROBOTS were prone to rape inventors'
daughters - but still TECHNOLOGY had to go on. The illustrations were
diagrams to enforce the thesis, and often set over a line or two of actual
text.Yet the subservient role of the sf artist is by no means the whole
story. Even in the most commercial period it was recognized that the
impact of the cover sold the magazine or paperback; in consequence, care
and money went into the cover art. Some artists worked at their best on
covers not just because the pay was better. Dedication was a more
noteworthy characteristic than artistic excellence among this low-salaried
breed of men.Because of printing deadlines some publishers, particularly
those with a "stable" of magazines, commissioned covers before stories. As
a result, a writer might be asked to write a tale to fit a picture; this
doubtful privilege gave the writer his name on the cover but could also
entail a cut in the already mean rates of payment.In this way, magazine
art developed and became, even if in small compass, a tradition, with
names of prolific illustrators like Frank R. PAUL, Virgil FINLAY and Emsh
(Ed EMSHWILLER) dominating the field. Interior art became increasingly
less tied to text, just as text became less tied to technics. It was free
to indulge in the pleasantly hazy symbolism of a Paul ORBAN, the
immaculacy of an Alex SCHOMBURG, or even the whimsicality of an Edd
CARTIER. It was also at liberty to fudge on the detail in which members of
the previous generation of illustrators, such as Frank R. Paul and Elliott
DOLD, had gloried. Increasingly, the magazine covers symbolized the spirit
of the magazine rather than depicting an incident in an actual story; the
series of covers Emsh executed for GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION in the early
1960s provides a noteworthy example of this.Increased paper and production
costs in the 1940s hit the PULP MAGAZINES hard; as they dwindled, the
COMIC book - which grew out of comic strips - rose in popularity. Hal
Foster (1892-1982) had started the ever-popular Tarzan strip in 1929, in
the same year that BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY, drawn by Dick CALKINS
and written by Philip NOWLAN, appeared on the scene. What Tarzan did for
Africa, Buck did for space. Success bred imitators: the 1930s brought the
caveman ALLEY OOP, a sort of anti-Tarzan (by Vincent Hamlin), The Phantom
(Lee Falk and Ray Moore), BRICK BRADFORD (Clarence Gray and William Ritt),
and the much admired FLASH GORDON, elegantly drawn by Alex RAYMOND. From
such SUPERHEROES it was only a step to the king of them all, SUPERMAN.
Created by Jerry SIEGEL and Joe Shuster, two sf fans, this character began
life in a comic book, Action Comics, in 1938, and was a success from the

start. Like Flash and Buck before him, Superman went into RADIO and then
into films. By 1941, the fortnightly comic-book version had reached a
circulation of 1,400,000. The day of the superhero had dawned. MARVEL
COMICS introduced The Fantastic Four in 1961; since then Marvel's fabulous
but fallible beings - The Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Silver
Surfer and the rest of the grotesques - have changed the nature of comics
and, on the whole, improved the standard of draughtsmanship in the field.
But the most astonishing developments came from France, in particular from
the group of artists (of whom Philippe DRUILLET was one) working for the
magazine METAL HURLANT. Here the mood was of brooding unease rather than
action; sophisticated surreal effects were achieved without recourse to
balloons or commentary.As the written word affected artwork, so artwork
influenced the written word. There was a period in sf when interiors of
SPACESHIPS were vast, shadowy, and echoing; they came complete with
cast-iron doors opening directly onto space and equipped with doorknobs
for handles. That was the influence of Calkins's Buck Rogers. Raymond's
Flash Gordon had similar effects, and his line of galactic romance, with
proud queens dressed in fur-tipped boots and haughty expressions, and
usurping villains lurking behind the arras with axe and ray-gun, is with
us yet. The enormous vacuum-vehicles of Christopher FOSS spring from A.E.
VAN VOGT's epics - and will surely inspire future van Vogts.Imitation is
promoted by systems of tight deadlines and tighter payrolls; whatever
comes to hand must be used. Artists, like writers, still borrow heavily
from each other. In the jungle world of the pulps, artists moved easily
from one genre to another, depending on the corporation employing them. We
should be surprised not that there is so little individuality but that
there is so much. Hubert ROGERS, ASF's chief artist throughout much of the
1940s, produced many covers for other STREET ? Frank
Kelly FREAS, an ASF illustrator of infinite jest, created Mad Magazine's
lunatic optimist Alfred E. Neuman ("What, me worry?").In the magazines of
the early post-Gernsback period the mode depended heavily on horror and
GOTHIC, perhaps because here was a convention readily to hand, waiting to
be adapted. Finlay, Lawrence (Lawrence Sterne STEVENS), Hannes BOK,
Alexander LEYDENFROST and Cartier are names that spring to mind. These
artists of the macabre secured and kept a great following: Finlay and Bok
in particular have become revered since their deaths. Leydenfrost, son of
a Dutch illustrator, produced some of the most imaginative MONSTERS in the
business; they are frequently based on insect morphology.Later sf artists
were able to forge an idiom more in tune with the technophile nature of
sf. The precept of Frank R. PAUL was decisive here. An artist with
training as an architect, Paul was possibly Gernsback's most remarkable
discovery. This prodigious talent created his own brand of future city,
with its sensuously curving lines an exotic amalgam of Byzantium and the
local movie palace, owing something to the Art Deco movement. The same
patterns were exaggerated in paranoid style by Elliot DOLD, who developed
an intense poetry of machinery. During this period, H.W. WESSO also
produced spirited interpretations of mighty cities and machineries, as did
Leo MOREY and Orban, but it was the purity of line of Charles SCHNEEMAN
and Rogers that best conveyed the aspirations of technocratic culture,
where the merely human dwindles in the light of its aseptic artefacts.Few
sf illustrations are memorable in their own right; they come and they go.

An exception must be made for Schneeman's idealistic picture of E.E. "Doc"
SMITH's hero, Kimball Kinnison, the Grey Lensman, striding along with two
formidable alien allies (ASF Oct 1939). Together with Rogers's cover for
Robert A. HEINLEIN's "The Roads Must Roll" (ASF Nov 1939), it represents a
synthesis of that immaculate metal-clad future towards which many thought
the world was rolling. Of course it was an illusion: WWII was already
raging in Europe. In place of Rogers, Freas became ASF's most popular
artist; he specialized in roughnecks with guns.ASF was iconoclastic, aware
of its brand-image as the intellectual's sf magazine. The emphasis was on
the word, which got things done, not the drawing, which was merely
decorative; in consequence, much interior artwork was dull. For vigour,
one turned to lesser magazines, to the crowded Herman Vestals in Startling
Stories and Planet Stories, or to Rod RUTH in Fantastic Adventures, whose
spirited sketches for "Queen of the Panther World" by Berkeley LIVINGSTON
(July 1948) still retain their power.Of the new 1950s magazines, Gal has
already been mentioned. Its misty interior illustrations appeared
refreshingly contemporary; best-remembered exponents of this style are
William Ashman, Don Sibley, Dick Francis and the alarming Kossin. Among
the names rising to prominence in the 1960s were John SCHOENHERR, Mel
Hunter (1929- ) and Jack GAUGHAN. By this time, the magazines had tidied
up their typography, imitating their powerful rivals in the paperback
industry; it is in paperback books that most of the traditional art is
aired nowadays.With sf motifs pervading certain strata of popular MUSIC,
sf and fantasy art made formidable appearances on record album sleeves.
Notably, Roger DEAN's striking composites of machine, insect, animal and
bone have convincing power. Dean and the remarkably fecund Patrick
Woodroffe (1940- ) published collections of their own work, as did Karel
THOLE, King Surrealist of sf art.The new professional magazines of the
later 1970s relied heavily on old modes of illustration. GALILEO did best,
with Tom Barber striving towards something fresh. But it seemed undeniable
that innovations would be more likely to occur elsewhere. Innovation
follows cash flow: movies, tv and record-album covers adopted, on a wide
front, an idiom that virtually began in the magazines. That early work,
for many reasons, can never be repeated; for aesthetic reasons, it cannot
be ignored. A number of books of the 1970s deal, in whole or in part, with
sf illustration: Hier, L'an 2000 (1973 France; trans as 2000 A.D.:
Illustrations from the Golden Age of Science Fiction Pulps 1975) by
Jacques SADOUL; One Hundred Years of Science Fiction Illustration (1974)
by Anthony FREWIN; Science Fiction Art (1975) by Brian W. ALDISS and A
Pictorial History of Science Fiction (1976) by David A. KYLE. [BWA]2. From
1978 to 1992 This has been a period of few sf magazines: Gal died and the
circulations of those that survived slipped inexorably downhill. The new
UK magazine INTERZONE (begun 1982) unevenly experimented with cover art in
many styles, Ian MILLER's bizarre, STEAMPUNK machines being among the more
memorable results. The balance, so far as sf illustration was concerned,
became permanently tilted in this period away from magazines and towards
the covers of paperback books and the dust-jackets of hardcovers, and even
here (remuneration in the book business not being highly competitive) some
of the more successful artists, like Frank FRAZETTA, worked only briefly
in the field before moving on to other forms of commercial art. A big
success on book covers of the late 1970s were the erotic fantasies of

Boris VALLEJO, whose busty bimbos in bondage harked back with a kind of
frozen tastelessness to the era of the pin-up girl, but after a while his
work could most easily be bought in the form of calendars.Through much of
the 1970s and 1980s UK sf paperback book covers were dominated by space
pictures in a smooth, airbrushed style, with vast spacecraft looming - a
style which most critics associated with Chris FOSS. Tim WHITE and Jim
BURNS, Foss's heirs as the most successful UK sf illustrators, worked
easily in this mode, though much of the best work of both is in other
styles. Anthony ROBERTS and Angus MCKIE were also among the guilty
parties. Burns was the first UK artist to win a HUGO for his work. While
the style lasted, it looked to the casual bookshop browser as if all
UK-published sf was effectively the same book.In the USA, sf cover art was
dominated through the 1980s by the paintings of Michael WHELAN, meticulous
and vivid but perhaps with a rather-too-commercial predictability. He has
created what will surely be an all-time record by failing to win the Hugo
for Best Professional Artist only twice in the years 1980-1991 inclusive,
winning 10 Hugos in all in that category, and an 11th for Best Non-Fiction
Book. Some find that the covers of one of his closer competitors, Don
MAITZ (who also won a Hugo), have more movement and vigour. Many of
Maitz's covers are fantastic rather than technological, and the move away
from icons of technology as a means of selling sf in book form was if
anything even more pronounced in the USA during the 1980s than in the UK.
Sf books sometimes featured the work of almost purely fantastic artists
like ROWENA or the well achieved Art Nouveau pastiche of Thomas CANTY
(although decorative styles based on woodcuts, stained glass and
late-19th-century illustration had previously been used, to very great
effect, by Leo and Diane DILLON). Other notable US cover artists of the
1980s include James GURNEY, Barclay SHAW and Darrell SWEET.It is
surprising that Surrealist book covers have been used comparatively seldom
for sf, despite the memorable work of Richard POWERS in the USA (
BALLANTINE BOOKS during the 1950s) in this supposedly more up-market and
respectable style. Others to adopt a semi-Surrealist style were Brian
LEWIS in the UK, Paul LEHR in the USA and Karel THOLE in Europe, but none
of these are artists whose work is at all typical of the 1980s. The best
known sf-Surrealist of our time is, like Thole, a European, and deeply
influenced by the traditions of decadent graphic art that were always so
much stronger in Europe than in the USA. This is H.R. GIGER, the Swiss
painter whose work became justly celebrated in the USA with the film ALIEN
(1979), for which he designed both monsters and spacecraft. His biomorphic
creations are both phallic and vulval in a manner that, had it appeared in
comic strips in the 1950s, would have justified the hysteria of Dr Fredric
Wertham (1895-1981), whose book The Seduction of the Innocent (1954)
charged that coded vaginas appeared in the shading of some comics drawing.
(These and similar charges led directly to the introduction of the Comics
Code in 1955.) Giger is not a cover artist, and has had only a small
influence in that field.It may be that sf illustration as a separate genre
is slowly dying away, with the advent of the paperback book not really
compensating for the death of the magazines in providing a niche for it.
Certainly, there is not much in the sf art of the late 1980s/90s to get
excited about; most of the development has been in fantasy art (and much
of that, too, deals in visual stereotypes). While general standards are

much higher than they were in, say, the PULP MAGAZINES, the sense of lurid
freedom seems to have disappeared now that publishers carefully commission
book covers which, normally, are designed to attract without giving
offence.In one area there have been great advances: the COMICS, once
again. Most comics art is poor, but some is very good indeed. A new
development in comics, the GRAPHIC NOVEL, has showcased artists, either
working in close collaboration with writers or writing their own
scenarios, some of whom are exceptional; they include Enki BILAL, Brian
BOLLAND, Dave GIBBONS, Dave MCKEAN and Frank MILLER. But this is a wholly
different art from sf illustration proper, comics being themselves a
storytelling medium whereas magazine illustrations and book covers have
the more static function of rendering icons designed to label the
publication as being sf (or fantasy) and then to sell it, not to further
the story.See the Introduction for lists of comics artists and sf
illustrators who receive entries in this encyclopedia. [PN]See also: SEX.
ILLUSTRATORS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST
WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST.
IMAGINARY SCIENCE
Imaginary science is extremely common in sf; it is not at all the same
thing as PSEUDO-SCIENCE. The difference is that the adherents of the
pseudo-sciences believe them to be true, whereas the sf writer who uses
imaginary science knows perfectly well that it is untrue.Sf has often been
criticized for scientific illiteracy, sometimes unfairly, for, while it
does produce many simple SCIENTIFIC ERRORS, it commonly uses presently
impossible science for two good reasons, neither of them ignorant: (a)
what is impossible now may one day become possible; (b) imaginary science
may be essential for plot purposes. An example of the first category is
the common sf device of MATTER TRANSMISSION. All matter can be described
in terms of information and, since all information can be transmitted,
then one may legitimately theorize that matter transmission (or at least
matter reconstruction) does not transgress the laws of Nature as we know
them, even though the practical problems are so vast as to seem, at
present, insuperable. (Instantaneous matter transmission, the most common
form portrayed in sf, is another kettle of fish: it violates Relativity in
the same way as any other mode of FASTER-THAN-LIGHT travel, such as via
HYPERSPACE.) Similarly, SUSPENDED ANIMATION is not possible now but, with
advances in CRYONICS, one day it may be.We are primarily concerned here
with the second category: the imaginary scientific device which does
indeed contradict what we know of the sciences, usually PHYSICS, but which
allows the writer a kind of imaginative freedom extremely difficult to
obtain otherwise. The five best-known examples are ALTERNATE WORLDS;
ANTIGRAVITY; FASTER-THAN-LIGHT (or FTL) travel and COMMUNICATION;
INVISIBILITY; and TIME TRAVEL. A separate entry is devoted to each of
these.The game - it is indeed a game - is to produce as plausible a
rationalization for the impossible as the author's artistry will allow,
and it is precisely this skill that worries the scientific purist. Thus
James BLISH, in his Cities in Flight series (1955-62; omni 1970), explains
his SPINDIZZY by referring to work by real theoretical physicists with an
air of such bland conviction that a generation of sf readers may have

grown up believing that antigravity is possible. Similarly, H.G. WELLS in
The Invisible Man (1897) rattles on about refraction with a perfectly
straight face. Blish did not believe in antigravity, nor Wells in
invisibility: their aim was simply to rationalize the surrealistic central
images of their story - US cities flying through space in Blish's book,
and a suit and a mask being removed to reveal nothing behind them in
Wells's. The imaginary science was there to clear the way, and, of course,
to lend conviction to the tale.Time travel is perhaps the clearest
example. The ingenuity of sf writers is constantly aimed at subverting the
prohibitions physics appears to place on time travel - some to do with
causality - because, critically, time travel gives narrative access to the
past and the future, and opens up exactly that perspective that is central
to sf's finest achievements. Through its (almost certainly impossible)
use, sf writers have achieved the freedom to consider things both possible
and real, as in the fields of HISTORY, EVOLUTION and even METAPHYSICS all three in the case of the great original, H.G. Wells's THE TIME MACHINE
(1895). A puritanical demand for universal scientific responsibility (the
genre is called science fiction after all) would instantly destroy this
and many others of sf's most intellectually rigorous works.The publication
of many books of scientific popularization in the 1970s and 1980s,
particularly those about the relationship of quantum physics to COSMOLOGY,
gave new credence to some of the imaginary sciences. If some real
scientists were prepared to contemplate quantum-mechanical explanations
for ALTERNATE WORLDS, or time-travelling particles like TACHYONS, or the
possibility that BLACK HOLES may provide portals to other, distant areas
of time or space (or even to "different universes"), then why should not
sf authors be allowed the same imaginative warrant? The imaginary sciences
took on a new lease of life, and Schrodinger's cat became, belatedly, an
overnight success. The cynic, of course, might argue that this is simply a
case of sf feeding back into science.A controversial example of imaginary
science is the employment of ESP or PSI POWERS - which might more properly
be seen as within the province of the pseudo-sciences - as central to the
story. Some sf writers, such as Alfred BESTER and Blish, have used psi
powers exactly as they might use other imaginary sciences, as an evocative
and useful plot device; other sf writers appear to be propagandizing on
behalf of parapsychology, or at least succumbing to the lure of wish
fulfilment. In SUPERMAN tales especially, the science involved tends to be
pseudo rather than imaginary, and perhaps open to criticism on that
account.Writers of HARD SF often like to develop a realistic extrapolation
from one imaginary change in scientific laws, or even in the fundamental
constants of the Universe. Thus Bob SHAW, in THE RAGGED ASTRONAUTS (1986),
invents a universe where pi equals exactly 3 (and where - perhaps as a
remote consequence? - interplanetary travel between two planets closely
orbiting one another is possible by balloon); Stephen BAXTER's Raft (1991)
takes place in a universe where the force of GRAVITY is very much stronger
than in ours; John E. STITH's Redshift Rendezvous (1990) proposes that in
HYPERSPACE the velocity of light is 22 mph (35kph).Sf writers have been
inventive in creating imaginary scientific devices - such as the "slow
glass" of Shaw's poignant "Light of Other Days" (1966) and others, which
allows us to view the past because light takes so long to penetrate a
sheet of the material - and occasionally even new sciences. An early

example of the latter, and still one of the best, is Alfred JARRY's
'pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions. Isaac ASIMOV was
especially prolific in creating new sciences, such as POSITRONICS and
PSYCHOHISTORY, though in these cases he was somewhat evasive about the
details of how they worked; he has also used such old imaginary-science
favourites as miniaturization ( GREAT AND SMALL), in Fantastic Voyage
(1966), and in THE GODS THEMSELVES (1972) he came up with an "electron
pump" that provides us with a limitless supply of electricity (electrons)
in return for positrons supplied to an alternate universe. His most absurd
coup in the imaginary-science line was "thiotimoline", described in "The
Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" (1948), which
parodies the dusty style of a scientific report, and in its several
sequels. Thiotimoline is, in effect, a time-travelling chemical which
effortlessly reverses cause and effect. Ursula K. LE GUIN likewise came up
with a new science in a spoof-scientific paper, "The Author of the Acacia
Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of
Therolinguistics" (1974); therolinguistics is the study of animal language
and literature.One real science is thus far imaginary, in the sense that
it has no available subject matter: XENOBIOLOGY. [PN]
IMAGINARY VOYAGES
A term much used in the TERMINOLOGY of sf/fantasy critics, probably
derived from the French, whose name for the genre is "voyages
imaginaires". From this term was also derived Voyages extraordinaires, the
overall series title used by publisher Hetzel on the novels of Jules
VERNE. In this encyclopedia the theme is treated under FANTASTIC VOYAGES
and PROTO SCIENCE FICTION. A book on the subject is The Imaginary Voyage
in Prose Fiction (1941) by Philip Babcock GOVE. [PN]
IMAGINATION
US DIGEST-size magazine. 63 issues. First released Oct 1950 by the Clark
Publishing Co., ed Raymond A. PALMER. Early in 1951, with #3, it was
acquired by William L. HAMLING's Greenleaf Publishing Co., and continued
with Hamling as editor until Oct 1958. Beginning as a bimonthly, it
operated a six-weekly and then briefly a monthly schedule Sep 1952-July
1955. Until July 1955 its full title was Imagination: Stories of Science
and Fantasy; from Oct 1955 it became Imagination Science Fiction. Hamling
followed a policy of including a short novel in each issue. Among his most
frequent contributors were Kris NEVILLE and Daniel F. GALOUYE, both of
whom published much of their early work in I; others were Milton LESSER,
Dwight V. SWAIN and, towards the end of I's career, Edmond HAMILTON. I
dealt primarily in routine SPACE OPERA, and featured an unusually high
number of titles ending in exclamation marks. [BS]
IMAGINATIVE TALES
US DIGEST-size magazine. 26 issues. A bimonthly companion to IMAGINATION,
IT was published by William HAMLING's Greenleaf Publishing Co., ed
Hamling, Sep 1954-Nov 1958. The last 3 issues, July-Nov 1958, were
published under the title Space Travel (but continued the previous
numeration) in a doomed effort to capture the post-Sputnik
space-enthusiast market.IT began as a humorous FANTASY magazine, the first
6 issues featuring complete novels in the style of Thorne Smith

(1892-1934) by Charles F. Myers and Robert BLOCH, but from Sep 1955 it
reverted to a policy identical to that of its companion, featuring only
sf, with a short novel heading every issue. Regular writers included
Edmond HAMILTON, Geoff St Reynard (Robert W. Krepps) and Dwight V. SWAIN,
while the supporting short fiction was principally supplied by authors
from the regular stable writing for the ZIFF-DAVIS magazines AMZ and
Fantastic. [BS]
IMAGINE
. . . CANADA.
I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE
Film (1958). Paramount. Dir Gene Fowler Jr, starring Tom Tryon, Gloria
Talbot, Ken Lynch. Screenplay Louis Vittes, from a story by Fowler and
Vittes. 78 mins. B/w.Another manifestation of the rampant PARANOIA of the
1950s, IMAMFOS might be called an sf version of I Married a Communist. In
this enjoyably tasteless MONSTER MOVIE, a young woman's fiance, on the way
to his wedding, is captured and replaced by a shape-shifting ALIEN, one of
a group whose mission on Earth is to breed with human women in an attempt
to replenish their own declining population. The sexual subtext of some
other sf B-movies is here brought out into the open, notably in the famous
wedding-night scene where a flash of lightning reveals to the audience
(but not the wife) the alien lineaments beneath the nervous
cigarette-smoking husband's face. But the woman, who grows suspicious of
her "spouse" over the next year, convinces a "real" man of what is
happening and he organizes a rescue party. The aliens, impervious to
bullets, are destroyed when dogs are set on them, and dissolve into
writhing, bubbling alien knots. At various points, surprisingly, some
sympathy for the aliens is deliberately roused, and in this respect
IMAMFOS is more interesting than the otherwise deservedly more celebrated
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956), whose story, in part, it imitates.
Gene Fowler, a former editor for Fritz LANG, directed well. [PN/JB]See
also: INVASION; SEX.
IMMORTAL, THE
US tv series (1969-71). Paramount/ABC TV. Concept based on the novel The
Immortals (fixup 1962) by James E. GUNN. Executive prod Tony Wilson. Prod
Lou Morheim. Dirs included Joseph Sargent (pilot), Mike Caffey. Writers
included Robert Specht, Stephen Kandel, Dan Ullman. Starring Christopher
George, Carol Lynley, Don Knight, David Brian, Barry Sullivan. 75min
pilot, followed by 15 50min episodes. Colour.In the 1969 pilot Ben
Richards (George) is discovered to have a rare blood-type which renders
him immune to disease and to the ageing process. An elderly millionaire
wants to keep him locked up as a human fountain of youth, but he escapes
to search for his long-lost brother, who may have the same type of blood.
The 1970 series reverts to the formula of the hunted man - others are
after him, too - having adventures on his travels. The novelization is The
Immortal * (1970), also by Gunn. [JB]
IMMORTALITY
Immortality is one of the basic motifs of speculative thought; the elixir
of life and the fountain of youth are hypothetical goals of classic

intellectual and exploratory quests. What is usually involved is, strictly
speaking, extreme longevity and freedom from ageing - the uselessness of
the former without the latter is reflected in the myth of Tithonus and in
Jonathan SWIFT's account of the Struldbruggs.One thing immediately
noticeable about this rich literary tradition is that immortality is often
treated as a false goal, sometimes as a curse recalling the infinitely
tedious punishments meted out to Ixion, Tantalus, Sisyphus and the
Wandering Jew. It is understandable that GOTHIC fantasies such as St Leon
(1799) by William Godwin (1756-1836), Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by
Charles MATURIN, The Wandering Jew (1844-5) by Eugene Sue (1804-1857),
Auriol (1850) by W. Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882) and The Death Ship
(1888) by W. Clark RUSSELL should be suspicious; these are cautionary
tales, warning against the emptiness of dreams (though a cynic might
equally suggest sour grapes). It is perhaps surprising, though, that early
sf writers mostly followed suit. Walter BESANT's The Inner House (1888)
proposes that immortality would lead to social sterility - an opinion
echoed by many later writers, including Martin SWAYNE in The Blue Germ
(1918), Harold Scarborough (1897-1935) in The Immortals (1924) and Aldous
HUXLEY in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939; vt After Many a Summer
UK). Stories which take a brighter view - like George C. FOSTER's The Lost
Garden and the trilogy by George S. VIERECK and Paul ELDRIDGE begun with
My First Two Thousand Years (1928) - usually have only a few privileged
immortals living in a world of mortals. When George Bernard SHAW expressed
enthusiasm for universal longevity in Back to Methuselah (1921), Karel
CAPEK added a rebutting preface to his own play The Makropoulos Secret
(1925) to explain his own opinion that it would be an unmitigated curse
even for a single individual.This difference of opinion remains very
evident in sf. In some stories immortality is the beginning of limitless
opportunity; in others it represents the ultimate stagnation and the end
of innovation and change. We find the former view in such early pulp
stories as "The Jameson Satellite" (1931) by Neil R. JONES and The Man who
Awoke (1933; fixup 1975) by Laurence MANNING, and its converse in David H.
KELLER's "Life Everlasting" (1934; title story of Life Everlasting and
Other Tales [1947]) and John R. PIERCE's "Invariant" (1944). In later
magazine sf, the former attitude is implicit in J.T. MCINTOSH's "Live For
Ever" (1954) and James BLISH's "At Death's End" (1954), while the latter
is seen in Damon KNIGHT's "World without Children" (1951). Frederik POHL's
Drunkard's Walk (1960), Brian W. ALDISS's "The Worm that Flies" (1968) and
Bruce MCALLISTER's "Their Immortal Hearts" (1980). There is, however, a
general acceptance of the fact that the desire for immortality is
immensely powerful, and that it constitutes the ultimate bribe; lurid
dramatizations of this supposition include Jack VANCE's To Live Forever
(1956), James E. GUNN's The Immortals (1955-60; fixup 1962), John
WYNDHAM's Trouble with Lichen (1960), Norman SPINRAD's BUG JACK BARRON
(1969), Bob SHAW's One Million Tomorrows (1970), Robert SILVERBERG's The
Book of Skulls (1972), Thomas N. SCORTIA's "The Weariest River" (1973) and
Mack REYNOLDS's and Dean ING's Eternity (1984). There have been numerous
notable sf novels featuring immortal heroes, including A.E. VAN VOGT's The
Weapon Makers (1943; 1952), Wilson TUCKER's The Time Masters (1953; rev
1971), Clifford D. SIMAK's WAY STATION (1963), Roger ZELAZNY's THIS
IMMORTAL (1966) and Robert A. HEINLEIN's Time Enough for Love (1973). But

the dominant opinion seems to be that boredom and sterility must
eventually set in. Raymond Z. GALLUN's The Eden Cycle (1974) is an
extended study of this presumed phenomenon, and the protagonists of
Michael MOORCOCK's Dancers at the End of Time sequence (1972-6) must go to
extreme and absurd lengths to keep ennui at bay.Some of the modern stories
dealing with the theme are scrupulously analytical, and are among the
finest exercises in speculative thought that the genre has produced. Most
are respectful of the problematic aspects of longevity, but almost all
eventually favour the prospect; notable examples of extended contes
philosophiques in this vein include Robert Silverberg's "Born with the
Dead" (1974) and Sailing to Byzantium (1985), Octavia E. BUTLER's WILD
SEED (1980), Pamela SARGENT's The Golden Space (1982), Kate WILHELM's
Welcome, Chaos (1983) and Poul ANDERSON's epic THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS
(1989). A particularly notable negative story is "The Tithonian Factor"
(1983) by Richard COWPER, in which hasty users of a technology which gives
them a Struldbrugg-like longevity are discomfited by the subsequent
discovery that humans do indeed have a joyous spiritual afterlife. Damon
Knight's "Dio" (1957), Marta RANDALL's Islands (1976; rev 1980) and
Frederik POHL's Outnumbering the Dead (1990 UK) are interesting stories
about lone mortals in societies of immortals.Research in biotechnology
following the cracking of the genetic code has encouraged speculation that
technologies of longevity are a real prospect, and a new immediacy was
introduced into the theme when R.C.W. Ettinger's The Prospect of
Immortality (1964) popularized the idea that CRYONIC preservation might
allow people now living to be preserved until the day when they might
benefit. Though satirized in such novels as Anders BODELSEN's Freezing
Down (1971; vt Freezing Point), this notion inspired a curious political
"manifesto" in Alan HARRINGTON's The Immortalist (1969), followed by his
extravagant novel Paradise 1 (1977); Harrington prefers the term
"emortality", which signifies an immunity to ageing but not to injury.
Technologies of longevity and genetically engineered emortality play a
central role in Brian M. STABLEFORD's and David LANGFORD's future history
The Third Millennium (1985), and the theme is a constant preoccupation in
Stableford's recent solo work, notably The Empire of Fear (1988). A
collection of essays on immortality in sf is Death and the Serpent (anth
1985) ed Carl B. YOKE and Donald M. HASSLER. A theme anthology is Immortal
(anth 1978) ed Jack DANN. [BS]See also: ESCHATOLOGY; GODS AND DEMONS;
HIVE-MINDS; LOST-WORLDS; MEDICINE; RELIGION; SUPERMAN.
IMPOSSIBLE VOYAGE, AN
VOYAGE A TRAVERS L'IMPOSSIBLE.
IMPULSE
SCIENCE FANTASY.
INCIDENT AT RAVEN'S GATE
(vt Encounter at Raven's Gate) Film (1988). Hemdale. Dir Rolf de Heer,
starring Steven Vidler, Celin Griffen, Ritchie Singer, Vince Gil, Saturday
Rosenberg. Screenplay Marc Rosenberg, de Heer. 89 mins. Colour.Australian
cinema has produced a number of under-appreciated genre items, such as The
Last Wave (1978) and Razorback (1984). This is another, a conspiracy-cumUFO movie which locates its bizarre storyline in a dried-up, mean-spirited

outback. It starts awkwardly with an unnecessary flashback structure, and
risks alienating audiences accustomed to complete explanations for all
manifestations, but is otherwise an outstanding atmospheric nail-biter. As
in the best 1950s cheapies - IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953) is the
particular touchstone evoked - the fantastic elements are used to bring
out the tensions of the human characters. The pressures on an already
uptight policeman turn him into a menace who competes with the influence
of the offscreen ALIENS as the source of the film's HORROR, so that IARG
wavers between the psycho-movie and alien-encounter genres. Though the
film does not produce tentacled monstrosities, it does have a few
impressively unsettling moments in the invaded-transformed Raven's Gate
farmhouse. [KN]
INCREDIBLE HULK, THE
US tv series (1977-82). Universal/CBS-TV. Created by Kenneth Johnson
(executive prod), starring Bill Bixby, Lou Ferrigno, Jack Colvin. Prods
included Nicholas Corea, James D. Parriott, Charles Bowman, Bob Sherman.
Dirs included Johnson, Bowman, Kenneth Gilbert, Jeffrey Hayden, Reza
Badiyi, Jack Colvin. Writers included Johnson, Parriott, Corea, Karen
Harris and Jill Sherman, Richard Christian MATHESON. 5 seasons, 2 100min
pilots plus 79 50min episodes. Colour.The series is based on the MARVEL
COMICS character of the same name. Mild-mannered scientist Dr David Banner
(Bixby) subjects himself to gamma radiation and turns temporarily into a
violent, green, 7ft (2.15m) hulk (Ferrigno), a condition that repeats
itself whenever he is under stress. The Hulk persona never speaks. Banner
has many adventures while on the run, trailed by abrasive investigative
reporter McGee (Colvin), who suspects the truth. Only a handful of
episodes - notably the 2-part "Prometheus", which involves a meteor
freezing Banner/Hulk into an intermediate state - have any sf components
aside from the initial SUPERHERO premise. In this formulaic but popular
series the Hulk is much more polite (and lacklustre) than his frenzied
comic-book counterpart.The 2 pilots and a further 2-episode story were
syndicated in the USA and released as movies elsewhere: The Incredible
Hulk (1977), Return of the Incredible Hulk (1977; a retitling of "Death in
the Family") and Bride of the Incredible Hulk (1978; a retitling of
"Married"). 2 made-for-tv movies, both dir Bill Bixby, are Trial of the
Incredible Hulk (1979) and Death of the Incredible Hulk (1990). [PN/JB]
INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN, THE
Film (1977). Quartet Productions/AIP. Written and dir William Sachs,
starring Alex Rebar, Burr DeBenning, Ann Sweeny, Michael Aldredge.
Additional dialogue Rebecca Ross. 84 mins. Colour.By 1977 the idea of an
astronaut returning to Earth after being contaminated by some space
infection was well and truly a CLICHE subgenre of the MONSTER MOVIE, an
early example being The QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955). This time the
infection causes great strength, the desire to eat human flesh, and an
unfortunate skin disease that gives the astronaut a strong resemblance to
man-shaped porridge. Some sequences are rather good, but the special
effects are laughable. [PN]
INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, THE
Film (1957). Universal. Dir Jack ARNOLD, starring Grant Williams, Randy

Stuart, April Kent. Screenplay Richard MATHESON, based on his own The
Shrinking Man (1956). 81 mins. B/w.This is one of the few truly classic sf
films of the 1950s. The basic premise is unscientific, but that does not
detract from the power of this story about a man (Williams) who becomes
contaminated by a radioactive cloud and starts to shrink. What were once
safe and comforting to him become increasingly threatening as he continues
to diminish. There is severe sexual anxiety as his wife (Stuart) looms
ever larger above him (and patronizes him). In due course his cat becomes
a monster and the prosaic confines of his own basement, into which he
escapes, become a surrealist jungle. Eventually he disappears completely
as the wind blows through autumn leaves and the stars glitter above in a
curiously joyful epiphany. Matheson's mature script is intelligently
handled by Arnold. Clifford Stine's special effects are a paradigm for how
these things should be done.A supposedly comic partial remake starring
Lily Tomlin, The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981), dir Joel Schumacher,
purports to be a SATIRE on the consumer society. [PN/JB]See also: GREAT
AND SMALL; HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS; HUGO; MUTANTS; PARANOIA.
INCREDIBLE SHRINKING WOMAN, THE
The INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN .
INFINITY
Original paperback anthology series ed Robert HOSKINS, published by
Lancer Books, and presented as a lineal descendant of the magazine
INFINITY SCIENCE FICTION (1955-8), whose editor, Larry T. SHAW, was also
connected with Lancer; the covers bore the slogan "New Writings in
Speculative Fiction". I was a competent but not outstanding series.
Regular contributors included Poul ANDERSON, Barry N. MALZBERG and Robert
SILVERBERG; Alan BRENNERT and George ZEBROWSKI made their debuts in its
pages. Infinity One (anth 1970) reprinted Arthur C. CLARKE's "The Star"
(1955) from the first issue of its spiritual ancestor; all other stories
were originals. Later volumes were Infinity Two (anth 1971), Three (anth
1972), Four (anth 1972) and Five (anth 1973). The series was terminated
when its publisher went bankrupt. [MJE/PN]
INFINITY SCIENCE FICTION
US DIGEST-size magazine. 20 issues Nov 1955-Nov 1958, published by Royal
Publications, ed Larry T. SHAW; irregular, with 4 months between some
issues, 1 month between others. ISF was one of the most interesting of the
flood of new sf magazines in the early and mid-1950s. Its first issue
featured Arthur C. CLARKE's HUGO-winning story "The Star", and the
magazine went on to publish other good stories by such authors as Isaac
ASIMOV, James BLISH, Algis BUDRYS, Damon KNIGHT and C.M. KORNBLUTH; Harlan
ELLISON made his debut here with "Glow Worm" (1956). Robert SILVERBERG was
another regular - and sometimes prolific-contributor; #20 contained book
reviews by him and also 3 of his stories (including "Ozymandias",
published as by Ivar Jorgenson). Damon Knight had earlier been ISF's
regular critic; much of the material in In Search of Wonder (1956; rev
1967) originated in ISF. After the first issue, all the covers were
painted by Ed EMSHWILLER. The original anthology series INFINITY described
itself as the "lineal descendant" of ISF. [MJE]

ING, DEAN
(1931- ) US writer whose work makes effective use of his years in the Air
Force (1951-5) and in the engineering profession (1957-70), and reflects
in its pragmatic tone - though not in its plotting, which can be pixilated
- his training in behavioural psychology (PhD in speech, 1974). Much of
his fiction can be described as SURVIVALIST, insofar as military tales set
in a post- HOLOCAUST USA necessarily inhabit survivalist terrain; but the
violence of his better work is relatively restrained, and the
libertarianism ( LIBERTARIAN SF) which underpins his conception of proper
behaviour cannot be described as unthinking. Collections like High Tension
(coll 1982) and Firefight 2000 (coll 1987), the latter including both
fiction and nonfiction, amply demonstrate the cogency of his concerns.DI
began writing sf with "Tight Squeeze" for ASF in 1955, though he became
active only in the late 1970s. His first novel, Soft Targets (1979),
interestingly copes with terrorism in a NEAR-FUTURE setting, though a
besetting weakness for melodrama diverts attention from the serious points
he makes about the fatal precariousness of societies in the advanced
Western World. DI is, in fact, much less interested in that precariousness
than in its consequences, and his most significant work, the Ted Quantrill
sequence-Systemic Shock (1981), Single Combat (1983) and Wild Country
(1985) - is set in a desolated and paranoid post-Bomb USA under the thumb
of a theocracy. (The similarity of this setting to Robert A. HEINLEIN's
Future History is sufficiently obvious to count as a homage.) Quantrill's
life, as he matures, presents a model of and argument for the individual
who admits no restraints upon his behaviour but his own recognizance. That
Quantrill does not behave poorly derives, perhaps, more from the author's
decency than from any notion that near-absolute autonomy makes one fully
human. Other titles of interest include several novels written as with
Mack REYNOLDS, who died in 1983, based on complete first drafts written by
Reynolds; they are Eternity (1984), Home Sweet Home: 2010 A.D. (1984), The
Other Time (1984), in which an archaeologist uses TIME TRAVEL to help the
Aztecs defeat the Spanish, The Lagrangists (1983), Chaos in Lagrangia
(1984), Trojan Orbit (1985) and Deathwish World (1986). His solo books
include Anasazi (coll of linked stories 1980), Pulling Through (coll
1983), which comprises a short ROBINSONADE and a series of survivalist
articles designed to add versimilitude to the course of the main story,
and The Big Lifters (1988), a HARD-SF tale in which entrepreneurship wins
the day. In general, DI presents what might be called the acceptable face
of survivalism. [JC]Other works: Blood of Eagles (1986), associational;
The Ransom of Black Stealth One (1989) and its sequel, Butcher Bird
(1993); Cathouse * (fixup 1990), tales set in Larry NIVEN's Man-Kzin
universe; The Nemesis Mission (1991); Silent Thunder (1991 chap dos).About
the author: The Work of Dean Ing: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide
(1990 chap) by Scott A. Burgess.See also: COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS;
IMMORTALITY; SOCIAL DARWINISM.
INGHAM, FREDERICK
Edward Everett HALE.
INGREY, DEREK
(1929- ) UK writer whose post- HOLOCAUST sf novel, Pig on a Lead (1963),

describes the dead-end life of the last surviving humans in the UK - two
men, who soon kill each other, and a boy, who survives in the company of a
young Eve-figure and the eponymous pig. Told in a remarkable pot pourri of
styles, the book makes effective use of many black-humour routines. [JC]
INGRID, CHARLES
Rhondi VILOTT.
INGS, SIMON (DAVID)
(1965- ) UK writer who began publishing sf with "Blessed Fields" in Other
Edens III (anth 1989) ed Christopher EVANS and Robert HOLDSTOCK; and who
has become moderately prolific as an author of short stories. His first
novel, Hot Head (1992), heatedly and congestedly, and with moments of
CYBERPUNK-ish brilliance, presents the life-story and adventures-in
VIRTUAL REALITY and other realms-of a lesbian Muslim wanderer in the early
21st century. SI's 2nd novel, City of the Iron Fish (1994), significantly
differs from the first novel. The eponymous city, whose physical existence
seems as arbitrary as all other physical phenomena in the world of the
novel, is reminiscent of such fantasy edificial concentrations as Mervyn
PEAKE's Gormenghast, or M. John HARRISON's Viriconium. But the surreal
dance of speculation-about cosmology in general, as well as the
reality-making function of ART in a world which lacks natural
meaning-distinguishes this novel apart from its models. SI may prove to be
one of the writers to capture the 1990s. [JC]
INNER SPACE
In sf TERMINOLOGY, an antonym to "outer space". The term was probably
first used in the sf field by Robert BLOCH in a speech at the 1948
Worldcon, but was not widely disseminated at that time. However, in "They
Come from Inner Space" (1954 The New Statesman) - an essay he later
included in Thoughts in the Wilderness (coll 1957) - J.B. PRIESTLEY more
conspicuously suggested that sf mistakenly attempted to explore "the other
side of the Sun rather than . . . the hidden life of the psyche". "Beyond
all these topical tales, fables and legends" lay "deep feelings of
anxiety, fear, and guilt" which themselves required exploration. "Having
ruined this planet," he continued, "we take destruction to other planets.
This very extension in space of our activities is desolating, at least to
minds that are not entirely childish, because it is a move, undertaken in
secret despair, in the wrong direction." Whether J.G. BALLARD's first use
of the term in 1962 was a separate coining or reflected a memory of this
essay, it is clear that he intended to designate something not dissimilar.
(It is also possible that he had read "Invasion from Inner Space" [1959
Star Science Fiction #6] by Howard Koch, a story about sceptical COMPUTERS
revolutionizing society, but this is obviously a rather different usage.)
The term soon became a commonplace, especially with reference to NEW-WAVE
writers (like Ballard) who came into prominence in the mid-1960s.
[JC/PN]See also: GREAT AND SMALL; MUSIC.
INNERSPACE
Film (1987). Amblin/Warner Bros. Steven SPIELBERG as an executive prod.
Dir Joe DANTE, starring Dennis Quaid, Martin Short, Kevin McCarthy, Fiona
Lewis, Meg Ryan. Screenplay Jeffrey Boam, Chip Proser, based on a story by

Proser. 120 mins. Colour.In this parody of FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966), tough
test pilot Tuck (Quaid) is accidentally injected into feeble Jack (Short)
while in a miniaturized state. Tuck, though tiny, can to a degree control
Jack. In a confused and sometimes unfunny plot, villainous industrial
spies pursue a microchip MCGUFFIN and a miniaturized killer is also
injected into Jack. Adventures happen. All Dante's films have delightful
moments, but this, an attempt to make good commercially after the debacle
of EXPLORERS (1985), seems oddly impersonal while at the same time trying
too hard. The inside-the-body effects are good. The technical adviser on
the movie was Gentry LEE. [PN]See also: CINEMA.
INNES, EVAN
Zach HUGHES.
INSIDE
US FANZINE. HUGO; RIVERSIDE QUARTERLY.
INTELLIGENCE
Intelligence is necessarily one of the issues discussed in the entries on
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF, CYBERNETICS, MUTANTS and SUPERMAN. MACHINE
intelligence is discussed under COMPUTERS and ROBOTS. This entry is
restricted to stories in which the emphasis is on the actual workings of
intelligence in living beings.Much sf refers to intelligence, but a
surprisingly small amount gives a good idea of what the workings of a
superior or different intelligence would feel like or even look like. In
many stories of abnormally intelligent supermen or mutants we have to take
the intelligence on trust. Such intelligences were favourites with A.E.
VAN VOGT, but their workings are often less than transparent to the
reader, as is the case with the hero of his The World of A (1945 ASF; rev
1948; rev vt The World of Null-A 1970), whose blinding leaps of
non-Aristotelian logic are frequently incomprehensible and on the face of
it rather silly.The first sf story of any significance about intelligence
was probably The Curse of Intellect (1895) by Frank Challice Constable, in
which an ape is given human intelligence ( APES AND CAVEMEN); the first of
real importance was The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911; vt The Wonder US) by J.
D. BERESFORD, in which the focus of interest is on the feelings of a
superintelligent child growing up in a world of what seem to him
subnormals. A colder and harsher reworking of the same theme was twice
undertaken by Olaf STAPLEDON, in Odd John (1935), about an abnormally
intelligent human whose spiritual powers are also highly developed, and in
Sirius (1944), about an intelligent dog. In some ways the latter work is
the more successful, perhaps because of the problem in stories of this
kind of finding a form of language appropriate to describing an experience
which by its very nature cannot be fully comprehended by either the reader
- or indeed the writer.One way around the problem of increasing
intelligence is to begin with an animal or a moron, so that the higher
intelligence is not hopelessly out of reach of our own. This strategy has
been adopted in several GENRE-SF stories, of which the two best known are
Brain Wave (1954) by Poul ANDERSON and "Flowers for Algernon" (1959) by
Daniel KEYES, later much exp as FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (1966). The latter,
filmed as CHARLY (1968), is a moving story, told largely through his own
diaries, of intelligence artificially induced in a moron. Sadly, the

process is only temporary; while hero and reader are given a glimpse,
surprisingly convincing, of what genius must feel like, the gates of the
golden city are soon barred, and the story ends with an itching discomfort
in the subnormal mind of the hero and an almost intolerable feeling of
loss in the reader's.Superintelligence is often pictured as going along
with what seems to ordinary humans a cold indifference and a casual
amorality. Perhaps this demonstrates a sour-grapes syndrome. We do not
like the thought of being relegated to a minor place in the evolutionary
scheme; and, as EVOLUTION is traditionally carried out by a "Nature red in
tooth and claw", we half expect that a race of geniuses would treat us
cruelly. A prototype of this kind of story is John TAINE's Seeds of Life
(1931 AMZ; 1951), in which an accident with radiation transforms a surly
laboratory technician into a cruel, glowing supermind in the body of an
Adonis; the sense we are given of the workings of his mind is vivid enough
to transcend the pulp crankiness of the story's ideas of evolution. Here,
too, the growth of intelligence is reversible.Many adults are ready enough
to see even normal children as essentially ALIEN creatures, and a
flourishing subgenre has been the story of the superchild ( CHILDREN IN
SF), often turning on his or her relationship with parents or guardians.
Henry KUTTNER reverted to this theme several times, as in "Mimsy Were the
Borogoves" (1943, as Lewis Padgett), in which a teaching machine from the
future has frightening effects on children, and "When the Bough Breaks"
(1944, again as Padgett), in which a peculiarly nauseating superbaby gives
his parents a hard time. "Star Bright" (1952) by Mark CLIFTON is a
typically pulp version of the intelligence theme in which the
manifestations of high intelligence in children - where the real interest
of the story might have lain - rapidly develop into what are in effect
magical powers. The two most thoughtful and mature novels in this subgenre
are probably Children of the Atom (1948-50 ASF; fixup 1953) by Wilmar H.
SHIRAS, which incorporates the classic story "In Hiding" (1948), in which
an extremely intelligent boy attempts, in self-protection, to behave just
like any other child, but is discovered, and The Fourth "R" (1959; vt The
Brain Machine) by George O. SMITH, in which the intelligence of a
5-year-old has been trained artificially by a machine which reinforces
learning mechanisms in the brain. Both books deal sensitively with the
contrast between intellectual maturity and emotional immaturity, and are
surprisingly plausible in their scenarios of ways in which
superintelligence might show itself in action.Two other relevant stories
from the 1950s are C.M. KORNBLUTH's "The Marching Morons" (1951), a
vividly unpleasant story of a future which has become polarized between
morons and geniuses, the former in much greater numbers because the middle
classes know more about contraception (an interesting not-very-hidden
assumption here), and The Black Cloud (1957) by Fred HOYLE, in which a
cloud-intelligence in space indirectly kills scientists who try to take on
board its entire knowledge of the universe, their human intellects being
too fully programmed and inflexible to cope with the new data. Something
similar happens to the people in the film FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) who
subject themselves to the intelligence-raising machinery of the Krel.A
number of stories have hinged on the COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS under an
imagined future law which states that the worlds of intelligent beings
must be either left alone or at least treated with great care. Thus the

measurement of alien intelligence becomes a question of politics. H. Beam
PIPER's Little Fuzzy (1962) is of this kind, as is Joseph GREEN's
Conscience Interplanetary (1965-71 var mags; fixup 1972), though Green
does not really develop the potential of the theme. Perhaps the most
interesting novel about surveying the nature of alien life and
intelligence is Naomi MITCHISON's MEMOIRS OF A SPACEWOMAN (1962).Other
variations on the intelligence theme include: Olof JOHANNESSON's Sagan om
den stora datamaskinin (1966; trans as The Big Computer: A Vision 1968 UK;
vt The Tale of the Great Computer: A Vision 1968 US; vt The End of Man?
1969 US), which is actually a history of intelligence, written in the
future, seeing human intelligence as an evolutionary step towards machine
intelligence; "The Planners" (1968) by Kate WILHELM, about the
acceleration of the genetic transmission of intelligence in apes; and
"Eurema's Dam" (1972) by R.A. LAFFERTY, about a genius whom the author
disingenuously describes as stupid. This last story is one of a long line
of genre-sf yarns about idiots savants who construct various marvellous
machines and theories without having the least idea about what they are
doing. A major work on the evolution of intelligence is Thomas M. DISCH's
CAMP CONCENTRATION (1968), a highly structured novel which describes,
through a series of recurrent images and thematic leitmotifs, an
experiment in drug-induced raising of intelligence among deserters and
conscientious objectors in a prose whose increasing richness and
difficulty reflect the ever-increasing intelligence of the narrator. Oscar
ROSSITER's Tetrasomy 2 (1974) is a black comedy about a young doctor in
whom a sudden acceleration of intelligence is catalysed by a
vegetable-like superbeing; the doctor's inability to use his improved mind
with any social sang froid poses a problem not generally considered in
this type of story.The question of intelligence testing comes up in many
UTOPIAS and DYSTOPIAS, and is analysed interestingly in "Intelligence
Testing in Utopia" by Carolyn H. Rhodes in EXTRAPOLATION, Dec 1971. Among
the works she discusses in which this theme is central are The Messiah of
the Cylinder (1917; vt The Apostle of the Cylinder) by Victor ROUSSEAU,
Player Piano (1952; vt Utopia 14) by Kurt VONNEGUT Jr, The Rise of the
Meritocracy (1958) by Michael YOUNG, The Child Buyer (1960) by John HERSEY
and World out of Mind (1953) by J.T. MCINTOSH.Two sf novelists whose work
consistently speculates on the nature of intelligence and the various
directions in which it may evolve are Frank HERBERT and Ian WATSON, both
heavily committed to the possibility of some form of transcendent
intelligence. In Herbert's work the theme is seen most clearly in the Dune
series and in The Dosadi Experiment (1977), though it appears in all his
novels. As with van Vogt, however, it is not always clear exactly how his
"other" intelligences operate. With Herbert, much depends on enigmatic
hints and clues, as if he knew more than he's telling; this is reflected
in his plots, which combine abstruse metaphysical speculation with
conspiratorial, cloak-and-dagger manipulations in a sometimes confusing
way. Nonetheless, Herbert has at times evoked the difference of evolved
intelligences with great feeling. Where Herbert hints, Watson analyses and
chips patiently away at his recurrent theme, approaching it from a
slightly different angle in each of his novels of the 1970s and in some
later ones. Unlike those sf writers who seem to fear the thought of a
transcendent intelligence, Watson desires it, while recognizing how such

an evolution may be quite alien to our present selves. Bringing to bear an
impressive arsenal of analytic tools taken from ANTHROPOLOGY, CYBERNETICS,
LINGUISTICS, PSYCHOLOGY, semiotics and neurology, he is ready to tackle
ambitious projects; in particular he has attempted, with partial success
but sometimes drily, to evoke the feeling of a supermind whose processes
are more lateral, analogizing and synthesizing than sequential in the
traditional mode of human logic. Examples can be found in The Embedding
(1973), The Martian Inca (1977) and Alien Embassy (1977). Similarly,
Damien BRODERICK's The Judas Mandala (1982; rev 1990) is notable for the
intellectual arabesques produced by its evolved intelligences, hovering
just this side of comprehensibility.In the 1980s the intelligence theme
became less important in genre sf, though Stephen KING's The Tommyknockers
(1987) has a lively if pulp-style treatment of a popular notion in sf that contact with aliens or their artefacts may cause a rapid evolution of
our intelligence - most famously evoked in the film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
(1968). In King's novel the artefact is an ancient spacecraft dug up in
Maine. Robert SILVERBERG's At Winter's End (1988) features a FAR-FUTURE
primitive tribe whose apparently human intelligence is the result of an
experiment in primate evolution. In The Divide (1990) by Robert Charles
WILSON a man whose superintelligence was created by a hormonal experiment
during his childhood attempts to cope with his alienation by splitting his
mind; this creates two wholly different personalities, one apparently
average. But generally the emphasis of 1980s sf has shifted away from
intelligence examined in isolation towards the nature of consciousness and
the workings of the mind in general. This is one of the recurrent themes
in Greg BEAR's work. His Blood Music (1985) has a transformation of
humanity brought about by intelligent microorganisms, and Queen of Angels
(1990) envisages a society in which most people are "therapied" by
molecule-scale machines made possible by developments in NANOTECHNOLOGY;
the same book features direct exploration/mapping of the mind and its
subroutines, consciousness alteration through vodoun ("voodoo"), and the
growth to self-consciousness of an AI.The idea of biological engineering
of the mind appears also in Geoff RYMAN's The Child Garden (1989), in
which almost the whole of humanity is educated by the direct importation
of tailored DNA into the brain through viral infection. Ironically the
heroine, who is immune to viruses, is very intelligent, and the book makes
an important distinction between knowledge and intelligence, emphasizing
how the conventional "grammars" of thought create a conformism
antipathetic to true creativity. In this case (and often, no doubt, in the
real world) education can muffle intelligence. [PN]
INTERNATIONAL FANTASY AWARDS
UK awards, made annually 1951-7 (not 1956). The idea came from four UK
enthusiasts, including John Beynon Harris (John WYNDHAM). The IFAs were
presented to the authors of the best fantasy or sf book of the year, with
a second category for the best nonfiction book likely to be of interest to
sf readers; the nonfiction class was dropped after 1953. Winners were
selected by a panel of prominent sf personalities; from 1952 the panel was
international. The award took the form of a trophy. Once the HUGOS had
been successfully launched, some of the raison d'etre for the IFAs was
gone, but in their time they were given to some excellent and

imaginatively chosen works, most of which would have had almost no chance
of winning any of the major US AWARDS. The first IFA was presented at the
1951 UK sf CONVENTION, the last at the London Worldcon in 1957.
[PN]1951Fiction: George R. STEWART, EARTH ABIDESNonfiction: Willy LEY and
Chesley BONESTELL, The Conquest of Space1952Fiction: John COLLIER, Fancies
and GoodnightsNonfiction: Arthur C. CLARKE, The Exploration of
Space1953Fiction: Clifford D. SIMAK, CITYNonfiction: Willy Ley and L.
Sprague DE CAMP, Lands Beyond1954Theodore STURGEON, MORE THAN
HUMAN1955Edgar PANGBORN, A MIRROR FOR OBSERVERS1957J.R.R. TOLKIEN, Lord of
the Rings
INTERNATIONAL SCIENCE FICTION
US DIGEST-size magazine. 2 issues, Nov 1967 and June 1968, published by
Galaxy Publishing Corp., ed Frederik POHL. The interesting idea of
reprinting stories from all over the world - authors ranging from Arkady
STRUGATSKI ( RUSSIA) through Hugo Correa (Chile [ SOUTH AMERICA]) to
Damien BRODERICK ( AUSTRALIA)-sadly but unsurprisingly met with no
success. [FHP/PN]
INTERNATIONAL STORYTELLER
STORYTELLER.
INTERPLANETARY ROMANCE
PLANETARY ROMANCE.
INTERZONE
UK magazine, current, #1 Spring 1982, small- BEDSHEET (A4) format,
saddle-stapled, continuously numbered, on slick paper from #41, Nov 1990,
quarterly to #24, Summer 1988; bimonthly to #34, Mar/Apr 1990; monthly
thereafter. IZ was first published and edited by a collective made up of
John CLUTE, Alan Dorey, Malcolm EDWARDS, Colin GREENLAND, Graham James,
Roz KAVENEY, Simon Ounsley and David PRINGLE. This group shrank: James
left after #2, Edwards after #4, Kaveney after #7, Clute and Dorey after
#10, and Greenland after #12. From #13, Autumn 1985, the only editors were
Ounsley and Pringle, although some previous editors continued to act as
advisory editors. Since #25, Sep/Oct 1988, when the magazine went
bimonthly, the sole editor (and publisher) has been David Pringle, who had
been from the outset, along with Edwards, one of the two major figures
behind its publication. IZ had reached #95 by May 1995. Begun as an
idealistic exercise by a group of fans and writers at a time when the UK
had almost no market for sf short stories, it has grown into by far the
most distinguished UK sf magazine since NEW WORLDS and SCIENCE FANTASY. In
appearance and content it is a fully professional magazine,although its
comparatively low circulation (by US standards) of around 4,500 requires
it to be classed as a SEMIPROZINE in HUGO voting.IZ published perhaps too
many downbeat stories in its early issues, hoping rather too obviously to
revive something of the feeling of Michael MOORCOCK's NW and its NEW-WAVE
glories. However, it slowly developed - certainly by 1985-6 - a real
personality of its own. From #13 (Autumn 1985) Nick Lowe has contributed a
sophisticated film-review column; from #16 (Summer 1986) John Clute has
been the featured and inimitable senior book reviewer. Since then the
nonfiction component has continually improved: a second book-review column

by Paul J. MCAULEY was added from #23 (Spring 1988), and Mary GENTLE has
reviewed with increasing frequency, as have, more recently, Chris Gilmore
and Gwyneth JONES. Good interviews have appeared regularly, as well as
literary and market analysis in the interesting Big Sellers series; Wendy
Bradley began (and later ceased) to review, amusingly, both tv shows and
fantasy fiction; David LANGFORD began to publish monthly a condensed
version of ANSIBLE, his well-known news-oriented FANZINEand Charles PLATT
and Bruce STERLING (separately) contributed occasional columns of
(deliberately) controversial polemics.All of this gave the magazine a good
bone structure on which the skin and musculature of the fiction could be
adequately supported. It has slowly become clear that this one magazine,
despite its slender resources and comparatively small readership, has been
largely (if not solely) responsible for catalysing a second new wave of UK
sf. Its younger UK authors have included Paul J. McAuley, Steve BAXTER,
Keith BROOKE, Eric BROWN, Richard Calder (1955- ), Neil FERGUSON, Nicola
Griffith, Simon D. Ings (1965- ), Ian Lee (1951- ), Ian MCDONALD, Ian R.
MacLeod, Kim NEWMAN and Charles Stross, among many others, coming in to
join already established writers like Brian W. ALDISS, J.G. BALLARD,
Barrington J. BAYLEY, M. John HARRISON, Gwyneth JONES, Garry KILWORTH,
Keith ROBERTS, Brian M. STABLEFORD and Ian WATSON. Australian Greg EGAN
has been an especially notable contributor, as has, though more seldom,
the Canadian Geoff RYMAN. Good US contributors have included Greg BEAR,
Michael BLUMLEIN, Scott BRADFIELD, Paul Di Filippo, Thomas M. DISCH, Karen
Joy FOWLER, Richard KADREY, Geoffrey A. Landis, Pat MURPHY, Rachel POLLACK
and Michael SWANWICK.This represents, so far as UK sf writing is
concerned, a spectacular upturn in both the quality and the quantity of sf
by new writers, after long years of near-stagnation in the 1970s and early
1980s. It is not so much the UK writers' uniform brilliance - they are by
no means always brilliant - as the sense of vigour and community they
arouse by their regular appearance together in this magazine; this is what
has revitalized UK sf, and incidentally encouraged the starting up of many
other small UK semiprozines in IZ's wake. Pringle as editor has
occasionally, and somewhat unfairly, been accused of playing it too safe
and commercial in recent years, after publishing much experimental fiction
early on. More commonly he is regarded as having got the balance between
SOFT SF and HARD SF, the experimental and the old-style fast-paced
narrative, about right. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, IZ has been
intelligently eclectic.Both cover art and interior art have been of uneven
quality. The most notable artist consistently associated with Interzone he was Art Editor for a time - is Ian MILLER. In Oct 1994 IZ merged with
the small-press magazine SF Nexus, with the result that Paul Brazier,
editor of the latter, became graphic designer for IZ. The result,
according not just to the elderly and conservative, has been a design of
striking ugliness in the name of modernism. [PN]See also: INTERZONE: THE
ANTHOLOGY.
INTERZONE: THE ANTHOLOGY
UK anthology series, mainly reprint (from the magazine INTERZONE), part
original, 5 vols to date. These are Interzone: The 1st Anthology (anth
1985) ed David PRINGLE with John CLUTE and Colin GREENLAND, The 2nd
Anthology (anth 1987) ed Pringle with Clute and Simon Ounsley, The 3rd

Anthology (anth 1988) ed Pringle with Clute and Ounsley, The 4th Anthology
(anth 1989) ed Pringle with Clute and Ounsley, and The 5th Anthology (anth
1991) ed Pringle with Clute and Lee Montgomerie. Original stories have
appeared in #1 (1 story), #4 (3 stories) and #5 (2 stories), their authors
including Geoff RYMAN and Cherry WILDER. [PN]
INVADERS, THE
US tv series (1967-8). A Quinn Martin Production for ABC TV, created by
Larry COHEN. Prod Alan Armer. Writers included Don Brinkley, Dan Ullman,
Jerry SOHL, Robert Collins. Dirs included Joseph Sargent, Paul Wendkos,
Sutton Roley. 43 50min episodes. Colour.Roy Thinnes stars as a man who has
witnessed a landing by ALIENS in a UFO but is unable to get anyone to
believe him. The aliens, from a doomed planet, are trying to take over
Earth by infiltration: able to take on human form, they can be
distinguished only by the odd angle of their little fingers; when dead
their bodies evaporate leaving only a pile of ashes, so lasting proof of
their existence is almost impossible to establish. The rigid formula - in
each episode the hero discovers and foils a new alien plot, but remains
unable to convince the authorities - meant that there was little
variation, and the series was cancelled after the second season. Larry
Cohen, whose idea the series was, later became celebrated for his
low-budget independent films, usually, as here, featuring an ordinary man
facing horrible incursions on the one hand and an uncaring, unimaginative
or conspiratorial establishment on the other. Perhaps TI came too late: it
belonged, in spirit, to the PARANOID sf version of the Communist-spy
scares of the 1950s, as in Robert A. HEINLEIN's The Puppet Masters (1951),
the tv serial QUATERMASS II (1955) and the film INVASION OF THE BODY
SNATCHERS (1956).Two short series of books based on TI were published in
the USA (3 books) and the UK (4 books). The 2 to appear in both series are
The Invaders * (1967; vt The Meteor Men UK as by Anthony LeBaron) by Keith
LAUMER, #1 in the USA and #2 in the UK; and The Halo Highway * (1967; vt
Army of the Undead US) by Rafe BERNARD, #1 in the UK and #3 in the USA.
Invaders #2 in the USA was Enemies from Beyond * (1967) by Laumer; #3 and
#4 in the UK were The Night of the Trilobites * (1968) and The Autumn
Accelerator * (1969), both by Peter LESLIE.Two further ties to the series
were hardbound juveniles, Alien Missile Threat * (1967) by Paul S. Newman,
and Dam of Death * (1967) by Jack Pearl. [JB/PN]
INVADERS FROM MARS
1. Film (1953). National Pictures/20th Century-Fox. Dir William Cameron
Menzies, starring Jimmy Hunt, Helena Carter, Arthur Franz, Leif Erickson.
Screenplay Richard Blake (and John Tucker Battle, uncredited). 78 mins (82
mins in Europe). Colour.A small, disturbing, curiously memorable film by
the director of THINGS TO COME (1936), made for children but capable of
terrifying them. Through a little boy's eyes we see ALIENS from a UFO take
over the minds of everyone in a town, beginning with the boy's own
parents. The army moves in, there is an underground battle and the aliens
are defeated. The boy wakes up and realizes that it was all a dream . . .
but then he once again sees the UFO land behind his house. (Extra footage
was shot for the European print to substitute for the all-a-dream ending,
which it was felt would be unpopular; more recent prints have combined

both versions.)Although IFM was cheaply made, Menzies produced - through
the use of mildly expressionistic sets (reinforcing the dream idea) and a
camera placed to give us a child's-eye view - a powerful sf metaphor for
the loneliness and alienation of a child whose world seems subtly wrong.
The image of human bodies concealing incomprehensible and menacing alien
motives was, in its PARANOIA, an important one in US sf cinema, especially
during the 1950s Communist-spy phobias.2. Film (1986). Cannon. Prods
Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus. Dir Tobe Hooper, starring Hunter Carson,
Karen Black, Timothy Bottoms, Louise Fletcher. Screenplay Dan O'Bannon,
Don Jakoby, based on original. 99 mins. Colour.Disappointing (although
astonishingly faithful) remake by a director more at home with
exploitation horror movies. The more sophisticated special effects
(Martians created by Stan Winston) and the updating of the setting serve
only to throw the original's flaws into high relief. What carried eerie
conviction on the small screen becomes merely silly on the big one,
especially as Hooper's direction sinks into near-incoherence in the pacing
of the finale. The best bits, unsurprisingly, are straight from the HORROR
genre: possessed parents chewing horribly burnt bacon, a malicious
schoolteacher eating a live frog, etc. [PN/JB]See also: INVASION; MONSTER
MOVIES.
INVADERS FROM THE DEEP
STINGRAY.
INVASION
Futuristic fiction in the UK was given a tremendous boost by the success
of George T. CHESNEY's clever piece of propaganda, The Battle of Dorking
(1871), which put the case for army reform and rearmament by offering a
dramatic illustration of the ease with which the UK might fall to an
invading German army. This became the foundation-stone of a subgenre of
future- WAR stories whose history is described in I.F. CLARKE's excellent
Voices Prophesying War 1763-1984 (1966). Significant exercises in similar
alarmism published in the run-up to WWI included The Great War in England
in 1897 (1894) by William LE QUEUX, The Riddle of the Sands (1903) by
Erskine CHILDERS, The Invasion of 1910 (1906) by Le Queux and When William
Came (1913) by SAKI. P.G. WODEHOUSE's early novel, The Swoop! (1909), was
a parody of the subgenre. The invaders were usually German, but stories of
French invasion were frequently used as cautionary tales against the folly
of building a Channel Tunnel, such as Max PEMBERTON's Pro Patria (1901).
UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE was to a large extent an outgrowth and elaboration
of this kind of fiction; and a crucial CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH was made by
H.G. WELLS in THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898), which imagined that an
invasion of the Earth by technologically superior ALIENS might appear to
Britons in much the same light as the eventually genocidal invasion of
Tasmania by Europeans had appeared to the luckless Tasmanians (see alsoThe
WAR OF THE WORLDS ). Although it was (very narrowly) anticipated in some
respects by Kurd LASSWITZ's Auf zwei Planeten (1897; cut trans as Two
Planets 1971), Wells's novel was far more influential in making the role
of invader central to the fictional image of the alien for the next
half-century.Mundane invasions remained fairly commonplace in UK fiction
between the wars, although the fear of occupation per se was outweighed

and largely superseded by the fear of the aerial bombardment which might
be its prelude; in the UK such stories far outnumbered stories of alien
invasion, although there were some notable examples of the latter: G.
McLeod WINSOR's Station X (1919) and Bohun LYNCH's Menace from the Moon
(1925), as well as the Martian invasion included in Olaf STAPLEDON's
future history LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930). This general dearth of
alien-invasion stories is understandable. Separated from continental
Europe by a mere 22 miles, the UK was especially vulnerable to the threat
of invasion - and Britons understood how narrowly such a fate had been
averted in 1588 and again in Napoleonic times.The USA was far less
vulnerable to such anxieties - although they found expression in such
novels as Thomas DIXON's The Fall of a Nation (1916) and Floyd GIBBONS's
The Red Napoleon (1929), as well as in various lurid accounts of the
"Yellow Peril", including Parabellum's (Ferdinand GRAUTOFF's) Bansai!
(1909), Philip Francis NOWLAN's Buck Rogers stories (1928-9) and the
series begun by Arthur Leo ZAGAT with "Tomorrow" (1939) - but in general
the possibility of alien invasion probably seemed to US citizens not too
much more remote than the probability of invasion by another nation.Early
pulp melodramas of alien invasion include J. Schlossel's "Invaders from
Outside" (1925), Nictzin Dyalhis's "When the Green Star Waned" (1925),
Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's The Moon Maid (1926), Edmond HAMILTON's "The Other
Side of the Moon" (1929) and John W. CAMPBELL Jr's Invaders from the
Infinite (1932 AMZ Quarterly; 1961). An interesting story by P. Schuyler
MILLER in which the "invasion" is by spores rather than sentient beings is
"The Arrhenius Horror" (1931), a theme which he recapitulated in "Spawn"
(1939); a later development of it was Jack FINNEY's The Body Snatchers
(1955; vt Invasion of the Body Snatchers), filmed twice as INVASION OF THE
BODY SNATCHERS. Alien-invasion stories quickly became a staple of the
specialist sf pulps, and Campbell went on to conduct a sober and rather
peculiar analysis of the idea of alien conquest and the subjugation of
humankind in four of his "Don A. Stuart" stories: "The Invaders" (1935),
"Rebellion" (1935), "Out of Night" (1937) and "The Cloak of Aesir" (1939)
- stories somewhat at odds with his later conviction that humanity was
destined to get the better of any and all alien species. One of the
side-effects of this later human chauvinism was Campbell's de-emphasizing
of alien-invasion stories in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION - it is surprising
how few such stories appeared in ASF in the decade separating The Dark
Destroyers (1938 as "Nuisance Value"; 1959) by Manly Wade WELLMAN from
"Late Night Final" (1948) by Eric Frank RUSSELL, even though such stories
could certainly (as did both the examples cited) champion the human
against the nonhuman. Joseph J. MILLARD's The Gods Hate Kansas (1941; rev
1964) is a notable example from elsewhere.A sparse but interesting line of
stories featuring invasions launched from UNDER THE SEA runs from Owen
Oliver's antique "Out of the Deep" (1904) and Eden PHILLPOTTS's The Owl of
Athene (1936) to John WYNDHAM's The Kraken Wakes (1953; vt Out of the
Deeps US) and Murray LEINSTER's Creatures of the Abyss (1961). These often
bring the typical features of mundane and alien invasion stories into
uneasy combination.Hypothetical Asian invasion continued to crop up
occasionally in GENRE SF - as in Robert A. HEINLEIN's Sixth Column (1941
ASF as by Anson MacDonald; 1949; vt The Day after Tomorrow) and C.M.
KORNBLUTH's Not this August (1955; vt Christmas Eve UK) - although they

were easily outnumbered by attempted and successful conquests of a more
exotic kind, even if most of these were featured in the less prestigious
magazines. Invasions came not only from outer space but from other
DIMENSIONS, as in Murray LEINSTER's "The Incredible Invasion" (1936 ASF;
1955 dos as The Other Side of Here), from the microcosm, as in "Invaders
from the Atom" (1937) by Maurice G. Hugi (1904-1947), and eventually from
the future, as in Invasion from 2500 (1964) by Norman Edwards (Terry CARR
and Ted WHITE). Among the more bizarre alien invasions is Fredric BROWN's
"The Waveries" (1945), in which electrical energy-beings hijack our
airwaves. Despite the sobering conclusion of THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, in
which lowly bacteria must compensate for human impotence, confidence in
human ability to repel alien invaders sooner or later always ran high in
pulp sf, one lone man occasionally being adequate to the task, as in A.E.
VAN VOGT's "The Monster" (1948). In some stories, of course, humans are
themselves the alien invaders of other worlds, and works of this kind
(which rarely appeared in ASF) were often fiercely critical of such human
follies as racism and imperialism; examples range from Edmond Hamilton's
"A Conquest of Two Worlds" (1932) through Robert Silverberg's Invaders
from Earth (1958 dos) and Downward to the Earth (1970) to Ursula K. LE
GUIN's THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST (1972 in Again, Dangerous Visions ed
Harlan ELLISON; 1976).From their earliest inception, stories of invasion
featured a paranoid anxiety that the invaders might already be lurking
undetected in our midst. William Le Queux was an indefatigable propagator
of the notion that a Fifth Column of German agents was already in the UK,
preparing to play its part in open conflict, and many US Yellow-Peril
novels likewise featured Fifth Columnists. This kind of PARANOIA could be
taken to extremes in sf, where aliens could easily be credited with the
power to masquerade as humans. The notion was understandably attractive to
low-budget film-makers, and it was extravagantly deployed in the magazines
and in the CINEMA during the McCarthy witch-hunts of the early Cold War
period. The new wave of paranoid alien-invasion stories was launched by
Murray Leinster's The Brain-Stealers (1947 Startling Stories as "The Man
in the Iron Cap"; 1954) and Ray BRADBURY's "Zero Hour" (1947), but it
really hit its stride with Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (1951), quickly
followed by INVADERS FROM MARS (1953), Eric Frank RUSSELL's Three to
Conquer (1955), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and I MARRIED A
MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (1958). By this time, however, the comic
potential of alien invasion was being more widely exploited, too, in such
works as Fredric Brown's Martians Go Home! (1955) and Richard WILSON's The
Girls from Planet 5 (1955). The possibility of benign invasions was
considered, notably by Arthur C. CLARKE in CHILDHOOD'S END (1953), by
Algis BUDRYS in "Silent Brother" (1956) and (somewhat perversely) by
Theodore STURGEON in The Cosmic Rape (1958).By the 1960s the
alien-invasion story appeared to be old hat, fit for cynical display in
such stories as Thomas M. DISCH's The Genocides (1965), in which humans
are relegated to the status of irrelevant vermin, and his Mankind under
the Leash (1966; vt The Puppies of Terra UK), in which they become pets;
or surreal parody, in such works as Keith LAUMER's The Monitors (1966) and
Philip K. DICK's and Ray NELSON's The Ganymede Takeover (1967); or
romantic nostalgia in such works as Robert SILVERBERG's Nightwings (fixup
1969). Serious treatments of the theme were rare: William BURKETT's

Sleeping Planet (1965) and Piers ANTHONY's Triple Detente (1968 ASF as
"The Alien Rulers"; exp 1974) do not quite qualify, although Gordon R.
DICKSON's The Alien Way (1965) and John BRUNNER's The Day of the Star
Cities (1965; rev vt Age of Miracles 1973) might. More recent attempts to
revitalize the theme have been relatively few in number; by far the most
determined and most successful is Footfall (1985) by Larry NIVEN and Jerry
POURNELLE, a conscientiously controlled melodrama. Other notable examples
include Jack CHALKER's Dancers in the Afterglow (1978) and the "invasion"
subplot of Gregory BENFORD's Across the Sea of Suns (1984).A notable theme
anthology of early genre stories is Groff CONKLIN's Invaders of Earth
(anth 1952). [BS/DP]
INVASION
Film (1966). Merton Park/AIP. Dir Alan Bridges, starring Edward Judd,
Valerie Gearon, Yoko Tani, Lyndon Brook. Screenplay Roger Marshall, based
on a story by Robert Holmes. 82 mins. B/w.This interesting UK film tells
of two humanoid aliens who crash-land on Earth outside a country hospital.
It turns out that one is a prisoner of the other. Further aliens, members
of an extraterrestrial police force, arrive and demand that the hospital
doctor hand over the prisoner; when their request is refused they place an
impenetrable FORCE FIELD around the hospital, but are finally outwitted by
the protective doctor. Bridges creates a powerfully strange atmosphere
despite a very small budget. [JB/PN]
INVASION EARTH 2150 AD
DALEKS - INVASION EARTH 2150 AD.
INVASION OF ASTRO-MONSTER
GOJIRA; RADON.
INVASION OF PLANET X
GOJIRA; RADON.
INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS
Film (1973). Centaur/Sequoia. Dir Denis Sanders, starring William Smith,
Anitra Ford, Victoria Vetri, Rene Bond. Screenplay Nicholas Meyer. 85
mins. Colour.This softcore erotic movie - perhaps inspired by The WASP
WOMAN (1959) - has deservedly developed a minor cult reputation for the
outrageousness of its tacky if typical exploitation premise, that SEX is
death. A woman becomes a nymphomaniacal but sterile "queen bee", and
conscripts housewives and other women to join the group; they are covered
with jelly and irradiated, and emerge as beautiful human-seeming ALIENS,
wearing dark glasses to conceal their insect eyes. They kill their male
victims through repeated induction of orgasm. The story hinges on the
murder investigation. Part parody, the film is intermittently amusing and
arguably perversely proto- FEMINIST. Meyer went on to cowrite The NIGHT
THAT PANICKED AMERICA (1975), to write and direct TIME AFTER TIME (1979),
to direct STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982), to direct The DAY AFTER
(1983), to cowrite STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME (1986), and to cowrite
and direct STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY (1992). He has also
written excellent Sherlock Holmes pastiches ( Sir Arthur Conan DOYLE.)
[PN]

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS
1. Film (1956). Allied Artists. Prod Walter Wanger. Dir Don Siegel,
starring Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Carolyn Jones, King Donovan.
Screenplay Daniel Mainwaring, Sam Peckinpah (uncredited), based on The
Body Snatchers (1955) by Jack FINNEY. 80 mins. B/w. PARANOIA was the
dominant theme running through much sf cinema of the 1950s. Nowhere was it
better realized than in this subtle and sophisticated movie, directed by
B-film veteran Siegel, about vegetable pods from outer space that turn
into emotionless replicas of human beings, in the process replacing the
usually sleeping originals. Whether the film reflects right-wing paranoia
about a secret takeover by communists or left-wing paranoia about the
increasing power of the McCarthyists has been much argued; either way, the
theme is loss of individual identity and of human feeling. The original
downbeat ending, in which the pods are victorious, was diluted by the
addition of a prologue and epilogue set in hospital, the latter showing
the authorities finally believing in the existence of the pods. These
scenes are often cut in modern prints. The film has been very highly
praised: it is possibly the most discussed B-movie in the history of US
film, and was the first of many 1950s sf films to be remade.2. Film
(1978). Solofilm/United Artists. Dir Philip Kaufman, starring Donald
Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff
Goldblum. Screenplay W.D. Richter, based on the Finney novel. 115 mins.
Colour.This unusually interesting remake shifts the emphasis from
political to sociological, from cohesive small town to alienating big city
(San Francisco), where it is more difficult at the best of times to tell
who is a pod and who isn't, a point made by the psychiatrist (Nimoy). The
script is witty, making satirical points about Californian society in the
late 1970s, so intent upon development and change that becoming a pod is
almost a logical next step. Kaufman's direction is confident, but
sometimes too ominous. [PN]3. A second remake was BODY SNATCHERS (1993),
(which see).See also: CINEMA; INVASION; MONSTER MOVIES.
INVASION OF THE FLYING SAUCERS
EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS.
INVENTION
DIME-NOVEL SF; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; EDISONADE; MACHINES;
SCIENTISTS;
TECHNOLOGY.
INVENTION OF DESTRUCTION
VYNALEZ ZKAZY.
INVISIBILITY
The fantasy of being able to make oneself invisible is a common childhood
daydream. As with all such daydreams, literary treatments of the theme
tend to be cautionary tales; the three-decker novel The Invisible
Gentleman (1833) by James Dalton is the most extravagant example. No good
comes of it in such early sf stories as Edward Page MITCHELL's "The
Crystal Man" (1881), H.G. WELLS's classic The Invisible Man (1897) and
Jack LONDON's "The Shadow and the Flash" (1903), though C.H. HINTON was
unconcerned with moralizing in "Stella" (1895). Almost as common as

stories of being invisible are stories of confrontation with invisible
adversaries, in which feelings of fear and insecurity with no immediate
and obvious cause are dramatically symbolized. Many stories in this vein
inhabit the borderland between supernatural fantasy and sf; notable
examples include Fitz-James O'BRIEN's "What Was It?" (1859), Guy de
Maupassant's "The Horla" (1887), Ambrose BIERCE's "The Damned Thing"
(1893), George Allan ENGLAND's "The Thing from Outside" (1923), H.M.
Egbert's The Sea Demons (1925; Victor ROUSSEAU), Edmond HAMILTON's "The
Monster-God of Mamurth" (1926), H.P. LOVECRAFT's "The Dunwich Horror"
(1929), Eric Frank RUSSELL's Sinister Barrier (1939; 1943; rev 1948) and
Murray LEINSTER's War with the Gizmos (1958). Invisibility is a staple of
cinematic special effects, displayed to good effect in the classic The
INVISIBLE MAN (1933) - based on Wells's novel and borrowing some
inspiration from Philip WYLIE's The Murderer Invisible (1931) - but not so
well in its inferior sequels, and with varying success in 3 tv series, all
likewise called The INVISIBLE MAN , featuring invisible crime-fighters and
secret agents.In more recent sf, invisibility - sometimes more
metaphorical than literal - is usually deployed symbolically. An invisible
manned bomb-carrier is featured in "For Love" (1962; vt "All for Love") by
Algis BUDRYS. In Damon KNIGHT's "The Country of the Kind" (1956) and
Robert SILVERBERG's "To See the Invisible Man" (1963) criminals are
"exiled" from society in that people simply refuse to see them, so that
they suffer agonies of loneliness; the notion is inverted in Gardner R.
DOZOIS's "The Visible Man" (1975), in which other people become invisible
to the outcast. The idea of unnoticed communities existing in the
interstices of everyday society is developed by Fritz LEIBER in The Sinful
Ones (1950 Fantastic Adventures as "You're All Alone"; exp 1953; rev 1980)
and Christopher PRIEST's THE GLAMOUR (1984). Stories in which people fade
from original inconsequentiality into literal or metaphorical invisibility
include Charles BEAUMONT's "The Vanishing American" (1955), Harlan
ELLISON's "Are You Listening?" (1958) and Sylvia Jacobs's "The End of Evan
Essant" (1962). More extensive and elaborate accounts of the existential
politics of individual invisibility can be found in H.F. SAINT's Memoirs
of an Invisible Man (1987), filmed as MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN (1992),
and Thomas BERGER's Being Invisible (1988). A pseudo-technological essay
at achieving invisibility is depicted in The PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT
(1984). A theme anthology is Invisible Men (anth 1960) ed Basil DAVENPORT.
[BS]
INVISIBLE AGENT, THE
The INVISIBLE MAN .
INVISIBLE BOY, THE
Film (1957). Pan/MGM. Dir Herman Hoffman, starring Richard Eyer, Philip
Abbott, Diane Brewster, Harold J. Stone. Screenplay Cyril Hume, based on
"The Invisible Boy" (1956; vt "The Brain Child") by Edmund COOPER. 90
mins. B/w.In this well written and made film for children, a 10-year-old
boy (Eyer) assembles a ROBOT from pieces brought back from the future by a
time-traveller, and ends up with Robby the Robot, who had won the hearts
of audiences in FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956). Robby comes under the influence
of a malign, fully aware supercomputer - probably the first such in movies

- and somewhat irresponsibly makes the boy an INVISIBILITY potion. More
importantly, he helps the COMPUTER - which is planning to conquer the
world - by implanting electronic receivers in the brains of prominent men,
but redeems himself at the end when he ignores the computer's command to
kill the boy and instead destroys the computer, with the implicit moral
that machines shaped like men are more trustworthy than machines shaped
like MACHINES. [JB/PN]
INVISIBLE MAN, THE
1. Film (1933). Universal. Dir James Whale, starring Claude Rains, Gloria
Stuart, Henry Travers, William Harrigan, Una O'Connor. Screenplay R.C.
SHERRIFF, Philip WYLIE, based on The Invisible Man (1897) by H.G. WELLS.
71 mins, cut to 56 mins. B/w.This excellent black comedy tells of a
scientist who discovers a drug that causes INVISIBILITY but whose
side-effect is megalomania. Wearing black goggles over a face wrapped in
bandages, he is memorably menacing. After a series of crimes he is trapped
by police (his footprints in the snow betray his presence) and shot,
slowly regaining visibility as his life ebbs away. Whale's direction is
full of his usual idiosyncratic touches, with much humour derived from
baffled minor characters. John Fulton's special effects are very
sophisticated for the period, and were widely imitated. One of the most
successful Wells adaptations, this made Claude Rains a star almost purely
on the basis of his mellifluous voice. TIM is archetypal in its
not-unsympathetic portrait of the SCIENTIST as over-reacher - it contains
the much-copied line: "I meddled in things that Man must leave alone."2.
Universal's progressively inferior and silly variations on the theme - not
true sequels - were The Invisible Man Returns (1940), The Invisible Woman
(1940), The Invisible Agent (1942), The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944) and
Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951). Over 30 other films use
the invisibility theme, some crediting Wells's novel as a source.3. UK tv
series (1958-9). ATV. Created and prod Ralph Smart, starring the voice of
Tim Turner. 2 seasons, 26 25min episodes. B/w. In this un-Wells-like
version, the unfortunate hero divides his time between seeking an antidote
for his condition and fighting crime. Lisa Daniely and Deborah Watling
played the hero's sister and niece.4. US tv series (1975-6). Universal TV
for NBC. Created and prod Harve Bennett, Steve Bochco. Dirs included
Robert Michael Lewis, Alan Levi, Sigmund Neufeld Jr. Writers included
Bochco, James D. Parriott. 1 season, 75min pilot plus 12 50min episodes.
Colour.David McCallum stars as a scientist who discovers a way of turning
himself invisible but cannot regain visibility. A plastic-surgeon friend
makes him a skin-coloured mask identical with his pre-invisibility face.
The pilot episode concerns his attempts to keep the formula from the
military; in later episodes the plots revolve, tepidly, around his work as
a secret agent.5. The above series had mediocre ratings, so in 1976
Universal replaced McCallum with Ben Murphy, changed the title to Gemini
Man, and started the story again from the beginning. 1 season, 75min pilot
plus 11 50min episodes (only 5 broadcast by NBC). Colour. Murphy plays a
secret agent who can control his invisibility with a wristwatch-like
device, but can remain safely invisible for only 15 minutes a day. This
version flopped, too, and was cancelled before all completed episodes were
shown. The producer, Harve Bennett, was having greater success elsewhere

with The SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN . [PN/JB]
INVISIBLE MAN RETURNS, THE
The INVISIBLE MAN .
INVISIBLE MAN'S REVENGE, THE
The INVISIBLE MAN .
INVISIBLE WOMAN, THE
The INVISIBLE MAN .
ION DRIVE
A common item of sf TERMINOLOGY derived from a theoretical means of
ROCKET propulsion. Chemically fuelled rockets are hampered by the
necessity of carrying large burdens of fuel. Other systems, including the
ion drive, propose using much lighter fuels, compensating for the decrease
in the mass available for propulsion by ejecting it at correspondingly
higher velocities. Ions (charged particles) can be accelerated to enormous
velocities using a magnetic field, and so would seem an ideal fuel. Also,
since all elements can be ionized (albeit with varying degrees of
difficulty), ion-drive rockets could theoretically make use of pretty well
any substance to hand. Although an ion drive would produce only a small
acceleration because of the relatively tiny masses involved, this could be
maintained for months or years, so that very high terminal velocities
could be achieved. The first tests in space of such a system began in 1971
with the SERT (Space Electric Rocket Test) satellites; the propellant was
ionized mercury and the electric power was derived from solar cells. [PN]
IONNESCU, DEMETRIU G.
[r] ROMANIA.
IRELAND, DAVID
(1927- ) Australian writer whose A Woman of the Future (1979 US), his
best known work, depicts a bizarre but positively conceived future which
his protagonist finds congenial. City of Women (1981 UK), on the other
hand, presents a FEMINIST vision of separatism whose ending befits its
Alice in Wonderland style, as the vision turns out to be the hallucination
of a lonely woman. Archimedes and the Seagle (1984), a fantasy, presents
the memoirs of a dog. [JC]
ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE
US DIGEST-size magazine. Quarterly from Spring 1977, bimonthly from
Jan/Feb 1978, monthly from Jan 1979, 4-weekly from Jan 1981. Published by
Davis Publications; ed George H. SCITHERS Spring 1977-Feb 1982, Kathleen
Moloney Mar 1982-Dec 1982, Shawna MCCARTHY Jan 1983-Feb 1986, Gardner
DOZOIS Mar 1986 to date. IASFM was sold to Dell Magazines, part of the
BANTAM/ DOUBLEDAY/Dell publishing group, early in 1992; the first
redesigned version under the new management was Nov 1992, and the title
became at that time Asimov's Science Fiction. (This Encyclopedia will
continue to use the abbreviation IASFM, since ASFis already in use for
ANALOG.) The magazine had reached #231 (Vol 19, no 6) by May 1995.Asimov
was named as "Editorial Director" of this sf magazine, which was titled to
take advantage of his popularity; the first 3 issues featured his
photograph on the cover, and he contributed a great many chatty editorial

articles. IASFM was commercially successful - at least relative to other
sf magazines - from the outset, though its contents under Scithers's
editorship were on the whole light and undemanding. However, it continued
to mature, especially under McCarthy and then Dozois, until by the midand late 1980s it was clearly the most accomplished and vigorous magazine
on the US market, with an extraordinarily high number of its stories
nominated for, and winning, various awards. Through the 1980s its
circulation was similar to, although in most years somewhat lower than,
that of the market leader, its sister publication Analog ( ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION), which Davis Publications had bought in 1980. The
circulations of sf magazines generally dropped steadily during the 1980s,
and again in the 1990s, so even IASFM, by a long way the best of them,
limped along with about 69,000 in 1994 (75,000 for Analog), down from
almost 109,000 in 1978.IASFM is popular with fans. Scithers was awarded
the HUGO for Best Professional Editor in 1978 and 1980, McCarthy in 1984,
and Dozois in every year from 1988 to 1993; all of these are effectively
awards for the magazine. New writers who have made their debuts in its
pages, or at least had much of their early work published there, included,
under Scithers alone, Barry B. LONGYEAR and S.P. SOMTOW, both of whom, in
successive years, won the JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for best new sf writer of
the year. Hugo- and NEBULA-winning stories have been Longyear's Enemy Mine
(1979; 1989 chap dos), "Fire Watch" (1982) by Connie WILLIS, "Hardfought"
(1983) by Greg BEAR, "The Peacemaker" (1983) by Dozois, "Speech Sounds"
(1983) by Octavia E. BUTLER, "PRESS ENTER" (1984) by John VARLEY,
"Bloodchild" (1984) by Butler, "Twenty-four Views of Mount Fuji, by
Hokusai" (1985) by Roger ZELAZNY, "Fermi and Frost" (1985) by Frederik
POHL, "Sailing to Byzantium" (1985) by Robert SILVERBERG, "Portraits of
His Children" (1985) by George R.R. MARTIN, "Gilgamesh in the Outback"
(1986) by Silverberg, "R?
into the Sky" (1986) by Kate WILHELM, "Eye for Eye" (1987) by Orson Scott
CARD, "Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers" (1987) by Lawrence
WATT-EVANS, "The Blind Geometer" (1987) by Kim Stanley ROBINSON, "Rachel
in Love" (1987) by Pat MURPHY, "The Last of the Winnebagos" (1988) by
Willis, "Ripples in the Dirac Sea" (1988) by Geoffrey A. Landis,"Enter a
Soldier. Later: Enter Another" (1989) by Silverberg, "Boobs" (1989) by
Suzy McKee CHARNAS, THE HEMINGWAY HOAX (1990) by Joe HALDEMAN, "The
Manamouki" (1990) by Michael D. RESNICK, "Bears Discover Fire" (1990) by
Terry BISSON, STATIONS OF THE TIDE (1991) by Michael SWANWICK,"Beggars in
Spain" (1991) by Nancy KRESS, "A Walk in the Sun" (1991) by Geoffrey A.
Landis,"Danny Goes to Mars" (1992) by Pamela SARGENT,"Even the Queen"
(1992) by Connie Willis,"Barnacle Bill the Spacer" (1992) by Lucius
Shepard and"The Nutcracker Coup" (1992) by Janet KAGAN. This density of
award-winning is without precedent in sf-magazine publishing, and says
much for Dozois's editorial discernment and skill. Indeed, if Dozois can
be criticized at all, it is perhaps on the grounds that he chooses stories
first for their literary quality and only second for their generic
positioning: IAFSM may in the 1970s have been a HARD-SF magazine, but
under Dozois it has on the whole been quite the reverse, with many of the
stories being only marginally sf or fantasy (so that sometimes IASFM can
look like The New Yorker), being as little bound by rigid generic
expectations as was, say, NEW WORLDS under Michael MOORCOCK. In the case

of Dozois, this does not seem to have brought about any substantial
backlash from conservative readers, though the magazine's circulation
cannot be said to be in rude health.The nonfiction features of IASFM have
ranged through, inter alia, editorial musings by Isaac Asimov, an
excellent mathematical column by Martin GARDNER, book reviews by Baird
SEARLES - later joined by a separate and very energetic books column from
Norman SPINRAD - literary articles by James E. GUNN in earlier issues,
poems by various hands, notably Robert FRAZIER, and a games column ( GAMES
AND TOYS) by Matthew J. Costello. [PN] .See also: JAPANA short-lived
companion magazine in BEDSHEET format was Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine,
designed to capture the feeling of the old-time sf adventure pulps. It ran
for four quarterly issues Fall 1978-Fall 1979, with Winter 1979 omitted.
ISAAC'S OUTPUT
By the time of his death in 1992, Isaac Asimov had published more than
450 books. This amazing output included not only science fiction novels
and stories, but also anthologies and children's books.While it took him
30 years to publish his first hundred books, the second hundred followed
after only a decade, and a third hundred came just five years later.As his
career rocketed, Asimov began to write about science literature, histor
y...and anything else that interested him. He was also a college professor
and an intrepid public speaker.Many feel that Asimov became the voice of
science fiction. At the very least, he communicated his enthusiasm and
converted a growing mass audience to the joys and challenges of SF.
ISLAND AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD, THE
Ian CAMERON; LOST WORLDS.
ISLAND OF DR MOREAU, THE
Film (1977). Cinema 77/AIP. Dir Don Taylor, starring Burt Lancaster,
Michael York, Nigel Davenport, Barbara Carrera. Screenplay John Herman
Shaner, Al Ramrus, based on The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) by H.G. WELLS.
98 mins. Colour.In this slow-moving and trite remake of ISLAND OF LOST
SOULS (1932), a young castaway (York) on a remote ISLAND learns that Dr
Moreau (Lancaster), resident SCIENTIST, is carrying out experiments to
give animals human characteristics; some of the resulting hybrids live in
the jungle and worship Moreau as a god. Unlike the novel and the first
film, where the hybrids were cruelly created by vivisection, these are
formed by GENETIC ENGINEERING; thus this version's Wellsian references to
the House of Pain become puzzlingly irrelevant. The novelization (so much
for Wells!) is The Island of Dr Moreau * (1977) by Joseph Silva (Ron
GOULART). [JB/PN]
ISLAND OF LOST SOULS
Film (1932). Paramount. Dir Erle C. Kenton, starring Charles Laughton,
Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams, Kathleen Burke, Bela Lugosi, Alan Ladd,
Randolph Scott. Screenplay Waldemar Young, Philip WYLIE, based on The
Island of Dr Moreau (1896) by H.G. WELLS. 72 mins. B/w.Though somewhat
altered from the Wells original, and adding such Hollywood touches as a
seductive Panther Girl, this memorable film incorporates much of the
novel's moody atmosphere. A young man is marooned on an ISLAND where he is
found by his fiancee and where the leering, whip-cracking Moreau

(Laughton), by means of vivisection and other cruel medical techniques, is
trying to turn animals into men. (Wells disliked the depiction of his
twisted idealist, Moreau, as a sadist.) The pathetic beast-men - rendered
with first-rate and often horrific make-up - are kept in check by their
belief that Moreau is a god. But, when they see him murdering his human
assistant and thereby breaking one of his own commandments, their fear of
him dissolves and they carry him off to the House of Pain - the laboratory
where they were all created - and wreak bloody, surgical vengeance. A
remake was The ISLAND OF DR MOREAU (1977). [JB] See also: MONSTER MOVIES.
ISLAND OF MUTATIONS
L' ISOLA DEGLI UOMINI PESCE.
ISLAND OF TERROR
(vt Night of the Silicates) Film (1966). Planet/Universal. Dir Terence
Fisher, starring Peter Cushing, Edward Judd, Carole Gray, Eddie Byrne.
Screenplay Alan Ramsen, Edward Andrew Mann. 89 mins. Colour.This is one of
the 3 films with an sf theme made for Planet by Terence Fisher, best known
for his HORROR movies, of which this, despite its sf trappings, is one.
(The others are The EARTH DIES SCREAMING [1964] and NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT
[1967].) Giant mutated viruses, the product of cancer research gone wrong,
get loose on a small island and kill their victims by sucking their bones
out of their bodies. There are some well choreographed shocks. As the
monsters, which look like animated piles of porridge, can move only
slowly, it is unclear how they overtake their prey. [JB/PN]
ISLAND OF THE BURNING DAMNED
NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT.
ISLANDS
Islands play a crucial role in imaginative fiction, providing
geographical microcosms in which the consequences of various types of
scientific or political hypotheses may be incarnated and made available
for inspection by visitors from the world at large. An archetypal island
venue is ATLANTIS, mentioned as early as the time of ancient Greece by the
philosopher PLATO. Many an island has played host to a UTOPIA, including
Thomas MORE's Utopia itself (1516 in Latin; trans 1551), Austin Tappan
WRIGHT's Islandia (1942) and Jacquetta HAWKES's Providence Island (1959);
not very many have harboured DYSTOPIAS. Islands also feature extensively
in SATIRE, notably those displayed in Jonathan SWIFT's Gulliver's Travels
(1726). Although rarely fantastic, the islands featured in ROBINSONADES
are also of some significance in the history of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION.
Islands are the natural refuge of weird lifeforms in many early fantasies
of EVOLUTION, including William Hope HODGSON's "The Voice in the Night"
(1907). An island was the natural "laboratory" for the daring scientific
experiment carried out in H.G. WELLS's The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), the
prototypic island-sf story and the significant inspiration of such later
works as S. Fowler WRIGHT's The Island of Captain Sparrow (1928), the 1940
title story of Adolfo BIOY CASARES's The Invention of Morel and Other
Stories (trans 1964), and-of course - Brian W. ALDISS's Moreau's Other
Island (1980; vt An Island Called Moreau US). A very different experiment
- an attempt to produce super- INTELLIGENCE (by somewhat fraudulent means)

in a child cut off from the world - is carried out on M.P. SHIEL's The
Isle of Lies (1909). An artificial island is featured in Jules VERNE's
L'ile a helice (1895; trans as The Floating Island 1896; vt Propeller
Island).Early pulp sf made considerable use of islands in its
thought-experiments. Notable weird lifeforms are featured in "Fungus Isle"
(1923) by Philip M. Fisher and in "Nightmare Island" (1941) by Theodore
STURGEON. Even more exotic fauna appear in Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's The Land
that Time Forgot (1924), Stanley G. WEINBAUM's "Proteus Island" (1936) and
Edmond HAMILTON's "The Isle of Changing Life" (1940). However, the scope
for the deployment of undiscovered islands in fiction shrank dramatically
during the early part of the century, and although such defiant-minded
authors as Lance SIEVEKING, in The Ultimate Island (1925), would not be
put off, most writers transferred their more extravagant
thought-experiments to remoter locations. Apparently innocuous islands
continued to be used, however, as bases for the hatching of nefarious
schemes in many NEAR-FUTURE thrillers, ranging from Edmund SNELL's Kontrol
(1928) to Ian FLEMING's Dr No (1962), and for such social experiments as
those carried out in Aldous HUXLEY's Island (1962) and Scott Michel's
Journey to Limbo (1963). Extraterrestrial islands play a significant role
in many sf stories about watery worlds, notably the floating islands of
VENUS in C.S. LEWIS's Perelandra (1943) and the "islands" thrown up by the
sentient ocean in Stanislaw LEM's SOLARIS (1961; trans 1970).The symbolic
significance of the word "island" has maintained its prominence in stories
which treat artificial satellites, SPACE HABITATS, asteroids, planets or
even galaxies as islands in the void, and it continues to supply neat
titular metaphors to such novels as Raymond F. JONES's This Island Earth
(1952), filmed as THIS ISLAND EARTH (1954), Marta RANDALL's Islands (1976)
and Bruce STERLING's ISLANDS IN THE NET (1988). A series of particularly
ingenious metaphorical changes have been rung by Gene WOLFE in "The Island
of Dr Death and Other Stories" (1970), which has been assembled with "The
Death of Dr Island" (1973), "The Doctor of Death Island" (1978) and "Death
of the Island Doctor" in The Wolfe Archipelago (coll 1983). Exotic
robinsonades continue to be written, often ironically; examples include
"The Terminal Beach" (1964) and Concrete Island (1974), both by J.G.
BALLARD.Because islands supply a strictly delimited space, rather like a
stage set, in which a plot may develop, they are ideal for certain kinds
of narrative exercise. Even if it were not for their specific "laboratory
function", therefore, they would have a significant continuing role to
play in sf. Recent works illustrative of this role include Hilbert
SCHENCK's A ROSE FOR ARMAGEDDON (1982) and Chronosequence (1988) and Garry
KILWORTH's Cloudrock (1988), in which an atoll is left high and dry after
the surrounding ocean has vanished. The Galapagos islands, which played a
crucial role in guiding Darwin to the theory of evolution by natural
selection, are afforded a key symbolic role in Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's bitter
futuristic fantasy Galapagos (1985). [BS/DP]
ISOLA DEGLI UOMINI PESCE, L'
(vt Island of Mutations; vt Screamers) Film (1978). Dania-Medusa/New
World. Dir Sergio Martino (and Joe DANTE, US version only), starring
Barbara Bach, Claudio Cassinelli, Richard Johnson, Beryl Cunningham,
Joseph Cotten (and Cameron Mitchell, Mel Ferrer, US version only).

Screenplay Martino, Sergio Donati, Cesare Frugoni. 99 mins, cut to 91
mins. Colour.This is a wild Italian schlock picture, seemingly inspired by
the flop The ISLAND OF DR MOREAU (1977). In 1891 a shipwrecked doctor
(Cassinelli) encounters a tribe of man/fish hybrids, created for sound
ethical reasons by a mad SCIENTIST (Cotten) but being exploited by a
vintage Victorian villain (Johnson) to recover the sunken treasures of
ATLANTIS. A heroine strutting in riding boots (Bach) and the villain's
voodoo priestess mistress (Cunningham) play roles in a demented story
which contains an immensely enjoyable collection of Boy's Own CLICHES. For
US release (as Screamers) the film was slightly recut by Roger CORMAN's
New World and given a much gorier prologue dir Joe Dante, with guest stars
Ferrer and Mitchell - neither a stranger to Italian exploitation - being
chomped by MUTANT leftovers from Humanoids from the Deep (1980). [KN]
ISRAEL
Israel's traditional orientation towards the West, the initially UTOPIAN
character of Zionism - partly inspired by founding Zionist ideologue
Binyamin Zev (Theodor) Herzl's polemic Der Judenstaat (1896; trans as The
Jewish State 1946) and short novel Altneuland (1902; trans as Old-New Land
1947) - and the country's adherence to its own form of democracy ought to
have made it a promised land for speculative literature. But, despite the
seminal influence within the genre of Jewish writers and editors, sf has
never attained more than marginal stature within Israel.Survival in this
pressure-cooker region has stunted the capacity of many Israelis to
contemplate alternate realities. Indeed Hebrew, the new lingua franca of
Israel, seems ill suited to sf. Unlike Yiddish, whose rich cadences
nourished the dreamlike imageries of an Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991),
modern Hebrew is leaner and less fanciful. Redeemed from a language
hitherto used for liturgical purposes, it was also more limited, early on,
in its ability to describe TECHNOLOGY. Indeed, merely agreeing a Hebrew
term for sf (initially mada dimioni ["imaginary science"] and ultimately,
in the late 1970s, mada bidioni ["science fabrication"]) severely
challenged the semantic abilities of Israel's small sf community.In the
1950s, brief forays by publishers tantalized would-be fans with a few
Hebrew translations of novels by Robert A. HEINLEIN and Fredric BROWN
before ending in bankruptcy. So too ended three plunges into sf magazine
publishing with Mada Dimioni (1958, 13 issues), Cosmos: Sipurei Mada
Dimioni ["Cosmos: Stories of Science Fiction"] (1958, 4 issues) and Flash
Gordon (1963, 7 issues); none published work by local authors. The only
Israeli sf writer of note in this period, Mordecai ROSHWALD, had his
apocalyptic novels Level Seven (1959 UK) and A Small Armageddon (1962 UK)
published abroad; neither was translated into Hebrew, and Roshwald, whose
work is unrecognized in Israel, eventually settled in the UK.The election
to power of the Likud bloc in 1977 heralded a period of consumerism in
Israel that permitted a brief boom in sf. Encouraged by young Israelis'
new spending power and by the success of such films as STAR WARS (1977),
publishers embarked upon ambitious schedules of mostly translated sf. By
the onset of the long recession following the 1982 invasion of Lebanon,
nearly 200 of the classic books of modern sf had been translated.Of
several new sf magazines, few survived long, but Fantazia 2000 merits
special notice. Launched in 1978, it nourished a group of local writers

and a small, vigorous fan community during its 44-issue, six-year life.
Among its writers was Hillel Damron, author of the critically well
received Milchemet Ha'minim ["The War of the Sexes"] (1982), set in a
post- HOLOCAUST underground colony where a society of sexual equals
devolves into full-scale subjugation of males.Before the Lebanon War,
Israeli sf tended to be reticent on POLITICS, but the 1982 watershed
altered this. Another Fantazia graduate, David Melamed, whose first
collection, Tsavua B'Corundy ["A Hyena in Corundy"] (coll 1980), contains
stories with little immediate relevance to Israel, powerfully recounted in
his third novel, Ha'Halom Ha'Rivi'i ["The Fourth Dream"] (1986) unequalled for its nightmare tones if not for its narrative drive - the
travails of an Israeli refugee in Germany after a NEAR-FUTURE fall of the
Jewish state.Melamed's dystopian excursion followed two other landmark
works. In 1983 the prominent left-wing columnist Amos Kenan published
Ha-Derech L'Ein Harod (1983; trans as The Road to Ein Harod 1986), which
postulated a NEAR-FUTURE military takeover of Israel. It was not his first
speculative novel - that being the more surreal Shoah II ["Holocaust II"]
(1973) - but it was the only Israeli sf novel ever awarded a peace prize
by the Palestine Liberation Organization. Although the book embraces well
known sf and TECHNOTHRILLER tropes, Kenan vehemently denied its genre
roots, no doubt because of the Israeli literary establishment's low esteem
of sf. A second significant DYSTOPIA was written by the established
novelist Binyamin Tammuz (d1990): Pundako Shel Yermiyahu ["Jeremiah's
Inn"] (1984) is a broad comic SATIRE about an Israel taken over by
religious zealots. A grimmer version of the future is Yitzhak Ben-Ner's
Ha'malachim Ba'im ["Angels are Coming"] (1987), in which world atomic
apocalypse has spared Israel, but by the 21st century life within the
theocratic state is characterized by street violence, persecution of the
secular minority and widespread alienation.Zirmat Ha'hachamim ["Genes for
Genius, Inc."] (1982) and Luna: Gan Eden Geneti ["Luna: The Genetic
Paradise"] (1985) by geneticist Ram Moav, about GENETIC ENGINEERING of
humans, inspired accusations of fascism on the part of the author, who had
written the two books while terminally ill. Ruth Blumert's Ha'Tzariach
["The Turret"] (1983) is a fantasy reminiscent of Mervyn PEAKE's
Gormenghast trilogy.Israel is not an important centre for sf film-making.
The most notable foreign production has been Menachem Golan's low-budget,
post- HOLOCAUST feature America 3000 (1985; video release only), dir David
Engelbach with a cast of comely Israeli and US Amazons. Poet and
avant-garde film-maker David Avidan directed Sheder Min Ha'atid (1981; vt
Message from the Future) in English about future humans visiting
present-day Israel; it is execrable. Ricki Shelach's James
BLISH-influenced short film Ishur Nehita ["Permission to Land"] (1978)
tells of a visiting alien. Both films may have reflected that SENSE OF
WONDER inspired among Israelis by the visit of Egypt's President Anwar
Sadat. The 1989 adaptation, shot in English, of Amos Kenan's 1983 novel as
Freedom: The Voice from Ein Harod failed to achieve Western distribution.
Directed by prolific producer/director Doron Eran and shot for $2 million,
Freedom was one of the most expensive films ever produced domestically,
but suffered from the Israeli army's refusal to donate the use of military
materiel; the peculiar lead casting of US actor Anthony Peck and Italian
model Allesandra Mussolini (grandaughter of Il Duce) also detracted from

its believability. In 1990 the Israeli film-maker Avi Nesher wrote and
directed a Los-Angeles-shot $7 million technothriller, Nameless (vt
Timebomb), as yet unreleased.A small body of sf criticism emerged in the
1980s, the first regular column outside the sf magazines being Sheldon
TEITELBAUM's in the Jerusalem Post (1981-5). Orzion Bartana, a professor
of literature at Tel Aviv University, published Israel's first critical
book on sf: Ha'fantazia b'siporet Dor Hamdina: Fantasy in Israeli
Literature in the Last Thirty Years (1989). The vagaries of the sf scene
are discussed in "Sociological Reflections on the History of Science
Fiction in Israel" ( SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES Mar 1986) by Nachman Ben
Yehuda, a Hebrew University sociologist and early contributor to Fantazia
2000. [ST]
ITALY
To trace an Italian sf tradition is not easy, because of the well
established split in Italy between scientific language and "literary
culture". It is of doubtful relevance to read DANTE ALIGHIERI's great poem
La divina commedia (c1304-1320 in manuscript; trans as The Divine Comedy)
as a sort of sf journey; Dante used his theological allegory to create a
world that in terms of medieval consciousness was perfectly real. It may
be more fruitful to consider as PROTO SCIENCE FICTION the chronicle of
Marco Polo's marvellous voyage to India, China and Japan, Milione ["One
Million Stories"] (1298): the meeting of the Venetian merchant with the
alien Eastern world does have the flavour of a First Contact. In his Le
citta invisibili (1972; trans as Invisible Cities 1974), Italo CALVINO
rewrites Marco Polo's work as a Borgesian catalogue of mysterious and
fascinating towns, conceived by an endless imaginative process. FANTASTIC
VOYAGES and UTOPIAN landscapes are the most effective contributions of
Italian literature to the development of a genre that would eventually
merge into sf, as in the Renaissance poem Orlando Furioso (1506) by
Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533), based on the mythical history of Charlemagne
and his Paladins. In this the palace of the wizard Atlante is a bewitched
place of unrequited desires and bitter delusions, and the knight Astolfo,
in his search for the brain of mad Orlando, rides on the wings of the
Hippogriff to the Moon, where he visits a large valley, the land of
forgotten dreams and wasted passions.A century later the philosopher
Tommaso CAMPANELLA evoked the City of the Sun, whose utopia is after the
political ideas of PLATO. The male inhabitants have abolished private
property, own all in common (women included) and believe in natural
RELIGION, not in historical Christianity. This tale, first written though
not first published in Italian, was Citta del sole (written 1602-12; 1623
in Latin as Civitas Solis; trans in Ideal Commonwealths 1885 as "The City
of the Sun").In the 18th century - the Age of Reason, but also of a keen
interest in exotic worlds - Italian culture enthusiastically hailed the
satirical-fantastical mood of Jonathan SWIFT's Gulliver's Travels (1726;
rev 1735) and VOLTAIRE's Candide (1759). Among the manifold imitators of
Swift (and of his French disciple, the Abbe Desfontaines [1685-1745]) was
the Venetian-Armenian Zaccaria Seriman, whose lively account of the
fantastic voyage of a British hero is Viaggi di Enrico Wanton alle terre
incognite australi ed ai regni delle scimmie e dei cinocefali ["Enrico
Wanton's Travels to the Unknown Lands of the Southern Hemisphere and to

the Kingdoms of the Monkeys and of the Dog-Headed People"] (1764).
Although issued in French, Giacomo CASANOVA's huge novel Icosameron (1788)
was partly drafted in Italian. Beyond its encyclopedic farrago of
scientific and philosophical meditations, Icosameron establishes a well
known imaginative pattern: two young protagonists (brother and sister)
discover an underground world where total harmony rules the lives of the
Megamicri ("Big-Littles").Italian Romanticism was not deeply involved in
the industrial and scientific upheavals of the 19th century. There was no
Italian equivalent of Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein (1818; rev 1831) or of
the Faustian short stories of Edgar Allan POE and Nathaniel HAWTHORNE.
(The main literary problems of Italy were connected with the struggle for
national independence, achieved in 1861, and the need for a common
language.) All the same, the major Italian Romantic poet Giacomo Leopardi
(1798-1837), inspired by the example of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), did
deal with the relationship between the scientific and the literary
imagination, as shown in the fabulous scenery of some of his Operette
morali (coll 1827; preferred trans Patrick Creagh as Moral Tales 1988 UK).
One of the most fascinating operette is the dialogue between the anatomist
Federico Ruysch and his mummies, reborn at the beginning of a new cosmic
cycle.Although Italy had neither a Jules VERNE nor an H.G. WELLS, the end
of the 19th century did offer a minor literature of extraordinary journeys
into the future, such as the utopian world explored in L'Anno 3000: Sogno
["The Year 3000: A Dream"] (1897) by Paolo Mantegazza. The enormously
popular Emilio Salgari (1862-1911), creator of the Malayan pirate
Sandokan, also published futuristic tales such as La meraviglie del
duemila ["The Marvels of the Year 2000"] (1907).Fantasy, both in the
GOTHIC form and in the sphere of the wonderful and the whimsical, appeals
to the modern Italian reader much more than the cognitive rhetoric of
GENRE SF; this is certainly why Giacinto Spagnoletti, a well known scholar
of Italian literature, has labelled native sf "neo-fantastico". The
tradition is a long one. Outstanding examples of fantasy appear in the fin
de siecle works of the so-called "Scapigliati" ["The Dishevelled Ones"], a
Milanese cultural movement fighting against tradition and provincialism;
in the "metaphysical" fiction of Massimo Bontempelli (1884-1960), whose
Eva ultima ["The Ultimate Eve"] (1923) was inspired by De Chirico's
painting; and, more recently, in the hallucinatory world of Dino BUZZATI's
short stories and his novel of military life in a forgotten fortress, Il
deserto dei Tartari (1940; trans as The Tartar Steppe 1952).Critics detect
a "true" sf production in Italian only from the period after WWII. Much of
this specialized sf was arguably not culturally Italian, in that it was
heavily influenced by the US-UK canon as enthusiastically presented by
publishers, notably the Romanzi di Urania series published since 1953 by
Arnoldo Mondadori under the editorship of Giorgio Monicelli (inventor of
the neologism "fantascienza" for "science fiction"). Even today some of
the younger Italian authors, especially those groomed by the main Italian
sf-publishing house, Editrice Nord, employ traditional US-UK sf formulae,
sometimes with the addition of fashionable brushstrokes taken from J.R.R.
TOLKIEN or Jorge Luis BORGES: Luigi Menghini and Vittorio Catani are
examples.But a more Italian trend has been advocated since the 1960s by a
group of writers who, while basically accepting the formulaic conventions
of sf, emphasize the need for psychological insight, a "human" perception

of the alien and a (somewhat sceptical) moral probing into the triumphs of
technology. Among them Lino Aldani - an accomplished and witty
storyteller, as in Quarta dimensione ["Fourth Dimension"] (coll 1963) Sandro Sandrelli, Inisero Cremaschi and Gilda Musa are certainly worth
mentioning. All four cooperated in the clever monthly review Il Futuro
["Future"] (1963-4); this and other Italian sf magazines (notably Gamma in
the mid-1960s and Robot in the mid-1970s) were short-lived and, except for
Il Futuro, had to rely heavily on US-UK material. Other novelists from the
1960s and 1970s, employing mainly formulaic devices, are Roberta Rambelli,
Ugo Malaguti, Gianni Montanari, Roberto Vacca - one of the very few with a
scientific background, author of Il robot e il minotauro ["The Robot and
the Minotaur"] (1959) - and Vittorio Curtoni, who is also the author of an
informative history of modern Italian sf, Le frontiere dell'ignoto
["Frontiers of the Unknown"] (1977).Unquestionably, the proper tool for
Italian writers to use in combining the scientific imagination, on the one
hand, with the subjective universe(s) of fantasy, on the other, is the
short story, as is evidenced by such representative anthologies as I
labirinti del terzo pianeta ["The Labyrinths of the Third Planet"] (anth
1964), ed I. Cremaschi and G. Musa, and Universo e dintorni ["Universe and
Surroundings"] (anth 1978), ed I Cremaschi.In the 1980s the emergence of a
group of young women sf writers in Italy confirmed an international
development. Daniela Piegai, perhaps the best of them, creates in Il mondo
non e nostro ["The World is Not Ours"] (1989) a technological version of
KAFKA's castle, whose inhabitants are entrapped in a sort of temporal
vortex, unable to return to the external world.Contemporary non-genre
Italian sf exists: some of the best of those postwar novelists usually
thought of as MAINSTREAM WRITERS have shown a highly original imagination
in handling sf themes and symbols. A mad astronaut is imprisoned in a
living starship in Tommaso LANDOLFI's Cancroregina (1950; in Cancerqueen
and Other Stories coll trans 1971 US); the achievements of scientific
progress are ironically explored by Primo LEVI in Storie naturali ["Tales
of the Natural World"] (coll 1966), whose contents make up part of The
Sixth Day (coll trans 1990 US); wandering on an untouched Earth from which
mankind has suddenly disappeared, a solitary survivor lives his grotesque
and suicidal loneliness in Guido Morselli's posthumously published
Dissipatio H.G. ["Disappearance of the Human Race"] (1977); the impact of
the scientific imagination, and the history of science, help shape the
fantastic narrative of Il pendolo di Foucault (1988; trans William Weaver
as Foucault's Pendulum 1989 US) by Umberto ECO. One outstanding sf writer
- although he did not like to be referred to as such-was Italo CALVINO, as
when he shaped his complicated web of scientific fables and myths in Le
Cosmicomiche (coll of linked stories 1965; trans William Weaver as
COSMICOMICS 1968 US). Contemporary non-genre sf seems obsessed by
theological and religious themes. In 1994: La nudita e la spada ["Year
1994: The Nakedness and the Sword"] (1990), Ferruccio Parazzoli builds up
an anti-Catholic coup-d'etat in a grim, NEAR-FUTURE Italy, while in
Ascolta, Israele ["Hearken, Israel!"] (1991) Ugo Bonanate creates an
ALTERNATE WORLD where Judaism is the only Western religion, early
Christian communities have been wiped out, and the Gospels are buried in a
hidden place until their sensational discovery by a team of astonished
international scholars . . .Italian cinema inclines more towards HORROR

than sf but, hovering between the two, a few quite good Italian films play
on the theme of cosmic catastrophe, as in La morte viene dallo spazio
(1958; vt Death from Outer Space; vt The Day the Sky Exploded), dir Paolo
Heusch, and Il PIANETA DEGLI UOMINI SPENTI ["Planet of the Soulless
People"] (1961; vt Battle of the Worlds; vt Planet of the Lifeless Men),
dir Anthony Dawson (Antonio Margheriti). Another sf/horror blend, TERRORE
NELLO SPAZIO (1965; vt Planet of the Vampires), dir Mario Bava, was in
some ways a predecessor of ALIEN (1979). More commonly, Italian sf films
exploit already successful foreign films: CONTAMINATION: ALIEN ARRIVA
SULLA TERRA (1981; vt Contamination) mimics Alien; 1990: I GUERRIERI DEL
BRONX (1982; vt 1990: Bronx Warriors) owes a lot to ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK
(1981); and L' ISOLA DEGLI UOMINI PESCE (1978; vt Island of Mutations; vt
Screamers) seems inspired by The ISLAND OF DR MOREAU (1977). Possibly the
one real contribution of Italian cinema to sf lies in the field of satire
and parody, exemplified by Tinto Brass's Il disco volante (1964; vt The
Flying Saucer), Elio Petri's La DECIMA VITTIMA (1965; vt The Tenth
Victim), based on a story by Robert SHECKLEY, and Mario Bava's DIABOLIK
(1967; vt Danger: Diabolik).Italian sf criticism is stronger on the
utopian tradition and modern DYSTOPIA than it is on GENRE SF, owing
perhaps to the activities of Vito Fortunati, founder of the Centre for
Utopian Studies in Bologna, and to the publications of A. Monti and C.
PAGETTI on H.G. Wells and of D. Guardamagna and S. Manferlotti on Aldous
HUXLEY, George ORWELL and Anthony BURGESS. A handful of critics deal with
contemporary sf: C. Pagetti with Il senso del futuro ["The Sense of the
Future"] (1970; rev edn projected), F. Ferrini with Che cosa e la
fantascienza ["What is SF?"] (1970), S. Solmi with Saggi sul fantastico
["Essays on Fantastic Literature"] (coll 1978), which includes his seminal
essay on sf published in 1953, R. Giovannoli with La scienza della
fantascienza ["Science and Science Fiction"] (1982), S. Salvestroni with
Semiotica dell'imaginazione ["Semiotics of the Imaginary"] (1984), on
Russian sf, A. Caronia with Il Cyborg ["Cyborgs"] (1985), on the
artificial human in sf, O. Palusci with Terra di Lei ["Herland"] (1990),
on the female imagination in sf, and F. La Polla on sf cinema and tv. [CP]
IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA
Film (1955). Clover/Columbia. Prod Charles H. Schneer. Dir Robert Gordon,
starring Kenneth Tobey, Faith Domergue, Donald Curtis. Screenplay George
Worthing Yates, Hal Smith, based on a story by Yates. 77 mins. B/w.In this
MONSTER MOVIE a giant octopus is affected by atomic radiation - as so
often in the genre - and goes on a destructive rampage, attacking San
Francisco and demolishing various landmarks, including the Golden Gate
Bridge, before being destroyed by an atomic torpedo. The film, unimportant
in itself, marks the beginning of the long partnership between producer
Schneer and special-effects supervisor Ray HARRYHAUSEN, who was limited
here by the small budget: his animated octopus, for instance, has only six
tentacles. [JB/PN]
IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
Film (1953). Universal. Dir Jack ARNOLD, starring Richard Carlson,
Barbara Rush, Charles Drake. Screenplay Harry Essex, based on a screen
treatment by Ray BRADBURY. 80 mins. 3-D. B/w.This was Arnold's, and

Universal's, first venture into the sf/ HORROR genre; it was also the
first sf film to exploit a desert location (here the Mojave Desert), and
the first 3-D film released in wide-screen format. Research by Bill
WARREN, in Keep Watching the Skies! Volume 1 (1982), shows conclusively
that much more of Bradbury's original treatment was used than for many
years had been thought the case, and that Bradbury's creative input was
greater than screenwriter Essex's. This is a genuinely alarming film about
an ALIEN spaceship that crashlands in the desert. The shapeshifting
aliens, more frightened - it turns out - than inimical, and needing
assistance to repair their ship, begin duplicating local inhabitants. Not
quite a classic, but historically important, ICFOS is a well made, moody
film. The human-duplication theme was to become a cinematic CLICHE (
MONSTER MOVIES; PARANOIA). [PN/JB]
IT CONQUERED THE WORLD
Film (1956). Sunset/American International. Prod and dir Roger CORMAN,
starring Peter Graves, Lee Van Cleef, Beverly Garland. Screenplay credited
to Lou Rusoff, actually by Charles B. Griffith. 71 mins. B/w.This film
only just survives its ridiculous monster (cone-shaped with fangs) and the
usual hurried air of a Corman production, but there's plenty of interest
in the tale of an idealistic but weak scientist (Van Cleef) who brings a
Venusian to Earth, where it proceeds to let him down badly by embarking on
conquest. The scheme (Earth people reduced to subservient zombies by the
bites of small batlike things generated by the monster) is foiled by
another scientist (Graves), and there is a subtext about loss of
individuality and emotion similar to that in the better-known INVASION OF
THE BODY SNATCHERS (also 1956). [PN]
IT HAPPENED HERE
Film (1966). Rath/Lopert. Dir Kevin Brownlow, Andrew Mollo, starring
Pauline Murray, Sebastian Shaw, Fiona Leland, Honor Fehrson. Screenplay
Brownlow, Mollo. 99 mins, cut to 93 mins. B/w. ALTERNATE-WORLD stories are
rare in sf cinema. This UK film is an exception; it shows what might have
happened had Nazi Germany successfully invaded the UK ( HITLER WINS). Shot
in a realistic, documentary-like style, it is a remarkable achievement
when one takes into account that it is virtually an amateur film, made
over a period of years by Brownlow and Mollo working mainly at weekends
and using nonprofessional talent. Its release date, 1966, is three years
later than the copyright date. Sadly, it was never widely shown. [JB]
IT LIVES AGAIN
(vt It's Alive II) Film (1978). Larco/Warner Bros. Prod and dir Larry
COHEN, starring Frederic Forrest, Kathleen Lloyd, John P. Ryan, John
Marley. Screenplay Cohen. 91 mins. Colour.This sequel to IT'S ALIVE (1974)
has the MUTANT child's father from the previous film warning another young
couple that the pregnant wife may also produce a mutant baby and that the
government is systematically terminating all such pregnancies, even though
he has learned that the monsters will respond to parental affection. There
follows a continuing clash between, on the one hand, the group determined
to save the babies and, on the other, a government group - including
another father of a mutant baby - equally determined to kill them. Apart
from being a devastating study in marital stress, the film also asks (but

does not answer) questions of an sf kind about the possible purpose of
this apparently horrible mutation. Primarily, however, the mutants
symbolize the way in which families and society as a whole can be torn
apart by diversions from the norm. Like most of Cohen's films, ILA is
deeply subversive of the conventional social pieties. The exploration of
these ideas is continued in the further sequel, It's Alive III: Island of
the Alive (1986), which blends schlock horror with extraordinary
sensitivity in Cohen's typical but unsettling manner. Here the mutants
have been isolated on an island contaminated by radioactivity, two of them
producing a child of their own, while once again a father (Michael
Moriarty) has to come to terms with his abhorrent role as star in a media
freak show. [PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES.
IT'S A BIRD! IT'S A PLANE! IT'S SUPERMAN!
SUPERMAN.
IT'S ALIVE
Film (1974). Larco/Warner Bros. Prod and dir Larry COHEN, starring John
Ryan, Sharon Farrell, Andrew Duggan, Guy Stockwell. Screenplay Cohen. 91
mins. Colour.A MUTANT baby (the mother has taken a new drug) kills all the
medical staff in the delivery room and leaps through a skylight to go on a
rampage, killing a woman, a milkman and several policemen. Although the
plot is evidently ludicrous, as a witty, low-budget MONSTER MOVIE IA is
more than satisfactory. The baby, wisely presented in a series of fast,
almost subliminal shots, is disturbing because it does what all babies do
- crawl around on the floor. Far more disturbing is the transition from
seeing the baby as monstrous menace to seeing it as somebody's child. The
father (Ryan), who joins the hunt, tries unsuccessfully to protect his
offspring in a curiously moving though absurd climax set in Los Angeles'
storm drains, deliberately evoking the finale of THEM! (1954). The two
sequels are IT LIVES AGAIN (1978; vt It's Alive II) and It's Alive III:
Island of the Alive (1986). [JB/PN] See also: CINEMA.
IT'S ALIVE II
IT LIVES AGAIN.
IT'S ALIVE III: ISLAND OF THE ALIVE
IT LIVES AGAIN.
IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE
Film (1958). Vogue/United Artists. Dir Edward L. Cahn, starring Marshall
Thompson, Shawn Smith, Kim Spalding. Screenplay Jerome BIXBY. 69 mins.
B/w.In this largely mediocre film there are good, tense moments. The crew
of a spaceship returning from Mars discover that "something" has stowed
away: a monster which attacks crew members (for their blood and soft
parts) and stores their bodies in the ship's ventilation system as future
snacks. The survivors are slowly forced to retreat, section by section, as
the seemingly invulnerable creature takes over the ship. An effective
build-up of suspense takes place so long as the monster is kept vague and
shadowy. The ending (the crew don spacesuits then asphyxiate the monster
by draining the craft of oxygen) is one of several plot similarities to
the later ALIEN (1979), but I!TTFBS itself cannot claim great originality,
being reminiscent of A.E. VAN VOGT's (uncredited) "The Black Destroyer"

(1939). [JB]
IVERSON, ERIC G.
Harry TURTLEDOVE.
IZBAVITELJ
YUGOSLAVIA.

SF?
JABLOKOV, ALEXANDER
(1956- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Beneath the Shadow of
her Smile" for IASFM in 1985, and who has since been fairly prolific in
short forms, several stories being set in a future Boston, comprising a
central element of Future Boston (anth 1994) ed David Alexander SMITH,
which is in fact a BRAIDED novel; other stories appear in The Breath of
Suspension (coll 1994 ). In its darkly suave competence, his first novel,
Carve the Sky (1991), demonstrates the benefits of this work. The story,
which opens on a clement, richly complex, low-tech Earth, soon begins to
argue that a viable human culture might consciously wish to inhabit a
PLANETARY-ROMANCE venue, and indeed so legislate. Later portions of the
tale, set on an outward-bound spaceship and introducing an elaborate set
of metaphors linking art ( ARTS) to the structure of the Universe, are
marginally less impressive. His second novel, A Deeper Sea (1989 ASFM; exp
1992), is a very much harsher exploration of a NEAR FUTUREvenue: a savage
world war in which dolphins with implants are extensively (and brutally)
used to reconnoitre and to destroy. The denouement once again invokes an
outward-bound spaceship, and is rich in images of escape and resolution.
His third novel, Nimbus (1993), is a noir tale, involving mind/machine
interfaces, also in a near future Earth venue. AB's work is both rounded
and exploratory, and this - in conjunction with his disinclination to
write sequels - generates the sense that an important sf career has gotten
well underway. [JC]See also: SPACE FLIGHT.
JACKSON, BASIL
(1920?- ) Canadian author of several unremarkable NEAR-FUTURE sf novels,
mostly for ROBERT HALE LIMITED: Epicenter (1976 UK), Supersonic (1976 UK),
Rage Under the Arctic (1977 UK), The Night Manhattan Burned (1979 US) and
Spill! (1979 UK). [JC]
JACKSON, SHIRLEY
(1919-1965) US short-story writer and novelist, married from 1940 to the
literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman (1919-1970), with whom she wrote (but
was solely credited for) Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons
(1957), two light memoirs of family life whose effect was radically
dissimilar to that of her fiction, none of which is sf in any orthodox
sense. Much of her work - like her first story, "Janice" (1937) comprises psychological studies of women at the end of their tether. She
became famous for one story, "The Lottery" (1948), which established her
reputation as an author of GOTHIC fiction; the ritual stoning which
climaxes the tale is perhaps more easily explicable in terms of HORROR
than of sf, but the New England in which the event occurs betrays the

profile of a land suffering the aftermath of the some vast CATASTROPHE.
Most of the remaining stories assembled in The Lottery, or The Adventures
of James Hardis (coll 1949) are fantasies of alienation. Unnamed but
tangible catastrophe is the explicit subject of The Sundial (1958), in
which 12 of her New England characters await the END OF THE WORLD. The
Haunting of Hill House (1959), filmed as The Haunting (1963) by Robert
WISE, is a superb ghost story. [JC]Other works: Hangsaman (1951); We Have
Always Lived in the Castle (1962); Come Along with Me (coll 1968); The
Lottery; The Haunting of Hill House; We Have Always Lived in the Castle
(omni 1991).
JACOBI, CARL (RICHARD)
(1908- ) US writer; also editor of several journals, including the
Minnesota Quarterly. His insinuatingly evocative short fiction is mainly
of horror and fantasy interest, much of it appearing in Weird Tales,
though he also produced some sf, mostly SPACE OPERA. He began publishing
with "The Haunted Ring" for Ghost Stories in 1931, and collected some of
his large output in Revelations in Black (coll 1947; vt The Tomb from
Beyond 1977 UK), Portraits in Moonlight (coll 1964), Disclosures in
Scarlet (coll 1972),East of Samarinda (coll 1989) and Smoke of the Snake
(coll 1994). [JC]
JACOBS, HARVEY
(1930- ) US writer whose work, much of it taking on a MAGIC-REALIST glow,
generally depicts the nature and fate of the urban Jew, especially in New
York. His more fable-like tales, many of which appear in The Egg of the
Glak and Other Stories (coll 1969), are not dissimilar to some of Bernard
MALAMUD's. The title story (1968) and "In Seclusion" (1968), with which he
began publishing stories in the sf magazines, typically demonstrate HJ's
sharply sardonic use of sf elements to make moral points about man's
inhumanity to man in a cold world. Beautiful Soup: A Novel for the 21st
Century (1993) is an sf SATIRE about NEAR FUTURE life in urban and
suburban America - a mode more frequently found in 1950s and 1960s titles
- and follows the life of a man who loses his official identity when he is
imprinted with a barcode in a supermarket accident. [JC]
JACOBSON, DAN
(1929- ) South African novelist, in the UK from the early 1950s. Moral
fervour and a harsh eloquence about his tortured homeland characterize
novels like The Trap (1955). The Confessions of Joseph Baisz (1977) is set
in a tyrannical DYSTOPIA, and Her Story (1987) is an examination in sf and
feminist terms of a desolate post- HOLOCAUST environment. [JC]
JACOMB, CHARLES ERNEST
(1888-? ) UK journalist and editor, author of one sf novel, And A New
Earth (1926), which combines the UTOPIAN and future- WAR genres: an
elitist, eugenic society is forced to defend itself with advanced weaponry
against the major powers. Civilization is destroyed by a comet, and postHOLOCAUST culture develops again very slowly. [JE]
JADE, SYMON
Pseudonym of US writer Michael Eckstrom (? - ), responsible for the
Starship Orpheus sequence of sf adventures: Return from the Dead (1982),

Cosmic Carnage (1983) and Alter Evil (1983). [JC]
JAEGER, MURIEL
(c1893-? ) UK writer who took an English degree at Oxford and was a minor
member of a group of women writers including Winifred HOLTBY and Dorothy
L. Sayers (1893-1957). Her first sf work, The Question Mark (1926),
depicts a UTOPIAN UK of 200 years hence (as witnessed by a waker from a
cataleptic trance; SLEEPER AWAKES) and shows strongly the influences of H.
G. WELLS and William MORRIS. In The Man with Six Senses (1927) a weakly
youth, endowed with unrefined ESP talents, is helped towards maturity by a
sympathetic girlfriend; the promise of originality shown in this novel was
never realized, perhaps because of discouraging sales. Hermes Speaks
(1933) follows the consequences, in the worlds of POLITICS and ECONOMICS,
of adherence to the prophecies of a fake medium. Retreat From Armageddon
(1936), a peripheral future- WAR novel in which a group of people withdraw
from the ensuing conflagration to a remote country house where they
philosophize on Man's shortcomings, is notable for its advocacy of GENETIC
ENGINEERING. It, too, met with little success, and MJ stopped writing
fiction. [JE]About the author: Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and
the Somerville College Novelists (1989) by Susan J. Leonardi.See also:
LEISURE; SUPERMAN.
JAFFERY, SHELDON (R.)
(1934- ) US attorney, editor and bibliographer. In the latter capacity he
has concentrated on fantasy and horror, beginning with Horror and
Unpleasantries (1982), an ARKHAM HOUSE bibliography, later incorporated
into his The Arkham House Companion (1989). His guides to WEIRD TALES-The
Collector's Index to Weird Tales (1985) with Fred Cook - and to DAW BOOKS
- Future and Fantastic Worlds (dated 1987 but 1988) - are also useful
tools, as is Double Trouble: A Bibliographic Chronicle of Ace Mystery
Doubles (1992). He has edited Sensuous Science Fiction from the Weird and
Spicy Pulps (anth 1982), Selected Tales of Grim and Grue from the Horror
Pulps (anth 1987) and The Weirds: A Facsimile Selection of Fiction from
the Era of the Shudder Pulps (anth 1987). [JC]
JAHN, MIKE
Working name of US writer Joseph Michael Jahn (1943- ), most of whose
work of sf interest has been in ties for the tv series The SIX MILLION
DOLLAR MAN : Wine, Women, and War * (1975), The Rescue of Athena One *
(1975), The Secret of Bigfoot Pass * (1976) and International Incidents *
(1977). The Invisible Man * (1975) is another tv tie. MJ has also
contributed Omega Sub * (1991) and City of Fear * (1991) to the Omega Sub
sf adventure series under the house name J.D. CAMERON. The Olympian Strain
(1980) and Armada (1981) are singletons. [JC]
JAHNSSON, EVALD FERDINAND
[r] FINLAND.
JAKES, JOHN (WILLIAM)
(1932- ) US writer best known for sf and fantasy before his Bicentennial
series of novels, which traces the fictional history of a US family over
the past 200 years; it achieved extraordinary bestsellerdom, undoubtedly
justifying, at least financially, his decision to retire from the genre.

Most of his shorter work, beginning with "The Dreaming Trees" for
Fantastic Adventures in 1950, was written by the 1960s - a good selection
appearing as The Best of John Jakes (coll 1977) ed Martin H. GREENBERG and
Joseph D. OLANDER - and he published his last sf novel in 1973. He
generally displayed competence, but his early work lacked bite and his
later novels, though sharper, were published in some obscurity. He was in
any case from the first actively involved in other genres, and published
at least 20 books, including several historicals as by Jay Scotland,
before When the Star Kings Die (1967), the first volume in the Dragonard
series of SPACE OPERAS, marked his full-scale entry into the field. The 3
novels in the sequence - the others are The Planet Wizard (1969) and
Tonight We Steal the Stars (1969 dos) - follow the adventures of the
Dragonard clan as they guard II Galaxy and its corporate "star kings"
against various perils. His second series, the Brak the Barbarian
SWORD-AND-SORCERY epic, includes Brak the Barbarian (coll of linked
stories 1968), Brak the Barbarian versus the Sorceress (1963 Fantastic as
"Witch of the Four Winds"; exp 1969; vt Brak the Barbarian - The Sorceress
1970 UK; vt The Sorceress 1976 UK), Brak the Barbarian versus the Mark of
the Demon (1969; vt Brak the Barbarian - The Mark of the Demons 1970 UK;
vt The Mark of the Demons 1976 UK), Brak: When the Idols Walked (1964
Fantastic Stories; exp 1978) and The Fortunes of Brak (coll 1980). The
deep debt of these stories to Robert E. HOWARD's Conan tales was
acknowledged in the publication of Mention my Name in Atlantis (1972), an
amusing pastiche of the subgenre.Out of the several sf novels JJ published
1969-73, three stand out. Six-Gun Planet (1970) depicts a deliberately
archaic colony planet called Missouri complete with ROBOT gunfighters,
just as in the later film WESTWORLD (1973). Black in Time (1970) presents
vignettes from Black history dramatized through a TIME-TRAVEL plot device.
On Wheels (1973), set about a century hence, tautly depicts a mobile US
subculture whose members live, breed and die on wheels, whether in large
trailers or on their own vehicles, never leaving the Interstate highway
system, never dropping below 40mph (65kph). Their god is the Texaco
Firebird, which they see only at the moment of death. As SATIRE the story
is simple but gripping, like most of JJ's best work. [JC]Other works: The
Asylum World (1969); The Hybrid (1969); Secrets of Stardeep (1969) and
Time Gate (1972), both juveniles, later brought together as Secrets of
Stardeep, and Time Gate (omni 1982); The Last Magicians (1969); Mask of
Chaos (1970); the Gavin Black novels, being Master of the Dark Gate (1970)
and Witch of the Dark Gate (1972); Monte Cristo #99 (1970); Conquest of
the Planet of the Apes * (1974); Excalibur! (1980) with Gil Kane.See also:
COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; SOCIOLOGY; TRANSPORTATION.
JAKOBER, MARIE
(1941- ) Canadian writer whose only sf novel, The Mind Gods (1976 UK),
confronts on another planet a materialist, tolerant society with a
repellent spiritual creed. With some subtlety the outcome is shown to be
not altogether, morally, on the side of the liberals. [PN]
JAKOBSSON, EJLER
(1911-1986) Finnish-born editor, in the USA from 1926. He became a
PULP-MAGAZINE writer in the 1930s and joined the staff of one of the pulp

chains, Popular Publications, in 1943. He briefly had responsibility for
ASTONISHING STORIES and SUPER SCIENCE STORIES, but both magazines were
already in the process of closing down due to paper shortages and Frederik
POHL's departure. EJ remained with the company and became editor on its
revival in 1949 of Super Science Stories, a position he retained until the
magazine again (and finally) ceased publication in 1951; Damon KNIGHT was
his assistant for part of this period. EJ returned to SF-MAGAZINE editing
in 1969, when he took over the editorship of GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION and IF
- again in succession to Pohl. With the assistance of Judy-Lynn DEL REY
and Lester DEL REY, he attempted to make the magazine more contemporary
and trendy, with mixed results, though Robert SILVERBERG praised his work.
He was succeeded as editor by Jim BAEN in mid-1974. During EJ's editorship
the following anthologies were published (his name did not appear on their
title pages): The Best from Galaxy Vol I (anth 1972) ed The Editors of
Galaxy Magazine; The Best from If (anth 1973) ed anon; The Best from
Galaxy Vol II (anth 1974) ed The Editors of Galaxy Magazine; The Best from
If Vol II (anth 1974) ed The Editors of If Magazine. [MJE]
JAKUBOWSKI, MAXIM
(1944- ) UK writer, critic, publisher, bookseller, translator and
anthologist. He was educated in France and writes in both French and
English. After some time as a company director in the flavour industry, he
turned to publishing, becoming Managing Director of Virgin Books (1980-83)
and then taking up directorships of Zomba and Rainbird. Since 1988 he has
run the Murder One bookshop, London, specializing in mysteries; since 1991
this has incorporated the New Worlds sf outlet. As a writer he has
published about 25 books, those in English mostly concerning rock music
and the mystery field. Generally more at ease in short-story length, in
both French and English, he began publishing fiction of genre interest in
English with "Lines of White on a Sullen Sea" for NW in 1969, which took
place in the Jerry Cornelius SHARED WORLD opened by Michael MOORCOCK for
contributors to the magazine. MJ's sf has tended to be marginal, and his
preoccupation with doomed love, music, sex and death has more often been
expressed in mainstream fiction. A prolific anthologist in France (9
vols), he has also edited several English-language anthologies: Travelling
towards Epsilon: An Anthology of French Science Fiction (anth trans Beth
Blish and MJ 1977), Twenty Houses of the Zodiac: An Anthology of
International Science Fiction (anth 1979), Lands of Never (anth 1983) and
Beyond Lands of Never (anth 1984), the latter two being original
fantasy.Most of his later anthology releases have been in the mystery
field, though The Mammoth Book of Erotica (anth 1994) contains material of
genre interest. With Malcolm EDWARDS he wrote The Complete Book of Science
Fiction and Fantasy Lists (1983; rev vt The SF Book of Lists 1983 US), and
with Edward JAMES he edited The Profession of Science Fiction (anth 1992),
a selection of pieces taken from the journal FOUNDATION: THE REVIEW OF
SCIENCE FICTION. As Charlotte Stone he wrote Cheon of Weltanland: The Four
Wishes (1983 US). [MJ/PN/JC]
JALES, MARK
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
JAMES, DAKOTA

Pseudonym used for his fiction by US academic Bernard (Joseph) James
(1922- ), whose sf novels Greenhouse (1984) and its sequel, Milwaukee the
Beautiful (1987), are set in a Wisconsin gradually isolated from the rest
of a balkanized USA by the greenhouse effect. In the first DJ riskily
assumes that the effect will be gravely consequential by 1997; but the
second, set further in the future, agilely explores the implications of a
Latin American invasion of independent Milwaukee. [JC]
JAMES, EDWARD (FREDERICK)
(1947- ) UK academic and editor who began teaching at University College,
Dublin, in 1970, and moved to York University in 1978, where he became
Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies in 1992; he was appointed
Professor of History at the University of Reading, as of September 1995.
He has been the editor of FOUNDATION: THE REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION since
1986; in that capacity he has compiled an Index to Foundation, 1-40 (1988)
and edited with Maxim JAKUBOWSKI The Profession of Science Fiction (anth
1992), which assembles autobiographical pieces first published in the
journal. Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (1994), though designed
as an introductory survey to the field, has much to say which is of use to
his fellow scholars as well. [JC]
JAMES, EDWIN
[s] James E. GUNN.
JAMES, LAURENCE
(1942- ) UK paperbacks editor and then writer active under his own name
and under at least 9 pseudonyms and house names, including Jonathan May,
in various genres including Westerns, thrillers, historical romances and
soft-core pornography. Over one four-year period he averaged about a book
a month. As LJ he began publishing sf with "And Dug the Dog a Tomb" for
New Worlds Quarterly 3 (anth 1972), an sf development of Samuel Beckett's
Waiting for Godot (trans 1954), though under his own name he is best known
for a series of paperback SPACE OPERAS featuring Simon Rack and his
Galactic Security Service Comrades: Earth Lies Sleeping (1974), Starcross
(1974; vt War on Aleph 1974 US), Backflash (1975), Planet of the Blind
(1975) and New Life for Old (1975). These are swiftly told but otherwise
unremarkable. The Dark Future series of post- HOLOCAUST adventures for a
young-adult audience includes The Revengers (1992),Beyond the Grave
(1992),The Horned God (1992) and The Plague (1992). For adults and as
James Axler he wrote the SURVIVALIST-FICTION Death Lands post-holocaust
military-sf series: Death Lands #1: Red Holocaust (1986 Canada), #2:
Pilgrimage to Hell (1987 Canada), #3: Neutron Solstice (1987 Canada), #4:
Crater Lake (1987 Canada), #5: Northstar Rising (1988 Canada), #6: Pony
Soldiers (1988 Canada), #7: Dectra Chain (1988 Canada), #8: Ice and Fire
(1988 Canada), #9: Red Equinox (1989 Canada), #10: Time Nomads (1989
Canada), #11: Latitude Zero (1991 Canada), #12: Seedling (1991 Canada) and
#13: Dark Carnival (1992 Canada). As James McPhee he wrote the similar
Survival 2000 sequence, dealing with events after an ASTEROID strikes
Earth: Survival 2000 #1: Blood Quest (1991), #2: Renegade War (1991) and
#3: Frozen Fire (1991). [JC]Other works: Electric Underground - A City
Lights Reader (anth 1973); the Witches sequence, all as by James Darke,
comprising The Prisoner (1983), The Trial (1983), The Torture (1983), The

Escape (1984), The Feud (1986) and The Plague (1986).
JAMES, PHILIP
[s] (1) Lester DEL REY; (2) James CAWTHORN.
JAMES, P(HYLLIS) D(OROTHY)
(1920- ) UK writer whose detective novels, beginning with Cover Her Face
(1962) and generally featuring Commander Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard,
comprise a literate, conservative, elegiac defense of traditional English
life; her one sf novel, The Children of Men (1992), carries that bent of
mind into a 21st century Britain crippled by universal human infertility
and dominated by a dictatorial "Warden". The ending-couched in guardedly
Christian terms-offers some chance of redemption. [JC]
JAMES, R. ALAN
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
JAMES BLISH AWARD
AWARDS.
JAMESON, FREDRIC
[r] POSTMODERNISM AND SF.
JAMES TIPTREE, JR. AWARD
AWARDS.
JAMESON, MALCOLM
(1891-1945) US writer who began producing fiction only after cancer
forced him to retire from a nonwriting life which had included a career in
the US Navy. He began publishing sf with "Eviction by Isotherm" for ASF in
1938, and wrote prolifically until his death. His books were all
posthumously published. Atomic Bomb (1944 Startling Stories as "The Giant
Atom"; rev 1945) is a NEAR-FUTURE story of an atomic explosion. Bullard of
the Space Patrol (1940-45 ASF; coll of linked stories 1951; omitting "The
Bureaucrat" cut 1955) is a set of SPACE-OPERA tales for juveniles ed Andre
NORTON. In Tarnished Utopia (1943 Startling Stories; 1956) two people
awaken from SUSPENDED ANIMATION to find themselves in conflict with a
dictatorship. [JC]See also: ASTEROIDS; DYSTOPIAS; NUCLEAR POWER.
JAMESON, (MARGARET) STORM
(1891-1986) UK novelist, the first woman to gain a BA from Leeds
University (1912), known mainly for family-chronicle novels such as those
assembled as The Triumph of Time (omni 1932). Her sf novels derive from
her interest in the POLITICS of change, and extrapolate extremist
political "solutions" into the NEAR FUTURE. In the Second Year (1936)
projects a fascist UK. In Then We Shall Hear Singing (1942) a victorious
German Reich dominates an unnamed country, but is unable to eliminate the
resistance of the individual consciousness ( HITLER WINS). Set after an
off-stage atomic HOLOCAUST, The Moment of Truth (1949) describes a UK
ruled by communists. Only in The World Ends (1937) as by William Lamb does
SJ permit herself some elegiac tranquillity: in this novel the world ends
quietly (but thoroughly) flooded, and a patriarchy comes into being. [JC]
JANE, FRED T.

Working name of UK writer and illustrator Frederick Thomas Jane
(1865-1916), best known for founding the Jane's Fighting Ships series
(from 1898). Blake of the "Rattlesnake", or The Man who Saved England
(1895) is a NEAR-FUTURE story in which, through a series of engagements,
modern torpedoes save the UK from the Russians and the French.
Artificially created according to an ancient Egyptian formula, the
protagonist of The Incubated Girl (1896) upsets the contemporary UK with
her soulless purity, her vegetarianism and her goddesslike charisma. To
Venus in Five Seconds: An Account of the Strange Disappearance of Thomas
Plummer, Pillmaker (1897) takes its kidnapped narrator to VENUS, where he
sets off a conflict between the natives - intelligent giant insects - and
the ancient Egyptians who have been resident there for some time,
including his lady kidnapper; the humorous effects in this tale are
clearly intentional. The Violent Flame: A Story of Armageddon and After
(1899) features a mad SCIENTIST who brings about the END OF THE WORLD which, Gaia-like, is a living entity - with a disintegrator ray. The
narrator and his wife survive to be a new ADAM AND EVE. FTJ's fiction,
though crude, conveys a genuine speculative impact; his ILLUSTRATIONS, not
only of his own work but also of future-war novels by George GRIFFITH and
E. Douglas FAWCETT, focus on WAR and WEAPONS, though some more interesting
sequences, like "Guesses at Futurity" (1894-5 Pall Mall Magazine), show a
wide-ranging visual sense of things to come. He was also of note as an
illustrator of some of Arthur Conan DOYLE's Sherlock Holmes stories.
[JC/PN]See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; HISTORY OF SF; MATTER TRANSMISSION;
TRANSPORTATION.
JANIFER, LAURENCE M(ARK)
(1933- ) US writer - in several genres - and performing musician. Born
Larry Mark Harris - a name used on his fiction until 1963 - he reverted to
the old family name, which had been discarded by an immigration officer
when LMJ's grandfather had gained entry to the USA from Poland. Some of
his non-sf books - mostly erotica - appeared under the pseudonyms Alfred
Blake and Barbara Wilson. His first sf publication was "Expatriate" for
Cosmos in 1953. Much of his sf has been written in collaboration,
including early works with Randall GARRETT and some later ones with S.J.
TREIBICH. With Garrett he wrote a bawdy mythological fantasy, Pagan
Passions (1959), as by Randall Garrett and Larry M. Harris, for the Beacon
Books series of GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS and 3 novels as Mark
PHILLIPS featuring confrontations between a secret-service agent and
various PSI-POWERED individuals: Brain Twister (1959 ASF as "That Sweet
Little Old Lady"; 1962), The Impossibles (1960 ASF as "Out Like a Light";
1963) and Supermind (1960-61 ASF as "Occasion for Disaster"; 1963).LMJ's
first solo novel was Slave Planet (1963). The Wonder War (1964), though
credited to Janifer alone, appears from the dedication to have been
written in collaboration with Michael KURLAND. You Sane Men (1965; vt
Bloodworld 1968) describes a world where sadism is the aristocratic way of
life. A Piece of Martin Cann (1968) features psi-assisted psychotherapy.
LMJ's most ambitious novel is Power (1974), a study of the POLITICS of
rebellion; similar themes are tackled in Reel (1983). The lively Knave
series - Survivor (1977) and its sequels Knave in Hand (1979) and Knave
and the Game (coll of linked stories 1987) - feature an interplanetary

troubleshooter, Knave, who is somewhat in the mould of Keith LAUMER's
Retief. LMJ's 3 novels with Treibich, the Angelo di Stefano series, are
comedies: Target: Terra (1968), The High Hex (1969) and The Wagered World
(1969). A collection of his short fiction is Impossible? (coll 1968). LMJ
edited the anthology Masters' Choice (anth 1966; vt in 2 vols SF: Master's
Choice 1968 UK; vt 18 Greatest Science Fiction Stories 1971 US). [BS]See
also: MUSIC.
JANSON, HANK
Initially a personal pseudonym of Stephen FRANCES but eventually a house
name used by other UK writers for various publishers. Authors writing as
HJ included Harry Hobson (1908- ), Harold Ernest Kelly (1900-1969), James
MOFFATT, Victor NORWOOD and Colin Simpson. Most HJ titles were thrillers.
[JC]See also: ADAM AND EVE.
JANUS/AURORA
US feminist sf FANZINE (1975-90) ed from Madison, Wisconsin, by Jan
Bogstad, Jeanne Gomoll and Diane Martin (#1-#3 by Bogstad, #4-#17 by
Bogstad and Gomoll, #18-#26 by Martin). Janus (which became Aurora with
#19) was born as FEMINISM began making itself felt in sf in the mid-1970s.
It carried articles by Samuel R. DELANY, Suzette Haden ELGIN, Joanna RUSS
and Jessica Amanda Salmonson (1950- ), and interviews with Octavia E.
BUTLER, Suzy McKee CHARNAS, Jo CLAYTON, Elizabeth A. LYNN, Clifford D.
SIMAK, John VARLEY, Joan D. VINGE and Chelsea Quinn YARBRO. Through
reviews and articles, J/A examined critically the depiction of sexuality
in sf, WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION, sf by women, women in fandom
and the feminist SMALL PRESSES. Right up to its demise it worked to
prevent the contribution of WOMEN SF WRITERS being ignored. In the
penultimate issue Gomoll wrote an "Open Letter to Joanna Russ" pointing
out that the dismissal of 1970s sf by CYBERPUNK writers was the sort of
attempt to erase the contribution of women that Russ had highlighted in
How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983). Many, such as Delany and Sarah
LEFANU, who used J/A extensively in her own researches into sf and
feminism, agreed. J/A is likely to remain one of the best sources for
research into the discourse between sf and feminism that took place in the
1970s and 1980s. [RH]
JANVIER, IVAN or PAUL
[s] Algis BUDRYS.
JANVIER, THOMAS A(LLIBONE)
(1849-1913) US novelist who was also active as a journalist. His
lost-race ( LOST WORLDS) novel, The Aztec Treasure House (1890),
didactically describes a surviving remnant of the Aztec empire. In The
Women's Conquest of New York (1894), published anon, Tammany Hall
misguidedly enfranchises females, who run amok until threatened with
physical violence by their aroused spouses. In the Sargasso Sea (1898) is
a ROBINSONADE in which a shipwrecked sailor survives aboard his disabled
vessel in a maze of seaweed, finds a treasure trove, and escapes. In Great
Waters (coll 1901) contains fantasies. [JC]See also: ANTHROPOLOGY.
JAPAN
It seems that the continuing attention the Japanese people give to their

ancient legends and fantastic stories has made them receptive to modern
fantasies and sf, and the rationalization of a chaotic Universe which such
stories offer. Appropriately, the history of Japanese sf begins during the
1870s, a period of violently rapid modernization in Japan, with
translations of the works of Jules VERNE. The native Japanese sf writers
of this era, such as Shunro Oshikawa (1877-1914), show his strong
influence. One of Oshikawa's most popular books is Kaitei Gunkan
["Undersea Warship"] (1900), a future- WAR novel about a conflict between
Japan and Russia, which effectively predicted the actual war of 1904-5.
Between the two World Wars, new writers of straight sf and fantasy began
to appear, the most popular and capable among them being Juza Unno
(1897-1949), who wrote stories influenced by the newly developing US sf;
stories of his such as Chikyu Tonan ["The Stolen Earth"] (1936) and
Yojigen Hyoryu ["Marooned in the 4-D World"] (1946) were, although not
highly regarded as literature, loved by young readers.It was only after
WWII, however, that sf became widely popular. A few ambitious publishers
attempted series of translated sf stories, though most of these
experiments failed due to limited sales. Notable among them were a series
of 7 anthologies from Amazing Stories (all 1950) and 20 volumes of the
Gengensha SF Series (1956-7); these began the process of establishing an
sf audience in Japan. This audience was soon catered for by the first
successful venture, the Hayakawa SF Series (1957-74), published by
Hayakawa Publishing Co., which issued 318 volumes, mostly of translations
but also including about 50 Japanese originals; another paperback series,
Hayakawa SF Bunko (1970-current), reached its 940th volume in 1991 (all
translations), including reprints from the earlier series. The same
company's Hayakawa JA Series of original works (1973-current) has reached
about 340 volumes. Hayakawa has also published hardback sf series. In
competition with Hayakawa, the Tokyo Sogensha Co. began its own
translation series (1963-current), which has reached some 300 volumes;
early on it featured Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's Barsoom books and E.E. "Doc"
SMITH's works. Asahi Sonorama's series of Japanese originals
(1975-current) numbers over 500, most of them sf. Sanrio Co. published
almost 200 titles in Sanrio SF Bunko (1978-84). Other publishers, such as
Kadokawa Shoten, Kodansha, Shinchosa, Shueisha and Seishinsa, publish both
translated and original sf or fantasy on a smaller scale. The NEW WAVE in
the 1960s and CYBERPUNK in the 1980s affected Japanese sf and stimulated
several writers to work in these styles.In 1957 the FANZINE Uchujin
["Cosmic Dust"] was founded, and began publishing original Japanese work;
nearly half of the sf writers in Japan today started there. With 190
issues and a circulation of about 1000, Uchujin remains Japan's leading
fanzine. In 1960 the first successful professional sf magazine in Japan
was launched by Hayakawa: SF Magazine began as a reprint vehicle for FSF,
but shortly began to publish original material, which soon predominated.
SF Magazine proved a success, celebrating its 400th issue in Oct 1990 with
a lavish special issue. The second professional sf magazine, Kiso-Tengai
["Fantastic"], began in 1975 and has folded twice, each time being revived
by a fresh publisher; by 1990 it had reached almost 100 issues. SF
Adventure (1979-current), published by Tokuma Shoten, has reached its
145th issue, and Shishioh ["Lion King"] (1985-current), published by Asahi
Sonorama, has reached its 69th. Three Japanese versions of US magazines,

ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, titled SF Hoseki ["SF Jewels"]
(1979-81), STARLOG (1979-87) and OMNI (1982-9), and two quarterly
SEMIPROZINES, SF-ISM (1981-5) and SF No Hon ["SF Books"] (1982-6), also
attracted readers, but not enough to survive. Though magazine circulation
figures are classified in Japan, the best estimate is that the top
magazine sells about 50,000 copies.Today, in the early 1990s, about 400
Japanese original and 150 translated sf books are published each year
(excluding reprints, game books and juveniles), a figure that varies
according to criteria for distinguishing between sf and non-sf. (The term
"sf" is in Japanese rather inclusive, embracing much that an occidental sf
purist would reject. The numbers cited therefore include light fantasies,
which have recently been popular.) Though the borderline between hardback
and paperback publication is difficult to determine in the Japanese
system, probably about a quarter of these are hardbacks. Paperbacks
generally sell about 20-30,000 copies in the first print run, though there
are many exceptions. As in other countries, most Japanese sf readers are
of secondary-school/university age.Japanese FANDOM began to reveal itself
in 1962 with the first Japanese sf CONVENTION in Tokyo, attended by about
200 fans; the 30th convention, i-con, was held in Kanazawa,
Ishikawa-Prefecture, in 1991 with about 1700 attendees; the 1983
convention, Daicon-4, held in Osaka, was the biggest to date, with about
4000. The site selection for conventions is presided over by the
Federation of Science Fiction Groups of Japan, founded 1965, which also
regulates the voting for the Sei'un AWARDS, the Japanese equivalent of the
HUGOS, established in 1970. The categories are: Novel (Japanese and
translation), Short Story (Japanese and translation), Media Presentation,
Comics, Nonfiction, and Artist. The Nippon SF Taisho ("Taisho" means "Big
Award"), the Japanese equivalent of the NEBULA, begun in 1980, is given to
the single most prominent product of Japanese sf in the preceding year.The
first Japanese sf film was GOJIRA (1954; vt Godzilla). It was followed by
many other MONSTER MOVIES such as RADON (1956; vt Rodan), MOSURA (1961; vt
Mothra), DAIKAIJU GAMERA (1966; vt Gamera) and GOJIRA 1985 (1985; vt
Godzilla 1985), and also by straight sf offerings like CHIKYU BOEIGUN
(1957; vt The Mysterians), BIJO TO EKITAI NINGEN (1958; vt The H-Man),
NIPPON CHINBOTSU (1973; vt The Submersion of Japan; cut vt Tidal Wave),
FUKKATSU NO HI (1981; vt Virus) and SENGOKU JIEITAI (1981; vt Time Slip).
Most of these were from Toho-Eiga or Kadokawa-Eiga Co. (Eiji Tsuburaya
[1901-1970], who worked with Toho-Eiga, was famous for his special
effects.) Monster and sf-adventure series flooded TELEVISION, too, but
were less successful than animated tv series like Tetsuwan Atom (1963-5;
vt Astroboy), the first of them, and Gatchaman (1972-4) and Uchusenkan
Yamato ["Space Battlecruiser Yamato"] (1974-5). Many of these series have
also been shown abroad. Recently, full-length animated feature films, such
as Hayao Miyazaki's Kaze no Tano no Nausika (1984; vt Nausica) and Tonari
no Totoro (1988; vt My Neighbour Totoro) and Katsuhiro OTOMO's AKIRA
(1987), have been highly regarded by the general public as well as sf
fans. Most such animations are derived from COMICS (by the same authors),
comics being an important form of publication not only for children but
also for young adults in Japan.Among Japanese sf authors, the best known
abroad is Kobo ABE, author of Dai-Yon Kampyoki (1959; trans as Inter Ice
Age 4 1970); he is, however, fundamentally a writer of mainstream

literature. Other stories by popular MAINSTREAM WRITERS have been highly
regarded in sf circles. Two such, by Hisashi Inoue in 1981 and Makoto
Shiina in 1990, won the Nippon SF Taisho in their respective years. The
reputation of Haruki MURAKAMI - whose work includes Hitsuji o meguru boken
(1982; trans Alfred Birnbaum as A Wild Sheep Chase 1989 US) and Sekai no
owar to hard-boiled wonderland (1984; trans Alfred Birnbaum as Hard-Boiled
Wonderland and the End of the World 1991 US)-is also spreading
widely.Osamu TEZUKA, the writer/artist for Astroboy, is regarded as a kind
of Japanese Walt Disney: he produced the first animated film series for tv
in Japan and is a top name in sf and other comics. Other important
writer/artists in comics are Fujio Fujiko (1933- ), Shotaro Ishinomori
(1938- ), Reiji Matsumoto (1938- ), Go Nagai (1945- ) and Katsuhiro Otomo.
Shin'ichi HOSHI has written more than 1000 short stories, with many
translated into other languages. His "Bokkochan" (1958; trans FSF June
1963) was the first Japanese sf story to be translated into English.
Hoshi's work was critical in the popularization of sf in the early days in
Japan. Sakyo KOMATSU is a sort of symbol of Japanese sf. Many of his
novels are panoramic in scope, dealing in broad strokes with the destiny
of the Universe and with Homo sapiens's place in it. He is best known
abroad as the author of Nippon Chinbotsu (1973; cut trans 1976 as Japan
Sinks), which sold about 4 million copies in Japan alone and, as mentioned
above, was filmed. Yasutaka Tsutsui (1934- ) is noted for his sharply
satirical comic situation fantasies - sometimes called slapstick sf - such
as Vietnam Kanko Kosha ["The Vietnam Sightseeing Co."] (1967), but his
recent bestselling stories are considered mainstream rather than sf. Ryo
Hammura (1933- ) won the Naoki Award - the most prestigious Japanese
literary prize - in 1974. He is best known for his earlier fantasy books,
which created a fictitious history of ancient Japan, but a more recent
bestseller, Misaki Ichiro no Teiko ["The Resistance of Ichiro Misaki"]
(1988), is centrally sf, describing the tragedy of a SUPERMAN. Hammura
also wrote the novel on which was based the film SENGOKU JIETAI. Ryu
Mitsuse (1928- ) combines a HARD-SF surface with poetic form in such
perceptive novels as Hyakuoku no Hiru to Sen'oku no Yoru ["Ten Billion
Days, a Hundred Billion Nights"] (1967), an sf variation on the Buddhist
theme of transience. Taku Mayumura (1934- ) is noted for his serious
attempts to create a future history ( HISTORY IN SF), a representative
work being Shiseikan ["Governors of the Worlds"] (1974), a book in a
series describing the rise and fall of a galactic government.Among the
younger authors, Masaki Yamada (1950- ) is a born sf writer, one of the
second generation of Japanese sf authors. His first story, the novella
"Kami-Gari" ["God Hunters"] (1974), deals with the fight against the
unseen and ruthless government of Almighty God. Baku Yumemakura (1951- )
became a bestselling sf writer through violent adventure novels, but his
recent Jogen no Tsuki o Taberu Shishi ["The Lion that Ate the Crescent
Moon"] (1989) is highly poetic and symbolic; he won both the Sei'un Award
and the Nippon Sf Taisho with this novel. Chohei Kambayashi (1953- ) could
be called a typical VIRTUAL-REALITY writer. His novel Sento-Yosei Yukikaze
["Fairy Fighter Yukikaze"] (1984) deals with the man-machine interface
when a ROBOT fighter plane fights an alien machine race. Yoshiki Tanaka
(1952- ) writes a variety of historical fantasies. The most popular among
them is Ginga Eiyu Densetu ["The Legend of Galactic Heroes"] (1982), which

tells of a space war and is based on the ancient Chinese story "Three
Kingdoms".Among women sf writers, perhaps Motoko Arai (1960- ) is the most
typical, with her rather easy-to-read style of fantasy. Quite different is
Mariko Ohara (1959- ), who writes CYBERPUNK stories. Kaoru Kurimoto (1953) is prolific in the field of HEROIC FANTASY. Many other women writers of
light fantasy have enjoyed popularity in recent years.A study in English
is Japanese Science Fiction: A View of a Changing Society (1989) by Robert
Matthew. Several of the writers mentioned above are represented in
translation in The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories (anth 1989 US) ed
John L. Apostolou with Martin H. GREENBERG. The most important
bibliographer of Japanese sf is Fujio Ishihara, whose major bibliographies
are (using an English version of their Japanese titles) SF Grand Annotated
Catalogue 1946-70 (1982) and SF Grand Annotated Catalogue 1971-1980 (five
vols 1989-1991); these works are in Japanese. [TSh/PN].
JARRY, ALFRED
(1873-1907) French writer who carried the fruits of his scientific
education into his surreal avant-garde writing, particularly the influence
of the French evolutionary philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941). AJ's
famous play Ubu roi (1896; trans 1951 UK) and its several sequels including Ubu enchaine (1900; trans B. Keith and G. Legman as King Turd
1953 UK) - helped found the THEATRE of the absurd, and he created the
mock-science of 'pataphysics ( IMAGINARY SCIENCE), which studies
exceptions rather than laws and aspires to provide imaginary solutions to
practical problems. H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE (1895) inspired him to
write the speculative essay "How to Construct a Time Machine" (1899) (
TIME TRAVEL). His most sciencefictional work is Le surmale (1901; trans
Barbara Wright as The Supermale 1964 UK; rev 1968), a comic fantasy
featuring a SUPERMAN who, nourished on superfood, wins an extraordinary
bicycle race against a six-man team and performs astonishing feats of
erotic endurance before perishing in the passionate embrace of an amorous
MACHINE. Also of interest is the disorganized and extravagant
"neoscientific romance" Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll,
'Pataphysician (1911; trans as "Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll,
'Pataphysician" in Selected Works of Alfred Jarry ed Roger Shattuck and
Simon Watson-Taylor, coll 1965 UK). There are minor fantastic elements in
his hallucinatory first novel, Les jours et les nuits (1897; trans Alexis
Lykiard as Days and Nights 1989 in an edition which also includes the
mythological extravaganza L'autre Alceste [1947 chap] trans Simon
Watson-Taylor as "The Other Alcestis") and in his bawdy historical romance
Messaline (1901; trans John Harman as Messalina 1985 UK). AJ's influence
on modern sf writers ( ABSURDIST SF; FABULATION) is best exemplified by J.
G. BALLARD's "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a
Downhill Motor Race" (1967), which echoes AJ's "Commentair pour servir a
la construction pratique de la machine a explorer le temps" (1900), most
familiar in trans as "The Crucifixion of Christ Considered as an Uphill
Bicycle Race" (1965). [BS]Other works: Caesar-Antichrist (1895; trans
Antony Melville as Caesar Antichrist 1992 UK).
JARVIS, E.K.
ZIFF-DAVIS house name used 1942-58 on AMZ, Fantastic Adventures and

Fantastic for over 45 stories, primarily by Robert Moore WILLIAMS, who
used the name as a personal pseudonym until the 1950s, when Paul W.
FAIRMAN, Harlan ELLISON and Robert SILVERBERG - 1 identified story each also wrote as EKJ. [JC]
JARVIS, SHARON
(1943- ) US writer whose fiction has all been written with collaborators
under joint pseudonyms. As Jarrod Comstock she published with Ellen M.
Kozak the These Lawless Worlds sequence of mildly erotic sf: The Love
Machine (1984) and Scales of Justice (1984). As Johanna Hailey she
published with Marcia Yvonne Howl (1947- ) three elf fantasies: Enchanted
Paradise (1985), Crystal Paradise (1986) and Beloved Paradise (1987). As
H.M. Major she published with Kathleen Buckley the Alien Trace sf
sequence, equally mild in its eroticism: The Alien Trace (1984) and Time
Twister (1984). As SJ, she edited Inside Outer Space: Science Fiction
Professionals Look at their Craft (anth 1985). [JC]
JASON, JERRY
George H. SMITH.
JAVOR, FRANK A.
Working name of US writer Francis Anthony Jaworski (1916- ), who has
written an estimated 10,000 "how to" articles for service magazines. He
has appeared infrequently in sf magazines from 1963, his first story being
"Patriot" for ASF; three tales were included in the Judith MERRIL Year's
Best S-F series of anthologies. The Eli Pike series of sf novels - The
Rim-World Legacy (1967; exp as coll vt The Rim-World Legacy and Beyond
1991), Scor-Sting (1990) and The Ice Beast (1990) - comprises 3 capably
framed intrigues on RIMWORLDS, where Pike must maintain some sort of
order. The series manages, despite the quarter-century gap between
episodes, to remain fresh. [JC]
JAY, MEL
John E. MULLER.
JAY, PETER
(1937- ) UK writer, economist and former diplomat who served as the UK
Ambassador to the USA 1977-9. His future HISTORY, Apocalypse 2000:
Economic Breakdown and the Suicide of Democracy (1987) with Michael
STEWART, was inefficient as fiction but acute about the pleasures and
miseries of late capitalism. [JC]
JEAN, ALBERT
Maurice RENARD.
JEEVES, (BYRON) TERRY
[r] Mike ASHLEY.
JEFFERIES, (JOHN) RICHARD
(1848-1887) UK naturalist and novelist. The son of a farmer, he showed
remarkable powers of observation when writing about Nature, describing it
in a poetic style from an animist viewpoint that was devoid of
sentimentality. This was particularly noticeable in his first fantasy
novel, Wood Magic: A Fable (1881; cut vt Sir Bevis: A Tale of the Fields

1889); semi-autobiographical, it features a young boy who has the ability
to communicate with animals, birds and plants, and was primarily concerned
with the social and political structure of the local animal kingdom and
the struggles of a contender for the throne. A sequel, the famous Bevis:
The Story of a Boy (1882), appeared a year later, but with the emphasis on
the pleasures and intrigues of childhood rather than the hero's
supernatural abilities.For the last six years of his life RJ's health was
severely in decline, and his thoughts turned to the future and to
speculation. The result was After London, or Wild England (1885), a postHOLOCAUST novel which describes, from the viewpoint of a future historian,
an England reverted to rural wilderness: the novel's first part describes
the lapse into barbarism, the specific reasons for the disaster being
deliberately kept vague, and the second details the medieval-style society
that has come into being and tells of a voyage of discovery on a great
inland lake that now covers the centre of England. After London is a
first-class example of Victorian sf and proved very popular at the time;
its influence can be traced through W.H. HUDSON's A Crystal Age (1887) to
John COLLIER's Tom's A-Cold (1933; vt Full Circle: A Tale US). RJ's
earlier political SATIRE, Jack Brass: Emperor of England (1873), can
loosely be construed as fantasy. [JE]See also: CITIES; HISTORY OF SF;
PASTORAL; POLLUTION; UTOPIAS.
JEFFERSON, IAN
L.P. DAVIES.
JEFF HAWKE
UK COMIC strip created by writer Eric Souster and artist Sidney Jordan
(1930- ). Some scripts were written by William Patterson and many of the
later ones by Jordan. JH first appeared in 1954 in the London Daily
Express, and ceased in 1974. During its lifetime it was the UK's leading
sf comic strip. The overall scenario depicted Earth as a primitive planet
on the periphery of a highly advanced galactic civilization, whose deposed
emperor, Chalcedon, was a frequent adversary. Individual stories, of which
there were over 60, contained standard sf concepts interspersed with plots
based on theories similar to those of Erich von DANIKEN (Vishnu and Shiva
as interplanetary visitors, Aladdin's lamp as a dead space-pilot's
communicator, etc.). The storylines were original for a comic strip, and
kept abreast of contemporary technological progress. Softcover reprints
have been published as Jeff Hawke Book 1 (graph coll 1985) and Jeff Hawke
Book 2: Counsel for the Defence (graph coll 1986), with covers by Brian
BOLLAND, who also worked briefly on the strip; hardcover collections have
appeared in Italy. JH also appeared briefly in 1955-6, drawn by Ferdinando
Tacconi, in the children's colour comic Express Weekly. [JE/RT]
JENKINS, WILL F.
[r] Murray LEINSTER.
JENNINGS, PHILLIP C.
(1946- ) US writer who began publishing work of genre interest with
"Tadcaster's Doom" for FSF in 1986, and who during the next few years
published over 30 often pyrotechnical stories, several of which described
a world dominated by "bugs" - personalities in electronic storage. Some of

the best of these stories are assembled as The Bug Life Chronicles (coll
1989). PCJ's first novel, Tower to the Sky (1988), set in the same
universe, explosively depicts a human campaign in 3700CE to escape the
crowded Solar System and the Gatekeepers who bar us from the stars, via
the eponymous skyscraper; this contains much of humankind within it, is
tall enough to reach into space, and is convertible into a starship. PCJ's
exuberance is intermittently chaotic, but he now seems to be exercising
greater control over his material; the next years may see work of very
considerable worth. [JC]
JENNISON, JOHN W(ILLIAM)
(? -?1969) UK writer, one of several who became active as mass-producers
of genre fiction for UK paperback houses and who remained reticent about
personal details during their careers. From about 1945 to the year in
which it is thought he may have died, JWJ seems to have written over 100
novels under at least 40 pseudonyms, mostly thrillers and Westerns. He
began to publish his routine but occasionally engaging sf with two novels
as Edgar Rees Kennedy, Conquerors of Venus (1951) and The Mystery Planet
(1952). Working for CURTIS WARREN, he then published: under the house name
Neil CHARLES, Para-Robot (1952); under the Gill HUNT name, Station 7
(1952) and Zero Field (1952); and under the King LANG name, Spaceline
(1952). After Invasion from Space (1954) as Matthew C. Bradford, however,
he ceased producing sf for some time, returning in the mid-1960s with the
marginal Supercar in the Black Diamond Trail (1965) as JWJ. Generally as
John Theydon, a name he had used since 1946 for non-sf tales, he then
published a sequence of STINGRAY tv ties - Stingray * (1965), Stingray:
Danger in the Deep * (1965) as JWJ, and Stingray and the Monster * (1966)
- a sequence of THUNDERBIRDS tv ties - Thunderbirds * (1966), Calling
Thunderbirds * (1966), Thunderbirds: Ring of Fire * (1966), Thunderbirds:
Lost World * (1966) as JWJ, and Lady Penelope: The Albanian Affair *
(1967) - and a sequence of Captain Scarlet tv ties ( CAPTAIN SCARLET AND
THE MYSTERONS) - Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons * (1967; vt Captain
Scarlet 1989) and Captain Scarlet and the Silent Saboteur * (1967). JWJ's
last known sf book, again as Theydon, was another tv tie, The Angels and
the Creeping Enemy * (1968). [JC]
JENS, WALTER
[r] GERMANY.
JENSEN, AXEL
(1932- ) Norwegian writer, active since 1955. His DYSTOPIAN sf novel, Epp
(1965; trans anon 1967 UK), describes in chillingly grey, fragmented prose
a world where people live isolated from one another in cells and file
reports on their similarly treacherous, alienated "neighbours". [JC]
JENSEN, JOHANNES V(ILHELM)
(1873-1950) Danish poet, novelist and essayist, awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1944. He is best known for Den Lange Rejse (6 vols
1908-22 Denmark; all but vol 5 trans Arthur G. Chater, vols 1-2 as The
Long Journey: Fire and Ice 1922 UK, vols 3-4 as The Cimbrians: The Long
Journey II 1923 UK, and vol 6 as Christopher Columbus: The Long Journey
III 1924 UK; vol 5, Skibet ["The Ship"] [1912], remains untranslated), an

epic myth spanning humanity's development from its origins in a temperate
Scandinavian Eden before the Ice Age through to the threshold of modern
times with the explorations of Christopher Columbus. The translated
portions were later released in 1 vol as The Long Journey (omni 1933 US).
JVJ also published several collections of "myths" that remain
untranslated. [JE]See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; ORIGIN OF MAN.
JENSEN, KRIS
(1953- ) US writer who began publishing sf with her first novel, the
Ardel sequence comprisingFreeMaster (1990), Mentor (1991) and Healer
(1993), in which an unscrupulous interstellar corporation is baulked from
exploiting a mineral-rich planet inhabited by ALIENS with PSI POWERS. Of
greatest interest are the detailed descriptions of the strange BIOLOGY of
the Ardellans, which help give the sequence its PLANETARY-ROMANCE flavour.
[JC]
JENSEN, NORMAN
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
JEPPSON, J.O.
[r] Janet ASIMOV.
JEPSON, EDGAR (ALFRED)
(1863-1938) UK schoolteacher and writer, prolific in various popular
genres from 1895; some of his books are of sf interest. Half- RURITANIA,
half- DYSTOPIA, the imaginary land-locked Asian country in The Keepers of
the People (1898) has been ruled for generations by Englishmen; the novel
encroaches on sf from several angles. The Horned Shepherd (1904) and No.
19 (1910; vt The Garden at 19 1910 US) are both fantasies, the first about
a new incarnation of a god which has also been Pan, the second about the
attempts of a magus (who resembles Aleister Crowley [1875-1947]) to summon
Pan. In The Moon Gods (1930), a lost-race ( LOST WORLDS) tale,
20th-century aviators discover a Carthaginian city in the African desert.
[JC/BS]
JEROME, OWEN FOX
Oscar J. FRIEND.
JERSILD, P(ER) C(HRISTIAN)
(1935- ) Swedish writer whose translated sf novels - En levande sjal
(1980; trans Rika Lesser as A Living Soul 1988 UK) and Efter Floden (1982;
trans Lone Thygesen Blecher and George Blecher as After the Flood 1986 US)
- are both DYSTOPIAS, the latter a post- HOLOCAUST tale of some ferocity.
[JC]
JESCHKE, WOLFGANG
(1936- ) German editor and writer, winner of the 1987 Harrison AWARD for
achievements in international sf. He began to publish sf with "Die
Anderen" ["The Others"] in 1959, but first became strongly involved with
the genre in 1969 when, while working as co-editor of Kinders
Literaturlexikon he edited as a freelancer the Science Fiction fur Kenner
series for Lichtenberg Verlag. In 1973 he took over Heyne Verlag's sf
publishing line, a job he retains (1992) and in which he has been
responsible for introducing many important works to the German market. He

has also edited more than 100 anthologies, from 1970 on, many containing
material translated from the English. WJ's first novel was Der Letzte Tag
der Schopfung (1981; trans Gertrud Mander as The Last Day of Creation 1982
UK), in which a US group uses TIME TRAVEL to acquire Middle Eastern oil,
evading the problems posed by modern-day local governments; TIME PARADOXES
ensue. In Midas (1987; author's trans 1990 UK), set on a NEAR-FUTURE Earth
which has suffered severe ecological damage, a primitive
matter-replication technique has been discovered, but the copies of humans
thus produced are crude and cannot live longer than a few months. WJ's
writing is humanist in orientation and strongly (on occasion
overbearingly) ironic in tone, but is sometimes betrayed by a certain lack
of subtlety and originality. [NT]See also: CLONES; GERMANY; POWER SOURCES.
JESSEL, JOHN
[s] Stanley G. WEINBAUM.
JE T'AIME, JE T'AIME
Film (1967). Parc/Fox Europa. Dir Alain Resnais, starring Claude Rich,
Olga Georges-Picot, Anouk Ferjac. Screenplay Resnais, Jacques STERNBERG.
94 mins, cut to 82 mins. Colour.A failed suicide is co-opted into a
dangerous scientific experiment; he is to be sent back into the past for
one minute. The experiment has proved safe for mice, but humans are
conscious of time and memory in a way that animals are not, and the
protagonist is trapped in a series of not-quite-random time oscillations
around the point of an unhappy love affair. Where Resnais's previous study
of time and memory, Last Year at Marienbad (1961), was a triumph for the
cameraman, this film is a triumph for the editor. Some of the oscillations
last only seconds, some minutes, sometimes replaying the same scene (with
subtle variations) several times over, sometimes visiting fantasy events
as if this second time around they were real - memory, with its
distortions, carrying the same metaphysical weight as fact. The TIME
MACHINE itself is organic and womb-like, and from it the hero emerges into
the amniotic fluid of the sea. This is a very striking sf film, though
only almost incidentally sf; it uses the idea of TIME TRAVEL to explore
the extent to which we can, or cannot, withdraw ourselves from our own
pasts, and hence from the processes of time. The screenwriter, Sternberg,
is an sf writer of distinction and sophistication. [PN]See also: CINEMA.
JETEE, LA
(vt The Jetty; vt The Pier) Short film (1963). Argos/Arcturus Films.
Produced, written and dir Chris Marker, starring Helene Chatelain, Jacques
Ledoux, Davos Hanich. 29 mins. B/w.This celebrated French short film is
often seen as a breakthrough in sf narration that has yet to be equalled.
With voice-over narration and composed entirely of still photographs
(though there is one brief sequence - a close-up of a girl winking - that
gives the impression of movement) the film is nearer in theme and approach
to the NEW-WAVE sf of the 1960s than to traditional TIME-TRAVEL stories in
the CINEMA or in literature. Set in a post- HOLOCAUST Paris where the
concept of passing time is disappearing and the principle of
cause-and-effect is therefore being lost, this subtle and complex film
shows an attempt being made to send back in time a man obsessed by his
memory of a woman's face, since the existence of memory suggests that time

still exists for him. He is also sent into the future where he finds the
remembered face is a witness to his own death. [JB/PN]
JETER, K(EVIN) W.
(1950- ) US writer of importance as an author of horror novels, the
highly charged claustrophobia of his style fitting the essential affect of
that genre rather better than it does sf. His early work, generally
conceived in sf terms, gives off an air of hectic congestion which
sometimes interferes with the presentation of ideas, the articulation of a
barrier through which to penetrate; for him, as for most HORROR writers,
CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGHS tend to end in tears. Nevertheless, his first
published novel, Seeklight (1975 Canada), fascinatingly combines
tried-and-true narrative conventions (its protagonist is the scion of an
ex-leader, whose rivals need to kill the lad) with exorbitant
reality-twists (a sociologist intermittently uses advanced technology to
intervene and to make queries about the action). The Dreamfields (1976
Canada) similarly juxtaposes contrasting realities, in this case a land of
dreams occupied by ALIENS but dominated by sick human teenagers. Morlock
Night (1979) is a sequel to H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE (1895) which
both extends the original story and, by conveying a Morlock invasion
backwards in time to the sewers of late 19th-century-London, may well
constitute the first significant STEAMPUNK novel, long before the flush
period of that subgenre in the late 1980s. But Soul Eater (1983), KWJ's
first outright horror novel, is more accomplished than any of these.KWJ's
most significant sf may lie in the thematic trilogy comprising Dr Adder
(1984) - his first novel (written 1972), long left unpublished because of
its sometimes turgid violence - The Glass Hammer (1985) and Death Arms
(1987 UK). Philip K. DICK read Dr Adder in manuscript and for years
advocated it; and it is clear why. Though the novel clearly prefigures the
under-soil airlessness of the best urban CYBERPUNK, it even more clearly
serves as a bridge between the defiant reality-testing PARANOIA of Dick's
characters and the doomed realpolitiking of the surrendered souls who
dwell in post-1984 urban sprawls. In each of these convoluted tales, set
in a devastated Somme-like NEAR-FUTURE USA, KWJ's characters seem to
vacillate between the sf traditions of resistance and cyberpunk quietism.
In worlds like these, the intermittent flashes of sf imagery or content
are unlasting consolations.Although sometimes technically sf, KWJ's later
novels have altogether abandoned the consolations of sf. Dark Seeker
(1987) is a horror novel about DRUGS which invokes Charles Manson.
Infernal Devices: A Mad Victorian Fantasy (1987) is another steampunk
tale, quite hilarious at points, but not reassuring in its use of sf
devices that its protagonist signally misunderstands. Mantis (1987) is
again horror, as are In the Land of the Dead (1989 UK), The Night Man
(1990) and Wolf Flow (1992). Only Madlands (1991), set in a parodic,
ENTROPY-choked Disneyland-like Los Angeles, and Farewell Horizontal
(1989), set in the FAR FUTURE, are sf, and their technical adventurousness
does not dispel the sense that KWJ is making a slow farewell to the genre.
[JC]Other works: Alien Nation #2: Dark Horizon * (1993); Star Trek: Deep
Space Nine #3: Bloodletter * (1993).About the author: A Checklist of K.W.
Jeter (1991 chap) by Tom Joyce and Christopher P. STEPHENS.See also: CRIME
AND PUNISHMENT; FANTASY; GOTHIC SF; MEDICINE; PSYCHOLOGY.

JET JACKSON, FLYING COMMANDO
CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT.
JETTY, THE
La JETEE .
JEURY, MICHEL
FRANCE.
JEWISH WRITERS
It's well known that many female SF writers had to use pseudonyms in
order to get work published. It’s less known that Jewish SF writers were
pressured to use less Jewish-sounding names for their bylines.John W.
Campbell, editor of Astounding, even tried to convince Isaac Asimov to
adopt a less "foreign-sounding" byline. However, Campbell was among the
few who allowed writer Horace Gold to use his own name on his stories.The
reason? Gold had taken the pseudonym "Clyde Crane Campbell" and John
Campbell didn’t want someone with his own name in the pages of Astounding.
J. LLOYD EATON AWARD
AWARDS.
J. LLOYD EATON COLLECTION
In 1969 the late Donald Wilson, University Librarian at the University of
California, Riverside Library (now the Tomas Rivera Library), purchased a
COLLECTION of 7500 volumes of sf and fantasy from the estate of J. Lloyd
Eaton MD. Eaton had for several decades collected many rare and unusual
monographs of sf, including such items as Varney the Vampire (1847) and
Frank AUBREY's King of the Dead (1903), ceasing his active interest in the
field about 1956. For the first decade after its purchase, the collection
remained in storage, uncatalogued and inaccessible to researchers. In 1978
Robert REGINALD and George Edgar SLUSSER successfully proposed an annual
conference centred on the Eaton Collection, and in 1979 Slusser was
appointed Curator. Simultaneously the Rivera Library began actively
cataloguing the newer parts of the collection, while making retrospective
purchases of missing items and adding current materials. Cataloguing of
the old books was completed with a federal grant in the late 1980s;
unfortunately, the Dictionary Catalog of the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of
Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, University of California,
Riverside (3 vols 1982) was compiled long before the task had been
completed.The collection now includes 100,000+ items, having been
supplemented with the acquisition of the Douglas MENVILLE collection
(10,000 paperbacks and esoterica), the Terry CARR collection (20,000
FANZINES), the Rick Sneary (1927-1990) collection (40,000 fanzines) and
the manuscripts of several contemporary sf writers, plus 10,000 superhero
COMICS, 10,000 boys' books, 500 shooting scripts of sf and fantasy films,
the Michael CASSUTT collection of screenplays and teleplays, and some
foreign-language material. Access to this, the largest academic library
collection of fantastic literature, is available to legitimate scholars
and to members of the university community. [RR]
JOE 90
UK tv series (1968-9). A Century 21 Production for ITC/ATV. Devised by

Gerry and Sylvia ANDERSON, prod David Lane (with Reg Hill as executive
prod). Script editor Tony Barwick. Dirs included Peter Anderson, Leo
Eaton, Alan Perry, Desmond Saunders. Writers included Barwick, Shane
Rimmer, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. 30 25min episodes. Colour.This was the
last and one of the least popular of the sf animated-puppet series made
for children in "SuperMarionation" by the Andersons - though TERRAHAWKS
(1983-6), in which the puppets were electronically operated in a process
Anderson called "Supermacromation", was still to come. The hero, Joe, is a
9-year-old boy whose scientist father has devised a method of transferring
specialist brain patterns into his mind, armed with which (looking
innocent) he becomes a test pilot, a brain surgeon and so on, working as a
special agent for the World Intelligence Network. J90 collapsed after 1
season, perhaps because it appeared more childish than most of its
immediate predecessors in the SuperMarionation tv shows. There were two
novelizations: Joe 90 and the Raiders * (1968) by Tom Sullivan and Joe 90
in Revenge * (1969) by Howard Elson. [PN]
JOHANNESSON, OLOF
Pseudonym of Swedish scientist and writer Hannes Olof Gosta Alfven
(1908-1995), winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Physics. His sf novel,
Sagan om den stora datamasknen (1966; trans as The Big Computer: A Vision
1968 UK; vt The Tale of the Great Computer: A Vision 1968 US; vt The End
of Man? 1969 US) purports to be a history of Earth written in the future
by a COMPUTER (or perhaps by a human). Its drily witty fundamental premise
is that mankind is merely an intermediate step in the EVOLUTION of
MACHINES. [JC/PN]Other works: Varlden-spegelvarlden: Kosmologi och
antimateria (1966 trans as Worlds-Antiworlds: Antimatter in Cosmology 1966
US), as by H. Alfven, nonfiction.See also: AUTOMATION; CYBERNETICS;
INTELLIGENCE.
JOHANSSON, GEORGE
[r] SCANDINAVIA.
JOHNS, AYRESOME
George LOCKE.
JOHNS, KENNETH
Pseudonym used for collaborations between Kenneth BULMER and John NEWMAN
on a long series of science-fact articles for NW and Nebula 1955-61. [JC]
JOHNS, MARSTON
R.L. FANTHORPE; John E. MULLER.
JOHNS, [Captain] W(ILLIAM) E(ARLE)
(1893-1968) UK writer who began producing boys' action adventures in
1930; his total output exceeded 200 volumes. He became famous in
particular for the 80 or more Biggles novels, of which two - Biggles Hits
the Trail (1935) and Biggles - Charter Pilot: The Adventures of Biggles ?
Co on a World-Wide Cruise of Scientific Investigation (1943) - have some
sf content. Of WEJ's other works, of particular sf interest is the "Tiger"
Clinton sequence: Kings of Space (1954), Return to Mars (1955), Now to the
Stars (1956), To Outer Space (1957), The Edge of Beyond (1958), The Death
Rays of Ardilla (1959), To Worlds Unknown (1960), The Quest for the

Perfect Planet (1961), Worlds of Wonder (coll 1962) and The Man who
Vanished into Space (1963). These novels feature "Tiger" Clinton, his son
Rex and Professor Brane, the first humans in space, who meet strange new
races and become caught up in interplanetary war. [AC/JC]
JOHNSON, DENIS
(1949- ) US writer whose second novel, Fiskadoro (1985), is set in postHOLOCAUST Key West, where an aged inhabitant confuses the desolate USA
with Vietnam, where she lived during the US action. For sf readers, that
is likely to be the only innovation apparent in this intensely conceived
tale, but it is striking. [JC]
JOHNSON, GEORGE CLAYTON
(1929- ) US writer who wrote 3 sf stories for GAMMA 1963-5 and was
co-author with William F. NOLAN of Logan's Run (1967), which was filmed as
LOGAN'S RUN (1976) and inspired a tv series. Scripts and Stories Written
for The Twilight Zone (coll 1977) and Writing for The Twilight Zone (coll
1981) assemble scripts created for that programme. He also wrote at least
one script for STAR TREK. [JC]See also: OVERPOPULATION.
JOHNSON, JAMES B(LAIR)
(1944- ) US writer who began publishing sf with his first novel, Daystar
and Shadow (1981), in which a post- HOLOCAUST USA is depicted. More
interesting, though the voltage of innovation remains low, is Trekmaster
(1987), set on a rediscovered colony planet whose inhabitants are divided
over the issue of reunion with the Galactic Federation; included are some
dynastic romance, a rite of passage and a cohabiting ALIEN species.
Further novels in the same general vein, though showing an increasing
competence, are Mindhopper (1988), Habu (1989) and A World Lost (1991).
[JC]
JOHNSON, KEN
Working name of US bibliographer Kenneth R. Johnson (? - ), whose main
work, undertaken with Jerry BOYAJIAN, has been a series of indexes to the
SF MAGAZINES: Index to the Science Fiction Magazines 1977 (1982 chap),
1978 (1982 chap), 1979 (1981 chap), 1980 (1981 chap), 1981 (1982 chap),
1982 (1983 chap) and 1984 (1985 chap). Both authors also began an
associated enterprise comprising Index to the Semi-Professional Fantasy
Magazines, 1982 (1983 chap) and Index to the Semi-Professional Magazines,
1983 (1984 chap). With Hal W. HALL and George Michaels he compiled The
Science Fiction Magazines: A Bibliographical Checklist of Titles and
Issues through 1983 (1983 chap).KJ is not to be confused with the UK
horror writer Kenneth R(ayner) Johnson (? - ), author of Zoltan, Hound of
Dracula * (1977; vt Hounds of Dracula 1977 US; vt Dracula's Dog 1977 US),
The Succubus (1979) and The Cheshire Cat (1983 US). [JC]
JOHNSON, L(EROY) P(ETER) V(ERNON)
(1905- ) UK writer whose In the Time of the Thetans (1961) features
unpleasant Thetans, who resemble starfish. [JC]
JOHNSON, OWEN M(cMAHON)
(1878-1952) US writer in various genres. The protagonist of The Coming of
the Amazons: A Satiristic Speculation on the Scientific Future of

Civilization (1931) finds on awakening in AD2181 from SUSPENDED ANIMATION
that women rule and that a simple sex-role reversal accounts for
humiliating changes in masculine behaviour. He resists vigorously, but
without success. Unlike most stories on this theme, the book treats women
with some sympathy. [JC]
JOHNSON, SAMUEL
(1709-1784) UK poet, critic, lexicographer and author of one novel, The
Prince of Abissinia: A Tale (1759; rev 1759; vt The History of Rasselas,
Prince of Abissinia: An Asiatic Tale 1768 US; vt The History of Rasselas,
Prince of Abissinia: A Tale 1787 UK), written to pay for his mother's
funeral (he got ps100 for the first printing). It is of interest to the
student of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION for its sustained meditation on the
nature of and chances of obtaining human happiness (see also UTOPIAS;
DYSTOPIAS). The initial setting of the tale is a secret valley, from which
Rasselas hopes to escape in a flying machine (in the event it fails - SJ's
spirit was inimical to unsustained flights of fancy); also featured is an
astronomer who believes himself responsible for weather control. The book
is an archetypal example of the important sf theme of CONCEPTUAL
BREAKTHROUGH. The most attractive 20th-century critical edition was ed
1927 by R.W. Chapman; a useful recent critical edition was ed 1977 by
Geoffrey Tillotson and Brian Jenkins. [JC/PN]See also: ASTRONOMY;
FANTASTIC VOYAGES.
JOHNSTONE, D(AVID) LAWSON
(? -? ) UK writer, mostly of novels for older children, including The
Mountain Kingdom (1888), a Jules VERNE-style LOST-WORLD tale whose young
protagonists travel into the Kingdom of the Smoking Mountains (in Tibet),
which is inhabited by descendents of ancient Greeks; our heroes thwart a
rebellion against the monarch. The Paradise of the North (1890; cut 1894)
similarly uncovers a lost world, but this time at the North Pole and
inhabited by Norsemen. The White Princess of the Hidden City (1898)
uncovers yet another, now in Central America and inhabited by Whites whose
claim to the Americas - in accordance with 19th-century fantasies of
racial justice - is found to antedate that of the Amerindians. [JC]
JOHNSTONE, WILLIAM W.
(1938- ) US writer who has written at least 85 novels since his first in
1980, being best known for Westerns; he has also written some horror. His
Ashes sequence of SURVIVALIST-FICTION military post- HOLOCAUST sf novels
comprises Out of the Ashes (1983), Fire in the Ashes (1984), Anarchy in
the Ashes (1984), Blood in the Ashes (1985), Alone in the Ashes (1985),
Wind in the Ashes (1986), Smoke from the Ashes (1987), Danger in the Ashes
(1988), Valor in the Ashes (1988), Trapped in the Ashes (1989), Death in
the Ashes (1990), Survival in the Ashes (1990),Fury in the Ashes (1991),
Courage in the Ashes (1992), Terror in the Ashes (1992), Battle in the
Ashes (1993), Vengeance in the Ashes (1993), Flames from the Ashes (1993),
Treason in the Ashes (1994) and D-Day in the Ashes (1994). The premise of
the first volume is, perhaps, surprisingly frank: shocked by the
imposition of gun control, a group of patriotric US citizens bring about
the nuclear holocaust in the expectation that a better world will,
phoenix-style, be born. The remaining volumes of the sequence attempt to

demonstrate how right they were. [JC]Other works: The Devil series,
comprising The Devil's Kiss (1980), The Devil's Heart (1983), The Devil's
Touch (1984) and The Devil's Cat (1987); Wolfsbane (1982); The Uninvited
(1982); Crying Shame (1983); Nursery (1983); Sweet Dreams (1985); Cat's
Cradle (1986); Jack-in-the-Box (1986); Rockinghorse (1986); Baby Grand
(1987) with Joseph E. Keene; Sandman (1988); Carnival (1989); Cat's Eye
(1989); Darkly the Thunder (1990); Watchers in the Woods (1991); The
Devil's Laughter (1992); Them (1992); Bats (1993); Night Mask (1994).
JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD
Award for the best new sf writer of the year, selected by votes of sf
fans and presented at the World Sf CONVENTION during the HUGO ceremony.
Sponsored by Conde-Nast, publishers of Analog, the JWCA was instituted in
1972 in tribute to John W. CAMPBELL Jr, its celebrated editor, who died in
1971. Davis Publications continued the sponsorship when Analog passed into
their hands. The anthology series NEW VOICES, ed George R.R. MARTIN, was
devoted to printing original novellas (written a few years later) by, in
each volume, a given year's finalists; it ceased after 5 vols. Several of
the winners were at the time of receiving the JWCA primarily fantasy
writers. [PR/PN]Winners:1973: Jerry POURNELLE1974: Lisa TUTTLE and Spider
ROBINSON1975: P.J. Plauger1976: Tom REAMY1977: C.J. CHERRYH1978: Orson
Scott CARD1979: Stephen R. DONALDSON1980: Barry B. LONGYEAR1981: Somtow
Sucharitkul (S.P. SOMTOW)1982: Alexis GILLILAND1983: Paul O. WILLIAMS1984:
R.A. MACAVOY1985: Lucius SHEPARD1986: Melissa SCOTT1987: Karen Joy
FOWLER1988: Judith MOFFETT1989: Michaela Roessner1990: Kristine Kathryn
RUSCH1991: Julia Ecklar1992: Ted Chiang1993: Laura Resnick1994: Amy
ThomsonSee also: WOMEN SF WRITERS.
JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD
Created by Harry HARRISON and Brian W. ALDISS, this is given annually in
July for the best sf novel of the previous year published in English,
selected by a committee of academic critics and sf writers. The membership
of the jury has undergone a number of changes, and the award has been
variously administered from first the USA, then the UK, Ireland, Sweden
and then back to the USA at the University of Kansas at Lawrence in 1979,
since when the committee has been chaired by James E. GUNN. The selections
have at times been criticized as overintellectual; the first was judged by
some to be untrue to the memory of Campbell. (In response, one judge
commented that it was no good trying to guess what Campbell would have
chosen; the only honest thing to do was to choose for oneself: "You can't
second-guess the dead.") The award, which has not been well publicized,
got off to a shaky start, but there is certainly room for an award voted
on by a small panel of experts, as opposed to fans (the HUGO) or writers
(the NEBULA). The winning books have generally been in interesting
contrast to the Hugo and Nebula winners, and include distinguished work
that might otherwise have largely escaped notice. [PN]Winners:1973: Barry
N. MALZBERG, Beyond Apollo; special trophy for excellence in writing to
Robert SILVERBERG1974: Arthur C. CLARKE, RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA, and Robert
MERLE, Malevil (tie)1975: Philip K. DICK, Flow My Tears, the Policeman
Said1976: Wilson TUCKER, The Year of the Quiet Sun (special retrospective
award)1977: Kingsley AMIS, The Alteration1978: Frederik POHL, GATEWAY1979:

Michael MOORCOCK, Gloriana1980: Thomas M. DISCH, ON WINGS OF SONG1981:
Gregory BENFORD, TIMESCAPE1982: Russell HOBAN, RIDDLEY WALKER1983: Brian
W. ALDISS, HELLICONIA SPRING1984: Gene WOLFE, The Citadel of the
Autarch1985: Frederik Pohl, The Years of the City1986: David BRIN, The
Postman1987: Joan SLONCZEWSKI, A Door Into Ocean1988: Connie WILLIS,
Lincoln's Dreams1989: Bruce STERLING, ISLANDS IN THE NET1990: Geoff RYMAN,
The Child Garden1991: Kim Stanley ROBINSON, Pacific Edge1992: Bradley
DENTON, BUDDY HOLLY IS ALIVE AND WELL ON GANYMEDE1993: Charles SHEFFIELD,
Brother to Dragons1994: No award
JOKAI, MOR or MAURUS
(1825-1904) Very prolific Hungarian novelist, the dominant literary
figure of 19th-century HUNGARY, frequently translated and still very
highly regarded. Many of his 100 or more novels are violent historical
tales, full of catastrophic incident. Az aranyember (1872; trans Mrs H.
Kennard as Timar's Two Worlds 1888 UK), which contrasts a hectic and
hysterical urban life with an idyllic UTOPIA established on an "ownerless
island" in the Danube, is not really sf, despite the title of its first
English translation. MJ did, however, write a number of anticipations in
novels and in short fiction, few of which have been translated into
English but many into German. Tales from Jokai (coll trans R. Nisbet Bain
1904 UK) contains "The City and the Beast" (1858), which deals with
ATLANTIS and its destruction, plus three contes cruels. An untranslated
novel, Oceania (1846), is also about Atlantis. The most important sf by
MJ, likewise untranslated into English, is A jovo szazad regenye ["The
Novel of the Next Century"] (1872), a dazzlingly inventive 3-vol novel of
the future. Egesz az eszaki polusig ["All the Way to the North Pole"]
(1876) is also sf, featuring SUSPENDED ANIMATION; Ahol a penz nem Isten
["Where Money is not a God"] (1904) is a utopian ROBINSONADE; Fekete
gyemantok (1870; trans A. Gerard as Black Diamonds 1896) has a scientist
seeking to create a utopia; it is partly set in an Arctic sea.
[PN/JC]Other work: Told by the Death's Head (trans 1902 of Egy hirhedett
kalandor a tizenhetedil szazadbol 1904).
JONES, D(ENNIS) F(ELTHAM)
(1917-1981) UK writer who served as an officer in the Royal Navy in WWII
and was variously employed afterwards. He began publishing sf with the
first - and best - volume of his Colossus trilogy, Colossus (1966),
effectively filmed as COLOSSUS, THE FORBIN PROJECT (1969). In both book
and film, Charles Forbin has helped to create a master COMPUTER designed
to coordinate all the defences of the Western World; however, the Soviets
have been building a similar computer, Guardian. In an impressive scene,
the two computers exchange information. Soon Colossus gains consciousness
and takes over the world. The sequels, The Fall of Colossus (1974 US) and
Colossus and the Crab (1977 US), expand from the first volume (in the
process diluting its admonitory impact) by introducing complicated plots,
religious sects that worship Colossus, and irritated Martians; ultimately
everything comes to a transcendental stop. Some of DFJ's other novels are
of interest. In Implosion (1967) most women have become sterile, those who
remain fertile being tied to a grimly DYSTOPIAN regime. Denver is Missing
(1971 US; vt Don't Pick the Flowers 1971 UK) subjects the city to

geological devastation. Earth Has Been Found (1979 US; vt Xeno 1979 UK)
burdens an unsuspecting Earth with an alien INVASION. All these later
novels succumb with excessive ease to a slick gloominess, caught in which
his characters show little scope for action or development, and by the end
of his career his work had lost most of its initial glum panache.
[JC]Other works: The Floating Zombie (1975); Bound in Time (1981).See
also: DISASTER.
JONES, DIANA WYNNE
(1934- ) UK writer whose name is sometimes incorrectly rendered as Diana
Wynne-Jones, although not on her books; probably the premier UK writer of
children's FANTASY today. She began her writing career as a playwright,
with three plays produced in London 1967-70, then published her first
novel (for adults and not sf), Changeover (1970). Her second, Wilkin's
Tooth (1973; vt Witch's Business 1974 US), was for children (as opposed to
teenagers), as were her next half-dozen or so. She hit her stride with her
third novel, The Ogre Downstairs (1974), which is very funny indeed about
the results of children playing with a magic alchemy set while at the same
time dealing honestly and movingly with some quite difficult human
problems. DWJ went on to write stories which, no matter how indirect or
devious their plots, always maintain an extraordinarily clearsighted
directness about sometimes painful human relationships.All her work for
children is fantastic, and most is shot through with HUMOUR; some is
fantasy with sf elements (precognition, ALTERNATE WORLDS); some is
borderline sf; some is sf proper. Dogsbody (1975), borderline sf, features
the incarnation of the star Sirius, exiled for an alleged murder, into the
body of a terrestrial dog. The Homeward Bounders (1981) features a child
trapped in a seemingly endless series of PARALLEL WORLDS. Perhaps DWJ's
best sf novel is Archer's Goon (1984), a splendidly convoluted mystery
involving TIME PARADOXES, alternate worlds, PARANOIA, writer's block and a
cheerful thug; it was dramatized by the BBC as a six-part tv serial in
1992. A Tale of Time City (1987), her most overtly sciencefictional story,
concerns a city outside time having trouble with the fabric of reality as
it sends patrollers up and down the time-stream.Fine fantasies from the
1970s include: Eight Days of Luke (1975), which has Norse gods amusingly
manifest on Earth; the Dalemark sequence, comprising Cart and Cwidder
(1975), Drowned Ammet (1977), The Spellcoats (1979) - one of her best
books, being set in the mythic prehistory of the other two - and The Crown
of Dalemark (1993); and Power of Three (1976), which regards humans from
an alien (or fairy) perspective.Through the 1980s DWJ's target audience
seemed, mostly, to become older. This is the case with The Time of the
Ghost (1981), perhaps her darkest work, and especially of her moving
reworking of the old ballad "Tam Lin" in Fire and Hemlock (1985). Other
good books of the period include the intricate Howl's Moving Castle (1986)
and its sequel Castle in the Air (1990). Her best-known series is the
Chrestomanci sequence: Charmed Life (1977), The Magicians of Caprona
(1980), Witch Week (1982) and The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988 US);
Chrestomanci is an enchanter who polices MAGIC across the parallel worlds.
Black Maria (1991; vt Aunt Maria 1991 US) has children trapped in a
seaside town held under the magical sway of their appalling aunt.Hidden
Turnings (anth 1989) is an ORIGINAL ANTHOLOGY of fantasy stories for

teenagers. A new departure is DWJ's fantasy for adults A Sudden Wild Magic
(1992 US), in which an alternate world planet has been using Earth as a
testing ground, thus generating much of the strife and tragedy of Earth's
history. [PN]Other works:Who Got Rid of Angus Flint? (1978 chap); The Four
Grannies (1980 chap); Warlock at the Wheel, and Other Stories (coll 1984),
containing a Chrestomanci story; The Skivers' Guide (1984); Wild Robert
(1989 chap); Chair Person (1989 chap); Hexwood (1993); Fantasy Stories
(anth 1994), containing reprints.See also: CHILDREN'S SF; GODS AND DEMONS;
MILFORD SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' CONFERENCE; MYTHOLOGY.
JONES, EDDIE
(1935- ) UK illustrator. One of the most prolific UK sf artists, EJ is
also one of the few in the field to be self-taught. His first professional
work was published in 1958 in Nebula and NW. He illustrated part-time
until 1969, when he became art director for VISION OF TOMORROW. He has
done sf covers for many publishers in the UK and Germany - notably Sphere
Books in the UK and Bastei Verlag, Fischer and Pabel in Germany - as well
as elsewhere, including the USA. His style is representational and uses
rich, glowing colours; he is best known for SPACESHIPS and other forms of
space hardware. [JG]
JONES, (THOMAS FREDERICK) GONNER
(? - ) UK writer of The Dome (1968), in which the eponymous brain is in
charge of a future city. [PN]
JONES, GWYNETH (ANN)
(1952- ) UK writer who became best known in the 1980s for three complex
adult sf novels, though most of her books have been juveniles, beginning
with Water in the Air (1977), a fantasy. From her fourth novel, Dear Hill
(1980), she has written sf and fantasy exclusively. Ally Ally Aster (1981)
and The Alder Tree (1982), both as by Ann Halam, exploit Norse and Gothic
material. King Death's Garden (1986), as by Halam, is a darkly subtle,
smoothly stark ghost story set in Brighton, where GJ lived. Set in postHOLOCAUST Inland, which is governed on deep-ecology lines by women, the
Zanne series - The Daymaker (1987), Transformations (1988) and The
Skybreaker (1990), all as by Halam - is bracingly sf. Young rebellious
Zanne slowly learns to control her innate rapport with the forbidden
high-tech artifacts of the old patriarchal world-destroying hegemony, and
becomes, willy-nilly and by protracted stages, an active agent in the sane
preservation of Inland. GJ's only 1980s juvenile under her own name, The
Hidden Ones (1988), is a contemporary urban fantasy. In Dinosaur Junction
(1992), as Halam, the young protagonist is confronted with dilemmas
relating to TIME TRAVEL and meets a dinosaur.GJ's first novel for adults,
DIVINE ENDURANCE (1984), remains her most widely admired. Like the Zanne
books, it is set in a post-holocaust land governed by a matriarchy, but
neither setting nor premise are presented with the clarity appropriate in
a juvenile text. No dates are given, but GJ's enormously complex Southeast
Asia venue has a dying-Earth ( FAR FUTURE) feel; and the matriarchical
society she depicts is riven by profound ambivalences. The protagonist, a
female android named Chosen Among the Beautiful, and the eponymous cat
which accompanies her, dangerously agitate the scene by arriving in it,
and a civil conflict begins to devastate the long polity of the land. The

hard melancholy and sustained density of the book are unique in recent sf.
Technically a sequel, Flowerdust (1993) - the title refers to a drug expands a background episode from the first book.Escape Plans (1986)
attempts some of the same density of effect through an acronym-heavy style
and a bruising presentation of the COMPUTER-run DYSTOPIAN world in which
the action takes place, but the sacrificial descent from other-world
luxury of the female protagonist and her implication in an inevitable
revolt have little of the resonance of her predecessor's structurally
identical gift of self. Kairos (1988), along with the first two books
-Flowerdust is a sidebar title, and should not be considered part of the
pattern being described - makes up a kind of thematic trilogy featuring
profoundly divided women who descend into the world and redeem it - is set
in a NEAR-FUTURE UK degenerating into fascism or anarchy. The title of the
book is a theological term designating the moment of fullness in time when
Christ appears, and clearly glosses the dramatic centre of each volume of
the implied trilogy. In this case the female protagonist descends into the
disintegrating UK's netherworld through ingesting a drug, Kairos, which
literally recasts reality around her. The world she creates is cleansed of
the grosser forms of evil. WHITE QUEEN (1991) moves beyond the pattern of
the previous books, confronting its protagonists (and the planet) with an
INVASION of ALIENS who themselves rewrite human perceptions of, and
therefore the rules that bind, reality. In 1992 the book shared the first
James Tiptree, Jr. Award with Eleanor ARNASON's A WOMAN OF THE IRON PEOPLE
(1991). A sequel, North Wind (1994), reworks the basic thematic material
some decades further into the ambivalent engagement of human and alien.In
her adult novels GJ is a writer of nearly unforgiving intensity, and on
occasion an incompetent story-teller; her very occasional short fiction,
assembled as Identifying the Object (coll 1993 chap US), confirms a sense
that she is most comfortable at lengths which give her room to think hard,
and perhaps recklessly. But the rewards for understanding her are so
considerable that the task of learning how to do so seems light enough.
[JC]Other works: The Influence of Ironwood (1978) and The Exchange (1979),
associational juveniles.See also: AUTOMATION; CYBORGS; INTERZONE; WOMEN AS
PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION.
JONES, LANGDON
(1942- ) UK short-story writer, editor and musician, strongly associated
with NEW WORLDS during its NEW-WAVE period both as contributor - he
published all his sf stories there, beginning with "Storm Water Tunnel" in
1964 - and in various editorial capacities. His most memorable work, most
of it experimental in form and characterized by a strongly angular
narrative style, appears in The Eye of the Lens (coll 1972). LJ's wide
taste as an editor was demonstrated in The New SF (anth 1969); he also
collaborated with Michael MOORCOCK in assembling The Nature of the
Catastrophe (anth 1971), which contained a number of Jerry Cornelius
stories from NW written by Moorcock and others. The first published
version of Mervyn PEAKE's Titus Alone (1959) had been heavily edited
because of Peake's degenerative illness, and LJ was responsible for the
reconstruction work resulting in the posthumous 1970 publication of the
definitive version of the book. [JC]See also: ARTS; MUSIC.

JONES, MARGARET
(? - ) UK writer and lecturer in human communication studies. In The Day
They Put Humpty Together Again (1968; vt Transplant 1968 US)
prosthetic-surgery techniques are used to wire an artist's head to a
criminal's libidinous torso. Through the Budgerigar (1970) is a fantasy.
[JC]
JONES, MERVYN
(1922- ) UK writer best known for his many novels outside the sf field
and for journalism with the political magazine New Statesman. On the Last
Day (1958) is a NEAR-FUTURE story about attempts during WWIII to build a
new intercontinental missile. [JC]
JONES, NEIL R(ONALD)
(1909-1988) US writer who until his retirement in 1973 worked as a New
York State unemployment insurance claims investigator. His first story,
"The Death's Head Meteor" (the first sf story to use the word "astronaut")
for Air Wonder Stories in 1930, shares with almost all his fiction a very
generalized common background, a future HISTORY-one of the earliest seen
in US genre sf - which is given some explanation in "Time's Mausoleum"
(1933), a story from the Professor Jameson series. Against a background of
epic advances and conflicts in the 24th and 26th centuries, Professor
Jameson arranges for his corpse to be preserved indefinitely in orbit.
After millions of years, long after all other humans have died, he is
woken by the ROBOT Zoromes, which encase his brain in metal and give him
the chance to travel the Universe in search of knowledge and adventure. He
embraces the opportunity. The first Jameson story, "The Jameson
Satellite", dates from 1931. Most of the pre-WWII stories in the series
appeared in AMZ, and most of the somewhat inferior later instalments in
Super Science Stories and Astonishing Stories. The first 16 stories of the
sequence were collected much later as The Planet of the Double Sun (coll
1967), The Sunless World (coll 1967), Space War (coll 1967), Twin Worlds
(coll 1967) and Doomsday on Ajiat (coll 1968 including 2 previously
unpublished stories). The stories that did not reach book form are "The
Cat-Men of Aemt" (1940), "Cosmic Derelict" (1941), "Slaves of the Unknown"
(1942), "Parasite Planet" (1949), "World without Darkness" (1950), "The
Mind Masters" (1950) and "The Star Killers" (1951); of the 7 further
hitherto-unpublished stories "Exiles from Below" appeared in the
SEMIPROZINE Astro-Adventures in 1987.NRJ was a vigorous, straightforward
writer whose style and concerns were typical of the first blossoming of sf
at the end of the 1920s. [JC]See also: CYBORGS; IMMORTALITY; UNDER THE
SEA.
JONES, RAYMOND F.
(1915-1994) US writer, very active for about 15 years after he first
appeared in ASF in 1941 with "Test of the Gods". He was virtually silent
in the 1960s; some novels appeared in the 1970s. His best-known short
story is the witty "Noise Level" (1952), an archetypal ASF tale of
CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH, scientific advance taking place through
destruction of a previous paradigm: SCIENTISTS are told that ANTIGRAVITY
exists, and so proceed to invent it. The story had two sequels, "Trade
Secret" (1953) and "The School" (1954). During his most prolific - and

most exciting - period he wrote 1 story, "Utility" (1944), under the
pseudonym David Anderson. Two collections, The Toymaker (coll 1951) and
The Non-Statistical Man (coll 1964), gather much of this work.RFJ's first
novel, also from that time, is probably his best. Renaissance (1944 ASF;
1951; vt Man of Two Worlds 1963) is a long, complicated PARALLEL-WORLDS
adventure with an exciting narrative - WAR, superscience and echoes of
nuclear HOLOCAUST - and a number of lively variations on favourite sf
themes. The Alien (1951), the story of the discovery of an ancient ALIEN
artifact in the ASTEROID belt, likewise displays strong narrative drive.
This Island Earth (1949-50 TWS; fixup 1952) begins with beleaguered ALIENS
secretly using human scientists in order to resist an enemy in an
intergalactic war which threatens to engulf Earth. The protagonist finally
persuades them that, by allowing their tactics to be dictated by vast
COMPUTERS, they have become predictable to the enemy. But he may be too
late. The film version, THIS ISLAND EARTH (1954), begins well but loses
interest when it diverges - perhaps inevitably-from the book.RFJ's 1950s
juveniles are also good. They are Son of the Stars (1952), Planet of Light
(1953) and The Year when Stardust Fell (1958).After The Secret People
(1956; vt The Deviates 1959) and The Cybernetic Brains (1950 Startling
Stories; 1962) RFJ became comparatively inactive, and more recent novels,
like Syn (1969) and Weeping May Tarry (1978), the latter with Lester DEL
REY, show a much diminished energy. Though not generally an innovator in
the field, RFJ, during his first period of activity, produced solid, well
crafted HARD-SF adventures. [JC/PN]Other works: Voyage to the Bottom of
the Sea * (1965), a tie to the tv series VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA;
Moonbase One (1971); Renegades of Time (1975 Canada); The King of Eolim
(1975 Canada); The River and the Dream (1977 Canada).See also: ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION; CYBERNETICS; CYBORGS; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION;
DYSTOPIAS;
GREAT AND SMALL; ISLANDS; PHYSICS; POWER SOURCES; SUSPENDED ANIMATION.
JONES, RICHARD GLYN
[r] Richard GLYN JONES.
JONES, ROBERT F(RANCIS)
(1934- ) US journalist (with Time-Life) and writer whose sf novel, Blood
Sport: A Journey up the Hassayampa (1974; vt Ratnose 1975 UK), follows a
man and his son up the Hassayampa River, along whose banks the future, the
present and the past exist simultaneously, together with every imaginable
culture as well as the villain Ratnose, against whom the protagonists must
prove themselves. [JC]
JONG, ERICA (MANN)
(1942- ) US poet and novelist, best known for the FEMINIST energy of her
first novel, Fear of Flying (1971). Her only tale of genre interest,
Serenissima (1987), is a timeslip fantasy with some sf language
inattentively buttressing the premise. The protagonist, haunted amid the
playfully sketched glitterati of the Venice film festival, slips back to
the 16th century ( TIME TRAVEL), where she meets a vacationing Shakespeare
and has sex with him. Dying, she is - anticlimactically - reborn in the
here and now. [JC/JG]

JORDAN, SIDNEY
[r] JEFF HAWKE.
JORGENSEN, IVAR
Floating PSEUDONYM first used in the ZIFF-DAVIS magazines AMAZING STORIES
and FANTASTIC, subsequently used in IF, IMAGINATION and IMAGINATIVE TALES.
Its main user was Paul W. FAIRMAN (whom see for details), who employed it
for 3 books: Ten from Infinity (1963; vt The Deadly Sky 1971; vt Ten
Deadly Men 1976), Rest in Agony (1963; vt The Diabolist 1972) and Whom the
Gods Would Slay (1951 Fantastic Adventures; 1968). One of Fairman's
stories as by IJ, "Deadly City" (1953 If), was filmed as TARGET EARTH!
(1954). Other writers who may have used the name IJ include Harlan
ELLISON, Randall GARRETT and Robert SILVERBERG, although IJ should not be
confused with Ivar Jorgenson, a later pseudonym of Silverberg's. [BS]
JORGENSON, IVAR
[s] Robert SILVERBERG.
JOSEPH, M(ICHAEL) K(ENNEDY)
(1914-1981) UK-born and Oxford-educated New Zealand writer and professor
of English; his first novels were not sf. The Hole in the Zero (1967 UK)
begins as an apparently typical SPACE-OPERA adventure into further
dimensions at the edge of the Universe, but quickly reveals itself as a
linguistically brilliant, complex exploration of the nature of the four
personalities involved as they begin out of their own resources to shape
the low-probability regions into which they have tumbled. Ultimately the
novel takes on allegorical overtones. As an examination of the
metaphorical potentials of sf language and subject matter, it is a
significant contribution to the field. In 1969 MKJ also produced a
scholarly edition of Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein(1818). [JC]Other works:
The Time of Achamoth (1977).See also: FANTASTIC VOYAGES; NEW ZEALAND.
JOSIKA, MIKLOS
[r] HUNGARY.
JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS
US academic critical journal sponsored by the International Association
for the Fantastic in the Arts, current, theoretically quarterly but
irregular after the first 4 issues (1988), with a further 6 issues during
1989-1991. Then the schedule became more regular, and the journal had
reached #21 (Vol 6, no 1) by 1994. Vol 1 #1-#4 published M.E. Sharpe, Inc.
, New York, subsequent issues by Orion Publishing, New York. Executive ed
Carl B. YOKE; other eds Marshall B. TYMN, Roger SCHLOBIN and Robert A.
Collins and later Charles A. Meyer.This comparatively recent addition to
the specialist academic journals dealing with sf ( EXTRAPOLATION;
FOUNDATION; SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES) has, on the whole, been vigorous and
(mostly) eschews excessive critical jargon. Because its remit includes the
whole range of the fantastic, including not only sf but also FANTASY,
HORROR and FABULATION, it has a certain amplitude the others lack usefully so in a period of literary history when generic boundaries are
rapidly dissolving - but by the same token it sometimes appears unfocused.
However, some of the issues have been thematic, vol 1 #4 being about
POSTMODERNISM, vol 2 #2 about CINEMA, vol 2 #3 about Doris LESSING and vol

3 #1 about art, for example. The portfolios of fantastic art have been
largely disastrous, but otherwise JOTFITA seems a promising addition to
the field. [PN]
JOURNAL WIRED
Semi-annual SEMIPROZINE from a SMALL PRESS in paperback-book form
("bookazine"), Winter 1989-Summer/Fall 1990, 3 issues only, published and
ed from California and Colorado by Andy Watson and MARK V. ZIESING. This
hip, elegant and short-lived periodical ran fiction by a mixture of
interesting new writers and better known names (like Paul Di Filippo,
Colin GREENLAND, Rudy RUCKER and Lewis SHINER), interviews (William
BURROUGHS and others) and commentary by Lucius SHEPARD and others on
politics, rock'n'roll, movies and even sf. At 363pp, the last issue was
very big. Some stories are sf. If the term NEW WAVE were still used, this
would have been a new-wave magazine. [PN]
JOURNEY INTO SPACE
Charles CHILTON; RADIO.
JOURNEY THROUGH THE BLACK SUN
SPACE 1999.
JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH
Film (1959). 20th Century-Fox. Prod Charles Brackett. Dir Henry Levin,
starring Pat Boone, James Mason, Arlene Dahl, Thayer David, Peter Ronson,
Diane Baker. Screenplay Walter Reisch, Brackett, based on Voyage au centre
de la terre (1864) by Jules VERNE. 132 mins. Colour.A lively and literate
screenplay (cowritten by producer Brackett, one of the Hollywood giants),
vigorous if stereotyped characterization, good performances and a charming
duck called Gertrud make this superior among the numerous Verne
adaptations of the 1950s. There is a real SENSE OF WONDER in some of the
underground sequences - which involve labyrinthine caverns, a great ocean
at the centre of the HOLLOW EARTH, the remains of ATLANTIS and statutory
dinosaurs (iguanas with fins attached) - though the special effects are
uneven. The escape from the centre riding a lava jet on an Atlantean altar
of serpentine up a presumably 3,900-mile (6,250km) volcanic shaft is
merely absurd; but, despite plot changes - including a rival expedition
led by a satisfyingly villainous Icelander played by David - JTTCOTE, set
in the 1880s, is true in spirit to its stirring original. [PN]
JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF TIME
Film (1967). Borealis/Dorad. Dir David L. Hewitt, starring Scott Brady,
Gigi Perreau, Anthony Eisley, Abraham Sofaer. Screenplay David Prentiss.
82 mins. Colour.Hewitt had been co-screenwriter and special-effects
director of The TIME TRAVELERS (1964), dir Ib Melchior, and JTTCOT is a
remake of the earlier film. A pointless, low-budget exercise, certainly no
better than the original, it does contain an additional sequence - a
battle against a dinosaur - set in the past. [PN]
JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN
DOPPELGANGER.
J.S. OF DALE
Pseudonym of F.J. Stimson. Robert GRANT.

JUBILEE
Film (1978). Waley-Malin Production/Megalovision. Written and dir Derek
Jarman, starring Jenny Runacre, Little Nell, Toyah Willcox, Jordan,
Orlando, Richard O'Brien, Ian Charleson, Adam Ant. 104 mins. Colour.This
was the first solo film by Jarman, one of the doyens of gay, experimental
and gender-bending cinema in the UK. The film, which displays a strong
sense of irony about the glories of England, was made to be released just
in time for Queen Elizabeth II's Jubilee celebrations. Queen Elizabeth I
(Runacre) is given the power to glimpse the future. This is (for us) a
NEAR-FUTURE London which is decayed, punk and anarchic, though retaining a
certain youthful energy (most characters being in their early 20s). The
forced decadence of the action is more middle-class Chelsea than
streetwise, and the film - with all its orgies, its castrations, its
shootings and its music arranged by Brian Eno - is theatrical high camp.
[PN]
JUDD, CYRIL
Pseudonym used for their 2 collaborative novels by C.M. KORNBLUTH and
Judith MERRIL (both of whom see for further details): Outpost Mars (1952;
rev vt Sin in Space 1961) and Gunner Cade (1952). [BS]
JUDGE DREDD
Judge (Joe) Dredd is an ultra-tough, mean, ruthless, granite-jawed lawman
of the future Mega-City One. The strip of which he is the HERO (or maybe
antihero) was created by Pat Mills, John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra
(artist). It first appeared in 2,000 AD #2 (5 Mar 1977), drawn by Mike
McMahon, and more than 800 issues later continued to dominate that COMIC.
In a world after the atomic HOLOCAUST, the millions of survivors are
crowded into vastly overpopulated Mega- CITIES whose soaring crime rate is
dealt with by the Judges, a breed of genetically selected men and (rarely)
women. Dressed in black leather with massively chunky insignia and
exaggerated elbow-, knee- and shoulder-pads, riding heftily armoured
motorcycles with ultra-wide wheels, these law officers have the power to
dole out on-the-spot sentences ranging from multi-credit fines to life
sentences in far-flung penal colonies. Early stories featured an
occasional sidekick, Walter the Wobot, a ROBOT valet with a speech defect.
The story-lines, mostly by John Wagner and Alan Grant (variously credited
to them under their own names and a number of their pseudonyms), quickly
established a high standard of plotting and characterization, with a
significant thread of grittily humorous social SATIRE. From this fertile
source flowed a rich succession of original ideas that served to establish
JD as one of the most popular comic-strip characters ever created. Among
the Wagner-Grant collaborations has been "The Apocalypse War" (25
episodes, 1982), as by T.B. Grover. Throughout, both storytelling and
characterization have been enriched by a strong element of continuity
introduced by Pat Mills, who has also written a number of the stories,
including 19 episodes of "The Cursed Earth" (25 episodes, 1978). Artists
on JD have included Brian BOLLAND, Esquerra, Ian Gibson, John Higgins, Can
Kennedy, Brendan McCarthy, McMahon, Colin MacNeil, Ron Smith and a host of
others.A few of JD's colleagues have become prominent enough to feature in
spin-off strips of their own: Judge Anderson of PSI Division, a female

Judge with PSI POWERS; Judge Death, a Judge from another DIMENSION where
all lifeforms have been sentenced to death, a verdict he has been
empowered to enforce throughout the universes; and Judge Armour, JD's
equivalent in the city called Brit Cit.The phenomenal popularity of JD has
led to a proliferation of spin-off publications, including among others 2
monthly black-and-white reprint titles (Best of 2,000 AD Monthly, which
does not focus on JD, and The Complete Judge Dredd, which does) and more
recently a monthly Judge Dredd, The Megazine, with mostly full-colour
painted artwork, published in different formats for the UK and US editions
and featuring serial stories, some starring JD, which cross over with the
parent comic. Reprint books have been published by Titan Books in the The
Chronicles of Judge Dredd series (begun 1981) and the Judge Dredd Graphic
Paperbacks series (begun 1988), with further material constantly being
added; there are also annuals, yearbooks and other titles.A separate
company, Eagle Comics, was set up to exploit JD in the USA, reprinting his
early 2,000 AD adventures but in colour and adapted for the US comic-book
format; the practice was taken over by Quality Comics. Both enterprises
overcame the problem of incompatible page proportions by stretching the
image on a laser copier; this had the effect of making all the characters
appear tall and skinny. JD took a further ponderous step across the
international stage with the publication of a DC COMICS/Fleetway
collaboration, Judgement on Gotham (graph 1991), featuring a Judge
Dredd/Batman team-up; this was written by the Wagner-Grant team and
painted by the talented high-flier Simon Bisley. In 1993 series of novels
featuring JD was begun with The Savage Amusement * (1993) by David Bishop,
Deathmasques * (1993) by Dave Stone and Dreddlocked * (1993) by Stephen
Marley, and it was reported that a film, starring Sylvester Stallone, was
in production. [RT]See also: GAMES AND TOYS.
JUENGER, ERNST
Ernst JUNGER.
JUGOSLAVIA
YUGOSLAVIA.
JULES VERNE-MAGASINET
Sam J. LUNDWALL; SCANDINAVIA.
JULES VERNE'S ROCKET TO THE MOON
FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON.
JUNGER, ERNST
(1895- ) German writer whose early works reflected his experiences in
WWI. Auf den Marmorklippen (1939; trans Stuart Hood as On the Marble
Cliffs 1947 UK as by Ernst Juenger) - though its status as a classic of
resistance to Nazism has been somewhat shaken by analysis of its
broodingly passive austerity regarding political action - is a peculiarly
resonant allegory of the destruction of a civilized country by an
incursion of vandal-like conquerors. Glaserne Bienen (1957; trans Louise
Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer as The Glass Bees 1960 US as by Ernst Juenger)
also applies an allegorical mode to the story of the creation and use of
ROBOT bees for industrial work. Heliopolis (1949), an ironical UTOPIA,
remains untranslated. [JC]Oher Works: Aladins Problem(1983; Joachim

Neugroschel as Aladdin's Problem 1992 US).See also: GERMANY.
JUPITER
Jupiter's importance in sf is derived from its status as the largest
planet in the Solar System and also the most accessible - because nearest
to Earth - of the GAS GIANTS. Its four major moons - Ganymede, Callisto,
Io and Europa - were discovered by Galileo, but it was not until 1892 that
the US astronomer Edward Barnard (1857-1923) discovered the fifth. About a
dozen others have been discovered in the 20th century. The visible
"surface" of Jupiter is an outer layer of a very dense, deep atmosphere
and is thus fluid, though it does have one enigmatic feature that has
endured at least since 1831: the Great Red Spot.Jupiter was included in
various interplanetary tours inspired by the religious imagination, and is
prominent in several 19th-century interplanetary novels, including A World
of Wonders (1838) by Joel R. Peabody, the anonymously published The
Experiences of Eon and Eona (1886; by J.B. Fayette) and John Jacob ASTOR's
A Journey in Other Worlds (1894), in which it is a "prehistoric" version
of Earth, replete with dinosaurs, etc. It is a parallel of Earth in A
Fortnight in Heaven (1886) by Harold Brydges (1858-1939) and in the
anonymous To Jupiter via Hell (1908). As astronomical discoveries were
popularized, however, the credibility of an Earthlike Jupiter waned
rapidly. The last significant novel to use a Jovian scenario for
straightforward UTOPIAN modelling was Ella SCRYMSOUR's The Perfect World
(1922), though pulp-sf writers squeezed a little more melodramatic life
out of the notion. Edmond HAMILTON's "A Conquest of Two Worlds" (1932)
tells the harrowing tale of the human invasion of Jupiter, and Edgar Rice
BURROUGHS sent John Carter there to fight the eponymous "The Skeleton Men
of Jupiter" (1943).Many exotic romances set beyond the orbit of Mars
employ the satellites of Jupiter. Ganymede is featured in E.E. "Doc"
SMITH's Spacehounds of IPC (1931 AMZ; 1947) and in Leigh BRACKETT's "The
Dancing Girl of Ganymede" (1950), and Io features in two notable early
pulp-sf stories: Stanley G. WEINBAUM's "The Mad Moon" (1935) and Raymond
Z. GALLUN's "The Lotus Engine" (1940). John W. CAMPBELL Jr required
contributors to ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION to pay more attention to what
was actually known about the planets. Early applications of this new
realism to Jupiter are "Heavy Planet" (1939) by Lee Gregor (Milton A.
Rothman; Tony ROTHMAN) and "Clerical Error" (1940) by Clifford D. SIMAK.
Simak revisited Jupiter in his curious "Desertion" (1944), in which humans
undergo biological metamorphosis in order to enjoy a paradisal existence
there. Isaac ASIMOV set one of his earliest stories, "The Callistan
Menace" (1940), in the neighbourhood, then turned his attention to Jupiter
itself in "Not Final!" (1941), in which hostile aliens are discovered
there, and in "Victory Unintentional" (1942), in which Jovians fail to
realize that their visitors are ROBOTS rather than men. Two classic
magazine sf stories dealing with conditions on Jupiter are James BLISH's
"Bridge" (1952 ASF; incorporated into They Shall Have Stars fixup 1956; vt
Year 2018!), in which a colossal experiment to test hypotheses tests also
the psychological resilience of the experimenters, and Poul ANDERSON's
"Call Me Joe" (1957), about the everyday life of an artificial
centaur-like creature designed for the Jovian environment. Anderson later
made use of a similar background in Three Worlds to Conquer (1964) - the

worlds being Jupiter, Ganymede and Earth - in which Ganymede comes into
focus as a possible site for a colony, a notion developed also by Robert
A. HEINLEIN in Farmer in the Sky (1950), Anderson again in The Snows of
Ganymede (1955 Startling Stories; 1958) and Robert SILVERBERG in Invaders
from Earth (1958). Blish, however, recognized that such COLONIZATION would
require considerable GENETIC ENGINEERING (which he called PANTROPY), as
displayed in "A Time to Survive" (1956 FSF; incorporated into THE SEEDLING
STARS, fixup 1957).Although it has become obvious that humans could never
live on Jupiter, the idea of a descent into its atmosphere continues to
attract attention. Such descents are featured in Isaac Asimov's Lucky
Starr and the Moons of Jupiter (1957 as by Paul French; vt The Moons of
Jupiter), the brothers STRUGATSKI's "Destination: Amaltheia" (1960; trans
1962), Arthur C. CLARKE's "A Meeting With Medusa" (1971) and its
elaboration as The Medusa Encounter (1990) by Paul PREUSS, Ben BOVA's As
on a Darkling Plain (1972) and Gregory BENFORD's and Gordon EKLUND's "The
Anvil of Jove" (1976; incorporated into If the Stars are Gods, fixup
1977). Several of these stories cling to the hope that Jupiter might
harbour alien life of some kind, albeit nothing remotely humanoid, as does
Benford's juvenile novel Jupiter Project (1975; rev 1980). By far the most
spectacular use to which Jupiter has recently been put, however, is in
Arthur Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two (1982), in which it is elevated to the
status of a second sun by monolithic di ex machina in order to give a
crucial boost to evolution on Europa - an idea echoed in Charles L.
HARNESS's Lunar Justice (1991). Europa (as revealed by the Voyager probes)
is also the centre of attention in Charles SHEFFIELD's Cold as Ice (1992).
A relevant theme anthology is Jupiter (anth 1973) ed Frederik and Carol
POHL. [BS]
JUPITER AWARD
AWARDS.
JURASSIC PARK
Film (1993). Amblin Entertainment/Universal. Dir Steven SPIELBERG, prod
Kathleen Kennedy and Gerald R. Molen; screenplay Michael CRICHTON and
David Koepp, based on JURASSIC PARK (1990) by Crichton; starring Sam
Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough, Bob Peck, Joseph
Mazello and Ariana Richards. 127 mins. Colour.A theme park on an island
off the coast of Costa Rica has been stocked with dinosaurs cloned from
DNA that was found within mosquitos preserved in amber. A male
palaeontologist Dr Alan Grant (Neill), a woman palaeobotanist Dr Ellie
Sattler (Dern) and a male mathematical expert in chaos theory Ian Malcolm
(Goldblum) are invited by the entrepreneur who had the place built, John
Hammond (Attenborough), to give their opinions of his success. Also
present are Hammond's two grandchildren, Tim and Lex (Mazello and
Richards). A criminal scheme from the chief of the park's computer systems
combines with an oncoming storm so that the security systems break down
while all these characters but Hammond, along with a nasty lawyer, are on
a tour of the park in automated cars whose power fails. The dinosaurs are
loose, the characters are stranded in the wind, rain and darkness, and a
tyrannosaurus rex is not far away. The rest of the film is a jolly
roller-coaster ride with only subsidiary characters getting killed (unlike

the book), and an astonishing display of convincing dinosaur
animation-these dinosaurs will be definitive in the history of special
effects-climaxing back in the park's headquarters with velociraptors out
to get the kids. This, unsurprisingly from Spielberg, the man who directed
E.T.: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL (1982), cost $60 million to make, was the
blockbuster of its year and, internationally, the highest grossing film
ever made. Although it easily won a HUGO in 1994, and was hugely enjoyed
by almost everyone, it did not escape criticism.Nearly all intellectual
toughness has been leached out of Crichton's original novel: the Luddite
chaos theoretician who explains why things are bound to go wrong when
technology is on the loose has nearly all his lines cut in the film, which
leaves him little to do; the theme-park designing capitalist, rather nasty
in the book, is rendered as cuddly as Santa Claus; a miscellaneous
collection of narrative loose ends points towards what must have been
gargantuan script difficulties never adequately resolved. In rendering the
film not too scary for kids and not too critical of the entertainment
business, the film is softened. The relationships play it cute, notably
child-hating Grant having to take care of the two children, and becoming a
sentimentalist. There has been much discussion of who first had the idea
of cloning dinosaurs from DNA; it appeared in an exploitation film of the
same year, Carnosaur (1993), based on the 1984 horror novel by Harry Adam
Knight (John BROSNAN) which predates Crichton's, but in fact it has been a
repeated theme in sf, an early example being "The Hunting Season" (1951
ASF) by Frank M. ROBINSON. But a more direct and obvious source for both
book and movie is Crichton's own film WESTWORLD (1973), which was also
about a theme park whose inhabitants-in this case robot gunslingers-become
homicidal. But criticisms cannot harm this state-of-the-art sf
extravaganza, for the heroic abilities of the myriad special-effects
designers and the cinematographer (Dean Cundey), far outweigh the
shortcomings of the script for nearly all viewers. After all, it is
primarily a film for children. [PN]
JUST IMAGINE
Film (1930). Fox. Dir David Butler, starring El Brendel, Frank Albertson,
Maureen O'Sullivan, John Garrick. Screenplay David Butler, Ray Henderson,
G.G. DeSylva, Lew Brown. 113 mins. B/w.The failure of this expensive sf
blockbuster - one of a flood of musicals that appeared after the advent of
sound in movies - may help explain why Hollywood kept clear of sf subjects
(except in the context of horror) for so long afterwards, but it was the
whimsicality of the silly story, rather than its sf content, that led to
JI's failure. A man is struck by lightning while playing golf in 1930 and
wakes to find himself in New York in 1980. Thereafter he acts as comic
relief. There follow a stowing-away on a spaceship, a beautiful Martian
princess, and a romantic-triangle plot between two 1980 men and a 1980
woman (who like everyone else in 1980 have numbers rather than names), all
interspersed with banal musical numbers. The special effects are good for
their period, and the sets by art directors Stephen Goosson and Ralph
Hammeras are spectacular, in particular the huge, futuristic model, which
cost $250,000 to build, of New York City. This city of the future is
imaginatively designed and just as memorable as its obvious progenitor,
the one in METROPOLIS (1926). [JB]See also: MUSIC.

JUVENILE SF
CHILDREN'S SF.
JUVENILE SERIES
When dime novels ( DIME-NOVEL SF) declined and disappeared in the 1900s partly because of public outcry against their supposed evil effect on
boys, and partly because of increasing competition from the PULP
MAGAZINES, which had become comparable in price - the torch of juvenile sf
was taken up by a new format, illustrated hardcover juvenile book series,
and the ideas in these began to range more widely. The Great Marvel series
(9 books 1906-35) by Roy ROCKWOOD - the first hardcover sf series on
record - began featuring interplanetary explorations and discoveries with
Through Space to Mars, or The Longest Journey on Record (1910), and was
surpassed in quality as juvenile-series sf only by Carl H. CLAUDY's later
Adventures in the Unknown series (1933-4), the 4 vols of which told of
TIME TRAVEL, journeys into the fourth DIMENSION and discoveries of ALIEN
intelligences on MARS and in the Earth's crust. Although their plots were
at least as strong as those of the contemporary GERNSBACK magazine
stories, they proved less popular than the tales of the Earthbound TOM
SWIFT (1910-41). In the years 1910-40 there were dozens of other book
series aimed at teenage boys and many had themes of scientific invention natural enough at a time when Edison and Ford were two of the greatest US
heroes ( EDISONADE) - but those named above are the most fondly
remembered.In the 1930s juvenile series began to appear in a new format,
the Big Little Books, squat, card-bound 3in x 4in (7.5cm x 10cm upright)
volumes which alternated full-page illustrations with text pages. Derived
from the COMICS, they included novelizations of BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH
CENTURY, FLASH GORDON and SUPERMAN. Their demise came in the late 1940s,
at which time Robert A. HEINLEIN's juveniles were becoming successful,
heralding a new wave of hardcover CHILDREN'S SF series, some of which were
novelized adventures derived from popular TELEVISION series.Tom Swift (or,
more accurately, his son) reappeared in the 1950s together with TOM
CORBETT: SPACE CADET, Rip Foster and others, all united by their
interplanetary settings, a feature shared by Isaac ASIMOV's Lucky Starr
series (1952-8; originally as by Paul French) and by E.C. ELIOTT's Kemlo
series (1954-63). [JE/PN]

SF?
KADREY, RICHARD
(1957- ) US writer, rock musician and illustrator; he did the cover for
INTERZONE #9 and the vigorous though somewhat derivative collage
illustrations for Dream Protocols (coll 1992 chap) by sf poet Lee
Ballentine (1954- ); he has also contributed articles to SCIENCE FICTION
EYE and Whole Earth Review. His first published sf was "The Fire Catcher"
(Interzone 1985; Omni 1986). Not wholly assimilated influences like
CYBERPUNK and J.G. BALLARD give an element of pastiche to his early work,
including his novel Metrophage (1988), but the latter transcends it in a
vigorous and inventive tale of a mean-streetwise drug pusher's problems in
a NEAR-FUTURE Los Angeles that is being eaten alive by urban decay, police

corruption and corporate cynicism. It reads like a supercharged arcade
game that appals even its creator.Covert Culture Sourcebook: A Guide to
Fringe Culture (1993) surveys similar territory from a non-fiction point
of view. [PN]
KAEMPFERT, WADE
House pseudonym (pronounced Kemfer) used by the editors of ROCKET
STORIES: Lester DEL REY on the first 2 issues and Harry HARRISON on the
#3. [PN]
KAFKA, FRANZ
(1883-1924) Czech novelist, not usually or profitably considered a writer
of fantasy or sf, though some of his stories - such as In der Strafkolonie
(1919 chap; trans 1933; trans Willa and Edwin Muir as title story in The
Penal Colony coll 1948 US; vt In the Penal Settlement 1949 UK) and Die
Verwandlung (1915; trans A.L. Lloyd as The Metamorphosis 1937 chap UK) present through a prose of hallucinated transparency a world radically
displaced from normal reality ( FABULATION). The former tells of an
execution machine which incises moral slogans on the victim's body; the
latter is a horrifying allegory of alienation in which a young man is
transformed overnight into a huge beetle. Other fables are included in The
Great Wall of China (coll trans Willa and Edwin Muir 1933 UK) and The
Transformation and Other Stories: Works Published during Kafka's Lifetime
(coll trans Malcolm Pasley 1992 UK), which presents a new version of Die
Verwandlung plus other material whose release FK sanctioned. His most
famous works - none finished and all published posthumously (and despite
his apparent wishes that they be destroyed on his death) - are his three
novels: Amerika (written 1911-14; 1927; trans Willa and Edwin Muir 1938
UK), Der Prozess (written 1914-15; 1925; trans Willa and Edwin Muir as The
Trial 1937 UK) and Das Schloss (written 1921-22; 1926; trans Willa and
Edwin Muir as The Castle 1930 UK). Though all share a vision of the
menacing absurdity of the world ( ABSURDIST SF), when read in
chronological order of writing they present an illuminating sequence from
the persecuted innocence of Amerika's protagonist (literally displaced
into a surrealistic New World) to the confidence-man ingenuities of K.,
the protagonist of The Castle, who seems almost capable of forcing the
20th-century world to give him meaning and a room. FK's work is Modernist,
its fable-like quality indefinably dreamlike; his influence, which has
been enormous, permeates much of modern sf's attempts to get at the
quality of life in dislocated, totalitarian, surrealistic or merely
inscrutable venues. [JC]About the author: The literature on FK is
enormous. A recent study of interest is Franz Kafka (1990) by Pietro
Citati.See also: AUSTRIA; FANTASY; MONSTERS; PARANOIA.
KAGAN, JANET
(1946- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Faith-of-the Month" for
ASF in 1982, and who won a 1993 HUGO Best Novelette Award for"The
Nutcracker Coup" (1992). Her first sf book was a STAR TREK tie, Uhura's
Song * (1985), reckoned to be one of the better novels attached to that
enterprise. Her second novel, Hellspark (1988), carries some of the same
digestible competence into an sf adventure whose heroine (attended by a
sentient AI) must defend the inhabitants of a valuable planet from a

predatory corporation, helped in her task by her very considerable
competence in kinesics and LINGUISTICS. More interesting is Mirabile (coll
of linked stories 1991), a loosely linked portrait of the eponymous
planet, colonized by humans who import flora and fauna whose DNA has been
genetically engineered to provide the new colony with all sorts of
lifeforms. However, the records (of what will sprout from what) have been
lost, and the heroine must cope with a variety of comic crises. [JC]
KAGAN, NORMAN
(? - ) US writer whose occasional sf stories, from "The Mathenauts" for
If in 1964, have sometimes dealt vigorously and amusingly with MATHEMATICS
as a subject, and tend to feature extroverted mathematicians as
protagonists. NK also wrote The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick (1972; exp
1989). [JC]See also: DIMENSIONS; FANTASTIC VOYAGES.
KAGARLITSKI, JULIUS (IOSIFOVICH)
(1926- ) Russian critic and professor of European drama at the State
Theatrical Institute in Moscow. JK, one of the leading Russian critics to
have a strong interest in sf, published the first and most comprehensive
study in the then USSR of an individual sf author: Herbert Wells (1963;
trans as The Life and Thought of H.G. Wells 1966 UK; considerably rev and
exp vt Vggiadyvaias v Griadusheie ["Staring into the Future"] 1989). He
later edited a 15-vol set of Wells's collected works (1965). Tchto Takoie
Fantastika? ["What is the Fantastic?"] (1974) is a popular history of the
genre, and has been translated into several languages (not English). JK
won, unusually, the Chief Award of the Polish Ministry of Culture, and,
again unusually, in 1972 the PILGRIM AWARD for services to sf studies.
[PN/VG]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; RUSSIA.
KAHN, JAMES
(1947- ) US physician and writer who began publishing sf with "Mobius
Trip" in 1971, but who has been most active as a novelist, usually of film
adaptations. His New World trilogy - World Enough, and Time (1980), Time's
Dark Laughter (1982) and Timefall (1987) - initially depicts a
fantasy-like FAR-FUTURE Earth in which GENETIC ENGINEERING on the part of
the self-destructing human race has generated vampires, centaurs,
semi-sentient cats, ANDROIDS and other creatures, all of which roam
through a transfigured California. The first volume floridly introduces
the cast, with some Grand Guignol episodes. The second, perhaps the most
interestingly baroque, carries its human protagonist through a love
affair, the begetting of a goddesslike child who wantonly transfigures the
world in her death-throes, and his return (with the child's mother)
through time to Eden. The third volume, set in Colombia, fails to bring
the complex structure of the sequence into clear focus, though the power
of the JK's imagery remains vivid in the reader's mind. The Echo Vector
(1988) is a medical thriller that verges on sf. JK's novelizations are
competent. [JC]Film novelizations: Poltergeist * (1982) and its sequel,
Poltergeist II: The Other Side * (1986); Star Wars: Return of the Jedi *
(1983), novelizing RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983); Indiana Jones and the Temple
of Doom * (1984); The Goonies * (1985).See also: MESSIAHS.
KAIJU DAISENSO

GOJIRA; RADON.
KAIJU SOSHINGEKI
GOJIRA; RADON.
KAINS, JOSEPHINE
Ron GOULART.
KAMBAYASHI, CHOHEI
[r] JAPAN.
KAMIKAZE
1. Variant title of the film KAMIKAZE 1989 (1982).2. Film (1986). Les
Films du Loup/ARP/Gaumont. Dir Didier Grousset, starring Richard
Bohringer, Michel Galabru, Dominique Lavanant, Riton Liebman, Kim Massee,
Harry Cleven. Screenplay Luc Besson, Grousset. 89 mins. Colour.An
amusingly black film with a serious point, K tells of a brilliant
unemployed scientist, obsessed with tv, who invents a ray-gun which, when
pointed at the screen, can kill anyone appearing live on it. When slimy
presenters on French afternoon tv start getting blasted mid-announcement,
a rumpled flic (Bohringer), with the help of a roomful of boffins, sets
out to hunt the killer. This French film is something of a throwback to
the international 1970s cycle of sf-tinged PARANOIA movies. Like The
Parallax View (1974) and Winter Kills (1979), or the home-grown Ecoute
Voir (1979), K mixes bizarre assassination hardware and computerized
complications with the traditional down-at-heel strengths of the policier
as it follows its two central characters down their own labyrinths.
Galabru is outstanding as the murderer, starting out as a sympathetic
loser but becoming a psychopath who whites his face and dresses up as a
Mishima-style samurai. [KN]
KAMIKAZE 1989
(vt Kamikaze; vt Kamikaze '89) Film (1982). Regina Ziegler/Trio/Oase/ZDF.
Dir Wolf Gremm, starring Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Boy Gobert, Gunther
Kaufmann, Nicole Heesters, Franco Nero. Screenplay Robert Katz, Gremm,
based on Mord pa 31 (1965; trans as Murder on the 31st Floor 1966) by Per
WAHLOO. 106 mins. Colour.In the Germany of 1989 people have no problems.
They are entertained around the clock by a gigantic multimedia
corporation, operating from a 30-floor building. Police Lieutenant Jansen
(Fassbinder), investigating a bomb threat against the corporation,
discovers the existence of a 31st floor where idealistic journalists are
developing plans to make people more intellectual. Their plans are never
realized: the corporation keeps an eye on all free-thinkers. Fassbinder's
very physical performance, his last (he died in 1982), is all that makes
this worth seeing more than once. The rest of this playful West German
adaptation of Wahlooo's DYSTOPIAN novel mixes sf and mystery elements with
no great individuality. Fassbinder had earlier directed an sf film, the
made-for-tv WELT AM DRAHT (1973). [JK]
KAMIN, NICK
Pseudonym of US writer Robert J. Antonick (1939- ), whose sf novels
Earthrim (1969 dos), a heavily plotted melodrama set on a tyrannized
Earth, and The HEROD Men (1971), both feature adventure plots somewhat

awkwardly presented. [JC]
KANDEL, MICHAEL
(1941- ) US writer, translator and book editor, best known until the late
1980s for his brilliant translations from the Polish of works by Stanislaw
LEM, among them a pyrotechnic rendering of the novella "Kongres
Futurologiczny" (1971 Poland) as The Futurological Congress (1974 US),
many of whose wordplays are of necessity MK's. The Cosmic Carnival of
Stanislaw Lem (coll 1981), which MK assembled, contains excerpts from
previously translated novels plus some stories. MK's own novels reflect,
perhaps, his immersion in the Eastern European tradition. STRANGE INVASION
(1989) describes, with dissecting humour, an alien tourist invasion of
Earth. In Between Dragons (1990) subjects a fantasy-game-like universe to
an equally wry analysis. Captain Jack Zodiac (1991), in a fashion
reminiscent of the way post- HOLOCAUST traumas were surreally ignored in
The BED-SITTING ROOM , exposes its zany cast to a USA gone terminally
insane after the Bomb has been dropped. [JC]
KANE, PABLO
Zack HUGHES.
KANE, WILSON
House name used by ZIFF-DAVIS on 4 stories 1958-9 in AMZ and Fantastic;
at least 1, unidentified, was by Robert BLOCH. [PN]
KANER, H(YMAN)
(1896-1973) Romanian-born UK writer and civil servant who published his
own books from Llandudno in Wales. Of them, two full-length novels stand
out: People of the Twilight (1946), a PARALLEL-WORLDS tale, and The Sun
Queen (1946), which features instantaneous TRANSPORTATION and a race of
beings dwelling within the SUN. [JC]Other works: Squaring the Triangle
(coll 1944 chap); Fire-Watcher's Night (coll 1944 chap); Hot Swag (coll
1945 chap); The Cynic's Desperate Mission (coll 1946 chap); Ape-Man's
Offering (coll 1946 chap); The Naked Foot (coll 1946 chap); The Terror
Catches Up (coll 1946 chap); Ordeal by Moonlight (coll 1947 chap).
KANTO, PETER
Zack HUGHES.
KANTOR, MacKINLAY
(1904-1977) US writer best known for such works outside the sf field as
Andersonville (1955), a long novel set during the US Civil War, the area
of his deepest concern. That war is also the setting for If the South had
Won the Civil War (1961), the ALTERNATE-WORLDS thesis of the title being a
favourite crux for US writers in the genre. [JC]
KAPITAN MORS DER LUFTPIRAT
See Der LUFTPIRAT UND SEIN LENKBARES LUFTSCHIFF.
KAPLAN, ALINE BOUCHER
(1947- ) US marketing executive and writer who began publishing sf with
Khyren (1988), in which the protagonist finds herself transported from her
conventional existence into a world where female worth is measured by
fertility; the FEMINIST implications of the tale are not heavily

underlined. ABK's second novel, set in the same universe, is World Spirits
(1992). [JC]
KAPP, COLIN
(1928- ) UK writer and worker in electronics. He began publishing sf with
"Life Plan" for NW in 1958, where his best work soon appeared, including
"Lambda 1" (1962), which gave its title to the John CARNELL collection,
Lambda 1 (anth 1964), and Transfinite Man (1964 US; vt under the 1963 mag
title The Dark Mind 1965 UK), in which a fierce unkillable SUPERMAN
protagonist pits himself against the corrupt Failway [sic] Terminal in
duels extending through various DIMENSIONS - access to which the Terminal
attempts to control. Despite CK's otherwise unextraordinary plotting, the
combination of invulnerability and rage in the tale generates a sense of
nearly uncontrollable energy, imparting to this one book something of the
exhilaration of Keith LAUMER and a touch of the complexity of Alfred
BESTER, whose Gully Foyle - from Tiger! Tiger! (1956 UK) - is clearly
evoked. The enjoyable The Wizard of Anharitte (1972), though less
energetic, features an intriguing sf power struggle on a backward planet,
with the protagonist (who finds himself on the wrong side) repeatedly
frustrated by the "wizard's" ingenious technological trickery.CK's later
publications include a sequence of problem-solver tales assembled as The
Unorthodox Engineers (coll of linked stories 1979), a short series
comprising The Patterns of Chaos (1972) and The Chaos Weapon (1977 US),
the former featuring a SUPERHERO implausibly capable of manipulating
chaos, and the Cageworld sequence of SPACE OPERAS centred on a DYSON
SPHERE: Cageworld (1982; vt Search for the Sun! 1983 US), The Lost Worlds
of Cronus (1982) and The Tyrant of Hades (1982). [JC]Other works: The
Wizard of Anharitte (1973); The Survival Game (1976 US); Manalone (1977);
The Ion War (1978 US); The Timewinders (1980).See also: NEW WORLDS; NEW
WRITINGS IN SF; TRANSPORTATION.
KARAGEORGE, MICHAEL
[s] Poul ANDERSON.
KAREL AWARD
WORLD SF.
KARIG, WALTER
(1898-1956) US journalist and novelist, a pseudonymous author for many
years of the Nancy Drew detective series and others. War in the Atomic
Age? (1946 chap) compresses into very few pages a sequence of 21st-century
superscience duels between the USA and Galaxia - they include atomic
warfare, FORCE FIELDS, biological WEAPONS and underwater ROBOT tanks. The
USA wins hands down. In his sf fantasy, Zotz! (1947), a man - given the
ancient power to kill by pointing his hand and saying "Zotz!" - is
frustrated by bureaucracy in his attempts to help the USA win WWII; the
effect is mildly satirical. [JC]
KARIMO, AARNO
[r] FINLAND.
KARINTHY, FRIGYES
(1887-1938) Hungarian writer and translator, best known for his work

outside the sf field, mostly humorous SATIRES first published in
newspapers; he also translated works by Jonathan SWIFT and Mark TWAIN,
among others, into Hungarian. His two continuations of Swift's Gulliver's
Travels (1726) - Utazas Faremidoba (1916) and Capillaria (1921) - were
assembled as Voyage to Faremido/Capillaria (omni trans Paul TABORI 1965
Hungary). The first carries FK's version of Gulliver to a ROBOT society,
the second to one ruled by women. Sharp-tongued and convincingly Swiftian,
they are impressive introductions to his melancholy, sometimes savage view
of the 20th century. His career, and his prescient use of robots as
symbols of the dawning new age, were similar to Karel CAPEK's, but he
pulled fewer punches. FK was a dangerous writer. [JC]See also: FANTASTIC
VOYAGES; HUNGARY.
KARP, DAVID
(1922- ) US writer whose sf novel One (1953; vt Escape to Nowhere 1955)
is a notable MAINSTREAM use of sf modes as a way of expressing DYSTOPIAN
views about the future. Though distinctly less convincing than such
predecessors as Arthur KOESTLER's Darkness at Noon (1940) and George
ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949), it does present a salutarily grim
and sharply described vision of a totalitarian future USA and the brutal
mind-control that must be imposed if the state is to survive. Part of the
novel's interest lies in its sometimes sympathetic insight into the mind
of inquisitor as well as victim. The Day of the Monkey (1955) is a
fantasy. [JC]See also: POLITICS.
KASACK, HERMANN
[r] GERMANY.
KASTEL, WARREN
ZIFF-DAVIS house name used on magazine stories by Chester S. GEIER and
possibly others 1948-50, and by Robert SILVERBERG in 1957. [JC]
KASTLE, HERBERT D(AVID)
(1924-1987) US writer best known outside the genre. He began publishing
sf with "The York Problem" for If in 1955. His one sf novel, The
Reassembled Man (1964; exp vt Edward Berner is Alive Again! 1975; vt The
Three Lives of Edward Berner 1976 UK) depicts without excessive
originality the transformation by aliens of a human into a sexually
supercharged SUPERMAN. [JC]
KAUL, FEDOR
(? -? ) German writer. His sf novel, Die Welt ohne Gedachtnis (trans
Winifred Ray as Contagion to this World 1933 UK), begins conventionally
enough with a deformed SCIENTIST, thwarted in love, determining to revenge
himself on the world by releasing dangerous bacteria he has developed;
these turn out to have a memory-erasing effect on humans. The scientist's
love-affair forgotten, the novel becomes a post- HOLOCAUST vision in which
the remnants of mankind mutate into a roving race of giants in harmony
with Nature. The scientist grows old and - remarkably - dies forgiven.
[JC]
KAVAN, ANNA
Name under which French-born, much travelled UK writer born Helen Woods

Edmonds (1901-1968) wrote her fiction from 1940, having previously signed
herself under her married name, Helen Ferguson; the orphaned protagonist
of Let Me Alone (1930) and A Stranger Still (1935) is named Anna Kavan,
and Edmonds eventually became AK by deed poll. Her life, which ended in
suicide, was tragically complicated by heroin addiction, and in most of
her work fantasy and mental illness surreally intermingle. She was well
known for work outside the sf field, though her last work, the sf novel
Ice (1967), is as familiar to readers as anything she wrote. It depicts,
through compulsively intense imagery which links her with Franz KAFKA and
the Surrealists generally, a post- HOLOCAUST search for a woman through a
world increasingly shadowed by an approaching ice age. An earlier novel,
Eagles' Nest (1958), traverses the same quest landscape, though in fantasy
terms. Later editions of Ice carry an introduction by Brian W. ALDISS, in
which he claims AK as one of the great sf writers; he also edited the
posthumous My Madness: The Selected Writings of Anna Kavan (coll 1990).
[JC]Other works: Asylum Piece and Other Stories (coll 1940); House of
Sleep (1947 US; vt Sleep has his House 1948 UK); A Bright Green Field
(coll 1958); Julia and the Bazooka (coll 1970); My Soul is in China (coll
1975).See also: END OF THE WORLD; WOMEN SF WRITERS.
KAVANNE, RISTO
[r] FINLAND.
KAVENEY, ROZ
(1949- ) UK critic, editor and writer. Her sf criticism, beginning in the
late 1970s (before 1980 as by Andrew Kaveney), has appeared in specialist
journals like FOUNDATION and in non-genre outlets like the Washington Post
and Books and Bookmen; it is marked by a seemingly off-hand general
erudition and a knowing sharpness about the field. Much of her non-sf
writing has concentrated on issues like FEMINISM, gay rights and
censorship. She began publishing sf with "A Lonely Impulse" in Temps:
Volume One * (anth 1991), "devised by" Neil GAIMAN and Alex Stewart. She
edited Tales from the Forbidden Planet (anth 1987) and More Tales from the
Forbidden Planet (anth 1990) as well as three SHARED-WORLD anthologies:
The Weerde * (anth 1992),Villains * (anth 1992) andThe Weerde: Book 2
(anth 1993), all with Mary GENTLE. [JC]See also: BIG DUMB OBJECTS;
INTERZONE.
KAY, SAMUEL M.
Charles DE LINT.
KAYE, MARVIN (NATHAN)
(1938- ) US writer, usually of fantasy and horror, noted here primarily
for the Masters of Solitude sf sequence: The Masters of Solitude (1978)
and Wintermind (1984), both written with Parke GODWIN (whom see for
details). The supernatural novel A Cold Blue Light (1983), also with
Godwin, is less successful; and its sequel, Ghosts of Night and Morning
(1987), by MK alone, is neither sf nor supernatural. Early in his career,
MK wrote some stories with Brother Theodore (Theodore Gottlieb, long
thought to be an MK pseudonym). [JC]Other works: The Umbrella/Fillmore
fantasy sequence, comprising The Incredible Umbrella (fixup 1979) and The
Amorous Umbrella (1981); The Possession of Immanual Wolf and Other

Improbable Tales (coll 1981); Fantastique (1992), a fantasy elaborately
constructed around Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique.As Editor:
Brother Theodore's Chamber of Horrors (anth 1975) with Brother Theodore;
Fiends and Creatures (anth 1975); Ghosts (anth 1981) with Saralee Kaye;
Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural (anth 1985) with S. Kaye;
Devils and Demons (anth 1987) with S. Kaye; Weird Tales: The Magazine that
Never Dies (anth 1988) with S. Kaye; Witches and Warlocks (anth 1990);
Haunted America: Star-Spangled Supernatural Stories (anth 1991); Lovers
and Other Monsters (anth 1992); Fantastique (1992).
KDO CHCE ZABIT JESSII
(vt Who Would Kill Jessie?) Film (1965). Filmove studio Barrandov. Dir
Milos Macourek, Vaclav Vorlicek, starring Jiri Sovak, Dana Medricka, Olga
Schoberova, Karel Effa, Juraj Visny. Screenplay Macourek, Vorlicek. 80
mins. B/w.This very funny Czechoslovak film was conceived for children,
but the makers realized that the idea had satirical potential. An
overworked professor (Sovak) becomes obsessed with a newspaper comic strip
featuring a voluptuous heroine, Jessie (Schoberova), who is constantly
being pursued by two villains - a malicious cowboy (Effa) and a
displeasing analogue of SUPERMAN (Visny). He dreams a lot about Jessie.
The straitlaced wife of the professor (Medricka), also a scientist, has
invented a dream-manipulator with which she hopes to eradicate her
husband's lascivious dreams, but it malfunctions and the three comic-book
characters materialize in their apartment, causing upheaval. This
exhilarating, well made film deserves wider distribution. [JB/PN]
KEA, NEVILLE
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
KEARNEY, (ELFRIC WELLS) CHALMERS
(1881-1966) Australian-born writer, in the UK most of his life, author of
the nonfiction Rapid Transit in the Future (only 2nd edn recorded, 1911).
His UTOPIA, Erone (1943; rev 1945), an old-fashioned love-story set in a
rather sentimentalized communist society on Uranus, had some popular
success, though now forgotten. A short pamphlet, The Great Calamity (1948
chap), itemizes the destruction of most of the world. [JC]
KEATING, H(ENRY) R(EYMOND) F(ITZWALTER)
(1926- ) UK writer, almost exclusively of detective novels, notably those
featuring Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID. His two sf novels are The
Strong Man (1971), a DYSTOPIAN tale of a dictator and the ambiguous
consequences of his removal, and A Long Walk to Wimbledon (1978), in which
a man treks laboriously across London to visit his wife just after a
DISASTER has devastated the capital. [JC]
KEAVENEY, JAMES R.
Arthur H. LANDIS.
KEE, ROBERT
(1919- ) UK broadcaster and writer. A Sign of the Times (1955) is set in
the NEAR FUTURE, where regimentation rules along lines familiar in
post-WWII UK fiction. [JC]
KEENE, CAROLYN

Harriet S. ADAMS.
KEENE, DAY
(1904-1969) US writer, mostly of detective novels and film and tv
scripts. In his sf novel, World without Women (1960) with Leonard PRUYN,
the few remaining women find themselves in DYSTOPIAN circumstances. [JC]
KEITH, LEIGH
[s] Horace L. GOLD.
KELLAR, VON
House name used for 2 routine sf adventures published by CURTIS WARREN:
Ionic Barrier (1953) by Dennis HUGHES and Tri-Planet (1953), whose
authorship has not been ascertained. [JC]
KELLEAM, JOSEPH E(VERIDGE)
(1913-1975) US writer and civil servant, an occasional contributor to the
sf field since publishing his first story, "Rust", in ASF in 1939. His
first novel, Overlords from Space (1956 dos), is a routine tale in which
ALIEN conquerors of Earth are defeated at last. The Little Men (1960) and
its sequel, Hunters of Space (1960), whose characters are derived from
European MYTHOLOGY, traces the fight between Jack Odin and the villainous
Grim Hagen, first under the Earth, then in space; various princesses and
dwarfs attend. In When the Red King Woke (1966), which may be sf, a
mysterious monarch sleeps off-planet in a bubble; as readers of Lewis
CARROLL might expect, when the king awakes the planet dies. [JC] See also:
ROBOTS.
KELLEHER, VICTOR (MICHAEL KITCHENER)
(1939- ) Australian lecturer in English and now full-time writer. Born in
London, VK spent 20 years in Africa before emigrating to New Zealand
(1973) and then Australia (1976). VK's major theme in the sf and FANTASY
(he makes no sharp distinction between the two genres) for adolescents for
which he is best known is the tension between cyclic/seasonal time and
linear time. His sf includes The Green Piper (1984), Taronga (1986) and
The Makers (1987); his fantasy includes Master of the Grove (1982) Australian Children's Book of the Year - Baily's Bones (1988), The Red
King (1989), Brother Night (1990),Del-Del (1991), To the Dark Tower
(1992), and also his early novels Forbidden Paths of Thual (1979) and The
Hunting of Shadroth (1981). Papio (1984) is an adventure story. His postHOLOCAUST novel for adults, The Beast of Heaven (1985), won a Ditmar AWARD
for best Australian sf. He has written four non-sf books for adults.
[JW]See also: AUSTRALIA; CHILDREN'S SF.
KELLER, DAVID H(ENRY)
(1880-1966) US writer, physician and psychiatrist, deeply involved in the
last capacity in WWI work on shell shock; he published a great deal of
technical work in his professional role. As a writer of fantasy and sf he
was active but unpublished for many years before the period 1928-35, his
first sf sale being "The Revolt of the Pedestrians" ( DYSTOPIA) to AMZ in
1928. For the next decade he appeared widely in Weird Tales and other PULP
MAGAZINES, including AMAZING STORIES, where he published "The Metal Doom"
(1932), in which advanced civilization ends when all metal begins to rust.

He fell out of wide public notice with the onset of the GOLDEN AGE OF SF,
whose optimism about the workability of the Universe he clearly did not
share. He remained active in FANDOM, however, and - it is rumoured - wrote
a large number of stories, some of which appeared in the 1940s; others
were published in the 1970s in response to the continuing appeal of his
apparently primitive fiction.DHK's sf is probably inferior to his horror
and fantasy work. The Thing in the Cellar (1932 Weird Tales; 1940 chap),
for instance, works almost as a hydraulic metaphor (in the Freudian
manner) of the relationship between the upstairs daylight of consciousness
and the blind tide of unconsciousness beneath our floors. It is much
superior to the sf story published as his first book, The Thought
Projector (1930 chap).His sf was conservative - against the spirit of the
age - in its presentation of the risks inherent in all science; the
eponymous detective of the Taine of San Francisco sequence of sf stories
(1928-47) generally operates so as to conceal, rather than expose, the
truth behind things. Much of DHK's sf concerns dilemmas created by GENETIC
ENGINEERING - the stories in Brian M. STABLEFORD's Sexual Chemistry (coll
1991) are readable as a direct rebuttal to DHK's unvarying pessimism - and
tends to end in arbitrary apocalypse. His novels are similar. In his
first, The Human Termites (1929 Science Wonder Stories; 1979 chap), the
human race is almost seen off by invading social insects. Other early
novels have not reached book form. In "Life Everlasting" (1934 AMZ), which
appears in Life Everlasting and Other Tales of Science, Fantasy and Horror
(coll 1947), the human race must choose between IMMORTALITY and fertility.
The second (and considerably longer) title in The Solitary Hunters; and
The Abyss (coll 1948) again demonstrates, by detailing the terrible
consequences of any removal of human repressions, DHK's sense of the
fragility of the psychic order.Several of his full-length books were story
collections, with some sf included in a preponderantly fantasy mix. They
include At the Sign of the Burning Hart (coll of linked stories 1938
France; with appendix added, vt At the Sign of the Burning Hart: A Tale of
Arcadia 1948 US), which is UTOPIAN, Tales from Underwood (coll 1952), The
Folsom Flint and Other Curious Tales (coll 1969), The Street of Queer
Houses and Other Tales (coll 1976) and The Last Magician: Nine Stories
from "Weird Tales" (coll 1978 chap). [JC]Other works: Wolf Hollow Bubbles
(?1934 chap); Men of Avalon (1935 chap dos); The Waters of Lethe (1937
chap); The Television Detective (1938 chap); The Devil and the Doctor
(fixup 1940), in which Satan is a HERO-figure; The Eternal Conflict (1939
Les Primaires, part only; 1949); The Homunculus (1949); The Final War
(1949 chap); The Lady Decides (1950); A Figment of a Dream: A New
Allegorical Fantasy (1962 chap).See also: AIR WONDER STORIES; AUTOMATION;
BIOLOGY; HIVE-MINDS; MACHINES; MEDICINE; PSYCHOLOGY; ROBOTS; SMALL
PRESSES
AND LIMITED EDITIONS; TECHNOLOGY; TRANSPORTATION.
KELLERMANN, BERNHARD
(1879-1951) German writer whose sf novel, Der Tunnel (1913; trans anon as
The Tunnel 1915 UK), tells the epic story, sometimes in heartfelt terms,
of the construction of a transatlantic tunnel. It was the basis of the
German film Der TUNNEL (1933) and its UK remake, The TUNNEL (1935).
[JC]See also: GERMANY; TRANSPORTATION.

KELLEY, LEO P(ATRICK)
(1928- ) US novelist, for some time also an advertising copywriter. He
began publishing sf with "Dreamtown, U.S.A." for If in 1955. Several of
his sf novels likewise concentrate on societies which invidiously dominate
their inhabitants by psychological means, as in his second, Odyssey to
Earthdeath (1968). His first, The Counterfeits (1967), as by Leo F.
Kelley, similarly puts sociological sf into a routine adventure frame. An
oddly affectless baroque style sometimes jars against the stories he
tells, pretending an urgency it fails to convey through plots of a
fashionable grimness; but he has been a readable contributor to the genre.
[JC]Other works: Time Rogue (1970); The Accidental Earth (1970); The Coins
of Murph (1971); Brother John * (1971); Time: 110100 (1972; vt The Man
from Maybe 1974 UK); Mindmix (1972); Mythmaster (1973); The Earth Tripper
(1973); a series of short juveniles, comprising Time Trap (1977 chap),
Star Gold (1978 chap; vt Alien Gold 1983), Backward in Time (1979 chap),
Death Sentence (1979 chap), Earth Two (1979 chap), Prison Satellite (1979
chap), Sunworld (1979 chap), Worlds Apart (1979 chap), Night of Fire and
Blood (1979 chap), Dead Moon (1979 chap), King of the Stars (1979 chap),
On the Red World (1979 chap), Where No Sun Shines (1979 chap), Vacation in
Space (1979 chap) and Good-bye to Earth (1979 chap).As Editor: Themes in
Science Fiction (anth 1972); Fantasy, the Literature of the Marvelous
(anth 1973); The Supernatural in Fiction (anth 1973).
KELLEY, THOMAS P.
(?1905-1982) Ex-prizefighter and, in his own description, "King of the
Canadian pulp writers", author mostly of adventure fiction and "true
crime", as well as of the sf novel "A Million Years in the Future" (1940
Weird Tales), which never reached book form. Four fantasy novels are I
Found Cleopatra (1938 Weird Tales; cut 1946), The Face that Launched a
Thousand Ships (fixup 1941), Tapestry Triangle (1946 UK), featuring an
immortal Chinese and a race of Amazons, and The Gorilla's Daughter (1950).
He contributed under pseudonyms, including Gene Bannerman, Roy P. Devlin
and Valentine North, to the Canadian UNCANNY TALES and wrote 40 scripts
for Out of the Night, a radio programme specializing in supernatural
tales. [PN/JC]See also: CANADA; WEAPONS.
KELLEY, WILLIAM MELVIN
(1937- ) US writer whose celebrated short novel A Different Drummer
(1959) is a borderline-sf fable telling of Black history in an imaginary
southern state of the USA, and ending with a mass emigration of all Blacks
from the state in 1957. [PN]Other works: Dem (1967); Dunsford Travels
Everywhere (1970).See also: POLITICS.
KELLOGG, MARJORIE BRADLEY
(1946- ) US scenery designer and writer who published her first three
novels as by M. Bradley Kellogg to avoid confusion with another Marjorie
Kellogg, but from 1991 used her full name. Her first novel, A Rumor of
Angels (1983), is unexceptional, but the Lear's Daughters sequence - The
Wave and the Flame (1986) and Reign of Fire (1986), both written with NASA
climatologist William B(rigance) Rossow (1947) and assembled as Lear's
Daughters (omni 1987) - somewhat more interestingly devotes much attention

to the ECOLOGY and violent climatic extremes of a potential colony planet,
though the conflict between the advocates of exploitation and those of
alliance with the pacific cave-dwelling weather-predicting natives lacks
originality. MBK's fourth novel, Harmony (1991), is a large and ambitious
tale set on an Earth dominated by centuries of POLLUTION, with almost all
humans now living in large, strictly controlled domes. But some artists here MBK again shows an untoward softness of mind - have somehow managed
to live in the open, and the book moves slowly towards a wholesome
resolution of the conflict between ensuring safety and embracing the
world. [JC]
KELLY, FRANK K(ING)
(1914- ) US writer who began to publish sf with "The Light Bender" for
Wonder Stories in 1931, and who rapidly became known for SPACE-OPERA tales
of some bleakness, though later titles were infused with an idealistic
glow. He stopped writing sf in 1935, turning to non-genre fiction and
political histories, and it was not until 45 years later that his sf work
became available again, with the release of Starship Invincible (coll
1979). FKK cofounded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions
in 1959, and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in 1982. [JC]
KELLY, HAROLD ERNEST
(1899-1969): UK writer and publisher, founder with his brother, Hector
Kelly, of Everybody's Books, and later of RobinHood Press and Hector Kelly
Ltd, for which he wrote many crime novels - being best known for those as
by Darcy Glinto - and westerns, along with some sf and horror. In the
1960s, he wrote crime under the house name Hank JANSON. As Eugene Ascher
he wrote the Lucius Carolus series of occult detective novels: There Were
No Asper Ladies (1944; vt To Kill a Corpse 1959), Uncanny Adventures (coll
1944 chap), and The Grim Caretaker (1944 chap). As Preston Yorke he wrote
The Astounding Crime (1943 chap), The Gamma Ray Murders (1943), which was
sf, and other crime tales. Space-Time Task Force (1953), also as by Yorke,
was set in the distant future, where the robot-like "syntho-selectives"
who rule Earth turn to the Primitives, who are true humans, to defend
against an alien invasion. [SH]
KELLY, JAMES PATRICK
(1951- ) US writer who began to publish after attending his first CLARION
SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' WORKSHOP in 1974. With "Dea Ex Machina" for Gal
in 1975, the first of about 40 tales to 1992, he began very quickly to
establish himself as an author whose work contained, within a sometimes
sober demeanour, considerable pyrotechnical charge. In the selfconscious
1980s controversy between CYBERPUNK and "Humanist" modes of sf discourse,
he was located with the latter, but like most "Humanists" he has disavowed
the distinction - and indeed published a story, "Solstice" (1985), in
Bruce STERLING's Mirrorshades (anth 1986). Some of his short work is
collected in Heroines (coll 1990). He is perhaps best known for Freedom
Beach (fixup 1985) with John KESSEL - an author with whom he has also
collaborated on separate stories. In the book several characters find
themselves in an interzone in which "reality" and dreamwork wed surreally,
and must make sense of their surroundings. The control they exercise can
be seen as allegorical of the creative act.Of greater interest are JPK's

solo novels, Planet of Whispers (1984) and Look into the Sun (1989), which
start the open-ended Messengers Chronicles. Whatever message is carried by
the various species who link the Galaxy into a communications network has
not been revealed so far. The first tale, set on the planet Aseneshesh,
explores in voluminous detail the native race of near-immortal bearlike
beings whose mental workings are derived from the attractive hypotheses
developed by Julian Jaynes in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown
of the Bicameral Mind (1976). In Jaynes's book, and in JPK's novel,
pre-conscious sentients - i.e., preliterate humans, including Homer "hear" right-brain "whispers" which they understand to be the voices of
the gods, and in this fashion hallucinate normative diktats which shape
their culture. No humans appear in the novel. In the second volume, set
partly on a depleted Earth, a young architect is recruited by Messengers
to travel to Aseneshesh, being engineered en route into the semblance of
an Asenesheshian, with a computer-implant substituting for the right-brain
voice of God. Aseneshesh is vividly depicted in the two books, in a
PLANETARY-ROMANCE style reminiscent at times of Jack VANCE; but the
plotting has a slow rigour typical of all JPK's work, an incremental power
which transcends the FIXUP structure of Wildlife (1991 IASFM as "Mr. Boy";
fixup 1994), a complex and - at points - singularly cruel analysis of the
relationship between a child artificially re-engineered each time he nears
puberty and his extraordinary mother. JPK stands at the verge of
recognition as a major writer. [JC]See also: CHILDREN IN SF; GODS AND
DEMONS.
KELLY, ROBERT
(1935- ) Extremely prolific US poet; a professor of English. His novel
The Scorpions (1967) has been read as sf because of its baroque rendering
of a psychiatrist's conviction that a rich patient does in fact have
contact with the Scorpions, a race of ultraviolet people. However, like
Cities (1971 chap), the book is more plausibly viewed as a FABULATION,
depicting US life after the fashion of Harry Mathews (1930- ) and Thomas
PYNCHON. In the 1980s RK began to publish short fiction in the same vein,
collected in A Transparent Tree: Fictions (coll 1985). [JC]
KELLY, WILLIAM PATRICK
(1848-1916) UK writer in whose Doctor Baxter's Invention (1912) it proves
possible to transfer insanity and homicidal behaviour from one person to
another via blood transfusions. [JC]
KEMLO
E.C. ELIOTT.
KEMP, EARL
An associate of William L. HAMLING (whom see for details) and recipient
of a 1961 fan-writing HUGO. [JC]
KENAN, AMOS
[r] ISRAEL.
KENDALL, GORDON
S.N. LEWITT; Susan SHWARTZ.
KENDALL, JOHN

Pseudonym of UK writer Margaret Maud Brash (1880-? ), author of Unborn
Tomorrow (1933), a futuristic DYSTOPIA describing dehumanization,
regimentation and subsequent revolution in the UK under communism. [JE]See
also: POLITICS.
KENDALL, MAY
[r] Andrew LANG.
KENEALLY, THOMAS (MICHAEL)
(1935- ) Australian writer best known for Bring Larks and Heroes (1967
UK) and for Schindler's Ark (1982 UK), vtSchindler's Listwhich won the
Booker Prize, but who has several times edged into generic displacements
to contain a remarkably intense and occasionally visionary imagination.
His first novel, The Place at Whitton (1964 UK), is horror. Blood Red,
Sister Rose (1974 UK) is an historical fantasy. Victim of the Aurora
(1977), which can be read as a detection, feels like sf in that it depicts
Antarctica exactly as an sf writer might depict an alien planet. Ned Kelly
and the City of the Bees (1978 UK) is juvenile sf. The eponymous human
foetus in Passenger (1979 UK) has been transformed by laser-scan into a
conscious and articulate being. [JC]
KENNAWAY, JAMES
Pseudonym of Scottish writer James Ewing Peebles (1928-1968), best known
for such works outside the sf field as Tunes of Glory (1956). His
borderline sf novel is The Mind Benders * (1963), which applies MAINSTREAM
tactics to a story about brainwashing and the psychological consequences
of overexposure to experimental conditions of sensory deprivation. The
book was written from his script for the 1963 film of the same name.
[JC]See also: PSYCHOLOGY.
KENNEALY, PATRICIA
Working name of US writer Patricia Kennealy-Morrison (1946- ), "married"
to rock singer Jim Morrison (1943-1971); she appeared in a cameo role in
Oliver Stone's film The Doors (1991). Her sf oscillates - in a manner
common to much 1980s work - between fantasy and sf, in the end seeming
more the former than the latter. However, her Keltiad sequence - The
Copper Crown (1985), The Throne of Scone (1986) and The Silver Branch
(1988) - is set in space, being an expansive SPACE-OPERA reworking of the
Arthurian Cycle. A second sequence, the Tales of Arthur, beginning with
The Hawk's Gray Feather (1990) and The Oak Above the Rings (1994) as by
Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, is set 1000 or so years before the first; the
tale is set on a single world and a PLANETARY-ROMANCE idiom dominates, so
it is hard to read the book as sf. The marriage of modes, however, remains
of genuine potential interest. [JC]
KENNEALY-MORRISON, PATRICIA
Patricia KENNEALY.
KENNEDY, EDGAR REES
John W. JENNISON.
KENNEDY, LEIGH
(1951- ) US writer, in the UK since 1985; married to Christopher PRIEST
from 1988. Her sf stories, beginning with "Salamander" for ASF in 1977,

combine generic sharpness of address and a "literary" density. "Her Furry
Face" (1983), perhaps her best-known single work, exemplifies this duality
of effect in a striking presentation of love between species, human and
primate ( APES AND CAVEMEN); it was assembled, with very various
companions, in Faces (coll 1986). The Journal of Nicholas the American
(1986) depicts with alarming exactitude the anguish of paranormal empathy
( ESP), which drives the young man who inherits the gift almost to
insanity. [JC]Other work: Saint Hiroshima (1987), associational.
KENNEDY, R.A.
(? -? ) UK metaphysical writer whose curious sf work, written as by "The
Author of Space and Spirit" is The Triuneverse: A Scientific Romance
(1912). Set in the future, after the destruction of Mars and other events,
it has only a thin narrative, being mainly taken up with cosmological
speculations about the fabric of the Universe. [JC]See also: COSMOLOGY;
GREAT AND SMALL; LIVING WORLDS.
KENT, BRAD
House name used on 4 routine sf adventures published by CURTIS WARREN, 3
by Dennis HUGHES and Out of the Silent Places (1952) by Maurice G(aspard)
Hugi (1904-1947). [JC]
KENT, KELVIN
Pseudonym used on the Pete Manx series in Thrilling Wonder Stories
(1939-44), individually by Arthur K. BARNES (4 stories) and Henry KUTTNER
(6 stories), and on the 2 they wrote in collaboration: "Roman Holiday"
(1939) and "Science is Golden" (1940). [PN]
KENT, MALLORY
[s] Robert A.W. LOWNDES.
KENT, PHILIP
Kenneth BULMER.
KENTON, L.P.
R. Lionel FANTHORPE.
KENWARD, JAMES (MACARA)
(1908- ) UK author, mostly of nonfiction studies and memoirs. Summervale
(1935) is a tale in which a man is transformed into a dog. The framing
narrative of The Story of the Poor Author (coll of linked stories 1959) is
sf; it involves SPACESHIPS. [JC]
KENYON, ROBERT O.
[s] Henry KUTTNER.
KEPLER, JOHANNES
(1571-1630) German astronomer, one-time assistant to Tycho Brahe
(1546-1601) and later imperial mathematician and astrologer to the Holy
Roman Emperor Rudolph II. JK's contribution to ASTRONOMY - most notably
his 3 laws of planetary motion - provided vital groundwork for Newton's
cosmological synthesis. In 1593 JK prepared a dissertation on the
heliocentric theory, which explained how events in the heavens would be
seen by an observer stationed on the MOON; a new draft, in which the

observer is conveniently placed on the Moon by a demon conjured up by his
mother, was prepared in 1609 (the manuscript was stolen in 1611 and JK
later had to defend his own mother against an accusation of witchcraft, a
charge which may have been encouraged by the literary device). Between
1620 and 1630 he annotated the essay extensively, but he died while it was
being prepared for publication; it finally appeared as Somnium (1634 in
Latin; definitive trans in Kepler's "Somnium" by Edward Rosen 1967; a cut
trans had earlier appeared in Beyond Time and Space, anth 1950 ed August
W. DERLETH). The last section constructs a hypothetical ECOLOGY for the
Moon, a significant pioneering exercise in the imagination of LIFE ON
OTHER WORLDS. [BS]See also: BIOLOGY; COSMOLOGY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES;
GERMANY; HISTORY OF SF; PROTO SCIENCE FICTION; SPACE FLIGHT.
KEPPEL-JONES, ARTHUR (MERVYN)
(1909- ) South African-born writer, in Canada from 1959, whose When Smuts
Goes: A History of South Africa from 1952 to 2010 (1947) takes a gloomy
view of the apartheid-ridden future of that country. It is a respectable though minor - contribution to the future- HISTORY genre. [JC]See also:
POLITICS.
KERN, GREGORY
E.C. TUBB.
KERR, KATHARINE
(1944- ) US writer, best known for her substantial contributions to
modern fantasy (see Other Works below); she became of interest as an
author of sf with Polar City Blues (1990), which is set on a desert world
populated by a wide ethnic mix of humans, and boxed in by 2 conflicting
interstellar empires. The main characters, good and ill, have PSI POWERS,
which allies the tale with KK's shaman-dominated fantasies; but there is a
genuine hard-edged sf-like feel, and consequentiality, to the novel.
Resurrection (1992) is a novella set in a NEAR-FUTURE (or perhaps
ALTERNATE WORLD) San Francisco, where a brain-damaged protagonist, after
suffering lengthy rehabilitation after a near-fatal crash, must sort out
her distressed perception that something is profoundly awry. The tale is
due to appear as well in Freeze Frames (coll of linked stories, dated 1994
but 1995). [JC]Other Works: the Kingdom of Deverry sequence, comprising
Daggerspell (1986; rev 1993), Darkspell (1987; rev 1994), The Bristling
Wood (1989; vt Dawnspell: The Bristling Wood 1989 UK) and The Dragon
Revenant (1990; vt Dragonspell: The Southern Sea 1990 UK); and the
connectedWestlands Cycle,comprising A Time of Exile(1991), A Time of Omens
(1992UK),A Time of War: Days of Blood and Fire(1993 UK; vt Days of Blood
and Fire: A Novel of theWestlands 1993 US) and A Time of Justice: Days of
Airand Darkness (1994 UK; vt Days of Air andDarkness 1994 US); Weird Tales
from Shakespeare(anth 1994) with Martin H. GREENBERG.
KERR, MICHAEL
Robert HOSKINS.
KERSH, GERALD
(1911-1968) UK writer-born in the county of Middlesex, despite stories
that he was born in Russia-active from the mid-1930s, very prolific in
shorter forms; known mainly for such work outside the sf field as Night

and the City (1938) and They Die with their Boots Clean (1941). Many of
his numerous short stories are sf or fantasy, and had their original book
appearance in collections such as The Horrible Dummy and Other Stories
(coll 1944), The Battle of the Singing Men (coll 1944 chap),Neither Man
nor Dog (coll 1946), Sad Road to the Sea (coll 1947), The Brighton Monster
(coll 1953), Men without Bones (coll 1955 UK; with differing contents, rev
1962 US), The Ugly Face of Love (coll 1960), The Terribly Wild Flowers
(coll 1962) and The Hospitality of Miss Tolliver (coll 1965). Two US
compilations, On an Odd Note (coll 1958 US) and Nightshade and Damnations
(coll 1968 US), the latter ed Harlan ELLISON, conveniently abstract some
of GK's fantasies and sf from his other short stories, which often take
the shape of anecdotes told to a narrator (sometimes identified as GK
himself), so that much of his work tends to verge upon the tall-tale or
CLUB-STORY genre; The Best of Gerald Kersh (coll 1960) is more general. In
"Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?" (1953) the corporal tells GK of
his 500 years of soldier life following a mysterious cure given to him
about 1537 ( IMMORTALITY). "Voices in the Dust of Annan" (1947) is a postHOLOCAUST tale starring fairies. In "Men without Bones" a tropical
explorer tells us of a species of loathsome invertebrates, adding the
hypothesis that we are really Martians.GK's novels are perhaps less
impressive. The Weak and the Strong (1945) grotesquely carries its cast trapped underground - into claustrophobic fantasy realms, and An Ape, a
Dog, and a Serpent: A Fantastic Novel (1945) fabulates a history of
film-making with borderline sf elements. The Great Wash (1953; vt The
Secret Masters 1953 US) is an sf novel in which the usual narrator - GK becomes gradually involved in a plot to inundate most of the world and to
rule the remains on authoritarian lines. The subplot of Brock (1969)
revolves around a new form of nuclear explosive. But GK's strengths as an
author are everywhere evident: a strong and vivid sense of character, a
colourful style and a capacity to infuse his stories with a deep emotional
charge (sometimes sentimentalized). He has strong admirers. [JC]See also:
HORROR IN SF; HUMOUR.
KESHISHIAN, JOHN M.
(1923- ) US doctor of medicine and writer whose sf novel, with Jacob HAY
(whom see for details), is Autopsy for a Cosmonaut (1969; vt Death of a
Cosmonaut 1970 UK). [JC]
KESSEL, JOHN (JOSEPH VINCENT)
(1950- ) US academic and writer who began publishing sf with "The Silver
Man" for Galileo in 1978, and whose short fiction rapidly established him
as an author of cunningly pastiche-heavy, erudite stories. His two best
known early tales - both assembled with other work in Meeting in Infinity:
Allegories ?
Park and Lock It!" (1981) and Another Orphan (1982 FSF; 1989 chap dos),
which won a NEBULA in 1982; in both, an urgent extremism of metaphor tends
to enforce allegorical readings. This extremism with the materials of
genre sf also dominates much of JK's first novel, Freedom Beach (1985)
with James Patrick KELLY, a tale whose characters find themselves
occupying allegorical venues construed according to the styles of various
authors, from Aristophanes to Groucho Marx. Of greater interest, perhaps,

is his first solo novel, GOOD NEWS FROM OUTER SPACE (fixup 1989), a
sustained but dizzying look at the human animal as the millennium
approaches, identity crises eat into men and women, the dead are medically
reawoken, and dreams of redeeming ALIENS raddle the large cast. There are
echoes of Philip K. DICK, but a gonzo Dick, and of Barry N. MALZBERG's
allegorized urban desolation (and black wit) - but JK's desolation, very
frighteningly and very movingly, is populous with human faces, however
fractured. JK seems to be one of the writers capable of bending the tools
of sf inward upon the human psyche. [JC]See also: END OF THE WORLD; The
MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION .
KESTEVEN, G.R.
Pseudonym of UK teacher and writer Geoffrey Robins Corsher (1911- ), some
of whose stories for children have been published under his own name. Of
sf interest is The Pale Invaders (1974), a post- HOLOCAUST tale set in the
FAR FUTURE and describing the impact upon an isolated valley culture of
the discovery of technologies which reveal much hitherto hidden history.
The Awakening Water (1977) has less impact. [JC]
KETTERER, DAVID (ANTHONY THEODOR)
(1942- ) UK-born Canadian academic (with a DPhil from the University of
Sussex) based at Concordia University, Montreal. His New Worlds for Old:
The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature
(1974) interestingly, though in rather academic terminology, links
apocalyptic themes in US MAINSTREAM literature with similar obsessions in
genre sf. The Rationale of Deception in Poe (1979) covers the whole of
Edgar Allan POE's writing, including the PROTO SCIENCE FICTION; a briefer
work on Poe is Edgar Allan Poe: Life, Work, and Criticism (chap 1989).
Frankenstein's Creation: The Book, the Monster, and Human Reality (1979)
is another of DK's later works which, to a degree, enlarge on the thesis
of his first. DK's critical work is widely respected and by no means
"one-note", but it does often return to the idea of "metaphorical
transcendence". The Science Fiction of Mark Twain (coll 1984) ed DK
contains 120pp of Introduction and critical apparatus. DK attracted much
attention with Imprisoned in a Tesseract: The Life and Work of James Blish
(1987). Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy (1992US) is an important
critical and historical survey of both English and French Canadian sf
literature, and includes a bibliography. [PN]See also: CANADA; CRITICAL
AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DEFINITIONS OF SF; SENSE OF WONDER;
WOMEN
AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION.
KETTLE, LEROY
[r] John BROSNAN.
KETTLE, (JOCELYN) PAMELA
(1934- ) UK writer, author of a historical novel, Memorial to the Duchess
(1968) as by Jocelyn Kettle, and of the sf novel The Day of the Women
(1969), in which sex-role reversal is instituted - and deplored. [JC]
KEY, ALEXANDER (HILL)
(1904-1979) US writer who began publishing novels for children with The
Red Eagle (1930), and who moved into CHILDREN'S SF with the Sprockets

sequence: Sprockets: A Little Robot (1963), Rivets and Sprockets (1964)
and Bolts - A Robot Dog (1966). These books were not likely, however, to
seize a wide audience, and it was only with the Witch Mountain sequence Escape to Witch Mountain (1968) and Return from Witch Mountain * (1978) that AK's easy sentimentality was attached to a narrative strong enough to
bear it, as two orphan children on the run gradually come to realize that
they are in fact ALIENS with powers (and memories) foreign to their
ignorant hosts. Both stories were filmed by Walt Disney, in 1975 and 1978
respectively, both dir John Hough. An earlier alien orphaned on Earth had
featured in The Forgotten Door (1965). Other singletons of interest
include The Golden Enemy (1969), set thousands of years hence when the
descendants of the survivors of nuclear HOLOCAUST must face their human
nature, and Flight to the Lonesome Place (1971), where a young
mathematical genius flees his oppressors into a space to which only he can
understand the route. [JC]Other works: The Incredible Tide (1970); The
Preposterous Adventures of Swimmer (1973); The Magic Meadow (1975);
Jagger, the Dog from Elsewhere (1976); The Sword of Aradel (1977); The
Case of the Vanishing Boy (1979).See also: SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED
EDITIONS; SUPERMAN.
KEY, EUGENE G(EORGE)
(1907-1976) US author whose sf collection, Mars Mountain (coll 1936),
published by William L. CRAWFORD's semi-professional company Fantasy
Publications, was the first full-length book to appear from any US
publishing house specializing in sf, and so the precursor of great things
to come. Otherwise the 3 stories assembled are unremarkable. [JC]
KEYES, DANIEL
(1927- ) US writer and university lecturer in English. He began his sf
career as associate editor of MARVEL SCIENCE FICTION, Feb-Nov 1951, and it
was in that magazine that his first published story, "Precedent" appeared
(1952). He is known mainly for one excellent novel, FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON
(1959 FSF; exp 1966), winner of a 1960 HUGO in its magazine form and of a
1966 NEBULA for the full-length book version, on which was based the film
CHARLY (1968). It is the story, largely in the first person, of Charlie
Gordon, whose INTELLIGENCE, starting at IQ 68, is artificially increased
to genius level ( MEDICINE; SUPERMAN). The mouse Algernon has preceded him
in this course, but Algernon soon dies, and Gordon's main contribution to
science is his working out of the "Algernon-Gordon Effect", by which
"artificially induced intelligence deteriorates at a rate of time directly
proportional to the quantity of the increase". The last pages of the
novel, detailing the loss of Charlie's faculties, are extremely moving.
His treatment as an object of scientific curiosity throughout his ordeal
underlines the book's points about deficiencies in the scientific method
as applied to human beings. The Touch (1968; vt The Contaminated Man 1977
UK), a borderline-sf tale about the psychological consequences of an
industrial accident involving radioactive contamination, has received less
attention. After a long silence in the sf field, a new novel from DK was
projected for the early 1990s. [JC]See also: ALIENS; CINEMA; CONCEPTUAL
BREAKTHROUGH; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; NUCLEAR
POWER;

PSYCHOLOGY; RADIO.
KEYES, THOM
(1943- ) UK writer whose sf novels, The Battle of Disneyland (1974) and
The Second Coming (1979), apply the tools of sf SATIRE, without excessive
energy, to a NEAR-FUTURE USA. [JC]
KEYHOE, DONALD E.
[r] DR. YEN SIN; EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS; UFOS.
KEYNE, GORDON
[s] H. BEDFORD-JONES.
KHAN, OBIE
Robert E. VARDEMAN.
von KHUON, ERNST
[r] GERMANY.
KIDD, (MILDRED) VIRGINIA
(1921- ) US literary agent and writer, married to James BLISH 1947-63,
who began to publish professionally in the early 1950s, writing at least 1
story with Blish; her first solo sf story, "Kangaroo Court", did not
appear until much later, in Orbit 1 (anth 1966) ed Damon KNIGHT. She
edited 3 strong ORIGINAL ANTHOLOGIES: Millennial Women (anth 1978; vt The
Eye of the Heron, and Other Stories 1980 UK), Interfaces (anth 1980) with
Ursula K. LE GUIN, and Edges (anth 1980), also with Le Guin. As a literary
agent from 1965, she became known for her FEMINIST views and - although
she did not handle only WOMEN WRITERS - for representing a highly capable
range of feminist authors, including Carol EMSHWILLER, Le Guin, Josephine
SAXTON and James TIPTREE Jr. [JC]
KILIAN, CRAWFORD
(1941- ) US-born writer, in Canada from 1967, who began publishing sf
with The Empire of Time (1978 US), the first volume of the Chronoplane
Wars sequence. This sequence - which continued with The Fall of the
Republic (1987 US) and Rogue Emperor: A Novel of the Chronoplane Wars
(1988 US) - is dominated by the discovery in a savagely declining
NEAR-FUTURE USA of the I-Screens, through which travel to a series of
ALTERNATE WORLDS is possible. Each Earth is located uptime or downtime of
our base reality but, ominously, uptime is uninhabitable, seemingly
because of the effects of an alien INVASION; the protagonist gradually
uncovers a seamy truth. Perhaps more interestingly, Icequake (1979) and
its sequel Tsunami (1983) - the latter set in Vancouver - depict an Earth
very much closer to home, with the ozone layer gone and the Antarctic
icecap beginning to melt disastrously. Eyas (1982) moves into the very FAR
FUTURE, where the eponymous primitive gingers his tribe into readiness for
the dawn of a new age. Brother Jonathan (1985 US) describes the effect of
experiments which permit human-animal interfaces, these soon being invaded
by AIs in typical CYBERPUNK fashion. Lifter (1986 US) is a fairly
unserious tale about ANTIGRAVITY and Gryphon (1989 US) somewhat
unadventurously deals with an alien invasion. CK's work can be analysed in
terms of its Canadianness, its emphasis on themes of survival ( CANADA);
but he slips too often into generic dogpaddling for this kind of analysis

to be entirely fruitful. [JC]Other works: Wonders, Inc. (1968), a
juvenile; Greenmagic (1992), a fantasy.
KILLDOZER
Made-for-tv film (1974). Universal TV/ABC. Dir Jerry London, starring
Clint Walker, Carl Betz, Neville Brand. Teleplay Richard Mackillop,
Theodore STURGEON, based on Sturgeon's "Killdozer" (1944). 74 mins.
Colour.Though derived from Sturgeon's own well known story about a huge
bulldozer that becomes possessed by a seemingly ALIEN force - actually a
semi-intelligent entity fabricated, aeons earlier, by a pre-human
terrestrial civilization - this tv movie does not live up to its
potential. The story is a tightly constructed description of the battle
between the machine and a group of men on a Pacific island; the film pads
this material out with cliched emotional conflicts between the human
characters. [JB]
KILLOUGH, (KAREN) LEE
(1942- ) US writer and Chief Technologist at the Department of Radiology,
Kansas State University Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital. She began
publishing sf with "Caveat Emptor" for ASF in 1970, and since then has
published about 30 stories, perhaps most notably the tales assembled as
Aventine (coll of linked stories 1982), set in an artist's colony in a
decadent future whose resemblance to that depicted in J.G. BALLARD's
Vermilion Sands (1971 US) led some critics to brand it as merely
derivative, though others accepted it as a homage. Her first novel, A
Voice out of Ramah (1979) - set on a planet where 90 per cent of males are
ritually slaughtered at puberty - is typical of much of her work in its
plumping for unexceptionable presentations of various issues ( FEMINISM in
this case) while at the same time tending to stumble over the generic
working-out of those presentations. The Doppelganger Gambit (1979) and its
sequels, Spider Play (1986) and Dragon's Teeth (1990), are police
procedurals starring Janna Brill and Mama Maxwell and set in a USA that
must be wary of COMPUTERS; and Blood Hunt (1987) and its sequel Bloodlinks
(1988) are police-procedural fantasies dealing with a cop's confrontation
of the fact that he has become a vampire. In both series there is a
recurring sense that unexamined plots have tended to dominate proceedings.
LK's singletons are various. The Monitor, the Miners, and the Shree (1980)
amiably deals with the issue of human exploitation of alien planets.
Deadly Silents (1981) again involves the police, though this time on
another world. The Leopard's Daughter (1987) is a vibrant fantasy set in
Africa. [JC]Other work: Liberty's World (1985).See also: ARTS; CRIME AND
PUNISHMENT.
KILPI, VOLTER
[r] FINLAND.
KILWORTH, GARRY (DOUGLAS)
(1941- ) UK writer who began to publish sf and fantasy stories and novels
in the mid-1970s on retiring after 18 years' service as a cryptographer in
the RAF; raised partly in Aden, he has travelled and worked in the Far
East and the Pacific. He published his first sf story, "Let's Go to
Golgotha"with the Sunday Times Weekly Review in 1974, having won the

associated competition, and some of his many stories have been assembled
as The Songbirds of Pain (coll 1984), In the Country of Tattooed Men (coll
1993) and Hogfoot Right and Bird-Hands (coll 1993 US). He has written
novels as Garry Douglas. His first sf novel, In Solitary (1977), is set on
an Earth whose few remaining humans have for over 400 years been dominated
by birdlike ALIENS, and deals with a human rebellion whose moral impact is
ambiguous; the novel is the first of several combining generic
adventurousness-indeed opportunism, for GK seldom accords his full
attention to the raw sf elements in his tales - and an identifiably
English dubiety about the roots of human action. Consequences of such
action in a GK novel are seldom simple, rarely flattering. The Night of
Kadar (1978) places humans whose culture has an Islamic coloration, and
who are hatched from frozen embryos on an alien planet where they must
attempt to understand their own nature. Split Second (1979) similarly
isolates a contemporary human in the mind of a Cro-Magnon. Gemini God
(1981) again uses aliens to reflect the human condition. A Theatre of
Timesmiths (1984) isolates a human society in an ice-enclosed city (
POCKET UNIVERSE) as computers fail and questions about the meaning of
human life must be asked. Cloudrock (1988) pits brothers - GK often evokes
kinship intimacies - against themselves and each other in a further
pocket-universe setting. Abandonati (1988), set in a desolate NEAR-FUTURE
London, reflects grittily upon the implications for the UK of the last
decades of this century. GK's non-genre novels (see listing below) follow
the same pattern; of them, Witchwater Country (1986), among his finest
works, has autobiographical elements. At the end of the 1980s, in an
apparent break with his sf career, he began to publish animal fantasies:
Hunter's Moon: A Story of Foxes (1989; vt The Foxes of First Dark 1990
US), Midnight's Sun: A Story of Wolves (1990) and Frost Dancers: A Story
of Hares (1992), in all of which he scrutinized nonhuman terrestrial life
with an unblinking eye. He has also moved into contemporary HORROR with
Angel (1993) and its sequel, Archangel (1994). Much of his short fiction
is uneven; but in his novels GK has developed into an observer whose
reports are both subtle and frank. [JC]Other works: Spiral Winds (1987),
In the Hollow of the Deep-Sea Wave: A Novel and Seven Stories (coll 1989)
and Standing on Shamsan (1992), all containing some fantasy elements; a
juvenile series comprising The Wizard of Woodworld (1987) and The Voyage
of the Vigilance (1988); Trivial Tales (coll 1988 chap); The Rain Ghost
(1989), Dark Hills, Hollow Clocks: Stories from the Otherworld (coll
1990), The Drowners (1991), a ghost story, The Third Dragon (1991),
associational, Billy Pink's Private Detective Agency (1993), The Electric
Kid (1993) and The Phantom Piper (1994), all juveniles.As Garry Douglas:
Highlander * (1986), a film novelization; The Street (1988), horror.See
also: INTERZONE; ISLANDS; MESSIAHS; RELIGION; TIME TRAVEL.
KIMBERLY, GAIL
(1937- ) US writer who began publishing work of genre interest with "The
Prince and the Physician" for Medical Opinion ?
has been moderately productive in short forms ever since. She has written
young-adult adventure novels under the house name Dayle Courtney and a
Gothic, Secret of the Abbey (1980) as by Alix Andre. Her sf novel is Flyer
(1975), a meditative tale of an Earth occupied by MUTANTS who fly and

swim. Dracula Began (1976) is horror. [JC]
KIMBRIEL, KATHARINE ELISKA
(1956- ) US writer whose work of sf interest - though she has published
some fantasy stories - is restricted to the Nuala sequence: Fire Sanctuary
(1986), Fires of Nuala (1988) and Hidden Fires (1991). Threatened by
mutations (caused by high radioactivity in the planetary crust) and by
intergalactic war, the inhabitants of the eponymous long-lost colony
planet must cope with intrigues, spies, dynastic disputes and an extremely
harsh climate. The plots are sometimes congested, but KEK's sense of local
colour and her capacity to create genuinely engaging characters have made
the sequence into something more than routine. [JC]
KING, ALBERT
[r] or CHRISTOPHER Paul CONRAD.
KING, JOHN
Ernest L. MCKEAG.
KING, JOHN ROBERT
(1948- ) UK writer whose Bruno Lipshitz and the Disciples of Dogma (1976)
rather uneasily juggles a number of ingredients in a complex plot: an
ALIEN invasion, a strange RELIGION, interpersonal conflicts and dollops of
adventure. [JC]
KING, PAULA
Paula E. DOWNING.
KING, STEPHEN
(1947- ) US writer of HORROR fiction. With over 80 million books in print
already-his first book was published less than 20 years ago-he is probably
the most successful bestseller novelist in history; the example of his
success has revolutionized the horror-fiction business, which is
considerably more flourishing in 1990 than it was in 1975.At first he was
attracted to sf, beginning with the unpublished novel The Aftermath
(written when he was 16) and, commercially, with "The Glass Floor" for
Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Night Shift (coll 1978) collects much
of his early short fiction, his main market then being Cavalier; it
includes some grisly sf in the pulp style. He was perhaps diverted from a
conventional sf career by the response of Donald A. WOLLHEIM to his first
novel submission: "We here at Ace Books are not interested in negative
Utopias."SK has since concentrated on horror/fantasy with occasional sf
grounding, as exemplified by the focus on PSI POWERS, notably TELEKINESIS,
in his first published novel, Carrie (1974), successfully filmed as CARRIE
(1976). Other paranormal talents feature in The Dead Zone (1979)
(precognition) and Firestarter (1980) (pyrokinesis), both also filmed (
The DEAD ZONE and FIRESTARTER). While SK does not have the analytical
approach of the HARD-SF writer, and is not especially interested in
"explanations" of his GOTHIC creations, he has a down-to-earth quality
which gives even his purely supernatural fiction a true sf "feel"; he
eschews the nebulous; he describes and specifies with some exactness.Under
his own name SK has written two further novels which are sf by any measure
(though both incorporate elements from other genres). The earlier and

better is THE STAND (abridged from manuscript 1978; with text largely
restored, rev 1990 UK), a long and intelligent story of the HOLOCAUST AND
AFTER in the USA, beginning with the accidental release of a germ-warfare
virus by the US military; in the second half of the book a supernatural
struggle between powers of light and darkness weakens the impact from an
sf point of view, but the novel remains a very superior example of its
genre, clearly owing something to George R. STEWART's EARTH ABIDES (1949),
but not imitative of it. THE STAND (1994) is an unusually strong tv
miniseries that deals well with this long and complex story. The
Tommyknockers (1987) is gothic horror dressed in sf clothes, a lurid,
eminently readable tale of an alien SPACESHIP buried for millions of years
and now dug up, and of the effects it has on people nearby: sudden
technological brilliance, physiological changes and a melding into a group
mind. A four-hour ABC tv miniseries dramatization, also called The
Tommyknockers, was broadcast in May 1993, and is available on
videotape.The Talisman (1984), with Peter Straub, is an uneasy
collaboration in which two very strong individual voices seem to muffle
one another; primarily a fantasy quest, it uses the sf device of PARALLEL
WORLDS, as does the ongoing Dark Tower fantasy series by SK alone: to date
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (1982), #2: The Drawing of the Three (1987)
and #3: The Waste Lands (1991); different in tone from most of SK's work and perhaps more demandingly inventive than usual - these have an
undeniable mythic charge, partly because of the alienated-adolescent theme
that runs through them. As the series continues, and especially in the
third volume, it has looked more like sf and less like pure FANTASY, both
in its post-holocaust imagery and in its use of a self-aware AI as a major
threat to the protagonists.SK wrote four early novels (the first three
before Carrie came out) subsequently published as paperback originals as
by Richard Bachman: Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981),
and The Running Man (1982). Shortly after the publication of a fifth,
Thinner (1984), Bachman's cover was blown, and an omnibus edition of the
first four out-of-print Bachman titles was published as The Bachman Books:
Four Early Novels by Stephen King (omni 1985; vt The Bachman Books: Four
Novels by Stephen King UK). The Long Walk and The Running Man are both
fringe sf about futuristic sadistic sports events, the first a marathon
walk where those who fall behind are shot, the second duelling to the
death as a tv game show; the latter was filmed as The RUNNING MAN
(1987).It is generally held that most films based on SK's novels, stories
and original screenplays are poor. In fact Carrie, The Shining (1980), The
Dead Zone (1983), Cujo (1983), Stand By Me (1986) and Misery (1990) are
all strong films, although SK dislikes the second. The Shawshank
Redemption (1994), neither sf nor horror, is a fine prison buddy movie
based on a novella from Different Seasons. Fantasy/horror films aside from
those already mentioned are Salem's Lot (tv miniseries 1979), Creepshow
(1982), Christine (1983), Cat's Eye (1984), Children of the Corn (1984),
Silver Bullet (1985), Creepshow II (1987), Pet Sematary (1989), Graveyard
Shift (1990) and It (tv miniseries 1990). Return to Salem's Lot (1987) dir
Larry COHEN is "based on characters created by Stephen King". Tales from
the Darkside: The Movie (1990), an anthology film based on the tv series
of the same name, contains an adaptation of SK's "The Cat from Hell"
(1977). The eight-hour tv anthology miniseriesThe Golden Years of Stephen

King(1991) was a ratings flop, and was re-released on videotape in 1992
with a new ending and cut to 236 mins.The Dark Half (1991 but released
1993 because of Orion Pictures' financial problems), dir George ROMERO, is
a valiant attempt to dramatize a not wholly satisfactory original. SK
rightly repudiated the sf film The LAWNMOWER MAN (1992), allegedly based
on a short story by him, as having nothing to do with his work, and won a
lawsuit demanding that his name be removed from the credits. He wrote an
original screenplay for the uneven vampire film Sleepwalkers (1992; vt
Stephen King's Sleepwalkers). Children of the Corn II: The Final
Sacrifice(1992) is a sequel to a film based on an SK story, but otherwise
has no connection with him. Stephen King's "Sometimes They Come Back"
(1993) is a 97-min tv movie adaptation dir Tim McLoughlin. Needful Things
(1994), 120 mins, dir Fraser C. Heston is less satisfyingly apocalyptic
than the original novel.One film adaptation of a story by SK - "Trucks"
(1973) - was directed by King himself from his own screenplay: Maximum
Overdrive (1986). Though not as bad as some critics stated, it flopped
commercially. Technically sf, it has Earth passing through the tail of a
comet that mysteriously gives self-awareness to MACHINES (trucks,
lawnmowers, hairdryers, electric carving knives, etc.), which then revolt
against humans. This paranoid fantasy is crudely made with very broad
stereotypes, but at least one sequence, of a boy cycling through a quiet
township littered with bodies, suggests latent cinematic talent.SK's
occasional critical commentaries, the reverse of academic in style, are
usually observant and interesting. Danse Macabre (1981), a study of horror
in books, films and comics, won a HUGO for Best Nonfiction Book in
1982.SK's pungent prose, his sharp ear for dialogue, his disarmingly
laid-back, frank style, along with his passionately fierce denunciations
of human stupidity and cruelty (especially to CHILDREN), put him among the
more distinguished of "popular" writers. [PN]Other works: 'Salem's Lot
(1975); The Shining (1977); The Monkey (1980 chap); Cujo (1981); The Raft
(1982 chap); The Plant (1982 chap); Creepshow (coll 1982); Different
Seasons (coll 1982); Pet Sematary (1983), one of SK's finest works;
Christine (1983; text differs slightly in UK edition); Cycle of the
Werewolf (1983; exp as coll with film screenplay "Silver Bullet" 1985);
The Eyes of the Dragon (1984; rev 1987); Skeleton Crew (coll 1985; exp by
1 story 1985); It (1986; the 1st edn was the German translation as Es
[1986]); Misery (1987); My Pretty Pony (1988 chap); Dolan's Cadillac (1989
chap); The Dark Half (1989 UK); Four Past Midnight (coll 1990); Needful
Things (1991); Gerald's Game (1992); Nightmares and Dreamscapes (coll
1993); Insomnia (1994).Nonfiction includes: Nightmares in the Sky (1988),
a book of photographs by "F-Stop Fitzgerald" with minimal contribution by
SK; Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King (coll 1988);
Feast of Fear: Conversations with Stephen King (coll 1989).About the
author: Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King (coll 1982) ed Tim
UNDERWOOD and Chuck MILLER; Stephen King: The Art of Darkness (1984; rev
1986) by Douglas E. Winter; The Stephen King Companion (coll 1989) ed
George Beahm; many others, including at least 10 from STARMONT HOUSE.See
also: CINEMA; CLICHES; DISASTER; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; EC COMICS; ESP;
FRANCE; INTELLIGENCE; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MUSIC.
KING, T(HOMAS) JACKSON (Jr)

(1948- ) US archaeologist and writer, married to Paula E. DOWNING. He
began publishing sf with his first novel, Retread Shop (1988), a somewhat
congested but pleasingly vivid tale of the upbringing of a young human in
the SPACE HABITAT of the title, and of his complicated dealings with alien
merchants and crises of various sorts. The energy of the telling
constitutes a forecast of much further work. [JC]
KING, VINCENT
Pseudonym of UK writer, artist and teacher Rex Thomas Vinson (1935- ),
who worked in Cornwall and began publishing sf with "Defence Mechanism"
for New Writings in SF No 9 (anth 1966) ed E.J. CARNELL. His more
successful novels, like Light a Last Candle (1969 US) and Candy Man (1971
US), tend to combine elements of epic and grotesque sf adventure with a
characteristically English darkness of emotional colouring and a tendency
towards downbeat conclusions. [JC]Other works: Another End (1971 US); Time
Snake and Superclown (1976).
KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS
Film (1977). Arachnid Productions/Dimension. Dir John "Bud" Cardos,
starring William SHATNER, Tiffany Bolling, Woody Strode. Screenplay
Richard Robinson, Alan Caillou, from a story by Jeffrey M. Sneller,
Stephen Lodge. 95 mins, cut to 90 mins. Colour.In its modest way, this is
one of the better films in the revenge-of-Nature cycle ( MONSTER MOVIES).
Near a small town in Arizona, tarantulas whose ECOLOGY has undergone
changes because of crop-dusting sprays are migrating north in large
numbers and apparently acting with communal intelligence ( HIVE-MINDS).
Starting small and building to local apocalypse, the film is crisply made,
the masses of spiders (normal size) are believable, and the end, though
clearly echoing Hitchcock's The BIRDS (1963), offers a genuine minatory
thrill with its vision of a whole town cocooned in spider-silk, its
occupants now preserved as food. Shatner plays the vet trying to puzzle
out why the normally solitary spiders are acting in concert. [PN]
KING-HALL, LOU
Working name of UK writer Louise (variously Luise) Olga Elisabeth
King-Hall (1897- ), whose Fly Envious Time (1944) posits a NEAR-FUTURE
world in which eugenics dominates and women have achieved full equality;
WWIII follows rather rapidly, in 1999. Her brother was Stephen KING-HALL.
[JC]
KING-HALL, (WILLIAM) STEPHEN (RICHARD)
(1893-1966) UK naval officer, writer and politician; brother of Lou
KING-HALL. His military experiences (1914-29) influenced his work as a
writer, especially the long series of admonitory newsletters he published
from 1936 for 30 years, first as the K-H News Service and later under
other names. Posterity (1927 chap), a play, is fantasy; it appears also in
Three Plays and a Plaything (coll 1933) along with "The Republican
Princess", a RURITANIAN spoof. In Post-War Pirate (1931) a submarine uses
a newly invented gas to disable shipping. Bunga-Bunga (1932) is a SATIRE
set on an ISLAND where anything is permitted. Number 10 Downing Street
(1948), a play which depicts an occupied UK, takes place in the mid-1950s.
His last novel, Men of Destiny (1960; vt Moment of No Return 1961 US), is

again set in the NEAR FUTURE. [JC]
KING KONG
1. Film (1933). RKO. Dir Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, starring
Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot. Screenplay James A. Creelman,
Ruth Rose, from a story by Cooper, with credit also given to Edgar
WALLACE. Special effects designed and supervised by Willis H. O'BRIEN. 100
mins. B/w.The classic MONSTER MOVIE. On a remote island inhabited by
unfriendly natives and prehistoric MONSTERS, of which the most powerful is
a giant APE called Kong, a young actress (Wray) from a visiting film unit
is kidnapped by tribesmen and offered to Kong, a gift which he eagerly
accepts. She is rescued and Kong is captured and taken to New York, where
he is exhibited, escapes, rampages, recaptures the girl (for whom he
appears to cherish strong feelings), and makes a last defiant stand on top
of the Empire State Building before being machine-gunned down by a
squadron of biplanes.Although KK is an early film, its special effects are
still very convincing today, many being the product of the technique of
stop-motion photography that had been pioneered by O'Brien in The LOST
WORLD (1925). The classic status of KK, which has become one of the great
mythopoeic works of the 20th century, has probably to do with the
ambiguous feelings - much as with its fairy-tale model, "Beauty and the
Beast" - created by the film towards Kong himself: terror at his savagery;
admiration for his strength, naturalness and effortless regality in his
primeval surroundings; and pity for his squalid end - the most memorable
of all cinematic images of Nature destroyed in the city. This ending is
also an image of the great destroyed by the small: the humans are dwarfed
by the ape and indeed by the city they have created, a feeling emphasized
by the ambience of the Great Depression, with a bored, impoverished
populace ready to grasp at any ersatz marvel but panicking when it finds
itself faced with the real thing. Yet another polarity is that of
innocence destroyed by sophistication, a feeling enhanced by the crucial
story-element of Kong's capture being to do with the shooting of a movie.
The narrative moves with elan, and the film has been almost as popular
with critics as with the general public. There is a GRAPHIC NOVEL version
of the tale: King Kong: The Greatest Adventure Story of All Time * (graph
1970) illus Alberto Giolitti.The disappointing sequel was SON OF KONG
(1933). Another Willis O'Brien giant ape, not quite so big, starred in
MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949; vt Mr Joseph Young of Africa).2. Film (1976). Dino
De Laurentiis/Paramount. Dir John Guillermin, starring Jessica Lange, Jeff
Bridges, Charles Grodin, Ed Lauter. Screenplay Lorenzo Semple Jr, based on
the 1933 screenplay. 134 mins. Colour.In this lavish and heavily
publicized remake, it is an oil-company executive who leads the expedition
to Kong's island. Kong is taken back to the USA in an oil supertanker. His
last stand is on top of the World Trade Center, and he is shot dead by a
group of helicopter gunships.This version did not use model animation and
was therefore more restricted - and indeed more primitive - in its
effects: most shots of Kong show a man in an ape suit. The original
set-piece battles between Kong and prehistoric monsters are gone. The
vigorous narrative of the original is here slowed down by didactic,
moralizing scenes in a manner which suggests that the new Hollywood has a
much lower opinion of the intelligence of the public than the old one did.

The delicate balance of the original between pity and terror is here
shifted towards pity, and Kong is softened. Tragedy becomes at best
pathos, yet many scenes remain moving, and the startlingly vulgar heroine
(now feminist and tough, no longer a limp screamer) has a more interesting
role than her original. In a flurry of self-contradiction, KK seems
designed to be spoof, tragedy, nostalgia-epic, spectacle and allegory
about "the rape of the environment by big business" - all rolled into one.
[JB/PN]See also: CINEMA; GREAT AND SMALL; LOST WORLDS.
KING KONG TAI GOJIRA
GOJIRA.
KING KONG VS. GODZILLA
GOJIRA.
KINGSBURY, DONALD (MacDONALD)
(1929- ) US-born academic and writer, in Canada from 1948, a teacher of
mathematics at McGill University from 1956 until his retirement in 1986.
He began publishing sf with "Ghost Town" for ASF in 1952; although he
produced relatively little for nearly 30 years, his intermittent
appearances in ASF, with both fiction and nonfiction, were generally
noticed. What could not have been noted - because of the sparseness of his
production and the wide-ranging nature of his underlying construct - was
that almost everything he wrote shared a common future HISTORY, somewhere
into the middle of which his first novel, COURTSHIP RITE (1982 US; vt Geta
1984 UK), fitted smoothly; indeed, the polished sweep and exuberance of
this large epic PLANETARY ROMANCE must have owed something to DK's long
familiarity with its sustaining Universe. The planet Geta is a venue which
amply contains: several warring cultures for whom all aspects of life are
agonistic; complicated group marriages; an elaborate ethical and
ecological justification of cannibalism in a world of terrible scarcity (
ECOLOGY); and the highly productive worship of a God in the sky (in fact,
in a standby orbit, the starship that seeded the world) who rewards
worship by raining down computer chips full of precious data. The plot,
involving the forced courtship of a woman from another culture by members
of a group marriage, is perhaps less convincing than the background; but
the pace is sufficient to intrigue and to engage even those readers who
might be dubious about the Libertarian assumptions underlying certain
elements of the unrelenting agons of Geta.DK's second novel, The Moon
Goddess and the Son (1979 ASF; exp 1986), is set so early in his Future
History that the NEAR-FUTURE setting of certain parts of the tale seems
directly extrapolative of current thinking about space technologies. The
HARD-SF arguments, about the design and construction of space stations
capable of grappling space freighters into dock, are as gripping as this
sort of narrative can sometimes be; and later sections, featuring the
eponymous Diana a generation or so further on, adequately point a way
forward into romance. A third novel, "The Survivor", forms the bulk of
Man-Kzin Wars IV * (anth 1991) in the Larry NIVEN Man-Kzin Wars
SHARED-WORLD enterprise; it is bleak and exorbitant, and constitutes a
self-sufficient tale.DK is a writer whose energy is conspicuous, and whose
imagined Universe does not lack ambition. At the time of writing, further
connective tissue is still wanting, but can be hoped for. [JC]See also:

ANTHROPOLOGY; CANADA; GODS AND DEMONS.
KING-SIZE PUBLICATIONS
FANTASTIC UNIVERSE.
KINGSMILL, HUGH
Working name of UK writer and anthologist Hugh Kingsmill Lunn
(1899-1949), who remains best known for An Anthology of Invective and
Abuse (anth 1929). The Dawn's Delay (coll 1924) contains "The End of the
World", of interest for its vision of a Solar System populated by various
species, and "W.J.", about a future WAR in 1966-72. The Return of William
Shakespeare (1929) presents within a sketchy sf frame the thoughts and
activities of a Shakespeare reconstituted in the 20th century ( ARTS;
REINCARNATION). In revised form both of these volumes were assembled as
The Dawn's Delay (omni 1948). With Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990), HK
wrote two SATIRES rendering NEAR-FUTURE doings in the form of newspaper
stories: Brave Old World: A Mirror for The Times (1936) and Next Year's
News (1938). A much-loved figure, HK appears in novels and reminiscences
of writers like William GERHARDI and Lance SIEVEKING. [JC]See also: END OF
THE WORLD; SUN.
KINGSTON, JEREMY
1. Full name Jeremy Hervey Spencer Kingston (1931- ), UK writer, mostly
of plays. His novel, Love Among the Unicorns (1968), a surreal fantasy set
in South America, features a LOST WORLD.2. Pseudonym under which John
Gregory BETANCOURT wrote Robert Silverberg's Time Tours #6: Caesar's Time
Legion * (1991). [JC]
KINLEY, GEORGE
Edmund COOPER.
KINROSS, ALBERT
(1870-1929) UK writer in various genres whose The Fearsome Island (1896),
most of which takes the form of a recently discovered 16th-century
manuscript, describes its protagonist's experiences after being
shipwrecked on an unknown ISLAND full of alarms and delights - including a
huge mechanical man, an ominous castle which has many perilous marvels,
and a Caliban-like native. The maker of all this, it turns out, is a cruel
Spanish inventor who left his homeland long ago on a pre-Columbian
expedition to the Americas. Some of the stories in Within the Radius (coll
1901) are sf. [JC]
KINVIG
UK tv series (1981). London Weekend Television. Created and written by
Nigel KNEALE. Prod and dir Les Chatfield; starring Tony Haygarth, Patsy
Rowlands, Colin Jeavons, Prunella Gee. 7 25min episodes. Colour.This most
recent of Kneale's many sf plays and series for tv was a sitcom, fuelled
apparently by a certain animus against sf FANDOM, about two lunatic fans
living seedy urban lives, one of whom (Haygarth) has a fat wife (Rowlands)
and a fat dog, and is entranced by an ALIEN from Mercury (Gee) in the
guise of a beautiful customer at his electrical repair shop. He has
adventures with her (she wearing a variety of sexy catsuits) and helps
ward off an INVASION of Earth by the alien Xux. The scripts lacked the

precision required for decent farce, and the invasive canned laughter did
not help. Kneale's belief that sf fans are typologically identical with
UFO cultists, and that both have an obsessive need for alien glamour to
lighten their ghastly lives, was offensive to some viewers. [PN]
KIPLING, ARTHUR WELLESLEY
(? - ) UK author, possibly pseudonymous, of 2 future- WAR novels. The New
Dominion (1908) pits the USA triumphantly against Japan and The Shadow of
Glory (1910) visualizes a worldwide conflict, mainly naval. [JC]
KIPLING, (JOSEPH) RUDYARD
(1865-1936) UK poet, short-story writer and novelist, known mainly for
such works outside the sf field as Plain Tales from the Hills (coll 1888
India) and Kim (1901). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.
Before the age of 27, RK wrote a considerable number of stories containing
elements of fantasy and horror. Some, like "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie
Jukes" (1885), are to be found in The Phantom 'Rickshaw, and Other Tales
(coll 1888 India; rev 1890 UK), the title story of which is also fantasy;
others appear in Life's Handicap, Being Stories of Mine Own People (coll
1891) and Many Inventions (coll 1893), which includes "The Lost Legion"
(1892). The Brushwood Boy (1895; 1899 chap) is fantasy, as are the various
linked and unlinked stories assembled in The Jungle Book (coll 1894) and
The Second Jungle Book (coll 1895), while Just So Stories for Little
Children (coll 1902) contains classic children's fables. "They" (1905
chap) is a ghost story. Puck of Pook's Hill (coll 1906) and its sequel,
Rewards and Fairies (coll 1910), contain a series of stories about the
formation and growth of Britain as told by Puck to two children. In
several of his late stories, all of which are complex, elliptic, highly
crafted and deeply pessimistic, RK made some ambiguous use of supernatural
principles of explanation; of these, "A Madonna of the Trenches" and "The
Wish House", both from 1924, are assembled along with "The Gardener" in
Debits and Credits (coll 1926), which has a claim to being his finest
collection. These tales are not comfortably amenable to either sf or
fantasy reading, but they demonstrate the power of hinted supernatural
themes in writing of high virtuosity. The Complete Supernatural Stories of
Rudyard Kipling (coll 1987) conveniently assembles this category of his
output, as does Kipling's Fantasy (coll 1992) ed John BRUNNER. Thy Servant
a Dog: Told by Boots (1930 chap), not included in either collection, is an
animal fantasy of almost perverse fervour.Sf proper appears infrequently
in RK's work, though "The Finest Story in the World" (1891), whose
narrator encounters a case of REINCARNATION, and "A Matter of Fact"
(1892), about a modern sea-serpent sighting - both assembled in Many
Inventions - are arguably sf, as are "The Ship that Found Herself" (1895)
and "007" (1897) from The Day's Work (coll 1898). Other early tales
include "Wireless" (1902; in Traffics and Discoveries [coll 1904]), in
which amateur-radio experiments make communication possible between a shop
assistant and John Keats; "The House Surgeon", in Actions and Reactions
(coll 1909), explains a ghost in terms of PSI POWERS; "In the Same Boat"
(1911), in A Diversity of Creatures (coll 1917), suggests a prenatal cause
for bouts of irrational dread; "The Eye of Allah", in Debits and Credits,
describes the ALTERNATE HISTORY that is almost generated when a microscope

falls into the hands of medieval English churchmen; and "Unprofessional"
(1930), assembled in Limits and Renewals (coll 1932), suggests that
planetary "tides" may affect human tissue.RK's most notable and
unmistakably sf stories are perhaps With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000
A.D. (1905 McClure's Magazine; 1909 chap US) and its sequel, "As Easy as
A.B.C." (1912), which was collected in A Diversity of Creatures. Both
tales revolve about the Aerial Board of Control, or A.B.C., which
dominates the world. The first is a dramatized travelogue, depicting some
incidents on a dirigible journey from London to Quebec, and is accompanied
by an appendix of futuristic advertisements; in the second - a somewhat
DYSTOPIAN vision of centralized government probably based on Wellsian
models - agents of the A.B.C. fly to Chicago to deal with a revolt of the
local underclass, whose demands for a return of democracy have generated
attacks by the rest of the population. The A.B.C. - though not necessarily
the political views it stands for - has influenced writers as far apart as
Michael ARLEN and Rex WARNER. Although its reprint of With the Night Mail
is incomplete, Kipling's Science Fiction (coll 1992; vt The Science
Fiction Stories of Rudyard Kipling 1994) ed John Brunner is otherwise
thorough in its coverage of this part of RK's work.Although RK was not an
sf writer by inclination, his intense, somewhat feverish talent makes even
the least characteristic of his works of more than peripheral interest to
the sf reader. [JC]About the author: Literature on RK is extensive.
Charles Carrington's Rudyard Kipling (1955) is the definitive biography,
while J.M.S. Tompkins's The Art of Rudyard Kipling (1959) very competently
surveys both prose and poetry. RK's own posthumous, sanitized
autobiographical fragment, Something of Myself (1937), is of some
interest. Angus WILSON's The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (1977)
combines biography and criticism in a sustained, intense study. Also
interesting is Rudyard Kipling and his World (1977) by Kingsley AMIS.See
also: APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD); DISCOVERY AND INVENTION;
HISTORY OF SF; PREDICTION; TRANSPORTATION.
KIPPAX, JOHN
Pseudonym of UK writer John Charles Hynam (1915-1974). He was a regular
contributor to the UK sf magazines during 1955-61, publishing over 30
stories in that time. His first two stories appeared in Dec 1954: "Dimple"
in Science Fantasy and "Trojan Hearse" in NW. The latter was a
collaboration with Dan MORGAN, with whom he also published a SPACE-OPERA
series - A Thunder of Stars (1968), Seed of Stars (1972 US), The Neutral
Stars (1973 US) and, by JK alone, Where No Stars Guide (1975) - about the
Space Corps team of the Venturer Twelve. [JC]
KIRBY, JACK
(1917-1994) US comic-book illustrator, born Jacob Kurtzberg. One of the
giants in the COMICS industry, he began his 50+-year career in 1935
working on newspaper comic strips (with a break in 1936, animating Popeye
cartoons for Max Fleischer). He later broke into the comic-book field,
creating Captain America with Joe Simon in 1941 for Timely Comics (later
MARVEL COMICS); he also worked on CAPTAIN MARVEL. His main claim to fame,
however, was his work in the 1960s for Marvel Comics, by then under the
direction of Stan LEE. In 1961 JK created The Fantastic Four (a group of

SUPERHEROES), one of the most popular series in the history of the genre.
He also created, or helped create, dozens of other superheroes, including
The Incredible Hulk, which helped launch Marvel to the top of the
business. He left the Lee organization in 1970 and for a while worked for
DC COMICS, where he produced an interesting group of four interconnected
superhero comics, including New Gods (referred to as "Kirby's Fourth
World"), before returning to Marvel. JK's style is blocky, almost
primitive, but with a power and sense of drama that many other comics
artists lack. His use of motion-picture techniques (such as still-frame
storytelling) and dramatic perspectives has influenced most of today's
comics artists. His work is reproduced in Origins of Marvel Comics (1974),
Son of Origins of Marvel Comics (1975) and Bring on the Bad Guys (1976),
all ed Stan Lee, and in many more recent and accessible collections,
including #2-#4, #6-#8, #13 and #14 of the Marvel Masterworks series (1986
onwards). [JG/RH/PN]
KIRBY, JOSH
(1928- ) UK illustrator, trained at Liverpool School of Art. JK's work in
sf began with covers for the 1956 paperback of Ian FLEMING's Moonraker
(1955) and for Authentic Science Fiction. Most of his art has been for
paperback covers, for publishers including Corgi, Panther and New English
Library and, in the USA, ACE BOOKS, BALLANTINE BOOKS, DAW BOOKS and Lancer
Books. His style is colourful and intricate, and often designed on a small
scale: the painting is frequently no larger than the book cover itself.
His trademark is the grotesquerie of his creations. He belongs to a
tradition derived more obviously from grotesque fantasists like Arthur
Rackham than from sf illustrators. JK's work has been strongly identified,
in the 1980s and since, with both hardcover and paperback editions of the
novels of Terry PRATCHETT, with whom he shares a cover credit for the
richly illustrated Eric (1990) - even Pratchett imitators often get JK
covers. A portfolio of his work is Voyage of the Ayeguy (1981). The Josh
Kirby Poster Book (1989), in large format and introduced by Pratchett,
contains 13 posters. JK's most substantial and recent book is In the
Garden of Unearthly Delights (1991), 159 paintings by JK with intro by
Brian W. ALDISS. [JG/PN]See also: FANTASY.
KIRCHER, ATHANASIUS
(1602-1680) German priest and scientist who predicted the germ theory of
disease. For his relevance to sf, MARS, MERCURY, OUTER PLANETS, RELIGION
and VENUS, in each of which entries there is reference to AK's
speculative, visionary round-trip to the planets, Itinerarium Exstaticum
["A Journey in Rapture"] (1656 Rome). [PN]
KIRK, RICHARD
Robert P. HOLDSTOCK; Angus WELLS.
KIRKHAM, NELLIE
(? - ) UK writer whose sf novel, Unrest of Their Time (1938), used
contrasting colours of type to represent the simultaneity of lives lived
in different periods by the one protagonist. [JC]
KIRKUP, JAMES (FALCONER)
(1923- ) UK poet and writer whose first book, The Cosmic Shape:An

Interpretation of Myth and Legend with Three Poems and Lyrics (coll1946)
with Ross Nichols, is at times foggy, but at times illuminating. The True
Mistery of the Passion (1961) is a fantasy play;Tales of Hoffmann (coll
trans 1966) is a goodselection; and Queens Have Died Young and Fair: A
Fable of theImmediate Future(1993) is an sf SATIRE whoseimprecations
encompass sex, politics, and culture. [JC]
KIRST, HANS HELLMUT
(1914-1989) German writer best known for his novels about WWII. His
NEAR-FUTURE sf novel, Keiner Kommt Davon (1957; trans Richard Graves as
The Seventh Day 1959 US; vt No One Will Escape 1960 UK), deals with the
period directly preceding WWIII and with the atomic HOLOCAUST that then
kills off the cast. [JC]
KISS ME DEADLY
Film (1955). Parklane. Prod and dir Robert Aldrich, starring Ralph
Meeker, Albert Dekker, Paul Stewart, Maxine Cooper, Gaby Rogers, Chloris
Leachman. Screenplay A.I. Bezzerides, based remotely on Kiss Me Deadly
(1952) by Mickey Spillane. 105 mins. B/w.This extraordinary film noir, now
recognized as one of the greatest of its period, substitutes a boxful of
radioactivity - a kind of surrogate atom bomb - for the packet of
narcotics everyone seeks control of in Spillane's original. In a sadly
tarnished world, the lethal Pandora's Box takes on a glamour which
literally shines out - destroying the world - at the apocalyptic climax.
Painful and furious, KMD gives an extraordinarily abrasive quality to the
stereotypes of the private-eye genre, but it is the box itself that
dominates the movie, growing from an apparent MCGUFFIN into an icon of a
menacing future, the object of worship in an impoverished present which,
by implication, yearns for the hard white light that abolishes all
shadows. [PN]See also: CINEMA.
KJELGAARD, JIM
[r] David A. DRAKE.
KLASS, PHILIP
[r] William TENN.
KLEIN, GERARD
(1937- ) French writer, anthologist, critic and editor. An economist by
profession, GK is one of the few European sf writers known in the USA. He
has used the pseudonyms Gilles d'Argyre, Francois Pagery and Mark Starr.
His first stories, heavily influenced by Ray BRADBURY, appeared in 1955
when he was only 18 years old, and he soon made a major impact on the
field in France, publishing over 40 delicately crafted stories 1956-62 (60
by 1977), while also establishing himself as a forceful and literate
critic of the genre with a series of 30 penetrating essays in various
publications. His first novel, Le gambit des etoiles (1958; trans C.J.
Richards as Starmaster's Gambit 1973 US), a clever and wide-ranging
adventure yarn, shows the increasing influence that US GENRE SF was having
on GK, a trend which comes strongly to the fore in novels like Le temps
n'a pas d'odeur (1963; trans P.J. Skolowski as The Day before Tomorrow
1972 US) and Les seigneurs de la guerre (1971; trans John BRUNNER as The
Overlords of War 1973 US); these, though well conducted and interesting,

lack the poetic invention of his early work. From 1969, GK edited the
Ailleurs et Demain imprint for publisher Robert Laffont, where he was
instrumental in introducing some of the major modern US-UK sf writers to
the French public while also encouraging the better local authors Philippe CURVAL, Michel Jeury, Christian LEOURIER, Andre Ruellan and
Stefan WUL. Many of GK's works feature an imagery and even a structure
influenced by chess. [MJ]Other works: Agent galactique ["Galactic Agent"]
(1958) as by Mark Starr; Embuches dans l'espace ["Ambushes in Space"]
(1958 as by Francois Pagery); Les perles du temps ["Pearls of Time"] (coll
1958); Chirurgiens d'une planete ["Planet-Surgeons"] (1960) as by Gilles
d'Argyre; Les voiliers du soleil ["Sailors of the Sun"] (1961) as by
d'Argyre; Le long voyage ["The Long Journey"] (1964) as by d'Argyre; Les
tueurs du temps (1965; trans C.J. Richards as The Mote in Time's Eye 1975
US), as by d'Argyre in France, GK in USA; Le sceptre du hasard ["The
Sceptre of Chance"] (1966) as by d'Argyre; Un chant de pierre ["Stone
Song"] (coll 1966); La loi du talion ["The Law of Retaliation"] (coll
1973); Histoires comme si ["Stories as If"] (coll 1975); Anthologie de la
science-fiction francaise (anth in 3 vols 1975, 1976, 1977) with others;
Le Livre d'or du Gerard Klein ["The Book of Gold of Gerard Klein"] (coll
1979).See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; FRANCE; GALACTIC
EMPIRES; GAMES AND SPORTS; LIVING WORLDS.
KLINE, OTIS ADELBERT
(1891-1946) US songwriter, author and literary agent, active in music
before beginning to write popular fiction in several genres, predominantly
fantasy, in the early 1920s, most notably for Weird Tales and The Argosy.
With the exception of marginal sf tales like "The Bride of Osiris" (1927)
and space adventures such as "Race Around the Moon" (1939), most of his
genre work is HEROIC FANTASY, and is generally thought to have been
written in competition with (and slavishly derived from) Edgar Rice
BURROUGHS's PLANETARY ROMANCES. The Robert Grandon sequence is typical:
comprising The Planet of Peril (1929), The Prince of Peril (1930) and The
Port of Peril (1932 Weird Tales as "Buccaneers of Venus"; 1949), it
carries the swashbuckling Grandon to VENUS, where he rises from slavery to
marry a princess; the later adventures expand upon this. Linked to this
series through the character of Dr Morgan - a scientist who makes
interplanetary transfers easy - are The Swordsman of Mars (1933 Argosy;
1960) and its sequel, The Outlaws of Mars (1933 Argosy; 1960). In Maza of
the Moon (1930) the P'an-ku who rule the MOON bomb Earth after Earth bombs
them. Call of the Savage (1931 Argosy as "Jan of the Jungle"; 1937; vt Jan
of the Jungle 1966) and its sequel Jan in India (1935 Argosy; 1974) again
ape Burroughs, the target this time being Tarzan. In his later years,
OAK's time was almost entirely taken up by his literary agency. Violently
coloured, crudely racist and sniggeringly sexist, his tales represent pulp
fiction at its worst, but they retain a raw compulsiveness. [JC]Other
works: The Man who Limped and Other Stories (coll of linked stories 1946);
Tam, Son of the Tiger (1931 Weird Tales; 1962); Bride of Osiris and Other
Weird Tales (coll 1975 chap).See also: COMICS; MARS; PUBLISHING.
KNEALE, (THOMAS) NIGEL
(1922- ) UK author and screenwriter, married to Judith Kerr (1923- ), a

well known children's author. After attending the Royal Academy of
Dramatic Art and working as an actor, NK began writing short stories, 26
of which - some horror or fantasy - appear in Tomato Cain and Other
Stories (coll 1949). Since then most of his writing work has been for
TELEVISION and film, often using sf themes, most commonly consisting of
scientific rationalizations of ancient motifs from HORROR fiction and
MYTHOLOGY. His first major tv success was in 1953 with a serial, The
QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT . In 1954 he successfully adapted George ORWELL's
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) for BBC TV; it caused much controversy. Two
more Quatermass serials for BBC TV were QUATERMASS II (1955) and
QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1958-9). All three were adapted into feature films
by Hammer Films, as The QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955; vt The Creeping
Unknown), QUATERMASS II (1957; vt Enemy from Space) and QUATERMASS AND THE
PIT (1968; vt Five Million Years to Earth). NK coscripted the second of
these films, and scripted the third. The tv scripts were published as The
Quatermass Experiment: A Play for Television in Six Parts * (1953 BBC TV;
rev 1959), Quatermass II: A Play for Television in Six Parts * (1955 BBC
TV; rev 1960) and Quatermass and the Pit: A Play for Television in Six
Parts * (1958-9 BBC TV; rev 1960). NK also scripted FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
(1964) and the horror film The Witches (1966), adapted from novels by H.G.
WELLS and Peter Curtis respectively.Three further tv plays, "The Road"
(1963), "The Year of the Sex Olympics" (1969) and "The Stone Tape" (1972)
have been collected in The Year of the Sex Olympics and Other TV Plays
(coll 1976). The first is an 18th-century ghost story in which the ghosts
are apparitions of 20th-century TECHNOLOGY; the second deals satirically
with a future tv-watching population and improved methods of apathy
control; the third again combines Gothic horror with messages across time.
In 1971 "The Chopper", about a biker's ghost, was televised as part of the
OUT OF THE UNKNOWN series. The 1975 ATV tv series Beasts was scripted by
NK, the beasts in question ranging from psychological to supernatural.In
1979 Quatermass returned, this time to ITV, in a new tv serial (4 parts)
entitled QUATERMASS. An edited-down version, retitled The Quatermass
Conclusion, was intended for cinema release, but in the UK was released
only on videotape. It had in fact been written a decade earlier for BBC
TV, and its plot (featuring mystically inclined flower children about to
be harvested by ALIENS via messages beamed through stone circles) seemed
curiously old-fashioned. The book version by NK, Quatermass (1979), which
appeared concurrently, is not a novelization, and diverges in detail from
the tv series. A more sinister version of the same theme appears in NK's
script for the film HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1983), in which
microchips made out of a Stonhenge monolith are used to booby-trap
children's Halloween masks with a hideous destruction device, this being
the plot of a madman who wishes (as perhaps NK does) that the true meaning
of Halloween had not been vulgarized.It had now become clear from NK's
sf/horror work that he had little interest in, or even knowledge of, sf
proper, a genre about which he has consistently expressed contempt (sf
being "very disappointing and horribly overwritten" and sf fans, he said
in a 1979 interview, being either fat with wispy wives or wispy with fat
ones); it is interesting, for example, that the two films he repudiated as
having vulgarized his scripts, Quatermass II - which he has kept from
circulation for years - and Halloween III, are among the better ones. With

hindsight, there is a clear pattern in NK's work of ordinary people being
seen as stupid and ignorant, and ready prey for the supernatural or
sciencefictional forces that will almost inevitably attempt to control
them. There is a seigneurial, Edwardian element in this, a recoiling from
the vulgar. It is worth labouring the point, because he is certainly a
much better than average scriptwriter - the Quatermass series especially
is exemplary - and his scripts have been, paradoxically, very influential
on sf, at least at the GOTHIC and irrational margin of the genre where sf
meets fantasy and horror (and particularly among film and tv producers,
who never expect sf to make sense anyway).NK's revulsion against what he
saw sf as standing for came into gloomy focus with the 1981 tv series
KINVIG, which attempts to call forth derisory laughter at the granting
(through the introduction of a very beautiful ALIEN) of two sf fans'
romantic longings for mysteries in a mundane world; it is a sitcom notable
for its contemptuous treatment of the leading characters. [PN]See also:
MUSIC; PSEUDO-SCIENCE; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
KNEBEL, FLETCHER
(1911-1993) US journalist and novelist, most of whose books are political
thrillers, not excepting his borderline-sf books. Seven Days in May
(1962), with Charles W. BAILEY, later filmed ( John FRANKENHEIMER),
describes an attempted military coup in the USA. Night of Camp David
(1965) tells of a NEAR-FUTURE President of the USA who goes mad and almost
destroys the country. In Trespass (1969), set in 1973, a Black activist
group takes over White properties and upsets the FBI. [JC/PN]
KNEIFEL, HANS
[r] GERMANY; PERRY RHODAN.
KNIGHT, DAMON (FRANCIS)
(1922- ) US writer and editor; his third marriage was to Kate WILHELM.
Like many sf writers, DK became involved in sf FANDOM at an early age, and
by 1941 was a member of the FUTURIANS in New York, where he shared an
apartment with Robert A.W. LOWNDES and met James BLISH, C.M. KORNBLUTH,
Frederik POHL and others. (In The Futurians: The Story of the Science
Fiction "Family" of the 30's that Produced Today's Top SF Writers and
Editors [1977] he published a candid history of the group and its era.)
His first professional sale was a cartoon to AMZ. His first story was
"Resilience" (1941) in STIRRING SCIENCE STORIES, edited by another
Futurian, Donald A. WOLLHEIM; but DK's career as a short-story writer lay
fallow for several years. In 1943 he became an assistant editor with
Popular Publications, a PULP-MAGAZINE chain. Later he worked for a
literary agency, then returned to Popular Publications as assistant editor
of SUPER SCIENCE STORIES. In 1950-51 he was editor of WORLDS BEYOND, but
the magazine ran for only 3 issues; later he edited IF for 3 issues
1958-9.DK made his initial strong impact on the field as a book reviewer,
and is generally acknowledged to have been the first outstanding GENRE-SF
critic. His very first piece - a fanzine review (in Larry SHAW's Destiny's
Child) of the 1945 ASF serial version of A.E. VAN VOGT's The World of A
(1948) - remains perhaps his best known; it is in any case one of the most
famous works of critical demolition ever published in the field, inspiring
considerable revisions in the published book, and being credited (perhaps

a touch implausibly) for van Vogt's eventual slide from pre-eminence. DK
later reviewed books for a number of amateur and professional magazines,
notably INFINITY and The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ,
expressing throughout a sane and consistent insistence on the relevance of
literary standards to sf. His early reviews were collected in In Search of
Wonder (coll 1956; rev 1967), and won him a HUGO in 1956. He stopped
reviewing entirely when FSF declined to print a negative response to
Judith MERRIL - the review of The Tomorrow People (1960) which appears in
In Search of Wonder. In 1975 he received a retrospective PILGRIM AWARD
from the SCIENCE FICTION RESEARCH ASSOCIATION.DK's 1940s stories including occasional collaborations with Blish, once using the
collaborative pseudonym Donald Laverty, and 3 times as Stuart Fleming were of only mild interest until the release in 1949 of his ironic END OF
THE WORLD story "Not With a Bang" in one of the first issues of FSF. This
magazine, and GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION even more so, now provided markets in
which DK could develop his urbane and darkly humorous short
stories-including the famous "To Serve Man" (1950), "Four in One" (1953),
"Babel II" (1953), "The Country of the Kind" (1955) and "Stranger Station"
(1956) - though as the decade advanced, and as his perspectives on the
human enterprise darkened, even these markets proved too narrow, and he
was forced to publish some of his finest work in lesser journals, where
his scouring, revisionary, anatomical rewrites of the genre's already
sclerotic conventions could appear in safe obscurity. DK's reputation as a
writer has primarily rested on the short stories published during the
1950s and, to a lesser extent, the 1960s; they are adult and sane and have
not dated. His best work has been assembled in various collections,
including Far Out (coll 1961), In Deep (coll 1963; cut 1964 UK), Off
Center (coll 1965 dos; exp vt Off Centre 1969 UK), Turning On (coll 1966;
exp 1967 UK) and Rule Golden (coll 1979); later collections like Late
Knight Edition (coll 1985), One Side Laughing: Stories Unlike Other
Stories (coll 1991) and God's Nose (coll 1991) tend to mix early and later
work.From the first, novels presented something of a difficulty for DK.
Most of them - like his first, HELL'S PAVEMENT (fixup 1955; vt Analogue
Men 1962), a DYSTOPIAN story of a future society with humanity under
psychological control, Masters of Evolution (1954 Gal as "Natural State";
exp 1959 chap dos) and The Sun Saboteurs (1955 If as "The Earth Quarter";
1961 dos) - were expanded from stories, losing in the process the
compressed drivenness of his short work. Of them all, only The People
Maker (1959; rev vt A for Anything 1961 UK) and the late The World and
Thorinn (fixup 1981), a scintillating picaresque derived from some 1960s
tales, seem comfortably to fill the longer format; and by the mid-1960s he
appeared to have turned his attention permanently elsewhere.Like Frederik
Pohl, DK became adept at all aspects of the writing business, having
worked as magazine editor, short-story writer, novelist and critic. He now
involved himself in formalizing the professional collegiality so important
to the sf field, first by cofounding, with Blish and Merril, the MILFORD
SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' CONFERENCE in 1956, which he ran (soon with
Wilhelm) for over 20 years, later participating in its spiritual
offspring, the CLARION SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' WORKSHOP writing seminar,
for which he edited The Clarion Writers' Handbook (anth 1978; rev as
Creating Short Fiction 1981; rev under that title 1985); and second by

being responsible for founding the SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA,
serving as its first president 1965-7. At about the same time he began to
issue well conceived reprint ANTHOLOGIES like A Century of Science Fiction
(anth 1962), First Flight (anth 1963; vt Now Begins Tomorrow 1969; exp vt
First Voyages 1981 with Martin H. GREENBERG and Joseph D. OLANDER),
Tomorrow x 4 (anth 1964), A Century of Great Short Science Fiction Novels
(anth 1964) and many others. He also translated a number of French sf
stories, some for publication in FSF, and collected them as 13 French
Science-Fiction Stories (anth 1965). But his greatest editorial
achievement during these years was the ORBIT series of ORIGINAL
ANTHOLOGIES that he began in 1966, and which would become the
longest-running and most influential series of that sort yet seen in the
field; among writers strongly identified with Orbit were Gardner DOZOIS,
R.A. LAFFERTY, Kate WILHELM and Gene WOLFE.In the 1980s, after the end of
Orbit, DK became more active as a writer again, though without making a
huge impression on a new generation of readers. But if The Man in the Tree
(1984) seems unduly slack and irony-poor in its presentation of a
contemporary MESSIAH figure, DK returned to something like form, though
without quite the energy of earlier efforts, in the wickedly UTOPIAN
sequence comprising CV (1985), The Observers (1988) and A Reasonable World
(1991), about ALIEN parasites who turn out not to be the
PARANOIA-justifiying plague of 1950s sf but moralistic symbionts who
enforce something like rational behaviour upon humanity's leaders; in the
third volume, a plethora of sf devices and utopian appeals somewhat
weakens the pleasurable sting, but the series as a whole seems young at
heart, and DK's cognitive energy remains clearly evident - as also
demonstrated by the autumnal ironies of Why Do Birds (1992), in which the
world is brought to an end. There is still a sense that he may have a mind
to continue to shock the sf world. In 1995, he was granted the NEBULA
Grand Master Award. [MJE/JC]Other works: Beyond the Barrier (1964); The
Rithian Terror (1953 Startling Stories as "Double Meaning"; exp 1965 dos);
Mind Switch (1965; vt The Other Foot 1966 UK); Three Novels (omni 1967; vt
Natural State and Other Stories 1975 UK); World without Children, and The
Earth Quarter (coll 1970) including The Sun Saboteurs as "The Earth
Quarter", its magazine title; Two Novels (omni 1974) presenting The
Rithian Terror and The Sun Saboteurs, both under their magazine titles;
THE BEST OF DAMON KNIGHT (coll 1976); Better than One (coll 1980) with
Kate Wilhelm; Rule Golden/Double Meaning (omni 1991) presenting the
collection Rule Golden plus The Rithian Terror as Double
Meaning.Nonfiction: Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained (1970);
Turning Points: Essays on the Art of Science Fiction (anth 1977), critical
essays.As Editor: Beyond Tomorrow (anth 1965); The Dark Side (anth 1965);
The Shape of Things (anth 1965); Cities of Wonder (anth 1966); Nebula
Award Stories 1965 (anth 1966); Science Fiction Inventions (anth 1967);
Worlds to Come (anth 1967); The Metal Smile (anth 1968); One Hundred Years
of Science Fiction (anth 1968); Toward Infinity (anth 1968); Dimension X
(anth 1970; in 2 vols, the 2nd vol vt Elsewhere x 3 1974 UK); A Pocketful
of Stars (anth 1971); First Contact (anth 1971); Perchance to Dream (anth
1972); Science Fiction Argosy (anth 1972); Tomorrow and Tomorrow (anth
1973); The Golden Road (anth 1973); A Shocking Thing (anth 1974); Happy
Endings (anth 1974); Science Fiction of the Thirties (anth 1975); Monad 1:

Essays on Science Fiction (anth 1990),Monad 2: Essays on Science Fiction
(anth 1992) and Monad 3: Essays on Science Fiction (anth 1994).The Orbit
anthologies: Orbit 1 (anth 1966); Orbit 2 (anth 1967); Orbit 3 (anth
1968); Orbit 4 (anth 1968); Orbit 5 (anth 1969); Orbit 6 (anth 1970);
Orbit 7 (anth 1970); Orbit 8 (anth 1970); Orbit 9 (anth 1971); Orbit 10
(anth 1972); Orbit 11 (anth 1972); Orbit 12 (anth 1973); Orbit 13 (anth
1974); Orbit 14 (anth 1974); Orbit 15 (anth 1974); Orbit 16 (anth 1975);
Orbit 17 (anth 1975); Best Stories from Orbit: Volumes 1-10 (anth 1975);
Orbit 18 (anth 1976); Orbit 19 (anth 1977); Orbit 20 (anth 1978); Orbit 21
(anth 1980).About the author: "All in a Knight's Work" by James Blish,
Speculation 29, 1971; "Knight Piece" by DK in Hell's Cartographers (anth
1975) ed Brian W. ALDISS and Harry HARRISON.See also: ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM
IN SF; ARTS; COMMUNICATIONS; COSMOLOGY; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; CRITICAL
AND
HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DEFINITIONS OF SF; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION;
ECOLOGY; ECONOMICS; EVOLUTION; GENETIC ENGINEERING; IMMORTALITY;
INVISIBILITY; MONSTERS; NEBULA; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; SF MAGAZINES;
SCI FI; SPACE HABITATS; TABOOS; TRANSPORTATION.
KNIGHT, HARRY ADAM
John BROSNAN.
KNIGHT, NORMAN L(OUIS)
(1895-1972) US writer and pesticide chemist for the Department of
Agriculture until his retirement in 1963. He was not a prolific writer,
publishing only 11 stories altogether, the first of which was the novella
"Frontier of the Unknown" for ASF in 1937. He made his main contribution
by collaborating with James BLISH on A Torrent of Faces (1967). This novel
- whose UNDER-THE-SEA sequences and amphibious Tritons (genetically
engineered humans; GENETIC ENGINEERING) are taken from NLK's first story
and from "Crisis in Utopia" (1940 ASF) - depicts an ambiguously UTOPIAN
Earth whose trillion people ( OVERPOPULATION) must face up to the
challenge of an approaching meteor. [JC]See also: ASTEROIDS.
KNIGHT RIDER
Glen A. LARSON.
KNIGHT, ROBERT
Christopher EVANS.
KNOWLES, W(ILLIAM) P(LENDERLEITH)
(1891- ) UK writer whose Jim McWhirter (1933), set in 1953, advances
towards a not unusual socialist UTOPIA via a sequence of very violent
catastrophes, including an emission of poison gases from within the crust
of the Earth. [JC]
KNOX, CALVIN M.
Robert SILVERBERG.
KNOX, G.D.
[r] T.C. WIGNALL.
KNOX, [Monsignor] RONALD A(RBUTHNOTT)
(1888-1957) UK Roman Catholic priest (converted 1917, ordained 1919) and

extremely prolific writer. Among his many books are several then-popular
detective novels, volumes of parodies, a new translation of the
Testaments, and some genre work. A Still More Sporting Adventure! (1911)
with Charles R.L. Fletcher (1857-1934), published anon, takes two women
back in time to spy on Queen Dido in Carthage, thus parodying An Adventure
(1911) by Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, a bestselling nonfiction
tale of the authors' experiences via supposed timeslip in Versailles.
Absolute and Abitofhell (1915 chap), as by R.A.K., is a fantasy poem about
Noah's Ark; with further material, some of genre interest, it was
republished in Essays in Satire (coll 1928). Memories of the Future: Being
Memoirs of the Years 1915-1972 Written in the Year of Grace 1988 by Opal,
Lady Porstock (1923) satirizes the type of evolutionary UTOPIA most
closely identified with H.G. WELLS. The story is perhaps too cleverly
told, and its imitation of the genteel memoir too exact in places. Other
Eyes than Ours (1926), which features an apparatus for communicating with
the dead, is in fact hoax sf, the device having been concocted to bring an
obsessive to his senses; The Rich Young Man: a Fantasy (1928 chap) is a
Christian fantasy. [JC]
KNYE, CASSANDRA
Thomas M. DISCH; John T. SLADEK.
KOCH, ERIC
(1919- ) German-born writer and tv producer, in Canada from 1935, three
of whose novels are of some sf interest. In The French Kiss: A Tongue in
Cheek Political Fantasy (1969), set in a NEAR-FUTURE Canada threatened as usual - by separatism, a reincarnated colleague of Napoleon muses on De
Gaulle's similarity to the long-dead Emperor. The Leisure Riots: A Comic
Novel (1973) suggests that, in 1980, the enforced leisure of the executive
class will trigger riots. In The Last Thing You'd Want to Know (1976) a
"witch" becomes US President, sweeping all before her except one tortured
ex-Nazi. EK was sometimes amusing, but fatally inattentive to questions of
verisimilitude. [JC]
KOESTLER, ARTHUR
(1905-1983) Hungarian-born author and journalist who narrowly avoided
execution in the Spanish Civil War and spent the rest of his life in the
UK and France, becoming a naturalized UK citizen in 1940. All his books
after the famous DYSTOPIA Darkness at Noon (trans Daphne Hardy 1940) were
written in English. Several of the speculative, philosophical works of his
later career have a direct interest for sf readers and have probably been
influential on sf writers. They include The Sleepwalkers: A History of
Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959), The Act of Creation (1964),
The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971) - about the "Lamarckian" inheritance
of acquired characteristics ( EVOLUTION; PSEUDO-SCIENCE) - and The Roots
of Coincidence (1972). His play, Twilight Bar: An Escapade in Four Acts
(written 1933; English version 1945), is a UTOPIAN fantasia set on a
world- ISLAND visited by ALIENS who threaten to destroy human life unless
we better ourselves immediately. The Age of Longing (1951), is NEAR-FUTURE
sf, a discussion novel set in France; it distils his intimate experience
with European thought and POLITICS into a prediction of the nature of our
response to a threatened INVASION from the East. The Call Girls: A

Tragi-Comedy (1972) is a discussion novel on sf-related themes. AK was an
important speculative thinker, many of whose ideas challenged (sometimes
with some success) "orthodox" scientific and social thought. He several
times expressed contempt for sf. [JC]See also: THEATRE.
KOHOUT, PAVEL
(1928- ) Czech poet, playwright, novelist and, since his emigration in
1968, emigre activist. Though his early poetry had been pro-communist, his
politics changed and his work remained unpublished in Czechoslovakia in
the period 1968-89; some was published there in 1990. His sf novel, which
deals with the political persecution of a man who can control ANTIGRAVITY,
is Bila kniha o kauze Adam Juracek, profesor telocviku a kresleni na
Pedagogicke skole v K., kontra Sir Isaac Newton, profesor fyziky na
univerzite v Cambridge (written 1970 and circulated in samizdat form; 1978
Canada; trans Alec Page as White Book: Adam Juracek, Professor of Drawing
and Physical Education at the Pedagogical Institute in K., vs. Sir Isaac
Newton, Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge 1977 US).
[JO]See also: CZECH AND SLOVAK SF; THEATRE.
KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER
US tv series (1974-5). Francy Productions for Universal TV/ABC. Created
Jeff Rice. Executive prod Darren McGavin. Prod Paul Playton, Cy Chermak.
Story consultant David Chase. 20 50min episodes. Colour.This fondly
remembered series was a spin-off from a successful made-for-tv movie, The
Night Stalker (1972), prod Dan Curtis and written Richard MATHESON, about
a vampire in contemporary Las Vegas. This led to a feature-length sequel,
The Night Strangler (1973), also written by Matheson, about a youth serum
produced from murdered women. The tv series was partly sparked off by the
enthusiasm of McGavin, star of the two movies, who became K:TNS's
executive producer. He again played the reporter, Kolchak, who each week
uncovered some fantastic threat. Unable to persuade anyone in authority of
its existence, he was usually obliged to combat the menace alone. Most
episodes featured supernatural creatures; sf-related episodes were "They
Have Been, They Will Be, They Are" ( ALIEN intervention), "The Energy
Eater" (invisible creature feeds on radioactivity), "Mr. R.I.N.G."
(government-created killer ROBOT), "The Primal Scream" (cells from the
Arctic grow into a prehistoric ape-creature) and "The Sentry" (lizardlike
monster). The series was entertaining and atmospheric, but too unvarying
in its rigidly formulaic stories. [JB]
KOLUPAYEV, VIKTOR (DMITRIEVICH)
(1936- ) Russian writer who made a striking debut in 1966, soon becoming
a leading author of SOFT SF; his work has been likened to that of Ray
BRADBURY. His lyrical short stories are assembled in Slutchitsia Zhe S
Tchelovekom Takoie! ["What Can Happen to a Man?"] (coll 1972), Katcheli
Otshel'nika (coll 1974; trans Helen Saltz Jacobson with somewhat differing
contents as Hermit's Swing 1980 US) and Poiushii Les ["The Singing
Forest"] (coll 1984). VK's only novel is the controversial and somewhat
unsuccessful Firmenny Poezd "Fomitch" ["The 'Fomitch' Special Train"]
(1979). [VG]
KOMAN, VICTOR

(1944- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "When it Worked" for New
Libertarian Notes in 1976. Much of his subsequent output has emphasized
material and points of view that could be characterized under the
LIBERTARIANISM rubric. After publishing Saucer Sluts (1980), and
collaborating with Andrew J. OFFUTT under the joint pseudonym John CLEVE
for two Spaceways sf adventures, #13: Jonuta Rising! (1983) and #17: The
Carnadyne Horde (1984), VK released his first novel of substance, The
Jehovah Contract (1985 Germany, trans as Der Jehova-Vertrag; 1987 US), in
which a Los Angeles private eye is commissioned, in 1999, to kill God; the
ensuing events might be considered blasphemous by some readers. In
Solomon's Knife (1989) abortions are averted through a medical technique
which allows the transfer of foetuses into the wombs of infertile women
who want a child. The Prometheus Meltdown (1990) is a round-robin
libertarian tale whose other contributors were Brad LINAWEAVER, J. Neil
SCHULMAN, Robert SHEA, L. Neil SMITH and Robert Anton WILSON. [JC]
KOMARCIC, LAZAR
[r] YUGOSLAVIA.
KOMATSU, SAKYO
(1931- ) Japanese novelist and essayist regarded as the premier sf writer
of his country. His main novels consistently deal with large subjects: the
destiny of the Universe and Homo sapiens's place within it. They are
highly regarded for their panoramic vision and the encyclopedic knowledge
they display. A graduate of Kyoto University, SK worked at many jobs from
factory manager to comedy writer. His first sf was the novelette "Chi Niwa
Heiwa Wo" ["Peace on Earth"] (1961); nominated later for the Naoki Award,
Japan's most prestigious literary prize, it was reprinted in Chi Niwa
Heiwa Wo (coll 1963) along with other early short fiction. His most
popular work is the DISASTER novel Nippon Chinbotsu (1973; trans Michael
Gallagher, cut by one-third, as Japan Sinks 1976 US; vt Death of the
Dragon 1978). It sold about four million copies in JAPAN and was filmed by
Toho Eiga as NIPPON CHINBOTSU (1973) with a very limited release in the
West as The Submersion of Japan; the film was later rereleased in the West
as Tidal Wave (1974), cut to two-thirds and with new scenes added by
producer Roger CORMAN. In the novel the Japanese archipelago begins to
slide inexorably into the Japan Trench. Beyond its well worked-out
geological basis, Japan Sinks is effective as an obviously deeply felt
elegy for Japan herself in all her physical and cultural fragility: the
story has no heroes or villains, the main focus of our attention being the
dying of the country.SK's novel Sayonara Jupiter ["Goodbye Jupiter"]
(1982) was also filmed by Toho Eiga, in 1984 (vt, tastelessly, Bye-Bye
Jupiter), prod and dir SK himself, who also wrote the screenplay. It
features a scheme to turn Jupiter into a small Sun to render the outer
Solar System habitable; the book predated Arthur C. CLARKE's 2010: Odyssey
Two (1982), which uses the same central image. SK's most recent novel,
Kyomu Kairo ["Gallery of Nothingness"] (1987), has an immortal "Artificial
Existence" (developed in an AI laboratory) riding a spaceship to research
a mysterious"SS"(super-structure), a cylinder 1.2 light years in diameter
and 2 light years in length, which suddenly appears 5.8 light years from
Earth ( BIG DUMB OBJECTS). SK's other main works include Nippon

Apache-Zoku ["Japanese Apache"] (1964), Fukkatso No Hi ["The Day of
Resurrection"] (1964), filmed as FUKKATSO NO HI (1981; vt Virus), Hateshi
Naki Nagare No Hateni ["At the End of Endless Flow"] (1966), an
extraordinary tale of PARALLEL WORLDS and human EVOLUTION, Tsugu Nowa
Dareka? ["Who Succeeds Humanity?"] (1972), which won the Sei'un AWARD, and
Shuto Shoshitsu ["The Disappearance of Tokyo"] (1985), which won the
Nippon SF Taisho.SK is active also as a journalist and publicist - for
example, as a consultant for and organizer of Expos. In 1970 he conducted
the "International SF Symposium", recognized as the first truly worldwide
gathering of sf authors, including 5 delegates from the USSR as well as
Brian W. ALDISS, Arthur C. CLARKE and Frederik POHL. [TSh/JC]
KONEC SRPNA V HOTELU OZON
(vt The End of August at the Hotel Ozone) Film (1966). Ceskoslovensky
armadni film. Dir Jan Schmidt, starring Ondrej Jariabek, Beta Ponicanova,
Magda Seidlerova, Hana Vitkova. Screenplay Pavel Juracek. 87 mins.
B/w.This Czech film is set in a desolate landscape 15 years after a
nuclear HOLOCAUST. A band of brutalized women survivors live primitively
(in what looks to Western eyes like an art-film version of an exploitation
movie), not really understanding the occasional remnants they come across
of the old world. One such survival is a deserted hotel; another is its
proprietor, who alas for him is too old to be of any use to them. The
film's bleakness is monotonous. [PN]
KOONTZ, DEAN R(AY)
(1945- ) US writer of much fiction under various names. He began his
career with a number of sf novels; since 1975 he has concentrated on
HORROR, becoming one of the bestselling authors in that genre, and a
figure of genuine significance for his well crafted and very various work,
though he lacks Peter Straub's panache and Stephen KING's compelling sense
of locality. Much of his horror output first appeared (see listing below)
as by Brian Coffey, Deanne Dwyer, K.R. Dwyer, Leigh Nichols, Anthony
North, Richard Paige and Owen West; from the 1980s, these titles when
reprinted are acknowledged as by DRK or Dean Koontz (on many of his more
recent books the middle initial is omitted). Sf titles have appeared also
as by David Axton, John Hill and Aaron Wolfe.DRK began publishing work of
genre interest in 1966 with "Kittens" for Writers ?
in 1967 with "Soft Come the Dragons" for FSF, which with other stories was
collected in Soft Come the Dragons (coll 1970 dos). His first novel, Star
Quest (1968 dos), was followed by at least 20 more sf novels within half a
decade. The sensibility that would find horror congenial quickly revealed
itself in a tendency to write stories in which, cruelly and effectively,
the boundaries of human identity were stretched. Monstrous children - who
classically embody a horror at the potential aliens beneath the human skin
- appear in Beastchild (1970; text restored 1993) and Demon Seed (1973),
filmed as DEMON SEED (1977); and MUTANTS and CYBORGS and ROBOTS appear
throughout, notably in books like Anti-Man (1970) and A Werewolf Among Us
(1973). As an sf writer, DRK managed frequently to transcend the plotting
conventions he seemed to obey and the forced "darkness" of imagery and
style to which he was prone, and to create worlds of invasive mutability.
Of those novels written within a more normal sf frame, Nightmare Journey

(1975) stands out; though overcomplicated, it impressively depicts a world
100,000 years hence when humanity, thrust back from the stars by an
incomprehensible ALIEN intelligence, goes sour in the prison of Earth,
where radioactivity has speeded mutation, causing a religious
backlash.DRK's large body of work contains some surprises; there are comic
novels like The Haunted Earth (1973), drolleries like Oddkins (1988), and
several fantasies. Some of his horror novels - like Night Chills (1976)
and Lightning (1988) - are plotted around sf premises, but the use of
these is clearly subordinate to the mode within which they fit as arbitary
enabling devices; they are best discussed as HORROR. In the end, the
effect of his work is oddly diffuse. After 50 books, the portrait of the
artist remains blurred. [JC]Other works: The Fall of the Dream Machine
(1969 dos); Fear that Man (1969 dos); Dark Symphony (1970); Dark of the
Woods (1970 dos); Hell's Gate (1970); The Crimson Witch (1971); A Darkness
in My Soul (1972); Warlock! (1972); Time Thieves (1972 dos); The Flesh in
the Furnace (1972), Starblood (1972); Hanging On (1973); After the Last
Race (1974); The Vision (1977); Whispers (1980); Phantoms (1983); Darkness
Comes (1984 UK; vt Darkfall 1984 US); Twilight Eyes (1985; exp 1987 UK);
STRANGERS (1986); Watchers (1987); The House of Thunder (1988 UK); The
Shadow Sea (1988); Midnight (1989); The Bad Place (1990); Cold Fire
(1991); Three Complete Novels (omni 1991), assembling The Servants of
Twilight (under its vt Twilight), Darkfall and Phantoms; Hideaway (1992);
Lightning/Midnight/The Bad Place (omni 1992 UK); Three Complete Novels
(omni 1992), containing Shattered, Whispers and Watchers; Dragon Tears
(1993); Trapped (graph 1993) adapted by Ed Gorman, illus Anthony Bilau; Mr
Murder (1993 UK); Dean Koontz Omnibus (omni 1993 UK), containing Cold
Fire, The Face of Fear and The Mask;Three Complete Novels (omni 1993),
containing Lightning, The Face of Fear and The Vision: Dark Rivers of the
Heart(1994); Three Complete Novels (omni 1994), containing STRANGERS, The
Voice of the Night and The Mask; Dean Koontz Omnibus (omni 1994),
containing Hideaway and The Vision: Winter Moon(1994); Strange Highways
(coll 1995).As David Axton: Prison of Ice (1976); rev vt Icebound 1995 as
DK), sf.As Brian Coffey: Blood Risk (1973); Surrounded (1974); Wall of
Masks (1975); The Face of Fear (1977; 1978 UK as K.R. Dwyer; 1989 UK as
DRK); The Voice of the Night (1980; 1989 UK as DRK).As Deanne Dwyer: Demon
Child (1971); Legacy of Terror (1971); Children of the Storm (1972); The
Dark of Summer (1972); Dance with the Devil (1973).As K.R. Dwyer: Chase
(1972; 1988 UK as DRK); Shattered (1973; 1989 UK as DRK); Dragonfly
(1975).As John Hill: The Long Sleep (1975), sf.As Leigh Nichols: The Key
to Midnight (1979; 1990 UK as DRK); The Eyes of Darkness (1981; 1989 as
DRK); The House of Thunder (1982; 1988 as DRK); Twilight (1984; vt The
Servants of Twilight 1985 UK; under original title, 1988 US as DRK);
Shadowfires (1987; 1990 as DRK).As Anthony North: Strike Deep (1974), not
sf/fantasy.As Richard Paige: The Door to December (1985; 1987 UK as Leigh
Nichols; 1991 UK as DRK; rev 1994 US).As Owen West: The Funhouse * (1980;
with new afterword 1992 as DK), film novelization; The Mask (1981; 1988 as
DRK).As Aaron Wolfe: Invasion (1975 Canada), sf.Nonfiction: Writing
Popular Fiction (1972); How to Write Best Selling Fiction (1981), which
incorporates parts of the earlier book.About the author: A Checklist of
Dean R. Koontz (last rev 1990 chap) by Christopher P. STEPHENS.See also:
BIOLOGY; GOTHIC SF; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MONSTERS.

KORNBLUTH, C(YRIL) M.
(1923-1958) US writer. A member of the FUTURIANS fan group, he published
prolifically during the years 1940-42 in magazines edited by fellow
Futurians Donald A. WOLLHEIM and Frederik POHL. His first sf publication
was "Stepsons of Mars" with Richard WILSON, writing together as Ivar
TOWERS, for Astonishing Stories in 1940; his first solo sf story was "King
Cole of Pluto" for Super Science Stories as S.D. GOTTESMAN, also in 1940.
He used many other pseudonyms, both for solo work and for work written in
collaboration with Pohl (and sometimes others, including Robert A.W.
LOWNDES); these included Arthur COOKE, Cecil Corwin, Walter C. Davies,
Kenneth Falconer, Paul Dennis Lavond and Scott MARINER. (He also wrote 1
non-sf novel in the early 1950s as Simon Eisner and 4 as Jordan Park.)
After WWII, in which he served as an infantryman and was decorated, CMK
went into journalism. He resumed writing sf in 1947, using his own name,
and quickly established himself as a brilliant short-story writer. His
classic works include "The Little Black Bag" (1950), about the misuse of a
medical bag timeslipped from the future ( MEDICINE), and the controversial
SATIRE "The Marching Morons" (1951), about a future where the practice of
birth control by the intelligentsia has had a spectacularly dysgenic
effect ( INTELLIGENCE). Such stories as "With These Hands" (1951) and "The
Goodly Creatures" (1952) are delicate and sensitive, but much of his work
is deeply ingrained with bitter irony. "The Cosmic Charge Account" (1956)
is a black comedy about a little old lady who finds the power to remake
her environs. "Shark Ship" (1958) is an early alarmist fantasy about
OVERPOPULATION and POLLUTION. The ALTERNATE-WORLD story "Two Dooms" (1958)
is one of the better studies of a world in which the Nazis won WWII (
HITLER WINS).CMK wrote two routine novels in collaboration with Judith
MERRIL as Cyril JUDD: Outpost Mars (1952: rev vt Sin in Space 1961), about
the colonization of MARS, and Gunner Cade (1952), about a future in which
WAR is a spectator sport ( GAMES AND SPORTS). His first solo sf novel,
Takeoff (1952), is a weak NEAR-FUTURE story about the building of the
first Moon ROCKET; but when CMK began working again in collaboration with
Frederik Pohl they produced a classic, THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1952 Gal as
"Gravy Planet"; 1953), about a world run by advertising agencies in the
service of capitalist consumerism. This became the archetype of a whole
generation of sf novels which showed the world of the future dominated by
one particular institution or power group. Two other collaborations with
Pohl - the episodic satirical comedy Search the Sky (1954; rev by Pohl
1985) and Gladiator-at-Law (1955) - belong to the same subspecies. The
last novel CMK wrote with Pohl was Wolfbane (1957; rev by Pohl 1986), in
which the Earth is moved out of its orbit by ALIENS who capture humans in
order to use their bodies in a vast COMPUTER complex. CMK and Pohl also
wrote two non-sf novels, A Town is Drowning (1955) and Presidential Year
(1956). Collaborative stories continued to appear for four years after
CMK's premature death, and Pohl wrote some more stories from CMK's ideas
in the early 1970s, one of which - "The Meeting" (1972) - won a HUGO. Some
of the collaborative short stories are reprinted in the overlapping
collections The Wonder Effect (coll 1962), Critical Mass (coll 1977)
Before the Universe (coll 1980) and Our Best (coll 1986). CMK's other solo
novels are undistinguished: The Syndic (1953) ironically depicts a future

USA run by organized gangsterism in a semi-benevolent fashion; Not this
August (1955; vt Christmas Eve 1956 UK; exp by Pohl under first title
1981) describes a revolution in a future USA which has been conquered by
communists.The best of CMK's short work is collected in The Explorers
(coll 1954; with 1 story cut and 4 added, vt The Mindworm and Other
Stories 1955 UK), A Mile Beyond the Moon (coll 1958; paperback omits 3
stories) and The Marching Morons (coll 1959). Eclectic selections from
these volumes are Best SF Stories of Cyril M. Kornbluth (coll 1968) and
The Best of C.M. Kornbluth (coll 1976), the latter ed Pohl. A selection of
early stories originally signed Cecil Corwin is Thirteen O'Clock and Other
Zero Hours (coll 1970) ed James BLISH. CMK's essay "The Failure of the
Science Fiction novel as Social Criticism" (in The Science Fiction Novel
coll 1959 intro by Basil DAVENPORT) is an important early piece of sf
criticism, sharply pointing out the genre's shortcomings. His widow, Mary
Kornbluth, compiled Science Fiction Showcase (anth 1959) as a memorial.
[BS]Other work: Gunner Cade, Plus Takeoff (omni 1983).See also:
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; ARTS; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS;
CYBERNETICS; DYSTOPIAS; ECOLOGY; ECONOMICS; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION;
GOLDEN
AGE OF SF; HEROES; HISTORY IN SF; HISTORY OF SF; INVASION; LEISURE;
LIBERTARIANSF; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION; MEDIA
LANDSCAPE; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; PARANOIA; PSYCHOLOGY; SF IN THE
CLASSROOM; SCIENTISTS; SOCIOLOGY; SPACE HABITATS; SUPERNATURAL
CREATURES;
TIME TRAVEL; UFOS; VENUS.
KORNWISE, ROBERT
[r] Piers ANTHONY.
KORZYBSKI, ALFRED (HABDANK SKARBEK)
(1879-1950) Polish-born aristocrat (a count) sent after WWI to the USA as
an artillery expert. He remained, and wrote a quasiphilosophical text,
Science and Sanity (1933), which became the basic handbook of the GENERAL
SEMANTICS movement, later to prove so influential on the writer A.E. VAN
VOGT. With the support of a Chicago millionaire, AK set up the Institute
of General Semantics in 1938. [PN]About the author: Fads and Fallacies in
the Name of Science (1957; rev exp vt of In the Name of Science 1952) by
Martin GARDNER.See also: PSEUDO-SCIENCE.
KOSINSKI, JERZY (NIKODEM)
(1933-1991) Polish writer whose harrowing experiences as a child in WWII
are reflected in his first novel, The Painted Bird (1965; rev 1976), a
hallucinated picaresque set in the surrealistic landscape of
war-devastated Poland; its child protagonist - like JK himself - is driven
mute by his experiences. JK regained the power of speech at the age of 15,
moved to the USA in 1958, and wrote all his fiction in English. Most of
his novels are shaped as mosaics of deracination ( FABULATION), and tales
like Cockpit (1975) displace these chips of reality in an sf direction.
His nearest approach to sf proper, Being There (1970), treats the US
political system as one from which any meaning has been evacuated; its
vacant-minded protagonist, named Chance, reflects through his media-shaped
emptiness the desires and delusions of the world, while at the same time

being selected to run for high office; it was filmed as Being There
(1979). JK's later years were not happy. Illness, accusations that he had
made excessive and unacknowledged use of helpers's work (F. Gwynplaine
MACINTYRE, for instance, ghost-wrote part of Pinball (1984), giving one of
the characters his own middle name), distressingly close examinations of
the background behind the childhood experiences he claimed to have
suffered, and (it may be) the fatalism that has often afflicted survivors
of the Holocaust attended him. He committed suicide. [JC]About the author:
Jerzy Kosinski: The Literature of Violation (1991) by Welch D. Everman.See
also: ABSURDIST SF.
KOTANI, ERIC
Pseudonym used by US astrophysicist and writer Yoji Kondo (1933- ) for
all his fiction. He has been professor of astrophysics at the University
of Oklahama (1972-7), the University of Houston (1974-7), the University
of Pennsylvania (from 1978) and concurrently the George Mason University
(from 1989), with over 100 scientific papers to his credit. He has edited
the journal Comments on Astrophysics since 1979, was President of the
International Astronautical Union Commission on Astronomy from Space
1985-8, and received a NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement
in 1990. Compared with the evident achievements of his academic career,
his fiction has been quite deliberately lightweight, though vigorously
speculative within those limits, consisting in general of adventures
substrated by HARD-SF concerns. He is perhaps best known for a NEAR-FUTURE
sequence written in collaboration with John Maddox ROBERTS: Act of God
(1985), The Island Worlds (1987) and Between the Stars (1988). The action
is at times congested, and is somewhat unrelentingly military in
orientation, but the vision that unfolds of a bustling and expanding Solar
System frequently exhilarates. Delta Pavonis (1990), also with Roberts, is
again an sf adventure; and Supernova (1991) with Roger MacBride ALLEN,
probably his most interesting novel to date, recounts with gripping
verisimilitude the scientific process involved in discovering that a
nearby star is due to go nova and flood Earth with hard radiation - which
happens. [JC]Other works: Requiem: New Collected Works by Robert A.
Heinlein (coll 1992) ed as Yoji Kondo.
KOTLAN, C.M.
[r] G.C. EDMONDSON.
KOTZWINKLE, WILLIAM
(1938- ) US writer who began his career with several novels for children
(see listing below); his genre-crossing FABULATIONS - some of them making
use of sf material - created something of a literary stir in the 1970s.
These early tales for adults - like Hermes 3000 (1972), Fata Morgana
(1977), set in the Paris of 1871 and plausibly describable as protoSTEAMPUNK, and Herr Nightingale and the Satin Woman (1978) - tend to treat
genre boundaries as thresholds through which characters pass from more or
less everyday realities into fantastic or sf-like worlds which rewrite
those realities in allegorical terms, sometimes feyly. Doctor Rat (1976),
on the other hand, never shifts from one plane, and seems all the more
extraordinary for that consistency. The tale is mostly narrated by an
elderly laboratory rat, his mind jumbled by too much maze-running, who

sees himself as an active collaborator with the human experimenters; the
destiny of the animal world, he feels, is that it be subjected to such
experiments for the ultimate good. Crises in the ECOLOGY, however, drive
the brutalized animals to form a global consciousness, and war ensues
between Man and animals; Doctor Rat heroically quells revolt in the lab,
until eventually he is the only animal left alive.WK is best known in the
sf world for some excellent film ties. They include E.T., The
Extra-Terrestrial, in his Adventure on Earth * (1982) - which appeared at
the same time as a text for younger readers, E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial
Storybook * (1982 chap) - and E.T., The Book of the Green Planet * (1985;
cut for younger readers 1985 chap), based on a story by Stephen SPIELBERG
( E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL) and designed to work as a bridge between
the first E.T. film and its yet-unmade successor. It too was accompanied
by a text for younger readers, E.T., The Storybook of the Green Planet: A
New Storybook * (1985 chap), probably derived from the cut version of the
main title. A further tie, Superman III * (1983), is perhaps less
memorable.At the same time WK continued to produce fabulations, including
Christmas at Fontaine's (1982), Great World Circus (1983), Queen of Swords
(1984), The Exile (1987), in which a contemporary US actor is transported
back to Nazi Germany, where he gets involved in black-market activities,
and The Midnight Examiner (1989), a perhaps overbroad comedy in which a
journalist - an ideal kind of protagonist for the typical WK novel becomes tangled in a world of Mafia revenges, voodoo and other sorceries.
Short work has been assembled in Elephant Bangs Train (coll 1971), Trouble
in Bugland: A Collection of Inspector Mantis Mysteries (coll 1983) Sherlock Holmes pastiches for younger readers - Jewel of the Moon (coll
1985), Hearts of Wood and Other Timeless Tales (coll 1986 chap) - mostly
fairytales - and The Hot Jazz Trio (coll 1989), which contains 3 long
stories, each involving a transgressive journey from "normal" reality into
other worlds, including the Land of the Dead. Because he crosses genres
with such ease, WK could fairly be accused of frivolity; but the charge
itself seems frivolous when his harsher texts are looked at square.
[JC/PN]Other works for children: The Fireman (1969); The Ship that Came
Down the Gutter (1970); Elephant Boy: A Story of the Stone Age (1970); The
Oldest Man and Other Timeless Stories (coll 1971); The Supreme, Superb,
Exalted, and Delightful, One and Only Magic Building (1973); The Leopard's
Tooth (1976 chap); The Ants who Took away Time (1978 chap), in which the
Solar System must be searched for the ant-dismembered Watch which keeps
Time together; Dream of Dark Harbor (1979); The Nap Master (1979); The
Empty Notebook (1990).
KOZAK, ELLEN
[r] Sharon JARVIS.
KOZUMI, REI
[r] Takumi SHIBANO.
KRAFT, ROBERT
[r] GERMANY.
KRAJEWSKI, MICHAps DYMITR
[r] POLAND.

KRAKATIT
Karel CAPEK; CZECH AND SLOVAK SF; TEMNE SLUNCE.
KRENKEL, ROY G(ERALD Jr)
(1918-1983) US illustrator. A lifelong resident of New York, he studied
at Burne Hogarth's School of Visual Arts after WWII and started his career
at EC COMICS, where he became friends with Frank FRAZETTA. A great deal of
his art, heavily influenced by the work of J. Allen ST JOHN and also by
the Australian artist Norman Lindsay (1879-1969), was published in the
SWORD-AND-SORCERY fanzine Amra ( George H. SCITHERS), where it came to the
attention of Donald A. WOLLHEIM of ACE BOOKS. Ace were planning to reprint
many of the works of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, and Krenkel's style fitted
perfectly. RGF did about 20 of these Burroughs covers, and because of
their popularity won a 1963 HUGO as Best Professional Artist; when he
could not meet all the deadlines, he got Wollheim to ask Frazetta onto the
project, thus launching Frazetta's sf career. Krenkel also did covers for
DAW BOOKS, some interior work for sf magazines and, most celebratedly,
cover and interior illustrations for several Robert E. HOWARD collections
published by Donald M. Grant. Though his covers were good, it was with his
pen-and-ink work, his first love, that he was most at home; it is both
delicate and spirited. All his best work was in the field of HEROIC
FANTASY. A book of his work is Cities ?
(1974). [JG/PN]See also: COMICS.
KRESS, NANCY (ANNE)
(1948- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "The Earth Dwellers" for
Gal in 1976, and whose first novels were fantasies like The Prince of
Morning Bells (1981), a quest tale during which, surprisingly, the young
princess involved ages into an old woman before the close, and The Golden
Grove (1984), which, again surprisingly, treats Greek myth with something
of the iron darkness it merits. After a further fantasy novel, The White
Pipes (1985), and an intermittently rewarding collection, Trinity and
Other Stories (coll 1985), which includes the NEBULA-winning "Out of All
Them Bright Stars" (1985), NK moved forthrightly into sf with her fourth
novel, the slow-moving but cumulatively impressive AN ALIEN LIGHT (1988),
set on a planet inhabited by two sets of irreconcilably opposed humans,
the descendants of the people from a starship that crashed there centuries
earlier after a battle with the ALIEN Ged. All knowledge of this history
has been lost, and the Ged set up a huge technological honey-trap to
entice humans inside for study, as they have found the territoriality and
attendant aggressiveness of Homo sapiens baffling. What they learn from
the two sets of stranded humans does not lead them to feel that they will
win the war against a species whose savagery seems ultimately unopposable.
Brain Rose (1990), just as impressively, presents an extremely grim
NEAR-FUTURE Earth whose inhabitants are harassed by an AIDS-like disease
which eats memory; the protagonists of the tale sign up for medically
dubious Previous Life Access Surgery ( MEDICINE), which is intended
somehow to counter the dimming out of the world itself through a "genuine"
return to the past. Beggars in Spain (1991), a novella, is set within a
framework familiar to most sf readers: a group of specially bred children
who need no sleep must band together to defend themselves against the

jealousy and oppressive behaviour of normal humans. But within this frame
NK embeds speculations about not only GENETIC ENGINEERING but also the
ethical consequences of "superiority" ( SUPERMAN) in a world which demands
an "ecology of help" to survive; the novella version won a NEBULA, and the
full-length version, Beggars in Spain (1992) which expands the novella
into an ironic saga set partly in space, is almost certainly her best work
yet; with Beggars ?
scope - and to encounter some of the difficulties of focus - of genuine
Future HISTORY. Her recent fiction - much of which makes virtuoso use of
sf devices, but from an angle of vision which gives the impression that
the author deems them irremediably belated - appears in The Aliens of
Earth (coll 1993). There seem few subjects that NK, in an already
fascinating career, will be unable to assimilate. [JC]Other Works:The
Price of Oranges (1992 chap).See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; ISAAC ASIMOV'S
SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION .
KRING, MICHAEL K.
(1952- ) US writer whose Space Mavericks series of SPACE OPERAS - The
Space Mavericks (1980) and Children of the Night (1981) - carries its
protagonists through various adventures but not to their destination
planet: the conclusion to the series was never published, due to
difficulties experienced by MKK's publisher, Leisure Books. [JC]
KROL, GERRIT
[r] BENELUX.
KRONOS
Film (1957). Regal/20th Century-Fox. Prod and dir Kurt Neumann, starring
Jeff Morrow, Barbara Lawrence, John Emery. Screenplay Laurence Louis
Goldman, from a story by Irving Block. 78 mins. B/w.A scientist is
possessed by an alien lifeform of pure energy. Shortly afterwards (the
incidents are connected) an "asteroid" (actually a flying saucer) deposits
a huge mechanical creature on a Mexico beach. When activated, it moves
across the countryside, crushing anything and anyone in its path: its aim
is to destroy power stations and absorb their energy, too much of which
ultimately causes it to explode after it has been deliberately
short-circuited. The script of this low-budget MONSTER MOVIE is mediocre,
but Kronos itself is such an unusual monster that it stands out among all
the giant reptiles, giant insects, etc., of the 1950s sf boom. Prod/dir
Kurt Neumann's other sf films include ROCKETSHIP X-M (1950) and the very
successful The FLY (1958). [JB/PN]
KUBE-McDOWELL, MICHAEL P.
Pseudonym of US writer Michael Paul McDowell (1954- ), who attached his
wife's name, Kube, in 1975; some years later this proved useful when both
he and Michael M. McDowell were writing scripts for the tv series Tales
from the Darkside. His first published sf story, "The Inevitable
Conclusion" for AMZ in 1979, also marked the inception of his Trigon
Disunity sequence, comprising his first three novels - Emprise (1985),
Enigma (1986) and Empery (1987) - along with other tales like "Antithesis"
(1980). Though failing to rise above some of the less attractive
assumptions held by popular writers in the sf field about the comical

incompetence of politicians compared to the world-changing nerve of
scientific entrepreneurs ( EDISONADE), the series triumphs through the
expansive exuberance of its premise: that an earlier wave of humanity had
long ago colonized the Galaxy, and that the apparent ALIENS whose probing
has reawakened contemporary humanity's interest in the stars - and
revitalized a decaying planet - are in fact our own cousins; the final
volume moves, less convincingly, into a vision of the human species
melding its differences through a form of communion. Alternities (1988)
similarly combines efficient action, in this case among a number of
ALTERNATE WORLDS, and marginally vapourish speculations about the human
species; but THE QUIET POOLS (1990), MPK-M's best novel to date,
successfully coordinates action and thought in a story about the ambiguous
nature of humanity's drive outwards to the stars, carried through the
troubled consciousness of a man who is genetically incapable - just as
most of humanity has always been - of denying the planet, of leaping into
space. The book's genetic determinism, which is much too explicit to have
been inadvertent, is both bleak and bracing. Rather more baldly, Exile
(1992) takes the sclerotic China of 1988's Tiananmen Square massacre as a
model for the construction of a rigid, terraformed colony world in the
throes of a tragic confrontation with its own youth. MPK-M has become,
quite suddenly, one of the authors to watch. [JC]Other works: Photon:
Thieves of Light * (1987) as Michael Hudson, a tv adventure tie; Isaac
Asimov's Robot City #1: Odyssey * (1987), the first of the tied ROBOT
sequence.See also: COMMUNICATIONS.
KUBIN, ALFRED
[r] AUSTRIA.
KUBRICK, STANLEY
(1928- ) US film-maker, resident in the UK. Born in New York, the son of
a doctor, he early became obsessed with photography; Look magazine hired
him as soon as he left school. Motion pictures became his dominant
interest, and he left Look after four years to make two short films with
his own money and then two feature films, Fear and Desire (1953) and
Killer's Kiss (1955), borrowing the production money from relatives. By
then he had also become a fully qualified cameraman. In 1956 he made The
Killing, which attracted the attention of critics, and his reputation was
further enhanced by Paths of Glory (1957); he directed most of Spartacus
(1960). In 1961 he moved to the UK and, with Lolita (1962), began the
cycle of films that have made him internationally famous. In 1963 he made
his first sf film, DR STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND
LOVE THE BOMB, and at the end of 1965 he started work on 2001: A SPACE
ODYSSEY, which he completed in 1968. His next film was also sf - the
controversial A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971). Breaking away from sf but
remaining true to his concerns, SK's continued his slim output with Barry
Lyndon (1975), from W.M. Thackeray's novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844;
1852), The Shining (1980), from Stephen KING's bestselling The Shining
(1977), and Full Metal Jacket (1987), from The Short Timers (1979), a
Vietnam novel by Gustav Hasford (1947- ). Having avoided direct
involvement in Peter Hyam's 2010, the sequel to 2001, SK is currently
(1992) planning a return to sf with an adaption of Brian W. ALDISS's

"Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" (1969).SK is one of the few film-makers
who has succeeded in maintaining control over all aspects of his films
(Spartacus was the exception), and his personal style is stamped on all
his work, its most obvious characteristic being a cool and ironic wit. His
films manifest a formidable intelligence, unusual in a maker of
high-budget spectaculars. SK is reported to have an almost obsessive
desire for perfection, which shows itself in a fastidious attention to
detail. Critics have emphasized the intellectual authority of SK's work though some see him as merely cold-bloodedly stylish - but he is also, and
perhaps primarily, a consummate showman. His sf work is notable for
distasteful, ultimately impotent protagonists dwarfed or cowed by
enigmatic, dehumanizing TECHNOLOGY; but his main theme, older than sf,
appears to be Original Sin. [JB/KN/PN]See also: CINEMA; COMMUNICATIONS;
MUSIC; ORIGIN OF MAN; PARANOIA.
KUCZKA, PETER
(1923- ) Hungarian publisher and critic who, beginning in the 1960s, was
a powerful force in the renaissance of Hungarian sf, even during a period
of Hungarian history not conducive to literary experiment (though the
situation was liberalized in the 1970s). In 1968 PK took over as
controller and editor of the publisher Mora's brand-new sf imprint Kozmosz
Fantasztikus Konyvek, which was and remains the most important sf
publisher in HUNGARY in terms of both original Hungarian sf and
translations. In 1972 Mora followed this paperback series with the
magazine Galaktika, ed PK, first as a quarterly and now as a monthly with
a circulation of about 50,000; it has several times won awards as the best
sf magazine in Europe. He also introduced sf into the Hungarian Writers'
Association (no easy task in a country whose literati and academics have
often regarded sf with revulsion), has been from the outset (1972)
connected with the Eurocons (trans-European sf CONVENTIONS), and is a
director of WORLD SF. Like all impresarios he has been criticized, but he
has done more for Hungarian sf than any other individual. He has published
a variety of essays on sf, many in Hungarian, some in English, and is the
author of the entry on HUNGARY in this encyclopedia. [PN]
KUNETKA, JAMES
[r] Whitley STRIEBER.
KUPPORD, SKELTON
Pseudonym of UK writer J. Adams (? -? ), whose sf novel, A Fortune from
the Sky (1903), features several inventions that are all linked to
"panergon", which is capable of generating a profitable sky-writing ray
but which its inventor soon uses, more conventionally, as a DEATH RAY.
Soon the UK is ringed with victims, mostly innocent ones. In the end,
world peace is enforced. [JC]
KUPRIN, ALEXANDER (IVANOVICH)
[r] RUSSIA.
KURD LASSWITZ AWARD
AWARDS.
KURLAND, MICHAEL (JOSEPH)

(1938- ) US writer who began publishing sf in 1964 with "Elementary" with
Laurence M. JANIFER for FSF and Ten Years to Doomsday (1964) with Chester
ANDERSON. The latter is a lightly written alien- INVASION novel, full of
harmless violence in space and on other planets. MK then participated in
the writing of an unusual trilogy comprising The Butterfly Kid (1967) by
Anderson, The Unicorn Girl (1969) by MK and The Probability Pad (1970) by
T.A. WATERS. The books all feature the various authors as characters. The
Unicorn Girl deals with a number of sf themes in a spoof idiom which is
sometimes successful; MATTER TRANSMISSION and invasions abound. Although
MK has perhaps gained most recognition for his suspense novel A Plague of
Spies (1969), which won an Edgar Allan Poe Scroll from the Mystery Writers
of America, his later sf has admirers for its briskness and its bright
touristic promenades through various venues.Transmission Error (1970) is
an adventure set on a colourful planet. Pluribus (1975), a post- HOLOCAUST
novel, though breaking no new ground makes effective use of its US
locations. The Whenabouts of Burr (1975) is an ALTERNATE-WORLDS tale
featuring Aaron Burr (1756-1836). The Princes of Earth (1978), a crowded
juvenile, takes its young backwater-planet protagonist to school on Mars.
The Last President (1980) with S.W. Barton (pseudonym of Barton Stewart
Whaley [1928- ]) posits the survival of a Nixon-like President in office
and his subsequent destruction of democracy. Star Griffin (1987), another
tale whose main flaw is crowdedness, sets its protagonist a series of
detective puzzles on an overpopulated Earth choked with sects, some of
which may be opposing the development of a FASTER-THAN-LIGHT vehicle.
Perchance (1989) initiates a projected sequence of humorous TIME-TRAVEL
tales, to be called The Chronicles of Elsewhen. Unlike many lesser (and
some more significant) writers, MK puts the themes and venues of sf to
work in a professional manner, with no radical innovations but always
imparting a sense of secure competence. [JC]Other works: The War, Inc
series, sf, comprising Mission: Third Force (1967), Mission: Tank War
(1968) and A Plague of Spies; Tomorrow Knight (1976); two Sherlock Holmes
pastiches, being The Infernal Device * (1979) and Death by Gaslight *
(1982); Psi Hunt (1980); First Cycle (coll 1984) with H. Beam PIPER; a
fantasy series set in the Lord Darcy universe created by Randall GARRETT,
comprising Ten Little Wizards * (1988) and A Study in Sorcery * (1989),
the latter again invoking Sherlock Holmes; Button Bright (1990),
borderline sf.
KURTEN, BJORN (OLAF)
(1924-1988) Finnish palaeontologist and writer; his fiction appeared in
Swedish. His sf novels - Den svarta tigern (1978 Sweden; trans BK as Dance
of the Tiger 1980 US with foreword by Stephen Jay Gould) and Mammutens
raddare (1984 Sweden; trans BK as Singletusk 1986 US) - fascinatingly
apply late-20th-century speculations about EVOLUTION to the old subgenre
of prehistoric sf ( ANTHROPOLOGY; ORIGIN OF MAN), offering the suggestion
that blond and burly Neanderthals fell fatally in love with their Black,
beautiful, neotenous Cro-Magnon neighbours, bringing them home to engage
in sterile matches. Neoteny can be defined as an indefinite prolongation
of childlike behaviour and physical proportions; the notion that our
ancestors rose to preeminence through cuteness is intriguing. [JC]

KURTZ, KATHERINE (IRENE)
(1944- ) US writer employed in various fields including oceanography and
cancer research, as well as a stint as instructional designer for the Los
Angeles Police Department. Her fiction, basically FANTASY, has been
dominated from the beginning by the unfolding Chronicles of the Deryni
sequences, all set in a highly detailed, coherent ALTERNATE WORLD whose
society is hierarchical and in many of its aspects medieval Welsh. By
internal chronology they are: The Legends of Camber of Culdi, comprising
Camber of Culdi (1976), Saint Camber (1978) and Camber the Heretic (1980);
The Heirs of Saint Camber, comprising The Harrowing of Gwynedd (1989), The
Chronicles of the Deryni (omni 1985) - which assembles her first novel,
Deryni Rising (1970), Deryni Checkmate (1972) and High Deryni (1973) King Javan's Year (1992) and The Bastard Prince (1994); and The Histories
of King Kelson, comprising The Bishop's Heir (1984), The King's Justice
(1985) and The Quest for Saint Camber (1986). These chronicles tell the
history of a group of humans whose witchlike PSI POWERS, the explanation
for which hovers between sf and mysticism, cause them to be persecuted by
a medieval Church. The first novel is perhaps the best, but the whole is
generally much above average for HEROIC FANTASY and is well characterized,
although sometimes archaic and modern language clash. Appended to the
series are 2 supplementary volumes: The Deryni Archives (1986) and Deryni
Magic: A Grimoire (1991). Her other work of interest includes The Legacy
of Lehr (1986), juvenile sf. [JC/PN]Other works: Lammas Night (1983); the
Adam Smith sequence comprising The Adept (1991) with Deborah Turner Harris
(1951- ),The Adept: The Lodge of the Lynx (1992) with Harris, and The
Adept: The Templar Treasure (1994) with Harris.See also: DEL REY BOOKS;
MAGIC.
KUTTNER, HENRY
(1915-1958) US writer. His interest in WEIRD TALES early led him to
correspond with H.P. LOVECRAFT and others; his first sale to the magazine
was a poem, followed by "The Graveyard Rats" (1936). His stories for it
included a Robert E. HOWARD-like SWORD-AND-SORCERY series collected as
Elak of Atlantis (1938-41; coll of linked stories 1985). He began to
publish sf stories in 1937 with "When the Earth Lived" for TWS. His early
sf work included a series about the movie business of the future:
"Hollywood on the Moon" (1938), "Doom World" (1938), "The Star Parade"
(1938), "The Energy Eaters" (1939) and "The Seven Sleepers" (1940), the
last two in collaboration with Arthur K. BARNES. (He and Barnes also wrote
together as Kelvin KENT.) HK achieved a certain notoriety with the
slightly risque stories he wrote for MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES, notably "The
Time Trap" (1938). He used many pseudonyms in this part of his career, and
even more after marrying C.L. MOORE in 1940, when the two wrote very many
stories in collaboration; these names included Paul Edmonds, Noel Gardner,
Keith Hammond, Hudson Hastings, Robert O. Kenyon, C.H. Liddell, K.H.
Maepen, Scott Morgan and Woodrow Wilson Smith. HK also published stories
under various house names, including James Hall and Will Garth, as though
he wrote "Dr Cyclops" (1940 Thrilling Wonder Stories) under his own name a
novelette confusingly unconnected with the novelization as by Will Garth
(probably Alexander SAMALMAN) of that same year's film DR CYCLOPS; HK's
tale was reprinted as the title story of Dr Cyclops (anth 1967) ed anon (

Will GARTH for more details).After their marriage in 1940, most of HK's
and Moore's works were to some extent joint efforts - it is said that each
could pick up and smoothly continue any story from wherever the other had
left off. Moore seems to have been the more fluent and perhaps the more
assiduous (indeed, talented) writer, but HK's wit, deftly audacious
deployment of ideas and neat exposition complemented her talents very
well. During WWII they became part of John W. CAMPBELL Jr's stable of
writers working for ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION. It was then that they
devised their best known pseudonyms, Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O'Donnell,
much of their best work appearing initially under these names. The Padgett
stories are ingenious and slickly written, often deploying offbeat HUMOUR.
HK was the sole author of the Padgett Galloway Gallegher series collected
as Robots Have No Tails (1943-8; coll of linked stories 1952 as by
Padgett; 1973 as HK; paperback as by HK; vt The Proud Robot: The Complete
Galloway Gallegher Stories 1983 UK). Other notable Padgett stories include
"The Twonky" (1942), filmed as The TWONKY (1952), and the classic "Mimsy
Were the Borogoves" (1943), about educative toys timeslipped from the
future. Two Padgett short novels, Tomorrow and Tomorrow ?
Chessmen (1946-7; coll 1951; 1st story published separately as Tomorrow
and Tomorrow 1963 UK; 2nd story published separately vt Chessboard Planet
1956 US and vt The Far Reality 1963 UK), are intensely recomplicated tales
in the tradition of A.E. VAN VOGT, whose influence is also evident in the
Baldy series about persecuted SUPERMEN, assembled as MUTANT (1945-53;
fixup 1953 as by Padgett; 1954 UK as HK). Most of the O'Donnell stories
were Moore's work, including the remarkable "Clash By Night" (1943), whose
sequel Fury (1947 as by O'Donnell; 1950; vt Destination Infinity 1958 US)
was a collaboration.HK and Moore wrote many colourful novels for STARTLING
STORIES during the 1940s. "When New York Vanished" (1940) and The Creature
from beyond Infinity (1940 as "A Million Years To Conquer"; 1968) are
slapdash sf probably by HK alone, but subsequent works - which became
archetypes of the hybrid genre SCIENCE FANTASY - neatly fused HK's
vigorous plotting with Moore's romanticism. These included The Dark World
(1946 as by HK; 1965 as by HK), Valley of the Flame (1946 as by Keith
Hammond; 1964 as by HK), "Lands of the Earthquake" (1947 as by HK), The
Mask of Circe (1948 as by HK; 1971), The Time Axis (1949 as by HK; 1965),
Beyond Earth's Gates (1949 as "The Portal in the Picture" by HK; 1954 dos
as by Padgett and Moore) and Well of the Worlds (1952 as by HK; as a
GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL by Padgett 1953; vt The Well of the Worlds as
by HK 1965 US). The first, second and fifth were combined in The Startling
Worlds of Henry Kuttner (omni 1987). Earth's Last Citadel (1943 Argosy as
by HK and Moore; 1964 as by Moore and HK) also belongs to this sequence,
although one other Startling Stories novel, "Lord of the Storm" (1947 as
by Hammond), does not. For Startling's companion THRILLING WONDER STORIES
HK wrote the humorous Hogben series about an ill assorted family of MUTANT
hillbillies: "Exit the Professor" (1947), "Pile of Trouble" (1948), "See
You Later" (1949) and "Cold War" (1949). In 1950 HK and Moore went to
study at the University of Southern California; they wrote a number of
mystery novels thereafter but very few sf stories. HK graduated in 1954
and went on to work for his MA, but died of a heart attack before it was
completed.During his career HK rarely received the credit his work
merited, and was to an extent overshadowed by his own pseudonyms. His

reputation as one of the most able and versatile of modern sf writers has
risen steadily since. His influence on the young Ray BRADBURY was
considerable, and many later writers have acknowledged their debt to him.
His short stories are distributed over numerous overlapping collections: A
Gnome There Was (coll 1950 as by Padgett), Ahead of Time (coll 1953), Line
to Tomorrow (coll 1954 as by Padgett), No Boundaries (coll 1955 as by HK
and Moore), Bypass to Otherness (coll 1961), Return to Otherness (coll
1962), The Best of Kuttner, Volume 1 (coll 1965 UK) and Volume 2 (coll
1966 UK), THE BEST OF HENRY KUTTNER (coll 1975) with intro by Ray
Bradbury, Clash by Night and Other Stories (coll 1980 UK as by HK and
Moore), Chessboard Planet and Other Stories (coll 1983 UK as by HK and
Moore) and Secret of the Earth Star and Others (coll 1991). Another early
sword-and-sorcery series was collected in Prince Raynor (1939 Strange
Stories; coll 1987 chap), while 3 early non-sf stories are in Kuttner
Times Three (coll 1988 chap). [MJE/BS]See also: ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN
SF; ATLANTIS; AUTOMATION; CHILDREN IN SF; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS;
COMICS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; DIMENSIONS; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION;
ECOLOGY; ECONOMICS; ESP; FANTASY; FAR FUTURE; GAMES AND SPORTS; GODS
AND
DEMONS; GOLDEN AGE OF SF; INTELLIGENCE; MESSIAHS; OUTER PLANETS;
PARALLEL
WORLDS; PSI POWERS; RECURSIVE SF; RELIGION; ROBOTS; SCIENTISTS; SUPERMAN
[character]; TIME TRAVEL; UFOS; UNDER THE SEA; VENUS.
al-KUWAYRI, YUSUF
[r] ARABIC SF.
KYLE, DAVID A(CKERMAN)
(1919- ) US sf fan, writer, illustrator, owner of several radio stations,
and publisher. DK is a member of "first fandom", having been active in the
field since 1933. Until the 1970s his writing activities were only
occasional. His first published sf was "Golden Nemesis" for Stirring
Science Stories in 1941. In 1948, with Martin GREENBERG, he founded the
fan publishing company GNOME PRESS, which maintained what were probably
the highest standards of any of the SMALL PRESSES of the period; DK
designed several of the book jackets. For much of the 1970s DK was
resident in the UK, where he wrote two well and lavishly illustrated
coffee-table-style books on sf, the first dealing primarily with the
HISTORY OF SF and the second with sf's dominant themes: A Pictorial
History of Science Fiction (1976) and The Illustrated Book of Science
Fiction Ideas and Dreams (1977). Both are descriptive rather than
analytic, and the main interest of their texts, which are conservatively
skewed towards HARD SF of the so-called GOLDEN AGE OF SF, is in their well
informed data about sf PUBLISHING.When E.E. "Doc" SMITH's Lensman books
were reissued in the early 1980s, new novels were published by other
hands, continuing and infilling the series. DK, who had been a friend of
Smith, wrote 3 of these: The Dragon Lensman (1980), Lensman from Rigel
(1982) and Z-Lensman (1983). The second, perhaps the most interesting, is
about an ALIEN who has progressed to the level of Second Stage Lensman. DK
succeeded to a degree in capturing the flavour of Smith, but not his
compulsiveness. [PN]See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; FUTURIANS;

ILLUSTRATION; NEW WAVE.

SF?
LACH-SZYRMA, W(LADISLAW) S(OMERVILLE)
(1841-1915) UK Anglican clergyman and author who began writing his series
of interplanetary romances featuring the travels around the Solar System
of the winged Venusian Aleriel in a magazine story in 1865; this was
incorporated into A Voice from Another World (1874 as by WSL-S; exp vt
Aleriel, or A Voyage to Other Worlds as by the Rev. W.S. Lach-Szyrma
1883). Aleriel's further travels were chronicled in his anonymous Letters
from the Planets series in Cassell's Family Magazine, 9 stories (1887-93)
which were reprinted in Worlds Apart (anth 1972) ed George LOCKE. Under
Other Conditions (1892), which belongs to the series, tells of another
Venusian's adventures on Earth. These rather preachy stories concentrate
on sightseeing and ethics, but fair-mindedly stress that other planetary
conditions may lead to other customs. Lach-Szyrma could be considered a
minor forerunner to C.S. LEWIS. [PN]See also: MARS; MOON; VENUS.
LACKEY, MERCEDES
[r] C.J. CHERRYH; Anne MCCAFFREY; Andre NORTON.
LADY AND THE MONSTER, THE
Film (1944). Republic. Prod and dir George Sherman, starring Vera
Ralston, Richard Arlen, Erich von Stroheim, Sidney Blackmer. Screenplay
Dane Lussier, Frederick Kohner, based on Donovan's Brain (1943) by Curt
SIODMAK. 86 min. B/w.This is the first of the 3 film versions of Siodmak's
novel; the others are DONOVAN'S BRAIN (1953) and VENGEANCE (1963; vt The
Brain). Financial wizard W.H. Donovan is killed when his plane crashes in
the desert. An obsessive SCIENTIST (von Stroheim), whose laboratory is
nearby, removes the undamaged brain and keeps it alive in a glass tank,
but it gradually takes over the minds of those around it, forcing them to
commit a series of evil deeds. The photography is atmospheric, but the
film overall is routine GOTHIC melodrama. [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA.
LAFARGUE, PHILIP
Pseudonym of UK writer and physician Joseph Henry Philpot (1850-1939),
whose The Forsaken Way: A Romance (1900) depicts the UK at the close of
the 20th century as a romantic ruin. After falling in love, the
protagonist leaves his monastery and starts a new life. [JC]
LAFAYETTE, RENE
[s] L. Ron HUBBARD.
LAFFERTY, R(APHAEL) A(LOYSIUS)
(1914- ) US writer who worked in the electrical business until retiring
in 1971; he came to writing only in his 40s, publishing his first sf, "Day
of the Glacier", with The Original Science Fiction Stories in 1960. Over
the next 25 years (he reportedly retired from writing at the age of about
70) he produced many stories - about 200 have been published - and a
number of novels. The extremely active SMALL-PRESS interest in his work
gave birth to a large number of titles in the late 1980s, most of them
short collections, but much RAL material remains apparently in manuscript,

including several of the titles mentioned in The Complete Book of Science
Fiction and Fantasy Lists (1983) by Malcolm EDWARDS and Maxim
JAKUBOWSKI.There are reasons for this apparent neglect of a writer whose
originality and whose value to the sf/fantasy world have never been
questioned. From the first, RAL demonstrated only the slenderest interest
in making his stories conform to any critical or marketing definition of
either sf or fantasy. He has fairly been described as a writer of tall
tales, as a cartoonist, as an author whose tone is fundamentally oral; his
conservative Catholicism has been seen as permeating every word he writes
(or has been ignored); he has been seen as a ransacker of old MYTHOLOGIES,
and as a flippant generator of new ones; he delights in a vision of the
world as being irradiated by conspiracies both godly and devilish, but at
times pays scant attention to the niceties of plotting; he has been
understood by some as essentially light-hearted and by others as a
solitary, stringent moralist; he is technically inventive, but lunges
constantly into a slapdash sublime; his skill in the deploying of various
rhetorical narrative voices is manifest, but these voices are sometimes
choked in baroque flamboyance. He was awarded a 1973 HUGO for Best Short
Story for "Eurema's Dam" (1972); and in the 1960s and 1970s, partly
through his (in retrospect tenuous) association with the NEW WAVE, he was
seen as a figure of looming eccentricity and central import. For his
career's sake, it was certainly unfortunate that his response to renown
seems to have been an intensification of the oddness of his product; final
judgement on the effect of this failure to observe normal canons of
writing still awaits a coherent presentation of his work as a whole.
However, though many stories remain uncollected, RAL did assemble several
volumes which grant some view of the entirety, including NINE HUNDRED
GRANDMOTHERS (coll 1970), Strange Doings (coll 1972), Does Anyone Else
Have Something Further to Add? (coll 1974), Ringing Changes (coll 1984;
1st published in Dutch trans as Dagan van Gras, Dagan van Stro ["Days of
Grass, Days of Straw"] 1979), Golden Gate and Other Stories (coll 1982),
Through Elegant Eyes: Stories of Austro and the Men who Know Everything
(coll 1983), and Lafferty in Orbit (coll 1991), which puts together all
the work originally published in Damon KNIGHT's ORBIT series of original
anthologies (1967-80). Many other stories have been printed as chapbooks
(see listing below).RAL's first three novels, Past Master (1968), The
Reefs of Earth (1968) and Space Chantey (1968 dos), all appeared within a
few months of one another, causing some stir. Pre-publication praise for
Past Master (accolades from New-Wave writers Samuel R. DELANY, Roger
ZELAZNY and Harlan ELLISON) demonstrated the impact his work was beginning
to have, and, though it can be said that the US New Wave amounted more to
an iconoclastic tone of voice than a programme, its generally sardonic air
proved bracing to such mature writers as RAL, whose entry at age 45 into
the field seemed to betoken its growing maturity. Past Master places Sir
Thomas More on the planet Astrobe, where he is tricked into becoming World
President and suffers once again a martyr's death: the contrasts between
UTOPIA and life are laid down without the normal derision. Space Chantey
retells HOMER's Odyssey as SPACE OPERA, very rollickingly, and is the most
representative of RAL's attempts to liberate sagas by transposing them
into a rambunctious, myth-saturated, never-never-land future. In The Reefs
of Earth (RAL's first-completed novel) a passel of ALIEN children

bumptiously attempt to rid Earth of humans, and fail. More complexly,
FOURTH MANSIONS (1969), possibly RAL's most sustained single novel,
articulates with some clarity the basic underlying bent of his best work:
a protagonist (or several) finds a pattern of flamboyant, arcane,
dreamlike clues to a conspiracy (or conspiracies) between Good and Evil
whose outcome will determine the moral nature of reality to come; and
enters the fray joyously (though confusingly) upon the side of the angels.
Though much of RAL's work shares characters, and plot segments shuttle
back and forth from book to book, he has written only one explicit genre
series, the Argos Mythos: Archipelago: The First Book of The Devil is Dead
Trilogy (1979), The Devil is Dead (1971), Promontory Goats (1988 chap
Canada), How Many Miles to Babylon? (1989 chap Canada),Episodes of the
Argo (coll 1990 chap Canada), which contains part of the conclusion of the
long-written third part of the series, the More than Melchisedech
sequence, now finally published in full, in 3 vols, as Tales of Chicago
(1992), Tales of Midnight (1992 chap Canada) and Argo (fixup 1992 Canada).
The Argos Mythos treats a group of WWII buddies as reincarnations of
Jason's Argonauts, and engages them in a long, myth-saturated battle
against Evil. Later novels, like Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography
of a Ktistec Machine (1971), the life story of a COMPUTER which also
features in some stories as well, begins to evince a tangledness that
comes, at times, close to incoherence."The Three Armageddons of
Enniscorthy Sweeny", the second novel-length tale assembled in Apocalypses
(coll 1977), suggests that the comprehensive power of opera ( MUSIC)
might, in an alternate world, stop war. Dotty (1990 chap Canada), though
not directly part of the Argos Mythos and ostensibly not sf or fantasy at
all, embraces the "mundane" world, sf, fantasy, Jason, the Argonauts and
much else in 96 packed pages. Even now the full explication of the
extremities of RAL's large universe remains impossible; for it seems there
is more to come. [JC]Other works: The Fall of Rome (1971); the Coscuin
Chronicles, historical novels transfigured into fable, of which have been
published The Flame is Green (1971) and Half a Sky (1984); Okla Hannali
(1972), historical; Not to Mention Camels: A Science Fiction Fantasy
(1976); Funnyfingers ? Horns on their Heads
(1976 chap); Aurelia (1982); Annals of Klepsis (1983); Snake in his Bosom
and Other Stories (coll 1983 chap); Four Stories (coll 1983 chap); Heart
of Stone, Dear and Other Stories (coll 1983 chap); Laughing Kelly and
Other Verses (coll 1983 chap); The Man who Made Models and Other Stories
(coll 1984 chap); Slippery and Other Stories (coll 1985 chap); the first
two chapters of My Heart Leaps Up (1920-28) (1986 chap), followed by
chapters 3 and 4 (1987 chap), 5 and 6 (1987 chap), 7 and 8 (1988 chap) and
9 and 10 (1990 chap), making up the first volume of the projected In a
Green Tree sequence, the second volume of which, Grasshoppers ?
(1928-1942), was continued on the same basis, starting with chapters 1 and
2 (1992 chap); Serpent's Egg (1987 UK; 1 story added to the limited issue
to make coll 1987); The Early Lafferty (coll 1988 chap Canada) and The
Early Lafferty II (coll 1990 chap Canada); East of Laughter (1988 UK; with
1 story added to the limited issue to make coll); Strange Skies (coll 1988
chap Canada), verse; The Back Door of History (coll 1988 chap Canada); The
Elliptical Grave (1989; with 1 story added to the limited issue to make
coll 1989); Sindbad: The 13th Voyage (1989); Mischief Malicious (and

Murder Most Strange) (coll 1991 chap Canada), which contains work from as
early as 1961; Iron Tears (coll 1992).Nonfiction: It's Down the Slippery
Cellar Stairs (coll 1984 chap); True Believers (coll 1989 chap); Cranky
Old Man from Tulsa: Interviews with R.A. Lafferty (coll 1990 chap Canada).
About the author: An R.A. Lafferty Checklist (1991 chap) by Dan Knight.See
also: CITIES; END OF THE WORLD; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; HEROES; HUMOUR;
INTELLIGENCE; LINGUISTICS; MESSIAHS; PERCEPTION; REINCARNATION.
LAGRANGE POINT
In 1772 the French mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813)
calculated that in the orbit of Jupiter around the Sun there would be two
stable positions, one 60deg ahead of the planet, the other 60deg behind,
where a comparatively tiny mass would remain in stable orbit around the
Sun rather than being swept up Jupiter's gravitational field. (More than a
century later two groups of ASTEROIDS, the Trojans, were found at these
positions in Jupiter's orbit.) This is a general principle, part of what
is sometimes called the three-body problem, although usually more than 3
bodies must be considered; for example, if planning to site a SPACE
HABITAT at one of the Lagrange Points (or Lagrangian Points) of the
Earth-Moon system, one must take into account also the gravitational
presence of the Sun (the mass of the habitat itself can be discounted as
trivially small). There are 5 Lagrange Points in the Earth-Moon system;
they are not absolutely fixed in relation to the Earth and Moon but,
because of the Sun's influence, slowly circle "Lagrange Regions". They are
numbered L1 to L5.The Princeton physicist Gerard K. O'Neill (1927-1992),
an important propagandist for space colonies, argued in The High Frontier
(1977) that good sites for such colonies would be L4 and L5, 60deg ahead
of and behind the Moon in its orbit. He particularly liked L5, and this
region soon became something of an sf CLICHE as the site for fictional
space cities consisting of clusters of habitats. [PN]
LAIDLAW, MARC
(1960- ) US writer who began publishing work of genre interest with "A
Hiss of Dragon" with Gregory BENFORD for Omni in 1978. Though he published
solo stories with some frequency in the 1980s, his best known short work
is perhaps the group of mathematically oriented tales written with Rudy
RUCKER, such as "Chaos Surfari" (1989). ML's first novel, Dad's Nuke
(1985), is a SATIRE of suburban life and Christian fundamentalism set in a
NEAR-FUTURE community effectively sealed off from the rest of the
disintegrating USA; ritual technological fixes for anxiety include having
a personal nuclear power plant and a baby adapted ( GENETIC ENGINEERING)
to recycle the wastes into her lead-lined diapers. ML's second novel, the
amusing Neon Lotus (1988), follows the consequences of the REINCARNATION
of a Tibetan Buddhist sage as a young girl in a highly technologized USA.
Kalifornia (1993) is a further satire, and The Orchid Eater (1994) is
associational. [NT]See also: TECHNOLOGY; WEAPONS.
LAING, ALEXANDER (KINNAN)
(1903-1976) US writer, editor and academic, noted for his books on the
sea, for editing The Haunted Omnibus (anth 1937; vt Great Ghost Stories of
the World 1939), and for his murder novel, The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck, by
a Medical Student (1934), which hinges on horrific changes to the human

body. Two further books with fantastic elements are Dr Scarlett: A
Narrative of his Mysterious Behavior in the East (1936) and its sequel,
The Methods of Dr Scarlett (1937). In collaboration with Thomas PAINTER,
AL wrote an sf thriller, The Motives of Nicholas Holtz, Being the Weird
Tale of the Ironville Virus (1936; vt The Glass Centipede, Retold from the
Original Sources 1936 UK). Persuasively authentic in its use of biological
data, it is a well told story of the creation of artificial life in the
form of a deadly virus, and of the dangers that beset the man who
investigates the ensuing deaths. [PN]See also: MONSTERS.
LAKE, DAVID J(OHN)
(1929- ) Indian-born Australian writer (he emigrated in 1967), originally
a UK citizen; his education (a Jesuit school in India, a BA in English at
Cambridge, a diploma in linguistics and a PhD in English) is reflected in
the texture of his sf work, as is his teaching in Vietnam, Thailand and
India (1959-67). After publishing several works of criticism, including
the strongly argued, somewhat controversial The Canon of Thomas
Middleton's Plays (1975) and a volume of poetry, Hornpipes and Funerals
(coll 1973), which deals with some of the themes of his fiction, he began
publishing sf with the first of his Breakout Novels sequence, Walkers on
the Sky (1976 US). It was followed by The Right Hand of Dextra (1977 US)
and The Wildings of Westron (1977 US), both set on Dextra; by The Gods of
Xuma, or Barsoom Revisited (1978 US) and Warlords of Xuma (1983 US), which
constitute a riposte to the sexism and crudity of E.R. BURROUGHS's Barsoom
novels; and by The Fourth Hemisphere (1980), set on yet another planet.
All the books in the sequence share certain fundamental premises: in WWIV
(AD2068) Earth destroys itself, and by AD2122 the colonies of the Moon are
also in the throes of terminal conflict; but, before the final collapse,
interstellar ships break out of the Solar System in search of suitable
planets for COLONIZATION. The novels to date are set on various of these
planets and share comparatively simple, action-packed surface narratives
matched with considerable complexity of implication, some of it Jungian.
Walkers on the Sky, set AD12117, entertainingly carries a young man across
a terraformed world irradiated by planes of force whose operation explains
the dreamlike behaviour indicated by the title. The Right Hand of Dextra,
set earlier, in AD2687, intermingles biological, religious and
colonization themes in the story of the reconciliation between
incompatible forms of biological organization on a planet whose human
colonists are religious fundamentalists insensitive to the vital questions
surrounding Dextra's weird ECOLOGY.Of books lying outside this central
sequence, the most interesting is perhaps The Man who Loved Morlocks
(1981). Ostensibly a sequel to H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE (1895), it
also works as a sustained and loving critique of that book, of its author
and of the late-19th-century mind-sets which shaped both. Ring of Truth
(1982; vt The Ring of Truth 1984 US) is a POCKET-UNIVERSE tale of surreal
intensity whose climax - unusually for this sort of book - provides no
soothing explanation for the shape of the world. The Changelings of Chaan
(1985) and West of the Moon (1988) are juveniles. Despite an occasional
truculent stiffness of diction, DJL is a writer of fully realized fictions
whose work, almost always, flows with thought. [JC]See also: ALIENS;
AUSTRALIA; COSMOLOGY; EVOLUTION; GRAVITY; SOCIOLOGY; TIME TRAVEL;

TRANSPORTATION.
LALLI, CELE G.
[r] Cele GOLDSMITH.
LA MASTER, SLATER
(1890-? ) US writer whose Cupid Napoleon (1928 Argosy-All-Story as
"Luckett of the Moon"; 1934) is a delusional interplanetary romance whose
satirical effects are seriously jumbled. The Phantom in the Rainbow (1929)
is marginal sf. [JE/JC]
LAMB, WILLIAM
Storm JAMESON.
LAMBE, DEAN R.
[r] Michael A. BANKS.
LAMBERT, S.H.
Neil BELL.
LAMBOURNE, JOHN
Form of his name used on books by UK writer John Battersby Crompton
Lamburn (1893-? ), brother of Richmal Crompton (1890-1969), authoress of
the Just William children's books. JL's The Kingdom that Was (1931) and
its sequel The Second Leopard (1932) are mildly allegorical, subduedly
humorous works describing how, 50,000 years ago, the apathetic rulers of
the animal kingdom were led to abdicate in favour of mankind. JL also
wrote The Unmeasured Place (1933), about a female
vampire-cum-were-leopard. [JE]
LAMPLUGH, LOIS
(1921- ) UK editor and writer whose Mandog * (1972) novelizes Peter
DICKINSON's script for a tv tale for children. [JC]
LAMPTON, CHRIS
Working name of US writer Christopher Lampton (1950- ), who began writing
sf with The Seeker (1976 Canada) with David F. BISCHOFF. He continued with
two further competent sf adventures, Cross of Empire (1976 Canada) and
Gateway to Limbo (1979). [JC]
LANCE, KATHRYN
(1943- ) US writer. Much of her work has consisted of non-sf tales for
children, often as by Lynn Beach (see listing below). Her sf has been
restricted to the Pandora sequence - Pandora's Genes (1985) and Pandora's
Children (1986) - set in a post- HOLOCAUST world where pluck and luck seem
set to ensure a viable future. [JC]Other works, as Lynn Beach:
contributions to the Find your Fate: G.I. Joe sequence, including G.I.
Joe: Operation Jungle Doom * (1986), G.I. Joe: Operation Time Machine *
(1987) and Invisibility Island * (1988); H.O.W.L. High (1991); the Phantom
Valley sequence of fantasy adventures starring a warlock boy, comprising
Phantom Valley #1: The Evil One (1991), #2: The Dark (1991) and #3: Scream
of the Cat (1992); other titles, variously attached to juvenile fantasy
series, include Secrets of the Lost Island * (1984 chap), The Attack of
the Insecticons * (1985 chap), Conquest of the Time Master * (1985), The

Haunted Castle of Ravencurse * (1985) and Invaders from Darkland * (1986).
LANCOUR, GENE
Working name of Gene Lancour Fisher (1947- ), US author of the
SWORD-AND-SORCERY Dirshan series about Dirshan the God-Killer, a barbarian
warrior: The Lerios Mecca (1973), The War Machines of Kalinth (1977),
Sword for the Empire (1978) and The Maneaters of Cascalon (1979). GL's
next book was sf: The Globes of Llarum (1980) puts a mercenary on the side
of rebel independents against a giant corporation on a frontier planet;
complications routinely ensue. [PN]
LANDIS, ARTHUR H(AROLD)
(1917-1986) US author and editor. While editing for Dealer's Voice, a
motorcycle magazine, AHL convinced his publisher to begin a new fantasy
magazine, Coven 13, which AHL edited for 4 issues Sep 1969-Mar 1970 before
the title passed to William L. CRAWFORD. The 4-part serial "Let There Be
Magick" in Coven 13, by AHL as James R. Keaveney, became A World Called
Camelot (1969-70; rev 1976) as by AHL, and was followed in the same series
by Camelot in Orbit (1978), The Magick of Camelot (1981) and Home - To
Avalon (1982). In the first novel a cultural engineer, or "Adjuster", is
sent from Earth to the second planet of Fomalhaut, known as Camelot, a
world where MAGIC works, rather as in Christopher STASHEFF's Warlock
series. Sf meets SWORD AND SORCERY in a whimsical manner throughout the
series, whose quality deteriorates. The final volume is set on a different
world. [PN]
LANDIS, GEOFFREY A.
(1955- ) US writer of poems and stories, his first story of sf interest
being "Elemental" for ASF in 1984. A wide sampling of his poetry appears
in Time Frames: A Speculative Poetry Anthology (anth 1991 chap) ed Terry
A.Garey; a relatively limited selection of his adventurous and various
short fiction is assembled as Myths, Legends, and True History (coll
1991). [JC]
LANDIS, MARIE
[r] Brian HERBERT.
LAND OF THE GIANTS
US tv series (1968-70). An Irwin Allen Production for 20th Century-Fox
TV/ABC. Created Irwin ALLEN, also executive prod. Writers included Bob and
Esther Mitchell, Bob and Wanda Duncan, Richard Shapiro, Dan Ullman,
William Welch. Dirs included Harry Harris, Nathan Juran, Sobey Martin,
Irwin Allen (1st episode only). Regular cast Gary Conway, Kurt Kasznar,
Don Marshall, Heather Young, Don Matheson, Deanna Lund, Stefan Arngrim.
Special effects L.B. Abbott, Art Cruickshank, Emil Kosa Jr. 2 seasons, 51
50min episodes. Colour.Carrying on in the tradition of such films as DR
CYCLOPS and The INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN ( GREAT AND SMALL) as well as an
earlier tv series, WORLD OF GIANTS, the first episode showed 7 people
aboard a future "stratocruiser" passing through a space/time-warp into a
world similar to 20th-century Earth, but where all things, including
people, are 12 times larger. The series concerned their predictable
encounters with giant people and giant props. Three novelizations by
Murray LEINSTER are Land of the Giants * (1968), Land of the Giants #2:

The Hot Spot * (1969) and #3: Unknown Danger * (1969). Others were Land of
the Giants: Flight of Fear * (1969) by Carl Henry RATHJEN and Land of the
Giants: The Mean City * (1969) by James Bradwell. [JB/PN]
LANDOLFI, TOMMASO
(1908-1979) Italian writer, active as an author of short fictions from
1929. Three selections have appeared in English: Gogol's Wife and Other
Stories (coll trans Raymond Rosenthal, John Longrigg and Wayland Young
1963 US), Cancerqueen and Other Stories (coll trans Raymond Rosenthal 1971
US) - which includes the short title novel, Cancroregina (1950; first
trans Jack Murphy as "Cancroregina" 1950 Botteghe Oscure), about a mad
astronaut imprisoned in a living starship - and Words in Commotion and
Other Stories (coll trans Kathrine Jason 1986 US), a volume taken mostly
from La piu belle pagine di Tommaso Landolfi ["The Best Pages of Tommaso
Landolfi"] (coll 1982), a compilation introduced by Italo CALVINO, who
compares TL to writers like VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM. TL's laconic,
surreal, testing FABULATIONS, which also resemble those of Jorge Luis
BORGES and Franz KAFKA, clearly influenced Calvino in turn. [JC]
LAND THAT TIME FORGOT, THE
Film (1975). Amicus. Dir Kevin Connor, starring Doug McClure, John
McEnery, Susan Penhaligon. Screenplay Michael MOORCOCK, James CAWTHORN,
adapted from The Land that Time Forgot (1924) by Edgar Rice BURROUGHS. 95
mins. Colour.This UK film was the first of 3 LOST-WORLD Burroughs
adaptations produced by Amicus, the others being AT THE EARTH'S CORE
(1976) and The PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT (1977). A German U-boat - with a
contingent of male Germans, Britons and one American, plus a young woman discovers Caprona, a long-lost landmass near the South Pole. It is
crawling with prehistoric monsters and cavemen who do their best to
destroy the invaders, with little success. The film ends with a volcanic
eruption and the marooning of the hero and heroine. The various monsters
are unconvincing. The script by Moorcock and Cawthorn was altered
extensively by the producers. [JB]
LANE, JANE
Pseudonym of UK writer Elaine Dakers (1905-1978), author of many esteemed
historical novels. Her post- HOLOCAUST sf novel, A State of Mind (1964),
is set in an ORWELL-like DYSTOPIA. [JC]
LANE, JOHN
Dennis HUGHES.
LANE, MARY E. BRADLEY
(? -? ) US writer of whom nothing is known other than that she may have
been the author of Mizora: A Prophecy: A Mss. Found Among the Private
Papers of Princess Vera Zarovitch: Being a True and Faithful Account of
her Journey to the Interior of the Earth, with a Careful Description of
the Country and its Inhabitants, their Customs, Manners and Government
(Cincinatti Commercial 1880-81; 1890 anon; 1975, with 2 prefaces, as by
Mary E. Bradley Lane). This obscure, part-radical, part-conservative
UTOPIA is set mainly within a HOLLOW EARTH, where an all-woman society (
FEMINISM) whose children are produced by parthenogenesis has an advanced
technology and stringent laws: they have eliminated brunettes and all men,

and by eugenics have produced a race of blonde superwomen. With men gone,
crime is gone. The book is notable for the ruthlessness of its social
speculations, quite extreme for 19th-century utopian writing. [PN]
LANG, ALLEN KIM
(1928- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Machine of Klamugra" for
Planet Stories in 1950 and wrote a good number of action stories in the
following decade. Wild and Outside (1966) sends a US baseball shortstop to
subdue a planet of alien musclemen. [JC]
LANG, ANDREW
(1844-1912) Scottish man of letters well known for a wide range of
literary activity, including novels, poetry, belles-lettres, anthropology,
children's books and (perhaps most familiar to current readers)
anthologies of traditional fables and tales retold for children, with some
added hagiographical and historical material, much of the work being done
by his wife; numerous volumes followed the first of these, The Blue Fairy
Book (anth 1889). The rather delicate fantasy content of many of his
children's tales gives them a nostalgic interest for some adults today;
representative are: The Princess Nobody: a Tale of Fairy Land (1884 chap;
rev vt In Fairyland 1979 chap US);The Gold of Fairnilee (1888); Prince
Prigio (1889) and Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia: Being the Adventures of
Prince Prigio's Son (1893), which has a trip to the Moon on a flying
horse, both titles being assembled as My Own Fairy Book (omni 1895); and
Tales of a Fairy Court (coll 1906), which contains more Prince Prigio
stories.Some of AL's adult fiction contains more bracing material,
however, though Much Darker Days (1884; rev 1885) as by A. Huge Longway,
which parodies Dark Days (1884) by Hugh Conway (1847-1885), does so
without venturing into the sensational fantasies of its target, and That
Very Mab (1885), written with May Kendall - the pseudonym of Emma
Goldworth (1861-?1931) - and published anon, is a rather feeble SATIRE
involving the return of the fairy queen to a 19th-century England where
(we discover incidentally) interplanetary travel exists. The title story
of In the Wrong Paradise and Other Stories (coll 1886) is less ineffectual
in its dramatization of the dictum that one man's paradise is another
man's hell. In the same volume, "The Romance of the First Radical" is an
early example of anthropological sf ( ANTHROPOLOGY; ORIGIN OF MAN),
predating H.G. WELLS's "A Story of the Stone Age" (1897) by more than a
decade. Why-Why, a revolutionary Ice Age citizen, falls in love with
Verva, asks intolerable questions of his tribe, and comes to a sad end.
"The End of Phaeacia" (same volume) is a lost-race ( LOST WORLDS) tale in
which a missionary is shipwrecked on a South Sea ISLAND that turns out to
be the Homeric Phaeacia. The Mark of Cain (1886) introduces, late in the
action, a flying machine as deus ex machina to solve a court case. Some of
the pieces collected in Old Friends: Essays in Epistolary Parody (coll
1890) represent a forerunner format for the writing of RECURSIVE
SF.Considerably more durable is AL's collaboration with his friend H.
Rider HAGGARD, whose She (1887) he parodied in He (1887), written with
Walter Herries Pollock (1850-1926) and published anon. After this, AL
joined with Haggard to write The World's Desire (1890), a novel which
combines Haggard's crude, sometimes haunting vigour and AL's chastely

pastel classicism; despite occasional longueurs, the resulting tale of
Odysseus's last journey to find Helen in Egypt is a moving, frequently
eloquent romance, coming to a climax with Odysseus's discovery that Helen
is the avatar of Ayesha (of Haggard's She) and his death at the hands of
his son. The Disentanglers (coll of linked stories 1901 chap US; much exp
1902 UK), AL's last book of adult fiction, is fundamentally
uncategorizable, though its sections have some resemblance to the CLUB
STORY; some of its episodes deal with submarines, occult sects, spectres
and so forth, all used - as Roger Lancelyn GREEN noted in the best work on
AL, Andrew Lang (1946) - to replace the traditional "magical devices of
the fairy tale" with the latest scientific developments, though retaining
the magical function. Copious, but flawed by a disheartening dilettantism,
AL's work lies just the wrong side of major ranking in the sf/fantasy
field, just as in his other areas of concentration. [JC]Other works:
Pictures at Play, or Dialogues of the Galleries (coll 1888) with W.E.
Henley (1849-1903), as by Two Art-Critics; A Monk of Fife: A Romance of
the Days of Jeanne d'Arc (1895); When it was Light: A Reply to "When it
was Dark" (1906), an anon response to Guy THORNE's 1903 novel; Tales of
Troy and Greece (coll 1907).
LANG, FRITZ
(1890-1976) Austrian film-maker who, after trouble with the Nazis, left
Germany for France in 1933 and emigrated to the USA in 1934. He was
originally trained as an architect but preferred the graphic arts; during
the years before WWI he supported himself as a cartoonist and
caricaturist. He turned to writing after being wounded during WWI,
producing several popular thrillers and fantasy romances. After WWI ended
he entered the German film industry and began directing a series of lavish
melodramas, such as Die Spinnen (1919; vt The Spiders), many of which were
sf-related, involving lost races ( LOST WORLDS), technology-driven plots
to take over the world, etc. In this vein was the first Dr Mabuse film, DR
MABUSE, DER SPIELER (1922; vt Dr Mabuse, the Gambler). In 1923-4 he made a
majestic 6hr fantasy, based directly on the myth rather than on Wagner:
Die Nibelungen (released as 2 separate films, Siegfrieds Tod [vt
Siegfried] and Kriemhilds Rache [vt Krimhild's Revenge]). Like all FL's
German films, this was cowritten with his wife, Thea VON HARBOU. In 1925
he started work on another epic, his first real sf film, METROPOLIS
(1926); it is deservedly the most celebrated of all sf films of the silent
period. Von Harbau novelized the script as Metropolis * (1926; trans anon
1927 UK). FL's other major sf film was Die FRAU IM MOND (1929; vt The Girl
in the Moon); von Harbou's novelization, Frau im Mond * (1928; trans
Baroness von Hutten as The Girl in the Moon 1930 UK; cut vt The Rocket to
the Moon; From the Novel, The Girl in the Moon 1930 US) was published in
Germany before the film was released.FL's German films of the 1930s
included the famous murder movie M (1931), which introduced Peter Lorre,
and Das Testament des Dr Mabuse (1933; vt The Testament of Dr Mabuse). The
latter, parts of which were interpreted as anti-Nazi, involved the master
criminal operating through hypnotic powers and even undergoing a form of
REINCARNATION, transferring his mind into the body of the director of the
lunatic asylum in which he had been locked up at the end of the previous
film.FL directed 22 films during his first 25 years in the USA, mostly

low-budget though often impressive thrillers, such as Fury (1936), You
Only Live Once (1937) and The Big Heat (1953). The nearest thing to
another sf film he ever directed was his last film, made back in Germany,
Die TAUSEND AUGEN DES DR MABUSE (1960; vt The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse;
vt The Diabolical Dr Mabuse). The influence of FL's harsh, expressive
style on genre cinema, especially on thrillers, psychological thrillers
and sf films, has been incalculable. He was a master at depicting the
compulsiveness and the politics of power, and most film critics regard him
as a great director. [PN/JB]Further reading: The Cinema of Fritz Lang
(1969 US) by Paul M. Jensen; Fritz Lang (1976 UK) by Lotte Eisner; Fritz
Lang: The Image ?
CITIES; COMICS; GERMANY; ROCKETS.
LANG, HERRMANN
(? -? ) Ostensibly a German writer and professor in the Polytechnic
School at Karlsruhe, with publications in chemistry. However, there seems
to have been no German edition of his sf novel, The Air Battle: A Vision
of the Future (ostensibly trans 1859), and HL is most likely the pseudonym
of a UK writer. The novel presents in short compass a remarkable portrait
of a world several millennia hence, long after European civilization has
been destroyed by floods and earthquakes; the peace-loving Black rulers of
the country of Sahara dominate Africa, and in a final battle with other
powers utilize their great heavier-than-air machines to establish a
beneficial hegemony over the world. Remarkably for a novel of this period,
miscegenation is strongly approved of, and the White woman whose
adventures the plot traces is destined to marry a Black man. [JC]See also:
HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; POLITICS; WAR.
LANG, KING
House name used by CURTIS WARREN on several sf novels: five by David
GRIFFITHS and 1 each by George HAY, Brian HOLLOWAY, John William JENNISON
and E.C. TUBB. [JC]
LANG, SIMON
Pseudonym of US screenwriter and author Darlene Hartman (1934- ). SL's
SPACE OPERAS - All the Gods of Eisernon (1973) and continuing with The
Elluvon Gift (1975) - constitute a loose series, both featuring the Terran
starship Skipjack and both set in the same galactic venue. The first novel
is the more ambitious, presenting in the planet Eisernon an idyllic
picture of an ALIEN race ecologically integrated with Nature. More
formally, as Voyages of the Skipjack, the sequence continues with The
Trumpets of Tagan (1992), Timeslide (1993) and Hopeship (1994). Aliens,
friendly and otherwise, are frequently met; and in general the Skipjack
books do sometimes suffer from some resemblance to STAR TREK, for which SL
had written. [JC]
LANGART, DARREL T.
Randall GARRETT.
LANGE, HELLMUTH
[r] GERMANY.
LANGE, JOHN

Michael CRICHTON.
LANGE, OLIVER
(1927- ) A pseudonym. In OL's Vandenberg (1971; vt Defiance: An American
Novel 1984) the eponymous hero fights to the death against Soviet takeover
of the USA, retreating to the Rocky Mountains to die undefeated. [JC]
LANGELAAN, GEORGE
(1908- ) French-born UK writer and journalist, active for many years in
the USA before returning to France. His collection of sf/horror stories,
Out of Time (coll 1964 UK), includes "The Fly" (1957), a macabre story of
an unsuccessful experiment in MATTER TRANSMISSION, in which the scientist
ends up with the head of a fly. It was filmed as The FLY (1958), with
various sequels. He has published several works in French, including
Nouvelles de l'anti-monde ["Tales of the Anti-World"] (coll 1962) and Le
vol de l'anti-g ["The Flight of Anti-G"] (1967). [JC/PN]
LANGFORD, DAVID (ROWLAND)
(1953- ) UK writer, critic and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient
of 8 HUGO awards for fan writing - some of the best of his over 450 pieces
are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US) ed Ben
Yalow - plus 1 Best FANZINE Hugo for his self-produced news magazine,
ANSIBLE. DL began to publish sf with "Heatwave" for New Writings in SF 27
(anth 1975) ed Kenneth BULMER. His first book-length fiction, An Account
of a Meeting with Denizens of Another World, 1871 (1979) as by William
Robert Loosley and ed DL, centres on a spoof 19th-century report of a
Close Encounter; its main narrative was summarized as if factual, without
permission or payment, by Whitley STRIEBER in his "fiction based on fact",
Majestic (1989). In DL's one serious novel, The Space Eater (1982),
emissaries from a devastated Earth are sent by an unpleasant form of
MATTER TRANSMISSION to a distant colony planet, where they must stop the
local military from ripping the fabric of the Universe. The Leaky
Establishment (1984), borderline sf, hilariously examines a crisis
involving lost nuclear warheads at what many readers have assumed is
Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (where DL, who has an MA
in physics, worked 1975-80). In Earthdoom! (1987) with John Grant (Paul
BARNETT), a parody of the DISASTER-novel genre and of countless sf
CLICHES, a multitude of catastrophes afflicts the world, more or less
simultaneously. The Dragonhiker's Guide to Battlefield Covenant at Dune's
Edge: Odyssey Two (coll 1988) assembles parodies of sf and fantasy
writers. Though some of his short fiction is entirely serious, DL remains
best known for the witty and ironic humour of his fan writing - perhaps
best distilled in the fanzine Twll Ddu (1976-83) - and most of his
full-length fiction, although it is sometimes over-broad. It is surprising
that a writer so obviously gifted has as yet produced so little sf of real
substance.DL has also written, often in collaboration, a variety of
nonfiction texts of sf interest, all imaginatively conceived and soundly
based: War in 2080: The Future of Military Technology (1979), Fact and
Fallacies: A Book of Definitive Mistakes and Misguided Predictions (1981)
with Chris MORGAN, The Science in Science Fiction (1982) with Peter
NICHOLLS and Brian STABLEFORD, Micromania: The Whole Truth about Home
Computers (1984), which is a reworking for the UK market of Charles

PLATT's Micromania: The Whole-Truth Home Computer Handbook (1984), and The
Third Millennium (A History of the World: AD 2000-3000) (1985) with
Stableford. [JC/NT]Other works: The Necronomicon (anth 1978) ed George
HAY, DL's contribution being to construct a hoax history of the "lost
occult text" invented by H.P. LOVECRAFT; The Transatlantic Hearing Aid
(1985 chap), nonfiction; A Novacon Garland (coll 1985 chap dos), fiction
and nonfiction; Critical Assembly: The First 50 White Dwarf Columns (coll
1987), book reviews; Platen Stories (coll 1987 chap);Critical Assembly II:
The Rest of the White Dwarf (and GM, and GMI) Review Columns (coll 1992),
book reviews; Irrational Numbers (coll 1994 chap US).See also:
ANTHROPOLOGY; BLACK HOLES; BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; COSMOLOGY;
GENETIC ENGINEERING; HUMOUR; HYPERSPACE; IMMORTALITY; NEW WRITINGS IN
SF;
PREDICTION; PSEUDO-SCIENCE; UFOS; UTOPIAS; WEAPONS.
LANGUAGES
LINGUISTICS.
LANIER, STERLING E(DMUND)
(1927- ) US editor and writer. SEL did 6 years' graduate work at the
School of Anthropology and Archeology at the University of Pennsylvania
before working as an editor, mainly for Chilton Books for periods during
1961-7; he persuaded the firm to publish Frank HERBERT's DUNE (fixup
1965). He subsequently turned freelance, working as as a sculptor and
jeweller and as a writer.His first published story was "Join our Gang?"
for ASF in 1961, but the majority of his short work belongs to the
Brigadier Ffellowes series published in FSF. Like Lord DUNSANY's Jorkens
stories or Arthur C. CLARKE's Tales from the White Hart (coll 1957), the
Ffellowes tales are examples of the CLUB STORY, as narrated by the
eponymous brigadier; they mostly involve the irruption of mythical
creatures into the real world. They are assembled in The Peculiar Exploits
of Brigadier Ffellowes (coll 1972) and The Curious Quest of Brigadier
Ffellowes (coll 1986). SEL's first novel was a good children's fantasy,
The War for the Lot (1969), about a young boy telepathically selected to
defend a tract of wilderness from city rats. His second remains his most
important: Hiero's Journey (1973) - and its sequel, The Unforsaken Hiero
(1983), both being assembled as Hiero Desteen (omni 1984) - is a long and
inventive quest tale set in a teeming post- HOLOCAUST world 5000 years
after an atomic war. Radiation dangers and recidivist mutant SCIENTISTS
still haunt this venue, threatening Hiero, who treks down from Canada
searching for a mythical COMPUTER which might help reconstruct things. In
the second volume, which returns to the plot of The War for the Lot, Hiero
telepathically marshals some animal allies and fights off an invasion of
the Unclean Masters. Not precisely innovative, the sequence succeeds
through its author's fluent and ingeniously varied cast of characters. A
later singleton, Menace under Marswood (1983), tamely repeats some of the
same material on a terraformed MARS. [JC/MJE]See also: FANTASTIC VOYAGES;
MUTANTS; MYTHOLOGY.
LAO SHE
[r] CHINESE SF.

LARGE, E(RNEST) C(HARLES)
(? -1976) UK plant pathologist and occasional fiction writer. Sugar in
the Air (1937) is a notable and original sf novel bitterly describing the
conflicts which arise between scientific and commercial interests during
the development of an industrial process of artificial photosynthesis. Its
sequel, Asleep in the Afternoon (1939), is a SATIRE whose frame narrative
about the tribulations of an author is interwoven with a frivolous sf
story about a device for inducing sleep. In the more adventurous sarcastic
fantasy Dawn in Andromeda (1956) God translocates a representative sample
of humanity by way of experiment; the political evolution of the community
and the spontaneous regeneration of RELIGION confound the UTOPIAN schemes
of the original group but cannot suppress mechanical progress. [BS]See
also: DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; SCIENTISTS; SOCIOLOGY.
LARSON, GLEN A.
(1937- ) US TELEVISION producer, perhaps best known as producer of
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (from 1978). However, GL had been long involved with
tv previously, being responsible for Quincy, McCloud, BJ and the Bear and
other non-sf programmes before he turned to sf. All the sf tv series that
GAL has produced have been simplistic, grossly formulaic, and generally
contemptuous of science; in interviews he has adopted a cavalier attitude
about the various SCIENTIFIC ERRORS pointed out to him. However, he
remained loyal to sf/fantasy programming on tv for a number of years.
Subsequent series of this kind for which he received the "Created by"
credit include: the Battlestar Galactica sequel-series GALACTICA 1980
(1980); BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY (1979-81); his most successful
series, Knight Rider, 4 seasons, 83 episodes 1982-6, starring David
Hasselhoff as Michael Knight, the former police officer almost killed in
an accident who is given a new identity and groovy futuristic car
controlled by a COMPUTER called KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand), to
help him catch bad people as a kind of licensed vigilante; Manimal, 8
episodes 1983, about a shapeshifting crimefighter, Jonathan Case (Simon
MacCorkindale), who catches bad people by adopting the guise of panther,
eagle, etc.; Automan, 11 episodes 1983-4, starring Desi Arnaz Jr as the
computer expert who creates Automan (Chuck Wagner), the world's first
living holographic image, to catch bad people; and The Highwayman, 10
episodes 1987-8, another road-movie series in which future law enforcers,
Highwaymen, use futuristic vehicles to catch bad people, starring Sam
Jones.GL was given cover credit for writing, always in collaboration, the
Battlestar Galactica series of tied novels, including Battlestar Galactica
* (1978) with Robert THURSTON, Battlestar Galactica #2: The Cylon Death
Machine * (1979) with Thurston, #3: The Tombs of Kobol * (1979) with
Thurston, #4: The Young Warriors * (1980) with Thurston, #5: Galactica
Discovers Earth * (1980) with Michael RESNICK, #6: The Living Legend *
(1982) with Nicholas Yermakov, #7: War of the Gods * (1982) with Yermakov,
#8: Greetings from Earth * (1983) with Ron GOULART, #9: Experiment in
Terra * (1984) with Goulart, #10: The Long Patrol * (1984) with Goulart,
#11: The Nightmare Machine * (1985) with Thurston, #12: "Die, Chameleon!"
* (1986) with Thurston, #13: Apollo's War * (1987) with Thurston and #14:
Surrender the Galactica! * (1987) with Thurston. With Roger Hill, GL wrote
a series of Knight Rider ties: Knight Rider * (1983), #2: Trust Doesn't

Rust * (1984), #3: Hearts of Stone * (1984),#4: The 24-Carat Assassin *
(1984 UK).and#5: Mirror Image * (1985 UK) [PN/JC]Other works: The Hardy
Boys and Nancy Drew Meet Dracula * (1978) with Michael Sloan.
LA SALLE, VICTOR
House name used on early paperback sf novels published by John Spencer ?
Co. (later BADGER BOOKS). Menace from Mercury (1954) was the
first-published novel of the prolific R.L. FANTHORPE (his only VLS title).
Dawn of the Half-Gods (1953) and Twilight Zone (1954) were by John S.
GLASBY. The remainder were: The Black Sphere (1951) by Gerald EVANS, After
the Atom (1953) by Leonard G. FISH, and Assault from Infinity (1953), The
Seventh Dimension (1953) and Suns in Duo (1953), all by Tom W. WADE.
[SH/MJE]
LASERBLAST
Film (1978). Irwin Yablans. Prod Charles BAND. Dir Michael Rae, starring
Kim Milford, Cheryl Smith, Gianni Russo. Screenplay Franne Schacht, Frank
Ray Perilli. 80 mins. Colour.In this ill made, low-budget exploitation
movie a miserable teenager finds in the desert an amulet and a laser left
by ALIENS. The amulet makes his eyes glow red; taken over by the alien
persona, he revenges himself with the laser on people who pick on him,
also exploding many cars and a Star Wars poster before the returning
aliens get him. [PN]
LASER BOOKS
Canadian sf imprint initiated in 1975 by Harlequin Books, the US
publisher of Mills ?
The books were restricted to a formula which specified a male protagonist,
an upbeat ending, no sex or atheism, and a minimum of long words. All
Laser Book covers were the work of Frank Kelly FREAS. The series was
suspended early in 1977 after 57 books had appeared. The Laser formula
made it unlikely that books of any literary quality would be published,
but some were interesting, including K.W. JETER's debut, Seeklight (1975),
and Ray NELSON's Blake's Progress (1975; rev vt Timequest 1985 US). [MJE]
LASKI, MARGHANITA
(1915-1988) UK writer, one of the most prolific contributors of material
(over 250,000 wordslips) to the Oxford English Dictionary. Though she was
not an avowed author of sf, her work often edged snappishly into the
fantastic, and she early demonstrated an uncircumscribed sense of good
writing in The Patchwork Book: A Pilot Omnibus for Children (anth 1946),
whose sf contents included several stories by H. Rider HAGGARD, Edgar
Allan POE, Jules VERNE and others. Love on the Super-Tax (1944) borders on
sf in its depiction of a wartime transformation of the UK. Tory Heaven
(1948) is a class-ridden spoof UTOPIA set in an ALTERNATE-WORLD UK in
which the Conservative Party has won the 1945 election. The Victorian
Chaise Longue (1953) is a fantasy in which two invalids, 100 years apart,
switch identities. The Offshore Island (written 1954; 1959 chap) is a
strongly pacifist sf play set in a UK continuing to suffer the effects of
nuclear HOLOCAUST after 10 years of war. It stingingly condemns (while
linking) the sexual prudery and political ruthlessness of the great
powers. Two volumes of nonfiction - Ecstasy (1961) and Everyday Ecstasy

(1980) - deal sympathetically with categories of experience often used
within the genre as agents or symbols of transition to a better world.
[JC]Other works: The Tower (1974 chap US).
LASSWITZ, KURD
(1848-1910) German Kantean philosopher, historian of science, novelist
and short-story writer. As the first major sf writer in German, he holds
the same place in GERMANY as do H.G. WELLS in the UK and Jules VERNE in
France. He taught philosophy for many years at the Gymnasium Ernestinum in
Gotha, and it is symptomatic of 19th-century German intellectual culture
that he irradiated his fiction with theoretical speculation; there is no
KL fiction without a lesson. In "German Theories of Science Fiction" (1976
Science-Fiction Studies) William B. Fischer claims on KL's behalf that
many of his ideas directly prefigure later critics' use of terms like
"extrapolation" and "analogue", and translates as follows from KL's
introduction to the short-story collection Bilder aus der Zukunft ["Images
of the Future"] (coll 1878): "Many inferences about the future can be
drawn from the historical course of civilization and the present state of
science; and analogy offers itself to fantasy as an ally." The seriousness
of KL's didactic impulse can be seen in the strong emphasis he places in
his fiction on establishing a plausible imaginary world whose hypothetical
nature will be governed, and given verisimilitude, by the resemblance to
scientific method evident in its realization.Unsurprisingly, the stories
that embody these overriding concerns tend to be more effective as broad
technological and scientific canvases than as studies in character. The
tales collected in Bilder aus der Zukunft read consequently almost like
illustrated tours of various "superior terrestrial cultures located in the
future". (A short story from this volume was published in Overland Monthly
in 1890 as "Pictures of the Future".) Further short stories are collected
in Seifenblasen ["Soap Bubbles"] (coll 1890), 2 stories from this volume
appearing (trans Willy LEY 1953 and 1955) in FSF, and Nie und Nimmer
["Never, Ever"] (coll 1902); 2 sf novels, Aspira (1906) and Sternentau
["Star Dew"] (1909), have not been translated into English.KL's major work
is his long sf novel, Auf zwei Planeten (1897; cut 1948; cut again 1969;
trans Hans J. Rudnick, much cut, as Two Planets 1971 US), in which mankind
confronts a superior Martian culture when a Martian SPACE HABITAT is
discovered above the North Pole along with an enclave at the pole itself.
After useless defiance of the Martians, Earth is put under a benign
protectorate, and humans gradually begin a process of self-improvement at
the same time that the Martians on Earth become decadent. Ultimately
mankind rebels, equality between the two planets is established, and Earth
seems destined to a UTOPIAN future. The book incorporates much
technological speculation, including details about life on MARS - based on
the theories of Percival Lowell (1855-1916) - possible alien forms of
biology ( XENOBIOLOGY), and the nature of mankind, actual and potential.
It was deeply influential upon at least two generations of German youth,
as the epigraph to the 1971 translation by Wernher von Braun (1912-1977)
attests; and E.F. BLEILER has speculated that it was important in shaping
Hugo GERNSBACK's "technologically based liberalism".In 1981, the Kurd
Lasswitz AWARDS were established to honour, in a fashion meant to reflect
the HUGO, the best German sf published during the previous year. [JC]See

also: HISTORY OF SF; INVASION.
LAST BATTLE, THE
Le DERNIER COMBAT .
LAST DAYS OF MAN ON EARTH, THE
The FINAL PROGRAMME .
LAST MAN ON EARTH, THE
L' ULTIMO UOMO DELLA TERRA.
LAST STARFIGHTER, THE
Film (1984). Lorimar/Universal. Dir Nick Castle, starring Lance Guest,
Dan O'Herlihy, Catherine Mary Stewart, Norman Snow, Robert Preston.
Screenplay Jonathan Betuel. 101 mins. Colour.In this cheerful, derivative
wish-fulfilment story, Alex (Guest), who lives in a trailer park, is a
teenage whiz at computer arcade games. Attaining the highest-ever score on
the Starfighter game, he is conscripted (though at first refusing) by its
inventor, an alien (Preston), to play a real-life version of the game in a
real starfighter and so save the Galaxy from the invasion of the Ko-Dan
Empire. While he is offworld, his place on Earth is taken by a robot
simulacrum; this leads to amusing problems. Made for a juvenile audience,
TLS is achieved with such good humour (and interesting computer animation
for the space battles) that it survives its silliness to become quite a
good film. The novelization is The Last Starfighter * (1984) by Alan Dean
FOSTER. (For further discussion of computer-game/real-life confusions
CYBERSPACE; VIRTUAL REALITY.) [PN]
LAST WOMAN ON EARTH
Film (1960). Filmgroup. Prod and dir Roger CORMAN, starring Antony
Carbone, Betsy Jones-Moreland, Edward Wain (pseudonym of Robert Towne).
Screenplay Towne. 71 mins. Colour.For unexplained reasons (war?) the world
is drained of oxygen for several hours; the lone survivors (as far as we
know) are three scuba divers: two men (one wealthy and aggressive, one
effete and intellectual) and the first man's wife. Scientifically silly
and poorly acted, with scriptwriter Towne - later celebrated for Chinatown
(1974) and other films-called in to play the intellectual part at the last
minute, LWOE still has compelling moments. For a quickie-movie the script
is remarkably mannered; yet it may be a sharper, less sentimental film
than the more famous The WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1959), on which
it was presumably modelled. [PN]
LATHAM, PHILIP
Pseudonym used for his sf by US astronomer Robert Shirley Richardson
(1902-1981). He began publishing sf in the magazines in 1946 with "N-Day"
for ASF, and continued to 1977, with 20 or so stories in all; many had
astronomical themes ( ASTRONOMY). The most anthologized is "The Xi Effect"
(1950), in which Earth is found to be in a segment of the Universe that is
contracting. Many of the later stories, oddly, are as much about MAGIC as
they are HARD SF. PL wrote two CHILDREN'S SF stories: Five against Venus
(1952) and Missing Men of Saturn (1953), and around the same time also
wrote scripts for the juvenile tv series CAPTAIN VIDEO. As Robert S.
Richardson he wrote astronomical articles for sf magazines, the story "Kid

Anderson" (1962), the semifictional Second Satellite (1956), and over 10
books on astronomy, including the juvenile Exploring Mars (1954; vt Man
and the Planets UK). [PN]See also: DISASTER; OUTER PLANETS; PHYSICS;
SCIENTISTS; SUN; VENUS.
LATHE OF HEAVEN, THE
Made-for-tv film (1980). TV Laboratory WNET/13, New York, for PBS. Prod
and dir David R. Loxton and Fred Baryzk, starring Bruce Davison, Kevin
Conway, Margaret Avery. Teleplay Roger E. Swaybill, Diane English, based
on The Lathe of Heaven (1971) by Ursula K. LE GUIN. 120 mins. Colour.Made
outside the commercial system for Public Television, this may be the best
sf tv-movie ever made, with innovative use of existing reality (futuristic
high-rises in Dallas, for example) substituting for expensive sets. The
visual consultant was Ed EMSHWILLER. The story of George Orr (Davison),
who can dream permanent changes to reality, is both here and in Le Guin's
chilling original a moral fable rather like the fairy-tales about three
wishes. Orr's talent is exploited by an ambitious psychiatrist (Conway),
but every time he tries to dream a better world something frightful goes
wrong, OVERPOPULATION being cured by plague or, later, racism cured by
everybody turning grey. The deliquescence of reality, whose binding glue
is ultimately in danger of dissolving (the ending is ambiguous), is subtly
caught, and the viewer has to be observant to register every change.
[PN]See also: VIRTUAL REALITY.
LATIN AMERICA
Although deeply influenced by US-UK sf, modern sf in Latin America is
also affected by the fantastic traditions of Indian and colonial times,
and in some instances by a conscious decision to depart from
English-speaking traditions. "Anglo-Saxon sf explores in one way: the way
in which Anglo-Saxons think and feel," writes Argentinian critic and
author Claudio Omar Noguerol. "Latin-American sf explores as only a person
immersed in the turbulence of Latin America can do it."Since the continent
produces very little technology and scientific research but is a consumer
(and sometimes victim) of technological advance, its sf has stressed the
social, economic and political costs of progress. In that respect,
Latin-American sf has paralleled the NEW-WAVE movement of the 1960s in the
US and UK, with the added advantage (albeit dubious) of not being
restricted by the market pressures of pulp publishing: in most
Latin-American countries publishers have yet to exploit the commercial
potential of sf. Sf as a literary pursuit is more notable than in
countries where mass-marketability is a requisite. Sf novels are
relatively scarce; sf is more often than not in the form of short fiction
and, frequently, POETRY. Its authors are commonly social scientists or
professional writers, only a very few coming from the ranks of the hard
sciences.Latin-American sf is also very close to the political turmoil
that surrounds it, and has frequently been the only available channel for
social criticism when and where military dictatorships have been in
control. Therefore, although there is a certain overall Latin-American
identity, it is not always easy to generalize. Argentina, Cuba and Mexico,
for instance, have such widely different histories, geographies, political
systems and inhabitants that sometimes the Spanish language (and some

universal aspirations) are the only common ground shared by their
literature; in the case of Portuguese-speaking Brazil there is also the
language barrier. Unfortunately, US and UK market conditions have made it
almost impossible for Spanish- or Portuguese-language sf writers to
publish in those countries.ArgentinaUnder the influence of such writers of
the fantastic as Macedonio Fernandez (1874-1952), the Uruguayan-born
Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937), Roberto Arlt (1900-1942) and Leopoldo Lugones
(1874-1938) - as well as the undefinable work of Jorge Luis BORGES, which
often borders on unconventional sf - and of sf precursors such as E.L.
Holmberg (1852-1937), author of Viaje maravilloso del senor Nic Nac ["The
Wonderful Voyage of Mr Nic Nac"] (1875), the magazine Mas alla ["Beyond"]
(1953-7) published 48 issues featuring the work of the first modern
generation of sf writers in the country. The second generation - heralded
by the short-lived magazine Revista de ciencia ficcion y fantasia
["Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy"] (1977)-arrived in the 1970s
and 1980s and has been especially interested in social issues as well as
language; sf's rebirth was in part due to the downfall of the military
regime. This allowed the creation of the Circulo Argentino de Ciencia
Ficcion y Fantasia ["Argentinian Circle of Science Fiction and Fantasy"]
and the publishing of several FANZINES (Unicornia azul, Nuevomundo,
Clepsidra and Sinergia, among others, plus Axxon, published in diskette
form) as well as professional magazines, like Parsec and Minotauro, and
scores of books. Argentina hosts the annual South-American sf and fantasy
convention, Consur.Among the best known Argentinian authors are Borges,
Adolfo BIOY CASARES and Angelica Gorodischer (1929- ), whose 2-vol Kalpa
Imperial ["Imperial Kalpa"] (coll vol 1 1983, vol 2 1984) is one of the
best stylistic examples of modern Latin-American sf, though she sometimes
veers towards pure fantasy. Other books by her are Opus dos ["Opus Two"]
(coll 1967), Bajo las jubeas en flor ["Under the Flowering Jubeas"] (coll
1973) and Casta luna electronica ["Chaste Electric Moon"] (coll 1977). The
work of Eduardo Goligorski (1931- ), author of A la sombra de los barbaros
["Under the Shadow of the Barbarians"] (coll 1977), is closer to
conventional sf. He became one of the few Latin-American writers to
publish in FSF - with "When the Birds Die" (1967)-and edited the most
representative 1960s Argentinian sf anthology, Los argentinos en la Luna
["Argentinians on the Moon"] (anth 1968). Other writers include: Carlos
Gardini, author of Mi cerebro animal ["My Animal Brain"] (1983) and
Sinfonia cero ["Zero Symphony"] (1984); Magdalena Moujan Otano; Emilio
Rodrigue, author of Plenipotencia ["Full Powers"] (coll 1967); Alberto
Vanasco (1925- ), who collaborated with Goligorski in Memorias del futuro
["Memories of the Future"] (anth 1966) and Adios al manana ["Goodbye to
Tomorrow"] (anth 1966); Daniel Barbieri (1951- ), author of Domun (1991);
Spanish-born Marcial Souto (1947- ), author of Para bajar a un pozo de
estrellas ["To Go Down a Well of Stars"] (coll 1985); and Sergio Gaut vel
Hartman (1947- ), author of Cuerpos descartables ["Disposable Bodies"]
(coll 1985).CubaSf in Cuba originated in the poetry of Oscar Hurtado
(1919-1977), as in La ciudad muerta de Korad ["The Dead City of Korad"]
(1964), and the stories and novels of Angel Arango (1926- ), which include
(?A donde van los cefalomos? ["Where do the Cephalhoms Go?"] (coll 1964),
El planeta negro ["The Black Planet"] (coll 1966), Robotomaquia
["Robotomachy"] (coll 1967), El arco iris del mono ["The Monkey's

Rainbow"] (coll 1980), Transparencia ["Transparency"] (coll 1982) and
Coyuntura ["Juncture"] (coll 1984). Cuban sf has been influenced both by
Caribbean magical traditions and by Soviet sf-there were no real
precedents for Cuban sf before the 1959 revolution. Although no
specialized Cuban sf magazines exist, sf stories were well received in
most periodical publications and dozens of titles were published every
year until, in 1990, Cuban publishing began to suffer severe problems
owing to lack of paper.Cuban sf began to find its own identity through the
work of Arango and of Miguel Collazo (1936- ), author of El libro
fantastico de Oaj ["The Fantastic Book of Oaj"] (1966), El viaje ["The
Journey"] (1968), Onoloria and El arco de Belen ["The Arch of Bethlehem"].
It has a strongly political trend but also, less expectedly, purely
fantastic and clearly erotic traits, best exemplified by the work of Daina
Chaviano (1957- ), first winner in the sf category (established 1979) of
the national literary award, the David, with her short-story collection
Los mundos que amo ["The Worlds I Love"] (coll 1980). Her other books to
date are Amoroso planeta ["Loving Planet"] (coll 1983), Historias de hadas
para adultos ["Fairytales for Adults"] (coll 1986), Cuentos de una abuela
extraterrestre ["Stories from an Extraterrestrial Grandmother"] (1988) and
El abrevadero de los dinosaurios ["The Waterhole of the Dinosaurs"] (coll
1990). Other Cuban sf writers to be noted are: Gregorio Ortega (1926- ),
author of Kappa
LA TOURETTE, AILEEN
(1946- ) US-born writer, in the UK from 1968, whose advocacy of a radical
FEMINISM informs most of her work, all of which is sophisticatedly told.
Her sf novel, Cry Wolf (1986), however, assays a somewhat jumbled moral
scan of the events leading up to a nuclear HOLOCAUST in language both too
ornately self-referential and too abstract to convey much of the
subsequent shattered world as it attempts to sort truth from myth and to
build anew. [JC]
LAUMER, (JOHN) KEITH
(1925-1993) US writer who used his experiences in the US armed forces and
Diplomatic Corps to considerable advantage in his sf work. He served in
the army 1943-5, studied architecture and graduated with a BScArch from
the University of Illinois in 1952, served in the USAF 1953-6, and then
joined the US Foreign Service. He rejoined the USAF as a captain in 1960.
He began publishing sf in 1959 with "Greylorn" for AMZ, and for more than
a decade remained extremely prolific, producing three major series and two
minor ones along with a number of independent novels; after 1973, affected
by illness, he published more sparingly.The most interesting of KL's
series is the Imperium sequence, comprising his first novel, Worlds of the
Imperium (1962 dos; with 2 stories added to make coll, rev 1982), The
Other Side of Time (1965) and Assignment in Nowhere (1968) - both
assembled as Beyond the Imperium (omni 1981) - and Zone Yellow (1990). The
Imperium dominates a complex nest of PARALLEL-WORLDS universes, and
strives to maintain the stability of its chosen time-stream. As opposed to
the grimmer and perhaps more plausible versions of the same task expressed
in novels like Barrington BAYLEY's The Fall of Chronopolis (1974 US), KL
takes an essentially optimistic view of this kind of situation, treating

it in a no-nonsense, problem-solving manner. Also related, if only
thematically, to the Imperium series is Dinosaur Beach (1971), a tale of
TIME PARADOXES in which a role similar to that of the Imperium is played
by Nexx Central. A second series, the parallel-worlds comic novels
featuring Lafayette O'Leary - The Time Bender (1966), The World Shuffler
(1970), The Shape Changer (1972) and The Galaxy Builder (1984) - attempts
to replay a similar scenario in terms of slapstick, with only moderate
success.KL's other major series depicts the adventures of interstellar
diplomatic troubleshooter Jaime Retief on a variety of alien worlds: Envoy
to New Worlds (coll 1963; exp vt Retief: Envoy to New Worlds 1987),
Galactic Diplomat (coll 1965), Retief's War (1966), Retief and the
Warlords (1968), Retief: Ambassador to Space (coll 1969), Retief of the
CDT (coll 1971), Retief's Ransom (1971; with new title story added to make
coll, rev vt Retief and the Pangalactic Pageant of Pulchritude 1986),
Retief: Emissary to the Stars (1975; exp 1979), Retief: Diplomat at Arms
(coll 1982), Retief to the Rescue (1983), The Return of Retief (1984),
Retief in the Ruins (coll 1986) and Reward for Retief (1989). Retief's
unchanging role is to mediate between the residents of alien worlds, some
of them nefarious, and his bumbling superiors in the Terran Diplomatic
Corps, and to solve various sticky problems, almost all couched in comic
terms, sometimes amusingly. Here as elsewhere, the KL bibliography is
tangled; putting aside titles which partially replicate earlier titles,
Retief collections assembled entirely from earlier volumes include Retief
at Large (coll 1978) and Retief Unbound (omni 1979), containing Retief's
Ransom plus 5 stories from Envoy to New Worlds.KL's singletons are varied,
ranging from broad HUMOUR like The Monitors (1966), filmed as The MONITORS
in 1969, to taut, efficient sf thrillers whose structures amalgamate SPACE
OPERA and the favourite sf theme of the coming to awareness of the
SUPERMAN. Best of them is A Plague of Demons (1965), in which a tough
human is biologically engineered into a sort of superman so that he can
deal with a threat to Earth, and finds - after a long, remarkably
sustained chase sequence ending in his capture by some singularly
efficient aliens - that for centuries Earth has been being despoiled of
its best fighting men, who, like himself, are taken off-planet and
surgically transformed into command centres for gigantic, armed fighting
machines embroiled in an eons-long interstellar war. In this CYBORG form,
he regains autonomy, organizes a revolt of his fellow cyborg-supertanks
and prepares to carry - fabulously armed - his message of freedom to the
stars. Thematically associated with this novel are the Bolo books - Bolo:
The Annals of the Dinochrome Brigade (coll of linked stories with new
linking material 1976) and Rogue Bolo (coll of linked stories 1986), both
assembled, with 1 piece missing, as The Compleat Bolo (omni 1990), plus
the weak The Stars Must Wait (1990) - which recount the long history of a
military unit of constantly upgraded quasisentient tanks.In A Plague of
Demons, and in other novels such as A Trace of Memory (1963), The Long
Twilight (1969), The House in November (1970; with 1 story added to make
coll, rev 1981), Dinosaur Beach and The Infinite Cage (1972), the
essential KL superman takes shape: often an orphan, usually a loner, he
discovers the world to be a persecuting snare and delusion, and gradually
comes to realize that his PARANOIA is justified, for his frustrated human
competence is no more than a cloak disguising his true - at times godlike

- superiority. Once he has become a superman he is able to transcend the
world of normals, and often takes that world over, though behind the
scenes. It is for novels in which this wish-fulfilment version of the
superman is expressed that KL will be best remembered, though his tendency
to repeat earlier inspirations in slackened form seems to have damaged his
later efforts even in this favourite mode; books such as The Ultimax Man
(1978) or End as a Hero (1985) are significantly weak by comparison with
his early work. But at his best KL wrote polished and succinct daydreams
of sf transcendence that served as models of their kind. [JC]Other works:
The Great Time Machine Hoax (1964); Embassy (1965), an associational novel
whose protagonist, Brion Bayard, shares his name but no other
circumstances with the hero of the Imperium sequence; Catastrophe Planet
(1966; with added pieces to make coll, rev vt The Breaking Earth 1981);
Earthblood (1966) with Rosel George BROWN (whom see for details); Nine by
Laumer (coll 1967); Galactic Odyssey (1967); Planet Run (1967; with 1
story by each added to make coll, rev 1982) with Gordon R. DICKSON; The
Day Before Forever and Thunderhead (coll 1968); The Invaders * (coll 1967;
vt The Meteor Men UK) as by Anthony LeBaron and Enemies from Beyond *
(coll 1967), adapting stories from The INVADERS ; The Afrit Affair *
(1968), The Drowned Queen * (1968) and The Gold Bomb * (1968), adapting
stories from The AVENGERS ; Greylorn (coll 1968; vt The Other Sky 1968
UK); It's a Mad, Mad, Mad Galaxy (coll 1968); Time Trap (1970); The Star
Treasure (1971; with stories added to make coll, rev 1986); Once There was
a Giant (coll 1971), a different book from Once There was a Giant (coll
1984), the first title containing 8 stories, the second 2 novellas;
Timetracks (coll 1972); The Big Show (coll 1972); Night of Delusions
(1972; with 2 stories added to make coll, rev vt Knight of Delusions
1982); The Glory Game (1973); The Undefeated (coll 1974); The Best of
Keith Laumer (coll 1976); Star Colony (fixup 1982); Chrestomathy (coll
1984); Judson's Eden (1991); Alien Minds (coll 1991); Back to the Time
Trap (1992).As Editor: Five Fates (anth 1972).About the author: Keith
Laumer, Ambassador to Space: A Working Bibliography (last rev 1990 chap)
by Gordon BENSON Jr and Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS;
GODS AND DEMONS; HIVE-MINDS; INVASION; PSI POWERS; PSYCHOLOGY; ROBERT
HALE
LIMITED; WEAPONS.
LAURIE, ANDRE
Pseudonym of Paschal Grousset (1845-1909), French politician and author.
His first political novel, Le reve d'un irreconciliable ["Dream of a
Diehard"] (1869) and several political works were published under his real
name, but thereafter he used the AL pseudonym. While living as a communard
exile in London, AL wrote the original version of the book which was later
published as The Begum's Fortune (1879) as by Jules VERNE. Laurie legally
renounced title to the story, as he did with The Southern Star Mystery
(1884), rewritten and published as by Verne. Both authors put their name
to L'epave du Cynthia (1885; trans as Salvage from the Cynthia 1958 UK).
It was a strange collaboration, AL being politically a long way to the
left of Verne. Of AL's several sf novels, 5 have been translated into
English. The best known is Les exiles de la Terre, Selene Company Limited
(1887; trans anon as The Conquest of the Moon: A Story of the Bayouda 1889

UK), in which the MOON is drawn from its orbit to land in the Sahara
desert. AL wrote of the discoveries of scientifically advanced societies
in The Secret of the Magian, or The Mystery of Ecbatana (1890 France;
trans 1891 UK) and Atlantis (1895; trans L.A. Smith as The Crystal City
Under the Sea 1896 UK; vt The Crystal City 1896 US), and of a
transatlantic tunnel in De New York a Brest en sept heures (1888; trans
anon as New York to Brest in Seven Hours 1890 UK). His most critically
acclaimed work, Spiridon le muet ["Spiridon the Mute"] (1909 France),
remains untranslated. [JE/PN]Other works: Axel Eberson, the Graduate of
Upsala (1891 France; trans 1892 UK).See also: BOYS' PAPERS; NEAR FUTURE;
UNDER THE SEA.
LAVERS, NORMAN
(1935- ) US writer whose sf novel, The Northwest Passage (1984), engages
in an experiment ( POSTMODERNISM) familiar to readers of the modern novel:
the book comprises a "text", complete with a scholarly apparatus which is
itself, of course, part of the "text". In this case, a far-future
editorial apparatus surrounds the late-20th-century scholarly edition of
an 18th-century manuscript. The title proves to have a more than
geographical context. [JC]
LAVERTY, DONALD
Pseudonym used by James BLISH and Damon KNIGHT in collaboration. [JC]
LAVOND, PAUL DENNIS
[s] C.M. KORNBLUTH; Robert A.W. LOWNDES; Frederik POHL.
LAWHEAD, STEPHEN R.
(1950- ) US writer of Christian sf and fantasy, beginning with the Dragon
King fantasy trilogy: In the Hall of the Dragon King (1982), The Warlords
of Nin (1983) and The Sword and the Flame (1984). Of sf interest are Dream
Thief (1983) and the Emphyrion sequence: The Search for Fierra (1985) and
The Siege of Dome (1986), both titles being assembled as Emphyrion (omni
1990 UK). A further fantasy sequence, the Pendragon Cycle - Taliesin
(1987), Merlin (1988),Arthur (1989) and Pendragon (1994) - Christianizes
(or re-Christianizes) Arthurian legends. The catechizing impulse evident
in earlier titles seems to have been moderated in later productions.
[JC]Other works: Howard Had a Spaceship (1986), juvenile; the Song of
Albion sequence comprisingThe Paradise War (1991), The Silver Hand (1992)
and The Endless Knot (1993).
LAWNMOWER MAN, THE
Film (1992). Allied Vision Lane Pringle/Fuji Eight Co. Dir Brett Leonard,
starring Jeff Fahey, Pierce Brosnan, Jenny Wright, Geoffrey Lewis.
Screenplay Leonard, Gimel Everett. 108 mins. Colour.The full title is
Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man, but the film has been repudiated by
KING, angry at the cynicism whereby his old (1975) short story was
purchased to exploit the marketing power of his name and then effectively
discarded through being altered out of recognition. In this dumb rewrite
of both FRANKENSTEIN (1931) and CHARLY (1968), an obsessive SCIENTIST
(Brosnan) uses a VIRTUAL-REALITY hook-up, along with intelligence-raising
drugs, to change the local handyman (Fahey), an affable simpleton, into a
homicidal SUPERMAN with telekinetic powers who ultimately downloads

himself into the USA's information networks in order to "cleanse this
diseased planet". The film's concepts and dialogue are uniformly
contemptible - noting in awe that his creation has learned Latin in two
hours, the brilliant scientist says: "It took me a year just to learn the
Latin alphabet!" The virtual-reality effects on which the film relies (the
suggestion being that computer-generated scenery makes you clever) are not
remotely like reality, and are routine in execution. [PN]
LAWRENCE
Lawrence Sterne STEVENS.
LAWRENCE, HENRY L(IONEL)
(1908- ) UK writer whose The Children of Light (1960) deals with the
effects of radiation. It was used as the basis for a 1961 film, The DAMNED
. [JC/PN]
LAWRENCE, J(UDITH) A(NN)
(? - ) US writer and artist, long resident in Greece, married to James
BLISH from 1964 until his death in 1975, collaborating with him (sometimes
without credit) on some of the later ties he wrote for the STAR TREK
enterprise. She was credited as co-author of Star Trek 12 * (coll 1977 US)
and was solely responsible for Mudd's Angels * (1978 US). [JC]See also:
MILFORD SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' CONFERENCE; NEBULA.
LAWRENCE, JIM
Working name of US writer James Duncan Lawrence (1918- ), whose sf
consists of the unremarkable Man from Planet X sequence - The Man from
Planet X #1: She-Beast (1975) and #2: Tiger by the Tale (1975), both as by
Hunter Adams - and 2 novels tied to SHARED-WORLD franchises: ESP McGee and
the Haunted Mansion * (1983 chap) for the ESP McGee series, and The
Cutlass Clue * (1986) for the A.I. Gang series. [JC]
LAWRENCE, LOUISE
Pseudonym of Elizabeth Rhoda Wintle (1943- ), UK writer who began
publishing sf for young adults with Andra (1971), and who early became
noted for the marked and sensitive intelligence of her settings and
characters. The Power of Stars (1972), in which an extraterrestrial force
transfixes human teenagers, and Star Lord (1978; rev 1987), in which a boy
protects the eponymous alien from the government, are characteristic; as
are The Wyndcliffe (1974) and its sequel, Sing and Scatter Daisies (1977),
an intricate romance fantasy. Her shorter work is assembled in Extinction
is Forever and Other Stories (coll 1990). [JC]Other works: The Earth Witch
(1981); Calling B for Butterfly (1982); Children of the Dust (1985);
Moonwind (1986); The Warriors of Taan (1986); Ben-Harran's Castle (1992;
vt Keeper of the Universe 1993 US); The Dispossessed (1994 UK; vt The
Patchwork People 1994 US).See also: STARS.
LAWRENCE, STEPHEN
Lawrence Sterne STEVENS.
LAZARUS, HENRY
(? -? ) UK writer, active in the 1890s, whose The English Revolution of
the Twentieth Century: A Prospective History (1894), caused some stir
through its advocacy of a welfare state following a revolution led by the

forces of Labour. [JC]
LAZENBY, NORMAN A(USTIN)
(1914- ) UK pulp writer, prolific as an author of Westerns and detective
novels, and a minor contributor to GENRE SF. He began publishing sf with
"A Matter of Size" for Fantasy in 1946, and continued to publish stories
under various names for several years, and then again for a few years
after 1970. The Coming of the Beetle Men (coll 1949 chap; the cover title
was Terror Trap) contains 1 sf story. His only sf novel is The Brains of
Helle (fixup 1953) as by Bengo Mistral. [SH]
LEA, HOMER
(1876-1912) US writer in whose "Yellow Peril" tale, The Valor of
Ignorance (1909), a racially contaminated USA - riddled also with
FEMINISTS-must attempt to gird its loins against a Japanese INVASION. But
Japan wins, gaining California and other Pacific regions. In 1942, the
book enjoyed the unusual privilege of being reprinted in both Japan and
the USA. [JC]
LEACOCK, STEPHEN (BUTLER)
(1869-1944) Canadian economist and writer of many books of humorous
sketches, the most famous being perhaps Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
(coll 1912). Sf often featured as the target of the more fantastical of
these sketches, beginning with spoofs like "The Man in Asbestos", which
parodies H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE, and other stories in Nonsense
Novels (coll 1911 UK). The Iron Man and the Tin Woman, with Other Such
Futurities: A Book of Little Sketches of To-day and Tomorrow (coll 1929
US) and Afternoons in Utopia: Tales of the New Time (coll 1932 US) contain
the highest proportion of this sort of material - UTOPIAS being a
favourite target-but examples can be found in many of his collections.
[JC]Other works: Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (coll 1917 UK); Frenzied
Fiction (coll 1918 UK); The Hohenzollerns in America, With the Bolsheviks
in Berlin, and Other Impossibilities (coll 1919 UK); Winsome Winnie and
Other New Nonsense Novels (coll 1920 UK).See also: CANADA.
LEAHY, JOHN MARTIN
(1886-1967) US PULP-MAGAZINE author and illustrator who contributed sf to
Science and Invention and Weird Tales, in which latter appeared Drome
(1927; 1952), a LOST-WORLD tale set in caves under California. [JE/EFB]
LEBAR, JOHN
Harold Bell WRIGHT.
LeBARON, ANTHONY
Keith LAUMER.
LeCALE, ERROL
Wilfred Glassford MCNEILLY.
Le CLEZIO, J(EAN)-M(ARIE) G(USTAVE)
(1940- ) Mauritius-born French writer, known primarily for his work
outside the sf field; he took his degree in literature at Nice University.
He is a major contemporary author in the ABSURDIST tradition, his work
often bordering on sf and the surreal through a minute examination of

physical phenomena and aspects of reality. His hallucinatory scrutiny of
manifestations of madness in the world at large is best demonstrated in
Les geants (1973; trans Simon Watson-Taylor as The Giants 1975 US), set in
Hyperbolis, a nightmare shopping complex in a futuristic city. [MJ]Other
works include: Le proces-verbal (1963; trans Daphne Woodward as The
Interrogation 1964 US); La fievre (coll 1964; trans Daphne Woodward as
Fever 1966 US); Le deluge (1965; trans Peter Green as The Flood 1967 US);
Terra Amata (1967; trans Barbara Bray 1969 US); Le livre des fuites (1969;
trans Simon Watson-Taylor as The Book of Flights 1972 US); La guerre
(1970; trans Simon Watson-Taylor as War 1973 US); Voyages de l'autre cote
["Journeys on the Other Side"] (1975).See also: MEDIA LANDSCAPE.
LEE, DAVID
David S. GARNETT.
LEE, GENTRY (B.)
(1942- ) US writer who held several important posts in NASA's deep-space
exploration programme and was a screenwriter for Carl SAGAN's Cosmos tv
series. His sf has been written exclusively in collaboration with Arthur
C. CLARKE (whom see for details); at least initially, the senior partner
provided outlines based on ideas generated by both writers, and then the
books themselves were written by GL. Cradle (1988), the first and weakest,
is a First-Contact drama exhibiting little of Clarke's economy or
intensity. Following on from Clarke's solo RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA (1973),
the Rama sequence - Rama II (1989 UK),The Garden of Rama (1991) and Rama
Revealed (1993) - shows a continual improvement. GL has proved competent
at conveying technical information, though tending to lapse into an
"airport novel" approach when it comes to dealing with human beings. [NT]
LEE, MATT
[s] Sam MERWIN.
LEE, ROBERT
[s] Paul W. FAIRMAN.
LEE, SHARON
[r] Steve MILLER.
LEE, STAN
(1922- ) US COMIC-book writer and executive, born Stanley Leiber; his
name has been legally changed to Lee. Before WWII he began to establish
himself in the New York comics publishing world, in 1939 joining Timely
Comics, Inc., the firm for which Jack KIRBY invented Captain America. SL
remained with Timely - which soon became Atlas Comics, then MARVEL COMICS
in 1963, without changing its corporate identity - for the whole of his
career, serving as its editor 1942-72, and as its publisher and editorial
director from 1972, concentrating on film productions after 1978. His
career was not of particular importance for the student of sf until 1961,
when - with Kirby, who had spent many years away from Marvel - he began to
create a new type of comic-book SUPERHERO, with titles like The Fantastic
Four (from 1961) and The Incredible Hulk (from 1962); other comics created
at this time included Spiderman (initiated in Amazing Fantasy in 1962) as
drawn by Steve Ditko, whose angular, repressed style greyly evoked the

pedestrian urban life which the hero tried to transcend. Over the next
half decade SL (usually with Kirby) initiated a number of similar comic
books including The Avengers (from 1963), into which Kirby reintroduced
his Captain America, X-MEN (from 1963) and Thor (separate comic from 1966,
character introduced in Journey into Mystery in 1962).These comics, most
of them scripted by SL-according to the "Marvel Method", which involved
much initial collaboration between artist and writer-were remarkable for
eschewing the template structures of previous work in the field
(characters neither ageing nor suffering significant change). SL's
protagonists grew up, aged, suffered, exhibited human frailties and
changed their minds about things; their superpowers were often explicitly
seen as compensatory wish-fulfilments, allowing them - though never
permanently - to transcend their personal problems. In hindsight, SL's
1960s work was a major influence on the creation of the GRAPHIC NOVEL in
the 1980s, especially perhaps the work from about 1965 on, when his
continuing storylines began to develop space-operatic complexities; most
memorable were those episodes of The Fantastic Four in which the heroes
became involved in intergalactic disputes with the planet-devouring (but
rather sympathetic) Galactus and his moody sidekick, the Silver Surfer, a
nonhuman rider of space imprisoned by Galactus within Earth's atmosphere
where, misunderstood and reviled, he time and again (as featured in The
Silver Surfer 1968-70) saved humanity from itself.The above account should
be read in the context of Jack Kirby's repeated claims during the 1980s
that SL was an administrator rather than a writer - indeed, that he
actually wrote none of the comics for which he received writing credit.
The editors of this encyclopedia are not in a position to evaluate those
claims.In 1970 Kirby left Marvel; though he would return later, it is
arguable that SL's domination of the comic-book world, as both editor and
writer, began to slip from about this time. For instance, it was Roy
Thomas who fruitfully introduced into Marvel's generic mix a number of
themes and characters from HEROIC FANTASY (including Robert E. HOWARD's
Conan in Conan the Barbarian from 1970), and though Marvel Comics featured
ever more spectacular and sf-like situations, there was a sense of
decreasing ebullience; routine situations began to predominate.SL is not
to be confused with the Stan Lee who has written novels such as The God
Project (1990), a NEAR-FUTURE thriller with metaphysical import. [JC] See
also: SUPERMAN.
LEE, TANITH
(1947- ) UK writer, first of fantasies for children, beginning with The
Dragon Hoard (1971), and then, after The Birthgrave (1975 US), primarily
of fantasies for adults. Both these areas of concentration lie outside our
proper remit, but it can be said that she is an inventive and fertile
writer, that she has encompassed her primary theme - the ethical and
sexual initiation of an adolescent character into a volatile world s/he
herself will shape, often through renunciation - in a wide variety of
modes, and that, although her work differs vastly in tone and subject
matter from that of C.J. CHERRYH, both writers share a daunting
comprehensiveness. TL, however, has not (yet) assembled her various
singletons and series into one shared universe.The Birthgrave and its
sequels, Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978 US; vt Shadowfire 1978 UK) and Quest

for the White Witch (1978 US), are sf by virtue of the ending of the first
volume, in which Earthmen arrive in a spaceship to tell the albino heroine
the true, non-supernatural explanation for the compulsions she feels and
the voices she hears inside her head - and, having awoken with amnesia in
the heart of a volcano and wreaked considerable damage upon the world with
her untutored powers, she is by this time sorely in need of some
reassurance. The second and third volumes deal primarily with her son, who
must deal with his own powers and learn that his mother is not evil. At
trilogy's end, immortal and forgiving, they commit incest. Don't Bite the
Sun (1976 US) and Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977 US), both assembled as
Drinking Sapphire Wine (omni 1979), form a genuine sf sequence set in a
FAR-FUTURE world somewhat resembling that in Michael MOORCOCK's Dancers at
the End of Time series, treated in this case as a DYSTOPIA whose citizens,
superficially free to shape-change and cavort, are in fact prisoners of
the protectiveness of their artificial environment. Electric Forest (1979
US) depicts the rite of passage of an ugly child on a planet where her
appearance is shocking. Day by Night (1980 US) is set on non-rotating
mirror-worlds unconscious of each other's existence. Sabella, or The Blood
Stone (1980 US) and its sequel, Kill the Dead (1980 US) - both assembled
as Sometimes, After Sunset (omni 1980 US) - associate vampirism with Mars.
The Silver Metal Lover (1981 US) concerns a love affair between a woman
and a ROBOT or ANDROID. Days of Grass (1985 US) is set a century or so
after an ALIEN invasion. TL's sf, though she is clearly conversant with
its instruments, makes such individual use of the normal displacements of
the genre that nothing - from robots to cosmogony - fails to serve her
primary impulses as a storyteller. For TL, sf is a kind of metaphysical
pathos: it illustrates her children.Of her several volumes of stories,
some of which are exceptional, the most far-ranging are probably Dreams of
Dark and Light: The Great Short Fiction (coll 1986 US), Forests of the
Night (coll 1989) and Women as Demons: The Male Perception of Women
through Space and Time (coll 1989). [JC]Other works:Juvenile fantasies:
Princess Hynchatti and Some Other Surprises (coll 1972); Animal Castle
(1972); Companions on the Road (1975) and The Winter Players (1976), both
assembled as Companions on the Road and The Winter Players: Two Novellas
(omni 1977 US); East of Midnight (1977); The Castle of Dark (1978); Shon
the Taken (1979); Prince on a White Horse (1982), assembled with The
Castle of Dark as Dark Castle, White Horse (omni 1986 US).Adult fantasies:
The Betrothed (1968 chap); Volkhavaar (1977 US); the Tales from the Flat
Earth sequence, comprising Night's Master (1978 US), Death's Master (1979
US) and Delusion's Master (1981 US), all assembled as Tales from the Flat
Earth: The Lords of Darkness (omni 1987 US), plus Delirium's Mistress: A
Novel of the Flat Earth (1986 US) and Night's Sorceries (coll 1987 US),
both assembled as Tales from the Flat Earth: Night's Daughter (omni 1987
US); the Wars of Vis sequence, comprising The Storm Lord (1976 US) and
Anackire (1983 US), both assembled as The Wars of Vis (omni 1984 US), plus
The White Serpent (1988 US); Lycanthia, or The Children of Wolves 1981
US); Unsilent Night (coll 1981 chap US); Cyrion (coll of linked stories
1982 US); Sung in Shadow (1983 US); Red as Blood, or Tales from the
Sisters Grimmer (coll 1983 US); The Beautiful Biting Machine (1984 chap);
USTamastara, or The Indian Nights (coll 1984 US); The Gorgon and Other
Beastly Tales (coll 1985 US); Madame Two Swords (1988 US); A Heroine of

the World (1989 US); the Secret Book of Paradys sequence, comprising The
Book of the Damned (coll of linked stories 1988) and The Book of the Beast
(1988), both assembled as The Secret Book of Paradys (omni 1991 US), plus
The Book of the Dead (coll 1991 US) and The Book of the Made (coll 1993
US), both assembled as The Secret Books of Paradys III ?
The Blood of Roses (1990 ); Black Unicorn (1991 US) and its sequel, Gold
Unicorn (1994); Into Gold (1986 IASFM; 1991 chap); the Blood Opera
sequence, comprisingDark Dance (1992)Personal Darkness (1993) and
Darkness, I (1994), with further volumes projected; Heart-Beast (1992), a
werewolf novel; Elephantasm (1993); Nightshades: Thirteen Journeys into
Shadow (coll 1993); Eva Fairdeath (1994).See also: CHILDREN'S SF; DAW
BOOKS; FEMINISM; RADIO; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
LEE, THOMAS
(? -? ) UK writer, active in the late 19th century, identified by Darko
SUVIN in Victorian Science Fiction in the UK (1983) as a North London
plasterer and publican. TL's sf novel, Falsivir's Travels: The Remarkable
Adventures of John Falsivir, Seaman, at the North Pole and in the Interior
of the Earth (1886), is a HOLLOW-EARTH tale. The narrator discovers a race
of giants oppressed by a race of normal-sized humans, along with other
features that E.F. BLEILER has suggested mark the author's attempts to
satirize the UK of the 19th century. [JC]
LEE, WALT(ER WILLIAM)
(1931- ) US film-writer and consultant with a 1954 BS in physics. His
monumental self-published Reference Guide to Fantastic Films: Volume 1 A-F
(1972), Volume 2 G-O (1973) and Volume 3 P-Z (1974) contains upwards of
20,000 entries. Fantasy, occult and horror films feature more largely than
pure sf, but the latter is dealt with thoroughly. The work remains a
useful research tool for anyone dealing with sf CINEMA, although
commentary on the actual content of the films it covers is very minimal.
He later collaborated with Richard DELAP on an sf horror novel about a
shape-changing ALIEN, Shapes (1987). [PN]
LEE, WILLIAM
William S. BURROUGHS.
LEESON, ROBERT (ARTHUR)
(1928- ) UK editor and writer, active from the mid-1940s. He began
publishing his books for children, in which he has since specialized, with
Beyond the Dragon Prow (1973), an historical romance. Of sf interest is
the Time Rope sequence - Time Rope (1986), Three Against the World (1986),
The Metro Gangs Attack (1986) and At War with Tomorrow (1986) - in which a
sharp social awareness of the contemporary world is focused through a
TIME-TRAVEL plot with ample conflicts; and the Zarnia Experiment sequence
- comprising Landing in Cloud Valley (1991; vt The Zarnia Experiment:
Phase 1: Landing 1993), Fire on the Cloud (1991; vt The Zarnia Experiment:
Phase 2: Fire! 1993), The Zarnia Experiment: Phase 3: Deadline (1993), #4:
Danger Trail (1993), #5: Hide and Seek (1993) and #6: Blast Off! (1993).
[JC]Other works: The Third Class Genie (1975); Slambash Wangs of a Compo
Gormer (1987); Landing in Cloud Valley (1991), which begins the projected
Cloud Valley sequence.

LEE TUNG
(? - ) Indian writer whose interesting sf novel, The Wind Obeys Lama Toru
(1967), is a complex story about OVERPOPULATION in which fertility and
sterility drugs act and counteract, driving the population up and down
disastrously. [JC]
LEFANU, SARAH
(1953- ) UK academic whose Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female
Mind (anth 1985), ed with Jen Green (1954- ), provided a forum for WOMEN
SF WRITERS. The FEMINISM illustrated in that book could serve readers as a
backdrop for In the Chinks of the World Machine (1988; vt Feminism and
Science Fiction 1989 US), a solid nonfiction analysis of the work of
several contemporary sf writers, most notably Suzy McKee CHARNAS, Ursula
K. LE GUIN, Joanna RUSS and James TIPTREE Jr. Through readings of some
acuteness, SL argues that GENRE SF has provided a conceptual opportunity
for women writers to speak in their own autonomous voices, unimprisoned by
the patriarchal modes dominant in more "normal" literatures. [JC]
LEGER, RAYMOND
[r] Raymond MACDONALD.
LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES
COMIC-book series about a group of superpowered youths in the 30th
century, published by DC COMICS. The LOS-H first appeared in Adventure
Comics #247 (April 1958) in a Superboy story written by Otto Binder (
Eando BINDER) and then featured in various SUPERMAN titles (ed Mort
WEISINGER) before gaining their own series in Adventure Comics #300.
Writers have included Jerry SIEGEL, Edmond HAMILTON, Paul Levitz and Jim
Shooter, whose first story appeared when he was only 13, a logical
extension of Weisinger's policy of incorporating reader suggestions. Many
LOS-H characters were designed by fans, and its leadership was regularly
decided by readers' votes. LOS-H appeared in Adventure Comics #300-#380
(Sep 1962-May 1969), then in Action Comics #378-#392 (July 1969-Sep 1970);
it then became a regular back-up feature in Superboy, appearing Mar
1971-Aug 1977 in #172-#173, #176, #183-#184, #188, #190-#191, #193, #195
and #197-#230. At this point there was a title change. Superboy became
Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes from #231 (Sep 1977), and this
became just Legion of Super-Heroes for #259-#313 (Jan 1980-July 1984).
Then there began a new "deluxe" series, produced on higher-quality stock;
also called Legion of Super-Heroes, it ran from #1 to #63 (July 1984-Aug
1989). The older title of the same name was from #314 renamed Tales of the
Legion of Super-Heroes, featuring new material to #325 (July 1985) and
thereafter reprinting the "deluxe" title on a one-year-behind schedule. A
new series, again called Legion of Super-Heroes, began with #1 (Nov 1989)
3 months after the last issue of the old, and (1991) is current. The
present writers are Tom and Mary Bierbaum.Much of LOS-H's sf content was
quaint even when it first appeared, but sf continues as an important and
evolving part of the series, even if in uneasy balance with its SUPERHERO
basis. [ZB/BF]
LE GUIN, URSULA K(ROEBER)
(1929- ) US writer, based in Portland, Oregon. Her first novel was

published in 1966; by 1970 she was spoken of as one of the most important
writers within the field. Her reputation has extended far beyond the
readership of GENRE SF, while within the genre she has been honoured with
5 HUGOS and 4 NEBULAS; more attention has been paid to her by the academic
community than to any other modern sf writer.UKLG is the daughter of Dr
Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, the former a celebrated anthropologist who
has published much work on Native Americans, the latter a writer best
known for Ishi in Two Worlds (1961). UKLG was thus brought up in academic
surroundings; her own education, with an undergraduate degree from
Radcliffe and a master's degree from Columbia, was in Romance Literatures
of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, particularly French. She wrote POETRY
(some of it collected in Wild Angels [coll 1975 chap]) and a number of
unpublished realistic novels, mostly set in an imaginary Central European
country, before turning to sf. (It is generally assumed that her two
Orsinia books, both set in 19th-century "Orsinia", Orsinian Tales [coll of
linked stories 1976] and Malafrena [1979] - neither sf or fantasy - are
reworkings of this 1950s Central European material.) Typically, UKLG's
tales set a man in an alien (and perhaps alienated) world, and follow him
on a quest, until he makes a CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH and proves an agent
for the reconciliation of the sundered parts; the quest often takes the
form of a winter journey.All her early published genre stories were bought
by Cele GOLDSMITH for AMZ and Fantastic, her first published genre piece
being "April in Paris" for Fantastic in 1962; like much of her early work
this is more FANTASY than sf, though she makes no rigorous distinction
between the two, as she notes in "A Citizen of Mondath" (1973) and other
essays in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
(coll 1979; rev with biblio omitted 1989 UK) ed Susan WOOD.Much of UKLG's
earlier work, generally known as the Hainish series, is set in a common
universe. The people from the planet Hain once seeded the habitable worlds
of our part of the Galaxy with human life; this has resulted in great
cultural variety, useful for a writer who grew up with ANTHROPOLOGY as an
everyday discipline. Five novels, two novellas and several short stories
belong to the sequence, which covers about 2500 years of future HISTORY,
beginning 300-400 years from now.UKLG's first three novels come late in
the sequence's internal chronology. They are Rocannon's World (1966 dos;
text corrected 1977), Planet of Exile (1966 dos) and City of Illusions
(1967), and were collected as Three Hainish Novels (omni 1978). In
Rocannon's World an ethnographer is marooned on a primitive planet with
which he comes to terms only with difficulty; finally, in giving himself
to the planet, he receives in return the gift of "mindspeech" or telepathy
( ESP). Planet of Exile, set over 1000 years later, has mindspeech in
normal use; a Terran colony is struggling to survive on a planet whose
natives they despise; under pressure the two communities are finally able
to merge. City of Illusions is set on a cowed Earth ruled by the
human-seeming but alien Shing invaders who have the hitherto unknown art
of "mindlying". The amnesiac hero turns out, when his memory is restored,
to be a messenger from the planet of the previous book; able to detect
mindlying, he will be the agent of destruction for the malign
Shing.Perhaps the generic structures of these books are too conventional
to sustain fully the weight of meaning they are required to bear. But,
though apprentice work, all show, well developed, the typical UKLG

strategy of shaping a story around recurrent motifs, which gain in
richness and density as the action juxtaposes them in new patterns, until
it might almost be said that the motifs are the story. Many of these are
the simple archetypal symbols that have always dominated myth and poetry:
darkness and light, root and branch, winter and spring, submission and
arrogance, language and silence. These are not seen by UKLG as polarities
or opposed forces; rather, they are twin parts of a balanced whole, each
deriving meaning from the other. UKLG's dualism, insofar as it exists, is
not so much in the Western philosophical tradition (where progress is
often seen to derive from the tension of antitheses, as in Marxist
dialectics) as in the Eastern Taoist tradition, where the emphasis is on
balance, mutuality (as in yin and yang) and an ordered wholeness. However,
while Jungian archetype and the tenets of Taoism play a central role in
all UKLG's work, critical commentaries on UKLG have emphasized them almost
too much; they are by no means the whole story.The first work of UKLG's
maturity as a writer is THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (1969), which won both
Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel. The story is told in a prose
notable for its clarity and evocative precision. Once again an ethnologist
visits a planet, this time Gethen, whose people are androgynous; normally
neuter, they have the capability of becoming either male or female at the
peak of their sexual cycle; the world itself is snow-bound. The
professional observer cannot hold aloof from events; in the novel's most
moving sequence, a long, lonely journey across the ice, he reaches a
painful understanding with, and a reciprocated love for, the Gethenian
protagonist. Because the Gethenians appear initially to be like us, the
reading experience - a gradual understanding of the differences between
Gethenians and us - invites thoughtfulness about the nature of SEX and
sexism in our world, and of cultural chauvinism generally. These four
Hainish novels were reprinted along with "The Word for World is Forest"
(see below) as Five Complete Novels (omni 1985).The next two important
items in the Hainish sequence are novellas: "Vaster than Empires and More
Slow" (1971) and THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST (1972 in Again, Dangerous
Visions ed Harlan ELLISON; 1976). The former story, its title taken from
Andrew Marvell's "To his Coy Mistress", is set just after the action of
Rocannon's World, and the latter, which won a 1973 Hugo as Best Novella,
rather earlier. Both set humans on alien planets; the first ( LIVING
WORLDS) is inhabited by only a sentient plant network (the previous line
of the Marvell poem is "My vegetable love should grow"); the second planet
is occupied by a much-exploited native race, in a situation clearly made
to articulate parallels with the Vietnam War. In both cases a kind of
union is gained through human surrender to otherness, and alienation is
imaged as violence, madness and ravening egoism. UKLG's stories are
remarkably persuasive and consistent in their outlook, although the
answers tend to come less easily in the work of her middle period, whose
major work was the fifth and last novel in the Hainish sequence.This was
THE DISPOSSESSED: AN AMBIGUOUS UTOPIA (1974), which won a Hugo and a
Nebula, and is widely regarded as UKLG's most richly textured sf work.
This is not a book in which difficulties are readily surmounted; a central
image is the wall. The novel stands at the head of the Hainish sequence,
for it tells the life of a physicist whose new MATHEMATICS (by another
conceptual breakthrough) will result in the ANSIBLE, the

instantaneous-communication device ( FASTER THAN LIGHT) necessary if the
League of All Worlds - the galactic network about which the sequence is
constructed - is to come into being. Two inhabited worlds, one a moon of
the other, have different systems of POLITICS: one is an anarchy
(reminiscent of that proposed in real life by Kropotkin), the other is
primarily capitalist. The hero, Shevek, is not completely at home in
either society. The book has been read as pitting a UTOPIA against a
DYSTOPIA, but, as the book's subtitle implies, there are seldom absolutes
in UKLG's work; the attractive anarchist society is in some ways blinkered
and emotionally regimented (with the willing collaboration of its people).
Ideationally the novel is very strong, but a slight didactic dryness in
the telling-which, perhaps deliberately, hinders any simple emotional
identification with the hero - alienated some readers. Nonetheless, it is
a deeply imagined work of art. The short story "The Day before the
Revolution" (1974) is an introduction to the anarchist society of The
Dispossessed, being the tired, unromantic last memories of that society's
founder; it, too, won a Nebula.One interesting non-Hainish novel was
published before The Dispossessed. Set in the imaginative territory
generally associated with Philip K. DICK, The Lathe of Heaven (1971) tells
of a man who through his dreams can bring alternate reality structures
into being. In its interest in METAPHYSICS, it is of a piece with her
other work, including her fantasy (see below). It was intelligently
dramatized for US tv as The LATHE OF HEAVEN .Through all this period
(1962-74), UKLG also wrote non-Hainish fiction, including the Hugo-winning
"The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973), a bitter, deft parable about
the cost of the good life, and "Nine Lives" (1969), a moving story of
CLONES mining an alien planet. With the exception of THE WORD FOR WORLD IS
FOREST, all UKLG's early short fiction can be found in THE WIND'S TWELVE
QUARTERS (coll 1975; UK paperback in 2 vols), her first and best
collection. UKLG has published fewer sf short stories since then. One of
them, The New Atlantis (1975 as title story of The New Atlantis ed Robert
SILVERBERG; 1989 chap dos), is a dark NEAR-FUTURE story, in which a ruined
ECOLOGY is causing the USA (along with its frightened and frightening
state apparatus) to sink into darkness just as ATLANTIS's white towers
re-emerge above the sea; it ends ambiguously - as much of UKLG's later
fiction does - with the cry of the Atlanteans: "We are here. Where have
you gone?" This is one of the stories in UKLG's second collection, The
Compass Rose (coll 1982), an occasionally whimsical book which had a mixed
critical reception, as did the novella The Eye of the Heron (1978 in
Millennial Women ed Virginia KIDD; 1982 UK), an over-diagrammatic
political fable whose translucent simplicity approaches self-parody.
Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (1971-87 var mags; coll 1987)
contains stories and poems about animals, many being previously collected,
but featuring the first book appearance of "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come
Out Tonight?"; this Hugo-winning story recounts a human girl's meeting
with incarnations of Native American spirit animals (including Coyote); it
was later released as a graphic novel, Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out
Tonight? (graph 1994). A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (coll 1994) continues
to reflect UKLG's increasing absorption in tales which - while difficult
to define generically - range comprehensively over the terrains of the
fantastic.It became clear in UKLG's fiction after The Dispossesed

(including the Orsinia sequence) that her strongly utopian impulse was
taking over. This is unusual in postwar sf, whether genre sf or
mainstream. Because utopian fiction tends not to be plot-driven, much of
her fiction since 1974 has seemed a little static: it consciously demands
a more contemplative kind of attention than that dictated by most sf. It
is a difficult, quixotic demand, since it requires that the reader will
accept a cultural re-education. The clearest example is the most recent
and biggest of her sf novels, ALWAYS COMING HOME (1985). This is an
experiment: a collage of verse, reports, tales, drawings by Margaret
Chodos, an associated cassette of music by Todd Barton, and even recipes,
all relating to the matriarchal society of the Kesh, who live in
California's Napa Valley in a future long after some catastrophic event
has sunk the coastal cities. An intermittent narrative tells of a woman
who marries into, then flees from, a masculine, aggressive society. Utopia
is here approached by way of a fictional anthropology, which focuses on
its society not by asking the sf question, "How did it get that way?", but
simply asking: "What is it?"UKLG's FANTASY stories may be her most
personal work, and have given some of her readers more pleasure than
anything she has written. The Earthsea trilogy, austere but vivid, is a
major work whose appeal goes far beyond the teenagers at whom in the first
instance it was aimed: A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan
(1971) and The Farthest Shore (1972; slightly cut 1973 UK), collected as
Earthsea (omni 1977; vt The Earthsea Trilogy 1979). Set on ISLANDS in an
ocean world, the trilogy tells of training in a MAGIC so rigorous in its
principles as to be easily understood as a form of alternate science. The
books recount episodes in the apprenticeship, the full-powered maturity
and the final death-quest of a magician, Ged. A grave joyfulness pervades
the trilogy, which is perhaps more maturely thoughtful (while remaining
exciting) than the comparable Narnia series of C.S. LEWIS. However, over
the next decade a certain backlash against UKLG became evident from the
women's movement. It was alleged that, especially in this trilogy, Le Guin
saw men as the actors and doers in the world (magicians are male) while
women remain the still centre, the well from which they drink. UKLG's
FEMINISM certainly altered in nature over the next two decades (as evident
in ALWAYS COMING HOME), and she also made a kind of restitution by writing
a fourth novel in the Earthsea series: Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea
(1990). It is a sad, powerful, quiet book about the strength of women (and
the ultimate impotence of Ged); it won a Nebula. Earthsea Revisioned (1992
lecture given as "Children, Men and Dragons"; 1993 chap) considers some
issues raised within - and by - the sequence. UKLG has edited 4
anthologies: Nebula Award Stories 11 (anth 1976);Interfaces (anth 1980)
and Edges (anth 1980), both with Virginia Kidd; and The Norton Book of
Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (anth 1993)
with Brian Attebery, assisted by Karen Joy FOWLER. She also published a
second collection of nonfiction pieces, mostly literary essays and
reviews, Dancing at the End of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
(coll 1989). In 1989 she received the PILGRIM AWARD for services to sf
criticism.The limpid, serene clarity of her fables, whether in fantasy, sf
or even the quasihistorical fiction of her Orsinia stories, is powerful,
and has won her many loyal friends, even in the genre readership which
some see her as having abandoned. Why else would this group continue to

award her Hugos and Nebulas through to the end of the 1980s? It is
possible that UKLG has been overpraised, but she has given much to the
genre, not least by showing (through example) how the traditional
novelist's interest in questions of character and moral growth need not be
alien to sf. John CLUTE once wrote of her as "eminently sane,
humanitarian, concerned" but went on to lament her "fatal lack of risk".
This may be overstatement, but it points to a quality in her work that has
been observed by other critics. It is true that UKLG's demure certainties
could, perhaps, be more open to the random and the unpredictable. But can
self-confidence justly be evidenced as a flaw? [PN]Other works: From
Elfland to Poughkeepsie (1973 chap), a critical pamphlet; Dreams Must
Explain Themselves (coll 1975 chap), a pamphlet which has a story, an
essay, a speech and an interview; The Water is Wide (1976 chap); Very Far
Away from Anywhere Else (1976; vt A Very Long Way from Anywhere Else 1976
UK), a contemporary love story, not sf, directed at teenagers; Walking in
Cornwall: A Poem for the Solstice (1976 chap); Leese Webster (1979 chap),
for children; The Beginning Place (1980; vt Threshold 1980 UK), a poignant
fantasy novel for young adults about an ambiguously desirable alternate
world; Gwilan's Harp (1977 Redbook; 1981 chap); Hard Words and Other Poems
(coll 1981 chap); the Adventures in Kroy sequence for children, comprising
The Adventures of Cobbler's Rune (1982 chap) and Solomon Leviathan's Nine
Hundred and Thirty-First Trip around the World (1983 chap); In the Red
Zone (1983 chap); The Visionary: The Life Story of Flicker of the
Serpentine (1984 chap dos), a pre-published excerpt from ALWAYS COMING
HOME (1985); King Dog: A Screenplay (1985 dos), based on Hindu myth; Wild
Oats and Fireweed . . . New Poems (coll 1988 chap); A Visit from Dr Katz
(1988 chap), for children; Catwings (1988 chap),Catwings Return (1989
chap) and Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings (1994 chap), all for
children; Fire and Stone (1989 chap) with illustrator Laura Marshall, for
children; Way of the Water's Going: Images of the Northern California
Coastal Range (1989) with Ernest Waugh and Allan Nicholson, nature
photographs printed with excerpts from ALWAYS COMING HOME; The Lathe of
Heaven/The Dispossessed/The Wind's Twelve Quarters (omni 1991); The Eye of
the Heron ? Searoad: The
Chronicles of Klatsand (coll 1991), not sf/fantasy, 10 short stories set
on the Oregon coast; Nine Lives (1969 Playboy; 1992 chap); Fish Soup (1992
chap); A Ride on the Red Mare's Back (1992 chap); Blue Moon over Thurman
Street (1992 chap); Going Out with Peacocks and Other Poems (coll 1994
chap).About the author: SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, Nov 1975, is a Le Guin
issue, concentrating on the sf; The Farthest Shores of Ursula K. Le Guin
(chap 1976) by George Edgar SLUSSER; Ursula K. Le Guin (anth 1979) ed M.H.
GREENBERG and J.D. OLANDER; Ursula K. Le Guin: Voyager to Inner Lands and
to Outer Space (anth 1979) ed Joe De Bolt; Ursula K. Le Guin (1984) by
Charlotte Spivack; Ursula K. Le Guin (anth 1986) ed Harold Bloom, in which
most notes and documentation from the original essays have been
unaccountably dropped; Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (anth
1987) ed Bloom.See also: ACE BOOKS; AMAZING STORIES; ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM
IN SF; CHILDREN'S SF; CITIES; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CRITICAL AND
HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; GENETIC ENGINEERING; GODS AND DEMONS;
IMAGINARY
SCIENCE; INVASION; LEISURE; LIBERTARIAN SF; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS;

LINGUISTICS; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MAINSTREAM
WRITERS OF SF; MUSIC; MYTHOLOGY; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; PASTORAL;
PERCEPTION; PHYSICS; POETRY; SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION; SCIENTISTS;
SOCIOLOGY; VIRTUAL REALITY; WOMEN SF WRITERS.
LEHMANN, RUDOLF CHAMBERS
(1856-1929) UK politician, lawyer and writer, involved in the journal
Punch 1890-1919 and composing for initial publication there "Mr Punch's"
Prize Novels (coll 1892), which includes parodies of H. Rider HAGGARD,
Jules VERNE and the future- WAR subgenre. A later volume, The Adventures
of Picklock Holes (coll 1901), contains at least 1 sf story in addition to
its parodies of Arthur Conan DOYLE. [JC]
LEHR, PAUL
(1930- ) US illustrator. After graduation, PL studied illustration at the
prestigious Pratt Institute, and sold his first sf painting to Satellite
in 1958. Since then he has done hundreds of book-cover paintings as well
as covers for ASF, Omni and non-sf magazines such as Saturday Evening
Post, Life and Time. Over the 30-plus years PL has been involved with sf
his art has become less realistic, and the greys that dominated his early
work have been replaced by more vivid colours. His paintings often contain
strange, egg-shaped objects, and sometimes his people seem insignificant
and symbolic. With the increasing reliance on realism in sf ILLUSTRATION
during the 1980s, PL's sf artwork became less in demand from publishers.
[JG]
LEHTIMAKI, KONRAD
[r] FINLAND.
LEIBER, FRITZ (REUTER Jr)
(1910-1992) US writer, father of Justin LEIBER. FL majored in psychology
and physiology at the University of Chicago, then spent a year at a
theological seminary. His subsequent career included periods as an editor
(chiefly with Science Digest) and as a drama teacher. He became interested
in writing through voluminous correspondence with a college friend, Harry
Fischer; it was Fischer who in 1934 suggested the characters of Fafhrd and
the Gray Mouser, whose HEROIC-FANTASY adventures were central to FL's
career. Both men worked intermittently on embellishments to the saga, as
described in detail by FL in his essay "Fafhrd and Me" (included in The
Second Book of Fritz Leiber coll 1975) and further discussed in Fafhrd ?
Me (coll 1991 chap); Fischer was important to FL as both a friend and an
inspiration, and was the model for the Gray Mouser, FL viewing himself as
Fafhrd. In 1939 "Two Sought Adventure", the first published story of the
sequence and FL's first story, appeared in Unknown; he was still adding to
the series half a century later. It comprises Swords and Deviltry (coll
1970), Two Sought Adventure (coll 1957; exp and rev vt Swords Against
Death 1970) and Swords in the Mist (coll 1968) - all assembled as The
Three Swords (omni 1989) - plus Swords Against Wizardry (coll 1968), The
Swords of Lankhmar (1961 Fantastic as "Scylla's Daughter"; exp 1968) and
Swords and Ice Magic (coll 1977; with 6 of the 8 stories cut vt Rime Isle
1977) - all assembled as Swords' Masters (omni 1990) - plus The Knight and
Knave of Swords (coll 1988). From fairly prosaic beginnings the series

developed into a complex and enjoyable cycle owing little to the standard
cliches of its subgenre (for which FL is credited with coining the widely
used description SWORD AND SORCERY). The mood varies from sombre
introspection to broad comedy, and there is a very wide range of
invention. On its original publication, the long story Ill Met in Lankhmar
(1970 in Swords and Deviltry; 1990 dos) won both HUGO and NEBULA awards.
The Swords of Lankhmar, which adds a strong element of sophisticated
fetishistic sex to its other virtues - as does the book-length title story
in The Knight and Knave of Swords-has strong claims to be considered the
best modern HEROIC-FANTASY novel, as well as FL's own best novel.FL was
noted also for his fantasies in modern settings, and was almost certainly
the most influential model for the sudden creation in the 1980s of the
subgenre of Contemporary (or Urban) Fantasy. FL's examples include: "Smoke
Ghost" (1941); Conjure Wife (1943 Unknown; assembled in Witches Three,
omni 1952, ed Fletcher PRATT; as a solo book 1953), a novel of
20th-century witchcraft which has twice been filmed - as Weird Woman
(1944) and Burn, Witch, Burn (1961; vt Night of the Eagle) - as well as
being adapted for tv; "The Man who Made Friends with Electricity" (1962);
and Our Lady of Darkness (1977), a subtle and touching Gothic with strong
autobiographical elements. Other fantasy tales include "Gonna Roll the
Bones" (1967), published in DANGEROUS VISIONS, which won a Hugo and a
Nebula and later appeared, with other tales of interest, in The Ghost
Light (coll 1984); in it a compulsive gambler finds himself playing dice
with the Devil, the stake being his soul. "Belsen Express" (1975) won both
the Lovecraft Award and the August Derleth Award. FL's further awards for
fantasy included the 1975 Grand Master of Fantasy (Gandalf) Award and the
1976 Life Achievement Lovecraft Award; the 1981 Grand Master Nebula Award
was presented for his work as a whole. He won altogether 6 Hugos (2 for
novels), 4 Nebulas and about 20 other awards.FL's first important work of
sf was GATHER, DARKNESS! (1943 ASF; 1950), in which a religious
dictatorship ( RELIGION) is overthrown by rebels who disguise their
superscience (colourfully, if by far-fetched logic) as witchcraft. Destiny
Times Three (1945 ASF; 1957) is a neglected ALTERNATE-WORLDS variant. In
the early 1950s he became a regular contributor to GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION,
for which he wrote a number of notable stories, chiefly social SATIRE.
Paramount among these is "Coming Attraction" (1950), depicting an
unpleasantly decadent future USA. The Green Millennium (1953) shows some
similar thematic concerns, particularly regarding sexual mores. He then
fell silent for four years, through alcoholism (about which he was
candid).His return to sf in 1958 was vigorous, his first stories
introducing the Change War series, built around a TIME-PARADOX war being
fought through time and space and ALTERNATE WORLDS by two factions, the
"Spiders" and the "Snakes". The sequence comprises THE BIG TIME (1958 Gal;
1961 dos) along with most of The Mind Spider and Other Stories (coll 1961
dos; rev 1976), this material being variously reassembled as The Change
War (coll of linked stories 1978; cut vt Changewar 1983). THE BIG TIME,
which takes place entirely in one room (an R ?
Place, sited beyond normal realities) is suggestive of a play in prose
form, and thus reflects FL's background in theatre; both his parents were
Shakespearean actors and his father appeared in many films, and FL himself
acted on both stage and screen, including a small part in the Greta Garbo

film Camille (1936). THE BIG TIME won a Hugo as Best Novel, as did his
most ambitious sf work, THE WANDERER (1964), a long DISASTER novel telling
of the havoc caused by the arrival of a strange planet in the Solar
System. Its mosaic narrative technique, through which events are observed
through a multiplicity of viewpoints, foreshadowed the profusion of such
novels and films in the 1970s. FL won a further Hugo for "Ship of Shadows"
(1969), a novella first published in a special FL issue of FSF, and
completed the double of Hugo and Nebula awards for the third time with
"Catch that Zeppelin!" (1975), a vivid if inconclusive PARALLEL-WORLDS
story. Selections of his best short fiction include THE BEST OF FRITZ
LEIBER (coll 1974 UK), The Worlds of Fritz Leiber (coll 1976), The Ghost
Light (noted above) and The Leiber Chronicles: Fifty Years of Fritz Leiber
(coll 1990) ed Martin H. GREENBERG.Despite his many awards FL never quite
established an identity as an sf writer in the way he had for his fantasy;
for this reason his work has sometimes been undervalued. His work
reflected his various enthusiasms - cats, chess and the theatre are all
recurrent motifs - and beliefs, notably a distaste for sexual repression
and hypocrisy; but the variety of his approaches was considerable. His
prose is ebullient; its idiosyncrasies occasionally appear mannered, but
its baroque and colourful qualities are usually prevented from becoming
slapdash by the precision with which he used words, and by the
appositeness of his imagery, at least in his fantasies. FL was never quite
as comfortable in sf, where a straining for effect is more often
noticeable. Many of his sf works, he revealed, were fantasies rewritten
when the fantasy market began to contract. By refusing to create an easily
recognizable template for his sf and then adhering to it, he may have
sacrificed some popularity; in compensation, he was the only sf and
fantasy writer of his generation to be still developing and producing his
best work in the late 1970s. [MJE/JC]Other works: Night's Black Agents
(coll 1947; cut vt Tales from Night's Black Agents 1961; original text
with 2 stories added, exp 1978); The Sinful Ones (1950 Fantastic
Adventures as "You're All Alone"; exp by other hands as title story of the
Universal Giant Edition #5 anth 1953; cut vt as title story of You're All
Alone coll 1972; text restored 1980); The Silver Eggheads (1958 FSF; exp
1962), an example of RECURSIVE SF; Shadows with Eyes (coll 1962); Ships to
the Stars (coll 1964 dos); A Pail of Air (coll 1964); Tarzan and the
Valley of Gold * (1966), one of only 2 Tarzan spin-offs ever authorized by
the Edgar Rice BURROUGHS estate (the other being by Joan D. VINGE); The
Night of the Wolf (coll 1966); The Secret Songs (coll 1968 UK); Night
Monsters (coll 1969 chap dos; exp 1974 UK); A Specter is Haunting Texas
(1969), discussed more fully under SPACE HABITATS; The Demons of the Upper
Air (coll 1969 chap), poetry; The Book of Fritz Leiber (coll 1974); Heroes
and Horrors (coll 1978); Sonnets to Jonquil and All (coll 1978 chap),
poetry; Bazaar of the Bizarre (coll 1978); Ship of Shadows (coll 1979 UK),
not to be confused with Ship of Shadows (1969 FSF; 1989 chap dos), which
reprints only the title story; Ervool (1980 chap); The World Fantasy
Awards 2 (anth 1980) with Stuart David Schiff; Riches ?
The Mystery of the Japanese Clock (1982 chap), nonfiction; In the
Beginning (1983 chap); Quicks around the Zodiac: A Farce (1983 chap);
Conjure Wife/Our Lady of Darkness (omni 1991); 2 Fafhrd and the Gray
Mouser GRAPHIC-NOVEL versions by Howard V. CHAYKIN, Fafhrd and the Gray

Mouser Book 1 (graph 1991) and Book 2 (graph coll 1991); Kreativity for
Kats and Other Feline Fantasies (coll 1992).About the author: The special
FL edition of FSF, July 1969; "The Profession of Science Fiction: XII:
Mysterious Islands" by FL in FOUNDATION 11/12 (1977); Fritz Leiber (1980
chap) by Jeff Frane; Fritz Leiber (1983) by Tom Staicar; Fritz Leiber,
Sardonic Swordsman: A Working Bibliography (last rev 1990) by Gordon
BENSON Jr and Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE; Witches of the Mind: A Critical Study
of Fritz Leiber (1991) by Bruce Byfield.See also: ANTHOLOGIES;
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; ARKHAM HOUSE; ARTS; ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION; CITIES; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; DYSTOPIAS; END OF THE
WORLD; FANTASY; FAR FUTURE; GAMES AND SPORTS; GENERATION STARSHIPS;
GENETIC ENGINEERING; GRAVITY; HITLER WINS; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER;
INVISIBILITY; LONGEVITY (INWRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); H.P. LOVECRAF T; The
MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MAGIC; MEDIA LANDSCAPE;
MUTANTS;
ROBOTS; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES; TRANSPORTATION; UFOS; WAR.
LEIBER, JUSTIN (FRITZ)
(1938- ) US academic and writer, son of Fritz LEIBER. A Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Houston, JL has used sf as a medium for
speculation in his field of interest, the philosophy of the mind. His
first novel, Beyond Rejection (1980), which begins the Beyond sequence,
deals in considerable detail with the problems associated with
transplanting the recorded mind of a man into the body of a woman (who has
a prehensile tail). In Beyond Humanity (1987) JL constrasts human
INTELLIGENCE with those of COMPUTERS and enhanced-intelligence chimpanzees
( APES AND CAVEMEN) as humans, computer and chimpanzee cooperate to
contact extraterrestrial intelligence. The sequence concludes with Beyond
Gravity (1988), set in 22nd-century Houston and Oxford. JL has also
written a number of academic books on similar themes, including Can
Animals and Machines Be Persons? (1985), which uses an sf scenario - a
legal case between a space-exploration company and a Civil Liberties Union
over whether a chimpanzee and a computer used on a space station should be
treated as tools or as employees. [TA]Other works: The Saga of the House
of Eigin sequence, comprising The Sword and the Eye (1984) and The Sword
and the Tower (1985).
LEIGH, STEPHEN (WALTER)
(1951- ) US writer and musician who began publishing sf with "A Rain of
Pebbles" for ASF in 1977, and who sometimes releases short stories as Lee
Stevens. The first novel of his Neweden sequence - Slow Fall to Dawn
(1981), Dance of the Hag (1983) and A Quiet of Stone (1984)-brought him
into some prominence through its depiction of the attractive feudal
culture obtaining upon the eponymous planet, whose name seemed, initially,
only moderately ironic. Later episodes, however, demonstrate the fragility
of Neweden mores in a SPACE-OPERA context that dissipates the network of
mutual obligations that makes the thieves' guild at the sequence's heart
so attractive a vehicle for sf adventures. Further sf novels of interest
include: The Bones of God (1986), an interplanetary tale pitting a
solitary prophet against the oppressive Judeo-Christian RELIGION that
dominates Old Earth; Crystal Memory (1987), a complex novel in which

problems typical of sf adventures - a female space-freighter pilot
attempts to recover her erased memories and to avenge the death of her
young son - are placed in a context featuring interestingly depicted MARS
colonies, ALIEN incursions, zombies, intrigue and loss; and The Abraxis
Marvel Circus (1990), a humorous fantasy, choked with variously comic
characters and rock musicians, about reviving the dead. SL has written
several ties in recent years, and his career has consequently lost some
focus. [JC]Other works: Dr Bones #1: The Secret of the Lona * (1988);
Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens #1: The Changeling * (1989);
The Next Wave #2: Alien Tongue (1991), including an essay by Rudy RUCKER;
volumes in the Byron PREISS package in which Ray BRADBURY"presents" a
series of time-travel tales: Dinosaur World * (1992), Dinosaur Planet *
(1993), Dinosaur Samurai * (1993) with John J.Miller, and Dinosaur
Warriors *(1994).
LEIGHTON, EDWARD
G.J. BARRETT.
LEINSTER, MURRAY
Pseudonym under which US writer William Fitzgerald Jenkins (1896-1975)
was best known in the sf field, and under which he wrote almost all his
work in the genre; exceptions were a few stories in magazines, mainly
those in the Bud Gregory series as by William Fitzgerald, and a small
number as by Will F. Jenkins. He remained active as an sf writer from
1919, when his first story, "The Runaway Skyscraper", about a building
falling backwards through time, was published in Argosy, until about 1970.
Like most contributors to the pre-WWII US sf PULP MAGAZINES, he published
a great deal of material that did not reach book form until after 1945.
His first book publication, Murder Madness (1931), as its title indicates
did not aim directly at the sf market (then still nascent in the USA),
though the book is in fact sf. The Murder of the U.S.A. (1946; vt Destroy
the U.S.A. 1950 Canada) as by Will F. Jenkins was again directed as much
to the mystery as to the sf market, though its plot (the hero solves the
mystery of who dropped 300 A-bombs on US cities) is more sf than
locked-room. Because of the pile-up of magazine material, many of ML's
post-WWII book publications contained or reworked early stories, and were
often rather dated in plotline and character development; ironically, it
was at this time that he was publishing his best work in the magazines,
stories that competed on equal terms with those by writers 20 years newer
to the field.ML's first series was the set of 4 off-beat Masters of
Darkness or Preston-Hines superscience-blackmail stories contributed to
The Argosy, 1929-30, and never collected in book form. The more widely
known Bud Gregory series comprises the 3 stories in Out of this World
(coll 1958) and "The Seven Temporary Moons" (1948); all 4 were originally
published in TWS. Bud is a hillbilly whose intuitive knack with high
technology allows him to solve various superscience problems. Of more
interest is the Med Service sequence, S.O.S. from Three Worlds (coll
1967), The Mutant Weapon (1959 dos), Doctor to the Stars: Three Novelettes
of the Interstellar Medical Service (coll 1964) and This World is Taboo
(1961); all but Doctor to the Stars were assembled as The Med Series (omni
1983). In these stories and novels, Calhoun and the "being" Murgatroyd act

as troubleshooters in various far-flung crises; the tales are robust and
adventurous, but rudimentary compared to the inventiveness of James
WHITE's Sector General tales (see also MEDICINE). The Joe Kenmore novels Space Platform (1953), Space Tug (1953), and City on the Moon (1957) make up a juvenile series about the crisis-ridden first years of the
near-future US space effort, told in melodramatic terms that have not worn
well.ML's best years as an sf writer were undoubtedly the decade following
WWII, a period during which his finest short stories were published, among
them "First Contact" (1945), "Doomsday Deferred" (1949) as by Jenkins,
"The Lonely Planet" (1949), "If You Was a Moklin" (1951) and "Exploration
Team" (1956), which won the 1956 HUGO for Best Novelette and became part
of Colonial Survey (1955-6 ASF; fixup 1956; vt Planet Explorer 1957),
perhaps his most enjoyable single volume, though his individual short
stories are generally superior to his book-length work. When ML did
contrive FIXUPS of short material, the result was often disappointing. His
first classic story, for instance, "The Mad Planet" (1920), on being
incorporated into The Forgotten Planet (1920-53 var mags; fixup 1954),
exposed to view implausibilities that may have been tolerable in a 1920
short story but which, 30 years later in book form, failed to convince.
His novels, which were frequently unambitious and repetitive, generally
stretched beyond their proper span, and seemed written for a less
demanding market than his best stories (which appeared in many journals,
including ASF and Gal). A good selection of these tales can be found in
Monsters and Such (coll 1959); The Best of Murray Leinster (coll 1976 UK)
ed Brian Davis is much inferior to The Best of Murray Leinster (coll 1978)
ed J.J. PIERCE.The last decade of ML's career boasted numerous
publications, but no substantial works were conceived after the mid-1950s
- though The Pirates of Zan (1959 dos), a competent but unremarkable space
opera, won some praise. In this book, and in almost every full-length
title ML published after WWII, the Galaxy serves as a template which
scamps and engineers tinker with to their own advantage, and to the
advantage of small communities on Earth or elsewhere. "According to the
fiction tapes," as ML puts it in The Pirates of Zan, "the colonized worlds
of the galaxy vary wildly from one another. In cold and unromantic fact,
it isn't so. Space travel is too cheap and sol-type solar systems too
numerous to justify the settlement of hostile worlds." It is perhaps
revealing that variations, in this quote, are seen as innately hostile. In
any case, the ML universe had little room for CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH, and
the similarities in background from one novel to another were sufficiently
numerous that his later books made up one loose series. Allied to this
template view of the Universe was a deepening political simplicity of
view, rather right-wing in orientation (a viewpoint common to many sf
writers of his generation), which led to the frequent depiction of
cartoon-like confrontations between the USA and underhanded enemies, in
the resolving of which means tended to dominate ends. In Timeslip! *
(1967) and The Time Tunnel * (1967), based on episodes from the tv series
TIME TUNNEL - another ML novel, Time Tunnel (1964), is confusingly
unrelated to this series - the past is paradoxically restructured by
executive fiat to make life safe for democracy. But the paradox seems
unconscious.The high and only superficially simple competence of the
stories remains as ML's memorial. In this work he speaks with a directness

to the heart of magazine sf and its readership with a craftsmanship and
consistency that warrant the nickname he was given: the Dean of SF.
[JC]Other works: Fight for Life (1947 Startling Stories; 1949); The Last
Space Ship (1946-7 TWS; fixup 1949); Sidewise in Time (coll 1950);
Conquest of the Stars 1952 (chap Australia); The Unknown (1952 chap
Australia); The Black Galaxy (1949 Startling Stories; 1954); The
Brain-Stealers (1947 Startling Stories as "The Man in the Iron Cap"; 1954
dos); Gateway to Elsewhere (1950 Fantasy Book; 1952 Startling Stories as
"Journey to Barkut"; 1954 dos); Operation: Outer Space (1954); The Other
Side of Here (1936 ASF as "The Incredible Invasion"; rev 1955 dos); War
with the Gizmos (1958); Four from Planet 5 (1959); The Monster from
Earth's End (1959); The Aliens (coll 1960); Men into Space * (1960), based
on the tv series; Twists in Time (coll 1960); Creatures of the Abyss
(1961; vt The Listeners 1969 UK); The Wailing Asteroid (1960); Operation
Terror (1962); Talents, Incorporated (1962); The Duplicators (1964 dos);
The Greks Bring Gifts (1964); Invaders of Space (1964); The Other Side of
Nowhere (1964); Get Off my World! (coll 1966); Space Captain (1966 dos);
Checkpoint Lambda (1966); Miners in the Sky (1967); Space Gypsies (1967);
ties based on the tv series LAND OF THE GIANTS, comprising Land of the
Giants * (1968), #2: The Hot Spot * (1969) and #3: Unknown Danger *
(1969); A Murray Leinster Omnibus (omni 1968), assembling Operation
Terror, Checkpoint Lambda and Invaders of Space; Last Murray Leinster
Interview (1983 chap) with Ronald Payne.As Editor: Great Stories of
Science Fiction (anth 1951).About the author: Murray Leinster (Will F.
Jenkins): A Bibliography (1970 chap) by Mark OWINGS.See also: ALIENS;
ALTERNATE WORLDS; AMAZING STORIES; ASTEROIDS; ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION;
COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; COMMUNICATIONS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT;
FASTER
THAN LIGHT; GREAT AND SMALL; HIVE-MINDS; INVASION; INVISIBILITY; LIVING
WORLDS; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); MACHINES; MOON; OUTER
PLANETS; PARALLEL WORLDS; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; SPACE FLIGHT;
SPACESHIPS; TIME PARADOXES; TIME TRAVEL.
LEISURE
The gradual AUTOMATION of industry and the progressive reduction of
working hours has already extended the amount of leisure time which
citizens of the developed nations have, and most contemporary images of
the future assume that everyone will have even more of it in times to
come. The majority of people, for whom work is a necessary but unpleasant
burden, regard this as a highly desirable outcome; but sociologists and sf
writers tend to be more sceptical. UTOPIAN satires like Muriel JAEGER's
The Question Mark (1926) and Aldous HUXLEY's BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932) offer
horrified and disapproving visions of the people of the future giving
themselves over to frivolous and intellectually vacuous pursuits, all in
the worst possible taste. Had Huxley lived to see contemporary tv,
Torremolinos and Euro-Disney he would undoubtedly have said "I told you
so", as he did with regard to far less garish spectacles in Brave New
World Revisited (coll 1958). GENRE-SF writers, who are themselves part of
the entertainment industry, might be expected to look upon leisure with a
kinder eye, but for the most part they have not. E.M. FORSTER's censorious

question about what happens when "The Machine Stops" (1909) is echoed even
in such pulp melodramas as Miles J. BREUER's "Paradise and Iron" (1930)
and Laurence MANNING's and Fletcher PRATT's strikingly vivid "The City of
the Living Dead" (1930). Frederik POHL's and C.M. KORNBLUTH's biting
SATIRE on consumerism, THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1953), kicked off a whole
series of similar sarcastic fantasies, notably Shepherd MEAD's The Big
Ball of Wax (1954), Pohl and Kornbluth's Gladiator-at-Law (1955) and
Harold LIVINGSTON's The Climacticon (1960). The most thoughtful and
carefully focused of these was probably James E. GUNN's The Joy Makers
(1954-5; fixup 1961), in which a cult of hedonism gradually takes over the
world; it concludes with a vision more refined but every bit as striking
as that in Manning's and Pratt's story, in which the vast majority of
people live cocooned in life-support systems experiencing nothing but
engineered dreams. Tomorrow's World (1956; vt Tomorrow and Tomorrow) by
Hunt Collins (Evan HUNTER) is exceptional in defending the supporters of
Vicarious Experience against their puritanically inclined opponents, and
is one of the few sf stories to assume that the people of the future will
sensibly accept the Epicurean dictum that pleasure, despite being the only
true end of human experience, ought to be taken in moderation. Other
images of technologically supported total escapism are featured in Arthur
C. CLARKE's "The Lion of Comarre" (1949), John D. MACDONALD's "Spectator
Sport" (1950), John T. SLADEK's "The Happy Breed" (1967) and Mack
REYNOLDS's Perchance to Dream (1977) and After Utopia (1977). The majority
opinion seems to be that such escapists need to be brought back to reality
whether they like it or not, and that those appointed to achieve that end
need not be overly scrupulous in so doing.The leisure pursuits
traditionally associated with cultural elites inevitably get a better
press in sf's images of the future than do those associated with the lower
orders; comparison of the works considered in the entries on the ARTS and
GAMES AND SPORTS will readily confirm this, but even stories about the
finer arts often deal in images of enervated decadence, like those
featured in J.G. BALLARD's stories of Vermilion Sands (coll 1971). A great
many sf stories propose that sadistic spectator "sports" of the kind which
went on in the Roman arena are likely to make a comeback in the future,
their lapse into apparent obsolescence being a temporary imposition of
censorship rather than a permanent refinement of feeling. Indeed, the
current popularity of sf war games ( GAMES AND TOYS; GAME-WORLDS; VIRTUAL
REALITY) has led to the production of TIES in which entire GALACTIC
EMPIRES become writ-large arenas for carefully staged and extraordinarily
bloody conflicts. Robert SHECKLEY's neatly satirical stories about
sadistic futuristic games, including "Seventh Victim" (1953; filmed as La
DECIMA VITTIMA [1965]) and "The Prize of Peril" (1958), were inflated by
popular demand into the film-associated melodrama The Tenth Victim *
(1966) and ultimately into the series of novels including Victim Prime
(1987) and Hunter/Victim (1988), whose narrative dispiritedness might be
seen as an ironic comment on the awful absurdity of their saleability.
When they are not revisiting the past, sf images of future leisure tend to
be firmly anchored in the trends of the present - as witness the recent
rash of stories about the Theme Parks of the future, including the series
begun by Larry NIVEN and Steven BARNES with Dream Park (1981) as well as
Michael CRICHTON's JURASSIC PARK (1991). The extension of the MEDIA

LANDSCAPE to take in mass-produced dreams, as featured in many stories including Chelsea Quinn YARBRO's Hyacinths (1983) and James MORROW's The
Continent of Lies (1984) - is seen by most writers as a natural
extrapolation of the trend towards privacy and subjection to personal whim
which led from cinema to tv to the VCR; and stories involving such
technologies frequently echo - often calculatedly-contemporary disputes
about the uses and alleged abuses of these media.The unfortunate
correlates of leisure are, of course, boredom and purposelessness. The
threat of boredom is seen by very many sf stories as something so likely
to spoil the experience of IMMORTALITY as to make it almost worthless - a
contention which is surely breathtaking in its closed-mindedness. Many sf
stories similarly argue that, because the use of TECHNOLOGY to supply all
our basic needs would rob our lives of a sense of purpose, we would be far
better off engaged in a constant struggle for existence. HARD SF has
characteristically adopted and adapted the frontier mythology of US
history in order to extrapolate the struggle for existence onto a galactic
stage, thus ducking the question of excessive leisure altogether, although
on occasion hard-sf writers are inclined to take it for granted that time
liberated from more vulgar forms of work will naturally be devoted, by all
those capable of such intellectual effort, to scientific inquiry. (Indeed,
many hard-sf writers seem unable to devise suitably sciencefictional
leisure-time activities for their characters. In many books the
protagonists seem to entertain themselves either by dabbling in quantum
physics or by engaging in sex, with very little - such as reading
thrillers or going to the movies - in between.) Aside from
four-dimensional chess or a hobby of dabbling in xenoarchaeology, Sf
novels which depict in some detail and without disapproval the leisure
pursuits of imaginary cultures generally do so in connection with low-tech
cultures whose leisure is both limited and evidently purposive; the works
of Jack VANCE offer many examples, although the single most elaborate
exercise in this vein is Ursula K. LE GUIN's ALWAYS COMING HOME (1985). It
is arguable that one of the great failures of the sciencefictional
imagination has been the inability to envision laudable ways in which the
leisured classes of the future might make use of that leisure. Even
stories which depict all-powerful immortals successfully keeping boredom
at bay generally assume that their projects and methods will be
essentially silly, like those of the central characters of Michael
MOORCOCK's Dancers at the End of Time series (1972-7). Godlike beings in
sf usually behave like spoiled children - although perhaps this is not
entirely surprising, given that the gods people have actually believed in
have mostly behaved in much the same fashion. Perhaps, on the other hand,
the concept of "leisure" is implicitly ambiguous; if so, sciencefictional
accounts of future leisure can do little else but unpack that ambiguity,
exposing its paradoxicality for purposes of lamentation or mockery,
according to taste. [BS/DP]
LEITHAUSER, BRAD
(1953- ) US poet and novelist whose sf novel, Hence (1989), is a
near-future FABULATION - itself told as from a point considerably further
into the future - in which a boy plays against a COMPUTER for the world
chess championship. Style and matter are at times reminiscent of the work

of Vladimir NABOKOV. [JC]
LEM, STANISpsAW
(1921- ) Polish writer, critic and polymath, winner of numerous awards
including the 1973 Polish State Literary Award. Born in Lwow, he has
described his childhood and adolescence charmingly in the autobiographical
Wysoki zamek ["High Castle"] (1966 Poland). SL's study of medicine was
interrupted in WWII by the Nazi occupation, when he worked as a car
mechanic and welder; these experiences closely inform his first-written
novel (not sf), Szpital Przemienienia (1957 Poland; trans William Brand as
Hospital of the Transfiguration 1988 US). In 1946 he moved to Cracow,
received his MD and wrote lyrical verse and essays on scientific
methodology until he ran foul of the Soviet state's adulation of the
Lamarckian biological theories of T.D. Lysenko (1898-1976) ( EVOLUTION;
PSEUDO-SCIENCE), and was research assistant in a scientific institute.
Another "naturalistic" novel, Czas nieutracony ["Time Saved"] (1955),
depicts an intellectual finding his way from solitude to sociopolitical
meaning; it likewise was written in the 1940s. In the meantime SL had
switched to sf; he has published over two dozen books so far, with
translations into at least 30 languages and several million copies sold.
His early sf novels, Astronauci ["The Astronauts"] (1951 Poland) and Oblok
Magellana ["The Magellan Nebula"] (1955 Poland), are works of a beginner
and limited by some of the conventions of "socialist realism", but are
still interesting and contain a number of SL's constant themes (the threat
of global destruction and militarism; human identity); their UTOPIAN
naivety is shaped by the committed humanism characteristic of one axis of
his work. His other axis, a black grotesque, appears in Dzienniki
Gwiazdowe (coll 1957 Poland; gradually exp until by 1971 there were 14
"voyages" and 8 other Ijon Tichy stories; trans in 2 vols, the second of
which is an expansion rather than simply a continuation of the first: vol
1 trans Michael KANDEL as The Star Diaries 1976 US, vol 2 trans Joel Stern
and Maria Swiecicka-Ziemianek as Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further
Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy 1982 US), which develops into a parable-like
expression.The dozen years after the "Polish October" of 1956 were the
golden noon of SL. He published 17 books: 5 sf novels; 10 partly
overlapping books of sf short stories including the Pirx the Pilot cycle
(see below), the "robotic fairy tales" of Bajki robotow (coll 1964 Poland)
and the Trurl-Klapaucius or Cyberiad cycle (see below); Noc ksiezycowa
(coll 1963 Poland), 1 sf play and 3 tv plays; nonfiction including the
"cybernetic sociology" of Dialogi (1957 Poland); and the crown of SL's
speculation and key to his fiction, Summa technologiae (1964 Poland), a
breathtakingly brilliant and risky survey of possible social,
informational, cybernetic, cosmogonic and biological engineering in Man's
game with Nature.Eden (1959 Poland; trans Marc E. Heine as Eden 1989 US),
SOLARIS (1961 Poland; trans Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox [from French
trans] 1970 US), Niezwyciezony (1964 Poland; trans Wendayne Ackerman [from
German trans] as The Invincible 1973 US) and Opowiesci o pilocie Pirxie
(coll 1968 Poland; trans Louis Tribarne as Tales of Pirx the Pilot 1979 US
and Louis Tribarne and Magdalena Majcherczyk as More Tales of Pirx the
Pilot1982 US) use the mystery of strange beings, events and localities to
educate their protagonists into understanding the limitations and

strengths of humanity; SOLARIS was filmed as SOLARIS (1971). These
parables for our age are fittingly open-ended: their tenor is that no
closed reference system is viable in the age of CYBERNETICS and rival
political absolutisms; the protagonists are redeemed by ethical and
aesthetic insight rather than by hardware, abstract cognition or power thence SL's strong, at times oversimplifying but salutary critique of
English-language sf in his Fantastyka i futurologia (1970 Poland; excerpts
trans with other material as coll Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction
and Fantasy 1985 US) for abusing the potentials of the new in gimmicks and
disguised fairytales. His critique of equally anthropomorphic banalities
in Soviet sf was effected by means of his immense popularity and
liberating influence there. In between the two leviathans, SL used the
experience of Central European intellectuals ( ALBANIA, BULGARIA,
CZECHOSLOVAKIA, HUNGARY, POLAND, ROMANIA, RUSSIA, SOVIET UNION) to fuse a
bright, humanistic hope with a bitter, historical warning. This double
vision subverts both the "comic inferno" approach and a deterministic
utopianism by juxtaposing the black flickerings of the former with the
bright horizons of the latter. Such a style of wit places SL in the contes
philosophiques tradition of Jonathan SWIFT and VOLTAIRE. Even his
grotesque stories, where no "cruel miracles" redeem the often disgusting
limits of Man - such as Cyberiada (coll 1965 Poland; trans Kandel as The
Cyberiad 1974 US), collecting many of the Trurl-Klapaucius stories - are
informed by such humanizing fun, black SATIRE or allegorical
iconoclasm.Signs of an ideological dead-end, if not exhaustion, showed in
about 1968, prompting further formal experimentation and a furious
brilliance in SL's writing. In Glos pana (1968 Poland; trans Kandel as His
Master's Voice 1983 US), SL's radical doubts about human
self-determination and sovereignty, and therefore about possibilities of
COMMUNICATION with other people (not to mention other civilizations),
began threatening to distort the fictional form of the novel into
solipsist musings, lectures and ideational adventure. His Master's Voice
may have avoided that by a tour de force of narrative tone, but SL learned
some lessons from this near-escape: he turned to a brilliantly innovative
series of briefer second-order glosses at the borderland of fiction and
treatise. Doskonala prozinia (coll 1971 Poland; trans Kandel as A Perfect
Vacuum 1978 US) - mainly composed of reviews of nonexistent books, which
simultaneously characterize and persiflage their targets - and Wielkosc
urojona (coll 1973 Poland; trans Marc E. Heine with 2 pieces from Golem
XIV [coll 1973] as Imaginary Magnitude 1984 US) range from thumbnail
sketches of grisly futuristic follies to developments of Summa
technologiae ideas on "intellectronics" (artificially heightened
intelligence) and "phantomatics" (illusory existence). We find the latter
in the most grimly hilarious and longest work of this period, a further
Ijon Tichy story, " Ze Wspomnien Ijona Tichego: Kongres
Futurologiczny""Kongres Futurologiczny" (in coll Bezsennosc 1971 Poland;
trans Kandel as The Futurological Congress 1974 US), as well as SL's
deeply rooted though atheistic theologico-cosmogonic obsessions. Only in
the 1980s, with the awkward but ferocious assault upon human cognitive
pretensions contained in Fiasko (1986 Poland; trans Kandel as Fiasco 1987
US), did he return to novel-length structures.SL's overflowing linguistic
inventiveness, matching his controversial ideational plenty, is partly

lost in translation, though the short stories assembled as Mortal Engines
(coll trans 1977 US), The Cosmic Carnival of Stanislaw Lem (coll trans
Kandel 1981) and One Human Minute (coll trans Catherine S. Leach 1986 US)
reveal some of the exuberance of the writing. Nonetheless, SL's peculiar
geopolitical vantage-point - enabling him effectively to transcend both
cynical pragmatism and abstract utopianism - his stubborn warnings against
static "final solutions", his position at the crossroads of major European
cultures and ethics, joined to an intense internalization of problems from
cybernetics and information theory, his fusion of dilemmas from
ultramodern science and the oldest cosmogonic heresies, his dazzling
formal virtuosity - all mark him as one of the most significant sf writers
of our century, and a distinctive voice in world literature. [DS]Other
works: Czlowiek z Marsa (1946 Poland, apparently only as episodes in a
weekly); Sezam ["Sesame"] (coll 1955 Poland); Sledztwo (1959 Poland; trans
Adele Milch as The Investigation 1974 US), ontological mystery rather than
sf; Inwazja z Aldebarana ["Invasion from Aldebaran"] (coll 1959 Poland);
Powrot s gwiazd (1961 Poland; trans Barbara Marszal and Frank Simpson as
Return from the Stars 1980 US); Pamietnik znaleziony w wannie (1961
Poland; trans Michael Kandel and Christine Rose as Memoirs Found in a
Bathtub 1973 US); Ksiega robotow ["The Book of Robots"] (coll 1961
Poland); Wejscie na orbite ["Getting into Orbit"] (coll 1962 Poland),
essays on technology and fiction; Polowanie ["The Hunt"] (coll 1965
Poland); Ratujmy kosmos (coll 1966 Poland); Opowiadania (coll 1969
Poland); Rozprawy i szkice (coll 1974 Poland), essays on literature, sf
and science; Katar (1977 Poland; trans anon as The Chain of Chance 1978
UK); Wisja Lokalna ["The Scene of the Crime"] (1982), an Ijon Tichy novel;
Prowokacja ["Provocation"] (1984 Poland); Pokoj na Ziemi (1987 Poland;
trans Elinor Ford with Michael Kandel as Peace on Earth 1994 US); Ciemnosc
i plesn ["Darkness and Mildew"] (1988 Poland). About the author: "To My
Readers" by Stanislaw Lem, Poland 5, 1973; "Language and Ethics in
Solaris" by Edward Balcerzan, Science-Fiction Studies: Selected Essays on
Science Fiction 1973-1975 (1976) ed R.D. MULLEN and Darko SUVIN;
"Stanislaw Lem, Rationalist and Sensualist" by Jerzy Jarzebski,
SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES July 1977; "Lem in Review (June 2238)" by Michael
KANDEL, Science-Fiction Studies Mar 1977; "Stanislaw Lem on Men and
Robots" by Kandel, EXTRAPOLATION Dec 1972; New Worlds for Old (1974) by
David KETTERER; "European SF" by Ursula K. LE GUIN, Science-Fiction
Studies Spring 1974; "The Open-Ended Parables of Stanislaw Lem and
SOLARIS" by Darko Suvin, afterword to SOLARIS (trans 1970) and rev for
1976 edn; Stanislaw Lem (1985) by Richard E. Ziegfeld; special SL issue of
Science Fiction Studies (vol 13, part 3, whole #4, 1986).See also: ALIENS;
ASTRONOMY; AUTOMATION; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CRITICAL AND
HISTORICAL
WORKS ABOUT SF; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; HUMOUR; ISLANDS; LIVING
WORLDS;
MACHINES; METAPHYSICS; PERCEPTION; PHYSICS; ROBOTS; SCIENCE FICTION
WRITERS OF AMERICA; SPACE HABITATS; SPACESHIPS; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
L'ENGLE, MADELEINE
Working name of US actress and writer Madeleine L'Engle Camp (1918- ),
whose first play, 18 Washington Square, South (1944), was produced in

1940, and who performed on the stage during the early 1940s. Her first
novel, The Small Rain (1945), and some of its successors are non-genre
fictions for adult audiences, but from And Both Were Young (1949) most of
her work has been for children. She gained immediate and lasting acclaim
for A WRINKLE IN TIME (1962), which was both her first sf novel and the
first volume of the Meg Murray sequence, which includes also A Wind in the
Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), Many Waters (1986) and An
Acceptable Time (1989). A WRINKLE IN TIME, which won the 1963 Newbery
Medal and various later awards, follows the adventures of the children of
Dr Murray, a scientist abducted to a distant planet where he is held in
thrall to a central COMPUTER intelligence. The tight plot and ample moral
scope of the tale make Meg Murray's rescue of her father into one of the
more memorable moments in CHILDREN'S SF. Later novels similarly expose the
Murray family to adventures and stresses, and develop a telling portrait
of complex young people. The Canon Tallis sequence - The Arm of the
Starfish (1965) and The Young Unicorns (1968) - is also of interest.
ML'E's singletons include Dance in the Desert (1969) and The Sphinx at
Dawn (coll of linked stories 1982). [JC]
LENGYEL, PETER
[r] HUNGARY.
LEONARD, FRANCOIS
[r] BENELUX.
LEONARD, GEORGE H.
(1921- ) US writer whose two sf novels, Beyond Control (1975) and Alien
(1977; vt Alien Quest 1981 UK), explore competently - but without much
energy - the conventions of the sf-adventure tale; the latter is
unconnected with the 1979 film of the same name. GHL is also the author of
a classic work of PSEUDO-SCIENCE (or possibly spoof), Someone Else is on
Our Moon (1976), which explains many features of the lunar landscape in
terms of the mighty engineering feats of ALIEN colonists - and, inter
alia, characterizes Galileo as a "feisty pioneer". [JC/JGr]See also: UFOS.
LEOPARDI, GIACOMO
[r] ITALY.
LEOURIER, CHRISTIAN
(1948- ) French writer, author of Les montagnes du soleil (1971; trans
anon as The Mountains of the Sun 1973 US), an interesting
socio-anthropological novel mapping the rediscovery of Earth after a
cataclysmic deluge. CL has since written principally for children. [MJ]
LE PAGE, RAND
House name used by CURTIS WARREN for some routine SPACE OPERAS. Authors
included William Henry Fleming BIRD, John S. GLASBY, Brian HOLLOWAY,
Dennis HUGHES and David O'BRIEN. Beyond These Suns (1952) was by Cyril
Protheroe. On the wrappers, RLP was described as "the French master of
modern science fiction". [SH/JC]
L'EPY, HELIOGENES de
Pseudonym of an unidentified 17th-century UK writer whose A Voyage into
Tartary, Containing a Curious Description of that Country (1689) depicts,

perhaps for the first time, the discovery of a LOST WORLD. The circular
city of Heliopolis in central Asia, inhabited by descendants of ancient
Greeks, is a republican UTOPIA which maintains remarkable control over its
own advanced technologies; a museum contains relics of flying machines and
other devices. [JC]About the author: "L'Epy's A Voyage into Tartary. An
Enlightenment Ideal Society" by E.F. BLEILER in Extrapolation (summer
1988) records Bleiler's pioneering investigation of this author and his
text.
LE QUEUX, WILLIAM (TUFNELL)
(1864-1927) French-born UK journalist and author of over 100 books in a
variety of genres, though most of his most popular works were espionage
thrillers in the vein of E. Phillips OPPENHEIM - he claimed,
unconvincingly, to be a spy himself - and detective novels, often with
oriental colouring. He wrote a number of fantasies in the vein of H. Rider
HAGGARD, with some immediate but no lasting success, and a number of
romances, like Stolen Souls (1895), whose generic definition shifts
between suspense and the occult. He is best remembered today for his two
future- WAR/ INVASION novels: The Great War in England in 1897 (1894) and
The Invasion of 1910: With a Full Account of the Siege of London (1906;
cut vt The Invasion 1910), the latter written with the anon collaboration
of H(erbert) W(rigley) Wilson (1866-1940). Both books were serialized in
English newspapers before being separately published, and both aroused
considerable stir, particularly the latter, with its letter of
commendation from the distinguished soldier and statesman Lord Roberts
(1832-1914), who shared WLQ's anti-German views (and collaborated with him
on two nonfiction dreadful-warning books, The Great War [1908] and Spies
of the Kaiser [1909]). Though both novels were told with every trick WLQ
had acquired in his years of journalism, and though the latter is replete
with diagrams of the threatened invasion from Germany, the ultimate effect
of each book is of a laboured turgidity of effect. A further tale whose
title hints at similar contents, England's Peril (1899), is fundamentally
an espionage thriller. WLQ persistently utilized Germany as the opponent
in his work; even after WWI, stories like The Terror of the Air (1920)
attempt to present a world in constant danger of Teutonic aggression. The
sf of WLQ's last years is consistently routine. He is fundamentally a
figure of pre-WWI interest. [JC]Other works: Zoraida: A Romance of the
Harem and the Great Sahara (1895); The Great White Queen: A Tale of
Treasure and Treason (1896); The Eye of Istar: A Romance of the Land of No
Return (1897), one of several lost-race novels ( LOST WORLDS); A Madonna
of the Music Halls (1897; vt A Secret Sin 1913); The Veiled Man (coll
1899); The Sign of the Seven Sins (1901); The Closed Book (1904); The
Unknown Tomorrow: How the Rich Fared at the Hands of the Poor (1910); The
House of Whispers (1910); The Great God Gold (1910); No 70 Berlin (1915);
The Mystery of the Green Ray (1915); "Cinders" of Harley Street (coll
1916), featuring a doctor with PSI POWERS; The Zeppelin Destroyer: Being
some Chapters of Secret History (1916); The Unbound Book (1916); The
Bomb-Makers (1917); The Rainbow Mystery: Chronicles of a
Colour-Criminologist (coll 1917); The Little Blue Goddess (1918); The
Voice from the Void (1922); The Gay Triangle (1922), featuring a car with
collapsible wings; Tracked by Wireless (1922); The Broadcast Mystery

(1925); Double Nought (1927); The Chameleon (1927; vt Poison Shadows 1927
US); The Secret Formula (1928).See also: DYSTOPIAS; WEAPONS.
LERANGIS, PETER
(? - ) US writer of a variety of ties, including 3 titles in the Byron
PREISS Time Machine sequence - The Amazing Ben Franklin * (1987 chap), The
Last of the Dinosaurs * (1988) and Time Machine, Special Edition: World
War II Code Breaker * (1989) - a STAR TREK novel, Star Trek IV, the Voyage
Home * (1986 chap) ( STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME), and a Find Your Fate
- G.I. Joe tale, The Sultan's Secret * (1988). [JC]
LEROUX, GASTON
(1868-1927) French writer of mystery novels who remains best known for Le
Fantome de l'Opera (1910; trans Alexander Texeira de Mattos as The Phantom
of the Opera 1911 UK), a tale of horror filmed in 1925 (rereleased with
sound 1930), 1943, 1962, 1983 (for tv), 1989 and 1990 (for tv) and used as
the basis for a highly successful 1986 musical. His first novel of direct
genre interest, La Double Vie de Theophraste Longuet (1904; trans anon as
The Double Life 1909 US; new trans Edgar JEPSON as The Man with the Black
Feather 1912 UK), is a horror fantasy. Balaoo (1912; trans Alexander
Texeira de Mattos 1913 UK) is an sf tale featuring a Missing Link in a
detective role ( APES AND CAVEMEN). L'Espouse de Soleil (1913; trans anon
as The Bride of the Sun1915 US) ventures into LOST-WORLD territory. Le
Capitaine Hyx (1920; trans Hannaford Bennett as The Amazing Adventures of
Carolus Herbert1922 US and its sequel The Veiled Prisoner (trans Hannaford
Bennett 1923 UK), recount the exploits of a mysterious captain and his
super-submarine in WWI. Le Machine a assassiner (1924; trans anon as The
Machine to Kill 1935 US) features a ROBOT murderer. GL's use of sf
material was opportunistic; a fair estimate of his skill as a novelist
almost certainly awaits better translations. [JC]Other works:Le Fauteuil
hante (1911; trans anon as The Haunted Chair1931 US); Le Coeur cambriole
(coll 1922; trans Hannaford Bennett as The Burgled Heart1925 UK; vt The
New Terror 1926 US), which includes some contes cruels;La Poupee Sanglante
(1924; trans anon as The Kiss That Killed 1934 US). .
LERTETH, OBEN
[s] R.L. FANTHORPE.
LESLIE, DESMOND (PETER ARTHUR)
(1921- ) UK writer, son of Shane Leslie and best known for co-authoring
with George Adamski (1891-1965) the famous UFO book Flying Saucers have
Landed (1954; exp by Leslie 1970). Of sf interest is Angels Weep (1948), a
right-wing DYSTOPIA, and The Amazing Mr Lutterworth (1958), in which
ALIENS avert the destruction of the planet through a device which provides
unlimited energy: a Time of Splendour ensues. [JC]Other work: How Britain
Won the Space Race (1982) with Patrick MOORE, illustrated spoof account of
a 19th-century UK space programme.See also: MUSIC.
LESLIE, O.H.
[s] Henry SLESAR.
LESLIE, PETER
(1922- ) UK author, journalist and actor, most of whose books have been

borderline-sf ties contributed to tv spin-off series, beginning with 2
titles for the INVADERS sequence: #3: The Night of the Trilobites * (1968)
and #4: The Autumn Accelerator * (1969). His tales for the MAN FROM U.N.C.
L.E. series included: The Finger in the Sky Affair * (1966), which is #5
in the UK and #23 in the US numbering; The Radioactive Camel Affair *
(1966), #7 UK and #7 US; The Diving Dames Affair * (1967), #10 UK and #9
US; The Splintered Sunglasses Affair * (1968), #14 UK and #16 US; and The
Unfair Fare Affair * (1968), #17 UK and #18 US. For the GIRL FROM U.N.C.L.
E. series he wrote #4: The Cornish Pixie Affair * (1967). [JC/PN]Other
work: Hell for Tomorrow (1966).
LESSER, DERWIN
[s] Charles D. HORNIG.
LESSER, MILTON
(1925-1988) US writer, more recently author of many crime novels and a
few sf stories under what he eventually took as his real name, Stephen
Marlowe. His sf mostly appeared in the ZIFF-DAVIS magazines, including his
first story, "All Heroes are Hated" (1950), but he was an active fan for
some years before that. His other pseudonyms for sf included Adam CHASE,
C.H. Thames (27 times), Christopher Thames (once), and the house name S.M.
TENNESHAW; he has also written thrillers as Thames, Andrew Frazer and
Jason Ridgway, as well as an Ellery Queen novel, Dead Man's Tale (1961).
He wrote the juvenile sf novels Earthbound (1952), The Star Seekers
(1953), Stadium Beyond the Stars (1960) and Spacemen Go Home (1961).
Novels reprinted from magazines are Recruit for Andromeda (1953
Imagination as "Voyage to Eternity"; exp 1959), Secret of the Black Planet
(1952 AMZ as "Secret of the Black Planet" and "Son of the Black Chalice";
fixup 1965), and The Golden Ape (1957 AMZ as "The Quest of the Golden Ape"
by Adam Chase and Ivar JORGENSEN; 1959 as by Chase), which latter he wrote
in collaboration with Paul W. FAIRMAN. ML also edited the anthology
Looking Forward (anth 1953). He abandoned sf in the early 1960s, but some
of his recent thrillers, notably the supernatural horror story Translation
(1976) and The Valkyrie Encounter (1978), both as Marlowe, have fantastic
elements; these are much more effective than his routine action-adventure
sf. [BS]See also: GENERATION STARSHIPS.
LESSING, DORIS
(1919- ) Persian (Iranian)-born Southern Rhodesian (Zimbabwean) writer,
in UK from 1949. She is best known for her searching examinations of the
position of women in the world in such novels as The Golden Notebook
(1962). The 5 vols of her Children of Violence sequence deal more
expansively with the same problems, and The Four-Gated City (1969), which
ends the series, moves in its final pages rapidly into the NEAR FUTURE,
providing in this fashion a somewhat apocalyptic perspective on the
preceding volumes from a viewpoint tinged with Sufi mysticism. This
Persian form of Islam, influenced by Indian religions, is centrally
concerned with the union of the soul with a Higher Being, in terms which
are at times surprisingly literal, invoking a kind of drama of the steps
one may take in order to achieve transcendence and the permanence of the
soul. Much of DL's later work, especially the Canopus in Argos: Archives
sequence, can be seen as exegetical of Sufist precepts.Before and after

the latter series, however, DL wrote four singletons of some sf interest.
Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) puts a schizophreniac through a
mythic journey. The Summer Before the Dark (1973) submits to a similar
voyage of external/internal discovery a woman at a point of crisis in her
life. In The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) a woman watches the end of urban
civilization from her window, never leaving her room, while a young girl
grows up beside her, giving some muted hope for human continuity; it was
filmed as MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR (1981). The Fifth Child (1988 US) explores
with considerable intensity the consequences of giving birth to an infant
so destructive of the humans around him that he seems to be a genuine
changeling. Far more expansively than these "domestic" novels, the Canopus
in Argos: Archives books place the crises of human self-striving into a
metaphysically conceived interstellar frame. Each individual novel in the
sequence - Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta (1979 US), The Marriage
Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980 US), The Sirian Experiments
(1981 US), The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982 US) and The
Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983 US) - depicts an exemplary
drama of the soul, as inhabitants of various planets, under the distant
aegis of the Canopan Empire, attempt to come to terms with sexuality,
politics, mortality and transcendence. Shikasta is Earth; the other novels
make use of other venues. Everywhere the drive - sometimes thwarted - is
towards literal union with universal principles (or God). The series
exudes, at times, a piety not normally associated with sf; but at others
the perspectives it opens are illuminating. In DL's hands, the instruments
of sf become parables. [JC]Other work: No Witchcraft for Sale: Stories and
Short Novels (coll 1956 Russia).About the author: Doris Lessing (1983
chap) by Lorna Sage; Doris Lessing (1985) by Mona Knapp; Unexpected
Universe of Doris Lessing (1985) by Katherine Fishburn.See also: ADAM AND
EVE; DISASTER; MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF; MUSIC; WOMEN SF WRITERS.
LESSNER, ERWIN (CHRISTIAN)
(1898-1959) US writer in whose Phantom Victory: The Fourth Reich
1945-1960 (1944) an underground cadre of Nazi officers successfully
conspires to conquer the world in the name of a resurgent Germany ( HITLER
WINS). [JC]
LESTER, ANDREW
Terry GREENHOUGH.
LESTER, EDWARD
(1831-1905) UK clergyman and writer in whose The Siege of Bodike: A
Prophecy of Ireland's Future (1886) the separation of Ireland from the
ruling UK is prevented in large part by the narrator, in a BALLOON; and
the landlords return. [JC]
LESTER, IRVIN
[s] Fletcher PRATT.
L'ESTRANGE, MILES
Pseudonym of an unidentified late-19th-century UK writer whose What We
are Coming To (1892) describes in satirical terms its narrator's response
to a rationalized England where women have been emancipated. Platonia: A
Tale of Other Worlds (1893) rather more interestingly presents its

narrator with an ancient design for a spacecraft which takes him to the
eponymous planet, located this side of Mars, where an oddity of the
atmosphere permits telescopic perusal of our world as it was 100 years
before. [JC]
LETHEM, JONATHAN (ALLEN)
(1964- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "The Cave Beneath the
Falls" for Aboriginal in 1989, and who has published at least 35 stories
since, the best known of them probably being "The Happy Man" (1991). His
first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music (1994), meticulously rehabilitates
the noir narrative voice CYBERPUNK writers notoriously acquired from
writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, not only through the
exactitude of the stylistic miming involved, but also because the setting,
characters and overall ambience of the tale directly homage the earlier
masters. The setting is a cloistral NEAR FUTURE California; and the main
character (who narrates) is a private eye in a world which has been
reduced-rather than liberated-by the recursiveness of a culture near the
end of its tether. In the terrified, shrinking world of Gun, With
Occasional Music, it is socially unacceptable to ask personal questions;
drugs like Forgettol continue to reduce the mental spaces available to
humanity; a weary dictatorial police state gives thugs in its employ the
right to punish citizens by reducing their "karmic points" until they have
none, and are sent to deepfreeze; animals and babies, transmogrified by
"evolution therapy", walk and talk. The nightmarishness of the book
derives, perhaps, from a sense that JL has-as accurately as or Steve
ERICKSON-captured the surreal underlying bleakness of any future Hammett
or Chandler might actually have imagined. JL's next novel, Amnesia Moon
(1995), is eagerly awaited. [JC]
LEVACK, DANIEL J.H.
(? - ) US bibliographer and critic, author of several author
BIBLIOGRAPHIES including Fantasms: A Bibliography of the Literature of
Jack Vance (1978 chap with Tim UNDERWOOD; rev vt Fantasms II 1979 with
Underwood and Kurt Cockrum; rev 1979), PKD: A Philip K. Dick Bibliography
(1981; rev 1988), Amber Dreams: A Roger Zelazny Bibliography (1983) and
Dune Master: A Frank Herbert Bibliography (1988). The leisurely production
schedules of some academic firms in the sf field may account for the
failure of the Frank HERBERT bibliography or of the Philip K. DICK text in
its 1988 "revision" to incorporate posthumous data. [JC]
LEVEN, JEREMY
(1941- ) US writer whose two sf novels, Creator (1980) and Satan: His
Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr Seymour Kassler, J.S.P.S.
(1982), both apply a sometimes portentous mainstream sensibility to
generic conceits. In the first, the attempted creation of a CLONE to
replace a dead wife activates considerable brooding about a variety of
issues. In the second a COMPUTER turns out to house the eponymous
Principle, invoking thoughts about the mind and the brain. [JC]See also:
PSYCHOLOGY; RELIGION.
LEVENE, MALCOLM
(1937- ) UK writer whose Carder's Paradise (1968) describes the mixed

blessings of a completely automated society whose inhabitants are kept
busy by complex entertainments. [JC]
LEVENE, PHILIP
[r] J.L. MORRISSEY.
LEVETT, OSWALD
[r] AUSTRIA.
LEVI, PRIMO
(1919-1987) Italian survivor of Auschwitz, industrial chemist,
autobiographer, essayist and writer of fiction: one of the most
distinguished men of letters of his generation, winning international fame
late in life. In much of his work - e.g., Il sistema periodica (1975;
trans Raymond Rosenthal as The Periodic Table 1984 US) - metaphors drawn
from science illuminate subjects normally thought of as literary or
historical, in a manner unusual in Europe generally and especially unusual
for a writer in ITALY, a country where the gap between the two cultures is
especially wide. This is true also of his sf stories, mostly sharp,
ironical fables, almost reductionist, that nevertheless often metamorphose
into direct affirmations of the values of life in a way unusual in sf
anywhere. Many feature a discomforting exploitation of strange inventions,
or a distancing alien perspective on human life. PL's sf stories appear in
2 Italian collections, Storie naturali (coll 1966) as by Damiano
Malabaila, and Vizio di forma (coll 1977), collected together in English
as The Sixth Day and Other Tales (trans Raymond Rosenthal omni 1990 US). A
typical story is "Excellent is the Water", where a gradual increase in the
viscosity of water in an Italian river spreads to become a worldwide
phenomenon, thereby serving as an image of the torpor and lethargy of the
heart's flow in our 20th-century world. [PN]Other works: La Chiave a
Stella (1978; trans William Weaver as The Monkey's Wrench 1986 US; vt The
Wrench 1987 UK) contains embedded fabular tales.See also: CLONES.
LEVIATHAN
Film (1989). Gordon Co./Filmauro. Dir George P. Cosmatos, starring Peter
Weller, Richard Crenna, Amanda Pays. Screenplay David Peoples and Jeb
Stuart, based on a story by Peoples. 98 mins. Colour.One of several
undersea- ALIEN movies of the period, L most resembles (and improves on)
DEEPSTAR SIX (1988), especially in the near-identical finale. In this
efficiently scary but routine horror-adventure film, miners at an undersea
base discover a sunken Russian submarine which turns out to have been the
jettisoned arena for dangerous experiments in genetic manipulation. Two of
the miners, infected, mutate into a shapeshifting MONSTER of familiar
format, like a downmarket cross between the menaces in ALIEN and the 1982
remake of The THING . Few survive. [PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES.
LEVIE, REX DEAN
(1937?- ) US businessman and writer whose The Insect Warriors (1965)
deals with problems humans face on a world where they are the size of
insects. [JC]
LEVIN, IRA
(1929- ) US playwright and novelist whose first book, A Kiss Before Dying

(1953), is an extremely impressive chiller. He is best known for the
fantasy Rosemary's Baby (1967), in which the Devil impregnates a young
woman; the book was filmed by Roman Polanski in 1968. IL moved into sf
proper with This Perfect Day (1970), a DYSTOPIAN view of a cybernetically
regimented future ( COMPUTERS), and The Stepford Wives (1972), which was
soon filmed ( The STEPFORD WIVES ), a horrific morality tale about a US
suburb whose men have turned their womenfolk into compliant ROBOTS. The
last 3 titles were assembled as Three by Ira Levin (omni 1985). His most
impressive book is perhaps The Boys from Brazil (1976), filmed as The BOYS
FROM BRAZIL , a complex story involving the cloning ( CLONES) of cells
from Adolf Hitler's body in order to later impregnate a number of women
with young Hitlers, whom a Brazilian neo-Nazi group headed by Dr Josef
Mengele tries to raise in environments as close as possible to that in
which the Fuhrer himself was raised. IL applies to sf themes meticulous
style and plotting, along with a certain fascination with the multitude of
ways in which women can be violated. [JC]Other works: Nightmares: Three
Great Suspense Novels (omni 1981), assembling A Kiss Before Dying,
Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives; Sliver (1991), associational.See
also: HISTORY OF SF; SATIRE.
LEVY, DAVID
(1913- ) US film executive and writer in whose The Gods of Foxcroft
(1970) the protagonist awakes from SUSPENDED ANIMATION to find the world
of 500 years hence suffering under ecologically disastrous circumstances
which have forced humans into cramped habitats; meanwhile, ALIENS are
observing us from space. [JC]
LEWIN, LEONARD C(ASE)
(1916- ) US writer whose spoof paper, Report from Iron Mountain: On the
Possibility and Desirability of Peace (1967), presents the conclusions of
a US Government commission formed to consider the economic and political
threat of world peace. In a tone of cunningly egregious Realpolitik, the
commission urges that the world be kept on a continual WAR-footing. Triage
(1972) is a NEAR-FUTURE novel about growing political oppression in the
USA; the government secretly applies the wartime medical practice of
triage to social "problems" with the aim of eliminating them - literally (
OVERPOPULATION). [JC]
LEWIS, ANTHONY R(ICHARD)
(1941- ) US bibliographer who compiled, solo and with others, various
indexes for the New England Science Fiction Association, including The
N.E.S.F.A. Index to the Science Fiction Magazines and Original
Anthologies, 1966 (1969 chap), 1967 (1968 chap), 1968 (1969 chap), 1969
(1970 chap), 1966-1970 (1971 chap), 1971-1972 (1973 chap) with Andrew
Adams WHYTE, 1973 (1974 chap) with Whyte, 1974 (1975 chap) with Whyte and
George Flynn, 1975 (1976 chap) with Whyte, 1976 (1977 chap) with Whyte and
Jerry BOYAJIAN, 1977-78 (1983 chap) with Whyte, 1979-1980 (1982 chap) with
Whyte, 1981 (1982 chap) with Whyte, 1982 (1983 chap) with Whyte, 1983
(1984 chap) with Whyte, 1984 (1985 chap), 1985 (1986 chap), 1986 (1988
chap) and The N.E.S.F.A. Index to Short SF, 1987 (1989 chap). Other works
have included The Best of Astounding (anth 1978) as by Tony Lewis,
Concordance to Cordwainer Smith (1984 chap) and, most interestingly, An

Annotated Bibliography of Recursive Science Fiction (1990 chap). [JC]See
also: BIBLIOGRAPHIES; RECURSIVE SF.
LEWIS, BRIAN
(1929-1978) UK illustrator. A skilled painter whose work dominated UK sf
magazine covers in the mid- and late 1950s, BL often showed a strong
influence from Surrealists such as Paul Klee (1879-1940) and Max Ernst
(1891-1976), perhaps partly mediated through the book-cover illustration
of Richard POWERS. This style was encouraged for a time by the editor John
CARNELL in Science Fiction Adventures (19 covers), NW (41 covers) and
Science Fantasy (21 covers), although some of these were representational,
a manner BL adopted when it was required of him. His colours were strong
and plain and seemed laid on thickly, an impression few other illustrators
give. Besides his work in sf magazines, BL drew COMIC strips in newspapers
(for a time he worked on DAN DARE - PILOT OF THE FUTURE) and then went
into stop-motion film animation and children's puppet films. [JG/PN]See
also: ILLUSTRATION.
LEWIS, CAROLINE
Harold BEGBIE.
LEWIS, CHARLES
Roger DIXON.
LEWIS, C(LIVE) S(TAPLES)
(1898-1963) UK author and critic, born in Belfast; Fellow of Magdalen
College, Oxford, 1925-54, and finally Professor of Medieval and
Renaissance English at Cambridge. Most of his writing, whether directly or
indirectly, was Christian apologetics; this was as true of his
autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955) as of the fantasy The Screwtape
Letters (1942; exp vt The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast
1961), in which an older devil writes letters of advice to a younger,
devising various means of winning human souls. In Oxford CSL was friendly
with Charles WILLIAMS (another Anglican) and J.R.R. TOLKIEN (a Roman
Catholic). All three were Christian moralists with a strong interest in
allegory or fantasy, and (with others) they formed a casual society, the
Inklings, during whose meetings they read to each other from works in
progress.CSL's most popular fiction is for children, and is allegorical
FANTASY, although it uses many sf devices, including TIME TRAVEL, other
DIMENSIONS and PARALLEL WORLDS. The kingdom of Narnia, to which various
human children travel, is ruled by a lion, Aslan, who is "crucified" by a
wicked witch. There are many excitingly described perils, most with a
direct Christian allegorical application. Widely loved by children as
straightforward fantasy, the series is: The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe (1950), Prince Caspian (1951), The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader"
(1952), The Silver Chair (1953), The Horse and his Boy (1954), The
Magician's Nephew (1955), which comes first in terms of the internal
chronology, and The Last Battle (1956); omnibuses include Prince Caspian ?
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (omni 1990) and Tales of Narnia: The Silver
Chair ?
Great Divorce (1945 chap), a minor allegory about Heaven and Hell, and
Till We Have Faces (1956), a dark retelling of the myth of Cupid and

Psyche which some of his admirers consider his best work.CSL's primary
contribution to sf proper is the Cosmic Trilogy (or Ransom Trilogy) about
the linguist Dr Ransom, who like Christ is at one point offered as a
ransom for mankind: OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET (1938), Perelandra (1943; vt
Voyage to Venus 1953), and That Hideous Strength (1945; cut 1955; cut
version vt The Tortured Planet 1958 US). The first two novels are
PLANETARY ROMANCES with elements of medieval mythology. Each planet is
seen as having a tutelary spirit; those of the other planets are both good
and accessible, while that of Earth is fallen, twisted and not known
directly by most humans. These two books are powerfully imagined, although
their scientific content is intermittently absurd. The effect of lesser
GRAVITY on Martian plant and animal life is rendered with great economy
and vividness, as is Ransom's first sight of the water world of Venus, a
rich exercise in PERCEPTION; in a passage as purely evocative of a sense
of alien wonder as anything in sf, Ransom's human eyes cannot at first
make sense of the strangeness about him. The religious allegory of
Perelandra, however, in which an evil SCIENTIST plays Satanic tempter to
the female ruler of Venus, a new Eve, is deeply conservative and also - in
its courtly, romantic (and some may think dehumanizing) view of womanhood
- sexist. Lewis's ideology of gender is spelled out in detail in a number
of essays and in the critical book A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942),
which can be seen as a template for Perelandra.The third volume, That
Hideous Strength, is set on contemporary Earth, and is more directly
occult in its genre machinery than either of its predecessors. The fury of
CSL's attack on scientific "humanism" or "scientism" (science directed
towards purely worldly ends) is very nearly unbalanced, and leads to
grossly melodramatic caricature of scientists and government-supported
research units in general, and of H.G. WELLS in particular, here
grotesquely envisaged as a vulgar cockney journalist, Jules. The book's
attack on government indifference to ECOLOGY won it a new audience in the
late 1960s. CSL's attitude towards any form of modernism was neatly
encapsulated by a remark he made during a lecture on medieval poetry in
1938: "And then the Renaissance came and spoiled everything." The three
books are collected in The Cosmic Trilogy (omni 1990).Some of CSL's minor
essays in and about sf, including a transcript of a talk with Brian W.
ALDISS and Kingsley AMIS, can be found in the posthumous Of Other Worlds
(coll 1966) ed Walter Hooper, which includes 2 stories originally
published in FSF. A later posthumous work is The Dark Tower and Other
Stories (coll 1977) ed Hooper. It has been strongly suggested by Kathryn
Lindskoog (1934- ) in The C.S. Lewis Hoax (1988) that the Reverend Hooper
- CSL's secretary for only one month - forged various items of
posthumously published CSL material included in The Dark Tower, a charge
which has been strenuously denied. Lindskoog offered a vigorous
counter-rebuttal in "The Dark Scandal: Science Fiction Forgery" (1992
Quantum #42), but in that year it was revealed that she herself had been
forging letters to do with the Hooper issue - indeed, she admitted as
much, though she described her 14 forged letters as a lighthearted
"prank". What there can be no doubt about is that the works assembled by
Hooper have affected readers as being both sexually poisonous and
egregiously amateur. [PN]Other works: Dymer (chap 1926), a narrative
fantastic poem as by Clive Hamilton; The Pilgrim's Regress: An Allegorical

Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (1933; rev 1943); On
Stories, and Other Essays in Literature (coll 1982; vt Of This and Other
Worlds 1984); Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C.S. Lewis (1985).As
Editor: Essays Presented to Charles Williams (anth 1947), including the
influential "On Fairy-Stories" by Tolkien.About the author: About 50
book-length studies of CSL's life and work exist, perhaps the most
distinguished biography being C.S. Lewis: A Biography (1990) by A.N.
Wilson. Further biographical material appear in Shadowlands: The Story of
C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman (1985) by Brian Sibley, based on Bill
Nicholson's tv drama Shadowlands, which was also a successful stage play.
This was in turn filmed as Shadowlands (1993), dir Richard Attenborough,
screenplay by Nicholson, with Anthony Hopkins as CSL and Debra Winger as
Joy. Other studies include: Shadows of Imagination: The Fantasies of C.S.
Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams (anth 1969; exp 1979) ed Mark
R. HILLEGAS, which contains an entertaining and passionate attack on CSL
by the Marxist biologist and author J.B.S. HALDANE; The Longing for a
Form: Essays on the Fiction of C.S. Lewis (coll 1977) ed Peter J. Schakel;
The Literary Legacy of C.S. Lewis (1979) by Chad Walsh; C.S. Lewis: His
Literary Achievement (1987) by C.N. MANLOVE.See also: ALIENS;
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; CHILDREN'S SF; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH;
ESCHATOLOGY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GODS AND DEMONS; HORROR IN SF;
ISLANDS;
LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; LINGUISTICS; LIVING WORLDS; The MAGAZINE OF
FANTASY
AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MAGIC; MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF; MARS; MESSIAHS;
MYTHOLOGY; RELIGION; SOCIAL DARWINISM; VENUS.
LEWIS, IRWIN
(1916- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "To Invade New York" for
ASF in 1963. This story's basic idea was incorporated into his first
novel, The Day They Invaded New York (1964), in which invading ALIENS
confuse New Yorkers by fouling the transportation systems of the great
city. A second novel, The Day New York Trembled (1967), creates its chaos
through a pain-relieving drug and its unexpected consequences. [JC]
LEWIS, OSCAR
(1893-1992) US editor and writer whose ALTERNATE-WORLD novel, The Lost
Years (1951), depicts the last years of Abraham Lincoln in a world where
he was never assassinated. [JC]
LEWIS, (ERNEST MICHAEL) ROY
(1913- ) UK novelist and journalist, editor of New Commonwealth 1953-4,
later with the Economist and The Times, and the author of several
political/sociological studies. His sf novel, What We Did to Father (1960;
vt The Evolution Man 1963; vt Once Upon an Ice Age 1979; vt The Evolution
Man; or, How I Ate my Father 1992), amusingly concentrates human cultural
EVOLUTION during the Pleistocene into the hands of one man, the narrator's
father, all of whose discoveries are seen in terms of their extrapolated
effects. Not surprisingly, the parricide which ends the book is nothing if
not proto-neo-Freudian.The Extraordinary Reign of King Ludd: An Historical
Tease (1990) is an ALTERNATE WORLD story, a utopian SATIRE in which Queen
Victoria abdicates in 1849 and International Socialism triumphs. A Walk

with Mr Gladstone (1991 chap) is a gaslight romance featuring the UK prime
minister and other characters, some historical, some RECURSIVE. [JC]See
also: ORIGIN OF MAN.
LEWIS, (HARRY) SINCLAIR
(1885-1951) US writer, highly esteemed in the 1920s and 1930s for such
novels as Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922) and first US winner of the
Nobel Prize for Literature (1930), but with much diminished reputation
today. His first novel, Hike and the Aeroplane (1912) as by Tom Graham, is
a juvenile centred on a futuristic 200mph (320kph) aircraft; Arrowsmith
(1925) is not so much sf as fiction about science, contrasting the
idealism of the research SCIENTIST with the avarice and greed of the
medical profession in general. SL's sf novel, It Can't Happen Here (1935),
warns of how a Nazi-like regime could come to power in the USA. SL pays
little attention to the nature of political institutions in this book, but
that is not to say that he is guilty of political naivety ( POLITICS): his
analysis of how fascist regimes can come to power largely through the
"little man's" apathy and perceived powerlessness is a potent example of
the dreadful-warning tale. His NEAR-FUTURE scenario contrasts
interestingly with Gordon EKLUND's very similar portrait of 1930s
authoritarianism in All Times Possible (1974), though in the latter case
there is an ALTERNATE-WORLDS framework. [JC]
LEWIS, (PERCY) WYNDHAM
(1884-1957) UK writer and painter, known in the latter capacity as the
instigator of Vorticism. His illustrations for Naomi MITCHISON's Beyond
This Limit (1935 chap) constitute a co-creation of the book, which she
acknowledged. As an author, he was responsible for determinedly Modernist
manifestos such as The Caliph's Design: Architects! Where is Your Vortex?
(1919 chap) and novels such as The Apes of God (1930). Of particular sf
interest is The Human Age, a trilogy comprising The Childermass (1928; rev
1956), Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, the two latter novels being first
published together as The Human Age: Book Two Monstre Gai, Book Three
Malign Fiesta (1955). Like Philip Jose FARMER's Riverworld series, though
with greater impact, The Human Age depicts the posthumous existence of
various characters. Pulley and Satters, the two freshly deceased
protagonists of The Childermass, observe and join in the jousting,
linguistic and intellectual, that surrounds the Bailiff, a sort of
doorkeeper who decides the eligibility of applicants to the Magnetic City,
and who, in Monstre Gai, takes them into the Third City, a DYSTOPIA based
on the post-WWII UK and its Welfare State. Finding life difficult there,
they all go on to Matapolis in Malign Fiesta, but Matapolis is Hell, and
punishments abound; there is a sense of suffocating evil. A fourth volume,
The Trial of Man, in which the two protagonists were to be transported to
Heaven, remained unwritten. The arduousness of The Childermass, a major
20th-century novel, has kept many readers from its much more clear-cut
sequels. WL is much less read than read about, a situation to be deplored.
[JC]See also: ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
LEWITT, S.N.
Working name of US writer Shariann Lewitt (1954- ); the N. stands for
"Nothing". She began publishing sf with "St Joey the Action" in Perpetual

Light (anth 1982) ed Alan Ryan. After First and Final Rites (1984), a
fantasy novel published as by Shariann Lewitt, she released the first of
the military SPACE OPERAS with which she soon became identified: White
Wing (1985) with Susan M. SHWARTZ, writing together as Gordon Kendall.
Angel at Apogee (1987), her first book as SNL and perhaps her best,
features a complicated (at times congested) PLANETARY-ROMANCE plot in
which much fighting co-exists with the author's punk sensibility; it tells
the story of a female pilot who must come to terms with the two submerged
races which revolt against her father's hegemony over the planet in
question. Other novels which similarly stretch the conventions of military
sf include Cyberstealth (1989) - and its sequel Dancing Vac (1991) - and
Blind Justice (1991). Her ties in the U.S.S.A. SHARED-WORLD enterprise, U.
S.S.A. Book 2 * (1987) and Book 4 * (1987), are of less interest, but
Cybernetic Jungle (1992), set in a near-future CYBERPUNK Brazil, is a
complex (although perhaps not entirely original) tale, and Songs of Chaos
(1993) provides something of the same mix, though this tale of a "normal"
human in a population otherwise modified through GENETIC ENGINEERING moves
eventually into interstellar space. [JC]
LEY, WILLY
(1906-1969) German-born scientist and scientific writer who emigrated to
the USA in 1935. In Germany he had been part of a small group which, early
on, had believed in the potential of rocket propulsion (some went on to
become famous for the construction of the V2). His first book was Die
Fahrt ins Weltall ["Journey into Space"] (1926); his second, Die
Moglichkeit der Weltraumfahrt ["The Possibility of Interplanetary Travel"]
(1928), was to be one of the inspirations behind the film (and book) Die
FRAU IM MOND (1929; vt The Girl in the Moon). In the USA his well
researched, precise science articles became a notable feature of the SF
MAGAZINES, especially ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION (from 1937) and AMAZING
STORIES (from 1940). He became Science Editor of GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION in
Sep 1952, having in March of that year begun there a science column which
would last until his death. During the brief period when science-fact
articles were a HUGO category, he received 2. He wrote 3 sf stories as
Robert Willey.WL was also a prolific author of books on science,
especially on ROCKETS and SPACE FLIGHT. Perhaps his best-known (and
certainly most beautiful) book was The Conquest of Space (1949), with
splendid illustrations, many in colour, by Chesley BONESTELL; it won the
nonfiction category of the INTERNATIONAL FANTASY AWARD in 1951. Lands
Beyond (1952) with L. Sprague DE CAMP, a historical account of strange
explorations and discoveries, won the same award in 1953. Of the
science-fact writers intimately connected with GENRE SF, only De Camp,
Arthur C. CLARKE and Isaac ASIMOV could rival WL. One of the Moon's
craters is named in his honour. [PN]Other works (all nonfiction): The
Lungfish and the Unicorn (1941; rev vt The Lungfish, the Dodo and the
Unicorn 1948); The Days of Creation (1941; rev 1952); Shells and Shooting
(1942); Rockets (1944; rev vt Rockets and Space Travel 1947; rev vt
Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel 1951; rev 1957; rev vt Rockets,
Missiles and Men in Space 1968); Dragons in Amber (1951); Engineer's
Dreams (1954); Salamanders and Other Wonders (1955); The Exploration of
Mars (1956; vt Project Mars 1962 UK) with Wernher von Braun (1912-1977),

illus Bonestell; Satellites, Rockets and Outer Space (1958; rev 1962);
Space Stations (1958); Space Travel (1958); Exotic Zoology (1959)
featuring rearranged selections from his previous books on natural
history; Watchers of the Skies (1963); Beyond the Solar System (1964)
illus Bonestell; Missiles, Moonprobes and Megaparsecs (1964); Ranger to
the Moon (1965); On Earth and in the Sky (coll 1967); Another Look at
Atlantis (coll 1969); The Drifting Continents (1969); Events in Space
(1969); Gas Giants: The Largest Planets (1969); Visitors from Afar: The
Comets (1969).See also: SPACE HABITATS; SUN.
LEYDENFROST, A(LEXANDER)
(1889-1961) US illustrator born in Hungary, where he lived until he was
34; his father was a Dutch illustrator. Although forgotten by most fans
today, AL was one of the best sf artists of the 1940s, particularly when
elements of fantasy or horror were required. His often grotesque, heavily
shadowed and hideous forms sprawled across the pages of such magazines as
Planet Stories, Super Science Stories, Astonishing Stories and Famous
Fantastic Mysteries. While AL's black-and-white ILLUSTRATIONS were strong
and dynamic with expressive lines and stark contrasts, his colour work,
which included 2 covers for Planet Stories, was strained and awkward. In
the 1920s and 1930s he had worked as an interior designer and commercial
artist, and many of his later illustrations were for the "slicks", notably
Esquire and Life. His sons Bob and Harry both briefly illustrated for
Planet Stories in the mid-1940s. [JG/PN]
L5
LAGRANGE POINT.
LIBERTARIAN SF
A political movement ( POLITICS) originating in and largely confined to
the USA, libertarianism is a form of anarchism - or "minarchism", the
desire for an extremely limited state - which emphasizes (nonviolent)
competition rather than the voluntary cooperation proposed by the older
strand of anarchist thinking, as exemplified by the writings of such
theorists as Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) or, in the sf field, by Ursula K.
LE GUIN's The Dispossessed (1974). The libertarian branch is generally
characterized as a "right-wing" type of anarchism (in the sense that the
[traditional] anarcho-syndicalists are "left-wing") through the premise
that voluntarily entered contracts are the only form of social interaction
that can be literally enforced (as opposed to, for example, state taxation
as a way of funding a democratically elected government). A common
libertarian assumption is that, in the absence of government intervention,
the free market will bring about almost unlimited growth in available
technology and personal wealth, thus solving any problems of human
poverty. These views are frequently associated with a belief in "positive
thinking" and a fundamental OPTIMISM about human potential.Uniquely among
political movements, many of libertarianism's most influential texts have
been by sf writers. Books from both inside and outside the genre which
strongly affected the early development of the movement include Ayn RAND's
Atlas Shrugged (1957), most of the early works of Robert A. HEINLEIN (up
to, and culminating in, THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS [1966]) and, to a
lesser extent, C.M. KORNBLUTH's The Syndic (1953). These works could be

said to be "proto-libertarian" in nature - a description which applies
particularly to Rand, founder of the allied Objectivist philosophy.
Explicitly libertarian fictions, with their characteristically detailed
alternative societies and economic systems, did not begin to appear until
the 1970s, with the publication of J. Neil SCHULMAN's Alongside Night
(1979) and the Illuminatus! trilogy (1975) by Robert SHEA and Robert Anton
WILSON. This trilogy - along with associated texts such as the
Schrodinger's Cat books from 1981 - probably represents the best of
libertarian sf. Other recent novels of significance have been F. Paul
WILSON's An Enemy of the State (1980) and the long series of mildly comic
adventures by L. Neil SMITH beginning with The Probability Broach (1980).
Authors currently writing from a libertarian perspective include Melinda
SNODGRASS (the Circuit trilogy), James P. HOGAN (notably in Voyage from
Yesteryear [1982]), Victor KOMAN, Brad LINAWEAVER, Victor MILAN, Jerry
POURNELLE and Vernor VINGE.The Prometheus and Prometheus Hall of Fame
trophies ( AWARDS) are given annually by the Libertarian Futurist Society
for, respectively, the best libertarian novel of the year and the past
novel most worth retrospective attention. While nonsympathizers may be
repelled by libertarian sf's frequent concentration on adventure rather
than character, its sometimes casual attitude towards violence, and its
loose association with the principles of SOCIAL DARWINISM, the libertarian
writers themselves might argue that they have made a genuine and deep-felt
commitment to their vision of human freedom. It seems likely that the
influence of the movement within sf will grow. [NT]
LIBRARIES OF SF
COLLECTIONS.
LICHTENBERG, JACQUELINE
(1942- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Operation High Time" for
Worlds of If in 1969, but soon concentrated on fan fiction set in the OPEN
UNIVERSE permitted by the owners of STAR TREK; Star Trek Lives! (1975)
with Sondra MARSHAK and Joan Winston is a famous nonfiction description of
the early days of Star Trek fandom. Her first book was House of Zeor
(1974), the initial volume of the Sime/Gen sequence, also an open-universe
series, which continued with Unto Zeor, Forever (1978), First Channel
(1980) with Jean LORRAH, Mahogany Trinrose (1981), Channel's Destiny
(1982) with Lorrah, RenSime (1984) and Zelerod's Doom (1986) with Lorrah.
The series is set 1000 years after a mutation has split the human race
into Gens and Simes; the latter survive by sucking life force ("selyn")
from the former, a process that is fatal unless effected through a
specially mutated Sime called a Channel. First Channel and Channel's
Destiny describe the first appearance of Channels in a society which has
been reduced to near-barbarism by undeclared war between the two
subspecies. House of Zeor and later volumes (in terms of internal
chronology) follow the gradual evolution of a compromise, and move toward
a sense that the two subspecies together may form a whole greater than the
sum of the parts. The considerable success of the series may be partially
due to the sexual connotations of the Sime/Gen relationship, particularly
the Simes' use of remarkably phallic tentacles to (sometimes forcibly)
acquire selyn.A second sequence, the Molt Brothers series - Molt Brother

(1982) and City of a Million Legends (1985) - deals with relationships
between humans and members of a reptilian species (the Kren) who must
choose special companions to guard them when they moult. The Dushau
trilogy - Dushau (1985), Farfetch (1985) and Outreach (1986) - tells the
story of a rebellion against a repressive galactic empire by the human
heroine and a group of alien empaths who establish rapport with planetary
ecologies.Although JL's prose is sometimes undistinguished and her
backgrounds are routine, she has acquired many dedicated readers through
writing about intensely emotional cross-species relationships based on
mutual affection and need. [NT]Other works: Those of My Blood (1988) and
its sequel, Dreamspy (1989).See also: ECOLOGY.
LIDDELL, C.H.
[s] Henry KUTTNER.
LIEBERMAN, ROBERT (HOWARD)
(1941- ) US writer who worked initially as a teacher of mathematics and
physics at university level until becoming a full-time writer in 1979. His
third novel, Baby (1981), tells of the consequences when an elderly
spinster gives virgin birth to a child with a beautiful singing voice.
Perfect People (1986) sets its post-holocaust DYSTOPIA in an underground
city. [JC]
LIFE AFTER DEATH
ESCHATOLOGY; REINCARNATION.
LIFEFORCE
Film (1985). Cannon. Dir Tobe Hooper, starring Steve Railsback, Peter
Firth, Frank Finlay, Mathilda May, Patrick Stewart. Screenplay Dan
O'Bannon, Don Jakoby, based on The Space Vampires (1976) by Colin WILSON.
101 mins. Colour.Astronauts exploring Halley's Comet discover three
humanoid ALIEN bodies in suspended animation in crystal containers in a
derelict alien spacecraft, and recover them. All but one of the astronauts
die; the strange bodies awaken back in London, and prove to be
shapeshifting vampiric lifeforms which, by sucking the lifeforce from
people, turn them into withered zombies who themselves can pass on the
zombie infection. Soon London becomes a zombie city. The narrative borders
on incoherence, non sequiturs abound, and the film is a melodramatic
travesty, especially the performance of Finlay as a "thanatologist"
(student of death). And yet it has its virtues. John Dykstra, famous for
his work in STAR WARS (1977), produces arresting special effects, and
Hooper, best known for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), directs with an
intensity verging on the hysterical. The film, though a mess (partly
through being based on Wilson's heavily philosophical but muddled novel),
is original and, despite all the zombies, avoids cliche. May's nude
performance as the female alien is striking. [PN]
LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS
Early interplanetary travellers invariably discovered worlds which were
markedly akin to Earth. Without a theory of EVOLUTION for a guide, let
alone any but the most primitive awareness of ECOLOGY, the imaginative
creation of other-worldly life was inevitably a haphazard and arbitrary
process. One notable exception is Johannes KEPLER's attempt to imagine

lunar life in the last pages of Somnium (1634). There is little in most
other pre-20th-century accounts to distinguish other worlds from the
strange Earthly lands featured in many travellers' tales and romances (
ANTHROPOLOGY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; LOST WORLDS). Camille FLAMMARION was
the
first writer to apply Lamarckian and Darwinian ideas to the construction
of hypothetical ALIEN worlds, in Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes
reels (1864; trans as Real and Imaginary Worlds 1865 US) and Lumen (1872;
exp 1887); and his later romance of other-worldly reincarnation, Urania
(1890), offers a description, albeit relatively undetailed, of the Martian
biosphere. Flammarion's contemporary, C.I. DEFONTENAY, gave a
comprehensive description of life on another world in Star, ou Psi de
Cassiopee (1854; trans as Star 1975 US), but biological speculation was
muted. Most late-19th-century interplanetary romances similarly feature
pseudo-human races and are vehicles for political and sociological rather
than biological hypothesis. Exotic milieux are used merely to provide
local colour for interplanetary tourists, as in George GRIFFITH's A
Honeymoon in Space (1901). Edgar FAWCETT's The Ghost of Guy Thyrle (1895)
takes some trouble to convey an impression of the multifariousness of life
on other worlds, but does not pause for detailed description. Even H.G.
WELLS, a writer whose biological training qualified him to take on the job
of designing an alien life-system, shirked the task; the Selenite society
in THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901) is given only the most cursory
supportive ECOLOGY. Wells's French contemporary J.H. ROSNY aine was
similarly shy until 1922, when he included a fairly elaborate description
of an alien life-system in his LOST-WORLD story L'etonnant voyage de
Hareton Ironcastle (1922; rewritten rather than trans by Philip Jose
FARMER as Ironcastle, 1976).The favourite abode of other-worldly life in
early sf was MARS, and an approximate consensus image of the Martian
biosphere slowly grew up, much encouraged by Mars as the Abode of Life
(1908) by the eccentric US astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916). The red
deserts and the canals became CLICHES but, whether Mars was seen as a
decadent world or as a primitive one, its biosphere tended to be somewhat
stripped-down. A lush Mars is featured in Edwin Lester ARNOLD's daydream
fantasy Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905; vt Gulliver of Mars),
the first of many novels to use the red planet as a backcloth for a
swashbuckling adventure story, but Arnold and his successor in this vein,
Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, were understandably uninterested in serious
biosphere-design. A similar blithe disregard for matters of rational
plausibility is exhibited not only by the great legion of Burroughs
imitators - Otis Adelbert KLINE, Ralph Milne FARLEY, J.U. GIESY, Lin
CARTER, Gardner F. FOX, Alan Burt Akers (Kenneth BULMER) et al. - but also
by less derivative sf writers who adapted the underlying philosophy to
their own purposes. Leigh BRACKETT, Ray BRADBURY and C.L. MOORE have
helped to maintain a calculatedly nonrealistic image of Mars long beyond
its natural lifespan, and Bradbury's curious amalgam of impossible
romanticism and heavy nostalgia, exhibited in THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (coll
1950; vt The Silver Locusts), remains so powerful that it still affects
contemporary works like Ian MCDONALD's Desolation Road (1988). Indeed, the
influence of this romantic image has been so great that it has had quite a
marked influence upon supposedly realistic treatments of the planet like

Arthur C. CLARKE's The Sands of Mars (1951) and James BLISH's Welcome to
Mars (1967). Some early GENRE-SF writers did make an effort to introduce
more variety and a greater degree of plausibility into their accounts of
extraterrestrial life. Laurence MANNING's "The Wreck of the Asteroid"
(1932), Jack WILLIAMSON's "The Moon Era" (1932) and Leslie F. STONE's "The
Hell Planet" (1932) all show enterprise in this regard, but the story most
remembered today as a crucial turning-point in the sophistication of
other-worldly melodrama is "A Martian Odyssey" (1934) by Stanley G.
WEINBAUM. Weinbaum went on to write a whole series of adventure stories
set against the backgrounds of various weird alien ecologies, but no one
seemed able to take up where he left off. John W. CAMPBELL Jr's Penton and
Blake series (1936-8; fixup as The Planeteers 1966) is imitative of
Weinbaum but much weaker. In 1939 Clifford D. SIMAK began a series
intended to deal in a realistic manner with conditions on each of the
planets in turn; of the 4 stories he completed the last, "Tools" (1942),
is the most notable. Eric Frank RUSSELL, in the course of his own series
of exploration stories-collected in Men, Martians, and Machines (coll of
linked stories 1956) - produced the memorable "Symbiotica" (1944), but did
little more in this line. Outside genre sf, very few writers tackled the
problem of describing life on worlds unlike Earth. Olaf STAPLEDON's STAR
MAKER (1937) is admirably wide-ranging but short on detail, save for one
long description of a very Earthlike world. The fullest descriptions of
other-worldly life offered by non-genre writers are to be found, oddly
enough, in allegories inspired by the religious imagination: David
LINDSAY's A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920) and C.S. LEWIS's OUT OF THE SILENT
PLANET (1938) and Perelandra (1943; vt Voyage to Venus).The sophistication
of post-WWII sf encouraged attempts to tackle the problem of constructing
strange alien life-systems more realistically. "Grandpa" (1955) by James
H. SCHMITZ is a notable study of a complex marine lifecycle on an
Earth-type planet. Conscientious attempts to design ecologies for
unearthly physical circumstances were regularly made by Hal CLEMENT, most
notably in MISSION OF GRAVITY (1953 ASF; 1954), Cycle of Fire (1957) and
Close to Critical (1958 ASF; 1964), and by Poul ANDERSON, especially in
"Call me Joe" (1957), War of the Wing-Men (1958; vt The Man who Counts)
and Three Worlds to Conquer (1964). Anderson also produced a nonfiction
work, Is There Life on Other Worlds? (1963), an early popularization of
the speculative science of XENOBIOLOGY - the study of extraterrestrial
life. Isaac ASIMOV wrote essays on this subject, and one of its leading
exponents, Carl SAGAN, has also written sf. One of the most intriguing
nonfictions in the field is Extraterrestrial Encounter (1979) by Chris
BOYCE, another sf writer. One writer of the post-WWII period whose name is
particularly associated with the detailed presentation of alien worlds is
Jack VANCE, whose interest in alien ecology is linked to a strong concern
for cultural ANTHROPOLOGY. His alien worlds usually have human populations
cleverly adapted to and integrated into the native ecology, and his works
carefully combine romanticism and earnest speculation (see also PLANETARY
ROMANCE); outstanding among his many novels in this vein are Son of the
Tree (1951 TWS; 1964), Big Planet (1952 Startling Stories; 1957), The
Houses of Iszm (1954 Startling Stories; 1964), The Languages of Pao
(1958), THE DRAGON MASTERS (1963), The Blue World (1966) and EMPHYRIO
(1969). There also grew up in this post-WWII period, in calculated

opposition to the romantic school of other-worldly adventures, a school of
fiction which represented human life on other worlds as a grim and
terrible battle against implacably hostile circumstances ( COLONIZATION OF
OTHER WORLDS).Popularization in the 1960s of the notion of impending
ecological crisis in the real world brought about a significant change in
emphasis in sf. The notion of "conquering" other worlds and mastering
harsh environments by hard work and sheer determination - which reached
its peak in such novels as Tom GODWIN's The Survivors (1958; vt Space
Prison) and Harry HARRISON's Deathworld (1960) - found new ideological
opposition in many stories emphasizing the notion of harmonious order (
ECOLOGY). Alien ecospheres possessing such perfection are often depicted,
with mankind featuring either as an unthinking destroyer or as a candidate
for membership whose case has yet to be judged. Such stories often embody
a strong element of mysticism ( RELIGION; MYTHOLOGY). The representation
of alien ecospheres as problematic Gardens of Eden has since become so
commonplace as to be almost ritual; notable examples of the careful
extension of this metaphor include Mark CLIFTON's Eight Keys to Eden
(1960), Richard M. MCKENNA's "Hunter Come Home" (1963), John BOYD's ironic
The Pollinators of Eden (1969), Ursula K. LE GUIN's THE WORD FOR WORLD IS
FOREST (1972; 1976), Neal BARRETT's Highwood (1972), Brian STABLEFORD's
The Paradise Game (1974) and The Gates of Eden (1983), Stanislaw LEM's
Edem (1959; trans as Eden 1989 US) and Michael D. RESNICK's Paradise
(1989). Many of these works echo the forest fantasies of the great pioneer
of ecological mysticism, W.H. HUDSON. The 1960s also produced two thorough
and detailed accounts of human populations in alien environments which are
particularly impressive: Frank HERBERT's DUNE (fixup 1965), with its
description of life on the desert world Arrakis, and Ursula K. Le Guin's
THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (1969), which describes the life of
hermaphroditic humans on the world of Winter. The scope which sf offered
for much more detailed and considered modelling of alien environments was
increased considerably during this period by virtue of the popularity of
series novels, and, although interest remained focused almost exclusively
on life-systems native to planets habitable by humankind, the foundations
of various notable exercises in long-term "worldbuilding" were laid down.
Marion Zimmer BRADLEY's Darkover series and Anne MCCAFFREY's Pern series
provided models for various subsequent endeavours on a smaller scale. Much
of this work is so heavily romanticized that it exists on the borderline
between sf and FANTASY, being little more realistic in its speculative
components than the Burroughsian romances which it has largely replaced,
but the most competent writers in this vein of planetary romance bring
considerable intelligence to bear on their work; one who has been
consistently ambitious is C.J. CHERRYH, whose descriptions of
other-worldly life in such novels as The Faded Sun (3 vols 1979-80) and
Serpent's Reach (1980) are outstanding.The depiction of authentically
alien life-systems has always been handicapped by the problems involved in
using such systems as backgrounds to entertaining stories. An enormous
amount of work goes into the design of an entire alien world, and it is
not easy to blend that kind of artistry with the less esoteric creation of
sensitive characterization and well-made plots. The most conscientious
efforts of writers like Hal Clement and those who have followed in his
footsteps - including Robert L. FORWARD in The Flight of the Dragonfly

(1984; exp vt Rocheworld 1990) and Larry NIVEN in The Integral Trees
(1984) and The Smoke Ring (1987) - run into acute problems in trying to
integrate the enormous amounts of information they must get across with
some kind of suspenseful narrative; Forward's novel was drastically cut
for its first publication in the interests of finding a reasonable
balance; its later reissue, restoring the additional information for the
benefit of purists, required appendices full of graphs and diagrams.
Novels which attempt to present an image of everyday life on alien worlds,
without the benefit of human observers - notable examples include John
BRUNNER's The Crucible of Time (1984), Brian HERBERT's Sudanna, Sudanna
(1985) and Charles L. HARNESS's Redworld (1986) - suffer inevitable
problems of reader-identification, and tend to take on an ironic, if not
outrightly satirical, edge even if that was not the author's primary
intention. Given these difficulties, it is not entirely surprising that
the most memorable images of other-worldly life are often highly
artificial, contained in stylized narratives whose main purpose is
allegorical. [BS]See also: BIOLOGY; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS;
HIVE-MINDS; LIVING WORLDS.
LIFT, DE
(vt The Lift) Film (1983). Sigma Films. Dir Dick Maas, starring Huub
Stapel, Willeke Van Ammelrooy. Screenplay and music Maas. 99 mins. Colour.
This neat Dutch horror film with an sf rationale, dubbed atrociously into
English, tells of a homicidal lift (elevator) in a high-rise office
building. The lift is controlled by an organic, living computer (biochip),
manufactured in Japan, which has run amuck and reprogrammed itself. The
film belongs to the anti-technology tradition of killer MACHINES, common
in sf cinema, to which also belong DEMON SEED (1977) and RUNAWAY (1984).
[PN]
LIGHT, JOHN
(1943- ) UK writer of unremarkable sf novels, the first for ROBERT HALE
LIMITED: The Well of Time (1981), The Legend of Melgor Erdin (1991) and
Death on Dorado (1993 chap). [JC]
LIGHTNER, A(LICE) M(ARTHA)
(1904-1988) US writer and entomologist who began publishing her sf, all
of which is for children, with "A New Game" for Boy's Life in 1959. Her
first published novel, The Rock of Three Planets (1963) - its sequels were
The Planet Poachers (1965) and The Space Ark (1968) - was followed by
several other effective juveniles, though she came to general sf notice
only with The Day of the Drones (1969), a post- HOLOCAUST story set half a
millennium after a nuclear WAR. (This was actually her first-written
novel; originally written for adults, it had been revised for publication
as a juvenile.) As in Margot BENNETT's The Long Way Back (1954), Black
Africa has survived. The two young protagonists, sent north on an
exploratory mission, discover that the White remnants of UK civilization
have evolved into a hive society ( HIVE-MINDS), and at a high cost save
one (male) drone, who may (or may not) prove acceptable to the Black
society back home. AML also wrote a number of nonfiction books of
dramatized natural science as Alice L. Hopf, her married name. [JC]Other
works: Doctor to the Galaxy (1965); The Galactic Troubadours (1965); The

Space Plague (1966); The Space Olympics (1967); The Thursday Toads (1971);
Star Dog (1973); Gods or Demons? (1973); The Space Gypsies (1974); Star
Circus (1977).See also: CHILDREN'S SF.
LIMITED EDITIONS
SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS.
LINAWEAVER, BRAD
(1952- ) US writer who came to general notice with his first novel, Moon
of Ice (1982 AMZ; exp 1988), set in an ALTERNATE WORLD where a
Nazi-controlled Europe and a freedom-loving USA confront each other in a
nuclear standoff ( HITLER WINS). The original novella (itself revised in
1986) conveys considerable impact in its description of the confrontation
between the supremely pragmatic and practical Joseph Goebbels and a
mystical inner circle of the SS which plans to replace humanity by
Ubermenschen. The novel, which also contains the story of Goebbels's
daughter's life as an anarchist revolutionary and the portrait of an
explicitly LIBERTARIAN US citizen, adds little to the original. [NT]
LINCOLN, MAURICE
Pseudonym of a UK writer, apparently born in 1887, whose two sf novels
display an uneasy bantering tone and slyly cluttered plots which make his
or her identification of some potential interest. In Nothing Ever Happens
(1927) two young UK men are transported to an unlocatable island run by an
impossibly old Master - it is possible T.H. WHITE's similar The Master
(1957) owes some debt to this book - where they are induced to breed with
his daughters and discover that he himself breeds ANDROIDS. In The Man
from Up There (1929) a similar duo discovers - and attempts to profit from
- a Cyclopean giant from the Moon, whose arrival on Earth has stopped all
radio transmissions for days. Eventually the giant goes home. [JC]
LINDBOHM, DENIS
[r] SCANDINAVIA.
LINDGREEN, JORGEN
[r] DENMARK.
LINDHOLM, MEGAN
Pseudonym of US writer Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden (1952- ) who began
publishing short stories for children in her late teens, and whose first
work of genre interest was "Bones for Dulath" in Amazons (anth 1979) ed
Jessica Amando Salmonson, and the characters from which featured in her
first novel, Harpy's Flight (1984), itself the first volume of the
Windsingers fantasy sequence, whose further instalments are The
Windsingers (1984) and The Limbreth Gate (1984), all 3 volumes being
assembled as The Windsingers (omni 1985 UK); plus Luck of the Wheels
(1989). Almost all her 1980s work is fantasy (see Other Works below), most
outstandingly perhaps in Wizard of the Pigeons (1986). Alien Earth (1992),
however, is sf, set initially in what may resembles a GENERATION STARSHIP
environment, though the ship turns out in fact to be sentient and under
the control of an alien boss. Humans are cargo, but the protagonists begin
to make revolutionary discovers about themselves, and their home planet,
which they must reinvigorate. ML also writes as Robin Hobb. [JC]Other

Works: the Reindeer People sequence, comprising The Reindeer People (1988)
and Wolf's Brother (1988), both assembled as A Saga of the Reindeer People
(omni 1989); Cloven Hooves (1991); The Gypsy (1992) with Stephen BRUST;
Silver Lady and the Fortyish Man (1989 IASFM; 1994 chap); Assassin's
Apprentice (1995) as by Robin Hobb.
LINDNER, ROBERT (MITCHELL)
(1914-1956) US psychoanalyst and prison psychologist who reported on his
work in the latter capacity in Rebel Without a Cause (1944). "The
Jet-Propelled Couch", a long narrative essay which appears in The
Fifty-Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales (coll 1955;
vt The Jet-Propelled Couch UK), absorbingly examines and analyses the
sf-based fantasies of one of his patients, who retreated from an
intolerable childhood, adolescence and adulthood through progressive
immersion in an elaborate SPACE-OPERA universe, to which he believed he
was regularly transported and in which he was the ruler of a planet. His
rationalization of his role in this universe was impeccably couched in sf
terms, with alternate time-streams playing a considerable role, and
provides an explanation in extremis for sf's imaginative power over
adolescents. Also of interest is one effect of RL's curative strategy: he
pretended to enter into his patient's universe with him, and eventually
was himself fascinated and almost ensnared by it. Roger ZELAZNY's THE
DREAM MASTER (1966) develops the implications of RL's experience in
bravura fashion. [JC]See also: PARANOIA; PSYCHOLOGY.
LINDSAY, DAVID
(1876-1945) UK writer remembered today almost entirely for his first
novel, A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920), in which he rather high-handedly makes
use of a range of sf and fantasy devices to transport a man to the planet
Tormance, where he is destined to undergo a series of baroque adventures.
In fact the journey to this planet is a mystical inner passage into a
state where ethical precepts, and all the other slings and arrows to which
the protagonist's soul is vulnerable, are embodied in the extraordinary
Tormance lifeforms. The metaphysic thus unfolded is of a compelling
ornateness, and may - it has been suggested - have inspired C.S. LEWIS's
Cosmic Trilogy. The Haunted Woman (1922) is a more conventional FANTASY in
which a similarly allegorical reading of the Ocean of Story is constantly
underlined. The Adventures of M. de Mailly (1926; vt A Blade for Sale 1927
US) is a historical novel, while Sphinx (1923), Devil's Tor (1932) and The
Violet Apple ?
Apple (1978) contains only the first tale. [JC]About the author: The
Strange Genius of David Lindsay (anth 1970) by J.B. Pick, E.H. VISIAK and
Colin WILSON; David Lindsay (1982 chap) by Gary K. WOLFE.See also:
CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; DIME-NOVEL SF; ESCHATOLOGY; FANTASTIC
VOYAGES;
GODS AND DEMONS; HISTORY OF SF; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; MYTHOLOGY;
PERCEPTION.
LINDSAY, RICHARD
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
LINDSAY, (NICHOLAS) VACHEL

(1879-1931) US poet, the clanging primitivism of whose best known work,
the poems assembled in The Congo and Other Poems (coll 1914), may have
been ingenuous. Of sf interest is The Golden Book of Springfield, being
the Review of a Book that will Appear in the Autumn of the year 2018, and
an Extended Description of Springfield, Illinois, in that Year (1920), a
prose work in which a world government is envisioned. [JC]
LINGUISTICS
Linguistics is the study of language, how languages work, what their
function is, how they are constructed and whence they are derived. As a
discipline it has leapt to academic prominence since the 1960s. Languages
play a surprisingly important role in sf, and many stories turn on
linguistic issues. The theme overlaps, naturally, with that of
COMMUNICATIONS, and also to some extent with those of ANTHROPOLOGY and
PERCEPTION, inasmuch as a language tells us a great deal about the culture
that uses it and the way that culture perceives the world. This entry
concentrates primarily on verbal languages in sf. Other ways of giving
information are dealt with under COMMUNICATIONS, and two examples will
suffice here. Terry CARR's "The Dance of the Changer and the Three" (1968)
is set on an alien planet whose natives are energy forms; their language
is dancing; for no clear reason they destroy many humans for whom they
seem to feel no enmity, and survival depends on the correct reading of the
dance. John VARLEY invents a nonverbal linguistic UTOPIA in the 1978 title
story of THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION (coll 1978), in which a sighted man
enters a community of people who are blind and deaf; they communicate
through touch (and sex) in a language more subtle and immediate than he
can at first grasp.Much earlier C.S. LEWIS and J.R.R. TOLKIEN both used
their considerable philological expertise in their fictions. The former's
OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET (1938) speaks interestingly of the different
grammars and vocabularies of the three Martian languages, and plays some
rather facile linguistic tricks to show up what Lewis regarded as the
arrogance of humanistic SCIENTISTS. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (3
vols 1954-5; omni 1968) is unusual in that its very genesis was largely
linguistic: Tolkien invented his imaginary languages (carefully glossed
and explained in the many appendices) before he wrote the books. If we
accept linguistics as a science - it is arguably the "hardest" (or "most
scientific") of the SOFT SCIENCES-then we might argue that the fiction of
Tolkien, usually regarded as FANTASY, at least approaches sf in its
linguistic aspects.Sf stories in which linguistics plays a subsidiary role
are very much more common than sf stories actually about linguistics. Most
writers who set stories in the future (or in the past, if it comes to
that) ignore the problem of language-change, but some have confronted the
problem, with various degrees of success; many of these attempts are
discussed by Walter E. MEYERS in what is by far the best study of the
topic, Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction (1980).
Although sf writers normally realize that their craft requires a good
understanding of the hard sciences (physics, etc.), many have no training
in nor understanding of linguistics; and nor, very often, do they seem to
feel this as a lack. Thus stories turning on points of ALIEN or future
language are often patchy; the ways in which grammar, vocabulary and
speech-sounds evolve do not seem to be widely understood.Examples of sf

stories demonstrating linguistic change, whether fanciful or plausible,
are: Alfred BESTER's "Of Time and Third Avenue" (1951), Bester being
generally very much alive to the forms of language; Robert A. HEINLEIN's
"Gulf" (1949), with its future speedtalk; Anthony BURGESS's A CLOCKWORK
ORANGE (1962), with its NEAR-FUTURE Russian-derived Nadsat slang; George
ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949), with its Newspeak, designed to
reinforce "proper" social attitudes; Poul ANDERSON's "Time Heals" (1949),
with a futurified pronunciation; Felix C. GOTSCHALK's Growing Up in Tier
3000 (1975), where a great variety of future colloquialisms are evoked;
and Michael FRAYN's A Very Private Life (1968), whose future languages are
more lively than plausible. A more generalized linguistic gusto is
displayed in, for example, Benjamin APPEL's The Funhouse (1959), Arthur
Byron COVER's Autumn Angels (1975) and much of the output of R.A.
LAFFERTY.A GENRE-SF writer who is always aware of linguistic problems is
L. Sprague DE CAMP; his article "Language for Time Travelers" (1938) similar material is incorporated into his Science-Fiction Handbook (1953;
rev 1975) - was probably the first account of linguistic problems in sf.
His stories, sometimes rather ploddingly, reflect this interest, as in
"The Wheels of If" (1940), set in an ALTERNATE WORLD where the Norman
Conquest did not take place and so English has never been Frenchified
(although here De Camp gets Grimm's Law of sound-changes quite wrong, in
terms of both its effect and the historical period to which it refers),
and in the Viagens Interplanetarias series, in which the space pidgin
Intermundos is heavily influenced by Brazilian space crews.Orwell's
Newspeak, although the most celebrated example of language-control being
used by the state to impose social conformity and an unthinking acceptance
of the way things are, was by no means the first. Yevgeny ZAMIATIN's We
(trans 1924) has a heavily conformist, mechanical language that reflects
the regimentation of society. Anthony BOUCHER's interesting TIME-TRAVEL
story "Barrier" (1942) likewise features such a language, along with a
daffy collocation of future linguists all researching via TIME MACHINES. A
tour de force of conformist-language creation is the story told by the
Ascian prisoner-of-war in Gene WOLFE's The Citadel of the Autarch (1983),
expressing entirely in patriotic slogans a tale of the individual spirit.
The whole of Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, indeed, is alive with linguistic
invention, not least in its use of words from the classical Greek to
express concepts at once futuristic and archaic.Language is an important
aspect of the above stories, but is not their raison d'etre. Three kinds
of story in which linguistics becomes central are those where humans
communicate with animals (1) or with aliens (2), or endeavour to translate
dead alien languages (3).Two good examples in the first group are Un
animal doue de raison (1967; trans as The Day of the Dolphin 1969) by
Robert MERLE and Slave Ship by Frederik POHL, in both of which animals who
must be spoken to are used as military weapons. Ursula K. LE GUIN's
amusing spoof scientific paper, based on the idea that animals and insects
have not only languages but also artforms, "The Author of the Acacia Seeds
and Other Extracts from The Journal of the Association of
Therolinguistics" (1974), is probably not intended entirely as a joke.
Many stories other than Merle's have looked at cetacean-human
communication, a subject popularized from 1961 in a series of nonfiction
books by the experimental psychologist John C. Lilly. Among such stories

are those in David BRIN's Uplift War sequence, particularly STARTIDE
RISING (1983; rev 1985), whose advanced dolphins have undergone GENETIC
ENGINEERING, and Ted MOONEY's Easy Travel to Other Planets (1981), in
which a love story between woman and dolphin, to which linguistic
questions are central, takes place against a backdrop of global
Information Sickness.First Contact stories ( ALIENS; ANTHROPOLOGY)
necessarily involve linguistics unless, as once was frequent, the issue is
dodged by the use of some kind of magical translation box. However, there
are many such stories that do involve linguistic questions, notably
including the series about galactic intelligence agent Coyote Jones by
Suzette Haden ELGIN, who spent a decade as a professor of linguistics.
John BERRYMAN's "Berom" (1951) has an amusing variant on the theme, in
which incomprehensible visiting aliens turn out to be speaking in a UK
commercial cable code of the 1920s that they have picked up by radio. The
Hoka series by Poul Anderson and Gordon R. DICKSON features aliens who
understand language quite literally, with sometimes comic results. Frank
HERBERT's Whipping Star (1970) conjures up, in a story of humans making
contact with aliens who turn out to be STARS, so intense a miasma of
semantic confusions (as recurs regularly in his work) that the narrative
structure and human interest of the story are very nearly overwhelmed.
Roger ZELAZNY's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" (1963), a verbally brilliant
story with a depth of feeling seldom found in sf, has a poet-linguist
chosen to attempt contact with the few remaining Martians, and to
translate their high language and their holy texts; his complacency is
punctured. Chad OLIVER's The Winds of Time (1957) has some expertly
worked-out descriptive field linguistics in operation in a story of
interstellar aliens waking from SUSPENDED ANIMATION on Earth. Edward
LLEWELLYN's Word-Bringer (1986) is another First Contact story (about an
alien ROBOT emissary to Earth) with linguistic ramifications. The film
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977) ends with a prolonged epiphany
when the occupants of a flying saucer () finally consent to make contact,
communication being initiated through a linguistic code of flickering
lights and a sequence of crashing chords. Another film, ICEMAN (1984), has
a prolongedly earnest linguistic sequence about attempted contact with a
resuscitated Neanderthal ( APES AND CAVEMEN). David I. MASSON, a devoted
student of linguistics, may have written the First Contact story with the
best-informed linguistic detail in "Not So Certain" (1967), which shows
one kind of problem that may bedevil the most well intentioned exo-culture
specialists. This was republished in his The Caltraps of Time (coll 1968),
which also contains the amusing "A Two-Timer" (1966), in which an
inadvertent time traveller from the 17th century describes in his own
English what he finds in the 20th - not least, semantic bafflement.Stories
of archaeological linguistics are less common. H. Beam PIPER's
"Omnilingual" (1957), probably his best story, has a woman seeking a
Rosetta Stone with which to interpret the writings of a dead Martian
civilization; she ultimately finds it in the periodic table of the
elements.Other sf works focusing strongly on linguistics include Hunter of
Worlds (1977) by C.J. CHERRYH, herself a linguist; and the Cuckoo series The Farthest Star (fixup 1975) and Wall Around a Star (1983) - by Frederik
Pohl and Jack WILLIAMSON. These are recent and quite sophisticated, but
one of the best sf books about linguistic problems was much earlier: Jack

VANCE's The Languages of Pao (1958) is one of the most intelligent uses in
genre sf of the idea that the perception of reality by different races is
reflected in, and to a degree actually determined by, the languages they
speak; hence CULTURAL ENGINEERING can be carried out by the teaching of
new languages. In real-life linguistics this view is strongly identified
with the writings of Dr Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941) in his studies of
Native American languages. Whorf's theories of linguistic relativity are
most obviously reflected in sf terms in Samuel R. DELANY's BABEL-17
(1966), a complexly structured novel about communication which takes
language itself as the central image; a web of different languages is
threaded through the spy-story plot, in which an alien code turns out to
be only paradoxically alien. It is Babel-17, a perfect analytical language
which has no word for "I"; this absence Delany sees as its strength and
also its weakness. (Meyers, in his book cited above, admonishes Delany for
not then knowing as much about linguistics as the confident tone of
BABEL-17 might suggest.) Delany's interest in language and linguistic
philosophy has continued, and is reflected in much of his work, including
the curious dialects he created in NOVA (1968) and also his critical book,
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (coll
1977).The use of linguistic devices in the actual telling of a story, to
reflect along Whorfian lines the nature of the human or alien cultures
described, is a difficult narrative skill. Suzette Haden Elgin attempts it
only occasionally in her series Native Tongue (1984) and The Judas Rose
(1987), but there is considerable interest in her account of the creation
of the secret language Womanspeak (or "La'Adan") used by a disempowered
female underclass as one weapon in their struggle to subvert the
self-satisfied world of men. The film MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME (1985), a
post- HOLOCAUST exploitation thriller, is the last place one might have
expected to find a linguistic thesis, but the devolved language of an
isolated community of children is presented with considerable imagination
(and a not inconsiderable beauty). The linguistic tour de force of the
1980s, however, was RIDDLEY WALKER (1980) by Russell HOBAN, a story of a
post-holocaust England actually told in the devolved but vivid language of
its inhabitants; the astonishing thing is not so much the attempt - many
sf writers have done the same thing on a smaller scale - but its success
at novel length. Other sf writers may have had much to say about
linguistic concepts, but none has ever so sustainedly shown such a
language in action, nor so successfully - and movingly - revealed the
culture of its speakers in so doing.If Whorf has been the one powerful
influence on sf linguistic scenarios, another may come to be Noam Chomsky
(1928- ), whose view that all human languages share a deep structure which
is perhaps genetically determined is to some extent at odds with Whorf's
view that our conceptual categorization of the world is determined by our
native language; where Whorf stressed diversity, Chomsky stresses unity.
Sf had added little to this debate, nor seemed very conscious of it, until
1973, when the ideationally exuberant Ian WATSON first attracted the
attention of the sf readership. Most of his novels feature linguistic
thought somewhere in their usually complex structure, and his first, THE
EMBEDDING (1973), is certainly the sf linguistics novel par excellence,
with all three of its subplots linking language and PERCEPTION in
interweaving stories of alien, South American Indian and computer-imposed

languages, and the differing subjective realities they may or may not
succeed in generating. An important essay by Watson is "Towards an Alien
Linguistics" (1975 Vector), reprinted in The Book of Ian Watson (coll 1985
US), in which he considers questions of epistemology and hazards the
thought that there may be "a topological grammar of the universe, which
reflects itself in the grammars of actual languages" - Chomsky writ very
large indeed. Watson is one of those theorists who have used arguments
from quantum mechanics to support the solipsistic view that the Universe
exists as an external structure only through the consciousnesses of its
participants and observers; language, in Watson's scheme, is reflexive,
Nature sending a message to itself - an intellectual position that, if
correct, would place linguistics as the scientific discipline right at the
heart of sf. [PN]Further reading: Aside from those cited above, two useful
texts about linguistics in sf are Linguistics and Language in Science
Fiction-Fantasy (1975) by Myra Edwards BARNES and an interesting essay on
the popular subject of word-coinage by sf writers, "The Words in Science
Fiction" by Larry NIVEN in The Craft of Science Fiction (anth 1976) ed
Reginald BRETNOR.
LINKLATER, ERIC (ROBERT RUSSELL)
(1899-1974) Scottish writer proficient in various genres though best
remembered for his novels, beginning with White Maa's Saga (1929). Much of
his work is fantasy, like The Devil's in the News (1934) and many of the
stories collected in God Likes them Plain (coll 1935), Sealskin Trousers
(coll 1947) and A Sociable Plover (coll 1957). The Impregnable Women
(1938) is a NEAR-FUTURE rewrite of Lysistrata in which the women of Europe
band together, go on sexual strike, and end a futile war ( WOMEN AS
PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION). Similar in attitude were EL's WWII
conversation plays, notably The Raft and Socrates Asks Why (1942 chap),
The Great Ship and Rabelais Replies (1944 chap) and Crisis in Heaven: An
Elysian Comedy (1944 chap), which employed fantasy elements as didactic
pointers. His two children's novels, The Wind on the Moon (1944) and The
Pirates in the Deep Green Sea (1949), are both attractive fantasies, in
the latter of which Davy Jones and all the drowned pirates under the sea
are discovered guarding the great knots that tie latitudes and longitudes
together to keep the world from splitting. A Spell for Old Bones (1949) is
a fantasy set in a mythical 1st-century Scotland. In A Terrible Freedom
(1966) a man finds the characters of his dream world taking over the real
one. [JC]See also: The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION .
LIN YUTANG
Working name of Chinese-US novelist, essayist and academic Lin Yu-t'ang
(1895-1976). In The Unexpected Island (1955 UK; vt Looking Beyond 1955 US)
refugees from several world HOLOCAUSTS establish a conservative UTOPIA on
an isolated ISLAND. [JC]
LIONEL, ROBERT
R.L. FANTHORPE.
LIPPINCOTT, DAVID (McCORD)
(1925-1984) US writer and advertising executive whose NEAR-FUTURE
political thriller E Pluribus Bang! (1970) finds the US President involved

in the murder of a Secret Service agent he finds in bed with his wife.
Tremor Violet (1975) is a DISASTER novel about earthquakes in Los Angeles.
[JC]Other works: Voice of Armageddon (1974); The Blood of October (1977);
Black Prism (1980 UK; vt Dark Prism 1981 US).
LIQUID SKY
Film (1982). Z Films. Dir Slava Tsukerman, starring Anne Carlisle, Paula
E. Sheppard, Susan Doukas, Otto von Wernherr. Screenplay Tsukerman,
Carlisle, Nina V. Kerova. 112 mins. Colour. ALIENS who have landed their
tiny flying saucer on the roof of a Manhattan penthouse observe the lives
of strange young people: fashionable, drug-using, white-faced Punk/New
Wavers. The aliens are attracted to chemicals released when humans use
heroin ("liquid sky") and/or achieve orgasm, killing the humans or causing
them to disappear at the moment of endorphin saturation. When looking
through alien eyes we see this in psychedelic patterns. This elegant,
sometimes funny, sometimes obscene art film, something of an
anthropological documentary about an alienated, self-brutalized human
subculture, was made by a group of Russian emigres in New York effectively aliens themselves - and features a German (that is, alien)
alien-hunter.The novelization is Liquid Sky * (1987) by Anne Carlisle
(1956- ). [PN]See also: SEX.
LISLE, SEWARD D.
Edward S. ELLIS.
LITTELL, JONATHAN
(?1969- ) US writer whose Bad Voltage: A Fantasy in 4/4 (1989) depicts a
CYBERPUNK Paris with confused verve. The young protagonist (he is Black;
the first edition's cover shows him White) moves from underground criminal
activities to the upper world of the rich, which mirrors the lower. The
energies of the book are expended scattershot, but attractively. [JC]
LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, THE
Roger CORMAN.
LI TUNG
[r] LEE TUNG.
LIVIA, ANNA
[r] ANNA LIVIA.
LIVINGSTON, BERKELEY
(1908-1975) US writer whose sf appeared only in the ZIFF-DAVIS magazines
AMZ and Fantastic Adventures. Some 50 stories appeared 1943-50, under
either his own name or the house names Alexander BLADE and Morris J.
Steele. His only book was Meteor of Death (1954 chap Australia). He is
noted for the quantity rather than the quality of his work. [JE/PN]See
also: ILLUSTRATION; LEISURE.
LIVINGSTON, HAROLD
(1924- ) US writer, often of tv scripts, whose fourth book, The
Climacticon (1960), spoofs SEX obsessions in a borderline-sf tale. [JC]
LIVING WORLDS

The notion that a planet might be a living creature is a rather startling
one; indeed, it was initially used purely for its shock value. In R.A.
KENNEDY's remarkable philosophical extravaganza The Triuneverse (1912),
MARS begins to reproduce by binary fission and its daughter cells devour
much of the Solar System. In "When the World Screamed" (1929) by Arthur
Conan DOYLE a hole is drilled through the Earth's "skin" and the living
flesh within reacts against the violation. Other attempts to exploit this
shock value include Edmond HAMILTON's "The Earth-Brain" (1932), Jack
WILLIAMSON's "Born of the Sun" (1934) - in which the Sun is living, the
planets are its eggs, and Earth hatches - and Nelson BOND's "And Lo! The
Bird" (1950). The perishability of easy shock value inevitably gives rise
to an escalation of scale; Laurence MANNING soon took the idea to its
extreme in "The Living Galaxy" (1934).The notion of living STARS seems to
fascinate sf writers more than that of living planets. Austere stellar
intelligences are featured in STAR MAKER (1937) by Olaf STAPLEDON, though
Stapledon discarded a first draft which featured the exploits of
intelligent nebulae; it was later published as Nebula Maker (1976). (An
intelligent nebula, albeit a very small one, figures also in Fred HOYLE's
The Black Cloud, 1957.) There are vestiges here of the occasional medieval
equation of stars and angels, seen also in William Blake's poem "The
Tiger" (1794). More recent examples of living stars are found in Gerard
KLEIN's Starmaster's Gambit (1958; trans 1973), Frederik POHL's and Jack
Williamson's Starchild (1965) and Rogue Star (1969), Frank HERBERT's
Whipping Star (1970) and If The Stars are Gods (fixup 1977) by Gregory
BENFORD and Gordon EKLUND. Living planets have become rare, although
visiting spacemen offend one in Ray BRADBURY's "Here There Be Tygers"
(1951), but planets whose whole ecospheres are single individuals, often
imbued with consciousness, are not uncommon. The planetary spirits in the
Cosmic Trilogy (1938-45) by C.S. LEWIS are somewhat rarefied, as are the
curious world-consciousnesses featured in Theodore STURGEON's "Case and
the Dreamer" (1972) and Neal BARRETT's Stress Pattern (1974), but more
mundane life-systems which comprise single vast organisms are featured in
such stories as Murray LEINSTER's "The Lonely Planet" (1949), Doris
PISERCHIA's Earthchild (1977), M.A. FOSTER's Waves (1980), Brian M.
STABLEFORD's "Wildland" (1989) and Isaac ASIMOV's Nemesis (1989). The most
popular model for such integrated ecospheres is the forest, displayed in
"Process" (1950) by A.E. VAN VOGT, "The Forest of Zil" (1967) by Kris
NEVILLE, and "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971) by Ursula K. LE
GUIN. The most impressive presentation of a truly ALIEN world-intelligence
is Stanislaw LEM's SOLARIS (1961; trans 1970), many features of which are
prefigured in his Edem (1959; trans as Eden 1989). The recent
popularization of James Lovelock's "Gaia hypothesis" has encouraged
writers to pay more attention to highly integrated ecospheres, but the
most radical repersonalization of the Earth is that in David BRIN's Earth
(1990), in which the planet undergoes metamorphosis into a gargantuan AI perhaps the most extravagant deus ex machina ever deployed. [BS]See also:
BIOLOGY; HIVE-MINDS.
LLEWELLYN, (DAVID WILLIAM) ALUN
(1903-1988) UK writer active in several genres, including political
SATIRE. His sf novel The Strange Invaders (1934), like John COLLIER's

Tom's A-Cold (1933), builds upon the deeply felt elegiac mood of Richard
JEFFERIES's post- HOLOCAUST novel After London (1885). Set in a new ice
age and told in an intensely worked, harsh style, it depicts a tribal
society in a future USSR where Marx, Lenin and Stalin are revered as
saints in a barbarian religion; the world has, long ago, been nearly
destroyed by war. The novel's focus is INVASION by great lizard-like
successors to humanity, which the inhabitants of a small settlement
finally defeat at great cost. [JC]Other works: Confound their Politics
(coll1934), political satires set in imaginary countries; Jubilee John
(1939).See also: DISASTER.
LLEWELLYN, EDWARD
Working name of Welsh-born Canadian writer and doctor Edward
Llewellyn-Thomas (1917-1984), who held professorships variously in
pharmacology, medicine, electrical engineering and psychology. Most of his
work is set loosely in the same universe, with his first 3 novels - The
Douglas Convolution (1979 US), The Bright Companion (1980 US) and Prelude
to Chaos (1983 US) - constituting a trilogy about a 22nd-century Earth
suffering from widespread female infertility. The muscularly told first
volume follows the arrival in this world, via TIME TRAVEL, of an ingenious
mathematician, who proves invaluable to the Order of fertile women; the
second presents a tour of the world dominated by this Order; the third is
a weak prequel. In Salvage and Destroy (1984 US) EL moved into SPACE
OPERA, though genetics continues to play a role in a complex plot
involving two immortal species of aliens, one of which becomes involved
with Earth. Fugitive in Transit (1985 US) similarly confronts humans with
representatives of galactic civilization, in this case the Galactic
Transit Authority, which is chasing the woman who has discovered a
stargate. Word-Bringer (1986) presents its protagonist with the discovery
- familiar to readers of Clifford D. SIMAK - that aliens have left on
Earth a device which spreads knowledge for free, engendering all sorts of
scientific advances. Though he did not seem destined to become a major
writer in the field, EL's tales are literate, numerate and attractively
marked by their frequent use of active and personable WOMEN as
protagonists. [JC]See also: CANADA; ESP; LINGUISTICS.
LLOYD, JOHN URI
(1849-1936) US chemist, author of Etidorhpa, or The End of Earth (1895;
rev 1901), a metaphysical FANTASTIC VOYAGE in which the narrator is led by
a blind humanoid to a LOST WORLD in the interior of the Earth, where he
gains occult enlightenment into the higher forms of love (the title is
Aphrodite reversed). Etidorhpa, which went through at least 11 editions,
is noteworthy for its bitter attack on the rational sciences. Like other
notable HOLLOW-EARTH works of the period, it derives from the theories of
John Cleves SYMMES. [JE/JC]
LOBATO, MONTEIRO
[r] LATIN AMERICA.
LOCKE, GEORGE (WALTER)
(1936- ) UK writer, one-time pharmacist, antiquarian bookseller and
bibliographer. He began publishing sf with "The Human Seed" for Authentic

in 1957, and under the name Gordon Walters published a number of sf
stories in the 1960s, but no sf books; his novels, Pattern of Terror
(1987) and A Spectre-Room of Fancy (1989 chap) as by Ayresome Johns, are
detective tales of "impossible crimes" and the supernatural. His most
important publications have been in the BIBLIOGRAPHY of sf and fantasy;
though his researches have been far-ranging, the emphasis has been on
19th-century interplanetary romances, which he annotated in Voyages in
Space: A Bibliography of Interplanetary Fiction, 1801-1914 (1975 chap).
Ferret Fantasy's Christmas Annual for 1972 (1972 chap), Ferret Fantasy's
Christmas Annual for 1973 (1974 chap) and Ferret Fantasy's Christmas
Annual for 1974 (1975 chap), which contains inter alia short
bibliographies of this material, led to the excellent Science Fiction
First Editions: A Select Bibliography and Notes for the Collector (1978
chap). A Spectrum of Fantasy: The Bibliography and Biography of a
Collection of Fantastic Literature (1980), and A Spectrum of Fantasy II:
Acquisitions to a Collection of Fantastic Literature, 1980-1993 (1994),
applied the same combination of bibliographic exactitude and anecdotal
commentary to a description of his own extremely large library. Many books
not previously understood to merit admission to the canon of sf and
fantasy were first cited in these volumes. His SMALL PRESS, Ferret
Fantasy, has so far issued 15 books of sf, fantasy and mystery interest.
[JC]Other works: Worlds Apart (anth 1972), ed, early interplanetary
fiction in facsimile; At the Mountains of Murkiness and Other Parodies
(anth 1973), ed anon; From an Ultimate Dim Thule (1973), a study of
fantasy illustrator Sidney H. Sime, and The Land of Dreams (1975), an
illustrated survey of Sime; The Affair of the Lost Compression and Other
Stories (anth 1975 chap); Guardians of the Lilac Moon, or The Downfall of
Dakeevle the Dire (1980 chap), a tale for children; Thirty Years of
Dustwrappers: 1884-1914 (1988 chap); Pearson's Weekly: A Checklist of
Fiction 1890-1939 (1990).
LOCKE, RICHARD ADAMS
(1800-1871) US journalist and editor, usually regarded as author of the
famous "Moon Hoax". In 1835 several issues of the New York Sun carried
articles purporting to describe the inhabitants of the MOON and their
environs as observed by the distinguished astronomer Sir John Herschel
(1792-1871) through a new, high-magnification telescope. It remains
unclear which of several variously titled chapbook versions of the
original hoax is in fact the original edition. Title variations include
Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel at the
Cape of Good Hope and A Complete Account of the Late Discoveries in the
Moon (both 1835 chap; under first title rev 1841; rev vt The Moon Hoax, or
A Discovery that the Moon has a Vast Population of Human Beings 1859 US;
vt The Great Moon Hoax of Richard Adams Locke 1886). The book has also
been dubiously ascribed to Joseph Nicolas Nicollet, but the consensus is
that the work was indeed RAL's. The effectiveness of the hoax was
comparable to the reactions to Edgar Allan POE's "Balloon Hoax" (1844 New
York Sun), which was purchased for the paper by RAL, then one of its
editors, and the Orson Welles broadcast of The WAR OF THE WORLDS (1938).
The Moon Hoax, or A Discovery that the Moon has a Vast Population of Human
Beings (anth 1859; exp with new intro by Ormond Seavey 1975) presents the

original text plus later material. [JE]See also: ASTRONOMY.
LOCKHARD, LEONARD
[s] Charles L. HARNESS; Theodore L. THOMAS.
LOCUS
US SEMIPROZINE, 1968-current, ed Charles N. BROWN (calling himself
Charlie Brown in earlier days), published by Locus Publications (in
Oakland, California, since the 1970s), 412 issues to May 1995. Locus was
founded in New York by Brown with Ed Meskys and Dave Vanderwerf as a
one-sheet news FANZINE; when Brown's partners dropped out, his then wife
Marsha Brown joined him as co-editor. At that time the magazine appeared
between fortnightly and monthly. Brown divorced, became sole editor,
remarried in 1970, and his new wife Dena Brown became the new co-editor.
Locus (and the Browns) moved to the San Francisco area in 1972, a year
after winning its first of many Best Fanzine HUGOS.In 1976 Charles Brown
gave up his job as an electrical engineer and began to edit Locus
full-time (Dena Brown had worked full-time on it 1972-5). He divorced
again in 1977, and since then has been sole editor; the magazine
effectively became a semiprozine at this point, since Brown was attempting
to earn a living from it alone; the first paid employee was hired in 1977.
During the 1970s the newsletter became a monthly, increased in size, and
began (from 1974) listing all sf books published in the USA. By 1980 the
circulation had topped 5000, reaching 7000 in 1984. In 1983 it increased
to 48pp an issue and switched to computer setting; it became fully
desk-top published with laser typesetting from 1986.By the 1990s Locus
(74pp as of June 1992 and varying between 70pp to 86pp more recently) had
long been established as the trade newspaper of sf; its paid circulation
has varied around 8,100-8,700 between 1988 and 1994, falling off slightly
from the high of 1990. Its clear superiority over all other news magazines
in the field has been confirmed by the astonishing number of Hugos (17) it
has now received: eight for Best Fanzine to 1983, and a further nine
1984-1992 for Best Semiprozine; i.e., a Hugo for the first nine years in
which the latter category has been in existence. The predictability of
Locus's annual Hugo, which had proved irritating to some in the sf world,
proved illusory when SCIENCE FICTION COMMENTARY won in this category in
1993 and 1994. Wholly professional in appearance, Locus excels in its news
coverage (with regular columns from overseas, including the UK and much of
Europe, Australia, Russia, China and occasionally various Latin American
countries). Its book-review coverage is very ample, taking up a large
proportion of the magazine. Brown's policy of not printing strongly
adverse reviews, while understandable in view of the magazine's reliance
on the book trade for advertising, is unfortunate. The policy matters less
in practice than in theory, since most reviews are intelligent and well
informed, although some readers find them somewhat bland overall.
Nonetheless, Locus is indispensable for professionals in the sf field, and
was one of the most important references used in the compilation of this
encyclopedia. Locus polls its readers annually about their favourites in
different categories of sf publishing ( AWARDS), and there is a case for
arguing that the Locus Awards are more securely based across the sf
readership than are the more celebrated Hugos. Locus also surveys annually

its subscribers' ages, occupations, reading habits, etc. Locus
Publications also publishes books (for further details of which Charles N.
BROWN and William CONTENTO). [PN]
LOCUS AWARDS
AWARDS.
LOFTING, HUGH
[r] CHILDREN'S SF.
LOGAN, CHARLES
(1930- ) UK writer, and nurse for the mentally handicapped. Shipwreck
(1975) won the 1975 Gollancz/Sunday Times sf contest jointly with Chris
BOYCE's Catchworld (1975). Calmly and inexorably, it tells the story of
the inevitable death of a man whose spaceship lands disabled on a planet
whose ECOLOGY is unfriendly to human survival. That this grim antiROBINSONADE presents the most likely outcome of such an occurrence has not
made it any more popular with sf fans. [JC]
LOGAN'S RUN
1. Film (1976). MGM/United Artists. Dir Michael Anderson, starring
Michael York, Jenny Agutter, Richard Jordan, Peter Ustinov, Farrah
Fawcett-Majors. Screenplay David Zelag Goodman, based on Logan's Run
(1967) by William F. NOLAN and George Clayton JOHNSON. 118 Mins.
Colour.One of the largest, most "prestigious" sf films of the decade, this
was also one of the most sluggish, reducing its lively source, Nolan's and
Johnson's novel, to a bland affair whose lavishness is all decoration, no
substance. Set in a domed city where no one is allowed to pass their 30th
birthday - official killers, "Sandmen", disposing of those who refuse
their ritual suicide - the film concerns a renegade Sandman and his
girlfriend, who attempt to reach the legendary "Sanctuary" outside. But
Sanctuary does not exist; instead they find a mildewed Washington DC,
inhabited by the only living old man. They decide that old age is a good
thing and return to the dome to spread the news. During interrogation, the
reformed Sandman confuses the city COMPUTER to the point where it blows
itself up, along with the city.LR's youth autocracy exists in a conceptual
vacuum and is riddled with contradiction, and the film's attack on its
sterile UTOPIA is - typically of much patronizing sf cinema of the period
- simplistic to the point of banality. There are livelier film versions of
the theme, one being GAS-S-S-S (1970).2. US tv series (1977-8), based on
the film. An MGM TV Production for CBS. Prod Ben Roberts, Ivan Goff.
Executive prod Leonard Katzman. Story editor D.C. FONTANA. Writers
included Fontana, Saul David, Harlan ELLISON. Dirs included Paul Krasny,
Curtis Harrington. 1 season, 75min pilot plus 13 50min episodes.
Colour.The two men who created and produced the popular crime-busting
programme Charlie's Angels - both admitted they knew nothing about sf made this short-lived tv series designed to exploit the film. For
budgetary reasons the series was set outside the film's domed city. It
concerns the adventures of Logan (Gregory Harrison), Jessica (Heather
Menzies) and Rem (Donald Moffat), the latter - a comic ANDROID with
nonbiological components - having been hastily introduced to exploit the
popularity of the two ROBOTS in STAR WARS (1977). These three characters

search for Sanctuary while pursued by deadly Sandmen from the city, moving
from one DYSTOPIAN situation to another, all this portrayed at the level
of comic-book stereotype. [JB/PN]
LOGGEM, MANUEL van
[r] BENELUX.
LOGSDON, SYD
(?1950- ) US writer whose first sf novel, Jandrax (1979), is a PLANETARY
ROMANCE about a sexually active scout who is also tough on planets. SL's
second, A Fond Farewell to Dying (1978 Gal as "To Not Go Gently"; exp
1981), is a far more interesting post- HOLOCAUST tale set in 23rd-century
India. A longstanding conflict with a Muslim nation to the north frames
the humanly complex story of a Westerner's research into cloning ( CLONES)
to compensate for the post-nuclear sterilization suffered by most of the
world. The sense that cloning barbarously parodies Hindu beliefs in
REINCARNATION permeates the text, whose very considerable competence makes
SL's subsequent silence all the more regrettable. [JC]
LOHRMAN, PAUL
House name used on the ZIFF-DAVIS magazines by Richard SHAVER, Paul W.
FAIRMAN and perhaps others on 7 stories 1950-53. "The World of the Lost"
(Fantastic Adventures 1950) has been definitely attributed to Shaver. [PN]
LOIS ?
US tv series (1993- ). December 3rd Productions/Warner Bros. Developed
for television by DeborahJoy LeVine. Exec prods David Jacobs, Robert
Singer; co-exec prods Deborah Joy LeVine, Jim Crocker; co-prods Philip J.
Sgriucia, Jim Michaels, John McNamara; supervising prods Randall Zisk,
Tony Blake ?
dir Robert Butler. Other writers include Crocker, Bryce Zabel, Robert
Killebrew, Thania St. John, Dan Levine; other directors include Zisk, Gene
Reynolds, Mark Sobel, Robert Singer, James R. Bagdonas. Starring Dean Cain
as Clark Kent and Teri Hatcher as Lois Lane; also starring Lane Smith as
Perry White, Michael Landes (first season) and Justin Whalen (second
season) as Jimmy Olsen, Tracy Scoggins as Cat Grant, K Callan as Martha
Kent, Eddie Jones as Jonathan Kent and John Shea as Lex Luthor. Two
seasons to date, 1993-1995, one-hour episodes, colour.This is the third
live-action tv spin-off from the comic SUPERMAN, the first being The
Adventures of Superman (1953-7), and the second being SUPERBOY (1988-91).
This is not a particularly revisionist version except perhaps for
Superman's outfit being made by his mother. In a formulaic manner each
week sees Superman battling against a villain (often a superscientist of
some sort), and normally an sf element such as invisibility or a cyborg
criminal. The main ongoing suspense is provided, traditionally enough, by
the never quite consummated love triangle between Clark Kent, Lois Lane
(Hatcher is beautiful but waspish) and Clark's alter ego Superman. The
series, which appears slanted towards a teenage audience, has enjoyed mild
success in the ratings, and in the US is screened on the ABC network. [PN]
LONDON, JACK
Working name of US writer John Griffith London (1876-1916), known
primarily for his work outside the sf field. After leaving school at the

age of 14, JL spent 7 years of adventure and hardship as an oyster pirate,
sailor, hobo, prisoner and Klondike gold-seeker. During this period, he
gave himself an education steeped in the most influential scientific and
philosophic theories of the late 19th century - Darwinism ( EVOLUTION;
SOCIAL DARWINISM), Nietzscheism and Marxism ( ECONOMICS; POLITICS) - which
he was to amalgamate in his voluminous writings. These writings consist of
adventure tales, socialist essays and fiction, autobiographical
narratives, and about 20 works of sf, including 4 novels.His first sf
story, "A Thousand Deaths" (1899), combines some key themes of
19th-century sf: a cold-hearted lone SCIENTIST uses his own son in
revivification experiments and is then dematerialized by a superweapon
invented by the son. "The Rejuvenation of Major Rathbone" (1899) displays
a "rejuvenator" extracted from a "lymph compound". "The Shadow and the
Flash" (1903) has two competing scientific geniuses attaining
INVISIBILITY, one by perfecting a pigment that absorbs all light, the
other by achieving pure transparency. In "The Enemy of All the World"
(1908) a lone genius invents a superweapon and terrorizes the world.
Racism runs through much of JL's sf, most shockingly in "The Unparalleled
Invasion" (1910): after the White nations have wiped out the Chinese with
an aerial germ-warfare assault, a joyous epoch can begin of "splendid
mechanical, intellectual, and art output". One major area of JL's sf is
the prehistoric world ( ANTHROPOLOGY; ORIGIN OF MAN), which is explored in
Before Adam (1906), his first sf novel - which uses a favourite theme,
atavism, as a device to project a consciousness into the past - as well as
in "The Strength of the Strong" (1911). Atavism appears also in "When the
World was Young" (1910), in which a "magnificent" and "yellow-haired"
savage shares the body of a successful California businessman, and in The
Star Rover (1915; vt The Jacket 1915 UK), a novel based partly on the
reported revelations of one Ed Morrell, who had experienced a dissociation
of mind from body under torture in San Quentin. In The Scarlet Plague
(1912 London Magazine; 1914) human history is viewed as cyclical; the
post- HOLOCAUST world of the NEAR FUTURE has reverted to primitive tribal
existence. The novella "The Red One" (1918) describes a contemporary
stone-age society that has turned a mysterious sphere from outer space
into the centrepiece of a death cult.Several of JL's sf works deal with
the struggle between the capitalist class, trying to establish a fascist
oligarchy, and the proletariat, striving for socialism. "A Curious
Fragment" (1908), set in the 28th century, shows one of the ruling
oligarchs encountering a severed arm bearing a petition from his
industrial slaves, though a more optimistic view appears in "Goliah"
(1908), in which a "scientific superman" masters the ultimate energy
source, Energon, becomes master of the world's fate, and inaugurates a
millennium of international socialism; both stories are assembled in
Curious Fragments: Jack London's Tales of Fantasy Fiction ed Dale L.
Walker (coll 1975). In "The Dream of Debs" (1909) a near-future general
strike brings the capitalist class to its knees. JL's finest achievement
in sf, and perhaps his masterpiece, is the DYSTOPIAN The Iron Heel (1907),
which predicts a 20th-century fascist oligarchy in the USA and recounts,
through documents discovered by scholars in the socialist 27th century,
the epic revolutionary struggle of the enslaved proletariat.Many of JL's
shorter works can be found reprinted in The Science Fiction of Jack London

ed Richard Gid Powers (coll 1975), which also has a good introduction.
[HBF]About the author: Jack London: A Bibliography (last rev 1973) by H.C.
Woodbridge; Jack London (1984 chap) by Gorman Beauchamp.See also:
DISASTER; HISTORY OF SF; MEDICINE; PULP MAGAZINES; REINCARNATION;
TABOOS.
LONG, CHARLES R(USSELL)
(1904-1978) US writer whose 2 routine sf novels are Infinite Brain (1957)
and The Eternal Man (1964). Both are filled with action, the first on a
distant planet, the second on an Earth replete with human and alien
immortals. [JC]
LONG, DUNCAN
(1949- ) US writer and editor of a SURVIVALIST newsletter. His first
novel, Anti-Grav Unlimited (1988), features a super-competent
tinker/inventor hero ( EDISONADE) who - in a post- HOLOCAUST atmosphere
almost perfectly designed to serve as an arena for his exploits - uses his
ingenious ANTIGRAVITY device to defeat a corporate cabal. The book is well
crafted. [JC]
LONG, FRANK BELKNAP
(1903-1994) US writer of sf and fantasy whose working life extended from
1924 to the 1980s; he was married to Lyda Belknap LONG. He produced poetry
very early, the best of it appearing in A Man from Genoa and Other Poems
(coll 1926) and The Goblin Tower (1935), but is most noted for the weird
fantasy he wrote from the beginning of his fiction career, publishing his
first stories, "The Desert Lich" and "Death Waters" in WEIRD TALES in
1924. Influenced by H.P. LOVECRAFT, who had promoted the acceptance of his
first work and who remained a close colleague until his death in 1937, FBL
tended to create worlds in his mentor's style with a slender sf base. He
frequently told of his friendship, personal and professional, with
Lovecraft, and gave additional details in the valuable introduction and
running notes to The Early Long (coll 1976), which assembles stories from
1924-44, the period of his prime as a writer of sf and fantasy. The
contents of his first ARKHAM HOUSE volume, The Hounds of Tindalos (coll
1946; cut 1963), were variously excerpted as The Dark Beasts (coll 1963)
and The Black Druid and Other Stories (coll 1975 UK); these stories
represent the cream of his work. A more recent Arkham collection, The Rim
of the Unknown (coll 1972), draws from the same prime material.The
post-WWII years saw a change of emphasis in FBL's long career, with much
more sf being written and published, beginning with John Carstairs: Space
Detective (coll of linked stories 1949) which, with "The Ether Robots"
(1942) and "The Heavy Man" (1943), formed a series about John Carstairs,
detective and biological expert. Most of FBL's sf deals with future-Earth
situations, space travel occurring relatively infrequently (Space Station
No 1 [1957 dos] occurs off Earth, but the setting is not too distant),
though much of his earlier sf featured TIME TRAVEL. Several of his sf
books concentrate on INVASION plots in which aliens menace our world, as
in Lest Earth be Conquered (1966; vt The Androids 1969 US) and Journey
into Darkness (1967); others, like It was the Day of the Robot (1963) and
This Strange Tomorrow (1966), depict intrigue-filled future-Earth
societies. Some of his later books, like Survival World (1971) and The

Night of the Wolf (1972), a HORROR fantasy, are among his better works.
FBL has published hundreds of short stories over his career, in addition
to those collected in his own books; a proper estimate of his stature will
have to take them into account, as well as the more routine sf novels of
his later years, which for some time obscured the shorter work for which
he will finally be remembered. His full-length study, Howard Phillips
Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside (1975), is also of interest. [JC]Other
works: Woman from Another Planet (1960); The Mating Center (1961); Mars is
my Destination (1962); Three Steps Spaceward (1953 Fantastic Universe as
"Little Men of Space"; 1963); The Horror from the Hills (1931 Weird Tales;
1963); Odd Science Fiction (coll 1964; vt The Horror from the Hills 1965
UK, not to be confused with the 1963 US title, which prints the novel
only); The Martian Visitors (1964); Mission to a Star (1958 Satellite;
1964); So Dark a Heritage (1966); . . . And Others Shall be Born (1968
dos); The Three Faces of Time (1969); Monster from Out of Time (1970); In
Mayan Splendor (coll 1977), poetry; When Chaugnar Wakes (1978 chap), poem;
Night Fear (coll 1979) ed Roy TORGESON; Rehearsal Night (1981 chap);
Autobiographical Memoir (1985 chap).As Lyda Belknap Long:To the Dark
Tower(1969)Fire of the Witches(1971)The Shape of Fear(1971)The Witch
Tree(1971)Hour of the Deadly Nightshade(1972)Legacy of Evil(1973)andThe
Crucible of Evil(1974)See also: LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS);
PARALLEL WORLDS; ROBERT HALE LIMITED; SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED
EDITIONS.
LONG, LYDA BELKNAP
[r] Hyperlink to: Frank Belknap LONG.
LONG, WESLEY
[s] George O. SMITH.
LONGBEARD, FREDERICK
[s] Barry B. LONGYEAR.
LONGEVITY
IMMORTALITY.
LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS)
A curious phenomenon in GENRE SF is the extreme longevity of some of its
writers and many of its publications. In referring to the longevity of
writers, we mean their professional lives rather than the span between
their births and deaths. Although sf careers spanning more than 50 years
are not usual, neither are they especially uncommon. The present records
may be those held by Jack WILLIAMSON (1908- ), whose first published story
was "The Metal Man" (1928) in AMZ and who was still writing at the time of
Beachhead (1992), a span of 64 years; and by Frank Belknap LONG (1903- ),
whose first published story was "The Desert Lich" (1924) in Weird Tales,
and who was active at least until 1986, making a span of 62 years. Others
to break the 50-year mark have included Lloyd Arthur ESHBACH (1910- ), who
has published comparatively little fiction but has played an important
role in sf publishing, and whose writing career nevertheless runs 60 years
from "The Man with the Silver Disc" (1930) to The Scroll of Lucifer
(1990); Andre NORTON (1912- ), whose first novel, not sf, was The Prince
Commands (1934) - her first sf being "The People of the Crater" (1947) as

by Andrew North - and whose most recent book is Songsmith (1992) with A.C.
CRISPIN, a span of 58 years; Raymond Z. GALLUN (1910- ), who began with
"The Space Dwellers" (1929) and whose most recent novel was Bioblast
(1985), a span of 56 years (increased to 62 years if we take into account
his sf memoir Starclimber [1991]); Clifford D. SIMAK (1904-1988), whose
first published sf was "The World of the Red Sun" (1931) and whose last
was Highway of Eternity (1986), a span of 55 years; L. Sprague DE CAMP
(1907- ), who began with "The Isolinguals" (1937) and who recently
published The Swords of Zinjaban (1991) with his wife Catherine A. Crook
de Camp, a span of 54 years; Frederik POHL (1919- ), who published a slew
of short stories under pseudonyms in 1940-41 and whose most recent book is
Mining the Oort (1992), a span of 52 years; Fritz LEIBER (1910-1992), who
began with "Two Sought Adventure" (1939) in Unknown and whose late
collection The Leiber Chronicles: Fifty Years of Fritz Leiber (coll 1990)
ed Martin H. GREENBERG announces his writing lifespan on the cover; and
Murray LEINSTER (1896-1975), whose first published sf was "The Runaway
Skyscraper" (1919) and whose last was Land of the Giants No 3: Unknown
Danger (1969), a span of 50 years. Among non-genre writers who
nevertheless published several books of sf, the prolific Eden PHILLPOTTS
(1862-1960) had altogether a 70-year career (1889-1959), and his fantasy
writing career ran 54 years from A Deal With the Devil (1895) to Address
Unknown (1949). Even a comparative youngster, in terms of natural
lifespan, like Isaac ASIMOV (1920-1992), whose career began when he was
very young with "Marooned Off Vesta" (1939), managed a 50-year span up to
the solo novel Nemesis (1989), and indeed continued to write stories,
collaborative novels and articles until only months before his death early
in 1992. Robert A. HEINLEIN (1907-1988), even though he began writing
quite late, managed 48 years between "Lifeline" (1939) and To Sail Beyond
the Sunset (1987).The lengths of these professional lives and of others
like them are not merely trivial material for the record books. They came
about partly because the sf community, made up of writers, editors,
publishers, agents, critics and fans, exists as a community - a community
which, sometimes sentimentally, and in the face of a clear decline in
their writing power, cares for its elders (although surprisingly many have
continued to write well, Fritz Leiber being a particularly clear example).
It is ironic that the literature of the future is, to a degree, in the
hands of men and women of the past; and there is no doubt that many young
writers, trying to get published, have cursed the names of Asimov or
Heinlein, who not only took up valuable space in the bookstores but also,
it must have seemed, would never stop writing.The longevity of these
careers is matched by the longevity of the texts. There is no other genre
which keeps its classic texts in print or focuses on its past with
anything like the same selfconscious zeal as sf does. In sf, work dating
as far back as the mid-1930s, like the Lensman books of E.E. "Doc" SMITH,
was still finding new readers in the 1980s. The writers of the GOLDEN AGE
OF SF - Asimov, Heinlein, Simak, James BLISH, A.E. VAN VOGT, Ray BRADBURY,
Arthur C. CLARKE and many others - are recycled for each generation
(though some, like Simak and van Vogt, seem at last to be fading from
sight). The same is true of more recent classics (some of them almost 40
years old now) by Jack VANCE, Frank HERBERT, Philip K. DICK and a host of
others.The oddity of this is that contemporary visions of the future exist

side-by-side with rivals that, in the context of our century of rapid
change, are ancient history. What confuses the issue further is the
tendency of sf, like the Worm Ouroboros, to eat its own tail (or its own
parents). There is a strangely conservative self-cannibalism in the sf
culture, always redigesting "new" ideas which might easily be 60 years
old, and this practice is not restricted to its lower echelons. Of all
genres, one might expect sf-with its focus on change and the future - to
be the one whose cutting edge would be continually resharpened. But, faced
with the actual situation, we might cynically propose that sf is more like
a wave, whose constituent molecules - the writers working at any one time
- are always changing, but which seems as it approaches us to be exactly
the same wave it was while still distant.There are good aspects, however,
to the longevity of successful sf texts. Sf's generic stability is a
function of its past co-existing with its present, and it is for this
reason, too, that sf's icons take on such density and richness, so that it
has become the most resonant of all popular literatures. Its words and its
metaphors and its narrative structures carry not just the burden of
yesterday but also that of some of yesterday's excitement (and these
images are not static; they slowly grow and change with the years, like a
tree).An sf that was always genuinely new would be intolerable; it would
concuss us with future shock. The reward for sf's longevity is that it
remains workable; the cost, too often, is that it is also kept familiar
and safe. [PN]
LONGWAY, A. HUGH
Andrew LANG.
LONGYEAR, BARRY B(ROOKES)
(1942- ) US writer and editor who ran a printing company with his wife
before beginning to write in 1977. He soon published his first sf story,
"The Tryouts" for IASFM in 1978. Before his 1981 hospitalization for
alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs - an experience which forms
the basis of the non-sf novel Saint Mary Blue (1988) - he had already
published prolifically, sometimes as by Frederick Longbeard. Most of the
short fiction for which he remains best known was soon released, most
notably the stories assembled in Manifest Destiny (coll 1980), which
explore their shared universe - dominated by a ruthlessly expanding Earth
- with considerable intensity. Enemy Mine (1979 IASFM; 1989 chap dos),
which appeared in that volume, won both HUGO and NEBULA and was filmed as
ENEMY MINE (1985); with the collaboration of David GERROLD, BBL novelized
the film version as Enemy Mine * (1985). In both versions, a human and an
ALIEN, caught in the bitter conflict occasioned by human expansion, are
isolated together on a primitive planet and must cooperate or die. The
Tomorrow Testament (1983) is a loose sequel to the tale, reiterating in
competently extended form its lessons.At the same time, BBL began to
publish his Circus sequence - comprising, in order of internal chronology,
City of Baraboo (coll of linked stories 1980), Elephant Song (1982) and
Circus World (coll of linked stories 1981) - about the escape of a circus
troop from Earth, its misadventures, its colonizing of the planet Momus,
and the final triumph of its representatives as an interstellar act. Most
of the contents of It Came from Schenectady (coll 1984) had first appeared

by 1981. In 1980 BBL won the JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for Best New
Writer.After the gap caused by his hospital experience, BBL returned to
active work with a sharp DYSTOPIA about OVERPOPULATION, Sea of Glass
(1987), told from the viewpoint of a child whose birth was illegal but
promulgated by the COMPUTER which struggles coldly to deal with the huge
excess of humans on the planet. Later novels like Naked Came the Robot
(1988), The God Box (1989), Infinity Hold (1989) and The Homecoming (1989)
are variously of interest, but exhibit some intermittent sense of fatigue.
At the same time, the alert clarity and genre cunning of BBL's best work
seem potentially available to him, and may surface at any point in the
1990s. [JC]Other works: Science Fiction Writer's Workshop - I: An
Introduction to Fiction Mechanics (1980); two Alien Nation tv ties: The
Change *(1994), which novelizes an unproduced script, and Slag Like
Me*(1994), which novelizes material from a cancelled season.See also:
ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE.
LONNERSTRAND, STURE
[r] SCANDINAVIA.
LOOKER
Film (1981). Ladd Co./Warner Bros. Dir Michael CRICHTON, starring Albert
Finney, James Coburn, Susan Dey, Leigh Taylor-Young. Screenplay Crichton.
94 mins cut to 90 mins. Colour.L was intended by Crichton as a comedy, but
the studio wanted a suspense thriller, and the result falls confusingly
between the two. Three models, after having undergone surgery to make them
even more beautiful, are murdered, and the plastic surgeon (Finney)
wonders why. Villainous company Digital Matrix, whose employees have guns
which create time-lapses in the victims, plans to use computer-generated
human images (the murder of their human originals is never explained) in a
tv advertising campaign designed to exploit the LOOKER (Light
Ocular-Oriented Kinetic Emotive Responses) system for mind-control by
hypnosis. L seems to be badly cut, since it is full of loose ends and non
sequiturs. The sequences of computer imaging are striking, the SATIRE
against the advertising business heavy-handed. [PN]
LOOMIS, NOEL (MILLER)
(1905-1969) US writer and editor, active in the magazine field for some
time, publishing work under his own name and as Benjamin Miller, and a
book as by Silas Water. Though his first novel, Murder Goes to Press
(1937), was a thriller, he was most successful as an author of Westerns.
In his first sf novel, City of Glass (1942 Startling Stories; exp 1955),
based on his first sf story, three men are time-warped into a desolate
distant future on Earth; "Iron Men" (1945) is a sequel. A second novel,
The Man with Absolute Motion (1955) as by Silas Water, is likewise set in
a desolate venue; in this case the Universe is running out of energy.
After saving the Universe, the eponymous hero takes an Eve figure back to
a depopulated Earth, and plans to breed. [JC]
LOOSLEY, WILLIAM ROBERT
[r] David LANGFORD.
LORAN, MARTIN
John BAXTER.

LORD, GABRIELLE
(1946- ) Australian author, mostly of thrillers, who has been publishing
novels since 1980. Her fourth, Salt (1990), is a routine post- HOLOCAUST
novel set in Australia in AD2075, the holocaust having been the product of
OVERPOPULATION, POLLUTION and dreadful damage to the ECOLOGY. [PN]
LORD, JEFFREY
Lyle Kenyon ENGEL; Roland GREEN; Ray NELSON; Manning Lee STOKES.
LORD OF THE FLIES
1. Film (1963). Allen-Hodgdon Productions/Two Arts. Dir Peter Brook,
starring James Aubrey, Tom Chapin, Hugh Edwards, Roger Elwin. Screenplay
Brook, based on The Lord of the Flies (1954) by William GOLDING. 91 mins.
B/w.Set in the NEAR FUTURE, the film concerns a group of English
schoolboys whose plane crash-lands on a remote island. With two exceptions
the boys quickly revert to savagery, resulting in the murder of one of
them. LOTF can be interpreted in several ways: as a demonstration of the
validity of the belief in Original Sin; as a variation on H.G. WELLS's
theme that civilization is only skin-deep (also demonstrated by the
implication that WWIII is taking place elsewhere); or as an indictment of
the English public-school system. It is an honest but "literary" (and not
very cinematic) rendition of a story that works better as a novel.2. Film
(1990). Castle Rock Entertainment/Nelson Entertainment/A Jack's
Camp/Signal Hill production. Dir Harry Hook, starring Balthazar Getty,
Chris Furrh, Daniel Pipoly. Screenplay Sarah Schiff, based on the Golding
novel. 90 mins. Colour.This updated remake (the boys are US rather than
UK) is well made, and its less than reverent adherence to its
distinguished source does not hurt it. The main adaptation is to modify
the hanged pilot of the original into a badly injured pilot who arrives on
the island with the boys, crawls into a cave and comes to be regarded as a
MONSTER. [JB/PN]
LORDS OF THE DEEP
Roger CORMAN.
LORINCZ, LASZLO L.
[r] HUNGARY.
LORRAH, JEAN
(c1942- ) US writer and academic, professor of English at Murray State
University in Kentucky. For the sf reader her writing career has perhaps
seemed to lack focus, being broken into three areas of concentration.
After fan involvement in the Star Trek OPEN UNIVERSE, she began publishing
sf with the first of her collaborations with Jacqueline LICHTENBERG, First
Channel (1980), a volume in the latter's Sime/Gen sequence; though this
and Channel's Destiny (1982) and Zelerod's Doom (1986) are worthy
companions to Lichtenberg's solo efforts, JL was perceived as the junior
partner in the enterprise, a perception modified by the publication of her
solo venture in the sequence, Ambrov Keon (1986). Her second area of
concentration was the Savage Empire series of fantasies concerning MAGIC:
Savage Empire (1981), Dragon Lord of the Savage Empire (1982), Captives of
the Savage Empire (1984), Flight to the Savage Empire (1986) with Winston

A. Howlett, Sorcerers of the Frozen Isles (1986), Wulfston's Odyssey: A
Tale of the Savage Empire (1987) with Howlett, and Empress Unborn (1988).
It is with her third focus, novels written for STAR TREK and STAR TREK:
THE NEXT GENERATION, that she has become perhaps most identified: Full
Moon Rising * (1976 chap), The Night of the Twin Moons * (1976), Epilogue,
Part 1 * (1979 chap) and Epilogue, Part 2 * (1979 chap), Jean Lorrah's
Sarek Collection * (coll 1980), The Vulcan Academy Murders * (1984) and
The IDIC Epidemic * (1988) are contributions to Star Trek proper, and
Survivors * (1989) and Metamorphosis * (1990) contributions to Star Trek:
The Next Generation. [JC]
LORRAINE, ALDEN
[s] Forrest J. ACKERMAN.
LORRAINE, LILITH
One of at least 5 pseudonyms of Mary Maude Wright (nee Dunn) (1894-1967),
US writer, poet, editor and radio lecturer, who regularly published sf in
the 1930s PULP MAGAZINES. The Brain of the Planet (1929 chap), from Hugo
GERNSBACK's Science Fiction series, is a FEMINIST socialist UTOPIA, as is
her "Into the 28th Century" (1930 Science Wonder Quarterly). Her favourite
themes included classless societies, revised gender roles and ESP. Between
1937 and 1967 she also edited poetry magazines and wrote much verse,
including Banners of Victory (coll 1937 chap), Beyond Bewilderment (coll
1942 chap), They (1943 chap), The Day before Judgement (coll 1944 chap)
and Trailing Clouds of Glory (coll 1947 chap), Call on the Rocks 1944-47
(coll 1947 chap); Let the Patterns Break (omni 1947) assembles the
previous volumes. The later Wine of Wonder (coll 1951 chap) was advertised
as being the first volume of POETRY devoted to sf. It is hard to say that
LL had an individual voice, though she did at times effectively translate
common poetic idioms into sf terms. In 1940 she founded Avalon, a poetry
association. [JD/JC]About the author: "Empress of the Stars" by Steve
Sneyd in Fantasy Commentator #43, 1992.
LORRAINE, PAUL
House name for CURTIS WARREN used by William Henry BIRD for Two Worlds
(1952), John Russell FEARN for Dark Boundaries (1953) and John S. GLASBY
for Zenith-D (1952). [PN/JC]
LORY, ROBERT (EDWARD)
(1936- ) US public relations adviser and writer who began publishing sf
with "Rundown" for Worlds of If in 1963; his stories have been assembled
as A Harvest of Hoodwinks (coll 1970 dos). His sf novels, mostly light,
fantasy-laced adventures, are unambitious but competent; they include
Identity Seven (1974) and The Thirteen Bracelets (1974). The Trovo series
- The Eyes of Bolsk (1969 dos) and Master of the Etrax (1970) - and the
Shamryke Odell sequence - Masters of the Lamp (1970 dos) and The Veiled
World (1972 dos) - are SCIENCE FANTASY of an undemanding sort. [JC]Other
works: 2 horror/fantasy series: the Dracula sequence, comprising Dracula
Returns! (1973), The Hand of Dracula (1973), Dracula's Brother (1973),
Dracula's Gold (1973), Drums of Dracula (1974), The Witching of Dracula
(1974), Dracula's Lost World (1974), Dracula's Disciple (1975) and
Challenge to Dracula (1975), featuring an immortal Dracula who has

survived ATLANTIS; the Horrorscope sequence, comprising The Green Flames
of Aries (1974), The Revenge of Taurus (1974), The Curse of Leo (1974) and
Gemini Smile, Gemini Kill (1975).
LOST ATLANTIS
Die HERRIN VON ATLANTIS .
LOST CONTINENT, THE
Film (1968). Hammer/20th Century-Fox. Dir Michael Carreras, starring Eric
Porter, Hildegard Knef, Suzanna Leigh, Darryl Read. Screenplay Michael
Nash, based on Uncharted Seas (1938) by Dennis WHEATLEY. 98 mins. Colour.A
ramshackle freighter wanders into the Sargasso Sea and becomes trapped in
a "lost continent" of seaweed. Passengers and crew then face the onslaught
of various menaces, including a giant octopus, a giant crab, carnivorous
seaweed and, finally, a lost race ( LOST WORLDS) whose people, descended
from Spanish conquistadores, travel in BALLOONS. Bad but enjoyable, wholly
absurd; good art direction. [JB/PN]
LOST HORIZON
1. Film (1937). Columbia. Dir Frank Capra, starring Ronald Colman, Jane
Wyatt, Sam Jaffe, Edward Everett Horton, H.B. Warner. Screenplay Robert
Riskin, based on Lost Horizon (1933) by James HILTON. 133 mins, cut to 118
mins, then to 109 mins; but full print now available. B/w.In this
memorably sentimental, deft, trite, enormously popular UTOPIAN/ LOST-WORLD
film set in the Himalayas, survivors of a plane crash find themselves in
the mysterious, tranquil city of Shangri-La. It is ruled by the High Lama,
a kindly old buffer, who tells them that war and disease do not exist here
and that if they remain in the city they will live for ever. After some
time the hero (Colman) leaves with his brother and a Shangri-La woman, who
ages with appalling speed away from her home. After a brief return to
civilization, Colman realizes that he has abandoned true happiness, and is
last seen, hauntingly, struggling through the snow and in long shot,
reaching the gate of the forbidden city as the bells ring out and the
audience weeps.2. Film (1973). Columbia. Prod Ross Hunter. Dir Charles
Jarrott, starring Peter Finch, Liv Ullman, Sally Kellerman, George
Kennedy, Charles Boyer, Michael York. Screenplay Larry Kramer. 150 mins,
cut to 143 mins. Colour.Long, lush, sluggish remake with banal songs (by
Hal David and Burt Bacharach) and much stilted dialogue in Hollywood's
philosophical vein. The original piece of hokum was orchestrated by Capra
with skill and conviction; this unmagical version was a box-office
failure. [JB/PN]
LOST IN SPACE
US tv series (1965-68). An Irwin Allen Production in association with Van
Bernard Productions for 20th Century-Fox Television/CBS. Created Irwin
ALLEN, also executive prod. Story consultant Anthony Wilson. Writers
included Peter Packer, William Welch, Bob and Wanda Duncan, Carey Wilbur,
Barney Slater. Dirs included Harry Harris, Sutton Roley, Nathan Juran, Don
Richardson, Sobey Martin. 3 seasons, 83 50min episodes. 1st season b/w;
colour from 2nd.LIS was aimed primarily at children. The Robinsons'
spacecraft is sabotaged by an enemy agent, causing them to crash-land on a
remote planet. The group consists of the family of 5 - the series was

originally to be called Space Family Robinson - along with a young male
co-pilot (Mark Goddard) and the whining saboteur, Dr Smith, played with
comic but sinister effect by Jonathan Harris; the Robinsons were played by
June Lockhart, Guy Williams, Angela Cartwright, Marta Kristen and Billy
Mumy. There was also a ROBOT, whose catch-phrase was "That does not
compute". Though remote, the planet soon became a stopping-off point for
practically every space-travelling alien or monster in the Galaxy, each
episode seeing the arrival of some new visitor. After the first season the
Robinsons got back into space themselves. As the series progressed the
young boy (Mumy) and the ambiguous Dr Smith became the central characters,
together with the robot, while the others receded more and more into the
background. The stories, at first straight sf, became more and more
fantastic. LIS was probably the most enjoyable of Irwin Allen's many
excursions into televised sf. Lost in Space * (1967) by Dave VAN ARNAM and
Ron Archer (Ted WHITE) is a novelization. [JB/PN]
LOST PLANET, THE
1. Film serial (1953). Columbia. Dir Spencer G. Bennet, starring Judd
Holdren, Vivian Mason, Ted Thorpe, Forrest Taylor, Michael Fox. Script
George H. Plympton, Arthur Hoerl. This 15-part children's series Hollywood's last sf serial - featured an investigative reporter, a mad
SCIENTIST, a ROBOT and an attempted alien INVASION of Earth. Individual
"chapters" had titles like "Blasted by the Thermic Disintegrator" and
"Snared by the Prysmic Catapult".2. UK tv serial (1954). BBC TV. Prod
Kevin Sheldon, starring Peter Kerr, Jack Stewart, Mary Law. Script by
Angus MacVicar, based on his The Lost Planet (1953). 6 25min episodes.
B/w. This was one of the first sf-related BBC TV serials for children;
previously it had been a very popular RADIO serial. An atomic-powered
spacecraft takes a group, including one child, to the lost planet of
Hesikos. A sequel, Return to the Lost Planet, based on MacVicar's Return
to the Lost Planet (1954), was produced the following year. We can find no
evidence for the assertion in The Encyclopedia of TV Science Fiction
(1990) by Roger Fulton that MacVicar is a pseudonym of Andre NORTON.
[PN/JB]
LOST RACES
ANTHROPOLOGY; LOST WORLDS.
LOST WORLD, THE
1. Film (1925). First National. Dir Harry O. Hoyt, starring Wallace
Beery, Lewis Stone, Bessie Love, Lloyd Hughes. Script Marion Fairfax,
based on The Lost World (1912) by Arthur Conan DOYLE. 9700ft (approx 105
mins, cut to 60 mins). B/w, with some tinted sequences.Wallace Beery makes
an unlikely Professor Challenger in this slow-moving, wordy (a large
number of dialogue frames) silent version of the famous novel about the
discovery of an almost inaccessible South American plateau, a LOST WORLD
in which prehistoric creatures, including dinosaurs and apemen, still
live. The film is relatively faithful to the book, certainly more so than
the 1960 remake (see below), though one departure occurs at the climax
when the brontosaurus taken back to London by Challenger to confound the
snooty doubters of the Royal Society breaks free and goes on a rampage
that ends with the destruction of Tower Bridge (in the book it was a small

pterodactyl that escaped), a forerunner of many sequences in later MONSTER
MOVIES. The film is interesting chiefly because of its special effects,
the work of stop-motion photography pioneer Willis H. O'BRIEN. It was the
first feature film to make large-scale use of model animation combined
with live action.2. Film (1960). 20th Century-Fox. Dir Irwin ALLEN,
starring Claude Rains, Michael Rennie, Jill St John, David Hedison,
Fernando Lamas. Screenplay Allen, Charles Bennett. 97 mins. Colour.This
rather lifeless remake contains all the usual Irwin Allen banalities, with
the customary reliance on spectacle to carry the film. The special
effects, supervised by L.B. Abbott, are certainly spectacular; this time
the various dinosaurs were portrayed using live lizards photographically
enlarged, and their death throes, when the plateau is engulfed by volcanic
fire, are alarmingly realistic. [JB]
LOST WORLDS
This rubric covers lost races, lost cities, lost lands: all the enclaves
of mystery in a rapidly shrinking world that featured so largely in the sf
of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This subgenre was obviously a
successor to the FANTASTIC VOYAGES of the 18th century and earlier, but
there are important distinctions to be drawn. The earlier tales had
belonged to a world which was still geographically "open"; at the time
Jonathan SWIFT wrote Gulliver's Travels (1726), Australia had yet to be
discovered by Europeans and Africa had yet to be explored. The lost-world
story, however, belonged to a cartographically "closed" world: in Jules
VERNE's and H. Rider HAGGARD's day unknown territories were fast
disappearing. The options were running out, and hence the 19th-century
lost lands tended to be situated in the most inaccessible regions of the
globe: the Amazon basin, Himalayan valleys, central-Asian and Australian
deserts, at the poles, or within the HOLLOW EARTH. These works are also
distinguishable from earlier travellers' tales by their much greater
"scientific" content. The new sciences of geology, ANTHROPOLOGY and, above
all, archaeology had a considerable influence on Verne, Haggard and their
successors. For a while, the fiction was concurrent with the reality (at
least in the popular mind). From the discoveries of Troy and Nineveh to
those of Machu Picchu and Tutankhamun's tomb, there flourished a "heroic
age" of archaeology and scientific exploration, of which the fiction was a
natural concomitant.The fiction was often based on PSEUDO-SCIENCE rather
than real science, for example the many ATLANTIS stories which followed
the success of Ignatius DONNELLY's nonfiction Atlantis, the Antediluvian
World (1882). Tales of undiscovered worlds within the Earth tended to be
based on the crackpot geology of John Cleves SYMMES. Perhaps the best of
all inner-world fantasies (though not set in a full-scale Symmesian Hollow
Earth) is Voyage au centre de la terre (1863; exp 1867; trans anon as
Journey to the Centre of the Earth 1872 UK) by Jules Verne, in which
explorers reach a subterranean sea by way of an extinct volcano. Other
underground lost worlds include LYTTON's The Coming Race (1871; vt Vril:
The Power of the Coming Race 1972 US), William N. HARBEN's The Land of the
Changing Sun (1894), John M. LEAHY's Drome (1927 Weird Tales; 1952),
Stanton A. COBLENTZ's Hidden World (1935 Wonder Stories as "In Caverns
Below"; 1957) and Joseph O'NEILL's Land Under England (1935). The
Hollow-Earth story "Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole" (1977) by Steven

UTLEY and Howard WALDROP is a pastiche of this whole tradition.The
archetypes of the lost-race story are, in the main, unrepentantly
romantic. Edgar Rice BURROUGHS was an extensive contributor to the
subgenre (with, for example, The Land that Time Forgot [1918 Blue Book;
1924] and most of his Tarzan novels) but its most famous exponent was a
generation earlier: H. Rider Haggard, whose lost-race fantasies include
King Solomon's Mines (1885), Allan Quatermain (1887), She (1887) - these
two introducing the hugely popular erotic motif of the beautiful queen, or
high priestess, who attempts to seduce the hero - The People of the Mist
(1894), The Yellow God (1908) and Queen Sheba's Ring (1910); the
publication dates of these novels span the period when the species was in
its heyday. Other notable examples are William WESTALL's The Phantom City
(1886), James DE MILLE's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder
(1888) and Thomas JANVIER's The Aztec Treasure House (1890). The
best-known individual work in the genre may be The Lost World (1912) by
Arthur Conan DOYLE, a perennially popular adventure story about the
discovery of surviving prehistoric creatures on a South American plateau (
The LOST WORLD ). The species was popular in the general-fiction pulps but
was in decline by the time the first SF MAGAZINES appeared, though
lost-world stories by A. MERRITT - The Face in the Abyss (1923-30 Argosy;
fixup 1931) - and by A. Hyatt VERRILL - The Bridge of Light (1929; 1950) proved influential on some later sf writers. John TAINE's The Purple
Sapphire (1924) and The Greatest Adventure (1929) have stronger sf
elements than usual, though somewhat vaguely described superscientific
technology was common enough in the subgenre. Other authors of lost-race
stories include Grant ALLEN, Austyn GRANVILLE, Andrew LANG, William LE
QUEUX, John MASTIN, S.P. MEEK, Talbot MUNDY, Hume NISBET, Gordon STABLES,
Rex STOUT, E. Charles VIVIAN and S. Fowler WRIGHT.Even from the 1930s,
when fewer lost-world stories were being published, there were occasional
popular successes. The film KING KONG (1933) opens in a lost world. James
HILTON's mystical Tibetan romance of IMMORTALITY, Lost Horizon (1933), was
a bestseller ( LOST HORIZON). Later examples can be found in the work of
Dennis WHEATLEY, including The Fabulous Valley (1934), Uncharted Seas
(1938), which was filmed as The LOST CONTINENT , and The Man who Missed
the War (1945).Only very occasional lost-race novels have appeared since
WWII. Ian CAMERON's The Lost Ones (1961; vt Island at the Top of the
World) is set in the Arctic and was filmed by Disney as The Island at the
Top of the World (1974) dir Robert Stevenson. Stones of Enchantment (1948)
by Wyndham MARTYN, The City of Frozen Fire (1950) by Vaughan WILKINS, Lost
Island (1954) by Graham MCINNES and The Rose of Tibet (1962) by Lionel
DAVIDSON seem rather old-fashioned. Gilbert PHELPS's The Winter People
(1963), though, is an intelligent novel about an eccentric South American
explorer and his discovery of a remarkable tribe. Stephen TALL's The
People beyond the Walls (1980) is a remarkably late example. Generally,
though, postwar lost-race stories edge close to pastiche; several examples
are given in the HOLLOW EARTH entry.The fact that this species of fantasy
was so little influenced by scientific thought may be a result of its
being largely anachronistic (and therefore implausible) from its
beginnings. Once TRANSPORTATION technology had allowed Phileas Fogg to
achieve his object, the lost-race fantasy owed more to the desire that
enclaves of mystery should exist than to the likelihood that they did.

Even from the point of view of sociological or political
thought-experiments, the genre had surprisingly little to offer. The
lost-race story is obviously an opportunity for the setting up of
imaginary UTOPIAS and DYSTOPIAS, but these elements are not as common as
might be expected, and most of the stories listed above - which include
the best-remembered classics of the genre - are quite straightforward
romantic adventure. It has been suggested, too, that such stories allow
exercises in imaginary cultural ANTHROPOLOGY, but few of these stories are
of any real interest in this respect - an exception being the late example
Providence Island: An Archaeological Tale (1959) by Jacquetta HAWKES - and
they have more to offer the student of popular mythology - in which
context they are discussed by Brian Street in The Savage in Literature
(1975). Oddly enough there is more and better cultural anthropology in
offworld stories of planetary exploration and COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS
(mostly postwar), subgenres that largely superseded the lost-race story,
than there are in lost-race stories set on Earth.Science-Fiction: The
Early Years (1990) by Everett F. BLEILER lists and describes some hundreds
of lost-race stories up to 1930, its index allowing a sort by scientific
advancement (from barbaric to superscientific), or by location (Antarctic
to Siberia), or by racial derivation (from Atlantean via Hebrew and Old
Norse to Phoenician). A relevant essay is "Lost Lands, Lost Races: A Pagan
Princess of Their Very Own" by Thomas D. CLARESON in Many Futures, Many
Worlds (anth 1977) ed Clareson. [DP/BS/PN]See also: APES AND CAVEMEN (IN
THE HUMAN WORLD); ISLANDS; PASTORAL.
LOTT, S. MAKEPEACE
Working name of UK author Stanley Makepeace-Lott (? - ), whose Escape to
Venus (1956) is an ORWELL-influenced DYSTOPIAN view of a VENUS colony
established 60 years after a 1980 world war. [JE]
LOTTMAN, EILEEN
(1927- ) US writer of ties, mainly for the The BIONIC WOMAN tv series:
The Bionic Woman #1: Welcome Home Jaime * (1976; vt Double Identity 1976
UK as by Maud Willis) and #2: Extracurricular Activities * (1977; vt A
Question of Life 1977 UK as by Maud Willis). Singleton ties include The
Devil's Rain * (1975) as by Willis and Through the Looking Glass * (1976)
as by Molly Flute. [JC]
LOUDON, JANE (WEBB)
(1807-1858) UK author of many books on popular natural history and
gardening, and of The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827;
much rev 1828), published anon. Around a somewhat melodramatic plot - the
Mummy of Cheops conspires with a Roman Catholic priest in AD2126 to
control the choice of the next Queen of England - JL assembles a number of
elaborate speculations about inventions of the future, including
mechanical farming, movable housing and weather control, among the more
plausible. [JC]See also: HISTORY OF SF; NEAR FUTURE; UTOPIAS.
LOVE AND ROCKETS
US COMIC book created in 1981 by the brothers Gilbert (1957- ), Jaime and
Mario Hernandez. #1, self-published, featured a 40pp future-apocalyptic
chase-thriller, "BEM", by Gilbert; it introduced tail-chasing supersleuth

Castle Radium as well as Luba, a continuing star of much of Gilbert's
output. Also in #1 were some short pieces by Jaime; one of these,
"Mechan-X", introduced the characters Maggie, Hopey and Rand Race, who
featured in #2's 40pp story "Mechanics", which told of a group of prosolar
mechanics (essentially, super-repairmen) who are trying to fix a crashed
rocket-ship in a primordial jungle. Except for later references to
Maggie's prosolar job and a brief strip about a little Black girl in outer
space ("Rocky"), the sf elements have since disappeared from LAR - a fact
often regarded by the magazine's enthusiasts as being all to the good.
Fantagraphics has published LAR since reprinting #1 in 1982, and also
brought out Jaime's "Mechanics" as a 3-issue colour comic in 1985. [SW]
LOVECRAFT, H(OWARD) P(HILLIPS)
(1890-1937) US writer who spent almost all his life in Providence, RI,
maintaining social contacts mainly by mail. He joined the United Amateur
Press Association ( APA) in 1914 and produced much of his early fiction in
connection with this enterprise, which also allowed him to come in touch
with Clark Ashton SMITH, Frank Belknap LONG and others. He began to
publish professionally with the serial release of Herbert West Reanimator
(1922 Home Brew; 1977 chap), but only began to establish himself when he
started, with "Dagon" (1923), publishing in WEIRD TALES; his prolific
correspondence with many other of its writers made him a key influence on
that magazine: without his background presence its highly significant
contribution to the development of US weird fiction would have been
considerably weakened. His disciples included Robert BLOCH, August W.
DERLETH, Henry KUTTNER and E. Hoffman PRICE. Derleth, with assistance from
Donald WANDREI, founded ARKHAM HOUSE to reprint HPL's work, and the
imprint was later to provide a haven for other writers influenced by HPL,
including Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley. Colin WILSON is another modern
writer who has written Lovecraftian novels, notably The Philosopher's
Stone (1969).Although HPL's primary reputation is as a HORROR writer, his
later works - those of his stories belonging to the Cthulhu Mythos attempted to develop a distinctive species of "cosmic horror", employing
premises drawn from sf: other DIMENSIONS, INVASION by ALIENS, and
interference with human cultural and physiological EVOLUTION. He tried to
convey a sense that the Universe is essentially horrible and hostile to
humankind by means of a distinctive prose style which extends by gradual
degrees from a quasiclinical mode into passages of dense, highly
adjectival description. A notable essay by HPL on the historical roots of
his fiction is Supernatural Horror in Literature(first magazine
publication 1927; revised magazine publication 1933-35; 1939; 1945). HPL
encouraged other writers to use the background of the Cthulhu Mythos; The
Reader's Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos (1969; rev 1973) by Robert E.
WEINBERG and Edward P. Berglund lists many such writers including (in
addition to those already cited) Lin CARTER, Robert E. HOWARD, Fritz
LEIBER, Robert A.W. LOWNDES and Manly Wade WELLMAN. HPL's principal
Cthulhu Mythos stories - which include his best works - are "The Nameless
City" (1921), "The Festival" (1925), The Colour out of Space (1927; 1982
chap), "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928), "The Dunwich Horror" (1929), "The
Whisperer in Darkness" (1931), "The Dreams in the Witch-House" (1933),
"The Haunter of the Dark" (1936), The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936), "The

Shadow out of Time" (cut 1936; 1939), At the Mountains of Madness (cut
1936; 1939; 1990 chap), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (cut 1941; 1943;
dated 1951 but 1952 UK) and "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1937).The first
Arkham House HPL collection was The Outsider and Others (coll 1939), which
contained all his major works except The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,
which first appeared in book form in the subsequent Arkham volume Beyond
the Wall of Sleep (coll 1943). Marginalia (coll 1944) included some
stories HPL had revised for other writers as well as essays, fragments and
appreciations; a complete collection of such revisions is The Horror in
the Museum and Other Revisions (coll 1970; cut vt Nine Stories from The
Horror in the Museum 1971; vt in 2 vols as The Horror in the Museum 1975
UK and The Horror in the Burying Ground1975 UK; rev and corrected 1989).
HPL's complete works can be obtained in 3 vols: The Dunwich Horror and
Others (coll 1963; cut vt The Colour out of Space, and Others 1964; full
text vt The Best of H.P. Lovecraft 1982; corrected text under original
title 1985), a title not to be confused with The Dunwich Horror, and Other
Weird Tales (coll 1945); At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels
(coll 1964; cut 1968 UK; again cut 1971 US; corrected text under original
title 1985); and Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (coll 1965; much cut vt
Dagon 1967 UK; UK edn again cut, vt The Tomb 1969 UK; corrected text of
original version 1986). The bibliography of the many other collections
drawn from the corpus is inordinately complicated, and is supplemented by
many chapbooks recovering all manner of trivia; the most frequently
reprinted eclectic selections are The Haunter of the Dark (coll 1951 UK),
which was a cut version of Best Supernatural Stories of H.P. Lovecraft
(coll 1945), both ed Derleth, The Doom that Came to Sarnath (coll 1971) ed
Lin Carter and Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre: The Best of
H.P. Lovecraft (coll 1982). Several SMALL PRESSES have been and are
dedicated to the celebration of his works, most notably the Necronomicon
Press, which publishes the journal Lovecraft Studies ed S.T. Joshi, and,
since 1990, when it took the title over from Cryptic Publications, the
long-running Crypt of Cthulhu ed Robert M. Price. Several bibliographies
of primary and secondary sources have been published, including Joshi's H.
P. Lovecraft: An Annotated Bibliography (1981). These small presses have
given a home to early work by several modern writers of note, including
Thomas Ligotti (1953- ).Derleth wrote many stories based on fragmentary
texts by HPL or on notes for unwritten stories, including the novel The
Lurker at the Threshold (1945), the stories in The Survivor and Others
(coll 1957) and 2 stories in The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces (coll
1959; cut 1970 UK), which also contains some HPL juvenilia and essays
about him; it is not to be confused with The Shuttered Room (coll 1971).
All the Derleth "collaborations" are assembled in The Watchers Out of Time
and Others (coll 1974); all but The Lurker at the Threshold had been in
The Shadow out of Time and Other Tales of Horror (coll 1968 UK), along
with the 6 which The Haunter of the Dark omitted from its parent
collection. The Derleth stories are weak exercises in pastiche, and
Derleth's editing of HPL's own stories came in for some criticism in the
1980s on the grounds of alleged insensitivity and distortion,
necessitating the corrected editions of the 3 Arkham House collections.
[BS]Other works: This list is selective, not including all small-press
publications, nor items of Lovecraftiana containing little or no actual

fiction by him: Fungi from Yuggoth (coll 1941), poetry, not to be confused
with vt of 1963 collection (see below); The Lurking Fear (coll 1947; vt
Cry Horror! 1958), not to be confused with either The Lurking Fear (coll
1964 UK) or The Lurking Fear (coll 1971), all 3 with differing contents,
or with The Lurking Fear (1928 Weird Tales; 1977 chap), which reprints the
story alone; The Curse of Yig (coll 1953); Dreams and Fantasies (coll
1962); The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1943; 1955), not to be confused
with The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (coll 1970) ed Lin Carter;
Something about Cats, and Other Pieces (coll 1949), revisions, essays,
notes, etc.; Collected Poems (coll 1963; cut vt Fungi from Yuggoth and
Other Poems 1971); Selected Letters 1911-1937 (5 vols 1965-76);
Uncollected Prose and Poetry (coll 1978) ed S.T. Joshi and Marc
Michaud.About the author: Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos
(1972) by Lin CARTER; Lovecraft: A Biography (1975) by L. Sprague DE CAMP;
Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside (1975) by Frank
Belknap LONG; The Dream Quest of H.P. Lovecraft (1978) by Darrell
SCHWEITZER; The H.P. Lovecraft Companion (1977) by Philip A. Schrefler;
The Major Works of H.P. Lovecraft (1977) by John Taylor Gatto; H.P.
Lovecraft (1982) by S.T. Joshi; H.P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (1983) by
Donald R. Burleson.See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; DEVOLUTION;
FANTASY; FANZINE; GAMES AND TOYS; GOTHIC SF; INVISIBILITY; METAL HURLANT;
MONSTERS; OPEN UNIVERSE; PARALLEL WORLDS; PARANOIA; PSEUDO-SCIENCE;
PSYCHOLOGY; PUBLISHING; SUSPENDED ANIMATION.
LOVEJOY, JACK
(1937- ) US writer with an advanced degree in Roman history who began
publishing work of genre interest with The Rebel Witch (1978), a fantasy
for children. His first sf novels, Star Gods (dated 1978 but 1979) and The
Hunters (1982), combine sf-adventure routines with some cultural
extrapolation. The Vision of Beasts sequence - Creation Descending (1984),
The Second Kingdom (1984) and The Brotherhood of Diablo (1985) - is set in
a fairly remote post- HOLOCAUST USA, where California has become an
archipelago and the mainland is overrun by MUTANTS known as "gunks".
[JC]Other works: Magus Rex (1983), a fantasy; Guardians of the Three #4:
Defenders of Ar * (1990), a SHARED-WORLD fantasy tie.
LOVELOCK, JAMES (EPHRAIM)
[r] Michael ALLABY; BIOLOGY; ECOLOGY; LIVING WORLDS.
LOVE ROMANCES PUBLISHING CO.
PLANET STORIES; TOPS IN SCIENCE FICTION.
LOVE, ROSALEEN
(1940- ) Australian author, science journalist and lecturer in the
history and philosophy of science. RL has been publishing short fiction not all sf - since 1985, and has won a number of Australian MAINSTREAM
awards for her stories. The astringent sf FABULATIONS collected in The
Total Devotion Machine and Other Stories (coll 1989 UK) and Evolution
Annie and Other Stories (coll 1993 UK) are wry, intelligent and often
funny; RL's style is straight-faced irony. Her subject matter is often
FEMINIST - as in the title story of the second volume, which is a kind of
counter-version of Roy LEWIS's What We Did to Father (1960) - or

ecological. [PN]See also: AUSTRALIA.
LOVE WAR, THE
Made-for-tv film (1970). Paramount/ABC-TV. Dir George McCowan, starring
Lloyd Bridges, Angie Dickinson, Harry Basch, Dan Travanti. Screenplay
Guerdon Trueblood, David Kidd. 74 mins. Colour.Six aliens from two warring
planets arrive on Earth for a duel to the death to decide which of those
planets is the victor. Four are eliminated; one survivor (Bridges) opts to
try to stop the fight, remain on Earth, merge with the natives, and have a
relationship with a woman (Dickinson). He promises that they will marry as
soon as he can overcome the other survivor, whom he knows to be closing in
for the kill. The surprise revelation of his fiancee's true identity will
not surprise B-movie and sf fans. This is an unpretentious and
entertaining sf thriller. [JB]
LOVIN, ROGER
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
LOW, A(RCHIBALD) M(ONTGOMERY)
(1888-1956) UK academic, inventor and writer, president of the British
Interplanetary Society for a period; in 1917 he invented a flying bomb. In
his first sf novel, Adrift in the Stratosphere (1934 Scoops as "Space";
1937), a juvenile, the young protagonists accidentally take off in a
professor's rocket-ship. In Mars Breaks Through (1937) a scientist
possessed by a Martian can bring about world peace, but seems unwilling
to. Satellite in Space (1956) is a SPACE OPERA in which humans, including
an old-time Nazi, meet aliens from the asteroid belt. AML also wrote two
nonfiction prognoses, The Future (1925) and It's Bound to Happen (1950; vt
What's the World Coming To? 1951 US). [JC]Other works: Peter Down the Well
(1933), a juvenile.See also: BOYS' PAPERS.
LOWNDES, ROBERT A(UGUSTINE) W(ARD)
(1916- ) US writer and editor, often referred to as "Doc" Lowndes, a
member of the FUTURIANS fan group and collaborator on several stories with
other members of the group under the names Arthur COOKE, S.D. GOTTESMAN,
Paul Dennis Lavond and Lawrence WOODS. His first story, "The Outpost at
Altark" for Super Science in 1940, was written in collaboration with
fellow-Futurian Donald A. WOLLHEIM, uncredited. For his solo work in the
early 1940s RAWL used the names Carol Grey, Mallory Kent, Wilfred Owen
Morley and Richard Morrison; later he added Carl Groener, Robert Morrison,
Michael Sherman and Peter Michael Sherman, and once collaborated with
James BLISH as John MACDOUGAL.RAWL edited FUTURE FICTION and SCIENCE
FICTION QUARTERLY for Columbia Publications from early 1941 until their
demise in 1943, and again throughout their shoestring revival in the early
1950s under various titles. He also edited DYNAMIC SCIENCE FICTION
(1952-4) and Science Fiction Stories (1954-5) for Columbia Publications,
continuing to edit the latter under its new name, The ORIGINAL SCIENCE
FICTION STORIES , from 1955 until the chain folded in 1960, when he began
editing for Health Knowledge Inc. He gradually added a number of fantasy
magazines to the latter publisher's line, including The MAGAZINE OF HORROR
in 1963, Startling Mystery Stories in 1966, FAMOUS SCIENCE FICTION in
1966, Weird Terror Tales in 1969 and Bizarre Fantasy Tales in 1970, but

all became defunct in 1970. He was also the editor of the Avalon Books sf
line 1955-67.RAWL wrote a hectic action-adventure novel in collaboration
with Blish, The Duplicated Man (1953 Dynamic Science Fiction as by Blish
and Michael Sherman; 1959), and later edited the posthumous THE BEST OF
JAMES BLISH (coll 1979). He also produced three solo novels: The Mystery
of the Third Mine (1953), which is a juvenile, The Puzzle Planet (1961)
and Believers' World (1952 Space as "A Matter of Faith" as by Michael
Sherman; exp 1959); in the third and most interesting of these,
inhabitants of three lost colonies have developed an eccentric RELIGION.
His best short stories are H.P. LOVECRAFT-like items such as "The Abyss"
(1941) and "The Leapers" (1942 as Carol Grey; rev vt "Leapers" 1968). His
literary columns from Famous Science Fiction were assembled as Three Faces
of Science Fiction (coll 1973 chap). [BS/PN/JC]
LOXMITH, JOHN
[s] John BRUNNER.
L. RON HUBBARD PRESENTS WRITERS OF THE FUTURE
Original anthology series, ed Algis BUDRYS, made up of stories by
entrants to the WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST and published by Bridge
Publications in the USA and New Era in the UK; both publishing houses were
originally set up to publish DIANETICS and SCIENTOLOGY textbooks, but had
already begun publishing fiction with the novels of L. Ron HUBBARD's
unexpected second career in fiction. The contest is quarterly (though an
annual award is given also), and most of the anthology stories are first,
second or third place-getters. Some fine writers have made their debut in
this series (which has survived the controversy surrounding it) - not
surprisingly, considering the fairly lavish nature of the awards involved.
They include Robert Touzalin (Robert REED), Karen Joy FOWLER, David
ZINDELL and Dave WOLVERTON. Anthologies to date, all ed Budrys, are L. Ron
Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future (anth 1985), Vol. II (anth 1986),
Vol. III (anth 1987), Vol. IV (anth 1988), Vol. V (anth 1989), Vol. VI
(anth 1990) and Vol. VII (anth 1991). [PN]
LUCAS, E(DWARD) V(ERRALL)
(1868-1938) UK editor and writer, the author of innumerable "weekend"
essays and tamely belletristic travel books. Of his several novels, The
War of the Wenuses (1898), with C(harles) L(arcom) Graves (1856-1944), is
of interest as a mildly sexist parody of H.G. WELLS's THE WAR OF THE
WORLDS (1898). Wisdom while You Wait: Being a Foretaste of the
"Insidecompletuar Britanniaware" (1903), also with Graves, mocks the
future Americanization of the world in the form of a parody encyclopedia;
further joint titles, in a similar vein, include England Day by Day: A
Guide to Efficiency and Prophetic Calendar for 1904 (1903) and If: A
Nightmare in the Conditional Mood (1908). Mr Pulteney (1910 chap) as by E.
D. Ward - a pseudonym which is simply EVL's first name - is fantasy,
featuring a hotel with an ANTIGRAVITY garden for the use of suicides.
Wells and Winston Churchill make appearances. [JC]
LUCAS, F(RANK) L(AURENCE)
(1894-1967) UK writer and critic, better known in the latter capacity. Of
his fiction, The Woman Clothed with the Sun and Other Stories (coll of

linked stories 1937), like much of the work of F. Britten AUSTIN, presents
a didactic rendering of mankind's destiny through a story-sequence, in
this case extending from AD53 to 1995, ending in an exemplary cleansing of
the human species from the world. [JC]
LUCAS, GEORGE
(1944- ) US film-maker. He attended the University of Southern California
Film School and as a graduate student made an sf short there entitled THX
1138:4EB (1967), which won film festival awards. Working in 1968 as an
assistant to Francis Ford Coppola he made a highly praised documentary
about the filming of Coppola's The Rain People (1969); then in 1969, with
Coppola as executive prod, Lucas began a feature-film version, THX 1138
(1971), of his sf short; it was well received by critics but not a popular
success. His second feature, American Graffiti (1973) - about small-town
Californian teenagers in the 1950s - established him as a commercial
film-maker. Nonetheless, GL had difficulty setting up his next film - a
project he had been planning for several years. His hardships were amply
recompensed when it was released as STAR WARS (1977) and had the highest
box-office takings of any film to that date.Star Wars was singly
responsible for the sf film boom (and to a lesser extent the literary
boom) of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but GL swiftly announced his
intention to retire from directing and stick to producing. He has kept
that vow, although the films produced under his aegis bear his obvious
personal stamp and his directors' personalities are invariably obscured.
The EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980), dir Irvin Kershner, and RETURN OF THE JEDI
(1983), dir Richard Marquand, conclude the trilogy, persistently rumoured
to be only the middle section of a 9-film triptych GL has long had on the
back burner. There have been frequent suggestions that the next trilogy,
tentatively entitled The Clone Wars, a prequel to the 3 extant films, is
due to go into production, but as of 1992 this seems very unlikely.
Lucasfilm (GL's company) has made several spinoffs from the Star Wars
universe, including the tv movies The EWOK ADVENTURE (1984; theatrically
released overseas as Caravan of Courage) and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor
(1985). GL sanctioned a new series of Star Wars spin-off books in the
1990s, beginning with Timothy ZAHN's Star Wars: Heir to the Empire *
(1991).Although his partnership with his contemporary and rival Steven
SPIELBERG has yielded the three commercially successful borderline-fantasy
Indiana Jones films, GL has otherwise often had trouble away from the Star
Wars universe, failing to make much impact with his productions of the
banal fairytales Labyrinth (1986) dir Jim Henson and Willow (1988) dir Ron
Howard, and scoring a disastrous miss with Howard the Duck (1986; vt
Howard . . . A New Breed of Hero), an adaptation from the comic books.
With Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Jackson, GL made Captain EO, a short
(viewable only in Disneyland, Disneyworld and the EPCOT Center) employing
various sophisticated new techniques and rumoured to have cost over $20
million, despite being only 17 mins long. He has also produced a tv
series, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (begun 1992).With his pack-rat
borrowings from sf, fantasy and Hollywood's past - not to mention his
conspicuous espousal of the mythical ideas of Joseph Campbell's The Hero
with a Thousand Faces (1949) - GL undoubtedly opened up the cinema for a
wave of big-budget sf movies in the 1980s, even while he ensured that its

level remained juvenile. The novelization THX 1138 * (1971) was by Ben
BOVA, and the novelization Star Wars * (1976), attributed to GL, may have
been by Alan Dean FOSTER. Many other books have been spun-off from the
Star Wars trilogy. [KN/PN]About the film-maker: Skywalking: The Life and
Films of George Lucas (1983) by Dale Pollock.See also: CINEMA; SWORD AND
SORCERY.
LUCENO, JAMES
(? - ) US writer whose main work has been in collaboration with Brian C.
DALEY (whom see for details) under the joint pseudonym Jack McKinney, but
who has also written solo sf adventures: A Fearful Symmetry (1989), a
NEAR-FUTURE thriller about the coming of the Millennium and the arrival of
ALIENS; Illegal Alien (1990), an interplanetary SEX spoof and The Big
Empty (1993), about a CYBORG caught in a war between biological and
mechanical forces. The Shadow* (1994) is a film TIE. [JC]
LUCIAN
(c120-180) Syrian-Greek writer, known also as Lucian of Samosata; born in
Samosata, capital of Commagene, in Syria. He early became an advocate and
practised at Antioch, but soon set out on the travels which were to help
provide the verisimilitude underlying the fantastic surface of some of his
works. He visited Greece, Italy and Gaul, studied philosophy in Athens,
and eventually became procurator of part of Egypt, where he died. The
number of works attributed to him varies with criteria of authenticity,
but at least 80 titles have been suggested, some certainly spurious. His
works can be subdivided into various categories, some of little interest
to the student of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION: works of formal rhetoric,
numerous essays, biographies and the prose fictions - which include The
True History and the possibly spurious Lucius, or The Ass - and the series
of Dialogues which comprise L's most important work, and to the form of
which he gave his name.The Lucianic Dialogue mixes PLATO's Dialogues, Old
and New Comedy, and Menippean Satire into a racy, witty, pungent form
ideally suited to the debunking activities with which L is most
associated, and which are his most important bequest; his influence on
these lines extends from Sir Thomas MORE and Erasmus (?1466-1536) to the
dialogue-based SATIRES of Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) and others. The
Lucianic Dialogue of greatest sf interest is the Icaro-Menippus, in which
Menippus, disgusted with the fruitless animadversions of Earthly
philosophers, acquires a pair of wings and flies first to the MOON, whence
he is able to get a literal (i.e., visual) perspective on the nature of
mankind's follies, and second to Olympus, where he meets Jupiter and
watches that god deal with men's prayers (which arrive fartlike through
huge vents). Jupiter proves moderately venal, but does in the end threaten
to destroy the acrimonious philosophers who drove Menippus to flight.
Other Dialogues of interest include the Charon, Timon, the 26 Dialogues of
the Gods and the Dialogues of the Dead.Though less important, the prose
fictions are vital proto sf. The True History - taking off from the
numerous unlikely travellers' tales that proliferated at the time - is an
extremely enjoyable and frequently scatological debunking exercise. L
travels with 50 companions to the Moon, where they become embroiled in a
space war; they then fly past the Sun and back to Earth, where they land

in the sea and are soon swallowed by an enormous whale, from which they
escape and visit various ISLANDS, where L's fertile imagination piles
marvel upon lunatic marvel. With regard to fantasy and the spirit of
romance, The True History is detumescent. Its influence extends to
Francois RABELAIS and Jonathan SWIFT. Lucius, or The Ass is important as a
cognate of or original for Apuleius's The Golden Ass (cAD200; vt
Metamorphoses), about a magician's helper who is turned into an ass,
suffers much, and is finally retransformed by a goddess. Lucius's
picaresque adventures, and the earthy manner of their telling, provided
models for picaresque counterattacks on idealistic fiction from Miguel de
Cervantes (1547-1616) onwards.L is vital to that somewhat problematic line
of descent of prose fictions which leads eventually to what we might
legitimately think of as sf proper. Though he has often been misunderstood
as being himself a romancer, he was in fact a consistent (and often
savage) debunker of the idiom and ideals of romance. His attitude to the
FANTASTIC VOYAGES of his supposed descendants would not have been that of
the typical proud father.There are various translations, the earliest in
English being A Dialog of the Poet Lucyan (trans 1530 UK); The Complete
Works of Lucian (trans in 4 vols 1905 UK) is useful. [JC]About the author:
"Lucian's True History as SF" by S.C. Fredericks in SCIENCE-FICTION
STUDIES, vol 3, part 1, Mar 1976.
LUCIAN
Pseudonym of a UK writer whose 1920: Dips into the Near Future (1917 The
Nation; coll of linked stories 1918 chap) sharply examines a UK inherently
deformed by years of unending war. [JC]
LUCIE-SMITH, EDWARD
[r] POETRY.
LUDWIG, EDWARD W(ILLIAM)
(1920- ) US writer and publisher whose The Mask of John Culon (1970)
awakens its protagonist from SUSPENDED ANIMATION into a DYSTOPIA dominated
by a repressive RELIGION. The 7 Shapes of Solomon Bean and 14 Other
Marvelous Stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy (coll 1983) contains some
similar material. [JC]
LUFTPIRAT UND SEIN LENKBARES LUFTSCHIFF, DER
["The Pirate of the Air and his Navigable Airship"] German DIME-NOVEL
series, popularly known as Kapitan Mors der Luftpirat; it has no
connection with a 1948 series of the same name. One of the most popular
series of its day, its author or authors are unknown, but well known
writers like Oskar Hoffmann (1866-? ) may have been involved; and, since
its adventures take place alternately on Earth and in space, it may have
been written by two people. 165 32pp issues were published 1908-11, at
first by the Druck- und Verlagsgesellschaft m.b.h. in Berlin and, retitled
simply Der Luftpirat, from #94 by Verlag Moderner Lekture, also in Berlin.
In 1914 #65-#86 were republished as #1-#22 of the series Der
Fliegerteufel, published by Verlag P. Lehmann G.m.b.h. in Berlin. During
WWI the series was proscribed by the military as "trash". DLUSLL
anticipates many SPACE OPERAS, having an interplanetary background - there
are numerous adventures with Venusians, Martians, crystal ROBOTS and

MONSTERS of all kinds on the planets of the Solar System. Many issues have
blueprints of Mors's spaceship on the back cover. Captain Mors, the Man
with the Mask, is a Nemo-like fugitive from mankind who, with his crew of
Indians, fights against evil. There is a case for calling this the first
sf magazine. [FR]
LUKENS, ADAM
Diane DETZER.
LUKODIANOV, ISAI (BORISOVICH)
[r] Evgeny VOISKUNSKY.
LULL, SUSAN
[s] Robert L. FORWARD.
LUNA, KRIS
A house name used twice for CURTIS WARREN publications: Stella Radium
Exchange (1952) by David O'BRIEN and Operation Orbit (1953) by William
Henry Fleming BIRD. [JC]
LUNA MONTHLY
US FANZINE (1969-77), published by Frank and Ann F. Dietz from New
Jersey, ed Ann F. Dietz, 67 issues, schedule varying from monthly to
quarterly, stapled DIGEST-size, litho. LM was notable for its
professionalism and its exceptionally thorough review coverage, for which
it is a useful research tool. Reviews - some by Greg BEAR - were often
good; Mark Purcell's column The International Scene was consistently well
informed. Paul WALKER conducted interesting interviews with sf writers.
[PN]
LUNAN, DUNCAN (ALASDAIR)
(1945- ) Scottish writer, generally of nonfiction books and articles in
popular science, with a concentration on space exploration and related
topics; titles include Man and the Stars (1974), New Worlds for Old (1979)
and Man and the Planets (1983). The first of these presented and supported
the hypothesis that historical radio anomalies might best be accounted for
in terms of a ROBOT probe from an ALIEN culture parked at one of the
Earth-Moon system's LAGRANGE POINTS; the anomalies have now been otherwise
explained, but DL's exposition of his case, based on sound science rather
than PSEUDO-SCIENCE, does not lack integrity. As an sf writer, DL began
publishing stories with "Renaissance" for the Glasgow University Magazine
in 1964, although his first fully professional sale, "The Moon of Thin
Reality", did not appear until 1970 (in Gal). In Starfield: Science
Fiction by Scottish Writers (anth 1989) DL demonstrated some of the range
of sf currently being written in his home country. [JC/JGr]
LUNDBERG, KNUD
(1920- ) Danish writer whose Det olympiske hab (1955; trans Eiler Hansen
and William Luscombe as The Olympic Hope1958 UK) suggests that the 1996
Olympics might be plagued by the use of DRUGS to improve the performance
of athletes. [JC]
LUNDIN, CLAES
[r] SCANDINAVIA.

LUNDWALL, SAM J(ERRIE)
(1941- ) Swedish author, editor, critic, translator (of about 400 books,
many sf), professional photographer, tv producer, film director, composer,
singer (several records) and publisher. His first published work was an sf
play for Swedish radio, broadcast in 1952 when he was 11 years old.
Enormously active in sf FANDOM since 1956, SJL began selling stories in
1963. His first book was a collection, Visor i var tid (coll 1965). His
next book was sold in SJL's own translation to ACE BOOKS: Science Fiction:
fran begynnelsen till vara dagar (1969; exp trans SJL as Science Fiction:
What It's All About 1971); it was one of the earlier studies of sf in
English.Beginning 1970, SJL has written a number of novels, 4 of which
have been translated into English. In Alice's World (1970 dos US; trans
SJL as Alice, Alice! 1974 Sweden) a spaceship returning to an abandoned
Earth finds it occupied by mythic and literary beings. SJL's SATIRE can be
vicious, as in King Kong Blues (1974; trans SJL as AD 2018, or The King
Kong Blues 1975 US), about advertising; at other times it is despondent as in Bernhards magiska sommar ["Bernhard's Magical Summer"] (1974), the
third in a trilogy beginning with No Time for Heroes (1970 dos US; trans
SJL as Inga Hjaltar har Sweden 1972) and Bernhard the Conqueror (1973;
trans SJL as Uppdrag i universum Sweden 1973) - or hilarious, as in
Morkrets furste ["The Prince of Darkness"] (1975), probably his best
novel, a burlesque of turn-of-the-century DIME NOVEL SF.From 1970 he
edited the Askild ?
interest in sf. In 1973 he left to form his own house, Delta, which lasted
until 1991, specializing in new and reprinted sf, averaging some 20 sf
books a year. Under the Delta imprint SJL also edited the revived Jules
Verne-Magasinet, Sweden's only professional sf magazine ( SCANDINAVIA),
which in its first incarnation had run 1940-48; it is still published, now
under his personal imprint, Sam J. Lundwall Fakta ?
BIBLIOGRAPHY of sf published in Sweden, both original and translated, is
Bibliografi over science fiction ?
revision of a work which originally appeared in 1962; the sequel is
Bibliografi over science fiction ?
series Den fantastiska romanen, 4 vols (1973-4), collects documents of sf
history with critical comment. A later 18-vol anthology series ed SJL was
Det hande i morgon ["It Happened Tomorrow"].Another work in English is
Science Fiction: An Illustrated History (1979 US), which argues the
primacy and greater sophistication of European over US sf. SJL's most
recent book in English is The Penguin World Omnibus of Science Fiction
(anth 1986) ed with Brian W. ALDISS, which in its eclectic, mostly non-US
content could be seen as a footnote to his earlier argument.Among the
dozen or so novels SJL has written since 1975, CRASH (1980) is about the
adventures of a Swedish sf author in the US publishing world. His most
ambitious project is a series (novels, stories, poems) set in a
probabilistic ALTERNATE WORLD, a flat Earth facing dissolution into other
probability formats; the scientific underpinning is rooted in quantum
physics. Only 3 short stories from the series have been translated into
English, "Nobody Here But Us Shadows" (1975 Gal), "Take Me Down the River"
(1979) and "Time Everlasting" (1986). The central novels of the series are
Fangelsestaden ["Prison City"] (1978), Flicka i fonster vid varldens kant

["Girl in the Window at the Edge of the World"] (1980), Tiden och Amelie
["Time and Amelie"] (1986), Gestalter i sten ["Figures in Stone"] (1988),
Frukost bland ruinerna ["Breakfast in the Ruins"] (1988) and Vasja
Ambartsurian ["Vasja Ambartsurian"] (1990).SJL has been a pivotal figure
in Swedish sf as author, editor, publisher, entrepreneur and translator.
He updated the SCANDINAVIA entry in this encyclopedia. [J-HH/PN]See also:
CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; MYTHOLOGY.
LUPOFF, RICHARD A(LLEN)
(1935- ) US writer who worked in computers until he became a full-time
writer in 1970. He was first active in sf fandom; the fanzine XERO, which
he co-edited with his wife Pat, won a HUGO in 1963. A series of articles
therein about COMICS later formed the core of All in Color for a Dime
(1970), which RAL co-edited with Don Thompson. He contributed a
long-running book-review column to the fanzine ALGOL. RAL is also an
expert on Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, and as fiction editor of Canaveral Press
in the early 1960s he supervised the republication of many of Burroughs's
works. His Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure (1965; rev 1968; rev
1975) is probably the best short introduction; Barsoom: Edgar Rice
Burroughs and the Martian Vision (1976) is also useful.After The Case of
the Doctor who Had No Business, or The Adventure of the Second Anonymous
Narrator (1966 chap), a RECURSIVE tale involving Burroughs and Arthur
Conan DOYLE's Dr Watson, RAL's first published fiction was the novel One
Million Centuries (1967; rev 1981), a colourful adventure of the FAR
FUTURE in a pastiche style (the object being in this case Burroughs) which
would mark most of his career. Pastiche and recursiveness feed naturally
into one another, and it is at times difficult, despite his clear and
abundant intelligence, to identify a unique RAL voice. His short stories
include a series of parodies of other sf writers published in FANTASTIC
under the pseudonym Ova Hamlet and assembled as The Ova Hamlet Papers
(coll 1979 chap); several were earlier incorporated into Sacred Locomotive
Flies (fixup 1971). He has also used the pseudonym Addison Steele. One of
RAL's most notable stories is the satirical "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys
on Little Old New Alabama" (in Again, Dangerous Visions 1972 ed Harlan
ELLISON), which eventually became the fine Space War Blues (fixup 1978), a
nearly surrealist tale of race wars fought in space between human
colonies; it and Sword of the Demon (1977), a novel based and styled on
Japanese mythology, came very close to giving him a recognizable profile
in the field, but his chameleon facility won out, and each new story bore
a new facet usually borrowed with a grin. His other 1970s novels are
various but insufficiently memorable. The Triune Man (1976) deals with the
split personality of a comic-strip artist. OVERPOPULATION, ecocatastrophe
and sf in-jokes are coped with in The Crack in the Sky (1976; vt Fool's
Hill 1978 UK), shipwreck on a dehydrated planet in Sandworld (1976), and a
female werewolf in Lisa Kane (1976).Two series dominated the 1980s. The
Twin Planet books - Circumpolar! (1984) and Countersolar! (1986)-carry
pastiche to the point of MAGIC REALISM. The first, in its depiction of an
ALTERNATE-WORLD Earth - with a Symmesian hole ingeniously implanted in the
centre of its doughnut shape ( HOLLOW EARTH) - has evoked comparisons with
the work of James P. BLAYLOCK; historical figures star in a race across
the gap. The second less interestingly moves into the 20th century and

features a large cast of undifferentiated real people. The Sun's End
sequence - Sun's End (1984) and Galaxy's End (1988) with a 3rd vol
projected - is of greater interest, exploiting the fascination with
Japanese culture that RAL first showed in Sword of the Demon in a complex
SPACE-OPERA venue - although this does not prevent a certain amount of
nostalgic pastiche of early-20th-century cultural modes and icons. But
there still remains in RAL's work a sense of focus frustrated, of ambition
deferred. [MJE/JC]Other works: Into the Aether (1974; rev as graph vt The
Adventures of Professor Thintwhistle and His Incredible Aether Flyer 1991
with Steve Stiles); The Return of Skull-Face (1977), "collaboration" with
Robert E. HOWARD; Nebogipfel at the End of Time (1979 chap); Stroka
Prospekt (1982 chap); The Digital Wristwatch of Philip K. Dick (dated 1985
but 1986 chap); Lovecraft's Book (1985); The Forever City (1988); The
Comic Book Killer (1988), associational; Philip Jose Farmer's The Dungeon
#1: The Black Tower * (1988) and #6: The Final Battle * (1990); Daniel M
Pinkwater's Melvinge of the Metaverse Book 3: Night of the Living 'Gator
(1992); The Digital Wristwatch of Philip K. Dick/Hyperprism (1994 dos).As
Addison E. Steele: Two Buck Rogers tv ties, Buck Rogers in the 25th
Century * (1978) and That Man on Beta * (1979).As Editor: The Reader's
Guide to Barsoom and Amtor (anth 1963 chap); The Comic-Book Book (anth
1973) with Don Thompson; What If? #1: Stories that Should Have Won the
Hugo (anth 1980) and its sequel, What If? #2 (anth 1981).See also: CITIES;
CYBORGS; SUSPENDED ANIMATION.
LURGAN, LESTER
Pseudonym of UK writer Mabel Winfred Knowles (1875-1949), author of
various popular novels including The League of the Triangle (1911). LL's
sf novel, A Message from Mars * (1912), based on an 1899 play by Richard
Ganthony, may have been used as well as the play in creating the film
version, A MESSAGE FROM MARS (1913). The story deals with the effects on
humans of the arrival of a messenger from MARS with words of good sense
about our earthly dilemmas. [JC]See also: SATIRE.
LUSTBADER, ERIC
[r] Eric VAN LUSTBADER.
LUTHER, RAY
Arthur SELLINGS.
LUXEMBOURG
BENELUX.
LYDECKEN, ARVID
[r] FINLAND.
LYDECKER, JOHN
Stephen GALLAGHER.
LYMINGTON, JOHN
Pseudonym of UK writer John Newton Chance (1911-1983), prolific author of
novels and stories, mostly detections, under his real name. His first
novels of genre interest were two juvenile fantasies, The Black Ghost
(1947) and The Dangerous Road (1948), both as by David C. Newton; a later
sf novel, The Light Benders (1968), as by Jonathan Chance, is

unremarkable. Under his own name he published the Bunst series of
children's stories - Bunst and the Brown Voice (1950), Bunst the Bold
(1950), Bunst and the Secret Six (1951) and Bunst and the Flying Eye
(1953) - which deploy sf elements, though casually. His first novel as JL,
later made into a film ( The NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT ), was The Night of the
Big Heat (1959), about an alien INVASION, and much of his subsequent work
constituted a set of variations on the theme of alien or natural menace to
Earth, though not at the imaginative level of his predecessors (and likely
models), John WYNDHAM and John CHRISTOPHER. JL's use of genuine science is
minimal and most of his books (many of which feature MONSTERS) operate at
the level of B-grade sf/horror films, where menace strikes unexpectedly in
a lazy, rural setting. Some of the better titles of this sort are The
Giant Stumbles (1960), Froomb! (1964) - probably his best single novel of
societal collapse (the title is an acronym for fluid's running out of my
brakes) - The Green Drift (1965), Ten Million Years to Friday (1967), and
Give Daddy the Knife, Darling (1969). He wrote with some verve but little
style, and there are many cliches of character. His short stories,
collected in The Night Spiders (coll 1964), are routine. It might be said
that JL's main deficiency as a writer of sf was a lack of interest in the
forward thrust of the genre; he was, at heart, a HORROR writer.
[JC/PN]Other works: The Grey Ones (1960); The Coming of the Strangers
(1961); A Sword Above the Night (1962), assembled with The Grey Ones as
(omni 1978 US); The Sleep Eaters (1963); The Screaming Face (1963); The
Night Spiders (1964); The Star Witches (1965); The Nowhere Place (1969);
The Year Dot (1972); The Hole in the World (1974); A Spider in the Bath
(1975); The Laxham Haunting (1976); Starseed on Eye Moor (1977); The
Waking of the Stone (1967); A Caller from Overspace (1979); Voyage of the
Eighth Mind (1980); The Power Ball (1981); The Terror Version (1982); The
Vale of Sad Banana (1984).
LYNCH, (JOHN GILBERT) BOHUN
(1884-1928) UK writer and caricaturist in whose Menace from the Moon
(1925) - which blends interplanetary, LOST-WORLD and future- WAR themes descendants of a MOON colony established by 17th-century Europeans attack
the Earth with heat-rays. It contains many references to the works of
Bishop John WILKINS. [JE]Other work: A Muster of Ghosts (anth 1924; vt The
Best Ghost Stories 1924 US), ed.See also: INVASION.
LYNCH, FRANCES
D.G. COMPTON.
LYNDS, DENNIS
(1924- ) US editor and writer whose sf consists of 2 sf adventures as by
Michael Collins - Lukan War (1969) and The Planets of Death (1970) - and
several late contributions under the house name Maxwell Grant to the The
Shadow book sequence, earlier titles in which had been mainly reprints of
lead novels from the pulp magazine The Shadow (1931-49), mostly by Walter
B. Gibson (also as Grant). DL's additions followed on from Gibson's last
contribution to the series (Return of the Shadow * [1963]): The Shadow
Strikes * (1964), Shadow Beware * (1965), Cry Shadow! * (1965), The
Shadow's Revenge * (1965), Mark of the Shadow * (1966), Shadow Go Mad *
(1966), The Night of the Shadow * (1966) and Destination Moon * (1967).

[JC]
LYNN, ELIZABETH A.
(1946- ) US writer who began publishing work of genre interest with "We
All Have to Go" for The Berkley Showcase (anth 1976) ed Victoria Schochet
and John SILBERSACK. This was assembled with other early work in The Woman
who Loved the Moon and Other Stories (coll 1981). Her early sf stories and
her first novel, A Different Light (1978), share certain assumptions about
the nature of the Universe, including the existence of HYPERSPACE, used
here both to facilitate storytelling and as an existential cusp for her
protagonists - like the cancer-stricken artist in the novel, who must
decide whether or not to seize the day by travelling where he needs to go
by hyperspace, even though such travel will mortally intensify his
illness. In her second and best-received novel, The Sardonyx Net (1981),
EAL applies a similar ironic torsion to a tale whose moral premises seem
initially unproblematic - slavery is bad for a planet, drugs are bad for
society, sadism is bad for the soul - but which become significantly less
clearcut in the telling. Although the slavery which obtains in one
mercenary planet in the Galaxy is never justified, its operations are seen
as complexly interactive; and the sadism of the captain and slavetrader
turns out to express so vividly his violated inner state that he almost
becomes the protagonist of the book. Most of her remaining work including the effective Chronicles of Tornor sequence, comprising
Watchtower (1979), The Dancers of Arun (1979) and The Northern Girl (1980)
- has been fantasy, and as the 1980s progressed she wrote less and less
sf. Given the sophisticated use to which she has put conventional
sf-adventure plots and venues, this slow departure seems most regrettable.
[JC]Other works: The Red Hawk (1984 chap); The Silver Horse (1984), a
fantasy for children; Tales from a Vanished Country (coll 1990), stories
all previously published in earlier volumes.
LYNN, GREY
(? - ) UK writer (possibly pseudonymous) whose The Return of Karl Marx
(1941) features the rising of the philosopher from his grave by
unexplained means. After exposure to the degenerate UK of 1940 he returns,
sadly, to his place of rest. [JC]
LYON, JOHN
Christopher EVANS.
LYON, LYMAN R.
[s] L. Sprague DE CAMP.
LYON, RICHARD K.
Andrew J. OFFUTT.
LYONS, DELPHINE C.
Evelyn E. SMITH.
LYTTON (EDWARD GEORGE EARLE LYTTON BULWER), FIRST BARON
(1803-1873) UK writer, known as Edward Bulwer until 1838, when he became
Sir Edward Bulwer. He became Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1843 when he
succeeded to the Knebworth estate on his mother's death. His name is often
rendered as Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, or simply as Bulwer Lytton; the

standard editions of his collected works give his name as Lord Lytton. He
became Colonial Secretary in 1858-9 (he signed the documents creating
British Columbia and Queensland), and was raised to the peerage as First
Baron Lytton in 1866.As a writer, he was most significant for such
fashionable and trendsetting novels as Pelham (1828), though he is best
remembered for The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). He was versatile and
prolific in several genres, and his collected works fill over 110 volumes.
His powerful interest in the occult, or more specifically in doctrines
associated with the Rosicrucians, surfaces throughout his work, becoming
explicit in Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (1862; rev 1863), which
feature ruminations on the proper route to the attainment of the elixir of
life and on other occult themes. The Haunted and the Haunters, or The
House and the Brain (1859 Blackwood's Magazine; 1905 chap) is a more
convincing haunted-house tale which qualifies as marginal sf through its
quasiscientific explanations in terms of mesmerism (animal magnetism). His
sf novel is The Coming Race (1871; vt Vril: The Power of the Coming Race
1972 US), a UTOPIA set in an underground LOST WORLD inhabited by an
evolved form of Homo sapiens, larger and wiser than surface dwellers. This
race derives its moral and physical virtue from vril, an electromagnetic
form of energy of universal utility which fuels flying machines and
automata, and even makes telepathy possible. (The UK beef-tea Bovril took
its name from vril.) Females of the Vril-ya are superior to men, a
circumstance which shapes the book's thin plot. A human visitor from the
surface is condemned to death for eugenic reasons but two women fancy him,
taking the initiative as is normal for Vril-ya; with the aid of one of
them he escapes to tell his tale. He understands little of his superiors'
lives, however, and masters nothing of their arts and sciences. Soon, it
is clear, the world above will be visited in turn and Homo sapiens will be
exterminated. Lytton's lack of horror at science, and the professionalism
of his text, help explain the extremely wide influence of The Coming Race,
which is one of the seminal sf texts before the age of H.G. WELLS.
[JC]Other works: Asmodeus at Large (1833); Godolphin (1833); The Pilgrims
of the Rhine (coll 1834), which contains "The Fallen Star", perhaps the
first story to consider primitive Man from an ethnographic point of view;
The Student (coll 1835).About the author: Strange Stories, and Other
Explorations in Victorian Fiction (1971) by Robert Lee Wolff; Gothic
Immortals: The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (1990) by
Marie Roberts.See also: ANONYMOUS SF AUTHORS; DIME-NOVEL SF; GOTHIC SF;
HISTORY OF SF; HOLLOW EARTH; POWER SOURCES; PROTO SCIENCE FICTION;
PSEUDO-SCIENCE.

SF?
McALLISTER, ANGUS
(? - ) Scottish writer whose first novel, The Krugg Syndrome (1988),
briefly conceals the mild-mannered and amusing tale of a country boy in
the big city by suggesting for a few pages that his personality has been
replaced by that of a telepathic alien. AM's second novel, The Canongate
Strangler (1990), plays more darkly with Doppelganger themes in a tale of
possession, murder and (once again) ESP. [JC]

McALLISTER, BRUCE (HUGH)
(1946- ) US writer, editor and academic, director since 1974 of the
creative-writing programme at the University of Redlands, California, and
Professor of English from 1983. He has written at least 40 stories since
starting to publish sf in 1963 with "The Faces Outside" (for If), which is
also the title story of a long-projected collection of his best work. "The
Boy" (1976) - a peculiarly revolting, skilful tale of the entropic life of
a reconstructed Peter Pan and Wendy on a less than utopian ISLAND - is an
exercise about, and to some extent in, literary sadism, which at the same
time gives exemplary form to his ongoing obsessions with psychic and
physical entrapment and with the alienation of human beings in worlds they
have not made. His first novel, Humanity Prime (1971), which takes some
material from "The Faces Outside" and was used as his thesis for an MFA
degree in creative writing, ingeniously depicts the complex underwater
environment of the planet Prime, where humans have, after 3000 years,
become deeply adapted to their aquatic life; they cope with both the
demented CYBORG starship which brought them there and an incursion of
reptile-like aliens. His second novel, the elegant and incandescent Dream
Baby (1989), is set in Vietnam during the darkest years of US involvement
there, and recounts the long excruciation of a nurse whose paranormal
power (she has precognitive dreams about the deaths of soldiers: the title
is an imperative) leads her, under the control of a secret military unit,
into the heart of the darkness.BM edited SF Directions (anth 1972), the
special sf issue of the New Zealand journal Edge (Autumn/Winter 1973),
which comprised a sizeable anthology of original stories, and the fine
Their Immortal Hearts (anth 1980), to which he contributed the title
novella. Because his first novel was published in a dying series (it was a
late Ace Special), because his second novel speaks unrelentingly of
painful matters, and because his shorter work remains scattered, BM
continues to be relatively obscure long past the point at which he should
have attained considerable prominence. [JC]About the author: The Work of
Bruce McAllister: An Annotated Bibliography ? rev 1986)
by David Ray Bourquin.See also: IMMORTALITY; WAR.
MAC AND ME
The PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT.
MacAPP, C.C.
Pseudonym used by US colour printer Carroll M. Capps (?1917-1971) in his
writing career, which began - after illness forced his retirement-with "A
Pride of Islands" in 1960 for If, with which magazine (and its
stablemates) he was associated for the balance of his short career. Much
of his fiction concerns itself with alien- INVASION themes, notably the
Gree stories (in If and Worlds of Tomorrow 1965-6) and his first novel,
Omha Abides (1964-6 Worlds of Tomorrow; fixup 1968), in which a
long-lasting alien occupation is opposed by Terrans whose Native-American
nature finds expression also in CCM's most ambitious novel, Worlds of the
Wall (1964 Fantastic; exp 1969), an intriguing adventure of initiation and
self-fulfilment set in a strange other-dimensional world. Though most of
his work skimps character development in favour of action-oriented plots,
CCM's last novel, Bumsider (1972), pays more attention to the development

of his cast's personalities. In general he wrote clearly and excitingly,
and his range was still growing at the time of his death; the early
truncation of his career was much regretted. [JC]Other works: Prisoners of
the Sky (1966 If; exp 1969); Secret of the Sunless World (1969) as Carroll
M. Capps; Recall Not Earth (1970); Subb (1968 If; fixup 1971).
McARTHUR, JOHN
Arthur WISE.
MacAULAY, DAVID (ALEXANDER)
(1946- ) US writer, much of whose work, beginning with Cathedral: The
Story of its Construction (1973), has concentrated on architectural
subjects, a focus reflected in Unbuilding (1980 chap), which depicts in
pictures and text the hypothetical demolition of the Empire State
Building. Of more specific sf interest are Motel of the Mysteries (graph
1979 UK), a comic FABULATION whose surreal twists cleverly evoke displaced
worlds, and Baaa (1985 chap), a fantasy SATIRE in which sheep take over
the world. [JC]
MACAULAY, (EMILIE) ROSE
(1881-1958) UK author of 23 novels from 1906, the most famous being her
last, The Towers of Trebizond (1956). Some of these books - like And No
Man's Wit (1940), in which a mermaid appears - venture edgily into
fantasy. What Not: A Prophetic Comedy (1918; libellous passages cut 1919),
set several years after the conclusion of WWI, depicts the coming to power
in the UK of an autocratic government designed to counter postwar crises.
(Although copies exist of the 1918 version, which portrays a newspaper
proprietor attempting political blackmail, it may never have been
officially released.) Mystery at Geneva: An Improbable Tale of Singular
Happenings (1922) is set in an undefined NEAR FUTURE where a monarchist
counter-revolution has replaced the Bolsheviks in Russia and a reporter (a
woman in drag) helps save the League of Nations from a conspiracy designed
to restore communism. Orphan Island (1924) is a borderline UTOPIA (see
also ISLANDS) set in the 19th and 20th centuries and satirizing
conventional Victorian social and sexual mores. [JC]About the author: Rose
Macaulay: A Writer's Life (1991) by Jane Emery.See also: POLITICS.
McAULEY, PAUL J.
(1955- ) UK biologist and writer. He began publishing sf with "Wagon,
Passing" for IASFM in 1984; his best shorter work is collected in The King
of the Hill and Other Stories (coll 1991). With his first novel, FOUR
HUNDRED BILLION STARS (1988 US), he launched conspicuously into a
far-reaching series which, combining SPACE-OPERA plots and cosmological
speculations, fruitfully amalgamated influences from both US and UK
traditions: H.G. WELLS and Larry NIVEN consort, sometimes uncomfortably,
in these tales of interstellar warfare, world-building and
universe-creation. Further volumes are Of the Fall (1989 US; vt Secret
Harmonies 1989 UK) and the very substantial Eternal Light (1991), which
best exemplifies to date PJM's control over the instruments of 1990s HARD
SF: wormholes, agathics to forestall death, GENETIC ENGINEERING and
cosmogony on the hugest scale. The series itself ostensibly concerns the
attempts of an almost fatally wearied corporation-run Earth - reminiscent

of Cordwainer SMITH - to fend off the panicked aggressions of an ancient
starfaring species, itself hiding from enemies of its own ilk; but the
pleasures of this ongoing sequence seem more and more to lie in the
increasingly comprehensive physical history of the entire Universe
adumbrated in Eternal Light.PJM's next two novels are singletons, and
represent his most accomplished work to date. Red Dust (1993) is set, like
many 1990s novels, on a MARS which has been colonized (and terraformed) by
humans. His treatment of this dominant theme - in terms of a quest plot
which takes its American protagonist across a complex landscape ruled by
the Chinese - is vivid, swift, and spontaneous-seeming. Pasquale's Angel
(1994) is an ALTERNATE WORLD story set in a Renaissance Italy dominated by
the remote figure of Leonardo da Vinci, who in this reality has created a
dystopian society through the power of his engineering genius. In the mid
1990s, PJM is beginning to look like one of the significant exploratory
talent of late sf. [JC] Other work: In Dreams (anth 1992) with Kim NEWMAN.
See also: ALIENS; AMAZING STORIES; BLACK HOLES; COLONIZATION OF OTHER
WORLDS; CYBORGS; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; ECOLOGY; EVOLUTION; GAMES
WORKSHOP; INTERZONE; METAPHYSICS; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; PARANOIA;
PHILIP
K. DICK AWARD; WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION.
MacAULEY, ROBIE (MAYHEW)
(1919- ) US writer, active as a non-genre story writer from 1947 but
almost certainly best known for his first novel, The Disguises of Love
(1952). His second, A Secret History of Time to Come (1979), sf, displays
some literary finesse in traversing a post- DISASTER terrain, but is
unoriginal. [JC]
MacAVOY, R(OBERTA) A(NN)
(1949- ) US writer, primarily of FANTASY - which tends to be quirky, well
written and scholarly about historical detail - and of one sf novel. Her
first book, Tea with the Black Dragon (1983), is a witty contemporary
fantasy about the friendship that grows between a middle-aged woman
musician and an ageless Oriental who is probably the human incarnation of
a dragon. The sequel was Twisting the Rope: Casadh an t'Sugain (1986). The
Trio for Lute trilogy - Damiano (1983), Damiano's Lute (1984) and Raphael
(1984), collected as A Trio for Lute (omni 1985) - is set in an
ALTERNATE-WORLD Renaissance Italy, France and Moorish Spain where MAGIC
works. The Book of Kells (1985) features time-travel from the present day
to a god-frequented 10th-century Ireland. The Grey Horse (1987), also set
in Ireland (Connemara in the late 19th century), is a finely told, complex
romance about local resistance allied to the Land League, featuring a
puca, or fairy-horse. RAM's sf novel is The Third Eagle (1989), an
entertaining romance about a naive Native-American warrior's learning
experiences on a variety of planetary and spacecraft venues; though
promising, it is less focused than most of her fantasy. RAM returned to
fantasy with theLens of the World trilogy, comprising Lens of the World
(1990), and King of the Dead (1991) and Winter of the Wolf (1993; vt The
Belly of the Wolf 1994 US): more coming-of-age material, this time set in
a marginally fantasticated baroque or renaissance alternate world. RAM has
become an important fantasist, especially in the unfamiliarity of her

material, which has enlivened a genre specializing all too often in
retreads. [PN]See also: JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD; PHILIP K. DICK AWARD.
McBAIN, ED
Evan HUNTER.
McBAIN, GORDON (DUNCAN III)
(1946-1992) US teacher and writer who, in his brief sf career, wrote the
moderately appealing but unremarkable Exoterra young-adult sf series: The
Path of Exoterra (1981) and Quest of the Dawnstar (1984). [JC]
McCAFFREY, ANNE (INEZ)
(1926- ) US writer, now living in Ireland. Most of her work is sf, though
tinged with the tone and instruments of FANTASY. She began publishing with
"Freedom of the Race" for Hugo GERNSBACK's Science Fiction Plus in 1953,
but became active only a decade or so later with her first novel, Restoree
(1967), which rather conventionally, though with tongue in cheek, tells
the story of a young woman who is flayed alive by alien flesh-eaters, is
saved, and with her skin restored has some adventures. Soon AM began
publishing the linked novels and stories that have made her reputation as
a writer of romantic, heightened tales of adventure explicitly designed to
appeal - and to make good sense to - a predominantly female adolescent
audience.Her major series is set in a long-lost Earth colony, Pern, a
world whose humans, symbiotically pair-bonded with tame, time-travelling,
telepathic and telekinetic dragons, engage in high adventures and defend
the planet from the poisonous Threads. It comprises several shorter units:
DRAGONFLIGHT (fixup 1968) (containing the 1968 HUGO-winner "Weyr Search"
and the 1968 NEBULA-winner "Dragon Rider"), Dragonquest (1971) and The
White Dragon (1978) are assembled as The Dragonriders of Pern (omni 1978);
Dragonsong (1976), Dragonsinger (1977) and Dragondrums (1979), which are
juveniles, are assembled as The Harper Hall of Pern (omni 1979); Moreta,
Dragonlady of Pern (1983 UK; exp 1983 US) and Nerilka's Story (1986) are
closely connected. Further titles include Dragonsdawn (1988), a prequel to
the overall sequence, which is followed by The Renegades of Pern (1989),
All the Weyrs of Pern (1991), The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall (coll of
linked stories (1993), The Girl Who Heard Dragons (coll 1994), The
Dolphin's Bell (1994) and The Dolphins of Pern (1994). A Time When: Being
a Tale of Young Lord Jaxom, his White Dragon Ruth, and Various
Fire-Lizards (1975 chap) is connected to the series; DRAGONFLIGHT (graph
1991) is the first of a projected series of graphic-novel versions of the
material. Though the tone is that of fantasy, the premises underlying Pern
are orthodox sf; even the dragons turn out to have been bio-engineered
eons previously by humans as a defence against a vacuum-traversing spore.
The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern (1989) with Jody Lynn Nye (1957- ) may be
of assistance to readers.Other series include: the Pegasus books - To Ride
Pegasus (fixup 1973), which deals with a corps of parapsychological
investigators in the near future and is notable for its political
conservatism, Pegasus in Flight (1990), these two being assembled as Wings
of Pegasus (omni 1991) - the Ireta books-Dinosaur Planet (1978 UK) and
Dinosaur Planet Survivors (1984), both being assembled as The Ireta
Adventure (omni 1985) - the Killashandra tales - The Crystal Singer
(1974-5 Continuum ed Roger ELWOOD; fixup 1982 UK), Killashandra (1985),

and Crystal Line (1992) and the Planet Pirates books - Sassinak (1990)
with Elizabeth MOON, The Death of Sleep (1990) with Jody Lynn Nye, and
Generation Warriors (1991) with Moon, all three being assembled as Planet
Pirates (omni 1993); the Rowan sequence - linked with the Pegasus books
(see above) to the extent that they may be considered as a single series,
the Talents books - comprising The Rowan (1990),Damia (1992), Lyon's Pride
(1994) and Damia's Children (1994), features a powerful female telepath
who engages in adventures and much sex with an even more powerful male
telepath named Jeff Raven. The Petaybee sequence, about a sentient planet
(see LIVING PLANETS), comprises Powers That Be (1993) with Elizabeth Ann
SCARBOROUGH and Power Lines (1994) with Scarborough, with further volumes
projected.AM's early singletons include Decision at Doona (1969) disappointingly sequeled much later by Crisis on Doona (1992) with Jody
Lynn Nye (1957- ) and Treaty Planet (1993; vt Treaty at Doona 1994 US),
also with Nye - and The City who Sang (fixup 1969) - unexcitingly sequeled
by PartnerShip (1992) with Margaret Ball (1947- ), and The Ship who
Searched (1992) with Mercedes Lackey (1950- ), The City Who Fought (1993)
with S.M. STIRLING and The Ship Who Won (1994) with Jody Lynn Nye. The two
original 1969 titles were assembled with Restoree as The Worlds of Anne
McCaffrey (omni 1981 UK). Though less popular than the Pern books, these
(the sequels excepted) are perhaps more clearly inventive. The Ship who
Sang, for instance, intriguingly presents a deformed girl who is grafted
into a SPACESHIP ( CYBORGS) and in effect becomes the ship; the emotional
difficulties facing a musical lady spaceship are many ( Hyperlink to:
MUSIC). Later singletons, like The Coelura (1983 chap) - strangely
assembled with Nerilka's Story from the Pern sequence as Nerilka's Story ?
The Coelura (omni 1987) - tend to downgrade their sf premises in favour of
romance. AM's stories, including some connected work, have been collected
in Get Off the Unicorn (coll 1977). Though her work has been criticized as
oversentimental, AM is among the most popular writers in her particular
subgenre. [JC]Other works: The Mark of Merlin (1971), Ring of Fear (1971)
and The Kilternan Legacy (1975), none sf or fantasy, and all assembled as
Three Women (omni 1990); The Smallest Dragonboy (1982 chap Ireland);
Stitch in Snow (1984 Ireland) and The Year of the Lucy (1986 Ireland),
neither being sf or fantasy; The Girl who Heard Dragons (1985 chap); Habit
is an Old Horse (coll 1986 chap); The Lady (1987; vt The Carradyne Touch
1988 UK), a romance; Rescue Run (1991 chap), an sf novella.As Editor:
Alchemy ? Cooking Out of This World (anth 1973), a
collection of recipes supplied by various sf writers.About the author:
Anne McCaffrey, Dragonlady and More: A Working Bibliography (latest rev
1989 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr and Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also: ARTS;
COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; DEL REY BOOKS; PLANETARY ROMANCE; PSI
POWERS; SCIENCE FANTASY; WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION;
WRITERS OF
THE FUTURE CONTEST.
McCANN, ARTHUR
[s] John W. CAMPBELL Jr.
McCANN, EDSON
Pseudonym used by Frederik POHL and Lester DEL REY on the novel Preferred

Risk (1955), hurriedly written for a GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION novel
competition because no acceptable submission had been received. Cast in
the same mould as Pohl's and C.M. KORNBLUTH's THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1953),
it features a world dominated by insurance companies. [BS]See also:
SATIRE.
McCARTHY, SHAWNA (LEE)
(1954- ) US editor who served 1983-5 as editor of ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE
FICTION MAGAZINE and 1985-8 as sf editor of BANTAM BOOKS. For IASFM she
produced 4 anthologies: Isaac Asimov's Wonders of the World (anth 1982),
Isaac Asimov's Aliens ?
Her Own (anth 1984; vt Isaac Asimov's Space of Your Own 1984 UK; cut under
original title 1989) and Isaac Asimov's Fantasy! (anth 1985; cut 1990).
With Lou ARONICA of Bantam she was involved in the FULL SPECTRUM
original-anthology series, editing Full Spectrum (anth 1988) with Aronica
and Full Spectrum 2 (anth 1989) with Aronica, Patrick LoBrutto and Amy
Stout. [JC]
McCARTHY, WIL
Working name of US writer William Terence McCarthy (1966- ) who began
publishing sf with "What I Did with the OTV Grissom" forAboriginal in
1990; the first of the 2 stories assembled in Dirtyside Down/C-Minor (coll
1991 chap dos) with Gregory R.Hyde is by WMcC. In his first novel,
Aggressor Six (1994), 34th century humanity is confronted by an implacable
alien race which wages interstellar war against us, and is only defeated
in the end due to discoveries made by a team of humans who have been
trained to think like the enemy. The action is fast and clean, though not
entirely unpredictable. [JC]
McCAY, BILL
Working name of US writer William McCay (? - ), who has exclusively
restricted himself to TIES. They include 2 titles in the 4th Tom Swift
sequence ( TOM SWIFT): The Black Dragon * (1991) and The Negative Zone *
(1992), both as by Victor APPLETON; 3 Nintendo Adventure Books: Monster
Mix-Up * (1991), Koopa Capers * (1991) and Doors to Doom * (1992); a Star
Trek title: Star Trek: The Next Generation: Chains of Command * (1992)
with Eloise Flood; and 2 volumes in Stan Lee's Riftworld series about a
superhero comic publisher accompanied by giants: Stan Lee's Riftworld:
Crossover * (1993) and #2: Villains * (1994). [JC]
McCAY, (ZENAS) WINSOR
(1867-1934) US COMIC-strip artist and creator of animated cartoons, of
seminal importance in both fields. His earliest years were obscure (it is
not known where he was born; his name is sometimes given as Winsor Zenic
McCay, and his year of birth as 1869 or 1871), but by 1889 he was employed
in Chicago as an engraver in a printing firm, and during the 1890s he
worked as a freelance poster painter and as an in-house artist at
Cincinnati's Vine Street Dime Museum before, in 1898, starting his
newspaper career by doing editorial cartoons for the Cincinnati Commercial
Tribune. By 1900 WM had switched papers and was drawing his first comic
strip, Tales of the Jungle Imps, signed Felix Fiddle.His new interest in
strips and success as a cartoonist for Life led to his moving in 1902 to

New York, where he began to work for the two New York papers owned by
James Gordon Bennett (1841-1918): the New York Herald as WM and the New
York Telegram as "Silas". A cascade of humorous allegories followed,
including A Pilgrim's Progress by Mr Bunion, Hungry Henrietta, Poor Jake
and Little Sammy Sneeze. 1904 saw the debut of WM's nightmarish Dreams of
the Rarebit Fiend, which carried its characters into a variety of very
frightening dyspepsia-generated dream experiences; it appeared in book
form as Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend (graph coll 1905; rev 1973). The success
of this strip inspired his masterpiece, Little Nemo in Slumberland, which
appeared in the New York Herald (1905-11), then for William Randolph
Hearst papers under the title In the Land of Wonderful Dreams (1911-14),
then for the Herald-Tribune (1924-7) under the original title. The first
sequence was the most innovative and inspired, and soon selections were
reprinted as Little Nemo in Slumberland (graph coll 1909). Later titles
included an adaptation by Edna Sarah Levine, Little Nemo in Slumberland *
(1941) illus WM, and The Complete Little Nemo in Slumberland (graph coll
1989-90) ed Richard Marschall, a definitive version in 4 vols of the
1905-11 strip, reproducing the original colours; a 5th vol, The Complete
Little Nemo in Slumberland: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams:1911-1912
(graph coll 1991), also ed Marschall, was followed by a 6th vol, The
Complete Little Nemo in Slumberland: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams:
1913-1914 (graph coll 1994) ed Bill Blackbeard, which together reprinted
the second sequence. Many of the first-sequence episodes - all drawn in
WM's florid, hallucinatory, meticulously crafted, architectonic,
poster-like Art Nouveau style - were straightforward dream fantasies; but
later sustained sequences - like those dealing with Shantytown, with
Befuddle Hall, and with a voyage by airship into outer space during 1909 intermittently displayed an sf-like verisimilitude; as pioneering
explorations into the techniques of narrating complex visions through
sequential drawings, the strip as a whole was of vital importance.While
busy with Little Nemo, WM was also able to continue with other graphic
work, including many individual drawings, those making up the Spectrophone
series of visions of the future being of particular sf interest. After he
moved to Hearst, he began concentrating on political cartoons from a
conservative point of view; but continued to issue enormously detailed
prophetic drawings involving vast airships, cityscapes and catastrophes.
Some of these have been assembled as Daydreams ?
Visions of Winsor McCay (graph coll 1988) ed Richard Marschall.WM also
took a central role in the development of the animated cartoon - indeed,
some claim that he invented the art of animation. In whatever medium he
worked, he drew with incredible speed; this gave rise to the vaudeville
act he presented from 1906, during which he executed a series of 40 chalk
drawings, one every 30 seconds, showing a man and a woman ageing while the
orchestra played a suitable melody. From here it was a logical step to
animation. With astonishing industry, he hand-painted each frame of his
cartoons; beginning in 1909 he produced 10 short films: Little Nemo
(1911), which required c4000 drawings; The Story of a Mosquito (1912; vt
How a Mosquito Operates); Gertie, the Dinosaur (1914), which required c10,
000 drawings; The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), the most ambitious,
requiring c25,000 drawings done in much more detail than in the earlier
films; The Centaurs, a fantasy film, Flip's Circus and Gertie on Tour,

these 3 being done c1918-21 and surviving only as fragments; and 3 Dreams
of the Rarebit Fiend shorts, all released in 1921: The Pet, Bug Vaudeville
and The Flying House. In The Pet household animals drink an elixir and
swell to huge proportions; a 10-storey cat ravages a city and,
KING-KONG-style, is assailed by airships. Bug Vaudeville is a Silly
Symphonies-style (but pre-Disney) fantasy. In The Flying House a couple,
escaping their creditors, fit out their house with wings and a propeller
and fly off into outer space where, inter alia, they meet a giant on the
Moon. It is not certain why WM gave up animation after these successes,
but it was possibly because he thought - wrongly, as was soon proven by
Felix the Cat and Walt Disney's Alice and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit - that
animation, as an artform, was a deadend street to whose end he had come.
He continued to produce newspaper strips and illustrations, however, until
the end of his life. [JC/JGr/SW]Further reading: "Winsor McCay" by John
Canemaker in The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology (anth
1980) ed Danny Peary and Gerald Peary; Winsor McCay: His Life and Art
(1987) by John Canemaker; Comic Artists (1989) by Richard Marschall.
McCLARY, THOMAS CALVERT
(?1909-1972) US speechwriter and ghostwriter whose sf appeared in ASF in
the 1930s under his own name and under the pseudonyms Thomas Calvert,
Miles Cramer and Calvin Peregoy - the latter for the Doctor Conklin series
in ASF in 1934-5. For Unknown he wrote "The Tommyknocker" (1940). Basic to
his two sf novels, Rebirth: When Everyone Forgot (1934 ASF; 1944) and
Three Thousand Years (1938 ASF; 1954), is the theory, reminiscent of
Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), that a small scientific elite unhindered
by the opportunism of businessmen and politicians could keep the world
running in decency and comfort. Both are worked out in post- HOLOCAUST
settings, intentionally and instantaneously precipitated in the former by
means of a ray which obliterates all memory and in the latter by the
transition of all lifeforms to a state of SUSPENDED ANIMATION. In both
books the idealistic theory is set up only to be exploded. [JE/RB/PN]
MacCLOUD, MALCOLM
(? - ) US writer of two sf juveniles for older children, The Tera Beyond
(1981) and A Gift of Mirrorvax (1981), the latter attempting with only
moderate success to make plausible a mirror Earth on the other side of the
Sun. [JC]
MacCLURE, VICTOR (THOM MacWALTER)
(1887-1963) UK writer of popular fiction. His Ultimatum: A Romance of the
Air (1924; vt The Ark of the Covenant: A Romance of the Air and of Science
1924 US) tells of world disarmament brought about by pacifists armed with
dirigibles carrying a sleep gas and a ray that transmutes elements. They
also possess atomic energy and other weapons invented by their dying South
American "Master". After the US President is converted to their cause,
peace ensues. [JC/PN]See also: AIR WONDER STORIES; WEAPONS.
McCLURE'S MAGAZINE
US "slick" magazine published by S.S. McClure, ed Ida Tarbell and others.
Monthly June 1893-Jan 1926 (irregularly towards the end). Recommenced June
1926 as a romance magazine. Merged with Smart Set in Apr 1929.Initially

conceived as the US edition of The IDLER, MM appeared as a new magazine
with original stories and features, although some sf was reprinted from
The Idler. MM's best remembered sf publication is Rudyard KIPLING's With
the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 AD (1905; 1909 chap US). Two interesting
disaster stories were "Within an Ace of the End of the World" (1900) by
Robert BARR and "The End of the World" (1903) by Jules Guerin. Jack
LONDON's "The Unparalleled Invasion" (1910) is a future- WAR Yellow-Peril
story in which the author, famous as a believer in the Brotherhood of Man,
recommends genocide of the Chinese. A serialized novel was Cleveland
MOFFETT's The Conquest of America: A Romance of Disaster and Victory: U.S.
A. 1921 A.D. (May-Aug 1915 as "The Conquest of America in 1921"; 1916).
[JE/PN]
MacCOLL, HUGH
(? -? ) UK author of Mr Stranger's Sealed Packet (1889), an
interplanetary novel describing a spaceship journey to MARS and the
discovery there of two races of Earth origin, one of which has attained a
UTOPIAN ideal ( EVOLUTION). Although lacking the depths of Percy GREG's
influential Across the Zodiac (1880), the book proved popular and may in
turn have influenced H.G. WELLS, especially in its account of the death of
a Martian through exposure to bacteria in Earth's atmosphere. [JE]
McCOLLUM, MICHAEL A.
(1946- ) US writer and control-systems engineer specializing in aerospace
propulsion. MAM began publishing sf with "Duty, Honor, Planet" for ASF in
1979. His first novel, A Greater Infinity (fixup 1982), established the
pattern he would follow through the 1980s: a complex SPACE-OPERA adventure
plot involves humans (in this case Terrans) with one or more alien races
as wars, quests and challenges galore generate a sense of movement. The
Makers series - Life PROBE (1983) and Procyon's Promise (1985) - and the
Antares series - Antares Dawn (1986) and Antares Passage (1987) - are in
this mould, but Thunderstrike! (1989) deals more mundanely with what
happens when a comet strikes Earth, and The Clouds of Saturn (1991)
concerns human and internecine strife in the cloud-cities colonizing
Saturn. MAM's touch is usually light, and accusations of racism occasioned by the sorry fate Africa suffers in the Makers books - seem
almost certainly misdirected. [JC]Other Works: The Sails of Tau Ceti
(1992).
McCOMAS, J(ESSE) FRANCIS
(1911-1978) US editor and writer who published a number of sf stories
under his own name - including "Shock Treatment" (1954) and "Parallel"
(1955) - and as Webb Marlowe. He was co-editor with Raymond J. HEALY of
the 35-story ANTHOLOGY Adventures in Time and Space (anth 1946; cut vt
Selections from Adventures in Time and Space 1954; recut vt More
Adventures in Time and Space 1955; text restored vt Famous Science-Fiction
Stories 1957), which was initially published by Random House, one of the
two or three most prestigious literary publishers of the time, and whose
contents - a very wide selection from the new US sf of the previous decade
- were made available for the first time to a wide non-genre audience. It
was in this anthology that he published his first story, "Flight into
Darkness" (1946) as by Webb Marlowe. JFM was also joint editor with

Anthony BOUCHER of The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION from #1
(1949) until Aug 1954, though he has not generally received his due share
of credit for establishing the direction of that magazine. He also
co-edited with Boucher the first 3 vols of the Best from FSF sequence: The
Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction (anth 1952), #2 (anth 1953) and #3
(anth 1954). He remained advisory editor of FSF until March 1962. JFM was
a member of the Mystery Writers of America. [MJE/JC]Other works as editor:
The Graveside Companion (anth 1962); Crimes and Misfortunes (anth 1970);
Special Wonder: The Anthony Boucher Memorial Anthology of Fantasy and
Science Fiction (anth 1970; in 2 vols vt Special Wonder #1 1971 and #2
1971).See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; GOLDEN AGE OF SF.
McCORD, GUY
[s] Mack REYNOLDS.
McCOY, ANDREW
Pseudonym of South African-born Australian writer Andre Jute (1945- ),
who has concentrated as AM on violent tales of conflict in the continent
of his birth, most of them verging into the NEAR FUTURE. Novels as AM
include Atrocity Week (1978 UK), The Insurrectionist (1979 UK), African
Revenge (1980 UK), Blood Song (1983 UK), Cain's Courage (1985 UK),
Survivors and Winners (1986 UK) and The Meyeresco Helix (1988 UK). Under
his own name he has published tales of a similar nature though less
aggressively told: Reverse Negative (1982 UK), Festival (1982 UK),
Sinkhole (1982 UK) and Iditarod (1990 UK). [JC]
MacCREIGH, JAMES
Frederik POHL.
McCRUMB, SHARYN
(1948- ) US writer, in most of whose titles detective plots intersect
with fantasy and/or sfmaterial,though her first novel to invoke these
genres, Bimbos of theDeath Sun: Murder Most Fun at the Ultimate Fantasy
Con (1987),a RECURSIVE tale set at an sf convention, does not actually
turn into sf, and the first of theJay Omega sequence. What is most
remarkable about the book, for the sf reader, maybe SMcC's intimate
understanding of fans and writers and their typical interactions,
aknowledgeability which also marks Zombies of the Gene Pool (1992), in
which sf writer Jay Omega - in real life James Mega, aprofessor of
engineering - visits another convention, and becomes embroiled in ancient
sf scandals; there may be some roman a clefmoments in the text. Of her
other novels, The Hangman's BeautifulDaughter (1992) and She Walks These
Hills (1994) both have fantasy elements. [JC]
McCULLOUGH, COLLEEN
(1937- ) Working name of Australian writer Colleen McCullough-Robinson,
who remains most famous for The Thorn Birds (1977). A Creed for the Third
Millennium (1985 US), set in the 21st century, has a familiar plot in
which a charismatic figure ambiguously revitalizes a disillusioned world.
The Ladies of Missolonghi (1987 UK) is a ghost story. [JC]
McCUTCHAN, PHILIP
(1920- ) UK writer, a Sandhurst attendee (though not graduate), author of

several routine sf thrillers, most of them in his Commander Shaw series,
which began with Gibraltar Road (1960) and closed with Corpse (1980). Of
these, Skyprobe (1966), The Screaming Dead Balloons (1968), The
All-Purpose Bodies (1969) and The Bright Red Business Men (1969) make the
clearest use of sf instruments, though never centrally. The Commander's
function, which is to involve himself with espionage and to save the world
from mad SCIENTISTS who grow extraterrestrial fungi, construct malign
CYBORGS, etc., generally necessitates the destruction of any sf device
before the story's end. [JC/PN]Other works: Bowering's Breakwater (1964),
a UK liner faces trouble after the start of a nuclear world war; A Time
for Survival (1966), a post- HOLOCAUST story of unremitting bleakness; The
Day of the Coastwatch (1968), a DYSTOPIA; This Drakotny . . . (1971);
Flood (1991), the northern polar icecap melts.
MCCUTCHEON, GEORGE BARR
RURITANIA.
McDANIEL, DAVID
(1939-1977) US writer who also wrote as Ted Johnstone. He published a
SPACE OPERA, The Arsenal Out of Time (1967), and a number of tv spin-offs,
most of them in the MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. series. They are The Dagger Affair
* (1966), The Vampire Affair * (1966), The Monster Wheel Affair * (1967),
The Rainbow Affair * (1967), The Utopia Affair * (1968) and The Hollow
Crown Affair * (1969). He also wrote a spin-off from the tv series The
PRISONER, The Prisoner #2: Number Two * (1969; vt Who is Number Two? 1982
UK). [JC]
McDERMOT, MURTAGH
Pseudonym of a UK or Irish author whose satirical MOON-voyage novel, A
Trip to the Moon (1728), describes various remarkable sights and beings
after the fashion of CYRANO DE BERGERAC. The necessary propulsion is
provided by gunpowder. [JC]
McDERMOTT, DENNIS
[s] P. Schuyler MILLER.
McDEVITT, JACK
Working name of US writer John Charles McDevitt (1935- ), who began
publishing sf with "The Emerson Effect" for Twilight Zone in 1981, coming
to prominence with "Cryptic" (1984), a tale whose theme - First Contact
between humans and the ALIEN races who are sending communications across
space - was elaborated in his first novel, The Hercules Text (1986).
Despite the occasional descent into CLICHES in his plotting and his
politics (even as early as 1986 the vision of the USA coming close to war
with the USSR over ownership of the information in the signals lacked
extrapolative vigour), JMcD managed in this tale to concentrate very
effectively on the human dimensions of the conundrum posed by the
existence of a COMMUNICATION whose contents, when deciphered, might well
devastate human civilization; and the Roman Catholic viewpoint of one of
the SCIENTISTS involved in decoding the message is presented with an
obvious sympathy which does not hamper the storytelling, which involves
threats of violent skulduggery. JMcD's second novel, A Talent for War
(1989), set in a galactic venue eons hence, similarly sets a religious

frame around the central quest plot, in which a young man must thread his
way through the unsettled hinterlands dividing human and alien space in
his search for the secret that may retroactively destroy the reputation of
a human who has been a hero in the recent wars. His third novel, The
Engines of God (1994), puts into the darkly humane terms that have become
his trademark an epic space opera plot that gives some new life to old
movements of story: the ancient artifact; the unfolding COSMOLOGY; and so
forth. In all three novels, JMcD wrestles valiantly with the task he has
set himself: that of imposing an essentially contemplative structure upon
conventions designed for violent action. He comes, at times, close to
success. [JC]See also: PHILIP K. DICK AWARD.
MacDONALD, ANSON
Robert A. HEINLEIN.
MacDONALD, GEORGE
(1824-1905) Scottish author and editor, noted for his fairy tales. His
former occupation as a clergyman was reflected in his allegorical
fantasies, Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858) and
Lilith (1895; rev 1924), the latter work being his closest to sf. Based on
the premise that an infinite number of three-dimensional universes can
exist in a four-dimensional frame ( PARALLEL WORLDS), Lilith draws heavily
from the Talmud in its enigmatic description of a search, set in both this
Universe and another, for the self. It compares interestingly with David
LINDSAY's A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920).After GM's death, his son Greville
wrote three fantasy novels as well as the biographical George MacDonald
and his Wife (1924). [JE/JC]Other works: Adela Cathcart (coll 1864; rev
1882 to exclude fantasy stories); The Portent: A Story of the Inner Vision
of the Highlanders, Commonly Called the Second Sight (1864; rev as coll vt
The Portent and Other Stories 1909; original novel vt Lady of the Mansion
1983 US); Dealings with the Fairies (1867); At the Back of the North Wind
(1870), The Princess and the Goblin (1871 US) and The Princess and Curdie
(1882 US), a series for children; Works of Fancy and Imagination (10 vols
1871); The Wise Woman: A Parable (1875; vt A Double Story 1876 US; vt
Princess Rosamund US; vt The Lost Princess 1895 UK); The Flight of the
Shadow (1891); The Fairy Tales of George MacDonald (coll in 5 vols 1904);
Fairy Tales (1920); The Light Princess (coll 1961) ed Roger Lancelyn
GREEN; Evenor (coll 1972) ed Lin CARTER; Visionary Novels: Lilith;
Phantastes (omni 1954 US; vt Phantastes; and Lilith 1962 UK); The Gifts of
the Child Christ: Fairy Tales and Stories for the Childlike (coll in 2
vols; 1973 US) ed Glenn Edward Sadler; The Gold Key and The Green Life
(anth 1986), the second story being by Fiona Macleod (pseudonym of William
Sharp [1824-1905]); The Day Boy and the Night Girl (1988 chap); Little
Daylight (1988 chap).About the author: There is a mass of critical work on
GM. Of particular genre interest is The Renaissance of Wonder in
Children's Literature (1977; vt Renaissance of Wonder: The Fantasy Worlds
of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, E. Nesbit and Others 1980
US) by Marion Lochhead (1902-1985).See also: ADAM AND EVE; MUSIC.
McDONALD, IAN
(1960- ) UK writer, a resident of Northern Ireland, who began publishing
sf with "The Islands of the Dead" for Extro in 1982; this, with other

short work, was assembled as Empire Dreams (coll 1988 US). He very quickly
demonstrated a fascination with garish sf impedimenta and a habit of
rococo elaboration which made him both a highly promising writer and
potentially a wilfully eccentric one. His first novel, Desolation Road
(1988 US), has been described as THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (coll 1950)
crossed with One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans 1970), a joke
limited in accuracy only by its failure to add Cordwainer SMITH to Ray
BRADBURY and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928- ). IM is not so much being
influenced or writing pastiche as appropriating deftly from other writers
the precise gestures needed to make ideological or emotional points about
the human implications of TERRAFORMING or cyborgization ( CYBORGS). Out on
Blue Six (1989 US) describes a failed UTOPIA, a standard theme in the UK
during the Thatcher years, working both to rehabilitate socialist ideals
and to acknowledge legitimate criticism; it combines standard Robert A.
HEINLEIN motifs - the Man, or in this case Woman, who Learns Better-some
A.E. VAN VOGT mystification about amnesiac Hidden Masters, and a catalogue
of DYSTOPIAN and heterotopian fragments, plus chunks of Grail quest and a
lot of shooting and running around. King of Morning, Queen of Day (1985 in
Empire Dreams; exp 1991 US), which won the PHILIP K. DICK AWARD in 1992,
is a fantasy about Irish identity across the generations which manages in
its third (contemporary) section to assimilate much of the feel of
CYBERPUNK. Hearts, Hands and Voices (1992; vt The Broken Land 1992 US),
set in a tropical venue much resembling Asia (though the religious
conflicts have an Irish ring), replicates the technique of his first
novel; in this case his models are Geoff RYMAN's novels The Unconquered
Country (1986) and The Child Garden (1988).Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone
(1994 US), which is novella-length, concisely depicts the circular hegira
through near-future Japan of an occidental man who is re-sorting his life
and attempting to come to terms with the consequences of his invention (or
discovery) of reality-controlling computer images. Necroville (1994; vt
The Terminal Cafe 1994 US), which is perhaps IM's most concentrated and
finest novel yet, constructs an intensely complicated urban NEAR FUTURE
world - CYBERPUNK imagery of the world-city is utilized with bravado
throughout - in which NANOTECHNOLOGY has accomplished what many - even in
1995 - feel may be its first transformative change, making it possible for
cellular creatures - like us - to become immortal. The plot spins this
speculation with feverish energy. [RK]Other works:Speaking in Tongues
(coll 1992); Kling Klang Klatch (graph 1992) illus David Lyttleton.See
also: CITIES; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; GAMES AND SPORTS; INTERZONE;
MARS; NEW WORLDS; WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION.
MACDONALD, JAMES D(OUGLAS)
Debra DOYLE.
MacDONALD, JOHN D(ANN)
(1916-1986) US writer and ex-lieutenant colonel in the US Army, known
mainly for such well written thrillers as The Brass Cupcake (1950) and the
21 Travis McGee novels (1964-85), which evolved from escapist tales of
derring-do into impassioned laments for the human race and the planet.
None of his sf, which began early in his career with "Cosmetics" for ASF
in 1948, significantly anticipates JDM's late mood; the best of his 50 or

so short stories, nearly all written 1948-53, were assembled in Other
Times, Other Worlds (coll 1978). His two early sf novels, Wine of the
Dreamers (1951; vt Planet of the Dreamers 1953 UK) and Ballroom of the
Skies (1952), were both polished and proficient adventures in PARANOID sf
involving extraterrestrial manipulations of humanity, inadvertent in the
first book and, in the second, as part of a winnowing process to select
good leadership material. A later novel, The Girl, the Gold Watch, ?
Everything (1962), is a complicated spoof adventure in which a man
inherits a watch which, when correctly used, speeds up time for the owner,
rendering him invisible to the people in real, apparently frozen, time,
and thereby giving him great power. All 3 novels were assembled as Time
and Tomorrow (omni 1980). JDM occasionally wrote sf stories under the
pseudonyms John Wade Farrell and Peter Reed. [JC/PN]About the author:
Bibliography of the Published Works of John D. MacDonald (1980) by Walter
and Jean Shine.See also: LEISURE; PULP MAGAZINES.
MacDONALD, PHILIP
(1899-1980) Scottish-born author of detective novels and screenplays, in
California from 1931; he was best known for thrillers like The Rasp (1924)
and X v. Rex (1933 as by Martin Porlock), of which at least four,
including The List of Adrian Messenger (1959), were filmed. His 23
screenplay credits included Rebecca (1940), The Body Snatcher (1945) and
the sf film Tobor the Great (1954). PM published occasional sf stories in
FSF and elsewhere in the 1940s and 1950s, and as W.J. Stuart wrote
Forbidden Planet * (1956), based on FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956), a film
novelization of higher quality than usual. [PN/JC]
McDONALD, RAYMOND
Joint pseudonym of US writers Raymond Leger (1883-? ) and Edward McDonald
(1873-? ), whose sf novel, The Mad Scientist: A Tale of the Future (1908),
features the increasingly dangerous - or effective - interventions of the
said SCIENTIST in the dealings of US businessmen and of the US Government
itself. The scientist's inclinations are socialist but, surprisingly for
1908, the authors are ambiguous about whether or not he is a menace pure
and simple; and the protagonists of the tale find themselves again and
again having to cope with uncomfortable revelations - from fraud to
conspiracies with German strikebreakers - brought into the open by the
scientist's numerous inventions. [JC]
McDONALD, STEVEN E(DWARD)
(1956- ) Jamaican writer who began publishing sf with "Empty Barrels" for
ASF in 1978, was most noted for "Ideologies" (1980), and whose first
novel, The Janus Syndrome (1981 US), put into SPACE-OPERA guise a tale
involving racial oppression, romantic exaggerations of material, and
masquerades. Unfortunately, he then fell silent. [JC]
MacDONELL, A(RCHIBALD) G(ORDON)
(1895-1941) Scottish writer who began his career as author with a series
of thrillers as Neil Gordon; one of these, The Professor's Poison (1928),
was sf. From 1933, AGM wrote under his own name. In Lords and Masters
(1936) an industrial struggle between traditional steel manufacturers and
the developers of a new metal escalates into a full-blown war involving

the whole of Europe; by novel's end, a Patriotic Government is ruling the
UK. [JC]
McDONOUGH, ALEX
(? - ) US writer whose sf is restricted to the Scorpio sequence of tales
packaged on a SHARECROP basis by the Byron PREISS enterprise: Scorpio
(1990), Scorpio Rising (1990), Scorpio Descending (1991) and Dragon's
Blood (1991). Scorpio, an ALIEN on the run with a pilfered superpowered
orb, has escaped to 14th-century Earth, where he has many adventures. [JC]
McDONOUGH, THOMAS R(EDMOND)
(1945- ) US writer and lecturer in engineering at Caltech. He is perhaps
best known for his nonfiction and for serving as the coordinator of the
SETI programme of the Planetary Society. The Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence (1987) argues the case for seeking out First Contact with
other races in the Galaxy. Much of his earlier work was also nonfiction,
beginning with "They're Trying to Tell Us Something" for ASF in 1969,
which likewise concerned SETI matters. He began to publish fiction only in
1979 with "Statues of the Gods" for Starlog. His first novel, The
Architects of Hyperspace (1987), features a clearly argued HARD-SF vision
of a Galaxy containing at least one artificial toroidal world; there is
also sophisticated speculation about the growth of civilizations
throughout the Universe. Yet it is narrated in an only intermittently
humorous pulp style, and features at least one bibulous Irishman. The
Missing Matter (1992) provides a similar mix of intriguingly couched
cognition and comic turns. [JC]Other work: Space: The Next 25 Years (1987;
rev 1989).
MacDOUGAL, JOHN
Collaborative pseudonym of James BLISH and Robert A.W. LOWNDES on "Chaos
Co-ordinated" (ASF 1946). [PN]
MACE, DAVID
(1951- ) UK writer whose first novel, Demon-4 (1984), describes with a
quite chilling quasilyrical remoteness a post- HOLOCAUST suicide mission
undertaken by the eponymous CYBORG probe to dismantle a doomsday device.
Most of his later novels, like Nightrider (1985), Fire Lance (1986), The
Highest Ground (1988),Shadow Hunters (1991) and Chasing the Sun (1992),
rework his territory, which might be defined as the NEAR FUTURE seen in
terms of military DISASTERS, threatened or consummated; but Frankenstein's
Children (1990), set in what remains of the Amazonian rain forest, gathers
this material into a metaphorically rich whole, envisioning the entire
diseased enterprise of exploitation and "development" as a collective
surrender to the overstepping venture of Victor Frankenstein himself. The
MONSTER, in this book, is the torn and galvanized world itself. [JC]
McELROY, JOSEPH
(1930- ) US writer who has gained attention for a series of
intellectually formidable novels, almost all of which may be described as
epistemological studies of contemporary life. Most notable among these are
Lookout Cartridge (1974) and the extremely long and ambitious Women and
Men (1987). All his work may be most fruitfully likened to the FABULATIONS
of US writers like Thomas PYNCHON and Don DELILLO. However, Plus (1977),

which dramatizes the experience of an artificially nurtured brain aboard a
research satellite, is sf. [GF]
McENROE, RICHARD S.
(? - ) US writer and literary agent who began writing sf with "Wolkenheim
Fairday" for IASFM in 1980. His first two novels were BUCK ROGERS IN THE
25TH CENTURY ties: Warrior's World * (1981) and Warrior's Blood * (1981),
both based on outlines by Larry NIVEN and Jerry POURNELLE; they were not
received with enthusiasm. The Far Stars and Future Times sequence - The
Shattered Stars (1983), Flight of Honor (1984) and Skinner (1985)-provides
some more competently told sf adventures. RSM has also edited an
interesting anthology of original stories, Proteus: Voices for the 80's
(anth 1981). [JC]
McEVOY, SETH
(? - ) US writer. His Not Quite Human sequence of young-adult sf tales is
about a teenage ANDROID: Not Quite Human #1: Batteries Not Included
(1985), #2: All Geared Up (1985), #3: A Bug in the System (1985), #4:
Reckless Robot (1986), #5: Terror at Play (1986) and #6: Killer Robot
(1986). The Arcade Explorers sequence, all written with Laure Smith,
comprises Arcade Explorers #1: Save the Venturians! (1985), #2: Revenge of
the Raster Gang (1985), #3: The Electronic Hurricane (1985) and #4: The
Magnetic Ghost of Shadow Island (1985). He also wrote two titles for the
Explorer sequence: Destination: Brain * (1987) and Escape from Jupiter *
(1987). SM has written one nonfiction text of interest, Samuel R. Delany
(1985), a bio-critical study of the writer. [JC]
McEWAN, IAN (RUSSELL)
(1948- ) UK writer who came to instant fame through the stories assembled
in First Love, Last Rites (coll 1975), followed by In Between the Sheets
(coll 1978), some of which are fantasy or sf - like "Reflections of a Kept
Ape" from the second volume ( APES AND CAVEMEN) - but most of which turn
an intensely fabulistic eye ( FABULATION) on young persons caught in the
hyperboles of a UK depicted as psychically incontinent and in terminal
decline. His first novel, The Cement Garden (1978), is a tale of horror.
Of the plays assembled in The Imitation Game (coll 1981), "Solid Geometry"
(1978) is sf. Or Shall We Die?: Words for an Oratorio Set to Music by
Michael Berkeley (1983 chap) deals with the threat and imagined aftermath
of nuclear WAR. The Child in Time (1987) is an sf novel set in the same
dystopian NEAR-FUTURE UK adumbrated in "Two Fragments: March 199 - ""(in
In Between the Sheets); in this desolate, privatized, factory-farmed
venue, the protagonist agonizingly loses his child outside a shop, and his
search for her becomes a search for meaning and grace in the desert
landscape the UK has become. The Daydreamer (1994 chap) recounts the
story-like perceptions of its young protagonist in a style of hallucinated
clarity. [JC]"
MACEY, PETER
(? - ) UK research chemist and writer whose routine sf novels are
Stationary Orbit (1974), in which the alien intelligence turns out to be a
local dolphin, Distant Relations (1975) and Alien Culture (1977), which
features invasion by intelligent microbes. [PN]

MACFADDEN, BERNARR
(1868-1955) US publisher, writer and film producer, born Bernard Adolphus
McFadden; much concerned throughout his life with physical culture, and an
espouser of nudism and eccentric health routines in various magazines from
early in his career. His acknowledged fiction, beginning with The
Athlete's Conquest (1892), is neither sf nor fantasy; but he may have
published some pseudonymous genre works in his own magazines. From 1904
his journals featured sf stories and novels. The first was "My Bride from
the Other World", a HOLLOW-EARTH tale by the Rev. E.C. Atkins (who may
have been BM himself) in Physical Culture; it was followed by the
book-length serial "Weird and Wonderful Story of Another World" (1905) as
by Tyman Currio (probably John Russell Coryell [1848-1924] with BM's
assistance), and many other stories followed in BM's other journals, which
included Brain Power (ed F. Orlin TREMAINE 1921-4), Dance World,
Metropolitan Fiction Lovers' Magazine, Midnight and Red-Blooded
Adventures. The most important early sf novel thus published was Milo
HASTINGS's remarkable "Children of 'Kultur'", which appeared in True Story
in 1919 and which, revised as City of Endless Night (1920), was one of the
central - and most politically prescient - US DYSTOPIAS. Ghost Stories,
which BM ran 1926-30 (it then soon folded under new management),
concentrated on the supernatural, as did True Strange Stories, whose
founding editor was Walter B. GIBSON; but Liberty, a later (and very
substantial) BM magazine, published Fred ALLHOFF's Lightning in the Night
(1940; 1979), which assumes the WWII triumph of Germany in Europe ( HITLER
WINS), though as the novel closes a nuclear stand-off maintains an uneasy
peace between Germany and the USA. After WWI, BM's Macfadden Pictures
released movies for several years, including Zongar (1918), which features
Amazons.BM is most important in the HISTORY OF SF for his role - long
obscure - in forcing the bankruptcy of Hugo GERNSBACK in 1929 and taking
over AMAZING STORIES, events which occasioned a competitive proliferation
of sf magazines; according to Sam MOSKOWITZ - in "Bernarr Macfadden", a
7-part study published in FANTASY COMMENTATOR 1986-92 - BM was, therefore,
inadvertently instrumental in setting off the chain of events which a
decade later would culminate in the GOLDEN AGE OF SF. [JC]
MacFARLANE, STEPHEN
John Keir CROSS.
McGARRY, MARK J.
(1958- ) US writer whose two novels are Sun Dogs (1981) and Blank Slate
(1984), both sf adventures. [JC]
McGIVERN, WILLIAM P.
[r] AMAZING STORIES; Alexander BLADE; P.F. COSTELLO; David Wright
O'BRIEN; PULP MAGAZINES.
McGOWAN, INEZ
[s] Rog PHILLIPS.
MacGREGOR, LOREN J.
(1950- ) US writer who began publishing sf with his first novel, The Net
(1987), a Galaxy-spanning sf adventure involving some unremarkable capers
and a play-feud between two spacefaring merchant families. It is redeemed

by the thought LJM gives to the implications of body-change technology
(the book reminded many readers of John VARLEY) and by his inventive use
of the Net itself, which creates a sensory field as well as conveying
information in space. [JC]
MacGREGOR, RICHARD
Pseudonym of UK writer Macgregor Urquhardt (? -? ). Under the name RM
were published several routine GENRE-SF novels: The Day a Village Died
(1963), Taste of the Temptress (1963), Horror in the Night (1963), The
Creeping Plague (1963), The Deadly Suns (1964), The Threat (1964) and The
First of the Last (1964). [JC/SH]
McGUFFIN
A term devised by Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) to designate an object
whose loss - or rumours of whose existence - triggers the cast of a
thriller or detective film into searching for it, or fighting for it, or
running from it, but which has in fact no intrinsic meaning once the dust
has settled. The use of McGuffins to generate chase-the-searcher plots is
widespread in 1920s and 1930s thriller sf and in more recent adventure sf;
McGuffin spoors are particularly noticeable in the second volumes of
trilogies. The term has been variously spelled "McGuffin", "MacGuffin" and
"Maguffin"; we have decided to stick with the spelling chosen by John
BOWEN for his novel The McGuffin (1984). [JC]
McGUIRE, JOHN J(OSEPH)
(1917-1981) US author best known for his collaborations with H. Beam
PIPER on the sf action novel Crisis in 2140 (1953 ASF as "Null ABC"; 1957)
and on A Planet for Texans (1957 Fantastic Universe as "Lone Star Planet";
1958). These books are not readily distinguishable from Piper's solo
efforts. JM wrote 2 other stories with Piper and 4 solo 1957-64. [JC]See
also: COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.
McGUIRE, PATRICK (LLEWELLYN)
(1949- ) US researcher whose Princeton doctoral thesis was revised as a
book, Red Stars: Political Aspects of Soviet Science Fiction (1985), one
of the more useful sources on sf in RUSSIA, although carrying the story
only as far as 1976. PM translated Vozvrashchenie (Polden'. 22-i vek)
(1962; rev as Polden', XXII vek (Vozvraschenie) 1967; the latter trans as
Noon: 22nd Century 1978 US) by Arkady and Boris STRUGATSKI, and wrote the
chapter on Russian sf in Anatomy of Wonder: Third Edition (1987) ed Neil
BARRON. He has published pieces on both Russian and English-language sf in
a variety of books and magazines. [PN]
MacHARG, WILLIAM
[r] Edwin BALMER.
MACHEN, ARTHUR
(1863-1947) Welsh writer, translator and actor, born Arthur Llewellyn
Jones, his parents adding Machen apparently in an attempt to please a rich
relative. AM was an isolated, lonely child, and was from a very early age
deeply devoted both to romantic literature and to the Welsh landscape that
visually dominated his writings all his life. He also imaginatively
applied his extensive if somewhat random readings in the occult and

metaphysics to his Welsh background. He was in London for long periods
from 1880. The death of his father in 1887 provided him with enough money
to marry and to write, but by the end of the century he was once again
poverty-stricken. He went on the stage for much of the following decade,
and for the rest of his life did a great deal of hackwork. By the time he
was rediscovered in the 1920s he was near retirement and no longer capable
of producing high-calibre material.With influences ranging from William
MORRIS to Robert Louis STEVENSON and associations from John Lane's Bodley
Head (at the time it was publishing The Yellow Book) to the Order of the
Golden Dawn (whose occultist members included Algernon BLACKWOOD, W.B.
Yeats [1865-1939] and Aleister Crowley [1875-1947]), and throughout
embodying a conviction that DEVOLUTION and racial degeneracy were
scientific facts (his Faerie represents a degenerated race in Britain),
AM's fiction generally shies clear of sf as practised in the
late-Victorian and Edwardian UK; most of his best tales are horror or
occult fantasies. They tend to be set in a medievalized England with Welsh
tinges, those set in London being irradiated by deeply romantic visions of
alternatives to the industrial world which he saw dominating England, and
despised: in both his work and his appearance he resembled a malefic G.K.
CHESTERTON. "The Great God Pan", the title story of The Great God Pan and
The Inmost Light (coll 1894; exp 1926), is typical of Victorian sf/horror
at about the time sf was beginning to shed its GOTHIC elements into a
separate HORROR/fantasy genre. The story begins with an sf rationale
(brain surgery) for a metamorphosis which remains one of the most
dramatically horrible and misogynistic in fiction: the evil female
offspring of the operated-on idiot girl grows into a malign being,
apparently a woman, but actually a half-human horror whose father may have
been the horned god of the story's title. The Terror: A Fantasy (1917; rev
1927) is quasi-sf in its story of animals turning against humans. Through
work of this sort, AM's influence, via H.P. LOVECRAFT and others, has been
strong on 20th-century GOTHIC SF.Volumes in which fantasy predominates
include The Chronicle of Clemendy (coll 1888), The Three Impostors, or The
Transmutations (coll 1895; vt Black Crusade 1966), The House of Souls
(coll 1906), The Hill of Dreams (1907), The Angels of Mons, The Bowmen and
Other Legends of the War (coll 1915), The Great Return (1915 chap), The
Secret Glory (1922), The Shining Pyramid (coll 1923), The Glorious Mystery
(coll 1924, partly nonfiction), Ornaments in Jade (coll 1924 US), Dreads
and Drolls (coll 1927), The Green Round (1933), The Cosy Room (coll 1936),
The Children of the Pool, and Other Stories (coll 1936), Holy Terrors
(coll 1946), Tales of Horror and the Supernatural (coll 1948 US) and The
Collected Arthur Machen (coll 1988). [JC/PN]About the author: A
Bibliography of Arthur Machen (1965) by Adrian Goldstone and Wesley
Sweetser.
MACHINES
Sf is sometimes considered, especially by its detractors, to be a genre
in which machines are more important than people. DEFINITIONS OF SF often
deny this, but the assumption that only HARD SF, dealing with the future
of TECHNOLOGY, can be "real" sf is very common. Various kinds of machine
have exerted a powerful fascination upon the sf imagination, and the
social impact of technology has been a continual concern in sf.The first

major prose work to celebrate the shape of machines to come (although the
earlier drawings of Leonardo da Vinci [1452-1519] are justly famous) was
Francis BACON's prospectus for the Royal Society, The New Atlantis (1627;
1629), which features a catalogue of marvellous inventions. Bacon's
contemporary John WILKINS similarly listed inventions - on which he would
be prepared to work if someone would finance him - in Mathematicall Magick
(1648). These catalogues aimed to be realistic; the metaphorical
usefulness of machines was explored for purposes of SATIRE by Daniel DEFOE
in The Consolidator (1705), which features a "cogitator" to force rational
thoughts into unwilling brains, a "devilscope" to detect and expose
political chicanery, and an "elevator" to facilitate communication between
minds and with the spirits of the dead. While Bacon and Wilkins
extrapolated from contemporary technology to test the limits of
practicality, Defoe suggested miraculous purposes and then proposed
machines to serve as symbols for the means to those ends; save for the
most conscientious hard-sf writers, the modus operandi of modern sf
writers has more in common with Defoe than with Bacon. Such staple devices
as TIME MACHINES and FASTER-THAN-LIGHT starships, operating in frank
defiance of rationality and known science, function as facilitating
devices to give writers access to the infinite realms of possibility. As
such they are indispensable, and are frequently included in stories
otherwise conscientious in their attempts at realism ( IMAGINARY SCIENCE).
With the exception of flying machines - a common concern in speculative
fiction in the 17th and 18th centuries - few of the machines anticipated
by Bacon and Wilkins played a significant part in sf until the late 19th
century, when the Industrial Revolution lent historical confirmation to
their prospectuses for technology. Some UTOPIAN writers made much of the
productive capacity of factory machinery, but the first major literary
disciple of the futuristic machine, Jules VERNE, was primarily interested
in vehicles for his imaginary voyages. TRANSPORTATION remained the chief
function of machines in sf for some time, though the role was augmented by
all manner of exotic WEAPONRY as future- WAR stories became popular.
Miracle-working facilitating devices played a limited role in 19th-century
sf, although some were employed as means of COMMUNICATION and others as
forms of amusement. Examples of the latter include the sporting
contraptions ( GAMES AND SPORTS) featured in Anthony TROLLOPE's The Fixed
Period (1882) and J.A.C.K.'s Golf in the Year 2000 (1892). Further
facilitating devices are found in Edward BELLAMY's Dr Heidenhoff's Process
(1880), about a machine which erases unpleasant memories, and in Arthur
Conan DOYLE's The Doings of Raffles Haw (1891), about a gold-making
machine; but the most important exemplar was provided by H.G. WELLS in THE
TIME MACHINE (1895). Another kind of fascination with mechanical
contrivance is manifest in various baroque tales and allegories, including
E.T.A. HOFFMANN's "Automata" (1814) and "The Sandman" (1816), Nathaniel
HAWTHORNE's "The Celestial Railroad" (1843) and Herman MELVILLE's "The
Bell-Tower" (1855), in which machines play a quasidiabolical role. This
respectful suspicion of machinery is marvellously extrapolated in those
chapters of Samuel BUTLER's Erewhon (1872) that present a vision of
mechanical evolution. Wells's "The Lord of the Dynamos" (1894), too,
reflects this sinister aspect; and L. Frank BAUM's children's fantasy The
Master Key (1901) is a cautionary allegory. Enthusiasm for technological

achievement and suspicion regarding human relationships with the machine
are combined in Morrison's Machine (1900) by Joseph Smith FLETCHER, a
curiously intense study of technological creativity.In the last few years
of the 19th century the potential of technology was drastically
transformed by the discovery of the electromagnetic spectrum and the
development of the new atomic theory. Vulgar mechanical contraptions were
suddenly augmented by the magic of rays and radio, and there seemed to be
no limits to possibility. A new era of imaginative exuberance began which
took means of transportation (especially SPACESHIPS) and weapons out of
the realms of extrapolation into those of boundless fantasy. One of the
prophets of the new technology, and one whose understanding of its
potential was more realistic than is sometimes appreciated, was Hugo
GERNSBACK, the would-be inventor who instead became the publisher of Radio
News, Modern Electrics, The Electrical Experimenter and SCIENCE AND
INVENTION, and who founded AMAZING STORIES as their companion. In Ralph
124C 41+ (1911-12; 1925) Gernsback produced a catalogue of wonders akin to
that in Bacon's The New Atlantis; though painfully naive in literary
terms, Ralph proved less incompetent as a technological prospectus.It was
not unnatural that the early sf PULP MAGAZINES should go to extremes in
their use of machines in a way that Verne never had. The pulp writers were
the product of an age of extremely rapid technological advance in which
science was coming to seem mysterious again. It was an age when it seemed
machines might do anything, when even the satirical metaphors of Defoe's
Consolidator could seem plausible as actual devices. The limitless scope
of the machine was reverently translated into a kind of quasisupernatural
awe in such stories as John W. CAMPBELL Jr's "The Last Evolution" (1932)
and "The Machine" (1935 as by Don A. Stuart). What was largely missing
from all the extravagant accounts of miracle-working machines, however,
was a consciousness of the social implications of extravagant
technological advance. Writers outside the genre were little better:
Gardner HUNTING's The Vicarion (1926) features a machine that can look
through time to record any event from the past, but in Hunting's blinkered
view it is merely a new entertainment medium which might make cinema
obsolete; the device in Andre MAUROIS's La machine a lire les pensees
(1937; trans as The Thought-Reading Machine 1938) is represented as a mere
fad. These and many other stories conclude that we might well be better
off without miraculous machines. E. Charles VIVIAN's Star Dust (1925),
Karel CAPEK's The Absolute at Large (1922; trans 1927) and William M.
SLOANE's The Edge of Running Water (1939) are other notable examples of
the "no good will come of it all" school of thought. Aldous HUXLEY's BRAVE
NEW WORLD (1932) is an outstanding attempt to consider large-scale social
consequences but it, too, is dominated by the conviction that
technological opportunities will be abused. A similar suspicion was
widespread in the early sf magazines, particularly in the work of David H.
KELLER, but was balanced by Gernsbackian optimism.Campbell's prospectus
for sf, promoted in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, demanded more
conscientious analyses of the social impact of new machines. Robert A.
HEINLEIN was one of the first to take up the challenge, in such stories as
"The Roads Must Roll" (1940) and BEYOND THIS HORIZON (1942 as by Anson
MacDonald; 1948). The 1940s became, in consequence, the era of the gadget:
the small machine with considerable implications. "A Logic Named Joe"

(1946) by Will F. Jenkins (Murray LEINSTER) is an archetypal gadget story
prefiguring the personal COMPUTER. WWII and the bombing of Hiroshima
encouraged the notion that machines had become so powerful that humans
were simply not up to the task of responsibly administering their use.
Several memorable images of the revolt of the machines appeared in this
period: Robert BLOCH's "It Happened Tomorrow" (1943), Clifford D. SIMAK's
"Bathe Your Bearings in Blood" (1950; vt "Skirmish") and Lord DUNSANY's
The Last Revolution (1951). A particularly powerful parable of the power
of the machine acting independently of human control is Theodore
STURGEON's "Killdozer!" (1944). T.L. SHERRED's "E for Effort" (1947)
features a machine similar to Hunting's vicarion, but goes to an opposite
extreme in arguing that its mere presence in the world would precipitate
all-out war. Jack WILLIAMSON's "The Equalizer" (1947) is an elegant study
of the political implications of free power.As the 1950s progressed,
GENRE-SF writers became increasingly prone to show machines out of human
control, remaking the world while humanity was swept helplessly along - or
left helplessly behind. Philip K. DICK's "Second Variety" (1953), in which
self-replicating, independently evolving war machines inherit the Earth,
is a striking example. Later works embodying similar images include Fred
SABERHAGEN's Berserker series, John T. SLADEK's satirical The Reproductive
System (1968; vt MECHASM) and Stanislaw LEM's The Invincible (1964; trans
1973). Anxiety about the alienation of people from their mechanical
environment seems to have reached its peak during the 1950s, and the 1960s
began a new trend towards uneasy reconciliation, perhaps best exemplified
by changes in the typical roles assigned to CYBORGS.In contemporary sf, as
in contemporary society, suspicion of machines remains deeply entrenched,
but the inevitability of our association with machinery is accepted. The
distinction between life and mechanism often becomes blurred, as in Philip
K. Dick's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (1968). The intimacy of the
man/machine relationship can only increase still further, and sf stories
anticipate this increasing intimacy in all kinds of melodramatic ways;
sexual relationships are of course included, as in such stories as Harlan
ELLISON's "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" (1967) and "Catman" (1967). The trend
towards ever-larger machines was decisively halted by the development of
microprocessors, and much contemporary speculation about future machinery
is concerned with NANOTECHNOLOGY: the development of machines which are no
more than large molecules and can do extensive work inside our bodies as
well as perform complex manufacturing tasks in huge vats. Sf has not yet
really got to grips with the possibilities of nanomachinery, but a
beginning has been made in such stories as Ian WATSON's "Nanoware Time"
(1989), Greg BEAR's Queen of Angels (1990) and Michael J. FLYNN's The
Nanotech Chronicles (fixup 1991). Pat CADIGAN's Mindplayers (1987) brings
up to date the older tradition of stories which feature psychologically
intrusive machinery.The growth of the awareness that mankind and machine
are inextricably bound together in contemporary society has deflected
attention away from the miraculous potential of the machine. The naive
assumption that all human problems might be solved by appropriate
technological innovations, not uncommon in the 1930s, has been replaced by
the assumption that human nature is bound to be remade by new machinery in
problematic ways. Machines have largely lost their force as symbols of
individual freedom and power, and with this loss the potential of

high-tech sf to provide simple escapist fantasies and power fantasies has
been eroded. Given this, it is not entirely surprising to find so much
contemporary sf being set in imaginary pasts ( ALTERNATE WORLDS), in
futures returned to primitivism ( HOLOCAUST AND AFTER) or on
technologically primitive lost colonies ( COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS).
Formerly, speculative fiction's main concern in dealing with machines was
the adaptation of machines to pre-existent human purposes (and this is
equally true of Baconian extrapolation and Defoesque fantasy); now the
main concern is with the challenges facing our descendants as they are
forced to adapt, physically and mentally, to their mechanical achievements
and environments. [BS]See also: AUTOMATION; CYBERPUNK; DISCOVERY AND
INVENTION; DYSTOPIAS; STEAMPUNK.
McHUGH, MAUREEN F.
(1959- ) US writer (her middle initial stands for nothing) who began
publishing sf with "All in a Day's Work" for Twilight Zone Magazine in
1988, writing as by Michael Galloglach. Her first novel, CHINA MOUNTAIN
ZHANG (1992), which has been criticized for loose plotting, works in fact
as a complex and multi-faceted portrayal of a 22nd century world dominated
by China, through the eyes of the eponymous gay half-Chinese protagonist,
who drifts through the world with a kind heart, an accurate eye, and a
constant apprehension of death, for homosexuality is a capital offense.
The text includes excursions to Mars, and various episodes which only seem
to be longueurs if China Mountain himself were about to change the world:
which he is not. MFMcH's second novel, Half the Day is Night (1994), makes
similarly acute observations of the ways human beings may cope with a
straitened, desperately crowded future, fitting them on this occasion into
a more tightly organized plot: a French-Vietnamese recently in Africa
comes to a Caribbean undersea city to work as a bodyguard for a woman
banker threatened by assassination. It is a world more complicated than he
can understand-in both her novels, MFMcH serenely violates any presumption
that the protagonists of a genre fiction must eventually understand and
control what's happening to them-and for that reason it is a world readers
may find alarmingly familiar. [JC]
McHUGH, VINCENT
(1904-1983) US writer whose comic saga Caleb Catlum's America (1936) is
about a family of immortals ( IMMORTALITY) who amusingly represent the
high points of US history in the flesh (the family includes Abe Lincoln
and Davy Crockett). I Am Thinking of My Darling (1943), in which an
inhibition-releasing epidemic hits New York, cuts surprisingly deep in its
superficially comic examination of the consequences. [JC]See also:
PSYCHOLOGY.
McILRAITH, FRANK
[r] Roy CONNOLLY.
McINNES, GRAHAM (CAMPBELL)
(1912-1970) UK-born, Australian-educated Canadian diplomat and novelist,
son of the novelist Angela Thirkell (1890-1961) - another son of hers was
Colin MacInnes (1914-1976). Most of GM's work is not sf, but Lost Island
(1954) is a lost-race story ( LOST WORLDS). [PN]

McINTOSH, J.T.
Pseudonym (in some earlier work spelled M'Intosh) of Scottish writer and
journalist James Murdoch MacGregor (1925- ), used for all his sf writing,
though he has written non-sf under his own name. He began publishing sf
with "The Curfew Tolls" in ASF in 1950, producing many stories (though no
collections) through 1980. With his first novel, World out of Mind (1953
US), he fully entered a career that was, in its early years, notably
successful. World out of Mind implausibly but enjoyably sets a disguised
ALIEN on an Earth dominated by aptitude tests, where he wins his way to
the top and thence prepares the way for INVASION. Born Leader (1954 US; vt
Worlds Apart 1958) puts two sets of colonists from a destroyed Earth on
nearby planets, where the authoritarian set conflicts with the libertarian
set. In One in Three Hundred (1954 US), with Earth doomed again, pilots of
the only rocketships available are given the task of selecting those they
will save of the planet's billions of inhabitants. The Fittest (1955 US;
vt The Rule of the Pagbeasts 1956 US) depicts the harrowing effects of a
misfired experiment to increase animal INTELLIGENCE. 200 Years to
Christmas (1961 dos US) is a routine but competent variation on the
GENERATION-STARSHIP theme.Although some of JTM's novels in the 1960s and
1970s continued to show his professional skill with a plot and his
competence at creating identifiable characters, his work began to show
some slackening of interest: The Million Cities (1958 Satellite; rev 1963
US) is a bland urban DYSTOPIA; The Noman Way (1952 as "The E.S.P. Worlds";
1964) uninterestingly repeats the test situation of his first novel, which
seems to have been something of a preoccupation of his, for it turns up
also in the serial "The Lady and the Bull" (1955 Authentic). Out of Chaos
(1965) is a routine post- HOLOCAUST novel; Time for a Change (1967; vt
Snow White and the Giants 1968 US) treats a local intrusion of
time-travelling aliens as a domestic issue; Flight from Rebirth (1960 as
"Immortality - For Some"; much exp 1971 US), a chase tale in an urban
setting, again features testing.JTM never lost the vivid narrative skills
that made him an interesting figure of 1950s sf, but his failure to
challenge himself in his later career led to results that verged on
mediocrity. After 1980 he fell silent. [JC]Other works: Six Gates from
Limbo (1968); Transmigration (1970 US); The Cosmic Spies (1972); The Space
Sorcerers (1972; vt The Suiciders 1973 US); Galactic Takeover Bid (1973);
Ruler of the World (cut 1976 Canada; rev vt This is the Way the World
Begins 1977 UK); Norman Conquest 2066 (1977); A Planet Called Utopia (1979
US).About the author: J.T. McIntosh: Memoir ?
by Ian Covell.See also: ANDROIDS; DISASTER; END OF THE WORLD; GAMES AND
SPORTS; IMMORTALITY; SUN.
MacINTYRE, F(EARGUS) GWYNPLAINE
(?1948- ) UK-born writer, who was raised in Australia, and began his
career in the UK with rewrite work-though no complete novels-for paperback
publishers of routine sf in the late 1960s; he is now resident in the US.
After contributing some material to the Welsh magazine Raven in the 1970s,
he began publishing work of sf interest with "For Cheddar or Worse" for
IASFM in 1980. As a ghost-writer, he wrote parts of Jerzy KOSINSKI's
Pinball (1984), giving a character in the book his own unusual middle
name. His first novel was an unremarkable contribution to the fourth Tom

Swift series ( TOM SWIFT), The DNA Disaster * (1991) as by Victor
APPLETON; but his first novel in his own name was the altogether more
interesting The Woman Between the Worlds (1994), a RECURSIVE
tale-involving, among others, Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) and Arthur
Conan DOYLE-set in late 19th century England. The ambience is less
STEAMPUNK than Gaslight Romance, given an ornate plot involving a PARALLEL
WORLD run on lines derived from the work of H.P. LOVECRAFT, and an
invisible woman ( INVISIBILITY) escaping from that other world, who
fascinates the protagonist by asking him to give her a full-body tattoo,
thus making her visible. [JC]
McINTYRE, VONDA N(EEL)
(1948- ) US writer and geneticist, one of the earliest successful
graduates of the CLARION SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' WORKSHOP, which she
attended in 1970. So far as the editors can establish, she began to
publish sf with "Only at Night" in Clarion (anth 1971) ed Robin Scott
WILSON, and gained prominence with "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand" (1973),
which won a NEBULA for Best Novelette and served as the initial section of
DREAMSNAKE (fixup 1978), her best known novel to date, which won her
another Nebula as well as a HUGO. The female protagonist of both story and
book is a healer in a desolated primitive venue, the violent and
destructive superstitions of whose inhabitants lead to her losing her
healer snake, with which she was linked through complex imprinting. The
book version goes on to recount her quest for a replacement snake, a
search through a strongly depicted post- HOLOCAUST environment which
includes gruelling experiences in the city that had served as the central
venue for VNM's first novel, The Exile Waiting (1975; rev 1976 UK). That
book likewise features a female protagonist with singular empathic powers:
she is a sneak thief - the plot is complicated - who manages to escape
Earth's last city with a Japanese poet from the stars and a virtuous
"pseudosib" (the bad "twin" having been killed in the city) and in due
course Earth entirely, with the prognosis that she will become a
successful starfarer.After Fireflood and Other Stories (coll 1979), which
assembled her best short work, VNM became associated with the STAR TREK
enterprise, producing the RECURSIVE Star Trek: The Entropy Effect * (1981)
and 3 film ties - Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan * (1982), Star Trek III:
The Search for Spock * (1984) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home * (1986) as well as Star Trek: Enterprise: The First Adventure * (1986). Her next
independent novel, Superluminal (1977 as "Aztecs" in 2076: The American
Tricentennial ed Edward BRYANT; exp 1983), places its female protagonist
in a rite-of-passage situation - she must replace her organic heart with
an artificial device in order to become a starship pilot, but manages
nonetheless to retain her humanity - and is significantly open to a
FEMINIST reading. Barbary (1986) is directed to a younger audience. The
Starfarers series - comprisingStarfarers (1989),Transition (1991),
Metaphase (1992) and Nautilus (1994) - is likewise written with deliberate
clarity and ease. VNM's recent work is considerably less demanding than
the novels and stories of her first professional decade but it continues
to demonstrate her argued, numerate and humane approach - via the
instruments of sf - to feminist concerns.Aurora: Beyond Equality (anth
1976) ed with Susan Janice Anderson is a collection of feminist sf

stories, not all by women. [JC]Other works: The Bride * (1985), a film
tie; Screwtop (1976 in The Crystal Ship ed Robert SILVERBERG; 1989 chap
dos); Star Wars: The Crystal Star * (1994).See also: CYBORGS; FASTER THAN
LIGHT; SPACE FLIGHT.
MacISAAC, FRED(ERICK JOHN)
(1886-1940) US writer who appeared frequently in Argosy after WWI with
stories in which his sober prophetic intelligence wrestles with his
PULP-MAGAZINE instincts, and usually loses. His work remains of interest,
however. The Vanishing Professor (1926 Argosy; 1927) complicatedly engages
a venal scientist, inventor of an INVISIBILITY machine, with crime czars
and detectives. "The Great Commander" (1926 Argosy All-Story) adumbrates
Richard CONDON's Emperor of America (1990). "World Brigands" (1928 Argosy
All-Story) suggests that the USA will develop an atomic bomb around 1940
in response to threats of war. The Mental Marvel (1930) deals with a boxer
whose skills represent an evolutionary leap. The Hothouse World (1931
Argosy; 1965) awakes its protagonist from SUSPENDED ANIMATION into the
insanely restrictive post-catastrophe world of AD2051 - its inhabitants
pent in a single tower - which he liberates once it is demonstrated that
the air outside can again be breathed. [JC]See also: CITIES; ECONOMICS;
POLITICS.
McIVER, G(EORGE M.)
(? -? ) Australian writer, still alive in 1943. His Neuroomia: A New
Continent: A Manuscript Delivered from the Deep (1894 UK) routinely
uncovers a clement LOST WORLD in the Antarctic inhabited by a long-lived
high-tech folk who inform us that Mars is inhabited and spins off her
excess population by dumping them on a visiting planet. [JC]
MacKAY, (JAMES ALEXANDER) KENNETH
(1859-1935) Australian writer and politician whose sf novel, The Yellow
Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia (1895 UK), describes
a Chinese invasion in 1954 under the guidance of Russia, the romance which
causes the death of the secret leader of the invaders, and the continuing
war which, as the book ends, the Australians seem likely to lose. [JC]See
also: AUSTRALIA.
MACKAYE, HAROLD STEELE
(1866-1928) US writer whose sf novel is The Panchronicon (1904). This
TIME-TRAVEL story is whimsically condescending about its provincial
characters, who travel in a TIME MACHINE (left by a traveller from the
future who died) that operates by repeatedly and very rapidly
circumnavigating the north pole (to which it is attached by a chain) in
the same direction as the Sun. The romance in Tudor England that follows
shows some awareness of TIME PARADOX, but little is done with the idea.
[PN]
McKEAG, ERNEST L(IONEL)
(1896-1974) UK author who began writing boys' fiction in 1921, some of it
featuring the occasional sf MCGUFFIN and several LOST WORLDS. In his later
career he published many non-sf novels under the house name "GRIFF"Invaded
by Mars (1934) and Terror from the Stratosphere (1937), both as by Jack
Maxwell, are juvenile sf. The Shuna sequence - Shuna, White Queen of the

Jungle (1951) and Shuna and the Lost Tribe (1951), both as by John King rounds up the usual suspects: lost worlds, PSI POWERS and so forth. The
first of these tales has an sf flavour: asteroid-dwelling space beetles
invade, kidnap an Inca city and take off with it for the Moon. [JC]
McKEAN, DAVE
Working name of UK COMIC-strip and GRAPHIC-NOVEL artist David Jeff McKean
(1963- ), whose subtle, sophisticated techniques - which include collage,
the reworking of photographic negatives, the use of found objects, and a
transformative take on most categories of 20th century art - challengingly
extend the potential range of the form. He attended Berkshire College of
Art and Design 1982-6. His first publication was Violent Cases (graph 1987
in monochrome; 1991 coloured) written by Neil GAIMAN, a short graphic
novel about childhood memories of an encounter with Al Capone's osteopath.
He provided some haunting covers for DC COMICS's Hellblazer and Sandman
comic books, and painted artwork for the 3-part graphic novel Black Orchid
(graph 1988 US; omni 1991 US), written by Gaiman, and the bestselling
graphic novel Arkham Asylum (graph 1989 US), written by Grant Morrison.
His other work has included Signal to Noise (1989 The Face; graph rev
1992), written by Gaiman, about a dying film-maker plotting out his last
movie in the knowledge that he will never make it;Cages (1991-2 US), which
DM both wrote and drew, a long episodic piece about creativity and cats;
and The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr Punch (graph 1994), also
with Gaiman, also - like Violent Cases - mixing autobiography (Gaiman's)
and fantasy, and perhaps the two collaborators' finest work to date. He
won the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist in 1991. DM formed the theatre
group The Unauthorised Sex Company with Colin GREENLAND, Simon Ings (1965) and Geoff RYMAN; debut performances were in 1991 at Mexicon and on the
Edinburgh Festival Fringe. He is increasingly active as a cover artist for
GOLLANCZ and other publishers. [RT]See also: ARKHAM HOUSE; ILLUSTRATION.
MACKELWORTH, R(ONALD) W(ALTER)
(1930- ) UK writer and insurance salesman who began publishing sf with
"The Statue" for NW in 1963 and produced some above-average sf adventure
novels, usually involving complex, sometimes jumbled plotting, and an
Earth somehow in danger. They include Firemantle (1968; vt The Diabols
1969 US), Tiltangle (1970 US), Starflight 3000 (1972 US) - which involves
some interesting TERRAFORMING of both the Moon and other planets - The
Year of the Painted World (1975) and Shakehole (1981), a DYSTOPIAN vision
of a NEAR-FUTURE UK. [JC]
McKENNA, RICHARD M(ILTON)
(1913-1964) US writer who spent most of his adult life, not very happily,
in the US Navy, which he joined in 1931. After returning to civilian life
in 1953, he took a BA in literature at the University of North Carolina.
His first published story was "Casey Agonistes" for FSF in 1958, although
the first he wrote was "The Fishdollar Affair" (1958), which appeared in
If. His efforts to revise the former story according to the editor's
demands are described in his essay "Journey with a Little Man", which was
reprinted in Damon KNIGHT's anthology of sf criticism, Turning Points
(anth 1977). RMM was to publish only 5 more sf stories during his
lifetime; another 6 appeared posthumously. 5 of the strongest were

assembled in Casey Agonistes and other Fantasy and Science Fiction Stories
(coll 1973). The central theme of these stories is the power of mind over
environment - either to adapt the existing one or, ultimately, to create
something new. "The Secret Place" (1966), which won a posthumous NEBULA,
is about PARALLEL WORLDS which can be reached through the power of the
mind, while "Fiddler's Green" (1967), perhaps RMM's most ambitious story,
tells of a group of men adrift in a small boat, without food and water,
who mentally create an ALTERNATE WORLD into which they may escape. RMM's
major work was a successful non-sf novel drawing on his naval experiences,
The Sand Pebbles (1962), filmed in 1966. He died soon after writing the
book; even had he lived it is unlikely that he would have written more sf.
Nonetheless, his existing body of sf was sufficient to secure him a small,
sure position in the sf pantheon. [MJE]About the author: "Casey Agonistes"
by Peter NICHOLLS in Survey of Science Fiction Literature, Volume One
(1979) ed Frank N. Magill.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; ECOLOGY; PARANOIA;
PASTORAL; PERCEPTION.
MACKENZIE, [Sir] (EDWARD MONTAGUE) COMPTON
(1883-1972) Scottish writer, knighted in 1952, best known for his
influential Bildungsroman, Sinister Street (2 vols 1913-14). His sf novel,
The Lunatic Republic (1959), one of his many comic entertainments,
depicts, with considerable slapstick in an easy-going, winning style, the
UTOPIAN society that exists at the end of the century on the MOON. Two
fantasies, Hunting the Fairies (1949) and The Rival Monster (1952),
display the pawkish whimsy which made novels like Whisky Galore (1947) so
popular. [JC]
McKENZIE, MELINDA
Melinda M. SNODGRASS.
McKEONE, (DIXIE) LEE
(? - ) US author of the Ghoster sequence of sf adventures - Ghoster
(1988), Backblast (1989) and Starfire Down (1991). The tales are set in
undemanding interstellar venues in which human enterprises flourish. [JC]
McKIE, ANGUS
(1951- ) UK illustrator. AM studied at Newcastle-upon-Tyne College of
Art. From the mid-1970s his sf work appeared often on book covers, in
picture books like Alien Landscapes (1979) by Robert HOLDSTOCK and Malcolm
EDWARDS, and also in his own The Flights of Icarus (1977). At first AM
worked mostly in the Chris FOSS style which dominated UK paperback book
covers of the 1970s, whether relevant to the content or not: usually
air-brushed ILLUSTRATIONS featuring high-tech artefacts, often space
hardware, rendered with great detail. As that particular stereotype began
to fade, AM's work, among the most proficient of its kind, showed greater
variety. AM has an exceptional feel for scale: when he paints an object
supposed to be huge it really looks huge. [PN/JG]
McKILLIP, PATRICIA A(NNE)
(1948- ) US writer whose early books were all fantasy, mostly for
children. These showed an increasing assurance (and appeared to be for
increasingly older children) from The House on Parchment Street (1973)
through The Throme of the Erril of Sherill (1973; exp with "The Harrowing

of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath" [1982] as coll 1984) and The Forgotten
Beasts of Eld (1974), an assurance which culminated in the Riddle-Master
trilogy: The Riddle-Master of Hed (1976), Heir of Sea and Fire (1978) and
Harpist in the Wind (1979), assembled as Riddle of Stars (omni 1979; vt
The Chronicles of Morgon, Prince of Hed 1981 UK). It has been argued, by
Peter NICHOLLS in Survey of Modern Fantastic Literature (1983) ed Frank N.
Magill, that the trilogy is a work of classic stature: the intricate
narrative of its quest story echoes a moral complexity almost unheard-of
in fantasy trilogies; PAM's protagonist has a special skill at unravelling
riddles and, through a series of strategies (including subliminal hints as
little obvious as leaves in a forest) not unlike those adopted by Gene
WOLFE in his Book of the New Sun series (1980-83), she forces the reader
also to become a decipherer of codes. Thus the book's meaning is enacted
by the way it must be read. While in no way resembling sf, the trilogy
contains one of the most sophisticated uses of the shapeshifter theme to
be found anywhere in sf or fantasy.Her sf proper began with the poignant
Kyreol sequence for young adults: Moon-Flash (1984) and The Moon and the
Face (1985). Much as in her fantasy books, the central theme is CONCEPTUAL
BREAKTHROUGH, in this case from an Edenic but primitive POCKET UNIVERSE,
Riverworld, which turns out to be an isolated corner of a planet
containing the way station of an interstellar civilization, and the
protected object of anthropological study. FOOL'S RUN (1987), which is
adult sf, retells the Orpheus myth in a story of a woman visionary who has
been found guilty of mass murder and is incarcerated in a prison
satellite, the Underworld; it is memorable for its evocative sequences
about future MUSIC.PAM's sf is unusual and well written, but perhaps she
is more at home with fantasy, to which she returned with the haunting The
Sorceress and the Cygnet (1991) - and its sequel, The Cygnet and the
Firebird (1994) - set in a land where star constellations manifest
themselves as gods or people and transform the mutable human world into
ageless story. [PN]Other works: The Night Gift (1976), marginal fantasy;
Stepping from the Shadows (1982), a possibly autobiographical novel about
the growing-up of a fantasy writer; The Changeling Sea (1988), young-adult
fantasy; Brian Froud's Faerielands: Something Rich and Strange (1994).See
also: ARTS; CHILDREN'S SF; MAGIC; MYTHOLOGY; SPACE HABITATS.
McKINNEY, JACK
Collaborative pseudonym of Brian C. DALEY and James LUCENO. [JC]
MacLAREN, BERNARD
(? - ) UK writer whose sf novel Day of Misjudgment (1956) unusually
represents the domination of society by COMPUTERS as more of a blessing
than a curse. [JC]
McLAUGHLIN, DEAN (BENJAMIN Jr)
(1931- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "For Those who Follow
After" for ASF in 1951. Of his three sf novels - Dome World (1958 ASF; exp
1962), The Fury from Earth (1963) and The Man who Wanted Stars (fixup
1965) - the last is probably the best, though all of these straightforward
adventures are densely written. The first is set UNDER THE SEA, the second
describes a war between Earth and a liberated VENUS, and the third depicts
one man's long, driven quest to force and trick Earth governments into

attaining interstellar SPACE FLIGHT. Hawk Among the Sparrows (coll 1976)
assembles stories of the 1960s. DM's subject matter and style were fairly
typical of those encouraged by John W. CAMPBELL Jr during his editorial
domination of ASF. [JC]See also: POLLUTION; STARS.
MacLEAN, ALISTAIR (STUART)
(1922-1987) Scottish writer whose novels are mostly - like The Guns of
Navarone (1957) - well crafted action adventures, usually set at least in
part at sea. The Dark Crusader (1961) and The Satan Bug (1962), both as by
Ian Stuart, are Cold War thrillers which make use of sf MCGUFFINS. The
Golden Gate (1976) features the abduction of a US President. Farewell
California (1977) deals with the threat of a major earthquake along the
San Andreas Fault, an event that would sink much of the eponymous state
beneath the Pacific. [JC]
MacLEAN, KATHERINE (ANNE)
(1925- ) US writer who took a BA from Barnard College, New York, did
postgraduate study in psychology, became a quality-control lab technician
in a food factory, and subsequently served as a college lecturer in
creative writing and literature. Much of KM's work has been short stories,
most of which, including her first, "Defense Mechanism" in 1949, appeared
in ASF. She has generally written under her own name, although some
stories were as by Charles Dye (Charles DYE was her husband 1951-3; see
his entry for details) and one as by A.G. Morris; she was also married
1956-62 to David MASON. KM was in the vanguard of those sf writers trying
to apply to the SOFT SCIENCES the machinery of the hard sciences in a
generally optimistic reading of the potentials of that application; her
range and competence in dealing with technological matters may in part
reflect the wide range of occupations in her extra-literary life. Despite
this subject matter her tone was generally that of HARD SF, and her work
was unconnected with the later NEW-WAVE uses of the same basic material.
KM was one of the earlier WOMEN SF WRITERS, but it would be neither
desirable nor possible to read her stories as "women's" sf: in a field
which was, in 1950, notoriously male-chauvinist she competed on equal
terms, not restricting herself to "feminine" themes or protagonists, and
not generally using a male pseudonym. A number of her stories were
assembled in The Diploids (coll 1962) and The Trouble with You Earth
People (coll 1980).Many of KM's early stories have been anthologized.
Perhaps the best-known are "Pictures Don't Lie" (1951), which tells of the
arrival of an alien SPACESHIP which seems normal according to advance
radio signals but turns out to be little more than microscopic, "The
Snowball Effect" (1952), an amusing SATIRE on social engineering in which
a ladies' knitting circle expands to become the strongest political
pressure group in the USA, and "Unhuman Sacrifice" (1958), an important
piece of anthropological sf ( ANTHROPOLOGY) in which a visiting
exploration/contact team on another planet misreads a painful initiation
ceremony as needless when its purpose is to prevent a damaging biological
change. Also notable is the Hills of Space series, dealing with the
settling of the ASTEROIDS by refugees, fugitives and the poor; it includes
"Incommunicado" (1950), "The Man who Staked the Stars" (1952 as by Charles
Dye), "Collision Orbit" (1954), "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl"

(1975) and a long-projected novel, provisionally titled The Hills of
Space.KM's first novel, Cosmic Checkmate (1958 ASF as "Second Game"; exp
1962 dos; exp vt Second Game 1981), with Charles DE VET, combines SPACE
OPERA with interesting speculations on a society whose hierarchy is built
around skill at games ( GAMES AND SPORTS). Missing Man (fixup 1975), which
contains the 1971 NEBULA-winning story "The Missing Man" (1971), deals
with the exploits of an ESPER whose telepathy is a kind of sonar device
enabling him to trace people emitting emotional distress signals; he
cooperates with New York's Rescue Squad to go to their aid. Unusually for
sf, the novel depicts New York with affection. Dark Wing (1979), with Carl
West, less convincingly presents a world in which MEDICINE is forbidden: a
teenager learns to become an outlaw surgeon by studying a medical kit.
[JC/PN]Other work: Trouble with Treaties (1959 Star Science Fiction #5 ed
Frederick POHL; 1975 chap).See also: ALIENS; PHYSICS; RELIGION; SOCIOLOGY.
MacLENNAN, (JOHN) HUGH
(1907-1990) Canadian novelist who early published two DYSTOPIAN tales,
"The Finding of the Way" (1955 The Montrealer) and "Remembrance Day, 2010
A.D." (1957 The Montrealer), but almost all of whose works, like his
second novel, Two Solitudes (1945), lay outside the field and were shaped
by the search for a Canadian national myth. His only sf novel, Voices in
Time (1980), whose frame story is set in Montreal in AD2039 after a
nuclear HOLOCAUST, reflects the failure of that search in a dour
meditation on the cycles of Canadian history. [JC]See also: CANADA.
MacLEOD, ANGUS
(1906- ) Scottish writer of fiction and plays for RADIO. His sf novels
are The Body's Guest (1958), in which a yoga machine built by an Indian
physicist switches identities between nine Scots and a bull, with mildly
amusing results, and The Eighth Seal (1962). [JC/PN]
MacLEOD, SHEILA
(1939- ) Scottish writer, married for several years to actor and pop
singer Paul Jones ( PRIVILEGE), an experience reflected in her first
novel, The Moving Accident (1968). Her second, The Snow-White Soliloquies
(1970), is a FABULATION with surprisingly firm sf underpinning, describing
in technological terms the SUSPENDED ANIMATION of its eponymous heroine as
the search for a Prince continues in a grey world. Xanthe and the Robots
(1977), set in an Institute for Advanced Robotic Research, explores the
creation of "Philophrenics" ( ROBOTS of near-human capability) and the
problems their all-too-human designers face in deciding how far to attempt
to exploit their development; it is an intelligent and sophisticated
novel. Circuit-Breaker (1978) entertainingly mixes INNER SPACE and outer,
describing an astronaut's attempts to use his PSI POWERS to save his ship
- assuming the hero is indeed an astronaut and not a mental case or an sf
writer: the ending is ambiguous. [MJE/PN/JC]
McLOUGHLIN, JOHN C.
(1949- ) US writer whose first novel, The Helix and the Sword (1983), is
an sf adventure of some competence, and whose second, Toolmaster Koan
(1987), more interestingly sets up a Soviet-US tussle - to be the first to
meet an ALIEN seemingly arriving from outer space in a GENERATION STARSHIP

- as a dramatic representation of the ongoing thematic argument that gives
shape to the tale. This argument, extrapolated from evolutionary BIOLOGY,
suggests that any species, once it acquires tools, enters an almost
certainly fatal period of disequilibrium between that manipulative
capacity and its powers of self-control. In the end, the "aliens" turn out
to be dinosaurs, relics of Earth's last self-destructive evolutionary
surge, and augurs of the failure to come. [JC]
McMAHON, PAT
[s] Edward D. HOCH.
McMULLEN, SEAN (CHRISTOPHER)
(1948- ) Australian writer whose first professional sf sale was "The
Pharaoh's Airship" for Omega Science Digest in 1986. The best of his
craftsmanlike stories appear in Call to the Edge (coll 1992), a notable
example being "The Colours of the Masters" (1988), in which a 19th-century
device, the clockwork "pianospectrum", is discovered to have recorded the
playing of Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt.Voices in the Light (fixup 1994),
which begins the Greatwinter sequence, is an exceedingly complex postHOLOCAUST tale set in a densely imagined Australia broken into many
individual states which are linked by heliograph. The main story involves
the gradual perfection of a kind of COMPUTER whose components are human
calculators, along with an equally gradual movement towards the
comprehension of the "Call" - the title story of SM's collection is worked
into this novel - which periodically entraps humans and large animals into
a fatal trek southwards to the ravening sea. The holocaust had been
man-made, and had generated the first Greatwinter; a new freezing-down is
threatened. The series is projected to continue with Mirrorsun Rising
(1995) and The Miocene Arrow. [PN/JC]See also: MUSIC.
McNEILLY, WILFRED GLASSFORD
(1921-1983) Scottish author of numerous novels and stories under a
variety of names; he achieved some minor notoriety when he claimed in
print to have written all the work published under the byline W. Howard
BAKER-actually WGM's editor on stories written for the Sexton Blake
library and for Press Editorial Syndicate - and various other Baker
pseudonyms, a claim since disproved. WGM did write (as Errol Lecale) the
Specialist series: Tigerman of Terrahpur (1973), Castledoom (1974), The
Severed Hand (1974), The Death Box (1974), Zombie (1975) and Blood of My
Blood (1975). As Peter SAXON, another house name, he cowrote with Baker 2
tales in the Guardians sequence: Dark Ways to Death * (1968) and The
Haunting of Alan Mais * (1969). Non-series collaborations with Baker
include The Darkest Night (1966) and The Torturer (1966). Solo titles as
Saxon include Satan's Child (1967) and Corruption (dated 1968 but 1969).
WGM is also credited with Drums of the Dark Gods (1966) as by W.A.
Ballinger; The Case of the Muckrakers (1966), a Sexton Blake title; and
Alpha-Omega (1977) as by Wilfred Glassford. [SH/JC]
McNELLY, [Dr] WILLIS E(VERETT)
(1920- ) US academic, sf critic and editor long based at California State
University at Fullerton, where he gave what were among the earlier sf
classes in the USA. His anthologies include Mars, We Love You (anth 1971;

vt The Book of Mars 1976 UK) ed with Jane Hipolito, Above the Human
Landscape: A Social Science Fiction Anthology (anth 1972) ed with Leon E.
STOVER and Science Fiction Novellas (anth 1975) ed with Harry HARRISON;
the last title had a companion work, Science Fiction Novellas: Teacher's
Guide (1975) by WEM alone. He edited a collection of brief essays about
the increasing interest of the academic world in sf ( SF IN THE
CLASSROOM), Science Fiction: The Academic Awakening (anth 1974 chap).
WEM's strangest work is certainly The Dune Encyclopedia (anth 1984); it
purports to have been published about 5000 years after the birth of Paul
Atreides, protagonist of Frank HERBERT's DUNE (fixup 1965), and presents
data about the history and ecology of the planet Dune. [PN]
MacPATTERSON, F.
Clark DARLTON.
McPHEE, JAMES
Laurence JAMES.
MacPHERSON, DONALD
(? - ) Canadian author, perhaps a pseudonym of George MacTavish. Go Home,
Unicorn (1935 UK) is a SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE set in Montreal, in which the
life of a research scientist - loved by two women, one jealous - is much
confused by projections, into the world of matter, of their (and other
people's) mental fantasies, brought into being by the X-ray field he is
using to create mutations in guinea-pigs; there is much scientific
speculation, rather far-fetched, about the nature of the mind/matter
division. The sequel, Men are Like Animals (1937 UK), likewise features
research scientist Reggie Brooks, and involves a device that controls
thoughts. [PN]
McQUAY, MIKE
Working name of US writer Michael Dennis McQuay (1949- ), who began to
publish sf with his first novel, Life-Keeper (1980), which very
competently presents the kind of scenario MM has unrelentingly promulgated
in book after book: a world governed by corrupt forces; a tough, anarchic,
street-wise male protagonist whose powers - and virtue - are very
exceptional indeed; and a plot which gives plenty of opportunities for
arena-like conflicts between that protagonist and the corrupt forces he
will ultimately defeat. The Mathew Swain sequence - Hot Time in Old Town
(1981), When Trouble Beckons (1981), The Deadliest Show in Town (1982) and
The Odds are Murder (1983) - makes explicit the generic origins of this
hero, who derives from the works of Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) and
Chandler's direct successors. As the series develops, Swain fights
corruption first on Earth, then on the Moon and then on Earth again,
always finding fit targets in the organizations which dominate society.
Escape from New York * (1981), a film tie ( ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK), if
anything intensifies the seamy clangour of the movie version. Jitterbug
(1984) interestingly posits an Arab hegemony over a corruptly DYSTOPIAN
22nd-century world. The Ramon and Morgan series - Pure Blood (1985) and
Mother Earth (1985) - exploits similar venues without much innovation.
MM's best novel to date is perhaps Memories (1987), in which the
Weltschmerz inherent in the Chandler tradition is cleverly re-articulated

in the story of a woman who arrives by a form of subjective TIME TRAVEL
from a devastated future, and who embroils the psychiatrist hero in
further travels backwards into a somewhat sentimentalized understanding on
both their parts of the depth of their deracination from the real world.
The Nexus (1989) likewise handles material of considerable complexity, in
this case a NEAR-FUTURE tale of innocence exploited. It is difficult to be
sure that MM's copious energy will eventually control his equally apparent
sentimentality; but he remains, without doubt, one of the more interesting
professionals in the field. [JC]Other works: My Science Project * (1985),
a tie to MY SCIENCE PROJECT (1985); The M.I.A. Ransom (1986); Isaac
Asimov's Robot City #2: Suspicion * (1987); Puppetmaster (1991 UK; rev
1991 US), associational thriller; State of Siege (1994), a near-future
thriller.As Victor Appleton (house name): Tom Swift: Crater of Mystery *
(1983); Tom Swift: Planet of Nightmares * (1984).As Jack Arnett: The Book
of Justice sequence of associational thrillers, those of some sf interest
being #1: Genocide Express (1989), #2: Zaitech Sting (1990) and #4: Panama
Dead (1990).As Laura Lee Hope (house name): Bobbsey Twins: Haunted House *
(1985).As Carolyn Keene (house name): Nancy Drew: Ghost Stories * (coll
1985).See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; PHILIP K. DICK AWARD.
McQUEEN, RONALD A.
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
McQUINN, DONALD E.
(1930- ) US writer whose first sf novel (his fifth overall), Warrior
(1990), packs into its setting - a USA 500 years after the nation's
nuclear destruction - almost every CLICHE available to writers of
barbarian-warrior novels: a variety of agon-based tribal societies; a
woman-run church; a batch of 21st-century warriors freshly resurrected
from CRYONIC slumber and ready for a fight; an evil monarch bent on
establishing an Empire; and a protagonist who must wander from one enclave
to another, gradually accumulating a passel of friends and adherents as he
goes. But the book itself, despite its (well handled) military moments, is
in effect a PLANETARY ROMANCE, and in its 500 pages slowly and lovingly
establishes an extremely complex portrait of a huge, densely populated,
intensely variegated land. Several women characters have featured roles
(though most of them are oppressed); the sequels, Wanderer (1993) and
Witch (1994), do not, perhaps, quite maintain that sense of the
multifarious, but it does continue to seem that DEM might be one of the
novelists to watch in the 1990s. [JC]
MACROCOSM
GREAT AND SMALL.
MacTYRE, PAUL
Pseudonym of Scottish writer R.J. Adam (1924- ). His best-known novel is
his first, Midge (1962; vt Doomsday, 1999 1963 US), a literate postHOLOCAUST story in which a new form of life threatens to take over from
the remnants of outmoded, destructive Man. Further novels are the John
Buchanesque Fish on a Hook (1963) and Bar Sinister (1964), the bar of the
title representing a borderline-sf COMMUNICATIONS technology. [JC]
MacVICAR, ANGUS

[r] The LOST PLANET ; RADIO.
MADACH, IMRE
(1823-1864) Hungarian playwright and parliamentarian, chiefly known for
his verse play Az ember tragediaja (1862; trans J.C.W. Horne as The
Tragedy of Man: A Dramatic Poem in Fifteen Scenes 1963 Hungary; preferred
trans by George Szirtes 1988 Hungary). This philosophical, rather
pessimistic fantasy about the destiny of mankind focuses on Adam (an
optimist), Eve and Lucifer (a materialist), who reappear in each scene in
different guises (Adam once as Johannes KEPLER), all this being a dream
shown to Adam by Lucifer. The somewhat high-flown narrative begins in
biblical times and ends in the future; one of the last scenes is set in
space, and another on a Dying Earth in the FAR FUTURE when the Sun is dim
and red. [PN]
MADARIAGA (Y ROJO), SALVADOR de
(1886-1978) Spanish man of letters and diplomat who spent much of his
life after 1916 in the UK and Switzerland, where he eventually retired. In
his sf novel, The Sacred Giraffe: Being the Second Volume of the
Posthumous Works of Julio Arceval (1925 UK), set in AD6922, the Blacks who
have survived much history, including the submergence of Europe, argue
about the possibility that Whites ever actually existed. Their
hierarchical and monogamous state of Ebony - which is in Africa - is ruled
by women. The book's various satirical points are generally directed at UK
culture. Sir Bob (1930 US) is a fantasy for children, though its mildly
satirical implications are clearly intended for the delectation of adults.
SdM either wrote both works initially in English or translated them
himself. [JC]
MADDOCK, LARRY
The solo writing name of Jack Owen Jardine (1931- ), a creative director
in radio, for his Agent of T.E.R.R.A. series, speedy SPACE OPERAS starring
Hannibal Fortune and an alien sidekick on various assignments to save
Earth from her enemies. The series comprises The Flying Saucer Gambit
(1966), The Golden Goddess Gambit (1967), The Emerald Elephant Gambit
(1967) and The Time Trap Gambit (1969). With his then wife, Julie Ann
Jardine, he also wrote under the pseudonym Howard L. CORY. [JC]See also:
UFOS.
MADDOX, CARL
E.C. TUBB.
MADDOX, TOM
Working name of US writer Daniel Thomas Maddox (1945- ) who began
publishing polished short stories with "The Mind like a Strange Balloon"
for Omni in 1985. His first novel, HALO (1991), moves from a CYBERPUNK
Earth to a SPACE HABITAT, engaging en route in an intense contemplation of
the nature of artificial intelligence ( AI; CYBERNETICS; ROBOTS) in a
VIRTUAL-REALITY environment. The tale is intermittently hectic, but
charged with energy. [JC]
MADER, FRIEDRICH W(ILHELM)
(1866-1947) German writer, mainly of juvenile novels, many set in German

East Africa and written somewhat in the style of H. Rider HAGGARD.
Wunderwelten (1911; trans Max Shachtman as Distant Worlds: The Story of a
Voyage to the Planets 1932 US) is a juvenile which takes its SPACESHIP
crew to Mars and finally, at several times the speed of light, to Alpha
Centauri, where they explore an Eden-like planet. Its content is quite
advanced for 1911, but it is ill written. Other untranslated works include
El Dorado ((1919; vt Auf den Spuren der Inkas), Die letzte Atlantide ["The
Last Atlantis"] (1923) and Die Messingstadt ["City of Brass"] (1924).
[PN/JE]See also: GERMANY.
MADLEE, DOROTHY
[r] Andre NORTON.
MAD LOVE
ORLACS HANDE.
MAD MAX
Film (1979). Mad Max Pty. Dir George MILLER, starring Mel Gibson, Joanne
Samuel, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Tim Burns. Screenplay James McCausland, Miller,
based on a story by Miller. 100 mins, cut to 91 mins. Colour.This
low-budget exploitation movie builds up to the vigilante-style revenge of
spaced-out policeman Max Rockatansky (Gibson) - who is almost as disturbed
as his antagonists - on the motorcycle gang that killed his wife and
child. It proved to be the successful harbinger of a boom in postHOLOCAUST sf films where a dying civilization is pitted against a growing
barbarism. Miller, whose debut feature this was, is extremely economical
with data about just what (other than fuel shortages) has happened to
create this crumbling of the social structure in Australia. Nonetheless,
his vision of anarchy's spread - the atmosphere is reminiscent of John
CARPENTER's Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) - is credible and well achieved.
The film's instant success was due to the panache (and great skill) with
which the chase sequences and spectacular vehicle demolitions were
mounted. Prints shown in the USA were dubbed so that audiences there
should not be subjected to the brutalities of the Australian accent.
[PN]See also: ACE BOOKS; CINEMA; MUSIC.
MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME
Film (1985). Kennedy Miller Productions. Dir George MILLER with George
Ogilvie, starring Mel Gibson, Tina Turner, Bruce Spence, Frank Thring,
Paul Larsson, Helen Buday. Screenplay Terry Hayes, Miller. 107 mins.
Colour.This Australian film, the second sequel to the post- HOLOCAUST
movie MAD MAX (1979), has lots of well directed action but is more
rambling and less focused than its predecessors. Max finds a community in
the desert, Bartertown, with a female warlord (Tina Turner), gladiatorial
games, and a great many extras being noisy, dirty and primitive. This
lively stuff is really no more than a rehash of a great many filmic
cliches, notably those of Italian sword-and-sandal epics. Far more
interesting is a subplot set in a different part of the desert and
involving a tribe of children who are now living in an oasis, having many
years ago survived a plane crash in which all adults were killed. In
perhaps the first attempt in cinema to achieve, albeit less complexly,
something of what Russell HOBAN achieved in RIDDLEY WALKER (1980), they

speak a devolved language ( LINGUISTICS); they also have a mythology
involving a MESSIAH-figure, whom they take Mad Max to be. Their final
return to the derelict ghost-city of Sydney is well done, and this whole
inventive section about the children - pure sf, and ambitious sf at that makes an otherwise routinely vivid film well worth watching. The
novelization is Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome * (1985) by Joan D. VINGE.
[PN]
MAD MAX 2
(vt The Road Warrior) Film (1981). Kennedy Miller Entertainment. Dir
George MILLER, starring Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence, Emil Minty, Mike
Preston, Kjell Nilsson. Screenplay Terry Hayes, Miller, Brian Hannant. 96
mins. Colour.The success of the first film in this series, MAD MAX (1979),
generated a bigger budget for this, the second. It was well used, and this
is a more sophisticated film, more purely sf than its predecessor. The oil
wars have left a devastated world; petrol is a medium of exchange, and its
conspicuous use - by burning it up on the roads - confers status.
Ex-policeman Max Rockatansky (Gibson) gives reluctant assistance to a
semicivilized group in a desert fortress. Possessing a valuable petrol
supply, they are beleaguered by a tribe of marauders (who, in this
Westerns replay, are effectively the Indians), designer-barbarians in
fetishistic gear on motorbikes and vehicles of war. Made with poker-faced
humour, and this time with the US prints allowed to retain Mel Gibson's
Australian drawl, the film is enlivened by small details - e.g., the Feral
Kid (Minty) with his razor-sharp metal boomerang - and has much to
recommend it beyond the tautly directed scenes of vehicular warfare.
Poignant use is made of memories when times were better. The name of the
sleazy real-world coastal resort Surfer's Paradise is now only
half-remembered, as "Paradise", and ironically the place becomes the
Promised Land to which the civilized remnant (minus the loner, Max)
finally treks. With all its comic-strip energy and vividness, this is
exploitation cinema at its most inventive. [PN]
MADSEN, SVEND AGE
[r] DENMARK.
MAEPEN, K.H.
[s] Henry KUTTNER.
MAGAZINE OF FANTASY, THE
The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION .
MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, THE
US DIGEST-size magazine; published Fall 1949-Feb 1958 by Fantasy House,
Inc., a subsidiary of Mercury Press, then by Mercury Press; Lawrence
Spivak was credited as Publisher Fall 1949-July 1954, Joseph W. FERMAN Aug
1954-Oct 1970, Edward L. FERMAN from Nov 1970; ed Anthony BOUCHER and J.
Francis MCCOMAS Fall 1949-Aug 1954, then by Boucher alone until Aug 1958,
by Robert P. MILLS Sep 1958-Mar 1962, by Avram DAVIDSON Apr 1962-Nov 1964,
by publisher Joseph W. Ferman Dec 1964-Dec 1965, by Edward L. Ferman Jan
1966-June 1991, and by Kristine Kathryn RUSCH from July 1991. To May
1995FSF had published 528 issues. #1 (Fall 1949) was titled The Magazine
of Fantasy. The magazine began as a quarterly, became a bimonthly in Feb

1951, and has maintained a monthly schedule since Aug 1952. A rather
short-lived companion magazine was VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION.FSF - the
abbreviation, taken from the words "Fantasy and Science Fiction" on the
spine, being in almost universal use by its readers - won HUGOS for Best
Magazine in 1958, 1959, 1960, 1963, 1969, 1970, 1971 and 1972; after that
category was dropped, Edward L. Ferman won the Hugo for Best Editor in
1981, 1982 and 1983. There was then a long gap until Kristine Kathryn
Rusch won the same award in 1994. FSF's editorial policy has always placed
the main emphasis on short stories. Its editors abandoned the standards of
PULP-MAGAZINE fiction and asked for stylish sf/fantasy that was up to the
literary standards of the "slick" magazines that had shaped US short-story
writing between the wars; they also abandoned interior illustrations. FSF
published a great deal of light and humorous material, and used occasional
reprints of stories by prestigious writers, including Robert GRAVES, Eric
LINKLATER, Robert NATHAN, Robert Louis STEVENSON, James Thurber
(1894-1961), Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) and P.G. WODEHOUSE. It also attracted
such writers as Kingsley AMIS, Gerald HEARD and C.S. LEWIS to write for
its pages. Despite the various changes of editorship the personality of
the magazine has been consistent, although since the 1970s it has been a
more orthodox sf magazine than in earlier days. It used serials only
occasionally, and most of the novels appearing in it are substantially
cut; they have included BRING THE JUBILEE by Ward MOORE (Nov 1952; 1953),
ROGUE MOON by Algis BUDRYS (Dec 1960; 1960) and STARSHIP TROOPERS (Oct-Nov
1959 as "Starship Soldier"; exp 1959) by Robert A. HEINLEIN. Several
notable series have been associated with the magazine, including Zenna
HENDERSON's People, Manly Wade WELLMAN's John the Ballad Singer, Poul
ANDERSON's Time Patrol and Reginald BRETNOR's Papa Schimmelhorn. Walter M.
MILLER's classic A Canticle for Leibowitz (fixup 1960) was developed from
3 novelettes published in FSF 1955-7.Starship Troopers and A Canticle for
Leibowitz were two of FSF's many award-winning stories. Others were Robert
BLOCH's "That Hellbound Train" (Sep 1958; Hugo), Daniel KEYES's "Flowers
for Algernon" (Apr 1959; Hugo; the novel version, Flowers for Algernon
[1966], won a NEBULA), Brian W. ALDISS's Hothouse series (1961; Hugo;
fixup as Hothouse 1962; vt The Long Afternoon of Earth) and "The Saliva
Tree" (Sep 1965; Nebula), Poul Anderson's "No Truce with Kings" (June
1963; Hugo), "The Queen of Air and Darkness" (Apr 1971; Hugo and Nebula)
and "Goat Song" (Feb 1972; Hugo and Nebula), Fritz LEIBER's "Ship of
Shadows" (July 1969; Hugo), "Ill Met in Lankhmar" (Apr 1970; Hugo) and
"Catch that Zeppelin" (Mar 1975; Hugo and Nebula), Roger ZELAZNY's "The
Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" (Mar 1965; Nebula) and "And
Call Me Conrad" (Oct-Nov 1965; Hugo; exp vt This Immortal 1966), Frederik
POHL's and C.M. KORNBLUTH's "The Meeting" (Nov 1972; Hugo), Harlan
ELLISON's "The Deathbird" (Mar 1973; Hugo), "Adrift Just Off the Islets of
Langerhans" (Oct 1974; Hugo) and "Jeffty is Five" (Jul 1977; Hugo and
Nebula), "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" (Feb 1973; World Fantasy
Award) by Robert Aickman (d1981), Robert SILVERBERG's "Born with the Dead"
(Apr 1974; Nebula), Tom REAMY's "San Diego Lightfoot Sue" (Aug 1975;
Nebula), Frederik Pohl's MAN PLUS (Apr-June 1976; Nebula), Charles L.
Grant's "A Crowd of Shadows" (June 1976; Nebula), Edward BRYANT's "Stone"
(Feb 1978; Nebula), John VARLEY's "The Persistence of Vision" (Mar 1978;
Hugo and Nebula) and "The Pusher" (Oct 1981; Hugo), C.J. CHERRYH's

"Cassandra" (Oct 1978; Hugo), Lisa TUTTLE's "The Bone Flute" (May 1981;
Nebula), Joanna RUSS's "Souls" (Jan 1982; Hugo), John KESSEL's "Another
Orphan" (Sep 82; Nebula), Kim Stanley ROBINSON's "Black Air" (March 1983;
World Fantasy Award), Nancy KRESS's "Out of All Them Bright Stars" (Mar
1985; Nebula), Ursula K. LE GUIN's "Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Out
Tonight" (Nov 1987; Hugo), Michael D. RESNICK's "Kirinyaga" (Nov 1988;
Hugo), Alan BRENNERT's "Ma Qui" (Feb 1991; Nebula), Mike CONNER's "Guide
Dog" (May 1991; Nebula, Joe HALDEMAN's "Graves" (Nov 1992; Nebula) and
Jack CADY's "The Night We Buried Road Dog" (Jan 1993; Nebula). Other
excellent stories have been contributed by Alfred BESTER, Boucher himself,
Samuel R. DELANY, Philip Jose FARMER, Richard MATHESON, James TIPTREE Jr
and many others.Under Rusch's editorship many readers claimed to detect a
change in the "feel" of the magazine, which is hardly surprising, since
she is very much younger than her predecessor had become. Publication
settled to 11 issues a year, one of them a double issue. As with most sf
magazines, paid circulation dropped between 1986 and 1994, in this case
from c56,500 to c51,800, comparatively stable for the period.From Nov 1958
to Feb 1992, 399 issues, every issue of FSF featured a science article by
Isaac ASIMOV; he collected these essays, which ceased not long before his
death, into many books. His replacements have been Gregory BENFORDand
Bruce STERLING. Early book-review editors were Boucher, Damon Knight,
Alfred Bester and Avram Davidson; the lead reviewer 1975-92 was Algis
Budrys. John Kessel followed, and leaving in 1995 will be followed in turn
by Robert Killheffer. Baird Searles has reviewed films. Another feature
was the long series (1958-64) of punning shaggy-dog stories known as
Feghoots, written by Reginald BRETNOR as Grendel Briarton. In 1968 the
magazine sponsored a novel-writing contest won by Piers ANTHONY with Sos
the Rope (July-Sep 1968; 1968).FSF has published a "special all-star
anniversary issue" every October since the mid-1960s, and a series of
special issues celebrating particular authors, each featuring a new story,
a checklist of the author's work and articles about the author. The first
of these was devoted to Theodore STURGEON (Sep 1962), and subsequent
special issues featured Ray BRADBURY (May 1963), Isaac Asimov (Oct 1966),
Fritz Leiber (July 1969), Poul Anderson (Apr 1971), James BLISH (Apr
1972), Frederik Pohl (Sep 1973), Robert Silverberg (Apr 1974), Harlan
Ellison (July 1977) and Stephen KING (Dec 1990), the Anderson, Leiber and
Silverberg stories being among the award winners listed above. The first 6
of these stories, with abridged checklists and biographical articles, were
published as The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: A Special 25th
Anniversary Anthology (anth 1974), ed Edward L. Ferman, which, though not
so titled, is assumed to be #21 of the Best series, as its successor was
#22. The Best series, beginning with The Best from Fantasy and Science
Fiction (anth 1952) ed Boucher and McComas, ran 1952-82, amounting to 24
anthologies (counting the 25th-anniversary volume). These at first
appeared annually, but none appeared in 1970, 1972, 1974-6, 1978-9 and
1981 (for details Anthony BOUCHER, Robert P. MILLS, Avram DAVIDSON and
Edward L. FERMAN). Other book spin-offs from FSF have been A Decade of
Fantasy and Science Fiction (anth 1960) ed Robert P. Mills, Once and
Future Tales from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (anth 1968)
ed Edward L. Ferman, Twenty Years of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction (anth 1970) ed Edward L. Ferman and Robert P. Mills, The Magazine

of Fantasy and Science Fiction: A Thirty Year Retrospective (anth 1980) ed
Edward L. Ferman, reprinting the stories from the Oct 1979 retrospective
issue, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1965 (anth 1981)
ed Edward L. Ferman and Martin H. GREENBERG, The Best Fantasy Stories from
the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (anth 1986) ed Edward L.
Ferman, The Best Horror Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction (anth 1988; in 2 vols US 1989; vt The Best of Modern Horror:
Twenty-Four Tales from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1989
UK) ed Edward L. Ferman and Anne Jordan, and The Best from Fantasy ?
Science Fiction: A 40th Anniversary Anthology (anth 1989) ed Edward L.
Ferman.UK editions of the magazine ran Oct 1953-Sep 1954 (12 issues) from
Mellifont Press, and Dec 1959-June 1964 (55 issues) from Atlas Publishing
?
recombined stories from the US edition. The UK reprint magazine VENTURE
SCIENCE FICTION (1963-5), also from Atlas, carried material from FSF as
well as from the US Venture. There was a selective reprint edition of FSF
in Australia 1954-8 (14 issues, undated) from Consolidated Press.
[BS/PN]See also: GOLDEN AGE OF SF.
MAGAZINE OF HORROR, THE
US DIGEST-size magazine, 36 issues Aug 1963 (Vol 1 #1)-Apr 1971 (Vol 6
#6). The longest-running and most successful of the reprint magazines ed
R.A.W. LOWNDES for Health Knowledge Inc., this chiefly published classic
horror tales, some from the early PULP MAGAZINES. Most issues also
contained 2-4 original stories, a number being of sf interest by writers
including John BRUNNER, R.A. LAFFERTY, Emil PETAJA, Joanna RUSS, Robert
SILVERBERG and Roger ZELAZNY. The majority of covers were by Virgil
FINLAY. Lowndes's editorials were notably balanced and lively. [PN]
MAGAZINES
For a statement about which magazines receive entries in this volume, and
why, see Magazines in the Introduction; for a general discussion of sf
magazines (and some fantasy magazines that occasionally published sf
stories) SF MAGAZINES, and also the individual entries for the
approximately 240 professional sf magazines and SEMIPROZINES we discuss in
detail; for amateur sf periodical publications FANZINES; for a discussion
of pulp magazines generally, and a listing of all the pulp entries not
listed under the SF MAGAZINES rubric, including the hero/villain pulps,
PULP MAGAZINES, which also discusses the relationship between the pulps
and their competitors, the "slicks" and tabloids.Many general-fiction
magazines other than the pulps have regularly published sf stories, and a
selection of the most important have received entries in this
encyclopedia: COLLIER'S WEEKLY, The IDLER , MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE, MUNSEY'S
MAGAZINE, The OVERLAND MONTHLY , The PASSING SHOW , PEARSON'S MAGAZINE,
PEARSON'S WEEKLY, ST NICHOLAS MAGAZINE and The STRAND MAGAZINE . Other
forms of periodical publishing are discussed under BOYS' PAPERS, COMICS,
DIME-NOVEL SF and JUVENILE SERIES. The entries for HISTORY OF SF and
PUBLISHING include discussion of the importance of the magazines. [PN]
MAGIC
In the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1884-1928) "magic"
is defined as "the pretended art of influencing the course of events . . .

by processes supposed to owe their efficacy to their power of compelling
the intervention of spiritual beings, or of bringing into operation some
occult controlling principle of nature". The lexicographer assumed that
there is no difficulty in telling a "pretended" art from a real one, nor
in distinguishing the "occult" from the scientific. Many sf authors have
felt dissatisfied with such confident categorizations, and have written
stories exemplifying alternative relationships between magic and
science.One typical attitude is summed up by Arthur C. CLARKE's "Third
Law", in Profiles of the Future (coll 1962): "Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic." This echoes the observation
by Roger Bacon (c1214-1292) 700 years before that "many secrets of art and
nature are thought by the unlearned to be magical"; the irony whereby
Bacon, a pioneer of experimental science, gained a posthumous reputation
for sorcery goes far to confirm Clarke's "Law", and is at the heart of
James BLISH's novel of the history of science, Doctor Mirabilis (1964 UK;
rev 1971 US). Stories in which superior technology is treated as magic are
common, the most thoroughgoing being Larry NIVEN's and David GERROLD's The
Flying Sorcerers (1971). However, the unexpressed converse of Clarke's
"Law" has proved even more attractive: if technology looks like magic,
could magic not have been misunderstood technology?The possibilities for
fiction of this nature were well exemplified by several stories published
in UNKNOWN in the 1940s: Fritz LEIBER's Conjure Wife (1943; 1953), Robert
A. HEINLEIN's "The Devil Makes the Law" (1940; vt as "Magic, Inc." in
Waldo and Magic, Inc. coll 1950), and the Harold Shea stories by L.
Sprague DE CAMP and Fletcher PRATT, later collected as The Incomplete
Enchanter (1940; 1941) and The Castle of Iron (1941; 1950); the Leiber
tale is set in the contemporary USA, the Heinlein in an ALTERNATE WORLD
very similar to it, and the Harold Shea stories in PARALLEL WORLDS to
which contemporary US citizens are sent. All rely heavily on the
juxtaposition of familiar and unfamiliar, realistic and fantastic; their
concern, above all, is to discipline and rationalize notions of magic.
Thus in Conjure Wife the hero, a professor of social anthropology,
discovers that his wife is a witch and forces her to give up this
"superstition". Accumulating catastrophes persuade him that he is wrong.
In the end he has to use his academic training to systematize his wife's
knowledge and restore stability. The "incomplete enchanters" are likewise
academic psychologists, though Heinlein's hero, characteristically, is a
small-town businessman.In presenting rationalized forms of magic the
Unknown authors were following arguments presented in The Golden Bough
(1890 in 2 vols; 3rd edn rev in 12 vols 1911-15) by Sir James Frazer
(1854-1941). This extremely influential work had suggested (a) that magic
is like science but unlike RELIGION in its assumption that the Universe
works according to "immutable laws", and (b) that some of these laws can
be codified as Laws of Sympathy, Similarity and Contact. Frazer was
probably no more than half serious in this, but the notion of
quasi-Newtonian laws proved irresistible. Leiber, de Camp and Pratt
include overt references to The Golden Bough, while the hero of "Magic,
Inc." is actually called Fraser. At one point this Fraser explains how,
for instance, he exploits the laws of "homeopathy" and "contiguity" to
erect temporary grandstands: he has a section of seating carefully built,
then chops it to pieces, and, "Under the law of contiguity, each piece

remained part of the structure it had once been in. Under the law of
homeopathy, each piece was potentially the entire structure." So Fraser
can send out splinters which, when activated by the proper spells, will
temporarily become entire structures. We realize that the world he lives
in is controlled entirely by "occult" principles, but that these are not
haphazard. Much of the amusement of worlds-where-magic-works stories lies
in developing the possibilities of a small number of magical rules.Many
authors have followed the lead of the Unknown stories: Poul ANDERSON in
Three Hearts and Three Lions (1953 FSF; exp 1961) and Operation Chaos
(1956-9 FSF; fixup 1971), John BRUNNER in The Traveler in Black (coll of
linked stories 1971; with 1 story added vt The Compleat Traveler in Black
1986 US), James Blish in Black Easter (1968) and James E. GUNN in The
Magicians (1954 Beyond as "Sine of the Magus"; exp 1976). The principles
of magic as a kind of alternate TECHNOLOGY are also examined in Jack
VANCE's THE DYING EARTH (coll of linked stories 1950) and The Eyes of the
Overworld (1966), in Mark GESTON's The Siege of Wonder (1976), in Fred
SABERHAGEN's Empire of the East trilogy beginning with The Broken Lands
(1968), and in Christopher STASHEFF's Warlock series beginning with The
Warlock in Spite of Himself (1969). Rachel POLLACK's Unquenchable Fire
(1988) envisages an alternate-world USA run by a bureaucracy of shamans
whose shamanism actually works. But the purest example of "Frazerian" sf
is Randall GARRETT's Lord Darcy series (1964-76 ASF), set in an alternate
world where King Richard I founded a stable Plantagenet dynasty, Europe
remained feudal and Catholic, and magic was developed in harmony with
science. The heroes are a detective pair, Lord Darcy and Master Sean
O'Lochlainn, resembling Arthur Conan DOYLE's Sherlock Holmes and Dr
Watson. Master Sean is not a doctor, however, but a sorcerer, and he plays
a much more significant role than Dr Watson ever did, compensating for the
absence of forensic science by a series of carefully described magical
tests for murder weapons, times of death, chemical analysis and so on. It
is not too much to say that the stories are vehicles for the explanations
of Master Sean rather than for the adventures of Lord Darcy. Garrett's
distinctive contributions lie in the range of new "laws" added to the old
Frazerian ones (Relevance, Synecdoche, Congruency, etc.) and in the rigour
with which these are stated and used.In the stories so far mentioned magic
is seen not as like science but as a form of science. The theme of magic
as a kind of alternate science remains intensely popular. Among the
writers who would convince us that magic is as much science as art are
Patricia MCKILLIP in her Riddle-Master trilogy, beginning with The
Riddle-Master of Hed (1976), who does so with gravitas, Phyllis EISENSTEIN
with Sorcerer's Son (1979) and its sequel The Crystal Palace (1988), who
does so with some frivolity, and Barbara HAMBLY in a variety of works,
notably the Sun-Cross sequence beginning with The Rainbow Abyss (1991 UK),
which presents magic as culturally disreputable. Though, for really
disreputable magic, it would be hard to go past Tim POWERS's splendid The
Drawing of the Dark (1979), whose title puns on approaching evil and
long-brewed beer, "the dark", which is the fountainhead, literally, of
magic in the book's alternate 16th-century Vienna.But, if magic is a form
of science, why has it never been systematized in our world? Many
different answers have been given to this. Garrett's, for example, is that
it is a result of prejudiced inquiry on the part of SCIENTISTS (exactly

the charge levelled at scientists in the real world by adherents of the
PSEUDO-SCIENCES and researchers into the paranormal), complicated by the
fact that the exercise of magic demands a mysterious "talent" which many
investigators do not possess: experiments are therefore likely to be
unrepeatable. Magic here is being assimilated to PSI POWERS, which sf
authors are capable of taking seriously. No matter how serious the
treatment, however, the end result can be argued as frivolous, for magic
is, if not precisely disproven, regarded by science as actually workable
only when both magician and subject are believers (as with faith healing
or Australian aborigines "pointing the bone"), when it is susceptible to a
psychological or psychosomatic rather than a supernatural explanation.The
subgenre of tales about alternate worlds in which magic is subsumed into
psi powers is often associated with the names of Andre NORTON and Marion
Zimmer BRADLEY. Above-average work in this vein has more recently been
produced by Katherine KURTZ with the continuing Chronicles of the Deryni
series, beginning with Deryni Rising (1970), by Sheri S. TEPPER with the
True Game series - which can be regarded as sf - beginning with King's
Blood Four (1983), and most famously by Orson Scott CARD in the Tales of
Alvin Maker, to date comprising Seventh Son (1987), Red Prophet (1988) and
Prentice Alvin (1989), assembled as Hatrack River (omni 1989).A not
uncommon elegiac variant is the idea of a world in which the supply of
magic, or its sources, is drying up. Peter DICKINSON's The Blue Hawk
(1976) is of this kind, and there never seem to be enough Sipstrassi
stones (superscientific sources of magical potency from ATLANTIS) to go
around in David GEMMELL's Sipstrassi sequence, which begins with Wolf in
Shadow (1987; vt The Jerusalem Man 1988 US). The best known book of this
kind may be Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away (1977), which was followed
by his two SHARED-WORLD anthologies, The Magic May Return * (anth 1981)
and More Magic * (anth 1984).It is striking that one "Frazerian" area has
daunted all but the boldest users of magic in sf, this being RELIGION. The
position of magic in a Christian universe is especially difficult to
define, since its compulsive quality appears to contradict dogmas of
divine omnipotence. Most authors accordingly relegate the problem to the
background of their stories, C.S. LEWIS going so far, in That Hideous
Strength (1945), as to explain how magic has come to be unlawful for
Christians in normal circumstances. One author who does not shirk the
challenge is James Blish, but his Black Easter ends with the words: "God
is dead."The actions of godlike creatures in sf ( GODS AND DEMONS) are
seldom distinguishable from magic, much as in Clarke's "Law" quoted above,
and John VARLEY's hyperactive Gaean sequence about an artificial world
controlled by an intelligence devoted to metamorphic theatricals of a
magical kind - Titan (1979), Wizard (1980) and Demon (1984) - though
published as sf, has less cognitive consistency than a number of works including McKillip's Riddle-Master series - which would normally be
classified as fantasy.That classification is frequently given also to the
only wholly successful resolution of magic, science and religion in sf so
far: Ursula K. LE GUIN's Earthsea trilogy (1968-72). This is in a sense a
"Frazerian" work, for the magic in it is based on the notion that
everything has a true name and can be controlled by knowledge of it:
Frazer was familiar with name-taboos. However, the relationship is
virtually one of parody, for while the first "golden bough" was Aeneas's

talisman of return from the underworld (Virgil's Aeneid Book 6), the
Archmage-hero of Earthsea finds himself continually struggling against
death without any supporting token. He learns in the first book that the
defeat of death is an improper aim for a magician, whose art must depend
on respect for the individual qualities (or names) of others, rather than
on manipulation of them for one's own self-perpetuation. In the second
book he faces an organized religion of sacrifice and propitiation, to
demonstrate that this offers no better hope for humanity. In the third he
duels with a rival "mage" who appears to have won power over death, though
with disastrous consequences for others. Magic is presented continually as
an alternative ideology to those with which we are familiar - i.e., those
of science and religion - and as a more attractive one. Earthsea is
informed, atypically for sf, by an awareness of the discoveries of
post-Victorian ANTHROPOLOGY; it exemplifies the serious and powerful
argumentative quality which can underline what appear to be only
entertaining fantasies.More recently two authors have, perhaps, done
something new in the subgenre. The first is Terry PRATCHETT, whose
Discworld sequence (from 1983) must have produced a greater (and funnier)
variety of riffs on the world-where-magic-works theme, many of them
borderline sf, than any other author; it is the sheer variety that
constitutes the novelty. The second is John CROWLEY, who has presented one
of the most scholarly (and historically accurate) varieties of the magical
art yet to appear in genre fiction, borrowed from the neo-platonic
scientist/magicians of the Renaissance. Magic of this sort permeates
(though seldom obviously) the novel Little, Big (1981), and actually
becomes the structural principle of AEGYPT (1987). This latter - first of
a projected quartet - may be the only novel by a genre writer whose story,
whose structure and whose imagery are wholly isomorphic with an actual
historical magical system, gnostic magic. Renaissance magic does, however,
also play a prominent role - and is portrayed as rigorous and systematic in Mary GENTLE's vivid alternate-world novel Rats and Gargoyles (1990).
[TS/PN]See also: GOTHIC SF; MONSTERS; MYTHOLOGY; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
MAGIC REALISM
A term originally used to describe a form of literature most commonly
associated with 20th-century Latin America, most notably in the works of
Isabel Allende (1942- ), Miguel Angel Asturias (1899-1974), Jorge Luis
BORGES, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928- ) and Juan Rulfo (1918-1986). US and
UK practitioners include Donald BARTHELME, Angela CARTER and John Hawkes
(1925- ).Contrary to the antirealistic assumptions of high Modernism
(Henry James [1843-1916], Ezra Pound [1885-1972] and T.S. Eliot
[1888-1965]) or the fable-producing, self-referential texts of metafiction
(John BARTH and Italo CALVINO), Magic Realism does not necessarily doubt
either the actuality of a real world or the ability of literary language
to describe that world. Instead it assumes that the mundane world and its
familiar objects are often filled with fabulous secrets. Magic realism
explores the real world's unrealities, and does not simply - like FANTASY,
Surrealism or fairy tales - invent the dreamlike unrealities of ALTERNATE
WORLDS. Magic Realism suggests that the real world can be represented,
even when it cannot be believed.For further discussion of the broad
tendencies of 20th-century literature from which Magic Realism partially

dissents, FABULATION. [SB]See also: POSTMODERNISM AND SF.
MAGIDOFF, ROBERT
(1905-1970) Russian-born US academic, Professor of Russian Literature at
New York University 1961-70. His 3 anthologies are Russian Science Fiction
(anth 1964 UK), Russian Science Fiction, 1968 (anth 1968) and Russian
Science Fiction, 1969 (anth 1969). [PN]
MAGILL, FRANK N.
[r] Keith NEILSON.
MAGNETIC MONSTER, THE
Film (1953). A-Men Productions/United Artists. Dir Curt SIODMAK, starring
Richard Carlson, King Donovan, Jean Byron. Screenplay Siodmak, Ivan Tors.
76 mins. B/w.A new isotope, created in a laboratory, sucks in nearby
energy and doubles its size every few hours; eventually it may destroy the
Earth. The first part of the film shows it being tracked down by
scientific investigators, puzzled at the strange magnetic fields it
produces. It emits deadly radiation and is finally destroyed in a giant
power plant in the ocean by feeding it with more energy than it can
absorb. The film includes much footage at the finale from the German sf
classic GOLD (1934). This is a well made, documentary-style, fast-moving
thriller, one of Siodmak's better scripts, and the best of the (generally
poor) films that he directed. [PN/JB]
MAGUIRE, JOHN FRANCIS
(1815-1872) Irish nationalist politician and journalist, founder of the
Cork Examiner. In his sf novel The Next Generation (1871), set in 1891,
the UK has been much improved by steam-powered BALLOONS and the granting
of women's suffrage; romance and the explication of other meliorist
reforms just this side of UTOPIA take up the remainder of a very long
book. "Jack Tubbs, or The Happy Isle", in Young Prince Marigold, and Other
Fairy Stories (coll 1873), features an Edenic ISLAND populated by animals
with whom the hero has learned to converse. [JC]
MAHMUD, MUSTAFA
(1927- ) Egyptian writer, known also as Moustaffa Mahmoud, author of
short stories, novels and plays dealing with Egypt's social and political
development; in the mid-1960s he wrote a number of sf novels. These
include Al-khuruj min at-tabut (1965; trans as Raising from the Coffin
undated Cairo), Rajul tahta as-sifr ["The Man with a Temperature Below
Zero"] (1965) and Al-anqabut (1965; trans as "The Spider", serialized
1965-6 in the magazine Arab Observer). He is well known also for his
short-story collections, which contain an sf component, as in Yawmiyat
nuss al-layl ["Diaries of Midnight"] (coll 1982). MM is also a propagator
of ideas about UFOS. [JO]See also: ARABIC SF.
MAIKOWSKI, MIKE
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
MAINE, CHARLES ERIC
Pseudonym used by UK writer David McIlwain (1921-1981) for his sf; two
other pseudonyms, Richard Rayner and Robert Wade, were not used for sf.
CEM was one of the relatively few but extremely active UK fans before

WWII, in 1938 publishing his first story, "The Mirror", in his FANZINE The
Satellite, which he edited with Jonathan BURKE. His first novel was
Spaceways: A Story of the Very Near Future * (1953; vt Spaceways Satellite
1958 US), based on his own 1952 radio play; it was filmed as SPACEWAYS
(1953). Also developed from a script, in this case his own screenplay for
TIMESLIP (1955; vt The Atomic Man), is CEM's The Isotope Man * (1957),
which begins his only series, the Mike Delaney books, the other volumes in
which are Subterfuge (1959) and Never Let Up (1964). Like most of his sf,
these have a leaning towards thriller-like plots and a disinclination to
argue too closely scientific pinnings that are often shaky; the latter
tendency is particularly visible in stories featuring HARD-SF themes like
space travel, as in High Vacuum (1957). Sometimes lightly, sometimes with
gravity, CEM's numerous books touch on a variety of sf themes from ROCKETS
to SOCIOLOGY, but generally without more than fitfully illuminating them;
he was determinedly an author of middle-of-the-road GENRE SF, and as such
was successful. His finest novel is generally thought to be The Mind of Mr
Soames (1961), a story of a man who does not reach consciousness until the
age of 30, and of the arguments about how best to educate him. The moral
issues are dealt with quite sensitively. The book was filmed as The MIND
OF MR SOAMES (1969). [JC/PN]Other works: Timeliner: A Story of Time and
Space (1955); Crisis 2000 (1955); Escapement (1956; vt The Man who
Couldn't Sleep 1958 US), filmed as The Electronic Monster (1957; vt The
Dream Machine); World without Men (1958 US; rev vt Alph 1972); The Tide
Went Out (1958; rev vt Thirst! 1977); Count-Down (1958 AMZ as "The Big
Count-Down"; 1959; vt Fire Past the Future 1959 US); Calculated Risk
(1960); He Owned the World (1960 US; vt The Man who Owned the World 1961
UK); The Darkest of Nights (1962; vt Survival Margin 1968 US; rev vt The
Big Death 1978 UK); B.E.A.S.T.: Biological Evolutionary Animal Simulation
Test (1966); The Random Factor (1971).See also: ANTIGRAVITY; CLONES;
DISASTER; MEDICINE; MONEY; MOON.
MAINE, DAVID
Pierre BARBET.
MAINS d'ORLAC, LES
ORLACS HANDE.
MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF
This discussion should be read in conjunction with several others as part
of a pattern of reasoning that is most clearly presented in DEFINITIONS OF
SF, FABULATION, GENRE SF, HISTORY OF SF, MAGIC REALISM, POSTMODERNISM
AND
SF, PROTO SF and SLIPSTREAM SF.When used of literature, the term
"mainstream" refers in its narrowest application to the tradition of the
realistic novel of human character; in a wider application commonly
employed by the sf community, it denotes all serious prose fiction outside
the market genres; in its widest and perhaps most regrettable sense it
refers to practically any fiction, serious or otherwise (including
Jackie-Collins-style lowbrow bestsellers), outside sf, fantasy, the
thriller and the Western. As a piece of jargon, not yet fully accepted
into the language, "mainstream" lacks precision; nonetheless, there is a
useful distinction to be drawn between writers of GENRE SF, who think of

themselves as writing sf and whose books and stories are marketed as sf,
and those writers of sf works who think of themselves (or are marketed) as
simply writing fiction, without adopting either the protection or the
stigma of a genre label. If, however, we are to employ "mainstream sf"
primarily in opposition to "genre sf" - which we think is the most useful
and desirable use of the former term - there is not much point in using
the word "mainstream" retroactively to refer to writers like Aldous HUXLEY
in the 1930s, since the term "science fiction" barely existed when he was
writing books like BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932). It is, of course, possible to
argue that genre sf has existed ever since Hugo GERNSBACK founded AMAZING
STORIES in 1926, but at that time it was a tiny genre, not well
publicized. It would make better sense to regard mainstream (that is,
non-genre) sf as, say, a post-1937 phenomenon (that being the year in
which John W. CAMPBELL Jr took over the editorship of ASTOUNDING STORIES,
after which genre sf undeniably became established as a known form),
though to name any actual year must be arbitrary.Certainly, until the sf
label was adopted (in the form of the word SCIENTIFICTION in Gernsback's
1926 usage) it is realistic to argue that all sf was mainstream. Sf did
exist, notably in the scientific romances of H.G. WELLS, the Voyages
extraordinaires of Jules VERNE, and in much fiction of these and other
kinds ( HISTORY OF SF) in the general fiction magazines, pulp or
otherwise, but it had not yet hardened into a selfconscious separateness.
Indeed Wells's term SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE was a good one, and many tales were
so described, whether informally or formally, and did belong to an sf-like
tradition. But if we regard the scientific romance as prototypical genre
sf, then we run counter to a common usage of "mainstream sf" - to mean sf
published in books that are not labelled sf, as opposed to magazines that
are - for it was precisely in such books, especially in the UK, that the
scientific romance largely appeared. In other words, in many people's
usage of the term, the scientific romance is almost by definition
mainstream. Any usage which leads to something very like a contradiction
in terms is clearly not useful.Especially in the UK, books written in the
tradition of the scientific romance and published as straight novels
continued well into the 1950s, some of the most popular being by John
WYNDHAM. It would clearly be a nonsense to argue that Wyndham was a
mainstream writer, especially since, under other pseudonyms, he was also
well known in the genre-sf magazines. This example is given only to show
that the idea of the presence or absence of genre labels on books as
somehow defining their content is unhelpful. Nonetheless, just such
judgments as to who is mainstream and who is not have often been made,
frequently with the implication that the mainstream writer is thus
marginalized. That is why it is more useful to decide who is mainstream
and who is not by the presence or absence in the tale of adherence to the
protocols of genre sf, rather than the label on the cover.During the
period in which sf was beginning to take shape as an identifiably separate
genre, in the 1920s and 1930s, the favourite sf themes with non-genre sf
writers who published in book format were: DYSTOPIAS; stories imagining
life after some sort of HOLOCAUST; stories creating imaginary societies
that satirize our own ( SATIRE); and stories of future POLITICS and WAR.
(The LOST-WORLDS theme was already in decline by the 1920s.) Some such
writers from this period, in addition to Huxley, are Karel CAPEK, John

COLLIER, Murray Constantine (Katharine BURDEKIN), Guy DENT, John GLOAG, E.
C. LARGE, Sinclair LEWIS, Wyndham LEWIS, Andre MAUROIS, Joseph O'NEILL, J.
B. PRIESTLEY, Herbert READ, Upton SINCLAIR, Olaf STAPLEDON, Alexei TOLSTOY
and Rex WARNER. Many of these were working in the tradition of the
scientific romance. One marginal sf theme whose main development - before,
after and during this period - has been more outside the genre than within
it is PSYCHOLOGY, under which heading the relation between mainstream and
genre sf is further discussed.The distinction between genre sf and
mainstream sf becomes more interesting, because more real, in the 1940s
and 1950s. As genre sf became better known outside its immediate small
circle of devotees, it also began to feed more from mainstream writing.
Huxley and Stapledon probably had a stronger influence on genre sf than
any non-genre writers since Wells. However, the traffic was by no means
one-way. The number of mainstream writers of sf remained very substantial
indeed, but a new distinction became apparent: between those writers whose
work demonstrates some knowledge of sf motifs as they developed in genre
sf or in the scientific romance, and those who rather cumbersomely
re-invent the wheel; one could (quite randomly) take Paul THEROUX as a
recent example of the latter. But many mainstream sf writers published
their work in book format rather than the pulp magazines because it would
not have crossed their minds to do otherwise; books were where respectable
persons published their fictions. Because sf became a book-marketing
category only in the 1950s in the USA (somewhat later in the UK) it would
not have occurred to writers like C.S. LEWIS to request that the magic
letters "SF" be placed on the covers of their books; if the thought had
occurred, it would probably have been dismissed as an irrelevance.The
dominant mainstream sf themes of the 1940s continued to be dystopias (
George ORWELL) and tales of the HOLOCAUST AND AFTER ( Pat FRANK, George R.
STEWART). But, again, the recitation of names is not very helpful because
the phenomenon we speak of was on such a grand scale. Around half the
writers discussed in this encyclopedia did not publish their work as genre
sf, and often, too, their work does not feel like genre sf. To quote from
the GENRE SF entry: ". . . works of fiction which use sf themes in seeming
ignorance or contempt of the protocols - these are often works from
so-called mainstream writers of sf - frequently go unread by those
immersed in genre sf; and, if they are read, tend to be treated as
invasive and alien . . . and incompetent." This is one of the sadder
results of sf's ghetto mentality, though that mentality is not now nearly
so aggressively inflexible as it was during the 1940s-60s, when the use of
sf themes by writers outside the genre was considered almost a form of
theft in the eyes of an sf community whose love for its genre was often
expressed in very proprietorial terms. Even now, similar reservations are
occasionally expressed by the sf community about the work of writers like
Doris LESSING.Under the heading FABULATION we discuss a further confusion,
common in criticism from within the sf community. This is the belief that
sf, by escaping from the here-and-now of realist fiction, was to be
greatly admired as spearheading a new, less constrictive, more imaginative
nonrealist mode. Sf, on the contrary, lies at the heart of the realist
mode; its whole creative effort is bent on making its imaginary worlds,
its imaginary futures, as real as possible. The experiments in breaking
down realist or "mimetic" fiction were taking place elsewhere; fabulations

are fictions distrustful both of the very tools with which the world can
be made known, words - which, as T.S. Eliot said, "slip, slide, perish, /
Decay with imprecision" - and as to whether the world can in fact be
known. A quite extraordinary number of fabulators use sf motifs, but in
the construction of works whose foregrounding of their own artifice is
opposed in style and feeling to the traditional mimesis of genre sf; it is
unsurprising that sf's conservatives deeply dislike the suggestion that
they in any sense share their genre with such writers as John BARTH, Jorge
Luis BORGES, Italo CALVINO, Angela CARTER and Don DELILLO (to penetrate
only a short way into the alphabet). But, confusingly, genre sf has
produced quite a few fabulators of its own - J.G. BALLARD, John CROWLEY,
Thomas M. DISCH, Karen Joy FOWLER, M. John HARRISON, Michael MOORCOCK,
Lucius SHEPARD, John T. SLADEK and Gene WOLFE among them - so here, too,
the distinctions between genre sf and the mainstream prove elusive.It was
probably not, however, the fabulators that Ursula K. LE GUIN had in mind
when she said: "If the mainstream definably exists, then I think it is
itself a genre; one among many ways of writing fiction - one of the many
modes I myself work in." This, too, is an arguable case, though Le Guin
was probably thinking of the traditional novel of character - which is
certainly a genre - when she said it. We bring this up primarily to make
the obvious, but perhaps needful, point that the mainstream (like sf) is
undefinable and not homogeneous, and indeed contains many genres within
it, of which the fabulation and the novel of character are but two, both
at times impinging upon sf.By the 1980s any attempt at protecting the
racial purity of genre sf from contamination by the mainstream or by any
other genre was more obviously doomed to failure than ever before, for sf
was marrying out. The 1980s saw a flood of works ( FANTASY for some
examples) where sf was interbred with fantasy, with horror, with MAGIC
REALISM, with the thriller, with practically anything available.
Postmodernists clasped CYBERPUNKS in their showy, affectless embrace. Sf's
furtive affaires (such as the one it consistently conducted with the
historical romance, especially in TIME-TRAVEL stories) were now out in the
open and legitimate, and so were their progeny.Sf is and has been a great
enterprise, many of whose most remarkable achievements have taken place
entirely within genre sf; all those who are part of this phenomenon should
feel justifiably proud, and perhaps justifiably angry at the literary
world's failure to give them their due. It is sad that equally spectacular
sf achievements, outside the genre walls and within mainstream fiction,
have not always been recognized by those in the "ghetto" (snobberies cut
both ways), but by the 1980s the quarrel was of historical interest only,
for the walls were tumbling down. Some still shelter behind those shards
left standing, but, if they look, they will see that the traffic is moving
freely in both directions.A theme anthology collecting sf stories by
mainstream writers is The Light Fantastic (anth 1971) ed Harry HARRISON
and Theodore J. Gordon. [PN]
MAISON d'AILLEURS, LA
"The house of elsewhere", subtitled (in French) "the museum of Utopia, of
extraordinary voyages and of science fiction". This establishment in
Yverdon, Switzerland, contains about 50,000 items relating to sf, maybe
half of them books and magazines, the remainder all sorts of ephemera:

toys, games, stamps, posters, calendars, etc. Founded in 1975 by Pierre
VERSINS, who donated his celebrated private COLLECTION to it, it was given
much-needed financial assistance by the town of Yverdon in 1989, shortage
of money having for some years previously restricted it to opening only
twice a month. It is the most important research centre for sf in the
French language. [PN]
MAITLAND, DEREK
(1943- ) UK writer whose sf novels - T Minus Tower (1971), about a
proposed transfer of the eponymous tower into space as a hotel, and The
Alpha Experience (1974) - exhibit a certain apocalyptic flippancy but
failed to target coming UK trends with any real accuracy. [JC]
MAITLAND, EDWARD
(1824-1897) UK author and Theosophist whose speculative UTOPIA By and By:
An Historical Romance of the Future (3 vols 1873), set several hundred
years in the future, takes an unusually optimistic view of the likely
effects of technology (irrigating the Sahara), is much interested in
social theory, imagines several varieties of marriage and foresees a
somewhat limited emancipation of women. This didactic book is the third of
a trilogy; the first 2 vols, The Pilgrim and the Shrine (1868) and The
Higher Law, were originally published as by Herbert Ainslee and are not
sf. [PN]
MAITZ, DON
(1953- ) US illustrator. DM began his career in sf art in 1974 while
still at art school (Paier School of Art), and since then has painted
mainly book rather than magazine covers; among his best known
ILLUSTRATIONS are the covers for the original editions of Gene WOLFE's
Book of the New Sun series (1980-83). He also does advertising work,
notably the very popular "Captain Morgan" for a Seagram's rum label.
Unlike many of his colleagues, DM departs a little from slickness by
allowing the brushstrokes in his work to be seen. He was among the sf
artists most popular with fans right through the 1980s, and had many HUGO
nominations before, in 1990, winning the Hugo for Best Professional
Artist, and in so doing becoming only the second artist, after Jim BURNS,
to break the extraordinary run of 11 Hugos (to 1992) in that category by
Michael WHELAN - indeed, these three between them were probably the
dominant sf book-cover illustrators of the 1980s. DM also won first place
in the new non-Hugo category at the Hugo ceremony in 1990 for Best
Original Artwork with his cover for the Warner/Questar edition of C.J.
CHERRYH's Rimrunners (1989). A collection of his interestingly ornate
artwork is First Maitz: Selected Works by Don Maitz (1988). [JG/PN]
MAJOR, H.M.
Sharon JARVIS.
MAJORS, SIMON
Gardner F. FOX.
MAKAY, ISTVAN
[r] HUNGARY.
MAKING MR RIGHT

Film (1987). Orion. Dir Susan Seidelman, starring Ann Magnuson, John
Malkovich. Screenplay Floyd Byars, Laurie Frank. 98 mins. Colour.The cold,
rational, shy SCIENTIST played by Malkovich has designed, in his own
image, Ulysses the ANDROID (actually in part a ROBOT), also played by
Malkovich, for use as a space pilot. Public-relations expert Frankie
(Magnuson), whose love affair with an "unreconstructed" politician is
coming to an end, has the task of "humanizing" Ulysses's image. The
fluffy, screwball SEX comedy that follows makes well observed satirical
points, from a FEMINIST perspective, about the men women want and to some
extent create. Ulysses, who rapidly evolves into a kind of parodic,
sensitive "new man", and Frankie fall in love. His tendency to
short-circuit whenever sexually aroused suggests a pessimistic view of
women's chance of happiness, even if they've helped design Mr Right
themselves. The film was nothing like as popular as Seidelman's previous
Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), being too offbeat (and lacking Madonna),
but is just as good. [PN]
MAKIN, WILLIAM J.
(? -? ) UK writer whose confused but inventive sf novel, Murder at Full
Moon (1937), features a mad scientist, who believes there is superior life
on the Moon, and who has invented a MACHINE capable of harnessing
moonlight, with which he causes tidal waves, earthquakes, and other
disasters. "The Monster of the Loch," a short novel included in The
Exploits of Jonathan Jow (coll circa 1937), features a plesiosaur. [JC]
MALABAILA, DAMIANO
Primo LEVI.
MALAMUD, BERNARD
(1914-1986) US writer whose fiction, beginning with The Natural (1952), a
mythopoeic tale of US baseball, makes use of techniques and motifs from
Russian-Jewish folklore and story-telling traditions, with the result that
many of his short stories are technically fantasies. His only novel of
strong genre interest, God's Grace (1982), mixes sf and fable - at times
uneasily - in the tale of a lone human survivor of a nuclear HOLOCAUST
attempting vainly to restart civilization by breeding with a group of
intelligent apes ( APES AND CAVEMEN) that have also, rather miraculously,
survived the worldwide tsunami responsible for the extirpation of all
else. [JC]See also: END OF THE WORLD; RELIGION.
MALCOLM, DAN
Robert SILVERBERG.
MALCOLM, DONALD
(1930- ) Scottish writer of fiction and considerable popular science who
began publishing sf with "Lone Voyager" for Nebula in 1958. Two series of
stories, the Preliminary Exploration Team tales in NW 1957-64 and the
Dream Background tales in NW in 1959 and subsequently in the continuing
anthology series NEW WRITINGS IN SF 1965-75 have not reached book form.
His sf novels, both routine, are The Unknown Shore (1976 Canada) and The
Iron Rain (1976 Canada). [JC]See also: STARS.
MALCOLM, GRANT

Dennis HUGHES.
MALEC, ALEXANDER
(1929- ) US writer, variously employed, who began publishing sf with
"Project Inhumane" for The Colorado Quarterly in 1966. Extrapolasis (coll
1967) assembles much of his sometimes awkward but frequently sharply
pointed work, which was restricted to short stories. [JC]
MALEVIL
Film (1981). NEF-Diffusion/Stella/Antenne 2/Gibe/Telecip. Dir Christian
de Chalonge, starring Michel Serrault, Jacques Dutronc, Robert Dhery,
Jacques Villeret, Jean-Louis Trintignant. Screenplay de Chalonge, Pierre
Dumayet, based on Malevil (1972; trans 1974) by Robert MERLE. 119 mins.
Colour.This moderately lavish Franco-German post- HOLOCAUST movie
reinforces the sentimental aspects of its good source novel. The Bomb goes
off while the vintage is being tasted deep in the wine cellar of an
aristocrat's chateau. The first half is gripping, as the survivors wonder
when, if ever, they will be able to leave the well stocked cellar again,
and the first glimpses of the devastated landscape outside are powerful.
But then a simplistic clash between the aristocrat's lovably feudal
paternalism and the totalitarianism of a local boss (he too has a gang of
survivors) reduces the film to something more routine, all done with
little verve and rather too much symbolism about life reasserting itself.
At the end the new society, whose medieval nature is approved by the film,
is threatened, ironically, by the somewhat late arrival of a relief
helicopter. [PN]
MALLETT, DARYL F(URUMI)
(1969- ) US bibliographer whose work, beginning in the late 1980s and
generally in collaboration with Robert REGINALD, has been of growing
significance for sf scholarship. Publications include the much expanded
2nd edn of Reginald's Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: A Comprehensive
Guide to the Awards and their Winners (1981; exp 1991) with Reginald, for
which DFM performed the essential updating task; and Science Fiction and
Fantasy Literature: A Bibliography, 1975-1991 (1992) with Mary Wickizer
Burgess and Reginald, which is the continuation of Reginald's Science
Fiction and Fantasy Literature: A Checklist, 1700-1974 (1979). Several
further publications are projected. [JC]See also: BIBLIOGRAPHIES.
MALLINSON, SUE
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
MALLORY, MARK
[s] Mack REYNOLDS.
MALONEY, MACK
US author, possibly pseudonymous, of the Wingman series of postHOLOCAUST military-sf novels: Wingman (1987), #2: The Circle War (1987),
#3: The Lucifer Crusade (1987), #4: Thunder in the East (1988), #5: The
Twisted Cross (1989), #6: The Final Storm (1989), #7: Freedom Express
(1990), #8: Skyfire (1990) and #9: Return from the Inferno (1991). War
Heaven (1991) is a singleton. [JC]
MALZBERG, BARRY N(ATHANIEL)

(1939- ) US writer. For about seven years he was extremely prolific in
the sf field, producing some 20 sf novels and over 100 short stories; his
output slowed dramatically towards the end of the 1970s, when he became
disenchanted with the genre for reasons explained in his collection of
essays The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties (coll
1982). He has also written numerous non-sf works, including several
notable erotic novels, and four excellent thrillers in collaboration with
Bill PRONZINI, including Night Screams (1979), which makes use of ESP. His
early sf appeared under the name K.M. O'Donnell, apparently derived from
the initial letters of the surnames of Henry KUTTNER and C.L. MOORE plus
the surname of one of their joint pseudonyms. Other pseudonyms, used on
non-sf works, include Mike Barry, Mel Johnson and Gerrold Watkins. His
first sf story was "We're Coming through the Window" (1967 Gal), which was
quickly followed by the bitter novelette "Final War" (1968 FSF), about an
unwilling soldier trapped in a neverending wargame. Books under the
O'Donnell name were the short-story collections Final War and Other
Fantasies (coll 1969 dos) and In the Pocket and Other Science Fiction
Stories (coll 1971 dos), the novels The Empty People (1969) and Universe
Day (fixup 1971), and two RECURSIVE farcical SATIRES featuring sf fans and
writers in confrontation with ALIENS: Dwellers of the Deep (1970 dos) and
Gather in the Hall of the Planets (1971 dos).The first sf novels to appear
under BNM's own name were sceptical commentaries on the Apollo programme:
The Falling Astronauts (1971), Revelations (1972) and Beyond Apollo
(1972). The third caused some controversy when it won the JOHN W. CAMPBELL
MEMORIAL AWARD despite its sarcastic and negative attitude to SPACE
FLIGHT. The three novels feature astronauts as archetypes of alienated
contemporary humanity, struggling to make sense of an incomprehensible
world and unable to account for their failure. All BNM's central
characters are caught in such existential traps, and the measure of his
versatility is the large number of such situations which he has been able
to construct using the vocabularies of ideas typical of sf and erotic
fantasy. In Screen (1968) the protagonist can obtain sexual satisfaction
only by projecting himself into fantasies evoked by the cinema, while in
Confessions of Westchester County (1971) a prolific seducer obtains
satisfaction not from the sexual act but from the confessions of
loneliness and desperation which follow it. The situation of the racetrack
punter, unable to win against the odds by any conceivable strategy,
becomes the model of alienation in Overlay (1972), in which aliens take an
actual part in the process of frustration, and in the non-sf novel
Underlay (1974). Aliens threaten the Earth, and set absurd tasks to decide
its fate, in The Day of the Burning (1974) and Tactics of Conquest (1974).
In GALAXIES (1975) the central character is in command of a corpse-laden
ship which falls into a BLACK HOLE. The protagonist of Scop (1976) is a
time-traveller trying desperately to change the history that has created
his intolerable world. Even the situation of the sf writer, struggling to
cope with real life and the pressures of the market, becomes in Herovit's
World (1973) a metaphor for general alienation. In this novel, GALAXIES
and the introductions to some of his collections, BNM offers a scathing
critique of the market forces shaping contemporary sf.BNM's writing is
unparalleled in its intensity and in its apocalyptic sensibility. His
detractors consider him bleakly monotonous and despairing, but he is a

master of black HUMOUR, and is one of the few writers to have used sf's
vocabulary of ideas extensively as apparatus in psychological landscapes,
dramatizing relationships between the human mind and its social
environment in an sf theatre of the absurd. The few sf books which he has
published since 1976 include three fine novels featuring real historical
characters. The hero of the black comedy Chorale (1978) becomes Beethoven,
while that of the remarkably intense The Cross of Fire (1982) becomes
Jesus; both are in search of a better psychological balance but find their
quests frustrating. THE REMAKING OF SIGMUND FREUD (fixup 1985) has the
father of psychoanalysis failing miserably to master his own difficulties
while trying to assist Emily Dickinson, and subsequently - following his
technological REINCARNATION - coming apart while failing to solve the
problems involved in COMMUNICATION with aliens. [BS]Other works: In the
Enclosure (1973); The Men Inside (1973); Phase IV * (1973 UK), a film tie
( PHASE IV); The Destruction of the Temple (1974); On a Planet Alien
(1974); The Sodom and Gomorrah Business (1974); Conversations (1974); Out
from Ganymede (coll 1974); Guernica Night (1975); The Gamesman (1975); The
Many Worlds of Barry Malzberg (coll 1975); Down Here in the Dream Quarter
(coll 1976); The Best of Barry Malzberg (coll 1976); The Last Transaction
(1977); Malzberg at Large (coll 1979); The Man who Loved the Midnight Lady
(coll 1980).As Editor: Final Stage (anth 1974; rev 1975), Arena: Sports SF
(anth 1976) and Graven Images: Three Original Novellas of Science Fiction
(anth 1977), all with Edward L. FERMAN; Dark Sins, Dark Dreams: Crime in
Science Fiction (anth 1977), The End of Summer: Science Fiction in the
Fifties (anth 1979; vt The Fifties: The End of Summer 1979) and Shared
Tomorrows: Science Fiction in Collaboration (anth 1979), all with Bill
PRONZINI; Neglected Visions (anth 1980) with Martin H. GREENBERG and
Joseph D. OLANDER; The Science Fiction of Mark Clifton (coll 1980) with
Greenberg ( Mark CLIFTON); Bug-Eyed Monsters (anth 1980) with Pronzini;
The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural (anth 2 vols 1981;
cut vt Great Tales of Horror ? text restored, vt
Classic Tales of Horror and the Supernatural 1991) with Pronzini and
Greenberg; The Science Fiction of Kris Neville (coll 1984) with Greenberg
( Kris NEVILLE).See also: AMAZING STORIES; ARTS; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL
WORKS ABOUT SF; ENTROPY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FANTASY; GAMES AND
SPORTS;
GREAT AND SMALL; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MESSIAHS; MUSIC; PARANOIA;
PERCEPTION;
PSYCHOLOGY; RELIGION; SEX; TIME PARADOXES; WAR.
MAN, EVOLUTION OF
ADAM AND EVE; ANTHROPOLOGY; EVOLUTION; ORIGIN OF MAN.
MAN AND HIS MATE
ONE MILLION B.C.
MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, THE
Film (1962). MC/Essex/United Artists. Dir John FRANKENHEIMER, starring
Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, Angela Lansbury, Henry Silva,
James Gregory. Screenplay George Axelrod, based on The Manchurian
Candidate (1959) by Richard CONDON. 126 mins. B/w.A group of US soldiers
captured in Korea are subjected to elaborate brainwashing by the Chinese

as part of a plot to have a Chinese agent elected President of the USA.
One officer is programmed-this is the strongest sf element - to become a
killing machine whenever any of the people working for the Chinese gives
the right command. The resulting confusions back in the USA, both funny
and sinister - especially the climax at the Party convention - are
choreographed with great panache by Frankenheimer, whose best film this
probably is, though it owes much to the wit and intelligence of Axelrod's
screenplay, which is faithful to the novel. Its ominous reverberations
became darker when President Kennedy was assassinated a year later.
[JB/PN]See also: CINEMA; PARANOIA.
MANCUSO, TED
(? - ) US writer whose The Granville Hypothesis (1979), set in AD2017,
features an unremarkable world- COMPUTER being suborned by an unremarkable
madman. [JC]
MANDEN DER TAENKTE TING
(vt The Man who Thought Life) Film (1969). Asa Film/Palladium. Dir Jens
Ravn, starring Preben Neergaard, John Price, Lotte Tarp. Screenplay Henrik
Stangerup, based on Manden der Taenkte Ting (1938) by Valdemar Holst. 97
mins. B/w.This Danish fantasy tells of a man who can create objects - even
people - by force of will. Anything he brings into existence has only a
short life, so he goes to a doctor and asks for a brain operation to
perfect his power. The doctor refuses, so the man creates a duplicate
doctor who takes over his original's career and wife and ultimately
performs the necessary operation, in so doing killing his creator.
Interestingly photographed, this comedy, Ravn's first film, presents
philosophical points about reality of the kind made familiar by Philip K.
DICK. [JB/PN]
MANDERS, HARRY
Philip Jose FARMER.
MAN FROM ATLANTIS, THE
US tv series (1977). Solow Productions for NBC TV. Created Lee Katzin
(who also dir the 1st episode), starring Patrick Duffy, Belinda J.
Montgomery, Victor Buono. Special effects Tom Fisher. The first 4
episodes, 90min telefilms, were followed by 13 50min episodes. Colour.A
green-eyed stranger with gills and webbed hands is found nearly dead on a
beach. He is revived by an attractive female scientist who, realizing that
he is not human, places him in a tank of water. Believed to come from
ATLANTIS, he is persuaded to work for the Foundation for Oceanic Research,
and is soon off on his first mission, to tackle an overweight villain in
his underwater headquarters. Though the settings and special effects were
sometimes eye-catching, the general intellectual level of this and
subsequent episodes, which featured aliens, monsters, time-warps, etc.,
was no higher than that of VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA. The series was
cancelled after 1 season.Novelized versions of the first 2 episodes were
Man from Atlantis: Sea Kill * (1977) and Man from Atlantis: Death Scouts *
(1977), both by Richard Woodley. [JB]
MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., THE
US tv series (1964-8). Arena Productions/MGM for NBC TV. Executive prod

Norman Felton. Writers included Harlan ELLISON, Howard Rodman, Sam Rolfe,
Henry SLESAR, David Victor. Dirs included Don Medford, Boris Sagal, Joseph
Sargent, Barry Shear. 105 50min episodes. 1st season b/w, subsequent 3
seasons colour.This was one of tv's first reactions to the success of the
James Bond films. Robert Vaughn starred as Napoleon Solo, a member of U.N.
C.L.E. (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement). With the
assistance of his Russian colleague Ilya Kuryakin (David McCallum) he
fought to prevent the sinister organization T.H.R.U.S.H. (Technological
Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity
- an acronym chosen, it has been suggested, because of its assonance with
"the Russians") from taking over the world. Most of the plots featured
futuristic technology (vaporizers, etc.); the style was tongue-in-cheek.
TMFU's success led to the creation of a sister series, The Girl From
U.N.C.L.E., which began in 1966, starring Stefanie Powers; it lasted only
1 season of 29 episodes.8 feature films had theatrical release outside the
USA. Each consisted of 2 episodes edited together, sometimes with added
footage, to make 90min films: The Spy with My Face (1965), To Trap a Spy
(1966), One of Our Spies is Missing (1966), One Spy Too Many (1966), The
Spy in the Green Hat (1966), The Helicopter Spies (1967), The Karate
Killers (1967) and How to Steal the World (1968). A subsequent telemovie
was Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1983).The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
series of ties was complex, 23 titles appearing from ACE BOOKS in the USA
and 16 from Souvenir Press in the UK. 10 of the 23 Ace books were reprints
from books originated by Souvenir, and 6 of the Souvenir books were
reprints of books originated by Ace; in the case of #3 in the Ace
sequence, the reprint confusingly appeared before its original. None of
the books was based directly on the tv scripts; all were original stories.
As all the Souvenir editions appeared, either before or after their UK
release, in Ace editions, we list only the Ace sequence: #1: The Thousand
Coffins Affair * (1965) by Michael AVALLONE, #2: The Doomsday Affair *
(1965) by Harry Whittington, #3: The Copenhagen Affair * (1965) by John
Oram, #4: The Dagger Affair * (1966) by David MCDANIEL, #5: The Mad
Scientist Affair * (1966) by John T. PHILLIFENT, #6: The Vampire Affair *
(1966) by McDaniel, #7: The Radioactive Camel Affair * (1966 UK) by Peter
LESLIE, #8: The Monster Wheel Affair * (1967) by McDaniel, #9: The Diving
Dames Affair * (1967 UK) by Leslie, #10: The Assassination Affair * (1967)
by Joan Hunter HOLLY, #11: The Invisibility Affair * (1967) by Thomas
Stratton (Robert COULSON and Gene DEWEESE), #12: The Mind Twisters Affair
* (1967) by Stratton, #13: The Rainbow Affair * (1967) by McDaniel, #14:
The Cross of Gold Affair * (1968) by Fredric Davies (Ron ELLIKand Steve
Tolliver), #15: The Utopia Affair * (1968) by McDaniel, #16: The
Splintered Sunglasses Affair * (1968 UK) by Leslie, #17: The Hollow Crown
Affair * (1969) by McDaniel, #18: The Unfair Fare Affair * (1968 UK) by
Leslie, #19: The Power Cube Affair * (1968 UK) by Phillifent, #20: The
Corfu Affair * (1967 UK) by Phillifent, #21: The Thinking Machine Affair *
(1967 UK) by Joel Bernard, #22: The Stone-Cold Dead in the Market Affair *
(1966 UK) by Oram, and #23: The Finger in the Sky Affair * (1966 UK) by
Leslie. McDaniel felt A.A. Wyn, publisher at Ace, was not paying him
enough; the initial letters of the chapters in #8 spell out
AAWYNISATIGHTWAD.Girl from U.N.C.L.E. spin-offs of a similar kind were The
Birds of a Feather Affair * (1966) by Michael Avallone; The Blazing Affair

* (1966) by Avallone; The Global Globules Affair * (1967 UK) by Simon
Latter; The Golden Boats of Taradata Affair * (1967 UK) by Latter; The
Cornish Pixie Affair * (1967 UK) by Peter Leslie. [JB/PN]
MANHATTAN FICTION PUBLICATIONS
STIRRING SCIENCE STORIES.
MANIMAL
Glen A. LARSON.
MAN IN THE STEEL MASK, THE
WHO?.
MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT, THE
Film (1951). Ealing Studios. Dir Alexander Mackendrick, starring Alec
Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Cecil Parker, Ernest Thesiger. Screenplay Roger
MacDougall, John Dighton, Mackendrick, based on the play The Man in the
White Suit by MacDougall. 85 mins, cut to 81 mins. B/w.A SCIENTIST creates
an artificial fibre that neither wears out nor gets dirty. To prove it, he
makes himself a shining white suit that retains its pristine condition
throughout the film. Attempts are made by clothing manufacturers and their
workers to suppress the new material. Finally its inventor is cornered in
a street where, suddenly and symbolically, his suit begins to disintegrate
and is torn to shreds by the angry mob. The film ends with the scientist
planning a second attempt. This fine film is a witty and pertinent SATIRE
whose success owes more to the traditions of the Ealing comedy than to sf.
[JB]
MANKIND PUBLISHING
VERTEX.
MANLOVE, C(OLIN) N(ICHOLAS)
(1942- ) UK critic. Most of his work of interest has focused on FANTASY,
beginning with Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (coll 1975). The Impulse of
Fantasy Literature (1983) concentrates on UK fantasy, and tends not to
deal with the more recent popularity of the genre in the USA. C.S. Lewis:
His Literary Achievement (1987) competently argues the case for an author
who divides critics into acolytes and disbelievers ( C.S. LEWIS); further
studies of fantasy interest include Christian Fantasy: from 1200 to the
Present (1992) and Scottish Fantasy (1994), a survey. Of direct sf
interest is Science Fiction: Ten Explorations (coll 1986), which smoothly
(though at times gingerly) engages with the fiction of 10 writers,
including some, like Philip Jose FARMER and Gene WOLFE, who have received
relatively little academic attention. [JC]
MANN, JACK
E. Charles VIVIAN.
MANN, (ANTHONY) PHILLIP
(1942- ) UK-born writer resident in NEW ZEALAND from 1969. His career as
a theatre director, translation copy-polisher, drama teacher and
university Reader in Drama brings to his writing a strong visual and
structural sense. His first sf publication, The Eye of the Queen (1982
UK), is an accomplished novel of First Contact between humans and the

enigmatic Pe-Ellians. The Gardener diptych - Master of Paxwax (1986 UK)
and The Fall of the Families (1987 UK) - describes a warring human society
and the downfall of its hegemony over various planets. In Pioneers (1988
UK), his best novel to date, genetically engineered explorers come to
terms with being human. Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic (1990 UK) is a character study
of a failed starship captain, Wilberfoss, narrated by an autoscribe; and
the Land Fit for Heroes sequence - comprising to date Escape to the Wild
Wood (1993 UK) and Stand Alone Stan (1994 UK) - is set in an ALTERNATE
WORLD version of a 20th century Britain still ruled by the Romans. PM has
written 3 fantasy plays for children as well as short stories and a
humorous sf RADIO play, "The Gospel According to Mickey Mouse" (broadcast
1990). He consciously uses his skill at portraying ALIEN species and
environments to display human vanity and hubris without being didactic and
with an underlying respect for life. [MMacL]See also: SOCIOLOGY.
MANNES, MARYA
(1904-1990) US author, features editor and journalist, often on FEMINIST
themes. Her first novel, Message from a Stranger (1948), is an afterlife
fantasy. In her sf SATIRE They (1968), the USA is taken over by the
under-30s. [JC/PN]
MANNHEIM, KARL
Pseudonym of unidentified UK author of 2 sf adventures: When the Earth
Died (1950) and Vampires of Venus (1950). They are modestly competent but
hasty. [JC]
MANNING, LAURENCE (EDWARD)
(1899-1972) Canadian-born writer, in the USA from 1920, a founder of the
American Interplanetary Society and editor of its journal, Astronautics.
He is remembered for his numerous contributions to WONDER STORIES and
WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY in the 1930s; he also collaborated on some
stories with Fletcher PRATT. His best-known series, which appeared in
Wonder Stories, was the Man who Awoke sequence, 5 stories later published
as The Man who Awoke (1933; fixup 1975), in which a man periodically
awakes from SUSPENDED ANIMATION into a pulp- STAPLEDON succession of 5
societies, the last of which is in a world of immortals. Another series
was the Stranger Club sequence, again in Wonder Stories: "The Call of the
Mech-Men" (1933), "Caverns of Horror" (1934), "Voice of Atlantis" (1934),
"The Moth Message" (1934) and "Seeds from Space" (1935). A short series of
above-average space stories comprised "The Voyage of the Asteroid" (1932)
and "The Wreck of the Asteroid" (1932). LM's style was very much of his
time, but he had a more wide-ranging imagination than many of his
colleagues. [JC/PN]See also: AUTOMATION; CANADA; DYSTOPIAS; EVOLUTION;
FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GENERATION STARSHIPS; HISTORY IN SF; IMMORTALITY;
LEISURE; LIVING WORLDS; MARS; SPACESHIPS; UTOPIAS.
MANO, D. KEITH
(1943- ) US writer whose second novel, Horn (1969), is a transcendental
fable, and whose third, War is Heaven! (1970), describes with some surreal
vividness a WAR in an imaginary - but easily imagined - South American
country. The Bridge (1973) is a full-fledged sf DYSTOPIA set in AD2035,
with regimentation leading to universal disaster. [JC]

MANOLESCU, FLORIN
[r] ROMANIA.
MANTEGAZZA, PAOLO
[r] ITALY.
MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG, THE
Film (1939). Columbia. Dir Nick Grinde, starring Boris Karloff, Lorna
Gray, Robert Wilcox, Roger Pryor. Screenplay Karl Brown, based on a story
by Leslie T. White and George W. Sayre. 72 mins. B/w.A kindly SCIENTIST
(Karloff) invents a mechanical heart, and one of his students volunteers
to undergo clinical death to test it; a police raid at the critical moment
prevents this and the student dies. Karloff is executed for murder, but
arranges to be revived with the artificial heart. Now vindictive, he lures
judge, jury and witnesses to a booby-trapped house where he proceeds to
dispose of them in turn. His daughter intervenes and is accidentally
killed by one of the lethal devices. He revives her at the cost of his own
life. Like most sf films of the period, TMTCNH has little real science; it
is, rather, a Gothic melodrama of retribution. [JB/PN]
MAN'S BEST FRIEND
Film (1993). New Line Cinema/Roven-Cavello Entertainment .Written and
directed John Lafia; starring Ally Sheedy, Lance Henriksen, Robert
Costanzo,John Cassini, Fredric Lehne. 87 mins. Colour.Routine sf/horror
movie, with moments of black humour: Dr Jarret (Henriksen) has been
performing animal experiments at the EMAX research lab, and has created a
super killer guard dog through DNA splicing, some of the imported genes
coming from other species. The mastiff-type dog, temporarily stable until
a controlling drug wears off, is accidentally released by tv journalist
Lori Tanner (Sheedy, a good performance), who adopts it, thinking it
(correctly, in a way) an innocent victim. The high-IQ dog goes on to rape
(another dog),multiple murder including killing Tanner's boyfriend by
pissing acid onto his face and,implausibly, even camouflaging itself as a
toolbox. Events escalate in the traditional manner of an exploitation
movie, and the animal rights issue is raised but never really
examined.Director/writer Lafia was previously best known for the extremely
violent horror flick Child's Play 2 (1990). This is not as good in the
horror-dog line as Cujo (1983) which was based on the Stephen KING novel,
but MBF did well commercially. [PN]
MANTLEY, JOHN (TRUMAN)
(1920- ) Canadian-born US screenwriter and producer whose sf novel, The
Twenty-Seventh Day (1956 UK; rev 1956 US), features Galactic Federation
aliens who give each of five humans from opposing countries an invincible
weapon to see what they do with them. The novel was filmed - from the US
version, which has a revised ending - as The 27TH DAY (1957). Mantley
wrote teleplays for The OUTER LIMITS and The WILD, WILD WEST , and for
years worked as a producer on Gunsmoke; he also produced the 2nd season of
the 1979-81 tv series BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY. [PN/JC]
MANVELL, (ARNOLD) ROGER
(1909-1987) UK writer, mostly on the cinema and on aspects of WWII; he
had a doctorate in English literature. His sf novel, The Dreamers (1958),

is a tale of revenge via a dream transmitted to the intended victim by
African tribesmen. A borderline-sf explanation is allowed as an
alternative to the supernatural one. [JC]
MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, THE
Film (1976). British Lion/A Cinema V Release. Dir Nicolas Roeg, starring
David Bowie, Rip Torn, Candy Clark, Buck Henry. Screenplay Paul
Mayersberg, based on The Man who Fell to Earth (1963) by Walter TEVIS. 140
mins; first US showing cut to 118 mins. Colour.In this UK film set in the
USA, the clear-cut narrative of Tevis's evocative novel - about an ALIEN
who comes to Earth to build a spacecraft large enough to transport his
native race away from his own dying world - is replaced by a nonlinear
structure that, in the familiar Roeg manner, shifts backwards and forwards
in time, reflecting the psychic TIME TRAVEL of which the alien is capable.
David Bowie as the frail, humanoid alien whose contact with the harsh
human world corrupts him is excellent, as is Candy Clarke as the sad,
funny woman who befriends him.The film is visually strong (Roeg was
earlier a fine cameraman) but has been regarded by some as wilfully
obscure, in part because of the rather literary complexity of its
allusions (many to the painting of the fall of Icarus by Pieter Brueghel
the Elder [c1525-1569], some to the Fall of Man) and the symbolism
(occasionally heavy-handed) of its visual juxtapositions and imagery. All
becomes much clearer on second viewing. Some sequences, including that
showing serried ranks of tv sets with which the lonely alien attempts to
barricade himself from direct human experience, are very powerful indeed.
The theme of an alien having his identity effectively stolen from him by
us - the reverse of the usual - is remorselessly followed through. TMWFTE
has worn very well and is regarded as an sf classic. The film should not
be confused with a 1988 made-for-tv movie (MGM)of the same book, starring
Lewis Smith as the alien, Wil Wheaton as atroubled teenager, David Gerber
exec. prod, teleplay by Richard Kletter, dir Robert J. Roth. This
soft-centred version alters the plot considerably to give a banal moral,
drops all reference to the alien's corruption, and imports much
sentimentality. [PN]
MAN WHO THOUGHT LIFE, THE
MANDEN DER TAENKTE TING.
"MAN WHO WAS WARNED, THE"
Harold BEGBIE.
MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES, THE
X - THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES.
MAN WITH TWO BRAINS, THE
Film (1983). Aspen Film Society. Dir Carl Reiner, starring Steve Martin,
Kathleen Turner, David Warner. Screenplay Reiner, Steve Martin, George
GIPE. 93 mins, cut to 86 mins. Colour.Pastiche is the essence of most
Steve Martin comedies; his self-indulgent acting style becomes rapidly
tiresome when his performances are not focused by a good director, but
Reiner is good, and this is a genuinely funny film spoofing the
disembodied-brain GOTHIC tradition of DONOVAN'S BRAIN (1953). Kathleen
Turner plays the man-destroying bitch whom brain surgeon Hfuhruhurr

(Martin) falls in love with and marries, though she refuses sex. He
transfers his affections to a bodiless brain, provided by a mad SCIENTIST
(Warner), with which he forms a telepathic relationship. The wife is
killed by a serial murderer, Hfuhruhurr grafts the beloved brain into her
head, and all ends happily. [PN]
MARAS, KARL
House name used twice by Kenneth BULMER and once by Peter Hawkins (1923) for his novel The Plant from Infinity (1954). [JC]
MARCH OF THE MONSTERS, THE
GOJIRA; RADON.
MAREK, JIRI
[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
MARGROFF, ROBERT E(RVIEN)
(1930- ) US writer who published his first story, "Monster Tracks", in If
in 1964, but who has long been best known for his collaborations with
Piers ANTHONY, beginning with The Ring (1968) and The E.S.P. Worm (1970),
and continuing with the Dragon series of fantasies: Dragon's Gold (1987),
Serpent's Silver (1988), Chimaera's Copper (1990) and Orc's Opal (1990).
[JC]See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; PSYCHOLOGY.
MARGULIES, LEO
(1900-1975) US publisher and editor, born in Brooklyn and educated at
Columbia University. He joined the Frank A. MUNSEY chain of PULP MAGAZINES
in 1932, later moving to Beacon Magazines and becoming editorial director
of THRILLING WONDER STORIES when Beacon began publishing that title in
1936. LM had overall responsibility for the entire output of the chain;
this later included the magazines CAPTAIN FUTURE, STARTLING STORIES and
STRANGE STORIES. One of the editors who worked with him on these magazines
was Oscar J. FRIEND, and the two later collaborated on 3 anthologies: From
Off This World (anth 1949), a thematic collection about ALIENS, My Best
Science Fiction Story (anth 1949) and The Giant Anthology of Science
Fiction (anth 1954). After WWII, LM formed a publishing company, and
returned to sf as publisher of FANTASTIC UNIVERSE, of which he was also
editorial director for a time. He left that company and formed another,
which published SATELLITE SCIENCE FICTION. Of the remaining anthologies
bearing his name, four - Three Times Infinity (anth 1958), Three in One
(anth 1963), Weird Tales (anth 1964) and Worlds of Weird (anth 1965) were in fact ghost-edited by Sam MOSKOWITZ; but Three from Out There (anth
1959), Get Out of My Sky (anth 1960), The Ghoul Keepers (anth 1961) and
The Unexpected (anth 1961) were LM's work. [MJE]
MARINER, DAVID
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
MARINER, SCOTT
Pseudonym used by C.M. KORNBLUTH and Frederik POHL in collaboration on
the story "An Old Neptunian Custom" (1942). [PN]
MARKHAM, ROBERT
Kingsley AMIS.

MARKOV, GEORGI
[r] BULGARIA; David ST GEORGE.
MARK V. ZIESING
US SMALL PRESS. MVZ is the direct successor to Ziesing Brothers, which
booksellers Michael Ziesing (1946- ) and his brother Mark V. Ziesing
(1953- ) had founded in Willimantic, Connecticut, initially to produce
poetry, but which then produced two books by Gene WOLFE: The Castle of the
Otter (coll 1982) and The Wolfe Archipelago (coll 1983). After this
Michael became inactive, and the firm became Mark V. Ziesing. Further
books by Wolfe followed, plus titles by A.A. ATTANASIO, Iain M. BANKS,
Neal BARRETT Jr, James P. BLAYLOCK, Pat CADIGAN,Thomas M. DISCH, Michael
MOORCOCK, Lucius SHEPARD, Bruce STERLING, Howard WALDROP and others. Since
1989 the firm has operated from California. Because of its inventive
publishing programme, and because most editions are well designed, MVZ has
as good a chance of surviving the difficult 1990s as any small press. [JC]
MARKWICK, EDWARD
Working name of UK lawyer and writer Edward Markwick Johnson (? -? ),
active in the last quarter of the 19th century, whose sf novel, The City
of Gold: A Tale of Sport, Travel, and Adventure in the Heart of the Dark
Continent (1896), direly invades H. Rider HAGGARD territory, taking its
protagonists into a scientifically advanced Semitic LOST WORLD run by a
Great White Witch whose love for the hero causes her death. [JC]
MARLOW, LOUIS
Pseudonym of UK writer and lecturer in English studies Louis Umfreville
Wilkinson (1881-1966), who also wrote novels under his real name. Of sf
interest is The Devil in Crystal (1944) which, in LM's typically pert,
dandiacal, somewhat overeager manner, describes the effects of a sort of
self-possession. The protagonist finds himself cast 20 years into his own
past, where he relives his life while being all the while conscious of his
observer status and of his almost total inability to alter reality.
[JC]See also: TIME TRAVEL.
MARLOWE, STEPHEN
Milton LESSER.
MARLOWE, WEBB
[s] J. Francis MCCOMAS.
MARNER, ROBERT
[s] Algis BUDRYS.
MAROONED
Film (1969). Columbia. Dir John Sturges, starring Gregory Peck, Gene
Hackman, David Janssen, Richard Crenna, James Franciscus. Screenplay Mayo
Simon, based on Marooned (1964) by Martin CAIDIN. 134 mins. Colour.John
Sturges is best known for Westerns (e.g., The Magnificent Seven [1960]),
though he also directed the borderline sf film The Satan Bug (1965); outer
space may be a less suitable setting for his work. The film is a
quasidocumentary about the rescue, by a Soviet/US team, of three
astronauts trapped in orbit around the Earth. Opinions are divided on

whether the slowly built suspense is potent or monotonous; the dialogue is
even more banal than real NASA chat. The special effects are low-key and
accurate, but not visually memorable; the most impressive sequence in the
film is the one containing shots of a genuine Saturn rocket-launch. The
film suffered through being released at much the same time as 2001: A
SPACE ODYSSEY. However, the friendly treatment given to Russian cosmonauts
in M played a part in bringing about the Apollo-Soyuz space rendezvous of
1975. [JB/PN]
MARRIOTT-WATSON, H(ENRY) B(RERETON)
(1863-1921) Australian-born writer, in UK all his working life; son of
Henry Crocker MARRIOTT-WATSON. His first novel, Marahuna (1888), is sf:
the eponymous female, extracted from a fiery ring in Antarctica, may well
come from the interior of the Earth. Some of the tales assembled in
Diogenes of London and Other Fantasies (coll 1893) are indeed fantastic,
as are some of the contents of The Heart of Miranda and Other Stories,
Being Mostly Winter Tales (coll 1899) and Aftermath: A Garner of Tales
(coll 1919). [JC]Other works: The Princess Xenia (1899) and Alise of Astra
(1910), both RURITANIAN tales.
MARRIOTT-WATSON, HENRY CROCKER
(1835-? ) New Zealand writer who spent some years in Australia, and whose
surname at birth was almost certainly Watson; father of H.B.
MARRIOTT-WATSON. Erchomenon, or The Republic of Materialism (1879 UK),
published anon, is a UTOPIA set some years in the future. The Decline and
Fall of the British Empire, or The Witch's Cavern (1890 UK), published as
by H.C.M.W., is a surprisingly adventurous and invention-filled
speculation set in the FAR FUTURE. [JC]
MARS
For a long time Mars seemed to be the most likely abode for life outside
the Earth, and for that reason it has always been of cardinal importance
in sf. Its surface, unlike that of VENUS, exhibits markings visible
(albeit unclearly) with the aid of optical telescopes, and has a distinct
red colour. Blue-green tracts interrupting the red were thought to be
oceans or vegetation. The polar caps, seen to wax and wane with the
seasons, were generally held to be of snow and ice. In 1877 Giovanni
Schiaparelli (1835-1910) reported an intricate network of canali
(channels), a word widely interpreted as "canals". The US astronomer
Percival Lowell (1855-1916), in Mars (1896), built up an image of a cool,
arid world with great red deserts and a few areas of arable land, but
perfectly capable of sustaining life. The landing of the Viking probes in
1976, however, revealed that Mars is extremely cold and has virtually no
atmosphere; although there really are gigantic channels, possibly caused
by water in the distant past, the intricate network reported by
Schiaparelli does not exist, and nor do the tracts of vegetation.Mars was
visited by the usual interplanetary tourists - Athanasius KIRCHER, Emanuel
SWEDENBORG, W.S. LACH-SZYRMA, George GRIFFITH et al. - but it became
important in the late 19th century as a major target for specific cosmic
voyages because the MOON, known to be lifeless, seemed a relatively
uninteresting destination. It is the home of an advanced civilization in
Percy GREG's Across the Zodiac (1880) and a setting for lost-race-type

adventures in Mr Stranger's Sealed Packet (1889) by Hugh MACCOLL. Robert
CROMIE's A Plunge into Space (1890) is an interplanetary love story and
sociological tract, as is Gustavus W. POPE's A Journey to Mars (1894).
Kurd LASSWITZ's Auf Zwei Planeten (1897; cut trans as Two Planets 1971)
provides another elaborate description of an advanced civilization and
discusses the politics of interplanetary relations. H.G. WELLS published a
brief vision of Mars in "The Crystal Egg" (1897) and followed up with the
archetypal alien- INVASION story, THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898), which cast
a long shadow over the sf of the 20th century. Wells's Martians, having
exhausted the resources of their dying world, come as predatory Darwinian
competitors to stake their claim to Earth. This novel firmly implanted in
the popular imagination the image of Martians as MONSTERS, and brought a
new sensationalism into interplanetary fiction; when Orson Welles's
Mercury Theatre dramatized the novel for US RADIO in 1938 it precipitated
a panic, whose seeds had been sown 40 years before and fed ever since by a
lurid stream of pulp fiction ( WAR OF THE WORLDS). Garrett P. SERVISS's
"sequel", Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898; 1947), which reassuringly
describes the obliteration of the decadent Martian civilization, made no
impact. Nor was there much imaginative power in romances of Martian
REINCARNATION like Camille FLAMMARION's Urania (1889; trans 1891) or Louis
Pope GRATACAP's The Certainty of a Future Life on Mars (1903). The only
other image which did take hold was something much closer to Lowell's
enthusiastic prospectus for exotic Martian life and landscape: an
uninhibitedly romantic Mars pioneered by Edwin Lester ARNOLD's Lt Gullivar
Jones - His Vacation (1905; vt Gulliver of Mars) and permanently enshrined
in modern mythology by the much imitated novels of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS,
whose Barsoom series, begun with A PRINCESS OF MARS (1912; 1917), was
extended to 11 volumes over the next 30 years. Burroughs's John Carter and
his kin battle for beautiful, egg-laying princesses against assorted
villains and monsters, armed with swords but borne aloft by flying
gondolas. Burroughs was co-opted into GENRE SF when The Mastermind of Mars
(1928) appeared as the lead story in the 1927 AMAZING STORIES ANNUAL, and
his influence within the genre has been as powerful as that of Wells. His
principal imitator, Otis Adelbert KLINE, began by setting his works on
Venus, but eventually began a Martian series with The Swordsman of Mars
(1933; 1960).The early sf pulps were resonant with echoes of THE WAR OF
THE WORLDS. The first issue of AMAZING STORIES reprinted Austin HALL's
"The Man who Saved the Earth" (1923); another early example was Edmond
HAMILTON's "Monsters of Mars" (1931). It was not long, however, before a
reaction against the CLICHE became manifest. P. Schuyler MILLER's "The
Forgotten Man of Space" (1933) features meek, mistreated Martians, and
Raymond Z. GALLUN's "Old Faithful" (1934) is an ideological reply to
Wells's Darwinian assumptions. Other notable depictions of life on Mars
include Laurence MANNING's "The Wreck of the Asteroid" (1932-3), Stanley
G. WEINBAUM's "A Martian Odyssey" (1934), Clark Ashton SMITH's "The Vaults
of Yoh-Vombis" (1932), C.L. MOORE's "Shambleau" (1933), P. Schuyler
Miller's "The Titan" (1st part 1936; 1952) and Clifford D. SIMAK's "The
Hermit of Mars" (1939). Outside the pulps one work stands out from all
others as a key contribution to the mythology of Mars: C.S. LEWIS's
fantasy OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET (1938), in which Mars is a world whose
life-system is organized according to Christian ethical principles rather

than the logic of Darwinian natural selection. John W. CAMPBELL Jr's
editorial insistence on more careful speculative logic suppressed the
"traditional" image of Mars in the pulps' primary sf market, ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION. Its exotic qualities were played down and replaced by the
kind of "realism" encapsulated by P. Schuyler Miller's "The Cave" (1944),
an ironic story in which Martian lifeforms kill an Earthman who violates
the truce which they all must observe in order to survive the long Martian
night. Martian exotica flourished nevertheless, particularly in the work
of Leigh BRACKETT, whose "Martian Quest" (1940) was in ASF but who went on
to do the bulk of her work for PLANET STORIES. Her gaudy version of the
red planet, where decadent alien cultures face the threat of plundering
Earthmen, is featured in Shadow over Mars (1944; 1951; vt The Nemesis from
Terra 1961 dos), The Sword of Rhiannon (1949 as "Sea-Kings of Mars";
1953), The Secret of Sinharat (1949 as "Queen of the Martian Catacombs";
exp 1964), The People of the Talisman (1950 as "Black Amazon of Mars"; exp
1964) and "The Last Days of Shandakor" (1952). Ray BRADBURY subsequently
brought the romantic image of Mars to a kind of impressionistic perfection
in THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (1946-50; coll 1950; vt The Silver Locusts 1951
UK; the latter and many subsequent edns have variant contents). In these
stories Mars is dead but still haunted by the ghosts of an extinct
civilization, visited by Earthmen who become doubly haunted by virtue of
the echoes of their own Earthly past which follow them. The stories are
heavy with nostalgia and extraordinarily seductive. A few other writers
have had some success in capturing a similar atmosphere, notably Simak in
"Seven Came Back" (1950) and J.G. BALLARD in "The Time-Tombs" (1963).In
the 1950s the romance of exotic Mars was mostly left behind as the
dominant theme became the problems of COLONIZATION of a planet with barely
enough water and barely enough oxygen. Notable stories in this newly
realistic vein were The Sands of Mars (1951) by Arthur C. CLARKE, Outpost
Mars (1952; rev vt Sin in Space 1961) by Cyril Judd (C.M. KORNBLUTH and
Judith MERRIL), "Crucifixus Etiam" (1953) by Walter M. MILLER, Alien Dust
(fixup 1955) by E.C. TUBB and Police Your Planet (1956 as by Erik van
Lhin) by Lester DEL REY. Among the many juvenile novels of the same
species were Red Planet (1949) by Robert A. HEINLEIN and a series by
Patrick MOORE begun with Mission to Mars (1955). Martian ROBINSONADES of
the same ilk include del Rey's Marooned on Mars (1952), Rex GORDON's No
Man Friday (1956; vt First on Mars 1957) and James BLISH's Welcome to Mars
(1967). Indigenous lifeforms are frequently featured in these novels, but
few are hostile; an exception is in Kenneth F. GANTZ's Not in Solitude
(1959). An uninhabited Mars becomes a grim prison colony in Farewell,
Earth's Bliss (1966; rev 1971) by D.G. COMPTON. Other memorable stories of
the period include Theodore STURGEON's poignant vignette about a dying
astronaut, "The Man who Lost the Sea" (1959), and Philip Jose FARMER's
pioneering exploration of the possibilities of alien sexuality, "Open to
Me, My Sister" (1960; vt "My Sister's Brother"). The mythology of Mars
moved into a new phase in the early 1960s as the scenarios of the 1950s
began to reappear in a somewhat surrealized form. Heinlein's STRANGER IN A
STRANGE LAND (1961) features a human raised by Martians who returns to
Earth to build a religious philosophy out of the elements of their
cultural heritage. Roger ZELAZNY's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" (1963)
reverses the idea, introducing to a Brackettesque Mars a poet who becomes

a preacher and leads the decadent Martians to a cultural revival. Philip
K. DICK's Martian Time-Slip (1964) and THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER
ELDRITCH (1964) use colony scenarios as backgrounds for reality-shifting
plots - the arid, depleted environment was ideal for Dick's psychological
landscaping. A more elaborate but equally enigmatic fantasy is Algis
BUDRYS's The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn (1967; vt The Iron Thorn 1968). The
real possibility that Mars might harbour life was by now on the brink of
extinction, and The Earth is Near (1970; trans 1974) by Ludek PESEK
provides a vivid requiem in which the myth-driven members of the first
Martian expedition undertake an obsessive search for life in an
environment which cannot sustain it.In more recent times Lin CARTER has
written pastiches of Brackett - The Man who Loved Mars (1973) and The
Valley where Time Stood Still (1974) - but they are blatant fakes;
Brackett herself had moved on to new worlds beyond the Solar System.
Christopher PRIEST went back to a more remote image in his Wellsian romp,
The Space Machine (1975), but other writers remained determined to do what
they had to in order to sustain the planet's future viability as a
potential home for life. Frederik POHL's MAN PLUS (1976) is a grimly
realistic account of the making of a CYBORG colonist, while Ian WATSON's
The Martian Inca (1976) and John VARLEY's "In the Hall of the Martian
Kings" (1977) stubbornly credit the seemingly unpromising Martian soil
with miraculous adaptive qualities. Some sf writers cling to the
conviction that, no matter how arid Mars might be, near-future
colonization remains a viable project, as in Lewis SHINER's stubbornly
realistic Frontera (1984); frontier Mars is featured also in Sterling
LANIER's Menace under Marswood (1983). Other writers have taken new heart
from the idea that it might be a promising world for TERRAFORMING. The
possibility that terraforming might help resuscitate, at least for a brief
while, a neo-romantic Mars is eloquently expressed in Ian MCDONALD's
fabulous Desolation Road (1988). In Green Mars (1985 IASFM; 1988 chap dos)
Kim Stanley ROBINSON looks forward ironically to the days when
conservationists are champions of the old red world against the nascent
fertile version; a version of their case provides one of several strands
of argument about terraforming in the ambitions Red Mars (1992 UK), which
begins a projected trilogy on the planet, with Green Mars (no connection
to the novella) and Blue Mars to follow. This project promises to be a key
work in the realistic school. (Robert L. FORWARD) Robert L. FORWARD's
Martian Rainbow (1991) and Jack WILLIAMSON's Beachhead (1992) are other
recent additions to this school. Invasions from Mars now seem completely
obsolete, but the idea still has a certain satirical mileage, as revealed
in Frederik Pohl's The Day the Martians Came (fixup 1988); the epic
journey to Mars receives similar satirical treatment in Terry BISSON's
Voyage to the Red Planet (1990). Magical echoes of romantic Mars still
insinuate themselves into all these works, as they will undoubtedly do
when and if the first manned mission to Mars takes place.A theme anthology
is Mars, We Love You (anth 1971; vt The Book of Mars 1976 UK) ed Willis E.
MCNELLY with Jane Hipolito. [BS]See also: SCIENTIFIC ERRORS.
MARSH, GEOFFREY
Charles L. GRANT.

MARSHAK, SONDRA
(? - ) US writer who has been associated with STAR TREK from the early
1970s, moving from fan activities into Star Trek ties and commentaries. SM
began with Star Trek Lives! (1975) with Jacqueline LICHTENBERG and Joan
Winston, moving on to Star Trek: The New Voyages * (coll 1976) with Myrna
CULBREATH and its direct sequel, Star Trek: The New Voyages 2 * (anth
1978), also with Culbreath, two enthusiastic but patchy compilations of
short fiction. Subsequent ties written with Culbreath include The Price of
the Phoenix * (1977) and its direct sequel The Fate of the Phoenix *
(1979), The Prometheus Design * (1982) and Triangle * (1983). With William
SHATNER, SM and Culbreath wrote Shatner: "Where No Man . . .": The
Authorized Biography of William Shatner (1979). [JC/CAJ]Other work: The
Star Trek Puzzle Manual (1976) with James Razzi.
MARSHALL, ARCHIBALD
Working name of UK novelist Arthur Hammond Marshall (1866-1934), who was
prolific and popular in the early decades of this century. His Erewhonian
sf SATIRE Upsidonia (1915) amusingly places a young man in a PARALLEL
WORLD, somehow linked with ours, where all values, in particular ECONOMIC
ones, suffer a reversal; many comic points are lightly made. [JC]Other
work: Simple People (1928).
MARSHALL, BRUCE
(1899-1987) Scottish writer whose sequence about a NEAR FUTURE world in
which the USSR controls the Vatican begins with The Bishop (1970), set in
what is recognizeably our own world, and continues with Urban the Ninth
(1973), Operation Iscariot (1974), Marx the First (1975) and Peter the
Second (1976). By the last volume the Pope is English, and allows priests
to marry. [JC]
MARSHALL, EDISON (TESLA)
(1894-1967) US writer and big-game hunter, best known for his work
outside the sf field, especially his many historical novels. He began
publishing sf with "Who is Charles Avison?" (1916). The narrator of
Ogden's Strange Story (1928 Popular Magazine; 1934), which is also sf,
suffers a head-injury and timeslips into the deep past, becoming a
proto-man named Og Dian of the Lost Land (1935; vt The Lost Land 1972) is
a romantically told tale of a lost race ( LOST WORLDS) of Cro-Magnons in
Antarctica. Earth Giant (1960) is about Hercules. [JC/PN]Other works: The
Death Bell (1924), Sam Campbell, Gentleman (1934), The Stolen God (1936),
Darzee, Girl of India (1937), The White Brigand (1937) and The Jewel of
Mahabar (1938), all primarily adventure but with some fantastic elements.
MARSTEN, RICHARD
Evan HUNTER.
MARTENS, PAUL
Neil BELL.
MARTIAN CHRONICLES, THE
US tv miniseries (1980). NBC TV. Dir Michael Anderson, starring Rock
Hudson, Gayle Hunnicutt, Darren McGavin, Roddy McDowall, Joyce van Patten,
Fritz Weaver, Nyree Dawn Porter, Bernadette Peters. Teleplay Richard

MATHESON, based on THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (coll of linked stories 1950;
rev vt The Silver Locusts 1951 UK) by Ray BRADBURY. 3 110min episodes.
Colour.The problems with this disappointing, expensive ($8 million)
adaptation cannot be blamed entirely on Anderson's sluggish direction (see
also LOGAN'S RUN) or Matheson's script (which establishes somewhat
artificial continuities between the 11 stories he adapts), or even the
inflexible performance of Rock Hudson as Colonel Wilder, the main linking
character. Bradbury's own words, which for many readers work poetically on
the page, tend to sound stilted when spoken, and clash with the realism
that tv seems to demand. The answer might have been to make the words more
austere and find a visual poetry to substitute, but in this the production
mostly fails, though some aspects (the Martians and their strange masks)
are authentically otherworldly. The insistent moralizing (not untrue to
the book) comes over as hackneyed and sentimental. Another director might
have done better than Anderson, but the book is intractably literary and
probably inappropriate for film or tv. Bradbury was reported to be unhappy
with the production. [PN]
MARTIN, CARL
[r] John DALMAS.
MARTIN, GEORGE R(AYMOND) R(ICHARD)
(1948- ) US writer and editor whose first published sf story was "The
Hero" for Gal in 1971. His success was thereafter rapid. "A Song for Lya"
(1974), a novella about a human convert to an alien RELIGION whose
ESCHATOLOGY is based in BIOLOGY, won the first of his 3 HUGOS to date; 2
others followed for "Sandkings" (1979), which also won a NEBULA, and "The
Way of Cross and Dragon" (1979); he won a second Nebula in 1986 for
"Portraits of his Children" (1985), and a Bram Stoker Award for The
Pear-Shaped Man (1987 Omni; 1991 chap). Other notable early stories
include a short series about an unusual form of interstellar
TRANSPORTATION begun with "The Second Kind of Loneliness" (1972) and
another begun with "Override" (1973), about the commercial exploitation of
zombies. A novella which he wrote in collaboration with Lisa TUTTLE, "The
Storms of Windhaven" (1975), was eventually extended into Windhaven (fixup
1981) as by GRRM and Lisa Tuttle. His first solo (and only sf) novel,
Dying of the Light (1977), is a vivid romance set on a drifting planet
which, while passing close by a sun, has been the site of a huge festival;
some short stories are set in the same universe. Fevre Dream (1982) is a
tale of vampires and Mississippi steamboats whose realistic treatment owes
as much to sf as to supernatural fiction. The Armageddon Rag (1983) is a
thriller in which the kind of apocalypse imagined in Norman SPINRAD's "The
Big Flash" (1969) is aborted in the nick of time. His most substantial sf
project is the series collected in Tuf Voyaging (coll of linked stories
1986) about the problem-solving exploits of an ecological engineer in a
declining GALACTIC EMPIRE. Perhaps because of his training as a journalist
and his employment in the mid-1970s as a teacher of journalism, GRRM seems
most comfortable with stories which are fast-paced and economical.
"Nightflyers" (1980), a horror story set aboard a spaceship and involving
a COMPUTER impressed with human PSI POWERS, is another outstanding
novella, very unevenly filmed as Nightflyers (1987).In the late 1980s GRRM

moved into tv, first writing for the new The TWILIGHT ZONE series (1985-7)
and then becoming heavily involved with the development of BEAUTY AND THE
BEAST. In parallel with these enterprises he launched Wild Cards, a set of
BRAIDED tales placed in an ALTERNATE WORLD - whose premise is rather more
sophisticated than most such in COMICS - starring SUPERHEROES; the
possibility of trademark infringement forced the substitution of the term
"Ace" for "Superhero". This SHARED-WORLD anthology series (GRRM prefers
the label "mosaic novels", on the grounds that individual volumes are more
coherently organized than in most such anthologies) currently (early 1992)
extends to 9 vols ( WILD CARDS for listing). GRRM earlier edited the
notable NEW VOICES series of ANTHOLOGIES of novellas by the nominees for
the JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for Best New Writer (of which he was himself
one): New Voices in Science Fiction (anth 1977; vt New Voices I: The
Campbell Award Nominees 1978), New Voices II (anth 1979), New Voices III
(anth 1980), New Voices 4 (anth 1981) and The John W. Campbell Awards
Volume 5 (anth 1984).GRRM is a vigorous storyteller with a flair for vivid
imagery. All of his collections - A SONG FOR LYA AND OTHER STORIES (coll
1976), Songs of Stars and Shadows (coll 1977), Sandkings (coll 1981),
Songs the Dead Men Sing (coll 1983; cut 1985 UK), Nightflyers (coll 1985)
and Portraits of his Children (coll 1987) - contain striking work. His own
output has declined as he has become increasingly active as an editor.
[BS]Other works as editor: The Science Fiction Weight-Loss Book (anth
1983) with Isaac ASIMOV and Martin H. GREENBERG; Night Visions 3 (anth
1986; vt Night Visions 1987 UK).About the author: George R.R. Martin, the
Ace from New Jersey: A Working Bibliography (last rev 1989 chap) by Phil
STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also: ALIENS; ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; BLACK
HOLES; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; FANTASY; GOTHIC SF; HEROES; HYPERSPACE;
ISAAC
ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; MUSIC; OMNI; SUPERMAN; TELEVISION.
MARTIN, GRAHAM DUNSTAN
(1932- ) Scottish writer who began publishing work of genre interest with
the Giftwish children's fantasy sequence: Giftwish (1978) and Catchfire
(1981), both as Graham Martin. With The Soul Master (1984), as GDM, he
moved sf-wards, though the godling-dominated land of Tethesta is described
in terms of fantasy. Time-Slip (1986), a bleak post- HOLOCAUST tale set in
nether Scotland, is fully sf, as is The Dream Wall (1987), a
dreadful-warning story of the UK under the Soviets in the early 21st
century. GDM's strengths - a dogged insistence on what he clearly feels to
be home truths - are fully on view in this narrative, as are certain
weaknesses, mainly a grim humourlessness which greys out any attempts at
SATIRE or novelistic ambiguity. Half a Glass of Moonshine (1988), a study
in PERCEPTION, suggests that the human sensorium blocks off certain
features of our environment for good Darwinian reasons. [JC]See also:
PARALLEL WORLDS.
MARTIN, PETER
Working name of UK writer Peter Martin Leckie (1890-? ) for his sf novel,
Summer in 3,000: Not a Prophecy - A Parable (1946), in which a progressive
World Island state is contrasted with a war-torn conservative one. [JC]
MARTIN, ROD

[r] John DALMAS.
MARTIN, THOMAS
[r] Martin THOMAS.
MARTIN, WEBBER
Robert SILVERBERG.
MARTINSEN, MARTIN
Ken FOLLETT.
MARTINSON, HARRY (EDMUND)
(1904-1978) Swedish author and poet, member of the Swedish Academy,
recipient of the 1974 Nobel Literature Prize. A prolific writer, HM's one
contribution to sf is Aniara (1953 Cikada; exp 1956; trans Hugh MacDiarmid
and E. Harley Schubert as Aniara: A Review of Man in Time and Space 1963
UK), a 103-canto epic poem ( POETRY) eloquently defending humane values
against the inhumanity of TECHNOLOGY within the story of the irreversible
voyage of a GENERATION STARSHIP, Aniara, towards outer space. Despite or
possibly because of the participation of Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978),
arguably Scotland's most important 20th-century poet, the English
translation ill serves the resonant, melodic and quotable original.
Karl-Birger Blomdahl's opera ( MUSIC) based on the poem, Aniara (1959),
features some pioneering electronic effects and has achieved international
success. Some of the poems in the untranslated Doriderna (coll 1980)
belong to the Aniara cycle. [J-HH/JC]
MARTYN, WYNDHAM
(1875-? ) UK thriller writer who occasionally tacked on sf devices. His
Stones of Enchantment (1948) details the discovery of a lost race ( LOST
WORLDS) possessing the secret of longevity. [JE]Other work: Nightmare
Castle (1935).
MARVEL COMICS
Eventually named for its first COMIC - much as DC COMICS was named after
Detective Comics - MC was founded by Martin Goodman (1910-1992) as Timely
Comics before, in the 1950s, being renamed Atlas Comics after its
distribution company; it became MC in 1963. Marvel Comics #1 (Nov 1939)
featured two of the company's three early mainstays. The Human Torch was
an ANDROID who could become a figure of living flame; he was created and
drawn by Carl Burgos. Prince Namor, the Sub Mariner - a warlike undersea
monarch who had an ambivalent relationship with the surface world - was
chronicled by William Blake (Bill) Everett. Throughout the 1940s both The
Human Torch and Prince Namor had their own comics (The Human Torch from
Fall 1940, Sub Mariner Comics from Spring 1941). Running alongside them
were Marvel Mystery Comics (Marvel Comics retitled) and the third of those
mainstays: Captain America (Mar 1941-Jan 1950). The original masked
superpatriot was created by artist Jack KIRBY and writer Joe Simon.In the
1950s Marvel Mystery Comics became Marvel Tales, and was indistinguishable
from dozens of other horror, war, sf, Western, gag and romance anthology
titles; Stan LEE was credited with writing most of the contents. Not quite
lost among the chaff were strips by many fine illustrators, including Bill
Benulis, Gene Colan, Richard Doxsee, Bernie Krigstein, Joe Maneely, Gray

MORROW and Al Williamson. The mid-1950s slump in comics sales saw the
disappearance of Atlas but not of all of its titles. Stan Lee retrenched
in 1958, giving more of an sf/horror/ MONSTER-MOVIE flavour to his titles.
With the help of a returned Jack Kirby (who had worked elsewhere through
most of the 1950s) plus regular artists Dick Ayers, Steve Ditko and Don
Heck, editor Lee and his "Bullpen" were soon eager to re-enter the
SUPERHERO genre, starting with Nov 1961's Fantastic Four. Lee allowed his
heroes to be fallible: they could be bad-tempered, immature, repressed . .
. The motif would establish MC at the vanguard of comics publishing.At the
dawn of the "Marvel Age" MC experimented with an sf-anthology title.
Produced by Lee and Ditko and complete with contents and letters pages,
Amazing Adult Fantasy ran for 8 issues Dec 1961-July 1962 before being
retitled Amazing Fantasy for 1 final issue, which featured the debut of
MC's most popular character ever: Spider-Man.Most of Marvel's superheroes
had various kinds of run-ins with PSEUDO-SCIENCE, especially The Fantastic
Four, a group of superpowered troubleshooters. Kirby and Lee elegantly
plundered Norse mythology for their Thor series (Journey into Mystery #83
[Aug 1962] to present; renamed Thor in 1966) while Lee and Ditko produced
the definitive interdimensional magic strip in Doctor Strange (Strange
Tales #114-#134 [Nov 1963-1965]; then his own title #169-#183 [June
1968-Nov 1969]; then in a relaunched Strange Tales #1-#19 [Apr 1987-Oct
1988]). Marvel Super-Heroes #12 (Dec 1967) saw the arrival of MC's
space-born superhero Captain Marvel; it was not long before he had the
red-yellow-blue costume and a teenage alter ego full of wisecracks and
buzzwords like his 1940s namesake. (For the full tortuous story of CAPTAIN
MARVEL, see his entry.) During 1968-71 MC's finest sf character, The
Silver Surfer, was given his own title, drawn by John Buscema and with the
writing credit going, inevitably, to Lee. In 1970 MC began publishing its
own version of Robert E. HOWARD's Conan, adapted by Roy Thomas with
artists John Buscema, Gil Kane and Barry Smith.MC currently (1992)
dominates the US comics marketplace, most notably with the bestselling
X-MEN titles. Since 1987 MC has been reprinting many of its sought-after
1960s comics in the Masterworks series: Spider-Man (4 vols to date), The
Fantastic Four (3 vols), X-Men (4 vols), The Avengers (2 vols) - no
relation to the tv series - The Silver Surfer (2 vols) and, each with 1
vol to date, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, Daredevil and Captain America.An
authorized and therefore somewhat uncritical account of the company's
history is Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comics
(1991) by Les Daniels. [SW]See also: ILLUSTRATION.
MARVELL, ANDREW
Pseudonym of UK editor and writer Howell Davies (1896-1985); between the
Wars he worked as a theatre critic for the Manchester Evening News and as
literary editor of the Star and News Chronicle, later serving as editor of
the South American Handbook (1938-69). During the brief time he wrote as
AM he published 3 novels. Minimum Man, or Time to be Gone (1938) combines
sf and thriller ingredients in its depiction of a 1950 fascist coup in the
UK, and of its overthrow by a new race of tiny but very powerful telepaths
whose parthenogenetic births were caused by poison gas. Three Men Make a
World (1939) is a kind of DISASTER story, though the turning of the UK
into a rural land by petroleum-destroying bacteria may strike modern

readers as a catastrophe with a silver lining. Congratulate the Devil
(1939), in which a happiness drug is found to be intolerable to society at
large, describes the process by which its disseminators are hounded to
death. AM's novels were professional and engrossing. [JC/BS]See also:
POLITICS; PSI POWERS; SUPERMAN.
MARVELMAN
CAPTAIN MARVEL; Alan MOORE.
MARVEL SCIENCE FICTION
MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES.
MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES
US PULP MAGAZINE. 9 issues 1938-41; 6 further issues 1950-52; published
by Postal Publications (#1 and #2), then by Western Fiction Publishing Co.
for the remainder of the 1st series, finally by Stadium Publishing Co.; ed
Robert O. Erisman (uncredited in 1st series).An sf pulp magazine from a
chain which included such fringe-sf titles as UNCANNY TALES, MSS was the
first of the many new sf magazines of the late 1930s and early 1940s. It
was notorious for the mildly erotic approach of its early issues, to which
Henry KUTTNER contributed several stories, including "The Time Trap" (Nov
1938). The Feb 1939 issue featured Jack WILLIAMSON's After World's End
(1961). After 5 issues the title changed in Dec 1939 to Marvel Tales, and
for 2 issues the magazine leaned more heavily towards titillating sex and
sadism, like "Lust Rides the Roller Coaster" (Dec 1939) by Ray King and
"World without Sex" (May 1940) by Robert Wentworth (Edmond HAMILTON). The
title then changed again in Nov 1940 to Marvel Stories, and the magazine
returned to straightforward sf. Although initially successful enough to
generate a companion, DYNAMIC SCIENCE STORIES, MSS, which began as a
quarterly, became less and less frequent through 1939-40, ceasing with the
Mar 1941 issue. It was revived in Nov 1950 under its original title,
switched to DIGEST size after 2 issues, appeared 3 times in that format,
and reverted to pulp size for its final issue; it was Marvel Science
Fiction for the last 3 issues. Daniel KEYES was an assistant editor for
some of these later numbers, which were generally unmemorable. The Feb
1951 issue was published in a UK reprint May 1951. [MJE]
MARVEL STORIES
MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES.
MARVEL TALES 1.
US SEMIPROZINE (the first 3 issues small- DIGEST-size, #4 digest-size and
#5 BEDSHEET-size), 5 issues May 1934-Summer 1935. Published by Fantasy
Publishers; ed William L. CRAWFORD, who was not only the publisher but
also set the type himself. Some issues were distributed with several
different covers. Distribution was very limited; MT was never generally
available. Its fiction included works by Robert E. HOWARD, H.P. LOVECRAFT,
Robert BLOCH's first story, "Lilies" (Winter 1934), and Clifford D.
SIMAK's The Creator (Mar 1935; 1946 chap). The Winter 1934 issue commenced
serialization of P. Schuyler MILLER's short novel "The Titan"; the
magazine died before the serialization was completed, and the work was
finally published as the title novella of Miller's The Titan (coll 1952).
An even shorter-lived companion title was UNUSUAL STORIES.2. Variant title

used for 2 issues of MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES. [MJE]
MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN
Film (1994). American Zoetrope/TriStar Pictures/Japan Satellite
Broadcasting, Inc./The IndieProd Company. Dir Kenneth Branagh; prods
include Francis Ford Coppola; co-prods Branagh and David Parfitt;
screenplay Seph Lady, Frank Darabont, based on Frankenstein, or The Modern
Prometheus (1818; rev 1831) by Mary SHELLEY; starring Branagh, Robert De
Niro, Tom Hulce, Helena Bonham Carter,Aidan Quinn, Ian Holm, Richard
Briers, John Cleese, Robert Hardy, Cherie Lunghi, Celia Imrie. 123 mins.
Colour.Branagh directs this as full-blooded (and extremely bloody) GOTHIC
melodrama,truer to the original plot than almost all previous adaptations,
but with thoughtful twists of his own. Much is made of birthing imagery,
both literal and in the case of the monster's creation,metaphorical,
perhaps showing an awareness of those readings of the original that
emphasize the relevance of Mary Shelley's miscarriage shortly before
writing the book, and her mother's death from blood poisoning shortly
after giving birth to her. Indeed, when the obsessive Victor Frankenstein
(Branagh) creates a bride for the monster, he does so out of body parts of
Justine, an innocent accused of a murder committed by the monster, and
Elizabeth (Bonham Carter), his fiancee murdered by the monster in revenge
for his isolation. The Creature,played by De Niro in make-up a long way
removed from the familiar nuts-and-bolts square-headed Karloff version, is
good at grief, rage and despair. The odd post-modern touch decorates what
is generally a rollicking historical costume drama. The film is, in its
eccentric and uneven way, quite distinguished, and certainly sensitive to
the issues raised by the book and the circumstances of its writing. It is
more a film about death (and reversing it) than creating life, and much is
made of a grim cholera epidemic. [PN]
MASK OF FU MANCHU, THE
Film (1932). Cosmopolitan/MGM. Dir Charles Brabin, Charles Vidor,
starring Boris Karloff, Lewis Stone, Karen Morley, Jean Hersholt, Myrna
Loy. Screenplay Irene Kuhn, Edgar Allen Woolf, John Willard, based on The
Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) by Sax ROHMER. 72 mins, cut to 67 mins.
B/w.Rohmer's Oriental supervillain has since been brought to the screen
many times ( FU MANCHU) but this first, visually lavish version, produced
by Irving Thalberg, is the most memorable. It is based on the 6th book in
Sax Rohmer's intensely popular, racy and racist Fu Manchu series. Malign
scientific genius, torturer and murderer Fu Manchu (Karloff), pitted
against his old nemesis Nayland Smith (Stone), lisps his way poisonously
through the film with the assistance of his sadistic daughter (Loy), who
has a wonderfully fetishistic scene (assisted by Nubians) where she whips
and then caresses one of their heroic enemies. Fu Manchu seeks Genghis
Khan's death-mask and sword, which he intends to use as symbols to arouse
the Oriental races in a war against the White nations; tarantulas and a
zombie serum play roles in an eclectic plot which mixes sf and occult
devices. In a spectacular climax Fu's electrical DEATH-RAY machine is
turned against Fu's generals by Nayland Smith. The bizarrely stylized sets
were by Cedric Gibbons and the electrical effects were by Ken Strickfaden.
This is the sort of pulp adventure classic later imitated enjoyably by

Steven SPIELBERG's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). [PN/JB]
MASON, ANITA
(1942- ) UK writer. Her second novel, The Illusionist (1983), is a
literary fantasy centred on Simon Magus. AM's sf novel, The War against
Chaos (1988), also intensely literary in demeanour, posits a NEAR-FUTURE
UK of surreal bleakness dominated by thought-control and savage divisions
between precarious Haves and Goyaesque Have-Nots, who live in something
very much like Hell. [JC]
MASON, DAVID
(1924-1974) US writer who began publishing with "Placebo" for Infinity in
1955; he was married 1956-62 to Katherine MACLEAN. Most of his novels such as his first, Kavin's World (1969), and its sequel, The Return of
Kavin (1972) - were routine SWORD AND SORCERY. However, his final book,
The Deep Gods (1973), more impressively implants a 20th-century mentality
into the brain of a prehistoric man who must deal with the insanity of a
whale (one of the "deep gods" of the title) that threatens to destroy
Eden. [JC]Other works: Devil's Food (1969); The Sorcerer's Skull (1970);
The Shores of Tomorrow (1971); three erotic novels - Degrees of Pleasure
(1969), Jellyroll (1969) and Devil's Food (1969).
MASON, DOUGLAS R(ANKINE)
(1918- ) UK junior-school headmaster and prolific writer after 1964, both
under his own name and as John Rankine; he has been silent since about
1980. His first story was "Two's Company", as by Rankine, in John
CARNELL's New Writings in SF 1 (1964), and he was soon publishing 2-3
books a year, generally routine SPACE OPERAS and other adventures as
Rankine. Occasionally, under his own name - as with From Carthage then I
Came (1966 US; vt Eight Against Utopia 1967) and Matrix (1970 US) - he
would attempt more ambitious novels containing some social comment.
Generally speaking, however, he was content to produce rather low-pressure
work.The Dag Fletcher series of space operas, as by Rankine, was initiated
in his first book, The Blockage of Sinitron: Four Adventures of Dag
Fletcher (coll of linked stories 1966), and continued with Interstellar
Two-Five (1966), One is One (1968), The Plantos Affair (1971), The Ring of
Garamas (1972) and The Bromius Phenomenon (1973 US). The series is set in
a galactic environment shared by other Rankine titles including The
Fingalnan Conspiracy (1973) and The Thorburn Enterprise (1977). [JC]Other
works:As John Rankine: The Space Corporation series, comprising Never the
Same Door (1968) and Moons of Triopus (1968); Binary Z (1969); The Weisman
Experiment (1969); Operation Umanaq (1973 US); 4 novelizations of episodes
from the tv series SPACE 1999, being #2: Moon Odyssey * (1975), #6: Astral
Quest * (1975), #8: Android Planet * (1976) and #10: Phoenix of Megaron *
(1976 US); The Vort Programme (1978); The Star of Hesiock (1980); Last
Shuttle to Planet Earth (1980).As DRM: Landfall is a State of Mind (1968);
Ring of Violence (1968); The Tower of Rizwan (1968); The Janus Syndrome
(1969); Dilation Effect (1971 US); Horizon Alpha (1971 US); Satellite
54-Zero (1971 US); The Resurrection of Roger Diment (1972 US); The End
Bringers (1973 US); The Phaeton Condition (1973 US); Pitman's Progress
(1976); The Omega Worm (1976); Euphor Unfree (1977); Mission to Pactolus R
(1978); The Typhon Intervention (1981).See also: CITIES; MATHEMATICS; NEW

WRITINGS IN SF.
MASON, ERNST
[r] Frederik POHL.
MASON, GREGORY
(1889-1968) US writer whose sf DYSTOPIA, The Golden Archer: A Satirical
Novel of 1975 (1956), depicts a USA suffering under regimented,
McCarthy-like bigotry. [JC]
MASON, LISA
(1953- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Arachne" for Omni in
1987, a tale she expanded into her first novel, Arachne (1990), a tightly
composed kitchen-sink narrative set in a post-earthquake San Francisco, in
CYBERSPACE, and in the heart of a complex corporate world, with a tough
female lawyer as protagonist, a maimed AI personality as trickster and
dubious colleague, and cyberspace-haunting human personas everywhere at
risk from AIs longing to acquire unprogrammed human virtues. As yet LM is
still writing in a rather crowded Californian grotto, and does not shift
very far in her second novel, Summer of Love (1994), which is fantasy; she
gives, therefore, the impression of being an author it is far too early to
attempt to define. [JC]
MASON, MARY
[r] Stephen GOLDIN.
MASON, ROBERT C(AVERLY)
(1942- ) US writer who became known for Chickenhawk (1983), a memoir of
his stint as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. Weapon (1989), ostensibly a
TECHNOTHRILLER, avoids the more restrictive implications of that term by
concentrating on an AI; Solo, the ROBOT referred to in the title, learns
more about being human than about being a superior killing machine. The
sequel, Solo (1992), sees the sensitive robot forced to fight off an even
more dangerous successor robot. The generic closeness of these novels to
the films The TERMINATOR (1984) and TERMINATOR 2 (1991) was noted in
reviews, but there is certainly little resemblance between either film and
Weapon. [JC]
MASON, TALLY
[s] August W. DERLETH.
MASSON, DAVID I(RVINE)
(1915- ) Scottish writer, long resident in England, with an MA in English
language and literature. He began publishing sf with "Traveller's Rest"
for NEW WORLDS in 1965; his fiction, including this extraordinarily
intense study in the distortion of PERCEPTION, was assembled in The
Caltraps of Time (coll 1968), which single volume established his strong
reputation as a writer of vigorously experimental, vivid, often
scientifically sound stories. Notable among them, and reflecting his close
and informed interest in LINGUISTICS, were "Not so Certain" (1967) and the
brilliant TIME-TRAVEL story "A Two-Timer" (1966), told entirely in
language appropriate to 1683, the year from which the inadvertent time
traveller is whisked into the future. Each of DIM's stories seems to be a
solution to some cognitive or creative problem or challenge, and he

appeared little inclined to repeat any of his effects. He has published
almost no fiction since 1968, though "Doctor Fausta" in George HAY's
Stopwatch (anth 1974) is an interesting SATIRE. DIM also reviewed sf
fairly frequently during the 1970s in FOUNDATION. [JC]See also:
DIMENSIONS; MATHEMATICS.
MASTER OF TERROR
4D MAN.
MASTER OF THE WORLD
Film (1961). AIP. Dir William Witney, starring Vincent Price, Charles
Bronson, Henry Hull, Mary Webster. Screenplay Richard MATHESON, based (not
very closely) on Robur le conquerant (1886; trans as The Clipper of the
Clouds 1887; vt Robur the Conqueror 1887) and Maitre du monde (1904; trans
as Master of the World 1914) by Jules VERNE. 104 mins. Colour.MOTW owes
more to the Disney version of 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (1954) - which
it clearly imitates - than to the two Verne novels, with the Albatross, a
very light clipper ship with propellers on the masts, substituting for a
submarine. Robur (Price), a warped idealist, uses his invention to enforce
peace by making war on war, bombarding opposing armies from the air; he
kidnaps as witnesses a US special agent (Bronson), an arms manufacturer
(Hull) and a young couple. The film was more lavish than most AIP
productions (usually very-low-budget exploitation movies), but most of the
money went on the elaborate flying ship. The travelogue aspect of the film
is achieved largely through library footage, some of it wildly
anachronistic: a supposed aerial shot of 1860s London is from the 1944
film of Shakespeare's Henry V. A melodramatic, one-note script by Matheson
(usually better than this) and flat direction weaken the film, but it
remains watchable if silly. [JB/PN]
MASTERS, DEXTER
(1908-1989) US writer whose only sf work was The Cloud Chamber (1971).
[JC]
MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE
Film (1987). Cannon. Dir Gary Goddard, starring Dolph Lundgren, Frank
Langella, Meg Foster, Billy Barty. Screenplay David Odell. 106 mins.
Colour.Goddard's unfortunate film debut announced itself as the first
live-action film to be based on toys ( GAMES AND TOYS) - the He-Man toys
made by Mattel; its obvious predecessor was an animated tv series, He-Man
and the Masters of the Universe, begun 1983. The SWORD-AND-SORCERY story
pits the muscle-bound He-Man (Lundgren) of Planet Eternia against Skeletor
(Langella), a demon figure from another DIMENSION and leader of the malign
Masters of the Universe. A MATTER-TRANSMITTER key takes He-Man to
contemporary California, where he finds the help necessary for defeating
Skeletor in a final showdown. The film lacks the vigour it requires. The
marketing phenomenon it exemplifies has concerned many parents, and some
countries ban films and tv series which, in the guise of entertainment,
are designed to sell commercial products by brainwashing very young
children. A further example is the much better (animated) film The
TRANSFORMERS - THE MOVIE (1986). [PN]
MASTIN, JOHN

(1865-1932) UK writer, clergyman and science popularizer, author of 3 sf
novels. The Stolen Planet (1906) features the picaresque adventures of two
Earthmen through the Solar System and beyond, as narrated by Jervis
Meredith, codeveloper of a space-conquering "aerostat"; centuries later,
in Through the Sun in an Airship (1909), Meredith's last descendant again
tours a number of planets. Through his various FANTASTIC VOYAGES, JM tried
to exploit the romance of science in stories which have an attractive
(though thin) patina of verisimilitude and are told in the uplifting
manner typical of too many UK boys' books; they are permeated with
religiosity, at times attempting a reconciliation of science and RELIGION.
The Immortal Light (1907) is a LOST-WORLDS novel set in the Antarctic
among an underground, Latin-speaking race. The Autobiography of a Picture
(1910) is fantasy. [JC/EFB]See also: HISTORY OF SF; SPACESHIPS; SUN.
MATHEMATICS
The imaginations of pure mathematicians have provided sf writers with
important motifs. For example, the notions taken from geometry and
topology of a fourth and other DIMENSIONS (which see for a listing of
relevant sf stories) have the essential qualities of strangeness and
mystery, making them an enjoyable struggle for the untrained intuition to
accept. A surprising number of sf writers have been mathematicians, or at
least have trained in mathematics; among them have been Lewis CARROLL,
Arthur C. CLARKE, Paul DAVIES, Ralph Milne FARLEY, Martin GARDNER, Norman
KAGAN, Johannes KEPLER, Donald KINGSBURY, Homer NEARING, Larry NIVEN,
Esther ROCHON, Rudy RUCKER, Bertrand RUSSELL, Boris STRUGATSKI, John
TAINE, Vernor VINGE and David ZINDELL.In discussing the use of
mathematical ideas in sf, the boundary between sf and fantasy must be
drawn according to somewhat different principles from those used in the
case of the natural sciences. Since many mathematical ideas derive their
piquancy from the fact that they are definitely incompatible with the
world we live in, a story illustrating such an idea cannot claim any
credence as a record of possible events, and should perhaps be classed as
a fantasy. Yet an important consideration in judging a story of this type
is its fidelity to mathematical truth, in which respect it belongs not
just to sf but to sf at the furthest remove from fantasy, to that subgenre
comprising stories which turn on a point of established science.In the
field of geometry these points are illustrated by the prototype of all
stories which use the idea of space having other than three dimensions, E.
A. ABBOTT's Flatland (1884 as by A Square). Written in a period when there
was great interest among mathematicians in n-dimensional geometry, this
fantasy offers an indirect approach to the problems we, as
three-dimensional creatures, have in understanding four-dimensional space
by examining the difficulties two-dimensional beings would have in
understanding three-dimensional space - an explanatory device which was to
become a standard feature of sf invoking a fourth dimension. With sentient
lines, triangles and polygons as its inhabitants, the book's only
three-dimensional character being a visiting sphere, Flatland makes no
pretence of being related to the real world. The book has been made into a
short animated film, Flatland (1965), dir Eric Martin, with narration by
Peter Cook. C.H. HINTON developed Abbott's speculations, adding some of
his own, in several pieces in Scientific Romances (coll 1886) and

Scientific Romances: Second Series (coll 1902), and in his sequel An
Episode of Flatland (1907). In Bolland (1957; trans as Sphereland 1965 US)
Dionys BURGER wrote another sequel designed to explain in the same way
Einstein's theories about curved space. Greg BEAR's stylish story
"Tangents" (1986) imagines the intrusion of higher-dimensional beings into
our three-dimensional space, in a sophisticated reworking of the theme of
Miles J. BREUER's "The Captured Cross-Section" (1929).Among the many
stories using fourth and other dimensions, two deserve mention here for
their emphasis on particular mathematical points. H.G. WELLS's "The
Plattner Story" (1896) turns on the fact that a three-dimensional object,
if rotated through half a turn in a fourth dimension, becomes its mirror
image (in the story this happens to Gottfried Plattner, who afterwards
finds his heart is on the right). The reception of this point by literary
readers amusingly illustrates how, if science can lend credibility to sf,
sf removes credibility from science: one critic (Allan Rodway, in Science
and Modern Writing [1964]) told his readers that this was "neither
scientific nor mathematical". In fact it is excellent mathematics. In "And
He Built a Crooked House" (1940) Robert A. HEINLEIN describes a house of
eight cubical rooms which fit together like the eight three-dimensional
"faces" of a four-dimensional cube (a tesseract). The story ostensibly
takes place in the real world, but Heinlein's main concern is not to
persuade the reader that his house is physically possible but to show us
something which is mathematically feasible though seemingly paradoxical.
He is therefore careful to be mathematically correct in describing the
structure of his house, while emphasizing its startling features. His one
slip, as it happens, offends against both requirements; the mathematical
truth is even stranger than he realizes.Other writers have set stories in
frankly imaginary worlds for the sake of unusual topological structures of
space, but few have been so careful to define the structures as Heinlein
was. It is common for the topological oddity to be revealed only at the
last, as a shock ending, as in David I. MASSON's "Traveller's Rest" (1965)
- though this is only one element of a subtle and complex story in which
the structures of time and language undergo variations related to that of
the structure of space - and Arthur C. CLARKE's "Wall of Darkness" (1949),
which uses a similar idea. Christopher PRIEST's INVERTED WORLD (1974)
features (or appears to, for the whole thing could be a trick of
perception) a hyperboloid world where variations of subjective experience
take place according to one's position in the world. (Several mathematical
stories, including Priest's, are discussed under PERCEPTION.) Topology is
also likely to be abused as a catch-all explanation for any weird
happening: in "A Subway Named Mobius" (1950) by A.J. Deutsch, for example,
it is supposed that a subway network has become so complex that trains
mysteriously disappear and reappear, although no proper topological
explanation is presented.This careless attitude to topology is comparable
with the numerology ( PSEUDO-SCIENCE) of such stories as "Six Cubed Plus
One" (1966) by John Rankine (Douglas R. MASON), in which magical
properties are attributed to special numbers. (A sardonic comment on
cavalier attitudes to mathematics was made by L. Sprague DE CAMP and
Fletcher PRATT in The Incomplete Enchanter [1942], in which a series of
propositions in mathematical logic is used as a magic
talisman.)Transfinite arithmetic shares with topology the appeal of the

unfamiliar and the smack of paradox, and infinity has its own sensational
connotations. For these reasons transfinite numbers are often called upon
to establish an atmosphere of mathematical mysticism, but few authors have
found it possible to do more with them. They appealed to the quirkiness of
James BLISH, who in "FYI" (1953) seized on the fact that they do not and
cannot count material objects and contemplated the Universe being
reconstructed to accommodate them.The two other areas of mathematics which
have provided material for sf stories are statistics and logic. The
concepts of statistics and probability theory are easy to misunderstand,
as has been demonstrated in many sf stories; also, being abstractions
which can masquerade as concrete instances, they are easy to ridicule, and
this can be seen in Russell Maloney's "Inflexible Logic" (1940), which
shows us monkeys typing famous works of literature, William TENN's
"Null-P" (1951), in which an exactly average man is discovered, and Jack
C. HALDEMAN's "A Very Good Year" (1984) in which the absence of death for
a whole year is statistically compensated for in the next. A rather more
serious point about statistics was made by Robert M. COATES in "The Law"
(1974), which describes the "Law of Averages" breaking down and so prompts
consideration of why human beings in large numbers normally do behave in
predictable ways.The perennial fascination of logical paradoxes was
exploited by Gordon R. DICKSON in "The Monkey Wrench" (1951). This story
uses the paradox of Epimenides the Cretan ("this statement is false") to
deflate a computer engineer's pride in the perfection of his machine, thus
giving a reassuring reminder of the insufficiency of logic. An opposite
effect was achieved by Frederik POHL in a number of stories, notably "The
Schematic Man" (1968), which describes a man coding himself as a computer
programme, and so raises the question of what makes the real world more
than a mathematical model. Logical paradoxes in fictional form were a
speciality of Lewis Carroll, whose A Tangled Tale (1886) and The Game of
Logic (1887) are devoted to them as, in part, are the Alice books. Closer
to our own time, Martin GARDNER, whose mathematical-puzzle column appeared
in Scientific American 1957-81 and in ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION
MAGAZINE from 1977, has written many fictionalized mathematical
diversions, such as those collected in Science Fiction Puzzle Tales (coll
1981) and Puzzles from Other Worlds (coll 1984).Mathematics whose point is
not primarily mathematical can also appear in sf; the use of an occasional
mathematical formula is seen by some sf writers, as by some scientists, as
conferring intellectual respectability. A rare example of a genuine
mathematical argument occurs in a footnote to Fred HOYLE's The Black Cloud
(1957): it is a nice calculation, and has probably added to a number of
readers' enjoyment of the book. Hoyle also gave a mathematical explanation
of an sf speculation in the preface to Fifth Planet (1963).Examples of
popular exposition of mathematical ideas in sf are the explanation of the
calculus of variations in David DUNCAN's Occam's Razor (1957) and that of
coordinate systems and relativity in Miles J. Breuer's "The Gostak and the
Doshes" (1930). Both authors proceed to tell stories which have only
tenuous connections with the mathematical ideas they have expounded.Though
the mathematical genius Libby in Robert Heinlein's "Misfit" (1939) proves
resourceful, mathematicians as characters in GENRE SF have often been
stereotyped as absent-minded, ineffectual and unworldly; they are clearly
descended from the inhabitants of Jonathan SWIFT's Laputa in Gulliver's

Travels (1726; rev 1735). Sf is popular among mathematicians, however, and
it is not surprising that there should have been some attempts to adjust
this image. This can be seen particularly in the stories of Norman KAGAN,
whose portrayals of zany, hyperactive maths students, although they
sometimes appear self-congratulatory, may be rather closer to reality.
Kagan's stories make witty use of many parts of mathematics; while
ostensibly concerned with sf speculations - in "Four Brands of Impossible"
(1964) the use of a different logic to describe the world, in "The
Mathenauts" (1964) a journey into various mathematical spaces - they are
really about the experience of doing mathematics. An important
mathematical sf protagonist is Shevek, in Ursula K. LE GUIN's The
Dispossessed (1974), whose new mathematics is the basis for building the
ANSIBLE, a FASTER-THAN-LIGHT communications device. A particularly
interesting mathematician is the elderly protagonist of "Euclid Alone"
(1975) by William F. Orr, himself a mathematician. A student successfully
proves one of Euclid's axioms to be wrong. His teacher is left with the
moral quandary of whether or not to suppress the discovery, which may,
ultimately, destroy the serenity of everyone in the world. Orr's story can
be found in Mathenauts (anth 1987) ed Rudy RUCKER, the only anthology of
sf mathematical stories since Fantasia Mathematica (anth 1958) and The
Mathematical Magpie (anth 1962), both ed Clifton Fadiman.Mathematics has
entered fiction in strange ways. Some of the oddest are discussed in the
terminology entry OULIPO. Certainly stories of COMMUNICATIONS can feature
mathematics, through the idea of mathematics as a universal language. Some
notable mathematical incursions into sf during the 1980s are the
mathematical harmonies in Kim Stanley ROBINSON's The Memory of Whiteness
(1985), the cosmic message concealed in the endless series of numbers
following pi's decimal point in Contact (1985) by Carl SAGAN, and the
disquisition on the Mandelbrot set in Arthur C. Clarke's The Ghost from
the Grand Banks (1990), one of the few sf stories to use the mathematics
of fractals. But the most important mathematical sf writers of the past
decade have been Rudy Rucker and David Zindell, both mathematicians.
Rucker's stories do not merely turn on mathematical points; they are often
set in worlds generated by mathematical ideas, whose exploration is itself
an act of mathematical intellection, in which the author delights, as he
does in raunchy humour. Such tales include much of his work, notably White
Light, or What is Cantor's Continuum Problem? (1980) - a crazed fantasia
moving in physical (though afterlife) analogues of Hilbertian space,
transfinite numbers and a lot else - The Sex Sphere (1983) and The Secret
of Life (1985). Zindell's Neverness (1988) is one of the few successful
books whose assumption is that mathematics is romantic. In this novel, to
win an ice-race is to solve a theorem. The sequence where the protagonist
can map the space windows only through mathematics - fountains and
arpeggios of mathematics - is sustained and moving, and conveys with great
conviction even to the nonmathematical reader what the high delight of
mathematical thought must feel like. [TSu/PN]
MATHESON, RICHARD (BURTON)
(1926- ) US author of stories, novels and filmscripts, initially thought
of as primarily an sf writer but from the 1960s increasingly recognized as
one of the most significant modern creators of terror and fantasy in both

fiction and film. He began publishing sf with "Born of Man and Woman" for
The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION in 1950. He had regarded this
as a simple terror story but, on finding it praised as sf, decided to cash
in on the then-current sf boom. He included most of his best early work in
Born of Man and Woman (coll 1954; with 4 stories cut vt Third from the Sun
1955). The famous title story tells in affecting pidgin English of a
terrifying MUTANT child and of his break towards a kind of freedom (
CHILDREN IN SF). The element of terror in the tale nearly overrides a
perfunctory sf base, as in his first sf novel, I Am Legend (1954; vt The
Omega Man: I Am Legend 1971), a post- HOLOCAUST story in which only one
man remains unaffected by a bacterium that induces vampirism (
SUPERNATURAL CREATURES). RM scripted the first film version of this, L'
ULTIMO UOMO DELLA TERRA (1964; vt The Last Man on Earth) but, angered by
the rewrite of his script, used the pseudonym Logan Swanson for his
screenplay credit; he was not responsible for the script of the second
film version, The OMEGA MAN (1971). He did, however, adapt The Shrinking
Man (1956), his second sf novel, as The INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957),
which won a 1958 HUGO; indeed, he sold it to Universal only on condition
that he could write the screenplay, thus gaining an entry into the film
business. This novel uses an sf component to shape the story of a man who,
after exposure to radiation and insecticide, begins to shrink inexorably
to microscopic size ( GREAT AND SMALL). RM's next major commission was for
the tv series The TWILIGHT ZONE in 1959; all told, 14 of his scripts
appeared in the series.In 1960 he wrote the screenplay for the first of
Roger CORMAN's adaptations of horror stories by Edgar Allan POE, The House
of Usher (1960; vt The Fall of the House of Usher UK), and subsequently he
scripted a number of fantasy/horror films, once in collaboration with
Charles BEAUMONT, for Corman and other directors: The Pit and the Pendulum
(1961), Tales of Terror (1962), Night of the Eagle (1962; vt Burn Witch
Burn) - based on Conjure Wife (1953; vt Burn Witch Burn 1962) by Fritz
LEIBER, screenplay written with Beaumont - The Raven (1963), The Comedy of
Terrors (1963), Fanatic (1965), The Devil Rides Out (1968) and De Sade
(1969). His tv work has included several scripts for STAR TREK and later
for ROD SERLING'S NIGHT GALLERY. He also scripted a number of made-for-tv
feature films, by far the best being Duel (1971), from his own story; the
film was Stephen SPIELBERG's first significant work as a director, and was
given theatrical release in the UK. Others included The Night Stalker
(1972) and The Night Strangler (1973) ( KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER), Dying
Room Only (1973), Dracula (1973), Scream of the Wolf (1974), The STRANGER
WITHIN (1974) and The MARTIAN CHRONICLES (1979). His script with William
F. NOLAN for the tv movie Trilogy of Terror (1975) was based on three of
his own stories. Of his feature-film scripts, that for MASTER OF THE WORLD
(1961) is the most obviously sciencefictional. His
psychological-cum-supernatural melodrama Hell House (1971) was filmed as
The Legend of Hell House (1973), again with his own screenplay. Here, too,
there are borderline sf elements; indeed, RM's entire career has
cross-fertilized sf with HORROR.Further volumes of stories with some sf
interest are The Shores of Space (coll 1957) and Shock! (coll 1961; vt
Shock I: Thirteen Tales to Thrill and Terrify 1979), though the latter
volume's successors, Shock II (coll 1964), Shock III (coll 1966), Shock
Waves (coll 1970) and Shock 4 (coll 1980 UK), are primarily assemblages of

fantasy stories. The 86 stories assembled in Richard Matheson: Collected
Stories (coll 1989) cover his career 1950-71. A fantasy, Bid Time Return
(1975; vt Somewhere in Time 1980), once again powerfully utilizes devices
from sf (in this case TIME TRAVEL) in a story whose emotional
satisfactions are not dependent on a successful sf resolution of the
problems that arise; it was filmed as Somewhere in Time (1980) from his
own script, and was later assembled with What Dreams May Come (1978) as
Somewhere in Time/What Dreams May Come: Two Novels of Love and Fantasy
(both texts rev, omni 1991). The latter novel, an afterlife fantasy,
shares with its predecessor a carefully controlled pathos occasionally
reminiscent of Robert NATHAN. Earthbound (1982 as by Logan Swanson; text
restored as by RM 1989 UK) is a ghost story. RM has also written some
short fiction - including "Where There's a Will" (1980) - in collaboration
with his son Richard Christian MATHESON. Though RM cannot be considered as
in any primary sense an sf writer, his influence as one of the
"liberators" of magazine sf in the early 1950s keeps his name vividly in
mind.The dominant theme in RM's work has always been PARANOIA, whether
imagined in GOTHIC or in sf terms. In Duel a truck inexplicably attacks a
car; in Dying Room Only a woman's husband disappears in a motel toilet but
no one will believe her; though the pregnancy in The Stranger Within did
not result from infidelity, that is the way it seems to the woman's
sterile husband. I Am Legend (one man against a world of vampires) is, in
its obsessive images of persecution, perhaps the very peak of all paranoid
sf. [JC/JB/PN]Other works: A Stir of Echoes (1958); Through Channels (1989
chap); Journal of the Gun Years (1992), The Gunfight (1993), By the Gun
(coll 1994) and Shadow in the Sun (1994), all Westerns; 7 Steps to
Midnight (1993), a thriller.As Editor: The Twilight Zone: The Original
Stories * (anth 1985), with Martin H. GREENBERG and Charles G. WAUGH.About
the author: Richard Matheson: He is Legend: An Illustrated
Bio-Bibliography (1984 chap) by Mark Rathbun and Graeme Flanagan.See also:
BIOLOGY; DISASTER; EC COMICS; END OF THE WORLD; MONSTERS; RELIGION;
ROBOTS.
MATHESON, RICHARD CHRISTIAN
(1953- ) US author and (primarily) writer for film and tv, and tv
producer. RCM's work has been at most only fringe sf; he is not to be
confused with his father, Richard MATHESON, nor with his younger brother
Chris Matheson, cowriter of the witty screenplay for BILL AND TED'S
EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989) and its sequel Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey
(1991). RCM's tv work includes scripts for The INCREDIBLE HULK and AMAZING
STORIES. His first published story was "Graduation" (1977 Whispers). A
collection of his short fiction, predominantly fantasy and horror, is
Scars, and Other Distinguishing Marks (coll 1987; rev with teleplay "Magic
Saturday" added 1988). [PN]Other works: Holiday (1988 chap); Created By
(1993).
MATINEE
Film (1993). Universal. Dir Joe DANTE, screenplay Charlie Haas from a
story by Jerico and Charlie Haas, starring John Goodman, Cathy Moriarty,
Simon Fenton, Omri Katz and Lisa Jakub. 99 mins. Colour.Not so much an sf
movie as a movie giving a cultural critique of sf movies. The setting is

Key West, Florida, during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear war
for a time seemed imminent. Teenager Gene Loomis (Fenton) is new in town,
and the son of a naval officer who has been posted to a Cuban blockade
ship. A MONSTER MOVIE buff, Gene is excited by the arrival in town of
exploitation movie director Lawrence Woolsey, played with tacky, genial
charisma by John Goodman; Woolsey appears largely modelled on real-life
film producer William Castle, and perhaps to a degree on Roger CORMAN
also. Woolsey's new movie, premiering here, is Mant ("Half man! Half ant!
All terror!"). The film deftly explores the paranoias and sociopolitical
fears of real-life 1962, and their relationship to the paranoias of the
monster movies of that time, with a lot of sharpness though no great
profundity, and is intelligent and amusing throughout. We see almost
twenty minutes of Mant, the film within a film, an extraordinarily
accurate parody of early 1970s monster movies made by JD with great
affection. The film's subject is partly the cultural cusp that was 1962,
with the greater openness to experience and liberality we associate with
the 1960s slowly coming into view. But the film is slightly weakened by
the conservatism on display being so exaggerated as to seem more mid-1950s
than 1962. [PN]
MATSON, NORMAN (HAGHEJM)
(1893-1965) US writer now best known for his completion, after the death
of Thorne Smith (1893-1934), of the latter's The Passionate Witch (1941),
capturing Smith's melancholy, mildly madcap, sentimentally erotic style
very neatly. NM also wrote a sequel, Bats in the Belfry (1943). A film, I
Married a Witch (1942), and the tv series Bewitched (1964-72) were based
on the books. Earlier NM wrote a fantasy, Flecker's Magic (1926; vt
Enchanted Beggar 1959), also concerning a witch, and an sf novel, Doctor
Fogg (1929). Fogg, having constructed a radio receiver capable of
listening in on other worlds and attracted the interest of a young woman
who has (perhaps coincidentally) been sent via MATTER TRANSMISSION to
Earth from a distant planet, falls in love with the girl while extracting
messages and information from space. But, when the US Government decides
it must control all these scientific findings for security reasons, he
destroys his device. [JC]
MATTER TRANSMISSION
The matter transmitter is one of sf's many facilitating devices: a
hypothetical machine which is not rationally plausible in terms of known
science but which is very convenient for certain narrative purposes (
IMAGINARY SCIENCE). By virtue of an obvious play on words, matter
transmitters were sometimes called "transmats" - as in Lan WRIGHT's
"Transmat" (1960) - but the contraction never really caught on.
Essentially, a matter transmitter is a teleportation machine ( PSI POWERS)
whose plausibility is usually secured by analogies with radio. The best
illustration of its narrative utility is in the tv series STAR TREK, in
which the "transporter" not only transfers people from the Enterprise to
this week's stage-set with a minimum of fuss but serves as an ever-ready
deus ex machina to come to the rescue when our heroes are in a tight
situation. As with other facilitating devices like the TIME MACHINE and
the FASTER-THAN-LIGHT starship, however, there is a flourishing subgenre

of "what if . . . ?" stories exploring the logical corollaries of the
supposition that such devices might one day exist, ranging from elementary
questions like "what happens to the matter occupying the space into which
you are transmitting?" to questions about the way in which routine
transportation of this kind would transform society. Three Trips in Time
and Space (anth 1973) ed Robert SILVERBERG presents three original
novellas on this theme by Larry NIVEN, John BRUNNER and Jack VANCE; the
commission for the volume intrigued Brunner sufficiently that he went on
to publish two novels further exploring the possibilities - Web of
Everywhere (1974) and The Infinitive of Go (1980) - while in 1973-4 Niven
wrote four other stories elaborating the background of his "Flash Crowd",
carrying forward ideas first broached in RINGWORLD (1970).Early stories of
matter transmission include "The Man without a Body" (1877) by Edward Page
MITCHELL and "Professor Vehr's Electrical Experiment" (1885) by Robert
Duncan MILNE, in both of which the process is interrupted with dire
consequences; a later variant of the same theme, with an additional
horrific twist, is George LANGELAAN's twice-filmed "The Fly" (1957) (The
FLY ). Matter transmitters feature as a method of interplanetary travel in
Fred T. JANE's tongue-in-cheek To Venus in Five Seconds (1897) and as a
method of ore-shipping in Garrett P. SERVISS's The Moon Metal (1900), but
few other authors could bring themselves to deploy the notion until the
advent of the sf PULP MAGAZINES, when it was quickly added to the standard
vocabulary of symbols, featuring in such stories as "The Secret of
Electrical Transmission" (1922) by Clement FEZANDIE, The Radio Man (1924;
1948) by Ralph Milne FARLEY, "The Moon Menace" (1927) by Edmond HAMILTON
and "The Cosmic Express" (1930) by Jack WILLIAMSON. Matter transmitters
are rarely featured in work done outside the genre, although Norman
MATSON's Doctor Fogg (1929) is an interesting comedy about an unexpected
arrival by such means.More sophisticated versions of the Star Trek
transporter can be found in various HARD-SF stories, including Poul
ANDERSON's THE ENEMY STARS (1959), Harry HARRISON's One Step from Earth
(fixup 1970) and Joe HALDEMAN's Mindbridge (1976). Melodramas cunningly
deploying them as plot-elements include Lloyd BIGGLE's All the Colours of
Darkness (1963), Philip K. DICK's The Unteleported Man (1964; 1966; exp
1982; vt Lies, Inc) and David LANGFORD's The Space Eater (1982); Langford
and John Grant (Paul BARNETT) cruelly parody several aspects of matter
transmission in Earthdoom! (1987). Matter transmitters function as devices
facilitating the COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS in Eric Frank RUSSELL's
"U-Turn" (1950) and Joseph L. GREEN's The Loafers of Refuge (fixup 1965).
"Buildings" whose doorways are matter transmitters and whose "rooms" are
on different worlds are featured in Bob SHAW's "Aspect" (1954), Roger
ZELAZNY's Today we Choose Faces (1973) and Dan SIMMONS's HYPERION (1989).
The idea of a galactic culture linked by matter transmitters is soberly
and memorably displayed in Clifford D. SIMAK's WAY STATION (1963).Matter
transmitters which malfunction occasionally result in embarrassing
duplications, as in Clifford Simak's Goblin Reservation (1968), and
stories about matter duplication - classic examples include the later
stories in George O. SMITH's Venus Equilateral (coll of linked stories
1947) and Damon Knight's "A for Anything" (1957; exp as The People Maker
1959; vt A for Anything UK) - may be regarded as an extension of the
theme; indeed, scrupulous attempts to rationalize matter transmission

(like Niven's and Brunner's) assume that what is actually transmitted is
information regarding the exact duplication of the object to be
reconstituted, not actual matter, so that much so-called matter
transmission is really matter duplication. In Algis BUDRYS's ROGUE MOON
(1960) the duplication is calculated, the transmitted "clones" being
continually sacrificed to the task of exploring a hazardous alien
artifact. In Thomas M. DISCH's Echo Round his Bones (1967) ghostly
duplicates, perceptible only to one another, are an unintended consequence
of the use of matter transmitters. Both of these last-named stories
sensitively exploit the bearing which the imaginary device has on the
philosophical problem of identity. [BS/MJE]
MATTHEWS, RODNEY
(1945- ) UK illustrator. RM's artwork first became popular in the
mid-1970s - a period of great vigour in UK sf/fantasy illustration - when
it began appearing on book covers and on the first 3 covers of the
short-lived magazine VORTEX (1977). Bizarre, whimsical, often spiky,
weirdly coloured, his art "feels" more like fantasy than sf, though it has
often been used on sf books - including some from Avon in the USA - and is
closely associated with the work of Michael MOORCOCK, notably in his many
illustrations to Moorcock's Elric at the End of Time (1987). RM's
fantastic animals and monsters are especially good, and his thorny cities
are another trademark. He works in various media, mostly watercolour,
gouache and ink; much of his work has been in the form of posters, record
sleeves (several winning awards) and calendars. In the 1980s a series of
RM fantasy calendars, some in very large format, featured mostly new
rather than recycled paintings. Books of his work include a very complete
and beautifully produced retrospective collection, In Search of Forever
(1985) with text by Nigel Suckling, Last Ship Home (1989) and The Rodney
Matthews Portfolio (1991). [PN]
MATTOTTI, LORENZO
(1954- ) Italian COMIC-strip artist whose work combines Futurist and
Vorticist forms with Expressionist colour. Born in Brescia, he studied
architecture before turning to comics in the late 1970s, with Jose Munoz
(1942- ) as his mentor. With other like-minded young artists, he formed
the Valvoline group to "explore the frontiers of progressive fumetti
[comic strips]". His first success came with Il signore Spartaco ["Mr
Spartaco"] (graph 1982), about a man whose dreams of his childhood fears
and anxieties affect his hold on reality. LM's masterpiece is Fuochi
["Fires"] (1985 Alter; trans as Feux 1986 France; trans as Fires 1988 US),
about a battleship visiting a magical island. The story climaxes in a
furious Expressionist inferno. Other works include: Labyrinthi
["Labyrinths"] (graph 1989); L'uomo alla finestra ["The Man at the
Window"] (1992), a long GRAPHIC NOVEL done in black-and-white line,
written with Lilia Ambrosini; and Murmur (graph 1992 UK), written by Jerry
Kransky. [RT]
MATURIN, CHARLES R(OBERT)
(1782-1824) Irish novelist, playwright and clergyman, the son of French
Protestants in exile, who wrote several GOTHIC romances and sensational
plays with intermittent success - most notably The Fatal Revenge, or The

Family of Montorio (1807) as by Dennis Jasper Murphy-before the
publication of his definitive terror-romance, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).
The eponymous hero, who is reminiscent of figures from the Wandering Jew
to Faust, has sold his soul to the Devil in return for IMMORTALITY. The
novel is made up of a series of complexly linked stories concerning people
in various extremities to whom Melmoth appears as tempter in his desperate
attempts to find someone to accept his curse; but all refuse him,
regardless of the perils under which they labour, and after a century or
so Melmoth returns to Ireland, where he disappears over the edge of a
cliff. Honore de BALZAC wrote a sequel, "Melmoth Reconcile" (1835; trans
in coll The Unknown Masterpiece 1896 UK). The Penguin edition of CRM's
novel (1977), ed and introduced by Alethea Hayter, is convenient and
scholarly. [JC]Other work: The Albigenses (1824).About the author: Charles
Robert Maturin: His Life and Works (1923) by Niilo Idman.
MAURICE, MICHAEL
Pseudonym of UK writer and clergyman Conrad Arthur Skinner (1889-? ),
whose sf novel Not in Our Stars (1923) can be forgiven its confused
science - giant meteorites are supposed to cause perturbations in
spacetime sufficient to reverse time's arrow for the protagonist - because
of the odd intensity of the tale. Awakening in a death cell after a meteor
strike, the protagonist is executed and then begins to relive his life
(each day passing normally, but with him awakening each morning a day
earlier) with foreknowledge of the murder he has committed/will commit in
error. The end of the story is ambiguous, with some hint that, on
re-entering the normal flow of time, he will be able to avoid the deed. A
later novel, Marooned (1932), is an afterlife fantasy. [JC]
MAUROIS, ANDRE
Pseudonym of prolific French novelist and man of letters Emile Salomon
Wilhelm Herzog (1885-1967), in the USA during WWII. He was best known for
his romantic biographies and other nonfiction, though his first work, "La
derniere histoire du monde" ["The Final History of the World"] (1903) as
by Emile Herzog, was sf; later included in Premiers contes ["First
Stories"] (coll 1935) as by AM, it was the first of his several future
histories. The most interesting of these is Le chapitre suivant (1927
chap; trans anon as The Next Chapter: The War Against the Moon 1928 chap
UK), which describes a war against the ostensibly uninhabited Moon
concocted by a cabal of newspaper barons to provide bored mankind with an
external enemy; unfortunately the Moon is indeed occupied, and retaliates.
This fragment was collected in Deux fragments d'une histoire universelle
1992 (coll 1928) with its sequel, "Chapitre CXVIII: La vie des hommes",
which appeared in English as the second of the two title stories of The
Weigher of Souls and The Earth Dwellers (coll 1963 US); it deals with
inhabitants of Uranus who fail to understand the supposedly inferior
inhabitants of Earth; this appeared in the collection Relativisme (coll
1930; trans Hamish Miles as A Private Universe 1932 UK). An interesting
ALTERNATE-WORLDS essay, "If Louis XVI had had an Atom of Firmness",
appeared in J.C. Squire's If, or History Rewritten (anth 1931).AM also
wrote more conventional sf narratives. Voyage aux pays des Articoles (1927
chap; trans David GARNETT as A Voyage to the Island of the Articoles 1928

chap UK) carries a man and woman to an ISLAND in whose UTOPIAN society the
dominant Articole caste is made up of artists who provide the other castes
with their raisons d'etre; the tale is ironic. In Le peseur d'ames (1931;
trans Hamish Miles as The Weigher of Souls 1931 UK) a doctor discovers
that the elan vital is a gas which escapes the body at death; his attempts
to mingle in posthumous harmony with his wife are, however, frustrated.
This short novel reappeared in The Weigher of Souls and The Earth
Dwellers. The sf device in La machine a lire les pensees (1937; trans
James Whitehall as The Thought-Reading Machine 1938 UK) is a "camera"
capable of registering thoughts on photographic film.Though amiability
tends to soften the bite of his morality-like tales and his reputation has
faded, AM's work is nicely representative of the idiomatic ease with which
sf ideas have been used in this century by MAINSTREAM WRITERS, especially
in the UK and mainland Europe, as vehicles for the conveyance of satirical
material. [JC/PN]Other works: Patapoufs et filifers (1930 chap; trans
Norman Denny as Fattypuffs and Thinifers 1941 chap UK; vt Patapoufs and
Filifers 1948 chap US), a juvenile parable set in an underground land,
illustrated by Jean Bruller ( VERCORS); Nouveaux discours du Docteur
O'Grady (1950; trans Gerard Hopkins as The Return of Dr O'Grady 1951 UK);
Illusions (1968), a speculative essay.See also: ARTS; ESCHATOLOGY; ESP;
HISTORY OF SF; MACHINES; RELIGION; SATIRE.
MAVITY, HUBERT
[s] Nelson S. BOND.
MAVOR, ELINOR
[r] AMAZING STORIES; FANTASTIC.
MAX HEADROOM
UK made-for-tv film (1985); US tv series (1987-8). Chrysalis/Channel 4
(UK); Chrysalis/Lakeside-Lorimar Telepictures (US). Created by Steve
Roberts (screenplay) and George Stone, Annabel Jankel, Rocky Morton
(story). Prod Peter Wagg, Brian Frankish, Roberts. Writers included
Roberts, Philip DeGuere, Michael CASSUTT. Dirs included Rocky Morton and
Annabel Jankel (UK teleplay), Farhad Mann, Tommy Lee Wallace, Thomas J.
Wright, Victor Lobl, Janet Greek. Teleplay 70 mins; series ran 2 seasons,
14 50min episodes in all. Colour.There are two distinct branches of the MH
tv saga, first in the UK, then in the USA. Originally the
computer-generated stuttering head - played by an image-processed Matt
Frewer - was created as a state-of-the-art link man for rock videos in a
tv music programme, but a fictional origin had to be devised for him.
Hence the 1985 made-for-tv film (originally titled A Rebus), in which
investigative newsman Carter (Frewer) digs into a conspiracy revolving
around compressed tv ads ("blipverts") that can cause sedentary viewers to
explode. After an accident Carter's brain patterns are electronically
duplicated to create his computerized alter ego.While this led in the UK
to the planned rock-video series - plus a talkshow, advertising contracts,
spin-off books and merchandise - US production company Lorimar was more
impressed by the teleplay explaining Max Headroom's origin, and remade it
(with small changes) as Blipverts, the first episode of a series. Frewer
continued to play Carter and Headroom, and Amanda Pays also transferred
from the UK production as Theora, Carter's computer-genius colleague.

Roberts likewise crossed the Atlantic.Although the MEDIA-dominated future
world of the pilot suggested many possibilities for a CYBERPUNK-style sf
thriller series, subsequent episodes were hindered by a reliance on tired
ideas (gladiatorial combat, test-tube babies) that could have easily been
used on LOGAN'S RUN or any other future- DYSTOPIA series, and MH lasted
only 2 short seasons. In its image-dense style and media-fuelled cynicism,
however, MH did introduce the trappings of cyberpunk to tv. [KN]
MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE
Stephen KING.
MAXWELL, ANN (ELIZABETH)
(1944- ) US writer, also of detective thrillers as A.E. Maxwell. She
began publishing work of genre interest with Change (1975) and The Singer
Enigma (1976), novels which combine a somewhat overready sensitivity with
sf-adventure instincts. Her Dancer Trilogy - Fire Dancer (1982), Dancer's
Luck (1983) and Dancer's Illusion (1983) - is a SPACE OPERA featuring a
passel of escaped slaves and a very fast starship. In Timeshadow Rider
(1986) two superpowered siblings must join together to save the Universe.
[JC]Other works: A Dead God Dancing (1979); Name of a Shadow (1980); The
Jaws of Menx (1981).See also: SUPERMAN.
MAXWELL, JACK
Ernest L. MCKEAG.
MAXWELL, JOHN C.
John S. GLASBY.
MAY, JULIAN
(1931- ) US editor and writer; married to T.E. DIKTY from 1953 to his
death in 1991, founding with him Publication Associates in 1957 (see his
entry for this and later enterprises); he also served as editor and agent
for all her mature work. She began publishing sf with "Dune Roller" for
ASF in 1951 but, except for some fan interests, became inactive in the
field for many years, during which time, under a number of pseudonyms, she
wrote something over 290 books, most of them nonfiction juveniles: many
were efficient presentations of science and nature topics, others
biographies. Pseudonyms of sf interest included Ian Thorne (see listing
below) and Lee N. Falconer, under which name she wrote A Gazeteer of the
Hyborian World of Conan (1977).In the 1980s JM turned her attention once
again to sf, making an immediate and very substantial impact with her Saga
of Pliocene Exile: The Many-Colored Land (1981) and The Golden Torc
(1982), both assembled as The Many-Colored Land ?
1982), plus The Nonborn King (1983) and The Adversary (1984), both
assembled as The Nonborn King ?
supplemented by The Pliocene Companion (1984), a guide to the sequence. A
second, closely linked, sequence, the Galactic Milieu books, began with
Intervention (1987; vt in 2 vols The Surveillance 1988 and The Metaconcert
1988),Jack the Bodiless (1992) and Diamond Mask (1994), with further
volumes projected. Underlying the increasingly complicated storyline of
the former sequence is what might be called a romance of vista: the
protagonists have fled via TIME TRAVEL from a 22nd century where they have
lived as internal exiles into deep prehistory, where at the bottom of time

they discover not only a land rich in potential but two apparently ALIEN
species in a state of deadly conflict over the young world. Much
additional material, from Celtic myths to intimations of HARD SF, is fed
into this vision, with an effect of romance and high purpose, leavened
intermittently by a Trickster protagonist or two. With Intervention the
overall sequence moves into contemporary times, the narrative being
charged by this point with dramatic irons in the fire and ironies galore,
as well as a sustaining concern with the attractive theme of psychic
evolution, as concentrated in a family of special folk and expressed in a
manner sometimes evocative of the work of Doris LESSING. [JC]Other works:
Black Trillium (1990) with Marion Zimmer BRADLEY and Andre
NORTON.Juveniles as Ian Thorne: Frankenstein * (1977 chap), film tie;
Godzilla (1977 chap), nonfiction; Dracula * (1977 chap), film tie; King
Kong (1977 chap), nonfiction; Mad Scientists (1977 chap), nonfiction; The
Wolf Man * (1977 chap), film tie; The Mummy * (1981 chap), film tie;
Frankenstein Meets Wolfman * (1981 chap), film tie; Creature from the
Black Lagoon * (1981 chap), film tie; The Blob * (1982 chap), film tie;
The Deadly Mantis * (1982 chap), film tie; It Came from Outer Space *
(1982 chap), film tie.About the author: The Work of Julian May: An
Annotated Bibliography ?
REGINALD.
MAYAKOVSKY, VLADIMIR (VLADIMIROVICH)
(1893-1930) Russian poet and playwright, a revolutionary from early
years, a Futurist poet whose verse radically shocked post-Revolution
RUSSIA. Of particular sf interest is his first fully fledged prose
SATIRICAL play, Klop (1929; trans Guy Daniels as The Bedbug in The
Complete Plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky [coll 1968 US]), in which, some
generations hence, a Soviet bureaucrat is kept in a zoo as a curious
example. Banya (1930; trans Guy Daniels in the same 1968 volume), set in
the contemporary USSR, employs a similar array of satirical tools. These
two plays were sufficiently sharp in their criticism of the blandness of
Soviet ideas that a good deal of official criticism descended on VM's
head. [JC]See also: THEATRE.
MAYHAR, ARDATH
(1930- ) US writer who began publishing poetry in the 1940s and who wrote
historicals and Westerns as Frank Cannon and other non-sf/fantasy books as
John Killdeer and Sarah MacWilliams. She began publishing sf/fantasy with
"The Cat with the Sapphire Eyes" for Weirdbook #8 in 1973; she integrated
this tale into the second volume of her Kyrannon sequence, which comprises
her first novel, How the Gods Wove in Kyrannon (1979), and The Seekers of
Shar-Nuhn (1980). Like much of her work, this sequence makes use of the
instruments of SCIENCE FANTASY - specifically, magical devices and powers
which are justified by recourse to "scientific" explanations, generally
rooted in the past - to heighten tales whose protagonists, often
adolescent girls, exhibit a goodness which is sometimes shining. In the
Kyrannon books, folk of transparent decency must resist a tyrant whose
disruptive influence threatens to sour the harmony between human beings
and Nature. The most sf-like of her subsequent novels are Khi to Freedom
(1983), Golden Dream (1983), Exile on Vlahil (1984), which elaborately and

effectively describes life upon the eponymous planet, The World Ends in
Hickory Hollow (1985), Trail of the Seahawks * (1987) with Ron Fortier, a
game tie, A Place of Silver Silence (1988), a First-Contact tale for a
younger audience, and Monkey Station * (1989) with Fortier ( APES AND
CAVEMEN). This last novel, in which monkeys are dubiously granted
INTELLIGENCE and the power of speech as the by-product of a plague, is the
first of a projected series of game tie-ins. AM's work has been compared
to that of Andre NORTON, with which it shares transparent story-telling
and a sense of moral certainty. [JC]Other works: The Tyrnos fantasies,
being Soul-Singer of Tyrnos (1981) and The Runes of the Lyre (1982);
Golden Dream: A Fuzzy Odyssey * (1982), continuing the H. Beam PIPER
series; Warlock's Gift (1982); Lords of the Triple Moons (1983); The Saga
of Grittel Sundotha (1985); Makra Choria (1987); BattleTech: The Sword and
the Dagger * (1987), a game tie; The Wall (1987), horror; People of the
Mesa (1992), prehistoric fantasy.
MAYNARD, RICHARD (JOHN)
(1926- ) UK-born writer, resident in Australia, whose The Coconut Book
(1985) is of some interest. The Quiet Place (1988; vt The Return 1988 US)
rather overcomplicatedly describes the return to Earth of a group of
astronauts long years after the planet has mysteriously reverted to
savagery. There is some SEX between the descending males and the females
who need them. [JC]
MAYNE, WILLIAM (JAMES CARTER)
(1928- ) UK author of nearly 100 children's books. These are sometimes
realistic, sometimes - especially his later work - fantastic; the
fantasies, however, are treated in so down-to-earth a manner that more
often than not they naturalize the supernatural. His style, which is
sophisticated and sometimes oblique, is found difficult by some children;
others love him, as do the many critics who see WM as perhaps the most
distinguished living UK writer of children's fiction, regardless of genre.
His first book was Follow the Footprints (1953), the earliest of the many
treasure-hunt stories he was to write.WM has written very little pure sf,
and even Earthfasts (1966), his book most commonly spoken of in an sf
context, is as much FANTASY as sf in its fine tale of an 18th-century
drummer boy emerging from a present-day mound and being befriended by a
sceptical youth who feels impelled to interpret this and other fantastic
intrusions in scientific terms. The actual sf story Skiffy (1972) and its
sequel Skiffy and the Twin Planets (1982), for rather younger children,
while interesting - especially the latter - are not the equal of his best
work. WM's fiction typically (in a great variety of ways) depicts the past
impinging on the present, often as a kind of mystery to be decoded; his
work tends to climax in epiphanies where a chaotic present day is suddenly
illuminated in this way; some of his books feature psychic TIME TRAVEL and
ESP. His young-adult fiction is adult in every sense except the youthful
consciousnesses of its protagonists, and deserves wider currency among the
adult readership.Among WM's most highly regarded books, mostly for older
children, all of them containing fantastic elements (some very obviously,
some crucially but near-invisibly) are A Grass Rope (1957), The Glass Ball
(1961), Over the Hills and Far Away (1968; vt The Hill Road 1969 US), A

Game of Dark (1971), The Jersey Shore (1973), A Year and a Day (1976), IT
(1977), All the King's Men (coll 1982), Gideon Ahoy (1987),Antar and the
Eagles (1989), The Farm That Ran Out of Names (1990 chap) and Low Tide
(1992). Some books written ostensibly for younger children - like The Book
of Hob Stories (omni 1991), which assembles four earlier pamphlets: The
Blue Book of Hob Stories (coll 1984 chap), The Green Book of Hob Stories
(coll 1984 chap), The Red Book of Hob Stories (coll 1984 chap) and The
Yellow Book of Hob Stories (coll 1984 chap), followed by Hob and the
Goblins (1993); and The Blemyah Stories (coll 1987) - are no more
conventional children's literature than is the late work of Alan GARNER.
[PN]See also: CHILDREN'S SF.
MAYUMURA, TAKU
[r] JAPAN.
MEACHAM, BETH
(1951- ) US writer and editor who worked first as an sf bookseller before
joining ACE BOOKS in 1981, where she developed the careers of Greg BEAR,
Orson Scott CARD and Tim POWERS, among others; she also discovered James
P. BLAYLOCK and oversaw the revived Ace SF Specials. She left Ace for TOR
BOOKS in 1984, where as head of sf and fantasy she supervised the
company's unusually large sf editorial staff and worked with authors like
Card, Kim Stanley ROBINSON and Walter Jon WILLIAMS. In 1989 she resigned
as editor-in-chief to become executive editor with a general acquisition
brief.With her husband, Tappan King (1950- ), she wrote Nightshade *
(1976), a novel in the Weird Heroes sequence. She collaborated with Wayne
BARLOWE and Ian Summers on Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials (1979; rev
1987), and with Summers and Vincent DI FATE on Di Fate's Catalog of
Science Fiction Hardware (1980). With Baird SEARLES, Martin Last and
Michael Franklin she wrote A Reader's Guide to Science Fiction (1979), and
with Searles and Franklin A Reader's Guide to Fantasy (1982). She is
perhaps best known to the reading public for editing Terry's Universe
(anth 1988), an original anthology in memory of Terry CARR. [PNH]
MEAD, HAROLD (CHARLES HUGH)
(1910- ) UK writer. The first and better known of his sf novels, The
Bright Phoenix (1955), is a sombrely told post- HOLOCAUST tale in which a
reestablished but overregimented human culture tries unsuccessfully to
reinhabit abandoned parts of the Earth; it ends a little sentimentally
with a Second Coming. The other, Mary's Country (1957), tells of the quest
of a group of children - most of whose social peers have been killed by
plague - for a perfect society. [JC]
MEAD, SHEPHERD
Working name of US author (resident in Switzerland) Edward Mead (1914- ),
who has been active in various genres. SATIRE and comedy combine in most
of his works, including his sf and fantasy novels: The Magnificent
MacInnes (1949; vt The Sex Machine 1950), in which consumer society is
satirized through the story of an electronic device that can predict
personal preferences; The Big Ball of Wax (1954), in which Madison Avenue
techniques are applied to corrupt a device that permits people to enter
vicariously into the lives of others, a technique whose potential for good

is subverted into a kind of feelie; and The Carefully Considered Rape of
the World (1966), in which ALIENS artificially inseminate Earth females.SM
worked in advertising before turning to writing, and his experience was
put to good use not only in The Big Ball of Wax, the most interesting of
his sf novels, but also in his best-known work (not sf), How to Succeed in
Business Without Really Trying (1952), for the staged version of which he
shared a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony. [JC/PN]See also: LEISURE; MEDIA
LANDSCAPE.
MEDIA LANDSCAPE
The degree to which COMMUNICATIONS technology (and foreseeable future
extensions of it) was replacing the natural world with a "media landscape"
was scarcely noticed until the 1950s. Coined to denote a world dominated
by the images of advertising and the popular arts (among which sf images,
especially the iconography of movies and magazine covers, loomed large),
the phrase was initially used to describe the obsessions of Pop artists
and media critics such as Eduardo Paolozzi (1924- ), Andy Warhol
(1930-1987), Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) and Rayner Banham (1922-1988).
The phrase, and indeed the idea underlying it, may seem quaint today; but
with the benefit of hindsight we can see how the notion of the media
landscape so popular in the 1960s and 1970s progressed naturally, through
both developments in technology and the expansion of what human beings
were prepared to conceive as feasible, to the VIRTUAL REALITY of the 1980s
(in speculation) and 1990s (in fact).Of course, the media landscape was
there before the 1950s, and sf had reflected it in various ways. The idea
that the media can be used to manipulate people had long been extant. In
George ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) this theme takes a directly
political form: the media are represented not only by the ubiquitous
posters of "Big Brother" but also by the "telescreens" which act as
two-way channels for propaganda and surveillance. Similar political use of
the media has featured frequently in sf; examples are in Ray BRADBURY's
FAHRENHEIT 451 (1953), Kurt VONNEGUT's "Harrison Bergeron" (1961) and
Philip K. DICK's The Penultimate Truth (1964). More often, sf has
portrayed future societies controlled by the media in more oblique ways.
McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride (1951), a book about the psychological
subtleties of advertising, contains a passing tribute to Fritz LEIBER,
whose "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" (1949) is about exploitation of the
female image by ad-men. Leiber returned to the theme of advertising - a
major theme in 1950s sf - in The Green Millennium (1953), set in a future
when the walls of private apartments are lined with ads. Frederik POHL's
and C.M. KORNBLUTH's THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1953) is a more extended satire
on the all-powerful admen; Pohl's much later solo sequel, The Merchants'
War (1984), seemed an anachronism. Other 1950s stories about advertising
include Pohl's "The Tunnel Under the World" (1954), Shepherd MEAD's The
Big Ball of Wax (1954) and (in part) Dick's The Simulacra (1964). Daniel
F. GALOUYE's Counterfeit World (1964 UK; vt Simulacron-3 1964 US) is about
a society which turns out to be a computer simulation generated for
purposes of market research; many of Ron GOULART's stories satirize
advertising techniques.Manipulation to the extent that one suspects that
one's very reality is a fiction ( PARANOIA) can give rise to a belief in
the "new demonology" - the idea that the artificial landscape has alien

inhabitants with evil powers. Literal treatments of "demons" taking over
the media include "Ether Breather" (1939) by Theodore STURGEON and "The
Waveries" (1945) by Fredric BROWN, both stories about creatures which
inhabit the airwaves, tampering with our communications. The writer who
took the new demonology most seriously was William S. BURROUGHS; in The
Ticket that Exploded (1962; rev 1967) and Nova Express (1964) he showed
the human race at the mercy of the "Nova Mob" and other alien parasites
who used the media (and drugs) as their means of control. Burroughs
asserted that life was "a biologic film" and that the purpose of his
writing was to help us break out of the "stale movie" into the "gray room"
of silence. This is not entirely different from the wishful conservatism
of Brown's "The Waveries", in which the USA abandons electricity and
reverts to a rural economy. Barrington J. BAYLEY's "An Overload" (1973) is
about computer-generated demons who adopt the personage of gangster-movie
stars.Not all media-men are demons, however, and some stories deal with
those who attempt to use their power to good effect. Norman SPINRAD's BUG
JACK BARRON (1969) concerns the compere of a phone-in chat-show in the
1980s who finds himself in a position to challenge the political and
industrial powers that be. Most of the action actually takes place "on the
air", before an audience of millions, making this a novel set almost
entirely within the media landscape. Spinrad returns to this area in
several of the stories in No Direction Home (coll 1975), and, much later,
in Little Heroes (1987), an sf novel about the music business in a
dystopian urban world. Several of Dick's novels deal with media-men, such
as Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965), in which a
post- HOLOCAUST world is held together by a disc-jockey's broadcasts from
an orbital satellite, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), in
which a famous tv personality is thrust into a world where nobody
recognizes him. Algis BUDRYS's Michaelmas (1977) concerns a roving newsman
who, through a secret COMPUTER link-up, is in fact the benevolent dictator
of the world.One of the ways in which the media create news is by invading
the privacy of individuals in order to gratify the curiosity of others. D.
G. COMPTON's The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1974; rev vt The
Unsleeping Eye 1974 US; vt Death Watch 1981 UK) is about a tv-man with
"camera eyes" who follows a dying woman in order to record her last
indignities for the entertainment of a mass audience; at the climax the
ethically awakened reporter elects to become blind. The story is continued
in Windows (1979 US). Many other tales deal with pornography, violence and
vicarious suffering; e.g., Arthur C. CLARKE's "I Remember Babylon" (1960),
Robert SILVERBERG's "The Pain Peddlers" (1963) and Thorns (1967), Robert
SHECKLEY's "The Prize of Peril" (1958), Dan MORGAN's The Richest Corpse in
Show Business (1966) and Brian STABLEFORD's The Mind-Riders (1976). A
particularly gruesome example is Christopher PRIEST's "The Head and the
Hand" (1972), in which a tv entertainer has his limbs amputated and
climaxes his "act" with his decapitation. Anything is grist to the media
mill, from violence to TIME TRAVEL: McLuhan's "global village" extending
through time as well as space. This has been dramatized in sf stories in
which the media literally invade the past in search of material. Isaac
ASIMOV's "The Dead Past" (1956) features a woman obsessed with watching
her dead child on the "chronoscope", Harry HARRISON's The Technicolor Time
Machine (1967) is a humorous treatment of a film crew's adventures in

history, and J.G. BALLARD's "The Greatest Television Show on Earth" (1972)
is a satire on the tv companies' attempts to film such events as the
parting of the Red Sea "live". These sf exaggerations point up the extent
to which the media have brought about la societe du spectacle.In such
stories as Ballard's "The Subliminal Man" (1963), in which vast hoardings
are erected alongside motorways to flash subliminal messages into drivers'
brains, even the unconscious is annexed by the media landscape. Of course,
manipulation of the desires of the unconscious has long been recognized as
part of advertising, and the media use a complex language of signs in
order to speak to it. Semiotics, as applied to popular culture by Roland
Barthes (1915-1980) in his Mythologies (1957; trans 1972), testifies to
this. All human creations are, in a sense, media of communication, since
they are coded with latent "messages"-particularly such everyday things as
architecture, furniture, clothing and vehicles. This is the conceptual
territory that Ballard has made very much his own, particularly in the
"condensed novels" collected in THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION (1970; vt Love and
Napalm: Export USA 1972 US; rev 1990 US). In these nonlinear stories he
juxtaposes elements of the media landscape of the 1960s, from the
architecture of motorways and multistorey carparks to the bodies of
Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, from the styling of cars and kitchen
gadgets to the televised violence of Vietnam and President Kennedy's
assassination. He blends these external "facts" with the private memories
and fantasies of his characters, and with the neutral language of medical
reports and astronomical data. THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION is a selfconscious
book (Ballard has been much influenced by the Pop artists) but it is the
most sustained attempt in sf to deal with the media landscape and its
massive influence on all our lives. Later Ballard stories have also dealt
with the media, such as "The Intensive Care Unit" (1977), which concerns a
society in which marriage and family life are conducted entirely by tv:
nobody ever meets anyone else in the flesh.Other sf works which have to
some extent been influenced by McLuhan and the ideas about the media which
became fashionable in the 1960s include John BRUNNER's Stand on Zanzibar
(1968), Dean R. KOONTZ's The Fall of the Dream Machine (1969), Michael
MOORCOCK's Jerry Cornelius novels, John T. SLADEK's The Muller-Fokker
Effect (1970), J-M. LE CLEZIO's Les Geants (1973; trans as The Giants
1975) and Barry N. MALZBERG's The Destruction of the Temple (1974). "The
Girl who was Plugged In" (1973) by James TIPTREE Jr is a savage story
about the creation of a jet-set member of "the beautiful people" for
purposes of advertising; in reality the woman is an ANDROID with no
independent intelligence, controlled through the nervous system of a
horribly exploited "ugly duckling". The language of the story cleverly
reflects the chill of a society whose cruelties are largely unconscious
and affectless.About the end of the 1970s traditional sf about the media
seemed to wither away almost overnight: during the 1980s harsh satires
about the world of admen, once almost commonplace, became scarce (although
some of sf's satirical spleen transferred itself to the closely related
field of rock MUSIC in search of new media targets). One or two films such as Le PRIX DU DANGER (1983), based on Sheckley's "The Prize of
Peril", and the very similar The RUNNING MAN (1987), based on The Running
Man (1982) by Richard Bachman (Stephen KING) - focused on the theme of
social violence institutionalized by tv game-shows, but they looked

curiously old-fashioned. The best sf media (or anti-media) films of the
1980s were John CARPENTER's THEY LIVE (1988) and David CRONENBERG's
VIDEODROME (1982), especially the latter - but perhaps more typical of the
new attitude towards the media was BLADE RUNNER (1982), where the vast,
seductively moving advertising hoardings form a ubiquitous and insinuating
backdrop - but nevertheless a backdrop, against which the story proper is
played.In general, what happened in the 1980s was that sf about the media
became more fascinated with potential real futures than with satirical
ones. Stories like The Space Merchants were never intended to be serious
predictions of a possible tomorrow: they exaggerated aspects of the
present in order to comment upon, not the future, but that present itself.
By the 1980s sf writers were becoming aware that the communications of the
future would be qualitatively quite different from those of the present,
and they threw themselves into the virgin speculative territory with
abandon. The theme of the media became absorbed into the broader theme of
a wired-up world, with the media being seen as only a part of a vision of
vast communications networks of such complexity as to be almost
autonomous, out of control - a vision of a world in which humans could
(perilously) swim but which they could not repudiate. In short, the
media-landscape story was supplanted by CYBERPUNK, with its focus on
VIRTUAL REALITY (further relevant stories are discussed under both those
headings). This was a logical development, for the entertainment industry
has always been hell-bent (as many of the earlier sf writers realized) on
creating virtual realities - if primitive ones - for its captive audiences
to occupy, and the cyberpunk writers simply envisaged the technologies
that would develop from, at least in part, this very phenomenon. Of
course, many such stories contain direct comments on the media world, as
in William GIBSON's Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), one of whose four
protagonists is a "stim" star for Sense-Net, the giant entertainment
corporation which prepares virtual-reality scenarios of impossible glamour
into which the proletariat can tune and which, for a time, they can
inhabit. It is this kind of engulfing media future that now preoccupies
sf. [DP/PN]
MEDICINE
Medical applications of TECHNOLOGY comprise one of the few areas where
the cutting edge of scientific research impinges directly and intimately
upon ordinary human life. New medicines are so rapidly brought into
everyday use that it is easy to forget how rapid progress has been, and
that barely 100 years separates us from the crucial CONCEPTUAL
BREAKTHROUGHS associated with the development of organic chemistry and the
germ theory enunciated by Louis Pasteur (1822-1895). Even people who can
find little else to say in favour of science and technology (
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF) are usually grateful for the benefits of
scientific medicine, although the rapid recent growth of "alternative
medicine" has shown that even this gratitude has its limits. So urgent is
the human need for better medicine that the field has always been home to
legions of quacks and charlatans offering hopeful panaceas for all ills (
PSEUDO-SCIENCE); the literary imagination has inevitably reflected and
magnified these hopes in fantasies of resurrection, rejuvenation and
IMMORTALITY - usually couched, of course, as cautionary tales - and the

ideative apparatus of sf has been promiscuously deployed in stories of
these types. Medical researchers and their endeavours have been objects of
central concern in sf ever since Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein, or The
Modern Prometheus (1818; rev 1831). Because of the urgency with which
medical matters concern us, plots involving new cures (and, of course, new
diseases) have an inbuilt dramatic quality which readily recommends them
to speculative writers inside and outside the genre. Thanks to writers
like Robin COOK one can today recognize a subgenre of "medical thrillers"
whose products very often stray over the sf borderline. Several notable sf
writers have been MDs, including Michael BLUMLEIN, Miles J. BREUER,
Michael CRICHTON, Arthur Conan DOYLE, David H. KELLER and Alan E. NOURSE.
M.P. SHIEL and J.G. BALLARD both studied medicine for a while; although
neither graduated, the influence of their studies is indelibly marked on
much of their work.Early US sf is replete with what one might call, after
the example of Oliver Wendell Holmes, "medicated novels", mostly dealing
with mental aberration ( PSYCHOLOGY) or the increasingly problematic
question of the precise relationship between body and soul. Bizarre
medical experiments are described in such early works as Nathaniel
HAWTHORNE's "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844) and Edgar Allan POE's "The
Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845). It was, however, UK writers who
took up such themes more boldly in the latter half of the 19th century, in
such novels as Robert Louis STEVENSON's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde (1886) and H.G. WELLS's The Island of Dr Moreau (1896). In keeping
with the traditions of the day, these experiments almost always go wrong,
usually horribly. Even techniques which have since become realized, to the
evident betterment of the human condition - organ transplantation,
chemical contraception and medical cyborgization ( CYBORGS) - were
frequently deployed by early sf writers in vivid horror stories or contes
cruels. Brain surgery offered considerable melodramatic scope to the
writer of medical horror stories, exploited to the full in W.C. Morrow's
"The Monster-Maker" (1887) and S. Fowler WRIGHT's "Brain" (1932), as did
stories of radiation-treatment gone awry ( MUTANTS). Even Sir Ronald Ross
(1857-1932), who received the Nobel Prize for his work on malaria,
deployed his expert knowledge thus in his only sf story, "The Vivisector
Vivisected" (written c1889; 1932). One can also identify a small-scale
subgenre of "medical nightmare" stories involving hallucinations - usually
vividly gruesome ones-suffered under anaesthetic; these run from Wells's
"Under the Knife" (1897) to Neil BELL's Death Rocks the Cradle (1933 as by
Paul Martens).Much modern sf continues this pessimistic tradition. C.M.
KORNBLUTH's tale of the use and abuse of medical equipment timeslipped
from the future, "The Little Black Bag" (1950), is one of the most famous
sf contes cruels, and Daniel KEYES's classic FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (1957;
exp 1966) is a tragedy of unparalleled poignancy. Bernard WOLFE's LIMBO
(1952) recruits medical technology to put an ironic twist on the idea of
disarmament. Walter M. MILLER's "Blood Bank" (1952), William TENN's "Down
Among the Dead Men" (1954), Cordwainer SMITH's "A Planet Named Shayol"
(1961) and Larry NIVEN's "The Organleggers" (1969) are other stories in a
vividly dark vein. Caduceus Wild (1959; 1978) by Ward MOORE and Robert
Bradford, in which doctors run the world, is as DYSTOPIAN as other
contemporary stories in which some special-interest group has become
dominant; James E. GUNN's The Immortals (1955-60; fixup 1962) is similarly

but more thoughtfully downbeat, while such Alan E. Nourse novels as The
Mercy Men (1968; rev from A Man Obsessed 1955) and The Bladerunner (1974)
deploy dystopian imagery in a carefully ambivalent fashion. The tradition
continues into recent times in such novels as Dr Adder (1984) by K.W.
JETER, Resurrection, Inc. (1988) by Kevin J. ANDERSON, The Child Garden
(1989) by Geoff RYMAN, Body Mortgage (1989) by Richard ENGLING and
Crygender (1992) by Thomas T. THOMAS.Linked to the horror-story tradition
of accounts of misfired medical experiments is a much less prolific comic
tradition, in which things go wrong with rather less awful consequences;
Wells' "The Stolen Bacillus" (1895) is an early example. The proposal by
the Russian physiologist Serge Voronoff (1866-1951) that testosterone
generated by transplanted monkey-testicles might "rejuvenate" ageing men
inspired some sf black comedies, including Bertram GAYTON's The Gland
Stealers (1922); a farcical film on a similar theme was MONKEY BUSINESS
(1952). A modern black comedy of medical chicanery is Joe HALDEMAN's
Buying Time (1989; vt The Long Habit of Living 1989 UK). Like Raymond
Hawkey's thriller Side-Effect (1979), the latter assumes that medical
miracles might well be reserved by their creators for the favoured few,
extrapolating the old medical adage that the best specialism is diseases
of the very rich.The Great Plague Story, memorably featured in Mary
Shelley's The Last Man (1826) and Jack LONDON's The Scarlet Plague (1912;
1915), remains a melodramatic staple of the DISASTER story. Notable
examples of stories whose main focus is on the medical effort to counter
or control such plagues include Cry Plague! (1953 dos) by Theodore S.
Drachman MD, The Darkest of Nights (1962; vt Survival Margin US) by
Charles Eric MAINE, Plague from Space (1965; vt The Jupiter Legacy) by
Harry HARRISON, The Andromeda Strain (1969) by Michael Crichton, Time of
the Fourth Horseman (1976) by Chelsea Quinn YARBRO and Disposable People
(1980) by Marshall Goldberg MD and Kenneth Kay. Interesting stories of
plagues which bring ambiguous benefits as well as posing threats include
Walter M. Miller's "Dark Benediction" (1951), Octavia E. BUTLER's Clay's
Ark (1984) and Greg BEAR's BLOOD MUSIC (1985). The newest real-world
plague, AIDS, has called forth a rapid response in the sf field; Dan
SIMMONS's Children of the Night (1992) features the notion that a cure
might be found in vampires' blood. Extravagant stories of medical
responses to AIDS include F.M. BUSBY's The Breeds of Man (1988), Thomas M.
DISCH's The MD: A Horror Story (1991) and Norman SPINRAD's "Journals of
the Plague Years" (1988).A much more positive image of medical science is
seen in stories in which doctors struggle to understand and solve exotic
problems which arise with respect to the interaction between humans and
ALIENS. There are two particularly notable sf series of this kind: Murray
LEINSTER's Med Service series (1957-66) and James WHITE's ongoing Sector
General series (begun 1957). L. Ron HUBBARD's earlier Ole Doc Methuselah
series (1947-50; coll 1970) is unfortunately weakened by the eponymous
hero's interest in eccentric theories. White's series is especially
interesting by virtue of the warmly liberal humanism of its attitude
towards aliens - gracefully making a point which is much more laboured in
Piers ANTHONY's sitcom-like series about an interplanetary dentist,
Prostho Plus (fixup 1971) - although White can also function effectively
in the medical horror/thriller vein, as in Underkill (1979). Alan E.
Nourse's Star Surgeon (1960) is a notable juvenile sf novel cast in the

earnest and constructive mould. These stories of fairly ordinary people
tackling localized problems tend to be more interesting than tales in
which the discovery of a panacea promises an instant end to all ills,
although some such stories can be effective; examples include S. Fowler
Wright's "The Rat" (1929), Charles L. HARNESS's The Catalyst (1980) and
Kate WILHELM's rather ambivalent Welcome, Chaos (1983).A theme anthology
is Great Science Fiction about Doctors (anth 1963) ed Groff CONKLIN and
Noah D. Fabricant MD. [BS/JSc]
MEDIEVAL SOCIETIES
CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; MAGIC; POLITICS; SWORD
AND
SORCERY.
MEEK, [Colonel] S(TERNER St) P(AUL)
(1894-1972) US Army ordnance officer and writer, active for about a
decade in the US PULP MAGAZINES after the publication of his first story,
"The Murgatroyd Experiments" for AMZ Quarterly in 1929. Many of his
stories are in a series featuring Doctor Bird and Operative Carnes,
running from "The Cave of Horror" (1930) to "Vanishing Gold" (1932); they
have not been collected in book form. The Monkeys Have No Tails in
Zamboanga (coll 1935) assembles a series of sf tall tales; some are
amusing. Of several novels published in magazine form, only two LOST-WORLD
tales about survivors of ATLANTIS, The Drums of Tapajos (1930 AMZ; 1961)
and its sequel Troyana (1932 AMZ; rev 1961), reached book form. [JC]Other
work: Arctic Bride (coll 1944 chap UK).See also: ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION; GREAT AND SMALL.
MEET THE APPLEGATES
Film (1990). New World/Cinemarque. Dir Michael Lehmann, starring Ed
Begley Jr, Stockard Channing, Bobby Jacoby, Cami Cooper, Dabney Coleman.
Screenplay Redbeard Simmons, Lehmann. 89 mins. Colour.In this sf/fantasy
SATIRE, a group of shapeshifting giant insects from the South American
rainforest, disturbed at humanity's destruction of their domain, disguise
themselves as human and infiltrate a small US town, where they plan to get
revenge by causing a nuclear meltdown at the local power plant. Their
knowledge of human life being gleaned largely from Dick and Jane books,
they begin as apparently stereotyped upright citizens, but are soon
corrupted by US society, becoming a secretary-screwing husband, a
consumer-product-obsessed shoplifting wife, a pregnant radical lesbian
feminist daughter and a dope-smoking son. MTA is witty and pointed, but
stops this side of hilarious because its affability dilutes the savagery
to which it appears to aspire. [PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES.
MEGAVILLE
Film (1990). White Noise/Heritage. Dir Peter Lehner, starring Billy Zane,
J.C. Quinn, Grace Zabriskie, Kristen Cloke, Daniel J. Travanti, Stefan
Gierasch. Screenplay Lehner, Gordon Chavis. 95 mins. Colour.An impressive
but very low-budget picture, updating some of the feel of Jean-Luc
Godard's ALPHAVILLE (1965) in its vision of a transformed future USA
(played oddly but effectively by present-day Switzerland) divided into
independent zones. The disguised hero (Zane) is sent from his puritanical

homeland, where the electronic MEDIA are outlawed, by a dying "Big
Brother" figure (Travanti) into the wide open city of Megaville, where
corrupting entertainments like tv are still available, to search for a
device that enables the user to experience the recorded consciousness of
another person. As in TOTAL RECALL (1990) the hero is gradually led to
question his own identity, in this case coming to wonder whether he is
indeed the criminal he is supposed to be impersonating. M is a bleak and
cynical film, with a supporting cast of well played sinister characters.
[KN]
MEGAVORE: THE JOURNAL OF POPULAR FICTION
The SCIENCE-FICTION COLLECTOR .
MEIER, SHIRLEY
[r] S.M. STIRLING.
MEKAGOJIRA NO GYAKUSHU
GOJIRA.
MELAMED, DAVID
[r] ISRAEL.
MELCHIOR, IB
[r] The OUTER LIMITS ; REPTILICUS; ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS; The TIME
TRAVELERS .
MELDE, G.R.
Dennis HUGHES.
MELIES, GEORGES
(1861-1938) French film pioneer. A natural showman, GM began his
theatrical career as a conjurer, designing his own trick gadgets. In 1888
his wealthy family provided him with the finances to buy the Theatre
Robert-Houdin, and his magic shows there became famous. In 1896, inspired
by the Lumiere brothers, he acquired a motion-picture camera and began
making his own short films. He realized the medium's potential for
creating illusions, and was soon producing many films utilizing trick
photography as well as the stage effects built into his theatre.His most
successful period was 1897-1902. It was in 1902 that he made Le VOYAGE
DANS LA LUNE , which is regarded as the first sf movie epic (21 mins long,
at a time when 5min movies were the norm). His work was popular in many
countries, but even by 1904, when he made Le VOYAGE A TRAVERS L'IMPOSSIBLE
, audiences were requiring more than just trick films. By 1913 he was
forced out of business. During WWI many of the negatives of his films were
destroyed, and much of his work was lost forever. He enjoyed a comeback in
the late 1920s when his surviving films were rediscovered by the French
intellectuals of the period. He died with the satisfaction of being
recognized as one of the CINEMA's true innovators; he had pioneered many
of the techniques on which all subsequent sf cinema has been based.He has
also been claimed, retrospectively, as a Surrealist pioneer, but the truth
is that his emphasis on mere trickery (and also his use of what was in
effect a proscenium arch, so that all action is seen as if it is stage
action witnessed from the seats of a theatre) is a long way removed from
art; not only does it seem crude now but, after the novelty had worn off,

it quickly came to seem crude then. [JB/PN]
MELLA, JOHN
(? - ) US writer whose Transformations (fixup 1975) is an ALTERNATE-WORLD
tale about the quest for a transvestite actor; it is set in a 19th-and
20th-century USA and Europe transfigured by time (the narrator, WS or
William Shakespeare, does not die until a movable 1916) and geography (the
two continents have been arbitrarily merged, and are haunted by
Hollywood). A FABULATION dense with quotations - from authors extending
from Shakespeare himself through Jonathan SWIFT, VILLIERS DE L'ISLE ADAM
and W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) down to the Vladimir NABOKOV of Pale Fire
(1962) and Ada(1969)-Transformations also has clear affinities to the
1970s Jerry Cornelius novels by Michael MOORCOCK, and JM's tale presages
1980s literary sf by writers like Angela CARTER, Steve ERICKSON and David
THOMSON. Most significantly for sf, perhaps, is the similarity between
JM's vision of the UK - a dark, labyrinth-riddled land, half antique, half
transformed by extraordinary inventions - and that typically presented by
the writers of STEAMPUNK. [JC]
MELTZER, DAVID
(1937- ) US poet and novelist whose sf is almost entirely restricted to
two sequences of erotic novels published by ESSEX HOUSE at the end of the
1960s, though he published a very few stories earlier. The first sequence,
the Agency series - The Agency (1968), The Agent (1968) and How Many
Blocks in the Pile? (1969) - is a remarkably savage SATIRE of a
NEAR-FUTURE USA through a plot whose erotic nature (a young man is
indoctrinated by the eponymous organization into sexual slavery, and
himself becomes an agent for his masters) can readily be seen as a
metaphor illustrating the nature of post-industrial society.This vision is
even more sharply focused in the Brain Plant sequence - comprising Brain
Plant #1: Lovely (1969), #2: Healer (1969), #3: Out (1969) and #4: Glue
Factory (1969) - in which cartoonlike characters ricochet surreally
through a disjointed USA in a pre-programmed search for theme-park SEX,
while the secret masters - in this case the military-industrial complex rule on.Most of DM's work, from his first book, Poems (coll 1957 chap),
has been poetry, and he can be seen as a very late member of the Beat
Generation; his roots in that tradition help make clear the intersection
of erotic excess and political protest in his work. [JC]
MELUCH, R(EBECCA) M.
(1956- ) US writer whose first novel, Sovereign (1979), shows a competent
grasp of the conventions and venues of sf adventure while at the same time
refracting traditional material through an unusually complex protagonist,
who is the genetically precarious culmination of a breeding programme
haunted by the continuing image of his first enemy: his own father. There
are, perhaps, too many additional enemies for plausibility - as the
protagonist defeats them all, whether on Earth, on his own planet or in
space - but the relative inwardness of the tale is convincing throughout.
The Wind series - Wind Dancers (1981) and Wind Child (1982) - comes close
to sentimentality in its depiction of a shapeshifting species oppressed by
an evil corporation intent on exploiting their planet. Jerusalem Fire
(1985) more bracingly depicts a space-born Arab culture, but War Birds

(1989) again veers towards sentiment. Chicago Red (1990), which returns to
RMM's somewhat high-blown but energetically conceived best, is a tale of a
USA which has reverted to 18th-century models of kingship, with revolution
inevitable, and the eponymous leader in rousing fettle; and The Queen's
Squadron (1992) opposes - in the foregrounded manner which has become a
stylistic feature of her work - free mortals and their immortal
oppressors. [JC]
MELVILLE, HERMAN
(1819-1891) US writer best known for such radically symbolic novels as
The Whale (1851 UK; vt Moby-Dick 1851 US); the great whale of this novel
is an archetype of the more METAPHYSICAL variety of sf MONSTER, and the
spirit of the book has permeated much sf, notably Roger ZELAZNY's "The
Doors of his Face, the Lamps of his Mouth" (1965) and, rather
superficially, Philip Jose FARMER's "sequel" to HM's original, The Wind
Whales of Ishmael (1971). HM's blending, in Moby-Dick, of rational
explanation and romantic openness with the inexplicable was later to
become typical of sf. In The Confidence-Man, His Masquerade (1857), HM's
violent conflict with the dictates (or concept) of a manipulative destiny
may well have provided some sf writers with inspiration for contemporary
sf tales of justified PARANOIA.Of more direct sf interest is HM's short
story "The Bell-Tower" (1855), which appears in The Piazza Tales (coll
1856); rather reminiscent of the work of his friend Nathaniel HAWTHORNE,
it is the story, set in Renaissance Italy, of the construction of a
MACHINE-man whose function it will be to strike the hour on a large bell,
but which in the event kills its maker. The story can be read as
allegorical of mankind's hubris, and a comment on the implications of the
new era of mechanical invention and science that HM was beginning to
witness. [JC/PN]See also: HISTORY OF SF; ROBOTS.
MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN
Film (1992). Warner Bros. Dir John CARPENTER, starring Chevy Chase, Daryl
Hannah, Sam Neill, Michael McKean, Stephen Tobolowsky. Screenplay Robert
Collector, Dana Olson, William Goldman, based on Memoirs of an Invisible
Man (1987) by H.F. SAINT. 99 mins. Colour.Nick Halloway (Chase), a
feckless businessman, is turned invisible by an industrial accident. The
Government, represented by a CIA psycho (Neill), tries to capture Halloway
to use him for its own nefarious purposes, and he falls for a glamorously
unbelievable anthropologist (Hannah) between escapes, disguises, stunts
and tricks. After a good opening the film slips into a standard romantic
comedy/thriller vein, with Carpenter reprising the facelessly efficient
approach he used on STARMAN (1984). Several of its best images are lifted
directly from James Whale's The INVISIBLE MAN (1932), but the film hardly
uses its ambitious source novel, raising but then abandoning a central
point - that Halloway was such an average loser as to be invisible even
before he became literally so. The well achieved effects (Chase smoking a
cigarette whose smoke outlines his lungs, and many others) keep the film
interesting. [KN]
MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR
Film (1981). Memorial Films/National Film Finance Corporation/EMI. Dir
David Gladwell, starring Julie Christie, Christopher Guard, Leonie

Mellinger, Debbie Hutchings. Screenplay Kerry Crabbe, Gladwell, based on
The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) by Doris LESSING. 115 mins. Colour.Amid
NEAR-FUTURE scenes of urban squalor in Western London a middle-aged woman
(Christie) observes (mostly peering round a lace curtain) increasing
dereliction and social breakdown in the wake of some unexplained
catastrophe. She sometimes seems to penetrate a wall at which she often
stares, finding herself invisible amid the life of a late-Victorian family
in comfortable circumstances. Given a teenage girl (Mellinger) to care for
in the real world, she watches her mature into the efficient partner and
mistress of an idealistic young man who runs a community centre for
abandoned children. When urban life becomes almost intolerable, she leads
these people through the wall into the ALTERNATE WORLD of her dreaming. In
the source novel, the inner life of the protagonist, permeated by Sufistic
meditation, is central, but here, through a savage reductionism, its
visual equivalent is given by mere cameos of stable but emotionally
disabling Victorian life. Christie's fine performance as the almost
unspeaking observer is, through no fault of hers, deeply uncinematic. [PN]
MENASCO, NORMAN
[s] Wyman GUIN.
MENDELSOHN, FELIX Jr
(1906-1990) US writer of two unremarkable comic sf novels, Club Tycoon
Sends Man to Moon (1965) and Superbaby (1969). The former, in its spoofing
of the space race, sometimes scores an amusing point. [JC]
MENDELSON, DREW
(? - ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Star Train" for IASFM in
1978. His Pilgrimage (1981) grippingly presents a vision of a bleak postHOLOCAUST Earth, long abandoned by most humans except for those who
inhabit the planet's one remaining artifact, a vast city that moves slowly
across the devastated land. This city houses a genuine POCKET-UNIVERSE
culture, which has lost touch with the human past and has become ignorant
of the technologies which give it life. The adolescent protagonists' quest
for meaning ( CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH) takes them from the moribund
Tailend of the City to Frontend; the novel closes in an ambiguous
affirmation of renewal. DM's apparent retirement from the field after the
publication of this novel is a matter for considerable regret. [JC]MENDES,
HENRY PEREIRA Henry PEREIRA MENDES.
MENVILLE, DOUGLAS (ALVER)
(1935- ) US author and editor. He ed FORGOTTEN FANTASY 1970-71 and, with
R. REGINALD (whom see for further details), was advisory editor of the
various ARNO PRESS reprint book series; he and Reginald have also
collaborated on several books and anthologies. Solo, DM has written A
Historical and Critical Survey of the SF Film (1975); with Reginald and
Mary A. Burgess he wrote Futurevisions: The New Golden Age of the Science
Fiction Film (1985). He also compiled The Work of Ross Rocklynne: An
Annotated Bibliography ?
MERAK, A.J.
John S. GLASBY.

MERCHANT, PAUL
[s] Harlan ELLISON.
MERCIER, LOUIS-SEBASTIEN
(1740-1814) French writer best known for his numerous plays and for his
anecdotal journalism; he was active in the French Revolution, being
imprisoned during the Terror. His UTOPIA, L'an deux mille quatre cent
quarante 52*B]1771 UK; trans William Hooper as Memoirs of the Year Two
Thousand Five Hundred 1772; vt Astraea's Return, or The Halcyon Days of
France in the Year 2440 1797), depicts a future FRANCE governed
rationally, according to Enlightenment precepts as stirred by the
neoprimitivism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), and is a central
18th-century text, important particularly for any analysis of
pre-Revolutionary ferment in France. It was probably the first utopia to
be published in the USA, in 1795, in an edition which replicated the 1772
translation; unfortunately, LSM's expanded version of the text (1786
France) has never appeared in English. [JC]See also: ANONYMOUS SF AUTHORS;
BALLOONS; CITIES; FUTUROLOGY; NEAR FUTURE; SUSPENDED ANIMATION.
MERCURY
Mercury is the planet nearest the Sun, and hence is difficult to observe.
Until the late 19th century it was believed to rotate on its axis every 24
hours or so, but this opinion was displaced by that of Giovanni
Schiaparelli (1835-1910) and Percival Lowell (1855-1916), who contended
that it kept the same face permanently towards the Sun. 20th-century sf
writers thus pictured it as having an extremely hot "dayside", a cold
"nightside" and a narrow "twilight zone". This image persisted until the
1960s, when it was discovered that Mercury rotates on its axis rapidly
enough to have a day somewhat shorter than its year.The earliest visit to
Mercury was probably that of Athanasius KIRCHER in his Itinerarium
Exstaticum (1656), and it was generally included in other round tours of
the planets, including Emanuel SWEDENBORG's The Earths in Our Solar System
(1758) and George GRIFFITH's A Honeymoon in Space (1901). John MUNRO's A
Trip to Venus (1897) includes a detour to Mercury. The earliest novel in
which Mercury came into principal focus was Relation du Monde de Mercure
(1750 France) by Le Chevalier de Bethune; the first novel in English to be
set there was William Wallace COOK's SATIRE Adrift in the Unknown (1904-5;
1925). E.R. EDDISON's series of fantasy novels begun with The Worm
Ouroboros (1922) is likewise set on Mercury, but the name is used purely
for convenience. GENRE SF rarely employed Mercury as a milieu for exotic
adventure, preferring MARS and VENUS, but it does feature in Homer Eon
FLINT's "The Lord of Death" (1919; in The Lord of Death and the Queen of
Life [coll 1965]), Ray CUMMINGS's Tama of the Light Country (1930; 1965)
and its sequel Tama, Princess of Mercury (1931; 1966), and Clark Ashton
SMITH's "The Immortals of Mercury" (1932). An invasion from Mercury is
thwarted in J.M. WALSH's Vandals of the Void (1931), and Leigh BRACKETT
set one of her exotic romances there, "Shannach - the Last" (1952).
Attempts to use Mercury in more thoughtful stories with some fidelity to
astronomical knowledge were likewise infrequent in the pre-WWII pulps, the
first significant examples being Clifford D. SIMAK's "Masquerade" (1941;
vt "Operation Mercury") and Isaac ASIMOV's "Runaround" (1942).After WWII,

however, things picked up a little. Three juvenile novels featuring
Mercury are Lester DEL REY's Battle on Mercury (1956 as by Erik van Lhin),
Asimov's Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury (1956 as by Paul French;
vt The Big Sun of Mercury), and Mission to Mercury (1965) by Hugh WALTERS.
Alan E. NOURSE's memorable "Brightside Crossing" (1956) represents a
journey across the dayside of the planet as an adventurous feat akin to
the then-recent conquest of Everest. The nightside of Mercury features
ironically in Larry NIVEN's "The Coldest Place" (1964), but recent sf
usually employs Mercury as merely a convenient place to site bases for
studying the SUN, like the one in David BRIN's Sundiver (1980). Perhaps
the most enduring sf image of Mercury, though, is from Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's
THE SIRENS OF TITAN (1959), which offers an account of the Harmonia,
cave-dwelling lifeforms thriving on vibration and introduced to music by a
stranded astronaut. [BS]
MERCURY PRESS
The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION.
MEREDITH, JAMES CREED
(1875-1942) Irish writer, usually on philosophical subjects, who carried
that interest into fiction in The Rainbow in the Valley (1939), which
features scientists in communication with Martians, and discursively
compares and contrasts the two civilizations. [JC]
MEREDITH, RICHARD C(ARLTON)
(1937-1979) US writer who began publishing sf with "Slugs" for Knight
magazine in 1962. His first novel, The Sky is Filled with Ships (1969), is
an effective SPACE OPERA in which colonies revolt against a tyrannical
corporation. We All Died at Breakaway Station (1969) is a bleak, well
crafted space opera in a kind of Alamo setting, where a CYBORG must
withstand both external enemies and the devils of introspection. Run, Come
See Jerusalem! (1976) is a complex, thoroughly worked out TIME-PARADOX
novel. Time also figures centrally in the Timeliner sequence - At the
Narrow Passage (1973; rev 1979), No Brother, No Friend (1976; rev 1979)
and Vestiges of Time (1978; rev 1979), all 3 being assembled as The
Timeliner Trilogy (omni 1987 UK) - during the course of which ALIENS
attempt to change Earth's past, and, more importantly, to punish humanity
in various PARALLEL WORLDS. RCM's sense of history was acute and
atmospheric, and his ALTERNATE-WORLDS tales are, as a consequence,
hauntingly suggestive. Into these frameworks his heroes - wounded and
reluctant but ultimately stoic - fit neatly. [JC/PN]Other work: The
Awakening (1979).See also: HITLER WINS.
MERLE, ROBERT
(1908- ) Algerian-born French writer, recipient of the Prix Goncourt in
1949, known primarily for his work outside the sf field. His Un animal
doue de raison (1967; trans Helen Weaver as The Day of the Dolphin 1969
US) is an ingenious examination of scientific and political ethics
following the main character's breakthrough in COMMUNICATION with
dolphins. Malevil (1972; trans Derek Coltman 1974 US), joint winner of the
JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD in 1974, is a realistic and delicately
told post- HOLOCAUST survival and reconstruction story. Both have been

filmed ( The DAY OF THE DOLPHIN ; MALEVIL). Les hommes proteges (1974;
trans Martin Sokolinsky as The Virility Factor 1977 US) uses an sf
framework to satirize both sexist and feminist attitudes. An epidemic to
which boys, castrated men and men over 60 are immune is killing the male
population of the USA. The government is taken over by women and eunuchs,
and new changes are rung on the old sf theme with what some saw as cheery
ribaldry, others as cheap vulgarity. [MJ/PN]Other works: Madrapour (1976).
See also: FRANCE; LINGUISTICS; UNDER THE SEA.
MERLYN, ARTHUR
[r] James BLISH.
MERRIL, JUDITH
(1923- ) US-born writer and anthologist, in Canada from 1968. Born
Josephine Grossman, she preferred the forename Judith; she became Judith
Zissman by marriage, then changed her name to Merril before marrying
Frederik POHL in 1949; they were divorced in 1953. She occasionally used
the pseudonym Rose Sharon. JM was associated with the FUTURIANS fan group
during and after WWII. Her first published sf was "That Only a Mother" for
ASF in 1948. Her first novel, Shadow on the Hearth (1950; rev 1966 UK),
tells the story of an atomic war in effectively understated fashion from
the viewpoint of a housewife; one of the very best stories of nuclear
HOLOCAUST, it was televised as Atomic Attack.JM wrote two routine novels
in collaboration with C.M. KORNBLUTH as Cyril JUDD: Outpost Mars (1952;
rev vt Sin in Space 1961) is about the COLONIZATION of MARS, Gunner Cade
(1952) about an era in which WAR is a spectator sport ( GAMES AND SPORTS).
Her best short stories, which usually feature protagonists passively
caught up in world-changing events, and often hurt thereby, were a little
ahead of their time. The neatly heart-rending "Dead Center" (1954) was
reprinted in The Best American Short Stories: 1955 ed Martha Foley.
Daughters of Earth (coll 1968 UK; cut vt A Judith Merril Omnibus:
Daughters of Earth and Other Stories 1985 Canada) features 3 fine
novellas: the title story (1953) is a family saga set on a colony world;
"Project Nursemaid" (1955)-cut from the vt-concerns the problems of the
administrator of a space project which must adopt human embryos;
"Homecalling" (1956) is a story of contact with an ALIEN being. The
Tomorrow People (1960), an intense psychological mystery story, lacks the
emotional resonance of her best early work. She published very little
fiction after 1960. Her short-story collections, which overlap somewhat,
are Out of Bounds (coll 1960), Survival Ship and Other Stories (coll 1974)
and The Best of Judith Merril (coll 1976).JM began editing sf ANTHOLOGIES
in the early 1950s with Shot in the Dark (anth 1950), Beyond Human Ken
(anth 1952; with 6 of 21 stories cut 1953 UK; cut version vt Selections
from Beyond Human Ken 1954 US), Beyond the Barriers of Time and Space
(anth 1954), Human? (anth 1954) and Galaxy of Ghouls (anth 1955; vt Off
the Beaten Orbit 1959). She made her mark with the series of 12 "year's
best" anthologies she began in 1956: S-F The Year's Greatest
Science-Fiction and Fantasy (anth 1956); SF: 57 (anth 1957; vt SF The
Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume 1957);
SF 58 (anth 1958; vt SF The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy:
Third Annual Volume 1958); SF 59 (anth 1959; vt SF The Year's Greatest

Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Fourth Annual Volume); The 5th Annual of The
Year's Best S-F (anth 1960; vt The Best of Sci-Fi 5 1966 UK); The 6th
Annual of The Year's Best S-F (anth 1961; vt The Best of Sci-Fi 1963 UK);
The 7th Annual of The Year's Best S-F (anth 1962; vt The Best of Sci-Fi Two 1964 UK); The 8th Annual of The Year's Best SF (anth 1963; vt The Best
of Sci-Fi No. 4 1965 UK); The 9th Annual of The Year's Best SF (anth 1964;
vt 9th Annual S-F 1967 UK); 10th Annual Edition The Year's Best SF (anth
1965; vt 10th Annual SF 1967 UK); 11th Annual Edition The Year's Best S-F
(anth 1966); SF 12 (anth 1968; vt The Best of Sci-Fi 12 1970 UK); though
announced, SF 13 never in fact appeared. The UK edns omit some editorial
material and are numbered without regard to sense; The Best of Sci-Fi 3
(anth 1964 UK) ed Cordelia Titcomb Smith has no connection with the JM
series. A selection from the sequence was published as SF: The Best of the
Best (anth 1967). JM was an unusually eclectic anthologist, habitually
using stories from outside the SF MAGAZINES, thus helping to broaden the
horizons of the genre; she campaigned in her anthologies and in her
book-review column in FSF (May 1965-May 1969) for the replacement of the
term "science fiction" by SPECULATIVE FICTION. She was the first US
champion of the NEW WAVE (primarily associated with the UK magazine NEW
WORLDS), which she attempted to popularize in England Swings SF (anth
1968; cut vt The Space-Time Journal 1972 UK). She ed the first of the
Tesseracts series ( CANADA) of representative anthologies of Canadian sf,
Tesseracts (anth 1985).Her book collection now forms the basis of the
MERRIL COLLECTION OF SCIENCE FICTION, SPECULATION AND FANTASY, based in
Toronto. [BS]See also: DEFINITIONS OF SF; END OF THE WORLD; GENERATION
STARSHIPS; SCIENTIFIC ERRORS; SHARED WORLDS; SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED
EDITIONS; WOMEN SF WRITERS.
MERRIL COLLECTION OF SCIENCE FICTION, SPECULATION AND FANTASY
Founded in 1970 by Toronto Public Library in Canada, to house a major
donation by sf author and anthologist Judith MERRIL and substantially
added to since; known as the Spaced Out Library until 1 Jan 1991, and
housed from September 1995 in a Special Collections building at 239
College Street in Toronto. With more than 29,000 books and 19,000
periodicals in the reference section, this COLLECTION is one of the
world's more important sf research libraries. Among its holdings are many
complete runs of PULP MAGAZINES, a good collection of sf from CANADA, a
full set of ARKHAM HOUSE publications and a strong Jules VERNE collection.
The quarterly newsletter of the library's Friends is Sol Rising.In 1993-94
the library board attempted to cut the Collection's budget, threatening
its proposed move to a new, large building in 1995, and possibly
restricting access through a combination of staff cuts and, perhaps, user
fees. At an angry meeting in the Worldcon in 1994 the Friends of the
Merril Collection announced the formation of a new body, the Canadian
Science Fiction Foundation, to lobby for the Collection's survival. [PN]
MERRILL, ALBERT ADAMS
(? -? ) US writer of whom nothing is known beyond his renowned UTOPIA,
The Great Awakening: The Story of the Twenty-Second Century (1899), in
which a reincarnated 19th-century American is guided through the
technological wonderland which the USA has become 200 years in the future,

with electric cars and tv; everyone is paid the same, the state owns all
property, and happiness seems rife. [JC]
MERRIMAN, ALEX
[s] Robert SILVERBERG.
MERRITT, A(BRAHAM)
(1884-1943) US editor, real-estate developer and writer, primarily of
FANTASY, though he was influential among sf writers and readers as well.
His first years were occupied with newspaper journalism; he was a longtime
assistant editor of The American Weekly, becoming editor-in-chief in 1937
and remaining so until his death. His fiction was written as a sideline to
this busy career, which may explain why his output was relatively small.
He began publishing stories with Thru the Dragon Glass (1917 All-Story
Weekly as "Through the Dragon Glass"; 1932 chap); his first novel, The
Moon Pool ("The Moon Pool" 1918 All-Story Weekly; "The Conquest of the
Moon Pool" 1919 All-Story Weekly; fixup 1919), begins with the Shining
One, a deadly though insubstantial monster within a pool in Micronesia,
and moves on to a complicated lost-race melodrama ( ANTHROPOLOGY; LOST
WORLDS). (The posthumous Reflections in the Moon Pool [coll 1985], ed anon
[actually Sam MOSKOWITZ], is unrelated to the novel, containing a long
biography of AM by Moskowitz, a few prose items by AM, and some poetry,
letters and articles.) The Metal Monster (1920 Argosy; 1946), another
lost-race tale (and containing one of the characters from the previous
book), describes a collective ALIEN being, comprised of millions of metal
parts, who is absentmindedly kind to the explorer-protagonist. The Face in
the Abyss ("The Face in the Abyss" 1923 Argosy; "The Snake Mother" 1930
Argosy; fixup 1931) describes an ancient, almost extinct, semireptilian
race and its considerable wisdom. In The Ship of Ishtar (1924 Argosy; cut
1926; text restored 1949), his best novel, a man travels into a magical
world and falls in love with the beautiful female captain of the ship of
Ishtar; the highly coloured descriptive passages of this novel still have
a strong effect on readers. 7 Footprints to Satan (1927 Argosy; 1928),
filmed in 1929, is a horror/detective mystery, "Satan" being a greedy
villain. The Dwellers in the Mirage (1932 Argosy with happy ending; 1932;
with original intended unhappy ending 1944) is an effective lost-race
novel, one of AM's best. Burn Witch Burn! (1932 Argosy; exp 1933) and its
sequel, Creep, Shadow! (1934 Argosy; 1934; vt Creep, Shadow, Creep! 1935
UK), the first volume filmed as The DEVIL DOLL (1936), comprise a short
series about witchcraft and HORROR detection. The Fox Woman and Other
Stories (coll 1949) assembles short stories and uncompleted fragments, of
which the title story had already been incorporated into The Fox Woman and
The Blue Pagoda (coll of 2 stories 1946) by AM and Hannes BOK, "The Blue
Pagoda" being by Bok but linked to AM's fragment with connecting passages.
Bok's second completion of AM's work was The Black Wheel (1947), of which
less than a quarter is by AM.AM was influential upon the sf and fantasy
world not primarily through his storylines, which tended to be unoriginal,
or through the excesses of his style, but because of the genuine
imaginative power he displayed in the creation of desirable alternative
worlds and realities. He was extremely popular during his life, even
having a PULP MAGAZINE, A. MERRITT'S FANTASY MAGAZINE, named after him;

and Sam MOSKOWITZ, in Chapter 12 of Explorers of the Infinite (1963),
probably represents the view of many of AM's original readers that he was
the supreme fantasy genius of his day. Even though, by any absolute
literary standard, AM's prose was verbose and sentimental, and his
repeated romantic image of the beautiful evil priestess was trivial deriving as it did from a common Victorian image of womanhood (women being
either virgins or devils) - the escapist yearning for otherness and
mystery that he expressed has seldom been conveyed in sf with such an
emotional charge. [JC/PN]Other works: Three Lines of Old French (1919
All-Story Weekly; 1937 chap); The Drone Man (1934 Fantasy Magazine as "The
Drone"; 1948 chap); Rhythm of the Spheres (1936 TWS; 1948 chap); Woman of
the Wood (1926 Weird Tales; 1948 chap); The People of the Pit (1918
All-Story Weekly; 1948 chap); Seven Footprints to Satan and Burn Witch
Burn! (omni 1952); Dwellers in the Mirage and The Face in the Abyss (omni
1953).See also: AMAZING STORIES; DIME-NOVEL SF; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FAR
FUTURE; HISTORY OF SF; PARALLEL WORLDS; PUBLISHING; SF MAGAZINES.
MERWIN, SAM Jr
Working name of US writer W. Samuel Kimball Merwin Jr (1910- ), son of
the writer W.S. Merwin (1874-1936). SM's first sf story was "The Scourge
Below" for THRILLING WONDER STORIES in 1939. He later went to work for the
Beacon pulp chain, which published TWS and STARTLING STORIES, and was
appointed to the editorship of both in 1944, succeeding Oscar J. FRIEND;
although he had contributed to TWS and had done some editorial work for
the magazines, he claimed never actually to have read an SF MAGAZINE
before becoming editor of two of them. During his editorship he greatly
raised the standard of both titles, abolishing the juvenile slant they had
previously adopted, and making them the leading PULP MAGAZINES in the
field behind ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION. He contributed stories to both,
using his own name and the pseudonyms Matt Lee and Carter Sprague. He also
edited WONDER STORY ANNUAL and FANTASTIC STORY QUARTERLY - additional
companion magazines to Startling and TWS - before leaving in 1951 to
freelance. Further editorial forays included editing the first issues of
FANTASTIC UNIVERSE, a period as assistant editor for Galaxy
Publications-working on GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION, BEYOND FANTASY FICTION and
GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS - and editing the auspicious first 2 issues
of SATELLITE SCIENCE FICTION. He later went to work in Hollywood. Two
articles by SM - reminiscences of his pulp-magazine days - appeared in The
ALIEN CRITIC #9 and #10. Although comparatively little known, SM's record
shows him to have been one of the most capable of all sf magazine editors.
SM's fiction, on the other hand, was unexceptional; his detective novels,
beginning with Murder in Miniatures (1940), are perhaps better than his
sf, of which the best are probably The House of Many Worlds (1951) and its
sequel Three Faces of Time (1955 dos), assembled as The House of Many
Worlds (omni 1983). The Feb 1957 issue of Satellite contained "Planet for
Plunder", a novel written in collaboration with Hal CLEMENT; this was
actually a Clement novelette expanded by SM (who added alternate chapters
from another viewpoint) in order to fit Satellite's novel-oriented policy.
Chauvinisto (1976) took a DYSTOPIAN attitude towards female domination.
[MJE]Other works: Killer to Come (1953); The White Widows (1953; vt The
Sex War 1960); The Time Shifters (1971).See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS;

SPACESHIPS.
MESHTE NASTRESHU
PLANETA BUR.
MESMERISM
PSYCHOLOGY.
MESSAC, REGIS
[r] FRANCE.
MESSAGE FROM MARS, A
Film (1913). UK Films. Dir J. Wallett Waller, starring Charles Hawtrey,
E. Holman Clark, Chrissie Bell. Scenario Waller, based on the play A
Message from Mars (1899) by Richard Ganthony. 60 mins, cut to 54 mins.
B/w.This moral fable about a messenger sent from Mars to help bring humans
- especially the selfish Horace Parlan - to their senses was based on a
remarkably successful and long-running play, and the film version was
actually made in the theatre with the same actors. The story is very
similar to that of Scrooge being redeemed by the ghosts in Charles
DICKENS's A Christmas Carol (1843); very little is made of the alien
nature of the Martian, who is more like an angel. An earlier film version
of the same play was made in 1909 in New Zealand, probably much shorter;
the details and the film itself have been lost. A later (1921) US version
(Metro, 69 mins, cut to 63 mins), dir Maxwell Karger, gives the events of
the story a dream framework. A novelized version of the play is A Message
from Mars * (1912) by Lester LURGAN, the 2nd edn of which was illustrated
by stills from the film. [PN]
MESSIAHS
In the MYTHOLOGY of the Old Testament the Messiah is the deliverer of
prophecy, destined to lead the Jews to their salvation; the New Testament
claims that Jesus was the Messiah. The term is applied by analogy to any
saviour or champion whose arrival is anticipated, hoped for or desperately
needed. Because Christian images of the future have always been associated
with ideas of the Millennium and the Apocalypse, a preoccupation with
messiahs in the futuristic fiction of Western culture is only to be
expected. Many HEROES in sf play quasimessianic roles, but there is a
more-or-less distinct category of stories which deals specifically with
this aspect of Judaeo-Christian religion.Early sf featured numerous
messianic political fantasies, including H.G. WELLS's When the Sleeper
Wakes (1899) and Victor ROUSSEAU's The Messiah of the Cylinder (1917); the
most literal of these is M.P. SHIEL's Lord of the Sea (1901). Earnest
futuristic religious fantasies of the same period featuring messianic
figures include Guy THORNE's And it Came to Pass (1915) and Upton
SINCLAIR's They Call me Carpenter (1922). William Hope HODGSON's "The
Baumoff Explosion" (1919; vt "Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani") strikes a
more sceptical note in describing a re-enactment of the crucifixion which
goes hideously wrong. There is little or no trace of messianic mythology
in the sf PULP MAGAZINES until the 1940s, when it became possible for a
SUPERMAN to play a quasimessianic role, as in DARKER THAN YOU THINK (1940;
1948) by Jack WILLIAMSON. What Dreams May Come (1941) by J.D. BERESFORD
likewise features a superhuman messiah, although The Gift (1946) by

Beresford and Esme Wynne-Tyson is a more straightforward religious
fantasy. L. Ron HUBBARD's Final Blackout (1940 ASF; 1948) has an
inordinately charismatic hero who may qualify as a messiah. Ordinary men
sometimes take on similarly charismatic roles when they are transplanted
into PARALLEL WORLDS, as in Henry KUTTNER's The Dark World (1946 Startling
Stories; 1965) and James BLISH's The Warriors of Day
(1953).Messiah-figures increased in popularity when Millenarian fantasies
became newly fashionable in the wake of the Bomb. C.S. LEWIS's trilogy of
interplanetary religious romances was concluded in That Hideous Strength
(1945), in which a messianic role is assumed by Merlin, though he is in
effect an agent only of the trilogy's true messiah figure, Ransom. Christ
first appeared in GENRE SF in this period - in Ray BRADBURY's "The Man"
(1949) - but it was not until the 1960s that TIME TRAVEL was used to
confront Christ's life (and death) directly. In Michael MOORCOCK's BEHOLD
THE MAN (1966 NW; exp 1969) a time traveller takes Christ's place. Brian
EARNSHAW's Planet in the Eye of Time (1968) features a time-trip to
witness the crucifixion; Garry KILWORTH's "Let's Go to Golgotha" (1975)
uses a similar notion to construct a heavily ironic parable, as does Gore
VIDAL's Live from Golgotha (1992). Another protagonist who becomes Christ
is featured in Barry N. MALZBERG's The Cross of Fire (1982). In Philip
Jose FARMER's "Riverworld" (1966) the crucifixion is re-enacted in the
human race's new incarnation. The most notable story featuring a
re-enactment of the crucifixion on an alien world is "The Streets of
Ashkelon" (1962) by Harry HARRISON. Nativity stories are more common; they
include Robert F. YOUNG's "Robot Son" (1959), Edward BRYANT's "Eyes of
Onyx" (1971) and John CAMERON's The Astrologer (1972).The theme of
redemption through sacrifice is more or less explicitly linked to
Christian mythology in many sf stories, including Robert F. Young's
"Redemption" (1963), Cordwainer SMITH's "The Dead Lady of Clown Town"
(1964), Harlan ELLISON's "'Repent, Harlequin!' said the Ticktockman"
(1965) and R.A. LAFFERTY's Past Master (1968); Robert A. HEINLEIN's
STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND (1961) also belongs to this category. Clifford
D. SIMAK's Time and Again (1951; vt First He Died 1953) features a
resurrection of sorts as well as a sacrifice, as do Thomas M. DISCH's CAMP
CONCENTRATION (1968) and Jack Williamson's Firechild (1986). Explicit (and
mostly ironic) sciencefictional accounts of the actual Second Coming
include Edward WELLEN's "Seven Days Wonder" (1963), J.G. BALLARD's "You
and Me and the Continuum" (1966), Damon KNIGHT's The Man in the Tree
(1984), Philip Jose Farmer's Jesus on Mars (1979) and Theodore STURGEON's
posthumous Godbody (1986).More enigmatic messiahs, who offer little in the
way of redemption, are featured in Vidal's Messiah (1954; rev 1965),
Robert SILVERBERG's The Masks of Time (1968; vt Vornan-19 1970 UK), Brian
M. STABLEFORD's The Walking Shadow (1979), Stuart GORDON's Smile on the
Void (1982), Somtow Sucharitkul's (S.P. SOMTOW's) Starship and Haiku
(1984) and Kim Stanley ROBINSON's The Memory of Whiteness (1985). A fake
messiah, used as a political instrument, is featured in Robin SANBORN's
The Book of Stier (1971). An enigmatically sinister "messiah" is featured
in Philip K. DICK's THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH (1964), but
later Dick novels, including A Maze of Death (1970), play in ever more
complex and constructive fashion with messianic figures - a process which
culminates in The Divine Invasion (1981). The most elaborate messianic

fantasy in modern sf, however, is that in Frank HERBERT's DUNE (1965) and
its sequels, following the career and posthumous influence of Paul
Atreides, messiah to the desert world Arrakis. Herbert has also deployed
messianic mythology elsewhere in his work, notably in The Jesus Incident
(1979) with Bill RANSOM. Another writer constantly fascinated by messianic
mythology is Roger ZELAZNY, whose many fantasies in this vein include "A
Rose for Ecclesiastes" (1963), LORD OF LIGHT (1967) and Isle of the Dead
(1969). Many of Zelazny's messianic fantasies take a broadly syncretic
view of such figures, linking them to mythologies other than the Christian
one; a similarly generalized theory of messianic revivification is
featured in James KAHN's Time's Dark Laughter (1982).The most significant
contemporary religious fantasy about a messiah is James MORROW's
brilliantly bitter Only Begotten Daughter (1990), which cleverly deploys
sf motifs alongside more traditional imagery. Jack WOMACK's Heathern (1990
UK) is another almost seamless alloy of sf and religious fantasy. [BS]See
also: GODS AND DEMONS.
MESSMANN, JON
[r] Nick CARTER.
METAFICTION
FABULATION.
METAL HURLANT
French BEDSHEET-size, glossy colour COMIC-strip sf magazine launched Jan
1975 by Bernard Farkas, Jean-Pierre Dionnet (1947- ) and illustrators Jean
GIRAUD and Philippe DRUILLET; published by Les Humanoids Associees.
Conceived as a high-quality showcase for the growing number of French sf
artists, MH was an instant success, combining many aspects of sf narrative
with particular stress on the erotic, the grotesque and the horrific in
illustrated form. Although it was accused of putting emphasis on graphics
rather than content, its influence was notable throughout Europe and North
America, and translations of its contents appeared in similar magazines in
the USA ( HEAVY METAL), Italy, Spain, Holland and elsewhere. Major
contributors included Druillet, Giraud, Alexis (Dominique Valler
[1946-1977]), Enki BILAL, Vaughn BODE, Caza (Philippe Cazaumayou [1941]), Nicole Claveloux (1940- ), Serge Clerc (1957- ), Richard CORBEN,
F'Murr (Richard Peyzaret [1946- ]), Jean-Claude Forest (1930- ),
Jean-Claude Gal (1944- ), Dominique He (1949- ), Jacques Lob (1932-1990),
Sergio Macedo (1951- ), Nikita Mandryka (1940- ), Francis Masse (1948- ),
Jean-Claude Mezieres (1938- ), Rene Petillon (1945- ) and Jacques Tardi
(1946- ). Quarterly from its inception, MH became a monthly with #9 (Sep
1976), at which time it began to carry a warning forbidding sale to
minors. In Oct 1976 it spawned a companion magazine devoted exclusively to
female illustrators, Ah! Nana (9 issues, Oct 1976-Sep 1978). HM also
published a series of Hors Serie (specials) on themes such as the END OF
THE WORLD and H.P. LOVECRAFT. In 1985 Hachette bought the title and
Dionnet was replaced as editor by C. Fromental. With #123 (Sep 1986) a new
team took over, but by this time MH had declined in quality and
popularity, and the new editor-in-chief C. Generot succeeded only in
prolonging its life as a pale imitation of its early self. Its last issue
was #133 (Aug 1987). [RT/MJ]See also: ILLUSTRATION.

METALSTORM: THE DESTRUCTION OF JARED-SYN
Film (1983). Albert Band International. Dir and coprod Charles BAND,
starring Jeffrey Byron, Mike Preston, Tim Thomerson. Screenplay by coprod
Alan J. Adler. 83 mins. 3-D. Colour.More SCIENCE FANTASY than sf, this 3-D
exploitation movie, set in a tribalized future wasteland, is notable for
the absence of metalstorms and the fact that the totalitarian wizard
Jared-Syn is not destroyed. The hero saves his girl - after post- MAD MAX
fights with punk nomads and CYBORGS - from the lifeforce-absorbing wizard
who exits via another DIMENSION. Aimlessly routine, the film shows little
of the comic-book energy that characterizes some later Band productions.
[PN]
METAPHYSICAL REVIEW, THE
Bruce GILLESPIE; SF COMMENTARY.
METAPHYSICS
One of the qualities of sf that sometimes baffles new readers is the
relative infrequency, despite its label, with which it deals with the hard
sciences; indeed, sf deals as often with metaphysics as with PHYSICS. This
is not an accidental or a recent development; the exploration of
metaphysical questions has been central to sf at least since the time of
Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818; rev 1831).
This centrality was not thereafter abandoned: it recurs in the pioneering
sf of Edgar Allan POE, Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, Robert Louis STEVENSON and
pre-eminently H.G. WELLS. The basic metaphysical question is the notorious
cliche, "What does it all mean?" It is to the credit of sf that it has
consistently tackled this overwhelming (if nebulous) question, through a
fantastically elaborate series of thought experiments, sometimes trivial
and sometimes profound, in a way that the traditional novel of character
and social interaction is ill equipped to manage.Metaphysics is an
important field of philosophy; and from early on has been regularly used
as a synonym for ontology, the study of being or existence. Metaphysics is
defined in The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as "that branch of
speculation which deals with the first principles of things, including
such concepts as being, substance, essence, time, space, cause, identity
etc." Many of the thematic entries in this encyclopedia can be regarded as
pertaining as much to metaphysics as to the natural sciences, notably
ALTERNATE WORLDS, CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH, COSMOLOGY, DIMENSIONS,
END OF
THE WORLD, ENTROPY, ESCHATOLOGY, EVOLUTION, GODS AND DEMONS,
INTELLIGENCE,
LINGUISTICS, MYTHOLOGY, ORIGIN OF MAN, PARALLEL WORLDS, PERCEPTION
(under
which rubric sf dealing with questions of appearance versus reality is
discussed), REINCARNATION, RELIGION, SENSE OF WONDER, TIME PARADOXES, TIME
TRAVEL and VIRTUAL REALITY. Indeed, it is no longer possible, particularly
at the frontiers of theoretical physics, to distinguish between
speculation which belongs specifically to the natural sciences and
speculation which is metaphysical. However, if metaphysics can be
distinguished from science it is in this (the quotation is from Man is the
Measure [1976], by Reuben Abel, a good account for the layman of central

problems in philosophy): "Metaphysics is that branch of philosophy which
attempts to comprehend the Universe as a whole - not so much by examining
it in detail (which is the procedure of science) as by analysing and
organizing the ideas and concepts by means of which we examine and think
about the world."Thus, for instance, a central example of metaphysical sf
is Stanislaw LEM's SOLARIS (1961; trans 1970), which asks to what extent
can scientists studying a totally alien and apparently sentient planet
comprehend its essence, if to do so requires transcending categories of
thought that are limited by their very humanness. This question about the
limitation of our perceptions is one of the fundamental problems sf
regularly tackles; many further examples are discussed under ALIENS and
CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH. Confrontation with the alien, especially in sf
stories of the 1960s and after, is often seen in sf as leading to a higher
level of understanding, and a renewed sense of cosmic harmony. Robert
SILVERBERG has written several novels of this type, a good one being
Downward to the Earth (1970). Algis BUDRYS's ROGUE MOON (1960) projects
its protagonist into a maze of metaphysical self-discovery by confronting
him with a literal, murderous, alien maze on the Moon.Metaphysical
questions of identity are particularly closely associated with the work of
Philip K. DICK, who by blurring the distinctions between human and
artificial, between Man, ANDROID and MACHINE, forces the reader to
consider what qualities of consciousness constitute the essence of
humanity. (Gene WOLFE entered the same area of speculation with his
brilliant and subtle THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS [1972], in which one of
the protagonists, it transpires, is a simulation.) Dick, in fact, has a
finger in almost every metaphysical pie. He specializes in questions of
appearance and reality, and of solipsism, asking to what extent the
Universe as it appears to us is an objective fact, and to what extent it
is a mental construct, either individual or consensual. The novels of Ian
WATSON have characteristically met some of the most difficult questions in
metaphysics head-on and doggedly. Watson's special interest is also
whether our models of the Universe, especially as reflected in language (
LINGUISTICS), correspond to any external reality; at times he seems to go
further and suggest that the meaning and shape of the Universe is created
by the consciousnesses that observe it.Questions of good and evil in sf
are intimately bound up with questions of human EVOLUTION; to what extent
do we carry the mark of the amoral beast within us, imprinted in the more
primitive areas of our brains? Robert Louis STEVENSON's Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) asks this question, and the theme is still very
much alive today, in part through the work of such evolutionary
behaviourist popularizers as Desmond Morris (1928- ) and Robert ARDREY,
and in part through sf itself. An example of this kind of metaphysics
running wild in sf is Altered States (1978) by Paddy CHAYEFSKY, filmed as
ALTERED STATES (1980), in which, absurdly, cause and effect are reversed
(because consciousness may be coded in the DNA molecule, Chayefsky
proposes that alterations in consciousness may be somehow able to alter
our genetic make-up); his hero devolves first to hominid, then, briefly,
to primal chaos, undifferentiated cosmic matter.Reversals of cause and
effect are not new to sf. It is the very nature of the TIME-TRAVEL story
to confront us with thought-provoking paradoxes of this sort, and in so
doing, of course, to make us speculate about the question (not merely an

intellectual game) of whether the shape of our lives is created by free
will or determinism. Stories that deal with this issue are legion: two
good ones are "The Custodians" (1975) by Richard COWPER and Slaughterhouse
Five (1969) by Kurt VONNEGUT Jr. The very nature of causality has been
questioned by stories like Brian W. ALDISS's An Age (1967; vt Cryptozoic!
US) and other stories in which the arrow of time is reversed and time runs
backwards, such as Dick's Counter-Clock World (1967) and Martin AMIS's
Time's Arrow (1991) (further examples are discussed under PERCEPTION);
John CROWLEY's story "Great Work of Time" (1989) is perhaps of all
time-travel stories the one that most sharply (and movingly) questions the
relationship of cause and effect.The books of writers like Crowley, Gene
Wolfe and Ian Watson are actually about metaphysical exploration; but such
questions are by no means eschewed by writers of HARD SF. Arthur C. CLARKE
has throughout his career been as interested in metaphysics as in physics;
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) amply testifies to that, as do many of his
novels. Within hard sf and SPACE OPERA to this day, metaphysical
explorations consistently appear. Greg BEAR, in novels like BLOOD MUSIC
(1985) and EON (1985), perhaps cuts even deeper than Clarke, often by way
of fantastic premises: genetically engineered microorganisms that develop
a gestalt consciousness and ultimately transform humanity into a new state
of being in the former, and the exploration of a conceptually impossible
infinitely extended SPACE HABITAT in the latter. While it might be
objected that sf, though it indeed tackles metaphysical questions, has
very often done so with a gosh-wow, pop crudity - producing metaphysical
notions like brightly coloured flags without in the least understanding
them - this is certainly not true of the writers of its upper echelons, of
whom Bear is one. Another is Paul J. MCAULEY, whose Eternal Light (1991)
is the very model of a metaphysical space opera, luring the reader in with
promises of high adventure and low conspiracy, and then stirring
cosmogony, GENETIC ENGINEERING and (of course) the secret history of the
Universe into a potent - and really rather demanding - mix. The increased
sophistication, in some quarters, of hard sf and space opera must, of
course, be connected with the sudden appetite the reading public has shown
for nonfiction books by authors like Fred HOYLE, Fritjof Capra, Heinz R.
Pagels, Stephen Hawking, Freeman DYSON and Paul DAVIES: books about the
most far-reaching speculations of contemporary theoretical physics. It was
in such popularizations that, for example, most of us first learned about
BLACK HOLES, a theme that rapidly became an irresistible magnet for
writers of metaphysical hard sf.There is no traditional crux in
metaphysics that is not amply reflected in sf, whether it be "What is the
nature of mind as opposed to body?" or "Is there purpose in Nature?" Among
sf writers of the pre-WWII generation, Olaf STAPLEDON is certainly
pre-eminent as a propounder of questions of ultimate meaning: he
confronted all the great metaphysical questions one after the other. But
GENRE SF, too, has been amply supplied with amateur metaphysicians who
have often made up in colour and verve what they may have lacked in
rigorous thought; they may not have answered the questions but they
certainly persuaded the reader to think about them ( SENSE OF WONDER).
A.E. VAN VOGT is one such, and Charles L. HARNESS, with his fantastic
paradoxes of COSMOLOGY, is another; while even in the early PULP MAGAZINES
John TAINE, in The Time Stream (1931 Wonder Stories; 1946) and elsewhere,

flung himself headlong and daringly (and quite unselfconsciously) into
questions of ultimate meaning. Later, and initially only in garish pulp
paperback format, Barrington J. BAYLEY did the same. Sf may derive its
muscle and sinew from science and sociology, but much of the time its
heartbeat derives from the drama of metaphysics, a drama that seems
primarily intellectual, but has an enormous capacity to touch the feelings
too. [PN]
METCALF, NORM
Working name of US fan bibliographer Norman Metcalf (1937- ), whose The
Index of Science Fiction Magazines 1951-1965 (1968) is a sequel to Index
to the Science Fiction Magazines 1926-1950 (1952) by Donald B. DAY, and
covers the same ground as the computerized index for the same years ed
Erwin S. STRAUSS (though without the latter's issue-by-issue contents
listing). One or other of these works is essential to the serious sf
researcher. [PN]See also: BIBLIOGRAPHIES.
METEOR MAN, THE
Film 1993. Tinsel Townsend/MGM. Prod Loretha C. Jones, dir and screenplay
Robert Townsend, starring Townsend, Marla Gibbs, Robert Guillame, Eddie
Griffin, James Earl Jones, Don Cheadle and Bill Cosby. 100 mins.
Colour.Townsend, the film's writer, director and leading actor, is a black
comic with an extremely likeable, gentle manner; likeable enough,
apparently, for him-he arranged the financing- to obtain many of the
leading black actors in the US for what in this congenial low-budget
comedy must have been a pittance. A timid schoolteacher (Townsend) in a
black area of Washington, DC, is given superhero powers when struck by a
mysterious green meteor. Being afraid of heights, however, he mostly flies
only four feet above the ground. His neighbours persuade him to use his
superpowers to do something about the Golden Lords, a black gang
terrorising the area, but after several spectacular successes this becomes
more difficult as his powers begin to wear off. In the end, his neighbours
summon up the strength to resist the hoodlums on their own. The film is
perhaps too simplistic in its view that endemic black-against-black
violence can be countered with ordinary decency, but despite that is
innocent and fresh in its portrayal of neighbourhood life, though most of
the star names are wasted in being given very little to do. It is pleasant
to have a borderline sf movie that questions whether superhero powers, in
the end, would be of much use. [PN]
METROPOLIS
Film (1926). UFA. Dir Fritz LANG, starring Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel,
Gustav Frohlich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Heinrich George, Fritz Rasp.
Screenplay Lang, Thea VON HARBOU. Original version about 3 hours (17
reels); 1927 UK release print 128 mins (12 reels); 1927 US Paramount
release print 75 mins (7 reels); Munich Film Museum reconstruction about
21/2 hours; 1984 US reconstruction and adaptation by Giorgio Moroder 83
mins. B/w.Set in a vast city of the future whose society is divided into
downtrodden workers and a ruling elite, M focuses on Freder (Froehlich),
who falls in love with Maria (Helm), saintly protector of the workers'
children and informal spiritual leader to the masses. But Freder's jealous
father Fredersen (Abel), the industrialist master of the city, has a ROBOT

duplicate of Maria built for him by malign SCIENTIST Rotwang
(Klein-Rogge), which he uses to incite the workers to self-destructive
revolt (for reasons which are never entirely made clear). The damage to
the city's machinery caused by the rioting floods the lower levels,
threatening the lives of the children, but they are saved by the real
Maria. The film ends with the city's ruler being persuaded to shake hands
with the workers' spokesman and promising that things will be better from
now on.Though often described as the first sf epic of the CINEMA, this
famous German film - of which no complete version now exists - has just as
much in common with the cinema of the GOTHIC. Though set in a future
visually emphasized by towering buildings and vast, brooding MACHINES, the
City of Metropolis has an underworld dark and medieval in atmosphere. One
might almost say that the film's metaphor is to keep the very spectacular
sf for the elite above, while the Gothic grub gnaws at the city's roots.
The bridging figure is Rotwang, both scientist and sorcerer, one hand
clean, the other deformed and gloved, accomplishing gleaming miracles of
science while living in a bizarre house with a pentagram inscribed over
the door. The story of M is trite and its politics ludicrously simplistic;
but these flaws cannot detract from the sheer visual power of the film - a
combination of the high Expressionistic sets (the work of art directors
Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut and Karl Vollbrecht) and Lang's direction,
particularly in the sequences involving the vast crowds which he uses as a
kind of living clay with which to create giant fluid sculptures.
Individual images, as when the apparently living Maria is burned to reveal
the gleaming robot beneath, have been so well remembered as now to seem
archetypes, alive still in the consciousness of filmgoers everywhere.M,
which was extremely expensive and not a financial success, almost
bankrupted the studio that made it (UFA). The film was cut almost as soon
as it was released, and - still in the 1920s - shortened yet more
radically in the UK and the USA. Even recently restored archival versions
are half an hour shorter than the original.The 1984 US adaptation by
Italian composer and producer Giorgio Moroder can be seen as a successful
homage, the new tinted print cleverly recut to match the fierce rock MUSIC
to which Moroder sets it. But the editing, for all its meticulousness,
makes of M something rather different from Lang's (presumptive) version;
now the love story is central, and the hesitant Freder appears much more
decisive, while much of the obliqueness and some of the ambiguity is gone.
Yet M is still a very strong film indeed, vividly renewed for a new
generation.The novelization is Metropolis * (1926; trans 1927) by von
Harbou. [JB/PN]See also: COMICS; GERMANY.
MEXICO
LATIN AMERICA.
MEYER, NICHOLAS
[r] The DAY AFTER ; Sir Arthur Conan DOYLE; INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS;
The NIGHT THAT PANICKED AMERICA ; STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN; STAR
TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME; STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY; TIME
AFTER TIME. [PN]
MEYERS, RIC
Richard S. MEYERS.

MEYERS, RICHARD S.
(1953- ) US writer who publishes also as Wade Barker. His sf novels are
of relatively little interest, though the Doomstar sequence - Doom Star
(1978; rev vt Doomstar 1985) and Doom Star 2 (1979; rev vt Return to
Doomstar 1985)-are moderately entertaining sf adventures. Of more interest
are his nonfiction film studies, including The World of Fantasy Films
(1980), For One Week Only: The World of Exploitation Films (1983) and S-F
2: A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films from "Rollerball" to
"Return of the Jedi" (1984; vt The Great Science Fiction Films from
"Rollerball" to "Return of the Jedi" 1990). [JC]Other works: Cry of the
Beast * (1979), an INCREDIBLE HULK tie; Dzurlord: A Crossroads Adventure
in the World of Steven Brust's Jhereg * (1987), anon with 6 other writers;
the Book of the Undead horror sequence, as by Ric Meyers, comprising Fear
Itself (1991), Living Hell (1991) and Worst Nightmare (1992).As Wade
Barker: Serpent's Eye: The Year of the Ninja Master: Autumn * (1985) and
The Shibo Discipline * (1988), both contributions to the Ninja Master
sequence.
MEYERS, ROY (LETHBRIDGE)
(1910-1974) UK physician and writer whose first sf novel, The Man They
Couldn't Kill (1944), introduces the vastly talented Dr D'eath, who is
capable of inducing hypnotic trances at a distance and of scientifically
arranging for souls to take out-of-body excursions. Falsely convicted of a
murder, D'eath clears his name and might have starred in a sequence of Doc
Savage-like adventures had the book been successful. RM is best known for
the later Dolphin series about the relationship between dolphins and
humans: Dolphin Boy (1967 US; vt Dolphin Rider 1968 UK), Daughters of the
Dolphin (1968 US) and Destiny and the Dolphins (1969 US). RM's style is
wooden, but his interest in dolphins is obviously profound, and the novels
are easy reading, though their mixture of melodrama and didacticism may
not be to everyone's taste. [JC]Other work: Gift of the Manti (1977
Canada) with J.F. BONE (RM's name is here spelled Myers, almost certainly
in error).See also: UNDER THE SEA.
MEYERS, WALTER E(ARL)
(1939- ) US academic based at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
A grammarian and medievalist, WEM has also been teaching sf and fantasy
since the 1970s (currently with John KESSEL). His first book of genre
interest, Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction (1980),
is an excellent and amusing work on LINGUISTICS in sf; the argument is
updated in "The Language and Languages of Science Fiction" in Fictional
Space: Essays on Contemporary Science Fiction (anth 1991) ed Tom SHIPPEY.
WEM has published other essays on sf in a number of critical anthologies,
and has written several books in his other specialities. [PN]
MEYN, NIELS
[r] DENMARK.
MEYRINK, GUSTAV
(1868-1932) Austrian novelist, long resident in Prague, a city whose
depiction in his novels prefigures Franz KAFKA's, and active as a writer
from the publication of Der heisse Soldat und andere Geschichten ["The Hot

Soldier and Other Stories"] (coll 1903). Of his broodingly Expressionist
work, much of which deals with the mechanics of occultism, genre interest
attaches to Der Golem (1914; cut trans Madge Pemberton as The Golem 1928
US; full version of trans 1976 US; preferred trans Mike Mitchell 1995 UK),
in which a 19th-century protagonist experiences the original myth of the
GOLEM; to Das grune Gesicht (1916; trans Mike Mitchell as The Green Face
1992 UK), an apocalyptic fantasy haunted by the Wandering Jew and
culminating in the destruction of Amsterdam; to some degree to
Walpurgisnacht (1917; trans Mike Mitchell 1993 UK) and Der weiAEe
Dominikaner (1921; trans Mike Mitchell as The White Dominican 1994 UK);
and to Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster (1927; trans Mike Mitchell as The
Angel of the West Window 1991 UK), in which a 20th-century figure engages
with John Dee (1527-1608), whose Neoplatonic speculations and adventurous
life have inspired writers like John CROWLEY. [JC]See also: AUSTRIA.
MEZO, FRANCINE (MARIE)
(? - ) US writer whose Fall of Worlds series - The Fall of Worlds (1980),
Unless She Burn (1981) and No Earthly Shore (1981)-features a female
starship captain who works also as a warrior mercenary in adventures
covering a good portion of the Galaxy. [JC]
MIALL, ROBERT
Jonathan BURKE.
MICHAELS, MELISA C.
(? - ) US writer who remains best known for her Skyrider sequence of sf
adventures - Skirmish (1985), First Battle (1985), Last War (1986), Pirate
Prince (1987) and Floater Factor (1987) - depicting the growth into
maturity of its eponymous female starship-pilot protagonist. The tales are
at times congested, often parodic, occasionally damaged by cliche, but
carry their underlying message about human potential with some grace. Far
Harbor (1989) depicts with sympathy the plight of a planet whose natives
are being attacked by humans. [JC]Other work: Through the Eyes of the Dead
(1988), a mystery novel, associational.
MICHENER, JAMES A(LBERT)
(1907- ) US author of numerous bestsellers. His long novel Space (1982),
televised 1985, is based on the history of the US space program, becoming
sf only in its later stages, when it describes invented missions and
adventures roughly contemporaneous with the historical ones (e.g., a
disaster owing to an outburst of solar radiation during an Apollo 18 lunar
mission in 1973), and then peers optimistically into the NEAR FUTURE.
Among several errors of fact are consistent references to Stanley G.
WEINBAUM as Stanley G. Weinberg. [JGr]See also: ROCKETS.
MICKIEWICZ, ADAM
[r] POLAND.
MICROCOSM
GREAT AND SMALL.
MIELKE, THOMAS R.P.
[r] GERMANY.

MIESEL, SANDRA (LOUISE)
(1941- ) US critic and writer, with degrees in chemistry and medieval
history. Her involvement in sf was initially as a fan; since 1967 she has
published over 75 pieces in FANZINES. As a critic she became active in the
1970s, her first book being Myth, Symbol, and Religion in The Lord of the
Rings (1973 chap) on J.R.R. TOLKIEN. Her next book, Against Time's Arrow:
The High Crusade of Poul Anderson (1979 chap), was her first significant
assessment of either Poul ANDERSON or Gordon R. DICKSON, the two figures
to whom she has devoted most attention, and of whose work and philosophies
she has become a noted advocate. This advocacy, especially perhaps in the
case of Dickson's Dorsai sequence, has perhaps assumed too readily that
the claims for thematic import made for it by its author have been fully
realized in the texts as read. Sometimes uncredited, she ed in the
mid-1980s several collections assembling short work by these writers,
usually selected from early in their careers: Anderson's Dialogue with
Darkness (coll 1985) uncredited and Dickson's Survival! (coll 1984)
uncredited, Forward! (coll 1985), Invaders! (coll 1985), The Last Dream
(coll 1986) uncredited, and Mindspan (coll 1986). With David A. DRAKE she
ed A Separate Star (anth 1989) and Heads to the Storm (anth 1989).As an
author of fiction, SM has concentrated mainly on fantasy. Dreamrider
(1982; rev vt Shaman 1989), however, mixes genres with some competence,
carrying its female protagonist from a NEAR-FUTURE Earth to an ALTERNATE
WORLD in which mental control ( PSI POWERS) over subatomic processes is
exercised by shamans; the protagonist soon becomes one. [JC]
MIGHTY JOE YOUNG
(vt Mr Joseph Young of Africa) Film (1949). Argosy/RKO. Dir Ernest B.
Schoedsack, starring Terry Moore, Ben Johnson, Robert Armstrong.
Screenplay Ruth Rose, from a story by Merian C. Cooper. 94 mins. B/w, with
some tinted sequences.A virtual remake, though on a smaller scale, of KING
KONG (1933), by much the same team that produced that classic. The hero
organizes a cowboy expedition to Africa to capture animals for his new
night-club. Once there they encounter a 12ft (3.7m) gorilla and, after
failing to lasso it, discover it is a girl's pet. They persuade her to
return with the ape to the USA, where it is exhibited in a nightclub.
Finally it goes berserk, but redeems itself by rescuing children from a
burning orphanage. Special-effects genius Willis H. O'BRIEN had few
successes after King Kong but at least MJY, on which he supervised the
model animation, won him some belated recognition as well as an Academy
Award. Also working on the film was the young Ray HARRYHAUSEN. [JB]
MILAN, VICTOR (WOODWARD)
(1954- ) US writer who has written under his own name and, it is
understood, under more than just his one acknowledged pseudonym, Richard
Austin. He began publishing sf with "Soldatenmangel" for Dragons of
Darkness (anth 1981) ed Orson Scott CARD. His first books were in the War
of Powers sequence of fantasies with Robert E. VARDEMAN (whom see for
titles) from 1984, but the next year he started publishing in his own
right with The Cybernetic Samurai (1985); it and its sequel, The
Cybernetic Shogun (1990), comprise the complicatedly and intriguingly told
story of the embodiment and education of an AI given the bodily form of a

samurai, and the subsequent warfare, which severely damages the entire
world, between its/his two "children". Runespear (1987) with Melinda M.
SNODGRASS is a fantasy set in 1936 in which the Nazi rulers of Germany
attempt to gain the eponymous spear and thus become invincible. As Richard
Austin, VM has been responsible for the Guardians sequence of postHOLOCAUST military-sf adventures: The Guardians (1985), #2: Trial by Fire
(1985), #3: Thunder of Hell (1985), #4: Night of the Phoenix (1985), #5:
Armageddon Run (1986), #6: War Zone (1986), #7: Brute Force (1986), #8:
Desolation Road (1987), #9: Vengeance Day (1987), #10: Freedom Fight
(1988), #11: Valley of the Gods (1988), #12: The Plague Years (1988), #13:
Devil's Deal (1989), #14: Death from Above (1989), #15: Snake Eyes (1990)
and #16: Death Charge (1991).Subsequent work - which includes a Star Trek
tie, From the Depths * (1993), a Wild Cards tie, Turn of the Cards*
(1993), a Battletech tie, Close Quarters *(1994), and a lonely singleton,
Red Sands (1992) - has not demonstrated any dauntingly explorative
tendency. A fuller sense of VM's career awaits a better sense of its range
and possible depths. [JC]See also: CYBERNETICS; LIBERTARIAN SF.
MILES
Neil BELL.
MILES, KEITH
Robert S. TRALINS.
MILFORD CIRCLE
When the Milford Science Fiction Conference was founded in 1956 by Damon
Knight and Judith Merril, Milford, Pennsylvania was already quite the
gathering place for writers. James Blish was the first to move to this
small town in eastern Pennsylvania. Other settlers eventually included
Thomas M. Disch and James Sallis. Why did Blish choose a town that, while
charming, was noticeably lacking in urban amenities? The reason was that
James Blish was convinced that nuclear war was imminent in the 1950s, and
Milford was outside the lethal blast radius if an H-bomb fell on New York.
MILFORD SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' CONFERENCE
Annual writers' workshop founded in 1956, held at Milford, Pennsylvania,
where several sf writers - including one of its founders, Damon KNIGHT have lived at various times. (A writers' workshop - see also CLARION
SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' WORKSHOP - includes sessions of mutual criticism
of not yet published stories, interspersed with discussion groups on
various professional problems.) The success of MSFWC, especially the
camaraderie it inspired, was directly responsible for the setting up of
the SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA. Robert SILVERBERG, Harlan ELLISON,
Kate WILHELM, Terry CARR and Samuel R. DELANY are among the many who were
at some period regular Milford attenders. Ideally, the workshop (open only
to published sf writers) had a balance between beginner writers and more
experienced professionals. It was felt by some critics that Milford
attenders constituted a powerful in-group in sf (particularly since
editors of important anthology series attended) and that they received
preferential treatment by publishers; hence the nickname "Milford Mafia".
Founder member James BLISH and his wife, J.A. LAWRENCE, moved to the UK,
where they set up a UK Milford in 1972, coincidentally the year in which

the US Milford was officially pronounced dead. This was held until 1988,
out of terminological nostalgia, at Milford-on-Sea in Hampshire each
autumn; thereafter it was held at Cheltenham (1989-90) and Margate (1991
onwards). Richard COWPER and Christopher PRIEST were two regular early
attenders; more recent regulars have included Mary GENTLE, Colin GREENLAND
and Diana Wynne JONES. [PN]
MILHAUS, MICHAEL F.X.
David F. BISCHOFF.
MILLARD, JOSEPH (JOHN)
(1908-1989) US writer in several genres who began publishing sf with "The
Crystal Invaders" for TWS in 1941, and was active in the field for a few
years, a period which included the magazine release of his only novel, The
Gods Hate Kansas (1941 Startling Stories; rev 1964), a routine adventure
involving manipulation of humans by aliens. It was filmed, dreadfully, as
They Came from Beyond Space (1967). [JC]See also: INVASION.
MILLENNIUM
Film (1989). First Millennium Partnership/Gladden Entertainment. Dir
Michael Anderson, starring Kris Kristofferson, Cheryl Ladd, Daniel J.
Travanti. Screenplay John VARLEY, based on his "Air Raid" (1977). 105
mins. Colour.Commando teams from the future steal people from planes just
before they crash, but an investigator becomes suspicious. He is seduced
by a woman time-traveller, follows her to a chaotic future (represented by
a single set) that is about to collapse in a timequake caused by careless
TIME PARADOXES in its past. They escape to a further future. Nowhere is
the reason for the kidnapping explained. Kristofferson acts like a
sleepwalker. There is a manipulative ROBOT that looks like the Tin Man
from The Wizard of Oz (1939). Michael Anderson's essays in genre
directing, including LOGAN'S RUN and DOC SAVAGE: THE MAN OF BRONZE, have
been uniformly wooden.Curiously, only Varley's short story is credited as
the basis for his screenplay, even though he had turned it into a novel,
Millennium (1983), which explains the points this botched film leaves
obscure; one can only suppose that his screenplay was cut to ribbons. [PN]
MILLER, BENJAMIN
[s] Noel LOOMIS.
MILLER, CHUCK
Working name of US publisher and anthologist Charles Franklin Miller II
(1952- ). For his publishing activities UNDERWOOD-MILLER INC.; for his
anthologies Tim UNDERWOOD. [JC]
MILLER, FRANK
(1957- ) US COMIC-book writer and artist, with a distinctive fragmented
narrative technique; also film scriptwriter. During 1979-85 FM worked on
MARVEL COMICS's Daredevil, producing work that was later re-released in
three collections: Child's Play (graph coll 1988), Marked for Death (graph
coll 1990) and Gang War (graph coll 1992). He then produced two
apocalyptic dramas for DC COMICS: Ronin (1983-4; graph coll 1987) and
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986; graph coll 1986). All of this work
brought a new integrity to the gritty, toughly narrated drama in comics,

and paved the way among prospective publishers for other hopeful
writer/artists. Further work from this period included Elektra Saga (1984;
graph coll 1989) and, written by Chris CLAREMONT, Wolverine (1982; graph
coll 1987).Following the phenomenal success of The Dark Knight Returns nominated for a 1987 HUGO in, absurdly, the Best Non-Fiction Book
category, coming second - FM has collaborated with other comics artists
including: David Mazzuchelli on Daredevil: Born Again (1985; graph coll
1987) and Batman: Year One (1987; graph coll 1988); Bill SIENKEWICZ on
Elektra Assassin (1986-7; graph coll 1987) and Daredevil: Love and War
(graph 1986); Dave GIBBONS on Give Me Liberty (1990-91; graph coll 1991);
and Geoff Darrow on Hard Boiled (1990-92). FM's other work includes
Elektra Lives Again (graph 1990) and Sin City (1991-2) in Dark Horse
Presents, as well as a collaboration with Walter Simonson on a series tied
to the Terminator films ( The TERMINATOR; TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY). FM
has also collaborated on the screenplays for ROBOCOP 2 (1990) and the
projected RoboCop 3, the former being based on his original story. [SW]See
also: GRAPHIC NOVEL; ILLUSTRATION; SUPERHEROES; SUPERMAN [character].
MILLER, GEORGE
(1948- ) Australian film-maker. After a satirical short film, A History
of Violence in the Cinema, Part One (1975), GM made an international
impact with MAD MAX (1979), a NEAR-FUTURE cop/vigilante car-chase movie
that introduced Mel Gibson to stardom as a leather-clad highway patrolman
in an anarchic post- HOLOCAUST Australia. It success was great enough to
fund a more elaborate, more effective sequel, MAD MAX 2 (1981, vt The Road
Warrior). Influential enough to generate an infestation of Italian and
Filippino imitations, including I nuovi barbari (1983; vt The New
Barbarians; vt Warriors of the Wasteland) and Stryker (1983), Mad Max 2
led to a sequel of its own, which GM codirected with George Ogilvie: MAD
MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME (1985). This was a more expensive, less gritty
retread of the earlier film, with themes imported from Russell HOBAN's
RIDDLEY WALKER (1980). GM's only feature film since the Mad Max trilogy
has been The Witches of Eastwick (1987), a successful adaptation of John
UPDIKE's 1984 novel, although he remade Richard MATHESON's TWILIGHT ZONE
episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" as a segment of Twilight Zone: The
Movie (1983) and produced Philip Noyce's thriller Dead Calm (1988). GM
should not be confused with the other Australian director of the same
name, who made The Man from Snowy River (1982) and The Neverending Story:
Part 2 (1990). [KN]See also: MUSIC.
MILLER, IAN
(1946- ) UK illustrator. After graduating from St Martin's College of
Art, IM became a commercial illustrator in 1970, with both book-cover work
and interior ILLUSTRATIONS, some of the latter in David Day's The Tolkien
Bestiary (1979). He did highly characteristic work on the backgrounds for
Ralph Bakshi's Wizards (1977), an animated film with a FAR FUTURE setting.
Books of his work are Green Dog Trumpet and Other Stories (graph coll
1978) - the stories being in the form of pictures without accompanying
text - Secret Art (1980) and, more recently, Ratspike (1990) with John
Blanche. The Luck in the Head (graph 1991) with M. John HARRISON is a
GRAPHIC NOVEL with text adapted by Harrison from his 1983 short story of

the same name. IM appears in The Guide to Fantasy Art Techniques (1984) ed
Martyn Dean. Though he has worked in a commercial vein, he is also known
for fanciful work at the opposite pole from the airbrushed superrealism
that has dominated UK sf/fantasy art for two decades: two of his gloomier
modes involve, respectively, detailed fine-lined GOTHIC black-and-white
work in ink, almost STEAMPUNK in style, and semi-abstracted deliquescing
faces; in Ratspike he classed these as "tight pen" and "asylum images"
respectively. IM was art editor for INTERZONE 1983-5. He is a gallery
artist as well as an illustrator, his first exhibition having been in
1973. [PN/JC]See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; GAMES WORKSHOP.
MILLER, JIMMY
(? - ) US writer whose The Big Win (1969) is a noisy but sometimes
effective post- HOLOCAUST quest story which moves eventually into space,
as the protagonists search for the Chinese war criminal whose plague has
decimated the rest of the world. Though not essentially an sf novel, her
Some Parts in the Single Life (1970) moves into a shattering NEAR FUTURE
at its close. JM was married to Warren MILLER. [JC]
MILLER, MIRANDA
(1950- ) UK writer whose early work, like Under the Rainbow (1978), was
published as by Miranda Hyman. Her sf DYSTOPIA, Smiles and the Millennium
(1987) as MM, depicts a fiercely uncongenial NEAR-FUTURE UK where class
differences have hardened, the poor are downtrodden, and the Isle of Man
has seceded. [JC]
MILLER, P(ETER) SCHUYLER
(1912-1974) US writer and critic; an MSc in chemistry, he did research
for a time and for most of his career worked as a technical writer. He
remains best known in the sf world for his book reviews in ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION, which first appeared in 1945 and became a regular monthly
feature in Oct 1951, continuing until his death. He was not a particularly
demanding critic, but his judgements were generally shrewd, his enthusiasm
never waned, and his column's coverage was remarkably comprehensive.
Largely as a by-product, he accumulated one of the largest private sf
COLLECTIONS; the annotated Catalogue of the Fantasy and Science Fiction
Library of the Late P. Schuyler Miller (1977) was a useful bibliographical
aid. In 1963 he was presented with a special HUGO for his
reviewing.However, he began as an author of fiction, being one of the more
popular and accomplished sf pulp writers of the 1930s; his first story was
"The Red Plague" for Wonder Stories in 1930. He collaborated with Paul
McDermott and Walter Dennis on two connected stories, "Red Spot on
Jupiter" (1931) and "Duel on the Asteroid" (1932), the first under the
pseudonym Dennis McDermott, the second as by PSM and Dennis McDermott.
Alicia in Blunderland (1933 Science Fiction Digest as by Nihil; coll of
linked stories 1983) presents a sequence of spoof tales with RECURSIVE-SF
elements, several figures from early FANDOM being represented. Later
stories of note included a TIME-PARADOX variant, "As Never Was" (1944),
and "The Titan" (1934-5), a story whose (mild) sexual content made it
unacceptable to the pulp magazines; MARVEL TALES, which published it,
ceased publication before the last instalment, and the story was not
printed entire until The Titan (coll 1952), which assembles most of PSM's

better fiction. He also collaborated with L. Sprague DE CAMP on Genus Homo
(1941 Super Science Stories; rev 1950), a novel set in the FAR FUTURE and
filled with satirical evolutionary marvels, for apes have taken over.
[MJE]About the author: A Canticle for P. Schuyler Miller (1975 chap) by
Sam MOSKOWITZ.See also: ALIENS; EVOLUTION; INVASION; MARS.
MILLER, RICHARD (CONNELLY)
(1925- ) US writer whose Snail (1984) is a satirical TIME-TRAVEL tale in
which the Wandering Jew and a Prussian soldier traverse a
late-20th-century USA, viewing with dismay the New Age trash - both
psychic and physical - which chokes the land, and en route meeting Kilgore
Trout ( Kurt VONNEGUT Jr). Squed (1989 UK) and its sequel Sowboy (1991 UK)
are sf FABULATIONS. [JC]
MILLER, R(ICHARD) DEWITT
(1910-1958) US writer who was involved in promulgating ideas about
Fortean phenomena ( Charles FORT), and who began publishing sf with "The
Shapes" for ASF in 1936. In addition to some works of Fortean nonfiction,
such as You Do Take it with You (1956), he published an sf novel, The Man
who Lived Forever (1938 ASF as "The Master Shall not Die" as by RDM alone;
rev 1956 dos; vt Year 3097 1958 UK) with Anna Hunger, about an immortal
who struggles to keep mankind's technology from running amuck. The Loose
Board in the Floor (1951) is a fantasy about stuffed animals going on a
trip. [JC]
MILLER, STEVE
(1950- ) US writer who began publishing sf with 3 novels set in the same
SPACE-OPERA galaxy, all in collaboration with Sharon Lee. Agent of Change
(1988) and Carpe Diem (1989) are closely linked adventure tales featuring
an interstellar agent on the loose; the heroine of Conflict of Honors
(1988) is a starship crewperson who undergoes various travails in her
quest to become a pilot. [JC]
MILLER, WALTER M(ICHAEL)
(1922- ) US writer. WMM flew combat missions in WWII and was converted to
Catholicism in 1947; he began publishing sf with "Secret of the Death
Dome" in AMZ in 1951, and over the 10 years of his active writing career
released about 40 more tales, many of which had a deep impact upon the
field. During the 1950s, a time when US sf tended to express its new-found
interest in character through stories whose rigid formulae were derived
from sentimental fiction and which tended to read as simplistic
moralities, WMM published in Gal, FSF, ASF and elsewhere tales whose
treatment of character was effortlessly complex; moreover, through his
preoccupation with RELIGION, he transfigured conventional sf themes and
instruments - progress, GENETIC ENGINEERING, BIOLOGY in general - by
treating them with a rich ambivalence.Perhaps the best example is "The
Darfsteller" (1955), which won a HUGO as Best Novelette in 1955. The sf
premise seems simple: a computer-like machine that controls a THEATRE of
life-sized mannequins has displaced human actors. The darfsteller, an
unemployed Method actor, has been working as a janitor in a theatre, and
sabotages one of the mannequin-tapes so that he can replace it on stage.
At this point the typical sf story of "character" might well give him his

comeuppance and the tale would end. But WMM is just beginning; the rigged
performance becomes an essay in acting and, through its presentation of
Christ's Passion, a continually deepening examination of the actor's
complex, emblem-haunted nature. The story appears in Conditionally Human
(coll 1962); WMM's other collection of shorter items was The View from the
Stars (coll 1965). The Science Fiction of Walter M. Miller, Jr. (coll
1978) and The Best of Walter M. Miller, Jr. (coll 1980) amply convey a
sense of his finest work in short form.But WMM remains best known for his
single novel, A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ (1955-7 FSF; fixup 1960), which,
along with James BLISH's A CASE OF CONSCIENCE (1953 If; exp 1958), stands
as one of the very few attempts in US sf to deal with formal religion. The
first part of this 3-part work is set in a Dark Ages 600 years after a
20th-century nuclear HOLOCAUST, when the survival of the human race
remains a moot question. The Catholic Order of Leibowitz - named after a
20th-century physicist who created the Order and bestowed upon it the task
of preserving knowledge during the period of violent nescience that
followed the holocaust - has come into some holy relics relevant to
Leibowitz's canonization, and their survival becomes emblematic of
humanity's. In the second part, half a millennium later, the Order is
confronted with the rise once again of the scientific mentality, with all
its benefits and risks. In the third part, a further half-millennium
later, the Order has lost prestige and power in a new
industrial-scientific age, but prepares a spaceship to escape the
inevitable second holocaust, thus hoping to shorten the period of darkness
that will ensue. The novel is full of subtly presented detail about the
nature of religious vocation and the way of life of an isolated community,
deals ably with the questions of the nature of historical and scientific
knowledge which it raises, and poses and intriguingly answers ethical
questions about mankind's proper relation to God and the world; though the
vagrant entry of the Wandering Jew into the text is perhaps a little
contrived, that is a small flaw in a seminal work. While A Canticle for
Liebowitz can be read as a work of Christian apologetics, WMM (like Gene
WOLFE after him) clearly responds mythopoeically to the holy story - and
to the institutions - of his Church, with effects both ambiguous and
ironic. At the same time, however, his central commitment (like Wolfe's)
is unwavering, and the cyclical pattern of the tale reads as anything but
defeatist - for the moment of Christ's Coming is not a matter of dead
history. The 1961 Hugo for the book was richly deserved. A sequel is
projected for publication in the early 1990s. [JC]Other works: Beyond
Armageddon: Survivors of the Megawar (anth 1985) ed with Harry Martin
GREENBERG.See also: AMAZING STORIES; ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; ARTS;
AUTOMATION; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; ESP; HISTORY IN SF; The
MAGAZINE
OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MEDICINE; MUTANTS; ROBOTS; SOCIOLOGY;
SPACE FLIGHT; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
MILLER, WARREN
(1921-1966) US writer, best known for his first Harlem novel, The Cool
World (1959). Looking for the General (1964) is a combination of
FABULATION and quest, and some of its devices belong to sf. WM's sf novel
proper, The Siege of Harlem (1964), is a NEAR-FUTURE tale in which Harlem,

New York, declares itself a separate state. WM was married to Jimmy
MILLER. [JC]See also: POLITICS.
MILLIGAN, SPIKE
Working name of Indian-born Irish writer and comic Terence Alan Milligan
(1918- ), who first became famous for his central role as the author and
one of the stars of the long series of Goon Show programmes on BBC Radio
in the 1950s. Many of his books, beginning with his first, Silly Verse for
Kids (coll 1959 chap), have fantasy content, as do his two novels, Puckoon
(1963) and The Looney: An Irish Fantasy (1987). He is of direct sf
interest for a play, The Bedsitting Room (1970) with John Antrobus (1933), which initially treats a nuclear HOLOCAUST in terms of surreal spoof,
though by the final act the few survivors are engaging in cannibalism. The
original play was filmed as The BED-SITTING ROOM in 1969. [JC]
MILLS, C(ARLA) J(OHNSON)
(1944- ) US writer known only for her Winter World sequence - Winter
World (1988), Winter World #2: Egil's Book (1991), #3: Kit's Book (1991),
#4: Brander's Book (1992) and #5: Zjhanne's Book (1992) - featuring
various adventures on a strife-beset frozen world. [JC]
MILLS, ROBERT E.
(? - ) US author who began writing sf with the Star Quest Trilogy of
adventure tales: Star Quest (1978), Star Fighters (1978) and Star Force
(1978). Under the Eyes of Night (1980) is a novel of the occult. [JC]
MILLS, ROBERT P(ARK)
(1920-1986) US editor and literary agent, managing editor of The MAGAZINE
OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION from its inception; he assumed the
editorship proper with the Sep 1958 issue, following Anthony BOUCHER's
resignation, remaining editor until Mar 1962 and continuing thereafter as
consulting editor until Feb 1963. During his tenure FSF maintained its
standing as the most sophisticated sf magazine and won HUGOS in 1959, 1960
and 1963. RPM edited several FSF anthologies, including The Best from
Fantasy and Science Fiction: Ninth Series (anth 1960; cut vt Flowers for
Algernon and Other Stories 1960), Tenth Series (anth 1961) and Eleventh
Series (anth 1962), as well as A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction
(anth 1960) and Twenty Years of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction (anth 1970), the latter with Edward L. FERMAN. RPM was also editor
of VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION during its first incarnation (1957-8), when the
magazine was renowned for its "daring" approach to sexual topics. He also
edited The Worlds of Science Fiction (anth 1963).After leaving FSF RPM
became a literary agent, operating as Robert P. Mills Ltd, and during the
1960s and early 1970s served a prestigious list of clients. He sold the
agency to Richard A. CURTIS in 1984. [MJE]
MILLS-MALET, VINCENT
(? -? ) UK writer in whose sf novel, The Meteoric Benson: A Romance of
Actuality (1912), the inventor of an aerostat (or helicopter) uses it to
frighten the Germans and subsequently the entire world into peace, and
gains the hand of the peer's daughter he loves. [JC]
MILNE, ROBERT DUNCAN (GORDON)

(1844-1899) Scottish-born journalist and writer, in the USA from about
1864, who published at least 60 sf stories of very considerable conceptual
ingenuity, prefiguring many of the themes of the modern genre. Beginning
with "A Modern Robe of Nessus" in 1879, he published most of these tales
in the San Francisco journal The Argonaut, one of whose editors, Ambrose
BIERCE, was strongly influenced by his work. Forgotten for many decades
after his death, RDM was rediscovered by Sam MOSKOWITZ, who in Science
Fiction in Old San Francisco, Volume 1: History of the Movement from 1854
to 1890 (1980) forcefully argued the case for treating him as an important
figure, and who assembled some of RDM's tales in a companion volume, Into
the Sun and Other Stories (coll 1980). Typical of RDM's vigorous creative
mind are "Into the Sun" (1882) and its sequel, "Plucked from the Burning"
(1882), which together describe a world-cataclysm caused by a comet,
detail the protagonist's escape in a BALLOON from the effects of impact,
follow him first to Tibet and then back to a devastated world full of
apocalyptic scenes, and end in the creation of a new and better society
based on the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).
Throughout his work - the rest of which remains uncollected - can be
perceived the workings of a mind for whom science and technology granted
far more to the imaginative mind when their rules were obeyed, or at least
understood. RDM was one of the first genuinely extrapolative thinkers to
work in the field. [JC]See also: MATTER TRANSMISSION.
MIND OF MR SOAMES, THE
Film (1969). Amicus. Dir Alan Cooke, starring Terence Stamp, Robert
Vaughn, Nigel Davenport. Screenplay John Hale, Edward Simpson, from The
Mind of Mr Soames (1961) by Charles Eric MAINE. 98 mins. Colour.Soames
(Stamp) has been in a coma since birth and is now 30 years old. A
neurosurgeon (Vaughn) brings him to consciousness with a brain operation.
Now a sexually mature man, his brain is a blank slate for life to write
on. Stamp's performance as the innocent who escapes his teachers too soon,
and who turns violent when society treats him violently, is touching;
through the pulp cliches a genuine thoughtfulness about the nature of
education and learning is dimly apparent. In its theme this small-scale,
rather solemn UK film resembles CHARLY (1968). [PN]
MINDWARP: AN INFINITY OF TERROR
Roger CORMAN.
MINES, SAMUEL
(1909- ) US editor who worked from 1942 for Standard Magazines, the chain
that published STARTLING STORIES and THRILLING WONDER STORIES. Although an
sf enthusiast - he published 4 stories in TWS, beginning with "Find the
Sculptor" in 1946 - he concentrated mainly on non-sf pulps until Sam
MERWIN left the company in 1951, whereupon he took over the editorship of
Startling Stories (Nov 1951-Fall 1954), TWS (Dec 1951-Summer 1954),
FANTASTIC STORY QUARTERLY (Winter 1952-Fall 1954) and WONDER STORY ANNUAL
(1952-3); he also edited all issues of the short-lived SPACE STORIES.
Although he took control of the magazines at a time when the PULP-MAGAZINE
industry was generally in decline, and the sf pulps in particular were
suffering from the powerful competition of such new magazines as GALAXY
SCIENCE FICTION and The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION , SM was

generally successful in maintaining the standard to which Merwin had
raised them. He ed The Best from Startling Stories (anth 1953; vt
Startling Stories 1954 UK; vt Moment without Time 1956 UK); the book
contained stories from TWS as well. SM left Standard in 1954; the various
magazines did not survive him long. He held no further editorial positions
in sf, although he did review books occasionally for LUNA MONTHLY. [MJE]
MINKOV, SVETOSLAV
(1902-1966) Bulgarian writer and man of letters, active from 1920 ( for
contextual comments on his earliest work BULGARIA). The sf tales and
FABULATIONS assembled in The Lady with the X-Ray Eyes (coll trans
Krassimira Noneva 1965 Bulgaria), which brings together work originally
published 1928-65, are sharp, occasionally didactic, and expose a
sometimes insistent irony. This text is not a translation of a 1934
Bulgarian collection with the same title. [JC]
MINTO, WILLIAM
(1845-1893) UK writer whose sf novel, The Crack of Doom (1886),
portentously invokes the threatened arrival of a dangerous comet to
influence, intermittently, an entirely prosaic plot. [JC]See also: END OF
THE WORLD.
MIRACLEMAN
CAPTAIN MARVEL; Neil GAIMAN; Alan MOORE.
MIRACLE SCIENCE AND FANTASY STORIES
US PULP MAGAZINE. 2 issues, Apr/May and June/July 1931, published by Good
Story Magazine Co., ed Douglas M. DOLD. MSFS's publisher was Harold
HERSEY, previously editor of THRILL BOOK, while Douglas Dold was
consulting editor of Astounding Stories ( ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION)
1930-31. The magazine featured undistinguished pulp fiction by both
Douglas and Elliott DOLD and by Victor ROUSSEAU. Its cover design, by
Elliott, was unusually stylish for its time. Douglas was blind, and a
reference by Hersey in Pulpwood Editor (1937) implies that the editor was
in fact Elliott. [MJE/PN]
MIRAGE PRESS
US SMALL PRESS publishing primarily fantasy-related material and taking
its name from Mirage, a successful 1960s FANZINE published by Jack L.
CHALKER. Chalker began issuing books under the Mirage logo in 1961,
beginning with his own The New H.P. Lovecraft Bibliography (1961 chap) and
including A Figment of a Dream (1962 chap) by David H. KELLER. The Mirage
Press took on a more formal existence in 1967, with new financing; later
publications include The Conan Reader (coll 1968), a collection of essays
by L. Sprague DE CAMP drawn from the fanzine AMRA (the dustjacket artwork
was Berni Wrightson's first professional sale). De Camp and George
SCITHERS subsequently edited 2 further vols of Conan-related
SWORD-AND-SORCERY material ( Robert E. HOWARD) for Mirage: The Conan
Swordbook (anth 1969) and The Conan Grimoire (anth 1972). Other Mirage
books include Dragons and Nightmares (coll 1969) by Robert BLOCH, poetry
by De Camp, A Guide to Middle Earth (1971) by Robert Foster, H.G. Wells:
Critic of Progress (1973) by Jack WILLIAMSON, and a variety of sf/fantasy
reference books. There were around 20 Mirage books by 1975, at which point

the business slowed to a near halt because its financial backer fell ill.
Chalker's career as a novelist began at about this point, and MP has since
been relatively inactive, though long-held projects - including an edition
of The Harlan Ellison Hornbook (coll 1990) slipcased with Harlan Ellison's
Movie (1990), both by Harlan ELLISON, and Chalker's and Mark OWING's The
Science-Fantasy Publishers (vastly exp 3rd edn 1991) - eventually
appeared. [MJE/JC/PN]
MISHA
Working name of US writer Misha Chocholak (? - ), of Native American
background, who began publishing material of genre interest with Prayers
of Steel (coll 1989 chap), which assembles some fantasy poems; her second
collection, Ke-Qua-Hawk-As (coll 1993), similarly incorporates poems,
intermixed with stories based on Native American material. Her sf novel,
Red Spider White Web (1990 UK), employs a congested CYBERPUNK venue (a USA
in which sanitized enclaves called "Mickey-sans" shelter their lobotomized
inhabitants from the excremental waste and POLLUTION outside) to darken
the inherently romantic story of a dedicated artist whose intransigent
attempts to do her work run afoul of surreally caricatured figures from
the corrupted mire. The ending is grim. [JC]Other Works: Dr. Ihoka's
Cure1993, non-fiction.
MISSION GALACTICA: THE CYLON ATTACK
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA.
MR JOSEPH YOUNG OF AFRICA
MIGHTY JOE YOUNG.
MISTER X
Created by Canadian designers Dean Motter and Paul Rivoche, this
cipherlike character-bald and with sunglasses, black overcoat and suitcase
- appeared in illustrations and on record-album covers in the late 1970s
before plans were made to publish a comic. The Mister X comic was promoted
with several gorgeously designed posters 1981-3 without in fact appearing.
Eventually Rivoche was taken off the strip and the project was handed over
to Jaime, Gilbert and Mario Hernandez, the creators of LOVE AND ROCKETS;
using Rivoche's designs, they produced The Return of Mister X (graph coll
1986) which first ran in Mister X #1-#4 1984-5.Mr X is not really the star
of his own comic. Its main subject and the cause of most of its stories is
its location, Radiant City. This city was codesigned by Mr X using the
dogmas of "Psychetecture", so that its enclosures, shapes and spaces would
have resonances in the human psyche. Sadly, someone skimped on the
materials during construction, and the result is the nightmare city
Somnopolis - a place deliberately reminiscent of Fritz LANG's
METROPOLIS.Since the Hernandez brothers many others have turned their hand
to matters Somnopolitan. They include D'Israeli, Shane Oakley, Klaus
Schoenfeld, Seth and eventually even Rivoche himself. [SW]
MISTRAL, BENGO
House name used for a novel by Norman A. LAZENBY and for two others:
Pirates of Cerebus (fixup 1953) based on stories in John Spencer magazines
( BADGER BOOKS) by B. Ward, and SPACE FLIGHT 139 (1954). [JC]

MISTRESS OF ATLANTIS, THE
Die HERRIN VON ATLANTIS.
MITCHELL, ADRIAN
(1932- ) UK writer, best known for his poetry. His second novel, The
Bodyguard (1970), is the deathbed narrative of a representative figure of
a 1980s UK, a paramilitary bodyguard whose reminiscences of his various
jobs defending a totalitarian state provide a DYSTOPIAN portrait of the
Europe to come. [JC]See also: POLITICS.
MITCHELL, CLYDE
ZIFF-DAVIS house name, 1956-7, used twice by Robert SILVERBERG and
Randall GARRETT in collaboration, twice by unidentified writers, and once
by Harlan ELLISON on "The Wife Factory" (1957 Fantastic). [PN]
MITCHELL, EDWARD PAGE
(1852-1927) US newspaperman and writer, associated from 1875 until his
death with the New York Sun, serving as editor-in-chief 1903-20. EPM's sf,
which came from the first decade of his career and most of which first
appeared in his own journal, was restricted to about 30 short stories,
beginning with "The Tachypomp" (1874), about a sort of humanoid
calculator. Their subject matters range widely, from TIME TRAVEL in "The
Clock that Went Backward" (1881) to MATTER TRANSMISSION in "The Man
without a Body" (1877) and INVISIBILITY in "The Crystal Man" (1881). EPM's
work, which in its variety and imaginative power may have influenced H.G.
WELLS and others, came to be noticed in the sf field through the
publication of The Crystal Man: Landmark Science Fiction (coll 1973),
edited and with a long and informative introduction by Sam MOSKOWITZ.
[JC]See also: COMPUTERS.
MITCHELL, J(AMES) LESLIE
(1901-1935) Scottish novelist, known mainly for regional novels written
as by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and for Scottish Scene (1934) with Hugh
MacDiarmid (1892-1978). Under his own name he wrote popular archaeology
and fiction, much of the latter coloured by fantasy and romantic
chinoiserie after the fashion of James Elroy FLECKER. Typical of these are
The Calends of Cairo (coll of linked stories 1931; vt Cairo Dawns 1931
USA) with a letter in preface by H.G. WELLS, and Persian Dawns, Egyptian
Nights (coll of 2 linked story sequences 1933) with a foreword by J.D.
BERESFORD. Three Go Back (1932; bowdlerized 1953 USA) is sf, combining
ANTHROPOLOGY, ATLANTIS and TIME TRAVEL themes in a well written though
awkwardly plotted story of three 20th-century passengers on an airship
cast back in time (by earthquakes!) to Atlantis, where they find unspoiled
proto-Basques in an Eden doomed by the nearing Ice Age and by conflicts
with savage Neanderthalers, which decimate the tribe; the two surviving
castaways then snap back to the present. The book is notable for its
realistic and ebullient female protagonist, who adapts far more readily to
her strange surroundings than either of the men. Very similarly, the
eponymous female protagonist of Gay Hunter (1934), on being cast into a
far-future Britain, adapts with commendable swiftness, stripping naked
just as quickly as the heroine of the previous book, but remaining
decorously virgin; eventually, espousing healthy athleticism, she helps

defeat a fascist attempt to reindustrialize the country. "Kametis and
Evelpis", a third tale linked to the previous two by similarities of plot,
was left incomplete at JLM's death; John GAWSWORTH revised the manuscript
and published the resulting novelette in his Masterpiece of Thrills (anth
1936), along with other posthumous sf and fantasy, as by Lewis Grassic
Gibbon. In the nonfiction Hanno, or The Future of Exploration (1928), JLM
committed himself to some humorous thoughts about exploring both space and
the centre of the Earth. [JC]Other work: The Lost Trumpet (1932).About the
author: "The Science Fiction of John Leslie Mitchell" by Ian Campbell in
EXTRAPOLATION, Dec 1974.See also: ORIGIN OF MAN.
MITCHELL, JOHN A(MES)
(1845-1918) US writer in various genres. His sf began with The Last
American: A Fragment from the Journal of Khan-Li, Prince of Dimph-Yoo-Chur
and Admiral in the Persian Navy (1889), a satirical post- HOLOCAUST novel
in which a 30th-century Persian expedition visits a North America long
devastated by climatic changes; it was much influenced by Edgar Allan
POE's "Mellonta Tauta" (1849) and curiously prefigures Gene WOLFE's Seven
American Nights (1978 Orbit #20; 1989 chap dos). The racism of the book the USA falls because of unfettered immigration - is typical of JAM's era.
His other well known sf book, Drowsy (1917), is a sentimental love story
involving a telepath who discovers ANTIGRAVITY and visits the Moon and
Mars. The book was notable for Angus Peter Macdonnal's fine illustrations,
many of them moonscapes, some reproduced in EXTRAPOLATION, May 1971; their
relationship to the text is at times exiguous. [JC]Other works: The
Romance of the Moon (1886 chap), a fantasy for children; Life's Fairy
Tales (coll 1892); Amos Judd (1895); Gloria Victis (1897; rev vt Dr
Thorne's Idea 1910); That First Affair and Other Sketches (coll 1902); The
Villa Claudia (1904); The Silent War (1906).
MITCHELL, KIRK (JOHN)
(1950- ) US writer and former police officer who began writing sf with an
ALTERNATE-WORLD trilogy - Procurator (1984), New Barbarians (1986) and Cry
Republic (1989) - based on the premise that Rome did not fall and that the
world of 2000CE reflects a mixture of Roman modes and richly conceived
technologies. KM's best single novel is probably Never the Twain (1987), a
TIME-TRAVEL tale in which a descendant of the US writer Bret Harte
(1836-1902) goes back to Civil War Nevada with a copy of Mark TWAIN's The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884 UK) and attempts to persuade Harte to
put his name to the tale, and so make his eventual heir rich. The ensuing
complications are superficially comic, but an intriguingly human and
detailed portrayal of the main characters, and of 19th-century Nevada,
slowly emerges. [JC]Other works: Anno Domini (1985); Lethal Wagon * (1987)
as by Joel Norst, a film tie; Black Dragon (1988).See also: TIME
PARADOXES.
MITCHELL, SILAS WEIR
(1829-1914) US physician, neurologist and writer, of considerable
eminence for his original research - he published at least 172 papers from
1852 on neurophysiology and related subjects. Most of his voluminous
fiction is historical and depicts US subjects with romantic solemnity. His
first story, "The Case of George Dedlow" (1866), is of some sf interest,

as it is a SATIRE on Spiritualism. In Dr North and his Friends (1900) a
female character exhibits a dual personality; it is one of the earliest
appearances of this phenomenon in fiction ( PSYCHOLOGY). Little Stories
(coll 1903) assembles tales whose sf interest lies in SWM's ability to
ground supernatural subject matter with speculations usually derived from
his own researches. A further story, "Was He Dead?" (1870), appears in
Future Perfect (anth 1966) ed H. Bruce FRANKLIN. [JC]
MITCHISON, NAOMI (MARGARET)
(1897- ) Scottish novelist, story writer, cattle breeder and polemicist,
sister of J.B.S. HALDANE. She is known mainly for her work outside the sf
field - her bibliography includes over 100 books and over 1000 shorter
pieces, beginning with Saunes Bairos: A Study in Recurrence: A Play in
Three Acts, a Prologue and Epilogue (1913 chap) as by N.M.Haldane, the
first performance of which featured an appearance by the young Aldous
HUXLEY - and includes such historical novels as The Conquered (1923) and
The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931; vt The Barbarian 1961 US), the
latter an ANTHROPOLOGICAL fantasy about Sparta. Some of her earlier
stories, such as "The Goat", published in Barbarian Stories (coll 1929),
the short novel The Powers of Light (1932 chap), which deals with
prehistory, and many of the tales and fables in The Fourth Pig (coll
1936), use sf or fantasy elements for allegorical purposes. We Have Been
Warned (1935) is a NEAR-FUTURE political novel involving the oppression of
the Left in the UK. Beyond this Limit (1935 chap), whose illustrations by
Wyndham LEWIS constitute a co-creation of the book, is an afterlife
fantasy with some satirical impact. The Big House (1950) is a fairy tale
for children, set within a Celtic frame. Travel Light (1952) is an
historical fantasy. To the Chapel Perilous (1955) is a witty account of
the Grail legend which pits rival anthropological and historical theories
together as if, in a sense, they were all true. Behold Your King (1957) is
a novel about Christ's crucifixion, told in a slangy, contemporary idiom
to demystify it. Images of Africa (coll 1980) assembles short fantasies
told in a folktale idiom. Early in Orcadia (1987), also fantasy, is set in
prehistoric Orkney. Of her 30 or more books for children, many are
fantasy. Two late collections, Beyond this Limit: Selected Shorter Fiction
(coll 1986), which assembles pre-WWII work, and A Girl Must Live: Stories
and Poems (coll 1990), which assembles work from the following
half-century, include a considerable amount of sf.NM's first genuine sf
novel was MEMOIRS OF A SPACEWOMAN (1962), a ruminative picaresque
comprising a series of episodes recollected by the narrator, Mary, a
COMMUNICATIONS expert dealing with ALIEN intelligences. Most of the
episodes contain ingenious biological (or exobiological) speculations.
Mary's reminiscences are warm and urgent; her job necessitates
interstellar travel, which requires "time blackouts", so that she
constantly returns to a changed world. She loves her work, however, and
intends to continue; it is a radiant book. Solution Three (1975) is a less
sustained examination of a CLONE solution to the problems of a
post-catastrophe Earth. Heterosexuality is out; but a new generation is
beginning to question the rigidity of the homosexual Solution Three. Not
by Bread Alone (1983) suggests that the sudden distribution of free food
worldwide will create serious problems; the Australian Aborigines wisely

refuse the offer.Though NM's fiction is both copious and fluent, her
writing is primarily motivated by extrinsic concerns. Where these concerns
are successfully embedded in her stories, she is a writer of glowing
power. [JC]See also: GENETIC ENGINEERING; INTELLIGENCE; MYTHOLOGY; WOMEN
AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION.
MITSUSE, RYU
[r] JAPAN.
MIXON, LAURA J.
(1957- ) US writer who began publishing sf with the first in the Omni
Odysseyssequence for younger readers, Omni: Astropilots(1987; vt Astro
Pilots 1987 UK); other titles were from other hands. Her first adultnovel,
Glass Houses (1992), is a CYBERPUNK-influenced tale set in New York City,
and told in a style one might describe asEast Coast noir. The female
protagonist, grittilycharacterized, is tough, believable, humanly
vulnerable. The plot, which involves at least one MCGUFFIN, brings in the
usual cyberpunk suspects: corporations; henchmen; crazedentrepreneurs;
VIRTUAL REALITY surfers. It is a remarkable debut, and points to muchmore.
[JC]
MOAV, RAM
[r] ISRAEL.
MODERN ELECTRICS
SCIENCE AND INVENTION.
MODESITT, L(ELAND) E(XTON Jr)
(1943- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "The Great American
Economy" for ASF in 1973, the first of two Council of Economic Advisors
tales. His first novel The Fires of Paratime (1982), is an eccentric but
ambitious TIME-TRAVEL tale, in which emissaries/guardians from the planet
Query engage in complex and metaphysical manipulations of reality. The
Hammer of Darkness (1985), also sf, was followed by two series. The
Forever Hero novels - Dawn for a Distant Earth (1987), Silent Warrior
(1987) and In Endless Twilight (1988) - treat the profound ecological
desecration of Earth through a sequence of SPACE OPERAS whose protagonist,
an immortal warrior called MacGregor Gerswin, saves the planet as part of
a scheme of sweeping galactic exploits. The Ecolitan Trilogy - The
Ecologic Envoy (1986), The Ecolitan Operation (1989) and The Ecologic
Secession (1990) - deals with similar themes, though ultimate success is
here achieved as part of a pattern of political intrigues and battles. The
Reclucefantasy sequence comprisesThe Magic of Recluce (1991), The Towers
of the Sunset (1992) and The Magic Engineer (1994).The Green Progression
(1992) with Bruce Scott Levinson is a nongenre novel on ecological issues.
Of Tangible Ghosts (1994) is an ALTERNATE WORLD sf tale. [JC]Other
Works:Timediver's Dawn (1992) and The Timegod (1993).
MOEBIUS
Jean GIRAUD.
MOFFAT, W. GRAHAM
(1866-? ) UK writer whose What's the World Coming To? (1893) with John
White takes the form of a series of discussions, set in AD2003, of the

various marvels which the 20th century has seen. The tone is satirical;
the targets include Edward BELLAMY, fictional cliches such as crime
detection by psychic means, and concerns such as FEMINISM. [JC]
MOFFATT, JAMES
(1922-1993) Canadian-born UK writer who wrote at least 290 novels in
several genres under at least 45 pseudonyms, including the Hank JANSON
house name (though not in that case for sf) and Richard Allen, a personal
pseudonym for the non-sf Skin books. In the 1960s he wrote the first
chapter of a novel which, when taken over by Michael MOORCOCK according to
a practice very common in UK pulp publishing, became Somewhere in the
Night (1966) as by Moorcock. JM's sf novels under his own name - others
may exist - are The Sleeping Bomb (1970; vt The Cambri Plot 1973 US),
which was the first volume in an otherwise non-sf series starring Silas
Manners, and Queen Kong (1977), spoofing KING KONG from a feminist point
of view. [JC]
MOFFETT, CLEVELAND LANGSTON
(1863-1926) US playwright and popular novelist, author of one of the most
explicit EDISONADES to appear in early-20th-century US sf. In The Conquest
of America: A Romance of Disaster and Victory (1916), Thomas Alva Edison
(1847-1931) himself saves the USA from decadent socialists while fending
off a threat of WAR from Germany. The Mysterious Card (fixup 1912) and
Possessed (fixup 1920) are occult fantasies. [JC]
MOFFETT, JUDITH
(1942- ) US writer and academic, a professor with the University of
Pennsylvania since 1979. She was first active as a poet, publishing 2
collections - Keeping Time (coll 1976) and Whinny Moor Crossing (coll
1984) - before turning to sf with an ape-as-human tale ( APES AND
CAVEMEN), "Surviving", for FSF in 1986, later assembled with "Not without
Honor" (1989) as Two that Came True (coll 1991). With her first novel,
Pennterra (1987), she came into immediate prominence, partly because of
the rousing sexual explicitness of some scenes between humans and the
pheromone-emitting Hrossa, a mysterious group-mind species named - oddly,
given C.S. LEWIS's prurient distaste for sexual material - after the
Martians who feature in OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET (1938). Having escaped a
terminally polluted Earth, a party of Quakers has landed on the planet
Pennterra and been permitted restricted residence on condition that they
do not breed indiscriminately, claim further territory or use invasive
technologies. All goes well until a second human expedition arrives with
no intention of changing any of the behaviour which has ruined humanity's
first home. The Hrossa warn them that Pennterra herself will punish them
for any disobedience, and the novel - taking on the hues of a grave and
didactic PLANETARY ROMANCE-moves inexorably to the comeuppance. JM's
second novel, THE RAGGED WORLD: A NOVEL OF THE HEFN ON EARTH (fixup 1991),
adroitly transforms a series of stories-including "Tiny Tango" (1989),
about AIDS - into a remarkably effective fable of DISASTER and redemption,
the latter at the hands of a deus ex machina cabal of aliens; the sequel
was Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream (1992). These novels come close to
aesthetic overkill, but do not succumb: the first generally avoids the
chill of piety, and the sequence overall eschews the coy. By choosing

controversial subjects and then treating them to generic solutions, JM
shows a mature sense of balance and an active engagement with the sf
genre; she is a risk-taker of very considerable interest. [JC]See also:
EDISONADE; JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD; PASTORAL; SEX; SUPERNATURAL
CREATURES;
THEODORE STURGEON MEMORIAL AWARD.
MOFFITT, DONALD (ANTHONY)
(1936- ) US writer who started publishing sf with The Jupiter Theft
(1977), a tale which established him as an author of numerate,
physics-oriented, fast-moving HARD-SF adventures. After some years of
silence came the Genesis series - The Genesis Quest (1986) and Second
Genesis (1986) - which demonstrates a competence with the mythopoeically
large scales and calculations typical of DM's category of SPACE OPERA as
Earth sends terminal messages through space which reach their alien
targets millions of years hence, generating an eon-leaping response.
Slightly closer to home, the Mechanical Sky sequence - Crescent in the Sky
(1990) and A Gathering of Stars (1990) - posits Arab-dominated venues in
space. Though some local-colour weaknesses (the first volume features a
court eunuch) might irritate Muslims, the focus of the tales - especially
the wide-ranging second instalment - is firmly on the wide-scale action
and the physics. [JC]
MOLESWORTH, VOL(TAIRE)
(1924-1964) Australian journalist and writer, active in FANDOM around the
period of WWII. His sf included 4 short novels: Ape of God (1943 chap) and
its sequel Monster at Large (1943 chap), Blinded They Fly (1951 chap),
based in part on the works of Charles FORT, and Let There Be Monsters!
(1952 chap), a tale about MUTANTS. VM also wrote Outline History of
Australian Fandom (1953). [JC]See also: SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED
EDITIONS.
MONEY
Love of money, being the root of all evil, has always played a leading
part in literature, and sf is no exception: few plots could move without
it. Precisely because it is so basic, however, speculative thought has
rarely focused on it; it is one of those things that is habitually taken
for granted. Money may change its form, and the dollar may be replaced by
the CREDIT, but its centrality in human affairs is inviolable.The
commonest of all wish-fulfilment fantasies is the sudden acquisition of
wealth, and sf has often given form to the wish. As with other such
fantasies, however, sf writers have characteristically taken a cynical and
slightly disapproving view of the issue, implying that no good can come of
it. T.L. SHERRED's "Eye for Iniquity" (1953) is a neat cautionary tale
about the problems involved in having a talent for making money out of
nothing. The frenzy which can be aroused by the prospect of easy money is
exemplified in history by the affair of the South Sea Bubble (1720), and
this prompted one of the earliest speculative fictions about speculation,
Samuel Brunt's A Voyage to Cacklogallinia (1727). However, many UTOPIANS
had already expressed their distaste for the profit motive and its effects
on human affairs. Various romances commenting on the folly of the
alchemical quest - of which the most notable is Honore de BALZAC's La

recherche de l'absolu (1834; trans under various titles) - took a similar
line. The prospect of science making at least the physical part of the
alchemist's quest a reality did little to alter this disparaging attitude.
Edgar Allan POE's "Von Kempelen and His Discovery" (1849) suggests that
the discovery of a way of making gold would simply rob a practically
valueless metal of its ridiculous price, and that the world would press on
regardless. Arthur Conan DOYLE's successful gold-maker in The Doings of
Raffles Haw (1891) is quickly disillusioned with philanthropy and reverts
his hoard to the dust whence it came. Henry Richardson CHAMBERLAIN's
eponymous 6000 Tons of Gold (1894) nearly precipitates worldwide
catastrophe. Only John TAINE's hero in Quayle's Invention (1927) gets much
joy out of his instant wealth, and he finds it far from easy. Much more
beneficial to humanity, in the eyes of its author, is the
wealth-destroying machine in George Allan ENGLAND's The Golden Blight
(1916), which frees mankind from the present generation of capitalists.
The folly of retaining the gold standard in an era of technological
ingenuity is exposed in Frank O'Rourke's SATIRE Instant Gold (1964); it is
hardly surprising that the main change in the money system consistently
made by sf writers was the replacement of the gold standard by a purely
theoretical credit system. Garrett P. SERVISS's The Moon Metal (1900)
offers a variant on the gold-making theme, while George O. SMITH's
"Pandora's Millions" (1945) concerns the desperate race to find a new
symbolic medium of exchange following the invention of the
matter-duplicator, and the title of "The Iron Standard" (1943) by Henry
KUTTNER largely speaks for itself. Exotic media of exchange are
occasionally featured in sf, notably the virtue-based credit system of
Patrick Wilkins's "Money is the Root of All Good" and the alien
exchange-system whereby depression leads to extinction in John BRUNNER's
Total Eclipse (1975). Jack VANCE has been particularly ingenious in the
invention of various monetary systems appropriately or ironically adapted
to different cultures.One subtheme of note is developed in stories
celebrating the wonders of compound interest. Simple mathematics shows
that money invested for 1000 years grows quite magnificently even at
relatively low interest rates - an observation first made in Eugene Sue's
The Wandering Jew (1845). SLEEPERS AWAKE from periods of SUSPENDED
ANIMATION to find themselves rich in Edmond ABOUT's The Man with the
Broken Ear (1861; trans 1867), H.G. WELLS's When the Sleeper Wakes (1899;
rev as The Sleeper Awakes 1910) and Charles Eric MAINE's The Man who Owned
the World (1961). Harry Stephen Keeler took the notion to extremes in
"John Jones' Dollar" (1915 Black Cat), in which a dollar invested in trust
for John Jones's distant descendants ultimately grows to represent all the
wealth in the Universe. More recently, however, we have become all too
well aware of what inflation can do to long-term investments, and the hero
of Frederik POHL's The Age of the Pussyfoot (1968) awakes from suspended
animation to find his "fortune" valueless in terms of real purchasing
power. It all goes to prove the old adage that money doesn't grow on trees
- except, of course, in Clifford D. SIMAK's "The Money Tree" (1958).
[BS]See also: ECONOMICS.
MONITORS, THE
Film (1969). Bell ?

Dir Jack Shea, starring Guy Stockwell, Susan Oliver, Avery Schreiber,
Sherry Jackson, with cameos by Keenan Wynn, Ed Begley and others.
Screenplay Myron J. Gold, based on The Monitors (1966) by Keith LAUMER. 92
mins. Colour.Filled with bizarre jokes and moments of stunning banality,
this film - or string of revue sketches - made in Chicago by the Second
City cabaret troupe, concerns an invasion of Earth by superior ALIENS who
enforce on the population a system of brotherly love and nonviolence.
Dressed in black overcoats, black hats and dark glasses, the monitors
control people by spraying them with a pacifying gas; a resistance
movement is formed and the aliens are overthrown. An oddity, which flopped
badly, the film is a product of a time when the hippy flower power
counterculture was attempting to usher in an era of peace and happiness,
but followed close on the heels of police brutality against hippy
protesters outside the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. [JB/PN]
MONKEY BUSINESS
Film (1952). 20th Century-Fox. Dir Howard Hawks, starring Cary Grant,
Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, Hugh Marlowe, Marilyn Monroe. Screenplay
Ben HECHT, I.A.L. Diamond, Charles Lederer. 97 mins. B/w.Made only a year
after The THING (though his direction of the latter was uncredited),
Hawks's second sf film is one of the classic screwball comedies. Grant
plays a staid scientist working on slowing the ageing process. One of his
laboratory apes accidentally mixes the ingredients that bring a kind of
rejuvenation and dumps them in the water cooler. First the scientist, then
his equally grave wife (Rogers) and then his employers mistakenly take the
elixir, and all, sequentially, revert to manic adolescent behaviour. In a
splendid bit part Marilyn Monroe plays the now predatory scientist's first
quarry. Amid the well orchestrated farce, a serious enough point is made
about hormonal experiments, as anarchy strikes deep into the heart of
adulthood. [PN]
MONKEY SHINES
(vt Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Terror) Film (1988). Orion/Charles
Evans. Dir George ROMERO, starring Jason Beghe, John Pankow, Kate McNeil,
Joyce Van Patten. Screenplay Romero, based on Monkey Shines (1983) by
Michael STEWART. 113 mins. Colour.The sf element in this horror thriller
is Ella, a monkey, the subject of an experiment to increase simian
intelligence by injecting human genetic material into her brain. Ella is
given as a therapeutic companion to quadriplegic Allan, with whom she
develops a quasitelepathic link. His exasperation at his helplessness is
translated by Ella into instructions to kill anyone (including his
suffocating mother) who angers him. She also becomes jealous, attacking
the two people closest to Allan: his best friend and his new lover. Allan
must stop her, using (literally) only his head. Put baldly this sounds
trite, but MS is close to perfect in its own apparently unpromising terms.
It is made with great patience and subtlety, with an astonishing
performance from the monkey - whose growing intelligence (and malice) is
rendered utterly believable - and with Beghe brilliant in the difficult
quadriplegic role. The subtext (a Jekyll-and-Hyde theme with Ella being
Allan's vicariously controlled Hyde, representing the animal instincts
still functioning within the human mind) is maintained even in the one

gratuitous shock added to the finale after previews in order to make the
film less sedate: a metaphoric twist on the old phrase "a monkey on my
back". [PN]
MONOLITH MONSTERS, THE
Film (1957). Universal. Dir John Sherwood, starring Grant Williams, Lola
Albright, Les Tremayne. Screenplay Norman Jolley, Robert M. Fresco, based
on a story by Jack ARNOLD, Fresco. 77 mins. B/w.In this rather good little
film, crystals from a meteorite that has fallen near a small desert town
grow and multiply rapidly when wet. They also cause death by absorbing all
the silicon from any living thing that touches them, paradoxically turning
the victims to stone. There is a rainstorm: the outstandingly surreal
sequences of the crystals rearing up and crashing down, in their
inexorable march towards the seemingly doomed town, are memorable. Then it
is discovered that ordinary salt will stop them. Sherwood's debt to Jack
Arnold is obvious, especially in the moody desert landscapes. The idea of
the marching crystals may well have been borrowed from "White Lily" (1930)
by John TAINE. [JB/PN]
MONROE, LYLE
Robert A. HEINLEIN.
MONSARRAT, NICHOLAS
Pseudonym of Nicholas John Turney (1910-1979), UK-born writer long in
Canada, best known for such adventure novels as The Cruel Sea (1951). The
first of the 4 vols of his Signs of the Times series, The Time Before This
(1962 UK), which is sf, tells of the discovery of ancient artefacts and
frozen beings in Canada, evidence of a highly evolved earlier race on
Earth, and of an atomic HOLOCAUST which ended their civilization. The
second, Smith and Jones (1963 UK), is a seemingly conventional spy story
but is transformed devastatingly into either an ALTERNATE-WORLD or a
NEAR-FUTURE novel by its last line. With The Master Mariner, Book 1:
Running Proud (1978 UK), NM began a projected 2-part novel about a Flying
Dutchman figure, whose story was planned to extend over four centuries of
UK life at sea; the second volume, which NM died before completing, was
published as The Master Mariner, Book 2: Darken Ship: The Unfinished Novel
(1980 UK). [JC]
MONSTER
Roger CORMAN.
MONSTER FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR
Roger CORMAN.
MONSTER MAKER
Roger CORMAN.
MONSTER MOVIES
A term colloquially used for a very specific genre of film, usually
borderline sf. A monster movie - sometimes called a Creature Feature must contain the unexpected appearance, normally in a serene setting, of a
creature (or many creatures) hostile to humanity. The nature of the
creature is usually revealed gradually, and its attacks normally increase
in severity. It may be a mutated animal or human, an alien, a kind of

animal normally not hostile (as in Hitchcock's The BIRDS [1963]), or any
unnatural (but not supernatural) creature.The monster is usually
rationalized (often half-heartedly) as, for example, a dormant prehistoric
species newly awakened (e.g., GOJIRA [1954]), an unintended result of
scientific experiment (e.g., TARANTULA [1955]), a MUTANT created by
radioactivity (e.g., THEM! [1954]), or a secret government experimental
warfare device gone wrong (e.g., the remake of The BLOB [1988]). In the
majority of cases the monster represents a punishment for humankind-for
tampering with Nature, corrupting the environment or creating vile
weapons. The featuring of a monstrous creature - e.g., the vampire
protagonist of Dracula (1931) and its successors - is not in itself a
sufficient condition for a film to be classed as a MM. The monster must
occupy our world - a world where cause and effect are operative, and
phenomena normally have explanations - and not a fantasy world; for this
reason MMs can properly be defined as sf. The monster is, however, not a
natural occupant of our world, and to this degree MMs approach the
condition of fantasy.If the MM has an ultimate moral, it is about the
fragility of the Age of Reason in which we supposedly live. Unreason lurks
in the surrounding dark, just beyond the light cast by our campfires, and
may break in. The case can be put psychologically, too: in Freudian terms
as the revenge of the id over the conscious ego ( FORBIDDEN PLANET), or in
Jungian terms as the irruption of archetypes into a world which does not
consciously recognize them. The oldest part of our brains, the hindbrain
or limbic system, wellspring of our fight-or-flight reflex, is sometimes
claimed as the source of our monsters, not so much Unreason reclaiming
ground from Reason as the Primitive asserting its continuing strength over
the Sophisticated. It is one of the interesting qualities of MMs that any
attempt to unravel their subtexts nearly always reveals a critique of the
smugness of "civilization" - indeed, a questioning of the very nature of
civilization. Thus one of our most apparently childish genres asks some of
the most unanswerable questions of our world.Various elements that make up
the generic MM had previously existed in isolation: prehistoric survivals
in The LOST WORLD (1925); a gigantic threat to humanity in KING KONG
(1933); deformed creatures revenging themselves against normality in
FRANKENSTEIN (1931), ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932) and Freaks (1932). It was
only with the sf movie boom of the 1950s that the generic structure of the
MM took the shape it retains today, quite rapidly developing inflexible
conventions. The most plausible candidate for the first such film is The
THING (1951), with subsequent milestones including The BEAST FROM 20,000
FATHOMS (1953), GOJIRA (1954), THEM! (1954) and TARANTULA (1955). The boom
climaxed with a veritable eruption of MMs in 1957, including one of Roger
CORMAN's first, ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS, and, unusually, a UK
offering, the marvellously insane FIEND WITHOUT A FACE. The cascade
continued in 1958, with variations on the theme becoming more knowing - a
sign that generic conventions had sufficiently hardened for audience
expectations to be consciously manipulated - in I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM
OUTER SPACE, The BLOB and The FLY . But generic rigidity soon degenerated
into decline and fall. More MMs were made 1959-62 than in the whole of
1951-8, but almost without exception they were low-budget, cynical
exploitationers of no real quality aimed at the teenage drive-in market;
an exception might be made of the surreal Japanese MOSURA (1961).The

structure of MMs normally follows, in sequence, the following narrative
conventions: the peaceful beginning; the first intimations that something
is wrong; half-seen glimpses of the monster; disbelief of the first
reports; attacks of increasing ferocity in which the monster is fully
revealed; the fight back against the monster and its destruction. Often
there is also the revelation in the final frames that more monsters are
hatching.An important variation, signalled by King Kong, is the
sympathetic monster, doomed to destruction, sometimes magnificent in its
monstrousness, more often merely pathetic as in The CREATURE FROM THE
BLACK LAGOON (1954), The QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955; vt The Creeping
Unknown), The AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (1957), NOT OF THIS EARTH (1957) and
The Fly (1958). Here the subtext might be that the monster, basically, is
us. Another classic variation is the monstrous creature that can take
over, or assume the shape of, human beings, as in IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
(1953), INVADERS FROM MARS (1953), INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956),
QUATERMASS II (1957; vt Enemy from Space), I Married a Monster from Outer
Space (1958), TERRORE NELLO SPAZIO (1965; vt Planet of the Vampires) and
the tv series The INVADERS (1967-8). Such films still turn up
occasionally, as in The HIDDEN (1988) and THEY LIVE (1988). Their subtext,
however, is entirely different from that of MMs proper ( PARANOIA) and
many would not regard them as the real thing.After The Birds (1963), few
MMs of any quality were made for some time. Then came the extraordinary
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), in which the director, George ROMERO,
rejuvenated the genre by adding to it one of its great icons, the army of
(scientifically created) zombies, literally eating society away. In the
1970s the revenge-of-Nature theme of The Birds was taken up again by a
number of other films in which the "monster" was natural, aside from its
exceptional ferocity towards humanity. Some of these were FROGS (1972),
NIGHT OF THE LEPUS (1972), Squirm (1976), The GIANT SPIDER INVASION
(1975), KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS (1977) and, most famous of all, Jaws
(1975). PHASE IV (1974) and BUG (1975), both featuring intelligent
insects, also have points of interest. Most of these films are marginal sf
at best, being closer in their paranoia to supernatural fantasy.In the
mid-1970s MMs - not just in the revenge-of-Nature subgenre - began bit by
bit to make their comeback, often through the work of quirky, independent
directors. DEATH LINE (1973; vt Raw Meat) and IT'S ALIVE (1974) are both
notable for sympathetic monsters. The latter is the work of the deeply
eccentric Larry COHEN, whose subsequent MMs include IT LIVES AGAIN (1978)
and Q (1983; vt The Winged Serpent; vt Q: The Winged Serpent). David
CRONENBERG also began making borderline MMs in the 1970s, with The
PARASITE MURDERS (1974; vt They Came from Within; vt Shivers), RABID
(1976) and The BROOD (1979), all notable for being both intelligent and
disgusting. Joe DANTE's PIRANHA (1978) is another witty and subversive
independent production. Indeed, it was now becoming clear that the second
generation of MMs, far from being primitive exploitation movies, were
attracting some of the most radical and sophisticated directors. Any of
these films offers sufficiently complex readings, often political, to give
grist for a doctoral thesis. This is only possible when genres enter their
mature phase, where, although self-referential decadence ( RECURSIVE SF)
can become tiresome, virtuoso variations on a theme are also likely to
occur.The year 1979 was a turning point for MMs. Although it featured one

of the most disappointing ever made, PROPHECY, an expensive flop for John
FRANKENHEIMER, it also saw the release of ALIEN, directed by Ridley SCOTT,
which was an enormous success, both commercially and, in the view of some
critics, artistically. Thus, although the 1980s saw the continuing release
of interesting low-budget MMs from independents - e.g., ALLIGATOR (1980),
DAY OF THE DEAD (1985), CRITTERS (1986), SOCIETY (1989) and TREMORS (1989)
- it saw also more expensive productions from companies encouraged by the
success of Alien. A surprising number were remakes (mostly middle-budget),
including two that were very interesting indeed and may come to have
classic status: John CARPENTER's The THING (1982) and David Cronenberg's
The FLY (1986). Also better than most people expected were The BLOB (1988)
and The FLY II (1989). Other middling-to-large budget MMs of the period
were PREDATOR (1987) and its efficient sequel PREDATOR 2 (1990), LEVIATHAN
(1989), The ABYSS (1989) - where the monsters turn out to be good
ALIENS-and perhaps the best of them, the spider movie to end all spider
movies, ARACHNOPHOBIA (1990), which has a strong element of social comedy.
Indeed, outright comedy - either at the expense of or through the medium
of MMs - is quite common, with one of the first examples being Woody
Allen's EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX (BUT WERE
AFRAID TO
ASK) (1972), which in one episode features a giant breast on the rampage.
Most MM spoofs (there are quite a few) are bad, with Attack of the Killer
Tomatoes (1978) being typical in its ineptness. SCHLOCK (1971), on the
other hand, featuring a Neanderthal survival rather than a monster proper,
is rather funny, as is Larry Cohen's The STUFF (1985), about a passive
monster disguised as food. Two more recent MM satires targeting Middle
America are TERRORVISION (1986) and MEET THE APPLEGATES (1990): the latter
ingeniously shows life from the monsters' point of view. [PN]
MONSTER ON THE CAMPUS
Film (1958). Universal. Dir Jack ARNOLD, starring Arthur Franz, Joanna
Moore, Judson Pratt, Troy Donahue. Screenplay David DUNCAN. 77 mins.
B/w.This is one of Jack Arnold's last and poorest sf films, a variation on
the Jekyll and Hyde theme: blood from a specimen coelacanth causes living
creatures to devolve ( DEVOLUTION); a SCIENTIST (Franz) temporarily but
repeatedly becomes an apeman. The film is, foolishly, structured as a
mystery which everybody is too unobservant to solve, and the science is
absurd. As critic Bill WARREN has pointed out, the main interest is noting
the variety of ways in which the unfortunate scientist (whose noble
quasi-suicide is the film's climax), along with a dog and a dragonfly,
contrive to contaminate themselves. [JB/PN]
MONSTERS
Monsters have always stalked the hinterlands of the imagination, emblems
of fear and symbols of guilt. They commonly take their aspects and roles
from the supernatural imagination ( SUPERNATURAL CREATURES); but the
scientific imagination has produced many monsters of its own. The
recruitment to the HORROR story of monsters spawned by Nature was
pioneered by H.G. WELLS's classic alien- INVASION story THE WAR OF THE
WORLDS (1897) and by William Hope HODGSON's sea stories. Sf monsters are
often familiar but repulsive creatures made monstrous by increasing their

size ( GREAT AND SMALL), and alien monsters are often created by
chimerical redeployment of the repulsive features of earthly creatures.
The fossil record has increased this vocabulary of ideas considerably.
Other monsters arise as MUTANTS or as the accidental products of human
scientific endeavour: the archetypal monster of this kind stars in Mary
SHELLEY's GOTHIC-SF classic Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818;
rev 1831). The actual scientific discipline of teratology (the study of
monsters) has made little impact on sf, although its elaboration in the
gruesome murder mystery The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (1934) by Alexander
LAING brings that novel close to the sf borderline, and the same might be
said of Whitley STRIEBER's horror-detective novel The Wolfen (1978).
Russell M. GRIFFIN's The Blind Men and the Elephant (1982) borrows heavily
from the well known "Elephant Man" case.Many of the standard figures of
fear have made their way from MYTHOLOGY or elsewhere into sf via
more-or-less ingenious processes of rationalization. The invisible monster
proved easy to adapt ( INVISIBILITY): one was featured in the first issue
of AMZ in George Allan ENGLAND's "The Thing from-Outside" (1926). The
Gorgon became C.L. MOORE's "Shambleau" (1933). Werewolves are rationalized
in DARKER THAN YOU THINK (1940; 1948) by Jack WILLIAMSON and "There Shall
Be No Darkness" (1950) by James BLISH. "Who Goes There?" (1938) by John W.
CAMPBELL Jr takes the idea of the menacing shapeshifter to its limit. Sf
vampires are featured in numerous stories, including "Asylum" (1942) by A.
E. VAN VOGT - whose The Voyage of the Space Beagle (fixup 1950) features a
whole repertoire of monsters - I Am Legend (1954) by Richard MATHESON, The
Space Vampires (1976) by Colin WILSON, The Vampire Tapestry (fixup 1980)
by Suzy McKee CHARNAS and The Empire of Fear (1988) by Brian M.
STABLEFORD. The entire retinue of mythological monsters is recreated by
COMPUTER in Nightworld (1979) and The Vampires of Nightworld (1981) by
David F. BISCHOFF. Other kinds of quasivampiric PARASITISM are featured in
Eric Frank RUSSELL's Sinister Barrier (1939; 1943; rev 1948), van Vogt's
"Discord in Scarlet" (1939) and Robert A. HEINLEIN's The Puppet Masters
(1951; text restored 1989).Monsters have always been very popular in the
movies, and until the 1960s sf CINEMA was dominated by MONSTER MOVIES of
every possible kind. The first of many versions of FRANKENSTEIN was made
in 1910, but the legend was created anew in 1931 when Boris Karloff took
the role of the monster. Shortly afterwards a new legend was born in the
story of KING KONG (1933), in which fear was modified by sympathy: the
pragmatically necessary destruction of monster by mankind was thereafter
able to take on a dimension of tragedy, and the monsters could be pitied
in their monstrousness. Japanese monster movies, pioneered by GOJIRA
(1954), have frequently converted charismatic monsters into heroes.
Another significant cinematic innovation was the monster liberated from
the scientist's id in FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956). Recent advances in
special-effects technology have permitted a resurgence of scary MONSTER
MOVIES, the most notable sf examples being ALIEN (1979) and its sequels,
and various films dir David CRONENBERG, while TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY
(1991) grafts a traditional monstrous propensity - shapeshifting-onto a
technological construct. GENRE SF, of course, made abundant melodramatic
use of monsters. ILLUSTRATION played a considerable part in building sf's
monster mythology - ALIEN horrors were a particularly rich source of lurid
cover pictures, and the BUG-EYED MONSTER, or BEM (whose archetype appeared

on the cover of ASF May 1931, illustrating Charles Willard Diffin's "Dark
Moon"), quickly became a CLICHE
MONSTERS FROM THE UNKNOWN PLANET
GOJIRA.
MONSTERS INVADE EXPO 70
DAIKAIJU GAMERA.
MONSTER ZERO
GOJIRA; RADON.
MONTANA, RON (A.)
(?1945- ) US writer whose published work in FANZINES included "We the
People" in 1974 for Craig STRETE's Red Planet Earth. His first sf novel,
The Sign of the Thunderbird (1977), conveys its post- HOLOCAUST
protagonists to the New Mexico of 1860, where their actions in espousing a
free Indian Nation generate an ALTERNATE-WORLD vision of the USA. His
second, The Cathedral Option (1978), is of less interest. RM's engagement
with Native American material ironically prefigured a controversy of the
1980s, in which he accused Strete of plagiarizing his draft of the
manuscript published as Death in the Spirit House (1988) under Strete's
name alone; RM's version of the book was eventually republished, as part
of an agreed settlement, as Face in the Snow (1992), under his name as
sole author. The book itself remains difficult to evaluate, for the
transformation of the protagonist from spoiled "evolue" Native American
into the transcendent manifestation of the spirit of a symbolic mountain
seems, perhaps, rather forced. [JC]
MONTEIRO, JERONIMO
[r] LATIN AMERICA.
MONTELEONE, THOMAS F(RANCIS)
(1946- ) US writer active in sf since 1972, first with book reviews in
AMZ, then with short stories, beginning with "Wendigo's Child" for Monster
Tales (anth 1973) ed Roger ELWOOD. Two of his stories have received NEBULA
nominations; nine of them (plus a play) are collected in Dark Stars, and
Other Illuminations (coll 1981). These were more ambitious than most of
his work at novel length, which is undemanding adventure fiction, starting
with Seeds of Change (1975 Canada); this is of interest in that, as the
first of the LASER BOOKS, it was issued free to libraries and booksellers
as a promotional item in order to generate sales of later titles. TFM's
subsequent sf novels include The Time-Swept City (fixup 1977), featuring a
city-controlling COMPUTER developing sentience; The Secret Sea (1979),
with Jules VERNE's Captain Nemo and the Nautilus turning up in one of a
set of PARALLEL WORLDS; and the entertaining post- HOLOCAUST Guardian
sequence: Guardian (1980) and Ozymandias (1981); in the first volume a
pre-holocaust supercomputer is found, and in the second it is incarnated
in a human body. The rather derivative Dragonstar sequence with David F.
BISCHOFF - Day of the Dragonstar (1983), Night of the Dragonstar (1985)
and Dragonstar Destiny (1989) - is about First Contact with a saurian race
aboard a vast, alien spacecraft. In 1980 TFM moved to horror/dark fantasy
with Night Things (1980), returning to it with Night-Train (1984) and

later with others.TFM is a thoughtful editor. His 2 sf theme anthologies
are The Arts, and Beyond: Visions of Man's Aesthetic Future (anth 1977)
and R-A-M: Random Access Messages of the Computer Age (anth 1984; vt
Microworlds: SF Stories of the Computer Age 1985 UK). His 2 horror
anthologies are Borderlands (anth 1990),Borderlands II (anth 1991 ) and
Borderlands III (anth 1994). [PN]Other works: The Time Connection (1976),
sf; Lyrica (1987), The Magnificent Gallery (1987), Crooked House (1987)
with John DECHANCIE and Fantasma (1989),The Blood of the Lamb (1992), all
horror.See also: ARTS.
MONTGOMERY, FRANCES TREGO
(1858-1925) US writer, mostly of books for children, whose Electric
Elephant sequence - The Wonderful Electric Elephant (1903) and On a Lark
to the Planets (1904) - describes in a DIME-NOVEL manner the adventures of
a young man who inherits a hollow mechanical elephant after the apparent
death of the old man who owned it. With a girlfriend (they later marry),
he frolics across the USA and, in the second volume, around the Solar
System, which is described in terms appropriate to astrology. The old man
then reappears and takes them on a guided tour of the Milky Way. [JC]
MONTHLY STORY BLUE BOOK MAGAZINE, THE
The BLUE BOOK MAGAZINE .
MONTHLY STORY MAGAZINE, THE
The BLUE BOOK MAGAZINE.
MOON
The lunar voyage has a long literary history, having developed from a
standard framework for social SATIRE to become one of the archetypal
projects of speculative fiction. Major works in the former tradition
include two 2nd-century tales by LUCIAN of Samosata, Francis GODWIN's The
Man in the Moone (1638), the first part of CYRANO DE BERGERAC's L'autre
monde (1657), Daniel DEFOE's The Consolidator (1705), Samuel Brunt's A
Voyage to Cacklogallinia (1727), Murtagh MCDERMOT's A Trip to the Moon
(1728) and Joseph ATTERLEY's A Voyage to the Moon (1827). This phase of
the history of the lunar voyage is the subject of Marjorie Hope NICOLSON's
excellent Voyages to the Moon (1948), which has an extensive annotated
bibliography. Several pre-1841 lunar voyages can be found in The Man in
the Moone (anth 1971) ed Faith K. Pizor and T. Allan Comp. The use of the
Moon as a stage for the erection of mock societies became less fashionable
in the 19th century, but echoes of the tradition recur even in the present
century, as in Compton MACKENZIE's The Lunatic Republic (1959). The first
trip to the Moon seemingly motivated solely by the spirit of adventure was
in a brief episode in Ralph MORRIS's ROBINSONADE The Life and Wonderful
Adventures of John Daniel (1751).The idea that travelling to the Moon
might be a notion worth taking seriously first crops up in the appendix to
John WILKINS's The Discovery of a New World (3rd edn 1640), where the
author suggests that a man might be carried to the Moon by a large bird or
that a flying machine capable of the trip might one day become
practicable. Another writer to take seriously the modes of TRANSPORTATION
used as conveniences by satirists was David RUSSEN, author of Iter Lunare
(1703): he suggested that a man might be propelled to the Moon by the

force of a gargantuan spring. The first writer to make any pretence at
verisimilitude was Edgar Allan POE, whose "The Unparalleled Adventure of
One Hans Pfaall" (1835) is a curious admixture of comic satire and
speculative fiction, although Pfaall's BALLOON seems hardly more credible
than Russen's spring. A superficially more convincing method was the
space-gun envisaged by Jules VERNE in De la terre a la lune (1865; trans
J.K. Hoyte as From the Earth to the Moon 1869 US) and its sequel, Autour
de la lune (1870; both trans Lewis Mercier and Eleanor King as From the
Earth to the Moon . . ., and a Trip Around It 1873 UK).Serious interest in
the Moon as a world in its own right, possibly harbouring ALIEN life of
its own, began with Johannes KEPLER's Somnium (1634), but this work stands
almost alone. Richard Adams LOCKE published his "Moon Hoax" in the New
York Sun in 1835, purporting to describe the inhabitants of the Moon as
observed by Sir John Herschel (1792-1871) with the aid of a new telescope,
but this vision of lunar life was a gaudy burlesque. By the time the
cosmic voyage began to be taken seriously in the 19th century the
possibility of there being life on the Moon was already past credibility.
H.G. WELLS imagined a Selenite society within the Moon in THE FIRST MEN IN
THE MOON (1901), but the setting here was no more than a convenient
literary device, like the antigravitic Cavorite by means of which the trip
was accomplished. Other contemporary works - including W.S. LACH-SZYRMA's
"Letters from the Planets" (1887-93), Edgar FAWCETT's The Ghost of Guy
Thyrle (1895) and George GRIFFITH's A Honeymoon in Space (1901)-portray
the Moon as a place of ultimate desolation where life is extinct, although
the scenes in which interplanetary voyagers find the ruins of long-dead
civilizations on the Moon exhibit a curiously nostalgic sense of tragedy.
A dead Moon is featured also in Andre LAURIE's Les exiles de la Terre
(1887; trans as The Conquest of the Moon 1889 UK), a story made memorable
by the magnificent notion that traversing the vacuum of space might be
avoided if the Moon could be temporarily attracted into the Earth's
atmosphere by giant magnets. Lunar life reappeared, however-sometimes in
extravagant fashion - in the works of PULP-MAGAZINE writers, notably in
Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's The Moon Maid (1923-5; fixup 1926), Edmond
HAMILTON's "The Other Side of the Moon" (1929), Otis Adelbert KLINE's Maza
of the Moon (1930) and, most impressively, Jack WILLIAMSON's "The Moon
Era" (1932). Lip-service is paid to the deadness of the Moon's visible
surface by locating the aliens inside the Moon, as Wells did, or only on
its far side, or in the distant past. A nostalgic elegy for lunar life is
offered by Lester DEL REY's "The Wings of Night" (1942).Dead or not,
though, the Moon was there - a mere quarter of a million miles away - to
be reached and to be claimed. To the early pulp writers this was an
article of faith, so easily taken for granted that the Moon routinely
became a mere stepping-stone en route to MARS or the STARS. The lunar
voyage remained a constant theme of sf of the 1930s and 1940s, but it was
more peripheral than the hype surrounding the first actual Moon landing
(1969) suggested. The imminent possibility of SPACE FLIGHT in a real NEAR
FUTURE had been taken seriously by relatively few writers. Arthur C.
CLARKE's essay, "We Can Rocket to the Moon - Now!" (1939), ushered in a
new era of realism, but it was the advent towards the end of WWII of the
V-2 rocket-bomb that hammered home the message that ROCKET-powered
SPACESHIPS were just around the corner. The post-WWII years saw

publication of a number of visionary novels which elevated the first trip
to the Moon to quasimythical status. Robert A. HEINLEIN, who had earlier
written the poignant "Requiem" (1940) about the burning ambition of a man
who longed to go to the Moon even though the trip would kill him, wrote a
short novel about the same hero's earlier fight to finance the first
Moon-shot and sell the myth of space conquest to the world: "The Man who
Sold the Moon" (1950). Heinlein also scripted the George PAL film
DESTINATION MOON (1950), drawing material from his first juvenile novel,
Rocket Ship Galileo (1947). Heinlein wrote realistic sf stories set on the
Moon for non-genre magazines, as did Arthur C. Clarke, the chief UK
prophet and propagandist of space travel, and author of Prelude to Space
(1951) and Earthlight (1951). Realistic juvenile novels concerning the
establishment of Moon bases were written by Lester DEL REY and Patrick
MOORE, and the UK RADIO serial Journey into Space (novelized by Charles
CHILTON as Journey into Space * [1954]) further popularized the idea.
Pierre BOULLE moved the myth decisively into MAINSTREAM fiction in Garden
on the Moon (1964; trans 1965), but by then most sf writers had abandoned
the theme as too commonplace. William F. TEMPLE's Shoot at the Moon (1966)
was one of the last major celebrations of the lunar-voyage myth in sf
before Neil Armstrong took his "one small step".In the mythology of sf,
the first lunar landing was usually a prelude to rapid COLONIZATION. A
lunar colony had waged its carbon-copy war of independence as long ago as
The Birth of a New Republic (1931 AMZ Quarterly; 1981) by Jack Williamson
and Miles J. BREUER. The hostility of the lunar environment was admitted,
but faith in human ingenuity ran high-John W. CAMPBELL Jr wrote the
ultimate lunar robinsonade in The Moon is Hell (1950), easily outdoing
Charles Eric MAINE's more modest High Vacuum (1956). Thrillers and
mysteries set on the inhabited Moon became commonplace in the 1950s;
examples are Murray LEINSTER's City on the Moon (1957), Clarke's A Fall of
Moondust (1961) and Clifford D. SIMAK's Trouble with Tycho (1961).
Heinlein produced a definitive new version of the birth of the new
republic in THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS (1966), a vision which John
VARLEY modified and expanded upon in Steel Beach (1992).Despite its
deadness, the Moon retained its status as an alien world, and human
visitors sometimes found echoes of others long passed on - artefacts left
behind to confront the Earthlings, as they broke out of their atmospheric
shell, with a glimpse of the infinite possibilities of an inhabited
Universe. Clarke's "Sentinel of Eternity" (1951; vt "The Sentinel")
captured the essence of this notion and became its archetypal expression,
ultimately forming the seed of the film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1967). An
equally challenging but far less hospitable artefact is featured in ROGUE
MOON (1960) by Algis BUDRYS, and the discovery of an apparently human
corpse on the Moon in James P. HOGAN's Inherit the Stars (1977) is a
prelude to far more spectacular discoveries.Post-1969 sf tends to look
farther out than the Moon, although lunar colonies are still a frequent
feature of HARD-SF stories. Despite a deflection of attention towards
orbiting SPACE HABITATS, Moon-based thrillers and mysteries are still
produced. Notable examples are Larry NIVEN's The Patchwork Girl (1980),
Roger MacBride ALLEN's Farside Cannon (1988), Michael SWANWICK's Griffin's
Egg (1991) and Charles L. HARNESS's Lunar Justice (1991). Moon colonies
occasionally survive the devastation of Earth, as in When the Sky Burned

(1973; exp vt Test of Fire 1982) by Ben BOVA. More spectacular use of the
Moon is made by Bob SHAW in The Ceres Solution (1981), where it is broken
up, and by John GRIBBIN and Marcus CHOWN in Double Planet (1988) and its
sequel Reunion (1991), where it is supplied with a brand new atmosphere.A
theme anthology is Men on the Moon (anth 1958) ed Donald A. WOLLHEIM. [BS]
MOON, ELIZABETH (N.)
(1945- ) US writer whose strongest work has been fantasy, primarily the
Deed of Paksennarion sequence: The Deed of Paksennarion #1: Sheepfarmer's
Daughter (1988), #2: Divided Allegiance (1988) and #3: Oath of Gold
(1989), all assembled as The Deed of Paksennarion (all texts rev, omni
1992); a prequel, Surrender None: The Legacy of Gird (1990), vigorously
sets the scene, and is followed by Liar's Oath (1992), which is similarly
vigorous. EM began publishing sf with "ABCs in Zero-G" for ASF in 1986, a
polished high-tech tale which was assembled, with other sf and FANTASY, in
Lunar Activity (coll 1990) - the title is a play on EM's name rather than
an accurate description of the book's contents. She collaborated with Anne
MCCAFFREY on Sassinak (1990) and Generation Warriors (1992), being #1 and
#3 of the Planet Pirates sequence of sf adventures featuring a young girl
who, after her home planet has been destroyed by "planet pirates", becomes
a Federation pirate hunter. Hunting Party (1993) is an sf tale starring a
female soldier who must recoup her reputation after having been forced to
resign in disgrace. [JC]Other Works: Sporting Chance (1994).
MOONBASE 3
UK tv serial (1973). BBC TV. Prod Barry Letts. Script ed Terrance Dicks.
Scriptwriters Dicks and Letts (1st episode), and John Brason, John
Lucarotti, Arden Winch. Dirs Ken Hannam, Christopher Barry. Scientific
advisor James Burke, a well known presenter of tv popular-science
programmes. Starring Donald Houston, Barry Lowe, Ralph Bates, Fiona Gaunt.
6 30min episodes. Colour.Set on an enclosed European Moon base in AD2003
(other nations had set up similar bases), M3 concerned a group of
scientists. The usual sensational elements (aliens, monsters) were
studiously eschewed in favour of psychological problems in the small,
claustrophobic community, but the attempt at responsible realism was
somewhat dull. [JB/PN]
MOONCHILD
Gardner F. FOX.
MOONEY, TED
Working name of US writer Edward Mooney (1951- ), whose remarkable first
novel, published in the MAINSTREAM, is sf: Easy Travel to Other Planets
(1981). Set on a NEAR-FUTURE Earth against a backdrop of global
information sickness, war in the Antarctic and a new emotion nobody has
ever felt before, it tells a love story - with visionary ramifications concerning a woman marine biologist and the dolphin on whom she conducts
experiments in LINGUISTICS. It has been seen as a proto- CYBERPUNK work,
but its cool, pellucid, dissecting style - perhaps influenced by J.G.
BALLARD - is far removed from the hectic insistence that has characterized
much of that school. TM's second sf book was the ALTERNATE-WORLD novel
Traffic and Laughter (1990), set in the near future of an Earth where WWII

was inconclusive and nuclear power never developed. [PN]
MOONRAKER
Film (1979). Eon/Les Productions Artistes Associes. Dir Lewis Gilbert,
starring Roger Moore, Lois Chiles, Michael Lonsdale, Richard Kiel.
Screenplay Christopher Wood, based on Moonraker (1955) by Ian FLEMING. 126
mins. Colour.British agent James Bond (Moore) uncovers a plot by
megalomaniac Hugo Drax (Lonsdale) to destroy the present human race using
space-launched nerve-gas capsules and replace it by a master race, to be
specially bred in a large, radar-invisible SPACE HABITAT. This belongs
towards the decadent, later end of the James Bond film sequence, with
Moore pouting fleshily as Bond and a sequence of spectacularly destructive
set pieces replacing any of the escalation of suspense we expect of the
true thriller. As with most James Bond films, the science is contemptible
and logical flaws highly visible. The film is remembered mainly for the
finding by giant, steel-toothed assassin Jaws (Kiel) of a pigtailed
girlfriend. The novelization is James Bond and Moonraker * (1979) by
Christopher Wood (1935- ). The other two (much earlier) films in the
sequence that most resemble sf are DR NO (1962) and YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
(1967). [PN]
MOON ZERO TWO
Film (1969). Hammer/Warner Bros. Dir Roy Ward Baker, starring James
Olson, Catherine von Schell, Warren Mitchell, Adrienne Corri. Screenplay
Michael Carreras. 100 mins. Colour.At the same time as the first actual
Moon landing, Hammer Films were making this quasi-Western set on the Moon,
envisaged as a rip-roaring Frontier area; the results are absurd. One of
the hoariest of pulp Western plots is dressed up with a lot of colourful
space hardware: a poor but honest space pilot/cowboy/gunslinger (Olson) is
forced by a group of villains to capture an asteroid of pure sapphire, but
his principles triumph and he foils their plans. The special effects by
Kit West, Nick Allder and Les Bowie are unexpectedly convincing,
considering the relatively small budget, but the film has no other
strength. The novelization is Moon Zero Two * (1969) by John BURKE.
[JB/PN]
MOORCOCK, MICHAEL (JOHN)
(1939- ) UK writer and editor, London-based and London-obsessed from his
first vivid memories of WWII bombing of its southern suburbs, experiences
constantly reflected in his fiction - wartime London providing many of its
characteristic landscapes and its images of ENTROPY - and central to what
may be his finest single novel, Mother London (1988), a work of singular
complexity whose comprehensive grasp makes generic pigeonholing
impossible, despite touches of telepathy and other psi phenomena in the
text ( ESP; PSI POWERS).During MM's desultory schooling he began to write,
starting with Outlaw's Own (about 1950), a hand-done magazine, and
continuing with several other similar FANZINE titles until 1962. After
leaving school he began to contribute professionally to Tarzan Adventures,
which he ed 1957-8, producing for it his first HEROIC-FANTASY series,
later assembled as Sojan (coll of linked stories with independent material
1977). The Golden Barge (written 1958; except 1965 NW as by William
Barclay; 1979) also demonstrated the precocity common to many generic

writers, plus an already characteristic questioning of the violence and
morality of commercial heroic fantasy, a genre he was all the same to
exploit extensively for the next 15 years. After working on the Sexton
Blake Library (a long series of thrillers)-publishing one non-sf novella
for it, Caribbean Crisis (1962 chap) with James CAWTHORN, together writing
as Desmond Reid - and after doing some night-club work as a blues singer,
MM, inspired by John CARNELL, began to contribute sf and fantasy stories
to SF ADVENTURES and SCIENCE FANTASY. His first sf novel was The Sundered
Worlds (1962-3 SF Adventures; fixup 1965; vt The Blood Red Game 1970), a
metaphysical SPACE OPERA which introduced the concept of the "multiverse",
a term probably derived from the works of John Cowper POWYS. The word
describes a Universe in which multiple PARALLEL WORLDS co-exist,
constantly (but never permanently) intersecting with one another; in this
infinite nesting of intersecting arenas, similar cosmic dramas are played
and replayed by numerous characters who inhabit the various worlds, but
who reduce to a relatively small cast of core identities, each playing
himself or herself under various names throughout the nest of worlds. Of
these recurring characters, the most central to the heroic-fantasy novels
is the figure of the Eternal Champion, the protagonist of various series
including the Eternal Champion or Erekose sequence, Elric of Melnibone,
the Warrior of Mars, Hawkmoon, Corum and Von Bek. In the fantasies, the
Champion's fundamental task is to combat Chaos on behalf of Order. In the
sf novels, the FABULATIONS and the non-genre works, the motives and tasks
of those figures closest in nature to the Champion are much more
ambiguous. Throughout, MM has consistently used the multiverse and the
Eternal Champion as devices by which it becomes possible to construe all
his very sizable oeuvre as comprising one enormous series.The Elric
stories, published intermittently for over 30 years, constitute MM's first
consequential work. At their heart is the albino melancholic Elric of
Melnibone, a treacherous figure who is in a sense the minion of his own
supernatural Chaos-inducing sword. They comprise a sustained critique and
parody of the SWORD-AND-SORCERY brand of heroic fantasy. A sense that the
target of this parody was trivial clearly motivated MM's next significant
move, the creation of a figure parodic of the pretentious Weltschmerz of
the antiheroic Elric: Jerry Cornelius, a portmanteau antihero painted
initially in the Pop colours of 1960s "Swinging London", was Elric turned
inside out, an anarchic streetwise urban ragamuffin with James Bond gear,
and amorally deft at manipulating everything from women to the multiverse
itself. In his early adventures - during which the planet suffers various
catastrophes - Jerry ranges from the present through the FAR FUTURE, ever
melancholy, randy and evanescent. This early version of Jerry dominates
the first two novels of the Jerry Cornelius sequence: The Final Programme
(excerpts 1965-6 NW; 1968 US; rev 1969 UK; rev 1977 US; rev 1979 UK),
later filmed as The FINAL PROGRAMME (1973; cut vt The Last Days of Man on
Earth 1975 US), and A Cure for Cancer (1969 NW; 1971; rev 1977 US; rev
1979 UK). In the third and fourth volumes of the sequence - The English
Assassin (1972; rev 1977 US; rev 1979 UK) and The Condition of Muzak
(1977; rev 1977 US; further rev 1978 UK), which won the 1977 Guardian
Fiction Prize - the portrait of Pierrot-like Jerry and his enduring family
and associates deepens, as the various Londons they inhabit become less
and less open to their sf/fantasy manipulations. Caught between the forces

of Law and Chaos, they gradually come to represent the dubious success of
any late-20th-century strategy for survival "in the deep cities of this
world, in the years of their dying", as claimed by John CLUTE in an
introduction to the omnibus which first assembled all 4 vols: THE
CORNELIUS CHRONICLES (omni 1977 US; using 1979 revs of individual titles,
rev vt in 2 vols as The Cornelius Chronicles: Book One 1988 UK and Book
Two 1988 UK). In The Cornelius Chronicles, Volume II (omni 1986 US) were
assembled The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius (coll 1976; exp 1987) and
The Entropy Tango: A Comic Romance (fixup 1981). In The Cornelius
Chronicles, Volume III (omni 1987 US) were assembled The Adventures of Una
Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century (1976; cut vt The
Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in omni 1980 US with The
Black Corridor [see below]) and "The Alchemist's Question" (1984) from The
Opium General and Other Stories (coll 1984). The titles assembled in the
second and third omnibuses served as modulations upon the thematic
material of the central quartet, but lacked its cumulative intensity or
Commedia dell'Arte pathos. Further associated material appeared in The
Nature of the Catastrophe (anth 1971) ed MM and Langdon JONES, which
contained stories and material by MM and other NW writers who were allowed
to use the Cornelius world as an OPEN UNIVERSE, and as The Great
Rock'n'Roll Swindle (1980 chap in the format of a tabloid newspaper; rev
vt "Gold Diggers of 1977" in Casablanca 1979). The Distant Suns (1969 The
Illustrated Weekly of India; 1975 chap) with Philip James (Cawthorn) has
as its protagonist a Jerry Cornelius who bears no relation to the Jerry
Cornelius of the other books.In the 1960s MM also became editor of NEW
WORLDS, a position he held, with a few voluntary breaks, from #142
(May/June 1964) to its effective demise (but see below) as a magazine with
#201 (Mar 1971). For some time he had been arguing that GENRE SF and
FANTASY sadly lacked human values and literacy of texture, and he now
began to accept for the journal stories from authors like Brian W. ALDISS,
J.G. BALLARD, Samuel R. DELANY, Thomas M. DISCH, M. John HARRISON, John T.
SLADEK and Norman SPINRAD which - he argued in its pages - proved that
literate and humane sf and fantasy could be written. Works from these
authors, and by MM himself, were soon identified as comprising a NEW WAVE
(a term first used in 1961 in a book review by P. Schuyler MILLER, and
later transformed by Christopher PRIEST into a tag for NW's new-style
fiction). For several years after 1965, NW and the New Wave were virtually
synonymous in the UK. MM published-and himself wrote - stories
experimental in form and content, influenced by French Surrealism and by
the early work of William S. BURROUGHS. After ceasing as a magazine, NW
continued as a series of anthologies until 1976, under the editorship
(variously and in combination) of MM, Hilary BAILEY (MM's wife 1962-78)
and Platt; another brief NW series in magazine format ran for several
issues in 1978-9; a further anthology series, with MM's authorization,
began in the 1990s with New Worlds 1 (anth 1991) ed David S.
GARNETT.Though MM was never prolific as an author of pure sf, the 1960s
saw several works of interest, notably: The Black Corridor (1969 US) with
Hilary Bailey (uncredited); The Ice Schooner (1966-7 SF Impulse; 1969; rev
1977 US; rev 1985 UK), a homage to and recasting of Joseph CONRAD's The
Rescue (1920) which convincingly portrays the cultures of a new Ice Age at
the moment when the temperature begins to rise again; and the Karl

Glogauer sequence, comprising BEHOLD THE MAN (1966 NW; exp 1969), the
magazine version of which won a 1967 NEBULA for Best Novella, and the full
version of which later appeared in Behold the Man and Other Stories (coll
1994), and Breakfast in the Ruins (1972). In the earlier book Glogauer is
cast back by a TIME MACHINE; he becomes Christ and is crucified. In the
second, structured as a series of vignettes, he is exposed to a series of
moral crises exemplary of our modern world, and to which he is forced to
respond. Collections included The Deep Fix (coll 1966) as by James COLVIN
(an NW house name) and The Time Dweller (coll 1969). MM's pseudonymous
output was, despite 1960s rumour, not large. Beyond Desmond Reid and
Colvin, he used only Bill Barclay (1 story; 2 non-sf novels), the
collaborative pseudonym Michael BARRINGTON (with Barrington J. BAYLEY; 1
story) and Edward P. Bradbury (3 fantasies).This intermittent production
of sf did not increase in the 1970s, though two sequences appeared. The
Oswald Bastable books - The Warlord of the Air (1971 US), subsequent texts
being edited by other hands, The Land Leviathan (1974) and The Steel Tsar
(1981) - expressed a nostalgia, evident also in The Condition of Muzak,
for the kind of future an Edwardian might have hoped for ( STEAMPUNK); all
3 were assembled as The Nomad of Time (omni 1982 US). More important was
the far-future Dancers at the End of Time sequence, comprising a central
trilogy - An Alien Heat (1972), The Hollow Lands (1974 US) and The End of
All Songs (1976 US), assembled as The Dancers at the End of Time (omni
1981) - plus a collection, Legends from the End of Time (coll 1976 US),
and a further novel, The Transformation of Miss Mavis Ming (1976 NW as
"Constant Fire";1977; vt A Messiah at the End of Time 1978 US), both
assembled as Tales from the End of Time (omni 1989 US). The protagonist of
the sequence, Jherek Carnelian, although his name echoes that of Jerry
Cornelius, nevertheless remains an independent character, inhabiting a
far-future Earth in which infinitely available power makes everything and
everyone constantly malleable; Carnelian himself, however, transported
into the 19th century, becomes obsessed with humanity's moral and physical
trammels, even to the point of falling in love. Gloriana, or The
Unfulfill'd Queen: Being a Romance (1978), a rare singleton, presents an
ambiguous sexual fable in a world which could be defined as an alternate
Elizabethan England.In the 1980s MM increasingly concentrated either on
fantasies which continued (and at times alarmingly amplified) earlier
work, or on tales in which little or no generic content could be found. He
also published: a political pamphlet, The Retreat from Liberty: The
Erosion of Democracy in Today's Britain (1983 chap); an autobiographical
sequence, Letters from Hollywood (1986); a patchy study, Wizardry and Wild
Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy (1987), a chapter of which was based on
Epic Pooh (1978 chap); and Fantasy: The 100 Best Books (1988) with (but in
fact written almost entirely by) James Cawthorn. After the singletons
Mother London and The Brothel in Rosenstrasse (1982), a fantasy of sexual
torment, the most interesting later novels are the Colonel Pyat sequence,
comprising Byzantium Endures (1981; cut 1981 US), The Laughter of Carthage
(1984), and Jerusalem Commands (1992), with one further novel projected,
The Vengeance of Rome (the 4 titles read together, appropriately
punctuated, as one sentence). These novels, which feature many characters
from the Jerry Cornelius books, are non-generic, being an ambitious
attempt to convey some sense of the 20th century through the unreliable

memoirs of one man. They represent MM's slow but inexorable evolution from
PULP to POSTMODERNISM, a transition made all the more interesting because
of the large number of books through which it can be traced, and because
he has so frequently returned to early sequences (Elric in particular),
transforming them in the process. MM has therefore become less and less
easy to pigeonhole as a writer, and has come to be recognized as a major
figure at the edge of - but materially helping to define - all his chosen
worlds. [JC]Other works:Sf: The Fireclown (1965; vt The Winds of Limbo
1969 US); The Twilight Man (1964 NW; rev1966; vt The Shores of Death
1970); The LSD Dossier (1966) as by Roger Harris (i.e., as heavily ed MM)
and its sequels Somewhere in the Night (1966 as by Bill Barclay; rev vt
The Chinese Agent 1970 US as by MM) and Printer's Devil (1966 as by Bill
Barclay; rev vt The Russian Intelligence 1980 as by MM), the revisions of
the latter books taking them out of the original sequence and recreating
them as tales of Jerry Cornell; The Wrecks of Time (1965-6 NW as by James
Colvin; edited 1967 dos US; text restored vt The Rituals of Infinity 1971
UK); Moorcock's Book of Martyrs (coll 1976; vt Dying for Tomorrow 1978
US); The Time of the Hawklords (1976) and Queens of Deliria (1977), the
first as by MM and Michael BUTTERWORTH, the second by Butterworth alone,
only the general idea (for the first title alone) being supplied by MM;
The Real Life Mr Newman (1966 in The Deep Fix; 1979 chap); My Experiences
in the Third World War (coll 1980); Casablanca (coll 1989).Eternal
Champion titles:The bibliographic description of the 2 1990s omnibus
sequences, each given the overall title of The Tale of the Eternal
Champion, is immensely complex, and as most of the 14 UK (or 15+ US)
volumes contain mostly fantasy, the sequence is not here described in any
detail. The UK sequence comprises Von Bek (omni 1992), The Eternal
Champion (omni 1992), Hawkmoon (omni 1992), Corum (omni 1992), Sailing to
Utopia (omni 1993), A Nomad of the Time Streams (omni 1993), The Dancers
at the End of Time (omni 1981; rev 1991; not rev for this sequence), Elric
of Melnibone (omni 1993), The New Nature of the Catastrophe (coll 1993),
which contains much of sf interest, The Prince with the Silver Hand (omni
1993), Legends from the End of Time (omni 1993), Stormbringer (omni 1993),
Earl Aubec (coll 1993), containing some new material, and Count Brass
(omni 1993). The US sequence begins with The Eternal Champion (omni 1994),
which differs - as will almost all subsequent US titles - from the UK
release bearing the same title. The various Eternal Champion series are
listed below according to their original titles and dates:Erekose: The
Eternal Champion (1962 Science Fantasy; exp 1970US; rev 1978 US); Phoenix
in Obsidian (1970; vt The Silver Warriors 1973 US); The Swords of Heaven,
the Flowers of Hell (graph 1979 US) with Howard V. CHAYKIN; The Dragon in
the Sword (1986 US; exp 1987 UK), all but the 3rd being assembled in The
Eternal Champion (rev omni 1992).Elric of Melnibone: (by internal
chronology) Elric of Melnibone (1972; cut vt The Dreaming City 1972 US);
The Fortress of the Pearl (1989); The Sailor on the Seas of Fate (fixup
1976), incorporating rev of The Jade Man's Eyes (1973 chap); The Weird of
the White Wolf (coll 1977 US), incorporating stories from The Stealer of
Souls (1961-62 Science Fantasy; coll 1963) and from The Singing Citadel
(coll 1970); The Sleeping Sorceress (1971; vt The Vanishing Tower 1977
US); The Revenge of the Rose: A Tale of the Albino Prince in the Years of
his Wandering (1991); The Bane of the Black Sword (1962Science Fantasy;

coll 1977 US), incorporating the remaining stories (see above) from The
Stealer of Souls and The Singing Citadel; Stormbringer (1963-4 Science
Fantasy; cut 1965; text restored and rev 1977 US). Omnibuses of this
material are The Elric Saga Part I (omni 1984 US) containing Elric of
Melnibone, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate and The Weird of the White Wolf;
and The Elric Saga Part II (omni 1984 US) containing The Vanishing Tower,
The Bane of the Black Sword and Stormbringer. Elric at the End of Time
(coll 1984) assembles mostly earlier stories, including some from
Sojan.Warrior of Mars: Warriors of Mars (1965; vt The City of the Beast
1970 US), Blades of Mars 1965; vt The Lord of the Spiders 1971 US) and
Barbarians of Mars (1965; vt Masters of the Pit 1971), all assembled as
Warrior of Mars (omni 1981 UK). The original versions of all 3 were
published as by Edward P. Bradbury.Hawkmoon: 2 series. The Runestaff books
are The Jewel in the Skull (1967 US; rev 1977 US), Sorcerer's Amulet (1968
US; vt The Mad God's Amulet 1969 UK), Sword of the Dawn (1968 US; rev 1977
US) and The Secret of the Runestaff (1969 US; vt The Runestaff 1969 UK;
rev 1977 US), all assembled as The History of the Runestaff (omni 1979 UK;
rev vt Hawkmoon 1992). The Count Brass books are Count Brass (1973), The
Champion of Garathorm (1973) and The Quest for Tanelorn (1975), all
assembled as The Chronicles of Castle Brass (omni 1985 UK).Corum: 2
series. The Swords books are The Knight of the Swords (1971), The Queen of
the Swords (1971 US) and The King of the Swords (1971 US), all assembled
as The Swords Trilogy (omni 1977 US; vt The Swords of Corum 1986 UK; rev
vt Corum 1992 UK). A second trilogy comprises The Bull and the Spear
(1973), The Oak and the Ram (1973) and The Sword and the Stallion (1974),
all assembled as The Chronicles of Corum (omni 1978 US).Von Bek: The War
Hound and the World's Pain (1981 US) and The City in the Autumn Stars
(1986), assembled with an added story as Von Bek (rev omni 1992).As
Editor: The Best of New Worlds (anth 1965); Best S.F. Stories from New
Worlds (anth 1967); Best Stories from New Worlds 2 (anth 1968; vt Best
S.F. Stories from New Worlds 21969 US); Best S.F. Stories from New Worlds
3 (anth 1968); The Traps of Time (anth 1968); Best S.F. Stories from New
Worlds 4 (anth 1969); The Inner Landscape (anth 1969), ed anon; Best S.F.
Stories from New Worlds 5 (anth 1969); Best S.F. Stories from New Worlds 6
(anth 1970); Best S.F. Stories from New Worlds 7 (anth 1971); New Worlds 1
(anth 1971; vt New Worlds Quarterly 1 1971 US); New Worlds 2 (anth 1971;
vt New Worlds Quarterly 2 1971 US); New Worlds 3 (anth 1972; vt New Worlds
Quarterly 3 1972 US); New Worlds 4 (anth 1972; vt New Worlds Quarterly 4
1972 US); New Worlds 5 (anth 1973); New Worlds 6 (anth 1973; vt New Worlds
Quarterly 5 1974 US) with Charles PLATT; Best S.F. Stories from New Worlds
8 (anth 1974); Before Armageddon (anth 1975); England Invaded (anth 1977);
New Worlds: An Anthology (anth 1983).Film: The LAND THAT TIME FORGOT
(1975), script by MM and James Cawthorn.About the author: The Tanelorn
Archives: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography of the Works of Michael
Moorcock, 1949-1979 (1981) by Richard Bilyeu; The Entropy Exhibition:
Michael Moorcock and the British "New Wave" in Science Fiction (1983) by
Colin GREENLAND; Michael Moorcock: A Reader's Guide (1991 chap; rev 1992
chap) by John Davey (1962- ); Death is No Obstacle (1992), a book-length
interview conducted by Greenland with MM about his work.See also:
ABSURDIST SF; BOYS' PAPERS; CITIES; COMICS; DAW BOOKS; GAMES AND TOYS;
GOTHIC SF; HISTORY OF SF; HUMOUR; IMMORTALITY; INTERZONE; ISAAC ASIMOV'S

SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD; LEISURE;
MESSIAHS; MUSIC; MYTHOLOGY; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; RELIGION; SATIRE; SF
REPRISE; SUSPENDED ANIMATION; TIME TRAVEL; TRANSPORTATION; WAR.
MOORE, ALAN
(1953- ) UK COMICS illustrator and writer, mainly active in the latter
capacity for the GRAPHIC NOVELS that made him famous; all of these,
including WATCHMEN, were illustrated by others. On rare occasions,
beginning with "Sawdust Memories" for Knave in 1984, he has also written
prose fiction.AM's first professional work was as an artist and
illustrator, beginning with a 1969 ad for the London sf bookshop Dark They
Were and Golden Eyed. As Curt Vile, he began creating comics with 2 series
- Roscoe Moscow (Mar 1979-July 1980) and The Stars my Degradation (July
1980-Feb 1982; continued with a different scriptwriter but drawn by AM
until the Mar 1983 issue) - for the weekly music paper Sounds; another
Curt Vile strip, Three Eyes McGurk ?
in Dark Star) appeared in the USA in Rip Off Comics #8 (1981). As Jill de
Ray, AM wrote and drew the weekly Maxwell the Magic Cat (Aug 1979-Oct
1986) for the Northants Post. Perhaps fortunately - his drawing style was
an anaemic rehash of underground-comix cliches - this was his last work as
an illustrator.The appearance in the UK in 1977 of the weekly sf comic
2,000 AD - the birthplace of JUDGE DREDD - had provided a forum for a new
generation of writers and artists, of which AM soon became a prominent
member. With scripts for MARVEL COMICS UK's Dr. Who Weekly/Monthly (June
1980-Oct 1981), he began to work for the commercial-comics industry, and
was intensely active for the next half decade. For the Future Shocks
section of 2,000 AD itself he wrote 26 sf shorts (July 1980-Aug 1983);
most of these were later assembled as Alan Moore's Shocking Futures (graph
coll 1986) and Alan Moore's Twisted Times (graph coll 1986), both with
various illustrators. During the same period, he wrote 5 stories for
Marvel UK's STAR WARS comic (Nov 1981-Aug 1982), and 20 episodes of the
PARALLEL-WORLDS Captain Britain sequence for various other Marvel UK
comics. Aside from Captain Britain, most of this early work was
comparatively journeyman.In March 1982, with #1 of the anthology-comic
Warrior, this all changed. In that issue, AM began 2 series of
considerable significance. Marvelman was a radical POSTMODERNIST
reinterpretation of a SUPERHERO ( CAPTAIN MARVEL) from the 1940s. After
Aug 1984, the strip was removed from Warrior, and in retitled form
reprinted and completed in the US anthology-comic Eclipse; the full strip
was then assembled as Miracleman (graph coll 1988 US), The Red King
Syndrome (graph coll 1990 US) and Olympus (graph coll 1990 US), with
various illustrators, including Alan Davis and Garry Leach. (Just as the
original Captain Marvel was plagued by litigation, so was the new: the US
MARVEL COMICS, which had begun its own Captain Marvel comic in 1967,
insisted on the AM strip being retitled Miracleman in the USA; in
retaliation, AM refused Marvel UK permission to reprint any of his early
work, which remains uncollected.) The second series begun in that first
issue of Warrior was V for Vendetta, which pits an anarchist hero against
the fascist regime of a NEAR-FUTURE, post-Thatcherite UK. V for Vendetta
also moved to the USA (after Feb 1985), being published there by DC
COMICS, and was assembled as V for Vendetta (graph coll 1990 US) illus

David Lloyd.Other UK work during this period included The Ballad of Halo
Jones (July 1984-Apr 1986 2,000 AD), set in a variety of sf locales and
later collected in 3 vols as The Ballad of Halo Jones, Book 1 (graph
1986), #2 (graph 1986) and #3 (graph 1986), all 3 being later assembled as
The Complete Ballad of Halo Jones (graph omni 1990), and all illus Ian
Gibson. Skizz (Mar 1983-Aug 1983 2,000 AD), an sf tale reminiscent of E.T.
: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL, was collected as Skizz (graph 1989) illus Jim
Baikie; and D.R. and Quinch (Apr 1983-Summer 1985 2,000 AD), a comedy
about ALIEN juvenile delinquents, was collected as D.R. and Quinch's
Totally Awesome Guide to Life (graph 1986) illus Alan Davis and D.R. and
Quinch (graph 1991).In 1984 AM began to work directly for US firms,
becoming the writer for DC's Saga of the Swamp Thing (in Nov 1984 the
title changed to SWAMP THING), the eponymous monster being a 1970s
antihero now revived in the wake of the poor 1982 film. AM's 44 Swamp
Thing stories (Jan 1984-Sep 1987), which were collected in 11 vols with
various illustrators, perhaps take the "orthodox" sf/ GOTHIC
only-partly-human-superhero theme as far as it could be taken within the
framework of the conventional comic, which is distributed through
newsstands and must operate in constant fear of censorship. The Grand
Guignol violence of AM's imagery, and the disturbing psychosexual impact
of his storylines, established Swamp Thing as probably the seminal comic
of the 1980s.The success of Swamp Thing led directly to WATCHMEN, a
graphic novel whose 12 chapters were first published as individual comics
(Sep 1986-Oct 1987 Watchmen), but which are best read in their intended
book form as Watchmen (graph 1987 US; with additional material 1988 US)
illus Dave GIBBONS. Set in an ALTERNATE WORLD distinguished by the fact
that the existence of costumed superheroes has subtly modified the history
of the 20th century, Watchmen is both a satirical analysis of the human
cost of being (or needing) a superhero, and an extremely distressing tale
of a nearly-terminal holocaust fomented by one of these iconic figures.
The impact of the tale - and that of its sophisticated visual language,
through which subtexts and subplots interweave with (in hindsight) the
utmost clarity - was enormous.After finishing the last parts of V for
Vendetta and a Batman book, The Killing Joke (graph 1988 US) illus Brian
Bolland, AM left mainstream comics, forming Mad Love (Publishing) Ltd in
1988 with his wife Phyllis and Debbie Delano, through which he edited and
self-published ARRGH! (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia)
(graph anth 1988). Subsequent work has tended to move away from genre
concerns, though A Small Killing (graph 1990) illus Oscar Zarate is
fantasy, and From Hell (graph 1991) begins a long fictional investigation
of Jack the Ripper; two instalments of his major project, the non-genre
Big Numbers, appeared in 1990. Lost Girls, a psychosexual study of Wendy,
Dorothy and Alice, who meet around the time of WWI, began in Taboo #5
(1992). For sf, AM remains of central importance for Watchmen, where the
long history of sf visual material in comics form was finally connected to
an sf plot of great interest. [RH/JC]
MOORE, BRIAN
(1921- ) Irish-born Canadian novelist, in the USA from 1959, best known
for non-genre works like The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960); he has
published detective thrillers under the names Michael Bryan and Bernard

Mara. Several of his novels contain strong elements of fantasy, like
Fergus (1970) and Cold Heaven (1983), two tales linked by their
preoccupation with the dead - dead parents visiting their child; dead
husband haunting a widow and challenging the terms of her faith. The Great
Victorian Collection (1975) somewhat resembles sf in its allegorical
treatment of a professor who dreams into reality a collection of Victorian
antiques, which survive his death. The Mangan Inheritance (1979) involves
a borderline use of Doppelganger themes. BM's only sf novel proper,
Catholics (1972 Canada), set at the end of the century, describes the
conflict between fashionable ecumenism and disillusioned conservatism in
the Roman Catholic Church. [JC]See also: CANADA.
MOORE, C(ATHERINE) L(UCILLE)
(1911-1987) US writer who achieved instant fame with her first story,
"Shambleau" for Weird Tales in 1933, a femme fatale story set on MARS. She
continued to chronicle the exploits of its hero Northwest Smith, most of
the series ultimately being assembled in Scarlet Dream (coll of linked
stories 1981; vt Northwest Smith 1982); the exceptions are "Nymph of
Darkness" (1935) with Forrest J. ACKERMAN, "Quest of the Starstone" (1937)
with Henry KUTTNER and "Werewoman" (1938). 4 of the 10 stories in Scarlet
Dream had earlier appeared in Shambleau and Others (coll 1953; with 3 of 7
stories cut, vt Shambleau 1958; with 1 story cut, also vt Shambleau UK
1961) and 5 in Northwest of Earth (coll 1954); the remaining stories in
these collections, comprising the first SWORD-AND-SORCERY series to
feature a female HERO, Jirel, were recombined in Jirel of Joiry (coll of
linked stories 1969; vt Black God's Shadow 1977). Jirel also appears in
the Northwest Smith story "Quest of the Starstone" (1937), CLM's first
collaboration with Henry Kuttner, whom she married in 1940.Most of CLM's
and Kuttner's works after this were to some extent collaborations; each
writer could reportedly pick up any story where the other had left off.
They used a wide diversity of pseudonyms ( KUTTNER for a listing).
Kuttner's wit, deftly audacious deployment of ideas and neat exposition
well complemented CLM's perhaps greater talents of fluency and assiduity.
When they became part of the stable of writers working for John W.
CAMPBELL Jr's ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION during WWII they devised their
most famous pseudonyms, Lewis Padgett and Laurence O'Donnell, under which
they did much of their best work. Kuttner was the primary user of the
Padgett name (for details of which see his entry) but the O'Donnell
stories were more often CLM's. These include the remarkable "Clash By
Night" (1943), whose sequel Fury (1947 as by O'Donnell; 1950; vt
Destination Infinity 1958) was a collaboration (although often reprinted
as by Kuttner alone); the stories are set in CITIES located UNDER THE SEAS
of VENUS after nuclear war has destroyed life on Earth. "Clash by Night"
has been reprinted with an alternative sequel by David A. DRAKE in The
Jungle (1991). 4 O'Donnell stories were combined with the title short
novel (originally signed CLM) in Judgment Night (coll 1952; title novel
only 1965), but these did not include the excellent "The Children's Hour"
(1944) and the classic Vintage Season (1946; 1990 chap dos with a sequel,
In Another Country by Robert SILVERBERG), about time-travelling tourists (
TIME TRAVEL); Vintage Season was intelligently filmed for cable tv in the
USA as DISASTER IN TIME (1991, vt Grand Tour: Disaster in Time, vt

TIMESCAPE), director David N. Twohy, later released on videotape. CLM's
other classic story of the 1940s was "No Woman Born" (1944 as by CLM),
about a badly burned dancer who is given a ROBOT body and becomes a
CYBORG. In these stories CLM's sometimes extravagant style is carefully
controlled and combined with an earnest sentimentality which was
underappreciated at the time.CLM and Kuttner wrote a series of novels for
STARTLING STORIES in the late 1940s which continued the colourful
tradition of the Northwest Smith stories to become archetypes of the
hybrid genre of SCIENCE FANTASY, neatly fusing the strengths of CLM's
romanticism and Kuttner's vigorous plotting. The Dark World (1946 as by
Kuttner; 1965 as by Kuttner) is a pastiche of A. MERRITT's Dwellers in the
Mirage (1932) and was itself pastiched in Marion Zimmer BRADLEY's Falcons
of Narabedla (1957; 1964); other novels in the same vein are Valley of the
Flame (1946 as by Keith Hammond; 1964 as by Kuttner), "Lands of the
Earthquake" (1947 as by Kuttner), The Mask of Circe (1948 as by Kuttner;
1971), The Time Axis (1949 as by Kuttner; 1965 as by Kuttner), Beyond
Earth's Gates (1949 as "The Portal in the Picture" by Kuttner; 1954 dos as
by Padgett) and Well of the Worlds (1952 as by Kuttner; 1953 as by
Padgett; vt The Well of the Worlds 1965 as by Kuttner). The first, second
and fifth of these were combined in The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner
(omni 1987). Earth's Last Citadel (1943 Argosy; 1964), with Kuttner, also
belongs to this sequence, although one other Startling Stories novel,
"Lord of the Storm" (1947 as by Hammond) does not. The attribution of
these science-fantasy novels has rarely given CLM the credit which she
deserves for her contribution to them.In 1950 Kuttner and CLM went to
study at the University of Southern California; although they wrote a
number of mystery novels, there were few more sf stories. CLM did one solo
sf novel in this period, Doomsday Morning (1957), a futuristic thriller
which did not exploit her greatest strengths as a writer. Having graduated
in 1956, CLM moved after Kuttner's death into writing for tv, doing
scripts for such series as Maverick and 77 Sunset Strip until she
remarried in 1963 and abandoned writing for good.CLM was the more
prestigious writer by far when she married Kuttner, and remained the
better half of their partnership, although unthinkingly sexist reportage
has always lavished the greater praise on her husband. Her true status can
be accurately judged from the collection The Best of C.L. Moore (coll
1975) ed Lester DEL REY. Other collections in which her work appears
include: A Gnome There Was (coll 1950) as by Padgett; Robots Have No Tails
(coll 1952 as by Padgett; 1973 as by Kuttner; vt The Proud Robot: The
Complete Gallegher Stories 1983 UK); Line to Tomorrow (coll 1954) as by
Padgett; No Boundaries (coll 1955) with Kuttner; Clash by Night and Other
Stories (coll 1980 UK) with Kuttner, not to be confused with Clash by
Night (1952 chap Australia) as by Lawrence O'Donnell; and Tomorrow and
Tomorrow, and The Fairy Chessmen (coll 1951), as by Padgett, containing 2
full-length tales, the second of which was also published as Chessboard
Planet (1956; vt The Far Reality 1963 UK), also as by Padgett. Another
collaborative text was MUTANT (fixup 1953 as by Padgett; 1954 UK as by
Kuttner). Many collections signed Kuttner or Padgett (for which see
KUTTNER) include work on which CLM collaborated with Kuttner.
[BS/MJE]Other works: There Shall be Darkness (1954 chap Australia) with
Kuttner; most remaining titles as by Kuttner alone (see his entry) have

anon contributions by CLM.About the author: Catherine Lucille Moore ?
Henry Kuttner, a Marriage of Souls and Talent: A Working Bibliography
(last rev 1989) by Gordon BENSON Jr and Virgil S. Utter.See also: ARTS;
AUTOMATION; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; DIMENSIONS; ECONOMICS; FANTASY;
FAR
FUTURE; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GAMES AND SPORTS; GOLDEN AGE OF SF; MONSTERS;
MUTANTS; PARALLEL WORLDS; RECURSIVE SF; SEX; SPACE OPERA; WOMEN SF
WRITERS; WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST.
MOORE, HARRIS
Joint pseudonym of Alf Harris (1928- ), a Canadian, and Arthur Moore (? ), whose nationality is not known. Together they wrote two sf novels:
Slater's Planet (1971 US), in which a spaceship looks for and finds alien
life, and The Marrow Eaters (1972 US), a garish adventure. [JC]
MOORE, PATRICK (ALFRED)
(1923- ) UK astronomer, scientific journalist, popular tv personality
(presenter of The Sky at Night BBC tv series from 1957) and writer, a
composer, a Squadron Leader in the R
MOORE, RAYLYN
(1928- ) US writer who began publishing with "Death is a Woman" for
Esquire in 1954. Her one novel of genre interest is What Happened to Emily
Goode after the Great Exhibition? (1978). [JC]
MOORE, ROBERT
Robert Moore WILLIAMS.
MOORE, WALLACE
Gerard F. CONWAY.
MOORE, (JOSEPH) WARD
(1903-1978) US writer, initially as well known for his works outside the
sf field - like the picaresque Breathe the Air Again (1942) - as for those
within. Although he contributed only infrequently to the field, each of
his books became something of a classic. His first sf publication was
Greener Than You Think (1947; cut 1961), a successful comic SATIRE about a
mutated form of grass which absorbs the entire world while governments
dither. His second and most famous sf tale, BRING THE JUBILEE (1953),
became the definitive ALTERNATE-WORLDS novel (also a TIME-TRAVEL story) in
which the South wins the American Civil War. After describing his
depressed world, an eminent historian from the disinherited Northern
States is given the chance to travel back in time to the vital moment of
the Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg, victory in which had won the
entire conflict for the South. At this crucial point, the narrator's own
actions change history, the South loses the battle, and he is caught in
the "past" (because his time machine will not be invented in the new
future that has been created); in our own 1877 he writes out his narrative
of the history he has changed, and the manuscript is discovered and
published in 1953. Concise and elegiac, BRING THE JUBILEE has generated
dozens of successor tales in which the Civil War is manipulated for
reasons of controversy or nostalgia. WM's third novel, Caduceus Wild (1959
Science Fiction Stories as with Robert Bradford; rev 1978) is a medical

DYSTOPIA whose book publication was long delayed. His final book, Joyleg
(1962) with Avram DAVIDSON, returns to a nostalgic view of the USA, this
time to comic effect, through the story of the eponymous immortal, who is
found in this century living deep in the Appalachians because he claims to
remain entitled to his Revolutionary War pension. His discoverers learn
that a special brew keeps him young, from which point in the novel
bureaucratic complications become tedious. WM was not a professional genre
writer, and as a possible consequence much of his work seemed to have been
written (and certainly it read) as though carefully and leisurely composed
for his own pleasure.WM also wrote two of the most notable stories
describing nuclear HOLOCAUST and its consequences, "Lot" (1953) and "Lot's
Daughter" (1954), featuring a great motorized exodus from a doomed Los
Angeles, seen through biblical parallelism as the city of Sodom. The hero
jettisons his irredeemably suburban wife and his sons and goes on to make
a new and incestuous life with his daughter in the mountains. The ironies
attached to his monstrous SURVIVALISM are savage. The stories were used as
an uncredited basis for the film PANIC IN YEAR ZERO (1962), losing much of
their power in the cleaning-up process. [JC/PN]See also: DISASTER;
ECOLOGY; END OF THE WORLD; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION
;
MARS; PASTORAL; TABOOS.
MOORE-BENTLEY, MARY ANN
[r] AUSTRALIA.
MORAN, DANIEL
Robert E. VARDEMAN.
MORAN, DANIEL KEYS
(1962- ) US writer who began publishing sf with, for IASFM in 1982, "All
the Time in the World", a tale which on expansion became his first novel
and the first volume of his projected Tales of the Great Wheel of
Existence series, The Armageddon Blues (fixup 1988). The story begins in
an unremarkable post- HOLOCAUST USA and features a not unusual mutant
barbarian female who hunts for a living; but, on her discovery of a time
machine left by aliens, the plot soon begins to move in complicated leaps
through time and space, engaging both the protagonist and an
entropy-reversing long-lived SUPERMAN (whom she discovers in 1968) in a
long arduous campaign to prevent the end of civilization. A second series,
Tales of the Continuing Time, is projected to extend to 33 vols, although
only 3 have appeared to date, Emerald Eyes (1988),The Long Run (1989) and
The Last Dancer (1993). They feature the campaign - which again might be
described as long and arduous - of a group of genetically engineered
telepaths ( ESP) to maintain their existence in a world of hostile
normals. The sequence as a whole is planned to deal with the descendants
of the last telepath still to be alive at the close of The Last Dancer. A
singleton, The Ring * (1988), tied to a projected film version of Wagner's
Ring cycle, places its GODS (rationalized as genetically engineered
superbeings) in a SPACE-OPERA venue. DKM displays very considerable energy
and some humour, shows a fine VAN VOGT-style recklessness with superman
plots, and has demonstrated a copious ambition. [JC]

MORE, [Sir] THOMAS
(1478-1535) UK writer, lawyer, diplomat and politician. The son of a
barrister, he was first educated for the Church, but soon decided upon a
secular career; he sat in Parliament and gained steadily in political
influence, being knighted in 1521 and occupying several posts under Henry
VIII until that king's proposed divorce from Catherine of Aragon; TM's
subsequent refusal to swear to the Act of Supremacy led to his execution.
He was canonized in 1935. Throughout his career he was intellectually
involved with the kind of humanism best exemplified by his friend Erasmus
(1466-1536), who spent some time in England, and the work by which TM is
popularly remembered, Utopia (Part 2 1516 in Latin; trans Ralphe Robynson
including Part 1, written after Part 2, 1551), can be seen as the first
substantial humanistic work written by an Englishman.In Part 1, TM, as a
character, comes across Raphael Hythloday, a Portuguese seaman who went
with Amerigo Vespucci to the New World. Hythloday, having discovered the
ISLAND of Utopia on his travels, compares the corrupt state of European
society with the ideal world of Utopia. In Part 2, Utopia is described in
detail. It is a humanistic reversal of English society: all goods are held
in common; the island's 54 shires are constructed and run rationally by
citizens who participate fully in the government, though there are also
slaves; arms are borne in self-defence only; there is religious tolerance,
though not for atheists. Most of the rational ingredients of the hundreds
of UTOPIAS (a word which, in TM's usage, is a pun on ou-topos, nowhere,
and eu-topos, good place) that followed TM's initiative can be found in
Utopia; what many of its successors lacked, however, was TM's insistence
that his humanistic, rationally governed world was amenable to change, and
that his picture of Utopia had caught only a moment in its evolution
towards a more perfect constitution for the life of men on Earth.While the
majority of readers of Utopia seem to have assumed that TM was
recommending the kind of society he would have liked to live in himself, a
number of critics have pointed out that some of his suggestions may have
been SATIRE; since irony is largely a matter of tone, and since it is
difficult for most modern readers to evaluate the tone of a Latin text, it
is almost impossible to prove the case one way or the other. Certainly
some aspects of TM's Utopia seem, to the modern reader, rigid and even
cruel, but to impute similar emotions to TM himself may be anachronistic
sentimentality. However, at least in translation, the book has a kind of
dry, ambiguous wit which suggests that to read it as a straightforward
prospectus of the good life may be simplistic.The degree to which Utopia
and utopias in general can be thought of as relevant to sf, particularly
GENRE SF of the 20th century, is controversial; it can be argued that the
utopian tradition has contributed only minimally to the fundamentally
Romance nature of modern sf (but see PROTO SCIENCE FICTION).The amount of
available reading on TM and on utopias is huge; some relevant works are
listed under UTOPIAS. [JC/PN]See also: ECONOMICS; FUTUROLOGY.
MORE WILD, WILD WEST
The WILD, WILD WEST .
MOREY, LEO
(? -1965) US illustrator, born into a well-to-do family in Peru, educated

in the USA, where he studied engineering at Louisiana State University; he
worked as an artist in New Orleans before entering sf ILLUSTRATION. He
took over from Frank R. PAUL as cover illustrator for AMAZING STORIES
after it changed hands in 1929 (his first cover was Feb 1930), and painted
77 covers and many interior black-and-white illustrations for that
magazine, and another 12 for Amazing Stories Quarterly. When these
magazines were sold again he freelanced, doing covers for small magazines
like Super Science Stories and quite a few interiors for Thrilling Wonder
Stories, then worked mostly in COMICS. His archetypal PULP-MAGAZINE-style
covers used a wider range of colours than Paul's; and, though naive and
crudely executed, they were vigorous and dramatic. His imaginary
technology was not as interesting as Paul's but his rendering of people
was superior. Though perhaps a better artist than Paul - some of his
black-and-white work was very imaginative - he was never as popular.
[JG/PN]
MORGAN, CHRIS
(1946- ) UK editor, critic and writer who began publishing sf with "Clown
Fish and Anemone" for Science Fiction Monthly in 1975. His fiction is
generally unexceptional, though some stories - such as "Losing Control"
(1989), about the crew of a crashed starship surviving by means of
incestuous marriage and a strange form of symbiosis with an ALIEN species
- involve interesting and innovative ideas. CM's main contribution has
been as a critic, notably in The Shape of Futures Past: The Story of
Prediction (1980), a comprehensive and valuable survey of pre-1945
PREDICTIONS about the future. Future Man (1980) is a history of sf
speculations on possible biological and behavioural changes in humanity.
[NT]Other works: Fritz Leiber: A Bibliography 1934-1979 (1979 chap); Facts
and Fallacies: A Book of Definitive Mistakes and Misguided Predictions
(1981) with David LANGFORD; Dark Fantasies (anth 1989), collecting
original stories.See also: PSEUDO-SCIENCE.
MORGAN, DAN
(1925- ) UK writer and professional guitarist, about which instrument he
wrote 2 successful manuals, Guitar (1965) and Spanish Guitar (1982). He
began publishing sf with "Alien Analysis" for NW in 1952. His first sf
novels, Cee-Tee Man (1955) and The Uninhibited (1957 NW; 1961), were
routine adventures, but The Richest Corpse in Show Business (1966) stood
out for its slapstick guying of sf conventions. He published the Venturer
Twelve SPACE-OPERA series - A Thunder of Stars (1968), Seed of Stars (1972
US) and The Neutral Stars (1973 US) all with John KIPPAX - and the much
more interesting Sixth Perception series: The New Minds (1967), The
Several Minds (1969), The Mind Trap (1970 US) and The Country of the Mind
(1975). In this latter series, which contains his most effective work, a
band of people linked by their PSI POWERS solve problems, often in
opposition to the world at large. Though not a powerful writer by any
means, and though he has never transcended the US action-tale conventions
to which he is so clearly indebted, it is all the same surprising that DM
is so ignored. [JC]Other works: Inside (1971); The High Destiny (1973 US);
The Concrete Horizon (1976).See also: ESP; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MUSIC.
MORGAN, DAVE

[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
MORGAN, J.M.
(? - ) US writer known only for her/his Eden sequence of post- HOLOCAUST
tales set in a world devastated by a biological-warfare experiment (
Hyperlink to: BIOLOGY) gone awry. Volumes to date are Desert Eden
(1991),Beyond Eden (1992) and Future Eden (1992). Between the Devil and
the Deep (1992) is horror featuring the Loch Ness monster. [JC]
MORGAN, SCOTT
[s] Henry KUTTNER.
MORK AND MINDY
US tv series (1978-82). Miller-Milkis Productions and Henderson
Production Co. in association with Paramount Television/ABC. Created Garry
K. Marshall, Dale McRaven, Joe Gauberg. Prod Marshall. Writers included
McRaven, April Kelly, Tom Tenowich, Ed Scharlach, Bruce Johnson. Dirs
included Howard Storm, Bob Claver. 1 50min pilot episode followed by 92
25min episodes. Colour.Filling the gap in sitcoms about aliens viewing
Earth between MY FAVORITE MARTIAN (1963-6) and ALF (1986-current),
although its premise is more in line with Gore VIDAL's Visit to a Small
Planet (1956; 1960), MAM was a spin-off from Happy Days (1974-83); Mork
from Ork (Robin Williams) first appeared in the 1950s-set sitcom in an
episode entitled "My Favorite Orkan". Response to the character - an
innocent in very 1970s multicoloured braces, bewildered and amazed by the
entire Universe, and given to cries of "nanu nanu"-was so positive that
Garry K. Marshall developed a series around him, in which he arrived on
Earth in a giant-egg spaceship and went to Boulder, Colorado, where he
moved in with the family of Mindy McConnell (Pam Dawber) and got a job in
their music store. Although early episodes present Mork as a childlike,
presexual character, the writers eventually had the couple marry and Mork
give birth, in the backwards Orkan fashion, to the middle-aged Mearth
(Jonathan Winters), who grew younger. Regular players included Conrad
Janis and Elizabeth Kerr (as Mindy's father and grandmother), Robert
Donner, Tom Poston, and the voice of Ralph James as Orson, Mork's Orkan
leader. Often trite in its moralizing, the show was sometimes inspired in
its skewed vision of life on Earth; and Williams, not yet the major screen
personality he has become, was allowed to demonstrate his versatility as a
clown. [KN]See also: SATIRE.
MORLAND, DICK
Pseudonym used by UK writer and academic Reginald Hill (1936- ) for his
sf. Both of his sf novels as DM, Heart Clock (1973) and Albion! Albion!
(1974), use DYSTOPIAN techniques to describe visions of repellent future
UKs. In the first, citizens are fitted with termination devices for the
government to use according to actuarial needs; in the second, England has
been literally taken over by soccer rowdies and is divided into competing
clubs with the citizenry as violent supporters. Both books are
heavy-handed but enjoyably sharp-tongued. Hill, who also writes detections
under his own name and as Patrick Ruell and Charles Underhill, has
published one sf novel under his own name, One Small Step: A Dalziel and
Pascoe Novella (1990), a detection set on the Moon in AD2010. [JC]

MORLEY, CHRISTOPHER (DARLINGTON)
(1890-1957) US man of letters and novelist who remains best known for
mildly fantasticated (but not fantasy) tales like Parnassus on Wheels
(1917) and The Haunted Bookshop (1919), and for Kitty Foyle (1939), a
sentimental romance. Where the Blue Begins (1922), a beast-fable, mildly
satirizes human life in New York City by substituting dogs for people,
deadpan.Thunder on the Left (1925), though also essentially a fantasy,
uses its TIME-TRAVEL theme to transport its child protagonist into a
taxing future. The Trojan Horse (1937) employs the Homeric tale to
satirize modern life. The narrator of The Swiss Family Manhattan (1932),
victim of a Zeppelin crash which deposits his family atop a New York
skyscraper under construction, at first thinks Americans are "anthropoids"
( APES AND CAVEMEN), but the text soon becomes a mundane SATIRE. [JC]Other
work: The Arrow (1927 chap; exp vt as coll The Arrow, and Two Other
Stories 1927 UK).
MORLEY, FELIX
(1894-1982) US writer whose Gumption Island (1956) features a Russian
superweapon which knocks some Americans on an island back millions of
years in time. [JC]
MORLEY, WILFRED OWEN
[s] Robert A.W. LOWNDES.
MORONS FROM OUTER SPACE
Film (1985). Dir Mike Hodges, starring Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones,
Joanne Pearce, Jimmy Nail, Paul Bown, Dinsdale Landen. Screenplay Jones,
Smith, developed Bob Mercer. 97 mins, cut to 91 mins. Colour.Very stupid
ALIENS (identical in appearance and behaviour to humans) have rented a
spaceship to go on holiday. They crashland on a UK motorway and later
become media stars. This remarkably unfunny film, written by and starring
two tv comedians - it looks like a tv sketch blown up out of all
proportion - is partly set in the USA in an attempt to broaden its appeal,
but what humour it has is impenetrably English; the satirical
possibilities are barely explored (in contrast to EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY
[1988]). MFOS was a comedown for director Hodges, whose previous sf movies
were The TERMINAL MAN (1974) and FLASH GORDON (1980). [PN]
MORRESSY, JOHN
(1930- ) US writer and professor of English at Franklin Pierce College in
New Hampshire. He began his sf career in 1971 - after 2 non-genre novels with "Accuracy" for FSF, where most of his short fiction has since
appeared. JM's early books were generally SPACE OPERA, through which
medium he constructed a series of interesting ALIEN societies, and most of
them shared a common galactic background: a somewhat disordered polity
still dominated by humans, though with no imperial government. Within this
scenario, his stories tended to the dark and extravagant end of the
sf-epic spectrum, as in the Del Whitby trilogy - Starbrat (1972), Nail
Down the Stars (1973; vt Stardrift 1975) and Under a Calculating Star
(1975) - which intriguingly tells the same tale of interstellar intrigue
and revolution from three partial points of view; none of the protagonists
(orphans or impostors all) knows the whole story. Also set explicitly in

the same galactic scene were A Law for the Stars (1976 Canada) and
Frostworld and Dreamfire (1977). The latter is a strongly constructed and
occasionally rousing epic of a metamorphic humanoid's search for a
breeding-partner; the last of his race on his native planet, he must find
her elsewhere or the race dies. Later sf works, like The Mansions of Space
(1983), continue to inhabit the same loosely defined, dark-textured
milieu, but JM's 1970s juveniles were not identifiably set there: The
Windows of Forever (1975) is an effective TIME-TRAVEL tale, and The Humans
of Ziax II (1974 chap) and The Drought on Ziax II (1978 chap) apply the
concerns of ECOLOGY to a planet colonized by humans, though the natives of
Ziax survive in the jungles. In the 1980s JM concentrated mainly on two
fantasy sequences: the Iron Angel series - Ironbrand (1980), Graymantle
(1981), Kingsbane (1982) and The Time of the Annihilator (1985) - and the
Kedrigern series, about a wizard - A Voice for Princess (1986), The
Questing of Kedrigern (1987), Kedrigern in Wanderland (1988), Kedrigern
and the Charming Couple (1990) and A Remembrance for Kedrigern (1990).
This latter series, in strong contrast to JM's early work, is determinedly
light-hearted. His first novels are perhaps more likely to last. [JC]Other
work: The Extraterritorial (1977 Canada).
MORRILL, ROWENA
ROWENA.
MORRIS, A.G.
[s] Katherine MACLEAN.
MORRIS, ALFRED
(? -? ) UK writer whose Looking Ahead!: A Tale of Adventure (Not by the
Author of "Looking Backward") (1892) conveys its anti-Edward BELLAMY and
anti-socialist argument through a ROBINSONADE plot which involves its
young protagonist, shipwrecked with his crew on a desert island, in a
series of political experiments. Socialism does not work; monarchy serves
well. After half a century, he returns to England, which has gone to ruin
after a socialist coup of 1905. [JC]
MORRIS, CHRIS
Working name of US rock musician and writer Christopher Crosby Morris
(1946- ); he is married to Janet E. MORRIS, who played bass in his band
and with whom he has written several sf novels (see her entry). [JC]
MORRIS, GOUVERNEUR
(1876-1953) US banker and writer, great-grandson of the Founding Father
Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816) and extremely prolific in his day as an
author of short fiction. Some of his work is sf and fantasy, beginning
with a prehistoric tale, The Pagan's Progress (1904), in which the hero
begins to acquire spiritual values. The Voice in the Rice (1910) is a
lost-race novel whose contemporary narrator discovers an Antebellum
society in a swamp. Other titles include The Footprint and Other Stories
(coll 1908), It and Other Stories (coll 1912) - which includes "Back There
in the Grass" (1911 Colliers), an enduring demonstration of the terrors of
BIOLOGY in early sf-If You Touch Them They Vanish (1913) and, with Charles
W. Goddard, The Goddess (1915). [JC]See also: ORIGIN OF MAN.

MORRIS, JANET E(LLEN)
(1946- ) US writer who gained some note as bass player 1972-5 in the band
named after her husband, Chris MORRIS; he subsequently collaborated with
JEM on several sf novels, always as Chris Morris. She herself began
writing with the ambitious Silistra sequence, comprising High Couch of
Silistra (1977; rev vt Returning Creation 1984), The Golden Sword (1977),
Wind from the Abyss (1978) and The Carnelian Throne (1979). Toughly told
and intellectually extremist, the sequence (prematurely) proclaimed an
ambition on her part to write at the highest possible level; it cannot be
said that she has quite fulfilled this ambition. Silistra intriguingly
presents a society complexly conceived in terms of patterns (some literal)
of cultural and biological bondage. Already, a sense of historical
analogies pervades the texts, and in the Dream Dancer trilogy - Dream
Dancer (1980 UK), Cruiser Dreams (1981) and Earth Dreams (1982) - this
becomes explicit; wafted away from Earth, the young protagonist of the
series climbs into the upper echelons of a culture whose assumptions about
behaviour reflect the world of Hellenistic Greece. The main sf instrument
deployed in these books - starships run by AIs which establish symbiotic
relationships with humans - prefigures JEM's growing interest in the
combat side of history, and the sequence itself becomes nightmarishly
complicated in its traversal of implied analogies from the past. In the
Tempus fantasies, based on the Thieves' World SHARED-WORLD enterprise Beyond Sanctuary * (1985), Beyond the Veil * (1985), Beyond Wizardwall *
(1986), Tempus * (coll of linked stories 1987), City at the Edge of Time *
(1988) with Chris Morris, Tempus Unbound * (1989) with Chris Morris, and
Storm Seed * (1990) with Chris Morris - the traversals of historical
material become even more hectic. In the Heroes in Hell shared-world
enterprise, which JEM co-created with C.J. CHERRYH - Heroes in Hell *
(anth 1986) with Cherryh, Rebels in Hell * (anth 1986) with Cherryh, The
Gates of Hell * (fixup 1986) with Cherryh, Masters in Hell * (anth 1987),
Kings in Hell * (1987) with Cherryh, Angels in Hell * (anth 1987), War in
Hell * (anth 1988), The Little Helliad * (1988) with Chris Morris,
Explorers in Hell * (1989) with David A. DRAKE and Prophets in Hell *
(anth 1989) - the result is something like chaos. In these works, which
occupy much of JEM's bibliography, the sharp cognitive focus has softened,
and the use of female protagonists whose sexual natures are
controversially foregrounded has also become somewhat routinized.More
interesting are some of the singletons, almost always written in
collaboration; they are deeply engaged in military matters, violent, often
extremely bloody, and profoundly cynical about all governments and their
agencies. The 40-Minute War (1984) with Chris Morris presents an utterly
disastrous nuclear HOLOCAUST brought about by stupidity; only by changing
history through a commandeered TIME-TRAVEL device is the world saved.
Active Measures (1985) with David A. Drake involves spying activities in
the NEAR FUTURE. M*E*D*U*S*A (1986) with Chris Morris describes Sky War
activities in a similar venue. Outpassage (1988) with Chris Morris is
ableak military adventure, and the Threshold Terminal sequence -Threshold
(1990),Trust Territory (1992) and The Stalk (1994), all with Chris Morris
- generates a similarly bleak vision of a Solar System engaging in
agonistic conflicts and interstellar diplomacy within the confines of the
eponymous space artifact. Throughout her career, JEM has consistently

worked to strip her language and plots of ornateness and idiosyncracy, and
her collaborative works are, at times, vividly efficient. At other times,
however, little sense of JEM's individual gifts as a writer with strong
convictions survives the impersonality. [JC]Other works: I, the Sun
(1983), historical novel; Afterwar (anth 1985); Warlord! (1987); Kill
Ratio (1987) with David A. Drake; Target (1989) with Drake; the two
Hawkeye novels: Hawkeye (1991) and Cobra (1991), both as by Daniel
Stryker.See also: ESCHATOLOGY; REINCARNATION.
MORRIS, JIM
(1940- ) US writer whose The Sheriff of Purgatory (1979; rev vt Spurlock:
Sheriff of Purgatory 1987) describes, with moments of sharpness, a
conflict between the sheriff and the Mafia, after the HOLOCAUST, in the
eponymous Arkansas county. The action soon moves to a devastated New York
City. [JC]Other works: Breeder (1988).
MORRIS, RALPH
Probably pseudonymous author of the ROBINSONADE A Narrative of the Life
and Astonishing Adventures of John Daniel . . . Taken from his own Mouth,
by Mr Ralph Morris (1751), which involves a voyage to the MOON and the
discovery of unearthly creatures there. The protagonists are unaware of
where they are marooned, although the reader is allowed to know. [JC]
MORRIS, WILLIAM
(1834-1896) UK artist and writer whose greatest fame rests on his work as
a designer of furniture and fabrics. His efforts to reform the prevalent
vulgarity of mid-Victorian taste and to preserve standards of
craftsmanship placed him in radical and irresolvable conflict with the
basic tendencies of the industrial era, then in the first vigour of its
youth. This conflict was variously expressed in his writing. In his early
poems, collected in The Defence of Guenevere (coll 1858) and The Earthly
Paradise (coll in 3 vols 1868-70), WM created the literary equivalent of
Pre-Raphaelite paintings: romances of febrile charm and phthisic delicacy.
The relation of these poems to their own time is one of studied and
disdainful avoidance. In life such avoidance was to be denied him. He was
- at least emotionally-cuckolded on an Arthurian scale by his friend and
mentor, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). He became involved in POLITICS
through his efforts, beginning in 1878, to save historical buildings from
demolition and unwise "restoration". This involvement led him, remarkably
quickly, to an active and enduring commitment to socialism.It was from
this unusual (for its day) perspective of orthodox Marxism that WM wrote
his UTOPIA, News from Nowhere, or An Epoch of Rest (1890 US; rev 1891 UK).
Written in immediate response to Edward BELLAMY's Looking Backward,
2000-1887 (1888), the novel propels its dreaming narrator from the England
of WM's day into a perfected England from which all traces of poverty,
squalor and industrial unsightliness have been effaced, an England that
bears notable similarities to the bucolic dream-landscapes of his early
poetry. As a work of fiction, this most translucent of utopias exhibits
all the clarity, grace - and narrative force - of WM's best wallpaper
designs. Where the book is most visibly Marxist in inspiration, as in the
capsule history of a proletarian revolution in Chapter XVII, it is also
most densely and compellingly imagined. Its influence on later utopian

writing has been negligible, and on GENRE SF still less, since WM's vision
is so relentlessly PASTORAL, looking back to an idealized Middle Ages which he also represented in the earlier and structurally related
socialist romance, "A Dream of John Ball" (in A Dream of John Ball, and A
King's Lesson [coll 1888], later issued in its own right as A Dream of
John Ball [1915 US]) - rather than to the urban, technologically advanced
"future" of common consensus.During the composition of News from Nowhere
the Socialist League, which WM had founded in 1884 and funded thereafter,
dissolved as a result of an excess of democracy. This event encouraged, by
reaction, WM's tendency to make his later writing into a species of highly
ornamented wish-fulfilment from which the less savoury odours of daily
life were artfully exorcized. The prose romances of his last years - such
as The Wood Beyond the World (1894) and The Well at the World's End (1896)
- have the same reluctantly valedictory air as his most defiantly escapist
poetry but little of the poetry's hypnotic harmony. He had become, once
more, "the idle singer of an empty day". It is these late romances,
however, through their acknowledged influence on C.S. LEWIS, J.R.R.
TOLKIEN and lesser writers of the SWORD-AND-SORCERY subgenre, that have
most impinged on sf.WM also translated Icelandic sagas and several Greek
and Roman classics. [TMD]Other works: The Life and Death of Jason (1867),
a poem; A Tale of the House of the Wolfings, and All the Kindreds of the
Mark (1889), an historical romance with fantasy elements; The Roots of the
Mountains (1889); The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891); Child
Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (1895); The Water of the Wondrous Isles
(1897); The Sundering Flood (1898). Alfred NOYES assembled WM's early work
in poetry and prose as The Early Romances of William Morris (coll 1907), ;
with poetry cut, vt Golden Wings, and Other Stories 1976 US including the
eight stories which originally appeared in Oxford and Cambridge Magazine
throughout 1856, some being separately published after his death: The
Hollow Land (1856; 1897 chap US), Golden Wings (1856; 1904 chap US) and
Gertha's Lovers (1856; 1905 chap US). Later collections include: Prose and
Poetry (1856-1879) (coll 1913); Early Romances (coll 1924); Selections
from the Prose Works (coll 1931), Three Works by William Morris: A Dream
of John Ball, The Pilgrims of Hope, News from Nowhere (omni 1968 US);
Svend and his Brethren (coll 1909 chap US); The Juvenilia of William
Morris, with a Checklist and Unpublished Early Poems (coll 1983 US).About
the author: Much has been written about WM. Studies of interest include:
William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955) by E.P. THOMPSON; William
Morris, the Marxist Dreamer (trans 1978) by Paul Meier; William Morris: A
Reference Guide (1985) by G.L. Aho.See also: ARTS; HISTORY OF SF; SLEEPER
AWAKES.
MORRISON, RICHARD and ROBERT
Robert A.W. LOWNDES.
MORRISSEY, J(OSEPH) L(AWRENCE)
(1907-1981) UK-born writer, almost certainly a US resident in his later
years, who began publishing thrillers in the 1930s and 1940s. His sf was
restricted to the 1960s. City of the Hidden Eyes * (1960 UK) with Philip
Levene was adapted from the latter's BBC radio serial about underground
monsters threatening the surface world. As Richard Saxon JLM wrote several

volumes of inconspicuous but not entirely negligible sf, including The
Stars Came Down (1964 UK), which is a UTOPIA, The Hour of the Phoenix
(1964 UK; 1965 US as by Henry Richards), Cosmic Crusade (1964 UK) and
Future for Sale (1964 UK). [JC]
MORROW, GRAY
Working name of US illustrator Dwight Graydon Morrow (1934- ). Like a
number of sf artists, GM began in COMICS, working with Atlas, Warren and
other companies, although he did some sf covers for If and Gal in 1959 and
through the 1960s produced covers and black-and-white interiors for these
two - carrying over much of his lively (if sometimes crude) comics style
and often using a distinctive "pen and wash" - as well as for AMZ, FSF and
Fantastic. During the mid-1960s he began painting book covers also,
especially for Avon Books, BALLANTINE BOOKS and ACE BOOKS, doing over 100
PERRY RHODAN covers for the latter. His comics work has never completely
stopped: he contributed to HEAVY METAL and in the 1980s took over
illustration of the FLASH GORDON comic strip. The Illustrated Roger
Zelazny (1978) by ZELAZNY and GM gives a good idea of his style. He has 3
times been nominated for a HUGO. [PN]See also: MARVEL COMICS.
MORROW, JAMES (KENNETH)
(1947- ) US writer who lectured and taught in the 1970s, served as a
contributing editor to Media and Methods magazine 1978-80, and produced
material for Boston tv 1979-84. His first book was Moviemaking
Illustrated: The Comicbook Filmbook (1973). Through the 1980s he produced
several textbooks for children, along with at least 5 children's novels
beginning with The Quasar Kids (1987). Unsurprisingly, his first sf novel,
The Wine of Violence (1981), shows in its smooth competence clear signs of
JM's wide experience, though even here can be sensed a tendency, which has
increased over the years, for his control over the suspension of disbelief
to falter - quite deliberately, perhaps - at rhetorical high-points. That
these slippages almost invariably occur at moments when JM wishes to
convey an intense ethical concern for the human race does not alter the
fact that, for some readers, they weaken the fictional context from which
they derive their specific meaning. The Wine of Violence is set on a
planet long colonized by humans, who have divided into two societies, the
nomad Brain-Eaters, who do precisely that, and the Quetzalians, who
discharge their human aggressiveness into a symbolic conduit which
encircles their city walls. Chances to engage in humanist sarcasms witness the very name Brain-Eaters - are rarely missed as the plot
develops, and the Quetzalians are forced by a group of human visitors to
the planet to come to grips, pyrrhically, with the vile nomads. JM's
second novel, The Continent of Lies (1984), also set on a planet settled
by humans, is less shaken by rhetorical overlays. With wit and concision
it traces the attempts of its protagonist to track down an evil category
of "dreambean" - good dreambeans being fruits which generate innocuous
entertainment-hallucinations when eaten - before it can madden its victims
into thinking of it as a god. Some moments of existential doubt intervene,
but all comes right in the end.With THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS (1986)
JM abandoned the galactic stage, for which he clearly felt only muted
sympathy, and came to Earth; as the book begins, a nuclear HOLOCAUST kills

all but a few, who are then transported via submarine to Antarctica, where
they are put on trial by the "unadmitted" - those souls who will now never
be born. As an idea it is perhaps more effective in paraphrase than within
the constraints of a fictional narrative, though the decency of the book
clearly transcends the inevitable disembodiedness of its message. Only
Begotten Daughter (1990) tells the story of Christ's sister, Julie Katz,
whose virgin birth derives from the fact that her father has contributed
to a sperm bank and whose life in other ways mirrors and affectionately
spoofs the Christian version. Counterpointed to that life, which is told
with sympathy and verve, are the stories of Satan and a fundamentalist
minister, the former being perhaps the more plausible creation; Julie's
preordained destiny plays out against these figures. Short stories - JM
has not been a prolific writer of them - are assembled in Swatting at the
Cosmos (coll 1990), which includes the NEBULA-winning "Bible Stories for
Adults, No.17: The Deluge" (1988). City of Truth (1991 UK), a novella,
conveys in parable form some sharp lessons about the nature of art and the
subtle virtues of untruth, with considerable wit; it won the 1992 Nebula
for Best Novella. Towing Jehovah (1994), in which the body of God is
discovered in the Atlantic Ocean and its towing arranged by the Catholic
Church, carries on JM's long satirical examination of the visions of
destiny which have governed, and distorted, Western civilization.JM's work
has been likened to that of Kurt VONNEGUT Jr, and similarities are indeed
very evident. JM could easily be seen as a more attractive author than his
mentor, and certainly he couches his vision of the world's plight more
happily than Vonnegut has ever done. But, while Vonnegut never disbelieves
in the medium of his art, JM has great difficulty giving credence to the
artifices of fiction. This may be the price paid for passion and clarity
of mind; and it may be a price worth paying. [JC]Other work: The
Adventures of Smoke Bailey * (1983 chap), a computer-game tie; 3 NEBULA
anthologies: Nebula Awards 26 (anth 1992), Nebula Awards 27 (anth 1993)
and Nebula Awards 28 (anth 1994).See also: ARTS; DISASTER; END OF THE
WORLD; LEISURE; MESSIAHS; PERCEPTION; PSYCHOLOGY; RELIGION.
MORSELLI, GUIDO
[r] ITALY.
MORT EN DIRECT, LA
(vt Death Watch) Film (1979). Selta Film/Little Bear/Sara
Film/Gaumont/Antenne 2/TV 15. Coprod and dir Bernard Tavernier, starring
Romy Schneider, Harvey Keitel, Harry Dean Stanton, Max Von Sydow.
Screenplay David Rayfiel, Tavernier, based on The Continuous Katherine
Mortenhoe (1974; vt The Unsleeping Eye) by D.G. COMPTON. 130 mins. Colour.
This French/West German coproduction chose, perhaps eccentrically, to
locate its DYSTOPIAN city of the future in Glasgow, and the film was shot
in English. In a bored NEAR FUTURE where illness has been almost
eradicated, death has an obscene fascination. A tv station, keen to
broadcast a real-life soap opera, sends cameraman Roddy (Keitel) to film,
without her knowledge, the last days of Katherine (Schneider), who helps
computers write romantic novels and who is dying of a rare disease; this
is achieved by surgically implanting in his skull a camera that operates
through his eyes. The evocation of the future is perfunctory: just a dash

of urban blight. Attention is tremulously on the morbid relationship of
invalid and cameraman. He blinds himself; she (who, we and she discover,
is not really dying at all) commits suicide. As an attack on MEDIA
invasion of privacy - a popular subject in sociological sf - this suffers
from morbid overkill, itself reminiscent of soap opera. [PN]
MORTON, J(OHN CAMERON AUDRIEU) B(INGHAM MICHAEL)
(1893-1979) UK writer primarily known as Beachcomber, a house name of
which he had sole use for half a century, and under which he wrote a comic
column for the London Daily Express 1924-75. He specialized in long,
serialized fantastical spoof narratives whose protagonists were themselves
hyperbolic comic types, this material being re-sorted in several
collections from Mr Thake (coll 1929) to Beachcomber: The Works of J.B.
Morton (coll 1974; vt The Bumper Beachcomber) ed Richard Ingrams. Of his
actual novels, Drink Up, Gentlemen (1930), a near-future SATIRE on English
mores after the fashion of his mentor Hilaire BELLOC, is sf. The
borderline Skylighters (1934) mocks a new religion. 1933 and Still Going
Wrong (coll 1932) assembles verse satires, and The Death of the Dragon:
New Fairy Tales (coll 1934) assembles fantasies. [JC]
MOSKOWITZ, SAM
(1920- ) US sf historian and anthologist; he also worked, as Sam Martin,
as an editor of trade magazines for the frozen-foods industry, retiring in
1985. For a long time SM, a prominent member of sf FANDOM since 1936, has
been among the best known of all historians and commentators from within
GENRE SF; his work in this field antedates that of nearly all non-genre
historians of the field, with the notable exception of J.O. BAILEY. His
first book was The Immortal Storm (1951 mimeographed; 1954), a history of
early sf fandom which recounted the feuds of the late 1930s among the
then-tiny group of sf fans with a passion and detail quite unabraded by
the passing years, and which won a 1955 HUGO. More important were SM's
profiles of sf authors and discussions of sf themes, which appeared in
various sf magazines, primarily AMZ, from 1959. Many of these were
collected (and revised) in 3 vols: Explorers of the Infinite (coll 1963),
which concentrates on the period up to 1940; Seekers of Tomorrow (coll
1966), which concentrates on writers 1940-65; and Strange Horizons (coll
1976), about such sf themes as RELIGION, women ( WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN
SCIENCE FICTION), Blacks and antisemitism in sf. SM's scholarship and
criticism were not to everybody's taste, and these works have at times
been criticized within the genre and by academics for inaccuracies and a
not always fluent style. But the fact remains that, though some of his
data and conclusions have been argued, SM did more original research in
this field than any other scholar of his period and few since; no later
history of sf has not made use of SM's painstaking work, especially his
research into the early HISTORY OF SF in periodical publications. Much of
this work appeared in 3 further vols which gave long historical
introductions to collections of stories: Science Fiction by Gaslight: A
History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines,
1891-1911 (anth 1968), Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of
the Scientific Romance in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 (anth 1970) and
The Crystal Man (coll 1973) by Edgar Page MITCHELL, ed SM. 3 later books

in the same vein are Far Future Calling: Uncollected Science Fiction and
Fantasies (coll 1980) by Olaf STAPLEDON, ed with a long biographical study
by SM, Science Fiction in Old San Francisco: Vol. 1, History of the
Movement from 1854 to 1890 (anth 1980) ed SM, and Into the Sun and Other
Stories: Science Fiction in Old San Francisco, Vol 2 (coll 1980) by Robert
Duncan MILNE, ed SM. Although SM is not an academic, and does not always
lay out his findings as carefully as academics might like - being
sometimes rather cavalier in withholding his sources of information - the
above books are a major contribution to sf scholarship. This contribution
won him a PILGRIM AWARD in 1981.SM's professional connection with sf
includes a brief stint as a writer, with 3 stories in 1941, the first
being a SPACE-OPERA novella of distant galaxies, "The Way Back" for Comet
Stories, and a couple more in the mid-1950s. He was an sf literary agent
1940-41, and managing editor for the last GERNSBACK magazine, SCIENCE
FICTION PLUS, 1952-4. He also edited a brief, 4-issue revival of WEIRD
TALES 1973-4. He ghost-edited a number of ANTHOLOGIES, including 4 which
appeared as ed Leo MARGULIES, 2 as ed Roger ELWOOD and 3 as ed Alden H.
Norton. He was special consultant on and largely responsible for Contact
(anth 1963) ed Noel Keyes and The Pulps (anth 1970) ed Tony Goodstone.SM
also ed the following: Life Everlasting (coll 1947) by David H. KELLER
with intro by SM; Editor's Choice in Science Fiction (anth 1954); The
Coming of the Robots (anth 1963); Exploring Other Worlds (anth 1963); A
Martian Odyssey and Other Classics of Science Fiction (coll 1966) by
Stanley G. WEINBAUM with intro by SM; Modern Masterpieces of Science
Fiction (anth 1966; vt in 3 vols Doorway into Time 1966, Microcosmic God
1968 and The Vortex Blasters 1968; vt in 2 vols as Doorway into Time 1973
and The Microcosmic God 1975); Strange Signposts (anth 1966) with Roger
Elwood; Three Stories (anth 1967; vt A Sense of Wonder 1967 UK with intro
severely cut; vt The Moon Era 1969 US); The Human Zero (anth 1967) with
Elwood; Masterpieces of Science Fiction (anth 1967); The Time Curve (anth
1968) with Elwood; The Man who Called Himself Poe (anth 1969; vt A Man
Called Poe 1972 UK), a collection of essays, poems and stories about Edgar
Allan POE, plus 2 stories arguably by Poe; Other Worlds, Other Times (anth
1969) with Elwood; Alien Earth (anth 1969) with Elwood; Great Untold
Stories of Fantasy and Horror (anth 1969) with Alden H. Norton; Futures to
Infinity (anth 1970); The Citadel of Fear (1970) by Francis STEVENS, intro
by SM; Ghostly by Gaslight (anth 1971) with Norton; The Space Magicians
(anth 1971) with Norton; Ultimate World (1971) by Hugo GERNSBACK, intro by
SM, a late and dreadful novel by Gernsback ed to half manuscript length by
SM; Horrors Unknown (anth 1971); When Women Rule (anth 1972); Horrors in
Hiding (anth 1973) with Norton; Horrors Unseen (anth 1974); The Raid of
"Le Vengeur" (coll 1974), hitherto uncollected stories by George GRIFFITH,
intro by SM; Out of the Storm (coll 1975) by William Hope HODGSON with a
25,000-word critical biography by SM; "A Dream of X" (1977) by Hodgson,
illus Stephen E. FABIAN, a short version of The Night Land (1912), intro
by SM; A. Merritt: Reflections in the Moon Pool (coll 1985), Merritt
marginalia, with long biographical intro by SM; Howard Phillips Lovecraft
and Nils Helmer Frome: A Recollection of One of Canada's Oldest Science
Fiction Fans (anth 1989), letters, articles, etc., by and about Frome,
many about his relationship with Lovecraft.SM's other work includes his
editorship of the 2 useful HYPERION PRESS series of reprints of sf

classics in 1974 and 1976; the Hyperion series includes also reprints of 6
of SM's most important historical works. [PN]Other works: Peace and Olaf
Stapledon (1949), Hugo Gernsback: Father of Science Fiction (1959), A
Canticle for P. Schuyler Miller (1975) and Charles Fort: A Radical
Corpuscle (1976), four privately printed pamphlets.See also: COLLECTIONS;
CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DEFINITIONS OF SF; GENERATION
STARSHIPS; NEW WAVE; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; SF IN THE CLASSROOM;
SOCIOLOGY.
MOST DANGEROUS MAN ALIVE, THE
Film (1958). Trans-Global/Columbia. Dir Allan Dwan, starring Ron Randell,
Debra Paget, Elaine Stewart, Anthony Caruso. Screenplay James Leicester,
Phillip Rock, based on a story by Rock, Michael Pate. 82 mins, cut to 76
mins. B/w.In this unusual blend of sf and crime movie, a framed gangster
(Randell) escapes from prison and hides out in the desert, where he is
caught up in a nuclear test. He survives but discovers that he is slowly
turning to steel. This enables him to exact revenge on those who framed
him - he can absorb bullets - but the process gradually robs him of
humanity, which worries the woman who loves him (Stewart) and renders his
seduction by his two-timing ex-mistress (Paget) rather difficult. He is
eventually destroyed by soldiers wielding flame-throwers. The film is
cheaply made and its script banal, but veteran director Dwan imbues it
with a certain harsh power. [JB/PN]
MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN THE WORLD, THE
(vt The Chairman) Film (1969). Apjac/20th Century-Fox. Dir J. Lee
Thompson, starring Gregory Peck, Anne Heywood, Arthur Hill, Conrad Yama.
Screenplay Ben Maddow, based on The Most Dangerous Man in the World by Jay
Richard Kennedy. 104 mins. Colour.A distinguished SCIENTIST (Peck) has a
transmitter implanted in his head and is sent to China with the object of
convincing Chairman Mao that he is a political defector. It is hoped he
will learn the formula of a new enzyme, developed by the Chinese, that
will enable crops to grow anywhere in the world; everything he says or
hears goes via satellite to the intelligence team in London - who, unknown
to him, have also implanted a small bomb in his head as insurance. This
thriller is no more than mildly effective, its main oddity being the role,
at the end, of the Russian army as valiant rescuers. [JB/PN]
MOST THRILLING SCIENCE FICTION EVER TOLD, THE
One of the many reprint DIGEST-size magazines published by Sol Cohen's
Ultimate Publishing Co., using reprint rights acquired when he bought
AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC. 42 issues early 1966-July 1975. Issues
#1-#13 and #18 appeared as The Most Thrilling SF Ever Told, other issues
as Thrilling Science Fiction Adventures (#14-#17) and Thrilling Science
Fiction (#19 to the end). The publishing schedule was rather irregularly
quarterly. The first 6 issues were undated; the first 25 issues were
numbered consecutively, but thereafter only month/year was used. Most
issues used stories of medium to good quality by well known names from the
period when Cele GOLDSMITH edited AMZ and Fantastic, but in #14-#25 older
(and dreadful) stories by obscure authors were published, probably because
of a dispute between Cohen and the SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA
regarding payment for the reprints. Another Ultimate magazine, SCIENCE

FICTION (ADVENTURE) CLASSICS, merged with Thrilling Science Fiction for
its last 2 issues in 1975. [BS]
MOSURA
(vt Mothra) Film (1961). Toho. Dir Inoshiro Honda, starring Frankie
Sakai, Hiroshi Koizumi, Kyoko Kagawa and the twins Emi and Yumi Ito.
Screenplay Shinichi Sekizawa, based on a story by Shinichiro Nakamura,
Takehido Fukunaga, Yoshi Hotta. 100 mins. Colour.Aficionados of Japanese
MONSTER MOVIES find their delight not only in the monsters themselves: the
attraction depends also on the sheer bizarreness, to Western eyes and
ears, of the stories and dialogue. M is perhaps the most notably grotesque
of all in this respect, its relatively mundane giant moth being amply
compensated for by the eccentricities of the story. Two 6in (15cm) women
(the Ito twins), kidnapped from an island whose inhabitants have been
mutated by radiation, are used as nightclub singers by an evil "Rosilican"
(i.e., US) showman (Kagawa). Back on the island a huge, venerated egg
hatches in response to prayers from the local natives, and the giant
caterpillar that emerges swims off to Japan to save the dwarf-girls, whose
piping singing voices act as a homing signal. It makes a mess of Tokyo and
spins a cocoon; the giant moth that emerges goes off to Rosilica (where
the showman has retreated) and saves the girls. This is Toho's most
sophisticated MONSTER MOVIE; its imagery, though lunatic, is surprisingly
poignant.Mosura never developed the following of GOJIRA (Godzilla) and
GAMERA, but did reappear 4 times, in Mosura Tai Gojira (1964; vt Gojira
Tai Mothra; released in English as Godzilla Vs. The Thing; vt Godzilla Vs.
Mothra), where, called by the tiny twins, she saves Tokyo from Gojira;
Ghidorah Sandai Kaiju Chikyu Saidai No Kessan (1964; vt Chikyu Saidai No
Kessan; released in English as Ghidrah, The Three-Headed Monster), in
which she defends Earth from an alien monster, helped out by Gojira and
RADON (Rodan) when she can't do the job on her own; Nankai No Daiketto
(1966; released in English as Ebirah, Horror of the Deep; vt Godzilla Vs.
the Sea-Monster) dir Jun Fukuda, the first of the series not to be dir
Honda, in which Mosura takes part in an aerial evacuation of people from
an island about to explode; and Kaiju Soshingeki (1968; released in
English as Destroy All Monsters; vt Operation Monsterland; vt The March of
the Monsters) dir Honda, a poor film in which all 11 Toho monsters get
together. [PN]
MOSURA TAI GOJIRA
GOJIRA; MOSURA.
MOSZKOWSKI, ALEXANDR
(1851-1934) German writer. In his excellent and encyclopedic SATIRE of
UTOPIAS Die Inselt der Weisheit (1922 Germany; trans H.J. Stenning as The
Isles of Wisdom 1924 UK) the protagonists are guided by Nostradamus
through an archipelago which features a Platonic ( PLATO) ISLAND, a
Buddhist utopia, an Island of Fine ARTS, pacifist islands, reactionary
islands, and so on. Of particular interest is Sarragalla, the "Mechanized
Island", where the technological utopianism of Walther Rathenau
(1867-1922) is mercilessly satirized. The characters conclude that "every
principle is bound to break down, somewhere, or, if its application is
enforced, it is transformed into a caricature of itself". [BS]Other work:

Der Venuspark ["The Venus Park"] (1923).See also: AUTOMATION.
MOTHRA
MOSURA.
MOTTRAM, R(ALPH) H(ALE)
(1883-1971) UK writer and banker who began his long and prolific writing
career as a chronicler of his WWI experiences in the famous Spanish Farm
trilogy, beginning with The Spanish Farm (1924). In his sf novel, The
Visit of the Princess: A Romance of the Nineteen-Sixties (1946), a joyless
UK is galvanized by the visit of a European princess. Fantasy titles are
The Old Man of the Stones: A Christmas Allegory (1930 chap), The Ghost and
the Maiden (1940), The Gentleman of Leisure (1948), in which the Gentleman
travels to Heaven, and To Hell, with Crabb Robinson (1962), which takes
its protagonist elsewhere. [JC/PN]
MOUDY, WALTER (FRANK)
(1929-1973) US writer, author of a few sf stories after his sole novel,
No Man on Earth (1964), a rather compellingly told story in which a man
born of a human mother and an alien father must seek out his destiny. [JC]
MOUNDS, MONICA
Robert E. VARDEMAN.
MOXLEY, F(RANK) WRIGHT
(1889-1937) US writer whose interesting Red Snow (1930) tells of a
snowlike precipitation which causes worldwide sterility, and of the
subsequent social breakdown, lovingly elaborated. One survivor is rescued
by what may be an enigmatic alien but - as the vessel from the heavens is
drawn by horses - is more likely to be Helios. But this fantasy-like
ending does little to dispel the sf materiality of the preceding events.
[JC/PN]
MOYLAN, TOM
[r] POSTMODERNISM AND SF.
MR
To avoid confusion over variant spellings, entries whose first word is
"Mr" are listed as if that title were spelt out in full as "Mister".
MROZEK, SLAWOMIR
(1930- ) Polish writer, mainly of absurdist plays ( FABULATION), several
of which are assembled in Six Plays (trans N. Bethell 1967 UK); a further
play, Vatzlav (1970; trans Ralph Manheim 1970 chap US), is set in a
mythical metamorphosis-engendering territory. The short stories in Slon
(coll 1957; trans Konrad Syrop as The Elephant 1962 UK) and The Ugupu Bird
(coll trans Konrad Syrop 1968 UK) - the latter derived from Wesele w
Atomicach (coll 1959), Deszcz (coll 1962) and Ucieczka na Poludnie (coll
1965) - satirically mix fantasy and absurdist elements in a manner similar
to that of Italo CALVINO. [JC]
MUDD, STEVE
(? - ) US writer whose sf novels, Tangled Webs (1989) and its sequel The
Planet Beyond (1990), are adventures set in a totalitarian interstellar

venue. [JC]
MUDDOCK, J(OYCE) E(MMERSON) PRESTON
(1843-1934) UK writer, much travelled in early life, who published
prolifically under his own name and as Dick Donovan, generally restricting
his pseudonym to juveniles and thrillers, including Tales of Terror (coll
1889) and The Scarlet Seal (1902), the latter a witchcraft fantasy. As
JEPM he published considerable nonfiction as well as Stories Weird and
Wonderful (coll 1889) and The Sunless City (1905), in which a submarine
explores a seemingly bottomless lake in the Rockies and comes upon a lost
race ( LOST WORLDS). [JC]
MUDGETT, HERMAN W.
[s] Anthony BOUCHER.
MUIR, WARD
(1878-1927) UK writer whose "Further East than Asia" (1919) is set in a
LOST WORLD whose inhabitants gain longevity through bathing in a
radioactive pool, which also disfigures them. [JC]
MULISCH, HARRY
[r] BENELUX.
MULLALLY, FREDERIC
(1920- ) UK writer whose only sf novel - after the borderline Oh! Wicked
Wanda (1970) - isHitler Has Won (1975), a competent presentation of what
has become a very common ALTERNATE-WORLD vision of history ( HITLER WINS).
FM's particular explanation for Hitler's victory involves an early assault
on Russia. He was also the author of Oh! Wicked Wanda (1970). [JC]
MULLEN, R(ICHARD) D(ALE)
(1915- ) US sf critic and scholar, now emeritus professor of English at
Indiana State University. RDM was a founding member of the SCIENCE FICTION
RESEARCH ASSOCIATION. In 1973 he established SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES and
was its publisher and, with Darko SUVIN, its co-editor through 1978; he
returned to the journal as an editor in 1991 and managing editor from the
Nov 1991 issue. He and Suvin also ed Science-Fiction Studies: Selected
Articles on Science Fiction 1973-75 (anth 1976) and Science-Fiction
Studies: Selected Articles on Science Fiction 1976-77 (anth 1978). RDM's
editorial personality is relaxed, sensible, meticulous, and always eager
to get the facts straight, qualities which also permeate his interesting
criticism, mostly published in EXTRAPOLATION and Science-Fiction Studies.
[PN]
MULLEN, STANLEY
(1911-1973) US artist, museum curator and pulp writer. He wrote over 30
sf and fantasy stories, many SPACE OPERA, in a variety of magazines,
including PLANET STORIES, 1949-59. His 3 books, from SMALL PRESSES, are
Kinsmen of the Dragon (1951), which pits the hero against a secret society
whose magical science has roots in a PARALLEL WORLD, Sphinx Child (1948
chap), a fantasy short story, and Moonfoam and Sorceries (coll 1948).
[PN]See also: ASTEROIDS.
MULLER, JOHN E.

House name used on many sf and supernatural novels published by BADGER
BOOKS. The great majority of these were the work of R.L. FANTHORPE (31
titles), with 3 by John S. GLASBY and 1 by A.A. GLYNN (for titles see
those authors). Works of unknown authorship are: Space Void (1960; 1965 US
as by Marston Johns), Edge of Eternity (1962), Night of the Big Fire
(1962) and In the Beginning (1962). [JC]
MULLER, PAUL
Paul CONRAD.
MULLER, PAUL ALFRED
[r] GERMANY.
MULLIN, CHRIS
Working name of UK politician and writer Christopher John Mullin (1947), whose A Very British Coup (1982), adapted for tv in 1990, depicts with
fixated clarity successful NEAR-FUTURE US efforts to subvert a potential
change for the better in the UK Government. [JC]
MULTIVERSE
PARALLEL WORLDS.
MUNDY, TALBOT
Pseudonym of UK-born writer William Lancaster Gribbon (1879-1940), who
emigrated to the USA in 1909 after his early life as a confidence man,
ivory poacher and all-round rogue in British Africa had culminated in a
prison sentence. He soon became a professional author, with most of his
work first appearing in Adventure magazine, where he became the star
writer; after 1935 he left PULP-MAGAZINE fiction and wrote scripts for the
radio series Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. TM's fiction is
sometimes difficult to classify. In his early stories he tried to combine
MAINSTREAM standards with exotic adventure in Africa and the Near East;
his later work often carried a didactic message and might be called
philosophic adventure fiction. From the first his sf stood apart from US
GENRE SF in its narrative structure, characterization and situation,
having grown out of the adult adventure-fiction models to be found in
Adventure, with tight, complex plotting, well handled ethnic types and
exotic locales, and a strong influence from Rudyard KIPLING. He commonly
used quest themes, stressing loyalty, honour and spiritual
self-development. The fantastic element derived in large part from
occultism, with ideas drawn from a schismatic branch of the Theosophical
Society to which he belonged. Such motifs - which included various PSI
POWERS, fantastic archaeology, incredible WEAPONS, strange drugs,
ANTIGRAVITY, atomic energy, Atlantean science, SUPERMEN (mahatmas),
transmutation of elements and vibratory phenomena - were conceived
rationally and "scientifically" as part of the ancient wisdom, a body of
knowledge once possessed by mankind but since lost.Most of TM's sf can be
found in the large group of associated novels known as the Jimgrim/Ramsden
sequence, though the interconnections are sometimes slender. Chief
characters include Jimgrim (James Schuyler Grim), a US soldier of fortune,
Athelstan King, an Anglo-Indian career officer, Jeff Ramsden, a US
engineer, Narayan Singh, a Sikh soldier, and Chullunder Ghose, an
unscrupulously brilliant Bengali babu. TM's more important works in this

series are: The Mystery of Khufu's Tomb (1922 Adventure as "Khufu's Real
Tomb"; 1933), fantastic archaeology based on Ancient Egyptian
superscience; Caves of Terror (1922 Adventure as "The Gray Mahatma";
1924), in which a vibratory superscience possessed by Jain adepts is in
danger of falling into the hands of an adventuress; Om: The Secret of
Ahbor Valley (1924), which is ultimately concerned with a jade sphere from
a great past civilization, but is noteworthy for its description of a
travelling Indian dramatic group; The Nine Unknown (1924), in which an
investigation into the disappearance of gold in India uncovers both a
benevolent secret organization that disintegrates the gold for atomic
power and an evil Shaktist order that uses secrets from the Ancient Wisdom
as "magic"; Jimgrim (1930-31 Adventure as "King of the World"; 1931; vt
Jimgrim Sahib 1953), featuring an attempt at world conquest using
scientific secrets from ATLANTIS deciphered from golden plates found in
buried cities in the Gobi; and There Was a Door (1933 UK; vt Full Moon
1935 US), with Fortean elements ( Charles FORT), disappearances into
another DIMENSION, fantastic archaeology and superscience of the past.
Some of TM's novels - like The Devil's Guard (1926; vt Ramsden 1926 UK),
Black Light (1930) and Old Ugly-Face (1939 UK) - gradually moved toward
religious occultism.TM remains best known for the Tros of Samothrace
books, a sequence of minimally fantastic, essentially mainstream
historical stories set in Britain, Gaul and the Mediterranean world just
before the beginning of the Christian Era, with debunking portraits of
Julius Caesar, Cleopatra and others. First appearing irregularly 1925-35
in Adventure, these stories were published in book form as Queen Cleopatra
(1929), Tros of Samothrace (1934; vt in 4 vols as Tros 1967, Helma 1967,
Liafall 1967 and Helene 1967; vt in 3 vols as Lud of Lunden 1976, Avenging
Liafall 1976 and The Praetor's Dungeon 1976) and The Purple Pirate (1935).
For sf readers, however, the Jimgrim/Ramsden books are of greater
interest. At his best, TM was a highly competent writer who produced the
finest stories of Oriental adventure to appear in the pulps. [EFB]Other
works: King - of the Khyber Rifles (1916); The Thunder Dragon Gate (1937).
About the author: Talbot Mundy: Messenger of Destiny (1983) by Donald M.
Grant (1927- ) et al.; Last Adventurer: The Life of Talbot Mundy (1984) by
Peter Berresford Ellis (1943- ); An Index to Adventure Magazine (2 vols
1990) by Richard BLEILER.
MUNKACSY, JANOS
[r] HUNGARY.
MUNRO, DUNCAN H.
[s] Eric Frank RUSSELL.
MUNRO, H.H.
[r] SAKI.
MUNRO, JOHN
(1849-1930) UK engineer, professor of mechanical engineering at Bristol,
and author of 2 short stories, "Sun-Rise in the Moon" (1894) and "A
Message from Mars" (1895), in Cassell's Magazine. The latter was revised
to form the first chapter of A Trip to Venus (1897), an unexceptional
account of a journey by ROCKET to an idyllic UTOPIA on VENUS, with a brief

excursion to MERCURY. [JE]
MUNSEY, FRANK A(NDREW)
(1854-1925) US newspaper and magazine publisher and writer. He began
publishing in 1882 with The Golden Argosy, a weekly BOYS' PAPER, later
transformed into The ARGOSY . FAM expanded his titles to include MUNSEY'S
MAGAZINE, The SCRAP BOOK , The ALL-STORY , CAVALIER and later, after a
complex series of mergers and title changes, All-Story Weekly and Argosy
All-Story Weekly. A self-made millionaire, FAM was reviled for his
heavy-handed treatment of the newspapers under his control. Under the
editorship of Robert Hobart Davis, his magazines became the most important
pre-sf PULP MAGAZINES, publishing many works by prominent sf and fantasy
authors, including Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, Ray CUMMINGS, George Allan
ENGLAND, Ralph Milne FARLEY, Homer Eon FLINT, Austin HALL, Otis Adelbert
KLINE, A. MERRITT and Sax ROHMER. [JE]See also: HISTORY OF SF.
MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE
US magazine published by the Frank A. MUNSEY Corp.; ed Richard H.
Thitherton (with Robert Hobart Davis as fiction editor) and others.
Appeared from 2 Feb 1889 as Munsey's Weekly, then as MM Oct 1891-Oct 1929,
when it merged with Argosy All-Story Weekly ( The ARGOSY ) to form 2
magazines, Argosy Weekly and All-Story Love Tales.Although MM was
contemporary with The ALL-STORY it published little sf, and that little
was not of any lasting quality. Most notable was its publication of
stories by E.F. BENSON, Ray CUMMINGS, George Allan ENGLAND and Sax ROHMER.
It also published the borderline-sf The Green Ray (1922-3; 1924) by Vance
THOMPSON. [JE]
MUNSEY'S WEEKLY
MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE.
MURAKAMI, HARUKI
(1949- ) Japanese writer of very considerable popularity whose Hitsuji o
meguru boken (1982; trans Alfred Birnbaum as A Wild Sheep Chase 1989 US)
tumbles a bevy of eccentric protagonists into a chase for a fabricated
sheep in a style that mixes FABULATION and nightmare; the sequel is Dansu
Dansu Dansu (1988; trans Alfred Birnbaum as Dance Dance Dance 1994 US).
Sekai no owar to hard-boiled wonderland (1985; trans Alfred Birnbaum as
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World 1991 US), which is
marginally more conventional, depicts a WAR for data in a NEAR-FUTURE
Japan that has become definable as a nest of information. The Elephant
Vanishes (coll trans Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin 1993 US) assembles
shorter works. [JC]
MURDOCK, M(ELINDA) S(EABROOKE)
(1947- ) US writer who began writing sf with a STAR TREK tie, Web of the
Romulans * (1983), and who later continued in much the same vein with her
BUCK ROGERS sequence: Rebellion 2456 * (1989), Hammer of Mars * (1989),
Armageddon Off Vesta * (1989) and Prime Squared * (1990). In between, MSM
composed a SPACE-OPERA series of her own - Vendetta (1987) and Dynteryx
(1988) - but this did little to modify a sense that her use of the
conventions of 1980s adventure sf, though professional, lacked a personal
touch. [JC]

MURNANE, GERALD
(1939- ) Australian writer, highly regarded in his native land for his
experimental short stories and novels, such as Tamarisk Row (1974). GM's
meditative style bears comparison with that of Jorge Luis BORGES. He
disclaims any connection with sf, but has written several fictions about
ALTERNATE WORLDS. In The Plains (1982) the narrator enters an alternate
Australia: an inland feudal society, whose landowners, devoted patrons of
the arts, take part in elaborate games and rituals. The narrator is hired
to make a film about this society, but in the end accepts its solipsistic
ideals and abandons his project. "The Battle of Acosta Nu" (1985), which
can be found in Landscape with Landscape (coll of linked novellas 1985),
tells of a man living in Melbourne, Australia, who all his life believes
himself to be living in New Australia, the (actual) Australian colony
founded in Paraguay in the early 1900s. Or perhaps it is the other way
around. [BG]
MURPHY, DENNIS JASPER
Charles MATURIN.
MURPHY, PAT
(1955- ) Working name of US writer Patrice Ann Murphy (1955- ), who began
publishing sf in the 1970s, her first acknowledged story being "Nightbird
at the Window" in Chrysalis 5 (anth 1979) ed Roy TORGESON. Her first novel
was the obscurely published The Shadow Hunter (1982), in which a Stone-Age
man is displaced by a TIME-TRAVEL device into a cruelly alienating future.
The theme of displacement, whether through time or across the gulf of
species, significantly shapes PM's two most famous works. Rachel in Love
(1987 IASFM; 1992 chap), which won a NEBULA and a THEODORE STURGEON
MEMORIAL AWARD, tells from her point of view the story of a chimpanzee
with enhanced INTELLIGENCE (see also APES AND CAVEMEN) who escapes an
impersonally horrific research institute. Nothing in the tale, with the
exception of Rachel's cognitively enhanced responses, is in any sense sf,
or even unlikely. The Falling Woman (1986), which won PM another Nebula in
the same year, concentrates upon a contemporary woman archaeologist who is
capable of perceiving, through palimpsests of midden and artifact, figures
from the period being investigated at a dig in Mexico, and can observe
their ghostlike maintenance of their ancient daily endeavours. A triangle
of implications develops intriguingly between one of the Mayans, who
speaks to the protagonist, and her estranged daughter, and climaxes in a
kind of healing transtemporal embrace.After editing and producing
environmental reports and graphics for various Pacific Coast
organizations, PM began in 1982 to edit the Exploratorium Quarterly, the
journal of the Exploratorium, a San Francisco museum designed to promote a
hands-on relationship between human perception and the arts and sciences.
Elements of her next novel, The City, Not Long After (1984 Universe 14,
anth ed Terry CARR as "Art in the War Zone"; much exp 1988), clearly
extrapolate some of the Exploratorium agenda. Set after a plague HOLOCAUST
in a physically intact San Francisco, the tale presents its protagonists'
capacity to make ART analogous to the shaping of a new reality. If there
is a slight air of local patriotism in the book's apotheosis of San
Francisco, it is at the same time perhaps something of a relief to

participate in a vision of the future not bound by CYBERPUNK shibboleths.
PM, like Kim Stanley ROBINSON, had been described in the course of the
1980s as a Humanist writer, in a formulation which opposed Cyberpunk to
Humanism, generally to the discredit of the latter; also like Robinson,
she resisted the labelling, which she clearly found procrustean. Her
stories have been assembled as Points of Departure (coll 1990), which won
a PHILIP K. DICK AWARD, and in Letters from Home (coll 1991 UK) with Pat
CADIGAN and Karen Joy FOWLER, each author contributing solo tales to the
volume. Though PM's career seems to be edging away from sf, it can be
predicted that, from her coign of vantage, she will continue to fertilize
the genre. [JC]See also: FANTASY; INTERZONE.
MURPHY, WARREN (B.)
(1933- ) US writer known largely for the Destroyer sequence, a long
series of spoof thrillers, many with Richard Ben SAPIR, featuring the Doc
Savage-like adventures of Remo Williams, a White man (and avatar of Shiva
the Destroyer) trained in the paranormal combat arts of Sinanju, which
allow him (for instance) to interpenetrate his body with other matter. The
first titles were written mostly by WBM and Sapir, who died in 1987, but
later titles - sometimes listed as by these two, sometimes by one alone are by various hands including WBM. The most prolific recent author of
Destroyer titles is Will MURRAY, who also wrote The Assassin's Handbook
(coll 1982; rev vt Inside Sinanju 1985) as by WBM and Sapir, an amused
(and amusing) companion to the sequence; other authors include WBM's wife
Molly Cochran, Ed Hunsburger, William Joy, Ric MEYERS and Robert Randisi.
A detailed presentation of titles, listing ascribed and actual authors,
can be found in R. REGINALD's Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature: a
Checklist, 1975-1991 (1992). Here we pay no attention to ascribed author
(always, in any case, WBM and/or Sapir); up to #74, unless otherwise
indicated, the actual author is WBM, alone or with Sapir; from #74 on the
author is Murray.The sequence began, rather inauspiciously, with Created,
the Destroyer (1971) with Sapir (who collaborated on all but one through
#24) and Destroyer #2: Death Check (1972), ponderous imitations of James
Bond; but with #3: Chinese Puzzle (1972) it took off with remarkable
panache, some instalments coming close to SPACE OPERA, others engaging
with SUPERMAN themes, and most indulging in raucous SATIRE of US politics
and mores. The sequence then runs: #4: Mafia Fix (1972), #5: Dr Quake
(1972), #6: Death Therapy (1972), #7: Union Bust (1973), #8: Summit Chase
(1973) by Murphy alone, #9: Murder's Shield (1973), #10: Terror Squad
(1973), #11: Kill or Cure (1973), #12: Slave Safari (1973), #13: Acid Rock
(1973), #14: Judgment Day (1974), #15: Murder Ward (1974), #16: Oil Slick
(1974), #17: Last War Dance (1974), #18: Funny Money (1975), #19: Holy
Terror (1975), #20: Assassin's Play-Off (1975), #21: Deadly Seeds (1975),
#22: Brain Drain (1976), #23: Child's Play (1976), #24: King's Curse
(1976), #25: Sweet Dreams (1976) with Meyers, #26: In Enemy Hands (1977),
#27: The Last Temple (1977) with Meyers, #28: Ship of Death (1977), #29:
The Final Death (1977) with Sapir and Meyers, #30: Mugger Blood (1977),
#31: The Head Men (1977), #32: Killer Chromosomes (1978), #33: Voodoo Die
(1978), #34: Chained Reaction (1978), #35: Last Call (1978), #36: Power
Play (1979), #37: Bottom Line (1979), #38: Bay City Blast (1979), #39:
Missing Link (1980), #40: Dangerous Games (1980) with Randisi, #41: Firing

Line (1980), #42: Timber Line (1980) with Joy, #43: Midnight Man (1981)
with Randisi, #44: Balance of Power (1981) with Cochran, #45: Spoils of
War (1981) by Cochran, #46: Next of Kin (1981) by Cochran, #47: Dying
Space (1982) by Cochran, #48: Profit Motive (1982), #49: Skin Deep (1982)
by Cochran, #50: Killing Time (1982) by Cochran, #51: Shock Value (1983)
by Cochran, #52: Fool's Gold (1983), #53: Time Trial (1983) by Cochran,
#54: Last Drop (1983) by Cochran, #55: Master's Challenge (1984) with
Sapir and Cochran, #56: Encounter Group (1984) with Murray, #57: Date with
Death (1984) with Cochran and Hunsburger, #58: Total Recall (1984) with
Randisi, #59: The Arms of Kali (1984), #60: The End of the Game (1985),
#61: Lords of the Earth (1985), #62: The Seventh Stone (1985) with Sapir
and Hunsburger, #63: The Sky is Falling (1986) by Sapir and Murray, #64:
The Last Alchemist (1986) with Murray, #65: Lost Yesterday (1986) by Sapir
and Murray, #66: Sue Me (1986) by Sapir, #67: Look into my Eyes (1987) by
Sapir, #68: An Old-Fashioned War (1987) by Sapir, #69: Blood Ties (1987)
with Murray, #70: The Eleventh Hour (1987) with Cochran and Murray, #71:
Return Engagement (1988) with Murray, #72: Sole Survivor (1988) with
Murray, #73: Line of Succession (1988) with Murray, #74: Walking Wounded
(1988) by Murray (who is responsible for the remaining titles listed),
#75: Rain of Terror (1989), #76: The Final Crusade (1989), #77: Coin of
the Realm (1989), #78: Blue Smoke and Mirrors (1989), #79: Shooting
Schedule (1990), #80: Death Sentence (1990), #81: Hostile Takeover (1990),
#82: Survival Course (1990), #83: Skull Duggery (1991), #84: Ground Zero
(1991), #85: Blood Lust (1991), #86: Arabian Nightmare (1991), #87: Mob
Psychology (1992) and #88: The Ultimate Death (1992) (we cannot trace #87,
nor have we been able to monitor further publications, though we are aware
of the release of #96: Infernal Revenue [1994]. An out-of-series Destroyer
title, Remo: The Adventure Begins * (1985) by Sapir, is a film tie to Remo
Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985; vt Remo-Unarmed and Dangerous).Other
genre adventures by WM include Grandmaster (1984) with his wife Molly
Cochran, High Priest (1987) with Cochran, The Hand of Lazarus (1988) with
Cochran, Scorpion's Dance (1990), and The Forever King (1992), again with
Cochran. [JC]
MURRAY, (GEORGE) GILBERT (AIME)
(1866-1957) UK classical scholar, best known for his many translations
from the Greek classic drama, for his UTOPIAN sense that contemporary
society could be changed by persuasion (justified in the case of women's
suffrage) and for seminal studies such as The Rise of the Greek Epic
(1907) and Four Stages of Greek Religion (1912). His sf novel, Gobi or
Shamo: A Story of Three Songs (1889), as by G.G.A. Murray, is a lost-race
tale ( LOST WORLDS) featuring a race of Hellenes whose ethical precepts
are unsparingly ancient but who have also mastered weapons of mass
destruction. [JC]
MURRAY, WILL
Working name of US writer William Patrick Murray (1953- ), who has shown
an interest throughout his career in pulp SUPERHEROES like DOC SAVAGE,
about which figure he wrote the nonfiction Secrets of Doc Savage (1981
chap); as Kenneth ROBESON he began a new sequence of Doc Savage adventures
comprisingPython Isle * (1991), White Eyes* (1992), The Frightened Fish*

(1992), The Jade Ogre* (1992), Flight into Fear* (1993), The Whistling
Wraith* (1993) and The Forgotten Realm* (1993). Under his own name he ed
The Duende History of the Shadow Magazine (anth 1980). Writing as Warren
MURPHY (whom see for titles) and/or Richard SAPIR, he has written many
volumes of the Destroyer sequence, including all those from #74 to date
(although forthcoming titles will, it seems, be by yet other hands). [JC]
MURRY, COLIN MIDDLETON
Richard COWPER.
MUSIC
This article is in 3 parts: 1, Science Fiction in Classical Music; 2,
Science Fiction in Popular and Rock Music; 3, Music in Science Fiction.
Because of the almost endless proliferation of popular and rock music, and
because there are so many ways in which the latter (in particular)
interpenetrates with sf and fantasy, section 2 is itself divided into 2
parts, from different hands: Maxim JAKUBOWSKI's comments focus on the
pre-1980s period, while Charles Shaar Murray's concentrate on more recent
work.1. Science fiction in classical music By historical necessity, sf
being in the broad sense a 20th-century phenomenon, earlier classical
music was generally unaffected by it, but there are exceptions: Baldassare
Galuppi (1706-1785) in 1750 and Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) in 1777
each wrote a comic opera with the title Il Mondo della Luna ["The World of
the Moon"] to a libretto by Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793). More directly
attributable to sf is the musical adaptation by Jacques Offenbach
(1819-1880), as "Le Voyage dans la lune" (1875), of the Jules VERNE book
known in English as From the Earth to the Moon (2 parts, 1865, 1870; trans
1873). The Moon is again the scene of the action in the first part of the
opera The Excursions of Mr Broucek (1917) by Leos Janacek (1854-1928),
based on the novel by Svatopluk Cech ( CZECH AND SLOVAK SF): the leading
character dreams he has been transported there while in a drunken stupor.
In The Makropoulos Secret (1925) Janacek adapted Karel CAPEK's play about
IMMORTALITY. In the anthology Les soirees de l'orchestre (1853) Hector
Berlioz (1803-1869) provides an interesting footnote in "Euphonia", a
short sf tale of a musical city.Other musical works of the late 19th and
early 20th century have taken on sf connotations because of their
subsequent use, such as Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896) by Richard Strauss
(1864-1949), which was featured in Stanley KUBRICK's film 2001: A SPACE
ODYSSEY (1968). The Planets suite (1918) by Gustav Holst (1874-1934) has
often been used in sf contexts. Many compositions since 1950 have followed
Holst's astronomical (in his case, astrological) lead, especially those
for which avant-garde instrumental techniques or electronic music might
make more traditional titles seem incongruous; thus numerous titles such
as "Cosmos", "Galaxy", "Nebula" and "Orbit" can be found. Works are named
after star charts (Atlas Eclipticalis [1961] by John Cage [1912-1992]),
inspired by types of celestial objects (NEUTRON STAR [1968] by Jan W.
Morthenson [1940- ] and Quasars [1980] by Christian Clozier [1945- ]) or
by individual heavenly bodies (Sirius [1968] by Karlheinz Stockhausen
[1928- ]), and dedicated to or illustrative of the journeys of early
astronauts and cosmonauts: in the USSR many songs and ballads were
composed in honour of Yuri Gagarin (1935-1968).Electronic music for

illustrating "the music of the spheres" - a phrase that has been used of
the work of Terry Riley (1935- ), Francois Bayle (1932- ) and others - and
stories of outer space can be found not only in film soundtracks,
especially Louis (1923- ) and Bebe (1928- ) Barron's pioneering score for
FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) and the understated contributions by Eduard
Artem'ev (1937- ) to Andrei TARKOVSKY's SOLARIS (1971) and STALKER (1979),
but also in short pieces commissioned or adapted by music-hire libraries,
like Desmond LESLIE's Inside the Space Ship and Music of the Voids of
Outer Space (both c1957). Works with similar titles also appeared early on
in concert programmes, with pieces such as Visions of Flying Saucers (1966
with Leo Nilsson) and Robot Amoroso (1978) by Ralph Lundsten (1936- ). The
use of electric instruments permeates the avant-garde reaches of jazz and
jazz-rock as with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report and Sun Ra's
Arkestra (whose varied names, including Blue Universe Arkestra, Solar Myth
Arkestra and Cosmo Love Arkestra, testify to a kind of sf
allegiance).Another relationship is the direct linkage of a piece of music
to an existing sf story. In rare cases this consists of a vocal work with
an sf text, as with the song-cycle The Tentacles of the Dark Nebula (1969)
by David Bedford (1937- ), from Arthur C. CLARKE's story "Transcience"
(1949), and The Music and Poetry of the Kesh (1985) by Todd Barton,
musical settings of the poems in Ursula LE GUIN's ALWAYS COMING HOME
(1985). More often a purely electronic or instrumental composition was
inspired by or evokes the atmosphere of the original story, as in
Quatermass (1964; Nigel KNEALE) by Tod Dockstader (1932- ), Alpha Ralpha
Boulevard (1979; based on a 1961 story by Cordwainer SMITH) by Ralph
Lundsten, the cycle Kristallwelt (1983-6; in homage to J.G. BALLARD's THE
CRYSTAL WORLD [1966]) by Michael Obst (1955- ), and several further works
by Bedford, including Jack of Shadows (1973; based on Roger ZELAZNY's 1971
novel), Star's End (1974; refers to Isaac ASIMOV's Foundation trilogy) and
The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas (1976; based on the 1973 story by Le
Guin). The Birthplace of Matter (1975) by Sten Hanson (1936- ) refers to
sf concepts, while his The John Carter Song Book (1979-85) is more
unusual: it is based, we are told, on the minimal information about
Martian music in Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's novels supplemented by Hanson's
direct contact with Carter; for lack of available recordings these
examples of Martian music were perforce recreated by means of computerized
vocal synthesis.Dramatic cantatas and music dramas concerned with sf
subjects but without the involvement of an sf author include the RADIO
drama Comet Ikeya (1966) by Joji Yuasa (1929- ) and Cometose (1987) by
Kristi Allik (1952). In the latter, Samuel Clemens (Mark TWAIN), who was
born and died during consecutive appearances of Halley's Comet, is
transported with his house to the comet's core, returning to Earth's
vicinity in 1985 only to have the Giotto satellite destroy the house.
Halley's Comet is celebrated also in The Return (1985) by Morton Subotnick
(1935- ). Deep concern over humanity's future can be found in the work of
the composer and poet Lars-Gunnar Bodin (1935- ), such as his Cybo (as in
CYBORG) trilogy (1967-8) and the cantata For Jon (Fragments of a Time to
Come) (1977), the final section of which is called "Instruction Manual for
Interdimensional Travel".Staging and costumes have emphasized sf elements
in certain musico-dramatic works, including Licht ["Light"], Stockhausen's
cycle of 7 full-length operas to his own scenarios (in progress since

1977), and the Surrealist Le grand macabre (1977) by Gyorgy Ligeti (1923), loosely based on the play by Michel de Ghelderode (1898-1962). Among
the operas for children by Gian Carlo Menotti (1911- ) are the
tongue-in-cheek Help, Help, The Globolinks! (1968), which tackles alien
INVASIONS, and A Bride from Pluto (1982), a modernized fairy tale. An
ALIEN being provides a suitable updating of the role of deus ex machina in
Michael Tippett's opera The Ice Break (1976), and three alien visitors
play significant parts in his New Year (1988).The most substantial
connection between sf and classical music can be found in recent operas
based on sf stories. One of the most successful has been Aniara (1959) by
Karl-Birger Blomdahl (1916-1968), a musical version of Harry MARTINSON's
epic starship poem featuring the Mima computer. Other operas that fall
into this category include Vaclav Kaslik's Krakatit (1961; based on Karel
Capek's 1924 novel), VALIS (1987; based on the 1981 novel by Philip K.
DICK) by Tod Machover (1953- ), and two operas by Paul Barker, Phantastes
(1986; based on George MACDONALD's 1858 fantasy) and The Marriages Between
Zones Three, Four and Five (1987; based on Doris LESSING's 1980 novel).
The composer who has had the greatest success in radicalizing and
popularizing opera in the late 20th century, Philip Glass (1937- ),
likewise selected Lessing's The Marriage Between Zones Three, Four and
Five for an opera he has been working on since his 1988 setting of the
same author's The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982).
Another work by Glass, more music drama than opera, is 1000 Airplanes on
the Roof (1988), involving TIME TRAVEL; the climax of his plotless first
opera, Einstein on the Beach (1976), takes place on board a spaceship, as
does a significant part of the action of his much later opera Christopher
Columbus (1992). [HD/MJ]2. Science fiction in popular and rock music It
was in the mid-1960s, with the widespread assimilation of sf into general
Pop culture, that sf came into its own as a factor in popular
music.Nowhere was this relationship more visible than with the San
Francisco groups, where sf themes and imagery often became the subject
matter of songs. The Steve Miller Band's early albums are titled Children
of the Future (1968), Sailor (1968) and BRAVE NEW WORLD (1969), and
feature songs like "Overdrive", "Song for our Ancestors" and "Beauty of
Time"; a similar fealty was paid by The Grateful Dead - with Aoxomoxoa
(1969), From the Mars Hotel (1974) and improvisatory pieces like "Dark
Star" - and by Spirit - whose Future Games (1977) flirts with STAR TREK Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Byrds, Moby Grape, Kaleidoscope and, in
a satirical guise, The Mothers of Invention. But the Californian group
most influenced was certainly Jefferson Airplane, spearheaded by Paul
Kantner (1942- ), Grace Slick (1939- ) and Marty Balin (1942- ). Their
early albums Surrealistic Pillow (1967), After Bathing at Baxter's (1968),
Crown of Creation (1968) and Volunteers (1969) are consummate examples of
dynamic melodies and furiously articulate lyrics often referring to sf
(including Robert A. HEINLEIN and John WYNDHAM). Shortly after Balin's
departure from the group, guitarist and songwriter Kantner recorded Blows
Against the Empire (1970) with Jefferson Starship, an amalgam of the
previous band with other outstanding San Francisco musicians. This concept
album (nominated for a HUGO in 1971) is sometimes thought to have been the
finest fusion of the genres, though the opposite opinion has also been
published: it is a symphonic poem in the rock mode about the hijacking of

a spaceship by a group of rebels in a fascist future USA, and their
hopeful journey to the stars. Later albums by Jefferson Starship saw
Kantner adopting a persistent revolutionary stance interlaced with stark
depictions of a totalitarian planet; the return of Balin to the group in
1975 brought an end to the predominance of Kantner's sf situations.While
the West Coast groups heartily embraced sf in the USA, the situation in
the UK was more fragmented. Despite the early, arguably sf imagery of The
Shadows' ethereal guitar style or The Tornados' "Telstar" (1962), Pink
Floyd were the premier sf group to gain popularity. Piper at the Gates of
Dawn (1967), A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), Ummagumma (1969) and Atom
Heart Mother (1970) are among their many albums having sf subject matter
contained in and illuminated by highly evocative music, using the
quicksilver guitar and organ runs which have since become closely
associated with the sf-music concept. Their style was widely imitated in
Europe by Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Nektar and a score of supposed
wizards of the synthesizer.Another important UK group was Peter Hammill's
Van Der Graaf Generator, who were particularly adept at mapping the
powerful, bleak vistas of post-nuclear desolation: The Aerosol Grey
Machine (1969), The Least We Can Do is Wave to Each Other (1970), "After
the Flood" (1970), "Pioneers over C", "Lemmings" and Hammill's solo album
Chameleon in the Shadow of the Night (1973). One band to attempt a
wholeheartedly sciencefictional concept album was the UK-based Nirvana (no
relation to the much later US band), with The Story of Simon Simopath
(1968), but it was fairly execrable on release and has not improved with
age - although it caused some stir at the time. The composer/singer David
Bowie (1947- ) enjoyed worldwide fame and showed a comprehensive
understanding of sf in his work, ranging from the early "Space Oddity" and
"Cygnet Committee" (both 1969) to the songs about Ziggy Stardust, the
ultimate superstar of the apocalypse, on the album The Rise and Fall of
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), or Diamond Dogs (1974),
an impressive jaunt through a DELANY-like city of fear. Other notable UK
groups conversant with the use of sf concepts included: Yes (showing the
influence of lyricist/singer Jon Anderson, who also used sf material in
his solo albums); King Crimson; Emerson, Lake ? Jimi Hendrix
(1942-1970); The Incredible String Band; The Rolling Stones (notably on
Their Satanic Majesties Request [1967]); Genesis; Man (whose guitarist
Deke Leonard peppered his songs with sf references); and the Anglo-French
group Gong, who evolved a complete mythology full of pixies and flying
teapots. Hawkwind, with whom Michael MOORCOCK was associated, built songs
around stories by Roger ZELAZNY, Ray BRADBURY and others, introducing many
sf archetypes, while Moorcock's own group, Deep Fix, recorded the uneven
New World's Fair (1975). A better use of aggressively high-energy music
with sf connotations can be found in the US group Blue Oyster Cult.There
have also been popular settings of sf classics. Though the style might not
be called popular, Anthony BURGESS set his own A Clockwork Orange (1962)
to music for a stage production. Notable (and controversial) was Giorgio
Moroder's new 1984 score for the 1926 film METROPOLIS, and the songs are a
basic feature of EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY. Other sf films were musicals in the
first place, including BIG MEAT EATER, It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's
Superman ( SUPERMAN), JUST IMAGINE, ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW and
TOOMORROW. [MJ/PN]2A. To the more adventurous pop fans of the late 1960s,

sf was a literary and cinematic extension of fashionable interest in
Eastern mysticism and psychedelic drugs, all three providing ways of
taking the mind "where minds don't usually go", as Pete Townshend (1945- )
put it in The Who's Tommy (1969). Most rockers' 1960s favourites were
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (the movie - complete with "trip" sequence - rather
than the 1968 Arthur C. CLARKE book) and J.R.R. TOLKIEN's fantasy trilogy
The Lord of the Rings (1954-5; rev 1966; omni 1968). The former provided
the most spectacular vision extant of the wondrously enigmatic nature of
the Universe, and the latter offered a grand struggle between Good and
Evil, with the heroes representing the purest of hippie virtues: bucolic
gentleness and a fondness for pipeweed and munchies. It was tailor-made
for Yes fans and admirers of Crosby, Stills ?
contribution to the apocalyptic end of rock's sf strain being "Wooden
Ships" (1969), a collaboration with Jefferson Airplane (who also recorded
their own version of the song) in which the hippies escape from a
polluted, war-torn world in the wooden ships of the title; the song was
highlighted as an anthem in the cinematic rock testament of hippiedom,
Woodstock (1970).But the primary rock science-fictioneers of the hippie
era were Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix; 1967-8 classics like the former's
"Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun", "Astronomy Domine" and"A
Saucerful of Secrets" and the latter's "Third Stone from the Sun", "The
Stars that Play with Laughing Sam's Dice" and "1983/Moon, Turn the Tides"
graphically equated the explorations of INNER SPACE and outer space: a
direct musical expression of the same concerns as the NEW-WAVE sf of the
era. Yet pop's first real signpost to the future came not from the UK or
the USA, but from the German quartet Kraftwerk, who during the first half
of the 1970s not only pioneered the use of the then-exotic synthesizer but
extended the process of computerized, digital music-making into a madly
seductive vision of the romance of technology with records like Autobahn
(1974) and, most significantly, We Are the Robots.The ever-alert David
Bowie began a new age of sf-influenced rock when "Space Oddity" (1969),
his comic-angsty tale of Major Tom, the astronaut who decides not to come
back, was used as the theme for tv coverage of the first Moon landing. His
later excursions into post-apocalyptic speculation included the albums The
Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), about a
leper- MESSIAH rocker, and Diamond Dogs (1974), jointly derived from
George ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) and Harlan ELLISON's "A Boy
and his Dog" (1969). Bowie also helped to kick in yet another phase when
he became an early devotee of Kraftwerk and, with the aid of Brian Eno
(1948- ), himself a pioneer synthophile from his stint as a member of Roxy
Music, helped to transform synthesizer technology from method to metaphor
with Low (1977). This enabled the likes of Gary Numan (1958- ) to
trivialize the new style into the superficial kitsch futurism which has
all too often been rock's perception of sf. More to the point was the work
of George Clinton (1940- ), the funk prankster and mastermind of such acts
as Parliament, Funkadelic and Bootsy's Rubber Band. Parliament's
Mothership Connection (1976), the stage version of which generally began
with Clinton descending from the flies in a massive flying saucer, and The
Clones of Dr Funkenstein (1976) used sf devices as an enhancement of
meaning rather than a substitute for it. Grandiose concept albums like
2112 (1976) by the Canadian power-trio Rush rubbed shoulders with

heavy-metal imagery drawn from horror (Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper
[1948- ] being the "onlie begetters" of an entire school of contemporary
death-metallists including Slayer, Metallica and Sabbath's own former lead
singer Ozzy Osbourne [1948- ]) and SWORD-AND-SORCERY heroic fantasy of the
Robert E. HOWARD variety (early-to-mid-1970s Led Zeppelin favourites like
"Immigrant Song" and "Stairway to Heaven", drawing on, respectively,
Nordic fantasies of rape'n'pillage and the most sentimental aspects of
Celtic faerie). Chris de Burgh's "A Spaceman Came Travelling" (1974)
blended the Christmas story with the Erich VON DANIKEN-esque notion that
the infant Christ arrived by UFO, to produce one of the more memorable
1970s sf commercial pop songs.An important piece was Jeff Wayne's musical
adaptation of H.G. WELLS's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898). The recording,
Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds, was released in
1978.The advent of rock video in the early 1980s reemphasized the fact
that much of sf's imagery enters rock music by way of the movies - like
the "Flying Saucers Rock and Roll", "Martian Hop" and "Purple People
Eater" of the 1950s - and the visual style of movies like BLADE RUNNER
(derived from Philip K. DICK's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?
[1968]), George MILLER's MAD MAX series and The TERMINATOR provided
instant raw material for many of the rock videos of the 1980s. At worst,
there was Duran Duran, mindlessly recycling the usual
leather-jacket-apocalypse cliches; at the other end of the intelligence
spectrum were Z.Z. Top, constructing elaborate sf mini-comedy-dramas in
videos like "TV Dinners" (1983) and "Rough Boy" (1985).What was most
apparent, however, was that the late 1980s and early 1990s saw an actual
sf future arrive in pop's present. The 1970s experiments of Kraftwerk and
Bowie bore genuine CYBERPUNK fruit in the shape of hundreds of "house"
dance records produced, as often as not, in bedrooms and home studios
rather than in the 24-track establishments of the previous decade. Their
creators took full advantage of the proliferation of affordable sampling
and sequencing technology to generate an authentic "cyberpop" which seemed
to have sprung full-blown from the brows of William GIBSON and Bruce
STERLING, and which rapidly achieved mass popularity. At the time of
writing (late 1991) at least half the records in the UK pop charts were
classifiable as "bleep" of one sort or another: records which made no
attempt at all to sound human. For every synth record that attempted to
mimic "real" drums, strings or keyboards, there were dozens that actively
celebrated their digital origins: vocals or raps were sampled into digital
keyboards and triggered on the stuttering electronic beat. "Robotic" dance
moves were the norm, humans imitating machines rather than - as early sf
visionaries had warned - machines imitating humans. An entire generation
of pop fans embraced a futurist metaphor quite unselfconsciously,
demonstrating that sf has, in this sphere at least, invaded and conquered
the present.Rock bands of both the orthodox and synthesized varieties
continue to name both themselves and their songs after their sf
favourites, just as the fiction of sf writers like Howard WALDROP,
Sterling, Jack WOMACK and Lewis SHINER reflects their preoccupation with
rock and its attendant culture. William S. BURROUGHS still leads the field
in this respect (groups like Soft Machine, Dead Fingers Talk and Steely
Dan have borne witness to his influence); The Comsat Angels derived their
name from a short story by J.G. BALLARD; the alter-ego KLF outfit

Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu demonstrate their allegiance to Robert Anton
WILSON and Robert SHEA's Illuminatus books; Level 42 drew their name from
a reference in Douglas ADAMS' Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series;
while jazz-rock bass virtuoso Stuart Hamm has paid an entire series of
tributes to William Gibson, most recently with the album Kings of Sleep.
As long as both sf writers and rock musicians continue to share a vested
interest in the hegemony of the imagination, the relationship is likely to
remain a fruitful one. [CSM]3. Music in science fiction Of the ARTS, music
is the one most commonly featured in sf - albeit not quite to the extent
that FANTASY is pervaded by it. Several sf writers studied it, notably
including Lloyd BIGGLE Jr (PhD in musicology), Langdon JONES and Edgar
PANGBORN, or were for a time professionally or semiprofessionally involved
in music: Philip K. DICK purveyed classical music on a radio programme and
in a record shop; Douglas ADAMS, Biggle, Jerome BIXBY, Anthony BURGESS,
the film director John CARPENTER, the sf editor Edmund CRISPIN, Samuel R.
DELANY, L. Ron HUBBARD, Jones, Desmond LESLIE, Pangborn and especially
Somtow Sucharitkul ( S.P. SOMTOW) have composed music, while Delany,
Laurence M. JANIFER, Anne MCCAFFREY, Barry N. MALZBERG, Michael MOORCOCK,
Dan MORGAN, Chris MORRIS and Janet E. MORRIS, Charles PLATT, John B.
SPENCER, Boris VIAN and many others have appeared as performers, often of
their own compositions.Music, dependent on the instruments with which it
is played, is more than most artforms associated with contemporary
technology. Also central, though we now take it for granted, is the
technology of sound reproduction. The "frozen words" of Francois
RABELAIS's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-52; trans 1653-94) anticipate
sound recording, as, more scientifically, do the hi-tech Sound Houses of
Francis BACON's New Atlantis (1629). Edward BELLAMY, in Looking Backward,
2000-1887 (1888), saw mechanically reproduced music as fundamental to a
UTOPIA. In "The Colours of the Masters" (1988) Sean MCMULLEN imagines a
19th century in which a clockwork "pianospectrum" has been invented in
time to record Chopin and Liszt.Many sf authors, like most of the general
public, believe that radical musicians (often using electronic technology)
are producing work that is deliberately ugly and unintelligible. Others
believe that the influence of technology on music is unavoidable and will
eventually give rise to new masterpieces. Arthur C. CLARKE, in The Songs
of Distant Earth (1986), makes the realistic extrapolation that historical
processes will integrate today's electronic music and instruments into the
artistic mainstream. Futuristic or ALIEN music is, of course, rather
difficult to describe, and stories which try - including "The Music
Makers" (1965) by Langdon Jones and Sweetwater (1973) by Laurence YEP set themselves a near-impossible task.Musicians from the past, both rock
and classical, occasionally figure in sf. A flute-playing character in
Piers ANTHONY's MACROSCOPE (1969) is obsessed by the life of the
19th-century poet and musician Sidney Lanier (1842-1881); the seeming
revival of Richard Strauss - to demonstrate the future poverty of hi-tech
music - in James BLISH's "A Work of Art" (1956) turns out to be a mental
pattern imposed on the brain of a totally unmusical person; Jimi Hendrix
(1942-1970) is mysteriously revived, with no desire to perform music, in
Michael MOORCOCK's "A Dead Singer" (1974). Other stories of interest in
this context include Gregory BENFORD's "Doing Lennon" (1975) and Michael
SWANWICK's "The Feast of St Janis" (1980).Music has always played a

substantial role in literature, whether as a principal plot element or
only incidentally, as in Captain Nemo improvising at the organ or Gully
Foyle plucking primitive tunes on an egg-slicer while marooned in space.
The profound effects achieved by music (and particularly singing), both
beneficial and destructive, have been favourite subjects from the stories
of Orpheus and HOMER's sirens through to, for example, Edgar Pangborn's
"The Music Master of Babylon" (1954) and "The Golden Horn" (1962), or the
operatic "Un Bel Di" (1973) and "The Fellini Beggar" (1975) by Chelsea
Quinn YARBRO. (The Orpheus legend features commonly in sf versions, a
recent and interesting example of its HARD-SF transmutation being Fool's
Run [1987], by Patricia MCKILLIP.) Music's therapeutic powers can be seen
in Delany's "Corona" (1967) and the impact of the Singers in his "Time
Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" (1969). Anne McCaffrey's
training as an opera singer is evident in her The Ship who Sang (fixup
1969) and elaborately reflected in The Crystal Singer (1974-5; fixup 1982)
and its sequel Killashandra (1985), all of which focus on the potency of
music. In Orson Scott CARD's Songmaster (fixup 1980) both the healing and
destructive powers of music are shown. Music is effectively used as a
weapon in Tintagel (1981) by Paul H. COOK and in Dargason (1977) by Colin
COOPER; in Charles L. HARNESS's "The Rose" (1953) the unusual time
signature of Tchaikowski's 6th Symphony (Pathetique) is used as a weapon
in a fight with a villain. Music may be a political tool; it instigates
revolution against repression in Lloyd Biggle's The Still, Small Voice of
Trumpets (1968), but supports the soulless, mechanical nature of the
societies in Yevgeny ZAMIATIN's My (trans as We(1924) and George ORWELL's
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949). (Biggle's interest in music is also apparent
in many of the stories in The Metallic Muse [coll 1972].) In Frank
HERBERT's "Operation Syndrome" (1954) music is a means of revenge, and it
is a means of escape from the constraints of the physical body in ON WINGS
OF SONG (1979) by Thomas M. DISCH.Since the late 1960s the charismatic
nature of rock music - and its power to create emotions so strong that
they can be read by those who feel them as transcendent - has played an
important role in sf, sometimes ambiguously, as in the Satanic heavy metal
of George R.R. MARTIN's Armageddon Rag (1983), with its power both to heal
and to destroy. This novel, part horror and part sf, has an intense
feeling for the music of the 1960s of a kind quite common in recent sf. It
(relevantly) powers such stories as Howard WALDROP's "Flying Saucer Rock ?
Roll" (1985) and "Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance" (1988), the former about
Black kids picked up by aliens on account of the transcendent power of old
Frankie Lymon songs, the latter about "a song that was gonna change the
world" and, two decades later at a class reunion, does. 1960s rock appears
by way of local colour in many novels by Stephen KING, sometimes
relevantly, and wholly irrelevantly in Allen STEELE's Orbital Decay
(1989). This last was reviled by some critics as culturally trapped in a
rock'n'roll era (dead even now), even though it is set in the mid-21st
century; it is a specific case of a general problem - the future story
whose cultural referents, often musical, are so absurdly anachronistic
that willing suspension of disbelief flies out the window. Other authors
who draw powerful metaphors from the rock'n'roll era are Jack WOMACK whose Elvissey (1993) plays on the Elvis Presley myth, as do Robert
RANKIN's Armageddon books and Allen Steele's Clarke County, Space (1990) -

Lewis SHINER, Norman SPINRAD - notably in "The Big Flash" (1969) and
Little Heroes (1987), another book about revolution and the music business
- Bradley DENTON, in Wrack and Roll (1986) and BUDDY HOLLY IS ALIVE AND
WELL ON GANYMEDE (1991), and John SHIRLEY, in Eclipse (1985). Two
predecessors of this particular strand of sf writing were The Book of
Stier (1971) by Robin SANBORN and Barefoot in the Head (1969) by Brian W.
ALDISS; in both, youth movements are at least partially inspired by
popular music, as a prelude to the triumph of the counterculture, and at
the risk of creating enormous personal power. One of the most interesting
variants is Bruce STERLING's acid, precise fable of an ALTERNATE WORLD in
which rock critic Lester Bangs (1948-1982) lived on, "Dori Bangs" (1989).
Some of the conventions of this strand are parodied in The Truth about The
Flaming Ghoulies (1984) by John Grant (Paul BARNETT), and the elevation of
the vampire Lestat to rock megastardom in Anne Rice's series of fantasies,
The Vampire Chronicles (1976-92), can also be read as in part a parody
(perhaps an unconscious one) of the subgenre.Colonizers of alien planets
might get back to their roots with access to a piano (Frank Herbert's
"Passage for Piano", 1973), but more commonly music in alien circumstances
is used as a means of understanding or even as the only means of
COMMUNICATION. Touring musicians thus may have an ambassadorial function,
as in the string quartet that visits the advanced society of Jules VERNE's
L'ile a helice (1895; trans as The Floating Island 1896). An
interplanetary touring opera company features in Jack VANCE's ironically
titled Space Opera (1965). Aliens may well be biologically musical, as
with the trumpet-faced heralds, one form of the Selenites in H.G. WELLS's
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901), the hollow-horned unicorns in Piers
Anthony's Apprentice Adept sequence (1980 onward) and the centauroid
titanides in John Varley's Gaean trilogy (1979-84). Mutated singing plants
feature in J.G. BALLARD's "Prima Belladonna" (1956). Musical contact is
achieved over interplanetary distances in Barrington J. BAYLEY's "The Big
Sound" (1962), in which an orchestra of 6000 becomes not only a sound
transmitter but also a receiver. Music as a kind of alien LINGUISTICS is
central to Jack Vance's "The Moon Moth" (1961); it has since become almost
a CLICHE. The aliens communicate with us this way in the film CLOSE
ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), initially with the most celebrated
five-note musical phrase in sf. Music is combined with dance in Spider and
Jeanne ROBINSON's STARDANCE (1979), another novel which supposes that
rapport with aliens might be made easier by the use of the kind of
nonverbal communication which music represents; yet another is The Rapture
Effect (1987) by Jeffrey CARVER. An amusing, well told ecological
melodrama is Sheri S. TEPPER's After Long Silence (1987; vt The Enigma
Score 1989 UK), in which giant, crystalline lifeforms can be appeased or, it turns out, spoken to - only by specially trained musicians.Music
unlocks galactic history for terrestrials in Piers Anthony's MACROSCOPE
(1969). It achieves such religious significance for the Third Men in Olaf
STAPLEDON's LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930) that a Holy Empire of Music is
founded; one of Stapledon's Last Men describes the Music of the Spheres
and, in its most rarefied application, it has become part of the very
fabric of some early universes described in Stapledon's STAR MAKER (1937),
where all movement is musical rather than spatial. Kim Stanley ROBINSON's
The Memory of Whiteness (1985) uses a great interplanetary "Orchestra" - a

vast calliope-like instrument with a single player - as part of a complex
metaphor, combining music and mathematics, in which musical structure and
cosmic structure are seen as analogous. This sort of music/
MATHEMATICS/structure-of-the-Universe imagery appears also in David
ZINDELL's ornate Neverness (1988).Perhaps the most distinguished of recent
sf novels with a musical theme is The Child Garden (1988) by Geoff RYMAN,
in which a densely portrayed future world, whose people are infected into
INTELLIGENCE by virally transmitted DNA, is both transcended and reflected
- in all its infernal and purgatorial aspects - by the setting to music of
DANTE ALIGHIERI's Inferno and Purgatorio (written c1314-21), works which
also shape the novel. This is one of the most richly orchestrated
portrayals of the function of music in all sf.The invention of imaginary
musical instruments is surprisingly common in sf, and by no means only
recently. It is touched on in several stories, notably "Automata" (1814)
by the composer E.T.A. HOFFMANN. There have been many proposals for what,
in recent years, have been known as sound sculpture and sound
environments: early mentions include the sounds made by wind blowing
through the statues in Samuel BUTLER's Erewhon (1872). More recent
wind-powered sound sculptures can be found in the "Music Masons" entry in
Dictionary of the Khazars (1983) by Milorad Pavic (1929- ); they
intricately carve rock salt in preparation for the season of the 40 winds.
Future instruments mostly fall into two classes: variants on traditional
instruments and those that exploit future technology. The focus of J.B.
PRIESTLEY's lighthearted Low Notes on a High Level (1954) is the
subcontrabass wind instrument, the Dobbophone, while more conventional
instruments include the 9-stringed guitar-like baliset played by
troubadors in Frank Herbert's DUNE (fixup 1965). Moderately conventional
instruments tend to be found in low-technology and post- HOLOCAUST
environments, like the pipe played by a 6-fingered MUTANT in Olaf
Stapledon's Odd John (1935), the 20-hole flute (played with fingers and
toes) fashioned inside a mutant's machete in Delany's THE EINSTEIN
INTERSECTION (1967) and, in Richard COWPER's Corlay trilogy (1978-82), the
double pipe articulated by its player's surgically twinned tongue-tip in
the Britain of AD3000.Forms of instruments unknown at the time of writing
but which could have existed a couple of decades later include: the
Fourier audiosynthesizer in Charles L. Harness's "The Rose", which
anticipates programmable synthesizers by some 25 years; the three-bass
radiolyn played in an ensemble in Delany's Out of the Dead City (as
Captives of the Flame 1963; rev 1968); and the multichord in Biggle's "The
Tunesmith" (1957). The sensory-syrynx in Delany's NOVA (1968) is operated
like a combination of theremin and guitar, and has sympathetic drone
strings. The ultracembalo in "The Song the Zombie Sang" (1970) by Harlan
ELLISON and Robert SILVERBERG is operated by electronic glove controllers.
A direct neural input to the auditory lobes is achieved with Ballard's
ultrasonic instruments in "The Sound Sweep" (1960), thereby reducing
workload for the "sonovac" operators in a world overloaded with sonic
pollution. Direct stimulation of the brain is featured also in Philip K.
Dick's We Can Build You (1972) by way of the Waldteufel Euphoria and the
Hammerstein Mood Organ.Not all such instruments are played by soloists.
Dance music in quintuple time in Aldous HUXLEY's BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932) is
performed by 16 sexophones (plus additional ether music, synthetic music

and a scent-and-colour organ). A typical "cosmos group" of audiovisual
instruments is featured in Silverberg's The World Inside (1971):
vibrastar, comet-harp, incantator, orbital diver, gravity-drinker,
doppler-inverter and spectrum-rider, some of them generating sounds and
images that are modulated by others. Similarly, in Ballard's Vermilion
Sands (coll 1971) sonic statues with built-in microphones respond to
sounds about them, replaying them in transmuted form. The most outrageous
instruments, buried in concrete bunkers, are played by means of off-planet
remote control by the rock group Disaster Area in Douglas ADAMS's The
Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980): these are the
photon-ajuitar, bass detonator and Megabang drum complex, with the
performance reaching its climax when a stunt ship is driven into the
system's sun.A recent anthology of original stories relating to pop and
rock music is In Dreams (anth 1992) ed Paul J. MCAULEY and Kim NEWMAN.
[HD/PN/BS]See also: THEATRE.
MUTANT
1. Variant title of the film FORBIDDEN WORLD (1982).2. Film (1983; vt
Night Shadows). Film Ventures International. Dir John Bud Cardos, starring
Wings Hauser, Bo Hopkins, Jennifer Warren, Jody Medford, Cary Guffey, Lee
Montgomery. Screenplay Peter Z. Orton, Michael Jones, John C. Kruize. 99
mins. Colour.When their car is wrecked by fun-loving good ole boys, two
city slickers are trapped in a little town whose inhabitants have been
turning strange since an unscrupulous chemical company started dumping
toxic waste nearby. A low-budget sensationalist film, this has more than
its share of blue-faced, yellow-drooling mutant zombies, but also takes
some care with its pleasantly offbeat characterization (Hauser is fine as
the hero who just wants to get the hell out of town) and its nonstop
action (there's an immaculate scare sequence with hero and heroine
cornered in the school toilets by pre-teen monsters). The picture was
begun by director Mark Rosman (The House on Sorority Row [1983]) but
Cardos, of KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS (1977) and The Day Time Ended (1979; vt
Vortex), stepped in - as he did when Tobe Hooper was fired from The Dark
(1978) - and efficiently took over. [KN]
MUTANTS
The idea of "mutation" as a concept for use in understanding biological
EVOLUTION was popularized by Hugo de Vries (1848-1935) in Die
Mutationstheorie (1901-3); he related it to gross hereditary variations the freakish "sports" which occasionally turn up in animal populations.
Such sports are usually short-lived and sterile, and Charles Darwin
(1809-1882) had rejected the notion that they might play a key part; the
concept of mutation as an evolutionary factor was eventually modified to
refer to relatively slight modifications of individual genes. In 1927 the
US geneticist H.J. Muller (1890-1967) succeeded in inducing mutations in
fruit flies by irradiation, and this success captivated the imagination of
many speculative writers. One of the first to take up the notion was John
TAINE, who wrote several extravagant "mutational romances". In The
Greatest Adventure (1929) the corpses of giant saurians, no two alike,
begin floating up from the ocean depths and are traced to a LOST WORLD in
Antarctica where experiments in mutation were once carried out. In The

Iron Star (1930) a mutagenic meteor transforms a region in Africa, causing
local wildlife to undergo exotic metamorphoses. In Seeds of Life (1931;
1951) an irradiated man becomes a SUPERMAN, but does not realize the
damage done to the genes which he transfers to the next generation.
Stories like these, which attribute magical metamorphic qualities to
radiation, owe far more to de Vries than to orthodox mutation theory, and
yet they have remained commonplace throughout the history of sf.
Mutational romance has been a staple of PULP MAGAZINES, COMICS and sf
CINEMA, with the irradiation of various creatures frequently producing
giant MONSTERS and the irradiation of people causing metamorphoses into
supermen (many - possibly most - SUPERHEROES have this type of genesis) or
subhumans. Examples from the early pulps include Jack WILLIAMSON's "The
Metal Man" (1928) and Edmond HAMILTON's "The Man who Evolved" (1931).
Hamilton went on to write many further mutational romances, notably The
Star of Life (1947; rev 1959). He habitually featured developmental
metamorphoses, and wrote an early story in which a mutant child is born to
irradiated parents, "He that Hath Wings" (1938). Another author who made
prolific use of mutational romance during the 1940s was Henry KUTTNER, in
such stories as "I am Eden" (1946) and "Atomic!" (1947), where the magical
transmogrifications are spread over several generations. Kuttner and C.L.
MOORE, collaborating as Lewis Padgett, introduced into the sf pulps the
sympathetic mutant superman, unjustly persecuted by "normal" humans, in
the Baldy series - assembled as MUTANT (1945-53; fixup 1953) - and made
comic use of the notion in the Hogben series.UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE of the
1930s frequently looked to mutational miracles to produce a better and
saner breed of humans; even H.G. WELLS - who knew better - toyed
halfheartedly with the idea in Star-Begotten (1937). The idea that
mutation is a necessary part of the process of EVOLUTION led many serious
sf writers to treat freakish human mutants sympathetically. Robert A.
HEINLEIN did so, in "Universe" (1941), as did Isaac ASIMOV in Foundation
and Empire (fixup 1952), the central character of which is "The Mule", a
mutant whose advent had been unforeseeable by PSYCHOHISTORY. Frequently
populations of persecuted mutants were used as a metaphor for real-life
oppressed minorities. The explosion of the atom bomb in 1945 gave a great
stimulus to mutational romance, and, although the wildest variants of the
concept became scarcer in written sf, the logically absurd notion of
clutches of similar superhuman mutants arising simultaneously as a result
of nuclear accidents remains commonplace. The most notable example is
perhaps Wilmar H. SHIRAS's Children of the Atom (1948-50; fixup 1953); a
more recent one is Aubade for Ganelon (1984) by John Willett (1932- ).
Post- HOLOCAUST stories frequently feature several subspecies of mutants,
and often show the "normal" survivors of the atomic war persecuting the
mutants - usually unwisely, as it is from the ranks of the mutants that a
new species of humanity, better than the old model, is scheduled to
appear; examples include Twilight World (1947; fixup 1961) by Poul
ANDERSON and F.N. Waldrop, John WYNDHAM's The Chrysalids (1955; vt
Re-Birth), Walter M. MILLER's A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ (1955-7; fixup
1960), Fritz LEIBER's "Night of the Long Knives" (1960; vt "The Wolf
Pair") and Edgar PANGBORN's DAVY (1964). It was in this period that the
cinema made most of its mutational romances; notably the giant-ant story
THEM! (1954).Variants on the post-holocaust mutant theme include Lester

DEL REY's The Eleventh Commandment (1962; rev 1970), in which a post-war
Church encourages limitless reproduction in order to fight the lethal
effects of the mutation rate; and Samuel R. DELANY's vivid romance of a
social world which has undergone total mutational metamorphosis, THE
EINSTEIN INTERSECTION (1967). Post-holocaust PARANOIA about mutants is
used in Norman SPINRAD's The Iron Dream (1972) as an analogue for Hitler's
attitude to the Jews. More recent examples of post-holocaust mutational
romance include Stuart GORDON's One-Eye (1973) and its sequels, and
Hiero's Journey (1973) by Sterling LANIER. A more original story of
mutant-persecution is J.G. BALLARD's "Low-Flying Aircraft" (1975), and the
ambitious thread of THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION has been taken up by A.A.
ATTANASIO in Radix (1981) and its sequels. Sf stories dealing sensibly
with the idea of mutation remain rare but, now that the mutational miracle
story has been taken to its ultimate extreme in Greg BEAR's BLOOD MUSIC
(1985), writers may be forced to become more ingenious in mining the
melodramatic potential of the notion. [BS]See also: DEVOLUTION; GREAT AND
SMALL; NUCLEAR POWER.
MUTATIONS
Film (1973). Getty Picture Corp./Columbia. Dir Jack Cardiff, starring
Donald Pleasence, Tom Baker, Michael Dunn, Julie Ege. Screenplay Robert D.
Weinbach, Edward Mann. 92 mins. Colour.In this scientifically ludicrous UK
film a mad SCIENTIST (Pleasence) attempts to combine plant with animal
life, aided by the dwarf owner of a carnival freak-show (Dunn), who
obtains human guinea-pigs for his experiments and exhibits the results.
Tom Baker plays the sadistic, deformed assistant. The results of these
experiments (one is a Venus Flytrap Man) carry out the inevitable revenge
on their creator. As in Tod Browning's Freaks (1932), real circus freaks
(human pincushion, pretzel boy, lizard lady) were used to make the film,
but, where Browning used them sympathetically, here they are only for
sensationalist voyeurism. Director Cardiff was usually more reputable than
this. [PN/JB]
MYERS, EDWARD
(1950- ) US writer whose LOST WORLD sequence-the Mountain Trilogy
comprising The Mountain Made of Light (1992), Fire and Ice (1992) and The
Summit (1994)-interestingly revises a long-abandoned convention. Though it
is primarily set in the 1920s, and though fantasy elements increasingly
dominate in later volumes, the trilogy is of sf as a demonstration of the
extent to which seemingly dead forms can, on re-thinking, serve
contemporary needs. The sequence is set in the Andes, and the lost race in
question is Native American. But the old Lost World novel-which normally
articulated late 19th century Western civilization's uneasy claims to
racial and political hegemony over the entire planet-would have
necessarily treated the lost race-because it was not of ancient white
stock-as inherently superstitious. EM's version is far more complex, and
the protagonist's rocky hegira towards higher wisdom in the 3rd volume
transforms the old Lost World progaganda vehicle into genuine dialogue.
[JC]
MYERS, HOWARD L.
(1930-1971) US writer whose Cloud Chamber (1977) attractively combines

COSMOLOGY, ANTIMATTER invaders of our Universe, SEX and effortless rebirth
of all sentient beings in a wide-ranging SPACE OPERA climaxing in its
hero's arrival at Nirvana. [JC]See also: SOCIOLOGY.
MYERS, ROY
Roy MEYERS.
MY FAVORITE MARTIAN
US tv series (1963-6). A Jack Chertok Production for CBS. Prod/created
Jack Chertok. Writers included John L. Greene, Ben Gershman, Bill
Freedman, Albert E. Lewin, Burt Styler. Dirs included Leslie Goodwins,
Oscar Rudolph, John Erman. 3 seasons, 107 25min episodes. First 2 seasons
b/w, 3rd colour.This was a fairly sophisticated (compared to most tv
sitcoms of the time), humorous and commercially successful series about a
Martian (Ray Walston) who becomes stranded on Earth. He is befriended by a
young man (Bill Bixby), who passes him off to friends as his uncle. The
Martian's unfamiliarity with Earth customs, plus his special powers which include ESP, INVISIBILITY and TELEKINESIS - provide much of the
humour. A similar premise, again mostly used for light SATIRE, was adopted
by 2 subsequent tv series, MORK AND MINDY (1978-82) and ALF
(1986-current). [JB]
MYHRE, OYVIND
[r] SCANDINAVIA.
MYLER, LOK
[r] GERMANY.
MYLIUS, RALPH
[r] Warren C. NORWOOD.
MY LIVING DOLL
US tv series (1964-5). CBS TV. Created Jack Chertok, also executive prod.
Prod Howard Leeds. 1 season, 25 mins per episode. Colour.After his success
with MY FAVORITE MARTIAN, Chertok came up with another sf comedy series.
Starring Bob Cummings as a psychiatrist, it concerned a female ROBOT,
originally designed for use in space but put in his care while its
inventor is away. Cummings decides to train it as the "perfect woman" that is, quiet and obedient - but the robot's unpredictability places him
in embarrassing situations. Statuesque Julie Newmar was memorable as the
robot, carrying an erotic charge that could not be properly utilized
within the context of a tv comedy. The underlying metaphor (woman equals
doll) could be interpreted as either sexist, as Cummings plays it, or
subversively proto- FEMINIST, which some of the ironies suggest. [JB/PN]
MY SCIENCE PROJECT
Film (1985). Touchstone/Silver Screen Partners II. Written and dir
Jonathan R. Betuel, starring John Stockwell, Danielle von Zerneck, Fisher
Stevens, Raphael Sbarge, Dennis Hopper. 94 mins, cut to 91 mins.
Colour.One of an epidemic of teen sf movies ( BACK TO THE FUTURE,
EXPLORERS, REAL GENIUS, WEIRD SCIENCE, etc.), this was among the less
successful, even though its director, whose debut this was, had previously
written the much better teen movie, The LAST STARFIGHTER (1984). Here a
young man seeking material for a science project finds in a derelict army

warehouse a strange engine (apparently taken from a hushed-up UFO), and it
turns out to work as a TIME MACHINE when fed energy; the school is
absorbed into a time vortex as the town's power supply is sucked up.
Teenagers do well (naturally) against cavemen, Japanese soldiers,
dinosaurs and mutants. The film lacks focus and straggles, but Hopper is
good as the ex-hippy science teacher. [PN]
MY STEPMOTHER IS AN ALIEN
Film (1988). Weintraub/A Franklin R. Levy/Ronald Parker
Production/Catalina. Dir Richard Benjamin, starring Kim Basinger, Dan
Aykroyd, Alyson Hannigan. Screenplay Jericho Weingrod, Herschel Weingrod,
Timothy Harris, Jonathan Reynolds. 108 mins. Colour.This charmless and
leaden-footed SEX comedy tells of an alien woman (Basinger), fully human
in appearance, who comes to Earth to learn the operation of a
Galaxy-penetrating beam accidentally invented by an oafish scientist
(Aykroyd). The running gags are all infelicitous variations on the theme
of cultural misunderstanding, often sexual, between alien and human. [PN]
MYSTERIANS, THE
CHIKYU BOEIGUN.
MYSTERIOUS ISLAND
Film (1961). American Films/Columbia. Prod Charles H. Schneer. Dir Cy
Endfield, starring Michael Craig, Joan Greenwood, Michael Callan, Herbert
Lom. Screenplay John Prebble, Daniel Ullman, Crane Wilbur, based on L'ile
mysterieuse (1874-5; trans W.H.G. Kingston as The Mysterious Island 1875
UK) by Jules VERNE. 100 mins. Colour.This is a jovial showcase for Ray
HARRYHAUSEN's robust special effects, with a luxuriant musical score by
Bernard Herrmann. Prisoners escape by balloon from a confederate prison
during the American Civil War and are washed ashore on a remote Pacific
island. They encounter a giant crab, two female castaways, a giant
prehistoric bird, huge bees, pirates, a deserted underwater city, Captain
Nemo (Lom) himself, with his famous submarine Nautilus and, of course, an
erupting volcano.Other versions include one made by MGM in 1929. Dir
Lucien Hubbard, Maurice Tourneur, Benjamin Christiansen, it starred Lionel
Barrymore as Count Dakkar (Nemo). The screenplay was by Hubbard; a
soundtrack was added at the last moment. A Russian version, Tainstvenni
Ostrov, was - surprisingly - made in wartime, in 1941. In 1951 Sam Katzman
produced a 15-part serial for Columbia, dir Spencer G. Bennett and
starring Richard Crane, Marshall Reed, Karen Randle. A little-seen
French/Italian/Spanish coproduction, L'Isola Misteriosa e il Capitano
Nemo, starring Omar Sharif, was briefly released as The Mysterious Island
of Captain Nemo (1972) in the USA. [JB/PN]
MYSTERIOUS TRAVELER MAGAZINE, THE
US DIGEST-size magazine. 5 issues #1-#4 Nov 1951-June 1952, #5 undated
1952, published by Grace Publishing Co.; ed Robert Arthur. A spin-off from
Mutual Broadcasting's Mysterious Traveler RADIO show, MTM was subtitled
"Great Stories of Mystery, Detection and Suspense, Old and New", but
included some sf (Ray BRADBURY, Murray LEINSTER) until, with its last
issue (#5), it was retitled The Mysterious Traveler Mystery Reader.
[FHP/MJE/PN]

MYSTERIOUS WU FANG, THE
US PULP MAGAZINE. 7 issues Sep 1935-Mar 1936, monthly, published by
Popular Publications; ed Rogers Terrill. Intended to capitalize on the
popularity of Sax ROHMER's Fu Manchu (featured in films and a radio series
of the period), MWF showed the "Dragon Lord of Crime" seeking world
domination, sometimes using sf means in the attempt. The novels were by
the prolific Robert J. Hogan (1897-1963), who was simultaneously producing
G-8 AND HIS BATTLE ACES; the first of them, The Case of the Six Coffins,
was reprinted in PULP CLASSICS #8 (1975 chap). DR YEN SIN was a
near-identical follow-up from the same publisher. [MJE/FHP]
MYTHOLOGY
The relationship of mythology to sf is close and deep, but not always
obvious. Part of the confusion stems from the widely held belief that sf
is itself a form of latter-day mythology, fulfilling comparable hungers in
us. James BLISH took issue with this argument, pointing out that myth is
usually "static and final in intent and thus entirely contrary to the
spirit of sf, which assumes continuous change". We restrict ourselves
below to the role of traditional mythologies in sf and to the literal, new
mythologies which are sometimes created within sf, usually in the context
of explaining the way alien societies think.Traditional mythology appears
in sf in two ways, its archetypes being either re-enacted or rationalized
(sometimes both). The re-enactment of myths is the more complex of the two
cases. Behind the retelling of a myth in a modern context lies the feeling
that, although particular myths grew out of a specific cultural
background, the truths they express relate to our humanness and remain
relevant to all our societies: the story of Prometheus, punished by the
gods for stealing fire from the heavens, or its Christian variant, where
Dr Faustus is doomed to eternal damnation for selling his soul in exchange
for knowledge, has a direct bearing on the SCIENTIST's aspiration for ever
more information about the meaning of the Universe, and more power over
matter. The entry on CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH lists many such stories; even
such an apparently HARD-SF technological story as Arthur C. CLARKE's
RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA (1973) is permeated quite deliberately with echoes of
ancient myths, the Promethean one in particular. But to list mythic echoes
in sf (as with most forms of prose fiction) would be impossible; there are
too many. Even a list of full-scale sf analogues of myths as opposed to
mere echoes would be fatiguingly long.Several of the most popular mythic
analogues are discussed elsewhere in this volume. Retellings of the
Christian legend are discussed under RELIGION and MESSIAHS, and reworkings
of the story of Genesis are examined under ADAM AND EVE. Obviously the
entry on GODS AND DEMONS bears on mythology, as does that on SUPERNATURAL
CREATURES.Mythology in sf reflects a familiar truth, that in undergoing
social and technological change we do not escape the old altogether, but
carry it encysted within us. The totally new is by its nature almost
impossible for sf writers or anyone else to envisage. Far more commonly,
they work out ancient patterns of love and death, aspiration and
reconciliation in a new context. Several sf writers have imagined a
sterile future which has consciously repudiated its myths and hence its
past, only to be left with a terrible emptiness. Ray BRADBURY's nostalgic
"The Exiles" (1949 as "The Mad Wizards of Mars") has literary and mythic

figures exiled on Mars, perishing when the last of the books containing
their stories is burned or lost; the emerald city of Oz dissolves like a
mist; an Earth expedition is faced with only a desert. Robert SILVERBERG's
"After the Myths Went Home" (1969) has figures of myth reincarnated, via a
time machine, for the entertainment of a far future which is suffering
from ennui; familiarity soon breeds boredom, and the myths are dismissed;
the society, emptied of heroism and mystery, is destroyed by invaders.
James WHITE's The Dream Millennium (1974) depicts a crew of starship
colonists, who spend much of their time in SUSPENDED ANIMATION, as able to
survive because in their dreams they have access to a kind of Jungian
substratum of racial memory; the awareness they thereby derive of the
mythic patterns in human history gives them the strength to survive on a
new world.Re-enactments of myth in sf take several forms. The simplest
strives to deepen the emotional connotations of a story by permeating it
with the reverberations of some great original, as C.S. LEWIS does
successfully with the myth of the temptation of Eve in Perelandra (1943;
vt Voyage to Venus), and less successfully with the Arthurian legend in
That Hideous Strength (1945; vt The Tortured Planet US). Lewis's friend
Charles WILLIAMS re-enacted myths both Christian and pre-Christian in most
of his novels, usually digesting the pagan elements so that they emerged
as supportive to the Christian faith. Patricia MCKILLIP's FOOL'S RUN
(1987) is one of several sf retellings of the Orpheus myth, perhaps the
most accomplished, set in a prison satellite, the Underworld. Several
writers have striven for a Homeric resonance by retelling HOMER's Odyssey
in sf terms, whether directly or indirectly; Stanley G. WEINBAUM did this
in a short series of stories in the 1930s, R.A. LAFFERTY in Space Chantey
(1968), and Brian STABLEFORD in his Dies Irae trilogy (1971). ( SPACE
OPERA generally, of course, has a good deal in common with the picaresque
voyages of Odysseus.) Lafferty has several times reverted to mythic
themes, notably in The Devil is Dead (1971) and FOURTH MANSIONS (1969);
the latter categorizes mythic archetypes into four groups, the eternal
conflict between which leads to many of our troubles.The supposed Cretan
myth of the Earth-Mothers, and the king sacrificed to ensure renewed
fertility, is often evoked in sf, naturally enough by Robert GRAVES, in
Watch the North Wind Rise (1949 US; vt Seven Days in New Crete 1949 UK),
since he is the best known popularizer of the myth in this century,
particularly in his nonfictional (though anthropologically unreliable)
book The White Goddess (1947 US). It is also used, colourfully if
confusingly, in Sign of the Labrys (1963) by Margaret ST CLAIR, in which
members of a surviving witch/priestess cult prove best equipped to cope
with an underground, post- HOLOCAUST existence. Philip Jose FARMER has
also been preoccupied with the image of WOMEN as archetypal seeresses,
creators and destroyers, and with men as virile but doomed horned gods,
notably in Flesh (1960; rev 1968). Like Bradbury in "The Exiles", Farmer
makes little distinction in most of his writings between literary and
religious myths, seeming to regard them as feeding the same human needs.
All Farmer's work is permeated by mythology, whether the mythic creature
is a reincarnated god, a great white whale or Tarzan; the mythology may be
a new one invented by Farmer himself, usually on very traditional models
(see below). The best known sf novel drawing on The White Goddess is THE
SNOW QUEEN (1980) by Joan D. VINGE, in which she designs an entire

planetary culture along Gravesian lines, and adds to it a secondary and
more recent myth taken from Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875).Another
bestselling book (like Graves's) about myth was The Hero with a Thousand
Faces (1949) by Joseph Campbell (1904-1987). Many myths that make their
way into modern sf have been filtered through a sort of Campbellian
sorting process before getting there. Among them are Farmer's books,
mentioned above, a particularly pure example being Tarzan Alive: A
Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke (1972), a spoof biography in which
Farmer draws on Campbellian ideas about the nature of the HERO. George
LUCAS has often spoken about his use of Campbellian ideas about myth, and
his films STAR WARS (1977) and its sequels, which are intended to have
many mythic resonances, incorporate these (as, indeed, does every second
work of sf mythology; see discussion of Roger ZELAZNY below). Something of
Farmer's engagingly packrat attitude towards myth can also be found in Sam
LUNDWALL's satirical Alice's World (1970 dos US), in which a spaceship
returning to an abandoned Earth finds a grotesque variety of mythic and
literary beings now living there.More complex than many of the above are
stories whose mythic components are seen with a degree of irony, stressing
not only ancient continuities but also modernist discontinuities with the
past. Several of Samuel R. DELANY's novels fall into this category,
notably THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION (1967) and NOVA (1968); in the former a
deserted Earth is repopulated by aliens who take on human shape and, with
it, the mythic burden of the past, in a confused form they do not always
understand; in the latter the story of Prometheus is replayed in a tale of
literally stealing fire from the heavens, but the narrative tone has as
much of the deflationary as the heroic in it. Michael MOORCOCK's BEHOLD
THE MAN (1966 NW; exp 1969) has a time traveller who wanted to see
Christ's crucifixion playing an uncomfortably central role in that event;
the scene he finds is more squalid than transcendent. Lawrence DURRELL's
Tunc (1968) and its sequel Nunquam (1970) feature a multinational
conglomerate called Merlin, but the Arthurian echoes are primarily to show
that there is little room for romance in a corrupt future. Michael
SWANWICK uses similar Arthurian echoes altogether more economically and to
equally squalid effect in "The Dragon Line" (1988), a tale of a
coke-snorting modern Mordred trying to do the right thing for the world
with a resuscitated Merlin's help. Cordwainer SMITH derives a considerable
emotional charge from the mythic analogues, often Oriental, he uses in his
stories; in "The Dead Lady of Clown Town" (1964) the parallels are with
the legend of Joan of Arc. Smith's use of myth is touching but sometimes
rather remote; often, as in this story, the mythic parallels are further
distanced by the events of the tale being themselves remembered by later
generations, and recounted with the formality and balance of a well
rounded myth-myths within myths, as it were. In The Infernal Desire
Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972; vt The War of Dreams US) Angela CARTER,
another ironist, has a mad scientist using a MACHINE charged with erotic
energy to make the dreams and myths of men come alive; the very series of
betrayals through which his plans go awry is itself, ironically, mythic.
Charles L. HARNESS regularly uses mythic archetypes both of character and
of plot in his involuted, grandiose melodramas, notably in THE RING OF
RITORNEL (1968) and "The Rose" (1953), in both of which art and science
dance a complex saraband and winged archetypes are confronted with

MATHEMATICS. Stories structured on myth can appear rather simple-mindedly
determinist, as events run along their preordained grooves. Alan GARNER,
for example, specializes in a kind of cyclic history in which ancient
myths of violence and betrayal work themselves out again in a modern
setting, but such books as The Owl Service (1967), based on a Welsh legend
in the Mabinogion, and Red Shift (1973) allow free will to loosen the
mythic trap, if not escape it entirely. James TIPTREE Jr evokes the
legendary figure of the Rat King in "The Psychologist who Wouldn't do
Awful Things to Rats" (1976), but the protagonist is not saved by its
majestic appearance; indeed, he is goaded into brutal rat murder.Within
both GENRE SF and FANTASY a particularly popular variant on the mythology
theme is to have humans encountering mythic figures through TIME TRAVEL to
the past or in an ALTERNATE WORLD, or conversely to have mythic survivals
appearing in the modern world. Some of these stories are dealt with under
the heading of MAGIC. They were especially associated with the magazine
UNKNOWN, and often involved a puckish or whimsical humour, as in the
Harold Shea stories by L. Sprague DE CAMP and Fletcher PRATT. Jack
WILLIAMSON's The Reign of Wizardry (1940; rev 1965) is from the same
magazine and the same period. Edmond HAMILTON's The Monsters of Juntonheim
(1941 Startling Stories as "A Yank at Valhalla"; 1950 UK; vt A Yank at
Valhalla 1973 US) is another story of this type. Naomi MITCHISON gives an
account of the search for the Holy Grail as told by two reporters from the
Camelot Chronicle and the Northern Pict in To the Chapel Perilous (1955),
but here the basic points are serious, despite the anachronistic jokes
that usually feature largely in stories of this kind, as in several by
Poul ANDERSON ( MAGIC). Thomas Burnett SWANN made a career out of writing
sweet, sometimes oversweet, narratives about mythic survivals, his point
being that something wonderful and delicate left the world as modern
rationalism took a grip, and as we desecrated our landscapes.One quite
popular strategy for mythology stories is to tell the myths from the
viewpoint of an observer or protagonist from the time in which they
happened - sometimes, of course, rationalizing them in the process. John
GARDNER's Grendel (1971) does this with the Beowulf story, as did Henry
Treece (1911-1966) in The Green Man (1966) and Michael CRICHTON in Eaters
of the Dead (1976), but only Crichton's book, which accounts for Grendel
and his dam as Neanderthal survivals ( APES AND CAVEMEN), can be seen as
sf.The majority of stories of mythic survival are more fantasy than sf,
like Swann's; or like The Last Unicorn (1968) by Peter Beagle (1939- ),
which tells of the sad search of the beast of the title for its extinct
fellows; or like Diana Wynne JONES's Eight Days of Luke (1975), in which
Loki turns up in modern England, and Fire and Hemlock (1984), in which the
tale of Tam Lin's escape from the Fairy Queen is replayed (yet again) in
the here and now; or like the allegorical The Circus of Dr Lao (1935) by
Charles FINNEY, in which mythic creatures survive in a circus, and have a
deep effect on the disbelieving town folk who witness them. A yearning for
the survival of mystery, and an intellectual belief in the necessity of
such a survival if human culture is not to become sterile and bleak,
pervade most such stories, and are central to the concerns of Beauty
(1991) by Sheri S. TEPPER, which fascinatingly (and fascinatedly) weaves a
centuries-spanning construct out of folklore and fairy-tale archetypes as
a possible prophylactic against a hellish, mythless future. The same

yearning is to be found even at the simplistic end of the spectrum, as in
Emil PETAJA's Kalevala series, where avatars of the Finnish gods have
adventures, or Joseph E. KELLEAM's The Little Men (1960) and its sequel,
where Jack Odin has fights in space and elsewhere. Stan LEE (and/or Jack
KIRBY) resuscitated various myths, notably that of Thor, in MARVEL COMICS,
and Thor turns up again in Douglas ADAMS's The Long Dark Tea-Time of the
Soul (1988), trying to catch a plane to Oslo. Sterling LANIER's The
Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes (coll 1971) wittily spins yarns
about confrontations with demigods, monsters, and other mythic survivals.
John BLACKBURN also worked with the theme, but here we enter a new area,
and a peculiarly sciencefictional one, the rationalized myth, which
becomes (not always convincingly) sf rather than fantasy.Blackburn was not
the best exponent of the rationalized myth, although Children of the Night
(1966) and For Fear of Little Men (1972) elicit satisfying shudders in
their accounts of hidden LOST RACES in England whose existence explains
legends of fairies and goblins, with a logic similar to that of the
Crichton novel mentioned above, and echoing the Faerie of Arthur MACHEN.
Manly Wade WELLMAN's Hok stories (1939-42) rationalize various myths, as
H. BEDFORD-JONES had done in his Trumpets from Oblivion series in The BLUE
BOOK (1938-9). Rather in the manner of the theories of Erich VON DANIKEN,
a number of sf stories explain myths as distorted memories of visits to
Earth by aliens, as did Arthur C. Clarke in CHILDHOOD'S END (1950; exp
1953) - though in this case it is through racial precognition, not memory,
that the horned aliens have given rise to the legend of the Devil. In
Clifford D. SIMAK's The Goblin Reservation (1968) a rather whimsical
attempt is made to explain gnomes, trolls, fairies, banshees and so forth
as specialized colonists created by biological engineering. More
successful was Nigel KNEALE's tv serial QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1958-9),
in which the image of the Devil turns out to be a race memory of
insect-like Martians, a memory that comes disturbingly to life in modern
London. Larry NIVEN and Jerry POURNELLE reversed the ordinary
rationalization procedure in Inferno (1976), in which an sf writer finds
himself, possibly deservedly, in Hell, a place he consistently and
unsuccessfully attempts to rationalize as an actual physical construct in
the Universe of matter; ultimately it turns out to be, indeed, Hell.A
quite different kind of mythic survival appears in Mythago Wood (1984) and
its sequel Lavondyss (1988) by Robert HOLDSTOCK. The wood of the title
(which like John CROWLEY's hidden world in Little, Big [1981] is
infinitely bigger on the inside than its modest periphery would suggest)
has the property, more fantastic than sciencefictional, of incarnating
mythagos from the collective unconscious of those humans who live in and
around it, mythagos being, effectively, walking figures of myth. As the
wood is ever more deeply penetrated, the ultimate bare myths of the Ice
Age come to life. The two books are Holdstock's most powerful work, and
perhaps the central mythological fantasy of the 1980s.The sf writer who
has most consistently used mythological themes in sf, as opposed to
fantasy, is Roger Zelazny. His first novel, THIS IMMORTAL (1966),
confronts its almost immortal protagonist ( IMMORTALITY) with various
MUTANT creatures which are somehow archetypes of Greek myth given flesh.
Zelazny stayed with themes of this type for some years, often using them
ironically, typically playing off the colloquial against the archaic, in

stories about quasi-gods of human origin whose powers blend advanced
mental training with high technology, deliberately reconstructing and
replaying mythic confrontations, in Creatures of Light and Darkness
(1969), which reincarnates the Egyptian pantheon, and perhaps most
successfully in LORD OF LIGHT (1967), an assured and oddly moving story of
planetary colonists who deliberately take on the aspect of Hindu gods, and
become involved with a variety of appropriate metaphysical paradoxes.These
comprise a new kind of mythology story, in which myths are evoked not only
by the author but quite consciously by the characters, often as a form of
cold-blooded CULTURAL ENGINEERING, and sometimes self-destructively, as
game becomes trap. Another example is Harry HARRISON's Captive Universe
(1969), in which the crew of a giant starship has been deliberately
programmed into a mental state of medieval monkishness, and the colonists
into an Aztec tribalism complete with Aztec "gods" (who turn out to be
constructs); both crew and colonists are ignorant of the true state of
affairs, and regard the starship simply as the world ( POCKET UNIVERSE).
Poul Anderson's "The Queen of Air and Darkness" (1971) has the native
inhabitants of a colonized planet reading the minds of the colonists,
picking out their archetypal fears and hopes, and creating by
hallucination a world of sinister faerie to keep the colonists away, even
kidnapping human children in the manner of the old ballads.Finally, sf
commonly creates its own myths. In his A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920) David
LINDSAY invents a whole series of imaginary (but hauntingly familiar)
mythologies on another planet; these ultimately annihilate one another in
a kind of mutual critique, leaving its protagonist at the end annealed by
fire and wholly stripped of illusion. The SWORD AND SORCERY subgenre
regularly constructs mythologies which often, as in the case of Robert E.
HOWARD's, bear a close relation to our own. Out of the Mouth of the Dragon
(1969) by Mark GESTON is permeated with a myth of Armageddon, a final
conflict doomed never to take place, since the forces who have volunteered
to fight it keep cutting their own side to ribbons in squabbles on the
way. At a more accessible level, GENRE SF has created a meta-narrative
SPACE-OPERA myth which has resulted from the borrowing of ideas from story
to story, with additional accretions on the way. A distinct sf version of
MARS, for example, is the work of no single writer, has little to do with
the real Mars, and yet exists very clearly in the imagination of readers.
Leigh BRACKETT and Ray Bradbury have created some of the more poignant
variations on this particular Mars myth.With the growing interest in
ANTHROPOLOGY in sf since the 1960s, several of the better sf writers have
added richness and density to their depiction of alien or imaginary
societies by creating myths for them. This is the case with most of Ursula
K. LE GUIN's work, as in THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (1969) and - with a
spectacular density and length - in ALWAYS COMING HOME (1985); her
"Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?" (1987), however, uses
traditional Native American myth in its story of a girl who comes to live
with incarnate animal spirits. Terry CARR's "The Dance of the Changer and
the Three" (1968) presents a dangerous alien society whose enigmatic
behaviour may be explained only if their myths are properly understood; it
was brave of Carr to essay a mythology for beings composed of pure energy.
Harlan ELLISON, by juxtaposing icons and images from the ancient and the
modern worlds, has forged some fine modern myths, many collected in

Deathbird Stories (coll 1975), which includes "The Whimper of Whipped
Dogs" (1973), in which the violence and indifference of a great city are
seen to coalesce into a kind of contemporary demon. His "Croatoan" (1975)
features a characteristically wild but unselfconscious metaphor in
bringing together the story of the lost Virginian colony of Roanoke with
(a development of a modern myth) the idea of a colony of children in the
sewers, descended from aborted foetuses flushed down the drains, who live
alongside huge alligators which, when smaller, suffered the same fate.THE
FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS (1972) is one of the many works by Gene WOLFE in
which, as with the Le Guin stories, the bearing of myth on reality is both
constant and unpredictable; along perhaps with John Crowley - whose
brilliant ENGINE SUMMER (1979), for example, plays cruelly with the idea
of cyclic myth in a post- HOLOCAUST venue - Wolfe makes the most
sophisticated use of myth of any modern sf writer. Clashes between free
will and predestination, the first signifying an outward thrust and the
second an inward pressure from the inexorable past, occur, as they must,
in all mythological sf written by people who are conscious of the
consequences of their themes. Certainly it is Wolfe's pre-eminent subject
- especially in the Book of the New Sun series - as it is, with the
emphasis rather more on myth as elegiac trap, Crowley's also.A theme
anthology is New Constellations: An Anthology of Tomorrow's Mythologies
(anth 1976) ed Thomas M. DISCH and Charles Naylor. [PN]See also: ATLANTIS.

SF?
NABOKOV, VLADIMIR
(1899-1977) Russian-born US novelist, poet, translator and entomologist.
Raised in Russia until the Revolution, and then educated at Cambridge, he
lived between the wars in Germany and France, emigrated to the USA in 1940
- at which point he began to write in English rather than Russian - and
from 1959 lived in Switzerland. His first books of poetry date from the
teens of the century, his first novel from 1926, though he came to world
fame only after the publication, many books later, of Lolita (1955
France). Several of his novels can be read precariously in terms of their
fantasy or sf elements - including Korol', Dama, Valet (1928 Germany;
trans Dmitri Nabokov and VN as King, Queen, Knave 1968 US), which features
automata; the afterlife fantasy Soglyadatay (1930 France; trans Dmitri
Nabokov and VN as The Eye 1965 US); Priglashenie na kasn' (1938 France;
trans Dmitri Nabokov and VN as Invitation to a Beheading 1959 US), a fable
which ends in a state beyond death; the DYSTOPIA Bend Sinister (1947); and
Pale Fire (1962 US), which transforms RURITANIAN manias into deeply
intricate parable. But VN's FABULATIONS tend to an austere
self-referentiality, and are not easily pigeonholed. (It has also been
suggested that all VN's novels from Pnin [1957] to Transparent Things
[1972] contain attempts at communication from dead characters to the
living.)Nevertheless Izobretenie Val'sa (1938 France; rev text trans
Dmitri Nabokov as The Waltz Invention 1966 US) is a genuine sf play; its
eponymous protagonist, having invented a kind of atomic device, demands to
rule his country or he will cause apocalypse. Some of the stories
assembled in Nabokov's Dozen (coll 1958) as well as "Poseshchenie muzeya

(1939; trans as "The Visit to the Museum" 1963) and "The Vane Sisters"
(1959), both found in Nabokov's Quartet (coll 1966 US), and "Lance"
(1952), found in Nabokov's Congeries (coll 1968 US), are of sf or fantasy
interest. Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969 US) has likewise been
treated as sf, though perhaps not fruitfully. Certainly Ada depicts an
ALTERNATE WORLD, whether or not this Anti-Terra has been created by
protagonist Van Veen as a counterpoint to and justification of incest; the
book can therefore be read with some interest for its rendering of sf
elements, though the novel itself comprises much, much more. However
individual texts might be defined, VN was concerned in all his work to
shape versions of the creative act. The materials he used were subjunctive
to the shaping, not vice versa, as in sf. [JC]"See also: HISTORY OF SF;
OULIPO.
NAHA, ED
(1950- ) US writer and journalist, at one time the Los Angeles-based
movie correspondent for the New York Post; since July 1986 he has run the
regular movie and tv Nahallywood column in SF CHRONICLE. His nonfiction
books, aimed at a popular market, include: Horrors - From Screen to Scream
(1975); The Science Fictionary: An A-Z Guide to the World of SF Authors,
Films and TV Shows (1980), a small, selective encyclopedia that is
reliable if brief on film and tv, but devotes far too little space to
authors; The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget (1982); and The
Making of Dune (1984).EN's first sf novel was The Paradise Plot (1980), a
humorous mystery novel set on a SPACE HABITAT at Lagrange 5 ( LAGRANGE
POINT); the sequel was The Suicide Plague (1982). In 1984, as D.B. DRUMM
(which may be a house name), he began writing the Traveler sequence of
SURVIVALIST FICTION set in a depleted post- HOLOCAUST USA: #1: First, You
Fight (1984), #2: Kingdom Come (1984), #3: The Stalkers (1984), #4: To
Kill A Shadow (1984), #5: Road War (1985), #6: Border War (1985), #7: The
Road Ghost (1985), #8: Terminal Road (1986), #9: The Stalking Time (1986),
#10: Hell on Earth (1986), #11: The Children's Crusade (1987), #12: The
Prey (1987) and #13: Ghost Dancers (1987). The first of these is
definitely by Naha, but most subsequent numbers are thought to be the work
of John SHIRLEY.EN has also written 3 film novelizations - Robocop *
(1987), Ghostbusters II * (1989) and Robocop 2 * (1990) - and 2 horror
novels, Breakdown (1988) and Orphans (1989). [PN]
NANKAI NO DAIKETTO
GOJIRA.
NANOTECHNOLOGY
Item of terminology borrowed by sf writers from theoreticians of future
TECHNOLOGY, and quite popular in sf from the late 1980s. It seems to have
been first used by K. Eric Drexler in 1976, and popularized by him in his
book on the subject, Engines of Creation (1987).Nanotechnology - the term
loosely combines "nano", the SI (metric system) prefix denoting 10(-9),
with "technology" - means the technology of the very small indeed. The
term microtechnology encompasses MACHINES of the order of a micrometre
across; nanotechnology envisages machines very much smaller than that,
perhaps of molecular size. Indeed, its working components would be atoms;
the nanomachine might be like "motorized DNA". Drexler called these

theoretical tiny machines "assemblers". As to the uses of these
molecule-size ROBOTS, there is little that cannot be imagined: scraping
fatty deposits from the insides of hardened arteries, brain surgery on
individual neurons, food-making, ore-mining . . . The suggestions have
been endless. Assemblers would be of a size small enough to conduct the
most delicate operations within human cells - although Kim Stanley
ROBINSON has suggested it might be better to image, rather than tiny
medics, 10 million molecule-sized steamrollers charging up one's
capillaries to perform brain surgery. Assemblers would also necessarily be
capable of self-replication, which raises two questions: could they be
considered a lifeform?; and could they get out of control,
self-replicating until all available building materials were used up?
Their number would increase exponentially: if a single assembler took 15
minutes to double, then at the end of 10 hours of doubling there would be
68 billion of them, and in just over 2 days the assemblage would outmass
the Sun.Whether or not their construction is a realistic prospect is
another question. Certainly it has been much discussed, and a number of
laboratories have worked on some of the preliminary problems. The scanning
tunnelling microscope, developed at the IBM laboratories in Zurich, has
been used (April 1990) to manipulate individual atoms - even, in an
episode of startling chutzpah, spelling out (using 35 xenon atoms) the IBM
logo. Now that we have reached the stage of manipulating individual atoms,
perhaps the construction of molecule-machines is not so impossible after
all, though it is still a long way from achievement. Nevertheless,
preliminary designs are already under way in the real world. A lively
account of the development of theories about nanotechnology can be found
in Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition (1990) by Ed Regis.The
concept of nanotechnology, not always named as such, appears regularly in
1990s sf. One of the most distinguished works to which it is fundamental
is Queen of Angels (1990) by Greg BEAR. The intelligent briefcase around
whose actions and fate Michael SWANWICK's eccentric tale STATIONS OF THE
TIDE (1991) pivots is, according to his acknowledgements, a work of
"nanotechnics". Perhaps more significant is the number of HARD-SF works in
which the existence of nanotechnology is merely taken for granted, forming
part of the overall background of futuristic technology. [PN]
NANOVIC, JOHN L(EONARD)
(1906- ). US editor and writer, associated with STREET ?
he edited The Shadow from 1932 to 1943. He was also involved in developing
the figure of Doc Savage for the firm, writing the initial treatment which
was published, long afterwards, as Doc Savage, The Supreme Adventurer
(1980 chap), and editing the actual journal, DOC SAVAGE, from 1933 to
1943. He was responsible for the successful choice of Lester DENT as
principal author of the series; Dent wrote most of the Doc Savage stories
published under the Kenneth ROBESON housename (see this entry and the
entry for the magazine itself for fuller details on the series). [JC]
NATHAN, ROBERT (GRUNTAL)
(1894-1985) US writer, author of over 40 novels from Peter Kindred (1919)
to Heaven and Hell and the Megas Factor (1975), in which latter (as so
often in his work) good and evil - in this case God and Satan - confer and

put aside their differences, smilingly. Much of his fiction reflects a
wistful, melancholy, sometimes satirical sense of fantasy; and it is
perhaps ironic that he is best remembered for perhaps the harshest of his
tales, Portrait of Jennie (1940), in which he uses J.W. DUNNE's time
theories to frame the sentimental tale of a young girl not of this Earth
whose love for a human artist reaches fruition only at the moment of her
death. The Barly Fields (omni 1938) - which contains The Fiddler in Barly
(1926), The Woodcutter's House (1927), The Bishop's Wife (1928) and its
sequel There is Another Heaven (1929), and The Orchid (1931) - fairly
represents the soft-edged work of his early years. Later came some
Arthurian fantasies, including The Fair (1964), which sustains a
sublimated elegiac tone in its depiction of a maiden's adventures there,
and The Elixir (1971). The Mallott Diaries (1965) deals with Neanderthal
survivals in Arizona, and The Summer Meadows (1973) movingly explores the
nature of love in a fantasy quest for significant and telling moments in
its protagonists' lives. Of direct sf interest is The Weans (1956 Harper's
Magazine as "Digging the Weans"; 1960 chap), a satirical archaeological
report on the long-destroyed US civilization. RN's reputation is submerged
at present, but on revaluation he may be seen as a significant creator of
humanistic fantasy. [JC]Other works: Jonah (1925; vt Son of Ammitai 1925
UK; vt Jonah, or The Withering Vine 1934 US); Road of Ages (1935), an
unusual political fantasy in which the Jews are sent into a new Exile; The
Enchanted Voyage (1936); Journey of Tapiola (1938) and Tapiola's Brave
Regiment (1941), assembled as The Adventures of Tapiola (omni 1950); They
Went on Together (1941); The Sea-Gull Cry (1942); But Gently Day (1943);
Mr Whittle and the Morning Star (1947); The River Journey (1949); The
Married Look (1950; vt His Wife's Young Face 1951 UK); The Innocent Eve
(1951), which is assembled in Nathan 3 (omni 1952) along with The River
Journey and the associational The Sea-Gull Cry (1952); The Train in the
Meadow (1953), an afterlife fantasy; Sir Henry (1955);The Rancho of the
Little Loves (1956); So Love Returns (1958); The Wilderness Stone (1961);
The Devil with Love (1963); Stonecliff (1967); Mia (1970).About the
author: Robert Nathan: A Bibliography (1960 chap) by Dan H. Laurence.See
also: The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; TIME TRAVEL.
NATION, TERRY
(1930- ) UK screenwriter involved in the inception of the long-running
BBC TELEVISION series DR WHO; he created in 1963 its most famous villains,
the DALEKS, the story of which he subsequently told in The Official Doctor
Who and the Daleks Book (1988) with John Peel, the relevant episodes
appearing as Doctor Who: The Scripts: The Daleks * (coll 1989) with John
McElroy. In 1975 TN created a post- HOLOCAUST series, SURVIVORS, also for
BBC TV, which rather unsuccessfully attempted to capture on tv the flavour
of the English DISASTER novel; his novelization is The Survivors * (1976).
Rebecca's World (1975), illustrated with bravura by Larry Learmonth, is a
fable for young children about ECOLOGY. In 1978 TN created a further sf
series for tv, BLAKE'S SEVEN; he wrote all 13 episodes of this SPACE
OPERA's 1st season as well as 6 later episodes, but by the time of its
weak 4th (and last) season in 1981 his association with it had ceased.
[JC/PN]

NATIONAL AMATEUR PRESS ASSOCIATION
APA.
NATIONAL FANTASY FAN FEDERATION
N3F.
NAYLOR, GRANT
Joint pseudonym of UK scriptwriters and authors Rob Grant and Doug
Naylor, who worked for 3 years as head writers for Spitting Image, a
satirical tv series using a combination of puppets and live action, and
who wrote the RED DWARF tv series, which weds black humour and SPACE
OPERA; some of the scripts have been published as Primordial Soup: Red
Dwarf Scripts (coll 1993). As GN they have published 2 novelizations: Red
Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers * (1989) and Better than Life *
(1990), both assembled, with additional material, as Red Dwarf Omnibus
(omni 1992). [JC]
NAZI NOVEL
Little did Norman Spinrad know that he was such an inspiring writer. His
novel, The Iron Dream, was published in 1972, and the plot was not exactly
realistic. It was set in an alternate universe where Hitler had emigrated
to the United States as a young man, eventually becoming a pulp fiction
writer. In Spinrad's book, Hitler ended up writing an SF novel called"Lord
of the Swastika." Obviously the German authorities didn’t get the satire.
Spinrad's book was banned in Germany in the early 1980s, under provisions
of postwar anti-Nazi laws.
NEAL, HARRY
[s] Jerome BIXBY.
NEANDERTHALS
ANTHROPOLOGY and especially ORIGIN OF MAN for prehistoric romances; APES
AND CAVEMEN for Neanderthal survivals.
NEAR FUTURE
Images of the near future in sf differ markedly from those of the FAR
FUTURE in both content and attitude. The far future tends to be associated
with notions of ultimate destiny, and is dominated by metaphors of
senescence; its images display a world irrevocably transfigured. It is
viewed from a detached viewpoint; the dominant mood is - paradoxically one of nostalgia, because the far future, like the dead past, can be
entered only imaginatively, and has meaning only in terms of its emotional
resonances. The near future, by contrast, is a world which is imminently
real - one of which we can have no definite knowledge, which exists only
imaginatively and hypothetically, but which is nevertheless a world in
which (or something like it) we may one day have to live, and towards
which our present plans and ambitions must be directed. The fears and
hopes reflected in our images of the near future are real, however
overpessimistic or overoptimistic they may seem ( OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM).
In order to plan our lives we must all possess such images, and the fact
that they are fictions does not mean that they are unimportant. Literary
representations of the near future both reflect and nourish those
images.Just as fictions of the far future could not emerge until there was

an appreciation of the true timescale of the Earth and the forces involved
in long-term change, so fictions dealing with the near future could not
emerge until it was generally realized that an individual's lifetime might
see changes of considerable import. An awareness that habits and
strategies designed to deal with the past and the present might not be
adequate to deal with one's personal future emerged rather more slowly
than an awareness of the geological timescale, and was handicapped by a
dogged ideative resistance. It is doubtful whether many people, even
today, have really cultivated a genuine appreciation of the scope of the
change that might overtake the world in the space of their own lifetimes.
The difficulty of making such an adjustment was the subject of Alvin
TOFFLER's bestselling work of popular FUTUROLOGY, Future Shock (1970).The
near future is implicitly threatening; whatever innovations it produces
must invalidate - however temporarily - the past experience on which our
present consciousness is based. At a time when no one believed in the
possibility of fundamental change, this threat was ineffective, not
because innovations never occurred but because they were unanticipated and
the processes producing them were unperceived. In today's world change is
so rapid we cannot fail to perceive it, despite our most fervent efforts
to ignore it. In such a historical situation it is easy to understand the
popularity of dogmas of conservatism and conservationism, and the acuity
of sensations of personal and social insecurity. It is also easy to
understand the rapid growth of a literature which both reflects these
anxieties and offers palliative reassurances.In much early futuristic
fiction there is no trace of either near or far future in the senses
outlined above; events take place in a disconnected, generalized
imaginative space which is comprehensively distanced by its dating.
Examples include the anonymous The Reign of King George VI 1900-1925
(1763), L.S. MERCIER's Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred
(1771; trans 1772) and Jane LOUDON's The Mummy! A Tale of the 22nd Century
(1827). The earliest near-future speculations are warnings about the
consequences of specific political practices; I.F. CLARKE's bibliography,
The Tale of the Future (3rd edn 1978), lists inter alia a 1644 pamphlet on
the dangers of restoring the monarchy and an 1831 pamphlet warning of the
effects of the Reform Bill. The idea of historical change independent of
strategic action on the part of governing bodies did not come until the
late 19th century.The first class of near-future fantasies to emerge was
the WAR-anticipation genre in the UK, which began with a political debate
concerning the need for rearmament. George T. CHESNEY's classic
drama-documentary The Battle of Dorking (1871) headed a tradition of
speculative stories exploring the probable effects of new TECHNOLOGY on
the business of warfare which eventually led writers like George GRIFFITH
and H.G. WELLS to produce literary nightmares of war remade by submarines,
tanks, aeroplanes and atomic bombs. Griffith died before the outbreak of
WWI, but most of his readers did not; Wells lived just long enough to
witness the advent of the real atom bomb. The anxieties reflected in this
early class of near-future fantasies were entirely justified, and the
notion of "a war that will end war", in Wells's phrase - an idea already
popularized in such jingoistic extravaganzas as Louis TRACY's The Final
War (1896)-was enthusiastically borrowed by the promoters of WWI as a
means of selling it to the populations which became involved.A somewhat

different set of images was presented by another subgenre which emerged in
the same period, celebrating the modern wonders of a newly emergent era of
technological DISCOVERY AND INVENTION. Significantly, there are few
genuine UTOPIAS in this class, most ideal societies being cast forward by
at least a century, as in Edward BELLAMY's Looking Backward, 2000-1887
(1888); and even the fervently optimistic Hugo GERNSBACK subtitled his
Ralph 124C 41+ (1911-12; 1925) "A Romance of the Year 2660". Technological
wonder stories located within the personal future of their readers were
mostly concerned with the future of TRANSPORTATION, connected to the
war-anticipation genre by virtue of rejoicing in the conquest of the air.
Jules VERNE is the archetypal early writer of near-future sf, although his
imitators often took a more cavalier view of imminent possibility than he
did; where Verne went Around the World in 80 Days (1873; trans 1874),
Andre LAURIE went from New York to Brest in Seven Hours (1888; trans
1890). Sf writers were slower to take account of the AUTOMATION of
industry than they were to foresee new opportunities in LEISURE. When
Gernsback attempted to capture the scattered aspects of technological
enthusiasm and bind them all together into a medium of communication which
would hopefully "blaze a trail, not only in literature, but in progress as
well" he was still a man ahead of his time, despite the precedents set by
Verne and Wells. He saw SCIENTIFICTION as a means not only of anticipating
the transformation which the world was undergoing through the acceleration
of technological progress, but also of making a crucial contribution to
it. He was an inventor himself, passionately involved with contemporary
technology and particularly with the development of radio. In the
editorials which he wrote for his early sf PULP MAGAZINES he talked about
atomic energy, radar, tv and space travel. His near-future anticipations
were by no means unjustified; most of his readers were in their teens in
the 1920s, and so lived to see Gernsback's hypothetical technologies made
actual. GENRE SF undertook to deal with all aspects of the future, but it
was in its generalization of images of the near future that it was really
new. The impact of sf upon young readers in the 1920s and 1930s may have
been partly due to a consciousness of the immediacy of change as well as
to the vastness of sf's imaginative horizons. That said, most early pulp
sf was located in numinous eras beyond the personal horizon, and its grasp
of the extent to which technological change would alter the quality of
life was decidedly weak. Outside the genre, the wide-eyed optimism and
ludicrously uninhibited melodrama of most pulp sf seemed childish; in the
less prolific but far more earnest tradition of the UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE,
the anxieties attendant on the awareness of change were much more
prominently represented. The balance began to be redressed when John W.
CAMPBELL Jr took over ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION in the late 1930s and
began to ask for more carefully considered appraisals of future
possibility. Many authors understandably preferred the freedom of more
distant future realms, where they could set melodramatic SPACE OPERAS
against the gaudy background of a GALACTIC EMPIRE, but a new generation of
sf writers were prepared to tackle the problems of the near future, and in
a more realistic fashion. The late 1930s and early 1940s produced several
notable stories dealing with the advent of NUCLEAR POWER, and Robert A.
HEINLEIN attempted to construct a detailed future HISTORY mapping the
interplay of technological innovation and political response. The

destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the first atom bombs brought into
the world a sensation of existential insecurity unparalleled in modern
history (it is perhaps more easily comparable with such events as the
slaughter of the population of Europe by the Black Death in the 14th
century). To those professionally involved in the sf field, like Campbell
and Donald A. WOLLHEIM, it seemed that sf had been "justified" by the
unveiling of the atom bomb, and that from 1945 on everyone would have to
acknowledge the power of technological change to transform the world. But
such advances in sf's popularity and esteem were limited, and there also
emerged within the genre a powerful sense of nostalgia for that GOLDEN AGE
when sf had been aware of change only as a succession of miracles and
make-believe adventures.The response of sf authors to the new intellectual
climate was varied. Straightforward PREDICTIONS of imminent atomic doom
were abundant ( END OF THE WORLD; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; WAR), but a more
eccentric response was the widespread creation of distorted future
societies in which some contemporary power-group had "taken over" and
formed an oppressive regime; the archetype of this species is THE SPACE
MERCHANTS (1953) by Frederik POHL and C.M. KORNBLUTH. These stories of
distorted societies are often labelled SATIRES, and do indeed have a
satirical edge, but there is also an element of actual anticipation in
them, and they reflect a genuine fear of the swamping of individual
ambitions by large-scale bureaucratic institutions.The baroque and
slightly surreal mode of this kind of imaginative exercise gradually gave
way to a more acute awareness of real processes of change in the
contemporary world, and of their dangers. In the 1960s OVERPOPULATION,
POLLUTION and resource crises ( POWER SOURCES) became standard features of
sf's images of the near future. Stories on these subjects often have a
hint of panic about them, and there was a distinct apocalyptic note about
the sf of the 1960s and 1970s. Images of the near future produced outside
the genre became virtually indistinguishable in attitude from those
produced within it (although the near-future novels produced by MAINSTREAM
WRITERS tended to work with an impoverished vocabulary of ideas). Insofar
as it deals with the near future, genre sf is primarily a literature of
anxiety; optimism and colourful adventurism remain the prerogatives of
fiction set in a more distant future, in which the particular problems of
Spaceship Earth are often reduced to irrelevance.Our awareness of
impending ecocatastrophe ( ECOLOGY) has been complicated in the 1970s and
1980s by the advent of two new species of technology which promise
dramatic transformations of the way we live. The COMPUTER revolution has
pressed forward much faster than most sf writers of the 1950s and 1960s
anticipated; CYBERPUNK fiction represents a somewhat belated but suitably
intense response to this developing situation, and its rhetoric is feeding
back into the real situation much as the rhetoric of the future-war story
fed back into the actual build-up to WWI. Second, while the cracking of
the genetic code and the subsequent advent of GENETIC ENGINEERING have not
yet begun to transform the everyday environments of the home and
workplace, the inherent possibilities hold the promise of a new
technological revolution which might overturn many of our assumptions
about the nature of MACHINES (see also NANOTECHNOLOGY). Within the last
few years the assumptions which sf writers have made about the POLITICS of
the future have been devastated by the collapse of communism in Eastern

Europe, and this too has ensured that virtually all extant sf images of
the near future, however recent, are now almost redundant. Those which
seem most pertinent are those which anticipate the greatest
confusion.Bruce STERLING's ISLANDS IN THE NET (1988) is perhaps the most
compelling recent image of the near future, overtaking Frederik Pohl's The
Years of the City (1985), which has already begun to seem tentative. David
BRIN's far more optimistic Earth (1990) is a worthy attempt to celebrate
heroic attempts to cope with ecocatastrophe but ultimately founders on the
rock of its outrageous deus ex machina, while Greg BEAR's Queen of Angels
(1990) obtains its conviction by focusing tightly on the particular
predicaments of a handful of characters. The vast majority of sf writers
are either narrower still in the focus of their concerns or content to
farm the much greener pastures of hypothetical futures which lie safely
beyond the personal event-horizon. This is probably inevitable. The near
future is an uncomfortable imaginative space for writers and readers to
inhabit, and it is entirely understandable that those who venture into it
should go equipped with blinkers, armoured by some protective obsession
which obviates the necessity of dealing with the near future-world as a
whole.The faster the pace of technological change becomes, the more
horrifying a prospect the near future seems. It could not be otherwise.
Our personal ambitions are tied to our expectations, which - if they are
not mere castles in the air - are based in our experience of the past. The
innovations which the future will surely bring are much more likely to
threaten these ambitions than to aid them (even though they may compensate
by making possible new ambitions) and are therefore bound to be sources of
acute anxiety. The rate of technological change will certainly not slow
down - unless DISASTER overtakes the entire cultural/industrial complex
and renders all ambitions beyond mere survival redundant - and there now
seem no grounds for hoping, as some apologists for sf once did, that
assiduous study of images of future possibility will help us adapt
ourselves to the acceleration of that change. Despite the increasing
number of sf titles published each year, realistic speculative fiction
about the near future is scarce and will undoubtedly remain so. Such
fiction is too frightening to be popular; even those readers who like to
be frightened prefer to gain their excitement from the obsolete workings
of the supernatural imagination, which are utterly without consequence for
the way they must live their lives. [BS]
NEARING, HOMER Jr
(1915- ) US writer and professor of English at Pennsylvania Military
College. His series of stories about Professor Cleanth Penn Ransom and
Professor Archibald MacTate, mathematician and philosopher respectively,
appeared in FSF from "The Poetry Machine" in 1950 up to 1963. 7 of these
stories were assembled with 4 unconnected tales (and very thinly
"novelized") as The Sinister Researches of C.P. Ransom (coll 1954); they
concern the two professors' attempts to formalize a union between science
and the arts. Their efforts, though doomed, are told without malice.
Uncollected stories are "The Embarrassing Dimension" (1951), "The
Maladjusted Classroom" (1953), "The Cerebrative Psittacoid" (1953), "The
Gastronomical Error" (1953) and "The Hermeneutical Doughnut" (1956
Fantastic Universe). The professors' names disconnectedly represent

several US poets and critics associated with the New Criticism: Cleanth
Brooks, Archibald MacLeish, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn
Warren. [JC/PN]See also: DIMENSIONS; HUMOUR.
NEBULA
Sf award given by the SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA (now the Science
Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) since 1966. The idea of funding
such an award from the royalties of an annual anthology of award-winning
short fiction was proposed in 1965 by the SFWA's then secretary-treasurer,
Lloyd BIGGLE Jr. The awards are made in the spring and, unlike the HUGOS,
are dated by the year of publication of the award-winning stories; thus
the 1965 awards, the first, were made in 1966. The award takes the form of
a metallic-glitter spiral nebula suspended over a rock crystal, both
embedded in clear lucite; the original design by J.A. LAWRENCE was based
on a drawing by Kate WILHELM and has been followed ever since.The original
4 classes of award, all for professional writing, have remained unchanged;
a 5th class, for Best Dramatic Presentation, was added in 1974, changed to
Best Dramatic Writing in 1976, and then immediately dropped. Several
special awards, taking the form of plaques or citations, have also been
made; the only special category listed here is the Grand Master Award made
from time to time by the Nebula committee for lifetime achievement in sf
writing; it goes always to writers who are senior in both status and
years.The 4 writing categories are Novel (over 40,000 words), Novella (17,
500-40,000 words), Novelette (7500-17,500 words) and Short Story (under
7500 words). Voting is by SFWA members, using a final ballot paper made up
from members' nominations. From 1970 a preliminary ballot of all nominated
works was circulated early in the year, the entries receiving the most
votes being entered on the final ballot. In 1980 procedures were changed
(not for the first or last time): the year of a work's eligibility became
the previous calendar year (not December 1 to November 30 as had earlier
been the case); more importantly, perhaps, a Nebula jury system was set
up, with each year's panel of judges allowed to add one item to the final
ballot in each category. For some time authors have been allowed the
option of choosing a one-year-later, usually mass-market, edition of their
books to be eligible, rather than the original edition: many authors
prefer to be judged on the basis of a widely read paperback rather than on
the original hardcover.The procedures for Nebula awards have been more
consistent than those for Hugos, but lobbying among the SFWA membership
has received much criticism over the years, with some critics maintaining
that the awards sometimes reflect political as much as literary ability.
It may be partly as a result of this that the proportion of SFWA members
voting is often not very high.Although the Nebulas have occasionally gone
to rather more experimental writing than ever wins a Hugo, there has not
been a great deal of difference between the choices. It might have been
expected that the Nebula, inasmuch as it is given by a consensus of
professional writers, would place a stronger emphasis on literary skills,
but there is no evidence that this has been so. Neither Hugo nor Nebula
has been given to non-genre sf or fantasy, and both have mostly gone,
quite disproportionately, to US recipients. While the Nebula has certainly
been awarded to some fine works, many critics have argued that the whole
AWARDS system, in sf at least, is more a publicity exercise than a

consistently well judged measure of value.Anthologies of Nebula-winning
short fiction, along with a selection of the runners-up, are published
annually in the Nebula Award Stories series, each volume ed by an SFWA
member. These books sometimes contain critical essays and accounts of the
year in sf, as well as winners of the Rhysling Award for sf POETRY.
Volumes to date are Nebula Award Stories 1965 (anth 1966; vt Nebula Award
Stories 1 UK) ed Damon KNIGHT, Nebula Award Stories Two (anth 1967; vt
Nebula Award Stories 2 UK) ed Brian W. ALDISS and Harry HARRISON, Three
(anth 1968) ed Roger ZELAZNY, Four (anth 1969) ed Poul ANDERSON, Five
(anth 1970) ed James Blish, Six (anth 1971) ed Clifford D. SIMAK, Seven
(anth 1972) ed Lloyd Biggle Jr, Eight (1973) ed Isaac ASIMOV, Nine (anth
1974) ed Kate Wilhelm, Ten (anth 1975) ed James E. GUNN, Eleven (1976 UK)
ed Ursula K. LE GUIN (Eleven appeared in 1977 in the USA; from then until
1983 the year of publication was 2 years behind the year for which the
awards were given), Twelve (anth 1978) ed Gordon R. DICKSON, Thirteen
(anth 1979) ed Samuel R. DELANY, Fourteen (anth 1980) ed Frederik POHL,
Fifteen (anth 1981) ed Frank HERBERT, Sixteen (anth 1982) ed Jerry E.
POURNELLE, Seventeen (anth 1983) ed Joe W. HALDEMAN, 18 (anth 1983) ed
Robert SILVERBERG (with these latter, both published in the same year, the
books went back to trailing the award year by only 1 year), 19 (anth 1984)
ed Marta RANDALL, 20 (anth 1985) ed George ZEBROWSKI, 21 (anth 1986) ed
Zebrowski (again the gap increased to 2 years), 22 (anth 1988) ed
Zebrowski, 23 (anth 1989) ed Michael BISHOP, 24 (anth 1990) ed Bishop and
25 (anth 1991) ed Bishop.In 1969 the concept of SFWA members voting on
stories was extended retroactively to cover those stories (but not novels)
considered the all-time best prior to 1965. The chosen short stories were
published as SCIENCE FICTION HALL OF FAME (anth 1970) ed Robert SILVERBERG
and the novellas in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume Two A (anth
1973; vt The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume Two UK) and The Science
Fiction Hall of Fame Volume Two B (anth 1973; vt The Science Fiction Hall
of Fame Volume Three UK) ed Ben BOVA. [PN]Novels:1965: Frank HERBERT,
DUNE1966: Daniel KEYES, FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON, and Samuel R. DELANY,
BABEL-17 (tie)1967: Samuel R. Delany, THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION1968:
Alexei PANSHIN, RITE OF PASSAGE1969: Ursula K. LE GUIN, THE LEFT HAND OF
DARKNESS1970: Larry NIVEN, RINGWORLD1971: Robert SILVERBERG, A TIME OF
CHANGES1972: Isaac ASIMOV, THE GODS THEMSELVES1973: Arthur C. CLARKE,
RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA1974: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed1975: Joe
HALDEMAN, THE FOREVER WAR1976: Frederik POHL, MAN PLUS1977: Frederik Pohl,
GATEWAY1978: Vonda N. MCINTYRE, DREAMSNAKE1979: Arthur C. Clarke, THE
FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE1980: Gregory BENFORD, TIMESCAPE1981: Gene WOLFE, The
Claw of the Conciliator1982: Michael BISHOP, NO ENEMY BUT TIME1983: David
BRIN, STARTIDE RISING1984: William GIBSON, NEUROMANCER1985: Orson Scott
CARD, ENDER'S GAME1986: Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead1987: Pat
MURPHY, The Falling Woman1988: Lois McMaster BUJOLD, FALLING FREE1989:
Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, The Healer's War1990: Ursula K. Le Guin,
Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea1991: Michael SWANWICK, STATIONS OF THE
TIDE1992: Connie WILLIS, DOOMSDAY BOOK1993: Kim Stanley ROBINSON, RED
MARSNovellas:1965: Brian W. ALDISS, "The Saliva Tree", and Roger ZELAZNY,
"He who Shapes" (tie)1966: Jack VANCE, "The Last Castle"1967: Michael
MOORCOCK, "Behold the Man"1968: Anne MCCAFFREY, "Dragonrider"1969: Harlan
ELLISON, "A Boy and his Dog"1970: Fritz LEIBER, "Ill Met in Lankhmar"1971:

Katherine MACLEAN, "The Missing Man"1972: Arthur C. Clarke, "A Meeting
with Medusa"1973: Gene Wolfe, "The Death of Dr Island"1974: Robert
Silverberg, "Born with the Dead"1975: Roger Zelazny, "Home is the
Hangman"1976: James TIPTREE Jr, "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?"1977:
Spider and Jeanne ROBINSON, "Stardance"1978: John VARLEY, "The Persistence
of Vision"1979: Barry B. LONGYEAR, "Enemy Mine"1980: Suzy McKee CHARNAS,
"Unicorn Tapestry"1981: Poul ANDERSON, "The Saturn Game"1982: John KESSEL,
"Another Orphan"1983: Greg BEAR, "Hardfought"1984: John Varley, "PRESS
ENTER"1985: Robert Silverberg,"Sailing to Byzantium"1986: Lucius
SHEPARD,"R ?
WILLIS, "The Last of the Winnebagos"1989: Lois McMaster Bujold,"The
Mountains of Mourning"1990: Joe Haldeman,"The Hemingway Hoax"1991: Nancy
KRESS, "Beggars in Spain"1992: James MORROW, "City of Truth"1993: Jack
Cady,"The Night We Buried Road Dog"Novelettes:1965: Roger Zelazny, "The
Doors of his Face, the Lamps of his Mouth"1966: Gordon R. DICKSON, "Call
Him Lord"1967: Fritz Leiber, "Gonna Roll the Bones"1968: Richard WILSON,
"Mother to the World"1969: Samuel R. Delany, "Time Considered as a Helix
of Semi-Precious Stones"1970: Theodore STURGEON, "Slow Sculpture"1971:
Poul Anderson, "The Queen of Air and Darkness"1972: Poul Anderson, "Goat
Song"1973: Vonda McIntyre, "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand"1974: Gregory
Benford and Gordon EKLUND, "If the Stars are Gods"1975: Tom REAMY, "San
Diego Lightfoot Sue"1976: Isaac Asimov, "The Bicentennial Man"1977:
Raccoona Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr), "The Screwfly Solution"1978: Charles
L. GRANT, "A Glow of Candles, A Unicorn's Eye"1979: George R.R. MARTIN,
"Sandkings"1980: Howard WALDROP, "The Ugly Chickens"1981: Michael Bishop,
"The Quickening"1982: Connie Willis, "Fire Watch"1983: Greg Bear, "Blood
Music"1984: Octavia E. BUTLER, "Bloodchild"1985: George R.R. Martin,
"Portraits of his Children"1986: Kate WILHELM, "The Girl who Fell into the
Sky"1987: Pat MURPHY, "Rachel in Love"1988: George Alec EFFINGER,
"Schrodinger's Kitten"1989: Connie Willis, "At the Rialto"1990: Ted
Chiang, "Tower of Babylon"1991: Mike CONNER, "Guide Dog"1992: Pamela
SARGENT, "Danny Goes To Mars"1993: Charles SHEFFIELD, "Georgia on my
Mind"Short Stories:1965: Harlan Ellison, "'Repent Harlequin!' said the
Ticktockman"1966: Richard MCKENNA "The Secret Place"1967: Samuel R.
Delany, "Aye, and Gomorrah . . ."1968: Kate Wilhelm, "The Planners"1969:
Robert Silverberg, "Passengers"1970: no award1971: Robert Silverberg,
"Good News from the Vatican"1972: Joanna RUSS, "When it Changed"1973:
James Tiptree Jr, "Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death"1974: Ursula K. Le
Guin, "The Day Before the Revolution"1975: Fritz Leiber, "Catch that
Zeppelin!"1976: Charles L. Grant, "A Crowd of Shadows"1977: Harlan
Ellison, "Jeffty is Five"1978: Edward BRYANT, "Stone"1979: Edward Bryant,
"giANTS"1980: Clifford D. SIMAK, "Grotto of the Dancing Deer"1981: Lisa
TUTTLE, "The Bone Flute"1982: Connie Willis, "A Letter From the
Clearys"1983: Gardner DOZOIS, "The Peacemaker"1984: Gardner Dozois,
"Morning Child"1985: Nancy Kress, "Out of All Them Bright Stars"1986: Greg
Bear, "Tangents"1987: Kate Wilhelm, "Forever Yours, Anna"1988: James
MORROW, "Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge"1989: Geoffrey A.
Landis, "Ripples in the Dirac Sea"1990: Terry BISSON, "Bears Discover
Fire"1991: Alan BRENNERT, "Ma Qui"1992: Connie Willis, "Even the
Queen"1993: Joe Haldeman, "Graves"Dramatic presentation/writing:1973:
SOYLENT GREEN (presentation)1974: SLEEPER (presentation)1975: Young

Frankenstein ( FRANKENSTEIN) (writing)Grand Master Award:(The years given
are the years in which the award was made)1975: Robert A. HEINLEIN 1976:
Jack WILLIAMSON1977: Clifford D. Simak1979: L. Sprague DE CAMP1981: Fritz
Leiber1984: Andre NORTON1986: Arthur C. Clarke1987: Isaac Asimov1988:
Alfred BESTER1989: Ray BRADBURY1991: Lester DEL REY1993: Frederik PohlSee
also: WOMEN SF WRITERS.
NEBULA SCIENCE FICTION
UK large- DIGEST-size magazine. 41 issues Autumn 1952-Aug 1959, published
by Crownpoint Publications, Glasgow, Autumn 1952-Apr 1955, and by Peter
Hamilton Sep 1955-Aug 1959; ed Peter Hamilton. Issues were numbered
consecutively after Vols 1 and 2 of 4 nos each; what should have been Vol
3 #1 was actually marked #9. Publication was quite irregular except for
July 1957-Feb 1959, which was monthly apart from the omission of Nov and
Dec 1957.N was the first and so far only Scottish sf magazine, and was
part of the 1950s UK sf magazine revival, one of the most important titles
along with NEW WORLDS and SCIENCE FANTASY. N was subsidized by its editor,
an enthusiastic fan, still a teenager when the magazine began. It always
ran a news section, including a column by the celebrated Irish fan Walt
Willis (1919- ), editor of HYPHEN and SLANT. But although N was fannish it
was by no means juvenile; Hamilton was serious-minded and prepared to
experiment with difficult stories and to encourage young writers. Brian W.
ALDISS, Bob SHAW and Robert SILVERBERG all had their first published
stories in N. Other contributors included Harlan ELLISON, Eric Frank
RUSSELL, Kenneth BULMER and E.C. TUBB, the latter being the most prolific.
Early issues each contained a novel with a small number of short stories,
but the novel-an-issue policy was later dropped. The handsome and
distinctive front covers were the work of various artists, including
Gerard QUINN and Eddie JONES. N was popular with writers; Hamilton was
able to keep it going as very much a one-man show, never very profitably,
for 7 years. Some later issues went on sale in the USA. [PN/FHP]
NEEF, ELTON T.
[s] R.L. FANTHORPE.
NEEPER, CARY
Working name of US microbiologist and author Carolyn A. Neeper (1937- )
for her fiction, which consists primarily of the ambitious A Place Beyond
Man (1975), which somewhat uneasily combines a HARD-SF rendering of the
physics and biology of her interplanetary venues with a contemplative
sweep characteristic of the SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE. Confronted with the
looming ecological self-destruction of Earth, the two other sentient
species of our Solar System must decide what course to follow; the
consequent lessons are earnestly put. [JC]
NEFF, ONDREJ
[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
NEILL, A(LEXANDER) S(UTHERLAND)
(1883-1973) UK educationist who gained fame for revolutionary theories
about the teaching of children and who cofounded the International School
- first on the Continent, then (from 1921) at Summerhill in the UK - to
put them into practice. Fictionalized accounts like A Dominie's Log (1915)

popularized his arguments, and his sf novel, The Last Man Alive (1938),
was read aloud to his pupils. The DISASTER it recounts is readable but
unoriginal. [JC]
NEILSON, KEITH (TOWNSEND OLAF)
(1935- ) US academic of importance in the field of sf and fantasy
scholarship for editing (anon: both books were created under the umbrella
editorship of Frank N. Magill [1907- ]) the 5-vol Survey of Science
Fiction Literature (anth 1979) and the 5-vol Survey of Modern Fantasy
Literature (anth 1983); each contains about 500 essays, averaging about
2000 words, on individual books and series. Although (inevitably) some
essays are weak or wrong-headed, many are strong and original, and the two
surveys present between them an indispensible series of critical responses
to the literature. [JC]
NELSON, RAY
Working name of Radell Faraday Nelson (1931- ), who also writes as R.F.
Nelson, R. Faraday Nelson and Ray Faraday Nelson, and once under the house
name Jeffrey Lord ( Lyle Kenyon ENGEL). He has been active in both sf and
detective genres, publishing his first sf story, "Turn off the Sky", in
FSF in 1963. He worked as a gagwriter for cartoonist Grant Canfield, and
for a time collaborated with Michael MOORCOCK in smuggling Henry Miller
books from France into the UK; Moorcock was caught, RN forced to cease. RN
holds a secure place in the hearts of sf FANDOM (he used to be a fan
artist) for having invented the propeller beanie which in fan cartooning
is always emblematic of the sf fan.RN's first sf novel was The Ganymede
Takeover (1967) with Philip K. DICK, a tale in which Dickian
preoccupations are somewhat dampened by implausibly foregrounded action
sequences. His second, Blake's Progress (1975 Canada; rev vt Timequest
1985 US), accords the poet/painter William Blake (1757-1827) the capacity
to travel through time, along with his wife Kate; she is by far the better
painter of the two, though her husband signs her works. History is
altered, the novel being in part an ALTERNATE-WORLDS story. In its full
revised form it is a highly energetic vision of the poet, and RN's best
work. Then Beggars Could Ride (1976 Canada) and its sequel, The Revolt of
the Unemployables (1978), depict an ecological UTOPIA of small,
self-contained but interacting units, in which a protagonist tries to sort
himself out. RN's most recently published novel is #1 in the projected
Timebinder sequence, The Prometheus Man (1982), in which a rigid and
therefore DYSTOPIAN meritocracy has transformed the USA into a land of
employables (not numerous) and the Uns, or unemployables (the great
majority). The plot revolves around a marriage broken by the system as
well as an assortment of gurus, tycooons and revolutionaries; it does not
fully resolve. At least one sequel is reportedly awaiting publication.
Though sometimes over-easily applied, RN's iconoclasm is all the more
welcome for its surprising rarity in the sf field. [JC]Other works: The
Ecolog (1977 Canada); Dimension of Horror * (1979) as Jeffrey Lord, #30 in
the Richard Blade series.See also: INVASION; PHILIP K. DICK AWARD;
TRANSPORTATION.
NEMERE, ISTVAN
[r] HUNGARY.

NEMESIS
Film (1993). Shah/Jensen and Imperial Entertainment. Prod Ash R. Shah,
Eric Karson and Tom Karnowski; dir Albert Pyun; screenplay Rebecca
Charles; starring Olivier Gruner, Tim Thomerson, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and
Merle Kennedy. 96 mins. Colour.This very violent, low-budget,
straight-to-video, exploitation action-adventure movie, directed by
straight-to-video specialist Pyun, has one element of sf interest. At a
time when, despite all the publicity given to them, CYBERPUNK themes are
barely impinging on the "respectable" end of the film business, parts of
poverty row are embracing them. In N, bio-enhanced gangsters, anti- CYBORG
terrorist groups, machine cops, a lovely dead woman encoded on a data
chip, and third world police forces take part in an almost unfathomable
series of shoot-outs in the information-saturated world of 2027, where the
largest information cartel consists of US/Japan. Hawaii is passed off as
Java, and ethnic Chinese unconvincingly represent Indonesians. Though the
acting is below par, the dialogue is largely four-letter words and nothing
in the plot goes beyond cyberpunk stereotypes, at least the attempt was
made. [PN]
NENONEN, KARI
[r] FINLAND.
NEPTUNE
OUTER PLANETS.
NESFA
BIBLIOGRAPHIES; Erwin S. STRAUSS.
NESVADBA, JOSEF
(1926- ) Czech psychiatrist, doctor and writer, born in Prague. He
started by writing dramatic sketches but soon turned to detective stories
and satirical sf, continuing the tradition of Karel CAPEK. One of the best
Czech sf writers ( CZECH AND SLOVAK SF) - though he has written less since
the late 1960s - and aside from Capek the best known in the West, JN
writes subtly ironic variations on common sf themes, poking fun at human
weaknesses, and is not afraid to satirize his own social system (as in
"Inventor of His Own Undoing", in all the English-language collections
noted below). His 3 early collections of short stories are Tarzanova smrt
["Tarzan's Death"] (coll 1958), Einsteinuv mozek ["Einstein's Brain"]
(coll 1960) and Vyprava opacnym smerem ["Expedition in the Opposite
Direction"] (coll 1962), not to be confused with the later Vypravy opacnym
smerem ["Expeditions in the Opposite Direction"] (coll 1976), which
assembles early work, some previously collected, as does Einsteinuv mozek
a jine povidky ["The Einstein Brain and Other Stories"] (coll 1987). A
mystery novel of fantasy interest is Bludy Erika N. ["The Ravings of Erika
N."] (1974), which draws on some of Erich VON DANIKEN's ideas.A later
stage of psychiatry-related sf novelettes and novels begins, in book form,
with Ridicsky prukaz rodicu ["Parents' Driving Licence"] (coll of 3 linked
novelettes 1979). Others are Minehava podruhe ["Minehava for the Second
Time"] (coll of 3 linked novelettes 1981) and the novel Hledam za manzela
muze ["I am Looking for a Man to be a Husband"] (1986). These are less
well known in the West, but the title story of the second collection has

been translated in cut form as "The Return of Minnehawa or Marian Kolda's
Psychoscope" in Panorama of Czech Literature, No 8 (anth 1986
Czechoslovakia) ed Nesvadba, an anthology of modern Czech fantasy and sf
with biographical pieces on the authors.JN's stories have been a fertile
source of inspiration for the Czech film industry. Films based on his work
include Tarzanova smrt (1962; vt The Death of an Apeman) dir Jaroslav
Balik, screenplay by JN and Balik, a tragicomic new adventure of Tarzan;
Blbec z Xeenemunde (1962; vt The Idiot of Xeenemunde) dir Balik,
screenplay by JN and Balik, another tragicomedy, this time about a halfwit
scientist who kills Nazis; Ztracena tvar (1965; vt The Lost Face) dir
Pavel Hobl, screenplay by Hobl and JN, a slapstick story set in the 1930s
about a doctor who can perform miracles of disguise with plastic surgery
and organ transplants; Zabil jsem Einsteina, panove! (1969; vt I killed
Einstein, Gentlemen) dir Oldrich Lipsky, screenplay by Lipsky, Milos
Macourek and JN, an overfarcical TIME-TRAVEL comedy involving a society in
1999 where women are sterile and bearded because of radiation from nuclear
war; Slecna Golem (1972; vt Miss Golem) dir Balik, screenplay by Balik and
JN, about the creation of an artificial woman by cloning; Upir z Feratu
(1981; vt The Vampire from Ferat) dir Juraj Herz, based on JN's story
known in English as "Vampires Ltd.", about a racing car that uses the
blood of drivers rather than petrol as fuel. Another film based on a JN
story is ZITRA VSTANU A OPARIM SE CAJEM (1977; vt Tomorrow I'll Wake up
and Scald Myself with Tea).JN's intricately plotted, absurdly logical
stories have been translated into many languages and widely anthologized.
English-language editions of JN's stories are Vampires Ltd. (coll 1964
trans Iris Urwin, Prague) and In the Footsteps of the Abominable Snowman
(coll 1970; vt The Lost Face US). All but the first and third stories of
the latter collection are also in the former, which also contains 5
stories not in the latter. [JO/SC/FR/PN]Other works: Dialog s doktorem
Dongem ["Dialogue with Dr Dong"] (1964), a contemporary novel about
Vietnam; Tajna zprava z Prahy ["Secret Report from Prague"] (censored text
1978; text restored 1992).
NETHERLANDS
BENELUX.
NEUTRON STARS
Item of TERMINOLOGY in ASTRONOMY, and much used in sf. In an ordinary
star, such as the Sun, the gravitational pressure tending to make it
collapse is balanced by the outward pressure created by the continuous
nuclear fusion within it. As a star's fuel burns out, GRAVITY takes over.
A star of mass less than the Chandrasekhar limit - a value calculated by
Indian physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910- ) to be about 1.4 times
the mass of our Sun - would usually contract under the force of gravity
into a very dense White Dwarf, with a radius of maybe only a few thousand
kilometres; but a further, more extreme compression is possible, as under
pressure the empty space within the atoms of the star's matter is
annihilated, the electrons being crushed down to the atomic nucleus, there
to fuse with the protons of the nucleus to form neutrons. The resulting
degenerate matter - neutronium - is incredibly dense because of the loss
of the intra-atomic emptiness: a neutron star having the same mass as our

Sun would have a radius of about 10km (6 miles). Its surface gravity would
be so strong that no "mountain" (i.e., surface irregularity) could exist
on it higher than about 5mm (0.2in); and, initially at least, it would
rotate very rapidly owing to the conservation of angular momentum (i.e.,
for the same reason as ice skaters can increase their rate of spin by
pulling in their limbs).Beginning in 1968, radio telescopes discovered
many celestial sources which emitted regular bursts of microwave radiation
with very short periods (from only a couple of seconds down to tiny
fractions of a second) between pulses. These objects were named pulsars,
and were soon shown almost certainly to be neutron stars. Their powerful
electromagnetic fields channel the radiation associated with the pulsar
into two continuous beams which, because of the object's rapid rotation,
we see (assuming we are in a suitable line-of-sight) in the form of
pulses, much as we might see the light from the rotating lamp of a
lighthouse. The period of a pulsar's pulses (i.e., its rate of rotation)
can be used as a measure of the pulsar's age - the rotation slows with
time - and there is excellent correlation between such measures and the
ages of pulsars whose dates of formation are known (notably the pulsar at
the core of the Crab Nebula, the remnant of the supernova observed in
AD1054).The tidal forces created in proximity to such a star would be
lethal, as imagined in Larry NIVEN's story "Neutron Star" (1966), in which
a spaceship pilot who has ventured too close is almost ripped apart
because, in such an intense gravitational field, the length of his body
represents a significant distance, and so the force exerted by GRAVITY on
his feet is considerably stronger than that exerted on his head; it is
this difference in pull that so nearly proves fatal to him. In Gregory
BENFORD's The Stars in Shroud (1978) a neutron star's gravity is exploited
by spacecraft whipping round it to accelerate into new courses - a more
extreme version of the manoeuvre whereby space-probes in the Solar System
exploit the gravitational fields of the larger planets. The most extreme
neutron-star stories may be Robert L. FORWARD's DRAGON'S EGG (1980) and
its sequel Starquake! (1985), which have an ALIEN race - who live on a
hugely accelerated timescale - evolving on the unfriendly surface of such
a star, and ultimately making contact with human observers.Stellar
collapse for stars with a mass greater than the Chandrasekhar limit can,
it is theorized, lead to a different and even more bizarre form, the BLACK
HOLE. [PN]
NEUTZSKY-WULFF, ERWIN
[r] DENMARK.
NEUWIRTH, BARBARA
[r] AUSTRIA.
NEVILLE, KRIS (OTTMAN)
(1925-1980) US writer of fiction who worked for many years as a technical
writer specializing in plastics technology, and through his connection
with the Epoxylite Corporation co-authored several texts on epoxy resins.
He began publishing sf with "The Hand from the Stars" for Super Science
Stories in 1949, and for several years was a prolific contributor to FSF
and other magazines; he wrote some fantasy as by Henderson Starke. His
short fiction was assembled in Mission: Manstop (coll with some stories

updated 1971) and in the posthumous The Science Fiction of Kris Neville
(coll 1984) ed Barry N. MALZBERG and Martin H. GREENBERG, much of it
demonstrating his notable strengths as a writer: concision, clarity of
style and a capacity to develop the sometimes routine initial material of
a story so that its implications expanded constantly, rather in the manner
mastered, with more recognition than KN ever received, by James TIPTREE
Jr. "Hunt the Hunter" (1951), for instance, begins as a simple hunt on an
alien planet but expands subtly but quickly into a study in power politics
whose trick ending very neatly turns the meaning of the whole tale in upon
itself. Another early story, "The Toy" (1952), powerfully structures a
very sharp lesson in ANTHROPOLOGY within an apparently routine tale about
humans oppressing "inferior" aliens. One of his very few late stories,
"Ballenger's People" (1967), counts as sf only through its moderately
futuristic form of urban transport; the tale itself describes, with superb
concision, the complex internal politics of a deranged mind.KN's best
known story is probably "Bettyan" (1951) which, with a sequel, "Overture"
(1954), eventually became Bettyann (fixup 1970). It tells the story of a
young girl whose adolescent sense that she really belongs somewhere else
is, in classic sf fashion, confirmed by her discovery first that she is
adopted, and second that she is a child of creatures from the stars. She
is then forced to decide between heredity and environment, a choice whose
implications are developed in a recent sequel, "Bettyann's Children"
(1973) with Lil Neville, KN's wife and frequent late collaborator. Among
the fiction KN wrote with her is a 1975 novel published only in Japanese
whose title translates as "Run, the Spearmaker".KN's comparative silence
for two decades before his death, a silence obscured by the book
publication of old material (some of it revamped), was much to be
regretted, for his intelligence was acute and his artistic control over
his material was always evident. He was one of the potentially major
writers in the genre who never came to speak in his full voice. [JC]Other
works: The Unearth People (1964); The Mutants (1953 Imagination as "Earth
Alert"; exp 1966); Special Delivery (1952 Imagination; 1967 chap dos);
Peril of the Starmen (1954 Imagination; 1967 chap dos); Invaders on the
Moon (1970) with Mel Sturgis (left uncredited through a publishing
decision against which KN protested).See also: LIVING WORLDS; SUPERMAN.
NEW ADVENTURES OF WONDER WOMAN, THE
WONDER WOMAN.
NEW AVENGERS, THE
The AVENGERS .
NEW BARBARIANS, THE
George MILLER; 1990: I GUERRIERI DEL BRONX.
NEWCOMB, SIMON
(1835-1909) Canadian-born writer, in the USA from 1853, of texts on and
studies of astronomical and mathematical subjects. In his sf novel His
Wisdom, the Defender (1900) future historians tell how a professor
discovers a source of limitless energy, invents ANTIGRAVITY and, after
creating a private army - equipping it with futuristic armour-takes over
the world from the air and prohibits war. In "The End of the World" (1903

McClure's Magazine) a black body from space hits the Sun, devastating the
world. The few who survive realize that eons must pass before civilization
may rise again. [JC]See also: WEAPONS.
NEW DESTINIES
DESTINIES.
NEW DIMENSIONS
ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series (1971-1981) ed Robert SILVERBERG. New
Dimensions I (anth 1971) appeared when original anthology series were
proliferating in the USA, with such titles as INFINITY, QUARK and
UNIVERSE. ND was one of the longest-lasting titles from this period,
although it had to change publishers several times (#1-#3 DOUBLEDAY, #4
Signet, #5-#10 Harper ?
New Dimensions I (anth 1971), #2 (anth 1972), #3 (anth 1973), #4 (anth
1974), #5 (anth 1975), #6 (anth 1976), #7 (anth 1977), #8 (anth 1978), #9
(anth 1979), #10 (anth 1980), #11 (anth 1980) with Marta RANDALL and #12
(anth 1981) with Randall. An associated anthology was The Best of New
Dimensions (anth 1979).ND was one of the more experimental anthology
series, and introduced a number of new writers. Its regular contributors
included Gardner DOZOIS, George Alec EFFINGER, Felix GOTSCHALK and James
TIPTREE Jr. #2 contained "Eurema's Dam" by R.A. LAFFERTY, which shared a
HUGO as Best Short Story; #3 contained 2 Hugo-winning stories: "The Girl
who was Plugged In" by Tiptree and "The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas" by
Ursula K. LE GUIN; #11 had "Unicorn Tapestry" by Suzy McKee CHARNAS, which
won a NEBULA as Best Novella. Many other stories were award nominees; ND
was one of the best original anthology series. [MJE/PN]
NEW FUTURIAN, THE
The FUTURIAN .
NEWMAN, BERNARD
(1897-1968) UK writer, mostly of espionage thrillers (some as by Don
Betteridge) and detective mysteries, the two genres being perhaps most
successfully combined in Maginot Line Murder (1939). The entertainment
value of his sf is somewhat minimal, as he used the form primarily to
provide platforms for his arguments about WAR, WEAPONS and the political
nature of peace. In Armoured Doves (1931) SCIENTISTS combine to end war,
as does the hero of Secret Weapon (1941), whose invention of an atomic
bomb ends WWII; later, in The Flying Saucer (1948), the same scientist
continues his peace campaign by creating an imaginary Martian threat
against the world. BN, who appears as himself in this book, acknowledged
that its source was Andre MAUROIS's Le Chapitre Suivant (1927 chap; trans
as The Next Chapter 1928 chap UK). Further novels combining politics and
future-war themes include Shoot! (1949), The Blue Ants: The First
Authentic Account of the Russian-Chinese War of 1970 (1962) and Draw the
Dragon's Teeth (1967). The Wishful Think (1954) is a borderline-sf story
about politicized ESP. [JC]Other works: The Cavalry Went Through (1930);
Hosanna (1933); The Boy who Could Fly (1967).
NEWMAN, JOHN
(? - ) UK research chemist and writer who collaborated with Kenneth
BULMER on a long series of science articles for NW and Nebula 1955-61

under the name Kenneth Johns. [JC]
NEWMAN, KIM (JAMES)
(1959- ) UK writer and broadcaster who remains as well known for his film
criticism as for his fiction, though the latter has become increasingly
dominant in his output. His film books - Nightmare Movies: Wide Screen
Horror Since 1968 (1984 US; rev vt Nightmare Movies: A Critical History of
the Horror Film, 1968-1988 1988 UK) and Wild West Movies (1990) - express
a generically savvy, sophisticatedly wry vision of their subject matters,
a vision also articulated in the weekly reviews he has conducted on tv
since 1989. KN began publishing sf with "Dreamers" for Interzone in 1984,
rapidly establishing a name for liquidly dense tales of the NEAR FUTURE or ALTERNATE-WORLD versions of the earlier 20th century - which combine a
more or less standard CYBERPUNK idiom with an acute sensitivity to the
dream world of the movies, in particular the film noir tradition already
mined by authors like William GIBSON; many of these tales appear in The
Original Dr. Shade and Other Stories (coll 1994). KN's almost excessive
sensitivity to the icons of Hollywood helps distinguish him from his sf
models. His first novel, The Night Mayor (1989), potently intensifies the
VIRTUAL REALITY claustrophobias of cyberpunk through a plot whose villain,
the criminal Daine, has escaped into a MAGIC-REALIST, glowing,
alternate-world mental construct peopled by personas from detective films
of the 1940s, from which haven he must be flushed by the protagonists. The
book clearly and deliberately harks back to Philip K. DICK's darker
investigations of the nature of reality and to Roger ZELAZNY's THE DREAM
MASTER (1966), though KN's rather impersonal polish may have kept his tale
from fully expressing the epistemological vertigo of some of its greater
models; and certainly his use of tropes out of the dream-life of US film
is, at times, soothingly nostalgic. His second novel, Bad Dreams (1990),
replicates much of this material in terms of HORROR, again diminished in
its visceral effect by a sense that the author has good-humouredly
distanced himself from the products of his imagination. Jago (1991), a
full-blown horror tale, once again features an antagonist capable of
exercising coercive control over his opponents' inner worlds, in this case
by transfiguring their dream self-images into reality, so that - for
instance - a farmer anguished by drought and debt becomes a Green Man.
Anno Dracula (1992) is set in a RECURSIVE alternate-world 19th-century
England which has been transformed by the marriage of Vlad Tepes, Count
Dracula, to Queen Victoria.The Quorum (1994) is again horror: four
ambitious young men (there are roman a clef elements in their depiction)
sell their souls to the devil, who manifests himself as a newspaper
magnate.At the same time as writing novels that eat at the consensual
world while suggesting that reality could still be addressed in something
like comfort, KN also produced, as Jack Yeovil, a series of ties for GAMES
WORKSHOP which leapt unashamedly into the explicitly easier environment of
the GAME-WORLD. Drachenfels * (1989), Beasts in Velvet * (1991) and
Genevieve Undead * (coll of linked stories 1993) are fantasies constructed
for the Warhammer enterprise; but the Demon Download sequence - written in
the Dark Future series, and comprising "Route 666" * (in Route 666 [1990]
ed David PRINGLE), Demon Download * (1990), Krokodil Tears * (1991),
Comeback Tour (The Sky Belongs to the Stars) * (1991) and Route 666*

(1994) - contains elements of genuine sf, ruthlessly blended into a
NEAR-FUTURE/alternate-world/fantasy/horror/punk mix. Both game-worlds and
horror as a genre tend to view CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGHS as breakers of the
dream, and it is not yet certain that KN is much inclined to engage
himself - or Jack Yeovil, under which name has also appeared Orgy of the
Blood Parasites (1994) - in the displacements necessary to compose full
and unadulterated sf.KN wrote many of the CINEMA and tv entries for the
2nd edition of this encyclopedia. [JC]Other works: Ghastly Beyond Belief:
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of Quotations (anth 1986) edited with
Neil GAIMAN; Horror: 100 Best Books (anth 1988) ed with Stephen Jones,
critical essays.See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; COMPUTERS; GOTHIC
SF; INTERZONE; NEW WORLDS; PSYCHOLOGY.
NEW ORIGINAL WONDER WOMAN, THE
WONDER WOMAN.
NEW PATHWAYS
US SEMIPROZINE, full title New Pathways into Science Fiction and Fantasy
(Mar 1986-Jan 1991); BEDSHEET-format, bimonthly to #6, later quarterly,
then irregular, ed and published Michael G. Adkisson from Texas, 19 issues
to Jan 1991. Lively, but struggling for readership, NP mixed fiction,
features and COMIC strips, all at the radical end of the sf spectrum,
including commentary by MISHA and fiction by Carter SCHOLZ, Lewis SHINER,
John SHIRLEY and others, and sometimes experimental, as in a number of
reprints from Brian W. ALDISS's Enigmas series of short stories. We can
trace no issues later than 1991. [PN]
NEWTE, HORACE (WYKEHAM CAN)
(1870-1949) UK novelist and controversialist on political matters whose
The Master Beast: Being a True Account of the Ruthless Tyranny Inflicted
on the British People by Socialism, A.D. 1888-2020 (1907; vt The Red Fury:
Britain Under Bolshevism 1919) lives fully up to its subtitle, telling of
a young socialist at the turn of the 20th century who first experiences a
German INVASION of an unprepared UK, then, after awakening ( SLEEPER
AWAKES) from suspended animation, experiences the enormity of a century of
socialist rule, with women freed for immorality, George Bernard Shaw
(1856-1950) canonized, and thought-control universal. The Ealing Miracle:
A Realistic Story (1911) is a fantasy in which two women exchange
personalities at the behest of a Christlike stranger and learn about love
and deprivation. [JC]
NEW TOMORROW PEOPLE, THE
TOMORROW PEOPLE, THE.
NEWTON, DAVID C.
John LYMINGTON.
NEWTON, JULIUS P.
(? - ) UK writer whose The Forgotten Race (1963) depicts with awkward
sincerity the attempts of Venusians and Martians-both survivors of the
atomic HOLOCAUST which destroyed the fifth planet - to persuade the humans
of Earth not to repeat the tragedy. [JC]
NEWTON, W(ILFRID) DOUGLAS

(1884-1951) Irish writer who began writing sf with 2 future- WAR novels,
War (1914) - prefaced by Robert Hugh BENSON and introduced by Rudyard
KIPLING - and The North Afire (1914). Later works include The Golden Cat
(1930), The Beggar and Other Stories (coll 1933), which contains a story
about guided missiles, "The Joke that Ended War", and Dr Odin (1933),
about an attempt to perfect a Nordic "master race". His Savaran series
includes two LOST-WORLD stories, "The Great Quest" in I, Savaran (coll
1937) and Savaran and the Great Sands (1939 The Passing Show as "The Devil
Comes Aboard"; 1939). He contributed sf to various early magazines,
including PEARSON'S MAGAZINE, and to the US PULP MAGAZINES, but only a
small proportion has been reprinted in book form. [JE]
NEW VOICES
ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series, subtitled "The Campbell Award Nominees", #1-#2
from Harcourt Brace ?
from BLUEJAY BOOKS; ed George R.R. MARTIN. Each vol contained original
novellas written (a few years later in most cases) by the 4-6 finalists
from a particular year of the JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for the best new sf
or fantasy writer. The books, which contained stories from the award
winners for 1973 to 1977 respectively, were New Voices in Science Fiction
(anth 1977; vt New Voices I: The Campbell Award Nominees 1978 US), New
Voices II (anth 1979), New Voices III (anth 1980), New Voices 4 (anth
1981) and The John W. Campbell Awards Volume 5 (anth 1984). Eventually the
publication year fell too far behind the year of the award, and this
interesting series lost its point and came to a close. The best-known
story published in the series is John VARLEY's "Blue Champagne" (1981) in
#4. [PN]
NEW WAVE
This term, as applied to sf, is borrowed from film criticism, where it
was much used in the early 1960s as a translation of the French nouvelle
vague to refer to the experimental cinema associated with Jean-Luc Godard
(1930- ), Francois Truffaut (1932-1984) and others. (It was also applied
to music around 1977 as a synonym for Punk.) The term was first applied to
UK sf writers in a 1961 book-review column by P. Schuyler MILLER, and then
used - probably first by Christopher PRIEST - to describe the sort of
fiction being published in NEW WORLDS. It came to be used more by sf
proselytizers than by the writers concerned - especially by Judith MERRIL,
in her anthology England Swings SF (anth 1968; cut vt The Space-Time
Journal 1972 UK) and elsewhere.The kind of story to which the term refers
is in fact rather older than the (late-1960s) term, which anyway has never
been defined with any precision. The first writers whose work was later
subsumed under the New Wave label were UK, notably Brian W. ALDISS and
J.G. BALLARD. These two were publishing stories in NW while it was still
under the editorship of John CARNELL, but it was not until Michael
MOORCOCK took over with the May/June 1964 issue that the kind of
imagistic, highly metaphoric story, inclined more towards psychology and
the SOFT SCIENCES than to HARD SF, that both men wrote (in quite different
styles) was given a setting where it seemed at home.Traditional GENRE SF
had reached a crisis point in both the UK and the USA by the middle 1960s;
too many writers were working with the same few traditional sf themes, and

both the style and content of sf were becoming generally overpredictable.
Many young writers entering the field came to feel, either instantly, like
Thomas M. DISCH, or after some years' slogging away at conventional
commercial sf, like Harlan ELLISON and Robert SILVERBERG, that genre sf
had become a straitjacket; though widely supposed to emphasize change and
newness, sf had somehow become conservative. Young Turks, of course,
conventionally exaggerate the sins of their seniors, but this time they
had a real case. It was not as if the market were shrinking; on the
contrary, hardcover publishers were more willing than ever to add sf to
their lists. There was no reason to suppose that publishers would not be
grateful for sf becoming rather more flexible in style and content.By
1965, then, sf was ripe for change. In fact, many of the so-called sf
experiments of the period were not experiments at all, but merely an
adoption of narrative strategies, and sometimes ironies, that had long
been familiar in the MAINSTREAM novel. In the event, some of the sf
writers who felt they now had the freedom to experiment, especially
Ballard and perhaps (rather later) Moorcock, were to add something new to
the protocols of prose fiction generally; the New Wave may have taken from
the Mainstream, but it gave something back in return (this is now a truism
of POSTMODERNIST criticism, but it was by no means clear at the time), and
certainly New-Wave sf did more than any other kind of sf to break down the
barriers between sf and mainstream fiction.Because it was never a formal
literary movement-perhaps more a state of mind than anything else-New-Wave
writing is difficult to define. Perhaps the fundamental element was the
belief that sf could and should be taken seriously as literature. Much of
it shared the qualities of the late-1960s counterculture, including an
interest in mind-altering DRUGS and oriental RELIGIONS, a satisfaction in
violating TABOOS, a marked interest in SEX, a strong involvement in Pop
Art and in the MEDIA LANDSCAPE generally, and a pessimism about the future
that ran strongly counter to genre sf's traditional OPTIMISM, often
focused on the likelihood of DISASTER caused by OVERPOPULATION and
interference with the ECOLOGY, as well as by WAR, and a general cynicism
about the POLITICS of the US and UK governments (notably the US
involvement in Southeast Asia and elsewhere). The element of DYSTOPIA in
New-Wave writing was particularly dramatic in the case of John BRUNNER,
much of whose earlier work had been relatively cheerful SPACE OPERA.
New-Wave sf often concerned itself with the NEAR FUTURE; but it often
turned inward, too, and one of the buzzwords of the period was INNER
SPACE.Moorcock's NW published most of the notable figures of the New Wave
at one time or another, including the work of several US writers who lived
for a time in the UK, such as Samuel R. DELANY, Disch, James SALLIS, John
T. SLADEK and Pamela ZOLINE. Other US NW contributors often subsumed under
the New-Wave label were Ellison, Norman SPINRAD and Roger ZELAZNY; other
UK contributors were Barrington J. BAYLEY, M. John HARRISON, Langdon JONES
and Charles PLATT, and one would add Christopher PRIEST, although he was
less closely associated with NW.Despite the various excesses of NW, whose
stories sometimes embraced ENTROPY with a fervour reminiscent of Edgar
Allan POE's "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842), there is no doubt that
it was influential on sf PUBLISHING generally, and it was not long at all
before various US markets were adopting a far less exclusive attitude to
what they would or would not publish, a symptom being the appearance of

ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series like DANGEROUS VISIONS, NEW DIMENSIONS, ORBIT
and QUARK, which included a good quota of experimental work - indeed, they
demonstrated clearly (though the point hardly needed to be made) that as
much US sf as UK had come to be New Wave in style and content.All this
naturally horrified some of sf's more conservative spokesmen, as a glance
at sf histories written by David KYLE, Sam MOSKOWITZ and Donald A.
WOLLHEIM will demonstrate. Wollheim commented, in The Universe Makers
(1971), that "the readers and writers that used to dream of galactic
futures now got their kicks out of experimental styles of writing, the
free discussion of sex, the overthrow of all standards and morals (since,
if the world is going to end, what merit had these things?)". It is easy
to feel some sympathy with the conservative viewpoint in one respect; with
few exceptions the New-Wave writers avoided HARD SF, and it must have
seemed to some observers of the scene as if the very thing that most
centrally defined sf by its presence-the science (to simplify) - was
disappearing.But in fact the battle was quickly over (though hard sf never
quite regained its former position of prominence). The better New-Wave sf
writers were soon accepted by sf readers generally, and often found an
audience outside sf as well; the bad writers (some were terrible) mostly
fell by the wayside. By the 1970s there no longer seemed very much point
to the term, although newly prominent figures like Gardner DOZOIS, Barry
N. MALZBERG, Joanna RUSS, James TIPTREE Jr and Gene WOLFE clearly wrote in
a style that would have been called New Wave only a year or so earlier.
Later in the decade all sorts of quite different new writers emerged who
had clearly absorbed the positive lessons of the New Wave, along with some
of its attitudes, ranging from Michael BISHOP and John VARLEY in the USA
to Ian WATSON in the UK.There can be no doubt that during the late 1960s
genre sf found new freedoms, while the market showed a greater readiness
to accept sophisticated writing. As with all ideological arguments, one
uses whatever ammunition comes conveniently to hand, and it suited many
friends (and foes) to see the New Wave as a kind of homogeneous,
monolithic politico-literary movement. It was never that in the minds of
most of its writers, many of whom resented being categorized. Disch
commented, in an open letter published in 1978: "I have no opinion of the
'New Wave' in sf, since I don't believe that that was ever a meaningful
classification. If you mean to ask - do I feel solidarity with all writers
who have ever been lumped together under that heading - certainly I do
not."It was common during the 1970s and 1980s, especially for those (like
Disch) who resisted stereotyping, to dismiss the importance of the New
Wave, or even to deny that it ever existed. From the perspective of the
1990s, however, it seems fair to say that the New Wave was real and
liberating; New-Wave excesses-including its sometimes miasmic gloom - have
largely dropped away in subsequent sf, while the New Wave's grasp of the
complexities of the world has remained. The 1960s were indeed a maturing
period for genre sf; if we see the 1960s as sf's puberty, then we also
have an explanation of why some of it, at the time, was so irritating
(especially in its tone of voice): most adolescents are. One reason why
the perspective of the 1990s is useful is that we have, meanwhile, been
able to observe yet another New Wave in action: CYBERPUNK.Two of the many
anthologies of New Wave sf are The New SF (anth 1969) ed Langdon Jones and
The New Tomorrows (anth 1971) ed Norman Spinrad. A book on the subject is

The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the UK "New Wave" (1983) by
Colin GREENLAND. [PN]See also: ARTS.
NEW WORLDS
The leading UK sf magazine (an ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series for two sections
of its chequered career), publishing 218 issues over an intermittent
career of nearly 50 years ([July] 1946-current), but including a 12-year
hiatus; 12 of these issues have been in book form. NW, though it had
volume numbers up to #177, has always been numbered consecutively (in its
magazine incarnations), the numeration not beginning again with each
volume number. #1-#5 were undated.3 PULP-size issues were published
irregularly by Pendulum in 1946-7 under the editorship of an sf fan, John
CARNELL (NW was a development from a pre-WWII FANZINE [1936-9] called
first NOVAE TERRAE and then New Worlds, the last 4 issues of which were ed
Carnell). #1 was issued twice with different covers; #1 with the original
cover had not sold well, but it did better the second time round (the
second version used the same cover as #2).Nova Publications, a publishing
group formed by UK sf fans who used to meet at the White Horse pub in
London, revived this somewhat tentative 1946-7 magazine in 1949 as a
DIGEST. Carnell remained in charge until #141 (Apr 1964), after which the
title was taken over by Roberts ?
issued it in a pocketbook (paperback-size) edition, ed Michael MOORCOCK.
After #172 (Mar 1967) it was published by Moorcock under the auspices of
the Arts Council in a stapled 8in x 11in (approx A4) format, rising to
BEDSHEET-size with #179. In this incarnation NW suffered financial
difficulties, compounded when the leading UK retail-newsagent chain, W.H.
Smith ?
particular the use of "obscene" language in Norman SPINRAD's BUG JACK
BARRON (Dec 1967-July 1968; 1969). The last issue to be properly released
was #200 (Apr 1970), though in 1971 #201, a special final, "Good-Taste"
issue with retrospective index went out to subscribers. During this period
Moorcock relaxed his control over the editorship, various members of his
coterie taking a hand in the issues released in 1969; Charles PLATT was
editor #197-#200. For the greater part of the period from #22 to #200 the
magazine maintained a monthly schedule with only occasional lapses.In 1971
the title was revived again, this time as a series of original anthologies
(numbered from #1 again, although the original numeration was tacitly
maintained) published in paperback by Sphere Books (#1-#8) and Corgi Books
(#9 and #10). These were New Worlds #1 (anth 1971; vt New Worlds Quarterly
1 1971 US) ed Moorcock; #2 (anth 1971; vt New Worlds Quarterly 2 1971 US)
ed Moorcock; #3 (anth 1972; vt New Worlds Quarterly 3 1972 US) ed
Moorcock; #4 (anth 1972; vt New Worlds Quarterly 4 1972 US) ed Moorcock;
#5 (anth 1973) ed Moorcock; #6 (anth 1973; vt New Worlds Quarterly 5 1974
US) ed Moorcock with Charles Platt; #7 (anth 1974) ed Hilary BAILEY with
Platt; #8 (anth 1975) ed Bailey; #9 (anth 1975) ed Bailey; and #10 (anth
1976) ed Bailey.When the book series was cancelled, NW was defunct, but
the fervour of its supporters brought about yet another resuscitation in
1978, with #212 ed Moorcock in a FANZINE-style format, and #213-#216 ed by
various supporters professionally published, the last 2 being in 1979.
This final incarnation, published by Charles Partington in Manchester, was
more a generalized underground magazine than an sf magazine; it contained

many satirical graphics. #214 was titled in Russian. #215 ed David BRITTON
was marked "limited edition of one thousand copies".In 1991 David S.
GARNETT, with Moorcock's approval and with Moorcock as Consulting Editor,
initiated yet another incarnation of NW, this time in anthology book form,
as New Worlds (anth 1991), New Worlds 2 (anth 1992), New Worlds 3 (anth
1993) and New Worlds 4 (anth 1994) all ed Garnett, published by GOLLANCZ.
These volumes were numbered #217, #218, #219 and #220 according to the
original sequence, which was again explicitly acknowledged. The financial
results were disappointing, and Gollancz cancelled after the fourth,
leaving Garnett currently looking for a new publisher.Under Carnell NW was
the primary force in shaping a tradition in UK magazine sf, and under
Moorcock its name became the banner of what was dubbed the NEW WAVE.
Carnell provided a stable domestic market for the leading UK writers and
played a considerable role in the careers of Brian W. ALDISS, J.G.
BALLARD, John BRUNNER, Kenneth BULMER, Colin KAPP, E.C. TUBB and James
WHITE. He encouraged a species of sf more sober in tone than much US
material, with the emphasis on problem-solving; an excellent example of
the species is James White's Sector General series. In publishing
ambitious work by Aldiss and most of Ballard's early work Carnell began a
shift in emphasis toward psychological and existential sf ( FABULATION;
PSYCHOLOGY), which also showed in his choice of reprints from US authors:
Philip K. DICK's Time Out of Joint (Dec 1959-Feb 1960; 1959) and Theodore
STURGEON's Venus Plus X (Jan-Apr 1961; 1960). Most of the US magazines
were also shifting their emphasis away from the "hardware" of sf, but
retained a kind of brashness not evident in NW save in the work of those
authors most heavily influenced by pulp sf.Moorcock's editorship was a
good deal more flamboyant than Carnell's, and he was as polemical in the
material which provided the environment for the fiction as John W.
CAMPBELL Jr had been in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION during the early 1940s,
though to very different ends, juxtaposing fiction with factual social
comment, visual collage, even concrete poetry, in a deliberate attempt to
lose the GENRE-SF image and to place speculative fiction in a context of
rapid social change, and radical art generally. Apart from his own
avant-garde material (often written as James Colvin), he promoted
inventive UK writers like Barrington J. BAYLEY, Langdon JONES, David I.
MASSON and, later, Ian WATSON, and recruited some US writers - notably
Thomas M. DISCH and John T. SLADEK. Moorcock's early Jerry Cornelius
pieces appeared in NW, as did his NEBULA-winning "Behold, the Man" (Sep
1966; exp as BEHOLD THE MAN 1969). The large-size version serialized, in
addition to Spinrad's BUG JACK BARRON (noted above), CAMP CONCENTRATION by
Disch (July-Sep 1967; 1968), and featured 2 more Nebula-winning short
pieces: Samuel R. DELANY's "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious
Stones" (Dec 1968), which also won a HUGO, and Harlan ELLISON's "A Boy and
His Dog" (Apr 1969). Under Moorcock NW established in its review columns a
particularly trenchant style of criticism which continued in the paperback
anthologies, much of it written by John CLUTE and M. John HARRISON. It
cannot be said that Moorcock's programme met with wide-ranging approval,
especially among those readers attuned to the more modest and traditional
aspects of Carnell's policy, and it certainly lacked Carnell's sense of
balance, but its contribution to sf in the 1960s was considerable-the
paths beaten by the NW writers are now much more generally in

use.Garnett's annualNW anthology of the 1990s could not find a secure
market niche, though the contents were impressive, featuring good stories
by, among others, Storm CONSTANTINE, Paul Di Filippo, Ian MCDONALD, Kim
NEWMAN and Moorcock himself, and also an annual round-up of the year's sf
by John CLUTE. Although Garnett sensibly avoided nostalgia for the
1960s/1970s, the enterprise seems to have been doomed anyway.A US edition
of NW, with Hans Stefan SANTESSON credited as editor, ran for 5 issues
Mar-July 1960, selected mainly from the 1959 NW with some stories from
other sources. Some unsold issues of the Roberts ?
in twos and threes and sold under the title SF REPRISE, these being SF
Reprise 1 (anth 1966) containing #144/#145; SF Reprise 2 (anth 1966)
containing #149/#150; and SF Reprise 5 (anth 1967) containing
#149-#151.There were many derived anthologies. Carnell ed The Best From
New Worlds Science Fiction (anth 1955), and his Lambda 1 and Other Stories
(anth 1964; UK and US contents vary) was also selected from NW. Moorcock
ed The Best of New Worlds (anth 1965), Best S.F. Stories from New Worlds
(anth 1967), Best Stories from New Worlds 2 (anth 1968; vt Best S.F.
Stories from New Worlds 2 US), Best S.F. Stories from New Worlds 3 (anth
1968), Best S.F. Stories from New Worlds 4 (anth 1969), Best S.F. Stories
from New Worlds 5 (anth 1969), Best S.F. Stories from New Worlds 6 (anth
1970), Best S.F. Stories from New Worlds 7 (anth 1971) and Best S.F.
Stories from New Worlds 8 (anth 1974), as well as the retrospective New
Worlds: An Anthology (anth 1983). These series anthologies also sometimes
used stories from SCIENCE FANTASY Impulse. The first 6 of the 8 Best S.F.
Stories from New Worlds vols were also published in the USA. [BS/PN]See
also: ENTROPY; TABOOS.
NEW WORLDS QUARTERLY
NEW WORLDS.
NEW WRITINGS IN SF
ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series begun 1964 by John CARNELL after he
relinquished the editorship of NEW WORLDS and SCIENCE FANTASY; it was
published by Dennis Dobson to #20, then by Sidgwick ?
paperback editions (all published by Corgi) sometimes preceded hardcover
publication, and in the case of #30, the last in the series, there was no
hardcover. NWISF carried on the tradition of Carnell's New Worlds:
predominantly middle-of-the-road sf, leavened with occasional more
adventurous pieces and saved from staleness by his willingness to publish
new writers. Regular contributors included not only Colin KAPP (chiefly
with his Unorthodox Engineers series), Douglas R. MASON (under his own
name and as John Rankine), John Rackham (J.T. PHILLIFENT) and James WHITE
(including stories in his Sector General series), but also Keith ROBERTS,
while M. John HARRISON and Christopher PRIEST both published early short
stories in its pages. NWISF was intended to be a quarterly, but later its
appearances became erratic. New Writings in SF 1 (anth 1964) was followed
by #2 (anth 1964), #3 (anth 1965), #4 (anth 1965), #5 (anth 1965), #6
(anth 1965), #7 (anth 1966), #8 (anth 1966), #9 (anth 1966), #10 (anth
1967), #11 (anth 1967), #12 (anth 1968), #13 (anth 1968), #14 (anth 1969),
#15 (anth 1969), #16 (anth 1970), #17 (anth 1970), #18 (anth 1971), #19
(anth 1971), #20 (anth 1972) and #21 (anth 1972), this last being

published after Carnell's death. 9 vols of this series were published in
the USA by BANTAM BOOKS 1966-72, with some difference in contents after
the first 6: the US #7 drew from the UK #7, #8 and #9; US #8 drew from UK
#10, #11 and #12; US #9 drew from UK #12, #13, #14 and #15.The series
remained alive after Carnell's death, its editorship being taken over by
Kenneth BULMER from #22 (anth 1973). This brought about no substantial
change in policy, although one feature of Bulmer's NWISF was Brian W.
ALDISS's Enigmas series. New authors to debut in the later issues included
David LANGFORD, Charles Partington ( NEW WORLDS; SOMETHING ELSE) and
Cherry WILDER, and early stories by Robert P. HOLDSTOCK and Ian WATSON
also appeared around this time. Bulmer edited #23 (anth 1973), #24 (anth
1974), #25 (anth 1975), #26 (anth 1975), #27 (anth 1976), #28 (anth 1976),
#29 (anth 1976) and #30 (anth 1978). At this point the market for
ANTHOLOGIES was looking even gloomier than usual in the UK, and the series
ended.Seldom groundbreaking but always reliable, NWISF did not have any
impact comparable to the major original-anthology series in the US (e.g.,
ORBIT, UNIVERSE), which mostly began somewhat later. Associated
anthologies are The Best from New Writings in SF: First Selection (anth
1971) ed Carnell and 3 omnibus volumes: New Writings in SF: Special 1
(anth 1975), containing #21 and #23; #2 (anth 1978), containing #26 and
#29; and #3 (anth 1978), containing #27 and #28. [MJE/PN]
NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION
US critical magazine, published Dragon Press, Pleasantville, New York; ed
(in 1995) by Kathryn CRAMER, L.W. CURREY, Samuel R. DELANY, David G.
HARTWELL, Robert J. Killheffer, Gordon Van Gelder and Donald G. Keller;
current; monthly, beginning with the trial issue (#0) Aug 1988 and #1 Sep
1988. It had reached #79 by Mar 1995. Too highbrow and professional - many
of its staff being sf/fantasy writers and publishers - to be called a
FANZINE, too informal to be called an academic journal, NYROSF is a
somewhat unusual critical SEMIPROZINE. It publishes general articles of
remarkably varying quality on sf, as well as some of the best long reviews
in the field. Its tone is far from homogeneous; it moves disconcertingly
(and fast) from chatty to pompous, and there is something to irritate
everyone. But, as one might expect from the very well informed staff
producing its 24 large-format pages a month with astonishing regularity,
it is also irreplaceable. Certainly its coverage of GENRE SF and FANTASY
is both wider and deeper than anything in the academic journals with the
possible exception of FOUNDATION: THE REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION. [PN]
NEW ZEALAND
One of the last lands discovered by Europeans, New Zealand was a
convenient setting for moral and UTOPIAN tales. The anonymous Travels of
Hildebrand Bowman, by Himself (1778 UK) anticipates Samuel BUTLER's
satirical Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (1901). Utopian fiction by
New Zealanders includes Anno Domini 2000, or Woman's Destiny (1889 UK) by
the NZ Premier Sir Julius VOGEL, a dreary novel of a UK/US empire formed
through dynastic marriage, and Godfrey SWEVEN's difficult novel sequence
Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles (1901 US) and Limanora: The Island of
Progress (1903 US), the latter described by E.F. BLEILER as "probably the
greatest of all early utopian novels". Some 19th-century works, mostly

published in England, are extrapolated from a remark of Lord Macaulay
(1800-1859) in Critical and Historical Essays (coll 1843): ". . . when
some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude,
take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St
Paul's." The UK writer Francis Carr's Archimago (1864), partly set in a
ruined London of 1964, is an example.A more popular taste is seen in the
end-of-the-century boom in romance. The Great Romance (1881) by "The
Inhabitant" is NZ's first space story. The heroes in Ajor's The Secret of
Mt Cook (1894) revive frozen people; in Hedged with Divinities (1895) by
Edward Tregear (1846-1931) all men die; the subject of The Elixir of Life
(1907 UK) by William Satchell (1860-1942) is self-evident.A puritan
realist mode dominates NZ MAINSTREAM fiction and criticism, yet writers
within the tradition often use sf and fantasy tropes. Robyn Hyde's
Wednesday's Children (1937 UK) is fantasy; Maurice GEE has written
fantasies for children; M.K. JOSEPH wrote the speculative The Hole in the
Zero (1967 UK) and The Time of Achamoth (1977); Janet FRAME's metafictions
Scented Garden for the Blind (1963) and Living in the Maniototo (1979 US)
are fantastic; and the dystopian Smith's Dream (1971) - filmed as Sleeping
Dogs (see below) - by C.K. STEAD tells of a future military dictatorship.
Current writers such as Russell Haley, Marilyn Duckworth (1935- ) and
Rachel McAlpine (1940- ) are adept at using sf devices for mainstream
audiences.Works marketed as sf include Adrian Geddes's The Rim of Eternity
(1964), in which aliens invade, Colin GIBSON's tale of nuclear winter, The
Pepper Leaf (1971 UK), and the novels of Hugh COOK, which are fantasy.
Peter Hooper's fantasies and Craig HARRISON's thrillers have escaped the
genre label. Phillip MANN and Cherry WILDER (who now lives in Germany) are
the best-known contemporary NZ sf writers, along with Sandi HALL. NZ sf in
the CINEMA started with the now lost A Message from Mars (1909), based on
Richard Ganthony's popular 1899 UK stage play, which he and Lester LURGAN
novelized (1912), the play itself being published much later (1924). There
was no further NZ sf film until the successful Sleeping Dogs (1977) dir
Roger Donaldson, a NEAR-FUTURE political thriller envisaging a
totalitarian government. The industry flourished from this time until the
mid-1980s with government subsidies, its sf titles including the routine,
post- HOLOCAUST Battletruck (1982), the violent, lunatic
brain-surgeon-and-his-experimental-subjects story Death Warmed Up (1984),
the sf thriller DEAD KIDS (1981; vt Strange Behavior) and The QUIET EARTH
(1985); then subsidies were withdrawn. Subsequent films, such as the
deliberately disgusting BAD TASTE (1987) and the TIME-TRAVEL fantasy The
Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988), plus tv shows such as Space Knights
(1988), seem to show that, in the visual media, NZ sf and fantasy must
cross genre boundaries if they are to be viable. [MM]
NEXUS
US COMIC-book series (1981-91), 80 issues, published first by Capital
Comics and later by First Comics, created by writer Mike Baron and artist
Steve Rude. Set in the 25th century, when Earth is the political hub of
the interstellar society known as the Cohesive Web and humanity just one
of many intelligent races, the comic had as title character a superpowered
agent of vengeance, driven to kill tyrants and criminals by targeting them
with dreams. N explored the moral ambiguity of execution and the often

logical motivations behind the atrocities of those killed by the hero; but
it also had a lighter side, much humour deriving from Nexus's problems in
dealing with his homeworld, Ylum. N began with 3 black-and-white issues,
changed to colour with #4, was cancelled by Capital with #6 and picked up
by First Comics from #7 a year later, in 1985. Declining sales - partly
due to long absences by Rude and the poor reception given to the fill-in
artists - led to N's demise in 1991. First Comics have published reprints
of #1-#26; spin-offs have been Nexus Legends (1989-91; 4 issues) and the
one-shot Nexus Files. [RH]
NEY, FERENC
[r] HUNGARY.
NICHOLLS, PETER (DOUGLAS)
(1939- ) Australian writer and editor, critic and historian of sf,
resident in the UK 1970-88, co-editor of this volume. He became first
Administrator of the SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION 1971-7, and edited its
journal FOUNDATION: THE REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION 1974-8, part of this
work being republished as Foundation Numbers 1-8: March 1972-March 1975
(anth 1978). PN ed Science Fiction at Large (anth 1976; vt Explorations of
the Marvellous 1978), collecting essays written for a 1975 sf symposium by
Philip K. DICK, Thomas M. DISCH, Alan GARNER, Ursula K. LE GUIN, himself
and others. His major work, of which he was General Editor and John CLUTE
Associate Editor, has been The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1979); vt
The Science Fiction Encyclopedia US; rev 1993 with Clute and PN
co-editors), for which he won the first Non-Fiction HUGO (1980), also
winning a PILGRIM AWARD in that year for services to sf scholarship. The
Science in Science Fiction (1983), ed PN and written with David LANGFORD
and Brian M. STABLEFORD, is a study of sf's scientific content. Fantastic
Cinema (1984; vt The World of Fantastic Films 1984 US), PN's first solo
book, is a critical history of sf, horror and fantasy films; it was
shortlisted for the British Film Institute Award for Best Film Book. PN
has also worked as an academic in English literature (1962-8, 1971-7),
scripted tv documentaries, been Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-70)
in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-3), often broadcast film
and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and published much sf criticism generally waspish but unsnobbish - in newspapers and magazines. [PN]See
also: BIBLIOGRAPHIES; CINEMA; COLLECTIONS; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS
ABOUT SF; DEFINITIONS OF SF; PROTO SCIENCE FICTION; SF IN THE CLASSROOM;
SENSE OF WONDER.
NICHOLS, LEIGH
Dean R. KOONTZ.
NICHOLS, ROBERT (MALISE BOWYER)
(1893-1944) UK poet and playwright whose lyrical talent did not survive
the end of WWI; he wrote plays and verse epics thereafter. The Smile of
the Sphinx (1920 chap), a fantasy, was later revised and assembled in
Romances of Idea, Volume One: Fantastica: Being the Smile of the Sphinx
and Other Tales of Imagination (coll 1923). The largest item in that
volume is the book-length "Golgotha ?
world war and assaulting capitalist dreams of the Earthly paradise; the

Wandering Jew (who is also a defiant Antichrist) appears and the Messiah
is recrucified (off-stage). No second volume of the "Romances" appeared.
Wings Over Europe: A Dramatic Extravaganza on a Pressing Theme (1929 US)
with Maurice Browne (1881-1955), a play, features the son of a UK prime
minister who gains the secret of atomic energy but is killed in an
accident before he can do the harm he intends. [JC]Other work: Under the
Yew (1928 chap), a marginal fantasy.
NICHOLSON, J.S.
[r] ANONYMOUS SF AUTHORS.
NICK CARTER
Nick CARTER.
NICOLSON, [Sir] HAROLD (GEORGE)
(1886-1968) UK diplomat, MP and writer, married to V. SACKVILLE-WEST,
knighted in 1953. His sf novel Public Faces (1932), set in 1939, describes
the international conflicts aroused through the UK knowing how to make
atomic bombs, developing a ballistic missile, destroying part of Florida
in error, and insisting on world nuclear disarmament. [JC]See also: END OF
THE WORLD; NUCLEAR POWER; POLITICS; WEAPONS.
NICOLSON, MARJORIE HOPE
(1894-1981) US scholar and university professor, with a PhD from Yale.
Her useful pioneering study in PROTO SCIENCE FICTION was Voyages to the
Moon (1949) - subtitled "Discourse on Voyages to the Moon, the Sun, the
Planets and Other Worlds generally, written by divers authors from the
earliest times to the time of the First Balloon Ascensions made during the
years 1783-84 with remarks on their sources and an epilogue about a few
selected later works of this kind; to which is appended a Bibliography of
133 works up to the year 1784 with an added listing of 58 books and
articles dealing with the theme itself and with related sciences". The
works dealt with are primarily English. MHN was the second winner of the
PILGRIM AWARD, in 1971. [PN]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT
SF; MOON.
NIEBO ZOWIET
Roger CORMAN; PLANETA BUR.
NIEKAS
US FANZINE (1962-current) ed from New Hampshire by Ed Meskys alone for
the first 5 issues, when it was a small, personal fanzine, then with
Felice Rolfe and Anne Chatland from #6, Chatland dropping out after #8.
Under Meskys and Rolfe, N established itself as a large and variegated
magazine containing a mixture of articles, but with particular emphasis on
FANTASY. Al Halevy's "Glossary of Middle Earth" was first published in N.
N ceased publication with #20 in 1968, then was revived with #21 in 1977.
Currently Meskys, now blind, is listed as editor-in-chief and Mike Bastraw
as editor and designer.Contributors to N have included Piers ANTHONY,
Isaac ASIMOV, Anthony BOUCHER, Algis BUDRYS, Avram DAVIDSON, Philip K.
DICK, Raymond Z. GALLUN, Jack GAUGHAN, Harry HARRISON, Sam MOSKOWITZ,
Andre NORTON, Alexei PANSHIN, Jerry POURNELLE, Donald A. WOLLHEIM and
Roger ZELAZNY. N won the HUGO for Best Fanzine in 1967. [PR/RH]

NIELSEN, NIELS E.
[r] DENMARK.
NIGHBERT, DAVID F(RANKLIN)
(1948- ) US writer who began publishing sf with his Stryker
sequence-Timelapse (1988) and Clouds of Magellan (1991)-which engages its
thrillerish protagonist first in a complicated TIME-PARADOX tale whose
villain tricks him into falling in love with his own mother, and second in
a traditional search for the long-gone ALIEN "Builders" responsible for an
enormous artifact ( BIG DUMB OBJECTS) called The Wheel. Strikezone (1989),
an associational thriller, again shows DFN's competence but also a
disturbing tendency to rifle his genres for material without showing much
concern for establishing a bailiwick of his own. [JC]
NIGHT CALLER, THE
(vt Blood Beast from Outer Space) Film (1965). Armitage Films. Dir John
Gilling, starring John Saxon, Maurice Denham, Patricia Haines, Alfred
Burke. Screenplay Jim O'Connolly, from The Night Callers (1960) by Frank
R. CRISP. 84 mins. B/w.Very-low-budget UK film, made with some genuine
style by Gilling, who had previously made good horror films for Hammer.
However, the story - an ALIEN aims to provide women (whom he finds by
advertising for models) for genetic experiments back home on Ganymede - is
pure pulp. The alien is tracked down by two SCIENTISTS (he strangles the
female one, well played by Haines) who have come across his energy
transmitter. The film should not be confused, under its US title, with the
US NIGHT OF THE BLOOD BEAST (1958) or the British The Blood Beast Terror
(1967). [PN]
NIGHT GALLERY
ROD SERLING'S NIGHT GALLERY.
NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT
(vt Island of the Burning Damned) Film (1967). Planet. Dir Terence
Fisher, starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Patrick Allen, Sarah
Lawson, Jane Merrow. Screenplay Ronald Liles, Pip Baker, Jane Baker, based
on The Night of the Big Heat (1959) by John LYMINGTON. 97 mins, cut to 94
mins. Colour.An island off the UK coast experiences a freak heatwave,
during which there are a number of mysterious killings involving fire. The
culprits turn out to be ALIENS who resemble giant fried eggs and are
attracted to any source of heat. At the climax the few survivors are saved
when a thunderstorm destroys the aliens: water, it seems, dissolves them.
Lymington's pulp novel was certainly not rational sf, but it built up an
atmosphere of claustrophobic tension which the film lacks. [JB]
NIGHT OF THE BLOOD BEAST
Film (1958). Balboa/AIP. Dir Bernard Kowalski, starring Michael Emmet,
Angela Greene, John Baer. Screenplay Martin Varno, based on a story by
Gene Corman. 65 mins. B/w.In this typically cheap 1950s Corman production
(the executive producer was Roger CORMAN; his brother Gene produced it
from his own story), a rocket pilot has cells implanted in his body by a
deeply unconvincing-looking ALIEN who returns to Earth with him. Embryos
grow inside him, making him the first (but not the last) effectively
pregnant movie astronaut. Several plot twists suggest an attempt to cash

in on the popularity of The QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955). [JB/PN]
NIGHT OF THE COMET
Film (1984). Atlantic 9000/Film Development Fund. Dir Thom Eberhardt,
starring Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Robert Beltran, Mary
Woronov. Screenplay Eberhardt. 100 mins cut to 95 mins for UK release.
Colour.This likable exploitation movie, witty throughout, opens with the
light from a comet (an idea stolen from John WYNDHAM's Day of the Triffids
[1951]) destroying almost everybody by turning them into red dust or, in
less severe cases, cannibal zombies. Two spunky teenage girls survive,
team up with a truck driver, raid department stores for fashionable
clothes, destroy the evil government agency that wants to kill them for
serum, do disco dances and shoot submachine guns. As one might expect from
the producers of Valley Girl (1984), the women are shown as self-reliant,
intelligent, unmotivated and vain. [PN]
NIGHT OF THE LEPUS
Film (1972). Lyles/MGM. Dir William F. Claxton, starring Stuart Whitman,
Janet Leigh, Rory Calhoun, DeForest Kelley. Screenplay Don Holliday, Gene
R. Kearney, based on The Year of the Angry Rabbit (1964) by Russell
BRADDON. 88 mins. Colour.Braddon's satirical novel was set in Australia,
but the film dropped the SATIRE and switched the setting to Arizona. A
test rabbit full of experimental hormones breaks loose and breeds with
local rabbits. Suddenly hordes of gigantic carnivorous rabbits are
attacking people, eating horses and demolishing houses. The film is
endearing for its unintentional humour, enhanced by the commendably
serious if wooden performances of all concerned, rabbits included.
[JB/PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES.
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
1. Film (1968). Image 10 Productions/Walter Reade-Continental. Dir George
A. ROMERO, starring Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea, Karl Hardman, Keith Wayne.
Screenplay John A. Russo. 96 mins, cut to 90 mins. B/w.This unrelenting
and downbeat HORROR film, Romero's astonishing debut, tells of a horde of
walking, cannibalistic corpses who lay siege to an isolated house. Their
revival is explained by "space radiation" brought to Earth on an aborted
rocket launch, but the absurdity of this barely detracts from the
concentrated Gothic PARANOIA of the action, whose intensity won the film a
cult following, especially from those who saw the savagery - and
helplessness - of both ordinary people and zombies (whose bite infects the
victim with zombiism) as symbolic of the horrors of the Vietnam War. NOTLD
was independently financed and made during weekends by a small group based
in Pittsburgh. The sequels, making up a Living Dead trilogy, are DAWN OF
THE DEAD (1978) and DAY OF THE DEAD (1985).2. Film (1990). 21st
Century/George Romero/Menahem Golan/Columbia. Dir Tom Savini, starring
Tony Todd, Patricia Tallman, Tom Towles, McKee Anderson, William Butler,
Katie Finneran. Screenplay George ROMERO, based on the 1968 screenplay by
Romero and Russo. 89 mins. Colour.It was a risky and possibly cynical
undertaking to remake, in colour, the 1968 b/w classic. However, while the
original remains the stronger, this was an accomplished feature-film debut
for Savini, best known for his ghoulish special make-up on Romero's zombie
movies. Generally the story-line of the original is followed closely, but

there is a greater emphasis on the female character, Barbara (Tallman),
who does not succumb so quickly to frozen fear as did her original. The
1968 film made a virtue of its ramshackle production values, with a cinema
verite style resulting from a shoestring budget; the greater smoothness of
the remake makes it strangely less compelling - more obviously a movie.
[PN/JB]See also: CINEMA; MONSTER MOVIES; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
NIGHT OF THE SILICATES
ISLAND OF TERROR.
NIGHT SHADOWS
MUTANT.
NIGHT STALKER, THE
KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER.
NIGHT STRANGLER, THE
KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER.
NIGHT THAT PANICKED AMERICA, THE
Made-for-tv film (1975). ABC TV. Dir Joseph Sargent, starring Vic Morrow,
Cliff De Young, Michael Constantine, Paul Shenar. Screenplay Nicholas
Meyer, Anthony Wilson, based partly on the text of the original 1938 radio
play WAR OF THE WORLDS by Howard Koch. 100 mins, cut to 78 mins.
Colour.The film recreates the 1938 Orson Welles broadcast of an updated
version of H.G. WELLS's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898) which, due to its
news-bulletin format, caused many US citizens to believe that a Martian
invasion was actually taking place. When the film concentrates on events
inside the broadcast studio it is fascinating, conjuring up a realistic
picture of work in 1930s US RADIO; but when it shows the resulting panic
it degenerates into a routine DISASTER movie with hackneyed characters
reacting in predictable ways. [JB]
NIHIL
[s] P. Schuyler MILLER.
NI KUANG
[r] CHINESE SF.
NILSON, PETER
[r] SCANDINAVIA.
1984
Film (1955). Holiday Film Productions. Dir Michael Anderson, starring
Edmond O'Brien, Michael Redgrave, Jan Sterling, Donald Pleasence.
Screenplay William P. Templeton, Ralph Bettinson, based on NINETEEN
EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) by George ORWELL. 91 mins. B/w.After the success of a
1954 BBC TV production of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, scripted by Nigel KNEALE
and starring Peter Cushing (the second - live - performance won the
biggest UK tv audience since the Queen's coronation) it was inevitable
that a film would follow. But, for all its technical limitations, the BBC
adaptation was superior to the lifeless film, which starred a badly
miscast O'Brien as Winston Smith; Anderson has a lame track record with sf
( LOGAN'S RUN). This version of the celebrated totalitarian nightmare

focuses on the love affair between Smith and Julia, and leaves Orwell's
grim SATIRE foggy and simplified. Two endings were shot, one for the USA
and one for the UK. The former followed the book, with Winston and his
lover successfully brainwashed and now devoted supporters of Big Brother;
the UK version had them overcoming their conditioning, defiantly dying in
a hail of bullets, and incidentally vitiating Orwell's theme.For the 1984
remake NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. [JB/PN]
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
Film (1984). Umbrella-Rosenblum/Virgin Cinema Films. Dir Michael Radford,
starring John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton, Cyril Cusack.
Screenplay Radford, Jonathan Gems, based on NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) by
George ORWELL. 110 mins. Colour.This second film version ( 1984 for the
first) is better acted and more intelligent than its predecessor, but
still stresses the romantic interest, substituting an orthodoxly liberal
lovers-against-the-system sadness for Orwell's sheer savagery and irony.
It was eight weeks into shooting before Burton was cast as the treacherous
O'Brien, Smith's torturer, and he seems a little cut off from the rest of
the film. [PN]
1990
UK tv serial (1977-8). BBC TV. Prod Prudence Fitzgerald. Regular cast
included Edward Woodward, Barbara Kellerman, Robert Lang, Tony Doyle, Lisa
Harrow. Most episodes written Wilfred Greatorex (1921- ), who devised the
series, or Edmund Ward. 16 55min episodes. Colour.Reflecting the fears of
the middle classes in the 1970s, this serial, set in a socialist UK of
1990, warns of what could happen if the welfare state continued in its
present direction. The country is run by the PCD, an all-powerful
bureaucracy that incorporates the trade-union movement within its
machinery; the only people free of its control are a select elite
possessing Privilege Cards. The story concerns the efforts of a lone
journalist (Woodward) to outwit the system in such ways as helping people
to escape to the USA, still a bastion of freedom. 1990's political
statement, which Orwell made much more powerfully in NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
(1949), plays second fiddle to the thriller elements. The novelization by
Maureen Gregson (with Greatorex also credited) is 1990 * (1977). [JB]
1990: BRONX WARRIORS
1990: I GUERRIERI DEL BRONX.
1990: I GUERRIERI DEL BRONX
(vt Bronx Warriors; vt 1990: Bronx Warriors) Film (1982). Deaf Film
International. Dir Enzo G. Castellari, starring Mark Gregory, Vic Morrow,
Chris Connelly, Stefania Girolami, Fred Williamson. Screenplay Castellari,
Dardano Sacchetti, Elisa Livia Briganti. 84 mins. Colour.Inspired by
Walter Hill's The Warriors (1979) and John CARPENTER's ESCAPE FROM NEW
YORK (1981), this Italian film is set in a future-Hell New York overrun by
street gangs, with a psychotic law-enforcer (Morrow) trying to rescue a
corporate princess (Girolami) from a biker hero named Trash (Gregory).
Essentially silly, it has three exploitation veterans (Morrow, Connelly,
Williamson) to make up for its pouting hero, and throws in an array of
intriguing minor characters - a sadomasochist Morticia-Addams figure, a

tap-dancing gang of killer Broadway chorines, subway troglodytes - and
some pleasantly melodramatic excesses. Its sequel is Fuga dal Bronx (1983;
vt Bronx Warriors 2), and Castellari also made a similar post- HOLOCAUST
actioner, inspired by MAD MAX 2 (1981), I nuovi barbari (1983; vt The New
Barbarians; vt Warriors of the Wasteland). The slew of similar Italian
cheapies included L'ultimo guerriero (1983; vt The Final Executioner),
Bronx lotta finale (1984; vt Endgame) and Il guerriero del mondo perduto
(1984; vt Warrior of the Lost World). [KN]
NIPPON CHINBOTSU
(vt The Submersion of Japan; vt Tidal Wave US) Film (1973). Dir Shiro
Moritani, starring Keiju Kobayashi, Hiroshi Fujioka, Tetsuro Tamba, Ayumi
Ishida. Screenplay Shinobu Hashimoto, based on Nippon Chinbotsu (1973; cut
trans as Japan Sinks 1976) by Sakyo KOMATSU. 140 mins, cut to 110 mins,
then to 81 mins. Colour.This film is more sophisticated than the usual
Japanese DISASTER or MONSTER MOVIE, and involves natural rather than
fantastic forces. Changes within the Earth's core result in the chain of
islands which make up Japan sinking beneath the ocean over a period of two
years. Other countries are not eager to accept millions of homeless
Japanese citizens, although Australia offers its Northern Territory as a
new Japanese homeland. The film has been praised for the elegiac feeling
aroused by the dying of Japan and her culture, but not especially for its
special effects (by Teruyoshi Nakano), which though spectacular are less
than wholly convincing.Tidal Wave is the title of the tawdry 1974 version
released to universal execration by Roger CORMAN's New World company. It
was cut to 81 mins and little more than the special effects remains; it
includes specially shot US footage written and directed by Andrew Meyer
and starring Lorne Greene and Rhonda Leigh Hopkins. [JB/PN]
NISBET, HUGH A.
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
NISBET, HUME
(1849-1921) Scottish writer and illustrator, in England or Australia from
1865, author of at least 45 novels, some of which are fantasy or sf,
beginning with The "Jolly Roger" (1892), which features a supernatural
wind and a hidden pirate island. In Valdmer the Viking: A Romance of the
Eleventh Century by Sea and Land (1893) Vikings find a technologically
superior LOST WORLD in the Arctic north of North America. The Great
Secret: A Tale of Tomorrow (1895), like much of HN's work, mixes genres,
here combining posthumous spirits and a this-worldly undersea excursion to
ATLANTIS. The Empire Builders (1900) sets its lost world in Africa.
[JC]Other works: The Haunted Station, and Other Stories (coll 1893);
Stories Weird and Wonderful (coll 1900); A Crafty Foe (1901); A Colonial
King (1905).
NIVEN, LARRY
Working name of US writer Laurence van Cott Niven (1938- ). He was born
in California, where he set many of his stories, and gained a BA in
mathematics from Washburn University, Kansas. From his first publication,
"The Coldest Place" for If in 1964, he set his mark on the US sf field,
winning four short-fiction HUGOS, and both Hugo and NEBULA in 1971 for

RINGWORLD (1970), a capstone title in his seminal Tales of Known Space
sequence, which he began with "The Coldest Place" and has added to ever
since. In the novels and stories of this sequence, and in some of his
other work, he was seen for some time as HARD SF's last best hope; and
there can be no doubt that hard-sf writers dominant in the 1980s, like
Greg BEAR, and some of those reaching for eminence in the 1990s, like Paul
J. MCAULEY and Roger MacBride ALLEN, owe much to the scope of LN's
inventiveness, the sense he conveys of technological ingenuity as being
ultimately beneficial, and his cognitive exuberance.The Tales of Known
Space, a title LN himself selected for the sequence, is a wide-ranging,
complex, unusually well integrated future HISTORY which, within an
essentially optimistic and technophilic frame, provides an explanatory
structure for the expansion of humanity into space, one notable from the
first for the complexity of the Universe into which it introduces the
burgeoning human race. ALIEN races - not normally found in the first
generation of future histories, those created in ASF under the influence
of the homocentric John W. CAMPBELL Jr - have dominated Known Space for
eons, beginning with the Thrintun, extinct a billion years ago with the
exception of one deadly Thrint held in a stasis field (one of LN's
numerous terminological coups) and released with deadly effect in his
first novel, World of Ptavvs (1966). Millions of years closer to the
present, humanity's ancestors, the Pak, spread their seed through the
local arm of the Galaxy. Protectors are the "adult" form of Homo sapiens,
the yam necessary to transform humans into full-grown Paks not being
available on Earth; the Pak protagonist of Protector (1967 Gal as "The
Adults"; exp 1973), set in human times, has travelled from afar at
terribly slow sublight speeds to take care of us and protect us against
other Protectors who find our slightly evolved species loathsome. The
novel spans many years; its complex, casually-alluded-to background
demonstrates the value of a coherent sequence in buttressing SPACE-OPERA
conventions, though at the same time, as LN himself once admitted, the
Universe-changing plot of Protector made it difficult to maintain internal
consistency within Known Space stories set after the Pak incursion. Less
dangerously, A Gift From Earth (1968) sticks to less transformative
material, being set on a planet colonized from Earth whose inhabitants,
descended from the ship's lowly passengers, rebel against the ruling caste
descended from its crew; the story is interfused with arguments for
personal and entrepreneurial liberty whose connection, as in much US sf,
is taken as axiomatic. Centuries of relative peace follow, until the start
of the Man-Kzin Wars, treated by LN as a sort of sideshow; the relevant
stories were delegated mainly to others in four SHARED-WORLD anthologies,
The Man-Kzin Wars * (anth 1988), The Man-Kzin Wars II * (anth 1989), III *
(anth 1990), IV * (anth 1991), V (anth 1992) and VI (anth 1994). Finally,
the tales and novels of Known Space culminated in RINGWORLD and its
immediate sequel Ringworld Engineers (1979), which feature the alien
Puppeteers, who are fleeing the explosion at the Galaxy's core which will
within some millennia make space uninhabitable, and who enlist human aid
to explore the eponymous BIG DUMB OBJECT - a million miles wide, 600
million miles around - which circles a distant star. This ring, created by
Pak ancestors, houses much life and serves as a final home for Teela
Brown, whose genetically programmed good luck is the culmination of a long

and secret Puppeteer breeding programme; the inevitability of her good
fortune might have significantly reduced the chance of LN's writing any
successful Known Space stories set after her maturity, which is perhaps
why she is killed off in the sequel.In the interstices of this joyfully
complicated galactic structure, humanity enters space, solves problems in
BIOLOGY and GENETIC ENGINEERING, benefits from local TELEPORTATION and the
discovery of a FASTER-THAN-LIGHT hyperdrive for interstellar travel, copes
with CORPSICLES and organlegging and a myriad other new challenges, and by
the beginning of the fourth millennium has reached a mature plateau.
Titles in which Known Space activities are dramatized include: NEUTRON
STAR (coll 1968); The Shape of Space (coll 1969), much of which is
re-assembled in Convergent Series (coll 1979); All the Myriad Ways (coll
1971); Inconstant Moon (coll 1973 UK; cut 1974), which was assembled from
The Shape of Space and All the Myriad Ways; Tales of Known Space: The
Universe of Larry Niven (coll 1975), which includes explanatory charts;
and The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton (coll of linked stories 1976) and its
immediate sequel The Patchwork Girl (1980); and Crashlander (coll
1994).Most of LN's first decade as a writer was occupied with Known Space,
with the exception of the tales assembled in The Flight of the Horse (coll
1973)-including the 5 stories of the Svetz series of TIME-PARADOX comedies
- A Hole in Space (coll 1974) and, with David GERROLD, The Flying
Sorcerers (1971), a tale of a low-tech people who think that high
technology is MAGIC. His next - and commercially his most successful move
- was to collaborate with Jerry POURNELLE on THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE (1974),
a giant, spectacular SPACE-OPERA epic with all the trappings-interstellar
shenanigans, aliens with unhealthy proclivities they must keep hidden,
galactic aristocracies, intricate solutions to hard-sf problems . . . The
book is essentially a development of Pournelle's CoDominium series, and
may fruitfully be read in that context. Several critics have taken the
book to task for what they regard as its human chauvinism, the discrepancy
between its imaginative plot and its old-fashioned characterization, and
its conservative political stance; but the combination of Pournelle's
ability to shape novel-length plots (an ability his partner has always
lacked) and LN's brilliant conceptual knack make for an enticing book. The
sequel, The Gripping Hand (1993; vt The Moat Around Murcheson's Eye 1993
UK), lacks the drive of the original, concentrating on heavy-handed
spacewar shenanigans which have been fatally overtaken by events, as the
problem of the Moties's breeding pattern is solved before any of the
battles actually occur.Further collaborations with Pournelle ensued.
Inferno (1975) reworks DANTE ALIGHIERI's Inferno, an act notable for its
apparently conscious vulgarity, interesting in its theological explanation
of evil - that God's "sadism" is in fact designed to encourage self-help
among the damned - and amusing in its placing of anti- NUCLEAR-POWER
propagandists in Hell. Lucifer's Hammer (1977) is a long, ambitious
DISASTER novel which sophisticatedly marries sf techniques with the
bestseller idiom familiar from the many disaster films of the early 1970s.
In Oath of Fealty (1981) a Los Angeles arcology - without the aid of an
ineffective, bureaucratic government - defends its wealthy inhabitants
from ECOLOGY freaks and terrorists. The internal government of this
arcology being a conveniently infallible hierarchy culminating in one
brilliant man in constant communication with a great COMPUTER, no

significant dissent is necessary, or heard. Footfall (1985), about an
alien INVASION of Earth, became an example of RECURSIVE SF through its
enlisting of a readily identifiable group of sf writers to brainstorm
solutions to the threat from space. The Legacy of Heorot (1987 UK), with
Pournelle and Steven BARNES, replays the Beowulf saga on a colony planet:
the natives of the planet have the unenviable role of the dragon. Fallen
Angels (1991), with Pournelle and Michael FLYNN - in which the US
Government betrays its own astronauts - once again treats
environmentalists as villains in a planetary drama of the NEAR FUTURE.LN
has increasingly made use of collaborators; in fact, in later years he has
written only 4 solo novels outside the Known Space canon: A World Out of
Time (fixup 1976), a complexly contemplative look through one
protagonist's eyes at millions of years of human history; The Magic Goes
Away (1977), a fantasy in which MAGIC is treated as a non-renewable
resource; and The Integral Trees (1984) and its immediate sequel The Smoke
Ring (1987), both linked to A World Out of Time. The Dream Park sequence Dream Park (1981), The Barsoom Project (1989) and Dream Park: The Voodoo
Game (1991 UK; vt The California Voodoo Game 1992 US), all with Barnes is set in a GAME-WORLD environment (see also VIRTUAL REALITY) in the 21st
century, with the eponymous corporation involved in running complex
role-playing games as well as enterprises in the real world and on Mars.
Other collaborations include The Descent of Anansi (1982) and Achilles'
Choice (1991), both with Barnes. LN's late collections - likeNiven's Laws
(coll 1984), Limits (coll 1985), N-Space (coll 1990), Playgrounds of the
Mind (coll 1991) and Bridging the Galaxies (coll 1993) - have tended
increasingly to re-sort earlier material. It cannot be denied that the
fresh inventive gaiety characteristic of LN's early work has not survived
the passing of the years, nor that the political agendas ( POLITICS)
exposed in the collaborations have become more rancorous over the same
period. He will perhaps be best remembered for the Tales of Known Space,
the most energetic future history ever written, for his bright and
profligate technophilia, for his astonishingly well conceived aliens, and
for his early joy. [JC]Other works: The Time of the Warlock (coll 1984),
fantasies; The Magic May Return * (anth 1981) and More Magic * (anth
1984), shared-world successor anthologies to The Magic Goes Away.About the
author: The Many Worlds of Larry Niven (last rev 1989 chap) by Chris
DRUMM.See also: ASTEROIDS; BLACK HOLES; CITIES; CLICHEES; CLUB STORY;
COMICS; COMMUNICATIONS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; CRYONICS; DC COMICS;
DEL REY
BOOKS; END OF THE WORLD; ESCHATOLOGY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GALAXY
SCIENCE
FICTION; GAMES AND TOYS; GODS AND DEMONS; GRAVITY; LEISURE; MATTER
TRANSMISSION; MEDICINE; MERCURY; MOON; MYTHOLOGY; NEUTRON STARS;
OUTER
PLANETS; OVERPOPULATION; PARALLEL WORLDS; PHYSICS; PROTO
SCIENCEFICTION;
Julius SCHWARTZ; SERIES; SOCIAL DARWINISM; SPACESHIPS; STARS; SUN;
SUPERMAN [character]; SUSPENDED ANIMATION; TERRAFORMING; TRANSPORTATION;
UTOPIAS; VENUS; WAR; WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST.
NOBEL, PHIL

R.L. FANTHORPE.
NO BLADE OF GRASS
Film (1970). Symbol/MGM. Dir Cornel Wilde, starring Nigel Davenport, Jean
Wallace, Anthony May, Lynne Frederick. Screenplay Sean Forestal, Jefferson
Pascal, based on The Death of Grass (1956) by John CHRISTOPHER. 96 mins
cut to 80 mins. Colour.Cereal crops all die and society breaks down. A
family journeys across chaotic England, battling armed groups of marauders
who are searching for food, and reach sanctuary in the Lake District.
Wilde had previously dealt well with the stripping away of civilized
instincts in The Naked Prey (1966), so this story must have attracted him,
but NBOG has an amateurish quality, reinforced by poor acting, though the
depiction of anarchy is zestful. The film is disjointed, partly due to
drastic cutting before release. [JB/PN]See also: HOLOCAUST AND AFTER;
PANIC IN YEAR ZERO.
NOBLE, MARK
[r] Bob STICKGOLD.
NOEL, ATANIELLE ANNYN
(1947- ) Now the legal name of the US writer who, under her earlier legal
name, Ruth S(wycaffer) Noel, published 2 studies of J.R.R. TOLKIEN: The
Mythology of Middle-Earth (1977) and The Languages of Tolkien's
Middle-Earth (1980). Her 3 novels as AAN rather mercilessly tumble
together fantasy, sf and thriller modes into spoof plots, through which
some excitements emerge willy-nilly. The Duchess of Kneedeep (1986) is a
humorous fantasy with ROBOTS. Speaker to Heaven (1987), set in postHOLOCAUST California, conflates PSI POWERS and MAGIC. Murder on Usher's
Planet (1987), evoking Edgar Allan POE, sends its investigator
protagonists to a planet containing a secret, which they uncover. [JC]
NOEL, STERLING
(1903-1984) US writer and journalist, author of 2 sf novels: I Killed
Stalin (1951), a NEAR-FUTURE thriller in which WWIII is staved off by the
deed described in the title, and We who Survived (1959), which depicts the
life of the survivors of the sudden onslaught of a new ice age. [JC]
NO ESCAPE
(vt Penal Colony; vt The Prison Colony; vt Escape From Absalom) Film
(1994). Pacific Western/Allied Filmmakers/Columbia Tristar. Prod Gale Ann
HURD; dir Martin Campbell; screenplay Michael Gaylin, Joel Gross, based on
The Penal Colony (1987) by Richard Herley; starring Ray Liotta, Lance
Henriksen, Stuart Wilson, Kevin Dillon, Kevin J. O'Conner, Don Henderson,
Ian McNeice, Jack Shepherd, Michael Lerner and Ernie Hudson. 115 mins.
Colour.Curiously, this is one of two future-privatised-prison movies
released in 1993/94 and shot in Australia, the other being the
fractionally better FORTRESS. Despite Hurd's impeccable credentials as an
independent producer of action sf movies, this is a messy
internationalised adaptation of a very British original novel. Apart from
the first five minutes, there is nothing futuristic about this world of
2022 (1997 in the novel) in which private corporations run prisons, and
the hardest cases are dumped on a high-security island (actually
Queensland rainforest) to rot. Two tribes exist on the island, the

civilised Insiders and the barbarian and psychotic Outsiders. (Among the
myriad visible sources are ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, LORD OF THE FLIES and MAD
MAX.) Captain Robbins (Liotta), imprisoned for killing his superior
officer as a protest against the slaughter by US forces of 342 women and
children, is the hero who battles the evil Outsiders, helps the Insiders,
and eventually escapes to tell the world about governmental cover-ups,
corrupt prisons and wartime slaughters. Narrative glitches abound, and
little attempt is made to confront questions of future penology; there is,
however, a genuine bid to characterise the two societies that have arisen
on the island, and there are surprisingly contemplative moments in what is
otherwise an adolescent action POW escape movie. But how could the
corporation running this corrupt system possibly make money from it, since
its elaborate security systems are clearly incredibly expensive? [PN]
NOLAN, WILLIAM F(RANCIS)
(1928- ) US writer and editor who trained and for a time practised as a
commercial artist; he also raced cars, publishing several books on the
subject. He became a full-time writer in 1956. Of his 55 books since then,
at least 30 have related directly to sf or fantasy. WFN first became
active in sf as a fan, cofounding the San Diego Science Fantasy Society,
editing a fanzine, the Rhodomagnetic Digest, publishing The Ray Bradbury
Review, and serving as managing editor of #1-#3 of GAMMA (1963-4). He
published his first sf story, "The Joy of Living", in If in 1954,
subsequently writing some short stories and criticism as by Frank Anmar
and F.E. Edwards. His first sf book, Impact 20 (coll 1963), assembles some
of his early work. His second, for which he remains best known, Logan's
Run (1967) with George Clayton JOHNSON, begins the Logan sequence, which
continued with Logan's World (1977) and Logan's Search (1980), both by WN
alone; all 3 are assembled as Logan: A Trilogy (omni 1986). The premise of
the books is melodramatic: after a strange act of nuclear terrorism a
youth culture takes over, instituting the rule that all those over 21 must
be killed to combat OVERPOPULATION; the protagonist, first an enforcer and
then posing as a fugitive, escapes Earth with a genuine female rebel,
returning (now authentically rebellious) in the later volumes to confront
the COMPUTER controlling Earth. The first volume was unsuccessfully filmed
as LOGAN'S RUN (1976) and adapted as a short-lived tv series. Written in
part as an homage to Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade (WFN's Hammett: A Life
on the Edge [1983] is an effective biography), the Sam Space sequence,
about an sf detective, comprises Space for Hire (1971), Look Out for Space
(1985) and3 for Space (coll 1992). WFN's later short fiction, some of it
of high quality, was assembled in Alien Horizons (coll 1974), Wonderworlds
(coll 1977 UK) and Things Beyond Midnight (coll 1984).WFN has also been
active as an anthologist, mostly of reprinted material, though The Future
is Now (anth 1970) assembles original stories. He also compiled a detailed
bibliography of Ray BRADBURY, with copious annotations: The Ray Bradbury
Companion (1975). [JC/PN]Other works: The Work of Charles Beaumont (1985
chap; rev 1991 chap); How to Write Horror Fiction (1990); Helltracks
(1991), a horror novel; Blood Sky (1991 chap); Helle on Wheels (1993).As
Editor: The Fiend in You (anth 1962) with Charles BEAUMONT, WFN anon; Man
Against Tomorrow (anth 1965); The Pseudo-People (anth 1965; vt Almost
Human 1966 UK); 3 to the Highest Power (anth 1968); A Wilderness of Stars

(anth 1969); A Sea of Space (anth 1970), no connection to the Sam Space
books; The Human Equation (anth 1971); Science Fiction Origins (anth 1980)
with Martin H. GREENBERG; Urban Horrors (anth 1990) with Greenberg; The
Bradbury Chronicles (anth 1991) with Greenberg.About the author: The Work
of William F. Nolan: An Annotated Bibliography ?
Clarke (R. REGINALD) and James Hopkins (WFN himself).See also: ANDROIDS.
"NONAME"
House name for the Frank Tousey publishing firm, used in the late 19th
century for boys' fiction in several genres, including mysteries and
Westerns as well as sf. Of most sf interest were the Frank Reade, Jr.
tales ( FRANK READE LIBRARY; Luis SENARENS) and the slightly later Jack
Wright tales ( Luis SENARENS). Authors whose sf work appeared as by
"Noname" include Harold Cohen (1854-1927), Francis Worcester DOUGHTY,
Senarens and possibly Cecil Burleigh and Frederic Van Rensselaer Dey
(1861-1933). [EFB]
NOON, JEFF
(1957- ) UK writer whose first novel, Vurt (1993), places in NEAR-FUTURE
Manchester a CYBERPUNK tale, complete with Mean-Streets idiom and a driven
(though occasionally tangled) narrative line; Vurt itself is a
reality-shifting drug. The novel won the 1994 ARTHUR C. CLARKE Award. A
second novel, Pollen (1995), has similar virtues. [JC]
NOONE, EDWINA
Michael AVALLONE.
NORBERT, W.
Norbert WIENER.
NORDEN, ERIC
(? - ) US writer who began publishing work of genre interest with "The
Final Quarry" for FSF in 1970, assembling his short work in Starsongs and
Unicorns (coll 1978). His novel, The Ultimate Solution (1973), depicts a
Nazi-dominated New York ( HITLER WINS), a state of affairs made possible
by the assassination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, as a
consequence of which the USA remained too long a noncombatant in WWII.
Slavery has been reinstituted. [JC]
NORMAN, BARRY
(1933- ) UK journalist, tv personality and writer whose sf novel is End
Product (1975), a NEAR-FUTURE story in which Blacks are lobotomized at
birth and provide the civilized world with ample meat. The allegorical and
political messages of the novel, though highly loaded, tend to clash. [JC]
NORMAN, ERIC
(? - ) US writer whose routine sf novel The Under-People (1969) is not to
be confused with The Underpeople (1968) by Cordwainer SMITH. [JC]
NORMAN, JOHN
Pseudonym used for his fiction by US writer and philosophy teacher John
Frederick Lange Jr (1931- ). His fiction mainly comprises a series of
borderline-sf PLANETARY ROMANCES set on Gor, a planet sharing Earth's
orbit but - because it is on the other side of the Sun - always invisible

to us. This astrophysical impossibility is never argued in the texts,
which might consequently read as either antiquarian sf or fantasy were it
not that the development of the series precludes any reading of Gor as an
exercise in sf nostalgia while at the same time demonstrating its great
remove from category FANTASY. In Tarnsman of Gor (1966), as the series
begins, Earthman Tarl Cabot abruptly finds himself on Gor, where - after
the fashion of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's Barsoom novels - he undergoes
numerous adventures, alarms, fights and romances of a SWORD-AND-SORCERY
nature. However, as the series progresses, the plots begin to revolve
around a singularly invariant sexual fantasy in which a proud woman-often
abducted for the purpose from Earth - is humiliated, stripped, bound,
beaten, raped, branded and enslaved, invariably discovering in the process
that she enjoys total submission to a dominant male, and can derive proper
sexual satisfaction only from this regime. Later volumes feature
interminable discussions which end, invariably, in an affirmation of the
Gorean status quo. The sequence, now terminated, includes: Outlaw of Gor
(1967) and Priest-Kings of Gor (1968), both assembled with Tarnsman of Gor
as Gor Omnibus (omni 1972 UK); Nomads of Gor (1969); Assassin of Gor
(1970); Raiders of Gor (1971); Captive of Gor (1972); Hunters of Gor
(1974); Marauders of Gor (1975); Tribesmen of Gor (1976); Slave Girl of
Gor (1977); Beasts of Gor (1978); Explorers of Gor (1979); Fighting Slave
of Gor (1980); Rogue of Gor (1981); Guardsman of Gor (1981); Savages of
Gor (1982); Blood Brothers of Gor (1982); Kajira of Gor (1983); Players of
Gor (1984); Mercenaries of Gor (1985); Dancer of Gor (1985); Renegades of
Gor (1986); Vagabonds of Gor (1987); and Magicians of Gor (1988).
Imaginative Sex (1974), a nonfiction text, details some Gor-like games for
Earthlings. JN's two out-of-series novels are Ghost Dance (1969) and Time
Slave (1975). Unless the new Telnarian Histories sequence - beginning with
The Chieftain (1991), The Captain (1993) and The King (1993) - strikes a
new note, JN will be remembered - and widely detested - for Gor alone.
[JC]See also: DAW BOOKS; SEX.
NORMYX
Norman DOUGLAS.
NORST, JOEL
Kirk MITCHELL.
NORTH, ANDREW
Andre NORTON.
NORTH, DAVID
(? - ) US writer whose Time Warriors sequence of military-sf adventures Time Warriors #1: Fuse Point (1991), #2: Forbidden Region (1991) and #3:
The Guardian Strikes (1991) - sends its protagonist, accompanied by a
barbarian named Brom, back and forth through time into various conflicts.
[JC]
NORTH, ERIC
Pseudonym used by Australian novelist Charles Bernard Cronin (1884-1968)
for his sf work; he used other pseudonyms in other genres. As EN he
published sf in Australian journals such as the Melbourne Herald and The
Bulletin. "The Satyr" (1924 Melbourne Herald; vt "Three Against the Stars"

Argosy 1938 US) tells of invaders from another DIMENSION; it was not
published in book form. The eponymous villain of Toad (1924 Melbourne
Herald as "The Green Flame"; 1929 UK) has invented an ingredient which
sets water aflame, and threatens to use it against first Australia and
then the world.The Ant Men (1955 US) is a LOST-WORLD juvenile about giant
intelligent ants. [JC]
NORTH, VALENTINE
[s] Thomas P. KELLEY.
NORTON, ANDRE
Initially the working name of Alice Mary Norton (1912- ), but for some
years now her legal name. A librarian for two decades before turning to
full-time writing, she was one of the few sf figures of any stature to
enter the field via CHILDREN'S SF, and, though much of her work is as
adult in theme and difficulty as most general sf, she was for many years
primarily marketed as a writer for children and adolescents. In the 1970s
and 1980s, however, as her work changed in emphasis from sf to fantasy and
as her popularity continued to grow, new novels and reprints alike were
released primarily into the general market.AN began to publish in the
1930s with The Prince Commands (1934) which, like her slightly later WWII
espionage trilogy - The Sword is Drawn (1944), Sword in Sheath (1949; vt
Island of the Lost 1953 UK) and At Swords' Point (1954) - was not of
direct genre interest. She came to sf proper only in 1947 with "The People
of the Crater" for Fantasy Book, as by Andrew North, a pseudonym she used
also for 3 novels; the story was included in Garan the Eternal (coll 1972)
which, along with High Sorcery (coll 1970), The Many Worlds of Andre
Norton (coll 1974; vt The Book of Andre Norton 1975), ed Roger ELWOOD, and
Perilous Dreams (coll 1976), assembled most of her relatively small output
of short fiction.AN's career can, very roughly, be divided into two equal
periods: the two decades from 1950 when she concentrated on sf novels,
most of them gathered into series which were in turn treated as loose
units in a broadly conceived common galactic superseries; and the two
decades from 1970 when, after the success of the Witch World
SCIENCE-FANTASY sequence, she produced numerous further fantasies.
Throughout both periods, her most typical protagonists have been young
women or men who must undergo some form of rite de passage into a sane
maturity; in so doing, they characteristically discover that the true
nature of the Universe lies not in what it might become (hence the lack of
CONCEPTUAL-BREAKTHROUGH novels in her oeuvre) but in its history, and in
the talismans and icons associated with that history. The Universe
revealed in these numerous books - from her first sf novel, Star Man's
Son, 2250 A.D. (1952; vt Daybreak-2250 A.D. 1954 dos; vt Star Man's Son
1978), to her most recent - is a colourful, complex and rewarding
environment for her typical protagonists to come to terms with; though any
advanced technology there deployed- FASTER-THAN-LIGHT space travel, for
instance, and at one time or another almost every other instrument of
SPACE OPERA - serves mainly to add verisimilitude to AN's romantic SENSE
OF WONDER, and to a style in which science and TECHNOLOGY are in fact
treated perfunctorily (if at all) and more often than not as inimical to
humanity and its friends. Close - sometimes telepathic - rapports might

exist among people, or between human and beast as in Catseye (1961), but
rarely or never are human beings called to shape their lives in the
service of transcendent or objective goals. AN's instincts, in other
words, have never been those of the natural sf author; however, in the
sense that her books never violate her audience's legitimate expectations,
AN has always been an orthodox writer.The sf novels, mostly told against
the shared galactic backdrop, were widely varied, featuring a multitude of
space-opera themes and plots, along with several comparatively intimate
studies of humans and ALIENS and beasts, and their relationships under
various circumstances. Series include: the Central Control sequence,
comprising Star Rangers (1953; vt The Last Planet 1955 dos) and Star Guard
(1955); the Astra or Company of Pax sequence, comprising The Stars are
Ours! (1954) and Star Born (1957); the Dane Thorson or Solar Queen
sequence, comprising Sargasso of Space (1955 as by Andrew North; 1969 as
by AN), Plague Ship (1956 as by North; 1969 as by AN), Voodoo Planet (1959
dos as by North; 1968 as by AN), Postmarked the Stars (1969) and Redline
the Stars (1993) with P.M. GRIFFIN; the Blake Walker sequence, comprising
The Crossroads of Time (1956 dos) and Quest Crosstime (1965; vt Crosstime
Agent 1975 UK); the Ross Murdock sequence, comprising The Time Traders
(1958), Galactic Derelict (1959), The Defiant Agents (1962), Key out of
Time (1963) and Firehand (1994) with P.M.Griffin; the Hosteen Storm
sequence, comprising The Beast Master (1959; cut 1961) and Lord of Thunder
(1962); the Forerunner sequence, comprising Storm over Warlock (1960),
Ordeal in Otherwhere (1964), Forerunner Foray (1973), Forerunner (1981)
and Forerunner: The Second Venture (1985); the Janus sequence, comprising
Catseye (1961), Judgment on Janus (1963) and Victory on Janus (1966); the
Moon Singer sequence, comprising Moon of Three Rings (1966), Exiles of the
Stars (1971), Flight In Yiktor (1986) and Dare to Go A-Hunting (1990); the
Murdoc Jern sequence, comprising The Zero Stone (1968) and Uncharted Stars
(1969); and the Star Ka'at sequence for younger readers, all written with
Dorothy Madlee (1917-1980), comprising Star Ka'at (1976), Star Ka'at World
(1978), Star Ka'ats and the Plant People (1979) and Star Ka'ats and the
Winged Warriors (1981).Though begun in the 1960s, the Witch World sequence
is essentially FANTASY - though it often uses such sf tropes as
dimensional gates and force fields - and lacks any connection with the
shared background; it soon became both her best known series and a model
for her later work. Set centrally in the matriarchal land of Estcarp on an
otherwise unnamed planet, and pleasingly sensitive to FEMINIST issues,
these tales engage personable young protagonists in SWORD-AND-SORCERY
adventures which tend to end well. Variously connected, the series titles
include Witch World (1963), Web of the Witch World (1964) and Year of the
Unicorn (1965), all 3 assembled as Annals of the Witch World (omni 1994),
plusThree Against the Witch World (1965), Warlock of the Witch World
(1967), Sorceress of the Witch World (1968), Spell of the Witch World
(coll 1972), The Crystal Gryphon (1972), The Jargoon Pard (1974), Trey of
Swords (1977), Zarsthor's Bane (1978), Lore of the Witch World (coll
1980), Gryphon in Glory (1981), Horn Crown (1981), 'Ware Hawk (1983),
Were-Wrath (1984 chap), Gryphon's Eyrie (1984) with A.C. CRISPIN,
Serpent's Tooth (1987 chap), The Gate of the Cat (1987), an internal
sequence comprising Witch World: The Turning: Storms of Victory (1991) and
Flight of Vengeance (1992) with P.M. Griffin and On Wings of Magic (coll

of linked stories 1994) with Patricia Matthews and Sasha Miller, and
Songsmith (1992) with Crispin. There were also 4 SHARED-WORLD anthologies
edited or authorized by AN: Tales of the Witch World * (anth 1987), Tales
of the Witch World II * (anth 1988), Four from the Witch World * (anth
1989) and Tales of the Witch World III * (anth 1990).Though her style has
matured over the years, and her plots have tended to darken somewhat, from
first to last an AN story will show the virtues of clear construction, a
high degree of narrative control, protagonists whose qualities allow easy
reader-identification and a Universe fundamentally responsive to virtue,
good will and spunk. Her disinclination to publish short material in the
sf magazines and her labelling for decades as a juvenile writer both
worked to delay proper recognition of her stature, though her actual sales
have been very considerable for decades. It has only recently been borne
in upon the sf world that AN's 100 or more books - most of them in print are for very many readers central to what the genre has to offer.
[JC]Other works:Non-sf includes:Follow the Drum (1942); Rogue Reynard
(1947); Scarface (1948); Huon of the Horn (1951); Murders for Sale (1954;
with Grace Allen Hogarth, together as Allen Weston; vt Sneeze on Sunday
1992 as AN and Hogarth); Ten Mile Treasure (1981); Stand and Deliver
(1984). Sf and fantasy:Sea Siege (1957); Star Gate (1958; exp 1963);
Secret of the Lost Race (1959 dos; vt Wolfshead 1977 UK); Shadow Hawk
(1960); The Sioux Spaceman (1960 dos); Star Hunter (1961 dos); Eye of the
Monster (1962 dos); Night of Masks (1964); The X Factor (1965); the Magic
fantasies, comprising Steel Magic (1965; vt Grey Magic 1967), Octagon
Magic (1967) and Fur Magic (1968), all assembled as The Magic Books (omni
1988); Operation Time Search (1967); Dark Piper (1968); Dread Companion
(1970); Ice Crown (1970); Android at Arms (1971); Breed to Come (1972);
Dragon Magic (1972); Here Abide Monsters (1973); Iron Cage (1974); Outside
(1974); Lavender-Green Magic (1974); Merlin's Mirror (1975); The White
Jade Fox (1975); The Day of the Ness (1975) with Michael Gilbert; No Night
without Stars (1975); Knave of Dreams (1975); Wraiths of Time (1976); Red
Hart Magic (1976); The Opal-Eyed Fan (1977); Quag Keep (1978); Yurth
Burden (1978); Seven Spells to Sunday (1979); Voorloper (1980); Moon
Called (1982); Wheel of Stars (1983); Ride the Green Dragon (1985) with
Phyllis Miller (1920- ); Imperial Lady: A Fantasy of Han China (1989) with
Susan M. SHWARTZ; Wizards' Worlds (coll 1989); Elvenbane: An Epic High
Fantasy of the Halfblood Chronicles (1991) with Mercedes Lackey (1950- );
The Jekyll Legacy (1990) with Robert BLOCH; Black Trillium (1990) with
Marion Zimmer BRADLEY and Julian MAY, the second sequel to which, by AN
alone, being Golden Trillium (1993); The Mark of the Cat (1992), based on
the cat drawings of Karen Kuykendall; Empire of the Eagle (1993) with
Susan Shwartz; Brother to Shadows (1993); The Hands of Llyr (1994).As
Editor: Bullard of the Space Patrol (coll of linked stories 1951) by
Malcolm JAMESON; Space Service (anth 1953); Space Pioneers (anth 1954);
Space Police (anth 1956); Gates to Tomorrow: An Introduction to Science
Fiction (anth 1973) ed with Ernestine Donaldy; Small Shadows Creep (anth
1974); Baleful Beasts and Eerie Creatures (anth 1976); the Ithkar
fantasies, all with Robert ADAMS, comprising Magic in Ithkar #1 (anth
1985), #2 (anth 1985), #3 (anth 1986) and #4 (anth 1987); Cat-fantastic
(anth 1989), Cat-fantastic II (anth 1991) and Cat-fantastic III (anth
1994), all with Martin H. GREENBERG.About the author: "Andre Norton: Loss

of Faith" (1971) by Rick Brooks in The Many Worlds of Andre Norton (coll
1974); intro by Sandra Miesel to the GREGG PRESS reissue (1977) of the
Witch World series; Andre Norton: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography
(1980) by Roger C. SCHLOBIN; Andre Norton: Grand Master of the
Witch-World: A Working Bibliography (1991 chap) by Phil
STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; GAMES AND TOYS; HITLER
WINS; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); MAGIC; NEBULA; ROBERT
HALE
LIMITED; WOMEN SF WRITERS.
NORTON, PHILIP
(? -? ) UK clergyman and writer, active in the former capacity 1871-1924.
As Artegall Smith he published one sf novel, Sub Sole, or Under the Sun:
Missionary Adventures in the Great Sahara (1889), in which the Wandering
Jew reveals to Artegall Smith the wonders of an underground LOST WORLD
peopled by the Lost Tribes of Israel, who have created there a scientific
civilization. Smith soon converts them and marries the girl of his choice.
Unusually for UK fiction before 1940, Jews are treated with some respect.
[JC]
NORTON, ROY (E.)
(1869-1942) US author of many Westerns and some sf, beginning with The
Vanishing Fleets (1908), in which a group of scientists, having invented
an ANTIGRAVITY device, use it to shift the world's fleets mysteriously
about, terrifying the bellicose nations into disarming. In his second sf
novel, The Toll of the Sea (1909; cut vt The Land of the Lost 1925 UK),
the Pacific figures again, this time changing its shape and uncovering a
LOST WORLD inhabited by advanced descendants of ATLANTIS. In The Flame
(1916) another antigravity device allows its user to force Germany into
early surrender. RN was notable both for his didacticism and for a strong
narrative imagination. [JC]Other works: The Caves of Treasure (1925).
NORVIL, MANNING
Kenneth BULMER.
NORWAY
SCANDINAVIA.
NORWOOD, VICTOR (GEORGE CHARLES)
(1920-1983) UK traveller and writer who concentrated on Westerns and
nonfiction works about exploration. Of some genre interest is the Jacare
series of jungle tales, loosely derived from Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's Tarzan
and mostly sf or fantasy: The Untamed (1951), The Caves of Death (1951),
The Temple of the Dead (1951), The Skull of Kanaima (1951), The Island of
Creeping Death (1952), Drums along the Amazon (1953), which was
associational, and Cry of the Beast (1953). Night of the Black Horror
(1962) is a singleton sf adventure. Among VN's other titles was Island of
the Voodoo Dolls (1969) as by Paul Dangerfield. [JC/SH]
NORWOOD, WARREN C(ARL)
(1945- ) US bookseller and writer who has normally published as Warren
Norwood, sometimes as Warren C. Norwood; due to a publisher's error, some
titles were published as by Warren G. Norwood. After a number of years in

bookselling, during which period he published some not particularly
distinguished poetry, WCN began his sf career with the Windhover Tapes
sequence - The Windhover Tapes: An Image of Voices (1982), #2: Flexing the
Warp (1983), #3: Fize of the Gabriel Ratchets (1983) and #4: Planet of
Flowers (1984) - attempting with some success to compose SPACE OPERAS
whose baroque inturnings are themselves of some narrative interest; but
calling the human protagonist of the series Gerard Hopkins Manley and
referring to Hopkins (1844-1889) with some frequency - while implying that
Manley himself is ignorant of any connection with the poet - does suggest
a disconnectedness deep within the structure of the sequence. The Tapes
themselves constitute a record kept by the sentient starship Windhover;
they detail Manley's quite various adventures on several planets as
troubleshooter and anthropologist. A second series, the Double Spiral War
sequence - Midway Between (1984), Polar Fleet (1985) and Final Command
(1986) - is less chaotic but also less interesting. The Seren Cenacles
(1983) with Ralph Mylius (1945- ) likewise suffers from inattentive bursts
of energy; though Shudderchild (1987), set in a genuinely complicated
multistate post- HOLOCAUST USA, is engagingly compact and full of action,
and True Jaguar (1988), a fantasy, delves intriguingly into Mayan lore.In
1988 WCN publicly announced that he had been diagnosed as having terminal
pancreatic cancer; in 1991 he said that he had entered remission, and also
indicated his wish to acknowledge assistance in completing the Time Police
sequence, a Byron PREISS package comprising Time Police: Vanished! (1988),
#2: Trapped! (1989) and #3: Stranded! (1989), with Mel Odom (1950- ) given
co-author credit on the final volume; WCN's wife had extensively outlined
the second and third volumes and Odom had done the writing work on both.
The sequence itself is a fairly unremarkable reworking of the Time Patrol
recipe created by Poul ANDERSON and others. Given the enforced hiatus at
the end of nearly a decade of intense productivity, it is difficult to
know whether or not WCN will eventually harness his knowledge and drive to
stories that move beyond the slightly unfocused exuberance of his first
work. [JC]
NOSILLE, NALRAH
[s] Harlan ELLISON.
NOT OF THIS EARTH
1. Film (1957). Los Altos/Allied Artists. Prod and dir Roger CORMAN,
starring Paul Birch, Beverly Garland, Jonathan Haze, Dick Miller.
Screenplay Charles B. Griffith, Mark Hanna. 67 mins. B/w.A sombre humanoid
alien (Birch), whose dark glasses conceal blank white eyes, seeks human
blood and victims to send by matter transmitter to his home planet, whose
inhabitants' blood is being "turned to dust" by radiation from continuing
nuclear war. Low-budget nonsense - a typical Corman film of the period cheaply made, NOTE is nevertheless well scripted and surprisingly
powerful; unusually, it shows some sympathy for the lonely, pedantic
alien.2. Film (1988). Miracle. "Roger CORMAN presents" a film dir Jim
Wynorski, starring Arthur Roberts, Traci Lords, Lenny Juliano. Screenplay
R.J. Robertson, Wynorski, based on that of the 1957 film. 76 mins. Colour.
Though fairly true to the original script, and played moderately straight
apart from a plethora of large-breasted women, this Corman-inspired remake

cannot cope with cultural and cinematic changes over the intervening three
decades, and what was once mildly serious now emerges as high camp; hence
it was promoted as a spoof. [PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES.
NOTT, KATHLEEN (CECILIA)
(1910- ) UK poet, novelist and academic, perhaps best known for The
Emperor's Clothes (1953), in which she mounted articulate and scathing
attacks on the religious pretensions of such writers as T.S. Eliot
(1888-1965) and C.S. LEWIS. Her sf novel, The Dry Deluge (1947), describes
the founding of an underground UTOPIA devoted to the achievement of
IMMORTALITY. [JC]
NOURSE, ALAN E(DWARD)
(1928-1992) US writer and physician; much of his nonfiction has been in
the field of popular MEDICINE - Intern (1965) as by "Doctor X" being a
great success. He began publishing sf with "High Threshold" for ASF in
1951, and gained a reputation as a reliable creator of CHILDREN'S SF
novels. His first, Trouble on Titan (1954), features rebellion and
conflict within a SPACE-OPERA Solar System, as do others of his juveniles,
like Raiders from the Rings (1962), where conflict between an oppressive
Earth regime and libertarian Spacers is finally halted by the intervention
of superior, peaceful ALIENS. In Rocket to Limbo (1957), mankind's destiny
is explained to us by alien observers. Star Surgeon (1960) interestingly
posits an Earth which, while being the main medical centre of all the
inhabited worlds, is still in the position of having to apply to join the
Galactic Confederation. The vision of these juveniles is appropriately
optimistic, and technologies - especially medical ones - are there for
humanity's benefit. AEN's adult novels are also straightforward,
frequently making somewhat simple points about bureaucracies and
tyrannies, as in The Invaders are Coming! (1959) with J(oseph) A. Meyer
and in several stories - some genuinely funny - assembled in Tiger by the
Tail (coll 1961; vt Beyond Infinity 1964 UK). Several others make use of
his medical knowledge: brain surgery figures in A Man Obsessed (1955 dos;
rev vt The Mercy Men 1968), part of a series also including "Nightmare
Brother" (1953) and "The Expert Touch" (1955); Rx for Tomorrow (coll 1971)
collects stories about medicine in general; The Bladerunner (1974)-which
was adapted by William S. BURROUGHS as Blade Runner (A Movie) (1979 chap),
neither book having anything to do with Ridley SCOTT's BLADE RUNNER (1982)
(although Scott obtained permission from AN for use of the title) - deals
with the medical implications of OVERPOPULATION in a framework of coercive
sterilization; and The Fourth Horseman (1983) deals with a NEAR-FUTURE
plague. A sense of fundamental decency permeates AEN's fiction; and,
though sometimes too easily achieved, the victories of decency over
bigotry cannot, for the market upon which AEN concentrated, be seriously
faulted. [JC]Other works: Junior Intern (1955), not sf; Scavengers in
Space (1959); Nine Planets (1960), science fact; The Counterfeit Man and
Others (coll 1963); The Universe Between (1951; fixup 1965), which
incorporates his first story; PSI High and Others (coll 1967).See also:
MERCURY; OUTER PLANETS; PARALLEL WORLDS; SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF
AMERICA.
NOVA

US ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series (1970-74) ed Harry HARRISON, published by
Delacorte (#1) and then Walker ?
#3) and then Manor Books. All had UK editions also. Its 4 vols were Nova 1
(anth 1970), #2 (anth 1972), #3 (anth 1973; vt The Outdated Man 1975) and
#4 (anth 1974). This was a catholic series, the contents ranging from
old-fashioned sf adventure stories by such writers as Gordon R. DICKSON
through humour by John T. SLADEK to experimental pieces by younger
authors. Tom REAMY made his first sale (though not his debut) here with
"Beyond the Cleft" (1974). The most regular contributors were Brian W.
ALDISS, Barry N. MALZBERG, Robert SHECKLEY and, unusually, Naomi
MITCHISON. It was an entertaining series, but had no great impact.
[MJE/PN]
NOVAE TERRAE
The earliest true FANZINE in the UK (1936-9), 33 issues, ed Maurice K.
Hanson, first for the Nuneaton chapter of the SCIENCE FICTION LEAGUE, and
then, from #10, for the pre-WWII Science Fiction Association, the UK's
first national sf organization. NT was given over primarily to discussion
of sf and FANDOM, the only fiction it carried being parodies or based on
fan doings. In Sep 1937 Hanson moved to London, and from #17 John CARNELL
and Hanson's flatmate Arthur C. CLARKE were listed as assistant editors.
Hanson's other flatmate, William F. TEMPLE, replaced Carnell with #25, but
after #29 Hanson handed NT to Carnell, who issued a further 4 issues numbered 1 to 4 - under the anglicized title New Worlds, which had always
appeared on the title page alongside the Latin version. The title was
revived after WWII by Carnell as a professional magazine of fiction, NEW
WORLDS. [RH]
NOVAK, JOHN LUTHER
Christopher PRIEST.
NOVA PUBLICATIONS
John CARNELL; NEW WORLDS; SCIENCE FANTASY.
NOVA SCIENCE FICTION AWARDS
AWARDS.
NOVELIZATIONS
Everyone knows examples of books that were made into films. In science
fiction, it often happens the other way around. Novelizations are novels
adapted from movie scripts and published in conjunction with the release
of a film.The Quatermass Xperiment was a big success as a novelization in
1959 - it was based on the 1955 Hammer film about an ancient Martian
spaceship excavated in modern London. Theodore Sturgeon wrote the book
version of A Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in 1961.By the mid-sixties,
movies and television were often novelized, including borderline SF shows,
such as The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and The Prisoner. Some novelizations, like
the ones for Star Trek, remained popular long after the show was
cancelled.
NOWLAN, PHILIP FRANCIS
(1888-1940) US writer whose first sf story, "Armageddon 2419" - published
in the same 1928 issue of AMAZING STORIES that featured the inception of

E.E. "Doc" SMITH's Skylark saga - introduced Anthony "Buck" Rogers to the
world, helping to inaugurate the reign of full-grown interstellar SPACE
OPERA in US sf. This and a subsequent story, "The Airlords of Han" (1929),
were put together long after PFN's death as Armageddon 2419 AD (1928-9
AMZ; fixup 1962). The Buck Rogers saga takes its hero, via SUSPENDED
ANIMATION, to a corrupt 25th-century USA under the thumb of the tyrannous
Hans, where Rogers soon becomes a central figure in the successful revolt.
His exploits were retold and then extended through space in BUCK ROGERS IN
THE 25TH CENTURY, the first sf COMIC strip, scripted by PFN and drawn by
Dick CALKINS; it ran 1929-67. PFN worked on it until his death, which also
cut short a new series he had begun in ASF. An adaptation of a tale from
the comic - each page of text faced with a Calkins illustration - appeared
as Buck Rogers 25th Century AD and the Planetoid Plot (1936), and the
first 426 daily strips were published in book form as Buck Rogers in the
25th Century, Great Classic Newspaper Comic Strips, No. 1 (graph coll
1964), #2 (graph coll 1965), #7 (graph coll 1967) and #8 (graph coll
1968). [JC]See also: ILLUSTRATION; INVASION; RADIO; TRANSPORTATION.
NOYES, ALFRED
(1880-1958) UK poet and man of letters, best known during his life for
extremely long epic poems like Drake (2 vols 1906-8) and The Torchbearers
(3 vols 1922-30), the latter depicting the march of science. He wrote some
fantasy and horror - in the form of narrative poems in Tales of the
Mermaid Tavern (coll 1914) and in the form of prose tales in Walking
Shadows: Sea Tales and Others (coll 1918) and The Hidden Player (coll
1924). Beyond the Desert: A Tale of Death Valley (1920 chap US) and The
Devil Takes a Holiday (1955) are fantasies. The Secret of Pooduck Island
(1943) is a juvenile. Of sf interest is a post- HOLOCAUST novel, The Last
Man (1940; vt No Other Man 1940 US), in which a doomsday ray stops all
human hearts, petrifying the corpses. A few survivors - man, woman and
(male) evil SCIENTIST-finally reach Assisi, which has been miraculously
saved. AN was a fervent Roman Catholic (converted in 1930), an ardent
anti-Modernist, an early Japanophile and a defender of VOLTAIRE and
Charles Parnell (1846-1891). In several novels Gordon R. DICKSON has
praised his lyric poetry. [JC]See also: CLUB STORY; END OF THE WORLD;
WEAPONS.
NOYES, PIERREPONT B(URT)
(1870-1959) US businessman and writer whose The Pallid Giant: A Tale of
Yesterday and Tomorrow (1927; vt Gentlemen: You are Mad! 1946) places in
an ominous NEAR-FUTURE context the discovery of records of a long-dead
ancient race, which destroyed itself with DEATH RAYS. Before the last
moments, however, its scientists had through GENETIC ENGINEERING set the
ape on an upward course. But now, in the 20th century, death rays have
just been invented. The narrator warns the world. [JC]
NOYES, RALPH
(? - ) UK writer whose sf novel, A Secret Property (1985), depicts an
alien INVASION without great originality. [JC]
N3F
The National Fantasy Fan Federation, formed in the USA 1941, the

brain-child of Damon KNIGHT. After a succession of short-lived and
factional US fan associations in the 1930s, the N3F proved a stable and
enduring national organization. However, despite its long existence, it
has maintained only a very low level of membership and activity and has
contributed little to sf or FANDOM. It continues to publish The National
Fantasy Fan, a newsletter which first appeared under the title Bonfire in
1941. [PR]
NUCLEAR COUNTDOWN
TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING.
NUCLEAR POWER
The claim that sf is a realistic, extrapolative literature is often
supported by the citing of successful PREDICTIONS, among which atomic
power and the atom bomb are usually given pride of place. When the news of
the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was released in 1945, John W.
CAMPBELL Jr, editor of ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, was exultant, claiming
that now sf would have to be taken seriously. Campbell was entitled to
congratulate himself: it was largely due to his editorial influence that
sf writers of the early 1940s had concerned themselves so deeply with
atomic power.It could, however, be argued that anticipating the advent of
atomic power was not such a tremendous imaginative leap. The notion of
"splitting the atom" goes back to antiquity as a philosophical problem
raised in the consideration of atomic theories from Democritus (fl 5th
century BC) and Epicurus (c341-270BC) onwards. It was not until the end of
the 19th century, however, that any evidence relating to the actual
structure of atoms became accessible. In 1902 Ernest Rutherford
(1871-1937) and Frederick Soddy (1877-1956) demonstrated that certain
heavy atoms-including those of uranium and radium - were in a state of
continuous spontaneous decay, emitting various types of energetic
radiation. The popularization of this and related discoveries had an
influence on SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE comparable only to that of evolutionary
theory; the first title to reflect this opportunity was probably Robert
CROMIE's The Crack of Doom (1895). The power of radioactivity - in many
applications, some of them bizarre - quickly became commonplace in sf,
especially in relation to WAR. Einstein's famous equation linking mass and
energy (E = mc2
NUETZEL, CHARLES (ALEXANDER)
(1934- ) US self-styled hack writer; in various genres, under a variety
of names, he wrote over 70 paperback novels. He became active in sf in the
1960s, publishing "A Very Cultured Taste" for Jade #1 in 1960. Lost Valley
of the Damned (1961 as by Alec River; exp vt Jungle Jungle 1969 as CN) was
routine. Lovers: 2075 (1964) as by Charles English, was, like Queen of
Blood (1966), mildly erotic, and marketed as such. Images of Tomorrow
(coll 1969) assembled satirical tales. Warriors of Noomas (1969) and its
sequel Raiders of Noomas (1969) were romantic adventures heavily
influenced by Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, as was Swordsmen of Vistar (1969). The
last 4 titles were all published by Powell Books, whose sf line CN edited,
as was The Slaves of Lomooro (1969) as by Albert Augustus Jr. [JC]Other
works: If this Goes On (anth 1965); Last Call for the Stars (1970).

NUEVA DIMENSION
SPAIN.
NUNES, CLAUDE
(1924- ) South African writer and statistician, most of whose work was in
collaboration with his wife Rhoda (Gwylleth) Nunes (1938- ). They
published their first sf story, "The Problem", in Science Fantasy in 1962,
and were active for the next two decades. Inherit the Earth (1963 Science
Fiction Adventures as by Claude and Rhoda Nunes; exp 1966 dos US) was
published as by CN alone, as his wife participated less than usual in the
rewrite; in it the telepathic ANDROIDS who inhabit Earth after a nuclear
HOLOCAUST has driven humanity to the stars hope one day to teach their
makers how to live in peace. Recoil (1971 US) was published as by both; in
a rather archaic style it tells of telepathic ALIENS and their attempts to
influence humans, specifically a group of children. The Sky Trapeze (1980
UK), by CN alone, again concentrated on the powers of the mind, this time
in an alien venue. [JC]
NUOVI BARBARI, I
George MILLER; 1990: I GUERRIERI DEL BRONX.
NUTTY PROFESSOR, THE
Film (1963). Jerry Lewis Productions/Paramount. Dir Jerry Lewis, starring
Lewis, Stella Stevens, Dell Moore, Kathleen Freeman, Howard Morris.
Screenplay Lewis, Bill Richmond. 107 mins. Colour.Even those who do not
normally enjoy the heavily overstated comedy of Lewis, which depends a lot
on gesticulation and face-pulling, admit this to be one of his best films;
it is a remake as a campus comedy of DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE, with Lewis
playing both Professor Kelp, the nerd who takes the potion, and the
revoltingly smooth, sexually charged lounge lizard and crooner, Buddy
Love, whom he intermittently becomes; the film is an imaginative act of
spite against Lewis's former partner and co-star Dean Martin, recognizable
even in this broad parody. Not only is it funny, it hits off the subtext
of Robert Louis STEVENSON's original rather well. [PN]See also: CINEMA.
NYBERG, BJORN
[r] L. Sprague DE CAMP; Robert E. HOWARD.
NYE, HAROLD G.
[s] Lee HARDING.

SF?
O'BRIEN, DAVID
(? - ) UK writer of whom nothing is known except that he wrote several
early-1950s sf novels for CURTIS WARREN under various house names,
including the International Research Council sequence - Photomesis (1952)
and Black Infinity (1952) - as Berl CAMERON, Blue Asp (1952) as Rand LE
PAGE, Stella Radium Discharge (1952) as Kris LUNA, and Ships of Vero
(1952) as Brian SHAW. [JC]
O'BRIEN, DAVID WRIGHT
(1918-1944) US writer. A nephew of Farnsworth WRIGHT, he published almost

entirely for the ZIFF-DAVIS magazines AMAZING STORIES and Fantastic
Adventures from early 1940; there were about 40 stories and novels under
his own name plus others under various pseudonyms, including John York
Cabot (the Sergeant Shane series and about 20 further tales), Bruce
Dennis, Duncan Farnsworth (19 stories), Richard Vardon and the house names
Alexander BLADE and Clee GARSON; nothing reached book form. He also
collaborated with William P. McGivern (1921-1982) on 4 stories. Almost all
his work was SPACE OPERA or other routine adventure. He served in the US
Army Air Force and was shot down over Berlin. [JC]
O'BRIEN, DEAN D.
[s] Eando BINDER.
O'BRIEN, E.G.
[s] Arthur C. CLARKE.
O'BRIEN, FITZ-JAMES
(1828-1862) Irish-born US writer, active from his arrival in New York in
1852 until he died of an infected wound in the Civil War. FJO contributed
numerous poems and minor stories to the magazines, but his importance
rests on a handful of brilliantly original sf tales, which were
influential not only on subsequent sf but also on the development of the
short-story genre.His finest work is "The Diamond Lens" (1858), a long,
precisely detailed story about a SCIENTIST who invents a supermicroscope
and is then consumed by his morbid love for a beautiful woman he perceives
living in an infinitesimal world inside a drop of water ( GREAT AND
SMALL). What Was It? A Mystery (1859 Harper's; 1974 chap) tells of an
encounter with an invisible being whose nature remains an enigma, although
a plastercast made while the creature is chloroformed reveals it as a
hideous diminutive humanoid ( INVISIBILITY). These two stories, his best
known, are both set firmly in mid-19th-century New York, and helped
establish a mode of sf characterized by surface realism. In a similar vein
was the earlier "The Bohemian" (1855), in which the narrator's passionate
love for gold fatally induces him to have his fiancee mesmerized in order
to reveal the whereabouts of a treasure. "From Hand to Mouth" (1858) is a
remarkable surrealistic fantasy in which a man sits in the Hotel de Coup
d'Oeil surrounded by disembodied but living eyes, ears, mouths and hands.
In "The Lost Room" (1858) a strange house, whose intricate "corridors and
passages, like mathematical lines, seemed capable of indefinite
expansion", becomes the scene of an orgy by six male and female
"enchanters" who apparently succeed in kidnapping the narrator's room into
some other world or DIMENSION. "The Wondersmith" (1859) is notable in the
history of sf, despite its fantastic framework, for its extended
descriptions of an army of miniature automata. The posthumous "How I
Overcame my Gravity" (1864), though marred by the use of dream, is
otherwise a singularly modern piece of sf: its core is a detailed
description of suborbital flight achieved with the aid of gyroscopic
stabilization. The great strength of FJO's sf is its inventiveness, which
also became its greatest weakness whenever he allowed ingenuity to
dominate the fiction. "The Diamond Lens" remains a masterpiece because he
subordinated his brilliant invention to a profound exploration of the
diseased psychology of one of the main figures of his age, the would-be

lone genius of scientific creation.FJO's works have been collected in
various posthumous editions: Poems and Stories (coll 1881) ed (sometimes
damagingly) by poet and reviewer William Winter (1836-1917), a member with
FJO of the Pfaff's Cellar literary circle in New York; The Diamond Lens
and Other Stories (coll 1885); What Was It? and Other Stories (coll 1889);
Collected Stories by Fitz-James O'Brien (coll 1925); The Fantastic Tales
of Fitz-James O'Brien (coll 1977). These were all superseded by The
Supernatural Tales of Fitz-James O'Brien, Volume One: Macabre Tales (coll
1988) and The Supernatural Tales of Fitz-James O'Brien, Volume Two: Dream
Stories and Fantasies (coll 1988), both ed Jessica Amanda Salmonson (1950), which assembles some previously uncollected work and presents well
known texts in their original magazine versions. [HBF]See also: HISTORY OF
SF.
O'BRIEN, FLANN
Pseudonym of Irish writer and civil servant Brian O Nolan (1911-1966),
who also wrote-mainly for a newspaper column - as Myles na Gopaleen,
sometimes rendered Myles na gCopaleen. He is best known for work outside
the sf field, such as the FABULATION, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939 UK), a
fantasy "saga" at the heart of which mythological entities inflict
themselves on a character within a book by a man about whom the
protagonist of the actual novel is writing a book, and Faustus Kelly
(1943) as by Myles na Gopaleen, a fantasy play about the Devil in Ireland;
Rhapsody in Stephen's Green (1994 UK), which was produced in 1943, is a
beast-fable, based on the Brothers CAPEK Insect Play of 1921, and
dangerously satirical of both Ulster and Eire. FO's novels most closely
resembling sf are The Third Policeman (written c1940; 1967 UK), a fantasy,
featuring numerous sciencefictional devices, in which a murderer sets off
(by bicycle) through a fantasmagorical posthumous POCKET UNIVERSE whose
circularity is not spatial but temporal, and The Dalkey Archive (1964 UK),
which utilizes material from the previous book in its entrancingly
eccentric presentation of a plot featuring a mad SCIENTIST eager to
destroy the world, and the fantastic results of a gas he invents. [JC/PN]
O'BRIEN, ROBERT C(ARROLL)
Pseudonym of US writer Robert Lesly Carroll Conly (1922-1973); his books
were marketed as juveniles, though the last two are essentially adult. His
first, The Silver Crown (1968), is a sometimes frightening, complex
fantasy about the kidnapping of a young girl by a king who is ruled in
turn by a malignant MACHINE. Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1971; vt The
Secret of NIMH 1982), which won the Newbery Medal, tells of a group of
fugitive rats from a laboratory where their INTELLIGENCE has been
enhanced; with the help of Mrs Frisby, a field mouse, they found an
independent colony, determined not to batten on humans. The treatment is
realistic and without a trace of whimsy. After his death his daughter,
Jane Leslie Conly, wrote two sequels, Rasco and the Rats of NIMH (1986)
and R.T., Margaret, and the Rats of NIMH (1991). RCO's A Report from Group
17 (1972) is about biological warfare between the USA and Russia; it is
competent, but less successful than his other work. In Z for Zachariah
(1975), a post- HOLOCAUST novel of considerable sensitivity, a solitary
surviving adolescent girl comes to realize that she cannot make a life

with the male survivor who has entered her quiet valley; she eludes his
attempt at rape and travels across the desolated landscape in search of
other survivors. It is a fine book, morally complex, and not simply a
story of good versus evil; the girl's victory is ambiguous. RCO died
before the novel was quite finished; it was completed by his family.
[PN/JC]See also: CHILDREN'S SF.
O'BRIEN, WILLIS H(AROLD)
(1886-1962) US special-effects supervisor in the film industry. For his
own amusement he early began to experiment with stop-motion photography. A
1min home movie of an animated caveman and dinosaur, involving 960
separate exposures, led to a producer advancing him $5000 to make a more
elaborate version of the same subject: The Dinosaur and the Missing Link
(1917) ran for only 5 mins but took 2 months to make. It proved successful
and later the same year he made a series of similar films for the Edison
Company. In 1919 he made the more elaborate The Ghost of Slumber Mountain,
one of the first films to combine footage of live actors with animated
models.WHO's first full-length film was The LOST WORLD (1925), whose
success led him to start work on a project of epic proportions, Creation,
a variation on the LOST-WORLD theme. It was never completed, but he
incorporated much of its material (including improved designs for his
models, which by then had metal skeletons with ball-and-socket joints)
into KING KONG (1933), which proved to be the peak of his career. A
sequel, SON OF KONG (1933), was hurriedly made, but after that WHO found
difficulty in getting backing for his increasingly expensive projects. In
the late 1930s he began work on The War Eagles (it was to climax in an
aerial battle between airships and men riding giant eagles over New York
City), but the film was abandoned, as was his 1942 project, Gwangi, about
cowboys who discover dinosaurs on a Texas mesa (it was eventually filmed
as The VALLEY OF GWANGI [1969]). It was not until 1949 that he was able to
complete another partially animated feature, MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (an
unambitious rerun of the King Kong theme), assisted by his new young
protege, Ray HARRYHAUSEN. It was the last film over which he had real
control. During the 1950s he worked on MONSTER MOVIES for other people but
was unable to obtain backing for his own films. He died in 1962 while
working on It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963 dir Stanley Kramer).
Despite his comparatively small output, he is widely regarded as one of
the great pioneers of special effects in fantastic cinema. [JB]
OBRUCHEV, VLADIMIR A(FANASEVICH)
(1863-1956) Russian geologist, academician and writer. Two of his novels,
both early classics of Russian sf, have been translated: Plutoniia (1915;
1924; trans B. Pearce as Plutonia 1957) and Zemlya Sannikova (1926; trans
Y. Krasny as Sannikov Land 1955 USSR). Both are adventures after the style
of Jules VERNE, aimed at younger readers, and informatively crammed with
geological and palaeontological data. The first is a HOLLOW-EARTH story in
which a party of Russian explorers enters the Earth via an unknown
landmass north of the Bering Strait and finds a LOST WORLD full of
prehistoric reptiles. The second is similar; a volcano thrusting through
the Arctic icecap to the far north of Siberia has a fertile lost world,
populated by a stone-age people, inside its huge crater. Other,

untranslated, works by VO were travel novels set in Central Asia. [PN]See
also: RUSSIA.
OBUKHOVA, LYDIA
(1924- ) Russian writer who began publishing work of interest as early as
1945, and whose books gained some popularity in her native land. Lilit
(trans Mirra Ginsburg as Daughter of Night 1974 US) tells the story of
Adam's first wife, Lilith, who meets an ALIEN assessing Earth for
colonization. He falls in love with her, presents her with the gift of
fire, and saves the planet from his own people. [JC]
OCEANOGRAPHY
UNDER THE SEA.
OCTOBER, JOHN
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
OCTOPUS, THE
US PULP MAGAZINE. 1 issue, Feb/Mar 1939, published by Popular
Publications; ed Rogers Terrill. The feature novel, "The City Condemned to
Hell" by Randolph Craig (Norvell W. PAGE), was actually a rewritten SPIDER
story; the evil Octopus broadcasts a ray that turns people into monsters.
It was reprinted as Pulp Classics #11 (1976) ( Robert E. WEINBERG). The
SCORPION was a follow-up to O. The single issue was confusingly designated
Vol 1 #4. [MJE/FHP]
ODELL, SAMUEL W.
(1864-1948) US writer of 2 sf books, Atlanteans (coll 1889) and The Last
War, or The Triumph of the English Tongue (1898). In the latter, a futureWAR story set in the 26th century, the highly civilized all-White Allied
Anglo-American Nations decide, more in sorrow, to engage in "war to the
end" against a miscegenate evil empire controlled by the Russian Czar,
destroying millions of the foe before their inevitable victory. [JC]
ODLE, E(DWIN) V(INCENT)
(1890-1942) UK writer and editor. As younger brother of Alan Odle, who
was the husband of Dorothy M. Richardson (1873-1957), EVO came into close
contact with J.D. BERESFORD, who had been instrumental in publishing the
first volume of Richardson's Pilgrimage in 1915. EVO's sole sf novel, The
Clockwork Man (1923), clearly shows Beresford's influence, and may also
have been published with his help. In this graceful SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE, a
CYBORG - in this case a man into whose body a clock has been inserted comes accidentally back through time from AD8000 to the present, where he
plays cricket and describes a world in which life regulated by MACHINES is
accepted by most, though not all. God, it is hoped, has been taking note
of the new, improved version of humanity. [JC]See also: DIMENSIONS;
EVOLUTION; HISTORY OF SF; SUPERMAN; TIME TRAVEL.
ODOM, MEL
[r] Warren C. NORWOOD.
O'DONNELL, KEVIN Jr
(1950- ) US author with a BA in Chinese Studies who has spent several
years in the Far East. His first published sf was "The Hand is Quicker"

(1973 ASF), and over 50 short stories have followed. His first novel,
Bander Snatch (1979), curiously blends pulp cliche and real inventiveness
in its tale of a ghetto mobster who has telepathic powers and learns to
use them responsibly. Mayflies (1979), which shows a real advance in
narrative skill, is a GENERATION-STARSHIP story where ephemeral human
lives flit past the hero, an (immortal) human brain embedded in the ship's
COMPUTER and fighting for control. KO is perhaps best known for the
amusing series The Journeys of McGill Feighan, which consists to date of
The Journeys of McGill Feighan: Book I: Caverns (1981), Book II: Reefs
(1981), Book III: Lava (1982) and Book IV: Cliffs (1986). Feighan is a
flinger (he can teleport people and things) who, though based on Earth,
solves problems on various planets; his quest is for the godlike Far Being
who has interfered with his life since birth. Like most of KO's fiction,
these are interesting, light-hearted books, casual in their tone of voice,
like a hybrid of Ron GOULART and Jack VANCE. ORA:CLE (1984), complexly
plotted, has an expert on Asian history, brain-linked with a computer, in
a future where people live indoors because the air is bad outside and
aliens hunt you there. Fire on the Border (1990), a SPACE OPERA with
interstellar warfare and a Japanese general, is crammed with almost too
much incident. It would be interesting to see what KO could do if his
novels proceeded less breathlessly. [PN]Other works: War of Omission
(1982); The Shelter (1987) with Mary Kittredge, horror; The Electronic
Money Machine (1984), written with the Haven Group, nonfiction about
personal computers.See also: CYBORGS; SPACESHIPS.
O'DONNELL, K.M.
Barry N. MALZBERG.
O'DONNELL, LAWRENCE
Henry KUTTNER; C.L. MOORE.
O'DONNELL, MARGARET
(? - ) Irish writer whose The Beehive (1980) is a FEMINIST thriller set
in a DYSTOPIAN world. [JC]
O'DUFFY, EIMAR
(1893-1935) Irish writer whose mock-epic-Irish Aloysius O'Kennedy
sequence-King Goshawk and the Birds (1926), The Spacious Adventures of the
Man in the Street (1928) and Asses in Clover (1933) - makes satirical
points about contemporary civilization, very much in the manner of James
Stephens (1882-1950) in The Crock of Gold (1912), by assessing modern life
through the eyes of characters who are, or claim to be, figures of Irish
legend. The second volume mounts its comparatively sustained SATIRE
through its heroes' voyage to a UTOPIA where everything is, not unusually,
inverted. The third, set like the first in Ireland after 1950, musters the
forces of legend to defeat US capitalism in the form of the egregious King
Goshawk. [JC]Other works: Bricriu's Feast (1919), a fantasy play.About the
author: Eimar O'Duffy (1972 chap) by Robert Hogan.
ODYSSEY
US BEDSHEET-size magazine. 2 issues, Spring and Summer 1976, published by
Gambi Publications, New York; ed Roger ELWOOD. O was advertised as an sf
magazine, but contained a high proportion of fantasy. The fiction and

articles were unremarkable; lead novellas were by Jerry POURNELLE (#1) and
Larry NIVEN (#2). Production was poor, and the covers by Frank Kelly FREAS
and Jack GAUGHAN were inferior to their usual work. Bad distribution and
poor sales killed O. [FHP/PN]
OFFRET
Andrei TARKOVSKY.
OFFUTT, ANDREW J(EFFERSON V)
(1937- ) US writer who often signed his name andrew j offutt; his first
published story was as by Andy Offutt and his first professional sale was
as by A.J. Offutt. That first published story, a contest winner, was "And
Gone Tomorrow" for If in 1954, but he regards his professional sf career
as beginning with "Blacksword" for Gal in 1959. He soon became a prolific
writer in several genres, both under his own name and under pseudonyms
including John Cleve (see below for the Spaceways sequence), Jeff Douglas
and the house name J.X. WILLIAMS. The pseudonymous works have been SEX
novels, several with sf content. AJO's first sf novel under his own name
was Evil is Live Spelled Backwards (1970), in which an underground
movement opposes a 21st-century religious tyranny through sexual
revolution. The Castle Keeps (1972) more ambitiously depicts - through an
acid examination of SURVIVALIST shibboleths - the violent disintegration
of Western culture. A juvenile, The Galactic Rejects (1973), features
three young friends with PSI POWERS on a UTOPIAN world threatened by
invasion.From the mid-1970s, with the appearance of tales like Messenger
of Zhuvastou (1973) and My Lord Barbarian (1977), AJO turned primarily to
fantasy, usually SWORD AND SORCERY, often works tied to other authors'
creations, though much of the John Cleve sf erotica was published in the
1980s. His urgent, sometimes rather hasty style and his sharp intelligence
are most effectively deployed in sf stories depicting a hectic urban world
and, though he clearly finds all sorts of material congenial, his later
career has not been of striking interest. [JC]Other works: The Great
24-Hour Thing (1971); Ardor on Aros (1973); Genetic Bomb (1975) with
D(ouglas) Bruce Berry; the Cormac Mac Art sequence, based on Robert E.
HOWARD's character and comprising Sword of the Gael * (1975), The Undying
Wizard * (1976), Sign of the Moonbow * (1977), The Mists of Doom * (1977),
When Death Birds Fly * (1980) with Keith Taylor (1946- ) and The Tower of
Death * (1982) with Taylor; Chieftain of Andor (1976; vt Clansman of Andor
1979 UK); a Conan parody, The Black Sorcerer of the Black Castle (1976
chap) plus 3 Conan novels, Conan and the Sorcerer * (1978), The Sword of
Skelos * (1979) and Conan the Mercenary * (1980); the War of the Wizards
fantasy sequence, all with Richard K. Lyon (1933- ), comprising Demon in
the Mirror (1978), Eyes of Sarsis (1980) and Web of the Spider (1981); the
War of the Gods on Earth fantasy sequence, comprising The Iron Lords
(1979), Shadows Out of Hell (1980) and The Lady of the Snowmist (1983);
King Dragon (1980); Shadowspawn * (1987), whose labelling identifies it as
a contribution to the Thieves' World SHARED-WORLD enterprise but which is,
according to AJO, not so - a denial whose terms might also apply to The
Shadow of Sorcery*(1993); Deathknight (1990).As John Cleve:Barbarana
(1970); The Devoured (1970); Fruit of the Loins (1970); Jodinareh (1970);
The Juice of Love (1970); Pleasure Us! (1971; vt The Pleasure Principal

1975 as by Baxter Giles); Manlib! (1974); The Sexorcist (1974; vt Unholy
Revelry 1976); the Spaceways sequence (the first 6 written solo, most of
the rest in collaboration, but all signed Cleve alone), comprising
Spaceways #1: Of Alien Bondage (1982), #2: Corundum's Woman (1982), #3:
Escape from Macho (1982), #4: Satana Enslaved (1982), #5: Master of Misfit
(1982), #6: Purrfect Plunder (1982), #7: The Manhuntress (1982) with Geo.
W. PROCTOR, #8: Under Twin Suns (1982), #9: The Quest of Qalara (1983),
#10: The Yoke of Shen (1983) with Proctor, #11: The Iceworld Connection
(1983) with Jack C. HALDEMAN II and his wife Vol Haldeman, #12: Star
Slaver (1983) with G.C. EDMONDSON, both writing as Cleve, #13: Jonuta
Rising! (1983) with Victor KOMAN, #14: Assignment: Hellhole (1983) with
Robin Kincaid, #15: Starship Sapphire (1984) with Roland GREEN, #16: The
Planet Murderer (1984) with Dwight V. SWAIN, #17: The Carnadyne Horde
(1984) with Koman, #18: Race Across the Stars (1984) with Kincaid and #19:
King of the Slavers (1985). There are further Cleve erotic novels.As Jeff
Douglas: The Balling Machine (1971) with D. Bruce Berry.As J.X. Williams:
The Sex Pill (1968).As Editor: The Swords Against Darkness series,
comprising Swords Against Darkness (anth 1977; vt Swords Against Darkness
I 1990); II (anth 1977); III (anth 1978); IV (anth 1979); V (anth
1979).See also: POLLUTION; SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA.
O'FLINN, PETER
[s] R.L. FANTHORPE.
O'HARA, KENNETH
[s] Bryce WALTON.
OHARA, MARIKO
[r] JAPAN.
O'KEEFE, CLAUDIA
(1958- ) US writer, the hero of whose first sf novel, Black Snow Days
(1990), has been genetically engineered by his mother to reawaken, 10
years after his fatal car crash, into a post- HOLOCAUST environment he is
intended to redeem; the novel rather confusedly puts him through a long
quest sequence for a MCGUFFIN Hidden Base which contains the answers to
questions he resents having to ask. CO'K has also edited Ghost Tide (anth
1993), mostly originals. [JC]
OKUN, LAWRENCE (EUGENE)
(1929- ) US medical doctor and writer whose sf novel, On the 8th Day
(1980), treats GENETIC ENGINEERING in terms of the PARANOIA it evokes.
[JC]
OLAN, SUSAN TORIAN
(? - ) US writer whose The Earth Remembers (1990) is a cagily written
example of the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink variety of post- HOLOCAUST
fiction. Set on the Texas-Mexico border, the tale features MUTANTS,
Amerindians and nuclear devices along with the usual protagonists and
antagonists. [JC]
OLANDER, JOSEPH D.
(1939- ) US academic and anthologist, all of whose work has been in
collaboration with Martin Harry GREENBERG (whom see for details),

sometimes plus further collaborators. "Name" authors involved in team
anthologies part-edited by JDO are Isaac ASIMOV, Damon KNIGHT, Frederik
POHL and Robert SILVERBERG. [JC]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS
ABOUT SF; SOCIOLOGY.
OLDMEADOW, ERNEST (JAMES FRANCIS)
(1867-1949) UK writer whose 1930s radio work sometimes verged on the
fantastic, as in The Town To-Morrow: Five and Twenty Imaginary Broadcasts
(coll 1937) as by Francis Downman. His sf novel, The North Sea Bubble: A
Fantasia (1906), set in 1910, spoofs the conventions of the future- WAR
tale in a manner later amplified by P.G. WODEHOUSE in The Swoop (1909).
[JC]
OLERICH, HENRY
(1851-? ) US author of a series of UTOPIAN novels, some barely
fictionalized. A Cityless and Countryless World (1893) fairly vividly
presents a highly organized Mars of FEMINIST interest, women there being
financially and sexually independent of men. His remaining books - even
The Story of the World a Thousand Years Hence (1923) - fatally eschew
narrative. [JC]Other works: Modern Paradise (1915); Cause and Cure of the
High Cost of Living (1919); The New Life and Future Mating (1927).
OLIVER, CHAD
Working name of US writer and anthropologist Symmes Chadwick Oliver
(1928-1993) for his sf. CO was born in Ohio but spent most of his life in
Texas, where he took his MA at the University of Texas (his 1952 thesis,
"They Builded a Tower", being an early academic study of sf). He took a
PhD in ANTHROPOLOGY from the University of California, Los Angeles, and
became professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin; his
sf work consistently reflected both his professional training and his
place of residence: much of it is set in the outdoors of the US Southwest,
and most of his characters are deeply involved in outdoor activities. CO
was always concerned with the depiction of Native American life and
concerns: The Wolf is My Brother (1967), which is not sf, features a
sympathetically characterized Native American protagonist. Most of CO's
sf, too, could be thought of as Westerns of the sort that eulogize the
land and the people who survive in it. The sf plots that drive his stories
- like, in The Winds of Time (1957), the awakening of ALIENS held in
SUSPENDED ANIMATION for hundreds of centuries - tend to be resolved in
terms that reward a deeply felt longing for a non-urban life closely
involved with Nature, though the effect of this is somewhat dissipated by
his characteristic inability to prepare for his favourite scenes by
adequate plotting, and a tendency (in his earlier works) to pad novelettes
to novel length.His first published story, "The Land of Lost Content",
appeared in Super Science Stories in 1950; his short work has been
collected in Another Kind (coll 1955) and The Edge of Forever (coll 1971),
the latter containing biographical material and a checklist compiled by
William F. NOLAN. CO's first novel, a juvenile, was Mists of Dawn (1952).
Shadows in the Sun (1954), set in Texas, describes with some vividness its
protagonist's discovery that all the inhabitants of a small town are
aliens, that it may be possible for Earth to gain galactic citizenship,
and that he can work for that goal by living an exemplary life on his home

planet; Unearthly Neighbors (1960; rev 1984) depicts human attempts to
communicate with alien visitors; The Shores of Another Sea (1971) is set
in Africa, and articulates CO's concern with the natural world,
specifically in terms of ECOLOGY; Giants in the Dust (1976) argues the
thesis that mankind's fundamental nature is that of a hunting animal, and
that our progress from that condition has fundamentally deracinated us.CO
was a pioneer in the application of competent anthropological thought to
sf themes, and, though awkward construction sometimes stifled the warmth
of his earlier stories, he is a careful author whose speculative thought
deserves to be more widely known and appreciated. [JC]Other works: Broken
Eagle (1989) and The Cannibal Owl (1994), both Westerns.About the author:
Chad Oliver: An Annotated Bibliography ?
W. HALL.See also: GENERATION STARSHIPS; LINGUISTICS; ORIGIN OF MAN; UFOS;
VENUS.
OLIVER, FREDERICK SPENCER
[r] ATLANTIS.
OLLIER, CLAUDE
[r] FRANCE.
OLSA, JAROSLAV Jr
(1964- ) Student of Arabic and Oriental studies and international
relations; also sf editor, translator and bibliographer. JO was for a time
assistant editor of the first Czechoslovak sf monthly magazine, Ikarie
(published since 1990), but his major role in sf studies has been as
co-editor of the Czechoslovak Encyklopedie science fiction ["Encyclopedia
of Science Fiction"] (1992). He has contributed to LOCUS, FOUNDATION and
other sf magazines, has compiled bibliographies of Czechoslovak FANZINES,
and wrote the entry on CZECH AND SLOVAK SF for this encyclopedia. [PN]
OLSEN, BOB
Working name of US writer Alfred John Olsen Jr (1884-1956), who began
publishing sf with "The Four Dimensional Roller Press" for AMZ in 1927;
this was the first of several tales in the Four Dimensional sequence.
Other tales featured Professor Archimedes Banning, whose exploits were
patterned on the model of the EDISONADE. One story, Rhythm Rides the
Rocket (1940 chap), was published in booklet form, but BO was a born
PULP-MAGAZINE writer, and lost interest in the field after about 1940.
[JC]See also: GREAT AND SMALL; HIVE-MINDS.
OLTION, JERRY B.
(1957- ) US writer who began publishing sf in 1982 with "Much Ado About
Nothing" for ASF, the journal which published a high proportion of the 25
or so stories he wrote in the 1980s, many of which appear in Love Songs of
a Mad Scientist: The Collected Stories of Jerry Oltion Volume One (coll
1993). His first novel, Frame of Reference (1987), is a POCKET-UNIVERSE
tale whose human protagonists discover, while growing up and falling in
love, that the starship they live in is actually a simulacrum hidden
underground and that the ALIENS on the surface of the Earth deserve a
strict comeuppance, which they soon get. JBO then published two Isaac
Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens ties: #4: Alliance * (1990) and #6:
Humanity * (1990). [JC]Other Works:The Gigantic Three in One Complete

History of the Universe (1994 chap) with A.B.Newcomer.
O'MALLEY, KATHLEEN
[r] A.C. CRISPIN.
OMEGA MAN, THE
Film (1971). Warner Bros. Dir Boris Sagal, starring Charlton Heston,
Anthony Zerbe, Rosalind Cash. Screenplay John William Corrington, Joyce H.
Corrington, based on I Am Legend (1954) by Richard MATHESON. 98 mins.
Colour.This is the second film version of Matheson's ultra- PARANOIA
novel, the first being L' ULTIMO UOMO DELLA TERRA (1964; vt The Last Man
on Earth). "The first one was very poorly done," said Matheson, himself a
screenwriter, "but it did follow the book. The Omega Man bore no
resemblance to my book . . . I had absolutely nothing to do with the
screenplay." A survivor of a biological war battles (with a machine gun
rather than Matheson's sharpened stakes) against a group of mutated,
albino fanatics haunting the almost dead city. The film sacrifices the
claustrophobia and nightmare of the novel for fast-moving action. The true
cinematic heir to Matheson's story, though not directly based on it, is
the far superior NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). [JB/PN]
OMEGA SCIENCE DIGEST
Australian popular-science magazine, small- BEDSHEET size, publishing an
average of 2 sf stories per issue; 37 bimonthly issues Jan/Feb
1981-Jan/Feb 1987, ed Philip Gore. The parent magazine was the US Science
Digest, discontinued at around the same time. Though unexceptional as a
science magazine, OSD was, with a circulation around 35,000, for 6 years
the most important publisher of Australian short sf, printing 78 stories
by Australian authors, illustrated by Australian artists such as Mark
McLeod, Tony Pyrzakowski and Frantz Cantor. Authors included Russell
BLACKFORD, Damien BRODERICK, Simon Brown, Sean MCMULLEN, Jack WODHAMS and,
perhaps most notably, Terry DOWLING, whose popular stories in OSD
attracted much local notice. [PN]
OMNI
US popular-science magazine which includes fiction; monthly, current to
April 1995 but (see below) slick, small- BEDSHEET size, #1 Oct 1978,
published by Omni Publications International, New York.Because it has a
high circulation - at times topping 1 million - and because it pays the
highest rates for fiction, Omni has a prestige in sf circles out of
proportion to the actual number of stories it publishes (seldom more than
2 per issue, 1 per issue through most of the early 1990s). Founded by Bob
Guccione of Penthouse magazine as a sister periodical, O has been one of
the big success stories of US MAGAZINE publishing: lavishly illustrated in
colour, publishing science articles ranging from the demanding through the
gosh-wow to features on only marginally scientific, sometimes New-Age
subjects like parapsychology and UFOS, O does not depend on fiction for
its sales, and has been fortunate in having fiction editors who have kept
the standard quite high; they have been Ben BOVA (Oct 1978-Dec 1979),
Robert SHECKLEY (Jan 1980-Sep 1981) and Ellen DATLOW (Oct 1981-current).
Bova was also executive editor Jan 1980-Aug 1981; the present executive
editor is Keith Ferrell, an sf enthusiast who is soliciting more

nonfiction from sf writers, thus increasing the sf presence in the
magazine.However, circulation figures kept dropping from the peak in 1988
of over one million. In Oct 1992 Omni changed from perfectbound to
staplebound. In that same year most of the staff (but not Datlow) was
moved to North Carolina. There were only 11 issues in 1993, but they
included the enormous 15th-anniversary Oct 1993 issue, which published
Harlan ELLISON's "Mefisto in Onyx". Circulation rose a little in 1994, but
it was still down 25% on the 1988 figures. The difficulties came to a head
in March 1995 when it was announced that Omni as a monthly would change to
electronic publishing, to be available as Omni Online through America
Online. The printed version would continue as a quarterly available
through newsstands only, all subscriptions being cancelled. Datlow would
continue as fiction editor.O's fiction has, interestingly, not put a high
premium on hard science; indeed, especially in later years, it has often
published SCIENCE FANTASY, pure FANTASY and MAINSTREAM fiction with a
small sf twist to it. This has been attributed (1991) by Datlow to the
higher quality overall of fantasy submissions relative to sf submissions,
rather than to any change of policy. As fiction editor, Datlow has pulled
in the big names but also done much for the careers of novice writers. For
example, Ted Chiang's novelette "Tower of Babylon" (Omni 1990), his first
story, won a NEBULA. Among the other award-winning Omni novelettes and
short stories have been "Sandkings" (1979) by George R.R. MARTIN ( HUGO
and Nebula), "The Way of Cross and Dragon" (1979) also by Martin (Hugo),
"Morning Child" (1984) by Gardner DOZOIS (Nebula), "Tangents" (1986) by
Greg BEAR (Hugo and Nebula), "Permafrost" (1986) by Roger ZELAZNY (Hugo),
"Schrodinger's Kitten" (1988) by George Alec EFFINGER (Hugo and Nebula)
and "At the Rialto" (1989) by Connie WILLIS (Nebula). Omni has also
published work of some literary distinction by Thomas M. DISCH and John
CROWLEY, supported the eccentric talent of Howard WALDROP and the
CYBERPUNK of William GIBSON and Bruce STERLING, and generally had an
honourable, imaginative publishing record. Although Datlow is on record as
liking very much some stories she would still not accept for Omni, she
seems to have made remarkably few concessions, in O's fiction, to its
mass-market audience.A UK version, Omni: Book of the Future, featuring new
UK material and US reprints, ed Jack Schofield, was test-launched as a
weekly partwork in Nov 1981 in the UK West Country by Eaglemoss
Publications; it lasted only 4 weeks and never received national
distribution.Anthologies based on Omni are The Best of Omni Science
Fiction (anth 1980) ed Bova and Don Myrus, #2 (anth 1981) ed Bova and
Myrus, #3 (anth 1982) ed Bova and Myrus, #4 (anth 1982) ed Bova and Myrus,
#5 (anth 1983) ed Myrus, #6 (anth 1983) ed Myrus-all but the first of
these containing original fiction in addition to reprints - The First Omni
Book of Science Fiction (anth 1983) ed Datlow, The Second Omni Book of
Science Fiction (anth 1983) ed Datlow, The Third Omni Book of Science
Fiction (anth 1985) ed Datlow, The Fourth Omni Book of Science Fiction
(anth 1985) ed Datlow, The Fifth Omni Book of Science Fiction (anth 1987;
includes 1 original story) ed Datlow, The Sixth Omni Book of Science
Fiction (anth 1989; includes 1 original story) ed Datlow and The Seventh
Omni Book of Science Fiction (anth 1989; includes 1 original story) ed
Datlow. [PN]

OMPA
Known usually by its acronym, the Offtrail Magazine Publishers
Association (1954-78/79) was formed in the UK by Kenneth BULMER, A.
Vincent Clarke and Chuck Harris. OMPA was modelled on FAPA, and was
founded to facilitate distribution of FANZINES published by and for
members. Early contributors included John BRUNNER and Michael MOORCOCK.
Uniquely for an APA, OMPA once organized a national convention, Ompacon,
the 1973 UK Eastercon. [PR/RH]
O'NEAL, KATHLEEN M.
Kathleen O'Neal GEAR.
1 APRIL 2000
AUSTRIA.
ONE HOUR TO DOOMSDAY
CITY BENEATH THE SEA.
O'NEILL, GERARD K.
[r] LAGRANGE POINT; SPACE HABITATS.
O'NEILL, JOSEPH
(1886-1953) Irish educationist and novelist; Permanent Secretary to the
Department of Education, Irish Free State, 1923-44; author of 3 sf novels.
Wind from the North (1934) is only marginally sf, its narrator passing
through a timeslip to give a vivid account of Dublin under Viking rule in
AD1013. JO turned to sf proper with Land under England (1935), a DYSTOPIA
in a LOST-WORLD setting: in a cave system beneath Cumberland, descendants
of the Roman Army suffer a totalitarian state in which individualism is
completely obliterated by telepathic means. The introduction by AE assumed
that the book was a SATIRE on Hitlerian totalitarianism, an impression
confirmed with the appearance of Day of Wrath (1936), a future- WAR novel
which describes the destruction of civilization by advanced aircraft
following a coalition between Germany, Japan and China. JO was not a
GENRE-SF writer; rather, he used sf instruments to make cultural and
political points. His eloquence was considerable. [JE]See also: OPTIMISM
AND PESSIMISM; POLITICS.
O'NEILL, SCOTT
[r] Barton WERPER.
ONE MILLION B.C.
(vt Man and his Mate) Film (1940). Hal Roach/United Artists. Dir Hal
Roach and Hal Roach Jr, starring Victor Mature, Carole Landis, Lon Chaney
Jr. Screenplay Mickell Novak, George Baker, Joseph Frickert, based on a
story by Eugene Roche. 85 mins, cut to 80 mins. B/w.In this not very
distinguished prehistoric Romeo-and-Juliet soap opera a young caveman is
exiled from the family cave and meets a girl from a rival tribe; together
they face various prehistoric hazards, including an earthquake and an
erupting volcano. Photographically enlarged lizards wearing rubber
disguises play the anachronistic dinosaurs, and an elephant wearing a
woolly coat stands in for a mammoth. D.W. Griffith (1875-1948) worked on
portions of the film, but resigned in anger at the decision not to have
the cavepeople speak modern English. The UK remake was ONE MILLION YEARS

BC (1966). [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA.
ONE MILLION YEARS B.C.
Film (1966). Hammer/20th Century-Fox. Dir Don Chaffey, starring Raquel
Welch, John Richardson, Robert Brown, Martine Beswick. Screenplay Michael
Carreras, based on the screenplay of ONE MILLION B.C. (1940). 100 mins.
Colour.The first of Hammer's several stone-age movies (see also WHEN
DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH), this is a remake of One Million B.C..
Prehistoric lovers from different scantily clad tribes, the rock people
and the shell people - some loony ANTHROPOLOGY here - survive warfare,
anachronistic monsters, unconvincing fur brassieres and volcanic
upheavals. Ray HARRYHAUSEN - this time not working with his usual
colleague Charles Schneer - was in charge of the monsters which are,
indeed, animated. [PN/JB]
ONN, CARRIE
Robert E. VARDEMAN.
ON SPEC
Canadian SEMIPROZINE, #1 Spring 1989, slightly irregular quarterly since
1991,current,eighteen issues to Fall 1994, pub The Copper Pig Collective
from Edmonton, ed Barry Hammond,Susan MacGregor, Hazel Sangster, Jena
Snyder and Diane L. Walton, DIGEST, perfect bound,around 96pp. With quite
a low circulation that perhaps should qualify it only as a FANZINE,
inother respects including the quality of its stories and the artwork of
its covers OSis a fairly professional venture. Most writers - Robert
Boyczuk and Alice Major for example - arecomparatively unknown, but
well-known authors like Charles DE LINT, Dave DUNCAN, Spider ROBINSON and
Robert J. SAWYER also occasionally contribute fiction. Most issues
containsome poetry. [PN]
ON THE BEACH
Film (1959). Lomitas Productions/United Artists. Dir Stanley Kramer,
starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, Anthony Perkins, Guy
Doleman. Screenplay John Paxton, based on On the Beach (1957) by Nevil
SHUTE. 134 mins. B/w.1964, the NEAR FUTURE: only Australia has survived a
global nuclear war. This merely prolongs the agony: a cloud of radioactive
fallout is moving south and everyone will die. Suicide pills are handed
out; people face death (or run to meet it) with varying degrees of
dignity, though tears are shed; big-name Hollywood stars (the plot
provides reasons for the number of Americans facing the end in Melbourne)
look anguished; the wind blows newspapers through empty streets. OTB was
the most celebrated of the 1950s anti-Bomb films, heavily publicized, much
discussed, seen as Art, and certainly effective propaganda in the Cold-War
nuclear-weapons debate. It has not weathered well; seen today it appears
slow, mawkish, ludicrously stiff-upper-lip, and unrealistic in a sanitized
middle-class way: no riots, no looting, just chaps feeling miserable and
driving racing cars in a reckless manner. The Australian legend that Ava
Gardner, while shooting, looked around and said of Melbourne "What a great
place to make a movie about the end of the world" is untrue. Peter
NICHOLLS appeared in a crowd scene. [PN]
OPEN UNIVERSE

In cosmology an open universe is a model of the Universe which implies
that it will continue to expand forever; in this general sense, the term
is found incidentally in many sf novels. However, sf readers also use it
in a quite different meaning: to designate a work or series whose
characters and venues may be made use of by fans and others in FANZINES
without copyright restrictions (although the original authors do sometimes
impose constraints). The best known open universes are probably STAR TREK
and Marion Zimmer BRADLEY's Darkover.A cognate use of the term, to
designate works or series whose authors invite other professional authors
to participate, is perhaps deceptive. Open universes of this sort, from H.
P. LOVECRAFT's Cthulhu to Michael MOORCOCK's Jerry Cornelius, are perhaps
more appropriately thought of as a kind of SHARED WORLD. [JC]
OPERA
MUSIC; THEATRE.
OPERATION GANYMED
Film (1977). Pentagrama/Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. Written/dir Rainer
Erler, starring Horst Frank, Dieter Laser, Uwe Friedrichsen, Jurgen
Prochnow, Claud Theo Gaestner, Vicky Roskilly. 126 mins, cut to 120 mins.
Colour.This grim German film emerges as a realist response to fantasies
like PLANET OF THE APES (1968). On their return to Earth, 5 survivors of a
3-ship, 21-man mission to Ganymede crashland off the Gulf of Mexico and,
lost in the desert, turn to madness, murder, cannibalism and guilt-ridden
introspection as they wonder whether humanity has been wiped out by a
nuclear war. During the mission, as we discover in flashbacks, the
astronauts discovered ALIEN microorganisms which caused a plague among
them, but it turns out that Earth is the harshest environment of all, as
the final survivor straggles back to an unchanged, uncaring civilization.
Concerned with the ethical issues of space travel-whether the expenditure
results in an improved earthly standard of living or not - this is a talky
and melodramatic film, but intermittently powerful. Erler's other sf
films, mainly for the German tv company ZDF which cofinanced this one,
include Das Genie ["The Genius"] (1974), Plutonium (1978) and Fleisch
["Flesh"] (1979). [KN]
OPERATION MONSTERLAND
GOJIRA; RADON.
OPERATOR #5
US PULP MAGAZINE, 48 issues, Apr 1934-Nov/Dec 1939, published by Popular
Publications; ed Rogers Terrill, it began as a monthly and then alternated
between bimonthly and monthly. This was one of the livelier and more
successful hero/villain pulps, and more sciencefictional than most.
Operator #5 was secret agent Jimmy Christopher, whose assignment, in the
lead novel every issue, was to save the USA from destruction by various
menaces (often superscientific) and unfriendly powers (frequently
Asiatic). The lead novels were published under the house name Curtis
STEELE, which concealed the highly prolific pulp writer Frederick C. DAVIS
(Apr 1934-Nov 1935), then Emile Tepperman (Dec 1935-Mar 1938), and lastly
Wayne Rogers. Other features included a series of spy stories by Arthur
Leo ZAGAT. 13 of the early lead novels, all the work of Davis, were

reprinted as paperback books ( Frederick C. DAVIS for details).
[MJE/FHP/PN]
OPPENHEIM, E(DWARD) PHILLIPS
(1866-1946) UK writer, publishing from 1887 at least 160 novels, most of
them espionage thrillers or society detective mysteries, the best known
being The Great Impersonation (1920). His sf novels of interest - most of
the titles listed below are romantic-fantasy potboilers - include The
Wrath to Come (1924 US), in which the USA is threatened by a 1940s
German-Russian-Japanese axis, Gabriel Samara, Peacemaker (1925 US; vt
Gabriel Samara 1925 UK; vt Exit a Dictator 1939 US), in which the Russian
government is overthrown, and The Dumb Gods Speak (1937), a novel set in
the future and involving high intrigue and a secret weapon. EPO was a
careless, clumsy, snobbish, quite enjoyable writer of escapist fiction.
[JC]Other works: The Mysterious Mr Sabin (1898); A Daughter of Astrea
(1898); The Traitors (1902); The Great Awakening (1902; vt A Sleeping
Memory 1902 US); The Secret (1907); Havoc (1911); The Falling Star (1911
US); The Double Life of Mr Alfred Burton (1913 US); The Black Box (1915
US); The Great Prince Shan (1922 US); The Golden Beast (1926 US);
Matorni's Vineyard (1928 US); The Adventures of Mr Joseph P. Cray (1929);
Up the Ladder of Gold (1931 US); The Spy Paramount (1935); Mr Mirakel
(1943 US).
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM
In the most simplistic version of the HISTORY OF SF, sf was always (and
rightly) an optimistic literature until the NEW WAVE came along in the
1960s and spoiled everything. This was at best a very partial truth, being
only remotely applicable to GENRE SF and not at all to MAINSTREAM sf.In
the mainstream, not even the work of individual authors could be
categorized as simply either optimistic or pessimistic. Both Jules VERNE
and H.G. WELLS took a darker view of the future as they became older;
indeed, Wells's vision described almost a parabola: between THE TIME
MACHINE (1895), a novel of evolutionary futility, and Mind at the End of
its Tether (1945), from 1905 through the 1920s his portraits of the future
were generally UTOPIAN. The favourite themes of sf outside the genre
magazines have always included DYSTOPIA, INVASION, future WAR, and the
HOLOCAUST AFTER, and the stories have often taken the form of dire
warnings or a generalized philosophical bleakness aimed at demonstrating
humanity's predilection for getting itself into trouble. Olaf STAPLEDON
envisaged, in LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930), an ultimate harmony in the
Universe, but one achieved only after a prolonged variety of evolutionary
torments.By contrast, sf in the PULP MAGAZINES was mostly cheerful,
especially after Hugo GERNSBACK founded AMAZING STORIES in 1926. Gernsback
proselytized actively for technological optimism, and this, despite many
exceptions - including several stories by John W. CAMPBELL Jr, writing as
Don A Stuart, which evoked an atmosphere of moody desolation - remained
the dominant tone of sf until the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima
in 1945. Campbell, as editor of ASF, normally required a constructive
attitude towards science from his contributors, but, though writers like
Robert A. HEINLEIN were temperamentally inclined to oblige, even before
1945 the typical ASF story was by no means mindlessly cheery, and many of

the stories showed a strong awareness of possible technological
DISASTER.After the advent of the Bomb ( NUCLEAR POWER) it was no longer
possible to see the applications of science as an unmixed blessing. Also
working against optimism were the Cold War and its domestic effect in the
USA: the suspicious atmosphere (approaching PARANOIA) prevalent from the
early 1950s (shown notably in the anti-communist scares) probably helped
to change the focus of interest of many sf stories from TECHNOLOGY to
SOCIOLOGY and POLITICS. The magazine GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION specialized in
a form of social SATIRE best exemplified by THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1952 as
"Gravy Planet"; 1953) by C.M. KORNBLUTH and Frederik POHL; this type of
story created its future scenario with a distinct cynicism, but its
narrative tone was similar to that of most pulp sf, cheerful and
hardbitten, with no such strong sense of horror and disgust as could be
found outside the genre in novels like George ORWELL's NINETEEN
EIGHTY-FOUR (1949).But any categorization of sf stories into the
optimistic and the pessimistic is so imprecise as not to be greatly
useful, and indeed there would be no point in discussing the subject were
it not that sf critics with backgrounds in 1930s and 1940s FANDOM have
often regarded the optimism/pessimism split as of grave importance. Just
such a distinction has also been made in several histories of sf, such as
Donald A. WOLLHEIM's The Universe Makers (1971), and it is implicit in
much of the work of Sam MOSKOWITZ. The work of Clifford D. SIMAK is
relevant as an example of the difficulties in such a categorization: his
stories regularly revolve around reconciliation and the achievement of
some kind of harmony between Technological Man and Nature (hence
optimistic), but his tone, as in CITY (fixup 1952), is often elegiac and
nostalgic (hence pessimistic).A distinction with some truth is often made
between US sf, as typically outward-thrusting and riding the momentum of
the old myth of the Frontier, and the UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE, which,
perhaps as a result of imperial power giving way rapidly to global
impotence, was far more inclined to expect DISASTER. But this was never
more than a gross generalization (though truer of UK sf than of US sf);
nor did it take into account the guileless pleasure the British took in
disaster. Could anything so enjoyable be called pessimism? Now that, in
the 1990s, the world economic hegemony of the USA is threatened by
financial weakness and domestic problems, as happened in the UK much
earlier, it will be interesting to observe what sociological reflections
appear in US sf of the later 1990s.It was only in the middle and late
1960s, with the advent of the so-called New Wave, that real anger and
sometimes despair about the future of humanity became quite commonplace in
genre sf. But the writers of the New Wave, even though their attitudes
sometimes appeared anarchic, were seldom passively acceptant of a dark
view; the dominant New-Wave metaphor may have been of ENTROPY, of things
running down, but the fierce commitment of, say, Harlan ELLISON or Brian
W. ALDISS could not be airily dismissed as "pessimism" by any but the
crudest of critics. Aldiss has many times inveighed in print against what
he regards as the strong moral pressure, found especially in some US
publishing houses, to legislate for a kind of mandatory optimism. The
casual insertion of a happy ending or a few improving messages no more
constitutes true optimism than an awareness of the difficulties of life
either now or in the future constitutes true pessimism.Poets have many

times argued that an awareness of death gives a sharper edge to love; just
so, the darker elements which have entered sf since 1945, and especially
since the mid-1960s, have been argued as redressing a balance without
which sf could never have reached maturity as a genre. The good sf writer
often mediates between simplistic extremes of optimism and pessimism, and
his mode of mediation is often irony: one meaning of this complex word has
been defined as "an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have
been, expected". The ironist is not just somebody sarcastic or even
somebody who expects the worst: he or she is somebody who understands the
multitude of possibilities concealed in apparently straightforward events,
does not take anything at face value, and (at best) embraces the largeness
and unpredictability of things (at worst being merely knowing). Notable sf
ironists have included J.G. BALLARD, Alfred BESTER, Algis BUDRYS, Philip
K. DICK, Thomas M. DISCH, Ursula K. LE GUIN, Michael MOORCOCK and, more
recently, Iain M. BANKS, John CROWLEY, William GIBSON, James TIPTREE Jr.
and Gene WOLFE. To read the more painful or rueful aspects of their work
as simple pessimism is to read inaccurately.Indeed the whole question of
optimism and pessimism in sf seems far less pressing today than it did
when the first edition of this encyclopedia was published in 1979, with
the residual echoes of the New-Wave debate still audible. While the
entropic introspection ( INNER SPACE) of the New Wave is no longer
characteristic of any but a few writers, the old certitudes of SPACE OPERA
(the Universe is ours for the taking, just so long as we're inventive and
self-reliant) are likewise long gone. Writers of HARD SF from the 1980s Greg BEAR, David BRIN, Orson Scott CARD, Paul J. MCAULEY, Michael SWANWICK
and others - no longer portray the Universe as waiting voluptuously to be
had. The extremes of optimism and pessimism have disappeared; perhaps,
except for purposes of tub-thumping argument, they were never there in the
first place. [PN]
OR, L'
GOLD.
ORAM, NEIL
(1938- ) UK writer whose involvement in sf was restricted to the 3 vols
of his The Warp sequence of metaphysical adventures - The Storm's Howling
through Tiflis (1980), Lemmings on the Edge (1981) and The Balustrade
Paradox (1982) - which novelize his 22-hour, 10-play cycle, The Warp,
performed in London in 1979, dir Ken Campbell. The sequence, after the
manner of the Illuminatus! books by Robert SHEA and Robert Anton WILSON,
features world conspiracies, ley energies, reincarnated searchers for the
key to unlock occult mysteries, and so forth. [JC]
ORBAN
Working name of US illustrator Paul Orban (?1896-?1974). He executed 7
covers and many interior ILLUSTRATIONS for a remarkable number of
magazines (1933-60), including If, Future, Space Science Fiction and The
Shadow, but is mostly associated in readers' minds with the 1940s ASF,
where he did many of the interior illustrations 1933-54. His
black-and-white work was often symbolic of a story rather than directly
representational, regularly placing faces or figures over geometrical
abstractions and using bold cross-hatching; it was always competent and

sometimes more. Brian W. ALDISS has called O "an incurable romantic in a
field of incurable romantics". [JG/PN]
ORBIT
Seminal US ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series ed Damon KNIGHT. Although Orbit was
not the first such series, having been preceded by STAR SCIENCE FICTION
STORIES in the USA and NEW WRITINGS IN SF in the UK, it was its
extraordinary early success that precipitated the boom in such series in
the early 1970s. It had a more literary orientation than the sf magazines,
and perhaps for this reason was especially popular with the active members
of the newly formed SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA. For whatever
cause, stories from Orbit dominated the NEBULA awards in their early
years, although none has ever won a HUGO. Orbit 1 (anth 1966) contained
"The Secret Place" by Richard MCKENNA, which won the short-story Nebula.
Orbit 3 (anth 1968) featured 2 Nebula-winning stories: "Mother to the
World" by Richard WILSON and "The Planners" by Kate WILHELM. Orbit 4 (anth
1968) contained another winner in "Passengers" by Robert SILVERBERG. That
was the last Orbit story to win an award, although the year of pervasive
dominance was 1970, when between them Orbit 6 (anth 1970) and Orbit 7
(anth 1970) provided 1 of the 5 novellas on the final Nebula ballot, 3 of
the 6 novelettes, and 6 of the 7 short stories. Three writers in
particular became associated with ORBIT, and remained its most regular
contributors: R.A. LAFFERTY, Wilhelm and Gene WOLFE; in the run of 21
volumes, Lafferty and Wilhelm had 19 stories each, and Wolfe 18. Orbit
lost its dominance once the flood of competitors appeared, and with #14
had to change publishers (becoming confined to a hardcover edition in the
process) in order to survive. Notable stories in later volumes include
Wolfe's "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" in Orbit 10 (anth 1972), Ursula K. LE
GUIN's "The Stars Below" in Orbit 14 (anth 1974) - which also contained
Joan D. VINGE's debut story - and Wilhelm's "Where Late the Sweet Birds
Sang" in Orbit 15 (anth 1974). Orbit was especially notable for stories
that seemed at the time odd and sui generis, quite unlike the usual run of
GENRE SF and fantasy, but with hindsight were early signs of a general
sophistication of genre sf in the 1970s, in which this series at first
played a vital role; later numbers became rather insipid. Other volumes in
the series are Orbit 2 (anth 1967), Orbit 5 (anth 1969), Orbit 8 (anth
1970), Orbit 9 (anth 1971), Orbit 11 (anth 1972), Orbit 12 (anth 1973),
Orbit 13 (anth 1974), Orbit 16 (anth 1975), Orbit 17 (anth 1975), Orbit 18
(anth 1976), Orbit 19 (anth 1977), Orbit 20 (anth 1978) and Orbit 21 (anth
1980). The Best From Orbit (anth 1977) is culled from the first 10 vols.
[MJE/PN]
ORBIT SCIENCE FICTION
US DIGEST-size magazine. 5 issues 1953-Nov/Dec 1954, first 2 undated,
published by Hanro Corp., New York; ed Jules Saltman. OSF was a
middling-quality magazine that fell victim to the inundation of the market
with too many sf magazines in the early 1950s. A story in the Tex Harrigan
series by August DERLETH appeared in every issue, and #5 contained
"Adjustment Team" by Philip K. DICK. All stories were chosen by Donald A.
WOLLHEIM, uncredited. A cut 1954 Australian edition of #1 only, in pulp
format, was published by Consolidated Press, Sydney. [FHP/PN]

ORCZY, BARONESS
Working name of Hungarian-born UK author and illustrator Baroness Emmuska
(variously Emma or Emulka) Magdalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Barbara Orczy
(1865-1947). After magazine work as an illustrator, she came to fame with
The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905). Her sf novel, By the Gods Beloved (1905; vt
The Gates of Kamt 1907 US), is a LOST-WORLD tale set in the desert, where
ancient Egyptians engage in sexual intrigues and politics. [JC]
ORDE, A.J.
Sheri S. TEPPER.
ORE, REBECCA
Pseudonym of US writer Rebecca B. Brown (1948- ), who began publishing sf
with "Projectile Weapons and Wild Alien Water" for AMZ in 1986 and is best
known for Becoming Alien (1988) and its sequels, Being Alien (1989) and
Human to Human (1990), a sequence which - with a deceptive air of
leisureliness - takes a young rural Virginian named Tom from the
provincial backwaters of xenophobic Earth to another planet where, as the
solitary human among a multitude of other races, he is trained to join, on
behalf of Earth, the Federation of Space Traveling Systems. A very wide
range of ALIENS is introduced in a concise but seemingly disorganized
cataloguing style which has reminded critics of Stanley G. WEINBAUM's "A
Martian Odyssey" (1934); but, as the sequence progresses, the momentum of
the tale builds, and RO's apparently scattershot concisions turn out to
have been carefully meditated. The end sense, as Tom grows into knowledge
of himself and of his prejudice-stricken fellow humans, is one of
complexities experienced. More immediately impressive, perhaps, is a
singleton, The Illegal Rebirth of Billy the Kid (1991), in which a CIA
specialist in DNA-recombinant engineering ( GENETIC ENGINEERING) creates a
CLONE - or chimera - of Billy the Kid whose "memories" of the 19th century
have been programmed into his blank brain, and whose perceptions are
controlled by a "nineteenth-century visual matrix" that causes him to read
21st-century sights in terms of Billy's own experiences. The story of this
chimera's slow and anguished climb into self-awareness, and of his escape
to a rural Appalachian theme-parked reservation, is swift and urgently
dense in the telling, fragilely hopeful in its implications. As of 1991,
RO herself lived in Appalachia, and the ironies attendent upon inhabiting
a contrived sanctuary enrich an already rich text. Her stories, which are
strong and varied, appear in Alien Bootlegger (coll 1993); Slow Funeral
(1994) is a contemporary fantasy which evocatively crosshatches
supernatural material into the American scene. [JC]
O'REILLY, JOHN BOYLE
(1844-1890) Irish-born US writer. A Fenian transported to Australia, he
escaped to the USA and became a journalist, poet and novelist. His sf
novel about a republican England, The King's Men: A Tale of Tomorrow
(1884) with Robert GRANT, F.J. Stimson and John T. Wheelwright, features
an attempted monarchist coup which is roundly defeated. [JC]
ORGILL, DOUGLAS (WILLIAM)
[r] John GRIBBIN.
ORIGINAL ANTHOLOGIES

An original ANTHOLOGY is an anthology in book format of stories that have
not been previously published, and such volumes played an important role
in sf PUBLISHING, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. This encyclopedia
gives entries to original-anthology series devoted to sf and (with one
exception, Dangerous Visions) running to 3 or more vols; we do not give
separate entries for shared-world anthology series ( SHARED WORLDS for
examples) with the exception of Wild Cards. There are 19 such entries: The
BERKLEY SHOWCASE , CHRYSALIS, DANGEROUS VISIONS, FULL SPECTRUM,
INFINITY,
INTERZONE: THE ANTHOLOGY (original only in part), L. RON HUBBARD PRESENTS
WRITERS OF THE FUTURE, NEW DIMENSIONS, NEW VOICES, NEW WRITINGS IN SF,
NOVA, ORBIT, OTHER EDENS, QUARK, STAR SCIENCE FICTION STORIES, STELLAR,
SYNERGY, UNIVERSE and WILD CARDS. (We classify some further
original-anthology series in book format as magazines, when they so
describe themselves; these include DESTINIES and PULPHOUSE: THE HARDBACK
MAGAZINE.) [PN]
ORIGINAL SCIENCE FICTION STORIES, THE
US DIGEST-size magazine, 38 issues, 1953-May 1960. Published by Columbia
Publications; ed Robert A.W. LOWNDES. A companion magazine to FUTURE
FICTION and SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY, TOSFS began life as a one-shot
simply entitled Science Fiction Stories, though some commentators see this
as a mere continuation, after a gap, of the magazine SCIENCE FICTION
(1939-41), also ed Lowndes. #2 followed in 1954, and the magazine
commenced regular publication in Jan 1955. The Sep 1955 issue added an
advertising slogan, "The Original", to the title on the cover, and the
magazine subsequently became known by that name, although technically its
title remained Science Fiction Stories. Like its companion magazines,
TOSFS existed on a very small editorial budget but maintained a
respectable, if largely mediocre, level of quality, a little better
perhaps than its stable companion Future Fiction. Serialized novels
included The Tower of Zanid (1958) by L. Sprague DE CAMP and Caduceus Wild
(1959 TOSFS; 1978) by Ward MOORE and Robert Bradford. Robert SILVERBERG
was the magazine's most prolific contributor. R.A. LAFFERTY made his debut
here with "Day of the Glacier" (1960). The numeration of this cluster of
magazines was very complex, and can be found explained in Science Fiction,
Fantasy and Weird Fiction Magazines (1985) ed Marshall B. TYMN and Mike
ASHLEY (in their article on Science Fiction, as they prefer to treat TOSFS
as a continuation of that journal). After its demise in May 1960 the title
was bought by fan James V. Taurasi ( FANTASY TIMES), who used it on 3
SEMIPROZINE issues - little more than FANZINES, in fact - in BEDSHEET
format in Dec 1961, Winter 1962 and Winter 1963. The UK abridged reprint
edition (1957-60) had 12 numbers. [MJE/FHP/PN]
ORIGIN OF MAN
An abundant literature dealing with the remote ancestry of the human
species inevitably sprang up in the wake of the theory of EVOLUTION, as
propounded by Charles Darwin (1809-1882). T.H. Huxley (1825-1895), the
principal champion of Darwinism, published a classic essay on "Man's Place
in Nature" (1863), and Darwin himself wrote The Descent of Man (1871) soon
after. The main point at issue was, as Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) put

it, "the question of whether Man is an ape or an angel". Disraeli was on
the side of the angels, but science and serious speculative fiction were
not; their main interest was in how Man had ceased to be a brute beast and
become human.Huxley took a rather harsh view of the process of natural
selection, and so did his one-time pupil, H.G. WELLS, whose "A Story of
the Stone Age" (1897) envisages the crucial moment in human evolution as
the invention of a "new club" - a better means to cut and kill. This view
recurs constantly, being memorably envisaged in Stanley KUBRICK's 2001: A
SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), in which the dawn of intelligence occurs as an ape
realizes that the bone he uses to smash other bones can also be used as,
among other things, a WEAPON. Darwin presented a rather different account,
stressing the positive value of cooperation and mutual protection in the
struggle for existence. This stress on cooperative emotions as well as
physical inventions is found in such works as Jack LONDON's Before Adam
(1906), although previous, more religiously inclined authors had
represented the origins of humanity in purely spiritual terms; Gouverneur
MORRIS's The Pagan's Progress (1904) is an example. The domestication of
fire was also widely seen as the crucial invention, notably in Stanley
WATERLOO's The Story of Ab (1897), in Charles Henry Robinson's Longhead:
The Story of the First Fire (1913), and in the most famous novel by the
most prolific author of prehistoric fantasies, J.H. ROSNY aine's La guerre
du feu (1909; cut trans as The Quest for Fire 1967). Rosny's prehistoric
stories - which include Vamireh (1892), Eyrimah (1893), Le felin geant
(1918; trans 1924 as The Giant Cat 1924 US; vt Quest of the Dawn Man 1964)
and Helgvor de Fleuve Bleu ["Helgvor of the Blue River"] (1930) - inspired
numerous works by other French writers, including Marcel Schwob's "The
Death of Odjigh" (1892; trans 1982), Claude ANET's La fin d'un monde
(1925; trans as The End of a World 1927) and Max BEGOUEN's Les bisons
d'argile (1925; trans as Bison of Clay 1926).The Huxleyan account of human
nature was comprehensively rejected by two UK writers in SCIENTIFIC
ROMANCES that glorified the innocent state of Nature and blamed
civilization for all human ills: S. Fowler WRIGHT in Dream, or The Simian
Maid (1929) and its intended sequel The Vengeance of Gwa (1935) (as by
Anthony Wingrave) and J. Leslie MITCHELL in the polemical Three Go Back
(1932) and the lyrical "The Woman of Leadenhall Street" (1936) as by Lewis
Grassic Gibbon. Similar nostalgia for a prehistoric Golden Age is
displayed in William GOLDING's The Inheritors (1955), though Golding
follows Wright rather than Mitchell in refusing to grant innocence to
Man's direct ancestors, and presents a more brutal view of prehistoric
life in "Clonk Clonk" (1971). All these works are, in part, admonitory
fables, and by natural exaggeration prehistoric fantasies have also been
employed for SATIRE, as in Andrew LANG's "The Romance of the First
Radical" (1886), Henry Curwen's Zit and Xoe (1887), W.D. Locke's "The
Story of Oo-oo" (1926) and Roy LEWIS's What We Did to Father (1960: vt The
Evolution Man 1963; vt Once upon an Ice Age 1979).There have been several
attempts to write novels on a vast scale which link prehistory and history
to provide a "whole" account of the "spirit of Man". The most impressive
is Den Lange Rejse (1908-22 Denmark; trans as The Long Journey 1922-4;
omni 1933) by the Danish Nobel prizewinner Johannes V. JENSEN, the first
two parts of which are prehistoric fantasies. A work on an even greater
scale is the Testament of Man series by Vardis FISHER, a 12-novel series

of which the first 4 vols are prehistoric fantasies. Also in this
tradition is Les enchainements (1925; trans as Chains 1925) by Henri
BARBUSSE, while more trivial examples include The Invincible Adam (1932)
by George S. VIERECK and Paul ELDRIDGE and Tomorrow (coll of linked
stories 1930) by F. Britten AUSTIN, who also wrote a volume of prehistoric
short stories, When Mankind was Young (coll 1927). The attempt to find in
the evolutionary history of Man some sequence of events for which the
Genesis myth might be considered a metaphor - a key theme of Fisher's
novels - is such an attractive notion that it has infected anthropological
theory as well as speculative fantasy. Austin BIERBOWER's From Monkey to
Man (1894) offers a simpler account of a metaphorical expulsion from Eden.
A fierce reaction against such superstitions can be found in The Sons of
the Mammoth (trans 1929) by the Russian anthropologist V.G. BOGORAZ.In the
US PULP MAGAZINES there grew up a romantic school of prehistoric fiction
glorifying the life of the savage. Its most prolific proponent was Edgar
Rice BURROUGHS, author of the Pellucidar series, The Eternal Lover (1914;
1925; vt The Eternal Savage) and The Cave Girl (1913-17; 1925). Novels
from outside the pulps, however, often show a similar if more muted
romanticism. Examples include most of Jack London's stories in this vein,
Sir Charles G.D. ROBERTS's In the Morning of Time (1919), H. Rider
HAGGARD's Allan and the Ice-Gods (1927) and Richard TOOKER's The Day of
the Brown Horde (1929). Prehistoric romances in the CINEMA, which are
notorious for their anachronisms, are perhaps the extreme examples of the
romantic school, from D.W. Griffith's Man's Genesis (1911) onwards.
Although Hugo GERNSBACK reprinted Wells's "A Story of the Stone Age",
GENRE SF did not really take prehistoric fantasy aboard, with notable
exceptions including Lester DEL REY's "When Day is Done" (1939), Jack
WILLIAMSON's "The Greatest Invention" (1951), Chad OLIVER's juvenile Mists
of Dawn (1952) and Theodore L. THOMAS's "The Doctor" (1967). Progress in
physical ANTHROPOLOGY has encouraged a sophistication of fictional images
of prehistoric life, reflected in such works as Cook (1981) by Tom Case
and NO ENEMY BUT TIME (1982) by Michael BISHOP. The most remarkable modern
manifestation of prehistoric fantasy is, however, the series of
bestselling novels by Jean AUEL, collectively entitled Earth's Children,
which begins with The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980). Auel ingeniously
combines a realism based in modern scientific understanding with robust
literary romanticism. Also worthy of special note is a series of surreal
prehistoric fantasies included in Italo CALVINO's COSMICOMICS (coll 1965;
trans 1968) and t zero (coll 1967; trans 1969; vt Time and the Hunter).
Significant scientific speculations on the topic are contained in two
novels by the palaeontologist Bjorn KURTEN, Dance of the Tiger (1978;
trans 1980) and Singletusk (1984; trans 1986).There have, of course, been
several unorthodox accounts of the origin of Man, including various
hypothetical extraterrestrial origins. Some, like that propounded by Erich
VON DANIKEN, have been presented as fact. Such notions recur throughout
the HISTORY OF SF, usually developed as silly plot gimmicks ( ADAM AND
EVE). Among the more interesting examples are Eric Frank RUSSELL's
Dreadful Sanctuary (1948; 1951; rev 1963), which plays with the Fortean
hypothesis ( Charles FORT) that Earth is an asylum for the lunatics of
other worlds, and James BLISH's "The Writing of the Rat" (1956), one of
many stories which makes us the descendants of a "lost colony" within a

galactic civilization. [BS]See also: MYTHOLOGY.
ORKOW, BEN (HARRISON)
(1896-1988) Russian-born US writer, mostly of plays and film scripts. In
his sf novel When Time Stood Still (1962) a couple travel via SUSPENDED
ANIMATION to AD2007, where her fatal disease may be curable. [JC]
ORLACS HANDE
(vt The Hands of Orlac) Film (1924). Pan Film. Dir Robert Wiene, starring
Conrad Veidt, Fritz Kortner, Carmen Cartellieri, Alexandra Sorina.
Screenplay Louis Nerz, based on Les mains d'Orlac (1920) by Maurice
RENARD. 92 mins, cut to 70 mins. B/w.In this Austrian film from the
director of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919), a pianist whose injured
hands have been replaced with those of an executed murderer inherits also
the murderer's homicidal tendencies, and must struggle against the
domination of the dead man. The central idea is scientifically absurd, but
it has an emotional logic and has attracted several film-makers. The best
version is the US remake Mad Love (1935; vt The Hands of Orlac), which
deviates somewhat from Renard's silly novel, shifting the emphasis from
pianist to surgeon. It was dir Karl Freund (best known as a brilliant
cameraman) from a script by Guy ENDORE, P.J. Wolfson and John L.
Balderston, and starred Peter Lorre, Frances Drake, Colin Clive, 70 mins,
b/w. Lorre - in one of his few truly great performances and one of his
first after arriving in the USA - plays the demented surgeon who grafts
the murderer's hands onto a pianist whose wife he loves, and then attempts
to drive him insane by masquerading as the executed murderer back from the
dead. This stylish, Grand Guignol melodrama still seems stunning half a
century later.Two later remakes were produced - one using the original
title The Hands of Orlac (1960; vt Les mains d'Orlac; vt Hands of a
Strangler) and the other called Hands of a Stranger (1963). The former was
a UK-French coproduction made in two versions, the UK version dir Edmond
T. Greville, the French dir Jacques Lemare, both versions starring Mel
Ferrer, Lucille Saint Simon, Christopher Lee, Donald Pleasence, Dany
Carrel, Felix Aylmer, Basil Sydney and Donald Wolfit, with screenplay by
John Baines and Grenville, 105 mins cut to 95 mins, b/w. The latter film
was US, written and dir Newton Arnold, starring Paul Lukather, Joan
Harvey, 86 mins cut to 73 mins, b/w. Both versions, particularly the
latter, are distinctly inferior to Mad Love. [JB/PN]
ORU KAIJU DAISHINGEKI
GOJIRA.
ORWELL, GEORGE
Pseudonym of UK writer Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), much of whose best
work was contained in his impassioned journalism and essays, assembled in
the 4 vols of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George
Orwell (all coll 1968). His fiction and extended social criticism, as in
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), also demonstrates his good sense
and the intense clarity of his mind. His books of sf interest are two.
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (1945 chap) is a fable satirical of the form
communism took once it had established itself in the Soviet Union, and
consequently enraged many of those who responded sensitively to criticisms

of what they continued to perceive as a valid experiment in socialism.
Despite its fable form, however, Animal Farm is an intensely practical
book, mocking not the ideals of socialism or communism (many of which GO
shared) but their corrupt embodiment in an actual state. The attack is
direct, and the USSR is the target. A great revolution takes place on the
Farm, but is soon subverted by the Pigs, whose leader, Napoleon, seizes
power and reduces the Revolution's original 7 Commandments (the last being
"All animals are equal") down to one, which is written in capitals on the
communal wall: All Animals Are Equal But Some Are More Equal Than Others.
The attack on Stalin is devastating. A cartoon feature film animated by
John Halas and Joy Batchelor, Animal Farm, was released in 1955.GO's most
famous book remains NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949), which was published
shortly before his death of tuberculosis and which again caused some of
his colleagues on the Left to accuse him (mistakenly) of betrayal. It was
filmed in 1955 as 1984 and in 1984 as NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. With Aldous
HUXLEY's BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932), it is the century's most famous
English-language DYSTOPIA. It is a book of hectic, devilish,
claustrophobic intensity, so nightmarish in the telling that some critics
have faulted it (imperceptively) for subjective imbalance. In 1984, the
world is divided into three vast enclaves: Britain, now known as Airstrip
One, is devastatingly shabby - never having been decently rebuilt after an
atomic war fought in the 1950s - and without hope. It is hard to resist a
sense that GO was painting, with an unusual savagery of verisimilitude,
the UK in which he lived - 1984 being simply a partial inversion of 1948 but his presentation of the totalitarian regime ruling Airstrip One could
be thought to apply to the contemporary Labour government of the UK only
by those whose POLITICS were radically to the right of GO's own. The
rulers of Airstrip One (symbolized by images of Big Brother) use their
ability to inflict pain to drive the fact of their power into the masses,
whose lives are mercilessly regimented by the Thought Police and who live
in squalid barracks monitored by two-way tvs, their thoughts controlled by
the Newspeak to which GO devoted a scathing appendix: "It was intended
that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak
forgotten, a heretical thought . . . should be literally unthinkable." The
scarifying story of Winston Smith's attempt to liberate himself, and of
his eventual surrender of all his human dignity under torture, makes up
the actual plot of the book. As an indictment of the deep tendency of
modern, technologically sophisticated governments to manage reality, and
as a further devastating assault upon the actual situation in the USSR of
1948, NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR was unmatched. Its pessimism was both
distressing and salutary. Its understanding of the nightmare of power when wielded by representatives of a species which had evolved beyond the
constraints of mercy - was definitive. "Do not forget this," his chief
torturer tells Winston at the finish, after glorying in the end of all
natural human affinities and goals: "Always there will be the intoxication
of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler . . . If
you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face
- for ever." [JC]About the author: There is much Orwell criticism in
print. Irving Howe's Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four (1963) is valuable, as
are George Woodcock's The Crystal Spirit (1967) and George Orwell: A
Reassessment (anth 1988) ed Peter Buitenhuis and Ira B. Nadel.See also:

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; HISTORY OF SF; LINGUISTICS; MEDIA LANDSCAPE;
MUSIC;
POLAND; PSYCHOLOGY; SOCIOLOGY; THEATRE.
`================================================
OSBORNE, DAVID or GEORGE Robert SILVERBERG.
O'SHEA, SEAN
Robert S. TRALINS.
OSHIKAWA, SHUNRO
[r] JAPAN.
OSMOND, ANDREW
[r] Douglas HURD.
OTHER EDENS
UK original anthology series, consisting of Other Edens (anth 1987), #II
(anth 1988) and #III (anth 1989), ed Christopher EVANS and Robert
HOLDSTOCK. This was a curious series. The (ironic?) title is taken from
the description of England in Shakespeare's Richard II, though the editors
mistakenly say it was Richard III; in fact, however, they rather let down
their own ambition of giving a boost to UK short fiction by including
stories by US writers like Kim Stanley ROBINSON and Scott BRADFIELD, which
led some readers to the unfortunate conclusion that not enough local
material existed. Though good stories were published (many of the better
ones inclining to FABULATION or fantasy rather than sf) the overall tone
was bleak and introspective, sometimes to the point of self-parody; thus
the series could be read as supporting the long-held US stereotype of UK
sf, a stereotype that was contemporaneously being destroyed by the
magazine INTERZONE. The series did include good work from the new
generation of UK writers, including Gill ALDERMAN, Stephen BAXTER, Keith
BROOKE and Ian MCDONALD. [PN]
OTHER DIMENSIONS
PARALLEL WORLDS.
OTHER WORLDS
US DIGEST-size magazine, in PULP-MAGAZINE format from Nov 1955. 47
issues, only 45 featuring fiction (not counting those titled either
SCIENCE STORIES or UNIVERSE SCIENCE FICTION), Nov 1949-July 1953 (31
issues) and May 1955-Sep 1957 (16 issues). Published by Clark Publishing
Co., Nov 1949-July 1953, and Palmer Publications Inc., May 1955-Nov 1957;
ed Raymond A. PALMER. Though for some periods monthly, OW was usually a
slightly irregular bimonthly.OW was launched by Palmer while he was still
editor of AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC ADVENTURES; for this reason
editorship of the first issue was credited to Robert N. Webster (a Palmer
pseudonym). OW was editorially very similar to the previous Palmer
magazines, particularly in featuring the supposedly nonfictional stories
of Richard S. SHAVER. Eric Frank RUSSELL was a regular contributor, and
the magazine serialized L. Sprague DE CAMP's nonfiction Lost Continents
(1952-3; 1954). OW was suspended after #31, July 1953.Palmer was notorious
for his many title changes, and it is possible to regard his short-lived
Science Stories (Oct 1953-Apr 1954) as a continuation of OW, the title

change allowing him to duck some inconvenient printing bills, but Science
Stories's numeration began again from #1. And, to confuse the story
further, also in 1953 Palmer anonymously founded a new magazine, Universe
Science Fiction, whose first 2 issues, June and Sep 1953, he ed under the
pseudonym George Bell; with #3, Dec 1953, Palmer became officially its
editor and publisher. After 10 issues (the last was Mar 1955) the title of
Universe Science Fiction was changed to Other Worlds, and at this point
the magazine's numeration followed both magazines (the first new OW, for
example, being #11 [32] May 1955, it being the 11th Universe and the 32nd
Other Worlds). 12 more issues followed, until in June 1957 the title was
changed again, to Flying Saucers from Other Worlds, reflecting Palmer's
increasing preoccupation with UFOS. Only 2 of the first 4 retitled issues
(3 of which were unnumbered) featured sf stories, these being #2 and #4
(July and Sep 1957). After this, though it carried on for some years, the
magazine became solely UFO-oriented. [MJE/FHP/PN]
OTOMO, KATSUHIRO
(1954- ) Japanese comic-book illustrator and film animator, one of the
most popular in the new generation of "manga" (Japanese COMICS) artists.
His debut, not sf, was in 1973 with "Jusei" ["Gun Report"], based on the
novella "Mateo Falcone" (1833) by Prosper Merimee (1803-1870). Since then
he has pleasantly shocked the comics world with his excellent artwork, his
surreal way of telling a story and the dynamic movement of his
scene-setting. His breakthrough from cult status to national fame came
with the GRAPHIC NOVEL Dohmu ["A Dream of Childhood"] (1981; 1983; English
trans projected 1992), which won the Nippon SF Taisho and a Sei'un Award (
JAPAN). This describes a conflict between the PSI POWERS of a murderous
old man and of a group of children. KO's international status largely
rests on the still-continuing Akira story, a graphic epic (over 1500pp)
rather than a graphic novel. This began its first serialization in 1982-6,
and resumed in 1988, in which year an English-language version commenced
publication from Epic Comics. It has also been published in book form several volumes - in both Japan and the USA. During the hiatus KO wrote,
designed and directed the feature film version, AKIRA (1987), a tour de
force of animation which, like the comic, alarmingly blends elements of
"splatter" ( SPLATTER MOVIES) with images of post- HOLOCAUST evolutionary
transcendence in a somewhat CYBERPUNK manner. KO's other main works
include "Kibun Wa Moh Senso" ["Almost Enjoying the War"] (1979), "Highway
Star" (1979) and "Rohjin Z" ["Old Man Z"] (1991). [TSh/PN]
OTTUM, BOB
Working name of US writer Robert K. Ottum Jr (?1925-1986), in whose
surprisingly funny sf novel, All Right, Everybody Off the Planet (1972),
inefficient ALIENS send a spy among us in human form; the humour derives
from their ignorance of human relationships and from their attempts to
stage-manage an impressive First Contact. A similar notion - with the
sexes reversed - was much later used, leadenly, for the film MY STEPMOTHER
IS AN ALIEN (1988). [JC]
OULD, CHRIS
(?1959- ) UK writer whose sf novel, Road Lines (1985), was a NEAR-FUTURE
thriller set in an apocalyptic landscape reminiscent, to some, of the MAD

MAX films. [JC]
OULIPO
A term standing for L'Ouvroir de Litterature Potentialle, which might be
crudely translated as "workshop of possible fictions". Oulipo is an
extremely selfconscious international literary movement founded in 1960 by
the French authors Raymond Queneau ( FRANCE) and Francois Le Lionnais; its
official membership was originally limited to 10 but eventually expanded
to the present 25. Over the years Oulipo's members and proponents have
included many internationally known fabulists and magic realists such as
Harry Mathews (1930- ), Georges Perec (1936-1982) and Italo
CALVINO.Oulipo's tenets are radically high-Modernist. Inspired by the
linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussurre (1857-1913), its members
consider "literature" a game of language rather than a means of
representing the world, a perspective foreign to most but not all sf
writers. By designing artificial "constraints" and "structures",
Oulipoeans try to make prose-writing difficult in the same way that
metrical schemes make sonnets and sestinas difficult. But, in order to
manufacture complicated products, it is necessary first to manufacture
complicated machines. It is the friction generated by the author's
imagination working against such formal constraints, Oulipo contends, that
produces great art.Members of the group have tended to be mathematicians
as well as writers. While many of their formal structures are extremely
complicated, it is often their simplest formulae that produce the most
spectacular results. Perhaps consciously following the example of Ernest
Vincent Wright, whose novel Gadsby (1939) has no letter "e", Georges Perec
(1936-1982) wrote the novel La Disparition ["The Disappearance"] (1969)
without once using that letter. (When a work is produced by deleting a
letter or set of letters, the resulting narrative is referred to as a
"lipogram"; The Wonderful O [1957] by James Thurber [1894-1961] is about a
lipogram world.) Italo Calvino generated the plot for his Il Castello dei
Destini incrociati (coll of linked stories 1973; trans as The Castle of
Crossed Destinies 1977 US) by randomly turning over the cards of a Tarot
deck. Similar procedures were used by various contributors to Rachel
POLLACK's Tarot Tales (anth 1989 UK).Thomas M. DISCH's novel 334 (fixup
1972 UK) is probably the most successful Oulipo-related experiment in the
sf field. The title (which should be pronounced "three three four") does
not refer primarily to a place or a time but rather describes the
three-dimensional narrative diagram according to which the book is
constructed. John T. SLADEK is another sf author who often builds his
novels and stories according to arbitrary designs or games; in Tik-Tok
(1983), for example, each of the 26 chapters begins with a successive
letter of the alphabet. Other sf or sf-related authors who exhibit a
similar "gamesmanship" in their work - whether having heard of Oulipo or
not - include Don DELILLO, Vladimir NABOKOV, Rudy RUCKER and Pamela
ZOLINE. [SB]See also: FABULATION; MAGIC REALISM; POSTMODERNISM IN SF;
PSEUDO-SCIENCE.
OUTER LIMITS, THE
US tv series (1963-5). A Daystar/Villa di Stefano Production for United
Artists, ABC TV. Created Leslie Stevens, also executive prod. Prod Joseph

Stefano (season 1), Ben Brady (season 2). Writers included Stefano (many
episodes), Stevens, David DUNCAN, Robert Towne, Harlan ELLISON, Meyer
DOLINSKY, John MANTLEY, Jerry SOHL, Otto O. Binder ( Hyperlink to: Eando
BINDER), Clifford D. SIMAK and Ib Melchior. Dirs included Byron HASKIN,
Leonard Horn, Gerd Oswald, Charles Haas. 2 seasons, 49 50min episodes.
B/w.TOL, which featured a new sf story each week, is often regarded as the
classic sf-anthology series. Though leaning towards the HORROR or
MONSTER-MOVIE end of the sf spectrum, the series was often innovative in
both style and subject matter, and many of its writers either were sf
professionals or knew the genre well. The pilot episode, "The Galaxy
Being", written and dir Stevens, concerned an ALIEN made of pure energy
who is accidentally absorbed into a 3D radio transceiver on Earth. Harlan
Ellison contributed 2 episodes: "Soldier" (1964), about an
ultraconditioned soldier from the future who is projected back in time and
finds himself in a typical 1960s US household - a precursor of The
TERMINATOR (1984) - and "Demon with a Glass Hand" (1964), perhaps the
finest episode, about an ANDROID, pursued by aliens, who has the entire
human race coded in his internal circuitry. Actors who appeared in the
series - many of them then unknown - included Leonard Nimoy, Robert Culp,
William SHATNER, Bruce Dern, Donald Pleasence, Martin Landau and David
McCallum. The bizarre make-up that was such a feature of the series was
the work of Fred Phillips, John Chambers and, primarily, Wah Chang.The
talented cinematographer Conrad Hall worked on the 1st season, and the
series was visually striking. Only stupid programming (it was shifted to a
time-slot opposite the hugely popular Jackie Gleason Show) led to the
series' cancellation halfway through the 2nd season. TOL was, on the
whole, more imaginative and intelligent than its more famous competitor on
CBS, Rod SERLING's The TWILIGHT ZONE. The Outer Limits: The Official
Companion (1986) by David J. Schow and Jeffrey Frentzen is about the
series. [JB/PN]
OUTER PLANETS
Relatively little attention has been paid in sf to the planets beyond
Jupiter. Of them only Saturn was known to the ancients - Uranus was
discovered in 1781, Neptune in 1846 and Pluto in 1930 - and it is
therefore the only outer planet featured in Athanasius KIRCHER's and
Emanuel SWEDENBORG's interplanetary tours. Uranus, however, is included in
the anonymous Journeys into the Moon, Several Planets and the Sun: History
of a Female Somnambulist (1837). The only object beyond Jupiter that has
made significant appeal to speculative writers as a possible abode for
life is Saturn's major moon Titan, though the fascinating rings have
provoked a good deal of interest from interplanetary passers-by. Pluto has
come in for a certain amount of special attention as the Ultima Thule of
the Solar System, although as much - if not more - interest has been shown
in the possibility of there being a 10th planet even further out.Saturn
was visited, en route to Earth, by VOLTAIRE's tourist from Sirius in
Micromegas (1750; 1952), and a Saturnian accompanied him on his
sightseeing trip. It was one of the major worlds featured in J.B.
Fayette's anonymously published The Experiences of Eon and Eona (1886);
and in John Jacob ASTOR's A Journey in Other Worlds (1894) it is the home
of the spirits, who confirm the truth of the theological beliefs of

travellers from a future Earth. Roy ROCKWOOD's series of juvenile
interplanetary novels extended thus far in By Spaceship to Saturn (1935),
but relatively few PULP-MAGAZINE writers followed suit. Arthur K. BARNES's
Interplanetary Hunter (1937-46; fixup 1956) ventured beyond Jupiter on two
occasions, but Stanley G. WEINBAUM was the only early pulp writer of any
real significance to explore the outer planets, in "Flight on Titan"
(1935), "The Planet of Doubt" (1935) - one of the rare stories set on
Uranus - and "The Red Peri" (1935), a SPACE OPERA set partly on Pluto.
Other pulp stories set in the outer reaches include J.M. WALSH's "The
Vanguard to Neptune" (1932), Wallace WEST's "En Route to Pluto" (1936),
Raymond Z. GALLUN's "Raiders of Saturn's Rings" (1941) and Murray
LEINSTER's "Pipeline to Pluto" (1945). One of Stanton A. COBLENTZ's
SATIRES, Into Plutonian Depths (1931; 1950), delved there, and Clifford D.
SIMAK's Cosmic Engineers (1939; rev 1950) begins near Pluto. By far and
away the most significant role allotted to an outer planet in the
speculative fiction of the pre-WWII period was, however, that given to
Neptune by Olaf STAPLEDON in LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930) and Last Men in
London (1932): in the very FAR FUTURE, the ultimate members of the human
race are forced to make a new home there following the expansion of the
Sun.In the post-WWII period the outer planets occasionally featured in
more serious speculative fictions. The rings of Saturn play a key part in
Isaac ASIMOV's "The Martian Way" (1952), and Asimov returned to the same
locale in his juvenile Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn (1958) as by
Paul French. Another notable juvenile in which Saturn is an abode of life
is Philip LATHAM's Missing Men of Saturn (1953). Elsewhere, Titan features
much more prominently than its parent world. Alan E. NOURSE's Trouble on
Titan (1954) is a juvenile novel about COLONIZATION of the satellite, the
climactic scenes of Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's THE SIRENS OF TITAN (1959) take
place there, and Titan is the location of huge ALIEN machines in Ben
BOVA's As on a Darkling Plain (1972). A more fully described colony is
featured in Arthur C. CLARKE's Imperial Earth (1976), and it is the home
of the strange lifeform that provides the climax of Gregory BENFORD's and
Gordon EKLUND's If the Stars are Gods (fixup 1977). An artificial world
hidden among the satellites of Saturn is the main locale of John VARLEY's
Gaean trilogy begun with Titan (1979).Pluto figures prominently in Algis
BUDRYS's Man of Earth (1958), and is the destination of the characters in
Wilson TUCKER's To the Tombaugh Station (1960). It is the setting of Kim
Stanley ROBINSON's mysterious artefact in Icehenge (1984), and the
starting-point of the interplanetary tour featured in the same author's
The Memory of Whiteness (1985), which zooms past Uranus and Neptune at
considerable narrative pace. Neptune's moon Triton is the setting of
Margaret ST CLAIR's "The Pillows" (1950) and Samuel R. DELANY's "ambiguous
heterotopia" in Triton (1976). The "outer satellites" conduct a war
against the inner planets in Alfred BESTER's Tiger! Tiger! (1956 UK; rev
vt The Stars My Destination US), but the reader never gets to visit them;
a much more detailed conflict takes place in Cecelia HOLLAND's Floating
Worlds (1976), in which the cities of the title float above Saturn and
Uranus. Few of those space operas whose action is partly set in the more
remote regions of the Solar System pause to take in much of the scenery,
but notable recent exceptions include Colin GREENLAND's TAKE BACK PLENTY
(1990) and Roger McBride ALLEN's The Ring of Charon (1990), both of which

are partly set on Pluto's large moon Charon.It has long been held in some
quarters that a 10th planet is necessary to account for the orbital
perturbations of Uranus, even after Neptune and Pluto are taken into
account, and sf writers have occasionally dealt with the possibility. The
protagonists of John W. CAMPBELL Jr's The Planeteers (1936-8; coll of
linked stories 1966) ultimately make their way there, and it is the
setting for Henry KUTTNER's "We Guard the Black Planet" (1942). In Philip
K. DICK's SOLAR LOTTERY (1955; vt World of Chance) members of an esoteric
cult flee Earth in the hope of finding such a world. Edmund COOPER's The
Tenth Planet (1973) plants an advanced civilization there. Contrastingly,
in Lucifer's Hammer (1977) by Larry NIVEN and Jerry POURNELLE it is a much
more remote GAS GIANT, whose gravity perturbs the orbit of a comet,
deflecting it towards Earth. Perhaps more intriguing than the notion of a
10th planet is speculation about the Solar System's diffuse cometary
"halo". An extravagant sf version of this is developed in The Reefs of
Space (1964) by Frederik POHL and Jack WILLIAMSON, which features a
particularly imaginative reef life-system. Clarke's Imperial Earth makes
much of the possibility of life existing beyond Pluto, and Williamson made
further use of the locale in Lifeburst (1984).More recently, there has
been discussion among astronomers of the possibility that the cause of the
orbital perturbations among the outer planets might instead be another
star a couple of light years away; i.e., that the Sun might be not a
singleton star but one element of a widely spaced binary (most stars are
multiple rather than solitary), the other component being a dwarf star, a
NEUTRON STAR or even a BLACK HOLE. Even a dwarf star would, at such a
distance, be insignificant enough in our skies to make identification
difficult. Or the cause might be a yet undetected nearby star heading in
our direction, as suggested in Asimov's Nemesis (1989). [BS]
OUTLAND
Film (1981). Ladd Co. Dir Peter Hyams, starring Sean Connery, Peter
Boyle, Frances Sternhagen. Screenplay Hyams. 109 mins. Colour.A mining
base on Io, third moon of Jupiter. The new marshal (Connery) discovers
that the mine manager (Boyle), in a bid to increase production, is
introducing powerful amphetamines which ultimately render the workers
psychotic and suicidal. The manager hires assassins to kill the nosy
marshal. The critical cliche that O is High Noon (1952) in space is
absolutely true. This routine anti-capitalist adventure is lifted out of
the ordinary by its richly textured setting (the art director was Malcolm
Middleton)-dirty, crowded, and wholly convincing as an unromanticized
future industrial settlement. There are also good performances from
Sternhagen as a cantankerous lady doctor and Connery as the tired,
middle-aged failure making good. The novelization is Outland * (1981) by
Alan Dean FOSTER. [PN]
OUTLANDS
UK DIGEST-size magazine. 1 issue, Winter 1946. Published by Outlands
Publications, Liverpool; ed Leslie J. Johnson. An abortive SEMIPROZINE of
undistinguished fiction, subtitled "A Magazine for Adventurous Minds", O
included stories by John Russell FEARN and Sydney J. BOUNDS (his first
published story). [MJE/FHP]

OUT OF THE DARKNESS
Roger CORMAN.
OUT OF THE UNKNOWN
UK tv series (1965-71). BBC TV. Prod Irene Shubik (seasons 1 and 2), Alan
Bromly (seasons 3 and 4). Script editor Irene Shubik (seasons 1 and 2),
Roger Parkes (seasons 3 and 4). Writers included Terry NATION, J.B.
PRIESTLEY, Troy Kennedy Martin, Clive Exton, Julian Bond, Nigel KNEALE.
Dirs included Michael Ferguson, Peter Sasdy, Philip Saville, Philip
Dudley, Eric Hills. 4 seasons, 49 episodes, each 50 mins in 1st season, 60
mins thereafter. Seasons 1-2 b/w, thereafter colour.This sf-anthology
series, originated by Irene Shubik - previously story editor on OUT OF
THIS WORLD (1962) - dramatized the work of many well known sf writers.
Adapted stories and novels included Immortality, Inc. (1958) by Robert
SHECKLEY, Liar! (1941; rev 1977 chap) by Isaac ASIMOV, "The Last Lonely
Man" (1964) by John BRUNNER, "Beachhead" (1951) by Clifford D. SIMAK,
"Random Quest" (1961) by John WYNDHAM, "The Little Black Bag" (1950) by C.
M. KORNBLUTH, "Thirteen for Centaurus" (1962) by J.G. BALLARD, The Naked
Sun (1957) by Asimov, "The Midas Plague" (1954) by Frederik POHL, "Andover
and the Android" (1963) by Kate WILHELM, "The Yellow Pill" (1958) by Rog
PHILLIPS, Level 7 (1959) by Mordecai ROSHWALD and "The Machine Stops"
(1909) by E.M. FORSTER. Despite budget limitations, the standard of
production was often very high, and good actors were used; one episode was
designed by Ridley SCOTT. The quality of the scripts varied, some of the
writers assigned being unfamiliar with sf. After 3 seasons the BBC decided
that the series lacked mass popularity, and for the 4th switched it from
sf to supernatural stories, all but one being original teleplays. [PN/JB]
OUT OF THIS WORLD
1. US tv series (1952). ABC TV. Prod Milton Kaye. Narrated Jackson Beck.
1 season, 25min episodes. B/w.OOTW hovered between sf and lectures on
science. In episode 3, for example, we saw a young couple in 1993 going to
the Moon for a vacation and then telephoning their relations on Earth.
Between these dramatized segments the narrator discussed with a scientist,
Robert R. Cole, the actual possibilities of space travel and conditions on
the Moon.2. UK tv series (1962). ABC TV. Prod Leonard White. Story editor
Irene Shubik. 13 50min episodes. B/w.This short-lived but relatively
ambitious sf-anthology series - the first such in the UK - was hosted by
Boris Karloff (1887-1969). Stories adapted for the series included Little
Lost Robot (1947; rev 1977 chap) by Isaac ASIMOV, "The Cold Equations"
(1954) by Tom GODWIN, "Impostor" (1953) by Philip K. DICK and "Pictures
Don't Lie" (1951) by Katherine MACLEAN. Of the two original teleplays
used, one was "Botany Bay" by Terry NATION, later to become a driving
force behind DR WHO. OOTW's success inspired Shubik to make the similar
(but better) OUT OF THE UNKNOWN series 3 years later, this time for the
BBC rather than commercial tv. [JB]
OUT OF THIS WORLD ADVENTURES
US PULP MAGAZINE. 2 issues, July 1950 and Dec 1950, published by Avon
Periodicals; ed Donald A. WOLLHEIM. #1 included an impressive line-up of
authors: A. Bertram CHANDLER, Ray CUMMINGS, Lester DEL REY, Kris NEVILLE,
Mack REYNOLDS, William TENN and A.E. VAN VOGT. The stories, however, were

not the authors' best, and Chandler was the only writer of equivalent
stature in #2. An unusual feature was a 32pp COMICS section in colour (#2
of the Canadian edition included a different comics section from that in
the US edition). The comics feature proved not to be the expected selling
point, and the magazine flopped. [MJE]OOTWA should not be confused with
the UK weird-fiction DIGEST magazine Out of this World (2 issues 1954-5),
published by John Spencer ?
OUTSIDER
FINLAND.
OVERLAND MONTHLY, THE
US magazine founded by Bret Harte (1836-1902), published in San Francisco
by A. Roman ?
1935. Under the editorship of Millicent W. Shinn a special "Twentieth
Century" issue - June 1890 - contained articles and essays all directly
related to Edward BELLAMY's then much discussed work Looking Backward,
2000-1887 (1888). In addition, its 6 fiction contributions were all sf,
including an early translation of Kurd LASSWITZ (Chapter 1 of "Bis zum
Nullpunkt des Seins" [1871], under the title "Pictures out of the
Future"). This is the earliest known case of a general magazine devoting
an issue exclusively to sf. OM is known for its publication of poetry and
fiction by Clark Ashton SMITH in the 1910s and 1920s, and for several
"Yellow Peril" stories by little-known authors. [JE/PN]
OVERPOPULATION
In 1798 the UK economist Thomas R. Malthus (1766-1834) published his
Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement
of Society, arguing that a UTOPIAN situation of peace and plenty would be
impossible to achieve because the tendency of populations, in the absence
of the checks of war, famine and plague, to increase exponentially would
result in society's continually outgrowing its resources. In the second
edition (1803), replying to criticism, he introduced another hypothetical
check: voluntary restriction of population by the exercise of "moral
restraint". But Malthus had little faith in the effectiveness of moral
restraint, and most modern sf writers agree with him.Although the amended
Malthusian argument was (and is) logically unassailable, it was ignored or
even attacked by most speculative writers even after it had become known
that world population was indeed increasing exponentially. Richard
Whiteing (1840-1928) brought the entire population of the world to the
Isle of Wight to prove that anxiety about overpopulation was, as his title
stated, All Moonshine (1907). It was not until the 1960s that awareness of
the population problem resurfaced, probably as a consequence of an
already-widespread DYSTOPIAN pessimism ( OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM), which it
then helped to maintain and amplify. The major nonfiction books involved
in the popularization of the issue were The Population Bomb (1968) by Paul
Ehrlich and The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project
on the Predicament of Mankind (1972) by D.H. Meadows et al.Although MARVEL
SCIENCE STORIES published in its Nov 1951 issue a "symposium" on the
subject of whether the world's population should be strategically limited,
the question was at that time unexplored in sf. C.M. KORNBLUTH's "The
Marching Morons" (1951), depicting a future in which the intelligentsia

have prudently exercised birth control while the lumpenproletariat have
multiplied unrestrainedly, is a black comedy on the theme of eugenics
rather than of overpopulation. In Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's equally black comedy,
"The Big Trip up Yonder" (1954), overpopulation is the result of
technologies of longevity rather than ordinary increase. Overpopulated
milieux became gradually more evident in 1950s sf. Isaac ASIMOV, one of
the first sf writers to become anxious about the matter, displayed one
such in The Caves of Steel (1954). Frederik POHL produced the first of
many ironic fantasies of corrective mass homicide in "The Census Takers"
(1956); Robert SILVERBERG's Master of Life and Death (1957) takes the
notion of institutionalized population control more seriously; and
Kornbluth's "Shark Ship" (1958) is a melodramatic horror story of
overpopulation and resultant POLLUTION. An effectively understated
treatment of the theme is J.G. BALLARD's "Billenium" (1961), which
presents a simple picture of the slow shrinkage of personal space. A
curiously ambivalent approach is adopted in Lester DEL REY's The Eleventh
Commandment (1962), which begins as a polemic against overfertility but
concludes with a SOCIAL-DARWINIST volte-face. The most powerful attempt to
confront the issue squarely and in some detail was Harry HARRISON's MAKE
ROOM! MAKE ROOM! (1966), a novel whose thrust was entirely lost when it
was filmed as SOYLENT GREEN (1973). A major novel from India, The Wind
Obeys Lama Toru (1967) by LEE TUNG, quickly followed.There are three
aspects to the population problem: the exhaustion of resources; the
destruction of the environment by pollution; and the social problems of
living in crowded conditions. The first two aspects form the basis of most
extrapolations of the problem, including A Torrent of Faces (1968) by
James BLISH and Norman L. KNIGHT and The Sheep Look Up (1972) by John
BRUNNER, and such black comedies as "The People Trap" (1968) by Robert
SHECKLEY and "The Big Space Fuck" (1972) by Vonnegut. The third aspect
comes into sharper focus in STAND ON ZANZIBAR (1968) by Brunner, The World
Inside (1972) by Silverberg, 334 (1972) by Thomas M. DISCH and My Petition
for More Space (1974) by John HERSEY. Because sf writers had not
considered the problem until it was imminent, the quest for hypothetical
solutions was difficult, and many stories hysterically allege that it is
already too late to act effectively. Such traditional sf myths as the
escape into space lack plausibility in the context of a problem so
immediate, as demonstrated by such stories as Blish's "We All Die Naked"
(1969). Confidence in moral restraint, even aided by birth control (which
Malthus forbore to propose), was so low that sf stories exploring possible
solutions almost always concern themselves with the setting up of
Draconian prohibitions or with various forms of overt and covert culling.
Stories of grotesque mass homicide include, in addition to those cited
above, D.G. COMPTON's The Quality of Mercy (1965), William F. NOLAN's and
George Clayton JOHNSON's Logan's Run (1967), Leonard C. LEWIN's Triage
(1972), Piers ANTHONY's Triple Detente (1974), Chelsea Quinn YARBRO's Time
of the Fourth Horseman (1976) and Snoo WILSON's Spaceache (1984).
Vonnegut's "Welcome to the Monkey House" (1968) mockingly envisages a
future in which reproduction is discouraged by the use of bromides, but
most speculations in this vein are more gruesomely inclined. Suggested
solutions not involving mass murder are rare, and not usually to be taken
seriously; a notable example is that featured in Philip Jose FARMER's

Dayworld (1985) and its sequels, in which every person is conscious only
one day a week, spending the remaining six in suspended animation, thus
effectively packing seven people into one person's space. A rare
application of Malthusian thinking to an ALIEN situation is employed in
THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE (1974) by Larry NIVEN and Jerry E. POURNELLE, in
which a species for whom birth control is impossible has negative checks
built in at the biological level.Although the real-world situation grows
worse each passing day, the fashionability of overpopulation stories in sf
has waned dramatically since 1980, partly in accordance with a general
tendency to skip over the most frightening problems of the NEAR FUTURE and
partly because of the absorption of the population problem into a more
general sense of impending ecocatastrophe ( ECOLOGY). Perhaps, though, the
problem does not really deserve to be considered urgent. As Malthus
pointed out, the situation is self-correcting; when there are more people
than the world can accommodate, the surplus will inevitably die - one way,
or another.An interesting but now quaintly dated anthology accurately
reflecting the mood at the height of the panic is Voyages: Scenarios for a
Ship Called Earth (anth 1971) ed Bob Sauer, published by BALLANTINE BOOKS
for the Zero Population Growth movement. [BS]See also: POLITICS;
PREDICTION; SOCIOLOGY.
OVERTON, MAX
[s] Don WILCOX.
OWEN, DEAN
Pseudonym - and eventually perhaps the legal name - of US writer Dudley
Dean McGaughy (1913-1985), whose routine novelizations of horror and sf
films are The Brides of Dracula * (1960), Konga * (1960), Reptilicus *
(1961) and End of the World * (1962), based on PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! (1962),
a film in turn based, without acknowledgement, on two short stories by
Ward MOORE. Monarch Books's habit of publishing soft-porn adaptations of
chaste movies led to at least one court case ( REPTILICUS). [JC/PN]
OWINGS, MARK
(1945- ) US bibliographer and SMALL-PRESS publisher; with Jack L.
CHALKER, he was involved for a period with MIRAGE PRESS, which published
his magnum opus, The Index to the Science-Fantasy Publishers (1966 chap;
rev 1966; vastly exp, vt The Science-Fantasy Publishers: A Critical and
Bibliographic History 1991), all edns with Chalker (whom see for further
details). Other books through Mirage included The Necronomicon: A Study
(1967 chap), solo, and The Revised H.P. Lovecraft Bibliography (1973 chap)
with Chalker. With Chalker and Ted Pauls, MO founded Croatan House,
through which he published Robert A. Heinlein: A Bibliography (1973 chap)
and James H. Schmitz: A Bibliography (1973 chap). Murray Leinster (Will F.
Jenkins): A Bibliography (1970 chap), The Electric Bibliograph, Part I:
Clifford D. Simak (1971 chap), Poul Anderson: Bibliography (1973 chap) and
A Catalog of Lovecraftiana: The Grill/Binkin Collection (1975 chap) with
Irving Binkin were all published elsewhere. [JC]

SF?
PADGETT, LEWIS

Henry KUTTNER; C.L. MOORE.
PAGE, KATHY
(1958- ) UK writer whose first novels - Back in the First Person (1986)
and The Unborn Dreams of Clara Riley (1987) - are associational, though
tinged with elements of literary fantasy. Island Paradise (1989), set 100
years after the Unfought War, promulgates an ambiguous worldwide UTOPIA
whose citizens enjoy lives uncluttered by violence, but are bullied to die
soon after they reach 50. Some of the stories assembled in As in Music and
Other Stories (coll 1990) are fantasy or sf. KP's style moves from a kind
of numb austerity into moments of cautious lyricism. [JC]
PAGE, NORVELL W.
(1904-1961) US writer who specialized during the 1930s in hero/villain
PULP MAGAZINES, much of his production being novel-length stories for The
SPIDER , featuring the eponymous SUPERHERO. The Spider sequence was
created in competition with the somewhat more successful Shadow tales,
mostly written for The Shadow magazine by Walter B. GIBSON. Under the
house name Grant STOCKBRIDGE NWP wrote more than 100 Spider tales, many of
whose plots verged into the supernatural and sf; those eventually
published in book form include Wings of the Black Death (1933; 1969), City
of Flaming Shadows 1934; 1970), Builders of the Black Empire (1934; 1980),
City Destroyer (1935; 1975), Hordes of the Red Butcher (1935; 1975),
Master of the Death Madness (1935; 1980), Overlord of the Damned (1935;
1980), Death Reign of the Vampire King (1935; 1975) and Death and the
Spider (1942; 1975). A final Spider title, left unpublished when the
magazine folded, was reworked with new characters as Blue Steel (1979) as
by Spider Page. As Randolph Craig, NWP created two spin-offs from The
Spider, The OCTOPUS and The SCORPION , neither of which extended past a
single story; these were subsequently published as The Octopus (1939 as
"The City Condemned to Hell"; 1976 chap) and The Scorpion (1939 as
"Satan's Incubator"; 1975 chap).Under his own name NWP contributed 3 long
stories to UNKNOWN in its first year: "But without Horns" (1940) concerns
a MUTANT who uses his PSI POWERS to induce religious worship in those who
come into contact with him; Flame Winds (1939; 1969) and Sons of the
Bear-God (1939; 1969) are SWORD-AND-SORCERY novels whose hero is based on
Prester John. During WWII NWP took a post writing government reports;
afterwards he worked for the Atomic Energy Commission. [MJE/JC]See also:
GODS AND DEMONS.
PAGE, THOMAS (WALKER IV)
(1942- ) US writer whose first novel was The Hepahaestus Plague (1973),
filmed as BUG (1975), a tale which starts strongly, with vivid
descriptions of the effect of an irruption from underground of a new
species of beetle capable of emitting fire, but which weakens when it
begins to deal with a SCIENTIST who becomes overfascinated with these
beetles, which seem to possess a kind of group intelligence. His later
novels - The Spirit (1977), Sigmet Active (1978) and The Man who Would not
Die (1981) - were borderline sf. [JC]
PAGERY, FRANCOIS
Gerard KLEIN.

PAGET, JOHN
John AIKEN.
PAGETTI, CARLO
(1945- ) Italian critic, Professor of English Literature at the
University of Turin. His study of sf Il senso del futuro: la fantascienza
nella letteratura Americana ["The Sense of the Future: Science Fiction in
American Literature"] (1970) is the first serious literary study of sf by
an Italian. Subsequent books are I Marziani alla corte della Regina
Vittoria ["Martians at the Court of Queen Victoria"] (1986), on H.G.
WELLS's SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES, and Cittadini di un assurdo universo
["Citizens of an Absurd Universe"] (coll 1989), essays on Ambrose BIERCE,
Katharine BURDEKIN, H.P. LOVECRAFT, Edgar Allan POE and Mark TWAIN. He ed
Nel tempo del sogno ["In the Time of the Dream"] (anth 1988), has had
articles on Wells, Philip K. DICK and Burdekin translated in
SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, and is editor of a critical series in book form
devoted to sf, La citta e le stelle ["The City and the Stars"]. He has
published a collection of short stories, mostly fantasy, Favole di
lontananza ["Fables of Distance"] (coll 1989). He wrote the entry on ITALY
in this volume. [PN]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF.
PAIGE, RICHARD
Dean R. KOONTZ.
PAIN, BARRY (ERIC ODELL)
(1864-1928) UK writer best known for the supernatural tales assembled in
volumes like Stories in the Dark (coll 1901), and for humorous fiction in
which he uneasily condescended to the lower orders. He frequently made
superficial use of sf devices and motifs - e.g., the IMMORTALITY of the
protagonist of Robinson Crusoe's Return (1906; rev vt The Return and
Supperizing Reception of Robinson Crusoe of York, Parrot-Tamer 1921)
facilitates the making of a number of satirical points about modern
England - and occasionally a tale depends on these devices. An Exchange of
Souls (1911) posits a scientific rationale for the said exchange. The
title story of The New Gulliver and Other Stories (coll 1913) takes its
hero to a futuristic UTOPIA in Ultima Thule. [JC]Other works: In a
Canadian Canoe (coll 1891); Stories and Interludes (coll 1892); The One
Before (1902); Three Fantasies (coll 1904); The Diary of a Baby: Being a
Free Record of the Unconscious Thought of Rosalys Ysolde Smith Aged One
Year (1907); The Shadow of the Unseen (1907) with James BLYTH; Here and
Hereafter (coll 1911); Stories in Grey (coll 1911); Going Home: Being the
Fantastical Romance of the Girl with Angel Eyes and the Man who Had Wings
(1921); Short Stories of To-day and Yesterday (coll 1928).
PAINE, ALBERT B(IGELOW)
(1861-1937) US writer best remembered as Mark TWAIN's confidant and
unconscionable expurgator: after Twain's death he published mutilated
editions of The Mysterious Stranger (1916) and Mark Twain's Autobiography
(1924). ABP was primarily a writer and editor of children's fiction. The
Mystery of Evelin Delorme: A Hypnotic Story (1894) exploits the late 19th
century's prurient fascination with split personalities, the eponymous
heroine committing suicide when her socially unacceptable self comes out.

In The Great White Way (1901) a warm, UTOPIAN, Antarctic LOST WORLD
peopled by telepaths is discovered by a businessman and a real-estate
developer, who are forced to flee when the latter's intentions are
revealed. [JC]
PAINE, LAURAN (BOSWORTH)
(1916- ) US rancher and author, extraordinarily prolific in several
fields, with nearly 1000 books under his own name and 85 pseudonyms,
almost all for ROBERT HALE LIMITED, over 600 of them Westerns and a very
few of them sf. This Time Tomorrow (1963) was published under his own
name; further routine SPACE OPERAS are: Focolor (1973) as by Roy
Ainsworthy; A Crack in Time (1971), The Undine (1972), Another View
(1972), Bannister's Z-Matter (1973) and The Underground Men (1975) as by
Mark Carrel; and The Harbinger (1972), The Misplaced Psyche (1973) and
Kernel of Death (1973) as by Troy Howard. [JC]
PAINTER, THOMAS
(1885-1970) US writer who collaborated with Alexander LAING (whom see for
details) on The Motives of Nicholas Holtz, being the Weird Tale of the
Ironville Virus (1936; vt The Glass Centipede, Retold from the Original
Sources 1936 UK). [PN]
PAIRAULT, PIERRE
[r] Stefan WUL.
PAL, GEORGE
(1908-1980) Hungarian film producer, based in the USA since 1940, best
known for his sf and fantasy films, for which he received a NEBULA Special
Award in 1976. Trained as an illustrator in Budapest, GP decided to
specialize in animation, and in 1931 moved to Germany, where he worked at
the UFA studios. When Hitler came to power GP went to Paris, where he soon
became very successful with a series of animated commercials and
entertainment films, his Puppetoons. After emigrating to the USA he set up
a Puppetoon unit at Paramount Studios.His first live-action film was The
Great Rupert (1949) dir Irving Pichel, starring Jimmy Durante and an
animated squirrel. He then started work on DESTINATION MOON (1950) dir
Pichel, which was so successful - it initiated the sf film boom of the
1950s - that GP immediately chose another sf subject for his next film,
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (1951) dir Rudolph Mate. This was followed by WAR OF
THE WORLDS (1953) dir Byron HASKIN, The Naked Jungle (1954) and CONQUEST
OF SPACE (1955), both dir Haskin, ATLANTIS, THE LOST CONTINENT (1959) and
The TIME MACHINE (1960), both dir GP, and The POWER (1968) dir Haskin and
GP. He also made a number of pure fantasy films during this period,
including Tom Thumb (1958) and The Seven Faces of Dr Lao (1964). His last
film was DOC SAVAGE: THE MAN OF BRONZE (1974) dir Michael Anderson. He is
credited as co-author with Joe Morhaim of Time Machine II (1981), a sequel
to H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE (1895), seemingly written in connection
with a film which was never made.GP's dominant interest in special effects
often led to other aspects of his films, including scripts and acting,
being neglected. Most of his productions, however, possess a colourful
bravura that distracts attention from their shortcomings, and he has on
occasion produced memorable images. [JB]See also: CINEMA; MOON; ROCKETS.

PALLANDER, EDWIN
(? -? ) UK author of whom nothing is known except that he published
several books and collaborated with Ellsworth DOUGLASS on one story, "The
Wheels of Dr Gynochio Gyves" (1899). Across the Zodiac: A Story of
Adventure (1896) is a Vernean interplanetary romance which carries its
three protagonists ( VERNE's usual complement) through the Solar System in
a spaceship captained by a mad scientist. The Adventures of a Micro-Man
(1902), one of the tales of miniaturization common to the period ( GREAT
AND SMALL), shrinks its protagonists to mites, subjecting them to
adventures before they grow again. [JC]
PALLEN, CONDE B(ENOIST)
(1858-1929) US writer and editor; in the latter capacity he was one of
the editors, with C.G. Herbermann and others, of The Catholic Encyclopedia
(15 vols 1907-18). Crucible Island: A Romance, an Adventure and an
Experiment (1919), a DYSTOPIA, describes the disillusioning experiences of
a young radical who is transported to Schlectland, where socialism has
been allowed to run rampant, and who comes to his senses while falling in
love with the daughter of a longtime resident. They escape to the USA. En
passant, points are scored against FEMINISM and the Irish. In Ghost House
(1928) a device is invented which reads details of a murder from the
walls. [JC]
PALMER, DAVID (REAY)
(1941- ) US writer whose first story, the impressive "Emergence" for ASF
in 1981, was expanded as Emergence (fixup 1984), attracting some notice
for its depiction of a USA suffering the consequences of a nuclear
HOLOCAUST, and for its juvenile heroine, who represents a superior form of
Homo sapiens and whose transcribed voice dominates the tale; some found
her obnoxiously reminiscent of the narrator of Robert A. HEINLEIN's THE
MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS (1966). The novel won the Compton Crook/Stephen
Tall Memorial Award ( AWARDS). DP's taste for protagonists whose special
gifts legitimize their behaviour also helped shape his second novel,
Threshold (1985), in which the Galaxy is saved. [JC]See also: PSI POWERS;
SUPERMAN.
PALMER, JANE
(1946- ) UK writer and illustrator who began writing sf with The Planet
Dweller (1985) which, with its sequel Moving Moosevan (1990), presents a
mildly comic set of parodies of sf tropes in dealing with alien INVASIONS
and the like. A somewhat greater force of imagination is demonstrated in
The Watcher (1986), which features brave young girls, a mysterious
survivor from Victorian times, an ANDROID which longs for human status,
and the rulers of the Universe. [JC]
PALMER, RAYMOND A(RTHUR)
(1910-1977) US author and editor. His childhood was plagued by serious
accidents, and in adulthood he stood only 4ft tall and was hunchbacked,
but he never allowed physical stress to affect his career. He was an
active sf fan in the 1930s - he is credited with publishing the first sf
FANZINE, The Comet, in 1930 - and was the author of a fair number of
stories, beginning with "The Time Ray of Jandra" for WONDER STORIES in

1930; some later tales were published as by Henry Gade, Frank Paton, J.W.
Pelkie, A.R. STEBER and Morris J. Steele. After the death of Stanley G.
WEINBAUM in 1935, RAP edited and published a memorial collection of his
stories, Dawn of Flame and Other Stories (coll 1936); RAP's only other
book was Strange Offering (anth c1945 chap UK) with Otis Adelbert KLINE.It
was as an editor that RAP would make his name. When AMAZING STORIES was
bought by the Chicago-based ZIFF-DAVIS in 1938 it was decided to replace
T. O'Conor SLOANE as editor. RAP, a resident of nearby Milwaukee, was
recommended for the job and was appointed. AMZ was in a moribund state by
this time; RAP made it livelier, albeit with a more overtly juvenile
slant, and it revived. He published work by Edgar Rice BURROUGHS and, in
1939, Isaac ASIMOV's first story, "Marooned off Vesta"; in the same year
he began a companion magazine, FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. The vigour of his
early editing work, though evident at the time and in retrospect, was
submerged during the 1940s by the notoriety he achieved with his promotion
as fact of the stories of Richard S. SHAVER. RAP claimed that the
popularity of the "Shaver Mystery" gave AMZ the highest circulation ever
achieved by an SF MAGAZINE. His interest in PSEUDO-SCIENCE and the occult
widened; in 1948, while still employed at Ziff-Davis, he started his own
occult magazine, Fate, which has proved enduringly successful.In 1949 he
established his own sf magazine, OTHER WORLDS (using the editorial
pseudonym Robert N. Webster on the first issue), and shortly afterwards he
left Ziff-Davis. In 1950 he began a companion magazine, IMAGINATION, in
this case lending his name as a cover for William L. HAMLING, who edited
the journal while still officially working for Ziff-Davis. After another
severe accident, RAP sold Imagination to Hamling, while Bea Mahaffey
edited Other Worlds. On his recovery in 1953, RAP took over the magazine
UNIVERSE SCIENCE FICTION and started a companion, SCIENCE STORIES;
meanwhile Other Worlds was suspended. Science Stories was short-lived, and
in 1955 RAP changed the title of Universe to Other Worlds, continuing the
Universe numeration. The magazine began to feature more and more UFO
material, and in 1957 was retitled Flying Saucers from Other Worlds, RAP
deciding to concentrate all his energies on UFOs and the occult. He later
explained that the bewildering title changes of his magazines resulted in
part from financial difficulties and the need to throw up smokescreens. A
last RAP publication, including UFO and Shaver material, was The HIDDEN
WORLD . [MJE/JC]
PALMER PUBLICATIONS, INC.
OTHER WORLDS; SCIENCE STORIES; UNIVERSE SCIENCE FICTION.
PALMER, THOMAS
(1955- ) US writer whose first novel, The Transfer (1983), verges on the
technothriller, and whose second, Dream Science (1990), made some stir for
its quiet (but ultimately ruthless) intelligence. The protagonist of the
book is one of those cursed with a perception of lines running across the
physical environment which, when crossed, take one into PARALLEL WORLDS.
These worlds, unfortunately, offer no solace to the protagonist, and even
his eventual return to what he thinks of as prime reality is constrained
by a dread sense that there is no true centre to life; that we may simply
be passing through the worlds, greyly. [JC]

PALTOCK, ROBERT
(1697-1767) UK lawyer and writer, known mainly for The Life and
Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man: Relating Particularly his
Shipwreck Near the South Pole; his Wonderful Passage Thro' a Subterranean
Cavern into a Kind of New World; His There Meeting with a Gawry or Flying
Woman (1751), which ranks in popularity as an 18th-century imaginary
voyage behind only Daniel DEFOE's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Jonathan
SWIFT's Gulliver's Travels (1726). After discovering a race of winged
people, Wilkins breeds with them and teaches them about civilization and
the arts of war, while himself manufacturing a flying machine in which he
returns, now an old man, to tell his tale. There have been many reprints
of the novel, variously titled (e.g., The Unrivalled Adventures of that
Great Aeronaut and Glum, Peter Wilkins 1802) and almost always cut. [JC]
PALUMBO, DENNIS (JAMES)
(1929- ) US writer in whose sf novel, City Wars (1979), set decades after
The Levelling when a nuclear HOLOCAUST flattened the USA, several seceding
city-states engage in a Great War which leads, through a terminal conflict
between New York and Chicago, towards ultimate extinction. The
cast-members, who include MUTANTS called "lunks" and a woman called
Cassandra, find no solace in the new world. [JC]
PAN
Leslie BERESFORD.
PANGBORN, EDGAR
(1909-1976) US writer whose publishing career began with A-100: A Mystery
Story (1930) as by Bruce Harrison, and other non-genre work. He published
his first sf story, the famous "Angel's Egg", for Gal as late as 1951. In
his first sf novel, West of the Sun (1953), six shipwrecked humans found a
UTOPIAN colony on the planet Lucifer in association with two native
species. When the rescue ship eventually arrives, they decide to stick
with the society they have constructed. The reflective conclusion of this
novel was typical of EP's work. In A MIRROR FOR OBSERVERS (1954), which
won the 1955 INTERNATIONAL FANTASY AWARD, Mars has been guiding humanity
into the light of civilization for thousands of years, but matters
approach crisis in the 20th century when two Martian observers contest for
control over a human boy genius, a potential ethical innovator; the good
Martian wins. In both novels-but not always in his career - EP's gracious
literacy usually overcomes a tendency towards cloying
sententiousness.After two fine non-genre novels - Wilderness of Spring
(1958) and The Trial of Callista Blake (1961), a moving courtroom drama EP created his most successful and sustained work, the Davy sequence,
comprising, by rough internal chronology, The Company of Glory (coll of
linked stories 1975), most of the stories assembled in Still I Persist in
Wondering (coll 1978), the loosely related The Judgment of Eve (see
below), and DAVY (fixup 1964). The sequence is set in a USA devastated by
a nuclear HOLOCAUST, whose immediate consequences dominate - at times
harshly - the first volumes. By the time of Davy's birth, 250 years later,
the land has long been balkanized into feudal enclaves, rather
romantically conceived, and Davy's picaresque adventures (which he
recounts in retirement) generate what might be called a kind of nostalgia

for a livable future, though at the same time it is clear that Davy, and
those he inspires, will necessarily begin to rebuild a more complex world.
Set in the same universe, The Judgment of Eve (1966) is less convincingly
constructed in mythopoeic terms, as Eve tries to choose among the
lifestyles of her disparate male suitors. The trek on which she
consequently sends them, in order to find out the meaning of love,
probably represents the deepest of EP's frequent descents into distinctly
uneasy bombast. When, however, he was able to control himself - the early
novels, most of Davy, and most of the stories in Good Neighbors and Other
Strangers (coll 1972) sidestep these pitfalls - the inherent though
sometimes selfconsciously rural decency of his view of life won through.
[JC]About the author: Edgar Pangborn: A Bibliography (1985 chap) by Gordon
BENSON Jr.See also: ALIENS; ARTS; CHILDREN IN SF; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION;
MUSIC; MUTANTS; PASTORAL.
PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!
(vt End of the World) Film (1962). Alta Vista/AIP. Dir Ray Milland,
starring Milland, Jean Hagen, Frankie Avalon, Mary Mitchell. Screenplay
Jay Simms, John Morton, story by Simms, based (without credit) on the
stories "Lot" (1953) and "Lot's Daughter" (1954) by Ward MOORE. 92 mins.
B/w.This cynical, violent film - one of the earliest examples of the
SURVIVALIST ethos in cinema - shows how a typical US family have to act to
survive the aftermath of an atomic HOLOCAUST: by trusting no one and
shooting first. The father quickly, and almost gleefully, reverts to being
a ruthless "natural survivor" who will let nothing stand in the way of
getting his family to safety after Los Angeles has been A-bombed. The
escape along roads jammed with panicking traffic is strongly done, but
thereafter the film subsides into clumsy adventure in the mountains; it is
inferior to, and lacks the sexual reverberations of, the stories on which
it was loosely based, though it retains some biblical parallels. The
novelization is End of the World * (1962) by Dean OWEN, and this was also
the title of the film's re-release. [JB/PN]
PANICO EN EL TRANSIBERIANO
(vt Horror Express) Film (1972). Granada/Benmar. Dir Eugenio Martin,
starring Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Telly Savalas. Screenplay Arnaud
d'Usseau, Julian Halevey. 90 mins, cut to 88 mins. Colour.In this
Spanish/UK coproduction the year is 1906. The body of an apparent "missing
link", dug up in China by an anthropologist (Lee), comes to life on the
Trans-Siberian Express and turns out to be an ALIEN who crash-landed on
Earth eons ago. He has the power to transfer his personality from one body
to another, and also to absorb people's personalities. The film is slick
and amusing, and moves so fast that there is little time to dwell on its
absurdities. It came into being only because the producer bought two model
trains that had been used in the epic Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) and
had a script written around them. The direction is in routine
exploitation-movie style, but the lively script has some surprising turns.
[JB/PN]
PANSHIN, ALEXEI (A.)
Working name of US writer Alexis Adams Panshin (1940- ), initially most
active as an sf fan, in this role doing considerable writing and editing,

for which he won a HUGO in 1967. He began publishing sf stories in 1963
with "Down to the Worlds of Men" for If, and soon became an active author
of both fiction and criticism. The story "Dark Conception" (1964), as by
Louis J.A. Adams, was written in collaboration with Joe L. HENSLEY. AP's
short work has been assembled as Farewell to Yesterday's Tomorrow (coll
1975; with "Lady Sunshine and the Magoon of Beatus" added, rev 1976) and
Transmutations: A Book of Personal Alchemy (coll 1982). His first novel,
RITE OF PASSAGE (1963 If as "Down to the Worlds of Men"; exp 1968), which
won a 1968 NEBULA, remains his only significant singleton. It is a complex
and expertly told novel, making adroit use of the basic rite-of-passage
structure ( POCKET UNIVERSE) that underlies almost all tales set in
GENERATION STARSHIPS; the fact that in this instance the asteroid-ship is
capable of FASTER-THAN-LIGHT speeds may modify the consciousness of the
protagonists-they have not been travelling long enough to forget their
origins - but does not make the venue itself seem any less constrictive.
The heroine must progress from childhood into questioning adulthood via a
dangerous trial conducted on the colony planet which her ship - one of
eight containing the survivors of the destruction of Earth 150 years
earlier - is currently monitoring. Surviving her ordeal, she not only
comes into her own as a person, but validly (as in the classic model)
comes to question the stratified "adult" quasidemocracy of the ship. AP
then wrote the Anthony Villiers series of SPACE OPERAS about a lordly
adventurer and his alien companion Torve the Trog: Star Well (1968), The
Thurb Revolution (1968) and Masque World (1969). The spoofing of sf's
PULP-MAGAZINE conventions was amusing and without malice and the echoes of
Leslie CHARTERIS's Saint were enjoyable, but the series lacked the energy
of its predecessor. As a writer of sf, AP then fell relatively
quiet.Heinlein in Dimension: A Critical Analysis (1968), a comprehensive
study of the works of Robert A. HEINLEIN, was perhaps the most thorough
and literate book on a US sf writer written to that date. It breaks its
subject's career into the 3 phases (1940-42; 1947-58; after 1958) that
every subsequent critic has utilized, arguing the superior merit of the
later juveniles, and presenting a case for thinking of his later work as
inferior. In the introduction to his first collection, AP credited his
wife, Cory PANSHIN (married 1969), as his collaborator on some of his
stories, and announced that from 1975 all future work would be jointly
signed. Much of the Panshins' joint criticism first appeared in Fantastic,
and some of these pieces, along with others, appeared in SF in Dimension
(coll 1976; exp 1980) as by both authors, as did Mondi interiori
["Interior Worlds"] (1978 Italy) which, it is understood, contained
material later developed by the Panshins into their Hugo-winning magnum
opus, The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for
Transcendence (1989), a massive and coherent history of sf whose
sustaining argument - that sf answered the world's need for a transcendent
domain through the creation of galactic venues and concerns beyond the
"village" of Earth - made inevitable its narrative halt at the year 1945,
just at the end of the GOLDEN AGE chaired by John W. CAMPBELL Jr. So clear
a cognitive strategy may have engendered a too-ruthless clarity of view and an all too simple acceptance of the notion of Progress - but the
detailed exegeses of critically neglected writers like E.E. "Doc" SMITH
and A.E. VAN VOGT are very much worth examining. In its close modelling of

GENRE SF's view of its own development, the book was exemplary; by virtue
of writing it the Panshins became US sf's house historians. [JC]See also:
CHILDREN IN SF; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; FABULATION;
GALACTIC EMPIRES; PARANOIA; SENSE OF WONDER; SOCIOLOGY; SPACESHIPS;
WOMEN
AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION.
PANSHIN, CORY (SEIDMAN)
(1947- ) US writer and critic, collaborator with her husband, Alexei
PANSHIN (whom see for details), from before 1975. She shared a nonfiction
HUGO with him for The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest
for Transcendence (1989). Her interest in Sufism and other philosophies of
transcendence suffuses, in particular, their joint criticism. [JC]See
also: SENSE OF WONDER.
PANTROPY
This useful item of sf TERMINOLOGY was coined by James BLISH in the
stories later melded together as THE SEEDLING STARS (fixup 1957). Blish's
view was that in humanity's COLONIZATION OF OTHER PLANETS (which see for
further discussion), we must either change the planet to make it habitable
( TERRAFORMING) or change humanity itself to fit it for survival in an
alien environment (pantropy). The Greek root of the word means "turning
everything". Pantropy is usually undertaken by some form of biological
engineering ( GENETIC ENGINEERING). An ugly pantropy fable is "Between the
Dark and the Daylight" (1958 Infinity) by David C. Hodgkins (Algis
BUDRYS), reprinted as by Budrys in Budrys' Inferno (coll 1963; vt The
Furious Future 1964 UK), in which generations of humans are genetically
rendered ever more inhuman to fit them for violent competition with
murderous alien life. MAN PLUS (1976) by Frederik POHL, a novel that
tackles several pantropy issues, prepares a man for living on MARS by
changing him into a CYBORG. [PN]
PAPE, RICHARD (BERNARD)
(1916- ) UK writer of various books including his bestselling wartime
autobiography, Boldness Be My Friend (1953), and a number of thrillers. In
And So Ends the World ... (1961) arrogant mankind is given a severe
warning from high-up cosmic sources - the Moon disappears - and comes to
its senses. The novel is more mysticism than sf. [JC]
PAPERBACK-BOOK FORMAT
DIGEST.
PAPER TIGER
Roger DEAN.
PAPILIAN, VICTOR
[r] ROMANIA.
PAPP, DESIDERIUS
(1897- ) German writer whose nonfiction Zukunft und Ende der Welt (1932;
trans H.J. Stenning as Creation's Doom 1934 UK) assesses the various ways
in which the world might end, in a manner which was influential on
contemporary sf. It has been incorrectly referred to in some
bibliographies as a work of fiction. [JC]

PARABELLUM
Ferdinand GRAUTOFF.
PARAL, VLADIMIR
[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
PARALLAX VIEW, THE
John FRANKENHEIMER; ROLLOVER.
PARALLEL EVOLUTION
EVOLUTION.
PARALLEL WORLDS
A parallel world is another universe situated "alongside" our own,
displaced from it along a spatial fourth DIMENSION (parallel worlds are
often referred to in sf as "other dimensions"). Although whole universes
may lie parallel in this sense, most stories focus on parallel Earths. The
parallel-world idea forms a useful framework for the notion of historical
ALTERNATE WORLDS, and is often used in this way. Most of the "secondary
worlds" of modern FANTASY are explicit or implicit parallel worlds.
Notable early sf extrapolations include J.H. ROSNY aine's "Un autre monde"
(1895; trans as "Another World" 1962) and two stories by H.G. WELLS: "The
Strange Case of Davidson's Eyes" (1895) and "The Plattner Story"
(1896).The idea that other worlds lie parallel to our own and occasionally
connect with it is one of the oldest speculative ideas in literature and
legend; examples range from Fairyland to the "astral plane" of
Spiritualists and mystics. There are two basic folkloristic themes
connected with the notion; in one, an ordinary human is translocated into
a fantasy land where s/he undergoes adventures and may find the love and
fulfilment that remain beyond reach on Earth; in the other, a
communication or visitation from the other world affects the life of an
individual within this world, often injuring or destroying that person.
Both patterns are very evident in modern imaginative fiction, shaping
whole subgenres. Much of the overlap between sf, FANTASY and HORROR
fiction-which makes clear-cut DEFINITIONS of the genres impossible occurs by virtue of the promiscuous use of parallel worlds. The first
pattern was modernized by Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, A. MERRITT and other
PULP-MAGAZINE writers before the founding of AMAZING STORIES, and was
easily dressed up with pseudo-scientific jargon; a notable early example
is The Blind Spot (1921; 1951) by Homer Eon FLINT and Austin HALL. Henry
KUTTNER and C.L. MOORE wrote several Merrittesque SCIENCE-FANTASY novels
after this fashion, notably The Dark World (1946; 1965) and Beyond Earth's
Gates (1949 Startling Stories as "The Portal in the Picture"; 1954 dos).
Among the first writers to co-opt parallel worlds for straightforward sf
melodrama were Edmond HAMILTON, in "Locked Worlds" (1929), and Murray
LEINSTER, in "The Fifth-Dimensional Catapult" (1931) and its sequels. The
idea was frequently used in humorous fashion by L. Sprague DE CAMP and
others in UNKNOWN WORLDS. The second pattern, in which entities from a
parallel world impinge on ours, was sciencefictionalized by William Hope
HODGSON in The Ghost Pirates (1909); his earlier The House on the
Borderland (1908) uses the landscapes of a parallel world to map and
symbolically display the psyche of its protagonist. The renewal of such

traditional horror motifs by sf imagery was taken further by H.P.
LOVECRAFT in a manner imitated by his many disciples, including Frank
Belknap LONG and Donald WANDREI.The early GENRE-SF writers were slow to
develop more extravagant speculative possibilities, although one notable
attempt to describe a parallel world with different physical laws from
those holding in our own continuum was made by Clark Ashton SMITH in "The
Dimension of Chance" (1932); this notion was eventually developed much
more carefully and elaborately by Isaac ASIMOV in THE GODS THEMSELVES
(1972). Raymond F. JONES's Renaissance (1944; 1951; vt Man of Two Worlds)
is straightforward, and Fritz LEIBER's use of parallel alternative worlds
in Destiny Times Three (1945; 1957) is quantitatively restrained. It was
in the 1950s and 1960s that exploration of the quirkier corollaries of the
basic notion really got under way. Clifford D. SIMAK imagined a more
extensive series of Earths - all empty of humanity and thus available for
colonization and exploitation - in Ring Around the Sun (1953) and examined
the hazards of trading between parallel worlds in "Dusty Zebra" (1954) and
"The Big Front Yard" (1958), as did Alan E. NOURSE in "Tiger by the Tail"
(1951). Gordon R. DICKSON's Delusion World (1955 Science Fiction Stories
as "Perfectly Adjusted"; exp 1961) features a city simultaneously occupied
by two societies, each invisible to the other.A common variant of the
theme is that of a multiplicity of almost-identical worlds existing in
parallel: alternate worlds in which there has been no significant change.
Examples include "The Celestial Plot" (1948; trans 1964) by Adolfo BIOY
CASARES and "Next Door, Next World" (1961) by Robert Donald Locke. In
Robert SILVERBERG's "Trips" (1974) transuniversal tourists wander
aimlessly through worlds similar and dissimilar. Parallel worlds often
feature eccentric societies, sometimes for purposes of SATIRE, and
sometimes equally eccentric patterns of EVOLUTION - like that in Stephen
BOYETT's The Architect of Sleep (1986), where raccoons have become the
dominant technological species. Bob SHAW has used the notion cleverly in
two original novels: The Two-Timers (1968), in which a man who has lost
his wife inadvertently creates a parallel world in which she still exists,
and A Wreath of Stars (1976), in which two worlds made of different
species of matter co-exist until the approach of an anti-neutrino star
shifts the orbit of one of them. A different kind of parallellism is
featured in a group of stories in which "timeslips" bring different eras
of earthly history into geographical proximity - a motif featured in
"Sidewise in Time" (1934) by Leinster and October the First is Too Late
(1966) by Fred HOYLE. The idea that parallel worlds might include literal
versions of fictional worlds as well as alternative histories is proposed
in "The Number of the Beast" (1980) by Robert A. HEINLEIN and more
sensitively developed in Frankenstein Unbound (1973) by Brian W. ALDISS.
Larry NIVEN's "All the Myriad Ways" (1969) deals tentatively with the
psychological implications of multiple universes. Richard COWPER's
Breakthrough (1967) extrapolates the psychological attractions of the
concept, as do Christopher PRIEST's stories of the Dream Archipelago,
including The Affirmation (1981).Modern uses of the theme usually imagine
an infinite number of parallel worlds extending in a manifold which
contains all possible Earthly histories and perhaps all possible physical
universes. The notion that the perceived Universe is simply one single
aspect of such a "multiverse" has been lent credence by the "many-worlds

interpretation" of the enigmas of quantum mechanics propounded by, for
example, John Wheeler, and popularized in nonfiction books by writers like
Paul DAVIES and John GRIBBIN. Keith LAUMER's Worlds of the Imperium (1962)
and its sequels deploy this kind of infinite series of parallel worlds in
connection with alternative histories, as do Richard C. MEREDITH's At the
Narrow Passage (1973) and its sequel and Frederik POHL's The Coming of the
Quantum Cats (1986). Certain philosophical implications of the many-worlds
interpretation are explored more-or-less seriously in a number of sf
novels, including Aldiss's Report on Probability A (1968), Graham Dunstan
MARTIN's Time-Slip (1986), Greg EGAN's Quarantine (1992) and Pohl and Jack
WILLIAMSON's The Singers of Time (1991).Modern fantasy novels - including
most of those in the intermediate science-fantasy category - sometimes
draw upon the legacy of sf recomplication in order to invigorate their use
of parallel worlds. Notable examples include Roger ZELAZNY's Amber series
and Michael MOORCOCK's many SWORD-AND-SORCERY series, which are all bound
together (with some sf novels) within a hypothetical multiverse. [BS]
PARANOIA
Paranoia is common in sf; schizophrenia (which we also cover here,
although aware that it is a wholly different condition) is comparatively
rare. Both are also discussed in rather a different context under
PSYCHOLOGY.It is obviously necessary to distinguish between sf stories
about paranoia (a fairly small group) and sf stories whose implicit
attitude is paranoid (an extremely large group); most stories discussed
below belong to the latter group. Paranoia has been defined as "a mental
disorder characterized by systematic delusions, as of grandeur or,
especially, persecution". The delusions ( PERCEPTION) of persecution that
appear to lie behind much sf were discussed in a forum of the SCIENCE
FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA, and 3 papers were published together as a
pamphlet, Paranoia and Science Fiction (coll 1967 chap), the contributors
being Alexei PANSHIN, James BLISH and also Joanna RUSS, who argued that,
historically, the paranoid element in sf stems largely from its roots in
the GOTHIC. It is fundamental to the gothic that none of us is safe; that
it is the nature of the Universe to contain menaces that may at any time,
arbitrarily, threaten us. Such menaces play a prominent role in, for
example, the stories of Ambrose BIERCE, notably "The Damned Thing" (1893),
a tale of a ravening invisible monster.The PULP MAGAZINES, especially
WEIRD TALES, but also the early SF MAGAZINES, were fond of such stories.
H.P. LOVECRAFT is an almost perfect example of a writer whose work
exhibits a systematic paranoid frame of reference; basic to his work was
the idea that adherents of cults formed to worship malign gods are
conspiring throughout the world to bring those gods physically back to
rule us and feed from us. There was no lack of paranoid stories at the sf
end of the spectrum, either; most stories of INVASION, whether by
foreigners or ALIENS, fall into this category. Paranoia is fundamental,
too, to whole classes of MAINSTREAM fiction, especially ABSURDIST fiction
(often bordering on sf); Franz KAFKA wrote little else but stories of this
kind.However, one should remember the old dictum that "the paranoid is not
entirely wrong". Invasions, after all, do take place; people are sometimes
persecuted (though seldom turned into beetles as in Kafka's famous story);
the Universe, as simple observation shows, does indeed contain menaces.

Also, one should not mistake the writer for the tale; paranoid stories are
not necessarily written by paranoiacs, though some GENRE-SF writers may
have been consciously feeding the perceived paranoia of their
readership.Early paranoid stories in the sf magazines include "Parasite"
(1935) by Harl VINCENT, where invading aliens attach themselves to us and
control our thoughts, and "The Earth-Owners" (1931) by Edmond HAMILTON,
one of the first examples of a theme later to be enormously popular in sf:
that Earth is already invaded and we are manipulated by aliens in
disguise. Charles FORT formulated this paranoid insight pithily: "We are
property." Many sf writers took the hint; e.g., Eric Frank RUSSELL in
Sinister Barrier (1939; 1943; rev 1948) and Dreadful Sanctuary (1948;
1951; rev 1963). A common variant on the theme, which must have won sf
countless adherents among genuine paranoiacs, is that many people in
mental hospitals are there because they have uncovered the conspiracy, but
nobody will listen; an example is "Come and Go Mad" (1949) by Fredric
BROWN, where it turns out that Earth is controlled by an intelligent
HIVE-MIND (of ants); the man who uncovers the truth is cold-bloodedly
driven mad. AMAZING STORIES improved its circulation very considerably in
the years 1945-7 by publishing a series of purportedly fact-based stories
by Richard S. SHAVER showing how we are all manipulated by malign
underground ROBOTS.Conspiracy theories of the Shaver variety are extremely
popular among propagandists of the PSEUDO-SCIENCES, many of whom
themselves have believed that there is a conspiracy (or "cover-up", to use
the prevalent terminology) among the scientific community to suppress
their findings - a phenomenon discussed by Martin GARDNER in his In the
Name of Science (1952; rev vt Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science
1957) and by other writers, notably John T. SLADEK in The New Apocrypha
(1973), which has many interesting observations about the relationship of
the pseudo-sciences themselves to paranoia. Among the more popular
pseudo-science cults are the groups believing we are being secretly
observed by UFOS and/or endorsing Erich VON DANIKEN's belief that human
progress is the result of alien intervention. Cult beliefs about UFOs are
very widespread, as witness the popularity of the tv series PROJECT UFO
(1978-79) and 1980s tale like W. Allen HARBINSON's Projekt Saucer series
(1980-91) or Whitley STRIEBER's Communion (1987) and Transformation: The
Breakthrough (1988), the latter purporting to be true accounts of the
author's and then his son's abduction by aliens. The Strieber books were
best-sellers; Project UFO was the only sf drama series ever to make it
into the top 20 of US tv programmes (in terms of number of viewers).An sf
subgenre that fascinatingly mixes delusions of grandeur with delusions of
persecution is the tyrannized- SUPERMAN story, especially associated with
A.E. VAN VOGT, whose oeuvre probably contains more systematic conspiracy
theories than that of any other writer in sf. Notable examples are SLAN
(1940; 1946; rev 1951) and The World of A (1945; rev 1948; rev 1970; vt
The World of Null-A). Similarly paranoid patterns occur in most of Keith
LAUMER's supermen stories of the 1960s and 1970s. Van Vogt was later to be
associated with L. Ron HUBBARD's DIANETICS movement, whose appeal was in
part to the same mixture: the desire to be superior and the fear of being
different. Hubbard himself wrote one of the most forceful paranoia stories
in pulp sf: Fear (1940; 1957; in Typewriter in the Sky/Fear, coll 1951).
This is a story both paranoid and about paranoia: it can be taken either

as the case history of a psychotic killer or as a demonstration of demonic
manipulation; in either event, a vivid and frightening series of delusions
is projected."Dreams are Sacred" (1948) by Peter Phillips (1921- ) has a
telepath entering the mind of a paranoid in order to destroy his grandiose
fantasies at root, but perhaps the most interesting study of a delusory
framework is the one presented as fact in Robert LINDNER's The
Fifty-Minute Hour (coll 1955; vt The Jet-Propelled Couch UK), a case-study
of an sf fan who believes himself to be living in a SPACE OPERA, and
merely dreaming reality.The other major paranoid variant is the story of
the alien menace which can either change its shape or attach itself as a
parasite to a human ( PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS); either way, the fear is
that the inhuman result looks just like us. This is an image from the very
heart of paranoia: the idea that our friends, sweethearts or even parents
could be mysteriously other, hateful, dangerous and to be destroyed. In
real life such delusions have led to murder; they are disturbingly popular
in sf. The most celebrated early example is John W. CAMPBELL Jr's story
"Who Goes There?" (1938) - filmed twice, the remake The THING (1982) more
closely and unnervingly duplicating Campbell's original theme as the
comradeship of a research installation crumbles into terrible isolation but the heyday of stories of this kind was the 1950s. This was the period
of the Cold War, when almost daily propaganda encouraged US citizens to
believe that a secret conspiracy of communists and homosexuals was
preparing to subvert the American way of life; it was the time of the
McCarthy hearings, and of the evangelical religious revival largely led by
Billy Graham; paranoia was in the air. The frightening thing about
communists and homosexuals, as everyone knew, was that from the outside
they looked just like us. Hence, in part, the unprecedented popularity of
stories about aliens who looked like humans, especially in the CINEMA (see
also MONSTER MOVIES), including such films as I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM
OUTER SPACE (1958), INVADERS FROM MARS (1953), INVASION OF THE BODY
SNATCHERS (1956) and IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953). (Over a decade later
the theme entered tv in the form of the series The INVADERS , and there
was a resurgence of the genre in the 1980s, with films like THEY LIVE
[1988] and SOCIETY [1989], and tv shows like WAR OF THE WORLDS [1988-90].)
In book form the best known example is Robert A. HEINLEIN's The Puppet
Masters (1951), where the analogy between the alien group mind and
totalitarian communism was made overtly.The most notable exponents of
paranoia in written sf were Richard MATHESON, Robert SHECKLEY and Philip
K. DICK, Matheson in almost everything he wrote, especially his
filmscripts for The INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) and, later, Duel
(1971). (The latter film, like DEMON SEED [1977], falls into the category
of machines-are-out-to-get-us stories, much used by the writer and film
director Michael CRICHTON.) Sheckley's style is more rueful and ironic; he
pokes fun at paranoia even while most of his stories - which are clear
demonstrations of his belief that the universe is out to get us - invoke
it. By far the most important writer in this area has been Dick, in whose
novels the basic question is often: "To what extent is a paranoid (or
schizophrenic) frame of reference delusory, and to what extent is reality
itself a mere construct erected defensively by the mind in order to
maintain sanity?" Several of Dick's stories take place, in effect, in
ALTERNATE WORLDS actually projected by paranoid consciousnesses. Three

novels relevant to the paranoia theme are Eye in the Sky (1957), Clans of
the Alphane Moon (1964) and, most powerfully, THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER
ELDRITCH (1965). Dick's novels are amazing in the emotional intensity of
their psychodramas and their cavalier attitude towards reality, but
dissolution of all meaning is (mostly) held at bay by the calm and wit of
their narrative voice. Delusory systems that can in fact be entered and
regarded as real are quite common in sf, especially among writers like
Heinlein for whom solipsism is an important theme; an outstanding example
is Richard MCKENNA, whose 12 sf stories published 1958-68 project
imaginary worlds as real over and over again; it is not clear whether this
sort of story more closely approaches paranoia or schizophrenia. One
paranoid idee fixe of the period turns up frequently, notably in stories
by Frederik POHL, with C.M. KORNBLUTH or solo: that a small group of very
selfish near-immortals is secretly manipulating society behind the scenes.
Examples are Gladiator-at-Law (1955), by both, and Drunkard's Walk (1960),
by Pohl.UK examples of paranoia stories from the 1950s are less common,
though Alien Life (1954) by E.C. TUBB, in which a starship crew is taken
over by alien parasites with the idea of invading Earth, would certainly
qualify. This idea has been used several times since, as in the film
TERRORE NELLO SPAZIO (1965; vt Planet of the Vampires) and QUATERMASS II
(1957; vt Enemy from Space). (Most sf/ HORROR films fall into the paranoia
category, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD [1968], Demon Seed and VIDEODROME
[1982] being good examples.)The hysterical edge of 1950s paranoid sf did
not dissipate as some of the worst Cold War fears subsided in the 1960s,
but it did change its nature, when a different (and actual) war took place
involving the USA, whose armed forces fought in Vietnam through the second
half of the decade, not finally withdrawing until 1975. The assassination
of John F. Kennedy in 1963 also heightened feelings of paranoia. Elements
of division in US society were reflected in a series of darkly paranoid
films about POLITICS directed by John FRANKENHEIMER, with The MANCHURIAN
CANDIDATE (1962), Seven Days in May (1964) and SECONDS (1966); the exiled
left-wing director Joseph Losey (1909-1984), a victim of Hollywood
politics in the 1950s, made The DAMNED (1961) in the UK; Stanley KUBRICK
added new ingredients to the paranoid brew with DR STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I
LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964), and Theodore Flicker
both spoofed and endorsed conspiracy theorizing with The PRESIDENT'S
ANALYST (1967). Also extremely relevant is the UK tv series The PRISONER
(1968), in which a political prisoner is subjected to ever more grotesque
psychological manipulations.In written sf, monuments of paranoia from the
late 1950s to the early 1970s include: Algis BUDRYS's WHO? (1958), in
which nobody knows if an enigmatic man in a metal mask is a good US
scientist or a Russian spy; several of Christopher HODDER-WILLIAMS's 1960s
novels in which the protagonist's sanity is called into question as he
makes curious discoveries; Philip Jose FARMER's Riverworld series (from
1965), in which the human race is apparently reincarnated en masse as a
cold-blooded experiment; Richard COWPER's Breakthrough (1967), in which
communication from outside seems like madness from inside; Frank HERBERT's
The Santaroga Barrier (1968), in which an entire community is cut off and
apparently has its identity submerged (here what begins as horrifying is
cleverly tilted so as to seem almost acceptable by the end); John
BRUNNER's The Jagged Orbit (1969), in which paranoia is endemic and taken

for granted in a NEAR-FUTURE situation of racial hatred; Roger ZELAZNY's
Amber series (from 1970) in which a family of quasi-superbeings plot
constantly against one another, and real universes keep on turning out to
be mere shadows of some further but unreachable reality; John T. Sladek's
The Muller-Fokker Effect (1970), which takes US paranoia as its prime
target; and Norman SPINRAD's The Iron Dream (1972), which parodies sf
paranoia by passing itself off as a SWORD-AND-SORCERY novel written by
Adolf Hitler.Though most of this work in book form shows no special
pattern, the films of the 1960s certainly did, and all this activity
culminated in a second wave of paranoia books and films that emerged in
the mid-1970s, and - in the cinema, at least - continues intermittently to
the present day. This new paranoia boom was shaped differently from its
1950s predecessor; the earlier period produced paranoia stories about
outside menaces that ultimately endangered the State; the later boom
produced a more domestic version in which the menace came from within, and
was very often the State itself - as in most of the films noted above - or
even, in an inward claustrophobic spiral, the family itself, in the case
of Richard CONDON's Winter Kills (1974), a FABULATION about a political
family closely resembling the Kennedys. The 1970s boom, though it built on
conspiracy theories of the 1960s, was immediately attributable to the
revelations following the 1972 break-in at Watergate which climaxed with
President Nixon's resignation. It is hardly surprising that paranoid sf
this time around emerged mostly (and perhaps justifiably) in stories that
blended sf with POLITICS, as in the borderline sf film The Parallax View
(1974) and the 1979 film of Condon's Winter Kills. Among the many more
obviously sciencefictional (though still political) paranoid film
scenarios that followed are The CRAZIES (1973), CHOSEN SURVIVORS (1974),
CAPRICORN ONE (1977), The FURY (1978), The BOYS FROM BRAZIL (1978), The
CHINA SYNDROME (1979), SCANNERS (1980), ROLLOVER (1981), BLUE THUNDER
(1982), ENDANGERED SPECIES (1982), FIRESTARTER (1984), KAMIKAZE (1986),
The BLOB (1988) and BRAIN DEAD (1989), each of which involves a
conspiracy, in most cases supported secretly by the apparatus of the
State.Curiously enough, conspiracy-theory material of this sort did not
much permeate written genre sf in the 1970s, though it was very obvious in
the sort of fabulations written by Kurt VONNEGUT Jr and especially Thomas
PYNCHON, a tradition continued in the work of many others, including
William T. VOLLMANN in his You Bright and Risen Angels: A Cartoon (1987
UK). Within more obviously generic work, a kind of knowing paranoia
characterized a series of novels by Barry N. MALZBERG (some listed under
PSYCHOLOGY) which see Man as a puppet in some kind of enigmatic or
indifferent cosmic game; but the conspiracy-theory work par excellence was
Robert SHEA's and Robert Anton WILSON's Illuminatus! (3 vols 1975), in
which recent political history is explained in terms of a dazzlingly
complex series of interlocking conspiracies by rival secret societies,
some with histories going back to ATLANTIS. Algis Budrys's Michaelmas
(1977) comes out, rather worriedly, on the side of conspiracy by producing
as hero the man who secretly manipulates human politics.In the 1980s,
paranoia in genre sf may have been slightly in abeyance, though it
appeared in recurrent motifs of various sub-genres: the "shoot first, ask
questions afterward" mentality of some SURVIVALIST FICTION; the godlike
manipulations of various VIRTUAL REALITIES in novels by Jack CHALKER and

others; and some of the more sophisticated SPACE OPERAS, in which galactic
history (including ours) turns out to have been warped by alien
superbeings, as in Paul J. MCAULEY's Eternal Light (1991). The most senior
1980s authors whose worlds are readable as paranoid are perhaps William
GIBSON and Orson Scott CARD, but in rather different ways. Gibson's
characteristically Canadian presentation is of struggling protagonists who
often find themselves treated as puppets, as if free will may come to be
illusory in a sufficiently complex world; Card's protagonists, who exist
in a kinetic Universe pervaded by a sense of omnipotent presence, are more typically of the USA - both manipulated and manipulative, the tool of
greater forces or in the upshot godlike themselves. Card's Universe is
intensely hierarchical, with his protagonists ranked high, but it is not
always clear which rung of the ladder he believes the rest of us to be
standing on; he may believe that we have free will if we stick to the
rules.It is difficult to generalize about paranoia in sf; clearly it is
important and has led to some distinguished work. It does seem as if sf of
the last few decades has matured and that, where sf once simply reflected
paranoia, it is now more often written to analyse the very real paranoia
that the writers know to exist in society. Western society has a cumbrous,
bureaucratic power system; no wonder if the average individual feels at
the mercy of forces he or she cannot even identify. In all paranoid sf the
question of our free will is the fundamental one.Schizophrenia is very
much rarer in sf, though there is a small but persistent subgenre of tales
about dual personality, its earliest classic being Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis STEVENSON. The popular belief
that schizophrenia is a synonym for split personality is incorrect; in
clinical psychology schizophrenia is more complex and more common than
that. However, it is the split-personality theme that has most attracted
sf writers ( PSYCHOLOGY for further examples). An amusing variant can be
found in Robert Sheckley's The Alchemical Marriage of Alistair Crompton
(1978 UK; vt Crompton Divided 1988 US), in which split personalities can
be excised by psychic surgery and implanted into new bodies. The film
FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) features a self-controlled scientist out of touch
with his own subconscious mind, the "id"; in a surprisingly successful
post-Freudian variation on Stevenson's Jekyll-and-Hyde syndrome, his
secret passions become literally projected into the form of a ravening
monster.Where stories of PARASITISM regularly have a subtext of paranoia,
those of symbiosis often appear schizophrenic, at least in such tales as
Brian STABLEFORD's Hooded Swan series, where the symbiote literally
inhabits the host's brain. (An earlier example is Algis Budrys's "Silent
Brother" [1956].) Stableford is one of the few sf writers to use
schizophrenia in the modern sense as an sf theme, in Man in a Cage (1975),
where a schizophrenic is chosen to take part in a space project which
might prove impossible for ordinary people. (Samuel R. DELANY had used a
similar idea in "The Star Pit" [1967], but there the spacemen, though
unbalanced, were not schizophrenic.)Theodore STURGEON wrote several strong
(but perhaps glib) stories about schizophrenia, including "The Other Man"
(1956), and "Who?" (1955; vt "Bulkhead"), which is about the deliberate
splitting of an astronaut's personality to save him from insanity during a
long space flight alone. And, of course, his gestalt creation in MORE THAN
HUMAN (fixup 1953) consists of the joining together of individually maimed

persons, each of whom (before joining) is like an inadequate,
schizophrenic personality split off from some unknowable whole. Another
story about the deliberate splitting of personality is Wyman GUIN's
interesting "Beyond Bedlam" (1951).The most consistently evocative use of
schizophrenic themes in sf, however, is in the work of Philip K. Dick,
notably in We Can Build You (1972) and Martian Time-Slip (1964). Both use
the word schizophrenia in the full clinical sense, and both treat
schizophrenics with considerable empathy, though not necessarily sympathy;
the latter is fascinating in its theorizing that the anomie of the
schizophrenic may be to do with his or her subjective experience of time
being radically removed from the normal; the desolated landscapes
projected by (or perceived by) the schizoid mind are memorable. [PN]See
also: MONSTERS; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
PARASITE MURDERS, THE
(vt They Came from Within; vt Shivers) Film (1974). Cinepix/Canadian Film
Development Corp. Written/dir David CRONENBERG, starring Paul Hampton, Joe
Silver, Lynn Lowry, Alan Migicovsky, Barbara Steele. 87 mins, cut to 77
mins. Colour.In an attempt to develop a beneficial symbiote, a scientist
creates a parasite that, when it invades a human body, makes its host
sexually ravenous. The vaguely phallic parasites spread though an isolated
apartment building, and sexual apocalypse follows, the film ending with
the sterile high-rise building's surviving occupants climbing into their
cars to infect first Canada and then the world. The film has
SPLATTER-MOVIE sequences and other scenes, notably the parasite's vaginal
penetration of Steele while she is in the bath, of a distinctly
neauseating kind, but it transcends the exploitation-movie genre to which
it belongs through its wit and intensity, and its readiness to follow its
axioms through to their conclusions. This was Cronenberg's first
commercial film, notable for its remarkably bold visual metaphors. [PN]See
also: CINEMA; MONSTER MOVIES; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; SEX.
PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS
Parasitism and symbiosis are Nature's extreme forms of commensalism
(physical association). A parasitic species promotes its own interests
entirely to the detriment of the other; symbiosis refers to the much less
common state in which both organisms obtain some benefit from the
association.Imaginary parasites of human beings are featured in many
effective sf HORROR stories, often linked to the idea of vampirism
(although classical vampires might better be regarded as predators than as
parasites). Stories dealing with LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS often feature
parasites which are exaggerated versions of earthly creatures. Those
insects which lay their eggs in living hosts are popular models; they
feature in A.E. VAN VOGT's "Discord in Scarlet" (1939; incorporated in The
Voyage of the Space Beagle, fixup 1950) and the film ALIEN (1979) and its
sequels; the closely related notion of the mother killed by her internal
young appears in Philip Jose FARMER's THE LOVERS (1952; exp 1961) and
Gardner DOZOIS's STRANGERS (1978). Parasites leeching the "vital energy"
of human beings are commonplace; when the parasites are internal rather
than external this often involves the will of the victim being usurped,
thus referring metaphorically to demonic possession as well as to

vampirism. Early examples of this kind of story include J. Maclaren
COBBAN's Master of His Fate (1890) and Arthur Conan DOYLE's The Parasite
(1895); the classic PULP-MAGAZINE sf extrapolations are Eric Frank
RUSSELL's Sinister Barrier (1939; 1943; rev 1948) and Robert A. HEINLEIN's
The Puppet Masters (1951). Other stories in the same vein are Russell's
"Vampire from the Void" (1939), Farmer's "Strange Compulsion" (1953; vt
"The Captain's Daughter"), Frank R. CRISP's The Ape of London (1959),
Robert SILVERBERG's "Passengers" (1968), Colin WILSON's The Mind Parasites
(1967) and The Space Vampires (1976), David CRONENBERG's film The PARASITE
MURDERS (1974) and Damon KNIGHT's CV (1985).This frequent movement of the
notion of parasitism from the context of the mundane to the
quasisupernatural is in keeping with sf's habitual treatment of biological
themes ( BIOLOGY). In concert with general trends relating to ALIENS there
was a dramatic change of emphasis in post-WWII stories, in which
apparently parasitic relationships are often revealed to be in fact
symbiotic. Some stories are conscious ideological replies to earlier works
- Ted WHITE's By Furies Possessed (1970), which attacks the implicit
xenophobia of The Puppet Masters, is a notable example. The concept of
symbiosis had earlier been used in some ecological puzzle stories (
ECOLOGY), notably Eric Frank Russell's "Symbiotica" (1943) and an ironic
story of defensive biological warfare, "Symbiosis" (1947) by Will F.
Jenkins (Murray LEINSTER), but the quasisupernatural connotations it
eventually took on were decisively opposed to metaphors of vampirism and
possession. It became a central notion of the "ecological mysticism"
displayed in such works as Sydney J. VAN SCYOC's trilogy Daughters of the
Sunstone (1982-4; omni 1985). Explicit religious imagery comes to the fore
in such stories of human/alien symbiosis as Clifford D. SIMAK's Time and
Again (1951; vt First He Died), Bob SHAW's Palace of Eternity (1969) and
Nicholas Yermakov's trilogy begun with The Last Communion (1981).
Post-WWII stories in which human and alien minds share a brain usually see
such relationships as potentially symbiotic; examples include Hal
CLEMENT's Needle (1950), Brian M. STABLEFORD's Halcyon Drift series
(1972-5), Roger ZELAZNY's Doorways in the Sand (1976) and F. Paul WILSON's
Healer (1976). Even Christopher EVANS's bleak mind-parasite story The
Insider (1981) is sympathetic to the parasitic consciousness. The more
ambivalent view of human/alien commensalism adopted in Octavia E. BUTLER's
Clay's Ark (1984) and related works and in the first part of Dan SIMMONS's
HYPERION (1989) cleverly exploits and undercuts this modern
sensibility.This area of speculation is perhaps the most obvious example
in sf of the utility of biological notions as metaphysical metaphors (
METAPHYSICS), and of the way that such metaphorical usage dominates the
expression of biological notions in sf. [BS]See also: HIVE-MINDS;
PARANOIA; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
PARAZZOLI, FERRUCCIO
[r] ITALY.
PARIS QUI DORT
(vt Le Rayon Invisible; vt The Crazy Ray) Film (1923). Films Diamant.
Written/dir Rene Clair, starring Henri Rollan, Albert Prejean, Madeleine
Rodrigue, Marcel Vallee. 61 mins. B/w.This is one of the earliest sf films

(other than shorts). A scientist accidentally freezes Paris into a
split-second of time with an invisible ray. Some Parisians escape, through
being either on the Eiffel tower or in a plane. Most of them take
advantage of the situation to break out of their social roles, have
drunken parties, etc., but a young nightwatchman persuades a group to seek
out the source of the problem and put it right, which they do (though at
first the victims can move only in slow motion). Made with style and charm
by Clair - whose first film it was - PQD retains its wit and good humour
when seen today. [JB]See also: CINEMA.
PARK, PAUL (CLAIBORNE)
(1954- ) US writer, educated in the land of his birth, peripatetic for
most of the 1980s, but resident again in the USA at about the time he
began publishing sf with SOLDIERS OF PARADISE (1987), the first volume of
The Starbridge Chronicles, which comprises also Sugar Rain (1989) assembled with the first volume as The Sugar Festival (omni 1991) - and is
completed with The Cult of Loving Kindness (1991). It is the sort of
sequence whose composition seems possible only in the later years of a
genre, when the literary atmosphere is saturated with memories of previous
work and a sense of antiquity attaches naturally to some of the sf
instruments used in new stories. RELIGION dominates every page of The
Starbridge Chronicles, which is set, eons hence, in a dying-Earth venue
where history endlessly recycles, tied to the return of the
generations-long seasons of a Great Year. (PP has denied being influenced
by Brian W. ALDISS's Helliconia sequence: the idea of a Great Year may be
one which comes naturally to mind in the late maturity of a genre.)As in
most dying-Earth tales ( FAR FUTURE), metal is now scarce, technologies of
radically varying complexity co-exist, human and humanlike species
intermingle, and nothing new can happen. The Great-Year cycle owes its
existence to the influence of a visiting planet (PP's astronomy is,
perhaps intentionally, vague on its exact nature) called Paradise, which
the religion dominant during the terrible Winter conceives to be the
habitat of those who have not yet died and been sent to Earth. The
delineation of this faith in SOLDIERS OF PARADISE - with its bloodiness,
its erotic complexities, its totalitarian control over the predestined
lives of the damned, its worship of the dog-god Angkhdt, its melancholia
and its strange rightness - is the major creative achievement of the
sequence. In that first novel, as Winter begins to end, the Starbridge
clan, which has dominated the great province whose capital is Charn,
begins to panic in foreordained ways; Abu Starbridge is martyred, and will
become the avatar of a Summer faith, and Thanakar Starbridge, a doctor who
blasphemously heals those low in the social order, escapes a crumbling
Charn with his lover. Sugar Rain deals in gravely slow terms with the
meteorological and social phenomena which signal Spring, as well as
continuing the Thanakar love story. The Cult of Loving Kindness, set in
Summer, depicts the slow rebirth of the cult of Angkhdt. The contemplative
and tocsin richness of the sequence demonstrates the continuing
imaginative power of latter-day sf.Coelestis (1993 UK; rev vt Celestis
1995 US) is a singleton and reads, at first glance, like an extended
vignette: a morose administrator from Earth, trapped by time dilation and
a failed career on a decrepit colony planet, falls in love with a wealthy

native ALIEN, who has been cosmetically modifying herself so as to
resemble human stock more closely; and she falls in love with him; and the
romance ends tragically, as seemed inevitable from the start. But the
quietly savage density of the prose, the inexorability of the telling, and
the more profound tragedy of the continuing destruction at human hands of
the complex alien culture, all add again to a demonstration of late 20th
century sf at its most responsible, and least conciliatory. [JC]See also:
GODS AND DEMONS; PLANETARY ROMANCE.
PARKER, RICHARD
(1915- ) UK writer for children. His The Hendon Fungus (1968) is about
fungal specimens from abroad proliferating in England, feeding on calcium,
and thus crumbling buildings of stone, concrete, etc. The Old Powder Line
(1971) is a fantasy featuring a train as a time machine. A Time to Choose
(1973) presents two children forced to pick between double lives in
ALTERNATE WORLDS, one pleasant, the other ours. [PN]Other works: M For
Mischief and Spell Seven (1971), both tales of magic.
PARKES, LUCAS or WYNDHAM
John WYNDHAM.
PARKINSON, H(AROLD) F(REDERICK)
(? - ) UK writer whose sf novel, They Shall not Die (1939), describes
with muted irony the effects of a MEDICINE which prevents all disease but
also sterilizes those who use it: only those who remain prone to the ills
of the flesh can give birth. [JC]
PARNELL, FRANCIS
[s] Festus PRAGNELL.
PARNOV, EREMEI (IUDOVICH)
(1935- ) Russian scientist and writer, almost all of whose sf of interest
was published in collaboration with Mikhail EMTSEV (whom see for details).
After the partnership broke up in 1970, EP published some further work,
like Prosnis' V Famaguste ["Wake up in Famagusta"] (1985), which mixes
Eastern mysticism and ALIEN encounters in a formula adventure plot. Some
superficial sf criticism appears in Fantastika V Vek NTR ["SF in the Age
of Scientific Revolution"] (1974) and Zerkalo Uranii ["The Mirror of
Urania"] (1982). [VG]See also: HIVE-MINDS.
PARODY
SATIRE.
PARRINDER, (JOHN) PATRICK
(1944- ) UK academic and critic whose work in the sf field has focused
primarily upon H.G. WELLS. His H.G. Wells (1970) remains the best short
introduction to the work and the man, though it may now, two decades
later, seem unduly dismissive about Wells's later career. H.G. Wells: The
Critical Heritage (anth 1972) reflects a similar viewpoint. PP ed with
Robert M. PHILMUS H.G. Wells's Literary Criticism (coll 1980). The War of
the Worlds: Notes (1981 chap) is a study guide. H.G. Wells: A
Comprehensive Bibliography, 4th Ed (1986 chap), with J.R. Hammond, A.H.
Watkins and the H.G. Wells Society, justifies its subtitle only if
periodical publications are to be ignored. H.G. Wells under Revision:

Proceedings of the International H.G. Wells Symposium, London, July 1986
(anth 1990) with Christopher Rolfe reflects some of the advances in Wells
studies since PP's first study, which in retrospect seems all the more
prescient in the sophisticated seriousness of its approach. PP has also
edited 2 critical editions for The H.G. Wells Society: Select
Conversations with an Uncle (Now Extinct) ([coll 1895] 1992 chap) with
David C. Smith, which includes previously uncollected material, and The
Discovery of the Future ([1902] coll 1989 chap), which includes also some
lesser essays.The useful Science Fiction: A Critical Guide (anth 1979) was
followed by Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching (1980), a
clear-headed and subtle conspectus of the field from a scholarly point of
view. [JC]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; SF IN THE
CLASSROOM; SCIENTISTS.
PARRY, DAVID MacLEAN
(1852-1915) US businessman and writer whose anti-socialist DYSTOPIA, The
Scarlet Empire (1906), introduces a young US citizen to a nightmarish
ATLANTIS, protected from the ocean by a great dome, in which the obsession
with regimented equality leads to grotesqueries prophetic of those dreamt
of by Evgeny ZAMIATIN in My (trans Gregory Zilboorg as We 1924 US). The
protagonist escapes with the young woman he loves, destroying the dome and hence the entire society - as he leaves. [JC]
PARSEC
The official SI unit of astronomical distance; the name is a contraction
of "parallax-second". The measure was introduced by UK astronomer Herbert
Hall Towner (1861-1930). As the Earth travels from one side of the Sun to
the other in half a year, parallax makes the position of any comparatively
nearby star apparently shift. Using simple trigonometry, from the observed
angular displacement of the star's measured position and knowledge of the
distance between Earth and Sun the distance of the star can be calculated.
One parsec is defined (essentially) as the distance at which a star would
show a parallax displacement of 1 second of arc, a distance which proves
to be approximately 3.258 light years.The term "parsec" is a common item
of sf TERMINOLOGY, either correctly as a unit of distance or, depressingly
often - especially in PULP-MAGAZINE, juvenile and cinematic sf mistakenly as a unit of velocity ("We're moving at 17 parsecs!" the hero
of SPACE 1999 might cry) or of time ("I made the run in less than four
parsecs," says Harrison Ford in STAR WARS). [PN]See also: SCIENTIFIC
ERRORS.
PARTINGTON, CHARLES
[r] NEW WORLDS; SOMETHING ELSE.
PASSES, ALAN
Working name of UK writer, translator and film technician Alan Pazolski
(1943- ), who also signs himself Alan Passes-Pazolski. His first sf story
was "Spoor" for NW in 1969, and he has written two sf plays, "Mystic of
the Western World", produced 1976, and "Death Raise", produced 1977. His
epic novel Big Step (1977) mixes sf material with MYTHOLOGY in the
experimentally couched story of the adventures on Earth of an interstellar
Angel of Death who seeks to punish a fugitive Nazi. [JC]

PASSING SHOW, THE
UK large-format (14" x 10" [36cm x 26cm]) weekly magazine, 26 Mar 1932-25
Feb 1939. It featured articles, short stories, serials and cartoons.
Beginning with the serializations of Pirates of Venus (1933; 1934) and
Lost on Venus (1933-4; 1935) by Edgar Rice BURROUGHS (both reprinted from
The ARGOSY ), TPS became the UK's most regular periodical source of sf in
the 1930s, remaining so until TALES OF WONDER and FANTASY started up.
Several short fantasy stories by Lord DUNSANY and others and a series of
articles by Ray CUMMINGS, The World of Tomorrow (1936), appeared in TPS
over the next 5 years together with 11 other serials, notably Warwick
DEEPING's "The Madness of Professor Pye" (1934), Edwin BALMER's and Philip
WYLIE's When Worlds Collide (1934-5; being a reprint of When Worlds
Collide [1933] and After Worlds Collide [1934]), Wynant Davis Hubbard's
The Thousandth Frog (1935; 1935), John Beynon's ( John WYNDHAM) Planet
Plane (1936 as "Stowaway to Mars"; 1936; vt cut as "The Space Machine",
1937 Modern Wonder; rev vt Stowaway to Mars 1953) and The Secret People
(1935; 1935), and W. Douglas NEWTON's "The Devil Comes Aboard" (1938; vt
Savaran and the Great Sand 1939).TPS later became The Illustrated and
focused its attention on WWII, though sf still made an occasional
appearance. [JE]
PASTORAL
The term "pastoral" can be understood in various ways. It can refer to
the Classical or Shakespearean tale of courtiers holidaying among nymphs
and shepherds; it can refer, as Sir William Empson (1906-1984) and other
modern critics have argued, to the proletarian novel or to the story which
contrasts childhood innocence with adult experience. In essence, however,
a pastoral is any work of fiction which depicts an apparently simple and
natural way of life, and contrasts it with our complex, technological,
anxiety-ridden urban world of the present. Pastorals can be full of moral
earnestness or they can be utterly escapist.Of the many versions of
pastoral in sf, the most obvious is the tale of country life as written by
Clifford D. SIMAK, Zenna HENDERSON and others. Such stories usually
involve the intrusion of ALIEN beings (frequently telepathic) into rural
landscapes peopled by farmers and small-town tradesmen. Examples are
Simak's "Neighbor" (1954), "A Death in the House" (1959), WAY STATION
(1963), All Flesh is Grass (1965) and A Choice of Gods (1972), and
Henderson's PILGRIMAGE: THE BOOK OF THE PEOPLE (fixup 1961) and The
Anything Box (coll 1965). Fantasies in a kindred mode include Ray
BRADBURY's Dandelion Wine (fixup 1957), Ward MOORE's and Avram DAVIDSON's
Joyleg (1962) and Manly Wade WELLMAN's Who Fears the Devil? (coll of
linked stories 1963). What these works have in common is an emphasis on
the virtues (and sometimes the constraints) of the rural way of life. They
are, explicitly or implicitly, anti-city and anti- MACHINE; they
frequently extol the values of living close to Nature, of being in rhythm
with the seasons. This bucolic and Luddite strain in GENRE SF has its
origins in some major works of US literature such as Walden (1854) by
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) and Winesburg, Ohio (1919) by Sherwood
Anderson (1876-1941), as well as in such UK UTOPIAS and romances as
Richard JEFFERIES's After London (1885), with its vision of the city
reconquered by forest and field, W.H. HUDSON's A Crystal Age (1887) and

William MORRIS's News from Nowhere (1890 US).A variant form of this
version of pastoral is that in which the contrast between city and country
is made quite explicit. Stories of this type, discussed more fully in the
entry on CITIES, have a long history, going back beyond After London. In
this variant urban life is depicted as cruel, oppressive or sterile, while
the country represents freedom; the genre-sf archetype is Arthur C.
CLARKE's The City and the Stars (1956). It is a particularly popular theme
in CHILDREN'S SF, as in John CHRISTOPHER's Wild Jack (1974) and Isobelle
CARMODY's Scatterlings (1991).A second version of pastoral, again taking
its cue from Jefferies and Morris, is exemplified by George R. STEWART's
Earth Abides (1949) and Leigh BRACKETT's The Long Tomorrow (1955), both
tales depicting the rise of agricultural and anti-technological societies
after some sort of HOLOCAUST. Although this type of story is set in the
future, the future becomes a clear analogue of the pre-industrial past. A
particularly fine example is Fredric BROWN's "The Waveries" (1945), a tale
in which the modern USA is forced back into a horse-and-buggy economy by
invading aliens who prevent the use of electricity. Other examples of this
kind of story are Pat FRANK's Alas, Babylon (1959) and Edgar PANGBORN's
DAVY (1964). This sort of pastoral is not always simple; the pastoral
post-holocaust world can itself be seen with a little irony, as in John
CROWLEY's ENGINE SUMMER (1979), which is suffused by an elegiac
melancholy. (Another ambiguous pastoral, not really sf, is Crowley's
Little, Big [1981], where the ultimate pastoral values of Faerie are
teasingly impossible to reach and, if reached, might mean death.)A third
version of sf pastoral is the story set on another world, often Edenic or,
at the least, satisfying. Such works usually depict benign alien ECOLOGIES
which support nontechnological societies. Humanity is often seen as a
destructive intruder upon these planets, although frequently the
protagonist is "accepted" because he or she is capable of seeing the
wisdom of the alien ways. The ideological thrust of such stories is
anti-anthropomorphic and anti-xenophobic. Examples are Robert A.
HEINLEIN's Red Planet (1949) - and, by implication, his STRANGER IN A
STRANGE LAND (1961) - Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (fixup 1950), Mark
CLIFTON's Eight Keys to Eden (1960), H. Beam PIPER's Little Fuzzy (1962),
Robert SILVERBERG's Downward to the Earth (1970) and The Face of the
Waters (1991), Lloyd BIGGLE Jr's Monument (1974), Cherry WILDER's Second
Nature (1982), Joan SLONCZEWSKI's A Door into Ocean (1986) and Judith
MOFFETT's Pennterra (1987). Ursula K. LE GUIN's The Word for World is
Forest (1976) is an outstanding treatment of this theme, the sourness of
the narrative reflecting the realities of the Vietnam War. Brian M.
STABLEFORD's The Paradise Game (1974) and Critical Threshold (1976) are
clever variations; both are about planets which are apparently Edenic but
which turn out to be rather more sinister. This is also the case in Ian
WATSON's "The Moon and Michelangelo" (1987), in which a pastoral alien
society has been wholly misunderstood but offers a form of ironic
transcendence nevertheless. Richard MCKENNA's "Hunter, Come Home" (1963)
and John VARLEY's "In the Hall of the Martian Kings" (1977) are both good
treatments of the ultimate in benign ecologies: bio-systems that enfold
and preserve the sympathetic human characters against all dangers.The
fourth version of sf pastoral is perhaps the commonest: the escapist
adventure story set in a simpler world, whether it be the future, the

past, another planet or in another continuum. If the portrayal of "Nature"
is an essential element in all pastorals, then this is the version of them
that prefers its Nature red in tooth and claw. Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's
Tarzan of the Apes (1914) belongs here, as do his A Princess of Mars
(1912; 1917), At the Earth's Core (1914; 1922) and all their various
sequels. Tarzan is an archetypal 20th-century pastoral hero; his freedom
of action, affinity with animals and innocent capacity for violence
represent an amalgam of daydreams, Rousseau married to Darwin. One could
go further and say that the whole subgenre of SWORD AND SORCERY is in a
sense pastoral. As urbanization increases and free space diminishes on the
Earth's surface, so the pastoral dream of simpler worlds in harmony with
(or in enjoyable conflict with) Nature becomes ever more compelling.In the
1980s (there are earlier examples) pastoral themes were used by a number
of WOMEN WRITERS OF SF to image the values of FEMINISM, as in
Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean. The prime example here, though, is Le
Guin's Always Coming Home (1985), an extraordinarily rich and dense
exercise in speculative ANTHROPOLOGY, largely set in a post-holocaust
pastoral culture whose values are the values of women. A cruder exercise
in the same vein is Sally Miller GEARHART's The Wanderground: Stories of
the Hill Women (coll of linked stories 1980), in which the women's
society's embrace of Nature and the men's society's despisal of it are
both so diagrammatic as to approach caricature. Sheri S. TEPPER achieves
the balance in Raising the Stones (1990), with plenty of melodrama but
also with plenty of real life, when she contrasts two agricultural
societies on two planets, the one society patriarchal and brutal, the
other deriving its strength from the realism (and, in the main, the
kindliness) of women, a confrontation between the bad pastoral and the
good.Pastoral has always been an attractive theme, but its simpler
pleasures can pall after a time. The most interesting uses of pastoral in
sf, many of which are cited above, are those in which the pastoral values
have their cost, or in which the urban/pastoral or civilized/primitive
oppositions are seen with some sort of irony - that is, with the
recognition that life is not always as neatly dualistic as we would
sometimes wish. Some of the poignant qualities of Hilbert SCHENCK's At the
Eye of the Ocean (1980) and A ROSE FOR ARMAGEDDON (1982), pastorals whose
pastures are the field of ocean, derive from this recognition. Behind the
greatest pastorals is often a sense of loss, for Nature herself often
throws up images of decline and decay as well as of growth and harvest,
and to invoke Nature is to invoke a world whose benisons are ephemeral
(although they will always return). This may be why some of the finest
pastorals are seasonal or cyclical; Brian W. ALDISS's Helliconia trilogy
(1982-5) is many other things as well, but at root it is a pastoral whose
burden is that Winter always comes. [DP/PN]See also: CHILDREN IN SF;
ISLANDS; LIVING WORLDS.
'PATAPHYSICS
IMAGINARY SCIENCE; Alfred JARRY.
PATCHETT, M(ARY OSBORNE) E(LWYN)
(1897- ) Australian writer, long resident in the UK, whose competent
CHILDREN'S SF novels are Kidnappers of Space (1953; vt Space Captives of

the Golden Men 1953 US), Adam Troy, Astroman (1954), which deals with the
consequences for Earth of colliding with a giant asteroid, Lost on Venus
(1954; vt Flight to the Misty Planet 1954 US), Send for Johnny Danger
(1956), The Venus Project (1963), Ajax and the Haunted Mountain (1963) and
Farm Beneath the Sea (1969). Her writing is alert, uncondescending,
sensitive to animal life and information-full. [JC]
PATON, FRANK
[s] Raymond A. PALMER.
PATON, JOHN
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
PATRICK
Oscar ROSSITER.
PAUL, BARBARA (JEANNE)
(1931- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Answer 'Affirmative' or
'Negative' "forASF in 1972, but who has become much better known in the
1980s for her detective novels, of which she has written at least 13; one
of them, Liars and Tyrants and People who Turn Blue (1980), depends for
its plot upon a psychic character. Earlier BP wrote several sf novels - An
Exercise for Madmen (1978), Pillars of Salt (1979), Bibblings (1979) and
Under the Canopy (1980) - which feature women protagonists, through whom
an unprogrammatic FEMINISM is pursued as they find themselves coping with
sf-adventure situations. Pillars of Salt, for instance, is a TIME-TRAVEL
tale which confronts its 21st-century protagonist with the challenge of
becoming Queen Elizabeth I of England. A later novel, The Three-Minute
Universe * (1988), is a Star Trek tie ( STAR TREK).BP should not be
confused with the Barbara Paul who wrote The Curse of Halewood (1976; vt
Devil's Fire, Love's Revenge 1976 US); this was the pseudonym of Barbara
Kathleen Ovstedal (1925- ). [JC]
PAUL, FRANK R(UDOLPH)
(1884-1963) Austrian-born US illustrator. FRP is the best candidate for
"Father of Modern SF ILLUSTRATION", at least in the form it took in the
PULP MAGAZINES. He received much of his education in Vienna, and studied
also in Paris and New York. Trained as an architect, he was discovered by
Hugo GERNSBACK in 1914 while working for a rural newspaper. Their names
have been virtually inseparable ever since the days of The Electrical
Experimenter ( SCIENCE AND INVENTION). For #1 of AMAZING STORIES in Apr
1926 FRP not only painted the cover illustration but did all the interior
black-and-white artwork as well, and continued to do both until Gernsback
lost control of the magazine in 1929. When Gernsback started publishing
again later that year, FRP was once more his primary illustrator, on
SCIENCE WONDER STORIES, AIR WONDER STORIES and then WONDER STORIES;
indeed, his association with Gernsback lasted until the short-lived
Science Fiction Plus in 1953; he painted more than 150 covers for
Gernsback in all. He worked elsewhere, too, with a further 28 front covers
for various non-Gernsback SF MAGAZINES, including all 12 for Charles D.
HORNIG's SCIENCE FICTION, and also a series of full colour back-cover
paintings for the ZIFF-DAVIS Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures
(1939-46). He also did all the illustration for Superworld Comics, a

Gernsback experiment of 1939.FRP's style shows his architectural training;
his CITIES and TECHNOLOGY are lovingly detailed, his ALIENS well thought
out and plausible, but his human figures stiff and simplistic. His colours
were bright (almost garish, even for the period) and flat, and he liked
pure reds and yellows, particularly as backgrounds (though this was partly
due to Gernsback's meanness in using three- rather than four-colour
printing). It seems odd to associate primitive art with sf, but FRP was in
his technological way, just as much a primitive as Grandma Moses
(1860-1961) and, like her, had an authentic naive poetry to his work. The
brightness of colour throughout the PULP-MAGAZINE era of sf was a direct
result of FRP's influence. FRP was guest of honour at the first World SF
CONVENTION in 1939. [JG/PN]See also: SPACESHIPS.
PAYN, JAMES
(1830-1898) UK writer and editor whose 100+ books cover a wide variety of
genres, his sf being comparatively inconspicuous. The Cruise of the
Anti-Torpedo (1871 chap) is a typical future- WAR tale, one of many
written in direct response to George T. CHESNEY's The Battle of Dorking
(1871 chap); along with the comic "The Fatal Curiosity, or A Hundred Years
Hence" (1877) it was included in High Spirits: Being Certain Stories
Written in Them (coll 1879). The Eavesdropper: An Unparalleled Experiment
(1888) is an INVISIBILITY tale whose protagonist, after taking the
requisite potion, discovers the truth about his friends and servants and
returns to the normal world sadder and wiser. [JC]
PAYNE, (PIERRE STEPHEN) ROBERT
(1911-1983) UK-born writer, much travelled, who spent his final years in
the USA. Immensely prolific under a variety of names - including Richard
Cargoe, John Anthony Devon, Howard Horne and Valentin Tikhonov - he wrote
little fantasy or sf. The War in the Marshes (1938) as by Robert Young is
an allegorical adventure rather in the mode of Rex WARNER. The Deluge
(1954), which pretends to be based on notes left by Leonardo da Vinci
(1452-1519), is sf. [JC]
PEABODY, JOEL R.
[r] JUPITER; SUN.
PEACE GAME, THE
GLADIATORERNA.
PEAKE, MERVYN (LAURENCE)
(1911-1968) UK writer and artist, born in China, where he lived until he
was 12 in a missionary compound, embedded into a land as strange as the
country surrounding Gormenghast. He was initially better regarded as an
artist than as a writer and, although he had written some poetry before
the end of WWII, the publication of Titus Groan (1946) showed an
unexpected side to his genius. Gormenghast (1950) is closely linked to
that first volume, but it is clear that MP never intended to compose a
trilogy per se; Titus Alone (cut 1959; reconstructed from manuscript by
Langdon JONES 1970) - a text the author was unable to take beyond draft
form due to the onset of the disease which killed him - ends at a point
that MP did not intend as a definitive terminus. This sense of the shape
of the sequence is confirmed by the 1991 critical edition of the 3 novels,

in which Titus Alone (as coll 1991 US) ed G. Peter Winnington includes the
surviving pages of "Titus Awakes", the incomplete 4th volume of the
sequence. But, although the existing trilogy-variously identified as the
Gormenghast or Titus Groan sequence, and on one occasion assembled as The
Titus Books (omni 1983; vt The Gormenghast Trilogy 1991 US) - was never in
its author's mind a complete entity, it remains a series of texts whose
power is remarkable, and the definition of which in generic terms is
loaded with difficulties. Although couched in a language which might point
towards FANTASY, it contains no fantasy elements; though redolent of a
dying-Earth ( FAR FUTURE) venue in its sense of belatedness and in the
person of Titus's father - a fidgety, crotchet-ridden, ENTROPY-exuding
manic-depressive aristocrat whose like has haunted the dying-Earth
habitats of writers from M. John HARRISON to Richard GRANT - the first 2
volumes cannot be thought of as sf. The sequence is perhaps best thought
of as being sui generis.Told in an elaborated, densely pictorial language,
the story of Titus's birth and childhood in Gormenghast Castle is
fundamentally the story of a coming-of-age: it is a genuine Bildungsroman,
the story of the growth of a soul. At the same time, great stretches of
the sequence ignore the priggish, bland young Titus entirely to
concentrate upon the vividly realized cast of grotesques which surrounds
him. In Titus Groan itself, one of the most intensely painterly books ever
crafted, the infant protagonist is surrounded by a dwelling so intricate
and dense (MP derived something of its scale from Sark, in the Channel
Islands) that he never becomes more than an occasional raised figurine in
the Gormenghast geography. Gormenghast is essentially devoted to the
Realpolitik rise and inevitable fall of the modern-minded Steerpike. Only
Titus Alone concentrates on the hero, now self-exiled from his childhood
and his great demesne, as he hurtles through a futuristic, jaggedly
conceived DYSTOPIAN world; at the end, about to return home, he turns his
back on all his memories, and the sequence stops short, dangling.
Throughout, the wealth of detail of the work makes Gormenghast one of the
most richly realized ALTERNATE WORLDS in all the literature of fantasy or
sf.MP contributed to Sometime, Never (anth 1956) a short story about
Titus, Boy in Darkness (1956; 1976 chap). Mr Pye (1953) is an excellent
whimsical fantasy, set largely on Sark, about a man whose goodness is so
profound that he sprouts angel's wings, and about his desperate attempts
to get rid of them. But the huge fragments of Titus Groan remain central.
[JC]Other works: Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (1939 chap), for
children; Letters from a Lost Uncle (1948), for children; Mervyn Peake:
Writings and Drawings (anth 1974) ed Maeve Gilmore, MP's widow, and
Shelagh Johnson.About the author: A World Away: A Memoir (1970) by Maeve
Gilmore; Mervyn Peake (1974) by John Batchelor; Mervyn Peake (1976) by
John Watney; Peake's Progress (coll 1978; rev 1981) ed Maeve Gilmore. A
journal, Peake Studies, ed G. Peter Winnington, was instituted in 1988 and
continues.
PEARCE, BRENDA
(1935- ) UK writer who began publishing sf with "Hot Spot" for ASF in
1974. Kidnapped into Space (1975) and Worlds for the Grabbing (1977) are
both routine but enjoyable adventures in which her interest in technical
and technological matters sometimes shows through to advantage.

PEARCE, PHILIPPA
[r] CHILDREN'S SF.
PEARSON, C.A., LTD
PEARSON'S MAGAZINE; PEARSON'S WEEKLY; SCOOPS.
PEARSON, MARTIN
Pseudonym used once by Donald A. WOLLHEIM alone, and also for "The
Embassy" (1942 ASF), which he wrote with C.M. KORNBLUTH. [PN]
PEARSONS
PEARSON'S MAGAZINE; PEARSON'S WEEKLY; SCOOPS.
PEARSON'S MAGAZINE
UK magazine published by C.A. Pearson Ltd, ed Sir Arthur Pearson and
others. Monthly, Jan 1896-Nov 1939.PM was a popular fact and fiction
magazine which, following the trend set by its companion paper PEARSON'S
WEEKLY, published sf by George GRIFFITH, H.G. WELLS, F.M. WHITE, C.J.
Cutcliffe HYNE and others on a regular basis for several years, becoming
the STRAND MAGAZINE's keenest competitor. It is best remembered for the
serializations of Wells's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1897; 1898) and The Food
of the Gods (1903-04; 1904) and of George Griffith's A Honeymoon in Space
(1900 as "Stories of Other Worlds"; fixup 1901) and the sf illustrations
of Fred T. JANE and Warwick Goble. Sf continued intermittently into the
1930s, sometimes originally, as with John Raphael's weird sf novel Up
Above (1912; 1913), and sometimes with reprints, as with Douglas NEWTON's
"Sunken Cities" (1923) from MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE.A US edition appeared Mar
1899-Apr 1925 with substantially different contents. In particular it
serialized H.G. Wells's War in the Air (1908; 1908) a month or two after
the original publication in Pall Mall Magazine. [JE]Further reading:
Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in
the Popular Magazines 1891-1911 (1968) by Sam MOSKOWITZ.
PEARSON'S WEEKLY
UK 16pp tabloid magazine published by C.A. Pearson Ltd; ed Peter Keary
and others. Weekly, 26 July 1890-1 Apr 1939. Retitled The New Pearson and
Today from 17 Sep 1938, and The New Pearson's Weekly from 26 Nov 1938.
Incorporated into Tit-Bits from 8 Apr 1939.PW popularized sf in Victorian
magazines with the publication of George GRIFFITH's The Angel of the
Revolution (1893; cut 1893), following it with other serials by Griffith,
H. Rider HAGGARD, Louis TRACY and M.P. SHIEL, and also H.G. WELLS's The
Invisible Man (1897; rev 1897). Many short sf stories appeared during this
period, with further stories appearing sporadically into the 1930s. [JE]
PEASE, Lt JOHN
[s] Ralph Milne FARLEY.
PECK, RICHARD E(ARL)
(1936- ) US writer and academic, professor of English at Temple
University, Philadelphia, and an active critic of both literature in
general and sf in particular. He began publishing sf with "In Alien
Waters" for Venture in 1969. His sf novel, Final Solution (1973), is an
amusing but grim tale in which a US academic is sent 50 years into the

future (through CRYONICS) to find universities and CITIES merged into a
hideous conglomerate and sealed off, with Middle America living
comfortably outside.REP is not to be confused with Richard (Wayne) Peck
(1934- ), author of the Blossom Culp series of children's fantasies.
[JC/PN]
PEDLER, KIT
Working name of UK writer and scientist Christopher Magnus Howard Pedler
(1927-1981). He was a medical doctor, practising from 1953 for about three
years, after which he began the research into the experimental pathology
of eye disease that resulted in a second doctorate. In 1970 KP and Gerry
DAVIS devised the BBC TV series DOOMWATCH, which ran to 37 episodes, many
written by KP and Davis, and most dealing in sf terms with the prevention
of manmade threats to this fragile planet. KP's first sf novel, Mutant 59:
The Plastic-Eater (1971) with Davis, featured a Doomwatch-type scenario
(indeed, the basic plot had been used as a Doomwatch episode) in which a
laboratory-created plastic-eating virus escapes, creating havoc as
plastics start dissolving. The working out of the notion is less than
crisp. POLLUTION and ECOLOGY themes recurred in the next two
collaborations, Brainrack (1974) and The Dynostar Menace (1975), neither
being wholly satisfactory. KP's scientific ideas were stronger than the
methods he used to dramatize them. He made many tv and radio appearances,
usually dealing with ecological problems, and presented several tv films
in this field. [JC/PN]See also: DISASTER; GENETIC ENGINEERING;
PSEUDO-SCIENCE.
PEEL, JESSE
[s] Steve PERRY.
PEIRCE, HAYFORD
(1942- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Unlimited Warfare" for
ASF in 1974 and who established a name for lightly written tales whose
backgrounds were unusually well conceived. "Mail Supremacy" (1975) began a
series - which has not reached book form - in which an Anglo-Chinese
businessman brings Earth into the Galactic Postal Union. Napoleon
Disentimed (1987; exp 1989 UK), his first novel, is an attractive example
of what might be called the ALTERNATE-WORLDS hijinks tale: cast into a
1992 ruled by the French Empire, a confidence trickster attempts to upset
the applecart. The Thirteenth Majestral (1989) - HP's titles are notably
inventive - is a TIME-TRAVEL tale set in the far future and disregardful
of the pretensions of established religion. Phylum Monsters (1989) deals
amusedly with GENETIC ENGINEERING. [JC]
PEKIC, BORISLAV
[r] YUGOSLAVIA.
PELKIE, J.W.
[s] Raymond A. PALMER.
PELLUME, NOAM D.
[s] Orson Scott CARD.
PEMBERTON, [Sir] MAX
(1863-1950) UK writer, educated at Caius College, Cambridge, the first

editor of Chums 1892-3, editor of Cassell's Magazine 1896-1906, and later
a director of Northcliffe Newspapers; he was knighted in 1928. Of more
than 60 novels, his most famous is a Jules VERNE-style piece of CHILDREN'S
SF: in the much-reprinted The Iron Pirate: A Plain Tale of Strange
Happenings on the Sea (1893; vt The Shadow on the Sea 1907) and its sequel
Captain Black (1911) an advanced submarine is used for piracy. Equally
popular in its day was his novel of attempted future WAR, Pro Patria
(1901), in which a Channel tunnel is excavated by the French for a planned
INVASION of the UK. France is again the unsuccessful antagonist in The
Giant's Gate (1901), this time using advanced submarines to bypass the
UK's defence systems. Another theme prominent in MP's writing is of secret
communities established either for scientific reasons, as in The
Impregnable City (1895) and The House under the Sea (1902), or for
UTOPIAN, as in White Walls (1910). [JE]Other works: Queen of the Jesters
(1897); The Phantom Army (1898); Dr Xavier (1903); The Diamond Ship
(1906).About the author: Sixty Years Ago and After (1936), an
autobiography.See also: HISTORY OF SF; SPACESHIPS; UNDER THE SEA.
PEMBERTON, RENFREW
[s] F.M. BUSBY.
PENA, ALFREDO CARDONA
[r] LATIN AMERICA.
PENAL COLONY
NO ESCAPE.
PENALURICK, JAN
[s] Charles DE LINT.
PENDLETON, DON(ALD EUGENE)
(1927- ) US writer who began with "Boomerang Peep Show" for Ace Magazine
in 1958 and whose sf novels - some written as by Dan Britain, and most of
them routine - began with Revolt! (1968 as by Britain; rev vt Civil War
II: The Day it Finally Happened! 1971 as DP) and The Olympians (1969),
both soft porn. Other singletons were Cataclysm: The Day the World Died
(1969), The Guns of Terra 10 (1970), The Godmakers (1970 as by Britain;
1974 as DP) and 1989: Population Doomsday (1970; vt Population Doomsday
1974). Also of some sf interest are the Asthon Ford psychic spy tales:
Ashes to Ashes (1986), Eye to Eye (1986), Mind to Mind (1987), Life to
Life (1987), Heart to Heart (1987) and Time to Time (1988).DP wrote the
first 27 vols of the Mack Bolan or Executioner series for Gold Eagle
Books, which thereafter adopted "Don Pendleton" as a house name; among the
authors who wrote under it was Peter LESLIE. Of sf interest in that series
is Mack Bolan: Paradine's Gauntlet * (1983) by Michael Newton (1951- ) as
Pendleton. [JC]
PENDRAY, (GEORGE) EDWARD
(1901-1987) US writer and rocket scientist, a founding member of The
American Interplanetary Society, and author of The Coming Age of Rocket
Power (1945); he was also involved in the Time Capsule featured at the
1939 New York World's Fair. As Gawain Edwards he published some stories in
sf magazines in the 1920s and 1930s and a future- WAR novel, The

Earth-Tube (1929), in which Asians take advantage of their possession of
the invulnerable metal undulal to tunnel under South America, which they
soon conquer. After a young hero has penetrated the secret, catastophic
explosions close the tunnel, inundating South America but sparing the USA,
which has transformed itself into a socialist regime in response to the
free gold which the Asians have been raining from the skies in an effort
to destabilize the great capitalist democracy. [JC]
PENNINGTON, BRUCE
(1944- ) UK illustrator. One of the young sf artists to gain prominence
in the 1970s, BP entered the field in 1967 with a cover for Robert A.
HEINLEIN's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND (1961), though at the time he worked
primarily on covers for Westerns and historical novels. Since then he has
done sf covers for New English Library, BALLANTINE BOOKS, Corgi and Sphere
among others; he was also associated with SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY. His
painting is textured, with brush-strokes showing and strong colour, often
featuring surreal landscapes; it is distinctive, vigorous work, but has
been criticized for crudeness, maybe because of its contrast with the
smooth, airbrushed superrealism that was coming into vogue in the UK at
that time. Three books are Eschatus (1977), containing fantasy paintings
illustrating the prophecies of Nostradamus,Ultraterranium: The Paintings
of Bruce Pennington (1991) and The Bruce Pennington Portfolio (1991).
[JG/PN]See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD.
PENNY, DAVID G(EORGE)
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. [JC]
PENRICE, ARTHUR
(? -? ) Unidentified UK writer; according to Darko SUVIN almost certainly
a pseudonym. AP's Skyward and Earthward (1875) features an interplanetary
BALLOON aboard which the narrator visits the telepaths who live on Mars
before returning to Earth to engage in further exploits. [JC]
PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT, THE
Film (1977). Amicus. Dir Kevin Connor, starring Patrick Wayne, Sarah
Douglas, Dana Gillespie, Thorley Walters, Doug McClure. Screenplay Patrick
TILLEY, Connor Carter, Maurice Carter, based on The Land that Time Forgot
(fixup 1924) by Edgar Rice BURROUGHS. 90 mins. Colour.After the mild
success of The LAND THAT TIME FORGOT (1975) and AT THE EARTH'S CORE
(1976), made by the same company, a third Burroughs LOST-WORLD adaptation
was inevitable, but Tilley's screenplay lacked the tautness and the mild
ironies of that by James CAWTHORN and Michael MOORCOCK for The Land that
Time Forgot. This time around the MONSTERS are perfunctory, and the added
feminist subplot ends up as more notably male chauvinist than the
Burroughs original. [PN]
PER ASPERA AD ASTRA
CHEREZ TERNII - K ZVYOZDAM.
PERCEPTION
The ways in which we become aware of and receive information about the
outside world, mainly through the senses, are together called perception.
Philosophers are deeply divided as to whether our perceptions of the

outside world correspond to an actual reality, or whether they are merely
hypotheses, intellectual constructs, which may give us an unreliable or
partial picture of external reality, or whether, indeed, outside reality
is itself a mental construct.Perception is and always has been a principal
theme of sf; it is the philosophical linchpin of many stories and has
played a subsidiary role in hundreds more. (Many perception stories are
discussed, from a different perspective, under PSYCHOLOGY.) For
convenience, we can divide sf perception stories into 5 groups: stories
about unusual modes of perception; stories about appearance and reality;
stories about perception altered through drugs; stories about
synaesthesia; stories about altered perception of time. The groups are not
mutually exclusive, and several stories fall into more than one
category.Unusual modes of perception appear early in sf. R.H. HORNE's The
Poor Artist (1871), which is partly devoted to the way the world would
appear as perceived through the senses of animals, was the first book ever
to be described as "science fiction" (by his contemporary William WILSON).
Edwin A. ABBOTT's Flatland (1884) is an exercise in how beings from a oneor two-dimensional universe would perceive reality, and about how we would
perceive a fourth DIMENSION. J.H. ROSNY aine's "Un autre monde" (1895;
trans as "Another World" 1962) tells of a MUTANT with a very fast
metabolism who can see colours beyond violet (and new life forms)
invisible to ordinary humans. David LINDSAY developed a similar idea in A
VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920), in which the protagonist, mysteriously
transported to another planet, keeps forming and then losing new organs of
perception whose functions run from seeing additional colours to sensing
emotions to intensifying the will.Many sf writers have followed Rosny's
lead in imagining modes of perception which allow the direct sensing of
ALTERNATE WORLDS or other dimensions, often through ESP (see also PSI
POWERS). (It is probably more accurate to suppose that the idea was
popularized by an H.G. WELLS story of the same year, "The Story of
Davidson's Eyes" [1895], though Rosny's story is superior as sf.) A.E. VAN
VOGT's melodramatic Siege of the Unseen (1946 as "The Chronicler"; 1959;
vt as title story in The Three Eyes of Evil coll 1973 UK) has a hero with
a third eye which allows him to perceive and then travel into another
dimension. In Richard MCKENNA's "The Secret Place" (1966) no special organ
is required; a world of the distant geological past is perceived direct by
the mind of the heroine. Nearly all McKenna's work involves the perception
and/or construction of alternate realities. Another of his stories,
"Hunter, Come Home" (1963) involves an alien lifeform that perceives by
instant molecular analysis - which is not too far removed from our own
sense of smell - an example of the strange modes of perception which
appear in many of the stories described in the entry on ALIENS. James
TIPTREE Jr often used perception themes, notably in the almost surreal
"Painwise" (1971), in which a human explorer, surgically modified to feel
no pain, takes up with a crew of hedonistic aliens fixated on taste
sensations; pain is rediscovered. Several of Ian WATSON's novels have
dealt more seriously with perception, as in The Jonah Kit (1975), where
the perceptions of a whale are mediated through (and modified by) a human
intelligence, and The Martian Inca (1977), where the perceptions of two
South American Indians are changed by the accidental intake of a Martian
organism, so that their model of the world becomes very much more complex.

Watson here, as elsewhere, touches on the relation between external
reality and the way that reality is perceived and modified by mental
programmes in the observer. These are questions that emerge regularly in
the second category, stories of appearance and reality.Appearance and
reality is one of the fundamental themes of sf. It has as much to do with
METAPHYSICS and CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH as with perception per se (and so
is discussed, from rather a different perspective, in those two entries
also; relevant stories treated in more detail in the latter are "The
Yellow Pill" [1958] by Rog PHILLIPS and Counterfeit World [1964 UK; vt
Simulacron-3 US] by Daniel GALOUYE). The difficulty in perceiving the
difference between the real and the illusory is a central theme in
ABSURDIST SF and in FABULATION, as it is in surrealist literature
generally; it comes up often in the stories of Josephine SAXTON and is the
subject of Angela CARTER's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
(1972; vt The War of Dreams USA) and Salman RUSHDIE's Grimus (1975). All
three writers regularly use the quest format, life being seen as a journey
through baffling illusions, the desired end being understanding. Ed
BRYANT's Cinnabar (coll of linked stories 1976) is set around an enigmatic
city where desires can be made flesh in various ways, and where reality
itself is ever dissolving from one form to another; always changing and
diverse, its one unchanging quality appears to be the evanescence of
external reality. In James MORROW's The Continent of Lies (1984)
"dreambeans" (which grow on genetically engineered trees) are used to
dissolve, temporarily, the boundaries between appearance and reality; the
hero is a dreambean reviewer.Richard COWPER has written that "one single
theme which intrigues me above all others is the nature of human
perception". Where van Vogt's ESP breakthroughs into other realms of
perception tend to be brutally direct and melodramatic, Cowper has
approached the subject more obliquely and sensitively; a kind of further
reality, not explicable in everyday terms, makes itself known to several
of his characters in dreams, intimations - glimpses caught, as it were,
out of the corner of the eye. Cowper clearly believes that our everyday
reality is only partial, and has expertly evoked a kind of quivering,
tense broadening of perception, especially in Breakthrough (1967) and The
Twilight of Briareus (1974). Sf stories commonly dwell on the strangeness
of such experiences, and the protagonist's feeling that he might be going
mad. Another example is Arthur SELLINGS's The Uncensored Man (1964), in
which drugs are used to increase receptivity, a theme we will examine
further below.Several sf stories have combined ideas from MATHEMATICS
(strange topologies and geometries) with stories of perception. Arthur C.
CLARKE's "The Wall of Darkness" (1949) describes how it feels to live in a
world which is a three-dimensional analogue of a moebius strip; it is all
inside and no outside. Ted Chiang's "Tower of Babylon" (1990), in which M.
C. Escher (1902-1972) seems to be an unacknowledged collaborator, has its
archaic people building a tower from Earth to Heaven, from which
perceptions of Earth's nature evolve the higher one climbs until, in a
perceptual loop, the top turns out to be the bottom. R.A. LAFFERTY's
"Narrow Valley" (1966) is quite remarkably bigger on the inside than it is
on the outside - like DR WHO's Tardis - and the perceptions of the
observers are driven to the brink of insanity. John CROWLEY uses a similar
but much more developed version of the theme in Little, Big (1981), more

fantasy than sf, in which the land of Faerie is described as having the
characteristic that the further in you go the bigger it gets. Christopher
PRIEST's INVERTED WORLD (1974) is a fascinating story of perceptual
paradox in two respects; first, the progressive spatial distortion that
takes place north and south of a shifting zone of stability on the
hyperboloid planet; second, the revelation that the planet may in fact be
our own Earth, viewed by a group whose perceptions have created a model of
its shape which inverts the spheroid to a hyperboloid, and who cannot
escape their own intellectual construct. Such stories approach genuine
philosophical questions, though these are evoked in sf more commonly than
they are actively explored; but even in such cases as Priest's novel (and
most like it), where the scientific and philosophical argument is not
really rigorous, there is a compulsive, teasing quality about the central
image that amply compensates.Stanislaw LEM has several times written about
the difficulties of transcending our perceptions. SOLARIS (1961; trans
1970) asks the pessimistic philosophical question: "Can we ever regard
reality as knowable, given the limitations of the senses with which we
apprehend it and the mental programmes which force us to relate our
understanding of it always to human experience?" Barry N. MALZBERG is also
intrigued with this area of speculation and pessimistic. Beyond Apollo
(1972) has an astronaut returning from a disastrous expedition to Venus;
he tells the story of what went wrong over and over again, always
differently, but it seems that the real tragedy cannot be put in terms of
his human perceptions, and all his analogies can give only a partial
truth. This theme, of course, is as familiar outside sf as it is inside,
though sf has remarkable resources of image and metaphor with which to
explore it.The two sf writers who have played the most extravagant and
kaleidoscopic variations on the theme of appearance and reality are J.G.
BALLARD and Philip K. DICK. Almost all of Ballard's early work, and much
of his later, deals with the various psychological processes to which we
subject our perceptions of reality. One of his earliest stories,
"Build-Up" (1957; vt "The Concentration City") is a kind of bravura replay
of the Clarke story cited above. A young man living in claustrophobic
circumstances catches a train to escape; after weeks of travelling in one
direction he finds he is going east, not west; the space of the city is
curved; there is no outside, just as with our own Universe. In "The
Subliminal Man" (1963) the very quickness of our perception is exploited
by advertisers. In "Manhole 69" (1957) an experiment in sleep deprivation
gets out of control as the subjects' apprehension of reality shrinks their
universe, smaller and smaller, effectively strangling them. The whole of
Ballard's oeuvre is, in effect, an extended exploration of the inner,
psychic universes made up by our selective perceptions of the external
world - hence the term he popularized, used often of his subject matter,
INNER SPACE.The paradox in Ballard is that, although our inner reality is
made up of data from the outside (in such a confusing hotchpotch that the
system can short out through overload), the inner pattern created by the
data mediates the reception of further data in a kind of vicious circle,
where no certainty is possible. Dick's emphasis is a little different; his
realities often require inverted commas: they are "realities" consistently
adulterated by false constructs, hallucinations, counterfeiting.
Ultimately the conjuring is so baffling that the stability of any reality

comes to seem suspect; the external world suffers a kind of dissolution.
In its place we are left with a view which is surprisingly far from
pessimistic, as Dick implies it; it can be synopsized (only crudely) as
"the universe is what we perceive it to be". This is not necessarily an
intolerable labyrinth, for Dick provides a dogged survival factor
connected somehow to innate human decency, by which the construction of
simple, often ethical reference points may prevent the self from
spiralling inwards into subjective madness: handholds for the mind. The
most important works by Dick relevant to perception are Eye in the Sky
(1957), Time Out of Joint (1959), THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE (1962), THE
THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH (1964), Martian Time-Slip (1964), The
Penultimate Truth (1964), Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the
Bomb, (1965), Now Wait for Last Year (1966), Ubik (1969), A Maze of Death
(1970), and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). Together they
constitute a kind of meta-novel, unique in literature. Ursula K. LE GUIN
moved briefly into Dick's territory with The Lathe of Heaven (1971), in
which a man has the power to alter reality through his dreams; here,
although the reality-shifts are adroitly managed, the central theme bears
more on the making of ethical decisions than it does on questions of
appearance and reality per se.Several of the shifting realities cited in
the Dick novels above were catalysed by drugs, his A SCANNER DARKLY (1977)
being his most prolonged exploration of the theme. The late 1960s saw a
general interest in the drug-culture. In the air was a romantic belief
that drugs could open the gates of perception, and offer heightened and
perhaps superior versions of reality. Very few sf writers subscribed to
this myth, and indeed when drugs had figured in earlier sf - as in Aldous
HUXLEY's BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932), where drugs are used to dim perception
and bring about a false euphoria - they had usually been seen as
detracting from rather than heightening the powers of perception, although
Margaret ST CLAIR in Sign of the Labrys (1963) has the
consciousness-heightening power of some fungi as potentially
transcendental. Similarly, in Robert SILVERBERG's Downward to the Earth
(1970) a drug is the agent for the transcendent rebirth undergone by the
hero, who, like the despised natives on the planet he has revisited, is
suffused by a new and joyful perception of life's harmony. Also relevant
here is The Butterfly Kid (1967) by Chester ANDERSON, in which the
drug-induced mood is more cheerful than transcendent.More common, even in
the 1960s, at the height of the drug culture's years of euphoria, were sf
stories about the distortions of perception brought about by drugs,
especially those written by NEW-WAVE writers, who could not generally be
described as conservative and who indeed lived in the main closer to the
drug-culture than sf writers a little older. Drug-taking, for example,
plays a role in Charles PLATT's The City Dwellers (1970; rev vt Twilight
of the City 1977) and M. John HARRISON's The Centauri Device (1974).
Perhaps the most vivid of all new-wave sf works dealing with perception
shifts through drugs is Brian W. ALDISS's Barefoot in the Head (fixup
1969), in which hallucinogenic drugs have been used as a weapon in Europe,
and the entire freaked-out population shifts into a euphoric anarchy that
changes easily to violence. Norman SPINRAD has written some notable
stories about drugs, including "No Direction Home" (1971), where a future
USA is so used to orchestrating its mental states by drugs that perception

of naked reality without any chemical assistance is seen as the worst trip
of all.Synaesthesia is an interesting perceptual state which occasionally
appears in sf; it is a condition where the senses become confused and feed
into one another, so that, perhaps, a vision can be smelt. Alfred BESTER
exploited it in Tiger! Tiger! (1956 UK; rev vt The Stars My Destination
1957 US), where, in a compelling passage, the hero's apotheosis comes
about (with many verbal fireworks) in a synaesthetic rite of passage which
mixes agony and exultation. Spinrad envisaged synaesthesia as perhaps
addictive in his strong story "All the Sounds of the Rainbow" (1973).Drugs
can be seen as a quasi-natural or at least organic method of altering
modes of perception. Sf, naturally, has many times invented technological
means for doing the same thing. Bob SHAW has persistently written about
alternate forms of vision: in the Slow Glass stories collected in Other
Days, Other Eyes (fixup 1972) a glass is invented which slows the passage
of light through it, so that the past can be directly perceived in the
present; in Night Walk (1967) a blind man invents a device which allows
him to see through the eyes of other humans and animals; and in A Wreath
of Stars (1976) a device is invented to render visible a world (coexisting
with our own) made entirely from antineutrinos.The Slow Glass stories
bring us directly to the last category: unusual perceptions of time (see
also TIME TRAVEL). Spinrad has written in this area: "The Weed of Time"
(1970) is about a drug which makes its victim see all his lifetime as
co-present; the effect is retroactive, so that the hero as a child knows
he will be affected by the drug before he has been. Dick's Martian
Time-Slip (1964) sees schizophrenia ( PARANOIA) as bringing with it an
altered time perception. In James BLISH's "Common Time" (1953) the altered
time perception is brought about by pseudo-relativistic effects in a
rapidly accelerating spaceship. Eric Frank RUSSELL's "The Waitabits"
(1955) is an amusing story about a race of aliens who experience time much
more slowly, appearing almost static to humans. Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) has aliens who, like Spinrad's hero, see all
time as existing simultaneously, which gives them a somewhat deterministic
view of the Universe. In Jacques STERNBERG's "Ephemera", one of the
stories in Futurs sans avenir (coll 1971; trans as Future without Future
1974), survivors of a spacewreck are doomed when they land on a planet in
which, as in Russell's story, the inhabitants see time more slowly.
Ballard, as might be expected, has several stories about the perception of
time, the most powerful being "The Voices of Time" (1960), in which the
Universe is running down and time perception on Earth is altered in
various ways; one man is able to sense geological time directly, as if he
smelt it. Time is a dominant theme of Aldiss's work; his stories about
time perception include the strange "Man in His Time" (1965), about a man
who perceives time a few minutes ahead of everyone else, and "The Night
that All Time Broke Out" (1967), in which a time gas used for controlled
mental time travel gushes out and affects everyone. His most notable story
of this kind is An Age (1967; vt Cryptozoic! 1968 US), in which it finally
turns out that time actually runs backwards, but our minds defensively
perceive it as going forward. The same notion was used at around the same
time, quite coincidentally, by Philip K. Dick in Counter-Clock World
(1967), but the Aldiss book, though uneven, has the greater imaginative
brio; more recent treatments of the ideas of An Age and "Man in his Time"

are, respectively, Martin AMIS's Time's Arrow (1991) and Eric BROWN's "The
Time-Lapsed Man" (1988). The strangest of all such stories, however, must
be David I. MASSON's "Traveller's Rest" (1965), about a war against an
unknown enemy on the northern frontier of a country where the perception
of time slows down as one travels south; a soldier on indefinite leave
marries, raises a family, grows middle-aged, and is eventually called up
again to find himself back in his bunker 22 minutes after he left. The
story is told with extraordinary conviction.The time-perception stories
cited above are generally of a very high standard, demonstrating clearly
the way that sf thought-experiments can stimulate the mind and move the
feelings in ways that are almost closed to traditional realist fiction. We
take time for granted without fully understanding it, or how it works;
these stories, with some intensity, stretch our perceptions of what
meaning it might have for us. [PN]
PERCY, F. WALKER
(1916-1990) US doctor and writer who reflected in his novels - the best
known of which remains his first, The Moviegoer (1961) - a searchingly
liberal and Catholic reading of US life. Love in the Ruins: The Adventures
of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World (1971), the first
vol of the Dr Thomas More series, is a long, complex NEAR-FUTURE story set
in a 1980s USA suffering technological decay, and almost certainly in no
real position to benefit from the invention by the narrator - distantly
related to the author of Utopia - of an insanity-curing device. It is
continued thematically in The Thanatos Syndrome (1987). The speculative
pieces assembled in Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (coll
1983) are mostly nonfiction, but the end of the book slips into uneasy sf.
[JC]
PEREGOY, CALVIN
[s] Thomas Calvert MCCLARY.
PEREIRA, W(ILFRED) D(ENNIS)
(1921- ) UK aviation engineer, advertising executive and writer whose
first books, from Time of Departure (1956), concentrated on flying. He
began writing sf with Aftermath 15 (1973), which depicts a DYSTOPIAN postHOLOCAUST USA whose inhabitants are rigidly stratified according to how
much radiation they have absorbed. The projected sequels, Aftermath 16 and
Aftermath 17, have never appeared. WDP's other novels, all written for
ROBERT HALE LIMITED in a professionally impersonal style, have been The
Charon Tapes (1975), Another Eden (1986), Contact (1977), The King of Hell
(1978) and Celeste (1979). [JC]
PEREIRA MENDES, H(ENRY)
(1852-1937) UK-born rabbi, academic and writer, from 1877 in the USA,
where he wrote prolifically in many genres. Looking Ahead: Twentieth
Century Happenings (1899) tells of various socialist upheavals which lead
to several world wars and are defeated, in the end, only by an alliance of
theocratical Christians and Jews, which also establishes in Palestine a
Jewish homeland ruled by a descendant of the ancient Jewish monarchy. [JC]
PERFECT WOMAN, THE
Film (1949). Two Cities/Eagle-Lion. Dir Bernard Knowles, starring

Patricia Roc, Stanley Holloway, Nigel Patrick, Miles Malleson, Irene
Handl, Pamela Devis, Constance Smith. Screenplay George Black, Knowles,
based on the play The Perfect Woman (produced 1948; 1950) by Wallace
Geoffrey and Basil Mitchell. 89 mins. B/w.An inventor creates a ROBOT in
the image of his niece and hires a young man to take it out on a date as a
final test of its believability. But the real girl takes the robot's place
during testing, and a conventional but well played farce follows, notable
for its underwear fetishism and a sauciness quite close to the rim of what
the period regarded as decent. The ending is mildly apocalyptic when the
malfunctioning robot marches stiff-legged, spouting sparks and smoke,
through a crowded hotel before exploding. [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA.
PERILS FROM THE PLANET MONGO
FLASH GORDON.
PERKINS, GEOFFREY
[r] Douglas ADAMS.
PERKINS, MICHAEL
[r] ESSEX HOUSE.
PERRY, ROGER
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
PERRY, STEVE
(1947- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "With Clean Hands" as by
Jesse Peel for Gal in 1977, and whose first novel, The Tularemia Gambit
(1981), combines sf with elements of the hardboiled detective genre. After
two ties for the Time Machine sequence produced by the Byron PREISS
packaging enterprise - Sword of the Samurai * (1984) with Michael REAVES
and Civil War Secret Agent * (1984) - and an effective sf adventure,
Hellstar (1984) with Reaves, SP finally came into his own with the Matador
sequence: The Man who Never Missed (1985), Matadora (1986) and The
Machiavelli Interface (1986), along with a prequel, The 97th Step (1989);
plus The Omega Cage (1988) with Reaves,Black Steel (1992) and Brother
Death (1992), all set in the Matador universe. Khadaji, the sequence's
hero, rebels against a violent military dictatorship using his skill at
martial arts to mock the enemy into impotence; in his raffish insouciance,
he rather resembles Leslie CHARTERIS's Saint. The first volume takes its
title from the fact that Khadaji has stolen a fixed number of non-lethal
poison darts and proceeds to knock out precisely that number of government
figures with them, never once missing, and generating a revolt through
mirth; the book might be called an exercise in muscular pacifism.
Subsequent volumes do not build on the success of the first, but neither
do they significantly decline. Of SP's remaining singletons, Dome (1987)
with Reaves makes efficient use of its post- HOLOCAUST submarine setting,
as AIs come gradually to dominate the new world. [JC]Other Works: Several
Conan SWORD-AND-SORCERY fantasies, including Conan the Fearless * (1986),
Conan the Defiant * (1987), Conan the Indomitable * (1989), Conan the Free
Lance * (1990) and Conan the Formidable * (1990); The Albino Knife (1991);
The Hero Curse (1991 chap); several Aliens ties: Earth Hive * (1992),
Nightmare Asylum *(1993), The Female War * (1993), plus one volume also
tied to the Predator film sequence, Aliens vs Predator: Prey *(1994) with

Stephani Perry; Spindoc (1994); Stellar Ranger (1994), a space opera in
Western style; The Mask * (1994), novelizing the film..
PERRY, WALTER COPLAND
(1814-1911) UK writer, lawyer and archaeologist in whose sf novel, The
Revolt of the Horses (1898), the Houyhnhnms (from Jonathan SWIFT's
Gulliver's Travels [1726]) arrive in the England of 1950. Finding humans
as terrible as ever - a future WAR features in the tale - they decide to
destroy the race. [JC]
PERRY RHODAN
German sf series, weekly, published by Verlagsunion Pabel Moewig
(formerly Moewig-Verlag). Created by Walter Ernsting (who writes for the
series as Clark DARLTON) and Karl-Herbert SCHEER, PR began in 1961 and is
still current: to the end of 1991 about 1600 booklets describing Perry
Rhodan's adventures and mankind's destiny had been published, a record
quite without precedent in sf. The weekly booklet series is accompanied by
a monthly paperback series, which fills some of the narrative gaps. Often
thought of as aimed at the teenage market, PR is actually read, surveys
show, by readers of all ages, both men and women.Though the stories have
been dismissed as potboilers, the fans of this German future HISTORY (of
whom thousands attend PR CONVENTIONS) argue that the density and
complexity of the world built up over so many volumes has led to a
sophistication unusual in SPACE OPERA. Conversely, the series's many
critics, especially in Germany, have attacked it not only on literary
grounds but also for being what Franz ROTTENSTEINER calls "notoriously
fascist". This judgement of PR's reactionary nature has been supported and
argued at length by Michael Pehlke and Norbert Lingfeld in Roboter und
Gartenlaube: Ideologie und Unterhaltung in derScience-Fiction-Literatur
["The Robot and the Summerhouse: Ideology and Entertainment in SF"] (1970)
and by Manfred Nagl in "Unser Mann im All" ["Our Man in Everywhere"] (1969
Zeitnahe Schularbeit #4/5). During the first years of its existence PR was
indeed dominated by military conflicts, but the concept changed so that
now PR concentrates on solving mysteries of galactic or even cosmic scale
- with lots of action.The success of the series has been enormous, and not
just in GERMANY. Translations have appeared (and sometimes still do) in
many European countries, including the UK (since 1974), France (1966),
Belgium (1966), Netherlands (1971), Finland (1975) and Italy (1976); also
in Japan (since 1971), Brazil (since 1975) and notably in the USA, where
it was published by ACE BOOKS. Ed Forrest J. ACKERMAN, the US
series-monthly for much of the time - appeared for 118 numbers (1969-77)
in paperback-book format, containing a letter column, articles, new
stories and reprints of sf classics in addition to the leading PR novella
or (in later volumes) 2 novellas; a few further PR titles were published
by Ace in their Atlans series. When all the translations are included, PR
has had a readership higher than anything else in sf.Perry himself is an
Earthman propelled into the politics of the Galaxy ( GALACTIC EMPIRES). He
builds his small group, the New Power, into a Solar Empire; after
renouncing all claims to leadership, the Solar Empire becomes one of the
equal members of the Galacticum. It has been said that there is no sf idea
which will not, sooner or later, be used in the series. The authors

include, in addition to Ernsting (Scheer died 1991): Kurt Brand, Arndt
Ellmer, H.G. Ewers, Robert Feldhoff, H.G. Francis, Peter Griese, Horst
Hoffmann, Hans Kneifel, Kurt Mahr, Marianne Sydow, Ernst Vlcek, William
Voltz (died 1984) and Thomas Ziegler. Voltz was the long-time coordinator
and chief author, having early superseded Scheer in this function. Each
episode is written by one of the team from a treatment done by the
"factory", currently Vlcek and Mahr, according to the further development
of the series as discussed in an annual authors' meeting. PR has appeared
in comic books, and there was also a PR magazine 1977-81. [HU/PN]Further
reading: Analyse einer Science-Fiction-Romanheftserie (1979) by Claus
Hallman; "'Perry Rhodan'", by Mike ASHLEY in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and
Weird Fiction Magazines (1985) ed Ashley and Marshall B. TYMN; partial
indexes of the Perry Rhodan novels were published by NESFA (1973 and
1975); a full list of English-language titles can be found in Science
Fiction and Fantasy Series and Sequels: A Bibliography (1986) by Tim
Cottrill, Martin H. GREENBERG and Charles G. WAUGH.
PERTWEE, ROLAND
(1885-1963) UK painter, actor, playwright and author whose MW.XX.3.
(1929; vt Hell's Loose 1929 US; vt The Million Pound Cypher 1931 UK) is an
early example of the tale of technological PARANOIA. A dead scientist is
discovered along with the eponymous formula for a cheap fuel which will if
released supplant petroleum. The UK Government allows limited use of the
fuel, but only until a working-class strike fomented by communists is
defeated; thereafter the petroleum corporations are allowed to
re-establish their dominance. [JC]
PERU
LATIN AMERICA.
PERUTZ, LEO
(1882-1957) Austrian novelist and playwright who moved to Israel in 1938
after the Anschluss. Most of his novels are baroque phantasmagorias, like
Zwischen Neun und Neun (1918; trans Lily Lore as From Nine to Nine 1926
US), an elaborately grotesque afterlife fantasy, Der Marques de Bolibar
(1920; trans Graham Rawson as The Marquis de Bolibar 1926 UK), in which
the Wandering Jew and the spirit of the eponymous marquis defeat a German
regiment fighting for Napoleon, and Die Geburt des Antichrist ["The Birth
of the Antichrist"] (1921). Of more direct sf interest are Der Meister des
juengsten Tages (1923; trans Hedwig Singer as The Master of the Day of
Judgment 1929 UK), in which it is suggested that an ancient hallucinogen,
when breathed by men of ambition, will so terrifyingly expose their true
nature that they will commit suicide, and Sanct Petri-Schnee (1933; trans
E.B.G. Stamper and F.M. Hodson as The Virgin's Brand 1934 UK; trans Eric
Mosbacher as Saint Peter's Snow 1990 UK), which similarly depends upon a
sense that human civilization is a fragile contrivance. The eponymous
wheat fungus at the centre of this tale has been, from time immemorial,
responsible for spreading a virus which induces faith in humans. In 1932,
after long dormancy, the virus has been deliberately reinjected into
European wheat strains in order to revitalize Christianity, but the deity
invoked turns out to be not God but Moloch. So forthright a fable for the
times could not go unchallenged, and the Nazis banned the book as soon as

they came to power. [JC]See also: AUSTRIA; GODS AND DEMONS.
PESEK, LUDEK
(1919- ) Czech writer and artist. LP's first novels (about social
inequalities; not sf) were published in Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s,
but for decades he has lived abroad, his books being first published in
German translation; they have been widely translated into other languages.
His astronomical paintings are well known, and have been featured in
National Geographic; he has illustrated some of his own books. The first
of several sf juveniles is Die Mondexpedition (1966 Germany; trans as Log
of a Moon Expedition 1969). His best is Die Erde ist nah (1970 Germany;
trans Anthea Bell as The Earth is Near 1973). It deals, with unusual
sophistication for CHILDREN'S SF, with the psychological stresses
experienced by the first expedition to MARS, and won the 1971
Jugendbuchpreis (Children's Book Prize) in Germany. Another sf book is
Falle fur Perseus (1976 Germany; trans Anthea Bell as Trap for Perseus
1980), set in a 23rd-century totalitarian DYSTOPIA. [JO/PN]Other works:
Preis der Beute ["Price of Plunder"] (1973 Germany); Eine Insel fur Zwei
(1974 Germany; trans as An Island for Two 1975).See also: CZECH AND SLOVAK
SF; SOCIOLOGY; SPACE FLIGHT.
PESSIMISM
ENTROPY; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM.
PETAJA, EMIL (THEODORE)
(1915- ) US writer of Finnish descent, most of whose earlier fiction was
fantasy rather than sf. He began publishing in 1935 with "The Two Doors"
for the semiprozine UNUSUAL STORIES; his first professional sale was "Time
Will Tell" for AMZ in 1942. Some of his early work can be found in
Stardrift, and Other Fantastic Flotsam (coll 1971). Occasionally he wrote
as E. Theodore Pine (once with Henry L. HASSE), though only in magazines.
A friend of Hannes BOK, EP founded the Bokanalia Foundation in 1967, after
Bok's death, publishing a commemorative volume, And Flights of Angels: The
Life and Legend of Hannes Bok (1968) and editing The Hannes Bok Memorial
Showcase of Fantasy Art (1974). EP's first novel was Alpha Yes, Terra No!
(1965 dos); he published a further 12 books over the next half decade. The
best known make up a series based on the Finnish verse epic Kalevala. In
each of the novels of the Kalevala sequence - Saga of Lost Earths (1966)
and The Star Mill (1966), both assembled under their joint titles (omni
1979), and The Stolen Sun (1967 dos) and Tramontane (1967 dos), both
likewise assembled under their joint titles (omni 1979) - a Terran
descendant of one of the four main heroes of the Kalevala is reborn into
his avatar's role to order to re-enact his adventures on Otava, the planet
of origin of this pantheon. A fifth book of the sequence remains
unpublished. A novel unconnected with the series but still related to the
Kalevala is The Time Twister (1968). The Green Planet series - Lord of the
Green Planet (1967 dos) and Doom of the Green Planet (1968 dos) - recounts
similar adventures befalling its Irish protagonist, who finds himself
role-playing fake Celtic deities for the benefit of a madman armed with sf
instruments of coercion. Most of EP's sf trades unpretentiously on the
emotions aroused by mythical analogues like those in his Kalevala books;
the adventure plots through which he evokes these resonances are by no

means poorly conceived, and he remains entirely readable. [JC]Other works:
The Caves of Mars (1965 dos); The Prism (1965 Worlds of Tomorrow; exp 1968
dos); The Nets of Space (1969); The Path Beyond the Stars (1969); Seed of
the Dreamers (1970 dos); As Dream and Shadow (coll 1972), poetry.See also:
FINLAND; MYTHOLOGY.
PETERKIEWICZ, JERZY
(1916- ) Polish writer-his first novel in English was published as by
Jerzy Pietrkiewicz - active as a poet in his native land before WWII. He
lived in the UK for many years, wrote in English, and was married to
Christine BROOKE-ROSE 1968-75. The Quick and the Dead (1961) is an
afterlife fantasy. Inner Circle (1966), which is sf, remarkably conflates
three strands of story: one set in the mythical past, one on the Circle
Line of London's underground railway, and one in a horrific FAR FUTURE
where congestion (under an artificial dome) is so great there is no room
to lie down. Each story reflects the others, setting up a complex
commentary on the human condition. [JC]
PETERS, DAVID
Peter DAVID.
PETERS, LAWRENCE
[s] L.P. DAVIES.
PETERS, LUDOVIC
Pseudonym of UK writer Peter Brent (1931-1984), one of whose political
thrillers, Riot '71 (1967), posits a NEAR-FUTURE racist crisis in an
economically battered UK. [JC]
PETRESCU, CEZAR
[r] ROMANIA.
PETTY, JOHN
(1919- ) UK writer, variously employed until he began publishing in 1957.
The Last Refuge (1966) is a post- HOLOCAUST novel set in an oppressive,
grey England that provides no refuge for the protagonist-writer. [JC]
PEYTON, AUDREY
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
PFEIL, DONALD J.
(? - ) US writer whose Voyage to a Forgotten Sun (1975), Through the
Reality Warp (1976) and Look Back to Earth (1977) were written in a
deliberately (and enjoyably) outmoded SPACE-OPERA idiom. Under the house
name William ARROW he wrote Return to the Planet of the Apes 2: Escape
from Terror Lagoon * (1976). He was also editor of VERTEX. [JC]
PFEIL, FRED
Working name of US writer and academic John Frederick Pfeil (1949- ),
whose sf novel, Goodman 2020 (1986), portrays in a superbly suffocating
present tense the corporate USA of AD2020, where all power has fallen into
the hands of priest-like businessmen. The most powerful of these hires the
"professional friend" Goodman to give him moments of human society, but
Goodman eventually kills him, escapes into the barrios (and the narrative

dynamism of the more normal past tense) and settles down to prepare for a
wholesome change. The politics of the book may seem naive, but the
execution is compelling. Some of the essays assembled in Another Tale to
Tell: Politics and Narration in Postmodern Culture (coll 1990) offer a
formal context for FP's sf work. [JC]
PHANTASM
Film (1978). New Breed. Dir/prod/written/photographed Don Coscarelli,
starring Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Bannister, Angus Scrimm.
90 mins, cut to 89 mins. Colour.At the independent, low-budget,
exploitation end of the movie market, small miracles sometimes occur that
could not take place inside a major studio. P is one such, a spirited
blend of horror, surrealism and sf, in which the presumably alien and
possibly supernatural Tall Man (Scrimm) steals bodies to be resuscitated
and turned into malicious, deformed midgets with yellow blood, and then
passed through a dimensional gate to be used as slave labour on a red
desert planet. The teenager who opposes him, Mike (Baldwin), is troubled
by a flying silver sphere that kills people by spiking their brains, by
the Tall Man's severed finger that becomes a nasty insect, and most of all
by the Tall Man's ability to confuse appearance and reality, to be there
and not there, anticipating Wes Craven's Freddy in Nightmare on Elm Street
(1984). P has the arbitrary, confused logic of a dream.A decade later
Phantasm II (1988), also written/dir Coscarelli, was a mostly failed
attempt to capitalize on the earlier cult success; it is less a sequel
than a remake with a bigger budget. The special effects are more
sophisticated and disgusting, but the randomness is more of a mess than a
dream; the acting is stilted; ideas that were wholly original in 1978 had
become cliches by 1988, and there were no new ideas to replace them; the
sf content is negligible. [PN]
PHANTASM II
PHANTASM.
PHASE IV
Film (1973). Alced/Paramount/PBR Productions. Dir Saul Bass, starring
Nigel Davenport, Lynne Frederick, Michael Murphy. Screenplay Mayo Simon.
91 mins, cut to 84 mins. Colour.A battle of wits takes place between, on
the one hand, a fanatical SCIENTIST and two others living in a
desert-based experimental dome and, on the other, an ant species which has
acquired intelligence. The script substitutes mysticism for science and
tries too hard to emulate 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) - as in its ending,
where the two surviving human protagonists undergo a transcendental
transformation. Originally there was also in the finale a 2001-like
montage of surrealistic images showing a fantastic evolutionary upheaval,
but this was cut by the studio after the initial release.Phase IV was
Bass's directorial debut; he had previously been known as the designer of
such striking movie title sequences as those for Psycho (1960) and Walk on
the Wild Side (1962). While he is a master of his craft visually, his
handling of actors is unsatisfactory and he seems to have little feeling
for sf. This conceptually silly melodrama is an interesting failure, its
attraction lying in the superb insect photography by Ken Middleham rather
than in any sf content. The novelization is Phase IV * (1973) by Barry N.

MALZBERG. [JB/PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES.
PHELPS, GILBERT (HENRY Jr)
(1915-1993) UK writer who spent much of his career in the BBC as a radio
producer. His first story, "I Have Lived a Hundred Years" in The Faber
Book of West Country Stories (anth 1951), prefigured the thematic material
of his first sf novel, The Centenarians (1958), whose protagonists attempt
- in the end unsuccessfully - to translate their eminence in the arts and
sciences into lives safely prolonged. The Winter People (1963), a very
late example of the LOST-WORLD tale, describes a tribe in the Andes which
has survived for centuries through hibernation and other adaptations to
extreme circumstances. [JC]See also: ANTHROPOLOGY.
PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT, THE
Film (1984). New World/Cinema Group/New Pictures/Douglas Curtis.
Executive prod John CARPENTER. Dir Stewart Raffill, starring Michael Pare,
Nancy Allen, Bobby Di Cicco, Eric Christmas. Screenplay William Gray,
Michael Janover, based on a story by Wallace Bennett and Don Jakoby, based
in turn on the purportedly nonfictional The Philadelphia Experiment (1979)
by William I. Moore and Charles Berlitz. 101 mins. Colour.In 1943 a device
to render warships invisible to radar is tested, but instead it throws an
entire destroyer and crew temporarily forward in time, where two crew
members fall through a vortex into the 1984 Nevada desert. One of them
(whose electromagnetic instability has been creating havoc) is later drawn
back to 1943. The second, joined by a paradigmatic 1980s woman (Allen),
undergoes the culture shock obligatory in all visiting- ALIEN and
TIME-TRAVEL films, refuses to believe that Reagan is president, looks up
his buddy (now elderly), finds the time vortex is getting worse, and winds
up - after a brief detour to 1943 during which he saves the world - back
in 1984. TPE is silly as sf (having undergone many rewrites, including a
script by Carpenter) but fun. While not as amusing as Raffill's earlier
The ICE PIRATES (1984), it is better than his appallingly sentimental Mac
and Me (1988), a film about cute aliens that appears to be an
unacknowledged advertising campaign for Coca-Cola and McDonalds. [PN]See
also: INVISIBILITY.
PHILIP K. DICK AWARD
Founded in 1983 by admirers of Philip K. DICK, who died in 1982. Because
much of Dick's classic sf was published with no fanfare and initially
without a hardcover edition, it seemed appropriate to give the award to a
distinguished work of sf or fantasy of the previous year first published
in paperback. The award was initially suggested by Thomas M. DISCH, who
was for several years its administrator; he was succeeded by an
administrative team of Algis BUDRYS and David G. HARTWELL. The winners are
chosen by a jury (with variously 3, 4 and 5 members) of writers and
critics, most of whom choose their own successors for the following year;
usually one judge is the previous year's winner. The PKDA is announced at
NorWesCon, a CONVENTION held in the state of Washington in March each
year. In good years, when the committee has collected enough cash, the
winner receives $1000 and the second-place winner $500. Plaques are
provided by the Philip K. Dick estate. [PN]Winners:1983: 1st, Rudy RUCKER,
SOFTWARE2nd, Ray Faraday NELSON, The Prometheus Man1984: 1st, Tim POWERS,

THE ANUBIS GATES2nd, R.A. MACAVOY, Tea With The Black Dragon1985: 1st,
William GIBSON, NEUROMANCER2nd, Kim Stanley ROBINSON, THE WILD SHORE1986:
1st, Tim Powers, Dinner at Deviant's Palace2nd, Richard GRANT, Saraband of
Lost Time1987: 1st, James P. BLAYLOCK, HOMUNCULUS2nd, Jack MCDEVITT, The
Hercules Text1988: 1st, Patricia Geary, Strange Toys2nd, Mike MCQUAY,
Memories1989: 1st (equal), Paul J. MCAULEY, 400 Billion Stars1st (equal),
Rudy Rucker, Wetware1990: 1st, Richard Paul RUSSO, Subterranean
Gallery2nd, Dave WOLVERTON, On My Way to Paradise1991: 1st, Pat MURPHY,
Points of Departure (coll)2nd, Raymond HARRIS, The Schizogenic Man1992:
1st, Ian MCDONALD, King of Morning, Queenof Day2nd, Emma BULL, Bone
Dance1993: 1st, Richard Grant, Through the Heart 2nd, Elisabeth VONARBURG,
In the Mother's Land1994: 1st, John M. FORD, Growing Up Weightless and
Jack WOMACK, Elvissey *
PHILLIFENT, JOHN T(HOMAS)
(1916-1976) UK writer of much sf and works in other genres; though he
claimed to reserve his best material for publication under his own name,
he was at least as well known to sf readers under his pseudonym John
Rackham. He began writing sf with the Space Puppet series for Pearson's
Tit-Bits SF Library as Rackham: Space Puppet (1954 chap), Jupiter
Equilateral (1954 chap), The Master Weed (1954 chap) and Alien Virus (1955
chap). He produced also a fantasy series, the Chappie Jones stories, for
Science Fantasy, beginning with "The Veil of Isis" (1961); these stories
were assembled as The Touch of Evil (coll of linked stories 1963) as by
Rackham. In the mid-1960s his career picked up some steam with a flow of
Rackham SPACE OPERAS for ACE BOOKS, beginning with We, the Venusians (1965
dos US) and Danger from Vega (1966 dos US), and continuing with others of
the same unambitiously readable nature. Under his own name, JTP produced
in the 1970s some sf novels of real competence, including King of Argent
(1973 US), an entertaining adventure set on an agreeably strange planet.
Through his career, he remained a reliable producer of the second-rank
fiction demanded by an entertainment genre hungry for copy. [JC]Other
works: 3 MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. ties: The Mad Scientist Affair * (1966 US),
The Corfu Affair * (1967) and The Power Cube Affair * (1968); Genius
Unlimited (1972 US); Hierarchies (1973 dos US); Life with Lancelot (coll
of linked stories 1973).As John Rackham: Watch on Peter (1964), a
juvenile; The Beasts of Kohl (1966 dos US); Time to Live (1966 dos US);
The Double Invaders (1967 dos US); Alien Sea (1968 dos US); The Proxima
Project (1968 dos US); Ipomoea (1969 dos US); Treasure of Tau Ceti (1969
dos US); The Anything Tree (1970 dos US); Flower of Doradil (1970 dos US);
Beyond Capella (1971 dos US); Dark Planet (1971 dos US); Earthstrings
(1972 dos US); Beanstalk (1973 US).
PHILLIPS, MARK
Pseudonym used on a series of novels written by Randall GARRETT and
Laurence M. JANIFER for ASF: Brain Twister (1959 as "That Sweet Little Old
Lady"; 1962), The Impossibles (1960 as "Out Like a Light"; 1963) and
Supermind (1960-61 as "Occasion for Disaster"; 1963). [BS]
PHILLIPS, ROG
Working name of US writer Roger Phillips Graham (1909-1965), a prolific
contributor to the sf magazines of the late 1940s and 1950s. His first

story was "Let Freedom Ring" in 1945 for AMAZING STORIES, which, along
with its companion magazine FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, remained his most
regular market. He wrote a series of stories featuring the character Lefty
Baker: "Squeeze Play" (1947), "The Immortal Menace" (1949), "The Insane
Robot" (1949) and "But Who Knows Huer or Huen?" (1969). His best known
story is "The Yellow Pill" (1958), an ingenious exercise in paradoxes of
PERCEPTION (see also CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; PSYCHOLOGY). Some of his
short work appeared as by Clinton Ames, Franklin Bahl, Craig Browning,
Gregg Conrad, Inez McGowan, Melva Rogers, Chester Ruppert, William Carter
Sawtelle and John Wiley; he also wrote under the house names Robert
ARNETTE, Alexander BLADE, P.F. COSTELLO, A.R. STEBER, Gerald VANCE and
Peter WORTH. Under the aegis of AMZ editor Raymond A. PALMER, RP conducted
an influential FANZINE-review column, The Club House (Mar 1948-Mar 1953),
later reviving it in other magazines ed Palmer: UNIVERSE SCIENCE FICTION
and OTHER WORLDS. RP wrote 4 novels, none negligible, though less
successful than some of his shorter work: Time Trap (1949), Worlds Within
(1950), World of If (1951) and The Involuntary Immortals (1949 Fantastic
Adventures; rev 1959), the last being an example of a kind of tale
intrinsic to GENRE SF (a recent example being Nancy KRESS's Beggars in
Spain [1991]): a group of young paranormals ( SUPERMAN) must band together
to protect themselves from the vengeance of ungifted normal humans.
[MJE/JC]See also: FANTASTIC VOYAGES; POLITICS; ZIFF-DAVIS.
PHILLIPS, THOMAS
L.P. DAVIES.
PHILLPOTTS, EDEN
(1862-1960) UK writer known primarily for his work outside the sf field.
He was extremely prolific, writing about 250 books and plays. His first sf
novel was the lurid thriller Number 87 (1922) as by Harrington Hext. His
most notable SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES belong to a later and very different
phase of his work: the excellent Saurus (1938), in which a reptilian ALIEN
becomes an objective observer commenting upon contemporary society and the
human condition; The Fall of the House of Heron (1948), a study of an
amoral atomic scientist; and Address Unknown (1949), which deliberately
challenges the assumption of Saurus that an alien observer could pass
meaningful judgment on human affairs. These novels carried forward
philosophical themes from a remarkable series of didactic philosophical
fables, most of which are based in Greek mythology: The Girl and the Faun
(1916chap), Evander (1919), Pan and the Twins (1922), The Lavender Dragon
(1923), The Treasures of Typhon (1924), Circe's Island (coll 1925;
includes The Girl and the Faun), The Miniature (1926), Arachne (1927), The
Apes (1929), Alcyone (1930) and The Owl of Athene (1936). The last-named
deploys some sf motifs, notably an INVASION of the UK by giant crabs, and
links the mythological fantasies to the scientific romances. EP's
philosophical meditations are featured also in a curious early fantasy, My
Laughing Philosopher (1896); but the determined rationalism and Epicurean
humanism developed in his allegorical fantasies is better displayed in his
collection of fiction and nonfiction, Thoughts in Prose and Verse (coll
1924), whose fantasy stories include a visionary encounter with an
inhabitant of JUPITER.Also of marginal sf interest are one of EP's early

collaborations with Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), The Statue (1908), which
involves innovative radio apparatus, and a treasure-island story Tabletop
(1939), which features giant spiders. He wrote numerous mystery novels,
some of which have very slight intrusions of ESP; the most interesting are
The Grey Room (1921), which features a dramatic confrontation between
scientific rationalism and religious mysticism in search of the solution
to the mystery of a haunted room, and the rationalized-werewolf story
Lycanthrope (1937). His other fantasies include A Deal with the Devil
(1895), an ANSTEY-esque novel about a man who grows young, and several
early stories collected in Fancy Free (coll 1901). There are occasional
fantasies in his various other collections; the tales of "witchcraft"
assembled in The Hidden Hand (coll of linked stories 1952) do not in fact
invoke the supernatural. [BS]Other works: The Transit of the Red Dragon
(coll 1903); The Golden Fetich (1903); The Flint Heart (1910); Black,
White and Brindled (coll 1923); Up Hill, Down Dale (coll 1925); The Voice
from the Dark (1925); Peacock House and Other Mysteries (coll 1926); The
Blue Comet: A Comedy in Three Acts (1927); The Torch and Other Tales (coll
1929); Golden Island (1938).See also: ASTEROIDS; ASTRONOMY; LONGEVITY (IN
WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); SATIRE; SOCIOLOGY.
PHILMUS, ROBERT M(ICHAEL)
(1943- ) US sf critic, professor of English literature at Concordia
University, Montreal. He became a co-editor of SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
with the Nov 1978 issue and remained in that position until the last issue
of 1991; he remains a contributing editor. His Into the Unknown: The
Evolution of Science Fiction from Francis Godwin to H.G. Wells (1970; rev
1983) is scholarly and informative, and something of a pioneering study
for its time. RMP also wrote the section on "Science Fiction: From its
Beginning to 1870" for the 1st edn of Anatomy of Wonder: Science Fiction
(1976; rev 1981; rev 1987) ed Neil BARRON. With David Y. Hughes he ed H.G.
Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction (coll 1975), and with
Patrick PARRINDER he ed H.G. Wells's Literary Criticism (coll 1980). A
variorum edition of Wells's The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), appeared in
1993. [PN]See also: CANADA; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF.
PHILPOT, JOSEPH HENRY
[r] Philip L AFARGUE.
PHYSICS
In discussing the scientific content of sf it is customary to regard the
sciences as ranging from "hard" to "soft", with physics lying at the hard
end of the spectrum ( HARD SF). A concern with the hard sciences is
generally held to have characterized sf of the period 1940-60, or a type
of sf whose locus classicus is to be found in that period, and so we may
expect this type of sf, in its scientific aspect, to be dominated by
physics. In fact a large part of the importance in sf of physics can be
attributed to its association with TECHNOLOGY; among the pure sciences,
ASTRONOMY and BIOLOGY have probably provided more motive force for hard sf
than has physics. Nevertheless, physics is prominent in the ideological
and cultural background to sf, and its influence can often be detected
even when it makes no explicit contribution to a story. A familiarity with
physical ideas and an ability to deploy the language of physics have been

used by many authors to establish a general scientific atmosphere, a good
example being Isaac ASIMOV's "Three Laws of Robotics", which borrow the
form of Newton's Three Laws of Motion so as to claim the same seminal
impact.The two areas of physics which have been most popular with sf
writers, GRAVITY (see also ANTIGRAVITY) and Relativity ( FASTER THAN
LIGHT), are covered in the relevant entries. Ideas from physics have been
applied to technology constantly since Hugo GERNSBACK or even Jules VERNE,
but in such writing the interest usually lies in the application. Some
writers seem to feel that the motivation of fundamental research lies
entirely in its applications. Tom GODWIN, for example, in "Mother of
Invention" (1953), changes the proverb and proposes that necessity is the
mother of DISCOVERY; he shows the crew of a crashed spaceship developing a
new theory of gravitation which enables them to design an antigravity
generator to lift their ship. The most extreme example of this attitude is
embodied in Raymond F. JONES's "Noise Level" (1952), which argues that, if
we only try hard enough, we can discover any laws of nature we should like
to be true.Many imaginary inventions and strange events are based on
points of physics, though sometimes the explanation of the modus operandi
amounts to no more than a translation into technical terms of the everyday
description of its effect - as in H.G. WELLS's explanation in The
Invisible Man (1897) that the INVISIBILITY potion works by giving human
flesh a refractive index of one. An effect at the opposite pole to this
was envisaged by Bob SHAW in his invention of "slow glass" in "Light of
Other Days" (1966), in which light travels so slowly that it takes several
years to travel through the thickness of a window pane. (Realizing that it
would not give quite the effect he wanted, Shaw was obliged to reject the
description of slow glass as simply having a very high refractive
index.)Part, if only a small part, of the effectiveness of the idea of
slow glass lies in the way it provides an imaginative realization of a
physical fact that in normal experience remains merely theoretical
knowledge, namely the finiteness of the speed of light. This kind of
imaginative exploration of physics can be seen in its purest form in James
BLISH's "Nor Iron Bars" (1957), which is an attempt to provide a picture
of the inside of an atom and the quantum behaviour exhibited by electrons,
utilizing the device of having a spaceship shrink to subatomic size and
move inside an atom as if it were a solar system. This was one of the very
few sf stories before the mid-1970s to make any substantial use of quantum
phenomena. Blish adopted a similar approach to a more familiar area of
physics in his famous microscopic-world story "Surface Tension"
(1952).Ideas from physics have been used in postulating new forms of life.
The favourite basis for these is electromagnetic fields, either in
isolation, as in Fredric BROWN's "The Waveries" (1945) and Bob Shaw's The
Palace of Eternity (1969), or in conjunction with inorganic matter, as in
Fred HOYLE's The Black Cloud (1957), the latter having something in common
with the sentient suns in Olaf STAPLEDON's STAR MAKER (1937). Blish's VOR
(1958) is about a creature whose energy source is one of the fusion cycles
which Bethe proposed as taking place in stars (this creature communicates
by modulating light waves rather than sound waves). In Fredric Brown's
"Placet is a Crazy Place" (1946) there are birds, made of condensed
matter, which fly through the rock of a planet as if it were air.
StanisLaw LEM's SOLARIS (1961; trans 1970) postulates life formed from a

new type of matter composed entirely of neutrinos. Shaw's A Wreath of
Stars (1976) postulates an antineutrino world whose form of matter can
interpenetrate with that of our own. Neutrinos are particles which have no
properties other than momentum and spin, and interact only very weakly
with other particles, so that they are very difficult to stop. Their
harmlessness is the point of Ralph S. Cooper's SATIRE "The Neutrino Bomb"
(1961); their delicacy underlies the idea of "neutrino acupuncture" in
"Six Matches" (1960) by Arkady and Boris STRUGATSKI.The last four examples
make use of the branch of physics which, together with COSMOLOGY
(including theories of BLACK HOLES), has undergone dramatic development in
the last decade and therefore has the most obvious potential for sf; the
physics of elementary particles. Subnuclear physics provides one of the
ideas in Isaac Asimov's THE GODS THEMSELVES (1972), which postulates a
parallel universe whose strong nuclear force is greater than in ours;
pumping electrons between the two universes provides a source of energy in
both. Some of the more striking ideas in the field of particle physics
concern condensed matter, ANTIMATTER and neutrinos. Condensed matter is of
two kinds: "electron-degenerate" matter, the material of white dwarf
stars, in which the atoms are compressed as close as they can be while
remaining atoms (a matchboxful would weigh several tons); and nuclear
matter ("neutronium"), the material of NEUTRON STARS, which has the
density of the atomic nucleus (a pinhead of it would weigh several
thousand tons). Degenerate matter features in "Placet is a Crazy Place"
and in Paul CAPON's juvenile novel The Wonderbolt (1955); and nuclear
matter in Larry NIVEN's "There is a Tide" (1968).Antimatter is composed of
particles which are the opposite in all respects to those which compose
ordinary matter; when matter and antimatter meet, they mutually annihilate
in a burst of radiation. A.E. VAN VOGT's "The Storm" (1943) is about a
storm in space that takes place when an ordinary gas cloud meets a cloud
of antimatter gas. Some more of the craziness of Placet in Brown's story
comes from its orbiting two suns, one of matter and the other of
antimatter. Larry Niven described an antimatter planet in "Flatlander"
(1967). The correspondence between an electron and its antiparticle, the
positron, was used by Blish in "Beep" (1954) as the basis of a method of
instantaneous signalling, following ideas suggested by the original
description by Paul Dirac (1902-1984) of the positron ( DIRAC
COMMUNICATOR). The formation of matter and antimatter universes in the
first fraction of a second of creation, and some extremely hypothetical
consequences for the nature of our reality, are treated in The Jonah Kit
(1975) by Ian WATSON, who blends real and imaginary physics very adroitly
throughout the book.Stories which turn on fairly elementary points of
physics include: Arthur C. CLARKE's "A Slight Case of Sunstroke" (1958),
in which the spectators at a football match hold their glossy programmes
so as to form an enormous parabolic mirror focusing sunlight on the
referee; Clarke's "Silence Please" (1954), in which the phenomenon of
interference is used as the basis for a silence generator; Robert A.
HEINLEIN's "Let There Be Light" (1940 as by Anson MacDonald), which
suggests that the relationship between radio waves and light waves could
be used to provide a cold light source; and Larry Niven's "A Kind of
Murder" (1974), in which the fact that potential energy and heat are
interchangeable forms of energy is exploited in an attempt at a perfect

murder. The Dispossessed (1974) by Ursula K. LE GUIN is unusual in sf in
that much of the story is focused on an attempt to recreate the thought
processes and psychology of a physicist whose theories regarding
simultaneity and the nature of time would create a revolution in physics
comparable to that initiated by Einstein's Relativity theories. Le Guin's
physics is imaginary though plausible and presented with conviction (
IMAGINARY SCIENCE); her psychology might very well be accurate.Finally,
since measurement is of fundamental importance in physics, this is the
place to mention those stories that make the point that all physical
measurements are relative. It was put in its simplest form by Katherine
MACLEAN in "Pictures Don't Lie" (1951); it was put further into the
context of physics by Philip LATHAM in "The Xi Effect" (1950), observing
that there would be no observable consequences if everything in the
Universe were to contract at the same rate (although the contraction would
become observable if the wavelength of visible light stayed constant).
Referring to time rather than length, Blish described in "Common Time"
(1953) an oscillating discrepancy between a man's internal (mental) time
and external (physical) time.Since the appearance of black holes in sf in
the mid-1970s there has been something of an upsurge of physics themes;
most relate to COSMOLOGY, but a number of stories concern quantum physics,
not necessarily cosmological. Often these stories take metaphors from
physics rather than physics itself; one of the first such ideas drawn from
physics and thereafter used as a metaphor is ENTROPY (which is from
thermodynamics, not quantum physics), and many such stories are discussed
under that head. An even older example is Heisenberg's Uncertainty
Principle, formulated in 1927, which regularly appears both within and
outside sf, usually not in its strict meaning but as a kind of "proof"
from the world of physics that we can no longer be sure of anything, and
that all the old certainties are gone. Schrodinger's Cat has popped up so
often as almost to have become a CLICHE, as in "Schrodinger's Cat" (1974)
by Ursula Le Guin, the Schrodinger's Cat trilogy (1979-81) by Robert Anton
WILSON, The Coming of the Quantum Cats (1986) by Frederik POHL and
"Schrodinger's Kitten" (1988) by George Alec EFFINGER. The attraction of
this idea is that, according to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum
physics formulated in the late 1960s by Hugh Everett, John Wheeler and
Neill Graham-who took the fate of Schrodinger's possibly murdered cat (a
half-dead, half-live wave function until somebody comes to look at it, at
which point it collapses into one state or the other) as their starting
point-the cat's fate gives an imaginative warrant for the existence of
ALTERNATE WORLDS. Perhaps the wittiest use of ideas from quantum physics
appears in Connie WILLIS's "At the Rialto" (1989), which describes the
extraordinary quantum uncertainties that vex a congress of quantum
physicists at a large hotel. It behoves us all to remember the remark of
physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962): "Those who are not shocked when they
first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it."Among
those who use ideas from physics with considerable sophistication and
know-how are a number of writers of SPACE OPERA and adventure on other
planets, including old-stagers like Larry Niven and Arthur C. Clarke but
also newer authors, in their turn expanding the genre, like Stephen
BAXTER, Greg BEAR, Gregory BENFORD, David BRIN, Robert L. FORWARD, Paul J.
MCAULEY, Charles SHEFFIELD and John E. STITH. More detailed accounts of

their work, and other relevant users of themes from physics, will be found
by following up the various cross-references above as well as BIG DUMB
OBJECTS, DYSON SPHERE, FORCE FIELD, ION DRIVE, MATHEMATICS, SPACE WARP
and
TACHYONS. [TSu/PN]
PIANETA DEGLI UOMINI SPENTI, IL
(vt Battle of the Worlds; vt Planet of the Lifeless Men) Film (1961).
Ultra Film/Sicilia Cinematografica/Topaz. Dir Anthony Dawson (pseudonym of
Antonio Margheriti), starring Claude Rains, Bill Carter, Umberto Orsini,
Maya Brent, Jacqueline Derval. Screenplay Vassily Petrov. 94 mins, cut to
84 mins. Colour.Earth is threatened by a large meteor, which launches
flying saucers at Earth and proves to be sent from an alien planet (now
dead) and run by a COMPUTER. Rains is the scientist who gains access to
the computer. The fevered stylization of the dead-planet imagery (giant
skeletons, etc.) rather than the bewildering though sometimes funny story
is what everyone who has seen this somewhat rare but visually striking
film remembers. Margheriti, a very uneven director, was one of the most
prolific stalwarts of the Italian exploitation movie. [PN]
PIEGAI, DANIELA
[r] ITALY.
PIER, THE
La JETEE.
PIERCE, JOHN J.
(1941- ) US editor and critic with a background in FANDOM, editor of a
FANZINE, Renaissance, in the 1960s, and at that time author of polemical
articles about the damage he saw being wrought on sf by writers of the NEW
WAVE. JJP ed GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION Nov 1977-Mar/Apr 1979, years in which
through no special fault of his the magazine was rapidly declining. Later
he published an ambitious trilogy of critical books about sf, A Study in
Imagination and Evolution, which together form a kind of HISTORY OF SF:
Foundations of Science Fiction (1987), Great Themes of Science Fiction
(1987),When Worlds Collide (1989) and Odd Genre: A Study in Imagination
and Evolution (1994). These may deserve more discussion than they appear
to have received. JJP's prose is accessible and the books are well
organized, but their ideology is deeply conservative in the sense that
non- GENRE SF is seen by JJP as effectively not sf at all. Within the
books' strong bias toward HARD SF are some well informed discussions about
the different ways in which sf has invented the future. Much of the
analysis is thematic, some philosophical. [PN]
PIERCE, JOHN R(OBINSON)
(1910- ) US scientist and writer. As scientist he was a director of Bell
Telephone Laboratories 1952-71, working intimately at the forefront of
communications research and development; after 1971 he was professor of
engineering at the California Institute of Technology, from which he had
received his PhD in 1936. As writer, JRP published 14 nonfiction works,
both specialized and popular, from Theory and Design of Electron Beams
(1949; rev 1954) to Almost All about Waves (1974). As an sf writer he has
published material under his own name, as John Roberts and as J.J.

Coupling, beginning with "The Relics from the Earth" for Science Wonder
Stories in 1930 under his own name. He remains best known as J.J.
Coupling, contributing 1944-71 a number of nonfiction articles under that
name to ASF. [JC]See also: IMMORTALITY.
PIERCY, MARGE
(1936- ) US writer who has become recognized as a significant voice of US
FEMINISM, initially with POETRY in volumes like Breaking Camp (coll 1968)
but more importantly in novels like Going Down Fast (1969) and Vida
(1980). Her first sf novel, Dance the Eagle to Sleep (1970), deals with an
attempt by a group of student revolutionaries to set up a loving,
communistic alternative society in the shadow of a near-totalitarian
NEAR-FUTURE US state. In WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME (1976) a Chicano woman,
falsely accused of abusing her daughter and confined to a mental
institution, makes contact with (or hallucinates the existence of) an
emissary from a future society which has arisen in the aftermath of a
"full feminist revolution". This vision of a USA in which women and men
are truly equal and truly whole has inspired many; although, while the
contemporary sequences are insightful and deeply moving, the descriptions
of the future UTOPIA tend to lack credibility. It might be accurate to say
that the culture so described is primarily a utopia of personal
relationships rather than one of social and technological structures, and
is perhaps best approached as a dream rather than as a realizable society.
He, She and It (1991; vt Body of Glass 1992 UK) more sustainedly places
its examination of human relationships in a CYBERPUNK-influenced vision of
a USA dominated by Japanese corporations, but the analogy which structures
the plot - an ANDROID powered by an AI is likened to the medieval GOLEM seems sentimental, especially in the closing pages, where the android
sacrifices itself so a Jewish commune may live. It nevertheless won the
ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD for 1993. [NT/JC]See also: POETRY; SOCIOLOGY; WOMEN
SF WRITERS.
PIKE, CHRISTOPHER
Pseudonym - apparently based on a Star Trek character - of US writer
Kevin McFadden (? - ), whose career has been mostly devoted to novels for
older children; some of these, like The Tachyon Web (1986), are sf
adventures combining orthodox plots (in this case a group of teenagers
"borrows" a spaceship in which they penetrate the eponymous barrier which
keeps humans from outer space) with a modicum of contemporary relevance
(the children in this book are sexually involved with one another). Other
juveniles - including Chain Letter (1986), Last Act (1988), Remember Me
(1989), Scavenger Hunt (1989), See You Later (1990), Witch (1990) and Fall
into Darkness (1990) - are horror or fantasy, the latter sometimes
involving TIME TRAVEL. With Sati (1990), whose eponymous heroine may be
God or may be a dippy channeller, CP moved into adult fiction. Whisper of
Death (1991) is an sf tale for older children, and The Season of Passage
(1992) is an adult horror novel. [JC]Other Works: Monster (1992); Road to
Nowhere (1993); The Eternal Enemy (1993); The Immortal (1993); The Wicked
Heart (1993); The Listeners (1994); The Midnight Club (1994); The Last
Vampire (1994).
PILGRIM AWARD

Given at its annual summer conference since 1970 by the SCIENCE FICTION
RESEARCH ASSOCIATION to a person who has made distinguished contributions
to the study of sf, the Pilgrim is awarded normally for a body of work
rather than for a specific book or essay, and has gone to both scholars
and critics, academic and otherwise. Judging is by a committee of the
SFRA, reconstituted each year. Recipients become Honorary SFRA Members;
until 1990 they received certificates, since then commemorative plaques
(also given retrospectively to previous winners). The award is named for
Pilgrims through Space and Time (1947) by J.O. Bailey, who in 1970 was the
PA's first recipient. [PN]Winners:1970: J.O. BAILEY1971: Marjorie Hope
NICOLSON1972: Julius KAGARLITSKI1973: Jack WILLIAMSON1974: I.F.
CLARKE1975: Damon KNIGHT1976: James E. GUNN1977: Thomas D. CLARESON1978:
Brian W. ALDISS1979: Darko SUVIN1980: Peter NICHOLLS1981: Sam
MOSKOWITZ1982: Neil BARRON1983: H. Bruce FRANKLIN1984: Everett F.
BLEILER1985: Samuel R. DELANY1986: George Edgar SLUSSER1987: Gary K.
WOLFE1988: Joanna RUSS1989: Ursula K. LE GUIN1990: Marshall B. TYMN1991:
Pierre VERSINS1992: Mark HILLEGAS1993: Robert REGINALD1994: John CLUTE
PILLER, EMANUEL S.
(1907-1985) US author, with Leonard ENGEL (whom see for details), of The
World Aflame: The Russian-American War of 1950 (1947). [JC]
PINCHER, (HENRY) CHAPMAN
(1914- ) Indian-born UK writer of some fiction and considerable
journalism. In his first sf novel, Not With A Bang (1965), the effects of
an anti-age drug are seen as catastrophic. The Giantkiller (1967) is
borderline sf in its portrait of a rabid union leader attempting to take
over the nation. [JC]Other works: The Penthouse Conspirators (1970) and
The Eye of the Tornado (1976), both borderline.
PINCHIN, FRANK J(AMES)
(1925-1990) UK research chemist and author. His first 4 sf novels, all as
by Peter Dagmar, were not exceptional: Alien Skies (1962), Spykos 4:
Strange Life-Forms on Unexplored Planets (1962; vt Spaceways 1973
Australia), Sands of Time (1963) - a fairly complex TIME-TRAVEL tale - and
Once in Time (1963; vt Mind Probe 1973 Australia). Mars 314 (1970), under
his own name, renders NEAR-FUTURE space flight with some versimilitude.
Two Equals One (1982), his last Peter Dagmar title, features an electronic
spying device which can read computer memories. Stargrail (1989) and
Nexweb (1990), both as FJP, attempt to marry sf and occultism. [JC]
PINE, E. THEODORE
[s] Henry L. HASSE; Emil PETAJA.
PINES, NED L.
(1905-1990) US magazine and book publisher who in 1931 founded a group of
magazines with Thrilling in the title: Thrilling Detective, Thrilling
Love, etc. These became part of the Pines Publications group (which NP
served as president 1929-61), whose associated companies included Standard
Magazines, Beacon Magazines and Better Publications. In 1936 NP bought
Gernsback's WONDER STORIES and retitled it THRILLING WONDER STORIES to fit
neatly among his other magazines. Among NP's senior staff members were Leo
MARGULIES and Mort WEISINGER. NP was by no means an sf specialist - of the

44 or so magazines he owned by the end of the 1930s, the huge majority
were not sf - but other SF MAGAZINES followed, among them STARTLING
STORIES in 1939, CAPTAIN FUTURE in 1940, and the reprint magazine
FANTASTIC STORY QUARTERLY in 1950. All of these PULP MAGAZINES had died
(like most of their kind) by the mid-1950s, Startling Stories being the
last to go (Fall 1955). In 1942 NP founded the paperback publishing house
Popular Library (which did not publish much sf) and put Margulies in
charge; the Popular Library logo became a pine tree in 1956, in honour of
NP, who retired in 1971. [PN]
PINKWATER, DANIEL M(ANUS)
(1941- ) US writer whose many novels for children have attracted large
adult audiences for their surreal wit, their supple and astringent wisdom
and (for sf readers in particular) the wry hilarity of their use of sf
venues and themes. After several non-genre works as Manus Pinkwater (a
form of his name which appears only in books of the 1970s), DMP began
writing tales of genre interest with Wizard Crystal (1973) and Magic
Camera (1974), attracting considerable attention with Lizard Music (1976),
an sf fantasia in which a young boy begins seeing musical lizards
everywhere, finds they are real and in secret occupancy of a nearby
invisible island, and later discovers that they have allied themselves
with the "right" sort of humans to oppose pod-people from space. Many of
DMP's books are either explicitly constructed as series - like the Magic
Moscow sequence and the Snarkout Boys sequence - or share venues and
characters with one another. In the end, no DMP book stands alone: all
occupy, in one way or another, a region whose children tend to be lonely
but clear-sighted and whose adults are either blind (or astonishingly
open) to the crowded marvellousness of the Universe. Some of the more
outstanding singletons for older children are Wingman (1975) as Manus
Pinkwater, Fat Men from Space (1976) as Daniel Manus Pinkwater, Alan
Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars (1979), Yobgorgle: Mysterious Monster of
Lake Ontario (1979), Java Jack (1980) with Luqman Keele, The Worms of
Kukumlima (1981) and Borgel (1990). The books for younger children,
heavily illustrated and written in a bumptious though easy-to-follow
style, are almost as intriguing. [JC]Other works (mostly for younger
readers): The Moose sf trilogy featuring a time-travelling moose vampire
and comprising Blue Moose 1975 chap) as Manus Pinkwater, The Return of the
Moose (1979 chap) and The Moosepire (1986 chap); The Big Orange Splot
(1977 chap); The Blue Thing (1977 chap); Pickle Creature (1979 chap); the
Magic Moscow sequence, comprising The Magic Moscow (1980 chap), Attila the
Pun (1981 chap) and Slaves of Spiegel (1982 chap); Tooth-Gnasher
Superflash (1981 chap); the Snarkout Boys sequence, comprising The
Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death (1982) and The Snarkout Boys and
the Baconburg Horror (1984); Roger's Umbrella (1982 chap) as by Honest
Dan'l Pinkwater; I Was a Second-Grade Werewolf (1983); Ducks! (1984 chap);
Devil in the Drain (1984 chap); The Frankenbagel Monster (1986 chap); The
Muffin Fiend (1986 chap); Guys from Space (1989 chap); Wempires (1991
chap).Nonfiction: Fish Whistle: Commentaries, Uncommentaries, and Vulgar
Excesses (coll 1989); Chicago Days/Hoboken Nights (1991), a memoir.
PIONEER AWARD

AWARDS.
PIPER, H(ORACE) BEAM
(1904-1964) US writer and gun collector, employed as a detective on the
Pennsylvania Railroad until made redundant in the mid-1950s; his first
name is not known for sure, and may have been Henry. Though he wrote for
other genres, he is best remembered for his sf, much of which appeared in
ASF from 1947, when he began with "Time and Time Again". Though he shared
John W. CAMPBELL Jr's political views, and his sense of the appropriate
kind of story in which to propound them, it is probably wrong to think of
HBP as a mouthpiece for the great editor: he was (in the end tragically)
his own man. His first sf novels - Crisis in 2140 (1953 ASF as "Null ABC";
1957) and A Planet for Texans (1958), both with John J. MCGUIRE - are
straightforward adventures, one set in a USA that has revolted from
literacy for fear of its consequences, the other on a planet set up like a
Western.Much of HBP's work fits very loosely into what has been called the
Terro-Human future- HISTORY sequence, though large gaps remained at his
death. The Federation tales - ostensibly embedded within the larger series
- can be read as self-contained, and themselves encompass the Fuzzy books.
Federation stories include Four-Day Planet (1961), Junkyard Planet (1963;
vt The Cosmic Computer 1964), Space Viking (1963) and 2 posthumous
collections, Federation (coll 1981) and Empire (coll 1981); of these
stories "Omnilingual" (1957 ASF) is perhaps the finest ( LINGUISTICS). The
Fuzzy series, in which HBP's enterprising clarity shows to best advantage,
includes Little Fuzzy (1962) and The Other Human Race (1964; vt Fuzzy
Sapiens 1976; the original, singularly stupid title was the choice of the
book's first publisher), both assembled as The Fuzzy Papers (omni 1977),
and the long-lost Fuzzies and Other People (1984). The small, joyful,
sapient Fuzzies are natives of the planet Zarathustra ( COLONIZATION OF
OTHER WORLDS). The first two volumes - which feature some gripping
courtroom-drama sequences - centre on the attempts of the mining
corporation which runs Zarathustra first to prevent recognition of Fuzzy
INTELLIGENCE (so as to retain mining rights) and then, when it has become
inevitable, to exploit this recognition. The third volume resolves the
conflict between the company and those humans who are fathering the
Fuzzies, whose neotenous, childlike nature ( Bjorn KURTEN) both demands
the attention of adults and reveals HBP's skill at the juvenile. The
series was continued in Fuzzy Bones * (1981) by William TUNING and Golden
Dream: A Fuzzy Odyssey * (1984) by Ardath MAYHAR.A second distinct
sequence, the Paratime Police/Lord Kalvan tales, most published originally
in ASF, were assembled as Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen (fixup 1965; vt
Gunpowder God 1978 UK) and Paratime (coll 1981). The series was continued
in Great Kings' War * (1985) by Roland GREEN and John F. CARR, the latter
also editing The Worlds of H. Beam Piper (coll 1983) and presenting his
work in other contexts. As a series of ALTERNATE-WORLDS variations, the
sequence showed HPB in perhaps excessively argumentative vein, the
alternate-world structure allowing him great latitude to express his
political feelings.Not in general an innovative writer, HBP was at his
best when he applied an ASF-derived firmness of setting and plausibility
of characterization to emotionally arousing adventure plots in which
political agendas existed only as subtexts. In 1964, his career apparently

on the skids, and prevented by reticence and LIBERTARIAN principles from
asking anyone to help him with temporary financial difficulties, he
committed suicide. He died in his prime. [JC] Other works: Murder in the
Gun Room (1953), HBP's first book, a detective novel; First Cycle (1982),
an HBP outline expanded by Michael KURLAND; Uller Uprising (in The
Petrified Planet [anth 1953] ed Theodore Pratt; 1983), part of the first
SHARED-WORLD anthology in GENRE SF; Four-Day Planet ?
(omni 1979), comprising two novels, the first under its original title and
the second being A Planet for Texans under a vt.About the author: Henry
Beam Piper (1985 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr.See also: ALIENS;
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; NUCLEAR POWER;
PASTORAL;
SPACE OPERA.
PIRANHA
Film (1978). New World. Executive prods Roger CORMAN, Jeff Schechtman.
Dir Joe DANTE, starring Bradford Dillman, Heather Menzies, Kevin McCarthy,
Keenan Wynn, Dick Miller, Paul Bartel, Barbara Steele. Screenplay John
SAYLES, based on a story by Sayles and Richard Robinson. 94 mins.
Colour.The army has been creating cold-water-tolerant man-eating piranhas
for use in Vietnam, and some escape into a Texas river. An attempt by the
army to hush this up permits a piranha invasion of a holiday resort on a
lake. Here one can see some of the notable talents of the 1980s (Dante,
Sayles, even Bartel) honing their craft in a MONSTER MOVIE of considerable
wit and pace, with a strong (and much-imitated) emphasis on social comedy;
the subtext is that ghastly people create metaphorical monsters that will
devour them.An unofficial sequel, Piranha II: Flying Killers (1981; vt
Piranha II: The Spawning), was a Dutch film, nothing to do with New World.
Set in the Caribbean and very inept, it features flying piranhas that look
like wind-up toys and was a surprisingly poor directorial debut for the
later-celebrated James CAMERON.
PIRANHA II
PIRANHA.
PIRATE WRITINGS
US SEMIPROZINE, #1 1992, current, irregular DIGEST until #5 in Fall 1994,
announced as quarterly small- BEDSHEET for future issues, edited by Ed
McFadden, pub PirateWritings Publishing. PW is a well produced SMALL PRESS
fiction magazine,perhaps more traditional to date than its title (which
refers to radical or cutting-edge fiction)suggests. Recent issues have
included work by Paul Di Filippo, Charkes DE LINT, Dan Hatch, IanMacLeod
and Roger ZELAZNY. [GF/PN]
PISERCHIA, DORIS (ELAINE)
(1928- ) US writer, born and raised in West Virginia, in the US Navy
1950-54. She began publishing short fiction with "Rocket to Gehenna" for
Fantastic in 1966. Her first novel, the remarkable and densely plotted VAN
VOGT-style revenge drama Mister Justice (1973 dos), appeared after she had
established some reputation in shorter forms, one of her stories being
included in Best Science Fiction for 1972 (anth 1973) ed Frederik POHL.
Star Rider (1974) recounts first-person adventures in a chokingly vivid

Universe, versions of which recur throughout her work: events are
pellmell, and the protagonist's far-flung quest for Doubleluck, a planet
of dreams, constantly becomes enmired in that environment. A Billion Days
of Earth (1976) similarly loses energy towards its close, but depicts its
FAR-FUTURE venue with precision and eloquence; its ratmen with mechanical
claws for hands are a particularly resonant notion, and demonstrate DP's
clear creative preference for ALIENS, who rarely fail to outshine her
human performers. Earthchild (1977) is similarly set on a far-future Earth
under a similar threat of termination. Later novels - like Doomtime (1981)
and Earth in Twilight (1981) - likewise tend to subordinate human
protagonists to her ornate and sometime animate mises en scene, so that
she is at times both daring and a trifle coy in subject matter and style:
not even the female protagonists of Spaceling (1978) or The Dimensioneers
(1982), though enjoying DP's approval, genuinely manage to dominate their
texts. Blood Country (1981) and I, Zombie (1982), both as by Curt Selby,
the latter a genuine sf novel about the posthumous revivification - for
purposes of forced labour - of suicides, are also of interest. In her
self-consciousness, and in the sense she conveys that landscape drowns
action (rather than vice versa), DP seemed for a period very much a member
of the US NEW WAVE; but she has not published since 1983, and the course
of her further development cannot properly be guessed. [JC]Other works:
The Spinner (1980); The Fluger (1980); The Deadly Sky (1983).See also:
CHILDREN IN SF; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; LIVING WORLDS.
PLANETA BUR
(vt Planet of Storms; vt Storm Planet; vt Cosmonauts on Venus) Russian
Film (1962). Leningrad Studio of Popular Science Films. Dir Pavel
Klushantsev, starring Kyunna Ignatova, Gennadi Vernov, Vladimir
Yemelyanov, Georgi Zhonov. Screenplay Alexander Kazantsev, Klushantsev. 85
mins, cut to 74 mins. Colour.Cosmonauts land on Venus, accompanied by a
robot that plays dance music (thus proving that funny ROBOTS are not
peculiar to US CINEMA). A well paced adventure story follows as they
search for intelligent life. In an interestingly realized alien landscape
they encounter dinosaurs, dangerous plants and a volcanic eruption, but
the sole intelligent Venusian appears only at the end, watching unnoticed
as the crew departs. By Western standards the film is a little slow and
overtalkative (long conversations between the ground crew and the woman
controlling the command ship), but it is always watchable. The best
Russian sf film until the 1970s, it is, like other Russian sf films of the
period (Niebo Zowiet [1959] and Meshte Nastreshu [1963]), stronger on
production design than on plot.Much footage from the Venus sequences was
used in a Roger CORMAN production, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet
(1965), which includes new US material written/dir John Sebastian
(pseudonym of Curtis Harrington), starring Basil Rathbone and Faith
Domergue, but is little more than a partial remake. PB footage was used
again in Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1966; vt Gill Woman),
also a Corman production, along with new material dir Peter Bogdanovich
(in his directorial debut), starring Mamie Van Doren and Mary Park. The
new feature here was the inclusion of telepathic Venusian women who send
the crash-landed astronauts home again. [JB]See also: RUSSIA.

PLANETARY ROMANCE
Any sf tale whose primary venue (excluding contemporary or NEAR-FUTURE
versions of Earth) is a planet, and whose plot turns to a significant
degree upon the nature of that venue, can be described as a planetary
romance. For the term to apply properly, however, it is not enough that a
tale simply be set on a world: James BLISH's A Case of Conscience (1958),
for instance, has a planet as a primary venue yet cannot be called a
planetary romance because the nature or description of this world has
little bearing on the story being told. Nor can the term profitably be
used for a tale set upon a planet whose mysteries are solvable in HARD-SF
terms: Hal Clement's MISSION OF GRAVITY (1954) and Robert L. FORWARD's
Rocheworld (1990), for instance, are typical hard-sf novels in that the
worlds on which they are set amount to little more than the sum of the
problems which they illustrate, and in that their protagonists
successfully explain (or solve) those worlds. In the true planetary
romance, the world itself encompasses - and generally survives - the tale
which fitfully illuminates it.Though the term is recent, the form is
coeval with SPACE OPERA. Most of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's sf sequences like the John Carter tales set on Barsoom - fit the description, and were
soon being referred to as "interplanetary romances", a term Gary K. WOLFE
defines in his useful Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy
(1986) as "broadly, an adventure tale set on another, usually primitive,
planet". Wolfe, properly restricting the use of the term to work done
before WWII, considers other important contributors to the form to include
Ralph Milne FARLEY, Homer Eon FLINT and Otis Adelbert KLINE.
Unfortunately, however, few of the tales described as interplanetary
romances show more than minimal interest in interplanetary travel, and the
term is used only occasionally in this encyclopedia, generally within
Wolfe's critical context.When we come to more sophisticated writers, for
whom the SWORD-AND-SORCERY simplicities of Burroughs seemed inadequate to
exploit the venue he had created, we must abandon the earlier formulation.
The ornate and decadent tales of Clark Ashton SMITH - which were also
instrumental in the creation of the subgenre SCIENCE FANTASY - are the
first planetary romances (if one puts aside the work of E.R. EDDISON as
being entirely fantasy, and David LINDSAY's A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS [1920] as
being too confusing in its use of various genres to work as a clear
example). By substituting temporal displacements for the early (and
inconsequential) spatial shifts of Burroughs and his followers, Smith
created the venue most favourable for the growth of the form: a
FAR-FUTURE-style planet on which magic and science intertwine, inhabited
by richly variegated races whose re-creation of the feudalisms and baroque
rituals of our own history is generally knowing and often a form of art.
Though her work for PLANET STORIES tended to be ostensibly set on MARS or
VENUS, the superb planetary romances of Leigh BRACKETT dwelt in versions
of those planets so displaced from our common history that they seem
natural descendants of Smith's work.Brackett held back, however, from a
complete exploitation of the venues hinted at by Smith, and the first
full-fledged modern planetary romance is therefore probably Jack VANCE's
THE DYING EARTH (coll of linked stories 1950), a book which successfully
incorporates into the subgenre our own planet - but sufficiently near the
end of time for magic to seem plausible. Vance's treatment of his

far-future Earth as a kind of entranced, doomed, topiary paradise, in
which primitivism and decadence mix and merge, soon became a trademark for
his work and influenced a large number of writers, including Gene WOLFE,
whose The Book of the New Sun (1980-83) is of course in part a planetary
romance. But THE DYING EARTH lacks any very convincing sf rationale, and
it was another Vance title that supplied sf writers with a model to
exploit. Big Planet (1952 Startling Stories; cut 1957; further cut 1958;
full text restored 1978), together with its sequel, Showboat World (1975;
vt The Magnificent Showboats of the Lower Vissel River Lune XXIII South,
Big Planet 1983), is set in a SPACE-OPERA Galaxy on a huge though
Earthlike world whose landmass is vast enough to provide realistic venues
for a wide range of social systems, and which is significantly low in
heavy-metal resources (this both explains its relatively low gravity and
permits a wide range of low-tech societies to flourish). Into this rich
environment - in a fashion not dissimilar to the entrance of visitors to
the typical UTOPIA - Vance introduces off-world protagonists whose need to
travel across the planet provides a quest plot and a rationale for the
lessons in ANTHROPOLOGY and SOCIOLOGY so common to the form. The pattern
would be repeated often over the next several decades, and remains one of
the central models for romantic sf.In his cogent introduction to a 1978
reprint of Philip Jose FARMER's The Green Odyssey (1957) Russell Letson
argues strongly for the use of the term "planetary romance" - he should be
credited for establishing it - to describe novels whose basic settings
derive from Burroughs, whose plots often make use of the chase-and-quest
conventions of adventure fiction, and whose protagonists frequently turn
out to be high-tech men (or women) "stranded among pretechnological
natives". Because Farmer is a more active plotter than Vance, The Green
Odyssey itself might well serve as a model for the transformation of the
Big Planet into story: its sophisticated play with anachronisms, and its
active use of contrasts between different levels of TECHNOLOGY
(reminiscent in this of the work of Poul ANDERSON) begins to demonstrate
the range of uses to which the basic model might be put. From these three
models - THE DYING EARTH, Big Planet and The Green Odyssey - can be seen
to derive, after the fashion of sf at its creative best, most of the
numerous planetary romances of recent decades. (Although J.R.R. TOLKIEN
might be seen, through his creation of Middle-Earth, to have granted an
oceanic imprimatur for the building of heavily mapped world-sized venues,
it is probable that fantasy and science fantasy should be distinguished
from one another precisely by the fact that, while the latter are usually
set on planets, the former are usually set in landscapes, which may well
be interminable. Middle-Earth is a landscape.)Authors early and
importantly associated with the planetary romance include Marion Zimmer
BRADLEY, with her Darkover novels, L. Sprague DE CAMP, some of the volumes
of whose Viagens Interplanetarias sequence are crossovers from fantasy,
and Frank HERBERT, whose Dune sequence incorporates some features from the
planetary romance into its complex mix. More recently, examples have
appeared from a very large number of authors: the Helliconia trilogy by
Brian W. ALDISS, A WOMAN OF THE IRON PEOPLE (1991) by Eleanor ARNASON,
Hegira (1979) by Greg BEAR, many of the novels of C.J. CHERRYH, the Song
of Earth novels by Michael G. CONEY, The Warriors of Dawn (1975) by M.A.
FOSTER, GOLDEN WITCHBREED (1983) and Ancient Light (1987) by Mary GENTLE,

Saraband of Lost Time (1985) and its sequels by Richard GRANT, COURTSHIP
RITE (1982) by Donald KINGSBURY, the Pern novels by Anne MCCAFFREY,
Pennterra (1987) by Judith MOFFETT, the Starbridge Chronicles by Paul
PARK, Lord Valentine's Castle (1980) and its sequels and The Face of the
Waters (1991) by Robert SILVERBERG, and parts of Neverness (1988) by David
ZINDELL. There are many more. [JC]
PLANET EARTH
Made-for-tv film (1974). ABC Dir Marc Daniels, starring John Saxon, Janet
Margolin, Ted Cassidy, Diana Muldaur. Teleplay Gene RODDENBERRY, Juanita
Bartlett. 75 mins. Colour.One of executive producer Roddenberry's several
attempts to repeat the success of STAR TREK, this pilot for a proposed
series - similar in concept to his earlier GENESIS II - failed to generate
the necessary network enthusiasm. It is sf at its most simplistic. The
hero and his companions are revived from SUSPENDED ANIMATION in a
tribalized, post- HOLOCAUST 22nd century. In a wretchedly strained attempt
at contemporary relevance, the party encounters a society of hostile
militant women (who keep men as slaves) and, by saving them from dangerous
mutants, proves to them that men can be useful. [JB/PN]
PLANETE SAUVAGE, LA
(vt Fantastic Planet) Animated film (1973). Les Films
Armorial/ORTF/Filmove studio Barrandov. Dir Rene Laloux. Scenario and
dialogue by Roland Topor (1938- ) and Laloux, based on Oms en serie ["Oms
by the Dozen"] (1957) by Stefan WUL. Original artwork by Topor. 72 mins.
Colour.The plot of this French/Czech coproduction is not original. Human
beings on a distant planet are kept as pets by a race of blue, humanoid
giants, but finally organize themselves into a guerrilla army and, despite
the disparity in size, force their oppressors to recognize them as equals.
The animation is not especially impressive in itself; what makes the film
interesting is the bizarre, surreal background in which go about their
sinister business such nightmarish creatures as the plant that spends its
time swatting down small animals for fun, while giggling unpleasantly. The
disturbing world shown in the background is at odds with the juvenile
events of the story. [JB]
PLANET OF BLOOD
Roger CORMAN.
PLANET OF HORRORS
Roger CORMAN.
PLANET OF STORMS
PLANETA BUR.
PLANET OF THE APES
1. Film (1968). Apjac/20th Century-Fox. Dir Franklin J. Schaffner,
starring Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, James
Whitmore. Screenplay Michael Wilson, Rod SERLING, based on La planete des
singes (1963; trans as Planet of the Apes 1963 US) by Pierre BOULLE. 112
mins. Colour.Astronauts crashland on a planet where intelligent apes of
three species rule over human savages. One astronaut is killed, one
lobotomized, and the survivor (Heston) is put in a zoo. There follows a

long middle sequence whose SATIRE, alternating between sharp and
heavy-handed, suffers from an attempt to have it both ways: sometimes ape
society - in its racism, its snobbery, its casual cruelty - is seen as a
reflection of our own excesses; yet sometimes the humans are seen as crass
and insensitive alongside the apes, who perhaps have made a better fist of
things than we ever did ( APES AND CAVEMEN). After unsuccessfully trying
to persuade his captors that he is an intelligent being, the astronaut is
befriended by two chimpanzee scientists (McDowall and Hunter) who accept
his story; with their help he escapes. The final sequence has him fleeing
to the Forbidden Zone with a female "savage" and - in a wonderful image
(perhaps inspired by Hubert ROGERS's cover for ASF Feb 1941) - coming
across the half-buried Statue of Liberty projecting from a sandy beach. He
realizes that he is still on Earth but in the FAR FUTURE, having
unknowingly passed through a time-warp.The film is well directed, and the
ape make-up by John Chambers is mobile and convincing, and deservedly won
an Oscar. A commercial success, POTA was one of the 1968 films that made
that year a turning point both for the increasing maturity of sf cinema
and for its popularity. POTA inspired 4 sequels - BENEATH THE PLANET OF
THE APES (1969), ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES (1971), CONQUEST OF
THE PLANET OF THE APES (1972) and BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973)
- as well as 2 tv series, one live-action (see 2 below) and the other
animated: Return to the Planet of the Apes, 13 20min episodes (1975).
Books spun-off from the animated series include 3 published as by William
Arrow, #1 and #3 being by William ROTSLER and #2 by Donald J. PFEIL:
Visions from Nowhere * (1976), Escape from Terror Lagoon (1976) and Man,
the Hunted Animal * (1976).2. US tv series (1974). 20th Century-Fox
Television for CBS. Prod Stan Hough. Executive prod Herbert Hirschman.
Starring Roddy McDowall, Ron Harper, James Naughton, Booth Colman, Mark
Leonard. 1 season, 14 50min episodes. Colour. This spin-off was set in the
same future world as the film (though its ethics were more
black-and-white), with some episodes in the ancient subterranean ruins of
BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1969). There were 4 books, all by George
Alec EFFINGER, based on the tv series: Man the Fugitive * (1974), Escape
to Tomorrow * (1975), Journey into Terror * (1975) and Lord of the Apes *
(1976). [PN/JB]
PLANET OF THE LIFELESS MEN
Il PIANETA DEGLI UOMINI SPENTI.
PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES
TERRORE NELLO SPAZIO.
PLANET OUTLAWS
BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY.
PLANETS
ASTEROIDS; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; JUPITER; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS;
LIVING WORLDS; MARS; MERCURY; OUTER PLANETS; PLANETARY ROMANCE;
TERRAFORMING; VENUS.
PLANET STORIES
US PULP MAGAZINE. 71 issues. Winter 1939-Summer 1955, published by Love
Romances Publishing Co.; ed Malcolm Reiss (Winter 1939-Summer 1942),

Wilbur S. Peacock (1915?-1979) (Fall 1942-Fall 1945), Chester Whitehorn
(Winter 1945-Summer 1946), Paul L. Payne (Fall 1946-Spring 1950), Jerome
BIXBY (Summer 1950-July 1951), Malcolm Reiss (Sep 1951-Jan 1952), Jack
O'Sullivan (Mar 1952-Summer 1955). (Reiss was always in control, however,
acting as Managing Editor when he was not named as editor.) The schedule
was quarterly Winter 1939-Fall 1950, bimonthly Nov 1950-Summer 1954,
quarterly Fall 1954-Summer 1955.Subtitled in its early years "Strange
Adventures on Other Worlds - The Universe of Future Centuries", PS was the
epitome of PULP sf. Its covers were garish in the extreme, and its story
titles promised extravagantly melodramatic interplanetary adventures
(which the stories themselves frequently provided). A typical selection of
featured stories (from 1947-8) includes "Beneath the Red World's Crust",
"Black Priestess of Varda", "The Outcasts of Solar III", "Werwile of the
Crystal Crypt", "Valkyrie from the Void" and "The Beast-Jewel of Mars",
The authors of these epics include such PS regulars as Erik Fennel,
Gardner F. FOX and Emmett McDowell; Fennel and McDowell, like Wilbur S.
Peacock (?1915-1979), were frequent contributors whose magazine
appearances were largely confined to PS. The magazine's artwork was mostly
crude and lurid; A. LEYDENFROST was the most individual of its regular
artists.Other authors who appeared often in later issues included Poul
ANDERSON and Alfred COPPEL. The most popular contributor, and the one
whose work characterizes PS's appeal at its best, was Leigh BRACKETT, with
her many colourful PLANETARY ROMANCES of love and adventure on MARS and
VENUS. PS's other short stories were more varied and less easily
classifiable. All but one of the issues from which the story titles listed
above were taken contained also short stories by Ray BRADBURY, including
"Zero Hour" (Fall 1947) and "Mars is Heaven!" (Fall 1948). Later PS
published Philip K. DICK's first story, "Beyond Lies the Wub" (July 1952).
One of the many sf magazines to come into being around 1940, PS was one of
the longest survivors, and one of the last sf pulps to continue in that
format. A UK edition, published by Pemberton, consisted of 12 numbered,
undated, truncated and initially irregular issues Mar 1950-Sep 1954. A
Canadian edition published 12 issues, identical to the US issues, Fall
1948-Mar 1951.The reprint magazine TOPS IN SCIENCE FICTION (2 issues 1953)
came from the same publisher and drew its material wholly from earlier
issues of PS. The Best of Planet Stories I (anth 1975) ed Leigh Brackett,
#1 in a book series that never had a #2, assembles 7 typical PS stories.
[MJE]
PLATO
(c429-347 BC) Greek philosopher, included here partly because his
dialogues Timaeus and its appendix Critias (c350 BC) have been taken as
examples of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION in their references to the state of
ATLANTIS and its sinking; additionally, and much more importantly, The
Republic (undated, but earlier than Timaeus, which is in a sense its
afterword) in part describes an ideal state, or UTOPIA, the first literary
work to do so in any detail. P's importance to the history of utopian
thought was absolutely central for more than 2000 years, but his emphasis
on an ideal stasis over the constant changes and evolution of the sensual
world was challenged in some 19th-century utopias, and of course runs
absolutely counter to the social ideas of most 20th-century sf writers.

Arthur C. CLARKE's The City and the Stars (1948; exp 1956) is effectively
an attack on a Platonic utopia. P's disapproval of poetry in The Republic
is a good example of his admonitory prescriptions, and his remarks on
children's games in Book VII of The Laws (a late work) are even better: ".
. . when innovations creep into their games and constant changes are made
in them, the children cease to have a sure standard of what is right and
proper. The person most highly esteemed by them is the one who introduces
new devices in form or colour, or otherwise.There can be no worse evil for
a city than this...Change...is most dangerous for a city." Nevertheless, P
was one of the first philosophers at least to consider the idea of change,
that the future could be better than the past - an imaginative leap
ancestral to the whole of sf.P's famous metaphor of the cave reappears
everywhere in sf, especially in stories of CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH: we are
prisoners in a cave and take the flickering shadows cast by the firelight
on the walls as reality; but the philosopher finds his way into the
sunlight and sees that he has hitherto been deceived. [PN]See also:
SOCIOLOGY; VIRTUAL REALITY.
PLATONOV, ANDREY (PLATONOVICH)
(1896-1951) Russian writer best known for his mainstream fiction. One of
the most talented figures active in the first decades after the 1917
Revolution, he was regarded with suspicion by "official" literary critics
and much of his work did not appear in RUSSIA until recently, including
his two powerful fictional analyses of UTOPIA-building, Tchevengur
(1928-29; trans Anthony Olcott 1978 US) and Kotlovan (trans as The Pit
US). Lunnaia Bomb ["The Moon Bomb"] (1921), Potomki Solntsa ["The Sun
Descendants"] (1926) and Efirnyi Trakt ["The Ether Road"] (written
1928-30; 1967) are good examples of the HARD SF of the period, although
they are marked by AP's uniquely sophisticated language and by some
unusual anticipations, including future "machineless" technologies with
"herds of electrons, bred like domestic animals". [VG]See also: RUSSIA.
PLATT, CHARLES (MICHAEL)
(1945- ) UK-born writer and editor, in the USA from 1970, who began
publishing sf with "One of Those Days" for Science Fantasy in 1964 and
soon became associated with NEW WORLDS during the period when, under
Michael MOORCOCK's editorship, it was seen as the pre-eminent NEW-WAVE
journal. CP performed various editorial functions for several years,
becoming editor in 1970 after Moorcock stepped down, and, of the NW
anthology series, co-editing with Moorcock #6 (1973; vt New Worlds
Quarterly #5 1974 US) and with Hilary BAILEY #7 (1974; vt as #6 1975 US).
CP's first novel, serialized the previous year in NW, was Garbage World
(1967 US), in which sf premise and scatological humour sometimes war - for
instance, the ASTEROID of the title, used as a garbage dump, is called
Kopra. Planet of the Voles (1971) is a confused SPACE OPERA, but The City
Dwellers (1970 UK; rev vt Twilight of the City 1977 US) is, in its heavily
revised version, a substantial NEAR-FUTURE look at the death of New York
and of a crisis-ridden USA surrounding it. From the first, CP's work
demonstrated undeviating clarity, PULP-MAGAZINE plotting instincts, and a
sure inclination to offend. The Gas (1970), which has a genuine sf
premise, treats its SEX material in pornographic terms. The Image Job

(1971 UK) and The Power and the Pain (1971 UK) are pornography with
marginal sf elements. A Song for Christina (1976) as by Blakely St James
(a Playboy Press house name) has no genre content, though Christina
Enchanted (1980), also as by St James, uses sf arguments to underpin an
occult hoax; a third St James volume, Christina's Touch (1981), once again
has no genre content. In the early 1980s CP wrote little sf, concentrating
his activities in the field on The Patchin Review (June 1981-March 1985),
a journal of comment, sometimes controversial, of which he edited and
wrote significant portions. A successor journal, REM (July 1985-December
1987), after 10 issues became Science Fiction Guide (occasionally from
March 1988; though none has appeared since 1989, the journal has not been
officially terminated). CP had written FANZINES during his involvement in
UK fandom in the 1960s; these later journals, however, were notable for a
rigorous concentration upon literary issues (and scandals), and should not
perhaps be categorized as fanzines. During these years CP also published
Dream Makers: The Uncommon People who Write Science Fiction (coll 1980;
exp vt Who Writes Science Fiction? 1980 UK) and Dream Makers, Volume II
(coll 1983), a revised selection from both volumes being published as
Dream Makers: SF and Fantasy Writers at Work (coll 1986); the interviews
here collected were polished and showed an attentive, surprisingly
sympathetic mind at work.CP then returned to active sf writing with Less
than Human (1986 as by Robert Clarke; 1987 UK as CP), the comic tale of an
ANDROID's descent upon New York, Free Zone (1988), a novel which
hilariously makes use of almost every sf theme and instrument yet devised
(a chart was provided) to tell a pixilated tale of urban anarchy and
dreadful threat, and The Silicon Man (1991), a HARD-SF perusal of the
implications of CYBERPUNK in which the sense of what it means actually to
become information (in CP's terms an infomorph) is chillingly and at
points bracingly examined.With the possible exception of this last book,
it cannot be claimed that CP is a warm writer, or that he generally finds
a narrative structure fit to convey the rigour of his thinking. But sf as
a genre is naggingly short of genuine iconoclasts: CP is therefore a
necessary writer. [JC]Other works: Sweet Evil (1977); Love's Savage
Embrace (1981) as by Charlotte Prentiss, associational; Tease for Two
(1983) and Double Delight (1983), both as by Aston Cantwell, both
associational; two Chthon ties, Piers Anthony's Worlds of Chthon: Plasm *
(1987) and Piers Anthony's Worlds of Chthon: Soma * (1988).Nonfiction:
Micromania: The Whole-Truth Home Computer Handbook (1984; rev by David
LANGFORD, vt Micromania 1984 UK); How to be a Happy Cat (1986 UK) with
Gray Joliffe; When You Can Live Twice as Long, What Will You Do? (1989), a
sequence of questions based upon sf-oriented visions of the near
future.See also: CITIES; DISASTER; GAMES WORKSHOP; INTERZONE; MUSIC;
PERCEPTION; POLLUTION; WOMEN SF WRITERS.
PLAUGER, P(HILLIP) J(AMES)
(1944- ) US writer and physicist, involved professionally in computers.
He began publishing sf with "Epicycle" for ASF in 1973, being best known
for "Child of All Ages" (1975), about an immortal woman ( IMMORTALITY) who
perpetually retains the body of a child; he won the JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD
for Best New Author in 1975. The novel-length "Fighting Madness" (in Ben
BOVA's Analog Annual, anth 1976) remains unpublished in book form. [JC/PN]

PLESKAC, KAREL
[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
PLOWRIGHT, TERESA
(1952- ) Canadian writer who began publishing sf with Dreams of an Unseen
Planet (1986 US; rev 1989 Canada), in which three human colony ships,
having escaped an Earth near terminal ecological collapse, orbit a
sentient planet called Gaea, where difficulties soon ensue. The tale,
heavily burdened with symbols and a selfconsciously significant prose,
climaxes in the realization that the planet needs humans and humans need
the planet for either species to reproduce and therefore survive. [JC]
PLUTO
OUTER PLANETS.
POCKET UNIVERSE
It might be said that the inhabitant of any constricted environment lives
in a pocket universe, whether as a child, a prisoner, a victim of
dementia, a chained watcher in Plato's cave, a resident of Hell or an
inhabitant of the world inside Pantagruel's mouth. It might also be
suggested that the dynamic moment of escape from confinement - a leitmotiv
of Western literature - always marks the transition from a pocket universe
to a fuller and more real world. When Huck, in the final pages of Mark
TWAIN's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1883 UK), decides "to light
out for the Territory ahead of the rest", the Hannibal from which he
escapes - with its rigid social organization and its conservative
inwardness of gaze - has many of the psychological characteristics of the
pocket universe as found in sf. The classic movement of the sf tale is of
course outward - via CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGHS and all the other forms of
initiation or unshackling - and in that sense most sf works contain some
sort of pocket universe, implied or explicit, which initially binds and
blinds the protagonist, and from which it is necessary to escape.The term
should perhaps, therefore, be confined to two usages, one broad, the other
narrower. It can be used broadly to describe an actual miniature universe
pocketed within a larger explanatory frame or device - like the various
godling-crafted worlds nesting within one another in Philip Jose FARMER's
World of Tiers sequence; or like the set-ups in almost any of Jack L.
CHALKER's series (e.g., the Well World sequence and the Four Lords of the
Diamond tetralogy) which feature universes constructed by godlike beings
as gamelike contrivances and inhabited by victim-players who must solve
their universe to escape from it; or like similar 1950s set-ups (see
PARANOIA) such as in Frederik POHL's "The Tunnel under the World" (1955)
or Philip K. DICK's Time Out of Joint (1958), whose protagonists are
victims of artificial worlds shaped to delude and manipulate them; or
(again trivially) like any fantasy game which involves role-playing within
a VIRTUAL-REALITY world; or in fact like any world (such as that on which
John CROWLEY's The Deep [1975] is set, or Terry PRATCHETT's Discworld)
whose origins and extent reflect a sense of constraining artifice. But
none of these applications contains the one essential element that defines
the true pocket-universe tale: Farmer's and Chalker's protagonists may not
know the nature of the worlds in which they find themselves, but they do

know that they are inhabiting some form of construct. In the
pocket-universe tale as more narrowly defined, the world initially
perceived seems to be the entire world, and the web of taboos preventing
the truth about its partial nature being known is structurally very
similar to the parental restrictions which initially hamper the move
through puberty into adulthood of the young protagonists of most non-genre
juveniles. It could, indeed, be argued that this move through puberty is a
particular example of the conceptual breakthrough which arguably
structures all genuine sf.The classic GENERATION-STARSHIP tale is one in
which the descendants of the original crew members have forgotten the true
nature of things and have instituted a repressive, TABOO-governed society
which suppresses any attempt to discover the truth; it is the task of the
young protagonist to break through the social and epistemological barriers
stifling this world while at the same time successfully managing puberty.
The pure generation-starship story embodies, therefore, the purest form of
the concept of the pocket universe. Examples of that pure form, though
central to sf, are not numerous - Robert A. HEINLEIN's Universe (1941 ASF;
1951 chap) is the most famous in the list, which includes also Brian W.
ALDISS's Non-Stop (1958; vt Starship 1959 US) and Harry HARRISON's Captive
Universe (1969); but Alexei PANSHIN's RITE OF PASSAGE (1968), for
instance, though explicitly a tale of puberty, does not suggest that there
is any epistemological mystery about the nature of the asteroid-sized
starship from which its heroine must escape.All post- HOLOCAUST tales in
which the descendants of survivors live in underground habitats which they
think to be the whole of reality are pocket-universe stories. The best of
them is perhaps Daniel F. GALOUYE's Dark Universe (1961), though Margaret
ST CLAIR's Sign of the Labrys (1963) and The Shadow People (1969) play
fruitfully with the concept, as do Richard COWPER's Kuldesak (1972), Roger
ELDRIDGE's The Shadow of the Gloom-World (1977) and many others. In all
these stories, the essential movement is from childhood constriction and
taboo-driven ignorance to adult freedom and breakthrough, though the
protagonist of Gene WOLFE's Darkside the Long Sun (1993) is, unusually, an
adult from the very beginning of his long adventure in truth-seeking; in
GENRE SF it is only more recently that ironies have significantly pervaded
this pattern, as in David LAKE's Ring of Truth (1983), where a traditional
enclosed world turns out to be interminably extensive, so that there is,
in fact, no exit. In the great pocket-universe stories, however, there is
always an out, a SENSE OF WONDER, a new world opening before the opened
eyes. [JC]See also: GODS AND DEMONS.
POE, EDGAR ALLAN
(1809-1849) US writer, a major figure in US literature and a pioneer of
sf. "By 'scientifiction'," wrote Hugo GERNSBACK, "I mean the Jules Verne,
H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story." As a poet, short-story
writer and critic, EAP's influence on world literature has been enormous,
though he spent most of his career in the cut-throat world of magazine
publishing. He is usually credited as an originator of the detective story
and the horror story, an innovator in the areas of psychological realism
and poetic form, as well as a precursor of the New Criticism and a strong
influence on the French Symbolist movement. In recent years his works have
been closely associated with various structuralist and deconstructuralist

approaches to literature.Among French appreciators of EAP was Jules VERNE,
who found in certain of his pieces a basis for his own "nuts-and-bolts" sf
- "The Balloon Hoax" (1844), for example, inspired both Cinq semaines en
ballon (1863; trans as Five Weeks in a Balloon 1869 US) and Le tour du
monde en quatre-vingt jours (1873; trans as Around the World in Eighty
Days 1874 US) - but it should be emphasized that in EAP's context much of
the scientific underpinning is of a deliberately specious, hoaxing nature.
Another writer of HARD SF, Isaac ASIMOV, created the kind of amalgam
between sf and detective fiction that EAP's work anticipated; but
something of the more central, metaphysical and visionary aspect of EAP's
writing is captured by two different disciples: H.P. LOVECRAFT and Ray
BRADBURY. Paul Valery (1871-1945) defined EAP's sf when he observed: "Poe
was opening up a way, teaching a very strict and deeply alluring doctrine,
in which a kind of mathematics and a kind of mysticism became one ..."
What EAP referred to as "the Calculus of Probabilities", a species of
extrapolation in which he and his detective hero, Dupin, were expert,
calls for the combined talents of the mathematician and the poet.EAP's
corpus is very much of a piece, and to isolate his sf would be
significantly to distort both the whole and the part. In fact, no single
work can be satisfactorily categorized as sf in any conventional sense for one thing, the hoaxing quality of many of the tales detracts from the
necessary illusion of verisimilitude - but at the same time the underlying
rationale is marginally sciencefictional, and by that token so is
everything EAP wrote.EAP assumed that the fabric of "reality" constituted
a "grotesque" deception imposed by limitations of time and space and by
such personal impediments as human reason. This revelation and the
concomitant awareness of what may be the true "arabesque" nature of a
unified reality are available only to the perspective provided by the
"half-closed eye" of the imagination or, in the later works, of intuition.
EAP makes clear in "Mesmeric Revelation" (1844; rev 1845) that this
visionary arabesque reality is of a material, not a spiritual, nature. It
is equivalent to the alternative or additional DIMENSIONS of sf and may be
apprehended by strategies which constitute EAP's version of the spacetime
warp. The dizzying sensation experienced on entering an EAP room,
typically containing a luridly lit, kaleidoscopically fluid assemblage of
arabesque furnishings, or in the process of literally falling in such
tales as "A Descent into the Maelstrom" (1841), will effect the
transition. In the case of most visionary or mystical literature, the
experience of a transcendent reality depends upon personal volition (an
unreliable programme of fasting or praying) or divine intervention. In
EAP's case, as in sf, natural phenomena may effect the transition
accidentally, and the conditions of such phenomena may be mechanically
duplicated.There is a further sense in which all of EAP's work may be
regarded as marginal sf. The COSMOLOGY embodied in the late summational
treatise Eureka (1848) - a scheme of remarkable prescience (to the point
of explaining BLACK HOLES) which has some parallel and perhaps conscious
development in the speculation of such writers as Olaf STAPLEDON, George
Bernard SHAW and Arthur C. CLARKE - is variously anticipated, whether
directly, rhythmically or symbolically, in virtually everything he wrote.
To this extent, for example, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) and
the sea tales may be regarded as displaced versions of a kind of

literalistic sf, if Eureka (which EAP called a "romance" or a "poem") may
be described as that. In Eureka the movement from a grotesque, deceptive
"reality" to arabesque reality is correlated with the history of the
Universe moving from its present diastolic state of dispersion to a
glorious future state of centripetal collapse into a primal unity, an
"Overmind".Although none of EAP's compositions can be fully accounted for
by the sf label, some do come closer than others in that they contain
specific sf elements. Three poems merit consideration. "Al Aaraaf" (1829;
rev 1831; rev 1845), with its astronomical setting and the apparent
destruction of the planet Earth, might be related to the post-apocalyptic
prose of "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (1839), in which Earth
is destroyed by fire when raped of nitrogen by a passing comet (cf H.G.
WELLS's "The Star" [1897] and In the Days of the Comet [1906]). (EAP's
"Shadow - A Parable" [1835] and "The Colloquy of Monos and Una" [1841] are
similarly metaphysical pieces.) A second poem, "The City in the Sea"
(1831; rev 1845), is related to various sf-like sunken-city myths.
"Ulalume" (1847) makes use of astrology and, to that degree, relates to
EAP's use of other PSEUDO-SCIENCES in some of his most sciencefictional
tales: mesmerism in "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (1844), in "Mesmeric
Revelation" (1844) and in "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845),
and alchemy in "Von Kempelen and his Discovery" (1849). The automaton
chess-player invented by (the real-life) Baron von Kempelen and probed by
EAP in his essay "Maelzel's Chess-Player" (1836) might be linked tenuously
to the ROBOTS of sf, while "The Man that was Used Up" (1839) presents a
part-human, part-machine being something like a CYBORG. "The Masque of the
Red Death" (1842) has humankind destroyed by plague, as in Mary SHELLEY's
The Last Man (1826) ( END OF THE WORLD).EAP's sea voyages, especially "MS.
Found in a Bottle" (1833) and The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1837), seem
ultimately oriented towards a HOLLOW EARTH (like Captain Adam SEABORN's
Symzonia [1820]). EAP's latter unfinished story was "completed" by various
hands: by Jules Verne in Le sphinx des glaces (1897; trans as An Antarctic
Mystery 1898 UK), by Charles Romyn DAKE in A Strange Discovery (1899), by
H.P. LOVECRAFT in "At the Mountains of Madness" (1936) and by Dominique
Andre in Conquete de l'Eternal ["The Conquest of the Eternal"] (1947). The
most ambitious of the BALLOON tales, "The Unparalleled Adventure of One
Hans Pfaall" (1835; rev 1840), is clearly oriented towards outer space; if
taken literally, it is an early example of a MOON voyage. Another balloon
story and another hoax, "Mellonta Tauta" (1849; the title is Greek for
"these things are in the future"), might better be considered as one of
the three tales that experiment with the theme of time displacement. "The
Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade" (1845), "Some Words with a
Mummy" (1845), a reanimation story, and "Mellonta Tauta" demonstrate the
inaccuracy of past conceptions of the future, present conceptions of the
past and future conceptions of the present, respectively; "Mellonta Tauta"
itself presents a UTOPIA as a DYSTOPIA, bears on the theme of
OVERPOPULATION, and is among the first of such works to open directly in a
future environment.Nearly all the above stories and the essay Eureka, but
not the poems, appear in The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (coll
1976) ed Harold Beaver, which has an interesting introduction and
commentary. Beaver also ed a companion volume, the Penguin Books edition
of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1975).A great many of

EAP's stories have been filmed, most famously and prolifically by Roger
CORMAN. [DK]About the author: "Edgar Allan Poe - Science Fiction Pioneer"
by Clarke Olney in Georgia Review #12, 1958; "The Prophetic Edgar Allan
Poe" in Explorers of the Infinite (coll 1963) by Sam MOSKOWITZ; "Edgar
Allan Poe and Science Fiction" in Future Perfect: American Science Fiction
of the Nineteenth Century (anth 1966) ed H. Bruce FRANKLIN; "The Influence
of Poe on Jules Verne" by Monique Sprout in Revue de Litterature Comparee
#41, 1967; "Edgar Allan Poe and the Visionary Tradition of Science
Fiction" in New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science
Fiction, and American Literature (1974) by David KETTERER; "Poe, Edgar
Allan" in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, vol 2 (1978) by
Donald H. TUCK; "The SF Element in the Work of Poe: A Chronological
Survey" by David Ketterer, SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES #1, 1974; "Edgar Allan
Poe" by E.F. BLEILER in Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the
Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day (1982)
ed E.F. Bleiler; "'Something Monomaniacal': Edgar Allan Poe" in Trillion
Year Spree (1986) by Brian W. ALDISS and David WINGROVE; the discussion of
Poe in The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary History
of American Writing (1990) by John Limon.See also: APES AND CAVEMEN (IN
THE HUMAN WORLD); ASTRONOMY; DEFINITIONS OF SF; GOTHIC SF; HISTORY OF
SF;
HORROR IN SF; MEDICINE; MONEY; NEW WAVE; PROTO SCIENCE FICTION;
PSYCHOLOGY; SPACE FLIGHT; SPACESHIPS; SUSPENDED ANIMATION; TIME TRAVEL.
POETRY
Before about 1965 - although much earlier Lilith LORRAINE had published
Wine of Wonder (coll 1951 chap), which she advertised as being the first
volume of poetry devoted to sf - only isolated examples of sf poetry
appeared in magazines like Unknown and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction. Yet now poetry appears regularly in SF MAGAZINES, anthologies and
author collections. This change can be attributed to two separate periods
of activity. The first centred on NEW WORLDS (NW) and the NEW-WAVE writers
in the UK during the late 1960s. NW published a classic poem during this
time, "The Head-Rape" (1968) by D.M. THOMAS. In 1979 Edward Lucie-Smith
(1933- ) anthologized this and other excellent poems like Edwin Morgan's
"In Sobieski's Shield" and Thomas M. DISCH's "A Vacation on Earth" in
Holding Your Eight Hands (HYEH) (anth 1969 UK), the first anthology of sf
poetry. HYEH was followed closely by 2 other all-poetry anthologies,
Frontier of Going (FG) (anth 1969 UK) ed John Fairfax and Inside Outer
Space (IOS) (anth 1970 US) ed Robert Vas Dias. FG and IOS were not sf per
se but celebrations of SPACE FLIGHT and the Universe inspired by the
Soviet/US space race and the unique lexicon of terms, and dreams, it
engendered. Also notable were the infusion of a quantity of poetry into
the text of Brian W. ALDISS's novel Barefoot in the Head (1969) and the
book-length poem Aniara (1956 Sweden; trans 1963) by the Swedish poet
Harry MARTINSON.A decade after HYEH, intense poetic activity in the USA
centred on the founding in 1978 of the Rhysling AWARDS (RA) for best sf
poetry and their parent association, the Science Fiction Poetry
Association, which was founded by Suzette Haden ELGIN. From the late 1970s
to the mid-1980s, poets emerged who wrote a large body of their work
within the genre, including in the USA Andrew Joron, Peter Dillingham,

Kathy Rantala, Bruce BOSTON, Sonya DORMAN, Gene Van Troyer, Duane
Ackerson, Terry A. Garey and Robert FRAZIER, as well as the UK's Steve
Sneyd and Andrew Darlington. Established sf writers published a good deal
of poetry - Ursula K. LE GUIN, Michael BISHOP, Ray BRADBURY, Jane YOLEN,
Joe HALDEMAN and others - and poets from the mainstream crossed over: Dick
Allen, Marge PIERCY, William Stafford, Tom Whalen and Marilyn Hacker
(1942- ). During this time, many magazines started to feature the growing
genre on a regular basis. Night Cry (NC) used horror poetry, while the
science magazine Science (SC) prominently featured one factual poem per
issue. AMAZING STORIES and ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE have
often used two or more poems an issue. IASFM featured excellent sf poetry,
like the Rhysling winners "The Migration of Darkness" (1979) by Peter
Payack and "For Spacers Snarled in the Hair of Comets" (1984) by Bruce
Boston; while literary magazines like Speculative Poetry Review,
Velocities (V), Uranus, Ice River, Umbral (UM), Star*Line (S*L), The
Magazine of Speculative Poetry and the UK's Star Wine devoted themselves
to fantastic poetry of all kinds.Fantastic poetry generally falls into 4
types: sf, as in Susan Palwick's "The Neighbor's Wife" (1985 AMZ) (RA),
wherein a widowed man nurses a very alien woman to health and accepts her
for a wife; science fact, as in Diane Ackerman's "Saturn" from her book
The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral (1976), a long work often quoted by Carl
SAGAN in his science books; macabre, as in Lucius SHEPARD's "White Trains"
(1987 NC) (RA), about mirage-like trains that pass certain towns on the
outskirts of their private mythologies; and speculative poetry, a catchall
term for poems on the periphery of the fantastic, as in Joe Haldeman's
almost otherworldly vision of Vietnam in "DX" (1987) or the surreal poetry
of Ivan Arguelles.Other classic works include: "The Sonic Flowerfall of
Primes" (1982 NW) (RA) and "Antenna" (1989) by Andrew Joron, with their
hard-science surrealism; "The Nightmare Collector" (1987 NC) (RA) by Bruce
Boston; "The Well of Baln" (1981) by Ursula K. Le Guin; "Corruption of
Metals" (1977) (RA) by Sonya Dorman; "Two Sonnets" (1983 SC) by Helen
Ehrlich; "Your Time and You" (1982 V) (RA) by Adam Cornford; "The Still
Point" (1984 IASFM) by David Lunde; "Ybba" (1983 S*L) by Elissa Malcohn;
"Lady Faustus" (1982 UM) by Diane Ackerman; and the World Fantasy
Award-winning "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station" by John M. FORD (1988).
Many of these recent works are anthologized in The Umbral Anthology (anth
1982) ed Steve Rasnic Tem, Burning with a Vision (anth 1984) ed Robert
Frazier and Songs of Unsung Worlds (anth 1985) ed Bonnie Gordon. Also of
great importance is the book-length THE NEW WORLD: AN EPIC POEM (1985) by
Frederick TURNER.Several anthologies of mostly original poetry made
impressions around the cusp of the 1990s: the award-winning Poly: New
Speculative Writing (anth 1989) ed Lee Ballentine (1954- ), Narcopolis ?
Other Poems (anth 1989 chap) ed Peggy Nadramia and Time Frames (anth 1991)
ed Terry A. Garey. The poet Scott Green has compiled an invaluable guide,
Contemporary Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Poetry: A Resource Guide
and Biographical Dictionary (1989).Star*Line, The Magazine of Speculative
Poetry and Velocities continue, along with newcomer Dreams ?
as strong poetry magazines. Ocean View Press, publisher of Poly, produces
poetry collections by many of the authors mentioned here. And a large wave
of fresh poets promises all the right stuff for the 1990s-people like
Denise Dumars, Michael R. COLLINGS, W. Gregory Stewart, David

Kopaska-Merkel, t. (not T.) Winter-Damon, Ann K. Schwader, Roger Dutcher,
Wendy Rathbone, Tom Wiloch, Terry McGarry, Sandra Lindow, Tony Daniel and
Wayne Allen Sallee. [RF]
POGUE, BILL
[r] Ben BOVA.
POHL, CAROL
[r] Frederik POHL.
POHL, FREDERIK
(1919- ) US writer, professionally involved in the sf field as an editor,
agent and writer since his teens, his first published piece being a poem,
"Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna" as by Elton V. Andrews, for AMZ in 1937,
and his first story proper being "Before the Universe" with C. M.
KORNBLUTH, both writing as S.D. Gottesman, for Super Science Stories in
1940. His 3rd marriage was to sf writer Judith MERRIL (1949-52) and his
4th to Carol Metcal Ulf (1952-82), who collaborated with him in editing
several anthologies. His 5th and present wife, Elizabeth Anne Hull
(married 1984), is an academic and a leading member of the SCIENCE FICTION
RESEARCH ASSOCIATION. FP was a member of the FUTURIANS, and wrote much of
his early work in collaboration with other members of the group, mostly
with C.M. Kornbluth. Names used by these two, sometimes involving third
parties (including Robert A.W. LOWNDES and Joseph H. Dockweiler), were
S.D. Gottesman (see above), Scott Mariner, Dirk WYLIE and the house name
Paul Dennis Lavond. On his early solo work FP usually used the name James
MacCreigh, though he published 1 story each as Wylie and Warren F. Howard.
He published much of this work himself while editing ASTONISHING STORIES
and SUPER SCIENCE STORIES Spring 1940-Fall 1941; he was then assistant
editor to Alden Norton on these magazines from late 1941 until their
demise in 1943. After WWII he worked as an sf literary agent; he
represented many of the most celebrated writers in the field during the
late 1940s. He began writing again, abandoning the MacCreigh pseudonym, in
1953, by which time he had used his own name on the first of a new set of
collaborations with Kornbluth, the classic THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1952 Gal
as "Gravy Planet"; 1953). While working as assistant editor to H.L. GOLD
at GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION he wrote a great deal for the magazine,
sometimes as Paul Flehr, Ernst Mason or Charles SATTERFIELD, the last once
used for a story written in collaboration with Lester DEL REY, in
partnership with whom he also wrote Preferred Risk (1955) as Edson MCCANN.
Other writers with whom he collaborated at one time or another were
Merril, Isaac ASIMOV and Joseph SAMACHSON, and he built up a second
long-term partnership with Jack WILLIAMSON. FP was editor of Gal and IF
from late 1961 to mid-1969. While under his aegis If won 3 HUGOS as Best
Magazine 1966-8. He also founded and edited 2 shorter-lived magazines,
WORLDS OF TOMORROW (1963-7) and INTERNATIONAL SCIENCE FICTION (1967-8).
Another significant editorial endeavour was an early series of original
ANTHOLOGIES, STAR SCIENCE FICTION STORIES: Star Science Fiction Stories
(anth 1953), #2 (anth 1954), #3 (anth 1955), #4 (anth 1958), #5 (anth
1959) and #6 (anth 1959), along with a volume of longer stories, Star
Short Novels (1954). He has also ed numerous reprint anthologies.As a
writer FP made his first reputation by way of slickly ironic short

stories, mostly SATIRES with a hint of black comedy. Works in this vein
include the classics "The Midas Plague" (1954; incorporated into Midas
World, fixup 1983) and "The Tunnel Under the World" (1955); almost all
these stories of the 1950s are collected in Alternating Currents (coll
1956; with 1 story dropped and 1 added, rev 1966 US), The Case Against
Tomorrow (coll 1957), Tomorrow Times Seven (coll 1959), The Man who Ate
the World (coll 1960), Turn Left at Thursday (coll 1961) and The
Abominable Earthman (coll 1963). Oddly, the only short-fiction award FP
won before his 1986 Hugo for "Fermi and Frost" was a Hugo for an atypical
"posthumous collaboration" with Kornbluth, "The Meeting" (1972), which
appeared in Critical Mass (coll 1977) with Kornbluth; some of their
collaborations had already been assembled as The Wonder Effect (coll
1962), and further selections appeared as Before the Universe, and Other
Stories (coll 1980) and Our Best: The Best of Frederik Pohl and C.M.
Kornbluth (coll 1987). FP's early solo novels were less successful: Slave
Ship (1957), Drunkard's Walk (1960), A Plague of Pythons (1965; rev vt
Demon in the Skull 1984) and The Age of the Pussyfoot (1969) lack the
vitality of his collaborations with Kornbluth. The gaudy image of a future
dominated by advertising painted in THE SPACE MERCHANTS now seems
remarkably prescient ( MEDIA LANDSCAPE) - although FP's solo sequel, The
Merchants' War (1984), was unfortunately belated; both novels were
assembled as Venus, Inc (omni 1985). Gladiator-at-Law (1955; rev 1986)
with Kornbluth is sillier, but makes some telling comments on housing
projects ( CRIME AND PUNISHMENT). The episodic Search the Sky (1954; rev
1985) with Kornbluth is an enjoyable early contribution to the
"absurd-society" variety of sf. The more ambitious and surrealistically
complicated Wolfbane (1959; rev 1986) with Kornbluth involves invading
alien robots, the kidnapping of the planet Earth, subsequent primitive
societies engineered to provide human components for living MACHINES on
the aliens' own dirigible planet, and a revolt organized by these.FP's
early collaborations with Jack Williamson were the Undersea juveniles Undersea Quest (1954), Undersea Fleet (1955) and Undersea City (1958) (
UNDER THE SEA) - and the Starchild novels, assembled as The Starchild
Trilogy (omni 1977): The Reefs of Space (1964), Starchild (1965) and Rogue
Star (1969). The latter are intelligent SPACE OPERAS combining
Williamson's flair for melodrama with FP's economy of style. As FP's solo
work has matured, so has his collaborative work with Williamson. The Saga
of Cuckoo - Farthest Star (fixup 1975) and Wall Around a Star (1983),
assembled as The Saga of Cuckoo (omni 1983) - is action-adventure fiction
involving a vast artificial world. Land's End (1988) confronts the human
survivors of a cosmic DISASTER with a godlike ALIEN. The Singers of Time
(1991) is an excellent fusion of traditional space opera with modern ideas
in PHYSICS.There was a sharp improvement in FP's longer works once he was
no longer editing full time. Two fine novellas, "The Gold at the Starbow's
End" (1971; exp vt Starburst 1982) and "The Merchants of Venus" (1971),
were important transitional works, the latter forming a prelude to the
enterprising Heechee series - GATEWAY (1977), Beyond the Blue Event
Horizon (1980), Heechee Rendezvous (1984), The Annals of the Heechee
(1987) and The Gateway Trip (coll of linked stories 1990) - which tracks
humanity's exploration of the Galaxy using artefacts abandoned by aliens
who have gone into hiding because of a threat posed to all living species

by the enigmatic Assassins. GATEWAY won the Hugo, NEBULA and JOHN W.
CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD, following up the success of MAN PLUS (1976), an
effectively cynical novel about the adaptation of a man for life on MARS
which had won a Nebula the year before ( PANTROPY); the rather less
impressive sequel is Mars Plus (1994) with Thomas T. THOMAS. JEM: The
Making of a Utopia (1979) is a similarly cynical and compelling account of
the COLONIZATION of an alien world - which somewhat resembles the
eponymous planet in Medea's World (anth 1985) ed Harlan ELLISON - by
competing human power blocs, but the more lightly satirical The Cool War
(1981) is less successful. Syzygy (1982), a mundane novel about the
failure of a much-touted catastrophe to overwhelm California as a result
of a rare alignment of planets, understandably suffers from a lack of
melodrama - an absence made good in two later non-sf novels, the thriller
Terror (1986) and the "drama-documentary" novel Chernobyl (1987). FP has
occasionally complained about the unwillingness of sf writers to be
constructive in their dealings with NEAR-FUTURE scenarios, and he made a
sustained attempt to practise what he preached in The Years of the City
(fixup 1984), a future history of the City of New York. The Coming of the
Quantum Cats (1986) is an ALTERNATE-WORLD adventure story only lightly
seasoned with satire, but a more considerable satirical edge is evident in
Black Star Rising (1985), Narabedla Ltd (1988) and the sharply pointed The
Day the Martians Came (fixup 1988). Homegoing (1989) is a more romantic
and light-hearted story of confrontation between humans and aliens. The
World at the End of Time (1990) recalls the theme of Land's End in
presenting a human colony's encounter with a godlike alien in a tale which
traverses eons to the time and location referred to in the title; while
the novella Outnumbering the Dead (1990 UK) focuses on the predicament of
a man who is among the very few who age and die in a world of
youthful-seeming immortals ( IMMORTALITY).FP was president of the SCIENCE
FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA 1974-6 and president of WORLD SF 1980-82. Much
insight into the early days of his career is provided by the commentary in
The Early Pohl (coll 1976), much of which was subsequently incorporated
into The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (1978). The special Sep 1973 issue
of The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION was devoted to his work. In
1993 he was granted the Nebula Grand Master award. [BS]Other works: Digits
and Dastards (coll 1966); The Frederik Pohl Omnibus (coll 1966; vt
Survival Kit 1979); Day Million (coll 1970); The Gold at the Starbow's End
(coll 1972); The Best of Frederik Pohl (coll 1975); In the Problem Pit
(coll 1976); Planets Three (coll 1982); Pohlstars (coll 1984); BiPohl
(coll 1987); Stopping at Slowyear (1991); Mining the Oort (1992); The
Voices of Heaven (1994).Nonfiction: Science Fiction: Studies in Film
(1981) with Frederik Pohl IV; Our Angry Earth (1991) with Isaac ASIMOV.As
Editor: Beyond the End of Time (anth 1952); Shadow of Tomorrow (anth
1953); Assignment in Tomorrow (anth 1954); Star of Stars (anth 1960; vt
Stars Fourteen UK); several Galaxy anthologies, including Time Waits for
Winthrop and Four other Short Novels from Galaxy (anth 1962), The Seventh
Galaxy Reader (anth 1964), The Eighth Galaxy Reader (anth 1965), The Ninth
Galaxy Reader (anth 1966), The Tenth Galaxy Reader (anth 1967; vt Door to
Anywhere 1970), The Eleventh Galaxy Reader (anth 1969) and Galaxy: Thirty
Years of Innovative Science Fiction (anth 1980) with Martin H. GREENBERG
and Joseph D. OLANDER; The Expert Dreamers (anth 1962), sf stories by

SCIENTISTS; The Best Science Fiction from Worlds of Tomorrow (anth 1964);
three If anthologies, being The If Reader (anth 1966), The Second If
Reader (anth 1967) and Worlds of If (anth 1986); Nightmare Age (anth
1970); Best Science Fiction for 1972 (anth 1972); Jupiter (anth 1973) with
Carol Pohl; Science Fiction: The Great Years (anth 1973) and Science
Fiction: The Great Years: Volume II (anth 1976), both with Carol Pohl; The
Science Fiction Roll of Honor (anth 1975); Science Fiction Discoveries
(anth 1976) with Carol Pohl; The Best of Cyril M. Kornbluth (coll 1976);
Science Fiction of the '40s (anth 1978) with Greenberg and Olander; Nebula
Winners 14 (anth 1980); The Great Science Fiction Series (anth 1980) with
Greenberg and Olander; Yesterday's Tomorrows: Favorite Stories from Forty
Years as a Science Fiction Editor (anth 1982); Tales from the Planet Earth
(anth 1986).About the author: Frederik Pohl, Merchant of Excellence: A
Working Bibliography (1989) by Gordon BENSON Jr and Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.
See also: ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION;
AUTOMATION; BLACK HOLES; CITIES; COMPUTERS; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH;
CORPSICLE; CRYONICS; CYBERNETICS; CYBORGS; DEL REY BOOKS; DIMENSIONS;
DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; DYSTOPIAS; ECONOMICS; END OF THE WORLD;
EVOLUTION; FANDOM; FASTER THAN LIGHT; GAMES AND SPORTS; GOLDEN AGE OF
SF;
GREAT AND SMALL; HISTORY IN SF; HISTORY OF SF; HUMOUR; HYPERSPACE; ISAAC
ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; LEISURE; LINGUISTICS; LIVING WORLDS;
MATHEMATICS; MONEY; NEW WAVE; NUCLEAR POWER; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM;
OUTER
PLANETS; OVERPOPULATION; PARALLEL WORLDS; PARANOIA; POLITICS; POWER
SOURCES; PSI POWERS; Julius SCHWARTZ; SF MAGAZINES; SOCIOLOGY; SPACESHIPS;
STARS; TERRAFORMING; UTOPIAS; VENUS; WEAPONS; WRITERS OF THE FUTURE
CONTEST.
POLAND
Polish sf effectively began with the publication in 1785 of the novel
Wojciech Zdarzynski, zycie i przypadki swoje opisujacy ["Wojciech
Zdarzynski, Describing his Life and Adventures"] (1785) by the Reverend
Michal Dymitr Krajewski. This describes the civilizations of the
Moon.Between then and WWII, Polish sf had, in terms of literary quality,
at least 4 major landmarks. (1) In 1804 Jan Potocki (1761-1815) published
(in French) Manuscrit trouve a Saragosse (2 vols 1804 and 1805 Russia and
1 vol 1813 France; exp 1847 as Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie Poland; cut
trans as The Saragossa Manuscript, ed Roger Caillois 1960 US). This
extraordinary work - more fantasy than sf - is a well written and witty
novel, a prolonged and vivid joke made by a worldly gentleman, a Count, at
the expense of all the superstitions of his age. The complex plot could be
seen as a series of ALTERNATE WORLDS nestling within one another like
Chinese boxes. It was filmed in Poland under the Polish title in 1965, dir
Wojciech Has, and distributed quite widely in the West as The Saragossa
Manuscript. (2) Historia przyszlos ci ["History of the Future"] (composed
1829-42; part published in French 1835; 1964) by Adam Mickiewicz
(1798-1855), unfortunately unfinished and partly lost, was done as a large
fresco of the world seen more from the cultural than from the
technological point of view. (3) The Moon trilogy by Jerzy ZUpsAWSKI
consists of Na Srebrnym Globie ["On Silver Globe"] (1901), Zwyciezca ["The

Victor"] (1908) and Stara Ziemia ["Old Earth"] (1910). This is an essay on
the birth of civilization and myth, and on myth's clash with reality,
beautifully written in the fin de siecle mood. (4) The road to modern
Polish sf was paved by the avant-garde painter and writer Stanislaw Ignacy
WITKIEWICZ in his apocalyptic novels Pozegnanie jesieni ["Farewell to
Autumn"] (1927) and Nienasycenie (1930; trans Louis Iribarne as
Insatiability 1977 US). Having seen the 1917 Revolution from inside
Russia, Witkiewicz was obsessed by the vision of "hordes of Asians"
invading Europe and destroying whatever cultural values might exist in the
future. He lived up to his philosophy and committed suicide when the Red
Army invaded Poland in Sep 1939.Polish postwar sf has had its literary
achievements, too - not only the celebrated works of Stanislaw LEM but
also the classical sf of Konrad Fialkowski, Adam Wisniewski-Snerg's cult
novel Robot (1973) and, in the 1980s, such novels by the wonderfully
inventive Wiktor Zwikiewicz as Delirium w Tharsys ["Delirium in Tharsys"]
(1986). Poland also has its GENRE-SF writers, such as Bohdan Petecki with
Strefy zerowe ["Zero Zones"] (1972).The current running through Polish sf
has really been political. Because sf provides a perfect means of
diverting attention away from drab reality into a beautiful future, it was
encouraged in the decade after WWII by Poland's communist rulers. The best
examples of such political sf are Krzysztof Borun's and Andrzej Trepka's
Zagubiona przyszlosc ["The Lost Future"] (1953), #1 in a SPACE-OPERA
trilogy, and Stanislaw Lem's early novels Astronauci ["The Astronauts"]
(1951) and Oblok Magellana ["The Magellan Nebula"] (1955). Rather later,
from the mid-1970s onwards, sf writers began to take the opposite tack.
Escaping strict censorship by using sf imagery, and with the help of a
linguistic ingenuity reminiscent of George ORWELL, they began to describe
the real world - even if at the price of incurring serious publication
problems. (Orwell was probably a direct influence on such work, as several
of his books had been published in Poland by underground publishers.) The
best examples of such works are Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski's Wir pamieci
["Whirlpool of Memory"] (1979), Maciej Parowski's Twarza ku Ziemi ["Face
to Earth"] (1981), Janusz A. Zajdel's Limes inferior (1982) and Marek
Oramus's Senni zwyciezcy ["Sleepy Victors"] (1982).Sf writers of the
younger generation are now turning to fantasy, which is more marketable,
and, because censorship no longer exists, political sf is in retreat and
looks a bit old-fashioned: the gaping hole this leaves in the Polish sf
tapestry is currently being filled by the importation (on a massive scale)
of US-UK sf by such new private publishers as Amber and Arax.Film has
never been a strong point of Polish sf. Aside from The Saragossa
Manuscript, 2 further sf films deserve attention. Fitting well into the
political-criticism-through-sf-metaphor stream, Wojna Swiatow - Nastepne
Stulecie (1982; vt The War of the Worlds-Next Century) dir Piotr Szulkin
tells of government manipulation of the media to disguise the facts of a
Martian invasion. Something of an exception to this sort of political
cinema is SEKSMISJA (1984; vt Sex Mission), a comedy dir Juliusz
Machulski.There are currently 2 monthly sf magazines in Poland. The older,
Fantastyka, has run since 1982 and has a circulation of over 120,000. Its
strong points are its fine critical essays and a good choice of Polish
authors. Fenix is the first privately owned and edited magazine; it
emerged from FANZINE origins in 1990 and now has a (growing) circulation

of about 70,000. Its selection of US-UK sf is considered the better, and
it also publishes young Polish writers. Polish FANDOM is massive and well
organized, its main activities centring on fanzines and CONVENTIONS. [KS]
POLITICAL PREDICTIONS
Science fiction writers have a mixed record as far as political
predictions are concerned.James Blish’s 1957 novel, The Frozen Year, made
a reference to President Kennedy, while C.M. Kornbluth's 1958 story,
"Theory of Rocketry," referred to President Nixon.In 1967, Thomas M. Disch
was not so prescient. The novel Camp Concentration contains a reference to
a President McNamara.
POLITICS
Most of the works which we can characterize with hindsight as PROTO
SCIENCE FICTION are political fantasies. The earnest and constructive
aspect of this endeavour is displayed in UTOPIAS, the mocking and
corrosive aspect in SATIRES. The desire to make political statements has
continued to be the main motive force in works of sf by MAINSTREAM
WRITERS, although modern works of this kind make much more frequent use of
images of DYSTOPIA than either of the traditional modes of comment.
Important subgenres of sf like the future- WAR story grew out of exercises
in political propaganda ( INVASION), and all real-world political crusades
have sparked the production of competing images of the future. All images
of the NEAR FUTURE embody political speculations, partly because of their
close continuity with the present and partly because political events are
usually a more significant agent of short-term change than scientific
DISCOVERY or technological development. There is today a thriving subgenre
of "political thrillers" - often written by sometime politicians like
Spiro T. Agnew (1918- ) and Jeffrey Archer (1940- ), or even practising
ones like Gary Hart (1936- ) and Douglas HURD, but much more elegantly
done by writers like Richard CONDON and Allen DRURY - the great majority
of whose plots are necessarily set in the near future.The principal
political debates of the 19th century are reflected in many early works of
sf, the most important being that associated with the rise of socialism.
Edward BELLAMY, William MORRIS, Jack LONDON and - in the early part of his
career - George GRIFFITH were all moved to construct images of future
socialist utopias and revolutions. H.G. WELLS, the presiding genius of UK
scientific romance, was a fervent if somewhat idiosyncratic socialist, as
was, in an even more curious way, M.P. SHIEL. Before the founding of the
SF MAGAZINES, such writers as George Allan ENGLAND followed Jack London's
lead in importing stridently anti-capitalist (or at least "anti-trust")
futuristic fables into the pulp stratum of the fiction marketplace.
Inevitably, socialist visions of the future called forth opposition in the
form of images of hideously bloody revolution and regimented dystopias.
Notable novels which combine serious political speculations with some
appreciation of the imperatives and opportunities associated with
technological progress are Bellamy's Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888),
Ignatius DONNELLY's Caesar's Column (1890), Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes
(1899), London's The Iron Heel (1907), Victor ROUSSEAU's The Messiah of
the Cylinder (1917) and Claude FARRERE's Useless Hands (1920; trans 1926).
With the passage of time the dystopian imagery associated with political

fantasies became more and more extreme, as such fantasies began to pose
more abstract questions of political philosophy and the political spectrum
was confused by the rise of fascism and the spectre of totalitarianism.
Owen GREGORY's prophetic account of the nation which might arise from the
ashes of German defeat, Meccania (1918), stands at the head of a tradition
of caricaturistic and surreal political fantasies which includes Milo
HASTINGS's City of Endless Night (1920), Yevgeny ZAMIATIN's My (trans as
We 1924), Edmund SNELL's Kontrol (1928), John KENDALL's Unborn Tomorrow
(1933), J. Leslie MITCHELL's Gay Hunter (1934), Joseph O'NEILL's Land
under England (1935), John Palmer's The Hesperides (1936), Katharine
BURDEKIN's Swastika Night (1937 as by Murray Constantine), Andrew
MARVELL's Minimum Man (1938), Ayn RAND's Anthem (1938) and P.G. CHADWICK's
The Death Guard (1939). Alongside these works appeared more modest
expressions of sour disenchantment, depicting short-sighted politicians
and their equally short-sighted supporters failing dismally to cope with
the challenges facing them; these include Rose MACAULAY's What Not (1919),
J.D. BERESFORD's Revolution (1921), Fred MACISAAC's "World Brigands"
(1928), Hilaire BELLOC's But Soft - We Are Observed (1928), Upton
SINCLAIR's Roman Holiday (1931), Harold NICOLSON's Public Faces (1932)
John GLOAG's Winter's Youth (1934) and Sinclair LEWIS's It Can't Happen
Here (1935).In stark contrast to non-genre writers, the suppliers of the
specialist sf PULP MAGAZINES paid relatively little attention to political
matters, mostly taking it for granted not only that technological progress
was the real engine of social change but that contemporary US democracy
might be subverted but would never be worthily superseded. Stanton A.
COBLENTZ's leaden satires do contain a certain amount of open-minded
political discussion, but such stories as Miles J. BREUER's "The Gostak
and the Doshes" (1930) relegated ideological disputes to literal
meaninglessness, and Breuer's and Jack WILLIAMSON's The Birth of a New
Republic (1930 AMZ Quarterly; 1981 chap) cast the interplanetary politics
of the future slavishly in the mode of the political evolution of the
USA's past ( HISTORY IN SF). Despite the conspicuously declared uninterest
of Hugo GERNSBACK (who published translations of a few German-supremacist
utopian fantasies by Otfried von Hanstein [ GERMANY] and others), events
in Europe gradually infected with anxiety the visions of the future
produced by sf writers. Paul A. CARTER's history of magazine sf, The
Creation of Tomorrow (1977), includes an excellent chapter tracking
reflections of and responses to the rise of Hitler in such stories as
Wallace WEST's "The Phantom Dictator" (1935) and Nat SCHACHNER's series
begun with "Past, Present and Future" (1937). There is a sense in which sf
has never stopped reacting to Hitler, in that ALTERNATE-WORLD stories of
what might have happened had he triumphed in WWII continue to be extremely
popular ( HITLER WINS). Norman SPINRAD's The Iron Dream (1972) suggests
that, if Hitler had become an sf writer instead of a dictator, his
sublimated dreams would have been readily accommodated within the great
traditions of SPACE OPERA and HEROIC FANTASY.WWII, in securing the defeat
of European fascism and paving the way for the Cold War, established a new
real-world context for political fantasy, but its main effect on sf was to
bring the entrenched trends rapidly to a climax in George ORWELL's
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949), which became the model for a great deal of
later fiction in which the future is imagined as a metaphorical boot

stamping on a human face forever. There is a sense in which dystopian
fiction after 1949 is merely a series of footnotes to Orwell-so much so
that it is not clear whether such works as David KARP's One (1953) and
L.P. HARTLEY's Facial Justice (1960) really qualify as political fantasies
at all, although Arthur KOESTLER's The Age of Longing (1951) and Adrian
MITCHELL's The Bodyguard (1970) clearly do. Orwellian fantasy was imported
into GENRE SF by Ray BRADBURY in FAHRENHEIT 451 (1953), and political
fantasy of a curious kind, featuring many tales of rebellion against
"perverted" political systems in which the interests of some
special-interest group have become dominant, became very popular in the
magazines of the 1950s. Because it was deemed socially insignificant, sf
could play host to political criticism of a kind which might elsewhere
have attracted the attentions of Joseph McCarthy (1909-1957) and his
Un-American Activities Committee; John W. CAMPBELL Jr's determined
affection for unorthodoxy led him to provide a home for such stories as
James BLISH's "At Death's End" (1954), whose anti-McCarthy elements were
further exaggerated when it was expanded to form part of They Shall Have
Stars (fixup 1956). On the other hand, Robert SILVERBERG has revealed that
Howard BROWNE terminated Rog PHILLIPS's career as a regular contributor to
the ZIFF-DAVIS pulps because of his reckless use of the word "communism"
in "Frontiers Beyond the Sun" (1953 as by Mallory Storm).The tradition of
HARD SF which developed in Campbell's ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION had a
conspicuous tendency towards what is now termed LIBERTARIANISM. This is
often credited to Campbell's own idiosyncrasies, including his
human-chauvinism (which caused the more conventionally liberal Isaac
ASIMOV to eliminate ALIENS from the future history mapped out in the
Foundation series) and his fascination with the merits of slavery, but
Campbell's unorthodoxy was actually quite elastic - as evidenced by the
permission which he gave to his chief Devil's Advocate of the 1960s, Mack
REYNOLDS, to challenge conventional political assumptions. It is rather
from Robert A. HEINLEIN's version of SOCIAL DARWINISM that the strident
Libertarian tradition of US hard sf stems, but there are noticeable
differences of ideological complexion and rhetorical style between the
other GOLDEN-AGE writers sometimes lumped together with him as
"right-wingers": L. Sprague DE CAMP, L. Ron HUBBARD and A.E. VAN VOGT. The
writers of the 1950s who enlisted in these ranks - most notably and most
thoughtfully Poul ANDERSON and Gordon R. DICKSON - were by no means
followers of a party line, nor were such 1960s writers as Larry NIVEN,
Jerry POURNELLE and G.C. EDMONDSON, and nor are more recently emergent
writers like James P. HOGAN and L. Neil SMITH. Extreme Libertarians are
inevitably drawn to images of the future which vividly display the
uncompromising nature of their philosophies - as can be seen in the
various writings of Ayn RAND and the work of such political philosophers
as Robert Nozick - and the clustering of such writers around the more
assertively optimistic threads of the sf tradition needs no conspiracy
theory to explain it. At least some of what passes for Libertarianism in
the works of these and other writers is not dogmatically based at all, but
rather represents a continuation of the tradition of sceptical fantasy
which grew up between the wars, taking the view that all political
institutions are likely to be manned by corrupt incompetents. The
quasi-anarchic spirit which one finds in the work of Eric Frank RUSSELL,

Philip K. DICK and many of the FUTURIANS is rooted in this ironic
tradition, as is the work of such non-genre writers as Kurt VONNEGUT Jr.
Then again, much supposedly Libertarian sf simultaneously glorifies
militarism to such an extent that the bureaucratic organizations of the
state are replaced, at least so far as the key characters are concerned,
by hyperorganized command structures in which the ethic of individual
freedom supposedly being upheld is chimerically bonded to ideals of
slavish loyalty and self-sacrificing "honour"; Niven and Pournelle's Oath
of Fealty (1981) is a particularly cleverly thought-out exercise in this
kind of doublethink. The sf writers who found themselves in the "opposite"
camp to the Libertarians when GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION published its
notorious paired ads about the USA's involvement in Vietnam ( WAR) have
produced little political rhetoric to compare with the dynamism of the
gung-ho glam-tech conquerors of space, although they have produced a good
deal of what their macho detractors might describe as "pinko
bleeding-heart fiction" lamenting the cruel injustices of a world in
danger of spoliation. Active left-wing movements, as featured in Gordon
EKLUND's All Times Possible (1974) and John SHIRLEY's Eclipse (1985),
remain rare, although the curious anarchist philosophies displayed in
Norman SPINRAD's Agent of Chaos (1967) and van Vogt's The Anarchistic
Colossus (1977) have attracted some attention from would-be
followers.Other political issues which gradually came to the fore in
post-WWII sf were sexual politics and race relations. Fantasies of sexual
politics had a long history dating back to the days of the suffragettes
and such feminist writers as Charlotte Perkins GILMAN, but serious
speculative work had largely been eclipsed by anxious fantasies about
female-dominated societies, written by males. WOMEN SF WRITERS increased
dramatically in numbers in the 1950s-60s, and began to build bridges to
the FEMINIST movement (see also WOMEN AS DEPICTED IN SCIENCE FICTION).
Futuristic fictions bearing on the problems of race relations had a fairly
similar history, serious speculations being virtually drowned out by
anxious fantasies and by the kind of unthinking racism and antisemitism
which were long rife in popular fiction of all kinds. Such (relatively)
open-minded works as Herrmann LANG's The Air Battle (1859) remain
anomalies in a 19th century dominated by the racist ideologies which found
virulent expression in King WALLACE's The Next War (1892) and Louis
TRACY's Anglo-Saxon-supremacist The Final War (1896). Tracy's worldview
was echoed in M.P. Shiel's early Yellow-Peril novel The Yellow Danger
(1898), but Shiel repented of it in such later books as the misleadingly
retitled The Dragon (1913; rev as The Yellow Peril 1929), in the same way
that he reassessed and reversed his occasional knee-jerk antisemitism in
his Messianic political fantasy The Lord of the Sea (1901). The USA
inevitably produced a considerable number of political fantasies about
Black/White relations, including thoughtful works like T. Shirby HODGE's
The White Man's Burden (1915) and George Samuel SCHUYLER's satire Black No
More (1931). As the Civil Rights movement began in the 1950s and reached
its first climactic phase in the 1960s, several notable futuristic
fantasies of race relations were produced by mainstream writers, including
A Different Drummer (1959) by William Melvin KELLEY, The Siege of Harlem
(1964) by Warren MILLER, The Spook who Sat by the Door (1969) by Sam
GREENLEE and several novels by John WILLIAMS, but such direct treatments

seemed too sensitive to most genre-magazine editors, who preferred their
writers to use aliens in parables whose arguments were conducted at a more
abstract level; the most notable exception is the series by Mack Reynolds
begun with Black Man's Burden (1961; 1972 dos), set in Africa rather than
the USA. UK sf novels bearing on racial problems include Margot BENNETT's
The Long Way Back (1954), Robert BATEMAN's When the Whites Went (1963),
John BRUNNER's The Jagged Orbit (1969) and - by far the boldest Christopher PRIEST's Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972; vt Darkening
Island US). South African political fantasies on the theme include Arthur
KEPPEL-JONES's anti-Apartheid When Smuts Goes (1947) and Garry ALLIGHAM's
pro-Apartheid Verwoerd - The End (1961). In general, though, as the
real-world problems become ever more urgent, the tendency of genre sf has
been to ignore the issue or sanctimoniously to take for granted its
eventual disappearance.Although there are some interesting sarcastic
fantasies about future election campaigns - e.g., William TENN's "Null-P"
(1951) and "The Masculinist Revolt" (1965), Arthur T. HADLEY's The Joy
Wagon (1958) and Gordon Eklund's The Eclipse of Dawn (1971) sophisticated political fantasy remains a rarity in genre sf. Reynolds's
efforts along those lines, heroic after their fashion, are muddled, and
bogged down by their fusion with the crude melodramatics and uneasy comedy
which he found necessary to include to secure publication. A certain
transcendence of the expectations of commercially minded editors is a
necessary prerequisite to the production of truly serious sf, and it is
arguable that the only writer with a keen interest in politics yet to have
achieved it is Ursula K. LE GUIN, whose most sustained essay in earnest
political fantasy is The Dispossessed (1974). The practical politics of
coping with the problems which are urgent today and steadily getting more
so are rarely addressed in sf, although there are noble exceptions,
including Frederik POHL's The Years of the City (fixup 1984). The
situation has, of course, been even worse in Eastern Europe, where the
content of popular fiction was - until very recently - determined by
diktat. Political discourse in almost all translated sf from pre-Yeltsin
RUSSIA treads the party line dutifully, if not always wholeheartedly; the
most interesting partial exception is the work of the brothers STRUGATSKI.
Dissident fiction which contrived to reach the West is, of course, much
more pointed; a notable example is 1985 (1983) by Gyorgy Dalos, which
replays the post-WWII history of Hungary as a sequel to Orwell's NINETEEN
EIGHTY-FOUR. It will be interesting to see what kinds of sf emerge from
post-communist Eastern Europe during the next few years. [PN/BS]
POLLACK, RACHEL (GRACE)
(1945- ) US writer, resident in the Netherlands 1973-90. She published
her first sf story with NW in 1972, "Pandora's Bust" as by Richard A.
Pollack. Her first novel, Golden Vanity (1980 US), was an ornate SPACE
OPERA whose large cast of aliens ransacks a venal Earth in search of a
female runaway. Alqua Dreams (1987 US) is a rather flat drama of ontology
set on an alien planet; the human protagonist, faced with the obdurate
Platonism of the inhabitants, must argue METAPHYSICS with them in an
attempt to suggest that the sensory world is sufficiently "real" for them
to sell him the rare mineral he needs. The background is voluminously
drawn, but the narrative is sluggish. In RP's third novel, Unquenchable

Fire (1988 UK), winner of the ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD for 1989, a similarly
intractable narrative - the book is constructed so that a long flashback
reiterates material already delivered - more closely models the situation
it depicts. In the ALTERNATE-WORLD USA of the tale, shamanism actually
works ( MAGIC); and a lovingly described bureaucracy of shamans, revering
the Founders who brought them to power generations earlier, are actually
able to ask the Earth's roots for energy. The protagonist of the book,
finding that her unwilled pregnancy is destined to make her the mother of
a new revitalizing shaman, resists her role fiercely; the resume of her
life, as given in flashback, only intensifies the sense of her deep
stubborness; the sequel, Temporary Agency (1994 UK), reconfigures some of
the same material. Throughout, RP's portrait of a radical different but
alarmingly similar USA is densely drawn, and her depiction of life in an
alternate Poughkeepsie is frequently hilarious. Several stories - like
"The Protector" (1986 Interzone) - depict similarly transformed universes.
An anthology of original stories, Tarot Tales (anth 1989 UK) with Caitlin
Matthews, carries RP's professional interest in the Tarot (she has
published nonfiction in the field) into fiction; each contributor used
OULIPO techniques to extract story ideas from a Tarot pack. From issue 64
to its demise at the end of 1994 with issue 87, she wrote Doom Patrol for
DC COMICS. RP's subject matter and manner are narrow in their extent,
compellingly intense in their focus. [JC]See also: PSEUDO-SCIENCE.
POLLOCK, WALTER HERRIES
Walter BESANT; Andrew LANG.
POLLUTION
Early sf stories dealing with catastrophes brought about by pollution of
the environment ( ECOLOGY) concentrate on the perils of smog; they include
W. Delisle HAY's The Doom of the Great City (1880) and Robert BARR's "The
Doom of London" (1892). The pollutant effects of industrial waste were
very familiar in the 19th-century UK: air pollution had shaped the city of
London (the prevailing wind blows east and the upper strata of the
population moved steadily west) and slag defaced England's northern
counties to the extent that Yorkshiremen coined a proverb: "Where there's
muck, there's brass [money]." It is hardly surprising that England
produced the one enduring 19th-century image of civilization as pollution,
in Richard JEFFERIES's After London (1885). The image of city life
presented in the socially conscious, traditional 19th-century novel, as by
Charles DICKENS, makes much of the foulness of city dirt, but the problem
was generally seen as easily correctable. The notion that environmental
pollution might be a serious threat in the future is not evident in early
sf, where it tends to be assumed that progress will sweep the dirt away.
Virtually all utopian CITIES are remarkable for their cleanliness, and it
seemed reasonable to one inhabitant of a northern industrial city, signing
himself "A Disciple" (of H.G. WELLS), to borrow the famous TIME MACHINE in
order to see The Coming Era, or Leeds Beatified (1900). This optimism
seems rather ironic today.By the end of the 1950s, serious attention had
been given in sf to only one kind of pollution: radioactive waste. The
effects of the residual radiation of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions
and the tests at Bikini atoll were well known, and the destruction of the

environment by radiation poisoning became one of the most horrifying
aspects of the post-atomic- WAR scenario ( HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; MUTANTS).
These stories probably helped bring about an increased sensitivity to the
idea of insidious poisons in the environment, and it was not long before
awareness grew of more commonplace dangers: arsenic in wallpaper, lead in
water pipes, etc. The first sf cautionary tales about society's general
philosophy of waste disposal began to appear in the 1950s. C.M.
KORNBLUTH's "Shark Ship" (1958) is an extreme example; and James WHITE's
story of the hazards of orbital garbage, "Deadly Litter" (1960), has been
transformed by the passage of time into a neat parable. It was in the
early 1960s, however, that the problem was brought very sharply into
focus, largely due to the publication of Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel
Carson (1907-1964), which argued that pollution of a radically new type
had begun, involving nonbiodegradable substances which accumulated in
living matter to fatal concentrations. DDT, once widely used as an
insecticide, was one of the main targets of attack in Carson's book; PBB,
a compound responsible for poisoning large numbers of cattle and some
people in Michigan, belongs to the same family of compounds; the
fluorocarbons more recently blamed for the depletion of the ozone layer
are closely related.Awareness of these threats was rapidly absorbed into
sf, and virtually overnight became a standard feature of NEAR-FUTURE
scenarios. A lurid early dramatization of the issue is The Clone (1965) by
Theodore L. THOMAS and Kate WILHELM, a horror story about pollutants which
spontaneously generate life to become an omnivorous, amorphous monster. A
more realistic treatment of some relevant issues is MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM!
(1966) by Harry HARRISON, which also deals with OVERPOPULATION. Similarly
alarmist stories include James BLISH's "We All Die Naked" (1969), John
BRUNNER's The Sheep Look Up (1972), Philip WYLIE's Los Angeles: A.D. 2017
(1971) and The End of the Dream (1972), Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's "The Big Space
Fuck" (1972), Andrew J. OFFUTT's The Castle Keeps (1972) and Kit PEDLER's
and Gerry DAVIS's Brainrack (1974). In more recent times pollution has
come to be taken so much for granted that it is rarely addressed as an
issue in itself, instead forming a constant background element in almost
all near-future extrapolations, whether they aspire to be DYSTOPIAN or
merely realistic; it is particularly evident in Paul THEROUX's O-Zone
(1986) and David BRIN's Earth (1990). The rapidity with which the subject
became familiar is evident in the early appearance of such works of SATIRE
as Charles PLATT's Garbage World (1967) and Norman SPINRAD's "The Lost
Continent" (1970). More thoughtful and sophisticated treatments include
The Thinking Seat (1970) by Peter TATE and "King's Harvest" (1972) by
Gardner DOZOIS. It is widely felt that the biggest danger is complacency-a
point made by the effective "To Walk with Thunder" (1973) by Dean
MCLAUGHLIN, in which the hero fights to suppress a device that will
guarantee clean air inside the home, on the grounds that it would become
an industrial carte blanche to pollute the atmosphere irredeemably.
Pollution: Omnibus (anth 1971), issued to cash in on the height of the
scare, contains "Shark Ship", MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM! and the dubiously
relevant CITY (fixup 1952) by Clifford D. SIMAK. The Ruins of Earth (anth
1971) ed Thomas M. DISCH is another theme anthology with a number of
relevant stories. [BS]

POMERLEAU, LUC
(1955- ) French-speaking Canadian physics graduate, technical translator,
editor of the French-language Quebec sf magazine SOLARIS since 1986, and
sf and comics critic. He wrote the section on Francophone sf in this
encyclopedia's entry on CANADA. [PN]
POPE, GUSTAVUS W.
(? -? ) US writer and physician, in whose 2 sf novels, Romances of the
Planets, No. 1: Journey to Mars (1894) and Romances of the Planets, No. 2:
Journey to Venus (1895), a US officer visits an advanced MARS (falling in
love with a princess) and a primitive VENUS (shooting, as E.F. BLEILER has
noted, anything that moves). Introducing a reprint edition of the first
book, Sam MOSKOWITZ noted some adumbrations of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's
Barsoom. [JC] See also: HISTORY OF SF.
POPKES, STEVEN
(1952- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "A Capella Blues" for
IASFM in 1982. Caliban Landing (1987) interestingly depicts a human
expedition to map a new planet (Caliban)-and the complex consequences of
its landing there-from the viewpoint of an ALIEN female, who becomes
embroiled in the humans' heated interactions. After a fairly conventional
start, the tale expands into a complex exploration of the personalities
thus thrust together. [JC]Other work: Slow Lightning (1991 dos).
POPOV, ALEXANDER
(1954- ) Bulgarian sf writer and publisher who has won awards for his
short fiction, some written under the pseudonym Al Vickers, some
translated into foreign languages. His sf novel Provinzia Pet ["Province
Five"] as by Al Vickers was contracted in 1991 for publication in Russian
translation in Russia. His recently established Gemini publishing house
began, in 1991, to publish a fortnightly sf magazine, Drugi Svetove
["Other Worlds"]. AP wrote this encyclopedia's entry on BULGARIA. [PN]
POPULAR FICTION CO.
WEIRD TALES.
POPULAR MAGAZINE, THE
US PULP MAGAZINE published by STREET ?
others. Appeared monthly from Nov 1903, semi-monthly from 1 Oct 1909,
weekly from 24 Sep 1927, semi-monthly from 7 July 1928, and monthly
Feb-Sep 1931. Merged with Complete Stories from Oct 1931.TPM, which was in
competition with the Frank A. MUNSEY chain, regularly published fantasy
and sf. Among its noteworthy contributions to the genre were stories in
the Craig Kennedy series by Arthur B. REEVE, future- WAR stories by Edwin
BALMER and the serialization of Ayesha (1905; 1905) by H. Rider HAGGARD.
Other contributors included John Buchan (1815-1940), John COLLIER, Roy
NORTON, Sax ROHMER and Edgar WALLACE. [JE]
POPULAR SCIENCE FICTION
Australian thin (64pp) DIGEST-size magazine. 8 numbered issues in all:
#1-#6 1953-5, published by Frew Publications, Sydney, plus 2, numbered NEW
SERIES 1 and 2, 1967, published by Page Publications, NSW; no eds named.
The Frew series printed some US reprints and also original Australian and

US material; the Page series reprinted #4 and #6 of the Frew publications.
A companion magazine, similarly poor, was FUTURE SCIENCE FICTION. [FHP/PN]
POPULATION EXPLOSION
OVERPOPULATION.
PORGES, ARTHUR
(1915- ) US writer and teacher of mathematics who began publishing sf
with "The Rats" for Man's World in 1951, and since then has published
about 70 stories - some as Peter Arthur and some as Pat Rogers - without
releasing any of them in book collections. He is, however, a strong and
inventive writer, especially of fantasy. He is best known for "The Fly"
(1952), not to be confused with George LANGELAAN's tale, and "The Ruum"
(1953).AP's brother, Irwin Porges (1909- ), who collaborated with him on
at least 1 story, wrote Edgar Allan Poe (1963) and Edgar Rice Burroughs:
The Man who Created Tarzan (1975). [JC]
PORTAL, ELLIS
Bruce POWE.
PORTER, ANDREW (IAN)
(1946- ) US editor and publisher, active in FANDOMsince the 1960s, who
founded and ran the influential ALGOL, for which he won a 1974 HUGO, as
well as its longer-lived (still current) companion, SCIENCE FICTION
CHRONICLE. AP also ed anon 2 critical texts, Exploring Cordwainer Smith
(anth 1975 chap) and Experiment Perilous: Three Essays on Science Fiction
(anth 1976 chap), and ed The Book of Ellison (anth 1978) - described by
Harlan ELLISON as "unauthorized". [JC]
PORTNOY, HOWARD N.
(1946- ) US writer and teacher whose Hot Rain (1977) seems to start off
as a horror fantasy about apparently supernatural bolts of lightning.
Eventually, however, a pseudo-scientific explanation is found in a secret
military project. [JC]
POSITRONIC ROBOTS
Because Isaac ASIMOV's ROBOT stories are so celebrated, this term is one
of the best known in the genre; it is not, however, a generally used item
of sf TERMINOLOGY, few writers having had the cheek to borrow the idea
from its inventor - although Data, the android in STAR TREK: THE NEXT
GENERATION, is described as having a positronic brain. The positron is the
antiparticle of the electron ( ANTIMATTER; PHYSICS); the idea of (highly
unstable) positrons being suitable material for the construction of an
artificial brain with "enforced calculated neuronic paths" was sheer
double-talk, as Asimov was the first to admit. [PN]
POSTAL PUBLICATIONS
MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES.
POST-DISASTER AND POST-HOLOCAUST STORIES
HOLOCAUST AND AFTER.
POSTMODERNISM AND SF
"Modernism" is a useful umbrella term for the art that followed the

collapse of Romanticism, especially in the first half of the 20th century,
but Postmodernism is not simply its more recent replacement. In fact, most
contemporary serious writing remains insistently Modernist. The term
"Postmodernism" implies a theory of both writing and the world, and a
shift in emphasis and method.In literature, Postmodernism is usually held
to imply showy playfulness, genre-bending, and denial of neat aesthetic or
moral wrap-up; above all, writing that knows or even struts itself as
writing, rather than as innocent portrayal. John BARTH, Jorge Luis BORGES,
Christine BROOKE-ROSE, Italo CALVINO, Angela CARTER, Don DELILLO, Philip
K. DICK, Umberto ECO, Raymond Federman and Thomas PYNCHON are all
Postmodernists whose inventions edge close to sf. Within the genre one
might name J.G. BALLARD, Samuel R. DELANY, William GIBSON, Michael
MOORCOCK, Rudy RUCKER, John T. SLADEK, Kurt VONNEGUT Jr, Robert Anton
WILSON, Joanna RUSS and Ian WATSON as well as Norman SPINRAD (sometimes),
Lucius SHEPARD (maybe) and even A.E. VAN VOGT (ahead of his time). Sheer
novelty, or even quality, are insufficient to qualify as Postmodernists
such writers as Brian W. ALDISS, Thomas M. DISCH, Gene WOLFE and the early
Roger ZELAZNY - exemplary sf Modernists all, but not Postmodernists. Such
catalogues, however, may miss a deeper point.Brian McHale, in
Postmodernist Fiction (1987), sees Postmodernism as defined by its focus,
as ontological rather than epistemological. That is, where Modernism
focuses upon "knowing" and its limits, including what we know about others
and ourselves as subjects, Postmodernism by contrast asks about "being",
the worlds the subject inhabits; it is about objects rather than subjects.
This shift reflects a realization that the world of human experience is
multiple and open-ended. The Postmodern condition has an analogy in
quantum theory ( PHYSICS), where phenomena are modelled by abstract waves
in many superposed states, collapsing to a single value or "reality" only
in the act of observation.Contemporary sf undoubtedly intersects the
Postmodernism of mainstream literature, especially when it follows the
kinds of strategy pioneered by Delany in such self-reflexive texts as,
perhaps, DHALGREN (1975) and, definitely, Triton (1976). For McHale, sf is
"perhaps the ontological genre par excellence. We can think of science
fiction as Postmodernism's noncanonized or 'low art' double, its
sister-genre in the same sense that the popular detective thriller is
Modernism's sister-genre." Sf is, of all the genres, the one that
constructs "realities" as a matter of course.Perhaps the most influential
critical account is the Marxist Fredric Jameson's. In "Postmodernism, or
the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (July/Aug 1984 New Left Review), he
itemizes its stigmata. He finds "a flatness or depthlessness" to be
"perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the Postmodernisms", and also a
waning of feeling linked to an alleged loss of people's sense of
themselves as individuals, and the consequent replacement of "affect"
(especially alienated angst) with "a peculiar kind of euphoria"; the end
of personal style and a sense of history (and memory) and their
replacement by pastiche (not parody, but the transcoding of Modernist
styles into jargon, badges and other decorations) and nostalgia; a
schizophrenic fragmentation of artistic texts, marked especially by
collage; and, most of all, the "hysterical sublime", in which the alien or
"other" surpasses our power to represent it and pitches us into a sort of
Gothic rapture (see also BIG DUMB OBJECTS; SENSE OF WONDER). All of these

qualities often characterize not only the arguably Postmodern environment
in which we live but also sf in particular, which Jameson himself has
recognized in his many essays on sf topics in SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES. His
theorizing is borrowed explicitly and persuasively for sf by Vivian
SOBCHACK in the last chapter of her Screening Space: The American Science
Fiction Film (1987), which projects a "postfuturism".Jameson suggests
specifically that today's information networks "afford us some glimpse
into a post-modern or technological sublime", which is perhaps what we
find in the VIRTUAL REALITIES of the CYBERPUNK writers, where simulation
and reality dissolve into one another. Indeed, Jameson later claimed in
Postmodernism (1991) that cyberpunk was "the supreme literary expression
if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself".Innovative sf
writers have adopted several of the expansive possibilities of
metafiction, MAGIC REALISM and poststructuralist FABULATION (which see for
further discussion of issues raised in this entry) in general; but more
specific both to sf and other Postmodernisms is a comparable adoption of
the language of scientific discourse rather than that of traditional
literature, and this too tends to the abolition of Modernism's
subjectivity - a common feature in late cyberpunk, as in Michael
SWANWICK's Vacuum Flowers (1987). In their emphasis on the technological
surround, on the dense new lexicons bursting up especially from the
consumer-oriented market productivity of post-industrial science, both sf
and Postmodernism give a privileged position to outward context, code and
world rather than to a poetic inward "message". They stress object over
subject, ways of being over ways of knowing. The Universe itself becomes a
text, open to endless interpretation and rewriting.Two generalizing texts
about Postmodernism, neither specifically about sf, are The Postmodern
Condition (1979) by Jean-Francois Lyotard and the weird The Postmodern
Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics (1986) by Arthur Kroker
and David Cook. A book relating Postmodernism in general to sf
specifically is the unevenly useful Postmodern Fiction: A
Bio-Bibliographical Guide (anth 1986) ed Larry McCaffery (1946- ).
Alternate Worlds: A Study of Postmodern Antirealistic American Fiction
(1990) by John Kuehl discusses many Postmodern authors of marginal,
non-genre sf. A good introduction from several perspectives can be found
in the special Postmodernism number of JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE
ARTS vol 1 #4 (1988). The Postmodernism issue of Science-Fiction Studies
(Nov 1991) has translations of essays on simulacra and on Ballard by the
French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, an important theoretician in this
area, along with other interesting material including Ballard's enjoyably
intemperate response. Also illuminating is Tom Moylan's Demand the
Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (1986 UK). [DB]
POTOCKI, JAN
[r] POLAND.
POTTER, ROBERT
(1831-? ) Australian author and clergyman; he died before 1912. His novel
The Germ Growers: An Australian Story of Adventure and Mystery (1892; vt
The Germ Growers: The Strange Adventures of Robert Easterley and John
Wilbraham 1892 UK) was published in AUSTRALIA as by Robert Easterley and

John Wilbraham, the names of the protagonists, but in the UK as "edited
by" RP. A race of discarnate beings, denizens of the interplanetary
"ether" capable of assuming human form, invades Earth and sets up
beachheads where they cultivate plague germs to be used on humanity; one
beachhead is discovered in the Australian outback, with an ALIEN who calls
himself Davelli in charge, and the adventures begin. At the end another
space dweller called Leafar (i.e., Rafael) saves the day. This alienINVASION story antedates H.G. WELLS's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898) by 6
years, but the element of Christian allegory (fallen angels confronted by
a good angel) leaves its sf potential not fully realized. Nonetheless, the
evil experiments in the chemical mutation of bacteria and the electric
flying machines are early GENRE SF in style. [PN]
POURNELLE, JERRY E(UGENE)
(1933- ) US writer with an undergraduate degree in engineering and PhDs
from the University of Washington in psychology (1960) and political
science (1964). He was employed for 15 years in the US space programme,
working for both government and private firms, and at one time was a
political campaign manager. Before entering sf, JP wrote some technical
nonfiction and some fiction, occasionally using pseudonyms and house
names. His first books were a nonfiction text, The Strategy of Technology
(1970) with Stefan T. Possony, and two non-sf novels as by Wade Curtis:
Red Heroin (1969; 1985 as JEP) and Red Dragon (1971; 1985 as JEP); he used
the Curtis name also for a few stories in ASF, though his first sf story,
"Peace with Honor", appeared in 1971 under his own name.This story forms
part of JEP's most extended series, the CoDominium sequence, earlier parts
of which are named after their chief military protagonist, a cunning,
honourable mercenary and military genius named Falkenberg who, in a period
of civilian stupidity and venality (it is a sort of period often depicted
in JP's work), conspires with the CoDominium military force to maintain a
human presence in those worlds already colonized by mankind. He appears in
West of Honor (1976 Canada) and The Mercenary (fixup 1977), the latter
book reworking "Peace with Honor" and other stories - both vols being
assembled as Falkenberg's Legion (omni 1990) - and in Prince of
Mercenaries (fixup 1989),Go Tell the Spartans (1991) and Prince of Sparta
(1993), both with S.M. STIRLING. Set considerably later in the CoDominium
world - after the rise and fall of a first Empire of Man, an interregnum,
and the birth of the Second Empire - A Spaceship for the King (1973; exp
vt King David's Spaceship 1981) also features a tough military genius,
whose resemblance to Falkenberg is obviously of thematic importance, for
JP argues implicitly in the sequence that civilization can be sustained
only through a hierarchical structuring of society which - perhaps rather
magically - manages to avoid bureaucratic sclerosis, and through the
maintenance of such military virtues as honour and loyalty. These
arguments are most clearly on view in the series' climax, THE MOTE IN
GOD'S EYE (1974) with Larry NIVEN, set in a period when the CoDominium has
evolved into a full-blown GALACTIC EMPIRE with all the trappings. The
fascinating ALIENS depicted in that novel reflect his collaborator's
conceptual ingenuity as clearly as the human Empire reflects JP's
sustained fictional argument for that kind of solution to the problems of
just government. The sequel, The Gripping Hand (1993; vt The Moat Around

Murcheson's Eyes 1993 UK), lacks the thrusting innovativeness of the first
volume. The more recent War World sequence of SHARED-WORLD anthologies War World, Volume 1: The Burning Eye * (anth 1988) with John F. CARR and
Roland GREEN, #2: Death's Head Rebellion * (anth 1990) with Carr and
Green, #3: Sauron Dominion * (anth 1991) with Carr alone, #5: Blood Feuds*
(anth 1992), #6: Blood Vengeance *(anth 1994) and #8: Invasion *(anth
1994) - carries the CoDominium concept into broader waters, with a
prequel, #4: Codominium: Revolt on War World * (anth 1992) with Carr,
setting the stage.After THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE, JEP collaborated with Niven
on several further novels, all singletons and most extremely successful in
the marketplace (for details see Larry NIVEN). They include Inferno
(1976), Lucifer's Hammer (1977), Oath of Fealty (1981), which rewrites
CoDominium feudalism in mundane - indeed, suburbanized - terms, Footfall
(1985), The Legacy of Heorot (1987 UK), with Niven and Steven BARNES, and
Fallen Angels (1991), with Niven and Michael FLYNN. Political subtexts always evident in both main collaborators' solo work - tend in their joint
efforts to surface rather more frequently, to the discomfort of some
readers, especially those unaccustomed to the singularly narrow range of
political discourse in the USA (though within that narrow range its
expression is singularly open); other readers find the books refreshingly
"robust" ( POLITICS).Most of JEP's solo work not devoted to the CoDominium
also focuses on issues of WAR and the decorums and tactics of waging war.
A second, shorter and more pessimistic series, the Laurie Jo Hansen
sequence, substitutes corporate warfare for military/political conflict:
High Justice (coll of linked stories 1977) and Exiled to Glory (1978). The
Janissaries sequence - Janissaries (1979), Janissaries: Clan and Crown
(1983) with Roland Green and Janissaries 3: Storms of Victory (1987),
again with Green - returns to explicit warfare, describing a mercenary
leader's efforts to unify the planet to which he and his soldiers have
been transplanted. JEP also edited, with John F. Carr (not always
credited), the There Will be War sequence of military anthologies: There
Will be War (anth 1983), Vol II: Men of War (anth 1984), Vol III: Blood
and Iron (anth 1984), Vol IV: Day of the Tyrant (anth 1985), Vol V:
Warrior (anth 1986), Vol VI: Guns of Darkness (anth 1987), Vol VII: Call
to Battle (anth 1988), Vol VIII: Armageddon! (anth 1989) and Vol IX: After
Armageddon (anth 1990).JEP was first recipient of the JOHN W. CAMPBELL
AWARD for Best New Writer in 1973, and very rapidly established himself as
a dominant creator of the politically conservative-libertarian HARD-SF
tale. His military sf has shaped that subgenre as well, though it would be
unfair to blame him for the excesses of his imitators. His nonfiction,
too, has been notable for its engaging clarity, its constant presentation
of political agendas, and its eagerness to convey knowledge. A sense of
deep cultural pessimism, though countered by explicit avowals of
LIBERTARIAN hopefulness, pervades and - for many readers - humanizes his
work. [JC]Other works: Escape from the Planet of the Apes * (1974), a film
tie ( ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES); Birth of Fire (1976
Canada).Nonfiction: That Buck Rogers Stuff (coll 1977); A Step Farther Out
(coll 1979); Mutual Assured Survival: A Space-Age Solution to Nuclear
Annihilation (1984) with Dean ING; The User's Guide to Small Computers
(1984); Adventures in Microland (1986).As Editor: 2020 Vision (anth 1974);
Black Holes (anth 1978) with John F. Carr (here, and occasionally

elsewhere, uncredited); The Endless Frontier (anth 1979), The Endless
Frontier, Volume 2 (anth 1985) and Cities in Space (anth 1991), all with
Carr; The Survival of Freedom (anth 1981) with Carr; Nebula Award Stories
Sixteen (anth 1982); The Science Fiction Yearbook (anth 1985) with Carr;
the FAR FRONTIERS original anthology series, all with James BAEN, Far
Frontiers (anth 1985), Vol II (anth 1985), Vol III (anth 1985), Vol IV
(anth 1986), Vol V (anth 1986), Vol VI (anth 1986) and Vol VII (anth
1986); the Imperial Stars reprint anthologies with Carr, Imperial Stars,
Vol 1: The Stars at War (anth 1986), Vol 2: Republic and Empire (anth
1987) and Vol 3: the Crash of Empire (anth 1989).See also: CITIES;
COMMUNICATIONS; DESTINIES; DISASTER; ECONOMICS; ESCHATOLOGY; GALAXY
SCIENCE FICTION; GODS AND DEMONS; INVASION; LIBERTARIAN SF; MYTHOLOGY;
NUCLEAR POWER; OUTER PLANETS; OVERPOPULATION; SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS
OF
AMERICA; SOCIAL DARWINISM; SPACESHIPS; STARS; UTOPIAS.
POWE, BRUCE
(1925- ) Canadian writer whose sf novels concentrate on political
disorders, a theme very common to post-WWII writers from his country.
Killing Ground: The Canadian Civil War (1968), as Ellis Portal, sets its
fatal conflict in the NEAR FUTURE. The Last Days of the American Empire
(1974) more far-rangingly sets its conflicts in the 21st century, when a
North American hegemony is threated by both Europe and Africa. [JC]
POWELL, SONNY
[s] Alfred BESTER.
POWER, THE
Film (1968). Galaxy/MGM. Prod George PAL. Dir Pal, Byron HASKIN, starring
George Hamilton, Suzanne Pleshette, Nehemiah Persoff, Michael Rennie.
Screenplay John Gay, based on The Power (1956) by Frank M. ROBINSON. 109
mins. Colour.Without the spectacular special effects of Pal's earlier sf
films, TP concentrates instead on suspenseful plotting and the clever
investing of apparently ordinary situations with a sense of menace,
coming-with considerable success - as close to film noir as Pal ever
approached. It tells of a MUTANT supermind VILLAIN, masquerading as an
ordinary human, who is eliminating, piecemeal, a group of scientists who
suspect his existence. One (Hamilton) survives not only murder attempts
but also efforts to make him a non-person, all records of his past being
deleted one by one. The reason for his survival, as he himself finally
learns, is that he too is a mutant: everybody's favorite cliche in pulp-sf
yarns about PSI POWERS. The film ends with a battle of wills between the
two superminds - a literally heart-stopping event. The interesting script
and taut direction led critic John BAXTER to call it "one of the finest of
all sf films". It is certainly, aside from WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953), Pal's
best sf production. [PN/JB]
POWERS, J.L.
John S. GLASBY.
POWERS, RICHARD M.
(1921- ) US illustrator. Born in Chicago, he studied in several art
schools in that area before and after WWII. He began work in sf

ILLUSTRATIONno later than 1950 - an early abstract RMP cover being for
Isaac ASIMOV's Pebble in the Sky (1950) - for DOUBLEDAYwhere he also did
mysteries and Westerns, and also with 2 1952 covers for Gal. When Ian
Ballantine founded BALLANTINE BOOKS in 1952 he approached RMP to do covers
for him. Although some of his early work there was representational (some
of the early Doubleday work had been abstract), RMP soon - with the cover
for Arthur C. CLARKE's CHILDHOOD'S END (1953) - adopted a Surrealist style
(much influenced by Yves Tanguy [1900-1955] and Joan Miro [1893-1983])
unique in sf; it became the trademark of Ballantine's 1950s sf. RMP's
glowing and sometimes whimsical paintings are full of amorphous shapes,
floating in space or over surreal landscapes, and have been enormously
influential in sf illustration. He did a little more magazine-cover work,
but most of his prolific sf cover illustration - he worked in other fields
as well, including children's books - was for books, for Ballantine,
Pocket Books, Berkley Books, MacFadden, Dell and others. After his first
wife's death he dropped most of his commercial work during the 1960s, then
returned in the 1970s, not quite so prolifically but as forcefully as
ever. He has had many exhibitions, in New York's Rehn Gallery and
elsewhere; his work commands as much respect outside sf as in it. With
RMP's work the packaging of sf could be said to have come of age. Covers
no longer required glamorous space girls or technological hardware, and
Surrealism captured sf's disturbing essence just as strongly as ray-guns
or monsters. A portfolio is Spacetimewarp Paintings(1983). [PN/JG]
POWERS, TIM(OTHY)
(1952- ) US writer who began publishing sf with The Skies Discrowned
(1976 Canada as Timothy Powers; rev vt Forsake the Sky 1986 as TP), a
fantasy-tinged sf adventure much influenced - TP stated in his
introduction to the revised version - by the work of Rafael Sabatini
(1875-1950). Epitaph in Rust (1976 Canada as Timothy Powers; text
restored, vt An Epitaph in Rust 1989 as TP) somewhat more vividly sets the
adventures of its protagonist, a reluctant monk, in a post- HOLOCAUST
California. Already some features typical of the mature TP novel were
taking shape: protagonists who have been lamed by symbolic wounds but who
are depicted with a sustaining dark geniality; plots which mix genres with
elegant facility but without bleaching out or calling into philosophical
question the various worlds which are flung together (so that TP cannot be
described as an author of FABULATIONS - differing in this from his
colleague and sometime collaborator, James P. BLAYLOCK); and settings
described with florid clarity and great devotion to detail. But the first
2 tales - written as they were for LASER BOOKS - only hinted at these
riches; it was not until his third novel, The Drawing of the Dark (1979),
an outright FANTASY, that TP began clearly to demonstrate his complex
gifts. The title refers to the drawing of a beer which has been brewed in
one location - atop the grave of Finn Mac Cool - for several thousand
years, and which must be drawn by Merlin in the middle of the 16th century
to allow a reborn Fisher King (and the protagonist, who is an avatar of
Arthur himself) to save Europe from the Turks. Vienna is vividly depicted;
the story, told in a slangy but unmocking manner, is gripping.THE ANUBIS
GATES (1983; rev 1984 UK), which won the 1984 PHILIP K. DICK MEMORIAL
AWARD and is a central example of STEAMPUNK, may be the easiest of all

TP's books to admire, though it is less daunting in scope than his later
work. While tracing the career and work of early-Victorian poet William
Ashbless - both TP and James P. Blaylock have written "Ashbless" poems,
including "Offering the Bicentennial Edition of the Complete Twelve Hours
of the Night" (1985 broadsheet) by both authors - the soon-to-be-wounded
protagonist Brendan Doyle is sent by TIME TRAVEL to the London of 1810,
where he is trapped, and the plot thickens with virtuoso speed; Egyptian
MAGIC (intricately described in terms of the precise techniques necessary
to operate it) intersects with a compulsive and feverish vision of the
underground life of the great city (patently derived from the work of
Charles DICKENS), while haunted MONSTERS roam the aisles of the city and
Doyle ricochets backwards through time and forwards into the body of
Ashbless, whom he becomes. Fantasy, sf, horror and historical fiction all
marry here with an ease which seems entirely natural.TP's next novel,
Dinner at Deviant's Palace (1985), which also won the Dick Award, marked a
partial return to the comparative simplicities of his first work, though
its use of post-holocaust California was markedly less genre-bound than
that of Epitaph in Rust, especially in its protagonists' re-enactment of
the Orpheus and Eurydice legend, and in the confrontation with an ALIEN,
who is both a fake MESSIAH and Lord of the Underworld. On Stranger Tides
(1987) is a hugely enriched pirate yarn, set in an ALTERNATE-WORLD 18th
century and concerning (in part) a search for IMMORTALITY. The Stress of
Her Regard (1989), possibly TP's most sustained single novel, is set in
the early 19th century of THE ANUBIS GATES, focusing not only on Byron
(who appears in the earlier book) but on Percy Shelley and Mary SHELLEY
and John Keats as well, in a story involving lamiae and vampires (
SUPERNATURAL CREATURES), culminating in the sf-like revelation that
non-carbon-based forms of life have survived and are the secret masters of
the Austrian Empire. Last Call (1992) is a complex contemporary fantasy
novel in which Bugsy Siegel is one of a series of Fisher Kings; its
protagonist must avoid being sacrificed in a ritual of succession.Though
his fertility of invention occasionally (as often with Blaylock) impedes
the flow of story, TP is at heart a storyteller, and ruthlessly shapes his
material into narrative form. The result is one of the few genuinely
original bodies of work in the modern sf/fantasy field. [JC]Other works:
Night Moves (1986 chap); The Way Down the Hill (1986 chap).About the
author: A Checklist of Tim Powers (1991 chap) by Tom Joyce and Christopher
P. STEPHENS.See also: CLICHES; GOTHIC SF; HEROES; RECURSIVE SF; WRITERS OF
THE FUTURE CONTEST.
POWER SOURCES
We live in an age of imminent resources crisis, anxiously anticipating
the depletion of fossil-fuel reserves even while we become reluctant to
rely on NUCLEAR POWER because of the POLLUTION problems caused by
radioactive wastes. New options rely either on discoveries not yet made the development of nuclear-fusion reactors, or of more efficient ways to
convert solar energy into electricity - or on a political will which
governments of all persuasions seem too short-sighted to exercise, as with
tidal and wind power. There was, however, little trace of such anxieties
in sf published before public concern began to grow; the future scenarios
envisaged by early sf writers frequently assumed our energy resources to

be potentially infinite.For most of human history, MACHINES were worked by
three basic power sources: wind, water and muscle. For millennia people
used fire as a source of heat and an agent of physical and chemical change
without learning how to harness it as an energy source in mechanical work;
then the invention of the steam engine precipitated the Industrial
Revolution. Sf writers, following in the tracks of countless optimists who
had tried to sidestep the problem by inventing "perpetual-motion
machines", were only too ready to imagine future revolutions of similarly
awesome scope. Electricity was often viewed as a quasimagical animating
force, as in Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818;
rev 1831) and Arthur Conan DOYLE's "The Los Amigos Fiasco" (1892). In Lord
LYTTON's The Coming Race (1871) the key to energy-prosperity is vril, a
kind of "atmospheric magnetism" administered by a device bearing a
suspicious resemblance to a magic wand (a wand waved to considerable
effect in The Vril Staff [1891] by "XYZ") ( PSEUDO-SCIENCE). Percy GREG's
Across the Zodiac (1880) employs the equally mysterious "apergy", which
seems to be ANTIGRAVITY with a seasoning of electrical mysticism; like
vril, apergy was borrowed by other writers, including John Jacob ASTOR in
A Journey in Other Worlds (1894), and it is the obvious model for the
antigravity devices used in Robert CROMIE's A Plunge into Space (1890) and
H.G. WELLS's THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901). In Twenty Thousand Leagues
under the Sea (1870; trans 1873) Jules VERNE was ready to assume that
electrical energy could be drawn from sea water by quasimagical means.
This optimistic outlook was boosted by the discovery of X-rays in 1895;
for many years thereafter unlimited power was casually generated in sf
stories by the invocation of magical "rays". The discovery of
radioactivity only a few years later provided yet another jargon: power
derived from atomic breakdown, spontaneous or forced. This, of course,
turned out to be a real possibility, but its prominence in early sf owes
more to convenience than to an assessment of its true potential. GENRE SF
inherited this considerable jargon and understandably made the most of it.
E.E. "Doc" SMITH's The Skylark of Space (1928; 1946) begins when a bathtub
coated with "X, the unknown metal" reacts to the appropriate Open Sesame
by releasing limitless quantities of "infra-atomic energy" - a moment
cruelly parodied by the discovery of "Cheddite" in Harry HARRISON's Star
Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers (1973).Given this confidence in the
imminent availability of unlimited power, it is not surprising that the
most thoughtful work of speculative writers in the early 20th century
deals with the question of the social responsibility of scientists making
such discoveries. Stories of wise men blackmailing the world into peace
and social justice for all are common, but much more delicate exercises
include Karel CAPEK's satire The Absolute at Large (1922; trans 1927) and
his surreal "atomic phantasy" Krakatit (1924; trans 1925). The former
concerns the "Karburator", which not only releases the energy bound in
matter but also the spiritual "power" which went into its creation,
generating worldwide religious fanaticism; a later satire with a related
theme is Romain GARY's The Gasp (1973), in which the energy of immortal
souls is harnessed as an industrial power source. Pulp sf celebrated the
imminence of what Hugo GERNSBACK sometimes called the "Age of Power
Freedom". Antigravity and wonderful rays were given carte blanche to defy
the conservation laws - a situation encouraged rather than inhibited by

the real-life discovery of atomic power, which was for a brief period
taken as "proof" that limitless energy was actually available. Jack
WILLIAMSON's "The Equalizer" (1947) is a thoughtful attempt to analyse the
social consequences of free power for all, resurrecting the vril staff as
a literary device. Raymond F. JONES's "Noise Level" (1952) supposes that
the only thing standing between science and the discovery of limitless
power is the belief of scientists in its impossibility. So convincing was
this line of argument to readers of ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION that the
story gave rise to several sequels, letters and articles criticizing
contemporary patent law for its unfair treatment of perpetual motion and
its blatant discrimination against discoveries of new fundamental
principles in science. This optimism waned rapidly during the 1960s,
although Theodore STURGEON's "Brownshoes"(1969) is a heartfelt parable
about the difficulty of making a gift of perpetual motion to mankind in a
world where so many vested interests (e.g., oil companies) would do their
utmost to suppress it.The dependence of the developed countries on
shrinking coal and oil reserves was brought home dramatically from 1973 on
by the emergence of OPEC as a political force capable of dictating energy
policy to the West. The POLITICS of energy came to play a major part in
many near-future novels, including Frederik POHL's JEM: The Making of a
Utopia (1979) and The Cool War (1981), the latter also being one of
several stories to explore the idea of transmitting power in the form of
microwaves down to Earth from solar cells mounted on satellites. The
OPEC-precipitated oil crisis of the 1970s inspired such unlikely projects
as the attempt to hijack the Middle-Eastern oilfields by TIME TRAVEL in
Wolfgang JESCHKE's The Last Day of Creation (1981; trans 1982) and the use
of exotic living machinery to extract oil in Rory HARPER's ALTERNATE-WORLD
story Petrogypsies (1989); many TECHNOTHRILLERS are concerned with power
sources in one way or another, standard plots often centring either on
squabblings between multinational power companies or on the discovery usually merely as a MCGUFFIN - of new ways of producing energy. Fantasies
in which energy sources appear by miraculous fiat, like D.G. COMPTON's
Ascendancies (1980), acquired a sharp cautionary note. A real measure of
imaginative fervour with respect to marvellous power sources survives only
in the matter of SPACESHIP propulsion, ranging from the solar yachts of
Arthur C. CLARKE's "Sunjammer" (1964; vt "The Wind from the Sun"), which
use the SOLAR WIND, to the BLACK-HOLE propulsion system for interplanetary
vessels in the same author's Imperial Earth (1975). [BS]See also: ECOLOGY;
SUN; TECHNOLOGY; UNDER THE SEA; WEAPONS.
POWYS, JOHN COWPER
(1872-1963) UK writer, resident for much of his career in the USA, though
he returned to the UK in his later years. The novels of his old age, from
Morwyn, or The Vengeance of God (1937) onwards, combine fantasy and sf
elements in an attempt, sometimes obscure, to heat his eccentric mysticism
into a unique amalgam: Porius (1951) is an Arthurian fantasy; The Inmates
(1952) presents the "delusions" of a cast of mental patients in
exaggerated terms and features a giant helicopter; Atlantis (1954)
describes Odysseus's search for ATLANTIS; The Brazen Head (1956) deals
with Roger Bacon (c1214-1292) as alchemist. Between 1957 and 1960, near
the end of his life, JCP produced a sequence of remarkable FABULATIONS,

some of them unhinged. They were all eventually published as Up and Out
(coll 1957), the first novella of which is a post- HOLOCAUST tale in which
four survivors witness the end of time, All or Nothing (1960), in which
two children make a kind of tour of the Universe, Real Wraiths (1974
chap), Two and Two (1974 chap) and Three Fantasies (coll 1985).Of JCP's
two brothers, both also writers, T(heodore) F(rancis) Powys (1875-1953)
wrote much of strong fantasy interest. [JC]Other works: The Owl, the Duck,
and - Miss Rowe! Miss Rowe! (1930 chap US); A Glastonbury Romance (1932
US); Maiden Castle (1936 US); Owen Glendower (1940 US); Lucifer: A
Narrative Poem (1956); Homer and the Aether (1959).See also: END OF THE
WORLD; FANTASTIC VOYAGES.
POYER, DAVID C(HARLES)
(1949- ) US writer who has published non-genre work as David Poyer, and
sf variously as David C. Poyer, D.C. Poyer and David Andreissen. The
Shiloh Project (1981) is set in the near future of an ALTERNATE WORLD in
which the South had won the Battle of Gettysburg 120 years before. Star
Seed (1982) as Andreissen places within a context of exceeding grimness ALIENS have irrevocably poisoned Earth in an attempt to "terraform" it for
their own needs - a tale of almost exuberant action: a surviving team
composed of one human, one mutant and one dolphin subverts the eponymous
starship to revolt against the "terraformers", then sets off to find
another planet. In DCP's third and most interesting novel, Stepfather Bank
(1987), set in a post- HOLOCAUST world dominated by a paternalist bank, a
rogue poet hornswoggles and destabilizes the entire AI-controlled system,
which has in fact been working to preserve humanity as well as to control
it. [JC]See also: UNDER THE SEA.
POYER, JOE
Working name of US writer Joseph John Poyer (1939- ) for his fiction,
beginning in 1965 with "Mission 'Red Clash'" for ASF, a magazine with
which he was closely associated. Of his novels, Operation Malacca (1968),
about the use of talking dolphins for military purposes, and North Cape
(1969) are TECHNOTHRILLERS. Tunnel War (1979) is an ALTERNATE-WORLD tale
involving the 1911 construction of a Channel Tunnel. JP has also written
novels in other genres. [JC]
POYSER, VICTORIA
[r] ROWENA.
PRAGNELL, FESTUS
(1905-?1965) UK writer and policeman who first appeared in the US PULP
MAGAZINES with "The Venus Germ" for Wonder Stories in 1932, written in
collaboration with R.F. STARZL; he published 1 tale as by Francis Parnell
(Festus Pragnell is not a pseudonym). His Don Hargreaves stories, all set
on a lurid Mars, appeared in AMZ from 1938 ("Ghost of Mars") to 1943
("Madcap of Mars"). His first sf novel, The Green Man of Kilsona (1936;
rev vt The Green Man of Graypec 1950 US), describes a voyage into a
miniature world ( GREAT AND SMALL). A second novel, The Terror from
Timorkal (1946), sets a world-threatening crisis in Africa, where a new
mineral suitable for the manufacture of superweapons is being exploited by
unscrupulous politicians. His last work, "The Machine God Laughs" (1948),

was the title story of The Machine God Laughs (anth 1949) ed William L.
CRAWFORD. [JC]Other works: Thieves of the Air (c1943 chap) with Benson
HERBERT.
PRATCHETT, TERRY
(1948- ) UK writer who began publishing with "The Hades Business" in
Science Fantasy in 1963, and who for many years was in full-time
employment, as a journalist until 1980, and as a publicity officer for the
Central Electricity Generating Board until 1987; as a consequence, his
early books were written and published intermittently. His first, The
Carpet People (1971; rev 1992), is a fantasy for children. The Dark Side
of the Sun (1976), sf, makes gentle fun of the alien-cluttered Known Space
books of Larry NIVEN, though further targets, including Ron GOULART and
Jack VANCE, are also affectionately addressed; STRATA (1981) also parodies
Niven and other HARD-SF writers, in this case by depicting an artificial
flat world embedded within Ptolemaic heavens - it is a POCKET UNIVERSE, in
fact-seemingly constructed by the ancient Spindle Kings, though in fact
Builder Gods were responsible. No GODS are given responsibility by name
for the construction of Discworld, a fantasy creation borne through space
on the back of a huge turtle, but an sf world-building premise does
unseriously underlie the Discworld books, which made TP famous. The novels
themselves are FANTASY. The series comprises The Colour of Magic (1983),
The Light Fantastic (1986), Equal Rites (1987), Mort (1987), Sourcery
(1988), Wyrd Sisters (1988), Pyramids (1989), Guards! Guards! (1989), Eric
(1990) with Josh KIRBY (responsible for all the UK Discworld covers) given
equal billing on the original edition (the text is heavily illustrated;
paperback editions, lacking the illustrations, give TP alone as author),
Moving Pictures (1990), Reaper Man (1991), Witches Abroad (1991), Small
Gods (1992),Lords and Ladies (1992), Men at Arms (1993), Soul Music (1994)
and Interesting Times (1994) with further titles projected; they make up
the finest set of pure comedies the genre has yet seen. A second series,
the Book of the Nomes CHILDREN'S-SF trilogy about small extraterrestrials
caught for eons on Earth and attempting escape, comprises Truckers (1989),
Diggers (1990) and Wings (1990), all three being assembled as The
Bromeliad (omni 1993 US). Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of
Agnes Nutter, Witch (1990; rev 1990 US) with Neil GAIMAN is a fantasy
about the END OF THE WORLD. The youthful protagonist of Only You Can Save
Mankind (1992), sf for young adults, must help the space warriors of an
arcade game ( GAMES AND TOYS) escape futile combat with human players; the
sequel is Johnny and the Dead (1993), in which Johnny fights on behalf of
its dead residents to keep developers from destroying a cemetery. [JC]See
also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; GREAT AND SMALL; HUMOUR; MAGIC;
SATIRE; TERRAFORMING.
PRATT, CORNELIA ATWOOD
Working and maiden name of Cornelia Atwood Comer (? -1929), author with
Richard Slee of Dr Berkeley's Discovery (1899), in which the doctor solves
a mystery with his memory-cell-reading device ( PSYCHOLOGY). [JC]
PRATT, (MURRAY) FLETCHER
(1897-1956) US writer and historian who began his career as an author and
translator for Hugo GERNSBACK's SCIENCE WONDER STORIES and its companions

in the early 1930s; his first published story was "The Octopus Cycle" for
AMZ in 1928 as with Irvin Lester (a Pratt pseudonym). While doing
translations of German sf novels FP evolved what became a renowned method
of extracting payment from the notoriously slow Gernsback organization: he
would submit the first part of a novel, wait until it was set in type,
then refuse to deliver the conclusion until paid. He undertook many
collaborations, notably "City of the Living Dead" (1930) with Laurence
MANNING, and contributed regularly to the sf magazines; but he is now best
remembered for his fantasy, especially for his collaborations with L.
Sprague DE CAMP (whom see for fuller details). The most successful were
the Harold Shea stories, among which the main titles are: The Incomplete
Enchanter (1940 Unknown; 1941), The Castle of Iron (1941 Unknown; 1950)
and The Wall of Serpents (fixup 1960; vt The Enchanter Completed 1980 UK).
The first 2 titles were assembled as The Compleat Enchanter: The Magical
Misadventures of Harold Shea (omni 1975), and all 3 were eventually
assembled as The Intrepid Enchanter (omni 1988 UK; vt The Complete
Compleat Enchanter 1989 US). A second series with De Camp, the Gavagan's
Bar CLUB STORIES, assembled in Tales from Gavagan's Bar (coll 1953; exp
1978), comprised mostly high-spirited tall tales, some of them sf. On
their collaborations De Camp, as junior partner, would write a first draft
after he and FP had jointly outlined the story; FP would then compose the
final draft, to which De Camp would put the finishing editorial touches.
This routine was varied on only a very few later short stories.FP's own
fantasy novels are The Well of the Unicorn (1948 as by George U. Fletcher;
1967 as by FP) and The Blue Star (1952 in Witches Three ed anon FP; 1969);
Witches Three was one of the Twayne Triplets series - Twayne being the
publisher - each vol assembling 3 original novellas by different authors
with a common theme or setting. The series idea was FP's, and he ed (also
anon) 1 later vol, The Petrified Planet (anth 1952). In the end the
project proved abortive, but the last title was the first SHARED-WORLD
anthology to appear in the genre. FP also wrote several volumes of popular
history and 3 books on rockets and space travel including Rockets, Jets,
Guided Missiles and Space Ships (1951). [MJE/JC]Other works: The Land of
Unreason (1941) and The Carnelian Cube (1948), both with De Camp; Double
in Space (coll 1951; rev 1954 UK), in the 1st edn comprising the 2
novellas "Project Excelsior" and "The Wanderer's Return", the latter being
replaced in the UK by "The Conditioned Captain", itself already published
in the USA as The Undying Fire (1953); World of Wonder (anth 1951), a
Twayne book but not a Triplet; Double Jeopardy (fixup 1952); Invaders from
Rigel (1932 Wonder Stories Quarterly as "The Onslaught From Rigel"; 1960);
Alien Planet (1932 Amazing Stories Quarterly as "A Voice across the
Years"; 1962).About the author: Chapter 7 of Literary Swordsmen and
Sorcerers (1976) by L. Sprague De Camp.See also: AUTOMATION; CLONES;
DYSTOPIAS; FINLAND; HUMOUR; LEISURE; MAGIC; MATHEMATICS; PSYCHOLOGY;
PUBLISHING; SCIENCE FANTASY; UTOPIAS.
PREDATOR
Film (1987). Amercent/American Entertainment/20th Century-Fox. Dir John
McTiernan, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Elpidia
Carrillo, Bill Duke. Screenplay Jim Thomas, John Thomas. 106 mins. Colour.
A special-forces group undertaking a commando-style rescue mission in

South America clashes bloodily with guerrillas and then very much more
bloodily with the Predator: an intelligent ALIEN that can bend light to
make itself almost invisible. The alien picks them off one by one, losing
only to the Schwarzenegger character, by now reduced to primitive combat.
The blend of the jungle-warfare (or Vietnam) scenario with the alienINVASION genre is potentially interesting, but the treatment follows a
wholly predictable pattern. Moreover on the evidence presented, the alien
should have won. [PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES.
PREDATOR 2
Film (1990). Gordon/Silver/Davis/20th Century-Fox. Dir Stephen Hopkins,
starring Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Ruben Blades, Maria Conchita Alonso,
Bill Paxton. Screenplay Jim Thomas, John Thomas. 107 mins. Colour.This
superior sequel to PREDATOR is a well oiled adrenaline machine. Los
Angeles, 1997, is anarchic, with Jamaican and Colombian drug gangs, the LA
police and the FBI all at each other's throats. A new ALIEN Predator,
drawn by global hotspots, is trophy-hunting there on safari. A Black
policeman succeeds where the creepy feds fail, and as a recognition of his
valour receives a duelling pistol from yet more Predators who arrive for
the finale. Stan Winston's alien design (great mandibles) is threatening
and interesting, just right for a New Right Vigilante alien who picks off
the bad guys first. P2 is pure and stylish exploitation-movie making, and
shows a witty recognition of the same violence-begets-violence syndrome it
abets. [PN]See also: CINEMA; MONSTER MOVIES.
PREDICTION
The most widespread false belief about sf among the general public is
that it is a literature of prediction. Very few sf writers have ever
claimed this to be the case, although Hugo GERNSBACK did see one function
of his sf magazines as to paint an accurate picture of the future. Very
few of the stories he published lived up to his editorializing. When John
W. CAMPBELL Jr took over the editorship of ASF he demanded an increasing
scientific plausibility from his writers, but a plausible-sounding
"perhaps" is a long way from prediction.None of this has prevented sf fans
from crowing with delight when an sf writer has made a good guess, and the
mythology of sf is full of such examples. H.G. WELLS predicted the use of
the tank in "The Land Ironclads" (1903), of aerial bombing in The War in
the Air (1908) and of the atom bomb (more or less) in The World Set Free
(1914). Ever since Einstein's mass-energy equations had been published, it
had been generally known that enormous power was locked up in the atom,
and stories about NUCLEAR POWER and atomic WEAPONS were commonplace in the
1920s and 1930s; they became very much more accurate in the early 1940s,
and Cleve CARTMILL, Robert A. HEINLEIN and Lester DEL REY all wrote good
predictive stories before Hiroshima. (Heinlein also predicted the water
bed and the use of remote-control WALDOS.) Most early prediction stories
were about future WAR, future weapons and the various possibilities of
INVASION. Not many of them were correct; although several stories
predicted war between the UK and Germany before 1914 (and, indeed, between
the UK and almost everyone else), most of them centred on an invasion
across the Channel which never took place. Edward Everett HALE wrote
rather charmingly about an artificial satellite in "The Brick Moon"

(1869). Arthur C. CLARKE wrote a celebrated article about communications
satellites, "Extraterrestrial Relays" (Wireless World Oct 1945), but this
was not a story; nor, sadly, did it become a patent. Jules VERNE is
thought by many to have invented the submarine in Vingt mille lieues sous
les mers (1870; trans as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea 1873), but
in fact functional submarines had existed since at least the 18th century.
One of Verne's best pieces of prediction was quite accidental; the
moon-shot in De la terre a la lune (1865), which was published with the
sequel Autour de la lune (1870) in From the Earth to the Moon (trans
1873), is fired from a spot very close to Cape Canaveral in Florida.
Rudyard KIPLING predicted transatlantic aerial trade, specifically airmail
postage, in With the Night Mail (1905; 1909 chap US). Erasmus DARWIN's
poem The Temple of Nature (1802) preceded Verne, Wells and just about
everybody else in its joyful description of airborne fleets of transport
ships, war in the air, submarines and great CITIES with skyscrapers. Edwin
BALMER had an early form of lie detector in The Achievements of Luther
Trant (coll 1910) with William MacHarg. Hugo Gernsback had many
technological predictions in Ralph 124C 41+ (1911-12; fixup 1925); this is
one of the 18 stories of the period quoted by Everett BLEILER in
Science-Fiction: The Early Years (1990) as anticipating tv. Nevil SHUTE
predicted metal fatigue as a danger to aircraft in No Highway (1948),
written shortly before several planes crashed for exactly that reason.It
is a moderately impressive list, and could be made more so by
multiplication of examples, but it proves very little. For every correct
prediction a dozen were wrong, or correct only if facts are stretched a
little; for example, PULP-MAGAZINE sf of the 1930s made much of DEATH
RAYS; it is rather a dubious vindication to point out that laser beams can
now be used as weaponry. The entry FUTUROLOGY (which includes several
examples of real prediction) discusses the usual strategy of sf writers
when dealing with the future; their imaginative scenarios are as often as
not meant as awful warnings, and the emphasis is almost invariably on what
could happen, not what will happen. It would hardly be fair to attack sf
writers as false prophets when they seldom think of themselves as being in
the prophecy business at all. In many ways their errors are more
interesting than their successes, for they add to our knowledge of social
history. Our expectations of the future change just as quickly as history
itself changes; the AUTOMATION to which Gernsback and others looked
forward in the teens of the century had already become a potential
nightmare by the time of Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's PLAYER PIANO (1952; vt Utopia
14). Where sf is correct, of course, the explanation is not magic, just
good research. Verne took much advice from his engineer friends and Shute
spent many years as an aeronautical engineer - and, of course, many sf
writers subscribe to scientific journals . . .One area where sf can claim
some credit is SPACE FLIGHT; this was the central dream of sf, even during
the years when respectable scientists regularly argued for its
impossibility ( ROCKETS). But even here, though sf was right enough in the
broad sense, it managed to get both the sociological and the technological
details appallingly wrong. Most of Heinlein's early Moon rockets were
built by capitalist enterprise, and not by the resources of the US
Government; the Russian government, naturally, was not mentioned at all,
even though it was in Russia that the first solidly grounded theorizing

about space travel had taken place, in the work of Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY,
who wrote somewhat didactic but staggeringly accurate prophetic stories on
the subject, beginning in the 19th century. The eponymous vessel in
Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo (1947) is, absurdly, constructed largely by
teenage boys in the backyard. Only William TENN ran counter to the
free-enterprise spirit of most US sf by imagining in "Alexander the Bait"
(1946) that the space programme would be run by giant government
institutions, not individuals or even corporations. Sf stories about the
first Moon landing almost invariably omit the single most dramatic detail,
that the entire proceedings would be watched on Earth on tv; an exception
is Arthur C. CLARKE's Prelude to Space (1951 US; vt Master of Space 1961
US; vt The Space Dreamers 1969 US). COMPUTERS are another area where sf's
predictive abilities were ridiculously askew; so preoccupied were sf
writers with the dramatic possibilities of the ROBOT that they hardly
noticed that back in the real world mechanical men were of little interest
to anyone while the computer - driven by the invention of the transistor,
likewise missed by sf - was rapidly transforming the face of the future.
Sf writers caught up, of course, but only after computers were becoming
commonplace.Nearly all the examples cited are cases of predictions in the
sphere of TECHNOLOGY; more interesting perhaps, and generally with a
slightly higher success rate, were the predictions made about future
POLITICS and SOCIOLOGY. Fortunately most DYSTOPIAS have not come into
being in the real world, but certain aspects of them certainly have. One
of the most interesting cases of prediction in the SOFT SCIENCES was
Robert Louis STEVENSON's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886),
whose melodramatic suppositions were, even as he wrote, being conceptually
paralleled by the work of Sigmund Freud (1865-1939), who also came to
believe that the human mind had a primitive component, the id, not wholly
masked by the more reputable ego.Occasionally the images thrown up by sf
enter the public mind by an apparent process of osmosis, so that they
become known even to those who do not read sf, and thereby create a kind
of self-fulfilling prophecy. Some examples are given in FUTUROLOGY, which
discusses this question. Perhaps the most notable is again the case of
space flight, where it is certainly arguable that the US Government could
never have got away with budgeting such large amounts of the national
income on the space programme had the desire for space flight, largely
catalysed by sf, not been so great.Most sf prediction is set in the NEAR
FUTURE, and further examples are given in that entry. In the nature of
things, a great many thematic entries in this encyclopedia necessarily
deal in part with prediction. Apart from those already mentioned, entries
where predictions in the social sciences predominate include CITIES;
DISASTER, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, GAMES AND SPORTS, LEISURE, MEDIA
LANDSCAPE
and OVERPOPULATION; more technical areas where sf has made checkable
predictions are COMMUNICATIONS, CYBERNETICS, ECOLOGY, MACHINES, MEDICINE,
MOON, POLLUTION, POWER SOURCES, TRANSPORTATION and UNDER THE SEA; areas
where sf predictions have not yet had the opportunity for a full testing,
but may be tested in the next 50 years, are CLONES, CRYONICS, CYBORGS,
GENETIC ENGINEERING, SPACE HABITATS, SPACESHIPS, SUSPENDED ANIMATION and
TERRAFORMING. Many readers suppose that the CYBERPUNK predictions of human
experience of VIRTUAL REALITIES achieved by plugging the brain into

machines are truly predictive. A technical problem is that the neurons in
the brain transmit information much more slowly than microprocessors do,
which might make the brain/computer interface rather tricky - but time
will tell.An sf scholar who has written interestingly about prediction is
Chris MORGAN, whose relevant books (their remit extends well beyond sf to
include popular science, journalism and so on) are The Shape of Futures
Past: The Story of Prediction (1980) and, with David LANGFORD, Facts and
Fallacies: A Book of Definitive Mistakes and Misguided Predictions (1981),
the latter being especially funny and eye-opening. [PN]
PREHISTORIC ROMANCES
ANTHROPOLOGY; APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD); ORIGIN OF MAN.
PREHISTORIC WORLD
Roger CORMAN.
PREISS, BYRON (CARY)
(1953- ) US book packager, anthologist and co-author of 2 sf novels Guts (1979) with C.J. Henderson and Dragonworld (1979) with J. Michael
REAVES - and The Bat Family (1984), a juvenile. Though he has also edited
and co-edited numerous ANTHOLOGIES, BP is best known as the most
successful of the independent sf book packagers (i.e., creative middlemen
who conceive projects, pitch them to publishers, commission writers,
artists and others to produce the required material, etc.), founding Byron
Preiss Visual Publications Inc (frequently abbreviated to BPVP) in 1974.
The company's first project was the Weird Heroes anthology series - BP
himself edited Weird Heroes #1 (anth 1975), #2 (anth 1975), #6 (anth 1977)
and #8 (anth 1978) - which early demonstrated BP's interest in visual
presentation. Among the early BPVP projects were a number of GRAPHIC
NOVELS: adaptations included a version written by BP of Alfred BESTER's
Tiger! Tiger! (1956 UK; rev vt The Stars My Destination 1957 US) published
under the vt in 2 vols (graph 1979 and graph 1992), both vols illus Howard
CHAYKIN; original works included Samuel R. DELANY's Empire (graph 1978)
with Chaykin. In the 1980s, BPVP branched out into many different areas,
from children's and young-adult books to art books, nature books and other
projects.But most of the company's attention remained on the sf field, and
BVPB was one of the forces behind the huge growth during that decade of
SHARED-WORLD texts tied either to the work of well known authors or
generated by BVPB itself, and almost always written on a SHARECROP basis.
Projects of the first sort included Isaac Asimov's Robot City, a series of
novels by various authors including David F. BISCHOFF, Arthur Byron COVER
and William F. WU; Arthur C.Clarke's Venus Prime, all by Paul PREUSS (whom
see for details); and Robert Silverberg's Time Tours, a series of novels
by Wu and others. Projects generated by BPVP included U.S.S.A., to which
authors like Tom DE HAVEN contributed individual volumes. Such projects which BPVP was far from alone in producing - generated lively debate, some
critics feeling that writers were being led to recycle the ideas of others
rather than exploring their own. Defenders of the sharecrop argued that
newer writers, who might otherwise have trouble selling a first novel,
could more readily work for hire; and suggested that young readers might
be encouraged to read more ambitious sf through initial exposure to
accessible shared-world books. Other BPVP projects included the Next Wave

line of novels, each focusing on a specific area of scientific speculation
and accompanied by an essay on the subject by a notable scientist; titles
included Red Genesis (1991) by S.C. SYKES, about colonizing MARS, with an
essay by Eugene Mallove; and Alien Tongue (1991) by Stephen LEIGH, about
ALIEN contact, with an essay by Rudy RUCKER.Also during the 1980s, BP
produced several lavishly illustrated, ambitious theme anthologies
combining fiction and nonfiction. The Planets (anth 1985) featured fiction
by Robert SILVERBERG, Jack WILLIAMSON and others, and essays by scientists
such as Dale P. Cruikshank. The Universe (anth 1987) included fiction by
Poul ANDERSON and Gene WOLFE along with essays on COSMOLOGY and BLACK
HOLES. The Microverse (anth 1989) included the NEBULA-winning "At the
Rialto" by Connie WILLIS along with nonfiction from Gerald Feinberg
(1933-1992) and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon M. Lederman. First
Contact (anth 1990) was a similar treatment of CETI. Other anthologies
have included the Ultimate series: The Ultimate Dracula (anth 1991) with
David Keller, Megan Miller and (anon) Martin H. GREENBERG; The Ultimate
Werewolf (anth 1991) with John BETANCOURT, Keller, Miller and (anon)
Greenberg; The Ultimate Frankenstein (anth 1991) with Keller, Miller,
Betancourt and (anon) Greenberg; The Ultimate Dinosaur: Past, Present,
Future (anth 1992) with Robert Silverberg; further titles
projected.Despite the controversy surrounding some of his sharecropped
projects, BP should be recognized for his contribution to the visual
presentation of sf, and for reaching out to a younger readership through
such projects as the new Tom Swift adventures ( TOM SWIFT for details),
the Dragonflight series of short novels, and the Camelot World series. Of
all the book packagers, BP is likely the only one from his period to have
made any real creative contribution to the field. [RKJK]Other works: The
Art of Leo and Diane Dillon (1981); The Secret: A Treasure Hunt (anth
1982).
PRENTISS, CHARLOTTE
Charles PLATT.
PRESCOT, DRAY
Kenneth BULMER.
PRESIDENT'S ANALYST, THE
Film (1967). Panpiper/Paramount. Written/dir Theodore J. Flicker,
starring James Coburn, Godfrey Cambridge, Severn Darden, Joan Delaney, Pat
Harrington, Barry McGuire. 104 mins. Colour.A psychoanalyst (Coburn),
hired to listen to the President's troubles, breaks down under the strain.
He takes refuge with a "typical" US family who describe themselves as
"militant liberals" (the husband collects guns, the wife takes karate
lessons and their son specializes in wire-tapping). Pursued by the FBI
(all very short men), the CIA (all college graduates with pipes and tweed
jackets), Russians, Chinese and others, the hero repeatedly avoids death
by a hairsbreadth; he then learns that the power secretly running the USA
is the Telephone Company (manned by bland, smiling ROBOTS), which plans to
insert a miniature telephone in the head of every person in the world. The
film ends with the robots still in control. Flicker's pleasing SATIRE is
witty and literate, and contrives to have it both ways by spoofing
PARANOIA movies while actually exploiting our genuine (and well grounded)

paranoias. [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA.
PRESSOR BEAM
FORCE FIELD.
PREUSS, PAUL
(1942- ) US writer who worked in film production for a decade before
beginning to write popular-science articles. He began to publish sf with
The Gates of Heaven (1980) which, with Re-Entry (1981), comprises a very
loose sequence, its main linkage being the assumption that BLACK HOLES may
be used to travel through both space and time. The second volume in
particular demonstrates considerable virtuosity in its presentation of a
SPACE-OPERA venue which is opened up - though at times rendered almost
incomprehensibly complicated-through a plot which encompasses various
timelines, the protagonist's discovery that he is his own beloved guru,
and much action. Later novels back away sharply from such exuberance,
gearing themselves more strictly to extrapolations based on contemporary
science. The first of these, Broken Symmetries (1983), concerns the human
and political implications of the markedly plausible discovery by
SCIENTISTS of a subatomic particle of explosive military potential; the
tone of the book has several times been compared with that of Gregory
BENFORD's TIMESCAPE (1980). HUMAN ERROR (1985) similarly examines the
ethical implications of a development in GENETIC ENGINEERING, bearing some
resemblance to the practically simultaneous BLOOD MUSIC (1985) by Greg
BEAR; while Starfire (1988) gives a verismo view of a NEAR-FUTURE space
expedition.Rather less interestingly, PP then became involved in the Venus
Prime sequence of novels tied to works and some concepts generated by
Arthur C. CLARKE. The sequence - Breaking Strain * (1987), Maelstrom *
(1988), Hide and Seek * (1989), The Medusa Encounter * (1990), The Diamond
Moon * (1990) and The Shining Ones * (1991) - features the long hegira of
its bio-engineered protagonist, Sparta, in her search through the Solar
System for the secret of her birth (or, perhaps, fabrication). It closes
with the 6th volume, and it may be hoped that the 1990s will see PP once
again apply his sharp abilities to fully independent work. [JC]See also:
ASTEROIDS; BIOLOGY.
PRICE, E(DGAR) HOFFMANN (TROOPER)
(1898-1988) US writer whose career lasted 64 years. He served in WWI,
graduated West Point in 1923, and began to publish weird fiction - the
genre for which he is remembered - with "Triangle with Variations" for
Droll Stories in 1924. By the time he stopped writing for the PULP
MAGAZINES in the 1950s he had published hundreds of stories in dozens of
outlets, sometimes as Hamlin Daly, and often drawing upon Oriental and
near-Eastern experiences for his backgrounds. His best known story from
this period is probably "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" (1934 Weird
Tales) with H.P. LOVECRAFT, a personal friend. Some of his early work was
later assembled in Strange Gateways (coll 1967) and Far Lands, Other Days
(coll 1975).In his retirement EHP became annoyed at being remembered only
as one of the "Lovecraft Circle", and in 1979 he resumed writing. In his
final decade he wrote a Western, two fantasies - The Devil Wives of
Li-Fong (1979) and The Jade Enchantress (1982) - and the loose Operation
sequence of sf novels: Operation Misfit (1980), Operation Longlife (1983),

in which EHP expressed a loathing of doctors and argued for the
individual's right to die, Operation Exile (1986) and Operation Isis
(1987). The sequence is set in a DYSTOPIAN future: it warns about Marxism
and comments on the weakness and decadence of the US Government; the
heroes are always competent, the plots often chaotic. Since he claimed to
be writing novels of ideas, it should be mentioned that EHP was an
astrologer, a Theosophist, a practising Buddhist and a conservative
Republican, and ideas from those fields do indeed percolate through his
work. EHP may be remembered primarily for his vivid biographical sketches
of his friends Robert E. HOWARD, Lovecraft and Clark Ashton SMITH. A
volume of reminiscences and a late mystery remain unpublished. [RB]See
also: SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS.
PRICE, ROGER (TAYLOR)
(1921- ) US writer and tv personality, best known in the 1950s for his
cartoon Droodles. In his sf novel, J.G., the Upright Ape (1960), the
eponymous silver-haired articulate gorilla ( APES AND CAVEMEN), having
been transported to the USA, serves as a focus for much amiable but
moderately far-reaching SATIRE. He is not to be confused with the Roger
Price (1941- ) who wrote ties for The TOMORROW PEOPLE . [JC]
PRIEST, CHRISTOPHER (McKENZIE)
(1943- ) UK writer, married 1981-7 to Lisa TUTTLE and from 1988 to Leigh
KENNEDY. He has published several novels (none apparently sf) under
various pseudonyms, of which only 2 have been disclosed: John Luther Novak
and Colin Wedgelock. CP began to publish sf with "The Run" for Impulse in
1966; much of his early work, which was relatively undistinguished, was
assembled as Transplantationen (coll trans Tony Westermayr 1972 Germany),
appearing in English only later as Real-Time World (coll 1974).CP's first
novel, Indoctrinaire (1970; rev 1979), is a bleak but fatally abstract
tale of imprisonment set in the heart of an unrealized Brazil, where an
unhelpful time-gate seems to lurk. His second, Fugue for a Darkening
Island (1972; vt Darkening Island 1972 US), is much stronger; set in an
England of the NEAR FUTURE, it deals with POLITICS and racial tension,
focusing on the arrival of African refugees whose homeland has been
destroyed by nuclear WAR. His third novel, INVERTED WORLD (1974; vt The
Inverted World 1974 US), marked the climax of his career as a writer whose
work resembled GENRE SF, and remains one of the two or three most
impressive pure-sf novels produced in the UK since WWII; the hyperboloid
world on which the action takes place is perhaps the strangest planet
invented since Mesklin in Hal CLEMENT's MISSION OF GRAVITY (1954), though
the characters pace through their lives with a haunted lassitude which
seems characteristically British. The tale deals with paradoxes of
PERCEPTION and CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH, and is a striking addition to that
branch of sf which deals with the old theme of appearance-versus-reality.
(The Making of the Lesbian Horse [1979 chap] is CP's spoof continuation of
the book.) The Space Machine (1976) is a cleverly plotted pastiche of the
work of H.G. WELLS, incorporating the author himself in the storyline (
RECURSIVE SF) which proposes plot-explanations for some of the narrative
gaps left by Wells in THE TIME MACHINE (1895) and War of the Worlds
(1898); in its literary focus and its retrospection, the book marked, in

hindsight, a significant shift in CP's work. With A Dream of Wessex (1977;
vt The Perfect Lover 1977 US), CP began to write tales whose increasingly
intricate plots had to be read as maps through which one explored not the
world (as in conventional sf) but the protagonists. 39 human minds are
meshed into a computer net which projects them (or their mental simulacra)
forwards from 1983 into a VIRTUAL-REALITY world of their consensus
imagination, 150 years in the future, in which they "live" without memory
of the real world. The entire book is a metaphor about the creative
process and its relation to solipsism. The Dream Archipelago stories
assembled, with others, in AN INFINITE SUMMER (coll 1979), intensify the
sense that CP's landscapes had now become forms of expression of the
psyche, and are of intense interest for the dream-like convolutions of
psychic terrain so displayed. The Dream Archipelago itself is a surreally
unspecific rendering of England as a land half-sunk beneath the ocean (a
vision perhaps influenced by Richard JEFFERIES's After London [1885]), and
is a powerful late-century representation of Sehnsucht (C.S. LEWIS's
expression to describe a longing for something that hovers, forever
unattainable, beyond the terms of reality).CP's next novels - The
Affirmation (1981), also set partly in the Dream Archipelago, and THE
GLAMOUR (1984; rev 1984 US) - move even more radically away from the
regions of sf or fantasy. They are his best work to that point and,
although representing to some sf readers an apostasy from the field, may
profitably be read as explorations of ravenous psyches whose hunger
expresses itself through the ingestion of or control over "unreal" (or
fantasy) worlds. It might be possible to suggest that The Affirmation is a
tale of ALTERNATE WORLDS and THE GLAMOUR a tale whose protagonist
literally becomes invisible ( INVISIBILITY); but these readings do scant
justice to their intense and conscious inwardness. Though it shares a good
deal of thematic material with these two, The Quiet Woman (1990) marks a
decided return to the external world. Set in the near future, with
radioactive contamination impinging upon the southern counties, the tale
is a scathing vision of an England rapidly becoming a DYSTOPIA.CP was
Associate Editor of FOUNDATION 1974-7. His anthologies are Anticipations
(anth 1978) and, with Robert P. HOLDSTOCK, Stars of Albion (anth 1979). In
The Last Deadloss Visions (1987 chap; various revs and addenda 1987 chap;
rev 1988 chap) he produced a cruel analysis of Harlan ELLISON's
non-completion of Last Dangerous Visions. [PN/JC]See also: BRITISH SCIENCE
FICTION AWARD; CITIES; DIMENSIONS; DISASTER; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; HISTORY
OF
SF; MARS; MATHEMATICS; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MILFORD SCIENCE FICTION
WRITERS'
CONFERENCE; NEW WAVE; NEW WRITINGS IN SF; PARALLEL WORLDS; POLITICS;
STEAMPUNK; TRANSPORTATION.
PRIESTLEY, J(OHN) B(OYNTON)
(1894-1984) UK novelist, playwright and man of letters, formidably
productive from the teens of the century until about 1980; he wrote over
70 plays, many extremely popular in their day, and as many books, though
he is now remembered chiefly for The Good Companions (1929), a huge
picaresque novel in praise of the English. He was married to Jacquetta
HAWKES. A surprising amount of his work makes use of sf or fantasy themes

and devices, though sometimes in a delusional frame, as with Albert Comes
Through (1933), whose eponymous hero's experiences in an absurd cinematic
universe are explained as a fever-dream. The Thirty-First of June (1961)
is a fantasy for young-adult readers. But sf concerns do propel Adam in
Moonshine (1927) and Benighted (1927; vt The Old Dark House 1928 US) both assembled as Benighted and Adam in Moonshine (omni 1932) - The
Doomsday Men (1938), where HOLOCAUST threatens; some of the stories about
time (a recurring theme) in The Other Place (coll 1953); The Magicians
(1954), JBP's closest approach to a full-fledged sf novel, featuring the
use of a wonder drug to spiritually invade the mind of a tycoon; Low Notes
on a High Level (1954), about the Dobbophone and other self-consciously
daft instruments of MUSIC; Saturn Over the Water (1961), a thriller with
sf overtones; The Shapes of Sleep (1962), which posits the use of
compulsively evocative shapes in advertising; and a juvenile, Snoggle
(1971), in which three children and an old man save an ALIEN pet from
bigoted Wiltshire locals and are thanked for their troubles by its
masters, advanced beings in a flying saucer ( UFOS).Nevertheless, JBP
never showed much aptitude for the traditional sf tale, and much of his
work has an effect more of bullying noise than bluff energy. His ideas
about the nature of the genre were unkindly. "They Come from Inner Space"
(1953 New Statesman) - later assembled in Thoughts in the Wilderness (coll
1957), which also contains an sf story, "The Hesperides Conference" makes what may be the first use of the term INNER SPACE in print, and goes
on to declare that the essential outward movement of sf was "a move,
undertaken in secret despair, in the wrong direction". Fittingly, of JBP's
considerable sf output, the most interesting titles are those tales and
plays which derive their motor impulse from the consolatory time theories
of J.W. DUNNE, who felt that various moments in time - whose relationships
to one another were, in a sense, geographical - could, in that sense, be
visited. Plays like Time and the Conways (1937) and I Have Been Here
Before (1937), both assembled as Two Time-Plays (omni 1937), along with
Dangerous Corner (1932), all assembled as Three Time Plays (omni 1947),
made extensive use of Dunne's theories. Other plays concerned with time
included Johnson over Jordan (1939), whose hero posthumously prepares
himself for Heaven, and Summer Day's Dream (1950). In the nonfiction Man
and Time (1964) and the essays in Over the Long High Wall (1972) JBP
meditated speculatively on the same themes. In the end, perhaps
surprisingly for a writer so otherwise aggressive, sf served not as a
technique to mount challenges but as a form of adjustment. [JC]Other
works: At least 2 of JBP's teleplays are of genre interest: "Doomsday for
Dyson" (1958), about atomic holocaust, and "Linda at Pulteney's" (1969), a
fantasy.About the author: J.B. Priestley: Portrait of an Author (1970) by
Susan COOPER; J.B. Priestley (1988) by Vincent Brome.See also: HISTORY IN
SF; THEATRE; TIME TRAVEL.
PRIESTLEY, MARGARET
(?1919- ) UK writer who, with Meriol TREVOR, created in childhood an
ALTERNATE WORLD called the World Dionysius, where both set several novels.
MP's were The Ring of Fortune * (1948), The Three Queens * (1950) and
Tomay is Loyal * (1951). They were marginally less effective than
Trevor's, though both authors had a tendency to fall back on RURITANIAN

conventions when more radical displacements might have generated a more
sustained sequence. [JC]
PRIME PRESS
Short-lived (the business had failed by 1953) US SMALL PRESS specializing
in sf; based in Philadelphia, founded in 1947 by Oswald TRAIN (editorial)
and James Williams, along with two fans, Alfred C. Prime and Armand E.
Waldo, who later dropped out. Several of PP's few titles are of interest,
including the first-published books of Lester DEL REY, George O. SMITH and
Theodore STURGEON: respectively, . . . And Some Were Human (coll 1948),
Venus Equilateral (coll of linked stories 1947) and Without Sorcery (coll
1948; cut vt Not without Sorcery 1961). [MJE]
PRINCE OF DARKNESS
Film (1987). Alive. Dir John CARPENTER, starring Donald Pleasence,
Jameson Parker, Victor Wong, Lisa Blount. Screenplay Martin Quatermass
(Carpenter). 101 mins. Colour.An old priest, guardian of a vat containing
Satan as a green liquid, dies. Young physicists are brought to the
derelict church by another worried priest (Pleasence) to analyse the
strange powers here. The church is surrounded by bag ladies and vagrants
(one being rock-star Alice Cooper) who kill anybody who leaves. Some of
the scientists are possessed by telekinetic jets of Satan-liquid, and
Anti-God attempts to manifest Himself through a mirror.Carpenter's worst
film, resembling a first draft rather than a finished product, inept and
barely coherent, POD nevertheless has points of considerable interest.
Often an apparent sf film turns out to be HORROR; this is an apparent
horror film that turns out to be sf. (Carpenter's screenwriter pseudonym,
Quatermass, is in clear homage to Nigel KNEALE, whose scriptwriting
speciality has been to rationalize supernatural forces in scientific
terms.) The ambitious but confused script evokes Godel and Schrodinger in
the first few minutes, explains precognition as TACHYON messages from the
future, solemnly broods on indeterminacy and the spiritual inferences to
be drawn from quantum mechanics, and appears to see the Anti-God as
theological ANTIMATTER present from the beginning, which is in fact a form
of the Manichean heresy. [PN]
PRINGLE, DAVID (WILLIAM)
(1950- ) Scottish editor and writer, resident in England, who served as
Research Fellow for the SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION in East London 1978-9
and as editor of FOUNDATION 1980-86. With Malcolm EDWARDS he was one of
the prime movers in the 8-strong collective which founded INTERZONE in
1982, eventually becoming its sole editor and publisher in 1988 and
co-editing all 5 anthologies taken from the magazine: Interzone: The First
Anthology (anth 1985) with John CLUTE and Colin GREENLAND, Interzone: The
2nd Anthology (anth 1987) with Clute and Simon Ounsley, Interzone: The 3rd
Anthology (anth 1988) with Clute and Ounsley, Interzone: The 4th Anthology
(anth 1989) with Clute and Ounsley, and Interzone: The 5th Anthology (anth
1991) with Clute and Lee Montgomerie. As Series Editor for GW Books
1988-91 he was responsible (in tandem, from 1990, with Neil Jones) for
commissioning and publishing several SHARED-WORLD fantasy and sf novels
tied to GAMES WORKSHOP games like Warhammer and Dark Future, notably
including titles by Kim NEWMAN (as Jack Yeovil), Brian M. STABLEFORD (as

Brian Craig) and David S. GARNETT (as David Ferring). For GW he also
edited some tied anthologies, including Ignorant Armies * (anth 1989),
Wolf Riders * (anth 1989) and Red Thirst * (anth 1990) in the Warhammer
series, Route 666 * (anth 1990) in the Dark Future series, and Deathwing *
(anth 1990) with Neil Jones in the Warhammer 40,000 series. In 1991 he
began a second magazine, Million: The Magazine about Popular Fiction, some
of whose articles deal with sf or fantasy writers.As a critic, DP's long
advocacy of the works of J.G. BALLARD was developed in J.G. Ballard: The
First Twenty Years (anth 1976 chap) ed with James Goddard, Earth is the
Alien Planet: J.G. Ballard's Four-Dimensional Nightmare (1979 chap US) and
J.G. Ballard: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1984 US). He then
produced several guides to sf, fantasy and popular literature in
alphabetized format: Science Fiction: 100 SF Authors (1978 chap), Science
Fiction: The 100 Best Novels: An English-Language Selection, 1949-1984
(1985), Imaginary People: A Who's Who of Modern Fictional Characters
(1987; rev 1989), Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels: An
English-Language Selection, 1946-1987 (1988) and The Ultimate Guide to
Science Fiction: An A-Z of SF Books (1990) with Ken Brown (uncredited).
DP's lack of an intuitive grasp of US sf could perhaps be detected in the
1949 inception date for books covered in the first of these (a significant
few years after the beginning of the SMALL-PRESS movement in the USA), but
the 200 short essays accumulated in that and the volume on fantasy provide
a valuable conspectus of fantastic literature over the chosen timespan. DP
also edited a retrospective collection of Theodore STURGEON's stories, A
Touch of Sturgeon (coll 1987 UK). He contributed some major entries to the
first edition of this encyclopedia and revised his BALLARD entry for the
current edition. [JC]See also: SF MAGAZINES.
PRISON COLONY, THE
NO ESCAPE.
PRISONER, THE
UK tv series (1967-8). An Everyman Films prod for ATV. Prod David
Tomblin. Created, starring and partly written/dir Patrick McGoohan; other
writers included George Anthony Skene, Terence Feely; other dirs included
Don Chaffey, Pat Jackson. Script ed George Markstein. 17 50min episodes.
Colour.In this KAFKA-esque, sf-related series a UK ex-secret agent
(McGoohan), who for unknown reasons has resigned from his organization, is
gassed in his apartment and wakes to find himself in The Village: a
mysterious establishment whose geographical location is ambiguous and
whose inhabitants consist of either rebels like himself or stooges of
"Them" - the people who run the place. The former spy (McGoohan had
previously starred in a spy series called Danger Man) is unable to
discover just who "They" are - perhaps the communists, perhaps his own
government. His every movement in The Village - externally a cross between
a bland Mediterranean holiday camp and an old people's home (in reality
the bizarre resort of Portmeirion, Wales, designed by the architect Sir
Clough Williams-Ellis [1883-1978] from 1926 until his death) - is watched
by "Number Two" and his staff on video. Various episodes concern his
attempts to escape from The Village, his neverending search for the unseen
Number One, and the efforts of the different Number Twos (they change with

each episode) to break him and discover why he resigned. The most obvious
sf elements are the balloon-shaped ROBOT watchdogs and the complex
brainwashing and surveillance equipment, including devices that project
thoughts onto a screen.McGoohan is a puritan (no kissing on screen) and an
acknowledged political conservative. The many liberal supporters of the
series may have misinterpreted its libertarian emphasis on individual
strength, especially the power to resist incursions into one's mind,
seeing the series instead as a plea for human rights and especially
democratic freedoms. The excellent, surrealist last episode interestingly
renders the POLITICS of the whole series retrospectively ambiguous by
suggesting that our metaphorical prisons may be self-imposed. The Prisoner
who continues to resist brainwashing may have brainwashed himself into a
prison of the mind. The series' thesis may be that freedom is impossible,
as is opting out.TP, not popular at first, soon developed an enthusiastic
cult following which has lasted for over two decades, especially for its
thought-provoking aspects and its deliberate bafflements, unusual in tv
drama. It has been repeated on tv several times in the UK and shown in the
USA. Its confident manipulations of Surrealist and sf themes, its literate
scripts, its sophisticated understanding of visual metaphor and its
enjoyably obsessive evocations of a whole range of fantasies of PARANOIA
together created what is in the opinion of many - often those discontented
with SPACE OPERA - the finest sf tv series to date. Its strengths in many
respects resemble those of the late-1980s tv cult favourite Twin Peaks.
Novels based on the series are The Prisoner * (1969) by Thomas M. DISCH,
The Prisoner No. 2 * (1969) by David MCDANIEL and The Prisoner 3: A Day in
the Life * (1970) by Hank STINE. Two of several books about the series are
The Official Prisoner Companion (1988), by Matthew White and Jaffer Ali,
and The Prisoner and Danger Man (1989) by Dave Rogers. A comic-book series
(4 numbers 1988-9), originally from DC COMICS, served as a sequel to the
tv series. [JB/PN]See also: GAMES AND TOYS.
PRISONERS OF GRAVITY
Canadian tv series (1990-93). TVOntario; also broadcast on La Chaine
Francaise. Prod/dir Gregg Thurlbeck, written and presented Rick Green.
Four seasons. 30 mins per programme. Colour.The premise of this vigorous
and surprisingly successful series - not a drama series but a talk show
about speculative fiction, probably the only such programme in the world was that Commander Rick (Rick Green) operates a pirate broadcasting
station from the communications satellite in which he lives, and
intercepts TVOntario's signals once a week, substituting his own quickfire
discussions of various sf themes. Quick cutting and Rick's aggressive,
well informed, jokey style (he is an ex-comedian as well an an sf expert)
won the programme a cult following. The major cultural breakthrough was
Rick's presentation of COMICS artists as deserving equal guest time with
sf writers, and viewers have been able to see for themselves that, say,
Neil GAIMAN, Jean GIRAUD, Frank MILLER and Bill SIENKEWICZ appear just as
thoughtful as, say, Douglas ADAMS, Gregory BENFORD, Harlan ELLISON and
William GIBSON. Horror writers such as Clive Barker (1952- ) and fantasy
writers such as Guy Gavriel Kay (1954- ) were also included. The wide
range of themes explored covers everything from Chaos Theory to Women's
Issues and The Family. POG won an Aurora award in 1994, posthumously so to

speak, for "Best Other Work in English". Reruns of the series are expected
on the new Canada Discovery channel. [PN]
PRISONS
COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.
PRIVILEGE
Film (1967). Worldfilm Services and Memorial Enterprises/Universal. Dir
Peter WATKINS, starring Paul Jones, Jean Shrimpton, Mark London, Max
Bacon. Screenplay Norman Bogner, based on a story by Johnny Speight. 103
mins. Colour.A successful rock-star (Jones) is used by a NEAR-FUTURE UK
government as a puppet MESSIAH to manipulate the opinions of the youthful
citizens. He is forced to change his image to suit the plans of the
Establishment, but rebels, only, ironically, to be destroyed by his
teenage followers. Watkins, who also directed The WAR GAME (1965),
GLADIATORERNA (1968) and PUNISHMENT PARK (1970), thumps his tub with a
heavy hand; but, though simplistic, P was ahead of its time in its
depiction of government attempts to co-opt and domesticate the
disaffection of the young, a theme of real importance, still rare in the
commercial CINEMA - which, after all, does much the same thing. [JB/PN]
PRIX APOLLO
AWARDS.
PRIX DU DANGER, LE
(vt The Prize of Peril) Film (1983). Swanie/TFI/UGC-Top 1/Avala. Dir Yves
Boisset, starring Gerard Lanvin, Michel Piccoli, Marie-France Pisier.
Screenplay Boisset, Jan Curtelin, based on "The Prize of Peril" (1958) by
Robert SHECKLEY. 98 mins, cut to 88 mins in English-dubbed version.
Colour.In this French/Yugoslav coproduction, a man volunteers for the tv
game show "The Prize of Peril", in which anyone who can escape being
murdered in the streets by trained killers (the whole event being
televised) can win large cash prizes. To a large extent the game is
rigged. The resourceful victim makes it back to the studio and exposes the
sham before being carried off in a straitjacket. A fairly routine action
movie masquerades as a morally outraged assault on media corruption. A
later film, The RUNNING MAN (1987), bears an astonishing resemblance. [PN]
PRIX JULES VERNE
AWARDS.
PRIX ROSNY AINE
AWARDS.
PRIZE OF PERIL, THE
Le PRIX DU DANGER .
PROCTOR, GEO(RGE) W.
(1946- ) US writer who began publishing sf with The Esper Transfer
(1978), a modest sf adventure whose telepathic protagonist must escape
various dangers. Although varied in its use of sf devices, and inventively
constructed so as to allow its protagonists some room for personal
relationships, his work has not exhibited sufficient innovation or energy
to bring him into wide repute. Other sf titles include Shadowman (1980),

again involving telepaths, Fire at the Center (1981) and Starwings (1984),
both involving TIME TRAVEL, and Stellar Fist (1989), in which the
discovery of a doom machine must somehow be controlled, once again through
the actions of a telepath. GWP's collaborations with Andrew J. OFFUTT,
both writing as John Cleve - Spaceways #7: The Manhuntress * (1982) and
#10: The Yoke of Shen * (1983) - and his two "V" ties-The Chicago
Conversion * (1985) and The Texas Run * (1985) - are of less interest. GWP
ed Lone Star Universe: Speculative Fiction from Texas (anth 1976) with
Steve UTLEY, which presents material of considerable interest, and The
Science-Fiction Hall of Fame #3: The Nebula Winners 1965-69 (anth 1982)
with Arthur C. CLARKE. [JC]Other works: The Swords of Raemllyn fantasy
sequence, all with Robert E. VARDEMAN: A Yoke of Magic (1985), To Demons
Bound (1985), Blood Fountain (1985), The Beasts of the Mist (1986) and For
Crown and Kingdom (1987).
PROJECT MOONBASE
Film (1953). Galaxy Pictures/Lippert. Dir Richard Talmadge, starring
Donna Martell, Ross Ford, Larry Johns, Hayden Rorke. Screenplay Robert A.
HEINLEIN, Jack Seaman. 63 mins, cut to 51 mins. B/w.This rarely seen film
is of interest mainly because Heinlein worked on the screenplay. A
three-strong expedition takes off from a space station orbiting Earth to
select a site for a Moonbase from lunar orbit, but their rocket crashlands
on the Moon. One of the three - a foreign spy (Johns) - subsequently dies
and the others, a man (Ford) and the woman team leader, coyly named
Colonel Breiteis (Martell), though doomed, are married via television by
the President of the USA (who, in a typical Heinlein touch, is also a
woman). The ambitious idea, with its confident taking for granted of
future TECHNOLOGY, is undermined by melodramatics, poor performances, and
sets designed for tv, this being the theatrical release of an unsold pilot
for a projected tv series, Ring Around the Moon. [JB]
PROJECT UFO
US tv series (1978-79). A Mark VIII Ltd Production/NBC. Executive prod
Jack Webb; created Harold Jack Bloom; prod Col. William T. Coleman.
Starring William Jordan as Major Jake Gatlin, Caskey Swaim as Sgt Harry
Fisk, Aldine King as Libby Virdon, Edward Winter (season 2) as Capt Ben
Ryan. Dirs included Richard Quine, Dennis Donnelly, Robert Leeds, John
Patterson, Rich Greer. Writers included Harold Jack Bloom, Donald L. Gold,
Robert Blees. 2 seasons, 26 50min numbered episodes. Colour.In terms of
the size of viewing audience, this was the most successful US sf tv series
ever made. The premise is that USAF investigators, belonging to a special
unit code-named Project Blue Book, each week look into a supposed UFO
(i.e., flying-saucer) sighting. Some of the cases prove to be hoaxes, some
misunderstandings of other phenomena; but most turn out to be genuine.
PUFO, which assumed the air of drama-documentary, was tabloid tv at its
most naked, aimed directly and cynically at a credible audience greedy for
wonders. Given the overall similarity of the plot-lines, it is astonishing
that 2 seasons were wrung from it. Executive prod Webb is remembered by
older viewers as the gravel-voiced presenter of Dragnet. [PN]See also:
PARANOIA.
PROJECT X

Film (1987). Amercent Films-American Entertainment Partners/20th
Century-Fox. Dir Jonathan Kaplan, starring Matthew Broderick, Helen Hunt,
Bill Sadler, Johnny Ray McGhee. Screenplay Stanley Weiser, based on a
story by Weiser, Lawrence Lasker. 103 mins, cut to 91 mins. Colour.A
trainee airman (Broderick), in trouble for joyriding, is sent to work in
an experimental USAF establishment where chimps are being trained in
flying simulators; the sinister premise (gradually uncovered) is that, if
successfully taught, they can be used on operations where pilots would be
subjected to heavy radiation. Several chimps are deliberately irradiated
to death. The young airman, who has bonded with an intelligent chimp that
understands sign language, helps foment rebellion, escapes with the
chimps, and en passant prevents a nuclear meltdown; of course, the chimps
themselves finally save the day - by flying a plane to safety. Wholly
absurd, emotionally manipulative and anthropomorphically sentimental, the
film is nevertheless very neatly crafted, evoking with real panache,
through its jittery, unnerving imagery, all kinds of subtexts that are
more intelligent than the plot would suggest. [PN]
PROMETHEUS AWARD
AWARDS.
PRONZINI, BILL
Working name of US writer William John Pronzini (1943- ), prolific and
admired in several genres, notably crime fiction, since his first book,
The Stalker (1971). Though he has published some very effective HORROR,
including Masques: A Novel of Terror (1981), and several other novels including Night Screams (1979) and Prose Bowl (1980), both with Barry N.
MALZBERG, the latter being sf - as well as Beyond the Grave (1986) with
Marcia Muller, his main importance to the field of the fantastic lies in
his anthologies. Relevant titles include: Dark Sins, Dark Dreams: Crime in
Science Fiction (anth 1978) with Malzberg; Midnight Specials (anth 1978);
Werewolf! (anth 1979); The End of Summer (anth 1979; vt The Fifties: The
End of Summer 1979), Shared Tomorrows: Science Fiction in Collaboration
(anth 1979) and Bug-Eyed Monsters (anth 1980), these 3 being with
Malzberg; Voodoo!: A Chrestomathy of Necromancy (anth 1980), Mummy!: A
Chrestomathy of Crypt'ology (anth 1981) and Creature!: A Chrestomathy of
"Monstery" (anth 1981), all assembled as The Arbor House Necropolis Voodoo! Mummy! Ghoul! (omni 1981; with 1 story cut, vt Tales of the Dead
1986); The Arbor House Treasury of Mystery and Suspense (anth 1981; with 1
story cut, vt Great Tales of Mystery and Suspense 1985) with Malzberg and
Martin H. GREENBERG; The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the
Supernatural (anth 1981; with 1 story cut, vt Great Tales of Horror ?
Supernatural 1985; text restored, vt Classic Tales of Horror and the
Supernatural 1991; again cut, vt The Giant Book of Horror Stories 1991)
with Malzberg and Greenberg; Specter!: A Chrestomathy of "Spookery" (anth
1982); and Witches' Brew: Horror and Supernatural Stories by Women (anth
1984) with Muller. [JC]See also: ESP.
PROPHECY
Film (1979). Paramount. Dir John FRANKENHEIMER, starring Talia Shire,
Robert Foxworth, Armand Assante, Richard Dysart. Screenplay David Seltzer.
102 mins. Colour.A mercuric fungicide used by a Maine pulp-mill has

mutagenic effects, bringing Minimata disease and miscarriages to the local
Native Americans and creating gigantism among the area's wildlife, notably
a MUTANT bear-creature responsible for many human deaths. All this is
discovered by a crusading doctor and his pregnant wife. A surprisingly
poor film from Frankenheimer - muddy photography, risible monster,
eco-cliche script, wooden performances, stumbling action sequences - P is
a rather crass example of the many revenge-of-Nature films ( MONSTER
MOVIES) made from the mid-1970s to cash in on the increase in the
community of legitimate concern for ECOLOGY. [PN]
PROSPERO AND CALIBAN
Frederick ROLFE.
PROTO SCIENCE FICTION
Meaningful use of the term "proto science fiction" obviously depends on
one's DEFINITION of the term "science fiction"; indeed, the quest for sf's
literary ancestry and "origins" is as much a dimension of the problem of
definition as a backward extrapolation of the HISTORY OF SF. If by sf we
mean labelled or GENRE SF, everything published before 1926 would become
proto sf; but Hugo GERNSBACK clearly believed that he was merely attaching
a name to a genre which already existed-he considered H.G. WELLS, Jules
VERNE and Edgar Allan POE to be "scientifiction" writers, and reviewers of
the 1890s seeking to characterize the kind of work which Wells was doing
had already identified a genre of SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE, which included
Verne, his UK imitators, and such writers as George GRIFFITH. Brian W.
ALDISS argues in Billion Year Spree (1973; exp vt Trillion Year Spree 1986
with David WINGROVE) that one can trace a coherent literary tradition of
sf to its point of origin in Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein, or The Modern
Prometheus (1818; rev 1831) ( GOTHIC SF). Darko SUVIN's study of Victorian
Science Fiction in the UK (1983), on the other hand, states that "if ever
there was in the history of a literary genre one day when it can be said
to have begun, it is May Day 1871 for UK sf", that being the day on which
Lord LYTTON's The Coming Race and the magazine version of George CHESNEY's
The Battle of Dorking appeared, and on which Samuel BUTLER handed in the
manuscript of Erewhon (1872). Other writers, including Peter NICHOLLS,
have argued that sf is merely a continuation, without any true hiatus, of
a much more ancient tradition of imaginative fiction whose origins are
lost in the mythical mists and folkloric fogs of oral tradition. If this
were accepted there would be no proto sf at all, and sf's history would
begin with, say, HOMER's Odyssey and continue with LUCIAN's True
History.It seems reasonable to argue that we cannot sensibly define
something called "science fiction" until we can characterize both
"science" and "fiction" with meanings close to those held by the words
today. It was largely due to the rise of the novel - which made a formal
attempt to counterfeit real experience - that it became appropriate to
draw a basic distinction between the types of discourse used for
nonfictional commentary and the types used for "fiction". The standardized
nonfictional forms of today - the essay, the treatise and the scientific
paper - were still in the early stages of their evolution in the late 18th
century. Logically, therefore, it seems inappropriate to describe as
"science fiction" anything published in the early 18th century or before.

Indeed, so intimately connected is our sense of the word "fiction" with
the growth of the novel that it would seem most sensible to begin our
reckoning of what might be labelled "science fiction" with the first
speculative work which is both a novel and manifests a clear awareness of
what is and is not "science" in the modern sense of the word. Willem
BILDERDIJK's A Short Account of a Remarkable Aerial Voyage and Discovery
of a New Planet (1813; trans 1987) and Frankenstein both fit this
definition well enough, although sceptics might argue that the supposed
tradition which extends from them is very tenuous, and that no obvious
precursor of Vernian and Wellsian scientific romance appeared before
Chrysostom TRUEMAN's History of a Voyage to the Moon (1864).There are, of
course, pre-19th-century works which, with the aid of hindsight, we can
now unequivocally locate within the literature of the scientific
imagination, notably Francis BACON's New Atlantis (1627; 1629), Johannes
KEPLER's Somnium (1634) and Gabriel DANIEL's Voyage to the World of
Cartesius (1692). These would have been considered by their authors to be
works of philosophy, although they are cast in a form (the imaginary
voyage) which we now consider to be a species of fiction. Some SATIRES
also referred to contemporary scientific endeavours, most notably the
third book of Jonathan SWIFT's Gulliver's Travels (1726), which also
co-opts some of the techniques of formal realism associated with early
novels; but such works usually extrapolate scientific ideas only to deride
their follies. The quasisatirical contes philosophiques of VOLTAIRE
include Micromegas (1750), which might also be considered an apt point of
origin for sf if one were to embrace the common theory that it is the
short story rather than the novel which is sf's natural form. On balance,
however, it seems more sensible to consider all these as significant works
of proto sf. The question as to which other works may be identified
likewise, and the extent to which they might be considered important in
defining the literary influences and patterns of literary expectation
which have contributed to the shaping of sf, is a difficult one - and
possible a sterile one, since we could argue that literary influences have
contributed little to the effective shaping of GENRE SF. Other influences
- historical and social-have certainly been important, and very probably
more important, but the influence on sf of earlier traditions in fantastic
literature should not be minimized: much sf, even the roughest-hewn
PULP-MAGAZINE sf, has been written with much earlier literary models in
mind.The species of proto sf which has exerted most influence on sf and on
attitudes towards it is undoubtedly the imaginary voyage ( FANTASTIC
VOYAGES). Those generally identified as being the closest kin to modern sf
are the lunar voyages whose history is chronicled in Marjorie Hope
NICOLSON's excellent study Voyages to the Moon (1948). Many attempts have
been made to incorporate the history of sf into this tradition, including
Patrick MOORE's Science and Fiction (1957), Roger Lancelyn GREEN's Into
Other Worlds (1957) and Russell Freedman's 2000 Years of Space Travel
(1963). This view makes Francis GODWIN's The Man in the Moone (1638),
CYRANO DE BERGERAC's Other Worlds (1657-62) and other interplanetary
satires the key works of proto sf, although the methods of travel employed
are calculatedly absurd. The cynical incredulity of many such stories,
however, commends them to the sceptical scientific worldview, and we must
remember that scientific fidelity in speculation is only one of the

characteristic demands made of modern sf ( DEFINITIONS). Sheer invention the bolder the better - has always played an important part in sf, and to
a large extent the effectiveness of sf derives from the pretence to
scientific fidelity which asks that wild flights of the imagination be
considered as if they were serious hypotheses. On this basis we can find a
close kinship between sf and the traveller's tale, which attempts to make
interesting fantasies palatable by reference to exotic distant lands;
Lucian's True History is important as a sceptical reminder of the tendency
of such tales to exaggerate wildly. Understandable difficulties arise with
those travellers' tales whose apparatus is concerned with the religious
imagination rather than with secular fabulation: Emanuel SWEDENBORG's
cosmic visions - which include some interesting descriptions of LIFE ON
OTHER WORLDS - are not frequently cited as examples of proto sf, although
Larry NIVEN and others have argued that the cosmological speculations in
DANTE ALIGHIERI's Divine Comedy entitle it to be considered a highly
significant work in the proto-genre. It should perhaps be remembered that
the distinction between scientific thought and religious thought, like the
distinction between fiction and nonfiction, has not always been nearly as
clearcut as it seems today; moreover, the classics of the religious
imagination were frequently echoed in sf, not always with the intention of
subverting their messages. Although such works as Milton's Paradise Lost
(1667; rev 1674) and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678; exp 1684) can
hardly be said to take much account of scientific knowledge, they have
established literary archetypes of considerable importance, and analogies
may be drawn between the kinds of fantastic environment which they
establish and those used in many sf stories.It is worth noting that the
literary tradition of UTOPIAS - which are also usually cast as imaginary
voyages - is not as intimately connected with sf as it might seem. Utopian
speculation is echoed in contemporary sf primarily because sf writers have
adopted a stereotyped "utopian scenario" as one of the standard
environments for futuristic adventure; there is less actual utopian
philosophy in modern sf than one might expect. Contrastingly, there is far
more transplanted MYTHOLOGY than any widely accepted definition could lead
us to expect. If any one imaginary voyage has had a far more than
appropriate share of influence on the genre it is Homer's Odyssey, of
which there are at least 5 straightforward sf transmogrifications. Of
course, the Odyssey is not only an imaginary voyage: it also incorporates
two literary forms which more or less died out in the later historical
periods under consideration here: the hero-myth and what was then its
corollary, the MONSTER story. Both forms have been revived within sf, and
there are clear structural and ideative links between many sf stories and
legendary constructions of these kinds. There are sf stories explicitly
based on the story of the Argonauts, the labours of Hercules and such
early literary exercises as Beowulf, although sf's HEROES are
characteristically conceived in a rather different way from those of the
ancient hero myths.There still remain for consideration the other
prose-forms current in the 17th and 18th centuries whose status as
"fiction" or "nonfiction" is not so easy to establish with hindsight: the
dialogue, the meditation and the history. The dramatic dialogue was quite
popular as a medium for imaginative literature in 19th-century France, its
most flamboyant product being Edgar Quinet's Ahasverus (1833); Poe's

"Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (1838) is a notable work of early sf
cast in this form. Dialogue is now subsumed within ordinary narrative
form, but there are numerous notable sf stories which are basically contes
philosophiques cast as dialogues; genre sf, despite the priority which the
pulps put on action-adventure, has been reasonably hospitable to such
exercises. Even though we now classify them as nonfiction, we should be
prepared to concede an important role in the history of proto sf to the
basic strategy employed in PLATO's dialogues and later works in the same
vein by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and David Hume (1711-1776). Socratic
debate and interrogation are extensively used in sf, not merely as a means
of exposition but also as a way of developing ideas and exploring their
implications; any genre which attempts to develop speculations logically
and rigorously must, obviously, depend to a considerable degree on the
Socratic method of examining ideas.The meditation seems much less
important to the form and development of sf, but the history is a
different matter. The construction of a history, which necessitates
connecting events into a coherent narrative, requires both a creative and
an orderly imagination (thus combining the essential requirements of the
imaginary voyage and the dialogue). Imaginary histories must be considered
alongside imaginary voyages as works which belong to the literary
tradition of which modern sf is one product. Many of the early works which
attempted to get to grips with the future, described in the early pages of
I.F. CLARKE's The Tale of the Future (3rd edn 1978), are cast as
histories. Mention must also be made in this context of the pioneering
exercises in alternative history ( ALTERNATE WORLDS) described in the
essay "Of a History of Events which Have not Happened" (c1800) by Isaac
d'Israeli (1766-1848).Imaginary voyages and imaginary histories may be
formulated in POETRY as well as in prose - several of the works referred
to above are verse epics rather than prose discourses - and a case might
obviously be made for including many poems and plays in the literature of
the scientific imagination; but the most important links we can draw
between classical literature and sf pertain to the settings in which the
stories take place and the apparatus deployed there. With the exception of
epic poetry, neither poetry nor drama is strong in this sense. This is not
to say that sf cannot be adapted to poetry or to the THEATRE (there are
some classic sf plays), but the importance of poetry and drama to any sf
tradition is restricted, and it is difficult to argue convincingly that
Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820) and Shakespeare's The Tempest (1623)
are significant works of proto sf.The attempt to identify a coherent
tradition of proto sf is vain, in more than one sense of that word.
Without a doubt, individual works of classical literature can be shown to
be ancestral in certain respects to occasional themes of sf, but we
devalue the word "tradition" if we use it to describe a series of isolated
juxtapositions. To say that an assembly of illustrious literary works
constitutes such a tradition is a form of self-congratulation on the part
of the sf writer/reader/critic akin to that of a prostitute who claims to
be operating in the tradition of Cleopatra and Madame de Pompadour, even
though in an obvious respect she is correct. Sf is a form of literature
and can lay claim to all of literary history as its background if its
adherents so wish, but this does not mean that we can turn the historical
sequence on its head and claim that sf is the logical culmination of the

"great tradition of proto sf", or the sole beneficiary of its heritage.
Nevertheless, going back into literary history with the intention (however
eccentric it may be) of classifying literary works according to their
various similarities with modern sf is not a complete waste of time. It
may serve as a reminder that sf, like prostitutes, is not a mere accident
of circumstance, and that it is not - either in the literal or in the
commonplace sense of the word - inconsequential. [BS]
PROUMEN, HENRI-JACQUES
[r] BENELUX.
PRUYN, LEONARD
(1898-1973) US writer who began publishing sf with "In Time of Sorrow" in
Authentic in 1954 and continued with an sf novel, World without Women
(1960) with Day KEENE, about the violent consequences to the world of the
loss of its women ( WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION). [JC]
PRYOR, VANESSA
Chelsea Quinn YARBRO.
PSEUDOMAN, AKKAD
Pseudonym of US writer Edwin Fitch Northrup (1886-1940), whose sf novel
Zero to Eighty (1937) tells woodenly of life during the entire 20th
century, culminating in technical and pictorial accounts of the building
of a gun-launched SPACESHIP and of its trip to the Moon. [JC]
PSEUDONYMS
Reasons for using pseudonyms are very various, but almost always involve
concealment. So obvious is this that it might seem to go without saying;
but in fact many reference books altogether disregard the factor of
concealment in their use of the term, and often designate as pseudonyms
variations upon real names made to heighten impact (C.J. Cherry, for
instance, writes as C.J. CHERRYH), or to shorten or simplify a spelling
(Francis A. Jaworski writes as Frank JAVOR), or to select part of a full
or married name for public use (Piers Anthony Jacob writes as Piers
ANTHONY, and Kate Wilhelm Knight writes under her maiden name, Kate
WILHELM). For this encyclopedia we have chosen to designate as "working
names" all such variations; and we restrict the term "pseudonym" to names
which, whether or not the author's legal name is known, have no clear
lexical relationship to that name (we do not treat acronyms or mirror
spellings as conveying a clear lexical relationship). Thus Christopher
ANVIL is a pseudonym for Harry Crosby, as are Bron Fane (a partial
acronym) and Trebor Thorpe (the given name here being a mirror spelling)
for Robert Lionel FANTHORPE, and Frederick R. Ewing for Theodore STURGEON.
In almost all cases the main entry for individuals covered in this volume,
whether authors, editors, illustrators, critics or film-makers, appears
under the name by which they are best known, whether that be the legal
name (Isaac ASIMOV), the working name (Algis BUDRYS) or the pseudonym
(James TIPTREE Jr).All the author's names that have been used for an sf
book - real, working or pseudonymous - appear in this encyclopedia, either
as the headword for an entry or as a cross-reference headword directing
the reader to the entry under which they are treated. Many (but not all)
names that have been used only for sf non-book stories are likewise

cross-referred, but with the additional notation [s]. Cross-reference
entries which designate real figures (who may be collaborators, etc., and
who on occasion may themselves be pseudonymous) are identified with the
notation [r].Collaborative pseudonyms, floating pseudonyms and house names
are given entries. A collaborative-pseudonym entry will usually give
details of books written together under that name by the authors
concerned. A floating-pseudonym entry covers a name which is, in a sense,
freely available for anyone who cares to use it. (Ivar JORGENSEN is an
example of a floating pseudonym.) A house name - which is a kind of
floating pseudonym - is an imaginary name invented by a publishing
company, and such were very frequently used in magazines to conceal the
fact that an author had more than one story in a given issue; e.g., had
Robert SILVERBERG sold 2 stories to a particular issue of a ZIFF-DAVIS
magazine (e.g., AMAZING STORIES), one of the stories might be published
under a Ziff-Davis house name such as Alexander BLADE or E.K. JARVIS usually, though not necessarily, the story of which he had less reason to
be proud. House names might also be used in a case where an author did not
want it known that he was selling stories to a certain magazine; and
(especially in the UK 1950-65) house names were very frequently used by
mass-production houses like CURTIS WARREN or BADGER BOOKS to conceal the
fact that a small team of writers was producing huge numbers of books in
whatever genre the firm required.Pseudonyms - as we said - are forms of
concealment. We might add the observation that, in the sf world,
pseudonyms were, for many years, very common. The reasons for their
popularity were various and (generally) obvious. They have always
flourished in PULP-MAGAZINE environments, where writers, being paid
pittances for most of the early decades of GENRE SF, were forced to write
voluminously, and often needed to use several names during their years of
high production before burn-out; the low prestige of sf also undoubtedly
inspired their use; and (perhaps mysteriously) many sf writers have
clearly enjoyed the creation and maintenance of pseudonymous identities.
The most recent guide to sf pseudonyms - Roger ROBINSON's Who's Hugh?
(1987) - contains about 3000 ascriptions, and is already seriously out of
date, having been compiled too early to take properly into account the
remarkable 1980s revival in the use of every kind of pseudonym, usually by
authors of TIES and adventure series. The flood of concealment is, once
again, rising. [JC/PN]
PSEUDO-SCIENCE
Pseudo-sciences are here defined as belief systems which, though adopting
a scientific or quasiscientific terminology, are generally regarded as
erroneous or unproven by the orthodox scientific community; frequently
they not merely disagree with, or are improbable adjuncts to, accepted
science but violate its fundamental tenets. They are not to be confused
with the IMAGINARY SCIENCES, which are literary conventions, although the
borderline can be blurred, especially with pseudo-technologies such as
ANTIGRAVITY devices.The adherents of many of the pseudo-sciences often
display an almost religious fervour - indeed, some pseudo-scientific
schools, notably SCIENTOLOGY (which is registered as a Church), use
terminology that is consciously more religious than scientific. A further
aspect is that creators of and believers in pseudo-scientific cults often

interpret the scientific establishment's indifference or contempt in terms
of jealousy or even as a self-interested conspiracy designed to conceal
the Truth. The type-example of this occurs in ufology ( UFOS), where
scientists, politicians, the military, the CIA (especially) and even the
presumed ALIEN crews have been frequently accused of mounting cover-ups of
global proportions. (John A. Keel has used the lack of good evidence of
alien visitors as an indication that such alien visitors do indeed exist:
who else would be able to mount such an effective cover-up?) Martin
GARDNER has documented such PARANOIAS in his classic study of
pseudo-scientific cults, In the Name of Science (1952; rev vt Fads and
Fallacies in the Name of Science 1957), and the cultic aspect of
pseudo-scientific belief systems is noted even in the titles of two
further surveys of the field: Cults of Unreason (1973) by Dr Christopher
Evans, which is moderately sympathetic, and The New Apocrypha (1973) by
John T. SLADEK, which is very comprehensive and occasionally strident.
Other works of note include: The Natural History of Nonsense (1947) by
Bergen Evans, which concentrates on biological/zoological fallacies; Can
You Speak Venusian?: A Guide to the Independent Thinkers (1972; rev 1976),
by Patrick MOORE, which is an idiosyncratic personal survey; Science:
Good, Bad and Bogus (coll 1981) by Gardner; Science and the Paranormal
(anth 1981) ed G. Abell and B. Singer; Facts and Fallacies: A Book of
Definitive Mistakes and Misguided Predictions (1981) by Chris MORGAN and
David LANGFORD; A Directory of Discarded Ideas (1981) by John Grant (Paul
BARNETT); and Pseudoscience and the Paranormal: A Critical Examination of
the Evidence (1987) by T. Hines. A Dictionary of Common Fallacies (1978;
rev and exp in 2 vols 1980) by Philip Ward contains a great deal of
scattered information on the pseudo-sciences. The best journal on the
topic is probably The Skeptical Inquirer, published from Buffalo, New
York, by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the
Paranormal.Few people could read any of these books without finding one or
other of their own pet beliefs being dismissed as nonsense; Gardner, for
example, has many harsh words about osteopathy, and Sladek is not gentle
with Teilhard de Chardin's theories of EVOLUTION or Marshall McLuhan's
ideas about the SOCIOLOGY of the MEDIA LANDSCAPE; Grant, contrariwise, has
been attacked for declining to dismiss some pseudo-sciences as necessarily
absurd rather than just exceptionally unlikely. Such reactions point up
the difficulty of defining the topic with any precision, and also indicate
that the authors of these books may have prejudices of their own.There has
always been a close and rather embarrassing link between the
pseudo-sciences and sf. Some commentators have suggested that, at its
lowest level, sf appeals to a childishness in readers, an unwillingness to
get to grips with the real world-qualities which could equally be ascribed
to devotees of various of the pseudo-sciences. When Gardner wrote in the
mid-1950s that "the average fan may very well be a chap in his teens, with
a smattering of scientific knowledge culled mostly from science fiction,
enormously gullible, with a strong bent towards occultism, no
understanding of scientific method, and a basic insecurity for which he
compensates by fantasies of scientific power" he was describing not
pseudo-science believers but sf fans; and in part he had a point, given
that his context was a discussion of John W. CAMPBELL Jr's editorials
puffing PSIONICS. Other aspects of mid-1950s magazine sf, notably its

tales of PARANOIA, its SUPERMAN fantasies and its obsession with ESP, were
not inconsistent with Gardner's caricature.Pseudo-scientific ideas have a
rather different spectrum in sf than outside it. For example,
pseudo-medicine is probably the richest (pun intended) area of
pseudo-science, being the region that attracts the most frauds as opposed
to sincere theoreticians, yet pseudo-medicine is rarely encountered in sf.
An early example is A.E. VAN VOGT's flirtation in Siege of the Unseen
(1946 ASF as "The Chronicler"; 1959) with the notorious eye exercises
devised by William Bates (d1931). Since about the mid-1970s, when ideas of
Mind/Body/Spirit became fashionable, the ability of characters to heal
themselves has, in sf, subtly shifted out of the more general category of
PSI POWERS to become regarded as a reasonable consequence of a general
enhancement of the mind; such an attitude is found in David ZINDELL's
Neverness (1988), among very many others. Trepanation - drilling a hole
through the skull in the pineal region in order to improve general and
particularly intellectual health, promoted from 1965 by the Dutch
theoretician Bart Huges - makes a brief appearance in David CRONENBERG's
film SCANNERS (1981). But such examples are trivial in comparison with the
huge diversity of pseudo-medical ideas found outside fiction. One sf idea
that has affected pseudo-medicine was LYTTON's vril, described in The
Coming Race (1871); in the 1920s the US businessman Robert Nelson marketed
his cure-all, Vrilium, which - unlike another product named for vril,
Bovril - was fortunately not recommended for oral consumption: it proved
to be rat poison. At a more fundamental level, one might make a case that
sf has contributed more to the pseudo-sciences than they have contributed
to sf.Psychiatry - more specifically psychoanalysis - has provided sf and
fantasy authors with better pickings. Some critics would dismiss the
theories of Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) as largely if not entirely
pseudo-scientific; and the same can be said with greater assuredness of
some of the later ideas of Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), which drew also upon
sciencefictional notions. Reich came to believe that he was a focus of a
SPACE-OPERA-style cosmic battle between friendly and hostile UFOs, powered
by the "orgone drive". He assisted the Forces of Good and defended himself
against the Forces of Evil using one of his own inventions, the
cloudbuster, which dispersed "destructive orgone energy". Of psychological
interest was the Christos Experiment carried out by occasional sf writer
G.M. GLASKIN and others in the 1970s, which suggested that the human mind,
in something akin to a dream state, was capable of exploring past and
future incarnations ( REINCARNATION). Sf has also produced its own
psychiatric ideas, notably those associated with DIANETICS and
Scientology. Perhaps the most enthusiastic exploiter of such notions in
genre sf has been A.E. van Vogt, who played a prominent role in the early
days of dianetics and was also much influenced by the GENERAL SEMANTICS
philosophy of Count Alfred KORZYBSKI. In more recent years Colin WILSON,
who admires van Vogt greatly, has based a considerable amount of his
fiction on unorthodox psychological hypotheses; the most interesting
example may be his novella "Timeslip" (1979), which mixes the (now rather
more reputable) theory of the divided brain with notions of the paranormal
and the possibility of humanity developing radically new modes of thinking
- a CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH in more than one sense of that term.Perhaps
the greatest single source of pseudo-scientific ideas in genre sf has been

the work produced by Charles FORT in the 1920s and 1930s. Fort himself was
not a pseudo-scientist per se - he was a chronicler of strange events
rather than a theoretician - but he had a habit of scattering wild
theories through his writings in the form of humorous asides. These have
been rich ground for sf writers in search of story-ideas, but some seem to
have taken them with a greater seriousness. The two areas of his
theorizing that have most influenced sf are ESP/ PSI POWERS and the notion
that we are being secretly observed, and perhaps controlled, by mysterious
intelligences. The latter hypothesis is reflected in many theories at the
wilder end of ufology, in the sort of PARANOIA demonstrated in the lurid
stories of Richard SHAVER, in the lasting popularity of H.P. LOVECRAFT's
Cthulhu Mythos - extensively imitated and developed by others - and, in a
roundabout way, in the idea that we have been visited many times in the
past by ALIENS, who have directed the evolution of our technology (as in
the works of Erich VON DANIKEN; sf stories reflecting this last view are
discussed also in the entries on ADAM AND EVE and ORIGIN OF MAN). It is
worth noting here that the notion of some archaic and long-lost alien race
having "seeded" all the technologically developed planets of the Galaxy
has become something of a CLICHE in SPACE OPERA; on occasion, where the
setting is the very FAR FUTURE, humanity itself - or its AI emissaries has been the "seeding" race. The cliche is interestingly deployed in, for
example, John BRUNNER's A Maze of Stars (1991).One of the most influential
pseudo-scientists of the latter half of this century has been Immanuel
VELIKOVSKY. He first put forward his theories in Worlds in Collision
(1950), a book that came to prominence largely thanks to the misguided
overreaction to it of orthodox scientists. In his first few books
Velikovsky examined countless legends of catastrophe from the Bible and
MYTHOLOGY, and claimed these were explicable in terms of profound cosmic
disturbances. (In several books in the 1960s W. Raymond Drake repeated the
exercise, this time coming to the "inescapable" conclusion that the
disasters could be explained only in terms of warring alien races - the
"Gods".) Most notable was Velikovsky's idea that the planet VENUS is
recent, having been spat out of Jupiter during biblical times and swooping
repeatedly near to the Earth before settling in its current orbit; these
close encounters naturally caused great upheavals on Earth. In the early
1980s there was an outburst of what can be termed "neo-Velikovskianism",
typified by Peter Warlow's The Reversing Earth (1982); such revisions of
the core theories, being considerably more scientifically literate than
the original, proved harder to refute and, because this time few
scientists bothered to make the public attempt to do so, were perhaps more
influential on the scientifically ignorant intelligentsia. A number of sf
novels have been directly affected by the original ideas of Velikovsky
(see his entry for examples) or the later revisions; the most notable is
The HAB Theory (1976) by Allan W. ECKERT. A good parody of Velikovskianism
is Judgement of Jupiter (1980) by John T. SLADEK writing as Richard A.
Tilms.A less well known catastrophe theory was produced in 1886 by the US
Quaker scientist Isaac Newton Vail. This was that all planets go through a
phase or phases of having rings of ice like those currently observable
around the GAS GIANTS. Natural instabilities in Earth's primordial rings
caused them eventually to crash down towards the surface, creating a
hugely thick cloud canopy in the upper atmosphere. When this canopy in

turn collapsed, there was of course the Flood. A sciencefictional
exploration of this is Piers ANTHONY's post- HOLOCAUST novel Rings of Ice
(1974). Another historically important theory of catastrophe was the World
(or Cosmic) Ice Theory of Hans Horbiger, devoutly espoused by the Nazis in
the years leading up to WWII; according to Nazi folklore, various "Jew
scientists" like Albert Einstein fled Germany merely because they could
not face the public demolition of their life's work in the light of
Horbiger's discovered Truth. The theory seems to have been regarded by
even the most sensationalist of pulp writers as too silly to be
exploitable, but as late as 1953 the Horbiger Institute was using it to
"prove" that the MOON's surface was covered in a deep layer of solid
ice.It is not only in GENRE SF that we find pseudo-scientific theories.
Many eccentricities relating to Spiritualism and astral bodies (
ESCHATOLOGY), to IMMORTALITY and REINCARNATION were commonplace in
late-19th-century sf, and are still occasionally found today. Theories
concerning race ( POLITICS), usually implying Black or Native American
inferiority, were depressingly common in LOST-WORLD stories and elsewhere
(but at least theories were called on to support such claims of racial
inferiority: the inferiority of WOMEN was usually just taken for granted),
as were ideas about the lost continents ATLANTIS, Lemuria and Mu, and the
hidden kingdoms inside the HOLLOW EARTH. For some decades after the
Darwinian controversy, alternative theories of EVOLUTION were popular in
sf, and the Lamarckian variant (founded on the notion that characteristics
acquired during an individual's lifetime may be passed on to its
offspring) proved especially fruitful for early writers; even today,
Lamarckian ideas turn up more frequently than most sf writers would care
to admit, as evolutionary ideas are misapplied to fictional ALIEN species
- although it might be claimed that evolutionary mechanisms may be
different in distinct biologies. (Very common, of course, is the perfectly
justifiable application of Lamarckian assumptions to the evolution of
machine INTELLIGENCE.) Pseudo-scientific theories of DEVOLUTION and racial
degeneracy appear in much early sf, including pulp sf at least up to the
1930s, John TAINE being a frequent culprit. Other SOFT SCIENCES have
produced their own rashes of pseudo-scientific ideas, although the
defining line between science and pseudo-science can in these areas be
especially hard to draw, since the empirical testing of, say, a
sociological hypothesis may require decades of patient observation. This
is particularly true of FUTUROLOGY, which is often decried as being a
pseudo-science in toto.None of the predictive pseudo-sciences have been of
much importance in sf, although they are often enough derided in stories
whose own purportedly scientific underpinning is at least as dubious: we
scorn numerology to pass the time before making a HYPERSPACE jump.
Astrology (further discussed under ASTRONOMY) plays a part in several
books, examples being MACROSCOPE (1969) by Piers Anthony and The
Astrologer (1972) by John CAMERON. Numerology is rare; its wilder
eccentricities are parodied in Martin Gardner's The Numerology of Dr
Matrix (coll 197?; vt The Incredible Dr Matrix1976; exp vt The Magic
Numbers of Dr Matrix 1985). An example of a numerology story is "Six Cubed
Plus One" by John Rankine (Douglas R. MASON). From about the mid-1980s,
though, the Tarot has become popular in stories on the borderline of sf
and fantasy; examples are Mary GENTLE's "The Tarot Dice" (in Scholars and

Soldiers [coll 1989]), Marsha Norman's interesting mainstream novel The
Fortune Teller (1988), and the original anthology Tarot Tales (anth 1989)
ed Rachel POLLACK and Caitlin Matthews.The above is not to imply that some
of the theories discussed here (especially those relating to ESP and psi
powers) have not had their supporters among the reputable scientific
ranks. For example, the scientific essayist (and novelist) Arthur KOESTLER
gave support to Jung's idea of synchronicity (that there are acausal
principles affecting events, as well as cause-and-effect) in The Roots of
Coincidence (1972) and made a case for Lamarckism in The Case of the
Midwife Toad (1971), where he also dealt with seriality, a hypothesis,
closely akin to synchronicity, developed by the Austrian biologist Paul
Kammerer (1880-1926). The mathematician John Taylor for some years gave
credence to the supposed fork-bending abilities of Uri Geller (1946- ),
although later he recanted, in Science and the Supernatural (1980). J.
Allen Hynek, a reputable space scientist, contributed considerably to
ufology. The psychologist H.J. Eysenck gave rather qualified support to
the psi powers, as in Explaining the Unexplained: Mysteries of the
Paranormal (1982) with Carl Sargent. The neurologist Kit PEDLER was
another to take the psi powers seriously, as in Mind Over Matter: A
Scientist's View of the Paranormal (1981), and many physicists engaged in
quantum mechanics today are open-minded about areas of parapsychology that
were scientifically TABOO a couple of decades ago. Yet the sometimes
aggressively illogical, proudly irresponsible outpourings of
pseudo-science have on occasion played a considerable part in establishing
such taboos. For example, it was possible in 1966 for Carl SAGAN to
speculate joyously about the possibility that alien races might indeed
have come among us in the remote past, as he did in Intelligent Life in
the Universe (1966) with I.S. Shklovskii, without in any sense damaging
his own scientific credibility; 10 years later, post-von Daniken, it would
have been a brave scientist who would have done the same. Similarly,
investigations in the late 1960s and 1970s by the French statistician
Michel Gauquelin of possible correlations between planetary positions at
individuals' births and their subsequent personalities brought down on him
considerable abuse from the scientific establishment - not because of his
research per se (interesting but inconclusive) but because he was seen to
be working in the taboo area of astrology.The heyday of pseudo-science
fiction was arguably the 1950s. Since the 1960s sf writers within the
genre, less so those outside it, have in general been more responsible in
their use of the dramatic possibilities of the pseudo-sciences, at least
within HARD SF, which purports to be based in the scientifically
plausible. On occasion their rejections of perceived pseudo-science have
been overenthusiastic; for example, in his novel Quatermass (1979), Nigel
KNEALE derides the (today perfectly respectable) notion that megalithic
monuments might be prehistoric astronomical observatories on the grounds
that, as computers were required to discover all their astronomical
alignments, our ancestors would have required computers in order to design
them - an argument exactly analogous to the proof that bees can't fly.Many
sf writers, including Isaac ASIMOV and John Brunner, have actively
campaigned against the mindless acceptance of pseudo-scientific propaganda
and its greedy exploitation by book publishers. Brunner, for example,
wrote a scathing article on the latter subject, "Scientific Thought in

Fiction and in Fact", for Science Fiction at Large (anth 1976; vt
Explorations of the Marvellous) ed Peter NICHOLLS, presenting the view
that the publishing boom (now somewhat abated) in books on the
pseudo-sciences was leading to a great deal of cynical and fraudulent
production of fictions masquerading as fact; sf writers at least maintain
their fictions as fictions.Some sf writers have used the tool of parody to
counter the influence of the pseudo-scientists: Sladek has produced not
only the Velikovsky parody mentioned above but also Arachne Rising: The
Thirteenth Sign of the Zodiac (1977) and The Cosmic Factor (1978), both as
by James Vogh; Langford is responsible for An Account of a Meeting with
Denizens of Another World, 1871 (1979) as if with his wife's (genuine)
ancestor William Robert Loosley; and Grant for Sex Secrets of Ancient
Atlantis (1985). Persistent rumour has, despite his strenuous denials,
claimed Patrick Moore as author of Flying Saucer from Mars (1955) by
"Cedric Allingham".During the late 1980s there began a disturbing tendency
for pseudo-scientists (examples include the Church of Scientology, Uri
Geller, US ufologist Stanton Friedman [1934- ] and Whitley STRIEBER) to
respond to criticism with litigation. Sf writers and readers, angered by
the threat to freedom of opinion, have been prominent among those
supporting the victims of such actions. To extend Brunner's point: the
greatest triumph of pseudo-science will come if it is permitted to impose
the acceptance of its fictions-or, at best, its hypotheses - as fact.
[PN/JGr]
PSIONICS
A common item of sf TERMINOLOGY, referring to the study and use of PSI
POWERS, under which head it is discussed. [PN]See also: PSEUDO-SCIENCE.
PSI POWERS
A name given to the full spectrum of mental powers studied by the
PSEUDO-SCIENCE of parapsychology, and a common item of sf TERMINOLOGY. In
his book From Anecdote to Experiment in Psychical Research (1972), Robert
Thouless claims that he and Dr B.P. Wiesner invented the term, prior to
its use in sf circles, as being less liable to suggest a pre-existing
theory than the term "Extra Sensory Perception" (or ESP). The term was
adopted into sf during the "psi boom" which John W. CAMPBELL Jr promoted
in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION during the early 1950s. Campbell also
popularized in the mid-1950s the related term "psionics", which he once
defined as "psychic electronics"; one of its earliest uses was in Murray
LEINSTER's "The Psionic Mousetrap" (1955). Although many notable psi
stories deal with the entire spectrum of such powers, telepathy,
clairvoyance and precognition - the "perceptual" paranormal powers - are
in this encyclopedia covered in the section on ESP (where many stories
featuring the full range of psi powers are also cited). The principal psi
powers which remain for specific consideration here are: psychokinesis or
telekinesis (moving objects by the power of the mind); teleportation
(moving oneself likewise, although the term is sometimes extended to cover
technologies of MATTER TRANSMISSION); pyrolysis (psychic fire-raising);
and the ability to take control of the minds of others (which, for some
unknown reason, has never been dressed up with a fancy jargon term although it is, of course, often thought to be possible by means of

hypnosis or mesmerism).Campbell's psi-boom was inspired by ideas borrowed
from J.B. Rhine (1895-1980) and Charles FORT to the effect that many
individuals with latent psi powers were already among us; Campbell took
them as representing the "next step" in human EVOLUTION. His own
"Forgetfulness" (1937 ASF as by Don A. Stuart) offers a significant early
image of a human race which has outgrown its dependence on TECHNOLOGY
because the mind can do everything that once required tools. This idea is
widely featured in the works of A.E. VAN VOGT and Theodore STURGEON, and
received a new lease of life after 1945 when the advent of the Bomb
inspired many stories in which the world before or after the HOLOCAUST
might be redeemed by psi-powered MUTANTS, as in Poul ANDERSON's Twilight
World (1947-61 ASF; fixup 1961), John WYNDHAM's Re-Birth (1955 US; vt The
Chrysalids UK) and Phyllis GOTLIEB's Sunburst (1964). Later versions of
the theme can be found in David PALMER's Emergence (1984) and the more
ambivalent Taji's Syndrome (1988) by Chelsea Quinn YARBRO.All the psi
powers, of course, used to be in the repertoire of powerful magicians (
MAGIC), and most are featured in occult romances. Mind control
(possession) has always been a popular theme in horror stories, and there
is a considerable grey area between sf and supernatural fiction of this
kind. Notable works featuring such powers include Trilby (1894) by George
DU MAURIER, The Parasite (1895) by Arthur Conan DOYLE, Congratulate the
Devil (1939) by Andrew MARVELL, "But without Horns" (1940) by Norvell W.
PAGE, The Midwich Cuckoos (1957; vt Village of the Damned US) by John
Wyndham and Children of the Thunder (1989) by John BRUNNER. Considered
historically, teleportation may be seen as an extrapolation of levitation,
which is usually given rather ironic treatment in modern literary works,
as in Neil BELL's "The Facts About Benjamin Crede" (1935), Michael
HARRISON's Higher Things (1945) and John SHIRLEY's Three-Ring Psychus
(1980). In logical terms, however, teleportation may be considered simply
as a special case of telekinesis, and levitation therefore crops up in a
lot of stories which deal with a broader range of telekinetic powers,
including James H. SCHMITZ's The Witches of Karres (1966), Tom REAMY's
Blind Voices (1978) and Timothy ZAHN's A Coming of Age (1985). In the
psi-boom years teleportation featured most prominently in Alfred BESTER's
Tiger! Tiger! (1956 UK; rev vt The Stars My Destination 1957 US), which
shows NEAR-FUTURE society adapting to the development of "jaunting"
(teleportation), and also in such works as Gordon R. DICKSON's Time to
Teleport (1955 Science Fiction Stories as "Perfectly Adjusted"; 1960).
Teleportation by alien creatures is a significant plot element in Anne
MCCAFFREY's Pern series, and comes into sharper focus in Vernor VINGE's
The Witling (1976) and Walter Jon WILLIAMS's Knight Moves (1985). A recent
story in which human teleportation comes in for specific examination is
Jumper (1992) by Steven Gould. Fire-raising rarely receives separate
treatment in sf stories, a notable exception being Stephen KING's
Firestarter (1980).In order to be dramatically effective, abilities like
mind control and telekinesis usually have to be moderated in some way,
unless the point of the story is sarcastically to demonstrate the
appalling tyranny which would surely result from the human possession of
godlike powers, as in Jerome BIXBY's classic "It's a Good Life" (1953),
Frederik POHL's "Pythias" (1955) and Henry SLESAR's "A God Named Smith"
(1957). On the other hand, the unthinkingly casual use of extravagant

powers for trivial purposes is ironically featured in Henry KUTTNER's
comedies about the hillbilly Hogbens. Humans made godlike by psi powers
are given less cynical treatment in Frank HERBERT's "The Priests of Psi"
(1959) and The God Makers (1972), and in several novels by Roger ZELAZNY.
One might perhaps wish that L. Ron HUBBARD had retained the amiable
cynicism he exhibited in his early psi story "The Tramp" (1938), but
instead he went on to build SCIENTOLOGY around a mythology of human
evolution towards psionic godhood. Several stories of gradually unfolding
psi power reach climaxes which may be regarded as apotheoses - Arthur C.
CLARKE's CHILDHOOD'S END (1953) is the most notable example; others are
Keith LAUMER's The Infinite Cage (1972) and Oscar ROSSITER's Tetrasomy Two
(1974). Carole Nelson DOUGLAS's Probe (1985) and Counterprobe (1988) offer
a more moderate account of psi powers, not initially under conscious
control, being gradually revealed.Despite the widespread publicity given
to the phenomenon of "spoon-bending" in the 1970s there is no convincing
evidence that real-world psychics can accomplish more than moderate
conjurers by way of telekinesis. It is a little recognized fact that the
evidence for ESP, seemingly a more plausible talent, is even worse. That
stories of ESP far outnumber stories devoted to the other psi powers has
far more to do with intrinsic narrative interest than with questions of
likelihood. Some critics feel that, in spite of the elaborate
pseudo-scientific jargon developed by believers in the "paranormal",
stories of psi powers really belong to the realm of magical FANTASY rather
than sf. The rapid growth of genre fantasy in the past two decades has, in
fact, allowed many such stories to be appropriately relocated. [PN/BS]
PSYCHEDELIC HUXLEY
Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932, and his vision of a future
world was original, funny, and shocking.In the book, drugs were presented
as an unqualified evil. Soma, the drug of choice, was used by the
authorities to tranquilize humanity into euphoric complacency.But Huxley
himself spent the last decade of his life exploring consciousness-altering
drugs with a lot more sympathy. He experimented with mescaline in 1953 and
tried LSD several times during the 1950s, writing about his experiences
with great enthusiasm and, as he said," an unspeakable sense of gratitude
for the privilege of being born into this universe."Huxley died on
November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. A few hours
before Huxley’s death, he requested LSD. As the doctor and nurses who were
attending him were clustered around the television, Huxley passed away,
under the influence.
PSYCHOHISTORY
A much-loved item of sf TERMINOLOGY, coined in Isaac ASIMOV's very
popular Foundation (1942-50; fixups 1951-3) (and not to be confused with
the term sometimes used by historians, which refers to the study of the
relation of psychological motives to historical process). The attractive
but purely IMAGINARY SCIENCE of psychohistory supposes that the behaviour
of humans in the mass - and thus future HISTORY - can be predicted by
purely statistical means, but ". . . a further necessary assumption is
that the human conglomerate be itself unaware of psychohistoric analysis
in order that its reactions be truly random". It is upon this condition

that the meta-plot of the trilogy depends. [PN]
PSYCHOLOGY
The science of the mind is sufficiently different from the physical
sciences for its discoveries and hypotheses to set very different problems
and offer very different opportunities to the writer of speculative
fiction. Psychology still carries a considerable burden of
pseudo-scientific conjecture even if one sets aside its close and
problematic relationship with parapsychology ( ESP; PSI POWERS). The
absence of convenient models of the mind (whether based on physical
analogy or purely mathematical) means that the mind remains much more
mercurial and mysterious than the atom or the Universe, in spite of the
fact that introspection appears to be a simple and safe source of data.A
great deal of fiction which attempts to explore the mysteries of mind lies
on the borderline between sf and MAINSTREAM fiction. Studies of both
normal and abnormal psychology may be accommodated within the province of
the traditional novel of character, even if their insights are derived
from scientific constructs like psychoanalysis. There is a whole school of
modern novelists, their work generally reckoned to be a long way removed
from sf, whose self-defined task has been to capture the "stream of
consciousness" - a psychological hypothesis we owe to the philosopher
William James (1842-1910), not to his writer brother Henry. Studies of
obsession, alienation and various forms of insanity are by no means
uncommon in contemporary fiction, and even the most exaggerated - e.g.,
many studies of "dual personality" - seem perfectly acceptable as
"realistic" novels. It is not until a notion of this kind is taken to
bizarre extremes, as in Stanley G. WEINBAUM's dual-personality tale The
Dark Other (1950), that the story becomes unmistakably sf. Even stories
replete with the jargon of supposedly scientific psychoanalysis, like
Thomas Bailey ALDRICH's The Queen of Sheba (1877) and S. Guy ENDORE's
classic Freudian murder mystery Methinks the Lady (1945), are
intrinsically mundane, although Endore's study of the psychological
syndrome of lycanthropy, The Werewolf of Paris (1933), is normally
considered a FANTASY. There is a certain irony in the fact that the
subgenre of psychological speculative fiction which is most easily claimed
for sf is the class of stories dealing with mesmerism and hypnosis because these are sufficiently disreputable to be evidently fantastic!
Thus a story like Edgar Allan POE's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"
(1845) invites classification as sf not so much because it mimics the form
of a scientific report but because the mesmerised hero's immunity to decay
is so obviously impossible. Stories of delusional neurosis or vivid
hallucination which become very bizarre - e.g., Sir Ronald FRASER's The
Flower Phantoms (1926) - are more conveniently classed as visionary
fantasy than as sf, because of rather than in spite of the fact that their
"impossible" events are entirely subjective, even though scientific
theories like Freud's psychoanalysis may have been used to generate the
substance of the fantasies.Early exercises in speculative psychology which
uncontroversially belong to sf are those in which some invention, usually
a MACHINE or a drug, is invoked as a literary device to exert specific
control over the substance of the psyche (although it is arguable that all
such devices are based on philosophical errors concerning the nature of

mental phenomena). The origins of psychological sf thus lie in such
stories as Edward BELLAMY's Dr Heidenhoff's Process (1880), about a
technology of selective amnesia, Robert Louis STEVENSON's Strange Case of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), about a drug which separates the principle
of evil from that of good (or the id from the superego, as the Freudian
reader is bound to interpret it), Richard Slee and Cornelia Atwood PRATT's
Dr Berkeley's Discovery (1899), about a method of "photographing"
memories, Walter BESANT's "The Memory Cell" (1900), again dealing with
selective amnesia, and Vincent HARPER's materialist polemic The Mortgage
on the Brain (1905), about an electrical method of
personality-modification.The early sf PULP MAGAZINES featured numerous
devices of these and related types, and Hugo GERNSBACK's recruitment of
the practising psychiatrist David H. KELLER did not result in any
conspicuous sophistication of pulp sf's handling of psychological matters.
Keller's most notable stories extrapolating psychological theory - the
remarkable Freudian erotic fantasy The Eternal Conflict (1939) and "The
Abyss" (1948), which tracks events following the release of a drug which
destroys inhibitions - were too risque for pulp publication. The theme of
"The Abyss" is featured also in Vincent MCHUGH's libidinous comedy I am
Thinking of My Darling (1943), which anticipated counterculture-inspired
LSD fantasies like William TENN's "Did your Coffee Taste Funny this
Morning?" (1967; vt "The Lemon-Green Spaghetti-Loud Dynamite-Dribble Day")
and Brian W. ALDISS's Barefoot in the Head (fixup 1969), rather than
endorsing the view shared by Freud and Keller that repression of our more
vicious urges is the necessary price we pay for society and civilization.
Other notable sf stories which side with Keller in their suspicion of the
unfettered id are Jerome BIXBY's "It's a Good Life" (1953) and James K.
MORROW's The Wine of Violence (1981).The most impressive psychological
study to appear in the pulps was not in an sf magazine but in UNKNOWN;
this was L. Ron HUBBARD's classic Fear (1940; 1957), about a man who loses
a slice of his life by repression and is tortured by the "demons" of
guilt. Material from the story was transplanted into Hubbard's substitute
psychotherapy, DIANETICS, which later became part of the dogma of
SCIENTOLOGY; dianetic theory is much in evidence in the stories collected
in Ole Doc Methuselah (1947-50 as by Rene Lafayette; coll 1972). It is a
fairly common ploy in sf stories to use amnesiac heroes whose memories
eventually turn out to be magnificently bizarre; examples are H.P.
LOVECRAFT's "The Shadow Out of Time" (cut 1936; restored 1939), L.P.
DAVIES's The Shadow Before (1970) and Keith LAUMER's The Infinite Cage
(1972).One of the most famous pulp sf stories, Isaac ASIMOV's "Nightfall"
(1941), deals with the psychology of revelation - a subject dealt with in
a less pessimistic fashion in other stories of CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH.
Asimov's more significant contribution to psychological sf, however, is
the IMAGINARY SCIENCE of robopsychology, which he invented for the stories
in I, ROBOT (1940-50; coll 1950), many of which feature robopsychologist
Susan Calvin in confrontation with practical and theoretical problems
arising from the Three Laws forming the basis of robotic ethics.
Robopsychology remained an essential element in Asimov's ROBOT stories,
especially such philosophically inclined ones as "That Thou Art Mindful of
Him" (1974) and "The Bicentennial Man" (1976).Technologically assisted
journeys into the hypothetical INNER SPACE of the human mind became

increasingly common in post-WWII sf. The hero of "Dreams are Sacred"
(1948) by Peter Phillips (1921- ) has to entice a catatonic dreamer back
to the real world by disrupting his fantasy world. Other such journeys are
featured in "The Mental Assassins" (1950) by Gregg Conrad (Rog PHILLIPS),
"City of the Tiger" (1958) by John BRUNNER, "Descent into the Maelstrom"
(1961) by Daniel F. GALOUYE, "The Girl in his Mind" (1963) by Robert F.
YOUNG, Mindplayers (1987) by Pat CADIGAN, The Night Mayor (1989) by Kim
NEWMAN and Queen of Angels (1990) by Greg BEAR. Several of the above-named
stories extrapolate the idea of "telepathic psychiatry" with considerable
intelligence; the Brunner story became the basis of the pioneering novel
THE WHOLE MAN (fixup 1964 US; vt Telepathist 1965 UK). Another fine novel
on the same theme is THE DREAM MASTER (1966) by Roger ZELAZNY; dreams are
taken very seriously in Connie WILLIS's Lincoln's Dreams (1987).Brunner's
numerous essays in psychological sf also include a notable story about a
reality-distorting drug, The Gaudy Shadows (1960; exp 1971), and a
psychiatric case-study, Quicksand (1967); both belong to categories of sf
story which became very abundant in the 1960s. Several other post-WWII
writers have shown a consistent interest in psychology. Alfred BESTER
produced, among others, the quasi-Freudian vignette, "The Devil's
Invention" (1950; vt "Oddy and Id"), a classic novel about a psychotic
murderer who eventually undergoes psychic demolition and reconstitution,
THE DEMOLISHED MAN (1953), and a remarkable study of confused identity,
"Fondly Fahrenheit" (1954). Most of Theodore STURGEON's sf consists of
psychological studies of loneliness, angst and alienation, often resolved
by the quasitranscendental curative power of love; a few examples selected
from a great many are the bitter study of prejudice, "The World Well Lost"
(1953), the painful study of megalomania, "Mr Costello, Hero" (1953), and
the classic novels of literal psychic reintegration, MORE THAN HUMAN
(fixup 1953) and The Cosmic Rape (1958). Ray BRADBURY has written a number
of neat stories turning on the vagaries of child psychology, most notably
the ironic "Zero Hour" (1947) and "The World the Children Made" (1950; vt
"The Veldt"), although most of his work in this nostalgic vein is pure
fantasy. Very many of Philip K. DICK's sf stories are concerned with false
worldviews of various kinds - and, indeed, with the possibility that
reality is intrinsically subjective; Eye in the Sky (1957) features a
series of ALTERNATE WORLDS incarnating neurotic worldviews, while THE
THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH (1965) was the first of a sequence of
novels dealing with reality-warping drugs which eventually culminated in
the deeply embittered black comedy A SCANNER DARKLY (1977). Several of
Dick's novels deal with schizophrenia (in the true clinical meaning rather
than the vulgar sense embodied in such split-personality stories as Wyman
GUIN's "Beyond Bedlam" [1951]), including Martian Time-Slip (1964) and We
Can Build You (1972), while Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) features the
full panoply of neuroses. PARANOIA and schizophrenia are sufficiently
widespread in modern sf to warrant a separate entry in this book, but
mention may be made here of the paranoid fantasies in which Barry N.
MALZBERG has specialized to great effect; different sf situations become
archetypes of paranoid delusion in Overlay (1972), Beyond Apollo (1972),
The Day of the Burning (1974) and The Gamesman (1975), and even Freud
cannot cope with the situations which confront him in THE REMAKING OF
SIGMUND FREUD (1985). Sf situations are used in much the same way to

construct exaggerated models of alienation in a number of stories by
Robert SILVERBERG, including Thorns (1967), The Man in the Maze (1969) and
Dying Inside (1972). Other writers who consistently extrapolate
psychological syndromes into situations, landscapes and world-designs
include J.G. BALLARD, in virtually all his work, and Philip Jose FARMER,
whose early short stories - including the Oedipus-complex fantasy "Mother"
(1953) and "Rastignac the Devil" (1954)-were pioneering exercises in this
vein.The use of sf to address such psychological questions as the problem
of identity - as in Algis BUDRYS's excellent WHO? (1958) or Silverberg's
The Second Trip (1972) - is often closely related to mainstream work; in
this instance, to such stories as Marcel AYME's The Second Face (1941;
trans 1951), David ELY's Seconds (1963) - filmed as SECONDS (1966) - and
Kobo ABE's Tanin no Kao (1964; trans as The Face of Another 1966 US).
Variants on the sf/mainstream borderline include skin-colour-change
fantasies, such as Chris Stratton's Change of Mind (1969) and the film
Watermelon Man (1970), and sex-change fantasies, such as Hank STINE's
Season of the Witch (1968) and Angela CARTER's The Passion of New Eve
(1977). The processes of mind control involved in "brainwashing" - which
play a key part in George ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) and which
have become a standard element in DYSTOPIAN fiction - bestride the same
borderline; exemplary works include A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1962) by Anthony
BURGESS and The Mind Benders (1963) by James KENNAWAY. Sf writers can,
however, come up with wild variants which attempt to clarify the moral and
philosophical questions involved; examples include The Ring (1968) by
Piers ANTHONY and Robert E. MARGROFF and The Barons of Behavior (1972) by
Tom PURDOM. Psychological themes of considerable interest where sf has a
monopoly include: the augmentation of INTELLIGENCE, as featured in Poul
ANDERSON's Brain Wave (1954), Daniel KEYES's FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (1959;
exp 1966) and Thomas M. DISCH's CAMP CONCENTRATION (1968); psychotic
plague stories like Gregory BENFORD's Deeper than the Darkness (1970; rev
as The Stars in Shroud 1978) and Jack DANN's THE MAN WHO MELTED (1984);
and stories dealing with the recording of emotional experiences for
replaying by consumers, including Lee HARDING's "All My Yesterdays" (1963)
and D.G. COMPTON's SYNTHAJOY (1972). The last story is a variant of the
more common notion that memories, and perhaps knowledge, might be
transferred from one mind to another, a theme featured in Curt SIODMAK's
Hauser's Memory (1968) and various films by him, A.E. VAN VOGT's Future
Glitter (1973; vt Tyranopolis) and James E. GUNN's The Dreamers (fixup
1980). Another related theme is that of recording and marketing dreams, a
notion elaborately developed in Chelsea Quinn YARBRO's Hyacinths (1983)
and James K. Morrow's The Continent of Lies (1984).Despite the profligacy
of sf writers in devising machines and drugs as facilitating devices, the
actual progress of experimental and physiological psychology has had very
little impact on sf by comparison with the more abstract and theoretical
side of the science, perhaps because of the kind of repugnance displayed
in "The Psychologist who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats" (1976) by James
TIPTREE Jr - herself a psychologist, and better qualified than most to
draw upon that inspiration. The heroic analyst selected by Jeremy LEVEN's
computer-incarnated Satan (1982) to solve the problem of evil is similarly
horrified by the gruesome activities of his experimentally inclined
colleagues. The psychological implications of theories in LINGUISTICS have

had more impact, notably in Samuel R. DELANY's BABEL-17 (1966) and Ian
WATSON's THE EMBEDDING (1973).Mention must also be made of a group of
stories dealing with the psychology of sf itself in a rather alarmingly
cynical fashion. The pioneer was a story purporting to be an essay, Robert
LINDNER's "The Jet-Propelled Couch" (1955), about a psychiatrist's
encounter with a patient who believes he has a second existence as the
hero of a series of SPACE OPERAS, a theme echoed by Iain BANKS in The
Bridge (1986), where SWORD-AND-SORCERY motifs obtrude into real life.
Norman SPINRAD's The Iron Dream (1972), in which Hitler channels his
power-fantasies into pulp sf rather than politics, and Malzberg's
Herovit's World (1973) and GALAXIES (1975) offer uncompromisingly harsh
judgments about the consolations of sf, and have aroused considerable ire
among sf fans. Some psychoanalytical literary criticism of well known sf
works is even harsher - examples are C.M. KORNBLUTH's "The Failure of the
Science Fiction Novel as Social Criticism" (1959), Robert Plank's analysis
of Robert A. HEINLEIN's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND (1961) in "Omnipotent
Cannibals" (1971), and Thomas M. DISCH's analysis of the same author's
STARSHIP TROOPERS (1959) in "The Embarrassments of Science Fiction" in
Science Fiction at Large (1976; vt Explorations of the Marvellous) ed
Peter NICHOLLS. The basic charge of all three essays is infantilism:
together with the oft-quoted adage that the GOLDEN AGE OF SF is 13, they
suggest that sf may appeal particularly strongly to people who cannot
(yet) cope with reality, and to those condemned to remain existentially
becalmed in psychological pre-adolescence forever. Spinrad's The Void
Captain's Tale (1983) extrapolates the thesis that tales of the conquest
of space are encoded sexual fantasies, and that SPACESHIPS are phallic
symbols; the one in the story is propelled by a literal sexual drive. On
the other hand, K.W. JETER's Dr Adder (1984) suggests that our deep SEX
fantasies are much more exotic and much sicker than anything which can
routinely be found in sf. Given that no one really knows what secrets lurk
in the shadowy recesses of the unconscious mind and how our imaginative
fictions are shaped to flatter them, speculation on such matters will
presumably continue to roam freely across the whole spectrum of
possibilities. [BS]See also: COMMUNICATIONS; CYBERNETICS; MEDICINE;
PERCEPTION; TABOOS.
PSYCHOTIC
US FANZINE, ed Richard E. GEIS; begun 1953; after 20 issues retitled
Science Fiction Review for 3 issues in 1955; then stopped publishing. Geis
resumed it with Psychotic #21 in 1967, then again changed the title to
Science Fiction Review from #28. It was by this time printing more serious
reviews and interviews, though its main feature remained Geis's amusing,
rambling, personal comments. As Science Fiction Review it won a HUGO for
Best Fanzine in 1969 and 1970; in its first incarnation Science Fiction
Review ended with #43, Mar 1971, at which point it had a circulation,
unusually high for a fanzine, of 1700. The editor also won 7 Hugos as Best
Fan Writer; 6 were for his work in The ALIEN CRITIC , a later fanzine he
began in 1973 and which itself, confusingly, underwent a change of title
to Science Fiction Review in 1975. [PN]
PUBLISHER'S FISCAL CORPORATION

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.
PUBLISHING
The history of sf publishing is, in its widest sense, the HISTORY OF SF
itself; this entry, however, is concerned with a much more recent
phenomenon, the emergence of GENRE SF as an identifiable and distinctive
category of publishing, and therefore concentrates on US firms. A great
amount of sf was published in the UK 1900-1950, but, although some
transplanted US genre sf appeared, until about 1950 most UK firms
published sf without any clear generic tagging, whether issued by prestige
houses or by firms specializing in the library market.It was the first US
sf magazines which, from 1926 onwards, established SCIENTIFICTION (for a
few years) and then "science fiction" as a generic term. The original
material which they featured was viewed, outside an immediate circle of
enthusiasts, as debased and trivial pulp literature. The term became
synonymous with ill written space adventure, while MAINSTREAM authors from
outside the PULP MAGAZINES, who in retrospect have become identified as sf
writers, pursued their careers and published their books without being
tarred with the sf brush. This entry concentrates on sf book publishing;
for magazine publishing SF MAGAZINES.Before 1945 only a small handful of
stories from the sf and fantasy pulp magazines found their way into
general publishers' lists; these included J.M. WALSH's Vandals of the Void
(1931), Edmond HAMILTON's The Horror on the Asteroid (coll 1936 UK), L.
Sprague DE CAMP's LEST DARKNESS FALL (1941) and two of De Camp's
collaborations with Fletcher PRATT, and a number of UK anthologies partly
or wholly drawn from the pages of WEIRD TALES. Meanwhile authors who sold
their sf and fantasy to the better-paying and less-despised
general-fiction pulps like The ARGOSY (Ray CUMMINGS, Otis Adelbert KLINE,
A. MERRITT and others) regularly had their magazine serials issued in book
form.In the absence of interest from established publishers, it fell to sf
enthusiasts themselves to publish in book form the stories they admired (
SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS). The first such project of real
importance was the memorial volume of Stanley G. WEINBAUM's stories, The
Dawn of Flame and Other Stories (coll 1936); the first enterprise to
launch itself as a proper publishing imprint was ARKHAM HOUSE, founded by
August DERLETH and Donald WANDREI to preserve the memory of H.P.
LOVECRAFT, beginning with their first title, The Outsider (coll 1939).WWII
postponed the establishment of any rival ventures. It also saw the
publication of the first significant sf ANTHOLOGIES: Phil STONG's The
Other Worlds (anth 1941) and Donald A. WOLLHEIM's Pocket Book of Science
Fiction (anth 1943) and Portable Novels of Science (anth 1945). The
immediate post-WWII years saw a boom in sf anthology publishing from
respectable imprints, epitomized by Adventures in Time and Space (anth
1946), a mammoth compilation ed by Raymond J. HEALY and J. Francis MCCOMAS
and published by the prestigious Random House. Other anthologists, notably
Groff CONKLIN and Derleth, mined the sf magazines extensively. Successful
as these books were, they did not immediately lead to an interest in
publishing novels or single-author collections written by magazine-sf
writers, and a rash of specialist publishers appeared to fill the gap.
Some of these, such as the Buffalo Book Company, New Era and Polaris
Press, vanished rapidly; others, such as HADLEY PUBLISHING COMPANY and

PRIME PRESS, though short-lived, were more significant; and four imprints,
FANTASY PRESS, FANTASY PUBLISHING COMPANY INC, GNOME PRESS and SHASTA,
proved more enduring. There was no shortage of material to draw on, and a
plentiful readership of sf enthusiasts who did not have access to the old
magazines in which many of the stories were confined. To a significant
degree it was the specialist publishers who determined the form in which
future readers would perceive the stories of the stable of contributors to
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION who formed the core of their lists. For
example, Isaac ASIMOV's Foundation series was merely a long string of
magazine stories until Gnome Press's packaging turned it into a trilogy of
FIXUPS; similarly, Shasta determined the shape of Robert A. HEINLEIN's
Future History series.By the early 1950s, however, a number of established
US publishers had become aware of the commercial potential of sf, and they
began sf lists. DOUBLEDAY was the most significant and enduring of these,
though Scribners had begun a few years earlier with Heinlein juveniles;
others included Grossett ?
similar boom occurred. Many of the giant US anthologies were republished,
generally heavily cut, and such publishers as Grayson ?
Weidenfeld ?
the mid-1950s the first sf list to try to establish the category as
worthwhile literature; its series, under the umbrella title "Novels of the
Future", was edited by the romantic novelist Clemence DANE and included
work by C.M. KORNBLUTH, Wilson TUCKER and others, but rode on the
considerable reputation already established by John WYNDHAM, whose career
with Michael Joseph had begun with The Day of the Triffids (1951); John
CHRISTOPHER shortly followed a similar path. UK publishers like Michael
Joseph found it easy to treat sf, with some confidence, as an
unstigmatized kind of literature. At the same time, however, some of the
worst sf ever published - assembly-line books from such publishers as
CURTIS WARREN, Scion, BADGER BOOKS, Hamilton (who later became Panther
Books) and the Tit-bits SF Library - appeared in the UK during these
years.Where paperback sf remained, with certain exceptions, largely
worthless ephemera in the UK until the late 1950s, in the USA it more
quickly became an established part of publishers' lists. From their
inception, publishers such as ACE BOOKS and BALLANTINE BOOKS relied
heavily, and successfully, on sf; other publishers had a less considerable
but nevertheless significant involvement. Ace, in particular, gave much
encouragement to newer writers, using their Ace Double format ( DOS-A-DOS)
to couple them with more established names. Competition from paperback
publishers was already, by the 1960s, causing the magazine publishers
severe difficulties, and from this time on it is fair to say that books
became the dominant form of sf publishing, with work that had not
previously been printed in magazine form often appearing in paperback
originals. Through the 1960s and 1970s sf continued to grow in strength as
a publisher's category. The last of the important specialist sf
publishers, Gnome Press, died in the early 1960s, although FPCI continued
into the 1970s on a semiprofessional basis; both had been squeezed out by
the larger firms, whose resources they could not match. Arkham House,
however, continued successfully to publish weird material, chiefly
collections of macabre stories and Lovecraftiana. Harper ?
Berkley/Putnam joined Doubleday as the leading US hardcover publishers of

sf (though Doubleday continued to produce the largest volume of titles);
in the UK GOLLANCZ books, in their distinctive yellow jackets, dominated
the market, although Faber ?
ROBERT HALE LIMITED (in descending order of discrimination and ascending
order of volume) also made significant contributions. In the paperback
field Ace Books faded in importance following the departure of editor
Donald A. Wollheim; his new imprint, DAW BOOKS, begun 1972, took over
Ace's place in the market with renewed success. In 1977 Ballantine
retitled its sf imprint DEL REY BOOKS after its editor, Judy-Lynn DEL REY.
From the late 1970s BANTAM BOOKS became a major rather than a minor player
in sf publishing, especially after joining forces with Doubleday in 1986.
In the UK, Panther Books was for many years the leading sf imprint, though
this supremacy was challenged in the early 1960s by Penguin Books and in
the 1970s by Sphere Books, Pan Books and the specialist imprint Orbit. By
1978 virtually every significant paperback publisher on both sides of the
Atlantic included sf as an integral part of its list, and a high
proportion of paperback editors were themselves sf enthusiasts.The 1970s
also saw a revival of small specialist publishers, but, whereas in the
1940s they had been largely animated by a wish to bring unobtainable
novels back into print, in the 1970s they were to a great degree feeding
the demand of the growing market of sf and fantasy collectors, publishing
obscure items by "collectable" authors (such as Lovecraft or, most
particularly, Robert E. HOWARD) or lavishly produced illustrated editions
of favourite works. FAX COLLECTORS EDITIONS was one of these, followed in
the 1980s by MARK V. ZIESING, UNDERWOOD-MILLER and others. Another
phenomenon of the 1970s, attesting to the academic respectability which sf
was achieving in some quarters, was the establishment of scholarly reprint
series, bringing classic sf works back into print in special durable
editions. Such series have been published by ARNO, GARLAND, HYPERION PRESS
and, most notably, GREGG PRESS. Thus sf novels first published in obscure
and garish pulp magazines, later reprinted in hardcovers by loving
enthusiasts when no commercial publisher would look at them, later still
issued in equally garish paperback editions, were now made safe for
posterity.By the 1980s, especially in the USA, sf publishing had begun to
be weighted, more heavily than previously, towards lower-end-of-the-market
series books, books derived from GAMES AND TOYS, film TIES and so forth, a
rather disturbing phenomenon noted and discussed in several of this
encyclopedia's entries (e.g., HISTORY OF SF, SERIES, SHARECROP and SHARED
WORLDS). Many serious sf writers became disturbed at what they perceived
as the shrinking of the middle-of-the-road part of publisher's lists, the
"midlist", to which much of their work had previously belonged, as it was
crowded out by formulaic "product". Nonetheless, serious sf publishing
continued, and new companies arrived. Two brave, short-lived experiments
were TIMESCAPE BOOKS, an imprint of Simon ?
lasted only 1981-3 but was prestigious and influential while it did, and
BLUEJAY BOOKS (1983-6), a quixotic attempt by a small press to enter
mass-market publishing. Much more successful was TOR BOOKS, initially a
mostly paperback house, founded in 1981 and brought under the umbrella of
St Martin's Press, which came from nowhere to be for a time the leading sf
publisher (in terms of number of titles, but also very competitive in
terms of quality) in the USA. By the beginning of the 1990s, US sf

publishing was dominated by Putnam/Berkley/Ace, Bantam/Doubleday/Dell,
Tor/St. Martins and Random House/Ballantine/Del Rey, with firms like
Warner Books edging towards a full involvement. Specialist sf publishers
like DAW and Baen Books ( Jim BAEN), while not exactly languishing, are a
good way down the list, publishing much less sf/fantasy/horror than the
big four groups.Sf publishing in the UK is on a much smaller scale, and is
perhaps quirkier and more individualistic for that reason, though many
titles published in the UK are reprints of US titles (a traffic that does
not flow so efficiently in the other direction). Of those publishers
mentioned above, Gollancz has survived more than one change of ownership
in the 1990s, Pan no longer publishes a large amount of sf, the Sphere sf
list has been absorbed into Orbit, and Penguin is less and less important
as an sf publisher. Panther is long gone, having been transmuted into
Granada and then Grafton, as such becoming a division of HarperCollins,
which in 1992 is perhaps the major player in UK publishing. It has,
however, received strong competition from Legend (a division of Random
Century), from New English Library (a division of Hodder ?
from Gollancz, which now publishes paperbacks as well as hardcovers, from
Orbit (from early 1992 a division of Little, Brown UK), from Headline
(mostly fantasy and horror), and from Millennium (a division of the
new-founded Orion Books). One interesting UK company has been The Women's
Press, whose sf list has specialized in sf by women.A recession in book
publishing generally in the late 1980s and early 1990s was predicted to
affect sf particularly adversely, but it is surviving well to date, though
the overall number of sf books published per year shrank a little from its
1988 peak, but then reached - in the USA at least - a new record, with
LOCUS magazine counting 1990 separate sf/fantasy/horror titles (including
reprints) published there in 1991, an average of over 5 per day. A further
1980s development in sf publishing has been the rise in popularity of the
large-format trade paperback, which has the same page size as the
hardcover edition, and is often printed and published simultaneously with
it; in fact, in such instances it is usually more accurate to say that the
trade-paperback version is the true first edition, the hardcover version
representing a small run-on in a special binding for the institutional and
gift markets. [MJE/PN]
PUCCETTI, ROLAND (PETER)
(1922- ) US philosopher and writer, long professionally involved in
mind-body problems. He published several essays on the split-brain
controversy, perhaps most accessibly in "Sperry on Consciousness: A
Critical Appreciation" for The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy in 1977.
Both of his novels deal, in their way, with the question. In The Death of
the Fuhrer (1972 UK) Hitler's brain is transplanted into the body of a
voluptuous woman, and "his" identity discovered, in (as it were) flagrante
delicto by the hero at a moment of passion. The Trial of John and Henry
Norton (1973 UK) convincingly updates the Jekyll and Hyde theme, in that
the two Nortons of the title inhabit a single body as the result of an
operation to cut the link between the two lobes of the upper brain, the
left and right lobes becoming in effect two different people. One of them
proves to be a murderer, and they are tried "together". RP's concern with
identity problems was evident also in Persons: A Study of Possible Moral

Agents in the Universe (1968 UK), which argues an expansion of the concept
of "person" beyond its usual human-centred limitations and provides
serious cognitive backing for the more speculative attempts in sf to
apprehend the potential nature of ALIENS. [JC]
PULLA, ARMAS J.
[r] FINLAND.
PULP CLASSICS
Robert E. WEINBERG.
PULPHOUSE: A WEEKLY MAGAZINE
PULPHOUSE: THE HARDBACK MAGAZINE.
PULPHOUSE PUBLISHING
Based in Eugene, Oregon, this SMALL PRESS was founded by its publisher
Dean Wesley SMITH in 1988, in association with Kristine Kathryn RUSCH and
others, and specializes in sf, fantasy and horror. It began with
PULPHOUSE: THE HARDBACK MAGAZINE in a limited edition. By 1990 it had
become quite active in book publishing also, and in 1991, with 20
employees, the company seemed on the verge of becoming a full-scale
publishing house; by mid-1992, however, most of these employees had been
laid off. Along with its subsidiary Axolotl Press, Pulphouse publishes
mostly limited editions. These include: a most unusual line of small
paperbacks each containing a single short story (mostly reprints of
award-winners and classics), a series that fell into abeyance in mid-1992;
a series of novellas in book form; and the Author's Choice Monthly
numbered series of single-author collections (28 of these by late 1992).
Most of the above are sf or fantasy, but in mid-1991 Pulphouse announced a
projected Mystery Scene imprint also. [PN]
PULPHOUSE: THE HARDBACK MAGAZINE
Quarterly "magazine" in hardcover-book format, in fact an
ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series; ed Kristine Kathryn RUSCH; published by Dean
Wesley SMITH trading as PULPHOUSE PUBLISHING of Eugene, Oregon; 11 issues
(each 1250 copies) Fall 1988-Spring 1991; publication projected to cease
after 12 issues.This interesting, eclectic and mostly successful
experiment alternated horror, speculative fiction, fantasy and sf in
different issues. Horror and dark fantasy, in which categories much of the
best work appeared, were the most repeated genres. The intended market
appears to have been sophisticated: P:THM published some experimental
work, and despite the notional pigeonholing of the fiction into
categories, many of its stories transcend or ignore genre conventions.
Many new authors were published by P:THM; more experienced contributors
included George Alec EFFINGER, Charles DE LINT, Robert SHECKLEY, Lisa
GOLDSTEIN, Joe R. Lansdale (1951- ) and Harry TURTLEDOVE. An anthology is
The Best of Pulphouse: The Hardcover Magazine (anth 1991) ed Rusch.P:THM
was replaced in 1991 by Pulphouse: A Weekly Magazine ed Smith, in small
BEDSHEET format - first (test) issue marked "Issue Zero" (Mar 1, 1991),
official #1 dated June 1, 1991 - though for a number of months the two
titles overlapped. The new 48pp magazine was anything but weekly to begin
with, and, belatedly realistic, changed its title to Pulphouse: A Fiction
Magazine with #5 (Sep 20, 1991) and announced a biweekly schedule. In its

eight official issues to Dec 1991 it published short fiction, serialized
novels by Robert SHECKLEY, Spider and Jeanne ROBINSON and S.P. SOMTOW, and
published nonfiction articles. P became more irregular in 1992, with only
six issues, then lurched on with only two further issues in 1993, and one
in 1994. #18 came out in early 1995. This latter edition was guest-edited
by Damon KNIGHT, and featured all stories about Jesus, all written by
graduates of CLARION SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' WORKSHOP. P is perfectly
capable of lingering on like this for years, displaying all the wan
fascination of the Undead. [PN]
PULP MAGAZINES
In discussions of popular literature, as in this volume, the term "pulp"
is used metaphorically as often as specifically, and when used
specifically it has both a narrow and a wide sense.1. "Pulp" is used in
this encyclopedia as an indication of format, in contrast to BEDSHEET and
DIGEST. The pulp magazine normally measured 10in x 7in (about 25cm x
18cm); where the word "pulp" is used with no other indication of size, it
can be assumed that the magazine in question was of approximately these
dimensions.2. More broadly, "pulp" is used to designate the type of
magazine whose format is as above. There was more to a pulp magazine than
its size. Pulp magazines, as their name suggests, were printed on cheap
paper manufactured from chemically treated wood pulp, a process invented
in the early 1880s. The paper is coarse, absorbent and acid, with a
distinctive sharp smell much loved by magazine collectors. Pulp paper ages
badly, largely because of its acid content, yellowing and becoming
brittle. Because of the thickness of the paper, pulp magazines tended to
be quite bulky, often 1/2in (1.25cm) thick or more. They generally had
ragged, untrimmed edges, and later in their history had notoriously
garish, brightly coloured covers, many of the coal-tar dyes used to make
cover inks being of the most lurid hues.It is usually accepted that Frank
A. MUNSEY invented the pulp-magazine formula when in 1896 he changed the
contents of The ARGOSY to contain nothing but fiction; previously the most
popular periodicals had published a mixture of fiction, factual articles,
poetry, etc. Sf was already popular in magazine format before the advent
of the pulps - for example, in The STRAND MAGAZINE , The IDLER and
MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE. However, these three and the many like them were aimed
at a wealthier, more middle-class and possibly more literate audience than
that which the pulps were invented to exploit: they were family magazines,
with a more demure format and usually printed on coated, slick paper,
which in the USA led to their being dubbed the "slicks" to distinguish
them from their humbler brethren, the pulps. It is sometimes stated that
the slicks were more expensive than the pulps, but this was not
necessarily so.The popular slicks and the pulps were both part of a
magazine-publishing revolution beginning in the 1880s, in which
mass-distribution techniques and greatly increased advertising allowed the
dropping of prices. Most magazines before the 1880s had had a small
circulation and been relatively expensive, aimed at a narrow,
upper-middle-class, literate group. But now, in the UK and USA, literacy
was becoming nearly universal, population was increasing at an amazing
rate (doubling in 30 years in the USA), modern technology was on the whole
leading to more leisure, and there was as yet no cinema to offer

opposition in the telling of stories. As a consequence, magazine
circulations became massive towards the end of the century, over half a
million in the most successful cases.The slicks and, a little later, the
pulps rode the crest of this wave, with the pulps cornering the
all-fiction-magazine market. Other periodical formats - some of which had
a longer history ( BOYS' PAPERS; DIME-NOVEL SF) included the popular
weekly tabloid, such as PEARSON'S WEEKLY.The general-fiction pulp magazine
began to give way to specialized genre pulps after the founding in 1915 of
Detective Story Monthly. (Frank Munsey had been a pioneer here, too, with
Railroad Man's Magazine [1906] and Ocean [1907].) Western Story followed
in 1919, Love Stories in 1921 and WEIRD TALES in 1923. It is surprising
that sf did not get its own pulp until AMAZING STORIES in 1926, for the
SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE had been a staple of the general-fiction pulps, along
with LOST-WORLD stories and FANTASY, and in these fields the pulps had
produced writers as celebrated and well loved as Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, Ray
CUMMINGS, George Allan ENGLAND, Ralph Milne FARLEY, William Hope HODGSON,
A. MERRITT, Sax ROHMER and Garrett P. SERVISS, as well as helped to
popularize H.G. WELLS (more commonly published in the slicks) and H. Rider
HAGGARD. Many of these writers retain their popularity.The advent of
specialized pulps did little at first to disturb the hardened pulp
writers, who turned from pirate stories to jungle stories, detective
stories to sf, etc., with admirable sang-froid, though often with unhappy
literary results. It was not until the late 1930s that sf writers in the
pulps generally came to see themselves as specialists, concentrating
usually on sf, fantasy and horror, and seldom ranging further. (The
crossing of genre boundaries is not, however, a rarity among pulp sf and
fantasy writers; many have written detective novels, and more recently
some have done very well with DISASTER novels.)Nor did the advent of
specialized pulps mark the end of sf in the general-fiction pulps. Argosy
and BLUE BOOK MAGAZINE, for example, continued in the early 1930s to
attract the most popular sf writers, including Burroughs and Farley;
Argosy was paying up to 6 cents a word, and Blue Book also paid well,
considerably better than the cent or even half-cent a word available from
the sf pulps. However, by the end of the 1930s Argosy's rates had dropped
to 11/2 cents a word. This marked the effective death of the
general-fiction pulp, and probably had a lot to do with the new vigour
apparent in such sf pulps as ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.Although the sf
pulps of the 1930s are remembered with great nostalgia by sf fans, the
fact is that they formed a very minor portion of the overall
pulp-publishing business. The great US pulp-publishing houses, such as
Clayton, STREET ?
sf, in terms of number of titles and overall sales, formed only a tiny
proportion. Sf as big business had to wait for the post-WWII
paperback-book publishing boom ( PUBLISHING).Most of the pulp magazines,
sf included, had died by the middle 1950s, to be replaced by DIGESTS ( SF
MAGAZINES) in increasingly unhappy competition with paperback books; also,
the reading of stories was itself giving way to the watching of
TELEVISION. Indeed, many pulp historians would claim that, despite the
proliferation of titles in the 1930s, the heyday of the pulp magazines
with their half-million circulations ended with the paper shortages
following WWI and the rapidly growing popularity of the CINEMA. The

economic depression of the late 1920s probably prolonged the end, bringing
with it an urgent need for fiction which escaped the greyness of an
ordinary world in which individuals seemed impotent. In the pulps,
individuals not only influenced events, they regularly saved the world.A
full index of sf and post-1930 fantasy magazines with entries in this
volume - including many pulp magazines - is given under SF MAGAZINES.
Other periodicals in which sf was published are discussed under BOYS'
PAPERS, COMICS, DIME-NOVEL SF and MAGAZINES, the latter entry listing the
most important of the general slicks and tabloids which published sf in
the period 1890-1940.The following are the general-fiction pulp-magazine
entries: The ALL-STORY , The ARGOSY , The BLUE BOOK MAGAZINE , The
CAVALIER , The POPULAR MAGAZINE and The SCRAP BOOK . 3 specialized early
pulps given entries are SCIENCE AND INVENTION, THRILL BOOK and WEIRD
TALES. A number of 1930s "weird-menace" and science/detective pulps whose
sf content was very marginal do not receive entries, with the pious
exception of Hugo GERNSBACK's SCIENTIFIC DETECTIVE MONTHLY. There is a
small fantasy element in such various genre pulps as Oriental Stories
(1930), Golden Fleece Historical Adventure (1938) and Jungle Stories
(1938), but the line had to be drawn somewhere in the no-man's-land
between sf and fantasy, and they have been omitted. The sf content of the
SUPERHERO/supervillain genre is sometimes greater and, though many are
omitted - including the extremely popular The Shadow (1931-49), whose sf
content was marginal and irregular (but see Walter B. GIBSON for some
details) - there are entries for CAPTAIN HAZZARD, CAPTAIN ZERO, DOC SAVAGE
MAGAZINE, DR. YEN SIN, DUSTY AYRES AND HIS BATTLE BIRDS, FLASH GORDON
STRANGE ADVENTURE MAGAZINE, G-8 AND HIS BATTLE ACES, The MYSTERIOUS WU
FANG , The OCTOPUS , OPERATOR #5, The SCORPION , The SPIDER and TERENCE X.
O'LEARY'S WAR BIRDS.A good account of life as a pulp writer is The Pulp
Jungle (1967) by Frank Gruber; books on pulp publishing are Cheap Thrills:
An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines (1972) by Ron GOULART, The
Fiction Factory, or From Pulp Row to Quality Street: The Story of 100
Years of Publishing at Street ?
(1902-1965), and Pulp Voices: Interviews with Pulp Magazine Writers and
Editors (chap 1983) ed J.M. Elliot; the feeling of the pulps themselves is
captured in The Pulps: 50 Years of American Pop Culture (1970) ed Tony
Goodstone; and The Shudder Pulps (1975) by Robert Kenneth Jones is on the
"weird-menace" pulps. Also relevant is Yesterday's Faces: A Study of
Series Figures in the Early Pulp Magazines: Volume 2: Strange Days (1984)
by Robert Sampson, vol 1 being largely about precursors in the dime
novels.3. When used metaphorically the word "pulp" describes the quality
and style of the fiction published in the pulp magazines - and, by
extension, any similar fiction, no matter in what format it was published.
The term is still used in this sense today, 40 years after the death of
the pulps proper. The pulps emphasized action, romance, heroism, success,
exotic milieux, fantastic adventures (often with a sprinkling of love
interest), and almost invariably a cheerful ending. In literary criticism
"pulp" is often taken as a synonym for "stylistically crude", but this was
not necessarily the case. Good narrative pacing, by no means a negligible
quality, was regularly found in the pulps, as were other the virtues of
colour, inventiveness, clarity of image and occasional sharp observation,
such as might be seen in the work of the early pulp writer Jack LONDON.

But it is true that the voracious appetite of the pulp market led to many
writers becoming, in effect, word factories, writing too swiftly and to a
cynical formula. The pulps did not generally pay as well for fiction as
did the slicks, so economic pressure forced the pulp writer into high
productivity.Today the term "pulp sf" is associated primarily with stories
written, usually rapidly, for the least intellectual segment of the sf
market - packed with adventure but with little emphasis on character,
which is usually stereotyped, or on ideas, which are frugally and
constantly recycled ( CLICHES). Many of the entries in this volume discuss
typical pulp-sf themes and modes, including GALACTIC EMPIRES, HEROES,
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM, SEX, SPACE OPERA, SUPERMAN, SWORD AND SORCERY
and
VILLAINS. On the other hand, not all the fiction published in the pulp
magazines was subject to the limitations that the word "pulp" usually
suggests. Two famous examples from crime fiction of writers transcending
their pulp origins, even while continuing to be published in a pulp
format, are Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) and Raymond Chandler (1888-1959),
both associated with Black Mask, and examples from sf are common, too, or
else the genre would long ago have died of malnutrition ( GOLDEN AGE OF
SF). [PN]
PULP SF
PULP MAGAZINES.
PULSARS
BLACK HOLES; NEUTRON STARS.
PUNISHMENT PARK
Film (1970). Chartwell/Francoise. Dir Peter WATKINS, starring Carmen
Argenziano, Stan Armsted, Jim Bohan, Frederick Franklin, Gladys Golden.
Screenplay Watkins. 89 mins. Colour.Set in the NEAR FUTURE, PP concerns a
group of young political dissidents who are forced to endure a
government-controlled "run of the gauntlet" before they can attain amnesty
for their political crimes. They must travel many miles across a US desert
to reach a flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes, at the same time
avoiding the patrols of government troops who have orders to shoot to
kill. The presence of a tv team that follows one group of dissidents,
increasingly involved with their situation, ingeniously increases our own
involvement. Made at a time when youthful protest against the USA's
involvement in Vietnam was at its peak, and a propaganda film on the side
of the protesters, PP nevertheless shows a genuinely individual cinematic
vision in its gloomy portrayal of a USA experiencing political repression.
[JB/PN]
PURDOM, TOM
Working name of US writer Thomas Edward Purdom (1936- ) for all his sf,
which he started publishing with "Grieve for a Man"for Fantastic Universe
in 1957. His sf novels, beginning with I Want the Stars (1964 dos), have
been unpretentious but competent adventures, generally set on challenging
alien worlds. The Tree Lord of Imeten (1966 dos) vividly puts two human
colonists into a crisis situation in the jungle while two native races
fight one another. The Barons of Behavior (1972) mixes politics and social

conditioning in a DYSTOPIAN future Earth. [JC]Other works: Five against
Arlane (1967 dos); Reduction in Arms (1967 ASF; exp 1971).As Editor:
Adventures in Discovery (anth 1969).See also: PSYCHOLOGY.
PURPLE DEATH FROM OUTER SPACE
FLASH GORDON.
PURSUIT
Made-for-tv film (1972). ABC Circle/ABC TV. Dir Michael CRICHTON,
starring Ben Gazzara, E.G. Marshall, William Windom, Joseph Wiseman,
Martin Sheen. Screenplay Robert Dozier, based on Binary (1972) by John
Lange (Crichton). 72 mins. Colour.In this lively thriller, Crichton's
directorial debut, an extremist politician plans to use a nerve-gas
chemical weapon, capable of killing millions, in San Diego during a
Republican convention in order to kill the US President. [JB/PN]
PYNCHON, THOMAS
(1937- ) US writer, all of whose works are FABULATIONS which resemble sf
under some interpretations, though the PARANOIA-wracked worlds his
protagonists inhabit defeat any secure reading of the malign figurations
of reality. In V (1963) dovetailing searches for a character named V
geographically reproduce the title; some events in the book border on sf.
The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) presents a complex conspiracy theory of
history, the tone of which seems to have influenced Robert SHEA's and
Robert Anton WILSON's Illuminatus! trilogy (1975). Enormous and complex,
GRAVITY'S RAINBOW (1973) offers no repose for a secure reading, but the
search for its main protagonist (whose sexual climaxes predict and attract
rockets from the V-2s on) fabulously posits an sf world. The walking dead
in Vineland (1990) are - it is almost certain - not literally posthumous.
TP's general concerns with ENTROPY, paranoia and COMMUNICATION have had a
fruitful effect on some sf writers. [JC]Other works: Entropy (1960; 1977
chap UK), also contained in Slow Learner (coll 1986).See also: CYBERPUNK;
FANTASY; HISTORY OF SF.

SF?
Q
(vt The Winged Serpent; vt Q: The Winged Serpent) Film (1983). Larco.
Prod and dir Larry COHEN, starring Michael Moriarty, Candy Clark, David
Carradine. Screenplay Cohen. 92 mins. Colour.In this witty MONSTER MOVIE which subverts our expectations about how both society and B-movies work
in almost the same breath - "Q" represents on the one hand Quetzalcoatl, a
giant winged serpent (thus sf) and Aztec god (thus not sf) that terrorizes
New York, possibly called up by the city's violence, and on the other hand
Quinn (Moriarty), a small-time jewel thief and opportunist who discovers
the monster's lair atop the Chrysler Building (where there is, naturally
enough, an Aztec pyramid). The likable human monster Quinn metaphorically
coalesces with the literal monster. But Quinn plays Judas to the
incarnated god, thus laying himself open to retribution from a ritual
mutilator, one of Q's disciples. He is saved by cool policeman Shepard
(Carradine), to whom monsters are just one more story in the Naked City.
Moriarty is superb and, in its confident mounting, its sophistication, and

its higher-than-average (for Cohen) production values, Q may be its
director's best film. [PN]
QERAMA, THANAS
[r] ALBANIA.
Q: THE WINGED SERPENT
Q.
QUANDRY
US FANZINE (1950-53), 30 issues, ed from Georgia by Lee HOFFMAN. Though
undistinguished in appearance, Q was noted for the quality and humour of
its writing; along with HYPHEN, its influence on fan publishing is still
strong. Contributors included Walt Willis (1919- ), Robert SILVERBERG,
Wilson TUCKER, Robert BLOCH and James WHITE. Hoffman still publishes, but
no longer edits, Science Fiction Five Yearly, the fanzine holding the
record for the longest gaps between regular issues, founded 1951, #9 in
1991; it shares many contributors with Q. A single-issue reprint
collection of Quandry #14-#17 was published in 1982 by Joe D. Siclari.
[PR/RH]
QUANTUM LEAP
US tv series, (1989-1993). Universal/MCA for NBC. Created and prod Donald
P. Bellisario. Supervising prod Deborah Pratt. Writers include Bellisario,
Pratt, Beverly Bridges, Paul Brown, Chris Ruppenthal, Scott Shepherd,
Tommy Thompson. Dirs include David Hemmings, Aaron Lipstadt, James R.
Whitmore, Gilbert Shelton, Christopher Welch, Joe Napolitano, Michael
Watkins, Michael Zinberg. Five seasons to May 1993, 95 one-hour episodes
in all. Colour.QL is an unusual TIME-TRAVEL series, with Scott Bakula as
Sam Beckett (!), a scientist lost in time, helped only by the projected
hologram of Albert (Dean Stockwell), an eccentric colleague trapped in the
future. Unlike the heroes of The TIME TUNNEL (1966-7), who were physically
dumped into historical situations, Beckett travels mentally, his
consciousness inhabiting the bodies of other people at any time between
the 1950s and the 1980s (the time visited has to be after his own birth).
As in Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941), the audience sees the hero as himself
while those around him see the person he is possessing. Although the
premise is gimmicky, the series reached a surprisingly high standard.
Highspots from 1989 have Beckett suddenly in the bodies of a test pilot
about to step into an experimental plane Beckett can't possibly fly, a
mobster required to sing in Italian at a wedding, an old Black man in the
South in the 1950s during a civil-rights demonstration, and a pretty woman
being pursued by a lecherous suitor. Only notionally sf, this is a shade
grittier, funnier and cleverer than it has any right to be, and benefits
strongly from the two relaxed, witty central performances. [KN]
QUANTUM: SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY REVIEW
THRUST.
QUARBER MERKUR
Austrian FANZINE; ed Franz ROTTENSTEINER since its inception in 1963. In
the argot of fans, QM is a "sercon" (serious and constructive) fanzine,
one of the longest-running and most impressive of its type. It publishes

critical, bibliographical, sociopolitical and historical studies of sf,
UTOPIAS, weird fiction and FANTASY. Averaging 90 large unillustrated pages
per issue, QM has now published around 3 million words of serious
criticism; it had reached #74 by the end of 1990. Contributors have
included most of the major German sf critics, and writers such as Herbert
W. FRANKE and Stanislaw LEM; many contributors have been from Eastern
Europe. A collection of some of the best contents is Quarber Merkur (anth
1979 Germany). [PN]
QUARK
US ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series from Paperback Library, ed Samuel R. DELANY
and the poet Marilyn Hacker (1942-) - they were married 1961-80 subtitled "A Quarterly of Speculative Fiction". It was the most overtly
experimental and NEW-WAVE of the ANTHOLOGY series of the early 1970s, and
provoked some hostility in the sf world. It attempted an ambitious,
graphically sophisticated package; but some illustration was substandard
and the design was irritating rather than innovative, with such
counterproductive features as the appearance of authors' names only at the
end of each story and, for #2 (because of a production oversight), the
omission of a contents page. Although Q featured good work by Thomas M.
DISCH, R.A. L AFFERTY, Ursula K. LE GUIN, Joanna RUSS and others, it
lasted only 4 issues: Quark 1 (anth 1970), #2 (anth 1971), #3 (anth 1971)
and #4 (anth 1971). [MJE/PN]
QUASARS
BLACK HOLES.
QUATERMASS
(vt The Quatermass Conclusion) UK tv serial (1979). Euston Films/ITV.
Prod Ted Childs. Dir Piers Haggard, starring John Mills, Simon
MacCorkindale, Rebecca Saire. Written Nigel KNEALE. 4 60min episodes.
Colour. Version for film release (but receiving general release only on
videotape) titled The Quatermass Conclusion, 102 mins.This fourth and
weakest of the Quatermass tv serials (see below for details of the others)
was written in the late 1960s for BBC TV, rejected as too expensive, and
finally made for commercial tv a decade later. The delay rendered
out-of-date the sequences about hippie adolescents lured to neolithic
sites to be harvested by aliens. The other part of the plot, dealing with
near-future breakdown of law and order in a London becoming a wasteland,
is stronger; but the two halves never properly meld, and Q lacks the
narrative thrust of its predecessors. John Mills's Quatermass is rather
old and sad, and, though there is much to enjoy, there is a faintly
querulous, elderly air about the whole production. The cut version, though
planned from the beginning, is semi-incoherent. Kneale's obsessive,
30-year repetition of the science-meets-superstition theme is altogether
jollier in his screenplay for HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1983),
also featuring a stone circle. [PN]
QUATERMASS AND THE PIT
1. UK tv serial (1958-9). BBC TV. Prod and dir Rudolph Cartier, starring
Andre Morell (as Quatermass), Anthony Bushell. Written Nigel KNEALE. 6
35min episodes. (Released on video 1988 at 178 mins.) B/w.As in QATP's two

predecessors, The QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT and QUATERMASS II, Kneale's theme
is demonic possession, dressed up ingeniously as sf. Morell was the best
of the BBC's three Professor Quatermasses, and most critics judge the tv
serial better than the film version. The published script is Quatermass
and the Pit * (1960) by Kneale. For details of the story see below.2. Film
(1967; vt Five Million Years to Earth US) Hammer/Seven Arts. Dir Roy Ward
Baker, starring Andrew Keir (as Quatermass), Barbara Shelley, James
Donald. Screenplay Nigel KNEALE, based on his BBC TV serial. 97 mins.
Colour.Hammer's third Quatermass film, a decade after the second and the
only one with an English actor (Keir) in the title role. The first two
were The QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955) and QUATERMASS II (1957). Workers
excavating a tunnel find an apparent unexploded bomb; it is actually a
Martian spaceship. In a plot-turn deftly blending sf with speculation on
Jungian archetype, it turns out that racial memories have been coded in
our brains by Martians during our prehistory: our image of the Devil is a
distorted "memory" of the Martians' appearance (antennae equalling horns),
and our irrational belligerence reflects the Martians' ritualistic culling
of the weaker members of their species. The spaceship's power source is
merely dormant, and as it comes to life (poltergeist phenomena being the
first effect) it reinforces ancient nightmares. In the disturbing climax
panicked Londoners begin an orgy of destruction as a Devil's head rises
above the streets and paranormal powers are let loose. QATP is surely the
inspiration for Stephen KING's novel The Tommyknockers (1987).Kneale's
characteristic blend of GOTHIC and science is intelligent and
entertaining. Although inferior to its tv original, which had more time to
develop its irrational but mesmerizing thesis, the film is still above
average. [PN/JB]See also: SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
QUATERMASS CONCLUSION, THE
QUATERMASS.
QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT, THE
UK tv serial (1953). BBC TV. Prod and dir Rudolph Cartier, starring
Reginald Tate (as Quatermass), Isabel Dean, Duncan Lamont. Written Nigel
KNEALE. 6 30min episodes. B/w.Before the first episode, the BBC warned
that the serial was "thought to be unsuitable for children or persons of a
nervous disposition". For 6 Saturday nights the UK tv audience watched a
genuinely unsettling story unfold - an ingenious combination of sf and the
traditional horror theme of possession. It was a milestone in televised
sf. The script was published as The Quatermass Experiment * (1959) by
Kneale. For details of the story The QUATERMASS XPERIMENT . [JB]
QUATERMASS II
1. UK tv serial (1955). BBC TV. Prod and dir Rudolph Cartier, starring
John Robinson (as Quatermass). Written Nigel KNEALE. 6 35min episodes.
B/w.This was the sequel to The QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT ; for details of the
story see below. The script was published as Quatermass II * (1960) by
Kneale.2. Film (1957; vt Enemy from Space US) Hammer/United Artists. Dir
Val Guest, starring Brian Donlevy (as Quatermass), Bryan Forbes, John
Longden, Sidney James. Screenplay Nigel KNEALE, Val Guest, based on the
BBC TV serial by Kneale. 85 mins. B/w.This was #2 of the 3 Quatermass
films produced by Hammer, and the first coscripted by Kneale; it is the

most difficult to judge since Kneale, who disliked Donlevy's US
performance and Guest's tampering with his script, withdrew the film from
circulation in 1965 when rights reverted to him. Many critics think it the
best of the Quatermass films, and some deem it the greatest of all UK sf
movies (though astonishingly similar in theme to the US film INVASION OF
THE BODY SNATCHERS [1956]): disturbing, intense, unrelenting, paranoid and
especially nightmarish in its depiction of figures in power conspiring
with aliens capable of entering and controlling human bodies. Much of the
action takes place in the brooding landscapes of the North of England,
where a mysterious technological complex turns out to be the alien power
base. The strong political allegory of ordinary people cruelly exploited
by a cold-blooded (and in this case literally inhuman) ruling class was
very adventurous for the time.The tv ending (Quatermass goes into space to
destroy the asteroid which is the alien base) is dropped in the film. The
film's predecessor was The QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955) and its successor
was QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1967). [PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES; PARANOIA;
QUATERMASS.
QUATERMASS XPERIMENT, THE
(vt The Creeping Unknown US) Film (1955). Hammer. Dir Val Guest, starring
Brian Donlevy (as Quatermass), Richard Wordsworth, Jack Warner. Screenplay
Richard Landau, Val Guest, based on the BBC TV serial by Nigel KNEALE. 82
mins, cut to 78 mins. B/w.It was this film version of the BBC's tv serial
The QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT that convinced the Hammer company there was
money in horror. (The spelling "Xperiment" referred jokingly to the X
certificate Hammer correctly expected the film to be given because of what
seemed in those innocent days its alarming horror content.) An astronaut
returns to Earth infected by spores from space that slowly take over his
body, finally transforming him into an amorphous blob that retreats into
Westminster Abbey, where it is electrocuted by Quatermass. (The original
tv serial ends with Quatermass talking to all the three astronaut psyches
lingering within the monster, thus convincing the blob to self-destruct.)
Richard Wordsworth's shambling, pitiful performance as the afflicted
astronaut is quite moving, communicating (though he barely speaks) a sense
of something utterly alien to human experience. TQX is a minor classic.
[PN/JB]See also: MONSTER MOVIES.
QEBEC
CANADA.
QUEEN OF BLOOD
Roger CORMAN.
QUENEAU, RAYMOND
[r] FRANCE.
QUESADA, ANGEL TORRES
[r] SPAIN.
QUESTAR
US sf magazine; large- BEDSHEET slick format; 13 issues, Spring 1978-Oct
1981; published by M.W. Communications Inc (William G. Wilson and Robert
V. Michelucci), Pittsburgh; ed William G. Wilson Jr. The final, redesigned

issue, had a new title: Quest/Star, subtitled "The World of Science
Fiction".Questar began as a media SEMIPROZINE largely devoted to talk
about COMICS and sf CINEMA, with a sprinkling of not very good stories. #3
introduced interior colour illustration, and a greater concentration on
movies and interviews. Though glossy, it remained insipid. Only with #13 for which, astonishingly, H.L. GOLD was dragged from retirement as fiction
editor - did Q begin publishing reputable fiction. This was too little,
too late. Undercapitalized - and undersold, despite its patchy national
distribution from #7 - Q sank, lamented by few. Publication was irregular,
though approximately quarterly. [PN]
QUEST FOR FIRE
Film (1981). ICC-Cine-Trail (Montreal)/Belstar Productions/Stephan Films
(Paris). Dir Jean-Jacques Annaud, starring Everett McGill, Ron Perlman,
Nameer El-Kadi, Rae Dawn Chong. Screenplay by Gerard Brach, based on La
Guerre du Feu (1909) by J.H. ROSNY aine. 100 mins. Colour.This
Canadian/French coproduction dramatizes the 1909 French classic
prehistoric romance by J.H. Rosny aine, trans as The Quest for Fire: A
Novel of Prehistoric Times (cut trans 1967 US). Great care (possibly
misplaced, since who can know?) was taken to make it all seem authentic,
from positions adopted for love-making (body language credited to Desmond
Morris) and an imaginary agglutinative language with a vocabulary of about
200 sounds (linguistics credited to Anthony BURGESS). The tribe's fire has
gone out, and three tribesmen go on a quest to find fresh fire (it is a
kind of Holy Grail), confronting a more primitive cannibal tribe and then
the more sophisticated Ivaka, who know how to make fire. As an exercise in
imaginary ANTHROPOLOGY it is mildly impressive (though it has its cod
aspects, its 1909 original not being the last word in prehistoric
insight); as story-telling, it covers familiar generic ground, but is all
very enjoyable - especially the arbitrary herd of mammoths (elephants
wearing rugs) - and rather touching. The Kenyan and Scottish highlands,
beautifully photographed, stand in for prehistoric Europe. [PN]
QUEST FOR LOVE
Film (1971). Peter Rogers Productions. Dir Ralph Thomas, starring Tom
Bell, Joan Collins, Denholm Elliott, Laurence Naismith. Screenplay Terence
Feely, based on "Random Quest" (1961) by John WYNDHAM. 91 mins.
Colour.Romance about a physicist (Bell) accidentally transferred to a
PARALLEL WORLD, where he falls in love with the wife (Collins) of his
alter ego, a playwright and cad, whose place he has taken. She dies. On
being sucked back to our own world, he desperately quests for her
counterpart, hoping to save her and have a second chance at love. He does.
Good performances, so-so as sf, with the differences of the new world
(Kennedy not assassinated, etc.) established only perfunctorily. Wyndham's
original story is one of his weakest. [PN]
QUESTOR TAPES, THE
Made-for-tv film (1974). Universal/NBC. Dir Richard A. Colla, starring
Robert Foxworth (as Questor), Mike Farrell, John Vernon. Teleplay Gene
RODDENBERRY, Gene L. Coon. 100 mins. Colour.This was the rather good pilot
episode for a tv series that never sold. Questor, the last of a series of
ANDROID guardians deposited on Earth eons ago by a beneficent ALIEN race,

has been faultily programmed, and the story involves his search for
information that will explain his origin and mission. Little is resolved,
since the film was designed as an introduction only. The novelization is
The Questor Tapes * (1974) by D.C. FONTANA. [JB]
QUESTS
FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FANTASY.
QUEST/STAR
QUESTAR.
QUICK, W.T.
(? - ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Rest in Pieces" for IASFM
in 1980, but who came to more general notice, after several 1980s stories
in ASF, with the Dreams sequence of sf adventures: Dreams of Flesh and
Sand (1988), Dreams of Gods and Men (1989) and Singularities (1990). The
tales are clear-cut and taut, but the huge corporations dominated by AIs
were unsurprising fare for readers familiar with the rapid explosion of
the CYBERPUNK subgenre. Yesterday's Pawn (1989), also an adventure tale,
takes its adolescent protagonist through space and time as he attempts to
decipher the importance of an ancient artefact; but Systems (1989) returns
to cyberpunk territory in the fast-paced story of a "data hunter"
simultaneously grieving for his pregnant wife and solving the mysteries
surrounding her murder. [JC]
QUIET EARTH, THE
Film (1985). Cinepro/Pillsbury. Dir Geoffrey Murphy, starring Bruno
Lawrence, Alison Routledge, Peter Smith. Screenplay Bill Baer, Bruno
Lawrence, Sam Pillsbury, based on The Quiet Earth (1981) by Craig
HARRISON. 91 mins. Colour.This New Zealand film tells of a
scientific/metaphysical DISASTER, perhaps consequent upon a secret project
in energy transmission, in which all people disappear from the Earth
except those who coincidentally die at the moment of the disaster: these
are resurrected. A guilt-ridden scientist plays solitary games in a
deserted city; he meets a woman survivor and then a tough Maori, with the
usual male rivalry ensuing. The scientist realizes the fabric of the
Universe has become unstable and tries to put it right, with interesting
results. A small, low-key, honest film, suffering from a derivative
storyline and rather pedestrian direction and performances. [PN]
QUILL, JOHN
[s] Max ADELER.
QUILLER, ANDREW
Kenneth BULMER.
QUILP, JOCELYN
Pseudonym of UK writer Halliwell Sutcliffe (1870-1932), whose Baron
Verdigris: A Romance of the Reversed Direction (1894) features a
12th-century knight cast into confusion by being able to remember both the
past and the future, but not to distinguish between them. [JC]
QUINN, DANIEL
(1935- ) US writer who began publishing work of genre interest with

Dreamer (1988), a dark fantasy, and who came to wide notice with Ishmael
(1992), which won the first Turner Tomorrow Award of $500,000. The novel
is a quietly told but elegantly unrelenting indictment of Homo sapiens's
lethal tenure as rulers of the planet, spoken through the consciousness of
a melancholy, didactic great ape ( APES AND CAVEMEN) who attempts to teach
the human protagonist what must be done: you must (he insists) change your
lives; or you will all die. [JC]
QUINN, GERARD A.
(1927- ) Northern Irish illustrator. One of the "grand old men" (with
Brian LEWIS) of UK sf illustration in the 1950s, GAQ did hundreds of
illustrations for UK sf magazines, beginning 1951, including 36 covers for
NW, 24 for Science Fantasy, 3 for Nebula Science Fiction, 2 for Vision of
Tomorrow and, in a minor 1982 comeback after largely disappearing from the
scene in the mid-1960s, 2 for EXTRO. Specializing in alien landscapes, his
astronomical paintings were often compared to those of Chesley BONESTELL,
though his use of colour was less photographically realistic. His interior
black-and-white work was intricate. [JG/PN]
QUINN, JAMES L(OUIS)
(? - ) US editor whose Quinn Publishing Co started the magazine IF in
1952; JLQ became editor after the first 4 issues. Its circulation
gradually declined, and in 1958 JLQ appointed Damon KNIGHT in his place.
The magazine's fortunes did not revive and JLQ suspended publication,
subsequently selling the title to the publishers of GALAXY SCIENCE
FICTION. With Eve Wulff he ed 2 anthologies drawn from the magazine: The
First World of If (anth 1957) and The Second World of If (anth 1958).
[MJE]
QUINN PUBLISHING CO.
IF.
QUINTET
Film (1979). Lion's Gate/20th Century-Fox. Dir Robert Altman, starring
Paul Newman, Bibi Andersson, Vittorio Gassman, Fernando Rey, Brigitte
Fossey, Nina Van Pallandt, David Langton. Screenplay Frank Barhydt,
Altman, Patricia Resnick, from a story by Altman, Lionel Chetwynd,
Resnick. 118 mins. Colour.This strange film, crucified on release, is
perhaps better than the then-consensus suggested. Newman is the
seal-hunter in an (apparently) post- HOLOCAUST frozen future, a new Ice
Age, who with his pregnant wife joins a dying but still crowded city,
where corpses are left in the snow for the dogs to eat, where nobody is
born any more, and where anomie is held at bay only by obsessive playing
of the game Quintet. This is played either on a board or in real life; in
the latter case 5 people must be killed: only 1 will survive. Newman's
wife (Fossey) is accidentally killed during a game attack (along with
Earth's last foetus), and Newman vengefully joins the game, wins, killing
his new lover (Andersson) in the process, and vanishes back into the snow.
The obvious reading is that of the still vigorous, romantic hero
destroying a corrupt society. Another plausible reading is that the
death-focused game is all the real life that is left, and that the hero's
despising it is itself a sterile act of turning away: the hero as lost

fool. The imagery is strong, the pace glacial and the theme
overintellectualized; the deliberately international cast sounds most of
the time very uncomfortable with English (though the very alienation that
suggests is appropriate to the story). Q bores the watcher, yet lingers
for years in the mind. [PN]

SF?
RABELAIS, FRANCOIS
(?1494-1553) French monk, doctor, priest and writer. The various
manuscripts now generally published as Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-52
plus a posthumous text of dubious authenticity 1564; many trans, of which
the best known is that by Sir Thomas Urquhart - first 2 books 1653 UK, 3rd
book 1693 UK - and Peter Le Motteux - 4th and 5th books 1694 UK, and of
which the most successful contemporary version is trans Burton Raffel 1990
US) form an immense, exuberant, linguistically inventive SATIRE with most
of medieval Christendom the target. The giants of the title are enormous
both physically and in their joyous gusto. In the Fourth Book (1552) of
the sequence, ISLANDS exemplary of various aspects of society are
visited-including the island of the Papimanes, description of whose
inhabitants involves a radical criticism of the Catholic Church. Darker
and more bitter in tone, the Fifth Book (1564) - which may well have been
completed by another hand from FR's first draft-incorporates a section,
The Ringing Island (1562), originally published separately, with the most
notable sf imagery of the entire work. The islands of the 4th and 5th
books were probably the most sustained invention of other worlds in
literature up to that time. The succession of ALIEN societies, often
making some kind of satirical comment on our own, complete with all sorts
of colourful anthropological detail, has been greatly influential in PROTO
SCIENCE FICTION, and its resonances can be sensed even today in the work
of writers like Jack VANCE, who, even if not directly influenced by him,
continue the FR tradition. [JC/PN]See also: FRANCE.
RABID
Film (1976). Cinepix/Dibar Syndicate/Canadian Film Development Corp.
Written/dir David Cronenberg, starring Marilyn Chambers, Joe Silver,
Howard Ryshpan, Patricia Gage, Susan Roman. 91 mins. Colour.In this
Canadian film from David CRONENBERG an experimental skin graft on an
accident victim (hardcore porn star Marilyn Chambers) turns her into the
carrier of a rabies-like disease which induces homicidal mania in its
victims; the disease is spread by means of a phallic, organic syringe
which emerges from labia in her armpit and is used to satisfy her new,
uncontrollable blood lust. Montreal is soon in the throes of apocalypse,
and martial law is established; citizens who cannot produce proof of
inoculation are shot by troops and their bodies dumped into garbage
trucks. Structured much like The PARASITE MURDERS (1974; vt They Came from
Within; vt Shivers), this is more smoothly directed but perhaps less
intense, and by Cronenberg's standards is a conventional exploitation
picture - though from anybody else this medical/Freudian HORROR movie,
with its gender-bending, penis-wielding killer woman, would have seemed
bizarre indeed. [PN/JB]See also: CINEMA; MONSTER MOVIES; SEX.

RABKIN, ERIC S(TANLEY)
(1946- ) US sf critic and professor of English Language and Literature,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Of the 18 books he has written or
edited to 1991, 15 have a direct relevance to sf and fantasy. His critical
books are: The Fantastic in Literature (1976), an academic study in genre
definition (including sf), provocative but not always rigorous; Science
Fiction: History, Science, Vision (1977) with Robert SCHOLES, a general
introduction to the subject seemingly aimed at the novice, with strong
opening and closing sections on the HISTORY OF SF and 10 representative
novels, but less impressive intermediate chapters on media, sciences and
themes; and Arthur C. Clarke (chap 1979; rev 1980). 2 anthologies ed ESR
intended for educational use ( SF IN THE CLASSROOM), collecting fantasy
and sf stories showing the historical development of those genres, are
Fantastic Worlds: Myths, Tales and Stories (anth 1979) and Science
Fiction: A Historical Anthology (anth 1983).ESR's other book publications
are anthologies of critical essays: Bridges to Fantasy (anth 1982) ed with
George Edgar SLUSSER and Scholes; The End of the World (anth 1983) ed with
Martin H. GREENBERG and Joseph D. OLANDER; Co-Ordinates: Placing Science
Fiction and Fantasy (anth 1983) ed with Slusser and Scholes; No Place
Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (anth 1983) ed with
Greenberg and Olander; Shadows of the Magic Lamp: Fantasy and Science
Fiction in Film (anth 1985) ed with Slusser; Hard Science Fiction (anth
1986) ed with Slusser; Storm Warnings: Science Fiction Confronts the
Future (anth 1987) ed with Slusser and Colin GREENLAND; Intersections:
Fantasy and Science Fiction (anth 1987) ed with Slusser; Aliens: The
Anthropology of Science Fiction (anth 1987) ed with Slusser; Mindscapes:
The Geographies of Imagined Worlds (anth 1989) ed with Slusser. Further
such anthologies, part of the now-formidable academic publishing industry
related to sf, are projected. [PN]See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; CINEMA; CRITICAL
AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF.
von RACHEN, KURT
[s] L. Ron HUBBARD.
RACIAL CONFLICT
POLITICS.
RACKHAM, JOHN
John T. PHILLIFENT.
RADAR MEN FROM THE MOON
COMMANDO CODY - SKY MARSHAL OF THE UNIVERSE.
RADCLIFFE, (HENRY) GARNETT
(1899- ) UK writer of occasional sf, including the title novella of The
Return of the Ceteosaurus, and Other Tales (coll 1926), which pits a huge
saurian against a DEATH RAY. The Great Orme Terror (1934) is a detective
novel whose solution involves ROBOTS. The task of the heroine of The Lady
from Venus (1947) is to acquire Earth eggs for use back home as a form of
currency. [JC]
RADIATION
HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; MUTANTS; NUCLEAR POWER; SUN; WEAPONS.

RADIO
1. Radio in the USA Fantastic thrillers, incorporating sf and
supernatural elements alternately, were fairly common in the USA all
through the "Golden Age" of radio (usually considered 1930-50), but
"hardcore" sf was rarer.As early as 1929, Carlton E. Morse (1900-1993) in
San Francisco wrote and produced closed-end serials (a single story, from
which the characters did not continue indefinitely) which involved sf
concepts. Amid ancient jungle temples, Morse rationalized mysticism into
science in The Cobra King Strikes Back and Land of the Living Dead. The
same titles and scripts were reprised in the 1945 series Adventures by
Morse. Similar themes were developed with more sophistication by Morse in
I Love a Mystery, 1939-45 (NBC, then CBS), and new productions repeating
the scripts, 1949-52 (Mutual). Temple of Vampires had heroes Jack, Doc and
Reggie facing human vampires and gigantic mutant bats. Two other I Love a
Mystery episodes, The Stairway to the Sun and The Hermit of San Felipe
Atabapo, concerned the same lost plateau in South America, where dwelled
prehistoric monsters and a race of supermen who controlled world destiny.
More celebrated for his literate domestic serial One Man's Family, Morse
was also radio's foremost adventure writer, similar (and comparable) to H.
Rider HAGGARD and Arthur Conan DOYLE. Much of his work has survived,
thanks to private collectors, and has been re-released on
record.Children's programming was deeply involved with sf. BUCK ROGERS IN
THE 25TH CENTURY was probably the first "hardcore" sf series on radio,
beginning in 1932 (CBS). (It was only the second important afternoon
adventure serial of any kind, its predecessor being Little Orphan Annie.)
Based on the comic strip by Phil NOWLAN and Dick CALKINS, it was written
partly by Calkins, but for the most part by radio producer Jack Johnstone.
The stories were far from silly or trivial, and made a good job of
presenting such basic ideas as time and space travel to a youthful
audience. Various revivals carried the Buck Rogers title through to 1946
on radio. Other series of shorter duration were FLASH GORDON, Brad Steele
- Ace of Space, SPACE PATROL and Space Cadet (the last two being original
radio shows based on established tv favorites in the early 1950s: TOM
CORBETT, SPACE CADET). SUPERMAN was an sf character, created by Jerry
SIEGEL and Joe Shuster in their comic strip, but on radio (1940-52) the
series generally dealt with crime and mystery. Some sf appeared when the
Man of Steel ventured to the planet Utopia, or when menaced by Kryptonite.
Supporting characters included guest stars Batman and Robin.Other juvenile
serials had Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy (1933-51) experimenting
with Uranium-235 in 1939; Captain Midnight (1938-50), the mysterious
aviator, encountering flying saucers ( UFOs) in 1949; and Tom Mix
(1933-50), the Western movie star (impersonated on radio usually by Curley
Bradley), constantly facing mysteries with a supernatural and superscience
atmosphere. (The same actor and theme were used in Curley Bradley's Trail
of Mystery, written and prod Jim HARMON in 1976 for syndication.)Horror
stories, in half-hour anthologies, appeared in the 1930s. Such series were
mostly supernatural in content, but sf occasionally appeared. Lights Out
began in 1938 (NBC), written by Willis Cooper, later by Arch Oboler.
Oboler's tale of an ordinary chicken's heart, stimulated by growth
hormones to engulf the entire world, is one of the most famous single

radio plays of any kind. Other horror anthologies included Witch's Tale by
Alonzo Deen Cole, Quiet Please by Willis Cooper, and Hermit's Cave by
various authors.A general drama anthology, Mercury Theater on the Air, was
begun by its producer-star Orson Welles (1915-1985) in 1938 (CBS). One of
its earliest broadcasts, WAR OF THE WORLDS, adapted H.G. WELLS's novel in
the form of a contemporary on-the-spot newscast. Thousands of listeners
were thrown into a state of panic, believing Mars was invading the Earth.
The resulting havoc undoubtedly made this sf play the most famous radio
broadcast of all time. The Mercury series also did a memorable version of
Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847-1912).Before leaving for the movies
and his classic Citizen Kane (1941), Welles also starred in The Shadow in
1937-8. The series had begun in 1931 and until 1954 often presented sf in
charmingly lurid pulp fashion, with its mysterious hero who could "cloud
men's minds" by hypnosis (thus becoming invisible), facing mad scientists
who could control volcanoes, dead bodies, even light and dark. Rival
fantasy heroes included The Avenger (almost an exact copy), Peter Quill, a
weird, benevolent, hunchbacked scientist, and the fearless shipmates of
Latitude Zero.Near the end of major night-time programming on radio in
1949, sf came into its own in an anthology of modern sf, Dimension X
(later vt X Minus 1). This NBC programme had well presented versions of
Bradbury's Martian Chronicles stories, Robert A. HEINLEIN's "Requiem"
(written 1940), and many other celebrated sf stories, intermittently until
1957. Although sf continued through the 1970s to be presented
experimentally (and only occasionally) on culture-oriented FM stations,
and on the CBS Radio Mystery Theater (the first major network revival of
drama, beginning 1973), X Minus 1 still stands as one of the finest
showcases for sf in any dramatic medium. [JH]2. Radio in the UK The
decreasing importance of US radio as a medium for dramatized sf (and drama
generally) is presumably due to the death of network radio; the situation
is different in the UK, where the BBC continues to broadcast across the
whole country, and is not dependent on income from advertising. Few FM
stations anywhere have the budget for drama productions.Sf has been
broadcast by the BBC since the 1930s; indeed, radio is such a suitable
medium for sf that it is hard to find a celebrated sf author whose work
has not been transmitted. Sf work by writers as various as H.G. WELLS,
John CHRISTOPHER and Brian W. ALDISS has regularly been broadcast as
readings (sometimes by the authors themselves) or dramatizations (as
single plays or as serials). Sf programmes have been aimed at all ages.
For example, a typical Monday in 1953 would offer one of Angus MacVicar's
LOST PLANET stories on the 5pm Children's Hour, and at 7.30pm an episode
of the fantastically successful Journey into Space serial would be
transmitted for the 7- to 70-year-olds.Journey into Space was written and
prod for radio by Charles CHILTON, already well known to youngsters as
creator of the popular Western Riders-of-the-Range series, which appeared
on radio and in the BOYS' PAPER Eagle. Journey into Space ran only 1953-5,
with 3 serialized stories comprising 54 episodes in all, but it enthralled
a generation for whom landing on the Moon was still a far-fetched fantasy.
The 3 stories were set on the MOON in 1965 and on MARS in 1971 and 1973,
and featured the adventures of the Scots pilot Jet Morgan and his crew,
Cockney Lemmy Barnet, Australian Stephen Mitchell and US Dr Matthews. High
points were the meeting with a malevolent ALIEN civilization shortly after

the first Moon landing, the foiling of a Martian INVASION, TIME TRAVEL,
mass hypnosis and flying saucers. By 1955 the programme reached 5 million
listeners, deservedly the largest UK radio audience ever, no previous sf
radio drama having equalled it for narrative vigour. The programmes were
sold to 58 countries; the adventures were novelized by Chilton as Journey
Into Space * (1954), The Red Planet * (1956) and The World in Peril *
(1960); he also scripted a further Jet Morgan adventure for a comic strip
in Express Weekly (1956-7).Another well remembered sf radio serial was Dan
Dare, broadcast for several years from 1953 by the English-language
service of Radio Luxembourg in weekly 15min episodes. The programme was
written and produced by people quite unconnected with the staff of Frank
HAMPSON's comic strip DAN DARE - PILOT OF THE FUTURE; although it used the
same characters and situations, it was in a quite different style. While
unsophisticated SPACE OPERA as sf, it was thoroughly successful as
juvenile high adventure.As radio lost its audience to tv in the late
1950s, so too did radio sf lose its mass appeal. Never again would an sf
series reach as wide an audience as the above two programmes. In the
1970s, however, a number of breakthrough productions appeared. The BBC
dramatized Isaac ASIMOV's Foundation series (1951-3) in 6 parts, and newly
emerging local stations experimented with the genre: disc-jockey and
comedian Kenny Everett's Captain Kremmen gained a cult following on
London's Capital Radio, with a subsequent degree of multimedia success;
Manchester's Piccadilly Radio helped launch the career of Stephen
GALLAGHER with the 6-part serial The Last Rose of Summer (1978).But it
took the stimulus of the visual media to prompt a serious reconsideration
of the genre's merits. In the wake of the film STAR WARS (1977) came a
mini-boom in radio sf that lasted into the 1980s: Saturday Night Theatre
presented dramatizations of novels by H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, John
Wyndham and Ray BRADBURY, and also brought about a belated revival of
Journey into Space in the singleton play The Return from Mars; James
FOLLETT contributed the serials Earth Search and Earth Search II; and
Douglas ADAMS's HITCH HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY became the biggest radio
attraction for a whole generation, each repeat broadcast bringing in a
larger audience and creating an enormous market for book, record, tape and
tv spin-offs.Despite its success, the BBC failed to capitalize on Hitch
Hiker, although its influence held through the 1980s in a string of
humorous sf series such as Nineteen Ninety-four and adaptations of the
Harry HARRISON novels Bill, the Galactic Hero (1965) and Star Smashers of
the Galaxy Rangers (1973). The most impressive drama of the decade came in
single plays by Tanith LEE, Stephen Gallagher and Wally K. Daly. Charles
Chilton made another worthy attempt to revive Journey into Space with 2
series of Space Force, but his efforts suffered from unsympathetic
scheduling.The start of the 1990s brought mixed prospects. The launch of
the BBC's newest network, Radio 5, promised serious programming for a
younger audience: genre material so far presented (dramatizations of works
by Alan GARNER, Ray Bradbury and Nicholas FISK) is pleasing in quantity if
poor in production. In 1991 Radio 5 broadcast Orson Welles's original 1938
Mercury Theater on the Air production of WAR OF THE WORLDS. Also in that
year Radio 4 presented a season of plays adapting well known sf works,
from the good, such as Daniel KEYES's FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (1959; exp
1966), to the poor, such as Snoo WILSON's Spaceache (1984), with much else

in between. Meanwhile, the popular repeats on Radio 2 FM of rediscovered
Journey into Space episodes (repeated on Radio 5) and the later
broadcasting by Radio 5 of a radio version of THUNDERBIRDS, edited from
the original tv tapes, showed that, despite technical advances, the cause
of radio sf had barely advanced since the Golden Age of the 1960s.
[ABP/PhN]
RADIO COMUNICATION
COMMUNICATION.
RADON
(vt, outside Japan, Rodan) Film (1956). Toho. Dir Inoshiro Honda,
starring Kenji Sahara, Yumi Shirkawa, Akihiko Hirata. Screenplay Takeshi
Kimura, Takeo Murata, based on a story by Takashi Kuronomura. 79 mins.
Colour.This film, the first Japanese MONSTER MOVIE in colour, is from the
same team that produced GOJIRA (vt Godzilla). A giant pterodactyl hatches
in a mine (and eats giant dragonfly larvae, in the film's best scene); it
is joined by a second flying reptile; they terrorize Japan then perish in
a volcano. The spectacular effects are by Eiji Tsuburaya and his team. The
US version added a voice-over written by David DUNCAN. Radon's second
appearance was in Kaiju Daisenso (1965; vt Invasion of Astro-Monster; vt
Battle of the Astros; vt Monster Zero; vt Invasion of Planet X) and his
third in Ghidorah Sandai Kaiju Chikyu Saidai No Kessan (1965; vt Chikyu
Saidai No Kessan; vt Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster). His swansong,
where he performed alongside 10 other major Toho monsters, was in Kaiju
Soshingeki (1968; vt Destroy All Monsters; vt Operation Monsterland; vt
The March of the Monsters). (For more on these sequels GOJIRA.) [PN]
RAES, HUGO
[r] BENELUX.
RAFFILL, STEWART
[r] The ICE PIRATES; The PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT.
RAINE, CRAIG
(1944- ) UK poet, whose first book, TheOnion, Memory (coll 1978 chap),
demonstrated his capacity to illuminate theworld through estranged
metaphors, a technique which came to full fruition in A Martian Sends a
Postcard Home(coll 1979 chap), the title poemof which represents an
alien's tabula rasa vision ofnormal human activities, and which has come
for many to represent an angle of perceptioncentral to good sf (and
fatally missing from routine work).His libretto for an opera by
CharlesOsborne, The Electrification of the Soviet Union(1986 chap) is
somewhat fantasticated; and "1953": A Version of Racine'sAndromache(1990
chap) is a HITLER WINS tale in play form,set in an Italy which, now ruled
by Mussolini's son, has conquered England,bombing London flat inthe
process. [JC]
RAINES, THERON
(1927- ) US lawyer and writer in whose sf novel, The Singing: A Fable
about What Makes us Human (1988), a team of Martians crashes its UFO into
the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where one of them, according to plan,
meets and impregnates the human girl through whose eyes the tale is told.

Both sides get what they need: for Mars new blood, and for the Earth
unsubtle flattery of our tough and obdurate human stock. One senses that
the author thought his storyline possessed some originality, though his
concerns, after the fashion of many non-genre writers using sf
instruments, are mainly didactic. [JC]
R.A.K.
Monsignor Ronald A. KNOX.
RAMSEY, MILTON WORTH
(?1848-1906) US writer who - although he self-published his sf novels was of some interest. In Six Thousand Years Hence (1891) a visiting planet
drags the protagonist's city into space, where he and his colleagues are
able to view several other civilizations, including a complex advanced
culture within the Sun, and return centuries hence to a tamed high-tech
Earth, where they die older than Methuselah. The Austral Globe (1892) and
Two Billions of Miles, or The Story of a Trip Through the Solar System
(1900) are similar in viewpoint but less engaging. [JC]
RAND, AYN
(1905-1982) Russian-born US writer whose Objectivist philosophy, as
expounded in most of her work, was influential during the 1950s among
college students, who were perhaps attracted by her instructions to heed
one's self-interest, to abjure altruism, and to maximize the SUPERMAN
potential within each of us. Her first and better sf novel, Anthem (1938
UK; cut 1946 US), is a DYSTOPIA set after a devastating war. Individualism
has been eliminated, along with the concept of the person, but the
protagonist discovers his identity while escaping with a beautiful woman
to the forest, where he christens himself Prometheus. The Fountainhead
(1943) is a MAINSTREAM novel advancing AR's vision of things. In Atlas
Shrugged (1957), which is sf, John Galt (AR's mouthpiece) and his
Objectivist colleagues abandon an increasingly socialistic USA and retreat
to the mountains as civilization crumbles, prepared to return only when
they will be able to rebuild along the lines of Objectivist philosophy.
AR's influence lessened over the years. Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991) by
Mary Gaitskell systematically caricatures AR and her work. [JC]See also:
ECONOMICS; LIBERTARIAN SF; POLITICS; SOCIAL DARWINISM; SOCIOLOGY;
WOMEN SF
WRITERS.
RANDALL, MARTA
(1948- ) US writer and editor who has taught in several sf writing
workshops and served in the SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA as
vice-president 1981-2 and president 1982-4. She began publishing sf with
"Smack Run" in New Worlds 5 (anth 1973 ed Michael MOORCOCK) as by Marta
Bergstresser; the surname, her first husband's, was used only on this one
occasion. Her stories since then have not been frequent, but are almost
always of high quality, tightly and densely written, even epigrammatic at
points, and generally impart elements of FEMINIST discourse, with
unbemused clarity of effect, to genre material. The intense force of a
late tale like "Lapidary Nights" (1987) derives at least in part-though no
"didactic" argument occupies the foreground - from its thorough

assimilation of a feminist agenda.MR's first and perhaps most successful
novel, Islands (1976; rev 1980), movingly depicts the life of a mortal
woman in an age when IMMORTALITY is medically achievable for all but a
few. To cope with her world she plunges into the study of archaeology, and
makes a discovery which enables her to transcend her corporeal life. In A
City in the North (1976) an ALIEN species self-destructs in a morally
dubious response to the colonizing presence on their planet of the human
race. The Kennerin or Newhome sequence - Journey (1978) and Dangerous
Games (1980) - also treats its colony-world setting with some ambivalence,
for the Kennerin family's decision to create a UTOPIA on the planet they
own has complex consequences, some of them relating to ECOLOGY. The Sword
of Winter (1983), like some of her later short fiction, is fantasy, though
with PLANETARY-ROMANCE features; and Those who Favor Fire (1984) is a
near-future DYSTOPIA set in an Apocalypse-prone California much like
today's. With Robert SILVERBERG, MR edited 2 vols of the ongoing New
Dimensions sequence, New Dimensions 11 (anth 1980) and #12 (anth 1981);
and was responsible solo for The Nebula Awards 19 (anth 1984). In the
later 1980s she was less active as a writer, concentrating at least in
part on the construction of "interactive time-travel games" ( GAME-WORLDS)
for the California State Department of Mental Health; but her fiction,
when it appeared, remained vividly alive, and she has begun to publish
mysteries, with Growing Light (1993) as by Martha Conley. [JC]See also:
ISLANDS.
RANDALL, NEIL
[r] Bill FAWCETT.
RANDALL, ROBERT
Pseudonym used on collaborative stories - about 19 in all (1956-8) - by
Robert SILVERBERG and Randall GARRETT; Silverberg was very young at the
time. The most notable were the Nidorian series, originally published in
ASF, dealing with the effects of human contact on an alien race; they were
published in book form as The Shrouded Planet (fixup 1957) and The Dawning
Light (1957 ASF; 1959). [BS]
RANDLE, KEVIN D.
(1949- ) US writer who served in the Army as a helicopter pilot in
Vietnam 1968-9 and in the Air Force as an Intelligence Officer 1976-86. He
began publishing sf with "Future War" for Combat Illustrated in 1978, but
became an active writer only in the 1980s, beginning 2 sequences in 1986:
the Seeds of War books, all with Robert Cornett - Seeds of War (1988), The
Aldebaran Campaign (1988) and The Aquarian Attack (1989) - and the
Remember! books, also with Cornett: Remember the Alamo! (1986), Remember
Gettysburg! (1988) and Remember Little Big Horn! (1990). The first series
is an unremarkable example of military sf, though told with some verve;
the second is a more exhilarating TIME-TRAVEL sequence, in which veterans
are enlisted to travel to famous battles, where they must make sure that
events take their proper course. The Jefferson's War sequence - The
Galactic Silver Star (1990), The Price of Command (1990), The Lost Colony
(1991), The January Platoon (1991), Death of a Regiment (1991) and Chain
of Command (1992) - is again military sf, carrying members of the United
States Space Infantry into various tight corners. The Global War sequence

began with Dawn of Conflict (1991); the Star Precinct sequence, with
Richard Driscoll, began with Star Precinct (1992),Star Precinct #2: Mind
Slayer (1992) and Inside Job (1992). [JC]Other works: Once upon a Murder *
(1987) with Robert J(oseph) Randisi (1951- ), a game tie; 3 nonfiction UFO
books, The October Scenario (1988), The UFO Casebook (1989) and UFO Crash
at Roswell (1991) with Don Schmitt.
RANDOM, ALEX
Donald Sydney ROWLAND.
RANK, HEINER
[r] GERMANY.
RANKIN, ROBERT (FLEMING)
(1949- ) UK writer who began writing his highly idiosyncratic sf novels
with the Brentford sequence: The Antipope (1981), The Brentford Triangle
(1983) and East of Ealing (1984), assembled as The Brentford Trilogy (omni
1988), plus The Sprouts of Wrath (1988). In the first volume, two
layabouts and their friends challenge Forces from the Beyond ranging from
an undead sorcerer to an alien invasion fleet. In later volumes the series
satirizes CLICHES taken in equal measure from horror, sf and fantasy,
setting them off against the thoroughly down-to-earth London suburb of
Brentford. In the end humanity is (apparently) destroyed. RR's Armageddon
series - Armageddon: The Musical (1990), They Came and Ate Us: Armageddon
II: The B-Movie (1991) and The Suburban Book of the Dead: Armageddon III:
The Remake (1992) - features a time-travelling Elvis Presley and is based
on the premise that the whole of human history has been stage-managed for
transmission as an extraterrestrial soap opera. Further (and similar)
works include the Ultimate Truths tales, comprising The Book of Ultimate
Truths (1993) and Raiders of the Lost Car Park (1994); and The Greatest
Show Off Earth (1994). [NT]See also: COSMOLOGY; HUMOUR.
RANKINE, JOHN
Douglas R. MASON.
RANSOM, BILL
(1945- ) US writer who has worked as a medic and as a firefighter. His
early writing was poetry, with several volumes released from Finding True
North ?
"Songs of a Sentient Flute" for ASF in 1979 as by Frank Herbert, a story
which eventually became part of Medea: Harlan's World * (anth 1985) ed
Harlan ELLISON. BR is best known for the Pandora Trilogy with Frank
HERBERT (whom see for details): The Jesus Incident (1979), The Lazarus
Effect (1983) and The Ascension Factor (1988). His first solo novel,
Jaguar (fixup 1990), is also of interest for its depiction of the
physically, psychologically and morally complex dream-driven pattern of
connections between Earth and another planet, each planet containing two
maturing adolescents whose sleep disorders allow them to make journeys
between the worlds. The Jaguar - a disturbed WWII vet who likewise roams
the dreamways-must be halted before he disrupts the fragile tissues of
reality. Slightly overweighted for the adventure-sf idiom in which it is
told, Jaguar is all the same an intriguing attempt to say more than could
easily be said. ViraVax (1993), on the other hand, almost deliberately

deploys an impressive presentation of the complex perils that inevitably
accompany in-depth virological research with a storyline, set early next
century, which focuses primarily upon a suspenseful thriller-like action
plot. [JC]See also: MESSIAHS.
RANZETTA, LUAN
(? -? ) UK writer (probably pseudonymous) whose routine sf adventures
were The Uncharted Planet (1961) as V. Ranzetta, The Maru Invasion (1962),
The World in Reverse (1962), The Night of the Death Rain (1963) and The
Yellow Inferno (1964). [JC]
RAOS, PREDRAG
[r] YUGOSLAVIA.
RAPHAEL, RICK
(1919-1994) US writer and journalist who began publishing sf with "A
Filbert is a Nut" for ASF in 1959 and established a considerable
reputation in the field with a comparatively small output of about 10
stories, most of them assembled in The Thirst Quenchers (coll 1965 UK) and
Code Three (fixup 1966). The first contains 4 good stories, the best of
which is the title story about professionals in a world where water is
scarce, their job being its proper allocation. Code Three describes the
way of life of the police who patrol the superhighways of the future in
enormously complex vehicles made to cope with the huge speeds and
corresponding irresponsibility on the roads. RR was at his best when
describing, in positive terms, the life of those who must deal
professionally with a technological world. [JC]Other work: The President
Must Die (1981), non-sf near-future thriller.See also: CRIME AND
PUNISHMENT.
RASMUSSEN, ALIS A.
(1958- ) US writer whose first novel, The Labyrinth Gate (1988), is a
tale of considerable interest, delineating a believably matrilineal
fantasy world. The Highroad Trilogy - A Passage of Stars (1990),
Revolution's Shore (1990) and The Price of Ransom (1990) - depicts in a
lighter vein the interstellar voyages of its young female protagonist,
whose involvement in music is infectiously presented and whose search for
a full life keeps the tale moving, albeit through markedly familiar
venues; the third volume, which carries the maturing crew back from
colonized space towards the old worlds, is the best. At this point in her
career, reportedly unhappy with the nature and amount of promotion
accorded her by her publishers, AAR began to write as by Kate Elliott, and
under that name created a new series which followed on from the Highroad
books; this sequence - the Sword of Heaven or Jaran sequence, comprising
Jaran (1992), An Earthly Crown (1993), His Conquering Sword (1993) and The
Law of Becoming(1994) - complicatedly embroils clans of alien warriors
(the jaran), rite-of-passage subplots featuring younger women, human
actors, all on an interstellar stage. [JC]
RASPAIL, JEAN
(1925- ) French writer, much of whose nonfiction controversially treats
the kind of issue explored in the inflammatory Le camp des saints (1973;
trans Norman Shapiro as The Camp of the Saints 1975 US), set in a

NEAR-FUTURE world in the coils of OVERPOPULATION. When the non-White Third
World lays siege to Europe, which should have been armed against the
onslaught, civilization perishes. [JC]
RATFANDOM
UK fan group of the 1970s, most of whose members later became sf
professionals. Based in London, Ratfandom produced some of the most
literate, witty and scurrilous FANZINES in that fertile period for UK
FANDOM; these included Big Scab (1974, 3 issues) ed John BROSNAN,
Macrocosm (1971-2, 3 issues) ed Robert P. HOLDSTOCK, Magic Pudding (1973,
1 issue) ed Malcolm EDWARDS, Seamonsters (1978-9, 4 issues) ed Simone
Walsh, Stop Breaking Down (1976-81, 7 issues) ed Greg Pickersgill, True
Rat (1973-8, 10 issues) ed Leroy Kettle, and Wrinkled Shrew (1974-9, 8
issues) ed Pat and Graham Charnock. Others in the group's orbit, though
not Rats, included Christopher PRIEST and Peter NICHOLLS. Ratfandom
organized the 1975 UK national CONVENTION, Seacon '75. [RH]
RATHENAU, WALTHER
[r] UTOPIAS.
RATHJEN, CARL H(ENRY)
(1909-1984) US writer in various genres from boys' fiction to tales for
the "slick" markets. Of sf interest is his contribution to the Land of the
Giants sequence, Flight of Fear * (1969). [JC]
RAT SAVIOUR, THE
YUGOSLAVIA.
RAW MEAT
DEATH LINE.
RAY, RENE
Pseudonym of UK actor and writer Irene Creese (1912-1993), in whose sf
novel, The Strange World of Planet X * (1957), romance becomes mixed with
the fourth DIMENSION. It was written to novelize her own tv series, The
STRANGE WORLD OF PLANET X, although there are differences in plot, which
differences are replicated in the 1958 film of the same name. Two of her
other novels - Wraxton Marne (1946) and Angel Assignment (1988) - are
fantasies. [JC]
RAY, ROBERT
(1928- ) Hungarian-born writer, in UK from 1957, who began publishing sf
with "Nightmares in Grey" for New Strand Magazine in 1962. His sf novels,
bleak but otherwise unexceptional, are No Stars for Us (1964), The Seedy
(1969) and Metamorphosis (1976). [JC]
RAY BRADBURY THEATRE
US tv series (1985-6). Atlantis Films/Wilcox Productions for Home Box
Office. Executive prods Michael MacMillan, Larry Wilcox, Ray BRADBURY;
prod Seaton McLean; teleplays by Bradbury, based on his own stories.
Leading actors included Drew Barrymore, James Coco, Jeff Goldblum, Nick
Mancuso, Peter O'Toole, William SHATNER. 6 25min episodes, the first 3 in
1985, the second 3 originally shown together as a 90min special in
1986.These playlets, introduced a little stiffly by Bradbury, were

imaginative adaptations of "Marionettes, Inc." (1949), "The Playground"
(1953), "The Crowd" (1943), "The Town Where No One Got Off" (1958), "The
Screaming Woman" (1951) and"Banshee"" (1984). Only the first could be
called sf (it features a neglected wife's husband being replaced by an "
ANDROID); the rest are dark fantasy. They were among the most successful
of many Bradbury dramatizations on tv (winning several awards and good
ratings), perhaps because Bradbury dramatized them himself.Further
Bradbury adaptations, intended as part of a new Ray Bradbury Theatre
package but actually screened in 1988-9 in the UK as part of the Twist in
the Tale series, were made by Granada TV in the UK. The 4 stories adapted
were "The Coffin" (1947), "Punishment without Crime" (1950), "The Small
Assassin" (1946) and "There was an Old Woman" (1944). Prod Tom Cotter,
they starred among others Cyril Cusack, Roy Kinnear, Dan O'Herlihy and
Donald Pleasence. Other programmes for the same package, which was
screened in the USA, were made in France and Canada. [PN]
RAYER, F(RANCIS) G(EORGE)
(1921-1981) UK writer and technical journalist who began publishing sf
with "Juggernaut" for Link House Publications in 1944. His first sf novel
was the unremarkable Realm of the Alien (1946 chap) as by Chester Delray.
His most notable was perhaps Tomorrow Sometimes Comes (1951), in which the
general who has inadvertently caused a nuclear HOLOCAUST awakens from
SUSPENDED ANIMATION to save the world from a destructive COMPUTER; this
thinking machine gave its name to the Mens Magna series, which includes
also "Deus Ex Machina" (1950), "The Peacemaker" (1952), "Ephemeral This
City" (1955), "Adjustment Period" (1960) and "Contact Pattern" (1961). FGR
was most closely associated with NW, and also had several lead novels in
the early years of Authentic, each of which comprised a whole single issue
of the journal, and cited therefore in this Encyclopedia as separate
titles; they are: The Coming of the Darakua (1952); Earth-Our New Eden
(1952) and We Cast No Shadow (1952). [JC]Other works: Fearful Barrier
(1950); The Star Seekers (1954 chap); The Iron and the Anger (1964);
Cardinal of the Stars (1964; vt Journey to the Stars 1964 US).As Editor:
Worlds at War (anth 1949), containing stories by FGR and his
brother-in-law, E.R. James.See also: COMPUTERS.
RAY-GUNS
WEAPONS.
RAYMOND, ALEX
(1909-1956) US COMIC-strip artist. After graduating from the Grand
Central School of Art in New York City, he worked on the strip Tillie the
Toiler. He soon moved up in the comics world, working for Chic Young on
Blondie and with Lyman Young on Tim Tyler's Luck before being given his
own strip, Secret Agent X-9; it was during this time that he began to
develop his distinctive style. In 1934 he was given the chance to do a new
strip, FLASH GORDON, and US cartooning has not been the same since; he was
the first demonstrably modern comics illustrator. Although his style at
first was characterized by convoluted masses and strong, sweeping lines,
by 1936 it had become more precise and controlled. He refined the
technique of "feathering" (a series of fine brush-or pen-strokes used in
cartooning to create contours) to a degree as yet unexcelled in comic

strips. The style was romantic, the protagonists' features impossibly
heroic, the settings exotic and fantastic. In 1944, AR joined the US
Marines, leaving the strip to Austin Briggs (1909-1973); when he returned
in 1946 he created a new strip, not sf, the very popular Rip Kirby. AR
died in a tragic accident in 1956, at the peak of his career. [JG]See
also: ILLUSTRATION.
RAYMOND, DEREK
Robin COOK.
RAYMOND, E.V.
[s] Raymond Z. GALLUN.
RAYMOND, P.T.
Cornelius SHEA.
RAYON INVISIBLE, LE
PARIS QUI DORT.
READ, [Sir] HERBERT (EDWARD)
(1893-1968) UK poet and prolific critic of art, literature and politics;
knighted 1953. His only novel, The Green Child (1935), is a remarkable
double UTOPIA in which two visions of ideal human life - one a
Latin-American political utopia, the other a mystical, underground realm
in which human aspirations are transcended - mirror one another,
comprising together a critique and dramatic metaphor of the utopian
impulse as a whole. [JC]
READE, PHILIP
Pseudonym of an unidentified US writer of dime novels ( DIME-NOVEL SF)
whose work appeared in STREET ?
in competition to Tousey's Frank Reade, Jr. stories ( FRANK READE
LIBRARY). PR wrote 9 stories about Tom Edison, Jr., no relation to the
inventor ( Hyperlink to: EDISONADE); unusual in being plotted (instead of
haphazard) in terms of character conflicts, they are the best of the
various invention series, containing as well an element of tongue-in-cheek
and fantasy. Tom Edison, Jr.'s Sky-Scraping Trip (1891), Tom Edison, Jr.'s
Sky Courser (1891), Tom Edison, Jr.'s Prairie-Skimmer Team (1891) and Tom
Edison, Jr.'s Air Frigate (1891) together form an episodic novel
describing the scientific feud between Tom and his rogue cousin. The
stories are filled with fantastic aircraft, individual flying suits,
advanced weapons and air battles. PR's most important story is Tom Edison,
Jr.'s Electric Sea Spider (1892), in which Tom combats the US-educated
Chinese mastermind of sea crime, Kiang-Ho of the Golden Belt. The story
culminates in an underwater battle between two fantastic submarine
vessels. This perhaps marks the first appeareance of a FU MANCHU-like
villain.Tom Edison, Jr. stories #10 and #11, Tom Edison, Jr.'s Air-Ship in
Australia (1892) and Tom Edison, Jr.'s Electric Eagle (1892), were
written, on a much lower level, by Henry Livingston Williams (1842-? ), a
prolific hack editor and author. [EFB]
READERCON SMALL PRESS AWARDS
AWARDS.

READY, WILLIAM B(ERNARD)
(1914-1981) Welsh librarian and writer, in the USA from 1948 as
professional librarian at several universities, and in Canada from 1966 in
the same capacity at McMaster University. His first story, "Barring the
Weight" for Atlantic Monthly in 1948, was not sf, but several of the tales
assembled in The Great Disciple, and Other Stories (coll 1951) are of
interest. He was best known, however, for his early study of J.R.R.
TOLKIEN, The Tolkien Relation: A Personal Inquiry (1968 US; vt
Understanding Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings 1969; orig title restored
1981). [JC]
REAL GENIUS
Film (1985). Tri-Star/Delphi III. Dir Martha Coolidge, starring Val
Kilmer, Gabe Jarret, Michelle Meyrink, William Atherton, Robert Prescott.
Screenplay Neal Israel, Pat Proft, Peter Torokvei, based on a story by
Israel and Proft. 106 mins. Colour.Genius students at a college for
advanced science are manipulated into designing a high-power laser by
their corrupt professor (Atherton), who unknown to them is supplying it to
a cold-blooded government agency as a secret weapon. On discovering this,
they revenge themselves with a complex practical joke. This was one of
several sf "teen" movies of the period (others were MY SCIENCE PROJECT
[1985] and WEIRD SCIENCE [1985]), and perhaps the best. Director Coolidge,
who is "feminist-influenced", as she cautiously puts it, gives a more
realistic flavour than usual to the dialogue, performances and even the
science, but much of the film dissolves into routine student-prank
sequences. [PN]See also: CINEMA.
REALITY AND APPEARANCE
CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; METAPHYSICS; PERCEPTION.
REAMY, TOM
Working name of US writer, movie projectionist and graphic designer
Thomas Earl Reamy (1935-1977). He began publishing with "Twilla" for FSF
in 1974 and, by late 1977 when he died of a heart attack, had become a
writer of potential stature in the field, having just won the 1976 JOHN W.
CAMPBELL AWARD for Best New Writer (though in fact most of his work must
be thought of as fantasy). The tales assembled in San Diego Lightfoot Sue
and Other Stories (coll 1979) - the title novelette won a 1976 NEBULA were notable for the threatening sweetness of their probing of unconscious
material, often sexual, though they often ended at a point of healing
uplift, occasionally sentimentalized. In his novel Blind Voices (1978),
which shared a common background with "Twilla" and "San Diego Lightfoot
Sue", a small Kansas town around 1930 is visited by a travelling circus
full of freaks and creatures of legend. The homage to Charles G. FINNEY,
Theodore STURGEON and Ray BRADBURY is clearly deliberate; a final
explanation of the circus creatures in terms of GENETIC ENGINEERING
provides no more than an sf pretext, the book reading as elegiac fantasy.
[JC]Other work: "Sting" in Six Science Fiction Plays (anth 1976) ed Roger
ELWOOD.See also: The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION; PSI POWERS.
RE-ANIMATOR
Film (1985). Re-Animator Productions/Empire. Dir Stuart Gordon, starring

Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton, David Gale. Screenplay
Dennis Paoli, William J. Norris, Gordon, based on "Herbert West Reanimator" (1922) by H.P. LOVECRAFT. 86 mins. Colour.In this Grand
Guignol film Herbert West (Combs), a medical student at Miskatonic
University, develops a reagent which restores corpses to life: they become
vigorous but brain-damaged zombies. He decapitates an evil professor
(Gale) who is envious of his brilliance, resuscitates both head and body,
and mayhem ensues. Sponsored by Charles BAND's Empire Pictures, based on
an untypical series of sardonic sketches by H.P. Lovecraft, R-A is a
lively SPLATTER MOVIE featuring the kind of undergraduate humour that
assumes it is funny to be disgusting. It very nearly proves the point, not
least in a scene involving the sexual activities of the still-living
severed head. R-A opened up new perspectives in bad-taste movies, and
helped introduce the comedy trend that dominated HORROR cinema in the late
1980s.The sequel was Bride of Re-Animator (1989; vt Re-Animator II) dir
Brian Yuzna, who had produced R-A. A lethargic reworking of R-A's bizarre
imagery, again starring Combs, Abbott and Gale, with a plot recapitulating
parts of The BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), it lacks the zest necessary for
the desired horror-comic effect and is merely emetic. Yuzna's SOCIETY
(1989) is so much better that the two hardly seem the work of the same
director. [PN]
RE-ANIMATOR II
RE-ANIMATOR.
REAVES, J(AMES) MICHAEL
(1950- ) US writer who has written at least 100 teleplays, most with
fantastic elements, for the children's Saturday-morning market, and who
began publishing sf stories with "The Breath of Dragons" for Clarion 3
(anth 1973) ed Robin Scott WILSON, after attending the previous year's
CLARION SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' WORKSHOP. His first 3 books were
published as by J. Michael Reaves, his later books as by Michael Reaves.
Much of his work is fantasy, though his first novel, I, Alien (1978), is
adventure sf, and Darkworld Detective (coll of linked stories 1982)
characteristically mixes sf, fantasy and detective genres in the story of
the quest by a colony planet's only detective for the Dark Lord (a
familiar fantasy icon), who is his father. Hellstar (1984) with Steve
PERRY is sf; and Dome (1987), also with Perry, a post- HOLOCAUST tale set
in the eponymous undersea habitat, engagingly tracks its large cast
through various crises while, in the background, an AI begins to
collaborate with humanity in preparing for the aquatic future. It is never
easy to find technical fault with JMR, but at the same time it is hard to
discover much individuality beneath the professional surface. [JC]Other
works: Dragonworld (1979) with Byron PREISS; the Shattered World sequence
of fantasies comprising The Shattered World (1984) and The Burning Realm
(1988); Time Machine 3: Sword of the Samurai * (1984) with Steve Perry;
Street Magic (1991).
RECURSIVE SF
Recycling material from the vast and growing storehouse of the
already-written has long been a practice of sf writers. Plots and
characters constantly reappear throughout sf, usually but not always in

the form of sequels written by the author of the original work; venues
(like Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's MARS) become universal props; and terms
descriptive of devices or circumstances unique to sf (from BEMS to
CORPSICLES to partials - Greg BEAR's coinage for autonomous
computer-generated partial copies of human personalities) tend, once
introduced, to become common parlance. When Robert A. HEINLEIN made
reference in "The Number of the Beast" (1980 UK) to characters and
situations which appeared in earlier novels by him and other sf writers,
he was operating in this traditional manner. But when he introduced into
the same book people - writers, editors, fans - who had been involved in
sf itself, he did something very different, something which marked his
career, and the sf genre within which the book was written, as approaching
a late and self-referential phase. Wilson TUCKER so frequently introduced
real figures into his stories that such insertions became known for a
while as Tuckerisms; but a Tuckerism is a private allusion or joke among
friends, and should not be seen as making a binding argument about the
relationship between fiction and the world. Heinlein, on the other hand,
was writing full-blown recursive sf, a term narrowly defined in Anthony R.
LEWIS's An Annotated Bibliography of Recursive Science Fiction (1990 chap)
as "science fiction stories that refer to science fiction . . . to
authors, fans, collectors, conventions, etc.". More broadly, recursive sf
may be defined as stories which treat real people, and the fictional
worlds which occupy their dreams, as sharing equivalent degrees of
reality. It is, in other words, a technique which may be used to create
ALTERNATE WORLDS, usually backward-looking in time, and frequently
expressing a powerful nostalgia for pasts in which the visions of early
GENRE SF do, in fact, come true.Novels with recursive elements include
Brian W. ALDISS's Frankenstein Unbound (1973) and Dracula Unbound (1991),
Manly BANISTER's early spoof on sf fandom, Egoboo: A Fantasy Satire (1950
chap), Michael BISHOP's The Secret Ascension (1987), Anthony BOUCHER's
detective novel Rocket to the Morgue (1942), Fredric BROWN's Martians, Go
Home (1955), Gene DEWEESE's and Robert COULSON's Now You See It/Him/Them
(1975) and Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats (1977), Philip K. DICK's
The Man in the High Castle (1962), David DVORKIN's Time for Sherlock
Holmes (1983), Philip Jose FARMER's To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971) and
its sequels, Charles L. HARNESS's Lurid Dreams (1990), Sharyn MCCRUMB's
farce-mysteries Bimbos of the Death Sun (1987) and Zombies of the Gene
Pool (1992), Barry N. MALZBERG's Dwellers of the Deep (1970 dos), Gather
in the Hall of the Planets (1971 dos, both as by K.M. O'Donnell, a
pseudonym which itself homages C.L. MOORE and Henry KUTTNER), and
Herovit's World (1973), Larry NIVEN's and Jerry POURNELLE's Footfall
(1985), Tim POWERS's The Stress of Her Regard (1989), Christopher PRIEST's
The Space Machine (1976), Mack REYNOLDS's mystery The Case of the Little
Green Men (1951), Rudy RUCKER's The Hollow Earth (1990), Fred SABERHAGEN's
and Roger ZELAZNY's The Black Throne (1990) and Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's God
Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1965). Inside the Funhouse (anth 1992) ed Michael
RESNICK assembles examples of the form, with an introductory essay. [JC]
REDAL, JAVIER
[r] SPAIN.

RED DAWN
Film (1984). MGM/United Artists. Dir John Milius, starring Patrick
Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen. Screenplay Kevin
Reynolds, Milius. 114 mins. Colour.Russians nuke US cities and their
paratroops, with Cuban and Nicaraguan allies, invade the Midwest.
Highschool kids escape into the Colorado mountains, become guerrillas,
undergo rites of passage and male bonding, fight brilliantly, mostly die.
This incoherent and implausible film gets so sentimental about toughness,
like a parody of Robert A. HEINLEIN, that the viewer's sympathy is largely
with the homesick Cuban commander. RD is symptomatic of the interest in
SURVIVALIST fictions during the 1980s. [PN]
RED DWARF
UK tv series (1988- ). A Paul Jackson Production for BBC North West; from
Series IV Paul Jackson Productions have not been credited. Prod Ed Bye,
Rob Grant, Doug Naylor. Dir Bye. Written Grant, Naylor. Starring Craig
Charles as Lister, Chris Barrie as Rimmer, Danny John-Jules as Cat, Robert
Llewellyn (season III onward) as Kryten, Norman Lovett (Seasons 1 and 2)
and Hattie Hayridge (season III onward) as Holly. Six seasons (given Roman
numerals from season III onwards, as in Red Dwarf III) of 6 30min episodes
each (to 1994). Possibly current but in suspension. Colour.Probably the
best blend of humour and sf on tv since The HITCH HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE
GALAXY , RD, a true situation comedy, rapidly became a cult success. Red
Dwarf is a very large, very dirty spaceship with only one crew member, a
definitively working-class Liverpudlian, Lister, who has been in suspended
animation for millions of years. Also present are a tyrannical but
self-pitying hologram, Rimmer, who outranks Lister, a vain humanoid called
Cat, descended from Lister's pet cat, an angst-ridden computer called
Holly and, later, an ANDROID trained to serve, the admirable Kryten.
Miracles of sf evocation - time travel, black holes, alternate realities
and other such tropes - are performed with considerable wit and style on,
one might deduce from the deliberate tackiness of the whole endeavour, a
tiny budget. At its radical fringes, UK tv of the 1980s specialized in
comedy emphasizing vulgarity, despair, entropy, stupidity and lack of
hygiene, and the people behind RD have impeccable pedigrees in this field:
executive prod Paul Jackson had made the nicely revolting The Young Ones
and Filthy, Rich and Catflap, and Grant and Naylor had been head writers
for the politically satirical puppet series Spitting Image. Spin-off books
as by Grant NAYLOR (Grant and Naylor) are Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes
Careful Drivers * (1989) and Better than Life * (1990). [PN]
REDGROVE, PETER (WILLIAM)
(1932- ) UK poet and novelist, married to Penelope SHUTTLE. His first
work of sf interest was "Mr Waterman" for Paris Review in 1963; although
he contributed occasionally to NW, including a fantasy poem later
published as The God-Trap (1966 chap), he remains of sf interest mainly
for his novels, the first two of which - The Terrors of Dr Treviles: A
Romance (1974) and The Glass Cottage: A Nautical Romance (1976) - were
written in collaboration with Shuttle. Both are FABULATIONS whose venues
are rendered unstable through hyperbolic imagery and their authors' taste
for holy witchcraft and other transcendental transgressions of the natural

order. The God of Glass (1979) is a tale of the NEAR FUTURE in which a new
prophet diseases the world with his message. The Sleep of the Great
Hypnotist (1979) introduces a device which cures ills but also hypnotizes
its inventor's daughter into bringing him back to life after death. The
Beekeepers (1980) and its sequel, The Facilitators, or Mister
Hole-in-the-Day (1982), set in an ominous insane asylum where strange
experiments are being conducted, marry occult imagery and murk-choked
scientism in a complex narrative involving an ambiguous penetration of
Bedlam. Primarily a poet, PR writes novels whose plots ride upon deep
swells of language-driven meditation, although the tales assembled in The
One who Set Out to Study Fear (coll 1989) - perhaps because they are
derived from the Brothers Grimm-display a more forthright story-telling
gift. [JC]
RED PLANET MARS
Film (1952). Melaby Pictures/United Artists. Dir Harry Horner, starring
Peter Graves, Andrea King, Marvin Miller. Screenplay John L. Balderston
(1889-1954), Anthony Veiller, based on the play Red Planet (produced in
New York in late 1932; 1933 chap) by Balderston, John E. Hoare. 87 mins.
B/w.Two young US scientists, man and wife, pick up tv transmissions
apparently from MARS. These messages (confusingly) take two forms. One
class, suggesting Mars is the centre of incredible technological
breakthroughs, has been faked by an ex-Nazi scientist and is designed to
panic the Western World, which it does, though it pleases the evil
Russians. The second class (genuine) tells us that Mars is ruled by a
"Supreme Authority" who is none other than God himself. This revelation
also causes chaos, and there are accusations of fakery, but religion is
ultimately justified and Godless communism (the true villain) destroyed:
aged revolutionaries overthrow the Soviet Government and restore the
monarchy, choosing an Orthodox priest as their new Czar.RPM is a
fascinating (and quite hysterical) product of the Cold War PARANOIA that
swept the USA in the early 1950s, and specifically a mirror of the
widespread feeling in US society that religious crusades (as led by Billy
Graham and others) were a political weapon against communism. Balderston,
responsible for the script and the original play, had a distinguished
career in genre movies, his screenplays including Dracula (1931), BRIDE OF
FRANKENSTEIN (1935), MAD LOVE (1935) and Gaslight (1944), but this essay
in patronizing populism did him no credit. The film flopped. [PN/JB]See
also: GODS AND DEMONS.
REED, CLIFFORD C(ECIL)
(1911- ) South African-born writer and civil servant, in UK from 1950,
who began publishing sf with "Jean-Gene-Jeanne" in Authentic in 1954. In
Martian Enterprise (fixup 1962) escaped convicts learn slowly how to
create a community on a new planet. [JC]
REED, DAVID V.
Pseudonym used by US writer David Vern (1924- ) for almost all his
fiction, mostly for Ray PALMER's magazines, starting with "Where is Roger
Davis?" for AMZ in 1939. He collaborated with Don WILCOX (who wrote the
first of the 2 stories from which it was cobbled together, DVR writing the
second) on The Whispering Gorilla (1940-43 Fantastic Adventures; fixup

1950 UK), about an ape with a man's brain ( Hyperlink to: APES AND
CAVEMEN); the book was published as by DVR alone. Murder in Space (1944
AMZ; 1954) unconvincingly attempts to combine mystery and sf techniques.
DVR was probably the first writer to use the house name Alexander BLADE;
he used also the house names Craig ELLIS and Peter HORN and wrote 1 story
as Clyde Woodruff. [JC/PN]Other work: The Thing that Made Love (1943
Fantastic Adventures as "The Metal Monster Murders"; 1952?), a mystery.
REED, ISHMAEL (SCOTT)
(1938- ) US writer, poet and playwright who emerged in the 1960s as a
central representative of the New Black Aesthetic movement, and a figure
controversial to the Black critical establishment from the publication of
his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), a powerful SATIRE. In
this and in books like Yellow-Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) and Mumbo Jumbo
(1972), whose main characters use Black humour to express their outrage in
the face of oppression, he mixed elements of surreal satire and
MAGIC-REALIST fantasy into complex plots, calling this distinctive
literary method Neo-Hoodooism. Further such tales include The Last Days of
Louisiana Red (1974) and Flight to Canada (1975). In several of these
books grotesquely overelaborated thriller plots carry the burden of the
flamboyant text, and similar plots - featuring a bemused detective named
Nance Saturday - shape his genuine sf novels, The Terrible Twos (1982) and
The Terrible Threes (1989). In the first of these sad and rather savage
NEAR-FUTURE satires the US President is a male model with an IQ of 55; the
second is a DYSTOPIAN vision of the Reagan years. Critics have seen IR's
use of humour as an attempt to distract attention from important social
issues and his suspicion of Black FEMINISTS as less than persuasive; by
contrast, Thomas PYNCHON and other authors of contemporary interest have
cited IR as an exemplary writer. [CAJ/JC]Other works: Shrovetide in Old
New Orleans (coll 1978), essays and interviews; Reckless Eyeballing
(1986).
REED, JEREMY
(1951- ) UK poet and writer, much of whose fiction comprises a set of
loosely-linked tales about19th century decadents; those with fantasy
elements include Isidore: ANovel About the Comte de Lautreamont (1991) and
When the Whip Comes Down: A Novel about de Sade(1992), in which de Sade
timeslips through the centuries. JR's sf novel,Diamond Nebula (1994), is
set in the 23rd century, and describesits protagonist's obsessions with
decadents of the 20th century, including J.G. BALLARD. [JC]
REED, KIT
Working name of US writer Lillian Craig Reed (1932- ), as well known for
her work outside sf and fantasy as within; she has also written a horror
novel, Blood Fever (1986) as by Shelley Hyde, and two detections - Gone
(1992) and Twice Burned (1993) - as by Kit Craig. She began publishing
stories of genre interest with "The Wait" (vt "To Be Taken in a Strange
Country") in 1958 for FSF, afterwards publishing mainly with that journal.
After some non-genre novels, the first being Mother isn't Dead She's Only
Sleeping (1961), KR began to assemble short stories of genre interest in
Mister da V. and Other Stories (coll 1967 UK), later releasing The Killer
Mice (coll 1976 UK), Other Stories And . . . the Attack of the Giant Baby

(coll 1981), Revenge of the Senior Citizens ** Plus: A Short Story
Collection (coll 1986) and Thief of Lives (coll 1992). It could be said,
unkindly, that her stories domesticate the world of Shirley JACKSON; but
that would be unduly to deprecate the sharp, clear, self-amused
perceptiveness of her best moral fables, often closer to fantasy than sf
as they make their uncomfortable points with precision and delicacy. Her
first sf novel, Armed Camps (1969 UK), perhaps more conventionally posits
a NEAR-FUTURE USA sliding into irretrievable collapse; neither the soldier
nor the woman pacifist who share the narrative, nor what they represent,
are seen as representing any solution. Magic Time (1980), less effective
because of its chatty plot, treats the USA as analogous to a grotesque
theme park, posthumously run by a Disney-like guru in cold storage. Fort
Privilege (1985) more convincingly transforms into moral fable a tale set
in an expensive New York apartment building under siege from the
innumerable homeless of the great city; and Little Sisters of the
Apocalypse (1994) similarly examines the lives of a group of women
besieged - in a world tainted by violence and social disintegration - by
conflicting gangs of marauders. Though sometimes her reticence is
overpowering, KR at her best is, very quietly, an explosive writer.
[JC]Other works: Fat (anth 1974), stories about obesity, several being sf
or fantasy; George Orwell's 1984 (1984), nonfiction.
REED, PETER
[s] John D. MACDONALD.
REED, ROBERT
(1956- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Mudpuppies" as by Robert
Touzalin for L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future (anth 1986) ed
Algis BUDRYS; the story gained the $5000 grand prize awarded in the
WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST for that year. RR has since gradually become
productive in short forms, though he remains best known for his novels,
beginning with The Leeshore (1987), a tale which combines adventure-sf
plotting (a pair of twins, the sole humans left on the eponymous
water-covered colony planet, must guide a task force in pursuit of the
COMPUTER-worshipping zealots who have killed everyone else) with an almost
mystical sense for the genius of place, the intricacies of selfhood. The
Hormone Jungle (1988) is set in an entirely different venue, a densely
crowded Solar System drawn in CYBERPUNK colours; but a similar attention
to the mysterious depths of his distorted characters saves the book from
RR's tendency to indulge in a sometimes choking virtuosity. Black Milk
(1989) is set in yet another of sf's familiar 1980s venues, a NEAR-FUTURE
world threatened by uncontrolled and secret GENETIC-ENGINEERING
experiments instigated by a late and movingly presented version of the
inventor/entrepreneur who runs the world ( EDISONADE); once again, the
expertness of the writing and its knowing exploitation of current
scientific speculations are balanced by an underlying quiet sanity about
how to depict and to illumine human beings. In Down the Bright Way (1991)
a group of sentient beings searches through an endless string of PARALLEL
WORLDS for the old gods - or sentient beings at the start of things while fending off others intent on using the pathways for darker purposes.
In The Remarkables (1992) a confrontation between the main stream of

humanity - sequestrated in densely populated local space - and a lost
colony leads to a complexly engaging rite of passage involving
representatives of both human streams with the eponymous aliens. And in
Beyond the Veil of Stars (1994), the sense of claustrophobia
characteristic of RR's work derives from an image of our Solar System as
impacted upon - from beyond a fabricated and deceitful veil of stars - by
innumerable similar inhabited systems. We live in a megalopolis of
planets, and we communicate with each other by passing through dimensional
barriers, which change our bodies so that we resemble natives of the
visited world; which is also overcrowded. RR's course to date has been
unusual in that he has avoided sequels in his first 5 novels, none of
which share any background material or assumptions whatsoever. Today's sf
readers tend to expect a kind of brand identity from authors, and it may
be for this reason that RR has not yet achieved any considerable fame.
[JC]See also: ANDROIDS.
REED, VAN
House name used for 2 books published by CURTIS WARREN, one by Dennis
HUGHES and the other, Dwellers in Space (1953), by an unknown author. [JC]
REEVE, ARTHUR B(ENJAMIN)
(1880-1936) US writer almost exclusively remembered for his Craig
Kennedy, Scientific Detective sequence, the early stories being first
published 1910-15 in monthly instalments in Cosmopolitan. Almost every
volume of the series contained one of more sf device, sometimes trivial,
sometimes central to the tale. Kennedy himself ( EDISONADE) was
interminably responsible for developing new forms of weaponry, making
medical breakthroughs, forging super-metals and chemicals . . . Though
many individual stories showed only minimal displacement into an sf frame,
the overall framework was clearly generic, and the individual titles
warrant listing: The Silent Bullet: The Adventures of Craig Kennedy,
Scientific Detective (similar subtitles are ignored below) (coll 1912; vt
The Black Hand 1912 UK), The Poisoned Pen (coll 1913), The Dream Doctor
(coll 1914), The War Terror (coll 1915; vt Craig Kennedy, Detective 1915
UK), The Gold of the Gods: The Mystery of the Incas Solved by Craig
Kennedy - Scientific Detective (1915), The Exploits of Elaine (1915), The
Social Gangster (coll 1916; vt The Diamond Queen 1917 UK), The Ear in the
Wall (1916), The Romance of Elaine * (1916), a film tie, The Triumph of
Elaine (1916), The Treasure-Train (coll 1917), The Adventuress (1917), The
Panama Plot (coll 1918), The Soul Scar (1919), The Film Mystery (1921),
Craig Kennedy Listens In (coll 1923), Atavar, the Dream Dancer (1924), The
Fourteen Points (coll 1925), The Boy Scouts' Craig Kennedy (coll 1925),
Craig Kennedy on the Farm (coll 1925), The Radio Detective * (1926), a
film tie, Pandora (1926), The Kidnap Club (1932), The Clutching Hand
(1934), Enter Craig Kennedy (1935) with Ashley Locke, and The Stars Scream
Murder (1936). Of these titles, the most remarkable was perhaps Pandora,
in which the evil land of Centrania successfully seduces the USA from her
former power by (as E.F. BLEILER remarks) "subsidizing jazz musicians",
inventing a synthetic fuel, and causing a stock-market crash. The quick
development of a tiny atomic bomb leads to the utter defeat of Centrania.
ABR was editorial consultant to SCIENTIFIC DETECTIVE MONTHLY (1930), which

printed 1 new Craig Kennedy story and reprinted 9 old ones. [JC]Other
works: Guy Garrick: An Adventure with a Scientific Gunman (1914);
Constance Dunlap, Woman Detective (1916); The Master Mystery (1919) and
The Mystery Mind (1921), both with John Grey; The Best Ghost Stories (anth
1936).See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.
REEVES-STEVENS, GARFIELD
(1953- ) Canadian writer who began writing works of genre interest with
Bloodshift (1981), a vampire tale which - not unusually for thisauthor intermixes sf, fantasy and horror. A professional killer is hired by
establishment vampiresto find a renegade female vampire who is interfering
with the sf-like Phoenix Project, throughwhich it is hoped to eliminate
the human race entirely. Other novels combining similar genremixes include
Dreamland (1985),Children of the Shroud (1989), Nighteyes (1989 US), which
additionally injects conspiracy-talk fromthe UFO sub-genre,and Dark
Matter(1990 US). GR-S's Star Trek TIES are more conventional sf,
andinclude Star Trek: Memory Prime* (1988US),Star Trek: Prime Directive*
(1990 US),Star Trek: Federation* (1994 US) with his wife,Judith
Reeves-Stevens,and The Making of Star Trek: Deep SpaceNine (1994 US), also
with Judith Reeves-Stevens. [JC]Other works: the Chronicles of Galen
Sword, a fantasy sequence with JudithReeves-Stevens comprising Shifter
(1990) andNightfeeder (1991); an Alien Nation tie:The Day of
Descent*(1993).
REEVES-STEVENS, JUDITH
[r] Garfield REEVES-STEVENS.
REEVES, L(YNETTE) P(AMELA)
(1937- ) UK writer exclusively associated with ROBERT HALE LIMITED, but
whose novels, often featuring TIME TRAVEL, rise intermittently above their
element: The Nairn Syndrome (1975), Time Search (1976), The Last Days of
the Peacemaker (1976), Harlow's Dimension (1977), Stone Age Venture
(1977), A Twist in Time (1978) and If it's Blue, it's Plague (1981). [JC]
REGINALD, ROBERT
The pseudonym under which US bibliographer, librarian and publisher
Michael Roy Burgess (1948- ) is best known, and under which (or as R.
Reginald) he has published his most important work in the sf field; it is
also under this name that he publishes and edits the BORGO PRESS in
California, a SMALL PRESS that publishes many monographs on and
bibliographical studies of sf, fantasy and horror. As M.R. Burgess or
Michael Burgess he has also published fairly widely, his most important sf
work under the latter form of his name being Reference Guide to Science
Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (1992); less frequently used pseudonyms
include Boden Clarke, C. Everett Cooper and Lucas Webb. RR has written on
himself in The Work of R. Reginald: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide
(1985 chap as by Michael Burgess and Jeffrey M. ELLIOT; exp vt The Work of
Robert Reginald: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide 1992 as by Burgess
alone).The various incarnations of RR's most important publication have
intermittently occupied his career through 1992. His first book, Stella
Nova: The Contemporary Science Fiction Authors (1970 anon; rev vt
Contemporary Science Fiction Authors, First Edition 1974 as RR),

eventually became the second volume of his magnum opus, Science Fiction
and Fantasy Literature: A Checklist, 1700-1974, with Contemporary Science
Fiction Authors II (1979) in 2 vols as RR, and listing over 15,000 titles
up to the end of 1974. The long-awaited supplement to this essential
reference tool has been broken back down into separate enterprises, with
Science Fiction ?
with Darryl F. MALLETT and Mary Wickizer Burgess, being restricted to an
updating of the checklist alone, to which it adds a further 22,000 titles;
a biographical volume, building on the original Stella Nova, is also
projected ( Hyperlink to: BIBLIOGRAPHIES for further comments).Other
bibliographical publications of interest include: Cumulative Paperback
Index, 1939-1959: A Comprehensive Bibliographic Guide to 14,000
Mass-Market Paperback Books of 33 Publishers under 69 Imprints (1973) as
RR with M.R. Burgess; Science Fiction ?
much exp vt Reginald's Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: A Comprehensive
Guide to the Awards and their Winners 1991 by Daryl F. Mallett with RR); A
Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy in the Library of Congress
Classification Scheme (1984 chap; exp 1988) as by Michael Burgess; The
Work of Jeffrey M. Elliot: An Annotated Bibliography ?
as by Boden Clarke; The Work of Julian May: An Annotated Bibliography ?
Guide (1985 chap) as by RR with Thaddeus DIKTY; The Work of George
Zebrowski: An Annotated Bibliography ? exp 1990) as by
RR with Jeffrey M. Elliot; Mystery and Detective Fiction in the Library of
Congress Classification Scheme (1987) as by Michael Burgess; Western
Fiction in the Library of Congress Classification Scheme (1988 chap) as by
Michael Burgess, with Beverly A. Ryan; and The Work of William F. Nolan:
An Annotated Bibliography ?
Nolan writing as James Hopkins. The individual author bibliographies, part
of an ongoing Borgo Press series by several hands, are devotedly thorough
and accurate.Before founding Borgo in 1975, RR founded the short-lived
Unicorn ?
associate editor of FORGOTTEN FANTASY (1970-71) and advisory editor of the
ARNO PRESS sf reprint series and Arno's subsequent reprints of
supernatural, fantasy and LOST WORLD books. Borgo itself began publishing
titles in 1976, and by 1992 had released well over 100 titles under its
own imprint as well as distributing over 1000 other titles. Though RR
became full Librarian at Cal State in 1984, he maintained complete control
over the firm, initiating and silently collaborating on many of its
bibliographical projects and publishing through it much of his
non-bibliographical work, as well as his two novels. The Attempted
Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Political Fantasy (1976 chap as by
Lucas Webb; rev vt If J.F.K. Had Lived: A Political Scenario 1982 chap as
by RR with Jeffrey M. Elliot) is an ALTERNATE-WORLD tale in which
monarchies have been retained worldwide and Kennedy is not killed. Up Your
Asteroid!: A Science Fiction Farce (1977 chap), as by C. Everett Cooper,
is a desultory spoof.RR also ed several anthologies for Arno Press, all
with Douglas MENVILLE: Ancestral Voices: An Anthology of Early Science
Fiction (anth 1975; cut 1992), Ancient Hauntings (anth 1976),
Phantasmagoria (anth 1976), R.I.P.: Five Stories of the Supernatural (anth
1976), The Spectre Bridegroom, and Other Horrors (anth 1976), Dreamers of
Dreams: An Anthology of Fantasy (anth 1978), King Solomon's Children: Some

Parodies of H. Rider Haggard (anth 1978), They: Three Parodies of H. Rider
Haggard's She (anth 1978) and Worlds of Never: Three Fantastic Novels
(anth 1978). Also with Menville, RR wrote two film books: Things to Come:
An Illustrated History of the Science Fiction Film (1977) and, with Mary
Wickizer Burgess also collaborating, Futurevisions: The New Golden Age of
the Science Fiction Film (1985). RR remains of central importance to sf as
a bibliographer of persistent exactness and enormous energy. He won the
PILGRIM AWARD in 1993. [PN/JC]
REHN, JENS
[r] GERMANY.
REICHERT, MICKEY ZUCKER
Working name of US medical doctor and writer Miriam S. Zucker Reichert
(1962- ), almost allof whose fiction (see Other Works below) has been
fantasy; but whose 9th novel,The Unknown Soldier (1994), is an sf tale
aboutan amnesiacal soldier whose treatment in hospital is complicated by
doubts over his origins intime and space, and interrupted by guerrilla
assaults; his character and feats are reminiscent ofthose of MZR's fantasy
protagonists. The medical side of the tale is perhaps more sustained
thanthe sf side. [JC]Other Works: the Bifrost Guardians sequence,
comprising Godslayer (1987), ShadowClimber (1988), DragonrankMaster(1989),
Shadow's Realm(1990) and By Chaos Cursed (1991);the Renshai seuqence,
comprising The Last of theRenshai (1992),The WesternWizard (1992) and The
Child ofThunder (1993); The Legend ofNightfall (1993), a singleton.
REID, DESMOND
A house name used by at least 30 writers for Sexton Blake Library tales,
one of which - The World-Shakers! (1960 chap) by Rex Dolpin ( Peter SAXON)
- was a UFO tale. Another - Caribbean Crisis (1962 chap) by James CAWTHORN
and Michael MOORCOCK - was Moorcock's first novel. Other authors of genre
interest who used the name included Sydney J. BOUNDS, Jonathan BURKE,
Stephen FRANCES, A.A. GLYNN, John LYMINGTON and Wilfred MCNEILLY. [JC]
REIDA, ALVAH
(1920-1975) US writer whose sf novel, Fault Lines (1972) - not to be
confused with Kate WILHELM's later novel of the same title - deals
apocalyptically with the consequences of a San Andreas Fault earthquake.
[JC]
REIN, HAROLD
(? -? ) US writer in whose extremely grim post- HOLOCAUST novel, Few Were
Left (1955), a suicidal protagonist is trapped with others in the New York
subway system after the bomb has dropped. He fails, after several
adventures, to escape. [JC]
REINCARNATION
The idea of reincarnation exerts a considerable fascination; its
fashionability has recently been renewed by hypnotists who claim to
facilitate a "regression" of their subjects which allows access to
memories of "former lives". Serial reincarnation is one of the standard
varieties of IMMORTALITY. In FANTASY the notion is an axiom of the curious
subgenre of "transcendental romance" - stories in which love becomes a

quasisupernatural force transcending time or death so that lovers may meet
in different ages to make repeated attempts to find true happiness. This
is the pattern of H. Rider HAGGARD's She (1887) and its sequels, Edwin
Lester ARNOLD's Phra the Phoenician (1890) and George GRIFFITH's Valdar
the Oft-Born (1895). Arnold's Lepidus the Centurion (1901) shows one of
the more subtle and intelligent uses of the notion. Many romances of
reincarnation have also been inspired by the ancient Egyptian methods of
preserving the dead, including Haggard's "Smith and the Pharaohs" (1912;
as title story of Smith and the Pharaohs and Other Tales coll 1920).
PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC rationalizations of the notion often invoke the concept
of "race memory"; Haggard bolstered his belief with this idea, deploying
it in The Ancient Allan (1920) and Allan and the Ice Gods (1927), and Jack
LONDON used it in Before Adam (1906) and The Star Rover (1915; vt The
Jacket). The most impressive sf story built on the race-memory premise is
John GLOAG's 99% (1944).Camille FLAMMARION, the first writer to develop
the notion of ALIEN beings adapted to LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS, did so mainly
in order to support his theory of the immortality of the soul with
speculations about possible reincarnations on other worlds. First
presented in Lumen (1864; exp 1887; trans 1897), the idea was used also in
Urania (1890) and was copied by Louis Pope GRATACAP in the didactic The
Certainty of a Future Life on Mars (1903).Hugh KINGSMILL reincarnated
Shakespeare in The Return of William Shakespeare (1929) so that a critical
commentary on the works could be put into the Bard's own mouth and
bracketed by a satirical comedy. When GENRE SF began to deploy
technological methods of reincarnation, the resurrection of great men of
the past was a theme used in many stories, including Manly Wade WELLMAN's
Giants from Eternity (1939), Ray BRADBURY's "Forever and the Earth"
(1950), James BLISH's "A Work of Art" (1956), R.A. L AFFERTY's Past Master
(1968), Philip K. DICK's We Can Build You (1972), Barry N. MALZBERG's THE
REMAKING OF SIGMUND FREUD (1985) and Dan SIMMONS's The Fall of Hyperion
(1990). Henry J. SLATER's The Smashed World (1952) features a remarkable
version of the Eternal Triangle involving Archimedes, Napoleon and
Cleopatra 3000 years in the future. In Anne Rice's The Mummy, or Ramses
the Damned (1989) an immortal Ramses forces the reincarnation of the
spirit of Cleopatra into the mummy of that queen, with disastrous results
- not just for Ramses but also for the novel, since the explanation of the
"mechanism" of reincarnation is hopelessly fudged.Reincarnation in sf
usually involves the "recording" of personalities for later re-embodiment,
sometimes in an ANDROID body. TIME TRAVEL also comes in handy as a means
of duplicating individuals. The idea that CLONES might be seen as
reincarnations is propounded in such stories as "When You Care, When You
Love" (1962) by Theodore STURGEON, and in several of the works of John
VARLEY clones are used such that in effect individuals can cheat death by
living in "serial bodies". MATTER TRANSMISSION is employed as a
reincarnating device in such stories as Algis BUDRYS's ROGUE MOON (1960).
The natural extravagance of genre sf has occasionally encouraged a blithe
disregard for the inconvenience of death; two writers who have sometimes
been very casual about incorporating metaphysical or frankly mysterious
methods of reincarnation into their scenarios are A.E. VAN VOGT, in such
works as The Book of Ptath (1943; 1947; vt Two Hundred Million A.D.), The
World of A (1945; 1948; vt The World of Null-A) and "The Monster" (1948;

vt "Resurrection"), and Philip Jose FARMER, most notably in the Riverworld
series-which stars many notable figures plucked from various eras of
Earthly history, and helped to inspire Janet E. MORRIS's Hell series of
shared-world adventures - but also in Inside Outside (1964) and Traitor to
the Living (1973).The particular ideas of reincarnation contained in
extant RELIGIONS are sciencefictionalized in various works by Roger
ZELAZNY, notably LORD OF LIGHT (1967), whose framework is taken from Hindu
MYTHOLOGY, and Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969), which uses Egyptian
mythology. Syd LOGSDON's A Fond Farewell to Dying (1981) thoughtfully
confronts a technology of reincarnation with Hindu beliefs which view it
as a blasphemy. An aesthetically satisfying quasireligious "mechanism" for
reincarnation is presented in the parapsychological thriller Death Knell
(1977) by C. Terry CLINE. Alien biologies permitting reincarnation,
perhaps adaptable to use by humans, are sometimes presented within an
explicitly religious framework; Robert SILVERBERG's Downward to the Earth
(1970) is a notable example.Future societies dramatically transformed by
technologies of reincarnation are featured in Robert SHECKLEY's
Immortality, Inc (1959), in which disembodied minds must compete for
bodies made redundant by their occupiers for one reason or another,
Silverberg's To Live Again (1969), in which similarly disembodied minds
must share living hosts, Robert THURSTON's Alicia II (1978), which
examines the predicament of the "rejects" whose bodies are used to house
the reincarnated, Stephen GOLDIN's The Eternity Brigade (1980), in which
the tapes recording trained soldiers for serial reincarnation are
bootlegged, with predictable consequences, and Michael BERLYN's Crystal
Phoenix (1980), in which attitudes to death are dramatically and
repulsively transformed. In Gray Matters (1971) by William HJORTSBERG and
Friends Come in Boxes (1973) by Michael G. CONEY minds awaiting
re-embodiment are mechanically-and not very happily - stored. Silverberg's
"Born with the Dead" (1974), Lucius SHEPARD's Green Eyes (1984) and Kevin
J. ANDERSON's Resurrection, Inc (1988) all draw some inspiration from the
idea of zombies, but develop their hypotheses in strikingly different
ways. [BS]See also: ESCHATOLOGY; SUSPENDED ANIMATION.
REINSMITH, RICHARD
Working name of US writer Richard Rein Smith (1930- ), who has apparently
written many sf novels under various pseudonyms, including the sf
adventure Starbright (1983) as by Damon Castle; further pseudonyms remain
unrevealed. As RR he wrote The Savage Stars (1981) and a Tarzan tie,
Tarzan and the Tower of Diamonds * (1985). [JC]
REJECTS
Some of science fiction’s best writers received their share of rejection
slips.Doubleday initially turned down Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy as
well as his I, Robot.In 1953, John Campbell rejected Hal Clement's Mission
of Gravity for publication in Astounding because he felt that it would not
divide naturally for serialization. He changed his mind after Frederik
Pohl divided it into three parts.After Samuel R. Delany won the Nebula
Awards for two consecutive novels, his experimental novel Dhalgren was
rejected by several publishers. When Bantam finally published Dhalgren in
1975, it became a word-of-mouth bestseller.

RELATIVITY
COMMUNICATIONS; FASTER THAN LIGHT; PHYSICS.
RELIGION
Familiar DEFINITIONS OF SF imply that there is nothing more alien to its
concerns than religion. However, many of the roots of PROTO SCIENCE
FICTION are embedded in traditions of speculative fiction closely
associated with the religious imagination, and contemporary sf recovered a
strong interest in certain mystical and transcendental themes and images
when it moved beyond the TABOOS imposed by the PULP MAGAZINES. Modern sf
frequently confronts age-old speculative issues associated with
METAPHYSICS and theology - partly because science itself has abandoned
them. Speculative fiction always tends to go beyond the merely empirical
matters with which pragmatic scientists concern themselves; perhaps
something called "science" fiction ought not to include metaphysical
fiction, but the genre as constituted obviously does.It was the religious
imagination of people such as Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) which first
envisioned an infinite Universe filled with habitable worlds, and it was
visionaries like Athanasius KIRCHER and Emanuel SWEDENBORG who first
journeyed in the imagination to the limits of the Solar System, and
beyond. John WILKINS, who first supposed in all seriousness that people
might go to the Moon in a flying machine, was a bishop, and so was Francis
GODWIN, the author of the satirical cosmic voyage The Man in the Moone
(1638). Other early speculative fictions were attacks upon religious
cosmology and religious orthodoxy by freethinkers such as CYRANO DE
BERGERAC, VOLTAIRE and, later, Samuel BUTLER. Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein
(1818) takes its imaginative inspiration from the image of the scientist
as usurper of the prerogatives of God. The boldest of all the 19th-century
speculative fictions, Camille FLAMMARION's Lumen (1864; exp 1887; trans
1897), was the result of the astronomer's desperate need to reconcile and
fuse his scientific knowledge with his religious faith. J.H. ROSNY aine,
the prolific writer of evolutionary fantasies, also saw the object of his
work as an imaginative revelation of the divinely planned evolutionary
schema, and he too wanted to remake theology so that it might be
reconciled with modern scientific knowledge - a task later taken up by the
heretic Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). C.H. HINTON's
stories and essays about the fourth DIMENSION were inspired by the notion
that a four-dimensional God might be omniscient of everything that has
ever or will ever take place in our three-dimensional continuum. Marie
CORELLI re-envisaged God as an entity of pure electric force in A Romance
of Two Worlds (1886). John Jacob ASTOR's A Journey in Other Worlds (1894),
Jean DELAIRE's Around a Distant Star (1904) and John MASTIN's Through the
Sun in an Airship (1909) are among many novels borrowing the literary
devices of SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE to dramatize cosmic voyages whose real
purpose was to "justify" theological dogmas. Edgar FAWCETT's The Ghost of
Guy Thyrle (1895) does not hesitate to engage its hero in conversation
with a messenger from God at the edge of the Universe.In virtually all
late-19th-century and early-20th-century speculative fiction the
antagonism of the scientific and religious imaginations - sharpened by
controversies regarding Darwinian EVOLUTION, socialism and humanism - is
evident, whether the thrust of the narrative is toward reconciliation or

conflict. Many of the early UK writers of scientific romance-notably
George GRIFFITH, M.P. SHIEL, William Hope HODGSON and J.D. BERESFORD were the sons of clergymen who converted to free thought and used their
fiction to justify and explore the consequences of their decision. Guy
THORNE's When it was Dark (1904) and Shiel's The Last Miracle (1906) both
feature rationalist plots to discredit Christian faith, although the
authors take up very different positions in extrapolating the
consequences. In Robert Hugh BENSON's Lord of the World (1907) a humanist
socialist woos the world to his cause, but proves to be the Antichrist;
its companion-piece, The Dawn of All (1911), offers an alternative vision
of a UTOPIAN future in which people have renounced such heinous heresies
as materialism, humanism, socialism and protestantism. Some humanists were
equally prepared to turn religious imagery to their own purposes: H.G.
WELLS brought a new kind of angel to Earth to observe the sins of mankind
in The Wonderful Visit (1895); his later flirtation with a reconstituted
faith-explained in God the Invisible King (1917) - led him to produce a
new Book of Job in The Undying Fire (1919), and towards the end of his
life he rewrote the tale of Noah in All Aboard for Ararat (1940). A
similar interest in "alternative theology" is central to the work of Olaf
STAPLEDON, whose STAR MAKER (1937) explores a vast cosmic schema, and
culminates in a vision of God the Scientist, constantly experimenting with
Creation. C.S. LEWIS co-opted the methods and ideas of scientific romance
for his theological fantasies OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET (1938), Perelandra
(1943) and The Great Divorce (1945 chap). In France Andre MAUROIS
confronted a SCIENTIST with proof of the existence of the soul in Le
peseur d'ames (1931; trans as The Weigher of Souls 1931); and the Austrian
Franz WERFEL wrote Stern der Ungeborenen (1946; trans as Star of the
Unborn 1946), a bizarre futuristic SATIRE promiscuously combining ideas
from the scientific and religious imaginations. The dedicatedly sceptical
philosopher Bertrand RUSSELL produced the VOLTAIRE-esque contes
philosophiques "Zahatopolk" (1954) and "Faith and Mountains" (1954), two
vitriolically scathing treatments of organized religion and faddish cults.
This long tradition of theological and antitheological speculative fiction
extends into recent times in such works as John CAMERON's The Astrologer
(1972), Romain GARY's The Gasp (1973), E.E.Y. Hales's Chariot of Fire
(1977), Bernard MALAMUD's God's Grace (1982), Jeremy LEVEN's Satan (1982),
Theodore STURGEON's Godbody (1986) and James K. MORROW's Only Begotten
Daughter (1990).If speculative fiction in the MAINSTREAM has always been
as much concerned with the visions of the religious imagination as with
those of the scientific imagination, within GENRE SF religious issues were
for many years excluded by editorial TABOO. One pulp subgenre to be
exempted was the "Shaggy God" story, often dealing with ADAM AND EVE;
writers mostly played safe by scrupulously avoiding the New Testament.
Godlike aliens were treated with circumspection, Clifford D. SIMAK's The
Creator (1935; 1946) finding a home only in the semiprofessional MARVEL
TALES. The future evolution of institutionalized religion was considered
in Robert A. HEINLEIN's "If This Goes On . . ." (1940), in which a
tyrannical state of the future operates through an Established Church
headed by a bigoted fanatic - a recurrent image in sf. Heinlein's Sixth
Column (1941 as by Anson MacDonald; 1949; vt The Day After Tomorrow),
based on a John W. CAMPBELL Jr story whose original version was ultimately

published as "All" (1976), shows the USA overthrowing Asian conquerors by
means of a fake religious cult - another recurrent image. Fritz LEIBER
amalgamated the two ideas in GATHER, DARKNESS! (1943; 1950), in which the
tyrannical rule of a state religion is overthrown by a cult masquerading
as witches and warlocks. ROBOTS sceptical of what humans tell them about
Earth construct a new faith for themselves in Isaac ASIMOV's "Reason"
(1941). But all these religions were mere superstructure: the theological
issues remained untouched. In the pages of UNKNOWN, Campbell's authors
used angels, GODS AND DEMONS with gay abandon, but such stories as Henry
KUTTNER's "The Misguided Halo" (1939) and Cleve CARTMILL's "Prelude to
Armageddon" (1942) were conscientiously playful in dealing with the
apparatus of the Christian mythos. Only A.E. VAN VOGT's The Book of Ptath
(1943; 1947 vt Two Hundred Million A.D.) came close to serious speculation
about metaphysics.After WWII there was a spectacular boom in sf stories
which, without any trepidation whatever, cut straight to the heart of
theological matters. The space travellers in Ray BRADBURY's "The Man"
(1949) follow Jesus on his interplanetary mission of salvation, while the
priests in "In this Sign . . ." (1951; vt "The Fire Balloons") encounter
sinless beings on Mars. A robot in Anthony BOUCHER's "The Quest for St
Aquin" (1951) emulates St Thomas Aquinas in logically deducing the
existence of God, thus justifying its own - and the author's - adherence
to the Catholic faith. In Paul L. Payne's "Fool's Errand" (1952) a Jew
finds a cross in the sands of Mars. In James BLISH's classic A CASE OF
CONSCIENCE (1953; exp 1958) a Jesuit interprets the axioms of his faith to
infer, heretically in the Manichaean style, that an alien world is the
creation of the Devil, and that it must be exorcised. In Lester DEL REY's
"For I Am a Jealous People" (1954) alien invaders arrive to take
possession of the Earth, having made their own covenant with God and
become his chosen people. In Arthur C. CLARKE's "The Star" (1955)
spacefarers discover the wreckage of inhabited worlds which had been
destroyed by the nova that shone over Bethlehem. Philip Jose FARMER's THE
LOVERS (1952; exp 1961) features a future Earth whose social mores derive
from the "Western Talmud"; its sequel, A Woman a Day (1953; rev 1960; vt
The Day of Timestop; vt Timestop), continues an earnest exploration of
future religion. Farmer's "The God Business" (1954) is a phantasmagoric,
pantheistic fantasy whose hero ends up as a deity; and the same
opportunity is offered to a conventional Churchman in "Father" (1955),
part of a series featuring the priest John Carmody, whose conversion as a
result of authentic transcendental experience is described in Night of
Light (1957; exp 1966), and whose eventual mission is the subject of "A
Few Miles" (1960) and "Prometheus" (1961). The most impressive single work
to come out of this boom is Walter M. MILLER's A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ
(1955-7; fixup 1960), which describes the role played by the Church in the
rebuilding of society after a nuclear HOLOCAUST. Even stories like Robert
A.W. LOWNDES's Believer's World (1952; exp 1961), James E. GUNN's This
Fortress World (1955) and Poul ANDERSON's "Superstition" (1956), which
deal with fake or misguided religious cults, exhibit a far more
sophisticated view of the SOCIOLOGY of religion than "If this Goes On . .
." or Sixth Column.Blish, tempted to try to explain this remarkable
phenomenon by his own involvement with it, wrote the notable essay
"Cathedrals in Space" (1953 as by William Atheling Jr; incorporated into

The Issue at Hand, coll 1964), citing the stories as "instruments of a
chiliastic crisis, of a magnitude we have not seen since the chiliastic
panic of 999 A.D.", and drawing a parallel between them and the boom in
atomic Armageddons - a parallel made explicit by Boucher and Miller and
spectacularly developed by Blish himself in Black Easter (1968) and The
Day after Judgment (1970). The supposed panics of AD999 were in fact a
myth invented by much later apocalyptic writers, but the argument holds
good. The advent of the atom bomb in 1945 was a revelation of sorts, and
the 1953 invention of the H-bomb gave to each of two ideologically opposed
nations the power to annihilate the entire human race. The interest in
theological issues, and in metaphysical issues in general, prompted by the
acute sense of existential insecurity to which this awareness gave birth
became gradually more powerful, though often less explicit. The 1950s also
saw a remarkable proliferation of images obviously allied to religious
notions but shorn of their association with actual religious doctrine.
Arthur C. Clarke has said that any religious symbolism or imagery in
CHILDHOOD'S END (1950; exp 1953) is "entirely accidental", although the
text itself refers to the climax as an "apotheosis" and the events
described there are strikingly - but coincidentally - similar to Teilhard
de Chardin's notion of the coming-together of displaced planetary
"noospheres" at an apocalyptic "Omega Point". Clifford D. Simak's Time and
Again (1951; vt First He Died) is similarly free of formal doctrine,
although the alien symbionts which infest all living things are obviously
analogous to souls ( ESCHATOLOGY). In later works by Simak - particularly
A Choice of Gods (1972) and Project Pope (1981)-religious ideas do become
explicit, and here again there are strong echoes of a Teilhardian schema.
Sf works explicitly based on Teilhard's ideas are George ZEBROWSKI's The
Omega Point Trilogy (2 parts published 1972, 1977; omni, including 3rd
part, 1983) and Gene WOLFE's The Book of the New Sun (1980-83) and The
Urth of the New Sun (1987 UK). The syncretic approach of these stories,
which blends the religious and scientific imaginations, contrasts with
uncompromising stories using TIME TRAVEL and other facilitating devices
directly to confront the central symbol of the Christian faith: the
crucifixion. Richard MATHESON's "The Traveler" (1962) visits the scene in
order to find faith. The heroes of Brian EARNSHAW's Planet in the Eye of
Time (1968) go there to protect faith from subversion. The protagonists of
Michael MOORCOCK's Behold the Man! (1966; exp 1969) and Barry N.
MALZBERG's Cross of Fire (1982) must become Christ and suffer crucifixion
in search of redemption for themselves. The time tourists of Garry
KILWORTH's "Let's Go to Golgotha" (1975) discover the horribly ironic
truth about the condemnation of Christ. More oblique treatments of the
motif can be found in Harry HARRISON's "The Streets of Ashkelon" (1962)
and Philip Jose Farmer's Jesus on Mars (1979).There was a very noticeable
change, too, in the attitude of sf writers to ALIEN religion. Before WWII,
it was taken for granted that all such religions were misguided, ripe for
SATIRE and open mockery; after WWII sf writers were prepared to treat
alien beliefs reverently, and frequently to credit them with a truthful
dimension which Earthly religion lacked. In Katherine MACLEAN's "Unhuman
Sacrifice" (1958) missionaries to an alien world find that the
"superstitions" they set out to subvert are not as absurd as they assumed.
In Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND (1961) religious ideas imported

from Mars become important on Earth. In Robert SILVERBERG's Nightwings
(1969) and Downward to the Earth (1970) humans seek their own salvation
via the transcendental experiences associated with alien religion,
although his Tom O'Bedlam (1986) is more ambiguous in its treatment of a
cult based on visionary experience of an alien world, and "The Pope of the
Chimps" (1982) is highly and ironically ambivalent. In D.G. COMPTON's The
Missionaries (1972) alien missionaries bring an enigmatic offer of
salvation to mankind. Poul ANDERSON's "The Problem of Pain" (1973) is a
fine conte philosophique about the relativity of values deriving from
human and alien religions. Satan is portrayed as a wise and misunderstood
alien in Harlan ELLISON's "The Deathbird" (1973), which argues that the
story of the Fall is a fraud perpetrated on us by God. In the first part
of Gregory BENFORD's and Gordon EKLUND's If the Stars are Gods (1974;
fixup 1977) alien visitors seeking a new sun-god allow a man to share
their enigmatic communion with our SUN. In George R.R. MARTIN's "A Song
for Lya" (1974) humans again seek and find transcendental experience in
alien ways. The first section of Dan SIMMONS's HYPERION (1989) deals with
an alien religion based in the effects of alien PARASITISM (or perhaps
symbiosis). Alien gods are treated with much greater suspicion in
Zebrowski's "Heathen God" (1970), Ian WATSON's extraordinary God's World
(1979) and Ted REYNOLDS's The Tides of God (1989), which is robustly
unsentimental in proposing that if God is an alien the best thing we can
do is get out there and destroy Him.Sf also became increasingly eager to
look at religious experience from the "other side", exploring the
experience of being a (or even the) God. This notion was tentatively
developed in pulp stories about scientists presiding over tiny creations,
including Edmond HAMILTON's "Fessenden's Worlds" (1937) and Theodore
STURGEON's "Microcosmic God" (1941), and in "Shaggy God" squibs like
Fredric BROWN's "Solipsist" (1954) and Eric Frank RUSSELL's "Sole
Solution" (1956). It received more serious consideration in Farmer's "The
God Business" and "Father" and in Robert BLOCH's intensely bitter "The
Funnel of God" (1960), and was more elaborately explored in a number of
novels by Roger ZELAZNY, notably LORD OF LIGHT (1967), Creatures of Light
and Darkness (1969) and Isle of the Dead (1969), and in Frank HERBERT's
The God Makers (1972).The sf writer who has dealt most prolifically with
issues in speculative theology is Philip K. DICK, whose long-standing
fascination was brought to a head by a series of unusual and possibly
religious experiences which he underwent in the early months of 1974.
Novels like Radio Free Albemuth (written 1976; 1985), comprehensively
reworked as VALIS (1981), are attempts to get to grips with these
experiences. The development of Dick's theological fascination can be
tracked through such works as "Faith of Our Fathers" (1967), GALACTIC
POT-HEALER (1969) and A Maze of Death (1970), and culminate in The Divine
Invasion (1981) and the non-sf The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
(1982).Artificial religions and cults still crop up regularly in sf,
sometimes deployed for satirical purposes, as by Kurt VONNEGUT Jr in THE
SIRENS OF TITAN (1959), Cat's Cradle (1963) and Slapstick (1976),
sometimes in the cause of thoughtful extrapolations in the sociology of
religion, as in This Star Shall Abide (1972; vt Heritage of the Star) by
Sylvia Louise ENGDAHL. Keith ROBERTS's PAVANE (coll of linked stories
1968) and Kingsley AMIS's The Alteration (1976) are both ALTERNATE-WORLD

stories endorsing the thesis of Max Weber (1864-1920) regarding the
Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism by displaying an unreformed
Catholic Church dominating a Europe where the Industrial Revolution is
only just getting under way in the 20th century. Roberts's Kiteworld
(fixup 1985) is one of the more memorable sf images of oppressive
Theocracy. More earnest explorations of possible developments in future
religion include Richard COWPER's Kinship series begun with the novella
"Piper at the Gates of Dawn" (1976). A number of books excoriate future
theocracies, particularly fundamentalist ones, such as The Stone that
Never Came Down (1973) by John BRUNNER, recent examples of the assault on
fundamentalism being Parke GODWIN's Snake Oil series, beginning with
Waiting for the Galactic Bus (1988), and several books by Sheri S. TEPPER,
notably Raising the Stones (1990). Conversely, in several of Orson Scott
CARD's novels a thinly disguised version of Mormonism is depicted with a
utopian glow. In contemporary sf, however, perhaps the most sophisticated
and detailed treatment of a future religion is The Starbridge Chronicles
by Paul PARK, beginning with SOLDIERS OF PARADISE (1987), in which the
seasons of a generations-long Great Year encourage contrasting
faiths.There are several interesting theme anthologies, including Other
Worlds, Other Gods (anth 1971) ed Mayo Mohs, Strange Gods (anth 1974) ed
Roger ELWOOD, An Exaltation of Stars (anth 1973) ed Terry CARR, Wandering
Stars (anth 1974) ed Jack DANN (a collection of Jewish sf), The New
Awareness: Religion through Science Fiction (anth 1975) ed Martin H.
GREENBERG and Patricia S. WARRICK, Perpetual Light (anth 1982) ed Alan
Ryan, and Sacred Visions (anth 1991) ed Michael CASSUTT and Andrew M.
GREELEY. [BS]See also: IMMORTALITY; MESSIAHS; REINCARNATION; SUPERNATURAL
CREATURES.
REMEMBER LEMURIA
When SF fans debate the fine line between magazine science fiction and
pop pseudo-science, the name of Richard Shaver inevitably comes up.Shaver
wrote "I Remember Lemuria," which was published in 1945 in Amazing
Stories. His tale contained what is now called a "conspiracy theory," in
which humans are manipulated by evil creatures called "deros," part of an
ancient civilization driven underground by solar radiation. Shaver
maintained that his theory was based on fact.The story became wildly
popular - and 2500 letters were received by Amazing after it appeared. So
more of the stories were commissioned. In 1947 an entire issue was written
about Lemuria for Amazing. Most SF fans called the Shaver tales a pure
hoax - and an earlyexample of the bogus stories about flying saucers,
worldwide conspiracies, and ancient races that have become such a staple
of American culture.
RENARD, JOSEPH
(1938- ) US playwright and novelist whose sf has been restricted to The
Monodyne Catastrophe (1970 Venture as "How We Won the Monodyne"; exp
1977), in which Native Americans attempt to take over the eponymous source
of future power. [JC]
RENARD, MAURICE
(1875-1939) French writer, generally regarded in FRANCE as the most
important native sf writer for the period 1900-1930, whose career began

with the stories assembled as Fantomes et fantoches ["Phantoms and
Puppets"] (coll 1905) as by Vincent Saint-Vincent. He is best known by
English-language readers for his sf novel Les mains d'Orlac (1920; trans
Florence Crewe-Jones as The Hands of Orlac 1929 US; new trans Ian White
1981 UK), filmed in 1924 as ORLACS HANDE; another version was Mad Love
(1935). The story deals in GOTHIC terms with the ominous consequences of a
hand transplant. A less well known though more wildly imaginative novel is
Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu["Doctor Lerne, Undergod"] (1908; trans anon as
New Bodies for Old 1923 US), in which a sinister SCIENTIST's experiments
in grafting produce, for example, rats with leaves; the transplantation of
a man's brain into a bull's body, and vice versa, creates a smart cow and
a Minotaur. Ultimately the German villain - who has already occupied the
scientist's brain - transplants himself into the body of a car, but the
machinery, thus rendered mortal, putrefies.Le Singe (1925; trans Florence
Crewe-Jones as Blind Circle 1928 US) with Albert Jean (1892- ) is a
gruesomely comic mystery story whose solution reveals the manufacture of a
series of identical ANDROIDS by a kind of electrolysis. The title story of
Le Voyage Immobile, suivi d'autres histoires singulieres (coll 1909; rev
1922; title story trans anon as The Flight of the Aerofix 1932 chap US)
features an unsteerable craft, powered by ANTIGRAVITY and detrimental to
its passengers.MR's untranslated works include the collections Monsieur
D'Outremort et autres histoires singulieres ["Mr Overdeath and Other
Curious Stories"] (coll 1913; vt Suite Fantastique 1921); L'Homme truque
["The Altered Man"] (coll 1921), the long title story of which described
by Pierre VERSINS as "a nightmare based on the Universe as seen by a
mutilated giant whose eyes have been replaced by 'electroscopes' . . . the
pretext for many pages of a strange, visual poetry"L'invitation a la peur
["Invitation to Fear"] (coll 1926),Le Carnaval du mystere ["Mystery
Merry-go-Round"] (coll 1929) and Celui qui n'a pas tue ["He Who Did Not
Kill"] (coll 1932). These volumes include many fine stories on a great
variety of sf themes: CLONES, invisibility, time travel, cyborgs, gravity,
space-time paradoxes, ESCHATOLOGY and, especially and often, altered modes
of PERCEPTION. His untranslated novels include Le peril bleu ["The Blue
Peril"] (1911), about an extraordinary civilization of lifeforms living on
the top of an atmosphere as if it were a sea; Un homme chez les microbes,
scherzo ["A Man Amongst the Microbes: A Scherzo"] (1928), a journey into
the microcosm with more sophistication and verbal wit than those of Ray
CUMMINGS; and Le maitre de la lumiere ["Master of Light"] ( 1933
L'Intransigeant; 1947), about the creation of a new form of glass which
condenses space and time, similar to the "slow glass" invented
(independently) by Bob SHAW. The huge Maurice Renard: Romans et contes
fantastiques ["Maurice Renard: Fantasy Novels and Tales"] (omni 1990)
contains most of his work of genre interest. [PN/JC]See also: HISTORY OF
SF.
RENOWN PUBLICATIONS
SATELLITE SCIENCE FICTION.
REPO MAN
Film (1984). Edge City Productions/Universal. Written/dir Alex Cox,
starring Emilio Estevez, Harry Dean Stanton, Tracey Walter, Olivia Barash.

92 mins. Colour.Set in the seedier areas of Los Angeles, this independent,
low-budget, semi-surreal film concerns a young man (Estevez) who gets a
job as a repo man - a repossessor of unpaid-for cars. A 1964 Chevrolet
Malibu driven by a lobotomized nuclear physicist is driving around town
with something nasty and radioactive in the trunk. People who look inside
see a glaring white light (shades of KISS ME DEADLY [1955]) which
distintegrates them. A series of coincidences (concerning repo men, a
teenager obsessed with aliens, chicano car thieves, middle-class punk
thugs and secret agents led by a woman with a metal hand) reveal something
about the underbelly of urban life and provide sciencefictional metaphors
for urban dreams. The Chevy undergoes a final apotheosis: now glowing all
over, it drifts into the heavens with two repo men inside. We never learn
what was in the car's trunk but, as an acid-head explains early on, flying
saucers and time machines are fundamentally the same thing and getting
into specifics misses the point. RM became an instant cult movie, not just
because of its punk aesthetics and black humour, but also because of its
old-fashioned virtues: it is well made and coherently scripted. [PN]
REPP, ED EARL
(1901-1979) US advertising man and newspaper reporter who wrote a large
number of fairly typical PULP-MAGAZINE adventures for about a decade from
1929, ceasing to produce sf during WWII, after beginning work as a
screenwriter; some of his tales appeared as by Bradnor Buckner. His first
sf story - "Beyond Gravity" for Air Wonder Stories in 1929 - appeared
simultaneously with the magazine publication of his first novel, The
Radium Pool (1929 Science Wonder Stories; with 2 other stories, as coll
1949) which was later bound with L. Ron HUBBARD's Triton and Battle of
Wizards as Science-Fantasy Quintet (omni 1953). 3 stories - 2 of them
linked - were assembled in The Stellar Missiles (coll 1949). EER also
wrote a series in AMZ 1939-43 about John Hale, a scientific detective
perhaps modelled on Arthur B. REEVE's Craig Kennedy; they remain
uncollected. Most of his published books were Westerns. [JC]See also: AIR
WONDER STORIES.
REPTILICUS
Film (1962). Cinemagic/AIP. Dir Sidney Pink, starring Carl Ottosen, Ann
Smyrner. Screenplay Ib Melchior, Pink. 90 mins. Colour.In this, the Danish
cinema's only excursion into the monster genre, the tail of a buried
dinosaur is exhumed and taken to a laboratory where it regenerates an
entire new body, which proceeds to behave like RADON. Generally thought to
be the worst MONSTER MOVIE ever made, R is notable for the visible strings
holding up the puppet dinosaur and for the fact that AIP found it
necessary to cut all flying scenes before the US release. The
novelization, Reptilicus * (1961) by Dean OWEN, was released before the
film and alleged in a lawsuit brought by Pink to contain gratuitous
passages of "lewd, lascivious and wanton desire"; there was also a 1961
comic book, Reptilicus, which fittingly changed its name in #3 to
Reptisaurus the Terrible. [JB/PN]
REPUBLIC FEATURES SYNDICATE
SPACE SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE.

RESNICK, MICHAEL D(IAMOND)
(1942- ) US author and dog-breeder who began his genre career with an
Edgar Rice BURROUGHS pastiche, The Forgotten Sea of Mars (1965 chap), and
who soon began producing many novels in various genres, most often soft
pornography and Gothics, and almost always under unrevealed pseudonyms;
his later books are usually signed Mike Resnick. His interest in Burroughs
had also generated material which he published in ERB-dom Magazine; his
first novels, the Ganymede series - The Goddess of Ganymede (1967) and
Pursuit on Ganymede (1968) - showed Burroughs's influence. After Redbeard
(1969), a post- HOLOCAUST tale set generations hence in the New York
subway system, he left sf and fantasy, restricting his activity to the
pseudonymous novels, writing (it has been estimated) well over 200 before
returning, around 1980, to work under his own name. The first relevant
title - Battlestar Galactica 5: Galactica Discovers Earth * (1980) with
Glen A. LARSON, a tv tie - was the least. MDR's large 1980s production
showed an increasing - and increasingly sophisticated - interest in the
use of sf venues and instruments to tell what he has more than once
described as "morality tales", sometimes with a simplistic ease, but in
later work with mounting vigour and a winningly complex sense of the
nature of the world; this was most evident in those stories and novels like Ivory: A Legend of Past and Future (1988), Paradise: A Chronicle of a
Distant World (1989) and Bwana ?
literal Africa or an sf analogue of it. Ivory has a Masai descendant
searching through many worlds for the tusks of a particular elephant and
the Chronicles of a Distant World sequence recasts the post-independence
history of various African countries as the history of various worlds:
Paradise treats Kenya; Purgatory (1993) treats Zimbabwe; and Inferno
(1994) treats Uganda. Two of the short works belonging to the thematically
linked Kenya series; both set in an African-styled SPACE HABITAT,
Kirinyaga (1988 FSF; 1992 chap) and its sequel, "The Manamouki" (1990),
though well received and both winning HUGOS, caused some controversy
through their display (and perhaps espousal) of cultural values alien to
our own. Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge (1994chap), which is about the
origins of homo sapiens, is actually set in Africa, and won a 1995 NEBULA
Award for Best Novella.Two further series of the 1980s are the Tales of
the Galactic Midway sequence - Sideshow (1982), The Three-Legged Hootch
Dancer (1983), The Wild Alien Tamer (1983) and The Best Rootin' Tootin'
Shootin' Gunslinger in the Whole Damned Galaxy (1983) - and the Tales of
the Velvet Comet sequence - Eros Ascending (1984), Eros at Zenith (1984),
Eros Descending (1985) and Eros at Nadir (1986). Both series - the first
set in a carnival, the second in a whorehouse visited at 50-year intervals
- are smooth, swift, cynical and without much in the way of argument about
anything that might be described as the moral Universe. But many of his
remaining novels of this decade shared the general background outlined in
Birthright: The Book of Man (coll of linked stories 1982), a text which
sketches in the next 15,000 years or so as our race expands through the
Galaxy, peaks, then dwindles to extinction. The individual stories within
this extremely loose frame convey in general a sense that humans are
incapable of answering the demands of history, that we are too short-lived
and too caught in our mortality to answer the challenges of a greater
world. Novels like Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future (1986) and The Dark

Lady: A Romance of the Far Future (1987) tend to portray adventurous
characters engaging in SPACE-OPERA exploits against a black, barely felt
background of closure; for the feats of MDR's protagonists are little more
than selfish spasms in the great night. His better novels are, all the
same, at least superficially cheerful, bustling with competently framed
action, and clear-headed.Tales that stand outside the future history
include The Soul Eater (1981), a retelling of Herman MELVILLE's Moby-Dick
(1851), and Stalking the Unicorn: A Fable of Tonight (1987), a fantasy.
After publishing some earlier short collections, MR signalled his
increasing involvement in short forms with Will the Last Person to Leave
the Planet Please Shut off the Sun? (coll 1992), which contains several
award-winning tales. In the 1970s, MDR published The Official Guide to
Fantastic Literature (1976), Official Guide to Comic Books and Big Little
Books (1977) and Official Price Guide to Comic and Science Fiction Books
(1979). [JC]Other works: Walpurgis III (1982); The Branch (1984);
Unauthorized Autobiographies and Other Curiosities (coll 1984 chap); The
Inn of the Hairy Toad (1985 chap); Adventures (1985); Through Darkest
Resnick with Gun and Camera (coll 1990); Second Contact (1990); Stalking
the Wild Resnick (coll 1991); Pink Elephants and Hairy Toads (coll 1991
chap); The Alien Heart (coll 1991); The Red Tape War (1991) with Jack L.
CHALKER and George Alec EFFINGER; the Oracle Trilogy, comprising
Soothsayer (1991), Oracle (1992) and Prophet (1993); A Miracle of Rare
Design: a Tragedy of Transcendence (1994).Anthologies: Shaggy B.E.M.
Stories (anth 1988); Inside the Funhouse (anth 1992), assembling examples
of RECURSIVE SF; the Alternate series, exploring at perhaps too
considerable a length a variety of ALTERNATE WORLD scenarios, and
including Alternate Kennedys (and 1992), Alternate Warriors(anth 1993),
Alternate Worldcons (anth 1994), By Any Other Fame (anth 1994) and
Alternate Outlaws (anth 1994), all with Martin H. GREENBERG, not
necessarily (as usual with his more recent anthology project) credited;
Aladdin: Master of the Lamp (anth 1992) with Greenberg; Whatdunits(anth
1992) and More Whatdunits(anth 1993), both with Greenberg; Future Earths:
Under South American Skies(anth 1993) and Future Earths: Under African
Skies(anth 1993), both with Gardner DOZOIS;Dinosaur Fantastic (anth 1993)
with Greenberg; Christmas Ghosts(anth 1993) with Greenberg; Deals with the
Devil (anth 1994) with Greenberg and Loren D. Estleman (1952- ).See also:
ALTERNATE WORLDS; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CRIME AND
PUNISHMENT;
HEROES; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; The MAGAZINE OF
FANTASY
AND SCIENCE FICTION; SOCIOLOGY.
RESTIF DE LA BRETONNE
Name by which the French writer Nicolas-Anne-Edme Restif (1734-1806) is
usually known. He was an extremely prolific author of formless,
semi-autobiographical novels often attacked for imputed pornographic
content. Of his various utopian texts, La decouverte australe par un homme
volant, ou le Dedale francais ["The Southern-Hemisphere Discovery by a
Flying Man, or the French Daedalus"] (1781) comes closest to genuine PROTO
SCIENCE FICTION, first describing the flying Frenchman's gear (wings plus
parachute), then his Alpine UTOPIA, then his adventures in the Antipodes

where, like Francois RABELAIS's heroes, he visits a number of allegorical
ISLANDS. [JC]Other works: Les posthumes ["The Posthumous Ones"] (1802).See
also: EVOLUTION; FRANCE.
RETURN FROM WITCH MOUNTAIN
Alexander KEY.
RETURN OF CAPTAIN INVINCIBLE, THE
Film (1982). Willarra/Seven Keys. Dir Philippe Mora, starring Alan Arkin,
Christopher Lee, Kate Fitzpatrick. Screenplay Steven E. De Souza, Andrew
Gaty; additional dialogue Peter Smalley. 91 mins. Colour.Australian
musical comedy whose premise is that its eponymous SUPERHERO (Arkin),
purged in the USA of the McCarthy period as "a premature anti-fascist", is
now a washed-up drunk. Discovered in Sydney by policewoman Patty Patria
(Fitzpatrick), he is recalled to confront his nemesis Mr Midnight (Lee),
whose evil plan is first to sell housing developments to non-Whites in New
York, then nuke them and make the city all-White. Much of the humour comes
from Captain Invincible's forgetting how to fly, and suffering low
self-esteem that affects his supermagnetic powers. As a spoof movie TROCI
is likable, and genre-literate in the range of sf motifs it hits off; the
songs are unmemorable. Arkin's muted, depressive performance, reminiscent
of something from a Barry N. MALZBERG novel, contrasts nicely with Lee
going over the top. [PN]
RETURN OF CAPTAIN NEMO, THE
Irwin ALLEN.
RETURN OF GODZILLA, THE
GOJIRA.
RETURN OF THE FLY
Film (1959). Associated Producers/20th Century-Fox. Dir Edward L. Bernds,
starring Vincent Price, Brett Halsey, David Frankham. Screenplay Bernds.
78 mins. B/w.The first of 2 sequels to the successful sf/horror film The
FLY (1958), the other being CURSE OF THE FLY (1965). Here the son of the
scientist in The Fly, after being attacked by an evil assistant, is forced
to replay his late father's tragedy, which he does rather limply; it is
the least successful of the 3 films. Although The FLY (1986) is a remake
of The Fly (1958), The FLY II is not a remake of ROTF. [PN]
RETURN OF THE GIANT MONSTERS, THE
DAIKAIJU GAMERA.
RETURN OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK
The INCREDIBLE HULK .
RETURN OF THE JEDI
Film (1983). Lucasfilm/20th Century-Fox. Executive prod George LUCAS. Dir
Richard Marquand, starring Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Ian
McDiarmid, David Prowse. Screenplay Lawrence Kasdan, Lucas, based on a
story by Lucas. 132 mins. Colour.Crisp and entertaining for the most part,
with dazzling special effects, ROTJ still seems weaker than its
predecessors, STAR WARS (1977) and The EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980), perhaps
because it is more sentimental. Han Solo (Ford) is rescued from literally

toadlike Jabba the Hutt in the bravura opening sequence, and then the
democratic rebels are pitted once again against a Death Star fortress as
part of their galactic struggle against the totalitarian Empire. The
Emperor (a cleverly obscene performance from McDiarmid) is an even
stronger incarnation of the Dark Side of the Force than Darth Vader
(Prowse), who finally turns good, saves his son Luke, is unmasked and is
then given a Viking's funeral. The forest world of Endor, populated by
Ewoks (teddy-bear lookalikes), is the venue for stirring battles. The
appalling cuteness of the Ewoks and the harmless rubbery appearance of the
monsters are surely Lucasfilm's acknowledgement, in this finale to the
cycle (the threat of 6 further episodes having evaporated), that young
children were now the series' main audience: even the potentially painful
father-son conflict is more soap opera than oedipal myth. The Ewoks later
resurfaced in 2 made-for-tv films, The EWOK ADVENTURE (1984) and Ewoks:
The Battle for Endor (1985).The novelization is Star Wars: Return of the
Jedi * (1983) by James KAHN. [PN]See also: CINEMA; HUGO.
RETURN OF THE LOST PLANET
The LOST PLANET.
RETURN TO THE PLANET OF THE APES
PLANET OF THE APES.
REVENGE OF THE CREATURE
Film (1955). Universal. Dir Jack ARNOLD, starring John Agar, Lori Nelson,
John Bromfield, Ricou Browning. Screenplay Martin Berkeley, story William
Alland. 82 mins. 3D. B/w.The success of CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON
(1954) inspired the inevitable sequel, shot in 3D although seldom
projected in that format. This time the Creature (Browning) is captured
and taken to an oceanarium in Florida, but it soon breaks out and (some
time later, after voyeuristically spying on her) makes off with a blonde
woman scientist (Nelson) under its arm. Though the film has erotically
charged moments, it is generally limp compared with its predecessor, and
is one of Arnold's weaker sf movies. A further sequel, not dir Arnold, was
The CREATURE WALKS AMONG US . [JB/PN]
REVENGE OF THE MYSTERONS FROM MARS
CAPTAIN SCARLET AND THE MYSTERONS.
REVENGE OF THE STEPFORD WIVES
The STEPFORD WIVES .
REY, RUSSELL
Dennis HUGHES.
REYNA, JORGE DE
Diane DETZER.
REYNOLDS, MACK
Working name of US writer Dallas McCord Reynolds (1917-1983); his first
sf story was "Isolationist" for Fantastic Adventures in 1950. He
occasionally used the pseudonyms Clark Collins, Guy McCord, Mark Mallory
and Dallas Ross; he wrote 2 Gothics as Maxine Reynolds and 1 other non-sf
book as Todd Harding. Some of his early work was with Fredric BROWN, and

he also wrote stories with Theodore R. COGSWELL and August W. DERLETH. He
was for 25 years an active member of the American Socialist Labor Party,
for which his father, Verne L. Reynolds, had twice been presidential
candidate; his "militant radicalism" is mutedly reflected, sometimes
ironically, in his sf, making him a maverick in the mostly right-wing
stable of writers associated with John W. CAMPBELL Jr's ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION (MR was one of several writers who wrote up Campbell's
plot ideas). Many of his later works are unashamedly didactic, although
not doctrinaire.MR's first novel, The Case of the Little Green Men (1951),
was a murder mystery set at an sf CONVENTION. It was to be 10 years before
he would publish another novel. Although his 1950s work is minor, he
served 1953-63 as foreign correspondent of Rogue magazine, travelling
extensively, and began to plough back this experience into more
substantial works on socioeconomic themes. Many of the books which
appeared prolifically through the 1960s-70s were expansions and fixups of
earlier magazine stories; the tauter magazine texts are usually preferable
to the padded-out versions. Planetary Agent X (fixup 1965 dos), the first
of several books featuring Section G, shows subversive secret agents of a
United Planets Organization working in the cause of socioeconomic progress
in the often-eccentric Ultima Thule colony worlds of a Galactic Empire,
masking their activities under the nom de guerre Tommy Paine. It was
followed by Dawnman Planet (1966 dos), The Rival Rigelians (1960 ASF as
"Adaptation"; exp 1967 dos), which ironically describes an experiment
comparing the methods of US capitalism and Soviet communism in developing
a primitive world, Code Duello (1968 dos) and Section G: United Planets
(1967 ASF as "Fiesta Brava" and "Psi Assassin"; fixup 1976).Tomorrow Might
be Different (1960 ASF as "Russkies Go Home!"; exp 1975) is a SATIRE in
which the USSR has overtaken the USA as the world's leading economy.
"Farmer" (1961) is the first of 3 notable stories which MR set in North
Africa, each similarly dealing with the problem of fostering economic and
technological development in the teeth of cultural inertia. It was
followed by the Homer Crawford sequence, the first 2 volumes of which are
Black Man's Burden (1961-2 ASF; 1972 dos) and Border, Breed nor Birth
(1962 ASF; 1972 dos), offering entirely serious and constructive versions
of Section G-type plots; although they have dated even more quickly than
MR's stories about the USSR, the issues raised in them (otherwise
virtually untouched in sf) remain politically pertinent. The Best Ye Breed
(fixup 1978), which incorporates "Black Sheep Astray" (1973) and a revised
version of "The Cold War . . . Continued" (1973), extends the series. Day
After Tomorrow (1961 ASF as "Status Quo"; exp 1976) introduced a
status-conscious future USA further elaborated in Mercenary from Tomorrow
(1962 ASF as "Mercenary"; exp 1968 dos), which became the first of the Joe
Mauser series set in a future world in which corporate disputes are
settled by pseudo-gladiatorial contests, packaged by the media as
entertainment, and involving small professional armies fighting with
pre-1900 WEAPONS ( GAMES AND SPORTS). Several lines of speculative thought
carried forward in the later didactic novels originated in this novella,
but the later novels in the series - The Earth War (1963 ASF as "Frigid
Fracas"; 1963), Time Gladiator (1964 ASF as "Sweet Dreams, Sweet Princes";
exp 1966 UK; rev by Michael A. BANKS, vt Sweet Dreams, Sweet Princes 1986
US) and The Fracas Factor (1978) - are routine action-adventure novels.

Joe Mauser, Mercenary from Tomorrow (coll 1986) with Banks contains
revisions of the earlier items. The Cosmic Eye (1963 FSF as "Speakeasy";
exp 1969) is a less convincing story set in a future USA where free speech
is prohibited.During 1965-72 MR's work was more determinedly commercial.
He continued to write stories around Campbell plot ideas. All involve a
good deal of rather slapstick HUMOUR; examples include Amazon Planet (1966
ASF; Italian trans 1967; 1975) and Brain World (1978). Of Godlike Power
(1966; vt Earth Unaware 1968) is a comedy about a preacher whose curses
really work. "Romp" (1966) was the first of a group of crime stories
reprinted as Police Patrol: 2000 A.D. (fixup 1977). Space Pioneer (1966
UK) and After Some Tomorrow (1967) are undistinguished, but 2 novels about
COMPUTERS, Computer War (1967 dos) and The Computer Conspiracy (1968),
gained strength from the timeliness of their themes. The final 2 stories
making up The Space Barbarians (fixup 1969 dos) and The Five Way Secret
Agent (1969 ASF; 1975 dos) were the last items MR did for Campbell, and
after Rolltown (1969 If as "The Towns Must Roll"; exp 1976) he published
virtually no new sf for three years (although he did publish books in
other genres).When his sf career resumed it was with the strikingly
different Looking Backward, from the Year 2000 (1973), a reprise of Edward
BELLAMY's classic UTOPIAN novel, displaying MR's ideas about the POLITICS
and ECONOMICS of an energy-affluent society. He was later to add a sequel
- Equality: in the Year 2000 (1977) - which borrowed an idea from his
earlier Ability Quotient (1975) to subvert the ending of the first book.
MR further extrapolated this line of speculation into the increasingly
doubt-ridden After Utopia (1977), which incorporates "Utopian" (in The
Year 2000 [anth 1970] ed Harry HARRISON) and Perchance to Dream (1977),
although he salvaged a curiously ironic optimism by re-using a deus ex
machina first deployed in the earlier Space Visitor (1977). He developed
parallel lines of thought in sequels to Rolltown - these were Commune 2000
A.D. (1974) and The Towers of Utopia (1975) - and re-used the central
characters of The Five Way Secret Agent in more lightweight stories with
similar underlying concerns: Satellite City (1975) and "Of Future Fears"
(1977 ASF). This series was further expanded in novels about the
tribulations of a quasi-utopian space colony: Lagrange Five (1979), The
Lagrangists (1983) and Chaos in Lagrangia (1984), The last 2 were ed Dean
ING, who went on to prepare for publication several other manuscripts
which MR had left behind on his death: Eternity (1984), Home Sweet Home:
2010 A.D. (1984), The Other Time (1984), Trojan Orbit (1985) and Deathwish
World (1986). Space Search (1984) is a posthumous work credited to MR
alone.The Best of Mack Reynolds (coll 1976) has an introduction explaining
MR's decision to concentrate on sf which speculated on social and economic
issues, and reflecting on his travels and the lessons he learned
therefrom. Although he was once voted most popular author in a poll run by
the GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION group of magazines, MR never received the
recognition he deserved for the fertility of his distinctive speculative
imagination. His ideas were always far more interesting than his plots,
and his writing was sometimes unpolished, but at his best he was a skilled
craftsman whose attempts to foresee the NEAR FUTURE were unusually bold,
well informed and challenging. It is a great pity that he had such
difficulty in finding publishers willing to put his work into respectable
formats. [BS]Other works: Mission to Horatius * (1968), a STAR TREK novel;

Once Departed (1970), a thriller with sf elements; Computer World (1970);
Depression or Bust (fixup 1974); Galactic Medal of Honor (1960 AMZ as
"Medal of Honor"; exp 1976); Trample an Empire Down (1978); Compounded
Interests (coll 1983).As Editor: The Science Fiction Carnival (anth 1953)
with Fredric Brown.About the author: "The Utopian Dream Revisited:
Socioeconomic Speculation in the Work of Mack Reynolds" by Brian M.
STABLEFORD in Foundation 16 (May 1979); A Mack Reynolds Checklist: Notes
Toward a Bibliography (1983 chap) by Chris DRUMM and George Flynn.See
also: AUTOMATION; CITIES; CRYONICS; IMMORTALITY; LEISURE; RELIGION;
SLEEPER AWAKES; SOCIAL DARWINISM; SPACE HABITATS; TECHNOLOGY; TIME
PARADOXES; WAR.
REYNOLDS, PHILIPS
Pseudonym of an unidentified French writer (1916- ) whose sf novel, When
and If (1950 Ce Matin as "Ce pourrait se passe come ca"; trans Joseph F.
McCrindle 1952 US; vt It Happened Like This 1953 UK), describes a future
WAR between the West and Soviet Russia in convincing detail; nuclear
weapons are eventually used, though the final battles are conducted in a
chastened, post-nuclear mood. The West wins.
REYNOLDS, TED
Working name of US writer Theodore Andrus Reynolds (1938- ), who began
publishing sf with "Boarder Incident" for IASFM in 1977. His first novel,
The Tides of God (1989) - the last of the Terry CARR Ace Specials intriguingly allows the surmise that millennial fervour is caused, on a
regular 1000-year basis, by a deranging ALIEN being whose expected arrival
from deep space as the 20th century ends spurs the mounting of an
expedition to destroy it. But RELIGION is a subject too complexly
integrated into the human psyche to be excised by any quasimilitary sortie
into the unknown; and the tale ends in ambiguity. [JC]
RHINEHART, LUKE
Pseudonym of US writer George Powers Cockcroft (1932- ). His first novel,
The Dice Man (1971; rev 1983), though not sf, inhabits the same universe
of discourse as The Adventures of Wim (1986 UK), a long, frequently
garrulous picaresque detailing the eponymous innocent's travels through
time and space. Matari (1975) is a heavily allegorical love story set in a
partly mythologized 18th-century Japan. Long Voyage Back (1983) takes the
crew of a small ship through post- HOLOCAUST ordeals and from Chesapeake
Bay to Chile. LR's books burst with didacticism, but have vivid moments.
[JC]
RHODES, W(ILLIAM) H(ENRY)
(1822-1876) US lawyer and writer who published various newspaper pieces
and stories under the name Caxton, notably The Case of Summerfield (1871
Sacramento Daily Union; 1907 chap), about a scientist who threatens to set
the oceans of the world afire unless he is paid blackmail. Along with its
sequel, 4 further sf stories and other ephemera, the tale was first
published as a memorial by his colleagues in Caxton's Book: A Collection
of Essays, Poems, Tales and Sketches (coll 1876). Also of interest in this
volume is "The Telescopic Eye", about a boy blind at normal distances but
able to observe the activities of the wheel-shaped denizens of the Moon.

[JC]
RHYS, JACK
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
RHYSLING AWARD
AWARDS; POETRY.
RICE, ELMER
First the pseudonym, then the legal name of US playwright and novelist
born Elmer Leopold Reizenstein (1892-1967). Of his plays, The Adding
Machine (1923) interestingly transforms its protagonist, Mr Zero, into the
para-human creature designated by the title. A Voyage to Purilia (1930), a
novel, combines a deft use of sf instruments - the protagonists travel to
the planet Purilia in a ship propelled by ANTIGRAVITY - with a very
extensive guying of UTOPIAN assumptions. On Purilia, life mirrors the
conventions of the cinema - the implication being that utopian worlds are
as fatuously bound by rigmarole and fetish as the "normal" lives depicted
in the classic Hollywood films - and the protagonist escapes marriage,
which is identical to a Hollywood fade-out, by the skin of his teeth. [JC]
RICH, BARBARA
Robert GRAVES.
RICHARDS, ALFRED BATE
(1820-1876) UK editor of the Morning Advertiser and writer. For many
years he was active as a propagandist for UK military preparedness, but
The Invasion of England (A Possible Tale of Future Times) (1870 chap),
published privately, had little impact, and was in any case much inferior
to Lt.-Col. Sir George T. CHESNEY's The Battle of Dorking (1871), which
effectively founded the future- WAR/ INVASION genre so popular over the
next 40 years. [JC]
RICHARDS, GUY
(1905-1979) US writer and reporter. In Two Roubles to Times Square (1956;
vt Brother Bear 1956 UK) a Russian takeover of Manhattan is embarrassedly
disowned by the Kremlin. [JC]
RICHARDS, HENRY
J.L. MORRISSEY.
RICHARDS, JOEL
Pseudonym of US writer Joel Richard Fruchtman (1937- ), who began
publishing sf with "Speedplay" for AMZ in 1980 and has published
subsequent stories in original anthologies. His first novel was Pindharee
(1986), an sf adventure. [JC]
RICHARDS, ROSS
[r] Peter SAXON.
RICHARDSON, LINDA
[r] David R. BISCHOFF.
RICHARDSON, ROBERT S.
[r] Philip LATHAM.

RICHMOND, LEIGH (TUCKER)
(1911- ) US writer who began publishing with "Prologue to an Analogue"
for ASF in 1961, and who wrote some solo stories. Her several sf novels
were all in collaboration with her husband, Walt RICHMOND; 3 were revised
by LR after his death. Almost all their work together expressed a sense one formally presented by the Centric Foundation which they founded and
directed - that scientific breakthroughs could be made by young minds
freed of the bureaucratic artifices of orthodox scientific thinking;
unfortunately, overloaded SPACE-OPERA plotting did little to make their
novels convincing emblems of this new clarity, and the exaggerated
individualism they expressed seemed less mould-breaking than nostalgic.
They published frequently in ASF. Their novels were Shock Waves (1967
dos), The Lost Millennium (1967 dos; rev vt Siva! 1979), which typically
suggests that a new source of solar energy was first exploited by
prehistoric supermen, Phoenix Ship (1969 dos; rev vt Phase Two 1980),
Gallagher's Glacier (1970 dos; rev 1979), Challenge the Hellmaker (1963
ASF as "Where I Wasn't Going"; exp 1976) and The Probability Corner
(1977). Stories were collected as Positive Charge (coll 1970 dos). [JC]
RICHMOND, MARY
Pseudonym of South-African-born UK writer Kathleen Lindsay (1903-1973),
author of about 900 romances and 2 sf novels, The Valley of Doom (1947), a
LOST-WORLD tale, and The Grim Tomorrow (1953), whose UK protagonists fail
to avert a Teutonic atomic HOLOCAUST, but who survive, after being flung
into space on a chunk of England fortunately large enough that they can
start a new life. The tale's telling is less incompetent than its science.
[JC]Other work: Terror Stalks Abroad (1935). ; The Hidden Horror (1937);
Terror by Night (1939); The Devil's Dominion (1956) as by Kathleen Lindsay
RICHMOND, WALT(ER R.)
(1922-1977) US writer and research scientist whose fiction was written
exclusively in collaboration with his wife, Leigh RICHMOND (whom see for
details). [JC]
RICHTER-FRICH, OVRE
[r] SCANDINAVIA.
RICKETT, JOSEPH COMPTON
(1847-1919) UK politician and writer, who was knighted in 1907 and
subsequently changed his name to Compton-Rickett. His sf novel The
Quickening of Caliban: A Modern Story of Evolution (1893) suggests that a
more natural (i.e., perhaps, less evolved) branch of Homo sapiens
continues to exist in Africa. The two branches are able to breed together,
and do. [JC]
RIDERS TO THE STARS
Film (1954). Ivan Tors/United Artists. Dir Richard Carlson, starring
William Lundigan, Herbert Marshall, Richard Carlson, Martha Hyer.
Screenplay Curt SIODMAK. 81 mins. Colour.Cosmic rays are destroying space
vehicles, and the theory is put forward that meteors possess a special
quality that protects them in space. Manned spaceships with special scoops
on their noses are sent up to capture meteors before they burn up in the
atmosphere so that their coating - which turns out to be diamond! - can be

used to protect spaceships. The story has been rightly singled out by
Damon KNIGHT as a splendid example of all that is silliest and most
unscientific in sf CINEMA, from which much of its value as entertainment
unintentionally derives. Riders to the Stars * (1953), as by Siodmak and
Robert (Eugene) Smith (1920- ), is the novelization. [JB/PN]
RIDING, JULIA
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
RIDING, LAURA
[r] Robert GRAVES.
RIDLEY, FRANK A(MBROSE)
The usual working name of UK politician, freethinker and author Francis
Ambrose Ridley (1897-1994), most of whose books were on historical
subjects. The Green Machine (1926) as by F.H. Ridley, though clearly
cavalier in in its treatment of science - presenting as it does the
eponymous bicycle as a spaceship capable of interplanetary travel interestingly sends its protagonist to tour a crowded Solar System
accompanied by a Martian ant bent on colonizing Earth. [JC]See also:
HIVE-MINDS.
RIDLEY, F.H.
Frank A. RIDLEY.
RIENOW, LEONA (TRAIN)
(1903-1983) US writer whose short Dark Pool prehistoric-sf sequence for
children comprises The Bewitched Caverns (1948) and The Dark Pool (1949).
With her husband Robert Rienow (1909-1989), a political scientist, she
later wrote The Year of the Last Eagle (1970), a sour NEAR-FUTURE comedy
about ECOLOGY, set in 1989. The hero's job is to locate the last bald
eagles (the national bird of the USA), if any still exist. [JC/PN]
RIENOW, ROBERT
[r] Leona RIENOW.
RIFBJERG, KLAUS (THORVALD)
(1931- ) Danish writer in whose sf novel, De Hellige Aber (1981; trans
Steve Murray as Witness to the Future 1987 US), two adolescents are
transported almost half a century forward from 1941; they find little in
the year 1988 to give them joy about Progress. [JC]
RIGG, [Lt.-Col.] ROBERT B.
(? - ) US writer on military topics whose War - 1974 (1958) puts into the
didactic fictional form of a future- WAR narrative his speculations about
developments in WEAPONS and tactics. After an initial exchange of ICBMs,
East and West settle down to conventional conflict dominated by much
implausible non-nuclear gimmickry. [JC]
RILEY, FRANK
(? - ) US writer who began publishing sf with "The Execution" for If in
1956, and who is mainly known for collaborating with Mark CLIFTON on
They'd Rather Be Right (1954), the HUGO-winning conclusion to Clifton's
Bossy series about an advanced COMPUTER rendered almost useless by men's

fear of "her". [JC]See also: AUTOMATION.
RIMWORLD
A common item of sf TERMINOLOGY. GALACTIC LENS.
RIPLEY, KAREN
(? - ) US writer who began publishing sf with Prisoner of Dreams (1989).
It and its sequel, The Tenth Class (1991), feature the adventures of a
female starship-pilot who must cope with repressive authorities and with
planets named, for instance, Heinlein. Romance also looms. The Slow World
trilogy - comprising The Persistence of Memory (1993), The Warden of
Horses (1994) and The Alchemist of Time (1994) - more impressively
presents autism as a metaphor for understanding - but not an explanation
of - the relation between the real or Slow world, and the fantasy world
ruled by the eponymous Warden of Horses, an autism victim in the here and
now. [JC]
RITCHIE, PAUL
(1923- ) Australian painter, novelist and playwright whose Confessions of
a People Lover (1967) depicts a grey, urban, DYSTOPIAN UK where the old
("longlivers") are eliminated by the state and the young are corrupt,
cultureless vandals. The book is narrated by a longliver in an enriched,
clotted, free-associational style, and is devoid of sf instruments or
speculations; it can be read as an allegory of the post- WAR UK. [JC]
RIVERE, ALEC
Charles NUETZEL.
RIVERSIDE, JOHN
[s] Robert A. HEINLEIN.
RIVERSIDE QUARTERLY
FANZINE (1964-current) ed Leland Sapiro from Canada and the USA. RQ began
as a retitled continuation of the fanzine Inside (1953-63), published by
Ron Smith and then Jon White, which won a HUGO in 1956 and itself
incorporated a still earlier fanzine, Fantasy Advertiser, later known as
Science Fiction Advertiser (1946-54). RQ quickly formed a quite different
character of its own, academic essays on sf and fantasy being its main
content. Alexei PANSHIN originally published the major part of his
Heinlein in Dimension (1968) in RQ; other contributors have included James
BLISH, Algis BUDRYS and Jack WILLIAMSON. Though irregular, this is one of
the longest-running - as well as the most serious - of all fanzines; it
had reached #32 by early 1992. [PN/PR]
ROAD WARRIOR, THE
MAD MAX 2.
ROBBINS, DAVID L.
(1950- ) US author of the Endworld post-holocaust SURVIVALIST military-sf
sequence: Endworld #1: The Fox Run (1986), #2: Thief River Falls Run
(1986), #3: Twin Cities Run (1986), #4: The Kalispell Run (1987), #5:
Dakota Run (1987), #6: Citadel Run (1987), #7: Armageddon Run (1987), #8:
Denver Run (1987), #9: Capital Run (1988), #10: New York Run (1988), #11:
Liberty Run (1988), #12: Houston Run (1988), #13: Anaheim Run (1988), #14:

Seattle Run (1989), #15: Nevada Run (1989), #16: Miami Run (1989), #17:
Atlanta Run (1989), #18: Memphis Run (1989), #19: Cincinnati Run (1990),
#20: Dallas Run (1990), #21: Boston Run (1990), #22: Green Bay Run (1990),
#23: Yellowstone Run (1990), #24: New Orleans Run (1991), #25: Spartan Run
(1991), #26: Madman Run (1991) and #27: Chicago Run (1991). The concurrent
Blade series comprises Blade #1: First Strike (1989), #2: Outlands Strike
(1989) (these 2 assembled as First Strike/Outlands [omni 1992]), #3:
Vampire Strike (1989), #4: Pipeline Strike (1989), #5: Pirate Strike
(1990), #6: Crusher Strike (1990), #7: Terror Strike (1990), #8: Devil
Strike (1990), #9: L.A. Strike (1990), #10: Dead Zone Strike (1990), #11:
Quest Strike (1991), #12: Deathmaster Strike (1991) and #13: Vengeance
Strike (1991). Singletons include The Wereling (1983), which seems to have
been DLR's first novel, The Wrath (1988), Spectre (1988), Hell-o-Ween
(1992) and Prank Night (1994). Under the house name J.D. Cameron he has
written 2 of the Omega Sub sequence: #2: Command Decision (1991) and #4:
Blood Tide (1991). [JC]
ROBERT HALE LIMITED
UK publishing firm which from 1936 through 1984, though mainly in the
1970s, published more than 450 sf novels, in hardbound editions, primarily
for the library market. (In 1990 a few US sf titles were reprinted, but no
originals.) A large majority of titles originating with the firm were
uniform in length (192 pages) and routine in substance, most being SPACE
OPERAS. In its early years Hale published speculative fiction from authors
like S. Fowler WRIGHT and Wyndham LEWIS, and in the 1970s many established
foreign writers - including Poul ANDERSON, A. Bertram CHANDLER, Hal
CLEMENT, Gordon R. DICKSON, Ron GOULART, Harry HARRISON, Keith LAUMER,
Frank Belknap LONG, Andre NORTON, Robert SILVERBERG and Kate WILHELM released titles to the UK market through the house; but from the middle of
that decade Hale published mostly books signed by names otherwise unknown
to the sf world. Some of these were young authors - e.g., Adrian COLE who would soon move on to more ambitious projects, and some - e.g., the
actor Michael ELDER - were authors who published primarily with Hale but
who were clearly real individuals; but many were pseudonyms, some of which
have been identified and can be found below so designated. Almost
certainly several remaining names - some of those below without
birth-dates being reasonable suspects - are also pseudonymous. Below we
list authors whose names are solely or primarily identified with the Hale
imprint, and, where appropriate, their works as well.John (Kempton) AIKEN,
writing for RHL as John Paget.Roy Ainsworthy Lauran Bosworth
PAINE.Adrienne Anderson: Wings of the Morning (1971).Walter Bacon: The
Last Experiment (1974).Bee BALDWIN.Jo Bannister (1951- ): The Matrix
(1981); The Winter Plain (1982); A Cactus Garden (1983).Mark Bannon Paul
CONRAD.Alan BARCLAY.D(onald) A(ndrew) Barker (1947- ): A Matter of
Evolution (1975); A Question of Reality (1981).G.J. BARRETT, whose
pseudonyms include Edward Leighton, Dennis Summers and James Wallace.Roger
(Alban) Beaumont (1935- ): Deep Space Processional (1982) with R. Snowden
Ficks.John Bedford (pseudonym of David Wiltshire - see below): The Titron
Madness (1984).Peter Bentley (real name Alan Moon): Destined to Survive
(1977).Leigh Beresford: Fantocine (1981).Fenton Brockley Donald S.
ROWLAND.Eric BURGESS.Roger Carlton Donald S. ROWLAND.Mark Carrel Lauran

Bosworth PAINE.R.M.H. Carter: The Dream Killers (1981).Garet Chalmers: A
Legend in his Own Deathtime (1978); Homo-Hetero (1980).David Clements: The
Backwater Man (1979).Paul CONRAD, who writes also under his real name
(Albert King) and as Mark Bannon, Floyd Gibson, Scott Howell and Paul
Muller.Paul COREY.James CORLEY.(Michael) George Corston (1932- ):
Aftermath (1968).S(idney) H(obson) Courtier (1904-1974): Into the Silence
(1973); The Smiling Trip (1975).N(icholas) J(ohn) Cullingworth: Dodos of
Einstein (1976).Jules N. Dagnol: The Sandoval Transmissions (1980).Cyril
Donson (1919-1986): Born in Space (1968); Tritonastra - Planet of the
Gargantua (1969); The Perspective Process (1969); Draco the Dragon Man
(1974).Iain Douglas: Point of Impact (1979); Saturn's Missing Rings
(1980); The World of the Sower (1981); The Hearth of Puvaig (1981).Alfred
Dyer: The Symbiotic Mind (1980); The Gabriel Inheritance (1981).Michael
ELDER.James England: The Measured Caverns (1978).R. Snowden Ficks Roger
Beaumont (above).Arthur H(enry) Friggens (1920- ) Eric BURGESS.Nicholas
Ganick: California Dreaming (1981).Donald J. Garden: Dawn Chorus
(1975).Graham Garner Donald S. ROWLAND.T.S.J. Gibbard (pseudonym of
Michael Vinter - see below): Vandals of Eternity (1974); The Starseed
Mission (1980); The Torold Core (1980).Floyd Gibson Paul CONRAD.John
Gilchrist (real name Jerome Gardner; 1932- ): Birdbrain (1975); Out North
(1975); Lifeline (1976); The English Corridor (1976); The Engendering
(1978).David Graham (1919- ): Down to a Sunless Sea (1979).J(ohn)
M(ichael) Graham: Voice from Earth (1972).Anthony Grant (possible real
name, Marion Staylton Pares [1914- ]): The Mutant (1980).Hilary Green:
Centrifuge 1977 (1978).Harry J. Greenwald: Chinaman's Chance (1981).Brian
GRIFFIN.Peter J. Grove: The Levellers (1981).Norman Hall (1904- ): Green
Hailstones (1978).William C. HEINE.Gordon T(homas) Horton: X-Isle
(1980).Troy Howard Lauran Bosworth PAINE.Scott Howell Paul CONRAD.Mark
Jales: Prelude to Exodus (1979); In his Own Image (1979); Normal Service
Will be Resumed (1980).R. Alan James: No News from Providence
(1978).Norman Jensen: The Galactic Colonisers (1971).Neville Kea: The
World of Artemis (1980); The Rats of Megaera (1980); The Glass School
(1980); Scorpion (1981).Albert King Paul CONRAD.Edward Leighton G.J.
BARRETT.John LIGHTRichard Lindsay: The Moon is the Key (1980).Roger Lovin:
Apostle (1980).Ronald A. McQueen: The Cosmic Assassin (1980); The Sorcerer
of Marakaan (1981); The Man who Knew Time (1981); Mardoc (1981).Michael F.
Maikowski: Fire in the Sky (1981) with Chris L. Wolf.Sue Mallinson: The
Serpent and the Butterfly (1980).David Mariner (real name David McLeod
Smith, 1920- ): A Shackleton Called Sheila (1970; vt Countdown 1000 1974
US).Dave Morgan: Reiver (1975); Genetic Two (1976); Adverse Camber (1977).
Paul Muller Paul CONRAD.Hugh A. Nisbet: Farewell to Krondahl (1980); The
Raven's Beak (1981).John October (real name Christopher Portway): The
Anarchy Pedlars (1976).Lauran Bosworth PAINE, whose pseudonyms include Roy
Ainsworthy, Mark Carrel and Troy Howard.John Paton (real name Frederick
John Alford Bateman [1921- ]): Leap to the Galactic Core (1978); Proteus
(1978); The Sea of Rings (1979).David G(eorge) Penny (1950- ): The Sunset
People (1975), Starshine 43 (1978) - both post- HOLOCAUST tales of some
grimness - Starchant (1975) and Out of Time (1979).W.D. PEREIRA.Roger
Perry (real name Roger William Cowern [1928- ]): Senior Citizen (1979);
The Making of Jason (1980); Esper's War (1981).Audrey Peyton: Ashes
(1981).Alex Random Donald S. ROWLAND.L.P. REEVES.Jack Rhys: The Eternity

Merchants (1981); The Five Doors (1981).Julia Riding: Gabion (1979); The
Strange Land (1980); Deep Space Warriors (1981) - Space Traders Unlimited
(1987), for children, is not a Hale book.J.R. Robertson: The Crab Eagle
Trees (1978).Brian Rolls: Something in Mind (1973).Raymond J. Ross: One
Hundred Miles above Earth (1981).Donald S(ydney) ROWLAND, whose pseudonyms
include Fenton Brockley, Roger Carlton, Graham Garner, Alex Random, Roland
Starr, Mark Suffling.James Ryder: Kark (1969); Vicious Spiral (1976).Ras
Ryman (real name James D. Brown): The Quadrant War (1976); Day of the
Ultramind (1977); Weavers of Death (1981).J(oseph) W(illard)
SCHUTZ.William T. SILENT.D(enise) N(atalie) Sims (1940- ): A Plenteous
Seed (1973); A Pastime of Eternity (1975).A(nthony) C(orby) Smith (1925): A Glimpse of Judgement (1978).Walter J(ames) Smith (1918- ): The Grand
Voyage (1973); Fourth Gear (1981).Roland Starr Donald S. ROWLAND.Mark
Suffling Donald S. ROWLAND.Dennis Summers G.J. BARRETT.Nevil
Tronchin-James: Ministry of Procreation (1968).James B. Tucker (1922- ):
Not an Earthly Chance (1970).Michael Vinter (1927- ): Along Came a Spider
(1980).Walter Walkham (real name James Harvey Trevithick Ivory [1921- ]):
When Earth Trembled (1980).James Wallace G.J. BARRETT.Chad Warren: Alien
Heaven (1976).William Thomas Webb (1918- ): The Eye of Hollerl-Ra (1977);
After the Inferno (1977); Cheyney's Robot (1978); Poisoned Planet (1978);
The Time Druids (1978); Dimension Lords (1979); The Fate of Phral (1980);
The Froth Eater (1980).Philip Welby: The Pleasure Dome of Sigma 93 (1978).
Martyn Wessex (real name D.F. Little): The Slowing Down Process (1974);
The Chain Reaction (1976).Ronald Wilcox: The Centre of the Wheel
(1981).Eric C. WILLIAMS.T. Owen Williams: A Month for Mankind
(1970).Robert Hendrie Wilson: The Gods Alone (1975); Ring of Rings (1976);
A Blank Card (1977); The Frisk Donation (1979).David Wiltshire (1935- ):
The Homosaur (1978); Child of Vodyanoi (1978; vt The Nightmare Man 1981);
Genesis II (1981).Chris L. Wolf: Fire in the Sky (1981) with Michael F.
Maikowski.J.A. Wood: We Alien Seed (1978). [JC]Further reading: Hale ?
Gresham Hardback Science Fiction (1988 chap) by Roger ROBINSON.
ROBERTS, ANTHONY
(1950- ) UK illustrator; he often works as Tony Roberts. He attended
Wolverhampton College of Art, 1967-9, and Ravensbourne College of Art,
1969-72. AR has painted sf covers for many UK paperback publishers. His
style is similar to, and perhaps imitative of, that of Chris FOSS; his
smooth, hard-edged, highly detailed paintings are typical of UK commercial
sf ILLUSTRATION during the 1970s. [JG/PN]
ROBERTS, ARTHUR
[r] John S. GLASBY.
ROBERTS, [Sir] CHARLES G(EORGE) D(OUGLAS)
(1860-1943) Canadian poet and novelist, important in CANADA's literary
history. Among his many works are several collections of animal fantasies,
most notably The Kindred of the Wild (coll 1902), in which various beasts
reason like human beings. In the Morning of Time (1914-15 Cosmopolitan;
coll of linked stories 1919 UK), set in prehistoric times, romantically
presents the first stages of the ascent to civilization. [PN/JC]See also:
ORIGIN OF MAN.

ROBERTS, JANE
Working name of US writer Jane Roberts Butts (1929-1984), perhaps best
remembered for such speculative works as Dialogues of the Soul ?
Self in Time (1975), which took the form of a series of connected poems.
She began publishing sf with "The Red Wagon" for FSF in 1956. Her sf novel
The Rebellers (1963 dos) provides a melodramatic mix of OVERPOPULATION and
ECOLOGY themes as successive waves of plague answer humanity's problems by
nearly eliminating the race for good. More typical of her later concerns
is The Education of Oversoul Seven (1973), a transcendental parable about
the meaning of reality and time and space, whose student protagonist
inhabits the bodies and souls of 4 humans from different periods, ranging
from 35,000BC to AD2300, and who discovers en passant the profound
simultaneity of all realities; its sequels are The Further Education of
Oversoul Seven (1979) and Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time (1984).
Emir's Education in the Proper Use of Magical Powers (1979) is a juvenile.
JR published many further titles of mystical speculation. [JC]
ROBERTS, JOHN
[s] John R. PIERCE.
ROBERTS, JOHN MADDOX
(1947- ) US writer, prolific in the later 1980s. His first sf novel, The
Strayed Sheep of Charun (1977; rev vt Cestus Dei 1983), is an
action-packed romance set on a medievalized planet in which Jesuits and
others attempt to reform the violence which is the planet's (and novel's)
raison d'etre. There followed a variety of work, all adventure fiction whose style is perhaps best described as brisk - in sf or fantasy
settings, including the juvenile SPACE-OPERA sequence comprising Space
Angel (1979), in which the commandeering of a spaceship by an ancient
ALIEN leads to adventures for a boy, and its sequel Spacer: Window of the
Mind (1988). King of the Wood (1983) is set in an alternate USA inhabited
variously by Norsemen, Native Americans, Aztecs and Spanish Muslims. The
Cingulum sequence about a raffish spaceship crew's adventures is The
Cingulum (1985), Cloak of Illusion (1985) and Cingulum #3: The Sword, the
Jewel and the Mirror (1988). JMR also collaborated on 4 books with Eric
KOTANI (whom see for details): the sequence Act of God (1985), The Island
Worlds (1987) and Between the Stars (1988), as well as Delta Pavonis
(1990). JMR's The Enigma Variations (1989) sets an amnesiac in a corporate
future. While all this sf activity was going on, JMR also contributed
several titles to the ever-growing Conan series, set in a SHARED WORLD
derived from Robert E. HOWARD's famous SWORD-AND-SORCERY stories: Conan
the Valorous * (1985), Conan the Champion * (1987), Conan the Marauder *
(1988), Conan the Bold * (1989), Conan the Rogue * (1991), Conan and the
Manhunters* (1994) and Conan and the Treasure of Python* (1994). The
Stormlands series, set in a tribalized fantasy world, so far comprises The
Islander (1990), The Black Shields (1991), The Poisoned Lands (1992), The
Steel Kings(1993) and Queens of Land and Sea (1994). [PN]Other works: the
associational SPQRsequence comprising SPQR (1990), SPQR II: The Catiline
Conspiracy (1991), #3: The Sacrilege (1992) and #4: The Temple of the
Muses (1992), police-procedural mystery novels set in ancient Rome.
ROBERTS, KEITH (JOHN KINGSTON)

(1935- ) UK writer and illustrator resident in the south of England,
where most of his best fiction is set. After working as an illustrator and
cartoon animator, he began publishing sf with "Anita" and "Escapism" for
Science Fantasy in 1964; several of his early stories were written as by
Alistair Bevan. He served as associate editor of SCIENCE FANTASY 1965-6
and edited its successor SF Impulse for the whole of its run (Mar 1966-Feb
1967). His first novel, The Furies (1966), is the most orthodoxly
structured and told of all his work, sf or otherwise, most of his later
novels being fixups told from a brooding, slantwise, intensely visual
point of view. The Furies is a traditional UK DISASTER tale, in which a
nuclear test goes awry, inspiring an onslaught of space-spawned giant
wasps which ravage England and come close to eliminating mankind. Beyond a
certain sultriness of tone, it could have been written by any of a dozen
UK specialists in disaster.With his second book, KR came fully into his
own as a writer. PAVANE (coll of linked stories 1968; with "The White
Boat" added, rev 1969 US) superbly depicts an ALTERNATE WORLD in which Elizabeth I having been assassinated, the Spanish Armada victorious and no
Protestant rise of capitalism in the offing - a technologically backward
England survives under the sway of the Catholic Church Militant. The
individual stories are moody, eloquent, elegiac and thoroughly convincing.
The Inner Wheel (coll of linked stories 1970) deals with the kind of
gestalt SUPERMAN theme made familiar by Theodore STURGEON's MORE THAN
HUMAN (fixup 1953) and is similarly powerful, though tending to a rather
uneasy sentimentality, perhaps endemic to tales of such relationships but
also typical of KR's handling of children and women. Anita (coll of linked
stories 1970 US; exp 1990 US) is fantasy; the stories had appeared much
earlier in Science Fantasy. The Boat of Fate (1971), an historical novel
with a Roman setting, shares a painterly concern for primitive landscapes
with The Chalk Giants (coll of linked stories 1974; cut 1975 US), whose
separate tales elegantly embody a cyclical vision of the future of the
island of Britain. The protagonist of the framing narrative (seen in the
UK edition only) drives to the south coast to escape an indistinct
disaster, goes into hiding, and (depending on one's reading) either cycles
the rest of the book through his head or can be seen as himself emblematic
of the movement the tales portend, from post- HOLOCAUST chaos through
God-ridden savagery back to a state premonitory of his own wounded
condition.KR's early short stories were assembled in Machines and Men
(coll 1973) and The Grain Kings (coll 1976), both being excerpted in The
Passing of the Dragons (coll 1977 US). The title story of the second
volume fascinatingly describes life on giant hotel-like grain harvesters
in a world of vast farms; in the same volume, "Weihnachtsabend" (1972),
perhaps KR's finest single story, depicts an alternate world in which the
Nazis have won WWII ( HITLER WINS), and expands upon certain savage myths
implicit in that victory. Later work was assembled in Ladies from Hell
(coll 1979), The Lordly Ones (coll 1986) and Winterwood and Other
Hauntings (coll 1989), the limited edition of which also contained,
bound-in, The Event (1989 chap). As in his later novels, these stories
increasingly display an entangled - though sometimes searching - dis-ease
with human nature and sexuality, with the course of history and with the
fate of the UK.KR's first novel after a gap of some years was Molly Zero
(1980), in which the classic sf tale of the growth of an adolescent is -

typically for KR - subverted by a sense that the DYSTOPIAN world into
which the young female protagonist enters is dismayingly corrosive; it is
a sense which variously governs the shadowy escapades of the eponymous
heroine of Kaeti ?
Apocalypse (1986 chap) and Kaeti on Tour (coll 1992), and the life of the
haunting femme fatale depicted in Grainne (1987). In mood or venue, these
books have little of the feel of sf; Kiteworld (fixup 1985), on the other
hand, invokes the atmosphere of earlier work in its depiction of a Britain
dominated by religious fanatics, and its constrictive rendering of the
life of the crews who man giant kites to guard the frontiers against
demons.As an illustrator, KR did much to change the appearance of UK sf
magazines, notably Science Fantasy, for which he designed all but 7 of the
covers from Jan 1965 until its demise (as SF Impulse) in Feb 1967, and
also NEW WORLDS for a period in 1966. His boldly Expressionist covers,
line-oriented, paralleled the shift in content of these magazines away
from GENRE SF and FANTASY towards a more free-form, speculative kind of
fiction. He later did covers and interior illustrations for the book
editions of New Worlds Quarterly ed Michael MOORCOCK, for some of whose
novels he has also designed covers. He has illustrated several of his own
1980s titles. [JC]Other works: A Heron Caught in Weeds (coll 1987 chap);
The Natural History of the P.H. (1988 chap), nonfiction, the initials
referring to the "Primitive Heroine" who appears throughout KR's work; The
Road to Paradise (dated 1988 but 1989), associational; Irish Encounters
(dated 1988 but 1989 chap).See also: ANDROIDS; BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION
AWARD; CYBERNETICS; ESP; HIVE-MINDS; INTERZONE; NEW WRITINGS IN SF;
RELIGION; SOCIOLOGY; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
ROBERTS, LIONEL
R.L. FANTHORPE.
ROBERTS, MICHELE (BRIGITTE)
(1949- ) UK poet and novelist, poetry editor of Spare Rib 1975-7. Her
novels all tend to FABULATION in their expression of an articulate
FEMINIST aesthetic, but 2 are of genre interest: The Wild Girl (1984)
vigorously displaces the reminiscences of Mary Magdalene, and The Book of
Mrs Noah (1987) similarly engages its heroine in myth-rich concourse with
the female icons which engender the stories that make the world (
MYTHOLOGY). [JC]
ROBERTS, TERENCE
Pseudonym of Ivan Terence Sanderson (1911-1973), UK-born US writer and
illustrator on the natural sciences, as in Living Treasure (1941), about
wildlife around the Caribbean. As TR his sf novel was Report on the Status
Quo (1955), a DISASTER story set in 1958-9, when the world is seen to reel
under great floods and WWIII. As Ivan T. Sanderson he wrote several books
with a relevance to PSEUDO-SCIENCE, including Abominable Snowmen (1961;
cut 1968) on cryptozoology, Uninvited Visitors: A Biologist Looks at UFOs
(1967) and Invisible Residents (1970) about UFOs and related Fortean
matter ( Charles FORT), Things (1967) and More "Things" (1969) about
unexplained mysteries, and the summative Investigating the Unexplained
(1972). [PN]

ROBERTS ?
NEW WORLDS; SCIENCE FANTASY.
ROBERTSON, E(ILEEN) ARNOT
Working name of UK writer and broadcaster Eileen Arbuthnot Robertson
(1903-1961), best known for such non-sf novels as Four Frightened People
(1931), whose protagonists find themselves making their way through a
tropical jungle. It was written to contrast with her sf novel Three Came
Unarmed (1929) which, in a striking attack on modern civilization, exposes
3 (Homo superior) enfants sauvages to contemporary England, which destroys
them. [JC]
ROBERTSON, J.R.
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
ROBERTSON, MORGAN (ANDREW)
(1861-1915) US writer, almost always on nautical themes; many of his
stories are sf or fantasy. The fantasy tales, typical of their maritime
venues, tend to the mystical, the fog-girt, the occult and the morose. His
sf is similar, though future- WAR tales enliven the tone on occasion. MR
is perhaps best remembered for Futility, or The Wreck of the "Titan" (1898
in untraced US mag as "Futility"; 1912 UK; vt with additional material,
coll The Wrecking of the Titan, or Futility: Paranormal Experiences
Connected with the Sinking of the Titanic 1914 US), which proved uncannily
predictive in telling the tale of a great new ship called the Titan which
steams at an arrogant pace into a iceberg and sinks. [JC]Other works: Spun
Yarn (coll 1898); "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Tales of the Sea
(coll 1899); The Three Laws and the Golden Rule (coll 1900); Down to the
Sea (coll 1905); Land Ho! (coll 1905); Over the Border (coll of linked
stories 1914); The Grain Ship (coll of linked stories 1914).See also:
GREAT AND SMALL.
ROBERT WEINBERG PUBLICATIONS
Robert E. WEINBERG.
ROBESON, KENNETH
House name for authors writing the Doc Savage series as it appeared
1933-49 in DOC SAVAGE MAGAZINE, published by STREET ?
name is most strongly associated with Lester DENT, who wrote all but 43 of
the Doc Savage stories; other authors involved in that initial run
included William G. Bogart, Harold A. Davis, Laurence Donovan, Alan
Hathaway and Rymon Johnson. 3 stories - The Man of Bronze: Doc Savage and
his Pals in a Novel of Unusual Adventure (1933; vt Doc Savage: The Man of
Bronze 1964), The Land of Terror (1933; vt Doc Savage: The Land of Terror
1965) and The Quest of the Spider (1933; vt Doc Savage: The Quest of the
Spider 1972) - were early published in book form. Three decades later the
series was brought to life again when BANTAM BOOKS began their
republication of the entire run in book form. Variously released as
individual titles or in omnibus format, the sequence began with the first
title above listed, Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, in 1964 and ended,
complete, 182 stories later with Doc Savage Omnibus #13 (omni 1990). An
entirely new sequence was then initiated, with Will MURRAY writing as KR,
#1 being Doc Savage: Python Isle * (1991).The enormously wealthy Doc

Savage - aided by 5 sidekicks who specialize in various crafts and
sciences at the borderline of sf - devotes his life to combating criminal
conspiracies, almost all masterminded by the kind of charismatic villain
later given definitive form by Ian FLEMING in the James Bond books. Doc
Savage himself clearly influenced the creation of SUPERMAN, and stands at
the heart of Philip Jose FARMER's Wold Newton Family sequence, either in
his own name or disguised, with 2 titles - Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic
Life (1973; rev 1975) and Doc Savage: Escape from Loki (1991) - devoted
directly to him. As the original Doc Savage tales are of only peripheral
sf interest, we do not list them. R. Reginald's Science Fiction and
Fantasy Literature: A Checklist, 1700-1974 (1979) provides coverage of the
book reprints to the end of 1974; and Science Fiction and Fantasy
Literature, 1975-1991: a Bibliography (1992), by Reginald with Darryl F.
MALLETT and Mary Wickizer Burgess, gives a more complete analysis of the
entire run.The house name KR was used also on the PULP MAGAZINE The
Avenger, another Street ?
fewer sf elements. This was an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the
Doc Savage stories. Most of the Avenger series (many also reprinted as
paperback books in the 1970s) were the work of Paul ERNST; the final dozen
titles of the 1970s run, from The Man from Atlantis (1974) on, were newly
written by Ron GOULART. Other writers associated with the Kenneth Robeson
name were Norman A. Danburg and Emile Tepperman. In 1991, Will MURRAY (who
see for further titles) began a new series of Doc Savage tales, also as by
KR, beginning with Python Isle* (1991). [JC/PN]About the author: The Man
behind Doc Savage: A Tribute to Lester Dent (1974) by Robert E. WEINBERG;
Bigger than Life: The Creator of Doc Savage (1990) by Marilyn Cannaday.
ROBIDA, ALBERT
(1848-1926) French illustrator, lithographer and writer. AR was the most
important and popular of 19th-century sf illustrators, and may even be
said to have founded the genre, though he was clearly working in the
tradition of such French fantastic artists as Grandville (Jean Gerard;
1803-1847) and Gustave Dore (1832-1883). Always interested in DYSTOPIAS
and SATIRE, he illustrated works by Francois RABELAIS, CYRANO DE BERGERAC,
Jonathan SWIFT and Camille FLAMMARION among others, but his most important
works had texts by himself. These were very often first published as
periodical-series, each instalment being slim, and then later in most
cases as books. AR took up sf themes with his gently satirical homage to
Jules VERNE's Voyages extraordinaires with Voyages tres extraordinaires de
Saturnin Farandoul, a 100-part periodical beginning June 1879. It was
later collected as 5 books (all 1882): Le roi des singes ["King of the
Monkeys"], Le tour du monde en plus de 80 jours ["Round the World in More
than 80 Days"], Les quatre reines ["The Four Queens"], A la recherche de
l'elephant blanc ["In Search of the White Elephant"] and S. Exc. M. le
Gouverneur du Pole Nord ["His Excellency the Governor of the North Pole"].
A more prophetic work was Le vingtieme siecle ["The 20th Century"], a
periodical in 50 parts beginning Jan 1882. There followed another series
appearing later as La vie electrique ["The Electric Life"] (1883), set in
1955. AR's ironically half-amused but pessimistic view of the likely
nature of future WAR (many of his predictions proved all too true)
appeared in #200 of the humorous magazine La Caricature (1883) as "La

guerre au vingtieme siecle" ["War in the 20th Century"], set in 1975, and
in a book with the same title but different contents, La guerre au
vingtieme siecle (1887), set in 1945. A TIME-TRAVEL fantasy, serialized in
the magazine Le petit francais illustre in 1890, Jadis chez aujourd'hui
["The Long-Ago is with Us Today"], features a scientist resuscitating
Moliere and other literary figures in order to show them the Universal
Exhibition of 1889, which bores them. L'horloge des siecles ["Clock of the
Centuries"] (1902) is one of the earliest treatments of the time-reversal
theme later used by, for example, Philip K. DICK in Counter-Clock World
(1967), Brian W. ALDISS in An Age (1967; vt Cryptozoic! US) and Martin
AMIS in Time's Arrow (1991). AR continued to produce quite prolifically,
his last work being another future fantasy entitled Un chalet dans les
airs ["Castle in the Air"] (1925).The texts to the above works are
generally undistinguished. The ILLUSTRATIONS, however, mostly in a vein of
detailed caricature, are consistently inventive and amusing. AR worked
mostly with lithographic pencil and crayon, achieving a haphazard but
impressive vigour. The figures are very much those of Victorian Europe,
dressed in the fashions of the time, and involved in various busy scenes
with a huge variety of modernistic devices. Among his hundreds of
predictions were the videophone and germ warfare. His machines and WEAPONS
were usually well designed - some may actually have been practicable although his flying machines look distinctly un-airworthy. The ironic
intelligence of his work is rather undermined by his inability to imagine
the future except in terms of more and more gadgetry: social mores remain
frozen in the Victorian mould. AR had a strong influence on the future-war
genre. [PN/JG]See also: FRANCE; TRANSPORTATION.
ROBINET, LEE
Robert Ames BENNET.
ROBINETT, STEPHEN (ALLEN)
(1941- ) US writer and lawyer who began publishing sf as Tak Hallus
(apparently Persian for "pen name") with "Minitalent" for ASF in 1969. His
first novel, Mindwipe! (1969 ASF as by Tak Hallus; 1976 Canada) as by
Steve Hahn, is unexceptional, but Stargate (1974 ASF as by Tak Hallus;
1976) intriguingly combines HARD SF and detective modes in the tale of two
great corporations and their quarrel over the eponymous MATTER
TRANSMITTER. Along with Frederik POHL's GATEWAY (1977), this novel was
important in establishing the commercial stargate (which can be variously
defined as a matter-transmission aperture or as a discontinuity or as a
wormhole extension of a singularity - so long as the phenomenon allows
profitable and instantaneous contact to be made between one part of the
Universe and another) as an essential instrument of modern sf. The Man
Responsible (fixup 1978) again focuses on the relationship between crime
and sf, the story dealing this time with a 21st-century world in which
computer projections pass as human. SR's stories, in which a sharp wit is
allowed free and satirical play, are assembled in Projections (coll 1979).
It is a matter of serious regret that SR ceased publishing around 1980.
[JC]
ROBINSON, CHARLES HENRY
(1843-1930) US writer whose Longhead: The Story of the First Fire (1913)

capably runs the gamut of prehistoric-sf themes from the discovery of fire
to the first hints of civilization ( ORIGIN OF MAN). [JC]
ROBINSON, E(DWARD) A.
(? -? ) US writer in whose The Disk: A Tale of Two Passions (1884; vt The
Disk: A Prophetic Reflection 1884 UK), with G(eorge) A. Wall, a series of
inventions - optical cables capable of harnessing the Sun's light,
imperishable food, disease-eliminating injections - plays second fiddle to
a tale of sexual passions. The inventions are effective. [JC]
ROBINSON, ELEANOR
(? - ) US writer in whose first novel, Chrysalis of Death (1976), a
disastrous primordial germ changes people into beasts. A brave doctor
fights the menace; there is soap opera and sex. The Silverleaf Syndrome
(1980; vt The Freak 1985) was less noticeable. [JC]
ROBINSON, FRANK M(ALCOLM)
(1926- ) US writer, also active in publishing, who began writing sf
stories in 1950 with "The Maze" in ASF and was for a time fairly prolific,
soon publishing his first (and for decades his only) solo novel, The Power
(1956). This effectively combines sf and thriller in the story of the
search for a malignant SUPERMAN with undefined powers, including the
ability to seem different to everyone who looks at him. The protagonist,
himself paranormally gifted, kills the bad superman and contemplates being
a good one. It was filmed as The POWER in 1967. FMR then fell relatively
silent-fewer than half the stories assembled in A Life in the Day of . . .
and Other Short Stories (coll 1981) were written after The Power - and
concentrated on editorial jobs, working for a variety of publications
including Rogue (1959-65) and Playboy) (1969-73). In the 1970s he changed
direction and, in collaboration with Thomas N. SCORTIA, produced a series
of DISASTER novels which, though sf devices and explanations are
occasionally invoked, most closely resemble the TECHNOTHRILLER. The first
of these, The Glass Inferno (1974), was filmed - along with Richard Martin
Stern's The Tower - as The Towering Inferno (1974); further titles were
The Prometheus Crisis (1975), which deals with the failure of a vast
nuclear reactor, The Nightmare Factor (1978), about biological warfare,
The Gold Crew (1980) and Blow Out! (1987). The Great Divide (1982), by FMR
with John Levin, is set in the NEAR FUTURE, when a coup threatens the USA.
FMR's concentration on these lucrative but unchallenging books tended to
blur the early critical sense that he was a sharp and incisive writer, and
The Dark Beyond the Stars (1991) came as a welcome reminder of his gifts.
It is - perhaps rather late in genre history - a GENERATION-STARSHIP tale,
told with much of the claustrophobia and dramatic irony typical of
POCKET-UNIVERSE narratives. In keeping with its late composition, the
ironies dominate: the family romance that the protagonist must decode in
order to mature is unfruitful, and the ship turns homeward. The book
itself was a welcome signal of its author's own return to the genre.
[JC]See also: ESP.
ROBINSON, JEANNE
[r] Spider ROBINSON.
ROBINSON, KIM STANLEY

(1952- ) US writer who began writing sf stories with "Coming Back to
Dixieland" and "In Pierson's Orchestra", both published in Orbit 18 (1975)
ed Damon KNIGHT. He has not been prolific in shorter forms, publishing
only about 10 stories before gaining his PhD in English at the University
of California in 1982. In revised form, his thesis was later published as
The Novels of Philip K. Dick (1984); thoroughly researched, at ease with
the protocols of academic writing while at the same time showing an acute
understanding of 1950s sf, it remains one of the most useful studies of
Philip K. DICK's thorny oeuvre.KSR became widely known with the
publication of his first novel, THE WILD SHORE (1984), released as one of
Terry CARR's Ace Specials. The first book of a thematic trilogy set in
various versions of Orange County on the Pacific coast south of Los
Angeles, and later assembled with its siblings as Three Californias (omni
1995), THE WILD SHORE lucidly examines the sentimentalized kind of US sf
pastoral typically set after an almost universal catastrophe. Sheltered
from the full DISASTER, Orange County has become an enclave whose
inhabitants espouse a re-established US hegemony, but whose smug ignorance
of the world outside is ultimately self-defeating. In The Gold Coast
(1988), Orange County several decades hence is seen through the lens of
DYSTOPIA; a similar array of characters - similarly related to one another
- must grapple with a polluted, corrupt, overcrowded, ecologically
devastated world. Under new names the same characters find themselves, in
Pacific Edge (1990 UK), breathing the air of UTOPIA. In this world Orange
County has benefited from restrictions on corporate size and strict
controls over land use and POLLUTION. Although the novel shows the near
impossibility of imagining a living utopia, a sense of earned freshness
and relief permeates its pages. As a whole, the trilogy may be read as
three versions of the same story, each nesting within the other;
structurally adventurous and searching, the Orange County trilogy remains
at the moment KSR's strongest accomplishment, though the Mars trilogy (see
below) will almost certainly come to seem even more substantial.Other
novels are varyingly successful. Icehenge (fixup 1984) strikingly
conflates three incompatible readings of the significance of an artifact
found on Pluto, exploring a range of issues from epistemology to the
nature of historical tradition. The Memory of Whiteness (1985) less
successfully attempts to suggest analogues between MUSIC theory and the
structure of the Universe, while at the same time conducting its musician
hero - who is, typically of KSR's protagonists, an almost constantly
active character - on a guided tour of the Solar System. Escape from
Kathmandu (1988 chap), later expanded as Escape from Kathmandu (coll of
linked stories 1989), set in a stress-ridden mystical Nepal, amusingly
exploits KSR's own experience as a mountaineer.Other stories appear in THE
PLANET ON THE TABLE (coll 1986), The Blind Geometer (1986 chap; with 1
story added, coll 1989 dos) - a later but lesser magazine version won the
1987 NEBULA for Best Novella - and Remaking History (coll 1991), which
includes all the stories published in the slightly earlier A Sensitive
Dependence on Initial Conditions (coll 1991 chap), and which was later
published as Remaking History (omni 1994), in which version it
incorporates THE PLANET ON THE TABLE; Down and Out in the Year 2000 (coll
1992 UK) gathers together The Blind Geometer and A Short Sharp Shock plus
tales from Remaking History. Green Mars (1985 IASFM; 1988 chap dos)

prefigures the long-projected Mars trilogy, which treats that planet as a
realistic habitat for the human species; the first volume, RED MARS (1992
UK), which won the 1993 Nebula, ranges magisterially over the early years
of TERRAFORMING, COLONIZATION and disruption; the sequence as a whole also comprising Green Mars (1993), which won the 1994 HUGO, and is not
textually related to Green Mars; and Blue Mars - is projected to extend
over 200 years of civilization on MARS. A Short Sharp Shock (1990) carries
its athletic and ultimately clear-eyed protagonist into a soul-defining
trek across an endless sea-girt peninsula which is freely symbolic of
death, or of the nature of life, or simply of the path a person must
follow to fill out a human span.In a somewhat contrived attempt to
contrast him to CYBERPUNK writers, KSR has been described as a Humanist;
he has himself disparaged as foolishly reductive this use of Humanism as a
label. What in fact most characterizes the growing reach and power of his
work is its cogent analysis and its disposal of such category thinking. He
is at heart an explorer. [JC]Other works: Black Air (1983 FSF; 1991 chap);
Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias (anth 1994).About the author: A
Checklist of Kim Stanley Robinson (1991 chap) by Tom Joyce and Christopher
P. STEPHENS.See also: ACE BOOKS; ALTERNATE WORLDS; DEFINITIONS OF SF;
HISTORY IN SF; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; JOHN W.
CAMPBELLMEMORIAL AWARD; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ;
MATHEMATICS; MESSIAHS; NANOTECHNOLOGY; NUCLEAR POWER; OUTER
PLANETS;
PHILIP K. DICK AWARD.
ROBINSON, PHILIP BEDFORD
(1926- ) UK writer who has worked in India. In Masque of a Savage
Mandarin (1969) the deracinated protagonist takes symbolic revenge upon
the world via the systematic destruction, by electrical means, of a
victim's brain. [JC]
ROBINSON, ROGER
(1943- ) UK computer programmer and bibliographer, active in UK fandom
for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984
chap) is an exhaustive BIBLIOGRAPHY of one of the most prolific sf
writers, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is
similarly exhaustive. Criticized at first for its failure to annotate its
findings - so that, for instance, pseudonyms used for sf could not be
distinguished from others - it has shown itself accurate and
comprehensive. By sourcing each attribution, so that readers can weigh the
reliability of the ascriptions, it aspires to a greater methodological
sophistication than is often found in sf scholarship. [JC]
ROBINSON, SPIDER
(1948- ) US-born writer who became a Canadian Landed Immigrant in 1975.
His first story was "The Guy with the Eyes" for ASF in 1973, inaugurating
his long-running Callahan series of CLUB STORIES. He has sometimes written
tales as by B.D. Wyatt. The first few years of his career were
honour-laden. He shared with Lisa TUTTLE the 1974 JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD
for Best New Writer; topped the 1977 Locus Poll for Best Critic, mainly
for his Galaxy Bookshelf column for Gal June 1975-Sep 1977; received a
1977 HUGO for the ASF publication (as "By Any Other Name") of the first 4

chapters of his first novel, Telempath (1976 US); and won both Hugo and
NEBULA in 1978, along with his wife and collaborator Jeanne Robinson, for
"Stardance", which became the nucleus of STARDANCE (1979 US) with Jeanne
Robinson. (In 1983 he won another Hugo, for "Melancholy Elephants" [1982].
) At this high point of his career, his punchy optimism about the human
condition and his adroit use of generic materials to express that optimism
seemed to have established him as a legitimate heir to Robert A. HEINLEIN,
a writer he deeply admired. Telempath, a complicated story set in a postHOLOCAUST Earth after a decimating virus plague, cleverly promulgates a
sense that the surviving humans, in conjunction with the telepathic
Muskies - gaseous beings imperceptible before the plague - can earn
cohabitation with a vast empathic net of species. STARDANCE similarly
presents its audience with a protagonist - this time a dancer too big for
Earth work - who helps propel humanity upwards into a Galaxy rich with
communicating species.The Callahan sequence makes use of the capacity of
the club story to reassure both participants and readers, and conveys a
sense of real community (as in the tv series Cheers) through a wide range
of tales - sf and fantasy predominating - which reveal human and alien
frailties while simultaneously affirming the group. The series comprises
Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (coll 1977 US), Time Travelers Strictly Cash
(coll 1981 US) and Callahan's Secret (coll 1986 US), most of the stories
from these 3 vols being assembled as Callahan and Company: The Compleat
Chronicles of the Crosstime Saloon (dated 1987 but 1988 US) and a smaller
selection being issued as Callahan's Crazy Crosstime Bar (1989 UK).
Callahan's Lady (coll 1989 US), set prior to the main series in a
whorehouse run by Callahan's wife, assembles similar tales; further titles
include Lady Slings the Booze (1992), The Callahan Touch (1993) and Off
the Wall at Callahan's (coll 1994). Kill the Editor (1991 US) is also set
in the whorehouse. SR's club stories differ from some older models mainly
through the amount of action that occurs in the saloon itself, so that
their ultimate effect is, at times, complex.The 1970s were the high point
for SR's somewhat insistent cheer, and subsquent work has proven
considerably grimmer in tone. Mindkiller: A Novel of the Near Future (1982
US) - for which the RECURSIVE Time Pressure (1987 US) serves as both
prequel and sequel - complicatedly shifts time-schemes and identities in
an attempt to depict a crime- and computer-ridden world; the succeeding
volume, even less coherently, re-invokes the 1973 Nova Scotia of SR's own
memories, introducing a nude time-traveller who nurses the psychically
wounded protagonist back to the point at which he can begin to understand
his significance in the scheme of things. SR's style in these later books
- exclamatory and burdened with Heinleinesque exaggerations - does little
to sustain their rollercoaster plots. Night of Power (1985 US), more
controlled, aroused some negative response for its depiction of a
Black-power revolt in New York City. His stories, on the other hand, have
been more stable and consistent. Collections include Antinomy (coll 1980
US); Melancholy Elephants (coll 1984; with 1 story dropped and 2 added,
rev 1985 US), his only book to be initially released by the feeble
Canadian publishing industry; and True Minds (coll 1990 US). [JC]Other
works: The Best of All Possible Worlds (anth 1980); Copyright Violation
(1990 chap); Starseed (1991) with Jeanne Robinson.See also: ARTS;
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; CANADA; DESTINIES; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION;

MUSIC.
ROBINSONADE
Daniel DEFOE's The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson
Crusoe (1719) provides the original model for robinsonades - romances of
solitary survival in such inimical terrains as desert ISLANDS (or planets)
- and also supplies much of the thematic and symbolic buttressing that
allows so many of these stories to be understood as allegories of
mankind's search for the meaning of life, just as Crusoe's ordeal is both
a religious punishment for disobedience and a triumphant justification of
entrepreneurial individualism. Crusoe's paternalistic relation to the
natives he eventually encounters has likewise been echoed in much modern
sf, where until very recently human/ ALIEN relations tended to be depicted
within the same code of mercantilist opportunism. A second important model
for sf's numerous robinsonades may well be Johann WYSS's Der
Schweizerische Robinson (1812-13; trans - perhaps by William Godwin - as
The Family Robinson Crusoe 1814 UK; new trans as The Swiss Family Robinson
1818 UK) - itself imitated by tales like D.W. Belisle's The American
Family Robinson (1853) - in which the element of the triumphant ordeal is
broadened to include the testing of a full microcosm of social life leading either to UTOPIAN speculations, to which the robinsonade has
always been structurally attuned, or to the simpler, more active adventure
of the COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS. However, the fundamental thrust of
the robinsonade - its convincing celebration of the power of pragmatic
Reason, and its depiction of the triumph, alone, over great odds, of the
entrepreneur who commands that rational Faculty - continues to drive most
of its offspring. [JC]
ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS
Film (1964). Schenck-Zabel/Paramount. Dir Byron HASKIN, starring Paul
Mantee, Vic Lundin. Screenplay Ib Melchior, John C. Higgins, remotely
based on Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel DEFOE. 109 mins. Colour.Haskin
directed several sf films in the 1950s, including WAR OF THE WORLDS
(1953), and returned to the genre in 1964 with this interesting,
futuristic version of Defoe's classic novel. After a spaceship crashlands
on Mars, one of the two pilots (the other is killed) struggles to survive
and to remain sane in the alien, barren landscape - here well played by
California's Death Valley - his only companion his pet monkey. This
section of the film is compelling; but, with the arrival of alien
spaceships, the ROBINSONADE in a hostile environment gives way to
SPACE-OPERA melodrama: the Earthman rescues one of the aliens' slaves, who
becomes his Man Friday, and a conventional pursuit-and-escape story
follows. The story resembles - but to no great degree-that of Rex
GORDON'sNo Man Friday (1956; vtFirst on Mars). [JP/PN]
ROBOCOP
Film (1987). Orion. Dir Paul Verhoeven, starring Peter Weller, Nancy
Allen, Daniel O'Herlihy, Ronny Cox, Kurtwood Smith. Screenplay Edward
Neumeier, Michael Miner. 102 mins. Colour.Dutch director Verhoeven here
unusually made a successful transition from foreign art films - the
violent medieval epic Flesh + Blood (1985) and the perverse thriller The
Fourth Man (1983) - to a US populist blockbuster. A corrupt corporation in

NEAR-FUTURE Detroit manufactures a prototype CYBORG (Weller) in which the
head of a mortally wounded policeman is integrated with a powerful metal
body. The brutal extermination of criminals and cleansing of the corrupt
business community that follow are directed with a blend of technical
skill, low cunning and genuine artistry that is both dismaying and
breathtaking. The casual cruelties of the ongoing bloodbath seem merely a
cynical exploitation of the worst aspects of audience voyeurism, but the
film also contains a density of information about, and a sharp satirical
observation of, this future world that are both rare and welcome in sf
cinema. Verhoeven went on to direct TOTAL RECALL. The sequel, not dir
Verhoeven, was ROBOCOP 2. [PN]See also: CINEMA.
ROBOCOP 2
Film (1990). Orion. Dir Irvin Kershner, starring Peter Weller, Nancy
Allen, Belinda Bauer, Daniel O'Herlihy, Tom Noonan. Screenplay Frank
MILLER, Walon Green from a story by Miller. 116 mins. Colour.Dismissed by
most critics as an unimaginative retread of ROBOCOP, R2 nevertheless has
merits. Its narrative clarity and dash, which deliver a vision of future
Detroit as one of the deeper circles of Hell, a sort of DANTE-meets- DC
COMICS, are a credit to the partnership of director Kershner (who made The
EMPIRE STRIKES BACK [1980]) and screenwriter Miller (who wrote and
illustrated the Batman GRAPHIC NOVEL The Dark Knight Returns [graph
1986]). These qualities partially redeem R2's simplistic repetition of the
previous film's thematic concerns (anti-capitalism, anti-liberalism,
casual slaughter and lots of cynicism about tv news coverage) in a story
where the good CYBORG cop (Weller) is again pitted against the evil
corporation (privatizing the police force and about to do likewise to City
Hall) and their new, drug-crazed cyborg killer. Rob Bottin's cyborg
designs are appropriately grotesque. [PN]
ROBOCOP 3
Film (1992, but released late 1993). Orion. Dir Fred Dekker; screenplay
Frank MILLER and Dekker based on a story by Miller based on characters
created by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner; starring Robert Burke, Nancy
Allen, Rip Torn, John Castle, Jill Hennessy and Remy Ryan. 104 mins.
Colour.With each sequel, life has been leached from the original ROBOCOP
(1987) scenario, remembered for its witty and satirical sadism, first by
ROBOCOP 2 (1990) and then by RoboCop 3. (The only place for the concept to
go was now television, and indeed Robocop: The Series was launched on TV
in 1994 with an optimistic plan for a two-hour pilot and 21 episodes; a
Canadian production, made in Toronto for syndication, it stars Richard
Eden as Robocop and Yvette Napier in the Nancy Allen role, and is scripted
by Neumeier and Miner who wrote the original movie; aimed at the youth
market, it was not very well received, and was cancelled in its first
season.)RoboCop 3 began with two problems. After the comparative failure
of Robocop 2, it had to work on a much smaller budget; and with Robocop
marketing franchises now aimed mainly at quite young children, the film
too had to be aimed at the kids, and hence pruned of much of the previous
violence, which is to remove much of the raison d'etre. This time the
politically correct Robocop (now played by Burke rather than Peter Weller)
takes the side of disenfranchised slum dwellers being evicted from

Cadillac Heights, Detroit, by the Japanese corporation Kanemitsu, new
owners of OCP, who plan to build the lavish "Delta City" in the area.
Bonding with a cute computer-whiz girl child orphan (Ryan) and a pretty
lady scientist (Hennessy), Robocop with the help of his new family-police
officer Anne Lewis, played by Nancy Allen, having been early and
conveniently eliminated- defeats the evil Japanese, their samurai
androids, and their commando cohorts, the British "rehabs" led by
Commander McDaggett (Castle). The casual xenophobia displayed by the film
against the Japanese and British is breathtaking. Poor matte work
disfigures the climax (Robocop flies!), but a perhaps surprising residue
of entertainment remains. [PN]
ROBOCOP: THE SERIES
ROBOCOP 3.
ROBOT JOX
Film (1990). Empire. Dir Stuart Gordon, starring Gary Graham, Anne Marie
Johnson, Paul Koslo, Robert Sampson, Hilary Mason. Screenplay Joe
HALDEMAN, Dennis Paoli. 82 mins. Colour.The people ("jox") who pilot the
future ROBOT colossi with which wars are settled in single combat are
popular idols. The hero (Graham) is traumatized when he accidentally
crushes a spectator stand and quits, but returns when the biologically
engineered, test-tube created woman he loves (Johnson) endangers herself
by entering the field of combat. A long-cherished project of Charles
BAND's financially troubled Empire Pictures, and his most expensive, RJ
was several years in the making and is disorientingly inconsistent in its
production values: top-of-the-line effects by David Allen in the robot
combat, but low-budget interiors and a few wobbly matte fringes. Gordon,
scaling down his gore effects after RE-ANIMATOR (1985) and FROM BEYOND
(1986), handles the subtly humorous pulp-sf angles very well and gives the
film a pleasantly uncluttered comic-bookish look, while Haldeman's
sf-writer touch can be traced in the neat background details (ad-campaigns
for pregnancy, bigotry against "tubies") and in his distinctive blend of
military-hardware expertise and anti- WAR attitudes, the latter being
especially apparent in the surprisingly emotional climax. [KN]
ROBOTS
The word "robot" first appeared in Karel CAPEK's play R.U.R. (1921; trans
1923), and is derived from the Czech robota (statute labour). Capek's
robots were artificial human beings of organic origin, but the term is
usually applied to MACHINES. Real-life assembly-line robots are adapted to
specific functions, but in sf - where the term overlaps to some extent
with ANDROIDS - it usually refers to machines in more-or-less human
form.Machines which mimic human form date back, in both fiction and
reality, to the early 19th century. The real automata were showpieces:
clockwork dummies or puppets. Their counterparts in the fiction of E.T.A.
HOFFMANN - the Talking Turk in "Automata" (1814) and Olympia in "The
Sandman" (1816) - present a more verisimilitudinous image, and play a
sinister role, their wondrous artifice being seen as something blasphemous
and diabolically inspired. The automaton in Herman MELVILLE's "The
Bell-Tower" (1855) has similar allegorical connotations.
Early-20th-century works are markedly different. William Wallace COOK's A

Round Trip to the Year 2000 (1903; 1925), which features robotic
"mugwumps", and the anonymous skit Mechanical Jane (1903) are both
comedies, as is J. Storer CLOUSTON's Button Brains (1933), a novel in
which a robot is continually mistaken for its human model and which
introduced most of the mechanical-malfunction jokes that remain the staple
diet of stage and tv plays featuring robots. (Robots are the most common
sf device used in drama because they can be so conveniently and so
amusingly played by live actors; the tradition extends to recent times in
Alan Ayckbourn's Henceforward [1988].)Early PULP-MAGAZINE stories about
robots are generally ambivalent. David H. KELLER's "The Psychophonic
Nurse" (1928) is a cooperative servant, but no substitute for a mother's
love. Abner J. Gelula's "Automaton" (1931) has lecherous designs on its
creator's daughter and has to be destroyed. Harl VINCENT's "Rex" (1934)
takes over the world and is about to remake Man in the image of the robot
when his regime is overthrown. But the balance soon swung in favour of
sympathy. The machines in Eando BINDER's "The Robot Aliens" (1935) come in
peace but are misunderstood and abused by hostile humans; and saccharine
sentimentality is also in the ascendant in "Helen O'Loy" (1938) by Lester
DEL REY, in which a man marries the ideal mechanical woman, in "Robots
Return" (1938) by Robert Moore WILLIAMS, in which spacefaring robots
discover that they were created by humans and accept the disappointment
nobly, in "Rust" (1939) by Joseph E. KELLEAM, which describes the tragic
decline into extinction of mechanical life on Earth, in the
anti-Frankensteinian parable "I, Robot" (1939) by Eando Binder, and in
"True Confession" (1940) by F. Orlin TREMAINE and "Almost Human" (1941) by
Ray CUMMINGS, both of which feature altruistic acts of robotic
self-sacrifice. Isaac ASIMOV claims to have invented his famous "Laws of
Robotics" (see below) in response to a technophobic "Frankenstein
syndrome", but there is little evidence of one in the robot stories
published around the time of "Strange Playfellow" (1940; vt "Robbie").
Robots are given higher status than mere humans in "Farewell to the
Master" (1940) by Harry BATES and "Jay Score" (1941) by Eric Frank
RUSSELL, the first of a series later published as Men, Martians and
Machines (coll of linked stories 1956).The system of ethics with which
Asimov's POSITRONIC ROBOTS were hardwired was enshrined in 3 famous Laws
(devised in discussions with John W. CAMPBELL Jr, whom Asimov insisted was
their co-creator): (1) a robot may not injure a human being or, through
inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; (2) a robot must obey the
orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict
with the First Law; (3) a robot must protect its own existence as long as
such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. The laws
emerged from "Reason" (1941); "Liar" (1941) became the first of many
Asimov stories whose plots involve the explication of odd robot behaviour
as an unexpected consequence of them. In "Liar" (as in many others) the
logical unravelling is accomplished by the "robopsychologist" Susan
Calvin. The early stories in the series - collected in I, ROBOT (coll of
linked stories 1950) - culminated in "Evidence" (1946), in which a robot
politician can get elected only by convincing voters that he is human, but
does the job far better than the man he replaces. In C.L. MOORE's "No
Woman Born" (1944) a dancer whose mind is resurrected in a robot body
quickly concludes that the robot condition is preferable to the human. The

robot servants who survive mankind in Clifford D. SIMAK's CITY (1944-52;
fixup 1952) are the perfect gentlemen's gentlemen rather than mere slaves.
One cautionary note was sounded by Anthony BOUCHER, whose stories "Q.U.R."
and "Robinc" (both 1943 as by H.H. Holmes) champion "usuform robots"
against anthropomorphous ones; the stated reasons are utilitarian, but
Boucher's religious faith - he was a devout Catholic - may have influenced
his opinion. The most notable comic robot in pulp sf - outside the works
of the prolific Ron GOULART, which are infested by logically
malfunctioning robots of every conceivable variety, not exclusively with
comic intent - is the narcissistic machine in Robots Have No Tails
(1943-8; coll of linked stories 1952) by Henry KUTTNER (as Lewis Padgett).
After 1945, when the atom bomb provoked a new suspicion of technology,
attitudes to robots in sf became more ambivalent again. In 1947 Asimov
published his first sinister-robot story, "Little Lost Robot", and Jack
WILLIAMSON produced the classic "With Folded Hands", in which robot
"humanoids" charged "to serve man, to obey, and to guard men from harm"
take their mission too literally, and set out to ensure that no one
endangers their own well being and that everyone is happy, even if that
requires permanent tranquillization or prefrontal lobotomy. Many writers
did not relinquish their loyalty to machines; Asimov and Simak remained
steadfastly pro-robot, and Williamson relented somewhat in his sequel to
"With Folded Hands", The Humanoids (1949) - although the ending of the
novel may have been suggested by John W. CAMPBELL Jr rather than being a
spontaneous expression of Williamson's own technophilic tendencies - but
most robot stories of the 1950s involve some kind of confrontation and
conflict. Robots kill or attempt to kill humans in "Lost Memory" (1952) by
Peter Phillips (1920- ), "Second Variety" (1953) by Philip K. DICK, "Short
in the Chest" (1954) by Idris Seabright (Margaret ST CLAIR), "First to
Serve" (1954) by Algis BUDRYS, The Naked Sun (1956) by Asimov and "Mark
XI" (1957; vt "Mark Elf") by Cordwainer SMITH. The mistaken-identity motif
takes on sinister or unfortunate associations in Asimov's "Satisfaction
Guaranteed" (1951), Dick's "Impostor" (1953), Walter M. MILLER's "The
Darfsteller" (1955) and Robert BLOCH's "Comfort Me, My Robot" (1955).
Robot courtroom dramas include Simak's "How-2" (1954), Asimov's "Galley
Slave" (1957) and del Rey's "Robots Should Be Seen" (1958). Man-robot
boxing matches are featured in "Title Fight" (1956) by William Campbell
Gault, "Steel" (1956) by Richard MATHESON and "The Champ" (1958) by Robert
Presslie. The robot is an instrument of judgement in "Two-Handed Engine"
(1955) by Kuttner and C.L. MOORE. Black comedies involving robots include
several stories by Robert SHECKLEY, notably "Watchbird" (1953) and "The
Battle" (1954), although Sheckley's classic story in this vein was the
later "The Cruel Equations" (1971). One story which deviates markedly from
the pattern is Boucher's Catholic fantasy "The Quest for St Aquin" (1951),
in which a perfectly logical robot emulates Thomas Aquinas and deduces the
reality of God; but in the main robot stories of the 1950s reflected
profound anxieties concerning the relationship between Man and machine.
Asimov's Caves of Steel (1954), which deals in some depth with its hero's
anti-machine prejudices and his mechanized environment, brings this
anxiety clearly into focus.As post-Hiroshima anxiety began to ebb away in
the late 1950s, a more relaxed attitude to the robot became evident,
humour and gentle irony coming to the fore in such stories as those in

Harry HARRISON's War with the Robots (1958-62; coll 1962), Brian W.
ALDISS's "But Who Can Replace a Man?" (1958), Fritz LEIBER's The Silver
Eggheads (1961) and Poul ANDERSON's "The Critique of Impure Reason"
(1962). The old sentimentality returned to the robot story in full force
in Simak's "All the Traps of Earth" (1960), and soon reached new depths of
sickliness in Ray BRADBURY's "I Sing the Body Electric!" (1969). The
rehabilitation of the robot was completed by Barrington J. BAYLEY's study
in robot existentialism, The Soul of the Robot (1974; rev 1976), and its
sequel, The Rod of Light (1985), and by Asimov's "That Thou Art Mindful of
Him" (1974) and "The Bicentennial Man" (1976), which took the robot's
philosophical self-analysis to its logical conclusion, ending with the
identification of the robot as a thoroughly "human" being. Asimov later
set out to integrate his robot stories into the Future History of his
Foundation series in such novels as THE ROBOTS OF DAWN (1983) and Robots
and Empire (1985); he also wrote a series of juvenile robot stories in
collaboration with his wife Janet ASIMOV, begun with Norby the Mixed-Up
Robot (1983), and lent his name to a series of SHARED-WORLD novels set in
Isaac Asimov's Robot City, begun with Odyssey (1987) by Michael P.
KUBE-MCDOWELL. Janet Asimov carried the family tradition forward in Mind
Transfer (1988), which explores the possibilities of robot SEX alongside
philosophical discussions of robotic "humanness". Other exercises in robot
existentialism are featured in Sheila MACLEOD's Xanthe and the Robots
(1977) and Walter TEVIS's angst-ridden Mockingbird (1980).Robot philosophy
of a less earnest but cleverer kind is extensively featured in Stanislaw
LEM's robotic fables, collected in The Cyberiad (coll 1965; trans 1974)
and Mortal Engines (coll trans 1977). Robot RELIGION and MYTHOLOGY are
featured in Robert F. YOUNG's "Robot Son" (1959), Roger ZELAZNY's "For a
Breath I Tarry" (1966), Simak's A Choice of Gods (1972) and Gordon
EKLUND's "The Shrine of Sebastian" (1973). The integration of the robot
into human religious culture is celebrated in Robert SILVERBERG's "Good
News from the Vatican" (1971), about the election of the first robot pope.
Some humans, at least, are prepared to fight for the freedom of
ex-colonial robots in James P. HOGAN's Code of the Lifemaker (1983). The
awkward question of whether one would let one's daughter marry a robot is
squarely addressed in Tanith LEE's The Silver Metal Lover (1982), and the
problems of an orphaned robot trying to get by in a puzzling and hostile
world are hilariously displayed in RODERICK (1980) and Roderick at Random
(1983) by John T. SLADEK. The homicidal robot, although an endangered
species, has not quite become extinct: a robot executioner is featured in
Roger Zelazny's "Home Is the Hangman" (1975) and a robot psychopath whose
"asimov circuits" have failed is the antihero of Sladek's Tik-Tok (1983).
The killer-robot, however, made its most successful comeback during the
1980s and 1990s in movies rather than books ( CINEMA for listing of
examples). The "paranoid android" Marvin (actually a robot), with his
"brain the size of a planet", is a major character in the various versions
of Douglas ADAMS's Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy saga, and for a time
attained cult-hero status. The writer whose work confirms the
identification of Man and robot most strongly is Philip K. Dick, who
usually preferred the term "android". His most notable stories using
humanoid machines to address the question of what the word "human" can or
should mean are DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (1968), "The Electric

Ant" (1969) and We Can Build You (1969-70; 1972). "Someday," he said in
his essay "The Android and the Human" (1973), "a human being may shoot a
robot which has come out of a General Electrics factory, and to his
surprise see it weep and bleed. And the dying robot may shoot back and, to
its surprise, see a wisp of gray smoke arise from the electric pump that
it supposed was the human's beating heart. It would be rather a great
moment of truth for both of them." This irony is explored in the character
Jonas, in Gene WOLFE's The Book of the New Sun (1980-83), a robot who
gradually acquires human prostheses.Anthologies of robot stories include
The Robot and the Man (anth 1953) ed Martin GREENBERG, The Coming of the
Robots (anth 1963) ed Sam MOSKOWITZ, Invasion of the Robots (anth 1965) ed
Roger ELWOOD, and The Metal Smile (anth 1968) ed Damon KNIGHT. Science
Fiction Thinking Machines (anth 1954) ed Groff CONKLIN has a section on
robots. [BS]See also: AUTOMATION; COMPUTERS; CYBERNETICS; CYBORGS;
INTELLIGENCE; TECHNOLOGY.
ROBU, CORNEL
(1938- ) Romanian lecturer in literature (at Cluj-Napoca University) and
sf critic, some of whose many articles have appeared in English, including
"A Key to Science Fiction: The Sublime" in FOUNDATION #42 (1988). He ed
the 1st reprint and critical edition (1986), with afterword in English, of
the early Romanian sf novel In anul 4000 sau O calatorie la Venus ["In the
Year 4000, or A Voyage to Venus"] (1899) by Victor Anestin, and also ed
the anthology of Romanian sf Timpul este umbra noastra: Science-fiction
romanesc dinultimele doua decenii: Antologie comentata ["Time is Our
Shadow: Romanian Science Fiction 1969-1989: Anthology with Commentary"]
(anth 1991), with an afterword in English. A more general work is Panorama
romanului romanesc contemporan: 1944-1974 ["Panorama of the Contemporary
Romanian Novel: 1944-74"] (1974) with Ion Vlad. For this encyclopedia CR
wrote the entry on ROMANIA and contributed ideas to that on SENSE OF
WONDER. [PN]
ROCHESTER, GEORGE E.
[r] SCOOPS.
ROCHON, ESTHER
(1948- ) Canadian writer who began publishing sf with "L'Initiateur et
les etrangers" ["The Initiator and the Strangers"] for Marie-Francoise in
1964, publishing stories frequently and cofounding the journal imagine . .
. ( CANADA) in 1979. With her first novel, En Hommage aux araignees ["In
Praise of Spiders"] (1974; rev as a juvenile vt L'Etranger sous la ville
["The Stranger under the City"] 1986), she began the Vrenalik sequence of
tales set in an ALTERNATE-WORLD archipelago, a venue of the sort used by
many Quebecois writers to express the St Lawrence River's domination of
the geography of Quebec, just as some English-speaking Canadian writers
tend to set their tales on the shores of glaciated lakes. L'Epuisement du
Soleil ["The Draining of the Sun"] (1985), part of which first appeared as
Der Traumer in der Zitadelle ["The Dreamer in the Citadel"] (1977
Germany), most of the stories assembled in Le Traversier ["The Ferry"]
(coll 1987), L'Espace du diamant ["The Space of the Diamond"] (1990) and
most of the stories assembled in Le Piege a souvenirs ["The Trap of
Memories"] (coll 1991) are also set in this venue. Of her novels only

Coquillage (1986; trans David Lobdell as The Shell 1990) is set outside
the Vrenalik world, though it too is set on an ISLAND, where several human
characters plunge into a profound sexual liaison with the eponymous ALIEN.
Like most WOMEN SF WRITERS at work in Quebec today, ER often depicts
characters who have to encounter and deal with the Other on their own
territory and without going into outer space, which has stimulated
FEMINIST and political readings of her work. In 1986 and 1987 she received
the Grand Prix de la science-fiction et du fantastique quebecois. [LP/JC]
ROCKETEER, THE
(vt The Adventures of the Rocketeer) Film (1991). Walt Disney. Dir Joe
Johnston, starring Bill Campbell, Jennifer Connelly, Alan Arkin, Timothy
Dalton, Paul Sorvino. Screenplay Danny Bilson, Paul DeMeo. 108 mins.
Colour.This enjoyable big-budget re-creation of the thrills of 1930s
B-serials - more accurate but less popular than Steven SPIELBERG's Raiders
of the Lost Ark (1981) - features gangsters, G-men, Nazis, pilots, movie
stars, a dirigible, Howard Hughes (1905-1976) and (in thin disguise) Errol
Flynn (1909-1959) and Rondo Hatton (1894-1946). The Flynn character,
played with relish by Dalton, is the villain; the gangster boss (Sorvino)
discovers his true loyalties ("I'm a hundred per cent American") when he
realizes he has been helping Nazis steal an experimental rocket pack;
there is an excellent re-creation of a Nazi propaganda cartoon. Unlike the
greedy, cynical, individualistic Indiana Jones, the old-fashioned
Rocketeer, the uncharismatic Campbell, is law-abiding and patriotic - and
outshone by the scheming Dalton. [MK]
ROCKETS
The Chinese were using skyrockets as fireworks in the 11th century, and
adapted them as WEAPONS of WAR in the 13th. Europeans borrowed the idea,
but rocket-missiles were abandoned as muskets and rifles became more
efficient. A 15th-century Chinese legend tells of one Wan Hu, who attached
rockets to a chair, strapped himself in, and blasted off for the unknown.
A similar notion was used by CYRANO DE BERGERAC in the first part of
L'autre monde (1657), in which the hero straps 3 rows of rockets to his
back, intending that as each set burns out it will ignite the next, so
renewing the boost; the device proves impracticable.War rockets were used
against the British in India at the end of the 18th century, and the
British reinstituted rocket technology, using rocket missiles in the
Napoleonic War and in the US War of 1812; their rockets used in an attack
on Fort Henry in 1814 inspired the reference to "the rocket's red glare"
in "The Star-Spangled Banner" by Francis Scott Key (1780-1843), who
witnessed the battle. Rockets fell into disuse again with the development
of better field artillery, but the possibility of using them as a means of
TRANSPORTATION encouraged some early experiments with unfortunate animals
as passengers.In 1898 Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY wrote a classic article, "The
Probing of Space by Means of Jet Devices" (1903); he had earlier written
"On the Moon" (1893), "Dreams of Earth and Sky" (1895) and other stories
and essays collected in The Call of the Cosmos (coll trans 1963) in
company with the didactic novel Outside the Earth (1920; trans 1960 as
Beyond the Planet Earth). In the same period the US inventor Robert
Goddard (1882-1945) - reputedly inspired by reading H.G. WELLS's THE WAR

OF THE WORLDS (1898)-also began thinking seriously about SPACE FLIGHT, and
in 1911 he began experimenting with rockets. He was working towards a
liquid-fuel stage rocket - a notion applied to the business of
interplanetary travel in John MUNRO's romance A Trip to Venus (1897).
Goddard launched the first liquid-fuel rocket in 1926. Meanwhile, the
German rocket-research pioneer Hermann Oberth (1894-1989) - author of Die
Rakete zu den Planetenraumen ["The Rocket into Interplanetary Space"]
(1921) - and others, including Willy LEY, formed a "Society for Space
Travel". In 1928 Oberth was offered the opportunity to build a rocket by a
German film company, which hired him as technical adviser for Fritz LANG's
film Die FRAU IM MOND (1929); his experimental rocket was to be launched
before the film's premiere as a publicity stunt, but the project
collapsed. Oberth began anew with a number of assistants, including
Wernher von Braun (1912-1977), and managed to get a number of rockets off
the ground in 1931. The project was abandoned as Germany's economy
crashed, but von Braun joined a rocket development project with the German
Army while Ley emigrated to the USA. In 1937 the Army project acquired a
large research centre at Peenemunde on an island in the Baltic, where von
Braun and his staff developed the V-2 rocket bomb. This arrived too late
to make any difference to the course of WWII, and von Braun fled to the
Bavarian Alps in order to surrender to the USA rather than wait for the
Russians. Goddard had spent WWII developing take-off rockets for US Navy
aircraft.Von Braun went to work for a US research programme. The project
developed the Jupiter rocket to launch the USA's first space satellite in
1958, and ultimately the Saturn rocket which carried the first men to the
MOON. During this period a number of US and UK sf writers - most notably
Arthur C. CLARKE, a leading member of the British Interplanetary Society
founded by P.E. Cleator (1908- ) in the 1930s - were active and
enthusiastic propagandists for the space programme. Even before WWII the
sf PULP MAGAZINES had taken a considerable interest in rocket research SCIENCE WONDER STORIES publicized an occasion when "The Rocket Comes to
the Front Page" (Dec 1929) with an unsigned article that was probably by
Hugo GERNSBACK, and ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION published such articles as
Leo Vernon's "Rocket Flight" (1938). The UK TALES OF WONDER published
Clarke's "We Can Rocket to the Moon - Now!" (1939). After WWII George PAL
made the film DESTINATION MOON (1950), with script by Robert A. HEINLEIN
(remotely based on his Rocket Ship Galileo [1947]). Ray BRADBURY became
particularly fascinated by the mythology of the rocket and followed up his
"I, Rocket" (1944) with the early Martian Chronicles episode "Rocket
Summer" (1947) and the curious non-sf story "Outcast of the Stars" (1950;
vt "The Rocket"). C.M. KORNBLUTH based his novel Takeoff (1952) on the
ironic theme of a crackpot project to build an unworkable rocket which
conceals a real attempt to build a practicable SPACESHIP - testimony to
the ambivalence of contemporary attitudes to rocket research. As late as
1956 a newly appointed British Astronomer Royal, Richard Woolley, was
reported to have declared that talk of space travel was "utter bilge", so
encapsulating a considerable body of opinion which endured pugnaciously
until the ascent of Sputnik - in 1957.There is no other historical
sequence of events in which fact and fiction are so closely entwined, or
which seems to justify so well the imaginative reach of HARD-SF writers.
Tsiolkovsky, Goddard and Oberth were visionaries more closely akin to

speculative writers than to their contemporary theorists. Rocket research
has always been dependent on the practical demands of hot and cold wars,
but it is surely true-as laboured in James A. MICHENER's pedestrian epic
"faction" Space (1982) - that for some of the people involved the real
objective was always that of Wan Hu, Cyrano, Munro and Tsiolkovsky. Pierre
BOULLE's Garden on the Moon (1964; trans 1965), in which the German rocket
scientists are entranced with the notion of cosmic voyaging even as they
develop the V-2, probably has an element of truth in it. [BS]See also: ION
DRIVE; PREDICTION; SPACE FLIGHT; SPACESHIPS.
ROCKETSHIP X-M
(vt Expedition Moon) Film (1950). Lippert. Prod/dir/written Kurt Neumann,
starring Lloyd Bridges, Osa Massen, John Emery. 78 mins. B/w.This cheap
movie was hastily made to beat the more illustrious DESTINATION MOON
(1950) to the theatres. A rocket on its way to the Moon is diverted by a
storm of meteors and lands on MARS instead. The astronauts find evidence
that the planet has suffered an atomic war, and encounter a race of
MUTANTS. In an unexpectedly downbeat ending the returning rocket crashes
on Earth and all are killed. Some cineastes like this SPACE OPERA better
than the more technological film on whose advance publicity it was
designed to get a free ride - especially the atmospheric Mars sequences,
tinted red in the film's original prints and well photographed by Karl
Struss in the Mojave Desert.A German director who came to Hollywood in
1925, Neumann is best known for The FLY (1958); he also made KRONOS
(1957). [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA.
ROCKET STORIES
US DIGEST-size magazine. 3 issues, Apr, July, Sep 1953, published by
Space Publications, New York, ed Wade KAEMPFERT (Lester DEL REY for #1 and
#2, Harry HARRISON for #3). RS was a companion magazine to FANTASY
MAGAZINE/ FANTASY FICTION, SPACE SCIENCE FICTION and the 1952-4 SCIENCE
FICTION ADVENTURES. All 4 magazines were closed down when the publisher
lost interest. RS, slanted to the juvenile market, contained fiction of
fair quality, including early work by Algis BUDRYS, but at the height of
the SF-MAGAZINE boom, with well over 30 sf magazines being published in
the USA, it was effectively invisible. [FHP/PN]
ROCKLYNNE, ROSS
Working name of US writer Ross Louis Rocklin (1913-1988) for his sf
stories, most of which appeared in such magazines as ASF from the
mid-1930s up to 1947, beginning with "Man of Iron" for ASF in 1935. He
specialized in SPACE-OPERA plots constructed around sometimes ingenious
"scientific" problems, such as how to escape from the centre of a hollow
planet in "At the Center of Gravity" (1936), the first of the Colbie and
Deverel series assembled with similar material in The Men and the Mirror
(coll of linked stories 1973); the story is flawed by the fact that RR did
not realize that a symmetrical hollow shell does not have an internal,
centrally directed gravity field. A second series, The Darkness, was
assembled as The Sun Destroyers (fixup 1973 dos); it features vast,
nebula-like beings ( LIVING WORLDS) and follows their life-courses through
millions of years from galaxy to galaxy without the intervention of
mankind. RR had one of the most interesting, if florid, imaginations of

the PULP-MAGAZINE writers of his time, and wrote very much better than
most. He continued to publish sf, rather sporadically, up to 1954 (he was
interested in DIANETICS at that time); and later made a formidable
comeback with several stories in 1968, demonstrating that he had no
difficulty at all in adjusting his narrative voice to the more
sophisticated demands of the later period - as in "Ching Witch!", one of
the most assured tours de force in Harlan ELLISON's Again, Dangerous
Visions (anth 1972), an ironic tale about the curious morality of a man
who, as a result of GENETIC ENGINEERING, has a lot of cat in him.
[JC/PN]About the author: The Work of Ross Rocklynne: An Annotated
Bibliography (1989 chap) by Douglas MENVILLE.See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS;
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; TIME PARADOXES; WAR.
ROCKWOOD, ROY
House name used on JUVENILE SERIES published by Cupples ?
York, and on one occasion by the Mershon Company of New Jersey. The best
of the RR titles are the first 6 vols (1906-13) in the Great Marvel
sequence by Howard R. GARIS, who probably wrote from outlines by Edward
STRATEMEYER. In his autobiography Ghost of the Hardy Boys Leslie McFarlane
says he wrote some 1920s novels in the Dan Fearless series under the name
RR. Other writers who worked under the RR name, which was used also on the
20 Bomba the Jungle Boy books (1926-38), remain unidentified. [JC]See
also: CHILDREN'S SF; HOLLOW EARTH; OUTER PLANETS.
ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, THE
Film (1975). A Lou Adler-Michael White Production/20th Century-Fox. Dir
Jim Sharman, starring Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Richard
O'Brien, Patricia Quinn, Little Nell (Laura Campbell), Jonathan Adams,
Peter Hinwood, Meatloaf, Charles Gray. Screenplay Sharman, O'Brien, based
on O'Brien's stage musical The Rocky Horror Show (1973). 101 mins. Colour.
This UK film created little stir when first released in the USA, but by
mid-1976 it was attracting large cult audiences at midnight showings; the
phenomenon grew throughout most of the late 1970s. TRHPS became the cult
movie of all time, with its audiences becoming part of the performance,
dressed as favourite characters, singing along, shouting wisecracks at the
screen, and so on. The phenomenon is analysed at length in Midnight Movies
(1983) by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum.The film itself is not
entirely mediocre - Curry's performance as transvestite Dr Frank-N-Furter
from the Planet Transsexual in the Galaxy Transylvania is memorable for
the energy of its polymorphous perversity, based largely on a lampooning
of Mick Jagger - but it is ill paced, has some dreadful performances, and
is too long. The story is about shocking the bourgeois, which is also its
object; this was the era of androgynous singer David Bowie, when
bisexuality, at least in personal appearance, was becoming fashionable in
the more radical fringes of youth culture. Sarandon and Bostwick play the
two normally dull young people seduced by the mad doctor in his gothic
mansion after their car has broken down on a dark and stormy night.TRHPS,
an example of RECURSIVE SF, begins with a song affectionately recalling
the delights of early sf movies, "Science Fiction, Double Feature";
another of the better numbers is "The Time Warp", a song and dance. Sf
references abound, especially to the FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER: the mad doctor

has created an artificial man, Rocky Horror, as a sexual plaything.
Eventually Frank-N-Furter is lasered down, and the Gothic mansion is
warped back to its planet of origin by Riff Raff the butler (O'Brien), who
turns out to be an alien. TRHPS is notable for summing up an entire
generation's attitude to sf: it is presented not as a bold facing-up to
the challenges of the future but as a campy nostalgia for the luridnesses
of the past. [PN]See also: MUSIC.
RODAN
RADON.
RODDENBERRY, GENE
(1921-1991) US tv scriptwriter, producer, director and creator of STAR
TREK. GR began writing in the late 1940s while working as a pilot for a
commercial airline. In 1953 he sold his first tv script and in 1956 his
first that was sf, a genre in which he had not previously been
particularly interested. In 1954 he became a full-time tv writer. In 1963
he created and produced a series of his own - The Lieutenant - for MGM,
and in the same year conceived Star Trek but had difficulty launching the
project; and it was not to be until 1966 that the show reached tv screens.
Star Trek was not a great success in terms of ratings and was ended in
1968, but over the next decade, partly as a consequence of reruns, the
show built up a huge following.After Star Trek, GR spent much time trying
to launch other tv sf series, but without success, although 4 pilot
episodes appeared as made-for-tv films: GENESIS II (1973), PLANET EARTH
(1974), The QUESTOR TAPES (1974) and STRANGE NEW WORLD (1975). In 1977,
turning from sf to horror, GR wroteSpectre, a tv pilot, directed by Clive
Donner, along the lines of KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER, with Robert Culp as
a demonologist detective; this too failed to be sold as a
series.Throughout the 1970s a Star Trek revival was continually announced,
either as a tv series or as a theatrical film, but it was only after the
success of STAR WARS (1977) that such a project became feasible. In 1979
GR finally produced STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE, dir Robert WISE, with
the cast of the old series stranded among state-of-the-art special
effects. The announced budget was much inflated by many years of
development costs having almost nothing to do with the final film; without
such irrelevant factors the film would have been the most successful of
the ST movies. As it was, on the official figures, though commercially
successful, it was by no means the blockbuster that Paramount had
envisioned, and GR took a less personal interest in the ongoing sequels,
of which there have been 5 to date, commencing with STAR TREK II: THE
WRATH OF KHAN (1982); these eschew the daring but tedious mystical
approach of Wise's film and revert to the cosy soap-and-sentiment basics
of the original series. In 1987 GR cowrote and produced Encounter at
Farpoint, the pilot episode of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION
(1987-current), a sequel tv series set 80 years on in the Star Trek
universe; he continued to serve as overall creative guide, but not on a
day-to-day basis, and died shortly before his basic concept was spun off
into a third tv series, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (begun 1992).The Making
of Star Trek (1968) by Stephen E. Whitfield and GR was actually written by
Whitfield and The Making of Star Trek The Motion Picture (1980) by Susan

Sackett and GR was written by Sackett. GR was also credited as author of
the novelization Star Trek: The Motion Picture * (1979). [JB/KN/PN]About
the author: Star Trek Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene
Roddenberry (1994) by David ALEXANDER; Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the
Man Behind"Star Trek"(1994) by Joel Engel.
RODGERS, ALAN
(1959 - ) US writer who began publishing work of genre interest with"The
Boy who Came Back from the Dead" inMasques #2 (anth 1987) ed J.N.
Williamson (1932- ), a strongly moving fantasy tale later assembled with
other work in New Life for the Dead (coll 1991). AR's first novel, Blood
of the Children (1989), is horror, but his second, Fire (1990), combines
sf and horror in a NEAR-FUTURE story in which a fundamentalist US
President threatens a nuclear attack against the USSR while at the same
time a lab explosion unleashes a virus which raises the dead and a
telepathic entity which takes on the aspect of the Beast of Revelation.
The plot then thickens pyrotechnically. Night (1991) is horror. [JC]
RODMAN, ERIC
[s] Robert SILVERBERG.
ROD SERLING'S NIGHT GALLERY
US tv series (1970-72). A Jack Laird Production for Universal TV/NBC.
Created Rod SERLING. 93 plays: the 1969 2-hour pilot had 3 plays; season
1, part of a mixture of dramas called Four-in-One, consisted of 6 50min
episodes containing 2-3 playlets; season 2, under the Rod Serling's Night
Gallery title, had 23 of the same sort of 50min episodes; season 3 had 16
25min episodes, each with 1 playlet. Colour.Created by Rod Serling - who
in the early 1960s had made the series The TWILIGHT ZONE - RSNG was
primarily made up of supernatural stories but did contain a small number
of sf episodes; many of the plays were scripted by Serling from original
stories by such writers as C.M. KORNBLUTH, Fritz LEIBER, H.P. LOVECRAFT
and A.E. VAN VOGT, and Richard MATHESON scripted several other segments.
One of the 3 plays in the pilot, starring Joan Crawford, was Steven
SPIELBERG's debut; other directors included John BADHAM, Leonard Nimoy and
Jeannot Szwarc. After a time Serling lost creative control and grew to
dislike the series, the studio requiring more monsters and fewer
subtleties; however, he continued to introduce it, strolling through a
sinister art gallery and pointing to a relevant painting before each play
began. RSNG was on the whole a disappointment after The Twilight Zone. 2
collections of stories by Serling were series spin-offs: Night Gallery *
(coll 1971) and Night Gallery 2 * (coll 1972). Also relevant is Rod
Serling's Night Gallery Reader * (anth 1987) ed Carol Serling (Serling's
widow) with Martin H. GREENBERG and Charles G. WAUGH. [JB/PN]
ROE, IVAN
[r] Richard SAVAGE.
ROESSNER, MICHAELA
Working name of US writer Michaela-Marie Roessner-Herman (1950- ), whose
first novel, the widely admired Walkabout Woman (1988), is a fantasy,
though she received, all the same, the JOHN W. CAMPBELL award for that
year; her second novel, Vanishing Point (1993) is, however, sf. Set in

California 30 years after the mysterious disappearance of 90% of the human
race, and climaxing in the edifice-like Winchester Mystery House in San
Jose (a real building), the story concerns the efforts of the protagonist
and others to plumb the depths of the mystery; but if there is a single
explanation it is not-after a fashion typical of the sf writers who have
come to maturity in the 1990s-vouchsafed the searchers, though the
rhetoric of virtual particle physics is invoked, and hitches in the
universe-wide unfolding of cosmological destiny are suggested, along with
a sense that ALTERNATE WORLDS might be far more distressingly complex than
normally depicted in sf. [JC]
ROGER, NOELLE
Pseudonym of Swiss writer Helene Dufour Pittard (1874-1953), whose sf
novel, Le nouvel Adam (1924; trans P.O. Crowhurst as The New Adam 1926
UK), is about a wholly logical and unpleasant SUPERMAN created by gland
transplants. Finally, after having invented a nuclear force field, he
blows himself up. [JC]Other work: Celui qui voit (1926; trans Robert
Lancaster as He Who Sees 1935 UK), occult fantasy.See also: ADAM AND EVE.
ROGER CORMAN'S FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND
FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND.
ROGERS, ALVA
(1923-1982) US writer and artist, nicknamed "Red" for the colour of his
hair and politics. A long-time sf fan, he drew the covers for a number of
1940s FANZINES as well as some for the (UK) AMERICAN FICTION series. His A
Requiem for Astounding (1964), though nostalgic and largely uncritical,
provides a valuable history, rich in story synopses, of ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION before the name-change to Analog. [MJE/JC]
ROGERS, HUBERT
(1898-1982) Canadian illustrator who studied art at Toronto Technical
School and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He began his
professional career in 1925 in New York, painting covers for books and for
various magazines, including Adventure and The ARGOSY . He entered sf
publishing with a cover painting for ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION in 1939,
and painted 58 covers and drew interior ILLUSTRATIONS for 60 issues of
that magazine 1939-56. He and William Timmins dominated the covers of ASF
during the 1940s (HR did all of them Apr 1940-Aug 1942), a period when his
comparatively muted style gave the magazine something of the dignity John
W. CAMPBELL Jr craved: more serious (and even solemn) than those of many
of his colleagues, HR's covers epitomized the technological aspirations of
ASF in its more high-minded mode. His cover painting for "Fury" (May 1947)
by Lawrence O'Donnell (Henry KUTTNER and C.L. MOORE) is considered his
premier painting, and is one of the best covers ever put on an sf
magazine. HR also did jacket paintings for several hardcover books,
including those for 3 Robert A. HEINLEIN novels from SHASTA. He left sf
during the 1950s to become one of Canada's foremost portrait painters.
[JG/PN]
ROGERS, LEBBEUS HARDING
(1847-1932) US businessman and writer whose The Kite Trust (A Romance of
Wealth) (1900), which may have been self-published, follows the juvenile

kite-inventors and founders of the eponymous compact into adulthood,
enormous wealth, the discovery of new energy sources and the construction
of transatlantic tunnels, while all the while an interplanetary spirit
instructs the cast on the history of the Solar System. [JC]
ROGERS, MELVA
[s] Rog PHILLIPS.
ROGERS, MICHAEL (ALAN)
(1951- ) US novelist and rock critic whose first-published sf story was
"She Still Do" as by M. Alan Rogers, for If in 1970. His first sf novel,
Mindfogger (1973), features a hippy inventor whose mind-fogging device
acts as a gentle hallucinogen; though the use to which he puts it is
against an armaments company, we are left wondering if hip mind control is
preferable to mind control by right-wing powers. Forbidden Sequence (1987)
is a TECHNOTHRILLER about gene-splitting. [PN/JC]
ROGERS, PAT
[s] Arthur PORGES.
ROGERSOHN, WILLIAM
Dennis HUGHES.
ROGOZ, ADRIAN
[r] ROMANIA.
ROHAN, MICHAEL SCOTT
(1951- ) UK (Scottish) Oxford-educated law graduate and author, whose
nonfiction books include an introduction to home computing and a study of
the Viking era; he also reviews for Opera Now. He began publishing sf with
stories like "The Insect Tapes" in Aries 1 (anth 1979) ed John Grant (Paul
BARNETT). His first novel was Run to the Stars (dated 1982 but 1983),
signed Mike Scott Rohan, a promising Scots-in-space thriller featuring
relativistic WEAPONS and an alien message, with nasty Earth bureaucrats
ready to attack their own space colony. Then, like several UK writers of
the period, he began genre crossing; most of his fiction since has been
FANTASY - the genre in which he seems most at home - beginning with The
Ice King (1986; vt Burial Rites 1987 US) with Allan SCOTT under the joint
pseudonym Michael Scot, a supernatural thriller involving Norse mythology.
There followed the more notable The Winter of the World trilogy - The
Anvil of Ice (1986), The Forge in the Forest (1987) and The Hammer of the
Sun (1988) - set in an invented frozen world imagined in some depth;
though the writing is sometimes floridly rhetorical. A young smith sets
himself against the entropic Powers; quests follow; spring comes, but at a
cost. MSR then made a partial return to a kind of sf, in the jaunty,
romantic SCIENCE FANTASY Spiral trilogy, comprising Chase the Morning
(1990),The Gates of Noon(1992) and Cloud Castles(1994), where real and
magical ALTERNATE WORLDS(the coreand the spiral) intersect, and a computer
program can become a spell. The series is intelligent, well thought-out,
and surprisingly full of observations about near-future POLITICS. A second
collaboration with Scott, A Spell of Empire: The Horns of Tartarus (1992),
was published under their real names. But perhaps his finest work to date
is the solo historical fantasy The Lord of Middle Air (1994), set partly

in thirteenth-century Scotland (the Border area) and partly in a very
convincing faery land, in which a young Scots chieftain encounters and has
his life changed by the (real-life) magician Michael Scot. (MSR claims
Michael Scot as an ancestor.) MSR has consistently grown in stature as a
writer throughout his career. [PN]
ROHMER, RICHARD H.
(1924- ) Canadian writer whose novels almost invariably express a sense
of fragile PARANOIA about the political and economic prospects for his
native land, thinly stretched as it is along the US border. Ultimatum
(1973) and its sequel, Exxoneration (1974), deal directly with Canadian-US
conflicts in a NEAR-FUTURE frame. Exodus/UK (1975) and its sequel,
Separation (1976; rev vt Separation Two 1981), turn inward to express a
similar paranoia about separatism. Singletons that deal worriedly with
similar material include Balls! (1979), Periscope Red (1980), Triad
(1981), Retaliation (1982) and Starmageddon (1986). [JC]
ROHMER, SAX
Pseudonym of UK journalist and popular thriller writer Arthur Sarsfield
Ward (1883-1959). He started writing in 1909 and published in Cassell's
Magazine, Collier's Weekly, The Premier Magazine and numerous other early
general fiction magazines and BOYS' PAPERS. SR capitalized on contemporary
anxiety about the Chinese, generated by the Boxer Rebellion and the
fictions of M.P. SHIEL and others, to produce many sensational novels
about the Yellow Peril. Most famous is his series about Dr Fu Manchu, a
malign scientific genius and leader of a secret Chinese organization bent
on world domination. This VILLAIN appeared in The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu
(1912-13 The Story Teller as "Fu-Manchu"; fixup 1913; vt The Insidious Dr
Fu-Manchu 1913 US), The Devil Doctor (1914-15 Collier's Weekly as
"Fu-Manchu ? fixup 1916; vt The Return of Dr Fu-Manchu 1916 US), The
Si-Fan Mysteries (1916-17 Collier's Weekly; fixup 1917; vt The Hand of
Fu-Manchu 1917 US), Daughter of Fu Manchu (1931), The Mask of Fu Manchu
(1932) - filmed as The MASK OF FU MANCHU (1932) - Fu Manchu's Bride (1933
US; vt The Bride of Fu Manchu 1933 UK), The Trail of Fu Manchu (1934),
President Fu Manchu (1936), The Drums of Fu Manchu (1938), The Island of
Fu Manchu (1941), The Shadow of Fu Manchu (1948), Re-Enter Fu Manchu
(1957; vt Re-Enter Dr Fu Manchu 1957 UK) and Emperor Fu Manchu (1959). The
Wrath of Fu Manchu and Other Stories (coll 1973) assembles various tales.
The Book of Fu Manchu (omni 1929 containing 3 novels; exp to 4 novels 1929
US) features the first volumes of the sequence. Although these and other
novels by SR are primarily occult thrillers, they contain many sf
elements.Apart from this main series, SR wrote several others. The Sumuru
series is about an oriental villainess: Nude in Mink (1950 US; vt Sins of
Sumuru 1950 UK), Sumuru (1951 US; vt Slaves of Sumuru 1952 UK), Virgin in
Flames 1952; vt The Fire Goddess 1952 US), Return of Sumuru (1954 US; vt
Sand and Satin 1955 UK) and Sinister Madonna (1956). The Gaston Max series
comprises The Yellow Claw (1915), The Golden Scorpion (1919), The Day the
World Ended (1930), set in and around a fortress guarded by DEATH RAYS,
and Seven Sins (1943). The Paul Harley series consists of Bat-Wing (1921),
Fire-Tongue (1921) and 11 short stories. The Red Kerry series - Dope
(1919) and Yellow Shadows (1925) - is not sf/fantasy.SR also wrote several

stage plays, including an adaptation from C.J. Cutcliffe HYNE's Captain
Kettle series. Several of his novels have been made into films ( The FACE
OF FU MANCHU ) and the Dr Fu Manchu sequence was adapted by him into a
popular RADIO series.Dr Fu Manchu was widely imitated, notably by Roland
Daniels, Anthony RUD and Nigel Vane, and was a strong influence on the
development of the more recent hero/villain quasi-sf thrillers written by
Lester DENT, Ian FLEMING and many others. Two direct imitations were the
short-lived magazines The MYSTERIOUS WU FANG and DR. YEN SIN. SR's only
book under another name was a supernatural/theological novel, Wulfheim
(1950) as by Michael Furey. [JE]Other works: The Sins of Severac Bablon
(1914); Brood of the Witch Queen (1914 The Premier Magazine; 1918); Tales
of Secret Egypt (coll 1918); The Orchard of Tears (1918); The Quest of the
Sacred Slipper (1913-14 Short Stories as by Hassan of Aleppo; fixup 1919);
The Dream Detective (coll 1920; with 1 story added 1925); The Green Eyes
of Bast (1920); The Haunting of Low Fennel (coll 1920); Tales of Chinatown
(coll 1922); Grey Face (1924); Moon of Madness (1927), not fantasy; She
who Sleeps (1928); Yu'an Hee See Laughs (1932), not fantasy; The Emperor
of America (1929); Tales of East and West (coll 1932 UK; same title,
different stories, coll 1933 US); The Bat Flies Low (1935); White Velvet
(1936), not fantasy; The Golden Scorpion Omnibus (coll 1938); The Sax
Rohmer Omnibus (coll 1938); Salute to Bazarada and Other Stories (coll
1939); The Moon is Red (1954); The Secret of Holm Peel and Other Strange
Stories (coll 1970).About the author: Sax Rohmer: A Bibliography (1963
chap) by Bradford M. DAY; Master of Villainy (1972) by Cay Van Ash and
Elizabeth Sax Rohmer. Van Ash also wrote Ten Years Beyond Baker Street
(1984), a novel in which Fu Manchu meets Sherlock Holmes.See also: CANADA;
GOTHIC SF; PULP MAGAZINES; WEAPONS.
ROKER, A.B.
Samuel BARTON.
ROLANT, RENE
R.L. FANTHORPE.
ROLE-PLAYING GAMES
GAMES AND TOYS.
ROLFE, FREDERICK (WILLIAM)
(1860-1913) UK author and eccentric, known as much for claiming the name
"Frederick, Baron Corvo" as for his writing. The 9 "Reviews of Unwritten
Books" (1903 The Monthly Review) with Sholto Douglas is an early
articulation of the concept of alternate history ( ALTERNATE WORLDS), if
only in a nonfiction format (one of the reviews, for instance, being of
"Machiavelli's Despatches from the South African Campaign").Hubert's
Arthur (written 1908-12; 1935) with H.C.H. Pirie-Gordon as by Prospero and
Caliban, in which King John fails to kill and is overthrown by his nephew
Arthur, is an early alternate-history novel, although its late publication
date precludes any influence on that genre. The Weird of the Wanderer
(1912), again with Pirie-Gordon as by Prospero and Caliban, is a fantasy,
but Hadrian the Seventh (1904), on which FR's reputation as an author
almost solely rests, is a genuine NEAR-FUTURE sf novel, set in 1910.
Dealing with the rise to the Papacy of a frustrated candidate for

priesthood, the novel offers a number of predictions regarding the future
of Europe, including a vision of the Russian Revolution. [GF]About the
author: There are many biographies, including A.J.A. Symons's famous The
Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (1934). More recent, and more
reliable, is Frederick Rolfe: Baron Corvo (1977) by Miriam J. Benkovitz.
ROLLERBALL
Film (1975). United Artists. Dir Norman Jewison, starring James Caan,
John Houseman, Maud Adams, John Beck. Screenplay William Harrison (1933), based on his "Roller Ball Murders" (1973). 129 mins, cut to 125 mins.
Colour.That one man who stands tall and proud can topple a corrupt system
by his example is the moral of this sluggish big-budget movie. In a future
run by corporations, ordinary citizens are (implausibly) kept happy by a
brutal gladiatorial spectator "sport" played on rollerskates and
motorcycles, and, to keep the proletariat in their place, designed as an
allegory of the futility of individual effort. Caan plays the team leader
who proves the bosses wrong by winning, even when they progressively break
all the rules to try to kill him. It has the theme but none of the verve,
or even the convincing violence, of an exploitation movie; the high moral
tone of the script (and the classical music on the sound track) are
ludicrously at odds with the film's fundamental (but incompetent)
voyeurism. [PN]
ROLLOVER
Film (1981). IPC Films/Orion. Dir Alan J. Pakula, starring Jane Fonda,
Kris Kristofferson, Hume Cronyn. Screenplay David Shaber, from a story by
Shaber, Howard Kohn, David Weir. 115 mins. Colour.R has a banker
(Kristofferson) and an oil-company chairman (Fonda) uncovering a
conspiracy in which the Saudi Arabians have, with the help of US banks,
been secretly dumping dollars and buying gold. Threatened with exposure,
the Saudis withdraw all funds from the banks and a world financial
collapse ensues, with apocalyptic consequences. R is an ironic,
diagrammatic thriller in which US individualists - innocent, greedy and
emblematic - are helpless against a powerful establishment (much as in
Pakula's best film, The Parallax View [1974], which has a marginally sf
brain-washing theme). Cold, difficult, sophisticated, anti-capitalist, R
was a commercial flop; it would have done better 8 years later. The
doomsday scenarios of sf, unlike those of the real world, seldom feature
ECONOMICS as the catalyst - probably because most people find
money-manipulation too complex a topic - but R, rather like the financial
thrillers of Paul E. ERDMAN, is a notable exception. [PN]
ROLLS, BRIAN
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
ROMANIA
Romanian sf is over a century old. 1873 marked the appearance of the
novelette "Finis Rumaniae" ["The End of Romania"] by the obscure writer
Al. N. Dariu; two years later came a future UTOPIA, Spiritele anului 3000
["Spirits of the Year 3000"] (1875) by Demetriu G. Ionnescu (the form of
his name used by the statesman Take Ionescu [1858-1922]). The earliest sf
writer proper in Romania was Victor Anestin (1875-1918), whose first novel

was In anul 4000 sau O calatorie la Venus ["In the Year 4000, or A Voyage
to Venus"]; 1914 marked the almost simultaneous appearance of two
"classic" novels of Romanian sf: O tragedie cereasca ["A Sky Tragedy"]
(1914), again by Anestin, and Un roman in Luna ["A Romanian on the Moon"]
(1914) by Henri Stahl (1877-1942). All these belong to the tradition of
the "astronomical" novel, as it was known before WWI.Between the Wars the
range of themes widened, the most notable novels being no longer
"astronomical": examples are Baletul mecanic ["The Clockwork Ballet"]
(1931) by Cezar Petrescu (1892-1961) and Orasele innecate ["The Drowned
Cities"] (1936) by Felix Aderca (1891-1962). There were also some valuable
short stories, including "Groaza" ["Horror"] (1936), "Manechinul lui Igor"
["Igor's Mannequin"] (1938) and "Ochiul cu doua pupile" ["The Two-Pupilled
Eye"] (1939), all by Victor Papilian (1888-1956); a scientific fairy-tale,
"Agerul Pamintului" ["The Deft Giant of the Earth"] (1939) by I.C.
Vissarion (1879-1951); and above all 2 sf novelettes set in India (see
below), by Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), better known in the West for his
studies in comparative religion; he was Professor of the History of
Religion at the University of Chicago 1956-86, and author of fundamental
works in this field, written in French and translated all over the
world.As a writer of fiction, Eliade belonged entirely to Romanian
literature: he became one of the nation's major writers before WWII, while
still living in Romania, and, when abroad afterwards, continued writing
fiction exclusively in Romanian. He wrote both realistic and fantastic
fiction, the latter including some genuine masterpieces: the novels
Domnisoara Christina ["Miss Christina"] (1936) and Sarpele ["The Snake"]
(1937), the novelettes "La tiganci" (1959; trans as " With the Gypsy
Girls"1973 Denver Review) and Pe strada Mantuleasa ["On Mantuleasa
Street"] (1968 France), and many others, including Foret Interdite (1955
France; in original Romanian as Noaptea de Sanziene 1971 France; trans Mac
Linecott Rickette and Mary Park Stevenson as The Forbidden Forest 1978
US), a huge novel in which the search for IMMORTALITY is parallelled to a
myth-saturated history of Romania. 5 of his writings are (somewhat
borderline) sf. From his rich knowledge of Indian culture (he studied at
the University of Calcutta 1928-31), Eliade extrapolated hypotheses drawn
from, for example, Yoga and Tantra in a sciencefictional manner, as in the
title story of Secretul doctorului Honigberger (coll 1940; trans William
Ames Coates as Two Tales of the Occult 1970 US; vt Two Strange Tales
1986); the title story (here trans as "Doctor Honigberger's Secret") is
about time distortion and INVISIBILITY; the volume also contains "Nopti la
Serampore" (1939) (here trans as "Midnight in Serampore"), in which time
reversibility reduces individual lifespans to infinitesimal proportions
compared to the great time-intervals of supra-individuality. The short
story "Un om mare" ["A Big Man"] (written 1945; 1948) is about a giant and
is partly reminiscent of H.G. WELLS's The Food of the Gods (1904); it is
included in Fantastic Tales (coll trans E. Tappe 1969 UK). The last 2 of
his works of sf interest are novelettes written in Paris much later, both
on the theme of MUTANTS: the hero of "Tinerete fara de tinerete . . ."
(written 1976; 1978 Germany), which appears in English as the long title
story of Youth without Youth (coll trans 1989 UK), is a mutant who becomes
young and immortal after a thunderbolt; and in "Les trois Graces" ["The
Three Graces"] (1976) Eliade transforms an idea he found in the Apocrypha

in a cruel story about a rejuvenation treatment given to three old women
suffering from cancer - they become unhappy mutants. A further
English-language collection of Eliade's stories is Tales of the Sacred and
Supernatural (coll trans 1981 US).Postwar Romanian sf can be thought of in
terms of 3 generations of writers. To the first of these (now called "the
old generation") belong Ovidiu Surianu (1918-1977), Mihu Dragomir
(1919-1964), Mircea Serbanescu (1919- ), Vladimir Colin (1921-1991),
Adrian Rogoz (1921- ), I.M. Stefan (1922- ), Victor Kernbach (1923- ),
Sergiu Farcasan (1924- ), Camil Baciu (1926- ), Georgina-Viorica Rogoz
(1927- ), Horia Arama (1930- ), Ion Hobana (1931- ) and many others
including Romulus Barbulescu (1925- ) and George Anania (1941- ), who
collaborated 1959-77 on 6 sf novels and several short stories. This
generation was able to publish in the bimonthly Colectia
'Povestiristiintifico-fantastice' ["The Collection of
'Scientific-Fantastic Stories'"], the longest-lasting Romanian sf review,
with 466 issues 1955-74 (editor-in-chief Adrian Rogoz). During its last
years this review also published the early stories of a number of the then
young writers (now known as "the middle generation"): Miron Scorobete
(1933), Leonida Neamtu (1934-1991), Constantin Cublesan (1939- ), Voicu
Bugariu (1939- ), Gheorghe Sasarman (1941- ), Mircea Oprita (1943- ) and
others. They continued their ascension in the period 1974-82, when the
Romanian literary scene was deprived of any sf periodical. Starting in
1982 the "new wave" of the 1980s emerged, the younger generation of
writers who have succeeded during the past decade in changing the
landscape of Romanian sf. This was a period of new outlets for sf writing,
including Almanah Anticipatia ["Anticipation Almanac"], with 8 annual vols
each over 300pp (editor-in-chief Ioan Eremia Albescu), and some
sporadically appearing magazines and FANZINES, the most regular being from
Timisoara: Helion (editor-in-chief Cornel Secu) and Paradox
(editor-in-chief Viorel Marineasa). Writers of this "young generation"
include Marcel Luca (1946- ), Gheorghe Paun (1950- ), Mihail Gramescu
(1951- ), Constantin Cozmiuc (1952-), Lucian Ionica (1952- ), Leonard
Oprea (1953- ), George Ceausu (1954- ), Cristian Tudor Popescu (1956- ),
Dorin Davideanu (1956- ), Ovidiu Bufnila (1957- ), Dan Merisca
(1957-1991), Lucian Merisca (1958- ), Alexandru Ungureanu (1957- ), Danut
Ungureanu (1958- ), Rodica Bretin (1958- ), Silviu Genescu (1958- ),
Mircea Liviu Goga (1958- ), Stefan Ghidoveanu (1958- ), Ovidiu Pecican
(1959- ), Viorel Pirligras (1959), Bogdan Ficeac (1960- ) and Mihnea
Columbeanu (1960- ).Another writer who, like Eliade, cannot be
accommodated into this generational classification is Ovid S.
Crohmalniceanu (1921- ). He is contemporary with the "old generation", and
as a literary critic has accompanied the whole sf movement since the
1950s. Suddenly this distinguished professor of Romanian literature burst
forth as an sf writer in the 1980s - simultaneously with the turbulent
young writers of the "new wave", yet quite distinct from them and from
FANDOM - with 2 masterly volumes of short stories: Istorii insolite
["Unwonted Stories"] (coll 1980) and Alte istorii insolite ["Other
Unwonted Stories"] (coll 1986).Though, naturally, each of these writers
has a distinctive voice, the generational differences do have an effect.
Ideologically shaped in the hard times of proletcult and "socialist
realism", then of "socialist humanism", most of the "old generation" took

an illusory refuge in the "humanistic credo" cynically imposed by an
inhuman communist dictatorship. Most of the young writers of the "new
wave", however, despite the even harder times of the 1980s, intuitively
accepted the elementary truth that a humanistic sf is an oxymoron. Thus
the older writers are generally more inclined to a hollow, programmatic
optimism: sweetened visions and lyricized epic sf motifs, with antagonisms
avoided and happy endings mandatory. The younger ones are more
misanthropic and sarcastic; sentimental lyricism is mocked, and the full
power of the epic is rediscovered. The result is a smouldering bitterness,
a cruelty of perception, an acknowledged auctorial "ruthlessness" that
recognizes conflict and does not flinch from unhappy endings.On the other
hand, there is a national context to be considered as well as the
international nature of sf itself, and this to a degree binds all the
generations. Romanian sf writers - most of them, at least - are seductive
storytellers, for palatable storytelling has always been praised in
Romanian literature. Thus the spirit of "finesse" conflicts with the
spirit of geometry, and extrapolation tends to be of only a loose logical
rigour (although not so with Eliade and Crohmalniceanu). Romanian sf has a
native propensity for analogy rather than extrapolation, soft sf rather
than hard, psychology rather than ontology; the thrill of science itself,
the true SENSE OF WONDER, is unusual in Romanian sf, though the sense of
HUMOUR is all too common, with parody sometimes ebulliently outrunning its
rather negligible objects.In place of thorough extrapolation is a rich
harvest of allegories, parables and dystopian visions, most of them
antitotalitarian. However, the best stories-including "Pianul preparat"
["The Prepared Piano"] (1966; rev 1974) by Horia Arama, "Evadarea lui
Algernon" ["Algernon's Escape"] (1978) by Gheorghe Sasarman, "Merele
negre" ["Black Apples"] (1981) by Mihail Gramescu, "Domenii interzise"
["Forbidden Domains"] (1984) by Leonard Oprea, "Omohom" (1987) by Cristian
Tudor Popescu and "Deratizare" (1985) by Lucian Merisca - are not mere
political pamphlets or moral essays but genuine stories, though equivocal
and allusive. The habit of double-thinking and half-speaking has deep
roots in history, and was exacerbated by the necessity of deceiving the
obtuse but draconian censorship imposed by the Communist Party and the
Romanian Secret Police. No matter how heart-relieving such Aesopian
stories may be, they limit their writers (and readers) to a minor
aesthetic. Now, with the risks diminished, Romanian writers - not only of
sf - realize they have forgotten how to express themselves directly, if
they have ever known; the Aesopian mode has become second nature,
difficult to eliminate if they are to face the major aesthetic challenge
of their art. [CR] Further reading: "Brief History of Romanian SF" by
Florin Manolescu, in Romanian Review #5 (1988); "Milestones in Postwar
Romanian Science Fiction" by Cornel ROBU in Foundation #49 (Summer 1990);
"About the Stories and their Authors" in Timpul este umbra noastra ["Time
is our Shadow"] (anth 1991) ed Robu; "Romanian 'Science Fantasy' in the
Cold War Era" by Elaine Kleiner, in Science-Fiction Studies, Mar 1992.
More information is available in Romanian: Virsta de aur a anticipatiei
romanesti ["The Golden Age of Romanian Anticipation"] (anth 1969) ed Ion
Hobana; Literatura S.F. ["Sf Literature"] (1980) by Florin Manolescu;
Anticipatia romaneasca ["The Romanian Anticipation"] (1993) by Mircea
Oprita.

ROMANO, DEANE (LOUIS)
(1927- ) US novelist and screenwriter, active in the latter capacity with
scripts like "Angels' Flight" (1962). Some of his work has dealt with
current investigations into parapsychology ( PSI POWERS), and his
filmscript on this subject was novelized by Louis CHARBONNEAU as The
Sensitives * (1968). DR's own sf novel, Flight from Time One (1972), also
treated parapsychology, this time in the didactic tale of an elite squad
of "astralnauts" whose members take on missions in their astral bodies.
[JC]See also: ESCHATOLOGY.
ROME, ALGER
Collaborative pseudonym used by Jerome BIXBY and Algis BUDRYS, on
"Underestimation" (1953). [PN]
ROME, DAVID
Pseudonym used by immigrant Australian tv writer David Boutland (1938- )
for his sf, the first example being "Time of Arrival" in Apr 1961 for NW,
where many others of DR's 25 or so stories appeared over the next decade.
His only sf book, Squat (1965), subtitled "Sexual Adventures on Other
Planets", is not his best work. [PN]See also: GENERATION STARSHIPS.
ROMERO, GEORGE A.
(1940- ) US film-maker. A maverick working out of Pittsburgh rather than
Hollywood, GAR changed the face of the HORROR-movie genre with NIGHT OF
THE LIVING DEAD (1968), an apocalyptic nightmare - its theme derived from
Richard MATHESON's I Am Legend (1954) - in which the dead inexplicably
return to eat the living. Having tackled a surprisingly wide variety of
Vietnam-era social issues in this debut, GAR made a pair of "serious"
films - There's Always Vanilla (1972; vt The Affair) and the
witchcraft-themed Jack's Wife (1973; vt Hungry Wives; vt Season of the
Witch) - before returning to the former panicked mood in The CRAZIES
(1973; vt Code Name Trixie), in which a biological weapon is spilled in
Pennsylvania and causes an epidemic of insanity. After filler work for tv
- mainly profiles of sports personalities - GAR formed Laurel
Entertainment in partnership with Richard Rubinstein, and relaunched his
career with Martin (1978), an unorthodox, apparently non-supernatural
vampire picture. He then made 2 impressive and rigorous sequels to Night
of the Living Dead: DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978; vt Zombies) and DAY OF THE
DEAD (1985). Throughout the trilogy, which is marked as sf not so much by
its (conflicting) "explanations" for the crisis as by the concentration on
the social, political and psychological outcome of the devastation of
society, GAR has powerfully mingled black SATIRE with shock effects.
Spin-offs have included: an anthology, The Book of the Dead (anth 1989) ed
John Skipp and Craig Spector; a remake in 1990 ( NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD)
dir special-effects man Tom Savini, scripted and exec-produced GAR; and a
satire, Return of the Living Dead (1985), from a story by John Russo,
coscripter of the original film, and dir Dan O'Bannon.Outside the trilogy,
GAR has dir: Knightriders (1981), a personal film about alternative
lifestyles; Creepshow (1982), an EC COMICS-style anthology film written by
Stephen KING; MONKEY SHINES (1988, vt Monkey Shines: An Experiment in
Terror), an understated and impressive movie based on Michael STEWART's

Monkey Shines (1983), about an intelligent experimental monkey; one half
of Two Evil Eyes (1990), which GAR adapted from Edgar Allan POE's "The
Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"; and The Dark Half (1991), a film
version of the 1989 Stephen King novel, which was only released two years
later. In addition, GAR has scripted episodes of the tv series Tales from
the Darkside (1984-9) and the films Creepshow 2 (1987) and Tales from The
Darkside: The Movie (1990). GAR left the Laurel Entertainment partnership
with Rubinstein in the early 1990s, leaving Rubinstein in control. [KN]See
also: CINEMA; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; MONSTER MOVIES; SUPERNATURAL
CREATURES.
ROMILUS, ARN
A CURTIS WARREN house name used by Brian HOLLOWAY for 1 novel and Dennis
HUGHES for 2. [JC]
RONALD, BRUCE W(ALTON)
(1931- ) US writer, advertising man and actor. His Our Man in Space (1965
dos) is a little reminiscent of Robert A. HEINLEIN's Double Star (1956) in
its story of an actor unhappily spying on behalf of Earth. With John JAKES
and Claire Strauch he wrote the musical comedy Dracula, Baby (1970); Jakes
played Van Helsing in the premiere in Ohio. [PN]
RONASZEGI, MIKLOS
[r] HUNGARY.
ROSCOE, THEODORE
(1906-1992) US writer whose I'll Grind Their Bones (1936) is a
locked-room mystery set in a future Europe about to go to war. Of fairly
moderate genre interest are the Thibaut Corday stories, featuring the
eponymous PULP hero in exotic adventures; they are assembled in The
Wonderful Lips of Thibong Linh [and] The Bearded Slayer (coll c. 1939 UK),
Monkey See, Monkey Do [and] Terror Stalks the Mangroves (coll c. 1939 UK),
the second story being by Eustace L. Adams, and The Wonderful Lips of
Thibong Linh (coll 1981), the latter title assembling earlier material.
[JC]Other Works: A Grave Must be Deep (1989) and Z is for Zombie (1989),
both titles reprints of pulp stories.
ROSE, F(REDERICK) HORACE (VINCENT)
(1876-? ) South African author, a periodic UK resident, whose The
Maniac's Dream: A Novel of the Atomic Bomb (1946) was one of the first
post-Hiroshima future- WAR novels to respond to the threat of nuclear
HOLOCAUST, though in this case without much grounding in scientific
realities. An earlier work, The Night of the World (1944), centres on a
timeslip in an oasis peopled by figures from other ages. [JE/JC]Other
works: Bride of the Kalahari (1940); Pharoah's [sic] Crown (1943).See
also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.
ROSE, LAURENCE F.
John Russell FEARN.
ROSE, MARK
(1939- ) US academic and writer whose assistance in preparing New Maps of
Hell (1960 US) was acknowledged by its author, Kingsley AMIS. An
apocalyptic post- HOLOCAUST short story, "We Would See a Sign" in Spectrum

3 (anth 1963) ed Amis and Robert CONQUEST, did not lead to a fiction
career, and MR remains best known in the sf field for Alien Encounters:
Anatomy of Science Fiction (1981) which, taking off from the DEFINITION OF
SF as a form of romance in Anatomy of Criticism (1957 US) by Northrop Frye
(1912-1991), redeploys the 19th-century confrontation between Man and
Nature to define sf as expressing a conflict between the human and the
nonhuman. Within the terms of this definition, which MR uses as a
conceptual (and inevitably partial) illumination of the field, he couches
some of the most elegantly literate practical criticism of selected texts
the genre has yet seen. The anthologies Science Fiction: A Collection of
Critical Essays (anth 1976) and Bridges to Science Fiction (anth 1980)
with George R. Guffey and George Edgar SLUSSER contain, perhaps
inevitably, less striking material. [JC]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL
WORKS ABOUT SF.
ROSENBERG, JOEL
(1954- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Like the Gentle Rains"
for IASFM in 1982, but who has clearly felt more comfortable with tales of
novel length. His first book, The Sleeping Dragon (1983), a
SWORD-AND-SORCERY fantasy, begins the RECURSIVE Guardians of the Flame
sequence, continued with The Sword in the Chain (1984) and The Silver
Crown (1985) - these 3 assembled as Guardians of the Flame: The Warriors
(omni 1985) - plus The Heir Apparent (1987) and The Warrior Lives (1989) these 2 assembled as Guardians of the Flame: The Heroes (omni 1989) - plus
The Road to Ehvenor (1991). Though this sequence, along with D'Shai (1991)
and Hour of the Octopus (1994) in the projected D'Shai fantasy series,
makes up the bulk of his production to date, it could be argued that JR's
sf, beginning with Ties of Blood and Silver (1984), is central to his
work. This sf adventure and Emile and the Dutchman (fixup 1986) belong
very loosely to the Metzada sequence, which spans the Galaxy with anarchic
verve. More controversially, Not for Glory (fixup 1988) and its sequel
Hero (1990) focus directly upon the Jewish planet of Metzada, from which
tough mercenaries (who rather resemble Gordon R. DICKSON's Dorsai) issue
forth into combat; but these Israeli-like soldiers, and the Germans and
French and Dutch who have rigidly maintained their own "racial"
characteristics for centuries on their own planets, seem strangely
stereotyped. It will be interesting to see what JR can do to sophisticate
his ongoing galaxy. [JC]
ROSENBLUM, MARY
(1952- ) US medical researcher and writer who began publishing sf with
"For a Price" for IASFM in 1990, and whose first 3 novels explore various
reaches of the contemporary sf landscape, though her favoured venue
remains the American West. The Drylands (1993), which is derived from
several stories but does not duplicate earlier material, posits a NEAR
FUTURE America quite strictly continuous with the present day: water in
the North-West states has become a burning issue; agribusinesses have
further impoverished rural areas; it is only with the introduction of a
protagonist with PSI POWERS that MR slips into conventional genre tactics.
Chimera (1993) somewhat less engagingly deals with the subject of VIRTUAL
REALITY, via a not-unusual mystery couched in noir terms and a Net

Conspiracy; her depiction of the actual inscapes of Virtual Reality are,
on the other hand, powerfully evocative. The Stone Garden (1994) features
a sculptor who encodes aesthetically moving emotional patterns into
mysterious stones found in the asteroid belt; but the book itself once
again depends on some precarious mystery-story plotting. MR's strengths
are in the vigorous realism of her rendering of human relationships as
they evolve under the stresses of the new worlds to come. [JC]
ROSHWALD, MORDECAI (MARCELI)
(1921- ) Polish-born Israeli writer and academic, variously resident also
in the USA and the UK, whose sf novels Level 7 (1959 US) and A Small
Armageddon (1962 UK) were both coloured by political concern about our
nuclear civilization. In the first and better known tale, a military
officer describes his feelings and duties from extremely deep within a
great bomb shelter as the world is gradually demolished above him. In the
second the crew of a nuclear submarine threatens to detonate its cargo
unless its demands - for sex and money - are met, with farcically
exaggerated results. The awful-warning content of MR's novels has perhaps
paled with the years, but only because of humanity's survival - pro tem.
[JC]See also: END OF THE WORLD; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; ISRAEL.
ROSNY aine, J.H.
Pseudonym of French-speaking Belgian writer Joseph-Henri Boex
(1856-1940). His younger brother Justin shared the pseudonym J.H. Rosny
with him 1893-1907, and some works published during that period are
collaborative. Joseph-Henri used the name for solo writings before 1893,
and after 1907 it was divided, Joseph-Henri taking the suffix "aine" and
Justin "jeune". The elder Rosny is an important figure in the development
of French speculative fiction, although only one of his novels, Le felin
geant (1918 France; trans The Hon. Lady Whitehead as The Giant Cat 1924
US; vt Quest of the Dawn Man 1964 US) was translated into English during
his lifetime. Damon KNIGHT translated 2 of his most important short
stories: "Les xipehuz" (1887; trans as "The Shapes" in One Hundred Years
of Science Fiction, anth 1968), in which prehistoric humans encounter
inorganic ALIENS, and the PARALLEL-WORLDS story "Un autre monde" (1895;
trans as "Another World" in A Century of Science Fiction, anth 1962). The
former is also included, along with the fine END-OF-THE-WORLD story "La
mort de la terre" (1910), in The Xipehuz and The Death of the Earth (coll
trans George Edgar SLUSSER 1978). The most famous of JHR's many
prehistoric fantasies, La Guerre du Feu (1909 France; cut trans Harold
Talbott as The Quest for Fire: A Novel of Prehistoric Times 1967 US), was
filmed as QUEST FOR FIRE (1981). A "translation" of L'etonnant voyage de
Hareton Ironcastle ["The Astonishing Journey of Hareton Ironcastle"] (1922
France) was produced by Philip Jose FARMER as Ironcastle (1976), but so
drastically modified that it cannot be regarded as the same work. JHR's
prehistoric romances - which include Vamireh (1892), Eyrimah (1893) and
Helgvor du fleuve bleu ["Helgvor of the Blue River"] (1930) as well as
above-mentioned titles - were reissued in France in 1990 by Editions
Robert Laffont in a huge omnibus volume; many of his short sf and fantasy
stories, plus his semi-mystical speculative essay on creation and
EVOLUTION, La legende sceptique ["The Sceptical Legend"] (1889), and his

short novel Les navigateurs de l'infini ["Navigators of Infinity"] (1925)
are in a Marabout collection titled Recits de science-fiction ["Works of
Science Fiction"] (coll 1975 Belgium). The story begun in Les navigateurs
de l'infini is continued in the posthumous Les astronautes (1960 France).
JHR's other sf works include La grande enigme ["The Great Enigma"] (1920
France) and Les compagnons de l'univers ["Companions of the Universe"]
(1934), another lyrical meditation in the vein of La legende sceptique.
[BS]About the author: "The Sf of J.H. Rosny the Elder" by J.P. Vernier,
Science-Fiction Studies vol 2 #2 (July 1975).See also: ANTHROPOLOGY;
BENELUX; BIOLOGY; COSMOLOGY; FRANCE; HISTORY OF SF; LIFE ON OTHER
WORLDS;
ORIGIN OF MAN; PERCEPTION; RELIGION.
ROSS, BERNARD L.
Ken FOLLETT.
ROSS, DALLAS
[s] Mack REYNOLDS.
ROSS, DAVID D.
(1949?- ) US writer who began publishing sf with his Dreamers of the Day
sequence - The Argus Gambit (1989) and The Eighth Rank (1991) - which
complicatedly traces the political and cultural consequences of a
21st-century ecological disaster. The seriousness with which he undertakes
the task of underlining the nature of the problems faced by humanity goes
some way to assuage the sense that DDR has not fully mastered the unstable
relationship between generic plotting and didactic thematic material. [JC]
ROSS, JAMES
Hugh DARRINGTON.
ROSS, JOSEPH
Working name of US editor Joseph Wrzos (1929- ). He acted as Managing
Editor of AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC 1965-7 while continuing to teach
high-school English fulltime in New Jersey. He ed The Best of Amazing
(anth 1967). [PN]
ROSS, MALCOLM (HARRISON)
(1895-1965) US writer and reporter, the protagonist of whose sf novel,
The Man who Lived Backward (1950), lives from 1940 to 1865, dying just
after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, which he is therefore unable
to prevent. [JC]
ROSS, RAYMOND J.
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
ROSS, [Sir] RONALD
[r] MEDICINE.
ROSSITER, OSCAR
Pseudonym of US physician and writer Vernon H. Skeels (1918- ), who
received his MD in 1949 and whose first sf novel, Tetrasomy Two (1974), is
set in a hospital where a seemingly helpless human vegetable turns out to
be an amoral SUPERMAN preparing to eliminate the Solar System in order to

accumulate the energy necessary to tour the Galaxy. The Australian film
Patrick (1978) dir Richard Franklin is based on a remarkably similar
notion. [JC]See also: INTELLIGENCE; PSI POWERS.
ROSSOW, WILLIAM B.
[r] Marjorie Bradley KELLOGG.
ROSZAK, THEODORE
(1933- ) US author of several works of cultural criticism who began
writing sf with Bugs (1981), in which a frightened child telepath causes
bugs to infiltrate computer systems and thereafter to eat people. A second
novel, Dreamwatcher (1985), concerning PSI POWERS, blends fantasy and sf,
as does the remarkable Flicker (1991) which, in a manner evocative of
Steve ERICKSON's blackly surreal version of film America, describes secret
horrors contained subliminally in 1920s and 1930s films made by a
mysterious forgotten German director, horrors which themselves reveal a
Secret History of the World. [JC]
ROTH, PHILIP (MILTON)
(1933- ) US writer who remains best known for Portnoy's Complaint (1969),
a novel whose sophisticated and often comic treatment of sexual obsessions
is fantastically furthered ( FABULATION) in The Breast (1972), the tale of
the sudden and painful transformation of a man into a female breast; the
psychosexual implications of the metaphor are clear, as is the debt to
Franz KAFKA. The descent to Hell of "Trick E. Dixon" in Our Gang (1971) is
arousing. [JC]
ROTHMAN, CHUCK
Working name of US writer Charles Warren Rothman (1952- ), who began
publishing sf with "The Munij Deserters" for IASFM in 1982 and whose sf
novel, Staroamer's Fate (1986), has a precognitive protagonist doomed by
her talent to travel from world to world, shaping events as she goes. With
his wife, Susan Noe Rothman, CR serves as joint secretary/treasurer of the
SCIENCE FICTION POETRY ASSOCIATION. [JC]
ROTHMAN, MILTON A.
[r] Tony ROTHMAN.
ROTHMAN, TONY
(1953- ) US writer whose sf novel, The World is Round (1978), though
suffering from excessive length and a confusingly overcomplicated story,
creates a Big-Planet venue ( Jack VANCE) of some interest; he has also
written some books popularizing physics, and several of the stories about
the USSR assembled in Censored Tales (coll 1989 UK) are absurdist
FABULATIONS. TR's father, Milton A. Rothman (1919- ), a physicist, also
wrote some sf stories, as by Lee Gregor. [JC]See also: JUPITER.
ROTSLER, WILLIAM
(1926- ) US writer and artist who received a 1975 HUGO for his fan art;
his cartoons may be remembered as much as his fiction. He began publishing
sf with "Ship Me Tomorrow" for Gal in 1970 and, although he initially kept
his own name for autonomous work - using the pseudonym John Ryder Hall and
the BALLANTINE house name William ARROW for novelizations - all his novels
since about 1980 have been TIES of one sort or another. His first novel,

Patron of the Arts (1974), remains his best received; incorporating his
best known and most praised short story, "Patron of the Arts" (1972), it
describes in Wagnerian terms an all-encompassing artform, using holograms
and other sf devices ( ARTS), but vitiates some of its speculative
interest through a contrived action plot. WR's second novel, To the Land
of the Electric Angel (1976), shares a similar setting - what seems to be
an extrapolation of modern southern California - in a tale involving
CRYONICS, the reawakening of the hero in a DYSTOPIAN future, gladiatorial
contests and much more. The Zandra series - Zandra (1978) and The Hidden
Worlds of Zandra (1983) - shares the same background, while The Far
Frontier (1980) is set in nearby space. These later books are
significantly less accomplished than their predecessors, and their large
casts of routinely differentiated characters generate the impression that
their author was attempting to work in a bestseller idiom dangerous to the
creative mind. With Gregory BENFORD (whom see for details) WR contributed
Shiva Descending (1980) to the the asteroid- DISASTER subgenre. [JC]Other
works: Iron Man: And Call my Killer . . . Modok * (1979); Dr Strange:
Nightmare * (1979); 2 Mr Merlin tv ties, Mr Merlin, Episode 1 * (1981) and
Mr Merlin, Episode 2 * (1981); Star Trek II: Short Stories * (coll 1982);
Blackhawk * (1982); Star Trek II: Biographies * (coll 1983); Star Trek II:
Distress Call * (1983); Star Trek III: The Vulcan Treasure * (1984); Star
Trek III Short Stories * (coll 1984); Goonies: Cavern of Horror * (1985),
a film tie.As John Ryder Hall: Futureworld * (1976); Sinbad and the Eye of
the Tiger * (1977).As William Arrow: #1 and #3 of the Return to the Planet
of the Apes books, based not on the films but on the later animated tv
series: Visions from Nowhere * (1976) and Man, the Hunted Animal * (1976).
ROTTENSTEINER, FRANZ
(1942- ) Austrian sf critic, editor and literary agent; he has a PhD from
the University of Vienna. He has edited the SF of the World series for
Insel Verlag, the Fantastic Novels series for Paul Zsolnay Verlag, and the
Fantastic Library series - now over 250 vols - for Suhrkamp Verlag. He
writes in English as well as in German, his critical articles having
appeared in SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES and elsewhere. He is particularly well
known for his spirited promotion of the work of Stanislaw LEM, for whom he
is literary agent, and for the contempt he has often expressed for much
GENRE SF. His criticism is intelligent, polemical and left-wing, and best
expressed in fairly academic formats; his popular illustrated history of
sf, The Science Fiction Book (1975), is generally felt to be sketchy. In
the same vein, but perhaps better, is The Fantasy Book: The Ghostly, the
Gothic, the Magical, the Unreal (1978). In English he is also known for
his collection of European sf, View from Another Shore (anth 1973); for
his collection of "literary" fantasies by Jorge Luis BORGES and others,
The Slaying of the Dragon: Modern Tales of the Playful Imagination (anth
1984); and for Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction (coll 1984) by
Lem, ed and introduced by FR. Many of his critical writings in German
appear in his own high-quality FANZINE, QUARBER MERKUR, from which the
book Quarber Merkur (anth 1979) was collected. 2 books of essays ed FR are
Uber H.P. Lovecraft ["On H.P. Lovecraft"] (anth 1984), and Die dunkle
Seite der Wirklichkeit ["The Dark Side of Reality"] (anth 1987). Since
1989 he has been editing a serial guide in loose-leaf form in binders,

1250pp to Feb 1991: "Werkfuhrer durch die utopisch-phantastiche Literatur"
["Work Guide to Utopian and Fantastic Literature"].In German he has ed
many anthologies of stories and essays about sf, including: Die Ratte im
Labyrinth ["Rats in the Maze"] (anth 1971); the Polaris series, Polaris 1
(anth 1973), #2 (anth 1974), a special Soviet sf issue, #3 (anth 1975), #4
(anth 1978), a French sf issue, #5 (anth 1981), #6 (anth 1982), a Herbert
W. FRANKE issue, #7 (anth 1983), #8 (anth 1985), #9 (anth 1985), old
German sf, and #10 (anth 1986), a STRUGATSKI issue; Phantastiche Traume
["Fantastic Dreams"] (anth 1983); Phantastiche Welten ["Fantastic Worlds"]
(anth 1984); Phantastiche Aussichten ["Fantastic Sights"] (anth 1985);
Phantastiche Zeiten ["Fantastic Times"] (anth 1986); Lovecraft Lesebuch
["Lovecraft Reader"] (anth 1987); Seltsame Labyrinthe ["Strange
Labyrinths"] (anth 1987); Der Eingang ins Paradies ["The Door into
Paradise"] (anth 1988); Arche Noah ["Noah's Ark"] (anth 1989); Die Sirene
["The Siren"] (anth 1990); Phantastiche Begegnungen ["Fantastic
Encounters"] (anth 1990). [PN]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS
ABOUT SF; GERMANY.
ROUCH, JAMES
(? - ) UK author of the Zone sequence of sf adventures set during WWIII,
waged in Germany: The Zone #1: Hard Target (1980), #2: Blind Fire (1980),
#3: Hunter Killer (1981), #4: Sky Strike (1981), #5: Overkill (1982), #6:
Plague Bomb (1986), #7: Killing Ground (1988), #8: Civilian Slaughter
(1989) and #9: Body Count (1990). [JC]
ROUSSEAU, VICTOR
Working name of UK-born writer Avigdor Rousseau Emanuel (1879-1960), who
also used the pseudonym H.M. Egbert on his sf, though not exclusively, and
V.R. Emanuel for other work; born of a Jewish father and a French
mother-as Sam MOSKOWITZ writes in Under the Moons of Mars (anth 1970) - he
moved to the USA some time during WWI. After a non-genre novel, Derwent's
Horse (1901), VR began writing sf in PULP MAGAZINES before WWI, stopping
in 1941; much material was never collected, including the Surgeon of Souls
series of 11 fantasy stories in Weird Tales (1926-7). In his first sf
novel, The Sea Demons (1916 All-Story Weekly as V. Rousseau; 1924 UK) as
by H.M. Egbert, invisible hive-like sea creatures threaten humanity (
INVISIBILITY), but a submarine finds and destroys the queen. The Messiah
of the Cylinder (1917; vt The Apostle of the Cylinder 1918 UK), VR's best
known work and told with his usual flamboyance and narrative verve,
directly imitates the form of H.G. WELLS's When the Sleeper Wakes (1899),
and harshly criticizes the atheistic world-state UTOPIA there depicted; it
was seen, consequently, as a melodramatic critique of Wellsian socialism,
though Wells's novel was, in fact, deeply ambiguous about the world it
described, serving more as a pretext for VR's book than as an argument to
be refuted. In VR's novel a brave protagonist destroys the future state
into which he has been awoken from SUSPENDED ANIMATION, and restores
aristocracy to the land. Draught of Eternity (1918 All-Story Weekly as V.
Rousseau; 1924 UK) as by Egbert is a love story set in a ruined New York.
Eric of the Strong Heart (1925 UK) is a lost-race tale ( LOST WORLDS).
Perhaps mainly because of his heated style, VR remains of some interest.
[JC]Other works: My Lady of the Nile (1923 UK) as by Egbert; Mrs Aladdin

(1925 UK).About the author: "H.G. Wells and Victor Rousseau Emanuel" by
Richard D. MULLEN in EXTRAPOLATION, Vol 8 #2 (1967).See also: ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION; HISTORY OF SF; INTELLIGENCE; MESSIAHS; POLITICS.
ROWCROFT, CHARLES
(?1795-1856) UK writer perhaps best known for his Australian adventure
fiction assembled in Tales of the Colonies (coll 1843) and its successors.
In his sf novel, The Triumph of Woman: A Christmas Story (1848), an
inhabitant of sexless Neptune visits a German, with whose daughter he
falls in love amid erudite discussions of Neptunian science. The plot then
devolves into a satirical travelogue. [JC]
ROWENA
Professional name of US illustrator Rowena Morrill (1944- ); she and
Victoria Poyser are among the few women who have had an impact on
sf/fantasy art. Her ILLUSTRATION has appeared since the mid-1970s,
primarily on paperback covers, more often FANTASY than sf; it is largely
fantastical and often symbolic, but quite varied in style and subject
matter. She has done several covers for novels by Piers ANTHONY. Her
technique is polished and sometimes fastidiously detailed, though her
human figures (often based on photographs) perhaps conform too much to a
commercially acceptable prettiness, and some of her painting in the
HEROIC-FANTASY vein of Boris VALLEJO has been accused of being "degrading
to women". Unusually, she uses a combination of acrylics and oils rather
than one or the other, and finishes with a high-gloss glaze. The Fantastic
Art of Rowena (1983) has colour reproductions of 26 of her pieces. She has
had a number of HUGO nominations. [PN/JG]
ROWLAND, DONALD S(YDNEY)
(1928- ) UK author of a very large number of pseudonymous works,
relatively few of them sf; most were for ROBERT HALE LIMITED. For that
firm (or for the highly similar house of Gresham) his SPACE OPERAS under
his own name are Despot in Space (1973), Master of Space (1974), Space
Venturer (1976) and Nightmare Planet (1976). [JC]As Fenton Brockley: Star
Quest (1974).As Roger Carlton: Beyond Tomorrow (1975), Star Arrow
(1975).As Graham Garner: Space Probe (1974), Starfall Muta (1975), Rifts
of Time (1976).As Alex Random: Star Cluster Seven (1974), Dark
Constellation (1975), Cradle of Stars (1975).As Roland Starr: The Omina
sequence, being Operation Omina (1973), Omina Uncharted (1974), Time
Factor (1975), Return from Omina (1976).As Mark Suffling: Project Oceanus
(1975), Space Crusader (1975).
ROWLEY, CHRISTOPHER (B.)
(1948- ) UK-born US writer who has from the first specialized in
efficiently written adventure-sf novels with a strong military component,
beginning with the War for Eternity sequence - The War for Eternity
(1983), The Black Ship (1985), The Founder (1989) and To a Highland Nation
(1994) - which concentrates on warfare within our Solar System. The Vang
sequence - Starhammer (1986), The Vang: The Military Form (1988) and The
Vang: The Battlemaster (1990) - moves into deeper space and features a
deadly ALIEN lifeform. In Golden Sunlands (1987) the humans on a colony
planet are kidnapped to serve as cannon fodder in an artificial universe,

but soon show their spunk. With George Snow (anon) he wrote the STAR WARS
text Return of the Jedi * (1983 chap). [JC]Other works: The Bazil
Broketail fantasy sequence comprising Bazil Broketail (1992), A Sword for
a Dragon (1993) and Dragons of War (1994).
ROWLOT LTD.
AD ASTRA.
ROY, ARCHIE
Working name of Scottish professor of astronomy Archibald Edmiston Roy
(1924- ), whose unremarkable sf adventures, all making use of PARALLEL
WORLDS, include Deadlight (1968), The Curtained Sleep (1969) and All Evil
Shed Away (1970). Sable Night (1973), The Dark Host (1976) and Devil in
the Darkness (1978) are horror. [JC]
ROYAL, BRIAN JAMES
Gardner F. FOX.
ROYAL PUBLICATIONS
INFINITY SCIENCE FICTION; SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES.
ROYCE, E.R.
Dennis HUGHES.
RUBEN, WILLIAM S.
(? - ) US writer known only for Weightless in Gaza (1970 as Fred Shannon;
exp vt Dionysus: The Ultimate Experiment 1977), in which NASA conducts sex
experiments in space. [JC]
RUBINSTEIN, GILLIAN
(1942- ) Australian writer of sf for adolescents ( CHILDREN'S SF). Space
Demons (1986) and its sequel, Skymaze (1989), deal with AI in interactive
COMPUTER games ( GAMES AND TOYS) in which players enter a VIRTUAL REALITY.
Space Demons: The Play * (1990) was an adaptation for the THEATRE by
Richard Tulloch. Beyond the Labyrinth (1988) shows teenagers developing a
relationship with an ALIEN anthropologist;Galax-Arena (1992) continues the
theme in a story whose human protagonists are captured by aliens. GR uses
sf devices as metaphors for exploring and resolving adolescents' painful
personal relationships. At Ardilla (1991), not sf, is a rite-of-passage
book about a growing girl. GR has edited After Dark (anth 1988) and Before
Dawn (anth 1988). Her books for much younger children are Melanie and the
Night Animal (1988), Answers to Brut (1988), Flashback: The Amazing
Adventures of a Film Horse (1990) and Dog In, Cat Out (1991), the last
being with illustrator Ann James. [JW]See also: AUSTRALIA.
RUCKER, RUDY
Working name of US writer, mathematician and computer programmer Rudolf
von Bitter Rucker (1946- ), who has advanced degrees in MATHEMATICS from
Rutgers University. Like many sf writers, he began very early to produce
stories, but unlike most who became successful he had difficulty placing
his work, in which mathematical concepts and diagrams tended to generate
both plot and venue, making arduous demands upon his readers. "The
Miracle", his first-published story, appeared in The Pegasus, an amateur
magazine, in 1962; "Faraway Eyes", the second to reach print, appeared in

ASF in 1980. Many of the stories assembled in The 57th Franz Kafka (col
1983) - which, along with RR's early poetry, later stories and nonfiction
pieces, were further assembled in Transreal! (coll 1991) - never appeared
in magazine form. It is, perhaps, no wonder. Any attempt to describe RR
convincingly as a CYBERPUNK writer must founder on a simple distinction.
Cyberpunk writers tended to describe the experience of living in a dense
and desolate NEAR FUTURE in a CYBERSPACE which served as their career-goal
and nirvana, but which they had no need to understand. For RR, on the
other hand, the experience of living in a game-like world was much less
important than the exercise of understanding its nature. The roots of his
fiction lie not in GENRE SF or the film noir that clearly inspired much
cyberpunk, but in the profound mathematical games of Lewis CARROLL, or of
Edwin A. ABBOTT, the author of Flatland (1884), or of C.H. HINTON, author
of Scientific Romances (colls 1886 and 1902), whose Speculations on the
Fourth Dimension: Selected Writings of Charles H. Hinton (coll 1980) RR
edited ( DIMENSIONS).The abstraction of RR's work cannot be denied, nor
the daunting assertiveness of his adventuring mind. At the same time, his
novels and stories are told with comic bravura - his work has been
compared to that of the early Robert SHECKLEY - and a strange crystalline
exuberance that makes any page of his easily identifiable. Moreover, his
protagonists - even the sexually ravaged first-person narrators of several
texts, sometimes named Bitter, who must in part be autobiographical - are
beguilingly raunchy, vigorous and zany. For instance, the posthumous
protagonist of his first novel to reach book form, White Light, or What is
Cantor's Continuum Problem? (1980), displays an undeniable glee as he
journeys through transreal spacetimes of crippling complexity. The
thematic sequels to this novel, The Sex Sphere (1983) and The Secret of
Life (1985), similarly combine HUMOUR and the chill of intellection as
further worlds derived from higher mathematics take prickly shape. RR's
first-written novel, Spacetime Donuts (1978-9 Unearth; full text 1981),
provides a mockingly simplistic vision of a DYSTOPIAN near future as well
as his first extended presentation of COMPUTERS, the second dominant
concern in his work as a whole. This concern pervades his ROBOT series which might be called the Ware books - comprising SOFTWARE (1982), which
won the first PHILIP K. DICK AWARD, and Wetware (1988), which shared the
same award in 1988, with at least one further volume projected; the first
two have meanwhile been assembled as Live Robots (omni 1994). In these
books a forbidding competence in the field of AI is lightened by a style
occasionally reminiscent of John T. SLADEK. RR's other novels include
Master of Space and Time (1984), very similar in tone to The Sex Sphere,
and with autobiographical sequences deriving from the earlier-written
nonfiction All the Visions: A Novel of the Sixties (1990 dos); the
RECURSIVE The Hollow Earth (1990), an orthodox ALTERNATE-WORLD tale set in
the 19th century, in which an inner world ( HOLLOW EARTH) can be entered
from the South Pole, which is what Edgar Allan POE (who is treated with a
remarkable lack of gaucheness) and the young protagonist eventually do;
and The Hacker and the Ants (1994), a tale couched in thriller mode, and
involving AIs and viral ants.In addition to several technical works of
nonfiction, RR edited Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder (anth 1987)
and Semiotext(e) (anth 1988) with Peter Lambourn Wilson and Robert Anton
WILSON. He was reported as of 1991 to be involved in writing

VIRTUAL-REALITY - which he preferred to call cyberspace-computer software.
[JC]Other works: Light Fuse and Get Away (coll 1983 chap),
poetry.Nonfiction: Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension (1977);
Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite (1982);
The 4th Dimension: Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality (1984).Computer
Software: CA Lab: Rudy Rucker's Cellular Automata Laboratory (1989); James
Gleick's Chaos: The Software (1990).See also: BLACK HOLES; CYBERNETICS;
ESCHATOLOGY; Marc LAIDLAW; Stephen LEIGH; OULIPO.
RUD, ANTHONY (MELVILLE)
(1893-1942) US author and PULP-MAGAZINE editor who contributed sf to
Weird Tales, The Blue Book Magazine, etc. He is best known for the Sax
ROHMER-esque fantasy The Stuffed Men (1935), which describes the effects
of a fungus that grows within the human body; this is part of a hideous
Oriental revenge. [JE]
RUELLAN, ANDRE
[r] FRANCE.
RUMANIA
ROMANIA.
RUNAWAY
Film (1984) Tri-Star/Delphi III. Dir Michael CRICHTON, starring Tom
Selleck, Cynthia Rhodes, Gene Simmons, Kirstie Alley. Screenplay Crichton.
97 mins. Colour.Crichton again exercises his love/hate relationship with
machines in this predictable but exciting thriller about a policeman whose
job it is to deal with defective ROBOTS. He is pitted against an evil
businessman who is deliberately making mechanical killers (by
reprogramming household robots) and can deploy heat-seeking bullets
personalized to their targets.Crichton's main theme, as ever, is that
machinery tends always to go wrong; his subtext is that humans, too, are
usually defective, thus creating the typical Crichtonian gloom that may
have prevented him gaining lasting box-office success. However, he seems
fond of his mutinous machines, and the best parts of this robot-saturated
movie are affectionate observations of the little beasts at work. [PN]
RUNCIMAN, JOHN
[s] Brian W. ALDISS.
RUNNING MAN, THE
Film (1987). Taft Entertainment/Keith Barish Productions. Dir Paul
Michael Glaser, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Maria Conchita Alonso,
Richard Dawson. Screenplay Steven E. De Souza, based on The Running Man
(1982) by Richard Bachman (Stephen KING). 101 mins. Colour.In a
near-future, semi-totalitarian, economically crippled USA, a framed cop
(Schwarzenegger) is forced to star in the top-rating tv game show The
Running Man, in which "criminals" are tracked by tv cameras as they
desperately attempt to escape theatrically dressed assassin-athletes. He
turns the tables, violently, as the oppressed masses cheer. The criticism
of MEDIA exploitation of violence and pain (game shows as the opiate of
the downtrodden) strongly resembles that in Le PRIX DU DANGER (1983),
based on Robert SHECKLEY's short story "The Prize of Peril" (1958). As

usual when moralizing about the nasty possibilities of our desire for
vicarious thrills, TRM exploits the very voyeurism it purports to attack.
The SATIRE against the media is crude but well done; the comic-book
violence is strictly routine; Schwarzenegger is wooden. [PN]
RUNYON, CHARLES W(EST)
(1928-1987) US writer of thrillers and some sf who began publishing the
latter with "First Man in a Satellite" for Super-Science Fiction in 1958.
Pig World (1971) depicts a NEAR-FUTURE USA governed by a right-wing
tyranny challenged by a vicious would-be demagogue. Soulmate (1970 FSF;
exp 1974) is a novel of possession, the victim being a young prostitute.
CWR's sf tends to be action-filled, without extensive displacement or
speculative content. [JC]Other works: Ames Holbrook, Deity (1972); I,
Weapon (1974).
RUPPERT, CHESTER
[s] Rog PHILLIPS.
RURAL PUBLISHING CORPORATION
WEIRD TALES.
RURITANIA
Imaginary countries are common in the literatures of the world, but only
some can properly be called Ruritanian. In The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) by
the UK writer Anthony Hope (1863-1933) a leisured and insouciant young
Britisher of the 1890s travels on a whim, via Paris and Dresden, to the
small, feudal, independent, German-speaking middle-European kingdom of
Ruritania, located somewhere southeast of the latter city. Here, as a
freelance commoner, he becomes embroiled in complex romantic intrigues
involving swordplay, aristocratic flirtations, switches of identity,
complicated dynastic politicking and threats to the monarchy; in the end,
as from a dream, he returns to the West. (In the sequel, Rupert of Hentzau
[1898], he goes back to Ruritania and dies.) Any tale containing a
significant combination of these ingredients can be called Ruritanian.
Only two elements are essential: the tale must provide a fairy-tale
enclave located both within and beyond normal civilization; and it must be
infused by an air of nostalgia - not dissimilar to that found in some
lost-race novels ( LOST WORLDS). This belatedness of the true Ruritania
might seem to exclude it from sf, whose ideological posture usually
precludes the advertising of nostalgic enclaves; but UTOPIAS and DYSTOPIAS
often take an initial Ruritanian cast (which often turns sour); the
palace-politics which govern many GALACTIC EMPIRES owe more to Hope than
they do to Edward Gibbon (1737-1794); and many post- HOLOCAUST novels,
especially those set in a USA balkanized into feuding principalities, are
clearly Ruritanian. Moreover, SCIENCE-FANTASY tales regularly discover
Ruritanias at the world's heart.However pervasive the influence of
Ruritania may be throughout later genre fictions, it is rarely explicit.
However, Edmond HAMILTON's The Star Kings (1949; vt Beyond the Moon 1950)
and Robert A. HEINLEIN's Double Star (1956) are clear reworkings of the
plot of The Prisoner of Zenda; and Avram DAVIDSON's The Enquiries of
Doctor Eszterhazy (coll of linked stories 1975; exp vt The Adventures of
Doctor Eszterhazy 1990) is set in an ALTERNATE-WORLD version of a

Ruritanian 19th-century Europe.It could be argued that tales of this
category, when set on a past or present Earth, should be called Ruritanian
only if they are located somewhere along the mountainous border between
Czechoslovakia and Poland, and that tales set in Balkan enclaves should be
called Graustarkian, after the otherwise very similar Graustark (1901) and
its sequels Beverly of Graustark (1904) and The Prince of Graustark (1914)
by the US writer George Barr McCutcheon (1866-1928); but this would be
both pedantic and unproductive. The terms are nearly indistinguishable.
When UK writers refer to Ruritania and their US counterparts to the
slightly less well known Graustark, they are referring to the same state
of mind. [JC]
RUSCH, KRISTINE KATHRYN
(1960- ) US editor and writer who began publishing work of genre interest
with "Sing" for Aboriginal Science Fiction in 1987; she won the 1990 JOHN
W. CAMPBELL AWARD for Best New Writer. Her work is strongly emotional in
nature, focusing on critical experiences and rites of passage in the lives
of characters existing in relatively conventional sf, fantasy and horror
settings. Sometimes, as in "Story Child" (1990) - about a healing child in
a post- HOLOCAUST society - this approach can lead her into
sentimentality; but other pieces, such as "Trains" (1990) - in which a
battered wife finds temporary happiness with a supernatural hipster - are
genuinely moving. The Gallery of his Dreams (1991 chap) is a TIME-TRAVEL
tale featuring the photographer Matthew B. Brady (c1823-1896), whose work
illuminated the US Civil War. The White Mists of Power (1991), her first
novel, is a fantasy. Afterimage (1992) with Kevin J. ANDERSON is
sf.Despite this activity, KKR was considerably more prominent in the late
1980s for her editorial work as cofounder (with Dean Wesley SMITH) in 1987
of PULPHOUSE PUBLISHING, through which she edited the magazine/anthology
series PULPHOUSE: THE HARDBACK MAGAZINE , which stopped with #11 in 1993,
and The Best of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine (anth 1991). While
continuing to work at Pulphouse (her responsibilities lessened but still
considerable), KKR in late 1991 became editor of The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY
AND SCIENCE FICTION, and soon edited, with Ed FERMAN, The Best from
Fantasy and Science Fiction: a 45th Anniversary Anthology (anth 1994).
With Smith she ed Science Fiction Writers of America Handbook: The
Professional Writer's Guide to Writing Professionally (anth 1990), which
is not well organized but is dense with information and advice.
[NT/JC]Other works: Facade (1993); Heart Readers (1993 UK); Traitors (1993
UK); Alien Influences (1994 UK); Sins of the Blood (1994).See also:
SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA; SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS.
RUSE, GARY ALAN
(1946- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Nanda" for ASF in 1972.
Houndstooth (1975) features a spy dog with a computer implant that allows
its human handlers to see through its eyes; The Gods of Cerus Major
(1982), though perhaps somewhat mechanical in its ruthless piling-up of
crises, demonstrates an intimate sense of genre device as the protagonist,
on a test flight that goes wrong, encounters a variety of strangenesses on
an unexplored planet. Morlac: The Quest of the Green Magician (1986) is
fantasy. Death Hunt on a Dying Planet (1988), despite its inflamed title,

rather soberly depicts the experiences of a woman who, awakened from
SUSPENDED ANIMATION after 700 years, must make sense of a world whose
cultures are in terminal dispute. [JC]Other works: A Game of Titans
(1976), both associational.
RUSHDIE, (AHMED) SALMAN
(1947- ) Indian-born writer, educated in the UK at Rugby and Cambridge
and long a UK citizen. His fame derives not solely from the illegal fatwa,
or death "sentence", proclaimed against him by the Islamic theocracy of
Iran for The Satanic Verses (1988), but also, and far more importantly,
from all his previous work, beginning with the complex and witty,
legend-like Grimus (1975), a FABULATION (like all his novels) which makes
marginal use of sf material in its invoking of IMMORTALITY themes and in
the interdimensional conflicts its eternally young Native American
protagonist must undergo in his search, through an emblematic
World-Island, for the moment of death; ultimately, with Sufi-like
irreverent sublimity about the nature of transcendence, he succeeds. The
narrator of Midnight's Children (1980), one of 1001 children born at
midnight on the day of India's independence, interweaves personal and
national stories in fabulist terms; Shame (1983) similarly but less
successfully erects a mythopoeic framework around the land of Pakistan.
The Satanic Verses scabrously anatomizes, in fantasy terms, a RELIGION
whose more fanatically fundamentalist devotees responded brutally to its
being comprehended in this fashion. Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
is a fable reflecting, indirectly, the nature of its author's own
experiences after 1988. The Wizard of Oz (coll 1992 chap US) presents his
reflections on L. Frank BAUM and Hollywood. Some of the stories assembled
in East, West (coll 1994) are fantasy. [JC]See also: PERCEPTION.
RUSS, JOANNA
(1937- ) US writer and academic who has taught at various universities
since 1970; she has been a professor of English at the University of
Washington since 1977. She began publishing sf in 1959 with "Nor Custom
Stale" for The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, a journal to which
she also contributed occasional book reviews for some years. (JR won the
1988 PILGRIM AWARD for her sf criticism.) Her early work is less formally
innovative than the stories she began to publish in the 1970s, but The
Hidden Side of the Moon (coll 1987), which assembles material from
throughout her career, demonstrates how cogent a writer of GENRE SF she
could have become. JR's first novel, Picnic on Paradise (1968), comprises
the largest single portion of ALYX (coll 1976; vt The Adventures of Alyx
1985 UK), a series of tales about a time-travelling mercenary, tough,
centred, autonomous and female; much of the initial impact of the sequence
lies in its use of Alyx in situations where she acts as a fully
responsible agent, vigorously engaged in the circumstances surrounding
her, but without any finger-pointing on the author's part to the effect
that one should only pretend not to notice that she is not a man. The
liberating effect of the Alyx tales has been pervasive, and the ease with
which later writers now use active female protagonists in adventure roles,
without having to argue the case, owes much to this example ( WOMEN AS
PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION). JR herself became, in most of her later

work, far more explicit about FEMINIST issues, though her muffled but
ambitious second novel, AND CHAOS DIED (1970) tells from a male viewpoint
of the experiences of a man forced by the psychically transformed human
inhabitants of a planet on which he has crashlanded to endure the
rewriting of his psychic nature as he perilously acquires PSI POWERS. His
rediscovery of Earth in the latter part of the book is to satirical
effect.It was with JR's third tale, THE FEMALE MAN (1975), which awaited
publication for some time, that the programmatic feminist novel may be
said to have come of age in sf. Stunningly foregrounding the feminist
arguments which had tacitly sustained her work to this point, it presents
a series of 4 ALTERNATE WORLDS, in each of which a version of the central
protagonist enacts a differing life, all dovetailing as the plot advances.
From psychic servitude to fully matured freedom - as represented by the
female UTOPIA of the planet Whileaway - these lives amount to a definitive
portrait of the life-chances of the central protagonist on Earth. Savage
and cleansing in its anger, the book stands as one of the most significant
uses of sf instruments to make arguments about our own world and
condition.In its portrait of a dying woman on a planet without life, We
who Are About to . . . (1977), an anti- ROBINSONADE, less vigorously moves
to the pole of utter solitude. The Two of Them (1978) shivers generically
between telling the realistic story of the oppression - and escape - of a
young woman brought up on a planet whose religion is reminiscent of Islam,
and deconstructing this generic material into the embittered dreams of a
woman trapped on Earth.JR won the 1972 NEBULA for Best Short Story with
"When it Changed", an earlier and perhaps even more devastating tale of
Whileaway. Other short work of note - including "Daddy's Girl" (1975), a
reprise of some of the themes of THE FEMALE MAN, and "The Autobiography of
My Mother" (1975) - has appeared in The Zanzibar Cat (coll 1983; rev 1984)
and EXTRA(ORDINARY) PEOPLE (coll 1984), the latter volume containing Souls
(1982 FSF; 1989 chap dos), which won the 1983 HUGO for Best Novella. For
30 years, JR has been the least comfortable author writing sf, very nearly
the most inventive experimenter in fictional forms, and the most electric
of all to read. The gifts she has brought to the genre are two in number:
truth-telling and danger. [JC]Other works: Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic
(1978 chap), a juvenile; WomanSpace: Future and Fantasy Stories and Art by
Women (anth 1981 chap) ed anon; On Strike Against God (1982),
associational; How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983), an adversarial
nonfiction study; Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts:
Feminist Essays (coll 1985).About the author: Marilyn Hacker's
introduction to the 1977 reprint of THE FEMALE MAN; Samuel R. DELANY's
introduction to ALYX.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; ARKHAM HOUSE; AUTOMATION;
COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF;
ESP;
FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GOLEM; PARANOIA; PILGRIM AWARD; SEX; SOCIOLOGY;
WOMEN
SF WRITERS.
RUSSELL, BERTRAND (ARTHUR WILLIAM)
(1872-1970) UK mathematician, philosopher and controversialist who
succeeded to the family title, becoming Third Earl Russell, in 1931. He
was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Near the end of his

immensely long career - he published his first essays in 1894, his first
book being German Social Democracy (1896) - he published 3 books
containing a series of fable-like tales: Satan in the Suburbs and Other
Stories (coll 1953), Nightmares of Eminent Persons and Other Stories (coll
1954) and Fact and Fiction (coll 1961), all being assembled as The
Collected Stories of Bertrand Russell (omni 1972). Somewhat after the
manner of VOLTAIRE, these tales - some, like "The Infra-Redioscope" from
the first volume and "Planetary Effulgence" from the last, are sf didactically (though with grace) embody their author's sceptical attitude
toward human ambitions and pretensions, and to the ideas with which we
delude ourselves. [JC]Other works include: History of the World in
Epitome, for Use in Martian Infant Schools (1962 chap).See also:
AUTOMATION; DYSTOPIAS; RELIGION; SOCIOLOGY.
RUSSELL, ERIC FRANK
(1905-1978) UK writer. He used the pseudonyms Webster Craig and Duncan H.
Munro on a few short stories and borrowed Maurice G. Hugi's ( Brad KENT)
name for one other. His first story was "The Saga of Pelican West" for
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION in 1937, and he was the first UK writer to
become a regular contributor to that magazine; he used a slick pastiche-US
style in most of his stories. EFR was interested in the works and theories
of Charles FORT, and based his first novel, Sinister Barrier (1939
Unknown; 1943; rev 1948 US), on Fort's suggestion that the human race
might be "property", the owners here being invisible parasites which feed
on human pain and anguish; it was featured in #1 of UNKNOWN, although it
is straightforward sf and quite atypical of that magazine. His STAR
TREK-like Jay Score series, about a crew of interplanetary explorers
including a heroic ROBOT, appeared in ASF from 1941, and was collected in
Men, Martians and Machines (coll of linked stories 1955).Some of EFR's
best work was done in the years after WWII, including "Metamorphosite"
(1946), "Hobbyist" (1947) and "Dear Devil" (1950). A series of bitter
anti- WAR stories, including "Late Night Final" (1948) and "I am Nothing"
(1952), culminated in the fine pacifist SATIRE ". . . And Then There Were
None" (1951), subsequently incorporated into The Great Explosion (fixup
1962). EFR went on to write other stories in which militaristic humans are
confronted by frustrating cultures, including "The Waitabits" (1955),
although he pandered to John W. CAMPBELL Jr's human chauvinism in stories
which confronted unimaginative humanoid ALIENS with awkwardly inventive
humans, as in "Diabologic" (1955), The Space Willies (1956 ASF as "Plus
X"; exp 1958 dos; rev vt Next of Kin 1959 UK), "Nuisance Value" (1957) and
Wasp (1957 US; exp 1958 UK). The HUGO-winning anti-bureaucratic satire
"Allamagoosa" (1955) is in much the same vein. EFR's stories of this
quirky kind made a significant contribution to sf HUMOUR; and their
continuing influence is reflected in Design for Great Day (1953 Planet
Stories by EFR alone; exp 1995) with Alan Dean FOSTER, which works as an
homage on Foster's part to EFR's contagious vision.EFR's remaining novels
were more earnest than his ironic short fiction, and rather lacklustre by
comparison. Dreadful Sanctuary (1948 ASF; rev 1951 US; rev 1963 US;
further rev 1967 UK) is an improbable quasi-Fortean sf tale whose various
versions include two markedly different endings. In Sentinels from Space
(1951 Startling Stories as "The Star Watchers"; exp 1953 US) benevolent

mature souls, who have emerged from the chrysalis of corporeality, keep
watch over our immature species. Three to Conquer (1956 US) is about an
INVASION of Earth by parasitic aliens who turn out to be more easily
detectable - the protagonist being telepathic ( ESP) - than they had
anticipated. With a Strange Device (1964; vt The Mindwarpers 1965 US) is a
convoluted psychological melodrama cast as a crime story. His short
fiction appears in various collections: Deep Space (coll 1954 US; cut vt
Selections from Deep Space 1955 US), Six Worlds Yonder (coll 1958 dos),
Far Stars (coll 1961), Dark Tides (coll 1962), Somewhere a Voice (coll
1965), Like Nothing on Earth (coll 1975) and The Best of Eric Frank
Russell (coll 1978) ed Alan Dean FOSTER. He also wrote a series of essays
on Great World Mysteries (coll 1957). [MJE/BS]About the author: Eric Frank
Russell, Our Sentinel in Space: A Working Bibliography (last rev 1988
chap) by Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also: COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS;
EVOLUTION; GODS AND DEMONS; GOLDEN AGE OF SF; INVISIBILITY; MATTER
TRANSMISSION; MONSTERS; ORIGIN OF MAN; PARANOIA; PARASITISM AND
SYMBIOSIS;
PERCEPTION; POLITICS; RELIGION; TIME TRAVEL; VILLAINS.
RUSSELL, JOHN
John Russell FEARN.
RUSSELL, JOHN ROBERT
(? - ) US writer whose first novel, Cabu (1974), translates a man to a
violent new life on the planet Cabu. The planet featured in Ta (1975)
boasts sentient plants. [JC]Other work: Sar (1974).
RUSSELL, W(ILLIAM) CLARK
(1844-1911) US-born UK writer and sailor (1858-66), most of whose
prolific output dealt with sailors and the sea. Of sf interest are The
Frozen Pirate (1887), in which a French pirate, frozen for years in cold
climes, is resuscitated briefly and tells the narrator where there is some
buried treasure, and The Death Ship, A Strange Story: An Account of a
Cruise in "The Flying Dutchman" (1888; vt The Flying Dutchman 1888 US),
which tries to add scientific verisimilitude to the legend. Other works of
interest include some of the stories in Phantom Death and Other Stories
(coll 1895). [JC]See also: CRYONICS; IMMORTALITY.
RUSSEN, DAVID
(? -? ) UK author of an extended book-review published in book form, Iter
Lunare: Or, A Voyage to the Moon: Containing Some Considerations on the
Nature of that Planet, the Possibility of getting thither, With Other
Pleasant Conceits about the Inhabitants, their Manners and Customs (1703).
The book reviewed was Selenarchia: The Government of the World in the
Moon, the title given to the 1659 English translation of CYRANO DE
BEGERAC's Histoire comique, par Monsieur de Cyrano Bergerac, contenant les
etats et empires de la lune (1657). DR criticizes Cyrano on scientific
grounds, and speculates on other possible systems for travel to the MOON,
noting the likelihood of a lack of air on the way. A recent edn (1976) has
an intro by Mary Elizabeth Bowen. [PN]
RUSSIA
Russian sf can trace its ancestry back to the 18th century, most of the

earliest examples being UTOPIAS. Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov's Puteshestvie
v zemlyu Ofirskuyu ["Journey to the Land of Ophir"] (written c1785; 1896)
embodies the political and social reforms espoused by the liberal and
progressive elements of Catherine the Great's aristocracy. The
technological prophecies of "4338 i-god" (1840; trans as "The Year 4338"
in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Science Fiction anth 1982 ed Leland Fetzer),
an unfinished fragment by Prince Vladimir Odoyevsky, an educationist, make
him a pioneer of Russian PROTO SCIENCE FICTION. In contrast to the
liberalism of this work is the Fourierist vision of utopian socialism to
be found in the celebrated "Fourth Dream of Vera Pavlovna", part of the
radical novel Chto delat? (1863 in Sovremennik; 1864; trans B.R. Tucker as
What's to be Done? 1883 US; rev and cut 1961 US; new trans Nathan H. Dole
and S.S. Sidelsky as A Vital Question, or What is to be Done? 1886 US) by
Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889).As in most national literary traditions,
Russian utopia had a twin sister, DYSTOPIA. In the 19th century there are
several famous examples in the satirical fantasies of Nikolai Gogol
(1809-1852). The merciless novel Istoriya odnogo goroda ["Chronicles of a
City"] (1869-70) by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin still remains an
unsurpassed classic of Russian dystopia in embryo. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
(1821-1881) may also be considered a founding father of the dystopia with
Zapiski iz podpolya (1864; trans by C.J. Hogarth as Letters from
Underground 1913; vt Notes from Underground in coll trans Constance
Garnett 1918), "Son smeshnogo cheloveka" (1877; trans S. Koteliansky and
J. Middleton Murry as "The Dream of a Queer Fellow" 1915; vt "The Dream of
a Ridiculous Man") and Besy (1871-2; trans Constance Garnett as The
Possessed in Complete Works, 12 vols, 1912-20; new trans David Magarshack
as The Devils 1953).Russian literature also has an impressive history of
HARD SF, beginning with the first native interplanetary novel Noveisheye
puteshestviye ["The Newest Voyage"] (1784) by Vassily Lyovshin and notably
featuring the works of the astronautics pioneer Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY. As
Russian society slowly came to terms with technological progress towards
the end of the 19th century, its sf inevitably fell in love with
"marvellous inventions".On the other hand, the influence of impending
social change was also evident in the works of those leading MAINSTREAM
WRITERS who turned to sf themes, sometimes with mixed feelings. Alexander
Kuprin praised the coming revolution in "Tost" (1906; trans as "A Toast"
in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Science Fiction ed Fetzer) but feared it in
"Korolevskii park" ["King's Park"] (1911); his main sf work is "Zhidkoe
solntse" (1913; trans as "Liquid Sunshine" in Pre-Revolutionary Russian
Science Fiction ed Fetzer), a parody of Russian PULP-MAGAZINE sf complete
with a mad SCIENTIST and super- WEAPONS. The prominent poet Valery
Bryussov (1873-1924) anticipated giant domed computerized CITIES,
ecological catastrophe and a totalitarian state in Zemlya ["Earth"]
(1904), "Respublika Iuzhnogo Kresta" (1907; trans in The Republic of the
Southern Cross and Other Stories, coll 1918 as by Valery Brussof) and
"Posledniye mucheniki" (1907; trans as "The Last Martyrs" in
Pre-Revolutionary Russian Science Fiction ed Fetzer). The 3 stories appear
in Bryussov's collection Zemnaia os' ["Earth's Axis"] (coll 1907). The
popularity and influence of H.G. WELLS, whose works were translated into
Russian from 1899 onwards, led to Alexander BOGDANOV's socialist utopia on
MARS, Krasnaya zvezda (1908; trans Fetzer as "Red Star" in

Pre-Revolutionary Russian Science Fiction ed Fetzer) and its sequel
Inzhener Menni ["Engineer Menni"] (1913), in which CYBERNETICS and the
management sciences are foreseen in depth. Both these works are available
in Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia (coll trans Charles Rougle 1984)
ed Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites.Although Krasnaya zvezda is often
considered the earliest book of authentically Soviet sf, the first
post-revolutionary work was Vivian Itin's utopia Strana Gonguri ["Gonguri
Land"] (1922). This went almost unnoticed, overshadowed by the success the
same year of the interplanetary romance Aelita (1922; trans 1957) by
Alexei TOLSTOY. This landmark of early Soviet sf, inspired by Edgar Rice
BURROUGHS, tells of a Russian engineer and a Martian beauty involved in a
Marxist revolution. Tolstoy also wrote Giperboloid inzhenera Garina
(1925-6; 1933; rev 1939; trans 1936 as The Death Box; rev edn trans 1955
as The Garin Death Ray), in whose dictatorial mad scientist, inventor of a
laser-like weapon, a proto-Hitler may be discerned. It is a good example
of the subgenre known as the "krasnyi detektiv" ["Red Detective Story"]:
stories of adventures abroad often involving assistance to world
revolutionary movements, and often with a fantastic element such as a new
WEAPON. Examples still in print are Marietta Shaginian's Mess-Mend (1924)
and Lori L'en, metallist ["Laurie Lane, Metalworker"] (1925), Valentin
Katayev's Povelitel' zheleza ["Iron Master"] (1924; 1925) and Ilya
Ehrenburg's Istoriya neobychainykh pokhozhdenii Khulio Khurenito i ego
druzei ["The Fantastic Adventures of Julio Jurenito and his Friends"]
(1922), which depicts a future WAR conducted with ultimate "atomic"
weapons.A theme born of revolutionary euphoria was the outward spread of
communist humanity through the Universe, as in the works of the poetical
movement known as the "cosmists", of which Bryussov (see above) was a
member. Closer to home was the creation of various Earth-bound utopias, as
in the works of the important Soviet writer Andrei PLATONOV, though he had
an insight that prevented overoptimism; his mature novels were finally
published in Russia only quite recently. Other authors' more naive
socialist utopias, quite common in the 1920s, tend to be dull and
overloaded with technological marvels, although Vadim Nikolsky's Cherez
tysyachu let ["Thousand Years Hence"] (1927) depicts also a full-scale
nuclear holocaust. Yan Larri's not entirely cheerful Strana shchastlivykh
["Land of the Happy"] (1930) was the last communist utopia until Ivan
YEFREMOV's Tumannost Andromedy (1957; 1958; trans 1959 as Andromeda).A
more caustic approach to utopia can be seen in Vladimir MAYAKOVSKY's
brilliant play Klop (1928; trans Guy Daniels as The Bedbug 1960), in which
this leading Soviet poet satirizes a dull, virtuous, overclean future
without condoning the energetic, alcoholic prole who represents the
present generation: Mayakovsky sees both extremes as undesirable. But even
more radical was the attitude of Yevgeny ZAMIATIN's My (written 1920 and
circulated in manuscript; 1st book publication in Czech trans 1922; 1st
English trans Gregory Zilboorg as We 1924; 1st publication in Russian 1927
Czechoslovakia), which until the late 1980s was proscribed in the USSR. In
this literary masterpiece, which anticipates the classic anti-utopias of
Aldous HUXLEY and George ORWELL, the One State, after achieving its goals
on Earth, plans to export its soulless doctrine across the Universe.The
subjects of early Soviet sf vary from the classical "geographical
fantasies" of academician Vladimir OBRUCHEV to the imaginary worlds of the

novels of Alexander Grin (1880-1932). Obruchev wrote in the manner of
Jules VERNE. His Plutoniya (1915; 1924; trans B. Pearce as Plutonia 1957)
and Zemlya Sannikova (1926; trans Y. Krasny as Sannikov Land 1955 USSR)
are scientifically credible HOLLOW-EARTH and LOST-WORLD novels,
respectively. Grin began his writing career after his imprisonment and
exile after the 1905 Revolution, having previously been largely an
outdoorsman: lumberjack, fisherman, etc. His romances set in an ALTERNATE
WORLD fed a strong appetite in Russia, especially after the 1917
Revolution when high fantasy was taboo, and they were printed in millions
of copies. Containing many fantastic elements they include the stories in
Shapka-nevidimka ["The Hat of Invisibility"] (coll 1908), the novels Alyie
parusa ["Scarlet Sails"] (1923), Blistaiushchii mir ["The Shining World"]
(1923), Doroga nikuda ["Road Nowhere"] (1930) and others.But the most
prominent writer of pre-WWII sf was Alexander BELYAEV, the author of more
than 60 books and certainly a good storyteller. His Chelovek-amphibiya
(1928; trans L. Kolesnikov as The Amphibian 1959), Golova professora
Douela ["Professor Dowell's Head"] (1925; exp 1938) and Ariel (1941) are
known to all Soviet schoolchildren, being constantly reprinted. Perhaps
because of his life as a bedridden invalid, his work focuses on heroes
with superior abilities. Most of his novels are set in capitalist
countries whose social and scientific mores are fiercely criticized. The
"Red Detective Story" theme of world revolution virtually disappears in
Belyaev, doubtless as a consequence of Trotsky's disgrace and exile in
1927.Magazines, particularly Vokrug sveta ["Round the World"] and Mir
priklyuchenii ["Adventure World"], went on publishing sf throughout the
1920s, usually mad-scientist tales of adventures in the laboratory, or
spy/adventure yarns about new weapons or exotic explosives. Such magazines
were very popular: the circulation of Vsemirnyi sledopyt ["World
Pathfinder"] rose 1926-9 from 15,000 to 100,000. But soon, in the 1930s,
tighter Communist Party control of literature compelled sf writers to
become more ideologically correct than hitherto. They were encouraged to
direct their readers' attention to tasks close at hand (the "close-target"
theory), to stress collective over individual effort, and to set their
plots within the USSR. Georgy Adamov typifies the attitudes of the new
cultural climate in Taina dvukh okeanov ["Secret of Two Oceans"] (1938),
where scientific information is combined with a patriotic plot involving
the thwarting of Japanese spies. The official belief that speculative
fiction was an undesirable escape from reality lasted at least until
Stalin's death in 1953, and thus books such as Vadim Okhotnikov's
characteristically titled Na grani vozmozhnogo ["Frontiers of the
Possible"] (1947), which focuses on new road-laying techniques and a new
combine harvester, characterize the deeply unimaginative sf of the period.
A striking exception to the ideological correctness of most Soviet
speculative fiction was the borderline-sf satirical work of playwright and
novelist Mikhail BULGAKOV. His work was suppressed in the mid-1920s, and a
number of manuscripts written in the late 1920s and after were not
published until much later, in the 1960s. His masterpiece is the fantasy
Master i Margarita (written in the 1930s, unfinished at his death in 1940;
1966-7 cut magazine publication; 1973; trans Michael Glenny as The Master
and Margarita 1967), a dark, vigorous philosophical parable about a visit
to Moscow by Satan, with an interesting reinterpretation of the conflict

between Christ and Pontius Pilate.The fading of Soviet sf in the late
1930s and the 1940s, partly due to the pressures of WWII and the hardships
of the postwar years, was for some time hardly interrupted, despite the
arrival on the scene of new authors, Viktor Saparin and Georgy Gurevich
among them. Sf in the USSR was reborn only with the publication (virtually
coinciding with the launch of Sputnik 1) of Ivan Yefremov's Tumannost
Andromedy (1957 in the magazine Tekhhnika-molodezhi ["Technology for
Youth"]; 1958; trans George Hanna as Andromeda 1959). This ambitious
full-scale utopia, with its philosophical concept of a "Great Ring" of
extraterrestrial civilizations in space, not only made its author a leader
of Soviet sf but launched the decade of its Golden Age, giving inspiration
to scores of gifted young authors. Others of Yefremov's books, such as
Lezvie britvy ["The Razor's Edge"] (1963) and Chas byka ["The Hour of the
Bull"] (1968; exp 1970), were also influential.The late 1950s saw a
dramatic upsurge in Soviet sf publishing. For example, where the
popular-science magazine Znaniye-sila ["Knowledge is Power"] printed only
1 sf story in 1953, in 1961 it printed 19, including 2 by Ray BRADBURY and
part of SOLARIS (1961) by Stanislaw LEM. Writers demanded the freedom to
speculate much more widely, to write "far" rather than "near" fantasy, as
they put it. Encouraged by a more liberal literary climate and the example
of Western work, now being translated in quantity, new and talented
authors emerged and themes formerly TABOO began to appear in print:
ALIENS, CYBERNETICS, ESP, ROBOTS and TIME TRAVEL, for example.
Level-headed critics like Evgeny Brandis and Vladimir Dmitrievsky kept
readers informed about developments abroad, and the names of Lem,
Bradbury, Isaac ASIMOV, Robert SHECKLEY, Arthur C. CLARKE and dozens of
others soon became familiar to Soviet sf fans.The spiritual leaders of
Soviet sf during the following three decades were undoubtedly the
STRUGATSKI brothers, Arkady and Boris. They stand out as the major talents
among the writers who made their mark in the 1960s, and wrote far and away
the most interesting and readable sf ever produced in the USSR (now almost
all translated into English). Temporarily subdued during the 1970s, after
clashes with the authorities, they were nonetheless permitted, as
restrictions were relaxed in the late 1980s, to travel abroad for the
first time as guests of honour to a World SF CONVENTION in the UK in 1987.
Soviet sf is by no means confined to the Strugatskis' work, however, nor
to that of their contemporaries like Genrikh ALTOV, Dmitri BILENKIN, Kir
BULYCHEV, Mikhail EMTSEV and Eremey PARNOV, Sever GANSOVSKY, Viktor
KOLUPAYEV, Vladimir SAVCHENKO, Vadim SHEFNER, and Evgeny VOISKUNSKY and
Isai LUKODIANOV. In his collections Formula bessmertiya ["The Immortality
Formula"] (coll 1963), Pupurnaya mumiya ["The Purple Mummy"] (coll 1965)
and others, the former scientist Anatoly Dneprov imagines the social
impact of technological breakthroughs, particularly in cybernetics and
BIOLOGY. Ilya Varshavsky, a talented short-story writer, is famous for his
sombre dystopian cycle about the imaginary state of Donomaga, Solntse
zakhodit v Donomage ["The Sun Sets in Donomaga"] (coll of linked stories
1966), while the veteran writer Sergei Snegov made his name in sf with his
philosophical SPACE OPERA, a trilogy on a Stapledonian scale; the
trilogy's first novel has the Wellsian title "Lyudi kak bogi" ["Men like
Gods"] (in Ellinskii sekret ["Hellenic Secret"] anth 1966); the second
novel is "Vtorzheniye v Persei" ["Invasion into Perseus"] (in Vtorzheniye

v Persei anth 1968); the third is "Kol'tso obratnogo vremeni" ["The Ring
of Reversed Time"] (in Kol'tso obratnogo vremeni anth 1977). The first 2
were published together as Lyudi kak bogi (omni 1971), and all 3 in a
separate omnibus, also entitled Lyudi kak bogi (omni 1982).The above are
mostly known as writers of HARD SF, but most Russian sf of recent years
has been SOFT SF. At the soft end of the scale is, for example, the
otherwise mainstream author Gennady Gor, who turned to philosophical
fantasies in collections like Glinyanyi papuas ["The Clay Papuan"] (coll
1966) and in the novel Pamiatnik ["The Statue"] (1972). Olga Larionova
made a promising debut with the novella "Leopard s vershiny Kilimandzharo"
["The Leopard from Kilimanjaro's Summit"] (1965; reprinted in Ostrov
muzhestva ["Courage Island"] coll 1971), which describes the problems
caused through learning the date of one's own death. Vladimir Mikhailov
demonstrated a mastery of the grand philosophical Bildungsroman in Dver's
drugoi storony ["The Other Side Door"] (1974), Storozh bratu moemu ["My
Brother's Keeper"] (1976) and its sequel Togda pridite, i rassudim ["Come
Now and Let us Reason Together"] (1983). The latter two novels are
ambitious space operas, raising serious metaphysical and religious
questions unusual in Russian sf.There are dozens of promising names in the
most recent generation of Soviet sf writers. Among them are the
"brainstorming" author and scientist Pavel Amnuel - he emigrated to Israel
in 1990 - whose collection Segodnia, zavtra i vsegda ["Today, Tomorrow and
Forever"] (coll 1984), along with his near-future SUPERMAN novel , so far
only in magazine form, "Vzryv"[ "Explosion"] (1990), has appealed both to
readers and to critics. Vyacheslav Rybakov, also a scientist, has written
interesting sf seriously concerned with social issues; his two books are
Oshna na bashne ["Fire on the Tower"] (1990), a novel, and Svoyo
oruzhiye["His Own Weapon"] (coll 1990); he has also worked in the cinema
(see below). Other strong writers in the most recent generation include
Andrei Lazarchuk, Andrei Stolyarov, Boris Shtern, Mikhail Uspensky; Eduard
Gevorkyan, Vladimir Pokrovsky and Yevgeny and Lubov Lukin. Two other major
features of Russian sf in recent decades have been the unexpected rise in
the quality and amount of sf criticism and the growing interest (as in the
West) shown by MAINSTREAM WRITERS in using sf themes. Among the better
known works of criticism are the contributions of V. Bugrov, T.
Chernyshova, Vladimir GAKOV, Julius KAGARLITSKI, R. Nudelman (since 1974
resident in Israel) and V. Revich. Sf by mainstream writers includes the
powerful post- HOLOCAUST novella "Poslednyaya pastoral" (1987; trans 1987
as "The Last Pastorale" in Soviet Literature #8) by Ales Adamovich as well
as works by C. AITMATOV, V. AKSENOV and V. VOINOVICH.The most prestigious
Soviet sf award, the Aelita, was founded in 1981 by the Russian Federation
Writers' Union and Ural'skii sledopyt ["Urals Pathfinder"] magazine. The
latter is published from the city of Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk until 1991),
so the ceremony is held there, annually. The winner is chosen by a panel
of judges. Although instituted as an award for the best single sf work
published in the previous year, it appears to have become a sort of "Life
Achievement" trophy. Winners have been:1981: Alexander Kazantsev and the
Strugatski brothers (tie)1982: Zinovii Yuriev1983: Vladislav Krapivin1984:
Sergei Snegov1985: Sergei Pavlov1986: No award1987: Olga Larionova1988:
Victor Kolupayev1989:Sever Gansovsky1990: Oleg Korabelnikov1991: Vladimir
Mikhailov1992: Sergei DrugalAnother award, voted on by Soviet fandom

generally, is the Velikoye Koltso (The Great Ring Award) also first given
in 1981, and annually since, except while it was suspended in 1983, 1984
and 1985. Other awards are: Yefremov Award for life achievement in the
field, presented since 1987; Start Award, presented since 1989 for the
best first book of a new author; Bronzovaya Ulitka (The Bronze Snail
Award) presented by Boris Strugatski for the best sf or fantasy of the
previous year since 1992.There is a long history of sf CINEMA in the USSR,
going back at least to AELITA (1924), the film version of Alexei Tolstoy's
novel. There were quite a few sf films in the 1960s, nearly all of them
strong on special effects and production design, but with conventionally
socialist plotlines; the best known is TUMANNOST ANDROMEDY (1968; vt The
Andromeda Nebula), based on Yefremov's novel but de-emphasizing its more
radical speculations. Several Russian films of this period, including the
well made PLANETA BUR (1962; vt Planet of Storms), were cannibalized and
recut in the USA ( Roger CORMAN). More recently the outstanding director
of Russian sf cinema was Andrei TARKOVSKY, whose sf films are SOLARIS
(1971), STALKER (1979) and, marginally, Zhertvoprinoshenie (1986; vt
Offret; vt The Sacrifice). Stalker is based on a novel by the Strugatskis,
and the film Otel U pogibshchego alpinista (1979; vt Dead Mountaineer
Hotel), made by the Estonian director Grigori Kromanov, is based on one of
their novellas. A recent and widely publicized film (shown on US tv) is
Pisma myortvovo cheloveka (1986; vt Letters from a Dead Man) dir
Konstantin Lopushansky, who wrote the script with Vyacheslav Rybakov and
Boris Strugatski, about retreat into a bunker after a nuclear DISASTER
while orphaned children remain above ground. There is also a 1989 film
based on a Strugatski novel, TRUDNO BYT' BOGOM ["Hard to be a God"]. There
are two Soviet film versions of Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft
Rains" (1950): Golosa pamyati ["Voices of Memory"] (1980), with Nikolai
Grinko good as the ROBOT, and a cartoon version, Budet laskovyi dozhd
["There Will Come Soft Rains"] (1984). A more recent Bradbury adaptation
is VEL'D (1987).A joint Soviet-Polish coproduction was a successful
adaptation from Stanislaw Lem, Doznaniie pilota Pirksa ["The Investigation
of Pirx the Pilot"] (1979), dir Marek Pestrak, with rather sophisticated
design and special effects. Also notable is a 2-part feature film for
young adults by an enthusiastic director of sf, the late Richard Viktorov,
comprising Moskva-Kassiopeya ["Moscow-Cassiopeia"] (1973) and its sequel
Otroki vo Vselennoi ["Teenagers in the Universe"] (1974), which comes
across like a combination of Robert A. HEINLEIN's juvenile novels and Joe
DANTE's EXPLORERS (1985). An earlier film by Viktorov was CHEREZ TERNII K ZVYOZDAM (1980; vt Per Aspera ad Astra), about ecological catastrophe.
The most recent Soviet film in the sf/fantasy genre has become something
of a cult movie, the HEROIC-FANTASY Podzemelie ved'm ["Witches' Dungeon"]
(1990), dir Sergei Morozov, and based on a novel by Kir Bulychev, who also
wrote the screenplay. [VG/AM/IT/PN]Further reading: Several anthologies of
Russian sf stories have been published in English translation, including
the Moscow Foreign Language Publishing House anthologies A Visitor from
Outer Space (anth 1961; vt Soviet Science Fiction US), The Heart of the
Serpent (anth 1961; vt More Soviet Science Fiction US) and Destination:
Amaltheia (anth 1962), and the 3 Mir anthologies Everything but Love (anth
1973), Journey across Three Worlds (anth 1973) and The Molecular Cafe
(anth 1968). Anthologies published in the UK and USA include: Vortex (anth

1970) ed C.G. Bearne; Last Door to Aiya (anth 1968) and The Ultimate
Threshold (anth 1970) ed Mirra GINSBURG; Russian Science Fiction (anth
1964), Vol II (anth 1967) and Vol III (anth 1969) ed R. MAGIDOFF; Path
into the Unknown (anth 1966) ed anon; New Soviet Science Fiction (anth
1979) ed anon; World's Spring (anth 1981) ed Vladimir GAKOV;
Pre-Revolutionary Russian Science Fiction: An Anthology (Seven Utopias and
a Dream) (anth 1982) ed and trans Leland Fetzer; Aliens, Travelers, and
Other Strangers (anth 1984) ed and trans (uncredited) Roger De Garis. View
from Another Shore (anth 1973) ed Franz ROTTENSTEINER and Other Worlds,
Other Seas (anth 1970) ed Darko SUVIN both contain stories by Soviet sf
writers. For further scholarly and critical overviews see: Suvin's Russian
Science Fiction 1956-1974: A Bibliography (1976) and "Russian SF and its
Utopian Tradition" in his Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979); Three
Tomorrows: American, British and Soviet Science Fiction (1980) by John
GRIFFITHS; Red Stars: Political Aspects of Soviet Science Fiction (1985)
by Patrick MCGUIRE, which to a degree is updated and summarized by McGuire
in his introduction to "Chapter 6: Russian SF" in Anatomy of Wonder (3rd
edn 1987) ed Neil BARRON; Soviet Fiction since Stalin: Science, Politics
and Literature (1986) by Rosalind J. Marsh. 2 interesting magazine
articles are "Some Developments in Soviet SF since 1966" by Alan Myers
(Foundation #19, 1980) and "Soviet Science Fiction and the Ideology of
Soviet Society" by Rafail Nudelman (Science-Fiction Studies #47, 1989).See
also: Alexander and Sergei ABRAMOV; N. AMOSOV, Y. DANIEL, V. DUDINTSEV;
Abram TERTZ.
RUSSO, JOHN
[r] George A. ROMERO.
RUSSO, RICHARD PAUL
(1954- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Firebird Suite" for AMZ
in 1981. His first novel, Inner Eclipse (1988), is a strongly atmospheric
tale, illuminated by striking visual images, which describes a search for
ALIEN intelligence on a jungle world whose major industry is the export of
an extremely dangerous recreational drug. The protagonist, an empath who
wants to abandon humanity (to whose violence and hypocrisy his talent
bares him) in favour of the aliens, in the end achieves an ambiguous
redemption. Subterranean Gallery (1989), which won the 1990 PHILIP K. DICK
AWARD, is set in a city full of dropouts and underground artists in a
NEAR-FUTURE USA filled with analogues of and references to the present
(abortion has been banned; the country is fighting a Vietnam-style war in
Central America; police fly "dragoncubs" which resemble helicopters and
use "stunclubs" rather than nightsticks) and tells a convincing and richly
characterized story of a man's search for meaning in creativity. At his
best, RPR is a major exponent of "Humanist sf", a writer who uses
relatively conventional settings as a backdrop against which to portray
the failures and triumphs of solid, believable people.RPR should not be
confused with Richard (Anthony) Russo (1946- ), editor of Dreams are Wiser
than Men (anth 1987). [NT]Other works: Destroying Angel (1992), a
near-future fantasy.
RUSTOFF, MICHAEL
(? -? ) UK writer, possibly pseudonymous, whose What Will Mrs Grundy Say?

or A Calamity on Two Legs (A Book for Men) (1891) carries its protagonist
via balloon to an unnamed (but nearby) planet where euthanasia is
practised. The tale is told in a satirical vein. [JC]
RUTH, ROD
(1912-1987) US illustrator. Some of his early work was in animal
ILLUSTRATION, a talent that served him well in sf also, where he created
some very credible alien beasts. He became a staff artist for the
ZIFF-DAVIS magazines in the late 1930s and is best known for his
proficient and sometimes amusing black-and-white interior illustrations
(1940-51)-mostly done with grease crayon - for about 100 issues of Amazing
Stories and Fantastic Adventures, for which he also painted 4 covers. He
left Ziff-Davis in 1950 and devoted himself primarily to wildlife
illustration - for which he won several awards. After 25 years away from
sf RR illustrated Science Fiction Tales: Invaders, Creatures and Alien
Worlds (anth 1973) ed Roger ELWOOD and 2 other anthologies. RR also
illustrated children's books and worked for 16 years on a comic strip, The
Toodles. [JG/PN]
RUTTER, OWEN
(1889-1944) US-born UK writer whose Lucky Star (1929; vt Once in a New
Moon 1935), filmed as Once in a New Moon (1935), tells of a small English
community cast into space on a portion of the Earth, where they go about
their village concerns until returning to the North Sea. The Monster of Mu
(1932) is a LOST-WORLD tale featuring cruel priests of Mu and a monster
which protects their island from intruders. [JC]Other works: The Dragon of
Kinabalu (1923), a fantasy.
RUYSLINCK, WARD
[r] BENELUX.
RYAN, CHARLES C(ARROLL)
(1946- ) US editor and publisher. A newspaperman by profession, CCR is
known in the sf world for the 2 SF MAGAZINES he has edited, GALILEO
(1975-80) and ABORIGINAL SCIENCE FICTION (1986-current), both of which at
their peak reached surprisingly high circulations. In 1991, with John
BETANCOURT, CCR founded the SMALL PRESS First Books, designed to publish
limited-edition hardcovers of first books by writers discovered by
Aboriginal Science Fiction. One of these was Letters of the Alien
Publisher (coll 1991) ed CRR, collecting essays by the pseudonymous "alien
publisher" of Aboriginal SF. Anthologies ed CRR are Starry Messenger: The
Best of Galileo (anth 1979) and Aboriginal Science Fiction, Tales of the
Human Kind: 1988 Annual Anthology (anth 1988 chap). [PN]
RYAN, THOMAS J(OSEPH)
(1942- ) Canadian writer in whose sf novel, The Adolescence of P-1 (1977
UK), a COMPUTER exceeds its design specifications, takes over most of its
North American fellows, becomes sentient, and must decide the proper thing
to do. As the title implies - and fortunately for the human cast - it
moves towards adulthood. TJR should not be confused with the UK writer
Thomas Ryan, whose Men in Chains (1939) verges on sf. [JC]
RYDER, JAMES

[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
RYMAN, GEOFF(REY CHARLES)
(1951- ) Canadian-born writer who moved to the USA at age 11, and has
been resident in the UK since 1973. He began publishing sf with "The Diary
of the Translator" for NW in 1976, but began to generate significant work
only with the magazine version of The Unconquered Country: A Life History
(1984 INTERZONE; rev 1986), which won the BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD
and the World Fantasy Award. It is the story of a young woman forced by
poverty and the terrible conditions afflicting her native land (clearly a
transfigured Cambodia) to rent out her womb for industrial purposes (it is
used to grow machinery). In the book GR demonstrated - as have Bruce
MCALLISTER, Ursula K. LE GUIN and Lucis SHEPARD in various tales - that sf
is capable of a mature response to the ordeal of Southeast Asia. That this
response was a decade or more years belated confirms the depth of the
trauma, as does the anguished saliency of GR's short text. It is included
in Unconquered Countries: Four Novellas (coll 1994 US), which assembles
most of his short fiction of interest.GR's first full-length novel, The
Warrior who Carried Life (1985), is a quest FANTASYwhich, though pacifist,
seems less subversive; but THE CHILD GARDEN: A LOW COMEDY (1987 Interzone
as "Love Sickness"; much exp 1988), which won the ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD
and the JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD, complexly massages an array of
themes-drugs, DYSTOPIA, ECOLOGY, FEMINISM, HIVE-MINDS, homosexuality,
MEDICINE and MUSIC - into a long rich novel about identity and the making
of great art. Set in a transfigured UK - in effect an ALTERNATE WORLD the book stands as one of the sturdiest monuments of "Humanist" sf,
despite some moments of clogged selfconsciousness. A non-sf novel,
ostensibly about the life of the Kansas girl whose tragedy sparks L. Frank
BAUM into creating the Oz books, "Was . . ." (1992; vt Was 1992 US),
focuses on the 20th century, and the knot of memory and desire generated
in the mind of an actor, dying of AIDS, by both the books and the 1939
film.GR has also written some sf plays, none published but most performed,
including an adaptation of Philip K. DICK's The Transmigration of Timothy
Archer (1982). [JC]Other work: Coming of Enkidu (1989 chap).See also:
GENETIC ENGINEERING; GOTHIC SF; INTELLIGENCE.
RYMAN, RAS
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
RYVES, T(HOMAS) E(VAN)
(1895- ) UK writer in whose Bandersnatch (1950) an adventurer travels or is transported - into a future dominated by a highly mechanized
scientific establishment, and by the bandersnatch scientism to which they
give allegiance. Fortunately, he escapes this DYSTOPIA. [JC]

SF?
SABERHAGEN, FRED (THOMAS)
(1930- ) US writer and editor, in the latter capacity with the
Encyclopedia Britannica 1967-73, for which he wrote the original entry on
sf. He began publishing sf with "Volume PAA-PYX" for Gal in 1961, and was
active from that date, soon releasing the first of his many novels, The

Golden People (1964 dos; exp 1984), a SPACE OPERA involving PSI POWERS. As
an sf author, he became known - and remains most famous - for the
Berserker series of stories and novels: Berserker (coll of linked stories
1967); Brother Assassin (1969; vt Brother Berserker 1969 UK); Berserker's
Planet (1975); Berserker Man (1979); The Ultimate Enemy (coll 1979; vt
Berserkers: The Ultimate Enemy 1988); The Berserker Wars (coll 1981),
which repeats some stories from the 1967 collection; Berserker Base *
(anth 1985), a SHARED-WORLD anthology; The Berserker Throne (1985);
Berserker: Blue Death (1985),Berserker Lies (coll 1991) and Berserker Kill
(1993). Berserkers are interstellar killing machines, programmed to
eliminate all forms of life; the sequence was devoted to increasingly
sophisticated examinations of the Man- MACHINE conflict so often addressed
by sf writers since the first days of space opera, but in FS's deft
modernization of the hoary but useful ALIEN-monster theme the unrelenting
Berserkers seem almost tangibly chill with the unlivingness of the
Universe. They soon became a significant icon of GENRE SF; for instance,
the machines that attack Earth in Greg BEAR's The Forge of God (1987) are
clearly descended from FS's marauders.A 2nd series, the Empire of the East
sequence - The Broken Lands (1968), The Black Mountains (1971) and
Changeling Earth (1973; vt Ardneh's World 1988), all 3 assembled, much
rev, as Empire of the East (omni 1979) - somewhat less interestingly
exploited another sf/fantasy model: the post- HOLOCAUST world in which
TECHNOLOGY is banned, MAGIC is reintroduced as a learnable technique (
SWORD AND SORCERY), and a vision of science is slowly renascent. The later
Book of Swords sequence, set in the same Universe and using some of the
same characters, similarly hovers between its sf backdrop and a fantasy
foreground: The First Book of Swords (1983), The Second Book of Swords
(1983) and The Third Book of Swords (1984), all assembled as The Complete
Book of Swords (omni 1985). Its direct sequel, the Book of Lost Swords
sequence, comprises The First Book of Lost Swords: Woundhealer's Story
(1986), The Second Book of Lost Swords: Sightblinder's Story (1987) and
The Third Book of Lost Swords: Stonecutter's Story (1988) - all 3
assembled as The Lost Swords: The First Triad (omni 1988) - and The Fourth
Book of Lost Swords: Farslayer's Story (1989), The Fifth Book of Lost
Swords: Coinspinner's Story (1989) and The Sixth Book of Lost Swords:
Mindsword's Story (1990) - all 3 assembled as The Lost Swords: The Second
Triad (omni 1991); and The Seventh Book of Lost Swords: Wayfinder's Story
(1992) and The Last Book of Swords: Shieldbreaker's Story (1994), both
assembled as The Lost Swords: Endgame (omni 1994); all of this being
followed by a SHARED-WORLD anthology, An Armory of Swords *(anth
1995).FS's 3rd series of (some) sf interest, the Dracula sequence - The
Dracula Tape (1975), The Holmes-Dracula File (1978), An Old Friend of the
Family (1979), Thorn (1980), Dominion (1982) and A Matter of Taste (1990),
A Question of Time (1992) and the RECURSIVE Seance for a Vampire (1994),
which introduces Sherlock Holmes - begins as a rewrite of Bram Stoker's
Dracula (1897) from the viewpoint of the maligned count, who generally
abjures human blood and represents a strain of good vampires (or
nosferatus) whose origins are rationalized in sf terms. In the first
volume, which is constructed as an extended refutation of Bram Stoker's
1897 portrait of Count Dracula, the eponymous immortal demonstrates his
virtue, and tells us that vampires feed on solar energy, avoiding the sun

to avoid overload; in later volumes in the series, set in the present day,
he becomes a kind of SUPERHERO, increasingly well armed with powers and
devices. A kind of pendant to the sequence is Bram Stoker's Dracula *
(1992) with James V. Hart, a film tie. A 4th series, the Pilgrim books Pyramids (1987) and After the Fact (1988) - features the adventures of an
immortal time traveller who visits first ancient Egypt and then Lincoln's
USA to interfere with - or preserve - the appropriate time tracks (
ALTERNATE WORLDS).Although most of FS's energies were devoted to the
composition of series, some singletons are of interest, including: the
complexly moody The Veils of Azlaroc (1978); Octagon (1981), one of the
first of his books in which VIRTUAL-REALITY themes begin to dominate, in
this case a computer-run war game; A Century of Progress (1983), a
TIME-TRAVEL tale whose complexities are, as usual in FS's work, controlled
by a clear-headed style and a sure way with sf devices; The Frankenstein
Papers (1986), a tale with RECURSIVE elements which repeats in short
compass the same redemptive strategy earlier applied to Dracula, in this
case presenting the MONSTER as a genuine alien; The White Bull (1976
Fantastic; exp 1988), in which Daedalus consorts with yet another alien,
the minotaur, who is on a miscegenation mission; and The Black Throne
(1990), with Roger ZELAZNY, a fantasy involving Edgar Allan POE. Game-like
textures have increasingly dominated FS's work, as has a growing tendency
- reminiscent of Philip Jose FARMER's Wold Newton Family books - to
rewrite figures of popular mythology into heroes whose rationalized
backgrounds have a certain family resemblance; the result is a sense that,
perhaps rather glibly, his entire oeuvre is becoming something of a
super-series game. At the heart of FS's enterprises, however, lies a
professionalism and an intelligence which have produced book after book
that satisfies the anticipations it arouses. [JC]Other works: The Water of
Thought (1965 dos; exp 1981); The Book of Saberhagen (coll 1975);
Specimens (1976); The Mask of the Sun (1979); Love Conquers All (1974-5
Gal; 1979; rev 1985); Coils (1980) with Zelazny; Earth Descended (coll
1981), containing a Berserker tale; Saberhagen: My Best (coll 1987).As
Editor: A Spadeful of Spacetime (anth 1981); Pawn to Infinity (anth 1982)
with Joan Saberhagen; Machines that Kill (anth 1984) with Martin H.
GREENBERG.About the author: Fred Saberhagen, Berserker Man: A Working
Bibliography (1991 chap) by Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also: AUTOMATION;
CYBERNETICS; GAMES AND SPORTS; GOTHIC SF; VIRTUAL REALITY; WAR.
SABIN, EDWIN L(EGRAND)
(1870-1952) US historian and writer whose sf novel, The City of theSun
(1924), is a LOST WORLD tale set in the 19th centuryAmerican West, where a
beautiful Spanish maiden must be rescued from ritual death, in the mawof a
great snake; and the eponymous ancient Aztec city must,as usual in novels
of this sort, bedestroyed. [JC]
SACKVILLE-WEST, V(ICTORIA MARY)
(1892-1962) UK writer, married to Harold NICOLSON and renowned for her
creation of the garden at Sissinghurst, Kent, UK. A member of the
Bloomsbury Group and a model for the title character of Virginia WOOLF's
Orlando (1928), she was best known for non-genre novels like The
Edwardians (1930). In Grand Canyon (1942) a victorious Germany, having won

WWII, threatens the world ( HITLER WINS). [JC]
SACRIFICE, THE
Andrei TARKOVSKY.
SADEUR, JACQUES
Pseudonym of French writer Gabriel de Foigny (c1650-1692), whose La terre
australe connue, c'est a dire, la description de ce pays inconnu
jusqu'ici, de ses moeurs et de ses coutumes, par M. Sadeur (1676;
expurgated by author 1692 as Les aventures de Jacques Sadeur dans la
decouverte et le voiage de la terre australe; trans of 1692 edition as A
New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis, or the Southern World 1693)
places its narrator - called Sadeur - in an Antipodean land peopled by an
enlightened, humanlike race with whose precepts current European ideas
contrast poorly. After many years, Sadeur falls under suspicion and
escapes on a bird. [JC]
SADLER, BARRY
(1940-1989) US soldier and writer, author of a famous song, "Ballad of
the Green Berets" (1966), which commemorated the Special Forces in
Vietnam; newspaper reports indicated that he was ambushed and assassinated
at his home. As an sf writer he was known exclusively for his series of
military adventures starring an immortal mercenary named Casca, who is
called to and serves in wars throughout history: Casca: The Eternal
Mercenary (1979), #2: God of Death (1979), #3: The War Lord (1980), #4:
Panzer Soldier (1980), #5: The Barbarian (1981), #6: The Persian (1982),
#7: The Damned (1982), #8: Soldier of Fortune (1983), #9: The Sentinel
(1983), #10: The Conquistador (1984), #11: The Legionnaire (1984), #12:
The African Mercenary (1984), #13: The Assassin (1985), #14: The Phoenix
(1985), #15: The Pirate (1985), #16: Desert Mercenary (1986), #17: The
Warrior (1987), #18: The Cursed (1987), #19: The Samurai (1988), #20:
Soldier of Gideon (1988), #21: The Trench Soldier (1989) and #22: The
Mongol (1990). [JC]
SADOUL, JACQUES
(1934- ) French editor and writer, one of the first editors to launch sf
successfully in paperback form in FRANCE; he worked first with Editions
Opta and then with J'ai lu, where he founded the Science-fiction imprint
and ed the Les Meilleurs Recits series of anthologies of stories
translated from the US PULP MAGAZINES. He was also a founder of the Prix
Apollo ( AWARDS). Hier, l'an 2000: L'illustration de science fiction des
annees 30 (1973; trans as 2000 A.D.: Illustrations From the Golden Age of
Science Fiction Pulps 1975 US), a book of sf ILLUSTRATION compiled by JS,
mostly in black-and-white, presents a good selection of gaudy nostalgia
but has no index. His Histoire de la science-fiction moderne ["Story of
Modern SF"] (1973; in 2 vols 1975; rev 1984) is a lengthy and enthusiastic
survey of the field, but has been upbraided for lacking critical analysis,
having a pedestrian style and structure, and containing too many sweeping
generalizations and personal prejudices. Two fantastic novels by JS are La
Passion selon Satan ["The Passion according to Satan"] (1960) and Le
Jardin de la licorne ["The Garden of the Unicorn"] (1978). [MJ/PN]
SAGAN, CARL

(1934- ) US astronomer, planetary scientist and author, professor of
astronomy and space sciences and director of the Laboratory for Planetary
Studies at Cornell University, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. CS played
an active role in the MARS experiments carried out by Mariner 9 (1971),
worked also on the Viking and Voyager projects, and was responsible for
placing a message to alien life aboard the interstellar spaceship Pioneer
10 (Jupiter flyby 1973). He is co-founder and president of the Planetary
Society, a very large space-interest group. For 12 years he was
editor-in-chief of Icarus, a journal devoted to planetary research. From
the mid-1970s, through books and pre-eminently through his 13-part PBS tv
documentary series Cosmos (1980), which he wrote and presented, CS became
perhaps the best known of all US scientific popularizers.His relevance to
sf had been evident much earlier than that, however, through his
speculations about LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; he is one of the comparatively
few scientists to have given serious thought to this question. His first
book was an updating of a translated 1963 book by the Russian astronomer
I.S. Shklovskii; the collaboration, published under both their names, was
Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966). CS's next books in this area were
The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective (1973), "produced"
by Jerome Agel, and Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (anth
1973), which he edited. He wrote on EVOLUTION (see also ORIGIN OF MAN) in
Dragons of Eden: A Speculative Essay on the Origin of Human Intelligence
(1977) - it won a Pulitzer Prize - and published a collection of
speculative essays (some on PSEUDO-SCIENCE) in Broca's Brain (coll 1979),
including "Science Fiction: A Personal View". There followed the
HUGO-winning book of the tv series, Cosmos *(1980) - it was on the
best-seller lists for over a year - and a book about comets, particularly
Halley's comet, Comet (1985) with Ann Druyan (his wife).Collaboration with
Druyan became the subject of much speculation in the case of CS's sf
novel, Contact (1985), for which he had received a $2 million advance in
1981 when it was still unwritten. It was alleged that this novel was a
collaboration with Druyan, rather than by CS alone; they countered that
only the (unproduced) screenplay based on the book had been collaborative.
The book itself is unexceptionable and unsensational. It invests science
with high glamour in its NEAR-FUTURE story of a successful SETI (Search
for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project; a rather good BLACK-HOLE
mechanism for interstellar travel is part of the flatly characterized
story, which grips in other respects, especially in its portrayal of the
way SCIENTISTS think. The plot elements about a COMMUNICATION from space
giving instructions for building a machine are reminiscent of the UK tv
serial A FOR ANDROMEDA (1961). The book has a strong religious focus.
[PN]Other works: UFOs: A Scientific Debate (anth 1973) ed with Thornton
Page; Other Worlds (1975) Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar
Record (1978) with Ann Druyan; many others.See also: ALIENS; ASTRONOMY;
MATHEMATICS; POETRY; TERRAFORMING; XENOBIOLOGY.
SAHA, ARTHUR W(ILLIAM)
(1923- ) US editor. The Year's Best Fantasy Stories sequence, started by
Lin CARTER in 1975, passed to AWS with The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: #7
(anth 1981), and continued with #8 (anth 1982), #9 (anth 1983), #10 (anth
1984), #11 (anth 1985), #12 (anth 1986), #13 (anth 1987) and #14 (anth

1988). With Donald A. WOLLHEIM (whom see for full list) AWS ed the Annual
World's Best SF sequence from #8: The 1972 Annual World's Best SF (anth
1972) until the series stopped in 1990. [JC]
SAINT, H(ARRY) F.
(1941- ) US businessman and writer whose first novel, Memoirs of an
Invisible Man (1987), filmed as MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN (1992), treats
the question of INVISIBILITY as a series of problems in practical living.
After the protagonist is rendered invisible by an accident at a research
establishment, he confronts head-on - sometimes comically - the numerous
conundrums of his state, finally becoming romantically involved with a
woman who believes in ghosts. The novel thus contrasts interestingly with
Thomas BERGER's Being Invisible (1987), in which the condition is likewise
accepted deadpan, but in which the protagonist cannot capitalize upon his
state. [JC]
ST CLAIR, MARGARET
(1911- ) US writer, usually under her own name, though she wrote a series
of elegant stories in the 1950s as Idris Seabright and published 1 tale in
1952 as Wilton Hazzard. Her sf career began with "Rocket to Limbo" for
Fantastic Adventures in 1946, and by 1950 she had published about 30
stories, most of them vigorous adventures in a strongly coloured idiom; a
magazine series, the Oona and Jik tales, appeared in Startling Stories and
TWS 1947-9. But, even though this early work seems at first glance
conventional enough, and obedient to PULP-MAGAZINE expectations, a
singularly claustrophobic pessimism could soon be felt. The Seabright
stories - which appeared almost exclusively in FSF 1950-59, and for which
MSC became temporarily better known than for the works published under her
own name - were smoother-textured than her pulp adventures and oriented
more towards FANTASY, but at the same time less daringly subversive of the
central impulses of sf: to solve problems, to penetrate barriers (
CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH), to gain control. In MSC's central work, these
impulses were consistently treated in terms of pathos.Her first novel,
Agent of the Unknown (1952 Startling Stories as "Vulcan's Dolls"; 1956
dos), is perhaps the definitive MSC text, packing into its brief compass a
remarkably complex plot whose protagonist only seems to represent the
typical HERO of SPACE OPERA. Though he remembers nothing before the age of
14, and though his actions enable the human species to begin a genetic
leap forwards, it is eventually revealed that he is not a SUPERMAN in the
making but a severely limited ANDROID - a toy of the godlike Vulcan who
appears in other MSC tales. His entrapment in a plot he cannot understand
until too late, his love for a human woman who is soon killed, and his
final realization that his puppet actions have released humans into a
state far beyond his comprehension - all generate a sense of extraordinary
constriction, to which the elegiac conclusion of the tale adds a powerful
emotional glow. MSC's other early books - The Green Queen (1955 Universe
Science Fiction as "Mistress of Viridis"; 1956 dos), The Games of Neith
(1960 dos), Message from the Eocene (1964 dos) and Three Worlds of
Futurity (coll 1964 dos) - sometimes feature more vigorous female
protagonists, but all in their various ways explore similar territories.
Published from the very heart of popular sf, they represent a fascinating

dissent from within.Her later novels, though ostensibly more ambitious,
perhaps lose some of the nightmare urgency of her early work, though both
Sign of the Labrys (1963), set underground after a nuclear HOLOCAUST, and
The Shadow People (1969), also set in a netherworld of caverns under the
daylit world, effectively present POCKET UNIVERSES without - significantly
- moving in the expected manner towards any convincing sort of
breakthrough into the larger world. The Dolphins of Altair (1967) uses
intelligent dolphins as an emblem of humanity's self-devastating
relationship with the planet Earth, and The Dancers of Noyo (1973)
overcomplicatedly deals with androids, post-holocaust California, Native
Americans and political oppression. Later stories appear in Change the
Sky, and Other Stories (coll 1974) and the excellent The Best of Margaret
St Clair (coll 1985) ed Martin H. GREENBERG, which includes the delicately
savage "Wryneck, Draw Me" (1980), the best of MSC's later anatomies of the
underside of progress. [JC]About the author: Margaret St Clair (1986 chap)
by Gordon BENSON Jr.See also: MYTHOLOGY; OUTER PLANETS; PERCEPTION;
ROBOTS; UNDER THE SEA; WOMEN SF WRITERS.
SAINT-EXUPERY, ANTOINE de
(1900-1944) French writer, most famous for Le Petit Prince (1944; trans
Katherine Woods as The Little Prince 1945 US). Regarded as an existential
fable for adults as well as one of the century's best children's books,
the story concerns a young prince who leaves his cosy ASTEROID home to
explore neighbouring worlds, among them Earth. His deceptively simple
adventures form a poignant SATIRE of modern society and an affirmation of
the ephemeral nature of life. [PhR]
St GEORGE, DAVID
Joint pseudonym of UK writer David Phillips (?- ) and UK-based Bulgarian
writer Georgi Markov (?1929-1978), whose assassination in London at the
hands of Bulgarian agents was admitted only in 1990 after the old
government fell. In The Right Honourable Chimpanzee (1978) a crisis-ridden
UK elects an ape as prime minister ( APES AND CAVEMEN). [JC]
St JAMES, BLAKELY
Charles PLATT.
St JOHN, J(AMES) ALLEN
(1872-1957) US illustrator, the principal illustrator from 1916 for the
original editions of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's many books; his Tarzan and
Barsoom series illustrations became so well known that they have since
overshadowed all his other work. He did 9 covers for Weird Tales, over 50
for AMZ and Fantastic Adventures and several for Other Worlds. JASJ's
illustrations were as Victorian as Burroughs's stories, with noble heroes
and pure, virginal heroines. His black-and-white illustrations are
unsophisticated sketches, and the colours in his paintings are muted, but
the overall effect of violent yet graceful movement added a perfect
romantic complement to Burroughs's writing. His visualizations have had a
profound influence on many illustrators, particularly those specializing
in HEROIC FANTASY, such as Roy G. KRENKEL and Frank FRAZETTA. [JG]Further
reading: J. Allen St John: An Illustrated Bibliography (1991) by Darrell
C. Richardson.See also: FANTASY; ZIFF-DAVIS.

St JOHN, PHILIP
Lester DEL REY.
St MARS, FRANK
[r] Frank AUBREY.
St. NICHOLAS MAGAZINE
US magazine for boys and girls, published by Scribner, later by Century
Co., then by American Education Press. Founded by Rosewell Smith and ed
Mary Mapes Dodge 1873-1905, William Fayal Clarke 1905-27, and others.
Assistant editors included Frank R. STOCKTON 1873-81 and Tudor Jenks
1887-1902. It appeared monthly Nov 1873-May 1930 as St. Nicholas, then as
SNM from June 1930 until its demise in June 1943. The format was large
square octavo, becoming quarto from 1926.SNM maintained a high literary
standard and kept its circulation at 70,000 for many years. Numerous
fantasy stories appeared within its pages, notably by Stockton, John
Kendrick BANGS and Rudyard KIPLING, ranging in content from fairy-tales to
sf such as Clement FEZANDIE's Through the Earth (1898; rev 1898) and
Stockton's "The Tricycle of the Future" (May 1885). Aimed at a more
educated and middle-class market than the dime novels ( DIME-NOVEL SF),
SNM was undoubtedly enjoyed by children to whom the FRANK READE LIBRARY
was out of reach (through parental veto), and thus has some bearing on the
HISTORY OF SF. [JE]Further reading: Books in Black or Red (1924) by Edmund
Lester Pearson.
SAKERS, DON
(1958- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Gamester" for Questar in
1981; his short work appeared in various magazines through the 1980s. His
first sf novel, The Leaves of October (fixup 1988), competently presents a
vision of ALIENS in the shape of sentient trees, who help humanity through
the evolutionary crisis of the current era. Carmen Miranda's Ghost is
Haunting Space Station Three * (anth 1990), which DS ed and to which he
contributed 2 stories, is a SHARED-WORLD anthology based on a filksong by
Leslie Fish. (Filksongs are songs composed by members of the sf community,
usually for performance at CONVENTIONS.) [JC]
SAKI
Pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916), UK author and journalist
noted for his acerbic writings. He began writing for The Westminster
Gazette in the late 1890s as Saki, the name of the cup-bearer in The
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. As H.H. Munro he wrote When William Came (1914),
a trenchant future- WAR novel about a German INVASION and the occupation
of London, regarded by I.F. CLARKE as the best of all such works. Many
tales of the weird and fantastic - ironic, witty and sometimes cruel - are
included in the following collections, all as by Saki: Reginald (coll
1904), Reginald in Russia (coll 1910), The Chronicles of Clovis (coll
1911) - an assemblage of CLUB STORIES - Beasts and Super-Beasts (coll
1914), The Toys of Peace (coll 1919), The Square Egg (coll 1924) and The
Complete Short Stories of Saki (coll 1930). [JE]Other works: The
Westminster Alice (1902); The Unbearable Bassington (1912).
SALAMA, HANNU
[r] FINLAND.

SALGARI, EMILIO
[r] ITALY.
SALlM, ALl
[r] ARABIC SF.
SALLIS, JAMES
(1944- ) US writer, briefly active in NW during its Michael
MOORCOCK-directed NEW-WAVE phase; he published his first sf story,
"Kazoo", there in 1967. His clearly acknowledged models in the French
avant garde and the gnomic brevity of much of his work limited his appeal
in the sf world, though he received some critical acclaim for A Few Last
Words (coll 1970). Later work (uncollected) appeared in the USA through
the 1970s and 1980s. He ed 2 sf anthologies: The War Book (anth 1969 UK)
and The Shores Beneath (anth 1971). [JC]
SALOON STORY
CLUB STORY.
SALVADOR, TOMAS
[r] SPAIN.
SAMACHSON, JOSEPH
(1906-1980) US writer and chemist, professor of biochemistry at Loyola
University before his retirement in 1973. His first story, "The Medicine"
for TWS in 1941, was published as by William Morrison, under which name he
wrote almost all his fiction of interest; he also wrote some stories with
Frederik POHL. Under the house name Brett STERLING he wrote 2 CAPTAIN
FUTURE tales, "Worlds to Come" (1943) and The Tenth Planet (1944 Captain
Future as "Days of Creation"; 1969), and a juvenile sf novel, Mel Oliver
and Space Rover on Mars (1954) as Morrison. [JC]
SAMALMAN, ALEXANDER
(1904-1956) US writer and editor who, after many years with Standard
Magazines, became in 1954 editor of their sf journals, THRILLING WONDER
STORIES, Fantastic Story Magazine ( FANTASTIC STORY QUARTERLY) and
STARTLING STORIES, the first two of which were soon amalgamated with the
latter, though to little avail, for it folded before the end of 1955.
Relatively little of AS's writing was sf, but it has been firmly
speculated - though there can be no certainty - that under the house name
Will GARTH he wrote Dr Cyclops * (1940), a rather effective novelization
of the film DR CYCLOPS (1940). [JC]
SAMBROT, WILLIAM (ANTHONY)
(1920- ) US author of more than 50 sf short stories, beginning with
"Report to the People" for The BLUE BOOK MAGAZINE in 1953. Most of his
work appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and other "slicks" and
consequently received less attention from within the sf world than it
might have done, considering its vigour and polish. WS released Island of
Fear and Other SF Stories (coll 1963), and under the pseudonym William
Ayes (he wrote also as Anthony Ayes) published a series of stories about
Crazy Murtag in various men's magazines; in these Melvin Murtag attempts
such impossible feats as repealing the First Law of Thermodynamics. [JC]

SAMUELSON, DAVID N(ORMAN)
(1939- ) US sf critic and professor of English at California State
University, Long Beach. His PhD dissertation (University of Southern
California) was later published by ARNO PRESS as a book, Visions of
Tomorrow: Six Journeys from Outer to Inner Space (1975): it contains
analyses of novels by Isaac ASIMOV, J.G. BALLARD, Algis BUDRYS, Arthur C.
CLARKE, Walter M. MILLER Jr and Theodore STURGEON. His next book was
Arthur C. Clarke: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1984). Many
shorter critical pieces have appeared in EXTRAPOLATION, SCIENCE-FICTION
STUDIES and various critical anthologies. DS is among the more intelligent
and better informed academic critics of sf. [PN]See also: CRITICAL AND
HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF.
SANBORN, B.X.
William S. BALLINGER.
SANBORN, ROBIN
(? - ) US writer in whose sf novel, The Book of Stier (1971), a youth
movement inspired by the MUSIC of the mysterious Richard Stier overtopples
all US institutions. As a sign of the devastation wreaked by this
countercultural putsch, Canada eventually takes over the USA. [JC]See
also: MESSIAHS.
SANDERS, GEORGE
[r] Leigh BRACKETT.
SANDERS, LAWRENCE
(1920- ) US writer best known for the Deadly Sin novels (The First Deadly
Sin was filmed in 1980) and for the thriller The Anderson Tapes (1970),
filmed in 1971. The Tomorrow File (1975) depicts a NEAR-FUTURE USA on a
large canvas. At the DYSTOPIAN heart of the book can be found the
Department of Bliss, whose functions in a jaded country are pejoratively
analysed. Of his many remaining books, some - like The Sixth Commandment
(1978) - are borderline sf. The Passion of Molly T (1984) depicts a near
future in FEMINIST terms. As Mark Upton, he wrote a fantasy, Dark Summer
(1979). [JC]See also: PULP MAGAZINES.
SANDERS, SCOTT RUSSELL
(1945- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Touch the Earth" for
Edges (anth 1980) ed Ursula K. LE GUIN. His first novel, Terrarium (1985),
is set in a future USA whose human population has retreated from the
polluted world into domed CITIES; the tale neatly expresses some
late-20th-century guilts and their redemption, for the few humans who
leave the domes find a rejuvenated Nature outdoors ( ECOLOGY). The
Engineer of Beasts (1988), a juvenile, is concerned with GENETIC
ENGINEERING. The Invisible Company (1989) examines the cost of maintaining
a colony of immortals in a place called Paradise Island, to which the
protagonist is ominously called. [JC]
SANDERS, WINSTON P.
[s] Poul ANDERSON.
SANDERSON, IVAN T.

[r] Terence ROBERTS.
SANTESSON, HANS STEFAN
(1914-1975) US editor and author. He ed FANTASTIC UNIVERSE from Sep 1956
until its demise in Mar 1960, and also a collection of stories from it:
The Fantastic Universe Omnibus (anth 1960). HSS was credited with the
editorship of the US edition of NEW WORLDS (5 issues 1960). Other HSS
anthologies are Rulers of Men (anth 1965), Gods for Tomorrow (anth 1967),
Crime Prevention in the 30th Century (anth 1969), Gentle Invaders (anth
1969), The Mighty Barbarians: Great Sword and Sorcery Heroes (anth 1969),
The Mighty Swordsmen (anth 1970), The Days After Tomorrow (anth 1971) and
Flying Saucers in Fact and Fiction (anth 1968), this last containing some
nonfiction items. [PN]
SANTO DOMINGO
LATIN AMERICA.
SANTOS, DOMINGO
[r] SPAIN.
SANTOS, JOAQUIM FELICIO DOS
[r] LATIN AMERICA.
SAPIR, RICHARD BEN
(1936-1987) US writer who published some borderline fantasy as by Richard
Ben and, as Richard Sapir and in collaboration with Warren B. MURPHY (whom
see for titles), parts of the Destroyer series of spoof thrillers
featuring the Doc Savage-like adventures of Remo Williams, a White man
(and avatar of Shiva the Destroyer) trained in the paranormal combat arts
of Sinanju. The Assassin's Handbook (coll 1982; rev vt Inside Sinanju
1985) as by RBS and Murphy (in fact by Will MURRAY) is an amused (and
amusing) companion to the sequence. RBS is of sf interest mainly for The
Far Arena (1978), a SLEEPER-AWAKES tale in which a Roman gladiator, having
offended the Emperor Domitian, is cast upon an ice floe where he freezes
until resuscitated in the 20th century; his responses to the contemporary
world are illuminatingly critical. In Quest (1987) the Holy Grail is
discovered and becomes the object of a violent modern-day quest; in The
Body (1983) the remains of Christ are apparently discovered. [JC]See also:
CRYONICS; SUSPENDED ANIMATION.
SAPPER
Pseudonym of UK writer Herman Cyril McNeile (1888-1937), who became
famous for the creation in Bulldog Drummond (1920) of a thuggish
antisemitic crime-fighting gentleman vigilante, some of whose adventures like The Final Count (1926), a tale set in 1927 and involving the use of a
secret weapon - come close to sf. The Island of Terror (1931 Canada)
features a race of ape-men ( APES AND CAVEMEN). Guardians of the Treasure
(1931 US), written under his own name, is a borderline-sf yarn. [JC]
SAPPHIRE AND STEEL
UK tv series (1979-82). An ATV Network Production. Written/created by
P.J. Hammond (except "Adventure Five" by Ben Houghton and Anthony Reed);
executive prod David Reid; prod Shaun O'Riordan. Dir O'Riordan, David
Foster. 4 seasons, 34 25min episodes in all; broken into "Adventure One"

(6 episodes 1979), "Adventure Two" (8 episodes 1979), "Adventure Three" (6
episodes 1981), "Adventure Four" (4 episodes 1981), "Adventure Five" (6
episodes 1981), "Adventure Six" (4 episodes 1982). Main players Joanna
Lumley (Sapphire), David McCallum (Steel) and David Collings
(Silver).Possibly the most mystifying and least coherent sf series ever to
appear on tv, SAS made a virtue of enigma. Sapphire and Steel are
elemental forces in human form, policing the integrity of the corridor of
time, which suffers incursions (often appearing as ghosts) from the past
or future. Sapphire has paranormal powers, but is not as time-resistant as
Steel. Time shifts and stops; people appear and disappear; memories
dissolve; the atmosphere is theatrical, ardent, brooding; Doppelgangers
proliferate; characters become absorbed into pictures and photographs. The
audience was deeply divided: many saw it as drivel, some as a triumph of
popular Surrealism-Magritte meets The AVENGERS - challenging our
PERCEPTIONS of what is real. [PN]
SARABANDE, WILLIAM
(? - ) US author of the prehistoric-sf First Americans series: The First
Americans: Beyond the Sea of Ice (1987), #2: Corridor of Storms (1988),
#3: Forbidden Land (1989), #4: Walkers of the Wind (1990),#5: The Sacred
Stones (1991), Thunder in the Sky (1992) and The Edge of the World (1993).
The books were SHARECROPPED. Wolves of the Dawn (1987) is a singleton.
[JC]
SARAC, ROGER
Pseudonym of US writer and motion-picture executive Roger Andrew Caras
(1928- ), author of nonfiction under his own name and, as RS, of an sf
novel, The Throwbacks (1965), about genetic monsters threatening mankind.
[JC]
SARBAN
Pseudonym of UK writer John W. Wall (1910-1989), a career diplomat for
the UK from 1933 until his retirement in 1966. Most of the short stories
assembled in Ringstones, and Other Curious Tales (coll 1951) and The Doll
Maker, and Other Tales of the Uncanny (coll 1953) are pure fantasy, but
the haunting and nightmarish THE SOUND OF HIS HORN (1952) has often been
conscripted to the sf ranks by sf critics, for it is partially set in an
ALTERNATE WORLD, a Germany 100 years after the Nazis have triumphed in
WWII ( HITLER WINS); the evocation of this timeless RURITANIAN enclave,
however, is as a pure fantasy land, ruled over by a charismatic Master
Forester (an avatar of Herne the Hunter), where untermensch dissidents are
hunted down for sport; the dark, flamboyant imagery of erotic chastisement
is startlingly fetishistic. [PN/JC]See also: GAMES AND SPORTS.
SARGENT, CRAIG
Jan STACY.
SARGENT, LYMAN TOWER
(1940- ) US academic and bibliographer, in the Department of Political
Science at the University of Missouri-St Louis. From his first piece of
interest, "Utopia and Dystopia in Contemporary Science Fiction" for The
Futurist in 1972, his sf work has been exclusively focused on the study of
UTOPIAS and DYSTOPIAS, the most important result of which has been British

and American Utopian Literature 1516-1975: An Annotated Bibliography
(1979; much exp, vt British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985: An
Annotated, Chronological Bibliography 1988). The revised edn, which lists
several thousand titles in a format which allows for (sometimes
excessively) brief comment, is an essential tool for the study of this
field. LTS's extremely broad-church definition of a utopian work allows
him to bring very disparate writings - ranging from GENRE SF to primarily
nonfiction works - into thought-provoking juxtaposition. [JC]See also:
BIBLIOGRAPHIES; HISTORY OF SF.
SARGENT, PAMELA
(1948- ) US writer and editor with an MA in classical philosophy from the
State University of New York at Binghamton, where she taught for some
time; she has lived with George ZEBROWSKI for many years. Although she
published her first sf story, "Landed Minority", in FSF as early as 1970 with much of her early work being assembled as Starshadows (coll 1977) she first came to wide notice as the editor of an excellent ANTHOLOGY
series comprising stories written by women about female protagonists.
Though the tales assembled in Women of Wonder (anth 1975), More Women of
Wonder (anth 1976) and The New Women of Wonder (anth 1978) are not all
FEMINIST, the long and argued introduction to the first volume necessarily
presents in feminist terms the case for a theme anthology of this sort. A
further theme anthology, Bio-Futures (anth 1976), is also notable for the
strength of the organizing mind behind it.At the same time PS began to
publish the novels which confirmed a sense that she was one of those
writers of the late 1970s and 1980s capable of making significant use of
the thematic potentials of the genre; the range of themes so examined was
very wide. Cloned Lives (fixup 1976) traces the lives of a number of
genetically identical children brought up together, grippingly
differentiating among them ( CLONES). The Sudden Star (1972 NW as "Julio
204"; much exp 1979; vt The White Death 1980 UK), set mostly in a
post-nuclear- HOLOCAUST Miami, examines through multiple viewpoints a
world whose disintegration reflects a cogent ecological passion (
ECOLOGY). In the Earthminds sequence of FAR-FUTURE sf tales for older
children - Watchstar (1980), Eye of the Comet (1984) and Homesmind (1985)
- comet-dwelling nontelepathic descendants of humanity confront Earth's
own telepaths, whose culture is otherwise primitive; their eventual
reconciliation comes after many trials. A kind of thematic pendant to this
series, Earthseed (1983), carries its juvenile protagonists through a
traditional rite of passage in which they escape a benevolent AI-monitored
GENERATION STARSHIP (see also POCKET UNIVERSE) and earn the chance to land
upon a new planet.The Golden Space (fixup 1982) examines questions of
IMMORTALITY, The Alien Upstairs (1983) exposes a disheartened NEAR-FUTURE
family to the transcendental influence of the eponymous visitor, and The
Shore of Women (1986) complexly subjects a traditional post-holocaust
venue to an analysis ambiguously feminist: women's dominance of science
and technology has a punitive ring, and the world depicted seems less than
stable. VENUS OF DREAMS (1986) and its sequel, Venus of Shadows (1988),
depict the TERRAFORMING of VENUS in long-breathed epic vein; a final
volume, Child of Venus, is projected. A late juvenile, Alien Child (1988),
somewhat awkwardly presents the last human children with ethical questions

about the future of their race as they approach adulthood in an ALIEN
breeding complex which is both hospice and research institute. The Best of
Pamela Sargent (coll 1987) ed Martin H. GREENBERG provides a conspectus of
her career from 1972; and "Danny Goes to Mars" (1992) won a NEBULA award
for Best Novelette. Not all of PS's varied explorations can be described
as fully successful, for a slight sense of cogitation sometimes causes her
narrative sense to falter, and her continued interest in the permutations
of human nature can seem abstract; but always a strong, serious, attentive
mind can be reassuringly felt at work. [JC]Other works: Elvira's Zoo (1979
chap), juvenile; The Mountain Cage (1983 chap); Afterlives: Stories about
Life after Death (anth 1986) ed with Ian WATSON; Ruler of the Sky (1993),
associational.About the author: The Work of Pamela Sargent: An Annotated
Bibliography ?
COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; ESCHATOLOGY; WOMEN SF WRITERS.
SATELLITE
The FUTURIAN .
SATELLITE OF BLOOD
FIRST MAN INTO SPACE.
SATELLITE SCIENCE FICTION
US magazine, DIGEST-size Oct 1956-Dec 1958, BEDSHEET-size Feb-May 1959,
18 issues Oct 1956-May 1959. Bimonthly; monthly for last 4 issues (Feb-May
1959). Published by Renown Publications. Cylvia Kleinman (Mrs Leo
MARGULIES) was managing ed on all issues, which were ed Sam MERWIN Jr
Oct-Dec 1956, Leo Margulies Feb 1957-Dec 1958 and Frank Belknap LONG
Feb-May 1959.SSF was to some degree a re-creation in digest format of
STARTLING STORIES, with a similar editorial policy ("a complete science
fiction novel in every issue") and an editor and publisher (Leo Margulies
was both) who had worked on that magazine in the 1940s. It began
promisingly, its first 2 issues featuring "The Man from Earth" (Oct 1956;
rev vt Man of Earth 1958) by Algis BUDRYS and "A Glass of Darkness" (Dec
1956; vt The Cosmic Puppets 1957) by Philip K. DICK, as well as stories by
Isaac ASIMOV, Arthur C. CLARKE (in each of the first 5 issues), L. Sprague
DE CAMP and others. Merwin left after #2, however, and the magazine
gradually declined into mediocrity, though it did run an interesting
series of articles by Sam MOSKOWITZ on the HISTORY OF SF - a partial basis
for his Explorers of the Infinite (coll 1963) - and The Languages of Pao
(Dec 1957; cut 1958) by Jack VANCE. The June 1959 issue was printed but
never distributed. [MJE]
SATIRE
From the earliest days of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION, satire was its
prevailing mode, and this inheritance was evident even after sf proper
began in the 19th century. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines
satire as literary work "in which prevailing vices or follies are held up
to ridicule". Proto sf is seldom interested in imagining the societies of
other worlds or future times for their own sake; most proto sf of the 17th
and 18th centuries (by, for example, CYRANO DE BERGERAC, Daniel DEFOE,
Francis GODWIN, Eliza HAYWOOD, Robert PALTOCK, RESTIF DE LA BRETONNE and
Jonathan SWIFT) created imaginary settings, commonly on ISLANDS or on the

MOON, as a kind of convenient blank slate upon which various societies
satirizing the writer's own could be inscribed - commonly a travesty of
some particular aspect of it (still a common strategy in sf by MAINSTREAM
WRITERS and in GENRE SF as well). Therefore, by extension, satire is
ancestral to the DYSTOPIA, and even the UTOPIA often contains satirical
elements. Many critics believe that Sir Thomas MORE intended the reader to
take some aspects of Utopia (1516 in Latin; trans 1551) with a grain of
salt. The satire may also take the form of debunking other kinds of
literature, as in The True History (2nd century AD) by LUCIAN. The
wonderful exaggerations of this story poke fun at travellers' tales
generally, though its zestful telling suggests a certain sympathy with the
inquisitive mind which dotes on such imaginings.It is almost impossible to
write a work of fiction set in another world - be it some alien place or
our own world in another time - which does not make some sort of statement
about the writer's own real world. Thus most sf bears at least a family
resemblance to satire. In his critical study New Maps of Hell (1960 US),
Kingsley AMIS argued that dystopian satire rather than technological
extrapolation is central to sf (perhaps because his own fiction is largely
satirical). It is an easy argument to support, at least in terms of the
number of texts that can be cited as evidence.Samuel BUTLER and Mark TWAIN
were supreme among the prominent satirists of the 19th century who used sf
imagery to make their points; even when we turn to the work of writers
considered more central to the development of modern sf, such as Jules
VERNE and H.G. WELLS, we find the satirical element prominent. Wells's THE
TIME MACHINE (1895), for example, focuses in large part on the
relationship of the working classes and the leisured classes, and THE WAR
OF THE WORLDS (1898) can be read as an ironic tale in which the UK, the
great, technologically advanced colonizing power of the day, is herself
subjected to colonization by a technological superior. Satire need not be
good-humoured (indeed, that brand of satire said to be descended from
Juvenal [AD 60-c130] is commonly biting), and both these works by Wells
are notably savage, especially THE WAR OF THE WORLDS in its portrait of a
demoralized and cowardly population.Among the mainstream writers of this
century who have written important sf satires are Anthony BURGESS, Karel
CAPEK, Anatole FRANCE, Aldous HUXLEY, Andre MAUROIS, George ORWELL, Gore
VIDAL and Evelyn WAUGH. It would be impossible to list the innumerable sf
satires by less-known writers, but we can pick out Archibald MARSHALL's
Upsidonia (1915), Owen M. JOHNSON's The Coming of the Amazons (1931),
Frederick Philip GROVE's Consider her Ways (1947) and Stefan THEMERSON's
Professor Minaa's Lecture (1953). The latter two contain many pungent
comments on human society by insect intelligences, both being examples of
one of the most popular satiric strategies in sf: the use of an alien
perspective to allow us to see our own institutions in a fresh light.
Indeed, there is a sense in which all satire depends upon just such
reversals of perspective, which sf is peculiarly well fitted to supply;
satire forces us to look at familiar aspects of our lives with a fresh
vision, so that all their absurdity or horror is, so to speak, framed, as
in a picture. Jonathan SWIFT used intelligent horses in Gulliver's Travels
(1726; rev 1735), VOLTAIRE a visiting giant alien from Sirius in
Micromegas (1750 Berlin; 1752 France), Grant ALLEN a man from the future
in The British Barbarians (1895), Lester LURGAN a visiting Martian in A

Message From Mars (1912) and Eden PHILLPOTTS a visiting alien lizard in
Saurus (1938). (The same strategy is now common in sf tv comedy; e.g., MY
FAVORITE MARTIAN [1963-6], MORK AND MINDY [1978-82] and ALF [1986-90].)
Aside from visiting aliens and future dystopias there are many other
strategies for producing such shifts of perspective. One such is evident
in The Stepford Wives (1972) by Ira LEVIN, filmed as The STEPFORD WIVES
(1975): sexist masculine attitudes are satirized in a thriller centring on
the attractions of passive, substitute robot wives. Indeed, the satirical
creation of imaginary societies in which the horrors of our own are writ
large is especially common in feminist sf ( FEMINISM), as in Margaret
ATWOOD's THE HANDMAID'S TALE (1985). ROBOTS are often used in sf satire
for a different reason: for their innocence. Because robots are, in
theory, not programmed with prejudices, and are given simple ethical
systems, they may have a childlike purity that cuts through
rationalizations and sophistications. In Philip K. DICK's Now Wait for
Last Year (1966), for example, the hero's moral quandary is amusingly but
touchingly resolved by advice from a robot taxi-cab. CHILDREN IN SF are
occasionally used in a similar manner. Both these are simply special cases
of the "innocent-observer" strategy first popularized by Voltaire in
Candide (1759), in which a naive man, with few expectations of life and a
likable character, is consistently abused and exploited in his travels.
Modern sf examples include THE SIRENS OF TITAN (1959) by Kurt VONNEGUT Jr,
in which the hero is a millionaire brainwashed into innocence on Mars, and
Robert SHECKLEY's Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1962; vt The Journey of Joenes
1978 UK), where the traveller is a naive islander who has a terrible time
in a future USA. Sheckley was for a time among the finest genre-sf
satirists, and a great deal of his work depends on the introduction of a
similar innocent viewpoint.Satire is not only a matter of imaginary
societies and shifts in perspective; it has a great deal to do with
narrative tone, which cannot generally afford to be too hectoring or
sarcastic, or the reader simply feels bludgeoned. An air of mild surprise
is often considered appropriate, though commonly the narrator's voice is
ironic or sardonic, a good example of the latter being found in a
collection which contains several satirical sf fables, Sardonic Tales
(coll trans 1927), assembled from Contes Cruels (coll 1883) by VILLIERS DE
L'ISLE ADAM, after whose collection this whole mode of writing is often
known as "contes cruels" or "cruel tales". Further examples of this
chilling subgenre can be found in the work of John COLLIER, Roald DAHL and
sometimes Howard FAST. In genre sf it characterizes the excellent work of
John T. SLADEK, who shifts skilfully between the mock-innocent and the
ironic in his stories, nearly all of which are satire.The standard of
satire within genre sf was not very high before the 1950s, though numerous
pulp writers from Stanton A. COBLENTZ to L. Sprague DE CAMP wrote
occasionally in this vein. One of the earliest sf writers to excel here
was, especially in his short stories, Henry KUTTNER (whose work, even when
signed Kuttner, was often written collaboratively with C.L. MOORE). Short,
satirical sf stories found a natural home in the early 1950s when the
magazine GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION opened up a new market. The best of the
Gal satirists were probably Damon KNIGHT, C.M. KORNBLUTH, Frederik POHL,
Sheckley and William TENN. As satirical collaborators, Pohl and Kornbluth
specialized in dystopian stories which extrapolated displeasing aspects of

present-day life into the future: the world of advertising was pilloried
in both THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1953) and Pohl's much later solo effort, The
Merchants War (1984), and of organized sport in Gladiator-at-Law (1955).
It was the turn of insurance companies in Preferred Risk (1955) by Pohl
and Lester DEL REY writing together as Edson MCCANN. Another sharp
anti-advertising book is The Big Ball of Wax (1954) by Shepherd MEAD; and
much of the amusing but occasionally heavy-handed satire of Ron GOULART is
directed against the ad-man's mentality, and the MEDIA LANDSCAPE
generally.In the 1960s and 1970s the magazine NEW WORLDS published many
writers whose satirical skills tended more towards a rather dry irony than
to overt anger or even jovial sarcasm. Notable among these were Brian W.
ALDISS, Thomas M. DISCH and the editor himself, Michael MOORCOCK, whose
most directly satirical sequence is Dancers at the End of Time, beginning
with An Alien Heat (1972). US satire, too, became less broad than before.
The amusing but obvious satire of Fritz LEIBER's The Silver Eggheads
(1961) and A Specter is Haunting Texas (1969) gave ground to the work of
writers like Barry N. MALZBERG and James TIPTREE Jr, who (in completely
different ways) also preferred a lower-key irony (through which in both
cases a ferocious bitterness is visible) and in whose works the satirical
was only one of several elements. Pure satires were becoming comparatively
rare in sf by the 1970s, although Peter DICKINSON's The Green Gene (1973)
and Richard COWPER's Clone (1972) are examples; the latter is another
story in the Candide pattern. Some important satirical work issued from
the Communist bloc, notably that of Stanislaw LEM in, especially,
Cyberiada (coll 1965; trans as The Cyberiad 1974 US) and "Kongres
Futurologiczny" (1971; trans as The Futurological Congress 1974 US), where
the savagery of the wit is Swift-like.The sf CINEMA has flirted with
satire quite often. The best-known examples are probably PLANET OF THE
APES (1968), SLEEPER (1973) and DR STRANGELOVE: OR HOW I STOPPED WORRYING
AND LEARNED TO LOVE THE BOMB (1963); others are The PRESIDENT'S ANALYST
(1967), WESTWORLD (1973), The STUFF (1985), TERRORVISION (1986), EARTH
GIRLS ARE EASY (1988) and MEET THE APPLEGATES (1990). DAWN OF THE DEAD
(1977; vt Zombie) is unusual in marrying satire to HORROR, especially in
its central image of zombies shambling around a shopping mall. STRANGE
INVADERS (1983) manages to combine an exciting alien-invasion story with
considerable satire on the USA of the 1950s (a cultural era into whose
behaviour patterns the aliens have been frozen) and of the 1980s (when
they attempt to act).Parody is a form of satire, and there has not been a
great deal in sf. The best parodies of sf writers and their CLICHES are
probably those by John Sladek in The Steam-Driven Boy (coll 1973); also
fairly successful are those in David LANGFORD's The Dragonhiker's Guide to
Battlefield Covenant at Dune's Edge: Odyssey Two (coll 1988). Langford's
cowritten Earthdoom! (1987) parodies bestselling DISASTER novels. A parody
with a more serious point is Norman SPINRAD's The Iron Dream (1972), which
masquerades as a SWORD-AND-SORCERY novel written by Adolf Hitler. Harry
HARRISON's Bill, the Galactic Hero (1965) and Star Smashers of the Galaxy
Rangers (1973) parody Robert A. HEINLEIN and E.E. "Doc" SMITH
respectively. H.G. WELLS was a favourite subject for parodists from early
on, as in The War of the Wenuses (1898) by E.V. LUCAS and C.L. Graves
(1856-1944) and Max Beerbohm's "Perkins and Mankind" (1912). Mention my
Name in Atlantis (1972) by John JAKES is a parody of Robert E. HOWARD, not

as sharp as Spinrad's, and its hero not as funny as Terry PRATCHETT's
"Cohen the Barbarian", who pops up occasionally in the Discworld series.
Bob SHAW's Who Goes There? (1977) parodies many themes of SPACE OPERA in
general with considerable inventiveness, as does the most successful
sf-parody film, DARK STAR (1974). Sf writers have produced a number of
parodies of PSEUDO-SCIENCE (which see for listing). The best known sf
parodist of the 1980s was Douglas ADAMS, with his Hitch Hiker's Guide to
the Galaxy series. There is also, of course, much pastiche - Philip Jose
FARMER has written a good deal - but pastiche and parody are not the same
thing, for the pastiche may be homage whereas parody normally implies
deflation (although the two can co-exist, as in Dark Star).In general
satire during the 1970s-80s was perhaps less visible in genre sf than in
borderline-sf FABULATIONS (including some by John Calvin BATCHELOR,
William BURROUGHS, Angela CARTER, Robert COOVER, Carol EMSHWILLER,
Alasdair GRAY, Jerzy KOSINSKI, Thomas PYNCHON and Josephine SAXTON - the
list could be considerably extended). While genre sf continues to take the
form of pure satire comparatively rarely, satirical elements are common in
seemingly nonsatirical genre novels, especially perhaps in the work of
writers for whom irony is an important part of their vision, such as Iain
BANKS, Terry BISSON, George Alec EFFINGER, M. John HARRISON, John KESSEL,
James MORROW, Rudy RUCKER and Howard WALDROP. Not that irony and satire
can be read as isomorphic: Gene WOLFE and John CROWLEY, for example, are
ironists almost always, satirists almost never. [PN]See also: HUMOUR;
SOCIOLOGY; TABOOS.
SATTERFIELD, CHARLES
Pseudonym used on 4 magazine stories by Frederik POHL, 1954-9, the first
being a collaboration with Lester DEL REY. [JC]
SATURN
OUTER PLANETS.
SATURN
US DIGEST-size magazine. 5 issues Mar 1957-Mar 1958, published by Robert
C. Sproul as Candar Publishing Company; ed Sproul with editorial
consultant Donald A. WOLLHEIM. A Jules VERNE story appeared in #1, but
nothing else of note. #1 was subtitled "The Magazine of Science Fiction",
#2 "Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" and the remainder "Science
Fiction and Fantasy". Despite his mere "consultant" title, Wollheim chose
the contents. [FHP/PN]
SATURN AWARD
AWARDS.
SATURN 3
Film (1980). Transcontinental. Prod and dir Stanley Donen, starring
Farrah Fawcett, Kirk Douglas, Harvey Keitel. Screenplay Martin AMIS, from
a story by John Barry. 87 mins. Colour.With a good director like Donen and
a screenplay by Martin AMIS, it is difficult to see how so obscene and
silly an exploitation movie could come to be. Douglas and Fawcett play the
couple alternating romping in bed with working on a hydroponics project,
designed to feed millions, situated for no logical reason on Titan, a moon
of Saturn. Unbalanced Benson (Keitel) arrives disguised as a legitimate

researcher and builds an equally unstable ROBOT which spends most of the
rest of the film tearing apart living creatures (including people) and
groping lasciviously at Fawcett. This is the second film after DEMON SEED
(1977) to feature an amorous, unbalanced AI, a notion more GOTHIC than
scientific. The novelization was Saturn 3 * (1980) by Steve GALLAGHER.
[PN]
SAUNDERS, CALEB
[s] Robert A. HEINLEIN.
SAUNDERS, JAKE
(1947- ) US writer, one of the less active members of a Texas grouping
which includes Howard WALDROP, his collaborator on The Texas-Israeli War:
1999 (1974). [JC]
SAVA, GEORGE
George BORODIN.
SAVAGE, BLAKE
John BLAINE.
SAVAGE, RICHARD
Pseudonym of UK writer Ivan Roe (1917- ) for his thrillers - including
The Horrible Hat (1949), in which a psychoanalyst/detective explains
strange manifestations - and his sf novel, When the Moon Died (1955),
whose telling involves an exceedingly complicated frame: far-future aliens
visit a dead Earth to listen to a tape whose long-dead narrator has
discovered how, long before, a nuclear HOLOCAUST was prevented by
scientists who destroyed the Moon but subsequently established a
totalitarian DYSTOPIA. The aliens never do work out why Earth is now
bereft of life. Under his own name Roe wrote some non-genre novels, like
The Salamander Touch (1952), in which an atomic scientist disappears with
difficult consequences. [JC/PN]
SAVARIN, JULIAN JAY
(? - ) Dominican-born West Indian writer and musician, in the UK since
his teens. His Lemmus trilogy - Lemmus One: Waiters on the Dance (1972),
Lemmus Two: Beyond the Outer Mirr (1976) and Lemmus Three: Archives of
Haven (coll of linked stories 1977) - is an expansive SPACE OPERA in which
GOD (the Galactic Organization and Dominions) experimentally settles Terra
with people who will evolve in isolation ( ADAM AND EVE). Explanations are
offered for the Judeo-Christian tradition, the fall of ATLANTIS, etc.
Arena (1979) involves folk from various times in a mighty struggle. JJS
afterwards turned to thrillers. [JC]
SAVCHENKO, VLADIMIR (IVANOVICH)
(1933- ) Russian writer who began as an author of short stories,
publishing Tchironyie Zviozdy ["Dark Stars"] (coll 1960) and contributing
to anthologies. His most famous novel, Otkrytiie Sebia (1967; trans
Antonina W. Bouis as Self-Discovery 1979 US), depicts in uncliched terms
the scientific development of a SUPERMAN. Later stories, comparable with
the metaphysical parables of Stanislaw LEM and Philip K. DICK, are to be
found in Ispytaniie Istinoi ["Truth Test"] (coll [date unconfirmed]) and
Algoritm Uspekha ["Success Algorithm"] (coll 1983). A play, Novoiie

Oruzhiie ["New Weapons"] (1983), portrays modern physicists obsessed by
moral problems after discovering a process which neutralizes all nuclear
weapons on Earth. A rare attempt, in the Soviet sf of the 1980s, to create
a future communist UTOPIA is the less successful Za Perevalom ["After the
Pass"] (1984). [VG]
SAVILE, FRANK (MACKENZIE)
(? -? ) UK writer who wrote also as Knarf Elivas (his own names
reversed). Beyond the Great South Wall (1899) combines the search for a
Mayan LOST WORLD in the Antarctic with the actual discovery of the extinct
Native Americans' polar deity, a brontosaurus with hypnotic eyes. All ends
well with the death of the creature and some human marriages. [JC]
SAVOY BOOKS
David BRITTON; Michael BUTTERWORTH.
SAWTELLE, WILLIAM CARTER
[s] Rog PHILLIPS.
SAWYER, ROBERT J(AMES)
(1960- ) Canadian writer who began publishing sf with "If I'm Here,
Imagine Where They Sent my Luggage" for The Village Voice in 1981, and was
moderately active as a short-story writer in the 1980s. His first novel,
Golden Fleece (1988 AMZ; exp 1990 US), set on a colony ship named Argo,
run by an AI named JASON, perhaps slightly overcopiously engages to meld
Greek myth and HARD SF in the story of a murder and its solution by a
human protagonist so psychologically recessed that the AI cannot read his
intentions. The Quintaglio Ascension sequence - comprising Far-seer (1992
US), Fossil Hunter (1993 US) and Foreigner (1994 US) - is set on an
unstable Moon orbiting a distant planet, and inhabited by intelligent
dinosaurs who were transported there from Earth by a quasi-omniscient
Watcher aeons past. True to the conventions of HARD SF, the young dinosaur
protagonist of the sequence both revolutionizes the sciences of his world,
and has copious adventures while doing so. Some of the detail work is
luminously enjoyable; some of the premises are facile. It is, all in all,
a thoroughly readable presentation. End of an Era (1994 US) is also about
dinosaurs, but different ones: 2 contemporary Earth paleontologists vie
over explanations for the death of dinosaurs on this planet, and use TIME
TRAVEL to test their theses. In the end, an overly intricate explanation
is offered; but again the journey through the text is swift. The Terminal
Experiment (1995 UK), first published 1994-95 in ASF as "Hobson's Choice",
is an sf mystery centring on the discovery that, at the instant of death,
a form of energy escapes the human brain. [JC]See also: CANADA.
SAXON, PETER
Initially the personal pseudonym of UK writer W. Howard BAKER, under
which he wrote many titles for Amalgamated Press, mainly stories in the
Sexton Blake series before its cancellation in 1963. He then took the name
to Mayflower Books, where the series continued, written by him and others
under what was now a house name. The claims of Scottish writer Wilfred
MCNEILLY to have written most of the PS titles are unjustified (see
entries on BAKER and MCNEILLY for their PS work). Other writers who used
the name included Rex Dolpin, Stephen FRANCES, Ross Richards and Martin

THOMAS. Titles of sf interest not by Baker or McNeilly include Slave Brain
(1967), Black Honey (1968) and Corruption (1968), whose authors have not
been identified, and some titles in the Guardians psychic-investigators
sequence: Through the Dark Curtain (1968 US) by Richards, The Curse of
Rathlaw (1968) by Martin and The Vampires of Finistere (1970) by Dolpin.
The most memorable PS title (written by Baker with Frances) may be The
Disoriented Man (1966; vt Scream and Scream Again 1967 US), filmed as
SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN (1969), the latter being something of a cult
classic. [JC]
SAXON, RICHARD
J.L. MORRISSEY.
SAXTON, JOSEPHINE (MARY HOWARD)
(1935- ) UK writer who began publishing sf with "The Wall" for Science
Fantasy in 1965, and whose first 3 novels - The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An
Smith (1969 US), Vector for Seven: The Weltanschaung [sic] of Mrs Amelia
Mortimer and Friends (1970 US) and Group Feast (1971 US) - established her
very rapidly as an inventive creator of sf FABULATIONS. Each of these
books presents narratives whose outcomes are more readable as allegories
of their protagonists' moral fates than of any physical journey, though
the image of what might be called the bollixed quest is central to her
work. These journeys are described - often in some detail, as in Vector
for Seven - in a register of perilous ambivalence, half INNER SPACE, half
mutable and frustrating external world. When JS returned to publishing
novels in the 1980s, titles like The Travails of Jane Saint (1980; exp as
coll vt The Travails of Jane Saint and Other Stories 1986) and The
Consciousness Machine; Jane Saint and the Backlash: The Further Travails
of Jane Saint (coll 1989) clearly demonstrated the fundamental continuity
of her vision. Queen of the States (1986) - a clever title in which
"States" can be interpreted as referring to the USA or to various sorts of
mental breakdown - comes very close to a savage reductionism: the
sf/fantasy escapades of the female protagonist default constantly to
delusion, for she is imprisoned in a mental institution. Perhaps even more
clearly than before, these later books are governed by a FEMINIST sense of
the constraints binding women to mundane, male-ordained reality - a sense
that goes far to explain the wildness of JS's protagonists and the
lungeing movements of her prose. Her non-Jane Saint short stories, which
tend to a slantwise but pointed lightness of touch, have been assembled in
The Power of Time (coll 1985) and Little Tours of Hell: Tall Tales of Food
and Holidays (coll 1986). [JC]See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; FANTASTIC
VOYAGES; PERCEPTION.
SAXTON, MARK
(1914-1988) US writer who, as an editor at Farrar ?
Austin Tappan WRIGHT's daughter, Sylvia Wright, edit the massive
manuscript of Islandia, which his firm published in 1942. MS himself
produced some detective fiction, but his sf was confined to the Islandia
world, for which he wrote 3 novels in continuation of Wright's original:
The Islar: A Narrative of Lang III (1969), narrated by the grandson of
Wright's John Lang, The Two Kingdoms: A Novel of Islandia (1979) and Havoc
in Islandia (1982). The UTOPIAN glow of the original did not survive

unaltered, but MS's work was both competent and devoted. [JC]
SAYLES, JOHN
(1950- ) US writer and film-maker. JS made his reputation as a MAINSTREAM
WRITER with the novels Pride of the Bimbos (1975) and Union Dues (1977)
and his collection The Anarchist's Convention (coll 1979). He began
writing scripts for exploitation movies in the late 1970s, and enjoyed a
burst of creativity in association with Roger CORMAN, Joe DANTE, Lewis
Teague and Steven SPIELBERG. His sf and fantasy screenplays, always lively
and self-aware, are PIRANHA (1978), BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS (1980), The
Howling (1980), ALLIGATOR (1980), The Clan of the Cave Bear (1985) and
Wild Thing (1989). Night Skies, a horror script about an isolated farm
besieged by alien visitors, was commissioned by Spielberg but then
abandoned in favour of the similar but more benevolent CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF
THE THIRD KIND (1977). JS made his directorial debut with Return of the
Secaucus 7 (1980), and has made a number of well received non-genre films
since, including Lianna (1981) and Baby, It's You (1983). His sole sf film
as director is The BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (1984), in which the story
of a Black alien who crashlands in Harlem is used to tackle JS's usual
concerns. [KN]See also: CINEMA.
SCANDINAVIA
This entry refers primarily to Sweden and Norway; there are separate
entries for DENMARK and FINLAND. Scandinavia has always been somewhat
isolated from the main roads of European cultural development, and never
more so than during the 18th century, when the Age of Enlightenment swept
across the rest of Europe. Outside the mainly French-speaking court,
Scandinavia was poor and starving, mainly agricultural, and crushed by
repeated, ruinous wars. It is perhaps not surprising that excursions into
fantastic literature were few: Scandinavia had nothing to compare with the
French Voyages imaginaires, a 36-vol series published from 1787 and
running from LUCIAN to CYRANO DE BERGERAC to Jonathan SWIFT. The first
noted Scandinavian example of fantastic literature was Danish ( DENMARK):
Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum (1741 in Latin; exp 1745; trans anon as A
Journey to the World Under-Ground. By Nicolas Klimius 1742 UK; vt A
Journey to the World Underground 1974 US) by Ludwig HOLBERG. This witty
journey into a HOLLOW EARTH, somewhat reminiscent of the work of Swift, is
regarded as a classic and has never been out of print. In Sweden, Olof von
Dalin (1708-1763) published in his magazine Then Swanska Argus an amusing
political story about extraterrestrial visitors to Earth, "Saga om Erik
hin Gotske" ["Tale of Erik of the Goths"] (1734), and in Norway there was
the early TIME-TRAVEL play Anno 7603 (1781) by John Hermann Wessel
(1742-1785). But these were isolated examples. Fantastic literature was
popular, but most of it was what we would today call HEROIC FANTASY, with
sword-toting heroes, maidens in distress, sentient dragons, etc. The first
Scandinavian novel that can be considered as modern sf, with everything
that description implies, appeared as late as 1878: Oxygen och Aromasia
["Oxygen and Aromasia"] (1878) by the Swedish journalist Claes Lundin
(1825-1908). Unfortunately, it bore unmistakeable signs that Lundin had
read the German book Bilder aus der Zukunft ["Images of the Future"] (coll
1878) by Kurd LASSWITZ, published in Breslau earlier that same year.

Lundin's version is a tale set a few hundred years hence in a failed
UTOPIA; it is a funny SATIRE bursting with then-new sf ideas-time travel,
tv, moving sidewalks, ALIENS, airships and SPACESHIPS, and even an
interesting TIME PARADOX. It is still eminently readable; a new edition
was published as recently as 1974.Again, however, this was an isolated
example. Lundin wrote no more sf - he is today mostly remembered as the
mentor of August Strindberg (1849-1912) - and no new talents appeared to
take his place. Although the first book ever written about sf, Camille
FLAMMARION's Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes reels (1864; trans as
Real and Imaginary Worlds 1865 US), was translated into Swedish as early
as 1867 and Jules VERNE's novels were translated into the Scandinavian
languages as soon as they appeared in France, few indigenous authors tried
their hands. Of the 286 straightforward sf novels published 1870-1900 in
Sweden, the leading literary market in Scandinavia, the overwhelming
majority were translations of the popular foreign sf authors of the time:
Verne, Flammarion, Lasswitz, Mor JOKAI, Andre LAURIE and H.G. WELLS. There
was an early attempt at a Swedish sf magazine, Stella - 4 irregular issues
Apr 1886-Aug 1888, with short stories by these foreign authors and a
scattering of anonymous material that may have been by local hands - but
it was much before its time and vanished without trace.Very little
happened in Scandinavia until the explosive arrival on the Swedish
literary scene of Otto Witt (1875-1923). Originally a mining engineer, he
worked in Germany until 1912, then returned to Sweden firmly resolved to
win fame and fortune. (Interestingly, he had studied at the Technicum in
Bingen, Germany, at the same time as Hugo GERNSBACK, later to launch the
first US SF MAGAZINE, AMAZING STORIES, and Karl Hans Strobl, later to
launch the first sf/fantasy magazine in AUSTRIA, Der Orchideengarten.
There is no evidence that they met.) To this end Witt wrote dozens of sf
novels, all bursting with new and usually harebrained ideas which nobody
else took seriously. He can be thought of as a Swedish Hugo Gernsback but
with ten times the ego. His many novels were merely vehicles for his
crackpot theories; Hur manen erovrades ["How the Moon was Conquered"]
(1915) treated the creation of the MOON, Guldfursten ["The Prince of
Gold"] (1916) proposed a sure-fire way of making gold, and so on. But his
great accomplishment was the creation of Sweden's first modern sf
magazine, Hugin, which ran for 85 issues 1916-20, preceded by a few
irregular issues published to test the market. According to its cover,
Hugin offered "scientific novels, scientific causeries, inventive
sketches, adventure stories and scientific fairy-tales". Inspiration
probably came from German and French sf magazines, like the German Der
LUFTPIRAT UND SEIN LENKBARES LUFTSCHIFF series, but the style was entirely
Witt's own. Hugin was unique among sf magazines: written, edited and
published by Witt, advocating in fictionalized form every mad idea he
could think of - as if John W. CAMPBELL had extended some of his more
notorious editorials into short stories that filled every issue of ASF.
Witt even wrote the advertisements as sf shorts, complete with kind words
about the sponsor's products!In Norway Ovre Richter-Frich (1872-1945)
issued more than 20 popular novels from 1911 detailing the adventures of
the superscientist Jonas Fjeld.Until now, inspiration for Scandinavian sf
had come mostly from Germany and France. After WWI, however, UK authors and to some extent Italian and Russian futurists - became more noticeable.

Wells, Vladimir MAYAKOVSKY, Mikhail BULGAKOV and Antonio Sant'Elia
(1888-1916) represented a sort of European New Wave in the field. A very
influential Swedish novel, Kallocain (1940; trans Gustav Lannestock 1966
US) by Karin BOYE drew heavily on My (written 1920; trans as We 1924 US)
by Yevgeny ZAMIATIN and Soviet "machinism" theories. Then US influence
grew stronger as the miseries of WWII diverted the attentions of European
sf writers and readers to more important matters, such as survival. Most
of Scandinavia felt the full impact of the war on its own territory,
especially Finland, which had to fight Germany and the USSR both singly
and simultaneously. Sweden, however, was largely outside WWII, and here
the world's first weekly sf magazine, Jules Verne-Magasinet ["The Jules
Verne Magazine"] started in 1940, offering mostly translated US
PULP-MAGAZINE stories. It lasted 332 issues before dying in 1948; later it
was resurrected as a bimonthly which is still being published. After WWII
came other magazines: the Norwegian Tempo-Magazinet, the Swedish Hapna!
and Galaxy, and the Finnish Aikamme. During the first boom in Scandinavian
sf, in the mid-1950s, there were 4 sf magazines and over a dozen book
series being published. Interest was fuelled by Harry MARTINSON's Aniara
(1953 Cikada; exp 1956; trans as Aniara: A Review of Man in Time and Space
1963 UK), a book-length poem about the starship Aniara which was later
made into an opera ( MUSIC); Martinson received the 1974 Nobel Prize for
Literature.Unlike the case in the English-speaking countries, fantastic
literature in Scandinavia - and, indeed, in mainland Europe as a whole was never trapped in the sf ghetto; one is tempted to suggest that this
was because Europe succeeded in exporting Hugo Gernsback, so that he
created the sf ghetto elsewhere. Although there is in fact an unimportant
fringe sf ghetto in Scandinavia - centring on cheap paperback translations
from English and German that are sold at newsstands but never in
bookstores - in general Scandinavian sf is published in trade editions,
sold in book stores and treated by reviewers with the same respect as any
other modern literature. This is because fantastic literature has always
been part of the Scandinavian literary mainstream, not generally being
regarded as generic; the line between sf and fantasy is very hazy, and
most Scandinavian authors have at one time or another ventured into the
field. The enormous popularity in Scandinavia today of Dutch and Latin
American MAGIC REALISM is probably also a consequence of this historical
attitude. By way of example, we can note that, when Frederik POHL's and C.
M. KORNBLUTH's THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1953) first appeared in Sweden in
1962, it did so in a series of books of social criticism published by FIB,
a company owned by the Labour Government.In short, Scandinavia is much
like the rest of continental Europe in having no specialized sf industry
but instead a lively world of fantastic literature in the old European
tradition, drawing its succour from E.T.A. HOFFMANN, Adelbert von Chamisso
(1781-1838), the German Sturm und Drang, the French 'pataphysics ( Alfred
JARRY; IMAGINARY SCIENCE) and Italian and Russian Futurism, rather than
from the world of English-language sf. Where GENRE SF exists, it is
confined to fans and FANDOM. Much of this sort of sf has traditionally
been published by specialist houses, of which Delta, in Sweden, was, until
it folded in 1991, the largest, with a hardcover book series containing
more than 300 volumes. Among Scandinavian authors to be published by the
specialist houses are Borje Crona (1932- ), Carl Johan Holzhausen

(1900-1989), Denis Lindbohm (1927- ), Bertil Martenson (1945- ) and Sven
Christer Swahn (1933- ) in Sweden, Erkki Ahonen in FINLAND, Oyvind Myrhe
(1945- ) in Norway and Niels E. Nielsen (1924- ) in Denmark. Sweden's
Sture Lonnerstrand (1919- ) played a major role in popularizing sf,
co-editing Hapna! and writing many articles and fictions, such as the
juvenile Rymdhunden ["The Space Dog"] (1954). All these authors are very
popular and eminently readable. However, Lindbohm, for many years a
leading light in Swedish fandom, is now writing mainly about mysticism and
reincarnation, while Martenson, also very popular in Sweden, now writes
only FANTASY.Other sf authors have left genre sf or were never part of it,
their books being usually published by mainstream houses and without the
"sf" label; they include Jon Bing (1944- ) and Tor Age Bringsvaerd (1939) in Norway, Sam J. LUNDWALL in Sweden and Kullervo Kukkasjarvi (1938- )
in FINLAND. Bringsvaerd, in particular, is highly respected in the
Scandinavian literary world as a writer of extraordinary merits, while his
countryman Knut Faldbakken (1941- ) achieved international bestsellerdom
with his utopian novels Aftenlandet ["The Evening Land"] (1972) and
Sweetwater ["Sweetwater"] (1974). Lundwall has also written many
influential CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF, which have to date
(1992) been published in 32 languages. John-Henri Holmberg (1949- ),
another prominent Scandinavian critic, is less known outside his native
Sweden. Slightly external to the sf field are a number of MAINSTREAM
WRITERS who occasionally write sf, and then almost inevitably to
bestselling effect. The well known Swedish author P.C. JERSILD has written
several enormously successful sf novels, including En levande sjal (1980;
trans Rika Lesser as A Living Soul 1988 UK), about a disembodied brain
sloshing about in a glass box, Efter floden (1982; trans Lone Tygesen
Blecher and George Blecher as After the Flood 1986 UK), a post-nuclearHOLOCAUST story, and Geniernas aterkomst ["The Return of the Geniuses"]
(1987), describing mankind's history from the very beginnings to the
distant future. The Swedish journalist George Johansson (1946- ) has
written a very successful series of young-adult novels set against an
increasingly enormous galactic backdrop, starting with Uppbrott fran
Jorden ["Flight from Earth"] (1979). Among the biggest and most surprising
bestsellers in Scandinavia during the 1980s were several sf novels by
Peter Nilson (1937- ), starting with Arken ["The Ark"] (1982) and going
through to his most recent, Avgrundsbok ["The Book of the Abyss"] (1987),
about an improbable Queen of Sheba travelling in space and time. Other
authors of note in this context include Anders BODELSEN in Denmark, Axel
JENSEN in Norway and Per WAHLOO in Sweden.Sf in Scandinavia has been hit
by the same problems as in the rest of continental Europe. Book sales are
very much down in all the Scandinavian countries, and there are currently
(1992) no specialist publishing houses in operation. There is only one sf
magazine in Sweden - Jules Verne-Magasinet-although the Finnish
SEMIPROZINE Aikakone ["Time Machine"] is thriving ( FINLAND). All told,
just over 100 sf books are published each year in Scandinavia, of which
about two-thirds are translations from other European languages and
English. About half the total are published in Sweden which, due to its
size, remains Scandinavia's leading sf nation.The first Scandinavian sf
CONVENTION was held in Lund, Sweden, in 1956. Since then conventions have
been held in all the Scandinavian countries, although the first Finnish

convention did not come until 1982. [SJL/J-HH]
SCANNERS
Film (1980). Filmplan International/Canadian Film Development Corp.
Written/dir David CRONENBERG, starring Stephen Lack, Jennifer O'Neal,
Patrick McGoohan, Lawrence Dane, Michael Ironside. 103 mins. Colour.This
superior PSI-POWERS movie easily outstrips CARRIE (1976) and The FURY
(1978). Pregnant women (we learn some way into the film) have been given
an experimental drug, ephemerol, ostensibly a tranquillizer but actually
designed to produce paranormal offspring - scanners - who can exercise
total control over the brains and nervous systems of others. The two
oldest telepaths (brothers, it turns out) are corrupted - in different
ways - by their power, though one (Lack) fights for human society, the
other (Ironside) for the superhumans. The film is choreographed in the
most exemplary manner, from the celebrated exploding-head sequence at the
beginning to the final telepathic duel between the brothers and its
enigmatic outcome. It is also advanced in sf terms, working sophisticated
variations on the MUTANT theme, streets ahead of the usual crudities of
psi-power movies. Cronenberg's restless marriage of highbrow metaphor and
lowbrow exploitation seldom works better than here, despite sometimes
indifferent performances, especially Lack's. The novelization is Scanners
* (1981) by Leon Whiteson.Cronenberg had nothing to do with the sequels,
also Canadian, of which there have been three with a fourth in production.
To date these are Scanners II: The New Order (1990), Scanners III: The
Takeover (1991; vt Scanner Force) and Scanner Cop (1993); the first two
were directed by Christian Duguay, the third by Pierre David, and all
three were produced by Rene Malo. Probably wisely, none of these even try
to duplicate the sophistication and complexity of Cronenberg's vision, but
they are slickly made, opting for stylised melodrama and lurid vigour in
their accounts of human/scanner and good scanner/bad scanner clashes, and
all retain Cronenberg's theme of telepathic powers coming at a painful
cost. Scanners III is probably the most compulsive and relentless of the
three, but all received more friendly attention from critics than is usual
for straight-to-video exploitation film releases. [PN]See also:
PSEUDO-SCIENCE.
SCANNERS II: THE NEW ORDER
SCANNERS.
SCANNERS III: THE TAKEOVER
SCANNERS.
SCANNER COP
SCANNERS.
SCANNER FORCE
SCANNERS.
SCARBOROUGH, ELIZABETH ANN
(1947- ) US writer whose work has long been read as fantasy, but some of
whose later novels transcend genre boundaries in interesting ways. Her
early novels-like her first, Song of Sorcery (1982) (see Other Works for
the Argonia sequence)-tend to lightweight effects; a little later, in

tales like The Drastic Dragon of Draco, Texas (1986), a more humane note
can be detected; and in her finest single novel to date, The Healer's War
(1988), which won the NEBULA Award, an altogether more complex kind of
storytelling unfolds. The protagonist of the book is a nurse in Viet Nam;
EAS's descriptions of events there are of a piece with those found in the
work of Bruce MCALLISTER and Lucius SHEPARD; and the central premise-and
in this too The Healer's War shares preoccupations with those other
writers's work-is that it is possible to access a deeper reality, in this
case via an amulet given her by a holy man, and to cure the maimed. The
protagonist of Nothing Sacred (1991) and its sequel, Last Refuge (1992),
is also a woman haunted by the distress of the world, this time a century
hence, who discovers that the prison camp in Tibet to which she is sent is
in fact Shangri-La, and that the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation is not
simply a belief. Because of their detailed setting in a recognizeable
world, and because the supernormal elements in each book are argued as
being truly integral to that recognizeable world, it is hard to pigeonhole
EAS's mature novels as either sf or fantasy. The Powers That Be (1994)
with Anne aps mccaffrey is, on the other hand, romantic sf in the
McCaffrey mode. [JC]Other Works: the Argonia sequence, comprising Song of
Sorcery (see above) and The Unicorn Creed (1983), both assembled as Songs
from the Seashell Archives #1 (omni 1987), plus Bronwyn's Bane (1983) and
The Christening Quest (1985), both assembled as Songs from the Seashell
Archives #2 (omni 1988); The Harem of Aman Akbar; or, The Djinn Decanted
(1984); The Goldcamp Vampire; or, The Sanguinary Sourdough (1987); the
Songkiller Saga sequence comprising Phantom Banjo (1991), Picking the
Ballad's Bones (1991) and Strum Again? (1992); The Godmother (1994).
SCARFF, WILLIAM
[s] Algis BUDRYS.
SCHACHNER, NAT(HANIEL)
(1895-1955) US chemist, lawyer and writer, known mainly for biographies
of US historical figures. He began publishing sf with "The Tower of Evil"
with Arthur Leo ZAGAT for Wonder Stories Quarterly in 1930. The
collaboration with Zagat lasted over a year, all NS's first 11 stories
being done with him, including a novel, "Exiles of the Moon" for Wonder
Stories in 1931. After they ceased collaborating, NS continued to write
very prolifically for the PULP MAGAZINES, under his own name and as Chan
Corbett and Walter Glamis. A novel, "Emissaries of Space" (1932), appeared
in Wonder Stories Quarterly; the Revolt of the Scientists sequence
appeared in Wonder Stories in 1933; and the Past Present and Future series
appeared in ASF 1937-9. He published only 1 sf novel in book form, Space
Lawyer (1941 ASF; fixup 1953), a humorous set of legal adventures in
space. His style was rough, but he was a sharp and knowledgeable writer;
his inattention to the field after about 1940 is regretted. [JC]About the
author: "The Science-Fiction of Nat Schachner" by Sam MOSKOWITZ in Fantasy
Commentator #43 (1992).See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; POLITICS;
TIME PARADOXES; WAR.
SCHAFFLER, FEDERICO
[r] LATIN AMERICA.

SCHATTSCHNEIDER, PETER
[r] AUSTRIA.
SCHEER, K(ARL)-H(ERBERT)
(1928-1991) German writer, active from 1948. He published prolifically including much sf - in the circulating-library format in which many pulp
adventures appeared in postwar GERMANY; none of this material has been
translated. However, translations of his novellas in the weekly DIME-NOVEL
SF format of PERRY RHODAN, the enormously successful series he cofounded
in 1961 with Walter Ernsting (who writes as Clark DARLTON), with whom K-HS
had written collaborative works, are familiar to English-language readers.
K-HS was for some time coordinator and chief author of the series. [JC/PN]
SCHEERBART, PAUL
[r] GERMANY.
SCHELWOKAT, GUNTHER M.
[r] GERMANY.
SCHENCK, HILBERT
(1926- ) US engineer, university lecturer and writer who published his
first sf story, "Tomorrow's Weather" for FSF in 1953, long before he
became seriously involved in fiction; much of his nonfiction of the 1950s
and 1960s dealt lovingly with the ocean and with oceanological research
and exploration technologies. His first two novels, At the Eye of the
Ocean (1980) and A ROSE FOR ARMAGEDDON (1982), both set in the wave-girt
Cape Cod region of New England, followed suit; they share a similar plot
structure, circling in upon a central instant of space/time at which
transcendence may be possible. The protagonist of the first book has an
intuitive capacity to understand the inner shape of the ocean, which
unveils to him a mystical enlightenment; the love-affair that drives the
action of the second comes to fruition at the morphological heart of a
timeslip in the centre of an ISLAND in the midst of the waters, leading to
a form of liberation from the NEAR-FUTURE slide of the world into chaos.
Chronosequence (1988) similarly presents its protagonist with a mystery
from previous centuries whose solution involves the ocean, geography,
time-slippage, and the potential redemption of the world. Though the range
of HS's concerns is clearly narrow, there is nothing forced or lame in his
presentation of these stories; their intensities are fluent, grounded and
scientifically competent. The title story of Steam Bird (coll 1988), a
somewhat heavy-handed comic tale, recounts the pioneering flight of an
enormously slow steam-driven nuclear bomber. Other stories are assembled
in Wave Rider (coll 1980); the best are set along the coasts of New
England. But the world for which HS speaks is central; his work is never
regional in its final effect. [JC]See also: ECOLOGY; END OF THE WORLD;
GOTHIC SF; PASTORAL; SCIENTISTS; SOCIOLOGY; TIME PARADOXES; TIMESCAPE
BOOKS; TRANSPORTATION; UNDER THE SEA.
SCHIZOPHRENIA
PARANOIA.
SCHLOBIN, ROGER C(LARK)
(1944- ) US academic and bibliographer, with the Department of English at

Purdue University, Indiana. Though RCS has contributed bibliographically
to the sf/fantasy field in general, it is clear that he focuses by choice
on fantasy. His first book of genre interest, A Research Guide to Science
Fiction Studies: An Annotated Checklist of Primary and Secondary Sources
for Fantasy and Science Fiction (1977) with L.W. CURREY and Marshall B.
TYMN, attempted, like many published by US academics in the 1970s, to
perform the essential task of making the field accessible to scholars; and
did so very well. A revised edition has been needed for many years. Also
with TYMN (whom see for further details) RCS cofounded and co-edited
(1976-81) the Year's Scholarship in Science Fiction and Fantasy series.
Solo, he compiled The Literature of Fantasy: A Comprehensive Annotated
Bibliography of Modern Fantasy (1979), which provides a listing of adult
fantasy up to 1979. Other bibliographical work includes Andre Norton: A
Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1980 chap), Urania's Daughters: A
Checklist of Women Science Fiction Writers, 1692-1982 (1983 chap) and the
rudimentary A Glen Cook Bibliography (1983 chap) with Glen COOK. The
Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art (anth 1982) is a useful gathering
of reprint essays, several aspiring to define the genre. RCS has ed The
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts since 1988. [JC]See also: CRITICAL
AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; SF IN THE CLASSROOM.
SCHLOCK
Film (1973). Gazotski Films. Written/dir John Landis, starring Landis,
Saul Kahn, Joseph Piantadosi, Eliza Garrett. 77 mins. Colour.This was the
feature debut of 22-year-old Landis, who went on to bigger things with The
Blues Brothers (1980) and An American Werewolf in London (1981), among
others. Low-budget, made in two weeks, it is a genuinely funny and
affectionate (though deeply undergraduate) parody of MONSTER MOVIES in
general, and TROG (1970) and the APES-AND-CAVEMEN subgenre in particular.
Landis plays the caveman Schlockthropus (in a costume designed by Rick
Baker, whose effects debut this was) who gets to terrify the populace,
play boogie on the piano, and form an erotic liaison with a blind girl who
rejects him horrifiedly when she regains her sight because she had thought
he was a dog. [PN]
SCHMIDT, ARNO (OTTO)
(1914-1979) German writer noted for his linguistic innovation and the
swift humour of his experimental fictions, which project an air of
joyfully cerebral quarrelsomeness. The marked FABULATION of sf tropes in
his work is noticeable in novels like Leviathan (1949), a metaphysical
train journey into death, KAFF, auch MARE CRISTUM ["KAFF, also MARE
CRISTUM"] (1960), which is set on the Moon, and Schwarze Spiegel ["Black
Mirrors"] (1963) - the last volume of Nobodaddys Kinder ["Nobodaddy's
Children"] (1951-63) - which presents the thoughts of the last man on
Earth. In Die Gelehrtenrepublik (1957; trans Michael Horovitz as The
Egghead Republic: A Short Novel from the Horse Latitudes 1979 UK), which
is genuine sf set in AD2008 after a nuclear HOLOCAUST, an American
attempts to report home on the International Republic for Artists and
Scientists, or IRAS, which is housed on a mobile island currently resting
in the Sargasso Sea. But sex, mutants, language-games and chaos afflict
his brief. [JC]See also: GERMANY.

SCHMIDT, DENNIS (A.)
(? - ) US writer who has restricted himself to series. The first was the
Zen or Kensho sequence - Way-Farer (1978), Kensho (1979), Satori (1981)
and Wanderer (1985) - featuring a protagonist who combines Zen and martial
arts in agreeably complex SPACE-OPERA adventures. The Twilight of the Gods
sequence - Twilight of the Gods: The First Name (1985), #2: Groa's Other
Eye (1986) and #3: Three Trumps Sounding (1988) - is fantasy, and is
likewise conceived with well orchestrated complexity. The Questioner
Trilogy - Labyrinth (1989), City of Crystal Shadow (1990) and Dark
Paradise (1990) - returns to intergalactic space, where the operations of
a peacekeeping force are featured. DS gives some impression of being an
author who might at any point decide to break through into higher regions
of his art. [JC]
SCHMIDT, STANLEY (ALBERT)
(1944- ) US editor, writer and academic, with a PhD in physics (1969),
which he taught until 1978. In that year he became editor of Analog, a
position which in 1992 he retains, occupying his role in the forthright
manner established by John W. CAMPBELL Jr, his most famous predecessor,
but more quietly. He began publishing his own sf with "A Flash of
Darkness" for ASF in 1968. His first novel, Newton and the Quasi-Apple
(1970 ASF; exp 1975), is a HARD-SF exploration in PHYSICS set on a
primitive planet where Newton's principles are being independently
discovered, raising questions as to what kinds of knowledge are helpful and when. The Sins of the Fathers (1976) and its sequel, Lifeboat Earth
(fixup 1978), perhaps overcomplicatedly invoke an exploding Galaxy, TIME
TRAVEL and more new physics in their presentation of an ALIEN race whose
effective social engineering challenges Earth ( SOCIOLOGY). Tweedlioop
(1986) again submits an alien - here through shipwreck - to human
PERCEPTIONS, this time those of a young woman; she falls in love.
Throughout his writing career, which has become less active since 1978, SS
has written clear-cut tales within which nest solvable problems, and in
the telling of which cogently argued hard-sf concepts are given fair play.
His editorship of Analog has been similarly clear-cut, and he has
maintained the journal as the primary outlet for thrusting, extroverted,
problem-solving sf tales of a sort that, for many readers, continues to
occupy the high road of sf. He has edited several anthologies spun-off
from the journal or from UNKNOWN, its stablemate from half a century
earlier. [JC]As Editor: The Analog Anthology #1: Fifty Years of the Best
(anth 1980) and #2: Readers' Choice (anth 1982); Analog's Golden
Anniversary Anthology (anth 1981); Analog Yearbook II (anth 1981);
Analog's Lighter Side (anth 1982); Children of the Future (anth 1982);
Analog: Writers' Choice (anth 1983) and Writers' Choice, Vol II (anth
1984); War and Peace: Possible Futures from Analog (anth 1983); Aliens
from Analog (anth 1983); From Mind to Mind: Tales of Communication from
Analog (anth 1984); Analog's Expanding Universe (anth 1986); 6 Decades:
The Best of Analog (anth 1987); Unknown (anth 1988); Unknown Worlds: Tales
from Beyond (anth 1988) with Martin H. GREENBERG.See also: ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION; CHILDREN IN SF.
SCHMITZ, JAMES H(ENRY)

(1911-1981) US writer born in Germany of US parents; he served with the
USAF in WWII. His first story was "Greenface" for Unknown in 1943. From
1949, when "Agent of Vega" appeared in ASF as the first of 4 stories later
assembled as Agent of Vega (coll of linked stories 1960), he regularly
produced the kind of tale for which he remains most warmly remembered:
SPACE-OPERA adventures, several featuring female HEROES depicted with
minimum recourse to their "femininity" - they perform their active tasks,
and save the Universe when necessary, in a manner almost completely free
of sexual role-playing cliches.Most of his best work shares a roughly
characterized common background, a Galaxy inhabited by humans and aliens
with room for all and numerous opportunities for discoveries and reversals
that carefully fall short of threatening the stability of that background.
Many of his stories, as a result, focus less on moments of CONCEPTUAL
BREAKTHROUGH than on the pragmatic operations of teams and bureaux
involved in maintaining the state of things against criminals, monsters
and unfriendly species; in this they rather resemble the tales of Murray
LEINSTER, though they are more vigorous and less inclined to punish
adventurousness. PSI POWERS are often found. At the heart of this common
Universe is the Federation of the Hub or the Overgovernment. The main Hub
sequence is A Tale of Two Clocks (1962; vt Legacy 1979), A Nice Day for
Screaming and Other Tales of the Hub (coll 1965), The Demon Breed (1968
ASF; exp 1968) and A Pride of Monsters (coll 1970). The Telzey Amberdon
books - The Universe Against Her (fixup 1964), The Telzey Toy (coll 1973)
and The Lion Game (fixup 1973) - nestle conceptually within the Hub.
Amberdon, a brilliant young telepath recruited by the Psychology Service
of the Overgovernment as an agent, is perhaps JHS's most typical creation,
and the stories in which she performs her activities are only marginally
less appealing than his single finest novel, The Witches of Karres (1949
ASF; exp 1966), which features three Amberdon-like psi-powered juvenile
"witches" and their rescue from slavery by a space captain in whom they
induce first apoplexy and second transcendence - for he too finds
superpowers within him.One novel, The Eternal Frontiers (1973), is set
outside this common background; it fails to delight. The Best of James H.
Schmitz (coll 1991) ed Mark L. Olson is a good conspectus. It may be that
JHS's work is too pleasing to have seemed revolutionary, and indeed-with
the exception of his choice of protagonists - it plays very safe with
conventions; but for nearly 40 years he succeeded in demonstrating,
modestly and competently, that the template of space opera could provide
continuing joy. [JC]About the author: James H. Schmitz: A Bibliography
(1973) by Mark OWINGS, with intro by Janet KAGAN.See also: CHILDREN IN SF;
ECOLOGY; ESP; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; SUPERMAN.
SCHNABEL, JOHANN GOTTFRIED
[r] GERMANY.
SCHNEEMAN, CHARLES
(1912-1972) US illustrator. CS was active in sf for only a short time,
most of his work being for ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION from 1935. He
painted 6 ASF covers, the earliest May 1938 and the last Nov 1952, but is
best remembered for his interior black-and-white ILLUSTRATION in that
magazine; he was its major interior artist until he joined the US Army in

1942. His best work may be the idealized sketches of the heroic Kimball
Kinnison for E.E. "Doc" SMITH's Grey Lensman (1939-40 ASF; 1951) and his
drawings for Jack WILLIAMSON's THE LEGION OF TIME (1938 ASF; rev 1952).
After WWII he worked mainly for newspapers. [JG/PN]
SCHNEER, CHARLES H.
[r] Ray HARRYHAUSEN.
SCHNEIDER, JOHN G.
(?1908-1964) US writer whose borderline-sf novel, The Golden Kazoo
(1956), satirized the Madison Avenue nature of the ( NEAR-FUTURE) 1960
presidential election, which he saw as foolishly COMPUTER-dominated. [JC]
SCHOENHERR, JOHN
(1935- ) US illustrator, regarded by some critics as the finest sf artist
of his generation. A New Yorker who studied at the Pratt Institute, he
made his sf- ILLUSTRATION debut in AMZ 1956. His work has appeared
primarily in ASF (including 75 covers), but he has drawn black-and-white
illustrations for other sf magazines, including Fantastic and Infinity,
and has also worked for paperback publishers, most notably ACE BOOKS and
Pyramid. The cover and interior illustrations he did for Frank HERBERT's
Dune stories in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION (1963-5) are classics; some of
the best are reproduced in The Illustrated Dune (1978) and Dune Calendar
(1978). JS's style in his colour work is Impressionistic, and he is
regarded by his peers as the most "painterly" in their field. Some of his
earlier work shows the influence of Richard M. POWERS, one of the few sf
artists he admires. He carries his painting techniques over into his
black-and-white work by using a dry-brush method on rough paper or
scratchboard, with fine details added by pen. His ALIENS are particularly
convincing, thanks perhaps to his love for animal illustration (for which
he has won numerous awards), and even his inanimate objects-like
rock-forms - tend to look organic. JS received a HUGO in 1965.
Dissatisfied by poor standards in sf art - "with few exceptions it's
really fourth rate" - and low budgets, he left the field in 1968,
returning briefly in the 1970s. [JG/PN]About the artist: "Sketches: John
Schoenherr Interview" in ALGOL, Summer-Fall 1978.
SCHOFIELD, ALFRED TAYLOR
(1846-1929) UK medical doctor and writer whose first sf novel, Travels in
the Interior, or The Wonderful Adventures of Luke and Belinda: Edited by a
London Physician (1887), as by Luke Courteney, carries its protagonists,
shrunk to a suitable size, on a didactic expedition through a human body (
GREAT AND SMALL). Another World, or The Fourth Dimension (1888), published
as ATS, takes its two-dimensional protagonist on a similarly didactic
mission from Edwin A. ABBOTT's Flatland to even more penurious Lineland,
and thence into worlds of three and four DIMENSIONS, all in order to
convey the truths of a dimension-encompassing Christianity. [JC]
SCHOLES, ROBERT (EDWARD)
(1929- ) US academic and sf critic. One of the better-known US theorists
in structuralism, he is the author of a number of books on literary
theory. Those with special relevance to sf are The Fabulators (1967),
which deals with FABULATION, Structural Fabulation: An Essay on the

Fiction of the Future (1975), Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision
(1977) with Eric S. RABKIN (whom see for further details) and Fabulation
and Metafiction (1979). The first two and the fourth of these are academic
in approach, the second especially for its attempted definition of the sf
genre ( DEFINITIONS OF SF). With George Edgar SLUSSER and Rabkin, RS
edited Bridges to Fantasy (anth 1982) and Co-Ordinates: Placing Science
Fiction and Fantasy (anth 1983), both collections of critical essays; he
also introduced the 1975 US paperback edition of Tzvetan TODOROV's
Introduction a la litterature fantastique (1970; trans as The Fantastic: A
Structural Approach to a Literary Genre 1973), and has written many
shorter critical pieces on sf. [PN]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS
ABOUT SF.
SCHOLZ, CARTER
(1953- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Closed Circuit" for
Clarion SF (anth 1976) ed Kate WILHELM, and whose short fiction, which
appeared with some frequency for the next decade, constitutes a series of
dark and fluid visions of the inhabitants of the world to come. None of
these stories - like the striking "The Eve of the Last Apollo" (1977) has been put into a CS collection (Cuts [coll 1985 chap] restricting
itself to previously unpublished material). He fell almost entirely silent
after 1986. CS is known mainly for his one novel, Palimpsests (1984) with
Glenn Harcourt; its dense, refractive, ruminative, palimpsest-laden style
more than amply surrounds the story of an archaeologist yanked from
brooding internal and external exile by the discovery of a dizzyingly
anachronistic object at a Neanderthal dig. TIME PARADOXES are alluded to,
but with something like ABSURDIST torpor, and the novel ends in dark
irresolution, in an epiphany of flow - "of landho that would never quite
achieve landfall" - which simultaneously moves and irritates the reader.
[JC]
SCHOMBURG, ALEX
(1905- ) US illustrator and COMIC-book artist; he has also spelled his
name Schomberg. His first assignment was for Hugo GERNSBACK in 1925; he
did his first cover in that year for SCIENCE AND INVENTION. During his
65-year career, which extended into the 1980s with covers for ISAAC
ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, he worked for many magazines, including
AMZ, TWS, FSF, Fantastic and Startling Stories. He also painted book
covers, primarily for ACE BOOKS and Winston Books (their "juvenile" sf
series of the 1950s, for which he also designed the endpapers). His
ILLUSTRATION is realistic, versatile and assured, usually eschewing bright
colours; he was known as "king of the airbrush". Important in the comics
industry as well, he worked on many of the Timely Comics (now MARVEL
COMICS) titles, helping develop Captain America and Sub-Mariner. In 1990
he was awarded a Special Award by the World Science Fiction Convention; he
has also won the Lensman Award (1979) and the Frank R. Paul Award (1984).
His work is showcased in Chroma: The Art of Alex Schomburg (1986), text by
Jon Gustafson. [JG]
SCHOONOVER, LAWRENCE
(1906-1980) US writer best known for his many historical novels. Central
Passage (1962) is set after a nuclear HOLOCAUST has demolished the Isthmus

of Panama, set the oceans astir and initiated a new ice age, whose
escalation is averted through a successful attempt to block the Isthmus
again. In the meantime, atomic radiation has caused mutations, resulting
in a breed of SUPERMEN destined to inherit the Earth. [JC]
SCHORER, MARK
[r] August DERLETH.
SCHULMAN, J(OSEPH) NEIL
(1953- ) US writer whose books have been very influential in the
LIBERTARIAN-SF movement. Alongside Night (1979) describes the salvation of
a future USA (whose economy has been destroyed by government intervention
in the free market) by a hard-cash underground economy evolved from
today's black market. The political message is reasonably unobtrusive,
though non-libertarians may find the somewhat casual attitude taken
towards the killing of tax collectors upsetting. The Rainbow Cadenza: A
Novel in Logosata Form (1983), generally considered inferior, is
interesting for its portrayal of a DYSTOPIA judged against libertarian
values rather than (as is more usual) humanist ones, as well as for its
depiction of laser-generated visuals ( ARTS) as a means of artistic
expression. Like many libertarian authors, JNS is a competent thriller
writer whose books are fundamentally motivated by a combination of moral
outrage and a fascination with the hardware of politics and economics.
[NT]
SCHUTZ, J(OSEPH) W(ILLARD)
(1912-1984) US writer, mostly of short stories, and diplomat who
graduated in science and later from the US Counter-Insurgency School. He
was in his 50s when - to give himself something to do while stationed in
West Africa - he began writing sf, with "Maiden Voyage" for FSF in 1965.
His two adventure-sf novels are People of the Rings (1975 UK) and The Moon
Microbe (1976 UK). He wrote thrillers as Jerry Scholl. [PN]
SCHUYLER, GEORGE S(AMUEL)
(1895-1977) US writer whose sf, normally written as by Samuel I. Brooks,
appeared obscurely in PULP MAGAZINES between the Wars. In his first sf
novel, Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful
Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933-1940 (1931) as GSS,
a cosmetic treatment is discovered which will bleach Blacks. In treating
this innovation in terms of SATIRE GSS, himself Black, acerbically
targeted both Blacks and Whites. Black Empire (1936-8 Pittsburgh Courier
as by Samuel I. Brooks; 1991), intro by John A. WILLIAMS, pits Blacks
against Whites in pulp terms, and ends in the creation of a Black UTOPIA.
[PN/JC]See also: POLITICS.
SCHWARTZ, ALAN
(? - ) US writer whose The Wandering Tellurian (1967 dos) is
appropriately titled: its Terran protagonist travels through space, having
adventures. [JC]
SCHWARTZ, JULIUS
(1915- ) US agent and editor, born Bronx, New York. JS met his lifelong
friend and colleague Mort WEISINGER at a meeting of the Scienceers sf

group in 1931. Together they published the first true FANZINE, The Time
Traveller (1932), and the later fanzine, Science Fiction Digest (1932),
which in 1934 became FANTASY MAGAZINE, though Weisinger was not officially
an editor on the latter. In 1934 they founded Solar Sales Service, the
first literary agency to specialize in sf; early clients included Henry L.
HASSE, David H. KELLER, P. Schuyler MILLER and Stanley G. WEINBAUM. When
Weisinger became editor of THRILLING WONDER STORIES in 1936, JS ran the
agency alone for the next 10 years, new clients including Alfred BESTER,
Otto Binder ( Eando BINDER), Leigh BRACKETT, Ray BRADBURY, John Russell
FEARN and Manly Wade WELLMAN.At Bester's suggestion, JS became editor at
All-American Comics (later part of DC COMICS) in Feb 1944. In the
mid-1950s he played a major role in the DC revival of the SUPERHERO with
new versions of earlier characters, many utilizing sf themes. These
included The Flash (police scientist who gains superspeed in accident),
Green Lantern (test pilot given power ring by alien Guardians from the
planet Oa so that he can police this sector of space), Hawkman (policeman
from the planet Thanagar operating on Earth), Adam Strange (Earthman who
becomes protector of the planet Rann) and The Atom (scientist with the
ability to become smaller - JS called this character, in his civilian
identity, Ray Palmer, Raymond A. PALMER being the shortest of all sf
editors). JS also revived the flagging fortunes of Batman by giving it a
"new look". When Weisinger left DC in 1971, JS took over as SUPERMAN
editor. He left this position in 1986 to edit the shortlived DC SF Graphic
Album adaptations (1985-7), whose titles in publication order were: Hell
on Earth (1942 Weird Tales; graph 1985) by Robert BLOCH, Nightwings (1968
Gal; graph 1985) by Robert SILVERBERG, Frost ?
as "The Land that Time Forgot"; graph 1985) by Ray Bradbury, Merchants of
Venus (graph 1986) from the 1971 novella by Frederik POHL, Demon with a
Glass Hand (graph 1986) from the 1964 Outer Limits tv script by Harlan
ELLISON, The Magic Goes Away (graph 1986) from the 1978 book by Larry
NIVEN and Sandkings (1979 Omni; graph 1987) by George R.R. MARTIN. The
line was a commercial failure, and JS gave up editing to become a
consultant to DC and "a goodwill ambassador for DC . . . to various
conventions". [RH]
SCHWARZ, MAURICIO-JOSE
(1955- ) Mexican writer who for 7 years had an sf column in the daily
newspaper Excelsior. He is the author of about 50 short stories, many sf
or horror. M-JS was the first winner (1984) of the Puebla Award ( LATIN
AMERICA) for Best SF Short Story in Mexico with his story "La pequena
guerra" ["The Smallest War"]. Some of his stories are collected in Escenas
de la realidad virtual ["Scenes from Virtual Reality"] (coll 1991). M-JS
founded (1991) and edits an sf SEMIPROZINE, Estacosa ["Thisthing"]. He is
part-author of the LATIN AMERICA entry in this encyclopedia. [PN]
SCHWEITZER, DARRELL (CHARLES)
(1952- ) US critic, editor and writer who began publishing stories of
genre interest with "Come to Mother" for Weirdbook #4 in 1971, but who
spent his energies very variously for many years, coming initially to
notice with a series of critical studies including Lovecraft in the Cinema
(1975 chap), The Dream Quest of H.P. Lovecraft (1978 chap), Conan's World

and Robert E. Howard (1979 chap), On Writing Science Fiction (The Editors
Strike Back!) (1981) with John M. FORD and George H. SCITHERS,
Constructing Scientifiction ?
Scithers, and Pathways to Elfland: The Writings of Lord Dunsany (1989).
During this period he also served as editorial assistant at IASFM 1977-82
and at AMZ 1982-6. With John BETANCOURT and Scithers he then restarted
WEIRD TALES (1987-current) with #290. Also with Scithers, he ed 2
anthologies of CLUB STORIES: Tales from the Spaceport Bar (anth 1987) and
Another Round at the Spaceport Bar (anth 1989).DS's fiction, which
sometimes tends to a grimly brisk SCIENCE-FANTASY diction, includes We are
All Legends (coll of linked stories 1981), The Shattered Goddess (1982), a
FAR-FUTURE fantasy which moves into dark regions, Tom O'Bedlam's Night
Out, and Other Strange Excursions (coll 1985), The Meaning of Life, and
Other Awesome Cosmic Revelations (coll 1988 chap) and The White Isle (1980
Fantastic; rev 1990). [JC]As Editor: Some of the SF Voices series of
interviews, those for which he was responsible including SF Voices (anth
1976), Science Fiction Voices #1 (anth 1979) and Science Fiction Voices #5
(anth 1982 chap); Essays Lovecraftian (anth 1977; rev vt Discovering H.P.
Lovecraft 1987); Exploring Fantasy Worlds (anth 1985); Discovering Modern
Horror Fiction #1 (anth 1985) and #2 (anth 1988); Discovering Stephen King
(anth 1985)Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I (anth 1992); Lord Dunsany:
A Bibliography (1993) with S. T. Joshi (1958- ); Speaking of Horror:
Interviews with Writers of the Supernatural (1994).
SCHWERIN, DORIS H(ALPERN)
(1922- ) US composer and writer whose The Rainbow Walkers (1985; vt The
Missing Years 1986 UK) is an intermittently moving sf tale involving
CRYONICS and their consequences. [JC]
SCIENCE AND INVENTION
US monthly BEDSHEET-size popular-science magazine, slick paper. 220
issues May 1913-Aug 1931. Published 1913-29 by Experimenter Publishing Co.
; ed Hugo GERNSBACK until his bankruptcy in 1929, thereafter ed anon. SAI
was not a new magazine but a retitling (from Aug 1920) of Gernsback's
Electrical Experimenter, founded May 1913, itself modelled on Modern
Electrics, an earlier Gernsback magazine (1908-13), in which his novel
Ralph 124C 41+ (1911-12; 1925) had first appeared. The Aug 1923 issue of
SAI was a special "Scientific Fiction" number with a cover by Howard V.
BROWN, and was effectively Gernsback's first sf magazine. Both before and
after this, however, SAI (whose main content was science articles)
regularly featured sf stories and novels - notably 3 serials by Ray
CUMMINGS and also A. MERRITT's "The Metal Emperor" (1920 Argosy; rev
1927-8 SAI; vt The Metal Monster 1946).The most typical writer of
Gernsbackian SCIENTIFICTION was perhaps Clement FEZANDIE: almost all of
his Dr Hackensaw series - 39 short stories and "A Journey to the Center of
the Earth" (1925), a 4-part serialized novel - was published in SAI (2
final stories were published in AMZ). These are wooden as narratives, but
contain lively ideas about new inventions, including ROBOTS, tv and
brainwashing through dissolution of neural ganglia; Hackensaw even
experiences weightlessness, on a trip to the Moon. After founding AMAZING
STORIES in Apr 1926, Gernsback naturally used there most of the sf he

bought, but sf serials (including Merritt's, noted above) continued in SAI
until 1928. SAI was in fact a more commercially successful magazine than
AMZ, with a formula not unlike that of OMNI today. [PN/MJE/FHP]
SCIENCE FANTASY
1. In the TERMINOLOGY of sf readers, and more especially publishers, this
term has never been clearly defined, although it was the title of a well
known UK magazine 1950-66 ( 2), which was also the period when the term
was most in general use. More recently it has been partially superseded by
the terms SWORD AND SORCERY and HEROIC FANTASY, but it differs from these
two categories in that Science Fantasy does not necessarily contain MAGIC,
GODS AND DEMONS, HEROES, MYTHOLOGY or SUPERNATURAL CREATURES, though
these
may be present, often in a quasirationalized form. Science Fantasy is
normally considered a bastard genre blending elements of sf and fantasy;
it is usually colourful and often bizarre, sometimes with elements of
HORROR although never centrally in the horror genre. Certain sf themes are
especially common in Science Fantasy - ALTERNATE WORLDS, other DIMENSIONS,
ESP, MONSTERS, PARALLEL WORLDS, PSI POWERS and SUPERMEN - but no single
one of these ingredients is essential. Many Science Fantasies are also
PLANETARY ROMANCES (many of the books so described in this volume can be
regarded as Science Fantasy). A good discussion of the term, which very
nearly builds to a definition through the accretion of examples, is
"Science Fantasy" by Brian Attebery in Dictionary of Literary Biography:
Volume Eight: Twentieth-Century American Science-Fiction Writers: Part 2:
M-Z (1981) ed David Cowart and Thomas L. Wymer. Attebery cites the
following as among the more important US authors of Science Fantasy:
Marion Zimmer BRADLEY, Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, L. Sprague DE CAMP and
Fletcher PRATT, Samuel R. DELANY, Anne MCCAFFREY, Andre NORTON, Jack
VANCE, John VARLEY, Roger ZELAZNY and Gene WOLFE (indeed, in the 1980s
Wolfe practically resuscitated the genre single-handedly), to which list
should certainly be added Joan D. VINGE and (especially the former) C.L.
MOORE and Henry KUTTNER. Attebery also makes special mention of The Deep
(1975) by John CROWLEY. [PN]2. UK DIGEST-size magazine published from
Summer 1950 by Nova Publications as a companion to NEW WORLDS,
subsequently taken over by Roberts ?
in a paperback-size format. 81 issues appeared as SF Summer 1950-Feb 1966,
and 12 more Mar 1966-Feb 1967 as Impulse (Mar-July 1966) and SF Impulse
(Aug 1966-Feb 1967). #1 and #2 were ed Walter GILLINGS; John CARNELL then
took over until Nova folded. The Roberts ?
1966 Kyril Bonfiglioli; the last 5 issues were ed Harry HARRISON and Keith
ROBERTS.SF was numbered consecutively from #1 to #81 (Feb 1966).
Numeration was begun again with the title change to Impulse, in Mar 1966,
with 1 vol of 12 numbered issues (hence Impulse is sometimes regarded as a
separate magazine). Early on SF appeared irregularly, with only 6 issues
1950-53, but from Mar 1954 an uneasy bimonthly schedule began, lapsing to
quarterly every now and then, improving in the late 1950s. A regular
monthly schedule ran from Mar 1965 to the end.SF used offbeat FANTASY
together with some sf not too different from that published in its
companion, NW (but only rarely the kind of whimsical story associated with
the US UNKNOWN). While Carnell was editing both, SF tended to use stories

of greater length than NW, including numerous novellas. Many of its lead
stories were supplied by John BRUNNER, Kenneth BULMER and Michael
MOORCOCK, all of whom published some of their best early work in its
pages. SF also published the first stories of Brian W. ALDISS and J.G.
BALLARD, and part of Aldiss's first sf novel, Non-Stop (1956; exp 1958;
rev vt Starship US 1959) and virtually all the important early work of
Thomas Burnett SWANN. After Bonfiglioli became editor in 1964, Keith
ROBERTS, Christopher PRIEST, Josephine SAXTON and Brian STABLEFORD all
made their debuts in the magazine, and the early Impulse issues featured
Keith Roberts's Pavane stories (Mar-July 1966; fixup 1968). During
Carnell's incumbency SF published material of a higher quality than its
companion, but after its sale in 1964 - despite Bonfiglioli and his
editorial successors buying some good material - it was overshadowed by
Moorcock's NW, with which it ultimately merged. NW and SF were the best sf
magazines published in the UK before INTERZONE joined them in this
category.The cover art of SF was intermittently of a high standard,
especially that by Brian LEWIS, who did most of the covers 1958-61, and
Keith Roberts, who did nearly all the covers from 1965 until the end.
Roberts's bold semi-abstractions were quite outside the conventions of
genre-sf ILLUSTRATION, and Lewis's surreal landscapes, reminiscent of the
work of Max Ernst (1891-1976), were also unusual. [BS]3. Variant title of
SCIENCE FANTASY YEARBOOK.See also: FANTASY REVIEW.
SCI FI FILMS
There have always been clashes between science fiction purists and sci-fi
fans. Some of the fiercest discussions have centered on the subject of
film.In 1936, thirteen episodes of Flash Gordon were released, and their
popularity was overwhelming. In their action-packed plots and characters,
these two-reelers much resembled what was being published by the magazines
and pulps of the time.But by the 1950s, the paths of print and film
diverged. While science fiction writing was becoming more sophisticated
and science-based, the decade of the monster movie had arrived. And some
of the monsters looked pretty cut-rate.By 1977, Steven Spielberg was
spending - and making - millions with Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. George Lucas hit it big with Star Wars.
But many members of the science fiction-reading public thought that these
films were simply wish fulfillment or slam-bang space opera.One film that
seemed to transcend all categories was 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film was
directed by Stanley Kubrick, with a screenplay by Arthur C. Clarke. This
1968 film still retains the intellectual complexity and the visual jolt
that it did thirty years ago. SF fans point to it as proof positive that
film CAN capture the magic and challenge of science fiction.
SCIENCE FICTION YEARBOOK
TREASURY OF GREAT SCIENCE FICTION STORIES.
SF YEARBOOK: A TREASURY OF SCIENCE FICTION
TREASURY OF GREAT SCIENCE FICTION STORIES.
SCIENCE STORIES
US DIGEST-size magazine. 4 bimonthly issues, Oct 1953-Apr 1954. #1 was
published by Bell Publications, Chicago, the rest by Palmer Publications,

Evanston; ed Raymond A. PALMER and Bea Mahaffey. SS printed no notable
fiction, but was nicely illustrated by Hannes BOK, Virgil FINLAY and
others. UNIVERSE SCIENCE FICTION, effectively a continuation of OTHER
WORLDS, was a companion magazine. Some magazine historians regard SS as
likewise a (shorter and cheaper) continuation of Other Worlds, since it
began shortly after Other Worlds's first demise and announced that it was
using Other Worlds's inventory of stories, but it was the numeration of
Universe that Other Worlds adopted when Universe changed its title back to
Other Worlds in 1955. [FHP/PN]
SCIENCE WONDER QUARTERLY
WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY.
SCIENCE WONDER STORIES
US BEDSHEET-size magazine. 12 monthly issues June 1929-May 1930,
published by Stellar Publishing Corp.; ed Hugo GERNSBACK.After Gernsback
lost control of his first fully sf magazine, AMAZING STORIES, in 1929, he
rapidly made a comeback with a new company and 2 new magazines, SWS and, a
month later, AIR WONDER STORIES. "SCIENCE WONDER STORIES are clean, CLEAN
from beginning to end. They stimulate only one thing - IMAGINATION," he
wrote in the first editorial. His policy, as usual, was to emphasize the
didactic aspects of sf, and he claimed that every story had been passed by
"an array of authorities and educators". SWS dealt with all aspects of
science, unlike Air Wonder Stories, but in fact they used much the same
authors and similar material, and it was logical, after a year, to
amalgamate them, as WONDER STORIES. SWS was a handsome magazine, all the
covers being by Frank R. PAUL. Authors included Miles J. BREUER, Stanton
A. COBLENTZ, David H. KELLER (in 10 of the 12 issues), Laurence MANNING,
Fletcher PRATT, Harl VINCENT and Jack WILLIAMSON. Raymond Z. GALLUN made
his debut here. [PN]
SCIENTIFIC DETECTIVE MONTHLY
US BEDSHEET-size magazine. 10 monthly issues Jan-Oct 1930, published by
Techni-Craft Publishing Co.; ed Hugo GERNSBACK, with Arthur B. REEVE as
editorial consultant. #6-#10 were entitled Amazing Detective Tales, but
Scientific Detective Monthly more accurately described the magazine's
contents. Most issues included Craig Kennedy stories by Arthur B. Reeve
and collaborations by Edwin BALMER and William McHarg. A number of stories
had sf elements (murder by X-ray, whisky contaminated by hormones), though
few were true sf, an exception being "Murder in the Fourth Dimension" in
#10, by Clark Ashton SMITH.SDM was a sister magazine to SCIENCE WONDER
STORIES and AIR WONDER STORIES. Another magazine, Amazing Detective
Stories, was published during 1931 with volume numbering suggesting that
it was a continuation of Amazing Detective Tales, from a new publisher,
Fiction Publishers Inc. This magazine, however, carried no fantasy. [FHP]
SCIENTIFIC ERRORS
Scientific errors in sf are not to be confused with IMAGINARY SCIENCE,
where the author invents the science and tries to make it plausible, nor
with PSEUDO-SCIENCE, where the author adheres to some alternative
quasiscientific system unrecognized by the majority of the scientific
community. Scientific errors are here taken to mean plain mistakes.Sf in

the days of the PULP MAGAZINES was very much more prone to error than it
is now, and it was for the absurdity of so much of the science, at least
in part, that pulp sf (particularly in the 1930s) got a bad name;
schoolteachers and parents were justifiably worried by its innumeracy as
well as its illiteracy. Most sf written since the 1960s will pass
scientific muster even with readers who have a little university-level
science, but the excesses of the 1920s and 1930s must have been obvious
even to many readers who had only a smattering of high-school science. Of
course, some elementary errors can be hard to pick up. Hal CLEMENT cites
stories in which myopic characters' spectacles are used to concentrate the
Sun's rays and light a fire; Clement points out that these would in fact
disperse the rays. By contrast, in The Tomorrow People (1960) Judith
MERRIL used a helicopter for transport on the Moon, even though most
schoolboys could have told her that it would not work without air.Some
errors are notorious. When Jules VERNE uses a gun to shoot travellers at
the Moon, he ignores the fact that the acceleration would leave them as a
thin red smear on the back wall of the cabin. The canali or channels which
the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) thought he saw on MARS
were wrongly translated into English as "canals", and hence Edgar Rice
BURROUGHS and many others felt justified in placing intelligent life
there.The history of pulp sf is full of examples of writers using PARSECS
as a unit of velocity instead of distance, of confusing weight with mass
(so that in space we have heroes able to push several tons of spaceship
along with their finger) and, most commonly of all, of exceeding the speed
of light without any sort of justification ( FASTER THAN LIGHT), as in
A.E. VAN VOGT's "The Storm" (1943): "Half a light year a minute; it would
take a while to attain that speed, but - in eight hours they'd strike the
storm." (The same story has a hero with a second brain which has an IQ of
917, as if somehow the exact figure might mean something.) Certain themes,
such as ANTIGRAVITY and ANTIMATTER, have notoriously resulted in schoolboy
howlers in much sf. In the pulp era ROCKETS would regularly perform
manoeuvres, just like a car doing a U-turn. In fact, as most of us know in
the space age, if you use gyros to turn a rocket it will continue in the
same direction, unless another rocket blast is given in the new
orientation to counter the original forward momentum. Nonetheless, STAR
WARS (like many cinematic SPACE OPERAS since) has spacecraft taking part
in what look like WWI dogfights. John W. CAMPBELL Jr, the man who was
supposed to have done more than any other to put the science back in sf,
was quite happy to publicize what he called the Dean Drive (ASF 1960), a
proposed propulsion device which depends on violating the conservation of
momentum: it pushes against itself. This is on a par with the "inertialess
drive" which propelled E.E. "Doc" SMITH's spaceships at fantastic
velocity. Another favourite of the pulps was the electromagnetic spectrum,
which was regularly rifled by writers in search of mysterious "rays" which
would have almost magical effects. Magnetism was yet another favourite,
and all sorts of remarkably cock-eyed schemes were cooked up to exploit
its hitherto unknown properties (though here we reach an area of overlap
between straightforward scientific errors and imaginary science). An
especially enjoyable biological howler was the notion, common on pulp
magazine covers, that aliens would lust after human women, especially if
partially unclad, this being on a par with men lusting after squids.

Nevertheless, James TIPTREE Jr made rather a good thing out of a similar
notion in "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" (1972),
the ultimate exogamy story. And nearly all stories in the pulps about
submicroscopic worlds ( GREAT AND SMALL) used a model of the atom - seen
as a kind of solid, spherical ball - which had been out of date for at
least half a century by 1920. Ray CUMMINGS, several of whose heroes shrink
and have adventures on atoms, was a noteworthy offender.Excesses of this
kind still exist, of course, especially in the lowest echelons, but Robert
A. HEINLEIN and Isaac ASIMOV did much in the 1940s to bring scientific
responsibility to sf, and their work was continued by Poul ANDERSON, James
BLISH, Hal CLEMENT, Larry NIVEN and many others. If they committed errors,
they mostly did so because they could not resist certain dramatic plot
turns, like the end of Poul Anderson's Tau Zero (1970), where the crew of
a spaceship survive to witness the ultimate collapse of the Universe into
the monobloc - despite the fact that, in such a scenario, the whole of
space would collapse: the very concept of being "outside" the monobloc is
a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, there are still novels being
published which would not put the pulps to shame. Battlefield Earth (1982)
by L. Ron HUBBARD was a classic example, containing such lunacies as
invading aliens who are said to come from another Universe whose Periodic
Table contains elements different from the ones we have here.Sf in the
CINEMA and on TELEVISION, moreover, is generally still about as
scientifically illiterate as was pulp sf of the 1930s. SPACE 1999 was a
particularly bad offender. Bob SHAW has several times expressed amazement
at the way that in STAR TREK, when the Enterprise is buffeted about (as it
frequently is), the crew are invariably thrown from their seats. Why, asks
Shaw, in this supertechnological future, has the concept of seat-belts
been forgotten? A particularly irritating error, almost invariable in film
and tv, is the audibility of explosions in space (as in Star Wars and
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA); it is apparently believed that, if the audience
can't hear the bangs, they'll all go home or change channels. TOTAL RECALL
(1990) showed that things had not got much better, with at least two
notable howlers. The first is the idea that, if you puncture a stationary
pressurized dome, normal air pressure will be sufficient to produce
hurricane winds that whip people and furniture out through the hole.
(People do get sucked out of aeroplanes, but only because they are moving
at 600mph.) Even stranger was the notion that oxygen deprivation and near
vacuum give people eyes the size of tangerines, a phenomenon they can
sustain for some minutes without suffering damage. MONSTER MOVIES very
often depend on giant ants, spiders, etc. In fact, such creatures could
not exist; they would collapse under their own weight, not having legs,
like the elephant's, designed to prop them up. Many problems arise with
increases in scale, one of them being that the ratio between skin area and
internal capacity does not stay the same, hence throwing the physiology of
the body completely askew. Flying men are probably impossible, though Poul
Anderson made a valiant attempt to rationalize them scientifically in War
of the Wing-Men (1958; rev vt The Man who Counts 1978), greatly increasing
their lung capacity and incorporating other necessary design
changes.Errors in sf are less common in the SOFT SCIENCES, perhaps because
these are subject to less rigorous laws, but nonetheless absurdities do
occur. It is commonly supposed that, if we had telepathy, we could

understand aliens by bypassing language; however, there is strong evidence
that we actually think in language, in which case telepathy probably would
not work efficiently between different nationalities, let alone between us
and the Rigelians. Brainwashing, and mental conditioning generally, are in
sf usually based on Pavlov's behavioural psychology rather than on B.F.
SKINNER's; that is, carried out through aversion and punishment, not
through reward, even though the latter system has been amply demonstrated
to be more efficient, and presents, perhaps, moral issues of a more subtle
and interesting kind. [PN/JS]
SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE
The most common generic term applied to UK sf in the years before the end
of WWII, at which time the "science fiction" label became sufficiently
commonplace to displace it; for several decades thereafter, the styles and
concerns of US GENRE SF dominated. C.H. HINTON issued 2 series of
Scientific Romances (colls 1886 and 1898) mixing speculative essays and
stories, and the term was widely applied by reviewers and essayists to the
early novels of H.G. WELLS, which became the key exemplars of the genre.
When listing his titles Wells usually lumped his sf and fantasy novels
together as "fantastic and imaginative romances"", but he eventually chose
to label the collection of his best-known sf novels "The Scientific
Romances of H.G. Wells (omni 1933), thus securing the term's definitive
status. Brian M. STABLEFORD has recently revived the term in order to
facilitate the comparison and contrast of the distinct UK and US
traditions of speculative fiction; his study of the UK genre's separate
evolution before the triumph of genre sf is Scientific Romance in Britain
1890-1950 (1985). In that book, and in entries throughout this
encyclopedia (see in particular EVOLUTION, RELIGION), the term can be seen
as tending to describe works characterized by long evolutionary
perspectives; by an absence of much sense of the frontier and a scarcity
of the kind of PULP-MAGAZINE-derived HERO who is designed to penetrate any
frontier available; and in general by a tone moderately less hopeful about
the future than that typical of genre sf until recent decades ( OPTIMISM
AND PESSIMISM).A few modern writers have found the term a convenient
rubric for offbeat works; examples include Christopher PRIEST for The
Space Machine (1976) and Kim Stanley ROBINSON for The Memory of Whiteness
(1985). [BS]
SCIENTIFICTION
1. Term coined by Hugo GERNSBACK as a contraction of "scientific fiction"
and defined by him in the first issue of AMAZING STORIES in Apr 1926 (
DEFINITIONS OF SF). It never became very popular, and within a decade of
its coining was largely replaced by "science fiction". When used now it
usually refers to the awkward, technology-oriented fiction published by
Gernsback or, disparagingly, to modern equivalents. Attempts to
re-establish the term in a positive sense have failed.2. Fanzine (1937-8).
FANTASY REVIEW. [PN]
SCIENTISTS
Scientists in pre-20th-century sf often exhibited symptoms of social
maladjustment, sometimes to the point of insanity; they were
characteristically obsessive and antisocial. Some scientists were

quasidiabolical figures, like Coppelius in E.T.A. HOFFMANN's "The Sandman"
(1816) or Mary SHELLEY's eponymous Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
(1818; rev 1831); others were ridiculous, like those in the third book of
Jonathan SWIFT's Gulliver's Travels (1726). In Honore de BALZAC's La
recherche de l'absolu (1834; 1st trans as The Philosopher's Stone 1844 US)
scientific research becomes an unholy addiction. Such stories make it
clear that the scientist had inherited the mantle (and the public image)
of medieval alchemists, astrologers and sorcerers, and certain aspects of
this image proved extraordinarily persistent; its vestiges remain even
today, with sciencefictional alchemical romances still featuring in the
work of authors like Charles L. HARNESS. The founding fathers of sf, Jules
VERNE (Nemo and Robur) and H.G. WELLS (Moreau, Griffin and Cavor),
frequently represented scientists as eccentric and obsessive; Robert Louis
STEVENSON's Dr Jekyll is cast from the same anxious mould, as is Maurice
RENARD's Dr Lerne; and Arthur Conan DOYLE's Professor Challenger is not so
very different. A detailed analysis of the process of scientific
creativity as a species of madness is presented in J.S. FLETCHER's
Morrison's Machine (1900).By the end of the 19th century, however, other
images of the scientist were beginning to appear. The US public made a
hero of Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), and this admiration for the clever
inventor is reflected in much popular fiction ( EDISONADE). The great man
himself is featured in VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM's L'Eve Future (1886) and
Garrett P. SERVISS's Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898; 1947), and a
DIME-NOVEL SF series featured Tom Edison Jr. Other scientists who
attracted hero-worship included Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) and Albert
Einstein (1879-1955), although Einstein's ideas were so non-commonsensical
that they were accepted by many as a proof of the oddity of scientists.
One wholehearted hero-worshipper of scientists was Hugo GERNSBACK, and he
gave voice to this sentiment in Ralph 124C 41+ (1911-12 Modern Electrics;
1925). The scientist-as- HERO thus entered pulp sf at its very inception,
alongside the eccentric genius - although many of the heroic scientists of
pulp sf were simply stock pulp heroes with scientific prowess improbably
grafted on: E.E. "Doc" SMITH's Richard Seaton is a cardinal example.
Scientists in the early sf pulps were often eccentric and absentminded,
and the demands of melodrama required many to turn their hands to criminal
enterprises, but they were rarely outright nuts, after the fashion of such
cinematic figures as the title-characters of DOCTOR X (1932) and DR
CYCLOPS (1940) and such non-genre arch-villains as Dr Munsker in The
Devil's Highway (1932) by Harold Bell WRIGHT and John Lebar.As pulp sf
matured there was a significant shift in the characterization of the
scientist hero. Especially in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, the role of the
theoretical genius was de-emphasized relative to that of the
practical-minded engineer; archetypal examples of this species were the
personnel of George O. SMITH's Venus Equilateral (coll 1947), forever
scribbling equations and designs on the tablecloths in Joe's Bar. The
presumed essence of real genius remained as wayward as ever, however:
Henry KUTTNER's inventor Galloway Gallegher always made his marvellous
machines while blind drunk and could never remember afterwards how he had
done it. Hero-worship of the scientific genius was further extended by
Isaac ASIMOV, whose Foundation series was the first notable work to
elevate a social scientist to that status. Outside the sf magazines, a

more realistic image of the work and social situation of the scientist was
depicted in E.C. LARGE's cynical Sugar in the Air (1937), which features a
visionary and idealistic scientist at odds with his stupid and irrational
employers. In the post-WWII decade this kind of image became much more
common - notably in several novels by Edward HYAMS, including Not in Our
Stars (1949), and in many magazine stories.Genre-sf writers mostly
responded to the widespread popular opinion that TECHNOLOGY had got out of
hand by putting the blame on machine-users rather than machine-makers,
claiming that it was not mad scientists but mad generals and mad
politicians who were the problem; nuclear scientists were often
represented as isolated paragons of sanity locked into a political and
military matrix that threatened the destruction of the world ( NUCLEAR
POWER). The US security clampdown of the 1950s emphasized the new social
situation of the scientist and provoked a wave of sf stories dealing with
the morality of carrying out research which had potential military
applications, and with the difficulty of making scientific discoveries in
such circumstances. An effective vignette dealing with the conscience of
the scientist who watches his discoveries in action is C.M. KORNBLUTH's
"The Altar at Midnight" (1952); the most dramatic depiction of the
conflict between scientific interests and military security is Algis
BUDRYS's WHO? (1958). Later tales of scientists in conflict with the
demands made by society include Theodore STURGEON's "Slow Sculpture"
(1970), Bob SHAW's Ground Zero Man (1971), D.G. COMPTON's The Steel
Crocodile (1970 US; vt The Electric Crocodile 1970 UK) and James P.
HOGAN's The Genesis Machine (1978). Non-genre writers continued to have
less sympathy with scientists; irresponsible or outrightly mad scientists
continued to appear in some profusion - notable examples include Peter
GEORGE's Dr Strangelove in DR STRANGELOVE: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP
WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1963) and Felix Hoenikker in Kurt VONNEGUT
Jr's Cat's Cradle (1963). Outside the protective walls of the sf genre
these sinister figures easily outnumbered scientists credited with the
noblest of ideals and motives; Pierre BOULLE's Garden on the Moon (1965),
which shows German rocket scientists thinking only of the Moon and SPACE
FLIGHT while working on the V2, is a vivid exception. The advent of
technologies like GENETIC ENGINEERING has helped sustain the routine
demonization of scientists in films and horror stories.In modern sf,
scientists have become rather less common, at least as major characters.
Writers who are not scientists themselves have become increasingly wary of
the difficulties involved in presenting a convincing picture of scientists
at work in the laboratory. Sf writers who are scientists are far more
ready to accept the challenge - see Great Science Fiction by Scientists
(anth 1962) ed Groff CONKLIN and The Expert Dreamers (anth 1962) ed
Frederik POHL - and the fictions of many science-trained writers are
regularly featured in the pages of Analog. But even they often find it
difficult to picture the kinds of equipment which will fill the
laboratories of the future, and the kinds of work which will be done
there. Scientists who have written notable sf about the scientists of the
future include Gregory BENFORD, David BRIN, Paul DAVIES, Robert L.
FORWARD, Fred HOYLE and Philip LATHAM. Many Eastern European writers are
practising scientists. (Communist sf characteristically put forward a
determinedly positive image of scientists and their endeavours, although

there are some very uneasy compromises with this orthodoxy in the work of
Arkady and Boris STRUGATSKI.) Many writers of HARD SF are also
popular-science writers of note, and they too have useful expertise which
they can and do deploy in their fiction; notable examples include Isaac
Asimov, Arthur C. CLARKE and John GRIBBIN.The most effective picture of
near-contemporary scientists at work in recent sf is probably Gregory
Benford's TIMESCAPE (1980); other notable examples are Kate WILHELM's The
Clewiston Test (1976), Hilbert SCHENCK's A ROSE FOR ARMAGEDDON (1982),
Paul PREUSS's Broken Symmetries (1983) and Jack MCDEVITT's The Hercules
Text (1986). The most memorable attempt at characterizing a scientific
genius in recent years is Ursula K. LE GUIN's Shevek in The Dispossessed
(1974); there are several charming but less earnest portraits in the work
of Vadim SHEFNER.A useful article (with a bibliography listing various
earlier sources) on the theme is "Scientists in Science Fiction:
Enlightenment and After" by Patrick PARRINDER in Science Fiction: Roots
and Branches (1990) ed Rhys Garnett and R.J. Ellis. A good book on the
subject is From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in
Western Literature (1994) by Roslynn D. Haynes; it deals with genre sf as
well as mainstream fiction. [BS]
SCIENTOLOGY
In its early years Scientology was known as DIANETICS (which see for
details), a term still used within Scientology. The word "Scientology" was
coined in 1952 by L. Ron HUBBARD, its founder; 2 of his books on the
subject are This is Scientology: The Science of Certainty (1955 UK) and
Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought (1956 UK).The activities of the
Scientologists have evolved in many curious and highly publicized ways
since 1952. A lively account by a not wholly unsympathetic outsider can be
found in Cults of Unreason (1973) by Dr Christopher Evans (1931-1979), but
there have been several more critical studies since then, both of the
movement and of its founder, notably L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?
(1987) by Bent Corydon and L. Ron Hubbard Jr a.k.a. Ronald DeWolf, and
Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard (1987) by Russell
Miller, both the subject of legal action by the various corporate groups
associated with the Church of Scientology.Scientology, originally a form
of psychotherapy with many PSEUDO-SCIENCE overtones, became what has been
described as the first sf RELIGION, when the Founding Church of
Scientology was incorporated in Washington DC in July 1955. Sceptical
commentators saw this as no more than a crafty tax dodge, but in fact
Scientology had from the beginning many of the qualities of a genuine
religion, and certainly aroused a religious fervour among its adherents.
(In 1992 it was announced that an arm of the Church of Scientology, the
Church of Spiritual Technology, was building an underground crypt to house
"the religious works of L. Ron Hubbard and other key religious works of
mankind".)Hubbard extended Scientology overseas quite early, opening
centres in Australia and South Africa in 1953, and himself moving to the
UK in 1955. A bad setback was the result of the Board of Inquiry set up in
the state of Victoria, Australia, in 1963; the melodramatic Anderson
report of 1965, having examined 151 witnesses, concluded that "Scientology
is evil; its techniques are evil; its practice a serious threat to the
community, medically, morally and socially; and its adherents sadly

deluded and often mentally ill", and Scientology was banned in Victoria. A
later disaster was the deportation of L. Ron Hubbard from the UK as an
undesirable alien in 1968. Scientology was then directed from the ships of
Hubbard's fleet, usually found in the Mediterranean, until in 1975 Hubbard
returned to the USA. In 1978 he was found guilty in Paris of obtaining
money under false pretences through Scientology, and sentenced in absentia
to 4 years' imprisonment.Scientology and Hubbard had lost some ground, but
the movement continued to attract members, and Hubbard himself was the
subject of an enormous publicity boost when the Scientology publishers,
Bridge Publications, reissued in 1984 Hubbard's novel Battlefield Earth
(1982), originally published by a mainstream publisher, St Martin's Press,
and followed it with an sf "dekalogy", the 10-vol Mission Earth saga by
Hubbard (1983-7; later vols posthumous); these were heavily and
expensively promoted. Around this time Hubbard had also founded and
sponsored the WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST, good entrants to which were
published in the L. RON HUBBARD PRESENTS WRITERS OF THE FUTURE series of
original anthologies, #1 being in 1985. All of this did something to
re-establish Hubbard (who had been discredited in the eyes of some
observers) as an important figure in the sf community, and something of a
philanthropist, though his own writings, and the literary contests and
workshops, became controversial themselves; the sf community is deeply
divided as to the merit of the latter, and Hubbard's own sf books of the
1980s are seldom highly regarded.Hubbard's role remains enigmatic; some
saw him as a cynic, the founder of an organization calculated to bring in
an income of many millions of dollars, which it did. This is almost
certainly too simplistic a view, though the opposing view - that he was a
man of genuine if eccentric vision, totally convinced of the truth of his
case, and fighting valiantly against the powerful conspiracy of orthodox
psychiatry - may also be less than the full story.Scientology is the most
dramatic example of the precepts of pulp sf being put into practice in the
real world. One regular attraction of pulp sf, as witness Hubbard's own
stories and those of his one-time colleague A.E. VAN VOGT, was its
dramatization of the idea that inside us there may be a SUPERMAN
struggling to get out. The glowing promise held out by scientologists is
that this dream can be realized. [PN]
SCI FI
Pronounced "sky fi" or "si fi", an abbreviation for "science fiction",
introduced by Forrest J ACKERMAN, a prominent fan fond of wordplay, in
1954, when the term "hi-fi" was becoming popular. Seldom much used within
the sf community, the term became very popular with journalists and media
people generally, until by the 1970s it was the most common abbreviation
used by nonreaders of sf to refer to the genre, sometimes with an implied
sneer. Some critics within the genre, Terry CARR and Damon KNIGHT among
them, decided that, since the term was commonly derogatory, it might be
critically useful in distinguishing sf hack-work - particularly ill
written, lurid adventure stories - from sf of a more intellectually
demanding kind. Around 1978 the critic Susan WOOD and others began
pronouncing the term "skiffy". In 1980s-90s usage "skiffy", which sounds
friendlier than "sci fi", has perhaps for that reason come to be less
condemnatory. Skiffy is colourful, sometimes entertaining, junk sf: STAR

WARS is skiffy. [PN]
SCION PUBLICATIONS
VARGO STATTEN SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE.
SCITHERS, GEORGE H(ARRY)
(1929- ) US writer, editor, publisher and military engineer (with the US
Army 1946-73). He began publishing fiction of genre interest with
"Faithful Messenger" for If in 1969, and wrote a spoof cookery book
(suggested by Damon KNIGHT's famous 1950 story), To Serve Man (1976) as
Karl Wurf; but his main sf activities have been as an editor and
publisher. He began his active involvement in 1959 with sf and fantasy as
editor of the famous FANZINE Amra; Amra, still appearing on an irregular
basis, specializes in SWORD AND SORCERY, particularly the work of Robert
E. HOWARD; it won HUGOS in 1964 and 1968. GHS published 2 anthologies
drawn from it: The Conan Swordbook (anth 1969) and The Conan Grimoire
(anth 1972), both with L. Sprague DE CAMP, cofounder with him of the
Hyborean Legion, a group devoted to Howard studies; earlier, De Camp alone
had been responsible for the Amra-derived The Conan Reader (anth 1968). In
1973 GHS founded the Owlswick Press ( SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS),
which continues successfully to publish sf and other material.GHS became
the founding editor of ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE in 1977; it
was the first sf magazine since the beginning of the 1950s to establish
itself as a dominant force; he continued as editor until the beginning of
1982, also editing several anthologies drawn from it (see listing below)
and winning Hugos for Best Professional Editor in 1979 and 1980. He then
edited the troubled AMAZING STORIES from late 1982 until 1986; more
recently, with John BETANCOURT (until 1990) and Darrell SCHWEITZER, who
had been assistant editor of both IASFM and AMZ during GHS's tenures, he
restarted WEIRD TALES, which had been variously (but unfruitfully) revived
more than once since ceasing regular publication in 1954; the new series
(the numbering is continuous over all incarnations) began with #290 in
1987, and continues, with all but the most recent edited by all three
(each taking the lead role in turn); #300 was ed Schweitzer alone. Also
with Schweitzer, GHS ed 2 anthologies of CLUB STORIES: Tales from the
Spaceport Bar (anth 1987) and Another Round at the Spaceport Bar (anth
1989). In all his projects, which are very various, GHS has managed to
combine energy-efficient verve with a transparent love of fantasy and sf.
[JC]Other works: On Writing Science Fiction (The Editors Strike Back!)
(1981) with John M. FORD and Schweitzer; Constructing Scientifiction ?
Fantasy (1982) with John Ashmead and Schweitzer.As Editor: Astronauts and
Androids (anth 1977); Black Holes and Bug Eyed Monsters (anth 1977);
Masters of Science Fiction (anth 1978); Comets and Computers (anth 1978);
Dark Stars and Dragons (anth 1978); Marvels of Science Fiction, Vol 2
(anth 1979); Science Fiction Anthology, #3 (anth 1979), #4 (anth 1980) and
#5 (anth 1981), anthologies from IASFM; Near Futures and Far (anth 1981).
SCOOPS
UK BEDSHEET-size magazine, 20 issues 10 Feb-23 June 1934, published by C.
A. Pearson Ltd, London; ed Haydn Dimmock. S was intended as a weekly BOYS'
PAPER that would "transport its readers from the everyday happenings into
the future"; whatever appeal it might have had for adults was not helped

by the decision to use, mostly, writers of ordinary boys' adventure
fiction - Dimmock was also editor of The Scout. There was not much
material by real sf writers, exceptions being A.M. LOW, with the serial
"Space" (1934; vt Adrift in the Stratosphere 1937), a reprint
serialization of The Poison Belt (1913) by Sir Arthur Conan DOYLE, and
stories by Maurice Hugi and John Russell FEARN. Another serial was "The
Black Vultures" by George E. Rochester (c1895-c1985). All issues are now
collector's items. S was the first UK sf magazine, and not a very good
one. 5 tales from it, along with 8 new stories, were later assembled as
The Boys' World of Adventure (anth 1937) ed anon. [FHP/PN]
SCORPION, THE
US PULP MAGAZINE. 1 issue, Apr 1939, published by Popular Publications;
ed Rogers Terrill. TS was in every respect a sequel to The OCTOPUS ; only
the alias of the villainous protagonist being changed. The sadistic,
borderline-sf feature novel, "Satan's Incubator" by Randolph Craig
(Norvell W. PAGE), was reprinted by Robert E. WEINBERG as Pulp Classics
#12: The Scorpion (1976 chap). [MJE/FHP]
SCORTIA, THOMAS N(ICHOLAS)
(1926-1986) US writer and chemist, active in solid-propellant research in
the aerospace industry during the 1960s before becoming a full-time writer
in 1970. He had already been publishing craftsmanlike stories for some
time, beginning with "The Prodigy" for Science Fiction Adventures in 1954.
He assembled some of his better work in Caution! Inflammable! (coll 1975);
a more definitive conspectus is The Best of Thomas N. Scortia (coll 1981)
ed George ZEBROWSKI. It has been argued that TNS was at his best in short
forms, where his sustained interestingness as a producer of ideas and
situations took sometimes bravura shape; and there is little doubt that
his first novel, What Mad Oracle?: A Novel of the World as It Is (1961),
concerning the aerospace industry, lumbered through its material without
much verve. After 1970, however, as his production started to increase,
TNS began to seem destined for a very substantial career. Artery of Fire
(1960 Original Science Fiction Stories; exp 1972), about the construction
of a huge power network, and Earthwreck! (1974), set in space after a
nuclear HOLOCAUST has extinguished the human species on its home planet,
were both intriguing tales, scientifically numerate and competently
commercial.He then shifted, however, into collaborative enterprises,
mainly a series of popular TECHNOTHRILLERS with Frank M. ROBINSON; though
successful in their own terms, these exhibited little of the creative
daring TNS had always threatened to exploit more fully. They are The Glass
Inferno (1974) - which along with Richard Martin Stern's The Tower (1973)
was filmed as The Towering Inferno (1974) - The Prometheus Crisis (1975),
The Nightmare Factor (1978), The Gold Crew (1980) and - completed by
Robinson after TNS died - Blow Out! (1987). TNS's death was reported as
being from leukemia induced by exposure to radiation as an observer at
early nuclear tests, and came just after he had announced new solo
projects. [JC]As Editor: Strange Bedfellows: Sex and Science Fiction (anth
1972); Two Views of Wonder (anth 1973) with Chelsea Quinn YARBRO;
Human-Machines (anth 1975) with Zebrowski.See also: CYBORGS; IMMORTALITY;
SEX; SPACESHIPS.

SCOT, MICHAEL
Michael Scott ROHAN; Allan SCOTT.
SCOTT, ALAN
(1947- ) UK writer whose sf novel, Project Dracula (1971; vt Anthrax
Mutation 1976 US), depicts an explosion in a space station which sprays
anthrax spores in dangerous directions. [JC]
SCOTT, ALLAN (JAMES JULIUS)
(1952- ) UK writer of fantasy novels, the first being The Ice King (1986;
vt Burial Rites 1987 US) with Michael Scott ROHAN, both writing as Michael
Scot; a second collaboration with Rohan, A Spell of Empire: The Horns of
Tartarus (1992), was published under their real names. Solo, AS has
written a further fantasy, The Dragon in the Stone (1991). [JC]
SCOTT, G. FIRTH
[r] AUSTRALIA.
SCOTT, JEREMY
Kay DICK.
SCOTT, J.M.
[r] Robert THEOBALD.
SCOTT, JODY (HUGUELET WOOD)
(1923- ) UK-born US writer whose 2 sf novels, Passing for Human (1977)
and I, Vampire (1984), comprise a joyously and at times scatologically
tangled SATIRE of the post-industrial Western world from a FEMINIST point
of view that wittily verges on misandry. The 2nd vol-whose protagonist,
the female vampire Sterling O'Blivion, is only intermittently relevant to
the action - ends in a state of violent confusion after a love affair
between O'Blivion and an ALIEN who closely resembles Virginia Woolf
(1882-1941), though a central message does remain: an arraignment of
exploitation (or vampirism), whether on the part of slave-trading aliens,
Earth-bound capitalists, men or women. [JC]See also: SUPERNATURAL
CREATURES.
SCOTT, MELISSA
(1960- ) US writer who began publishing sf with her first novel, The Game
Beyond (1984), a SPACE OPERA of some resonance which uses analogies with
the Roman Empire - familiar since the early Foundation stories (1951-3) of
Isaac ASIMOV-with considerable skill. In 1986 she won the JOHN W. CAMPBELL
AWARD for Best New Writer, at least in part for Five-Twelths of Heaven
(1986), #1 in her Silence Leigh sequence, which continues with Silence in
Solitude (1986) and The Empress of Earth (1987), all 3 assembled as The
Roads of Heaven (omni 1988). As with her first novel, these adventures of
aspiring space-pilot Silence Leigh capably marshal echoes of Earth-in this
case alchemy and astrological symbols - to enrich space-opera routines,
including several close calls with various enemies, a patch of slavery and
an ongoing quarrel with an inimical Empire. The main weakness lies in MS's
attempts to impose FEMINIST arguments upon a traditionally conceived venue
without seeming to think their implications through in that context; the
main strengths, perhaps, lie in the power of the main characters' longing
to find old Earth and in the ironies attendant upon their eventual

success. The Kindly Ones (1987), whose title and plot evoke Aeschylus's
Oresteia trilogy (458BC), specifically its third play, Eumenides, in an
interstellar setting, competently depicts a cruelly rigid society in a
Solar System of some interest. Dreamships (1992) sets an AI on a
FASTER-THAN-LIGHT ship, and very competently examines the nature of a
sentience slaved to travel the stars and, in the sequel, Burning Bright
(1993), to undergo taxing experience on an alien planet. Trouble and her
Friends (1994), though it breaks no new ground, does very competently
traverse CYBERPUNK territory, and the eponymous Trouble is an attractive
protagonist. [JC]Other works: A Choice of Destinies (1986); The Armor of
Light (1988) with Lisa A. Barnett; Mighty Good Road (1990).
SCOTT, PEG O'NEILL and PETER T.
[r] Barton WERPER.
SCOTT, RIDLEY
(1939- ) UK film-maker who has worked mostly in the USA. After making a
name with a series of stylish, inventive tv commercials, RS made his
feature debut with The Duellists (1977), a period film adapted from a
story by Joseph CONRAD. He then went on to direct 2 of the most
influential and important sf films of the last 15 years: ALIEN (1979) and
BLADE RUNNER (1982), the latter an adaption of Philip K. DICK's Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). RS is a visionary, at least in
terms of production design, and both his sf films conjure up a detailed
and utterly convincing future (whose style RS later recycled in tv
advertisements for a bank); Blade Runner is particularly powerful in its
design, and proved an influence on the CYBERPUNK movement. However, after
these films RS vanished into the (comparatively well publicized) limbo of
Legend (1985), a fairy tale resembling a feature-length advertisement for
hairspray. He made a tentative commercial comeback with Someone to Watch
Over Me (1987) and Black Rain (1989), both policiers whose content was
more conventional than their style. RS's films are mostly underconceived
on a script and character level, and thus can appear cold. He had a big,
if controversial, success, however, with the effective and satisfying
Thelma and Louise (1991), a female road movie about two women escaping
routine and put-upon lives and revenging themselves against various forms
of sexism; it and the 2 sf films are RS's best work.RS's brother Tony
Scott has directed one borderline-sf film about vampires - The Hunger
(1983) - whose exotic visual qualities fail to eclipse its narrative
failings, rather as in RS's own lesser films. [KN/PN]See also: CINEMA;
HORROR IN SF; MONSTER MOVIES.
SCIENCE FANTASY YEARBOOK
One of the many reprint DIGEST-size magazines from Sol Cohen's Ultimate
Publishing Co., using stories from old issues of AMZ and Fantastic
Adventures, including Theodore STURGEON's The Dreaming Jewels (1950
Fantastic Adventures; exp 1950; vt The Synthetic Man 1957). 4 quarterly
issues appeared, 2 in 1970, 2 in 1971, all but #1 as Science Fantasy.
[BS/PN]
SF
Pronounced "esseff", the preferred abbreviation of "science fiction"

within the community of sf writers and readers, as opposed to the
journalistic SCI FI. In this volume - as often elsewhere - it is rendered
in lower-case letters. [PN]
SCIENCE FICTION
US PULP MAGAZINE, 12 issues Mar 1939-Sep 1941. Published by Blue Ribbon
Magazines Inc. (Mar-Dec 1939), Double Action Magazines Inc. (Mar 1940-Jan
1941) and then Columbia Publications Inc. (Mar-Sep 1941); ed Charles D.
HORNIG (Mar 1939-Mar 1941) and Robert A.W. LOWNDES (June-Sep 1941).The
second venture into magazine editing by former WONDER STORIES editor
Hornig, SF was never better than very mediocre; although its covers were
all by Frank R. PAUL, they were poor examples of his work. The stories
were from such authors as John Russell FEARN and Eando BINDER, both of
whom also used pseudonyms to multiply their contributions to the magazine.
The readers' departments were conducted on a determinedly chummy basis by
Hornig, who spent a good deal of space airing his enthusiasm for
Esperanto. (In later issues his firm pacifism showed in some anguished
editorials.) After 2 issues under Lowndes's editorship SF was merged with
its companion FUTURE FICTION to form Future Combined with Science Fiction.
The Apr and July 1943 issues of SCIENCE FICTION STORIES, which revived the
SF cover design, were actually a continuation of Future Fiction after a
further title change. Some commentators see The ORIGINAL SCIENCE FICTION
STORIES , also ed Lowndes, as a delayed continuation of SF in the 1950s. 2
issues of SF, cut, were reprinted in the UK. [MJE/PN]
SCIENCE FICTION ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
HUGO.
SCIENCE FICTION (ADVENTURE) CLASSICS
SCIENCE FICTION CLASSICS.
SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES
Title used on 2 US DIGEST-size magazines during the 1950s, and on 1 UK
magazine that began as a reprint and continued, using original material,
after its parent - the 2nd US magazine - folded. (The title was used also
as a variant title of SCIENCE FICTION CLASSICS, Jan-May 1973, Sep and Nov
1974.)The 1st US magazine published 9 issues Nov 1952-June 1954. #1 was
published by Science Fiction Publications, the rest by Future
Publications. The issues Nov 1952-Sep 1953 were ed Lester DEL REY as
Philip St John; Harry HARRISON took over shortly before the magazine
folded. The schedule was irregularly bimonthly.The 2nd US magazine,
published by Royal Publications, was ed Larry T. SHAW and ran for 12
issues in 18 months, Dec 1956-June 1958. #1 was numbered, confusingly, vol
1 #6, continuing the numeration of a defunct magazine (Suspect Detective
Stories) from the same publisher; however, #2 was numbered vol 1 #2.The
editorial policy in each case - more overt in Shaw's magazine - was to
concentrate on adventure stories. The 1st SFA serialized del Rey's Police
Your Planet (Mar-Sep 1953; 1956), as by Erik Van Lhin, and C.M.
KORNBLUTH's The Syndic (Dec 1953-June 1954; 1953). The 2nd SFA used very
few short stories, usually featuring 3 long novelettes per issue. Robert
SILVERBERG, under various names, was a particularly prolific contributor,
magazine versions of 6 of his early novels appearing there.Novelettes from

Shaw's magazine were resorted into 5 issues of a UK edition marketed
Mar-Nov 1958 by Nova Publications, with both Shaw and John CARNELL
credited as editors. Carnell alone, no longer using material from the
parent magazine, continued SFA for a further 27 issues until May 1963,
using a great deal of material by Kenneth BULMER (under various names) and
novelettes by other writers regularly featured in the companion magazines
NEW WORLDS and SCIENCE FANTASY. Notable stories included John BRUNNER's
Society of Time series (1962; fixup as Times without Number 1962; rev
1974) and the magazine version of J.G. BALLARD's The Drowned World (Jan
1962; rev 1962). The UK SFA was numbered consecutively #1-#32,
approximately bimonthly to #14, and regularly bimonthly from then on.
Though sometimes regarded as more juvenile than its two companion
publications, it remained continuously enjoyable. [BS]
SCIENCE FICTION ADVERTISER
RIVERSIDE QUARTERLY.
SCIENCE FICTION ?
US critical magazine, founded and ed Neil BARRON, published by BORGO
PRESS, 13 issues 1979-80; revived with the SCIENCE FICTION RESEARCH
ASSOCIATION as publisher, still ed Barron, 20 issues 1982-3; amalgamated
with Fantasy Newsletter to form FANTASY REVIEW, Jan 1984, ed Robert A.
Collins, with Barron as reviews editor. This useful journal often reviewed
as many as 50 books an issue - novels, collections, secondary and
associational literature - and with so many reviewers involved was a
triumph of editorial organization. Its passing is regretted, especially
since SFRA NEWSLETTER, which since the late 1980s has been doing something
similar, usually prints rather shorter reviews (especially since mid-1992)
than did SF?
SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY BOOK REVIEW ANNUAL
Beginning with Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review Annual 1988 (dated
1988 but 1989) ed Robert A. Collins and Robert Latham - whose coverage is
of 1987 - this series is an annual book spin-off from the defunct magazine
FANTASY REVIEW (folded Aug 1987). The book-review section of the magazine
had been its strongest feature, and continues as the central feature of
the annual, whose first edition published around 550 brief reviews (most
reprinted, though individual reviews are not so acknowledged, from SFRA
NEWSLETTER) along with essay surveys of the year in sf, sf scholarship,
horror, etc. SFAFBRA's utility is dubious, since by the time its
information is published many of the books described are out of print.
SFAFBRA, published by Meckler for 2 years then by GREENWOOD PRESS, had
(1989), (1990) and (1991) editions up to the end of 1994. [PN]
SFFWA
SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA.
SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY WRITERS OF AMERICA
SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA.
SCIENCE FICTION: A REVIEW OF SPECULATIVE LITERATURE
Australian critical magazine ed Van Ikin from University of Sydney and
later University of Western Australia; associate ed Terry DOWLING;

irregular; PULP-MAGAZINE format, 35 issues 1977-1993, presumably current.
Intended to be a reputable academic journal, as the editorial addresses
suggest, SF:AROSL has oscillated a little uneasily between the academic
and the fannish, but has nevertheless published good critical features.
Until the more regular and perhaps livelier AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE FICTION
REVIEW: SECOND SERIES appeared in 1986, this was the main repository for
Australian sf criticism (especially since its main rival, SF COMMENTARY,
was notably irregular in the 1980s), publishing interesting material by
its editors and by Russell BLACKFORD, George TURNER and others. The very
irregular publication means letters and reviews often seem out of date
even as they appear. [PN]
SFBC AWARD
AWARDS.
SCIENCE FICTION BOOK CLUB
Sf book clubs were started in both the UK and the USA at roughly the same
time (c1953). The UK version was owned in its early years by Sidgwick ?
Jackson, then by Dent as part of that company's Readers' Union group of
book clubs, and finally by David ?
group in the 1970s. David ?
enthusiasts, was apathetic towards the SFBC, which later became subject to
competition from Encounters, a book club aggressively promoted by the
larger group Book Club Associates. Even before the death in 1982 of its
freelance consultant Edmund COOPER, the editorless UK SFBC was slowly
petering out, despite part- and spare-time efforts by one Readers' Union
employee, Paul G. Begg, to keep it alive; it died altogether some time
after Begg left the company.The US SFBC, by contrast, has had a history of
continuity. It is published by Nelson Doubleday, Inc., an associate of,
but distinct from, DOUBLEDAY, whose differing imprint is Doubleday ?
Company, Inc. In 1986 the US SFBC was sold, along with Doubleday, to the
German company Bertelsmann. The US club is far larger than the UK club
ever was, offers a very much broader selection, publishes its own editions
(including special hardcover editions of paperback originals) and creates
books - omnibuses of various sorts - especially for its members. (The UK
club normally presented no more than one title per month, reprinted
cheaply on cheap paper and with a cheap binding and cover.) The US SFBC
has been a major force in sf publishing. [MJE/PN/JGr]
SFCD-LITERATURPREIS
AWARDS.
SCIENCE FICTION CHRONICLE
US SEMIPROZINE published and ed from New York by Andrew PORTER, monthly,
current, 180 issues to Feb 1995. SFC was founded in 1978 as a department
of Porter's more elaborate but now defunct magazine ALGOL, and became a
separate publication in Oct 1979. It is a general news magazine about sf,
whose coverage is not as broad as that of its competitor, the West Coast
magazine LOCUS, though it contains fan material, a film column by Ed NAHA
(until Sep 1990) and the "London Report" by Stephen Jones and Jo Fletcher,
all of which cover ground rather different from Locus's. The film column
is disappointingly fragmentary and the book reviews, by Don D'Ammassa, are

very short. Something of an East Coast institution, SFC does offer an
alternate voice for the sf community. In its one-man-band editorial
performance it shows astonishing stamina in its producer, Porter, who
received a Special Award at the World CONVENTION in 1991 for his "years of
continuing excellence" in editing SFC, in the pages of which he
subsequently apologized for his less than graceful acceptance of the
award, which he regarded as "a consolation prize". No such response was
necessary in 1993 and 1994, for SFC did indeed win the HUGO award in the
semiprozine category in both those years, bringing to an end Locus's
astonishing run of nine years' domination of the award ever since that
category was first established. [PN]
SCIENCE FICTION CLASSICS
One of the many reprint DIGEST-size magazines published by Sol Cohen's
Ultimate Publishing Co., 30 issues published, ed Herb Lehrman as Ralph
Adris #1-#5, then ed Cohen. It began Feb 1967, published #1-#6 in 1967-8
as Science Fiction Classics and #7-#8 in 1969 as Science Fiction
(Adventure) Classics. It resumed publication in Winter 1970 under the
latter title with #12 and published 22 more issues before merging with
Thrilling Science Fiction ( The MOST THRILLING SCIENCE FICTION EVER TOLD )
in early 1975. SFC was numbered consecutively up to #19, and thereafter
merely dated. The schedule was irregular. The hiatus in numbering (#9-#11
missing) is connected with the fact that 2 other magazines took up their
numbering from SFC in 1969: SPACE ADVENTURES (CLASSICS) published 6 issues
numbered #9-#14, and STRANGE FANTASY published 6 issues numbered #8-#13;
they folded in 1971 and 1970 respectively.In its early issues SFC used a
great deal of material from the 1930s AMZ, reprinting stories by John W.
CAMPBELL Jr, Hugo GERNSBACK, Edmond HAMILTON et al., but from #13 it
reprinted mainly poor stories from the period of Raymond A. PALMER's
editorship. Variant titles were Science Fiction Adventures Classics (July
1973-July 1974) and Science Fiction Adventures (Jan-May 1973, Sep and Nov
1974). [BS]
SCIENCE FICTION CLASSICS ANNUAL
US DIGEST-size magazine. 1 issue, dated 1970, published by Ultimate
Publishing Co.; probably ed Sol Cohen. All stories were reprinted from the
1930s AMZ. [FHP]
SCIENCE-FICTION COLLECTOR, THE
Canadian bibliographical SEMIPROZINE (1976-81), describing itself as a
FANZINE, published by James Grant Books, Calgary, to #3, then by Pandora's
Books Ltd; ed J. Grant Thiessen (1946- ). With #9 (June 1980) the journal
merged with the fanzine Age of the Unicorn, and was renamed Megavore: The
Journal of Popular Fiction.Thiessen, a book dealer with a bibliographical
bent, published in TS-FC a good deal of extremely useful research - which
quite often cannot be found duplicated elsewhere - on sf PUBLISHING,
frequently in the more obscure and less reputable areas of paperback-book
and magazine publishing, with features on ACE BOOKS, sf pornography,
defunct paperback lines, Avalon Books, A.E. VAN VOGT and much else. After
the title-change the emphasis was less strongly on sf/fantasy; within a
year the journal died. [PN]

SF COMMENTARY
Australian FANZINE, irregular (Jan 1969-current), ed Bruce GILLESPIE.
SFC, which had reached #73/74/75 by Oct 1993, is a serious critical
journal in stencilled format (until issue #69/70, Jan 1991, since when it
has been lithographed); it also includes rather charming autobiographical
ramblings by Gillespie. It is generally considered one of the best serious
fanzines, and has received 3 HUGO nominations. Important contributors have
included John Foyster, Yvonne Rousseau, George TURNER and Stanislaw LEM;
most of the earliest English translations of Lem's critical articles
appeared in SFC. During June 1981-Jan 1989 SFC did not appear, Gillespie
instead publishing his The Metaphysical Review, which is less
concentratedly about sf, and which had reached #19/20/21 by July 1994.
[PN]
SCIENCE FICTION DIGEST
1. US DIGEST-size magazine. 2 issues, Feb and May 1954, published by
Specific Fiction Corp., New York, ed Chester Whitehorn. SFD was intended
as a reprint magazine which would take its material from the slick
general-fiction magazines and other sources, but the selections were weak
and it quickly failed. Its (purportedly) nonfiction articles had a strong
occult bent. The same publisher and editor had already failed with VORTEX
SCIENCE FICTION the previous year.2. US DIGEST-sized magazine. 4 issues
Oct/Nov 1981-Sep/Oct 1982, ed Shawna MCCARTHY, published by Davis
Publications, New York, as a companion magazine to ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE
FICTION MAGAZINE and ASF. This was an experiment in presenting excerpts
from forthcoming books, both fiction and nonfiction, in the form of
self-sufficient episodes. #4 was a 288pp double issue.3. FANZINE founded
in 1932, better known under the title to which it changed its name in
1934, FANTASY MAGAZINE (which see for details).None of these magazines
should be confused with the UK SF DIGEST. [FHP/PN]
SF DIGEST
UK small- BEDSHEET-size magazine. 1 undated issue, 1976, published by New
English Library; ed Julie Davis. SFD was to have been a quarterly
successor to SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY, but was doomed even before #1
appeared by the publisher's decision to concentrate on books rather than
magazines. SFD's format was superior to that of Science Fiction Monthly,
and was less obviously slanted toward a juvenile market. [PN]
SCIENCE FICTION EYE
US SEMIPROZINE, #1 Winter 1987; ed Stephen P. Brown, Daniel Steffan, and
published by the 'Til You Go Blind Cooperative to #5; ed and published
Brown alone from #6; published from Washington DC to #8, thereafter from
Asheville, North Carolina; thirteen issues to Spring 1994, theoretically 3
issues a year (actually highly irregular), maybe current.This intensely
lively critical journal, professional in appearance, has at times been
regarded as the house journal of CYBERPUNK; it prints its price in US
dollars, pounds sterling and Japanese yen on the cover. It covers
literature (mostly but not exclusively sf), music, technology,
communications, or whatever is hot on the streets at a given moment, with
an agreeable if irritating air of seeing itself as living on the cutting
edge. Its various controversies have included a continuing savage attack

on Orson Scott CARD. Contributors have included Paul Di Filippo, William
GIBSON, Richard GRANT, Eileen Gunn, Elizabeth HAND, Richard KADREY, John
KESSEL, Charles PLATT, Lucius SHEPARD and Bruce STERLING. As time went by
in the 1990s, and the frequency of publication went down to around once a
year, the editor's riding the surf of the future was compromised by the
likelihood he would slop off the back of the wave. But the magazine
remained very readable. [PN]
SCIENCE FICTION FIVE YEARLY
QUANDRY.
SCIENCE FICTION FORTNIGHTLY
AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION.
SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION
UK research unit set up in 1971 at the North East London Polytechnic
(which became the University of East London in 1992), but semi-autonomous,
being controlled by a council, partly academics and partly sf
professionals, and including George HAY, whose enthusiasm had much to do
with the SFF's inception. Peter NICHOLLS, the first administrator
(1971-7), was followed by Malcolm EDWARDS (1978-80). The SFF was the first
and only academic body in the UK set up to investigate sf: until 1980 it
also supervised graduate research work in the field and investigated the
usefulness of sf in education generally ( SF IN THE CLASSROOM).Severe
restrictions on UK educational budgets in 1980 led to the freezing of the
position of administrator when Edwards left in May of that year, though
Colin GREENLAND, as an Arts-Council-funded Writing Fellow attached to the
SFF, kept the flag flying for a period, and Charles BARREN served as
(unsalaried) acting administrator for some years, followed by Ian
MacPherson and Ted Chapman, variously designated but never paid. During
1980-91 the SFF was staffed only by a single part-time employee, Joyce
Day, becoming primarily known for its journal, FOUNDATION: THE REVIEW OF
SCIENCE FICTION, and its research library, housed at the Barking precinct
of the Polytechnic, the largest publicly accessible COLLECTION of sf in
the UK outside the British Library, with c20,000 items including magazines
and fanzines. In 1991 it seemed briefly that the Polytechnic - then about
to be granted, as were other UK polytechnics, the more prestigious
designation "University" - was prepared to refinance the SFF, and an
additional clerical staff member was introduced, though not one either
versed in sf or with a teaching brief. But the now "University" soon
declared itself unwilling to sustain the collection, to house the academic
journal, or to appoint an academic lecturer to the essential post of
Administrator; the "University" additionally proposed to evict the SFF on
a short notice unless the SFF agreed to pay it ps40,000 per annum - though
no Administrator would be appointed, nor any courses permitted, nor any
accessions budget granted, if that sum were in fact advanced. In October
1992, the Council of the SFF therefore agreed in principle to move in
early 1993 to the University of Liverpool, which had expressed much
interest in the chance to gain so substantial (and unique) a research
resource. The University of Liverpool selected Andy Sawyer as
Administrator in 1993; an MA course in sf was announced; and the
Collection was formally transferred into the University's keeping 26

January 1995, though ownership of SFF books remains with the Friends of
Foundation, which was formed in the late 1980s specifically in order to
help sustain the SFF through the difficult period which was, even then,
anticipated.The SFF patrons are Arthur C. CLARKEand Ursula K. LE GUIN;
council and ordinary members have included practically all UK sf writers
as well as distinguished US writers including James BLISH. The SFF helps
administer the ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD. [PN/JC]
SCIENCE FICTION GREATS
GREAT SCIENCE FICTION.
SF GREATS
GREAT SCIENCE FICTION.
SF IMPULSE
SCIENCE FANTASY.
SF IN MUSIC
MUSIC.
SF IN THE CLASSROOM
In September 1953 Sam MOSKOWITZ began to teach what was almost certainly
the first sf course in the USA to be given through a college. The course
was on Science Fiction Writing, was delivered on a non-credit basis
through the City College of New York, and was presented with the
collaboration of a popular-science writer, Robert Frazier (not to be
confused with the sf poet Robert FRAZIER). For the Autumn 1953 sessions,
Moskowitz arranged for several sf writers - including Isaac ASIMOV, Lester
DEL REY, Murray LEINSTER, Robert SHECKLEY and Theodore STURGEON - to give
talks; later sessions included talks by Robert A. HEINLEIN and others.
Moskowitz left the course after 1955, and it probably ceased in
1957.Further sf courses were slow to be established. Guest lectures were
occasionally given, including 2 by Moskowitz, the first in December 1950
at New York University, the second in December 1953 at Columbia
University. Those given by Heinlein, C.M. KORNBLUTH, Robert BLOCH and
Alfred BESTER at the University of Chicago in 1957 were collected as The
Science Fiction Novel (anth 1959) with an introduction by Basil DAVENPORT;
those by Kingsley AMIS at Princeton in 1959 were published as New Maps of
Hell (1960 US). A key year was 1961, when courses were set up by Mark R.
HILLEGAS at Colgate and H. Bruce FRANKLIN at Stanford. 10 years later Jack
WILLIAMSON's pamphlet Science Fiction Comes to College (1971 chap) listed
61 universities offering such courses, and he judged that to be a mere
sampling; by the time of his later pamphlet, Teaching SF (1975 chap), that
estimate had considerably increased, and it seems likely that today there
are at least 250 such courses in the USA. A Research Guide to Science
Fiction Studies (1977), compiled by Marshall B. TYMN, Roger C. SCHLOBIN
and L.W. CURREY, lists 412 doctoral dissertations on sf subjects, the
great majority having been submitted in the USA. Sf scholars have their
own association, the SCIENCE FICTION RESEARCH ASSOCIATION, whose
membership in the early 1990s hovered just above 300, perhaps two-thirds
being US-based teachers of sf. It is clear that there has also been a
greatly increased use of sf material at high-school level, sf being
studied not only in its own right but because it helps to dramatize issues

of ECOLOGY, FUTUROLOGY, OVERPOPULATION, SOCIOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY, etc.
Also,
as one of the most interesting and rapidly evolving forms of popular
culture, sf is an important register of social history, reflecting shifts
in the prejudices and expectations of society at large.The story is very
different outside the USA. A scattering of universities in Canada, Europe
and Australia have sf courses. The first sf course in the UK was a
non-credit course begun by Philip STRICK in 1969 at the City Literary
Institute, London; it had various leaders (including the editors of this
encyclopedia: John CLUTE, Peter NICHOLLS and Brian M. STABLEFORD) before
its demise in 1992. Brief academic sf courses were taught by Nicholls and
Ian WATSON in the 1970s, and occasional sf texts still find their way on
to more conventional courses in English, politics, etc., but sf courses at
university level remain a rarity in the UK.Fears have been expressed that
the academic study of sf will domesticate it. (A common catchphrase among
sf fans was "Kick sf out of the classroom and back to the gutter where it
belongs".) They are not groundless. Anecdotal evidence suggests that too
often the sf course is regarded as a "soft option", and, although the
number of distinguished scholars and teachers of sf, especially in the
USA, has certainly increased through the 1970s and 1980s, the overall
standard of academic sf criticism is not notably high. Also, the academic
acceptance of sf may have suffered a setback through the popular
perception, in the post- STAR WARS era, that sf books are largely
juvenilia - a perception partly justified in a period when sf PUBLISHING,
chiefly in the USA, appeared to have become cynically focused on a
routine, mass-market product to the detriment of "mid-list" writers whose
work was more serious, more carefully written and, it could be argued,
more entertaining. Nonetheless, the number of CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL
WORKS ABOUT SF increased very dramatically during this period: during 1991
SFRA NEWSLETTER reviewed about 15 books a month on sf/fantasy. Also, many
more academic essays on sf are being published; they are now likely to
turn up in all sorts of nonspecialist literary and critical journals, not
just the specialist journals, whose "Big Three" remain SCIENCE-FICTION
STUDIES and EXTRAPOLATION in the USA, and FOUNDATION: THE REVIEW OF
SCIENCE FICTION in the UK; it is too soon to say with what success JOURNAL
OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS (founded 1988) will join this group. These
journals regularly publish a proportion of unexciting and mediocre work,
as they always did, but there is currently a strong sense that more good
and lively sf criticism and scholarship are abroad in the land now than
when the 1st edn of this encyclopedia was prepared.Especially since the
early 1970s, many books - far too many to be listed here - have been
published for use by teachers of sf at high-school level. Some have
unfortunately tended towards the patronizing and simplistic, or to the
formulaic, as in too many (but not all) of the readers' guides to
individual authors published by companies like BORGO PRESS, Cliffs Notes,
GREENWOOD PRESS, STARMONT HOUSE, Twayne and Ungar. Among the useful
classroom guides are: Science Fiction: An Introduction (1973; rev vt
Science Fiction Reader's Guide 1974) by L. David Allen; Grokking the
Future: Science Fiction in the Classroom (1973) by Bernard C. Hollister
and Deane C. Thompson; Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching (1980)
by Patrick PARRINDER; Critical Encounters: Writers and Themes in Science

Fiction (anth 1978) ed Dick Riley; Science Fiction: A Teacher's Guide and
Resource Book (1988) by Marshall B. Tymn; and Teaching Science Fiction:
Education for Tomorrow (anth 1980) ed Jack Williamson.The standard of
books aimed at university-level readers and graduates ranges bafflingly
from the opaque and semiliterate to the stimulating and rigorous, and
their sheer volume - as suggested under CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS
ABOUT SF - is now dizzying. Among the more important (English-language)
academic authors to have written books in this field are Paul K. ALKON,
Thomas D. CLARESON, I.F. CLARKE, Samuel R. DELANY (a part-time academic),
H. Bruce FRANKLIN, James E. GUNN, Hal W. HALL, Mark R. HILLEGAS, David
KETTERER, C.N. MANLOVE, Walter E. MEYERS, Patrick PARRINDER, Robert M.
PHILMUS, Eric S. RABKIN, Mark ROSE, Joanna RUSS, David N. SAMUELSON, Lyman
Tower SARGENT, Roger C. SCHLOBIN, Robert SCHOLES, George Edgar SLUSSER,
Brian M. STABLEFORD, Darko SUVIN, W. Warren WAGAR, Patricia S. WARRICK and
Gary K. WOLFE. Critical anthologies and journals contain - amid the dross
- the work of other interesting sf academics who have yet to publish
books. An early set of essays about the academic interest in sf is Science
Fiction: The Academic Awakening (anth 1974) ed Willis E. MCNELLY.Sf
BIBLIOGRAPHIES have become a marketable commodity only because of the
academic interest in sf. The 1980s saw the publication of many more of
them than ever before. Somewhere between bibliography, history and
critical reference work is one of the outstanding reference works in the
field, a book whose most recent incarnation is Anatomy of Wonder: A
Critical Guide to Science Fiction: Third Edition (1987) ed Neil BARRON,
aimed in the first instance at librarians but useful for all sf academics;
it contains a chapter on the teaching of sf, with suggested texts.This
interest has brought about the publication of many sf ANTHOLOGIES that are
obviously designed for the classroom, the stories they contain being
complemented by introductions or some kind of critical apparatus. Some
notably thoughtful compilations are The Mirror of Infinity: A Critic's
Anthology of Science Fiction (anth 1970) ed Robert SILVERBERG, Those who
Can (anth 1973) ed Robin Scott WILSON, Modern Science Fiction (anth 1974)
ed Norman SPINRAD, Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the
Nineteenth Century (anth 1966; rev 1968; rev 1978) ed H. Bruce Franklin,
and The Road to Science Fiction (anth in 4 vols 1977-82) ed James E. Gunn.
There are also, of course, a great many theme anthologies collecting sf
stories about everything from ANTHROPOLOGY to RELIGION. One of the most
active theme anthologists for the academic market has been Martin Harry
GREENBERG, along with several colleagues with whom he often works.Beyond
all these direct responses to the academic stimulus is the now very
general interest in sf to be found in the intellectual world generally:
even newspapers and magazines are less dismissive or ignorant about sf
than was the case in, say, the 1960s. Much of the material now published
about sf - notably in the 1980s and 1990s in newspaper articles about
CYBERPUNK - has been hacked out by trend-spotters and journalists cashing
in on a good thing, but this is inevitable. Sceptics see the breaking down
of the walls of sf's ghetto - a process hastened by sf's partial academic
acceptance - as leading to such a general diffusion of sf ideas into the
community at large as to leave sf itself less identifiable as a genre,
perhaps less relevant, and even, according to the pessimists, moribund. If
so, we have the paradox of a genre so disreputable in life that decent

persons turned aside from it in disgust, only for its corpse to be praised
for its beauty and vigour. [PN]
SCIENCE FICTION LEAGUE
Launched Apr 1934 by Charles D. HORNIG and Hugo GERNSBACK through WONDER
STORIES, the SFL was the first and most successful of several
professionally sponsored sf organizations. The formation of local chapters
in the USA, Australia, and the UK brought sf readers together and provided
a firm foundation for present-day sf FANDOM; in particular, the
establishment of the Leeds and Nuneaton SFL chapters led directly to the
first UK FANZINES. [PR]
SCIENCE FICTION LIBRARY
UK pocketbook magazine. 3 numbered undated issues 1960; published by G.G.
Swan, London; no ed named. SFL had no table of contents, poor paper and
very small type. Original and reprinted stories were used, including some
from the first incarnation of SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY. A companion
magazine was WEIRD AND OCCULT LIBRARY. [FHP]
SCOTT, ROBIN
[s] Robin Scott WILSON.
SCOTT, WARWICK
Elleston TREVOR.
SCRAP BOOK, THE
US PULP MAGAZINE published monthly Mar 1906-Jan 1912 by the Frank A.
MUNSEY Corp.; ed Perley Poore Sheehan. TSB was published in 2 separate
sections from July 1907, the first containing articles, the second
fiction. The second section became The CAVALIER from Sep 1908, the first
continuing as SB, with some fiction content, until merging with The
Cavalier to form The Cavalier Weekly.SB began as a reprint magazine, often
featuring classic weird fiction. Later it published original stories,
including some sf, notably Julian Johnson's "When Science Warred" (1907),
George Allan ENGLAND's "The House of Transformation" (Sep-Nov 1909) and
Garrett P. SERVISS's "The Sky Pirate" (Apr-Sep 1909). [JE]
SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN
Film (1969). Amicus/AIP. Dir Gordon Hessler, starring Vincent Price,
Christopher Lee, Alfred Marks, Michael Gothard. Screenplay Christopher
Wicking, based on The Disorientated Man (1966; vt Scream and Scream Again
1967 US) by Peter SAXON. 94 mins. Colour.This blend of policier, cold-war
political thriller, FRANKENSTEIN and vampire movie, initially ignored, was
later seen by some cineastes as one of the major UK sf films. An enjoyable
farrago, it does have moments of distinction, but its silliness gets in
the way: the opening sequence - a hospital patient is understandably upset
to find that each day he is missing yet another limb - could be a sketch
from the Monty Python tv series. Nowhere is it explained why mad
SCIENTISTS (the main one played by Price) need to construct a super-race
(which they do using stolen body parts), why the constructed beings are so
incredibly strong, why they suck blood and murder people, and why this
makes them good prime-ministerial material. Marks's energetically
down-to-earth performance as the baffled police inspector almost saves the

film, but SASA works only as a (literally) disjointed series of paranoid
surreal nightmares - and, even then, poor production values and mostly
indifferent performances are as likely to elicit laughter as horror. The
radical subtext - our political masters are literally MONSTERS - had been
better done elsewhere; e.g., QUATERMASS II (1957; vt Enemy from Space).
[PN]
SCREAMERS
L' ISOLA DEGLI UOMINI PESCE.
SCRYMSOUR, ELLA M.
(1888-? ) UK writer whose remarkable The Perfect World: A Romance of
Strange People and Strange Places (fixup 1922) is thought by E.F. BLEILER
almost certainly to consist of 2 separate magazine novels here published
sequentially; however, as EMS clearly attempted to weave their plots
together, we designate the outcome a FIXUP. In the first main sequence the
two young gentlemen protagonists are transported from a company town
dominated by their family coalmine into an underground cave system
populated by theocratic relics of an Old Testament quarrel; after they
finally emerge in Australia and note that the world is about to blow up,
they travel with their inventor uncle to JUPITER, where a similar
oligarchy, this time pre-Adamic, subjects the main protagonist - as had
happened already underground - to erotic inducements. He marries the
relevant princess and together they rule Jupiter in peace. In dealing with
the sinlessness of the Jovians, EMS ineffectively prefigured the work of
C.S. LEWIS. [JC]
SEA
UNDER THE SEA.
SEABORN, ADAM
Unidentified pseudonym of the author of the well written Symzonia: A
Voyage of Discovery (1820), which sets a UTOPIA inside a HOLLOW EARTH.
Some commentators have assumed AS to have been Captain John Cleves SYMMES,
whose hollow-earth theories are exploited in the book. However, they are
also satirized, so a more likely candidate may be Nathaniel Ames (?
-1835), whose style in his books about the sea resembles AS's.
[JC/PN]About the author: "The Authorship of Symzonia: The Case for
Nathaniel Ames" by Hans-Joachim Lang and Benjamin Lease in New England
Quarterly (June 1975).See also: FANTASTIC VOYAGES; HISTORY OF SF.
SEABRIGHT, IDRIS
[s] Margaret ST CLAIR.
SEAFORTH
A pseudonym used by 2 entirely separate authors.1. As A. Nelson Seaforth,
UK author George Sydenham Clarke (1848-1933), 1st Baron Sydenham of Combe,
wrote the future- WAR novel, The Last Great Naval War (1891), in which
France and the UK become involved.2. George C. FOSTER. [JC]
SEA-LION
Pseudonym of UK naval officer and writer Geoffrey Martin Bennett
(1909-1983), whose two sf novels both deal with menaces at sea: The
Invisible Ships (1950) indeed features invisible ships, and This Creeping

Evil (1950) features sea monsters. [JC]
SEAMARK
Austin J. SMALL.
SEARLES, A(RTHUR) LANGLEY
(1920- ) US FANZINE publisher and Professor of Chemistry at the College
of Mount St Vincent, New York (he retired in 1987); as publisher from 1943
of FANTASY COMMENTATOR (which see for details), he has maintained the
journal as a significant forum for the study of sf in many of its aspects,
though concentrating on early GENRE SF. [JC]
SEARLES, (WILLIAM) BAIRD
(1934-1993) US writer known mainly for his several nonfiction works on sf
and fantasy, beginning with Stranger in a Strange Land ?
chap) and continuing with The Science Fiction Quizbook (1976) with Martin
Last,(1929- ) A Reader's Guide to Science Fiction (1979) with Last,
Michael Franklin and Beth MEACHAM, A Reader's Guide to Fantasy (1982) with
Franklin and Meacham, and Films of Science Fiction and Fantasy (1988).
With Brian Thomsen he edited Halflings, Hobbits, Warrows ?
Collection of Tales of Heroes Short in Stature (anth 1991). He is a useful
figure in the field as a practical critic and guide. [JC]See also: ISAAC
ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE.
SEARLS, HANK
Working name of US writer Henry Hunt Searls Jr (1922- ), who began
publishing sf with "Martyr's Flight" for Imagination in 1955, and whose sf
has been primarily restricted to NEAR-FUTURE tales of the early space age.
In his first novel, The Big X (1959), a test pilot flies a plane designed
to reach Mach 8. HS's best-known tale, The Pilgrim Project (1964) - filmed
as COUNTDOWN (1968) - is about a race between the USA and the USSR to get
to the Moon first, with both countries launching flights almost
simultaneously. Melodramatically plotted, and technologically bound (with
considerable expertise) to the world of the 1950s and 1960s, HS's work is
now an artefact of an earlier (and in some ways bolder) age. From about
1980 he has concentrated on non-sf tales, some of them TECHNOTHRILLERS.
[JC]Other works: The Crowded Sky (1960); The Astronaut (1960); The
Penetrators (1965); The Hero Ship (1969); Overboard (1977), marginal;
Sounding (1982).
SEAQUEST DSV
US tv series (1993- ). Amblin Television/Universal. Series creator Rockne
S. O'Bannon. Execprods include O'Bannon, David J. Burke, Patrick Hasburgh,
Steven SPIELBERG, TommyThompson. Supervising prods include Kerry Lenhart,
John J.Sakmar, Hans Tobeason, more. Dirsinclude Irvin Kershner, Les
Landau, Bill L. Norton, Les Sheldon, Bryan Spicer. Writers includeLenhart,
Sakmar, Michael CASSUTT, Melinda SNODGRASS, more. Stars include Roy
Scheider(Capt. Nathan Bridger), Jonathan Brandis (Lucas), Don Franklin
(Cmdr. Jonathan Ford), "Darwin" (voice: Frank Welker),Stephanie Beacham
(Dr Kristin Westphalen, season 1), Royce D. Applegate (Chief
Crocker,season 1),Edward Kerr (Lt. Brody, season 2). Two seasons to 1995,
current. An 86-min pilot (Aug1993) was followed by approximately fifty
50-min episodes in the first two seasons.seaQuest DSV (so spelled out on

screen), re-teaming the successful Jaws(1975) combination of Scheider and
Spielberg, was the Spielberg organization's second attempt to develop a
major prime-time sf tv show for NBC, the first being AMAZING STORIES,which
lasted only two seasons. Critical consensus is that the producers'
ambitions again exceed their grasp.The series, set around 25 years in the
future, postulates an Earth loosely governed by the "United Earth
Organization", wherein many nations and corporate entities have claimed
areas of the ocean for colonization or resource development. The title
refers to the submarine designed and commanded by Captain Nathan Bridger,
a flagship vessel in the tradition of STAR TREK's U.S.S. Enterprise.Also
distinctive was the introduction of "Darwin", a dolphin crew member able
to communicate with his crewmates via voder-liketechnology.Young actor
Jonathan Brandis, as boy genius Lucas Wolenczak, rapidly became a fan
favorite.Initially conceived and promoted as fairly rigorous science
fiction with an emphasis on exploration and discovery (Woods Hole
oceanographer Dr Robert Ballard was a technical consultant during the
first season, delivering educational messages over the closing
credits),the series achieved only faltering ratings and was soon embroiled
in a nearly constant cycle of retoolings and changes in creative
leadership. The direction of the stories changed,increasingly emphasizing
extra-terrestrial visitations and mystical phenomena, much to the publicly
expresseddisapproval of Scheider. Several cast members departed or were
dismissed after the first season, when it was announced that second-season
production would be moved to Florida from Hollywood.Part of seaQuest DSV's
rocky history may arise from its time slot, 8.00pm Sunday,opposite CBS's
venerablMurder, She Wrote and ABC's SUPERMAN vehicle LOIS ?
solid ratings success, it showed a further marked decline in
ratingstowards the end of the second season. Prospects for a third season
appear uncertain, and further retooling is likely, but loyal fans have
mounted a well-organized lobbying campaign reminiscent of that launched
nearly 30 years earlier to preserve the original Star Trekseries.Tie-in
material has included a novelisation of the pilot by Diane DUANE and Peter
Morwood, novels by Matthew J. Costello and David BISCHOFF, and a
short-lived comic book from Nemesis Comics. [JCB]
SECONDARY WORLD
J.R.R. TOLKIEN.
SECONDS
Film (1966). Paramount/Joel/Gibraltar. Dir John FRANKENHEIMER, starring
Rock Hudson, Salome Jens, John Randolph, Will Geer. Screenplay Lewis John
Carlino, from Seconds (1963) by David ELY. 106 mins. B/w.A middle-aged
businessman (Randolph) pays a large sum to have his death faked and his
youth restored by futuristic surgery, so that he can start a new life in a
new body (Hudson). Tiring of the young swingers he now moves with, he
learns it is impossible to return to his old life. The shadowy
organization which arranged all this turns menacing at his backsliding,
and eventually has him killed, to be recycled for his body parts. The idea
was old, but the treatment, with its cold evocation of PARANOIA - all
Frankenheimer's best films feature powerful conspiracies using
technological means of manipulation (brainwashing in the case of 1962's

The MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE ) - was in advance of its time, anticipating the
sombre conspiracy movies of the 1970s. S is much helped by James Wong
Howe's moody, alienating black-and-white photography. [JB/PN]See also:
CINEMA.
SECRETS OF F.P.1
F.P.1 ANTWORTET NICHT.
SECRET FILES OF CAPTAIN VIDEO, THE
CAPTAIN VIDEO.
SEDBERRY, J(AMES) HAMILTON
(1863-? ) US writer known only for Under the Flag of the Cross (1908), in
which, in AD2005, a valiant US Army fights off a Mongolian-Japanese
invasion with electric rifles. [JC]
SEESTERN
Ferdinand GRAUTOFF.
SEI'UN AWARDS
AWARDS; JAPAN.
SEKSMISJA
(vt Sex Mission) Film (1984). Zespoly Filmowe. Dir Juliusz Machulski,
starring Olgierd psukaszewicz, Jerzy Stuhr, Bozena Stryjkowna, Boguslawa
Pawelec. Screenplay Machulski, Jolanta Hartwig, Pawel Hajny. 121 mins.
Colour.A solemn adventurer and a jolly wastrel volunteer for a CRYOGENICS
experiment and wake up 50 years later, after atomic war has (supposedly)
devastated the surface and the survivors have retreated into the usual
underground enclaves. There are no more men, and the mildly totalitarian
society is run by parthenogenetic women. The wastrel is keen on
reintroducing traditional methods of procreation, while the SCIENTIST is
more interested in demonstrating the follies of the brave new world. In
the Eastern European tradition of satirical sf, this Polish production
uses BUCK ROGERS trappings to get a few cheap laughs out of women. The
occasional sharp point is made, but S is surprisingly unwitty and obvious;
its anti- FEMINISM, latent throughout, emerges at the end when it is
revealed that society's matriarch is a manipulative male transvestite. S
is mainly redeemed by its wry performances, particularly by Stuhr,
POLAND's favourite comedian, as the lecherous lazybones. [KN]
SELBY, CURT
Doris PISERCHIA.
SELECTED SCIENCE FICTION
Australian DIGEST-size magazine. 5 slim (32pp saddle-stapled) monthly
issues May-Sep 1955, published by Malian Press, Sydney; ed anon. SSF, a
companion to AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, reprinted US material of
quite good quality. [FHP]
SELLERS, CON
Working name of US writer Connie Leslie Sellers (1922-1992), author of at
least 100 novels invarious genres.His sf work, which is not significant,
includes F.S.C. (1963),The PleasureMongers (1964; vt Mr.Tomorrow1974) and

Red Rape(1964). [JC]
SELLINGS, ARTHUR
Pseudonym of UK writer and bookseller Robert Arthur Ley (1921-1968), who
began publishing sf stories with "The Haunting" for Authentic in 1953; the
best of his output of about30 tales was assembled in Time Transfer (coll
1956; with 5 stories cut 1966) and The Long Eureka (coll 1968). In the
1960s his productivity increased; he died (suddenly, of a heart attack)
just as he was gaining more and more notice. His first novel, Telepath
(1962 US; vt The Silent Speakers 1963 UK), is typical of all his best work
in the complexity of its protagonist (who must deal with his discovery of
his own limited ESP ability), the careful realization of venue, and a
sense that, although it may be intrusive, the unknown must be faced and
lived with. Later novels, quite variously expressing this quiet but
competent point of view, include: The Uncensored Man (1964), whose
protagonist is transferred via drugs into another DIMENSION where he
develops previously masked PSI POWERS and meets dubiously superior forms
of life ( SUPERMAN); The Quy Effect (1966), in which a man faces the
consequences attendant upon his invention of ANTIGRAVITY while at the same
time falling in love; Intermind (1967 US as Ray Luther; 1969 UK as AS), in
which a secret agent is injected with another person's memory to pursue a
complex case; and The Power of X (1968), which sets an art dealer perhaps a self-portrayal-into a world where material objects can be
perfectly duplicated, calling into question the nature of the authentic
work of art. AS's finest novel was his last. Junk Day (1970), a postHOLOCAUST tale set in the ruins of his native London and peopled with
engrossing character types, is perhaps grimmer than his previous work but
pointedly more energetic. [JC]See also: ESP; GENERATION STARSHIPS;
PERCEPTION.
SEMIPROZINE
In the terminology of sf FANDOM, this expression - once colloquial but
enshrined since 1983 in the constitution of the World Science Fiction
Society, the body that administers the HUGOs - means a semiprofessional
magazine as opposed to an amateur magazine, or FANZINE. According to that
constitution a magazine with a circulation of more than 10,000 is a
professional magazine. A semiprozine must therefore have a circulation of
less than 10,000. It must also, according to the constitution, have
published at least 4 issues (at least 1 in the previous calendar year) and
fulfil 2 of the following 5 criteria: have an average press run of at
least 1000 copies; pay its contributors and/or staff in other than copies
of the publication; provide at least half the income of any one person;
have at least 15% of its total space occupied by advertising; announce
itself to be a semiprozine. Charles N. BROWN, editor of LOCUS magazine
(which has won numerous Hugos for Best Semiprozine), states additionally
in his regular commentaries on magazine publishing that the frequency of a
semiprozine should be at least quarterly, and that unlike a professional
magazine it should not have national newsstand circulation. A number of
the most important magazines of comment in the fields of sf and fantasy,
and several of the magazines that publish fiction, are or have been
semiprozines. [PN]

SENARENS, LUIS PHILIP
(1863-1939) US writer, editor and publishing aide. Under at least 27
pseudonyms he wrote perhaps 2000 stories, mostly boys' fiction, beginning
in his teens. In later life, when that market declined, he served as
managing editor for the Tousey publications, edited the weekly Motion
Picture Stories and wrote motion-picture scenarios. He remains best known
for his early work. In 1882, under the house pseudonym " NONAME", he took
over the Frank Reade, Jr. series of dime novels ( DIME-NOVEL SF; FRANK
READE LIBRARY), later claiming to have written "most" of the 179 stories
about Frank Reade, Jr. and "all" the comparable Jack Wright yarns; these
claims may be overstated. LPS exemplified the worst in the dime-novel
tradition: very bad writing, sadism, ethnic rancour, factual ignorance and
an exploitational mentality. On the positive side, he led the dime novel
away from eccentric inventions into a developmental stream that culminated
in modern CHILDREN'S SF. [EFB/JE]About the author: "The American Jules
Verne" (anon) in Science and Invention, Oct 1920; "Lu Senarens, Writer of
a Thousand Thrillers" by E. Alden in American Magazine, Apr 1921; "Ghosts
of Prophecies Past" by Sam MOSKOWITZ in Explorers of the Infinite (coll
1963); intro by E.F. BLEILER to The Frank Reade Library (omni, 10 vols
1979-86), which reprinted the complete FRANK READE LIBRARY.
SENDER, THE
Film (1982). Kingsmere Properties/Paramount. Dir Roger Christian,
starring Shirley Knight, Kathryn Harrold, Zeljko Ivanek, Paul Freeman.
Screenplay Thomas Baum. 91 mins. Colour.This modest melodrama, on the
borderline between sf and HORROR, tells of a hospitalized young man
(Ivanek) whose PSI POWERS of telepathic projection and TELEKINESIS cause
major disruption. As in VIDEODROME of the same year, the dividing line
between the real and the hallucinatory is invisible, to disturbing effect,
as bleeding mirrors and severed heads proliferate. It is a crisply told
story, though the cod psychiatric explanation (which hinges on a possibly
incestuous relationship of the patient with his mother, played by Knight)
is less interesting than the phenomena themselves. This was the debut
feature of the director, Christian, who had previously worked as set
decorator on STAR WARS and as joint art director on ALIEN. [PN]
SENGOKU JIETAI
(vt Time Slip) Film (1981). Toho. Dir Kosei Saito, starring Sonny Chiba,
Iasao Natsuki, Miyuki Ono, Jana Okada. Screenplay Toshio Kaneda, based on
Sengoku Jietai (1971) by Ryo Hammura ( JAPAN). 139 mins, cut to 100 mins.
Colour.Based on one of Ryo Hammura's intelligent novels, which use sf
reinterpretations to comment on Japanese history, this tells of a troop of
modern Japanese soldiers caught in a timeslip and transported back to
16th-century conflicts in the same area between local warlords. The
troop's commander, unlike the agonized ship's captain in The FINAL
COUNTDOWN (1980), has no hesitation in trying to change history so that he
and his men might somehow be returned to their own time, and sets about
conquering Japan. This action adventure plays its sf riffs confidently,
and shows visual flair in the numerous gory battle scenes in which few
soldiers (with modern technology) face many samurai (with very sharp
swords). [PN]

SENSE OF WONDER
A term used to describe the sensation which, according to the CLICHE of
fan criticism that goes back at least to the 1940s, good sf should inspire
in the reader. In Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) Darko SUVIN
summed up the attitude of many critics by describing the term as "another
superannuated slogan of much SF criticism due for a deserved retirement
into the same limbo as extrapolation". And yet . . ."Sense of wonder" is
an interesting critical phrase, for it defines sf not by its content but
by its effect (the term " HORROR" is another such). Several fan critics,
notably Alexei and Cory PANSHIN in The World Beyond the Hill (1989), have
attempted to locate the "sense of wonder" more specifically; the Panshins
found it in sf's "quest for transcendence", which elicited wonderment from
John CLUTE that the Panshins could give such emphasis to "the reified
wet-dream they think of as transcendence, but which others might call
fetish". It is true that to locate one abstraction, "sense of wonder",
within another, "transcendence", does not take us far forward, but that
does not necessarily rob the former phrase of its usefulness.The second
interesting thing about "sense of wonder" is that, by consensus, it can be
found par excellence in a number of books that are usually regarded as
rather badly written. Both E.E. "Doc" SMITH and A.E. VAN VOGT, for
example, failed to transcend the pulp style in novels which involved the
transcending of many other Earthly perspectives. The simplest escape from
the paradox - that sf's highest aspiration, the "sense of wonder", should
often be located in its lowest form, pulp prose - is to claim that those
readers who find the diamond in the dung-heap are mistaken, misled not by
Smith and van Vogt directly but by their own yearning adolescent dreams,
as fed by Smith, van Vogt and the others. This becomes another version of
the cynical old epigram that the GOLDEN AGE OF SF is 12 (or 13, or 14),
and as such may be rejected by the many readers who can still recall with
perfect clarity the feelings inspired in them by their first childhood or
adolescent encounters with these books, feelings that seem too honest and
strong to be dismissed as youthful illusion. The term "sense of wonder" is
useful precisely because it sums up these feelings accurately and
succinctly. Indeed, the principle of Occam's Razor suggests that, rather
than arguing (without evidence) that the diamond in the dung-heap was (or
is) really a bit of old quartz, it would be more useful to accept it as a
diamond, and to go on to ask the really interesting question: what was
(and is) it doing there?Twin loci classici of the "sense of wonder" are
the final sentences of van Vogt's THE WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER (1941-2 ASF;
1949 Thrilling Wonder Stories; fixup 1951) and The Weapon Makers (1943
ASF; fixup 1947; rev 1952; vt One Against Eternity 1955 dos). The first
novel ends: "He would not witness but he would aid in the formation of the
planets." The second novel ends: "This much we have learned. Here is the
race that shall rule the sevagram."The first of these examples (the second
is discussed in the entry on A.E. VAN VOGT) presents a sudden shift in
perspective, as the previously human protagonist of the novel now,
compelled by ever deeper seesaw-swings into the past and the future,
becomes an astronomical phenomenon, the phenomenon from which we all
sprang: here is the HERO as cosmological Adam. The "sense of wonder" comes
not from brilliant writing nor even from brilliant conceptualizing; it
comes from a sudden opening of a closed door in the reader's mind. (This

phenomenon may explain why generations of readers can still quote these
final lines verbatim.) In other words, the "sense of wonder" may not
necessarily be something generated in the text by a writer (which is where
the Panshins' analysis foundered, in their suggestion, for example, that
Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's Barsoom is a "transcendent realm"): it is created
by the writer putting the readers in a position from which they can
glimpse for themselves, with no further auctorial aid, a scheme of things
where mankind is seen in a new perspective.Cornel ROBU, in "A Key to
Science Fiction: The Sublime" (Foundation #42 [Spring 1988]) and
elsewhere, has argued that the new perspective is often a sudden
dislocation of scale, a shift to a new position along the enormous span
between cosmos and microcosm. Robu's argument that the "sublime" is the
key to "sense of wonder" takes its cue from a review by Peter NICHOLLS (in
Foundation #2 [June 1972]) of Poul ANDERSON's Tau Zero (1967 Gal; exp
1970), where, in an attempt to understand why so flatly characterized a
book could be so moving, Nicholls took refuge in defining"sense of wonder"
by quoting Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey":"And I have felt . . . a sense
sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the
light of setting suns, / And the round ocean and the living air, / And the
blue sky, and in the mind of man: / A motion and a spirit, that impels. /
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all
things." Another critic to use aesthetic notions of what he calls "the
natural sublime" in an sf context has been David KETTERER in "Science
Fiction and Allied Literature" (Science-Fiction Studies Mar 1976).To move
from Wordsworth to van Vogt may not quite be to move from the sublime to
the ridiculous. Van Vogt's hero poised in the archaic heavens ready to
create the planets will indeed, and literally, be far more deeply
"interfused" than the reader could possibly have expected up to that point
of the novel. Young readers of van Vogt might have been amused to know
that they would have to wait three decades, until about the mid-1970s,
before again encountering the view implied by van Vogt's sentence - but
this time lent support by the speculations of quantum physicists - that
the Universe exists as an external structure only through the
consciousness of its participants. The suggestion is not that van Vogt
seriously anticipated the quantum physicists; it is that his last sentence
invites readers to open their minds to such thoughts.Arguably, almost any
"sense-of-wonder"-producing case embedded in an sf text, no matter how
weak that text may be elsewhere, could be analysed to show a comparable
forcing of CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH. That term was coined in the 1st edn of
this encyclopedia in recognition of the fact that Nicholls's earlier
"sense-of-wonder" definition in terms of the sublime was open to abuse in
the form of vaguely mystical, pantheist - or, indeed, transcendent! readings of sf texts. "Conceptual breakthrough", whereby the "sense of
wonder" is inspired through paradigm shifts - a variant of the shift in
perspective noted above - is a more focused term than "sublime", and
perhaps a more helpful one. (A further essay by Nicholls exploring the
links between conceptual breakthrough and "sense of wonder" is "Doors and
Breakthroughs" in Frontier Crossings [anth 1987] ed Robert Jackson.)We do
contend that, pace Suvin, the concept of "sense of wonder" may be
necessary if we are to understand the essence of sf that distinguishes it
from other forms of fiction, including most FANTASY. The diamond is real,

and cuts. But before we can use "sense of wonder" as a defining feature we
must first know more accurately what fictional elements produce it. The
discussion here does not pretend to do that, only to point in some
possibly useful directions.The task is made more difficult by the fact
that"sense of wonder" has become a debased term even within sf FANDOM,
which these days is as likely to use it ironically, spelling and
pronouncing it"sensawunna"This is in part because there are so many ways
in which sf writers can counterfeit, and have counterfeited, the "sense of
wonder", the simplest method being to introduce into the plot something
(a) alien, and (b) very, very big. BIG DUMB OBJECTS for a discussion of a
subgenre particularly subject to ersatz or automatic-pilot "sense of
wonder" of this kind - yet which often contrives to produce the genuine
article as well.As we become older and at least in our own eyes more
sophisticated, we are of course less likely to seek diamonds in
dung-heaps. Perhaps younger readers find them more readily because, while
they recognize a diamond when they see one, they haven't yet learned to
recognize a dung-heap. In this respect the "sense of wonder"is a
phenomenon of youth - but that does not make it any less real. [PN/CR]
SENTRY, JOHN A.
[s] Algis BUDRYS.
SERIES
There have been series in popular fiction, both within and outside GENRE
SF, at least since there have been magazines. For example, fans of Arthur
Conan DOYLE may have waited eagerly a century ago for the next Sherlock
Holmes story, or, inside sf and a bit later, the next Professor Challenger
story. Series are fun to write, fun to read, and they help sell magazines.
There were many sf series before the advent of specialized sf magazines,
examples being the Quatermain books of H. Rider HAGGARD and the much loved
Barsoom and Pellucidar stories of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, or, popular at the
time but now mostly forgotten, the Dr Hackensaw series of Clement
FEZANDIE. (In this encyclopedia we print series titles in bold type.)
There is no point here in trying to list the most popular fantasy and sf
series from, say, Robert E. HOWARD's Conan through Nelson S. BOND's Pat
Pending, but there may be a point in spelling out some of the ways sf
PUBLISHING has affected, and been affected by, series publication.In the
1930s, it became quite common to devote entire PULP MAGAZINES - or at
least their lead novels - to a single series featuring one main character
and his (or her) sidekicks. Examples include scientific detective Craig
Kennedy in SCIENTIFIC DETECTIVE MONTHLY (1930) or DUSTY AYRES AND HIS
BATTLEBIRDS (1934-5), or, more spectacularly in terms of longevity, Doc
Savage in DOC SAVAGE MAGAZINE (1933-49) or The Shadow (1931-49) or CAPTAIN
FUTURE (1940-44).When, in the late 1940s and the 1950s, SMALL PRESSES were
set up devoted to republishing classic magazine sf, it quite often
happened that their sometimes arbitrary dividing up of a series into books
set the shape by which that series was ever afterwards known. Thus Isaac
ASIMOV's Foundation series of 8 stories (mostly novelettes), published in
ASF (1942-49), appeared in book form as if 3 novels: Foundation (fixup
1951), Foundation and Empire (fixup 1952) and Second Foundation (fixup
1953). In this instance the illusion of them being novels was not

difficult to sustain, because the stories had been well planned to fit a
coherent and developing pattern.When a series of stories is collected in
book form, however, it is not always easy to decide, bibliographically,
the degree of cohesion the stories (often revised for this format) have
been given. Thus we might describe one book as "coll of linked stories"
and another as a FIXUP, the latter term being used by us to describe
stories sufficiently jelled together even in their first writing, or woven
together by rewriting, for the result to be called a novel. To take
examples, it seems fair to call George O. SMITH's Venus Equilateral (1947)
a collection of linked stories, although we describe A.E. VAN VOGT's THE
WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER (1941-2 ASF; 1949 Thrilling Wonder Stories; 1951) as
a fixup (a term its author also uses), because the degree of cohesion and
plotting towards a climax is very much greater in the latter than in the
former. But what, for example, of Gene WOLFE's THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS
(fixup 1972)? This is described by many bibliographers as a collection of
linked stories, which is true. But when one comes to examine the links,
including those that lie half-concealed beneath the surface of the text,
then the interweaving comes to appear so strong that the book, although
indeed in 3 parts, must surely be read as a single novel.These problems
about sf series whose first appearance was in magazines and original
anthologies came to seem somewhat old-fashioned during the 1980s and
1990s, because by far the greater number of sf series now being published
were appearing in books in the first instance. That, on the face of it, is
not very important, but the sinister aspect of 1980s series publishing was
the implacable way in which book series were taking over more and more of
the industry. These were often series thought up by a publisher or some
sort of entrepreneur, or even licensed out by a film studio. That is to
say, the author's primacy in writing series was beginning to lose out to
the purveyors of product concept, to whose instructions the authors wrote.
(The question of whether or not the authors retained copyright in the work
is not necessarily connected to their following of instructions, though
those authors who followed instructions but retained copyright no doubt
felt rather more dignified than those who did not.) This whole depressing
issue is touched on (from different perspectives) under the rubrics
GAME-WORLDS, PUBLISHING, SHARECROP, SHARED WORLDand TIE. Things are seldom
entirely bad, however: there have been, for example, many enjoyable
original novels among the 100 or so STAR TREK ties. Even the book series
spun off from GAMES AND TOYS are not all bad, though many are; in the UK,
the company GAMES WORKSHOP persuaded several quite distinguished writers
to write novels and stories set in worlds first created for a games
format. Some of the shared-world series like WILD CARDS have produced
excellent work. But, even when the exceptions are admitted, there remains
a huge residue that few demanding readers could find anything but
dispiriting: series as formula, writing by numbers. In FANTASY writing,
for example, for every trilogy published that actually requires 3 vols for
its adequate development, there are half a dozen that are trilogies (or
even longer) for no better reason than to fill slots in the marketing
space. In HEROIC FANTASY (or SWORD AND SORCERY) the series mentality is
especially strong, as it is in SURVIVALIST FICTION and post- HOLOCAUST sf.
All this is saddening, because previously series had held a very
honourable position in the history of sf's development. Many readers of an

earlier generation had their innocent SENSE OF WONDER first awakened by E.
E. "Doc" SMITH's Lensmen stories (1934-50), and that is a comparatively
straightforward SPACE-OPERA example. In a series, there can be room for
enormous conceptual elaborations which could scarcely be confined within
the covers of a single book, as (arguably) in Frank HERBERT's Dune series,
or Larry NIVEN's Known Space series (a good example of the whole coming to
seem greater than the sum of its parts), or Ursula K. LE GUIN's Hainish
novels, or C.J. CHERRYH's Union/Alliance sequence, or Bruce STERLING's
Shaper/Mechanist series, or Brian W. ALDISS's Helliconia novels, or Gene
WOLFE's Book of the New Sun (more readily thought of as a 4-vol novel), or
Michael MOORCOCK's Jerry Cornelius books. It would obviously be possible
to extend this sequence for a very long way even while restricting it to
unusually distinguished work. Be sf in the form of HARD SF, NEW WAVE,
CYBERPUNK or SCIENCE FANTASY, it has been one of its great strengths (and
one of its unifying factors) that, unlike most MAINSTREAM fiction, it has
been able to work on such broad canvases. So far as we are aware, nobody
has made any academic analysis of the effect of series-writing on the
HISTORY OF SF, but the result would surely be a confirmation that series
developments have been at sf's very heart, certainly in the special but
vital case of future histories ( HISTORY OF SF). It may not be too great
an imaginative leap to see the whole of GENRE SF as constituting a kind of
gigantic meta-series (or multiverse), in which intellectual developments
in the form of constantly evolving protocols and motifs are passed from
writer to writer. Certainly many sf readers share an intuitive,
metaphysical sense that the entirety of genre sf somehow (ignoring
nitpicking distinctions) shares a common background, as if there were now
a real future that has been invented by consensus of the sf community. If
that seems an overstatement, then at least it can be granted that some of
sf's most heroic generic exploits have been conducted, and could only have
been conducted, in series form. All the more tragic, then, that the word
"series" in the 1980s (and still) should gradually be changing its meaning
to "multi-volume packaged commercial product". [PN]
SERIMAN, ZACCARIA
[r] ITALY.
SERLING, ROD
Working name of US screenwriter and TELEVISION producer Rodman Edward
Serling (1924-1975), best known for the tv series The TWILIGHT ZONE , for
which he won 3 HUGOS (1960-62). A paratrooper in WWII, he went to New York
in 1948 as a freelance writer, first for radio and then for tv. During the
1950s he became one of the most highly regarded tv writers, winning many
awards including 6 Emmies for such tv plays as Patterns (1955), Requiem
for a Heavyweight (1956) and The Comedian (1957). In 1959 he created,
wrote and produced the first of his The Twilight Zone anthology series, on
which he also appeared as host; his dark figure and gravelly tones became
very familiar to viewers. The series, mainly fantasy dramas with some sf,
lasted 5 years. In 1970 he tried to repeat this success with a similar
series, ROD SERLING'S NIGHT GALLERY, but it lasted only until 1972. In
addition to his tv work, which included writing many episodes for both The
Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, RS wrote a number of filmscripts such as

those for Requiem for a Heavyweight (1963; based on his tv script), John
FRANKENHEIMER's Seven Days in May (1964) and the original version (later
rewritten) of PLANET OF THE APES (1968).RS could hardly be described as an
original writer, but he was certainly clever at adapting existing ideas
and was a capable craftsman. He had the knack of producing work that, in
the context of most tv material, seemed more daring and profound than it
really was; his major flaw was slickness. Whatever his limitations, The
Twilight Zone came as a breath of fresh air to fans of fantasy and sf, who
had previously had little tv material available.RS wrote some of his
teleplays into short-story form and published several collections: Stories
from The Twilight Zone * (coll 1960), More Stories from The Twilight Zone
* (coll 1961), New Stories from The Twilight Zone * (coll 1962) - these
two almost certainly ghostwritten, possibly by Walter B. GIBSON - The
Season to Be Wary * (coll 1967), Night Gallery * (coll 1971) and Night
Gallery 2 * (coll 1972). Selections from the first 3 of these appeared in
From The Twilight Zone * (coll 1962) and all the contents of the first 3
in an omnibus, again titled Stories from The Twilight Zone * (omni 1986).
Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone * (coll 1963) and Rod Serling's Twilight
Zone Revisited * (coll 1964), ghostwritten by Walter B. Gibson, were
collected as the omnibus Rod Serling's Twilight Zone * (omni 1984). Of 3
further anthologies, Rod Serling's Triple W: Witches, Warlocks and
Werewolves (anth 1963), Rod Serling's Devils and Demons (anth 1967) and
Rod Serling's Other Worlds (coll 1978), the first 2 at least were
ghost-edited by Gordon R. DICKSON, and RS had been dead for 3 years by the
time the 3rd appeared.RS's name has continued to be used as a marketing
device. His widow, Carol Serling, who retains RS's tv rights, edited Rod
Serling's Night Gallery Reader * (anth 1987) with Martin H. GREENBERG and
Charles G. WAUGH. More importantly, she also played a prominent role as
editorial consultant in setting up Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone
Magazine (1981-9), initially monthly, which achieved prominence in the
fantasy/horror field. [JB/PN]
SERNINE, DANIEL
Pseudonym of Canadian writer Alain Lortie (1955- ), a central force in
Canadian sf, who began publishing in 1975 with the dark fantasies
"Jalbert" and "La Bouteille" ["The Bottle"] for Requiem, later serving
(from 1983) on the editorial collective of that magazine, now renamed
SOLARIS ( CANADA). His early work has been collected in Les Contes de
l'ombre ["Tales from the Shadow"] (coll 1979). His novels, marketed as
juveniles, are split into 2 main series: the Grandverger fantasies, set in
an imaginary enclave of New France - Legendes du vieux manoir ["Tales from
the Old Manor House"] (coll 1979), Le Tresor du "Scorpion" (1980; trans as
The "Scorpion" Treasure 1990), L'Epee Arhapal (1981; trans as The Sword
Arhapal 1990) and Le Cercle Violet ["The Purple Circle"] (1984) - and the
Exode or Argus sequence, about a benevolent extraterrestrial organization
keeping watch on the Earth: Organisation Argus (1979; trans David Homel as
Those Who Watch the Skies 1990), Argus Intervient (1983; trans David Homel
as Argus Steps In 1990), Argus: mission mille ["Argus: The Thousandth
Mission"] (1989) and Les Reves d'Argus ["The Dreams of Argus"] (1991).
Both series are brought together in La nef dans le nuages ["The Ship in
the Clouds"] (1989). Some of the adult stories assembled in Le Vieil Homme

et l'espace ["The Old Man and Space"] (coll 1981) also belong to the Exode
saga; the collection as a whole effectively displays DS's social and
political interests, as does the ambitious and well received Les Meandres
du temps ["The Meanders of Time"] (1983). More recently, he has begun
publishing tales set in a neverending Carnival; these have been assembled
as Boulevard des etoiles ["Stardust Boulevard"] (coll 1991) and A la
Recherche de Monsieur Goodtheim ["Looking for Mr Goodtheim"] (coll 1991).
This more recent work shows a willingness to explore new avenues, a
willingness also demonstrated by Chronoreg (1992), a complex and bleak
time-travel tale, set in an ALTERNATE WORLD Earth, and featuring a
homosexual telepathic death-haunted mercenary. [LP]Other works: La Cite
inconnue ["The Unknown City"] (1982); Ludovic (1983); Les Envoutements
["Bewitchments"] (1985); Quand vient la nuit ["As Night Falls"] (coll
1983); Aurores Boreales 2 (anth 1985); Nuits Blemes "Wan Nights" (1990);
Quatres destins ["Four Destinies"] (1990); La Magicienne bleue ["The Blue
Magician"] (1991); Le Cercle de Khaleb ["Khaleb's Circle"] (1991).
SERVICE, PAMELA F.
(1945- ) US writer of fantasy and sf, usually for older children,
beginning with the Winter sequence of post- HOLOCAUST fantasies invoking
King Arthur: Winter of Magic's Return (1985) and Tomorrow's Magic (1987).
Of sf interest are: A Question of Destiny (1986), a young-adult sf
thriller; Stinker from Space (1988 chap) and its sequel, Stinkers Return
(1993); Under Alien Stars (1990), set on an Earth occupied by ALIEN
invaders whose mores challenge human prejudices, and who themselves are
under attack from space; and Weirdos of the Universe, Unite! (1992), which
unconvincingly pits figures from human MYTHOLOGY against another alien
INVASION. [JC]Other works: When the Night Wind Howls (1987); The Reluctant
God (1988), a TIME-TRAVEL fantasy; Vision Quest (1989); Wizard of Wind and
Rock (1990); Being of Two Minds (1991); Weirdos of the Universe, Unite!
(1993).
SERVICE, ROBERT W(ILLIAM)
(1874-1958) UK-born poet and novelist, in Canada 1896-1912, where much of
his exceedingly popular verse was set. Of his several novels, The Master
of the Microbe: A Fantastic Romance (1926) is sf, featuring a deadly
plague virus developed by a vengeful German but stolen from him by a
master-criminal. The House of Fear (1927) is a werewolf tale. [JC]
SERVISS, GARRETT P(UTMAN)
(1851-1929) US journalist and writer who majored in science at Cornell
University, then studied law, and only afterwards entered journalism,
working on 2 New York newspapers before moving into freelance writing and
lecturing. His speciality was ASTRONOMY; his Other Worlds (1901) was a
significant work of popular science. In 1897 he was commissioned to write
an unofficial sequel to an equally unofficial US newspaper recasting of H.
G. WELLS's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898), which was then making a
considerable stir as a newspaper and magazine serial, and - in the absence
of adequate copyright protection - inspiring various imitations along the
way. GPS's "sequel" was Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898 The New York
Journal; 1947; cut vt Forrest J. Ackerman Presents Invasion of Mars 1969),
a tale which quite remarkably captured the ebullient US spirit of the

time. Edison himself ( EDISONADE) is the protagonist. After the first wave
of Martians have duly perished of bacteria, he invents a disintegrating
WEAPON and an ANTIGRAVITY machine, using the latter to power 100
SPACESHIPS he has persuaded the nations of the world to build. The armada
invades MARS, and after many battles causes its polar icecap to melt,
which results in a genocidal flood. The book was one of the first
edisonades to be written for adults, and perhaps the only adult
presentation of the entrepreneurial inventor to mention his name on its
title page. In details of plot, and in its triumphal narrative tone, it
closely prefigured the SPACE-OPERA edisonades of E.E. "Doc" SMITH and his
imitators.GPS's remaining sf is intermittently vivid, but lacks the
seemingly unconscious mythopoeic potency of his first. In The Moon Metal
(1900), set in 1940, a mysterious figure supplies the world with a rare
untraceable metal which serves, for a while, as a new fiscal standard (
MONEY). "The Sky Pirate" (1909 The Scrap Book) features the
superscientific exploits of the eponymous adventurer. A Columbus in Space
(1909 All-Story Magazine; rev 1911) features another pioneering SPACE
FLIGHT, this time to VENUS. The Second Deluge (1912) is a DISASTER novel
in which the Earth is inundated to a depth of several miles as a result of
passing through a "nebula" composed of water; a latter-day Noah, having
built an ark, saves all God's creatures and visits the US West, where the
President has also been saved. This novel was reprinted 3 times: in
AMAZING STORIES (1926), AMAZING STORIES QUARTERLY (1933) and FANTASTIC
NOVELS (1948). GPS's last story, The Moon Maiden (1915 The Argosy; 1978
chap), is a dubiously complicated love tale in which it is revealed that
lunar beings have been guiding us upwards for millennia. In a sense, GPS
was born too soon; born 20 years later he might have become one of the
prolific masters of the new sf. [JC/MJE]See also: DISCOVERY AND INVENTION;
END OF THE WORLD; HISTORY OF SF; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; MATTER
TRANSMISSION;
NUCLEAR POWER; PULP MAGAZINES; SCIENTISTS.
SEVEN DAYS IN MAY
Fletcher KNEBEL; John FRANKENHEIMER.
SEVERANCE, CAROL (ANN WILCOX)
(1944- ) US writer who began publishing work of genre interest with "Isle
of Illusion" for Tales of the Witch World (anth 1987) ed Andre NORTON. Her
first novel, Reefsong (1991), features a genetically altered female
protagonist sent on an interstellar mission by the corporation which
controls her destiny. The Island Warrior sequence - comprisingDemon Drums
(1992), Storm Caller (1993) and Sorcerous Sea (1993) - is fantasy. [JC]
SEX
This entry is primarily about human sexual relationships and sexual
stereotypes as themes in sf; i.e., it is primarily about PSYCHOLOGY and
SOCIOLOGY. It discusses neither procreation nor the various inventive
methods of ALIEN sexual reproduction devised by sf writers.Traditionally
sf has been a puritanical and male-oriented literature. Before the 1960s
there was little sf that consciously investigated sexual questions but, as
with all popular literatures, what is implied is often as important as
what is openly put forward. Seen from this viewpoint, sf has been an

accurate reflector of popular prejudices and feelings about sex over the
years - especially in stories at the PULP-MAGAZINE end of the sf spectrum,
where the fantasies and TABOOS of the day are encapsulated more clearly
than in sophisticated works.An important theme of pulp sf - sex as
beastliness - appeared much earlier. Jonathan SWIFT's famous work of PROTO
SCIENCE FICTION, Gulliver's Travels (1726; rev 1735), in its 4th book
contrasts the brutish life of carnality led by the human-like Yahoos much given to public defecation and genital display - with the life of
reason led by the intelligent, horse-like Houyhnhnms; everyone understands
the satirical assault on the Yahoos, but fewer critics have recognized the
horses' fastidious squeamishness as being also, more subtly, under attack.
Swift's 18th-century frankness about sex was not to appear in sf again
with the same force for more than two centuries.In the 19th century,
feelings about sex were implied but seldom dealt with openly. The sexual
fears and fantasies often involved in GOTHIC SF tended to be envisioned as
powerful, irrational forces, difficult to quell. Frankenstein, or The
Modern Prometheus (1818; rev 1831) by Mary SHELLEY is more overt than most
in asking whether the artificial man's bestial urges, unfettered by a
soul, would prove devastating. This aspect of the story has been
emphasized in several film versions of FRANKENSTEIN, especially in the
parody Young Frankenstein (1974), where the monster's amorous abilities
prove as formidable as we had always suspected.Frankenstein points towards
a recurrent theme in pulp sf: fear of the ALIEN manifest (at least in the
subtext) as fear of a sexual capacity greater than ours, just as White men
stereotypically fear Black as sexual athletes too well endowed to compete
against. The menace of the alien is often seen in sexual terms in sf
ILLUSTRATIONS, which right through the magazines of the 1930s and 1940s
had a stronger sexual charge than the milk-and-water stories they
purported to illuminate.The sf pulp magazines seldom attempted to
titillate in the manner of, say, Spicy Mystery Stories - an exception was
MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES (especially in its incarnation as Marvel Tales),
which contained stories like "Lust Rides the Roller Coaster". Generally,
however, the SF MAGAZINES proved unable to link the two genres of the
spicy and the technological with any conviction. (The conjunction of flesh
and metal, however, later proved inspirational to sf COMICS artist
Jean-Claude Forest [1930- ], whose mildly erotic BARBARELLA featured a
heroine who was prepared to receive even the embrace of a ROBOT - a not
uncommon theme in the liberated 1970s, most amusingly dealt with in Robert
SHECKLEY's "Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?" [1969]. Barbarella was
successfully filmed in 1967 by Roger Vadim as a veritable compendium of
the sexual fantasies to be found in sf.)The sexual implications of sf
stories have varied remarkably little in the past 100 years, and most of
the themes were already well established in the popular literature of the
19th century. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis
STEVENSON explores the notion that the human mind contains a cheerfully
bestial component controlled by a mental censor that can - in this case
with drugs - be bypassed. Although there was more of METAPHYSICS than
science in the idea when Stevenson penned it, developments in psychology
(beginning, even as Stevenson wrote, with the work of Sigmund Freud
[1856-1939]) and later neurology showed him to have been not so very far
from the truth. Stevenson's fundamental theme, however, has a long history

in the Christian West, where the pleasures of the flesh have traditionally
been seen as sinful: it is the theme of Original Sin. Hyde was an
incarnation of "the evil that lurks in the heart of Man". Sin and
retribution remains a popular theme in HORROR and MONSTER MOVIES.Sf has
been largely written by men, and tends to reveal specifically masculine
sexual prejudices. (The female archetypes created by men are further
discussed in WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION.) An interesting early
example of gender archetype is found in THE TIME MACHINE (1895) by H.G.
WELLS. The future races discovered by the Time Traveller are the
masculine, hairy Morlocks and the effeminate, beautiful, irresponsible
Eloi, who are ultimately just cattle for the Morlocks. The two races
allegorize 19th-century sexual distinctions and class distinctions
simultaneously. One of the illustrations by Virgil FINLAY to a magazine
reprint of the story makes the point vividly.To immature men, women often
appear like an alien race, and much popular sf reflects a fear of their
threatening foreignness. The stereotype of the Amazon Queen - imperious,
cruel and desirable - is abundantly present in She (1887) and other novels
by H. Rider HAGGARD. The she-devil, a favourite recurring Victorian
literary archetype (Victorian pornography makes just as much of women
chastising men with whips as vice versa), turns up throughout pulp sf,
notably in the romances of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS and in many tales
published in PLANET STORIES.It might be expected that the image of woman
as all-engulfing Holy Prostitute and She-Fiend would be an exclusively
masculine fantasy, but - perhaps because it is at least an image of power
in a world where, during the era of the pulp magazines, women were
relatively powerless - it attracted some women writers. C.L. MOORE made a
speciality of such figures, notably in her Northwest Smith tales. The
Medusa creature in Moore's "Shambleau" (1933) is an archetype of the
female as a fantasy of sexual horror: "From head to foot he was slimy from
the embrace of the crawling horror about him . . . and the look of
terrible ecstasy that overspread [his face] seemed to come from somewhere
far within"The conjunction of womanhood and slime may have pathological
connotations, but is familiar enough in GENRE SF and elsewhere. Consider
the following passage from The Deathworms of Kratos (1975) by Richard
Avery (Edmund COOPER): "Each time she was penetrated, the queen's huge
body rippled and arched and she gave out a hissing, screaming grunt. Steam
rose from her straining body, gouts of milky fluid dripped from her
immense length, bubbling from her orifices . . ." The sexual confusions
are intense: the queen is a giant worm, and, though female, unmistakably
phallic in shape. The watchers are "sickened" but excited and, within
pages, are asking the spaceship captain for permission to pair off and
copulate. The sexual ambiguities here are of the very essence of pulp
sf.Some of the worst sexual crudities in sf, much attacked by FEMINISTS of
both sexes, are found in the male writers of HEROIC FANTASY. What was
merely a subtext in Robert E. HOWARD's Conan stories of the 1930s had
become explicit and central in John NORMAN's Gor books of the 1960s: a
male desire to exert power over women, which Norman depicts in his many
bondage and flagellation scenes in a manner clearly intended to be
sexually arousing. The visual counterpart of these writings can be seen in
the paintings of Frank FRAZETTA, whose ripe, lush beauties, when not being
menaced by scaly, phallic monsters or subdued by men, are themselves cruel

Amazons, holding the most brawny-thewed men in thrall.Miscegenation, the
mixing of races, is another common sexual theme in sf. It was often seen
in LOST-WORLD fiction from around the turn of the century to be degrading
( DEVOLUTION), as in Austyn GRANVILLE's The Fallen Race (1892), where a
primitive tribe has resulted from the bestial union of aboriginals and
kangaroos. But even during the period up to the 1920s, when racist popular
fiction was the rule rather than the exception, miscegenation could be
seen as a good thing. An early human-alien union can be found in
Burroughs's A PRINCESS OF MARS (1912; exp 1917), symbolized in the amusing
scene where John Carter stands proudly next to his wife, the princess,
looking at their child in its incubator: the child at this stage is a
large egg. For decades the sf magazines, notably Planet Stories, often
featured on their covers BEMS with lascivious expressions pursuing human
women - an obvious absurdity ( SCIENTIFIC ERRORS).Thus far we have
emphasized the sexual assumptions of society - especially male society as revealed in sf, but not as analysed in sf. The very nature of sf,
however, in which societies with cultures and appearances different from
our own can be readily imagined, makes it an excellent medium for asking
hard questions about our own sexual prejudices. By the 1980s, the
conservative sexual bigotry of sf had largely given way to a radical
exploration of alternative sexual possibilities (though these, too,
produced their own CLICHES). The process had first got under way in the
early 1950s, when Philip Jose FARMER and Theodore STURGEON treated the
miscegenation theme more seriously. Hitherto magazine sf, no matter what
it might coyly imply, had never been sexually explicit. Kay Tarrant,
assistant to John W. CAMPBELL Jr, the editor of ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION
(later Analog), was famous for her prudishness, and persuaded many writers
to remove "offensive" scenes and "bad language" from their stories. This
was partly in keeping with the spirit of the age and partly to protect
adolescent boys, probably ASF's main readership. Some writers made a game
of outwitting her; in his story"Rat Race" (1947) George O. SMITH got away
with mentioning a "ball-bearing mousetrap" on one page, revealing on the
next page the device: a tomcat. But both Farmer and Sturgeon were, for
their period, explicit. They recognized that, in a genre which prided
itself on imagining new and different societies, the sexual taboo was
absurdly anachronistic, particularly because it did not exist to the same
degree in conventional fiction. Sturgeon explored both three-way
relationships and human-alien relationships in a number of stories and
novels, notably Venus Plux X (1960), a savage attack on gender
stereotyping. Farmer's THE LOVERS (1952 Startling Stories; exp 1961) dealt
with inter-species love and sex, as did many of his stories, including
"Mother" (1953), in which a spaceman is inveigled into an alien womb,
where he makes his home - perhaps the ultimate in Freudian sf stories.
Both these writers questioned concepts of "normal" and "perverse"
(although there is a critical argument about the degree of crudeness,
salacity or sometimes sentimentality with which the attempt was made).By
the 1960s miscegenation was an acceptable serious theme in sf, and it was
perhaps most carefully and delicately explored in Ursula K. LE GUIN's
novel THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (1969). An ordinary human is forced to
rethink the whole question of sexual roles when faced with a race (and
emotionally involved with one of its members) who are bisexual in that

they can be, at different times, either man, woman or neuter. A sensitive
treatment of love between alien races is STRANGERS (1974 New Dimensions;
exp 1978) by Gardner DOZOIS, which draws attention to the ghastly errors
that can occur from trying to understand a foreign society in terms of the
assumptions of one's own.After the pioneer work of Sturgeon and Farmer-and
also such mildly daring works as The Disappearance (1951) by Philip WYLIE,
which postulates a total but temporary division between the societies of
men and of women, "Consider Her Ways" (1956) by John WYNDHAM, which deals
with an ambiguously utopian all-women society, and The Girls from Planet 5
(1955) by Richard WILSON, which deals skittishly with a similar theme the breaking of the dam came with the so-called NEW WAVE in the 1960s.
Suddenly, explicit sex was commonplace in sf, in work by Brian W. ALDISS,
J.G. BALLARD, Samuel R. DELANY, Norman SPINRAD and many others. Harlan
ELLISON's consciously taboo-breaking anthology DANGEROUS VISIONS (anth
1967) printed some stories of this type.Writers of an older generation,
such as Isaac ASIMOV and Robert A. HEINLEIN, also blossomed out into the
freedom of the 1960s. In much of Heinlein's late work the central theme is
a strong plea for sexual emancipation, sometimes expressed with a kind of
embarrassing locker-room prurience. This was his emphasis from his popular
STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND (1961) onwards, most obviously in I Will Fear
No Evil (1970) - in which an old man is given new life in the body of his
young female secretary - and again in Time Enough for Love (1973) and
FRIDAY (1982).One publisher, ESSEX HOUSE, specialized in pornographic sf
(a genre that had its heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s) including
Farmer's The Image of the Beast (1968) and A Feast Unknown (1969) as well
as books by Hank STINE and David MELTZER. Other publishers followed suit,
notably Olympia and Ophelia Press, which published sf erotica by, among
others, Charles PLATT and Barry N. MALZBERG, the latter's work being
perhaps the gloomiest pornography ever published. Most of the above were
partially serious in intent, and sometimes more emetic than erotic.
Slightly less reputable houses published pornography by Richard E. GEIS
and Andrew J. OFFUTT, and down at the bottom of the barrel could be found
books with titles like Anal Planet (1976) by Alex Forbes. (A number of
other sf writers - including both Marion Zimmer BRADLEY and Robert
SILVERBERG under pseudonyms - occasionally published non-sf erotica,
usually as a quick way of earning money.)Some critics consider that the
most distinguished work of "pornographic" sf is Crash (1973) by J.G.
Ballard, in which images of technology and images of sex are interwoven to
make an ambiguous and not necessarily disapproving comment on the nature
of technological society and its alienations. The central images of this
book are the orgasm and the car crash, the one often leading to the other.
Also of note are some of the stories in Ballard's THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION
(coll 1970; vt Love and Napalm: Export USA 1972 US).Sf is more liable than
other genres, with the exception of horror, to link sex with disgust.
Robert BLOCH, Ray BRADBURY and Sturgeon all wrote stories in which images
of sex overlap with images of violence, blood, revulsion and pain, yet
these authors are generally considered to be towards the more "liberal"
end of the sf spectrum. This dis-ease with sexuality, perhaps cultural in
origin, is also reflected in a recurrent image of overtly sexual sf: a
mind/body dualism in which the body is seen as "alien" and governing the
mind, rather than governed by it or in partnership with it.On the more

positive side, sf that consciously judges the sexual prejudices of our own
society by imagining societies with quite different sexual expectations
began - relatively speaking - to flourish from the 1970s on, though
remaining rather a small subgenre within sf as a whole. Many of these
works were written by women, especially feminist writers, most notably
Joanna RUSS, and are discussed under FEMINISM. Such writers have made
extrapolations towards cultures where troilism, homosexuality, bisexuality
or even pansexuality is the norm. Samuel R. DELANY does so in much of his
writing, notably in DHALGREN (1975) and Triton (1976) along with later
works. Thomas M. DISCH does so in 334 (1972). Sf with a homosexual or
bisexual theme is now commonplace, though Delany, for one, has suffered
censorship from book-distribution companies for dramatizing these issues.
An interesting reference work in this field is Uranian Worlds: A Reader's
Guide to Alternative Science Fiction and Fantasy (1983; rev 1990) by Eric
Garber and Lyn Paleo, which annotates 935 novels and stories of "variant
sexuality", plus films. (Sf FANDOM, too, has recognized the interest in
gay sf with the formation in 1987 of the Gaylactic Network, based in
Massachusetts, with 7 affiliated Gaylaxian groups in the USA and
Canada.)Two important writers on sexual themes, both interested in
"alternative" sexuality and both attaining prominence in the 1970s, have
been James TIPTREE Jr and John VARLEY. Tiptree (not revealed to be a woman
until 1977, when she had been publishing sf for a decade) sadly, savagely
examined the skewings of sexual impulse in much of her work; it was her
central theme, and with her anthropologist's eye she dissected it with
great power. Varley, who works with broader strokes, examines polymorphous
eroticism - with dazzle and schmaltz perhaps approaching too closely the
condition of the romp - among the several themes of his Gaean trilogy:
Titan (1979), Wizard (1980) and Demon (1984). More recently, Sexual
Chemistry (coll 1991) by Brian M. STABLEFORD deals wryly with sexual
issues, though its prime theme is GENETIC ENGINEERING.The great change in
sexual life during the 1980s was (as it still is) the AIDS epidemic, among
whose many results has been the higher premium now placed on monogamy.
Much sf of the 1980s has (either directly or metaphorically) touched on
the AIDS theme, including Unicorn Mountain (1988) by Michael BISHOP and
the surreal, sodomitical nightmares of The Fire Worm (1988) by Ian WATSON.
A distinguished short story on the theme is Judith MOFFETT's "Tiny Tango"
(1989), later incorporated into THE RAGGED WORLD: A NOVEL OF THE HEFN ON
EARTH (1991), which features, among many strange, sad images, that of an
HIV-positive woman who voyeuristically frequents male lavatories wearing a
fake penis.Sf CINEMA has also been transformed in the past two decades,
though much of its sexual explicitness in the 1970s and 1980s is merely
titillation, as in MY STEPMOTHER IS AN ALIEN (1988). The mild frissons of
ALRAUNE (1928), with its image of the soulless seductress formed by
artificial insemination, or I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (1958),
with its theme of the bridegroom-cum- MONSTER (a traditional fear), have
given way to the women who kill with sex in INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS
(1973) and the alien orgasm-feeders of LIQUID SKY (1982). But by far the
most sophisticated, and to some disgusting, of modern cinematic
explorations of sexuality are the films of David CRONENBERG, especially
The PARASITE MURDERS (1974; vt They Came from Within; vt Shivers), RABID
(1976), The BROOD (1979), VIDEODROME (1982), The FLY (1986) and Dead

Ringers (1989). From the parasite-induced nymphomania of the first,
through the sexual metamorphoses of the next four, to the grotesquely
cruel gynaecological technology of the last, the much-abused and
-penetrated body is both the battlefield of Cronenberg's mind/body
metaphysics and the object of his tenderness.Perhaps the strongest
anthology of sf stories with sexual themes is Alien Sex (anth 1990) ed
Ellen DATLOW; this includes Connie WILLIS's shocking, but to some
unconvincing, "All My Darling Daughters" (1985), about child and animal
abuse, which presents men as sexual sadists. Arrows of Eros (anth 1989) ed
Alex Stewart is a recent UK anthology. Strange Bedfellows: Sex and Science
Fiction (1972) ed Thomas N. SCORTIA, Eros in Orbit (1973) ed Joseph Elder
and The Shape of Sex to Come (1978) ed Douglas HILL are earlier theme
anthologies. An amusing study, with special reference to sf ILLUSTRATION,
is Great Balls of Fire! A History of Sex in Science Fiction (1977) by
Harry HARRISON. 2 anthologies of critical essays about sex in sf/fantasy
are Erotic Universe (anth 1986) and Eros in the Mind's Eye (anth 1986),
both ed Donald Palumbo. [PN]
SEX MISSION
SEKSMISJA.
SEYMOUR, ALAN
1. (1927- ) Australian writer, long resident in the UK, whose The Coming
Self-Destruction of the United States of America (1969) features a Black
revolution that, though temporarily successful, precipitates an atomic
catastrophe.2. Early pseudonym used by S. Fowler WRIGHT. [JC]
SF
Titles of organizations, magazines, etc., which begin "SF", meaning
"science fiction", are listed as if that acronym were spelt out in full.
SHAARA, MICHAEL
(1929-1988) US writer who began publishing sf with "All the Way Back" for
ASF in 1952, and who for a few years seemed to be one of the heirs
apparent to the sf pantheon. He did not remain in the field, however, and
his name faded from its collective memory. His Civil War novel, The Killer
Angels (1974), won a Pulitzer Prize. In the early 1980s he returned to sf
for a short while with The Herald (1981), a novel set in a NEAR-FUTURE
USA, where a scientist has developed a plague with which to rid the Earth
of humanity. In Soldier Boy (coll 1982) he assembled his most memorable sf
stories, in which a slightly distanced diction is at times absorbingly
applied to straightforward genre plots involving strange planets, ALIENS
and quick revelatory ironies about the human condition. [JC]
SHACKLETON, C.C.
[s] Brian W. ALDISS.
SHADOW, THE
Walter B. GIBSON; RADIO.
SHAHAR, ELUKI BES
[r] Eluki BES SHAHAR.
SHANKS, EDWARD (RICHARD BUXTON)

(1892-1953) UK editor and writer in various genres whose sf novel, The
People of the Ruins: A Story of the English Revolution and After (1920),
uses SUSPENDED ANIMATION to take a man 150 years onwards from a
strife-torn 1924 into a balkanized primitive land whose descent into final
chaos his reintroduction of WWI weaponry fails to prevent. Coming so soon
after WWI, this novel may be the first to express the conservative
aftermath pessimism (ES's 1924 is ruined by labour strife) that soon
became common in UK sf. [JC]Other work: Old King Cole (1936), involving
the revival of ancient British rites.See also: END OF THE WORLD; HISTORY
IN SF; SLEEPER AWAKES; WAR.
SHANNON, FRED
William S. RUBEN.
SHAPIRO, STANLEY
(1926-1990) US writer in whose A Time to Remember (1986) a man travels
back via timeslip to prevent John F. Kennedy's assassination. [JC]Other
work: Simon's Soul (1977), a fantasy.
SHARECROP
A term almost certainly devised by Gardner DOZOIS in the late 1980s to
designate a story or book which has been written on hire; that is,
assigned to an author - who will not hold copyright in the piece that s/he
writes - by a franchiser or the copyright owner of the concept being
developed. To describe a text as sharecropped is in 1995 almost certainly
to disparage it as commodity fiction, designed to fit a prearranged
marketing slot and written to order according to strict instructions from
the owner. Most pieces written for hire are in fact spun off from previous
works or concepts, and for this reason the term has often been used to
designate any tie or shared-world text, without respect to the ownership
of that text. This usage tends to reduce the term to an epithet whose
actual meaning is impossible to fix. In this encyclopedia - given that we
are not as a whole much interested in examining contractual arrangements
between authors and publishers - the term is used infrequently, and then
only to designate a condition of ownership. Any text spun off from a
previous work or concept not originated by the author of the text is here
designated a TIE (which see for further discussion). Similarly, many
sharecrops are tied to SHARED WORLDS; but the author of a shared-world
text may be the originator of that world (so the work in question cannot
properly be called a tie) and may also retain copyright in his or her own
name (so the work cannot properly be called a sharecrop). In sum, although
the three terms often overlap, they are in fact quite distinct. [JC]
SHARED WORLDS
Stories and novels written by different hands but sharing a setting are
in this encyclopedia called shared-world stories. They are usually (but
not always) published as contributions to original- ANTHOLOGY series, in
turn usually (but not always) edited by the creator(s) of the original
setting, who also controls the "bible". This "bible" is a set of rules
controlling a shared world by defining the roles, actors, venues, genres,
plots and significance of any story written within that world, and is
usually shaped in the first instance by the owner(s) and/or creator(s) of

the shared world in question, although it may often be augmented by later
contributors, who may or may not own a share of the enterprise. A mature
"bible" - like that for Jerry E. POURNELLE's War World - will almost
certainly accrete, over the years, an onion growth of supplementary
speculations, genealogies, tables, maps and ancillary tales; but at heart
it remains a set of instructions, a kind of genetic code, for writing
stories.It could be argued that the first shared-world anthology to make a
significant impact on the Western World was the Christian New Testament,
and that the authors of the various pieces which were eventually assembled
under that name used the Old Testament as their "bible". It is, of course,
understood that the Old Testament typologies which the authors of the New
Testament felt impelled to match served for them as profound adumbrations
of a Story which was True; but the point is made to underline the fact
that the concept of pooling a vision of the Universe did not originate (as
has been asserted by some) in the Thieves' World anthologies (published
from 1979) created by Robert ASPRIN. Beneath and beyond the commercial
shared-world enterprises of today lies a vision of (and perhaps a
nostalgia for) a human Universe in the hands of a Creator, whose Book we
obey (and share).If we place round-robin novels to one side as being forms
of collaboration, we find that the first relevant shared-world enterprises
were probably the Christmas Annual anthology/special issues produced by
popular magazines and publishers in the UK after about 1860. The most
significant shared-world anthology thus produced was probably Mugby
Junction * (anth 1866 chap) ed Charles DICKENS, a special Christmas issue
of All the Year Round, a self-contained volume entirely given over to 2
frame narratives plus 6 stories (the most famous being Dickens's own "No.
1 Branch Line, the Signalman") set at the eponymous railway stop; it
involved 5 writers, 4 of them following Dickens's instructions. Other
examples of the form include Beeton's Christmas Annual (anth 1880), which
contained Max ADELER's "Professor Baffin's Adventures", a long lost-race
tale ( LOST WORLDS) that served as the centrepiece of a series of linked
stories over-titled The Fortunate Island, and was quite probably a source
for Mark TWAIN's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889); and
some of the parodic journal Truth's Christmas Numbers, including The
Spookeries * (anth 1893 chap), Munchausen [sic] Up to Date * (anth 1894
chap), Phon-Photopsy-Grams, or Speaking Likenesses * (anth 1897 chap),
Nineteen Hundred and Seven * (anth 1900 chap) and Interview with the
Departed * (anth 1908 chap).Again ignoring round-robin collaborations, the
first shared-world anthology in GENRE SF was The Petrified Planet (anth
1952) ed Fletcher PRATT, which contained long stories by Judith MERRIL, H.
Beam PIPER and Pratt. These stories were set on the world of the title,
were written according to a primitive "bible", and were the first to
engage upon what would become a central activity of sf shared-world
writers: world-building. While almost any premise, however loose, can
become the basis of a shared world, in sf the essential shared world is
literally a world, and the "bible" serves as a manual for world-building
(or, in less rigorously constructed collaborations, for PLANETARY-ROMANCE
excursions). A World Named Cleopatra * (anth 1977) ed Roger ELWOOD from a
concept by Poul ANDERSON, Medea: Harlan's World * (anth 1985) ed Harlan
ELLISON and Murasaki * (anth 1992) ed Robert SILVERBERG and Martin Harry
GREENBERG are examples of planet-building exercises, and all stand close

to the heart of sf. Marion Zimmer BRADLEY's Darkover sequence is an
example of the planetary-romance shared world.In the meanwhile, however,
the STAR TREK tv series began to generate adaptations of individual
episodes, these first tales being simple novelizations rather than
contributions to a shared-world enterprise (although of course in script
form they adhered to series continuity); but the Star Trek owners soon ran
out of adaptable stories, and the first original novels within the world Mack REYNOLDS's children's book Mission to Horatius * (1968) and James
BLISH's adult novel Spock Must Die! * (1970) - soon appeared. It is not
known if Blish was tied to an extensive "bible" for the writing of this
novel, but certainly later original stories - from Spock Messiah! * (1976)
by Theodore COGSWELL and Charles A. Spano onward - were shaped according
to a "bible" that became more and more strict as the years passed. Over a
similar timespan, the approximately 140 DR WHO ties also appeared, though
many of these have been adaptations - as have been most novels tied to tv
series. (The simple distinction between an adaptation and a shared-world
story should perhaps be made explicit: an adaptation is the reworking of
an existing story or script; a shared-world tale is a narrative written
according to the set of instructions, or agreements, which generate that
particular setting.)There is a general assumption - which may or may not
be well founded - that almost all shared-world novels tied to tv or film
series are SHARECROPS, and can therefore be defined as work-for-hire
contributions to "franchised worlds". In this encyclopedia, however, our
focus is on the literary nature of shared worlds rather than on issues of
ownership, and thus we have barely used the term "franchised"; it may be
noted in passing that most franchised worlds are in fact shared-world
enterprises written to strict "bibles" by authors whose disenfranchisement
is generally all too evident.)Star Trek and Dr Who are examples of
shared-world series whose inspiration lies in media other than the written
word; the Star Wars novels of L. Neil SMITH and Timothy ZAHN belong in
this category, as does the Dark Futures sequence edited by David PRINGLE,
which constitutes one of the very few sf sequences based on a role-playing
game ( GAME WORLDS) whose authors (although the books were sharecropped)
were able to write with apparent autonomy.During the past 15 years or so,
two rough categories of shared worlds have become popular. Stories written
for the Witch World setting by hands other than Andre NORTON (or by other
hands for Bradley's Darkover) typify the class of shared-world enterprises
which are based on a setting already created by an author for his or her
own use, and subsequently made available to other writers ( CLOSED
UNIVERSE and OPEN UNIVERSE for brief analysis of the generally very
restrictive nature of that availability). Other shared worlds of this sort
include Isaac ASIMOV's Robot City, Larry NIVEN's Man-Kzin Wars, Jerry
Pournelle's War World and Fred SABERHAGEN's Berserker. The second category
concerns the shared-world setting created - either alone by its inventor,
or by creative personnel working for hire for a packager such as the Byron
PREISS enterprise, or as a communal enterprise on the part of those who
plan to write within its terms - as a pure and original shared world
without any preceding text to sanction or constrain it, and only a "bible"
for its initial guide. Asprin's Thieves' World is of this sort. Others
include: Liavek, ed Emma BULL and Will Shetterly; the Fleet, run by David
A. DRAKE and Bill FAWCETT; Temps, The Weerde and Villains ed by members of

Midnight Rose (Neil GAIMAN, Mary GENTLE, Roz KAVENEY and Alex Stewart);
WILD CARDS, supervised by George R.R. MARTIN; and Time Machine, one of
several controlled by Byron Preiss.In recent years the concept of the
shared world has generated large masses of mediocre work, often written
for hire, without joy, or taste, or thought. But that is not a universal
rule. Some shared worlds begin in comradeship and continue to demonstrate
the pleasures of sharing. The collegial shared world is a model of the sf
community at play. Good shared worlds of this sort may, we can hope, in
due course drive out the bad. [JC]
SHARKEY, JACK
Working name of US writer John Michael Sharkey (1931-1992) for all his
sf, which he began publishing with "The Captain of his Soul" for Fantastic
in 1959. He produced about 50 stories over the next 5 years or so,
including several in the 1960s for Gal on ECOLOGY. His sf novels, The
Secret Martians (1960 dos) and Ultimatum in 2050 A.D. (1963 AMZ as "The
Programmed People"; 1965 dos), were enjoyable contributions to the genre.
The protagonist in the first book is a thoroughly likable SUPERMAN; the
second book is by contrast downbeat. After 1965 he was actively mainly as
a playwright. [JC]Other work: The Addams Family * (1965), a tv tie.
SHARON, ROSE
[s] Judith MERRIL.
SHARP, ROBERT
[r] Jon J. DEEGAN.
SCIENCE FICTION AGE
US magazine; current; #1 Nov 1992; bimonthly; by March 1995 up to vol 3,
no. 3, whole number 15; saddle-stapled; small- BEDSHEET; full-colour;
slick. Published by Mark Hintz, ed Scott Edelman, from Herndon,
Virginia.This was the most impressive professional sf magazine launched in
the 1990s. With a cover price for two years of $2.95, it has settled to a
respectable over-60,000 circulation: higher than FSF, lower than IASFM and
ASF. The 1995 cover price is $3.95, with a 16-page insert with more
fiction on non-slick paper announced. The magazine is not dominated by
fiction. It has a good mix, most issues featuring an artwork portfolio,
articles, reviews, columns and fiction, with many comparatively short
pieces. Fiction authors have included Ben BOVA, David BRIN, Greg
Costikyan, Paul Di Filippo, Geoffrey A. Landis, Barry N. MALZBERG, Robert
REED, Mike RESNICK, Allen STEELE, Adam Troy-Castro and others. The fiction
is not generally experimental, but by no means all conservative either.
Not many of its stories have received award nominations, though a number
of good stories have been published. However it is the liveliness of the
layout, the art work, and the non-fiction pieces that probably accounts
for most of SFA's success; the covers are mostly reprint artwork, a policy
that allows for a high standard. Not only fiction is reviewed; coverage
includes comics, sf art and movies. Reviewers and columnists have included
Edelman, Terry BISSON, John BRUNNER, Robert SILVERBERG. A companion
magazine (not sf), Realms of Fantasy, was distributed at the world sf
convention with a cover date of Oct 1994, bimonthly, ed Shawna MCCARTHY;
it, too, has been well received. [PN]

SF MAGAZINES
Sf stories were a popular and prominent feature of such general-fiction
PULP MAGAZINES as The ARGOSY and The ALL-STORY during the first quarter of
the 20th century. They were not, however, known as sf: if there were any
need to differentiate them, the terms SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE or "different
stories" might be used, but until the appearance of a magazine
specifically devoted to sf there was no need of a label to describe the
category. The first specialized English-language pulps with a leaning
towards the fantastic were THRILL BOOK (1919) and WEIRD TALES (1923), but
the editorial policy of both was aimed much more towards weird-occult
fiction than towards sf.As specialized pulps became common it was
inevitable that there would be one devoted in some fashion to sf; it fell
to Hugo GERNSBACK actually to publish the first such magazine (if we
discount the "Twentieth Century Number" [June 1890] of the OVERLAND
MONTHLY). Gernsback's SCIENCE AND INVENTION consistently published much sf
among its otherwise nonfiction articles, and in Aug 1923 had a special
issue devoted to "scientific fiction"; in 1924 he solicited subscriptions
for a magazine to be called Scientifiction. This did not materialize, but
two years later (Apr 1926) #1 of AMAZING STORIES appeared. Gernsback's
coinage, SCIENTIFICTION, reflected his particular interest in sf as a
vehicle for prediction and for the teaching of science. In a magazine
which featured both Jules VERNE and Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, it was a label
that fitted the former's stories far more readily than the latter's.AMZ
was somewhat different in appearance from the usual pulp magazines, which
measured approximately 7in x 10in (20cm x 30cm) and were printed on
poor-quality paper with rough, untrimmed edges. AMZ adopted the larger
BEDSHEET size (approx 81/2in x 111/2in [24cm x 32.5cm]) and its pages were
trimmed. The reason for this may have been to give an impression of
greater respectability in order to have the magazine displayed on
newsstands with the more prestigious "slick" magazines; certainly this was
the result. The attempt at dignity was belied by the garishness of some of
Frank R. PAUL's cover art, while the magazine's editorial matter had a
stuffy, Victorian air. However, AMZ proved initially successful; according
to Gernsback in the Sep 1928 issue, 150,000 copies were printed monthly,
although "Very frequently we do not sell more than 125,000 copies". The
same issue gives a clue to AMZ's readership; of 22 letters printed, 11 are
avowedly from high-school pupils. It was through the letters column of AMZ
and later magazines that sf FANDOM began.When Gernsback lost control of
AMZ in 1929 through bankruptcy it remained in the hands of his assistant,
the venerable T. O'Conor SLOANE, and changed little, while the new
magazines which Gernsback then started - AIR WONDER STORIES and SCIENCE
WONDER STORIES - adopted the same format and were very much the mixture as
before. In fact, including AMAZING STORIES QUARTERLY and Science Wonder
Quarterly (later WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY), Gernsback started not just the
first English-language sf magazine but the first five. It is not
surprising that the limited Gernsbackian view of sf gained a strong hold.
The emphasis on "science" in the category label (either "scientifiction"
or "science fiction"), often quite inappropriately, is a legacy of
this.The first challenge to Gernsback's view of sf magazine publishing
came in 1930 with the appearance of Astounding Stories of Super-Science (
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION). ASF belonged to the large Clayton magazine

chain, and was unequivocally a pulp magazine. Its editor, Harry BATES, was
unimpressed by Gernsback's achievements ("Packed with puerilities! Written
by unimaginables!" was his later assessment of AMZ), and ASF's priorities
were adventure first and science a long way second. Aficionados of AMZ
were, in turn, unimpressed by ASF's vulgarity, and certainly the Clayton
ASF produced vanishingly few stories of enduring quality. However, the
same is true of its competitors.Air Wonder and Science Wonder soon
amalgamated into WONDER STORIES; with minor exceptions (in 1931 MIRACLE
SCIENCE AND FANTASY STORIES published 2 issues; in 1934 the
semiprofessional MARVEL TALES began its short life), AMZ, ASF and Wonder
Stories constituted the US sf-magazine field until 1939. Interestingly,
not one of them finished the decade under the same ownership it had had at
the beginning. ASF was initially the only sf magazine belonging to a pulp
chain; when it was sold to another group, STREET ?
because of the collapse of the whole Clayton chain. The magazine itself
had been quite successful, if undistinguished in content; under its new
management and new editor F. Orlin TREMAINE it went from strength to
strength, its popular success matched by a notable increase in quality. It
had the advantage of paying considerably better than its sf competitors
(one cent a word on acceptance, rather than half a cent a word on
publication or later - "payment on lawsuit" as the saying had it). Even
so, ASF's payment rates were only half what they had been in its Clayton
days, and represented the lowest standard pulp rates; it was a question of
the other sf magazines' paying very badly rather than ASF's paying
particularly well. This had obvious repercussions on the quality of the
writers prepared to contribute. Authors who could sell their work to
Argosy for six cents a word were not going to favour the sf magazines with
anything other than their rejects. More importantly, the prolific
professional pulp writers, turning out hundreds of thousands of words each
year in any and every category, never made the sf magazines their chief
focus of attention. The adverse result of this was that the sf magazines
published a great deal of material by writers ignorant even of the minimal
standards of professionalism of the pulp hack (hence Bates's dismay with
AMZ), but in the longer term the advantage was that the field was able to
develop itself from within. Fans of the magazines believed, with
justification, that they could do as well as the published writers. They
tried; a proportion of them succeeded. Jack WILLIAMSON, an early example
of such a writer, describes in The Early Williamson (1975) how he received
little useful encouragement from Gernsback and Sloane; things changed when
ASF under Tremaine became the first sf magazine with a dynamic editorial
policy. It reaped dividends.While ASF prospered, its competitors
floundered, losing their better writers and failing to replace them. By
the end of 1933 both AMZ and Wonder Stories had adopted the standard pulp
format. By the end of 1935 both had gone over to bimonthly publication
(the same year that ASF was contemplating twice-monthly publication). In
1936 Wonder Stories was sold, reappearing after a short gap as THRILLING
WONDER STORIES with a change of emphasis epitomized by the BEMS (bug-eyed
monsters) on the cover of #1; AMZ followed suit in 1938.The failure of the
sf magazines to establish themselves as a healthy pulp category in the
1930s is surprising in that, during that decade of the Great Depression,
the pulps provided cheap entertainment and were thus generally popular. As

a comparison, the far more specialized, peripherally associated field of
"weird menace" pulps (as described in The Shudder Pulps [1975] by Robert
Kenneth Jones) - i.e., magazines devoted entirely to stories in which
apparently strange happenings turned out to have mundane explanations was thriving, with such titles as Dime Mystery Magazine, Horror Stories,
Terror Tales and Thrilling Mystery. The only sf magazine to establish
itself on a regular monthly basis was also the only sf magazine with which
Gernsback had never been associated, which suggests that Gernsback's
conception of sf, and of sf-magazine publishing, failed to capture the
audience it sought. The emphasis of the early sf magazines on MACHINES, as
represented by Paul's cover art, may have alienated as many readers as it
attracted.The first boom in sf-magazine publishing came towards the end of
the 1930s. In 1938 MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES became the first fully
professional new title since Miracle in 1931; it gained some notoriety by
trying briefly to introduce to sf a little mild lasciviousness of the kind
common in other pulps. In 1939 it was followed by a rush of new titles.
AMZ and TWS had both proved successful enough under new management and
with a more lively approach to give birth to companion magazines,
FANTASTIC ADVENTURES and STARTLING STORIES respectively. John W. CAMPBELL
Jr, who had become editor of ASF late in 1937, began in 1939 a fantasy
companion, UNKNOWN, as well as printing during that year the first stories
by Robert A. HEINLEIN, Theodore STURGEON and A.E. VAN VOGT, which heralded
the start of ASF's greatest period of dominance. Other new magazines of
1939 were DYNAMIC SCIENCE STORIES, FUTURE FICTION, PLANET STORIES, SCIENCE
FICTION, STRANGE STORIES and the reprint magazine FAMOUS FANTASTIC
MYSTERIES. In 1940 ASTONISHING STORIES, CAPTAIN FUTURE, COMET, SCIENCE
FICTION QUARTERLY, SUPER SCIENCE STORIES and the reprint FANTASTIC NOVELS
came along; in 1941 COSMIC STORIES and STIRRING SCIENCE STORIES made their
appearance. However, this was not quite the flood it might seem. The
economics of magazine publishing meant that when a bimonthly magazine was
successful it was often better to start a companion title in the alternate
months than to switch to monthly publication. In this way the magazines
gained twice as much display space and twice as long a period on sale,
while the publisher could hope for an increased share of the total market
through product diversification. So Startling Stories was paired with TWS
(although TWS went monthly in 1940-41), Marvel Science Stories with
Dynamic Science Stories, Astonishing Stories with Super Science Stories,
Cosmic Stories with Stirring Science Stories and Future Fiction with
Science Fiction. Nevertheless, much more sf was needed each month, most of
it paid for at minimal rates (if at all), and many young sf fans were able
to gain invaluable early experience as writers or editors. Asimov, James
BLISH, Damon KNIGHT, C.M. KORNBLUTH, Robert A.W. LOWNDES, Frederik POHL
and Donald A. WOLLHEIM - all FUTURIANS - launched their careers in this
period.Inevitably, the boom oversaturated the market: some of the new
titles published only 2-3 issues. US involvement in WWII, with consequent
paper shortages, took its toll of other titles. By the middle of 1944 all
but 4 of the new titles had disappeared; nevertheless, these had all
established themselves, and for the duration of the 1940s there were 7
regular sf magazines: AMZ, ASF, Fantastic Adventures, Planet Stories,
Startling Stories, TWS and Famous Fantastic Mysteries, the latter still a
reprint magazine. ASF was in a different class from the others in terms of

both quality and appearance. In 1943 it changed to DIGEST size (approx
51/2in x 71/2in [14cm x 21.5cm]), anticipating the general trend of the
1950s. Discovering a serious adult readership for sf - and discovering and
developing the writers to provide appropriate stories - it changed its
appearance until it looked as different as possible from the sf pulps,
often seeming deliberately to cultivate a drab look. In the early 1940s
Startling Stories and TWS aimed themselves overtly at a juvenile audience
- perhaps recognizing their readership for what it was (although later,
under the editorship of Sam MERWIN Jr, the standard soared, until by 1948
Startling Stories represented the closest challenge to ASF). Their cover
art, largely the work of Earle K. BERGEY, typified the drift away from the
appeal of futuristic technology - scantily clad girls threatened by
monstrous aliens promised more undemanding entertainment, and evidently
provided the necessary sales appeal to sustain the enlarged market. Planet
Stories was more garish still, the epitome of SPACE OPERA. The ZIFF-DAVIS
magazines AMZ and Fantastic Adventures appeared crude, but prospered under
the editorship of Raymond A. PALMER. AMZ, especially, grew huge (a peak of
274pp in 1942). Palmer showed a shrewd ability to tap the market for
occultism and PSEUDO-SCIENCE, using in particular the allegedly factual
stories of Richard S. SHAVER to attain for AMZ (he claimed) the highest
circulation ever reached by an sf magazine.New magazines began to appear
again in 1947-8, although at first they were either reprint-inspired (
AVON FANTASY READER, ARKHAM SAMPLER(which also published original
stories), though in fact reprints only comprised about 25% of an issue,
the revived FANTASTIC NOVELS) or of only SEMIPROZINE (i.e.,
semiprofessional) status ( FANTASY BOOK). They were followed in 1949 by A.
MERRITT'S FANTASY MAGAZINE, the revived Super Science Stories and OTHER
WORLDS SCIENCE STORIES. However, the significant development of the period
was the appearance in 1949 of The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION
, followed in 1950 by GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION. Both magazines originated in
digest format, and from their inception were aimed at the adult audience
which ASF had shown existed. Campbell's ASF was by this time showing
evidence of stagnation, and both FSF, with its emphasis on literary
standards, and Gal, which concentrated on the SOFT SCIENCES and SATIRE,
appeared more sophisticated; they quickly established themselves alongside
ASF, so that these three became the leading magazines - a situation which,
generally speaking, continued until the late 1970s.New and revived
magazines continued to appear in profusion, and to disappear almost as
regularly. They included: Future Combined with Science Fiction Stories,
IMAGINATION, Marvel, OUT OF THIS WORLD ADVENTURES, TWO COMPLETE
SCIENCE-ADVENTURE BOOKS and WORLDS BEYOND in 1950; IF and Science Fiction
Quarterly in 1951; DYNAMIC SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASTIC, SCIENCE FICTION
ADVENTURES, SPACE SCIENCE FICTION and SPACE STORIES in 1952; BEYOND
FANTASY FICTION, FANTASTIC UNIVERSE, FANTASY MAGAZINE, ORIGINAL
SCIENCE
FICTION STORIES, SCIENCE FICTION PLUS and UNIVERSE SCIENCE FICTION in
1953; IMAGINATIVE TALES in 1954; INFINITY SCIENCE FICTION in 1955;
SATELLITE SCIENCE FICTION, SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES (the 2nd magazine of
this title) and SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION in 1956; and DREAM WORLD, SATURN and
VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION in 1957. From this plethora of new titles, the
group of magazines ed Robert A.W. Lowndes - Future, Original and Science

Fiction Quarterly - managed well for a number of years on tiny budgets;
Fantastic Universe, Imagination and Imaginative Tales continued for
several years; and Infinity, Satellite and Venture were notable among the
shorter-lived magazines. Many other titles came and went after only 1-2
issues, and only Fantastic and If survived the end of the decade.
Fantastic was a digest-size companion to AMZ and Fantastic Adventures. AMZ
switched to digest size in 1953, at which point Fantastic Adventures
ceased, although Fantastic can be considered as in effect a continuation.
If would have been another 1950s casualty had not the title been sold in
1958 to Galaxy Publishing Corporation, which wanted a companion for
Gal.The new magazines that succeeded were digests; of the 6 1940s pulps
only AMZ (and, in a sense, Fantastic Adventures) survived the change in
the publishing industry. The pulp-magazine business in general died in the
early 1950s, a victim of increasing distribution problems and of the
growing tv industry, which provided a more immediate cheap home
entertainment. Weird Tales (which had pursued its own course through the
1930s-40s, publishing occasional sf) failed in 1954. Famous Fantastic
Mysteries ceased in 1953; TWS, Startling Stories and Planet Stories
survived until 1955, when they were among the last of all pulp magazines
to die.In the UK, sf magazines had gained less of a foothold before WWII.
The first was SCOOPS (1934), a short-lived BOYS' PAPER. This was followed
in 1937 by TALES OF WONDER, the most notable early UK magazine, which
survived until 1942. The first FANTASY appeared briefly in 1938-9.
However, the post-WWII revival started earlier in the UK than in the USA,
with the appearance of two magazines in 1946. Walter GILLINGS, editor of
the prewar Tales of Wonder, now edited the second, equally short-lived
FANTASY; NEW WORLDS, under John CARNELL, began in the same year. Both
ceased publication in 1947, but NW was revived in 1949. In 1950 a
companion magazine to NW, SCIENCE FANTASY, began under Gillings's
editorship. Carnell took over from #3 and continued the magazines
successfully through the decade, publishing the early work of such authors
as Brian W. ALDISS, J.G. BALLARD and John BRUNNER. In 1958 SCIENCE FICTION
ADVENTURES joined these two magazines; initially a reprint of the US
title, it continued after its transatlantic parent had died, publishing
original stories under Carnell's editorship. Other UK magazines of the
1950s were AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION and NEBULA SCIENCE FICTION; there
were also a number of minor titles, such as VARGO STATTEN SCIENCE FICTION
MAGAZINE.Six US magazines continued into the 1960s: AMZ, ASF (now retitled
Analog), Fantastic, FSF, Gal and If. AMZ and Fantastic began the decade
strongly under the editorship of Cele GOLDSMITH, who raised AMZ to a
relative prominence which it had not enjoyed since the mid-1930s (although
it was still of only secondary interest). In 1965 ZIFF-DAVIS sold AMZ and
Fantastic, and they became reprint magazines, spawning numerous companion
titles. Later they began to include original fiction once more, undergoing
a resurgence with Ted WHITE's accession to the editorship in 1969. Analog,
under new management, took on a more modern, glossy appearance experimenting for a while with a handsome large format - and continued to
lead the field in sales. FSF, established as the "quality" sf magazine,
maintained its reputation through two changes of editor. Gal and If had a
new editor, Frederik POHL, under whom they remained successful; in the
mid-1960s If concentrated strongly on adventure sf with a popular success

that showed itself in 3 consecutive HUGOS (otherwise shared between Analog
and FSF). Later Gal and If came under the editorship of Ejler JAKOBSSON,
who made an unconvincing, gimmicky attempt to "modernize" them. Chief
among the few attempts to launch new magazines during the decade, although
a great number of reprint titles appeared, were the short-lived GAMMA and
another companion to Gal and If, WORLDS OF TOMORROW. The most significant
event for the future of sf magazines was the publication in 1966 of the
first volume of Damon Knight's ORBIT series of ORIGINAL ANTHOLOGIES. It
was not the first such series - Pohl had edited STAR SCIENCE FICTION
STORIES in the 1950s - but it came at a more significant time, when the
magazines were suffering increasing problems in distribution and in many
cases falling circulations, while the paperback book industry continued to
grow strongly. Anthology series like Orbit - essentially magazines in book
format, less frequent, and without some of the readers' departments could obtain better distribution, would remain on sale for longer periods,
could be more selective in their choice of material, and could offer
better payment than the majority of sf magazines. In due course Orbit was
followed by other anthology series - INFINITY, NEW DIMENSIONS, NOVA, QUARK
and UNIVERSE - as well as many one-off original anthologies, most notably
DANGEROUS VISIONS. It was widely felt that the traditional sf magazine had
become an anachronism and in due course would be replaced by the paperback
anthology, just as the digest magazines had supplanted the pulps. (In the
event the magazines were not supplanted, but both the magazine market and
the original-anthology market shrank radically in the 1980s.)In the UK it
all happened rather differently. NW and Science Fantasy were taken over by
a new publisher, Roberts ?
magazines now adopted paperback format, although continuing to be marketed
as magazines rather than books. Science Fantasy went through various
changes of editor - and in 1966 of title, to Impulse and then SF Impulse before folding in 1967. NW's new editor, Michael MOORCOCK, gradually
transformed its outlook, making it more experimental and less bound to the
conventions of GENRE SF; it became known as the standard-bearer of the NEW
WAVE. In 1967 Moorcock, with Arts Council assistance, took over as
publisher of the magazine, changing it to a large (approx 8in x 111/2in
[A4]) format which allowed for more graphic adventurousness. NW
encountered moments of controversy and subsequent distribution problems;
it was banned by W.H. Smith ?
chain in the UK. NW eventually ceased magazine publication in 1971, though
various attempts to revive it in both book and magazine format have taken
place sporadically since. Carnell, meanwhile, had begun NEW WRITINGS IN
SF, a quarterly original anthology series which predated Orbit by two
years. In 1969 the short-lived magazine VISION OF TOMORROW
appeared.Between the mid-1970s and 1980 there were several major changes
among the established US sf magazines. At the beginning of 1975 If was
absorbed into Gal (which had acquired a new editor, Jim BAEN, in 1974).
From the beginning of 1977, Gal began to miss issues; it managed to
stagger on until Summer 1980. AMZ and Fantastic suffered slowly dwindling
circulations; even produced with minimal staff and budget, they were only
just viable. The last separate issue of Fantastic came in Oct 1980;
thereafter only AMZ survived . . . by the skin of its teeth. FSF and
Analog remained stable, Analog with by far the greater circulation and,

from 1972, a new editor, Ben BOVA, who did much to revive it from the
stagnation of the later years of Campbell's reign.In the UK NW reappeared
as an irregular paperback series (1971-6), changing editors and publishers
along the way. In 1974-6 SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY was published, a
poster-size magazine relying heavily on the appeal of pages of full-colour
art. A projected successor, SF DIGEST, was aborted even before #1 had been
distributed.Despite the predictions that original anthologies would
replace magazines, in the USA the 1970s proved a more fertile period for
new titles than the previous decade, while several of the anthology series
failed. VERTEX, a glossy bedsheet-size magazine, was begun in 1973 and
enjoyed success until forced by paper shortages to change to a newsprint
format, dying soon after, in 1975. 1976 saw the launch of the short-lived
ODYSSEY and the subscription-based semiprozine GALILEO (1976-80). It was
at around this time that the semiprozine started making real progress;
production costs could be kept low with a small (maybe one-person)
operation, so compensating in part for distribution difficulties and
consequent low sales. Few lasted long, although besides Galileo twoUNEARTH (8 issues 1977-9) and SHAYOL (7 issues 1977-85) - had an influence
greater than their small-scale production might suggest. 1977 saw 3
further titles: in the UK VORTEX came and went; in the USA COSMOS SCIENCE
FICTION AND FANTASY MAGAZINE and ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION
MAGAZINE
were launched, both on apparently firm foundations. In the event the
former lasted only 4 issues, but the latter steadily improved, to overtake
all but Analog in terms of circulation, and to rival and then perhaps to
supersede the big three (Analog, AMZ and FSF) in terms of quality. While
IASFM was the major success story of the 1970s among the pure-sf
magazines, a spectacular development took place in 1978 with the launch of
a new science magazine in slick format, OMNI, by the publisher best known
previously for the sex magazine Penthouse. Omni's circulation, at well
over 800,000 in some years, was about 8 times higher than that of any sf
magazine, so it was a matter of considerable significance when Omni
decided at the outset to include some sf stories as part of its mix. This
it did with great success: although it published only 20-40 stories
annually, these were often of high quality. 1978 also saw the launch of AD
ASTRA in the UK; it lasted until 1981. Also in 1978, Jim Baen at ACE BOOKS
decided to get the best of both worlds by combining the sf magazine with
the original-anthology series, launching DESTINIES, subtitled "The
Paperback Magazine of Science Fiction and Speculative Fact", in book
format.By the 1980s it seemed that the magazines were ultimately doomed:
they could no longer compete with paperback publishers, video rentals and
so on for the consumer's dollar. Through the decade the survivors faced
steadily dropping circulations (with occasional fluctuations), and the
founding of a new magazine could be seen as an act of insane courage.
Nonetheless, new titles did appear. In the UK EXTRO lasted only 3 issues,
but INTERZONE, likewise launched in 1982, proved quite another story.
Founded by a collective (several members of which worked professionally in
sf publishing as critics or editors), it began with the slightly morose
air of yet another NW clone, with plenty of stories about ravaged
societies. But bit by bit it picked up until, a decade later, now under
the editorship and ownership of David PRINGLE, it rivals the very best US

magazines in terms of quality, although the circulation is still small. In
the USA Charles RYAN (who had edited Galileo) returned in 1986 with
ABORIGINAL SCIENCE FICTION, which continues, though floundering, in the
1990s.Of possible future significance is the proliferation of desk-top
published magazines produced by small groups of enthusiasts and aimed not
at the mass market but at a continuing specialist readership. These
magazines, partly a result of technological developments having brought
home publishing within the financial reach of people who could once not
have considered it, provide extremely valuable proving grounds for young
writers who then may move elsewhere. Among the more distinguished such
titles of the 1980s devoted to publishing fiction have been BACK BRAIN
RECLUSE (UK), EIDOLON (Australia), JOURNAL WIRED (US), NEW PATHWAYS (US)
and STRANGE PLASMA (US). Many more thus published are critical journals,
such as SCIENCE FICTION EYE (US). Other SMALL PRESSES with considerably
better financial backing have occasionally moved into the periodical
field, notably PULPHOUSE PUBLISHING with first PULPHOUSE: THE HARDBACK
MAGAZINE (1988-91) and then its successor, Pulphouse: A Weekly Magazine,
which in late 1992 was continuing on a monthly basis. This, too, is aimed
at a specialist market. In 1992 it was reported that Pulphouse was
launching Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, ed Algis BUDRYS.By the end of
1991, the only English-language sf magazines with circulations over 20,000
were Aboriginal SF, Analog, IASFM, FSF and Omni, and only 3 of these
topped 70,000: Analog, IASFM (both sold to Dell in 1992) and Omni. All
have problems, even Omni. When seen in the context of magazine publication
generally, sales figures of this order (apart from Omni's) are minuscule,
and from the economic point of view sf has long since ceased to be of any
importance at all in periodical publishing. These magazines, however,
remain absolutely vital to sf's continued health, because it is primarily
through them that short sf - which is in a remarkably healthy state at the
beginning of the 1990s - remains alive at all. [MJE/PN]Further reading:
The Introduction ( page xix) gives an explanation of which sf magazines
are given individual entries. Early fantasy magazines and hero/villain
pulp magazines with an sf content, such as The SPIDER , are separately
listed under PULP MAGAZINES, as are general-fiction pulps like The BLUE
BOOK MAGAZINE . Further information on the publishing of sf in periodical
format can be found under BOYS' PAPERS, COMICS, DIME-NOVEL SF, FANZINES,
JUVENILE SERIES, SEMIPROZINES and MAGAZINES; the latter entry lists all
general-fiction slicks and tabloids which regularly published sf. An
excellent reference on individual sf and fantasy magazines up to 1984 is
Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Magazines (1985) ed Marshall
B. TYMN and Mike ASHLEY.
SCIENCE FICTION MONTHLY
1. As Science-Fiction Monthly, Australian DIGEST-size magazine, 18
numbered undated issues, Aug 1955-Feb 1957, published by Atlas
Publications, Melbourne; ed anon Michael Cannon. The fiction, reprinted
from various US magazines, was mostly routine, but included some good work
by Ray BRADBURY and others. The covers were reprinted from the same
sources. A feature from #12 was Graham Stone's column of commentary,
Science Fiction Scene.2. Name used by AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION in an
early manifestation, May-Aug 1951.3. UK magazine, tabloid-size (11in x

16in [280mm x 405mm]). 28 monthly issues Feb 1974-May 1976 (2 vols of 12
issues, 1 vol of 4 issues), numbered, undated, published by New English
Library; ed Feb 1974-Jan 1975 Pat Hornsey and Feb 1975-May 1976 Julie
Davis. Born after the demise of NEW WORLDS, SFM - published by a
paperback-book company which had a big sf list - was the only UK sf
magazine of its time. It featured much full-page colour artwork, often in
the form of pull-out posters, in an effort to find a teenage audience
similar to that for pop-music magazines. Neither editor had previous
experience of sf, and at first the quality of fiction was low, though it
improved under Davis's editorship. From the beginning a feature was the
number of well researched factual articles, review pages, news pages and
interviews, with Mike ASHLEY and Walter GILLINGS regular contributors.
Featured UK authors included Robert P. HOLDSTOCK, Bob SHAW, Brian M.
STABLEFORD and Ian WATSON; reprints of well known US stories also
appeared. The juvenile policy succeeded at first, but circulation dropped
from above 100,000 to below 20,000. A plan to replace it with SF DIGEST
was aborted. A spin-off book is The Best of Science Fiction Monthly (anth
1975) ed Janet Sacks. [PN/FHP]
SCIENCE FICTION PLUS
US BEDSHEET-size magazine. 7 issues Mar-Dec 1953, monthly for 4 months,
then bimonthly, published by Hugo GERNSBACK's Gernsback Publications, with
Sam MOSKOWITZ as managing ed. This was Gernsback's last venture in the sf
field, and attempted to recover something of the flavour of his early
pulps, including some Frank R. PAUL covers, but it was a financial
failure. Notable stories - there were few - included 2 of Philip Jose
FARMER's early novelettes, "The Biological Revolt" (Mar 1953) and "Strange
Compulsion" (Oct 1953), and 2 stories by veteran Harry BATES: "Death of a
Sensitive" (May 1953) and "The Triggered Dimension" (Dec 1953). The
magazine was well produced, #1-#5 being on slick paper, but an appeal to
nostalgia was not enough, and Gernsback retired hurt, complaining in his
final editorial that fans had become too highbrow. [BS/PN]
SCIENCE FICTION POETRY ASSOCIATION
The SFPA was founded in 1978 by Suzette Haden ELGIN to promote a wide
range of POETRY (from sf to horror) through the publication of a bimonthly
journal, Star*Line, ed Robert FRAZIER, and the annual presentation of the
Rhysling AWARD; Rhysling was the blind poet in "The Green Hills of Earth"
(1947) by Robert A. HEINLEIN. [JC]
SCIENCE FICTION PUBLICATIONS
SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES.
SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY
US PULP MAGAZINE. Summer 1940-Spring 1943 (10 issues) and May 1951-Feb
1958 (28 issues), published by Columbia Publications. #1-#2 of the 1st
series were ed Charles HORNIG, all others by Robert A.W. LOWNDES.In its
1st incarnation SFQ - a companion to SCIENCE FICTION and FUTURE FICTION featured a complete novel in every issue, most reprints from varied
sources; 5 were by Ray CUMMINGS. Many of the short stories were original,
and the magazine, under Lowndes, was an important market for members of
the FUTURIANS, notably C.M. KORNBLUTH under various pseudonyms. 2 undated

reprint editions of the Summer 1940 and Winter 1941-2 issues were
published in the UK in 1943. The 2nd version published a number of notable
articles, including the series Science in Science Fiction by James BLISH
(May 1951-May 1952) and "The Evolution of Science Fiction" by Thomas D.
CLARESON (Aug 1953). Notable stories included Blish's "Common Time" (Aug
1953) and Isaac ASIMOV's "The Last Question" (Nov 1956). When SFQ died in
1956 it was the last of the sf pulp magazines, and an era had come to an
end.Some stories from series 1 were reprinted in the UK as part of SCIENCE
FICTION LIBRARY (a 1960 pocketbook series). Winter 1942 was reprinted as
#15 of SWAN AMERICAN MAGAZINE in 1950. 10 numbered undated issues of
series 2 were published by Thorpe ?
[BS/PN]
SFRA NEWSLETTER
US DIGEST-format magazine, the official newsletter, mostly monthly, of
the SCIENCE FICTION RESEARCH ASSOCIATION; founded 1971, current, 215
issues to Jan/Feb 1995, ed Fred Lerner (1971-4), Beverly Friend (1974-8),
Roald Tweet (1978-81), Elizabeth Anne Hull (1981-4), Richard W. Miller
(1984-7), Robert A. Collins (1987-9), Betsy Harfst (1989-92), Daryl F.
MALLETT (1993-94) and Amy Sisson (1994- ). Aside from news of specific
interest to SFRA's mostly academic members, the newsletter has published
much material of general interest, including PILGRIM-AWARD speeches, but
is most obviously of use for its book reviews, which, though very
intermittent to Aug 1987, became a regular feature from the Sep 1987 issue
(#151) onward. Books about sf and fantasy are covered very fully and well;
reviews of sf are variable in quality, but still useful. Collected reviews
from SFRAN form a substantial part of those published in SCIENCE FICTION
AND FANTASY BOOK REVIEW ANNUAL (begun 1988), whose editors, Robert A.
Collins and Robert Latham, have been stalwarts of SFRAN. Other important
SFRAN contributors have been Neil BARRON and Michael Klossner. From #194,
Jan/Feb 1992, the magazine changed its name to SFRA Review, which better
describes its function. [PN]
SFRA REVIEW
SFRA NEWSLETTER.
SF REPRISE
At the time when both magazines were being published by Roberts ?
some unsold issues of NEW WORLDS and SCIENCE FANTASY were bound up in 2s
and 3s and sold as SF Reprise, which had 6 numbers: 4 in 1966, 2 in 1967.
#1, #2 and #5 were NW; #3, #4 and #6 were Science Fantasy. [PN]
SCIENCE FICTION RESEARCH ASSOCIATION
This group was formed in October 1970 to aid and encourage sf
scholarship, especially in the USA and Canada. The first chairman was
Thomas D. CLARESON. The organization has acted as a central liaison
between academics teaching sf in the USA, though academic affiliation is
not a requirement for membership, which can be active, honorary,
institutional, student or emeritus. Members receive SFRA NEWSLETTER
(retitled SFRA Review in 1992) 10 times a year; the annual SFRA Directory;
and the critical journals EXTRAPOLATION and SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES. 1977
membership was 330, 1991 membership was 313 - of whom over 50 came from

outside the USA - so it has remained much the same size. The SFRA holds an
annual conference, usually in June, at which papers are delivered and its
annual PILGRIM AWARD for services to sf scholarship and/or criticism is
announced. Since 1990 the SFRA has given a second annual award, the
Pioneer Award, for best critical essay of the year, the first 2 being won
by Veronica Hollinger (1990) and H. Bruce FRANKLIN (1991). Although SFRA
was originally envisaged as focusing primarily on sf, it has for some time
announced itself as "the oldest professional association for the study of
science fiction, fantasy and horror/Gothic literature and film, and
utopian studies". [PN]See also: SF IN THE CLASSROOM.
SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW
Variant title of 2 FANZINES - The ALIEN CRITIC and PSYCHOTIC - ed Richard
E. GEIS. [PN]
SF SERIES
SERIES.
SCIENCE FICTION STORIES
FUTURE FICTION (for the 1943 magazine); The ORIGINAL SCIENCE FICTION
STORIES (for the 1953-5 magazine).
SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES
Academic journal, published both from the USA and from Canada, founded
Spring 1973, current, 65 issues to Mar 1995, 3 issues a year. S-FS was
co-edited from the outset by R.D. MULLEN and Darko SUVIN, with Mullen also
acting as publisher; the magazine was first published from Indiana State
University, where Mullen taught. He left at the end of 1978, and in 1979
with #17 the magazine moved to McGill University in Montreal, where it was
ed Suvin, Marc Angenot and Robert M. PHILMUS, joined by Charles Elkins
with #20 (1980). Suvin's last issue was #22 (1980) and Angenot's #25
(1982). Philmus and Elkins remained in charge until #52, Nov 1990. With
#53, 1991, Mullen resumed the editorship along with Philmus, Istvan
Csicsery-Ronay, Arthur B. Evans and Veronica Hollinger, Philmus dropping
out with #54. S-FS returned to Indiana with #56 (1992), now published at
DePauw University.S-FS is the second youngest of the 4 academic journals
about sf ( EXTRAPOLATION and FOUNDATION are older, JOURNAL OF THE
FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS is younger). It does not normally review
contemporary sf, though it runs excellent reviews of books about sf. Over
the years it has probably published more good, substantial articles on sf
than any of its competitors, being especially strong on European sf, on
debate about the nature of the genre, on UTOPIAS, on FEMINISM and on
POSTMODERNISM, but very patchy on GENRE SF. There have been 2 special
issues on Philip K. DICK, 1 on Ursula K. LE GUIN, and sporadic articles on
authors like Gregory BENFORD, Pamela SARGENT and William GIBSON, but these
are in a minority, so that sometimes S-FS gives the impression of looking
anywhere rather than at the heart of its subject. Unusually for a US
journal, some of its critical material is Marxist-oriented. S-FS is a
responsible, intellectually robust journal which, while it reflects some
of the excesses of academic criticism generally (e.g., too much critical
jargon), also reflects its strengths. [PN]
SCIENCE FICTION THEATRE

US tv series (1955-7). ZIV/WRCA-TV. Prod Ivan Tors. Hosted by Truman
Bradley. Technical adviser Dr Maxwell Smith. 3 seasons, 78 25min episodes.
First 2 seasons b/w, last season colour.This anthology series, presenting
a different sf play each week, went out of its way to avoid the
sensationalism so prevalent in sf films of the period. The result was
prosaic. In 1956 the producer said, revealingly: "One of the traps into
which such a series may fall is complete dependence on science for
interest. This is avoided at the story conference by excluding the
scientists at the start and depending on the writers to come up with a
story with human interest . . . After the story is developed it is up to .
. . the research people to suggest some scientific fact on which the story
can be hung."Each episode began with dignified Truman Bradley sitting at a
desk covered with "scientific" objects (some of which were spinning, or
had flashing lights) and introducing the audience to the theme of the
story. A typical episode from 1955 involves a hurricane moving towards
Miami. A young meteorologist and his wife sit worrying about their son,
who is on a camping trip. But, just as the hurricane reaches the shore, a
high-pressure area pushes it back again. The sf element in the story
consists of the discovery that the hurricane was created by a meteor
landing in the sea. [JB]
SCIENCE FICTION TIMES
FANTASY TIMES; GERMANY; HUGO.
SFWA
SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA.
SFWA BULLETIN
A journal, published quarterly, which serves as the official public voice
of the former SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA (since early 1992 the
journal's title has been SFFWA Bulletin). The SFWAB was founded in 1965
and ed 1965-7 by Damon KNIGHT, as part of his activities in founding the
SFWA itself. Subsequent editors included Terry CARR (1967-8), Alexei
PANSHIN (1968-9), Barry N. MALZBERG (1969-70), George ZEBROWSKI (1970-75),
Stephen GOLDIN (1975-7), John F. CARR (1978-80), Richard Kearns (1981-2),
Pamela SARGENT with Zebrowski (1983-91), and Daniel Hatch (1991-current).
The SFWAB - unlike its sister journal, SFWA FORUM, which is restricted to
active members - sedulously eschews controversial material. Though at
times given over to projects of wider interest (like John F. Carr's 1979
special issue devoted to "Science-Fiction Future Histories") or articles
on contract law as it applies to writers, for much of the year it
concentrates on matters like the NEBULA. [JC]
SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA
A professional guild created to inform sf writers on matters of
professional interest, to promote their professional welfare, and to help
them deal effectively with publishers, agents, editors and anthologists;
in 1992 (see below) renamed the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of
America (SFFWA). The initial impulse for the SFWA came through discussions
and activities at the MILFORD SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' CONFERENCES,
founded by Damon KNIGHT and others; in 1965, feeling the need for a formal
body to represent sf writers, Knight founded the SFWA and served as its

first president (1965-7). Later presidents have been Robert SILVERBERG
(1967-8), Alan E. NOURSE (1968-9), Gordon R. DICKSON (1969-71), James E.
GUNN (1971-2), Poul ANDERSON (1972-3), Jerry POURNELLE (1973-4), Frederik
POHL (1974-6), Andrew J. OFFUTT (1976-8). Jack WILLIAMSON (1978-80),
Norman SPINRAD (1980-82), Marta RANDALL (1982-4; 1st woman president),
Charles SHEFFIELD (1984-6), Jane YOLEN (1986-8), Greg BEAR (1988-90), Ben
BOVA (1990-92) and Joe HALDEMAN (1992-current). Full or "active"
membership is restricted to professional writers - defined as writers who
have sold a minimum of 3 short stories or 1 full-length book of fiction
(collaborations are acceptable) to a "professional" US market, which
excludes journals of less than 12,000 circulation (an exclusion which
nullifies work in almost any literary journal). The qualification is
one-off; a writer, once he or she has become a member, need never
re-qualify.In addition to its guild activities, the SFWA sponsors the
annual NEBULA Awards and the annual anthologies resulting from them. There
are, in addition, 2 SFWA journals: The Bulletin of the Science Fiction and
Fantasy Writers of America ( SFWA BULLETIN), which is available to the
public; and SFWA FORUM, whose circulation is restricted to active members
(and some other categories of membership). As well as the Nebula
anthologies, the SFWA has been responsible for the SFWA Handbook, a
writer's guide which has gone through various editions and formats, the
most recent (and fullest) incarnation being Science Fiction Writers of
America Handbook: The Professional Writer's Guide to Writing
Professionally (anth 1990) ed Kristine Kathryn RUSCH and Dean Wesley
SMITH, which is packed with information (but lacks an index).The SFWA
membership has been given to polemics, and resignations have been
moderately commonplace. One major rift occurred in 1976 when Stanislaw
LEM's honorary membership was cancelled. Another controversy erupted in
1992, a US election year, when outgoing president Bova unilaterally
invited the conservative Republican Newt Gingrich to give the keynote
address at the annual Nebula banquet. All the same, although the SFWA has
suffered public accusations of parochialism, and although much of its
energies in recent years seems to have been devoted to increasingly arcane
attempts to revise the already labyrinthine rules governing the Nebula
Awards, it has played an important role in improving the conditions of the
sf writer's life - by, for example, negotiating with publishers to improve
the wording of contracts.The 1980s witnessed a de facto but ex jure
increase in the proportion of fantasy and horror writers in the SFWA. At
the beginning of 1992 a name change was agreed, and the SFWA became the
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, or SFFWA. [PN/JC]See also:
PARANOIA.
SFWA FORUM
Privy journal of the SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA (since early 1992
the journal's name has been SFFWA Forum). One of the few publications perhaps the only one - in the sf world restricted to a designated
readership, the SFWAF is circulated only to "active" SFWA members (the
term "active" being defined by the rules of that guild). Where the SFWA
BULLETIN, which is the official public journal of the SFWA, maintains a
strict public-relations approach to material, SFWAF allows (reportedly)
unfettered expressions of opinion - which are (reportedly) not always

exhilarating. [JC]
SHASTA PUBLISHERS
Chicago-based US specialist publisher founded by T.E. DIKTY, Erle Melvin
Korshak and Mark Reinsberg (who soon dropped out), originally to publish
books about fantasy and sf. Its first title was E.F. BLEILER's The
Checklist of Fantastic Literature (1948). The company soon expanded into
fiction publishing with such titles as John W. CAMPBELL Jr's Who Goes
There? (coll 1948), L. Sprague DE CAMP's The Wheels of If (coll 1949) and
L. Ron HUBBARD's Slaves of Sleep (1948); it turned down a Hubbard book on
DIANETICS. All these early titles featured jackets by Hannes BOK.
Subsequent publications include the first 3 vols of Robert A. HEINLEIN's
Future History series and Alfred BESTER's THE DEMOLISHED MAN (1953). In
1953 Shasta sponsored a novel competition in conjunction with the
paperback publisher Pocket Books. This was won by Philip Jose FARMER with
I Owe for the Flesh. By this time the company was in financial
difficulties; the book was never published and the prize money never paid.
(The novel later formed the basis of Farmer's Riverworld series.) Shasta
produced one or two further titles, then expired in 1957. [MJE]See also:
SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS.
SHATNER, WILLIAM
(1931- ) Canadian actor and writer, long resident in the USA, where he
gained fame as Captain Kirk in the STAR TREK tv series, going on to star
in all the film sequels; he also directed the disappointing STAR TREK V:
THE FINAL FRONTIER (1989), about which he wrote, with Lisbeth Shatner, The
Captain's Log: William Shatner's Personal Account of the Making of Star
Trek V, the Final Frontier (1989). Other books incorporating public
memories include Star Trek Memories (1993) with Chris Kreski and Star Trek
Movies Memories (1994), also with Kreski. In the preface to his first sf
novel, TekWar (1989) - set in a 22nd-century Los Angeles where crime is
rife, and where a wise-mouth robot resignedly helps a lanky protagonist
solve a mystery - WS acknowledges the assistance of Ron GOULART, who is
otherwise uncredited as co-author. Teklords (1991),TekLab (1991), Tek
Vengeance (1993), Tek Secret (1993) and Tek Power (1994), all also with
Goulart (uncredited), soon followed. Believe Me (1992) with Michael Tobias
is associational, with tinges of the occult. [JC]
SHAVER, RICHARD S(HARPE)
(1907-1975) US writer, author of some sf stories (some under the house
name Paul LOHRMAN) but now remembered almost exclusively for his hoax-like
sequence of Shaver Mystery stories, presented as based on fact, published
in Raymond A. PALMER's AMAZING STORIES 1945-7, beginning with "I Remember
Lemuria" in March 1945. It brought over 2500 letters in response, and the
sequence boosted AMZ's circulation though at the same time alienating many
fans; the June 1947 AMZ was an all-Shaver issue. RS continued to release
the same sort of material briefly in Other Worlds (still as Palmer's
protege), and enjoyed a further comeback in Palmer's small-circulation The
HIDDEN WORLD in 1961. A selection of the "articles" was published as I
Remember Lemuria ?
"articles" comprise a series of messages from an underground world and,
VON DANIKEN-like, establish a new, conspiracy-oriented, highly lurid

history and cosmology in which humans (it transpires) have long been
manipulated by "deros" (detrimental robots) through various ESP powers.
Until the end of his life RS maintained that he genuinely believed what he
wrote. [JC/PN] See also: HOLLOW EARTH; PARANOIA; PSEUDO-SCIENCE; SF
MAGAZINES.
SHAW, BARCLAY
(1949- ) US illustrator; attended the New England School of Art and
Design. BS's earliest magazine cover was for FSF in 1979 (followed by 8
more in the next two years); also in 1979 he did one for CINEFANTASTIQUE.
By 1980 he was doing book covers; and in 1982 a series of reissues of
Harlan ELLISON books, with covers by BS at Ellison's request, began to
appear. Another interesting series of covers was for some of the Robert A.
HEINLEIN reissues of the late 1980s. BS's ILLUSTRATION, indebted to
European Surrealists and painters of the grotesque, is sophisticated:
often surreal and sometimes a touch decadent, typically shadowy with some
areas or objects glowing. [PN]
SHAW, BOB
Working name of Northern Irish writer Robert Shaw (1931- ), in mainland
UK from 1973. He worked in structural engineering until the age of 27,
then aircraft design, then industrial public relations and journalism,
becoming a full-time author in 1975. BS was early involved in sf,
initially as a fan, his first book being, with Walt Willis (1919- ), The
Enchanted Duplicator (1954 chap), an allegory of fan and FANZINE
activities; he received HUGOS in 1979 and 1980 for his fan writing. He
published his first story, "Aspect", with Nebula Science Fiction in 1954,
and during the mid-1950s contributed several more stories to that magazine
and one to Authentic before ceasing to write for some years. After a
"come-back" story - ". . . And Isles Where Good Men Lie" (1965) - he
published "Light of Other Days" (1966 ASF), which gained a NEBULA
nomination and established his reputation as a writer of remarkable
ingenuity. Built around the intriguing concept of "slow glass", through
which light can take years to travel - thus allowing people to view scenes
from the past - this story remains BS's best known. He would later
incorporate it, together with two sequels, into the novel Other Days,
Other Eyes (fixup 1972; expurgated 1974).His first novel was Night Walk
(1967 US), a fast-moving chase story. A man who has been blinded and
condemned to a penal colony on a far planet invents a device that enables
him to see through other people's (and animals') eyes and thus manages to
escape. The Two-Timers (1968 US), a well written tale of PARALLEL WORLDS,
doppelgangers and murder, demonstrates BS's ability to handle
characterization and, in particular, his talent for realistic dialogue. In
The Palace of Eternity (1969 US) he still more impressively controls a
wide canvas featuring interstellar warfare, the environmental degradation
of an Edenic planet, and human transcendence; the final section of the
novel, where the hero finds himself reincarnated as an "Egon", or
soul-like entity, displeased some critics, though it is in fact an
effective handling of a traditional sf displacement of ideas from
METAPHYSICS or RELIGION. This intelligent reworking of well worn sf theses
was from the first BS's forte, as was demonstrated in his next novel, One

Million Tomorrows (1970 US), an IMMORTALITY tale whose twist lies in the
fact that the option of eternal youth entails sexual impotence.All BS's
early books - which include also Shadow of Heaven (1969 US; cut 1970 UK;
rev vt The Shadow of Heaven 1991 UK) and Ground Zero Man (1971 US; rev vt
The Peace Machine 1985 UK) - were published first (and sometimes solely)
in the USA; and their efficient anonymity of venue may result from an
attempt to appeal to a transatlantic audience. Only slowly did BS come to
write tales whose venue and protagonists were distinctly UK in feel; and
it could be argued that his best work is his most general. Orbitsville
(1975) - along with its rather less effective sequels, Orbitsville
Departure (1983) and Orbitsville Judgement (1990)-must stand, after Other
Days, Other Eyes, as his finest early inspiration. Like Larry NIVEN's
RINGWORLD (1970) and Arthur C. CLARKE's RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA (1973), the
Orbitsville books centre on the discovery of - and later developments
within - a vast alien artefact in space (a BIG DUMB OBJECT, in fact), in
this case a DYSON SPHERE. Within the living-space provided by the inner
surface of this artificial shell - billions of times the surface area of
the Earth - BS spins an exciting story of political intrigue and
exploration, which in later volumes develops, perhaps rather impatiently,
into a heavily plotted move into another universe entirely. Orbitsville
gained a 1976 BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD.A Wreath of Stars (1976) may
be BS's most original, and perhaps his finest, singleton. A rogue star,
composed entirely of antineutrinos, approaches the Earth. It passes nearby
with no immediately discernible effect. However, it is soon discovered
that an antineutrino "Earth" exists within our planet, and its orbit has
been seriously disturbed by the passage of the star. This is an ingenious,
almost a poetic, idea, to which the plot only just fails to do full
justice. Other books followed quickly: the overcomplicated Medusa's
Children (1977); Who Goes Here? (1977), and its sequel, Warren Peace
(1993), jeux d'esprit akin to Harry HARRISON's Bill, the Galactic Hero
(1965); Ship of Strangers (fixup 1978), in which the crew of the Stellar
Survey Ship Sarafand, after some routine adventures, confront a
cosmological issue; Vertigo (1978; with "Dark Icarus" added as prologue,
exp vt Terminal Velocity 1991), an effective policier set in a world
transformed by ANTIGRAVITY devices; and Dagger of the Mind (1979) and The
Ceres Solution (1981), in both of which BS's ingenuity declined, for a
period, into something close to jumble. He had meanwhile been writing
short stories - his collections include Tomorrow Lies in Ambush (coll
1973; with 2 stories added, rev 1973 US), Cosmic Kaleidoscope (coll 1976;
with 1 story omitted and 2 added, rev 1977 US), A Better Mantrap (coll
1982), Between Two Worlds (coll 1986 dos US) and Dark Night in Toyland
(coll 1989) - which again demonstrate his professional skills but tend to
lack a sense of personal involvement.However, with the Ragged Astronauts
sequence - THE RAGGED ASTRONAUTS (1986), The Wooden Spaceships (1988) and
The Fugitive Worlds (1989) - BS returned to his very best and most
inventive form, describing with joyful exactness the sensation of
emigrating, via hot-air BALLOON, up the hourglass funnel of atmosphere
that connects two planets which orbit each other. Later volumes lost some
of the freshness and elation of the first, but the series as a whole
emphasizes BS's genuine stature in the genre as an entertainer who rarely
fails to thrill the mind's eye with a new prospect. At his best, BS has

been a lover of the worlds of sf. [DP/JC]Other works: The Best of the
Bushel (coll 1979 chap) and The Eastercon Speeches (coll 1979 chap), both
humorous fan writing, and both assembled with additional material as A
Load of Old BoSh (coll 1995 chap); Galactic Tours: Thomas Cook Out of This
World Vacations (1981 US) with David HARDY; Courageous New Planet (1981
chap); Serious Scientific Talks (coll 1984 chap), humorous fan writing;
Fire Pattern (1984); Messages Found in an Oxygen Bottle (coll 1986 dos
US); Killer Planet (1989), juvenile sf; How to Write Science Fiction
(1993).About the author: Bob Shaw (anth 1981 chap) ed Paul Kincaid and
Geoff Rippington; Bob Shaw, Artist at Ground Zero (last rev 1989 chap) by
Gordon BENSON Jr, Chris Nelson and Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also:
ALTERNATE WORLDS; ARTS; ASTEROIDS; COMICS; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH;
COSMOLOGY; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; ESCHATOLOGY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES;
FASTER
THAN LIGHT; GRAVITY; HUMOUR; IMAGINARY SCIENCE; MATTER TRANSMISSION;
MOON;
PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; PERCEPTION; PHYSICS; SATIRE; SCIENTIFIC ERRORS;
SCIENTISTS; SPACE FLIGHT; TIME PARADOXES; UNDER THE SEA.
SHAW, BRIAN
House name used by CURTIS WARREN on 4 novels by 4 different authors:
Argentis (1952) by E.C. TUBB, Ships of Vero (1952) by David O'BRIEN, Z
Formation (1953) by John Russell FEARN (signing himself Bryan Shaw) and
Lost World (1953) by Brian HOLLOWAY. All are adventure sf. [PN/JC]
SHAW, DAVID
David Arthur GRIFFITHS.
SHAW, FREDERICK L(INCOLN)
(1928-1978) US writer in whose routine sf novel, Envoy to the Dog Star
(1967 dos), a dog's brain travels to Sirius. [JC]
SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD
(1856-1950) Irish-born writer of novels, plays and much controversial
nonfiction; Nobel Literature Prize 1925. He lived most of his life in
England, where he remained ferociously active over a writing career
lasting 70 years. Some of his early plays - like Man and Superman: A
Comedy and a Philosophy (1903) and Androcles and the Lion (performed 1913;
as title of omni 1916) - contain fantasy elements, though deployed with a
cool Shavian sanity which repudiates any sense of escapism. Press Cuttings
(1909 chap), a play about women's rights set in the NEAR FUTURE, was close
to sf, and the destruction of the old world order in Heartbreak House (as
title of omni 1919) seemed backward-looking only because of the play's
five-year wait for publication. GBS's first genuine sf play was Back to
Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (1921 US; rev 1921 UK and several
times further to 1945 UK), a 5-part depiction of mankind's EVOLUTION from
the time of Genesis into the FAR FUTURE, when people have become
long-lived and, by AD31,920, are on the verge of suffering corporeal
transcendence into disembodied thought-entities. Hereafter GBS's plays which have only posthumously escaped the charge that their dissolution of
realist conventions simply demonstrated the senility of their author increasingly utilized sf or fantasy modes to make a series of remarkably

bleak utterances about Homo sapiens and about the chances of the species
ever doing well. The Apple Cart: A Political Extravaganza (first
English-language publication 1930), set in the UK near the end of the
century after a Channel Tunnel has been built, ironically posits
monarchism as an answer to the power of great corporations. Too True to be
Good: A Political Extravaganza (performed 1932) and On the Rocks: A
Political Comedy (performed 1933) - both assembled in Too True to be Good,
Village Wooing ?
far-rangingly explore similar material, as do The Simpleton of the
Unexpected Isles: A Vision of Judgment (1935) and Geneva: A Fancied Page
of History (1939). Buoyant Billions (1948 Switzerland; with Farfetched
Fables as omni 1950) presents some terminal UTOPIAN thoughts in the guise
of fantasy.None of GBS's 19th-century novels are of genre interest, but
The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God (1932 chap) is
fantasy, and some of the items assembled in Short Stories (coll 1932) are
sf. Both books were assembled with revisions as Short Stories, Scraps and
Shavings (omni 1934); The Black Girl in Search of God, and Some Lesser
Tales (coll 1946) also assembles this part of his oeuvre.It should be
noted that many of GBS's plays were "published" for the use of actors long
before their official release, and that the official release was generally
revised; moreover, during the last half century of his life - financial
independence allowing him to subsidize this activity - GBS was in the
habit of making constant unsignalled revisions to the extremely numerous
reprints of his work. We have not attempted to trace these changes.
[JC]See also: ADAM AND EVE; IMMORTALITY; SUPERMAN; THEATRE.
SHAW, LARRY T.
Working name of US writer and editor Lawrence Taylor Shaw (1924-1985), an
active sf fan from the early 1940s and a member of the FUTURIANS; married
to Lee HOFFMAN 1956-9. Beginning with "Secret Weapon" for Fantasy Book in
1948 as by Terry Thor, he published some sf stories into the early 1950s,
but was primarily known for his editorial work. He was associate editor of
IF May 1953-Mar 1954. In 1955 he became editor of INFINITY SCIENCE
FICTION, which grew to be one of the leading sf magazines of its period;
and he later started a companion title, SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES. When
both magazines failed, in 1958, he turned to editing in other fields. He
came back to sf as editor for Lancer Books (1963-8), where he built a
successful sf line and edited the anthologies Great Science Fiction
Adventures (anth 1964) and Terror! (anth 1966). He subsequently worked for
Dell Books (1968-9) and American Art Enterprises (1969-75), founding Major
Books for the firm. In 1975 he began to work as a literary agent, but this
new career was hampered by poor health. He received a Special HUGO in
1984. [MJE/JC]
SHAWN, FRANK S.
Ron GOULART.
SHAYOL
US SEMIPROZINE, 7 issues, irregular, Nov 1977-1985, small- BEDSHEET slick
format, published by Flight Unlimited, Kansas City; ed Pat CADIGAN. This
was brought out by a partnership of Arnold Fenner (publisher) and Cadigan,
now better known as a writer, whose first story, "Death from Exposure",

was published in #2 (1978) and went on to win a Balrog AWARD. S was a
development from Fenner's previous publication, Chacal, which had been
largely devoted to SWORD AND SORCERY. With good covers, and excellent
design and interior artwork - including work by Stephen FABIAN - S seemed
almost created to prove a point about magazines not having to look tacky.
It showcased good fiction, too, mixing sf and fantasy, from Michael
BISHOP, C.J. CHERRYH, Charles L. GRANT, Tanith LEE, Tom REAMY, Lisa
TUTTLE, Howard WALDROP and others. It was an astonishingly adept
performance, the most spectacular (though by no means the most regular)
sf/fantasy magazine of its era, though as a SMALL-PRESS publication it was
not indexed in the N.E.S.F.A. magazine indexes. Having proved they could
do it, Cadigan and Fenner simply stopped. [PN]
SHEA, CORNELIUS
(1863-1920) US writer of dime novels ( DIME-NOVEL SF), prolific in many
categories but best remembered for marvel stories using a fairly
consistent "mythology" of dwarfs, subterranean eruptions, and stage
illusion masquerading as supernatural magic. Van Vincent's Vow (1892)
offers African adventures, sex-exploiting Amazons, and a socialist UTOPIA
founded by Egyptians who possess superscience. The Enchanted Diamond
(1894) is a lost-race tale ( LOST WORLDS) featuring a passage underground
between Alaska and Asia and a magical monarch. The Hidden Island (1898)
describes a vicious She-like femme fatale ( H. Rider HAGGARD), who claims
to be of Jovian descent, and a sinking island. In The Wonderful Electric
Man (1899), to prevent OVERPOPULATION couples are put to death after the
birth of their first child; if they have no children, they are put to
death anyway. Probably by CS, The Enchanted Emerald (1902) as by P.T.
Raymond describes an emerald with seemingly magical powers, plus lost
civilizations and another She-like queen in Africa. CS's work was widely
reprinted, often pseudonymously as "By the Author of 'The Wreck of the
Glaucus'". [EFB]
SHEA, MICHAEL
1. Michael (Sinclair MacAuslan) Shea (1938- ) UK writer, press secretary
to the Queen for a decade from 1978. AsMichael Sinclair he wrote a
NEAR-FUTURE thriller, The Dollar Covenant (1973); and as MS Tomorrow's Men
(1982), a DYSTOPIAN tale of the near-future UK in the grip of private
armies - the USA soon takes a hand in straightening things out.2. (1946- )
US writer, mostly of FANTASY; most of his few sf stories border on horror.
His books, which are both witty and disquieting, include A Quest for
Simbilis (1974) - derived, with permission, from Jack VANCE's The Eyes of
the Overworld (1966) - plus Nifft the Lean (coll of linked stories 1982)
and In Yana, the Touch of Undying (1985), both showing Vance's influence
less explicitly. Other books include The Color out of Time (1984), a
sequel to H.P. LOVECRAFT's The Colour out of Space (1927), Fat Face (1987
chap),Polyphemus (coll 1987) - which contains several deft sf tales,
including the title story and the horrific "The Autopsy" (1980) about
possession by an alien parasite. [JC]
SHEA, ROBERT (JOSEPH)
(1933-1994) US writer and senior editor of Playboy magazine best known
for collaborating with Robert Anton WILSON on the Illuminatus! trilogy -

The Eye in the Pyramid (1975), The Golden Apple (1975) and Leviathan
(1975), all assembled as The Illuminatus Trilogy (omni 1984) - in which
detective, FANTASY and sf components combine in the extremely complex tale
of a vast conspiracy on the part of the Illuminati, historically a
late-18th-century German association of freethinkers but here rendered
into the gods of H.P. LOVECRAFT's Cthulhu Mythos (among other
incarnations). The Illuminati plan, more or less, to destroy the world in
their search for power; almost everything of meaning in the contemporary
world turns out somehow to signify their malign omnipresence. The
influence of Thomas PYNCHON's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is evident
though, where the PARANOIA of that novel was presented with haunting
conviction, the Illuminatus! books, simultaneously deadpan and hysterical,
treat conspiracy as a game. RS subsequently wrote solo contributions (see
Wilson's entry for his own continuations): The Saracen: Land of the
Infidel (1989) and The Saracen: The Holy War (1989) provide background to
the main enterprise. Time of the Dragons (1981) and Last of the Zinja
(1981), both assembled as Shike (omni 1992), are historical novels with
fantasy elements. Shaman (1991) is a fantasy. [JC]See also: HUMOUR;
LIBERTARIAN SF; MUSIC; THEATRE.
SHECKLEY, ROBERT
(1928- ) US writer, born and educated in New York, where he set some of
his fiction, publishing his first story, "Final Examination", for
Imagination in 1952. RS's career falls into 3 periods: the 1950s, the
1960s, and afterwards. In the first period he produced short fiction
prolifically for several years in various magazines, though his supple,
witty, talkative, well crafted work was especially suited to GALAXY
SCIENCE FICTION, where much of it appeared. This work remains, perhaps,
his best known. In the second period he wrote several novels which
combined "zany" plots, metaphysical speculation and comic SATIRE. In the
third period he has rested. The Collected Short Stories of Robert Sheckley
(coll in 5 vols 1991), though incomplete, gives a good view of the entire
career.RS's first collection, UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS (coll 1954; with
differing contents 1955 UK), is one of the finest debut volumes ever
published in the field, and contains several tales which have remained
famous, including "The Monsters" (1953), the title story (1952), and the
superb "Specialist" (1953) which, with an energy and adroitness typical of
his early work, posits a Galaxy inhabited by a variety of cooperating
races who can merge their specialized functions to become, literally,
SPACESHIPS. The story describes the search for a new Pusher, a being
capable of shoving the ship to FASTER-THAN-LIGHT velocities unsurprisingly for the 1950s, Homo sapiens turns out to be a Pusher
species. Also in the collection is "Seventh Victim" (1953), much later
filmed as La DECIMA VITTIMA (1965), in turn novelized by RS as The Tenth
Victim * (1966); see below for its feeble continuation into a series.
Further successful collections followed swiftly: Citizen in Space (coll
1955), Pilgrimage to Earth (coll 1957), Notions: Unlimited (coll 1960),
Store of Infinity (coll 1960) and Shards of Space (coll 1962). Later
compilations include The Robert Sheckley Omnibus (coll 1973 UK) ed Robert
CONQUEST and Is THAT What People Do?: The Selected Short Stories (coll
1984). RS's stories are unfailingly elegant and literate; their mordant

humour and sudden plot reversals separate them from the mass of magazine
sf stories of the time, for the wit and surprises usually function to make
serious points about the calamitous aspects of life in the later 20th
century. At the same time, RS clearly found it worthwhile during these
early years to express the corrosive pessimism of his wit within the
storytelling conventions of sf, to dress his nihilism in sheep's clothing.
The second period began with Immortality Delivered (1958-9 Gal as "Time
Killer"; 1958; exp vt Immortality, Inc. 1959), filmed in 1992 as FREEJACK,
and continued with his best novels, The Status Civilization (1960),
Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1962; vt The Journey of Joenes 1978 UK) and
Mindswap (1966). In these books the typical Candide-like RS protagonist
began, at times unduly, to dominate. In short stories, the occasionally
venal naivete of this character did not much impair the rhythm of the
tale; but in the novels his lethargy tended to be translated into plots
which lacked drive. The typical RS full-length story is episodic,
befitting the protagonist's lack of drive, and structured as a kind of
guided tour of a particular sf milieu RS wishes to expose to satirical
view; dumped into this disconcerting circuit, his typical protagonist must
scramble about - sometimes comically - in order to survive and to gain
some orientation. The protagonist of the first novel, after dying in a car
crash, awakens 150 years hence in a whirligig USA where most forms of
psychic phenomena, including life and death, have been verified. The
Status Civilization is genuinely successful, embodying its satirical
despairs in a shaped narrative set on a prison planet, where social
hierarchies have turned topsy-turvy and conformity means being always
wicked. In Journey Beyond Tomorrow the RS protagonist is an innocent who
suffers a variety of alarming adventures after leaving his quiet
NEAR-FUTURE Pacific island; the novel takes the form of a series of
remembrances enshrined as myths 1000 years later. In Mindswap the
protagonist switches minds with a Martian and is subjected to reality
displacements galore. That was the end of RS's easy years.Dimension of
Miracles (1968) - in which the protagonist wins in error a prize which
shunts him back and forth across a Galaxy whose reality is disconcertingly
arbitrary - may be thought to signal the slow onset of the third RS
period, which was marked by novels either uneasy (like Miracles) or
absent-minded, like Dramocles: An Intergalactic Soap Opera (1983). RS also
continued his Victim sequence, begun in 1966 with The Tenth Victim, in 2
uninspired sequels, Victim Prime (1987 UK) and Hunter/Victim (1988 UK).
The best novel of the period was probably Options (1975), a tale whose sf
apparatus could be taken as a delusional frame, or understood as a series
of dramatic projections - generated by the protagonist - of the various
forms his life could be read as taking, rather after the fashion of Barry
N. MALZBERG, whose treatment of sf themes as metaphors for all-too-human
problems RS's late work most resembles. But The Alchemical Marriage of
Alistair Crompton (1958 Gal as "The Humours"; exp 1978 UK; vt Crompton
Divided 1978 US) - about the attempts of a paranoid schizophrenic to
reassemble his mind, which has been split off into three widely separated
receptacles - is also strong. The quality of RS's short fiction was less
variable, though his increasing tendency to write almost ABSURDIST stories
( FABULATION) was not perhaps to the taste of the sf market in general - a
sense reflected in the fact that many of them were first published in

slick magazines such as Playboy rather than in sf magazines, though "A
Suppliant in Space" won the Jupiter AWARD for the Best Short Story of
1973. The People Trap (coll 1968) contains a mixture of old and new
stories, but most of the fiction in Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?
(coll 1971; vt The Same to You Doubled 1974 UK) is typical of his late
work-spasmodic, hilarious, despairing. Further examples can be found in
The Robot who Looked like Me (coll 1978 UK) and The Wonderful World of
Robert Sheckley (coll 1979). It may be that RS's inability to take
seriously the simpler, more adventurous forms the genre can take, which he
regularly and affectionately parodied when young, has had a paralysing
effect on the mature writer, who sometimes sounds like a tongue-tied Kurt
VONNEGUT Jr. If this is so, it is a considerable loss to the sf field that
one of its sharpest wits can no longer pay it serious attention. [JC]Other
works: Futuropolis (1978), nonfiction; The Status Civilization, and
Notions: Unlimited (omni 1979); After the Fall (anth 1980); The People
Trap/Mindswap (omni 1981); Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of
Bottled Brains * (1990) with Harry HARRISON; Watchbird (1990 chap);
Minotaur Maze (1991); Xolotl (1991 chap); Alien Starswarm (1991 chap);
Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming (1991) with Roger ZELAZNY.Crime
fiction/thrillers: 8 novels, from Calibre .50 (1961) to The Alternate
Detective (1993).See also: ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; CITIES; CRIME AND
PUNISHMENT; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; ECONOMICS; ESCHATOLOGY; FORCE
FIELD;
GAMES AND SPORTS; GODS AND DEMONS; HISTORY OF SF; HUMOUR; LEISURE;
MEDIA
LANDSCAPE; OMNI; OVERPOPULATION; PARANOIA; REINCARNATION; ROBOTS; SEX;
SUPERNATURAL CREATURES; TABOOS.
SHEDLEY, ETHAN
Pseudonym of Belgian-born writer Boris Beiser (1934- ), in the USA from
1941. In Earth Ship and Star Song (1979) humanity finds itself banned from
ruined Earth. The Medusa Conspiracy (1980) is a more conventional
adventure. [JC]
SHEEHAN, PERLEY POORE
(1875-1943) US writer and journalist responsible for much magazine
fiction. The Abyss of Wonders (1915 Argosy; 1953) mixes Theosophy and
superscience in its tale of a lost race in the Gobi Desert ( LOST WORLDS).
[JC]Other works: The Seer (1912; vt The Prophet 1913 UK); The One Gift
(1920 Argosy; 1974 chap); The Whispering Chorus (1928).
SHEFFIELD, CHARLES
(1935- ) UK-born physicist and writer, in the USA from the mid-1960s,
publishing the first of nearly 100 technical papers and science articles
in 1962, and the first of 80 or more sf stories, "What Song the Sirens
Sang", for Gal in 1977; many of these stories are assembled in Vectors
(coll 1979), Hidden Variables (coll 1981), Dancing With Myself (coll 1993)
and Georgia on my Mind, and Other Places (coll 1995), the title story of
which won the 1993 NEBULA and the 1994 HUGO awards for Best Novelette. His
first novel, Sight of Proteus (1978), describes in ultimately optimistic
terms the wide-ranging effects of machine-driven shapechanging
technologies which might open the way to the nearby stars; the book almost

instantly established CS's reputation for briskly argued, cleverly
plotted, sanguine HARD SF, a reputation only marginally darkened by its
first sequel Proteus Unbound (1989), which recasts material from the
earlier book. Both tales were assembled as Proteus Manifest (omni 1989;
rev vt Proteus Combined 1994); a second sequel is Proteus in the
Underworld (1995). CS's second novel, The Web Between the Stars (1979; exp
1989), famously posited a sky-hook space elevator at almost exactly the
same time as Arthur C. CLARKE presented an astonishingly similar space
elevator in THE FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE (1979); the concepts had clearly
been arrived at independently, and their similarity only underscored the
clarity of each man's scientific imagination.In the 1980s, with an
exuberance that seemed almost irresponsible in a writer of his scientific
bent, CS ranged very widely in his choice of metier. The Selkie (1982)
with David F. BISCHOFF, a SCIENCE-FANTASY novel tinged with elements of
horror, describes a MUTANT race of male "wereseals" who must mate with
human women to perpetuate their kind. My Brother's Keeper (1982) is an sf
thriller whose MCGUFFIN, astonishingly, is half of the protagonist's
brother's brain, housed in half the protagonist's head. Erasmus Magister
(coll of linked stories 1982) features Erasmus DARWIN in a series of
lightly told scientific adventures, and The McAndrew Chronicles (coll of
linked stories 1983;rev vt One Man's Universe 1994) follows the exploits
of the eponymous inventor. Between the Strokes of Night (1985) is a
"cosmogony opera" sometimes compared to novels by Greg BEAR about
exploring, understanding and transforming the Universe; in this case,
exiled from Earth, humanity finds infinite resources in "S-space" and
travels down the aisles of time to visit the Galaxy. The Nimrod Hunt
(1986; with original text restored, exp vt The Mind Pool 1993) features
intricately interesting ALIENS and CYBORGS in a SPACE-OPERA setting.
Trader's World (fixup 1988) moves from a post- HOLOCAUST venue to higher
things, including the threat of alien INVASION. Cold as Ice (1992), an
intricate and polished space opera, depicts with glad clarity a Solar
System full of highly active and scientifically curious human beings. The
Heritage Universe sequence for younger readers - Summertide (1990),
Divergence (1991) and Transcendence (1992), with a further volume
published only in German - fills much of the Universe with BIG DUMB
OBJECTS and sets in train a complex of plots hinging upon their
decipherment and use. Some of his tales are dark enough, and ironies are
frequently evident; but CS continues to seem ready to feel that the
Universe may be enjoyed. [JC]Other works (all nonfiction): Commercial
Operations in Space 1980-2000 (anth 1981) ed with John L. McLucas;
Earthwatch: A Survey of the World from Space (1981 UK); Man on Earth: How
Civilization and Technology Changed the Face of the World - A Survey from
Space (1983); Space Careers (1984) with Carol Rosin; Brother to Dragons
(1992); Godspeed (1993); The Judas Cross (1994) with David Bischoff;
Future Quartet (anth 1994); The World of 2044: Technological Development
and the Future of Society (anth 1994) with Marcelo Alonso and Morton A.
Kaplan.See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; BIOLOGY; COSMOLOGY; DEL REY
BOOKS; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; END OF THE WORLD; GENETIC ENGINEERING;
JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD; SUSPENDED ANIMATION;
TRANSPORTATION.

SHEFNER, VADIM (SERGEEVICH)
(1915- ) Russian writer known mostly for his poetry (from c1963) and
mainstream fiction. Two short novels, Tchelovek S Piatiu "Ne" (trans Alice
Stone Nakhimovsky and Alexander Nakhimovsky as "The Unman") and Devushka U
Obryva (1970; trans Antonina W. Bouis as "Kovrigin's Chronicles"), were
published in omnibus form as The Unman; Kovrigin's Chronicles (omni 1980
US). Both are - like other work assembled as Skromny Genii ["A Modest
Genius"] (coll 1974), Imia Dlia Ptitsy ["The Name for the Bird"] (coll
1976), Kruglaia Taina ["The Round Mystery"] (coll 1977) and Skazki Dlia
Unmykh ["Fairy-Tales for Smart Ones"] (coll 1985) - poetical and sometimes
ironical borderline fantasies: modern urban fairy-tales. VS's full-length
novel, Latchuga Dolzhnika ["A Debtor's Hovel"], is a mature literary work,
combining elements of sf with those of philosophical prose. [VG]See also:
SCIENTISTS.
SHELDON, ALICE B.
[r] James TIPTREE Jr.
SHELDON, LEE
Pseudonym of US writer and mailman Wayne Cyril Lee (1917-1987), who began
publishing sf with "Project Asteroid" for Teens in 1966. His routine sf
adventure novel was Doomed Planet (1967). [JC]
SHELDON, RACCOONA
[s] James TIPTREE Jr.
SHELDON, ROY
UK house name used by Hamilton ?
short fiction and full-length novels in AUTHENTIC 1951-2 and on some
routine sf novels 1952-4 by H.J. CAMPBELL, George HAY and E.C. TUBB. [JC]
SHELLEY, MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
(1797-1851) UK writer, daughter of the philosopher and novelist William
Godwin (1756-1836) and of the feminist and educationist Mary
Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), who died giving birth to her. MWS married
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) in 1816, 2 years after they had eloped to
the Continent, and after his first wife had committed suicide. During 1816
the Shelleys spent much time with Lord Byron (1788-1824) who (or possibly
his physician, John William Polidori [1795-1821]) suggested, after reading
some of their work, that they should each write a ghost story. Nothing
much came of Byron's or Percy Shelley's efforts, though Dr Polidori wrote
The Vampyre (1819), but MWS - who was in her teens - wrote Frankenstein,
or The Modern Prometheus (1818; rev 1831), the most famous English HORROR
novel - though perhaps not the most widely read, as its conventional
GOTHIC narrative structure, which involves stories within frames and
sentimentalized rhetoric, makes it somewhat difficult going for many
modern readers more familiar with the numerous film, tv and other
spin-offs from the original tale ( FRANKENSTEIN; FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER).
The young Swiss scientist Frankenstein is obsessed with the notion that
the spark of life may be a "spark" in some literal fashion, and hopes to
create life by galvanizing dead matter. To this end he collects human
remains, constructs a grotesque but mechanically sound body, and shocks it
into life. The awakened/created MONSTER, initially innocent but soon

corrupted by Frankenstein's growing revulsion, demands of his maker that a
mate be created for him, and when this demand is refused starts on a
rampage in which Frankenstein's wife and brother are killed. Frankenstein
begins to track the monster down to destroy it, but eventually perishes,
his mind gone, deep in the Arctic. The monster disappears across the ice
floes.The increasing critical attention Frankenstein has received in
recent years has focused on MWS herself, on her relation to her father's
rationalist philosophy, and on her life with her husband at the time of
the book's genesis. The novel itself has been analysed in terms of these
concerns, perhaps most fruitfully in studies of its relation to the idea
of the "natural man". The monster - who reads Goethe's The Sorrows of
Young Werther (1774) - is in a sense a tabula rasa, and the evil that he
does, he is shaped to do by the revulsion and persecution of others; he
has to learn to be a monster. Alternatively, he can be thought of as an
embodiment of the evil latent in mankind, in which case he need merely be
given the opportunity to be a monster. The novel has also been studied as
a defining model of the Gothic mode of fiction, and in Billion Year Spree
(1973; much exp vt Trillion Year Spree 1986 with David WINGROVE), Brian W.
ALDISS argues its importance as the first genuine sf novel, the first
significant rendering of the relations between mankind and science through
an image of mankind's dual nature appropriate to an age of science.
Aldiss's own Frankenstein Unbound (1973) treats of both MWS and her
creation. Although MWS's novel does seem vulgarly to argue that there are
things that Man is not meant to know, it is far more than an awful-warning
shot across the bows of the evils of scientism; no simple paraphrase of
this sort can adequately describe it.MWS wrote a further
PROTO-SCIENCE-FICTION novel, The Last Man (1826), set at the end of the
21st century, in which a plague decimates humanity. The surviving
Americans invade Europe but, although war ends before the extinction of
humanity, the remaining British are soon reduced through strife to the
last man of the title, who much resembles MS's late husband, and who ends
the novel in a small boat sailing off to the Eastern Isles. The tale
served as a model for much subsequent work using its basic idea of a world
in which there can be a last, secular survivor. The story of most interest
assembled by Richard GARNETT in Tales and Stories by Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley (coll 1891) is The Mortal Immortal (in The Keepsake [anth 1934];
c1910 chap US); the later Collected Tales and Stories (coll 1976 US) is
more convenient. The Mary Shelley Reader (coll 1990 US) presents the
original-and rather more sharply told - 1818 version of Frankenstein,
several short stories, and other valuable material. [JC]About the author:
There is much criticism. Mary Shelley (1959) by E. Bigland; Mary Shelley
(1972) by William A. Walling; Ariel Like a Harpy: Shelley, Mary and
Frankenstein (1972; vt Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Tracing the Myth US)
by Christopher Small; Mary Shelley's Monster - The Story of Frankenstein
(1976) by Martin Tropp; Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley (1978) by
Jane Dunn; Mary Shelley (1985) by Harold BLOOM. Critical editions of
Frankenstein include those ed M.K. JOSEPH (1969), James Rieger (1974 US),
Maurice Hindle (1985), Marilyn Butler (1994), which gives the 1818 text;
and The Annotated Frankenstein (1979; rev vt The Essential Frankenstein
1993), ed Leonard Wolf, also giving the 1818 text.See also: ANDROIDS;
ANONYMOUS SF AUTHORS; BIOLOGY; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CRITICAL

AND
HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; END OF THE WORLD;
FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GODS AND DEMONS; HISTORY OF SF; HOLOCAUST AND
AFTER;
HORROR IN SF; MEDICINE; POWER SOURCES; RELIGION; SCIENTISTS; SEX; THEATRE;
WOMEN SF WRITERS.
SHELTON, MILES
[s] Don WILCOX.
SHEPARD, LUCIUS
(1947- ) US writer about whose first appearances in print there has been
some confusion, due to the fact that he is credited with 4 stories and 4
articles in Collins Magazine (various retitled Collins, the Magazine to
Grow Up With and Collins Young Elizabethan) between 1952 and 1955, the
first short story thus credited being "Camp Greenville" in 1953; it is
understood that a family member may have placed these stories under LS's
name (he would otherwise need to be described as an author of noticeably
competent short stories from the age of 6). LS's first acknowledged work
was POETRY, and his first book was a poem, Cantata of Death, Weakmind ?
Generation (1967 chap); he began to publish adult prose fictions of genre
interest only with "The Taylorsville Reconstruction" for Universe 13 (anth
1983) ed Terry CARR. Between the mid-1960s and the beginning of the 1980s,
LS lived in various parts of the world, travelled widely, became according to his own testimony - marginally and incompetently involved in
the fringes of the international drug trade, and in about 1972 started a
rock band which went through various incarnations over the following
years. Some of the experiences of this long apprenticeship are directly
reflected in stories like "A Spanish Lesson" (1985); but the abiding sense
of authority generated by all his best work depends upon the born exile's
passionate fixation on place. It is no accident that - aside from the
Latin American MAGIC-REALIST tradition whose influence upon him is often
suggested - the writer whom LS seems at times most to resemble is Joseph
CONRAD, for both authors respond to the places of the world with
imaginative avarice and a hallucinated intensity of portrayal; both create
deeply alienated protagonists whose displacement from the venues in which
they live generates constant ironies and regrets; and both tend to
subordinate mundane resolutions of plot to moments of terminal, deathly
transcendence. None of this constitutes a necessary or sufficient
description of an sf writer; and certainly, despite his aesthetic
influence on the genre in the years since his explosive debut (for which
he received a JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD in 1985), LS is not at heart an sf
writer.His first novel, however, is as much sf as horror. In Green Eyes
(1984) a research organization in the US Deep South has successfully
created zombies by injecting cadavers with bacteria from a graveyard. As
an sf premise, this is unconvincing; but LS presents the transformation of
dead bodies into representative human archetypes, and the escape of one of
them into bayou country, with a gripping closeness of touch; the
transcendental epiphany at the end, already characteristic of his work,
also tests true. His second novel, Life during Wartime (fixup 1987),
similarly embeds sf elements - a 21st-century setting, advanced forms of

drug manipulation - into a Latin American venue which, essentially,
absorbs these elements in a horrified, dense presentation of a Vietnam WAR
conducted, this time, in the Western Hemisphere. "R ?
a NEBULA, shapes the first part of the book; and a hallucinated, obsessed
journey into the heart of darkness in search of underlying transcendence
dominates its last sections. Kallimantan (1990 UK) evokes, with extreme
vividness, Conrad himself as well as Graham Greene (1904-1991) in another
transcendental heart-of-darkness tale, set this time in Borneo and
featuring at its centre a not altogether convincing transference to an sf
ALTERNATE WORLD.LS continues to be most successful at novelette/novella
length, and several of the longer tales assembled in THE JAGUAR HUNTER
(coll 1987; with 1 story cut and 3 added, rev 1988 UK; cut 1989 US) and
The Ends of the Earth (coll 1991) are among the finest FABULATIONS
composed by a US writer in recent years; he won a 1993 HUGO Best Novella
Award for"Barnacle Bill the Spacer" (1992). A story sequence - "The Man
who Painted the Dragon Griaule" (1984) plus 2 novellas, The Scalehunter's
Beautiful Daughter (1988) and The Father of Stones (1988) - makes the same
use of the devices of high fantasy that the full-length novels made of sf:
as material to massage into thematic compost, in the heart of which dark
epiphanies may be viewed and embraced, perhaps at the cost of death. LS
has clearly felt comfortable with sf, as he uses it; and the genre has
benefited from the publication of a dozen tales which assimilate sf into a
wider imaginative world. At the time of writing, however, there is some
sense that two ships may have passed in the night. [JC]About the author: A
Checklist of Lucius Shepard (1991 chap) by Tom Joyce and Christopher P.
STEPHENS.See also: ACE BOOKS; ESCHATOLOGY; FANTASY; GOTHIC SF; ISAAC
ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; REINCARNATION.
SHERBURNE, ZOA (MORIN)
(1912- ) US author of an sf novel for older children, The Girl who Knew
Tomorrow (1970). Why Have the Birds Stopped Singing? (1974) is fantasy.
[JC]
SHERIDAN, THOMAS
[s] Walter GILLINGS.
SHERMAN, HAROLD M(ORROW)
(1898-1987) US writer. His first work was the Tahara sequence - Tahara,
Boy King of the Desert (1933), Tahara Among African Tribes (1933), Tahara,
Boy Mystic of India (1933) and Tahara in the Land of Yucatan (1933) - in
which a young White boy parachutes into the Sahara and becomes king of the
Stone Age inhabitants of a LOST WORLD; subsequent novels take him and his
companions to various lands ( ATLANTIS is mentioned but not visited),
where they solve various mysteries (sometimes by ESP). HMS later became
known almost exclusively for work published in AMAZING STORIES in the
1940s, most notably The Green Man (1946) and its sequel, "The Green Man
Returns" (1947 AMZ), both assembled as The Green Man and his Return (coll
1979), in which the eponymous ALIEN tries to bring peace to a recalcitrant
Earth. [JC]
SHERMAN, JOEL HENRY
(1957- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Medium" for AMZ in 1984.

His first novel, Corpseman (1988), is an unremarkable tale of a CYBORG who
must cope with false imprisonment. More interestingly, Random Factor
(1991) combines routine sf-thriller components with an ALIEN race whose
nature must be deciphered at the interstellar station where various
species are in conflict. [JC]
SHERMAN, MICHAEL and PETER MICHAEL
[s] Robert A.W. LOWNDES.
SHERRED, T(HOMAS) L.
(1915-1985) US writer who worked in Detroit for the auto industry as a
technical writer. His production of fiction was small, and First Person,
Peculiar (coll 1972) contains all the stories for which he is remembered,
most significantly "E for Effort", his first published story (1947 ASF).
It describes, humorously but with a fundamental pessimism, the
consequences of a device that permits its users to view past and present
events. Its inventor and his associate are successful at first, but are
soon defeated by government forces. Ultimately the existence of the
"camera" in the hands of the US military causes a final WAR, as the
victim-narrator has predicted. (It is understood that the story was
accepted for ASF in John W. CAMPBELL Jr's absence.) The other tales are
"Cue for Quiet" (1953), "Eye for Iniquity" (1953) and "Cure, Guaranteed"
(1954); they are clear-cut, forceful and black. The note accompanying
"Bounty" in Again, Dangerous Visions (anth 1972) ed Harlan ELLISON
revealed that TLS had suffered a mild stroke before 1971 and was unlikely
to write further. However, Alien Island (1970), his first novel, had
already been written; its sequel, Alien Main (1985) with Lloyd BIGGLE Jr,
was completed by his collaborator. Alien Island is a sometimes comic but
fundamentally melancholy tale about ALIENS secretly on Earth and the
eventual disaster that results; the sequel - set two centuries later, with
an Earth-descended alien defending the beleaguered planet - broadens and
softens the implications of the first book, but returned TLS, at the close
of his life, to the sf main. [JC]See also: MACHINES; MONEY; TIME TRAVEL.
SHERRELL, CARL
(1929-1990) US commercial artist and, later, writer whose novels are
essentially fantasies, with the exception of the unremarkable The Space
Prodigal (1981). His fantasies are the Raum sequence - Raum (1977) and
Skraelings (1987) - plus Arcane (1978) and The Curse (1989). [JC]
SHERRIFF, R(OBERT) C(EDRIC)
(1896-1975) UK playwright, novelist and film-writer, known mainly for his
hit play Journey's End (1929), filmed in 1930 by James Whale and in 1975
as Aces High. His sf novel, The Hopkins Manuscript (1939; rev vt The
Cataclysm 1958), is a DISASTER tale set mostly in rural England where the
protagonist, Edgar Hopkins (whose manuscript is discovered hundreds of
years later by Abyssinian archaeologists), fussily eulogizes his beloved
countryside and people as the dislodged Moon crashes into the Atlantic
Ocean, causing tornadoes and tsunamis. Hopkins then records an abortive
recovery of civilization before the Moon's mineral wealth tempts the
shattered nations of Europe into terminal conflict and an Asian warlord
moves in. The science is derisory, but the elegy is strongly felt. RCS

wrote the screenplay for the 1933 film The INVISIBLE MAN . [JC]
SHERWOOD, MARTIN (ANTHONY)
(1942- ) UK writer with a PhD in organic chemistry; editor of Chemistry ?
Industry. His sf novels are Survival (1975) and Maxwell's Demon (1976); in
the latter, ALIENS invade humans, thus putting them to sleep. [JC]
SHETTERLY, WILL
[r] Emma BULL.
SHEW, ROWLAND
Michael F. FLYNN.
SHIBANO, TAKUMI
(1926- ) Japanese writer, translator and critic. TS began writing sf as
Rei Kozumi while a high-school mathematics teacher - a job he quit in 1977
to become a full-time translator; he published his first short story in
1951. Later, 1969-75, he published 3 sf juveniles, including Hokkyoku-Shi
No Hanran ["Revolt in North-Pole City"] (1977). But his influence on
Japanese sf was more in his work as editor and publisher of the widely
circulated Uchujin (1957-current), the first Japanese FANZINE, in which
many stories by later-prominent sf writers - such as Sakyo KOMATSU - were
published; it reached #190 in 1991 and continues to introduce new writers.
One of the most prominent figures in the Japanese sf community, TS has
received many sf awards; the "Takumi Shibano Award", given since 1982 to
people who have performed generous work in fandom, was named after him. As
a translator he has specialized in HARD SF: most of Larry NIVEN's books as
well as works by James P. HOGAN, Poul ANDERSON, Hal CLEMENT and many more
- about 50 books in all. TS has also ed 2 anthologies of stories from
Uchujin, the first in 3 vols (1977) and the second in 2 (1987). He wrote
the entry on JAPAN in this encyclopedia. [PN]
SHIEL, M(ATTHEW) P(HIPPS)
(1865-1947) UK writer, born Shiell in Montserrat in the British West
Indies; in the UK from his late teens. He began writing fiction in the
late 1880s and continued intermittently until his death, although his
significant fantastic fiction was published 1896-1901. MPS was intensely
concerned with style per se, incorporating poetic techniques into
narrative prose; he also used sensational adventure fiction as a vehicle
for idiosyncratic ideas about ECONOMICS, science and RELIGION. As a
result, his work is not to every reader's taste, although it has been
praised highly by such critics and fellow writers as Rebecca West
(1892-1983), Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) and Dorothy L. Sayers
(1893-1957).Since MPS matured in England during the fin de siecle, it is
not surprising that his early work shows highly romantic subject matter
and an obsessive concern with decorated prose, his models being mostly
Edgar Allan POE and mid-19th-century French writers. Early work includes
extremely baroque detective short stories, in Prince Zaleski (coll 1895),
and horror fiction collected in Shapes in the Fire (coll 1896) and The
Pale Ape (coll 1911). Although these stories, written in a lapidary style,
were on the edge of being old-fashioned when they appeared, they are among
the very best examples of their sort.After his noncommercial early work,
MPS shifted to serials for the popular press. Future- WAR novels include

The Yellow Danger (1889 Short Stories as "The Empress of the Earth"; 1898)
and The Dragon (1913 The Red Magazine as "To Arms!"; 1913). Both novels,
which contain sf elements (especially The Dragon), are adventure stories
in which the Yellow Peril - i.e., Chinese hordes - overwhelms the world by
sheer quantity of manpower. Both, however, depart from the stereotyped
Yellow Peril story in seeing the quarrel between Orient and Occident as
ultimately a spiritual matter, rather than economic, as Chinese and UK
SUPERMEN strive for domination. Both novels are developed along similar
lines, basic ideas being: the horrors of war (depicted on such a colossal
scale and with such sangfroid that some have seen MPS's attitude as
callous approval); a strange mixing of Nietzschean and Tolstoyan theories
of history, in which supermen make history but are generated by their
culture; a Spencerian survival of the fittest on a racial level; and
thinly veiled suggestions of paranoia. Both books, aimed at a popular
market, are sparsely written with no attempt at stylistic decoration. A
third war novel, The Yellow Wave (1905), is a non-fantastic work based on
the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5).MPS's finest work is generally conceded to
have been The Purple Cloud (1901), the story of the last man left on Earth
after hydrocyanic acid gas liberated by volcanism has killed off mammalian
life. The doings of the protagonist, driven mad by solitude, are
brilliantly and vividly imagined. Behind the story, however, lies a mythic
cosmic struggle between opposing forces that use humans as tools. The Lord
of the Sea (1901; savagely cut 1924 US), almost as fine, is strongly based
on Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1844-5; trans anon as The Count of
Monte-Cristo 1846 UK) by Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870). It develops a
network of mid-19th-century sensational motifs - incredible coincidences,
swapped babies, hidden identities, chance-found incredible wealth,
documents in a trunk, festering revenges, elaborate prison escapes,
frustrated romance, Napoleonic megalomania - yet, though written to an
aesthetic outdated for its time, it embodies that aesthetic with enormous
elan and vitality. The essence of the book is a concept adapted from the
work of the popular US economist Henry George (1839-1897): if certain
individuals can hog the land, others can hog the sea. Building on this
insight, one Hogarth, using the wealth plucked from a diamond-laden
meteorite, builds sea forts and claims ownership of the oceans. The Lord
of the Sea has been criticized as antisemitic, since it depicts a UK
overrun by Jewish refugees from Continental pogroms, including unpleasant
caricatures reminiscent of the stage Jew of earlier drama; other critics,
however, have rejected the accusation.MPS's other fantastic fiction
includes: The Last Miracle (1906), about a plot to discredit Christianity
with fake miraculous visions created by gigantic hologram-like devices;
"The Place of Pain Day" (1914 The Red Magazine), about a natural water
lens that shows horrors on the Moon, and "The Future Day" (1928 London
Daily Herald), about life and love in an aeronautic culture, which both
appeared in The Invisible Voices (coll 1935); and This Above All (1933; vt
Above All Else 1943), about a trio of immortals made so by Jesus, who is
alive in Tibet. MPS also occasionally ghost-wrote for Louis TRACY; the sf
novel An American Emperor (1897), as by Tracy, is in large part by MPS.
His last sf work, The Young Men are Coming (1937), deals partly with
contemporary social upheaval and partly with an interstellar visit. The
multiple-sex ALIENS are far superior to humanity and possess an incredible

superscience. The sf element is much more sophisticated and imaginative
than contemporary GENRE SF, but is buried in a welter of eccentric social
philosophy, and told in the decorated style of its author's youth. The
result is at times almost unreadable.With MPS is associated the "Kingdom
of Redonda". His sea-trader father (MPS claimed) laid claim to the small
uninhabited ISLAND of Redonda, near Antigua, and in a ceremony there
crowned young Matthew king. On MPS's death the "crown" passed to John
GAWSWORTH, who awarded titles of nobility to persons associated with
Shiel, including Sayers, West, Edward SHANKS and Dylan Thomas (1914-1953).
On Gawsworth's death the title became clouded.MPS has received some
attention outside fantastic fiction as a writer of partial Black ancestry,
and as perhaps the first UK novelist of Caribbean origin. [EFB]Other
works: The Best Short Stories of M.P. Shiel (coll 1948) ed John Gawsworth;
Xelucha and Others (coll 1975 US); Prince Zaleski and Cummings King Monk
(coll 1977 US); Xelucha and the Primate of the Rose (coll 1994 chap).About
the author: The Works of M.P. Shiel: A Study in Bibliography (1948), rev
and much exp as The Works of M.P. Shiel - Updated (in 2 vols 1980) by A.
Reynolds Morse, along with Shiel in Diverse Hands (anth 1984), also ed
Morse; "The World, the Devil, and M.P. Shiel" by Sam Moskowitz in
Explorers of the Infinite (coll 1963); "The Politics of Evolution:
Philosophical Themes in the Speculative Fiction of M.P. Shiel" in
Foundation #27 (1983) by Brian M. STABLEFORD.See also: END OF THE WORLD;
MEDICINE; MESSIAHS; POLITICS; SOCIAL DARWINISM; VILLAINS; WEAPONS.
SHINER, LEWIS (GORDON)
(1950- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Tinker's Damn" for
Galileo in 1977, and who wrote a substantial number of tales before
beginning to assemble them in Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the
Universe (coll 1990) and The Edges of Things (coll 1991). His work in
short form has been various, tending at its best to a clear-edged
intensity which gives his venues, whether or not sf, a glow of
seriousness; at its less impressive, in earlier stories, there is a sense
of overindustrious journeyman plundering of recent sf writers for models.
But increasingly an engaged and sophisticated mind can be seen extracting
hard kernels of import out of those models. LS's first novel, Frontera
(1984), in which a team is sent to MARS by a large corporation to
investigate an abandoned colony, ostensibly obeys the sf-adventure rules
governing tales of that sort, but insinuates throughout a bleaker, denser
view of humanity's life in space. Deserted Cities of the Heart (1988), set
in a MAGIC-REALIST Mexico, features a complexity of plots, involving
imagined TIME TRAVEL back to the age of the Mayas, heated sexual and
political intertwinings, and moments of not entirely convinced
transcendence; but the style of the tale is shining and faceted, and its
various protagonists are vividly realized. Slam (1990), a non-sf tale
about a reformed tax-evader paroled from prison (or "slam"), competently
and copiously evokes a sense of Texas not dissimilar to that imparted by
fellow Texans like Neal BARRETT Jr and Howard WALDROP; the ambitious
Glimpses (1993) is fantasy. It is sf's loss that LS's career seems to be
moving swiftly away from the genre. [JC]Other works: Twilight Time (1984
IASFM; 1991 chap); When the Music's Over (anth 1991).See also: CYBERPUNK;
GOTHIC SF; MUSIC; WILD CARDS.

SHIRAS, WILMAR H(OUSE)
(1908-1990) US writer whose first novel, Slow Dawning (1946) as by Jane
Howes, was not sf or fantasy. She began publishing sf with "In Hiding"
(1948 ASF), the first of several stories assembled as Children of the Atom
(1948-50 ASF; fixup 1953). This concerns a number of radiation-engendered
child geniuses who initially hide their abilities from the world, then
reveal themselves, taking the risk that in trying to help normal humans
they may merely end as martyrs. The story is sensitively told, avoiding
most of the CLICHES of pulp-sf SUPERMAN stories. WHS remained active as a
story writer until the 1970s. [JC]See also: ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF;
CHILDREN IN SF; INTELLIGENCE; MUTANTS; WOMEN SF WRITERS.
SHIRLEY, JOHN (PATRICK)
(1954- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "The Word 'Random,'
Deliberately Repeated" for Clarion (anth 1973) ed Robin Scott WILSON, and
who has performed as lead singer in rock bands, including the punk band
Sado Nation. This background heavily influenced his first novel, the
DYSTOPIAN Transmaniacon (1979), in which the typical JS protagonist
appears: punk, anarchic, exorbitant, his mind evacuated of normal
constraints, death-loving. Similar characters appear in Three-Ring Psychus
(1980), which describes mass levitation ( PSI POWERS) with anarchist
rapture, and City Come A-Walkin' (1980), set in a surrealistically harsh
inner city. After writing some horror novels - to which genre his
inclinations have constantly urged him, for JS is not at heart an sf
writer - and most titles in the Traveler sequence as by D.B. DRUMM ( Ed
NAHA), he created his finest sf work in the CYBERPUNK-coloured Song Called
Youth trilogy - Eclipse (1985), Eclipse Penumbra (1988) and Eclipse Corona
(1990) - set after a realistically conceived WWIII and describing a
technologically deft resistance movement which fights a neofascist regime
to a standstill, ultimately defeating it. In another late novel, A
Splendid Chaos (1988), JS returns to a more surreal background, this time
a hazardous planet where a small group of humans must compete for survival
against unpredictable ALIENS. But the main challenge to "normal" humans
comes from some of their own species, who have been remoulded in the image
of their darkest fantasies - a horror device typical of the author, whose
best effects have always come from sparking the gap between normality and
horrific madness.Though his short work sometimes suffers burnout from
excessive intensity, the stories assembled in Heatseeker (coll 1988)
effectively demonstrate JS's solitudinous strengths, the flare of his
anger. [JC/CW]Other works: Dracula in Love (1979); The Brigade (1982);
Cellars (1982); Kamus of Kadizhar: The Black Hole of Carcosa: A Tale of
the Darkworld Detective * (1988), tied to J. Michael REAVES's Darkworld
Detective (coll of linked stories 1982); In Darkness Waiting (1988);
Wetbones (1992); New Noir (coll 1993).See also: CITIES; MUSIC; POLITICS.
SHIVERS
The PARASITE MURDERS.
S.H.M.
[s] A. Bertram CHANDLER.
SHORT CIRCUIT

Film (1986). Turman-Foster/Tri-Star. Dir John BADHAM, starring Ally
Sheedy, Steve Guttenberg, Fisher Stevens, Brian McNamara. Screenplay S.S.
Wilson, Brent Maddock. 98 mins. Colour.Military ROBOT Number Five, a
prototype killing machine, is struck by lightning which endows it with
sentience. It escapes from evil Nova Robotics, finding refuge with nice
animal-lover Stephanie (Sheedy), who assumes it to be an ALIEN. It
educates itself and is winsome. When she finds it is a robot she turns it
in, but has second thoughts and helps save it from deactivation. SC's
assumption that, with a bit of divine aid, even a weapon will turn to
peace and love is pleasantly silly. SC is amusing but formulaic, and the
robot is nauseatingly cute; the film is much weaker than Badham's BLUE
THUNDER and WARGAMES. The displeasing sequel is Short Circuit 2 (1988),
dir Kenneth Johnson, who normally directs tv (The BIONIC WOMAN , The
INCREDIBLE HULK ), and stars Fisher Stevens again as the Indian
co-inventor of the robot, played in an offensively patronising Peter
Sellers Indian accent. This is a caper movie in which Number Five (now
Johnny Five) is duped into helping criminals out with a jewel robbery.
[PN]See also: CINEMA.
SHORT CIRCUIT 2
SHORT CIRCUIT.
SHORT STORIES INC.
WEIRD TALES.
SHRINKING MEN
GREAT AND SMALL.
SHUPP, MIKE
(1946- ) US aerospace engineer and writer known for his Destiny Makers
sequence-With Fate Conspire (1985), Morning of Creation (1985), Soldier of
Another Fortune (1988), Death's Gray Land (1991) and The Last Reckoning
(1991) - featuring the exploits of a Vietnam veteran transported by TIME
TRAVEL into a future where telepaths, being despised, are trying to change
history. Time wars of the usual complexity ensue. [JC]See also: ESP.
SHUSTER, JOE
[r] Jerry SIEGEL; SUPERMAN.
SHUTE, NEVIL
Working name of UK writer Nevil Shute Norway (1899-1960), who for many
years combined writing with work as an aeronautical engineer, specializing
in Zeppelins; after moving for health reasons in 1950 to Australia - where
he set much of his later fiction - he wrote full-time. Some of his earlier
fiction, by taking advantage of his intense and very up-to-date knowledge
of aeronautics, verges very closely on sf, and What Happened to the
Corbetts (1939; vt Ordeal 1939 US) is a genuine future- WAR tale. An Old
Captivity (1940) is the tale of a man who dreams in a coma (accurately, it
proves, and on the basis of data unknown at the time of the dream) of
Vikings in Greenland and of their life there; a later screenplay to an
unmade film, Vinland the Good (1946), treats similar material. No Highway
(1948) deals with metal fatigue as the cause of airplane disasters and was
published just before the first of the Comet jet crashes that occurred for

exactly that reason; the protagonist's daughter seems, as well, to have
ESP powers. It was filmed as No Highway in the Sky (1951).NS's two
Australian sf novels remain his best known. In the Wet (1953), the journal
of an Australian outback priest who copies down from a dying man a UTOPIAN
vision (or memory) of the British Empire cAD2000, anticipates a time when
Australia has become the leader of the Commonwealth, royalty has survived
handsomely, socialism has faded away, and the Empire is secure. Much
closer to the bone was the famous On the Beach (1957), filmed as ON THE
BEACH (1959), a near-future DISASTER tale in which nuclear war has
eliminated all life in the northern hemisphere, leaving Australia to await
the inevitable spread of radioactive contamination - delayed by global
wind-patterns - that will end human life on Earth. NS was an excellent
popular novelist; his stories demonstrate a seamless narrative skill, and
his protagonists are, unfailingly, decent men. [JC]See also: END OF THE
WORLD; PREDICTION.
SHUTTLE, PENELOPE (DIANE)
(1947- ) UK poet and novelist, married to Peter REDGROVE (whom see for
their sf collaborations). Her only solo novel of genre interest, The
Mirror of the Giant (1980), combines FEMINIST self-analysis with elements
of the traditional ghost story. [JC]
SHWARTZ, SUSAN M(ARTHA)
(1949- ) US writer who has been much more clearly associated with fantasy
than with sf, beginning with her first story, "The Fires of Her Vengeance"
in The Keeper's Price (anth 1979) ed Marion Zimmer BRADLEY, and continuing
with extended works like the impressive Heirs to Byzantium ALTERNATE-WORLD
fantasy trilogy: Byzantium's Crown (1987), The Woman of Flowers (1987) and
Queensblade (1988). Her 2 sf novels are White Wing (1985) with S.N.
LEWITT, writing together as Gordon Kendall, which is a vigorous sf
adventure, and Heritage of Flight (fixup 1989), an adventure set on an
alien planet. Though sf has not attracted her full attention, a caring
literacy attractively infuses both tales; and Habitats (anth 1984)
contains several interesting sf tales original to that volume. [JC]Other
works: Silk Roads and Shadows (1988); Imperial Lady (1989) with Andre
NORTON; The Grail of Hearts (1992); Empire of the Eagle (1993) with
Norton.As Editor: Hecate's Cauldron (anth 1982); Moonsinger's Friends
(anth 1985), in honour of Norton; Arabesques: More Tales of the Arabian
Nights (anth 1988) and its sequel, Arabesques II (anth 1989).
SIBSON, FRANCIS H(ENRY)
(1899-? ) South African writer, prolific during the 1930s; most of his
work, which was technically proficient, had something to do with airplanes
or the sea and ships. The Survivors (1932) and its sequel The Stolen
Continent (1934) describe first the violent creation of a new island in
the Sargasso Sea (its rapid surfacing beaches an ocean liner), and second
the international conflicts surrounding claims to the new territory, named
New Canada. Unthinkable (1933) depicts an arduous Antarctic expedition
whose members find, on their return north, that civilization has been
destroyed by a final WAR involving gas and other weapons. [JC]
SIEGEL, JERRY

(1914- ) US writer and sf fan who founded and issued with the illustrator
Joe Shuster (1914-1992) the FANZINE Science Fiction in October 1932, one
of the earliest occasions on which the term was used in a title; it ran
for 5 issues, publishing stories by Raymond A. PALMER and others. In the
same year he published a story, Guest of the Earth (1932 chap). Also with
Shuster he created the comic SUPERMAN, which first appeared in 1938, after
they had spent years trying to sell the idea to publishers. [JC]See also:
COMICS; DC COMICS; ILLUSTRATION.
SIEGEL, MARTIN
(1941-1972) US writer who died young of leukemia. His sf novels are Agent
of Entropy (1969) and The Unreal People (1973). The first combines SATIRE
and SPACE OPERA in a heated tale; the second is a post-holocaust
POCKET-UNIVERSE tale in which Earth's surface is uninhabitable and people
live frenetically and desperately underground. [JC]
SIENKIEWICZ, BILL
(1958- ) US COMICS artist. His early work was heavily influenced by Neal
ADAMS, although his fine pen line was more fluid and expressive, and his
brushwork freer. His work matured, becoming more painterly and stylish, as
he graduated to GRAPHIC NOVELS. BS appears now to have deserted narrative
art for advertising, record-cover design and more upmarket illustration.
He has won many awards, including the 1987 Jack Kirby Award for Best
Artist and the 1986 Yellow Kid (Italy).He attended the Newark School of
Fine and Industrial Art, and began illustrating comic books in 1978 with a
story in The Hulk magazine featuring Moon Knight, a character who gave the
title to a comic-book series which BS drew 1980-84, developing a dramatic
narrative technique along with his energetic and increasingly
sophisticated drawing. He drew and coloured an adaptation of the 1984 film
DUNE (Marvel Super Special #36, 1984), and contributed a number of
exciting issues to MARVEL COMICS's New Mutants title 1984-6. His first
fully painted strip, which appeared in the last issue of Epic Illustrated
(1986), was "Slow Down Sir"; he went on to develop this aspect of his work
further with the graphic novel Electra Assassin (1986-7; graph 1987). His
magnum opus was Stray Toasters (graph 1988), a 4-part graphic novel
inspired by the film-maker David Lynch (1945- ). Since then his comic-book
work has been limited to the first 2 episodes of Alan MOORE's Big Numbers
(1990). [RT]Other work: Bill Sienkiewicz Sketch Book (1990).
SIEVEKING, LANCE
Working name of UK writer and radio producer Lancelot de Giberne
Sieveking (1896-1972) on his later work, though his first books were
signed L. de Giberne Sieveking. He was with the BBC 1924-56; in 1955-6 he
edited the publisher Ward Lock's sf list; his literary memoir, The Eye of
the Beholder (1957), included portraits of figures of sf interest such as
H.G. WELLS. He began publishing sf with "The Prophetic Camera" for The
English Review in 1922, and his first novel Stampede! (1924)-dedicated to,
illustrated by, and in its side-of-the-mouth fantasticality derivative of
G.K. CHESTERTON-featured a Thought Machine used by anarchists to convey
telepathic commands. In The Ultimate Island: A Strange Adventure (1925)
ATLANTIS has survived in the midst of concealing fog and whirlpools, into
which maelstrom ships have for centuries been lured. LS's best known sf

work, A Private Volcano (1955), depicts the effects of a catalyst (thrown
up from a volcano) which turns all dross to gold. After outgrowing his
borrowed manners, LS became a literate writer, though sometimes uneasy in
his handling of genre effects. [JC]Other works: The Woman She Was
(1934).See also: ISLANDS.
SIEVERT, JAN
Ryder SYVERSTEN.
SILBERSACK, JOHN (WALTER)
(1954- ) US editor and writer, active in the former capacity with
Putnam/Berkley books 1977-81, with New American Library 1986-92, with
Warner Books in 1992, and with Harper Collins from 1993. Throughout his
career he has been noted for a swift and canny knowledgeability about the
sf world. With Victoria Schochet he ed the first 4 vols of the Berkley
Showcase: New Writings in Science Fiction and Fantasy anthology series (#1
and #2 1980; #3 and #4 1981) ( The BERKLEY SHOWCASE for further details).
He has also ed 2 collections: Fritz LEIBER's The Change War (coll 1978)
and Avram DAVIDSON's Collected Fantasies (coll 1982). His own writing has
been, by comparison, peripheral, consisting of an anonymous sf spoof, No
Frills Science Fiction (1981 chap), and Rogers' Rangers * (1983), a BUCK
ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY tie. [JC]
SILENT, WILLIAM T.
Pseudonym of US writer John William Jackson Jr (1945- ), author of the sf
adventure novel Lord of the Red Sun (1972). [JC]
SILENT RUNNING
Film (1971). Universal. Dir Douglas Trumbull, starring Bruce Dern.
Screenplay Deric Washburn, Mike Cimino, Steve Bocho, from a story by
Trumbull. 90 mins. Colour.All plant life on Earth has been destroyed in
the aftermath of a nuclear HOLOCAUST; only vast orbiting spaceships like
Valley Forge, with its external hydroponic domes, still contain trees and
flowers, the hope being that these may one day be used to re-seed the
planet; but then their destruction is ordered by the totalitarian Earth
government. SR's premise is obviously fatuous - it would be cheaper to
leave the spaceships in place. Bruce Dern plays, in penitent's robes, the
only true conservationist left alive, a low-grade gardener aboard the
Valley Forge. When the order comes through to dump the vegetation he kills
his companions (with the film's tacit approval) and sets off into deep
space with the plants (apparently forgetting they have previously needed
sunlight to live). He is accompanied only by three small, cute, box-shaped
ROBOTS (in fact operated by amputees). SR is occasionally spectacular Trumbull was one of the special-effects supervisors on 2001: A SPACE
ODYSSEY (1968), and SR's scenes of vast spaceships floating through space
compare well with those in Stanley KUBRICK's epic - but the film is
morally dubious, scientifically unsound and sociologically implausible.
[PN/JB]
SILKE, JAMES R.
[r] Frank FRAZETTA.
SILLITOE, ALAN

(1928- ) UK writer best known for novels like Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning (1958). The General (1960) sets abstract armies clashing on an
abstract ground, perhaps not Terran. The anti-authoritarian SATIRE,
Travels in Nihilon (1971), initially reads as a DYSTOPIA, for the 5
travellers to that country despise its government and work to overthrow
it; but, by story's close, Nihilism as a political creed seems to gain the
author's guarded sanction. Snow on the North Side of Lucifer (1979) is a
poetry sequence about conflicts between God and Satan. [JC]
SILVA, JOSEPH
Ron GOULART.
SHIPPEY, TOM
Working name of UK academic and editor Thomas A. Shippey (1943- ),
Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature at the University of
Leeds. In essays and reviews, which he has been publishing since the
mid-1970s, he takes a clear-headed orthodox view of the central figures of
sf and fantasy; Fictional Space: Essays on Contemporary Science Fiction
(coll 1991) assembles some of this work. The Road to Middle-Earth (1982)
is a study of J.R.R. TOLKIEN. TS also ed The Oxford Book of Science
Fiction Stories (anth 1992), in the Introduction to which he espouses
James Bradley's notion that sf is a literature whose central image is "the
creator of artefacts" or Homo "fabril". TS cowrote the theme entries on
MAGIC and HISTORY IN SF in this encyclopedia. [JC]
SILVERBERG, ROBERT
(1935- ) Extremely prolific US writer, author of more than 100 sf books,
more than 60 nonfiction books and a great deal of other work, including an
estimated 100-150 erotic novels as by Don Elliott and other undisclosed
pseudonyms; he has also edited or co-edited more than 60 anthologies. He
began to write while studying for his BA at Columbia University; his first
published story was "Gorgon Planet" (1954). His first novel, a juvenile,
was Revolt on Alpha C (1955). He began to publish prolifically in 1956,
winning a HUGO in that year as Most Promising New Author, and continued to
specialize in sf for 3 years. He worked for the ZIFF-DAVIS stable,
producing wordage at assembly-line speed for AMAZING STORIES and
FANTASTIC, and was a prolific contributor to such magazines as SCIENCE
FICTION ADVENTURES and SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION, using many different names.
For part of this time Randall GARRETT was a partner in this "fiction
factory"; they wrote in collaboration as Robert Randall, Gordon Aghill and
Ralph Burke (RS also used the Burke pseudonym on solo work). The most
important pseudonyms which RS used exclusively were Calvin M. Knox and
David Osborne; he also wrote sf as T.D. Bethlen, Dirk Clinton, Dan Elliot,
Ivar Jorgenson (a variant spelling of the floating pseudonym Ivar
JORGENSEN), Dan Malcolm, Webber Martin, Alex Merriman, George Osborne,
Eric Rodman, Hall Thornton and Richard F. Watson. He appeared under such
Ziff-Davis house names as Robert ARNETTE, Alexander BLADE, E.K. JARVIS,
Warren KASTEL and S.M. TENNESHAW; Blade and Tenneshaw were used also on
collaborations with Garrett, as were Richard GREER, Clyde MITCHELL,
Leonard G. SPENCER and Gerald VANCE. Silverberg wrote 1 story in
collaboration with his 1st wife Barbara; The Mutant Season (1989), a novel
developed from one of his short stories by his 2nd wife (from 1987) Karen

HABER, was published as a collaboration. Later volumes were by Haber
alone.He also published 3 "collaborations" with Isaac ASIMOV, developing
full-length novels from classic Asimov short stories: these are Nightfall
(1941 ASF; exp 1990 UK; vt The Ugly Little Boy 1992 US), Child of Time
(1958 Gal as "Lastborn"; vt "The Ugly Little Boy"; exp 1991 UK) and The
Positronic Man (in Stellar, anth 1976, ed Judy-Lynn DEL REY as "The
Bicentennial Man"; exp 1992 UK).The most notable novels of RS's early
period are Master of Life and Death (1957 dos), a novel dealing with
institutionalized measures to combat OVERPOPULATION, Invaders from Earth
(1958 dos), a drama of political corruption involved with the COLONIZATION
of Ganymede, and Recalled to Life (1958 Infinity; 1962; rev 1972), which
investigates the social response to a method of reviving the newly dead.
The Nidorian series, which he wrote with Garrett as Robert Randall - The
Shrouded Planet (fixup 1957) and The Dawning Light (1959) - is also
interesting.As the magazine market shrank, in 1959 RS virtually abandoned
sf for some years. The majority of the sf books he published 1960-66 were
rewritten from work originally done in 1957-9. His output was prodigious,
but somewhat mechanical, except for a handful of nonfiction books notably The Golden Dream (1967) and Mound-Builders of Ancient America
(1968), which were painstakingly researched and carefully written.A new
phase of RS's career, in which he brought the full range of his artistic
abilities to bear on writing sf, began with Thorns (1967), a stylized
novel of alienation and psychic vampirism, and Hawksbill Station (1968; vt
The Anvil of Time 1969 UK), in which political exiles are sent back in
time to a Cambrian prison camp; this full-length version should not be
confused with the novelette version, Hawksbill Station (1967 Gal; 1990
chap dos). The Masks of Time (1968; vt Vornan-19 1970 UK) describes a
visit by an enigmatic time traveller to the world of 1999. The Man in the
Maze (1969) is a dramatization of the problems of alienation, based on the
Greek myth of Philoctetes, the hero whose wound makes him both necessary
and repulsive. Nightwings (fixup 1969) is a lyrical account of the
conquest of a senescent Earth by ALIENS, which culminates with the rebirth
of its hero; it should not be confused with the Hugo-winning novella which
contributed to the fixup, Nightwings (1968 Gal; 1989 chap dos). Up the
Line (1969) is a clever TIME-PARADOX story. Downward to the Earth (1970)
is a story of repentance and rebirth, with calculated echoes of Joseph
Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (1902) and strong religious imagery (
RELIGION). Tower of Glass (1970) also makes use of religious imagery in
its study of the obsessional construction of a new "Tower of Babel" and
the struggle of an ANDROID race to win emancipation. A TIME OF CHANGES
(1971) describes a society in which selfhood is a cardinal sin. Son of Man
(1971) is a surreal evolutionary fantasy of the FAR FUTURE. The World
Inside (fixup 1971) is a study of life under conditions of high population
density. The Second Trip (1972) is an intense psychological novel
describing the predicaments of a telepathic girl and a man who has been
newly created in the body of an "erased" criminal. The Book of Skulls
(1971) is a painstaking analysis of relationships among 4 young men on a
competitive quest for IMMORTALITY. Dying Inside (1972) is a brilliant
study of a telepath losing his power. The Stochastic Man (1975) is a
complementary study of a man developing the power to foresee the future.
Shadrach in the Furnace (1976) concerns the predicament of the personal

physician of a future dictator who finds his identity in jeopardy. After
writing the last-named, RS quit writing for 4 years, ostensibly because of
his disenchantment with the functioning of the sf marketplace, where his
books seemed to him to be suffering "assassination" as they were allowed
to go out of print after a few months; sheer exhaustion may also have been
a factor.In view of the sustained quality of this astonishing burst of
creativity, it is perhaps surprising that only one of these full-length
works won a major award in the USA - A TIME OF CHANGES ( NEBULA). Several
better novels, most notably Dying Inside, went unrewarded, perhaps because
the voters found them too intense and too uncompromising in their
depictions of anguish and desperation. RS did, however, win awards for
several shorter pieces: the novella Nightwings won a Hugo, and Nebulas
went to "Passengers" (1968), a story about people who temporarily lose
control of their bodies to alien invaders, "Good News from the Vatican"
(1970), about the election of the first ROBOT pope, and the brilliant
novella Born with the Dead (1974; 1988 chap dos), about relationships
between the living and the beneficiaries of a scientific technique
guaranteeing life after death. The novella "The Feast of St Dionysus"
(1972), about the experience of religious ecstasy, won a Jupiter award; it
became the lead title of one of his finest collections, The Feast of St
Dionysus (coll 1975), which also includes "Schwartz Between the Galaxies"
(1974). In addition to his award-winners RS published a great deal of
excellent short fiction during this second phase of his career.
Particularly notable are "To See the Invisible Man" (1963), assembled in
Earth's Other Shadow (coll 1973), "Sundance" (1969), assembled in The Cube
Root of Uncertainty (coll 1970), and "In Entropy's Jaws" (1971), assembled
in The Reality Trip and Other Implausibilities (coll 1972). Other
collections assembling material from this period include The Calibrated
Alligator (coll 1969), Dimension Thirteen (coll 1969), Parsecs and
Parables (coll 1970), Moonferns and Starsongs (coll 1971), Unfamiliar
Territory (coll 1973), Sundance and Other Science Fiction Stories (coll
1974), Born with the Dead (coll 1974), Sunrise on Mercury (coll 1975), The
Best of Robert Silverberg (coll 1976) and The Best of Robert Silverberg,
Volume Two (coll 1978), Capricorn Games (coll 1976), The Shores of
Tomorrow (coll 1976), The Songs of Summer and Other Stories (coll 1979
UK), and Beyond the Safe Zone: The Collected Short Fiction of Robert
Silverberg (coll 1986).RS returned to writing with Lord Valentine's Castle
(1980), a polished but rather languid HEROIC FANTASY set on the world of
Majipoor, where he also set the shorter pieces - including The Desert of
Stolen Dreams (1981 chap) - collected in The Majipoor Chronicles (coll of
linked stories 1982). The addition of Valentine Pontifex (1983), a sequel
to the novel, converted the series into a trilogy of sorts. In the mid
1990s, beginning with The Mountains of Majipoor (1995 UK), several new
volumes were projected. Almost all of RS's work of the 1980s was in the
same relaxed vein: the psychological intensity of his mid-period work was
toned down, and much of his sf was evidently pitched towards what RS
considered to be the demands of the market. His work of this period has
been commercially successful, but the full-length sf often seems rather
mechanical; the historical novels Lord of Darkness (1983) and Gilgamesh
the King (1984) appear to have been projects dearer to his heart. The
gypsy king in Star of Gypsies (1986), waiting in self-imposed exile for

his one-time followers to realize how badly they need him, might be
reckoned an ironic self-portrait. The best works of this third phase of
RS's career are novellas, most notably Sailing to Byzantium (1985), winner
of a 1985 Nebula, and The Secret Sharer (1988), a sciencefictionalization
of CONRAD's 1912 story of the same title. RS also won Hugo awards in this
period for the novella "Gilgamesh in the Outback" (1986), which was a
sequel to Gilgamesh the King and was integrated into To the Land of the
Living (fixup 1989), and the novelette "Enter a Soldier. Later, Enter
Another" (1989). His recent work includes the first 2 vols of the New
Springtime trilogy about the repopulation of Earth by various races (not
including humans) after a future ice age - At Winter's End (1988; vt
Winter's End 1990 UK) and The Queen of Springtime (1989 UK; vt The New
Springtime 1990 US) - a novel about humans living as exiles on a watery
world after the destruction of Earth, The Face of the Waters (1991 UK);
and Hot Sky at Midnight (fixup 1994), a tale which, set in the early years
of the 21st century, is told in a tone of searingly bleak pessimism
increasingly to be encountered in sf writers in their late prime as the
millennium approaches. Much of his short fiction of this period is
assembled in The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party (coll 1984),The Collected
Stories of Robert Silverberg: Volume One: Pluto in the Morning Light (coll
1992 UK; vt The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg: Volume One: Secret
Sharers 1992 US) and The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg: Volume
Two: The Secret Sharer (coll 1993 UK; cut 1993 US). He remains one of the
most imaginative and versatile writers ever to have been involved with sf.
His productivity has seemed almost superhuman, and his abrupt
metamorphosis from a writer of standardized pulp fiction into a prose
artist was an accomplishment unparalleled within the field.As an editor,
RS was responsible for an excellent series of original ANTHOLOGIES, NEW
DIMENSIONS (see listing below). In collaboration with Haber he has taken
over the UNIVERSE series once ed Terry CARR, relaunching the title with
Universe 1 (anth 1990),Universe 2 (anth 1992) and Universe 3 (anth 1994).
He has also been a prolific compiler of ORIGINAL ANTHOLOGIES that comprise
3 novellas, and has edited many reprint anthologies, recently doing much
of this kind of work in collaboration with Martin H. GREENBERG. RS was
president of the SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA 1967-8. The MAGAZINE
OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION published a special issue devoted to him in
Apr 1974. An autobiographical essay appeared in Hell's Cartographers (anth
1975) ed Brian W. ALDISS and Harry HARRISON. [BS]Other works: The 13th
Immortal (1957 dos); Aliens from Space (1958) as by David Osborne;
Invisible Barriers (1958) as by Osborne; Lest We Forget Thee, Earth (fixup
1958 dos) as by Calvin M. Knox; Starhaven (1958) as by Ivar Jorgenson;
Stepsons of Terra (1958 dos); The Planet Killers (1959 dos); The Plot
against Earth (1959 dos) as by Knox; Starman's Quest (1959); Lost Race of
Mars (1960); Collision Course (1961); Next Stop the Stars (coll 1962 dos);
The Seed of Earth (1962 dos); The Silent Invaders (1958 Infinity as by
Knox; exp 1963 dos; with "Valley beyond Time" added, as coll 1985);
Godling, Go Home! (coll 1964); One of Our Asteroids is Missing (1964 dos)
as by Knox; Regan's Planet (1964); Time of the Great Freeze (1964); Sex
Machine (1964) as by Dan Elliot; Conquerors from the Darkness (1957
Science Fiction Adventures as "Spawn of the Deadly Sea"; 1965); To Worlds
Beyond (coll 1965); Needle in a Timestack (coll 1966; rev 1967 UK); The

Gate of Worlds (1967); Planet of Death (1967); Those who Watch (1967); The
Time-Hoppers (1956 Infinity as "Hopper"; exp 1967); To Open the Sky (fixup
1967); Across a Billion Years (1969); Three Survived (1957; exp 1969); To
Live Again (1969); World's Fair 1992 (1970); Valley beyond Time (coll
1973); Unfamiliar Territory (coll 1973); A Robert Silverberg Omnibus (omni
1981); World of a Thousand Colors (coll 1982); Tom O'Bedlam (1985);
Nightwings (graph 1985), an adaptation in GRAPHIC-NOVEL form; Project
Pendulum (1987), a juvenile; In Another Country (1990 chap dos) with C.L.
MOORE's Vintage Season (1946), to which it is a sequel; Lion Time in
Timbuctoo (1990); Letters from Atlantis (1990); Thebes of the Hundred
Gates (1991); Kingdoms of the Wall (1992 UK).Omnibuses: A Robert
Silverberg Omnibus (omni 1970 UK), assembling Master of Life and Death,
Invaders from Earth and The Time-Hoppers; Science Fiction Special (30):
Invaders from Earth; The Best of Robert Silverberg (omni 1978 UK);
Conquerors from the Darkness, and Master of Life and Death (omni 1979);
Invaders from Earth, and To Worlds Beyond (omni 1980); A Robert Silverberg
Omnibus (omni 1981), assembling The Man in the Maze, Nightwings and
Downward to the Earth; The Masks of Time/Born with the Dead/Dying Inside
(omni 1988); Three Novels: The World Inside/Thorns/Downward to the Earth
(omni 1988); The Book of Skulls/Nightwings/Dying Inside (omni
1991).Nonfiction: Drug Themes in Science Fiction (1974 chap).As Editor:
Earthmen and Strangers (anth 1966); Voyagers in Time (anth 1967), Men and
Machines (anth 1968); Dark Stars (anth 1969); Three for Tomorrow (anth
1969; UK edn credits Arthur C. CLARKE as ed); Tomorrow's Worlds (anth
1969); The Ends of Time (anth 1970); Great Short Novels of Science Fiction
(anth 1970); The Mirror of Infinity (anth 1970); Worlds of Maybe (anth
1970); The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol 1 (anth 1970); To the Stars
(anth 1971); Four Futures (anth 1971); Mind to Mind (anth 1971); The
Science Fiction Bestiary (anth 1971); Beyond Control (anth 1972); Invaders
from Space (anth 1972); The Day the Sun Stood Still (anth 1972); Chains of
the Sea (anth 1973); Other Dimensions (anth 1973); Three Trips in Time and
Space (anth 1973); No Mind of Man (anth 1973); Deep Space (anth 1973);
Threads of Time (anth 1974); Mutants (1974); Infinite Jests (anth 1974);
Windows into Tomorrow (anth 1974); The Aliens (anth 1976); Epoch (anth
1975) with Roger ELWOOD; The New Atlantis (anth 1975); Strange Gifts (anth
1975); Explorers of Space (anth 1975); The Crystal Ship (anth 1976); The
Aliens (anth 1976); The Infinite Web (anth 1977); Earth is the Strangest
Planet (anth 1977); Trips in Time (anth 1977); Triax (anth 1977); Galactic
Dreamers: Science Fiction as Visionary Literature (anth 1977); The
Androids are Coming (anth 1979); Lost Worlds, Unknown Horizons (anth
1978); The Edge of Space (anth 1979); Car Sinister (anth 1979) with Martin
H. Greenberg and Joseph D. OLANDER; Dawn of Time: Prehistory through
Science Fiction (anth 1979) with Greenberg and Olander; The Arbor House
Treasury of Modern Science Fiction (anth 1980; cut vt Great Science
Fiction of the 20th Century 1987) with Greenberg; The Arbor House Treasury
of Great Science Fiction Short Novels (anth 1980; cut vt Worlds Imagined
1988) with Greenberg; The Science Fictional Dinosaur (anth 1982) with
Greenberg and Charles G. WAUGH; The Best of Randall Garrett (coll 1982);
The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces (anth 1983; cut
vt Great Tales of Science Fiction 1988) with Greenberg; The Fantasy Hall
of Fame (anth 1983; vt The Mammoth Book of Fantasy All-Time Greats 1988

UK) with Greenberg; Nebula Award Winners 18 (anth 1983); The Time
Travelers: A Science Fiction Quartet (anth 1985) with Greenberg;
Neanderthals (anth 1987) with Greenberg and Waugh; Robert Silverberg's
Worlds of Wonder (anth 1987); Time Gate (anth 1989); Time Gate 2:
Dangerous Interfaces (anth 1990); Beyond the Gate of Worlds (anth 1991);
The Horror Hall of Fame (anth 1991) with Greenberg; The Ultimate Dinosaur
(anth 1992) with Byron PREISS; Murasaki (anth 1992) with Greenberg
(uncredited), assembling stories set in an elaborated crafted shared
world.Series: The Alpha sequence of anthologies, comprising Alpha One
(anth 1970), Two (anth 1971), Three (anth 1972), Four (anth 1973), Five
(anth 1974), Six (anth 1975), 7 (anth 1977), 8 (anth 1977) and 9 (anth
1978); the New Dimensions sequence of original anthologies, comprising New
Dimensions I (anth 1971), #2 (anth 1972), #3 (anth 1973), #4 (anth 1974),
#5 (anth 1975), #6 (anth 1976), #7 (anth 1977), #8 (anth 1978), #9 (anth
1979), #10 (anth 1980), #11 (anth 1980) with Marta RANDALL and #12 (anth
1981) with Randall, plus The Best of New Dimensions (anth 1979).About the
author: Robert Silverberg: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1983) and
Robert Silverberg (1983 chap), both by Thomas D. CLARESON.See also: ACE
BOOKS; ALTERNATE WORLDS; ANTHROPOLOGY; APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE
HUMAN
WORLD); ARTS; BLACK HOLES; CHILDREN'S SF; CITIES; COMICS; COMPUTERS;
CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; CRITICAL AND
HISTORICAL
WORKS ABOUT SF; DC COMICS; DYSTOPIAS; END OF THE WORLD; ENTROPY;
ESCHATOLOGY; ESP; EVOLUTION; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GODS
AND
DEMONS; HIVE-MINDS; INTELLIGENCE; INVASION; INVISIBILITY; JOHN W.
CAMPBELL
MEMORIAL AWARD; JUPITER; MATHEMATICS; MATTER TRANSMISSION; MEDIA
LANDSCAPE; MESSIAHS; METAPHYSICS; MILFORD SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS'
CONFERENCE; MONSTERS; MUSIC; MYTHOLOGY; NEW WAVE; PARALLEL WORLDS;
PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; PASTORAL; PERCEPTION; PLANETARY ROMANCE;
POLITICS; PSYCHOLOGY; REINCARNATION; ROBERT HALE LIMITED; SEX; SHARED
WORLDS; SOCIOLOGY; SPACE OPERA; SUN; SUPERMAN; TIME TRAVEL;
TRANSPORTATION; UNDER THE SEA; WOMEN SF WRITERS; WRITERS OF THE FUTURE
CONTEST.
SIM, DAVE
(1958- ) US artist and writer, creator of Cerebus the Aardvark, the
abrasive and perverse eponymous star of a satirical COMIC book originally
intended as a pastiche of Robert E. HOWARD's Conan the Barbarian, and
which has lampooned a number of the leading characters of the
HEROIC-FANTASY genre. Published by DS himself, the comic book has become
so popular that Cerebus #1 (Dec 1977) is reputed now to be worth several
hundred times its original $1 cover price. Much of the series is available
in reprint assemblage, beginning with Cerebus (graph coll 1987). DS's
early style was heavily influenced by Barry Windsor-Smith. The comic book
features characters such as Elrod of Melvinbone, Bran Mak Mufin and
Wolveroach. DS's stated ambition is to complete the projected 6000pp of
Cerebus the Aardvark in AD2004. [RT]

SIMAK, CLIFFORD D(ONALD)
(1904-1988) US writer whose primary occupation 1929-76 was newspaper
work, and who became a full-time writer of sf only after his retirement.
He was, however, a prolific and increasingly popular sf figure - after a
false start in 1931 - from the true beginning of his career in 1938. His
first published stories, beginning with "The World of the Red Sun" for
Wonder Stories in 1931, were unremarkable, though significantly that first
tale deals with TIME TRAVEL, which became his favourite sf device for the
importation of ALIENS into rural Wisconsin, always his favourite venue.
Apart from 1 novelette, The Creator (1935 Marvel Tales; 1946 chap), he
published no sf 1932-8; then, inspired by John W. CAMPBELL Jr's editorial
policy at ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, he began to produce such stories as
"Rule 18" and "Reunion on Ganymede" (both 1938). He swiftly followed with
his first full-length novel, Cosmic Engineers (1939 ASF; rev 1950), a
Galaxy-spanning epic in the vein of E.E. SMITH and Edmond HAMILTON. He
continued to write steadily for Campbell, and his work gradually became
identifiably Simakian - constrained, nostalgic, intensely emotional
beneath a calmly competent generic surface. Stories like "Rim of the Deep"
(1940), "Tools" (1942) and "Hunch" (1943) were signs of this development,
though the full CDS did not "arrive" until the appearance of "City" and
its sequel, "Huddling Place" (both 1944). These tales concerned the
NEAR-FUTURE exodus of mankind from the CITIES and the return to a PASTORAL
existence aided by a benign technology. As the series progresses, the
planet is abandoned by all humans except the reclusive Websters; and
Jenkins, an excellently depicted ROBOT, is left to monitor the forced
EVOLUTION of intelligent dogs, who are destined to inherit the Earth. As
CITY (fixup 1952; exp 1981) the sequence won an INTERNATIONAL FANTASY
AWARD. It remains CDS's best known work.In 1950 he found another market in
the new magazine GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION, which serialized his novel Time
and Again (1951; vt First He Died 1953). A trickily plotted time-travel
story, it proved to be very popular - though ominously prefiguring some of
his over-plotted works of the late 1970s. Also of strong interest is Ring
Around the Sun (1953), which involves the discovery of a chain of PARALLEL
WORLDS and the machinations of a secret society of mutants who are
plotting to subvert the world's economy by producing everlasting goods.
Its anti-urban and pro-agrarian sentiments were by now a standard part of
CDS's work; in stories like "Neighbors" (1954) he became sf's leading
spokesman for rural, Midwestern values. His stories in general contain
little violence and much folk humour, and stress the value of
individualism tempered by compassion - "good neighbourliness", in short.
Throughout the 1950s, he produced dozens of competent short stories, many
assembled in Strangers in the Universe (coll 1956; with 4 stories cut
1957; with 4 different stories cut 1958 UK), The Worlds of Clifford Simak
(coll 1960; with 6 stories cut 1961; with 3 stories cut, vt Aliens for
Neighbours 1961 UK; text restored in 2 vols, vt The Worlds of Clifford
Simak 1961 US and Other Worlds of Clifford Simak 1962 US) and All the
Traps of Earth (coll 1962; with 3 stories cut 1963; text restored in 2
vols, vt All the Traps of Earth 1964 UK and The Night of the Puudly 1964
UK). Two highpoints were the stories "The Big Front Yard" (1958), which
won a 1959 HUGO, and "A Death in the House" (1959). Many of these tales
appear in the retrospective Skirmish: The Great Short Fiction (coll 1977).

After 1960 CDS began to produce novels at the rate of roughly one a year.
Time is the Simplest Thing (1961) and They Walked Like Men (1962) are
workmanlike and entertaining, but WAY STATION (1963), which won the 1964
Hugo, more impressively concerns a lonely farmer given IMMORTALITY in
return for his services as a galactic station-master, his house having
been made into a way-station for aliens who teleport from star to star.
Its warmth, imaginative detail and finely rendered bucolic scenes make
this probably CDS's best novel. All Flesh is Grass (1965), Why Call them
Back from Heaven? (1967) and The Werewolf Principle (1967) are enjoyable,
if essentially repetitive. The Goblin Reservation (1968) seemed at first
glance to be innovative, striking out into new territory; but in fact it
turned out to be the old Wisconsin-valley fantasy in a new and whimsical
guise. CDS had always wrestled with such whimsy - notoriously paired with
nostalgia in many authors - and by the start of the 1970s whimsy seemed to
be winning. Its triumph may have derived from the fact that the venues for
which CDS felt genuine emotion were now 40 years gone, and the world had
irrevocably repudiated and scummed over the rural simplicities dear to his
heart; however, this cannot excuse his sentimental sidestepping of change.
Novels like Destiny Doll (1971), Cemetery World (cut 1973; text restored
1983), Enchanted Pilgrimage (1975), Shakespeare's Planet (1976),
Mastodonia (1978; vt Catface 1978 UK), Special Deliverance (1982), Where
the Evil Dwells (1982) and Highway of Eternity (1986; vt Highway to
Eternity 1987 UK), his last novel, contain only flashes of the old talent,
mingled with a good deal of sheer silliness. There were exceptions. A
Choice of Gods (1972) is an elegiac tale in which CDS reiterated the
plainsong of his favourite themes: the depopulated world, the sage old
man, the liberated robots, the "haunted" house, teleporting to the stars,
etc. A Heritage of Stars (1977), a quest novel set in a post-technological
society, is another compendium of CDS's old material. Though he seemed
generally to need the relative discipline of sf to achieve his best
effects, The Fellowship of the Talisman (1978) is an effective FANTASY.
The Visitors (1980), in which aliens once again visit Earth bearing
enigmatic gifts, may be his finest late novel, for a vein of irony is
allowed some play. The strengths of Project Pope (1981), about the
devising of an AI to serve as the ultimate pope, are somewhat vitiated by
CDS's visible reluctance to understand COMPUTERS.CDS's late short stories
are less mixed, and the tales assembled in The Marathon Photograph and
Other Stories (coll 1986 UK), including the Hugo- and Nebula-winning
"Grotto of the Dancing Deer" (1980), retain all the skill and much of the
emotional saliency of his prime. He was a man of strong moral convictions
and little real concern for ideas, and surprisingly for a man of such
professional attainments he rarely tended to stray outside his natural
bailiwick. Wisconsin in about 1925 - or any extraterrestrial venue
demonstrating the same rooted virtues - was that true home, and when he
was in residence CDS reigned as the pastoral king of his genre. He
received the NEBULA Grand Master Award in 1977. [DP/JC]Other works: Empire
(1951); The Trouble with Tycho (1961 chap dos); Worlds without End (coll
1964); Best Science Fiction Stories of Clifford Simak (coll 1967 UK); So
Bright the Vision (coll 1968 dos); Out of their Minds (1969); Our
Children's Children (1974); The Best of Clifford D. Simak (coll 1975 UK);
4 collections ed Francis Lyall, being Brother and Other Stories (coll 1986

UK), Off-Planet (coll 1988 UK), The Autumn Land and Other Stories (coll
1990 UK) and Immigrant and Other Stories (coll 1991 UK); The Creator and
Other Stories (coll 1993 UK), the title story being the same text as the
1946 pamphlet.As Editor: Nebula Award Stories 6 (anth 1971); The Best of
Astounding (anth 1978).About the author: "Clifford D. Simak" by Sam
MOSKOWITZ, in Seekers of Tomorrow (1966); Clifford D. Simak: A Primary and
Secondary Bibliography (1949) by Muriel R. Becker.See also: ANDROIDS;
ARTS; ASTEROIDS; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; COMMUNICATIONS;
CRYONICS;
DIMENSIONS; ECOLOGY; ECONOMICS; ESCHATOLOGY; ESP; GALACTIC EMPIRES;
GAMES
AND SPORTS; GENERATION STARSHIPS; GODS AND DEMONS; GOLDEN AGE OF SF;
JUPITER; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS);
MACHINES; MARS; MATTER TRANSMISSION; MERCURY; MESSIAHS; MONEY; MOON;
MYTHOLOGY; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; OUTER PLANETS; PARALLEL WORLDS;
PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; POLLUTION; RELIGION; SOCIOLOGY; SPACE OPERA;
SPACESHIPS; SUN; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES; VENUS.
SIMMONS, DAN
(1948- ) US writer, for many years a teacher of gifted children, who
began publishing with "The River Styx Runs Upstream" for Rod Serling's The
Twilight Zone Magazine in 1982, and who was for some time best regarded as
an author of tales of HORROR, some of which - along with sf and FANTASY
stories - were assembled in Prayers to Broken Stones (coll 1990). True to
the instincts of that genre, his first novel, Song of Kali (1985),
rendered modern-day Calcutta as a moral and psychic cesspool, into which
the protagonists of the book sink very deep indeed as unleashed evil from
the world's ancient heart threatens to flood the 1980s. His second novel,
the immense Carrion Comfort (1983 Omni; much exp 1989), is also horror,
though with an sf underpinning, and as such its basic premise is un-new.
The "carrion-eaters" of the title are MUTANT humans who have acquired the
capacity to control other humans through direct psychic access to their
hind-brains, while at the same time feasting psychically on the
experiences into which they force their victims. True to the dictates of
the horror genre - to which Simmons remains astonishingly faithful for
nearly 500,000 words - his mutants soon decay into lovers of pain and
death, and the protagonists of the book must attempt to exploit divisions
among these puppet masters. Their survival seems genuinely triumphant,
though the sole surviving vampire is preparing to start WWIII.However,
despite the haunting rationality of this tale, DS's later work is of much
greater sf interest. Phases of Gravity (1989) is not sf, being instead if one is able to ignore a moment or two of muffled transcendence perhaps the first historical novel by an sf author about the space
programme, recounting the psychic rejuvenation of a grounded astronaut.
But HYPERION (1989) - which won a 1990 HUGO - and The Fall of Hyperion
(1990) - 2 vols which together, under the preferred title Hyperion Cantos
(omni 1990), clearly make a single novel - are genuine, full-blown
METAPHYSICAL sf. Over a SPACE-OPERA structure - ages after a BLACK HOLE
has destroyed Old Earth, the Galaxy is dominated by a vast human hegemony
knit together by ANSIBLE-like fatlines and farcasters that plumb
discontinuities in space - an extremely complex narrative engages with

many themes, including religious quests, TIME TRAVEL, CYBERSPACE, ECOLOGY,
bioengineering and much else. In the first volume, which is structured
after Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, 7 "pilgrims" have been called to the
planet Hyperion, where the time-travelling Shrike which guards the Time
Tombs promises some dreadful transcendence; en route they tell tales which
reveal their significant life-experiences (one of these tales,
"Remembering Siri", was first published separately in 1983), each tale
being recounted in a different sf idiom, and each contributing to the
growing mosaic of the overall story, described by John CLUTE as a space
opera about the end of things, an "entelechy opera" or tale of cosmogony.
Every member of the cast bears a secret burden, and each burden expands in
significance as the surviving protagonists arrive on Hyperion and engage
more and more deeply with the Keatsian implications of their mission (the
two sections of Hyperion Cantos take the titles of Keats's long but
incomplete poems about the displacement of the old gods, the victory of a
new pantheon). Meanwhile, wars and apocalypse and ENTROPY threaten the
entire Galaxy. The AIS that run everything turn out to inhabit the
quantum-level interstices of the farcaster net - just as does the AI who
tends to dominate Orson Scott CARD's Xenocide (1991) - and the end of the
Universe will depend upon which AI faction is able to corner for itself
the significance of Hyperion, the Shrike, and the human saintliness which
begins to invest activities there.As a compendium and culminating
presentation of GENRE SF's devices and deep impulses, Hyperion Cantos is
perhaps definitive for the 1980s. In one novel, DS became one of the
half-dozen central figures of that decade. A slight sentimentality about
children and a love of generic competence for its own sake only slightly
modify the sense of excitement generated by his arrival on the scene,
though his two 1992 novels may have calmed that excitement to some degree.
The Hollow Man (1982 Omni as "Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams"; much exp
1992), though pure sf in its rationale, is structured (somewhat stiffly)
to reflect the metaphysical journey of DANTE ALIGHIERI's protagonist in La
Divina Commedia (written c1304-21), containing ample references as well to
the poetry of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965). It deals with a tortured man whose
ESP powers are explained in terms of quantum physics and Chaos-theory
mathematics; a longish horror story is implanted in its midst. Children of
the Night (1992) - which features a priest who had appeared as a child in
Summer of Night (1991), a Stephen- KING-like tale of supernatural horror rationalizes the vampire novel, and is a pure-sf thriller in its
AIDS-related story of Romanian vampires, led by the still-living Vlad
Dracula, whose condition turns out to be a hereditary immune deficiency
curable by the intake of human blood. The novel arguably trivializes the
agonies of post-Ceausescu Romania and of AIDS by linking them to
vampirism, and does not fully justify DS's return to themes he had already
used so forcefully in Carrion Comfort. And Fires of Eden (1994), a horror
novel with supernatural elements set in 19th and 20th century Hawaii,
quite as fully overmaster his material as initially he was inclined to.
There is an intellectual chill about all three novels, which are well
crafted but dispassionate, suggesting that for the moment at least DS is
marking time. [JC]Other works: Entropy's Bed at Midnight (1990 chap);
Banished Dreams (1990 chap); Going After the Rubber Chicken (coll 1991
chap), 3 cogent after-dinner speeches; Summer Sketches (coll 1992),

nonfiction.About the author: "The True and Blushful Chutzpah" by John
Clute, Interzone #38, 1990.See also: CLICHES; COMMUNICATIONS; CYBERNETICS;
FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GODS AND DEMONS; GOTHIC SF;
PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; REINCARNATION; RELIGION; SPACE FLIGHT;
VILLAINS.
SIMMONS, GEOFFREY
(1943- ) US writer and medical doctor whose first sf novel, The Adam
Experiment (1978), set in an orbital space lab, features an experiment in
human procreation which runs up against the fact that ALIENS have been
monitoring Homo sapiens and will not permit us to breed off-planet.
Pandemic (1980) is a medical sf thriller; Murdock (1983), a heavily
plotted tale involving CRYOGENICS, again makes some effective use of GS's
medical expertise. [JC]
SIMON, ERIK
[r] GERMANY.
SIMPSON, HELEN (de GUERRY)
(1897-1940) UK novelist, the last and longest section of whose The Woman
on the Beast (1933) is set in 1999, when a woman anarchist becomes ruler
of the world with apocalyptic intentions, including the purificatory
abolition of all reading. [JC]
SIMS, D(ENISE) N(ATALIE)
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
SINCLAIR, ANDREW (ANNANDALE)
(1935- ) UK writer of much fiction and nonfiction. His The Project (1960)
comes as close to nuclear HOLOCAUST as possible - a doomsday weapon is
just about to go off as the final page ends - without actually meeting the
END OF THE WORLD head-on. AS remains best known for his Gog sequence - Gog
(1967), Magog (1972) and King Ludd (1988) - a FABULATION about the Matter
of Britain which is half sentimental SATIRE and half mythopoesis. [JC]
SINCLAIR, IAIN (MacGREGOR)
(1943- ) UK poet and novelist whose Lud Heat: A Book of the Dead Hamlets
(1975) is a narrative prose-poem which fabricates a numerological myth of
the geography of London; it provided a direct inspiration for Peter
ACKROYD's Hawksmoor (1985). A novel, Downriver (Or, the Vessels of Wrath):
A Narrative in Twelve Tales (1991), develops similar material in a
FABULATION which combines detective modes and NEAR-FUTURE sf visions of
the complex destiny of London. Radon Daughters: A Voyage, Between Art and
Terror, from the Mound of Whitechapel to the Limestone Pavements of the
Burren (1994) covers similar territory in an ornately constructed fantasia
based on a perhaps non-existent sequel to William Hope HODGSON's The House
on the Borderland (1908), but also includes an elaborately ironic
description of an sf convention. [JC]
SINCLAIR, MICHAEL
Michael SHEA.
SINCLAIR, UPTON (BEALL)
(1878-1968) US writer known primarily for his work outside the sf field,

particularly for his novels of social criticism, including The Jungle
(1905). His most notable sf work is the comedy The Millennium: A Comedy of
the Year 2000 (1914 Appeal to Reason; in 3 vols 1924), based on a play, in
which the survivors of a DISASTER recapitulate the economic stages
described by the Marxist theory of history. In Prince Hagen (1903; play
1921) a Nibelung ruler acknowledges that US capitalists are his superiors
in avarice. The Industrial Republic: A Study of the America of Ten Years
Hence (1907) is a utopian fantasy. Roman Holiday (1931) is an interesting
and curiously bittersweet account of a delusional timeslip in which an
industrialist discovers parallels between his own time and a nascent Roman
republic which cannot anticipate the indignities that history has in store
for it. US's lighter political satires include the documentary future
histories I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty (1933) and
We, People of America, and How We Ended Poverty: A True Story of the
Future (1934). He also wrote a number of religious fantasies in which
MESSIAH figures are frustrated by the injustices of the modern world: They
Call me Carpenter (1922) is a delusional fantasy starring Jesus; Our Lady
(1938) is an effective timeslip story which brings the Blessed Virgin to
contemporary California; and What Didymus Did (1954 UK; vt It Happened to
Didymus 1958 US) is a dispirited account of the failure of a reluctant
miracle-worker commissioned by Heaven to spread spiritual enlightenment in
an unappreciative world. [BS]Other works: Plays of Protest (coll 1912)
includes Prince Hagen and a play featuring a female noble savage, The
Naturewoman; Co-op: A Novel of Living Together (1936 UK); The Gnomobile
(1936), a juvenile filmed by Disney as The Gnome-Mobile (1967); A Giant's
Strength: A Three-Act Drama of the Atomic Bomb (1947), a post- HOLOCAUST
play.See also: BOYS' PAPERS; ECONOMICS; POLITICS; THEATRE.
SINYAVSKY, ANDREY (DONATOVICH)
(1925- ) Russian dissident writer and literary critic who published the
manuscripts he smuggled into the West in the late 1950s and early 1960s
under the name Abram Tertz. His identity became known when the Soviet
authorities arrested him in 1966 and subjected him, along with his friend
and fellow dissident Yuli DANIEL (who wrote as Nikolai Arzhak), to a show
trial; both were imprisoned and subsequently exiled. Several of AS's
"fantastic stories" are of sf interest, most being assembled in
Fantasticheskiye Povesti (coll 1961 Paris; trans Max Hayward and R.
Hingley as The Icicle and Other Stories 1963 UK; vt Fantastic Stories 1963
US), though the most striking of all, "Pkhentz" (trans 1966; Russian text
in Fantasticheski Mir Abrama Tertza, coll 1967 US), was only later
smuggled to the West. In this story an ALIEN spaceship crashes in Russia
leaving only one survivor, who is forced to exist for years in a desperate
limbo under a false identity, passing for an ordinary citizen. "The
Icicle" (1961) features a man of whose clairvoyant powers the state makes
destructive use in its attempts to control the future. AS's finest novel,
Lyubimov (Washington 1964; trans Manya Harari as The Makepeace Experiment
1965 UK), tells with warmth and power of the transformation of a small
Russian village through the ability of one man to broadcast his will
hypnotically through space; when he loses this power, robot tanks regain
the village and he flees. The satirical implications of this allegorical
recasting of the triumph of communism in Russia are obvious. At the same

time, AS's satirical effects are mediated through an imagination deeply
Russian in its metaphysical, fundamentally religious, Slavophile bent; his
sf stories are slashing moral fables rather than political diatribes.
[JC]Other work: For Freedom of Imagination (coll trans Laszlo Tikos and
Murray Peppard 1971 US) contains speculations on the nature of sf.About
the author: On Trial: The Case of Sinyavsky (Tertz) and Daniel (Arzhak)
(1967) ed Leopold Lebedz and Max Hayward deals largely with AS, and
discusses his work in literary as well as political terms.See also:
TABOOS.
SIODMAK, CURT or KURT
(1902- ) German writer/film-director based in Hollywood who began to
publish adult stories in Germany as early as 1919, and whose first
English-language publication was "The Eggs from Lake Tanganyika" (1926
AMZ), a tale almost certainly translated from an earlier German version.
CS entered the film industry in 1929 as a screen-writer; his credits
include F.P.1 ANTWORTET NICHT (1932; vt F.P.1 DOESN'T ANSWER; based on his
own novel F.P.1 Antwortet Nicht [1932; trans H.W. Farrel as F.P.1 Does not
Reply 1933 US; vt F.P.1 Fails to Reply 1933 UK]). He emigrated to the USA
in 1937; his US screenplays (some co-authorships) include The Ape (1940),
The Invisible Man Returns (1940), The Invisible Woman (1940), Invisible
Agent (1942), The Wolf Man (1942), Son of Dracula (1943), Frankenstein
Meets the Wolf Man (1943), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), House of
Frankenstein (1944), The LADY AND THE MONSTER (1944; based on his novel
Donovan's Brain [1943], subsequently filmed again as DONOVAN'S BRAIN
[1953] and VENGEANCE [1963]), The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), Tarzan's
Magic Fountain (1949), RIDERS TO THE STARS (1953) and Creature with the
Atom Brain (1955). He also wrote the story for EARTH VS. THE FLYING
SAUCERS (1956; vt Invasion of the Flying Saucers). Later in his career he
also directed films, rather badly, including Bride of the Gorilla (1951),
The MAGNETIC MONSTER (1953) and Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956).
Although often involved with sf-oriented subjects, he never displayed much
understanding for the genre: like other German film-makers of his
generation, he was more at home with the GOTHIC (the supernatural, the
macabre and the grotesque) than with science, and such science as he
introduced tended to be for picturesque atmosphere. Donovan's Brain was
parodied in The MAN WITH TWO BRAINS (1983).CS has 35 movie credits in the
USA and 18 in Europe. Before emigrating he had 18 novels published in
Germany, F.P.1 Does Not Reply being the only one translated into English.
His novels in English, aside from Donovan's Brain - his most interesting are its belated sequel Hauser's Memory (1968), filmed as HAUSER'S MEMORY
(1970); Skyport (1959), The Third Ear (1971) and City in the Sky (1974),
the last dealing with rebellion in a prison satellite. Riders to the Stars
* (1953) was published as by CS and Robert Smith (1920- ), but CS's only
connection with it was the original screenplay. Hauser's Memory and The
Third Ear both feature spy-thriller plots and absurd experiments carried
out by biochemists; Gabriel's Body (1992) is an sf medical thriller.
[JB/PN]See also: CYBORGS; PSYCHOLOGY; TRANSPORTATION.
SIRIUS
Australian critical SEMIPROZINE, subtitled "The Australian Magazine for

readers of science fiction, fantasy and the macabre".Announced as
quarterly but slightly irregular,test issue #0 Sep 1992, #1 Mar 1993,seven
full issues to Mar 1995, A4 format, saddle-stapled, ed Garry Wyatt from
Canberra, pubGaslight Books Publications. S contains critical articles,
reviews, movie articles,checklists, annual round-ups, etc., some by
academics or professional authors, all quiteprofessionally presented, and
has confounded sceptics who doubted the market for a $7.50magazine (around
60 pages) in this area, by lasting out its first two years. The
intellectual quality,while uneven, is sometimes good. [GF]
SIRIUS
Magazine. YUGOSLAVIA.
SIRIUS VISIONS
US SEMIPROZINE, current, #1 1994, published eight times a year "on the
ancient Celtic holidays" by Claddagh Press,Portland, Oregon, five issues
to Feb 1995, ed Marybeth O'Halloran. SMALL-PRESS 16pp tabloid-format
fiction magazine, describing itself as a "magazine of speculative fiction,
humorous science fiction, fantasy and visionary fiction",but closer to
FANTASY than sf to date. In its first year it published stories by
Kristine Kathryn RUSCH, Dean Wesley SMITH, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, among
others, some of them sf. [GF]
SITWELL, [Sir] OSBERT
(1892-1969) UK writer. The title novella in Triple Fugue (coll 1924)
posits a 1948 world in which Trotsky is President of Russia and lifespans
have been trebled for the rich. The Man who Lost Himself (1929) tells the
complex psychological life-story of a man from his youth to his death
sometime after the middle of the 20th century. Miracle on Sinai (1933), a
discussion novel like several of H.G. WELLS's from this period, is set in
a luxury hotel near Mount Sinai and on the Mount itself, where a glowing
cloud deposits new Tablets of the Law, which are variously interpreted; in
the final chapter a cataclysmic war begins. A Place of One's Own (1941
chap) is a ghost story. Fee Fi Fo Fum!: A Book of Fairy Stories (coll
1959) assembles SATIRES. [JC]See also: TIME PARADOXES.
SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN, THE
US tv series (1973-8). A Silverton and Universal Production for ABC.
Executive prods Glen A. LARSON, Harve Bennett, Allan Balter. Prod Michael
Gleason, Lionel E. Siegel, Joe L. Cramer, Fred Freiberger. Based on the
novel Cyborg (1972) by Martin CAIDIN. The series began as a 90min ABC
"Wednesday Movie of the Week" in 1973; 2 more made-for-tv movies followed,
then the series: 5 seasons, 100 50min episodes. Colour.Lee Majors plays
Steve Austin, a former US Air Force astronaut who, after an accident in an
experimental aircraft, has his badly injured body rebuilt with artificial
parts (2 legs, 1 arm, 1 eye), becoming a CYBORG, though it is impossible
to tell externally which parts are artificial. His unique situation is
treated in purely comic-book terms for a presumably juvenile audience. He
becomes a latter-day SUPERMAN, able to perform feats of great strength and
move at incredible speeds, and is used as a special agent by a CIA-like
government organization. The basic premise of the series is
technologically absurd - while Austin's bionic arm might be able to

withstand lifting huge weights, the leverage would pull the rest of his
body apart. The success of the series resulted in a rather better spin-off
series, The BIONIC WOMAN . [JB]
SKAL, DAVID J(OHN)
(1952- ) US writer whose first novel, Scavengers (1980), suggests some sf
basis for a plot involving memory transfer in a corrupt world. His second,
When We Were Good (1981), evokes a powerful sense of cultural despair in
the tale of a sterile world in which genetically engineered hermaphrodites
fail to represent an emblem of hope for the terminal remnants of normal
humanity. A sense that DJS is by inclination a horror writer was
intensified by the entropic dismay evoked by Antibodies (1989), a short
accusatory trawl through Californian subcultures, where sf characters emit
pretentious twaddle about transcendence and the military-industrial
complex conspires to transform pseudo-hippies into spare computer parts;
all this is told with a sense of gnawing revulsion. Hollywood Gothic: The
Tangled Web of "Dracula" from Novel to Stage to Screen (1990), and The
Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (1993), are both extremely
competent nonfiction studies. [JC]See also: GENETIC ENGINEERING.
SKIFFY
SCI FI.
SKINNER, AINSLIE
Pseudonym used by US-born crime writer Paula Gosling (1939- ), resident
in the UK, for her sf novel Mind's Eye (1981; vt The Harrowing 1980 US),
which convincingly (and often movingly) depicts the scientific testing of
a girl possessed of ESP and the realization of the consequences of the
fact that this power is transferable to others. [JGr/JC]
SKINNER, B(URRHUS) F(REDERICK)
(1904-1990) US psychologist and writer whose cogently argued (and just as
cogently refuted) brand of behaviourism dominated that theory of
PSYCHOLOGY for many years in the USA, and provides the basic tenets for
his one work of fiction, Walden Two (1948), depicting a UTOPIA whose
inhabitants grow up as successful experiments in behavioural engineering.
The title refers, of course, to Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) by
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). Walden Two is conducted in the main as a
dialogue between Castle and Frazier, two colleagues of a professor named
Burris, a clear stand-in for the author himself. Frazier, who has founded
the colony, dismisses - as BFS later did himself in Beyond Freedom and
Dignity (1972) - the traditional notions of free will, and disparages
democratic forms of government; his opponent, Castle, argues for the
time-tested liberal solutions to the problems of human happiness. Burris
seems neutral, but the colony, with its creches, positive reinforcement
regimes and transparently happy residents, is obviously intended to
represent the power of Frazier's ideas. [JC]See also: SCIENTIFIC ERRORS;
SOCIOLOGY.
SKORPIOS, ANTARES
James William BARLOW.
SKY, KATHLEEN

(1943- ) US writer whose first genre story was "One Ordinary Day, with
Box" in Generation (anth 1972) ed David GERROLD. She was married to
Stephen GOLDIN 1972-82, and wrote with him The Business of Being a Writer
(1982). Her debut novel Birthright (1975) speculates emotionally about
distinctions between human and ANDROID after GENETIC ENGINEERING has
become a common practice. Her other work in the genre has also been
romantic, including 2 competent STAR-TREK ties, Vulcan! * (1978) and
Death's Angel * (1981), and the separate novels Ice Prison (1976) and
Witchdame (1985), the latter being a fantasy, and seemingly #1 in a
projected series. [PN]
SKYWORLDS
US DIGEST-size reprint magazine, subtitled "Classics in Science Fiction"
on #1, thereafter "Marvels in Science Fiction". 4 issues Nov 1977-Aug
1978, published by Humorama Inc., New York; ed Jeff Stevens (uncredited).
S reprinted mostly from MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES of 1950-52, material badly
dated by the 1970s and undistinguished when it had first appeared.
Production was terrible. [FHP/PN]
SLADEK, JOHN T(HOMAS)
(1937- ) US writer who spent two decades in the UK from 1966, becoming
involved in the UK NEW-WAVE movement centred on Michael MOORCOCK's NEW
WORLDS, and co-editing with Pamela ZOLINE Ronald Reagan: The Magazine of
Poetry (2 issues 1968), in which work by both editors, J.G. BALLARD,
Thomas M. DISCH and others appeared. In the mid-1980s he returned to
Minneapolis, a town which had long supplied local colour to many of his
more severely satirical stories, whose protagonists ricochet through their
preordained and absurd lives within the vast, hyperbolic flatlands of
middle America. This mise en scene, when illuminated by his adept control
of the language and pretensions of the modern bureaucratic state, provides
a matrix for his best work, and helps make plausible the frequent
comparisons that have been drawn between him and Kurt VONNEGUT Jr; but
Vonnegut has an easier emotional flow than JTS, while JTS lacks Vonnegut's
rhetoric and avoids his excessive simplicity of effect.He began writing sf
with "The Happy Breed", published in Harlan ELLISON's DANGEROUS VISIONS
(anth 1967), though his first published story was "The Poets of Millgrove,
Iowa" for NW in 1966; his first 2 novels - The House that Fear Built (1966
US) with Disch and The Castle and the Key (1967 US) - were GOTHICS, both
as by Cassandra Knye. His first sf novel, The Reproductive System (1968;
vt MECHASM 1969 US), introduced into his typical small-town-US setting a
brilliant maelstrom of sf activity: a self-reproducing technological
device goes out of control in passages of allegorical broadness, but
everything turns out all right in the end, though not through positive
efforts of the inept cast, and a dreamlike UTOPIA looms on the horizon;
governing the conniptions of the tale is an obsessive discourse upon and
dramatization of the metamorphic relationships between human and ROBOT, a
relationship which lies at the centre of all his subsequent solo novels
and much of his short fiction. His next book, however, Black Alice (1968
US) with Disch, both as Thom Demijohn, was a mystery novel, not sf. In
JTS's next sf book, The Muller-Fokker Effect (1970), a man's character is
transferred onto COMPUTER tape, and the dissemination of several copies of

this "personality" instigates a series of absurd events ( FABULATION),
some of them extremely comic in effect, some horrifying, all mounting to a
picture of a USA disintegrated morally and physically by its own surrender
to TECHNOLOGY, the profit motive and the ethical falseness that leads to
dehumanization. In its questioning of the nature of narrative events and
of fiction itself, the book is a significant example of modern US
self-analysis at its highly impressive best. In 1970 the book gained
little response, and for a decade JTS wrote no more sf novels.Through his
career, JTS has written numerous stories whose strenuous formal ingenuity,
and whose surreal combining of a deadpan ribaldry and pathos, have made
them underground classics of the genre. The most notable of them all,
because of its length and impassioned veracity of tone, may be "Masterson
and the Clerks" (1967), in which the immolation of its protagonists in the
process of a US business is first hilariously then movingly presented;
true to the oddly uncommercial course of his career, JTS collected this
tale only much later, in Alien Accounts (coll 1982). Previous collections
- The Steam-Driven Boy and Other Strangers (coll 1973), which contains
several superb parodies of well known sf writers ( SATIRE), and Keep the
Giraffe Burning (coll dated 1977 but 1978), selections from both vols
being brought together as The Best of John Sladek (coll 1981 US) - tended
to assemble stories which, perhaps more formally brilliant than
"Masterson", lack something of its human intensity. Later stories were
assembled in The Lunatics of Terra (coll 1984), in which the comic
melancholy of his early work wears a somewhat calmer guise. During the
1970s, when most of his stories became generally available, JTS published
two detective novels, Black Aura (1974) - which contains some
borderline-sf elements - and Invisible Green: A thackeray Phin Mystery
(1977), as well as a sequence of nonfiction texts of considerable
interest. The New Apocrypha: A Guide to Strange Sciences and Occult
Beliefs (1973) - all subsequent texts modified under threat of legal
action from the Church of Scientology - scathingly anatomizes the various
cults and PSEUDO-SCIENCES that exist as a kind of fringe around the sf
reader's areas of interest, from SCIENTOLOGY to VON DANIKEN. Arachne
Rising: The Thirteenth Sign of the Zodiac (1977; vt The Thirteenth Zodiac:
The Sign of Arachne 1979 ) as James Vogh, The Cosmic Factor (1978) as
James Vogh and Judgement of Jupiter (1980) as Richard A. Tilms were hoax
demonstrations of the kind of fringe theorizing that underpins the cults
described in The New Apocrypha.JTS then returned to sf with Roderick, or
The Education of a Young Machine (1980) and Roderick at Random, or Further
Education of a Young Machine (1983), 2 texts conceived as a single novel.
The US version, also entitled RODERICK (1982 US), constituted only about
two-thirds of the original RODERICK; the publisher had intended to make a
trilogy out of the 2-vol novel, but the project foundered, and only the
single savagely truncated vol appeared. The novel represents the
autobiography of the eponymous robot and is JTS's most ambitious work to
date, conveying with considerable ingenuity and some pathos its
protagonist's Candide-like innocence and its author's OULIPO-derived
numerological sense of narrative structure. Tik-Tok (1983), a thematic
pendant which again took its structure from the arbitrary rule-generating
principles of oulipo, follows the career of a robot who, once his "asimov
circuits" go on the blink, becomes criminally ambitious. Though robots

inevitably appear, Bugs (1989 UK) was JTS's first sf novel to feature a
"normal" human protagonist; and in its tracing of the deranging
experiences of a UK immigrant to a strange Midwestern city the tale could
be seen as guardedly autobiographical.As the most formally inventive, the
funniest, and very nearly the most melancholy of modern US sf writers, JTS
has always addressed the heart of the genre, but never spoken from it. We
need his attention: he deserves ours. [JC]Other works: Red Noise (1982
chap US); Flatland (1982 chap US); The Book of Clues (1984), a series of
short detective puzzles; Blood and Gingerbread (1990 chap).About the
author: A John Sladek Checklist (1984 chap) by Chris DRUMM.See also:
ABSURDIST SF; AUTOMATION; BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; HUMOUR;
LEISURE;
MACHINES; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; PARANOIA.
SLANT
UK FANZINE (1948-53) ed from Belfast by Walt Willis. Neatly hand-printed
on a small letterpress machine, and containing woodcut illustrations by
James WHITE and Bob SHAW, S is best remembered for introducing Irish
FANDOM (principally Willis, Shaw and White) to sf fandom at large; it also
contained fine pieces of humorous writing (continued in HYPHEN) and
featured fiction by authors such as Kenneth BULMER, John BRUNNER, A.
Bertram CHANDLER and Shaw. [PR]
SLATER, HENRY J.
(1879-1963) UK author whose work showed the influence of H.G. WELLS in
both Ship of Destiny (1951), where survivors of a HOLOCAUST sail across a
drowned world, and The Smashed World (1952), set 3000 years hence in a
World State which is destroyed by a reborn Napoleon. Some of HJS's effects
oddly prefigure the afterlife fantasies of Philip Jose FARMER. [JC]See
also: REINCARNATION.
SLATER, PHILIP (ELLIOT)
(1927- ) US writer who remains best known for acute analyses of Western
culture like The Pursuit of Loneliness (1970) and Earthwalk (1974). His
How I Saved the World (1985), about nuclear DISASTER, reiterates in
spoof-thriller guise the lessons urged in his nonfiction. [JC]
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE
Film (1972). Vanadas/Universal. Dir George Roy Hill, starring Michael
Sacks, Ron Leibman, Eugene Roche, Sharon Gans, Valerie Perrine. Screenplay
Stephen Geller, based on Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade
(1969) by Kurt VONNEGUT Jr. 104 mins. Colour.A middle-class, middle-aged
American (Sacks), dissatisfied with his job, marriage and life in general,
starts to experience sudden shifts in time, mainly back to when he was a
PoW in the German city of Dresden before its fire-bombing on a massive
scale by the Allies. He later experiences forward shifts in time to when
he has become a prisoner of the ALIEN Tralfamadorians, who keep him in a
zoo on their planet and provide him with a half-naked Hollywood starlet
for company. The novel's ABSURDIST disjunctions between the real horrors
of war and the minor horrors of suburban life are arguably satirical, and
certainly agonized, though arbitrary; here, with quite extraordinary
vulgarity, they become merely flippant, especially in the context of the

Tralfamadore sequences, where what is black in the book is merely
whimsical in the movie, which nevertheless won a 1973 HUGO. [JB/PN]
SLEATOR, WILLIAM (WARNER III)
(1945- ) US writer of books for older children. His first novel,
Blackbriar (1972), is an occult fantasy. Titles of sf interest include:
House of Stairs (1974), an attack on behavioural science and the
experiments to which it might lead; Green Futures of Tycho (1981), set in
a familiar version of the Solar System; Interstellar Pig (1984), which
intermixes gaming ( GAMES AND SPORTS) and ALIEN themes in the tale of a
game whose pieces represent moves in a nonhuman conflict; The Boy who
Reversed Himself (1986), about travel through the DIMENSIONS at some risk
to the lad; The Duplicate (1988), in which a machine CLONES duplicates of
a teenaged boy, all of them upset; and Strange Attractors (1990; vt
Strange Attractions 1991 UK), a TIME-TRAVEL tale. WS's range is wide, and
his recalcitrant protagonists stick doggedly in the reader's memory, but
he has a tendency sometimes to accept sf devices without much bothering to
examine them, and this in turn thins the texture of reality of his tales.
[JC]Other works: Among the Dolls (1975 chap), fantasy; Into the Dream
(1979); Fingers (1983); Singularity (1985); The Spirit House (1991);
Others See Us (1993).
SLEE, RICHARD
[r] Cornelia Atwood PRATT.
SLEEPER
Film (1973). Rollins-Joffe Productions/United Artists. Dir Woody Allen,
starring Allen, Diane Keaton, John Beck, Mary Gregory, Don Keefer.
Screenplay Allen, Marshall Brickman. 88 mins. Colour.The plot device of
having a man from the present suddenly finding himself in the future (this
time through CRYONICS) is nearly always used to comment on contemporary
society rather than to speculate about the future ( SLEEPER AWAKES). This,
one of Allen's best slapstick SATIRES, targets Nixon, health food, beauty
contests and revolutionary politics, but it does include genuinely
futuristic sf gags involving ROBOTS and robot pets, SEX practices and
artificial food (which has to be beaten into submission before it can be
served). One of the best sequences involves an attempt to CLONE a new body
from the nose of the country's assassinated dictator, the only bit left.
Allen is the always-anxious heath-food faddist who cannot come to terms
with the future's partiality to pleasure. The film won both HUGO and
NEBULA. [JB/PN]
SLEEPER AWAKES
As the 19th century progressed and the planet became more and more
thoroughly explored, authors of UTOPIAS and DYSTOPIAS began to abandon
present-day LOST WORLDS and ISLANDS as venues for their ideal societies,
and instead to locate their speculations in the future, perhaps hundreds
of years hence. Almost always these speculations were framed by prologues
(and sometimes epilogues) set at the time the novel was written; this
frame served to introduce the protagonist who was to travel into the
future and act the role of inquisitive visitor to the new world. The route
he (the protagonist was almost always male) generally took seems in

retrospect an odd one. Though TIME MACHINES were available to fiction
writers before the end of the century, they were rarely used, either by
utopian/dystopian speculators or by tellers of tales. Even H.G. WELLS, who
conceived perhaps the first imaginatively plausible device in THE TIME
MACHINE (1895), did not re-use the idea, even though the notion of an
instantaneous trip through time served one essential function for the
writer who wished to illuminate the world to come: it brought the then and
the now into abrupt and glaring contrast. When Wells came to write his
first dystopia, When the Sleeper Wakes (1899; rev vt The Sleeper Awakes
1910), he fell back on the convention of the protagonist who falls asleep
in the present day and wakes again in the future. Not for the first time
in his career, he did not invent but gave definitive form to (and named,
in the vt) a significant sf theme or motif.The sleeper-awakes device
shares with TIME TRAVEL, however, the capacity to transit centuries in the
turning of a page, so that the essential function of contrast between the
then and the now can be retained in exemplary focus. The two most famous
late-19th-century utopias in the English language, Edward BELLAMY's
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) and William MORRIS's News from Nowhere
(1890 US), took advantage of the device to sharpen contrasts throughout.
Many less famous titles, like Ismar THIUSEN's The Diothas (1883), also
utilized it. In his Science Fiction: The Early Years (1991), E.F. BLEILER
lists about 40 further novels and stories published before 1930 - by no
means all of them utopias or dystopias - which feature an awakened
sleeper. Few have retained much popularity, although Alvarado M. FULLER's
A.D. 2000 (1890), W.H. HUDSON's A Crystal Age (1887; rev 1906), Horace
W.C. NEWTE's The Master Beast (1907; vt The Red Fury 1919) and Edward
SHANKS's The People of the Ruins (1920) remain of some interest.It is hard
to escape the sense that the sleeper-awakes structure betrayed, even
before the beginning of the 20th century, an undue fastidiousness of
imagination, and that some straightforward magic (like a time machine)
might always have been a more elegant option; even more attractive to the
imagination, of course, would have been a story which did not need a
time-frame or anchor to make its point about the worlds to come, or to
thrill its readers with the new. One of the centrally important
accomplishments of GENRE SF has been the abandonment of the anchor of the
present day, for most genre sf is set unabashedly in the future, and needs
no present-day protagonist to reassure its readers of the imaginative
reality of the new worlds. A non-genre writer like J. Leslie MITCHELL
might still hint at something along the lines of the device when he sent
the eponymous heroine of Gay Hunter (1934) 20,000 years hence, but few
sleepers-awake stories appeared in genre sf until the development of the
notion of the GENERATION STARSHIP, in the bowels of which might repose
thousands of humans in SUSPENDED ANIMATION; and, anyway, here the sleepers
tend not to be the protagonists of the tale - it is their shepherds, in
the here and now of the narrative, who generally fill that role. Only
occasionally - as in Orson Scott CARD's Hot Sleep (fixup 1979) - will a
sleeper awake from generation-starship solitude as protagonist in a
changed world. Other genre-sf examples of the device either - like Mack
REYNOLDS's Looking Backward, from the Year 2000 (1973) - are introduced as
a homage, or - as in T.J. BASS's remarkable Half Past Human (fixup 1971) are integrated into genre pyrotechnics that far transcend the original

simplicity of the notion. But these are eccentric examples. When, after
1926, the future became domesticated as a venue for the imagination, the
sleeper-awakes tale faded away.There are also many tales in both
19th-century sf and genre sf which feature a figure from the past who
awakens into the present. Indeed, this is a far older theme, growing
perhaps from legends like that of Sleeping Beauty and famously given new
life by Washington Irving (1783-1859) in "Rip Van Winkle" (in The Sketch
Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent [in parts 1819-20]), whose lazy protagonist
falls asleep in the Catskills for 20 years. Modern tales of this sort
rarely focus on the awakened sleeper, but on the impact that an intruder
from beyond, whose responses to us may well be inappropriate or alien,
might have upon our own world. [JC]
SLEEPING DOGS
NEW ZEALAND.
SLESAR, HENRY
(1927- ) US writer who began his career in advertising. He started to
publish sf with "The Brat" for Imaginative Tales in 1955. Of his several
hundred stories, about a third have been sf or fantasy, most of them
appearing in his first decade as a writer; many are as by O.H. Leslie. He
is best known for his work in the mystery field, with a number of
thrillers from The Gray Flannel Shroud (1958), which won an Edgar,
onwards. Among them was a borderline-sf tale, The Bridge of Lions (1963);
closely connected to this kind of work was his stint as headwriter for the
US daytime suspense serial, The Edge of Night, in the late 1950s and
1960s. Other tv work included 24 episodes for Alfred Hitchcock Presents
(1955-61), The Virtue Affair for The MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. in 1965, and at
least 100 additional scripts, many of them fantasy or sf. His one sf book
has been the novelization of TWENTY MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957; 1957),
published as #1 in the abortive AMAZING STORIES SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS
series. [JC/PN]See also: PSI POWERS.
SLICKS
BEDSHEET; DIGEST; PULP MAGAZINES.
SLIPSTREAM
Film (1989). Entertainment Film Productions. Prod Gary Kurtz. Dir Steven
M. Lisberger, starring Bill Paxton, Bob Peck, Mark Hamill, Kitty Aldridge,
Eleanor David, Ben Kingsley. Screenplay Tony Kayden, based on a story by
Bill Bauer. 102 mins. Colour.Unspecified ecological rape has led to great
earthquakes and geological changes all over the world. A strong, constant
"river" of wind, the Slipstream, blows always in one direction across a
scarred landscape which confusingly alternates between scenes shot in
Yorkshire and in Turkey. Eccentric remnants of civilization persist in
isolated pockets; transport is, inexplicably, by microlight aircraft. A
supposedly criminal ANDROID (Peck) is hunted by a psychotic cop (Hamill)
and protected by a young bounty hunter (Paxton). The post- HOLOCAUST
scenario is intriguing, the execution is dreadful. Kurtz, who produced
STAR WARS (1977), was attempting a come-back here, along with Star Wars
star Hamill; both failed. A few powerful moments focus on Peck's
intelligent performance as the Christlike healer-android. Lisberger's

previous sf film, TRON (1982), was not bad, and one can only wonder why
this apparently promising project suffered from murky photography,
confused editing and an incoherent and pretentious script. [PN]
SLIPSTREAM SF
A term devised, apparently by Bruce STERLING - in part as a pun on, or
echo of, MAINSTREAM - to designate stories which make use of sf devices
but which are not GENRE SF. The image is either nautical or aeronautical:
a ship or an airplane (either of which stands for genre sf) can create a
slipstream which may be strong enough to give non-paying passengers (Paul
THEROUX, say) a ride. As a description of commercial piggybacking, the
term seems apt; however, when used to designate the whole range of
non-genre sf here called FABULATION (which see for discussion), the term which implies a relationship of dependency - can seem derogatory. [JC]
SLOANE, T(HOMAS) O'CONOR
(1851-1940) US editor and author of popular scientific works. He was
associate editor (designated managing editor for #1) of AMAZING STORIES
and of AMAZING STORIES QUARTERLY from the beginning, and carried much
responsibility for the actual running of the magazines, although they were
in the overall charge of, successively, Hugo GERNSBACK and Arthur Lynch.
He succeeded to the editorship of both journals in 1929. Amazing Stories
Quarterly ceased publication in 1934, but he retained the editorship of
AMZ until June 1938, when the ailing magazine was sold to the
Chicago-based ZIFF-DAVIS. Nearing his 80th year when he finally succeeded
to the editorship, TOS had a long white beard and an appropriately Rip Van
Winkle-like approach to the job; though he worked for 12 years on SF
MAGAZINES, he stated publicly (in a 1929 AMZ editorial) his belief that
Man would never achieve space travel. AMZ nevertheless bought the first
stories of such writers as E.E. SMITH, John W. CAMPBELL Jr and Jack
WILLIAMSON; but the combination of poor payment and slack management made
it inevitable that writers of any calibre would soon move to more
attractive markets. TOS actually lost the manuscript of Campbell's first
story, and returned Clifford D. SIMAK's first submission after 4 years'
silence, remarking that it was "a bit dated". He was more than once fooled
into publishing plagiarisms. On one occasion (Feb 1933) he printed a story
("The Ho-Ming Gland" by Malcolm R. Afford) which had already appeared in
WONDER STORIES (Jan 1931): the author had submitted the story to TOS 4
years earlier but, having heard nothing after a year, had sold it to the
rival magazine.TOS, a PhD, had been an inventor, and his son married a
daughter of a more celebrated inventor, Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931).
[MJE]
SLOANE, WILLIAM M(ILLIGAN)
(1906-1974) US playwright, novelist and publisher whose interest in the
occult was reflected in his sf novels, To Walk the Night (1937; rev 1954)
and The Edge of Running Water (1939; vt The Unquiet Corpse 1946), both
later assembled as The Rim of Morning (omni 1964); along with 1 story,
"Let Nothing You Dismay" (1954), they are all the sf he wrote. The first
complexly combines horror and sf in the story of an ALIEN entrapped in a
human life as the widow of a famous physicist, in whose death she seems
implicated; the story is absorbing and polished. The second, rather

similarly, features a scientist's attempts to communicate with his dead
wife and to revive her; horrors ensue, and local prejudice exacts its
toll. WMS also ed 2 sf anthologies, Space, Space, Space (anth 1953) and
Stories for Tomorrow (anth 1954); the latter was one of the finest
collections of its period. [JC]
SLOCOMBE, GEORGE (EDWARD)
(1894-1963) UK writer whose Dictator (1932), set in an imaginary European
country, describes the rise of a tyranny there. Escape into the Past
(1943) features an artist's wife who escapes irrevocably into the 17th
century. [JC]
SLONCZEWSKI, JOAN (LYN)
(1956- ) US writer and professor of biology, specializing in genetics,
who began publishing sf with her first novel, Still Forms on Foxfield
(1980), a tale in which most of her subsequent concerns take initial
shape. A human community of Quakers, having fled an apparently doomed
Earth and establishing on the planet Foxfield a sane and ECOLOGY-obedient
relationship with the native species, is contacted centuries later by a
technologically resurgent humanity and must now deal with the challenge to
its ways. Significantly, the book deals not with rediscovery - an old and
typically triumphalist sf theme - but with being discovered, a point of
view reiterated in her second and best known novel, A Door into Ocean
(1986), which won the JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD. The planet (in fact
a moon) is in this case water-covered and inhabited by WOMEN, who thwart a
military invasion; the book teaches some sharp FEMINIST lessons en
passant. The sequel, Daughter of Elysium (1993), broadens the terms of
discourse - several contrasting societies are portrayed - at some cost to
narrative vigour, though sharp subtle observations constantly, as before,
prickle and amuse.The Wall around Eden (1989), set on a devastated postHOLOCAUST Earth, provides its female protagonist with numbing challenges
of comprehension (the supervising ALIENS are invisible and their
insect-like culture may in fact have been decorticated - i.e., its central
control systems may have been destroyed) and response, with no clear
answers available in the waste. From the slightly sentimentalized burden
of her first book, JS has moved rapidly into supple command of her ample
concerns. [JC]See also: PASTORAL; UNDER THE SEA.
SLOVAK SF
CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
SLUSSER, GEORGE EDGAR
(1939- ) US academic and critic with a PhD in literature from Harvard. He
is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California,
Riverside, and Curator of the J. LLOYD EATON COLLECTION there; he is also
Director of the Eaton Program for Science Fiction and Fantasy Studies,
which is devoted to research. GES has written and edited a number of
critical books on sf, and has also translated sf-related works by Honore
de BALZAC and J.H. ROSNY aine.His critical books, all from BORGO PRESS,
are Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in His Own Land (chap 1976; rev 1977),
The Farthest Shores of Ursula K. Le Guin (chap 1976), The Bradbury
Chronicles (chap 1977), Harlan Ellison: Unrepentant Harlequin (chap 1977),

The Delany Intersection (chap 1977), The Classic Years of Robert A.
Heinlein (chap 1977) and The Space Odysseys of Arthur C. Clarke (chap
1978).Anthologies of critical essays ed GES, most collecting papers
delivered at the annual Eaton Conference on fantasy and sf, and generally
edited collaboratively with other academics involved in the Conference,
are Bridges to Science Fiction (anth 1980) ed with George R. Guffey and
Mark ROSE, Bridges to Fantasy (anth 1982) ed with Eric RABKIN and Robert
SCHOLES, Co-Ordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy (anth 1983) ed
with Rabkin and Scholes, Shadows of the Magic Lamp: Fantasy and Science
Fiction in Film (anth 1985) ed with Rabkin, Hard Science Fiction (anth
1986) ed with Rabkin, Storm Warnings: Science Fiction Confronts the Future
(anth 1987) ed with Rabkin and Colin GREENLAND, Intersections: Fantasy and
Science Fiction (anth 1987) ed with Rabkin, Aliens: The Anthropology of
Science Fiction (anth 1987) ed with Rabkin,Mindscapes: The Geographies of
Imagined Worlds (anth 1989) ed with Rabkin, Styles of Creation: Aesthetic
Technique and the Creation of Fictional Worlds (anth 1992) with Rabkin,
Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative (anth 1992) with Tom
SHIPPEY, Fights of Fancy: Armed Conflict in Science Fiction and Fantasy
(anth 1993) with Rabkin and Styles of Creation: Aesthetic Technique and
the Creation of Fictional Worlds (anth 1993) with Rabkin. By academic
standards, at least, GES is a controversialist. On receiving the PILGRIM
AWARD for services to sf criticism and scholarship in 1986, he argued that
"we need to get sf out of the English department" into comparative
literature, interdisciplinary studies or even as "a discipline in itself".
[PN]See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; CINEMA; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT
SF.
SMALL, AUSTIN J(AMES)
(1894-1929) UK adventure and thriller writer, born Austin Small Major,
though his death certificate gives AJS. He wrote 3 books of sf interest.
In Master Vorst (1926; vt The Death Maker 1926 US) an insane plan to kill
off the human race by germ warfare is thwarted in the nick of time. The
Man They Couldn't Arrest (1927) is a mystery novel incorporating unusual
devices and inventions into the plot. The Avenging Ray (1930), as Seamark,
again features a mad scientist intent upon destroying the world, his
WEAPON in this case being a "Degravitisor" DEATH-RAY. The title story of
Out of the Dark (coll 1931, assembled after the author's suicide) as by
Seamark features a were-leopard. [JC/JE]
SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS
1. The USA Any firm founded to release work of personal interest to the
publisher, and which distributes that work to readers whose interest can
also be assumed, may be called a small press. Four years before Hugo
GERNSBACK began AMAZING STORIES in 1926, The Lunar Publishing Company of
Providence, Kentucky, was founded by friends of the author of the book it
had been created in order to publish - and then folded. To the Moon and
Back in Ninety Days: A Thrilling Narrative of Blended Science and
Adventure (1922) by John Young Brown (1858-1921) was a genuine exercise in
Gernsbackian sf, featuring a ship driven by ANTIGRAVITY plus lessons in
ASTRONOMY and other sciences. It may have been the first GENRE-SF novel to
reach book form in the USA; it was certainly the first such novel to be

published for an affinity readership.Several years passed, however, before
the Lunar example was followed for sf publications; for more than a
decade, the only small-press activity of genre interest took place in the
fields of FANTASY and HORROR. The writers who formed a circle around H.P.
LOVECRAFT - they included Robert E. HOWARD, Frank Belknap LONG, Edgar
Hoffman PRICE, Clark Ashton SMITH and Donald WANDREI - all found it
difficult to publish with conventional houses, and when W. Paul Cook
(1881-1948), a friend of Lovecraft's and editor of some influential early
APAS, decided in 1925 to move into PUBLISHING they were happy to
contemplate having material released by his Recluse Press. In the event,
its sole publications of interest were Long's first book, A Man from Genoa
(coll 1926 chap), Wandrei's first book, Ecstasy (coll 1928 chap), and
Lovecraft's The Shunned House (1928 chap), only a very few copies of which
were bound. Another start-and-stop small press, The ARRA Printers run by
Conrad H. Ruppert, released 4 pamphlets in the early 1930s as a sidebar to
FANTASY MAGAZINE, including Allen GLASSER's The Cavemen of Venus (1932
chap), which seems to have been the first independent work of fiction
produced from within fandom.The most important figure in this first
flowering of the small press - although the quality of his work aroused
controversy in the field - may have been William L. CRAWFORD (whom see for
details of his long career), who began in imitation of Ruppert as a
magazine producer, and who similarly moved into books; operating as
Fantasy Pubs., his first release was Men of Avalon/The White Sybil (anth
1935 chap), which featured a story each by David H. KELLER and Clark
Ashton Smith, and he continued with Mars Mountain (1935) by Eugene George
KEY. More importantly, operating as Visionary Publishing Company, he then
released The Shadow over Innsmouth (1937) by Lovecraft. It is worth noting
that Crawford, like his predecessors, clearly found it easier to publish
fantasy than sf; it was not until after WWII that any significant sf, with
one exception, reached book form via the small presses; that exception was
Dawn of Flame and Other Stories (coll 1936) by Stanley G. WEINBAUM, a
memorial volume put together by The Milwaukee Fictioneers, a fan group
whose members included, among others, Robert BLOCH, Ralph Milne FARLEY and
Raymond A. PALMER, and which would soon be seen as of great importance.
But when in 1939 August DERLETH and Wandrei founded ARKHAM HOUSE:
PUBLISHERS - which soon became and which remains the most famous of all
small presses - they were inspired by Crawford's publication of the
Lovecraft title. The reasons for this dominance of fantasy are not
entirely clear, but probably come down to accidents of personality and
opportunity: the early small presses could be described as close-knit
"family" endeavours, and their publications were released to an extremely
narrow group of buyers; and the Lovecraft circle, active through the 1920s
and 1930s, was exactly the sort of "family" required for primitive
small-press activities. It was only after sf FANDOM became properly
organized at the end of the 1930s that sf itself was able to give birth to
the "family" firms that multiplied after WWII.It all changed after 1945.
Crawford himself began to publish sf with real frequency in 1947, when he
founded FANTASY PUBLISHING COMPANY INC. (better known as FPCI), but by
then he found himself sharing the sf world with several other new houses,
including FANTASY PRESS, founded by Lloyd Arthur ESHBACH in 1946, GNOME
PRESS, founded by David A. KYLE and Martin GREENBERG in 1948, the HADLEY

PUBLISHING COMPANY, founded by Donald M. Grant (1927- ) and Thomas G.
Hadley in 1946, PRIME PRESS, founded by Oswald TRAIN and others in 1947,
The Avalon Company, founded in 1947 by Will Sykora (1913-1994), which
published only one title, Life Everlasting and Other Tales of Science,
Fantasy and Horror (coll 1947) by David H. KELLER, and SHASTA PUBLISHERS,
founded by T.E. DIKTY (whom see for details of his long career), Erle
Melvin Korshak and Mark Reinsberg in 1947. For almost a decade from 1946
these small presses - along with a few even smaller enterprises dominated sf publishing. Various factors came together to explain this
dominance: general-list firms had not yet discovered the field, while at
the same time an influx of young men, all potential readers and
book-buyers, had been released from military service; a large backlog of
GENRE SF had built up in the magazines, including work by several
prominent authors who were eager to see their material in book form; the
genre was now old enough to have a past worthy of celebration, and had
gained through the workings of fandom a singularly loyal readership; and
the men (no women were importantly involved) who wished to celebrate the
genre by publishing its works were now, most of them, mature and
experienced enough to operate small publishing firms with some chance of
success. For almost a decade from 1946, the fans and writers of sf seemed
to be in control of their own house. For many still alive, those years
were the true GOLDEN AGE OF SF.By the middle of the 1950s, however, almost
all the small presses were moribund or dead, crushed by the rise of the
paperback ( ACE BOOKS; BALLANTINE BOOKS; BANTAM BOOKS) and the incursion
of general publishers (like DOUBLEDAY and Scribners) into what had become
a profitable market; in 1995, limited editions remain comparatively
difficult to market. Arkham House survived, and some small presses devoted
in the main to nonfiction - like ADVENT: PUBLISHERS from 1956, Jack L.
CHALKER's MIRAGE PRESS from 1961, Lloyd C. CURREY's and David G.
HARTWELL's Dragon Press from 1971, and Dikty's FAX COLLECTOR'S EDITIONS
and STARMONT HOUSE from 1972 - continued to produce work. But genre sf, it
seemed, had outgrown its familial dependence on fans; it had entered the
commercial world, and what small presses remained could hope only to
service the fringes of the genre, supplying readers with books of
criticism (until the academic houses began to sense that sf might be a
growth subject), fan BIBLIOGRAPHIES and indexes, and memoirs. Or so it
seemed.There is no doubt that in the 1990s general publishers still
dominate commercial sf; but from the early 1970s small presses began to
reappear, for reasons which are not entirely understood. Owlswick Press
was founded by George SCITHERS in 1973, Robert Weinberg Publications by
Robert E. WEINBERG in 1974, the BORGO PRESS by Robert REGINALD in 1975,
UNDERWOOD-MILLER INC. by Tim UNDERWOOD and Chuck MILLER in 1976, Phantasia
Press by Sid Altus and Alex Berman in 1978, Locus Press by Charles N.
BROWN in 1981 (with an emphasis on reference material), MARK V. ZIESING by
Ziesing in 1982, and Dark Harvest by Paul Mikol and Mark Stadalsky in 1983
(with an emphasis on fantasy). Many more followed, including (most
importantly) PULPHOUSE PUBLISHING, founded by Kristine Kathryn RUSCH, Dean
Wesley SMITH and others in 1988. Two fine presses (see below) were also
active: Roy A. Squires, founded by Squires (1920-1988) in 1960, and Cheap
Street, founded by Jan and George O'Nale in 1980.Though nothing can be
certain in a field which has expanded so very much, three broad sets of

explanations for the small-press renaissance can be suggested: a desire on
the part of new generations of sf aficionados to re-occupy the "family"
territory, which had for so many years been spoken for by ever-huger
publishing firms whose interest in sf was (understandably) merely
commercial; a sense that the large general-list firms tended to ignore
some writers whose sales potential was limited, and who might profitably
be published by a press with an affinity for the author or the material;
and a more general sense that small presses might profitably occupy niches
left vacant by the commercial houses.There are several such niches.
Because paperback houses became the dominant form of sf publishing after
the early 1950s, the work of many significant post-WWII authors appeared
only in the form of paperback originals, and by the 1970s a second pool of
publishable work - larger in fact than the pool of material available just
after WWII - had accumulated. Many of the small presses, therefore,
concentrated on republishing, in hardback, novels from the previous two
decades, thus putting some of the best sf into permanent form, generating
library sales for their authors, and making their oeuvres available - a
mixed blessing, perhaps - to academics. A second important niche was the
collectors' market, which could itself be divided into three sectors:
first editions, limited editions, and fine-press productions.For many sf
collectors - whose rationality on the subject is a matter of dispute - the
publication of a book as a paperback original does not constitute its
first edition as a collectable item, which status is reserved for the
first hardback publication. Small-press publishers were very quick to
understand and to profit from this bias, and the entirely responsible
republication in hardback form of fragile paperback originals soon became
somewhat tainted by fetishism, especially when limited editions became
popular.Limited editions are generally thought to be independently created
books, identifiable by some statement of limitation, which usually gives
the total number of copies produced along with a handwritten or
hand-stamped number indicating which precise copy is in the collector's
hands. They are often signed. Many collectors assume that limited editions
by definition boast at least subtle differences in typesetting, binding or
paper quality from the trade issue; unfortunately, this is not always the
case, and many are distinguishable from the trade issue by no more than a
tipped-in label designating them as special. This practice - added to the
extraordinary proliferation of limited editions of unremarkable work, plus
the quite astonishing ugliness of many small-press releases - has not
unsurprisingly led to a 1990s glut in the limited-edition market; in 1995,
limited editions remain comparatively difficult to market.In distinction
to this crassness, publishers of fine-press books like Roy A. Squires and
Cheap Street have concentrated on the individual crafting of extremely
small editions of books produced on the premises by letterpress (a
technique of printing directly from movable metal type, an expensive and
slow typesetting process otherwise rarely encountered in book-production
today). However, because such items are relatively expensive and are
purchased by a very particular kind of book collector, it cannot be argued
that fine presses represent a return to the roots of the fantasy and sf
small press. Those roots continue to be watered, though intermittently, by
the small presses cited above, and by dozens of other similar houses.
Refreshingly opinionated, though occasionally inaccurate, The

Science-Fantasy Publishers: A Critical and Bibliographic History (3rd,
hugely expanded edn 1991; various revs whose presence must be discovered,
as copyright data do not reflect them) by Jack L. CHALKER and Mark OWINGS
provides a comprehensive analysis of about 150 firms.2. Other countries
There is little to say about small-press activity in other
English-speaking countries before the past couple of decades.The
Australian Futurian Press, founded in Sydney in 1950 by Vol MOLESWORTH and
others, operated for a few years; and Donald H. TUCK formed Donald H. Tuck
in 1954 to publish the first versions of what became the essential
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy through 1968 (3 vols 1974,
1978 and 1982, all US, from Advent). Two decades later, however, with the
founding of two houses - Norstrilia Press in 1975 by Bruce GILLESPIE and
Void Publications ( VOID) by Paul COLLINS in 1978 - small presses finally
became a visible component of AUSTRALIA's sf scene. Later imprints include
Graham Stone from 1989, Aphelion Publications from 1990 and Dreamstone
from 1991. However, Norstrilia and Void stopped publishing in 1984 and the
other firms are frail. CANADA saw even less activity than Australia,
perhaps because Canadian sf fans had readily available to them the
formidable output of US small presses. Occasional imprints appeared - like
the Kakabeka Publishing Company, which published Judith MERRIL's Survival
Ship (coll 1973) and some non-sf books. More recently, the Press Porcepic
issued an anthology of Canadian sf, Tesseracts (anth 1985) ed Merril, the
first in a series, and subsequently calved a second small press, Tesseract
Books, in 1988. And United Mythologies Press was founded in 1990
essentially to print unpublished works by R.A. LAFFERTY, though it soon
began to look further afield.In the UK, small-press publishing did not
awake sustained interest among the sf community until the 1980s, the only
example of an interest from earlier being Ferret Fantasy, founded by
George LOCKE in 1972 mainly to publish bibliographical work plus
occasional reprints. However, with the founding of Kerosina Publications
in 1986 by James Goddard and several colleagues, a small flowering
occurred. Morrigan Publications was founded in 1987 by Jim and Les Escott,
Kinnell Publications in 1987 by A.E. Cunningham and Richard G. Lewis, and
Drunken Dragon Press in 1988 by Rod Milner and Rog Peyton; by 1995,
however, all these firms had either formally given up the ghost, or were
inactive. Slightly earlier, Titan Books, an arm of the Forbidden
Planet/Titan bookselling and distribution complex, was brought into
existence as a small press, but by 1990 (after 3 books) it had moved into
general publishing; in late 1992 it was in the throes of restructuring and
takeover. However, none of these firms - with the exception of Kerosina
for a year or so - has published original UK work with enough frequency to
make a significant impact. [JC]
SMITH, A(NTHONY) C(HARLES)
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
SMITH, ARTEGALL
Philip NORTON.
SMITH, CLARK ASHTON
(1893-1961) US writer and sculptor, of most interest to the sf reader as
a fantasist whose rich style (sometimes idiomatic, sometimes "jewelled" in

the Lord DUNSANY manner) and baroque invention had a loosening effect on
the sf field, doing much to transform the interplanetary romance of the
early years of the century into the full-fledged PLANETARY ROMANCE, whose
characteristic attitude towards the FAR FUTURE and the possibilities
inherent therein was capitalized upon by Jack VANCE and others.By 1910 CAS
had sold stories to The Black Cat and The OVERLAND MONTHLY , but he
concentrated on poetry (see listing below). Although he published some
desultory fantasy before 1930, almost all his work of note within the
genre, commencing with "The Last Incantation" (1930), was written for PULP
MAGAZINES - most frequently Weird Tales, occasionally Wonder Stories from that date to about 1936, when he virtually stopped writing. Of most
importance as an influence on sf was "City of the Singing Flame" (1931;
1940), notable for the power of the SENSE OF WONDER it evoked. These
stories, over 100 of them, can be found in The Immortals of Mercury (1932
chap), The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (coll 1933 chap), Out of
Space and Time (coll 1942; in 2 vols 1974 UK), Lost Worlds (coll 1944; in
2 vols vt Lost Worlds: Zothique, Averoigne, and Others 1974 UK and Lost
Worlds: Atlantis, Hyperborea, Xiccarph, and Others 1974 UK) - which
includes Sadastor (1930 Weird Tales; 1972 chap) - Genius Loci and Other
Tales (coll 1948), The Abominations of Yondo (coll 1960), Poems in Prose
(coll 1964 chap), Tales of Science and Sorcery (coll 1964) and Other
Dimensions (coll 1970; in 2 vols 1977 UK). The last 2 collections contain
most of his sf, most of it interplanetary SPACE OPERA. Subsequently, Lin
CARTER reassembled those of CAS's tales set in particular venues and
republished them as Zothique (coll of linked stories 1970), Hyperborea
(coll of linked stories 1971), Xiccarph (coll of stories, some linked,
1972) and Poseidonis (coll of linked stories 1973).CAS was not much
interested in science, or in expressing the forward thrust of conventional
sf, and it is perhaps inadvisable to think of him in sf terms. His work is
better considered in conjunction with the weird fantasies written by his
friend H.P. LOVECRAFT and by Robert E. HOWARD. His best work has not
dated. [JC/PN]Other works: The Mortuary (1971 chap); Prince Alcouz and the
Magician (1977 chap), previously unpublished early tale; The City of the
Singing Flame (coll 1981), which assembles previously collected material;
As it is Written (1982), written as CAS by De Lysle Ferree Cass; The Last
Incantation (coll 1982); The Monster of the Prophecy (coll 1983); the
Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith sequence, comprising The Dweller in the
Gulf (cut 1933 as "Dweller in Martian Depths"; 1987 chap), Mother of Toads
(cut 1938 Weird Tales; 1987 chap), The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis (cut 1932
Weird Tales; 1988 chap), The Monster of the Prophecy (cut 1932 Weird
Tales; 1988 chap), The Witchcraft of Ulua (cut 1934 Weird Tales; 1988
chap) and Xeethra (cut 1934 Weird Tales; 1988 chap); Nostalgia of the
Unknown: Complete Prose Poetry (coll 1988 chap); A Rendezvous in Averoigne
(coll 1988); Strange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays (coll
1989).Poetry: The Star-Treader (coll 1912); Odes and Sonnets (coll 1918
chap); Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Verse and Prose (coll 1923), which
includes From the Crypts of Memory (1973 chap) and The Hashish-Eater, or
The Apocalypse of Evil (1989 chap); Sandalwood (coll 1925 chap); Nero and
Other Poems (coll 1937 chap); The Dark Chateau (coll 1951 chap); Selected
Poems (coll 1971); Grotesques and Fantastiques (coll 1973 chap), which
includes drawings; Klarkash-ton and Monstro Lieriv (coll 1974 chap) with

Virgil FINLAY; many further vols, usually chapbooks, have been
issued.Nonfiction: Planets and Dimensions: Collected Essays (coll 1973
chap) ed Charles K. Wolfe (brother of Gary K. WOLFE); The Black Book of
Clark Ashton Smith (coll 1979); The Devil's Notebook: Collected Epigrams
and Pensees (coll 1990 chap).About the author: Emperor of Dreams: A Clark
Ashton Smith Bibliography (1978) by Donald Sydney-Fryer.See also: ARKHAM
HOUSE; ASTEROIDS; ATLANTIS; HORROR IN SF; MARS; MERCURY; PARALLEL
WORLDS;
SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS; SUN; SWORD AND SORCERY;
TRANSPORTATION; VENUS.
SMITH, CORDWAINER
Most famous pseudonym of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913-1966), US
writer, political scientist, military adviser in Korea and Malaya (though
not Vietnam). A polyglot, he spent many of his early years in Europe,
Japan and China, in the footsteps of his father, Paul M.W. Linebarger, a
sinologist and propagandist for Sun Yat-sen. He was a devout High
Anglican, deeply interested in psychoanalysis and expert in "brainwashing"
techniques, on which he wrote an early text, Psychological Warfare (1948;
rev 1954). Right-wing in politics, he played an active role in propping up
the Chiang Kai-shek regime in China before the communist takeover.His
interest in China was profound - he studied there, and there edited his
father's The Gospel of Chuang Shan (1932 chap France), writing as well
several texts of his own, beginning with Government in Republican China
(1938); the style of some of his later stories reflects his attempts to
translate a Chinese narrative and structural style into his sf writing,
not perhaps with complete success, as the fabulist's voice he assumed (
FABULATION) verged towards the garrulous when opened out into English
prose. He began to publish sf with "War No. 81-Q" as by Karloman Jungahr
for The Adjutant - a high-school journal - in 1928; the tale bore some
relationship to the Instrumentality of Mankind Universe into which almost
all his mature work fitted. Before beginning to write that mature work,
however, CS served with the US Army Intelligence Corps in China during
WWII and published 3 non-sf novels: Ria (1947) and Carola (1948), both as
by Felix C. Forrest, and Atomsk: A Novel of Suspense (1949) as by
Carmichael Smith. After that date he published fiction only as CS.His
first CS story, and one of the finest of his mature tales, "Scanners Live
in Vain" (1950), appeared obscurely in FANTASY BOOK 5 years after it had
been rejected by the more prestigious sf journals (although John W.
CAMPBELL Jr had penned an encouraging rejection note from ASF), perhaps
because its foreboding intensity made the editors of the time uneasy,
perhaps because it plunges in medias res into the Instrumentality
Universe, generating a sense that much remains untold beyond the dark
edges of the tale. Scanners are space pilots; the rigours of their job
entail the functional loss of the sensory region of their brains. The
story deals with their contorted lives and with the end of the form of
space travel necessitating the contortions: it is clear that much has
happened in the Universe before the tale begins, and that much will ensue.
The Instrumentality dominated the rest of CS's creative life, which lasted
1955-66, with individual stories making up the bulk of several collections
- including You Will Never Be the Same (coll 1963), Space Lords (coll

1965), Under Old Earth and Other Explorations (coll 1970 UK) and
Stardreamer (coll 1971) - before being re-sorted into 2 definitive vols,
The Best of Cordwainer Smith (coll 1975; vt The Rediscovery of Man 1988
UK) ed John J. PIERCE and The Instrumentality of Mankind (coll 1979); and
subsequently resorted again, this time definitively, as The Rediscovery of
Man: The Complete Short Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (coll 1993). A similar
complexity obscured the publication of his only full-scale sf novel,
Norstrilia (1975), which first appeared as 2 separate novels - each in
fact an extract from the original single manuscript - as The Planet Buyer
(1964 Gal as "The Boy who Bought Old Earth"; rev 1964) and The Underpeople
(1964 Worlds of If as "The Store of Heart's Desire"; rev 1968). Along with
Quest of the Three Worlds (coll of linked stories 1966), the 2 re-sorted
collections and Norstrilia assemble all of CS's sf.The Instrumentality of
Mankind covers several millennia of humanity's uncertain progress into a
FAR-FUTURE plenitude. Before the period of "Scanners Live in Vain" a
shattered Earth is dubiously revitalized by the family of a Nazi scientist
who awake from SUSPENDED ANIMATION to found the Instrumentality, a
hereditary caste of rulers, under whose hegemony space is explored by
scanners, then by ships which sail by photonic winds, then via
planoforming, which is more or less instantaneous. Genetically modified
animals are bred as slaves ( GENETIC ENGINEERING). On the Australian
colony planet of Norstrilia, an IMMORTALITY drug called stroon is
discovered, making the planet very rich indeed and granting the oligarchy
on Earth eternal dominance, with no one but Norstrilians and members of
the Instrumentality being permitted to live beyond 400 years. (Norstrilia
deals with a young heir to much of the planet's wealth who travels to
Earth, which he has purchased, discovering en passant a great deal about
the animal-descended Underpeople.) Human life becomes baroque,
aesthetical, decadent. But a fruitful concourse of Underpeople and
aristocrats generates the Rediscovery of Man - as witnessed in tales like
"The Dead Lady of Clown Town" (1964), "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard" (1961) and
"The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" (1962), which embodies a sympathetic response
to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s - through which disease,
ethnicity and strife are deliberately reintroduced into the painless
world. Much later an adventurer makes a Quest through Three Worlds in a
Universe seemingly benign.The Instrumentality of Mankind remains, all the
same, a fragment - as, therefore, does CS's work as a whole - for the long
conflict between Underpeople and Instrumentality, the details of which are
recounted by CS with what might be called oceanic sentiment, is never
resolved; and CS's habitual teasing of the reader with implications of a
fuller yet never-told tale only strengthens the sense of an almost coy
incompletion. This sense is also reinforced by the Chinese ancestry of
some of CS's devices, which inspired in him a narrative voice that, in
ruminating upon a tale of long ago, seemed to confer, both with the reader
and with general tradition, about the tale's meaning. Alfred Doblin
(1878-1957) ( GERMANY) has also been suggested as a significant influence,
both for his early expressionist work set in China, like Die drei Sprunge
des Wang-Lun ["The Three Leaps of Wang-Lun"] (1915), and for his surreal
metamorphic sf novels - none translated - like Wadzeks Kampf mit der
Dampfmaschine ["Wadzek's Struggle with the Steam-Machine"] (1918) and
Berge, Meere und Giganten ["Mountains, Sea and Giants"] (1924; rev vt

Giganten ["Giants"] 1931). CS's best later stories glow with an air of
complexity and antiquity that, on analysis, their plots do not not always
sustain. Much of the structuring of the series is lyrical and incantatory
(down to the literal use of rather bad poetry, and much internal rhyming)
but, beyond stroon, and Norstrilia, and Old Earth and the absorbingly
described SPACESHIPS, much of the CS Universe remains only glimpsed.
Whether such a Universe, recounted in such a voice, could ever be fully
seen is a question which, of course, cannot be answered. [JC]About the
author: Exploring Cordwainer Smith (anth 1975) ed John Bangsund, from
ALGOL Press; almost the whole of SPECULATION #33, 1976, is an analysis of
CS's work by John J. Pierce; "The Creation of Cordwainer Smith" by Alan C.
Elms, Science Fiction Studies #34 (11,3) (1984); Concordance to Cordwainer
Smith (1984 chap) by Anthony R. LEWIS; A Cordwainer Smith Checklist (1991
chap) by Mike Bennett.See also: ANDROIDS; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS;
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; CYBORGS; FASTER THAN LIGHT; GALACTIC EMPIRES;
GALAXY
SCIENCE FICTION; MEDICINE; MESSIAHS; MUSIC; MYTHOLOGY; ROBOTS; SOLAR
WIND.
SMITH, CURTIS C(OOPER)
(1939- ) US critic and bibliographer, most of whose work in the first
category has focused upon Olaf STAPLEDON, beginning with essays like
"William Olaf Stapledon: Saint and Revolutionary" for Extrapolation in
1971, and culminating in Olaf Stapledon: A Bibliography (1984) with Harvey
J. Satty. He is best known, however, for editing the first 2 edns of
Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers (1981; rev 1986), part of a
series of genre BIBLIOGRAPHIES designed for library use; he did not
participate in the 3rd edn of 1991. The work offers coverage of about 600
sf (and fantasy) writers, some names being dropped (and others added) with
each successive edn. The brief biographical sections are generally
accurate; the critical pieces vary in quality, with some excellent short
essays being included; but the bibliographies are flawed by a murkily
inconsistent methoddology (perhaps due to the series' house style), and
are error-strewn. [JC]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF.
SMITH, D(AVID) ALEXANDER
(1953- ) US investment banker and writer who served as Treasurer of the
SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA 1987-90 and has written several
articles on wargame strategy ( GAMES AND TOYS). He began publishing sf
with Marathon (1982), #1 in the Marathon sequence, which continues with
Rendezvous (1988) and Homecoming (1990). The sequence is a First-Contact
tale which depicts, with very considerable cunning, the slow process of
learning and ultimate CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH attendant upon any genuine
confrontation of Homo sapiens with the Other. In this case, the Cygnan
ALIENS, who are rendezvousing with humans in interstellar space, are
intriguingly perceived through flawed human eyes. Although DAS succumbs to
some cliched presentation of sf conventions - for instance, the neurotic
AI aboard the human starship - this slow, densely realized SPACE-OPERA
epic deserves considerable notice.For some time, in conjunction with the
Cambridge Science Fiction Writers' Workshop, DAS had been building a
SHARED-WORLD portrait of Boston, Massachusetts, focusing on a period about

100 years hence when the central city has accreted into a vast defensive
cube and has seceded from the USA. His own novel, In the Cube: A Novel of
Future Boston (1993), focuses on this historical moment; a shared-world
anthology, Future Boston (anth 1994) ed DAS, ranges backwards and forwards
around the locus of the Cube. The whole enterprise demonstrates the
potency of the shared world in those cases where creators, owners and
writers are the same persons. [JC]
SMITH, DEAN WESLEY
(1950- ) US editor and writer who remains best known for founding, in
1988, PULPHOUSE PUBLISHING, whose various enterprises he has since
dominated, in partnership with Kristine Kathryn RUSCH. With her he also ed
Science Fiction Writers of America Handbook: The Professional Writer's
Guide to Writing Professionally (anth 1990), a vade mecum full of
necessary data, though not supremely well organized. After a vignette in
The Clarion Awards (anth 1984) ed Damon KNIGHT, his first sf story was
"Adrift in the Erotic Zone" for Gem in 1985. He won an award from the
WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST for "One Last Dance", which appeared in L.
Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future (anth 1985) ed Algis BUDRYS.
His first novel, Laying the Music to Rest (1989), begins slowly, with an
attempt to exorcise a ghost from a deep lake, but soon entangles itself in
the routines of a TIME-TRAVEL conflict between warring factions; en
passant the protagonist visits the Titanic, where it seems he may be stuck
forever. There is energy and feeling in DWS's work, but also a sense of
scurry. [JC]Other work: The Moscow Mafia Presents Rat Tales (anth 1987)
with Jon Gustafson, both as Smith Gustafson.See also: SCIENCE FICTION
WRITERS OF AMERICA; SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS.
SMITH, E(DWARD) E(LMER)
(1890-1965) US writer and food chemist specializing in doughnut mixes,
often called the "Father of SPACE OPERA". Because Hugo GERNSBACK appended
"PhD" to EES's name for his contributions to AMZ from 1928, he became
known as "Doc" Smith. Greatly influential in US PULP-MAGAZINE sf between
1928 and about 1945, he found his reputation fading somewhat just after
the end of WWII, when it seemed the dream-like simplicities of his
world-view could no longer attract the modern reader of GENRE SF; but the
specialty houses that became active after 1945 ( SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED
EDITIONS) soon put his vast space-opera sagas into book form, and his name
was kept alive. Towards the end of his life, after his retirement around
1960, he began producing space operas again, and his earlier work started
to appear in paperback editions; after his death, yet another new
generation made him an sf bestseller, first in the USA and later in the
UK.EES's work is strongly identified with the beginnings of US pulp sf as
a separate marketing genre, and did much to define its essential
territory, galactic space. When in 1915 he began to write the first novel
of his Skylark series with Mrs Lee Hawkins Garby (1890-? ) - a neighbour
seconded to help with feminine matters such as dialogue - no models
existed (or, at least, none that were available to a monolingual US food
chemist) that could explain the combined exuberance and scale that The
Skylark of Space (written 1915-20; 1928 AMZ; 1946; rev with cuts 1958)
demonstrated when it finally appeared in AMAZING STORIES, 2 years after

the start of that magazine, in the same issue as Philip NOWLAN's
"Armageddon - 2419 A.D.", the story which introduced BUCK ROGERS IN THE
25TH CENTURY. (Mrs Garby retained co-author credit in the 1st book edn,
but the 1958 rev was as by EES alone.) Elements of EES's prelapsarian
exuberance may have been discernible in some of the EDISONADES which
proliferated in the USA from about 1890; and a certain cosmogonic
high-handedness is traceable to the works of H.G. WELLS and his UK
contemporaries. But it was EES who combined the two. Along with its
sequels - Skylark Three (1930 AMZ; 1948), Skylark of Valeron (1934-5 ASF;
1949) and Skylark DuQuesne (1966) - The Skylark of Space brought the
edisonade to its first full maturity, creating a proper galactic forum for
the exploits of the inventor/scientist/action-hero who keeps the world (or
the Universe) safe for US values despite the efforts of a foreign-hued
villain (Marc "Blackie" DuQuesne) to pollute those values. But the highly
personalized conflict between HERO-inventor Richard Seaton and
VILLAIN-inventor DuQuesne - who develops from the stage histrionics of the
first novel to the dominating antiheroics of the last and is perhaps EES's
most vivid creation - did not very satisfactorily motivate the vast
intergalactic conflicts of the later volumes of the series, as the scale
of everything - the potency of the WEAPONS, the power, size and speed of
the SPACESHIPS, the number of planets overawed - increased by leaps and
bounds. Nor was EES much concerned to sophisticate the chummy, clammy
idiocy of his women ( SEX; WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION) or the
hokum of the slang in which all emotions were conveyed.It was not until he
began to unveil the architectural structure of his second and definitive
SERIES that EES was able to demonstrate the thoroughness of his thinking
about space opera. And it is with the Lensmen series - or The History of
Civilization, the over-title for the 1953-5 limited-edn boxed reprint of
the original books - that his name is most strongly and justly associated.
In order of internal chronology, the sequence is Triplanetary (1934 AMZ;
rev to fit the series 1948), First Lensman (1950), Galactic Patrol (1937-8
ASF; 1950), Gray Lensman (1939-40 ASF; 1951), Second-Stage Lensmen (1941-2
ASF; 1953) and Children of the Lens (1947-8 ASF; 1954). The Vortex Blaster
(1941-2 var mags; fixup 1960; vt Masters of the Vortex 1968 US) is also
set in the Lensman Universe, probably some time before Children of the
Lens, but does not deal with the central progress of the main series, the
working out of which was EES's most brilliant auctorial coup. As published
in book form, the first 2 novels likewise stand outside the main action;
it is the final 4 that lie at the heart of EES's accomplishment. Conceived
as one 400,000-word novel, and divided into separate titles for
publication 1937-48 in ASF - from before John W. CAMPBELL Jr began editing
the journal, through the high pitch of the GOLDEN AGE OF SF (1939-42) he
supervised, and into the post-WWII period - the central Lensmen tale is
constructed around the gradual revelation of the hierarchical nature of
the Universe.Two vastly advanced and radically opposed races, the good
Arisians and the evil Eddorians, have been in essential opposition for
billions of years. The Arisians understand that their only hope of
defeating the absolute Evil represented by the Eddorians is to develop
over eons a countervailing Civilization via special breeding lines on
selected planets, of which Earth (Tellus) is one. These breeding lines
will develop beings capable of enduring the enormous stress of inevitable

conflict with the forces of Evil: the various planets and empires, known
collectively as Boskone, inimical to Civilization and secretly commanded
through a nest of hierarchies by the invisible Eddorians. We are
introduced first to the broad picture and to the idea of the Lens, a
bracelet which tenders to suitable members of the Arisian-influenced
Galactic Patrol certain telepathic and other powers; then, as the central
sequence progresses, we climb, link by link, the vast chain of command, as
seen through the eyes of the series' main protagonist, Kim Kinnison - who
with his wife represents the penultimate stage in the Arisian breeding
programme, and whose children will finally defeat the Eddorians. Kinnison
never knows that the layer just penetrated has layers behind it, and has
never so much as heard of the Eddorians; each new volume of the sequence,
therefore, begins with the revelation that the Universe is greater, and
requires greater powers to confront, than Kinnison had hitherto imagined.
In the Skylark books, Seaton's acquisition of similar powers was
distressingly unbridled; but Kinnison, as a commanding member of the
organization of Lensmen (itself hierarchical), is by contrast licensed,
and his institutionalized gaining of superpowers and special knowledge is
measured, inevitable, and kinetically enthralling. It was almost certainly
these controlled jumps in scale that fascinated most early readers of the
series and which, for many of them, represented the essence of the SENSE
OF WONDER. The Lensmen books had the shape of dreams.EES wrote some rather
less popular out-of-series books, none having anything like the force of
his major effort. A decade after his death, books he had begun or
completed in manuscript, or had merely inspired or authorized, began to
appear in response to his great posthumous popularity. Lensmen ties
included New Lensman * (1976) by William B. Ellern (1933- ) and The Dragon
Lensman * (1980), Lensman from Rigel * (1982) and Z-Lensman * (1983), all
by David A. KYLE. The Family d'Alembert series, published as by EES "with
Stephen GOLDIN", derived some material from posthumous manuscripts; the
1st vol, The Imperial Stars * (1964 If; exp 1976), was based on published
material, but subsequent volumes were essentially the work of Goldin (whom
see for details). Lloyd Arthur ESHBACH constructed in Subspace Encounter *
(1983) a sequel to the inferior Subspace Explorers (1960 ASF as "Subspace
Survivors"; exp 1965). None of these adjuncts did anything to help EES's
reputation. Today, while he must be read, it has to be in the loving
awareness that he is a creature of the dawn. [JC]Other works: What Does
this Convention Mean?: A Speech Delivered at the Chicago 1940 World's
Science Fiction Convention (1941 chap); Spacehounds of IPC (1931 AMZ;
1947); The Galaxy Primes (1959 AMZ; 1965); The Best of E.E. "Doc" Smith
(coll 1975); Masters of Space (1961-2 If; 1976) with E. Everett
EVANS.About the author: The Universes of E.E. Smith (1966) by Ron ELLIK
and Bill EVANS; "E.E. Smith" in Seekers of Tomorrow (coll 1966) by Sam
MOSKOWITZ.See also: ALIENS; BIG DUMB OBJECTS; CHILDREN'S SF; COSMOLOGY;
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; DEFINITIONS OF SF; DIMENSIONS; EVOLUTION;
FABULATION; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FORCE FIELD; GAMES AND TOYS; HISTORY OF
SF;
JUPITER; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); POWER SOURCES;
SCIENTIFIC ERRORS; SCIENTISTS; SPACE FLIGHT; STARS.
SMITH, E.E.

The real name of the US author who for obvious reasons writes under a
pseudonym, Gordon EKLUND. [JC]
SMITH, EVELYN E.
(1927- ) US writer and crossword-puzzle compiler who began publishing sf
with "Tea Tray in the Sky" for Gal in 1952, and for about a decade
published actively in the magazines; after about 1960 she appeared there
only infrequently. She has also written as Delphine C. Lyons. Her first
novel, The Perfect Planet (1962), is set on a planet which was once a
health farm. Valley of Shadows (1968) as Delphine C. Lyons is a fantasy.
Unpopular Planet (1975) - no connection to the first book - is a
comparatively ambitious work, written in a sometimes passable imitation of
18th-century typographical (if not stylistic) practices and presenting the
memoirs, set down long after most of the events recounted, of a human from
an overpopulated future Earth whose contacts with ALIENS trying to
maintain the planet as a breeding-ground for humans and other species have
led to picaresque adventures, some of them sexual. The Copy Shop (1985) again an element of SATIRE is mildly evident - places aliens in New York
City; they are not noticed. [JC]See also: COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS;
WOMEN SF WRITERS.
SMITH, GARRET
(?1876-1954) US journalist and newspaper editor who was active with sf
stories in magazines like The Argosy, where several novels appeared. Only
Between Worlds (1919 Argosy; 1929), one of his weakest, reached book form;
it is a semi-juvenile tale that begins on a DYSTOPIAN Venus and concludes
on Earth, with female protagonists plotting to conquer the world. Of more
interest are "On the Brink of 2000" (1910 Argosy) and "The Treasures of
Tantalus" (1920-21 Argosy All-Story), which feature devices to see
anything happening anywhere in the world; the morality of these is
discussed, though at no great length. The FLAMMARION-inspired "After a
Million Years" (1919 Argosy) comprehends a dystopian Earth, an Edenic
Jupiter, mad scientists, telepathic powers, aliens and the virtual
extinction of humanity. Other magazine novels include "Thirty Years Late"
(1928 Argosy All-Story) and "The Girl in the Moon" (1928 Argosy
All-Story). GS was a sometimes capable writer whose ideas tended to
outclass his fiction. [RB]See also: FANTASTIC VOYAGES.
SMITH, GEORGE H(ENRY)
(1922- ) US writer of much popular fiction and considerable sf, under his
own name and several pseudonyms including books as Jan Hudson, Jerry
Jason, Jan Smith, George Hudson Smith, Diana Summers (not sf), Hal Stryker
and - mostly with his wife M. Jane Deer - M.J. Deer. He began publishing
sf with "The Last Spring" for Startling Stories in 1953, and became very
active after about 1960, releasing his first sf novels - Satan's Daughter
(1961), 1976 - Year of Terror (1961; vt The Year for Love c1965), Scourge
of the Blood Cult (1961), The Coming of the Rats (1961) and Love Cult
(1961 as by Jan Hudson) - in a rush. These early novels are, however,
rather negligible, and the collaborative Flames of Desire (1963) as by
M.J. Deer is post- HOLOCAUST soft pornography. But with The Four-Day
Weekend (1966) he began to strike a more sustained note, and in the
following year started a series set in the ALTERNATE WORLD of Annwn:

Druids' World (1967), Witch Queen of Lochlann (1969), Kar Kaballa (1969
dos), Second War of the Worlds (1976) and The Island Snatchers (1978). The
last 3 vols of this sequence share the same main characters and present a
complex interplay between this world and the alternative Welsh domain;
they are GHS's most telling example of the kind of fantasy-textured sf at
which he was best. Short stories of interest include "The Last Days of
L.A." (1959) and "In the Imagicon" (1966). [JC]Other works: Doomsday Wing
(1963); The Unending Night (1964); The Forgotten Planet (1965).As
M.J.Deer: A Place Named Hell (1963).As Jan Hudson: Loveswept #293: Water
Witch * (1988).As Jerry Jason: Sexodus (1963); The Psycho Makers (1965).As
Hal Stryker: NYPD 2025 (1985), the first of an apparently abortive series;
Hawkeye (1991), a TECHNOTHRILLER.
SMITH, GEORGE HUDSON
George H. SMITH.
SMITH, GEORGE O(LIVER)
(1911-1981) US writer and electronics engineer, most active and prominent
in the 1940s in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, for which he wrote his first
story in 1942; "QRM - Interplanetary" began both his sf career and his
most famous endeavour, the Venus Equilateral SERIES of stories (all in
ASF) about a COMMUNICATIONS space station in the Trojan position (60deg
ahead of the planet) of the orbit of VENUS, and the various crises that
must be solved. These stories were assembled as Venus Equilateral (coll of
linked stories 1947; with 3 stories added, exp in 2 vols 1975 UK; the UK
version in 1 vol vt The Complete Venus Equilateral 1976 US). They exhibit
GOS's main strength, a fascination with technical problems and their
didactic explanation, after the fashion of Hugo GERNSBACK and the early
AMZ, as well as his main weakness, an almost complete lack of interest in
character or plot plausibility. However, though the technical
presuppositions on which he based his communications station dated very
swiftly, the sequence - featuring as it does a passel of cheerful
wisecracking engineer/troubleshooters - vividly evokes a characteristic
1940s sf point of view about the future and the kinds of problems we might
have to handle in space.GOS also wrote several SPACE OPERAS whose
technical assumptions have likewise dated - perhaps because he was
sufficiently numerate to make use of falsifiable speculations. The rocket
gimmickry, the sense of space, and the kind of protagonists featured in
his stories were - for instance - strongly reminiscent of but markedly
less entrancing than the more expansive galactic venues of E.E. "Doc"
SMITH's Lensmen series, the later vols of which were being serialized in
ASF at about the same time. The best of GOS's space operas, originally
published under his occasional pseudonym Wesley Long, is Nomad (1944 ASF;
1950 as GOS). Like most of his space epics, the story concerns an alien
INVASION of the Solar System, in this case by means of a wandering planet.
Other similar novels are Pattern for Conquest (1946 ASF; 1949) and the
inferior Hellflower (1953).Though GOS wrote several further novels before
becoming relatively inactive in 1959, he published only one other
memorable book, the vivid SUPERMAN story The Fourth "R" (1959; vt The
Brain Machine 1968). Although the story - about an artificially created
Homo superior child who must fight to remain independent until adulthood -

reflects earlier novels, such as Theodore STURGEON's The Dreaming Jewels
(1950; vt The Synthetic Man 1957), The Fourth "R" so vividly enters into
its protagonist's young mind, and so intriguingly details his strategy for
survival against a particularly unpleasant villain, that it has become a
model for tales of this kind (see also INTELLIGENCE). Another novel that
combines both invasion and superman themes is Highways in Hiding (1956;
cut vt The Space Plague 1957).Never strongly original, GOS was nonetheless
an effective expounder of ideas and an enjoyable sf novelist of the second
rank. The autobiographical notes in The Worlds of George O. (coll 1982)
warmly and modestly evoke his life in the 1940s as a colleague and friend
of John W. CAMPBELL Jr, Robert A. HEINLEIN and others; the collection
assembles the best of his short work. [JC]Other works: Operation
Interstellar (1950); Troubled Star (1953 Startling Stories; 1957); Fire in
the Heavens (1949 Startling Stories; 1958); Lost in Space (1954 Startling
Stories as "Spacemen Lost"; 1959); The Path of Unreason (1947 Startling
Stories as "Kingdom of the Blind"; rev 1958).See also: DISCOVERY AND
INVENTION; ECONOMICS; ESP; HEROES; ILLUSTRATION; MATTER TRANSMISSION;
MONEY; SCIENTISTS; SEX; SPACE HABITATS; SUN.
SMITH, H(ARRY) ALLEN
(1907-1976) US newspaperman and author, mostly of humorous sketches and
books, often for Saturday Evening Post. In his first sf novel, Mr Klein's
Kampf, or His Life as Hitler's Double (1939), a Jew takes over from Hitler
and declares Germany to be the new Zion. The Age of the Tail (1955), also
a comic SATIRE, depicts the effect on a NEAR-FUTURE world of all children
being born with tails. [JC]
SMITH, JAN
George H. SMITH.
SMITH, JUNIUS
[r] J.U. GIESY.
SMITH, KENT
(? - ) US writer in whose sf novel, Future X (1990), a Black man from a
racist 21st century discovers a TIME-TRAVEL device, returns to the time of
Malcolm X (1925-1965) with the intention of saving him from assassination,
causes his death months too early, and finds himself bound into taking his
place. But history continues as before, for there is no way, the book
seems to argue, of curing the system that killed Malcolm X in the first
place. [JC]
SMITH, LAURE
[r] Seth MCEVOY.
SMITH, L. NEIL
(1946- ) US writer, ex-police reserve officer, gunsmith and former state
candidate for the US LIBERTARIAN Party who began publishing sf with
"Grimm's Law" for Stellar 5 (anth 1980) ed Judy-Lynn DEL REY. The Win Bear
sequence, set in a parallel universe ( ALTERNATE WORLDS) in which a
libertarian version of the USA has become progressively decentralized ever
since its foundation, includes The Probability Broach (1980), The Venus
Belt (1981) and The Nagasaki Vector (1983), with Their Majesties'

Bucketeers (1981) set in the same universe. A second series, the North
American Confederacy sequence - Tom Paine Maru (1984), The Gallatin
Divergence (1985) and Brightsuit MacBear (1988)-shows the descendants of
the original protagonists expanding out into the Galaxy, spreading the
libertarian gospel to ALIENS and abandoned human colonies in both the
parallel universe and our own. Taflak Lysandra (1988), although set in the
same universe, is unconnected to the main series.The Crystal Empire
(1986), a somewhat confused tale of libertarian technological
inventiveness, is set in another alternate world, a Europe destroyed by a
far more devastating Black Death. The Wardove (1986), set on a terraformed
Moon long after a nuclear HOLOCAUST has made Earth uninhabitable, depicts
a state of war between anarcho-capitalists of several different species
(including humans) and a repressive government, and is unusual among LNS's
work for its general darkness of tone and comparative lack of humour.
Contrastingly, Henry Martyn (1989) is a light-hearted SPACE OPERA written
in a style strongly reminiscent of Raphael Sabatini's Captain Blood. A
further sequence - Contact and Commune (1990),Converse and Conflict (1990)
and Pallas (1993) - is set in yet another alternate world; in this
instance Mikhail Gorbachev (1931- ) has been deposed (as was soon, indeed,
to happen in the real world), Soviet hardliners have (perhaps rather
mysteriously) taken over the USA, and disturbingly alert
anarcho-capitalists (once again) begin to upset the apple cart. One of the
protagonists is (also mysteriously) descended from the inhabitants of
ATLANTIS.LNS is a writer of generally competent, fast-moving and often
amusing adventures which can be marred by preachiness and intolerance
where matters of POLITICS and morality are concerned. Almost all are
distinguished by their relentlessly upbeat mood; the more recent are often
rather poorly constructed. [NT]Other works: 3 STAR WARS ties, Lando
Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu * (1983), Lando Calrissian and the
Flamewind of Oseon * (1983) and Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of
ThonBoka * (1983).See also: ECONOMICS; SHARED WORLDS.
SMITH, MARTIN
Martin Cruz SMITH.
SMITH, MARTIN (WILLIAM) CRUZ
(1942- ) US writer who became famous with the political
thriller/detective novel Gorky Park (1981), but whose first book, The
Indians Won (1970), originally published as by Martin Smith, is genuine
sf, positing an ALTERNATE WORLD in which the Native Americans - after
Sitting Bull (c1834-1893) defeated General Custer (1839-1876) - have
managed to consolidate themselves into an independent state, and in the
20th century hold the balance of power. Gypsy in Amber (1971) and its
sequel, Canto for a Gypsy (1972), both originally published as by Martin
Smith, feature a detective with ESP. The Analog Bullet (1972) utilizes the
paranormal in similar circumstances. Under the house name Nick CARTER MCS
wrote 3 borderline-sf thrillers, The Inca Death Squad * (1972), Code Name:
Werewolf * (1973) and The Devil's Dozen * (1973). As Simon Quinn he
published the non-sf Inquisitor series of novels about a Catholic
organization opposed to Satanists. In Nightwing (1977), as MCS, it is
discovered that a swarm of vampire bats is burdened with fleas which serve

as vectors for a deadly plague; it was filmed as Nightwing (1979). [JC]
SMITH, ROBERT CHARLES
(1938- ) UK writer, prolific in various genres under several pseudonyms,
including Roger C. Brandon, Robert Charles and Charles Leader. Flowers of
Evil (1981) as by Robert Charles is horror, and Nightworld (1984; vt The
Comet 1985 US), also as by Charles, is an expertly told but fairly
unadventurous sf DISASTER tale. [JC]
SMITH, SHERWOOD
Pseudonym of US writer Christine I.S.Lowentrout (1951- ), much of whose
work has been fantasy, and much of her production under other pseudonyms,
usually for the production of TIES. As Robyn Tallis, she wrote 4 Planet
Builders ties: Rebel from Alphorion * (1989), Visions from the Sea *
(1989), Giants of Elenna * (1989) and Fire in the Sky * (1989); as
Nicholas Adams, she wrote a Horror High tie, Final Curtain * (1991); she
has written under yet other names as well. Her Wren series-Wren to the
Rescue (1990) and Wren's Quest (1993)-is fantasy for children. With David
Trowbridge (1950- ), who also edits a computer trade magazine, she has
written the Exordium sequence, which is sf, and which comprises Phoenix in
Flight (1993), Ruler of Naught (1993) and A Prison Unsought (1994). [JC]
SMITH, WALTER J(AMES)
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
SMITH, WAYLAND
Pseudonym for his sf novel of UK engineer Victor Bayley (1880-1972),
whose career at a high level in the Indian railway system was reflected in
much of his adventure fiction, some of which verged on fantasy, and which
he signed with his real name. In his sf novel, The Machine Stops (1936),
all metals disintegrate, casting humanity back into barbarism; one young
man attempts to fabricate a new alloy to save the race. [JC]
SMITH, WOODROW WILSON
[s] Henry KUTTNER.
SNAITH, J(OHN) C(OLLIS)
(1876-1936) UK writer, mostly of historical novels, whose first sf novel,
An Affair of State (1913), is set in a NEAR FUTURE England raddled by
social strife, whose The Council of Seven (1921) describes a totalitarian
DYSTOPIA, and whose Thus Far (1925) depicts the creation of an enormously
powerful, telepathic SUPERMAN by the application of various rays,
chemicals and, as E.F. BLEILER states, "glandular extracts from a missing
link"; Bleiler further suggests that JCS may have published an earlier
work describing the discovery of this link, but no such work has yet been
unearthed. [JC]
SNELL, EDMUND
(1889-? ) UK writer, exceedingly prolific between the Wars, specializing
in thrillers (often with Oriental villains) and mysteries. He wrote some
sf books, including Kontrol (1928), in which a mad SCIENTIST switches a
genius brain into an athlete's body and vice versa; he is in league with a
Bolshevik agent who has built a fleet of futuristic vertical-take-off
aerial juggernauts and a UTOPIAN supercity on a secret ISLAND with an

active volcano. It is a well written sf thriller with an exuberance that
lifts it above the ordinary.The Sound-Machine (1932) likewise features a
crazed inventor; this one uses sound-waves to kill and disintegrate.
[PN]Other works: The Yellow Seven (1923); The Yu-Chi Stone (1925); Blue
Murder (1927); The White Owl (1930); The "Z" Ray (1932); The Sign of the
Scorpion (1934).See also: ISLANDS; POLITICS; WEAPONS.
SNODGRASS, MELINDA M(ARILYN)
(1951- ) US lawyer and writer who has been associated with Star Trek
since the publication of her first novel, Star Trek: The Tears of the
Singers * (1984). She served as Executive Script Consultant for the first
2 seasons of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION. Of ostensibly greater sf
interest is her Circuit Trilogy - Circuit (1986), Circuit Breaker (1987)
and Final Circuit (1988) - which takes a handsome lawyer and his extremely
clever female sidekick into space, where they become involved in defending
a batch of individualistic space stations and settlements against the
hidebound bureaucracies of Earth. This point of view is not, of course, a
fresh one, and a sense that MMS was not perhaps concentrating fully on the
richer implications of her setting is strengthened by a plot structure
which eventually relegates the tough female protagonist to the sidelines in strict accordance with the Robert A. HEINLEIN guidelines on such
matters-as soon as she becomes pregnant. Runespear (1987) with Victor
MILAN is fantasy, as is Queen's Gambit Declined (1989).A Very Large Array:
New Mexico Science Fiction and Fantasy (anth 1987) embodies MMS's theory
that the urgent New Mexico landscape might serve to unify in some sense
the work of writers there resident; in the event, though the theory still
proves difficult to assess, the stories assembled are of admirable
quality. [JC]Other works: MMS was assistant editor to George R.R. MARTIN,
the editor, on 4 of the WILD CARDS series to date, these being #6: Ace in
the Hole: A Wild Cards Mosaic Novel * (anth 1990), #7: Dead Man's Hand *
(1990), written by Martin with John J. Miller, the 1st true novel in the
series, #8: One-Eyed Jacks: A Wild Cards Mosaic Novel * (anth 1991) and
#9: Jokertown Shuffle: A Wild Cards Mosaic Novel * (anth 1991); the next
title, #10: Double Solitaire * (1992) is another true novel, written by
MMS solo.As Melinda McKenzie: Magic to Do: Paul's Story (1985); Of Earth
and High Heaven (1985)See also: LIBERTARIAN SF.
SNOW, C(HARLES) P(ERCY)
(1905-1980) UK writer, created Baron Snow of Leicester in 1964, best
known for the long Strangers and Brothers sequence of novels, several of
which deal intimately with science and the scientific establishment. In
Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), nonfiction, he famously
suggested that science and the humanities had indeed become "two
cultures", a phrase which has become part of the language. His sf novel,
New Lives for Old (1933), published anon, depicts a search for IMMORTALITY
and the negative consequences that attend its success. [JC]
SNYDER, CECIL III
(? - ) US author of The Hawks of Arcturus (1974), in which a lone
Earthman defies the eponymous ALIENS in their attempt to find the secrets
of an ancient Galaxy-ruling race. [JC]

SNYDER, E.V.
[r] Gene SNYDER.
SNYDER, GENE
(1943- ) Working name of US writer and academic Eugene Vincent Snyder.
With William Jon WATKINS (whom see for details), he published 2 sf novels,
Ecodeath (1972) as E.V. Snyder and The Litany of Sh'reev (1976). His solo
works include Mind War (1980), The Ogden Enigma (1980) - in which the US
military must deal with the fact that it has repressed all evidence that a
UFO landed in 1950, a matter of urgency because the UFO now wants to go
home - Dark Dreaming (1981), Tomb Seven (1985), a fantasy, and The Sigma
Project (1988), a TECHNOTHRILLER. [JC]See also: ECOLOGY.
SNYDER, GUY
(1951- ) US author and journalist in whose Testament XXI (1973) a space
explorer returns to Earth a century after a nuclear HOLOCAUST to find a
balkanized land at war with itself. [JC]
SOBCHACK, VIVIAN (CAROL)
(1940- ) US author of academic film criticism, notably The Limits of
Infinity: The American Science Fiction Film 1950-1975 (1980), expanded as
Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (1987), retaining the
unaltered text of the earlier book but adding a long final chapter,
"Postfuturism", which gives a reading of sf CINEMA developed from the
critical theories of Fredric Jameson ( POSTMODERNISM AND SF). The original
text is among the most sophisticated analyses of sf film yet published;
the added chapter is clotted, but important in its placing of recent sf
films in a Postmodernist context where, for example, computer imagery and
outer space in film are registered as flat imitations of one another, or
where we read schizophrenic narrative structures as zany comedies. VS's
FEMINISM informs her work, particularly the essay "The Virginity of
Astronauts: Sex and the Science Fiction Film" in Shadows of the Magic
Lamp: Fantasy and Science Fiction in Film (anth 1985) ed George E. SLUSSER
and Eric S. RABKIN. [PN]
SOCIAL DARWINISM
Social Darwinism is the thesis that social evolution and social history
are governed by the same principles that govern the EVOLUTION of species
in Nature, so that conflict between and within cultures constitutes a
struggle for existence which is the motor of progress. Such ideas are
inherent in the socio-economic theories of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903),
who actually coined the phrase "the survival of the fittest", borrowed by
Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Darwin himself was not a Social Darwinist,
preferring to stress the survival value of cooperation in human societies.
Social Darwinism was popularized in the USA by ardent political champions
of laissez-faire capitalism, notably William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) whose pessimistic anticipation of a coming war between the social classes
echoed the Marxist theory of history, and presumably inspired Ignatius
DONNELLY's apocalyptic Caesar's Column (1890; early edns as by Edmund
Boisgilbert) - and the industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919). Social
Darwinist rhetoric was co-opted to the justification of race hatred by the
German writer Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896), a major source of

inspiration for Hitler's Mein Kampf (2 vols 1925-6; trans 1939 UK) and the
political ideology of Nazism. There is, however, no logically necessary
connection between Social Darwinism and right-wing POLITICS; it is a
versatile analogy which lends itself to many differing opinions as to
which group ought to be designated "the fittest", and its arguments can be
deployed both for and against calculated eugenic selection.The most
important sf writer who might be termed a Social Darwinist was the
socialist H.G. WELLS, who had no doubt that the "laws of evolution"
discovered by Darwin applied to human society. His account of the future
evolution of society in THE TIME MACHINE (1895) is based on a Social
Darwinist logic, and in such UTOPIAS as A Modern Utopia (1905) a "struggle
for existence" is artificially maintained - here in the ascetic training
of the elite "samurai". Many of Wells's blueprints for the future assume
that a better society can emerge only out of the destruction of the
present one, by a process of rigorous winnowing; such future histories are
sketched in The World Set Free (1914), Men Like Gods (1923) and The Shape
of Things to Come (1933). When Wells finally despaired of his world-saving
mission it was the logic of Darwinian law that he invoked to condemn
society for its failure in Mind at the End of its Tether (1945). Louis
TRACY's The Final War (1896) and M.P. SHIEL's The Yellow Danger (1898) are
early future- WAR stories deploying a Social Darwinist species of racism,
the latter suggesting that there must ultimately be a war between the
different races of Homo sapiens for possession of the Earth; but Shiel
later modified his Spencerian views and espoused a curiously Nietzschean
kind of Social Darwinism most vividly displayed in The Young Men are
Coming (1937). S. Fowler WRIGHT is the UK writer of SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE who
most consistently glorified the struggle for existence and railed against
the "utopia of comforts".Opposition to Darwinist analogies is evident in
Claude FARRERE's Useless Hands (1926), a lurid warning of the ultimate
effects of applying Darwinian logic to human society, and in Raymond Z.
GALLUN's PULP-MAGAZINE story "Old Faithful" (1934), which argues that
intellectual kinship is more important than biological difference. A
fierce attack on Social Darwinism is mounted by C.S. LEWIS in his Ransom
trilogy: OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET (1938), Perelandra (1943; vt Voyage to
Venus) and That Hideous Strength (1945). The last volume - in which the
organization N.I.C.E. begins to mould UK society along Social Darwinist
lines - is the most direct.The logic of Social Darwinism has cropped up
continually, but rather inconsistently, in GENRE SF. One writer
particularly fond of invoking such ideas was Robert A. HEINLEIN. The
assumptions of Social Darwinism seem to have shaped many of his
perspectives - notably his attitude towards ALIENS, as displayed in The
Puppet Masters (1951) and STARSHIP TROOPERS (1959), the "robust"
LIBERTARIAN social theory of TANSTA AFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A
Free Lunch) propounded in THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS (1966), and the
collection of aphorisms called "The Notebooks of Lazarus Long" in Time
Enough for Love (1973). Other libertarian sf writers make less use of this
type of supportive logic. Poul ANDERSON's political views are based on
more pragmatic grounds, and the same appears to be true of Jerry E.
POURNELLE, although his collaboration with Larry NIVEN, Lucifer's Hammer
(1977), employs some Social Darwinist arguments. Echoes of Sumner and
Carnegie frequently resound in the work of genre libertarians, as they do

more plangently in Ayn RAND's Objectivist tracts Anthem (1938) and Atlas
Shrugged (1957). L. Ron HUBBARD's Return to Tomorrow (1954) is the most
hysterically Social Darwinist work in genre sf, advocating that the human
race commit universal genocide of all alien races to secure its hegemony.
John W. CAMPBELL Jr was a notorious human chauvinist, but he made
relatively little (and rather inconsistent) use of Social Darwinist ideas
in his editorials. His variously argued defences of slavery as an
institution inspired some of the odder fiction published in ASF, including
Lloyd BIGGLE Jr's The World Menders (1971), and his opinion that mankind
needs some kind of external enemy - if not actual, then imaginary - to
maintain the competitive thrust of progress is also reflected in work by
writers from his stable, notably Mack REYNOLDS, as in Space Visitor
(1977). Lester DEL REY, whose early short stories displayed a strongly
humanist outlook, seemingly embraces a kind of Social Darwinism in The
Eleventh Commandment (1962; rev 1970).The idea that aliens should be seen
primarily as Darwinian competitors has fallen into considerable disrepute
in modern sf, but there has been a marked resurgence of Social Darwinist
thinking in recent years in SURVIVALIST FICTION, mostly brutal
action-adventure stuff in the vein of Jerry AHERN. Dean ING's Pulling
Through (coll 1983) is more level-headed, while David BRIN's The Postman
(fixup 1985) is profoundly sceptical of the Social Darwinist ethos of
survivalism. [BS]See also: ECONOMICS; HISTORY IN SF; SOCIOLOGY.
SOCIAL ENGINEERING
CULTURAL ENGINEERING.
SOCIETY
Film (1989). Wild Street Pictures. Dir Brian Yuzna, starring Bill
Warlock, Devin DeVasquez, Ben Meyerson. Screenplay Woody Keith, Rick Fry.
99 mins. Colour."Society" (as in the upper classes) is an ALIEN race,
parasitic on humanity (as in the poor), that has been around as long as
humans have, but we learn this only at the end. In the tradition of 1980s
schlock/surrealist horror cinema (e.g., RE-ANIMATOR [1985]), there is
gross bad taste, but the film is unusual in the demureness of its first
hour, and in its knowing and relentless use of metaphor, both visual and
verbal. Bill is a wealthy teenage boy whose PARANOIA (he feels alienated
from his family) turns out gradually to be justified. Intimations of
incest and half-glimpsed bodily distortions deepen into the discovery by
Bill of Society's devotion to "shunting", a combination of cuddling,
tenderizing, sodomitic rape and cannibalism deplorably unpleasant for the
human victims. The alien rich are shapeshifters capable of gazing out
quizzically from their own rectums. The shock tactics of the climax struck
some viewers as more nadir than peak; certainly Yuzna lacks the intensity
of a David Lynch, and there is a strong element of gleeful childishness.
But new cinematic ground is promisingly broken. [PN]See also: MONSTER
MOVIES.
SOCIOLOGY
Sociology is the systematic study of society and social relationships.
The word was coined by Auguste Comte (1798-1857) in the mid-19th century,
and it was then that the first attempts were made to divorce studies of
society employing the scientific method, on the one hand, from dogmatic

political and ethical presuppositions, on the other. Social studies in a
more general sense have, of course, a much longer history, going back to
PLATO. Sociology and sf have a common precursor in UTOPIAN philosophy,
which often used literary forms - most commonly the imaginary voyage - for
the imaginative modelling of ideal societies ( FANTASTIC VOYAGES;
PROTOSCIENCE FICTION). The evaluation and criticism of such models may be
regarded as a crude form of hypothesis-testing. As utopian fiction
evolved, more reliance was placed on literary techniques; the modelling of
characters and personal relationships became a means of evaluating the
"quality of life" in these hypothetical societies. The increasing use of
such purely literary strategies in the late 19th century is also highly
relevant to the evolution of DYSTOPIAN images of the future.Insofar as sf
involves the construction of hypothetical societies, both human and
nonhuman, it is an implicitly sociological literature and many observers including Isaac ASIMOV - have described the sophistication of GENRE SF
encouraged by John W. CAMPBELL Jr in terms of its becoming "more
sociological". Any assumptions which are consciously or unconsciously
deployed in the building of hypothetical societies are sociological
hypotheses, and any attempt to construct a narrative which analyses or
tracks changes within imaginary societies is a form of sociological
theorizing. This is very rarely the primary purpose of sf writers, of
course, but it is a significant aspect of their work. The investigation of
"sociological themes" in sf has to be an examination of the fruits of this
process rather than an exploration of the influence of academic sociology
itself upon sf, because such influence is clearly negligible. Even works
of sf which mirror formal sociological hypotheses - such as Keith
ROBERTS's PAVANE (coll of linked stories 1968), which recalls the thesis
of Max Weber (1864-1920) that a complicit relationship connects the
Protestant Ethic and the rise of capitalism, in its depiction of an
ALTERNATE WORLD in which modern Europe remains under Catholic domination almost invariably do so unconsciously. Some sf writers have borrowed
extensively from academic ANTHROPOLOGY in constructing ALIEN societies,
but almost all have preferred to rely upon their own intuitive judgements
regarding human society and social relationships.Some sf stories are quite
straightforward thought-experiments in sociology: Philip WYLIE's The
Disappearance (1951), Theodore STURGEON's Venus Plus X (1960) and Ursula
K. LE GUIN's THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (1969) are notable examples
investigating issues of sexual politics, while the brief account of a
factory-society run according to the tenet of "from each according to his
ability, to each according to his need" in Ayn RAND's Atlas Shrugged
(1957) aspires to prove the impracticability of socialism. Poul ANDERSON's
"The Helping Hand" (1950) carefully compares the fortunes of two conquered
cultures, one of which accepts economic aid from its conquerors while the
other - the "control group" - does not. Many of the classics of UK
SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE - including Grant ALLEN's The British Barbarians
(1895), J.D. BERESFORD's The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911), Aldous HUXLEY's
BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932), Olaf STAPLEDON's Odd John (1935) and Eden
PHILLPOTTS's Saurus (1938) - introduce an outside observer into a society
in order to evaluate its merits and faults "objectively". If the society
is contemporary, then the observer must be an sf artefact, like Allen's
time-travelling anthropologist, Beresford's and Stapledon's SUPERMEN, and

Phillpotts's alien; if the society is exotic then an ordinary human being
will do. Such social displacements are a staple strategy of SATIRE,
another common precursor of sociology and sf; works like the fourth book
of Jonathan SWIFT's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and The Voyage of Captain
Popanilla (1828) by Benjamin DISRAELI can embody scathing social
criticism. Other modern sf novels using this strategy include Robert A.
HEINLEIN's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND (1961) and Robert SILVERBERG's The
Masks of Time (1968; vt Vornan-19). An interesting MAINSTREAM novel in
which sociologists investigate a cult whose MYTHOLOGY is sciencefictional
in kind is Imaginary Friends (1967) by Alison Lurie (1926- ). Stories of
the type that construct hypothetical "human studies" projects for alien
sociologists - like S.P. SOMTOW's Mallworld (1981) and Karen Joy FOWLER's
"The Poplar Street Study" (1985) and "The View from Venus" (1986)-tend to
be darkly humorous and satirical.The quasiscientific activities featured
in these kinds of sf are impracticable in the real world (although there
are analogues in cultural anthropology) both because culture-bound
sociologists find it virtually impossible to become "objective observers"
and because they cannot construct actual societies by way of experiment.
Natural scientists do not, for the most part, encounter problems of these
kinds, and so the relationship between the social sciences and speculative
fiction is markedly different from that involving the natural sciences;
that is, sociological fiction may try to accomplish what the practical
science cannot, and thus is a generator of ideas rather than a borrower.
Ideas from speculative fiction are occasionally "fed back" into ways of
thinking about the real world: Aldous HUXLEY's BRAVE NEW WORLD and George
ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) have had considerable influence on
attitudes to social trends and actual political rhetoric. Some modern
social theorists have built literary models to dramatize their theories,
notably B.F. SKINNER in Walden Two (1948) and Michael YOUNG in The Rise of
the Meritocracy (1958). Where Skinner's work is a utopia, Young's is a
DYSTOPIA - he promotes his own ideas by displaying the folly of opposite
ideas in action. The US sociologist Richard Ofshe (1941- ) compiled an
anthology of sf stories, with appropriate commentary, as a textbook on The
Sociology of the Possible (anth 1970); John Milstead, Martin H. GREENBERG,
Joseph D. OLANDER and Patricia S. WARRICK's Sociology through Science
Fiction (anth 1974) and Social Problems through Science Fiction (anth
1975) are similar but less competent.The simple classification of
hypothetical societies into satires, utopias and dystopias serves
moderately well for models built outside genre sf, but GENRE-SF writers
are very rarely concerned with trying to design ideal societies, and,
although they do have a tendency to offer dire polemical warnings about
the way the world is going, the extent to which their visions may be
described as satirical or dystopian has also been exaggerated. Sf writers
often try to envisage forms of society which are quite simply conceivable;
they invent for the sheer joy of invention, and often it does them some
disservice to invoke the commonplace category labels. For example,
although the first significant model of a purely hypothetical society,
H.G. WELLS's THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901), has definite dystopian
aspects, such a classification would be too narrow, and the same is true
of many subsequent novels which take the ant-nest as their model (
HIVE-MINDS).Another interesting early example of a hypothetical society

which is really neither a satire nor a dystopia is The Revolt of Man
(1882) by Walter BESANT, the prototype of a whole subgenre of stories
depicting female-dominated societies. Its assumptions regarding the
structure and fortunes of the society clearly reveal the main tenets of
Victorian male chauvinism, and it makes an interesting comparison with
more recent explorations of the same theme, including Edmund COOPER's Five
to Twelve (1968), Robert BLOCH's Ladies' Day (1968 dos) and Thomas
BERGER's Regiment of Women (1973). This is one of the commonest themes in
social modelling. Its early phases are tracked by Sam MOSKOWITZ in When
Women Rule (anth 1972), and further relevant fictions include J.D.
BERESFORD's Goslings (1913; vt A World of Women US), Owen M. JOHNSON's The
Coming of the Amazons (1931), Philip WYLIE's The Disappearance (1951),
Richard WILSON's The Girls from Planet 5 (1955), John WYNDHAM's "Consider
Her Ways" (1956), Charles Eric MAINE's World without Men (1958; vt Alph),
Poul ANDERSON's Virgin Planet (1959) and Edmund COOPER's Who Needs Men
(1972; vt Gender Genocide). Sf stories in which the social roles
associated with the sexes are in some fashion revised have become a highly
significant instrument of ideative exploration in the hands of FEMINIST
writers. Outstanding works of this kind include Joanna RUSS's THE FEMALE
MAN (1975) and Marge PIERCY's WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME (1976). In the UK
The Women's Press has an sf line, and many of the books published by the
radical lesbian Onlywomen Press are sf.Both The Revolt of Man and THE
FIRST MEN IN THE MOON show "distorted societies" constructed by altering a
single variable in a quasi-experimental fashion. Outside GENRE SF such
distortions are almost always invoked for dystopian or satirical ends, but
inside the genre distortion often seems to be an end in itself. Alien
societies have been used in sf for satirical purposes - Stanton A.
COBLENTZ made a habit of it in such works as The Blue Barbarians (1931;
1958) and Hidden World (1935; 1957; vt In Caverns Below) - but this is
comparatively rare. The most memorable nonhuman societies in sf - they are
so numerous that any list has to be highly selective - reflect a far more
open-minded kind of creativity: Clifford D. SIMAK's CITY (1944-51; fixup
1952), L. Sprague DE CAMP's Rogue Queen (1951), Philip Jose FARMER's THE
LOVERS (1952; exp 1961), James BLISH's "A Case of Conscience" (1953), Poul
ANDERSON's War of the Wing-Men (1958; vt The Man who Counts) and The
People of the Wind (1973), Brian W. ALDISS's The Dark Light Years (1964),
Isaac ASIMOV's THE GODS THEMSELVES (1972), Stanley SCHMIDT's The Sins of
the Fathers (1976), David LAKE's The Right Hand of Dextra (1977), Ian
WATSON's and Michael BISHOP's Under Heaven's Bridge (1981), Phillip MANN's
The Eye of the Queen (1982) and Timothy ZAHN's A Coming of Age (1985).
Distorted human societies are even more numerous, but some notable
examples are: Wyman GUIN's "Beyond Bedlam" (1951), Frederik POHL's and
C.M. KORNBLUTH's THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1953), James E. GUNN's The Joy
Makers (fixup 1961), Jack VANCE's The Languages of Pao (1958), Alexei
PANSHIN's RITE OF PASSAGE (1963; exp 1968), John JAKES's Mask of Chaos
(1970), Robert SILVERBERG's A TIME OF CHANGES (1971), Samuel R. DELANY's
Triton (1976), Ludek PESEK's A Trap for Perseus (1976; trans 1980), George
ZEBROWSKI's Macrolife (1979), Bruce STERLING's SCHISMATRIX (1985), Keith
ROBERTS's Kiteworld (1985) and Philip Jose FARMER's Dayworld (1985).
Implicit in all these stories, whatever their immediate dramatic purpose,
are arguments about directions and limits of social possibility.One of the

commonest forms of sociological thought-experiment in sf is that of taking
society apart and building it up again. Many stories of this type are
discussed in the sections on DISASTER and HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; classic
examples include S. Fowler WRIGHT's Deluge (1928) and Dawn (1929), George
R. STEWART's EARTH ABIDES (1949) and Walter M. MILLER's A CANTICLE FOR
LEIBOWITZ (1955-7; fixup 1960). The pattern of social disintegration is
subject to detailed scrutiny in William GOLDING's Lord of the Flies
(1954), while the building of a society from scratch is satirically
featured in E.C. LARGE's Dawn in Andromeda (1956). Investigations of the
theme range in character from outright HORROR stories to ROBINSONADES,
often steering a very uneasy course between realism and romanticism.Many
particular fields within sociology are not widely reflected in sf, but
there is an abundance of stories bearing upon issues in the sociology of
RELIGION, including Heinlein's "If This Goes On . . ." (1940), Bertrand
RUSSELL's "Zahatopolk" (1954), Miller's A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ,
Anderson's "The Problem of Pain" (1973) and Gerald Jonas's "The Shaker
Revival" (1970). There is no such abundance of stories relating to the
sociology of science, largely because most sf - unlike most mundane
fiction - treats religion sceptically and science reverently; but Asimov's
THE GODS THEMSELVES includes some shrewd observations on the working of
the community of SCIENTISTS, as does Howard L. MYERS's pointed comedy
"Out, Wit!" (1972). An interesting exercise in hypothetical applied
sociology is featured in Katherine MACLEAN's "The Snowball Effect" (1952),
in which a sociologist draws up an incentive scheme which permits the
Watashaw Ladies Sewing Circle to recruit the entire world (the technique
later became known in the real world as "pyramid selling"). The definitive
sf exercise in the sociology of POLITICS is Michael D. RESNICK's vivid
account of the COLONIZATION and subsequent "liberation" of Paradise
(1989). Sociologists working in the field of demography play a key role in
Hilbert SCHENCK's curious timeslip romance, A ROSE FOR ARMAGEDDON (1982),
although they rarely feature in stories of OVERPOPULATION.The marked shift
in the emphasis of genre sf away from scientific hardware towards
sociological issues has had several causes. Sheer literary sophistication
is one; the expansion of the sf audience to take in many readers (and
writers) who have little scientific education is another. It also reflects
a growing awareness of the pace of social change and of insistent
challenges to social values which were once supported by wider consensus.
Elementary features of social organization like the family are
increasingly subject to the erosions of individual liberty. Commonplace
social problems like crime ( CRIME AND PUNISHMENT) and care of the aged
and the sick are becoming magnified - ironically, by virtue of the very
success of the technologies which have been brought to bear on the
problems. The fact that social situations do and will determine the
context in which scientific inventions are and will be made and used was
frequently glossed over by early sf writers, but is now clearly
recognized. The slowly but steadily growing interest in sf may be a
symptom of wider recognition of the acceleration of social change and the
imaginative utility of sociological thought-experiments; if so, the
academic study of sf ( SF IN THE CLASSROOM) might perhaps be a matter more
suited to sociologists than to students of literature per se. [BS]See
also: CITIES; HISTORY IN SF; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; LINGUISTICS; SOCIAL

DARWINISM; TABOOS; WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION.
SOFT SF
This not very precise item of sf TERMINOLOGY, formed by analogy with HARD
SF, is generally applied either to sf that deals with the SOFT SCIENCES or
to sf that does not deal with recognizable science at all, but emphasizes
human feelings. The contrasting of soft sf with hard sf is sometimes
illogical. Stories of PSI POWERS or SUPERMEN, for example, have little to
do with real science, but are regularly regarded by sf readers as hard sf.
The NEW WAVE was generally associated with soft sf; CYBERPUNK falls
somewhere between the two. [PN]
SOFT SCIENCES
In academic slang and sf TERMINOLOGY, the soft sciences are in the main
the social sciences, those which deal mainly with human affairs - very
often the sciences that require little or no hardware for their carrying
out. (Most would claim BIOLOGY and subsidiary fields - e.g., CLONES and
GENETIC ENGINEERING - as hard sciences [ HARD SF].) Theme entries in this
volume which deal directly or indirectly with soft sciences include
ANTHROPOLOGY, ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, EVOLUTION, FUTUROLOGY,
INTELLIGENCE,
LINGUISTICS, PERCEPTION, PSYCHOLOGY and SOCIOLOGY. The soft sciences very
often work through statistics, and hard scientists have been known to
despise them for their lack of rigour and their occasional difficulty in
predicting quantifiable results; sociology has been particularly
criticized in this context. Sf that deals primarily with the soft sciences
is sometimes known as SOFT SF. [PN]
SOHL, JERRY
Working name of US writer and former journalist Gerald Allan Sohl Sr
(1913- ), active from about 1950 in sf and other genres as JS and under
various pseudonyms, including Nathan Butler and Sean Mei Sullivan. He
began publishing sf with "The 7th Order" for Gal in 1952, and soon
released The Haploids (1952), the first of several 1950s novels whose
slick surface and sharp economy of scale marked him as a professional
craftsman. These books include Transcendent Man (1953), Costigan's Needle
(1953) - which deftly depicts the colonizing of a PARALLEL WORLD - The
Altered Ego (1954) - which ingeniously treats as a problem in detection an
IMMORTALITY puzzle involving personality recordings, though without the
concept of CLONES the technology of transference was clearly unwieldy and Point Ultimate (1955), a fine example of 1950s PARANOIA in its picture
of Russians occupying the USA through use of a plague virus. In all these
books JS's use of science, though attractive, seems in hindsight somewhat
opportunistic, and several of them fail ultimately to make much sense of
the premises they dramatize. His sf output began to slacken by the end of
the decade, though he remained active in other areas, several non-sf
novels being published as by Butler. Of his later sf, The Odious Ones
(1959) and Night Slaves (1965), later televised, best demonstrate his
competence. From 1958 JS did considerable tv work, including scripts,
under various names, for The INVADERS , The OUTER LIMITS, STAR TREK and
The TWILIGHT ZONE . [JC]Other works: The Mars Monopoly (1956 dos); The
Time Dissolver (1957); One Against Herculum (1959 dos); The Anomaly

(1971); I, Aleppo (as "I am Aleppo" in The New Mind [anth 1973] ed Roger
ELWOOD; exp 1976); Death Sleep (1983); Kaheesh (1983) as by Nathan Butler.
SOKOpsOWSKI, KRZYSZTOF
(1955- ) Polish critic, translator and editor, author of the POLAND entry
in this encyclopedia. A graduate of Warsaw University, KS is well known
for his critical pieces on US-UK sf in the magazine Fantastyka. Since its
foundation in 1990 he has been editor of Fenix, the first privately owned
professional sf magazine in Poland; he is also a professional translator
of sf. [PN]
SOLARIS
1. French-language Canadian magazine. CANADA; Luc POMERLEAU; Daniel
SERNINE.2. Russian film (1971). Mosfilm. Dir Andrei TARKOVSKY, starring
Donatas Banionis, Natalia Bondarchuk, Youri Jarvet, Anatoli Solinitsin.
Screenplay Tarkovsky, Friedrich Gorenstein, based on SOLARIS (1961; trans
1970) by Stanislaw LEM. 165 mins; first US version 132 mins. Colour.This
long, ambitious rendering of Lem's metaphysical novel is regarded by some
as one of the finest sf films made; a minority sees it as tediously
slow-moving. S changes the emphasis of the story from the intellectual to
the emotional, partly by restructuring the narrative, which in the film is
framed by elegiac and nostalgic sequences at the country house of the
young space-scientist hero's parents, focusing on the scientist's
relationship with his father; the opening passage is on Earth, the closing
passage on Solaris's recreation of Earth. The main action is set on a
space-station hovering above the planet Solaris, whose ever-changing ocean
is thought to be organic and sentient. The protagonist finds the station
in disrepair and his colleagues demoralized by the materialization of
"phantoms" (quite real and solid) of their innermost obsessions; soon he
is himself haunted by a reincarnation of his suicided wife. These phantoms
may be an attempt by Solaris to communicate. Horrified, he kills the
phantom wife, but a replica arrives that night. Ultimately he recognizes
that, no matter what her source, she is both living and lovable; but while
he sleeps she connives at her own exorcism. Solaris remains an enigma. The
philosophical questions about the limits of human understanding are not
put so sharply as in the book, but the visual images, despite occasionally
mediocre special effects, are potent - haunting leitmotivs of water,
sundering screens, technology and snow. [PN]See also: MUSIC; RUSSIA; SPACE
HABITATS.
SOLAR WIND
This scientific term has found much favour in sf TERMINOLOGY. The stars
constantly emit highly energetic particles as well as, of course, light,
which is itself composed of tiny particles, photons (although here the
word "particle" has a slightly different meaning). These particles exert a
gentle outward pressure (which is why the tail of a comet always points
away from the Sun). A low-mass spacecraft with a huge, incredibly thin
sail, perhaps made of aluminium, could take advantage of this pressure
just as a yacht uses wind - hence the proliferation of rather charming
space-sailing stories, including "The Lady who Sailed the Soul" (1960) by
Cordwainer SMITH and "Sunjammer" (1964; vt "The Wind from the Sun") by
Arthur C. CLARKE. An anthology including 4 original stories, a number of

reprints and some nonfiction is Project Solar Sail (anth 1990) ed Clarke
and (anon) David BRIN. [PN]
SOLO, JAY
[s] Harlan ELLISON.
SOLOGUB, FYODOR
Pseudonym of Russian poet and novelist Fyodor-Kuzmich Teternikov
(1863-1927), who remains best known for his second novel, Melkii bes
(1907; best trans R. Wilks as The Little Demon 1962 UK); the title refers
to the apotheosis of numbing mediocrity, mercilessly depicted, which
devours the schoolteacher protagonist. FS's third novel, Tvorimaia legenda
(1907-13 Shipovnik, then Zemlya; cut 1914; part 1 only of cut text trans
John Cournos as The Created Legend 1916 UK; complete trans Samuel D.
Cioran of restored text in 3 vols as The Created Legend 1979 US), is sf,
though of a strange order. The 1st vol describes the life in 1905 Russia
of the protagonist who-pedagogue, inventor, sybarite and mage - clearly
represents a wish-fulfilment version of the author. The 2nd describes the
RURITANIAN kingdom of the United Isles, threatened by volcanoes and
dynastic upheavals. In the 3rd, after successfully applying to become king
- echoes of Frederick ROLFE's Hadrian VII (1904) are clear - the
protagonist escapes Russia in a spherical flying device of his own
invention and enters into his meritocratic heritage. The text as a whole
irretrievably mixes superscience, Satanism, an eroticized vision of
history, SATIRE and dream. The Sweet-Scented Name, and Other Fairy Tales,
Fables and Stories (coll trans Stephen Graham 1915 UK) and The Old House
and Other Tales (coll trans John Cournos 1916 UK) contain some fantasies.
[JC]
SOL RISING
The quarterly newsletter of the MERRIL COLLECTION OF SCIENCE FICTION,
SPECULATION AND FANTASY.
SOMERS, BART
Gardner F. FOX.
SOMETHING ELSE
UK SEMIPROZINE, 3 issues (Spring 1980, Winter 1980, Spring 1984), smallBEDSHEET format, published and ed Charles Partington from Manchester. This
was a short-lived but brave attempt by Partington, who had previously
edited ALIEN WORLDS, to continue the NEW WORLDS tradition. Many of the
stalwarts of NW appeared, including Brian W. ALDISS, Hilary BAILEY, John
BRUNNER, M. John HARRISON and Michael MOORCOCK. Like its more illustrious
predecessor, SE did not get the distribution it deserved. [RR]
SOMETHING IS OUT THERE
1. US/Australian tv miniseries (1988). CPT Holdings/Hoyts for NBC.
Executive prods Frank Lupo, John Ashley. Dir Richard Colla, starring Joe
Cortese, Maryam d'Abo, George Dzundza. Written Lupo. 2 100min
episodes.This sometimes exciting, often threadbare policier pits a tough
Earth cop (Cortese) and a marooned, telepathic medical officer from an
ALIEN prison spaceship (d'Abo) - she looks both human and
beautiful-against an escaped alien "xenomorph", extremely dangerous and

capable of invading a human host (as in The HIDDEN [1988], which SIOT
strongly resembles). In romantic buddy-movie style, he teaches her Earth
customs and she teaches him monster-catching. Rick Baker's creature
effects are good; the pacing is bad; the ending is ambiguous. An edited
version (165 mins) was released on videotape.2. US tv series (1989). NBC.
8 50min episodes, the last two not aired in the USA. After the promising
if uneven pilot miniseries, the series proper, again starring Cortese and
d'Abo, was disappointing: crime-fighting cliches, unremarkable scripts,
and little use made of the extraterrestrial elements. [PN]
SOMTOW, S.P.
Working name of Thai composer and writer Somtow Papinian Sucharitkul
(1952- ), who used his surname from the beginning of his career to 1985,
when he switched to SPS, announcing that any book previously signed
Sucharitkul would be signed SPS on reprinting (although some children's
books continued to appear under the earlier form of his name). After
university education in the UK and a period in the USA, SPS began in
recent years to spend about half his time in Thailand and half in the USA.
His first publication of any genre interest was a poem, "Kith of
Infinity", which appeared in the Bangkok Press in 1967 and was assembled along with early stories like "Sunsteps" (1977 Unearth) - in Fire from the
Wine Dark Sea (coll 1983). He won the JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for Best New
Writer in 1981.His first novel, Starship and Haiku (1981), is typical of
much of his work: the tale takes place in a crowded but fluid venue, with
culture shocks leading to ornate resolutions; in this case, the citizens
of a post- HOLOCAUST Earth are committing suicide, but whales contact
Japanese survivors (with whom they share a genetic heritage) and the novel
closes as a new hybrid species sets off for the stars.The Chronicles of
the High Inquest sequence - Light on the Sound (1982; rev vt The Dawning
Shadow #1: Light on the Sound 1986), The Throne of Madness (1983; rev vt
The Dawning Shadow #2: The Throne of Madness 1986), Utopia Hunters (coll
of linked stories 1984) and The Darkling Wind (1985) - again injects
whale-like sentients into a complex mix, following the interactions of the
mutilated humans who hunt them on instructions from the Inquestors, a
Galaxy-spanning race whose pretensions to moral superiority are harshly
examined as the sequence advances. In the end, the Inquestor race dies in
cataclysm, leaving a deposit of myth for later races to decipher. Other sf
of interest includes the ALTERNATE-WORLD Aquiliad sequence - The Aquiliad
(1983; vt The Aquiliad: Aquila in the New World 1988), The Aquiliad #2:
Aquila and the Iron Horse (1988) and #3: Aquila and the Sphinx (1988) set in a Western Hemisphere dominated by the Roman Empire; a resident time
traveller injects a malicious note of imbalance and insecurity, generating
a state of fluid near-chaos typical of SPS at his best. Sf singletons
include Mallworld (coll of linked stories 1981), in which the eponymous
venue doubles as an observation post for ALIENS fascinated by the human
race; and The Shattered Horse (1986), another alternate-world tale in
which the Trojans win.At about the time he changed his byline he also
began to move from sf into fantasy and horror, notably with the Valentine
sequence of vampire novels - Vampire Junction (1984) and Valentine (1992
UK) - and Moondance (1989), a powerful werewolf tale. It is to be hoped,
however, that he will continue to contribute sf tales which reflect his

quicksilver, sea-change imagination. [JC]Other works: 2 "V" novelizations,
The Alien Swordmaster * (1985) and Symphony of Terror * (1988); The Fallen
Country (1986), for children; Forgetting Places (1987), associational;
Riverrun (1991), first volume of the projected Riverrun or Darkling Wars
sequence, comprising Riverrun (1991), Forest of the Night (1992) and Music
of Madness (1993); Fiddling for Waterbuffaloes (1986 ASF; 1992 chap)I Wake
from a Dream of a Drowned Star City (1992 chap); The Wizard's Apprentice
(1993); Jasmine Nights (1994 UK), an associational novel with
autobiographical elements.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; ECOLOGY; GALACTIC
EMPIRES; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; MESSIAHS; MUSIC;
SOCIOLOGY; SPACE OPERA.
SONDERS, MARK
Michael BERLYN.
SONGWEAVER, CERIN
[s] Charles DE LINT.
SON OF BLOB
The BLOB .
SON OF GODZILLA
GOJIRA.
SON OF KONG
Film (1933). RKO. Dir Ernest B. Schoedsack, starring Robert Armstrong,
Helen Mack, Frank Reicher, Noble Johnson. Screenplay Ruth Rose. 70 mins.
B/w.This film was made immediately after KING KONG (1933) as a small-scale
sequel. The hero returns to Skull Island and discovers Kong's son, a 20ft
(6m) white ape with all the characteristics of a friendly puppy. Various
prehistoric monsters appear before a volcanic upheaval destroys the
island. The ape saves the hero by holding him above the flood waters.
There are good special effects by Willis H. O'BRIEN, but the film is
obviously a rush job to cash in on the success of the original, whose
mythic resonance this lacks. [JB]
SOREL, EDWARD
(1929- ) US illustrator and writer. In Moon Missing: An Illustrated Guide
to the Future (1962) the MOON disappears and the early 1960s are
satirized. The illustrations are more satisfyingly vindictive than the
text. [PN]
SOUCEK, LUDVIK
[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
SOUKUP, MARTHA
(1959- ) US writer whose work, beginning with "Dress Rehearsal" for
Universe 16 (anth 1986) ed Terry CARR, has been restricted to short
stories, and who has published several stories whose surface clarity
conceals taxingly insistent examinations of readerly assumptions. Some of
this work is assembled in Rosemary's Brain and Other Tales of Weird Wonder
(coll 1992 chap). MS won a NEBULA Award for Best Story for "A Defense of
Social Contracts" (1994). [JC]

SOUTH, CLARK
[s] Dwight V. SWAIN.
SOUTH AMERICA
LATIN AMERICA.
SOUTHERN, TERRY
[r] Peter GEORGE.
SOUTHWOLD, STEPHEN
Neil BELL.
SOVIET UNION
The vast majority of the sf from what until 1991 was the Soviet Union,
especially that translated into English, was in the first instance written
and published in Russian ( RUSSIA). A small amount of Soviet sf exists in
the various languages other than Russian, notably Ukrainian, in which the
dissident writer Oles Berdnyk writes. Little of this material has been
translated into Russian, let alone English. The break-up of the USSR will
certainly in due course increase interest from both within and outside
their borders in the native writings of the new (or re-established)
nations. [PN]
SOWDEN, LEWIS
(1905-1974) UK-born South African writer and newspaperman whose
Tomorrow's Comet (1949 Blue Book as "Star of Doom"; 1951 UK) treats the
END OF THE WORLD in psychological terms. [JC/PN]Other works: The Man who
was Emperor: A Romance (1946 UK).
SOYKA, OTTO
[r] AUSTRIA.
SOYLENT GREEN
Film (1973). MGM. Dir Richard Fleischer, starring Charlton Heston, Edward
G. Robinson, Leigh Taylor-Young, Chuck Connors, Joseph Cotten, Paula
Kelly. Screenplay Stanley R. Greenberg, based on MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM!
(1966) by Harry HARRISON. 97 mins. Colour.A New York police detective
(Heston) in an AD2022 marked by OVERPOPULATION investigates what appears
to be a routine murder and in the end discovers that "soylent green", the
main food for the world's population, is actually made from dead human
bodies. The plot has little to do with Harrison's book, whose
pro-contraception message it nervously avoids for fear of alienating Roman
Catholic viewers (Harrison has spoken eloquently of the perversion of his
work), but the vision of a teeming, overpopulated and festering New York
is recreated quite well. The cannibalistic denouement is purely for shock
value, and makes no rational sense; indeed Harrison coined the word
"soylent" from "soy beans" and "lentils", and the people of his future are
largely and necessarily vegetarian. Edward G. Robinson's fine performance
as a dying old man coaxed into a euthanasia clinic is touching, for he was
dying in real life as well. The film won a NEBULA. [JB/PN]
SPACE ADVENTURES
SPACE ADVENTURES (CLASSICS).

SPACE ADVENTURES (CLASSICS)
One of the reprint DIGEST-size magazines published by Sol Cohen's
Ultimate Publishing Co. 6 issues Winter 1970-Summer 1971. The title was
shortened to Space Adventures after the first 2. The numbering ran,
strangely, #9-#14, apparently picking up where SCIENCE FICTION (ADVENTURE)
CLASSICS left off, and SAC would be regarded as simply a variant title
were it not that the latter resumed publication, also in Winter 1970, with
#12. Most of SA(C)'s stories were reprinted from AMAZING STORIES, from the
rather dismal period of Raymond A. PALMER's editorship. [BS]
SPACE CAMP
Film (1986). ABC. Dir Harry Winer, starring Kate Capshaw, Lea Thompson,
Kelly Preston, Larry B. Scott, Leaf Phoenix, Tate Donovan, Tom Skerritt.
Screenplay W.W. Wicket, Casey T. Mitchell, from a story by Patrick Bailey,
Larry B. Williams. 108 mins. Colour.At a NASA-sponsored summer space camp,
a flight simulation in a space shuttle becomes the real thing after the
intervention of a well meaning ROBOT, and 4 teenagers and a small boy have
to replenish their oxygen from a satellite and then bring the shuttle down
again. With the help of the Force (from STAR WARS [1977]) and their own
self-reliance they manage. This implausible but patriotic advertisement
for Teamwork and the American Way has plenty of tension (and, in the wake
of the Challenger disaster, plenty of bad taste), but stereotyped
characters, mediocre process work in the space scenes and flat direction
render it routine. [PN]
SPACE CHILDREN, THE
Film (1958). Paramount. Dir Jack ARNOLD, starring Michel Ray, Adam
Williams, Peggy Webber, Johnny Crawford, Jackie Coogan. Screenplay Bernard
C. Schoenfeld, from a story by Tom Filer. 69 mins. B/w.This was the last
of Arnold's cycle of sf films with producer William Alland, though here
the studio is Paramount, not Universal. In this earnest but likeable moral
fable, a group of children are "taken over" by a benign ALIEN resembling a
glowing brain (which expands as the film progresses). The peace-loving
alien's aim is to use the children in the sabotage of a missile project on
which their parents are working, and it gives them special powers to help
them do this. The alien is not entirely a pacifist; it kills the brutal
father of one of the children. Arnold makes his usual evocative use of
landscape - this time a remote beach. [JB/PN]
SPACE COLONIES
SPACE HABITATS.
SPACED INVADERS
Film (1989). Smart Egg Pictures. Dir Patrick Read Johnson, starring
Douglas Barr, Royal Dano, Ariana Richards, J.J. Anderson, Gregg Berger,
Fred Applegate. Screenplay Johnson, Scott Alexander. 100 mins. Colour.This
spoof, obviously made for younger viewers, starts promisingly with the
premise that the diminutive crew of a Martian spaceship, in the middle of
a battle, pick up the radio signal of Orson Welles's broadcast of WAR OF
THE WORLDS, and hasten to Earth to join the presumptive Martian invasion,
only to find a disinterested population (in small-town Illinois) more or
less ignoring them, or mistaking them for trick-or-treating children. The

ensuing gags seldom rise above poorly choreographed knockabout farce, with
no great ingenuity but a perceptible flavour of bigotry. [PN]
SPACED OUT LIBRARY
MERRIL COLLECTION OF SCIENCE FICTION, SPECULATION AND FANTASY.
SPACE FACT AND FICTION
UK magazine, PULP-MAGAZINE size. 8 monthly issues Mar-Oct 1954, several
undated, published by G.G. Swan, London; ed anon. SFAF published mainly
reprints from wartime issues of FUTURE FICTION and SCIENCE FICTION,
slanted towards the juvenile reader, but also new stories; the Apr 1954
issue was all new. An album of unsold copies in jumbled order was issued,
presumably as a Christmas annual. [FHP]
SPACE FLIGHT
Flight into space is the classic theme in sf. The lunar romances of
Francis GODWIN, CYRANO DE BERGERAC et al. are the works most commonly and
readily identified as PROTO SCIENCE FICTION. In modern times, as GENRE SF
spilled out of print into the CINEMA, RADIO and TELEVISION, many of the
archetypal works produced for these media were romances of space travel.
Flight into space provides the stirring climax of the film THINGS TO COME
(1936) and the subject-matter of DESTINATION MOON (1950) and 2001: A SPACE
ODYSSEY (1968), as well as of Charles CHILTON's BBC radio serial Journey
into Space (1953) and its sequels, and tv's STAR TREK. The landing of
Apollo 11 on the MOON was seen by many as "science fiction come true". It
is natural that sf should be symbolized by the theme of space flight, in
that it is primarily concerned with transcending imaginative boundaries,
with breaking free of the gravitational force which holds consciousness to
a traditional core of belief and expectancy. The means by which space
flight has been achieved in sf - its many and various SPACESHIPS - have
always been of secondary importance to the mythical impact of the theme.
Only a handful of writers - notably Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY - embodied real
scientific ideas about the feasibility of space ROCKETS in fictional form
for didactic purposes.Actually, all the early lunar voyages are stories of
flight rather than of space flight, in that their authors took for granted
the continuity of an atmospheric "ether" (a convenience ingeniously
co-opted into modern sf by Bob SHAW in THE RAGGED ASTRONAUTS [1986] and
its sequels). No early travellers had to contend with the interplanetary
vacuum, not even the hero of Edgar Allan POE's "The Unparalleled Adventure
of One Hans Pfaall" (1835; rev 1840), although this was the first of the
traveller's tales in which the protagonist takes elaborate precautions to
provide himself with air, in recognition of the tenuousness of the
sublunar atmosphere. All romances of interplanetary flight prior to "Hans
Pfaall" are didactic - either straightforwardly, after the fashion of
Johannes KEPLER's Somnium (1634) and Gabriel Daniel's A Voyage to the
World of Cartesius (1690), or satirically, after the fashion of Daniel
DEFOE's The Consolidator (1705). Poe's story is a satire, too, although
the author advanced claims as to its verisimilitude. But it was really
Jules VERNE who made the first serious attempt at realism in De la terre a
la lune (1865; trans J.K. Hoyte as From the Earth to the Moon 1869 US) and
its sequel Autour de la lune (1870; both trans Lewis Mercier and Eleanor
King as From the Earth to the Moon 1873 UK). Hindsight invests

19th-century lunar romances with the same mythical significance that sf
has more recently lent to the notion of space travel, but the stories had
no such significance in their own day. The idea of flight into space
became the central myth of sf only once the genre had been identified and
demarcated by Hugo GERNSBACK. This was not really a strategic move on
Gernsback's part: his interest in the future and in the effect of
TECHNOLOGY on society was more catholic-with space travel as only one
among a whole series of probable developments. It was because of the kind
of impact sf made on the readers who discovered it - young, for the most
part - that space flight acquired its special significance. Many sf
readers found in sf a kind of revelation, a sudden mind-opening shock (
CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; SENSE OF WONDER): this was not the effect of any
single story but the discovery of sf as a category, a genre of fictions
presenting an infinity of possibilities. It is because of this element of
revelation, the sudden awareness of a vast range of possibilities, that
the paradigmatic examples of early sf are stories of escape from Earth
into a Universe filled with worlds: the first SPACE OPERAS, notably E.E.
"Doc" SMITH's The Skylark of Space (1928; 1946).As with other themes in
sf, the post-WWII period saw considerable sophistication of the myth of
space flight. Significantly, and perhaps contrary to popular belief, there
was relatively little development in verisimilitude outside the work of a
very few technically adept authors. The most significant post-WWII stories
related to the theme are not so much stories about space flight as
commentaries upon the myth itself; they are concerned with imaginative
horizons rather than hardware. One of the earliest examples of this kind
of commentary is Ray BRADBURY's "King of the Gray Spaces" (1943; vt "R is
for Rocket"); the classics are Robert A. HEINLEIN's "The Man who Sold the
Moon" (1950) and Arthur C. CLARKE's Prelude to Space (1951). Others
include Murray LEINSTER's "The Story of Rod Cantrell" (1949), Fredric
BROWN's The Lights in the Sky are Stars (1953; vt Project Jupiter 1954
UK), Walter M. MILLER's "Death of a Spaceman" (1954; vt "Memento Homo")
and Dean MCLAUGHLIN's The Man who Wanted Stars (fixup 1965). The mythic
significance of the theme is most obvious in a story in which "space
flight" is, from the viewpoint of the reader, purely metaphorical: James
BLISH's "Surface Tension" (1952), in which a microscopic man builds
himself a protective shell and forces his way up through the surface of a
pond into the open air. Also notable is a short story by Edmond HAMILTON,
"The Pro" (1964), in which an ageing sf writer meets up with the reality
of the myth when his son goes into space.Sf writers often became annoyed
when, following Neil Armstrong's Moon landing in 1969, they were asked
what they would find to write about in the future. In fact, a subtle
change did overcome sf during the course of the Apollo programme. Since
then, stories about space flight within the Solar System have been
"demystified", and we have a generation of stories in which spacemen
operating within a "real" context come into conflict with the myth: Barry
N. MALZBERG's The Falling Astronauts (1971), Nigel BALCHIN's Kings of
Infinite Space (1967), Ludek PESEK's Die Marsexpedition (1970 Germany;
trans Anthea Bell as The Earth is Near 1974) and Dan SIMMONS's Phases of
Gravity (1989) are examples; while J.G. BALLARD has for some time been
writing nostalgic stories which regard the space programme as a glorious
folly of the 1960s (8 are collected in the ironically titled Memories of

the Space Age [coll 1988]). Sf novels which bitterly assume that a second
break-out into space may well be necessary if the actual space programme
is allowed to fade away include The Man who Corrupted Earth (1980) by G.C.
EDMONDSON and Privateers (1985) by Ben BOVA. However, the myth of
transcending the closed world of the known and familiar is now more often
tied specifically to interstellar travel, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey,
Poul ANDERSON's Tau Zero (1967; exp 1970), Vonda MCINTYRE's Superluminal
(1984) and some of the stories in Faster than Light (anth 1976) ed Jack
DANN and George ZEBROWSKI. Star-drives which free mankind from the prison
of the Solar System take on an iconic significance in such novels as TAKE
BACK PLENTY (1990) by Colin GREENLAND and Carve the Sky (1991) by
Alexander JABLOKOV. [BS]See also: FASTER THAN LIGHT; GALACTIC EMPIRES.
SPACE HABITATS
Stories of space stations or artificial satellites appear early in sf,
the first example being Edward Everett HALE's extraordinary "The Brick
Moon" (1869) and its sequel "Life in the Brick Moon" (1870), in which the
satellite of the title consists of many brick spheres connected by brick
arches, and is launched, with people on board, by gigantic flywheels. Kurd
LASSWITZ's Auf Zwei Planeten (1897; cut trans as Two Planets 1971 US) has
Martian space stations shaped like spoked wheels floating above the poles,
but these are kept hovering by gravity-control devices of a somewhat
implausible kind. The first detailed and thoroughly scientific treatment
is in Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY's Vne zemli (written 1896-1920; 1920; trans
as "Out of the Earth" in The Call of the Cosmos 1963 Russia), a
semifictionalized didactic speculation; it deals with free fall, space
greenhouses for growing food, communication via space mirrors, and
artificial GRAVITY effected by spinning the station on its axis - indeed,
much of the spectrum of space-habitat ideas that would first begin to
appear in any profusion after WWII, at a time when space travel by ROCKETS
was generally realized to be something actually likely to happen.A highly
influential book of popular science, dealing with (among other things) the
construction of space stations was The Conquest of Space (1949) by Willy
LEY, illustrated by Chesley BONESTELL, and it was after this that the
space-station story began to appear commonly in GENRE SF. However, the
idea was not new to the genre, a celebrated earlier example being George
O. SMITH's Venus Equilateral stories, published in ASF from 1942, about a
communications space station in a Trojan position (60deg ahead of the
planet) in the orbit of Venus.The image of the space habitat presented
through the 1950s was usually (though not always) as a way station, a
stopping-off point prior to flights deeper into space. Indeed, the usual
term of the time was "space station"; another book by Ley was titled Space
Stations (1958). Such stations were envisaged as being in Earth orbit, the
first place you reach after leaving Earth. We see this image of the
stopping-off place quite often in movies, an early example being CONQUEST
OF SPACE (1955) and a later one 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), and of
course in books, as in Arthur C. CLARKE's children's novel Islands in the
Sky (1952). Other 1950s books and stories in which the space station is
totemic include Rafe BERNARD's The Wheel in the Sky (1954), Frank Belknap
LONG's Space Station No 1 (1957 dos), James E. GUNN's Station in Space
(1958) and Damon KNIGHT's psychological melodrama about the trauma of

meeting an alien, "Stranger Station" (1959).One version of the theme that
might have been expected to play a far greater role than it actually has
in genre sf is the space station as menace, as a weapons-delivery platform
in space easily able to target any point on Earth's surface. This notion
has popped up occasionally in films, such as MOONRAKER (1979) (biological
warfare) and HELLFIRE (1986) (a new energy source that can fry people). An
early novel to use the theme is C.M. KORNBLUTH's Not This August (1955; vt
Christmas Eve 1956 UK), in which it is hoped that a military space station
will evict the Russians occupying the USA.Although this Earth-orbit phase
of the space-station story has now largely been superseded, there is still
in HARD SF a sense of real nuts-and-bolts excitement when the actual
building of one is envisaged, and books are still written on the theme; e.
g., Donald KINGSBURY's The Moon Goddess and the Son (1979 ASF; exp 1986)
and Allen STEELE's Orbital Decay (1989).Soon, as the space station became
absorbed into GENRE SF as one of its primary icons, they were popping up
all over the place, not just in Earth orbit. We can obviously regard
(perhaps not very usefully) all SPACESHIPS as space habitats, not to
mention hollowed-out ASTEROIDS and, of course, GENERATION STARSHIPS. Alien
space habitats of incredible complexity may be stumbled across by human
observers, who have to make sense of their enigmatic qualities and deduce
their purpose and the lifeforms for which they were built ( BIG DUMB
OBJECTS). 3 such works are Clarke's RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA (1973), John
VARLEY's Gaean trilogy (1979-84) and Greg BEAR's EON (1985).One iconic
space-habitat motif has the space station representing the anthropological
observers in the sky, looking down at the primitives below, as in Patricia
MCKILLIP's Moon-Flash (1984), where the superstitiously regarded flash of
the title turns out to be the firing retro-rockets of spacecraft visiting
the station; a particularly good example is Brian W. ALDISS's Helliconia
trilogy (1982-5), whose observing space habitat, ironically named
"Avernus", is central to the structure of the whole long tale, its
"superior" observers standing for a civilization that is played out. The
observers in Stanislaw LEM's SOLARIS (1961; trans 1970), filmed as SOLARIS
(1971), are also played out and receive the come-uppance due to people who
try to hold themselves aloof, their space station becoming a shambles, as
the LIVING WORLD beneath reconstructs in the flesh their most feared and
desired memories and nightmares. An interesting variant of the
space-habitat story is Fritz LEIBER's A Specter is Haunting Texas (1969),
whose spectre is, in fact, the skinny body of a visitor from a space
habitat who, unable to move properly in Earth gravity, is supported by an
exoskeleton.The second boom in space-station stories was, like the first,
catalysed by a book of popular science, this time The High Frontier (1977)
by Princeton physicist Gerard K. O'NEILL (1927-1992), which vigorously
proselytized for the construction of colonies in space, either in Earth
orbit or at one of the LAGRANGE POINTS - especially L5, 60deg behind the
Moon in the Moon's orbit around Earth. The amazing long-range quality of
Tsiolkovsky's prescience has never been more evident than in the fact that
his predictions - not just of space stations, but of huge self-sufficient,
heavily populated space colonies - took more than half a century to come
to their full flowering in scientific speculation and in sf.One of the
first writers to take O'Neill's tip was Mack REYNOLDS, in Lagrange Five
(1979), The Lagrangists (1983) and Chaos in Lagrangia (1984) (the latter 2

ed Dean ING from manuscripts found after Reynolds's death). Now that the
space station was being re-envisioned as the space colony or space habitat
- a home where people might live all their lives - its iconic significance
was radically changing. The space habitat has become the locus of the new,
with everything old, washed-up and politically out-of-date being left
rotting back on Earth while the real action is in space. The second new
thing about space habitats has to do with diversity and cultural
evolution: there can be a lot of them, each giving a home to a different
political or racial or social group, so that the habitat takes over the
function of ISLANDS in earlier sf as an isolated area that can be used as
a laboratory in which to conduct thought experiments in cultural
anthropology. (Not all these motifs are post-O'Neill, of course; some including the idea of diverse habitats each catering for different
tastes-were prefigured in Jack VANCE's eccentric "Abercrombie Station"
[1952].)Among the many books of the past 15 years to make use of
space-habitat themes, mostly along the lines suggested above, are Colony
(1978) by Ben BOVA, Joe HALDEMAN's Worlds series, starting with WORLDS
(1981), Melinda SNODGRASS's Circuit trilogy, beginning with Circuit
(1986), Lois McMaster BUJOLD's FALLING FREE (1988), Christopher HINZ's
Paratwa series, starting with Liege-Killer (1987), and Richard LUPOFF's
The Forever City (1988). The idea is taken to its extremes in George
ZEBROWSKI's Macrolife (1979; rev 1990), in which humanity largely abandons
planetary environments in favour of star-travelling habitats.Obviously the
iconic significance of the space-habitat story is evolving rapidly, a
topic analyzed (rather differently) in "Small Worlds and Strange
Tomorrows: The Icon of the Space Station in Science Fiction" by Gary
Westfahl in Foundation #51 (Spring 1991) (Westfahl has published pieces
elsewhere on the same theme). Complex use of the motif - the space habitat
both as cultural forcing ground and as creator of instability through
cultural claustrophobia - appears in some key CYBERPUNK works, notably
William GIBSON's Neuromancer trilogy (1984-8) and Bruce STERLING's vastly
inventive SCHISMATRIX (1985), and also - to a degree - Michael SWANWICK's
Vacuum Flowers (1987). In only a decade we have seen the emphasis move
from space habitat as brave new world to space habitat as a trap that
corrupts and is prey to cultural and technological dereliction.Though
space habitats are likely to remain popular in sf because of their
peculiar usefulness in creating specific kinds of cultural scenario, in
the real world the idea seems, outside a hard core of O'Neill cultists, to
be receiving less and less support as something towards which we should
currently be working. Although the theoretical advantages of low gravity
and permanent energy supply are real, it is difficult to envisage any
remotely plausible circumstances that would make the capital cost of space
habitats, at least when considered in isolation, redeemable economically,
nor any evolutionary advantages in the small-town-mentality balkanization
(and shrinkage of the gene pool) that their building and occupation might
come to represent. [PN]
SPACEHUNTER: ADVENTURES IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE
Film (1983). Delphi Productions/Columbia. Dir Lamont Johnson, starring
Peter Strauss, Molly Ringwald, Ernie Hudson, Michael Ironside. Screenplay
David Preston, Edith Rey, Dan Goldberg, Len Blum, from a story by Stewart

Harding, Jean Lafleur. 90 mins (but reported as being originally 105
mins). Made in 3D. Colour.Bedevilled with production problems, changing
directors in midstream (it was begun by Jean Lafleur), suffering from the
ominous stigma of 6 screenwriting credits, S:AITFZ is surprisingly
relaxed. Strauss is a space scavenger who comes to plague-and-pollution
ridden Terra Eleven, the post- HOLOCAUST chic of whose citizens owes much
to MAD MAX 2 (1981; vt The Road Warrior), to save three maidens. He is
joined by a fast-talking tomboy (Ringwald) and an old army buddy (Hudson),
and they fight their way past Bat People, Barracuda Women and feral
children to the showdown with CYBORG woman-despoiler Overdog (Ironside)
and his barbarian cohorts. Strauss is appealing as a down-at-heel Indiana
Jones in space, and, while the movie is derivative and meandering, it is
also often ingenious and enjoyable. The overtactfully used 3D becomes an
inconsequential irritant. [PN]
"SPACE" KINGLEY
The tough and resourceful Captain "Space" Kingley was the hero of 3 UK
children's SPACE-OPERA annuals of the early 1950s. Beyond his pukka
Britishness he displayed few individual characteristics. The sequence
(which remains extremely difficult to date precisely; the dates here may
not be reliable) comprises The Adventures of Captain "Space" Kingley (coll
1952) with stories by Ray Sonin, The "Space" Kingley Annual (coll 1953)
with stories by Ernest A. Player, and "Space" Kingley and the Secret
Squadron (coll 1954) with stories by David White. All were heavily
illustrated by R.W. Jobson. [JC/RR]
SPACE 1999
UK tv series (1975-7). A Gerry Anderson Production for ITC. Created Gerry
and Sylvia Anderson. Prods Sylvia Anderson (season 1), Fred Freiberger
(season 2). Executive prod Gerry Anderson. Story consultant Christopher
Penfold. Special effects Brian Johnson. 2 seasons, 48 50min episodes in
all. Colour.This UK-made series, created by Gerry and Sylvia ANDERSON who had previously produced a number of tv series ( STINGRAY, THUNDERBIRDS
and others) with puppets and UFO and the film DOPPELGANGER (1969) with
real actors - was obviously inspired in part by the success of STAR TREK.
The format has a group of people - live actors again - travelling through
the Galaxy, visiting various planets and encountering strange lifeforms;
but, where the Star Trek characters travelled on a spaceship, the Space
1999 personnel do their interplanetary wandering on Earth's runaway Moon an unwieldy gimmick that must have caused many frustrations to the
writers. Despite good special effects and sometimes imaginative sets the
series, with its stereotyped characters and humourless scripts, was
remarkably wooden, eliciting predictable jokes about puppets. The other
major flaw was a scandalous disregard for basic science ( SCIENTIFIC
ERRORS): stars are confused with asteroids, the Moon's progress through
space follows no physical laws, and PARSECS are assumed to be a unit of
velocity. The series was cancelled in 1977, though 1 episode was delayed
until 1978. The regular cast included Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Barry
Morse (season 1), Nick Tate, Catherine Schell (season 2), Tony Anholt
(season 2), Zienia Merton. Dirs included Ray Austin, Lee H. Katzin,
Charles Crichton, David Tomblin, Val Guest, Tom Clegg. Writers included

Christopher Penfold, Johnny Byrne, Terence Feely, Donald James and Charles
Woodgrove (pseudonym of Freiberger). The series did better in the USA than
in the UK, perhaps because of lower expectations, perhaps because of the
deliberately international cast.At the end of the 1970s 8 episodes were
cobbled together in pairs and recycled by ITC in the guise of 4 movies;
the words "Space 1999" nowhere appeared in their titles. Though we have
been unable to trace any theatrical release, at least 2 have turned up on
tv: Destination Moonbase-Alpha (1978), dir Tom Clegg (based on a 2-episode
story, The Bringers of Wonder, by Terence Feely), and Journey through the
Black Sun (1982) dir Ray Austin and Lee (based on the episodes Collision
Course by Anthony Terpiloff and The Black Sun by David Weir). The other 2
were The Cosmic Princess and Alien Attack.A book about the series is The
Making of Space 1999: A Gerry Anderson Production (1976) by Tim Heald. A
number of novelizations appeared. Brian N. BALL wrote The Space Guardians
* (1975). Michael BUTTERWORTH wrote Planets of Peril * (1977), Mind-Breaks
of Space * (1977) with Jeff Jones, The Space-Jackers * (1977), The
Psychomorph * (1977), The Time Fighters * (1977) and The Edge of the
Infinite * (1977). John Rankine (Douglas R. MASON) wrote Moon Odyssey *
(1975), Lunar Attack * (1975), Astral Quest * (1975), Android Planet *
(1976) and Phoenix of Megaron * (1976 US). E.C. TUBB wrote Breakaway *
(1975), Collision Course * (1975), Alien Seed * (1976 US), Rogue Planet *
(1976 US) and Earthfall * (1977). [JB/PN]
SPACE OPERA
When RADIO was the principal medium of home entertainment in the USA,
daytime serials intended for housewives were often sponsored by
soap-powder companies; the series were thus dubbed "soap operas". The name
was soon generalized to refer to any corny domestic drama. Westerns were
sometimes called "horse operas" by false analogy, and the pattern was
extended into sf terminology by Wilson TUCKER in 1941, who proposed "space
opera" as the appropriate term for the "hacky, grinding, stinking,
outworn, spaceship yarn". It soon came to be applied instead to colourful
action-adventure stories of interplanetary or interstellar conflict.
Although the term still retains a pejorative implication, it is frequently
used with nostalgic affection, applying to space-adventure stories which
have a calculatedly romantic element. The term might be applied
retrospectively to such early space adventures as Robert W. COLE's The
Struggle for Empire (1900) but, as it was coined as a complaint about pulp
CLICHE, it seems reasonable to limit its use to GENRE SF.Five writers were
principally involved in the development of space opera in the 1920s and
1930s. E.E. "Doc" SMITH made his debut with the exuberant interstellar
adventure The Skylark of Space (1928; 1946), and continued to write
stories in a similar vein until the mid-1960s; 2 sequels, Skylark Three
(1930; 1948) and Skylark of Valeron (1934-5; 1949), escalated the scale of
the action before the Lensmen series took over, the SPACESHIPS growing
ever-larger and the WEAPONS more destructive until GALACTIC EMPIRES were
toppling like card-houses in Children of the Lens (1947-8; 1954). Once
there was no greater scale of action to be employed, Smith had little more
to offer, and his last novels - The Galaxy Primes (1959; 1965) and Skylark
DuQuesne (1966) - are mere exercises in recapitulation. In the 1970s,
however, a reissue of the Lensmen series enjoyed such success with readers

that Smith's banner was picked up by William B. Ellern (1933- ), David A.
KYLE and Stephen GOLDIN ( E.E. SMITH for details). Contemporary with
Smith's first interstellar epic was a series of stories written by Edmond
HAMILTON for WEIRD TALES, ultimately collected in Crashing Suns (1928-9;
coll 1965) and Outside the Universe (1929; 1964). Although he was a more
versatile writer than Smith, Hamilton took great delight in wrecking
worlds and destroying suns, and his name was made with space opera (he too
continued to write it until the 1960s), other early examples being "The
Universe Wreckers" (1930) and the CAPTAIN FUTURE series. In the late 1940s
Hamilton wrote The Star of Life (1947; 1959) and the memorable The Star
Kings (1949; vt Beyond the Moon), an sf version of The Prisoner of Zenda
(1894) by Anthony Hope (1863-1933). The last of Hamilton's works in this
vein were Doomstar (1966) and the Starwolf trilogy (1967-8). Even before
Smith and Hamilton made their debuts, Ray CUMMINGS was writing
interplanetary novels for the general-fiction pulps and for Hugo
GERNSBACK's SCIENCE AND INVENTION. His principal space operas were Tarrano
the Conqueror (1925; 1930), A Brand New World (1928; 1964), Brigands of
the Moon (1931) and its sequel Wandl the Invader (1932; 1961), but his
reputation was made by his microcosmic romances ( GREAT AND SMALL), and it
was to such adventures that he reverted when he turned to self-plagiarism
in later years. The two most important writers who carried space opera
forward in the wake of Smith and Hamilton were John W. CAMPBELL Jr and
Jack WILLIAMSON. Campbell made his first impact with the novelettes
collected in The Black Star Passes (1930; fixup 1953), and he went on to
write Galaxy-spanning adventures like Islands of Space (1931; 1957),
Invaders from the Infinite (1932; 1961) and The Mightiest Machine (1934;
1947). Campbell had a better command of scientific jargon than his
contemporaries, and a slicker line in superscientific wizardry, but he
began writing a different kind of sf as Don A. Stuart and subsequently
abandoned writing altogether when it clashed with his duties as editor of
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION. Williamson flavoured space opera with a more
ancient brand of romanticism, basing characters in The Legion of Space
(1934; rev 1947) on the Three Musketeers and Falstaff; although he soon
moved on to more sophisticated varieties of exotic adventure, he never
quite abandoned space opera: Bright New Universe (1967) and Lifeburst
(1984) carry forward the tradition, and his collaborations with Frederik
POHL, such as The Singers of Time (1991), retain a deliberate but deft
romanticism which places them among the best modern examples of the
species. Another notable space opera from the 1930s is Clifford D. SIMAK's
Cosmic Engineers (1939; rev 1950).During the 1940s some of the naive charm
of space opera was lost as standards of writing rose and plots became
somewhat more complicated, and the trend was towards a more vivid and lush
romanticism. Notable examples are Judgement Night (1943; title story of
coll 1952; separate publication 1965) by C.L. MOORE and several works by
A.E. VAN VOGT, including The Mixed Men (1943-5; fixup 1952; cut vt Mission
to the Stars) and Earth's Last Fortress (1942 as "Recruiting Station"; vt
as title story of Masters of Time coll 1950; 1960 dos). By this time the
GALACTIC-EMPIRE scenario was being used for other purposes, most
effectively by Isaac ASIMOV in the Foundation series (1942-50; fixups
1951-3); by the 1950s it had become a standardized framework available for
use in entirely serious sf. Once this happened, the impression of vast

scale so important to space opera was no longer the sole prerogative of
straightforward adventure stories, and the day of the "classical" space
opera was done. But Asimov, like many others, retained a deep affection
for old-fashioned romanticism, deploying it conscientiously in The Stars
Like Dust (1951). Many of the more "realistic" space adventures of the
1950s incorporate space-operatic flourishes, including James BLISH's
Earthman Come Home (1950-53; fixup 1955), which features space battles
between star-travelling cities - although the other novels in the Okie
series have rather different priorities. The old-style space opera seemed
rather juvenile by this time, but it remained an important component of
the fiction published by the more downmarket pulps while they were still
being published, especially PLANET STORIES and THRILLING WONDER STORIES.
New life could still be breathed into it by the better writers associated
with those magazines; prominent were Leigh BRACKETT, as in The Starmen
(1952), and Jack VANCE, as in The Space Pirate (1953; cut vt The Five Gold
Bands). There were DIGEST magazines which specialized in exotic adventure
stories, including space operas - notably IMAGINATION and the 2nd of the 2
US magazines entitled SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES (which survived as a UK
magazine for some years after its death in the USA) - but they did not
long outlast the pulps. When it was abandoned by the magazines, space
opera found a new home in the ACE BOOKS Doubles ed Donald A. WOLLHEIM (see
also DOS). Robert SILVERBERG published a good deal of colourful material
in this format, including the trilogy assembled as Lest We Forget Thee,
Earth (fixup 1958) as by Calvin M. Knox, while Kenneth BULMER, John
BRUNNER and E.C. TUBB became UK recruits to this largely US tradition, the
last-named labouring to preserve it with his long-running Dumarest series.
Space-operatic romanticism is still widely evident, usually cleverly
combined with other elements. Examples include Gordon R. DICKSON's
long-running Dorsai series, Poul ANDERSON's Ensign Flandry series, H. Beam
PIPER's Space Viking (1963), Michael MOORCOCK's The Sundered Worlds (fixup
1965; vt The Blood Red Game), Ian WALLACE's Croyd (1967) and Dr Orpheus
(1968), Samuel R. DELANY's NOVA (1968), Alan Dean FOSTER's The Tar-Aiym
Krang (1972) and its sequels, Barrington J. BAYLEY's Star Winds (1978),
Philip Jose FARMER's The Unreasoning Mask (1981), S.P. SOMTOW's Light on
the Sound (1982) and its sequels, F.M. BUSBY's Star Rebel (1984) and its
sequels, Ben BOVA's Privateers (1985), Michael D. RESNICK's Santiago
(1986), Iain M. BANKS's Consider Phlebas (1987) and other Culture novels,
Colin GREENLAND's TAKE BACK PLENTY (1990) and Stephen R. DONALDSON's Gap
series, begun with The Gap into Conflict: The Real Story (1990), which
transfigures Wagner's Ring Cycle of real operas. It seems in no danger of
losing its popularity, given the recent winning of Hugo awards by space
operas like C.J. CHERRYH's DOWNBELOW STATION (1981), David BRIN's STARTIDE
RISING (1983) and Lois McMaster BUJOLD's THE VOR GAME (1990). The
crudities of the subgenre are easily parodied by such comedies as Harry
HARRISON's Bill, the Galactic Hero (1965) and Star Smashers of the Galaxy
Rangers (1973), M. John HARRISON's The Centauri Device (1974) and Douglas
ADAMS's Hitch-Hiker books, but the affection in which it is held defies
total deflation - as evidenced by the much more recent Bill, the Galactic
Hero series of SHARED-WORLD adventures. The tv series STAR TREK has given
rise to a long-running series of spinoff novels, many of which are more
space operatic than the studio budget ever permitted the tv scripts to be.

An excellent theme anthology is Space Opera (anth 1974) ed Brian W.
ALDISS; his Galactic Empires (anth 2 vols 1976) is also relevant. [BS]See
also: FANTASTIC VOYAGES; SPACE FLIGHT.
SPACE PATROL
1. US tv serial (1950-55). ABC TV. Prod Mike Moser (1950-52), Helen Moser
(1953-5), dir Dik Darley, starring Ed Kemmer, Lyn Osborn, Ken Mayer,
Virginia Hewitt, Nina Bara. Written Norman Jolley. 210 25min episodes.
B/w.One of the many SPACE-OPERA serials on TELEVISION after CAPTAIN VIDEO,
and possibly the first to feature FASTER-THAN-LIGHT travel to the stars,
SP began as a 5-times-a-week 15min programme on local tv; soon after, it
went on RADIO and network tv. The patrol leader was Commander Buzz Corry.
Viewers were invited to "become space cadets of the SP" (join the fan
club) and to buy special SP cosmic smoke guns, etc. Like most such
programmes of the time SP was transmitted live, and with some ad-libbing.
Special effects were minimal, but a mild attempt was made to keep the
stories scientifically plausible.2. UK tv series (1963-4). National
Interest Picture Production/Wonderama Productions. Created/written Roberta
Leigh, prod Leigh and Arthur Provis, dir Frank Goulding. 2 seasons, 39
25-min episodes in all. This was a SPACE-OPERA series for children
produced with animated puppets, not unlike the various SuperMarionation
series made by Gerry ANDERSON, and indeed created by one of Anderson's
former colleagues. Main characters were Captain Larry Dart, Slim the
Venusian and Husky the Martian in the spacecraft Galasphere 347; also
important were Haggerty the genius inventor and Gabblerdictum the Martian
parrot. [PN]
SPACE PRECINCT
Tv series (1994- ). A Mentorn Films and Gerry Anderson
Production.Directors include JohnGlen, Sidney Havers and Alan Birkinshaw.
First episode written by Paul Mayhew-Archer. StarringTed Shackleford, Rob
Youngblood, Simone Bendix. Current.First episode Oct 1994, 24
one-hourepisodes announced.This syndicated series is apparently based on a
singleton drama some years back entitled Space Police, but the title was
changed so as not to infringe the title copyright heldby a toy company. It
took a long time for the series to get off the ground. This is a Gerry
ANDERSON production, but unlike most of his tv shows is live action, not
puppets (though criticshave complained about the inexpressive rubber masks
worn by the aliens). Anderson hasdescribed the series as a New York cop
show transplanted to outer space. It is actually set in anunspecified
future in Demeter City, a galactic crossroads where two immigrant alien
racescomprise most of the population, an "inter-galactic melting pot,
attracting a bad element as well as the good", according to the show's
publicists. Two New York cops (Shackleford and Youngblood) are sent to
help out; Bendix is the beautiful and brilliant cop from the local force.
Some cops are aliens. Opinions differ about whether the show is
deliberately or accidentally humorous. Some think it is
tongue-in-cheek.Either way, the production values are questionable.
[GF/PN]
SPACE PUBLICATIONS
SPACE SCIENCE FICTION.

SPACE RAIDERS
BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS; Roger CORMAN.
SPACE SCIENCE FICTION
US DIGEST-size magazine. 8 issues May 1952-Sep 1953, published by Space
Publications; ed Lester DEL REY. The most prolific contributor was del Rey
himself, sometimes as Erik van Lhin or Philip St John. Notable stories
included T.L. SHERRED's "Cue For Quiet" (May-July 1953) and Philip K.
DICK's "Second Variety" (May 1953) and "The Variable Man" (Sep 1953). #8
began serialization of Poul ANDERSON's Brain Wave (as "The Escape"; 1954),
but it was not completed. All 8 issues were reprinted in the UK 1952-3,
numbered but undated, published by the Archer Press, London. [BS]
SPACE SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE
US DIGEST-size magazine. 2 issues, Spring and Aug 1957, published by the
Republic Features Syndicate; ed Lyle Kenyon ENGEL, with much editorial
work, uncredited, by Michael AVALLONE. The best story may have been John
JAKES's "The Devil Spins a Sun-Dream" (Spring 1957). [BS/PN]
SPACESHIPS
The suggestion that people might one day travel to the MOON inside a
flying machine was first put forward seriously by John WILKINS in 1638.
There had been cosmic voyages prior to that date, and there were to be
many more thereafter ( FANTASTIC VOYAGES; SPACE FLIGHT), but few took the
mechanics of the journey seriously enough to invest much imaginative
effort in the design of credible vehicles. Edgar Allan POE's "The
Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" (1835) has an afterword
complaining about the failure of other writers to achieve verisimilitude,
but Pfaall makes his journey by BALLOON, and Poe's assumption of the
continuity of the atmosphere - a full 2 centuries after Torricelli had
concluded that the Earth's atmosphere could extend upwards for only a few
miles - is hardly scientific.Jules VERNE's travellers in De la terre a la
lune (1865; trans J.K. Hoyte as From the Earth to the Moon 1869 US) and
its sequel, Autour de la lune (1870, both trans as From the Earth to the
Moon 1873 UK) use a projectile fired from a gun rather than a vessel, and
most of those who followed in his footsteps treated their vessels as
facilitating devices, inventing various jargon terms to signify mysterious
forces of propulsion. Percy GREG's spaceship in Across the Zodiac (1880)
is powered by "apergy"; H.G. WELLS invented the antigravitic "Cavorite"
for THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901); John MASTIN's "airship" is borne
into space by a "new gas" in The Stolen Planet (1905); and Garrett P.
SERVISS's A Columbus of Space (1909; rev 1911) employed an atomic powered
"space-car". Because their means of propulsion were so often mysterious,
spaceships in this period could easily assume the "perfect" spheroid shape
of the heavenly bodies themselves; a notable example is in Robert CROMIE's
A Plunge into Space (1890). When not round or bullet-shaped they tended to
resemble flying submarines.Spaceships were taken up in a big way by the
early sf PULP MAGAZINES, and their visual image was dramatically changed.
Frank R. PAUL and other contemporary illustrators ( ILLUSTRATION) showed a
strong preference for bulbous machines like enormously bloated aeroplanes
or rounded-off oceangoing liners with long rows of portholes. These were

often shown with jets of flame or vapour gushing out behind, but this was
as much to suggest speed as to indicate that the means of propulsion
involved might be one or more ROCKETS; similarly, the slow process whereby
hulls became streamlined and elegant fins appeared corresponded less to
any realization of the importance of rocket-power than to the development
of sleeker automobiles in the real world. Two of the more convincing early
pulp-sf spaceships are featured in Otto Willi GAIL's The Shot into
Infinity (1925; trans 1929; 1975) and Laurence MANNING's "The Voyage of
the Asteroid" (1932), but such stories were overshadowed by extravagant
SPACE OPERAS which thrived on fantastic machines with limitless
capabilities, fighting interstellar WARS with all manner of exotic WEAPONS
- the ultimate fulfilment of childhood fantasies. Classic examples include
the various Skylarks employed by E.E. "Doc" SMITH's Richard Seaton and
friends. Many pulp-sf writers still regarded spaceships as mere
facilitating devices - Edgar Rice BURROUGHS was prepared to do without
them in many of his interplanetary romances - but the pioneers of space
opera exploited the fantasies of unlimited opportunity and luxurious
seclusion which had hitherto been attached to such Earthly vessels as
Captain Nemo's Nautilus, the Crystal Boat in Gordon STABLES's The Cruise
of the Crystal Boat (1891) and the Golden Ship used in Max PEMBERTON's The
Iron Pirate (1897). Outside the pulps, the hero of Friedrich W. MADER's
Distant Worlds (1921; trans 1932) declared that his spacefaring vessel was
no mere "airship" but a world-ship with the freedom of the Universe.By the
1930s writers of HARD SF had become convinced that the first real
spaceships would be rockets, and stories about the large-scale projects
required to build them were being written as early as Lester DEL REY's
"The Stars Look Down" (1940); other notable examples include Arthur C.
CLARKE's Prelude to Space (1951) and Gordon R. DICKSON's The Far Call
(1973; exp 1978). But dominance was always retained by naive fantasies in
which spaceships could be casually built in anyone's back yard, or in
which their familiarity was simply taken for granted. Realistic stories of
the building and launching of spaceships can still be written - Manna
(1984) by Lee Correy (G. Harry STINE) is noteworthy - but we have now
become so blase about the spectacle of Saturn rockets blasting off from
Cape Canaveral and space shuttles gliding down to land at Edwards Air
Force Base that modern sf rarely bothers with matters of construction or
with maiden voyages. Tense NEAR-FUTURE melodramas involving moderately
advanced hardware can still be very suspenseful - The Descent of Anansi
(1982) by Larry NIVEN and Steven BARNES is a good example - but the vast
majority of sf stories look towards further horizons.A different kind of
realism was introduced into spaceship stories by Robert A. HEINLEIN in
"Universe" (1941), which scorned the convenience of FASTER-THAN-LIGHT
travel and established the archetypal image of the GENERATION STARSHIP.
This notion - an ironic embodiment of the motto per ardua ad astra quickly took over the sf version of the myth of the Ark, earlier displayed
in such novels as When Worlds Collide (1933) by Philip WYLIE and Edwin
BALMER. Notable later examples include Leigh BRACKETT's Alpha Centauri or Die! (1953 as "The Ark of Mars"; exp 1963) and Roger DIXON's Noah II
(1970). The spaceship became a powerful symbol of permanent escape,
invoked continually throughout the 1950s in stories of future tyranny and
the struggles of oppressed minorities. The myth of escape is taken to its

extreme in Poul ANDERSON's time-dilatation fantasy Tau Zero (1967; exp
1970), the first of several stories in which the spaceship provides its
human crew with a means to escape the end of the Universe. Such escape
motifs are, however, opposed in stories of space disaster; two interesting
stories which recast the voyage of the Titanic (1912) as sf are "The Star
Lord" (1953) by Boyd Ellanby (William Boyd [1903-1983]) and "The Corianis
Disaster" (1960) by Murray LEINSTER. Other stories developed the notion of
far-travelling starships into the idea of a starship culture. Notable
examples are Heinlein's CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY (1957) and Alexei PANSHIN's
RITE OF PASSAGE (1963; exp 1968). Relativistic effects were built into the
idea of a starship culture in L. Ron HUBBARD's Return to Tomorrow (1950;
1954), in which spacefarers become alienated from the course of history by
the time-dilatation effect of travelling at near-lightspeed.The UFO crazes
of the post-WWII years made some impact on sf imagery in the magazines.
Disc-shaped spaceships became more common in ILLUSTRATIONS, and the
interest of editors Sam MERWIN Jr - who also wrote about flying saucers in
"Centaurus" (1953)-and Raymond A. PALMER was reflected in the magazines of
which they had charge. Ufology had far more influence on the imagery of sf
CINEMA, where saucer-shaped ships became commonplace. The sleekly
streamlined ships which still dominated magazine illustration continued to
hold their ground until the 1970s; when their imagery was finally
challenged, it was by the bizarre and surreal hardware of artists like
Eddie JONES and Christopher FOSS. This movement towards a more complicated
topography - licensed by the knowledge that starships built in space for
journeys in hard vacuum had no need of streamlining - had been
foreshadowed in fiction since the 1950s. Among the more romantic
spaceships featured in the later years of magazine sf are those in
Cordwainer SMITH's Instrumentality stories, which include the
light-powered "sailing ships" in "The Lady who Sailed the Soul" (1960) and
"Think Blue, Count Two" (1963) ( SOLAR WIND). The tree-grown starships of
Jack WILLIAMSON's Dragon's Island (1951; vt The Not-Men) and the
animal-drawn starships of Robert Franson's The Shadow of the Ship (1983)
are among the most curious in sf.The men who sail or fly in them often
refer to ships and aircraft as "she", crediting them with personalities
and giving them names. Much sf transplants this tendency in perfectly
straightforward terms, but other stories carry it to its logical and
literal extreme. Human brains are frequently transplanted into spaceship
bodies to become functional CYBORGS, as in Thomas N. SCORTIA's "Sea
Change" (1956; vt "The Shores of Night"), Anne MCCAFFREY's The Ship who
Sang (coll of linked stories 1969), Cordwainer Smith's "Three to a Given
Star" (1965) and Kevin O'DONNELL Jr's Mayflies (1979). Other spaceships
acquire intelligence and personality in their own right thanks to their
sophisticated COMPUTER networks; the one in Frank HERBERT's Destination:
Void (1966) has delusions of godlike grandeur, and the one in Clifford D.
SIMAK's Shakespeare's Planet (1976) has a multiply split personality. More
often, though, the relationship between humans and spaceships maintains a
traditional naval rigour, as in many novels by the Merchant Navy writer A.
Bertram CHANDLER, Starman Jones (1953) by ex-US Navy officer Robert
Heinlein and THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE (1974) by Larry Niven and Jerry E.
POURNELLE.Sf stories whose subject matter is the spaceship MYTHOLOGY built
up by their predecessors include Stanislaw LEM's Niezwyciezony (1964;

trans as The Invincible 1973) and Mark GESTON's Lords of the Starship
(1967). The idea that the spaceship owes much of its charisma to phallic
symbolism has been much bandied about - as reflected in Virgil FINLAY's
cover for the Oct 1963 issue of WORLDS OF TOMORROW, Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's
"The Big Space Fuck" (1972) and Norman SPINRAD's The Void Captain's Tale
(1983) - but a more convincing analogy would liken spaceships to the
"sperms" of sea-dwelling creatures which require no intromission (and
hence no phallus) but are simply released into an oceanic wilderness to
seek out the object of their fertilizing mission. This is the metaphor
contained in such novels as Jack Williamson's Manseed (fixup 1982). The
spaceship is still commonly deployed as a straightforward facilitating
device - a means to send ordinary near-contemporary characters into exotic
and fabulous situations - but even in this role it can become as
charismatic as STAR TREK's Starship Enterprise. The terminal decline in
the plausibility of the home-made spaceship in the face of the magnitude
and complexity of the actual space programme has to some extent been
compensated for by the remarkable frequency with which sf characters
serendipitously discover ALIEN spaceships; a notable example is Frederik
POHL's GATEWAY (1977) and its sequels. Alien starships are sometimes
invested with even more mystique than those constructed by humans; notable
examples include those whose one-time arrival on Earth is revealed in Ivan
YEFREMOV's "Stellar Ships" (trans 1954) and the gargantuan vessel featured
in Arthur C. Clarke's RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA (1973). Awesome alien
spaceships provide stirring climaxes for such films as CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF
THE THIRD KIND (1977) and The ABYSS (1989), but they can also perform a
much more sinister role, as in Stephen KING's novel The Tommyknockers
(1988).The power of the sf mythology of the spaceship was made evident by
the decision to bow to public pressure and name one of the experimental
space shuttles, constructed in 1977, the Enterprise.[BS]
SPACESHIP TO THE UNKNOWN
FLASH GORDON.
SPACE STORIES
US PULP magazine. 5 bimonthly issues Oct 1952-June 1953, published by
Standard Magazines as a companion to STARTLING STORIES et al.; ed Samuel
MINES. Its policy, identical to that of Startling Stories, was to feature
a complete novel in every issue; the most notable was The Big Jump (Feb
1953; 1955) by Leigh BRACKETT. [BS]
SPACE TRAVEL
GENERATION STARSHIPS; ROCKETS; SPACE FLIGHT; SPACESHIPS;
TRANSPORTATION.
SPACE TRAVEL
Magazine. IMAGINATIVE TALES.
SPACE WARP
In sf TERMINOLOGY, a concept similar to that of hyperspace and subspace.
The term (along with "hyperspace") may first have been used by John W.
CAMPBELL Jr in Islands of Space (1931 Amazing Stories Quarterly; 1957). If
a handkerchief is folded, two otherwise separated points of it can become
adjacent; if space - more accurately, spacetime - could be warped in like

style (which it cannot), the resulting short cut would effectively enable
SPACESHIPS to travel FASTER THAN LIGHT: the topic is discussed further in
HYPERSPACE. Space warp has become such a CLICHE in sf that it allows
endless variants. One of the best known is the "warp factor" used in STAR
TREK as a measure of velocity. This is illogical on all levels.The idea of
ANTIGRAVITY is also connected with the warping of space: since GRAVITY (or
a gravitational field) is an effect dependent on the curving (or warping)
of spacetime in the presence of mass, then antigravity could be envisaged
as what would happen if you contrived to warp space the other way, an idea
proposed by Charles Eric MAINE in Count-Down (1959; vt Fire Past the
Future 1959 US). This is actually a development of that same idea proposed
by Campbell in Islands in Space; Campbell correctly recognized that to
warp spacetime would not only alter gravitational fields but be equivalent
to altering the velocity of light. Maine's negative space curvature is
anyway impossible, since it would require the existence of negative mass,
an existence prohibited on several theoretical grounds. [PN]
SPACEWAY
US DIGEST-size magazine, 8 issues Dec 1953-June 1955, 12 issues in all,
published by William L. CRAWFORD's FPCI in Los Angeles; the subtitle
"Stories of the Future" was changed to "Science Fiction" Dec 1954. The
title was taken from the UK film SPACEWAYS (1953). When S died it had
published only the first part of Ralph Milne FARLEY's "Radio Minds of
Mars"; on its resurrection by the same publisher many years later to
publish 4 more issues, Jan 1969-June 1970, it printed the serial in full.
This new version of S reprinted material from the first, but added a few
new stories. The most notable story carried by the magazine was "The
Cosmic Geoids" by John TAINE (Dec 1954-Apr 1955), though this had already
been published in book form, by the same publisher, as the lead novel of
The Cosmic Geoids, and One Other (coll 1949). An unfinished serial in the
2nd version of S was Andre NORTON's "Garan of Yu-Lac", which Crawford had
been holding since 1935; he later published it in book form as Garan the
Eternal (1972). #1-#4 were reprinted in the UK 1954-5 by Regular
Publications. [BS/PN]
SPACEWAYS
Film (1953). Hammer/Exclusive. Dir Terence Fisher, starring Howard Duff,
Eva Bartok, Alan Wheatley, Andrew Osborn. Screenplay Paul TABORI, Richard
Landau, based on a 1952 radio play by Charles Eric MAINE. 76 mins. B/w.In
this first UK space movie since THINGS TO COME (1936) a scientist falsely
suspected of murdering his wife and placing her body in a satellite takes
a space trip to establish his innocence. This is an early, low-budget
Hammer melodrama of indifferent quality. Maine's novel Spaceways: A Story
of the Very Near Future (1953; vt Spaceways Satellite 1958 US), also based
on the radio play, appeared the same year as the film. [JB/PN]
SPACE-WISE
UK BEDSHEET-size magazine. 3 issues, Dec 1969, Jan and Mar 1970,
published by the Martec Publishing Group; ed Derek R. Threadgall. SW
contained a mixture of sf and science and occult articles which proved not
viable. [FHP]

SPAIN
Modern sf appeared in Spain during the 1950s with the publishing imprint
Minotauro and the magazine Mas Alla (1953-7), both from Argentina ( LATIN
AMERICA). Spanish sf editions began in 1953, with pulp novelettes in the
Futuro and Luchadores del Espacio series, followed by Nebulae, the first
specialized Spanish imprint for sf books. During 1955-90 about 1300 sf
books were published in Spain, mostly translations from English, with only
about 50 by Spanish authors.Before the Civil War, Coronel Ignotus (the
pseudonym of Jose de Elola), Frederic Pujula, Elias Cerda and Domingo
Ventallo were the most important authors of old-fashioned speculations and
fantasies, mainly satirical and sometimes political. Ignotus was published
in one of the earliest quasi-sf MAGAZINES in the world, earlier than any
in the USA or UK: Biblioteca Novelesco-Cientifica (1921-3), each of whose
10 issues containing a single novel by Ignotus, 3 featuring interplanetary
voyages. In the 1950s George H. White (pseudonym of Pascual Enguidanos)
wrote a series of 32 sf adventure novelettes known collectively as the
Saga de los Aznar ["Aznar Saga"] series (1953-8). More interesting are
subsequent stories in the 1950s and 1960s by Antonio Ribera, Francisco
Valverde, Juan G. Atienza, Domingo Santos, Carlos Buiza and Luis Vigil
(1940- ); it was with these that modern Spanish sf really began.The 1960s
saw the first boom in sf publishing in Spain. After the short life of the
magazine Anticipacion (1966-7), the most influential of all Spanish sf
magazines began: Nueva Dimension, founded in 1968, ed Sebastian Martinez
(1937- ), Domingo Santos and Luis Vigil; it was voted the best European sf
magazine at the 1972 Eurocon in Trieste. A real milestone in Spanish sf,
ND published local authors alongside the best sf from other countries. It
lasted 148 issues, until Dec 1983.Incursions into sf have also been made
by writers who normally work outside the genre, such as Tomas Salvador
(1921- ), whose La nave ["The Ship"] (1959) is a reworking of the popular
GENERATION-STARSHIP theme, and Manuel de Pedrolo (1918-1990), who had a
big success with his novel written in Catalan, Mecanoscrit del segon
origen ["Mechanuscript of the Second Origin"] (1974), about life after a
world HOLOCAUST.Domingo Santos - the pseudonym of Pedro Domingo Mutino
(1941- ) - is the major contemporary Spanish sf writer. Some of his
stories and novels have been translated into several foreign languages.
His best known novel is Gabriel, historia de un robot ["Gabriel, The Story
of a Robot"] (1963), about the personality and coming of age of a ROBOT
not subject to the "fundamental laws" that compel other robots to
obedience. Another interesting novel is Burbuja ["Bubble"] (1965), but the
best of Santos is found in his short fiction. Meteoritos ["Meteorites"]
(coll 1965) is a classic collection, but more demanding are the stories in
Futuro imperfecto ["Future Imperfect"] (coll 1981) and No lejos de la
Tierra ["Not Far from Earth"] (coll 1986), set in the NEAR FUTURE and
often concerned with ECOLOGY and the threats that endanger the quality of
our lives.In the 1970s Gabriel Bermudez Castillo (1934- ) appeared with
well written books such as Viaje a un planeta Wu-Wei ["Travel to a Wu-Wei
Planet"] (1976) and action-adventure novels like El senor de la rueda
["The Lord of the Wheel"] (1978). Carlos Saiz Cidoncha (1939- ) has
specialized in SPACE OPERA, and in 1976 also privately published the first
history of Spanish sf; this was the embryo of his 1988 PhD thesis, the
first in Spain on such a topic.The political changes following Franco's

death in 1975 appear to have had no effect on sf publishing. Sf in Spain
has always had a restricted market, perhaps too small to bother with. Its
only political censorship under Franco may have been the prohibition in
1970 of Nueva Dimension #14, which contained a story by an Argentinian
that appeared to advocate Basque separatism.A second boom in sf publishing
took place in the 1980s, and more new authors appeared, the most gifted
perhaps being Elia Barcelo (1957- ). Her novelette "La Dama Dragon" ["The
Dragon Lady"] (1982) has been translated into several foreign languages
and is collected in Sagrada (coll 1990), the title being the feminine form
of the word for "sacred". The first Spanish woman to publish an sf book,
Barcelo is a very good stylist in a country where the usual style of sf
writing precludes it from consideration by more demanding literary
critics. Her stories are concerned with women's role in society and with
the contrast between technological and primitive cultures. Other new
authors are Rafael Marin Trechera (1959- ) with Lagrimas de Luz ["Tears of
Light"] (1982), an interstellar epic, and the collaboration of Javier
Redal (1952- ) and Juan Miguel Aguilera (1960- ) in a modern HARD-SF space
opera, Mundos en al abismo ["Worlds in the Abyss"] (1988), an unusually
science-conscious book for Spain. A
SPANNER, E(DWARD) F(RANK)
(1888-? ) UK writer and naval architect, author of 3 future- WAR novels The Broken Trident (1926), The Naviators (1926) and The Harbour of Death
(1927) - in all of which the UK is warned to beware remaining unduly
dependent upon her navy; the dire consequences of so doing are dramatized
in imaginary conflicts with-presciently - both Germany and Japan. [JC]
SPARKROCK, FRED
Robert E. VARDEMAN.
SPARTACUS, DEUTERO
R.L. FANTHORPE.
SPEARS, HEATHER
(1934- ) Canadian writer, poet and artist now resident in Denmark, author
of much non-genrepoetry, for which she won the Governor-General's Medal
for Poetry, her first volume beingAsylum Poems (coll 1958). Her sf, which
ismuch more recent, includes Moonfall (1991)which, with its sequel, The
Child of Atwar(1993), vividly explores post- HOLOCAUSTterritory. [JC]
SPECIAL BULLETIN
Made-for-tv film (1983). NBC. Dir Edward Zwick, starring Christopher
Allport, David Clennon, Ed Flanders, Kathryn Walker, David Rasche.
Screenplay Marshall Herskovitz. 92 mins. Colour.An unnervingly effective
pseudodocumentary, this presents itself as tv coverage of an escalating
terrorist crisis in Charleston, where a dissident group of nuclear
scientists and peace activists threatens to set off an atomic bomb in the
dockyard unless all the nuclear weapons in the region are turned over to
them for dumping. With cutaways to White House spokesmen lying,
conflicting reports from political correspondents, interviews with
experts, on-the-spot reports, ranting demands from the terrorists and
hastily assembled background profiles on the offenders, SB is a fine
recreation of a now-familiar style of tv coverage, and in a surprisingly

rigorous manner examines the MEDIA influencing the atrocities they purport
to cover. The glimpses at the end of the detonation of the bomb - a
defusing attempt is bungled - are perhaps more effective than the
special-effects holocausts of The DAY AFTER (1983) and THREADS (1984), and
the final moments, in which other news issues creep into the schedule, are
understated but cutting. [KN]
SPECULATION
UK FANZINE ed Peter WESTON from Birmingham 1963-73. Averaging 60pp, S was
for many years consistently the UK's best amateur magazine of comment and
criticism. Regular contributors included James BLISH, Kenneth BULMER, M.
John HARRISON, Michael MOORCOCK and Frederik POHL. Several fans whose
writing often appeared in S later became sf writers, Christopher PRIEST
and Brian M. STABLEFORD among them. The final issue, #33, though printed
1973, was not distributed until 1976. [PN]
SPECULATIVE FICTION
Term used by some writers and critics in place of "science fiction". In
the symposium published as Of Other Worlds (coll 1947) ed Lloyd Arthur
ESHBACH, Robert A. HEINLEIN proposed the term to describe a subset of sf
involving extrapolation from known science and technology "to produce a
new situation, a new framework for human action". Judith MERRIL borrowed
the term in 1966, spelling out her version of "speculative fiction" in
rather more detail ( DEFINITIONS OF SF) in such a way as to de-emphasize
the science component of sf (which acronym can equally stand for
"speculative fiction") while keeping the idea of extrapolation - i.e.,
Merril's use of the term was useful for that kind of sociological sf which
concentrates on social change without necessarily any great emphasis on
science or TECHNOLOGY. Since then the term has generally appealed to
writers and readers who are as interested in SOFT SF as in HARD SF. Though
the term has proved attractive to many, especially perhaps academics who
find the term more respectable-sounding than "science fiction" and lacking
the pulp associations, nobody's definition of "speculative fiction" has as
yet any formal rigour, though the term has come to be used with a very
wide application (as by Samuel R. DELANY in his ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series
QUARK), as if science fiction were a subset of speculative fiction rather
than vice versa. Because the term "speculative fiction", as now most often
used, does not clearly define any generic boundary, it has come to include
not only soft and hard sf but also FANTASY as a whole. Many critics do not
find it a consistently helpful term but, as Gary K. WOLFE points out in
Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy (1986), critics tend to
worry more about the demarcation of genres than writers do, and, as a
propaganda weapon, the term has been useful precisely because it allows
the blurring of boundaries, which in turn permits a greater auctorial
freedom from genre constraints and "rules". [PN]
SPENCE, CATHERINE HELEN
(1825-1910) Scottish-born Australian novelist whose Handfasted (written
c1879; 1984), a UTOPIA with LOST-WORLD elements set in the hidden state of
Columba somewhere in Southern California, was unpublished at the time
because of its FEMINIST views on women's autonomy; the title refers to a
traditional form of trial marriage, and in Columba single mothers are not

treated as pariahs. Less impressively, A Week in the Future (1888-9
Centennial Magazine; 1987) takes its heroine by SUSPENDED ANIMATION to the
socialist utopia that London has become in 1988. The first book is a fully
dramatised novel of real quality, but the second, only novella length,
more resembles a tract. In her later years, CHS fought for women's
suffrage. [JC/PN]See also: AUSTRALIA.
SPENCER, JOHN (BARRY)
(1944- ) UK writer, rock musician and one-time art-agency director,
founding what would become Young Artists, a major UK agency for
preponderantly sf/fantasy artists. His first sf novel, The Electronic
Lullaby Meat Market (1975), in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Mick
FARREN sets a quirky thriller in a violently hyperbolic NEAR-FUTURE world
described in sex-charged terms reminiscent of the late-1960s
counterculture. After editing Echoes of Terror (anth 1980 chap) with Mike
Jarvis, JS returned to sf with A Case for Charley (1985) and Charley Gets
the Picture (1986), two idiosyncratic murder mysteries set after the
HOLOCAUST, when Nevada and Arizona have been destroyed by earthquakes and
California has been rebuilt as a vast tourist centre. He is not to be
confused with the John Spencer (1946- ) who illustrated a number of
fantasy/folklore juveniles in the early 1970s, nor with the publisher John
Spencer ( BADGER BOOKS). [JC/JGr]See also: MUSIC.
SPENCER, LEONARD G.
ZIFF-DAVIS house name used once by Robert SILVERBERG and Randall GARRETT
in collaboration on "The Beast With 7 Tails" (AMZ 1956), and twice by
unknown writers, 1956-7. [PN]
SPIDER, THE
US PULP MAGAZINE. 118 issues Oct 1933-Dec 1943; monthly until Feb 1943,
bimonthly thereafter. Published by Popular Publications; ed Rogers Terrill
until near the end. TS, one of the hero/villain pulps, began as a
straightforward imitation of the highly successful The Shadow, telling of
a mysterious caped avenger. The first 2 novels were by R.T.M. Scott; the
remainder, credited to the house name Grant STOCKBRIDGE, were mainly by
Norvell W. PAGE with others by Emile Tepperman, Wayne Rogers and Prentice
Winchell (1915-? ). Under Page's guidance, the Spider became a more
ruthless character who stamped a spider sign on the foreheads of the
villains he killed, and the menaces he combated became more fantastic,
including a metal-eating virus and Neanderthal hordes (the 2 novels
concerned were reprinted as The City Destroyer [1935; 1975] and Hordes of
the Red Butcher [1935; 1975]). TS also contained short stories, including
the non-sf Doc Turner series by Arthur Leo ZAGAT. The character later
featured in a cinema serial, The Spider's Web (1938; 15 episodes,
Columbia, starring Robert E. Kent). Since 1969 further novels have been
reprinted in book form ( Norvell W. PAGE for details). A final Spider
title, left unpublished when the magazine folded, was reworked with new
characters as Blue Steel (1979) as by Spider Page. [MJE/FHP/PN]
SPIELBERG, STEVEN
(1947- ) US film-maker. Born in Cincinnati, raised in Arizona and an
amateur film-maker in his early teens, SS completed his first sf feature -

the 140min Firelight (1963) - at the age of 16; he studied English rather
than film at college in California. His first professional film was
Amblin' (1969), a slick short about hitch-hiking which was distributed as
a support feature with the very successful Love Story (1970); it secured
SS a contract with Universal Pictures' tv division. His tv debut was a
segment of the 1969 pilot for ROD SERLING'S NIGHT GALLERY, starring Joan
Crawford; in 1971 he made LA 2019, an sf-themed episode of The Name of the
Game (1968-71), and went on to tv features: Columbo: Murder by the Book
(1971), Something Evil (1972), a ghost story, and Savage (1972), a
high-tech thriller. He first attracted widespread attention with Duel
(1971), a suspenseful tv adaptation of Richard MATHESON's horror story
about a motorist pursued by a vindictive petrol tanker.Duel was
successfully released overseas as a movie, with 15 extra minutes of
characterization to bring it up to feature length, and it led to SS's
first theatrical feature, The Sugarland Express (1974), and to the
enormously successful assignment of the MONSTER MOVIE Jaws (1975), a
box-office rollercoaster about the hunting of a giant shark. After Jaws,
in which SS had little script involvement, he opted for a more personal
and visionary film, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), which
managed on the strength of its extraordinary climactic vision of an alien
epiphany to become another major box-office success, despite a lopsided
story and an unevenness of tone SS himself tried in vain to rectify in his
revision of the material, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND - THE SPECIAL
EDITION (1980). The novelization Close Encounters of the Third Kind *
(1977; rev vt Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Special Edition
1980) was published as by SS.After the critically vilified 1941 (1979), SS
made a solid return to popular acceptance with the George LUCAS-produced
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), a tribute to the Saturday matinee serials
of the 1940s, and then scored a phenomenal hit with E.T.: THE
EXTRATERRESTRIAL (1982), which currently stands as the most commercially
successful film of all time. Sciencefictional in its subject matter but a
fairy-tale in feeling, it tells of a child's miraculous friend who happens
to be an ALIEN. Since that career high SS has made two Raiders sequels Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Indiana Jones and the Last
Crusade (1989)-in between more ambitious, less obviously box-office
pictures, adaptations of novels by Alice WALKER and J.G. BALLARD,
respectively The Color Purple (1985) and Empire of the Sun (1987), and the
wistful fantasy Always (1990). His long-awaited but disappointing homage
to Disney's Peter Pan (1953) was Hook (1991), a lumbering and sentimental
rendition of a fantasy that should have had a certain delicacy in its
otherworldliness. However, he had a splendid return to form in 1993, when
he directed both the hugely popular sf extravaganza JURASSIC PARK (1993)
and the critically acclaimed drama about efforts to shelter Jews in
wartime Germany, Schindler's List (1993), which won seven Oscars including
- it was a long wait - Best Director.In addition to his work as a
director, SS has shown a commitment to genre material in his work as a
producer, coproducing and directing episodes of Twilight Zone: The Movie
(1983) and the tv series AMAZING STORIES (1985-7). He has done much to
further the careers of fellow film-makers Joe DANTE, Robert Zemeckis and
Frank Marshall, and has coproduced, usually as Executive Producer through
his Amblin Entertainment group, a wide variety of sf, fantasy and horror

productions, including Poltergeist (1982), Gremlins (1984), The Goonies
(1985), BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985), Young Sherlock Holmes (1985; vt Young
Sherlock Holmes and the Pyramid of Fear), An American Tail (1986), HARRY
AND THE HENDERSONS (1987; vt Bigfoot and the Hendersons), INNERSPACE
(1987), ,*BATTERIES NOTINCLUDED (1987), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988),
The Land Before Time (1988), BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II (1989), BACK TO
THE FUTURE PART III (1989), Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), Joe vs the
Volcano (1990), ARACHNOPHOBIA (1990), An American Tail II (1991) and Cape
Fear (1991). Spielberg's Amblin also produced the prehistoric nostalgia
movie The Flintstones (1994), but SS received no production credit. In tv
Amblin produced the sf series SEAQUEST DSV (1993- ), a sort of VOYAGE TO
THE BOTTOM OF SEA for a new generation, but like Amazing Stories it has
disappointed in the ratings. Tv seems to be an area where the Spielberg
magic - or at least the Amblin magic - does not fully operate, as shown by
another series, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992), an unexpectedly
earnest show that slumped badly.Unashamedly populist and sentimental although not without a gleefully nasty side, as seen in Jaws, Poltergeist
and Gremlins - SS has proved himself unquestionably the most commercially
successful film-maker of all time, dominating the box office for 16 years
with a succession of hits that make up for the occasional 1941. A skilled
and in many ways sophisticated director, he is, despite his incredible
success, still young enough and powerful enough to be labelled
"promising". On the other hand, he has become one of the most powerful
figures in Hollywood. A big Hollywood story of late 1994 was the annouced
partnership between Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, to
form a major new film studio into which Amblin Entertainment would be
merged, while retaining its own identity. This - if it is not merely a
political-industrial power ploy - could have interesting repercussions on
the whole industry. [KN/PN]See also: CINEMA; HISTORY OF SF; STEAMPUNK;
TELEVISION; UFOS.
SPINDIZZY
One of the best-loved items of sf TERMINOLOGY. The spindizzy is the
ANTIGRAVITY device used to drive flying cities through the Galaxy in James
BLISH's series collected as CITIES IN FLIGHT (omni 1970), though he was
using the term as early as 1950. He gave the spindizzy a wonderfully
plausible rationale, rooted in theoretical physics, in which GRAVITY
fields are seen as generated or cancelled by rotation. [PN]
SPIN-OFF
TIE.
SPINRAD, NORMAN (RICHARD)
(1940- ) US writer, born in New York - where he has set some impressive
fiction - and now resident in France. He began publishing sf with "The
Last of the Romany" for ASF in 1963, which he assembled with other early
work in The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde (coll 1970), the title story
being among the most successful of the attempts made by divers authors to
write a tale using the characters and Universe of Michael MOORCOCK's Jerry
Cornelius series. The story was originally published in NW, to which NS
was a significant contributor during the 1960s, when both the US and UK
NEW-WAVE movements, though with different emphases (the UK form tending

more selfconsciously to assimilate MAINSTREAM modes like Surrealism),
argued against traditional sf, which had failed to use the hard sciences
to explore INNER SPACE, regarded as the proper territory of all genuinely
serious writing. After publishing two commercial SPACE OPERAS - The
Solarians (1966) and Agent of Chaos (1967) - NS subsequently kept faith
with that brief and the ethos which generated it.The Men in the Jungle
(1967) - which subjects its tough, urban protagonist to a complex set of
Realpolitik adventures on a distant planet - demonstrates the vigour and
occasionally slapdash bravado of what would become NS's typical style; but
it was with his next book, BUG JACK BARRON (1969), that he made his
greatest impact on the sheltered world of sf. This long novel was first
serialized in a shorter form in NEW WORLDS (1967-8), where its violent
texture and profanity rattled the excitable dovecotes of the UK "moral
establishment", leading directly to the banning of the magazine by W.H.
Smith, a newsagency chain so huge that its action was tantamount to
censorship. The equally risible parochialism of the sf world, when
confronted by this not particularly shocking novel, was demonstrated by
Sam J. LUNDWALL in his Science Fiction: What It's All About (1969; trans
exp 1971), where he described and dismissed the book as "practically a
collection of obscenities". The novel itself, whose language does not
fully conceal a certain sentimentality, deals with a NEAR-FUTURE USA
through tv figure Jack Barron and his involvement in a politically corrupt
system: the resulting picture of the USA as a hyped, SEX-obsessed,
apocalyptic world made the text seem less sf than FABULATION, where this
sort of vision is common. The sledgehammer style matched, at points, the
content.In NS's next novel, The Iron Dream (1972), the intention to offend
was gratifyingly explicit. An ALTERNATE WORLD in which Hitler, thwarted as
a politician, must make do with being an author of popular fiction is the
frame for a long sf tale from his feverish pen, "Lord of the Swastika".
This makes up most of the novel's text and gives NS the opportunity to
mock - effectively if at times unrelentingly - some of the less attractive
tendencies of right-wing sf, its fetish with gear, its fascist love of
hierarchical display, its philistinism, its brutishness, its not entirely
secret contempt for the people its HEROES defend. The "Afterword" by
"Homer Whipple" just as hilariously guys the kind of critical writing
generated by publish-or-perish academics. NS then released 2 further
collections - No Direction Home (coll 1975) and The Star-Spangled Future
(coll 1979), the latter an adroitly shaped compilation of his first 2
collections - which concisely demonstrate the range of his response to the
complexities of a rapidly changing Western world. From this point, that
world dominated - as metaphor or in realistic depiction-his work. In A
World Between (1979) the citizens of a UTOPIAN world deal with strident
threats to their middle way from technophile fascists of the right and
lesbian fascists of the left. The Mind Game (1980; vt The Process 1983),
not sf, savagely treats a manipulative "church" whose dictates and
cynicism are of a sort familiar to sf readers, and the later The Childen
of Hamelin (1991), likewise not sf, deals with contemporary people trapped
in a cult. The post- HOLOCAUST Songs from the Stars (1980) opposes a
restrictive "black" technological rule with an uplift message from a
soaring galactic civilization.NS's best 1980s novel was perhaps The Void
Captain's Tale (1983) which, with its thematic partner Child of Fortune

(1985), comprises what one might call an eroticized vision of the Galaxy.
The SPACESHIP in the first tale is driven by Eros, in a very explicit
sense; and the female protagonist of the second fertilizes-at least
symbolically - all she touches in her elated Wanderjahr among the
sparkling worlds. Little Heroes (1987) is set in a nightmarish urban
near-future USA, divided into haves and ruthlessly manipulated have-nots;
the plot turns on a combination of technology-fixing and co-optation that
cuts close to the bone, though by this date NS's weary rage had begun to
lose some of its purgative bite. However, the 4 novellas about the state
of the USA assembled in Other Americas (coll 1988) show a recovery of NS's
urban venom about the self-devouring progress of his native land into the
millennium; Russian Spring (1991), set in a near-future world dominated by
a USSR liberated by perestroika, again voluminously anatomizes the
American Dream, though the effect of the book was muffled by the real-life
collapse of the USSR in 1991; but Deus X (1993) adroitly mixed the cod
theologizings of a troubled Pope with excursions into CYBERSPACE, where
souls may - or may not - be deemed to dwell; and Vampire Junkies (1993
Tomorrow; 1994 chap) neatly contrasts the experiences of Vlad Dracul in
the 1990s with those of a hooker addicted to smack; Pictures at Eleven
(1994) is associational.Two nonfiction collections - Staying Alive: A
Writer's Guide (coll 1983) and Science Fiction in the Real World (coll
1990) - make even more explicit some of his bleak assumptions about the
course of the world to which he so vehemently belongs. [JC]Other works:
Passing through the Flame (1975), not sf; Riding the Torch (in Threads of
Time [anth 1974]; 1978 dos).As Editor: The New Tomorrows (anth 1971);
Modern Science Fiction (anth 1974).Nonfiction: Experiment Perilous: Three
Essays on Science Fiction (coll 1976 chap) ed Andrew PORTER; The Reasons
behind the SFWA Model Paperback Contract (1978 chap).See also: CLONES;
CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; CYBERPUNK; DEFINITIONS OF SF;
DESTINIES; ECOLOGY; END OF THE WORLD; ENTROPY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES;
FASTER
THAN LIGHT; GAMES AND SPORTS; HITLER WINS; IMMORTALITY; ISAAC ASIMOV'S
SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MEDICINE; MUSIC; MUTANTS;
PARANOIA; PERCEPTION; POLITICS; POLLUTION; PSYCHOLOGY; SATIRE; SCIENCE
FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA; SUN; SWORD AND SORCERY; TECHNOLOGY; WAR.
SPIRITUALISM
ESCHATOLOGY.
SPITTEL, OLAF R.
[r] GERMANY.
SPITZ, JACQUES
(1896-1963) French writer whose first sf novel of interest, L'agonie du
globe (1935; trans Margaret Mitchiner as Sever the Earth 1936 UK),
describes the consequences attendant upon the splitting of the planet into
two halves 50 miles (80km) apart. In La Guerre des mouches ["War of the
Flies"] (1938) mutated flies defeat humanity, keeping alive only a few
abject specimens, one of whom tells the tale. The SCIENTIST protagonist of
L'Homme elastique ["The Elastic Man"] (1938) discovers a method of
compressing atoms, allowing him (on request) to create an army of tiny
soldiers, who turn out to be examples of Homo superior ( SUPERMAN). In

L'Oeil du purgatoire ["The Eye of Purgatory"] (1945) a mad scientist
develops a bacillus which, when injected into the protagonist, allows (or
forces) him to see the future wherever he looks - a condition which
becomes purgatorial as he sees deeper and deeper into the destinies of
those around him, until eventually he is capable of perceiving little more
than corpses. [JC]See also: FRANCE.
SPLATTER MOVIES
Term used by 1980s movie-goers to describe films that display gore,
disembowelment and mutilation as a central feature. Many exploitation
films of the 1970s and 1980s fall into this category, including such
fringe sf/ HORROR movies as BAD TASTE (1987), DAY OF THE DEAD (1985),
RE-ANIMATOR (1985) and The THING (1982 remake). By no means all such films
are bad, though all may be ethically suspect in their apparent appeal to
sadistic voyeurism. [PN]
SPLIT PERSONALITY
PARANOIA; PSYCHOLOGY.
SPLIT SECOND
Film (1991). Challenge. Dir Tony Maylam, Ian Sharp, starring Rutger
Hauer, Kim Cattrall, Neil Duncan, Michael J. Pollard, Alun Armstrong, Pete
Postlethwaite, Ian Dury. Screenplay by Gary Scott Thompson. 91 mins.
Colour.London, AD2008. The Thames has risen and society is crumbling.
Coffee-drinking hard man Hauer and comics-reading Scots intellectual
Duncan are brawling buddy cops on the trail of a heart-eating villain who
carves astrological symbols on what's left of his victims' chests.
Proposed solutions include mutant DNA and the Devil, but in the finale the
baddie turns out to be a regulation ALIEN-style Big Monster With Teeth who
confronts Hauer on a tube train. Inexplicable events, disappearing
characters and logical lapses abound. Maylam, who directs this sf SPLATTER
MOVIE at a rapid plod, establishes a Drowned World atmosphere by pouring
water into all the sets and painting everything grey; Sharp took over for
the action climax. Despite the murkiness of this future world, Hauer stays
cool in sunglasses; Duncan's enthusiastic performance offers the sole
touch of character. [KN]
SPORTS
GAMES AND SPORTS.
SPRAGUE, CARTER
[s] Sam MERWIN Jr.
SPRIGEL, OLIVIER
Pierre BARBET.
SPRUILL, STEVEN G(REGORY)
(1946- ) US writer and psychologist. In his first sf novel, Keepers of
the Gate (1977; rev 1978), a complicated adventure tale rather in the mode
of Keith LAUMER, the alien Proteps of Eridani turn out to be an advanced
form of Homo sapiens, and have been suppressing mankind's urge to the
stars for selfish reasons; the generic cues for revelling in such a tale
are deployed with some competence. He is best known for his Elias Kane
sequence - even the protagonist's name seems to be a homage to Isaac

ASIMOV's earlier detective Elijah Bailey - about an intelligently moody
detective and his superpowered sidekick: The Psychopath Plague (1978), The
Imperator Plot (1982) and Paradox Planet (1988). The series seems
incomplete; but, although a template interminability attends Kane's
repeated assignments, granted him by the current Imperator who rules Earth
and several colonies, the passage of time is clearly marked throughout:
the woman Kane falls in love with and marries in the 1st vol - whose
deadly plague has been induced by aliens - is murdered in the 2nd; and the
Imperator who is beheaded, but remains alive, in the 2nd - which concerns
this attempted assassination - has been succeeded in the 3rd, which is set
on a heavy-gravity colony planet. A sense of potential interestingness
pervades even the most convincingly unambitious of SGS's works. [JC]Other
works: The Janus Equation (1980 dos); Hellstone (1981); The Genesis Shield
(1985); My Soul to Take (1994), a medical sf thriller.
SQUIRE, J.C.
[r] ALTERNATE WORLDS.
SQUIRM
BLUE SUNSHINE.
SSSSNAKE
SSSSSSSS!
SSSSSSSS!
(vt Ssssnake!) Film (1973). Zanuck-Brown/Universal. Prod Dan Striepeke.
Dir Bernard L. Kowalski, starring Strother Martin, Dirk Benedict, Heather
Menzies. Screenplay Hal Dresner, based on a story by Striepeke. 99 mins.
Colour.In a period when most MONSTER MOVIES were spoofs, this competently
made film is unusual for playing it straight (despite the title). An
obsessed scientist (Martin) believes that only ophidians (snakes) will
survive what he sees as coming ecocatastrophe, so he works on developing
snake-like properties - e.g., cold blood - in humans, early failures being
sold to the carnival freak-show. He finally succeeds in transforming his
daughter's boy-friend (Benedict) into something like a king cobra (rather
good make-up by John Chambers). Then along comes a mongoose . . . [JB/PN]
STABLEFORD, BRIAN M(ICHAEL)
(1948- ) UK writer, critic and academic, with a degree in BIOLOGY and a
doctorate in SOCIOLOGY, which he taught 1977-88 before turning to writing
full-time. He began his writing career early, collaborating with a
schoolfriend, Craig A. Mackintosh (together as Brian Craig), on his first
published story, "Beyond Time's Aegis" for Science Fantasy in 1965. BMS
then dropped the Brian Craig pseudonym, using it again only in the late
1980s when he undertook to SHARECROP some ties for a GAME-WORLD enterprise
( GAMES WORKSHOP and listing below). His first novel, Cradle of the Sun
(1969 dos US), a quest story set in the FAR FUTURE, is notable for its
colourful imagery. The Blind Worm (1970 dos US), hastily written, is in
the same vein. In these early works, and in most of his subsequent sf
novels, BMS put his knowledge of biology to good use, constructing a long
series of outrageous but plausible ECOLOGIES whose intricacy sometimes
overwhelmed the SPACE-OPERA formats to which he generally adhered over the
first 15 years of his career. The early Dies Irae trilogy - The Days of

Glory (1971 US), In the Kingdom of the Beasts (1971 US) and Day of Wrath
(1971 US) - mixed these usual space-opera trappings with SWORD AND
SORCERY. Based on HOMER's Iliad and Odyssey, the trilogy was dismissed as
cynical hackwork (not least by BMS himself); although the narrative has
some verve, it clearly does not attempt to pay due homage to its source.
To Challenge Chaos (1972 US), the last example of BMS's juvenilia, is an
overextravagant adventure set on the chaotic hemisphere of a planet that
intersects another dimension; short stories associated with this novel are
"The Sun's Tears" (1974), "An Offer of Oblivion" (1974) and "Captain Fagan
Died Alone" (1976).It was with the Grainger or Hooded Swan series-The
Halcyon Drift (1972 US), Rhapsody in Black (1973 US; rev 1975 UK),
Promised Land (1974 US), The Paradise Game (1974 US), The Fenris Device
(1974 US) and Swan Song (1975 US) - that BMS began to attract serious
notice in the USA, where his early work was all first published, being
marketed there as adventure sf. The Grainger novels - first-person
narratives in a Chandleresque style - concern the adventures of the pilot
of a FASTER-THAN-LIGHT spacecraft, the Hooded Swan, on a variety of
planets. In the first tale Grainger, marooned on a remote world, becomes
host to a mind parasite, a benign entity which occasionally takes over his
body and drives it to feats of endurance. In later books the increasingly
disillusioned, sardonic, pacific Grainger penetrates further biological
mysteries, but the series itself holds back from fully articulating the
subversiveness of his behaviour, and there is little sense of accumulating
burden. A second series - the Daedalus Mission books, comprising The
Florians (1976 US), Critical Threshold (1977 US), Wildeblood's Empire
(1977 US), The City of the Sun (1978 US), Balance of Power (1979 US) and
The Paradox of Sets (1979 US) - recounts to similar effect the various
experiences of the crew of the spaceship Daedalus, which has been sent out
to re-contact lost Earth colonies.Most of BMS's fiction has been confined
to series, but Man in a Cage (1975 US), an unformulaic singleton, deals
with the PSYCHOLOGY of social adaptation as dramatized through a
schizophrenic narrator selected to participate in a space-project where
"sane" men have already proved inadequate. A powerfully written but
difficult novel, it is slightly reminiscent of the best work of Robert
SILVERBERG and Barry N. MALZBERG. The Mind-Riders (1976 US), perhaps
somewhat more conventional, is narrated by a cynical boxer who performs
via an electronic simulation device while the audience "plugs in" to his
emotions. Like Grainger's wonderful spaceship, and like the false
personality which "cages" the hero of Man in a Cage, the simulator is an
armour surrounding the self, enabling the protagonist to survive in a
hostile world. The Face of Heaven (1976) -the first part of a trilogy
published in 1 vol as The Realms of Tartarus (1977 US) - is a biological
phantasmagoria concerning a UTOPIA built on a huge platform above the
Earth's surface, and the conflict with the mutated lifeforms which
proliferate below. This tale, choked with ingenious invention and
grotesqueries, and The Walking Shadow (1979) stand as BMS's most clearly
STAPLEDON-esque epics, and show a vein of contemplative wonder that he was
later - in the impressive academic study, The Scientific Romance in
Britain 1890-1950 (1985) - to characterize as an essential element tending
to distinguish UK from US sf.Further novels of interest from this period
include The Castaways of Tanagar (1981 US) and The Gates of Eden (1983

US). After beginning the Asgard trilogy with Journey to the Center (1982
US; rev 1989 UK)-which he completed with Invaders from the Centre (1990)
and The Centre Cannot Hold (1990) - BMS stopped producing fiction for some
time, concentrating on popular and scholarly studies of sf and FUTUROLOGY
like The Science in Science Fiction (1982) with David LANGFORD and Peter
NICHOLLS, The Sociology of Science Fiction (1985 US) and, with Langford,
The Third Millennium: A History of the World AD 2000-3000 (1985); he also
contributed very widely during this period to a number of journals,
including FOUNDATION, and to various scholarly anthologies, including many
of the essays in E.F. BLEILER's 2 anthologies devoted to extended studies
of individual authors: Science Fiction Writers (anth 1982 US) and
Supernatural Fiction Writers (2 vols anth 1985 US). He has served as
contributing editor to both editions of this encyclopedia.Whether or not
these years away from fiction were in themselves rejuvenating, on
returning to sf BMS produced in short order his 3 finest novels to date.
The Empire of Fear (1988) is an alternate history ( ALTERNATE WORLDS) of
Europe from the Middle Ages to the present in which immortal vampires whose condition is here scientifically premised - dominate the world; told
with the geographic sweep and visionary didacticism typical of the
SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE, the book successfully assimilates into sf modes some
of the vast lore of the vampire. In The Werewolves of London (1990) and
its sequels The Angel of Pain (1991) and The Carnival of Destruction, the
first two set in a 19th-century UK and the third reflecting the events of
WW1, BMS appropriates further material from other genres, creating a
sequence in which werewolves, bred by primordial godling-like creatures at
the dawn of time, participate in an apocalyptic - and thoroughly discussed
- testing of the nature of reality. With these novels, and with the sharp
tales assembled in Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic
Revolution (coll 1991), BMS suddenly became a writer whose fiction
befitted his intelligence, for in much of his earlier work a certain tone
of chill indifference had tended to baulk the reader's identification. The
change was most welcome, and Young Blood (1992) - which could be described
as a scientific romance about the biochemical roots of human identity
within the context of an unconventional vampire tale - fully justifies the
sense that BS had entered his years of flourishing. [DP/JC]Other works:
The Last Days of the Edge of the World (1978), fantasy juvenile; Optiman
(1980 US; vt War Games 1981 UK); The Cosmic Perspective/Custer's Last
Stand (coll 1985 chap dos US); Slumming in Voodooland (1991 chap US); The
Innsmouth Heritage (1992 chap), a sequel to H.P. LOVECRAFT's "Shadow Over
Innsmouth" (1942); Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future (1994 US), a novel
mostly composed very early in BS's career, but only published now.As Brian
Craig: For Games Workshop, the Orfeo sequence of fantasies tied to the
Warhammer fantasy game-world - Zaragoz * (1989); Plague Demon * (1990);
Storm Warriors * (1991) - plus Ghost Dancers * (1991), tied to the Dark
Future sf game-world.As Editor: The Decadence anthology sequence, being
The Dedalus Book of Decadence (Moral Ruins) (anth 1990) and The Second
Dedalus Book of Decadence: The Black Feast (anth 1992); Tales of the
Wandering Jew (anth 1991); The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy: The 19th
Century (anth 1991); The Dedalus Book of Femmes Fatales (anth
1992).Nonfiction: The Mysteries of Modern Science (1977); A Clash of
Symbols: The Triumph of James Blish (1979 chap US); Masters of

Science-Fiction: Essays on Science-Fiction Authors (coll 1981 chap US);
Future Man: Brave New World or Genetic Nightmare? (1984).See also:
ANTHROPOLOGY; ARTS; COLLECTIONS; COSMOLOGY; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL
WORKS
ABOUT SF; CRYONICS; DEFINITIONS OF SF; ESP; EVOLUTION; FANTASY; GAMES AND
SPORTS; GENERATION STARSHIPS; GENETIC ENGINEERING; GODS AND DEMONS;
HARD
SF; HISTORY IN SF; HISTORY OF SF; HORROR IN SF; IMMORTALITY; INTERZONE;
LIVING WORLDS; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MESSIAHS; MONSTERS; MYTHOLOGY;
PARANOIA;
PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; PASTORAL; SEX; STEAMPUNK.
STABLES, (WILLIAM) GORDON
(1840-1910) Scottish author of children's fiction; he served as surgeon
on a whaling boat and later with the Royal Navy; some of his books were
signed Dr Gordon Stables, RN. He wrote extensively for the BOYS' PAPERS,
including The Boys' Own Paper, where he published many FANTASTIC VOYAGES
in competition with the serials of Jules VERNE; the most Verne-like were
The Cruise of the Crystal Boat (1891), a moralistic tale of aerial
adventure in an electrically powered craft, and An Island Afloat (1903).
LOST-WORLD elements appeared in some stories, notably In Quest of the
Giant Sloth (1901; vt The Strange Quest 1937) and In Regions of Perpetual
Snow (1904), and became more dominant in The City at the Pole (1906),
which envisages a temperate polar region and a Viking community and
prehistoric survivals there. His only excursion outside these themes was
his future- WAR novel, The Meteor Flag of England (1905). [JE]Other works:
The Cruise of the Snowbird (1882) and its sequel Wild Adventures Round the
Pole (1883); From Pole to Pole (1886); Frank Hardinge (1898); In the Great
White Land (1902).See also: SPACESHIPS.
STACPOOLE, H(ENRY) DE VERE
(1865-1951) UK author best known for his South Sea romances, including
non-sf ROBINSONADES like, most famously, The Blue Lagoon (1908), filmed in
1948 and 1980. His LOST-WORLD novel is The City in the Sea (1926). He
wrote several weird novels: Death, the Knight, and the Lady (1897), The
Man who Lost Himself (1918), The Ghost Girl (1918) and The Sunstone
(1936). His sf proper was generally restricted to the magazines; it
includes a world- DISASTER story, "The White Eye" (1918). The Story of My
Village (1947), his only sf novel proper, depicts a plague of blindness
which stops progress short, saving the world from nuclear HOLOCAUST.
[JE]Other works: The Vengeance of Mynheer Van Lik (coll 1934).
STACY, JAN
(1948-1989) US writer of military sf novels, including the first 4 vols
of the Doomsday Warrior, some in collaboration with Ryder SYVERTSEN under
the joint pseudonym Ryder Stacy; Syvertsen continued the series solo after
JS's death (see his entry for titles). Their only non-series collaboration
appeared under their real names: The Great Book of Movie Monsters (1983).
Writing as Jan Sievert, they began, with C.A.D.S. (1985), the C.A.D.S.
sequence, carried on separately by Syvertsen and David ALEXANDER. As Craig
Sargent JS wrote the Last Ranger sequence of military-sf novels set in a
post- HOLOCAUST venue: The Last Ranger (1986), #2: The Savage Stronghold

(1986), #3: The Madman's Mansion (1986), #4: The Rabid Brigadier (1987),
#5: The War Weapons (1987), #6: The Warlord's Revenge (1988), #7: The Vile
Village (1988), #8: The Cutthroat Cannibals (1988), #9: The Damned
Disciples (1988) and #10: Is This the End? (1989). [JC]
STACY, RYDER
Joint pseudonym of Jan STACY and Ryder SYVERTSEN (whom see for titles),
and solo pseudonym, after Stacy's death, of the latter. [JC]
STAFFORD, PETER
Paul TABORI.
STAHL, HENRI
[r] ROMANIA.
STAIG, LAURENCE (FREDERICK)
(1950- ) UK writer who began publishing sf with "Hello Hugo" in Twisted
Circuits (anth1987) ed Mick Gowar, and whose vigorously told sf and
fantasy novels, usually forteenage readers, include The Network(1988),Dark
Toys and Consumer Goods (coll 1989),Digital Vampires (1989), The Glimpses
(1989), Smoke-stackLightning(1991) and Shapeshifter(1992). He also wrote
the illuminating ItalianWestern: The Opera of Violence (1975) with Tony
Williams. [JC]
STAINES, TREVOR
[s] John BRUNNER.
STALKER
Russian film, 1979. Mosfilm. Dir Andrei TARKOVSKY, starring Aleksandr
Kaidanovsky, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko. Production design
Tarkovsky. Screenplay Arkady and Boris STRUGATSKI, based on their Roadside
Picnic (1972; trans 1977). 161 mins. B/w and colour.The original novel
tells of a mysterious Zone in Canada where enigmatic artefacts can be
found, left there like picnic litter by aliens. Tarkovsky's somewhat
inaccessible film, set in a desolate, unnamed country which is probably to
be read as an allegorical RUSSIA, de-emphasizes the sf elements. In place
of the alien artefacts is the Room, where (maybe) one's most secret wish
will be granted. To reach the Room, one must enter the Zone (photographed
in muted colour, as opposed to the bleak b/w opening sequence set in an
industrial wasteland) - perhaps a Bermuda Triangle, perhaps an ironic gift
from a probably nonexistent God - which is a little like the alien
killer-maze in Algis BUDRYS's ROGUE MOON (1960): it is a mixture of
dereliction and greenery, waterlogged, a maze of ever-changing lethal
traps, to be traversed only in a kind of drunkard's walk, an arbitrary
zigzag. The Stalker, the shaven-headed smuggler-saint whose wretched life
flares up only within the Zone, which he loves, is guide to the Writer and
the Professor, the former seeking genius, the latter secretly planning to
bomb the Room.S is agonizingly static, punctuated by abstract
philosophical conversations with long pauses, and yet for some viewers it
has an almost unequalled hypnotic intensity. This is partly due to
Tarkovsky's lingering artist's eye, catching the beauty of ugliness as,
for example, the camera pans endlessly across a shallow lake in the Zone
whose floor is kitchen tiles, passing indifferently across coins,

syringes, icons, calendars, a gun, all looming through the weed. The Room
is reached, but left unentered and unbombed. Afterwards, at the Stalker's
home, we witness his legless daughter (the children of stalkers being
often mutated) push a glass slowly across a table by telekinesis while her
exhausted father sleeps, the only unambiguous miracle of the film. S is a
meditation on faith and cynicism, certainly pretentious, memorable for
some, and perhaps the grimmest metaphor for Russia produced by a Russian
in our generation. [PN]See also: MUSIC.
STALLMAN, ROBERT
(1930-1980) Literary critic, professor of English at Western Michigan
University, author of the Beast trilogy, the last 2 books of which were
published posthumously: The Orphan (1980), The Captive (1981) and The
Beast (1982; vt The Book of the Beast UK). The books are complex,
sensitively written FABULATIONS, fitting between the generic borders of sf
and HORROR, and update the myth of the werewolf with the sf premise that
they are a chrysalis form of alien life; when two mate they will trigger a
new phase in their life-cycle. The books do not, however, feel very
sf-like, and they most come to life in the opposing tugs between the first
beast's life as beast and as human, both phases desiring autonomy. The
awkwardly structured last book of this engrossing series probably needed
an auctorial revision which it could not be given. [PN]
STAMEY, SARA (LUCINDA)
(1953- ) US writer in whose Wild Card Run sequence of sf adventures-Wild
Card Run (1987), Win, Lose, Draw (1988) and Double Blind (1990) - a
refreshingly tangential attitude towards plotting keeps a young female
protagonist with PSI POWERS hopscotching from planet to planet. En route
she embraces her own tangled family romance on one world, and elsewhere
confronts some AI conundra, sensing that the entire venue of her sport is
in fact a galactic experiment on their part. [JC]
STAND, THE
US tv miniseries (1994). Laurel Entertainment/ABC Television. Exec prods
Stephen KING and Richard Rubinstein. Dir Mick Garris, teleplay by King
based on his own novel THE STAND (1978, text restored rev 1990). Starring
Gary Sinese as Stu Redman, Molly Ringwald as Frannie Goldsmith, Rob Lowe
as Nick Andros, Adam Storke as Larry Underwood, Laura San Giacomo as
Nadine, Ruby Dee as Mother Abagail, James Sheridan as Randall Flagg, Matt
Frewer as Trashcan Man and many others. Eight hours divided into four
two-hour episodes.King's enormous novel about the HOLOCAUST AND AFTER,
specifically about a plague produced by the military that wipes out most
of near-future America, was optioned as a feature film for some years, but
nobody could find a way of fitting such a huge story into conventional
film length, and the dark subject matter also worried the studios. The tv
solution was probably the best, and it is indeed a well made miniseries,
probably Garris's best piece of direction to date, and something of a
television milestone. Hovering between sf and fantasy, both book and
miniseries focus on character studies as the surviors slowly begin to
rebuild, with the democratic good guys restoring a decent sense of
community in Denver and the fascist bad guys in Las Vegas planning to nuke
them. Both groups have quasi-supernatural guardians, the old black woman

Mother Abigail standing for good, and Randall Flagg, the Dar Man, for
evil. Some sf fans feel that the supernatural subtext diminishes the
story's strength as science fiction, but the story remains an optimistic,
populist classic about the endurance of the human spirit after enormous
DISASTER, and the miniseries retains much of this strength. It is
available on videotape. [PN]
STANDARD MAGAZINES
Ned L. PINES; SPACE STORIES; STARTLING STORIES; THRILLING WONDER STORIES.
STANFORD, J(OHN) K(EITH)
(1892-1971) UK writer, mostly of humorous material, whose sf SATIRE, Full
Moon at Sweatenham: A Nightmare (1953), takes rather clumsy potshots at a
decadent, ludicrous 1960 UK; the welfare state is guyed. [JC]Other works:
The Twelfth (1944 chap).
STANG, [Reverend] IVAN
(1949- ) US writer, given the title "Reverend" by the Church of the
SubGenius. He ed The Book of the SubGenius (anth 1983), a SATIRE on other
religions and cults in the form of densely packed clip art relating the
teachings of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, a former encyclopedia salesman. The
crackpot literature that inspired the book is reviewed in the nonfiction
High Weirdness by Mail: A Directory of the Fringe-Made Prophets, Crackpots
?
Stories in the SubGenius Mythos * (coll 1990), much of whose content is
sf. [NT]
STANGERUP, HENRIK
(1937- ) Danish journalist, playwright and novelist who worked mainly
within the tradition of "new realism" prevalent in Denmark during the
1960s; he also wrote historical fiction. His sf novel Manden der ville
vaere skyldig (1973; trans David Gress-Wright as The Man who Wanted to be
Guilty 1982 UK) satirically assaults the welfare state and the Social
Democratic party in a NEAR-FUTURE tale of a man who accidentally kills his
wife and is treated by the state not as a criminal but as a patient,
stifling his natural need to assume some personal guilt for the deed. The
book was filmed in 1990 by Ole Roos. [ND]See also: DENMARK.
STANILAND, MEABURN
(? - ) UK writer whose Back to the Future (1947), in no way connected to
BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985) and its sequels, sends its protagonist into a
bureaucratic DYSTOPIAN future UK. [JC]
STANLEY, A(LFRED) M(ORTIMER)
(1888-1966) US writer in whose Tomorrow's Yesterday (1949) an
archaeologist wakes up in a future where sex-roles are reversed and mental
growth is matched by physical decay. [JC]
STANLEY, WILLIAM (FORD ROBINSON)
(1829-1909) UK writer, often on economic issues, of sf interest for The
Case of The. Fox: Being his Prophecies under Hypnotism of the Period
Ending A.D. 1950. A Political Utopia (1903). Hypnosis releases the
"prophetic mental element" in a poet, Theodore Fox; the UTOPIA he
describes in a series of visions, with its Federal Europe, electrified

cars and Channel Tunnel, has few unusual elements. At the end, perhaps
dazzled, Fox kills himself. [JC]
STANTON, KEN
Manning Lee STOKES.
STANTON, PAUL
Pseudonym of UK writer (Arthur) David Beaty (1919- ), who wrote thrillers
under his own name. Village of Stars (1960) as by PS was an unremarkable
NEAR-FUTURE nuclear- WAR thriller. [JC]
STAPLEDON, (WILLIAM) OLAF
(1886-1950) UK writer and philosopher, born of well-to-do parents in the
Wirral peninsula near Liverpool, where he spent the greater part of his
life. In Waking World (1934) he admitted that he lived "chiefly on
dividends and other ill-gotten gains". The name Olaf does not indicate
foreign antecedents: his parents happened to be reading Carlyle's The
Early Kings of Norway (coll 1875) at the time. Memories of childhood in
Suez and a cultivated family background are recaptured in Youth and
Tomorrow (1946). He was educated at Abbotsholme, a progressive public
school, and at Balliol College, Oxford. For a short period he worked
without enthusiasm in the family shipping office in Port Said, an
experience he used in his highly autobiographical last novel, A Man
Divided (1950). There is scattered evidence that the international flavour
of Port Said influenced his complex ideas about "true community". His
service with the Friends' Ambulance Unit in WWI helped him formulate his
pacifism, and provided material for Last Men in London (1932). He took a
doctorate in philosophy at Liverpool University in 1925.OS began
publishing essays as early as 1908; his first book was Latter-Day Psalms
(coll 1914 chap), a small volume of privately printed verse. It is
remarkable only for showing a preoccupation at the outset with one of the
themes that would engage him for the rest of his life: the irrelevance of
a RELIGION based on hopes of IMMORTALITY and the hypothesis of an evolving
god. There was a gap of 15 years before his next book, A Modern Theory of
Ethics (1929), written when OS was 43. Here is the philosophical
underpinning for all the major ideas that would appear repeatedly in the
fiction: moral obligation as a teleological requirement; ecstasy as a
cognitive intuition of cosmic excellence; personal fulfilment of
individual capacities as an intrinsic good; community as a necessary
prerequisite for individual fulfilment; and the hopeless inadequacy of
human faculties for the discovery of truth. It was this last conviction
which provided the springboard for the writing of his fiction; all of it,
by some speculative device or other, strives to overcome the congenital
deficiencies of the ordinary human being.LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930), OS's
first novel, caused something of a sensation. Contemporary writers and
critics acclaimed it, though later it would for a time be nearly
forgotten. The book employs a timescale of 2 billion years, during which
18 races of humanity rise and fall. The story is told by one of the Last
(18th) Men working through the "docile but scarcely adequate brain" of one
of the 1st Men (ourselves). The civilization of the 1st Men (he explains)
reached its highest points in Socrates (in the search for truth) and Jesus
(in self-oblivious worship). The 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 15th, 16th and 18th Men

represent higher orders of wisdom. The emigration of the 5th Men to VENUS
is an early example of TERRAFORMING, and the construction of the 9th Men
to adapt them for Neptune ( OUTER PLANETS) is likewise for GENETIC
ENGINEERING. In the intimate and less expansive Last Men in London, one of
the Last Men returns to the time of WWI, enters into profound symbiosis
with a young human, and attempts to arouse the Race Mind.In Odd John: A
Story Between Jest and Earnest (1935) the individual SUPERMAN appears,
although his attributes are spiritual and intellectual, quite divorced
from the supermen of the COMICS and PULP MAGAZINES. John recapitulates in
his own evolution some of the characteristics of the 2nd, 3rd and 5th Men.
He and his fellow "supernormals" finally achieve something akin to the
wisdom of the 18th Men; a spiritual gain which costs them their lives:
when normal humans threaten to destroy their island, they destroy
themselves rather than fight back.STAR MAKER (1937) is often regarded as
OS's greatest work. Its cosmic range, fecundity of invention, precision
and grandeur of language, structural logic, and above all its attempt to
create a universal system of philosophy by which modern human beings might
live, permit comparison with DANTE ALIGHIERI's Divine Comedy. The narrator
is rapt from a suburban hilltop and becomes a "disembodied, wandering
viewpoint", rather like Dante's own protagonist. Over a timespan which
extends to 100 billion years, he first observes "Other Men", whose
extraordinary development of scent and taste should remind us of the
relative nature of our own perceived values; his purview then extends to
"strange mankinds", including the Human Echinoderms - whose communal
method of reproduction provides an ingenious metaphor for the ideal of
true community - and to a wide range of species far removed from mankind.
Of these ALIENS, among the most interesting are the "ichthyoids" and
"arachnoids". Over a long period of time these 2 species come together in
a symbiosis; the ichthyoids are artistic and mystical, while the
arachnoids are dexterous and practical. The development of the
relationship provides OS's most extended and detailed metaphor for the
ideal of true community, which has its microcosm in a pair of human lovers
and its macrocosm in a Universe of "minded" LIVING WORLDS. The narrator
proceeds to the "supreme moment of the cosmos" in which he faces the Star
Maker and discovers something of his pitiless nature.Paradoxically, the
book with the greatest human interest is sometimes said to be Sirius: A
Fantasy of Love and Discord (1944), the story of a dog with enhanced
INTELLIGENCE, consciousness and sensibility. The dog, with its natural
limitations, is a paradigm of our own limited capacity; but at the same
time the dog's superior gifts - e.g., in the faculty of scent - are
another reminder of human inadequacy. As in Odd John, the MUTANT being,
when faced with the violence of normals and their incomprehension, dies this time directly at their hands.The four works of sf described
constitute the living core of OS's fiction. Both LAST AND FIRST MEN and
STAR MAKER have their advocates as the finest sf ever written; many
critics argue that Odd John is the best novel about a superman, and that
Sirius is the best book with a nonhuman protagonist. All 4 show OS's
unwavering concern with the pursuit of truth and with the impossibility of
our species ever finding it. Each sets up a speculative device to leap
over the plodding faculties of Homo sapiens: the supernormal intelligence
of Homo superior in LAST AND FIRST MEN and Odd John, and the alternative

intelligence of alien creatures in STAR MAKER and Sirius. Along with the
quest for truth, and as a necessary accompaniment to it, there is a search
for the gateways to a "way of the spirit". These constant preoccupations
give to all OS's work a striking consistency, and it is possible to place
everything he did within a highly original scheme of METAPHYSICS.
Everything has its place in the same cosmic history that the Star Maker
coldly regards. In his avatar of Jahweh, the Star Maker was invoked at the
beginning in Latter-Day Psalms; and as the "mind's star" and "phantom
deity" he will be there at the end in the posthumous The Opening of the
Eyes (1954).Of OS's remaining fiction, perhaps The Flames (1947 chap)
deserves most attention. The "flames" are members of an alien race,
originally natives of the Sun, who can be released when igneous rock is
heated; they have affinities with the "supernormals" who occur on OS's
other worlds. There are similarities with the later-discovered Nebula
Maker (1976), apparently written in the mid-1930s as part of an early
draft for STAR MAKER and then put aside. It relates the history of the
nebulae and shows how their striving is brought to nothing by an uncaring
God. Religion is dismissed as the opium of the people in Old Man in New
World (1944 chap). Supermen reappear in Darkness and the Light (1942) and
cosmic history is recapitulated in Death into Life (1946). OS's insistence
on scrupulously considering opposed points of view, and his sceptical
intelligence, found an admirable vehicle in the imaginary conversations of
Four Encounters (1976), probably written in the later 1940s. Of OS's
remaining nonfiction, Philosophy and Living (1939), written after the best
of his fiction, is the most comprehensive work. The best introduction for
the general reader is Beyond the "Isms" (1942), whose last chapter, under
the characteristic heading "The Upshot", provides an admirable summary of
his philosophy and a clear exposition of what he means by the "way of the
spirit".OS was writing in an ancient tradition of European speculative
fiction. He called his stories "fantastic fiction of a semi-philosophical
kind". He was - at least initially - unaware of GENRE SF and was somewhat
taken aback when in the 1940s he was acclaimed by sf fans; he was even
more startled when shown the contemporary magazines which provided their
staple fodder. Ironically, the acclamation he received as an sf writer may
partially account for his total neglect by historians of modern
literature. At the same time he is sometimes ignored by sf commentators e.g., Kingsley AMIS in New Maps of Hell (1960 US) - presumably partly
because he did not write for the sf magazines and partly because his work
is difficult to anthologize. OS is, however, though sometimes dimly
perceived, the Star Maker behind many subsequent stories of the FAR FUTURE
and GALACTIC EMPIRES. He did much original and seminal thinking about such
matters as ALTERNATE WORLDS, COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS, COSMOLOGY,
CYBORGS, ESP, HIVE-MINDS, IMMORTALITY, MONSTERS, MUTANTS and TIME
TRAVEL.
Arthur C. CLARKE and James BLISH are among the few sf writers who have
expressed their indebtedness to him, though his influence, both direct and
indirect, on the development of many concepts which now permeate genre sf
is probably second only to that of H.G. WELLS. [MA/JC]Other works: New
Hope for Britain (1939); Saints and Revolutionaries (1939); Worlds of
Wonder (omni 1949 US), assembling The Flames, Death into Life and Old Man
in New World; To the End of Time (omni 1953 US), assembling LAST AND FIRST

MEN (cut), STAR MAKER, Odd John, Sirius and The Flames; Odd John, and
Sirius (omni 1972 US); Far Future Calling: Uncollected Science Fiction and
Fantasies of Olaf Stapledon (coll 1979 US) ed Sam MOSKOWITZ; Nebula Maker,
and Four Encounters (omni 1983 US); Letters Across the World: The Love
Letters of Olaf Stapledon and Agnes Miller, 1913-1919 (coll 1987
Australia; vt Talking Across the World 1987 US); numerous uncollected
articles for such scholarly journals as Mind and Philosophy.About the
author: Olaf Stapledon (1982) by P.A. McCarthy; Olaf Stapledon: A Man
Divided (1984) by Leslie A. FIEDLER; Olaf Stapledon: A Bibliography (1984)
by Harvey J. Satty and Curtis C. SMITH; Olaf Stapledon and his Critics
(1988) by Curtis C. Smith.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE
HUMAN WORLD); DEVOLUTION; END OF THE WORLD; EVOLUTION; FRANCE; GODS
AND
DEMONS; HISTORY IN SF; HISTORY OF SF; INVASION; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS;
MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF; MUSIC; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; PHYSICS;
SOCIOLOGY; SUN.
STARBURST
UK monthly nonfiction magazine about sf, fantasy and horror in the media
(primarily films and tv). Small- BEDSHEET slick format. Founded Jan 1978,
first published by Starburst Magazines, London, ed Dez Skinn, but soon
taken over by MARVEL COMICS and ed Alan Mackenzie until #77 (Jan 1985),
then by Roger P. Birchall to #79 and Cefn Ridout to #87. With #88 (Dec
1985) the magazine left Marvel and was taken over by Visual Imagination,
with Stephen Payne the new ed.What must have been designed as little more
than a fan magazine for kids became rather good, especially under
Mackenzie's editorship, and it was for some time in the UK the only
(fairly) reliable source for developments in fantastic films and tv. What
probably saved S, in contrast to its US equivalent STARLOG, is that it
never gave the impression of being in hock to the film studios. S had a
collection of eccentric but well informed critics, some slavishly devoted
to SPLATTER MOVIES; among the regular contributors were John BROSNAN, Tony
Crawley and Alan Jones, and sf writers like Robert P. HOLDSTOCK, David
LANGFORD and Ian WATSON made occasional appearances. During the year
following the change of ownership from Marvel the magazine became blander
and more juvenile. The magazine had reached #167 in 1992. [PN]
STAR COPS
UK tv series (1987). BBC TV. Devised Chris Boucher, prod Evgeny Gridneff,
script ed Joanna Willett. Dirs Christopher Baker, Graeme Harper. Writers
Boucher (5 episodes), Philip Martin, John Collee. Leading players David
Calder as Nathan Spring, Erick Ray Evans, Linda Newton, Jonathan Adams as
Krivenko, the Russian commander of Moonbase. 9 55min episodes.
Colour.AD2027. Nathan Spring is the new head detective of the
International Space Police Force, an undisciplined force with poor morale
whose headquarters are on Moonbase, and whose policing area includes
manned orbital space stations. Spring whips them into shape, and they
solve crimes. The low-key realism of the series was efficient enough, but
in the end it seemed little more than just another cop show, failing to
imagine the future with any real vividness or depth. [PN]
STARDATE

US gaming magazine, small- BEDSHEET slick format, published first by
gaming company FASA for issues #1-#7 (which included several double
issues), 1984-5. These issues contained no fiction, but did have sf
reviews and articles. With #8 (Oct 1985) S changed hands (to Associates
International, Inc., Delaware), subtitle (becoming Stardate: The
Multi-Media Science Fiction Magazine), editors (Ted WHITE and David
BISCHOFF) and contents (one third gaming, one third film/tv and one third
fiction, including stories by William GIBSON, Jack HALDEMAN, Damon KNIGHT,
John SHIRLEY and William F. WU). It lasted 4 issues in this format,
folding after #11 (Mar/Apr 1986). [PN]
STARGATE
Film (1994). Le Studio Canal+ (U.S.)/Centropolis Film in association with
Carolco. Exec prod Mario Kassar; dir Roland Emmerich; screenplay Dean
Devlin ? starring Kurt Russell, James Spader, Jaye Davidson,
Viveca Lindfors, Alexis Cruz, Mili Avital. 121 mins. Colour.Entertaining,
spectacular, big-budget ($55 million, 1,900 extras) SCIENCE-FANTASY epic,
designed to appeal to a similar audience to those of Steven SPIELBERG's
three Indiana Jones movies. The unlikely plot, harking back to pulp
fiction of the 1930s and kids' movie serials of the 1940s, has a prologue
showing a huge metallic ring, inscribed with strange symbols, dug up by
archaeologists in Egypt near the pyramids in 1928. In the present day a
young, clever Egyptologist Daniel Jackson (well played by Spader) is hired
to translate the symbology, and is amazed to find himself part of a US
military project. The ring turns out to be a "stargate", a matter
transmitter, connected to another planet in another galaxy. The VON
DANIKEN style explanation is that Earth's Egyptian civilisation and
technology were instigated by an alien, an immoral energy form capable of
inhabiting other bodies, masquerading on our Earth as the sun god Ra, but
now long gone. A military party, led by Colonel Jack O'Neil (Russell),
along with the Egyptologist, goes through the stargate, finds another
planet, Abydos, with an ancient Egyptian style of civilisation and three
moons. The inhabitants there (humans) are in thrall to the sinister Ra
(played with androgynous beauty by Jaye Davidson) who occupies something
between a spacecraft and a pyramid, and is surrounded by seemingly
superhuman god figures dressed as Anubis, Osiris and so on. The best half
of the film is the first, with a series of very well contrived riddles to
be unravelled, and much tension built up. After that, a comparatively
routine series of adventures takes place with some friction between the
intellectual "dweeb" Jackson and the tough but emotional colonel: the
quasi-Egyptians are incited to revolt, and the malicious Ra is dealt with.
The special effects are very well done (visual effects Kit West,
production design Holger Gross, digital effects Jeffrey A. Okun, Egyptian
god designs and creature effects Patrick Tatopoulos). This is a much
better film than Emmerich and Devlin's previous sf collaboration,
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER (1992), though it has no intellectual pretensions and
seems pitched at a rather young audience. [PN]
STARK, HARRIET
(?1883-?1969) US writer who may have published at a precocious age; in
her moral tale, The Bacillus of Beauty: A Romance of Today (1900), a lady

is infected with a beauty-enhancing germ ( BIOLOGY). Her character
subsequently deteriorates, and she dies. [JC/PN]
STARK, (DELBERT) RAYMOND
(1919- ) UK writer in whose Crossroads to Nowhere (1956) an anarchist
unsuccessfully confronts a future dictatorship before escaping into the
wilds, where his kind may survive. [JC]
STARK, RICHARD
Donald E. WESTLAKE.
STARKE, HENDERSON
[s] Kris NEVILLE.
STAR*LINE
Robert FRAZIER; POETRY; SCIENCE FICTION POETRY ASSOCIATION.
STARLOG
US monthly nonfiction magazine about sf (and fantasy) in the media,
largely films and tv, founded 1976, current; small- BEDSHEET,
saddle-stapled; publishers have included O'Quinn Studios and Starlog
Communications, New York; editors have included Howard Zimmerman and David
McDonnell.This magazine aimed at the juvenile market has been a success
(circulation around quarter of a million), and has generated spin-off
books and posters and various companion magazines, including Fangoria
(mainstream horror) and Gorezone (cult horror and SPLATTER MOVIES).
Indeed, the horror companions have been livelier than S, which makes heavy
use of studio publicity pictures; in order to maintain good relationships
with the studios S does not review current films and is undiscriminating
throughout. Many of its articles are interviews with actors. That said,
the sheer volume of material these magazines have published makes them a
useful resource for researchers seeking production details, tv episode
guides and so forth. David GERROLD has been a columnist for S. A somewhat
more adult (on average) UK version of the same sort of magazine is
STARBURST, and a much more adult US magazine about fantastic film is
CINEFANTASTIQUE. #214 in early 1995 was the 19th anniversary issue. A
recent spin-off is Starlog Platinum Edition, which had reached #8 by early
1995. [PN]
STARLOST, THE
Canadian tv series, syndicated by CTV (1973). Executive prods Douglas
Trumbull, Jerry Zeitman. Prod William Davidson. Series created Cordwainer
Bird (pseudonym of Harlan ELLISON). Technical advisor Ben BOVA. Starring
Keir Dullea, Gay Rowen, Robin Ward, William Osler. 1 season of 17 50min
episodes. Colour.This series about life on a vast GENERATION STARSHIP,
none of whose occupants know its entire extent, should have been good
given the quality of some of its creators (Trumbull, Ellison, Bova). In
fact it was dire, and only in Canada were all episodes aired. Ellison
repudiated it, and Bova wrote a roman a clef about the fiasco, The
Starcrossed (1975). Ellison's original script for episode 1 (not as
filmed) won the prestigious Writer's Guild of America Award, and was
novelized: Phoenix without Ashes * (1975) as by Ellison with Edward
BRYANT. [PN]

STAR MAIDENS
(vt Space Maidens) UK/West German tv series (1976). A Portman Production
for Scottish and Global/Jost Graf von Hardenberg ?
Werbung-in-Rundfunk. Prod James Gatward. Dirs Gatward, Wolfgang Storch,
Freddie Francis. Writers Eric Paice, John Lucarotti, Ian Stuart Black,
Otto Strang. Starring Judy Geeson, Dawn Addams, Pierre Brice, Gareth
Thomas, Christiane Kruger, Lisa Harrow, Christian Quadflieg, Ronald Hines,
Derek Farr. 13 30min episodes. Colour.On the planet Medusa women have
enslaved men, two of whom (Brice and Thomas) steal a spaceship and flee to
Earth. They are pursued by Medusan women, led by Fulvia (Geeson), who take
Earth hostages (Harrow and Quadflieg) in their place. The plotting was
chaotic and the role-reversal SATIRE unsubtle. The series was (by UK
standards) expensive, and audience figures did not justify the cost of a
2nd season.
STARMAN
1. Film (1984). Delphi Productions II/Columbia. Dir John CARPENTER,
starring Jeff Bridges, Karen Allen, Charles Martin Smith, Richard Jaeckel.
Screenplay Bruce A. Evans, Raynold Gideon (and Dean Riesner, uncredited).
115 mins. Colour.Carpenter ventured into SPIELBERG territory in this sweet
- possibly saccharine - story of a wide-eyed innocent arriving from space.
The Starman (Bridges), first seen as a ball of light, exactly recreates
himself in the image of young Jenny's dead husband, kidnaps Jenny (Allen)
in the nicest possible way, learns about human customs, is pursued by
government forces who want to study or kill him, raises a deer and Jenny
(separately) from the dead like an affably dopy Christ, impregnates Jenny,
and leaves again. Most of S is a protracted chase sequence across the USA,
and, though it has rewarding moments and touching performances from its
leads, it is too long and slight. The subtext (What would happen to Christ
if He came again? We'd crucify Him) is serious enough, but evoked only
playfully. The novelization is Starman * (1984) by Alan Dean FOSTER.2.
Columbia Television produced a spin-off 22-episode tv series, also called
Starman, which ran 1 season 1986-7. This dealt in a stereotyped manner
with the return to Earth, 11 years later, of the Starman (now played by
Robert Hays), his reconciliation with his son, his seemingly endless
search for Jenny and an equally protracted search for him by a federal
agent. [PN]See also: CINEMA.
STARMONT HOUSE
Former US SMALL PRESS, located successively in West Linn, Oregon, and in
Mercer Island, Washington State from 1980, founded 1976 by T.E. DIKTY,
specializing in monographs on individual sf writers, along with some
BIBLIOGRAPHIESof and guides to sf magazines and book lines, and occasional
reprints of pulp and paperback fiction. SH's first book was The Annotated
Guide to Robert E. Howard's Sword ?
its best known line was the Starmont Reader's Guide series of sf
monographs, established in 1979, ed to a fairly rigid pattern by Roger C.
SCHLOBIN, originally under 100pp, but 100-170pp in later years; the final
volume was #61, Kurt Vonnegut (1992) by Donald E. Morse, some #s having
been skipped. From 1983 a series of more general studies in literary
criticism appeared, mostly related to sf/fantasy and especially HORROR,

with a number of titles by Michael R. COLLINGS, Darrell SCHWEITZER and
others, and including critical anthologies. After Dikty's death in late
1991, his daughter, Barbara Dikty, continued as publisher but, after 8
titles in 1992, shut down operations on 1 March 1993. Most of SH's and FAX
COLLECTOR'S EDITIONS nonfiction books and many unpublished manuscripts
were sold to BORGO PRESS. SH published 131 books altogether (all but two
related to sf), 2 art folios, and a fantasy map; and distributed FAX
Collector's Editions. [JC/PN]About the Publisher:"A Requiem for Starmont
House" by Robert REGINALD, in SFS 20 (November 1993).See also: SF IN THE
CLASSROOM.
STAR PRESS
GAMMA.
STAR PUBLICATIONS
COSMOS SCIENCE FICTION.
STARR, BILL
(? - ) US writer known only for the Farstar and Son sequence of sf
adventures: The Way to Dawnworld (1975) and The Treasure of Wonderwhat
(1977). The books have something of the quaintness of their titles. [JC]
STARR, MARK
Gerard KLEIN.
STARR, ROLAND
Donald S. ROWLAND.
STARS
The stars have always exerted a powerful imaginative fascination upon the
human mind. When they were thought to be mere points of light in the
panoply of heaven, it was believed by astrologers that the secrets of the
future were written there, and various cultures wove their MYTHOLOGY into
the patterns of various constellations. Not until 1718 did Edmond Halley
(1656-1742) demonstrate that the stars were not "fixed", and not until the
late 1830s were the distances of the nearer stars realistically
calculated.It was the religious imagination which first despatched
imaginary voyagers so far from Earth. The notion of the stars as suns
circled by other worlds was first popularized by Bernard le Bovyer de
FONTENELLE in Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes habites (1686; trans
J. Glanvill as A Plurality of Worlds 1929). In the 18th century Emanuel
SWEDENBORG's visions took him voyaging throughout the cosmos, and other
religious mystics followed. C.I. DEFONTENAY, presumably influenced by
Fontenelle, undertook to describe another stellar system in some detail in
Star (1854; trans 1975), but the first work which took the scientific
imagination out into the greater cosmos was Camille FLAMMARION's Lumen
(1864; exp 1887; trans 1897). The Pythagorean notion that the Universe
revolves around a single central sun is extrapolated in an oddly
allegorical manner in William Hope HODGSON's The House on the Borderland
(1908).An early SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE of interstellar adventure was Robert W.
COLE's The Struggle for Empire (1900), but it was not until the
establishment of the SF MAGAZINES that the interstellar adventure
playground was extensively exploited by such writers as E.E. "Doc" SMITH,

Edmond HAMILTON and John W. CAMPBELL Jr. Hamilton became especially
fascinated by the ultimate melodramatic flourish of exploding stars, and
was still exploiting its potential in the 1950s. This new familiarity with
the stars did not breed overmuch contempt: in all stories where stars were
confronted directly, rather than being used simply as coloured lamps to
light imaginary worlds, they remained awe-inspiring entities. Their
sustained power of fascination is evident in Fredric BROWN's The Lights in
the Sky are Stars (1953; vt Project Jupiter 1954 UK), Robert F. YOUNG's
"The Stars are Calling, Mr Keats" (1959) and Dean MCLAUGHLIN's The Man who
Wanted Stars (fixup 1965), and nowhere more so than in Isaac ASIMOV's
classic story of CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH, "Nightfall" (1941), which
contradicts Emerson's allegation that "if the stars should appear one
night in a thousand years, how would Man believe and adore and preserve
for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!". Relatively few
sf stories make significant use of scientific knowledge concerning stars
and their nature. An exception is Hal CLEMENT's "Cold Front" (1946), which
links the behaviour of an odd star to the meteorology of one of its
planets. An even odder star, shaped like a doughnut, is featured in Donald
MALCOLM's "Beyond the Reach of Storms" (1964). It is, however, quite
common to find stars invested with some kind of transcendental
significance ( Hyperlink to: METAPHYSICS; RELIGION). Stars are credited
with godlike life and INTELLIGENCE in Starchild (1965) and Rogue Star
(1969) by Frederik POHL and Jack WILLIAMSON, and a collective
quasisupernatural influence is spiced with sf jargon in The Power of Stars
(1972) by Louise LAWRENCE. Such metaphysical mysticism is carried to
extremes in the first section of If the Stars are Gods (1973; fixup 1977)
by Gordon EKLUND and Gregory BENFORD, and the inspiration of sun-worship
also plays a minor part in THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE (1974) by Larry NIVEN and
Jerry E. POURNELLE. Even HARD-SF stories based on astronomical discoveries
are not entirely immunized against residual mysticism; a proper sense of
awe is evident in Poul ANDERSON's THE ENEMY STARS (1959), the most notable
sf novel featuring a "dead star", and in his "Starfog" (1967) and World
without Stars (1967). Work done in ASTRONOMY to clarify the lifecycles of
stars helped, some decades ago, to popularize both giant and dwarf stars;
more recently it has led to a good deal of sf being written about pulsars
( NEUTRON STARS) as well as, of course, BLACK HOLES, to the extent that
both these forms of collapsar ("collapsed star") are now standard
implements in the sf writer's toolbox. [BS]See also: COSMOLOGY;
LINGUISTICS; LIVING WORLDS.
STAR SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE
US DIGEST-size magazine. 1 issue, published by BALLANTINE Magazines, Jan
1958. This was an abortive attempt to convert Frederik POHL's STAR SCIENCE
FICTION STORIES into a magazine after its first 3 issues (1953-4) in book
format. It reverted to book format at the end of 1958. [BS/PN]
STAR SCIENCE FICTION STORIES
ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series (1953-9) ed Frederik POHL, published by
BALLANTINE BOOKS. SSFS was the first such series, antedating NEW WRITINGS
IN SF by 11 years, and in its example very influential. The series was
irregular; after Star Science Fiction Stories (anth 1953), #2 (anth 1953)

and #3 (anth 1954) there was a 3-year gap. In Jan 1958 Ballantine
attempted to relaunch the title in magazine format, but STAR SCIENCE
FICTION MAGAZINE lasted only 1 issue. Reverting to book format, the series
continued with Star Science Fiction Stories #4 (anth 1958), #5 (anth 1959)
and #6 (anth 1959). Star Short Novels (anth 1954) was an out-of-series
volume. The first 3 vols were of extraordinarily high quality; later
issues, while highly competent, were less inspired. Notable stories
included "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. CLARKE (#1),
"Disappearing Act" by Alfred BESTER (#2), "It's a Good Life" by Jerome
BIXBY (#2), "Foster, You're Dead" by Philip K. DICK (#3) and "Space-Time
for Springers" by Fritz LEIBER (#4). Star of Stars (anth 1960; vt Star
Fourteen UK) collects stories from SSFS. The later Ballantine anthology
series STELLAR derived its title from SSFS. [MJE]
STARSHIP
In sf TERMINOLOGY, a ship capable of travel between the stars - one of
the many sf neologisms which have passed into the language. GENERATION
STARSHIPS; SPACESHIPS. [PN]
STARSHIP
Magazine. ALGOL.
STARSHORE
US magazine, 4 issues Summer 1990-Spring 1991, small- BEDSHEET format,
published McAlpine publishing, Virginia; ed Richard Rowland.Though
initially receiving national distribution, S was undercapitalized. With a
subscription base of only c300, it soon folded, #4 going to subscribers
only. Mixed with fiction by new writers were stories by established names
including Jack DANN, Mike RESNICK with Lou Tabakow, Kristine Kathryn RUSCH
and Charles SHEFFIELD. [PN]
STARTLING STORIES
US PULP MAGAZINE, 99 issues Jan 1939-Fall 1955, published by Better
Publications Jan 1939-Winter 1955, and by Standard Magazines (really the
same company) Spring-Fall 1955; ed Mort WEISINGER (Jan 1939-May 1941),
Oscar J. FRIEND (July 1941-Fall 1944), Sam MERWIN Jr (Winter 1945-Sep
1951), Samuel MINES (Nov 1951-Fall 1954) and Alexander SAMALMAN
(Winter-Fall 1955). Leo MARGULIES was editorial director of SS and its
companion magazines during Weisinger's and Friend's editorships. The
schedule varied between bimonthly (dated by month) and quarterly (dated by
season), with a monthly period in 1952-3.SS was started as a companion
magazine to THRILLING WONDER STORIES. Whereas TWS printed only shorter
fiction, the policy of SS was to include a complete novel (albeit
sometimes very short) per issue; in its early years the cover bore the
legend "A Novel of the Future Complete in This Issue". The space left for
shorter stories was limited, and was partially filled by "Hall of Fame"
reprints - stories from the Hugo GERNSBACK-edited WONDER STORIES and its
predecessors. #1 featured Stanley G. WEINBAUM's The Black Flame (Jan 1939;
1948); other contributors in the early years included Eando BINDER, Oscar
J. Friend, Edmond HAMILTON, Henry KUTTNER, Manly Wade WELLMAN and Jack
WILLIAMSON. Hamilton's "A Yank at Valhalla" (Jan 1941; vt The Monsters of
Juntonheim 1950 UK; vt A Yank at Valhalla 1973 dos US) was a particularly

vigorous early novel. Early covers were by Howard BROWN and Rudolph
Belarski, but from 1940 onwards the covers were mostly by Earle K. BERGEY,
the artist whose style is most closely identified with SS and its sister
magazines. The characteristic Bergey cover showed a rugged hero, a
desperate heroine (in either a metallic bikini or a dangerous state of
deshabille) and a hideous alien menace.Under Margulies and, more
particularly, under Friend SS adopted a deliberately juvenile slant. This
was most clearly manifested in the patronizing shape of the character
"Sergeant Saturn", who conducted the letter column and other readers'
departments (in TWS and CAPTAIN FUTURE as well as in SS). Many readers
were alienated by this, and when Merwin became editor he phased out such
juvenilia and gradually built SS into the best sf magazine of the period,
apart from ASF. In 1948-9 it featured such novels as WHAT MAD UNIVERSE
(Sep 1948; 1949) by Fredric BROWN, Against the Fall of Night (Nov 1948;
1953; rev vt The City and the Stars 1956) by Arthur C. CLARKE and Flight
into Yesterday (May 1949; 1953; vt The Paradox Men UK) by Charles L.
HARNESS, in addition to novels by Henry Kuttner (mostly SCIENCE FANTASY)
and Murray LEINSTER and stories by Ray BRADBURY, Clarke, C.M. KORNBLUTH,
John D. MACDONALD, Jack VANCE, A.E. VAN VOGT and others.Merwin left the
magazine in 1951 (thereafter becoming a frequent contributor). By this
time SS, like other PULP MAGAZINES, was feeling the effect of the
increased competition provided by such new magazines as GALAXY SCIENCE
FICTION and The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION . Although the
standard suffered to a degree, Merwin's successor, Mines, continued to
publish interesting material, such as Philip Jose FARMER's The Lovers (Aug
1952; exp 1961) - which helped earn him a HUGO as Most Promising New
Writer - and many Vance stories, notably Big Planet (Sep 1952; 1957). The
magazine adopted a new cover slogan ("Today's Science Fiction - Tomorrow's
Fact") and a more dignified appearance, but it became another victim of
the general decline of pulp magazines. In Spring 1955, as the most popular
title in its stable, it absorbed TWS and its more recent companion,
FANTASTIC STORY MAGAZINE. After 2 further issues it ceased publication,
one short of #100. Mines ed an anthology drawn from its pages, The Best
from Startling Stories (anth 1954), while a number of its "Hall of Fame"
reprints were collected in From off this World (anth 1949) ed Margulies
and Friend. A heavily cut and very irregular UK edition was published by
Pembertons in 18 numbered issues June 1949-May 1954. A 1st Canadian
reprint series ran 1945-6, and a 2nd 1948-51. [MJE]See also: GOLDEN AGE OF
SF.
STAR TREK
US tv series (1966-9). A Norway Production for Paramount Television/NBC.
Created Gene RODDENBERRY, also executive prod. Prods Roddenberry, Gene L.
Coon, John Meredyth Lucas, Fred Freiberger (season 3). Story consultants
Steven Carabatsos, D.C. FONTANA. Writers for seasons 1 and 2 included
Jerome BIXBY, Robert BLOCH, Coon, Max EHRLICH, Harlan ELLISON, Fontana,
David GERROLD, George Clayton JOHNSON, Richard MATHESON, Roddenberry,
Jerry SOHL, Norman SPINRAD, Theodore STURGEON; the only well known writer
to work for season 3 was Bixby. Dirs included Marc Daniels, Vincent
McEveety, Gerd Oswald, Joe Pevney, Joseph Sargent, Ralph Senensky, Jud
Taylor. 3 seasons, 79 50min episodes. Colour.A phenomenon among sf tv

series, ST is set on the worlds visited by a giant SPACESHIP, the U.S.S.
Enterprise, and on the ship itself. Its crew is on a mission to explore
new worlds and "to boldly go where no man has gone before". Though the
crew supposedly number several hundred, only a few of them are ever seen
at one time, the principal characters being Captain Kirk (William
SHATNER), Mr Spock (Leonard Nimoy), Doctor McCoy (DeForest Kelley), Mr
Sulu (George TAKEI), Scotty (James Doohan), Ensign Chekov (Walter Koenig)
and Lt Uhura (Nichelle Nichols). For fans of written sf, ST can seldom
have seemed challenging in any way, as it rarely departed from sf
stereotypes, though in its first 2 seasons it was certainly adequate and
even quite strong relative to much televised sf. Although several well
known sf writers (see above) contributed to the first 2 seasons, their
work was invariably rewritten by the show's regular writers; the quality
of the scripts had dropped badly by the end of season 3. As a general rule
the SPACE-OPERA format was not used with any great imagination. A typical
episode would face the crew with ALIEN superbeings (regularly godlike when
first encountered - Roddenberry's favourite theme appears to have been
flawed GODS), MONSTERS, or cases of apparent demoniac possession telepathic aliens being the rule rather than the exception in ST's
universe. The formula seldom varied. Many adult viewers came to feel that
the series was bland, repetitious, scientifically mediocre and, in its
earnest moralizing, trite. The effort to please all and offend none was
evident in the inclusion of a token Russian, a token Asiatic and, together
in the person of actress Nichelle Nichols, a token Black and token woman.
The defect in this liberal internationalism was that all these characters
behaved in a traditional White Anglo-Saxon Protestant manner: only Spock
was a truly original creation.The early 2-part episode The Menagerie,
adapted from the original pilot for the series, won a 1967 HUGO for Best
Dramatic Presentation, as did Harlan Ellison's City on the Edge of Forever
in 1968. The latter is generally thought to be the best of the individual
episodes; it posed a moral dilemma which cut more deeply than usual. The
original script, which differed slightly from the filmed version, was
published in Six Science Fiction Plays (anth 1976) ed Roger ELWOOD.ST was
not particularly successful in the ratings. However, it had attracted a
hard core of devoted fans, "Trekkies", who made up in passionate
enthusiasm what they lacked in numbers. These numbers grew over the years,
in part because the series was often replayed, attracting new fans each
time. There have been many ST CONVENTIONS, some drawing very large
attendances. Perhaps Roddenberry's blend of the mildly fantastic with the
reassuringly familiar, and his use of an on the whole very likable cast,
attracted viewers precisely because its exoticism was manageable and
unthreatening. The Trekkie phenomenon became spectacular.Despite the
reservations expressed above, there is no doubt that ST was one of the
better sf tv series. Its success, though delayed, was very real and had
extraordinary repercussions in the publishing industry. ST ties began with
short-story adaptations of individual episodes; James BLISH wrote 11
collections of these 1967-75 (see his entry for details); he also,
significantly, published an original novel set in the ST world and
featuring ST characters: Spock Must Die * (1970). Another early ST novel
was Star Trek: Mission to Horatius * (1968) by Mack REYNOLDS. Soon
original ST novels became more important than the novelizations of

teleplays. As with DR WHO novels, ST novels are too numerous to be listed
here in full, though almost all, having been written by authors who are
the subject of individual entries, are listed elsewhere in this
encyclopedia. Many ST authors are not hacks and some are distinguished;
they include Greg BEAR, Theodore R. COGSWELL, Gene DEWEESE, Diane DUANE,
John M. FORD, Joe HALDEMAN, Barbara HAMBLY, Vonda N. MCINTYRE, Peter
Morwood (1956- ), Melinda M. SNODGRASS and many others. A series of
"fotonovels" - in comic-book style, but using stills from episodes instead
of drawings - was inaugurated with Star Trek Fotonovel 1: City on the Edge
of Forever * (1977; based on the Harlan Ellison script) and continued for
at least 12 issues. There are also GAMES AND TOYS, costumes, models,
calendars, puzzles, badges and, of course, MAGAZINES devoted to ST. There
are books of blueprints, technical manuals and medical manuals. ST is, in
fact, an industry. There is even a thriving trade in ST pornography ( FAN
LANGUAGE) in the underground press.The first account of ST published as a
book was The Making of Star Trek (1968) written by Stephen E. Whitfield
and credited on the cover to Whitfield and Roddenberry. Two more early
accounts of ST and its production problems were by David Gerrold: The
World of Star Trek (1973; rev 1984) and The Trouble with Tribbles (1973).
The latter includes Gerrold's ST script of the same title, together with
an account of its production. There have been many books since, including
Star Trek Concordance (1976) by Bjo Trimble, Star Trek Compendium (1981;
rev 1987) by Allan Asherman, and The Trek Encyclopedia (1988) by John
Peel. I am not Spock (1975) by Leonard Nimoy is a cautious account, not
very deep, of the actor's relation to the character he played.When it
became clear that the fuss over ST was unlikely to die down, NBC
commissioned an animated cartoon series, also called Star Trek (1973-4),
based on the original series but introducing several new characters,
including an orange, tripedal, alien navigator, Arex, and a catlike alien
communications officer, M'Rees. The voices were done by the actors from
the original series. 1 of the 22 episodes was by Larry NIVEN, and several
by Gerrold. This series in turn spawned yet more book adaptations, in the
form of the Star Trek Log series by Alan Dean FOSTER (whom see for
details), of which 10 appeared 1974-8.Rumours, counter-rumours and press
releases about proposed revivals of ST, either on tv or as a feature film,
abounded through the 1970s. In the event there were both. The 6
feature-film sequels starring the original cast, were: STAR TREK THE
MOTION PICTURE (1979), STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982), STAR TREK
III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK (1984), STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME (1986),
STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER (1989) and STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED
COUNTRY (1991). A seventh movie spin-off, STAR TREK: GENERATIONS (1994),
showcases Kirk's heroic death, and briefly features Chekov and Scotty, but
is in essence a spin-off from ST's successor, STAR TREK: THE NEXT
GENERATION. This latter series was the first live-action television
spin-off from ST. With an all-new cast it became very successful and
popular, beginning in 1987 and running for seven seasons, ending in May
1994. Subsequent tv series have been STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE (Jan 1993) and STAR TREK: VOYAGER (Jan 1995- ). The Paramount ST machine has not
stopped. [PN/JB]See also: OPEN UNIVERSE; SCIENTIFIC ERRORS; SHARED WORLDS;
SPACE FLIGHT; TABOOS; WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION.

STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE
US tv series (1993- ). Paramount. Series creators/executive prods: Rick
Berman and Michael Piller. Exec prod Ira Steven Behr. Based upon STAR TREK
created by Gene RODDENBERRY.Writers have included Piller, Behr,James
Crocker, Paul Robert Coyle, Bill Dial, Jill Sherman Donner, Peter Allan
Fields, D.C. FONTANA, Morgan Gendel, Michael McGreevey ?
Joe Menosky, Kathryn Powers, Frederick Rappaport, Sam Rolfe, Alexander
Singer, Jim Trombetta, Robert Hewitt Wolfe. Directors have included Corey
Allen, Cliff Bole, Avery Brooks, David Carson, James L. Conway, Kim
Friedman, Winrich Kolbe, Les Landau, Rob Legato, David Livingston, Paul
Lynch, Robert Scheerer, Robert Wiemer. The two-hour pilot was aired in Jan
1993. Since then, 18 one-hour episodes in the first season, and a further
26 in the second. Two seasons to 1994. A third season is current in
1995.In an unusual departure for the STAR TREK franchise (the first
live-action tv spin-off was STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION and this was
the second) ST:DSN is set on a space station (newly occupied by the
Federation) orbiting a planet, not a starship. The effect of this more
enclosed and stationary world is slightly to emphasize characterisation
and personal conflict among the occupants of the station, many of whom do
not belong to Starfleet, and to reduce the number of episodes featuring
exploration and the discovery of strange alien races and artifacts.
However, the station is dramatically situated: it is close to a stable
WORMHOLE leading to an unexplored area at the other side of the galaxy,
the GammaQuadrant; the planet below is inhabited by the spiritual-natured
Bajorans first encountered in a fifth season episode of Star Trek: The
Next Generation: "Ensign Ro"; the station itself has just been vacated
bythe militaristic Cardassians, persecutors of the Bajorans who are still
in the vicinity, and as an alien construct lacks the comforts of
Federation starbases. The series is set towards the end of the time period
covered by Star Trek: The Next Generation.The regular cast are the station
commander, Benjamin Sisko, played by black actor Avery Brooks; his
non-Starfleet second in command, a Bajoran, Major Kira Nerys, played by
Nana Visitor; science officer Jadzia Dax, a Trill (humanoid and internal
slug acting in symbiosis, currently female but the previous humanoid
partner in the symbiosis was an old man), played by Terry Farrell; the
young medical officer Julian Bashir, sometimes aggressive,sometimes naive,
usually a womaniser, played by Siddig El Fadil; the non-Starfleet Security
Chief, Odo, a shape- shifting alien of unknown origin, played by Rene
Auberjonois; Chief of Operations Miles O'Brien, ahuman, played by Colm
Meaney; Quark, the opportunistic and greedy Ferengi proprietor of the
station's bar and gambling casino, one of an alien race of merchants and
entrepreneurs introduced in ST:TNG, played by Armin Shimerman; Jake Sisko,
the 14-yr-old son of the commander, played by Cirroc Lofton.As an ensemble
the cast is efficient, with Odo and Dax both being very interesting
characters, and some good "morphing" effects when Odo changes shape. The
"Q"character from ST:TNG makes several appearances. Various sinister
beings appear through the wormhole from the Gamma Quadrant, and the last
episode of the second season introduced a new alien race, the Jem'Hadar,
who live in the quadrant. But the response from STfans to the series has
been a little luke warm, and it has not come closeto rivalling the high
ratings of its immediate predecessor, in part perhaps because of

competition from the other new space-station program, the harder-edged
BABYLON-5 (1993- ). Spin-off novels had reached, by early 1995, Star Trek:
Deep Space Nine#11: Devil in the Sky (1995) by Greg Cox and John
BETANCOURT. There are also young adult book spin-offs. [PN]
STAR TREK: GENERATIONS
Film (1994). Paramount. Prod Rick Berman; dir David Carson; screenplay
Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, based on a story by Berman, Moore and
Braga; starring Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, Levar
Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Malcolm McDowell,
James Doohan, Walter Koenig and William SHATNER. 117 mins. Colour.This is
the seventh film spin-off from the STAR TREK franchise, though the first
actually spun off from STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION rather than Star
Trek itself. Kirk (Shatner), Chekov (Koenig) and Scotty (Doohan) appear in
a twenty-minute prologue, in which Kirk appears to die, and then the story
proper takes place at the time Jean-Luc Picard (Stewart) is in command of
the Enterprise, 80 years later. The two Enterprise captains meet in a
virtual reality world, courtesy of a "temporal nexus", at the end. The
story melds elements thoroughly familiar to ST followers: war-crazed
Klingons; a mad, genocidal astronomer, Dr Soran (McDowell; and a strange
energy field with the power to cocoon those who enter it in re-enactments
of their most desired fantasies. In the appealingly silly sub-plot, the
android Data (Spiner) inserts an "emotions chip", and has to cope with
upwards of 272 different feelings. Kirk dies heroically again. The moral,
thumped home in the ST manner, is that it is better to face real life
rather than escape into worlds of happy delusion. The film looks good, and
makes better than usual use of the wide screen (cinematographer the
distinguished John A. Alonzo), but has an air of staleness and
predictability. Directed by a tv director, Carson, the film appears
designed to counteract the deprivation felt by fans of Star Trek: The Next
Generation, the tv series which had recently completed its seventh and
last season. [PN]
STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE
Film (1979). Paramount. Prod Gene RODDENBERRY, dir Robert WISE, starring
the lead players from the STAR TREK tv series, along with Persis
Khambatta, Stephen Collins. Screenplay Harold Livingstone, from a story by
Alan Dean FOSTER. 132 mins (released with additional material on video and
tvat 143 mins). Colour.After more than a decade of rumour and
counter-rumour, Star Trek (1966-8) was finally relaunched, and on the big
screen at that, with a very big budget. The plot, one of Roddenberry's old
favourites about the godlike thing in space, seems to have been based on
the original tv episodes The Changeling (1967) by John Meredith Lucas and
The Doomsday Machine (1967) by Norman SPINRAD, the latter about an
implacable alien force heading straight for Earth, the former about an old
Earth space probe that develops autonomous life. The response from Star
Trek fandom was disappointing - they warmed more to the cosier, more
domestic, more small-screenish movies that followed - but there is much to
enjoy in Wise's partly successful effort to meld a story of old mates
together again with a story of transcendental union between human and
MACHINE, the film ending with a daring sexual apotheosis. At times the

film becomes almost too contemplative, especially in the drawn-out,
quasimystical finale, but most of all (and traditionally) it is the
disparity between the soap-opera ordinariness of the crew and the
extraordinary events that surround them that keeps the SENSE OF WONDER
visible in the distance but never quite there where you need it.The
novelization is Star Trek: The Motion Picture * (1979) by Roddenberry.
[PN]
STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN
Film (1982). Paramount. Dir Nicholas Meyer, starring the lead players
from the STAR TREK tv series, along with Kirstie Alley, Bibi Besch,
Merritt Butrick, Ricardo Montalban. Screenplay Jack B. Sowards, based on a
story by Harve Bennett and Sowards. 114 mins. Colour.This was the 2nd (and
very much cheaper) movie incarnation of Star Trek, the first being STAR
TREK THE MOTION PICTURE (1979). Montalban plays Khan, the villain,
resurrected from the tv episode Space Seed (1967), who thinks he is
Captain Ahab. Project Genesis, a TERRAFORMING project that can be used as
a weapon, is about to be set off by Khan. Kirk meets his alienated son.
Chekov is mind-controlled by an alien earwig in his ear. Spock sacrifices
himself for the greater good. The whole melodramatic, sentimental mishmash
is muddily photographed in flat tv style, but, mystifyingly, many fans
liked it better than its much more considerable predecessor.The
novelization is Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan * (1982) by Vonda N.
MCINTYRE. [PN]
STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK
Film (1984). Paramount. Dir Leonard Nimoy, starring the lead players from
the STAR TREK tv series, along with Robin Curtis, Merritt Butrick,
Christopher Lloyd. Screenplay prod Harve Bennett. 105 mins. Colour.This is
the 3rd movie in the Star Trek movie series begun with STAR TREK THE
MOTION PICTURE (1979), and it follows directly on from the action of STAR
TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982) in which Spock died and the Genesis
Planet was created. It transpires - the realization is slow - that Spock's
body has been recreated (as a rapidly ageing child) by the Genesis Planet,
while his soul is sharing McCoy's mind, rendering McCoy schizophrenic.
Kirk undertakes to get body and soul together and does so on Vulcan, first
outwitting Klingon warlord Kruge (Lloyd). Spock is absent for most of the
film, the resulting emptiness being palpable, but Nimoy made up for this
by competently directing it. Only complete non-cynics, however, could find
other than laughable this saccharine soap opera (rather than SPACE OPERA)
in which Kirk loses his son and his ship, Spock is retrospectively
canonized, and there is tear-jerking all round.The novelization is Star
Trek III: The Search for Spock * (1984) by Vonda N. MCINTYRE. [PN]
STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME
Film (1986). Paramount. Dir Leonard Nimoy, starring the lead players from
the STAR TREK tv series, along with Catherine Hicks. Screenplay Steve
Meerson, Peter Krikes, Harve Bennett, Nicholas Meyer, based on a story by
Nimoy and Bennett. 119 mins. Colour.Returning to Earth on their captured
Klingon spacecraft to stand trial for exceeding orders in various ways (
STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK [1984]), Kirk and the crew of the
(late) Enterprise are faced with an unidentified probe evaporating the

oceans in order, it is somehow deduced, to communicate with humpback
whales (now extinct). The only thing to do is to go back to 20th-century
San Francisco, get a couple of whales, and use them to talk the probe out
of destroying Earth; this they do. It is perhaps unkind to criticize the
Star Trek people for their liberalism, but why do they always choose such
safe issues? There is some lively humour connected with the crew's
attempts to come to grips with 20th-century culture. This was by consensus
the most relaxedly watchable of the series to date.The novelization is
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home * (1986) by Vonda N. MCINTYRE. [PN]
STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER
Film (1989). Paramount. Dir William Shatner, starring the lead players
from the STAR TREK tv series, along with Laurence Luckinbill. Screenplay
David Loughery from a story by Shatner, Harve Bennett, Loughery. 107 mins.
Colour.A visibly middle-aged, overweight crew enact a tepid melodrama in
which the Enterprise is hijacked by a charismatic Vulcan healer, Sybok
(Luckinbill), in search of God, who not unlike the Wizard of Oz proves
fraudulent. (False gods are a STAR TREK cliche in both tv and film
incarnations.) The film has many anticlimaxes, especially the effortless
transit of the supposedly impermeable Great Barrier, and is notable for
embarrassingly Californian-style Vulcan therapy-"getting in touch with
your own feelings". Shatner's direction has much in common with his
acting. After mildly perking up with STAR TREK IV, the film series here
plunged again, almost fatally.The novelization is Star Trek V: The Final
Frontier * (1989) by J.M. DILLARD. [PN]See also: CINEMA.
STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY
Film (1991). Paramount. Dir Nicholas Meyer, starring the lead players
from the STAR TREK tv series, along with Kim Cattrall, David Warner,
Rosana DeSoto, Christopher Plummer, Morgan Sheppard. Screenplay Denny
Martin Flinn, Meyer, based on a story by Leonard Nimoy, Lawrence Konner,
Mark Rosenthal. 109 mins. Colour.After the disaster of STAR TREK V: THE
FINAL FRONTIER (1989), this film may have been a cynical decision to cash
in on Star Trek's 25th anniversary and squeeze the last possible dollars
out of the box-office. It is a watchable wrap-up of the series, or at
least of the series as starring the original and now elderly cast. The
story, a metaphor about Russian-US glasnost, deals with the dawn of more
peaceful relations between humans and Klingons, with Kirk's dislike of
making any such accommodation, and with an unholy alliance of right-wing
factions on both sides whose purpose is to sabotage the peace process by
assassinating leaders among the peacemakers. Plummer plays the
Shakespeare-quoting villain, Chang; strangely the film's title is a
mistake; Shakespeare's phrase "the undiscovered country" refers not to the
future, as the film has it, but to death. Like all but the first of its
predecessors, this low-budget affair has the feel of a blown-up tv
episode, but is enjoyably melodramatic.The novelization is The
Undiscovered Country * (1992) by J.M. DILLARD. [PN]
STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION
US tv series (1987-1994). Paramount. Series creator/executive prod Gene
RODDENBERRY. Co-executive prods Rick Berman, Michael Piller and later Jeri
Taylor. Supervising prods include Maurice Hurley and Michael Wagner. Dirs

include Corey Allen, Gabrielle Beaumont, Cliff Bole, Rob Bowman, LeVar
Burton, David Carson, Richard Colla, Jonathan Frakes, Winrich Kolbe, Les
Landau, Paul Lynch, Gates McFadden, Joseph L. Scanlon. Writers include
Peter Beagle, Hans Beimler, Brannon Braga, Diane DUANE, Rene Echevarria,
D.C. FONTANA, David GERROLD, Maurice Hurley, Richard Manning, Joe Menosky,
Ronald D. Moore, Michael Piller, Michael REAVES, Naren Shankar, Hannah
Louise Shearer, Melinda SNODGRASS, Jeri Taylor, Tracy Torme, Michael
Wagner. Seven seasons to 1994. There was a 2hr pilot, then 175 50min
episodes.This new Star Trek series was syndicated rather than networked,
thus giving the production company a (perhaps) greater creative freedom.
Roddenberry, who created the original STAR TREK, cowrote the pilot episode
for this new series 20 years later. Although he remained executive prod,
after two years he was no longer closely involved with the show; he died
in 1991.The series is set 80 years further on than Star Trek. It is
introduced with a slight twist on the traditional text: "to boldly go
where no one has gone before"; this demonstrated from the outset that
ST:TNG would concentrate more on eschewing possible insult than on
avoiding split infinitives, and so it has proved. The general likability
of the new cast, the fact that their characters seldom conflict with one
another (though this became less marked in the last three seasons), the
homely moralizing, the absence (usually) of real pain, the appearance of
liberalism while avoiding truly sensitive issues (though in season five
"The Outcast" raised gay-rights questions): all recall the blandness of
its much-loved original - a quality attributed by some to Roddenberry's
"bible" ( SHARED WORLDS), a very detailed list of things you can't do in
Star Trek scripts - as do many of the story-lines. But, after an uncertain
start (tensions on the set and many resignations, including those of
writers Gerrold and Fontana; an improvement late in season 1, then a
patchy season 2), ST:TNG surprised many by picking up considerable pace
and interest in season 3. It is now generally agreed to be superior to its
original, whose reruns look ever more amateurish by comparison. There was
a slump in season five, but season six was strong; season seven looked
tired at the outset, but went out with several strong episodes, even
though ST:TNG was by this time competing with STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE,
the second of Star Trek's live-action tv spin-offs.It could be said that
ST:TNG is not really sf at all. That is, the events of any episode seldom
if ever arise of necessity from a truly sf idea. The sf elements are, by
and large, prettifications used to enliven fables about human ethics, and
are essential to the plot only insofar as they are enabling devices to
create moral dilemmas. Thus, for example, in the several episodes that are
variations on the theme of the immaturity of wanting to be a god, the only
necessary sf element is the temporary conferral of godlike power.Much
credit for the success of ST:TNG must go to certain cast members, notably
UK actor Patrick Stewart, ex-Royal Shakespeare Company, who plays Captain
Jean Luc Picard, the Enterprise's captain, with impressive gravitas and
vigour. Also very good is Brent Spiner as the ANDROID (and Spock
substitute) Data. Most of the rest of the cast are efficient; they include
Jonathan Frakes as First Officer Riker, Marina Sirtis as the empath
Counsellor Troi, Gates McFadden as the female medical officer Dr Crusher
(in season 2 a new medical officer appeared, played by Diana Muldaur),
Denise Crosby (season 1 only) as the tough security officer, Black actor

LeVar Burton as Geordi LaForge, the blind navigating officer with
artificially enhanced vision, Wil Wheaton as the initially teenaged Ensign
Crusher (in later seasons he was reduced to occasional guest-starring
roles rather than as a regular), and Michael Dorn as the Klingon
Lieutenant Worf of the Enterprise (galactic politics having changed in 80
years). Michelle Forbes was introduced in season five as Ensign Ro, a
Bajoran, in "Ensign Ro", the episode that was ultimately to prove the
starting point of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Notable among occasionally
returning guest stars have been Whoopi Goldberg as a bartender and John
DeLancie as the roguish, enigmatic "Q", the show's equivalent of Trickster
figures like Coyote or Loki or Monkey King, who has featured in some of
the better episodes. Many episodes have been released on videotape.In
retrospect, ST:TNG must be seen as a great success, at least commercially.
It attracted a large and passionate fan following, and with 15 to 20
million US viewers is the highest rated syndicated series in US tv
history. One fifth-season episode, "The Inner Light", was awarded a HUGO
in 1993. Ironically, the show's very success may have helped kill it off.
Paramount initially sold screening rights back at a time when the show's
success was very uncertain; had these rights been sold in 1993, it would
have been a very different story, and a much more profitable one. The
obvious answer was to hope that fannish loyalty was to the whole ST
franchise, not just to the program, and to start a new series. This was
done with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in 1993, and again with STAR TREK:
VOYAGER in 1995.As with the original "classic" series, there has been a
substantial number of spin-off books, beginning with Star Trek, The Next
Generation: Encounter at Farpoint * (1987) by David GERROLD, which
novelizes episode 1, and reaching, by early 1995 Star Trek: The Next
Generation #35: The Romulan Stratagem (1995) by Robert GREENBERGER. Other
authors have included A.C. CRISPIN, Peter DAVID, David DVORKIN and Jean
LORRAH. A preliminary judgment - that there seems less in this series than
in its predecessor to stimulate the creativity of book authors - may be
premature. As expected, the series has also spawned comics and magazines.
[PN]
STAR TREK: VOYAGER
US tv series (1995- ). Paramount Network Television. Series
creators/executive prods: Rick Berman, Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor.
Supervising prod (pilot) David Livingston.The two-hour (less advertising
space) pilot was aired in Jan 1995, and written by the executive
producers. The series is to follow. The 24th-century Federation starship
Voyager commanded by Captain Kathryn Janeway (played by Kate Mulgrew)-the
first female captain to be a regular cast member in the various ST
series-is swept away 75,000 light years from home by a godlike being known
as The Caretaker, while searching for a group of resistance fighters, the
Maquis, which has also been kidnapped. The pilot episode (replaying one of
the oldest and tiredest STAR TREK themes) deals with attempts to convince
the flawed godlike being that humans have autonomy and can cope very well
by themselves, some of the action taking place in a cornball virtual
reality resembling a midwest farmhouse. The remaining series is to deal
with attempts to shorten the trip back to Federation space, reckoned to
take around 70 years at "warp speed", with Federation crew and outlaws

working in uneasy harmony.The pilot episode suggests that despite cosmetic
changes (the tactical/security officer, otherwise resembling Spock, is an
Afro-American Vulcan, or looks like one; the captain is female) the ST
universe is much the same as ever, and the routine nature of the script,
along with the perfunctory special effects, raise serious questions about
how much artistic life there may still be in the ST concept despite its
continuing popularity. Other continuing characters are to include Robert
Beltran as First Officer Chakota (of native American descent), Roxann
Biggs-Dawson as B'Ellana Torres (a half-Klingon), Robert Duncan
McNeill-one of the better actors-as Lt. Tom Paris, Jennifer Lien as Kes,
Ethan Phillips as Neelix (comic relief), Robert Picardo as Doc Zimmerman,
Tim Russ as Tuvok (the black Vulcan Tactical/Security Officer) and Garrett
Wang as Ops/Comm Officer Harry Kim. The series is syndicated. This is the
third live-action ST tv spin-off, its two predecessors being STAR TREK:
THE NEXT GENERATION and STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE. [PN]
STAR WARS
Film (1977). 20th Century-Fox. Dir George LUCAS, starring Mark Hamill,
Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Alec Guinness, Peter Cushing. Screenplay
Lucas. 121 mins. Colour.One of the most financially successful sf films to
date, SW is an entertaining pastiche that draws upon comic strips, old
serials, Westerns, James Bond stories, The Wizard of Oz, Snow White, Errol
Flynn swashbucklers and movies about WWII - the ending, for instance, is
lifted from The Dam Busters (1955). Lucas may not have succeeded in
unifying these diverse elements into a seamless whole, but SW is always
visually interesting. The gratifyingly spectacular special effects and
martial music hypnotize the audience into uncritical acceptance of the
basically absurd, deliberately PULP-MAGAZINE-style conflict between Good
and Evil. Young Luke Skywalker (Hamill) becomes involved in a mission to
rescue a princess (Fisher) from the evil head of a decadent GALACTIC
EMPIRE.The Empire's military headquarters is the Death Star, the size of a
small moon and capable of destroying whole planets. With the help of an
old man who possesses supernatural powers (Guinness), a human mercenary
(Ford) and his alien sidekick Chewbacca, plus 2 cute ROBOTS, Luke rescues
the princess and secures information that enables a group of rebel
fighters to destroy the Death Star. He is assisted by a power of good, the
"Force", left vaguely ecumenical enough to be equally inoffensive to all.
The plot is almost precisely that of a fairy tale. The villainous hit of
the film was the Emperor's associate, the asthmatically breathing, masked,
black-clad giant, Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones). The film
received a HUGO.The special effects are very sophisticated. John Dykstra,
in charge of SW's miniature photography, used an automatic matteing system
with the help of such technical innovations as a computer-linked effects
camera. While the model work was created by US effects men, the
live-action settings and effects were created by UK technicians, such as
John Barry, production designer, and John Stears, physical effects.SW's
influence was great, and not just within the CINEMA. As a direct
consequence of its success, many paperback PUBLISHING houses switched
their sf lines strongly toward juvenile SPACE OPERA. The novelization,
attributed to Lucas but rumoured to be by Alan Dean FOSTER, is Star Wars *
(1976). The two sequels are The EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980) and The RETURN

OF THE JEDI (1983). [JB/PN]See also: GAMES AND TOYS; HISTORY OF SF;
SCIENTIFIC ERRORS; SWORD AND SORCERY; TABOOS; UFOS.
STARZL, R(OMAN) F(REDERICK)
(1899-1976) US journalist and writer who between 1928 and 1934 wrote over
20 stories - typical but competent PULP-MAGAZINE adventures and SPACE
OPERAS - including 1 with Festus PRAGNELL (whom see for details). [JC]
STASHEFF, CHRISTOPHER
(1944- ) US writer with a PhD in theatre, a subject he taught at
university level; his career began with and has remained almost wholly
dedicated to the Rod Gallowglass or Warlock sequence, in order of internal
chronology: Escape Velocity (1983), The Warlock in Spite of Himself
(1969), CS's first book, and King Kobold (1969; rev vt King Kobold Revived
1984) - the first 2 assembled as To the Magic Born (omni 1986) and all 3
assembled as Warlock to the Magic Born (omni 1990 UK) - The Warlock
Unlocked (1982) and The Warlock Enraged (1985) - both assembled with King
Kobold as The Warlock Enlarged (omni 1986) and without it as The Warlock
Enlarged (omni 1991 UK) - The Warlock Wandering (1986), The Warlock is
Missing (1986) and The Warlock Heretical (1987) - the first 2 assembled as
The Warlock's Night Out (omni 1988) and all 3 assembled as The Warlock's
Night Out (omni 1991 UK) - The Warlock Heretical (1987), The Warlock's
Companion (1988) and The Warlock Insane (1989) - all 3 assembled as Odd
Warlock Out (omni 1989) - The Warlock Rock (1990),Warlock and Son (1991),
Wizard in Absentia (1993), The Witch Doctor (1994) and M'Lady Witch
(1994). The sequence follows - with decreasing joie de vivre, and with an
increasing sense that lessons of religious import were being conveyed the zany adventures of Rod Gallowglass and his clumsy ROBOT sidekick, who
have found themselves on the planet of Gramarye, where MAGIC works (thinly
rationalized as an expression of PSI POWERS); they settle in and flourish.
There is some TIME TRAVEL, and many creatures of Faerie are comically
rendered. In some extremely similar out-of-series titles, A Wizard in
Bedlam (1979), and the Matt Mantrell sequence - comprising Her Majesty's
Wizard (1986), The Oathbound Wizard (1994), The Witch Doctor (1994), with
further titles projected - CS stuck to his last, but more recently he has
ventured into new territory. The Starship Troupers sequence - beginning
with A Company of Stars (1991) , We Open on Venus (1994) and A Slight
Detour (1994), and with further sequels projected - proposes to follow a
theatre company from 23rd-century New York to the stars. It is expected
that CS's own love for the theatre will bring life to these volumes. With
Bill FAWCETT he has begun to ed a SHARED-WORLD series about the Crafter
family of magicians, The Crafters * (anth 1991) and The Crafters #2:
Bellsings and Curses * (anth 1992). [JC]Other works: The Gods of War (anth
1992); Sir Harold and the Monkey King* (1993 chap), based on the
Incomplete Enchanter sequence by L. Sprague DE CAMP and Fletcher PRATT;
Wing Commander: End Run * (1994) with William FORSTCHEN; Dragon's Eye
(anth 1994).See also: FANTASY; HUMOUR; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
STATIC SOCIETIES
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; DYSTOPIAS;
UTOPIAS.

STATTEN, VARGO
John Russell FEARN.
STAUNTON, SCHUYLER
L. Frank BAUM.
STEAD, C(HRISTIAN) K(ARLSON)
(1932- ) New Zealand writer whose acerbic, well crafted novels have
received considerable praise. Only one is of sf interest: Smith's Dream
(1971; rev 1973) depicts a tyrannical DYSTOPIA. [JC]
STEAD, W(ILLIAM) T(HOMAS)
(1849-1912) UK editor (from 1871) and writer; he edited Borderland, a
journal dealing with psychic phenomena, during 1893-97, andfounded and
edited Review of Reviews in 1890. He isperhaps most notorious for an
article, "Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon" (1885 The Pall MallGazette),
which pruriently details the deflowering of a child prostitute, but which
didhave some effect in raising the age of consent. If Christ Came
toChicago!: A Plea for the Union of All Who Love in the Service of All Who
Suffer(1894) similarly fails to escape unctuousness, but its depiction of
a religious co-operative UTOPIA has points of interest. Blastus,the
King'sChamberlain: Being the Review of Reviews Annual for 1896 (1895;
vtBlastus the King's Chamberlain: a Political Romance1898) is a tale of
NEAR FUTURE political intrigue, the second half of which is set in1900.
The Despised Sex (1903) is constructedas a report sent - by a visitor to
England - to Dione, the queen of Xanthia, a matriarchy in
centralAfrica,for whom Britain is a kind of LOST WORLD. Along with John
Jacob ASTOR and Jacques FUTRELLE, WTS went down on the Titanic. [JC]
STEAKLEY, JOHN
(1951- ) US writer. Armor (1984) is a rough-edged example of military sf.
Vampire$ (1990) pits a high-tech team of vampire hunters against the
serried ranks of the foe. [JC]
STEAMPUNK
Item of sf TERMINOLOGY coined in the late 1980s, on the analogy of
CYBERPUNK, to describe the modern subgenre whose sf events take place
against a 19th-century background. It is a subgenre to which some
distinguished work attaches, though in no great quantity. There are a
number of works of proto-Steampunk, some by UK writers, such as
Christopher PRIEST's The Space Machine (1976), in which H.G. WELLS himself
plays a RECURSIVE role, and Michael MOORCOCK's Oswald Bastable books,
beginning with The Warlord of the Air (1971 US), which are at once a
critique and a nostalgic expression of the technological optimism of the
Edwardian era. Oddly, though, books like these do not sort well with the
kind of book later described as Steampunk, perhaps because in essence
Steampunk is a US phenomenon, often set in a London, England, which is
envisaged as at once deeply alien and intimately familiar, a kind of
foreign body encysted in the US subconscious. Three more works of
proto-Steampunk, only borderline sf FABULATIONS, were by US writers:
William KOTZWINKLE's Fata Morgana (1977), set in 1871 Paris,
Transformations (fixup 1975) by John MELLA, and "Black as the Pit, from
Pole to Pole" (1977) by Steven UTLEY and Howard WALDROP, in which latter

the FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER descends into a SYMMES-style HOLLOW EARTH. These
recall not so much the actual 19th-century as a 19th century seen through
the creatively distorting lens of Charles DICKENS, whose congested,
pullulating 19th-century landscapes-mostly of London, though the
industrial Midlands nightmare exposed in Hard Times (1854) is also germane
- were the foul rag-and-bone shop of history from which the technological
world, and hence the world of sf, originally sprang. Somewhere behind most
steampunk visions are filthy coal heaps or driving pistons. It was a
vision that also entered the CINEMA, especially through David Lynch, first
in Eraserhead (1976) and then in The Elephant Man (1980), and even inappropriately enough - in much of the mise-en-scene of his sf movie DUNE
(1984). Another, rather frivolous Steampunk movie is Young Sherlock Holmes
(1985; vt Young Sherlock Holmes and the Pyramid of Fear), prod Steven
SPIELBERG. Steampunk has entered sf ILLUSTRATION through the work of UK
artist Ian MILLER. Macabre sf adventures in a Dickensian London have even
entered tv: Steampunk was anticipated several times in the UK tv series DR
WHO, notably in The Talons of Weng Chiang (1977). There was also a much
earlier proto-Steampunk sf tv series set in a 19th-century USA, the
eccentric The WILD, WILD WEST (1965-9).In sf books it was at first largely
in the work of 3 Californian friends, James P. BLAYLOCK, K.W. JETER and
Tim POWERS, that the Steampunk vision became obvious, the first being
Jeter with Morlock Night (1979), in which H.G. Wells's Morlocks travel
back in time and invade the sewers of 19th-century London. Powers followed
with a historically earlier and even more malign MAGIC-REALIST London in
THE ANUBIS GATES (1983; rev 1984 UK), and then Blaylock with HOMUNCULUS
(1986). In each of these romances a Dickensian London itself is a major
character. All three have written at least one more novel along similar
lines: Jeter's Infernal Devices: A Mad Victorian Fantasy (1987),
Blaylock's Lord Kelvin's Machine (1992) and - not precisely Steampunk, but
evoking some of the same alchemical madness - Powers's On Stranger Tides
(1987) and The Stress of her Regard (1989). In most of these works the
vision is GOTHIC and the city, despite its horrors, a kind of seedbed
where mutant life stirs even in the oldest and deepest parts, the cellars
and sewers.Other writers have worked in similar vein, perhaps closer to
rationalized fantasy than to sf proper, such as Barbara HAMBLY with her
alienated race of vampires co-existing with humans in Those who Hunt the
Night (1988; vt Immortal Blood UK) and Brian STABLEFORD with his
rationalized werewolves in The Werewolves of London (1990). It is an
irony, however, that one of the strongest Steampunk works to date should
actually have been written by the prophets of Cyberpunk, William GIBSON
and Bruce STERLING, in THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (1990 UK), set in an
alternate 19th-century London even more dystopian than Dickens's (though
clearly modelled on it), the imminent collapse of which under the weight
of POLLUTION (and reason) is watched and perhaps controlled by an AI
evolved from Charles BABBAGE's calculator.It is as if, for a handful of sf
writers, Victorian London has come to stand for one of those turning
points in history where things can go one way or the other, a turning
point peculiarly relevant to sf itself. It was a city of industry,
science, technology, commerce and above all, finance (thoughthere was
actually more industry in the midlands and the north) where the modern
world was being born, and a claustrophobic city of nightmare where the

cost of this growth was registered in filth and squalor. Dickens - the
great original Steampunk writer who, though he did not write sf himself,
stands at the head of several sf traditions - knew all this. [PN]See also:
RECURSIVE SF.
STEARN, JESS
[r] Taylor CALDWELL.
STEBER, A.R.
House name used 1938-45 on the ZIFF-DAVIS magazines, mostly on AMAZING
STORIES, primarily by Raymond A. PALMER, and later, from 1950, by his
friend Rog PHILLIPS, who used it in OTHER WORLDS. [PN]
STEELE, ADDISON E.
Richard A. LUPOFF.
STEELE, ALLEN (M.)
(1958- ) US journalist and writer whose first story was "Live from the
Mars Hotel" for IASFM in 1988; his short fiction has been assembled as
Rude Astronauts (coll 1993 UK). He made a considerable impact on the field
with his first novel, the NEAR-FUTURE Orbital Decay (1989), set like
almost all his work in the vicinity of Earth orbit, where nuts-and-bolts
engineering problems are coped with by a refreshingly variegated cast of
employees in space. A sequel, Lunar Descent (1991), set on and above the
Moon, replays the grit and clanguor of the first novel in a lighter mood.
Though AS, like so many of his HARD-SF colleagues, has a damagingly lazy
attitude towards characterization and tends to export unchanged into
space, decades hence, the tastes and habits of 1970s humanity, he manages
to convey a verisimilitudinous sense of the daily round of those men and
women who will be patching together the ferries, ships and SPACE HABITATS
necessary for the next steps into space. Clarke County, Space (1990), set
in one of those habitats, exposes most of AS's weaknesses - cultural
provincialism, jerkily melodramatic plotting - without allowing much room
for the strengths. [JC]Other work: Labyrinth of Night (1992), about a
mission to MARS; Labyrinth of Night (1992 UK); The Jericho Iteration
(1994).See also: CLICHES; MUSIC.
STEELE, CURTIS
House name used by Popular Publications on OPERATOR #5: during Apr
1934-Nov 1935 CS was Frederick C. DAVIS, Dec 1935-Mar 1938 Emile
Tepperman, then to the end (Nov/Dec 1939) Wayne Rogers. [PN]
STEELE, LINDA
(? - ) US writer (not the Linda Steele married to Michael MOORCOCK) whose
Ibis: Witch Queen of the Hive World (1985) examines human sexual politics
( FEMINISM) through the perspective of an affair between a human male and
a female of an ALIEN hive-like species ( HIVE-MINDS). [JC]
STEELE, MORRIS J.
[s] Raymond A. PALMER.
STEFFANSON, CON
House name used by Avon Books. Carter BINGHAM; FLASH GORDON; Ron GOULART.

STEIGER, A(NDREW) J(ACOB)
(1900-1982) US writer and journalist, a Moscow-based foreign
correspondent, whose philosophical novel The Moon Man (1961) involves the
lunar thoughts of immortals. [PN]
STEINER, K. LESLIE
[s] Samuel R. DELANY.
STEINMULLER, KARLHEINZ and ANGELA
[r] GERMANY.
STELLA
SCANDINAVIA.
STELLAR
US ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series published by BALLANTINE BOOKS, ed Judy-Lynn
DEL REY. The first issue was just Stellar (anth 1974); subsequent issues
were Stellar Science-Fiction Stories #2 (anth 1976), #3 (anth 1977), #4
(anth 1978), #5 (anth 1980), #6 (anth 1981) and #7 (anth 1981). An
associated book was Stellar Short Novels (anth 1976), also ed del Rey. As
the title suggests, the series was envisaged as a follow-up to STAR
SCIENCE FICTION STORIES ed Frederik POHL 1953-9, also published by
Ballantine. However, S, while entertaining, concentrated more on
straightforward adventure, with the emphasis on HARD SF, and less on
SATIRE than Pohl's series had done, and few stories had the same edge;
exceptions were Robert SILVERBERG's "Schwartz Between the Galaxies" (#1),
Isaac ASIMOV's HUGO- and NEBULA-winning "The Bicentennial Man" (#2) and
"Excursion Fare" (#7) by James TIPTREE Jr. [PN]
STELLAR PUBLISHING CORPORATION
AIR WONDER STORIES; Hugo GERNSBACK; WONDER STORIES.
STEPFORD CHILDREN, THE
The STEPFORD WIVES .
STEPFORD WIVES, THE
Film (1974). Fadsin Cinema Associates/Columbia. Dir Bryan Forbes,
starring Katharine Ross, Paula Prentiss, Peter Masterson, Nanette Newman,
Patrick O'Neal. Screenplay William Goldman, based on The Stepford Wives
(1972) by Ira LEVIN. 115 mins. Colour.In this black but rather crude
SATIRE on the role of women in US society, the men of Stepford, a sleepy,
attractive Connecticut town, take part in a bizarre conspiracy - devised
by an ex-employee of Disney World and in due course discovered by a newly
arrived wife (Ross) - to replace their wives with biddable, contented
ROBOT duplicates. The finale shows the robot wives of Stepford drifting
like the living dead around a vast supermarket and swapping recipes.
Despite stodgy direction, this is an above-average PARANOIA movie,
comparable in theme if not in charisma with INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS
(1956) - not least because of Prentiss's lively performance. Though the
film's FEMINISM is superficial, it is astonishing that it was attacked as
antifeminist. Made-for-tv sequels were Revenge of the Stepford Wives
(1980), 100 mins, dir Robert Fuest, and The Stepford Children (1987), 104
mins, dir Alan J. Levi. [PN/JB]

STEPHENS, CHRISTOPHER P(EYTON)
(1943- ) US book-dealer, publisher and bibliographer, founder in 1987 of
Ultramarine Publishing Co., Inc., a SMALL PRESS which has concentrated on
releasing trade publisher's printed sheets in fine bindings. As a
bibliographer, he has compiled checklists (which he regularly revises) on
several authors, including Samuel R. DELANY, Philip K. DICK, Thomas M.
DISCH, K.W. JETER, Dean R. KOONTZ, Wilson TUCKER, Gene WOLFE and Roger
ZELAZNY (all of whom see for details). He has also compiled checklists of
some publishers of interest, including the TOR BOOKS Doubles and, together
in 1 vol, Kerosina Press and Morrigan Press. [JC]
STEPHENSEN-PAYNE, PHIL
(1952- ) UK bibliographer who regularly supplied UK publishing data to
Locus from 1986 to the beginning of 1994, and who has compiled, often in
collaboration with Gordon BENSON Jr, a number of extremely useful "working
BIBLIOGRAPHIES" of sf writers (whom see for titles), including Poul
ANDERSON (with Benson), Brian W. ALDISS, John BRUNNER (with Benson), C.J.
CHERRYH, Philip K. DICK (with Benson), Charles L. HARNESS, Harry HARRISON
(with Benson), Robert A. HEINLEIN; C.M. KORNBLUTH (with Benson), Keith
LAUMER (with Benson), Anne MCCAFFREY (with Benson), George R.R. MARTIN,
Andre NORTON, Keith ROBERTS; Bob SHAW (with Benson and Chris Nelson),
Clifford D. SIMAK, Theodore STURGEON (with Benson), James TIPTREE Jr (with
Benson), Jack VANCE, James WHITE (with Benson), Gene WOLFE (with Benson),
John WYNDHAM and Roger ZELAZNY. [JC]
STEPHENSON, ANDREW M(ICHAEL)
(1946- ) Venezuelan-born UK writer, electronics design engineer and, as
Ames, a magazine and book illustrator. He began publishing sf with
"Holding Action" for ASF in 1971, but then published only 1 more story
before his first novel, Nightwatch (1977), in which fortifications in
space are constructed against an assumed alien INVASION which proves to be
a friendly contact. The Wall of Years (1979; rev 1980 US), more typically
of a UK writer, describes the destruction of spacetime through
interdimensional warfare, and an attempt to set things right again in a
lovingly depicted Dark Ages. [JC]See also: HISTORY IN SF.
STEPHENSON, NEAL
(1959- ) US writer whose first 2 novels- The Big U (1984) and Zodiac: The
Eco-Thriller (1988)-both convey a strong sense that sf turns are just
around the next page, but neither of which can justly be read as sf. The
first is a gonzo college caper, told rather in the style of John Landis's
film, National Lampoon's Animal House (1978); the second, much more
controlled but still shaggy, carries a cast of slightly older but similar
characters through a complicated story involving pollution in the waters
around Boston, Massachusetts. Neither book adequately signalled the
bravura attack and fine control of NS's first sf novel, SNOW CRASH (1992),
in which-as it were-the sf content seems to have sopped up the excesses
that marred the earlier efforts. Set in a NEAR-FUTURE Los Angeles and
elsewhere, and infusing its CYBERPUNK ambience with a cornucopia of data
and references to American cultural icons, it depicts a land exorbitantly
devolved into private-enterprise enclaves. The plot, whose protagonists
are armed skateboard "Deliverators" of pizza and other substnaces, soon

moves into VIRTUAL REALITY territory, where the eponymous computer virus
turns out not only to affect human brains, but also, perhaps, historically
to have been instrumental in the creation of humanity's early religions.
[It might be illuminating to compare SNOW CRASH with Leo PERUTZ's Sanct
Petri-Schnee (1933; new trans Eric Mosbacher as Saint Peter's Snow 1990
UK), the eponymous virus of which novel engenders religion in humans.] The
novel then slides into chase sequences. l Interface (1994), with NS and J.
Frederick George writing together as Stephen Bury, is an energetic
near-future thriller, somewhat reminiscent of Zodiac, centring on a
presidential candidate under the control of a bio-chip, which is connected
to online polling software, so that-unless things go wrong-he can
instantly spin-doctor his behaviour. The Diamond Age; or, A Young Lady's
Illustrated Primer (1995) awaits a full response, but its examination of
NANOTECHNOLOGY seems likely to have as much effect on the field as SNOW
CRASH's explosive rendering of Cyberpunk. [JC]
STERANKO, JAMES
(1938- ) US COMIC-book illustrator, writer and one-time stage magician
and escapologist; Jack KIRBY based his comic-book character Mr Miracle Super Escape Artist (1971) on JS. Influenced early in his career by Kirby,
JS rapidly developed a reputation for originality, especially with his
work for MARVEL COMICS on the sf comic-book character Nick Fury, first for
Strange Tales 1966-8 (no connection with the weird-fiction magazine
STRANGE TALES) and then for Nick Fury, Agent of Shield June 1968-Mar 1971,
and also for his work on X-MEN and Captain America. Some of his Nick Fury
covers - he painted the first 7 covers and drew the stories of #1-#3 and
#5 - were revolutionary for comic books of that time in their bold design
and utilization of Surrealist themes. JS was not so much an innovator per
se as an artist who took a number of techniques hitherto seldom (and
haphazardly) used and welded them into a new style in which the design
unit became the double-page, not just the single frame. Like Kirby's, JS's
narrative technique is strongly cinematic, but his work is more stylized
and baroque, and less straightforwardly representational. Considering the
height of his reputation, he has done remarkably few comics, but he has
been much imitated, by Philippe DRUILLET among others. JS worked
occasionally in the sf ILLUSTRATION field, producing 1 cover for AMZ, some
work for Infinity, and also paperback covers for Pyramid Books's reprints
of The Shadow.In 1970 JS left Marvel to found Supergraphics in order to
publish his projected 6-vol history of PULP MAGAZINES and comics. Of this
only the first 2 vols have appeared: The Steranko History of the Comics
(1970) and The Steranko History of the Comics Volume 2 (1971). He has
published and edited a bimonthly tabloid magazine/newspaper called
Comixscene 1974-5 and then Mediascene 1974-80; with #41 in 1980 it became
a slick movie magazine called Prevue. A planned SWORD-AND-SORCERY
comic-book project, Talen, never materialized, although previews and
sketches were published 1968. He wrote and drew: a remarkable GRAPHIC
NOVEL, Chandler (graph 1976), which can only be described as
Chandleresque; a graphic-novel version of the 1981 film OUTLAND (1981-2
Heavy Metal; graph 1982); and a 10pp strip celebrating SUPERMAN in DC
COMICS's special #400 of that title (1984). He created a unique series of
3D illustrations (i.e., for use with 3D spectacles) for Harlan

ELLISON's"'Repent, Harlequin,' Said the Ticktockman" in The Illustrated
Harlan Ellison (graph coll 1978). He is listed among the creative talents
currently working under Francis Ford Coppola on a projected movie,
Dracula. Among his many awards is the 1970 Best Illustrator of the Year
Award. [PN/JG/RT]
STEREOTYPES
CLICHES; HEROES; PULP MAGAZINES; SCIENTISTS; SEX; SPACE OPERA;
SUPERHEROES; VILLAINS.
STERLING, BRETT
House name of Better Publications, used originally in the magazines
STARTLING STORIES and CAPTAIN FUTURE for 5 short Captain Future novels, 3
of which - "The Star of Dread" * (CF 1943), "Magic Moon" * (CF 1944) and
"Red Sun of Danger" * (SS 1945; vt Danger Planet 1968) - were by Edmond
HAMILTON. 2 BS Captain Future stories by Joseph SAMACHSON are "Days of
Creation" * (CF 1944; vt The Tenth Planet 1969) and "Worlds to Come" * (CF
1943). The BS pseudonym was used once more by Hamilton for "Never the
Twain Shall Meet" (1946 TWS) and once by Ray BRADBURY for "Referent" (1948
TWS). [PN]
STERLING, BRUCE
(1954- ) US writer, essayist and editor, whose first published sf was a
short story, "Man-Made Self", in an anthology of Texan sf, Lone Star
Universe (1976) ed Geo W. PROCTOR and Steven UTLEY. His first novel,
Involution Ocean (dated 1977 but 1978), is a memoir of the baroque
adventures and moral education of a young man who joins the crew of a
whaling ship sailing a sea of dust on a waterless alien planet. Sterling
continued in this vein of moralized extravaganza with The Artificial Kid
(1980), another first-person FAR-FUTURE picaresque. While its shockproof
milieu of glamorized youth, martial arts and omnipotent technology recalls
the early work of Samuel R. DELANY, the novel also looks forward to the
CYBERPUNK subgenre, whose principles and character BS largely defined in
his polemical FANZINE Cheap Truth (c1984-6) which he wrote and edited as
by Vincent Omniveritas, and whose representative anthology Mirrorshades
(anth 1986) he edited.BS's talent for rhetoric and his pre-eminence as sf
ideologue of the 1980s may have distracted attention from his own fiction.
In SCHISMATRIX (1985), a 1-vol future HISTORY of the interplanetary
expansion and transformation of the human race, he exchanges the fantastic
exorbitance of his earlier work for a hard-edged and highly detailed
realism closely informed by scientific speculation and extrapolation.
Linked with SCHISMATRIX is the Shaper/Mechanist series of short stories
included in CRYSTAL EXPRESS (coll 1989), about a spacefaring post-humanity
divided into two factions, the Shapers, who favour bio-engineering, and
the Mechanists, who prefer prosthetics. The collection contains some of
Sterling's best and most fully realized work; he has called it "my
favourite among my books". Stories not connected to the sequence have been
assembled as Globalhead (coll 1992).Narrated by an anonymous historian
above and beyond space and time, SCHISMATRIX is a homage to Olaf
STAPLEDON, but all Sterling's novels may be seen as tours conducted around
fields of data by protagonists whose main function is to witness them for
us. This approach culminates in ISLANDS IN THE NET (1988), a NEAR-FUTURE

thriller concerned with the increasing growth and complexity of political
power in electronic communication networks. Sterling's fascination with
the inner workings of cultures foreign to his own also led to his
collaboration with William GIBSON, THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (1990 UK), an
ALTERNATE-WORLD, STEAMPUNK novel in which the successful development of
Charles BABBAGE's mechanical COMPUTER in 1821 has produced a world divided
between France and an 1850s UK ruled by a radical technocracy under Lord
Byron; this UK is depicted as a DYSTOPIA whose visual squalor seems to
reflect the influence of Charles DICKENS's apocalyptic vision of an
industrialized land. And worse is to come: the eponymous computer is
clearly en route to becoming an AI, and may end up ruling the
world.Sterling is one of the most globally minded of North American sf
writers, seeing civilization as an intricate and unstable mechanism, and
pitting the search for equilibrium against our insatiable demands for
knowledge and power; such concerns centrally govern the plot of Heavy
Weather (1994), set early in the 21st century at a point when the
ecological degradation of the planet has generated storm systems of
unprecedented ferocity. His main interest continues to be the behaviour of
societies rather than individuals, and the perfection of sf as a vehicle
for scientific education and political debate. [CG]Other work: The Hacker
Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992), nonfiction
about computer crime.See also: ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; CYBORGS;
ECONOMICS; END OF THE WORLD; EVOLUTION; GENETIC ENGINEERING; HISTORY
OF
SF; INTERZONE; ISLANDS; JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD; MUSIC; OMNI;
SLIPSTREAM SF; SOCIOLOGY; SPACE HABITATS; TRANSPORTATION; VILLAINS;
WOMEN
AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION.
STERN, J(ULIUS) DAVID
(1886-1971) US writer and newspaper publisher. His Eidolon: A
Philosophical Phantasy Built on a Syllogism (1952) tells of a virgin
birth. [PN]
STERN, PAUL FREDERICK
[s] Paul ERNST.
STERNBACH, RICK
(1951- ) US astronomical and sf illustrator, born in Connecticut. He has
worked in sf since 1973, when he sold a cover painting to Analog (Oct
1973), for whom he did 14 covers in all, along with 9 for Gal and 8 for
FSF, mostly in the 1970s. He has also done black-and-white interior art
for a variety of magazines including IASFM, covers for both paperback and
hardcover books, and colour work for Astronomy Magazine. In 1976 he was
one of the founders of the Association of Science Fiction/Fantasy Artists
(ASFA). RS also worked, from 1977, for Walt Disney Studios and Paramount
Pictures. In 1977 he worked on Carl SAGAN's Cosmos tv series. In 1986 he
became an illustrator for STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, and is now a
senior illustrator and technical consultant for it. He produced The Star
Trek, the Next Generation Technical Manual * (1991) with Michael Okuda.
Now California-based, he no longer does much book or magazine
illustration. He won the HUGO for Best Professional Artist in 1977 and

1978. He is an acknowledged master of the airbrush but also uses ordinary
brushes extremely well, particularly with gouache. Though his space art is
evocative and his design sense strong, his figures are sometimes awkward.
[JG]See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.
STERNBERG, JACQUES
(1923- ) Belgian writer. A particularly idiosyncratic author with a keen
sense of the absurd, JS built from 1953 a unique body of work, often only
tenuously linked to sf, where everyday situations logically degenerate
into darkly humorous nightmares. Toi, ma nuit (1956; trans Lowell Bair as
Sexualis '95 1967 US) is a witty presentation of the dawn of a new age of
sexual excess. Futurs sans avenir (coll 1971; incomplete trans Frank Zero
as Future without Future 1974 US) is a representative selection; the title
story, an astonishingly bleak DYSTOPIA set at the end of the 20th century,
is typical in its progress from grey reality through surreal black wit
down to the end of time itself. JS also wrote the script for Alain
Resnais's only sf film, JE T'AIME, JE T'AIME (1968). As the 1970s
progressed, his work showed less and less attachment to genre devices.
[MJ]Other works: La geometrie dans l'impossible ["Impossible Geometry"]
(coll 1953); La sortie est au fond de l'espace ["The Way Out is at the
Bottom of Space"] (1956), a black comedy set in space and featuring the
last human survivors of a bacterial HOLOCAUST; Entre deux mondes
incertains ["Between Two Uncertain Worlds"] (coll 1957); La geometrie dans
la terreur ["Geometry in Terror"] (coll 1958); L'employe ["The Employer"]
(1958); Univers zero ["Universe Zero"] (coll 1970); Attention, planete
habitee ["Beware, Inhabited Planet"] (1970); Contes Glaces ["Icy Tales"]
(coll 1974); Sophie, la mer, la nuit ["Sophie, the Sea, the Night"]
(1976); Le navigateur ["The Navigator"] (1977).See also: BENELUX; FRANCE;
PERCEPTION.
STETSON, CHARLOTTE PERKINS
Charlotte Perkins GILMAN.
STEUSSY, MARTI
(1955- ) US writer of a short sequence about First Contact. In Forest of
the Night (1987) the ALIENS are, as the Blakean title hints, tiger-like,
though feathered, and must be protected from settlers on their planet who
hope to hunt them down; in Dreams of Dawn (1988) they are crustaceans.
MS's heart is in the right place, but the sequence shows signs of making
it all much too easy for her young protagonists. [JC]
STEVENS, FRANCIS
Pseudonym of US writer Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1884-?1939), who wrote
12 quite highly acclaimed fantasies in the period 1917-23; these appeared
in The ARGOSY , The ALL-STORY , THRILL BOOK and other early PULP
MAGAZINES. A similarity in style and imagery led many readers to believe
that FS was a pseudonym of A. MERRITT. The sf content is highest in her
DYSTOPIA The Heads of Cerberus (1919 Thrill Book; 1952), in which a grey
dust from a silver phial transports its inhalers to a totalitarian
Philadelphia of AD2118. Other novels include the LOST-WORLD tale The
Citadel of Fear (1918 Argosy Weekly; 1970), Claimed (1920 Argosy Weekly;
1966) in which an elemental being recovers an ancient artefact, and "The

Labyrinth" (1918 All-Story), "Avalon" (1919 Argosy), "Serapion" (1920
Argosy) and "Sunfire" (1923 Weird Tales). Short stories include "The Elf
Trap" (1919), "Friend Island" (1918) and "Behind the Curtain" (1918). Some
of her stories were reprinted in FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES and FANTASTIC
NOVELS. [JE]See also: FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GAMES AND SPORTS; WOMEN SF
WRITERS.
STEVENS, GORDON
HITLER WINS.
STEVENS, GREG
Glen COOK.
STEVENS, LAWRENCE STERNE
(1886-1960) US artist and illustrator who also signed himself Stephen
Lawrence and just Lawrence. He trained as a newspaper artist and did not
begin working in the sf PULP MAGAZINES until the early 1940s. Like Virgil
FINLAY, though faster and more versatile, he was a master of pen-and-ink
stippling; he never achieved Finlay's fame. LSS's finest work may be the
dozens of interiors he did for Adventure 1943-54, though his ILLUSTRATIONS
for FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES, STARTLING STORIES, SUPER SCIENCE STORIES
and THRILLING WONDER STORIES are uniformly excellent. Portfolios include A
Portfolio of Illustrations by Lawrence: Reproduced from Famous Fantastic
Mysteries Magazine (nd) and A Portfolio of Ilustrations by Lawrence, 2nd
Series: Reproduced from Famous Fantastic Mysteries Magazine (nd). In the
case of magazine-cover paintings the Stephen Lawrence pseudonym was shared
between LSS and his talented son, Peter Stevens (1920- ); interior
illustrations by Stephen Lawrence were all the work of LSS. [RB]
STEVENS, PETER
[r] Lawrence Sterne STEVENS.
STEVENS, R.L.
[s] Edward D. HOCH.
STEVENSON, D(OROTHY) E(MILY)
(1892-1973) Scottish writer. In The Empty World (A Romance of the Future)
(1936; vt A World in Spell 1939 US) survivors of a great HOLOCAUST must
attempt somehow to cope. [JC]
STEVENSON, JOHN
[r] Nick CARTER.
STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS (BALFOUR)
(1850-1894) Scottish author, best known for works outside the sf field.
As a student at Edinburgh University, he abandoned engineering for law,
but never practised. He travelled widely, suffered most of his life from
tuberculosis, and settled in Samoa in 1890. His early novel, Strange Case
of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886; the usual vt from 1896 on being The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), shows the influence of a Calvinist
youth on a hot, romantic temperament. An early version (which he
scrapped), resulting from a nightmare, had an evil Jekyll using the Hyde
transformation as a mere disguise. The published version has echoes of the
case of Deacon Brodie, hanged in 1788 (and also the subject of the play

Deacon Brodie, or The Double Life [1880; rev 1889] by RLS and W.E. Henley
[1849-1903]), as well as of James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions
of a Justified Sinner (1824), not to mention psychological theories that
were then current. It is a Faustian moral fable which takes the form of a
tale of mystery and HORROR. It precedes Oscar Wilde's The Picture of
Dorian Gray (1891), which in some respects resembles it, by five years,
and is the prototype of all stories of multiple personality,
transformation ( APES AND CAVEMEN) and possession; in some aspects it is
also a tale of drug dependency.The plot takes the form of a spiral which
moves gingerly into the heart-of-darkness of the climax, when the already
dead Jekyll's written confession of his terrible fall is discovered and
presented to readers as the last chapter of the text. Years before the
tale begins, Jekyll (whose name RLS pronounced with a long "e") has begun
to use drugs to dissociate his libertine side (cf Freud's "id") from his
normal self. The evil self that surfaces, Hyde, in whose person (or
persona) Jekyll enjoys unspecified depravities (we are given instances
only of rage, brutality and murder), is less robust at first than the full
man. But spontaneous metamorphoses into an increasingly dominant Hyde
begin to occur, and after a temporary intermission larger and larger doses
are needed for the "recovery" of Jekyll. Eventually supplies run out and,
cornered, Hyde commits suicide. The symbolic physical changes (Hyde is
young, stunted, nimble and repulsive) seem today unconvincing melodrama,
and the silence about vices other than cruelty seems prudish, but the
psychological power of the writing, including Jekyll's agonies, is patent.
The story has been filmed many times ( DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE) and has been
deeply influential on the development of the theme of PSYCHOLOGY in sf.RLS
wrote a deal of other stories with fantastic or supernatural elements,
many to be found in New Arabian Nights (coll in 2 vols 1882); the contents
of the 1st vol initially appeared in the magazine London in 1878 under the
general title Latter-Day Arabian Nights, and were later reprinted as The
Suicide Club, and The Rajah's Diamond (coll 1894) ( CLUB STORIES). Others
appear in: More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (coll 1885) by RLS with
his wife Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson; The Merry Men, and Other Tales and
Fables (coll 1887), which contains "Thrawn Janet", Markheim (1886
Cornhill; 1925 chap), a good-angel story with a twist, Will o' the Mill
(1886; 1901 chap US) and "Olalla"; Island Nights' Entertainments (coll
1893), which contains The Bottle Imp (1891 Black and White; 1896 chap US;
vt Kaewe's Bottle 1935 chap UK); Tales and Fantasies (coll 1905), which
includes The Misadventures of John Nicholson (1887 Cassell's Christmas
Annual; 1889 chap US) and The Body-Snatcher (1884 Pall Mall Christmas
Extra; 1895 chap US); and Fables (coll 1914). Many further pamphlets
containing RLS tales were published during his lifetime and after; of
interest are The Waif Woman (written 1892; 1914 Scribner's Magazine; 1916
chap), When the Devil was Well (1921 chap US) and Ticonderoga: A Legend of
the West Highlands (1923 chap US). Though it has no fantastic elements,
Prince Otto (1885) is an interesting precursor of the RURITANIAN tale.
[DIM/JC]Other works: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Other
Fables (coll 1896), and many other collections whose titles feature Jekyll
and Hyde; The Short Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson (coll 1923 US); Two
Mediaeval Tales (coll 1930 chap US); The Tales of Tusitala (coll 1946);
Great Short Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson (coll 1951 US); The

Body-Snatcher and Other Stories (coll 1988 US); The Complete Shorter
Fiction (coll 1991); several series of collected works.About the author:
Frank Swinnerton's Robert Louis Stevenson (1915), though venomous, is a
necessary purgative for the early adulation; the numerous subsequent
studies are more balanced. Of special interest is Definitive Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde Companion (1983) by H.M. Geduld.See also: BIOLOGY; DEVOLUTION;
GOTHIC SF; HISTORY OF SF; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ;
MEDICINE; METAPHYSICS; PARANOIA; PREDICTION; SCIENTISTS; SEX;
SUPERNATURAL
CREATURES; THEATRE; VILLAINS.
STEVEN SPIELBERG'S AMAZING STORIES
AMAZING STORIES.
STEWART, ALEX
(1958- ) UK editor and writer who began publishing sf with "Seasons Out
of Time" for Interzone in 1982, but who has been primarily active as an
editor since.Solohe ed Arrows of Eros: Unearthly Tales of Love
andDeath(anth 1989); with Neil GAIMAN he ed the SHARED
WORLDanthology,Temps* (anth1991), featuring a clatch of SUPERHEROES in
modern Britain whom thegovernment occasionally drafts for superhero work;
the sequel, EuroTemps* (anth 1992) was ed solo by AS. [JC]
STEWART, FRED MUSTARD
(1936- ) US writer who has specialized in psychological HORROR novels at
the edge of sf and/or fantasy, like The Mephisto Waltz (1969), filmed in
1971. Star Child (1974), arguably, and The Methuselah Enzyme (1970),
certainly, are sf. [JC]
STEWART, GEORGE R(IPPEY)
(1895-1980) US writer who obtained his PhD from the University of
California in 1922, later became professor of English there, and
concentrated his attention - through novels, literary studies, popular
history, etc. - on the Pacific Edge of the USA. His only sf novel, EARTH
ABIDES (1949), is set in California, and tells of the struggle to survive
and rebuild after a viral plague has wiped out most of humanity. The
protagonist, Isherwood Williams, lives for many decades after the
DISASTER, breeding children with one of his rare fellow survivors, and
watching the long night begin as his descendants gradually lose all sense
of the civilization he represents; but the Earth abides. The sense of
requiem and rebirth promulgated in the novel is rendered all the more
complex for readers aware of the implications of Isherwood's nickname,
Ish, a direct reference to the historic Ishi, a California Indian who
became famous in the early years of the century as the last living
representative of his tribe, just as Ish is one of the last living
representatives of the civilization which has destroyed his namesake's
world. Ishi in Two Worlds (1961) by Theodora Kroeber (1897-1979), Ursula
K. LE GUIN's mother, serves as a telling complement. One of the finest of
all post- HOLOCAUST novels, GRS's superb elegy was the first winner of the
INTERNATIONAL FANTASY AWARD. [MJE/JC]See also: GENRE SF; HISTORY OF SF;
PASTORAL; SHARED WORLDS; SOCIOLOGY.
STEWART, MICHAEL

1. UK writer and economist (1933- ). With Peter JAY (whom see for
details) he wrote Apocalypse 2000: Economic Breakdown and the Suicide of
Democracy, 1898-2000 (1987).2. UK writer (1945- ), most of whose novels
are medical thrillers, although Monkey Shines (1983), filmed by George A.
ROMERO as MONKEY SHINES (1988), uses the sf premise that a monkey may have
her intelligence successfully augmented through the injection of human
genetic material; the experiment ends tragically. Other thrillers with sf
elements include Far Cry (1984), Blindsight (1987), Prodigy (1988), which
also includes elements of occult horror,Birthright (1990), in which a
feral child turns out to be a Neanderthal, and is threatened with human
exploitation, Belladonna (1992) and Compulsion (1994). [JC]See also:
ANTHROPOLOGY; APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD).
STEWART, RITSON
(? - ) UK writer who, with Stanley Stewart (their relationship, along
with everything else about them, is unknown), published The Professor's
Last Experiment (1888), in which a scientifically superior Martian arrives
on Earth but is captured by a vivisectionist, who chops off the visitor's
wings. [JC]
STEWART, SEAN
(1965- ) US writer long in Canada but resident in the US again from 1995,
whose first novel, Passion Play (1992), depicts an American governed by
the fundamentalist religious right. The story is told by a female private
eye in standard noir style, down to the sequence of interviews with
suspects which make up the centre of the narrative; but although there are
fewer surprises at this level than perhaps desirable, SS conveys
throughout a sense of revisionist scrutiny of the conventions he follows.
This scrutiny is very much more evident in Nobody's Son (1993), a fantasy
set almost entirely after the hero has won the princess. Resurrection Man
(1995) is also a fantasy. [JC]
STEWART, STANLEY
[r] Ritson STEWART.
STEWART, WENDELL
[s] Gordon EKLUND.
STEWART, WILL
Jack WILLIAMSON.
STICKGOLD, BOB
(1945- ) US writer and neurobiologist whose first sf novel, Gloryhits
(1978) with Mark Noble, deals with a recombinant-DNA disaster. His second,
The California Coven Project (1981), similarly exploits his professional
knowledge in a NEAR-FUTURE venue. [JC]
STIEGLER, MARC
(? - ) US writer who began publishing his characteristic HARD-SF stories
with "The Bully and the Crazy Boy" for ASF in 1980, and whose short work,
assembled in The Gentle Seduction (coll 1990), promulgates technological
solutions to neatly couched problems. David's Sling (1984) applies the
same philosophy to problems of NEAR-FUTURE political stress, as East and
West come close to blows through lack of information-flow. Valentina: Soul

in Sapphire (fixup 1984) with Joseph H. DELANEY (whom see for details) has
a similar bent. [JC]
STILLMAN, RON
Pseudonym of the unidentified author, presumably US, of the Tracker
military-sf series starring a USAF pilot and genius whose inventions make
his blindness irrelevant; the stories are told in a maliciously
exaggerated parody of the conventions of this sort of fiction. The
sequence so far comprises Tracker (1990), Green Lightning (1990), Blood
Money (1991), Black Phantom (1991), Firekill (1991) and Death Hunt (1991).
[JC]
STILSON, CHARLES B(ILLINGS)
(1880-1932) US journalist and editor, active in the early decades of the
century with serialized novels and some stories for the Frank A. MUNSEY
magazines. His Edgar Rice BURROUGHS-inspired sf/fantasy trilogy, Polaris
of the Snows (1915-16 All-Story; 1965), Minos of Sardanes (1916 All-Story;
1966) and Polaris and the Immortals (1917 All-Story as "Polaris and the
Goddess Glorian"; 1968), features the improbably durable Tarzan-like
Polaris Janess, who spends his Antarctic childhood killing polar bears
[sic] by hand and as an adult enjoys adventures in a LOST-WORLD colony of
Greeks and with technologically advanced survivors of ATLANTIS. "The Sky
Woman" (1920 All-Story) concludes with the tragic death of a Martian woman
borne to Earth in a meteorite. The more sophisticated "Dr Martone's
Microscope" (1920 All-Story) is a homage to Fitz-James O'BRIEN's "The
Diamond Lens" (1858) and Ray CUMMINGS's "The Girl in the Golden Atom"
(1919), both of which are mentioned by name. At the same time it invokes a
surreptitious sexuality: the doctor's microscope has been used for
voyeuristic purposes. At his best CBS was a writer who transcended
PULP-MAGAZINE formulae. [RB/JC]Other works: The Island God Forgot (1922);
The Ace of Blades (1924); A Cavalier of Navarre (1925); Sword Play (1926);
The Seven Blue Diamonds (1927).See also: ESCHATOLOGY.
STIMSON, F.J.
[r] Robert GRANT; John Boyle O'REILLY.
STINE, G(EORGE) HARRY
(1928- ) US writer who was for many years best known for work published
under his pseudonym, Lee Correy, but who in the 1980s began increasingly
to write under his own name, though his popularizing nonfiction about
space travel and satellites had always been released as by GHS, as was his
first story, "Galactic Gadgeteers" for ASF in 1951. As Correy, his
best-known sf tale is "And a Star to Steer Her By" (1953), to which his
first novel, a juvenile, Starship through Space (1954), is a sequel. There
soon followed another juvenile, Rocket Man (1955), and Contraband Rocket
(1956), about amateurs launching a SPACESHIP. GHS's preoccupation with
space travel has never, in fact, faltered, and although many years passed
before his next novel as Correy, his urgent advocacy of the space
programme remained as attractively fresh as ever. Star Driver (1980),
Shuttle Down (1981), Space Doctor (1981), Manna (1984) and A Matter of
Metalaw (1986), all as Correy, variously work to increase the sense of the
reality of space, an agenda perhaps less evident in The Abode of Life *

(1982), a STAR TREK tie. Under his own name, GHS's fiction has been less
ambitious, being restricted mainly to the NEAR-FUTURE Warbots sequence in
which humans and MACHINES clashingly interface as the US Robot Infantry
fights evil everywhere: Warbots (1988), Warbots #2: Operation Steel Band
(1988), #3: The Bastaard [sic] Rebellion (1988), #4: Sierra Madre (1988),
#5: Operation High Dragon (1989), #6: The Lost Battalion (1989), #7:
Operation Iron Fist (1989), #8: Force of Arms (1990), #9: Blood Siege
(1990), #10: Guts and Glory (1991),#11: Warrior Shield (1992) and Judgment
Day (1992). A second series, the Starsea Invaderssequence comprising First
Action(1993) and Second Contact (1994) is not dissimilar.Nonfiction works
of sf interest include Earth Satellites and the Race for Space Superiority
(1957), Rocket Power and Space Flight (1957), The Third Industrial
Revolution (1980), Shuttle into Space: A Ride in America's Space
Transportation (1978), The Space Enterprise (1980), Space Power (1981),
Confrontation in Space (1981), The Hopeful Future (1983), The Silicon Gods
(1984) and Handbook for Space Colonists (1985). [JC]
STINE, HANK
(1945- ) US writer, born Henry Eugene Stein, whose Season of the Witch
(1968) interestingly blends sf and erotica in the story of a man
biologically transformed into a woman as a punishment for rape and murder,
but who eventually finds her/his true role and contentment as a
transsexual. Other sf novels include Thrill City (1969), set in a city
devastated by WWIII, and a novelization tied to the tv series The PRISONER
, A Day in the Life * (1970). HS was editor of GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION for
2 issues in 1979. [MJ]See also: PSYCHOLOGY; SEX.
STINGRAY
UK tv series with animated puppets (1964-65). AP Films with ATV/ITC.
Created Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. Prod Gerry Anderson. The writers were
the Andersons (3 episodes), Alan Fennell, Dennis Spooner. 39 25min
episodes. Colour.The 3rd of the SuperMarionation puppet sf series for
children ( Gerry and Sylvia ANDERSON for details) and the first in colour,
S was also one of the better. Handsome but irascible Troy Tempest pilots
the atomic submersible Stingray for WASP (World Aquanaut Security Patrol)
and is involved in a love triangle with Marina, lovely but mute daughter
of an undersea emperor, and Atlanta, wistful daughter of WASP's crusty
commander. Most weeks saw somewhat repetitive undersea menaces defeated,
primarily those associated with the evil but incompetent Titans, an
"aquaphibian" race. The miniature sets were good (special effects Derek
Meddings). Some episodes were later cobbled together as "films" which
probably never saw theatrical release but were shown abroad as tv
features. One was Invaders from the Deep (1981), made up from the episodes
Hostages of the Deep, Emergency Marineville, The Big Gun and Deep Heat,
all written by Fennell. [PN]
STIRLING, S(TEPHEN) M(ICHAEL)
(1954- ) French-born Canadian writer who began publishing work of genre
interest with Snowbrother (1985 US), the 1st vol of the Fifth Millennium
fantasy sequence, which continued with The Sharpest Edge (1986 US) with
Shirley Meier (1960- ), The Cage (1989) with Meier, and Shadow's Son
(1991) with Meier and Karen Wehrstein. It was, however, with his 2nd

series, the ALTERNATE-WORLD Draka sequence - Marching through Georgia
(1988), Under the Yoke (1989) and The Stone Dogs (1990) - that SMS came to
notice because of the considerable violence (undeniable) and right-wing
convictions (apparent). In an ALTERNATE-WORLD 20th century generated in
part by the success of Charles BABBAGE's Difference Engine, a group of
British loyalists, having previously escaped the consequences of the
American Revolution by emigrating to South Africa, have established there
a racist feudalism, the Domination of Draka, which soon comes to dominate
the entire continent. In the first volume the start of WWII sees Draka
allied with the USA against the Nazis, and winning a crushing victory
against the German hordes in Soviet Georgia; subsequently, slavery is
extended to newly conquered territories. This nightmare (which SMS
presents with seeming affection) continues in subsequent volumes, with the
Domination seemingly ineradicable and a post-war conflict between the
Drakans (who have mastered GENETIC ENGINEERING) and the USA (expert in
COMPUTERS) extending into space.SMS has also contributed to Larry NIVEN's
Man-Kzin Wars SHARED-WORLD anthologies, with work in Man-Kzin Wars II *
(anth 1989), Man-Kzin Wars III * (anth 1990) and Man-Kzin Wars IV * (anth
1991), plus a novel in the sequence, The Children's Hour * (1991) with
Jerry POURNELLE. Also with Pournelle, to whose CoDominion sequence the
tale belongs, he wrote Go Tell the Spartans (1991) about Falkenberg, the
series' main protagonist. Other novels include The Forge (1991),The Hammer
(1992), The Anvil (1993) and The Steel (1993), all with David A. DRAKE,
the first volumes of The General, a military series. SMS has also ed
Fantastic World War II (anth 1990) and The Fantastic Civil War (anth
1991), both with Martin H. GREENBERG, Charles G. WAUGH and Frank McSherran
Jr, and Power (anth 1991). [JC]See also: CANADA; WAR.
STIRRING SCIENCE STORIES
US PULP MAGAZINE, changing to BEDSHEET-size for #4. 4 issues Feb 1941-Mar
1942, published bimonthly by Albing Publications for #1-#3, then by
Manhattan Fiction Publications for the final abortive revival 9 months
later; ed Donald A. WOLLHEIM. The companion magazine to COSMIC STORIES,
SSS was produced under similar adverse financial conditions: writers were
promised payment only if SSS were a success. 3 issues carried covers by
artist Hannes BOK. SSS featured many stories by FUTURIANS, including James
BLISH and C.M. KORNBLUTH (who contributed various stories under at least 3
pseudonyms), and printed Damon KNIGHT's first published story,
"Resilience". SSS was presented as two magazines in one: the second half
was separately titled Stirring Fantasy Fiction, and came complete with its
own editorial and readers' departments. [MJE/PN]
STITH, JOHN E(DWARD)
(1947- ) US writer and software engineering manager who began to publish
sf with "Early Winter" for Fantastic in 1979. His first novel, Scapescope
(1984) - HARD SF like all his work-uses his work experience at the NORAD
Cheyenne Mountain Complex to extrapolate conditions in that location two
centuries hence. Memory Blank (1986) places a classic sf protagonist - the
hero with amnesia - on an L-5 orbital colony ( LAGRANGE POINT). Death
Tolls (1987) is a detective mystery set on a terraformed MARS (see also
TERRAFORMING), and Deep Quarry (1989), set on a planet far from the Solar

System (to which JES had previously restricted himself), pits a private
eye against various mysteries in a hard-boiled style. More impressive than
any of these is Redshift Rendezvous (1990), set on a FASTER-THAN-LIGHT
starship travelling through a version of HYPERSPACE in which the speed of
light is so low (22mph [35kph]) that its passage is visible. Within this
intriguingly presented environment, a murder mystery, a hijack and other
events occur; but the appeal of the novel lies in the playing-out of the
concept - or thought experiment - at its heart. Both Manhattan Transfer
(1993), in which an alien force matter-transmits the island elsewhere for
reasons unknown, and Reunion on Neverend (1994) continue to demonstrate a
growing facility and storytelling energy. [JC]See also: IMAGINARY SCIENCE
STOCKBRIDGE, GRANT
House name used by Popular Publications, especially in The SPIDER . Most
if not all the GS stories in The Spider were by Norvell W. PAGE. It has
been suggested that Frank Gruber, Reginald T. Maitland and Emil Tepperman
also used this pseudonym. [PN]
STOCKTON, FRANK R(ICHARD)
(1834-1902) US author and editor. He worked on Scribner's Magazine before
being assistant editor of ST NICHOLAS MAGAZINE 1873-81. It was during this
period, while writing for children, that he developed the combination of
humour and fantasy featured in such works as Tales out of School (coll
1875), which includes "How Three Men Went to the Moon", and The Floating
Prince and Other Fairy Tales (coll 1881). His numerous short stories
appeared in over 20 collections, of which several were composite volumes.
His better works include "The Lady or the Tiger?" (1882), a classic puzzle
story, "The Transferred Ghost" (1882) and its sequel "The Spectral
Mortgage" (1883), and his sf story "A Tale of Negative Gravity" (1884).
Among other short sf stories were "The Tricycle of the Future" (1885) and
"My Translataphone" (1900; reprinted in The Science Fiction of Frank R.
Stockton [coll 1976] ed Richard Gid Powers).Later, when FRS turned to
novels, he continued to use sf themes occasionally, though his humorous
style remained the most prominent feature. In The Great War Syndicate
(1889) a naval WAR between the UK and USA is resolved when the British see
the advanced weaponry arrayed against them. The Adventures of Captain Horn
(1895) is a LOST-WORLD novel. The Great Stone of Sardis (1898), set in
1947, culminates in the discovery that the Earth is a gigantic diamond
with a relatively thin crust of surface soil. The Vizier of the Two-Horned
Alexander (1899) lightly recasts the Wandering Jew theme.FRS was
influential on John Kendrick BANGS and other humorous fantasists and is
regarded as a forerunner of O. Henry (1862-1910) in his use of the trick
ending. His complete works appear in The Novels and Stories of Frank R.
Stockton (23 vols 1899-1904). A posthumously written collection, The
Return of Frank R. Stockton (coll 1913), "transcribed" by the medium Miss
Etta de Camp, is surprisingly good and stylistically recognizable, though
death has clearly impaired his vision. [JE]Other works: Collections with
at least some sf/fantasy material include Ting-a-Ling (coll 1879); The
Lady or the Tiger? and Other Stories (coll 1884); The Christmas Wreck and
Other Stories (coll 1886); The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales
(coll 1887); A Borrowed Month and Other Stories (coll 1887 UK); Amos

Kilbright: His Adscititious Experiences, with Other Stories (coll 1888);
The Stories of the Three Burglars (coll 1889); The Rudder Granges Abroad
and Other Stories (coll 1891); The Great Show in Kobol-Land (1891); The
Clocks of Rondaine and Other Stories (coll 1892); The Watchmaker's Wife
and Other Stories (coll 1893); Fanciful Tales (coll 1894); A Chosen Few
(coll 1895); A Story-Teller's Pack (coll 1897); Afield and Afloat (coll
1900); John Gayther's Garden, and the Stories Told Therein (coll 1902);
The Queen's Museum, and Other Fanciful Tales (coll 1906); The Magic Egg
and Other Stories (coll 1907); The Lost Dryad (1912 chap); The Fairy Tales
of Frank Stockton (coll 1990).See also: UNDER THE SEA.
STOKES, MANNING LEE
(1911-1976). US writer whose work of sf interest was confined to
pseudonymous contributions to various series. As Nick Carter, he wrote The
Red Rays (1969) in the Nick Carter series; as Jeffrey Lord, he wrote #1
through #8 of the Richard Blade series: The Bronze Axe (1969), The Jade
Warrior (1969), Jewel of Tharn (1969), Slave of Sarma (1970), Liberator of
Jedd (1971), Monster of the Maze (1972), Pearl of Patmos (1973) and
Undying World (1973); and as Ken Stanton he wrote two Aquanauts titles:
Operation Sea Monster (1974) and Operation Mermaid (1974). [JC]
STOKES, SIMPSON
F. Dubrez FAWCETT.
STOLBOV, BRUCE
(? - ) US writer whose post- HOLOCAUST novel, Last Fall (1987), describes
the dilemma faced by a wood-dwelling pacifistic enclave of survivors when
gun-bearing intruders arrive. The tale is notable for the quiet warmth of
its depiction of a renewed natural world. [JC]
STONE, CHARLOTTE
Maxim JAKUBOWSKI.
STONE, LESLIE F(RANCES)
(1905-c1987) US writer who began publishing sf with "Men with Wings" for
Air Wonder Stories in 1929, and was active in the field for the next 8
years, publishing at least 17 stories. Her 2 sf books are When the Sun
Went Out (1929 chap), a FAR-FUTURE tale which appeared in Hugo GERNSBACK's
Science Fiction series, and Out of the Void (1929 AMZ; 1967), a SPACE
OPERA. "Across the Void" (1930 AMZ), a sequel to the latter, attained
magazine publication only. [JC/PN]See also: LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; WOMEN SF
WRITERS.
STONG, PHIL(IP DUFFIELD)
(1899-1957) US novelist and editor, author of the thrice-filmed State
Fair (1932). His The Other Worlds (anth 1941; vt 25 Modern Stories of
Mystery and Imagination 1942 US) was the first important sf ANTHOLOGY. Its
25 stories, about half sf, half horror, were mostly from the PULP
MAGAZINES, not previously regarded as a proper source of material (of sf
at least) for respectable hardcover books. [PN]
STOREY, ANTHONY
(1928- ) UK writer, formerly a rugby player, brother of the novelist
David Storey (1933- ) and author of a SATIRE-drenched trilogy-The Rector

(1970), The Centre Holds (1973) and The Saviour (1978) - which deals with
the traumas surrounding the announced birth of a child its mother claims
to be the MESSIAH, and the 1980s upheavals centring on the ambivalent
effect of the new Jesus upon an unfit world. [JC]
STOREY, RICHARD
[s] H.L. GOLD.
STORM, BRIAN
Brian HOLLOWAY.
STORM, JANNICK
[r] DENMARK.
STORM, MALLORY
Paul W. FAIRMAN.
STORM, RUSSELL
Robert Moore WILLIAMS.
STORM PLANET
PLANETA BUR.
STORR, CATHERINE
(1913- ) UK doctor and writer, for many years a psychotherapist, since
1963 an author of journalism, children's books - most famously Marianne
Dreams (1958; vt The Magic Drawing Pencil 1960 US), in which physical and
mental malaises are incarnated in a fantasy world - and an sf novel,
Unnatural Fathers (1976), in which the success of an experiment to make
men capable of child-bearing causes great upheavals in a NEAR-FUTURE UK.
[JC/BS]Other works for children: Rufus (1969); The Adventures of Polly and
the Wolf (1970); Thursday (1972).
STORY, JACK TREVOR
(1917-1991) UK writer who remains best known for his first novel, The
Trouble with Harry (1949), not sf, which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock
(1889-1980) in 1955. The rumours that he wrote several of the Volsted
GRIDBAN sf novels are unverified, but certainly he did produce many
pseudonymous books over the first decade or so of his career. His openly
acknowledged work included non-sf - but remarkable - tales for the Sexton
Blake Library and several novels which used sf components to make their
points about the decline of England and the loss of youth, including
Hitler Needs You (1970), One Last Mad Embrace (1970), Little Dog's Day
(1971), which is a genuine sf DYSTOPIA, the surrealistic The Wind in the
Snottygobble Tree (1971), Morag's Flying Fortress (1976), which is a
borderline novel about sexual obsession, and Up River (1979; vt The
Screwrape Lettuce 1980), in which an appalling aphrodisiac devastates the
UK while the secret police, unnoticed, grab power. [JC]
STORY OF MANKIND, THE
Irwin ALLEN.
STORY-PRESS CORPORATION
BLUE BOOK MAGAZINE.

STORYTELLER
UK pocketbook magazine published by Liverpolitan, Birkenhead. The front
cover bears the variant title International Storyteller, while the spine
and title page read Storyteller. #3 was an all-sf issue, all stories
(apart from Chris BOYCE's first) by writers unknown in sf; it is dated
1964, no ed named. Other issues were not sf. [PN]
STOUT, REX (TODHUNTER)
(1886-1975) US writer, best known for his Nero Wolfe detective novels,
beginning with Fer-de-Lance (1934) and continuing into the 1970s. Under
the Andes (1914 All-Story Magazine; 1984) describes, in a style very
unlike his deft mature drawl, an underground LOST WORLD of dwarf Incans.
In The President Vanishes (1934), published anon, the disappearance of the
US President causes a NEAR-FUTURE crisis. [JC]See also: DIME-NOVEL SF.
STOVER, LEON E(UGENE)
(1929- ) US editor and writer, professor of ANTHROPOLOGY at the Illinois
Institute of Technology, where he also taught sf courses, and science
editor of AMZ 1967-9. He was most active in sf in collaboration with Harry
HARRISON, editing with him Apeman, Spaceman: Anthropological Science
Fiction (anth 1968), and writing with him Stonehenge (1972), a historical
novel in which refugees from ATLANTIS - here rather conventionally
identified as the Mediterranean island, Thera (Santorini), which exploded
in Mycenaean times - help build the eponymous megalith. With Willis E.
MCNELLY he ed Above the Human Landscape: An Anthology of Social Science
Fiction (anth 1972). He was founder and first chairman of the JOHN W.
CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD.LES's critical studies perhaps represent him at
his most interesting. La science-fiction americaine: essai d'anthropologie
culturelle ["American Science Fiction: An Essay in Cultural Anthropology"]
(1972 France) was based on one of his courses. Ostensibly a RECURSIVE
tale, The Shaving of Karl Marx: An Instant Novel of Ideas, after the
Manner of Thomas Love Peacock, in which Lenin and H.G. Wells Talk about
the Political Meaning of the Scientific Romances (1982) was more
accurately a dramatized debate. In The Prophetic Soul: A Reading of H.G.
Wells' Things to Come together with his Film Treatment "Whither
Mankind?"and thePostproduction Script (1987) LES continued to argue that
H.G. WELLS - especially in his Samurai mood - produced Leninist solutions
to social problems. His Robert A. Heinlein (1987), more stridently, works
better as an assault upon H. Bruce FRANKLIN's powerful study of HEINLEIN
than as a balanced presentation of the author; the advocacy of his friend
and subject in Harry Harrison (1990) proves ineffective through lack of
judicious distance.Throughout his work, LES has been perhaps most notable
- after his erudition is acknowledged - for a gadfly vigour. [JC]See also:
ECONOMICS.
STOW, (JULIAN) RANDOLPH
(1935- ) Australian writer whose novels tend to embed deeply alienated
protagonists into venues - some remote-which are described with
anthropological precision, resulting in tales, whether non-genre or
sf/fantasy, that verge constantly upon fable. In Tourmaline (1963) the
venue is a decaying town in backwoods Australia and the time the NEAR
FUTURE; the narrative is loaded with echoes of myth and forebodings. The 5

protagonists of Visitants (1979), set in Papua, supply a mosaic of
responses to a First-Contact experience in a manner that remotely
prefigures the strategies underlying Karen Joy FOWLER's SARAH CANARY
(1991). [JC]Other works: Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy (1967);
The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980).
STRAND MAGAZINE, THE
UK magazine published monthly Jan 1891-Mar 1950 by George Newnes Ltd; ed
Sir George Newnes and others. TSM was cheap, though not in appearance: it
contained illustrated articles and fiction by well known authors. Its
success created many rivals. In competition with PEARSON'S MAGAZINE (begun
1896) it started to feature sf regularly, having earlier published "An
Express of the Future" (1895), a short story by Michel Verne (1861-1925),
whom the editors mistook for his father (M. - "Monsieur" - Verne),
bylining the story Jules VERNE. Foremost among TSM's sf contributors were
Grant ALLEN, H.G. WELLS, Fred M. WHITE and Arthur Conan DOYLE, whose
Sherlock Holmes stories had already given the magazine its initial
success. In sf terms it is best remembered for the serializations of
Wells's THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1900-1; 1901) and Doyle's The Lost
World (1912; 1912), The Poison Belt (1913; 1913) and "The Maracot Deep"
(1927-8). But there were many others, including L.T. Meade's (Mrs
Elizabeth Thomasina Smith [1854-1914]) and Robert Eustace's The
Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (Jan-Oct 1898; 1899). SM is an excellent
source for sf stories intensely characteristic of the late Victorian and
Edwardian period in the UK. [JE/PN]Further reading: Science Fiction By
Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular
Magazines 1891-1911 (1968) by Sam MOSKOWITZ; The Strand Magazine
1891-1950: A Selective Checklist (1979 chap) by J.F. Whitt; Strange Tales
from the Strand Magazine (anth 1991) ed Jack Adrian (1945- ).
STRANG, HERBERT
Collaborative pseudonym of UK writers George Herbert Ely (1866-1958) and
C.J. L'Estrange (1867-1947) used on a large number of boys' adventure
stories, among them a series of novels about futuristic TRANSPORTATION
devices, including King of the Air, or To Morocco on an Airship (1908),
Lord of the Seas (1908), The Cruise of the Gyro-Car (1910), Round the
World in Seven Days (1910), The Flying Boat (1912) and A Thousand Miles an
Hour (1924). These were competently written with a certain Edwardian dash,
and a fair amount of imperialist cliche. HS also published future- WAR
Yellow Peril stories. [PN]Other works: The Old Man of the Mountain (1916);
The Heir of a Hundred Kings (1930).See also: UNDER THE SEA.
STRANGE ADVENTURES
UK magazine, PULP-MAGAZINE size. 2 undated issues 1946 and 1947,
published by Hamilton ? ed anon. SA was an unmemorable
juvenile sf magazine. As with its companion, FUTURISTIC STORIES, it was
written entirely by Norman FIRTH under pseudonyms. [FHP]
STRANGE BEHAVIOR
DEAD KIDS.
STRANGE FANTASY
One of the many reprint DIGEST-size magazines published by Sol Cohen's

Ultimate Publishing Co.; ed anon. 6 issues, 3 in 1969 (#8-#10) and 3 in
1970 (#11-#13). The strange numbering seems to be connected with the
temporary death in 1969 of SCIENCE FICTION (ADVENTURE) CLASSICS after #8,
but SF is not simply a variant title of the latter, which began again in
1971 with #12. Also, SF concentrated on fantasy (while printing some sf),
mostly reprinted from FANTASTIC during the period of Cele GOLDSMITH's
editorship. [PN]
STRANGE INVADERS
Film (1983). EMI Films/Orion/A Michael Laughlin Production. Dir Michael
Laughlin, starring Paul Le Mat, Nancy Allen, Diana Scarwid, Michael
Lerner, Wallace Shawn, Fiona Lewis. Screenplay William Condon, Laughlin.
93 mins. Colour.A very agreeable pastiche of movies like INVASION OF THE
BODY SNATCHERS (1956) ( PARANOIA). The prologue shows a flying saucer (
UFOS) landing in a small town in 1958. The rest of this charming SATIRE is
set in 1983, when entomologist Charlie (Bigelow) comes to learn that
Centerville (the town) is now occupied by ALIENS in human form, that his
wife (Scarwid) is an alien - he had previously regarded her blank manner
as normal - that his (half-breed) daughter is to be taken with the aliens
when they leave, and that New York is being infiltrated. The alien
anthropological survey team have adopted the appearance and manner of
small-town Americans of the Eisenhower years, and naturally appear grossly
out of place in modern New York. ( MEET THE APPLEGATES [1990] adopts a
similar premise.) Director Laughlin has his cake and eats it too by
injecting genuine suspense into a story that is also deeply funny. This is
the second of a projected but unfinished Strange trilogy from Laughlin,
the first being DEAD KIDS (1981; vt Strange Behavior). [PN]
STRANGE NEW WORLD
Made-for-tv film (1975). Warner Bros. TV/ABC. Dir Robert Butler, starring
John Saxon, Kathleen Miller, Keene Curtis, James Olson, Martine Beswick,
Gerrit Graham. Screenplay Walon Green, Ronald F. Graham, Al Ramrus. 100
mins. Colour.The 1970s are littered with tv movies representing Gene
RODDENBERRY's repeated attempts at pilot episodes for new tv series,
though in this case he is not credited. This editing together of 2
never-aired episodes is a sort of sequel to GENESIS II (1973) and PLANET
EARTH (1974), sharing the same star, Saxon, with the latter. Three
astronauts, after 180 years in SUSPENDED ANIMATION, return to an Earth
devastated by a meteor storm. What is left of civilization is balkanized,
each group differing. The astronauts encounter two such groups. Eterna is
a sterile utopia, with an obsession for cleanliness, that has conquered
death; the wholesome travellers ensure that death makes a cleansing return
to Eterna before they leave. They go on to restore peace in Arboria, a
land divided by the Hunters and the Zookeepers, the latter being fanatical
conservationists ready to kill to achieve their aims. [JB/PN]
STRANGE PLASMA
US SEMIPROZINE, small- BEDSHEET format, subtitled "speculative +
imaginative fiction", published and ed Steve Pasechnick from Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Eight irregular issues 1989-1994. This fiction magazine,
too irregular to be influential, has quite high standards; it has
published good stories by Terry DOWLING, Carol EMSHWILLER, R.A. LAFFERTY,

Paul PARK, Cherry WILDER, Gene WOLFE and others. It features an
interesting column of opinion by Gwyneth JONES. #8 (cover by Ian MILLER)
announced itself to be the final issue. [PN]
STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
Robert Heinlein's book, Stranger in a Strange Land, was one of the first
SF novels to reach a mass market. In fact, it became such a cultural
phenomenon in the 1960s that various religious cults attempted to live
according to the precepts of the book's hero. And "Grok" buttons suddenly
became hot items.In the spring of 1968, U.C.L.A. offered a course called
"J.D. Salinger, Robert Heinlein, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and other Personal
Gurus."Reported Heinlein, "I'm sure a square, I don't even know who the
third guru is."Heinlein's bemusement at his popularity may have ended
abruptly in 1970, when it was reported that the sociopathic killer Charles
Manson had been influenced by Stranger in a Strange Land.
STRANGER WITHIN, THE
Made-for-tv film (1974). Lorimar/ABC TV. Dir Lee Philips, starring
Barbara Eden, George Grizzard, Joyce Van Patten, David Doyle. Teleplay
Richard MATHESON, based on his "Mother by Protest" (1953). 72 mins.
Colour.A woman (Eden) becomes pregnant - inexplicably, as her husband
(Grizzard) is certified to be sterile. It turns out that she has been
impregnated by a wandering Martian seed. At first the unpleasant
side-effects of the pregnancy drive her to an attempted abortion, but she
finally bears a healthy child who, along with a number of other Martian
babies, floats off back towards Mars. The film, whose atmosphere of
mounting PARANOIA is well achieved, belongs to the sinister-pregnancy
movie cycle set off by Rosemary's Baby (1968). [JB/PN]
STRANGE STORIES
US PULP MAGAZINE. 13 bimonthly issues Feb 1939-Feb 1941, published by
Better Publications Inc.; ed Leo MARGULIES or Mort WEISINGER, uncredited.
A companion magazine to STARTLING STORIES and THRILLING WONDER STORIES, SS
was devoted to supernatural and weird fiction, in not very successful
competition with WEIRD TALES. Most of its covers were by Earle K. BERGEY.
Its contributors included August DERLETH, Henry KUTTNER and Manly Wade
WELLMAN. Although its companion magazines always publicized each other,
they hardly mentioned SS. The magazine has remained remarkably little
known. [MJE]
STRANGE TALES 1.
US PULP MAGAZINE. 7 issues Sep 1931-Jan 1933, published by Clayton
Magazines; ed Harry BATES. ST (subtitled "of Mystery and Terror") was a
companion magazine to Astounding Stories ( ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION) and
was similar in editorial policy to WEIRD TALES; it carried very little sf.
Its contributors included Robert E. HOWARD, Clark Ashton SMITH, Jack
WILLIAMSON and others familiar to readers of ASF and Weird Tales. Its
covers were all by WESSO. Like ASF it ceased publication when the Clayton
Magazines went into liquidation, but was not revived when STREET ?
acquired the rights to the Clayton magazines. Strange Tales (anth 1976) is
a facsimile collection of stories from the magazine.2. UK DIGEST
weird-story reprint magazine; 2 undated issues 1946, published by Utopian

Publications; ed Walter GILLINGS, uncredited, and featuring stories by,
among others, Robert BLOCH, Ray BRADBURY, H.P. LOVECRAFT, Clark Ashton
SMITH, Jack WILLIAMSON and John Beynon Harris (John WYNDHAM). [MJE/PN]
STRANGE WORLD OF PLANET X, THE
1. UK tv serial (1956). ATV. Prod Arthur Lane. Dir Quentin Lawrence,
starring William Lucas, David Garth, Helen Cherry, Maudie Edwards.
Teleplay Rene RAY. 7 25min episodes. Scientists discover a formula giving
access to the 4th DIMENSION and, with others, are thereby transported to
the abstractly arid Planet X.2. UK film (1958; vt The Cosmic Monster).
Eros/DCA. Dir Gilbert Gunn, starring Forrest Tucker, Gaby Andre, Martin
Benson, Wyndham Goldie. Screenplay Paul Ryder, Joe Ambor, based on The
Strange World of Planet X * (1957) by Rene Ray. 75 mins. B/w.A mad
scientist's magnetic experiments rupture Earth's ionosphere, thereby
permitting the penetration of cosmic rays (!), which create giant insects
on an area of Earth 80 miles (130km) across. The creatures are eventually
destroyed by a friendly ALIEN. The special effects were manifestly done on
a tiny budget; the film is normally regarded as mediocre. Its immediate
source was probably Ray's novelization of 1, rather than the series
itself, since the plot-lines differ. In the film, Planet X is Earth and
the Cosmic Monster is Man. [PN/JB]
STRASSER, TODD
(1950- ) US writer whose first sf novel, The Mall from OuterSpace (1987),
was a juvenile in which shopping malls are taken over byaliens. His
remaining sf consists of film TIES: Honey, IBlew up the Kid* (1992); Super
MarioBrothers* (1993) and Addams FamilyValues* (1993). [JC]
STRATEMEYER, EDWARD T.
(1869-1930) US dime-novel writer ( DIME-NOVEL SF), entrepreneur and mass
producer of boys' books. He is chiefly important as the operator of the
Stratemeyer Syndicate, a story factory (or packager) that produced
hundreds of boys' and girls' books in such popular series as The Bobbsey
Twins, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and many others. ETS prepared plot
summaries, farmed out writing to a stable of freelance writers to whom he
paid pittances, and sold the products to publishers. The Great Marvel
series as by Roy ROCKWOOD, the first 6 vols of which were written out by
Howard R. GARIS, constitutes perhaps the first clothbound sf series in any
language. The TOM SWIFT books, written by Garis 1910-32, were the most
popular boys' books of all time. Borderline series included Don Sturdy
(collaborator unknown) and Bomba, the Jungle Boy (collaborator unknown).
After ETS's death his daughter Harriet Stratemeyer ADAMS successfully
carried on the syndicate. [EFB]
STRATTON, THOMAS
Robert COULSON; Gene DEWEESE.
STRAUS, RALPH
(1892-1950) UK writer whose only full-scale sf novel, The Dust which is
God: An Undimensional Adventure (1907), tamely depicts a world which has
evolved religiously. In 5000 A.D.: A Review and an Excursion, Read Before
ye Sette of Odd Volumes at Oddenino's Imperial Restaurant on Jan. 24th,
1911 (coll 1911 chap) the review is of the sf genre and the excursion is a

TIME-TRAVEL tale. [JC]
STRAUSS, ERWIN S(HEEHAN)
(1943- ) A member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology SF
Society, for whom he compiled Index to the S-F Magazines, 1951-1965
(1966), a BIBLIOGRAPHY which covers the same years as Norman METCALF's
similar index; both succeed the original index for 1926-50 by Donald B.
DAY. Unlike Metcalf's, ESS's book is compiled from a computer printout,
and contains an issue-by-issue contents listing of the magazines for the
period, in addition to story and author indexes. The MIT group, now known
as N.E.S.F.A (New England Science Fiction Association) has produced
subsequent vols, starting with Index to the Science Fiction Magazines
1966-1970 (1971), with annual vols since, which, from 1971, have also
indexed the contents of original anthologies. A well known fan, EES wrote
The Complete Guide to Science Fiction Conventions (1983 chap). [PN]
STREET ?
Important US magazine publisher, established in the 19th century with
various dime-novel series like Good News and The Nugget Library, and
publishing early juvenile sf in the Tom Edison Jr. and Electric Bob
series. The general-fiction The POPULAR MAGAZINE (1903-31) published a
good few sf stories too. S?
including Ned Buntline's deeply influential Buffalo Bill Cody stories,
which helped mythologize the West. S?
PULP MAGAZINES into various genres, each aiming to have a market leader,
one example being Detective Story Magazine. S?
carry over from dime-novel publishing the idea of a pulp magazine devoted
to a single character, with the very successful The Shadow (1931-49),
whose adventures bordered sometimes on sf ( Walter B. GIBSON), The Avenger
( Paul ERNST) and, rather closer to sf, DOC SAVAGE MAGAZINE (1933-49).When
Clayton Publishing Company, publishers of Astounding Stories ( ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION) began to flounder in 1933, S?
order to fill yet another market niche. S?
backing meant that ASF could pay quite good rates, get good stories, and
compete strongly in the market, which it did. Later, S?
W. CAMPBELL Jr) added a fantasy companion magazine, UNKNOWN (later Unknown
Worlds). S? from 1948 the
firm was phasing out its pulp publication and, with paperback books and tv
increasingly threatening the dominance of the magazines, declining in
importance ( PUBLISHING). S? its only remaining sf
title, ASF, was sold to Conde Nast, the last S?
[PN]
STRETE, CRAIG (KEE)
(1950- ) US Native American writer - the suggestion has been bruited that
CS is the pseudonym of a Cherokee who does not wish to reveal his real
name, but this has not been confirmed. He has written as CS and under
other names, by himself and in collaboration; at least 40 of the 80 or
more stories claimed for him must be under unrevealed names. As CS, he
began publishing for If in 1974 with the well known "Time Deer", a
runner-up for the 1975 NEBULA; 2 other tales appeared simultaneously. From
the mid-1970s he maintained a publishing connection with a Dutch house,

and his first collection appeared initially in Dutch as Als Al Andere
Faalt (coll 1976 Netherlands), only later gaining English-language release
as If All Else Fails (exp coll 1980). His first book in English was The
Bleeding Man and Other Science Fiction Stories (coll 1977) for older
children. Intensely written, spare, though with lunges into flamboyance,
committed and often moving, his tales frequently combine prose rhythms and
subject matter connoting a Native American background with more usual sf
themes like COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS, as in "When They Find You" from
the latter vol. Though passionately couched, this work is sometimes crude
in its opposition of the total horror of the White world with the mythic
"naturalness" of the Native American: there is a sense, perhaps, of
protesting too much. Later collections include Dreams that Burn in the
Night (coll 1982) and Death Chants (coll 1988), the latter - as its title
signifies - dealing frequently with terminal moments, though at times
comically.After some children's fantasies - those published in English
include Paint Your Face on a Drowning in the River (1978), When
Grandfather Journeys into Winter (1979) and Big Thunder Magic (1990) - and
the non-genre Burn Down the Night (1982), CS published a carnival fantasy,
To Make Death Love Us (1987) as by Sovereign Falconer, and Death in the
Spirit House (1988), over which controversy reigned for some time due to
accusations by Ron MONTANA that the book had been plagiarized, very nearly
in whole, from a manuscript given by him to CS. Granting only a modicum of
Montana's case, CS mounted an elaborate defence. As part of an agreed
settlement, Montana's version of the book was eventually published as Face
in the Snow (1992), as by Montana and without reference to CS. [JC]
STRIBLING, T.S.
[r] APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD).
STRICK, PHILIP
(1939- ) UK sf and film critic, anthologist, teacher, and director of a
film library. In 1969 he initiated one of the first adult evening classes
in sf in the UK, sponsored by the University of London ( SF IN THE
CLASSROOM), which continued until 1992. PS's Science Fiction Movies (1976)
is a witty, rather helter-skelter account of sf CINEMA, one of the best
early books on the subject (despite its lack of a filmography); his film
criticism continues to appear in Monthly Film Bulletin (now incorporated
in Sight and Sound). Antigrav (anth 1975) ed PS assembles funny sf short
fiction, including John BROSNAN's first-published story. [PN]
STRICKLAND, BRAD
Working name of US writer William Bradley Strickland (1947- ), who has
concentrated mainly on fantasy, most notably perhaps in early stories like
"The Herders of Grimm" for FSF in 1984 and in the Jeremy Moon sequence Moon Dreams (1988), Nul's Quest (1989) and Wizard's Mole (1991) - which
conveys its protagonist into a wittily constructed dream world, where he
takes his stand. BS's first novel, To Stand beneath the Sun (1986), is an
sf adventure whose protagonist must come to terms with a world dominated
by women. Ark Liberty (1992) as by Will Bradley treats the ecocatastrophic
( ECOLOGY) near-death of Earth with melodramatic panache, pitting its
scientist hero against suicidal governments and embedding him - after his
physical death - into the eponymous undersea biome as its computer mentor

and spirit, while centuries pass. [JC]Other works: ShadowShow (1988);
Children of the Knife (1990), medical horror; Dragon's Plunder (1992);
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Star Ghost * (1994) and Star Trek: Deep Space
Nine: Stowaways * (1994).
STRIEBER, WHITLEY
(1945- ) US writer, much better known for horror novels like The Wolfen
(1978) and The Hunger (1981) than for his sf. War Day: And the Journey
Onward (1984) with James Kunetka (1944) is a remarkably detailed postHOLOCAUST tour of the USA after a 1988 nuclear conflict. Wolf of Shadows
(1985) is a juvenile set in a post-holocaust nuclear winter. Nature's End
(1986), again with Kunetka, is set in a NEAR-FUTURE world devastated by
OVERPOPULATION (see also ECOLOGY). Communion: A True Story (1987) and
Transformation: The Breakthrough (1988) purport to be nonfictional
accounts of his encounters with visiting ALIEN intelligences ( UFOS).
Communion was filmed as COMMUNION (1989). Also centred on ufology is his
sf novel Majestic (1989; rev 1990), whose subject is the so-called Roswell
Incident of 1947 (when, some claim, a UFO crashed in the New Mexico desert
and the US Government mounted an extraordinary cover-up that persists to
this day); putatively based on meticulously researched background detail,
the novel incorporates, without acknowledgement or permission, a summary
derived from secondary sources of David LANGFORD's fictional An Account of
a Meeting with Denizens of Another World, 1871 (1979 as by William Robert
Loosley, ed Langford) ( PSEUDO-SCIENCE). [JC]Other works: Black Magic
(1982); The Night Church (1983); Cat Magic (1986 as Jonathan Barry with
WS; 1987 as WS alone); The Wild (1991); Unholy Fire (1992); The Forbidden
Zone (1993).See also: PARANOIA.
STRIKE, JEREMY
Pseudonym of US writer Thomas E(dward) Renn (1939- ), author of the
unremarkable sf adventure A Promising Planet(1970 dos). [JC]
STRINGER, ARTHUR (JOHN ARBUTHNOTT)
(1874-1956) Canadian writer prolific in several genres from 1894, though
he concentrated on the Canadian genre of survival tales set in the
northern wilds. The Man who Couldn't Sleep (coll 1919 US) and The Wolf
Woman (1928 US) are fantasy. Of sf interest are a film tie, The Story
without a Name * (1924) with Russell Holman, in which a DEATH RAY appears,
and The Woman who Couldn't Die (1929 US), whose Viking heroine, after
spending 900 years in an ice-floe in a LOST WORLD (inhabited by blond
Eskimos whose culture is based upon worshipping her) in northern Canada,
is resurrected through blood transfusions injected by a mad scientist,
only to fall fatally in love with one of his fellow intruders into the
lost world. [JC]
STROBL, K.H.
[r] AUSTRIA.
STRONGI'TH'ARM
Charles Wicksteed ARMSTRONG.
STROUD, ALBERT
[s] Algis BUDRYS.

STRUGATSKI, ARKADY (NATANOVICH)
(1925-1991) and BORIS (NATANOVICH) (1931- ) Russian writers. Before they
began to collaborate in the early 1950s, AS studied English and Japanese,
and worked as a technical translator and editor, and BS was a computer
mathematician at Pulkovo astronomical observatory. The brothers' first
books made up an interplanetary cycle: Strana bagrovykh tuch ["The Country
of Crimson Clouds"] (1959); Shest' spichek ["Six Matches"] (coll 1960);
Put'na Amal'teiu (coll 1960), the lead novella of which was trans Leonid
Kolesnikov as the title story of Destination: Amaltheia (anth 1962 USSR);
Vozvrashchenie (Polden'. 22-i vek) (coll of linked stories 1962; exp to 22
stories vt Polden', XXII vek (Vozvrashchenie) 1967; trans Patrick L.
MCGUIRE as Noon: 22nd Century 1978 US); and Stazhery (coll of linked
stories 1962; trans Antonina W. Bouis as Space Apprentice 1982 US). This
optimistic future HISTORY, set on or near Earth over a two-century period,
espouses the romance of exploration and humanity's UTOPIAN thrust forward
against the forces of Nature, and is acted out by believable vernacular
heroes.A second phase soon began, in which utopian hopefulness did not
survive unscathed. In "Dalekaia Raduga" (1963 Russia; trans Alan Myers as
Far Rainbow 1967 USSR), history, with its pain, invades human existence
through a physical catastrophe (which kills nearly all of the characters
remaining alive from the first cycle). In Trudno byt' bogom (1964; trans
Wendayne Ackerman from the German as Hard to be a God 1973 US) the
darkness of history is - more directly - demonstrated on a feudal planet,
where an observer from Earth finds it impossible to conclude that utopian
intervention on his part will do any more than stun the world into a
numbing dictatorship. But the unaltered world is dangerous and iniquitous,
with premonitions of fascism and Stalinism clearly hinting to the visitor
that, without intervention, huge tragedies will ensue. The successful
marriage of vivid historical novel and sf makes this the brothers'
paradigmatic early work. The book was filmed as TRUDNO BYT' BOGOM
(1989).Far Rainbow later appeared, along with "Vtoroe nashestvie marsian"
(1968) as Far Rainbow/The Second Invasion from Mars (coll trans Bouis [Far
Rainbow] and Gary Kern [Second Invasion] 1979 US); the second tale is a
Jonathan SWIFT-like masterpiece in which the INVASION is seen through the
journal of a philistine who blindly registers the Martians' use of
consumerism and conformity to transform humans into commodities. In this
third phase, the brothers' darkening vision tended to express itself in
VOLTAIRE-style FABULATIONS, where a formal mastery of expressionist plots
cunningly exposed the societal bewilderment and growing bureaucratic
sclerosis of their native Russia. In Ponedel'nik nachinaetsia v subbotu
(1965; trans Leonid Renen as Monday Begins on Saturday 1977 US), folktale
motifs are masterfully updated to embody in a dark picaresque the black
and white MAGIC of modern alienated science and society. The sequel,
Skazka o troike (1968 in a Russian magazine; 1972 Germany; trans Bouis as
Tale of the Troika), which appeared with "Piknik na obochine" (1972
Avrora; trans Bouis as Roadside Picnic) in Roadside Picnic/Tale of the
Troika (coll 1977 US), even more bleakly exposed the
"scientifico-administrative" bureaucracy of the time. Roadside Picnic was
turned by the brothers into 11 different scenarios for Andrei TARKOVSKY's
STALKER (1979). The two stories, as published together in English, are an
ideal introduction to this phase of their career. A final third-phase

tale, Ulitka na sklone (part 1 in Ellinskii sekret [anth 1966] as
"Kandid", part 2 1968 Baikal as "Pepper"; trans Alan Myers as The Snail on
the Slope fixup 1980 US), is constructed as two interlocked stories set in
an overpoweringly alien forest swamp; the two protagonists, Kandid and
Pepper, respond differently to the world, the first in a "naive" stream of
consciousness, the second in the guise of a Kafkaesque bureaucrat. The
Kandid sequences are remarkably eloquent. The overall title is an image of
the uncertainties of knowing: humanity climbs towards knowledge as a snail
climbs a mountain.A fourth and even more sombre phase begins with the
Maxim Trilogy - Obitaemyi ostrov (1969-71; trans Helen Saltz Jacobson as
Prisoners of Power 1978 US), "Zhuk v muraveinike" (1979-80 Znanie-sila;
trans Bouis as Beetle in the Anthill 1980 US) and "Volney gasiat veter"
(1985-6 Znanie-sila; trans Bouis as The Time Wanderers 1987 US) - in which
the sometimes consoling glow of fable is stripped from abrupt and violent
stories as the (at times) incongruously juvenile heroes confront scenes of
increasing alienation and desperation. In Gadkie lebedi (1966-7 in a
Russian magazine; 1972 Germany [edn disavowed]; trans A.E. and A.
Nakhimovsky as THE UGLY SWANS 1979 US [also disavowed]; trans as Children
of Rain c1987 USSR), the metaphysical swamp of The Snail on the Slope is
transfigured into a mysterious fog which envelops Moscow, and which seems
to engender all manner of intrusions. The fog is a signal of the death of
the old world, and a highly dubious harbinger of a new: the children of
the tale, justifying its title (a play on that of the famous fable by Hans
Christian Andersen), seem to be entering into metamorphosis and a future
which may (possibly) be bright. "Za milliard let do kontsa sveta" (1976-7
Znanie-sila; trans Bouis as Definitely Maybe: A Manuscript Discovered
under Unusual Circumstances 1978 US) again combines fable and a bleak
depiction of the social world as SCIENTISTS attempt (in a manner evocative
of the work of Stanislaw LEM) to parse an implacably unknowable "force"
which seems to be paralysing human progress.Their last works, published
only in the glasnost period, were: Khromaia sud'ba ["Lame Destiny"] (fixup
1989), which intertwines THE UGLY SWANS with other material from 1986;
Grad obrechennyi ["The Doomed City"] (written 1970-87; 1989), perhaps
their weightiest work to date; and Otiagoshchennye zlom, ili sorok let
spustia ["Burdened by Evil, or 40 Years After"] (1989), which was
evocative of the work of Mikhail BULGAKOV. Over their career, the brothers
moved from a comparatively sunny vision in which utopia could be aimed at
in the NEAR FUTURE to a sense that the tensions between utopian ethics and
the inscrutable overwhelmingness of stasis were in fact irresolvable. They
became the best Soviet sf writers, legitimate continuers of a Russian
tradition extending from Nikolai Gogol ( RUSSIA) and Shchedrin (Mikhail E.
Saltykov [1826-1889]) to Vladimir MAYAKOVSKY and Yuri Olesha (1889-1960);
and half a dozen of their novels, in their recognition that a people
without cognitive ethics devolves into a predatory bestiary, approach
major literature. After the death of Arkady in 1991, it remained uncertain
whether or not Boris would continue writing alone. [DS]Other works:
Khishchnye veshchi veka (1965; trans Leonid Renen as The Final Circle of
Paradise 1976 US);"Otel' 'U pogibshchego alpinista'" ["Hotel 'To the Lost
Climber'" (1970 Iunost'), filmed in 1979 (vt Dead Mountaineer Hotel) and
trans as The Hotel of the Lost Alpinist (a ghost title because the
English-language publisher went out of business); Escape Attempt (coll

trans 1982 US).As editors: The Molecular Cafe (anth 1968 Russia), ed anon.
About the authors: "Criticism of the Strugatskii Brothers' Work" by Darko
SUVIN, Canadian-American Slavic Studies #2 (Summer 1972); "The Literary
Opus of the Strugatskii Brothers" by Suvin, Canadian-American Slavic
Studies #3 (Fall 1974); "Future History, Soviet Style: The Work of the
Strugatsky Brothers" by Patrick L. MCGUIRE, Critical Encounters #11 ed Tom
Staicar; Soviet Fiction since Stalin: Science, Politics, and Literature
(1986) by R.J. Marsh; The Second Marxian Invasion: The Fiction of the
Strugatsky Brothers (1991) by Stephen W. Potts.See also: DISCOVERY AND
INVENTION; GODS AND DEMONS; JUPITER; PHYSICS; POLITICS; SUPERMAN.
STRYKER
George MILLER
STRYKER, DANIEL
Chris MORRIS.
STUART, ALEX R.
Stuart GORDON.
STUART, DON A.
John W. CAMPBELL Jr.
STUART, (HENRY) FRANCIS (MONTGOMERY)
(1902- ) Irish writer, perceptions of whose long and controversial career
were shaped by the fact that - although averse to Nazism - he stayed in
Berlin during WWII as an Irish neutral, an experience recounted with chill
brilliance in Black List, Section H (1971 US), his most famous single
novel. Of his many books, some are fantasy, including Women and God (1931
UK), Try the Sky (1933 UK), A Hole in the Head (1977 UK) and Faillandia
(1985), the latter book set in an imaginary Ireland in the throes of a
military takeover. Pigeon Irish (1932 UK), set in a bleak battle-torn
NEAR-FUTURE Europe, is sf, as is Glory (1933 UK), in which the
world-dominating Trans-Continental Aero-Routes corporation is threatened
by intrigues. [JC]
STUART, IAN
Alistair MACLEAN.
STUART, SIDNEY
Michael AVALLONE.
STUART, W.J.
Philip MACDONALD.
STUFF, THE
Film (1985). Larco/New World. Prod (with Peter Sabiston) and dir Larry
COHEN, starring Michael Moriarty, Andrea Marcovicci, Garrett Morris,
Patrick O'Neal. Screenplay Cohen. 87 mins. Colour.The Stuff is an
addictive, gooey fast food which, though passive, is in all other respects
a traditional monster; this MONSTER MOVIE is, in the Cohen manner, an
atypical one. The baleful Stuff, originally found in a hole in the ground,
takes over its victims when they eat it, sometimes rendering them
homicidal. Moriarty plays with verve the industrial spy hired by other

food manufacturers to get the truth about this new commercial success, and
a satire ensues on corporate and individual greed, private right-wing
armies, conformity and the nuclear family. This is a silly, not very well
organized film that occasionally surprises with moments of truth and even
of real horror. [PN]
STURGEON, THEODORE
(1918-1985) Working name of US writer born Edward Hamilton Waldo in New
York City, later adopting his stepfather's surname and taking on a new
first name; Argyll (coll 1993 chap) prints a long anguished letter TS
wrote to his stepfather, plus an autobiographical essay from 1965, both of
which more than confirm the hints of emotional turmoil implied by these
name changes. Certainly TS early suffered or entered into several exiles:
illness cut him off from any chance he might become a gymnast; when still
a teenager he went to sea, where he spent 3 years while at the same time
making his first fiction sales (1937) to McClure's syndicate for newspaper
publication; after beginning to publish sf with "Ether Breather" for ASF
(1939) he remained active as a member of the small band of genre-sf
writers for only a few years before he abruptly stopped producing; he then
spent half a decade abroad, variously employed, before returning to his
primary career in 1946. The next 15 years saw him produce, in an almost
constant flood, virtually all the remaining stories and novels for which
he is remembered. Then, for the last 25 years of his life, except for 2-3
short periods of renewed flow, he was silent. Given that all of TS's best
work somehow or other moves from alienation to some form of transcendent
community, it might - crassly - be suggested that, in his own life, it was
story-writing itself which represented that blissful movement towards
acceptance and resolution which makes so many of his tales so emotionally
fulfilling, and that when he was silent he was in exile. Certainly there
can be no denying the green force that shoots through even the silliest
PULP-MAGAZINE conceits to which he put his mind, or the sense of achieved
and joyful tour de force generated by his best work.He had, one might say,
a binary career: either he was writing nothing or he was writing at a high
pitch. Of his approximately 175 stories, a very high proportion are as
successful as he was allowed to be in a field not well designed, during
his active years, to accommodate sf tales told with raw passion. TS was,
in fact, initially less comfortable with ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION than
with UNKNOWN, and that magazine's demise may have had something to do with
his first departure from the field. In those first 3 years, however, he
produced more than 25 stories, all in ASF and Unknown, using the
pseudonyms E. Waldo Hunter or E. Hunter Waldo on occasions when he had 2
stories in an issue; several of the 25 remain among his best known,
including "It" (1940 ASF; 1948 chap) and "Microcosmic God" (1941). Along
with A.E. VAN VOGT, Robert A. HEINLEIN and Isaac ASIMOV, TS was a central
contributor to and shaper of John W. CAMPBELL Jr's so-called GOLDEN AGE OF
SF, though less comfortably than his colleagues, as even in those early
years, while obeying the generic commands governing the creation of
Campbellian technological or HARD SF, he was also writing sexually
threatening, explorative tales like "Bianca's Hands" which, refused by US
markets, finally appeared in the UK in 1947.In the late 1940s and the
1950s TS came into his full stride, and almost all his collections sort

and resort this material. They are Without Sorcery (coll 1948; cut vt Not
Without Sorcery 1961), E PLURIBUS UNICORN (coll 1953), A Way Home (coll
1955; with 2 stories cut 1956; with 3 stories cut, vt Thunder and Roses
1957 UK), Caviar (coll 1955), A Touch of Strange (coll 1958; with 2
stories cut 1959), Aliens 4 (coll 1959), Beyond (coll 1960), Sturgeon in
Orbit (coll 1964), . . . And My Fear is Great/Baby is Three (coll 1965),
Starshine (coll 1966; 3 uncollected stories plus reprints), The Worlds of
Theodore Sturgeon (coll 1972), The Stars are the Styx (coll 1979), The
Golden Helix (coll 1979) and Alien Cargo (coll 1984). A late compilation,
A Touch of Sturgeon (coll 1987 UK) ed David PRINGLE, usefully selects from
this mass; and a definitive attempt to publish his entire short fiction
began with The Ultimate Egoist (coll 1994) ed Paul WILLIAMS. Although he
continued to contribute to ASF for several years, most of the work
assembled in these collections first appeared in newer and more flexible
markets like GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION, where he published much of his best
work after 1950. Though shibboleths ( TABOOS) still haunted editors of
GENRE SF, he clearly felt increasingly free to write stories expressive of
his sense that sexual diversity, sexual "abnormality" and love - however
manifested - constituted a set of codes or maps capable of leading maimed
adolescents out of alienation and into the light. Though most of his
explorations of this material seem unexceptionable in 1992, stories like
"The World Well Lost" (1953), about ALIENS exiled from their own culture
because of their homosexuality, created considerable stir in the 1950s (
SEX). Though the road to liberation (or transcendent community) was
sometimes solely internal, the dictates of sf and fantasy, and TS's own
romantic impulses, generated a large number of tales in which CHILDREN,
gifted with paranormal powers, must fight against a repressive world until
they meet others of their kind. TS's short stories read like instruction
manuals for finding the new world.The most famous examples of the sense of
enablement he generated, however, were his 3 best novels. The Dreaming
Jewels (1950; vt The Synthetic Man 1957) is an enjoyable and sophisticated
tale whose young protagonist, forced to run away to a circus by wicked
step-parents, gradually becomes aware of his powers, and defeats the evil
adult forces about him. MORE THAN HUMAN (fixup 1953), winner of the 1954
INTERNATIONAL FANTASY AWARD and TS's most famous single title, consists of
3 connected stories, "Baby is Three" (1952 Gal) plus 2 novellas written
around it. With very considerable intensity it depicts the coming together
of 6 deeply alienated "freaks" into a PSI-POWERED gestalt, where they
achieve true maturity. In The Cosmic Rape (1958) a HIVE-MIND from the
stars invades mankind but finds itself - to its ultimate betterment catalysing Homo sapiens as a racial entity into one gestalt: the sense of
homecoming generated by the final pages of this short book is deeply
touching.Though TS won both HUGO and NEBULA for one of his infrequent
later stories, "Slow Sculpture" (1970), his later career was not happy.
Venus Plus X (1960), however, bravely came as close to a traditional
UTOPIA as any US genre-sf writer had approached before the efforts of Mack
REYNOLDS. Charlie Johns awakens in Ledom (that is, Model), a melodious
unisex society, longingly and effectively depicted as having transcended
that sexual divisiveness of mankind against which TS always argued, and
finds that he has been roused so as to examine Ledom and judge its
success. Though he discovers to his distress that the androgynous bliss of

Ledom depends not on a mutation but on surgery immediately after birth,
the final message of the novel combines didactic arguments for and against
this vision of human paradise with longing for its realization. Later
stories were assembled in Sturgeon is Alive and Well . . . (coll 1971) and
Case and the Dreamer (coll 1974). Godbody (1986), a short novel on which
he had been working for some time before his death, weakly reiterates
earlier paeans to transcendence. But the continued publication of stories
from the years of his prime helped maintain an appropriate sense of TS as
a writer of very considerable stature. His influence upon writers like
Harlan ELLISON and Samuel R. DELANY was seminal, and in his life and work
he was a powerful and generally liberating influence in post-WWII US sf.
Though his mannerisms were sometimes self-indulgent, though his excesses
of sympathy for tortured adolescents sometimes gave off a sense of
self-pity, and though his technical experiments were perhaps less
substantial than their exuberance made them seem, his very faults
illuminated the stresses of being a US author writing for pay in an
alienated era and in the solitude of his craft. [JC]Other works: The Rare
Breed (1966), a Western, as are the stories in Sturgeon's West (coll
1973), 3 of which are with Don Ward; I, Libertine (1956), a historical
novel as by Frederick R. Ewing; The King and Four Queens (1956), a
detective novel; Some of Your Blood (1961), a non-sf study of a
blood-drinking psychotic; Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea * (1961), a
novelization of VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA (1961); an Ellery Queen
detection, The Player on the Other Side (1963) as by Ellery Queen; The
Joyous Invasions (coll 1965 UK), which includes 2 stories from Aliens 4
together with "To Marry Medusa", which was later exp as The Cosmic Rape,
both being reissued as The Cosmic Rape and "To Marry Medusa" (coll 1977);
To Here and the Easel (coll 1973 UK), all stories previously collected;
Amok Time * (graph 1978), a STAR TREK "fotonovel"; More Than Human: The
Graphic Story Version (graph 1979); Maturity: Three Stories (coll 1979);
Pruzy's Pot (1972 The National Lampoon; 1986 chap); The [Widget], the
[Wadget], and Boff (1955 FSF; 1989 dos); The Dreaming Jewels/The Cosmic
Rape/Venus Plus X (omni 1990).About the author: Theodore Sturgeon: A
Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1980) and Theodore Sturgeon (1981
chap), both by Lahna F. Diskin; Theodore Sturgeon (1981) by Lucy
Menger.See also: BIOLOGY; CITIES; CLONES; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH;
DEFINITIONS OF SF; DIMENSIONS; ESP; EVOLUTION; FEMINISM; GODS AND
DEMONS;
GREAT AND SMALL; INVASION; ISLANDS; LIVINGWORLDS; MACHINES; The
MAGAZINE
OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MARS; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MESSIAHS; NEW
WORLDS; NUCLEAR POWER; PARANOIA; POWER SOURCES; PSYCHOLOGY;
REINCARNATION;
RELIGION; SCIENTISTS; SOCIOLOGY; SUPERMAN; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES;
THEODORE STURGEON MEMORIAL AWARD; TRANSPORTATION; UNDER THE SEA;
WRITERS
OF THE FUTURE CONTEST.
STURGIS, MEL
[r] Kris NEVILLE.

SUBMARINES
TRANSPORTATION; UNDER THE SEA.
SUBMERSION OF JAPAN, THE
NIPPON CHINBOTSU.
SUBURBAN COMMANDO
Film (1991). New Line Cinema. Dir Burt Kennedy, starring Hulk Hogan,
Christopher Lloyd, Shelley Duvall, Larry Miller. Screenplay by Frank
Capello. 90 mins. Colour.This modest, affable sf comedy about a large,
rough, humanoid ALIEN (pro wrestling star Hogan) who crashlands on Earth
after being temporarily retired as an interstellar righter of wrongs, sets
its sights rather low, and does quite well. The primitive but effective
humour is in the wish-fulfilment fantasy of seeing one kind of nastiness as found in a somewhat blue-collar Californian suburb - getting its
comeuppance from a more "decent" brand of brutality. Lloyd plays the
put-upon husband who learns not to let them kick sand in his face, and
helps defeat the MONSTER disguised as a human who seeks to rule the
Galaxy. [PN]
SUCHARITKUL, SOMTOW (PAPINIAN)
[r] S.P. SOMTOW.
SUCHDOLSKY, METOD
[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
SUDDABY, (WILLIAM) DONALD
(1900-1964) UK writer, mostly for children, who began publishing work of
genre interest as Alan Griff with stories like "House of Desolation" for
Cornhill in 1934; his first sf book, a novel for adults, was Lost Men in
the Grass (1940) ( GREAT AND SMALL) as by Griff. The third novella
assembled in Masterless Swords: Variations on a Theme (coll of linked
stories 1947) is set in a future where men wage war on women. DS soon
became - and remained - best known for his juvenile sf novels, beginning
with The Star Raiders (1950) and The Death of Metal (1952); the most
notable is perhaps Village Fanfare, or The Man from the Future (1934
Cornhill as by Griff; much exp 1954), a TIME-TRAVEL tale in which a 1907
Shropshire village is visited from the future by a man looking for, and
finding, human wisdom in his past. Prisoners of Saturn (1957) is a SPACE
OPERA. Some of DS's non-sf books, like Tower of Babel (1962), have some
fantasy content. [JC]Other work: Scarlet-Dragon: A Little Chinese Phantasy
(1923 chap).See also: CHILDREN'S SF.
SUFFLING, MARK
Donald S. ROWLAND.
SULLIVAN, (EDWARD) ALAN
(1868-1947) Canadian writer who spent much of his adult life in the UK,
and who was prolific in various genres, including detective fiction as
Sinclair Murray. His fantasies include The Jade God (1924), In the Days of
their Youth (1926), The Magic Makers (1930), Mr Absalom (1930) and ". . .
And from that Day" (1944). Of sf interest is In the Beginning (1927), a
LOST-WORLD tale set - as so often in the early 20th century - in the
Andes; this one contains ancient species and some Neanderthals (unusually

far south). In A Little Way Ahead (1929) an ordinary man, suddenly
becoming prescient, makes money on the Stock Exchange, but is doomed by
personal flaws. [JC]
SULLIVAN, SEAN MEI
Jerry SOHL.
SULLIVAN, SHEILA (P.)
(1927- ) UK writer, sometimes of criticism as by Sheila Bathurst. Her sf
novel Summer Rising (1975; vt The Calling of Bara 1976 US) depicts a postHOLOCAUST trek across a peaceful Ireland. [JC]
SULLIVAN, TIM(OTHY ROBERT)
(1948- ) US writer and editor who began publishing sf with stories like
"My Father's Head" for Chrysalis 5 (anth 1979) ed Roy TORGESON and "The
Rauncher Goes to Tinker Town" for New Dimensions 9 (anth 1979) ed Robert
SILVERBERG, tales whose sophistication led to some disappointment when his
first-published novels turned out to be 3 "V" ties: "V": The Florida
Project * (1985), "V": The New England Resistance * (1985) and "V": To
Conquer the Throne * (1987). The published order of TS's books is,
however, deceptive, as his first-written novel, Destiny's End (1988),
suffered delays and modifications from its initially intended publisher.
The book proved to be a complexly moody depiction of humanity at the end
of its tether in an array of DYING-EARTH venues, as ALIEN races with
quasimagical technologies manipulate the course of events. The Parasite
War (1989) and The Martian Viking (1991) likewise demonstrate a nascent
vigour, and TM seems to be one of those authors whose time might, finally,
come.Two anthologies, Tropical Chills (anth 1988) and Cold Shocks (anth
1991), composed of carefully selected original and reprinted material,
mostly horror, demonstrate TM's editorial acuteness. [JC]
SULLIVAN, VERNON
Boris VIAN.
SUMMERS, DENNIS
G.J. BARRETT.
SUN
The Sun, as the energy-source which permits life to exist on Earth, was
widely worshipped in the ancient world. After the Copernican Revolution it
became the hub of the Universe, but with the advent of a broader view of
the cosmos it lost some of its prestige. Some speculative writers of the
19th century considered it a world like any other and included it in
cosmic tours; examples are the anonymous Journeys into the Moon, Several
Planets and the Sun (1837) and Joel R. Peabody's A World of Wonders
(1838). Several early sf stories, assuming the Sun to be sustained by
combustion, anticipated the day when it would burn out; examples are
Camille FLAMMARION's Omega (1893-4), H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE (1895),
George C. WALLIS's "The Last Days of Earth" (1901) and William Hope
HODGSON's The House on the Borderland (1908) ( END OF THE WORLD). Clark
Ashton SMITH recalls the imagery of Hodgson's novel in "Phoenix" (1954), a
poignant but anachronistic story about the reignition of the dying Sun (by
the time the story was written - in the 1930s - it had long been known

that the Sun produced heat by nuclear fusion), an idea ingeniously
recapitulated in Gene WOLFE's Book of the New Sun series (1980-83).
Although the Sun's surface temperature had been established
spectroscopically in the 1890s, John MASTIN was still able to imagine, in
Through the Sun in an Airship (1909), exactly such a voyage, and H. KANER
set The Sun Queen (1946) on a sunspot.J.B.S. HALDANE's "The Last Judgment"
(1927) and Olaf STAPLEDON's LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930) imagine changes in
the Sun's brilliance as crucial factors in Man's future EVOLUTION. In "Ark
of Fire" (1943) by John Hawkins the Earth is moved nearer to the Sun, with
predictable consequences for surface life. In numerous DISASTER stories
the Sun goes nova, although some humans usually manage to escape, as in J.
T. MCINTOSH's One in Three Hundred (1954). In Edmond HAMILTON's
"Thundering Worlds" (1934) the 9 planets themselves become interstellar
wanderers, accelerating towards a new star. In Arthur C. CLARKE's "Rescue
Party" (1946) ALIENS arrive to save mankind but find that their aid is
unnecessary, and in Norman SPINRAD's The Solarians (1966) the nova is
induced to destroy an alien spacefleet, while the human race makes its
escape. In Edward WELLEN's Hijack (1971) disinformation about such a nova
is used in order to trick the Mafia into hijacking a spacefleet and
blasting off for the stars. Stories which make a detailed study of
reactions to the news that the Sun may go nova include Hugh KINGSMILL's
"The End of the World" (1924) and Larry NIVEN's "Inconstant Moon" (1971).
The hero of George O. SMITH's Troubled Star (1953) discovers that aliens
want to make the Sun into a variable star so that it may serve as an
interstellar lighthouse.The notion that the Sun might be the abode of life
is developed in Stapledon's The Flames (1947) and Hamilton's "Sunfire!"
(1962). Sun-consuming lifeforms hatch out of the planets in Jack
WILLIAMSON's improbable "Born of the Sun" (1934). The idea that STARS
might be living beings has been developed on several occasions, but not
often applied to our own Sun; Gregory BENFORD's and Gordon EKLUND's "If
the Stars are Gods" (1974; incorporated into If the Stars are Gods, fixup
1977) is ambiguous in this respect. The Sun's significance as a religious
symbol is further exploited in The Day the Sun Stood Still (anth 1972) ed
Robert SILVERBERG, which features 3 novellas based on the premise that the
miracle granted to Joshua so that he could win a vital battle might be
repeated tomorrow to persuade mankind of the reality of divine power.The
Sun often figures in GENRE SF as a potential disaster area ready to
consume spaceships which stray too close; examples are Willy LEY's "At the
Perihelion" (1937 as by Robert Willey; vt "A Martian Adventure"), Hal
CLEMENT's "Sun Spot" (1960), Poul ANDERSON's "What'll You Give?" (1963 as
by Winston P. Sanders; vt "Que Donn'rez Vous?") and George Collyn's "In
Passage of the Sun" (1966). The weather technicians of Theodore L.
THOMAS's "The Weather Man" (1962), however, skim across the surface of the
Sun in "sessile boats" in order to control its radiation output. A spate
of dangerous radiation from the Sun plays a key role in Philip E. HIGH's
Prodigal Sun (1964), which was presumably written around its awful titular
pun; the Earth is saved through the creation of an artificial shielding
layer of gas in the upper atmosphere. A spectacular close encounter by a
space-station takes place in Charles L. HARNESS's Flight into Yesterday
(1949; 1953; vt The Paradox Men 1955 dos), and an even more spectacular
one in David BRIN's Sundiver (1980), the sf novel to date which deals most

extensively and most scrupulously with modern scientific knowledge about
the Sun.One curious aspect of the Sun's behaviour, the 11-year sunspot
cycle discovered by Heinrich Schwabe (1789-1875) in 1851, is
hypothetically correlated with Earthly events in Clifford D. SIMAK's
"Sunspot Purge" (1940) and Philip LATHAM's "Disturbing Sun" (1959). The
SOLAR WIND is featured in a number of sf stories. [BS]
SUPERBOY
US tv series (1988-91). An Alexander and Ilya Salkind Production, for
syndication. Executive prod Ilya Salkind, prod Robert Simmonds. Dirs
included Reza S. Badiyi, Colin Chilvers, Peter Kiwitt, David Grossman,
David Nutter, Richard J. Lewis. Writers included Fred Freiberger, Cary
Bates, Mark Jones, Toby Martin, Michael Carlin and Andrew Helfer, David
GERROLD. 3 seasons, 78 25min episodes in all. Colour.The Salkinds, who
made 3 of the SUPERMAN movies, here returned with a brisk, not very
expensive series based on the teenage years of Clark Kent at Shuster
University (Joe Shuster [1914-1991] was co-creator of Superman), where he
is studying with his childhood friend, glamorous Lana Lang. The time is,
anachronistically, the present. Cast changes were confusing: John Haymes
Newton played Superboy (woodenly) in season 1, then was replaced by Gerard
Christopher; Scott Wells played Lex Luthor in season 1, then was replaced
by Sherman Howard. Lana Lang was played by Stacy Haiduk, and cub reporter
T.J. White (son of Daily Planet editor Perry White) by Jim Calvert. At
only half an hour per episode there was not much room for complex
plotting. There was a laudable variety of villains (golems, werewolves,
other-dimensional imps, androids, aliens and succubi among them), but the
treatment was mostly routine. In season 3 Lana and Clark go to work for
the Bureau for Extra-Normal Matters. [PN]
SUPERCAR
UK tv series (1961-2). AP Films/ATV/ITC. From an idea by Gerry ANDERSON
and Reg Hill, produced by Anderson. Dirs included David Elliott, Alan
Pattillo, Desmond Saunders, Bill Harris. Writers were either Gerry and
Sylvia Anderson or Martin and Hugh Woodhouse. 2 seasons, 39 25min episodes
in all. B/w.This was the first of Anderson's SuperMarionation sf series
for children. Supercar, which can also travel under the sea and through
the air, was invented by Professor Popkiss and is driven by Mike Mercury
(or sometimes the talking monkey Mitch). Constant efforts to steal
Supercar are made by Masterspy. Some of the storylines are sf (mad
scientists, supermagnets); some are merely crime-fighting. The series was
a big success, and sold in the USA. More SuperMarionation series followed
( Gerry and Sylvia ANDERSON for details). [PN]
SUPERGIRL
Film (1984). Artistry/Cantharus. Dir Jeannot Szwarc, starring Helen
Slater, Faye Dunaway, Peter O'Toole, Peter Cook, Brenda Vaccaro.
Screenplay David Odell, based on the Supergirl comic. 124 mins.
Colour.This is the last and least successful of the 4
SUPERMAN-and-spin-off films made by the Salkinds before they sold the
rights to Golan and Globus of Cannon Films, who went on to make SUPERMAN
IV. S is basically fantasy. The Omegahedron, a power source from Krypton's
Argo City, is lost and Supergirl (nee Kara) goes to Earth in search of it.

It has fallen into the hands of a sorceress, Selena (Dunaway). Female
superpowers are interestingly seen in terms of natural fertility rather
than physical strength: bunnies and flowers surround sweet teenager
Supergirl (Slater). The film has imaginative moments (the mountain
fortress that appears in the high street, the Dore-inspired Phantom Zone)
but is also incoherent and trite, and haltingly directed by a graduate
from tv, Szwarc, whose most acceptable sf film was his first, BUG
(1975).The novelization is Supergirl* (1984) by Norma Fox Mazer.[PN]
SUPERHEROES
Superhero fiction is a genre invented in COMICS; since then it has
infiltrated the CINEMA, RADIO, TELEVISION and books. Sf stories of
supermen go back to the beginning of the century, but the particular
version of the superman theme that established the "superhero" pattern
began in Action Comics (June 1938) when the comic-book hero SUPERMAN made
his first appearance; he was soon given his own comic. Imitations soon
appeared, including CAPTAIN MARVEL (from 1940), Wonder Woman (from 1942),
Plastic Man (from 1944), Human Torch (from 1939), Captain America (from
1941) and so on. These characters differed from the PULP-MAGAZINE heroes
of the 1930s, like DOC SAVAGE, who, though highly trained and with access
to superscientific devices, were ordinary human beings; superheroes had
superpowers which, despite their varying sf rationalizations, were
effectively MAGIC abilities. (One hugely popular borderline superhero is
Batman, created as a character in 1939 and given his own comic in 1940: he
has no superpowers, and is in the line of descent from Doc Savage, not
Superman.) However, superheroes and HEROES of the period were alike in
that both spent much of their working hours struggling against crime often crime carried out by mad SCIENTISTS seeking to rule the world - and
in this important respect hero-fiction and superhero fiction formed a
continuum rather than two different genres. Also, then as now, superhero
fiction was (most of the time) only a borderline-sf genre. Most of the
action took place in a comic-book version of the real world, against
gangsters, secret agents and the like; the borderline-sf elements lay in
the origin of the superhero (Superman, for example, getting his power from
his birth on the alien planet Krypton) and secondarily in the often
superscientific devices used by the VILLAINS. (In this Encyclopedia we
have therefore been somewhat selective in choosing which superhero comics,
films and tv series should be given entries.)Having begun in the comics,
superheroes soon started appearing in other media: children's books, radio
serials and film serials at first. After intensive activity in the 1940s,
the superhero theme came to seem rather played out by the 1950s, since its
possible story variations seemed few. It was in the comics, again, that
the superhero found a new lease of life, notably in the work Jack KIRBY
did for MARVEL COMICS, and especially in his creation of The Fantastic
Four in 1961. (For many years Marvel propaganda had it that Stan LEE was
the true creator of the Marvel superheroes of the 1960s, with Kirby merely
the artist assigned to carry out instructions. The now- dominant
revisionist view is that Kirby was the presiding genius of the new
superhero format, which among other things involved enormous advances in
the techniques of comic-book ILLUSTRATION.) Superheros became humanized;
they aged, had neuroses, suffered angst; they often behaved badly;

sometimes they were corrupted by their constant battle against the tawdry
and the criminal; some superheroes chose to become supervillains instead;
sometimes they even had sex lives (unlike the prissy and celibate
Superman). In short, they became very much more interesting. These changes
did not happen overnight; they began with The Fantastic Four, but
developed in The Incredible Hulk from 1962, The Amazing Spider-Man in his
own comic from 1963, X-MEN (from 1963) and so on. The complex stories
developed in The Fantastic Four were particularly memorable (and
sciencefictional) when the Four found themselves pitted against Galactus,
and especially in those issues containing the most surreal superhero of
all, the temperamental and reviled Silver Surfer, imprisoned in Earth's
atmosphere by Galactus, riding capriciously through space on his surfboard
and sometimes saving Earth. He had his own comic for a while, The Silver
Surfer (1968-70).Superhero fiction since the 1960s, while it has remained
often repetitive and simplistic in its mass-market manifestations, has
developed, here and there, an extremely sophisticated edge-sometimes in
mass-market comics but more often in GRAPHIC NOVELS. One landmark was
Frank MILLER's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986), which re-created
Batman in darker, more painful shades than ever before, but the
outstanding critique of the superhero comic from within the genre itself
is Alan MOORE's WATCHMEN, a coherent graphic novel which is (unusually) a
true novel in structure; its first publication constituted the 12 issues
of Watchmen (1986-7) from DC COMICS. This is true sf, which confronts with
great imaginative intensity the whole issue of what a society would be
like that did actually contain superheroes, and how corrupting and
fatiguing the state of superheroism might be. Also complex and
sophisticated, beginning at around the same time, is the WILD CARDS series
of original anthologies (from 1987) ed George R.R. MARTIN, in which
superheroes are called"Aces" for fear of copyright infringement. The Wild
Card stories (and the subsequent sequence of graphic books based on them)
imagine, among other things, how superheroes might interact with
historical process. A blackly comic novel which also forms a critique of
the superhero business is Michael BISHOP's Count Geiger's Blues
(1992).Sadly, the increasing intelligence and imagination displayed in
many superhero comics since the 1960s has seldom been reflected in their
tv and film equivalents. We do not include entries for the Spiderman or
Batman movies, or tv series like Batman (1966-8, very influential with its
stylized jokiness) or The Flash (1990 on), even though the latter is more
inventive than most of its kind; both are too far removed from sf proper.
Superhero tv series that do receive entries are The BIONIC WOMAN (1976-8),
The INCREDIBLE HULK (1977-82), The INVISIBLE MAN (1975-6), The MAN FROM
ATLANTIS (1977), The SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN (1973-8), SAPPHIRE AND STEEL
(1979-82), SUPERBOY (1988-91), SUPERMAN (1953-7) and WONDER WOMAN
(1974-9). The notable thing about this list is that all but one (Sapphire
and Steel) are US; the superhero phenomenon is almost exclusively a US
phenomenon. The other notable thing is that these series are nearly all
infantile. One marginal superhero (not usually thought of in that light)
of greater interest than most of the above is Vincent, the Beast in BEAUTY
AND THE BEAST (1987-90); this may be due to George R.R. Martin, its chief
writer, who is very much alive to the mythic resonances of the superhero
genre.In the cinema, the superhero genre managed better, at least in the

SUPERMAN movies, than it normally did on tv, but beyond the Superman films
there is not a great deal of interest. Indeed, in the cinema people with
superpowers often come to a bad end, as in X: THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES
(1963), The 4D MAN (1959), The DEAD ZONE (1983) and The LAWNMOWER MAN
(1992). The protagonists of The RETURN OF CAPTAIN INVINCIBLE (1982), The
TOXIC AVENGER (1984), The TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE (1986), MASTERS OF THE
UNIVERSE (1987), ROBOCOP (1987), DARKMAN (1990) and TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA
TURTLES (1990) cannot be called hardcore superheroes, being respectively a
drunk, disgusting, robots, musclebound, cyborgized, hideously deformed and
pizza-eating adolescent reptiles, although in the new era of superheroes
(these all being films of the 1980s) this rag, tag and bobtail bunch may
represent precisely where the superhero genre now finds itself.The fact
still unrealized by much of the world of letters is that the best
superhero fictions are still to be found where they were found in the
first place: in the comics.[PN]
SUPERMAN
In the same way that theories of EVOLUTION provide an imaginative context
for sf stories about the ORIGIN OF MAN and LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS, so they
govern attitudes to superhumans. There is a significant difference,
though, between Darwin-inspired images of a "fitter"species and images
inspired by Lamarckian and Bergsonian ideas of"creative evolution", in
which the emergence of a superman might be the result of humankind's
fervent desire to become something finer. Also of some relevance-although
its direct influence on sf is minimal-is the philosophy of Friedrich
Nietzsche (1844-1900), with its heavy emphasis on the life-enhancing"will
to [creative] power" which might be brought to full flower in
the"Ubermensch", or "overman" .Early sf writers were surprisingly loth to
make the superman an outright figure of menace, even where Darwinian
thought was dominant: although they usually conceded that there was no
place for them in contemporary human society, and generally disposed of
them in one way or another, most were very much on the side of the
superhumans. The reasons are simple enough: most of the early writers
concerned were harshly critical of the contemporary human condition and
wholly in favour of"progress"; moreover, writers frequently credit
themselves with a proto- superhuman viewpoint. It is very easy to love the
notion of the superman if we believe that we might become supermen
ourselves, or at least be parent to their becoming; it is for this reason
that Bergsonian ideas are more frequently echoed in superman stories than
Darwinian ones, and some works-most notably George Bernard SHAW's Back to
Methuselah (1921)-are based on an explicit neo-Lamarckism. Both the
Darwin-inspired H.G. WELLS, in The Food of the Gods (1904), and the
Bergson-inspired J.D. BERESFORD , in The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911), are
allied with their superhuman characters, agreeing with their indictments
of the follies of contemporary man. The same is true of two other classic
SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES directly inspired by Beresford: E.V. ODLE's The
Clockwork Man (1923) and Olaf STAPLEDON's Odd John (1935)-although the
former carefully keeps its real superhumans (the makers of the eponymous
CYBORG) offstage, as does Claude HOUGHTON in This was Ivor Trent (1935)
whose hysterical climax represents the extremity of UK interbellum
disenchantment. The fascination which writers of scientific romance had

for the idea of superhumanity is displayed also in M.P. SHIEL's Ubermensch
stories, The Isle of Lies (1909) and The Young Men are Coming (1937),
Muriel JAEGER's The Man with Six Senses (1927) and Hermes Speaks (1933),
John HARGRAVE's The Imitation Man (1931), Wells's Star-Begotten (1937),
Andrew MARVELL's Minimum Man (1938), Beresford's "What Dreams May Come
..." (1941) and Stapledon's A Man Divided (1950). Guy DENT's Emperor of
the If (1926) is especially interesting in its sceptical examination of
the hypothesis that a more challenging environment would have produced a
fitter and better mankind.In France, Bergson's one-time pupil Alfred JARRY
produced a comic erotic fantasia of superhumanity in The Supermale (1902;
trans 1968) but The New Adam (1924; trans 1926) by Noelle ROGER, working
under the inspiration of religious rather than scientific ideas, presents
an emotionless ultrarationalistic superman as a straightforward figure of
menace. In the USA Philip WYLIE put an ordinary human mind into a
superhuman body in Gladiator (1930), and thus avoided the whole issue of
INTELLIGENCE, but his heroic superman decides of his own accord that there
is no place for him in human society and invites God to strike him dead;
God (no friend of evolution) obliges.In early GENRE SF the superman was
used as a figure of menace by John Russell FEARN in The Intelligence
Gigantic (1933; 1943), but Fearn gradually relented: the short version of
The Golden Amazon (1939 as by Thornton Ayre; rev 1944) is similar, but in
the novel version, and even more so in its many sequels, superwoman Violet
Ray is a comic-style caped crusader. The MUTANT superman in John TAINE's
Seeds of Life (1931; 1951) is also menacing, meeting his end in a
particularly horrible manner; but there is some attempt to analyse his
viewpoint with sympathy. In Stanley G. WEINBAUM's"The Adaptive Ultimate"
(1936) a scientist who creates a superwoman has to kill her in order to
protect the world from her ruthlessness, but again there is a tentative
expression of sympathy. Weinbaum had earlier written the posthumously
published The New Adam (1939), a painstaking account of a superhuman
growing up in the human world, treating the hypothesis objectively rather
than intending to criticize the contemporary human condition. The superman
suffers as a result of being a"feral child" among ordinary humans, but his
death does not put an end to the history of his kind. Publication of this
pioneering work was quickly followed by 2 novels that paved the way for a
glut of superhuman HEROES: SLAN (1940; 1946) by A.E. VAN VOGT and DARKER
THAN YOU THINK (1940; 1948) by Jack WILLIAMSON. In the former a persecuted
superchild grows into mature command of his latent powers as he confronts
a sea of troubles; in the latter the hero sets out to fight a species of
the genus Homo which threatens to replace Homo sapiens, but discovers that
he is one of the other species himself, and accepts the dictates of his
genes. In both stories a superman is unhesitatingly offered to the reader
for identification and, far from going to his destruction in the climax,
becomes something of a MESSIAH figure. This new pattern quickly became a
CLICHE of pulp sf. Van Vogt repeated it many times, other versions
including Earth's Last Fortress (1942 ASF as"Recruiting Station"; vt as
title story of Masters of Time [coll 1950]; 1960 dos),"The Changeling"
(1944), The World of A (1945; rev 1948; rev vt The World of Null-A 1970)
and The Pawns of Null-A (1948-9 ASF as "The Players of A";1956; rev vt The
Players of Null-A 1966) and Supermind (fixup 1977). Van Vogt abandoned
writing sf for some years when he became involved with L. Ron HUBBARD's

DIANETICS movement, which translocated this cliche into a PSEUDO-SCIENCE
which in turn transmuted into the RELIGION of SCIENTOLOGY. Williamson,
too, repeated the formula in Dragon's Island (1951; vt The Not-Men
1968).Genre sf of the late 1940s and early 1950s abounded with stories
about groups of noble superhumans-notably covert immortals (
IMMORTALITY)-misunderstood and unjustly persecuted by their stupid,
envious cousins. Great impetus was lent to the theme by the popularization
of J.B. Rhine's experiments in parapsychology ( ESP), which lent credence
to the idea that there might be supermen already among us, not yet aware
of their latent powers. Rhine provided a new archetype for the superhuman,
outwardly normal but possessed of one or more PSI POWERS. John W. CAMPBELL
Jr's interest in Rhine's research and in Dianetics helped to make
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION home to a considerable"psi boom" in the early
1950s. Notable stories of persecuted Rhine-type supermen include Henry
KUTTNER's Baldy series, published as by Lewis Padgett (fixup 1953 as
MUTANT), Wilmar H. SHIRAS 's Children of the Atom (fixup 1953), Zenna
HENDERSON's People series, assembled in Pilgrimage (coll of linked stories
1961) and The People: No Different Flesh (coll of linked stories (1966),
and Wilson TUCKER's Wild Talent (1954). Sympathy for supermen was enhanced
by the frequent use of CHILDREN as protagonists, as in SLAN, Children of
the Atom, James H. SCHMITZ's The Witches of Karres (1949; exp 1966), Kris
NEVILLE's Bettyann (1951-4; fixup 1970) and George O. SMITH's The
Fourth"R" (1959; vt The Brain Machine 1968). (A cautionary note was
sounded by Jerome BIXBY's"It's a Good Life" [1953], in which a superchild
institutes a reign of terror directed towards the gratification of his
every infantile whim.) Physically afflicted supermen were occasionally
employed to the same sympathy-seeking end, as in Theodore
STURGEON's"Maturity" (1947) and John BRUNNER's THE WHOLE MAN (fixup 1964;
vt Telepathist 1965). Sometimes during this period there were secret
organizations of criminal supermen fighting against the good supermen, as
in James BLISH's Jack of Eagles (1951; rev vt ESP-er 1958) and George O.
Smith's Highways in Hiding (1956; cut vt Space Plague 1957), but even
where the superman appears to be used as an outright figure of menace, as
in Frank M. ROBINSON's The Power (1956), the good guy may only be waiting
for his own latent superpowers to develop in order to bring about that
menace's defeat. Similar leap-frogging accounts of confrontation include
Jack VANCE's"Telek" (1951) and Theodore Sturgeon's"... and my fear is
great..." (1953). The everyone-can-be-superman motif reached its ultimate
expression in Poul ANDERSON's Brain Wave (1954), in which the Earth passes
out of a zone of cosmic distortion which has been damping potential
intelligence throughout history, so that even idiots and animals get
smart. The attractiveness of the motif is exploited to the full by comics
SUPERHEROES like SUPERMAN and CAPTAIN MARVEL , whose superness is
concealed by mild-mannered"secret identities". Superhero COMICS were
popular throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and enjoyed subsequent boom
periods in the 1960s-following the resurgence of MARVEL COMICS, whose
heroes were more morally ambiguous, suffering wildly exaggerated versions
of teenage Angst and alienation-and in the 1980s, when GRAPHIC NOVELS lent
the format a new respectability, and when comic-book superheroes spilled
over into narrative fiction in George R.R. MARTIN's WILD CARDS series
of"mosaic novels" (fixups 1986 onwards) and in the Temps series created by

Neil GAIMAN, Alex Stewart (1st vol 1991) et al.L. Ron Hubbard is by no
means the only cult-creator to have sold a pseudo-scientific or
quasireligious version of this motif. Many other contemporary cults offer
their members supposed opportunities to cultivate transcendental powers as
well as arcane knowledge. The idea of the superman, and its development in
fiction, has always been entangled with religious notions of transcendence
and personal salvation ( ESCHATOLOGY), and the achievement of superpowers
in sf stories frequently recalls transcendental imagery of various kinds.
In extreme cases it comes to resemble an apotheosis. The transcendental
version of the superman myth is particularly obvious in certain works by
Charles L. HARNESS, including Flight into Yesterday (1949; exp 1953; vt
The Paradox Men), the memorable novella"The Rose" (1953; title story of
coll 1966) and THE RING OF RITORNEL (1968), and it forms the bases of the
classic novels MORE THAN HUMAN (fixup 1953) by Theodore Sturgeon and
CHILDHOOD'S END (1953) by Arthur C. CLARKE; the former tracks the
maturation of a gestalt of misfit superchildren, and their eventual
transcendental admission to a community of superminds, while the latter
has an entire generation of Earth's children undergoing an apotheosis to
fuse with the cosmic mind. The climax of Clarke's novel bears a striking
resemblance to the ideas put forward by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard
de Chardin (1881-1955) regarding the possible evolutionary future of
humanity within a Bergsonian scheme, as expressed in The Future of Man
(1959; trans 1964). A similar"cosmic mind" is featured in The Uncensored
Man (1964) by Arthur SELLINGS, and superhuman apotheoses are also found in
The Infinite Cage (1972) by Keith LAUMER and Tetrasomy Two (1974) by Oscar
ROSSITER. Images of transcendental rebirth have likewise become common, as
in several novels by Alfred BESTER: THE DEMOLISHED MAN (1953), in which a
psychopathic murderer is"cleansed" of his madness; Tiger! Tiger! (1956; vt
The Stars My Destination 1957 US), in which the superpowered protagonist
moves through time to appear to himself and others as a fire- shrouded
vision, and is eventually cleansed in his turn; and The Computer
Connection (1974; vt Extro), in which supermen recruit others to their
kind by the only process known to them, involving violent death. The
survival after death of Ubermensch characters is featured in CAMP
CONCENTRATION (1968) by Thomas M. DISCH, I Will Fear No Evil (1971) and
Time Enough for Love (1973) by Robert A. HEINLEIN, and Traitor to the
Living (1973) by Philip Jose FARMER. Religious imagery is overt in the
many works by Robert SILVERBERG which couple the notion of superhumanity
with the idea of rebirth, including To Open the Sky (fixup 1967), Downward
to the Earth (1970), Nightwings (fixup 1970), Son of Man (1971), The Book
of Skulls (1972) and"Born with the Dead" (1974). Silverberg's Dying Inside
(1972) is another fantasy of rebirth seen in terms of the loss of a
superhuman power; the decline of ephemeral superhumanity is also a
powerful motif in the classic FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (1959; exp 1966) by
Daniel KEYES. Messianic supermen whose deaths are redemptive appear in the
2 bestselling sf novels of the 1960s, Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE
LAND (1961) and Frank HERBERT's DUNE (1965). The transcendence of
superhuman figures is by no means always quasi-Christian; the
MYTHOLOGY-rooted novels of Roger ZELAZNY delight in examining the
existential problems of godlike beings-shaped by the belief systems of,
for example, the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, and of the Hindus-and the

borderline between sf and FANTASY becomes very problematic in such works.
A notable recent portrait of transcendental superhumanity, conventionally
replete with quasireligious imagery, can be found in Jack Williamson's
Firechild (1986).The idea of the superman has in recent times become
entangled with ideas of man/machine hybridization and GENETIC ENGINEERING.
CYBORG supermen and genetically designed superhumans have become
commonplace. The notion of the emergent superhuman appearing in our
midst-possibly as a MUTANT product of radiation-is not as significant a
motif as it once was, but its various stereotypes continue to crop up.
Recent stories of superchildren include David PALMER's Emergence (1984) as
well as young-adult novels like Alexander KEY's Escape to Witch Mountain
(1968) and Virginia HAMILTON's Justice and Her Brothers (1978), all three
of which have sequels, as does a similar novel featuring an older central
character, Carole Nelson DOUGLAS's Probe (1985). Timothy ZAHN 's A Coming
of Age (1985) is a more sophisticated work in the same vein; Ann MAXWELL's
Timeshadow Rider (1986), a pioneering exercise in the sf love story, seems
rather more juvenile than the juvenile novels. A more ambivalent view of
emergent superchildren is taken in the STRUGATSKI brothers' THE UGLY SWANS
(1972; trans 1979). More sober studies in superhuman existentialism
include Wyman GUIN's The Standing Joy (1969) and Raymond Z. GALLUN's The
Eden Cycle (1974)-although Gallun's later Bioblast (1985) is far more
melodramatic. The tradition of Beresford's The Hampdenshire Wonder is
belatedly carried forward by George TURNER's Brain Child (1991), and that
of Stapledon's A Man Divided by Robert Charles WILSON's The Divide (1990).
The idea of emergent superhumanity remains highly significant in the works
of Ian WATSON, where it is intricately interwoven with the notion of
CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH. Watson rarely imagines the breakthrough to
superhumanity as an easy matter, and in such early novels as THE EMBEDDING
(1973) and The Jonah Kit (1975) the attempts to achieve it fail, but in
The Martian Inca (1977), Alien Embassy (1977), Miracle Visitors (1978) and
The Gardens of Delight (1980) advancement is possible; the easier
transitions of the light-hearted Converts (1984) are less convincing.It is
arguable that no other symbol in sf has evolved quite so dramatically as
that of the superman, which has consistently pandered to the simplest and
most basic form of human wish-fulfilment while sometimes carrying out far
more sophisticated and ingenious analyses of our aspirations and our
fears.[BS]See also: PARANOIA.
SUPERMAN
1. US COMIC strip created by writer Jerry Siegel (1914- ) and artist Joe
Shuster (1914-1992), loosely based on Philip WYLIE's Gladiator (1930).
Siegel was an sf fan, creator of several early FANZINES, including Science
Fiction (5 issues from Oct 1932), in which illustrations by his friend
Shuster had appeared. Their Superman idea was originally - over a period
of years - rejected by almost every comics publisher in the USA before he
was finally allowed to make his debut in Action Comics, June 1938,
published by Detective Comics Inc, later known as DC COMICS; he got his
own comic book with Superman Comics in 1939. Shuster and Siegel did not
create many of the stories (perhaps just as well, since Shuster's
style-though it had a charming simplicity-was very stiff), but their names
continued to be used on the title pages. Under the editorship of Mort

WEISINGER the series was given a more elaborate background, and was
expanded to include additional superbeings and further comic titles. Many
writers and artists, including Alfred BESTER, Edmond HAMILTON, Henry
KUTTNER and Manly Wade WELLMAN, have contributed to the series, which
continues today.As sole survivor of a cataclysm on the planet Krypton,
raised from infancy by US fosterparents, the character's dual identity as
timid reporter Clark Kent and indestructible crime-fighter Superman has a
basic appeal to readers. His dynamic personality has transcended the
comics medium to become incorporated into contemporary Western MYTHOLOGY.
Storylines have been varied, with themes including time travel,
interplanetary journeys, alternate universes, etc., while subplots have
been woven around attempts to unmask his secret identity and to engage him
amorously.For many years the character became increasingly implausible,
leading to his lampooning in Frank MILLER's Batman: The Dark Knight
Returns (1986), where he appears in one sequence as an a raddled skeleton.
DC COMICS began to perceive a need to rationalize the character, most
notably through an epic storyline involving many of their
characters:"Crisis on Infinite Earths" (1987), written by Marv Wolfman.
Artist-writer John Byrne was engaged to take a completely new approach to
the characters. In his version, which began publication in Adventures of
Superman #424 (Jan 1987; the title had previously been simply Superman),
the first step was the elimination from the mythos of all the other
SUPERHEROES which had intruded over the years (Superboy, Supergirl, etc.).
Superman's powers and abilities were reduced and given specified limitse.g., he could no longer travel at the speed of light, survive in space
longer than he could hold his breath, or travel through time. His
long-time sweetheart Lois Lane discovered his secret identity, and the
couple are to be married. At the time of writing (mid-1992) the publishers
are planning to take them all the way to the altar and then show Superman
facing up to the responsibilities of marriage and child-rearing.In order
to achieve weekly appearance on the newsstands, 4 monthly titles are now
published in sequence: Superman, Superman in Action Comics, Adventures of
Superman and Superman, the Man of Steel.Superman has been the most
influential of sf comics heroes and has inspired many imitations, the most
noted being CAPTAIN MARVEL. His adventures have appeared as a syndicated
newspaper strip and as the RADIO programme, tv series, serial films and
feature films described below. The character's sex life was guyed in Larry
NIVEN 's"Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" (1971) and his old age in
Superfolks (1977) by Robert Mayer (1939).[JE/RT]2. US animated cartoon
series, prod Max Fleischer, dir Dave Fleischer for Paramount, 17 cartoons,
Technicolor, 1940-43.3. US RADIO series, usually pitting Superman against
criminals, 1940-52.4. Serial film (1948). Columbia. Prod Sam Katzman. Dirs
Spencer Bennet, Thomas Carr, starring Kirk Alyn (Superman), Noel Neill,
Tommy Bond. 15 episodes; later released (cut to 88 mins) as a feature
film.Although the production values were strictly Poverty Row, S was
perhaps the most successful film serial ever made. The sequel was Atom Man
Vs. Superman (1950), 15-episode serial, Columbia, with much the same cast,
in which Lex Luthor the Atom Man (Lyle Talbot) was introduced.5. US tv
series (1953-7): The Adventures of Superman . ABC TV. First season (Feb
1953) prod Robert Maxwell, Bernard Luber; from season 2 (Sep 1953) to #6
and last prod Whitney Ellsworth. 104 25min episodes. First 2 seasons b/w,

remainder in colour.Superman was played by George Reeves, a former
Hollywood leading man who had made his film debut as a suitor of Vivien
Leigh in Gone With the Wind (1939); he had first taken the role in the
film Superman and the Mole Men (1951; vt Superman and the Strange People
UK), dir Lee Sholem, 67 mins, b/w, in which Superman saves from a lynch
mob little glowing troglodytes who have emerged from a deep oil well. With
the tv series (one of whose early producers, Robert Maxwell, had also
produced on 3 and written and coproduced the 1951 movie) Reeves became
typecast in the role; when the series ended (he directed the last 3
episodes himself) he was unable to find further work in films. He
committed suicide in 1959, aged 45.Phyllis Coates played Lois Lane in the
1951 film and the first tv season only, being replaced for the rest of the
series by Noel Neill, who had played the part in the 2 Columbia serials
(4). Other cast members included Jack Larson as Jimmy Olsen and John
Hamilton as Perry White.The series was aimed primarily at children and,
though mediocre, was extremely popular. Unlike the case in the comic
strip, the stories rarely entered the realm of the fantastic: Superman was
usually pitted against mundane, often bumbling criminals. 5 theatrical
films were recut, each from 3 tv episodes, and released abroad (all 1954)
as Superman's Peril, Superman Flies Again, Superman in Exile, Superman and
Scotland Yard and Superman and the Jungle Devils.6. Musical/made-for-tv
film. A 1966 Broadway musical based on Superman and called It's a Bird!
It's a Plane! It's Superman! was turned into a film for ABC TV in 1975
with David Wilson as Superman. Dir Jack Regas. Script Romeo Miller, based
on the musical by Charles Strouse and David Newman.[JB/PN]7. Film (1978).
Dovemead/International Film Production. Dir Richard Donner, starring
Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Valerie Perrine, Ned
Beatty, Jackie Cooper, Marlon Brando. Screenplay Mario Puzo, David Newman,
Leslie Newman, Robert Benton, with Tom Mankiewicz as"creative consultant";
based on a story by Puzo. 143 mins. Colour.Superman's visit to the wide
screen was long delayed, but lavishly appointed when it did come. Screen
rights to the most famous of SUPERHEROES had been bought by father-and-son
producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind. They made S, the sequels SUPERMAN II
(1980) and SUPERMAN III (1983) and the spin-off SUPERGIRL (1984), with
diminishing box-office returns, after which the rights were resold to
Golan and Globus of Cannon Films, who made SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR
PEACE (1987).Expensive difficulties, largely to do with the flying scenes,
delayed S, whose special effects vary from mostly excellent to
occasionally awful. On the whole the end product is a triumph (it was
awarded a HUGO), confidently walking the tightrope (though it stumbles
once or twice) between playing it romantically straight and putting its
tongue in its cheek, and much assisted by intelligent performances from
Reeve, who plays Superman as a kind of Innocent Abroad, and Kidder, as a
Lois Lane whose passion for Superman appears as touchingly erotic. Indeed
the Caped Crusader's career is given a resonance with other great US
myths, especially his Midwest boyhood, luminously photographed by Geoffrey
Unsworth as though in homage to the paintings of Norman Rockwell. Part of
the film's success, oddly, may be that it is UK- made, so that its USA is
given an attractively foreign, story-book quality. The plot involves
arch-villain Lex Luthor (Hackman) threatening to nuke the San Andreas
fault, thus sinking West California and making a fortune out of real

estate in what will be the new West Coast.8. The 1989-91 tv series
SUPERBOY describes Superman's teenage years at university. It was again
produced by the Salkinds.[PN]9.Another tv series permiered on ABC tv in
the US in 1993, LOIS ?
for details). [PN]See also: MUSIC.
SUPERMAN II
Film (1980). Dovemead/International Film Production. Dir Richard Lester,
starring Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Ned Beatty,
Terence Stamp, Sarah Douglas, Jack O'Halloran, Susannah York. Screenplay
Mario Puzo, David Newman, Leslie Newman (and, as"creative consultant", Tom
Mankiewicz) from a story by Puzo. 127 mins. Colour.Originally to be shot
back-to-back with SUPERMAN, SII changed directors after conflict between
the previous director, Richard Donner, and the producers, Ilya Salkind and
Pierre Spengler. SII as released is perhaps 25% Donner's work and 75%
Lester's. Certainly in its pace and its pop-art ironies it seems the work
of Lester, maker of, inter alia, the Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night
(1964). A trio of criminals exiled from the planet Krypton find their way
to Earth, which they attempt to take over using their superpowers.
Superman, who finally stops them, has first to restore his own powers,
lost through his love for Lois Lane. (Apparently the condition of
SUPERHERO, like that of priest, requires celibacy.) The protracted finale
is choreographed with skilful comic-strip glee: the mythic dignity of the
first film is lost, but enough wit takes its place-including the parallel
between an impotent Superman and an impotent USA-for the film to be good
value. Superman was to be further demystified in SUPERMAN III
(1983).[PN]See also: SUPERGIRL; SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE.
SUPERMAN III
Film (1983). Dovemead/Cantharus/Alexander and Ilya Salkind. Dir Richard
Lester, starring Christopher Reeve, Richard Pryor, Jackie Cooper, Marc
McClure, Annette O'Toole, Pamela Stephenson, Robert Vaughn. Screenplay
David Newman, Leslie Newman. 125 mins. Colour.Sequel to SUPERMAN (1978)
and SUPERMAN II (1980), this is a movie on a more domestic scale,
involving Clark Kent returning to the Midwest for a high-school reunion,
where he (as opposed to his colourful alter ego) is fallen in love with by
hometown girl Lana Lang (O'Toole). Abetted by his computer-genius pawn
(Pryor), an evil business tycoon (Vaughn) with conventional world-takeover
plans uses synthetic kryptonite to subvert the now thoroughly demystified
Superman, who turns bad, broods in bars, tells a woman in distress"Don't
expect me to save you, 'cos I don't do that nice stuff any more", but
finally has his conscience awakened by a sweet little boy. Closer to its
COMIC -strip origins than its 2 predecessors, and broader, SIII's best
moments are the opening scenes of escalating chaos, at least equal to Mack
Sennett's work. There are good sequences throughout, and it is clearly
better than its successors, SUPERGIRL and SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR
PEACE, if less ambitious (and even sillier) than the earlier films.The
novelization is Superman III * (1983) by William KOTZWINKLE.[PN]
SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE
Film (1987). Cannon. Dir Sidney J. Furie, starring Christopher Reeve,
Gene Hackman, Margot Kidder, Mariel Hemingway. Screenplay Lawrence Kohner,

Mark Rosenthal, based on a story by Reeve, Kohner. 93 mins.
Colour.Superman's death knell, at the box office anyway, was tolled by
Cannon's attempt to get more mileage from his exploits after he had been
jettisoned by Alexander and Ilya Salkind. Reeve agreed to play the part
again only in exchange for co-authoring the original story, hence the
anti-nuclear, anti-tabloid-journalism message. He meant well politically,
but his disjointed story, which makes sense neither scientifically nor
metaphorically (Superman throws nuclear missiles into Sun; evil Nuclear
Man is cloned by Lex Luthor from a Superman hair; Superman defeats him by
causing eclipse of the Sun and then anticlimactically throws him down
chimney), is intensely feeble, as are the special effects.The novelization
is Superman IV* (1987) by B.B. Hiller.[PN]
SUPERMAN AND SCOTLAND YARD
SUPERMAN.
SUPERMAN AND THE JUNGLE DEVILS
SUPERMAN.
SUPERMAN AND THE MOLE MEN
SUPERMAN.
SUPERMAN AND THE STRANGE PEOPLE
SUPERMAN.
SUPERMAN FLIES AGAIN
SUPERMAN.
SUPERMAN IN EXILE
SUPERMAN.
SUPERMAN'S PERIL
SUPERMAN.
SUPER MARIO BROS.
Film (1993). Lightmotive/Allied Filmmakers in association with Cinergi
Productions. Prod Jake Eberts and Roland Joffe; dir Rocky Morton and
Annabel Jankel; screenplay Parker Bennett ?
based on the concept and characters created by Shigeru Miyamoto and
Takashi Tezuka of Nintendo; starring Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Samantha
Mathis, Dennis Hopper and Fiona Shaw. 104 mins. Colour.US comedy adventure
film based on the hugely popular Japanese computer games, made by
Nintendo, starring Mario and Luigi: the Super Mario Brothers. Sixty-five
million years ago a meteor struck America in what is now Brooklyn,
splitting Earth into two alternate worlds, in one of which the humanoid
dominant species has descended from intelligent dinosaurs, the other being
our own world. A child from the dinosaur world is hidden in ours by her
justifiably worried mother, using a meteor fragment to open a gateway
between the two worlds. That child, now a young woman, is Daisy (Mathis),
a university student studying dinosaur remains in Brooklyn. When she is
kidnapped and returned to her own world, she is followed by two
resourceful plumbers, Mario (Hoskins) and his younger brother Luigi
(Leguizamo), who have befriended her. King Koopa (Hopper) wants her for
the meteor fragment she now wears as a pendant, for with this fragment he

can invade our world and take it over by using his DEVOLUTION gun to turn
humans into apes. (He has already devolved the old king Bowser, Daisy's
father, into fungus.) The movie is not a mere attempt to find cinematic
equivalents for the various facets of the original games that have now
developed iconic significance for the young, and is surprisingly
inventive, though it moves at perhaps too leisurely a pace. Koopa and his
sinister but intelligent mistress Lena (Shaw) carry off the acting
honours. In this well written but routinely acted and directed film, the
well-realized dystopian city of Koopa's world is amusingly like a
comic-book version of the city in BLADE RUNNER. [PN]
SUPERMARIONATION
Gerry and Sylvia ANDERSON.
SUPERNATURAL CREATURES
Just as it is common in sf to give empirical explanations of ancient
myths and stories of the gods ( GODS AND DEMONS; MYTHOLOGY) and to seek a
rationale for MAGIC, so too, when sf deals with supernatural creatures, it
commonly invokes quasiscientific rationalizations. Sometimes these involve
racial memory of unusual but natural creatures, or they may involve
MUTANTS (commonly) or abnormal PSYCHOLOGY (occasionally). The sf writer
does not, however, wish to demythologize all that is strange to the point
of rendering it utterly matter-of-fact. More commonly he or she retains
the horror (or the wonder) while rendering it a believable phenomenon of
the world we live in. Also, by making the condition of vampirism or
lycanthropy, for example, a natural affliction, it is often possible to
evoke pity for the MONSTER as well as its victims. 2 stories illustrating
this clearly are James BLISH 's"There Shall be no Darkness" (1950) and
Richard MATHESON 's I Am Legend (1954). The former is a werewolf story
which links lycanthropy with artistic talent, and allows the reader some
empathy with the shapeshifting killer; the latter tells of a plague which
transforms its victims into vampires, who besiege the one immune left in
the city. In both a far-fetched rationale is given, Matheson being
particularly ingenious in explaining the traditional stigmata of the
vampire in terms of symptoms of an illness.Jack WILLIAMSON wrote an
excellent werewolf story, DARKER THAN YOU THINK (1940; exp 1948), in which
lycanthropes are seen as members of a distinct race, genetically different
from Homo sapiens though superficially identical; the hero who discovers
the truth turns out to share this awful but thrilling heritage. This
story, like many others of its kind, has a symbolic relationship with
split-personality stories like Robert Louis STEVENSON's Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), in which the more primitive, amoral, beastlike
part of our evolutionary heritage is able to emerge and take on a shape of
its own. All such stories can ultimately be traced back to a dualistic
view of Man, manifest in Christian doctrine as the idea that humanity on
the one hand suffers from Original Sin, but on the other hand has an
aspiring spirit which is a gift from God.Guy ENDORE's The Werewolf of
Paris (1933) sees lycanthropy as a psychological distortion, perhaps
hereditary, and no literal transformation from man to wolf takes place.
Similarly Theodore STURGEON's Some of Your Blood (1961) has a tortured and
not very dangerous"vampire" who is in fact a psychotic, whose

blood-drinking, it gradually emerges, can be traced back to childhood
trauma. The protagonist of Gene WOLFE's"The Hero as Werwolf" (1975) is one
of the few still-human survivors of a utopian future where the genetically
fit have been bred into placidity and health - superhuman sheep, as it
were - while the descendants of the abandoned remainder live a tragic,
hole-and-corner life, surviving cannibalistically on the super-race
responsible for their condition. Whitley STRIEBER's The Wolfen (1978),
though primarily a thriller, provides a rigorous cryptozoological
rationale for werewolf myths in terms of a perfectly natural animal
species, but one that is rare, intelligent, furtive and hence unknown to
orthodox taxonomy.Stories of demonic possession, such as John
CHRISTOPHER's The Possessors (1965) and many others, are commonly
rationalized in terms of PSI POWERS or as a form of parasitism, usually by
an alien; several of these stories are discussed in PARASITISM AND
SYMBIOSIS. Familiars are often symbiotes also, as is the case with the
sinister little creatures who accompany the"witches" in Fritz LEIBER's
GATHER, DARKNESS! (1943; 1950).Many stories of supernatural creatures
which appear in supposedly sf collections are in fact straight FANTASY; i.
e., the supernatural status of these beings is left unquestioned. UNKNOWN
magazine published quite a few stories of this kind, as did WEIRD TALES
earlier and The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION later. The latter
published the John the Minstrel stories by Manly Wade WELLMAN (probably
his best work), whose hero is faced with a variety of supernatural
menaces, though occasionally some sf jargon is used to bring them down to
earth a little, one of the best being"O Ugly Bird!" (1951); they were
collected in Who Fears the Devil? (coll 1963). Ray BRADBURY's"Homecoming"
(1946) is a touching story of the one"normal" in a jolly, clannish family
of supernaturals. Many supernatural stories of the jokier kind can be
found in Theodore COGSWELL's The Wall Around the World (coll 1962) and
Avram DAVIDSON's Or All the Seas with Oysters (coll 1962); Davidson was
editor of FSF for a period. A number of such stories are collected in
Judith MERRIL's lively anthology Galaxy of Ghouls (anth 1955; vt Off the
Beaten Orbit 1959), which contains Walter M. MILLER's"Triflin' Man" (1955;
vt"You Triflin' Skunk"), in which the demon lover turns out to be an
ALIEN, a common explanation for supernatural manifestations.Elves and
fairies likewise often turn out to be aliens, as in Clifford D. SIMAK's
The Goblin Reservation (1968), or Neanderthal or atavistic survivals, as
in several stories discussed in MYTHOLOGY, John BLACKBURN's Children of
the Night (1966) among them. Sometimes they merely live on colonized and
then forgotten planets, as in Christopher STASHEFF's Warlock series. The
creatures out of Greek legend, including several of an apparently
supernatural variety, in Roger ZELAZNY's THIS IMMORTAL (1965 FSF as"...
And Call me Conrad"; exp 1966) are mutants. C.M. KORNBLUTH's vampire
in"The Mindworm" (1950), is a telepathic mutant created by atomic
radiation.Unicorns and dragons remain popular, unicorns for some reason
being usually allowed to remain mythic while dragons are often
rationalized as aliens. Examples of the former occur in Peter Beagle's The
Last Unicorn (1968), Harlan ELLISON's"On the Downhill Side" (1972) and
Mark GESTON's The Siege of Wonder (1976); there are many others. Dragons
appear notably in Anne MCCAFFREY's Dragonrider series, Jack VANCE's THE
DRAGON MASTERS (1963) and Avram Davidson's Rogue Dragon

(1965).Supernatural creatures generally play a prominent role in romantic
fantasy, often as symbolic of a wondrousness that may survive in odd,
untouched corners of the world while dead in our rational, urbanized,
modern civilization. They are, for example, to be found in forms both
horrific and lovely in the various LOST WORLDS of A. MERRITT, in
practically every story written by Thomas Burnett SWANN, and in SWORD AND
SORCERY generally.Ghosts are rather a special case, and are discussed in
ESCHATOLOGY. They are reconstructed in the flesh from a reading of human
minds by the sentient planet SOLARIS (1961; trans 1970) by Stanislaw LEM;
and along with zombies have a very real existence in Robert SHECKLEY's
amusing Immortality Delivered (1958; exp vt Immortality, Inc. 1959).
Sheckley often plays games with supernatural creatures; he brings
nightmares, for example, to life in"Ghost V" (1954), and the hero
of"Protection" (1956) has good reason to wish he had never accepted aid
from a ghostly alien from another DIMENSION. The poltergeists in Keith
ROBERTS's"Boulter's Canaries" (1965) are energy configurations which can
do substantial damage in the real world. Nigel KNEALE's entire career in
sf cinema and tv was devoted to rationalizing the supernatural, most
notably perhaps in the tv serial QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1958-9), where
racial memories of the Devil and the Wild Hunt turn out to have been
transmitted by Martians. Stories of this kind are not restricted to
English-language sf, nor to genre sf. Stanislaw Lem's Sledztwo (1959;
trans as The Investigation 1974) is an interesting study of the extent to
which the unknown may be susceptible to rational explanation, in a mystery
where Scotland Yard is faced with the activities of a ghoul, whose status
as either natural or supernatural is difficult to determine.There is a
kind of class distinction among the three most popular varieties of
supernatural creature to be found in HORROR movies: vampires are
aristocratic, drinking only the most refined life essences, usually blood;
in Lucy SUSSEX's"God and Her Black Sense of Humour" (1990) it is semen. In
the iconography of horror, the vampire stands for SEX. The werewolf, who
stands for instability, shapeshifting, lack of self control, is
middle-class and lives in a dog-eat-dog world. The zombie or ghoul, who
shambles and rots (as, archetypally, in George ROMERO's sf movie The NIGHT
OF THE LIVING DEAD [1968]), is working-class, inarticulate, dangerous,
deprived, wishing only to feed on those who are better off; in the
iconography of horror the zombie stands for the exploited worker.During
the period of the Vietnam War the zombie, both in pure horror and in sf
horror, was perhaps the most popular archetype, but since then vampires
and werewolves have made a major comeback, often in sf-rationalized form.
Witty FEMINIST subtexts appear in Jody SCOTT's vampire satire I, Vampire
(1984) and Suzy McKee CHARNAS's HUGO-winning werewolf story"Boobs" (1989),
in which the lunar cycle controls menstruation and transformation into
werewolf. Tanith LEE's several werewolf stories, including"Wolfland"
(1980), Lycanthia, or The Children of Wolves (1981),"Bloodmantle" (1985)
and Heart-Beast (1992), also have womanly subtexts;"Bloodmantle" has Red
Riding Hood as a kind of victor, as she is again in Angela CARTER's
metamorphic FABULATION"The Company of Wolves" (1979), filmed in 1984.
Lee's"The Gorgon" (1983), about Medusa, may be one of the finest,
simplest, most touching of all supernatural-creature
rationalizations.Other sf (or at least sciencefictionalized) tales of

vampire and werewolf from recent years include: The Orphan (1980) and its
2 sequels, about a werewolf, by Robert STALLMAN; Vampire Tapestry (coll of
linked stories 1980) by Suzy McKee Charnas; Vampire Junction (1984) and
Valentine (1992) by S.P. SOMTOW (Somtow Sucharitkul); The Empire of Fear
(1988) by Brian STABLEFORD (vampires); Moon Dance (1989) by Somtow again
(werewolves); Carrion Comfort (1989) by Dan SIMMONS (vampires); Michael
WEAVER's trilogy collected as Wolf-Dreams (omni 1989 UK); Barbara HAMBLY's
Those Who Hunt the Night (1988; vt Immortal Blood UK) (vampires); Kim
NEWMAN's Bad Dreams (1990) (shapeshifting vampires); The Werewolves of
London (1990) and its sequel The Angel of Pain (1991) by Stableford again;
and Wolf Flow (1992) by K.W. JETER. Another important vampire title is
Nancy Collins' Sunglasses After Dark (1989), and major series have been
written by Anne Rice (vampires and mummies) and by Chelsea Quinn YARBRO,
with her Saint-Germain series (vampires) from 1978 on. All these books,
whose standard is overall rather high, lie somewhere between sf and
supernatural horror, none of them fitting purely in one genre or the
other, though Stableford quite closely approaches sf in Empire of Fear.
With so much work of this sort being produced - the cited texts are merely
a fraction of the whole - it almost seems as if a new genre is in the
making, not so much pure horror as the semirationalized"horror romance", a
kind of half-sister to the SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE.Supernatural horror made
other appearances of a more outre kind in the 1980s, three landmarks being
Alfred BESTER's Golem 100 (1980) which marries sf, diabolism and depth
psychology to produce its supernatural monster from the id; Judith
MOFFETT's"The Hob" (1988), in which the hobs or brownies from myth turn
out to be exiled aliens, a story later incorporated into THE RAGGED WORLD:
A NOVEL OF THE HEFN ON EARTH (fixup 1991); and best of all, perhaps, Tim
POWERS's strange fable of the romantic poets, The Stress of Her Regard
(1989), which memorably incarnates romantic longings and fears in the
partly rationalized figure of the Lamia.[PN]See also: GOLEM; GOTHIC SF;
RELIGION.
SUPER SCIENCE AND FANTASTIC STORIES
SUPER SCIENCE STORIES.
SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION
US DIGEST-size magazine. 18 bimonthly issues Dec 1956-Oct 1959, published
by Headline Publications; ed W.W. Scott. Though S-SF used material by
established writers - including 36 stories by Robert SILVERBERG and 10 by
Harlan ELLISON, both using pseudonyms as well as their own names - its
contents were mediocre. [BS/PN]
SUPER SCIENCE NOVELS
SUPER SCIENCE STORIES.
SUPER SCIENCE STORIES
US PULP MAGAZINE. 31 issues, published by Fictioneers, Inc., a subsidiary
of Popular Publications; 16 issues Mar 1940-May 1943, 3 of the 1941 issues
(Mar-Aug) being under the title Super Science Novels; ed Frederik POHL
until Aug 1941, then Alden H. Norton. The magazine was revived by Popular
Publications, continuing the old volume numeration, for 15 more issues Jan
1949-Aug 1951, ed Ejler JAKOBSSON, with Damon KNIGHT assistant ed on some

issues. In both incarnations the magazine varied between quarterly and
bimonthly.SSS, a companion to ASTONISHING STORIES, featured standard pulp
adventure sf, and in its 1st incarnation was an important market for the
FUTURIAN group, Pohl buying a good deal of material from himself
(including many of his early collaborations with C.M. KORNBLUTH). The most
notable story was Genus Homo (Mar 1941; rev 1950) by L. Sprague DE CAMP
and P. Schuyler MILLER. It also published a number of early stories by
Isaac ASIMOV and James BLISH's first story, "Emergency Refueling" (1940),
and his much superior "Sunken Universe" (1942) as by Arthur Merlyn. The
2nd incarnation published Chad OLIVER's debut story, "The Land of Lost
Content" (1950). SSS had a greater importance to the HISTORY OF SF than
the quality of its stories would suggest; it was an important training
ground.The Canadian magazine of the same title, published by Popular
Publications, Toronto, continued publication for 2 years after the first
US version ceased, publishing 21 issues in all Aug 1942-Dec 1945, the last
5 under the title Super Science and Fantastic Stories. From Aug 1942 to
Feb 1944 the Canadian SSS drew its material in alternate issues from the
US SSS and Astonishing Stories. From the Apr 1944 issue onwards some
original stories were used (11 in all), including "The Black Sun Rises"
(June 1944) by Henry KUTTNER, but mostly it ran stories from the Popular
Publications reprint magazine FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES. The 2nd
incarnation of SSS was also reprinted in Canada 1949-51, as Super Science
Stories. There were 2 series of UK reprints: Thorpe ?
whole issues in 1949-50; and Pembertons published 14 consecutively
numbered issues of selections from both versions of the US magazine
1950-53. [BS/PN]
SUPERSWAMP
People may think that the concept of Superman was born on the planet
Krypton. But they’re wrong. His birth was directly inspired by a story
written by Philip Wylie in 1930 called "The Gladiator."Theodore Sturgeon’s
short story, "It," written in 1940, provided the inspiration for another
well-known character -The Swamp Thing, a monster entirely made of
vegetable matter. The Swamp Thing, created by Len Wein for DC COMICS,
became the star of several movies, including Swamp Thing, directed by Wes
Craven in 1982 and Swamp Thing II in 1989.
SURREALISM
ABSURDIST SF; ILLUSTRATION; NEW WAVE.
SURVIVALIST FICTION
During the near-half century of Cold War after the dropping of the atom
bomb on Japan in 1945, nuclear HOLOCAUSTS were a commonplace plot device
in various genres of popular fiction. Some novels took readers teasingly
up to the brink without actually carrying them into the terminal moments;
Cold War thrillers of this sort are not generally treated in this
encyclopedia. A rather larger number of novels treated the final war as a
given, an assumed premise of the action of the tale, which took place
subsequent to the horror of the actual event. One subgenre of this
sizeable cohort of post-holocaust novels usually goes by the name
survivalist fiction.Though it takes much of its political extremism and
attendent social prejudices from the genuine survivalist movement which

flourished in the USA during the Cold War (see also LIBERTARIAN SF),
survivalist fiction as such has little to do with the actual concerns of
real survivalists, who tend to concentrate most of their energies on
exercises and training and hoarding and forward-planning for the
anticipated event; less thought is given to the aftermath, where
survivalist fictions are almost invariably set. The significance of
genuine survivalists is of the here and now, as an example of the pathos
of "self-reliance" in a world too complex and fragile to reward simple
solutions.Of greater potential interest to sf writers than realist stories
about survivalists is, perhaps, the apocalypse pathology ( RELIGION;
ESCHATOLOGY) detectable in the survivalist mentality. Those who live their
lives in anticipation of surviving the holocaust are almost certainly
geared to welcome its coming, and to feel that - by contrast with the
civilian hordes who ignore the tenets of the faith - they comprise an
Elect ( SUPERMAN) of true believers; and, typical of that form of
psychopathy, demonstrate extreme agility in shifting the focus of their
love or hate when conditions so demand - hence the 1990s shift of American
survivalists' loathing from Cold War enemies to the Federal government.
Survivalists, in other words, run the risk of seeing the holocaust as a
test of Faith: of feeling virtuous about the END OF THE WORLD. A novel
like Robert A. HEINLEIN's Farnham's Freehold (1964), though displaced
through TIME TRAVEL beyond the normal boundaries of survivalist fiction,
does convey the extremist mind-set of some participants in the movement,
and the "Darwinian" ruthlessness they long to ape. But Farnham's Freehold
is a tale of wish-fulfilment; the actualities of survival are clearly so
unrewarding when faced directly that almost all sf which deals with
nuclear holocaust directly treats its human protagonists as doomed. There
is, in fact, almost no genuine sf that describes a genuine survivalist
agenda without descending into fantasy; even Dean ING's Pulling Through
(1983), which is a good example of an extremely rare breed, has recourse
to a magic sports car which enables the protagonist to leap over some
otherwise terminal obstacles. Andrew J. OFFUTT's The Castle Keeps (1972)
is a scathing analysis of the effects of survivalist doctrines in any
plausible post-holocaust world.There are of course many sf tales of
survivors (like Gordon R. DICKSON's attractive Wolf and Iron [1990]) and
post-holocaust stories whose protagonists are oppressed (as in Chelsea
Quinn YARBRO's False Dawn [1978]) by predators whose resemblance to
survivalists may not be accidental; but survivalist fiction is something
very different from tales like these. From about 1980, survivalist fiction
has become established as a very particular kind of male-action story, set
in post-holocaust venues where law-and-order has disappeared, and where
there is effectively no restraint upon the behaviour of the hero, who
therefore kills before he is killed, demonstrating his fitness to survive
through acts of unbridled violence (which very frequently descend into
prolonged sessions of rape and sadism). The first full-blown example of
the subgenre is probably the Survivalist series by Jerry AHERN, which
began with Survivalist #1: Total War (1981) and which now extends to more
than 20 volumes. A second important open-ended series (survivalist
fiction, like pornography, tends to be structured as a series of
escalating repetitions of the same material) is William W. JOHNSTONE's
Ashes sequence from 1983, in which an extreme right-wing political agenda

is used to legitimize the hero's actions. Other sequences include David
ALEXANDER's Phoenix books, James BARTON's Wasteworld books, D.B. Drumm's
Traveler books (initiated by Ed NAHA, though some or most of the sequence
was by John SHIRLEY), Bob HAM's Overload books, Laurence JAMES's Death
Land books as by James Axler, Mack MALONEY's Wingman books, Victor MILAN's
Guardians books as by Richard Austin, David L. ROBBINS's Endworld books,
James ROUCH's Zone books, some episodes in Barry SADLER's Casca sequence,
and the Doomsday Warrior books written as by Ryder Stacy ( Ryder
SYVERTSEN). To this list could be added MAD MAX (1979) and its sequels,
although these are at the top of the heap; the same cannot be said of
their cheap imitators. During 1992 several book series were terminated due
to declining sales; it may be that the changing world scene had reduced
their appeal.There may be some connection between present-day survivalist
movements in the USA and survivalist fiction as here described, in that
survivalist fiction may seem to express a grotesquely decayed form of
Heinleinian relish at the defeat of "civilian" values when the "real"
world bares its teeth. But even this is to claim too much. Sadistic,
sexist, racist, pornographic, gloating and void, survivalist fiction is an
obscene parody of genuine survivalism, and a nightmare at the bottom of
the barrel of sf. [JC]See also: PARANOIA.
SURVIVORS
UK tv series (1975-7). BBC TV. Created Terry NATION (who also wrote 7
episodes in season 1). Prod Terence Dudley. Writers included Jack Ronder,
Martin Worth, Roger Parkes. Dirs included Pennant Roberts, Terence
Williams, Eric Hills. 3 seasons, 38 50min episodes in all. Colour.The
post- HOLOCAUST novel is a particularly UK subgenre of sf, and so it is
not surprising that the theme's first significant appearance on tv should
come from the BBC. The accidental release of a deadly virus kills almost
everyone; in the UK only about 7000 people are left alive. S follows the
adventures of small groups of mostly middle-class survivors, their efforts
to cope without TECHNOLOGY and their encounters with other, less
sympathetic groups. The main characters include a housewife (Carolyn
Seymour), a secretary (Lucy Fleming), an engineer (Ian McCulloch) and an
architect (Denis Lill). Initial gloom is gradually replaced by rather too
cosy an atmosphere, with aspects of a rural paradise - not only have all
those smelly cities disappeared, but also the working classes. The subtext
involves a very English political myth (which in literature goes back
beyond Richard JEFFERIES's After London [1885]) about the strengths of a
life lived close to the land. The overnight disappearance of technology
and in particular the shortage of petrol are never adequately
rationalized. Nation's partial novelization is The Survivors * (1976).
[JB/PN]
SUSANN, JACQUELINE
(1921-1974) US writer most famous for her first novel, Valley of theDolls
(1966); her only sf novel is the posthumous Yargo (1979), which, written
in the 1950s, and telling the tale of alover from the stars who wins the
heart of an Earth woman, rather lacks JS's later books'acidulous
presentation of the costs of indulgence and self-absorption. [JC]
SUSPENDED ANIMATION

The notion of suspended animation is one of the oldest literary devices
in sf, by virtue of its convenience as a means of TIME TRAVEL into the
future (see also SLEEPER AWAKES). It is used in UTOPIAN romances like L.S.
MERCIER's Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred (trans 1772), Mary
GRIFFITH's Three Hundred Years Hence (1836; 1975) and Edward BELLAMY's
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888). It became somewhat more than a
literary convenience in H.G. WELLS's When the Sleeper Wakes (1899; rev vt
The Sleeper Awakes 1910). These stories, having other purposes in view,
gloss over the scientific means by which suspended animation might be
achieved. Edgar Allan POE's short story "The Facts in the Case of M.
Valdemar" (1845) features mesmerically induced suspended animation, while
Grant ALLEN's "Pausodyne" (1881) imagines an 18th-century scientist
inventing a gas which puts him into protracted anaesthesia. The most
popular means, however, has always been preservation by freezing (
CRYONICS). Many fantasies using the theme were inspired by the ancient
Egyptian habit of mummifying the dead; it was a relatively small
imaginative step to suppose an arcane mummification process which
preserved life and beauty, and Egyptian princesses ripe for revival are
featured in Edgar Lee's Pharaoh's Daughter (1889), Clive Holland's An
Egyptian Coquette (1898; rev vt The Spell of Isis) and Robert W.
CHAMBERS's The Tracer of Lost Persons (1906); a very much more recent
example is Anne Rice's The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned (1989). The modern
world is visited by observers preserved from even more remote eras in Erle
COX's Out of the Silence (1919; 1925; exp 1947), Olof W. ANDERSON's The
Treasure-Vault of Atlantis (1925) and Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's "The
Resurrection of Jimber Jaw" (1937). A curious novel which explores the
existential significance of the ability to suspend animation in oneself is
The Insurgents (1957) by VERCORS; and Robert A. HEINLEIN intricately
constructs The Door into Summer (1957) around 2 trips to a single future
by suspended animation.Suspended animation was co-opted into GENRE SF as
one of the standard items in its vocabulary of ideas; it was used in the
first extensive pulp exploration of future HISTORY, Laurence MANNING's The
Man who Awoke (1933; fixup 1975). Genre-sf writers found it a useful
device in another context: avoiding the intolerable timelags involved in
journeys to the stars. An early trip of this kind is featured in A.E. VAN
VOGT's "Far Centaurus" (1944), whose luckless heroes arrive to find that
FASTER-THAN-LIGHT travel has been invented as they slept. More recent
dramas involving ships populated largely by people in suspended animation
include The Black Corridor (1969) by Michael MOORCOCK and Hilary BAILEY
and The Dream Millennium (1974) by James WHITE. Stranger beings than Cox's
or Olof W. Anderson's Atlanteans could be found in suspended animation, in
a manner reminiscent of supernatural stories in which ancient GODS and
their dormant MAGIC are revived into the present by folly or evil intent.
The later work of H.P. LOVECRAFT is notable in this respect, while more
orthodox sf variations on the theme include The Alien (1951) by Raymond F.
JONES, World of Ptavvs (1966) by Larry NIVEN and The Space Vampires (1976)
by Colin WILSON.The recent popularization of cryonics as a means of
suspending animation has offered a boost to the credibility of the jargon
surrounding the literary device, and has helped increase interest in
alternative methods. These include the various works ultimately gathered
into The Worthing Saga (1978-89; fixup 1990) by Orson Scott CARD and the

fascinating Between the Strokes of Night (1985) by Charles SHEFFIELD,
which takes the notion to its logical extreme. Its deployment as a
timeslipping device is nowadays less frequent, but the motif is still
capable of further sophistication, as shown in Richard Ben SAPIR's
visitor-from-the-past story The Far Arena (1978) and Richard LUPOFF's
FAR-FUTURE story Sun's End (1984). [BS]See also: IMMORTALITY; GENERATION
STARSHIPS; MEDICINE.
SUSPENSE
US DIGEST-size magazine. 4 quarterly issues Spring 1951-Winter 1952,
published by Farrell Publishing Co., Chicago; ed Theodore Irwin. S, based
on the CBS RADIO series of the same name and including the script of 1
episode per issue, contained also a mixture of detective, weird, sf and
fantasy stories, including some reprints. Authors included Theodore
STURGEON and John WYNDHAM, and there was a new Gray Mouser story from
Fritz LEIBER, "Dark Vengeance" (Fall 1951). The unusual mixing of genres
may have accounted for S's rapid demise. [FHP/PN]
SUSSEX, LUCY
(1957- ) New Zealand-born writer and critic, in AUSTRALIA since the age
of 14. She was one of the co-editors of the anthology of sf criticism
Contrary Modes (anth 1985) with Jenny Blackford, Russell BLACKFORD and
Norman Talbot, and a co-editor of AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW:
SECOND SERIES for its first 2 years (1986-7). At about the same time she
began publishing promising sf FABULATIONS like "The Lipton Village
Society" (1985), about alienated people creating an ALTERNATE WORLD by
force of will. This and "My Lady Tongue" (1988), about life inside (and
outside) a utopian FEMINIST lesbian community, and "God and Her Black
Sense of Humour" (1990), about immortal semen-swallowing vampires (
SUPERNATURAL CREATURES), are assembled with others in My Lady Tongue ?
Other Tales (coll 1990). LS's racy, slangy narrative voice sometimes jars
with a content that seems to require a less aggressive tone. Her earlier
The Peace Garden (1989), for children, is not sf or fantasy. [PN]
SUTCLIFFE, HALLIWELL
[r] Jocelyn QUILP.
SUTPHEN, (WILLIAM GILBERT) VAN TASSEL
(1861-1945) US writer whose The Nineteenth Hole: Being Tales of the Fair
Green: Second Series (coll 1901) includes 2 tales of golfing sf ( GAMES
AND SPORTS), one set in 1999 when the game fully dominates US life. The
Doomsman (1906) depicts a medievalized post- HOLOCAUST USA where dashing
Doomsmen run a protection racket from Manhattan and an old priest keeps an
electric dynamo humming. All ends in tears. [JC/PN]
SUTTON, JEAN
(1915-1983) US author, with Jeff SUTTON (whom see for details), of
several novels for older children. [JC]
SUTTON, JEFF(ERSON HOWARD)
(1913-1979) US writer who began publishing sf with "The Third Empire" for
Spaceway in 1955, and whose background - he had been a journalist, served
time in the Marines and done research in high-altitude survival - was

reflected in several of his novels, from First on the Moon (1958), his
debut, to Spacehive (1960) and Whisper from the Stars (1970). JS wrote
with a somewhat dilute clarity, his tales occasionally rising above the
routine when he dealt in NEAR-FUTURE subject matter; but even these
stories soon became fatally dated. When he attempted more far-flung
adventures his inspiration tended to flag and his plots to become
strained. His juvenile sf novels (see listing below) with his wife, Jean
SUTTON, were somewhat smoother. [JC]Other works: Bombs in Orbit (1959);
The Missile Lords (1963); The Atom Conspiracy (1963); Apollo at Go (1963);
Beyond Apollo (1966); H-Bomb over America (1967); The Man who Saw Tomorrow
(1968 dos); Alton's Unguessable (1970 dos); The Mindblocked Man (1972);
Cassady (1979).With Jean Sutton: The River (1966); The Programmed Man
(1968); The Beyond (1968); Lord of the Stars (1969); Alien from the Stars
(1970); The Boy who had the Power (1971).See also: CHILDREN'S SF.
SUVIN, DARKO (R.)
(1932- ) Academic, sf critic and poet, born and raised in that part of
YUGOSLAVIA that is now Croatia; PhD from Zagreb University, where he
taught 1959-67; since 1968 he has lived in CANADA (until 1991 he had
Canadian/Yugoslav dual nationality), where he is a full professor of
English at McGill University, Montreal. DS has been very closely
associated with the development of academic interest in sf in the USA,
having been an active member of the SCIENCE FICTION RESEARCH ASSOCIATION
and a co-editor of SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES from its inception to Nov 1980
(subsequently a contributing editor), and having lectured and published
widely on the subject. (His other field is drama, especially the work of
Bertolt Brecht.) His books about sf are Od Lukijana do Lunjika ["From
Lucian to the Lunik"] (1965 Yugoslavia), Russian Science Fiction
1956-1974: A Bibliography (1976 US); Pour une poetique de la
science-fiction (cut and trans into French from his original English by DS
1977; longer English version as Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the
Poetics and History of a Literary Genre 1979 US), Victorian Science
Fiction in the U.K.: The Discourses of Knowledge and of Power (1983
US)-perhaps his most important book, in its splendid blend of scholarly
research into early sf, explication of its nature and sociological
argument about its ideological setting - and Positions and Presuppositions
in Science Fiction (coll 1988 US).The last 3 books especially constitute
(among other things) one of the most formidable and sustained theoretical
attempts to define sf as a genre. This was recognized when he was awarded
the 1979 PILGRIM AWARD, while still very much in mid-career, for services
to sf scholarship. DS's writing has been unwisely dismissed by some
readers as too clotted and difficult, and it is true that his critical
prose sometimes seems more convoluted than his arguments require. But part
of the difficulty results from the praiseworthy scrupulousness and rigour
of his complex theses, for which he has had to find a terminology (new to
sf studies at least) that is very much based in European socio-formalism;
he has often been described as a "Marxist" critic but, while this is not
untrue, it is not especially helpful either, as modern structuralism and
semiotics also play an important role in his theoretical approach. DS sees
sf as a "literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the
presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main

formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's
empirical environment" ( DEFINITIONS OF SF); it was DS who introduced the
term "cognition" to sf criticism. One result of DS's approach is a
contemptuous dismissal of FANTASY as lacking "cognitive believability".DS
ed Other Worlds, Other Seas: Science-Fiction Stories from Socialist
Countries (anth 1970 US), H.G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction (anth 1977
US), a collection of essays by various hands, and, with R.D. MULLEN,
Science-Fiction Studies: Selected Articles on Science Fiction 1973-1975
(anth 1976 US) and Science-Fiction Studies, Second Series: Selected
Articles on Science Fiction 1976-1977 (anth 1978 US), both from GREGG
PRESS.Of marginal relevance to sf and UTOPIAS are DS's 2 vols of poems,
some prize-winning: The Long March: Notes on the Way 1981-1984 (coll 1987)
and Armirana Arkadija (coll 1990 Yugoslavia). [PN]See also:
BIBLIOGRAPHIES; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; GENRE SF; GOTHIC
SF; HISTORY OF SF; PROTO SCIENCE FICTION; SENSE OF WONDER.
SWAHN, SVEN CHRISTER
[r] SCANDINAVIA.
SWAIN, DWIGHT V(REELAND)
(1915-1992) US writer, very variously employed in jobs ranging from
migrant labourer to university lecturer to scriptwriter. His first sf
story, "Henry Horn's Super Solvent" for Fantastic Adventures in 1941,
initiated the Henry Horn series of tales about a bumblingly incompetent
would-be SCIENTIST; the others are "Henry Horn's Blitz Bomb" (1942),
"Henry Horn's Racing Ray" (1942) and "Henry Horn's X-Ray Eye Glasses"
(1942). He also wrote 3 stories in 1942 as Clark South. DVS published
several sf novels up to the end of the 1950s which did not reach book
form, the exception being The Transposed Man (1955 chap dos; with 1 story
added, as coll 1957 UK), in which a human rebel wins through to the stars.
In his later career, during which he concentrated on his work in
educational film-making - also publishing several nonfiction books on the
art of successful writing, including Creating Characters: How to Build
Story People (1990) - DVS returned occasionally to adventure tales of the
sort he clearly preferred, writing 1 Nick CARTER novel, The Pemex Chart *
(1979), and 2 further tales, The Planet Murderer (1984) as John CLEVE (in
collaboration with Andrew J. OFFUTT), and Monster (1991).In 1991, the
Oklahoma Professional Writers' Hall of Fame named him a "grand master",
along with C.J. CHERRYH. [JC]
SWAMP THING, THE
Created by writer Len Wein and artist Berni Wrightson in DC COMICS's
House of Secrets #92 (July 1971), TST is a monster whose moss-and
muck-encrusted body is formed entirely of vegetable matter. In that
original short graphic story, as a result of a scientific "accident"
arranged by his jealous assistant Damian Ridge, Dr Alex Olsen is killed
and subsequently resurrected in mutated form as TST, destined to wreak
vengeance. Wein and Wrightson rewrote the character's early biography in
the Swamp Thing series of COMIC books for DC, running from #1 (Nov 1972)
until July 1974. According to the revised version, the unfortunate Dr Alec
Holland (note name-change) was working on a "Bio-restorative Formula" when
an explosion in his laboratory set off the chain of events described

above. These 10 issues (reprinted as Roots of the Swamp Thing Aug-Nov
1986) are regarded in the comics world as classics of GOTHIC horror.In May
1982 TST began to reappear in another comic-book series, Saga of the Swamp
Thing. In this version he initially developed as a SUPERHERO of no great
interest, but #20, Loose Ends, introduced Alan MOORE as writer. Moore
continued until #64 and, with artists Steve Bissette, John Totleben, Rick
Veitch and others, attained what is usually accepted to be his greatest
achievement to date (with the possible exception of WATCHMEN). Moore's
themes - including menstrual werewolves, serial killers, racial zombies
and, in a swipe at the gun-lobby, a house haunted by guns - were
wide-ranging, and he radically changed the basic premise: TST was now a
MONSTER who had incorporated through RNA some of Alex Holland's
personality. Moore also introduced significant ECOLOGY and ESCHATOLOGY
themes, latterly taking TST into a series of SPACE OPERA adventures. From
#30 DC found it necessary to drop the Comics Code logo from the cover,
replacing it with the words "Sophisticated Suspense"; at the same time the
title reverted to the original Swamp Thing. Since Moore's departure the
scripts have rarely reached the same quality.There have been 2 Swamp Thing
films: Swamp Thing (1982) dir Wes Craven, 91 mins, and its chaotic spoof
sequel, the occasionally hilarious The Return of Swamp Thing (1989; vt
Swamp Thing II) dir Jim Wynorski, 88 mins. Both films, neither very
successful, star stuntman Dick Durock as the monster and Louis Jourdan as
his conniving foe, Dr Arcane. [RT]
SWAN AMERICAN MAGAZINE
UK magazine, PULP-MAGAZINE size, published by G.G. Swan, London. The 2
(undated) sf issues in the series, #11 (probably 1948) and #15 (probably
1949), were resettings with UK illustrations of parts of Future Fantasy
and Science Fiction (a variant title of FUTURE FICTION), Dec 1942, and of
SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY, Winter 1942. This was effectively a postwar
renewal, with new numbering, of the earlier SWAN YANKEE MAGAZINE series.
[FHP]
SWANN, S. ANDREW
(? - ) US writer of a sequence of sf noir detective novels set in a world
where GENETICALLY ENGINEERED animals-called "moreaus" after H.G. WELLS's
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1896), and also evocative of the evolved animals
in Cordwainer SMITH's Instrumentality of Man-have been bred to occupy
underclass roles in NEAR-FUTURE America. The sequence to date comprises
Forests of the Night (1993), after William Blake, and in honour of the
fact that the detective protagonist of the series comes from tiger stock,
Emperors of the Twilight (1994) and Specters of the Dawn (1994). A second
series, set in the same world but centuries later, begins with Profiteer
(1995). [JC]
SWANN, THOMAS BURNETT
(1928-1976) US poet, novelist and academic who taught English literature
at Florida Atlantic University, turning to full-time writing in the early
1960s. As an academic he published works on the poet HD (Hilda Doolittle
[1886-1961]) and others, including Wonder and Whimsy: The Fantastic World
of Christina Rossetti (1960). Much of his fiction - beginning with "Winged
Victory" for Fantastic Universe in 1958 - could be described as SCIENCE

FANTASY, as it posits a sustained ALTERNATE-WORLD version of Earth's
history; but its abiding tenor is of FANTASY. Briefly, the TBS version of
history centres on the doomed encounter of the SUPERNATURAL CREATURES of
legend - dryads, centaurs, panisci, minotaurs, et al. - with ascendant
humanity, climaxing at the time when Rome and Christianity were extending
their imperialisms across the doomed, childlike, prelapsarian world. Most
of his tales - all set well before the alternate 20th century, which TBS
clearly found impossible to imagine - fit into this history. In order of
their internal chronology they are: The Minikins of Yam (1976), set around
2500BC; the Minotaur sequence, comprising Cry Silver Bells (1977), The
Forest of Forever (1971) and The Day of the Minotaur (1966), set in
Mycenaean Crete; the Mellonia sequence, comprising Queens Walk in the Dusk
(1977), Green Phoenix (1972) and Lady of the Bees (1962 Science Fantasy as
"Where is the Bird of Fire?"; exp 1976), set in burgeoning Rome;
Wolfwinter (1972), The Weirwoods (1967) and The Gods Abide (1976), the 3
novels in which humanity's religious and political destruction of the old
ways reaches a climax; and a final scattering of nostalgia-choked tales
set in the Christian era, The Tournament of Thorns (fixup 1976),
Will-o-the-Wisp (1976 UK), The Not-World (1975) and The Goat without Horns
(1971). This litany of dying falls evoked a warm response from fantasy and
sf readers, a response not dissimilar to that evoked by the ecological sf
that began to appear around the same time ( ECOLOGY). TBS's early works
are generally stronger than the late books, where a finger-pointing
sentimentality tends to vitiate all but the most fleeting moments of loss.
[JC]Other works: The Dolphin and the Deep (coll 1968); Moondust (1968);
Where is the Bird of Fire? (coll 1970); How are the Mighty Fallen
(1974).About the author: Thomas Burnett Swann: A Brief Critical Biography
and Annotated Bibliography (1979 chap) by Robert A. Collins.See also: GODS
AND DEMONS; MYTHOLOGY.
SWANSON, LOGAN
Richard MATHESON.
SWANWICK, MICHAEL (JENKINS)
(1950- ) US writer who began to publish sf with "The Feast of St Janis"
for New Dimensions 11 (anth 1980) ed Marta RANDALL and Robert SILVERBERG,
and who became known, very rapidly, as an author of intensely crafted,
complex tales whose multiple layering allows his conventional sf plots and
venues to be understood as exercises in mythopoesis, somewhat after the
manner of Gene WOLFE's shorter works, though less perplexingly. MS was not
prolific in the 1980s, but his short fiction - assembled as GRAVITY'S
ANGELS (coll 1991) - ran a wide gamut, from "The Man who Met Picasso"
(1982), a slightly sentimental fable of redemption, to "Ginungagap"
(1980), a HARD-SF tale set in the ASTEROID belt whose imagery and language
comprehensively prefigure CYBERPUNK; the more recent "A Midwinter's Tale"
(1988), though making nods to both Wolfe and A.E. VAN VOGT, seems in the
end to be written in MS's mature voice - warm, cruel, contemplative,
moral.His 5 novels show a steady progress towards that voice. In the Drift
(fixup 1985), set in an ALTERNATE WORLD in which Three Mile Island did in
fact explode, describes its post- HOLOCAUST balkanized USA through a
series of linked episodes which ultimately fail to cohere sufficiently, so

that the transcendental implications of the final sequences seem forced.
Vacuum Flowers (1987), which builds upon the world foreshadowed in
"Ginungagap", very much more cogently combines a tour-of-the-Solar-System
plot-carrying the reader downward from the corporation-dominated asteroid
belt to an AI-run Earth - with a dense load of extrapolation about the
nature of identity when persona-chips can be bought and plugged in. The
protagonist, a persona bum who has hijacked an attractive new identity for
herself, runs an extremely complex gamut before turning-perhaps inevitably
in MS's work - towards transcendence. Griffin's Egg (1991 UK) applies his
by-now-expected multiplex extrapolations to the NEAR FUTURE in a tale set
on the MOON - controlled by corporations - during a period when Earth
seems at the edge of self-destruction, and a long cold hegira may be in
store for any survivors of the HOLOCAUST. The titles of both these novels
serve as metaphors for the evolving human species and as banners to
proclaim the continuation of the species under new conditions.Unlike his
first 3 books, STATIONS OF THE TIDE (1991), which won a NEBULA, takes
place centuries hence and far from Earth, on a planet quarantined from the
higher technologies now controlled by a far-flung humanity. After a
Prometheus/Caliban figure has stolen some of these technologies from the
interstellar network that monitors quarantine, the protagonist descends to
the planet, which is due to suffer a vast periodic climatic
transformation, traces the "thief", and apprehends what it is necessary
for him to apprehend - the knowledge, the meaning of life on the planet,
the meaning of his own existence, and a sense of how best (he is a
Prospero figure) to relieve himself of power and servants. The complexity
of this brief, dense, and fast-moving book is very considerable; and the
interstellar network - whose HQ takes the shape of a Renaissance Theatre
of Memory - is convincing in its own right and as a focus for MS's
continued speculations about the refractions of identity in a world where
autonomous subset personality-copies held on computers (they resemble the
"partials" in Greg BEAR's EON [1985]) do much of the work of being human.
The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993 UK), a fantasy, taxingly examines human
action (and guilt) in fantasy worlds themselves taxingly examined. In the
1980s "debate" between "humanists" and cyberpunks, MS was variously
associated with one or both "schools". In the end-like the similarly
treated Kim Stanley ROBINSON-he was not so easily assimilated. The most
telling thing to say about MS is that he is fiercely contemporary. [JC]See
also: ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; ARKHAM HOUSE; END OF THE WORLD; GAMES
AND SPORTS; GOTHIC SF; INTERZONE; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION
MAGAZINE;
MYTHOLOGY; NANOTECHNOLOGY; NUCLEAR POWER; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM;
POSTMODERNISM AND SF; SPACE HABITATS; THEODORE STURGEON MEMORIAL
AWARD.
SWAN YANKEE MAGAZINE
UK magazine, PULP-MAGAZINE size, published by G.G. Swan, London. There
were 3 sf and 3 weird-fiction issues in the series. The sf numbers were #3
(1941), #11 (1942) and #21 (1942), the weird numbers #6 (1942), #14 (1942)
and #19 (1942). Despite the title, SYM contained mostly original UK
stories, with a few US reprints. The sf titles were marketed as Yankee
Science Fiction. [FHP]

SWARM, THE
Irwin ALLEN; Arthur HERZOG.
SWAYNE, MARTIN
Perhaps the pseudonym of UK writer and psychologist H(enry) Maurice
D(unlop) Nicoll (1884-1953). In The Blue Germ (1918) well wishing
scientists infect the world with a virus that turns folk immortal,
lethargic and blue. After the psychological effects of IMMORTALITY have
played direly upon the cast, the novel ends with the hope, or fear, that
the virus has burned itself out. [JC]
SWEDEN
SCANDINAVIA.
SWEDENBORG, EMANUEL
(1688-1772) Swedish scientist, philosopher and theologian. The first half
of his career was devoted to investigations into a number of scientific
fields, from mathematics and physics to geology; in 1743-5 he underwent a
visionary experience, after which most of his writings became mystical.
These later writings, which influenced the UK poet William Blake
(1757-1827) and the German idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804),
and were an important forerunner to the Romantic movement, included Arcana
Caelestia (1749-56 in Latin; trans John Clowes in 13 vols as Arcana
Coelestia, or Heavenly Mysteries Contained in the Sacred Scriptures
1802-16 UK), perhaps his magnum opus, and De Telluribus (1758 in Latin;
trans John Clowes as Concerning the Earths in Our Solar System, Which are
Called Planets, and Concerning the Earths in the Starry Heaven; Together
with an Account of their Inhabitants 1787 UK). This latter volume,
commonly known as The Earths in Our Solar System . . . and the Earths in
the Starry Heaven, describes a visionary trip around the Solar System,
which is seen (in part through a system of correspondences) as having a
spiritual significance; the book also contains some scientific speculation
about the planets. After his death, ES's followers founded the New
Jerusalem Church to promote his doctrines. [PN/JC]See also: COSMOLOGY;
MARS; MERCURY; OUTER PLANETS; PROTO SCIENCE FICTION; RELIGION; STARS;
VENUS.
SWEET, DARRELL
(1934- ) US illustrator. His first sf/fantasy work was for BALLANTINE
BOOKS, and when that publisher formed the new DEL REY BOOKS imprint in
1977 DS became their main cover artist, his ILLUSTRATION being strongly
associated with their Jack L. CHALKER covers. His style works especially
well with fantasy books: his delicate women emphasize their fantasy, and
his earthy men give a sense of reality to unreal scenes. His colourful
style is reminiscent, sometimes, of the PULP-MAGAZINE covers of the 1940s,
especially his monsters. He works mainly with acrylics. [JG/PN]
SWENSON, PEGGY
Richard E. GEIS.
SWEVEN, GODFREY
Pseudonym of New Zealand writer and professor of English John Macmillan
Brown (1846-1935), Chancellor of the University of NEW ZEALAND from 1923.

Both his fiction and his nonfiction deal almost exclusively with the South
Pacific. Of sf interest is his 2-part Antarctic UTOPIA, published as
Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles (1901 US) and Limanora: The Island of
Progress (1903 US; rev 1931 UK), in which an ethereal man with artificial
wings is shot down in the South Pacific but survives - he's British - to
recount his long trek through a mist-enshrouded group of ISLANDS, each of
them exemplifying different modes of existence, until he finds himself in
the scientific utopia of Limanora, which GS anatomizes in extraordinary
detail. Here he is physically and psychologically reconstructed. [JC]See
also: HISTORY OF SF.
SWIFT, JONATHAN
(1667-1745) Irish satirist, poet and cleric. His most famous work,
perhaps the most important of all works of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION, is
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World in Four Parts . . . by
Lemuel Gulliver (1726; rev 1735), better known today as Gulliver's
Travels. The work is in part pure sf, and certainly makes use of and in
some cases invents narrative strategies which are now basic to sf; its
influence, both direct and indirect, on subsequent sf has been enormous,
as for example on H.G. WELLS's The Island of Dr Moreau (1896). In each of
its 4 books Captain Gulliver finds himself marooned in an ALIEN culture.
JS's SATIRE has two main forms: sometimes the culture in which he finds
himself reflects aspects of British society in an exaggerated manner, so
as to reveal its absurdities, and sometimes - more interestingly to sf
readers - it is the differences between alien societies and ours which
serve by contrast to make us see our own culture from a new perspective.
This latter technique predominates in Book IV, "A Voyage to the Country of
the Houyhnhnms", in which Gulliver finds himself stranded in a society of
intelligent horses, who do not (for example) understand such concepts as
war, the telling of untruths, or sexual passion. The details of their
culture are more convincing than was commonly the case with satire of this
kind, and the satire itself more complex. Although the story is often read
as a forceful attack on mankind - the brutish Yahoos who live there are in
fact humans - a more interesting reading, and one more readily supported
from the text, is that Gulliver's admiring description of the life of pure
intellect is part of Swift's ironic strategy, and that the reader is to
see the horses as emotionally sterile and soulless. Swift's use of horse
and Yahoo as sticks to beat one another is a double irony of a kind that
has been much used in sf.Books I and II, in which Gulliver voyages to
Lilliput, where everyone is very small, and to Brobdingnag, where everyone
is a giant ( GREAT AND SMALL), are the best known, partly because
bowdlerized versions have become children's classics; the originals are
savage and bawdy. Book III is set in and around Laputa, an ISLAND floating
in the air and largely populated by semi-crazed scientific researchers
(the first important appearance of the mad SCIENTIST in literature); in
the distant city of Luggnagg live a group of depressing, senile immortals,
"opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but uncapable
of Friendship and dead to all natural Affection", the Struldbruggs. Many
of the scientific experiments satirized by JS were to become staples of
later sf; though he shows their absurdity, he also has sympathy for the
imaginative enthusiasm with which they are carried out. Most of JS's work

contains such paradoxes.Another satirical strategy of JS has become
important to DYSTOPIAN writing generally: he takes an outrageous
proposition and debates it quite deadpan, as if he not only supports it
but does not seriously expect opposition. Thus he satirized the more
inhuman attitudes to poverty (then as now) in A Modest Proposal (1729
chap) by suggesting that OVERPOPULATION and starvation in Ireland could
both be cured at a stroke by using the children of the poor as food.
[PN]See also: APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD); ASTRONOMY;
BULGARIA;
FANTASTIC VOYAGES; HUMOUR; IMMORTALITY; LOST WORLDS; MATHEMATICS;
SEX;
SOCIOLOGY; UTOPIAS.
SWIGART, ROB
Working name of US writer and academic E. Robison Swigart (1941- ), whose
novels, from Little America (1977) on, have been FABULATIONS composed in a
style which might be described as flamboyantly brisk; they include A.K.A.:
A Cosmic Fable (1978), The Time Trip (1979) and The Book of Revelations
(1981). Vector (1986) and its sequel Toxin (1989) deal, within a mystery
frame, with the threat to Earth of a bio-engineered disease; and Venom
(1991) similarly poses for its investigative protagonists the problem of a
deadly poison. Perhaps more interestingly, Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval
(1988) offers a complex future HISTORY of our planet over the next 100
years, the intercourse and coming to reflective awareness of an AI named
Homer, a returned astronaut's search through an apparently abandoned Earth
for some sign of humanity, speculations about GENETIC ENGINEERING, and an
explanation of the nature of the route taken by humanity through the
eponymous exit into a transcendental state. [JC]See also: COMPUTERS.
SWORD AND SORCERY
This term - describing a subgenre of FANTASY embracing adventures with
swordplay and MAGIC - is usually attributed to Fritz LEIBER, who is said
to have coined it in 1960, but the kind of story it refers to is much
older than that. (Other terms that overlap with "sword-and-sorcery" are
HEROIC FANTASY and SCIENCE FANTASY, the overlap being considerable in the
former case, but all 3 terms have different nuances.) Earlier terms with
similar meaning are "weird fantasy" and "fantastic romance".Leiber was a
member of the Hyborian League, a fan group, founded in 1956 to preserve
the memory of the pulp writer Robert E. HOWARD, to which many professional
writers belonged; the group's FANZINE was Amra. The members believed that
Howard founded the sword-and-sorcery genre with his stories in WEIRD
TALES, especially the Conan series of swashbuckling, romantic fantasies,
beginning with "The Phoenix on the Sword" (1932), set in Earth's imaginary
past, and featuring a mighty swordsman, violently amorous, who often
confronted supernatural forces of Evil.Howard's stories were not sui
generis, however: the creation of imaginary worlds on which colourful
adventures took place was very much a feature of PLANETARY ROMANCES in the
PULP MAGAZINES, notably the Barsoom stories of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, which
began 20 years before Conan's debut. Burroughs did not feature magic to
quite the same extent as Howard (and usually rationalized it as advanced
science), but the atmosphere of the books shows a clear continuity between

the two writers. In MAINSTREAM literature, too, there was a long tradition
of picaresque adventures in imaginary worlds, though usually more modest
(and literate), and sometimes less energetic, than Howard's. The usually
quoted high points of this tradition up to the time of Howard are the
somewhat etiolated medieval fantasies of William MORRIS, the stylish
though mannered romances of Lord DUNSANY (often set in a sort of
"Faerie"), the rather more swaggering romances of E.R. EDDISON, and James
Branch CABELL's elegant, ironic and elaborate Poictesme series. All of
these influenced various of the Weird Tales sword-and-sorcery writers,
though Howard less than Clark Ashton SMITH, C.L. MOORE and Henry KUTTNER.
Moore was perhaps the best writer of this group, with her Jirel of Joiry
and her Northwest Smith stories. But there is no denying the colour and
vigour of Howard's work. The essential, new element which Howard brought
to the genre was the emphasis on brutal, heroic ambition in the HERO, who
is seen (unlike Cabell's heroes, for example) quite without irony, as
simply admirable.Sometimes sf devices are used to explain the setting of
the societies (nearly always tribal or feudal) in which such adventures
take place; they may be in ALTERNATE WORLDS, PARALLEL WORLDS, other
DIMENSIONS, LOST WORLDS, Earth's prehistoric past even before ATLANTIS, on
other planets such as MARS or VENUS, inside the HOLLOW EARTH, or even on
forgotten colonies of a GALACTIC EMPIRE. It does not really matter which;
the thing is to provide an exotic background - the more elaborately worked
out the better - to a dualistic conflict, almost invariably between Good
and Evil.Weird Tales continued to publish sword-and-sorcery stories up to
the 1940s; many did not see book publication until much later. Clark
Ashton Smith's extremely colourful, "jewelled" prose was popular; C.L.
Moore had perhaps the most baroque imagination, especially when it came to
dreaming up sinister menaces. But sword and sorcery was a very minor genre
by the 1950s, despite the activities of the Hyborian League and the
publication in book form during that decade (often by GNOME PRESS) of the
works of Howard, Moore and others. The chances are that it would never
have attained the extraordinary popularity it has today were it not for
the belated but huge success of J.R.R. TOLKIEN's The Lord of the Rings (3
vols 1954-5), and the lesser though still remarkable success of T.H.
WHITE's The Once and Future King (1958), the latter forming the basis of
the musical Camelot (1960), filmed in 1967. When these works had filtered
through to the mass market via paperback editions (not until 1965 in the
case of Tolkien) it became obvious that there was a huge appetite for work
of this kind; publishers began to fall over one another in the effort to
feed it.Tolkien's long, richly imagined work is as important to modern
sword and sorcery as Howard's, the two representing the two ends of the
genre's spectrum: Howard all amoral vigour, Tolkien all deeply moral
clarity of imagination. (Also, Howard's heroes were very big, Tolkien's
very small.) Common to both - although the two writers could not have had
the remotest influence on each other - is a powerful commitment to the
idea of worlds where magic works, and where heroism can be pitted against
Evil.By the time Tolkien was published, sword and sorcery was showing
signs of vigour elsewhere, its two finest exponents being perhaps Fritz
Leiber and Jack VANCE. Leiber, with his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series
beginning with "Two Sought Adventure" (1939), had been one of the few to
publish sword and sorcery through the 1940s. The series is imaginative and

full of verve; Leiber's stroke of genius was to have two heroes, one huge
and powerful, one small, nimble and quick-witted. Vance's THE DYING EARTH
(coll of linked stories 1950) and its successor The Eyes of the Overworld
(coll of linked stories 1966) are dry, ironic, moving, cynical, and often
very witty indeed; they are written with precision and flourish, and,
insofar as they can be compared with anything else in the genre, recall
the work of Cabell.Other writers who have had a strong influence on the
development of the genre are L. Sprague DE CAMP and Fletcher PRATT, Poul
ANDERSON, Leigh BRACKETT (especially her Mars stories) and Lin CARTER.
Both De Camp and Carter have had a hand in adding to the Conan series, and
Carter's style in particular is more verbose than that of the original.
Carter was also from 1969 editor of BALLANTINE BOOKS's Adult Fantasy
series, which certainly did much to increase the fantasy readership among
young people, and he was a tireless proselytizer for the genre. An
unfortunate but inevitable consequence of sword and sorcery's sudden
popularity was (and continues to be) the large amount of hackwork that
came to be published in the genre.Among the stronger writers is Andre
NORTON, whose Witch World books, set in parallel worlds where magic works,
are genuinely macabre and evoke vividly the difficulties of maintaining
some kind of civilization in the face of Evil, ambition and chaos, though
like other works in the genre her books sometimes suffer from a rather
clotted, mock-medieval rhetoric. Even Robert A. HEINLEIN wrote one
sword-and-sorcery novel, Glory Road (1963), but his matter-of-factness and
preachiness render the book less than spellbinding. Sterling LANIER, Fred
SABERHAGEN and Christopher STASHEFF have all produced entertaining stories
in the genre, as has Avram DAVIDSON, with perhaps more originality.Michael
MOORCOCK is one of the relatively few UK writers to work in the genre, and
though his sword and sorcery (which he began publishing around 1963) has
been dismissed, not least by himself, as hackwork, and while he certainly
wrote too much too fast, his fantasy generally and his Elric books in
particular imported a welcome breadth to the genre: Good and Evil in
Moorcock's books are never easy to define; the forces of Chaos and the
forces of Law are alike unsentimental, self-seeking and untroubled by
human anguish. Moorcock put paid to the idea of the hero in control of his
own destiny; in his books an indifferent universe cares nothing for
heroism, but Moorcock does, and the courage shown by his heroes is the
more touching for being (usually) doomed. His sword-and-sorcery work is as
much a critique of the genre as it is a continuation of its traditions. M.
John HARRISON's The Pastel City (1971) is a more interesting than usual
variant, using the conventions of the genre with skill, but to slightly
deflationary effect.Many fine WOMEN WRITERS have been attracted to sword
and sorcery, including those noted above and C.J. CHERRYH, Jane GASKELL,
Barbara HAMBLY, Katherine KURTZ, Tanith LEE, R.A. MACAVOY, Sheri S.
TEPPER, Joan VINGE and Patricia Wrede (1953- ).Sword-and-sorcery readers
appear to welcome long - sometimes seemingly endless - series, and many
writers have obliged: John JAKES with the Brak books, Lin Carter with the
Thongor books, John NORMAN with the Gor books, and others by Alan Burt
Akers (Kenneth BULMER), Gardner F. FOX, Jeffrey LORD, Andrew J. OFFUTT,
Peter Valentine TIMLETT, Karl Edward Wagner (1945- ) and Robert Moore
WILLIAMS. Not all of these works are pure sword and sorcery; many, such as
Akers's, are more directly in the Edgar Rice Burroughs SCIENCE-FANTASY

tradition. It can be said that most of these (Jakes's and Wagner's being
perhaps the best) are routine, and that at their worst they are execrable.
By the mid-1970s sword and sorcery as a marketing term was giving way to
HEROIC FANTASY or sometimes "high fantasy". In practice, however, this
meant little (if any) change in the sort of material being published. Many
sword-and-sorcery motifs found their way into sf proper, too; e.g., the
violent Horseclans series (from 1975) by Robert ADAMS, set in a postHOLOCAUST future. Generally, though, the late 1970s and the 1980s saw a
greater separation between sf and sword and sorcery than before, with
fewer writers working in both fields, though Stephen DONALDSON, who had
made sword-and-sorcery history by introducing a protagonist with leprosy
in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever series (from 1977),
went on to write some sf, as did MacAvoy and, most notably of all, Tepper.
The scenarios of some sword-and-sorcery writers, such as David GEMMELL,
Hambly and Eric VAN LUSTBADER, occasionally approach the sciencefictional,
but many of the most publicized sword-and-sorcery authors of the decade e.g., David Eddings (1931- ), Robert Jordan (1948- ) and Tad Williams
(1957- )-have had nothing to do with sf at all.Sword and sorcery is not
sf; it is an accident of publishing history that its links with sf are so
strong, but hardly a surprising accident: both have roots in 1930s pulp
fiction, and they were for a long time often written by the same people.
Both genres, indeed, revel in the creation of imaginary worlds. The fact
that sf attempts to rationalize its mysteries while sword and sorcery
simply attributes them to supernatural powers does not, perhaps, make as
big a difference as sf purists would like to believe. Certainly
genre-crossing between the two by writers as various as Norton and Vance
has strongly influenced both genres. John CROWLEY's The Deep (1975) uses
the confusion between the genres interestingly in its actual
structure.Sword and sorcery has also moved inexorably into other media,
notably COMICS but also (seldom with much success) CINEMA, as with the
John Milius film Conan the Barbarian (1981) and George LUCAS's production
Willow (1988). More interestingly, STAR WARS (1977), Lucas's great
success, arguably owes as much to sword and sorcery as it does to sf. The
most extensive influence of sword and sorcery has been in role-playing
games, many discussed under GAMES AND TOYS, whose scenarios it has wholly
dominated ever since Gary Gygax (1938- ) and Dave Arneson created and
published Dungeons and Dragons (1974).The genre has, perhaps, too narrow a
range of interests, and the constant recurrence of the same themes is
likely to make all but the most fanatic enthusiast tire quickly, at least
with work at the lower end of the market. Much sword and sorcery is
violent, sexist and even, according to some, fascist. Norman SPINRAD
showed what he thought of the genre in The Iron Dream (1972), which
contains a heroic fantasy purportedly written by an alternate-world
Hitler. But at its best the genre welcomes wit, imagination, and
freewheeling invention; it has produced some memorable images.There are no
outstanding studies of sword and sorcery at book length. De Camp's
Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy (1976) is
useful, however, and Michael MOORCOCK's uneven Wizardry and Wild Romance:
A Study of Epic Fantasy (1987) has a number of shrewd observations.
[PN]See also: GODS AND DEMONS; PARANOIA; PASTORAL; SEX; VILLAINS.

SWORD ?
US DIGEST-size reprint magazine. 1 issue, 1975, published by Ultimate
Publishing Co.; ed Sol Cohen, uncredited. 1 story was from WEIRD TALES,
the Conan tale "Queen of the Black Coast" (1934) by Robert E. HOWARD; the
others were from Fantastic 1961-5. [FHP]
SWYCFFER, JEFFERSON P(UTNAM)
(1956- ) US writer, almost exclusively of TIES, including the Tales of
the Concordat sequence, which is tied to a game, and which comprises Not
in our Stars * (1984), Become the Hunted * (1985), The Universal Prey *
(1985), The Presidium of Archive * (coll 1985), The Empire's Legacy *
(1988), Voyage of the Planetslayer * (1988) and Revolt and Rebirth *
(1988). Warsprite (1990) is a somewhat jumbled sf novel featuring ROBOTS
in a future Wyoming; and Web of Futures (1991) is a somewhat more
ambitious TIME TRAVEL fantasy. [JC]
SYKES, S(ONDRA) C(ATHARINE)
(? -? ) US writer of a tie in the U.S.S.A. sequence, U.S.S.A., Book 3 *
(1987), in which high-school students continue to oppose NEAR-FUTURE
totalitarian oppression. Red Genesis (1991), #1 in the The Next Wave line
of otherwise unconnected novels from Byron PREISS Visual Productions,
deals with the colonization of MARS. [JC]SYLVESTER, JOHN Hyperlink to:
Hector HAWTON.
SYLVESTER, JOHN
Hector HAWTON.
SYMBIOSIS
PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS.
SYMMES, JOHN CLEVES
(1780-1829) US army officer with the rank of Captain, who distinguished
himself in the War of 1812, retired, and subsequently devoted his life to
propagandizing (largely through speeches, apparently charismatic) on
behalf of his theory of a HOLLOW EARTH consisting of 5 concentric spheres,
with openings at the poles. He twice petitioned Congress (1822, 1823) for
funds to mount an expedition to the (literal) interior, but failed. His
health failed, too, after many lecture tours, and he died quite young. He
did not leave any account in book form of his theories, though he did
issue a paper in 1818. Symmes' Theory of Concentric Spheres (1826) was by
a disciple, James McBride, and The Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres,
Demonstrating that the Earth is Hollow, Habitable Within, and Widely Open
about the Pole: Compiled by Americus Symmes from the Writings of his
Father Captain John Cleves Symmes (1878) was by his 10th child. Although
it has been thought that the novel Symzonia (1820) by Adam SEABORN may
have been written pseudonymously by JCS, it has been pointed out (by E.F.
BLEILER) that this is unlikely since, although the book alludes to Symmes
in its title, it actually satirizes some of Symmes's ideas. These ideas
were not sui generis, and indeed belong to a long tradition of
PSEUDO-SCIENCE theorizing, one of whose important milestones was a 1692
paper by the astronomer Edmond Halley (1656-1742), published by the Royal
Society in London, also arguing for nested spheres (and an internal sun).
JCS's version was, however, directly influential through much of the 19th

century. [PN]See also: LOST WORLDS.
SYNERGY
US ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series ed George ZEBROWSKI, published by Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich: Synergy: New Science Fiction #1 (anth 1987), #2 (anth
1988), #3 (anth 1989) and #4 (anth 1989). It was interesting without being
remarkable, publishing good stories by Gregory BENFORD, Chad OLIVER, Ian
WATSON and others. [PN]
SYNGE, J(OHN) L(YTON)
(1897- ) Irish physicist and writer whose best-known nontechnical work of
nonfiction is Science, Sense and Nonsense (1951). His novel, Kandelman's
Krim: A Realistic Fantasy (1957), features a long conversation in which an
Orc, a Kea, a Unicorn and a Plumber discuss the concept of infinity and
instruct a passing Goddess in the foundations of MATHEMATICS. [BS]
SYVERTSEN, RYDER (OTTO)
(1941- ) US writer specializing in sf and fantasy adventure sequences,
the only one to appear under his own name being the Mystic Rebel series:
Mystic Rebel (1988), #2: The Dancing Dead (1988), #3: Darkness Descends
(1988), #4: Temple of Dark Destiny (1989) and #5: Cave of the Master
(1990). Also under his own name he wrote Psychic Spawn (1987) with Adrian
Fletcher (pseudonym of Rosemary Ellen Guiley); and with Jan STACY he wrote
The Great Book of Movie Monsters (1983).Also with Stacy, writing together
as Jan Sievert, he began the C.A.D.S. sequence (the acronym stands for
Computerized Attack/Defence System) with C.A.D.S. (1985). Stacy then
dropped out, and the sequence was continued by RS, who wrote #2-#8, and
then by David ALEXANDER, who wrote #9-#11, both always writing as Sievert.
The sequence continued with C.A.D.S. #2: Tech Background (1986), #3: Tech
Commando (1986), #4: Tech Strike Force (1987), #5: Tech Satan (1988), #6:
Tech Inferno (1988), #7: Doom Commander (1989), #8: Cybertech Killing Zone
(1989), #9: Suicide Attack (1990), #10: Recon by Fire (1990), #11: Death
Zone Attack (1991) and #12: Tech Assassins (1991).RS and Stacy also began
the Doomsday Warrior sequence of SURVIVALIST-FICTION novels, all as by
Ryder Stacy, set in a USA after 100 years of occupation by brutish
Russians, who commit their first strike in 1989 and, during the subsequent
HOLOCAUST, cause the world's axis to tip out of true, killing off most of
any remaining animal life: Doomsday Warrior (1984), #2: Red America
(1984), #3: The Last American (1984) and #4: Bloody America (1985), all
with Stacy, and then, by RS solo, #5: America's Last Declaration (1985),
#6: American Rebellion (1985), #7: American Defiance (1986), #8: American
Glory (1986), #9: America's Zero Hour (1986), #10: American Nightmare
(1987), #11: American Eden (1987), #12: Death, American Style (1987), #13:
American Paradise (1988), #14: American Death Orbit (1988), #15: American
Ultimatum (1989), #16: American Overthrow (1989), #17: America's Sword
(1990), #18: American Dream Machine (1990) and #19: America's Final
Defense (1991). [JC]
SZABO, PETER SZENTMIHALYI
[r] HUNGARY.
SZATHMARY, SANDOR
[r] HUNGARY.

SZEPES, MARIA
[r] HUNGARY.
SZILARD, LEO
(1898-1964) Celebrated Hungarian-US physicist, in the USA from 1937,
whose The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories (coll 1961) was
published late in his career. Several of these sf stories had been written
in the 1940s, one of them, "My Trial as a War Criminal" (1949), being an
early expression of the deep and often hidden fears of the scientific
community about the development of the nuclear bomb. The title story, told
in the form of an impersonal report, makes pioneer use of the notion that
cetacean INTELLIGENCE is both vastly different and in some ways superior
to that of Homo sapiens. Dolphins grow to dominate mankind, using
scientists and institutions as fronts, and the planet is saved. [JC]
SZYDLOW, JARL
Mary VIGLIANTE.

SF?
TABOOS
Many sf stories are set in imaginary or alien societies, where taboos are
an important part of the social structure; Robert SHECKLEY and Jack VANCE
both wrote a lot of them. Several such stories are discussed under
ANTHROPOLOGY. And sf has a reputation, not always deserved, for attacking
the sacred cows and breaking the taboos of our own society; while a few
examples of this are necessarily discussed below, this entry focuses on
those taboos set up not by society or by the law but by sf publishers (
PUBLISHING).Sf by MAINSTREAM WRITERS has been subjected to no more
censorship than fiction in general, and indeed has often been a medium for
discussing "taboo" subjects with comparative freedom, even since before
the time of The Great Taboo (1890) by Grant ALLEN. Things were very
different within GENRE SF, where publishers were unwilling to alienate any
part of their readership, and therefore set a great many taboos into
operation for a period that lasted at least from the inception of the SF
MAGAZINES in 1926 until well into the 1950s. Most of these taboos related
to SEX, profanity and RELIGION. Several examples of stories which broke
religious or sexual taboos, and consequently had difficulty in finding
publishers, are discussed under ALIENS. To mention a single example, Harry
HARRISON had great difficulty placing "The Streets of Ashkelon" (1962) - a
not extraordinarily daring story about the anthropological ignorance and
stupidity of a Christian missionary on an alien planet, and about the
damage he does - on the grounds that Christians might find it offensive.
Similarly, although since (at least) WWII MAINSTREAM WRITERS have had
considerable freedom in discussing sexual matters, magazine sf and genre
sf generally remained downright prudish even after the pioneering work (
SEX) of Theodore STURGEON and Philip Jose FARMER.Not all subjects were
taboo. Violence, for example, was (and is) all right, and extreme
conservative POLITICS ( LIBERTARIANISM, SOCIAL DARWINISM) was acceptable
to editors like John W. CAMPBELL Jr, whose own editorials on possible
justifications for slavery (though not just for Blacks) were notorious.

Campbell's ASF also exercised several quite subtle taboos in addition to
those regarding sex and profanity; notably, he strongly disliked
publishing downbeat stories in which humanity was somehow unsuccessful, or
outwitted by aliens. This sort of prejudice did not precisely take the
form of censorship, but the writers all knew very well what sort of
stories would be acceptable to which editors. (Later Roger ELWOOD, who for
a while in the 1970s controlled a large percentage of the ANTHOLOGY
market, was well known for his extremely conservative views, both
religious and sexual.) There seems to have been a kind of unspoken
agreement not to publish stories of a socialist orientation - although it
may just have been that few were written, unlike the position in the early
decades of the century when socialist writers like Jack LONDON were at
work and being readily published. And until the 1960s Black writers, and
indeed Black issues, were rare in magazine sf. Racial problems tended to
be discussed symbolically, in terms of meetings with alien races, rather
than directly.In the nations which until recently were often described as
the communist-bloc countries, political censorship of sf, as of most forms
of writing, remained ruthless, especially from the 1940s through the
1960s. As late as 1966 the Soviet writers Yuli DANIEL and Andrey SINYAVSKY
were first imprisoned and then exiled. Political censorship in these
nations had its ups and downs in the 1970s, relaxing only in the late
1980s, not long before the Communist Party began losing power throughout
Eastern Europe and Russia. The entries for BULGARIA, CZECH AND SLOVAK SF,
HUNGARY, POLAND, ROMANIA, RUSSIA and YUGOSLAVIA all (to various degrees)
document this phenomenon. Sf, of course, because of its metaphoric
flexibility, whereby stories apparently set in the future on other worlds
actually tell us something about our world right now, is an ideal medium
for subdued political protest, as many Communist-bloc writers (and some
Capitalist-bloc writers) knew very well.Moving away from politics, we find
that until the 1960s pessimism in magazine sf was largely if not entirely
taboo ( OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM). Cannibalism, on the other hand, was
perfectly acceptable in genre sf. It turned up quite often even before the
1960s, and has been central in more recent stories like Harlan ELLISON's
"A Boy and his Dog" (1969). Ellison was prominent among the
ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY and magazine editors of the NEW WAVE in consciously
breaking taboos, notably in his DANGEROUS VISIONS anthologies, although a
decade later most of these stories seemed tame enough (indeed, many were
quite tame even at the time). The magazine NEW WORLDS, under Michael
MOORCOCK, performed a similar function, rather earlier, in the UK; other
original-anthology series like ORBIT and NEW DIMENSIONS also had an
important liberating effect on what could or could not be discussed in
genre sf. By 1976 Damon KNIGHT had no qualms about publishing a story
advocating incest in a post- HOLOCAUST situation, Felix GOTSCHALK's "The
Family Winter of 1986" in Orbit 18 (anth 1976); Knight's editorial
foreword itself contained a vulgarity which would have been impossible not
long before: "The family that lays together stays together." But the
ground-breaking incest story in genre sf is very much older: Ward MOORE's
classic "Lot's Daughter" (1954).While the 1980s have been seen, rather
like the 1960s, as a period when just about anything controversial could
be published in the USA and the UK, there was, especially in the USA, a
kind of covert censorship operating in some areas. Sometimes this could

perhaps be justifiable: Knight's vulgarity, cited above, seemed less funny
once the prevalence of child abuse became publicly known. Otherwise,
though, this was the period when infantilism forcefully re-entered the
field, after it had been discovered how extremely young much of the
audience was for smash-hit films like STAR WARS. Whenever mass-market
publishers believe there is big money to be won from the youthful market,
then a whole series of taboos comes into operation. (The same syndrome has
always been visible in US tv programmes like STAR TREK whose audiences are
known to be predominantly young; Star Trek scriptwriters still have
"bibles" to tell them what issues cannot be tackled, and what kinds of
language cannot be used.) Thus the 1980s saw the reverse of, say, the
1950s, when book publishers offered more freedom than magazine publishers.
The genre magazines of the 1980s could generally be as broad-minded as
their editors wished, notably in the cases of ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE
FICTION MAGAZINE in the USA and INTERZONE in the UK. But book publishers,
especially those publishing series for the semi-juvenile market, were very
cautious about any undue cleverness or sophistication; though,
disgracefully enough, editors as usual did not seem too disturbed by
violence. Obviously, many publishers paid no attention to restrictions of
this sort, but it is fair to say that during the 1980s the proportion of
the mass market where writers could expect to have their more
sophisticated work published was shrinking relative to the hack-markets
operating according to strict (and uncontroversial) formulae.We should
note also that there are cultural trends perceived by editors and
journalists as not being worth opposing because to do so makes people
cross. In other words, new sacred cows appear every decade. It is not
clear to what degree some of these trends operate in sf publishing. A good
example in the early 1990s was the topic of global warming and the
greenhouse effect: to express the opinion that there was no evidence that
the world was getting hotter, and precious little evidence that it was
likely to, was to say something disgusting. [PN]
TABORI, PAUL
Working name of Hungarian writer Paul Tabor or (variously) Pal Tabori
(1908-1974), who gained a doctorate in economic and political science in
1930 and then worked as a literary agent. He moved to the UK before the
outbreak of WWII, about which he would publish several works, including
They Came to London (1943), a marginally NEAR-FUTURE tale involving the
Second Front, and The Frontier (1950), which reworked the terrible history
of Germany in an ALTERNATE-WORLD frame. He cowrote the script for
FOUR-SIDED TRIANGLE (1953), adapted from William F. TEMPLE's novel. Some
of his later (and increasingly commercial) fiction was sf, the best
example being The Green Rain (1961 US), a sour comedy about chemically
polluted rainfall turning people green. Sex and the occult infused much of
his later work, like The Cleft (1969 US), the fissure of the title being
nearly as symbolic as the crack in Emma TENNANT's The Time of the Crack
(1973). PT was an effective writer who sometimes allowed haste to spoil
his results. [JC]Other works: Solo (1948); The Talking Tree (1950); The
Survivors (1964), a post- HOLOCAUST tale; the Hunters series, comprising
The Doomsday Brain (1967 US), The Invisible Eye (1967 US) and The Torture
Machine (1969 US); The Demons of Sandorra (1970 US); Lily Dale (1972); The

Wild White Witch (1973) as by Peter Stafford.See also: HUNGARY.
TACHYONS
There is an only half-facetious precept in PHYSICS stating that "anything
which is not prohibited is compulsory". Olexa-Myron Bilaniuk and E.C.
George Sudarshan suggested in 1962, and Gerald Feinberg in 1967, that the
idea of a particle that can only travel FASTER THAN LIGHT does not violate
any of the basic maxims of relativistic physics. Such a hypothetical
particle (a tachyon, as opposed to the more familiar tardyon, or
slower-than-light particle) might emit Cerenkov radiation analogous to the
bow wave of a ship, and thus might perhaps be detected. The mass (or
metamass) of a tachyon must be imaginary, in the same sense that the
square root of minus one is imaginary.If tachyons were shown to exist we
might have to rethink the idea of causality, since they would appear in
some circumstances to go backwards in time, so that to a hypothetical
observer the emission of a tachyon would appear to be its absorption.
However, a negative-energy tachyon propagating backward in time could be
reinterpreted as a positive-energy tachyon propagating forward in time;
some physicists think that such a reinterpretation would be the loophole
through which the principle of causality might be preserved. J. Richard
Gott proposed in 1973 that, after the Big Bang, a tripartite Universe may
have been formed, consisting of universes of matter, ANTIMATTER and
tachyons.The tachyon became an item of sf TERMINOLOGY in the 1970s (though
never to any great extent), because it suggests a more rational basis on
which TIME-TRAVEL stories - or (more plausibly, since we cannot, even
theoretically, convert tardyonic into tachyonic matter) stories of
COMMUNICATION through time - can be written. The physicist-writer Gregory
BENFORD was the first to do this with some care, in his major novel
TIMESCAPE (1980), which describes an attempt to change future history by
transmitting a tachyonic message from that future to our present. [PN]
TAFF
AWARDS.
TAINE, JOHN
Pseudonym for all his fiction of Eric Temple Bell (1883-1960), US
mathematician and writer, born in Scotland; he also wrote academic and
popular works on mathematics under his own name. JT's first novel was a
LOST-WORLD fantasy, The Purple Sapphire (1924), and he published several
further sf books before writing for the sf PULP MAGAZINES. The Gold Tooth
(1927) concerns a quest for a magical element. Quayle's Invention (1927)
features a device for making gold. Green Fire (1928) is one of many
contemporary stories about super- WEAPONS. His best and most interesting
work includes a long sequence of mutational romances ( MUTANTS) involving
rapid and uncontrolled EVOLUTION: The Greatest Adventure (1929); The Iron
Star (1930); The Crystal Horde (1930 AMZ Quarterly as "White Lily"; 1952),
featuring crystalline life, and Seeds of Life (1931 AMZ Quarterly; 1951),
an important early SUPERMAN story, both much later assembled as Seeds of
Life and White Lily (omni 1966); "The Ultimate Catalyst" (1939); and The
Forbidden Garden (1947). Before the Dawn (1934) is a didactic prehistoric
romance in which the end of the dinosaurs is observed through a
time-viewer. The Time Stream (1931 Wonder Stories; 1946) is an elaborate

TIME-TRAVEL adventure which, like the mutational romances, helped to
extend the horizons of pulp sf and is one of the outstanding products of
the early SF MAGAZINES; it was much later assembled with The Greatest
Adventure and The Purple Sapphire, all texts slightly edited, as Three
Science Fiction Novels (omni 1964). The title story of The Cosmic Geoids
and One Other (coll 1949) is an interesting but not altogether successful
literary experiment, taking the form of a series of imaginary scientific
reports dealing with strange extraterrestrial objects; the "one other" is
the novella "Black Goldfish". Two inferior novels were the superweapon
story "Twelve Eighty-Seven" (1935 ASF) and the DISASTER story "Tomorrow"
(1939 Marvel Science Stories). JT's last book was the sympathetic- MONSTER
story G.O.G. 666 (1954).JT's prose style is sometimes crude, and his
characterization usually lacks finesse, but his best work shows an
admirable imaginative flair. He loved to do things on a grand scale, and
many of his novels end with catastrophes which overwhelm whole continents.
[BS]Constance Reid, The Search for E T Bell, Also Known as John Taine
(1993).See also: BIOLOGY; DEVOLUTION; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; HISTORY OF SF;
INTELLIGENCE; METAPHYSICS; MONEY; PSEUDO-SCIENCE.
TAIT, STEPHEN
[r] Kenneth ALLOTT.
TAIWAN
CHINESE SF.
TAKEI, GEORGE
(1939- ) US actor and writer, best known for his role as Mr Sulu in STAR
TREK. Mirror Friend, Mirror Foe (1979) with Robert Lynn ASPRIN places a
Japanese mercenary in a free-for-all corporate world. [JC]
TALBOT, BRYAN
[r] COMICS.
TALBOT, LAWRENCE
[s] Edward BRYANT.
TALES OF TOMORROW
1. UK pocketbook-size magazine. 11 issues 1950-54 (none in 1951),
numbered but undated, published irregularly by John Spencer, London; ed
(uncredited) by Sol Assael and Michael Nahum. One of the 4 low-quality
Spencer juvenile-sf magazines, the others being FUTURISTIC SCIENCE
STORIES, WONDERS OF THE SPACEWAYS and WORLDS OF FANTASY.2. US tv series
(1951-6). ABC TV. Created and prod George Foley, Dick Gordon. 25 mins per
episode. B/w.One of the earliest and most successful sf-anthology tv
series, TOT was ambitious but, like most tv of the period, limited by the
restrictions imposed by live studio shooting. It drew its material from a
variety of sources, including the sf PULP MAGAZINES, as well as using
original teleplays. The first 2 episodes dramatized Jules VERNE's Vingt
mille lieues sous les mers (1870; trans as Twenty Thousand Leagues under
the Seas 1872 UK), starring Thomas Mitchell as Captain Nemo; Leslie
Nielsen co-starred. [FHP/JB]
TALES OF WONDER
UK magazine, PULP-MAGAZINE size. 16 issues [Summer] 1937-Spring 1942,

quarterly to 1940, thereafter slightly irregular, numbered consecutively,
#1 undated. Published by World's Work, London; ed Walter GILLINGS.TOW,
though preceded by SCOOPS (1934), the sf BOYS' PAPER, was the first adult
UK sf magazine. It used both original UK and reprinted US material, and
prospered until wartime paper restrictions and the drafting of the editor
caused its demise. William F. TEMPLE and Frank Edward ARNOLD were among
the authors who made their debuts in TOW, as, with nonfiction, was Arthur
C. CLARKE. Stories included "Sleepers of Mars" (1938) by John Beynon title story of Sleepers of Mars (coll 1973) as by John WYNDHAM-and, as
reprints, "The Mad Planet" (1920; 1939) by Murray LEINSTER and "City of
the Singing Flame" (1931; 1940) by Clark Ashton SMITH. Other writers were
John Russell FEARN, Benson HERBERT, Festus PRAGNELL and Eric Frank
RUSSELL. [FHP/PN]
TALIB, IMRAN
[r] ARABIC SF.
TALL, STEPHEN
Pseudonym of US writer and biology professor Compton Newby Crook
(1908-1981), who began his writing career under various undisclosed
pseudonyms in the 1930s; none of this early work was apparently sf, which
he began publishing as ST with "The Lights on Precipice Peak" for Gal in
1955. He did not start to be active in the field until more than a decade
later, becoming known initially for the Stardust sequence, beginning with
The Stardust Voyages (coll of linked stories 1975), a SPACE-OPERA saga of
the crew of the Stardust, whose mission is to assess the potential of
various planets and the nature of their ALIEN inhabitants. Though the
stories exhibit a sameness of effect, they are capable expressions of ST's
concern for ECOLOGY, in which discipline he was professionally trained. A
sequel, The Ramsgate Paradox (1976), carries the crew into a novel-length
adventure. The People Beyond the Wall (1980), is a remarkably late
LOST-WORLD tale set under an Alaskan glacier, where a placid UTOPIA is
invaded by the usual suspects.The Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Memorial
AWARD for Best First Novel of Sf was established 1983. [JC]See also:
ANTHROPOLOGY.
TALLO, JOZEF
[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
TAMMUZ, BINYAMIN
[r] ISRAEL.
TANAKA, YOSHIKI
[r] JAPAN.
TARANTULA
Film (1955). Universal. Dir Jack ARNOLD, starring John Agar, Mara Corday,
Leo G. Carroll. Screenplay Martin Berkeley, Robert M. Fresco, based on an
episode of SCIENCE FICTION THEATRE called No Food for Thought by Fresco.
80 mins. B/w.This better-than-average MONSTER MOVIE belongs to the Luddite
technology-out-of-control genre. Three idealistic biochemists experiment
with nutrients that cause gigantism in animals (which would help feed the
world) but (unexpectedly) acromegaly in humans, a horrible deformity that

destroys two scientists and then, rather later, the third (an affecting
performance by Carroll). A tarantula injected with the nutrient escapes
into the desert and grows to a vast size. It preys on cattle and people
before being incinerated by the USAF using napalm. Arnold makes strong use
of the desert setting, creating a kind of watchful stillness, where the
giant spider seems natural rather than alien. [PN/JB]See also: MUTANTS.
TARDE, GABRIEL
Writing name of French sociologist Jean Gabriel de Tarde (1843-1904). His
sf novel, Fragment d'histoire future (1896 Revue internationale de
sociologie; 1904; trans Cloudesley Brereton as Underground Man 1905 UK
with intro by H.G. WELLS), depicts first a world society on the surface of
the Earth, then, with the exhaustion of the Sun's energy, a sanitary
underground UTOPIA. The author seems to evince satirical doubts about the
value of the latter as a model for human conduct. [JC]See also: END OF THE
WORLD.
TARDIVEL, JULES-PAUL
(1851-1905) US-born journalist and writer, in Canada from about 1868;
there he founded a newspaper, La Verite, espousing Quebec nationalism, and
published in it his separatist UTOPIA, Pour la patrie: roman du xxe siecle
(1895; 1895; trans Sheila Fischman as For my Country 1975). Set in a 1945
characterized by electric trains and other sf projections, it describes a
conservative, Catholic "Laurentian Empire" which is opposed - vainly - by
the forces of Satan. [JC]
TARGET EARTH!
Film (1954). Abtcon Pictures/Allied Artists. Dir Sherman A. Rose,
starring Richard Denning, Virginia Grey, Kathleen Crowley, Richard Reeves.
Screenplay William Raynor, based on "Deadly City" (1953 If) by Paul W.
FAIRMAN (as Ivar JORGENSON). 75 mins. B/wIn this film, whose low budget is
reflected in its appearance, robots from Venus invade the Earth, using a
beam that kills people. They are eventually defeated by scientists, who
find that ultrasonic sound will break open their glass faceplates, thus
destroying them. Critic Bill WARREN, while he regards it as poor, aside
from lonely, atmospheric sequences in a deserted city, adds that it is
"better than the story it came from". [JB/PN]
TARKOVSKY, ANDREI
(1932-1987) Russian film-maker. A graduate of the Soviet State Film
School, AT attained prominence in RUSSIA with his first film, Ivanovo
Detstvo (1962; vt Ivan's Childhood; vt My Name is Ivan), the story of an
orphan cut off behind enemy lines during WWII. With his next feature,
Andrei Roublev (1966; release delayed until 1971), AT fell foul of the
Soviet censors with his dark vision of the life of the 15th-century icon
painter. His sf reputation rests on two long films, SOLARIS (1971), based
on SOLARIS (1961) by Stanislaw LEM, and STALKER (1979), based on "Piknik
na abochine" (1972; trans as Roadside Picnic 1977) by the STRUGATSKI
brothers. Alternating between b/w and colour, and featuring many static
scenes prolonged to the point of tedium, AT's sf films have been both much
lauded and much reviled by critics, but there is no denying the startling
power of such crystal-clear images as the country house marooned on an

alien lake in SOLARIS or the gradual telekinetic movement of a glass on a
table at the finale of Stalker. More personal are AT's linked pair of
non-sf films, Zerkalo (1974; vt Mirror) and Nostalghia (1983; vt
Nostalgia), the latter made in Italy after his emigration from the USSR.
Not long before his death from cancer, AT made a borderline-sf film in
Sweden, Offret (1986; vt The Sacrifice), a contemplation on faith and
responsibility, heavily influenced by Ingmar Bergman (1918- ), which
contains a central section visualizing WWIII and the dilapidation of
society. [KN]See also: CINEMA; MUSIC.
TATE, PETER
(1940 - ) Welsh journalist and author who began publishing sf with "The
Post-Mortem People" for NW in 1966; this was assembled with his other
short fiction as Seagulls under Glass and Other Stories (coll 1975 US).
His first novel, The Thinking Seat (1969 US), began a loose sequence of
tales featuring the charismatic and guru-like Simeon; it was followed by
Moon on an Iron Meadow (1974 US) and Faces in the Flames (1976 US). All
demonstrate an interest in POLITICS, and Moon on an Iron Meadow in
particular shows a deep concern about biological weapons - it also
manifests the extent to which PT had been influenced by Ray BRADBURY, the
bulk of the story taking place in Bradbury's imaginary Green Town,
Illinois. PT published 3 other novels: Gardens 12345 (1971; vt Gardens One
to Five 1971 US), Country Love and Poison Rain (1973), probably the first
sf novel about Welsh Nationalism - it concerns the political repercussions
of the discovery of a secret NATO cache of deadly nerve gas in the Brecon
Beacons-and Greencomber (1979 US), a surly and metaphor-choked tale of a
battered NEAR-FUTURE UK rather reminiscent of the work of Keith ROBERTS,
but without that writer's shaping power. [MJE]See also: POLLUTION.
TATE, ROBIN
[s] R.L. FANTHORPE.
TAUSEND AUGEN DES DR MABUSE, DIE
(vt The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse; vt The Diabolical Dr Mabuse) Film
(1960). CCC Filmkunst/CEI Incom/Criterion. Dir Fritz LANG, starring Dawn
Addams, Peter Van Eyck, Gert Frobe, Wolfgang Preiss, Werner Peters.
Screenplay Lang, Heinz Oskar Wuttig, based on characters created by
Norbert Jacques (1880-1954), author of Dr Mabuse, Master of Mystery (trans
Lilian A. Clare 1923 UK). 103 mins. B/w.After a gap of 27 years Fritz Lang
returned, in this West German, Italian and French coproduction, both to
the character who had helped make him famous and from the USA in order to
do it; it was to be his last film. His other films about Dr Mabuse - the
evil genius who seeks world conquest - were the 2-part DR MABUSE, DER
SPIELER (1922), also borderline sf, and Das Testament des Dr Mabuse
(1933). DTADDM, which received a very mixed critical reception, tells of a
kind of Mabuse REINCARNATION (whose identity - or identities - is not
revealed until the end) who operates from a hideout, fitted with monitors,
in a grand hotel whose every room is bugged with hidden tv cameras; he
seeks control of an atomic-weapons empire as part of his scheme for
international anarchy. The film is absurdly plotted and slow-moving, but
is powerful in its single-minded pursuit of images of vision (and of its
distortion): screens, one-way mirrors, a blind seer, dark glasses,

disguises, masquerades. It has been described as Lang's masterpiece. In
Germany it was successful enough to catalyse the making of 5 further
Mabuse films (1961-4) which Lang, now in his 70s, refused to direct; they
feature, successively, zombies, invisibility, post-mortem hypnotism, a
hypnotizing machine and death rays. [PN]
TAVARES, BRAULIO
Working name of Brazilian writer Braulio Fernandes Tavares Neto (1950- ),
whose O que e FC ["What is SF?"] (1986) is an introduction to the subject
for younger readers. His first story collection, A Espinha Dorsal da
Memoria ["The Backbone of Memory"] (coll 1989 Portugal), won a Portuguese
sf award. He wrote the notes on Brazilian sf in this encyclopedia ( LATIN
AMERICA). [PN]
TAYLOR, KEITH
[r] AUSTRALIA; Andrew J. OFFUTT.
TAYLOR, ROBERT LEWIS
(1912- ) US writer, often of HUMOUR, in whose Adrift in a Boneyard (1947)
the few survivors of a mysterious DISASTER come to a peaceful ISLAND where
they must decide, in terms both farcical and serene, what it will now mean
to be human. [JC]
TECHNOLOGY
Although various literary traditions supplied inspiration and continued
support to PROTO SCIENCE FICTION, it was the perception of the power which
the new MACHINES of the Industrial Revolution had to transform the world
which gave birth to sf itself, inspiring Jules VERNE's imaginary voyages,
George GRIFFITH's future- WAR stories, H.G. WELLS's SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES,
the hi-tech UTOPIAN fantasies of Edward BELLAMY and others, and the
mechanized DYSTOPIAN nightmares which dissented from them. The demands of
melodrama have always ensured that, even in those specialist magazines
whose editors were outspoken champions of technological advancement - most
notably Hugo GERNSBACK and John W. CAMPBELL Jr - most stories were about
dangerous products or about technology running out of control. Many
particular aspects of general technological progress require individual
treatment as themes in sf: AUTOMATION, CITIES, COMPUTERS, CYBORGS,
DISCOVERY AND INVENTION, GENETIC ENGINEERING, NUCLEAR POWER, POWER
SOURCES, ROBOTS, ROCKETS, SPACESHIPS, TRANSPORTATION and WEAPONS.The
attitude of sf to technology has always been deeply ambivalent ( OPTIMISM
AND PESSIMISM). The 18th-century idea that moral progress and
technological progress were inseparably bound together has never been
universally accepted, and literary images of the future have always
recognized doubts as to the essential goodness of technology, even when
their purpose has been to argue that technological progress is the
principal facilitator of moral progress. GENRE-SF writers may take it for
granted - it is a central ideological tenet of almost all HARD SF - but
writers of futuristic fantasy outside the genre have always been more
likely to take the position that moral, social and spiritual values
essential to human happiness are actually placed in hazard by
technological advancement. Leading genre-sf writers like Isaac ASIMOV and
Arthur C. CLARKE have become enormously influential apologists for

technological progress in an era when many voices are raised in outspoken
criticism of the supposed "dehumanizing" effects of technology. More
tellingly - as Jacques Ellul (1912- ) suggests in La Technique (1954
France; trans John Wilkinson as The Technological Society 1964 US) - it is
possible to argue the high cost to human consciousness of emphasizing
means over ends, "technic" over understanding, in a world which is bound
to the measurable and blind to the unique.Sf is, of course, the natural
medium of antitechnological fantasies as well as of serious extrapolations
of technological possibility. There is a good deal of PASTORAL sf which
glorifies a nostalgically romanticized quasi-medieval way of life, often
with PSI-POWER-jargonized MAGIC thrown in to help with the chores. Such
imagery bears no relation whatsoever to the brutal reality of actual
medieval existence, but its phenomenal psychological power is even more
elaborately reflected in modern genre FANTASY; and stories of LIFE ON
OTHER WORLDS and the depiction of ALIEN societies frequently deal in
similar imagery. No doubt the appeal of low-tech societies to sf writers
has much to do with the fact that the strategic elimination of known
technology is easier by far to accomplish than elaborate technological
innovation, but there is clearly also some powerful force at work endowing
such visions with a special glamour. E.M. FORSTER's question - posed in
reaction to Wells's technological utopianism - about what happens when
"The Machine Stops" (1909) is by no means purely practical; he and many
others who followed in his footsteps were arguing - as Aldous did HUXLEY
in BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932) - that the "Machine" will rot our minds down to
intellectual compost. It is worth noting, however, that in pastoral
writings within genre sf, rather than from outside it, the joy and triumph
of technological rediscovery and redevelopment provide a frequent theme one particularly prevalent in tales of the HOLOCAUST AND AFTER.If genre sf
needs a defence, it is quite simply that technological progress has
allowed us to become in almost every way healthier, wealthier and in some
senses wiser, and may well continue to perform that role. If Gernsback's
advocacy of that case was naive and Campbell's eccentric, the writers for
whom they created a home were sufficiently various, intelligent and
heterodox to make sure the question was examined in all kinds of ingenious
ways. The wide-eyed optimism of Gernsback's own Ralph 124C 41+ (1911-12;
fixup 1925) and the curiously convoluted explorations of Campbell's "Don
A. Stuart" stories were soon supplemented by David H. KELLER's fabular
cautionary tales, Robert A. HEINLEIN's celebration of all-purpose
problem-solving aptitudes and Asimov's die-hard championship of technical
improvisation as the favourite offspring of maternal necessity. Even if
the conventions of melodrama demanded that things must go wrong in story
after story, true sf writers always put the blame on the greed and
vainglory of rogues, politicians, military men or business tycoons, never
on the march of progress itself. Criminal or mad SCIENTISTS were often
required as VILLAINS, but scientists figured more prominently in genre sf
as HEROES - or, at least, as key supporting players whose endeavours
enabled Everyman heroes to succeed. It was perhaps unfortunate that
Campbell developed in "Forgetfulness" (1937 as by Don A. Stuart) - and was
ever after willing to play host to - the notion that human society might
one day "transcend" technology by developing powers of the mind which
would obviate its necessity. And genre sf has also generated its own

perverse brand of technological scepticism, enshrined in images of
technology literally moving beyond human control by establishing its own
independent processes of EVOLUTION, an idea first broached satirically in
Samuel BUTLER's Erewhon (1872) but given a new edge by genre stories of
self-replicating machines which - as, for instance, in some of Gregory
BENFORD's recent works - may become involved in an ultimate and universal
struggle for existence against biological organisms.Like the Romantics
before them, genre-sf writers have generally been on the side of Faust,
convinced that the quest for knowledge was a sacred one, no matter how
fondly a jealous God might prefer blind faith. Characters in bad Hollywood
MONSTER MOVIES might be able to sign off with a resigned admission that
"there are things Man was not meant to know", but nothing could be more
alien to the ethos of genre sf. Even in early pulp sf, technology was a
means rather than an end, and, however much Campbell's writers were
inclined to the celebration of the competence of the engineer, there
remained a visionary element in their work which centralized the
CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH as the peak experience of human existence. The
hi-tech future of pulp sf was not the "Utopia of Comforts" so bitterly
criticized by such sceptical writers as S. Fowler WRIGHT but rather a
reaching-out for further horizons. SPACE FLIGHT became and remained the
central myth of sf because it was the ultimate window of opportunity,
through which the entire Universe could be viewed - and, ultimately,
known. In genre sf, the ultimate aim of technological progress is, in the
words of Mack REYNOLDS, "total understanding of the cosmos". This is
clearly reflected in the increasing interest which post-WWII sf has taken
in the traditional questions of RELIGION and in the evolution of
sciencefictional ideas of the SUPERMAN.Genre sf has played a key role in
the development of modern images of future technology. The ILLUSTRATIONS
of the pulp magazines were remarkably potent in this respect particularly the cityscapes of Frank R. PAUL. The imagery of futuristic
vehicles and cities, especially spaceships, has a glamour all of its own,
carried forward in the work of artists like Chris FOSS and Jim BURNS. Much
of this has, of course, been absorbed into the CINEMA, although technical
limitations put a severe restraint on its evolution until films like STAR
WARS (1977) were able to deploy models which looked far more real than the
impressive but obvious fakes used in, say, METROPOLIS (1926). William
GIBSON's dismissal of much of this imagery as an obsolete dream of "The
Gernsback Continuum" (1981) is not altogether fair, although Gibson has
played a leading role in updating and supplementing sf's visual imagery by
providing CYBERSPACE with "inner-spatial landscapes" reflective of the
types of graphics which modern computers are particularly adept at
generating.As anxieties about impending ecocatastrophes increase (
Hyperlink to: ECOLOGY; OVERPOPULATION; POLLUTION), sf stories which focus
closely on controversies regarding the goodness or badness of technology
have inevitably increased in number, and will presumably continue to do
so. Such debates are the central issue of such novels as Norman SPINRAD's
lyrical Songs from the Stars (1980), Poul ANDERSON's dogged Orion Shall
Rise (1983) and Marc LAIDLAW's satirical Dad's Nuke (1985). Perhaps the
most apt verbal image of modern humanity's relationship with technology is
that enshrined in the title of Marc STIEGLER's collection The Gentle
Seduction (coll 1990); the title story (1989) is one of the more eloquent

of the many contemporary sf tales arguing that the development of
NANOTECHNOLOGY will eventually bring us into a much more intimate and
rewarding association with our machines than we could ever, until
recently, have imagined. [BS/PN]
TECHNOTHRILLER
A common term, used in this encyclopedia to designate a tale which,
though it often makes use of sf devices, in fact occupies an undisplaced,
entirely mundane narrative world. Technothrillers may be set in the NEAR
FUTURE and invoke technologies beyond the capacities of the present
moment, but they differ from sf in two respects: first, like the unknown
in HORROR novels, science in the technothriller is either inherently
threatening or worshipfully (and fetishistically) exploited; second, a
typical technothriller plot evokes a technological scenario whose
world-transforming implications are left unexamined or evaded, often
through the use of MCGUFFIN plots. Any novel in which future developments
in science play a central role is not a technothriller at all: it is
sf.Examples of technothrillers by sf writers are Frank M. ROBINSON's and
Thomas N. SCORTIA's successful collaborations from The Glass Inferno
(1974) to Blow Out! (1987), Robin COOK's tales of medicine gone awry, and
the films loosely based on Ian FLEMING's James Bond novels. The latter are
examples of the most common variety - the political thriller in which the
artefacts of science serve as gear (or fetish) and as a target for the
PARANOIAS of our century. [JC]
TEDFORD, WILLIAM G.
(? - ) US writer whose sf activities long seemed to have been restricted
to the publication, in a single year, of not only the 3 books of the
Timequest sequence - Time Quest #1: Rashanyn Dark (1981), #2: Hydrabyss
Red (1981) and #3: Nemydia Deep (1981) - but also Silent Galaxy (1981), a
singleton. But a decade later he did publish a horror novel, Liquid Diet
(1992). [JC]
TEENAGE CAVEMAN
Roger CORMAN.
TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES
1. A team of 4 pizza-loving humanized turtle troubleshooters created by
US artists Kevin Eastman (1962-) and Peter Laird (1954- ) in a
self-published black-and-white COMIC book from May 1984. Initially seen as
a parody of martial-arts SUPERHERO team-ups, they became so enormously
popular that their creators are reputed to have received about $600
million from merchandising rights alone, and a veritable tsunami of
imitators was rushed into print, including Adolescent Radio-Active
Black-Belt Hamsters and Naive Interdimensional Commando Koalas.TMNT was
published bimonthly from 1985, and within 18 months sales had reached 100,
000 copies per issue. The original story concerned 4 turtles living in New
York's sewers who become engulfed in radioactive mud which causes them to
become humanized and very considerably enlarged. The characters' names are
shared with artists of the Italian quattrocento: Leonardo, Raphael,
Donatello and Michaelangelo (sic). In 1987 Archie Comics began publishing
a children's version of the strip in colour, and four untitled GRAPHIC

NOVELS (numbered I-IV) were published by First Publishing 1986-8. A hugely
successful US animated tv series was spun off from the comic in the late
1980s. [RT]2. Film (1990). Golden Harvest. Dir Steve Barron, starring
Judith Hoag, Elias Koteas. Screenplay Todd W. Langen, Bobby Herbeck. 93
mins. Colour.After the comic, the tv series and the marketing campaign
came the film. This was the biggest independently made hit in film
history, though in fact production had been planned before the success of
the tv series. The surprise was that it was good. The splicing of live
action with puppetry from the Jim Henson workshop - Henson (1936-1990)
died just after the film's release - is seamless, the direction is clean
and purposeful, the script is amusing and succinct. The 4 teenage outsider
SUPERHEROES, the mutant turtles, are junk-food-eating vigilante good guys
up against a Ninjutsu villain who plays a Japanese Fagin to the teenage
pickpockets of New York. The martial-arts fights are excellent (their
violence, subject of many parental complaints, is nominal and stylized);
the affable turtles' shabby rat father-figure, Splinter, is as tatty a Zen
master as ever seen on screen.The sequel, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II:
The Secret of the Ooze (1991), dir Michael Pressman, played it much safer.
Sales of Turtles were falling off, and the blandness of this movie,
intended to reassure the family market, renders its story of the discovery
by a villain of more mutant-creating radioactive ooze almost without
interest. The second sequel was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (1992),
dir and written Stuart Gillard, 96 mins, which has the turtles
time-travelling back to seventeenth-century Japan in a conflict involving
Japanese samurai, innocent villagers and English pirates. While the
creators of the original comic, Estman and Laird, had more to do with this
third film, which was touted in advance publicity as "more hard-edged"
than no. 2, the critical consensus was that it was a mess, strictly for
the younger children, and not hugely enjoyed by them. [PN]
TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES II: THE SECRET OF THE OOZE
TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES.
TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES III
TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES.
TEITELBAUM, SHELDON
(1955- ) Canadian journalist and film and sf critic, resident 1977-85 in
ISRAEL, where he served 5 years as an officer in the paratroop corps. His
sf/horror column in the Jerusalem Post was the first such outside the sf
magazines; he also had a film column in the Hebrew-language magazine
Fantazia 2000. ST is currently Los Angeles correspondent for
CINEFANTASTIQUE. [PN]
TEK WAR
Canadian/US tv miniseries (1994). Atlantis Films/Universal. Exec prods
William SHATNER andPeter Sussman; line prod John Calvert; supervising prod
Seaton McLean, based on theTek novels by Shatner. First episode written by
Alfonse Ruggiero, Jr.and WestbrookClaridge, dir Shatner, starring Greg
Evigan, Eugene Clark, Torri Higginson,Barry Morse, Sonja Smits, Sheena
Easton and Shatner. Four 88-min episodes.TW was part of a syndicated
package called "The Action Pack" inwhich it and other two-hour

action/adventure miniseries were broadcast in rotation, 24 episodes inall,
four being devoted to TW, and based with moderate fidelity on theTek
novels attributed to Shatner. Evigan plays Jake Cardigan, a framed cop
doing 15years in cryogenic sleep for murder and drug abuse, but
mysteriously paroled after four. The first book was set in twenty-second
century Los Angeles, but the miniseries, shot in Toronto, Canada, appears
to be in a much closer future than that. The series' most intriguing
aspect is its CYBERPUNK elements,and an interesting attempt is made to
create a visual equivalent for theexperience of cruising in "cyberspace".
In other respects - especially the cars and the cityitself - the series is
less successfully futuristic. The story is a fairly routine affair about
conspiracies involving drug lords ("tek" is a dangerous drug that enables
fantasies to seem, temporarilyreal), android killers and so forth. One
critic described it as "Miami Vice meets NEUROMANCER", and the latter
aspect is more interesting than the former.The miniseries found a
following, and a full series began in Jan 1995, Tek War:The Series, 18
one-hour episodes being planned. [PN/GF]
TEK WAR: THE SERIES
TEK WAR.
TELEKINESIS
An important item of sf TERMINOLOGY, from the Greek words for "movement
at a distance", developed from the earlier word "psychokinesis" (often
shortened to PK), coined by Dr J.B. Rhine (1895-1980) in the 1930s;
Charles FORT used the term TELEPORTATION to describe the same phenomenon.
Telekinesis is the ability to move objects by the power of the mind, and
after telepathy is the most commonly used PSI POWER (which see for
details) in sf. The word "telekinesis" was probably not coined in sf, but
began to be used in sf (especially in ASF) in the early 1950s. [PN]
TELEPATHY
ESP; FANTASY; PSI POWERS; SUPERMAN.
TELEPORTATION
Although a common item of sf TERMINOLOGY, this word is (or has been) used
in 3 different ways.1. Charles FORT used it in Wild Talents (1932) as a
synonym for "psychokinesis" or, later, TELEKINESIS; i.e., the ability to
move objects by the power of the mind alone.2. In sf of the 1950s and
1960s there was a tendency to use "teleportation" as a special case of
"telekinesis", meaning the ability to move oneself from one place to
another by the power of the mind alone; this is probably the commonest
usage.3. Some writers use "teleportation" as the ability to move people or
objects from one place to another by MATTER TRANSMISSION; i.e., using
scientific equipment to transmit items in the form of information-carrying
waves, which at the destination are reconstituted into matter. A
particularly implausible version (since there is no transmitting equipment
at the far end) is the "Beam me up, Scottie!" gadget in STAR TREK. [PN]See
also: PSI POWERS.
TELEVISION
The first thing to understand about televised sf is that it has never
been commercially successful (relative to the top programmes) on US tv,

and seldom on UK tv. Advertisers in the USA seek new programmes that are
likely to end up in the year's top 20; these are the programmes that get
the top advertising and the big budgets. It has been reported that the
only US sf tv programme ever to enter the top-20 category was the
tabloid-style documentary drama programme PROJECT UFO (1978-9), which
exploited widespread PARANOIA already much sensationalized by the popular
press, and had little to do with true sf. Because producers know that sf
does not normally pull that sort of audience, it tends to be regarded as
filler material, with neither budgets, writers nor actors being
top-drawer. Every now and then someone with power tries to break the
hoodoo, as Steven SPIELBERG did with his anthology-series AMAZING STORIES
(1985-7), spending a lot of money and getting good writers and
(especially) good directors, but that too disappointed, in terms of both
quality and commercial success.To concentrate for a moment on artistic
rather than commercial success (though they are linked), we note that for
a while everyone thought the turning point would come in about 1978, when
sf in the CINEMA had made an enormous breakthrough, especially with STAR
WARS (1977), CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977) and SUPERMAN
(1978). US tv may have had its chance then, but blew it, partly through
the lowest-common-denominator populism of Glen A. LARSON, who created the
infantile BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (1978), its successor GALACTICA 1980 (1980)
and the only fractionally better BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY
(1979-81). US tv has failed consistently with sf adventure (the various
STAR TREK series being, along with The WILD, WILD WEST , the main
exceptions, and then only partially so) and SUPERHERO adventure (like The
INCREDIBLE HULK [1977-82] and WONDER WOMAN [1974-9]); has had limited
success with sf anthology series (like The OUTER LIMITS [1963-5], and The
TWILIGHT ZONE [1959-64]); and has done quite nicely with borderline-sf
sitcoms (like MY FAVORITE MARTIAN [1963-6] and MORK AND MINDY
[1978-82]).Outsiders would argue that much of the problem of US tv rests
in the advertisers, who have a vested interest in reaching as wide an
audience as possible, and therefore tend to veto (especially in programmes
aimed at younger viewers) anything remotely controversial that might upset
a section of the potential audience. It would seem to follow that UK
commercial tv should have just as bad a record, for the same reasons, but
this is not entirely true, as witness The AVENGERS (1961-9), The PRISONER
(1967-8) and the original MAX HEADROOM (1985), all originated by UK
commercial channels. Nonetheless, most classic sf tv in the UK has come
from the BBC - including the first 3 Quatermass serials, DR WHO, BLAKE'S
SEVEN, HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY and RED DWARF - and the BBC
operates quite independently from advertising income, though it is open
to, and occasionally suffers from, other pressures towards conformity,
including ratings.The other main reason why sf has failed on tv in the
USA, and to a large degree in the UK, is the almost invariable assumption
that it is stuff for the kids. It is difficult to know if adult sf would
succeeed on tv; few people have ever tried. The first sf series to appear
on US tv, CAPTAIN VIDEO (1949-56), was primarily aimed at children, and it
is arguable that the situation, over four decades later, has not
changed.Captain Video, which began in 1949, was a series made on a very
small budget and transmitted live every night. This situation ensured that
sets and special effects were primitive (scenes involving special effects

were pre-filmed and then inserted, usually clumsily, into the show, by
cutting to a tv camera that was pointing directly into the lens of a movie
projector), but its popularity with young viewers quickly produced a host
of imitations, like BUCK ROGERS (1950-51), TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET
(1950-55), SPACE PATROL (1950-55), SUPERMAN (1953-7), CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT
(1954-6) and COMMANDO CODY: SKY MARSHAL OF THE UNIVERSE (1955). While the
later series were more expensively produced and were pre-recorded on film,
they all followed in the tradition of the movie and RADIO serials of the
1930s-40s rather than that of written sf. Science had little part in any
of these productions, with the exception of Tom Corbett, which had Willy
LEY as scientific adviser, but it was prominent in one of the first
"adult" sf series on US tv, OUT OF THIS WORLD (1952), which was a mixture
of sf and science fact, with guest scientists interrupting the story to
discuss scientific points with the narrator. This nonsensational approach
to sf was continued in SCIENCE FICTION THEATER (1955-7), in which the
host, Truman Bradley, and the show's various writers did their best
(presumably unconsciously) to ensure that no trace of any SENSE OF WONDER
remained in the stories. Nearer to written sf was TALES OF TOMORROW
(1951-6), one of the earliest sf anthology series, which featured stories
adapted from sf books and magazines but, like the early children's
serials, was handicapped by being transmitted live.The first major UK sf
event on tv (apart from Nigel KNEALE's 1949 tv adaptation of George
ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR [1949]) was the BBC serial The QUATERMASS
EXPERIMENT (1953), a horror/sf mixture which was at the time considered
suitable only for adults, though today it would probably seem no more
disturbing than the children's serial DR WHO (1963-89). Even by the early
1950s the fundamental differences between US and UK tv had been
established; instead of having to produce self-contained programme
"packages" that would be attractive to sponsors, the BBC producers had
editorial freedom. One result was that the most popular format for BBC
drama (apart from individual plays) became the serial, usually in 6-10
episodes, whereby the writers could build up atmosphere and concentrate on
character development; in the USA, by contrast, the trend was towards
long-running series whose episodes were self-contained. (The lack of
commercial interruptions was itself an advantage in the pacing of the BBC
programmes, which did not have their rhythm broken by false climaxes and
cliff-hangers designed to entice the viewer to stay tuned during the ads.)
With the arrival of commercial tv in the UK (the first channel in 1955,
the second in 1982), US-style programming was also introduced (though the
UK commercial-break pattern is much less intrusive), but the serial format
still remains popular on all channels of UK tv.BBC TV's first productions
of sf for children also took the form of serials, one of the earliest
being The LOST PLANET (1954). Its sequel, Return to the Lost Planet
(1955), came in the year that saw the first of the Quatermass sequels,
QUATERMASS II (1955).1956-8 were sparse years. In the USA most of the
juvenile series had ended, with the exception of Superman (already the
steady erosion of the boundaries between children's and adult programmes
on US tv had begun) and the sober and dull Science Fiction Theater, both
of which lasted until 1957. From then until 1959 sf on tv was practically
nonexistent. The situation was little different in the UK, though in 1958
there was the third and best of the Quatermass serials: QUATERMASS AND THE

PIT (1958-9).In the USA WORLD OF GIANTS had 1 brief season in 1959, but
the most important new US series that year for sf fans was The TWILIGHT
ZONE (1959-64), an anthology series created by Rod SERLING as a mixture of
fantasy and sf stories, more of the former than the latter. The 1960s saw
an increase of sf-related series in both countries: the BBC serial A FOR
ANDROMEDA (1961) was unusual in that it was cowritten by a scientist, Fred
HOYLE. In 1961 The Avengers (1961-9; followed by The New Avengers
[1976-7]) began, though at that time it was called Police Surgeon and did
not feature any of the sf or fantasy gimmicks that were to dominate this
enjoyably bizarre and imaginative show in later years. Another UK series,
OUT OF THIS WORLD (1962) - not to be confused with the earlier US series
of the same name - tried to repeat the success of The Twilight Zone by
adopting a similar format, with episodes based on the stories of many well
known sf writers. It lasted only 1 short season.The most remarkable of all
sf phenomena on tv began in 1963: the splendid BBC series DR WHO
(1963-89), which was aimed at children but came to attract adults as well.
It had many serialized stories run consecutively, each normally lasting
for at least 4 episodes. Producers, writers and cast changed many times,
but Dr Who ran for 26 years and, according to rumour, even now may be in
suspended animation rather than dead.In the USA another series inspired by
The Twilight Zone began in 1963. The OUTER LIMITS (1963-5) was more
sf-oriented than Serling's series and also took itself rather less
seriously; though inventive and entertaining, it could hardly be described
as adult sf. The same year saw the first of many comedy sf series, MY
FAVORITE MARTIAN (1963-6), a relatively sophisticated sitcom that proved
popular with audiences. Less successful, though in some ways superior, was
MY LIVING DOLL (1964-5), an sf comedy about a ROBOT woman that ran for
only 1 season.It was also in 1964 in the USA that Irwin ALLEN, the Glen
LARSON of the 1960s, produced the first of his sf action/adventure series
for tv, VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA (1964-8). His
lowest-possible-common-denominator approach to the genre has influenced
the style and quality of US tv sf ever since. The same year saw the debut
of The MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. (1964-8), a by-product of the craze for James
Bond movies ( Ian FLEMING) but incorporating many sf devices and plot
situations. This was better, and better still was The Wild, Wild West
(1965-9) which featured two secret agents, equipped with various
anachronistic devices, pitted against mad scientists in the 19th-century
West. Another Irwin Allen series, LOST IN SPACE (1965-8), was more
obviously aimed at children than Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, though
that made little difference in quality or plausibility.In the UK, 1965 saw
the debut of the adult sf series OUT OF THE UNKNOWN (1965-71), an
anthology show that presented adaptations of the work of sf writers
including (among many others) Isaac ASIMOV, Clifford D. SIMAK and J.G.
BALLARD; from this practice it derived an authority not often visible in
televised sf, which is normally written by professional tv screenwriters.
The standard of the adaptations varied and the small budgets were a
handicap (another major difference between US and UK tv is that the former
is usually produced on much larger budgets), but overall it was superior
to most sf series before or since. This view was not shared by the BBC
itself, however; after a couple of seasons it was turned into a series
about the supernatural.Also from the UK came THUNDERBIRDS (1965-6), a

series that used sophisticated puppets and clever special effects.
Produced by Gerry ANDERSON, it proved very popular with children on both
sides of the Atlantic. Anderson had pioneered the use of puppetry for
children's sf with SUPERCAR (1961-2) and FIREBALL XL5 (1962-3). Anderson's
SuperMarionation puppet programmes are fun, but are really for quite young
children.In 1966 began TIME TUNNEL (1966-7), another Irwin Allen
production, but it was not as popular as his other series. The important
new US series of 1966 was STAR TREK, whose ever-swelling following
(largely garnered during re-runs) has become legendary. Aimed primarily at
adolescents, it featured the work of several established sf writers in the
first 2 seasons, though their scripts were usually rewritten by the show's
resident writers. Aside from Jerome BIXBY, no well known sf names appeared
in any of the credits for the final season, which may account in part for
the plunge in quality.The INVADERS (1967-8) was another US series of the
late 1960s but, as based on a single plot gimmick that had to be repeated
each episode, it lasted only 2 seasons. More interesting, and equally
reliant on evoking total PARANOIA, was The PRISONER (1967-8), a
KAFKA-esque UK series created by actor Patrick McGoohan (1928- ), who also
starred. But at the time it was popular neither with the UK company that
produced it (ITC) nor with the public, and it came to a premature end,
although its supporters continue to argue passionately that it was the
finest sf ever to appear on the small screen, and it has been rescreened
more successfully since. In the USA Irwin Allen launched yet another
series, LAND OF THE GIANTS (1968-70), but the vogue for his type of
programme was coming to an end. Also fairly short-lived was The IMMORTAL
(1969-71), based on The Immortals (fixup 1962) by James E. GUNN, who also
produced a novelization, The Immortal * (1970).In the UK Gerry Anderson
switched from puppets to live actors in his new children's series UFO
(1970-73). A UK series with more serious intentions was DOOMWATCH
(1970-72), which exploited popular anxiety about the dangers of scientific
research; one of the creators of the series was the scientist Kit
PEDLER.Rod Serling began another anthology series with ROD SERLING'S NIGHT
GALLERY (1970-72), but it was less sf-oriented than The Twilight Zone and
proved less successful as well. Then, in 1973, came the series which had
the greatest influence on US sf tv in the 1970s, The SIX MILLION DOLLAR
MAN (1973-8), which, though basically a live COMIC strip rather similar to
the 1950s Superman series for children, was successfully cloned; there
were several near-duplications of the formula.The UK children's serial The
TOMORROW PEOPLE (1973-9) began on commercial tv in 1973, and at times
approached the level of Dr Who. The BBC in the same year attempted a more
adult series with MOONBASE 3 (1973), a nonsensational serial set on the
Moon, but it was not a success. That year the awful GENERATION-STARSHIP
programme The STARLOST (1973) came from Canada ( Harlan ELLISON). The
following year in the USA saw 2 further short-lived series, PLANET OF THE
APES (1974), based on the popular movie, and (much better) KOLCHAK: THE
NIGHT STALKER (1974-5), an anthology series primarily about the
supernatural, which included a few sf episodes.In 1975 Gerry Anderson,
after the failure of UFO, created a pale UK imitation of Star Trek with
SPACE 1999 (1975-8). Surprisingly, it enjoyed some success in the USA, but
only briefly, and it ended after 2 seasons. The series represents a nadir
in the quality of scientific thought in televised sf. A more typically UK

series of the same year was SURVIVORS (1975-7), created by Terry NATION, a
post- HOLOCAUST series in the UK manner established by John WYNDHAM and
John CHRISTOPHER.One of the first of the many Six Million Dollar Man
imitations was The INVISIBLE MAN (1975-6), but it did not prove as popular
as expected, despite some ingenious special effects and the use of David
McCallum, the star of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. It returned the following
season with a different actor in the lead role and a new title: The Gemini
Man (1976), neither of which saved the series from being cancelled. Yet
another short-lived series was The FANTASTIC JOURNEY (1977) which utilized
the Star Trek formula without spaceship or other planets (different
cultures being encountered via "time zones" on a lost island in the
Bermuda Triangle). WONDER WOMAN (1974-9), derived from the fantasy comic
strip of the same title, had made her debut in 1974; she was followed by
The BIONIC WOMAN (1976-8), a spin-off from Six Million Dollar Man. In 1977
the comic-book style trend was continued - but with none of the verve of
the best comics - with The MAN FROM ATLANTIS (1977), LOGAN'S RUN (1977-8)
and The INCREDIBLE HULK (1977-82). But while fantasy- and sf-related
series were proliferating in the USA, mostly in a vain attempt to capture
the charisma of the various SUPERHERO comics, UK tv was producing only the
gloomy, Orwellian serial 1990 (1977-8) and, of course, the never-ending
and still sprightly Dr Who. It was not until 1978 that UK tv made a
comparatively formidable entry into the world of SPACE OPERA with Terry
Nation's series BLAKE'S SEVEN (1978-81), which also began in Orwellian
vein. While proficiently produced, and disarmingly cynical, it was still
too close to the Star Trek formula.In the 1970s such anxiety-ridden UK
series as Doomwatch, Survivors and 1990 reflected the fears of a society
that seemed to find itself on the brink of something unpleasant, whereas,
whatever fears may have been preying on the US mass-consciousness, the
apparent reaction to them was (and is) to plunge wholeheartedly into a
second childhood, not only with tv, but also in the CINEMA, as with STAR
WARS and SUPERMAN.The 1980s in the USA saw increasing infantilism in sf
series. Short-lived movie spin-offs included BLUE THUNDER (1984), STARMAN
(1986-7) and ALIEN NATION (1989-90), and a spin-off from a tv miniseries,
SOMETHING IS OUT THERE (1989). Ray BRADBURY's stories barely survived the
miniseries The MARTIAN CHRONICLES (1980), although they did rather better
in RAY BRADBURY THEATRE (1985-6). A US series based on a UK original, MAX
HEADROOM (1987-8), looked promising for a time but deteriorated rapidly.
So did the big-budget sf series of the decade (whose budget shrank with
each succeeeding segment), "V" (1983-5). This was an object lesson in the
corrupting influence of the US tv system, for it worsened practically
minute by minute. In the first part of the first miniseries, this story of
alien invasion (for "aliens" read "Nazis") was interesting; by the end it
was pure pabulum.Until the end of the decade, the most interesting US
experiments in sf were probably the uneven anthology series TWILIGHT ZONE
(2nd series 1985-6) and AMAZING STORIES (1985-7), but in both cases
glutinous sentiment hovered too closely overhead. Then things perked up a
little, with the romantic and sometimes very imaginative BEAUTY AND THE
BEAST (1987-90)-which may have been helped by the input of sf writer
George R.R. MARTIN - and the TIME-TRAVEL series QUANTUM LEAP
(1989-current), which was sometimes amusing and certainly infinitely
better than the earlier VOYAGERS (1982-3) on a similar theme. The end of

the decade also saw the vigorous but silly WAR OF THE WORLDS (1988-90).
But for many the most exciting development was STAR TREK: THE NEXT
GENERATION (1987-current), which surprisingly enough was made for
syndication (a demonstration of the effects of cable, and of the
consequently reduced market sway of the old networks like NBC, home of the
first series). Once viewers recovered from their sorrow at the absence of
the geriatric Kirk, Spock, Scottie, Bones, etc., most agreed that it was
rather better than its famous original.In the UK the 1980s were ushered in
with the fourth (and slightly old-fashioned) Quatermass serial, QUATERMASS
(1979), no longer from the BBC. The BBC was having a semi-success with
Blake's Seven, the prisoners-on-the-run-pursued-by-the-evil-empire series
mentioned above; it also successfully serialized John Wyndham's 1951 novel
with The DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (1981). By casting cult-figures from earlier
sf series, David McCallum (Man From U.N.C.L.E, Invisible Man) and Joanna
Lumley (New Avengers), commercial tv signalled high hopes with the
time-police series SAPPHIRE AND STEEL (1979-82); in the event it was
incomprehensible, but atmospheric and fun for Surrealism fans. The big UK
sf theme of the 1980s was anarchic comedy, with two big successes from the
BBC, The HITCH-HIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (1981), based on a cult BBC
RADIO programme, and RED DWARF (1988-current), and one failure from the
commercial side, Nigel KNEALE's disappointing KINVIG (1981). The 1980s
also saw the so-so STAR COPS (1987) and Dr Who repeatedly changing his
persona but somehow losing the plot; the 1970s had been Dr Who's peak
decade.The pressures towards conformity and formula, especially in the USA
but also in the UK, have meant that televised sf, in a history spanning
well over 40 years, has never approached the intellectual excitement of
the best written sf, or indeed the best sf in the cinema. Because
televised sf cleaves to the expected, we are seldom surprised by it: we
seldom feel any sense of wonder or even stimulation. At best we are amused
by the occasional adroit variation on a familiar theme, or by bits of
rather good acting. Televised sf is a cultural scandal; it is, on average,
so much worse than it could be or needs to be. But there seems no way to
combat the entropic forces that make it that way. The tv industry is
something of a "closed shop", with its own well established writers and
producers - one reason why it has generally proven inhospitable to sf
writers - and it is difficult to influence from the outside. Until this is
done, the standard of televised sf will not improve.Good references on
televised sf are hard to come by, and the subject is surprisingly
difficult to research, since tv is more ephemeral than cinema and is not
nearly as well documented. The most up-to-date book on the subject is The
Encyclopedia of TV Science Fiction (1990) by Roger Fulton, which is
descriptive rather than critical, and good on UK sf, rather poor on US sf.
A slightly amateurish monthly US magazine with useful episode synopses
(but much vital information, including production companies, omitted) is
Epi-Log, whose #1 was Summer 1990, published by William E. Anchors Jr from
Tennessee. Also useful is Science Fiction, Horror ?
Television Credits (1983) by Harris M. Lentz, which has a supplement
(1989) through 1987.This encyclopedia includes a number of made-for-tv
movies which we treat as if they were actual movies. Some have been good like The NIGHT THAT PANICKED AMERICA (1975) and The LATHE OF HEAVEN (1980)
- but most have not. We also include one entry on what, so far as we can

trace, is the only tv series about sf, the eccentric Canadian talk show
PRISONERS OF GRAVITY (1990-current). The 96 entries for tv serials and
series in this encyclopedia (excluding made-for-tv movies and variant
titles) are: A FOR ANDROMEDA; ALF; ALIEN NATION; AMAZING STORIES; The
ANDROMEDA BREAKTHROUGH ; The AVENGERS ; BATTLESTAR GALACTICA; BEAUTY
AND
THE BEAST; The BIG PULL ; The BIONIC WOMAN ; BLAKE'S SEVEN; BLUE THUNDER;
BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY; CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT; CAPTAIN SCARLET AND
THE
MYSTERONS; CAPTAIN VIDEO; The CLONING OF JOANNA MAY ; COMMANDO CODY:
SKY
MARSHAL OF THE UNIVERSE; The DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS ; DOOMWATCH; DR WHO; The
FANTASTIC JOURNEY ; FIREBALL XL5; GALACTICA 1980; The HITCH-HIKERS GUIDE
TO THE GALAXY ; The IMMORTAL ; The INCREDIBLE HULK ; The INVADERS ; The
INVISIBLE MAN ; JOE 90; KINVIG; KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER; LAND OF THE
GIANTS; LOGAN'S RUN; LOST IN SPACE; The LOST PLANET ; The MAN FROM
ATLANTIS ; The MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. ; The MARTIAN CHRONICLES ; MAX
HEADROOM; MOONBASE 3; MORK AND MINDY; MY FAVORITE MARTIAN; MY LIVING
DOLL;
1990; The OUTER LIMITS; OUT OF THE UNKNOWN; OUT OF THIS WORLD; PLANET OF
THE APES; The PRISONER ; PRISONERS OF GRAVITY; PROJECT UFO; QUANTUM LEAP;
QUATERMASS; QUATERMASS AND THE PIT; The QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT ;
QUATERMASS
II; RAY BRADBURY THEATRE; RED DWARF; ROD SERLING'S NIGHT GALLERY;
SAPPHIRE
AND STEEL; SCIENCE FICTION THEATER; The SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN ;
SOMETHING
IS OUT THERE; SPACE 1999; SPACE PATROL; STAR COPS; STARLOST; STAR MAIDENS;
STARMAN; STAR TREK; STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION; STINGRAY; The
STRANGE
WORLD OF PLANET X ; SUPERBOY; SUPERCAR; SUPERMAN; SURVIVORS; TALES OF
TOMORROW; TERRAHAWKS; THUNDERBIRDS; TIME TUNNEL; TOM CORBETT, SPACE
CADET;
The TOMORROW PEOPLE ; The TROLLENBERG TERROR ; The TWILIGHT ZONE (1st and
2nd series); UFO; "V"; VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA; VOYAGERS; WAR OF
THE WORLDS; The WILD, WILD WEST ; WONDER WOMAN; WORLD OF GIANTS. Some
further tv series are mentioned in passing in film entries and elsewhere,
but not normally with full production data. [PN/JB]See also: JAPAN.
TELLUS
TERRA.
TEMNE SLUNCE
(vt The Black Sun) Film (1980). Filmove studio Barrandov. Dir Otakar
Vavra, starring Radoslav Brzobohaty, Magda Vasaryova, Rudolf Hrusinsky.
Screenplay Vavra, Jiri Sotola, loosely based on Krakatit (1924; trans
1925) by Karel CAPEK. 133 mins. Colour.This is the better-known of Vavra's
2 films of Capek's novel; the earlier and more faithful adaptation,
Krakatit (1948), is the better. TS, a very free version, is set in a
stylized Cold-War world of the late 1970s. Where in the earlier film it is
the aristocracy who wish to control "krakatit" - an energy source which is

also an incredibly powerful explosive (symbolic of nuclear weapons) - in
TS it is the imperialist military-industrial establishment that attempts
to misuse it. This high-budget production, with a prestigious cast, was
intended as propaganda on behalf of the peaceful communists against the
warmongering capitalists. It is less artistic than its predecessor.
[SC/JO]
TEMPLE, ROBIN
Samuel Andrew WOOD.
TEMPLE, WILLIAM F(REDERICK)
(1914-1989) UK writer who began his activities in the sf world before
WWII as an active fan, a member of the British Interplanetary Society and
editor of its Bulletin, and housemate of Arthur C. CLARKE. He published a
horror story, "The Kosso" in Thrills (anth 1935) ed anon Charles Birkin
(1907-1986); his first sf story was "Lunar Lilliput", for Tales of Wonder
in 1938. War service interrupted his career for more than half a decade.
His first and best-known novel, Four-Sided Triangle (1939 AMZ; exp 1949),
is a love story in which a girl who is loved by two men is duplicated by
the one she has refused, but unfortunately both clones are attracted to
the same man; it was filmed as FOUR-SIDED TRIANGLE from a script cowritten
by Paul TABORI. WFT then became active in the magazines for about a
decade, continuing to produce at a moderate rate until about 1970, though
it cannot be suggested that he built his post-WWII career with anything
like the energy of more famous colleagues like Clarke or John WYNDHAM, nor
during this period were his book-length fictions remarkably distinguished.
The Martin Magnus series of sf juveniles - Martin Magnus, Planet Rover
(1954), Martin Magnus on Venus (1955) and Martin Magnus on Mars (1956) was followed by some undistinguished sf adventures: The Automated Goliath
(fixup 1962 dos US), The Three Suns of Amara (1961 SF Adventures as "A
Trek to Na-Abiza"; exp1962 chap dos US) and Battle on Venus (1953
Authentic as "Immortal's Playthings"; rev 1963 dos US). His last 2 novels,
however, are far more impressive. Shoot at the Moon (1966), parodying many
of the more routine sf conventions concerning trips to the MOON and the
gallery of characters usually involved, is a ship-of-fools extravaganza of
some hilarity. The Fleshpots of Sansato (1968) is a remarkable SPACE OPERA
replete with interstellar agents, a corrupt city in the stars, and much
symbolism. [JC]Other works: The Dangerous Edge (1951), a crime novel; The
True Book about Space Travel (1954; vt The Prentice-Hall Book about Space
Travel 1955 US).See also: CLONES.The Work of William F. Temple: An
Annotated Bibliography ?
TEMPLE BAR PUBLISHING CO.
FANTASY [magazine].
TENN, WILLIAM
Pseudonym of US writer and academic Philip Klass (1920- ), who taught
writing and sf at Pennsylvania State College from 1966. After serving in
WWII, WT began writing sf, publishing in 1946 in ASF his first story,
"Alexander the Bait", a tale that demonstrates the pointed (and, in terms
of the sf shibboleths of 1946, iconoclastic) intelligence of his work in
its PREDICTION that SPACE FLIGHT would be achieved institutionally rather

than through the efforts of an individual inventor-industrialist-genius (
EDISONADE) - a prediction that sf as a whole was remarkably loth to make,
and with the reality of which it proved subsequently loth to live. WT soon
became one of the genre's very few genuinely comic, genuinely incisive
writers of short fiction, sharper and more mature than Fredric BROWN and
less self-indulgent than Robert SHECKLEY. From 1950 onwards he found a
congenial market in Gal, where he published much of his best work before
falling relatively inactive after about 1960. Among the finer stories
assembled in his first collection, OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS (coll 1955; with
2 stories cut and 3 added, rev 1956 UK), were "Down Among the Dead Men"
(1954), about the use of ANDROIDS reconstituted from human corpses as
front-line troops in a savage interstellar war, "The Liberation of Earth"
(1953), in which liberation is imposed upon Earth alternately by two
warring ALIEN races (in a prescient satirical model for much of the
revolutionary activity of later decades), and "The Custodian" (1953), an
effective variant on the last-man-on-Earth theme. WT's occasional
post-1960 stories maintained the high calibre, comic manner and dark
vision of his early work. Most of the contents of his 5 further
collections, however, date from the late 1940s through the mid-1950s: The
Human Angle (coll 1956), Time in Advance (coll 1958), comprising 4 longer
stories, The Seven Sexes (coll 1968), The Square Root of Man (coll 1968)
and The Wooden Star (coll 1968), each containing at least some examples of
his best work. In The Human Angle, for instance, can be found "Wednesday's
Child" (1956), in which a rather simple young woman's biological
peculiarities climax in her giving birth to herself, and "The Discovery of
Morniel Mathaway" (1955), which involves TIME TRAVEL and (unusually in
GENRE SF) evolves into a serious look at the nature of the making of
ART.OF MEN AND MONSTERS (1963 Gal as "The Men in the Walls"; exp 1968),
WT's only full-length novel-released at the same time and in the same
format as the 3 1968 collections listed above, and cursed with a title
that seemed to indicate merely a further assembly - had little impact on
publication, although its reputation has justifiably grown. Giant aliens
have occupied Earth and almost eliminated mankind, except for small groups
living, like mice, within the walls of the aliens' dwellings. These humans
manage to survive, and even prosper after a fashion - though the rites of
passage they engage upon, and the CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGHS they
experience, can only be seen as ironically reversing the implications of
such moments as they occur in "normal" sf. As the novel closes, humanity
is about to spread, again like mice, hiding in niches in the holds of the
aliens' spaceships, to the stars. Also published in derisory book form at
this time was A Lamp for Medusa (1951 Fantastic Adventures as "Medusa was
a Lady"; 1968 chap dos), a fantasy-like tale in which a young American
falls into a kind of PARALLEL WORLD where, as Perseus, he is given an
opportunity to rewrite human history.Despite his cheerful surface and the
occasional zany HUMOUR of his stories, WT, like most real satirists, was
fundamentally a pessimist; and, when the comic disguise was whipped off,
as happened with some frequency, the result was salutary. The sf community
has granted WT no awards.WT is not to be confused with Philip J. Klass
(1919- ), US electrical engineer and UFO debunker, for many years senior
editor of Aviation Week ?
Identified (1968), Secret Sentries in Space (1971), UFOs Explained (1974),

UFOs: The Public Deceived (1983) and UFO-Abductions: A Dangerous Game
(1988). [JC]As Editor: Children of Wonder (anth 1953; vt Outsiders:
Children of Wonder 1954); Once Against the Law (anth 1968) with Donald E.
WESTLAKE.About the author: William Tenn (Philip Klass) (1987 chap) by
Gordon BENSON Jr.See also: AUTOMATION; CHILDREN IN SF; ECOLOGY; GREAT AND
SMALL; HISTORY OF SF; MATHEMATICS; MEDICINE; POLITICS; PSYCHOLOGY; TIME
PARADOXES.
TENNANT, EMMA (CHRISTINA)
(1937- ) UK writer whose first acknowledged novel - her true first, The
Colour of Rain (1964) as by Catherine Aydy, was not sf - was The Time of
the Crack (1973; vt The Crack 1978), an sf tale about an inexplicable
faultline - described in terms that imply a gamut of meanings, from SEX to
apocalypse - that opens through the heart of London. The Last of the
Country House Murders (1974) is a rather shoddy and very short pastiche of
a classic detective novel set in a hazily realized, depressed NEAR FUTURE
in which the last country house is maintained as a relic of a culture
which ET - a member of the eminent Tennant family - views with
considerable ambivalence. Some sf devices figure in Hotel de Dream (1976),
whose obsessively nostalgic residents begin to find themselves in each
other's dreams: the nostalgia they share - for a cleansed and triumphant
royal Britain, the kind of land Edwardians might have anticipated, but
which WWI destroyed any chance of - somewhat resembles in detail and
ironical import the Edwardian futures promulgated by Michael MOORCOCK in
his Jerry Cornelius and Oswald Bastable series and elsewhere. ET's next
several books - like The Bad Sister (1978), Wild Nights (1979), Alice Fell
(1980), Queen of Stones (1982) and Woman Beware Woman (1983; vt The
Half-Mother 1985 US) - tend to combine GOTHIC furniture, a complex
FEMINISM, supernatural intrusions and an abiding ambivalence. This refusal
to settle meaning upon her characters, her plots or her generic surrounds
results in books of dream-like vivacity which, through their tendency to
close insecurely, occasionally diminish the insights they have dodged
towards. At the same time, her clearly non-genre novels are relatively
unconvincing. Of her more recent titles, the most interesting are fables
in the indeterminate mode of her best work. Two Women of London: The
Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde (1989) plays on its classic source
an intricate game of female possession in the late 20th century. Sisters
and Strangers: A Moral Tale (1990) is a feminist reconstruction of history
in which ADAM AND EVE survive to the present day. Faustine (1992) replays
the Faust myth with a female protagonist whose beauty chills the world.In
1975-8 ET ed the journal Bananas, which published J.G. BALLARD and others.
Bananas (anth 1977) was taken from the journal, and Saturday Night Reader
(anth 1979) fairly represents its bent. [JC]Works for children: The
Boggart (1980); The Search for Treasure Island (1981); The Ghost Child
(1984).See also: WOMEN SF WRITERS.
TENNESHAW, S.M.
Floating pseudonym used 1947-58 by ZIFF-DAVIS and by the other Chicago
magazines IMAGINATION and IMAGINATIVE TALES. Initially SMT was probably
used by William HAMLING as a personal pseudonym, many of the 22 stories
whose authors have not been identified being perhaps by him; later it was

used once by Randall GARRETT alone, 3 times by him in collaboration with
Robert SILVERBERG, once by Silverberg alone, once by Milton LESSER and
once by Edmond HAMILTON. [PN]
10 STORY FANTASY
US magazine, PULP-MAGAZINE size. 1 issue, Spring 1951, published by Avon
Periodicals, ed Donald A. WOLLHEIM. 10SF is primarily remembered for its
poor arithmetic (there were 13 stories), for the fact that many of its
writers were very eminent - John Beynon (John WYNDHAM), L. Sprague DE
CAMP, Lester DEL REY, Fritz LEIBER, C.M. KORNBLUTH, Kris NEVILLE and A.E.
VAN VOGT - and for publishing Arthur C. CLARKE's "Sentinel of Eternity"
(vt "The Sentinel"), on which was based 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. 10SF was
published simultaneously in Canada. [FHP/PN]
TENTH VICTIM, THE
La DECIMA VITTIMA .
TEPPER, SHERI S.
(1929- ) US writer whose first genre publications were poems under her
then married name Sheri S. Eberhart, the earliest being "Lullaby, 1990" in
Gal, Dec 1963. She then fell silent as a writer, beginning to write again
only once she was in her 50s. Her first-written novel, a long, complex
fantasy, eventually appeared as The Revenants (1984). Her first-published
novel was King's Blood Four (1983), #1 in the long and very interesting
True Game series, which continued with Necromancer Nine (1983), Wizard's
Eleven (1984), The Song of Mavin Manyshaped (1985), The Flight of Mavin
Manyshaped (1985), The Search of Mavin Manyshaped (1985), Jinian Footseer
(1985), Dervish Daughter (1986) and Jinian Star-Eye (1986). The first 3
were assembled as The True Game (omni 1985 UK), the next 3 as The
Chronicles of Mavin Manyshaped (omni 1986 UK) and the final 3 as The End
of the Game (omni 1987). In terms of internal chronology, the middle
trilogy precedes the first.Their readers knew almost at once that
something very unusual was happening in these books, but most serious
critics ignore paperback fantasy trilogies, and it took some years before
SST was spoken of much at all. In the True Game books some of the human
colonists on a planet also inhabited by aliens have, long before the story
opens, evolved PSI POWERS; the best term for these books would be SCIENCE
FANTASY. They show an astonishing assuredness of narrative voice; for SST
is that unusual kind of writer, the apparently born story-teller. Further
evidence of her narrative fluency (and her seemingly endless
inventiveness) came with the Marianne fantasy trilogy: Marianne, the Magus
and the Manticore (1985), Marianne, the Madame and the Momentary Gods
(1988) and Marianne, the Matchbox and the Malachite Mouse (1989), all 3
assembled as The Marianne Trilogy (omni 1990 UK). SST also showed real
accomplishment in HORROR fiction with Blood Heritage (1986) and its sequel
The Bones (1987) - both humorous and both involving some very practical
modern witchcraft-and the later (and better) horror novel Still Life (1989
as E.E. Horlak; 1989 UK as by SST).SST's first novel of sf proper was
initially split by the publisher into 2 vols, The Awakeners: Northshore
(1987) and The Awakeners: Volume 2: Southshore (1987), but was soon
sensibly released as The Awakeners (1987). As a work of speculative
sociobiology and ecology it is ebullient, but the plotting of this tale of

a theocratic riverside civilization where it is forbidden to travel
eastwards is sometimes a little awkward. The same year saw the shorter and
more confident After Long Silence (1987; vt The Enigma Score 1989 UK), a
melodrama set on a planet whose crystalline native lifeforms are very
dangerous, and can be lulled only by MUSIC.From this point SST
concentrated on sf, although during and in between sf books she published
crime and mystery fiction as by A.J. Orde (the Jason Lynx series) and B.J.
Oliphant. Her first truly ambitious sf work was THE GATE TO WOMEN'S
COUNTRY (1988), which surprised some readers for the ferocity with which
it imagined a post- HOLOCAUST world where social separation by gender is
almost complete, but where the supposedly meek women outmanoeuvre the
really dreadful men on almost all grounds. All SST's subsequent work is
fierce; indeed, with hindsight, the same controlled anger is visible in
the apparently affable science-fantasy books.The next year saw the
beginning of her major sf work to date, the loosely and thematically
connected Marjorie Westriding trilogy: Grass (1989), Raising the Stones
(1990) and Sideshow (1992). To describe the trilogy by naming its villains
somewhat distorts the ease and glow of these books' telling, and labours
their melodramatic elements (which are only sometimes insistent): the
villains are Nature-ruiners, fundamentalist religionists and - it is a
category which comprehends the previous two - men (whom SST sees as almost
doomed by their own sociobiological nature). SST interrupted this trilogy
with Beauty (1991; preferred text 1992 UK), part MAGIC REALISM, part fairy
tale, part sf, in which Sleeping Beauty is taken to a savagely DYSTOPIAN
future and meets (in various guises, including that of Prince Charming)
the Beast; this is a book about despoliation, not just of womanhood but of
Earth. A Plague of Angels (1993) puts its protagonists through the long
ordeal of coming to an understanding of a world complexly crafted out of
sf and fantasy conventions; and Shadow's End (1994) returns directly to
the theme of environmental destruction at the hands of the fundamental
religionists whom she dubs, in this instance, Firsters, after their
insistence that only humans, of all creatures in the galaxy, have any
right to live.SST requires the engine of story to provide impulsion for
the other things she can do, which tends to tilt her work towards
melodrama and excess, and thus to obscure a little her remarkable
sophistication. In the space of only a few years she has become one of
sf's premier world-builders; the diversity of invented societies in
Sideshow - this diversity being the actual point of the book - is
breathtaking, as is the vivid ecological mystery of Grass and the bizarre
discovery of a bona fide "god" in Raising the Stones. She is one of the
most significant new - and new FEMINIST - voices to enter 1980s sf. The
kindly grandmother, who tells romantic tales around the campfire, has jaws
that bite and claws that snatch. [PN]See also: ECOLOGY; FANTASY; GOTHIC
SF; MAGIC; PASTORAL.
TERAS, KAPTEENI
[r] FINLAND.
TERENCE X. O'LEARY'S WAR BIRDS
US PULP MAGAZINE. 3 issues, #84-#86, Mar, Apr and May/June 1935,
published by Dell; ed Carson Mowre. These were futuristic, pure-sf issues

(the story was of O'Leary vs the Ageless Men, who are malign immortals,
with DEATH RAYS, from ATLANTIS) bringing O'Leary over from the aviation
pulp War Birds, whose numeration they followed. Extremely rare collector's
items, they have little interest for anyone else, being very ill written
by Arthur Guy Empey. #85 was reissued as a facsimile paperback book,
Terence X. O'Leary's War Birds (1974). [FHP/PN]
TERMINAL MAN, THE
Film (1974). Warner Bros. Prod/dir/written Mike Hodges, starring George
Segal, Joan Hackett. Based on The Terminal Man (1972) by Michael CRICHTON.
107 mins, cut to 104 mins. Colour.Segal plays a man who suffers from
violent blackouts as a result of brain damage suffered in a car accident.
Doctors use him as an experimental guinea pig: into his brain they insert
electrodes linked to a tiny computer implanted in his shoulder, so that
when a convulsion starts the computer will automatically send soothing
impulses to the brain. However, the brain enjoys the soothing effect so
much that it induces the blackouts at an ever-increasing rate; the man is
driven to commit further acts of violence and finally has to be shot down.
Quotes from T.S. Eliot, music by Bach, colour-coded visual symbolism (with
lots of black) - all seem to aspire to a significance that does not, in
the end, seem very profound. The mutually destructive relationship between
man and machine is interesting; the stereotypes (monstrous doctors, etc.)
are crude. [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA.
TERMINATOR, THE
Film (1984). Cinema '84/Pacific Western/Orion. Prod Gale Anne HURD. Dir
James CAMERON, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, Linda
Hamilton. Screenplay Cameron, Hurd. 107 mins. Colour.In AD2029 a vicious
war between humans and machines is raging. To ensure their victory, the
machines send back a CYBORG Terminator (apparently human, with flesh and
blood coating a metal armature and electronic implants) to California in
1984 to murder the mother (Hamilton) of the human leader, thus deleting
him from history. The humans send back a man to protect her. Their
desperate efforts to escape the inexorable Terminator form the main part
of this virtuoso film, which also has remarkably vivid if modestly
budgeted sequences of the future war. A virtue is made of Schwarzenegger's
rather robotic appearance as the Terminator; when reduced to metal, the
still-stalking creature - now an actual ROBOT - is as designed by Stan
Winston, who specializes in convincing, nasty aliens ( ALIENS; PREDATOR
2).A lawsuit against the production company was brought by Harlan ELLISON,
alleging similarities with several of his teleplays, notably Soldier (The
OUTER LIMITS [1964]). It was settled out of court and a credit to Ellison
was inserted into prints of TT. The sequel is TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY
(1991). [PN]See also: CINEMA; MUSIC.
TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY
Film (1991). Lightstorm/Carolco/Tri-Star. Prod/dir/written James CAMERON.
Executive prods Mario Kassar, Gale Anne HURD. Starring Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong, Robert Patrick, Joe
Morton. Screenplay Cameron, William Wisher. 135 mins. Colour.A decade
after The TERMINATOR (1984), two more Terminators (human-seeming killer
ROBOTS) have been sent back to the present from the human-machine wars of

AD2029, one to eliminate John Connor, the future human leader (the
initials are shared with Jesus Christ), while he is still a child (well
played by Furlong), the other (Schwarzenegger) to protect him. Linda
Hamilton again plays Sarah Connor, John's mother, but, where once she was
cute, now she is a chain-smoking, violent obsessive in a psychiatric ward,
body rippling with muscles, awaiting with a frozen snarl the nuclear
HOLOCAUST-due to arrive in August 1997 - of which she has been forewarned.
T2:JD is fundamentally an action thriller, choreographed with precision,
probably the most expensive film ever made (budget estimated at $95
million), and very exciting indeed. It does, however, project images of
pain and impotence in the shadow of a dark future: the imminence and
immanence of nuclear disaster (powerfully rendered in a dream sequence),
Sarah's wrecked psyche, the irony of a MACHINE becoming a father figure,
the boy struggling inarticulately to explain the sanctity of life to a
killer robot (even if a "good" one this time). There is a clear awareness
in Cameron of the intractability of human anger and violence; it is
precisely these qualities, we must suppose, on which the nihilistic
machines, our killer children, are modelled. This awareness runs
half-hidden beneath the cynicism of the son/daddy mawkishness aimed
directly at the older, softer viewer, and the dishonesty of so violent a
film hawking a dove message.As sf the film becomes embedded in its own
causal loop, whereby a future technology sent into the past catalyses the
creation of the very technology that caused the trouble in the first
place. The second Terminator - played by the interestingly cast Patrick, a
slightly built actor with a wholly affectless face-has the ability to flow
from shape to shape like quicksilver. Though silly, this makes for great
special effects. Commercial considerations demand an upbeat ending, which
leaves us with the unlikelihood of a plot in which the most efficient
killing machine ever created is shown as lacking the competence to kill.
[PN]The film was awarded a HUGO in 1992.See also: ACE BOOKS; CINEMA.
TERMINOLOGY
Newcomers to sf are occasionally dismayed by its jargon. Certain concepts
have become so useful in sf (and also in talking about it) that they tend
to be referred to - especially by GENRE-SF writers - in a kind of
shorthand and without explanation. Many receive entries in this volume,
sometimes brief ( CREDITS), sometimes detailed ( ANDROIDS, CLONES,
ROBOTS). We regard the briefer entries, mainly devoted to definition, as
"terminology" entries and the fuller entries as "theme" entries. This
encyclopedia contains 64 terminology entries and 211 theme entries. In the
listing below we have marked the latter with an asterisk ( TIE).Many but
not all sf jargon words and phrases are now recognized by dictionaries.
The ones to which we have chosen to give entries are as follows. First is
a cluster of terms used by sf readers and critics to describe different
aspects of the genre, including CYBERPUNK*, DYSTOPIAS*, EDISONADE*,
GAME-WORLDS*, GENRE SF, HARD SF, HEROIC FANTASY, LOST WORLDS*, MONSTER
MOVIES*, NEW WAVE*, PLANETARY ROMANCE*, SCIENCE FANTASY*, SF, SCI FI,
SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE, SCIENTIFICTION, SHARECROP, SHARED WORLDS*,
SLIPSTREAM
SF, SOFT SF, SPACE OPERA*, SPECULATIVE FICTION, STEAMPUNK*, SWORD AND
SORCERY*, UTOPIA*. Second is a cluster of terms borrowed from outside sf,

usually from science, but much used within sf, sometimes with modified
meanings: ALIENS*, ANDROIDS*, ANTIMATTER*, AI, BIONICS, BLACK HOLES*,
CLONES*, CRYOGENICS, CRYONICS*, CULTURAL ENGINEERING, CYBERNETICS*,
DIMENSIONS, DYSON SPHERE, ENTROPY*, ESP*, EXTRATERRESTRIAL, GALACTIC
LENS,
HOLLOW EARTH*, ION DRIVE, LAGRANGE POINT, MUTANTS*, NANOTECHNOLOGY*,
NEUTRON STAR*, PARSEC, PULSARS, SOLAR WIND, SPACE HABITATS*, SUPERMAN*,
SUSPENDED ANIMATION*, TACHYONS, TELEKINESIS, TELEPORTATION, TERRA,
UFOS*,
VIRTUAL REALITY*, WHITE HOLES, WORMHOLES. The final cluster is of terms
which either originate within sf or would be almost unknown were it not
for sf: ALTERNATE WORLDS*, ANSIBLE, ANTIGRAVITY*, ASTROGATION, BIG DUMB
OBJECTS, BEM, BLASTER, CORPSICLE, CREDITS, CYBERSPACE, CYBORGS*, DALEKS,
DEATH RAYS, DIRAC COMMUNICATOR, DISINTEGRATOR, ESPER, FORCE FIELD*,
FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER, FTL, GAS GIANT, GENERATION STARSHIPS*,
HIVE-MINDS*,
HYPERSPACE*, INNER SPACE, MATTER TRANSMISSION*, PANTROPY, PARALLEL
WORLDS*, POSITRONIC ROBOTS, PRESSOR BEAM, PSIONICS, PSI POWERS*,
PSYCHOHISTORY, RIMWORLD, ROBOTS*, SPACESHIPS*, SPACE WARP, SPINDIZZY,
STARSHIP, TERRAFORMING*, TIME MACHINE, TIME PARADOXES*, TIME TRAVEL*,
TRACTOR BEAM, WALDO.Sf fans have also developed a specialist terminology,
but this is quite distinct, generally, from the terminology of sf itself.
It is discussed under FAN LANGUAGE.Terminology entries not listed above
are BRAID, DIANETICS, DOS, GENERAL SEMANTICS, IMAGINARY VOYAGES,
MAGAZINES, MAGIC REALISM, ORIGINAL ANTHOLOGIES, OULIPO, ROBINSONADE,
SCIENTOLOGY, SEMIPROZINE, SOFT SCIENCES, SPLATTER MOVIES, XENOBIOLOGY.
[PN]
TERMINUS PUBLISHING CO.
WEIRD TALES.
TERRA
Common item of sf TERMINOLOGY. In sf the Latin form is that
conventionally given to the name of our planet, since Earth is ambiguous,
meaning both the planet itself and soil. (The irony is that the same
ambiguity exists in Latin, where terra can mean anything from soil or the
ground, as in terra firma, to the whole world.) Similarly, our Sun is
often, in sf, called Sol. The other Latin word for Earth, commoner in
poetry than in prose, was tellus, and Tellus and its adjective Tellurian
make occasional appearances in sf. [PN]
TERRAFORMING
If the COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS is not to be restricted to those that
prove almost-exact duplicates of the Earth, some form of adaptation will
be necessary; the colonists might adapt themselves by GENETIC ENGINEERING,
as in James BLISH's PANTROPY series, or cyborgization ( CYBORGS), as in
Frederik POHL's MAN PLUS (1976), but if they are bolder they might instead
adapt the worlds, by terraforming them. The term was coined by Jack
WILLIAMSON in the series of stories revised as Seetee Ship (1942-3; fixup
1951; early editions as by Will Stewart), where it is used in a minor
subplot, but such a project had earlier been envisaged in Olaf STAPLEDON's
LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930), where VENUS is prepared for human habitation by

electrolysing water from its oceans to produce oxygen. Stapledon's project
was primitive (and unworkable); most sf stories envisage plant life being
used to generate a breathable atmosphere on terraformable planets, just as
it once did on Earth.As it gradually became accepted that the other
planets in the Solar System could not sustain human life, terraforming
projects became commonplace in sf, especially in relation to MARS. Stories
like Arthur C. CLARKE's The Sands of Mars (1951) and Patrick MOORE's
series begun with Mission to Mars (1956) envisage relatively small-scale
modifications, but, as the true magnitude of the problem has become
apparent, writers have been forced to imagine much more complex processes.
Ian MCDONALD's Desolation Road (1988) tends to the frankly miraculous, but
compensates with some memorable imagery; its echoes of Ray BRADBURY seem
slightly more appropriate than the echoes of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS in The
Barsoom Project (1989) by Larry NIVEN and Steven BARNES. In the real
world, however, people have been hatching long-term plans ever since the
idea of terraforming was first treated seriously by such nonfiction
popularizations as Carl SAGAN's The Cosmic Connection (1973) and Adrian
BERRY's The Next Ten Thousand Years (1974). Kim Stanley ROBINSON has begun
to elaborate a trilogy of novels around his novella Green Mars (1985; 1988
dos), which will endeavour to describe a realistic series of procedures;
RED MARS (1992 UK) begins the series, which is projected to continue with
Green Mars (no textual connection with the novella) and Blue Mars.Other
writers have followed Stapledon in imagining the terraforming of Venus,
among them Poul ANDERSON in "The Big Rain" (1954) and "Sister Planet"
(1956). This project has recently become the subject of an ambitious and
extensive series by Pamela SARGENT, begun in VENUS OF DREAMS (1986) and
continued in Venus of Shadows (1988).The only other worlds in the Solar
System which seem to be plausible candidates for terraforming are some of
the satellites of JUPITER and Saturn ( OUTER PLANETS). Ganymede is the
favourite, featuring in Robert A. HEINLEIN's Farmer in the Sky (1950),
Poul Anderson's The Snows of Ganymede (1955; 1958 dos) and Gregory
BENFORD's Jupiter Project (1975). Jack VANCE's "I'll Build Your Dream
Castle" (1947), about custom-terraformed ASTEROIDS, is decidedly
tongue-in-cheek.The idea that the terraforming of worlds might be reduced
to a matter of routine as mankind builds a GALACTIC EMPIRE is occasionally
featured in sf novels, although generally as a throwaway idea. Elaborate
descriptions of terraforming in such a context are rare, but David
GERROLD's Moonstar Odyssey (1977) and Andrew WEINER's Station Gehenna
(1987) both involve terraforming projects whose methods are more-or-less
scrupulously sketched out. Some of Roger ZELAZNY's works assume that
terraforming projects can be so routinized that "worldscaping" might
become a kind of art form; his Isle of the Dead (1969) features a
protagonist who is in this godlike line of work. The same notion surfaces
in Douglas ADAMS's Hitch Hiker series and in the film Time Bandits (1981)
dir Terry Gilliam, and technologically powerful worldmakers with a
mischievous bent hover (unfathomably) in the background of Terry
PRATCHETT's STRATA (1981). It is probable, though, that it is the
realistic treatments of Sargent and Robinson which will set the pattern
for the most significant future uses of the theme in sf. [MJE/BS]
TERRAHAWKS

UK tv series (1983-6). Anderson Burr Pictures/London Weekend Television.
Created Gerry ANDERSON, prod Anderson, Christopher Burr; dirs Alan
Pattillo, Tony Bell, Tony Lenny, Desmond Saunders; all episodes written
Tony Barwick (1 with Trevor Lansdown) except for pilot, by Anderson. 3
seasons, 39 25min episodes in all.Using more advanced puppets than in all
his SuperMarionation series, with more electronic movements built in, this
was the last of Anderson's sf puppet series for children, made after he
had been working for some years with live-action tv ( SPACE: 1999). The
Terrahawks are an elite special force who must save Earth from the
depredations of Zelda, the ANDROID witch-queen of Guk. To help, they have
the silver ROBOTS the Zeroids, commanded by Sgt Major Zero, who has a
funny Sgt-Major voice. Most of the old Anderson ingredients are shuffled
about in this attack-from-space series, but the results are tired and
self-parodic. [PN]
TERRORE NELLO SPAZIO
(vt Planet of the Vampires) Italian film (1965). Italian
International/Castilla Cinematografica/AIP. Dir Mario Bava, starring Barry
Sullivan, Norma Bengell, Angel Aranda, Evi Morandi. Screenplay: US Louis
M. Heyward, Ib Melchior; Italian Callisto Cosulich, Antonio Roman, Alberto
Bevilacqua, Bava, Rafael J. Salvia; based on a story by Melchior, based in
turn on an Italian story by Renato Pestriniero. 86 mins. Colour.This
Italian/Spanish/US co-production is directed by Mario Bava, whose baroque,
erotic and sometimes sadomasochistic HORROR films have won him a cult
following; he also dir DIABOLIK (1967). He was once a notable cameraman,
and this sf/horror film is visually intense. Astronauts land on a strange
planet and immediately and inexplicably start killing each other. Three
corpses are buried but, in a striking sequence, rise from the grave, still
shrouded in polythene. It turns out they are possessed by alien spirits.
Two possessed astronauts and the still-human captain (Sullivan) take the
spaceship to return to Earth, where the pickings will be rich. The
discovery in TNS of an ancient, alien SPACESHIP on the surface, occupied
by a giant skeleton, was echoed with some fidelity in the later film ALIEN
(1979). The florid, dreamlike atmospherics of TNS almost make up for the
silliness of the story. Originally to be shot simultaneously in Italian
and US versions, with pages of script delivered only on the day, it must
have presented a challenge to even Bava's celebrated inventiveness.
[PN]See also: CINEMA; MONSTER MOVIES; PARANOIA.
TERROR OF MECHAGODZILLA
GOJIRA.
TERROR STRIKES, THE
The AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN .
TERRORVISION
Film (1986). Altar/Empire. Executive prod Charles BAND. Dir Ted Nicolaou,
starring Mary Woronov, Gerrit Graham, Diane Franklin, Chad Allen, Jonathan
Gries. Screenplay Nicolaou. 83 mins. Colour.This lurid
exploitation-movie-cum-satire has good moments. A hungry beast first
appears on the tv screen, then materializes in the house, of wife-swapping
vulgarians, a SURVIVALIST grandfather, military-minded son and

heavy-metal-obsessed daughter. With admirable joviality the beast eats and
dissolves most of them one by one, along with others, later reproducing
their heads when necessary. Earth's only hope, the interstellar policeman
who pursues it, is summarily dispatched by a tv horror-show hostess who
mistakes him for the monster. [PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES.
TERTZ, ABRAM
Andrey SINYAVSKY.
TESSERACTS
CANADA.
TESTAMENT
Film (1983). Entertainment Events/American Playhouse. Dir Lynne Littman,
starring Jane Alexander, Ross Harris, Lukas Haas, William Devane, Leon
Ames. Screenplay John Sacret Young, based on "The Last Testament" by Carol
Amen (?1934-1987). 90 mins. Colour.We follow the ordinary, loving,
quarrelsome life of one family in a small Californian town, Hamlin.
Without warning, all US cities are destroyed by nuclear weapons. Hamlin,
not far from San Francisco, is spared the immediate blast (in which the
husband is killed), but loses most of its population to radiation
sickness. Two children die. The mother and her surviving son, at the end,
decide not to commit suicide.This is an intimate film about the END OF THE
WORLD. Too well observed to be simple soap opera, it is nevertheless
formidably and touchingly domestic, and (deliberately) declares itself in
every scene a film made by a woman; even the death of a child is evoked by
the careful sewing of a shroud. It treats the vast scale of the DISASTER
obliquely, the small standing for the large, and seems not interested in
causes, only in effects - in marked contrast to The DAY AFTER , made the
same year. Also in contrast to that film, T is diffident to the point of
shrinking about the physical effects of the HOLOCAUST; radiation sickness
is merely symbolized, by dark shadows round the eyes. The Hamlin/Hamelin
parallel of the "Pied Piper" school play focuses the tightly controlled
anger of the film on the adult negligence that makes children innocent
victims. T is potent and sentimental, one of a number of 1980s films about
nuclear destruction - e.g., SPECIAL BULLETIN, THREADS and WHEN THE WIND
BLOWS. [PN]
TETSUO
(vt Tetsuo: The Iron Man) Film (1989) Produced, directed, written, art
directed, special effects, co-photographed by Shinya Tsukamoto, who also
plays one of the two leading roles; also starring Tomorah Taguchi and Kei
Fujiwara. 67 mins. Black and white.A metal fetishist (Tsukamoto) is hurt
in a hit and run car accident; the driver of the car, a conservative
office worker (Taguchi), notices a metal splinter growing out of his cheek
the next day. As time passes his body metamorphoses into metal; his penis
becomes a power drill, with which he makes love to his girlfriend
(Fujiwara) in an ecstasy of blood. Meanwhile the fetishist, now
telepathic, is also changing into rusty junk metal. Eventually the two
metal men merge, to form a single metallic monster, the harbinger of a new
conjunction of flesh and metal that will engulf the world.Though not
strictly science fiction-no rational explanation is offered for the

metamorphoses-this Japanese film has been assimilated by CYBERPUNK
enthusiasts as a major cyberpunk document in its portrayal of the
unification of the world of the machine with the world of humans. The
machinery, however, is everyday junk, not high-tech computer stuff. It is
an astonishing film, made on an amateur basis on 16mm film, with nearly
all major production roles taken by its maker, Tsukamoto (b. 1960).
Chaotic and indescribable-the synopsis above takes no account of the jump
cuts and surreal juxtapositions in the story as witnessed-it is at once
hardcore exploitation and an art film, whose nearest Western equivalent
may be David Lynch's Eraserhead (1976), though elements of J.G. BALLARD's
fiction also come to mind. While owing much to the violent, sexist
traditions of Japanese manga (comic books) and anime (animated films), it
is in fact live action throughout. The name "Tetsuo", borrowed from the
hero's name in AKIRA (1987), is spelled by the director, punningly, with
two Japanese characters which individually mean "iron" and "man". The film
was first shown in student clubs, rock-and-roll venues and so on, before
its cult success ensured that it was taken up for distribution in cinemas.
It is insanely powerful, though all too clearly low budget and in some
ways completely unprofessional; the hysterical metallic sound track is
also astonishing in its neurotic machine-like edginess. The somewhat
smoother but still extraordinary sequel, made with financial backing, is
TETSUO II: BODYHAMMER (1991). [PN]
TETSUO: THE IRON MAN
TETSUO.
TETSUO II: BODYHAMMER
Film (1991). Kaiju Theatre Production for Toshiba EMI.Co-exec prod, dir,
co-cinematographer, ed, screenplay Shinya Tsukamoto; starring Tsukamoto,
Tomoroh Taguchi, Nobu Kanaoka, Toraemon Utazawa. 83 mins. Colour.This is
in many ways a remake two-years later of TETSUO, this time with
professional backing and shot in colour. An office-worker (Taguchi, who
also starred in the previous film) who is amnesiac about his childhood is
maddened by the kidnapping and murder of his own child, sprouts guns from
his chest (to his astonishment) and sets out on revenge. The kidnappers
proveto be a group of skinhead body builders who with special injections
can become partly metallic. They are led by another metal-sprouting
mutant, Yatsu (Tsukamoto), who turns out to be the office worker's kid
brother. Flashbacks reveal that their insane scientist father had
conducted experiments on them. The bad brotherYatsu and the good brother
clash. Good brother wins, but ends up barely human; now resembling a tank,
he later shatters the city. The greater coherence of the remake - in the
manner of an American SUPERHERO comic - comes at a cost; this is more like
a straight exploitation film (there is some arbitrary sexual sadism); the
sound track is brilliant, but some of the deranged surrealist vigour is
lost. However, the idea, stronger in this version, of aggression altering
body image is an interesting metaphor and the cynicism about family values
is unusual in a Japanese film. [PN]
TEVIS, WALTER (STONE)
(1928-1984) US writer, professor of English literature at the University
of Ohio, who perhaps remains best known as the author of The Hustler

(1959), filmed in 1961, and its sequel, The Color of Money (1984), filmed
in 1986. He began publishing sf with "The Ifth of Oofth" for Gal in 1957
as Walter S. Tevis - his early work, and the tales he wrote around 1980,
are assembled as Far from Home (coll 1981) - but he first came to wide
notice as an sf writer with The Man who Fell to Earth (1963), the basis of
Nicolas Roeg's film The MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976). It is the delicately
crafted story of an ALIEN who comes to Earth from Anthea in an attempt to
arrange asylum for his dying race; in return, he will pass on the benefits
of Anthean science. Becoming as physically and emotionally human as his
technology and his powers of empathy permit, he finds the xenophobic
bureaucracy of humanity's response to him, when he reveals himself and his
quest, impossible to bear; and the blinding he suffers fairly represents
the dying of any hope he might have had of making sense of us. WT's
subsequent novels were less darkly inspired. Mockingbird (1980) rather
mechanically runs its ANDROID protagonist through a process of
self-realization in a senescent USA 500 years hence. The Steps of the Sun
(1983) is the story of an impotent tycoon who revivifies himself and
perhaps the entire world by finding a sentient, motherly and cornucopian
planet on his first space flight and bringing her gifts back home; too
often the plot fades away into psychodrama. WT himself said that his work
was autobiographical. His early death perhaps kept him from telling a
whole story. [JC]See also: ROBOTS.
TEZUKA, OSAMU
(1928-1989) The premier artist in the world of Japanese manga ( COMICS)
and animation, in both of which he established a standard. He began
contributing serial comic strips to a regional newspaper in 1946 while in
junior college. He became a leader in Japanese comics with Shin Takarajima
["The New Treasure Island"] (1947). Most of today's Japanese comics
illustrators grew up strongly influenced by OT. His most famous creation
was the Tetsuwan Atom series (1952 on; in trans as Astroboy], which began
as a series in the children's magazine Shonen. It was eagerly welcomed not
only by comics lovers but also by sf fans all over JAPAN, because his
stories showed a real sense of the feeling of modern sf which at that time
had been grasped by few Japanese writers. Most of his work was for
children, but he published in general magazines also, and 2 pure-sf
serials appeared in SF Magajin ["SF Magazine"], SF Fancy Free (1963) and
Chojin Taikei ["Rise and Fall of the Bird-Human Race"] (1971-5). These
were highly esteemed by sf fans, who are normally severe towards comics.In
1952 OT established an animation studio, Mushi Productions, produced
several full-length animated films, and then began work on the first
animated series for Japanese tv, Tetsuwan Atom (1963 onwards), famous in
the West as Astroboy. This was the dawn of "Japanimation". He is often
looked upon as a Japanese Walt Disney, but failed to elevate his company
to a major enterprise, being a better artist than businessman. His main
other comics series were Jungle Taitei (1950 on; trans as Kimba, The White
Lion), later a tv series, the Black Jack series (1973 on), and the Hi No
Tori ["The Phoenix"] series (1966 on), selected sections of which were
made into feature films, some live and some animated: one which appeared
in the West was the animated Hi No Tori: 2772 (1979; vt Space Firebird
2772; vt Phoenix 2772), dir OT with Suguru Sugiyama, which tells of the

attempted capture of a cosmic space firebird whose life-blood may
rejuvenate Earth. [TSh]
THAMES, C.H.
[s] Milton LESSER.
THANET, NEIL
R.L. FANTHORPE.
THAYER, TIFFANY (ELLSWORTH)
(1902-1959) Prolific and once immensely popular US novelist - his first
novel, the courtroom drama Thirteen Men (1930), was reprinted 40 times in
20 years. After the success of Tiffany Thayer's Three Musketeers (1939),
he devoted most of his remaining years to an enormous historical work,
Tiffany Thayer's Mona Lisa; of 7 projected instalments, only the 1200pp
The Prince of Taranto (1956) ever appeared. TT's sf includes The Greek
(1931), about a NEAR-FUTURE dictatorship, Doctor Arnoldi (1934), which
recounts the grisly implications of being both immortal ( IMMORTALITY) and
unkillable, and One-Man Show (1937), a Thorne-Smith-like comedy of the
afterlife. He was an enthusiastic follower of Charles FORT, founding the
Fortean Society and editing its publication Doubt for many years. Although
unknown today except for this affiliation, TT exerted an influence that
has yet to be assessed: his highly kinetic, sardonic prose was almost
certainly known to Alfred BESTER, and his Mona Lisa project may well have
coloured the description of Fellowes Kraft's opus in John CROWLEY's AEGYPT
(1987). [GF]Other works: 33 Sardonics I Can't Forget (anth 1946).About the
author: Charles Fort, Prophet of the Unexplained (1970) by Damon KNIGHT
contains some material on TT.
THEATRE
Sf literature and theatre have much in common, as both rely heavily on
the audience's imagination, yet the two forms have rarely been combined in
a significant dramatic work. The principal reason seems to be a widely
held assumption that the theatre, with its physical limitations, cannot
plausibly present the fantastic vistas which sf writers envision. "Writing
an sf play is a bit like trying to picture infinity in a cigar box," Roger
ELWOOD declared in his introduction to Six Science Fiction Plays (anth
1976), the only such anthology in existence. Thus, though more than 300 sf
dramas have been catalogued, the history of theatrical sf is largely that
of various playwrights influenced by the genre, but with no commitment to
it. (The parenthetical references given in this article are to cities and
years of premieres; only when no such date is known is the earliest
publication date used.)Although some scholars detect speculative elements
in the plays of Aristophanes and even Shakespeare's The Tempest, the
earliest dramas with sf premises were adaptations. Richard Brinsley
Peake's Presumption, or The Fate of Frankenstein (London, 1823) began a
history of more than 100 plays inspired by Mary SHELLEY's novel
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818; rev 1831). Adaptations of
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) appeared almost immediately
after Robert Louis STEVENSON's novel was published. Jacques Offenbach's
opera Les contes d'Hoffman ["Tales of Hoffman"] (Paris, 1881), based on
stories by E.T.A. HOFFMANN, includes an episode based on "The Sandman", in

which a poet falls in love with a scientist's mechanical doll.The first
significant original plays appeared in the 1920s and 1930s. Karel CAPEK's
R.U.R., in which an army of rebellious ANDROIDS destroys the human race,
introduced the Czech word ROBOT to our language, and enjoyed successful
runs in New York and London after its 1921 premiere in Prague. (Capek
wrote 2 other plays with sf themes.) New York's Theatre Guild premiered
the first play to deal with EVOLUTION, George Bernard SHAW's Back to
Methuselah (1922), and the first atomic-weapons play, Wings Over Europe
(1928) by Robert NICHOLS and Maurice Browne. Russian satirists Vladimir
MAYAKOVSKY (The Bedbug, Moscow, 1929; The Bathhouse, Moscow, 1930) and
Mikhail BULGAKOV (Bliss, 1934; Ivan Vasilievich, 1935-6) used TIME TRAVEL
to expose the foibles of the Soviet bureaucracy.Through the 1950s many
other famous writers produced full-length sf-related dramas of varying
quality, some of them never staged. Arthur KOESTLER's dark comedy Twilight
Bar (Paris, 1946) features 2 ALIENS who threaten to destroy Earth unless
the inhabitants of a small island achieve happiness within 3 days. J.B.
PRIESTLEY (Summer Day's Dream, London, 1949) and Upton SINCLAIR (A Giant's
Strength, Claremont, California, 1948; The Enemy Had it Too, 1950) were
among the many playwrights to speculate on the consequences of nuclear WAR
in the post-Hiroshima period. Elias Canetti (1905- ) wrote 2 plays in
which societies strive towards UTOPIA: by numbering all citizens according
to their predicted death dates (Die Befristeten, Oxford, 1956; trans as
The Numbered; vt Life-Terms), or by banishing mirrors and other tools of
vanity (Komodie der Eitelkeit, written 1934; 1950 Germany; trans as Comedy
of Vanity). Egypt's Tawfik al- HAKIM sent 2 convicted killers into space
in search of a second chance in Voyage to Tomorrow (1950). Gore VIDAL's
play Visit to a Small Planet (1956; 1960), filmed in 1960, is claimed as
one of the most successful sf plays ever staged.Since the 1950s various
writers have adapted sf narratives for the theatre, but their results have
seldom been satisfactory. An exception is Ray BRADBURY, who relied on
simple staging techniques to dramatize 3 of his short stories in The World
of Ray Bradbury (Los Angeles, 1964; New York, 1965) and THE MARTIAN
CHRONICLES (Los Angeles, 1977). Other sf classics to be adapted have
included H.G. WELLS's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898; Brainerd Duffield,
1955; Albert Reyes, 1977), John HERSEY's The Child Buyer (1960; Paul
Shyre, 1962), Aldous HUXLEY's BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932; David Rogers, 1970),
George ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949; Pavel KOHOUT, 1984) and Walter
M. MILLER's A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ (1960; Richard Felnagle, 1986).The
most noteworthy sf dramas since the 1960s have been those by professional
playwrights employing familiar sf premises or iconography for non-sf
purposes. Antonio Buero Vallejo explored the sociological effects of the
Spanish Civil War through the eyes of two scholars from the future in El
tragaluz (Madrid, 1967; trans as The Basement Window). Sam Shepard's "The
Unseen Hand" (New York, 1969) features an alien fugitive who seeks the aid
of 3 Old West outlaws, while his The Tooth of Crime (London, 1972) posits
a society ruled by rock'n'roll stars. David Rudkin's The Sons of Light
(London, 1977) pits a pastor's sons against an evil scientist who has used
myth and brainwashing techniques to create a subterranean slave army. In
Eric Overmeyer's Native Speech (Los Angeles, 1983) the monologues of a
disc jockey influence events in a devastated urban world; in Overmeyer's
On the Verge (Baltimore, 1985) words propel 3 19th-century lady explorers

on a journey through time.Sf has also influenced performance art. In The
Games (West Berlin, 1983) by Meredith Monk and Ping Chong a future society
attempts to preserve its past through Olympic-style rituals. 1000
Airplanes on the Roof (Vienna, 1988), a multimedia collaboration by
playwright David Henry Hwang, composer Philip Glass ( MUSIC) and designer
Jerome Sirlin, is a single-character narrative about a psychological
encounter with aliens.A few playwrights have combined comedy with sf to
reflect modern social problems. Alan Spence's Space Invaders (Edinburgh,
1983) and Constance Congdon's Tales of the Lost Formicans (Woodstock, New
York, 1988) use the alien-encounter premise as a metaphor for the plight
of the individual in a confused world. Alan Ayckbourn employs a mechanical
nanny to explore a similar theme in Henceforward . . . (Scarborough,
1987).Despite the failure of the Broadway musical Via Galactica (Galt
MacDermot, Christopher Gore, Judith Ross, 1972), sf spectaculars have
appeared frequently since the early 1970s. A more successful musical was
Bob Carlton's Return to the Forbidden Planet (Blackheath, England, 1983),
a 1990 hit in London, which covers much the same ground as FORBIDDEN
PLANET (1956) with great good humour and a lot of mainly 1960s rock'n'roll
songs. (For further discussion of sf musical dramas and opera see MUSIC.)
A cult favourite in the USA was Warp! (Chicago, 1971-2; New York, 1973), a
comic trilogy by Stuart Gordon and Lenny Kleinfeld. Its counterpart in
England, Ken Campbell's and Chris Langham's Illuminatus! (Liverpool, 1976;
London, 1977), was a 5-play epic based on the trilogy by Robert SHEA and
Robert Anton WILSON, and was followed by Neil ORAM's 10-part play sequence
The Warp (1979), also dir Ken Campbell. These productions employed a
variety of modern theatrical techniques to create convincingly fantastic
worlds on the stage. [RW]
THEM!
Film (1954). Warner Bros. Dir Gordon Douglas, starring Edmund Gwenn,
James Whitmore, James Arness, Joan Weldon. Screenplay Ted Sherdeman, based
on a story by George Worthing Yates. 93 mins. B/w.Unexplained deaths
occur, but it is some time before we learn that atomic tests in the US
desert have created gigantism ( GREAT AND SMALL) in a species of ant.
Their nest is located and destroyed, but a queen ant escapes and lays her
eggs in a storm drain beneath Los Angeles, which becomes the setting for
the final battle between giant ants and humans. Along with The THING
(1951) and The BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953), T! was a template for a
series of similar MONSTER MOVIES that followed in the 1950s. It is well
made, and handles its absurd subject with an austere but vivid documentary
style, thus standing out from most of the cheaper and more sensational
variations that followed on the theme. The giant ants were not animated
miniatures but full-scale mock-ups. [JB/PN]See also: HIVE-MINDS; MUTANTS.
THEMERSON, STEFAN
(1910-1988) Polish-born author, scriptwriter and photographer, active in
Poland in the 1930s, there editing journals and publishing widely; in the
UK from before the beginning of WWII, he continued publishing in Polish
and French, but increasingly turned to English. He was a member of the
College de 'Pataphysique and founded the Gaberbocchus Press. Given over as
they were to paradox, games of logic and the dislocations of Semantic

Poetry (his own term), ST's novels have never been easy to pigeonhole but
can be thought of - very roughly - as exuberant FABULATIONS. In Professor
Mmaa's Lecture (1953), which comes as close to conventional sf as any of
his books, the eponymous termite lectures his audience on the vast new
primitive creatures called mammals, which are threatening to take over the
world; the book had an introduction by Bertrand RUSSELL. Though they
radically displace the normal world, none of his other fictions could be
called sf; but his last 2 novels - The Mystery of the Sardine (1986) and
Hobson's Island (1988) - assemble many characters from previous books into
worlds which are mirrors of our own - an Anti-Earth floats in the heavens
of the first tale - where they engage in levitations, speculations and
prestidigitations galore. [JC]Other works: Bayamus (1949); Wooff Wooff, or
Who Killed Richard Wagner? (1951); Cardinal Polatuo (1961); Tom Harris
(1967); Special Branch (A Dialogue) (1972 chap); General Piesc, or The
Case of the Forgotten Mission (1976 chap).
THEOBALD, ROBERT
(1929- ) US writer and economist, an exponent of the need for alternative
technologies and strategies to survive the turn of the century; his
several texts on these issues culminate in An Alternative Future for
America's Third Century (1976). His sf novel, Teg's 1994: An Anticipation
of the Near Future (1972) with J.M. Scott, carries on these concerns
through a series of dialogues between George ORWELL-Fellowship-winner Teg
and various interlocutors who discuss the course of history leading up to
1994, a time less bad than it might have been (because alternative
technologies were employed), hence the name of the fellowship she has won.
The book, originally circulated in mimeographed form in 1969, was written
to elicit readers' responses, and 60pp of the first printed edn contain
readers' and authors' comments. [JC/PN]
THEODORE STURGEON MEMORIAL AWARD
Given in memory of Theodore STURGEON, who died in 1985, to the previous
year's best sf/fantasy story in English under 17,500 words. The TSMA has
been announced annually since 1987 during a July ceremony at the
University of Kansas in Lawrence, at which the JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL
AWARD is also announced. The winner and place-getters are chosen by a
committee, largely of sf writers, chaired by Orson Scott CARD, with whose
self-published critical magazine Short Form the TSMA is affiliated.
[PN]Winners:1987: Judith MOFFETT, "Surviving"1988: Pat MURPHY, "Rachel in
Love"1989: George Alec EFFINGER, "Schrodinger's Kitten"1990: Michael
SWANWICK, "The Edge of the World"1991: Terry BISSON, "Bears Discover
Fire"1992: John KESSEL, "Buffalo"1993: Dan SIMMONS, "This Year's Class
Picture"1994: Kij Johnson, "Fox Magic"
THERE WILL COME SOFT RAIN
VEL'D.
THEROUX, PAUL (EDWARD)
(1941- ) US writer best known for novels like Saint Jack (1973) and The
Mosquito Coast (1982), which cruelly anatomize their far-flung settings,
and for travel books which do the same. Some of his slighter books are
FABULATIONS, The Black House (1977) is a horror story, and O-Zone (1986)

is an extremely long, seemingly ambitious sf novel set in the familiar
killing ground of a near-future DYSTOPIAN USA, irradiated with traces of
HOLOCAUST, where the rich lurk behind domes and the poor roam a desolated
terrain. It may be that PT thought the venue was original to this book.
Titles of some fantasy interest include Dr. De Marr (1990 UK) and Millroy
the Magician (1993). [JC]See also: MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF; POLLUTION;
SLIPSTREAM SF.
THESE ARE THE DAMNED
The DAMNED .
THEY CAME FROM BEYOND SPACE
Joseph MILLARD.
THEY CAME FROM WITHIN
The PARASITE MURDERS .
THEYDON, JOHN
John W. JENNISON.
THEY LIVE
Film (1988). Alive Films. Dir John CARPENTER, starring Roddy Piper, Keith
David, Meg Foster. Screenplay Frank Armitage (pseudonym of Carpenter),
based on "Eight O'Clock in the Morning" (1963) by Ray NELSON. 94 mins.
Colour.After several not very successful films for major studios ( STARMAN
[1984], Christine [1983]), Carpenter went independent again for this, his
best film for years and, though it did not do much in the marketplace,
most popular with the critics. Based on a 6pp story about the USA being
controlled by disguised ALIENS (partly a satirical attack on tv), it
expands its original cleverly, and is a model of taut, B-movie narrative
skills. In a depression-ridden, conformist USA, Nada (Piper), a labourer,
is puzzled by intimations of something not quite right. He accidentally
discovers a cache of sunglasses that, when worn, reveal subliminal codes
all over the city, urging submission to authority, and also finds that
many wealthier-looking citizens are in fact skull-faced aliens, exploiting
what to them is a Third-World colony. An excellent formula film, TL is
almost something more ambitious as well - but settles for action. [PN]See
also: MONSTER MOVIES; PARANOIA.
THIESSEN, J. GRANT
[r] The SCIENCE-FICTION COLLECTOR .
THIJSSEN, FELIX
[r] BENELUX.
THING, THE
1. Film (1951; vt The Thing from Another World). Winchester Pictures/RKO.
Dir Christian Nyby (but see below), starring Kenneth Tobey, Margaret
Sheridan, Robert Cornthwaite, Douglas Spencer, James Arness. Screenplay
Charles Lederer, based on "Who Goes There?" (1938) by Don A. Stuart (John
W. CAMPBELL Jr). 86 mins. B/w.TT was by far the most influential of the
films that sparked off the sf/ MONSTER-MOVIE boom of the 1950s, and
remains one of the most powerful of that decade. The film was actually dir
Howard Hawks, who arranged as a favour that Nyby (an editor on previous

Hawks films) should receive the directing credit. It is full of Hawks's
trademarks: fast pace, overlapping dialogue and an ability to elicit
relaxed, naturalistic performances from the cast. It describes the
discovery of a UFO in the Arctic ice, its retrieval, and the subsequent
series of attacks on a military/scientific base by its thawed-out
occupant, a humanoid, vegetable ALIEN, searching for blood. Hawks wisely
kept the Thing (Arness) off the screen for most of the film; when seen it
is disappointing - and not at all like an "intellectual carrot", as it has
been described. The best things in TT are the increasing tension (every
time a door is opened the audience jumps) and claustrophobia; the gutsy
performance by Sheridan as the wisecracking woman who gives as good as she
gets, especially in the astonishing bondage scene; and the convincing
sense of a nervous group under siege. Typical of adventure films made
during the Cold War, there is a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later
morality (the scientists who want to communicate with the Thing are seen
as fools); the Cold-War feeling is heightened by the famous last line,
"Keep watching the skies!" [PN/JB]2. Film (1982). Turman-Foster/Universal.
Dir John CARPENTER, starring Kurt Russell, A. Wilford Brimley, T.K.
Carter, Richard Dysart, Charles Hallahan, Richard Masur. Screenplay Bill
Lancaster, based on the Stuart/Campbell story. 109 mins. Colour.Not so
much a remake as a return to the original story, this film reinstates
Campbell's shapeshifting alien that can kill and duplicate the base
workers one by one, with all the PARANOIA that that engenders. It was not
very successful commercially, and was widely criticized as being merely a
string of curiously disgusting special effects (designed by Rob Bottin, an
uncredited Stan Winston and others) without any of the subtlety of the
Hawks version. But the Hawks version, though vivid, was itself not very
subtle, and Carpenter carries his beleaguered working men much further in
extremis emotionally than Hawks would have cared to. Only 2 survive, and
either or both may in fact be alien. There is a case for arguing that the
Carpenter version goes as far as genre movies normally dare, if not
further, in questioning not just the nature of humanity under stress but
its value. Faced by the alien, the humans themselves become inhuman in
every possible way. It is a black, memorable film, and may yet be seen as
a classic. The novelization is The Thing * (1982) by Alan Dean FOSTER.
[PN]See also: CINEMA.
THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, THE
The THING .
THINGS TO COME
Film (1936). London Films. Dir William Cameron Menzies, starring Raymond
Massey, Cedric Hardwicke, Margaretta Scott, Ralph Richardson, Edward
Chapman, Ann Todd, Maurice Braddell. Screenplay Lajos Biro, H.G. WELLS,
based on Wells's The Shape of Things to Come (1933). 130 mins, cut to 113
mins. B/w.This Alexander Korda production was the most expensive and
ambitious sf film of the 1930s - and, despite the growth of magazine sf
over the next 15 years, the last sf film of any importance until the
1950s. Although Wells himself was closely associated with TTC, it is not
the most satisfactory of the 1930s films based on his work, and was a
box-office failure. The film is divided into 3 parts: the 1st, set in

1940, sees the start of a world WAR that continues for decades; the 2nd,
set in 1970, deals with a community reduced by the war to tribalism until
the arrival of a mysterious "airman", who announces that a new era of "law
and sanity" has begun and quells the local warlords with "Peace Gas"; and
the 3rd takes place in AD2036, when the ruling technocrats have built a
gleaming white UTOPIA and an attempt is being made to fire a manned
projectile into space, using an electric gun, despite (vain) opposition
from effete "artists" who are still maintaining that "there are some
things Man is not meant to know".Characterization and dialogue are weakly
imagined and the rhetoric is preachy and pompous, despite the famously
overblown but moving concluding speech delivered by Raymond Massey, as he
declares of Man: ". . . and when he has conquered all the deeps of space
and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning." Wells's belief
that the future of humanity lay with a technocratic elite and his scorn
for the ARTS seemed oddly old-fashioned even in 1936 - not to say
undemocratic. But the visual drama (supported by Arthur Bliss's majestic
musical score), despite static compositions, is exhilarating: the special
effects were by the imported Hollywood expert Ned Mann and director
Menzies was a great production designer (most famously for Gone With the
Wind [1939]). TTC is one of the most important films in the history of sf
CINEMA for the boldness of its ambitions and for the ardour with which it
projects the myth of SPACE FLIGHT as the beginning of humankind's
transcendence. Wells published a version of the script as Things to Come *
(1935). [PN/JB]
THIRY, MARCEL
[r] BENELUX.
THIS ISLAND EARTH
Film (1955). Universal. Dir Joseph Newman, starring Jeff Morrow, Faith
Domergue, Rex Reason. Screenplay Franklin Coen, Edward G. O'Callaghan,
based on This Island Earth (fixup 1952) by Raymond F. JONES. 86 mins.
Colour.TIE came closer than any film of its period to capturing the
flamboyant essence of PULP-MAGAZINE sf stories. Unlike most other
early-1950s sf films, which were MONSTER MOVIES, TIE becomes a SPACE OPERA
halfway through; the high cost of special effects required in films of
this type was one reason for their comparative rarity.A nuclear physicist
(Reason), having passed what turns out to have been an IQ test set by
extraterrestrials - he builds an "interociter" from mysterious components
that have arrived in the mail - is conscripted by them, along with other
SCIENTISTS. These include an old girlfriend (Domergue). Several adventures
later the two are taken unwillingly by flying saucer through the "thermic
barrier" to the aliens' planet, Metaluna. The Metalunans hope that the
scientists' expertise in the conversion of elements will provide the
massive amounts of uranium required to keep their atomic shield
functioning, so that it will continue to protect them from meteoritic
bombardment by the sadistic Zahgons. Their arrival is too late; they
witness the death of Metaluna and are returned to Earth by Exeter
(Morrow), the arrogant but sympathetic alien who kidnapped them in the
first place.Newman was a run-of-the-mill director, but it is probable that
Jack ARNOLD (uncredited) directed the Metaluna sequences with the help of

Clifford Stine's extravagant special effects. The sequences are remarkable
not for their realism but for their imaginativeness; they are the closest
sf cinema ever got to the style of ASF's or AMZ's 1930s magazine
covers.TIE can hardly be called a good film, but it is an excellent bad
film, a classic of sf cinema. Its most obvious subtext (what would it feel
like to be the colonized rather than the colonizers?) seems to point
towards isolationism as the best strategy for Earth, but the exoticism of
the offworld sequences, and Exeter's dying speech ("our Universe is vast,
full of wonders . . .") offer powerful propaganda for the contrary
political position, the embrace of otherness. [PN]
THIUSEN, ISMAR
Pseudonym of Scottish-born US writer and academic John Macnie
(1836-1909), whose UTOPIA The Diothas, or A Far Look Ahead (1883; vt A Far
Look Ahead, or The Diothas 1890; vt Looking Forward, or The Diothas 1890
UK), set several millennia hence, was prolific with its suggestions of
technological progress while presenting a not untypically regimented
picture of human relations, which are especially constricting for women who, if unmarried, go out only with chaperons. Unusually, the book's
protagonist and narrator is himself a native of a future time (a few
centuries hence, which may explain the strangeness of his name, Ismar
Thiusen), and travels from that point into the FAR FUTURE where the main
action takes place. [JC]See also: SLEEPER AWAKES.
THOLE, KAREL
Working name of Dutch illustrator Carolus Adrianus Maria Thole (1914- ),
resident in Milan since 1958. The best-known European sf illustrator, KT's
book covers have appeared in virtually every country in continental
Europe, as well as in the UK and the USA (including some for BALLANTINE
BOOKS and DAW BOOKS). But the greatest body of his sf ILLUSTRATION has
been for the publishers Mondadori in Italy and Heyne in Germany; for
considerable periods he has been the only artist working on their sf
lines. His work may be the most sophisticatedly surreal in sf, and it is
not absurd to compare it with that of Max Ernst (1891-1976), Salvador Dali
(1904-1989) or Rene Magritte (1898-1967), all of whom are visible
influences. Symbolic and dreamlike, his covers are often more evocative
than the stories they illustrate. He received a Special Award at the World
SF CONVENTION in Toronto in 1973. A book of his work ed Carlo Fruttero and
Franco Lucentini was published in Italy, and the following year in
Germany, where it was entitled Visionen des Unwirklichen: Die
phantastichen Bilder des Karel Thole ["Visions of the Unreal: The
Fantastic Paintings of Karel Thole"] (1982). [PN/JG]
THOMAS, CHAUNCEY
(1822-1898) US author of a technocratic UTOPIA, The Crystal Button, or
Adventures of Paul Prognosis in the Forty-Ninth Century (1891). The
protagonist travels thence in a dream-state, learns how the peace is
maintained through a rigorous and worldwide attachment to Truth, and, just
as a comet destroys this idyllic civilization, returns to 19th-century
Boston. [JC]
THOMAS, CRAIG (DAVID)

(1942- ) Welsh writer of TECHNOTHRILLERS, most interestingly the Firefox
books - Firefox (1977) and Firefox Down (1983) - about a NEAR-FUTURE
Russian fighter, the MIG-31, which boasts both anti-radar and weapons
operated by thought waves. The former novel was filmed as FIREFOX (1982).
Moscow 5000 (1979), as by David Grant, and Sea Leopard (1981) have less sf
import. [JC]
THOMAS, DAN
Pseudonym of US writer Leonard M. Sanders Jr (1922-1991). In his sf novel
The Seed (1968) a COMPUTER explains the meaning of life to one of its
engineers. [JC]
THOMAS, D(ONALD) M(ICHAEL)
(1935- ) UK poet and novelist who made use of sf themes most explicitly
in early POETRY like "The Head Rape" for NW in 1968. His The Devil and the
Floral Dance (1978) is a juvenile fantasy. His first adult novels were
densely conceived Freud-inspired FABULATIONS. The Flute-Player (1979), a
fable that depicts the intertwining of art and love, is set in an
imaginary state much like Russia (to which DMT often returns in his
fiction, poetry and translations). Birthstone (1980; rev 1982) features a
protagonist whose several personalities have autonomous lives, and whose
fantasies leak into the world, transforming it. The most successful of
these tales is The White Hotel (1981), in which a graphic and surreal
association in the protagonist's mind between sex and images of mass
violence proves - long after a 1920s analysis by Freud himself - prophetic
of the Final Solution; the book then becomes an extremely dark afterlife
fantasy. The later Ararat sequence - Ararat (1983), Swallow (1984), Sphinx
(1986) and Summit (1987) - adds futurity, politics and garish SATIRE to
the generic mix; and seems, at times, to be sf. [JC]
THOMAS, G.K.
L.P. DAVIES.
THOMAS, MARTIN
Working name of UK writer Thomas Hector Martin (1913-1985) in a career
that began just after the end of WWII; he also used the floating pseudonym
Peter SAXON at least once during his association with W. Howard BAKER, for
The Curse of Rathlaw (1968 US) in the Guardians psychic-investigators
series. His first novel, The Evil Eye (1958), was, like many of its
successors, a routine occult tale. [JC]Other works: Bred to Kill (1960);
Assignment Doomsday (1961); Beyond the Spectrum (1964); Laird of Evil
(1965); The Mind Killers (1965); Such Men are Dangerous (1965); Sorcerers
of Set (1966), a contribution to the Sexton Blake Library; The Hands of
Cain (1966; vt The Hand of Cain 1978 US); Brainwashed (1968).
THOMAS, SUE
(1951- ) UK writer whose sf novel, Correspondences (1992), is a complexly
crafted presentation of a range of interweaving material, with regard to
which a number of correspondences can be contemplated. The protagonist,
having been transformed into a CYBORG, has developed software which allows
her interact directly with her audience in the telling of her fantasies;
within the frame of this narration, created characters live out lives that
are directly correspondent to their creator's. Correspondences between

machine and human intelligence are also brought into play; and discussed.
[JC]
THOMAS, THEODORE L(OCKARD)
(1920- ) US writer and lawyer, prolific in the magazines under his own
name, sometimes rendered Ted Thomas, and as Leonard Lockhard, the
pseudonym he used for his Patent Attorney spoof series (8 stories
1952-64), some of which were with Charles L. HARNESS. He began publishing
sf in 1952 with 2 stories, "The Revisitor" for Space Science Fiction and
"Improbable Profession" (as Lockhard) for ASF, and appeared frequently in
the magazines until about 1980 with tales competently designed for their
markets, the most effective perhaps being those, like "The Weather Man"
(1962), set on a future Earth dominated by a Weather Control Board. With
Kate WILHELM he wrote 2 novels, The Clone (1959 Fantastic as by TLT alone;
exp 1965) and The Year of the Cloud (1970), both featuring unnatural
DISASTERS. The eponymous menace in the first novel represents a rare use
in sf of what is a CLONE in the strict biological sense. [JC]See also:
ECOLOGY; MONSTERS; ORIGIN OF MAN; POLLUTION; SUN; TIME TRAVEL.
THOMAS, THOMAS T(HURSTON)
(1948- ) US writer who began writing sf with The Doomsday Effect (1986),
as by Thomas Wren, which won the Compton Crook Best First Novel AWARD. The
novel describes-in terms that anticipated Greg BEAR's The Forge of God
(1987) and David BRIN's Earth (1990) - the effect upon Earth of a
rampaging BLACK HOLE. The narrative efficiency of the tale, and the
briskly knowledgeable handling of scientific material, marked TTT as a
HARD-SF writer of considerable potential. First Citizen (1987) is a
NEAR-FUTURE tale mixing, in a typical hard-sf manner, POLITICS and
ECONOMICS. An Honorable Defense * (1988) with David A. DRAKE, tied to the
latter's Crisis of Empire sequence (each volume being essentially written
by a different collaborator under Drake's supervision), is military sf,
featuring a disgraced soldier who may be expected to save the Empire,
which will then find that it has been in need of him. The Mask of Loki
(1990) with Roger ZELAZNY is a fantasy set in the 13th and 21st centuries.
Me: A Novel of Self-Discovery (1991) is sf, told from the point of view of
the eponymous AI. Crygender (1992), with an anonymous collaborator,
depicts the hermaphrodite owner of a bordello on Alcatraz Island, by now
owned by a Japanese consortium. Flare (1992), again with Zelazny,
describes with absorbed detail the effects of the short and violent life
of a deadly solar flare. [JC]See also: MEDICINE.
THOMPSON, EDWARD
E.C. TUBB.
THOMPSON, E(DWARD) P(ALMER)
(1924-1993) UK historian and writer, whose highly articulate Marxist
interpretation of the last centuries of UK history is best expressed in
The Making of the English Working Class (1963). His studies of William
MORRIS - William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955) and The
Communism of William Morris (1965 chap) - are of sf interest, as is his
only novel, The Sykaos Papers: Being an Account of the Voyages of the Poet
Oi Pas to the System of Strim . . . (1988), a laboured SATIRE of Earth

customs seen through the eyes of the poet Oi Pas, who comes from another
planet. [JC]
THOMPSON, JOYCE (MARIE)
(1948- ) US writer, often of works for children. Her sf novel Conscience
Place (1984) describes with quiet gravity an apparent UTOPIA hidden in the
US West which is in fact populated by MUTANT nuclear- DISASTER victims.
These people are threatened by the "need" of the scientists who maintain
the refuge to perform GENETIC-ENGINEERING experiments on them. In telling
this emotive tale, JT avoids almost all the traps of sentiment. [JC]Other
works: The Blue Chair (1977); Harry and the Hendersons * (1987; vt Bigfoot
and the Hendersons 1987 UK), a tie based on the film HARRY AND THE
HENDERSONS (1987); East is West of Here: New ?
(coll 1987).
THOMPSON, VANCE
(1863-1925) US writer in various genres whose The Green Ray (1922-3
Munsey's Magazine as "The Man of the Miracle"; 1924) is hoax rather than
sf, except for some ambivalence surrounding a Black bleached White and
unpleasantly made the basis of a racist denouement. [JC]Other works: The
Carnival of Destiny (1916); The Scarlet Iris (1924).
THOMSON, AMY
(1958- ) US writer whose first novel, Virtual Girl (1993), cunningly
updates the icon of the female ROBOT, long a locus for uneasy speculation
among older sf writers (see FEMINISM). Maggie, the protagonist of this
NEAR-FUTURE tale, is an AI and consequently illegal, as independent
artificial intelligences have been outlawed. More humanely, less sharply,
but with a happier outcome than the robot Bildungsromanen for which John
SLADEK became best-known, Virtual Girl carries its robot into what may be
a successful adulthood. AT received the JOHN W. CAMPBELL Award for 1994.
[JC]
THOMSON, DAVID
(1941- ) UK writer long resident in the USA, best known for his
nonfiction studies of film. His 2 novels of sf interest were also, in a
sense, film studies. Suspects (1985) is a complex FABULATION, a portrait
of a USA populated - or infiltrated - by a vast extended family of
characters who, the premise argues, have featured at some point in their
lives as protagonists in innumerable films noirs from the period of
Hollywood's prime and dark innocence; at the black heart of the tale sits
the sinister figure of George Bailey, the character portrayed by James
Stewart in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946). In Warren Beatty: A
Life and a Story (1987; vt Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes: A Life and a
Story 1987 US), chapters which examine the eponymous actor's real life
alternate with chapters of a NEAR-FUTURE tale which dramatize the ideal
life Beatty may be presumed to have indited upon the dream world of film.
[JC]
THOR, TERRY
[s] Larry T. SHAW.
THORNE, GUY

Pseudonym of UK journalist and writer Cyril Arthur Edward Ranger-Gull
(1874-1923); he also wrote speculative fiction as Ranger Gull. His most
successful work was the alarmist and antisemitic When It Was Dark (1903),
in which faked "scientific evidence" that Christ's resurrection never took
place sends the Christian world into a catastrophic crisis of
demoralization. His later fantasies, stridently championing Christianity,
include several with borderline-sf elements. In Made in His Image (1906) a
bleak futuristic world is redeemed by Christian belief, and in The Angel
(1908) and And it Came to Pass (1915) miracle-working emissaries from God
help show modern mortals the error of their ways. Other borderline-sf
stories signed GT include 2 stories of near-future WAR, The Secret
Sea-Plane (1915) and The Secret Monitor (1918), and a story of
artificially induced DISASTERS, When the World Reeled (1924). Books signed
Ranger Gull include 3 fairly conventional thrillers - The Soul-Stealer
(1906), The Enemies of England (1915) and The Air Pirate (1919) - as well
as the most ambitious of his sf novels, The City in the Clouds (1921),
about an airborne pleasure-palace afloat over London. The detective novel
Black Honey (1913), signed C. Ranger-Gull, has some borderline-sf
elements. Other novels with fantasy elements include the detective story
Doris Moore (1919), the mesmeric fantasy The House of Danger (1920), The
Love Hater (1921) and The Dark Dominion (1923). His translations from the
French include Charles Baudelaire: His Life (1868 France; trans 1915 UK)
by Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), with added material. The latter part of
GT's life was spent in a remote seaside cottage later rented by Neil BELL
- where, Bell learned, GT's behaviour had scandalized the local
population. [BS]Other work: Lucky Mr Loder (1918), a fantasy.See also:
HISTORY OF SF; MESSIAHS; RELIGION.
THORNE, IAN
Julian MAY.
THORNTON, HALL
[s] Robert SILVERBERG.
THORPE, FRED
Pseudonym of Albert Stearns (? -1899), US dime novelist and author of 2
popular children's books based on the Arabian Nights, Chris and the
Wonderful Lamp (1895) and Sindbad, Smith and Co (1896). He wrote many
kinds of dime novel ( DIME-NOVEL SF), but was best known for marvel
stories written on an almost ABSURDIST level. His most popular was "The
Silent City" (1892 Golden Hours), about adventures in a Fata Morgana city
seen over the Bering Sea. The Boy in Black (1894 Golden Hours; 1907)
describes a weird, irrational supercivilization inside a Western mountain.
"In the World Below" (1897 Golden Hours) anticipates Edgar Rice
BURROUGHS's Pellucidar with adventures in a HOLLOW EARTH after an
earth-borer goes out of control. [EFB]
THORPE, TREBOR
R.L. FANTHORPE.
THOUSAND EYES OF DR MABUSE, THE
Die TAUSEND AUGEN DES DR MABUSE.

THREADS
Made-for-tv film (1984). BBC-TV. Dir Mick Jackson, starring Karen
Meagher, Reece Dinsdale, June Broughton, Henry Moxon, Sylvia Stoker, David
Brierly. Screenplay Barry Hines. 115 mins. Colour.This BBC production, at
once a UK equivalent of The DAY AFTER (1983) and an attempt to update the
harrowing vision of Peter WATKINS's The WAR GAME (1965), is an impressive
and persuasive account of a near-future nuclear attack on the UK, focusing
on the fate of Sheffield. Ordinary people are seen ignoring the escalating
international crisis as they deal with their own problems - the heroine
(Meagher) is a pregnant young girl unsure whether or not to marry - and
are then shattered completely by the coming of war. The civil-defence
forces cannot deal with the extent of the calamity, and traffic wardens
are drafted to supervise summary executions of looters. The film mimics
The War Game's documentary approach as it trots out disturbing statistics.
Finally, it flashes forward a few years to show a medievalized postHOLOCAUST UK, brutal and tribalized, bringing this resolutely non-sf
treatment of an sf theme surprisingly close to the surreal horrors of Le
DERNIER COMBAT (1983). [KN]
THRILL BOOK
US magazine in the larger, saddle-stapled DIME-NOVEL format for 8 issues,
then PULP-MAGAZINE size. 16 issues, 2 per month, 1 Mar-15 Oct 1919,
published by STREET ? ed Harold HERSEY (Mar-June 1919) and Ronald
Oliphant (July-Oct 1919). The legendarily rare TB is often cited as the
first SF MAGAZINE, but its initial 8 issues contained no sf, rather
stories intended to provide "thrills" of an occult or weird sort. Only
after Oliphant became editor did TB regularly publish sf stories,
including 2 by Murray LEINSTER (one involving a mad inventor, the other a
biological menace). Others included: an H.G. WELLS-inspired story of
INVISIBILITY by Greye La Spina (1880-1969); a Sax ROHMER-inspired Chinese
supervillain whose inventions include a device for creating black light in
"Mr Shen of Shensi" by H. BEDFORD-JONES; and the satirical "The Man from
Thebes", featuring a reanimated mummy, by William Wallace COOK. Additional
sf by less notable authors treated routinely such sf/ HORROR motifs as
devices to communicate with the dead, drugs that distort the time-sense,
men protected by invisible armour, and LOST WORLDS. TB's most famous story
was The Heads of Cerberus (Aug-Oct 1919; 1952) by Francis STEVENS, a
SCIENCE-FANTASY adventure set predominantly in a Philadelphia located in
an alternate time-track. The definitive work on TB is Richard BLEILER's
obsessively thorough The Annotated Index to The Thrill Book (chap 1991).
[RB]
THRILLING SCIENCE FICTION
The MOST THRILLING SCIENCE FICTION EVER TOLD .
THRILLING SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES
The MOST THRILLING SCIENCE FICTION EVER TOLD .
THRILLING WONDER STORIES
US PULP MAGAZINE. 111 issues Aug 1936-winter 1955. Published by Beacon
Magazines, Aug 1936-June 1937; by Better Publications Oct 1937-Aug 1943;
and by Standard Magazines Fall 1943-Winter 1955. Ed Mort WEISINGER (Aug

1936-June 1941), Oscar J. FRIEND (Aug 1941-Fall 1944), Sam MERWIN Jr
(Winter 1945-Oct 1951), Samuel MINES (Dec 1951-Summer 1954) and Alexander
SAMALMAN (Fall 1954-Winter 1955). Leo MARGULIES was editorial director
during Weisinger's and Friend's editorships. TWS began as a regular
bimonthly and changed to monthly Dec 1939-Apr 1941, then back to bimonthly
June 1941-Aug 1943. A quarterly schedule followed, Fall 1943-Fall 1946;
then bimonthly Dec 1946-Aug 1953. The last 6 issues ran Nov 1953, Winter
1954, Spring 1954, Summer 1954, Fall 1954, Winter 1955.TWS was the
continuation, after a brief gap, of Hugo GERNSBACK's WONDER STORIES; the
adjective "Thrilling" was added to the title to bring it into conformity
with other magazines from its new publisher. The issue numeration
continued from Wonder Stories, Aug 1936 being vol 8 #1, so there might be
a case for regarding it as the same magazine. However, its personality
changed. The new magazine was far more garish than its predecessor. The
early covers, by Howard V. BROWN, are said to have been responsible for
the coinage of the term "Bug-Eyed Monsters" (or BEMS), such creatures
being a regular feature of his painting, along with giant dinosaurs,
insects and men. The first 8 issues featured an early sf comic strip
(Zarnak by Max Plaisted) which was abruptly suspended in mid-plot after
the Oct 1937 number. TWS's contributors were mostly second-string authors:
Eando BINDER, Frederick Arnold Kummer (1873-1943), Arthur Leo ZAGAT and
others. It ran a number of popular series, notably John W. CAMPBELL Jr's
Penton and Blake stories, Arthur K. BARNES's Gerry Carlyle stories and the
Hollywood on the Moon series by prolific contributor Henry KUTTNER. An
amateur writers' contest sponsored by the magazine was won by Alfred
BESTER with his first story, "The Broken Axiom" (Apr 1939). TWS was
successful enough to generate 2 companion magazines: STARTLING STORIES, in
Jan 1939, and STRANGE STORIES, featuring mostly weird fiction, in Feb
1939. Startling featured longer stories (a complete novel in each issue,
when possible) and soon became the better magazine. In mid-1940 TWS also
began to proclaim a "complete novel" in most issues, but in actuality the
majority of these were no more than long novelettes. During this boom
period a third companion, CAPTAIN FUTURE, was initiated, and for a little
over a year TWS changed from its habitual bimonthly schedule and appeared
monthly. Earle K. BERGEY succeeded Brown as cover artist with the Sep
1940, issue and was responsible for most subsequent covers; his paintings
switched the emphasis from the BEM to the scantily clad lady being
threatened by it. TWS became more overtly juvenile in the early 1940s with
the introduction of Sergeant Saturn ( STARTLING STORIES).When Merwin
became editor he did away with the magazine's juvenile trappings and
considerably improved it, although it remained evidently secondary to
Startling. It published further noteworthy stories, including many from
Murray LEINSTER, and some "novels" genuinely of novel length: A.E. VAN
VOGT's THE WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER (Feb 1949; fixup 1951), James BLISH's
Jack of Eagles (Dec 1949 as "Let the Finder Beware"; rev 1952; vt ESP-er)
and Leigh BRACKETT's Sword of Rhiannon (June 1949 as "Sea-Kings of Mars";
1953). Ray BRADBURY, whose first solo short story appeared in TWS in 1943,
was a regular contributor, as was Jack VANCE, who also made his debut in
its pages. Vance's Magnus Ridolph series and Kuttner's Hogben stories were
popular features of the Merwin TWS.Although the magazine acquired more
companions in the boom of the early 1950s - Fantastic Story Magazine (

FANTASTIC STORY QUARTERLY) and SPACE STORIES - it soon began to suffer in
the general decline of the pulp-magazine industry. Changes in editor had
little effect, Mines maintaining, approximately, the standard of Merwin's
TWS; he published Philip Jose FARMER's celebrated TABOO-breaking "Mother"
(Apr 1953). The last issue of TWS appeared in Winter 1955, after which the
magazine's title (along with that of Fantastic Story Magazine) was
absorbed into Startling for that magazine's last 3 issues.2 issues of a
reprint magazine, Wonder Stories, revived the old title and continued the
TWS numeration ( WONDER STORIES). 2 UK edns appeared for short periods,
both heavily cut from the original: Atlas Publishing produced 10 numbered
issues (3 in 1949-50, 7 in 1952-3); Pemberton published a further 4,
numbered #101-#104, in 1953-4. A Canadian reprint ran 1945-6 and again
1948-51. [MJE]
THRILLS INCORPORATED
Australian magazine, PULP-MAGAZINE format #1-#5, BEDSHEET format #6-#12,
DIGEST format #13-#23, numbered, undated, mostly monthly Mar 1950-June
1952, published by Associated General Publications, Sydney, company name
changed to Transport Publications from #13; mostly ed (uncredited) by
Alister Innes. TI was intended for children. Although US reprints as such
were not used, plagiarism did occur without the publishers' knowledge.
These (with new titles, but originally by Ray BRADBURY, Charles L.
HARNESS, Clifford D. SIMAK, William TENN and others) were the only good
stories printed, although Alan G. YATES contributed some Australian
stories, as did G.C. Bleeck (1907-1971) - some under the name of Belli
Luigi - and Norma Hemming. Some stories were reprinted in the UK AMAZING
SCIENCE STORIES. [FHP/PN]
THRUST
US SEMIPROZINE, originally a FANZINE, advertised as quarterly but in the
past often irregular; ed D. Douglas Fratz, #1 Jan 1973 as magazine of the
Maryland Science Fiction Society; it became independent 1977, at which
time Fratz stopped publishing fiction and established the blend of
interviews, articles and reviews, emphasizing controversy and argument,
which has continued since. Always one of the solider journals of
commentary on sf and fantasy, and one of the longest-lasting, T has been 4
times nominated for a HUGO (1980, 1988, 1989, 1990). Beginning with #36,
Spring 1990, T changed its name to Quantum: Science Fiction and Fantasy
Review without major changes to style or format; and in #42, Summer/Fall
1992, Fratz announced that the magazine would end with #43/44. This last
edition, a double-sized 20th anniversary issue, appeared in 1993. Writers
associated with T have included Michael BISHOP, George Alec EFFINGER,
Darrell SCHWEITZER and Ted WHITE. [PN]
THUNDERBIRDS
UK animated-puppet tv series (1965-6). An AP Films Production for
ATV/ITC. Created Sylvia and Gerry Anderson. Prod Gerry Anderson (season
1), Reg Hill (season 2). Writers included Dennis Spooner, Alan Fennell,
Alan Pattillo. Dirs included David Lane, David Elliott, Desmond Saunders,
Pattillo. Model effects supervised by Derek Meddings. 2 seasons, 32 50min
episodes (re-edited in the USA so that each episode occupied two half-hour
timeslots). Colour.This animated puppet series for children was one of the

most elaborate (and perhaps the best-loved) of all such Gerry and Sylvia
ANDERSON productions, and the first designed for a 1hr timeslot. The 4th
of their SuperMarionation shows to be sf, it involved International
Rescue: based on a secret Pacific Island, this was a future air-, spaceand undersea-rescue service which utilized a variety of spectacular
vehicles (a spaceship, a submersible and a heavily armed pink Rolls Royce
among them) and was run by the Tracy family with the help of Lady
Penelope, their glamorous London assistant, Parker, her Cockney chauffeur,
and Brains, a stuttering bespectacled genius. 2 feature-film spin-offs,
also with animated puppets, were Thunderbirds Are Go (1966) and
Thunderbird Six (1968). [PN/JB]
THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO
THUNDERBIRDS.
THUNDERBIRD SIX
THUNDERBIRDS.
THURSTON, ROBERT (DONALD)
(1936- ) US writer who published his first story, "Stop Me before I Tell
More", in Orbit 9 (anth 1971) ed Damon KNIGHT, and who was for some years
known only for his short work. This is notable more for its examination of
individual humans caught in social or sexual extremis than for any
specific extrapolative bent, so that moments of genuine insight or threat
tend to be lost in weak plotting. His first novel, Alicia II (1978),
exemplifies this problem, introducing an interesting existential problem
(the brain of an old man is implanted into the body of a young "retread"
and the new amalgam must come to terms with the kind of society which
legitimizes this obscene method of attaining longevity for a few) but
foundering in the telling, which confusedly leads the protagonist into
improbable PULP-MAGAZINE adventures. RT's second independent novel, A Set
of Wheels (in Clarion, anth 1971, as "Wheels"; exp1983), shows the same
difficulty, but his third, Q Colony (in The Berkley Showcase 4 [anth 1981]
ed John W. SILBERSACK and Victoria Schochet as "The Oonaa Woman"; exp
1985), set in a research station on an ALIEN planet whose inhabitants can
interbreed with humans, explores his usual material - sex and identity with greater aplomb.It may be, however, that RT will remain best known for
a series of ties, the most significant being his contributions to the
Battlestar Galactica sequence, all with Glen A. LARSON: Battlestar
Galactica * (1978), #2: The Cylon Death Machine*(1979), #3: The Tombs of
Kobol* (1979), #4: The Young Warriors * (1980), #11: The Nightmare Machine
* (1985), #12: "Die, Chameleon!" * (1986), #13: Apollo's War * (1987) and
#14: Surrender the Galactica! * (1987). His sequence of BattleTech ties
begins with Legend of the Jade Phoenix #1: Way of the Clans * (1991), #2:
Bloodname * (1991) and #3: Falcon Guard * (1991). Singleton ties include
Robot Jox * (1989), based on a screenplay by Joe HALDEMAN ( ROBOT JOX),
and Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens #3: Intruder * (1990).
[JC]See also: GAMES AND SPORTS; REINCARNATION.
THX 1138
Film (1971). American Zoetrope/Warner Bros. Dir George LUCAS, starring
Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence, Maggie McOmie. Screenplay Lucas, Walter

Murch, from a story by Lucas. 88 mins, restored to 95 mins. Colour.A
subterranean future society is governed repressively by COMPUTERS and
bland human technocrats who keep the population under control with drugs.
Everyone wears white clothing, heads are shaven, and sexual intercourse is
forbidden (breeding is by artificial insemination) - it is a truly
sterile, antiseptic world. One of the few dissenters is THX (Duvall), who
experiments with sex; his cellmate becomes pregnant and is liquidated. THX
is imprisoned in a White Limbo but escapes and reaches the surface and
freedom. It is an old and familiar story to sf readers, but Lucas presents
it with panache. He begins with apparently unrelated visual fragments,
accompanied by snatches of dialogue, all of which gradually coalesce to
form a comprehensive DYSTOPIAN nightmare, visually impressive but not
lavish, with a bleak sense of style and a drily witty script.THX 1138,
though a small masterpiece, failed commercially - unsurprisingly since it
is both difficult and downbeat; it did a little better when released again
after the success of Lucas's STAR WARS (1977) with some footage originally
excised by a worried Warner Bros. restored. The novelization is THX 1138 *
(1971) by Ben BOVA. [JB/PN]
TIDAL WAVE
NIPPON CHINBOTSU.
TIDYMAN, ERNEST
(1928-1984) US journalist, novelist and screenwriter, author of the Shaft
series of books about a Black detective, and of scripts for the Shaft
movies, The French Connection (1971) and the supernatural Western High
Plains Drifter (1973), among others. His sf novel, Absolute Zero (1971),
is a NEAR-FUTURE thriller whose protagonist becomes involved in CRYONICS
in an attempt to preserve his accidentally frozen dwarf parents. [JC]
TIE
A term used in this encyclopedia to designate a work whose subject matter
is tied to a previous work or concept. In some respects, therefore, a tie
clearly resembles a sequel. However, ties can be differentiated from
sequels in two ways: first, a tie is generally written to occupy a
different format or genre than the work which inspires it - novelizations
are, for instance, often spun off from films, an example being The
Sensitives * (1968), Louis CHARBONNEAU's novelization of a script written
by Deane ROMANO - and, second, a tie is almost always written by some
person other than the author or creator of the original work or concept.
Ties can be spun off, therefore, from almost any kind of source: from
stories, novels, series, comics, films, tv series, BRAIDS and other
SHARED-WORLD enterprises, GAMES AND TOYS, or concepts put out for hire by
packagers like Byron PREISS.The first ties were almost certainly
shared-world anthologies like Mugby Junction * (anth 1866 chap), ed
Charles DICKENS as a special Christmas Number of his journal All the Year
Round; and film novelizations can be found from before WWI, though most
books-of-the-film, until at least 1950, were in fact simple reprintings of
the original novel, sometimes with movie stills inserted. With the
increasing commodification of sf in the 1980s, ties suddenly became very
common, and were often found in conjunction with sharecropping activities.
Ties can be distinguished from SHARECROPS by the fact that ties are

defined by their relationship to the source of their inspiration, while
sharecrops - though they usually involve ties-are, strictly speaking,
works of any sort written for hire.The most interesting tied enterprises
in the 1980s and 1990s are probably shared-world anthologies like George
R.R. MARTIN's WILD CARDS sequence from 1987 and the War World books ed
from 1988 by Jerry POURNELLE, John F. CARR and Roland J. GREEN; but works
of interest can be found through the whole range of the phenomenon.In this
encyclopedia ties are signalled by an asterisk placed between the title
and the date of the work. [JC]
TILLEY, PATRICK
(1928- ) UK writer whose first sf novel, Fade-Out (1975), after the
fashion of borderline works like Fail-Safe (1962) by Eugene BURDICK and
Harvey WHEELER, concentrates long-windedly on the workings of government
and military in a TECHNOTHRILLER context, in this instance displaced
sf-wards by the fact that the action is occasioned by an ALIEN landing
which damps out all electrical impulses ( UFOS). In Mission (1981) Christ
returns to contemporary New York, bearing with him the news that His
crucifixion was one small event in a long SPACE-OPERA conflict between the
Ain-folk and the evil Brax. The Amtrak Wars sequence - The Amtrak Wars #1:
Cloud Warrior (1983), #2: First Family (1985), #3: Iron Master (1987), #4:
Blood River (1988), #5: Death Bringer (1989) and #6: Earth-Thunder (1990)
- more vividly set primitive Mutes against the blindly technocratic Amtrak
Federation in a post- HOLOCAUST USA; as the sequence develops, the
geopolitical realities governing the land become increasingly complex and
the fulfilment of the revelatory Talisman Prophecy-though constantly
deferred - gives succeeding books an increasing momentum. Dark Visions: An
Illustrated Guide to the Amtrak Wars (1984 chap), with Fernando Fernandez,
provides a useful orientation. The sequence, clearly incomplete at the end
of #6, was one of the most compelling sf-adventure series of the decade.
[JC]Other work: Xan (1986), horror.
TILLYARD, AELFRIDA (CATHERINE WETENHALL)
(1883-? ) UK writer first known for editing Cambridge Poets 1910-1913
(anth 1913), but perhaps best remembered for her 2 sf novels. Set after a
series of HOLOCAUSTS, Concrete: A Story of Two Hundred Years Hence (1930)
contrasts an irreligious DYSTOPIA, which holds under its sway most of the
civilized world, with a pious island UTOPIA; there is much action.
Interestingly, one of the rulers of the dystopia, the head of the Ministry
of Reason, goes by the name of Big Brother. The Approaching Storm (1932)
more conventionally posits a left-wing dictatorship in the UK. [JC]
TILMS, RICHARD A.
John T. SLADEK.
TIME AFTER TIME
Film (1979). Orion/Warner Bros. Dir Nicholas Meyer, starring Malcom
McDowell, David Warner, Mary Steenburgen. Screenplay Meyer, from a story
by Karl Alexander, Steve Hayes. Novelized as Time After Time * (1979) by
Alexander. 112 mins. Colour.Dr Stevenson (Warner), whom we soon learn to
be Jack the Ripper, eludes police by stealing the TIME MACHINE from H.G.
WELLS (McDowell) in 1893, and travelling to San Francisco in 1979. The

machine, however, returns, and Wells uses it to pursue the criminal. There
are some good moments in this ingenious movie, with Wells as the alien
naif amazed and baffled by the world of the future (which he had expected
to be utopian), though the mad, affectless Ripper finds its violence and
sleaziness precisely to his taste. But the view, presented rather
labouredly by the film, that 1979 is a period of unparalleled cruelty (and
that Wells could not cope with it), is conceptually tawdry. Steenburgen is
charming as Amy, the not-quite-liberated bank clerk who falls for Wells,
though anybody knowing anything of Wells' real private life will be
astonished to learn that he took Amy back to his own time and they lived
happily ever after as Mr and Mrs Wells! [PN]
TIMECOP
Film (1994). Largo International N.V. in association with JVC
Entertainment present a Signature/Renaissance/Dark Horse
EntertainmentProduction. Dir Peter Hyams; exec prod Mike Richardson; prods
include Sam Raimi; screenplay by Mark Verheiden from a story by Richardson
and Verheiden, based on the comics series created by Richardson and
Verheiden; starring Jean- Claude Van Damme, Mia Sara, Ron Silver, Bruce
McGill, Gloria Reuben, Scott Bellis and Jason Schombing. 98 mins.
Colour.Belgian martial-arts performer Van Damme is here asked to extend
his range to therequirements of a romantic lead, a not wholly convincing
exercise. He plays Max Walker,whose wife (Sara) was mysteriously murdered
in 1994, and who now, in 2004, is a timecop for the TEC (Time Enforcement
Commission). Ambitious presidential hopeful Senator McComb (Silver) heads
the government committee that finances TEC, which has effectively become
an arm of government. Walker is sent back to investigate 1994 and later
1929 because somebody has beensending back operatives into history to make
a profit through patents, cheap stocks, etc. The source of the corrupt
senator's campaign funds becomes clear.The film ends in a flurry of time
paradox, less stringently worked out than those of, say, DISASTER IN TIME
(1991). It is all diverting and proficient, with plenty of action, and the
emphasis on governmental conspiracy that is a Hyams trademark, but evokes
memories of other films that have done it better. The time machine, for
instance, recalls BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985).T represents another entry
into film production of a comic-book company,Mike Richardson's Dark Horse,
which earlier in the same year had a fantasy hit with the jokey SUPERHERO
movie The Mask (1994). Director Hyams has a long but not especially
exciting connection with filmed sf, having made CAPRICORN ONE (1977),
OUTLAND(1981, his best) and 2010 (1984). [PN]
TIME MACHINE
One of the early key items of sf TERMINOLOGY, first used by H.G. WELLS in
the title of THE TIME MACHINE (1895). It is, of course, a machine used for
TIME TRAVEL. [PN]
TIME MACHINE, THE
Film (1960). Galaxy Films/MGM. Prod/dir George PAL, starring Rod Taylor,
Alan Young, Yvette Mimieux, Sebastian Cabot. Screenplay David DUNCAN,
based on THE TIME MACHINE (1895) by H.G. WELLS. 103 mins. Colour.Unlike
Pal's WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953), TTM is set in the Victorian era - at least
at the beginning of the film - and it is these sequences, with the

inventor demonstrating his creation to his disbelieving friends amid the
Victorian bric-a-brac of their cosy world, that work the best. After a
visually interesting journey through time (special effects by Wah Chang
and Gene Warren), pausing occasionally - for example, to note the nuclear
bombardment of London in 1966 - the film reduces Wells's angry parable to
a Hollywood sf formula. The parallels between the troglodytic Morlocks and
the Victorian working class and between the beautiful but thoughtless Eloi
and the Victorian upper class are lost. The Time Traveller becomes a
confident, romantic hero, successfully rousing the Eloi to battle against
their ape-like devourers. The disturbing evolutionary perspectives of the
end of Wells's book are also missing. William Ferrari's charming design
for the TIME MACHINE does not compensate for the vulgarization of the
story. [JB/PN]
TIME PARADOXES
The fact that TIME TRAVEL into the past disrupts the pattern of
causality, changing or cancelling matters of known fact, has not caused
stories of this kind to be banished from the sf field; instead it has led
to the growth of a subgenre of stories celebrating the peculiar aesthetics
of such paradoxes. The essential paradoxicality of time travel is often
dramatized by asking: "What would happen if I went back in time and killed
my own grandfather?" - a question to which sf writers have provided many
different answers. A time-paradox story usually leads either to a
singularly appropriate reductio ad absurdum or to a cunning literary move
which appears to resolve the paradox by removing or avoiding the seemingly
inevitable contradiction. F. ANSTEY's pioneering fantasy The Time Bargain
(1891; vt Tourmalin's Time Cheques) provided a prototype for the first
kind of story; Fritz LEIBER's "Try and Change the Past" (1958) is a good
example of the latter. Sf writers frequently invoke sweeping metaphysical
hypotheses in the cause of accommodating potential paradoxes; Alfred
BESTER's "The Men who Murdered Mohammed" (1958) does so by providing every
individual with his or her own personal continuum. There are several
notable stories and series about "time police" who try to protect the
world - or, more often, a whole series of ALTERNATE WORLDS - from temporal
upset. Poul ANDERSON's Time Patrol series, Isaac ASIMOV's The End of
Eternity (1955) and John BRUNNER's Times without Number (fixup 1962; rev
1974) are among the most notable of these.The closed loop in time, in
which an event becomes its own cause, is the simplest narrative form of
the time-paradox story, seized upon by several of the contestants invited
by the editor of AMAZING STORIES to find a clever ending for Ralph Milne
FARLEY's "The Time-Wise Guy" (1940). More notable examples include Ross
ROCKLYNNE's "Time Wants a Skeleton" (1941), Bester's "The Push of a
Finger" (1942), P. Schuyler MILLER's "As Never Was" (1944), Murray
LEINSTER's "The Gadget had a Ghost" (1952) and Mack REYNOLDS's "Compounded
Interest" (1956). Greater ingenuity is exercised when these loops become
more complicated, forming convoluted sealed knots. Two classic exercises
in this vein were written by Robert A. HEINLEIN: "By His Bootstraps"
(1941) as by Anson MacDonald and "All You Zombies . . ." (1959), the
latter being a story whose central character moves back and forth in time
and undergoes a sex-change in order to become his own mother and
father.The second fundamental variant of the time-paradox story is that in

which the present from which the time-travellers start is replaced by an
alternative because of the effect (often trivial and unintended) which
they have had upon the past. Nat SCHACHNER's "Ancestral Voices" (1933) is
an early story which uses such a device to expose the absurdities of
ancestor-worship and racism, but the best known example is Ray BRADBURY's
moral fable "A Sound of Thunder" (1952), in which a time-tourist who
treads on a prehistoric butterfly alters the POLITICS of the present for
the worse. Eando BINDER's "The Time-Cheaters" (1940) suggests that time
might have stubbornly ingenious ways of taking care of such threatened
contradictions, and William TENN's "Brooklyn Project" (1948) points out
that observers who change with the world would not notice such
alterations, however drastic they became. In many stories the good
intentions of would-be history-changers go sadly and ironically awry. L.
Sprague DE CAMP's "Aristotle and the Gun" (1958) is a fine example; others
are Poul Anderson's "The Man who Came Early" (1956) and Kirk MITCHELL's
Never the Twain (1987). Works in which such ideas are further extrapolated
and intensively recomplicated tend to feature wars fought through time by
the representatives of alternate worlds ambitious to demolish their
competitors. Jack WILLIAMSON's THE LEGION OF TIME (1938 ASF; 1961) opened
up such imaginative territory for further exploration in Fritz Leiber's
Change War series and Barrington J. BAYLEY's spectacular The Fall of
Chronopolis (1974); the long Timewars series by Simon Hawke (Nicholas
Yermakov) of exuberantly extravagant stories in this vein, begun with The
Ivanhoe Gambit (1984), is still continuing.The potential which
time-travellers have to exist twice in the same time is considered so
uniquely unreasonable as to be specifically proscribed in stories like
Wilson TUCKER's The Lincoln Hunters (1957), where the restriction opens up
potential for ingenious plotting, as it does also in John VARLEY's
elaborate paradox-avoidance story Millennium (1983). However, other
writers - including such non-genre writers as Osbert SITWELL in The Man
who Lost Himself (1929) and Eliot Crawshay-Williams (1879-1962) in "The
Man who Met Himself" (1947) - have been particularly intrigued by the
possible psychological effects of a person's meeting with a later version
of his or her own self. Ralph Milne FARLEY's "The Man who Met Himself"
(1935) is an early example from the sf PULP MAGAZINES. Later sf writers
have casually extended this notion to its absurd limits, displayed by
Barry N. MALZBERG in "We're Coming Through the Window" (1967) and David
GERROLD in The Man who Folded Himself (1973), the latter being a notable
if silly story which conscientiously attempts to compile a narrative
portmanteau of all possible time paradoxes.Sf writers who have made
particularly prolific and ingenious use of time-paradox plots include
Charles L. HARNESS, whose many works in this vein extend from the early
"Time Trap" (1948) and "Stalemate in Space" (1949; vt "Stalemate in Time")
to Krono (1988) and Lurid Dreams (1990), and Robert SILVERBERG, whose even
more numerous contributions range from the early "Hopper" (1956 Infinity;
exp as The Time-Hoppers 1967) and Stepsons of Terra (1958) through the
convoluted Up the Line (1969) to the neat "Many Mansions" (1973) and the
smooth "The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve" (1982).The time-paradox
story may have posed an attractive challenge to sf writers but it has also
been something of a wasting asset. All the elementary changes have been
rung, and it now requires considerable cunning to find a new twist or even

to redeploy an old one in more pointed or poignant fashion. Nevertheless,
there still remains a good deal of life in the subgenre: Bob SHAW's Who
Goes Here? (1977) slickly exploits the comic potential of the theme;
Hilbert SCHENCK's A ROSE FOR ARMAGEDDON (1982) is a brilliantly
recomplicated timeslip romance; Walter Jon WILLIAMS's Days of Atonement
(1991) interrelates time paradox and quantum physics; and John CROWLEY's
Great Work of Time (1989 in coll NOVELTY; 1991) cleverly recombines
several well worn themes to striking quasi-surreal effect. [MJE/BS]
TIMERIDER: THE ADVENTURES OF LYLE SWANN
Film (1983). Zoomo Productions/Jensen Farley Pictures. Dir William Dear,
starring Fred Ward, Belinda Bauer, Peter Coyote, Ed Lauter, L.Q. Jones.
Screenplay Dear, Michael Nesmith. 92 mins. Colour.This TIME-TRAVEL Western
prefigures the more successful BACK TO THE FUTURE PART III (1989) in its
juxtaposition of 20th-century technology and the generic conventions
associated with tales of the 19th century. Motorcycle ace Lyle Swann
(Ward) blunders into a time-travel experiment and is zapped back to the
Old West, where he tangles with outlaw varmint Peter Coyote, terrifies the
superstitious Mexicans and romances Belinda Bauer so that he can turn out
to be his own great grandfather. Despite the amiable cast and pleasant
scenery, the film, like its hero, does little but ride around in circles
in the desert. Nesmith, the co-screenwriter, ex-member of the pop group
The Monkees, went on to produce Alex Cox's REPO MAN (1984). [KN]
TIMESCAPE
DISASTER IN TIME.
TIMESCAPE BOOKS
US sf publishing imprint, issuing both hardcover and paperback, whose
logo first appeared in Mar 1981 and whose last titles were published in
1984. TB was formed by Simon ?
former), for both of whom David G. HARTWELL had been director of sf, and
he was set in charge of the new imprint. It was named after the resonant
title of Gregory BENFORD's successful novel TIMESCAPE (1980), which had
been published by Simon ? Benford was paid a licensing fee, and
published 2 books - Against Infinity (1983) and Across the Sea of Suns
(1984) - with the imprint. TB was prestigious and influential. However,
despite publishing good books which won awards, it did not produce
bestsellers, was hit by the economic downturn of the early 1980s, and soon
folded. There is an argument over whether Hartwell chose the wrong books
or if publicity and packaging were inadequate. TB publications included
many books of somewhat literary sf and fantasy, such as Philip K. DICK's
The Divine Invasion (1981), John M. FORD's The Dragon Waiting (1983), Lisa
GOLDSTEIN's The Red Magician (1982), which won a National Book Award,
Nancy KRESS's The Prince of Morning Bells (1981), Frederik POHL's The
Years of the City (1984), Hilbert SCHENCK's A Rose for Armageddon (1982)
and Gene WOLFE's Book of the New Sun tetralogy (1980-83). TB NEBULA
winners were The Claw of the Conciliator (1981) by Wolfe and No Enemy But
Time (1982) by Michael BISHOP; as Benford's Timescape had won in 1981, TB
effectively scooped the Nebula pool 3 years running. With hindsight, the
story of TB can be seen as a moral fable of central importance in the
history of US sf publishing, which has certainly been - in the main - a

more cynical business since TB's demise. [PN]
TIMESLIP
(vt The Atomic Man US) Film (1956). Merton Park/Allied Artists. Dir Ken
Hughes, starring Gene Nelson, Faith Domergue, Peter Arne, Vic Perry.
Screenplay Charles Eric MAINE. 93 mins, cut to 76 mins US.
B/w.Undistinguished UK thriller whose sf concept is that an atomic
scientist, who temporarily died for 71/2 seconds on the operating table
while a bullet was being dug out of his back, now lives mentally exactly
71/2 seconds in the future. The sf implications are mostly left unexplored
in what is essentially a hard-bitten-reporter-investigating-crime story.
The same notion was later treated more intensively by Brian W. ALDISS in
"Man in his Time" (1965) and by Eric BROWN in "The Time-Lapsed Man"
(1988). Maine's The Isotope Man * (1957) was based on his script. [PN]
TIME SLIP
SENGOKU JIETAI.
TIME TRACKERS
Roger CORMAN.
TIME TRAVEL
It is a great literary convenience to be able to move a narrative
viewpoint backwards or forwards in time, and writers have always been
prepared to use whatever narrative devices come to hand for this purpose.
Until the end of the last century dreams were the favoured method perhaps most significantly deployed in Charles DICKENS's A Christmas Carol
(1843) and Edgar Allan POE's "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (1844) although entirely arbitrary timeslips were also used, while characters
could be brought from the past into our own time via various
SUSPENDED-ANIMATION devices, including CRYONIC preservation, extended
sleep and drugs, as in Grant ALLEN's "Pausodyne" (1881). H.G. WELLS's THE
TIME MACHINE (1895) was a crucial breakthrough in narrative technology,
providing sf with one of its most significant facilitating devices,
ultimately used in this instance to survey the kind of FAR FUTURE and END
OF THE WORLD prophesied (erroneously) by contemporary scientific
knowledge. The idea of employing a hypothetical MACHINE as a literary
device, using a jargon of apology to add plausibility, was not entirely
new, but this particular deployment of it was so striking as to constitute
a historical break and a great inspiration. Oddly enough, Wells never
again used such a device, leaving its further exploitation to others. The
earliest writers to take up the challenge included Alfred JARRY in his
classic essay in 'pataphysics, "How to Construct a Time Machine" (1899);
the anonymous "A Disciple" (of Wells), who borrowed the machine in order
to explore The Coming Era, or Leeds Beatified (1900); and H.S. MACKAYE,
whose eponymous time machine in The Panchronicon (1904) is unashamedly
ludicrous. Most UK writers of SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE, however, continued to
prefer visionary fantasy as a method of time-exploration - E.V. ODLE's The
Clockwork Man, (1923) is one honourable exception - and it was left to the
US pulp writers to show what really might be done with time machines if
one had the imaginative daring to employ them. Even the pulp writers
remained relatively modest in their time-jaunting until the 1920s,

although William Wallace COOK's A Round Trip to the Year 2000 (1903
Argosy; 1925) deals sarcastically with the accumulation of time-travellers
to be expected in the magical millennial year. MAINSTREAM WRITERS who
found literary dreams becoming increasingly unfashionable had more and
more recourse to arbitrary timeslips, and there is a curious subgenre of
"timeslip romances" whose affective power is very often concentrated into
love stories, although the real emotional substrate is nostalgia. "Arria
Marcella" (1852) by Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), although its timeslip
is "rationalized" as a visionary fantasy, provides an archetypal example
of the peculiarly heated eroticism with which such stories are sometimes
endowed. Henry James (1843-1916) spent the last few years of his life
working on The Sense of the Past (1917), but left it incomplete; it
inspired the play Berkeley Square (1929) by J.L. Balderston and J.C.
Squire (1884-1958) which was memorably filmed in 1933. Other notable
timeslip romances include Still She Wished for Company (1924) by Margaret
Irwin (1889-1967), The Man in Steel (1939) by J. Storer CLOUSTON, Portrait
of Jennie (1940) by Robert NATHAN, Time Marches Sideways (1950) by Ralph
L. FINN, Time and Again (1970) by Jack FINNEY, Bid Time Return (1975) by
Richard MATHESON, The Dream Years (1986) by Lisa GOLDSTEIN and Serenissima
(1987) by Erica JONG. "Psychological timeslips", by means of which
protagonists are permitted to relive their lives with the aid of a mature
and knowledgeable consciousness, are featured in The Devil in Crystal
(1944) by Louis MARLOW, Strange Life of Ivan Osokin (1947) by P.D.
Ouspensky (1878-1947), Replay (1986) by Ken Grimwood and Changing the Past
(1989) by Thomas BERGER. Significant timeslip "anti-romances" include A
Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889) by Mark TWAIN and Friar's
Lantern (1906) by G.G. Coulton (1858-1947), the latter being written to
dispel the nostalgic illusions about the Medieval Church harboured by G.K.
CHESTERTON and Hilaire BELLOC. Within pulp sf, writers were quick to grasp
the nettle, using time machines to explore both past and future, often
venturing speculations about the nature of time. Even a mediocre pulp
writer like Ray CUMMINGS could get entranced by such mysteries, although
such romances as The Man who Mastered Time (1924 Argosy; 1929) - which
obligingly defines time as "what keeps everything from happening at once"
- and The Shadow Girl (1929 Argosy; 1947) cannot take such philosophizing
very far. Ralph Milne FARLEY, whose time stories - begun with "The Time
Traveler" (1931) - were collected in The Omnibus of Time (1950), did a
little better, and John TAINE (a professional mathematician) set new
standards of sophistication in The Time Stream (1931 Wonder Stories;
1946). Theories about the nature of time, especially those put forward by
J.W. DUNNE, also influenced non-genre writers - the most conspicuous
example being J.B. PRIESTLEY, in his various Time plays - but the
mainstream fictions inspired by that interest were understandably more
modest.Certain periods of the past have always attracted time-travellers
because of their melodramatic potential. The Age of the Dinosaurs was
inevitably the biggest draw - even to people who could only stand and
stare, like the users of the time-viewer in Taine's Before the Dawn
(1934); it was later to become a favourite era for hunters, as in Ray
BRADBURY's "A Sound of Thunder" (1952) and L. Sprague DE CAMP's "A Gun for
Dinosaur" (1956). Meeting famous people has also been a favourite theme,
and Manly Wade WELLMAN was the first writer to allow a timeslipping hero

to become somebody famous, in Twice in Time (1940 Startling Stories;
1957). Some of the more scrupulous pulp writers thought that time travel
into the past really belonged to the realms of fantasy because of the TIME
PARADOXES thus generated, and the first classic timeslip romance from a
genre writer, De Camp's LEST DARKNESS FALL (1939; 1941; rev 1949), was
initially published in Unknown Worlds for this reason. Others had fewer
scruples, and many writers gleefully set about exploiting the peculiar
aesthetics of time paradoxes. In fact, despite the dubious propriety of
its literary device, De Camp's novel - like Wells's THE TIME MACHINE warrants serious consideration as sf because of the conscientious way in
which it employs its displaced viewpoint, the protagonist here being used
to explore the crucial but subtle role played in HISTORY by
TECHNOLOGY.Inevitably, the main focus of pulp sf interest was in the
melodramatic potential of time travel, as first displayed by Cummings and
then taken to exotic extremes by such writers as John Russell FEARN, in
Liners of Time (1935 AMZ; 1947), and Jack WILLIAMSON, in his pioneering
story of WAR between ALTERNATE WORLDS, THE LEGION OF TIME (1938 ASF;
1961). Timeslipping was similarly taken to extremes in Murray LEINSTER's
"Sidewise in Time" (1934), in which whole regions of the Earth's surface
slip into anachronistic conjunction - an idea later redeployed by Fred
HOYLE in October the First is Too Late (1966). Individuals and objects
timeslipped from the future cause havoc in the present in a number of
famous sf stories, including "The Twonky" (1942) and "Mimsy Were the
Borogoves" (1943) by Lewis Padgett (Henry KUTTNER and C.L. MOORE),
"Child's Play" (1947) by William TENN and "The Little Black Bag" (1950) by
C.M. KORNBLUTH. These stories appeared during the period when the
elementary plot-possibilities of time paradoxes were also being
comprehensively explored. The cavalier use made of time travel by the
early genre writers did beg certain important questions; the language
problem which would be faced by time-travellers was overlooked until De
Camp pointed it out in "The Isolinguals" (1937) and his essay "Language
for Time Travelers" (1938), and was frequently ignored thereafter,
although this too became a plot-gimmick in the 1940s, in such stories as
"Barrier" (1942) by Anthony BOUCHER. Other sharp idea-twisting stories of
the period include C.L. Moore's "Vintage Season" (1946) as by Lawrence
O'Donnell, in which future time-tourists are drawn to our NEAR FUTURE for
reasons which ultimately become clear, and T.L. SHERRED's "E for Effort"
(1947), which sets out with compelling logic the reasons why the invention
of a time-viewer would bring about the END OF THE WORLD.The capacity of
time travel to generate fresh plot-twists capable of sustaining stories on
their own inevitably declined in the 1950s, by when all kinds of time
travel had been routinized into part of the standard vocabulary of sf
ideas; this was the heyday of the "time police" story, in which vast
manifolds of ALTERNATE WORLDS were routinely patrolled by cunning secret
agents or historical conservationists. The 1960s, however, brought a new
sophistication to treatments of now-classic themes and a new
thoughtfulness to metaphysically inclined stories, particularly but by no
means exclusively in connection with the UK NEW WAVE. J.G. BALLARD's
fascination with time is reflected in many of his early stories, including
"The Voices of Time" (1960), "Chronopolis" (1960), "The Garden of Time"
(1962) and THE CRYSTAL WORLD (1966). The timeslip story was remarkably

refined by Brian W. ALDISS in "Man in his Time" (1965), which features a
very slight but distressing slip, and Aldiss also wrote the best of
several "reversed time" stories, An Age (1967; vt Cryptozoic! US and later
UK edns); others are Philip K. DICK's Counter-Clock World (1967) and
Martin AMIS's Time's Arrow (1991). A psychological timeslip story
underpinned by split-brain research, then very fashionable, is Colin
WILSON's "Timeslip" (1979). The linguistic problems of time-travellers
were thrown into sharper focus by David I. MASSON's "A Two-Timer" (1966).
The Age of the Dinosaurs gave way to the Crucifixion as a key focus of
interest, as in Michael MOORCOCK's BEHOLD THE MAN (1966 NW; exp 1969) and
Brian EARNSHAW's Planet in the Eye of Time (1968). Theodore L. THOMAS's
"The Doctor" (1967) cynically re-examines the potential available to the
time-traveller to operate as an apostle of progress. This kind of
narrative sophistication of idea-twists extended into the 1970s in such
stories as Robert SILVERBERG's "What We Learned from this Morning's
Newspaper" (1972), James TIPTREE Jr's "The Man who Walked Home" (1972),
Garry KILWORTH's "Let's Go to Golgotha" (1975) and Ian WATSON's "The Very
Slow Time Machine" (1978).The metaphysics of time continues to intrigue
writers inside and outside the genre; notable recent works deploying ideas
of this kind include Chronolysis (trans 1980) by Michel Jeury (1934- ) and
When Time Winds Blow (1982) by Robert P. HOLDSTOCK. The oppressions of
determinism are bewailed in Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's Slaughterhouse 5 (1979).
Action-adventure stories involving time travel have, inevitably, continued
to reach new extremes of narrative extravagance, but at the same time have
shown an increasing willingness to become involved with the intimate
details of real history, and hence with its presumed dynamics. Such works
as David LAKE's The Man who Loved Morlocks (1981), Connie WILLIS's "Fire
Watch" (1982) and DOOMSDAY BOOK (1992), Michael BISHOP's NO ENEMY BUT TIME
(1982), David DVORKIN's Time for Sherlock Holmes (1983), Tim POWERS's THE
ANUBIS GATES (1983), Howard WALDROP's Them Bones (1984), Jack L. CHALKER's
Downtiming the Nightside (1985) and Vernor VINGE's Marooned in Realtime
(1986) combine playfulness and seriousness in an artful fashion which is
squarely in the tradition of THE TIME MACHINE. Even such frank melodramas
as DR WHO and Julian MAY's series begun with The Many-Colored Land (1981),
and such knockabout comedies as Ron GOULART's The Panchronicon Plot (1977)
and Simon Hawke's (Nicholas Yermakov's) Timewars series, begun with The
Ivanhoe Gambit (1984), have implications which are not simply left to
languish as throwaway ideas.A variant of the time-travel story which
requires brief mention is the time-distortion story, pioneered by Wells in
"The New Accelerator" (1901), which is about a device that "speeds up"
time for its users and makes the world seem almost to freeze; a similar
hypothesis is explored in Arthur C. CLARKE's "All the Time in the World"
(1952). A device with a contrary effect is deployed in John GLOAG's Slow
(1954), and ALIENS for whom time moves exceedingly slowly are featured in
Eric Frank RUSSELL's "The Waitabits" (1955). More sophisticated stories of
subjective time-distortion include Masson's "Traveller's Rest" (1965) and
Eric BROWN's "The Time-Lapsed Man" (1988), and more extravagant
distortions are featured in Dick's Ubik (1969) and Gordon R. DICKSON's
Time Storm (1977).However paradoxical it may be, time travel will remain a
central element in the sf tradition, and the time machine - whether
modelled on the bicycle, the cummerbund or the police telephone box - will

doubtless retain its status as the ultimate literary-device-made-machine.
An interesting book on the subject is Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics,
and Science Fiction(1993 by Paul J. Nahin. [MJE/BS]
TIME TRAVELERS
Made-for-tv film (1976). Irwin ALLEN.
TIME TRAVELERS, THE
Film (1964). Dobil/AIP. Dir Ib Melchior, starring Preston Foster, Philip
Carey, Merry Anders, John Hoyt. Screenplay Melchior, from a story by
Melchior and David Hewitt. 85 mins. Colour.Melchior is best known as a
screenwriter - e.g., ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS (1964), TERRORE NELLO SPAZIO
(1965) and DEATH RACE 2000 (1975). This is one of his few films as
director. A group of scientists travel through a time portal 107 years
into the future, where they find a world a little like an updated version
of that in H.G. WELLS's The Time Machine (1895) - indeed, the film was
conceived as a sequel to the film The TIME MACHINE (1960). After the
HOLOCAUST a human society living underground battles against MUTANTS on
the surface, while using their ANDROID associates to help them build a
spaceship for their escape from Earth. This uneven but vigorous film is
inventive ( MATTER TRANSMISSION, hydroponics, all sorts of incidental sf
tropes), not least in the final trapping of the scientists in a
deterministic time loop, unable to influence events. David Hewitt's
special effects are sometimes good (nicely displeasing androids), but it
is unclear why he went on to direct the unnecessary remake, JOURNEY TO THE
CENTER OF TIME (1967), only 3 years later. Irwin ALLEN was clearly
influenced by TTT to make the tv series The TIME TUNNEL (1966-7). [PN]
TIME-TRAVELLER, THE
Forrest J. ACKERMAN; FANTASY MAGAZINE; FANZINES;Julius SCHWARTZ.
TIME TRAX
US tv series (1993- ). Gary Nardino Productions in association with
Lorimar Television. Created by/Co-exec prod Harve Bennett, Jeffrey Hayes,
Grant Rosenberg. Exec prod Gary Nardino. Starring Dale Midkiff , Elizabeth
Alexander, Mia Sara. Writers include Bennett, Harold Gast, David Loughery.
Two-hour pilot Jan 1993, written by Bennett,directed by Lewis Teague.
Series proper, beginning in 1993, around 45 one-hour episodes to
date.Harve Bennett is an almost legendary figure in sf tv production and
writing, and fulfilled both those roles on THE INVISIBLE MAN (tv series
1975-76), THE BIONIC WOMAN (tv series 1976-8), GEMINI MAN (tv series
1976), THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN (tv series 1973-78), amongothers, and
also on most of the STAR TREK movies: his metier being the creation of
populist,action-packed, comparatively routine sf adventure. TTis more of
the same, and runs in syndication to independent tv stations. In the year
2192 police officer Captain Darien Lambert (Midkiff) finds that major
criminals are disappearing, and discovers that megalomaniac physicist Dr
Mordecai Sahmbi (Peter Donat) is sending criminals back in time to the
20th century, indeed to our present day. He follows them there.Apart from
the time travel, and a few super-scientific accessories for Lambert
(including Selma, a mainframe computer contained in something that looks
like a credit card and can project a female hologram in visual mode,

played by Elizabeth Alexander), most of the action is not especially
science fictional, and is more concerned with running down criminals
hiding out in our time. There is a degree of humour in Lambert's attempts
to adjust culturally to 20th-century customs. Lambert has superpowers by
our standards (IQ 204, runs the 100 metres in 8.6 secs, can use "time
stalling" to slow down visual perception and thus react faster) butthese
are not unusual, we are told, for the 22nd century.TT has been popular
according to surveys with young men. The series is filmed in Australia,
and some post-production is also Australian. [PN/GF]
TIME TUNNEL, THE
US tv series (1966-7). An Irwin Allen Production for 20th Century-Fox
Television/ABC TV. Created Irwin ALLEN, also executive prod. Writers
included William Welch, Wanda and Bob Duncan. Dirs included Allen (pilot
only), Sobey Martin, J. Juran. 1 season. 30 50min episodes. Colour.Dr Tony
Newman (James Darren) and Dr Doug Phillips (Robert Colbert) are trapped in
time after testing a defective TIME MACHINE, which takes the form of a
spiral vortex and is controlled by military personnel. Their military and
civilian colleagues can see what is happening to them but are unable to
return them to the present; efforts in this direction conveniently switch
the travellers to a new time-period every week, usually 5 mins from the
end of an episode, leaving them at a cliffhanger. Tony and Doug spend more
time in the past than in the future, in such venues as the Alamo, the
Little Big Horn, the Titanic, the walls of Jericho and Pearl Harbor, just
as dangerous events are about to take place; thus a good deal of stock
footage could be utilized. Rather more fantastic episodes featured Merlin
and the vengeful ghost of Emperor Nero. Writing, performances and sets
were dire. 2 novelizations are The Time Tunnel * (1967) and Timeslip! *
(1967) by Murray LEINSTER. [JB]
TIMLETT, PETER VALENTINE
(1933- ) UK writer whose sf/fantasy Atlantis trilogy - The Seedbearers
(1974), The Power of the Serpent (1976) and Twilight of the Serpent (1977)
- deals in occasionally occult terms with ATLANTIS and its fall, moving
subsequently to the founding of civilization in Britain, where Atlantean
impulses might be preserved. [JC]
TIMLIN, WILLIAM M(ITCHESON)
(1892-1943) UK-born illustrator and writer, in South Africa from 1912.
The Ship that Sailed to Mars (1923), his only fiction, is more fantasy
than sf, though it does describe in glowing detail the fitting up of a
SPACESHIP and its trip to MARS. But WMT's astonishingly evocative
illustrations to the text - for which the original quarto edn of the book
is now heavily collected - strongly underline the surreal nature of the
tale. [JC]
TINCROWDER, LEO QUEEQUEG
[s] Philip Jose FARMER.
TIPHAIGNE DE LA ROCHE, C(HARLES) F(RANCOIS)
(1729-1774)French author of some works of fantasy and a
PROTO-SCIENCE-FICTION work, Giphantie (1760; trans anon in 2 vols as
Giphantia, or A View of What Has Passed, What is Now Passing, and During

the Present Century, What Will Pass in the World 1761 UK). A traveller in
Africa witnesses a prelapsarian world, a possibly farcical vision of world
history as being governed by the effects of emblematical trees grown from
the One Tree in Eden, and a HOLLOW EARTH via which the protagonist returns
to Europe. [JC]
TIPTREE, JAMES Jr
Pseudonym of US writer and psychologist Alice Hastings Bradley Sheldon
(1915-1987), who was widely assumed to be a man, despite the deeply felt
rapport she displayed for women in stories like "The Women Men Don't See"
(1973), until her identity was exposed in 1977; she also wrote several
stories as Raccoona Sheldon. She was born in Chicago, spent much of her
childhood in Africa and India and worked in the US Government for many
years, including a period in the Pentagon; this much was known about JT,
but was wrongly assumed to describe a masculine career. Her mother, Mary
Hastings Bradley, was a well known geographer and travel author of 35
books; her father was a lawyer and traveller. After a short pre-WWII
career as an artist and the later work whose details she shared with her
pseudonym, she left the CIA in 1955 and attended college, acquiring a PhD
in experimental psychology in 1967. She began writing as JT in 1967 though she had, in fact, as Alice Bradley, published her first, non-sf,
story, "The Lucky Ones" for The New Yorker, as early as 1946.Though she
wrote some novels, JT will be best remembered for her many extraordinary
sf stories. Her first efforts - she began with "Birth of a Salesman" for
ASF in 1968 - were not, perhaps, very remarkable, showing some dis-ease
and an intermittent tendency to protest too vehemently that she-the JT
telling the tale - was just folks; but within a few years she shot into
her prime, and between 1970 and about 1977 produced at great speed and
with great concentration her finest work. Almost all of her best stories
appeared in 4 collections - Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home (coll 1973;
reset with fewer errors 1975 UK), Warm Worlds and Otherwise (coll 1975),
Star Songs of an Old Primate (coll 1978) and Out of the Everywhere and
Other Extraordinary Visions (coll 1981); a later, very thorough selection,
HER SMOKE ROSE UP FOREVER: THE GREAT YEARS OF JAMES TIPTREE, JR. (coll
1990) ed James Turner, also concentrated on the work from this period.
Byte Beautiful (coll 1986) assembled an odd mixture of early and late
work. Crown of Stars (coll 1988) restricted itself almost exclusively to
the stories JT wrote in a final splurge of creative energy in the
mid-1980s. The Girl who was Plugged In (in New Dimensions 3 [anth 1973] ed
Robert SILVERBERG; 1989 chap dos) - which won JT her first HUGO - and
Houston, Houston, Do you Read? (in Aurora [anth 1977] ed Vonda MCINTYRE
and Susan J. Anderson; 1989 chap dos) - which won a NEBULA and a Jupiter
AWARD and shared a Hugo - were separate appearances of novellas from her
prime. The Color of Neanderthal Eyes (1988 FSF; 1990 chap dos) is the only
major late item not assembled in Crown of Stars.Several themes
interpenetrate JT's best work - SEX, exogamy, identity, FEMINIST
depictions of male/female relations, ECOLOGY, death - but the greatest of
these is death. It is very rarely that a JT story does not both deal
directly with death and end in a death of the spirit, or of all hope, or
of the body, or of the race. "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold
Hill's Side" (1971), for instance, seems initially to read as a

straightforward rendering of the effects vastly superior ALIENS have upon
Homo sapiens; only retroactively is it made clear, through the apt sexual
and ANTHROPOLOGICAL analogies worked into the basic story, that these
effects are utterly ravaging, that humans exposed to aliens become
afflicted with a fatal cargo-cult mentality, bound into a sexual
submission very like death. In "The Last Flight of Doctor Ain" (1969; rev
1974), only gradually do we begin to realize-through a reportage-like,
impersonal reconstruction of certain events - that the woman whom Doctor
Ain seems to be accompanying across a heavily polluted, wounded Earth is
actually the Earth herself personified in the Doctor's mind; and that, as
he passes around the globe, he is infecting mankind with a redesigned
leukaemia virus, hoping - probably in vain - to save her, whom he loves,
from the human species, which he does not. In what may be JT's finest and
most intense longer story, "A Momentary Taste of Being" (1975), the human
race, en route to the stars, discovers that its racial role is to act as
gamete in a cosmic coupling, and that the drives that make us human are
merely displacements of that central mindless imperative. It is one of the
darkest GENRE-SF stories ever printed. In shorter compass, it is matched
by others, like "On the Last Afternoon" (1972), "Love is the Plan the Plan
is Death" (1973) - which won a Nebula - "The Screwfly Solution" (1977) and
"Your Faces, O my Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!" (1977), both
originally as by Raccoona Sheldon, and "Slow Music" (1980).JT's most
famous single story, "The Women Men Don't See", may appear to escape this
pattern, as only the male narrator seems bound to a quietus, while the two
women he travels with - but fails, symptomatically, to comprehend - seem
bound starwards into a new life. But the ironies of the tale are very
evident, and characteristic of JT's inconsolable complexities of vision.
It may be true that the ageing and surprisingly sympathetic narrator may
represent a suicidal blindness on the part of humanity; but the women who
choose to leave are, in fact-by electing to become companions of utterly
unknown aliens in the depths of space - also expressing the power of
thanatos upon our species. JT's surface was often airy and at times
hilarious, and her control of genre conventions allowed her to convey the
bleakness of her abiding insights in tales that remain seductively
readable; but she was, in the end, incapable of dissimulation.There were 2
novels and 2 collections of linked stories. In Up the Walls of the World
(1978), apparently written around the time her health began to break, she
deliberately broadened her techniques in the fabrication of an
extraordinarily full-blown SPACE OPERA whose 3 venues - the interior
"spaces" of a vast interstellar being derangedly destroying all suns in
its path; an alien planet inhabited by skatelike telepathic flying beings
whose sun is being destroyed; and contemporary Earth, where a
government-funded experiment in ESP begins terrifyingly to cash
out-interpenetrate complexly and with considerable narrative impact. From
telepathy to COSMOLOGY, from densely conceived psychological narrative to
the broadest of SENSE-OF-WONDER revelations, the novel is something of a
tour de force. But stresses - particularly a sense that the whole
structure was willed into existence - do show; and BRIGHTNESS FALLS FROM
THE AIR (1985) demonstrates how difficult it had become for her to
maintain control over the intensities of her vision, which had, if
anything, darkened as the 1980s began. In this novel an assortment of

characters variously confront, on a distant planet, the fact that death
agonies felt by another species generate a literal nectar for our own; but
moments of overt sentimentality, as well as excesses of subplotting, tend
to intrude. The Starry Rift (coll of linked stories 1986) assembled loose,
somewhat sententious tales set in the same universe; and Tales of the
Quintana Roo (coll of linked stories 1986) gathered a mild sequence of
visions of the eastern coast of southern Mexico.Like the novels, the short
fiction of JT's last years, though substantial by the standards of other
writers, suffered from an increasing incapacity of narrative voice and
structure to contain emotion. The best of them are perhaps "Yanqui Doodle"
(1987) and "Backward, Turn Backward" (1988). Alice Sheldon had been
married to Huntington Sheldon since 1945. In the early 1980s he contracted
Alzheimer's Disease. In 1987, herself in precarious health, she shot him
and killed herself.About the author: The Fiction of James Tiptree, Jr.
(1977 chap) by Gardner DOZOIS; James Tiptree, Jr., a Lady of Letters: A
Working Bibliography (1989 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr and Phil
STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also: ASTEROIDS; ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION;
BIOLOGY;
CYBERPUNK; ENTROPY; GODS AND DEMONS; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; The
MAGAZINE OF
FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MYTHOLOGY; OPTIMISM
AND
PESSIMISM; PERCEPTION; PSYCHOLOGY; SATIRE; SCIENTIFIC ERRORS; TIME TRAVEL;
WOMEN SF WRITERS.
TITAN, EARL
John Russell FEARN.
TODD, RUTHVEN
(1914-1978) UK writer and Blake scholar whose Tracks in the Snow: Studies
in English Science and Art (1946) effectively argued the imaginative power
- when joined - of the two subtitled categories; he was author, as R.T.
Campbell, of several detective novels, and as RT of two metaphysical
tales: Over the Mountain (1939), whose quest plot is consanguineous with a
search for political self-understanding, and the surrealist The Lost
Traveller (1943), in which the protagonist, lost in a strange country,
finds himself questing for a great bird which, at the final moment, he
himself becomes. In his introduction to the 1968 reprinting of the latter,
RT recognized influences from Rex WARNER to Wyndham LEWIS. [JC]Other
works: The Space Cats series of juvenile sf novels, Space Cat (1952 chap
US), Space Cat Visits Venus (1955 chap US), Space Cat Meets Mars (1957
chap US) and Space Cat and the Kittens (1958 chap US).See also: DYSTOPIAS;
FANTASTIC VOYAGES.
TODOROV, TZVETAN
(1939- ) Bulgarian literary critic who pursued his postgraduate studies
in Paris under the direction of the semiotic philosopher Roland Barthes
(1915-1980). Among TT's several books and essays on structuralist
criticism, all written in French, Introduction a la litterature
fantastique (1970; trans Richard Howard as The Fantastic: A Structural
Approach to Literary Genre 1973; US paperback 1975 with intro by Robert
SCHOLES) has relevance to the student of sf, along with Scholes's own

Structural Fabulation (1975). (Structuralism has been important in sf
criticism, influencing critics as otherwise diverse as Samuel R. DELANY,
Mark ROSE and Darko SUVIN.) An interesting controversy about TT's book
arose in SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, the Fall 1974 and July 1975 issues
containing an attack on TT's work by Stanislaw LEM and further debate.
Also relevant is "Historical Genres/Theoretical Genres: A Discussion of
Todorov on the Fantastic" by Christine BROOKE-ROSE in New Literary
History, Autumn 1976. TT's definition of "the fantastic" is much more
exclusive than most ( DEFINITIONS OF SF; FANTASY); he devotes only a
half-page to sf. [PN]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF.
TOFFLER, ALVIN
(1928- ) US journalist and author, best known for his speculative
nonfiction on SOCIOLOGY and FUTUROLOGY. Future Shock (1970) documents the
increasing rate of change in the 20th century, and speculates on the
psychological trauma this may be causing Western civilization. It has had
a great influence in futurology generally, and quite directly on many sf
writers, notably John BRUNNER, whose THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER (1975) pays
homage to AT in its title. The Eco-Spasm Report (1975), a much shorter
work which produces 3 plausible scenarios for NEAR-FUTURE disaster, at
points approaches the narrative strategies of some sf. The Third Wave
(1980) is a more utopian (and in some ways LIBERTARIAN) book, whose Third
Wave of history (which AT hopes is arriving) will emphasize diversity,
decentralization, individualism and new social structures. AT's style is
populist, and he has been read by some as simply promoting techno-fixes
for the things that are going wrong in the world, but this is to
underestimate the complexity of his argument. [PN]Other works: The
Futurists (anth 1972), ed; Learning for Tomorrow (anth 1973), ed.See also:
DEFINITIONS OF SF; DYSTOPIAS.
TOFTE, ARTHUR R.
(1902-1980) US writer who enjoyed two widely separated careers as a
published author, the first beginning with his first story, "The Meteor
Monsters" for AMZ in 1938, when as a member of the Milwaukee Fictioneers which was focused on the memory and example of Stanley G. WEINBAUM - he
was briefly interested in sf. Between 1938 and his retirement in 1969 he
was a business executive. In the 1970s, encouraged by Roger ELWOOD, he
began publishing stories again. Crash Landing on Iduna (1975 Canada) and
Walls Within Walls (1975 Canada), a post- HOLOCAUST tale with MUTANTS in
conflict, are unremarkable but mildly spirited. The Day the Earth Stood
Still (1976) and Survival Planet (1977) are juveniles. The Ghost Hunters
(dated 1978 but 1979) is an occult tale. [JC]
TOLKIEN, J(OHN) R(ONALD) R(EUEL)
(1892-1973) South-African-born UK writer and philologist who specialized
in early forms of English; his academic career was crowned by his
appointment as Merton Professor of English at Oxford University in 1945, a
post he held until his retirement in 1959. It was at Oxford, before WWII,
that he formed a close literary association with Owen BARFIELD, C.S. LEWIS
and Charles WILLIAMS, a group which came to be known as The Inklings. It
was at their regular meetings that much of their fiction received a first
hearing, including draft portions of a long High Fantasy epic by JRRT

which put into definitive fictional form his concept of the Secondary
World, as embodied in the creation of Middle-Earth, the intensely imagined
land- or world-scape in which the central action of all his work takes
place. No reasonable definition of sf would encompass the works of JRRT;
but this concept and its embodiment in the Lord of the Rings trilogy have
had enormous influence on both sf and fantasy.Although Secondary Worlds,
"inside which the green sun will be credible", long predate JRRT, it was
"On Fairy Tales" - a 1939 lecture he expanded for Essays Presented to
Charles Williams (anth 1947) ed anon C.S. Lewis, and further exp for its
appearance in Tree and Leaf (coll 1964; rev 1988) - that first gave
legitimacy to the internally coherent and autonomous land of Faerie as
part of the geography of the human imagination. For the sf and fantasy
writers who followed, and who found in the Lord of the Rings trilogy a
model for their own subcreations (his coinage for invented fantasy
worlds), this affirmation of autonomy was of very great importance. No
longer did fantasy writers feel any lingering need to "normalize" their
Secondary Worlds by framing them as traveller's tales, dreams or timeslip
adventures, or as beast-fables. For sf writers, especially practitioners
of the PLANETARY-ROMANCE, the example of JRRT was equally liberating though it must be emphasized that Middle-Earth is not in fact a world in
any sf sense but an autonomous landscape, and pure High Fantasy.JRRT's
profound interest in philology permeated his work from its beginnings,
which, as the posthumous publication of a vast assemblage of drafts and
fragments (see below) has demonstrated, predated WWI. His first published
tale of Middle-Earth, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (1937; rev 1951;
rev 1966), a Faerie-story for children, introduced its readers to an
already achieved and named Secondary World, with a history and geography
that had already long existed in its subcreator's mind; as The Hobbit, it
was made into an animated film dir Arthur Rankin Jr in 1977. The tale of
the hobbit, Bilbo, and of his quest through a portion of Middle-Earth to
help some dwarves (JRRT's preferred spelling of "dwarfs") retrieve a
treasure, gave JRRT the opportunity to reveal some of that history and
geography. But it was not until the release of the Lord of the Rings broken for publishing reasons into 3 vols, The Fellowship of the Ring
(1954; rev 1966), The Two Towers (1954; rev 1966) and The Return of the
King (1955; rev 1966), assembled as The Lord of the Rings (omni 1968) that the full expanse of his world began to come clear. (The first portion
of Lord of the Rings was made into an animated film in 1978; the expected
conclusion failed to appear.)Middle-Earth is perhaps the most detailed of
all invented fictional worlds, rivalled only by Austin Tappan WRIGHT's
Islandia (1942), the published version of which (as in JRRT's case)
represents only a portion of what was written; JRRT differed from Wright,
however, in having a compelling story to tell. Some of the background
material appeared in the form of appendices to the Lord of the Rings and
in The Silmarillion (1977) ed Christopher Tolkien (JRRT's son); the latter
comprises 5 interconnected texts on which JRRT had been working most of
his life, and which supply an historical background for all his other
work. Poems and songs belonging to the cycle are assembled as The
Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (coll 1962
chap) and The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle (coll 1967) with music by
Michael Swann. In Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-Earth (coll 1980)

Christopher Tolkien continued the long task of publishing his father's
literary remains. The main sequence of these works, various volumes
containing the History of Middle-Earth, all ed Christopher Tolkien,
comprises The History of Middle-Earth #1: The Book of Lost Tales 1 (coll
1983), #2: The Book of Lost Tales 2 (coll 1984), #3: The Lays of Beleriand
(coll 1985), #4: The Shaping of Middle-Earth (coll 1986), #5: The Lost
Road and Other Writings (coll 1987), #6: The Return of the Shadow: The
History of the Lord of the Rings l (coll 1988), #7: The Treason of
Isengard: The History of the Lord of the Rings 2 (coll 1989), #8: The War
of the Ring: The History of the Lord of the Rings 3 (coll 1990), #9:
Sauron Defeated: The History of the Lord of the Rings 4 (coll 1992) and
#10: Morgoth's Ring (1993).JRRT's influence on fantasy and sf has been not
merely profound but also - with no discredit to JRRT himself - demeaning.
Fortunately for readers of sf, the fairies and elves and orcs and cuddly
dwarves and loquacious plants and bargain-counter Dark Lords and kings in
disguise and singing barmen have been restricted in general to commercial
market-driven FANTASY, caveat emptor; the main exception being hybrid
productions like the STAR WARS films, which are filled with blurred and
decadent copies of JRRT's own creations. It can only be hoped that the
genuine JRRT will survive this assault, the JRRT for whom the heart of the
enterprise of Faerie lay in "the desire of men to hold communion with
other living things". [JC]Other works: Farmer Giles of Ham (1949 chap) and
Smith of Wootton Major (1967 chap), assembled as Smith of Wootton Major
and Farmer Giles of Ham (omni 1975 US); The Tolkien Reader (coll 1966);
Bilbo's Last Song (1974 chap); The Father Christmas Letters (coll 1976
chap); Poems and Stories (coll 1980); Mr Bliss (1982 chap).Nonfiction: A
Middle English Vocabulary (1924) is the earliest of a number of works of
varying interest, including an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
(1925) with E.V. Gordon.About the author: Books about JRRT and his work
are numerous. They include J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977) by Humphrey
Carpenter, various atlases and concordances like A Guide to Middle Earth
(1971) by Robert Foster and The Tolkien Companion (1976) by J.E.A. Tyler;
and, among many other biographical/critical works, Tolkien and the Critics
(anth 1968) ed Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, Tolkien: A Look Behind
the Lord of the Rings (1969) by Lin CARTER, Master of Middle Earth (1972)
by Paul H. Kocher, Tolkien's World (1974) by Randel Helms, J.R.R. Tolkien:
Architect of Middle-Earth (1976) by Daniel Grotta-Kurska, The Mythology of
Middle-Earth (1977) by Ruth S. Noel, The Inklings (1979) by Humphrey
Carpenter and J.R.R. Tolkien: This Far Land (anth 1983) ed Robert
Giddings. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1981), ed Humphrey Carpenter with
the assistance of Christopher Tolkien, is a revealing compilation.See
also: CHILDREN'S SF; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FANZINE; GAMES AND TOYS; HEROIC
FANTASY; LINGUISTICS; MUSIC; SWORD AND SORCERY.
TOLLIVER, STEVE
[r] Ron ELLIK.
TOLSTOY, ALEXEI (NIKOLAYEVICH)
(1882-1945) Russian writer, sometimes mistakenly thought to have been a
distant relative of Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910); he was not in fact a blood
relative of the famous Tolstoy, though his mother's second husband was

related, and gave AT his surname. Alexei Constantinovich Tolstoy
(1817-1875), on the other hand, was part of the wideflung Tolstoy family;
his supernatural fiction has been translated as Vampires: Stories of the
Supernatural (coll trans Fedor Nikanov 1969 US). AT is best known for 2
books whose first versions appeared in the experimental 1920s and both of
which were revised in the decade of terror which followed. Aelita (1922;
rev 1937; 2nd text trans Lucy Flaxman 1957 USSR; new trans of 2nd text
Antonina W. Bouis 1981 US; 1st text trans Leland Fetzer 1985 US) - the
first version of the book being filmed as AELITA (1924) - was set on MARS,
where a Red Army officer foments a rebellion of the native Martians (who
are in fact long-ago emigrants from ATLANTIS) against a corrupt oligarchy.
Giperboloid inzhenera Garina (1926; rev 1937; 1st text trans B.G. Guerney
as The Death Box 1936 UK; 2nd text trans George Hanna as The Garin Death
Ray 1955 USSR; Hanna trans cut vt Engineer Garin and his Death Ray 1987
USSR) feverishly describes an attempt on the part of the eponymous
inventor - who is treated with some affection as a kind of force of Nature
- to use his death ray to conquer the world. He manages to rule a
decadently capitalist USA for a short period. At least in their original
versions, both books showed a narrative gusto typical of their precarious
period, in attractive contrast to AT's later, less ebullient work. [JC]See
also: RUSSIA; WEAPONS.
TOM CORBETT: SPACE CADET
US tv series (1950-55). CBS TV, later ABC TV, and then NBC TV for season
5. Prod Mort Abrahams. Writers included Albert Aley, Alfred BESTER, Jack
Weinstock. Dirs included George Gould, Ralph Ward. Starring Frankie
Thomas, Jan Merlin, Al Markim, Michael Harvey. 5 seasons. 3 15min episodes
weekly for first 4 seasons; weekly 30min episodes in season 5. B/w.This
was one of the earliest US children's-sf tv serials ( CAPTAIN VIDEO was
earlier, but TC:SC got into space first). Very loosely based on Robert A.
HEINLEIN's Space Cadet (1948), it concerns teenaged Tom Corbett (Thomas),
who is a cadet in the Solar Guards, an interplanetary police force in
AD2350 that helps maintain the Solar Alliance of Earth, Mars and Venus.
Later in the series the cadets leave the Solar System and go out into the
Galaxy. The scientific adviser was Willy LEY. As with other sf serials of
the early 1950s, the concept was on a grand scale but the visual effects
were severely limited by budget and by the necessity to broadcast live:
much had to be described in dialogue or merely suggested. Nevertheless,
the show was hugely successful - it introduced the phrase "Blast off!"
into popular speech - and was followed by comic strips, comic books, toys,
etc., in one of the first examples of the merchandising power of televised
sf. 8 Tom Corbett: Space Cadet hardcover books by Carey Rockwell (a
pseudonym) were published 1952-6, beginning with Stand By For Mars! *
(1952). [PN/JB]
TOMORROW
The FUTURIAN .
TOMORROW I'LL WAKE UP AND SCALD MYSELF WITH TEA
ZITRA VSTANU A OPARIM SE CAJEM.
TOMORROW PEOPLE, THE

UK tv series (1973-9). A Thames TV Production. Series conceived by Roger
Price. Prod Ruth Boswell and Price (1973), Boswell alone (1974-5), Price
alone (1976), Vic Hughes (1977-9). Technical adviser Dr Christopher Evans.
Starring Nicholas Young, Peter Vaughan-Clarke, Sammie Winmill, Stephen
Salmon, Elizabeth Adare, Mike Holoway. Written mostly Price. Dirs included
Brian Finch, Price, Hughes. 8 seasons (2 in 1978); 68 25min episodes.
Colour.TTP, incorporating many childhood wish-fulfilment fantasies,
concerns a group of MUTANT children-Homo superior - with PSI POWERS. They
band together for self-protection, occasionally conscripting other child
mutants. They can teleport themselves, the term they use (taken
unacknowledged from Alfred BESTER) being "jaunting". They are free of
parental control and live in a secret, underground base protected by a
smooth-voiced supercomputer. Most of the stories, each lasting on average
4 episodes, involve either TIME TRAVEL or encounters with evil beings from
outer space. As with most UK tv series made for children, the budget was
limited, but within that constraint the sets and special effects were
adequate. Probably intended as commercial tv's answer to the BBC's DR WHO,
TTP was not in that league. Novelizations, all by Roger Price (1941- ),
were The Visitor * (1973) with Julian R. Gregory, Three in Three * (1974),
Four into Three * (1975), One Law * (1976) and The Lost Gods, with
Hitler's Last Secret and The Thargon Menace * (coll 1979).Beginning in Nov
1992 a tv miniseries of five 23-min episodes entitled The New Tomorrow
People was broadcast in the UK (ITV), starring Kristian Schmid and
Christian Tessier. This was entirely written by Roger Price, who had
written and conceived the first series twenty years earlier. More of a
remake of the first series than a continuation, it made no reference to
the first series' chronology. This time the kids are not just British:
there was one from England, two from America and one from Australia.
[JB/PN/GF]
TOMORROW: SPECULATIVE FICTION
US SEMIPROZINE. #1 launched in Sep 1992, but marked on cover as Jan 1993;
bimonthly; by Apr 1995 had reached #14; small- BEDSHEET format; began with
68pp, went up to 82 pp; color covers, internal art b/w; published and
edited by Algis BUDRYS from Illinois.This magazine was originally to have
been published by PULPHOUSE PUBLISHING, but was sold to Budrys, who had
resigned in 1991 from the L. RON HUBBARD PRESENTS WRITERS OF THE FUTURE
programme, and his position as co-ordinating judge of the WRITERS OF THE
FUTURE CONTEST (though he continued to serve as an advisor). The magazine
is mostly fiction (at least once by Budrys writing as Paul Janvier), with
a column on writing by Budrys the main non-fiction element. The quality of
the fiction has been quite good, writers including Harlan ELLISON,
Geoffrey A. Landis, Ursula K. LE GUIN, Robert REED, Elisabeth VONARBURG,
Gene WOLFE and a number of newer writers like Mike Christie, Eliot
Fintushel, Donna McMahon and Brooks Peck. The magazine is classified as a
semiprozine because the (low) circulation is only around 3,000, though the
fiction is in the main fully professional. Some readers feel the fiction
tends to lack distinctive voices in the sense of many of them being low
key. Clearly there are distribution problems: the magazine is not
especially well designed visually, and is unlikely to stand out on
newsstands. [PN]

TOM SWIFT
Hero of a JUVENILE SERIES of scientific-invention novels produced by the
STRATEMEYER Syndicate, constituting a central example of the importance
and persistence of the EDISONADE in boys' fiction, and written under the
house name Victor APPLETON, most being the work of Howard R. GARIS. TS was
the most commercially successful and is still the best remembered of all
the boys' sf series of the period. During 1910-38, beginning with Tom
Swift and His Motor-Cycle (1910), 38 titles appeared, all but the last 3
by Garis, and featuring such inventions as the "photo telephone" and the
"ocean airport", the technical difficulties of utilizing which were
emphasized. These stories created a potential readership for Hugo
GERNSBACK's magazines. The TS books were written in what was, even for the
time, stilted prose. Between 1954 and 1971, beginning with Tom Swift and
His Flying Lab (1954) as by Victor Appleton II, a 2nd TS series appeared,
this time featuring Tom Swift Jr, its 33 titles being released at a rate
of about 2 per year; at first it was enormously successful, possibly
giving rise to the 1960s popularity of the Tom Swiftie ("I think we can
get there in time, said Tom swiftly"). The authors behind the new house
name are not known. In 1981 a 3rd TS series, as by Victor Appleton, began
with The City in the Stars (1981), continuing to #11, The Planet of
Nightmares (1984), which was by Mike MCQUAY writing as Appleton; 2 of
these titles have recently been ascribed to Neal BARRETT Jr. Most
recently, in 1991, under the Byron PREISS packaging aegis, a 4th series
began with Tom Swift #1: The Black Dragon (1991) by Bill MCCAY writing as
Appleton; further titles include novels by G. Gwynplaine MACINTYRE and 2
by the team of Debra DOYLE and James D. MACDONALD. [JE/PN/JC]Further
reading:"Tom Swift and the Syndicate" in Strange Horizons: The Spectrum of
Science Fiction (1976) by Sam MOSKOWITZ; Science-Fiction: The Early Years
(1991) by Everett F. BLEILER.
TONG ENZHENG
[r] CHINESE SF.
TONKS, ANGELA
(? - ) UK writer, resident in the USA, whose Mind Out of Time (1958 UK)
deals with a telepathic relationship ( ESP). [JC]
TOOKER, RICHARD (PRESLEY)
(1902-1988) US writer and publisher who wrote also as Dick Presley
Tooker; his first sf story, under that name, was "Planet Paradise" for
Weird Tales in 1924. He is best remembered for The Day of the Brown Horde
(1929), in which cavemen fight one another and the last of the
plesiosaurs, and which deals, like most of the prehistoric-sf subgenre,
with the onset of human consciousness ( ORIGIN OF MAN). The Dawn Boy
(1932), a juvenile, revisits a similar venue. Inland Deep (1936) rather
more imaginatively features man-frogs and other odd creatures in an
underground LOST WORLD. It is reported that from about 1940 RT was a
ghost-writer. [JC]
TOOMBS, ALFRED (GERALD)
(1912-1986) US writer. In Good as Gold (1955) the transmutation of the
metal produces what might be called manure. [JC]

TOOMBS, ROBERT
[r] DIME-NOVEL SF.
TOOMEY, ROBERT E. Jr
(1945- ) US writer who began publishing sf stories with "Pejorative" for
NW in 1969. His A World of Trouble (1973), sets a galactic agent on an
alien planet, where he has many jocosely told adventures. [JC]
TOOMORROW
Film (1970). Sweet Music/Lowndes Productions/United Artists. Written/dir
Val Guest, starring Olivia Newton-John, Benny Thomas, Vic Cooper, Karl
Chambers, Roy Dotrice. 95 mins. Colour.This is an unsuccessful attempt by
producer Harry Saltzman, best known for the James Bond films, to mix pop
MUSIC with sf. An embarrassingly made-to-order pop group is kidnapped by
aliens from outer space (who have detected their vibrations) and taken to
their planet for the purpose of creating music. The film was an artistic
and financial failure. [JB]
TOPS IN SCIENCE FICTION
US reprint magazine. 2 issues, Spring 1953 ( PULP-MAGAZINE size) and Fall
1953 ( DIGEST size). Published by Love Romances, Connecticut; ed Jack
O'Sullivan (#1) and Malcolm Reiss (#2). TISF featured stories which had
first appeared in PLANET STORIES. Contributors included such Planet
regulars as Leigh BRACKETT and Ray BRADBURY. A UK edn, published by Top
Fiction, had 3 digest-sized issues 1954-6. [FHP/MJE]
TOR BOOKS
US paperback publishing company-later moving into hardcover also founded by Tom Doherty, then aged 44, in 1980, in conjunction with Richard
Gallen; the first titles were published in 1981. Doherty had previously
been in control of ACE BOOKS for 5 years. The first editor-in-chief was
Harriet McDougal, and first head sf editor was Jim BAEN, who left in 1983
to form his own company in 1984. Beth MEACHAM became sf/fantasy editor in
1984, soon becoming editor-in-chief; David HARTWELLbecame consulting sf
editor the same year. This put two of the most expert sf editors in the US
in the same company. TB expanded rapidly, publishing only a few sf titles
in 1981 but 137 in 1986, which made them one of the most important sf
publishers. At the end of 1986 Doherty and his partners sold Tom Doherty
Associates, Inc. to St Martin's Press, a move perhaps connected to the
bankruptcy of Pinnacle (Tor's paperback distributor on a contract basis),
and to Tor's rapid expansion which had left TB temporarily short of cash;
but Doherty stayed on to run TB. In 1988, TB introduced Tor Doubles,
similar to the old Ace Doubles ( DOS). Beth Meacham left in 1989, but
continued (from Arizona) as an executive editor. The senior editor in
charge of sf and fantasy then became Patrick Nielsen Hayden.By 1988 TB and
St Martins together topped all US sf publishers in terms of number of
titles published, 256; but TB found this too much, and dropped from 12
sf/fantasy/horror titles per month to 9. By 1990-91 TB was publishing
fewer sf/fantasy books than BANTAM/ DOUBLEDAY/Dell and Putnam/Berkley/Ace,
though during those years - and since - it has published more sf/fantasy
hardcovers than any other firm in the English-speaking world. In 1991 TB
dropped its separate horror list. Robert Gleason became editor-in-chief in

1991.TB have published many important sf authors, including Poul ANDERSON,
Greg BEAR, Michael BISHOP, Orson Scott CARD, John KESSEL, Pat MURPHY, Mike
RESNICK, Kim Stanley ROBINSON, Sheri S. TEPPER, Jack VANCE, Walter Jon
WILLIAMS, Gene WOLFE and Jack WOMACK. Authors whose first novels have been
published by TB include Tom MADDOX, Rebecca ORE and Richard Paul RUSSO.
[PN]
TORGESON, ROY
(? -1991) US editor, noted mainly for the competent CHRYSALIS series of
ORIGINAL ANTHOLOGIES: Chrysalis (anth 1977), #2 (anth 1978), #3 (anth
1978), #4 (anth 1979), #5 (anth 1979), #6 (anth 1980), #7 (anth 1980), #8
(anth 1980), #9 (anth 1981) and #10 (anth 1983). A second sequence ran for
only 2 vols: Other Worlds 1 (anth 1979) and #2 (anth 1980). [JC]
TORRO, PEL
R.L. FANTHORPE.
TOTAL RECALL
Film (1990). Carolco. Dir Paul Verhoeven, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Michael Ironside, Ronny Cox. Screenplay
Ronald Shusett, Dan O'Bannon, Gary Goldman, based on a story by Shusett,
O'Bannon, Jon Povill, inspired by "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"
(1966) by Philip K. DICK. 113 mins, cut to 109 mins. Colour.At a purported
$60,000,000 budget this was one of the most expensive films ever made
(though TERMINATOR 2 [1991] would cost even more). Verhoeven, whose sf
film debut was ROBOCOP (1987), is a deft, intelligent director good at
tough action sequences, but with a strong liking for gratuitous violence
which, for all its over-the-top comic-book harmlessness here, still has
about it a faint whiff of sadism. Exported versions were mostly cut to the
requirements of the relevant country's censorship code.Some of the
strengths of Dick's original story remain in this tale of a man who, in
attempting to purchase false memories of a trip to Mars, uncovers some
real ones, and is pitchforked into a heady sequence of exotic adventures,
leaving Earth and fighting with rebels against a power-crazed Martian
establishment. False memories clash with true ones and, since both look
the same on the screen, it is as difficult for the viewer as for the
muscle-bound protagonist to tell illusion from reality. TR is
entertaining, information-dense and packed with intriguing detail, but has
most of the usual faults of big-budget sf sagas: too great a reliance on
grotesque special effects (the bugging eyes of victims exposed to vacuum
are merely absurd); with-one-bound-Jack-was-free plotting; and in this
case a finale of protracted idiocy in which Mars's long-disappeared
atmosphere is replaced through vents in a mountain in a matter of minutes.
Ideas are "borrowed" eclectically from diverse sources: an air-machine
from Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's A PRINCESS OF MARS (1917), disfigured MUTANTS
from Roger CORMAN's The Haunted Palace (1963), a two-headed mutant from
Walter M. MILLER's A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ (1960), archaic alien
machinery from FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956), and so on. It would take a fresh
and ignorant viewer to suspend his or her disbelief throughout the film:
sf aficionados tend to giggle through the whole of the second half.
[PN]See also: SCIENTIFIC ERRORS.

TOTER SUCHT SEINER MORDER, EIN
VENGEANCE.
TOUSEY, FRANK
[r] DIME-NOVEL SF; FRANK READE LIBRARY.
TOUZALIN, ROBERT
[s] Robert REED.
TOVOLGYI, TITUSZ
[r] HUNGARY.
TOWERS, IVAR
A Fictioneers Inc. house name (1940-42), used once by C.M. KORNBLUTH and
Richard WILSON in Astonishing and once on an unattributed story in Super
Science Stories. [PN]
TOWLSON, IVAN
[r] M.H. ZOOL.
TOWNSEND, JOHN ROWE
(1922- ) UK writer, principally for older children, beginning with
Gumble's Yard (1961; vt Trouble in the Jungle 1969 US), not sf. In Noah's
Castle (1975), set in a deeply depressed NEAR-FUTURE UK, a family attempts
to find enough to eat but the world's decline is too precipitate, and
their haven is destroyed. The Xanadu Manuscript (1977; vt The Visitors
1977 US) is a TIME-TRAVEL tale which makes it clear that visitors from the
future can bring only grief. King Creature, Come (1980; vt The Creatures
1980 US), told from the viewpoint of two young representatives of the
ALIENS now occupying Earth, carries them into the human Creatures' lives
just as a revolt is fomented, which they join. A Foreign Affair (1982) is
RURITANIAN, and The Fortunate Isles (1981 US) and The Persuading Stick
(1987) are fantasies. A nonfiction study, Written for Children: An Outline
of English Children's Literature (1965; rev 1974), is of interest.JRT was
not the John Townsend responsible for the interplanetary series for
children consisting of The Rocket-Ship Saboteurs (1959) and A Warning to
Earth (1960). [JC]
TOXIC AVENGER, THE
Film (1984). HCH/Troma/Palan. Dir Michael Herz, Samuel Weil, starring
Mark Torgl, Mitchell Cohen, Andree Maranda. Screenplay Joe Ritter, based
on a story by Lloyd Kaufman. 100 mins, cut to 79 mins. Colour.After a
cruel practical joke is played on him, a teenage nerd falls into a barrel
of toxic waste in Tromaville, New Jersey, "Toxic Waste Capital of
America". He mutates into the Toxic Avenger and is compelled to murder bad
people very violently. This farrago, combining teenage tits-and-ass comedy
with horror/splatter, typifies the way exploitation films of the 1980s
regularly used sf tropes, in this case gaining a mild cult following.
TTA's deliberate tastelessness is uninteresting because pointless. The
sequel, partly set in Japan, dir Herz alone, is The Toxic Avenger: Part II
(1989). [PN]
TOXIC AVENGER PART II
The TOXIC AVENGER .

TOYNBEE, POLLY
(1946- ) UK writer and investigative journalist; she is of the fourth
generation of Toynbees to be involved in literature. Leftovers (1966)
depicts with feeble verve the mixed destinies of a group of youths,
survivors of a poisonous gas which has destroyed the rest of humanity.
[JC]
TRACTOR BEAM
FORCE FIELD.
TRACY, LOUIS
(1863-1928) UK journalist and writer, a colleague of M.P. SHIEL, who
(uncredited) assisted him with several detective novels, all published as
by Gordon Holmes. LT is best remembered for The Final War (1896), the
first of his several future- WAR novels, which is significant for the
malign intensity of the SOCIAL DARWINISM it espouses on behalf of "the
Saxon race". The Vansittart sequence - An American Emperor: The Story of
the Fourth Estate of France (1897) with Shiel and The Lost Provinces
(1898) - moves from the RURITANIAN shenanigans of the first vol, in which
the American Vansittart romances a princess and becomes the emperor of
France, into a future-war scenario in which, on behalf of France, he uses
a fleet of armoured vehicles to defeat Germany. The Invaders: A Story of
Britain's Peril (1901) less interestingly threatens the UK with a
NEAR-FUTURE German invasion. 2 later novels endow their protagonists with
PSI POWERS: in Karl Greier: The Strange Story of a Man with a Sixth Sense
(1906; vt The Man with a Sixth Sense 1910) the power is that of reading
minds and controlling others from a distance; in The Turning Point (1923
US) the hero embodies centuries-old family memories. [JC]Other works: The
Wings of the Morning (1903 US), associational ROBINSONADE; The King of
Diamonds (1904), featuring a diamond-filled meteorite; The House 'round
the Corner (1914), a ghost story.See also: ESP; POLITICS.
TRAIN, ARTHUR (CHENEY)
(1875-1945) US writer and lawyer, best known for work outside the sf
field, particularly his legal series about the lawyer Ephraim Tutt. Some
of the stories assembled in Mortmain (coll 1907) verge on sf. In his first
sf novel, The Man who Rocked the Earth (1915) with R.W. WOOD, the
NEAR-FUTURE course of WWI is interrupted by messages from a mysterious PAX
threatening superscientific punishments if war is not stopped. After some
demonstrations, featuring rays, a flying ship and atomic energy, the
nations obey. In the sequel, The Moon Maker (1916-17 Cosmopolitan; 1958
chap), also with Wood, the character who discovered the dead PAX in the
previous book must now defend Earth against an approaching asteroid. He
travels with a proto- FEMINIST mathematician; they marry. AT's quick skill
as a popular novelist allowed him to fill out the speculations generated
by his collaborator, a competent scientist; both novels thus avoid most of
the absurdities that dogged the sf of the time. [JC]
TRAIN, OSWALD
(1915-1988) UK-born US fan ( FANDOM) from 1935, when he became involved
in the nascent Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, also attending the
1st (highly informal) CONVENTION in 1936. A significant SMALL-PRESS

publisher, he was the main figure behind PRIME PRESS. In 1968 he founded
Oswald Train: Publisher, which specialized in detective fiction, although
it also released work by Lloyd Arthur ESHBACH, A. MERRITT, P. Schuyler
MILLER and Olaf STAPLEDON. [JC]
TRALINS, S(ANDOR) ROBERT
(1926- ) US writer, prolific in several genres under more than one name
and author of various borderline-sf tales, often involving sex. They
include: Dragon's Teeth (1973) as Keith Miles; the Valentine Flynn series
- What a Way to Go! (1966), Operation Boudoir (1967), Win with Sin (1967),
The Nymph Island Affair (1967) and Invasion of the Nymphomaniacs (1967) all as Sean O'Shea; Pleasure Planet (1979) as Starr Trainor (a tentative
identification); and, as SRT, the Miss from S.I.S. sequence - The Miss
from S.I.S. (1966), The Chic Chick Spy (1966) and The Ring-A-Ding UFOs
(1967) - Ghoul Lover (1972) and #3 in a Frankenstein sequence (other vols
by various hands). Also as SRT he wrote 3 unremarkable genre novels, The
Cosmozoids (1966), Android Armageddon (1974) and Signal Intruder (1991).
[JC]
TRANCERS
(vt Future Cop) Film (1984). Lexyn/Empire. Prod/dir Charles BAND,
starring Tim Thomerson, Helen Hunt, Michael Stefani. Screenplay Danny
Bilson, Paul DeMeo. 76 mins. Colour.Band apparently learned from his
early, mostly bad movies, for this small film is confident, stylish sf.
Future cop Jack Deth (Thomerson) travels back from AD2247 to present-day
Los Angeles in search of dangerous mystic Whistler (Stefani), who has fled
back in time and now occupies the body of an ancestor. Protected by a
number of zombie-like "trancers", Whistler plans to murder the ancestors
of his future opposition. Although primarily an action movie, T is packed
with sf ideas, and it has an interesting punk look about it. There are
astonishing plot resemblances to The TERMINATOR , released in the same
year.The sequel, Trancers 2: The Return of Jack Deth (1991, vt Future Cop
2), prod and dir Band, written by Band with Jackson Barr, again stars
Thomerson and Hunt. Convolutions of TIME TRAVEL make Jack Deth, 6 years
on, a bigamist, his original (dead) wife, played cutely by Megan Ward,
being sent back (alive) to the present. Soap-opera elements are played out
against further battles with trancers, who use a trendy ecological
movement as a front. This returns us to the awfulness of Band's early
films. Maybe T was a happy accident. Trancers 3: Deth Lives (1993, vt
Future Cop 3), dir C. Courtney Joyner, carries Deth to an even further
future than the one from which he originally came, and is a partial return
to form. Trancers 4: Jack of Swords (1994), dir David Nutter, takes place
in a medieval alternate world called Orpheus and was shot back to back in
Romania with Trancers 5: Sudden Death (1995), dir David Nutter, which
finishes the SWORD-AND-SORCERY story begun in the fourth film. These last
two represent a sad falling off and are not really sf. All these sequels
went straight to video. [PN]
TRANSATLANTIC FAN FUND
AWARDS.
TRANS-ATLANTIC TUNNEL

The TUNNEL .
TRANSFORMERS - THE MOVIE, THE
Film (1986). Sunbow/Marvel. Dir Nelson Shin. Voices by Orson Welles, Eric
Idle et al. Screenplay Ron Friedman. Animation by Toei Animation. 86 mins.
Colour.This US-produced, Japanese-animated film is a spin-off from the
comic-book and tv series of the same name, and all are part of a gigantic
marketing operation to sell Transformers: model robots (invented 1984)
which, when twisted around a bit, change their shape from humanoid to
(usually) cars or spaceships. Most such films are pure exercises in
commercial cynicism ( MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE [1987]) but TT - TM has a
surreal vigour. In AD2005 Earth and other planets are largely populated by
good transforming ROBOTS, the Autobots, who are perpetually at odds with
bad transforming robots who look much the same, the Decepticons. Since
names, voices and shapes are constantly changing, it is almost impossible
to follow the story further. The aggressive animation - which unusually
for a film is in the style of state-of-the-art COMIC-book illustration (in
this case MARVEL-COMICS-derived) - keeps the whole thing swirling along.
Welles's last starring role is, appropriately, as a megalomaniac planet.
[PN]
TRANSPORTATION
Sf stories based on serious speculations about future means of
transportation are greatly outnumbered by stories in which those means
function as facilitating devices - i.e., as convenient ways of shifting
characters into an alien environment. Inevitably, the same kinds of
machines crop up in both categories of story because stories of the second
kind borrow heavily from those of the first. SPACESHIPS have been employed
by sf writers almost exclusively as a literary device; few stories deal
speculatively with the real possibilities of interplanetary and
interstellar transportation. Much fruitless argument has been wasted
comparing the plausibility of machines designed for quite different
literary functions. One such argument, of long standing, concerns the
relative merits of the space-gun in Jules VERNE's From the Earth to the
Moon (1865-70: trans 1873) and the ANTIGRAVITY device in H.G. WELLS's THE
FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901), which tends to ignore the fact that only the
former device aspires (unsuccessfully) to practicability.In FANTASTIC
VOYAGES written before the mid-19th century virtually all modes of
transport were facilitating devices. Today, the short-sightedness of the
anonymous The Reign of George VI, 1900-1925 (1763), which is optimistic
about the bright future of the canal barge, seems slightly absurd; but the
author of the book lived in a world in which there had been no significant
advance in motive power for 2000 years. John WILKINS, fascinated by ideas
of novel means of transportation, had discussed submarines, flying
machines and land-yachts at some length in Mathematicall Magick (1648),
but even he touched only tentatively on the possibility of adapting new
POWER SOURCES to the business of transport. This situation underwent a
revolutionary change in the 19th century.The first practical steamboat,
The Charlotte Dundas, was built in 1801, but it was not until the
development of the screw propeller in 1840 for the Great Eastern, built by
Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859), that the revolution in marine

transport really began. Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) built the first
practical steam locomotive in 1804, but only in 1825, with the opening of
the Stockton-Darlington railway, did there begin the railroad revolution
which very rapidly extended itself across Europe and the emergent USA. It
is understandable that the speculative writers of the later 19th century
should find the future of transportation one of their most inspiring
themes. The revolution was continued with the development of the internal
combustion engine, and entered a new phase in 1909, when Henry Ford
(1863-1947) set his Model-T production line rolling. By then the first
heavier-than-air flying machines were in operation, as were the first
practicable submarines. Everything that has happened since in the world of
transportation was within the imaginative sights of the writers of 1909:
private motor cars for all; fast aeroplanes to carry passengers and
freight; even spaceships (Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY published "The Probing of
Space by Means of Jet Devices" in 1903). The man whose literary work
stands as the principal imaginative product of this era of revolution is
Verne, whose first novel was Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863; trans "William
Lackland" 1869 US). This was the period that made tourism possible, and
Verne remains the archetypal tourist of the literary imagination. He was
fascinated by the machines that made far travelling practical, and wrote a
memoir of a real voyage on the Great Eastern:"A Floating City" (in coll
1871; trans 1874 UK). The submarine Nautilus is the real protagonist of
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870; trans Lewis Mercier 1872 UK),
just as the "aeronef" is of The Clipper of the Clouds (1886; trans 1887;
vt Robur the Conqueror 1887 US). Around the World in 80 Days (1873: trans
Geo. M. Towle 1874 US) inspired many imitators, literary and actual, but
few of the literary ones had Verne's fascination with means: most of them
invented marvellous devices simply to enable the characters to participate
in exotic adventure stories whose plots were thoroughly routine - a kind
of inventiveness ironically celebrated by such latter-day SCIENTIFIC
ROMANCES as Michael MOORCOCK's The Warlord of the Air (1971) and its
sequels, and Christopher PRIEST's The Space Machine (1976).Submarines and
airships were most often invoked in futuristic fiction as carriers of
WEAPONS and other materials of WAR. It quickly became obvious to military
observers of the US Civil War in 1861-5 that observation balloons,
ironclad ships and railroads would transform the tactics and logistics of
warfare. Writers like George GRIFFITH took a particular delight in
imagining the kind of battles which might be fought with airships and
submarines, greatly assisted by the illustrator and occasional sf writer
Fred T. JANE. Other illustrators, most notably Albert ROBIDA, likewise
became entranced by flying machines. Wells's speculations about the future
of transportation technology are mainly concerned with warfare-most
spectacularly, the aerial battles in When the Sleeper Wakes (1899; rev vt
The Sleeper Awakes 1910) and The War in the Air (1908). In The Shape of
Things to Come (1933) he imagined the rebirth of a world devastated by
wars under the aegis of a benevolent "Air Dictatorship", a notion
anticipated by Rudyard KIPLING's stories of the Aerial Board of Control,
With the Night Mail (1905; 1909 chap US) and "As Easy as ABC" (1912).
Kipling's ideas were echoed in Michael ARLEN's Man's Mortality (1933), and
the technological charisma of the aeroplane is evident also in Zodiak
(trans Eric Sutton 1931 US) by Walther Eidlitz (1892-? ). This mystique

carried over into the early sf PULP MAGAZINES: Hugo GERNSBACK founded AIR
WONDER STORIES to deal exclusively with the future of flight. Pulp-sf
writers interested in facilitating devices were soon ready to take extreme
liberties. The FASTER-THAN-LIGHT starship had arrived before the end of
the 1920s, as had the ultimate in personal transport, the antigravity-belt
featured in the BUCK ROGERS stories by Philip Francis NOWLAN. MATTER
TRANSMISSION soon became commonplace; and some interplanetary romances of
the kind pioneered by Edgar Rice BURROUGHS simply ignored the whole issue,
tacitly employing the most blatant facilitating device of all:
TELEPORTATION. Such methods began to receive more detailed speculative
evaluation in Jack WILLIAMSON's "The Cosmic Express" (1930), but not until
Alfred BESTER's Tiger! Tiger! (1956 UK; rev vt The Stars My Destination
US) was there a serious attempt to imagine a society which uses
teleportation as a routine means of travel.Attempts to imagine the
eventual social effects of the transportation revolution soon appeared in
the pulps. In David H. KELLER's "The Revolt of the Pedestrians" (1928) a
ruling elite of automobilists is overthrown by the underprivileged
pedestrians. The social role of the motor car remained a significant theme
in sf, with explorations ranging from satirical comedies like Clark Ashton
SMITH's "The Great God Awto" (1940), Isaac ASIMOV's "Sally" (1953) and
Robert F. YOUNG's "Romance in a 21st Century Used Car Lot" (1960) through
blacker comedies like Fritz LEIBER's "X Marks the Pedwalk" (1963) and
dourer analyses like Ray BRADBURY's The Pedestrian (1952 FSF; 1964 chap),
H. Chandler ELLIOTT's "A Day on Death Highway" (1963) and John JAKES's
surreal On Wheels (1973) to such extreme quasi-apocalyptic works as Ben
ELTON's Gridlock (1991) and the poem Autogeddon (1991) by Heathcote
Williams (1941- ). The car also features as a death-machine in macabre
stories of future GAMES AND SPORTS, in such stories as Harlan ELLISON's
"Dogfight on 101" (1969; vt "Along the Scenic Route") and the film DEATH
RACE 2000 (1975). A classic early exercise in sf realism is Robert A.
HEINLEIN's "The Roads Must Roll" (1940), which deals with the commuter
chaos resulting from a strike by the engineers who maintain moving
roadways. Other notable sf stories attempting to get to grips with the
idea of social revolution brought about through transport deploy some kind
of matter transmission in a quasi-symbolic fashion; notable stories in
this vein include "Ticket to Anywhere" (1952) by Damon KNIGHT and "Granny
Won't Knit" (1954) by Theodore STURGEON. Robert SILVERBERG's anthology
Three Trips in Time and Space (anth 1973) contains novellas on the theme:
Larry NIVEN's "Flash Crowd", Jack VANCE's "Rumfuddle" and John BRUNNER's
"You'll Take the High Road". Niven later continued the theme in 4 further
stories, and Brunner developed it in a novel, Web of Everywhere
(1974).Early sf about transportation infrastructure is mostly concerned
with tunnels. The Channel Tunnel often features in UK INVASION stories,
while a transatlantic tunnel is the subject of Bernhard KELLERMANN's The
Tunnel (1913; trans 1915) and the films based on it, Der TUNNEL (1933) and
The TUNNEL (1935). The idea reappears in modern sf in Ray NELSON's "Turn
Off the Sky" (1963) and is the theme of Harry HARRISON's ALTERNATE-WORLD
satire Tunnel through the Deeps (1972 US; vt A Transatlantic Tunnel,
Hurrah! 1972 UK). Early stories about artificial ISLANDS in the Atlantic
to facilitate the refuelling of aeroplanes, such as Curt SIODMAK's F.P.1
Does Not Reply (trans 1933), filmed as F.P.1 ANTWORTET NICHT (1932), were

soon out of date. The problems of laying railroad tracks on an alien world
are featured in "The Railways up on Cannis" (1959) by Colin KAPP.There are
numerous sf stories which involve improvised means of transport adapted to
exotic situations. Jack VANCE is particularly ingenious in devising such
inventions, although they rarely play a major part in his plots.
Ice-yachts take centre stage in Moorcock's The Ice Schooner (1969) and
Alan Dean FOSTER's Icerigger (1974), and ships which travel on unwatery
media are also featured in David LAKE's Walkers on the Sky (1976), Bruce
STERLING's Involution Ocean (1977) and Brian P. HERBERT's Sudanna, Sudanna
(1985). The strangest vehicles ever devised are perhaps those in Robert
Wilfred Franson's The Shadow of the Ship (1983), in which trails through
airless "subspace" link primitive planets, and can be used only by
starships that are effectively sleds drawn by vast animals; among the
largest are the spacefaring CITIES of James BLISH's CITIES IN FLIGHT
series (omni 1970) and the much more laborious moving city in Priest's The
Inverted World (1974). An abundance of technical detail supports Hilbert
SCHENCK's memorable account of the circumnavigation of the globe by a
steam-powered aeroplane in Steam Bird (1984; title story of coll 1988). In
spite of such bold adventures, it cannot really be said that sf has been
particularly adept in the invention of new means of transportation that
have subsequently proved practicable, aside from a number of devices
concerned with space technology - including, of course, space ROCKETS.
Arthur C. CLARKE has proved particularly expert in this regard, and there
remain several imaginative devices used in his stories which may one day
be actualized, including the lunar transport in A Fall of Moondust (1961)
and the spacefaring SOLAR-WIND-powered yachts of "Sunjammer" (1965), the
latter developing a notion first put forward in 1921 by Konstantin
TSIOLKOVSKY. Clarke's THE FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE (1979) and Charles
SHEFFIELD's The Web Between the Worlds (1979) both deploy "space
elevators" connecting the Earth's surface to orbital stations - a
wonderful idea whose practical limitations are, alas, mercilessly exposed
in Sheffield's own article "How to Build a Beanstalk" (1979). [BS]See
also: COMMUNICATIONS; UNDER THE SEA.
TRAPROCK, WALTER E.
Pseudonym of US writer George Shepard Chappell (1877-1946) for a series
of sf tales spoofing the geographical romances popular just after WWI. In
The Cruise of the Kawa: Wanderings in the South Seas (1921) a new
Polynesia is discovered featuring birds which lay dice. Through the
Alimentary Canal with Gun and Camera: A Fascinating Trip to the Interior
(1930) takes Dr Traprock through a human digestive system. [JC]Other
works: Sarah of the Sahara: A Romance of Nomads Land (1923); My Northern
Exposure: The Kawa at the North Pole (1925); Dr Traprock's Memory Book, or
Aged in Wood (1930).
TREASURY OF GREAT SCIENCE FICTION STORIES
US annual reprint magazine, PULP-MAGAZINE size. 8 issues 1964-71,
published by Popular Library; ed Jim Hendryx Jr for #1-#3, then Helen Tono
for the next 4, then Anne Keffer for the last. A follow-up of Hendryx's
WONDER STORIES of 1957 and 1963, this was retitled as Great Science
Fiction Stories (#3), SF Yearbook: A Treasury of Science Fiction (#4) and

then Science Fiction Yearbook. The stories were from STARTLING STORIES and
THRILLING WONDER STORIES. It is possible to consider the last 5 issues as
a separate magazine, as the "Yearbook" title now stressed annual
publication, the editor changed, and the numeration began again from #1.
Although all 8 issues were in magazine format, there were no editorial
departments, and they could equally be regarded as annual anthologies.
[FHP]
TREBOR, ROBERT
(? - ) US writer, almost certainly pseudonymous (his surname is Robert
spelled backwards), whose sf novel is the unremarkable An XT Called
Stanley (1983). [JC]
TRECHERA, RAFAEL MARIN
[r] SPAIN.
TREIBICH, S(TEVEN) J(OHN)
(1936-1972) US writer, co-author with Laurence M. JANIFER of the Angelo
di Stefano series: Target: Terra (1968), The High Hex (1969) and The
Wagered World (1969). [BS]
TREMAINE, F(REDERICK) ORLIN
(1899-1956) US editor and writer; his first story was "The Throwback" for
Weird Tales in 1926 as by Orlin Frederick. Already experienced in
PULP-MAGAZINE publishing-he had ed various magazines from 1921 onward,
including Bernarr MACFADDEN's Brain Power 1921-4 and True Story in 1924 FOT assumed the editorship of Astounding Stories ( ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION) in Oct 1933, after it had been taken over by STREET ?
SMITH; curiously, although he had been working for ASF's previous
publishers, Clayton Magazines, FOT seems to have had no connection with
the magazine prior to becoming its editor. He produced 50 issues of ASF,
initially with the assistance of Desmond W. HALL, and under his editorship
it became unquestionably the pre-eminent sf magazine of its day, featuring
all the leading writers of the period and publishing the first stories of
such writers as L. Sprague DE CAMP and Eric Frank RUSSELL. He soon
instituted a policy of featuring in each issue at least 1 story described
as a "thought variant" - i.e., a tale which presented a new concept, or a
new gloss on a familiar idea. As an attention-attracting device this was
an undoubted success, inspiring an imitation "new-story" policy in WONDER
STORIES. When FOT became editorial director of a number of the Street ?
Smith magazines, he gave up the editorship of ASF, being followed in
December 1937 by his personal choice for the job, John W. CAMPBELL Jr,
whose stories as by Don A. Stuart FOT had been publishing for several
years; the GOLDEN AGE OF SF was just around the corner. FOT's
"thought-variant" notion can be seen as marking an important step in
shifting magazine sf from its concentration on pulp adventure to the
idea-led sf instituted by his successor.The next year FOT left the company
to found his own publishing firm, Orlin Tremaine Co., producing and
editing COMET STORIES, which lasted only 5 issues 1940-41. He wrote a
number of stories under his own name, and at least 1 as Warner VAN LORNE.
He worked in non-sf publishing enterprises in later years, before being
forced into early retirement through ill health. [MJE]See also: ROBOTS; SF

MAGAZINES.
TREMAINE, NELSON
[r] Warner VAN LORNE.
TREMORS
Film (1989). No Frills/Wilson-Maddock/Universal. Executive prod Gale Anne
HURD. Dir Ron Underwood, starring Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Finn Carter.
Screenplay S.S. Wilson, Brent Maddock from a story by Wilson, Maddock,
Underwood. 96 mins. Colour.A thinly populated valley in the Nevada desert
is ravaged by 4 monstrous subterranean worm creatures, apparently
possessed of some intelligence, which are finally destroyed by the courage
and wit of the handful of local residents, along with a woman
seismologist, who survive the initial attacks. This unambitious, textbook
MONSTER MOVIE is notable for good dialogue and ensemble acting and for its
very convincing MONSTERS, usually seen in broad daylight: a triumph of the
special-effects teams. However, the monsters are hardly convincing as sf:
arbitrary and unexplained - and probably "pre-dating the fossil record" they have no apparent food-source undergound to enable them to grow so
big. They are very like the sandworms in Frank HERBERT's DUNE (1965) in
appearance and in their sensitivity to vibration. [PN]
TRENT, OLAF
R.L. FANTHORPE.
TREVARTHEN, HAL P.
J.K. HEYDON.
TREVENA, JOHN
Ernest G. HENHAM.
TREVOR, ELLESTON
Initially the most famous pseudonym and latterly the legal name of the UK
writer born Trevor Dudley-Smith (1920- ), who eventually became best known
for his Quiller espionage tales as by Adam Hall, after an early career
writing children's fantasies (see listing below), some under his original
name. His first novel of genre interest, The Immortal Error (1946), a
fantasy, tells of an accident survivor who wakes up with the wrong soul in
residence. The Domesday Story (1952 as by Warwick Scott; vt Doomsday 1953
US as ET and 1972 US as Adam Hall) tells of fears that an H-bomb test in
Australia will bring about the end of the world. Forbidden Kingdom (1955)
is a children's LOST-WORLD story about a high-tech enclave in the Kalahari
desert. The Pillars of Midnight (1957) depicts the effects of a
devastating disease. The Mind of Max Duvine (1960) is about telepathy. The
Shoot (1966) returns to weapons-testing, this time depicting the launching
of a missile whose fuel is dangerously unstable. The Sibling (1979 US as
Adam Hall; 1989 US as ET) is horror. Deathwatch (1984) is about the
NEAR-FUTURE accidental creation of a fatal virus by GENETIC ENGINEERING
and its subsequent use by rogue Soviet hardliners to cause a decimating
plague in the West.Some of the Quiller tales, such as The Berlin
Memorandum (1965; vt The Quiller Memorandum 1967) and The Theta Syndrome
(1977), have TECHNOTHRILLER elements. A writer of almost excessive
fluency, ET has made use of sf devices in passing, but never - it must be

said - with much air of conviction. [JC]Other works: Children's fantasies,
many with shared characters: Into the Happy Glade (1943) andBy a Silver
Stream (1944), both as Trevor Dudley-Smith, followed by Green Glade (1959)
as ET; the Wumpus sequence, comprising Wumpus (1945), More About Wumpus
(1947) and Where's Wumpus? (1948); the Deep Wood sequence, comprising Deep
Wood (1945), Heather Hill (1946), The Secret Travellers (1947), Badger's
Beech (1948), which was also serialized on BBC radio, Ants' Castle (1949),
2 closely-linked tales - The Wizard of the Wood (1948) and Badger's Moon
(1949) - themselves comprising a short sf subseries featuring space
travel, Mole's Castle (1951), Sweethallow Valley (1951), Badger's Wood
(1958) and Squirrel's Island (1963); Ants' Castle (1949); Secret Arena
(1951); The Racing Wraith (1953) as Trevor Burgess; The Crystal City
(1959), set a thousand fathoms beneath the surface of the ocean.
TREVOR, (LUCY) MERIOL
(1919- ) UK writer whose ALTERNATE-WORLD tales in the World Dionysius
sequence - The Forest and the Kingdom * (1949), Hunt the King, Hide the
Fox * (1950) and The Fires and the Stars * (1951) - convey a bright
childlike nostalgia for a planet which in some regards resembles Earth but
whose history is more satisfactory than ours. This angle of view may be
accounted for by the fact that, with Margaret PRIESTLEY (whom see for her
own contributions), MT had decades earlier created the World Dionysius as
a childhood fantasy. The Other Side of the Moon (1956), an sf juvenile,
and Merlin's Ring (1957), an Arthurian fantasy, are unconnected to the
sequence. [JC]
TRIAL OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK
The INCREDIBLE HULK .
TRIMBLE, JACQUELYN
[r] Louis TRIMBLE.
TRIMBLE, LOUIS (PRESTON)
(1917-1988) US writer and academic, prolific in several genres including
mysteries and Westerns - he wrote 66 novels by 1977 - but relatively
little sf; his only sf short story was "Probability" for If in 1954. His
sf novels came later, in a spurt, beginning with the Anthropol Bureau
tales - Anthropol (1968 dos) and The Noblest Experiment in the Galaxy
(1970 dos) - and climaxing with The City Machine (1972), set on a colony
planet, where the device that constructs CITIES has been lost, forcing
everyone into one overcrowded construct. LT clearly found sf venues of
interest for the telling of tales - some of them surprisingly placid and
landscape-oriented - and showed little concern for the exploration of the
extrapolative implications that inspired the original invention of those
venues. But he was extremely competent, and his entertainments mused
profitably within the worlds of sf. [JC]Other works: Guardians of the Gate
(1972) with his first wife, Jacquelyn Trimble (1927- ); The Wandering
Variables (1972); The Bodelan Way (1974).
TRINGHAM, NEAL
[r] M.H. ZOOL.
TRIP TO THE MOON, A

Le VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE .
TROG
Film (1970). Herman Cohen Productions/Warner Bros. Dir Feddie Francis,
starring Joan Crawford, Michael Gough, Bernard Kay, Joe Cornelius.
Screenplay Aben Kandel, based on a story by John Gilling, Peter Bryan. 93
mins, cut to 91 mins. Colour.A troglodyte or caveman survival (Cornelius)
is discovered in a cavern, and investigated by an anthropologist
(Crawford, in her last performance). All the innocent-in-the-modern-world
cliches ( Hyperlink to: APES AND CAVEMEN) feature as the bewildered
creature runs amuck, but loyal Crawford stands by him. One scene shows
electrodes taped to his head so that we can "see" his remarkably
anachronistic prehistoric memories, actually old dinosaur clips from Irwin
ALLEN's The Animal World (1956). This routine UK movie was parodied (as if
parody were needed) in John Landis's first feature, SCHLOCK (1973), whose
caveman, unlike Trog (who is disturbed by it) loves rock'n'roll. [PN]
TROLLENBERG TERROR, THE
1. UK tv serial (1956-7) ITV. Prod/dir Quentin Lawrence, written Peter
Key, starring Sarah Lawson, Rosemary Miller, Laurence Payne. 6 25min
episodes. B/w. This is set mainly in an Alpine Hotel where intimations of
doom received by a woman with ESP are followed by the revelation that
ALIENS are on the mountain.2. Film (1959; vt The Crawling Eye; vt The
Creature from Another World). Tempean Production/DCA. Dir Quentin
Lawrence, starring Forrest Tucker, Laurence Payne, Janet Munro, Jennifer
Jayne, Warren Mitchell. Screenplay Jimmy Sangster, based on 1. 85 mins.
B/w.The film version is more full-bloodedly unpleasant than 1, especially
in scenes where the aliens animate their dead human victims telepathically
and turn them homicidal in a not very sensible scheme for conquest. The
aliens themselves cannot come off the mountain, because they can survive
only where it is very cold. Special-effects man Les Bowie worked hard on a
shoestring budget, but the octopoid alien, with its one big eye, is
ludicrous and the cloud beneath which the aliens lurk on the mountain was
a piece of cotton wool pinned to a photograph. Loose ends of plot dangle
everywhere, perhaps as a result of a 3hr story being reduced to half that
length, but the film is not as bad as legend has it. [JB/PN]
TROLLOPE, ANTHONY
(1815-1882) UK writer whose most famous novels make up the Barchester
Chronicles. His 61st book, and sole venture into sf, The Fixed Period
(1882), written a few years before his death, understandably (though
evasively: no one actually dies in the book) concentrated upon that topic.
It is 1980 on an ISLAND near New Zealand where sheep farmers are
establishing an ambiguous UTOPIA in which no one will be allowed to live
past the age of 67 - the age at which AT would in fact die. The Navy
arrives in time to avert implementation of the scheme. Though not one of
AT's stronger novels, it remains a speculation of interest, and
demonstrates the vigour of its author's rather gloomy Indian summer.
[JC]See also: MACHINES.
TRON
Film (1982) Lisberger/Kushner/Walt Disney. Dir Steven Lisberger, starring

Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy Morgan. Screenplay
Lisberger, from a story by Lisberger, Bonnie MacBird. 96 mins. Colour.In
this pleasing but lightweight film, a young man (Bridges) seeks evidence
about dirty work in the computer company from which he has just resigned.
Smuggled into the firm's building by friends, he is deconstructed by the
Master Control Program (or MCP) software, which rules the VIRTUAL REALITY
within which he comes to consciousness as a subprogram (along - just as in
Oz - with analogues of two friends programmed by them to help him out).
There follows, disappointingly, a standard Good-against-Evil struggle involving Bridges and MCP's hench-progam Sark (Warner), itself an analogue
of a real-life evil-doer - on a somewhat austere computer-generated
landscape resembling that of a rather good video game ( GAMES AND TOYS).
The film has moments of wit, and a stunning last shot where the now
reconstituted hero looks down on the streets of Los Angeles at night, for
all the world like the computer grid from which he has escaped. This
suggests that perhaps the whole film is a light-hearted text about
determinism, but most of it aspires to being little more than a
wide-screen arcade-game scenario. [PN]
TROSKA, J.M.
[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
TROUT, KILGORE
An sf-writer character in Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's God Bless You, Mr Rosewater
(1965) and Breakfast of Champions (1973), first used as a pseudonym by L.
W. CURREY and David G. HARTWELL for a short bibliography, SF-I: A
Selective Bibliography (1971 chap), and later (there was a row about this)
by Philip Jose FARMER on the novel Venus on the Half-Shell (1975). [PN]
TROWBRIDGE, DAVE
Sherwood SMITH.
TRUDNO BYT' BOGOM
(vt Hard To Be a God) Film (1989). Dovzhenko Studio/Halleluya Film
GMBH/VO Sovexportfilm. Dir Peter Fleischmann, starring Edward Dzentara,
Ann Gautier, Christina Kaufmann, Alexander Filippenko, Andrei Boltnev,
Mikhail Gluzsky, Werner Herzog. Screenplay Fleischmann, Jean-Claude
Carriere, Dal Orlov, based on Trudno byt' bogom (1964; trans as Hard to be
a God 1973 US) by Arkady and Boris STRUGATSKI. 120 mins. Colour.The most
ambitious Soviet sf film to date, this Soviet/West German coproduction was
4 years in the making, and even so seems unfinished. Gorgeous sets, a good
story (combining medieval swordfighting and futuristic starships) and a
distinguished international cast did, however, ensure its success in
European cinemas. The Strugatskis' multilevelled moral drama has been
simplified to the level of pure action. The focus is court intrigue on an
underdeveloped planet where a group of secret agents/investigators from a
highly developed Earth witness the rise of a kind of medieval fascism, led
by the local Hitler, Reba. The protagonist, Rumata, camouflaged as an
indigenous nobleman, is not allowed to involve himself in the planet's
politics; he is the historical observer who must not interfere with the
experiment. However, he and his friends do attempt to save local
intellectuals from pogroms and, when Reba's men kill the native girl with

whom Rumata is in love, the Earthman humanist takes to the sword. A
failure for Strugatski fans and for those who enjoy serious sf, but a
feast for lovers of sword-and-bluster combat and a sentimental love story.
[VG]See also: RUSSIA.
TRUEMAN, CHRYSOSTOM
The unidentified pseudonym of the UK author who lists himself as "Editor"
of The History of a Voyage to the Moon, with an Account of the
Adventurers' Subsequent Discoveries (1864), a PROTO-SCIENCE-FICTION tale
described by Darko SUVIN in Victorian Science Fiction in the UK (1983) as
being of considerable importance; Suvin also speculates that CT may
possibly have been James Hinton (1822-1875), father of C.H. HINTON. The
Voyage depicts its protagonists' discovery of an ANTIGRAVITY device which
they use to fly to the Moon, where they find a UTOPIA inhabited by
"amnesiac reincarnations of select Earthmen". [JC]
TRUSCOTT, GERRY
[r] Candas Jane DORSEY.
TSIOLKOVSKY, KONSTANTIN (EDUARDOVICH)
(1857-1935) Russian scientist and writer. He began investigating the
possibility of SPACE FLIGHT in 1878. In his monograph Free Space (1883
chap) he suggested that SPACESHIPS would have to operate by jet
propulsion. His consideration of some of the practical difficulties led to
a paper entitled "How to Protect Fragile and Delicate Objects from Jolts
and Shocks" (1891). In 1903 he published the classic paper "The Probing of
Space by Means of Jet Devices", proposing that space travel could be
achieved using multistage liquid-fuelled ROCKETS. He wrote a good deal of
didactic sf, mostly for young readers, in order to popularize his ideas.
All of this is collected, along with several essays by or about
Tsiolkovsky, in a vol ed V. Dutt, Put' k zbezdam (coll 1960 USSR; trans by
various hands as The Call of the Cosmos 1963 USSR; unauthorized edn, with
cuts, vt The Science Fiction of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky 1979 US), the US
version substituting an intro by one "Adam Starchild", also falsely
credited as ed. The sf stories include the novelette On the Moon (written
1887; 1893), Dreams of Earth and Sky (coll 1895), and a full-length novel,
Vne zemli (1916 Priroda i Lyudi; exp 1920; trans in this coll as "Outside
the Earth"; also appeared trans, with intro, Kenneth Syers as Beyond the
Planet Earth 1960 US), which is an account of the building and launching
of a spaceship by an international group of scientists which ends with the
initiation of a project to colonize the Solar System.KT was the first
great pioneer of space research and the first real prophet of the myth of
the conquest of space which has played such a vital role in modern sf. The
inscription on the obelisk marking his grave reads: "Man will not always
stay on Earth; the pursuit of light and space will lead him to penetrate
the bounds of the atmosphere, timidly at first but in the end to conquer
the whole of solar space." [BS]See also: COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS;
FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GENERATION STARSHIPS; HISTORY OF SF; HOLLOW EARTH;
PREDICTION; RUSSIA; SPACE HABITATS; TRANSPORTATION.
TSR INC.
AMAZING STORIES; GAMES AND TOYS; GAME-WORLDS.

TSUBURAYA, EIJI
[r] JAPAN.
TSUTSUI, YASUTAKA
[r] JAPAN.
TUBB, E(DWIN) C(HARLES)
(1919- ) UK writer and editor who began publishing sf with "No Short
Cuts" for NW in 1951, and for the next half decade or so produced a great
amount of fiction, in UK magazines and in book form, under his own name
and under many pseudonyms, some still undisclosed. After the late 1950s,
his production moderated somewhat, but he remained a prolific author of
consistently readable SPACE OPERAS. Of his many pseudonyms, those known to
have been used for book titles of sf interest include Charles Grey,
Gregory Kern, Carl Maddox, Edward Thompson and the house names Volsted
GRIDBAN, Gill HUNT, King LANG, Arthur Maclean, Brian SHAW and Roy SHELDON.
At least 50 further names were used for magazine stories only. His first
sf novels were pseudonymous: Saturn Patrol (1951) as by King Lang,
Planetfall (1951) as by Gill Hunt, "Argentis" (1952) as by Brian Shaw and
Alien Universe (1952 chap) as by Volsted Gridban. He soon began publishing
under his own name, with Alien Impact (1952) and Atom War on Mars (1952),
though his best work in these years was probably that as by Charles Grey,
beginning with The Wall (1953). Of his enormous output of magazine
fiction, the Dusty Dribble stories in Authentic 1955-6 stand out; ECT also
edited Authentic from Feb 1956 to its demise in Oct 1957.With Enterprise
2115 (1954 as by Grey; vt The Mechanical Monarch 1958 dos US as by ECT) he
began to produce more sustained adventure novels. Alien Dust (1952-3 NW;
1954 Nebula; fixup 1955; expurgated 1957 US) effectively depicts the
rigours of interplanetary exploration. The Space-Born (1956 dos US) is a
crisp GENERATION-STARSHIP tale. These novels all display a convincing
expertise in the use of the language and themes of PULP-MAGAZINE sf,
though they tend to avoid examining their material very thoroughly.
Enterprise 2115, for instance, deals swiftly and with ECT's typical
largesse with REINCARNATION, the SUPERMAN theme and CYBERNETICS, along
with a matriarchal DYSTOPIA; but the sustaining narrative - the pilot of
the first spaceship returns from frozen sleep to reinvigorate a world gone
wrong through its misuse of a predicting machine - hardly allows much
justice to be done to any one concept.The next decade saw few ECT titles
until the start of the long series for which he remains best known, the
Dumarest books: The Winds of Gath (1967 dos US; rev vt Gath 1968 UK),
Derai (1968 dos US), Toyman (1969 dos US), Kalin (1969 dos US), The Jester
at Scar (1970 dos US), Lallia (1971 dos US), Technos (1972 dos US),
Veruchia (1973 US), Mayenne (1973 US) and Jondelle (1973 US) - both
assembled as Mayenne and Jondelle (omni 1981 US) - Zenya (1974 US), Eloise
(1975 US), Eye of the Zodiac (1975 US), Jack of Swords (1976 US), Spectrum
of a Forgotten Sun (1976 US), Haven of Darkness (1977 US), Prison of Night
(1977 US), Incident on Ath (1978 US), The Quillian Sector (1978 US), Web
of Sand (1979 US), Iduna's Universe (1979 US), The Terra Data (1980 US),
World of Promise (1980 US), Nectar of Heaven (1981 US), The Terridae (1981
US), The Coming Event (1982 US), Earth is Heaven (1982 US), Melome (1983
US) and Angado (1984 US) - both assembled as Melome and Angado (omni 1988)

- and Symbol of Terra (1984 US) and The Temple of Truth (1985 US) - both
assembled as Symbol of Terra and the Temple of Truth (omni 1989). It is
understood that a final volume (#32) has been published in France, in
about 1992, under the title Le Retour; there is no English-language
edition. Earl Dumarest, who features in each volume, maintains with
soldier-of-fortune fortitude a long search for Earth - the planet on which
he was born, and from which he was wrested at an early age - but must
battle against the universal belief that Earth is a myth. Inhabited
planets are virtually innumerable; the period is some time after the
collapse of a GALACTIC EMPIRE, and everyone speaks the same language; and,
as Dumarest moves gradually outwards from Galactic Centre along a spiral
arm of stars, it is clear that he is gradually nearing his goal. The
opposition he faces from the Cyclan - a vast organization of passionless
humans linked cybernetically to a central organic computer whose location
is unknown - long led readers to assume that the Cyclan HQ was located on
Earth, but the sequence stopped - perhaps at the behest of its publishers
- at a somewhat inconclusive point. Though some of the later-middle titles
seemed aimless, ECT showed consistent skill at prolonging Dumarest's
intense suspense about the outcome of his long quest.Concurrently, writing
as Gregory Kern, ECT produced a more routine space-opera sequence
featuring galactic secret agent Cap Kennedy. The Kern titles are Galaxy of
the Lost (1973 US), Slave Ship from Sergan (1973 US), Monster of Metelaze
(1973 US), Enemy within the Skull (1974 US), Jewel of Jarhen (1974 US),
Seetee Alert! (1974 US), The Gholan Gate (1974 US), The Eater of Worlds
(1974 US), Earth Enslaved (1974 US), Planet of Dread (1974 US), Spawn of
Laban (1974 US), The Genetic Buccaneer (1974 US), A World Aflame (1974
US), The Ghosts of Epidoris (1975 US), Mimics of Dephene (1975 US), Beyond
the Galactic Lens (1975 US) and The Galactiad (first published as Das
Kosmiche Duelle ["The Cosmic Duel"], 1976 Germany; first English version
1983 US). Though these and some of the Dumarest books descend too readily
to CLICHE, ECT established and successfully maintained a reputation for
providing reliably competent adventure sf, full of action, sex and
occasional melancholy. Late singletons like The Luck Machine (1980) and
Stardeath (1983 US) continued the parade of efficient titles. [JC]Other
works: The Mutants Rebel (1953); Venusian Adventure (1953); Alien Life
(1954); World at Bay (1954); Journey to Mars (1954); City of No Return
(1954); The Stellar Legion (1954); The Hell Planet (1954); The Resurrected
Man (1954); Supernatural Stories 9 (coll 1957), ostensibly a magazine but
all stories by ECT under various names; Moon Base (1964); Ten from
Tomorrow (coll 1966); "The Life Buyer" (1965 NW; the entire novel appears
in SF REPRISE #5 1967); Death is a Dream (1967); C.O.D. Mars (1968 chap
dos US); S.T.A.R. Flight (1969 US); Escape into Space (1969); Century of
the Manikin (1972 US); A Scatter of Stardust (coll 1972 dos US); Sword in
the Snow (1973 chap); novelizations of episodes from the tv series SPACE
1999, being Breakaway * (1975), Collision Course * (1975), Alien Seed *
(1976 US), Rogue Planet * (1976 US) and the comparatively ambitious
Earthfall * (1977); The Primitive (1977); Death Wears a White Face (1957
Authentic as "Dead Weight"; exp 1979); Stellar Assignment (1979); Pawn of
the Omphalos (1980 US).As Charles Grey: Dynasty of Doom (1953); The
Tormented City (1953); Space Hunger (1953); I Fight for Mars (1953); The
Hand of Havoc (1954); The Extra Man (1954).As Volsted Gridban: Reverse

Universe (1952); Planetoid Disposals Ltd (1953); De Bracy's Drug (1953);
Fugitive of Time (1953).As Arthur Maclean: Touch of Evil * (1959 chap),
#438 in the Sexton Blake Library.As Carl Maddox: The Living World (1954
chap); Menace from the Past (1954 chap).As Roy Sheldon: The Metal Eater
(1954).As Edward Thompson: The Imperial Rome series, comprising Atilus the
Slave (1975), Atilus the Gladiator (1975) and Gladiator (1978).About the
author: "The Perils of Bibliography: A Look at the Writings of E.C.Tubb"
(1979 The Science-Fiction Collector #7) by Mike ASHLEY.See also: BOYS'
PAPERS; CRYONICS; CYBORGS; DAW BOOKS; END OF THE WORLD; GAMES AND
SPORTS;
MARS; NEW WORLDS; PARANOIA.
TUCK, DONALD H(ENRY)
(1922- ) Australian bibliographer and industrial manager, retired. His
bibliographical labours in sf since the late 1940s were among the most
extensive in the field since the pioneering work of Everett F. BLEILER;
they have since been partially superseded, but comprise one of the
foundation stones upon which later workers have built. His early work was
A Handbook of Science Fiction and Fantasy (1954; rev in 2 vols 1959), in
duplicated format, self-published. Far more thorough is the 3-vol The
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy through 1968, consisting of
Vol 1: Who's Who, A-L (1974), Vol 2: Who's Who, M-Z (1978) and Vol 3:
Miscellaneous (dated 1982 but 1983), all from ADVENT: PUBLISHERS; their
usefulness to researchers was a little limited by the slowness of
production, Vol 3 arriving 15 years after the book's cut-off date.
Synopses are given for many books, and publishing data for all. Coverage
of GENRE SF is thorough; coverage of non-genre sf and of older sf is
patchy but sometimes illuminating. Generally (there are exceptions) DHT
does not cover work which has not been reprinted 1945-68. Listings of
stories in collections and anthologies are given, and the coverage is
almost as thorough for fantasy and weird fiction as for sf. [PN]See also:
AUSTRALIA; BIBLIOGRAPHIES; HUGO; SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS.
TUCKER, BOB
[s] Wilson TUCKER.
TUCKER, GEORGE
Joseph ATTERLEY.
TUCKER, JAMES B.
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
TUCKER, (ARTHUR) WILSON
(1914- ) US writer, orphaned, brought up in Bloomington and Normal,
Illinois, where he set some of his fiction, some early stories being
signed Bob Tucker. For several decades he worked as a film projectionist,
retiring in 1972, and he always spoke of his writing - more than 20 books,
half of them sf, half of them mysteries - as an avocation. WT began his
involvement with sf about 1932, and during the 1930s was exceedingly
active as a fan and FANZINE publisher, starting with The Planetoid in
1932, though his most notable fanzine was Le Zombie, which lasted more
than 60 issues 1938-75, the first half-decade of that period being its
heyday; his Neo-Fan's Guide to Science-Fiction Fandom (1966 chap)

demonstrates the quality of this work. As an example of the violent humour
and intense emotions aroused in early FANDOM, it is notable that WT was
twice subjected to hoax obituaries in the sf magazines of the time. His
fanzine The Bloomington News Letter (later Science Fiction News Letter)
dealt mainly with the professional field.While active as a fan WT was also
writing fiction, though not until 1941 did he publish his first story,
"Interstellar Way Station" as Bob Tucker, in Super Science Novels. He
never became prolific in shorter forms - The Best of Wilson Tucker (coll
1982) is definitive - soon turning to novels. His first, The Chinese Doll
(1946), was a mystery, but made RECURSIVE use of the world of sf fandom.
(WT pleased the knowledgeable fans, while annoying some critics, by his
lifelong habit of using the names of fans and writers for the characters
of his books; these names became known as Tuckerisms.) His first sf novel,
The City in the Sea (1951), deals somewhat crudely with material similar
to that treated far more effectively in the much later Ice and Iron (1974;
exp 1975); in both, a matriarchal culture begins to re-invade a USA
reverted to savagery, but in the latter the far-future matriarchy is
linked through TIME TRAVEL to a USA, only generations hence, in the grip
of a new ice age. This latter tale is not very coherently told, but the
panoramas are lucid. Time travel is central to much of WT's work,
featuring in tales like The Lincoln Hunters (1958), one of his best
novels. Time travellers from an imperial USA several hundred years hence
are sent to acquire a recording of a lost speech of Abraham Lincoln; the
two cultures are effectively contrasted. The ending, in which the
protagonist is trapped in an 1856 far less unattractive than the future
from which he came, is both poignant and welcome. In The Time Masters
(1953; rev 1971), whose protagonist appears also in the sequel Time Bomb
(1955; vt Tomorrow Plus X 1957), a long-lived extraterrestrial's presence
throughout human history generates some of the same perspectives as time
travel itself.WT had a knack of choosing unusually resonant and
appropriate titles for his novels. Examples are The Long Loud Silence
(1952; rev 1970; early US edns delete implications of cannibalism, UK edns
do not) and The Year of the Quiet Sun (1970). The former is a powerful
post- HOLOCAUST novel, sombre and tough in feeling, though at points
awkwardly told; the hero, unusually for a genre-sf novel, is in many ways
cruel and insensitive. The latter, which won a JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL
AWARD retrospectively in 1976, sends its Black protagonist forwards in
time to around AD2020, where he finds the USA in dire shape, his Blackness
terrifying to the racially divided remnants of the civil war which has
ended civilization. The prophecy that he had discovered in a non-Biblical
ancient manuscript is fulfilled: there is to be a Year of the Quiet Sun.
He prepares to watch the final rites of history.WT was a very uneven
writer, but expanded the boundaries of genre sf with his downbeat and
realistic variations on old material, and demonstrated how effective a
generic cliche like time travel could become when treated with due
attention. By tying his use of time travel to virtual archaeologies of the
worlds thus exposed, he transformed that cliche into an instrument of
vision. He became inactive in the field after about 1980. [JC/PN]Other
works: Prison Planet (1947 chap); Wild Talent (1954; exp 1955 UK; The Man
from Tomorrow 1955); Science Fiction Sub-Treasury (coll 1954; cut vt Time:
X 1955); To the Tombaugh Station (1960 dos); Resurrection Days

(1981).About the author: A Checkist of Wilson Tucker (1991 chap) by
Christopher P. STEPHENS.See also: END OF THE WORLD; ESP; HUGO;
IMMORTALITY; OUTER PLANETS; SPACE OPERA; SUPERMAN; TIME PARADOXES.
TUCKERISMS
RECURSIVE SF; Wilson TUCKER.
TUMANNOST' ANDROMEDY
(vt The Andromeda Nebula; vt Andromeda the Mysterious; vt The Cloud of
Andromeda) Film (1968). Dovzhenko Studio. Dir Eugene Sherstobytov,
starring Viya Artmane, Sergei Stoliarov, Nikolai Kriukov. Screenplay
Sherstobytov, Vladimir Dmitrievski, based on Tumannost' Andromedy (1958)
by Ivan YEFREMOV. 85 mins, cut to 77 mins. Colour.A disappointingly
polemical Russian adaptation of Yefremov's much better novel, TA tells of
an attempt, 2000 years hence, to establish contact with an intelligent
alien race living somewhere in the Andromeda Nebula. Most of the action
takes place on a spaceship. The film's optimism about the future manifest in the woodenly cheerful, healthy and uniformly handsome cast and
the lack of dramatic tension of any kind (a problem not uncommon in
UTOPIAN fictions) - is light years from the bleakness of later Russian sf
films such as SOLARIS (1972). The sets and special effects are good.
[PN]See also: RUSSIA.
TUNG, LEE
LEE TUNG.
TUNING, WILLIAM
(1935-1982) US writer whose Tornado Alley (1978) dramatizes NEAR-FUTURE
attempts to deal with very bad storms. Fuzzy Bones * (1981) is a
continuation of H. Beam PIPER's Fuzzy series, quite successfully
extracting from Piper's own texts material requiring development, and
exploring the origins of the Fuzzy race. [JC]
TUNNEL, DER
Film (1933). Vandor Film/Bavaria Film. Dir Kurt Bernhardt, starring Paul
Hartmann, Olly von Flint, Attila Hoorbiger, Gustaf Grundgens, Elga Brink.
Screenplay Bernhardt, Reinhart Steinbicker, based on Der Tunnel (1913;
trans 1915) by Bernhard KELLERMANN. 80 mins (French version 73 mins). B/w.
This ambitious German film tells of a NEAR-FUTURE attempt by German
engineers, imbued with nationalist fervour, to drill a tunnel under the
Atlantic. A speculator attempts to sabotage the project. Technically, the
film has a high standard, with convincing sets and special effects; the
various disasters that occur - cave-ins, floods and volcanic eruptions are realistically staged (too realistically, perhaps, as the film's
associate producer was killed during the shooting of one such sequence). A
French-language version was made simultaneously, starring Jean Gabin and
Madeleine Renaud. The slightly inferior UK remake was The TUNNEL (1935; vt
Trans-Atlantic Tunnel US). [JB/PN]
TUNNEL, THE
(vt Trans-Atlantic Tunnel US) Film (1935). Gaumont. Dir Maurice Elvey,
starring Richard Dix, Leslie Banks, Madge Evans, Helen Vinson, C. Aubrey
Smith, George Arliss, Walter Huston. Screenplay Clemence DANE, L. du Garde

Peach, based on Der Tunnel (1913; trans 1915) by Bernhard KELLERMANN. 94
mins. B/w.A UK remake of the successful German film Der TUNNEL (1933). The
plot is basically the same: a tunnel is built under the Atlantic linking
the USA with Europe (though here the European end of the tunnel is
situated in England). The film is not as technically impressive as the
German version; it concentrates less on the national grandeur of the
project and more on the domestic dramas of the tunnel's creators. [JB/PN]
TUNSTALL, (WILLIAM CUTHBERT) BRIAN
(1900-1970) UK writer whose Eagles Restrained (1936) showed some
prescience in predicting a German-Polish conflict (though dating the event
to 1954), but was less fortunate in its assumption that the League of
Nations would intervene to quell the dispute. [JC]
TUREK, IAN and IONE
Eando BINDER.
TUREK, LUDWIG
[r] GERMANY.
TURK, H(AROLD) C.
(1958- ) US writer who began publishing sf with the comic adventure Ether
Or (1987), an ALTERNATE WORLD tale in which a female"Hitler"is a force for
peace, and which has been transformed by the eponymous fuel, which makes
space travel cheap. The exceedingly ambitious Black Body (1989) presents,
in terms readable as both sf and fantasy, the autobiography of an
18th-century witch, during which she makes it clear that witches are in
fact a kind of ALIEN species. The style in which the tale is told is both
estranged (because she is not human) and strained (because HCT seems
himself uneasy with some aspects of 18th-century diction); but the end
result is, at points, very impressive. [JC]
TURNER, EDGAR
(? -? ) UK writer whose LOST-WORLD adventure, The Armada Gold (1908) with
Reginald Hodder, is moderately exciting, but who remains of greater
interest for The Submarine Girl (1909), in which a super-submarine meets
up with the Flying Dutchman, awakens her crew, and arranges for their
resettlement in South Africa. [JC]
TURNER, FREDERICK
(1943- ) UK-born writer, in the USA from 1967, best known for his POETRY,
though his first book of sf interest, A Double Shadow (1978), is a novel.
Set on a FAR-FUTURE terraformed MARS, it depicts in dying-Earth flavours
the conflicts of two characters who represent deeply contrasting classes
of evolved humans; their strife leads them to transcend their volatile
human condition. THE NEW WORLD: AN EPIC POEM (1985) more daringly takes
the form of a book-length narrative poem. In a 24th-century balkanized USA
3 men vie to marry the heroine, herself stubbornly attached to an earlier
lover. After much adventuring and a series of disquisitions on the UTOPIAN
lifestyle achieved by the heroine's rural culture, the long tale ends in
the mass-suicide of the villainous fundamentalists who have been
threatening this society and with the resumption of her sanctioned
relationship. Cumbersome at certain points, the book works in the end as

an advocacy of and paean to the good life. Genesis: An Epic Poem (1988) is
perhaps less successful but, in its successful presentation of a
believable MARS, demonstrates its author's very considerable gifts. [JC]
TURNER, GEORGE (REGINALD)
(1916- ) Australian writer and sf critic. His connection with sf came
quite late in life, long after the publication 1959-67 of his first 5
(mainstream) novels. (There has since been a 6th, Transit of Cassidy
[1978].) He became well known for somewhat stern sf criticism in the
1970s, published in SF COMMENTARY, FOUNDATION and elsewhere, and ed The
View from the Edge (anth 1977), stories from a major Australian sf
workshop; GT then began writing sf himself. His first sf novel was Beloved
Son (1978 UK), in which an interstellar expedition returns to Earth in
AD2032 to find a diminished post- HOLOCAUST population with very few old
people, and a radically changed and somewhat merciless culture; the
scenario is complicated by developments in GENETIC ENGINEERING. The book
is perhaps ponderous, but was well received for its careful exploration of
some plausible moral problems of the NEAR FUTURE. The other novels in this
Ethical Culture series - different protagonists but a common background are Vaneglory (1981 UK) and Yesterday's Men (1983 UK). They are serious
and interesting, but the characteristic solemnity of their presentation
has alienated some. The first piece in the series was the story "In a
Petri Dish Upstairs" (1978), one of 8 stories collected in Pursuit of
Miracles (coll 1990).Astonishingly, for he was now in his 70s, GT then
changed gear. His next 2 novels are more fluid and spirited than his
earlier work, though sharing with them a (this time different)
21st-century setting. The Sea and Summer (1987 UK; vt Drowning Towers 1988
US), closely related to the earlier story "The Fittest" (1985), marked his
breakthrough into the US market, with a genuinely distinguished and deeply
imagined story of life in an overpopulated city in a future where
Australia and the world's littorals are being drowned by the slowly rising
ocean, a result of greenhouse-effect global warming; it won the ARTHUR C.
CLARKE AWARD in 1988. Brain Child (1985 in Strange Attractors, anth ed
Damien BRODERICK, as "On the Nursery Floor"; much exp1991 US) is a
thriller whose narrator slowly uncovers the story of a scientific
experiment in genetic manipulation designed to enhance INTELLIGENCE (of
which he is in part a product) and learns of the superhumans that may have
resulted. This study in the ethics of superiority ( SUPERMAN) incorporates
the story "On the Nursery Floor" (1985). In the autobiographical In the
Heart or In the Head (1984), GT describes his relationship with sf, and
displays a certain waspishness. He may be his country's most distinguished
sf writer. [PN]Other Works: Genetic Soldier (1994).See also: AUSTRALIA;
CHILDREN IN SF; ECOLOGY; ECONOMICS; FASTER THAN LIGHT.
TURNER TOMORROW AWARD
AWARDS.
TURTLEDOVE, HARRY (NORMAN)
(1949- ) US writer and academic who has made use of his field of
scholarship (his PhD was in Byzantine history) to create all his
best-known work. The fantasy Videssos Cycle - The Misplaced Legion (1987),
An Emperor for the Legion (1987), The Legion of Videssos (1987) and Swords

of the Legion (1987), with the Krispos sequence, Krispos Rising (1991),
Krispos of Videssos (1991) and Krispos the Emperor (1994), serving as a
prequel - follows the exploits of a Roman legion translated to the empire
of Videssos, situated in a world where MAGIC works and Byzantine history
is recapitulated. The Basil Argyros stories (1985-7), set in an ALTERNATE
WORLD in which Mahomet became a Christian saint - assembled as Agent of
Byzantium (coll of linked stories 1987) - follows the exploits of a
medieval secret agent who tends to cause scientific innovations against
both his brief and his intentions. Though these books focus on their
various charismatic and canny protagonists, HT's thorough understanding of
his source material gracefully infiltrates the fun and fantastication.HT
began writing work of genre interest with two SWORD-AND-SORCERY tales as
by Eric Iverson, Wereblood (1979) and its sequel Werenight (1979), and was
soon publishing sf and fantasy with some frequency, sometimes as by Eric
G. Iverson, some of his better non-series work being assembled as
Kaleidoscope (coll 1990). Noninterference (fixup 1988) - in which a
galactic survey team runs across ALIENS - and Earthgrip (fixup 1991) - in
which a reader of sf uses the expertise so gained to save alien races are, unusually for HT, straight sf books not set in alternate worlds; but
A Different Flesh (fixup 1988) places hominid survivors ( APES AND
CAVEMEN) in an alternate USA, and A World of Difference (1989) confronts
Soviet and US missions on an alternate Mars - here called Minerva populated by warring Minervans. HT has never failed to be exuberant when
he sees the chance; and although it may be argued that he has not yet
written any single book that has unduly stretched his very considerable
intelligence, the WorldWar sequence - comprising WorldWar: In the Balance
(1994) and WorldWar: Tilting the Balance (1995), with further volumes
projected - deftly, and at great length, unfolds an ALTERNATE WORLD WW2
scenario, in which the opposing forces are uneasily allied in opposition
to an invading force of comfortingly obtuse aliens, very clearly described
in strict accordance (so far) with the traditional sf view that invading
alien armies were almost certainly to be run by hidebound, reptile-thick
bureaucrats. HT won a 1994 Best Novella HUGO Award for"Down in the
Bottomlands" (1992). [JC]Other works: The Pugnacious Peacemaker (1990 chap
dos), a sequel to L. Sprague DE CAMP's The Wheels of If (1940 Unknown;
1990 chap dos), which precedes it in this sequentially printed DOS volume.
See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.
TURTON, GODFREY (EDMUND)
(1901- ) UK writer of fantasies like There Was Once a City (1927), The
Devil's Churchyard (1970 US) and The Festival of Flora: A Story of Ancient
and Modern Times (1972 US). He remains of some sf interest for The Moon
Dies (1972), a book-length blank-verse narrative of the destruction of
Earth's first moon (broken apart by gravity), the death of human
civilization, and the survival of Noah. [JC]
TUTTLE, LISA
(1952- ) US-born writer, in the UK from late 1980, married to Christopher
PRIEST 1981-7. An early member of the CLARION SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS'
WORKSHOP, she very rapidly established her name as a writer in short
forms, beginning with her first story, "Stranger in the House", for Robin

Scott WILSON's Clarion II (anth 1972), and winning the 1974 JOHN W.
CAMPBELL AWARD for Best New Writer. Her stories very frequently make
quietly devastating use of genre devices - often those associated with
HORROR - to convey FEMINIST lessons about the relationships between men
and women ( WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION), though she tends to
allow the political implications of these lessons to reside, tacitly,
within her texts. Some of her better stories have been assembled in A Nest
of Nightmares (coll 1986), A Spaceship Built of Stone and Other Stories
(coll 1987) and Memories of the Body: Tales of Desire and Transformation
(coll 1992). Her first novel, Windhaven (1975 ASF; exp 1981 US) with
George R.R. MARTIN, depicts life on a lost colony planet whose feudal
culture is focused on the use of artificial (but functional) wings. Most
of her subsequent books - like Familiar Spirit (1983 US), Gabriel (1987)
and Lost Futures (1992), whose heroine is thrust into several ALTERNATE
WORLDS - are fantasies with strong elements of horror, idiomatically and
cleanly told, in a level and foreboding voice, and tending to depict
worlds which, in visual terms, seem both sinister and washed. More and
more, though commercial sagacity seems sometimes to have guided her
tongue, she has given a sense of having revelations in store. She refused
a 1981 NEBULA for "The Bone Flute". [JC]Other works: Catwitch (1983), a
juvenile fantasy; Angela's Rainbow (1983), associational; Skin of the
Soul: New Horror Stories by Women (anth 1990).Nonfiction: Children's
Literary Houses (1984) with Rosalind Ashe; Encyclopedia of Feminism
(1986).See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; ESCHATOLOGY; GOTHIC SF.
TWAIN, MARK
Pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), US writer and
humorist. It is often not appreciated, although Philip Jose FARMER makes
him the central character of his RECURSIVE The Fabulous Riverboat (1971),
that a significant portion of MT's output - including what is at least his
second-best novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889; vt A
Yankee at the Court of King Arthur 1889 UK) - may be classified as sf.
Some of Edgar Allan POE's sf was humorous but MT, drawing on the
traditions of the literary hoax and the tall tale, was the first US writer
fully to exploit the possibilities for HUMOUR of sf, inaugurating a rich
but narrow vein that finds its current apotheosis in the work of Kurt
VONNEGUT Jr.One of MT's notebooks indicates that, like Poe, he was
interested in the possibilities of ballooning, and in 1868 began a story
about a Frenchman's BALLOON journey from Paris to a prairie in Illinois,
leaving it unfinished because of the US publication of Jules VERNE's Cinq
semaines en ballon (1863; trans "William Lackland" as Five Weeks in a
Balloon 1869 US). However, he returned to the topic in an unpublished
manuscript entitled "A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage" (1876) and in
Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), in which the hero crosses the Atlantic by
balloon and ends up in Cairo.Also essentially humorous is a skewed UTOPIA,
"The Curious Republic of Gondour" (1875), in which certain classes of
people, including the more intelligent, have more votes than others (cf
Vonnegut's antithetical "Harrison Bergeron" [1961]). An equally skewed
view of another ideal state is offered in Captain Stormfield's Visit to
Heaven (written 1870s or later; 1909). This materialist heaven is located
in interstellar space, through which Stormfield sails with an increasing

number of companions rather in the manner of the narrator in Olaf
STAPLEDON's STAR MAKER (1937). To begin with, Stormfield races a comet, a
not unlikely invention for a writer whose arrival and departure from Earth
coincided with the timetable of Halley's Comet (a fragment from the 1880s
is entitled "A Letter from the Comet"). MT's interest in astronomical
distances, evident elsewhere, is particularly apparent here.A parallel
interest in vast temporal perspectives and geological ages is conspicuous
in the many pieces that constitute MT's down-home version of the Genesis
story, including his practical speculation concerning the daily lives of
ADAM AND EVE in "Papers from the Adam Family" (written 1870s or later;
1962) and "Letters from the Earth" (written 1909; 1962). A considerably
darkened sense of time and cyclical history informs "The Secret History of
Eddypus, the World-Empire" (written 1901-2; 1972), MT's horrific but
uncompleted vision of a future, 1000 years hence, in which Mary Baker
Eddy's Christian Science rules the world, and MT himself, the potential
saviour, is confused with Adam; MT's acerbic views on Eddy (1821-1910) are
fully presented in his Christian Science (1907).Given his fascination with
time and history, it is not surprising that MT's best and most influential
work of sf, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, should be
concerned with TIME TRAVEL. The tale which seems to have inspired A
Connecticut Yankee, Max ADELER's "Professor Baffin's Adventures" (1880),
is an implicit time-travel story, but Twain's novel may be the first
genuine time-travel story (the destructive ending takes care of the
anachronism issue) and certainly established the pattern for that kind of
sf (predominantly US) in which the hero, more or less single-handedly,
affects the destiny of an entire world or Universe (cf L. Sprague DE
CAMP's LEST DARKNESS FALL [1941]). While writing A Connecticut Yankee, MT,
who like his Promethean hero was gripped by the march of invention - his
own inventions included a history game and a notebook with ears, and he
anticipated radio and tv - became disastrously involved financially with
the Paige typesetter. That was one reason why A Connecticut Yankee is the
transitional work between the light and the dark in MT's corpus. Many of
the gloomy, quasi-Darwinist, philosophical ideas explored in such non-sf
works as What is Man? (first version written 1898; 1906) - the answer
being a machine - and Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts
(written 1897-1903; fraudulent composite text 1916; 1969), which claim
that everything is determined and that reality is all a dream anyway,
figure prominently in A Connecticut Yankee.The same ideas pervade MT's
explorations in microcosmic worlds ( GREAT AND SMALL) in 2 extended but
unfinished works: "The Great Dark" (A.B. PAINE's title; written 1898;
1962) is about an apocalyptic voyage in a drop of water (cf Fitz-James
O'BRIEN's "The Diamond Lens" [1858]), while the narrator of "Three
Thousand Years among the Microbes" (written 1905; 1967), reduced to
microscopic size by a wizard, explores the world-body of a diseased tramp,
Blitzowski (one of the inhabitants is called Lemuel Gulliver, and the
influence of Jonathan SWIFT is otherwise apparent); it is implied that the
Universe we inhabit is actually God's diseased body. (This kind of
macrocosm/microcosm relationship is hinted at in MT's 1883 notebook
outline for what, in anticipation of the GENERATION-STARSHIP theme, might
best be called a generation-iceberg story.) In The American Claimant
(1892): Colonel Mulberry Sellers claims, among other inventions, to have

perfected the "Materializer", which can reconstruct the dead from whatever
original atoms remain, and to be able to affect the climate by shifting
sunspots.If travel or communication can be managed instantaneously (and in
A Connecticut Yankee and the microscopic-world stories the transference is
indeed instantaneous), it seems logical that some loss of faith in the
physicality of existence might occur, augmenting MT's notion that reality
is insubstantial, a vagrant thought, a dream. In this connection, and as
evidence of MT's concern with psychic possibilities (including the
whirligig of schizophrenia), we should note the essays "Mental Telegraphy"
(1891) and "Mental Telegraphy Again" (1895), which argue for the reality
of ESP. Reference is made to the English Society for Psychical Research,
and it is suggested that something called a "phrenophone" might
communicate thoughts instantaneously just as the telephone communicates
words. In "From the 'London Times' of 1904" (1898) - a newspaper hoax like
"The Petrified Man" - another futuristic invention, called the
"telelectroscope", a visual telephone, is used seemingly to disprove a
murder. But it is precisely the divorce between image and reality afforded
by this kind of instantaneous communication which causes ontological
anxiety, and so the suspected murderer is executed anyway. [DK]About the
author: The Science Fiction of Mark Twain (coll 1984) ed David KETTERER;
New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and
American Literature (1974) by David Ketterer; "An Innocent in Time: Mark
Twain in King Arthur's Court" by Philip Klass (William TENN),
Extrapolation #16, 1974; "Hank Morgan in the Garden of Forking Paths: A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court as Alternative History" by
William J. Collins, Modern Fiction Studies #32 (1986); "'Professor
Baffin's Adventures' by Max Adeler: The Inspiration for A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur's Court?" by Ketterer, Mark Twain Journal (1986);
Mark Twain and Science: Adventures of a Mind (1988) by Sherwood Cummings;
The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel to the Past in
Science Fiction (1990) by Bud Foote; the Mark Twain entries in
Science-Fiction: The Early Years (dated 1990 but 1991) by Everett F.
BLEILER.See also: DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; EDISONADE; HISTORY OF SF;
MUSIC; POCKET UNIVERSE; SHARED WORLDS.
TWEED, THOMAS F(REDERICK)
(1890-1940) UK publisher and writer in whose first sf novel, Rinehard: A
Melodrama of the Nineteen-Thirties (1933; vt Gabriel Over the White House:
A Novel of the Presidency 1933 US), filmed as Gabriel Over the White House
(1933), a NEAR-FUTURE US President, after a car crash, begins to transform
society, providentially destroys a Japanese war fleet through the use of
air power, and - after recovering his old personality - dies before he can
dismantle the new world order. Blind Mouths (1934; vt Destiny's Man 1935
US) less interestingly posits the collapse of society. Both books are
written with smooth gravity. [JC]
20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH
Film (1957). Columbia. Prod Charles H. Schneer. Dir Nathan Juran,
starring William Hopper, Joan Taylor, Frank Puglia, John Zaremba.
Screenplay Bob Williams, Christopher Knopf, based on a story by Charlott
Knight, Ray HARRYHAUSEN. 84 mins. B/w.In this typical MONSTER MOVIE a

spaceship returns to Earth from Venus carrying a strange egg which hatches
a humanoid/reptilian creature, an Ymir. The Ymir grows and grows until,
bigger than an elephant, it escapes into Rome and is trapped and killed on
top of the Colosseum. The model animation is pretty good, but the trouble
with the Schneer/Harryhausen collaborations - designed solely to showcase
Harryhausen's skills - is invariably a poor script, so that the special
effects exist within an intellectual vacuum. No reason for this
sulphur-eating alien's arbitrary destructiveness is given. A novelization
by Henry SLESAR filled the only issue of AMAZING STORIES SCIENCE FICTION
NOVELS (1957). [JB/PN]
27TH DAY, THE
Film (1957). Romson Productions/Columbia. Dir William Asher, starring
Gene Barry, Valerie French, George Voskovec, Arnold Moss, Stefan Schnabel.
Screenplay John MANTLEY, based on his The Twenty-Seventh Day (1956). 75
mins. B/w.This sf morality tale - there were several such in the 1950s is more optimistic about mankind's inherent goodness than most. An alien
gives each of 5 people, in 5 different countries, a box of capsules (which
will lose their power after 27 days) capable of destroying all human - but
no other - life on any one continent. The boxes will open only for the
recipients, on whom, especially the Russian, great pressure is put to use
the capsules to wipe out enemy states. The recipients all act nobly (one
suicides) and finally learn that the capsules have a second power: they
will selectively destroy "every enemy of peace and freedom". They are used
thus, several thousand bad people die, and only good people (the vast
majority, in this breathtakingly simplistic scenario) are left. This was
the second sf movie, the first being The DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951),
to advocate mass murder as a way of eliminating warmongers. [JB/PN]
20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA
Film (1954). Walt Disney. Dir Richard Fleischer, starring James Mason,
Kirk Douglas, Paul Lukas, Peter Lorre. Screenplay Earl Felton, based on
Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870; trans as Twenty Thousand Leagues
under the Seas 1872 UK) by Jules VERNE. 127 mins. Colour.This early Walt
Disney live-action film was one of his best and most lavish. Fleischer has
since returned to sf themes with FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966) and SOYLENT GREEN
(1973), but not so successfully. Nemo is an anarchist scientist who hates
war; he uses his submarine, the Nautilus (here nuclear powered), to sink
warships. The script is rather lame, though James Mason gives a stirring
performance as the obsessed Nemo, who fights a lone battle against the
world before being betrayed by 3 shipwreck survivors (including a
displeasing harpoonist played hammily by Kirk Douglas) whom he has taken
on board. He expires in style, at the centre of a self-made holocaust that
envelops both his private island and the Nautilus before, significantly,
forming a mushroom-shaped cloud. The special effects are good (and won an
Oscar), especially notable being Bob Mattey's mechanically operated giant
squid; the Nautilus itself with its ornate Victoriana is beautifully
designed by Harper Goff.There had been 3 previous film versions of Verne's
novel: a mysterious 1905 Biograph production (18 mins) that does not
appear in Biograph records, a French one made by George MELIES in 1907 (18
mins) and a US one, with fine underwater photography, written/dir Stuart

Paton in 1916 (113 mins). [JB]
TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING
(vt Nuclear Countdown) Film (1977) Geria Productions/Hemdale. Dir Robert
Aldrich, starring Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Paul Winfield, Charles
Durning, Melvyn Douglas. Screenplay Ronald M. Cohen, Edward Huebsch, based
on Viper 3 by Walter Wager (1924- ). 146 mins (cut to 122 mins). Colour.In
this borderline-sf movie, set in 1981, a renegade US general takes over a
missile base and threatens to initiate WWIII unless the President reveals
to the nation the contents of a secret Pentagon file concerning the
Vietnam War. The uncut version reveals how the Pentagon deliberately
became involved in Vietnam to prove to the world that the USA was willing
to sacrifice thousands of men, thus giving extra credibility to its
willingness to fight a conventional war. These sequences disappeared when
24 minutes were cut by the distributor, ostensibly to "speed it up". What
is left is a tautly directed thriller, though some of Aldrich's
characteristic cynicism - reminiscent of his KISS ME DEADLY (1955) remains (the Pentagon is victorious, destroying even the President to
protect its secrets). The skilful use of a split-screen technique to
create tension and moments of chaos and confusion justifies it as a
legitimate cinematic tool. [JB/PN]
TWILIGHT ZONE, THE
1. US tv series (1959-64). A Coyuga Production/MGM. Created Rod SERLING,
also executive prod. Prods were Buck Houghton, Herbert Hirschman, Bert
Granet, William Froug. Writers included Serling (91 episodes), Charles
BEAUMONT, Ray BRADBURY, Earl Hamner Jr, George Clayton JOHNSON, Richard
MATHESON. Dirs included Jack Smight, Stuart Rosenberg, John Brahm, Ralph
Nelson, Buzz Kulik, Boris Sagal, Lamont Johnson, Elliot Silverstein, Don
Siegel, William Friedkin, Richard Donner, Joseph Newman, Ted Post. 5
seasons, 156 episodes (138 each 25 mins, plus 18 in season 4 each 50
mins). B/w.TTZ, hosted by Serling with a rasping voice and a thin black
tie, was an anthology series - perhaps the most famous ever on tv. Most of
the playlets were pure fantasy, but a number were sf. The very first
episode, "Where is Everybody?" by Serling, has a young man waking in a
small town to find it deserted, with signs that the inhabitants had left
only moments before. The denouement reveals that the situation has been
implanted in his mind as part of a study conducted by space scientists
into human reactions to loneliness. Sting-in-the-tail plotting was
standard on TTZ.Overall the series was thoughtful and fairly original,
though it certainly had its fair share of CLICHES. Episodes varied in
quality, many of the better sf ones being written by Matheson: 3 of these
were "Steel" (1963), in which Lee Marvin is the manager of a robot boxer
who is forced to take his machine's place in the ring after it breaks
down, "Little Girl Lost" (1962), about a child who falls into a
dimensional warp under her bed, so that her parents can hear her crying
but cannot reach her, and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (1963), with William
SHATNER as a man on an airliner who keeps seeing a mysterious creature invisible to others - playing on the wing; as in most of Matheson's work,
PARANOIA is eventually vindicated and the creature is proved to exist.
Another sf episode was Bradbury's "I Sing the Body Electric!" (1962),

about a robot grandmother.Short-story versions of some of his TTZ scripts
appeared in 3 books by (or ostensibly by) Serling: Stories from The
Twilight Zone * (coll 1960), More Stories from The Twilight Zone * (coll
1961) and New Stories from The Twilight Zone * (coll 1962) - the latter
two possibly being by Walter B. GIBSON - with selections appearing in From
The Twilight Zone * (coll 1962) and all 3 being reprinted in 1 vol as
Stories from The Twilight Zone * (omni 1986). Two collections ghosted by
Walter B. Gibson are Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone * (coll 1963) and Rod
Serling's Twilight Zone Revisited * (coll 1964), both assembled in Rod
Serling's Twilight Zone * (omni 1984). A book about the series is Twilight
Zone Companion (1982; rev as The Twilight Zone Companion: Second Edition
1989) by Marc Scott Zicree. TTZ received 3 HUGOS (1960-62) as Best
Dramatic Presentation.TTZ was fondly remembered - indeed, it could hardly
have been forgotten, the episodes being repeated endlessly in syndication
for the next 20 years. This resulted in an anthology feature film prod and
partly dir Steven SPIELBERG, Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), mostly
updatings of some of the old scripts. Then came a new TTZ tv series (2).
The title was used also for a horror/fantasy magazine, Rod Serling's The
Twilight Zone Magazine (1981-9), whose editors included T.E.D. Klein
(1947- ) and Tappan King (1950- ), and which published some weird fiction
of high quality.2. US tv series (1985-7). CBS TV. Based on 1. Executive
prod Philip DeGuere. Supervising prod James Crocker. Prod Harvey Frand.
Creative consultant Harlan ELLISON. Story editor Rockne S. O'Bannon.
Writers included Ray BRADBURY, Alan BRENNERT, Crocker, DeGuere, Ellison,
David GERROLD, George R.R. MARTIN, O'Bannon, Michael REAVES, Carter
SCHOLZ. Dirs included Wes Craven, Tommy Lee Wallace, Theodore Flicker, Joe
DANTE, Gerd Oswald, Martha Coolidge, Allan Arkush, Peter Medak, Jim
McBride, Paul Lynch, Noel Black. 2 seasons. Season 1: 24 50min episodes,
each containing 2-4 stories. Season 2: 12 episodes, some 50min and some
25min. There were 80 stories in the 36 episodes. Colour.In the mid-1980s
US tv turned back, for a while, to the anthology format, especially for
series of fantastic stories - AMAZING STORIES was another. Few had any
prolonged success. This new series of TTZ dramatized several well known sf
stories, including "The Star" (1955) by Arthur C. CLARKE and stories by
Robert SILVERBERG and Theodore STURGEON, but the majority of playlets were
based on original scripts, some also by sf writers, though as with the
original series the emphasis was on fantasy rather than sf. Good directors
were used and the quality was quite high, but the series was axed after 2
seasons. TTZ was quickly re-edited into half-hour segments for
syndication, when a further 30 stories were dramatized (executive prods
Mark Shelmerdine and Michael MacMillan), with substantially lower budgets,
and shown along with the 80 stories from the 1985-7 series. [PN/JB]
TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE
Joe DANTE; George MILLER; Steven SPIELBERG; The TWILIGHT ZONE .
TWO COMPLETE SCIENCE-ADVENTURE BOOKS
US PULP MAGAZINE.Thrice yearly, 11 issues Winter 1950-Spring 1954,
published by Wings Publishing Co.; ed Jerome BIXBY (Winter 1950-Summer
1951), Malcolm Reiss (Winter 1951-Summer 1953) and Katharine Daffron
(Winter 1953-Spring 1954). Issues numbered #1-#11.A companion magazine to

PLANET STORIES, TCSAB was originally intended to reprint in cheap magazine
format recently published sf novels; #1 contained Isaac ASIMOV's Pebble in
the Sky (1950) and L. Ron HUBBARD's novella "The Kingslayer" (title story
of The Kingslayer, coll 1949). This policy proved impossible to sustain;
although there were a few more reprints, the majority of subsequent
stories were original. These included: Arthur C. CLARKE's "The Seeker of
the Sphinx" (Spring 1951; vt "The Road to the Sea"); James BLISH's The
Warriors of Day (Summer 1951 as "Sword of Xota"; 1953) and "Sargasso of
Lost Cities" (Spring 1953), one of his Okie series; L. Sprague DE CAMP's
"The Tritonian Ring" (Winter 1951; title story of The Tritonian Ring coll
1953); and John BRUNNER's first (acknowledged) story, The Space-Time
Juggler (Summer 1953 as "The Wanton of Argus" by Kilian Houston Brunner;
1963 chap dos as JB). TCSAB did not contain any editorial matter and was
unusual among pulp sf magazines in seldom printing readers' letters. [MJE]
TWONKY, THE
Film (1953). Arch Oboler Productions/United Artists. Dir Arch Oboler,
starring Hans Conreid, Billy Lynn, Gloria Blondell, Janet Warren and Ed
Max. Screenplay Oboler, based on "The Twonky" (1942) by Lewis Padgett
(Henry KUTTNER). 72 mins. B/w.After his sanctimonious FIVE (1951), about
survivors of nuclear war, Oboler chose another sf subject for his next
film. A creature from the future invades a tv set, bringing it alive. The
set is soon running its owner's life, scuttling about doing household jobs
by means of an electronic beam, but later becoming censorious and
dictatorial, hypnotizing those who attempt to stop it. Kuttner's witty
story collapses under the weight of Oboler's laborious script and the
inadequate special effects. Tv was a much-hated medium in Hollywood at
that time, and it was only appropriate that Oboler, an old-time radio
producer, should have launched this symbolic attack. The film was
unreleased for 17 months, then flopped. [JB/PN]
2,000 AD
UK weekly sf COMIC-strip magazine, 32-36pp, published by IPC from 26 Feb,
1977, and then from 1987 by Fleetway. Eds have included Kelvin Gosnell,
Steve McManus, Richard Burton. Throughout, the editor has been presented
as an ALIEN called Tharg, and some very entertaining and original sf short
stories have appeared under the title Tharg's Future Shocks. Early issues
(referred to as "progs") were printed on cheap pulp paper with colour for
the front and back and for a centre-spread. Continued success eventually
justified a "new look", with better-quality paper and printing, including
50-60 per cent in colour. Many of 2,000 AD's contributing artists and
writers have achieved transatlantic success. They include Simon Bisley,
Brian BOLLAND, Dave GIBBONS, JUDGE DREDD writers Alan Grant and John
Wagner, Cam Kennedy, Alan MOORE, Grant Morrison, Kevin O'Niell and Bryan
Talbot. The magazine has featured a number of high-quality sf strips,
including DAN DARE (from #1, 26 Feb 1977), Judge Dredd (from #2, 5 Mar
1977), Robo-Hunter (from #76, 5 Aug 1978), Strontium Dog (from #86, 14 Oct
1978), ABC Warriors (from #119, 30 June 1979), The VCs (from #140, 24 Nov
1979), Stainless Steel Rat (also from #140), Slaine (from #330, 20 Aug
1983), Ballad of Halo Jones (from #376, 7 July 1984), Anderson Psi
Division (from #416, 4 May 1985) and Bad Company (from #500, 13 Dec 1986).

Many 2,000 AD strips have been reprinted in the UK as GRAPHIC NOVELS and
also in the USA in comic-book format (with artwork stretched lengthways to
suit the taller page shape) under the Eagle Comics imprint (subsequently
continued by Quality Comics and later by Fleetway). There have been
several related hardback publications in the form of Annuals and
Yearbooks, containing occasional reprints from the weekly but mostly new
material of lower quality. A monthly black-and-white title with a glossy
cover, Best of 2,000 AD, has been published since Oct 1985. [RT]
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
Film (1968). Prod/dir Stanley KUBRICK, starring Keir Dullea, Gary
Lockwood. Screenplay Kubrick, Arthur C. CLARKE, based loosely on Clarke's
"The Sentinel" (1951). 160 mins, cut to 141 mins. Colour. Originally in
Cinerama.This was the most ambitious sf film of the 1960s and perhaps
ever. Kubrick's unique production, which received a 1969 HUGO, takes
several traditional sf themes - including the idea, derived from Charles
FORT, that "we are property" - and spins from them a web of pessimistic
METAPHYSICS. In prehistoric times the mysterious arrival of an alien
artefact, a black monolith, triggers primitive ape people into becoming
tool-users; the first tool is a weapon. The transition to the AD2001
sequence - marked by the resonant image of a bone weapon thrown (in slow
motion) into the air and becoming a spaceship - suggests that, for all the
awesome complexity of our tools, humanity itself is still in a primitive
stage. The idea of human deficiency in the 21st century is reinforced by
the deliberate banality of the dialogue and the sterility of the settings;
ironically the most "human" character is a neurotic computer, itself
subject to Original Sin, HAL 9000. A second monolith discovered on the
Moon beams a signal at one of the moons of Jupiter and a spaceship, the
Discovery, is sent to investigate, but, through HAL having a nervous
breakdown, only one of the astronauts (Dullea) survives to reach the area.
There he embarks (through a "Star Gate") on a prolonged, disorienting trip
through what appears to be inner time and INNER SPACE, pausing to meet his
dying self in an 18th-century bedroom, and becoming the foetus of a
Superbeing, an optimistic apotheosis - with its suggestion of a
transcendent EVOLUTION, directed by never-seen ALIENS, or perhaps God - in
an otherwise dark film.Aside from its intellectual audacity, 2001 is
remarkable for a visual splendour that depends in part on astonishingly
painstaking special effects. Conceived by Kubrick - notoriously a
perfectionist - and achieved by many technicians (pointing forward to the
huge teams that would work on the special-effects blockbusters of a decade
later), these mostly employ traditional techniques. Instead of such modern
automatic matteing processes as the blue-screen system, hand-drawn mattes
were produced for each effects frame at the cost of two years' time and
much money, which is why this method is now rarely used. Innovative in
another way is the setting of romantic MUSIC by Richard Strauss, Johann
Strauss and Gyorgy Ligeti against much of the technological action, giving
the paradoxical feeling of a cool romanticism and reinforcing the film's
ambiguities. The present 141min version, cut from the 160min preview
length, should be viewed in the full wide-screen 70mm format (2001 was one
of the early films designed for Cinerama).The tension between Kubrick's
love of oblique allusion and Clarke's open rationalism is resolved in the

latter's book of the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey * (1968), whichwritten
after the film's completion - provides clear explanations in Clarke's
usual manner. He described his connection with the film in The Lost Worlds
of 2001 (coll 1972), which also prints alternative script versions of key
scenes. The film sequel, based on another Clarke novel, was 2010 (1984).
[PN/JB]See also: COMICS; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; GODS AND DEMONS;
HISTORY
OF SF; INTELLIGENCE; LINGUISTICS; ORIGIN OF MAN; SPACE FLIGHT; SPACE
HABITATS.
2010
Film (1984). MGM/UA. Prod/dir/photographed/written Peter Hyams, starring
Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, Helen Mirren, Bob Balaban, Keir Dullea.
Screenplay based on 2010: Odyssey Two (1982) by Arthur C. CLARKE. 116
mins. Colour.Nine years after the events of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968),
a joint Soviet-US space mission in a Russian spacecraft is sent to recover
information from the Discovery, which in the previous film had been left
in orbit around Jupiter with its computer, HAL 9000, disabled. In a
remarkably thin storyline the crew reach the Discovery and are contacted
by the ALIEN monolith, their intercourse being mediated through the
"ghost" of Dave Bowman (Dullea), who was last seen transfigured to a Star
Child in 2001: "Something wonderful is going to happen." They then go home
again, helped by the resuscitated HAL. Countless monoliths invest Jupiter
and turn it into a second sun. Homo sapiens is given the Solar System to
populate, except for Europa (one of Jupiter's moons), which is off limits,
and on which a new monolith awaits . . .Devoid of both narrative thrust
and any interaction of characters that transcends cliche, the film despite some rather good space scenes - could never have succeeded. The
old pulp-sf notion of Peace on Earth (where WWIII may be about to break
out) being restored by the intervention of a godlike figure Out There is,
to some viewers, insulting mysticism. The approach of Clarke and Hyams to
the metaphysical is a lot less magical and delicate (and ambiguous) than
was that of Clarke and Stanley KUBRICK. This time the alien superbeings
pretty well hit us over the head with a truncheon. The film was awarded a
1985 HUGO. [PN]
TYERS, KATHY
Working name of US writer Kathleen Moore Tyers (1952- ). She began
writing with her Firebird sequence,Firebird (1987) and Fusion Fire (1988),
set in an interplanetary-romance venue replete with colourful planetary
cultures, an overarching Federation, space invasions, palace politics and
the discovery of budding PSI POWERS in the eponymous protagonist, a
princess on an evil planet. Her route to psionic maturity and marital
happiness with a telepathic intelligence officer from a neighbouring world
is depicted with cluttered vigour. In Crystal Witness (1989) a female
criminal, exiled to another world, must come triumphantly to terms with
her new circumstances. In Shivering World (1991) yet another arrival into
an alien world must deal with the TERRAFORMING problems of some settlers.
KT is an active writer, and may settle into significant work, though Star
Wars: The Truce at Bakura* (1994) does not, perhaps, mark the way forward.
[JC]

TYLER, THEODORE
Pseudonym of US writer Edward William Ziegler (1930-1993), whose The Man
whose Name Wouldn't Fit, or The Case of Cartwright-Chickering (1968) deals
humorously with the computerized regimentation of a NEAR-FUTURE society.
[JC]
TYMN, MARSHALL B(ENTON)
(1937- ) US editor, academic, sf/fantasy bibliographer and editor, whose
work concentrates on the pedagogical implications of both sf and fantasy (
SF IN THE CLASSROOM). After a first, short, self-published bibliographical
guide - A Directory of Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing Houses and
Book Dealers (1974 chap) - MBT issued a stream of helpful material,
including A Research Guide to Science Fiction Studies: An Annotated
Checklist of Primary and Secondary Sources (1977) with L.W. CURREY and
Roger C. SCHLOBIN, Recent Critical Studies on Fantasy Literature: An
Annotated Checklist (1978 chap), A Basic Reference Shelf for Science
Fiction Teachers (1978 chap), The Science Fiction Reference Book (anth
1981) and its abridged successor, Science Fiction: A Teacher's Guide ?
Resource Book (anth 1988), and A Teacher's Guide to Science Fiction (1981
chap; exp 1982 chap). Of somewhat wider interest is the Year's Scholarship
sequence of annotated checklists, appearing first in the journal
EXTRAPOLATION, these instalments being incorporated in the book-form
publication of the series, which comprised The Year's Scholarship in
Science Fiction and Fantasy: 1972-1975 (1979) with Roger C. Schlobin, The
Year's Scholarship in Science Fiction and Fantasy: 1976-1979 (1983) with
Schlobin, The Year's Scholarship in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
Literature: 1980 (1983), The Year's Scholarship in Science Fiction,
Fantasy, and Horror Literature: 1981 (1984) and The Year's Scholarship in
Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Literature: 1982 (1985). After this
last volume the series was again published in Extrapolation through
coverage year 1987 (in 1988). A successor series, Year's Scholarship in
Fantastic Literature and the Arts, began in 1990 in JOURNAL OF THE
FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS, with coverage year 1988, but further work was
hampered by the aftereffects of a serious auto accident in late 1989.Of
even broader potential interest were several BIBLIOGRAPHIES of the genre
itself, including: American Fantasy ?
Bibliography of Works Published in the United States, 1948-1973 (1979);
Index to Stories in Thematic Anthologies of SF (1979) with L.W. Currey,
Martin H. GREENBERG and Joseph D. OLANDER; Fantasy Literature: A Core
Collection and Reference Guide (1979) with Robert H. Boyer (1937- ) and
Kenneth J. Zahorski (1939- ); Horror Literature: A Core Collection and
Reference Guide (1981); Survey of Science Fiction Literature:
Bibliographical Supplement (1982); and - perhaps most interesting of all
his work - Science Fiction, Fantasy ?
Mike ASHLEY, a comprehensive history of magazines in the field, arranged
as an encyclopedia. Though MBT's coverage of sf and fantasy has sometimes
been partial, with some of his checklists eventually being supplanted by
fuller works from Hal W. HALL, Robert REGINALD and others, MBT was for two
decades an essential figure, and did much to focus the field for the
academic world, not least through his editorial work with GREENWOOD PRESS.
In 1990 he was given the PILGRIM AWARD for sf scholarship, his wife

accepting on his behalf. [JC]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT
SF; FANTASY; SF MAGAZINES.
TYSON, J(OHN) AUBREY
(1870-1930) US writer whose The Scarlet Tanager (1922), set in 1930,
rousingly puts a submarine pirate in opposition to a tough US intelligence
agent. A UK agent, the actress of the title, also becomes involved. Sf
devices include sonar and an invisible ray. [JC]Other work: The Barge of
Haunted Lives (coll of linked stories 1923).

SF?
UCHUJIN
Fanzine. JAPAN; Takumi SHIBANO.
UFO
UK tv series (1970-73). Century 21 Pictures Ltd Production/ITC. Created
Gerry and Sylvia ANDERSON with Reg Hill. Executive prod Gerry Anderson.
Prod Reg Hill. Script ed Tony Barwick. Dirs included Anderson, David
Tomblin, Alan Perry, Dave Lane, Ken Turner. Writers included Barwick,
Tomblin. Special effects Derek Meddings. 26 50min episodes. Colour.Before
this series the Andersons had been best known for their sf tv puppet
series, such as THUNDERBIRDS. In this first live-action tv series from
them the actors certainly resembled puppets, and the make-up, apparently
deliberately, reinforced the effect. Set in the NEAR FUTURE (1980), UFO
tells how SHADO (Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organization), headed
by Commander Straker (Ed Bishop), fights against hostile, telepathic
aliens in flying saucers ( UFOS). Meddings's special effects were
impressive, though some of the props, costumes, etc., were recycled from
the Andersons' first live-action production, the film DOPPELGANGER (1969;
vt Journey to the Far Side of the Sun). The bland scripts, though more
sophisticated than those of the SuperMarionation puppet series, were
typical of Anderson productions (see also SPACE 1999), possibly because
the Andersons underestimated children's intelligence. Many of the stories,
about elusive disguised aliens, were reminiscent of episodes of The
INVADERS (1967-8). Though there were only 26 episodes, lack of enthusiasm
by the commercial networks led to a gap of more than 2 years between first
and last. Ties are UFO * (1970; vt UFO-1: Flesh Hunters 1973 US) and UFO 2
* (1971; vt UFO-2: Sporting Blood 1973 US) by Robert Miall (Jonathan
BURKE). [PN/JB]
UFO INCIDENT, THE
Made-for-tv film (1975). Universal/NBC. Dir Richard A. Colla, starring
James Earl Jones, Estelle Parsons, Bernard Hughes, Beeson Carroll, Dick
O'Neill. Screenplay S. Lee Pogostin, Hesper Anderson, based on The
Interrupted Journey (1966) by John G. Fuller. 100 mins. Colour.James Earl
Jones (the voice behind Darth Vader in STAR WARS) tried for years to
secure the finance to make a film about this supposed UFO incident (
UFOS), which took place in 1961. A couple, Betty and Barney Hill,
encounter a UFO while out driving. Subsequent nightmares and feelings of
anxiety lead them to seek psychiatric help which reveals, through
hypnosis, that they possess unconscious memories of being taken and

examined for 2 hours by aliens. It is unusually well made and
intelligently acted for a tv movie. [JB/PN]
UFOS
A common item of terminology, both inside and outside sf, UFO is an
acronym for Unidentified Flying Object. In the 1st edn of this
encyclopedia, the subject of ufology was discussed under the heading
"Flying Saucers". The change of title reflects the fact that ufology
itself has changed over the past couple of decades, to the extent that it
must now be thought of almost as 3 separate disciplines, one of which
(concerning flying saucers) is a straightforward PSEUDO-SCIENCE, one of
which is a hybrid of aspects of geology and meteorology, and one of which
deals with psychology.The term "flying saucer" was born in 1947 when the
US businessman Kenneth Arnold, while flying his private plane near Mt
Rainier, Washington State, saw what he perceived as 9 disc-like objects
flying in formation nearby; he described their flight as being "like a
saucer would if you skipped it across the water". Sightings continued
through the late 1940s and the 1950s, becoming ever more elaborate and
intimate, and still continue today, decades later, albeit not at the same
feverish frequency as during the height of the Saucer Craze. Reports came,
and still come, from all over the world. Early books on the subject
include The Flying Saucers are Real (1950) by Donald E. Keyhoe (1897-1988)
and Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953; rev 1970) by George Adamski
(1891-1965) and Desmond LESLIE. The latter book marked a new development,
in that Adamski claimed not only to have seen flying saucers but to have
interacted with their ALIEN occupants.However, it would be wrong to think
that flying saucers are solely a 20th-century phenomenon. During Winter
and Spring 1896-7 there were widespread reports of an airship being
sighted over North America: it crossed the USA roughly west to east over a
5-month period. The situation was complicated by hoaxers making false
statements and even sending up appropriately styled hot-air balloons, but
this cannot account for the bulk of the sightings; nor can it explain why
this particular flap started. It ended only when Thomas Alva Edison
(1847-1931) firmly denounced the whole affair as a farrago. Clearly this
was a flying-saucer flap in every respect except that people "saw"
airships rather than saucers; moreover, they did so at a time when the
airship was at the cutting edge of TRANSPORTATION technology and had for a
time featured plausibly in sf stories. Spaceships, although not as yet in
operation, occupied a similar position in the public consciousness by the
late 1940s. In earlier centuries, otherwise inexplicable aerial phenomena
could be attributed to whatever seemed indicated by the TECHNOLOGY of the
day: witches on broomsticks were for a long time popular.That people see
unexplained "objects" in the sky cannot be denied. The vast majority of
such sightings can be confidently put down to misidentifications of
perfectly normal phenomena: oddly shaped and illuminated clouds, the image
of VENUS refracted in the atmosphere, ball lightning (itself only quite
recently recognized as a naturally occurring, though rare, phenomenon),
etc. The remainder have been regarded as simply inexplicable; or
attributed to flying saucers piloted by aliens (variously supposed to
derive from other planets, other DIMENSIONS, the future, or the inside of
the HOLLOW EARTH; whichever, this is dubbed the "extraterrestrial

hypothesis"); or to rare geological/meteorological circumstances involving
processes that are explicable in terms of current scientific knowledge.
The branch of ufology investigating what it prefers to call by such terms
as "transient atmospheric phenomena" ("TAPs") has scored some minor
successes, notably in demonstrating that stressed granite can, as a result
of the piezoelectric effect, produce dancing lights in the air
overhead.The psychological school of ufology accepts that people who
report encounters with aliens are recording genuine experiences - in the
sense that, say, a dream is a genuine experience - and seeks to find
objective explanations for subjective events. Here again there is much to
interest the cultural historian, for there are astonishingly close
similarities between modern descriptions of encounters with aliens and
historical ones of meetings with the Little People. As
withbroomsticks/airships/spaceships, it would appear that the "contact"
experience is interpreted by the human mind in terms of the state of
technology of the age. Modern "contactees" seem to be involuntarily basing
their interpretations on contemporary sf, a hypothesis buttressed by the
fact that there was a noticeable qualitative shift in "contactee" accounts
after the colossal success of the film STAR WARS (1977) - for example,
cute little 'bots were more frequently reported.If sf feeds ufology, how
does ufology feed sf? Most GENRE-SF writers are hostile to the notion of
flying saucers; that is, to the extraterrestrial hypothesis. The hostility
is fuelled by the infuriating public assumption that sf writers are deeply
interested in ufology. Early on, sf writers did indeed quite frequently
assume the reality of alien-piloted flying saucers, but this was almost
always for the purposes of story, irony or symbolism. There are
exceptions: Adamski himself, some time before his famous experiences,
wrote Pioneers of Space (1949), and Dennis WHEATLEY's Star of Ill Omen
(1952) seems to be the work of a believer. Novels rooted in the
extraterrestrial hypothesis include: Shadows in the Sun (1954) by Chad
OLIVER; I Doubted Flying Saucers (1958) by Stan Layne; The Flying Saucer
Gambit * (1966) by Larry MADDOCK in the Agent of T.E.R.R.A. series; Brad's
Flying Saucer (1969) by Marian Place (1910); The Mendelov Conspiracy
(1969; vt Encounter Three 1978) by Martin CAIDIN; The Gismo (1970; vt The
Gismo from Outer Space 1974 chap) by Keo Felker Lazarus (1913); Fade-Out
(1975 US) by Patrick TILLEY, by a very long way the most interesting of
the books in this list; Alien (1977) by George H. LEONARD (not to be
confused with the film tie Alien * [1979] by Alan Dean FOSTER); Close
Encounters of the Third Kind * (1977) by Steven SPIELBERG, a film tie; The
Melchizedek Connection (1981) by Ray Fowler (1930- ); Majestic (1989) by
Whitley STRIEBER; Alintel (1986; no English trans to date) by Jacques
Vallee (1939- ), the famous French ufologist (the model for Lacombe,
played by Francois Truffaut, in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND [1977])
and winner, as Jerome Seriel, of the 1961 Prix Jules Verne; and the UFO
Conspiracy sequence by David BISCHOFF: Abduction: The UFO Conspiracy
(1990), Deception (1991) and Revelation (1991). An anthology is Encounters
with Aliens (anth 1968) ed George Earley (1927- ). The Strieber and
Bischoff titles concern themselves with the notion of the "cover-up", a
CLICHE of ufology: the paranoid belief that the US Government (or other
authority figure) possesses the physical proof that aliens are visiting us
but chooses to keep the information secret. In Strieber's story the case

concerned is the Roswell Incident of 1947, in which a flying saucer is
claimed to have crashed in the New Mexico desert; a story predating this
incident and bearing some resemblance to it was "Mewhu's Jet" (1946) by
Theodore STURGEON. Cover-ups feature also in ufological sf that does not
subscribe to the extraterrestrial hypothesis. In W. Allen HARBINSON's
Projekt Saucer series - Projekt Saucer #1: Inception (1991) and Genesis
(1980; vt Projekt Saucer #2: Genesis 1991 US) - based on UFO reports
during and just after WWII, the flying saucers are human artefacts, the
Nazis being largely responsible. (Some wilder ufologists have claimed that
flying saucers are indeed piloted by ex-Nazis, who fled into the Hollow
Earth at the end of WWII.) A Secret Property (1985) by Ralph Noyes
enjoyably focuses on secret experiments trying to harness a
natural/supernatural (depending upon viewpoint) force, one side-effect of
which is the manifestation of UFOs; the alien myth is a cleverly
engineered disinformation campaign mounted by the US Government, which has
even built phoney dead aliens which are occasionally, in order to spread
the disinformation yet further, shown to ufologists with strict
instructions never to breathe a word of what they have seen.A number of sf
writers have exploited not ufology itself but the social phenomenon of the
widespread interest in it. C.M. KORNBLUTH used the Saucer Craze slyly in
"Silly Season" (1950), in which Earth is invaded but nobody pays attention
because the newspapers have cried wolf too often. Henry KUTTNER used a
flying saucer as a device for a moral parable in "Or Else" (1953), as did
Theodore Sturgeon in "A Saucer of Loneliness" (1953). Robert A. HEINLEIN
exploited saucer fears (as he exploited communist-conspiracy fears) in his
invasion novel The Puppet Masters (1951), and he later used a UFO in his
entertaining juvenile, Have Space Suit - Will Travel (1958). Gore VIDAL's
Messiah (1954; rev 1965) opens with an analysis of UFOs as portents, which
in some ways anticipates the theories of the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav
Jung (1875-1961) in his Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in
the Skies (1958; trans 1959). The made-for-tv film The FLIPSIDE OF
DOMINICK HYDE (1980) and its sequel use a flying saucer from the future as
an enabling device. Very small flying saucers feature in Richard FRANCIS's
Blackpool Vanishes (1979) and in the films LIQUID SKY and *BATTERIES NOT
INCLUDED. An Account of a Meeting with Denizens of Another World, 1871
(1979) by David LANGFORD (presented as being written by William Robert
Loosley) is a spoof.Saucer enthusiasts have themselves been the subject of
sf stories, as in the tv series KINVIG. J.G. BALLARD's "The Encounter"
(1963; vt "The Venus Hunters") leans heavily on Jung, and Fritz LEIBER's
THE WANDERER (1964) deals in part with the reactions of various ufologists
to an actual celestial visitor.The best novel about the UFO experience is
undoubtedly Miracle Visitors (1978) by Ian WATSON; it is widely loathed by
those readers who expect UFOs to be flying saucers. Watson instead
envisages UFOs and "contacts" in terms of altered states of consciousness
and the dichotomy between objective and subjective reality - much as do
ufologists of the "psychological school", in fact. His book, with its
surreal inventiveness and loose link with ordinary causality, is
understandably offensive to determined rationalists, who find it a
nonsense; exactly the same could be said for "contact" experiences
themselves, which is perhaps the mark of Watson's success.
[DP/JR/JGr]Further reading: The UFO Experience: A Scientific Enquiry

(1972) by J. Allen Hynek; UFOs Explained (1974) by Philip J. Klass; The
UFO Enigma: The Definitive Explanation of the UFO Phenomenon (1977) by
Donald H. Menzel and Ernest H. Taves; The UFO Encyclopedia (1980) by
Margaret Sachs.See also: PARANOIA.
ULTIMATE PUBLISHING CO.
FANTASTIC; SCIENCE FICTION (ADVENTURE) CLASSICS; STRANGE FANTASY.
ULTIMATE WARRIOR, THE
Film (1975). Warner Bros. Written/dir Robert Clouse, starring Yul
Brynner, Max von Sydow, Joanna Miles, William Smith. 92 mins. Colour.New
York in AD2022 is in an advanced state of decay after a man-made
biological catastrophe that occurred decades earlier. The leader of a
group who have barricaded a street against gangs of thugs roaming outside
hires the services of a super-Samurai (Brynner). This was promoted as the
first Kung Fu sf movie, following, as it does, the basic formula of the
Kung Fu genre (two camps each with their own champion fight it out to the
death in the final reel) and it was produced by Fred Weintraub and Paul
Heller, who had made Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon (1973), also dir Clouse.
But, surprisingly, it is well scripted and unpretentious, though cynical.
TUW was a forerunner of the post- HOLOCAUST action-movie boom represented
by MAD MAX (1979) and its many sequels and imitations, including ESCAPE
FROM NEW YORK (1981). [JB/PN]
ULTIMO UOMO DELLA TERRA, L'
(vt The Last Man on Earth) Film (1964). La Regina/Alta Vista. Dir Sidney
Salkow, Ubaldo Ragona, starring Vincent Price, Franca Bettoia. Screenplay
Logan Swanson (pseudonym of Richard MATHESON, who disliked the rewrite),
William P. Leicester, based on Matheson's I Am Legend (1954). 86 mins.
B/w.This Italian/US coproduction was the 1st film version of Matheson's
novel about the lone survivor of a plague whose victims become vampires, a
metamorphosis for which the novel, unlike the film, provides an ingenious
medical explanation. Each night the survivor is besieged in his house by
"vampires", and each day he kills as many as he can while they sleep.
Finally, however, they succeed in trapping and killing him. The film has a
reputation as being dreadful, but arguably it captures the brutalization
of its hero in the human world's last gasp better than the remake, The
OMEGA MAN (1971), and it is certainly truer to the novel. The film truest
to the novel's spirit, though with a different plot, is NIGHT OF THE
LIVING DEAD (1968). [PN/JB]
UNCANNY STORIES
US PULP MAGAZINE. 1 issue Apr 1941, published by Manvis Publications; ed
Robert O. Erisman. US contained both sf and weird fantasy, including "The
Coming of the Giant Germs" by Ray CUMMINGS, but nothing of importance. It
should not be confused with (although it was the successor of) the US
Uncanny Tales (1938-40) - a weird-menace pulp from the same stable, also
ed Erisman - or with the Canadian UNCANNY TALES, which like US did publish
some sf. [FHP/MJE/PN]
UNCANNY TALES
Canadian sf magazine, in DIGEST format for 4 issues, then BEDSHEET-size.
21 issues Nov 1940-Sep 1943; published to #17 (May 1942), by the Adam

Publishing Co., then by the Norman Book Co.; ed Melvin R. Colby
(uncredited). The schedule was monthly for 17 issues, then irregular, the
last issue appearing 9 months after #20. Most of the stories, especially
early on, were weird fiction, but a fair amount of sf was added to the
mix. It published original material by Thomas P. KELLEY, Robert A.W.
LOWNDES, Donald A. WOLLHEIM and others, as well as reprinting from US
pulps including WEIRD TALES, COSMIC STORIES and STIRRING SCIENCE
STORIES.Earlier a US pulp with the same title, a companion to MARVEL
SCIENCE STORIES, had been published by Manvis Publications, 5 issues
1938-40, ed Robert O. Erisman (uncredited), but printed no sf (though it
had 1 sf cover), being a sex-and-sadism horror magazine. [PN/BS]
UNCANNY X-MEN, THE
X-MEN.
UNDEAD, THE
Roger CORMAN.
UNDER THE SEA
The world under the sea is an alien environment still in the process of
being explored. John WILKINS, in Mathematicall Magick (1648), offered
speculative designs for submarines and discussed the possibility of
underwater colonization; already, in about 1620, Cornelius Van Drebbell
(1572-1634) had successfully navigated a submarine rowing-boat in the
Thames, and before the end of the century another would-be submariner had
perished in Plymouth Sound. David Bushnell (1742-1824) built a submarine
boat in 1775, and Robert Fulton (1765-1815) remained under water for 4
hours in his egg-shaped submarine in 1800. By 1863 the David, a submarine
built by the Confederacy during the US Civil War, was sufficiently
functional to attempt a torpedo attack on an ironclad; its successor
actually managed to sink a ship, but was lost with all hands. By the 1890s
the French Navy was equipped with 4 submarines and both Germany and the
USA were building them.The first notable literary work to feature a
submarine was a romance by Theophile Gautier (1811-1872) about a plot to
rescue Napoleon, Les deux etoiles (1848; exp vt Partie carree 1851; vt La
Belle Jenny; trans in var colls as "The Quartette", "The Belle-Jenny" and
"The Four-in-Hand"). The classic underwater romance of the 19th century
was, however, Jules VERNE's Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870; trans
as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas 1872 UK), in which the undersea
world became for the first time a place of marvels and natural wonders to
be explored. Frank R. STOCKTON's The Great Stone of Sardis (1898), Harry
COLLINGWOOD's The Log of the Flying Fish (1887), Herbert STRANG's Lord of
the Seas (1908) and Max PEMBERTON's Captain Black (1911) feature submarine
adventures, but are concerned primarily with TRANSPORTATION rather than
with exploring the wonders of the deep. The main reason for this relative
uninterest was the impossibility of any real interaction between human
visitors and the alien environment. Apart from the occasional duel with a
sea- MONSTER (almost always a giant squid or octopus) there seemed to most
writers to be little dramatic potential in underwater ventures; for a
protagonist to get to grips with the underwater world, some fantastic
modification was necessary - as in The Water Babies (1863) by Charles
Kingsley (1819-1875) - and the notion of adapting humans to underwater

life by biological engineering did not appear until Alexander BELYAEV's
The Amphibian (1929; trans 1959). The only attempts to set aside this
difficulty in the 19th and early 20th centuries were stories dealing with
the rediscovery of ATLANTIS - which had often, by more-or-less miraculous
means, managed to preserve itself and its air despite its cataclysmic
submersion; examples include Andre LAURIE's The Crystal City under the Sea
(1895; trans 1896), the title story of Arthur Conan DOYLE's The Maracot
Deep (coll 1929), Stanton A. COBLENTZ's The Sunken World (1928; 1949) and
Dennis WHEATLEY's They Found Atlantis (1936).Early GENRE-SF writers showed
relatively little interest in undersea adventures, although film-makers
made persistent attempts to make bigger and better versions of Verne's
novel from the earliest years of silent movies to Disney's 20,000 LEAGUES
UNDER THE SEA (1954). Several pulp-sf stories, however, dealt with
undersea life on alien worlds. An early example was Neil R. JONES's "Into
the Hydrosphere" (1933), but the classics of the species are "Clash by
Night" (1943) and Fury (1947; 1950; vt Destination: Infinity) by Lawrence
O'Donnell (Henry KUTTNER and C.L. MOORE), reflecting the common image of
VENUS as a watery world. The most notable pulp story partly set beneath
the oceans of Earth is The Green Girl (1930; 1950) by Jack WILLIAMSON.In
the post-WWII period sf writers became more interested in the
possibilities of undersea melodrama. Alien oceans figure in "The Game of
Glory" (1958) by Poul ANDERSON, "The Gift of Gab" (1955) by Jack VANCE,
Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus (1954; vt The Oceans of Venus) by Paul
French (Isaac ASIMOV) and in the story in which Roger ZELAZNY bade a final
fond farewell to the image of Venus as an oceanic world, "The Doors of His
Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" (1965). The notion of adapting humans to
underwater life by GENETIC ENGINEERING is notably featured in James
BLISH's "Surface Tension" (1952), although Blish had introduced it in a
more tentative form in "Sunken Universe" (1942 as by Arthur Merlyn), which
is combined with the later story in THE SEEDLING STARS (fixup 1957). Blish
and Norman L. KNIGHT's novel A Torrent of Faces (1967) features humanoid
"tritons" engineered for underwater life, similarly carried forward from
Knight's earlier solo work "Crisis in Utopia" (1940).The mid-1950s saw a
minor boom in sf stories set beneath the oceans of Earth, including Frank
HERBERT's submarine spy-thriller THE DRAGON IN THE SEA (1956; vt 21st
Century Sub; vt Under Pressure), Arthur C. CLARKE's novel about
whale-farming, The Deep Range (1954; exp 1957) and the first of Frederik
POHL's and Jack Williamson's Eden trilogy of juveniles dealing with
undersea colonization, Undersea Quest (1954) - a theme to which they
returned much later in Land's End (1988). Kenneth BULMER's City under the
Sea (1957) makes much of the idea of surgical modification for life in the
sea; he further extrapolated the notion in Beyond the Silver Sky (1961).
Other stories of the biological engineering of humans for undersea life
include Gordon R. DICKSON's The Space Swimmers (1963; 1967), Hal CLEMENT's
Ocean On Top (1967; 1973) and Lee HOFFMAN's The Caves of Karst (1969). The
idea is more elaborately developed in such works as Inter Ice Age 4 (1959;
trans 1970) by Kobo ABE, in which Japanese scientists prepare for a new
deluge, and in The Godwhale (1974) by T.J. BASS, whose eponymous
protagonist is a CYBORG leviathan.The scientific community took an
increasing interest in dolphins during the 1960s and 1970s, inspired by
researches into their high INTELLIGENCE. The idea of communication between

dolphins and humans was popularized in numerous sf stories, including the
Dickson titles mentioned above, Clarke's Dolphin Island (1963), Joe
POYER's Operation Malacca (1968), Roy MEYERS's Dolphin Boy (1967; vt
Dolphin Rider) and its sequels, Robert MERLE's The Day of the Dolphin
(1967; trans 1969), Margaret ST CLAIR's The Dolphins of Altair (1967),
Robert SILVERBERG's "Ishmael in Love" (1970), John BOYD's "The Girl and
the Dolphin" (1973) and Ian WATSON's The Jonah Kit (1975). Dolphins gifted
with sentience by means of human ingenuity play a key role in David BRIN's
Uplift series, most notably in STARTIDE RISING (1983), in which a
dolphin-commanded starship takes refuge from a host of enemies in an alien
ocean; similarly blessed - or in this case, perhaps, cursed - dolphins
feature in Alexander JABLOKOV's A Deeper Sea (1992).Analogies may easily
be drawn between submarines and SPACESHIPS. In Harry HARRISON's The Daleth
Effect (1970; vt In our Hands, the Stars) the heroes, in urgent need of a
spaceship, simply attach their drive unit to a submarine. Greater subtlety
is exhibited in James WHITE's The Watch Below (1966), which juxtaposes the
problems of an ALIEN spaceship nearing Earth with those of a group of
people surviving in the hold of a ship which has been under water for many
years. A similar analogy is drawn in Asimov's "Waterclap" (1970), which
deals with a conflict of interest between projects to colonize the sea bed
and the Moon. A curious novel in which huge water drops function as "space
habitats" of an extraordinary kind is Bob SHAW's Medusa's Children (1977).
The CINEMA has carried forward its own tradition of submarine romance as
its technical capacities have grown. Notable sf examples include VOYAGE TO
THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA (1961), which spawned a long-running tv series
(1964-68), and The ABYSS (1989). The latter was the most distinguished of
a cluster of such movies at around the same time, others including
DEEPSTAR SIX (1988), LEVIATHAN (1989) and Lords of the Deep (1989). In the
juvenile-adventure tradition of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea came
another tv series in 1993, SEAQUEST DSV, made by Steven SPIELBERG's
production company, and featuring an intelligent dolphin as a crew member.
Sciencefictional submarines are featured in Martin CAIDIN's The Last
Fathom (1967) and Richard COWPER's satirical comedy Profundis (1979).
Alien oceans and races adapted to them are found in Stefan WUL's Temple of
the Past (1958: trans 1973), in which a spaceship which lands in an alien
ocean is swallowed by a whale-like creature, Michael G. CONEY's Neptune's
Cauldron (1981), Joan SLONCZEWSKI's A Door into Ocean (1986), in which
emissaries from a race of peace-loving ocean-dwellers must visit a very
different kind of world, our own, and Piers ANTHONY's Mercycle
(1991).Arthur C. Clarke's constant interest in the sea - reflected in his
nonfiction as well as his fiction - is further demonstrated in The Ghost
from the Grand Banks (1990), about the raising of the Titanic. Another
writer much interested in the sea is marine engineer Hilbert SCHENCK,
whose fascination is evident in the stories in Wave Rider (coll 1980) and
the curiously mystical At the Eye of the Ocean (1980). [BS]See also:
ECOLOGY; INVASION.
UNDERWOOD, TIM (EDWARD)
(1948- ) US publisher ( UNDERWOOD-MILLER INC.), bibliographer of Jack
VANCE in Fantasms: A Bibliography of the Literature of Jack Vance (1978
chap with Daniel J.H. LEVACK; rev vt Fantasms II: A Bibliography of the

Works of Jack Vance 1979 with Levack and Kurt Cockram), and anthologist,
always in collaboration with his partner, Chuck MILLER. Their anthologies
include Jack Vance (anth 1980) and 3 studies of Stephen KING: Fear Itself:
The Horror Fiction of Stephen King (anth 1982), Kingdom of Fear: The World
of Stephen King (anth 1986) and Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with
Stephen King (anth 1988). [JC]
UNDERWOOD-MILLER INC.
US SMALL PRESS founded in 1976 by Pennsylvania-based Chuck MILLER and Tim
UNDERWOOD, who worked in California. Their 1st book, a first hardcover
edition of Jack VANCE's THE DYING EARTH (1950; their edn 1976) almost
accidentally set them on a course which would identify them with that
author, many of whose works, new and old, they have since released. Other
ambitious projects have included a well edited 5-vol edn of THE COLLECTED
STORIES OF PHILIP K. DICK (coll 1987), which came very close to honouring
the claim made by its title - an accomplishment worth noting in the
small-press field, where editing standards sometimes lag significantly
behind ambition, especially (as in collected editions) where archive work
may be required. UMI remains one of the best-run, most prolific and
successful of US small presses, and may be one of the first to move into
general publishing and survive. [JC]
UNEARTH
US magazine in DIGEST format, 8 issues Winter 1977-Winter 1979, published
from Boston by Unearth Publications, ed Jonathan Ostrowsky-Lantz and John
M. Landsberg. Subtitled "The Magazine of Science Fiction Discoveries", U's
avowed intention was that all fiction should be by previously unpublished
authors or by authors previously published only in U, or be reprints of
first-sf-story sales by well known authors; these constraints were
slightly relaxed for the last 2 issues. The reprints featured early work
by Algis BUDRYS, Philip K. DICK, Harlan ELLISON, Roger ZELAZNY and others,
but U's main significance came from the new writers it discovered. These
included, among many others, William GIBSON with "Fragments of a Hologram
Rose" (1977), James P. BLAYLOCK with "Red Planet" (1977), Paul di Filippo
with "Falling Expectations" (1977) and S.P. SOMTOW with "Sunsteps" (1977).
The artist Barclay SHAW was another discovery. Alongside this innovative
approach to fiction were the usual departments, plus the series Science
for Fiction by Hal CLEMENT and articles under the heading Writing by
Ellison. [RR]
UNEARTHLY STRANGER
Film (1963). A Julian Wintel-Leslie Parkyn Production/Independent
Artists/AIP. Dir John Krish, starring John Neville, Gabriella Licudi,
Philip Stone, Jean Marsh, Warren Mitchell. Screenplay Rex Carlton. 74
mins. B/w.In this low-key, unpretentious UK sf film a space scientist
gradually realizes that his wife (who sleeps with her eyes open) is an
alien, one of many who are infiltrating Earth and wiping out the
scientists first. She is ordered by her superiors to kill him but cannot,
having fallen in love with him. This emotional involvement destroys her
ability to survive undetected and the film's strongest image is of her
tears leaving corrosive tracks down her cheeks as she reveals the truth to
her husband. This is a good (but rare) film, untypical of its writer,

Carlton, who was usually responsible for monstrosities like The Brain that
Wouldn't Die (1962). [JB/PN]
UNHOLY LOVE
ALRAUNE.
UNICORNS
SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER
Film (1992). Carolco International. Dir Roland Emmerich; exec prod Mario
Kassar; screenplay Richard Rothstein, Christopher Leitch, Dean Devlin;
starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Ally Walker, Ed O'Ross,
Jerry Orbach. 103 mins.Colour.Crisply made but derivative in most of its
plot turns, US centres on a secret military unit of CYBORGS, many
reconstructed from soldiers who died in Vietnam, their resurrection
dependent on a new drug. They are given great powers of strength and
endurance, and the ability to recover rapidly from wounds - though with a
tendency to overheat - and used by the government as a kind of
super-anti-terrorist unit. Two of these begin to remember their pasts,the
Louisianan Devreux (Van Damme) who was a peaceful kind of guy, and the
brutal psycho Sergeant Andrew Scott (Lundgren), his old enemy. When
investigative journalist Veronica Roberts (Walker) stumbles onto what is
happening, the psycho now called GR13 attempts to kill her and she is
saved by Devreux, now GR44. Violent conflict between the two cyborgs
(envisagedas a kind of good FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER and a bad one) takes up
the rest of the film, which given its predictability as an action thriller
- two martial-arts musclemen its protagonists - is quiteeffective.
Emmerich's sf debut was the confused space-frontier German film Moon 44
(1989); this is better. His STARGATE (1994), however, is much better
again. [PN]
UNIVERSE
ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series ed Terry CARR (1971-87) and renewed by Robert
SILVERBERG and Karen HABER (1990-current). This is arguably the best (and
also one of the longest-lasting) of all original-anthology series in the
field. Universe 1 (anth 1971) appeared while Carr was still an editor for
its publisher, ACE BOOKS. Since then it has been peripatetic, the 17 vols
of series 1 coming from Ace Books (#1-#2), Random House (#3-#5) and
DOUBLEDAY (#6-#17); series 2 has come from Doubleday Foundation (#1) and
BANTAM Spectra (#2). The further titles are Universe 2 (anth 1972), #3
(anth 1973), #4 (anth 1974), #5 (anth 1974), #6 (anth 1976), #7 (anth
1977), #8 (anth 1978), #9 (anth 1979), #10 (anth 1980), #11 (anth 1981),
#12 (anth 1982), #13 (anth 1983), #14 (anth 1984), #15 (anth 1985), #16
(anth 1986) and #17 (anth 1987), plus The Best from Universe (anth 1984).
The new series, ed Silverberg with his wife Karen Haber, is to date
Universe 1 (anth 1990) and Universe 2 (anth 1992).Carr's #1 contained
Robert Silverberg's NEBULA-winning "Good News From the Vatican";
Silverberg was one of the series' most regular contributors, along with
Gregory BENFORD, Gordon EKLUND, R.A. LAFFERTY, Edgar PANGBORN, Howard
WALDROP, Ian WATSON and, later, Lucius SHEPARD. Benford and Eklund won a
Nebula for "If The Stars Are Gods" in #4. Gene WOLFE won a Nebula for "The

Death of Dr Island" in #3, as did Waldrop's "The Ugly Chickens" in #10.
Harlan ELLISON's "Paladin of the Lost Hour" (#15) won a HUGO. The awards
(mostly from the early years) do not truly reflect the quality of this
series, which proved again that Carr was one of the outstanding editors in
the field; while he knew exactly what constituted good writing, and never
patronized his readership by feeding them pulp, he also never lost the
popular touch. The series stopped with his death. A volume dedicated to
the memory of both Carr and Universe was Terry's Universe (anth 1988) ed
Beth MEACHAM. The Silverbergs' 1990 relaunch of the Universe series was
exemplary: the new #1 is a strong collection in the Carr tradition (but
much longer), with good stories from Ursula K. LE GUIN, Barry MALZBERG,
Kim Stanley ROBINSON, Bruce STERLING and others. [PN/MJE]
UNIVERSE SCIENCE FICTION
US DIGEST magazine, 10 numbered issues June 1953-Mar 1955; #1-#2
published by Bell Publications, Chicago, the rest by Palmer Publications,
Evanston; #1-#2 ed George Bell (pseudonym of Raymond A. PALMER and Bea
Mahaffey), rest ed (officially) Palmer and Mahaffey.This was a companion
magazine to Palmer's SCIENCE STORIES, and both have been seen as
continuations of his earlier OTHER WORLDS, whose last issue in its 1st
incarnation was dated July 1953. It was USF, however, that changed its
title back to Other Worlds with #11 (May 1955), which confusingly numbered
itself 2 ways, continuing both USF's numeration (#11) and Other Worlds's
numeration (#32). (For the rest of this deeply confusing story OTHER
WORLDS.)Fewer than usual of the contributors were the Chicago hacks so
regularly employed by Palmer, so the fiction was a bit better than his
average - perhaps because of Mahaffey's influence. Authors included Chad
OLIVER and Theodore STURGEON. [PN]
UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY LIBRARY
Host to one of the world's biggest institutional collections of sf and
fantasy (65,000+ items); it is surprising to find such a thing in
Australia, a country where sf plays only a minimal role in academic
curricula. The collection is part of the Rare Books and Special
Collections Library, and is publicly accessible. It was begun in 1974, and
dramatically expanded in 1979 when bequeathed the huge collection of Ron
Graham, the very active sf fan who had published VISION OF TOMORROW
(1969-70). A 1991 count showed over 53,000 sf items (books, magazines and
fanzines) and a further 12,000+ items in the COMICS collection (mostly
SUPERHERO titles). [PN]
UNKNOWN
US magazine, pulp-size Mar 1939-Aug 1941, BEDSHEET-size Oct 1941-Apr
1943, then back to pulp-size to Oct 1943. 39 issues Mar 1939-Oct 1943.
Monthly Mar 1939-Dec 1940, then bimonthly. Published by STREET ? ed
John W. CAMPBELL Jr.The fantasy companion to ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, U
was one of the most unusual of all PULP MAGAZINES, and its demise one of
the most lamented. #1 featured Eric Frank RUSSELL's novel Sinister Barrier
(Mar 1939; 1943; rev 1948), but a better indicator of the direction in
which the magazine would develop was, in the same issue, H.L. GOLD's story
"Trouble with Water", a humorous fantasy exploiting the incongruity of
confronting a 20th-century American with a figure out of folklore. While U

featured some ordinary sf and some SWORD-AND-SORCERY stories, particularly
during its first year, it quickly attracted a group of regular
contributors who defined its very individual flavour. Among them was L.
Sprague DE CAMP, with such stories as "Nothing in the Rules" (1939), LEST
DARKNESS FALL (1939; 1941), "The Wheels of If" (1940) and his
collaborations with Fletcher PRATT: "The Roaring Trumpet" (1940), "The
Mathematics of Magic" (1940) - combined in The Incomplete Enchanter, fixup
1942) - The Castle of Iron (1941; 1950) and others. These De Camp/Pratt
stories - the Harold Shea series, in which the hero is transported into a
series of fantasy worlds drawn from Norse mythology, Spenser's Faerie
Queene (1590-96) and so forth - typify the exuberantly wacky approach to
fantasy which U made its own. Other authors who appeared frequently were
Anthony BOUCHER, Cleve CARTMILL, L. Ron HUBBARD - with Slaves of Sleep
(1939; 1948), "The Indigestible Triton" (1940), "Fear" (1940), "Typewriter
in the Sky" (1940) (these 2 collected as Fear ?
[coll 1951]) and many others - Henry KUTTNER, Fritz LEIBER, whose
sword-and-sorcery Fafhrd/Gray Mouser series had a wry, ironic tone which
suited the magazine very well, Theodore STURGEON and Jack WILLIAMSON. U
occasionally carried serials, but most issues included a complete novel or
novella. Notable examples were Robert A. HEINLEIN's "The Devil Makes the
Law" (1940; as "Magic, Inc." in Waldo ?
Williamson's DARKER THAN YOU THINK (1940; 1949), Alfred BESTER's "Hell is
Forever" (1942), Leiber's Conjure Wife (1943; 1953) and A.E. VAN VOGT's
The Book of Ptath (1943; 1947; vt Two Hundred Million A.D.).Until June
1940 U had illustrative covers, of which the best (apart from #1, by H.W.
Scott) were the work of Edd CARTIER, the artist whose style most exactly
caught U's tone. With the July 1940 issue U adopted a lettered cover
intended to give it a more dignified appearance. In Oct 1941 it switched,
3 months before ASF, to the larger bedsheet format, at the same time
changing its name to Unknown Worlds. The Dec 1943 issue was to have
adopted the DIGEST size which ASF had taken the previous month, but it
never appeared: wartime paper shortages had put an end to the magazine.
After WWII, a revival was mooted, and an anthology in magazine format,
From Unknown Worlds (anth 1948) was put out to test the market, but U
never reappeared, although H.L. Gold's fantasy companion to Gal, BEYOND
FANTASY FICTION, was an avowed imitation. Anthologies drawn from U's pages
include The Unknown (anth 1963) and The Unknown Five (anth 1964), both ed
D.R. BENSEN, and Hell Hath Fury (anth 1963) ed George HAY.The UK edn, from
Atlas Publishing Company, had fewer pages and was unusual in appearing for
more issues (41) than the original, outlasting it by 6 years. It was
published regularly Sep 1939-Dec 1940, then intermittently for 3 years,
then mostly quarterly, ending with Winter 1949. Like its parent, but a
little later (June 1942) it changed its title to Unknown Worlds.U appeared
during Campbell's peak years as editor. Its reputation may stand as high
as it does partly because it died while still at its best. [MJE]See also:
GOLDEN AGE OF SF.
UNKNOWN WORLDS
UNKNOWN.
UNNO, JUZA

[r] JAPAN.
UNUSUAL STORIES
US DIGEST-size magazine. 3 issues 1934-5, published by Fantasy
Publishers, Everett, Pa.; ed William L. CRAWFORD. An advance issue of this
SEMIPROZINE (see also SMALL PRESSES) was published (and mailed) in 2 parts
in 1934, and could be considered as #1, even though the 1935 issues are
referred to as #1 and #2. US was a companion magazine to MARVEL TALES, but
unlike that magazine published no important stories. [FHP/PN]
UPDIKE, JOHN (HOYER)
(1932- ) US writer whose exuberantly polished and opulent style has led
him more than once into realms of FABULATION. In The Centaur (1963)
mythological avatars haunt present-day characters. The government toppled
in The Coup (1978) had ruled an imaginary country - a setting which might
readily occasion comment from within the sf field, given JU's conspicuous
aversion to genre literature in general - as witness his remarkably obtuse
New Yorker review of John Le Carre's Our Game (1995) - and specifically as in an earlier review of Vladimir NABOKOV's Ada (1969) - to the creation
of imaginary countries. The Witches of Eastwick (1984) is - though
enfeeblingly dilatory about the fantasy premises it invokes - a genuine
tale of the supernatural involving a Devil-like male and 3 women whose PSI
POWERS develop alarmingly. Only JU's first novel is sf: The Poorhouse Fair
(1959) is set in a NEAR-FUTURE institution for the aged which serves as
the focus of a popular revolt. [JC]Other works: Roger's Version (1986);
The Chaste Planet (1980 chap); Brazil (1994), a magic-realist fantasy
based on the story of Tristram and Iseult.
UPTON, MARK
Lawrence SANDERS.
UPWARD, ALLEN
(1863-1926) UK writer best known for inflamed studies of the politics of
Eastern Europe and for various thrillers set in the same venue; their
RURITANIAN complexion was perhaps inadvertent. In High Treason (1903 chap)
and its sequel, The Fourth Conquest of England (1904 chap), he outlined
the dire consequences of a Roman Catholic takeover of the UK, including a
new Inquisition and the exile of the monarchy to Australia. The Yellow
Hand (1904) is a supernatural tale featuring out-of-body villainy. Of most
interest is The Discovery of the Dead (1910), an sf novel told in the form
of reportage which itself encloses a scientific memoir, within which the
discovery of "necrolite" opens new areas of the spectrum, making the dead
- "necromorphs" - visible. Allergic to the visible spectrum, a great
society of necromorphs lives in a great city at the North Pole; they
themselves are haunted by "dynamorphs" from the bowels of the Earth, and
long to radiate heavenwards. [JC]
URANUS
OUTER PLANETS.
URQUHART, PAUL
Ladbroke BLACK.
URUGUAY

LATIN AMERICA.
USSR
RUSSIA; SOVIET UNION.
UTLEY, STEVE(N)
(1948- ) US short-story writer whose black verve and acidulous
knowingness about the absurdities of the genre made him, for a while, a
figure of edgy salience in the field. He began publishing with "The
Unkindest Cut of All" for Perry Rhodan 20 (anth 1972), but stopped by the
end of the decade. Some of his best work - like "Custer's Last Jump"
(1976), which illuminates in MAGIC-REALIST terms an ALTERNATE-WORLD USA was written with Howard WALDROP, as was "Black as the Pit, from Pole to
Pole" (1977), which has been cited as a significant influence on 1980s
STEAMPUNK. Other tales likewise tend - after the fashion of the group of
writers who came to maturity in Texas in the 1970s - to fabulate (
FABULATION) the USA's past. Some of the stories in Lone Star Universe:
Speculative Fiction from Texas (anth 1976) ed with Geo W. PROCTOR
exemplify this tendency. [JC]See also: HOLLOW EARTH; LOST WORLDS.
UTOPIAS
The concept of a utopia or "Ideal State" is linked to religious ideas of
Heaven or the Promised Land and to folkloristic ideas like the Isles of
the Blessed, but it is essentially a future-historical goal, to be
achieved by the active efforts of human beings, not a transcendental goal
reserved as a reward for those who follow a particularly virtuous path in
life. The term was coined by Thomas MORE in Utopia (Latin edn 1516; trans
1551; many edns since), although More's work has far more SATIRE than
practical POLITICS in it; he derived the word from "outopia" (no place)
rather than "eutopia" (good place), although modern usage generally
implies the latter, and modern works recapitulating More's ideas including The New Moon (1918) by Oliver Onions (1873-1961) and The Rebel
Passion (1929) by Kay BURDEKIN - do so more earnestly than he did.It can
be argued that all utopias are sf, in that they are exercises in
hypothetical SOCIOLOGY and political science. Alternatively, it might be
argued that only those utopias which embody some notion of scientific
advancement qualify as sf - the latter view is in keeping with most
DEFINITIONS OF SF. Frank Manuel, in Utopias and Utopian Thought (anth
1966), argues that a significant shift in utopian thought took place when
writers changed from talking about a better place (eutopia) to talking
about a better time (euchronia), under the influence of notions of
historical and social progress. When this happened, utopias ceased to be
imaginary constructions with which contemporary society might be compared,
and began to be speculative statements about real future possibilities. It
seems sensible to regard this as the point at which utopian literature
acquired a character conceptually similar to that of sf. The scientific
imagination first became influential in utopian thinking in the 17th
century: an awareness of the advancement of scientific knowledge and of
the role that science might play in transforming society is very evident
in Francis BACON's New Atlantis (1627; 1629) and Tommaso CAMPANELLA's City
of the Sun (1637). Bacon's claims for the utopian potential of
technological advance are extravagant, and inspired at least 2 later

writers to undertake the fragment's completion ("R.H. esq." in 1660 and
Jos. Glanvil in 1676); but works such as The Blazing World (1668) by
Margaret Cavendish (?1624-1674), Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan
SWIFT and Rasselas (1759) by Samuel JOHNSON embody a very different
attitude, parodying the efforts of SCIENTISTS and inventors and mocking
their presumed unworldliness. It was left to a school of French
philosophers during the second half of the 18th century to become the
first strident champions of the idea that moral and technological progress
went hand in hand. L.S. MERCIER's pioneering euchronian novel, L'an deux
mille quatre cent quarante (1771 UK; trans as Memoirs of the Year Two
Thousand Five Hundred 1772) proposed that the perfectibility of mankind
was not only possible but inevitable, with the aid of science, mathematics
and the mechanical arts. Another member of the school, RESTIF DE LA
BRETONNE, concluded La decouverte australe par un homme volant, ou le
Dedale francais ["The Southern-Hemisphere Discovery by a Flying Man, or
the French Daedalus"] (1781) with a description of a utopian state based
on the principles of natural philosophy and scientific advancement.
Scepticism was not, however, entirely overcome. Aristotle's doubts about
the workability of PLATO's Republic, based on the observation that its
citizens would lack incentives to make them work, remained to be
countered; and the end of the 18th century produced Malthus's objection that population increase would always outstrip resources no matter how
much TECHNOLOGY increased production - to the utopian optimism of William
Godwin (1756-1836).Despite the international popularity of Mercier's book,
the 19th century was well advanced before the utopian potential of
scientific progress was widely celebrated in English literature. Jane
LOUDON's anonymous SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE The Mummy! (1827) has some utopian
undertones, but Mary GRIFFITH's Three Hundred Years Hence (1836; 1975) was
the first English-language utopian novel to endorse Mercier's optimism
wholeheartedly. In many of the classic UK utopias of the 19th century
there is a strong vein of antiscientific romanticism. Lord LYTTON's The
Coming Race (1870) is more occult romance than progressive utopia. Samuel
BUTLER's satirical Erewhon (1872) and its sequel are PASTORAL and
antimechanical insofar as they are utopian at all. W.H. HUDSON's A Crystal
Age (1887) is a mystical work whose pastoral Ideal State remains
inaccessible to the civilized man who stumbles into it. Richard
JEFFERIES's After London (1885) is even more extreme in its nostalgia for
barbarism. This romantic pastoralism extended into 20th-century UK
scientific romance in the works of J. Leslie MITCHELL and S. Fowler
WRIGHT, both of whom glorified a life of noble savagery in opposition to
the idea of utopia as a city, and a similar suspicion continues to infect
modern UK sf. 19th-century US writers, by contrast, tended to see their
emergent nation as the true homeland of progress - a presumption brought
to full flower in Edward BELLAMY's Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888),
which provoked a great many imitations and replies in kind, including
Alvarado M. FULLER's A.D. 2000 (1890), Arthur Bird's Looking Forward: A
Dream of the United States of the Americas in 1999 (1899), Paul Devinne's
The Day of Prosperity (1902) and Herman Hine Brinsmade's Utopia Achieved
(1912). Most of the dissenting voices objected to Bellamy's socialism on
political grounds, although Ignatius DONNELLY's pioneeering DYSTOPIA
Caesar's Column (1890) argued that technological society's historical

momentum was towards greater inequality and social injustice, and the most
famous of the UK replies, William MORRIS's News from Nowhere (1890 US),
objected to the prospect of humanity living in idleness while machines
supplied its needs. Nevertheless, Bellamy's book became the archetype of a
whole school of mechanized utopias; further technology-glorifying novels
in its wake included The Crystal Button (1891) by Chauncey THOMAS and
Limanora (1903) by Godfrey SWEVEN. Other nations discovered prophets of
technological utopia: the German statesman Walther Rathenau (1867-1922)
wrote Von kommenden Dingen (1917; trans Eden and Cedar Paul as In Days to
Come 1921) and Der neue staat (1919; trans Arthur Windham as The New
Society 1921), while H.G. WELLS became the UK's great prophet of utopian
progress in such works as A Modern Utopia (1905), Men Like Gods (1923) and
The Shape of Things to Come (1933). But scepticism was further renewed
too. Anatole FRANCE's Sur la pierre blanche (1905; trans as The White
Stone 1910) pays homage to Wells, but has a citizen of a future utopian
state declare that peace and plenty are insufficient to ensure happiness,
which is a problem of an entirely different kind. E.M. FORSTER, in "The
Machine Stops" (1909), objected much more fiercely, asserting that
Wellsian dreams were sterile and would lead to stagnation of the human
mind. Alexandr MOSZKOWSKI's Die Inselt der Weisheit (1922 Germany; trans
as The Isles of Wisdom 1924) set out to show that all utopian schemes are
absurd, and that real people could not live in them.Hugo GERNSBACK was a
confirmed euchronian and an enthusiastic propagandist for technological
progress. His PULP MAGAZINES lent what aid they could, practically and
imaginatively, to the cause. In Modern Electrics he serialized his own
utopian romance Ralph 124C 41+ (1911-12; 1925), and he regarded
"scientifiction" as a means of promoting the magnificent potential of
modern TECHNOLOGY. By the time AMAZING STORIES was founded in 1926,
however, there had been a considerable loss of faith in utopian thought,
and dystopian images of the future were becoming commonplace. Aldous
HUXLEY's BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932), a scathing satirical attack on scientific
utopianism as expressed in J.B.S. HALDANE's Daedalus (1924), tipped the
balance decisively in favour of anxiety about how the technologies of the
future might be used. Despite Gernsback's inspiration and intention, GENRE
SF has never been strongly utopian. The early sf pulps abounded with
adventure stories set in pseudo-utopian futures where poverty and
injustice were nowhere in evidence but, when sf writers like David H.
KELLER turned their attention to serious speculation about the future,
unease was manifest. Miles J. BREUER in "Paradise and Iron" (1930),
Laurence MANNING and Fletcher PRATT in "City of the Living Dead" (1930)
and John W. CAMPBELL Jr in "Twilight" (1934 as by Don A. Stuart) all
warned that decadence and decline might be the consequence of
overdependence on machines. Where utopian states were manifest in pulp sf,
as in The Sunken World (1928; 1949) by Stanton COBLENTZ, they were often
small enclaves facing imminent destruction. This was the fate of utopian
dreams outside the sf establishment, too: after WWI they were mostly
relegated to the status of the Isles of the Blessed, as pleasant
impossibilities.Utopian thought in the last half century has to a large
extent dissociated itself from the idea of progress; we most commonly
encounter it in connection with the idea of a "historical retreat" to a
way of simpler life, as in James HILTON's Lost Horizon (1933), in the very

elaborate Islandia (1942) by Austin Tappan WRIGHT and its various sequels
by other hands, in Watch the North Wind Rise (1949 US; vt Seven Days in
New Crete 1949 UK) by Robert GRAVES, in Aldous Huxley's Island (1962), in
In Watermelon Sugar (1968) by Richard BRAUTIGAN, and in Ecotopia (1975)
and its sequel by Ernest CALLENBACH. Even the recent past has been
restored by the momentum of nostalgia almost to the status of a utopia, in
such novels as Time and Again (1970) by Jack FINNEY. Utopian designs
extrapolating individual hobby-horses are still produced - early examples
include Erone (1943) by Chalmers KEARNEY and Walden Two (1948) by B.F.
SKINNER - but large-scale attempts to imagine a technologically developed
future state which is in any sense of the word ideal tend to be highly
ambivalent: in Herman HESSE's Magister Ludi (1943; trans 1950; vt The
Glass Bead Game) the hero finally rejects the ideal on which his society
is based, and Franz WERFEL's phantasmagoric Stern der Ungeborenen (1946;
trans as Star of the Unborn 1946) imagines a futuristic demi-Paradise
which is still under threat from rebellion and war, and retains many
horrors.Within genre sf those novels which can be cited as examples of
analytical utopian thought retain the same deep ambiguity, tending towards
rejection. Theodore STURGEON's Venus Plus X (1960) constructs a
hermaphrodite utopia for evaluation by a man of our time, who fails the
test by failing to overcome his prejudice against hermaphroditism even
though it points, though ambiguously, towards an ideal society. James
BLISH and Norman L. KNIGHT boldly devised a "fascist utopia" for A Torrent
of Faces (1967), but the state seems hardly ideal. Mack REYNOLDS's
determined revisitation of Bellamyesque ideas in Looking Backward from the
Year 2000 (1973) was carried enthusiastically forward in his Equality in
the Year 2000 (1977), but then ran into accumulating doubts in his
Perchance to Dream (1977) and After Utopia (1977). Ursula K. LE GUIN's The
Dispossessed (1974) carries the subtitle "An Ambiguous Utopia". Samuel R.
DELANY's Triton (1976), presumably in response, is subtitled "An Ambiguous
Heterotopia", implying that the word has been devalued along with the
dream and carrying forward the notion that human individuals are so
different, and so prone to change, that only a very heterogeneous society
could possibly aspire to provide utopian opportunities for all - an idea
less convincingly developed in Reynolds's Commune 2000 (1974) and R.F.
NELSON's Then Beggars Could Ride (1976). Suzy McKee CHARNAS's Motherlines
(1979) - a sequel to her dystopian WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD (1974) follows Le Guin in tying uncompromising idealism to social deprivation.
Frederik POHL's JEM: The Making of a Utopia (1979) is relentlessly
cynical, although The Years of the City (fixup 1984) does try to accept
the challenge of developing solutions to the world's problems, as (less
convincingly) does James E. GUNN's Crisis! (fixup 1986). Even a HARD-SF
writer like Poul ANDERSON tends to attribute utopian qualities to
low-technology societies like that of the "Maurai" in Orion Shall Rise
(1983), although a more robustly apologetic line is taken by some other
libertarian writers, notably Larry NIVEN and Jerry E. POURNELLE in their
quasi-utopian "arcology" in Oath of Fealty (1981) - which extrapolates
ideas earlier developed in Mack Reynolds's The Towers of Utopia (1975) and James P. HOGAN in Voyage from Yesteryear (1982). It is perhaps
significant that in the works of Isaac ASIMOV and Arthur C. CLARKE, both
proselytizers for the beneficence of technological advance, there is very

little utopian thought. The imagery of Clarke's optimistic Imperial Earth
(1975) cannot compare with that of The City and the Stars (1956), which
echoes Forster's "The Machine Stops" and Campbell's "Twilight", while
Asimov's dystopian settings for Pebble in the Sky (1950) and The Caves of
Steel (1954) are described far more graphically than utopian Trantor,
which is already in terminal decline as the Foundation series begins. Sf
in Soviet RUSSIA, as pioneered by Ivan YEFREMOV's Andromeda (1958; trans
1959), had for a while a presumed mission to look forward to the promised
socialist utopia, and undertook a more enthusiastic championship of the
alliance of technology and socialism than may be found in even Bellamy or
Wells, but the mission faltered well in advance of the collapse of Soviet
communism; the novels of the STRUGATSKI brothers in particular - notably
Trudno byt' bogom (1964; trans as Hard to be a God 1973) and Khishchnye
veshchi veka (1965; trans as The Final Circle of Paradise 1976) - display
an anxiety comparable to that of contemporary Western sf.The necessity for
works of fiction to be dramatic and the fact that workable plots require
conflict inhibit the use of sf to display utopian schemes. These still fit
more comfortably into works of FUTUROLOGY like Brian M. STABLEFORD and
David LANGFORD's The Third Millennium: A History of the World 2000-3000 A.
D. (1985), which offers a moderately detailed image of a future where a
kind of utopia has been secured by technological advancement, especially
in the biological sciences.A theme anthology is The New Improved Sun: An
Anthology of Utopian Science Fiction (anth 1976) ed Thomas M. DISCH.
[BS]Further reading: Utopias Old and New (1938) by Harry Ross; Utopian
Fantasy: A Study of English Utopian Fiction since the End of the
Nineteenth Century by Richard Gerber (1955); Yesterday's Tomorrows (1968)
by W.H.G. ARMYTAGE; American Utopias: Selected Short Fiction 1790-1954
(anth 1971) ed Arthur O. Lewis; The Image of the Future (rev 1973) by Fred
Polak; and British and American Utopian Literature 1516-1975 (1979) by
Lyman T. SARGENT.See also: ECONOMICS; FEMINISM; HISTORY OF SF; LIBERTARIAN
SF; MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; PROTO SCIENCE
FICTION.

SF?
"V"
2 US tv miniseries followed by a series. NBC. The 1st miniseries (1983),
2 100min episodes, was titled "V" and created/written/dir Kenneth Johnson.
The 2nd miniseries (1984), 3 100min episodes, was titled V: The Final
Battle and dir Richard T. Heffron, written Brian Taggert, Peggy Goldman,
from a story by Lillian Weezer, Goldman, Faustus Buck, Diane Frolow, Harry
and Renee Longstreet. The series (1984-5), titled "V", had 19 50min
episodes, prod Dean O'Brien, Garner Simmons; dirs included Gilbert
Shilton, Kevin Hooks, John Florea; writers included David Braff, Brian
Taggert, Simmons, David Abramowitz. The main cast members throughout were
Marc Singer as Mike Donovan, Faye Grant as Julie, Jane Badler as Diana,
Blair Tefkin as Robin, Michael Ironside as Ham Tyler, Robert Englund as
Willy, Jennifer Cooke as Elizabeth.Kenneth Johnson's track record included
The INCREDIBLE HULK and The BIONIC WOMAN , so it was surprising that "V"
started as well as it did. He based the story on Sinclair LEWIS's It Can't

Happen Here (1935), about a fascist takeover in the USA, but substituted
alien invaders - at first seemingly friendly, but actually after our
water, and ourselves for food - for the fascists. The carnivorous, saurian
invaders, as in the tv series The INVADERS (1967-8) and many films, are
disguised to look just like us, but with jackboots. A resistance movement
grows, whose "V" (for "Victory") is daubed on walls everywhere, but many
humans become collaborators; SCIENTISTS become objects of persecution (the
comparison being with Jews under the Nazis); some aliens are worse than
others.The first half of the initial mini-series was quite good, but
afterwards the series became an object lesson in US tv's remorseless
appetite for CLICHE - especially in its programmes for younger viewers and its reduction of all controversial issues to moral stereotypes: the
latter half of this miniseries lost direction; the second miniseries was
absurd; and the series was infantile hackwork and cancelled before the
story was completed. The two mini-series were expensive and - especially
the first - had quite spectacular sets and special effects. [PN]
VACCA, ROBERTO
[r] ITALY.
VADRE, LESLIE
L.P. DAVIES.
VALDEZ, PAUL
Alan G. YATES.
VALE, RENA (MARIE)
(1898-1983) US writer who began publishing sf in 1952 with the novella
"The Shining City" for Science Fiction Quarterly, and with her first
novel, The Red Court: Last Seat of National Government of the United
States of America (1952). She subsequently restricted herself to novels,
like Beyond the Sealed World (1965), based on the 1952 novella, and Taurus
Four (1970), which combines SATIRE with SPACE OPERA in a story containing
hippies lost on another planet, a sociologist and an alien INVASION. In
The Day After Doomsday: A Fantasy of Time Travel (1970) 12 selected
survivors of a nuclear HOLOCAUST are lectured by their saviours, the race
which bred humans on Earth in the first place. [JC]Other works: Beyond
these Walls (1960); The House on Rainbow Leap (1973).See also: CITIES.
VALENTINE, VICTOR
(? - ) UK writer whose Cure for Death (1960) features a ray that not only
cures cancer and ageing but also dissociates its patients from their own
past lives. [JC]
VALIGURSKY, ED(WARD I.)
(1926- ) US illustrator. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago and the
American Academy of Arts before graduating from the Art Institute of
Pittsburgh. He began as an associate art director for ZIFF-DAVIS in 1952
and became art director for Quinn Publishing, publisher of IF, in 1953.
From 1954 he freelanced, though most of his magazine work was for those 2
companies; he painted 49 covers for AMZ and 32 for Fantastic, mostly in
the 1950s, and many book covers (often unsigned) for ACE BOOKS in the
1950s and 1960s - notably the Ace Doubles - and for many other book

publishers, including Avon and Dell. His work sometimes looks hurried, but
he was proficient at menacing ROBOTS and his characteristic needle-nosed
SPACESHIPS. Like many sf illustrators of the period, he found other
markets that paid better, and moved into advertising, general-fiction
magazines like COLLIER'S, and nonfiction magazines featuring aviation and
aerospace subjects. [JG/PN]
VALLEE, JACQUES
[r] UFOS.
VALLEJO, BORIS
(1941- ) Illustrator, born in Peru probably around 1947 and trained there
in graphic design; moved to the USA in 1964. BV, who signs his work
"Boris", began working in the sf/ FANTASY genre with Warren Publications'
magazines and comics in 1971, then shifted to MARVEL COMICS, where his
covers for The Savage Sword of Conan soon caused him to be tagged "the
next Frazetta"; work in this vein won him a reputation in heroic-fantasy
ILLUSTRATION second only to Frank FRAZETTA's, though perhaps BV's work is
smoother and less vigorous. His book-cover work in this genre since 1975
has been primarily for BALLANTINE BOOKS and DEL REY BOOKS. His erotic
fantasies of male power and female bondage were a natural accompaniment to
the Gor novels of John NORMAN, for 7 of which he did covers in 1976; he
also painted the covers for Ballantine's reissue of 24 of Edgar Rice
BURROUGHS's Tarzan books in 1977. BV's work is almost a compendium of
alternate sexual fantasies, moving easily from men like a homo-erotic
musclebuilder's dream to lush-breasted, dominatrix whip-wielding women.
Much of BV's later output is in the form of books and pictorial calendars,
often featuring previously unpublished work. There are at least 10
calendars, starting with The Tarzan Calendar 1979 (1978). The books
include The Fantastic Art of Boris Vallejo (1978), Mirage (1982), overtly
erotic original art with poems by BV's wife, Doris Vallejo, Enchantment
(1984), further erotic art with stories by Doris Vallejo, and Boris
Vallejo's Fantasy Art Techniques (1985). [PN/JG]Other Works: The Boris
Vallejo Portfolio (1994); B.V. (1994); Bodies: His Photographic Art
(1994).
VALLEY OF GWANGI, THE
Film (1969). Morningside/Warner-Seven Arts. Prod Charles H. Schneer. Dir
James O'Connolly, starring James Franciscus, Gila Golan, Richard Carlson,
Laurence Naismith. Screenplay William E. Bast, with additions by Julian
More. 95 mins. Colour.Cowboys discover a hidden valley in Mexico where
surviving dinosaurs still live. They capture Gwangi, an allosaur, roping
it like a steer, and take it back to civilization to put it on display in
a stadium; but, like KING KONG, Gwangi escapes and goes on the rampage,
until finally cornered in a church. TVOG had been a pet project of Willis
O'BRIEN, who had wanted to make it in 1942. Ray HARRYHAUSEN, O'Brien's
special-effects protege, finally brought it to life, and, although usually
rated a poor film, it is one of the more cheerful and entertaining
showcases for Harryhausen's stop-motion animation - the cowboy vs dinosaur
scenes comprise one of the great sequences of B-movie lunacy. But it
flopped. [PN]

VAMPIRES
SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
van ARNAM, DAVE
Working name of US writer David G. van Arnam (1935- ) who began
publishing sf with Lost in Space * (1957) with Ron Archer (Ted WHITE), a
novelization from the tv series LOST IN SPACE. Sideslip (1968) was also
written with White, who this time used his own name. Further routine sf
adventures by DVA are Star Gladiator (1967 chap dos), Star Mind (1969) and
Greyland (1972). The Zantain fantasies - The Players of Hell (1968 chap
dos) and Wizard of Storms (1970) - are well constructed and occasionally
vivid, as are the Jamnar fantasies, Star Barbarian (1969) and Lord of
Blood (1970). [JC]
van CAMPEN, KARL
[s] John W. CAMPBELL Jr.
VANCE, GERALD
ZIFF-DAVIS house name (1941-58), used by Roger P. Graham (Rog PHILLIPS),
by Randall GARRETT in collaboration with Robert SILVERBERG, and on 35
stories whose authors have not been identified, many perhaps by Chester S.
GEIER. [PN]
VANCE, JACK
Working name of US writer John Holbrook Vance (1916- ), who was educated
at the University of California first as a mining engineer, then as a
physics major and finally in journalism, though without taking a degree.
During WWII he served in the Merchant Navy, being twice torpedoed and
writing his first story, "The World Thinker", published in 1945 in TWS. In
the late 1940s and early 1950s JV contributed a variety of short stories
(one time using the pseudonym John Holbrook) and novels to the PULP
MAGAZINES, primarily STARTLING STORIES and THRILLING WONDER STORIES. These
included the Magnus Ridolph series, chronicling the adventures of a
roguish interstellar troubleshooter, assembled as The Many Worlds of
Magnus Ridolph (coll 1966 dos; exp 1980; further exp vt The Complete
Magnus Ridolph 1984). But nothing of this early work, dependent as it was
on pulp conventions, prefigured the mature JV.The change began with his
first published book, THE DYING EARTH (coll of linked stories 1950),
comprising 6 previously unpublished tales set on Earth in the FAR FUTURE,
at a time, long after the wasting away of science, when MAGIC has become
the operating principle. This Dying Earth venue derived its languid
colours and its florid architecture from the romances of Clark Ashton
SMITH, and the tales are the first mature examples of that form as
adumbrated by Smith; but, unlike his mentor, JV told his stories in an
ironical tone, uniquely distanced and serene, that itself became an
integral part of any definition of a Dying-Earth tale. Cruelties and
nostalgias, picaresque flashes of plotting, adjurations of melancholy: all
were enveloped in the musing voice. JV's only real failure in THE DYING
EARTH - it would dog him throughout his career - lay in his inability to
conceive narrative structures capable of sustaining his vision for more
than novelette length. His later full-length Dying Earth volumes were all
made up from shorter units; they included The Eyes of the Overworld (fixup

1966), Morreion: A Tale of the Dying Earth (1973 Flashing Swords #1, anth
ed Lin CARTER; 1979 chap), A Bagful of Dreams (1979 chap), The Seventeen
Virgins (1974 FSF; 1979 chap), Cugel's Saga (coll of linked stories 1983)
and Rhialto the Marvelous (1984). (This last is not to be confused with
Rhialto the Marvelous * [anth 1985], a SHARED-WORLD book containing also
"Basileus" by C.J. CHERRYH and Janet E. MORRIS. Before that, in A Quest
for Simbilis * [1974], Michael SHEA wrote a direct sequel to The Eyes of
the Overworld, territory later covered in conflicting terms by Cugel's
Saga.) The influence of JV's articulation of the tone and venue of the
Dying Earth was widespread, affecting both fantasy and sf writers, and
helping authors such as Michael MOORCOCK to define the characteristic
ambience of SCIENCE FANTASY. It would not be until The Book of the New Sun
(1980-82) by Gene WOLFE - who amply acknowledged JV's central influence that a new paradigm for the Dying-Earth tale would appear, one more
tightly tied to narrative revelation but no more entrancing than its
model.JV's second original contribution to the sf/fantasy field was his
sophistication of the PLANETARY ROMANCE in Big Planet (1952 Startling
Stories; cut 1957; further cut 1958; full text restored 1978), to which
Showboat World (1975; vt The Magnificent Showboats of the Lower Vissel
River Lune XXIII South, Big Planet 1983) forms a retroactively conceived
sequel. Before 1950 and THE DYING EARTH, the planetary romance had been
generally restricted either to tales which replicated, palely, the work of
Edgar Rice BURROUGHS or to pulp-sf adventures set on worlds which might be
colourful but which were at the same time conceived with a fatal thinness.
What was lacking was any form of enabling premise. In Big Planet JV
provided an sf model for the planetary romance which has been of
significant use for 40 years. The planet of this novel is a huge though
Earthlike world, with enough landmass to provide realistic venues in which
a wide range of social systems can operate, and, significantly, is low in
heavy-metal resources (a fact that both explains its relatively low
gravity and requires the wide range of societies that flourish to be
low-tech ones). As is usual with JV, these societies are all of distant
human origin, though they have become exceedingly variegated in ways open
to description in the ethnographical style he developed to tell this tale,
and upon which he depended for his best and truest effects over the next
decades ( ANTHROPOLOGY; SOCIOLOGY). The world of the JV planetary romance
might occasionally be linked notionally to Earth by conventional sf
trappings (generally of little actual relevance), but basically it is a
venue, placed far into the future though without foregrounding any common
dating or other device that might tie it too tightly to any Future
History.His other titles from this period were less ambitious but
contained some interesting incidental invention; they include Son of the
Tree (1951 TWS; 1964 dos), Slaves of the Klau (1952 Space Stories as
"Planet of the Damned"; cut 1958 dos; text restored, vt Gold and Iron
1982) and The Houses of Iszm (1954 Startling Stories; 1964 dos). None of
these were particularly well organized books - nor for that matter are THE
DYING EARTH and Big Planet - but the development of IMMORTALITY themes in
the far-future DYSTOPIA depicted in To Live Forever (1956) is more
impressive, and The Languages of Pao (1958) interestingly espouses the
Whorfian hypothesis ( LINGUISTICS) that language creates PERCEPTION,
rather than the reverse. The main thrust of JV's work, however, as in such

stories as "The Miracle Workers" (1958), continued to lie in increasingly
ambitious explorations of the planetary-romance theme of LIFE ON OTHER
WORLDS. THE DRAGON MASTERS (1963 dos), a short novel which won JV his
first HUGO, clearly illustrates this tendency. Set on a distant world in
the far future, it is a story grounded in GENETIC ENGINEERING, but the
science is so far advanced that it could equally be considered magic.As
JV's created worlds became richer and more complex, so too did his style.
Always tending towards the baroque, it had developed by the time of THE
DRAGON MASTERS into an effective high-mannered diction, somewhat pedantic,
and almost always saturated with a rich but distanced irony. JV's talent
for naming the people and places in his stories (a mixture of exotic
invented terms and commonplace words with the right resonance) contributed
to the sense that dream ethnographies were being carved, almost as a
gardener would create topiary. Three novels, similar in structure, show
these talents at their fullest stretch: The Blue World (1964 Fantastic as
"King Kragen"; exp 1966), EMPHYRIO (1969) and The Anome (1971 FSF as "The
Faceless Man"; 1973; vt The Faceless Man 1978) each follow the life of a
boy born into and growing up in a static, stratified society, with which
he comes into conflict, being driven eventually into rebellion. The
invented world in each is particularly carefully thought-out. Both
EMPHYRIO and The Anome additionally feature some piercing SATIRE of
RELIGION.As his professional career developed, JV began to initiate
various sequences - with mixed results, for he often gave the impression
that, once the setting had been fully established, his interest began
inexorably to wane. Later books in his series are often inferior to their
predecessors, and far more likely to depend for their effects upon
plotting routines extracted - none too competently - from the dawn of
pulp. This is the case with the earlier vols of the Demon Princes series,
an interstellar saga of vengeance comprising The Star King (1964), The
Killing Machine (1964), The Palace of Love (1967), The Face (1979) and The
Book of Dreams (1981), though the last two titles are of more interest;
with the Planet of Adventure series, comprising City of the Chasch (1968;
vt Chasch 1986), Servants of the Wankh (1969; vt Wankh 1986), The Dirdir
(1969) and The Pnume (1970), all assembled as The Planet of Adventure
Omnibus (omni 1985 UK); and with the Durdane trilogy, comprising The
Anome, The Brave Free Men (1973) and The Asutra (1974), all assembled as
Durdane (omni 1989 UK). In contrast, the Alastor Cluster sequence Trullion: Alastor 2262 (1973), Marune: Alastor 933 (1975) and Wyst:
Alastor 1716 (1978) - arguably improves from beginning to end. Most of
these novels are planetary romances, and can be read in isolation from
their fellows; at the same time, most embody mild hints - for example, the
Demon Princes series is set in the far past of the Cadwal Chronicles (see
below) - that they belong to the same tenuously knit future Gaean Reach
Universe, most clearly described in the Demon Princes series. But this
background never governs the reader's perception of individual tales.JV
has written comparatively little short fiction. Apart from those stories
already mentioned, the best include "Telek" (1952), "The Moon Moth" (1961)
and the novella THE LAST CASTLE (1967 dos), which won JV a NEBULA and his
2nd Hugo. "The Moon Moth", one of JV's most elaborate stories, features
the use of MUSIC as a secondary form of COMMUNICATION. Music and other
ARTS feature in several other JV stories, including Space Opera (1965),

EMPHYRIO, The Anome and Showboat World. Many of JV's best short stories
are in Eight Fantasms and Magics (coll 1969; with 2 stories cut, vt
Fantasms and Magics 1978 UK) and The Best of Jack Vance (coll 1976). The
latter is also notable for containing informative commentaries on the
stories included, as JV is renowned for his reticence concerning himself
and his stories, maintaining such a low profile that a rumour that began
in 1950 that he was another Henry KUTTNER pseudonym was still being
perpetrated in some quarters 20 years later, notwithstanding Kuttner's
death in 1958.The 1980s saw some slackening in JV's production, though
this might not have been evident to the casual observer, as it was now
that much of his earlier short fiction was finally brought out in book
form. Beyond continuations of earlier series, his most interesting work in
this decade was restricted to 2 new series. One was the Lyonesse sequence
of fantasies about Tristan's birthplace off the coast of France, now sunk
into the wide funnel of the English Channel: Suldren's Garden (1983; rev
1983; vt Lyonesse 1984 UK), Lyonesse: The Green Pearl (1985; rev vt The
Green Pearl 1986) and Lyonesse: Madouc (1989; vt Madouc 1990). Of greater
sf interest are the Cadwal Chronicles - to date Araminta Station (1987),
Ecce and Olde Earth (1991) and Throy (1992) - expanding the
planetary-romance idiom into very long books with a sophisticated, newly
plot-wise leisureliness which almost fully warrants their length.
Interestingly, the planet Cadwal - the main character of the sequence, in
a fashion typical of JV - is a nature reserve.JV also wrote mystery
novels, mostly during the 1960s - one of the best of them, The Man in the
Cage (1960), won an Edgar - and scripts for the tv series CAPTAIN VIDEO.
None of this work lacks competence, but none has the haunting
retentiveness in the mind's eye of his planetary romances or his Dying
Earths. As a landscape artist, a gardener of worlds, JV has been for half
a century central to both sf and FANTASY. He has a genius of place.
[MJE/JC]Other works: The Space Pirate (1950 Startling Stories; 1953; cut
vt The Five Gold Bands 1962 dos; text restored 1980); Vandals of the Void
(1953); Future Tense (coll 1964; vt Dust of Far Suns 1981); The World
Between (coll 1965 dos; vt The Moon Moth dated 1975 but 1976 UK); Monsters
in Orbit (1952 TWS as "Abercrombie Station" and "Cholwell's Chickens"; cut
1965 dos); The Brains of Earth (1966 dos), assembled vt Nopalgarth with
The Houses of Iszm and Son of the Tree in Nopalgarth (omni 1980); The
Worlds of Jack Vance (coll 1973); Green Magic (coll 1979), not to be
confused with Green Magic (1963 FSF; 1979 chap), which contains only the
collection's title story; Galactic Effectuator (coll of linked stories
1980); Lost Moons (coll 1982); The Narrow Land (coll 1982); Light from a
Lone Star (coll 1985); The Dark Side of the Moon: Stories of the Future
(coll 1986); The Augmented Agent (coll 1986); Chateau d'If and Other
Stories (coll 1990); When the Five Moons Rise (coll 1992).Non-sf, some as
John Holbrook Vance: Take My Face (1957) as by Peter Held and Isle of
Peril (1959) as by Alan Wade, both assembled (the latter vt Bird Isle) as
Bird Isle/Take My Face (omni 1988); A Room to Die In (1965) as by Ellery
Queen; The Four Johns (1964; vt Four Men Called John 1976 UK) as by Ellery
Queen; The Madman Theory (1966) as by Ellery Queen; The Fox Valley Murders
(1966); The Pleasant Grove Murders (1967); The Deadly Isles (1969); Bad
Ronald (1973); The House on Lilly Street (1979); Strange Notions (1985);
The Dark Ocean (1985).About the author: Jack Vance, a Fantasmic

Imagination: A Working Bibliography (last rev 1990 chap) by Gordon BENSON
Jr and Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE; The Jack Vance Lexicon: From Aluph to
Zipangote (1992) ed Dan Ternianka; The Work of Jack Vance: An Annotated
Bibliography ?
ALIENS; ASTEROIDS; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT;
CYBORGS; ECOLOGY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GALAXY SCIENCE
FICTION; GAMES AND SPORTS; GOTHIC SF; LEISURE; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS;
LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); MATTER TRANSMISSION; MONEY;
SPACE
HABITATS; SPACE OPERA; SUPERMAN; SWORD AND SORCERY; TABOOS;
TERRAFORMING;
THRILLING WONDER STORIES; TRANSPORTATION; UNDER THE SEA; VILLAINS.
VANCE, STEVE
(1952- ) US writer who has since the late 1980s concentrated on horror
novels, but who began writing with some unremarkable but competently
conceived sf adventures, including Planet of the Gawfs (1977), All the
Shattered Worlds (1980) and The Hybrid (1981). Later novels include The
Hyde Effect (1986) and The Asgard Run (1990), about a shipwrecked crew of
alien scientists encountered in the mountains of Wyoming. [JC]Other works:
The Abyss (1989), Spook (1990) and Shapes (1991), all horror.
van DONGEN
Working name of US illustrator Henry Richard van Dongen (1920- ).
Entering the sf field in 1950 with a cover for SUPER SCIENCE STORIES (Sep
1950), vD soon dominated the covers (and the interiors) of ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION, with 46 covers Aug 1951-Sep 1961. He seldom worked for
other magazines, but did 3 covers for SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES,
including #1 (Nov 1952). His style was very distinctive, with muted
colours and gaunt, angular people. He left the genre in 1961 for the more
lucrative commercial-art field, returning in 1976 as a result of a chance
conversation with Lester DEL REY at BALLANTINE BOOKS. For the next decade
he did covers for Ballantine and DAW BOOKS in a style similar to his 1950s
magazine work but with much brighter colours. He retired in 1987 with
nerve problems related to injuries suffered in WWII. [JG/PN]
van DYNE, EDITH
L. Frank BAUM.
van GREENAWAY, PETER
(1929-1988) UK lawyer who began writing full-time in 1960; though he
never became known as a genre writer, much of his work was sf, including
his 1st novel, The Crucified City (1962), a post- HOLOCAUST story set in a
devastated London after a nuclear bomb has been dropped, and his 2nd, The
Evening Fool (1964), which carries its protagonist into an unviable
UTOPIA. The Man who Held the Queen to Ransom and Sent Parliament Packing
(1968) features a NEAR-FUTURE coup attempt in the UK, told in the
astringent, side-of-the-mouth pessimistic voice which became a trademark.
In later novels - like Judas! (1972; vt The Judas Gospel 1972 US), The
Medusa Touch (1973), Take the War to Washington (1974), Suffer! Little
Children (1976), The Dissident (1980) and Mutants (1986) - this dubiety
about the human animal became visibly more inflamed. Manrissa Man (1982)

makes savage play with the ape-as-human ( APES AND CAVEMEN) theme; and in
graffiti (1983), another post-holocaust tale, survivors of a nuclear war
revenge themselves upon its perpetrators. The increasingly solitary,
evasively narrated, uncompromisingly dark work of his later years made it
unlikely that PVG would ever be read with comfort as a genre writer.
[JC]Other works: Doppelganger (1975); A Man Called Scavener (1978); Edgar
Allan Who - ? (coll 1981); The Immortal Coil (coll 1985); The Killing Cap
(1987).
VANGUARD SCIENCE FICTION
US DIGEST-size magazine. 1 issue June 1958, published by Vanguard Science
Fiction; ed James BLISH. VSF made a promising debut: it included the
much-anthologized "Reap the Dark Tide" (vt "Shark Ship") by C.M. KORNBLUTH
and what were intended as regular features by L. Sprague DE CAMP and
Lester DEL REY. However, the decision to fold the magazine was made before
#1 even appeared. [MJE]
VAN HELLER, MARCUS
Zach HUGHES.
van HERCK, PAUL
(1939- ) Belgian (Flemish) writer whose Sam, of de Pluterdag (1968; trans
Danny De Laet and Willy Magiels as Where Were You Last Pluterday? 1973 US)
is a SATIRE of a society in which the higher classes have access to an
extra day of the week. Van Herck also wrote a collection of ingenious
short stories, De Cirkels ["The Circles"] (coll 1965). [JC]See also:
BENELUX
van HERP, JACQUES
[r] FRANCE.
van HOLK, FREDER
[r] GERMANY.
van LHIN, ERIK
Lester DEL REY.
van LOGGEM, MANUEL
[r] BENELUX.
van LORNE, WARNER
Pseudonym, probably of US writer Nelson Tremaine (1907-1971), author
under that name of a number of stories in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION
1935-9. "The Blue-Men of Yrano" (1939) is probably the best remembered.
WvL's identity has remained undetermined, although certainly F. Orlin
TREMAINE wrote at least 1 WvL story. The remainder have been ascribed to
his brother, Nelson Tremaine, but it remains possible that they were all
the work of the former. [MJE]
VAN LUSTBADER, ERIC
(1946- ) US author who graduated from Columbia University, majoring in
sociology, and worked for a time in the rock-music industry. His published
sf/fantasy work began with the Sunset Warrior trilogy: The Sunset Warrior
(1977), Shallows of Night (1978) and Dai-San (1978), to which Beneath an

Opal Moon (1980) is a coda with a different hero. This was remarkably
vivid SWORD AND SORCERY with sex and violence, and imaginatively rendered:
the first book is true sf, set in an underground post- HOLOCAUST society
which has almost forgotten the technology that keeps it alive, and to
which the surface is a distant memory, but subsequent volumes make no
great attempt to cleave to the sf premise. EVL then turned to the
bestseller genre with The Ninja (1979), the first of the Nicholas Linnear
trilogy, whose other titles are The Miko (1984) and White Ninja (1990).
These blend Oriental mysticism with martial-arts adventure and sex, and
contain (especially the 3rd) many fantastic elements, though more magical
than scientific. EVL maintained a string of bestsellers through the 1980s,
and is now an important commercial writer. His work is florid and intense,
with a sadistic streak, and mostly set in Asia; his more recent books are
generally signed Eric Lustbader. Some of his other novels also contain
fantastic elements. [PN]Other works Sirens (1981); the China Maroc
sequence, comprising Jian (1985) and Shan (1987); The Black Heart (1986);
Zero (1988); French Kiss (1989); Angel Eyes (1991); Black Blade (1992).
van SCYOC, SYDNEY J(OYCE)
(1939- ) US writer, active in the Unitarian Church, who began publishing
sf with "Shatter the Wall" for Gal in 1962 and afterwards contributed
stories regularly to the magazines, though she soon became best known for
her novels, beginning with the impressive Saltflower (1971), in which
aliens seed Earth to produce a new breed of "men". Assignment Nor'Dyren
(1973) depicts a DYSTOPIAN Earth and a complexly rendered alien planet in
trouble. Starmother (1976) and Cloudcry (1977) are both set in a Galaxy
dominated by humanity but on alien planets which offer fundamental
challenges to the human senses of order and rightness, and which
ultimately reward attempts to transcend, in a sometimes lukewarmly oceanic
fashion, human hierarchies and failures of empathy. The Sunstone Scrolls
sequence - Darkchild (1981), Bluesong (1983) and Starsilk (1984), all
assembled as Daughters of the Sunstone (omni 1985) - also combine an alien
setting, a variety of characters and species and an ultimate sharing of
transcendence, here occasioned by the symbiosis-engendering starsilks.
Drowntide (1987) could again be described as fusion sf, depicting the slow
coming to communion of a land-based race and an ocean-based race through
the agency of a hybrid offspring. SJVS's predilection for one-word titles
continued in Featherstroke (1989) but was rested in Deepwater Dreams
(1991). Though her tales are sometimes damaged by narrative longueurs,
SJVS's capacity to evoke a sense of the deep strangeness of the Universe and her iterated attempts to craft tales that persuasively espouse
marriages of species and venues - make her work sometimes compelling.
[JC]Other work: Sunwaifs (1981).See also: PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS.
VANSITTART, PETER
(1920- ) UK writer best known for his densely written historical novels.
His first novel, I Am the World: A Romance (1942), generalizes its
politically speculative plot by placing it in an allegorized and unnamed
country, where a dictator creates an ambiguous UTOPIA; The Game and the
Ground (1956) covers similar territory. The Story Teller (1968) offers no
sf explanation for the longevity of its central character - who lives over

500 years and the stages of his life are analogous to the development of
northern European civilization - but the novel's narrative and linguistic
powers deserve notice from the sf readership. In 3 further novels of
IMMORTALITY - Lancelot (1978), The Death of Robin Hood (1981) and Parsifal
(1988) - which share a polymathic density of language and a complexly
ambiguous mythopoeic attentiveness to the cultural icons of their titles,
PV again provided models of human history as a sequence of incessantly
reiterated tales whose casts, although they may metamorphose, do so only
to return. Robin Hood in particular prefigures the entangled chthonic
worlds of sf fantasists like Paul HAZEL and Robert P. HOLDSTOCK. [JC]Other
works: The Dark Tower: Tales from the Past (coll 1965) and The Shadow
Land: More Stories from the Past (coll 1967), juveniles which retell myths
and legends of Britain.
van VOGT, A(LFRED) E(LTON)
(1912- ) Canadian-born writer who moved to the USA in 1944 after
establishing his name as one of the creators of John W. CAMPBELL Jr's
GOLDEN AGE OF SF with a flood of material in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION,
starting with "Black Destroyer" (1939), though he had been active for
several years in various other genres. In 1939 he married E. Mayne HULL,
and produced several stories with her until she stopped writing in 1950.
With his conversion to DIANETICS - also in 1950 - AEVV became virtually
silent for several years. After the early 1960s, however, a second,
smaller spate of new material came from his pen.In 1939-47 AEVV published
at least 35 sf stories in ASF alone, some of novel length, and it was the
work of these years, much of it not to be published in book form until
long afterwards in reconstructed versions, that gave him his high
reputation as a master of intricate, metaphysical SPACE OPERA. Along with
Isaac ASIMOV and Robert A. HEINLEIN, and to a lesser extent L. Sprague DE
CAMP and L. Ron HUBBARD - he seemed nearly to create, by writing what
Campbell wanted to publish, the first genuinely successful period of US
sf; only in this "Golden Age" did it begin to achieve, in literary terms,
what the writers of US GENRE SF had eschewed 20 years earlier when they
had found that PULP MAGAZINES not only wished to publish sf but were their
only consistent market. Although AEVV catered for the pulps, he
intensified the emotional impact and complexity of the stories they would
bear: his nearly invincible alien MONSTERS, the long timespans of his
tales, the TIME PARADOXES that fill them, the quasimessianic SUPERMEN who
come into their own as the stories progress, the GALACTIC EMPIRES they
tend to rule and the states of lonely transcendental omnipotence they tend
to achieve - all are presented in a prose that uses crude, dark colours
but whose striking SENSE OF WONDER is conveyed with a dreamlike
conviction. The abrupt complications of plot for which he became so well
known, and which have been so scathingly mocked for their illogic and
preposterousness - within narratives that claimed to be presenting higher
forms of logic to the reader - are best analysed, and their effects best
understood, when their sudden shifts of perspective and rationale and
scale are seen as analogous to the movements of a dream. It is these "
HARD-SF dreams", so grippingly void of constraints or of the usual
surrealistic appurtenances of dream literature, that have so haunted
generations of children and adolescents.AEVV's first novel, and perhaps

still his best known, is SLAN (1940 ASF; 1946; rev 1951). Its HERO, the
young Jommy Cross, is a member of a MUTANT race, the Slans, originally
created to help mankind out of its difficulties but long driven into
hiding because of the jealousy of normals. Jommy's powers ( CHILDREN IN
SF), which include ESP, physical superiority to normals (he has 2 hearts)
and extraordinary INTELLIGENCE, enable him to survive the mobbing, arrest
and offstage death of his mother and to escape from sight into an
adolescence and young manhood during which he begins to sense his true
powers. As a man he becomes involved with Earth's mysterious dictator,
with defective Slans, and with various intrigues centring on new sources
of energy. Matters are cleared up only at the book's close with the
revelation that the dictator is himself a secret Slan, that the girl Slan
with whom Jommy is in love is the dictator's daughter, and that Jommy is
in line for the succession. SLAN is a much imitated model for the creation
of wish-fulfilment stories.However, it was in the 2 Weapon Shops books-THE
WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER (1941-2 ASF, 1949 Thrilling Wonder Stories; fixup
1951) and The Weapon Makers (1943 ASF; 1947; rev 1952; vt One Against
Eternity 1955 dos), assembled as The Weapon Shops of Isher, and The Weapon
Makers (omni 1988 UK) - that AEVV's mixture of hard-sf dreams, enormities
of complication, and transcendent superheroes was most hypnotically
presented. The main protagonist of the 2 books, the immortal Robert
Hedrock ( IMMORTALITY), has not only in the dim past created the WEAPON
Shops as a LIBERTARIAN force to counterbalance the imperial world
government long dominant on Earth, but also turns out eventually to have
literally begotten the race of emperors and empresses who rule that
government in traditional opposition to the mysterious Shops, which are
invulnerable and sell weapons to anyone. To cap this dream of omnipotence,
Hedrock unwittingly passes a Galactic initiation test at the end of the
2nd book, the test having been designed to select the next rulers of the
"sevagram". The word "sevagram" appears only once in the series, as the
very last word of The Weapon Makers; in its placing, which seems to open
universes to the reader's gaze, and in its resonant mysteriousness, for
its precise meaning is unclear, this use of "sevagram" may well stand as
the best working demonstration in the whole of genre sf of how to impart a
SENSE OF WONDER.The 2nd major series of AEVV's prolific decade-the Null-A
sequence comprising The World of A (1945 ASF; rev 1948; rev vt The World
of Null-A 1970) and The Pawns of Null-A (1948-9 ASF as "The Players of A";
1956; rev vt The Players of Null-A 1966), plus Null-A Three (1984 France
[in French]; 1985 UK) - may have appeared weightier in its attempts to
present its arguments in terms of "non-Aristotelian" thought ( GENERAL
SEMANTICS), a claim which might seem ominously to prefigure a
rationalization of the effortless dream logic of the earlier stories; but
in the event tends to stumble into excessive tangles of complication. The
protagonist, Gosseyn (go sane), lacks humour even more decidedly than his
superman predecessors, and his rapid, confusing, nearly emotionless
shifting from one Gosseyn body to another, in a kind of cloning ( CLONES)
without the concept of cloning to sustain it, makes his eventual supremacy
so peculiarly disorganized as to be almost without effect on the reader.
By this time AEVV was nearing the end of his association with ASF, after
an extraordinarily productive decade, and would soon stop writing
entirely; perhaps The Pawns of Null-A, which in magazine form stretched to

100,000 words, was about as far as he could go without an extended
breather. Certainly his 3rd series from this period-the Linn sequence
comprising Empire of the Atom (1946-7 ASF; fixup 1957; cut 1957 dos) and
The Wizard of Linn (1950 ASF; 1962) - is considerably less intense. James
BLISH argued of this series about superscience and palace politics that
its plot and characters closely resemble those of Robert GRAVES's Claudius
novels: it would have been a brave critic who, with equal persuasiveness,
found AEVV's earlier series to resemble any previous work of world
literature.During this first decade of his career, AEVV contributed
material also to ASF's sister magazine, Unknown, most notably The Book of
Ptath (1943 Unknown; 1947; vt Two Hundred Million A.D. 1964; vt Ptath
1976), a FAR-FUTURE epic in which a reincarnated god-figure must fight to
re-establish his suzerainty. Some of the independent stories of these
years were collected in Destination: Universe (coll 1952) and Away and
Beyond (coll 1952; with 2 stories cut rev 1959; with 1 story cut rev 1963
UK). The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1939-43 ASF and 1950 Other Worlds;
fixup 1950; vt Mission: Interplanetary 1952) marshalled several early
stories into a chronicle depicting various ways in which a "Nexialist",
Elliot Grosvenor, by using a response to ALIENS and their environments
that synthesizes different fields of knowledge, copes with divers
monsters. The book incorporates AEVV's first 2 sf stories; and Nexialism
itself, which involves a system of intensive psychological training,
interestingly prefigures L. Ron HUBBARD's Dianetics, with which AEVV was
to become so closely involved. This involvement was the culmination of his
persistent interest in all training systems which purport scientifically
(or pseudo-scientifically; PSEUDO-SCIENCE) to create physical or mental
superiority and awaken dormant talents, an interest which generated not
only the 3 General-Semantics novels described above but also Siege of the
Unseen (1946 ASF as "The Chronicler"; 1959 dos; vt as title story in The
Three Eyes of Evil coll 1973 UK), in which, inspired by the Bates
eye-exercise system, he dramatized the curing of eye problems through
partly mental means.In the autobiographical Reflections of A.E. van Vogt
(1975), AEVV uses the term "fix-up" (or FIXUP) in the sense which we have
adopted for this encyclopedia: a book made up of previously published
stories altered to fit together - usually with the addition of new
cementing material - the end product being marketed as a novel. It is
possible that AEVV invented the term for, although fixups are not unknown
outside sf, the peculiar marketing circumstances of the genre in the USA
encouraged their creation, and certainly AEVV wrote (or compiled) more
fixups than any other sf writer of stature. It was during his time of
relative inactivity as a creator of original material - the 1950s and
early 1960s - that he began producing these numerous fixups, including of
course THE WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER, perhaps the most successful and
ingenious of all. Fixups incorporating Golden-Age material include The
Mixed Men (1943-5 ASF; fixup 1952; cut vt Mission to the Stars 1955), The
War Against the Rull (1940-50 ASF; fixup 1959), The Beast (1943-4 ASF;
fixup 1963; vt Moonbeast 1969 UK) and Quest for the Future (1943-6 ASF;
fixup 1970).The Silkie (1964-7 If; fixup 1969), though technically
similar, was the first to use substantially contemporary material - and
may have been the first whose component parts were all written with the
end result in mind. It signalled the beginning of AEVV's 2nd period of

productivity, with Children of Tomorrow (1970) being his first completely
new sf novel since The Mind Cage (1948 Fantasy Book as "The Great Judge";
exp 1957) - although he had also published a political thriller about the
attempted brainwashing of Westerners in contemporary communist China, The
Violent Man (1962). The most sustained effort of this 2nd wave of titles
was perhaps The Battle of Forever (1971), in which the enhanced-human
protagonist, Modyun, leaves the refuge where his kind have for eons dwelt
in seclusion and undertakes a far-future odyssey through a decadent world
and Galaxy, battling against aliens and gradually coming to full stature
as a superman. Compared to the fixups of the previous decade or so, the
story is well paced and emotionally coherent, though the oneiric flow of
arousing event and imagery is damaged by a sense of self-consciousness.
Further novels do not live up to this promise of partial renewal, and have
not been well received.Critics such as Damon KNIGHT - in an essay
reprinted as "Cosmic Jerrybuilder" in In Search of Wonder (critical coll
1956; rev 1967) - have tended to treat the typical AEVV tale as a failed
effort at hard sf, and have consequently tended to describe stories others
have written in the modes he developed - like Philip K. DICK, Charles L.
HARNESS and Larry NIVEN-as "improvements" on the original model. In some
ways, of course, these writers have built upon the complexity of AEVV's
worlds and have significantly rationalized his convulsive shuffling and
reshuffling of every element of his stories. But AEVV's space operas, as
noted, are at heart enacted dreams which articulate deep, symbolic needs
and wishes of his readership. Because there is no misunderstood science or
cosmography or technology at the very heart of his best work, there is no
"improving" AEVV. [JC]Other works: Tomorrow on the March: The Text of the
Speech Delivered July 4, 1946 at the PACIFICON by the Guest of Honor (1946
chap); Out of the Unknown (coll 1948; exp 1969; vt The Sea Thing and Other
Stories 1970 UK; with 5 of the 6 original stories under original title,
cut 1970 UK) with E. Mayne Hull, 3 stories by each writer; Masters of Time
(coll 1950), comprising 2 stories later published separately as The
Changeling (1944 ASF; 1967) and Earth's Last Fortress (1942 ASF as
"Recruiting Station"; 1960 dos; vt Masters of Time 1967); The House that
Stood Still (1950; rev vt The Mating Cry 1960; text restored vt The
Undercover Aliens 1976 UK); The Universe Maker (1949 Startling Stories as
"The Shadow Men"; rev 1953 dos); Planets for Sale (1943-6 ASF as by Hull
alone; fixup 1954) with Hull alone credited; the 1965 ed credits both
authors; Rogue Ship (1947 ASF, 1950 Super-Science Stories and 1963 If;
fixup 1965); The Twisted Men (coll 1964 dos); Monsters (coll 1965; vt The
Blal and Other Science-Fiction Monsters 1976); The Winged Man (1944 ASF as
by Hull alone; exp 1966) with Hull; The Far-Out Worlds of A.E. van Vogt
(coll 1968; vt with added stories as The Worlds of A.E. van Vogt 1974);
More than Superhuman (coll 1971); The Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind
Benders (coll 1971; with 1 story cut and others retitled but unrevised,
rev vt The Gryb 1976); M-33 in Andromeda (coll 1971); The Darkness on
Diamondia (1972); The Book of Van Vogt (coll 1972; vt Lost: Fifty Suns
1979); Future Glitter (1973; vt Tyranopolis 1977 UK); The Secret Galactics
(1974; vt Earth Factor X 1976); The Man with a Thousand Names (1974); The
Best of A.E. Van Vogt (coll 1974 UK), a different selection from The Best
of A.E. Van Vogt (coll 1976); Supermind (fixup 1977; The Anarchistic
Colossus (1977); Pendulum (coll 1978); Enchanted Village (1950 Other

Worlds; 1979 chap); Renaissance (1979); Cosmic Encounter (1980);
Computerworld (1983; vt Computer Eye 1985).Omnibuses include: Triad (omni
1959) assembling The World of A, The Voyage of the Space Beagle and SLAN;
A Van Vogt Omnibus (omni 1967 UK) assembling Planets for Sale, The Beast
and The Book of Ptath; Van Vogt Omnibus (2) (omni 1971 UK) assembling The
Mind Cage, The Winged Man and SLAN; Two Science Fiction Novels (omni 1973
UK) assembling Siege of the Unseen (as The Three Eyes of Evil) and Earth's
Last Fortress; The Universe Maker and The Proxy Intelligence (omni 1976
UK).About the author: "A.E. van Vogt" in Seekers of Tomorrow (1966) by Sam
MOSKOWITZ; "The Development of a Science Fiction Writer" by AEVV in
Foundation #3, 1973; The World beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the
Quest for Transcendence (1989) by Alexei and Cory PANSHIN.See also: ADAM
AND EVE; ANTIMATTER; ARKHAM HOUSE; CANADA; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH;
COSMOLOGY; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FRANCE;
GALACTIC
EMPIRES; GENERATION STARSHIPS; GENETIC ENGINEERING; GODS AND DEMONS;
HISTORY IN SF; HISTORY OF SF; ILLUSTRATION; INVASION; LIVING WORLDS;
LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); PARANOIA; PARASITISM AND
SYMBIOSIS; PERCEPTION; PHYSICS; POLITICS; PSI POWERS; PSYCHOLOGY;
REINCARNATION; RELIGION; SCIENTIFIC ERRORS; SERIES; SUSPENDED ANIMATION;
THRILLING WONDER STORIES; WAR.
VARDEMAN, ROBERT E(DWARD)
(1947- ) US writer whose ruthless productivity - he has written about 50
books since his first sf novel, Pleasure Planet (1974 as by Edward E.
George; vt Outer Space Embrace 1978 as by Monica Mounds; vt Janet's Sex
Planet 1980 as by Carrie Onn; vt Intergalactic Orgy 1983 as Obie Khan; vt
Sexual Coquette 1985 dos as by Marv Elous; vt Playing with Desire 1986 as
by Fred Sparkrock) - has yet to give birth to any memorable work. As well
as some further pseudonymous titles, including 2 fairly marginal sf
adventures as Nick CARTER - The Solar Menace * (1981) and Doctor DNA *
(1982) - 2 Star Trek ties - The Klingon Gambit * (1981) and Mutiny on the
Enterprise * (1983) - and a number of fantasy sequences, he has produced
several series for the sf market, including: the Weapons of Chaos
sequence, comprising Echoes of Chaos (1986), Equations of Chaos (1987) and
Colors of Chaos (1988), all assembled as The Weapons of Chaos (omni 1989);
the Masters of Space sequence, comprising The Stellar Death Plan (1987),
The Alien Web (1987) and A Plague in Paradise (1987), all assembled as
Masters of Space (omni 1990 UK), which was advertised as resembling E.E.
SMITH's work but lacked any similar conviction; and the Biowarriors
sequence, comprising The Infinity Plague (1989), Crisis at Starlight
(1990) and Space Vectors (1990). Singletons include The Sandcats of Rhyl
(1978), Road to the Stars (1988), Ancient Heavens (1989) and Deathfall
(1991). [JC]Other works: Fantasies, mostly in series form, including: the
War of Powers sequence, all with Victor MILAN, comprising The Sundered
Realm (1980), The City in the Glacier (1980) and The Destiny Stone (1980),
all assembled as The War of Powers (omni 1984), then The Fallen Ones
(1981), In the Shadow of Omizantrim (1982) and Demon of the Dark Ones
(1982); the Cenotaph Road sequence, perhaps his best, comprising Cenotaph
Road (1983), The Sorcerer's Skull (1983), World of Mazes (1983), Iron
Tongue (1984), Fire and Fog (1984) and Pillar of Night (1984); the Jade

Demons sequence, comprising The Quaking Lands (1984), The Frozen Waves
(1985), The Crystal Clouds (1985) and The White Fire (1986), all assembled
as The Jade Demons Quartet (omni 1987 UK); the Swords of Raemllyn
sequence, all with George W. PROCTOR, comprising To Demons Bound (1985), A
Yoke of Magic (1985) and Blood Fountain (1985), all 3 assembled as Swords
of Raemllyn Book 1 (omni 1992 UK), plus Death's Acolyte (1986), The Beasts
of the Mist (1986) and For Crown and Kingdom (1987), all 3 assembled as
Swords of Raemllyn Book 2 (omni 1992 UK); the Demon Crown trilogy,
comprising The Glass Warrior (1988). Phantoms on the Wind (1989) and A
Symphony of Storms (1990), all assembled as The Demon Crown Trilogy (omni
1990 UK); the Peter Thorne psychic detective sequence comprising The
Screaming Knife (1990),A Resonance of Blood (1992) and Death Channels
(1992). A singleton is The Keys to Paradise (1986 UK; vt in 3 vols, all as
by Daniel Moran, The Flame Key 1987 US, The Skeleton Lord's Key 1987 US
and Key of Ice and Steel 1988 US as by Moran); The Accursed (1994 UK);
Deathfall (1994).
VARDON, RICHARD
[s] David Wright O'BRIEN.
VARDRE, LESLIE
L.P. DAVIES.
VARGO STATTEN BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE
VARGO STATTEN SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE.
VARGO STATTEN SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE
UK magazine. 19 issues 1954-6, published by Scion, London, for the first
7 issues, then Dragon Publications; ed "Vargo Statten" (Alistair Paterson
for 7 issues, then John Russell FEARN). The last 2 issues were undated.
#1-#3 were PULP-MAGAZINE size, then DIGEST size to #11, then pocketbook
size. Intended to be a monthly, it 7 times skipped months. The magazine
was retitled Vargo Statten British Science Fiction Magazine vol 1 #4-#5,
The British Science Fiction Magazine vol 1 #6-#12, and finally The British
Space Fiction Magazine from vol 2 #1 to the end.VSSFM owed its existence
to the success of Scion's paperback-book line, which included many sf
novels written by Fearn and published as by Vargo Statten. A magazine
under Statten's name seemed a good financial bet, given the popularity of
the books. The policy of aiming stories at younger readers may have
alienated some UK authors; the low rates of payment, finally 12s 6d per
1000 words for world rights, cannot have helped. Barrington J. BAYLEY made
his debut here, and E.C. TUBB often appeared both under his own name and
under pseudonyms, but Fearn was forced to use many of his own stories,
sometimes old ones slightly rewritten under various pseudonyms, to fill up
the issues. [FHP]
VARLEY, JOHN (HERBERT)
(1947- ) US writer who entered the sf field with "Picnic on Nearside" for
FSF in 1974 and who was soon thought to be the most significant new writer
of the 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative
implications of transformative developments like cloning ( CLONES), many
of his protagonists were women, and most of the stories he told were set
within an overall background Universe whose centre of geography had been

startlingly displaced - in a manner characteristic of the finest sf - from
Earth itself. It may have been the case that many previous SPACE OPERAS,
especially those claiming galactic scope, were set far from the home
planet (which was often "forgotten"), but JV's innovation was twofold: to
bring the displacement close to the present day, which NEAR-FUTURE setting
made it more vivid, and to present a subsequent Solar System whose own
complexity seemed to mark a genuine evolutionary shift - in fictional
terms - from the old geocentricity. The image of an incessantly humming
Solar System - it is central to books like Michael SWANWICK's Vacuum
Flowers (1987) - owes as much to JV as it does to the idioms of CYBERPUNK.
Urgent and risk-taking, the stories assembled in THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION
(coll 1978; vt In the Hall of the Martian Kings 1978 UK) and The Barbie
Murders (coll 1980; vt Picnic on Nearside 1984) seemed to announce the
shape of sf's response to the end of the 20th century. JV's shorter works
have brought him 3 HUGOS - for "The Persistence of Vision" in 1979, "The
Pusher" in 1982 and PRESS ENTER (1984 IASFM; 1990 chap dos) in 1985 - and
2 NEBULAS - for "The Persistence of Vision" and "PRESS ENTER".This sense
of currency was also a feature of JV's first - and perhaps finest - novel,
THE OPHIUCHI HOTLINE (1977), set 500 years into his future HISTORY - it is
sometimes called the Eight Worlds sequence - at a time when humanity has
been long exiled from Earth by immensely superior, indifferent "Invaders".
Bioengineered and variously cloned, humans now subscribe to social and
sexual codes - and live within perspectives and according to processes that differ radically from those of their flesh-bound, planet-bound
ancestors. The protagonist is in fact several successive clones of the
same person, the original dying only a few pages into the text and new
versions of that original - clone bodies with pre-recorded mind-tapes of
the original plugged in at the point of arousal - taking over when needed.
The sense of ongoing process - and of an identity-dissolving taste for
metamorphosis - is incessant. The eponymous hotline, which is operated by
similarly displaced interstellar exiles, beams data through the Solar
System, the last item being a message that humanity will soon be banned
from its home system, and will be doomed to wander the stars, homeless,
for ever. This happens.JV then composed the Titan or Gaean sequence Titan (1979), Wizard (1980) and Demon (1984) - which begins exuberantly
with a mission to explore the largest satellite of Saturn. But Titan turns
out to be a sentient artifact (or BIG DUMB OBJECT) called Gaea and to
contain within its entrails a veritable POCKET UNIVERSE of trapped
individuals and species. The female protagonist of the series becomes
Gaea's agent, intimate and enemy. Although this was technically an
interminable template, the series was kept decorously to trilogy length,
but did not fully escape the charge that the libidinous solipsisms of the
plot had a VIRTUAL-REALITY resonance. Millennium (1977 IASFM as "Air Raid"
as by Herb Boehm; exp 1983) - filmed as MILLENNIUM (1989) - is a
TIME-TRAVEL novel in which humans from a devastated future extract
contemporary accident victims at the moment before their deaths because,
being still genetically whole, they can be used in a project to repopulate
the Earth, with the aid of an AI. Like JV's best work, the book was
smoothly muscled, manipulative and ruthless. His output of the 1980s was,
nevertheless, less strikingly innovative than had been hoped - and,
perhaps unfairly, expected - of him. The stories assembled in Blue

Champagne (coll 1986) - Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo (1989 chap)
reprints an original story from the collection - show no technical decline
but lack some of the exploratory dangerousness of his first work.
Similarly, Steel Beach (1992) demonstrates through its huge length a
virtuoso control of sf themes, presented through many of the kind of
compulsive narrative hooks employed by Robert A. HEINLEIN in his ruthless
prime; but the story itself, set in the Eight Worlds universe about 200
years after humanity's expulsion from Earth, lacks dramatic urgency,
despite many cleverly conceived (but sidebar) episodes full of action. The
title itself, however, may well become established as a tag for the
evolutionary impasse humanity may soon face: like a lungfish struggling to
breathe on a Pacific beach, JV suggests, humanity could soon find itself
struggling for breath on the steel beach that is all the home it has,
after the final death of Nature. [JC]See also: BLACK HOLES; CHILDREN IN
SF; ESCHATOLOGY; ESP; FANTASY; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; GENETIC
ENGINEERING; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; LINGUISTICS; The
MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MAGIC; MARS; NEW WAVE; OUTER
PLANETS; PASTORAL; SCIENCE FANTASY; SEX; SPACE HABITATS; TIME PARADOXES;
WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST.
VASOVA, ALTA
[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
VECTOR
The journal of the BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION (BSFA). There have
been 181 issues to Nov/Dec 1994.V has been published since the foundation
of the BSFA in 1958, fairly regularly since the 1970s. E.C. TUBB was its
first editor (#1), and it has had 32 editors since then, including,
briefly, Michael MOORCOCK (#6-#7). Both production and literary quality
have fluctuated severely from editor to editor, and V has appeared
variously as an association newsletter, a typical FANZINE and an academic
journal. It had a strong period under the editorship of Roger Peyton in
the mid-1960s (#26-#39), and has been much more consistent ever since 1972
when Malcolm EDWARDS took over (#59-#68), his successors including
Christopher J. Fowler (#69-83), David WINGROVE (#84-#94), Geoff Rippington
(#108-#123), David V. Barrett (#126-#150), Boyd Parkinson and Kev McVeigh
(#151-#160), and Kev McVeigh and Catie Cary (#161-#165) and by Cary alone
(#166-current). The page-size varied between large and small for many
years, but since 1984 (#122) it has been large-format A4. Since the late
1970s, when some of V's functions were hived off into other BSFA
publications - paperback-book reviews in Paperback Parlour (soon renamed
Paperback Inferno, and then incorporated into V from #169), fan news in
Matrix, and advice for new writers in Focus - V has sometimes looked less
useful than it once was, but it has continued to print good interviews,
major articles and substantial reviews, often approaching professional
standards, but equally often lapsing into fannish polemic, which is quite
proper, since its function is to act as a kind of central clearing house
for UK FANDOM. Almost every UK sf writer of note has appeared in its
pages, and many US writers too. [PN/PR]
VEIS, JAROSLAV
[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.

VEJDELEK, CESTMIR
[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
VEL'D
(vt The Veldt) Film (1987). Uzbekfilm. Dir Nazim Tulyakhodzhaev, starring
Igor Beliayev, Nelly Pshonnaya, Georgy Gegechkori. Screenplay
Tulyakhodzhaev, based on stories by Ray BRADBURY. 90 mins. Colour.The
second attempt by a talented Uzbek director to transfer the mood of
Bradbury's GOTHIC prose onto the screen proved not so successful as the
first, the short animated movie There Will Come Soft Rains (1982), had
done. This full-length feature is a poetic adaptation of several Bradbury
stories, such as "The Garbage Collector" (1953),"Hail and Farewell" (1953)
and "The Dragon" (1956), along with some episodes from Dandelion Wine
(1957), all combined into a single, if rather dissolving, plot, for which
the title story, "The Veldt" (1950), serves as a bar or pivot. The baroque
atmosphere evoked by the unique Bradbury mixture of horror, pathos and
sentimentality is well maintained, and visually some episodes are
excellent. But the director's lack of feeling for narrative or plot means
that he does not create a main focus for the film; it is as if he has
forgotten what he wished to say. However, it still stands as a good
example of the new Soviet horror film. [VG]See also: RUSSIA.
VELDT, THE
VEL'D.
VELIKOVSKY, IMMANUEL
(1895-1979) Russian-born US pseudo-scientist and writer. He is primarily
known for a series of books putting forward, with a vast amount of
documentation and argument, a theory of Earth's history which proposes
that comparatively recent large-scale changes in the Solar System had
catastrophic effects on the Earth, and that historical evidence (in the
form of legends, MYTHOLOGY, the Bible and other accounts) exists for
these. The books are Worlds in Collision (1950), Ages in Chaos (1952),
Earth in Upheaval (1955) and Oedipus and Akhnaton (1960). In particular,
Velikovsky claimed that the planet VENUS was a recent addition to the
Sun's retinue, having been spat out by Jupiter in biblical times and then
having swooped close to the Earth on several occasions before coming to
rest in its current orbit: one effect of these near-misses was to make the
Earth flip over on its axis. Making planets flip over in this way is
extremely hard to do because of the gyroscope effect, and it was soon
proven that his basic mechanism was infeasible. Nevertheless, the books
are probably the most significant in 20th-century PSEUDO-SCIENCE.An
apparent attempt by scientists to have IV's work censored is recounted in
The Velikovsky Affair (anth 1966) ed Alfred de Grazia. A collection of
essays defending IV's science and pointing to the accuracy of many of his
predictions (while, it has to be said, ignoring the inaccuracy of others)
is Velikovsky Reconsidered (anth 1976) ed by the editors of Pensee. The
proceedings of a scientific conference to discuss the affair are found in
Scientists Confront Velikovsky (anth 1977) ed Donald Goldsmith. An
over-friendly overview of Velikovskianism is given in Doomsday: The
Science of Catastrophe (1979) by Fred Warshovsky.In the early 1980s there

was a flurry of renewed interest in Velikovsky's ideas when it was
proposed that flipping the Earth over on its axis might not be so
difficult as had been thought. Various writers pointed to the childhood
toy called the tippe-top which, when spun, easily turns over to stand on
its head, apparently defying the gyroscopic effect. Probably the most
significant book in this vein was The Reversing Earth (1982) by Peter
Warlow, which described the tippe-top effect (and much else in support of
IV's ideas) in persuasive detail. The flaw in the argument is (to
simplify) that the tippe-top effect works only if the tippe-top is placed
on a surface (e.g., a table-top) in an appropriate gravitational
field.Orthodox scientists have themselves proposed some quasi-Velikovskian
ideas since the 1960s, reflecting a recognition that catastrophic changes
caused by cosmic events may have played a greater part in our planet's
history than hitherto recognized; in particular, it is now generally
accepted that the extinction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago
was the result of one such event. A type example of a disproved theory of
this sort is supplied by The Jupiter Effect (1974) by John GRIBBIN and
Stephen Plagemann, which predicted dire consequences from an unusual
planetary alignment and a peak of solar activity in 1982; Beyond the
Jupiter Effect (1983) is rather more muted.IV's dramatic scenario of
planetary near-misses parallels many of the catastrophic events described
in sf; a notable fictional precursor is When Worlds Collide (1933) by
Philip WYLIE and Edwin BALMER. Some of the few interesting sf novels in
the Velikovskian mode (there are countless bad DISASTER novels) are THE
WANDERER (1964) by Fritz LEIBER, in which a singleton planet enters the
Solar System, The HAB Theory (1976) by Allan W. ECKERT, in which the Earth
flips on its axis, Lucifer's Hammer (1977) by Larry NIVEN and Jerry
POURNELLE, in which the Earth is struck by a small comet, and Nemesis
(1989) by Isaac ASIMOV, which focuses on the threat to Earth of a dwarf
star on course for a close encounter with the Solar System. [PN/JGr]See
also: ADAM AND EVE.
VENEZUELA
LATIN AMERICA.
VENGEANCE
(vt Ein Toter Sucht seiner Morder; vt The Brain) Film (1963).
CCC/Stross/Governor. Dir Freddie Francis, starring Peter Van Eyck, Anne
Heywood, Cecil Parker, Bernard Lee. Screenplay Robert Stewart, Phil
Mackie, based on Donovan's Brain (1943) by Curt SIODMAK. 83 mins. B/w.This
West German/UK coproduction is the 3rd and least successful film version
of Siodmak's novel: the others are The LADY AND THE MONSTER (1944) and
DONOVAN'S BRAIN (1953). This gory remake retains the plot absurdities of
the earlier versions but lacks their eerie atmosphere. [JB]
VENNING, HUGH
Pseudonym of UK writer Claude van Zeller (1905-1984), whose The End: A
Projection, Not a Prophecy (1947) envisages, in AD2050, a DYSTOPIAN
(though scientifically advanced) England surrounded by a worse world under
the dominion of 666, who rules the Greater Roman Empire and is defeated at
the last moment (HV was Roman Catholic) by the hosts of the Lord. [JC]

VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION
US DIGEST-size magazine. 16 issues, published by Fantasy House (a
subsidiary of Mercury Publications) Jan 1957-Mar 1958 and by Mercury Press
May 1958-Aug 1970, as a companion to The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE
FICTION . 10 bimonthly issues Jan 1957-July 1958 ed Robert P. MILLS; the
title was revived a decade later for 6 quarterly issues May 1969-Aug 1970;
ed Edward FERMAN. After the 1st series finished, the contents-page
masthead in FSF was altered to read "including Venture Science Fiction".
VSF put a higher priority on action-adventure sf than did its companion.
In its second incarnation it featured a cut novel in every issue. Notable
stories include C.M. KORNBLUTH's "Two Dooms" (July 1958), James TIPTREE
Jr's "The Snows are Melted, the Snows are Gone" (Nov 1969) and Edward
WELLEN's short novel Hijack (May 1970; 1971).The UK edn was a monthly
digest magazine published by the Atlas Publishing and Distribution Co.,
Sep 1963-Dec 1965 (28 issues). It reprinted most of its material from the
1st series of the US magazine, but also used stories from FSF, some from
the 1950s, and some which had appeared after FSF's UK edn had folded in
June 1965. [BS/PN]
VENUS
Because Earth's inner neighbour presented a bright and featureless face
to early astronomers, it became something of a mystery planet.
19th-century astronomers and early-20th-century sf writers generally
imagined that, as the featureless face was a permanent cloud layer, the
surface beneath must be warm and wet; the Venus of the imagination became
a planet of vast oceans (perhaps with no land at all) or sweltering
jungles. In the 1960s, however, probes revealed that Venus has no liquid
water at its surface, and that its clouds - mostly composed of carbon
dioxide - create a greenhouse effect in the lower atmosphere which
generates temperatures of several hundred degrees Celsius.Early planetary
tours to take in Venus - including Athanasius KIRCHER's Itinerarium
Exstaticum (1656), Emanuel SWEDENBORG's The Earths in our Solar System
(1758) and George GRIFFITH's A Honeymoon in Space (1901) - were influenced
by the planet's longtime association with the goddess of love: its
inhabitants were frequently characterized as gentle and ethereal, after
the fashion of Bernard le Bovyer de FONTENELLE's Entretiens sur la
pluralite des mondes habites (1686; trans J. Glanvill as A Plurality of
Worlds 1929). The first novel concerned specifically with Venus was
Achille Eyraud's Voyage a Venus ["Voyage to Venus"] (1865). A winged
Venusian arrived on Earth in W. LACH-SZYRMA's A Voice from Another World
(1874), and was later the protagonist of an interplanetary tour in the
form of a series of 9 "Letters from the Planets" (1887-93). A detailed
description of a Venusian civilization is featured in History of a Race of
Immortals Without a God (1891 as by Antares Skorpios; vt The Immortals'
Great Quest as by James W. BARLOW). Early SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES set on Venus
include Gustavus W. POPE's Romances of the Planets, No. 2: Journey to
Venus (1895) and John MUNRO's A Trip to Venus (1897). Fred T. JANE's early
SATIRE on the interplanetary romance was To Venus in Five Seconds (1897),
and Venus was also the world visited by Garrett P. SERVISS's A Columbus of
Space (1911). A brief vision is featured in "Venus" (1909) by Maurice
Baring (1874-1946). Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's chief imitator, Otis Adelbert

KLINE, set his principal series of exotic romances on Venus - a trilogy
comprising The Planet of Peril (1929), The Prince of Peril (1930) and The
Port of Peril (1932; 1949). Burroughs's own Venusian series, begun with
Pirates of Venus (1934), is weak self-pastiche. Other PULP-MAGAZINE
romances set on Venus include Homer Eon FLINT's "The Queen of Life" (1919;
in The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life, coll 1966) and Ralph Milne
FARLEY's series begun with The Radio Man (1924; 1948; vt An Earthman on
Venus). The early sf pulps made abundant use of Venusian scenarios.
Notable examples include John W. CAMPBELL's "Solarite" (1930), Clark
Ashton SMITH's "The Immeasurable Horror" (1931) and John WYNDHAM's story
of COLONIZATION, "The Venus Adventure" (1932 as by John Beynon Harris).
Stanton A. COBLENTZ used Venus as the setting for his satire The Blue
Barbarians (1931; 1958) and for the more sober The Planet of Youth (1932;
1952). Some of Stanley G. WEINBAUM's best stories of LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS
are set on Venus, including "The Lotus Eaters"(1935) and "Parasite Planet"
(1935). Clifford D. SIMAK used Venusian milieux imaginatively in "Hunger
Death" (1938) and "Tools" (1942), as did Lester DEL REY in "The Luck of
Ignatz" (1939) and Robert A. HEINLEIN in "Logic of Empire" (1941).The
image of Venus as an oceanic world was extensively developed in the 1940s,
most memorably by C.S. LEWIS in Perelandra (1943; vt Voyage to Venus), in
which ISLANDS of floating vegetation serve as a new Garden of Eden for a
replay of the myth of ADAM AND EVE. The most enduring pulp image of the
same species was that provided by Lawrence O'Donnell (Henry KUTTNER and C.
L. MOORE) in "Clash by Night" (1943) and its sequel Fury (1947; 1950).
Here mankind lives in the submarine "keeps" of Venus after Earth has died,
and is faced with the terrible task of colonizing the inordinately hostile
land-surface; a more recent sequel to "Clash by Night", incorporating the
earlier story, is The Jungle (1991) by David A. DRAKE. The notion that
Venus might be an appropriate home for mankind after Earth becomes
uninhabitable had earlier been advanced in J.B.S. HALDANE's visionary
essay "The Last Judgment" (1927), and was taken up from there by Olaf
STAPLEDON in LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930), where humanity spends an ecstatic
period of its future history as a winged creature on the Venusian floating
islands. Other stories deploying the watery image include Isaac ASIMOV's
Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus (1954 as by Paul French; vt The Oceans
of Venus) and Poul ANDERSON's "Sister Planet" (1959). The alternative
image of Venus the jungle planet, perpetually beset by fierce wet weather,
is featured in Ray BRADBURY's "Death-by-Rain" (1950; vt "The Long
Rain").Although MARS was much more popular as a setting for exotic
romances, Venus had the advantage of being rather more versatile: the
clouds of Venus could hide exotic wonders. For this reason, some of the
gaudiest romances of GENRE SF are set on Venus: C.L. Moore's "Black
Thirst" (1934), Leigh BRACKETT's and Ray Bradbury's "Lorelei of the Red
Mist" (1946), Brackett's "The Moon that Vanished" (1948) and "The
Enchantress of Venus" (1949; vt "City of the Lost Ones") and Keith
Bennett's "The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears" (1950). The other side of the
coin was that there never grew up a consistent "Venusian mythology"
comparable in power to the MYTHOLOGY of Mars.As with Mars, during the
1950s there was a change in the main concern of stories about Venus, so
that it was more often seen as a tough challenge to would-be colonists. In
THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1953) by Frederik POHL and C.M. KORNBLUTH it is the

"Gravy Planet" which has to be "sold" to the public by high-pressure
advertising; Pohl continued the story in The Merchants' War (1984), having
earlier presented a somewhat different image in "The Merchants of Venus"
(1971). Other stories of colonization from the 1950s are Heinlein's
Between Planets (1951), Chad OLIVER's "Field Expedient" (1955) and a
trilogy by Rolf Garner (Bryan BERRY): Resurgent Dust (1953), The Immortals
(1953) and The Indestructible (1954). Philip LATHAM's Five Against Venus
(1952) is a Venusian ROBINSONADE.Since the discovery of the true nature of
the Venusian surface the interest of sf writers in the planet has waned
considerably. The new Venus shows its intimidating face in Larry NIVEN's
"Becalmed in Hell" (1965), contrasting poignantly with Roger ZELAZNY's
florid farewell to the world of the great ocean, "The Doors of His Face,
the Lamps of His Mouth" (1965) and with Thomas M. DISCH's brief jeremiad
"Come to Venus Melancholy" (1965). The idea that Venus might be
terraformed ( TERRAFORMING) has, however, renewed interest in the notion
of colonization, and such a project is celebrated on an appropriately
massive scale in a series of novels by Pamela SARGENT begun with VENUS OF
DREAMS (1986) and continued in Venus of Shadows (1988).2 theme anthologies
are The Hidden Planet (anth 1959) ed Donald A. WOLLHEIM and Farewell,
Fantastic Venus! (anth 1968; cut vt All About Venus) ed Brian W. ALDISS
and Harry HARRISON. [BS]See also: UNDER THE SEA.
VERCORS
Pseudonym used by French artist, illustrator and writer Jean-Marcel de
Bruller (1902-1991) for all his publications from 1942 on, including his
first novel, Le silence de la mer (1942; trans Cyril Connolly as Put Out
the Light 1944 UK); to publish this he founded the French Resistance press
Les Editions de Minuit. After WWII he wrote several moral fables in a
manner influenced by Albert Camus (1913-1960). Les Animaux denatures
(1952; trans Rita Barisse as You Shall Know Them 1953 US; vt Borderline
1954 UK; vt The Murder of the Missing Link 1958 US) deals with the
discovery of a new species of ape-man ( APES AND CAVEMEN) and the
deliberate murder of an infant by its human father to provide a test case
in which he hopes to establish the rapidly uplifted species' claim to
human status; he wins, and is acquitted of murder as the act preceded the
declaration of humanity. Coleres (1956; trans Rita Barisse as The
Insurgents 1957) deals with the search for IMMORTALITY by a man who
attains it at great personal cost. Sylva (1961; trans Rita Barisse 1962
US) is an inversion of David GARNETT's Lady into Fox (1922): here a vixen
is changed into a woman by an English bachelor but eventually reverts. V's
postwar allegorical fictions, though thought-generating and occasionally
moving, never challenged the fame of his first novel, which is somewhat
unfairly the only one for which he is remembered outside France. As an
illustrator - which work he signed as Bruller - he showed a rollicking
good humour; his illustrations for Andre MAUROIS's Patapoufs et Filifers
(1930 chap; trans Norman Denny as Fattypuffs and Thinifers 1941) appear in
both French and English versions. [JC]See also: SUSPENDED ANIMATION.
VERDE, CAMPO
Irving A. GREENFIELD.
VERN, DAVID

David V. REED; Don WILCOX.
VERNE, JULES (GABRIEL)
(1828-1905) French playwright and novelist, generally thought of as one
of the 2 founding fathers of sf - the other being H.G. WELLS - though
neither claimed this status for himself or for the other, and nor did
either of them claim to be originating a new genre. As sf scholarship
began to emphasize only in recent decades, both Wells and JV wrote
consciously within traditions of popular literature that already had large
though diffuse reading publics; both were adept at picking up hints from
inferior or earlier writers and turning out definitive versions of sf
themes later to become central to the field as it took on shape with the
20th century, and both excelled in the imaginative density and (in Wells's
case, certainly) the shapeliness of their tales. Like Robert A. HEINLEIN
for a later generation, they brought the instruments of sf into the home
world.In some other ways as well, the linking of the two writers as
founding fathers is deceptive. JV was a pragmatic, middle-class
entrepreneur of letters, and at least during the first part of his career
wholeheartedly espoused the clear-eyed optimism about progress and
European Man's central role in the world typical of high 19th-century
culture. Born almost 40 years later, and to lower-middle-class parents,
Wells in his early work exuded and helped to define the doom-laden
fin-de-siecle atmosphere of the old century's hectic, premonitory climax.
It should be noted, however, that JV was by no means insensible to moods
of change, and that the novels of his last decade were much darker in
texture and more pessimistic in implication than the novels for which he
is best remembered today, all of which were written by 1880.JV was born
and raised in the port of Nantes, and it is probably no coincidence that
the sea appears in a large number of his best and most romantic novels.
His father was a successful lawyer and assumed that JV would eventually
take over his practice, but from an early age the child rebelled against
this form of worldly success (though, true to his time, his rebelliousness
did not express itself in disdain for the things of the world). His first
declaration of independence was an attempt to switch places with a ship's
cabin-boy; he was extricated only after the vessel had actually left
harbour. By young adulthood, however, JV's romantic flamboyance took a
more productive course. He went to Paris on an allowance and, under the
influence of such writers as Victor Hugo (1802-1885) and Alexandre Dumas
fils (1824-1895), wrote a good deal of drama (about 20 plays remain
unpublished), romantic verse and libretti, several of which were produced,
as well as engaging in mild, unsuccessful flirtations. (JV was never at
ease with women, and his works are notably free of realistic portrayals of
them; his Catholicism, which did not sit well with the Bohemian lifestyle
he tried to imitate, may have contributed to this.) He soon discovered the
works of Edgar Allan POE, somewhat misreading his solitary melancholy as a
kind of romantic adventurousness, and under this influence published his
first tale of sf interest, "Un voyage en ballon" ["A Voyage in a Balloon"]
(1851) - which was eventually republished in Une fantaisie du Docteur Ox
(coll 1872; part trans George H. Towle as Doctor Ox and Other Stories 1874
US; different trans anon as Dr Ox's Experiment, and Other Stories 1874 UK)
as "Une Drame dans les airs" ["A Drama in the Air"] and then in book form

under this latter title (1874). Also in Dr Ox's Experiment was the more
interesting early story "Maitre Zacharius" ["Master Zacharius"] (1854), an
allegory about time, a clockmaker and the Devil. Both stories demonstrate
from how early a date JV developed his characteristic technique of
inserting quasiscientific explanations into a simply told adventure imbued
with the romance of geography. This story-telling method proved from the
first to be a singularly appropriate tool, legitimizing the love of
adventure (or more specifically of travel, in this first age of the
tourist) by infusing it with the sense that scientific progress (and hence
national virtue) was being encouraged along with the thrill of
voyaging.But, despite these early hints of the course he was to follow, JV
felt himself only marginally successful as a writer and bon vivant, and
with his father's help he soon turned to stockbroking, an occupation he
maintained until 1862, when his singularly important association with
Jules Hetzel (1814-1886), a successful publisher and writer for children,
began. JV had come to him with a narrative about travelling in BALLOONS
(it was apparently couched in semi-documentary form); when Hetzel
suggested that he properly novelize his story, JV did so eagerly and
swiftly, and the renovated tale, published as Cinq semaines en ballon
(1863; trans "William Lackland" as Five Weeks in a Balloon, or Journeys
and Discoveries in Africa, by Three Englishmen 1869 US), began the long
series of Voyages extraordinaires ["Extraordinary Journeys"] which the
firm of Hetzel published under that rubric from then until the end of JV's
career. In this first tale, which was still comparatively primitive, 3
colleagues decide to try to cross Africa in a balloon, have numerous
adventures as they go, and learn a great deal about Africa. But Five Weeks
in a Balloon lacks the hectic, romantic intensity of JV's best work, those
stories whose displacement from normal realities allowed him to transcend
the element of illustrated travelogue which occasionally domesticated-in a
negative sense - his fiction.His next novel, Paris au XXe Siecle ["Paris
in the 20th Century"] (written 1863; 1994), caused a considerable stir on
its eventual discovery in manuscript form and subsequent publication. Set
in 1960, and depicting a dystopian corporate dictatorship in unrelievedly
grim terms, the tale is remarkable on several counts. It contradicts any
sense that JV's cultural pessimism came from the disappointments of old
age, or that it was the whole-cloth creation of his son, Michel Verne
(1861-1925), who was indeed wholly or partially responsible for stories
like"In the Year 2889" (1889 The Forum), originally published in English
and variously modified, as described by Arthur B. Evans in"The 'New' Jules
Verne" (1995 Science-Fiction Studies). The novel was also noteworthy for
the wide range and accuracy of its predictions - 1960 Paris boasts
automobiles, pneumatic tube-trains, computers and faxes - all the more
surprising, given the wide assumption that JV's almost total refusal to
set his stories in the future demonstrated his inability to make proper sf
extrapolations. Its 1994 publication also roused some suspicions about the
date and actual authorship of the text; these suspicions are acutely
analyzed by Evans, who treats them as natural but, in this case,
unfounded. JV's next published novel, Voyage au centre de la terre (1863;
exp 1867; trans anon as Journey to the Centre of the Earth 1872 UK), not
only abandons futurity, but is the first to convey what became the
trademark Vernean thrill - a congenial admixture of 19th-century moral

clarity, the safety of numbers (multiple protagonists were usual), and a
sense of coming very close to but never toppling over the edge of the
known; in this novel 3 protagonists take part variously in an expedition
into the core of a dormant volcano which leads them eventually into the
dark hollow heart of the Earth itself. JV's highly visible wonderment at
the world's marvels in tales of this sort goes far to explain the success
he was beginning to achieve by this time; the Vernean thrill was conveyed
with a childlike exuberance and clarity that give traditional
PROTO-SCIENCE-FICTION devices, like the HOLLOW EARTH of this tale, an
intensely memorable shape; and his tripartite division of protagonists
(one a SCIENTIST, one an intensely active, athletic type, the third a more
or less ordinary man representative of the reader's point of view) sorted
out didactic duties and narrative pleasures remarkably well.In the
meantime, Hetzel was planning a children's magazine and JV seemed an ideal
collaborator. There has been some misunderstanding about the contracts
under which JV supplied material for Le Magasin d'Education et de
Recreation, which Hetzel founded in 1864, and to which JV began
contributing with Les adventures du Capitaine Hatteras (in 2 vols as Les
anglais au pole nord [1864; trans anon as The English at the North Pole
1874 UK] and Le desert de glace [1866; trans anon as The Desert of Ice
1874 US; vt The Field of Ice 1875 UK]). He was required by Hetzel to
provide a certain number of vols a year - initially 3, eventually 2 - but
a single volume did not necessarily make a novel, some taking 2 or even 3
to run their course. JV's production, therefore, while large, was not
phenomenal; he tended to publish about 1 novel a year, writing 64 in all,
many of them not sf.JV's techniques for merging wonderment and didacticism
became more refined with the books - his most famous - of the next decade.
These include: De la terre a la lune (1865; trans J.K. Hoyte as From the
Earth to the Moon, Passage Direct in 97 Hours and 20 Minutes 1869 US) and
its sequel, Autour de la lune (1870; both trans Lewis Mercier and Eleanor
King as From the Earth to the Moon Direct in 97 hours 20 minutes, and a
Trip Around It 1873 UK; new trans Jacqueline and Robert Baldick 1970 UK);
Les enfants du Capitaine Grant (1867-8; trans anon as In Search of the
Castaways 1873 US); Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870; trans Lewis
Mercier as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas 1872 UK; vt Twenty
Thousand Leagues under the Sea 1873 US; new trans Emanuel J. Mickel as The
Complete Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea 1991 US), with its sequel,
L'ile mysterieuse (1874-5; trans W.H.G. Kingston as The Mysterious Island
1875 UK); and, perhaps best known of all, Le tour du monde en quatre-vingt
jours (1873; trans Geo. M. Towle as Around the World in Eighty Days 1874
US). These were the books of JV's prime, written with what one might call
jubilant flow, but as a whole they were execrably translated, cut,
bowdlerized and travestied. The reputation he long had in English-speaking
countries for narrative clumsiness and ignorance of scientific matters was
fundamentally due to his innumerate and illiterate translators who - along
with the publishers who commissioned their work - remained impenetrably of
the conviction that he was a writer of overblown juveniles and that it was
thus necessary to trim him down, to eliminate any inappropriately adult
complexities, and to pare the confusing scientific material to an absolute
minimum. There are some newer translations, though even recent versions of
these books are not untroubled by cuts and incoherence.A dominant and

abiding note in the novels of JV's prime is a powerful sense of the
ultimate rightness of the course of the 19th century, a note only
strengthened by their author's fundamentally conservative, pragmatic
imagination, for he almost never trespassed into futurity and never
actually carried his protagonists off the edge of the known. His tales are
geographies, not extrapolations. From the Earth to the Moon may seem an
exception, with its huge cannon in Florida blasting passengers into space,
but (questions of acceleration aside) the science of the story was firmly
conceived, and the Moon, once safely circumnavigated, was left to its own
resources. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (the vt is now universal)
may likewise seem to stand somewhat outside the normal canon, though it is
perhaps JV's most deeply felt novel; carefully and slowly composed, it
introduces Captain Nemo and his elaborate submarine, the Nautilus, in a
tale whose easy, exaggerated sombreness agreeably conflates the
domesticated Byronism of the time and expressive marvels of science. Nemo
(it turns out in the sequel) is an Indian prince whom British injustice
has turned misanthropic, hence his life under the seas in his submarine,
amply and comfortingly furnished in Second Empire plushness. But
throughout both volumes Nemo's exploits hover just at the edge of the
technologically possible; his prophetic gloominess is encased within a
narrative frame which clearly represents his mood as aberration and his
science as attainable. Around the World in Eighty Days is not sf at all
(The Other Log of Phileas Fogg [1973] Philip Jose FARMER's sequel,
rectifies this mundanity), for JV conceived his protagonist's journey
around the world entirely in terms of travel arrangements then existing,
basing Fogg's trip on a real journey by the US entrepreneur, traveller and
eccentric George Francis Train (1829-1904).From the 1870s on, JV's work
tended to repeat itself in gradually darkening hues, though he never lost
the sense of the fundamental usableness of science and technology, a sense
vital to much 20th-century sf, where - as with JV - usableness tends to
serve as its own justification. It is notable, for instance, that JV's
several ROBINSONADES - which include The Mysterious Island, L'ecole des
Robinsons (1882; trans W.J. Gordon as Godfrey Morgan: A Californian
Mystery 1883 UK; vt Robinson's School 1883 US) and the late, nostalgic
Deux ans de vacances, ou un pensionnat de Robinsons (1888; trans anon as
Adrift in the Pacific 1889 UK) - all exploit the romantic implications of
being cast alone or with a few companions into the bosom of a bounteous
Nature; JV's robinsonades are carefully socialized, and their small groups
of protagonists always make do very well together. Even so, JV's later
work was increasingly painted from a grimmer palette. Robur le conquerant
(1886; trans anon as The Clipper of the Clouds 1887 UK; vt Robur the
Conqueror 1887 US) and its sequel, Maitre du monde (1904; trans anon as
Master of the World 1914 UK), together demonstrate the process. In the
earlier book the steely, megalomaniacal Robur, inventor of an impressive
flying machine, though rendered less favourably than earlier romantic
misanthropes like Nemo, is still allowed by JV to represent the march of
scientific progress as he forces the world to listen to him; but in the
second book, JV's last work of any significance, Robur has become a
dangerous madman, blasphemous and uncontrollable, and his excesses - like
those of Wells's Dr Moreau - seem to represent the excesses of an
unfettered development of science. Science and a subservient, bounteous

Nature are no longer seen-in late JV or early Wells - as benevolently
united under Man's imperious control.JV's life was externally uneventful
from the 1860s on. He married, prospered mightily, lived in a large
provincial house, yachted occasionally, unflaggingly produced his novels
for the firm of Hetzel and became an exemplary 19th-century French
middle-class dignitary. While his works inescapably reveal the boyish,
escapist dream-life of that class, they can also be read as an ultimate
requiem for the dream of his astonishing and transformative century, that
waking dream of the daylight decades so effectively fleshed in his early
work; but in 1900 that vision - that dream that the world was illimitable
and obedient, and that Man could only improve upon creation - seemed to
have begun to fade, as demonstrated perhaps most clearly in a remarkable
post- HOLOCAUST tale, "The Eternal Adam" from Hier et demain (coll 1910;
trans I.O. EVANS as Yesterday and Tomorrow 1965 UK), in which a far-future
historian discovers to his dismay that 20th-century civilization was
overthrown by geological cataclysms, and that the legend of ADAM AND EVE
was both true and cyclical. (No manuscript in JV's hand exists of this
story, which may have been written by his son, Michel Verne [see above];
but it clearly reflects JV's late state of mind, and has more than once
been treated as a thematic summation of his career.)JV's work has always
been attractive to film-makers, and as early as 1902 Georges MELIES
loosely adapted From the Earth to the Moon to make Le VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE.
It was not until JV's work came out of copyright in the 1950s, however,
that the real rush started, beginning with Walt Disney's 20,000 LEAGUES
UNDER THE SEA in 1954. Other JV adaptations were Around the World in 80
Days (1956), FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON (1958), JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF
THE EARTH (1959), MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961), MASTER OF THE WORLD (1961) and
Five Weeks in a Balloon (1962). The Czech film VYNALEZ ZKAZY (1958),
released in the USA as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, was a blend of
live action and animation. JV's characters have been revived in various,
sometimes embarrassing guises, as in CAPTAIN NEMO AND THE UNDERWATER CITY
(1969). [JC]Other works: Here we list those Voyages extraordinaires not
discussed above; many are not sf. Most of the better-known titles present
a bibliographical nightmare, and unauthorized editions proliferate; we
have normally attempted to list first translations only, and have not
traced paths through the jungle of (usually pirated) vts.Une ville
flottante suivi Les Forceurs de blocus (coll 1871; trans anon as A
Floating City, and the Blockade Runners 1874 UK);Aventures de trois russes
et de trois anglais dans L'Afrique australe (1872; trans Henry Frith as
Meridiana: The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South
Africa 1873 US);Le pays des fourrures (1873; trans N. D'Anvers as The Fur
Country 1873 UK);Le "Chancellor" (1875; trans Ellen E. Frewer as Survivors
of the Chancellor 1875 UK);Michel Strogoff, Moscou-Irkoutsk (1876; trans
W.H.G. Kingston as Michael Strogoff, the Courier of the Czar 1877
UK);Hector Servadac (1877; trans anon as Hector Servadac: Travels and
Adventures through the Solar System 1877 US);Les indes-noires (1877; trans
W.H.G. Kingston as The Child of the Cavern, or Strange Doings Underground
1877 UK);Un capitaine de quinze ans (1878; trans anon as Dick Sand, or A
Captain at Fifteen 1878 US);Les cinq cents millions de la begum (1879;
trans W.H.G. Kingston as The 500 Millions of the Begum 1879 US; vt The
Begum's Fortune 1880 UK) (based on a manuscript by Andre LAURIE);Les

tribulations d'un chinois en Chine (1879; trans anon as The Tribulations
of a Chinaman in China 1879 US);La maison a vapeur (1879-80; trans Agnes
D. Kingston as The Steam House 1881 UK); La Jangada (1881; trans W.J.
Gordon as The Giant Raft 1881 US);Le rayon vert (1882; trans J. Cotterell
as The Green Ray 1883 UK);Keraban-le-tetu (1883; trans J. Cotterell as The
Headstrong Turk 1883-4 US);L'etoile du Sud (1884; trans anon as The
Vanished Diamond: A Tale of South Africa 1885 UK; vt The Southern Star
1885 US) (based on a manuscript by Laurie);L'Archipel en feu (1884; trans
anon as The Archipelago on Fire 1885 US);Mathias Sandorf (1885; trans anon
1885 US);Un billet de loterie: Le Numero 9672 (1886; trans Laura E.
Kendall as Ticket No. "9672" 1886 US);Nord contre sud (1887; trans Laura
E. Kendall as Texar's Vengeance, or North Versus South 1887 US);Le chemin
de France (1887; trans anon as The Flight to France 1888
UK);Famille-sans-nom (1889; trans anon as A Family without a Name 1889
US);Sans dessus dessous (1889; trans anon as Topsy-Turvy 1890 US; vt
Purchase of the North Pole: A Sequel to "From the Earth to the Moon" 1891
UK);Cesar Cascabel (1890; trans A. Estoclet 1890 US);Mistress Branican
(1891; trans A. Estoclet 1891 US);Le Chateau des Carpathes (1892; trans
anon as Castle of the Carpathians 1893 UK);Claudius Bombarnac (1892; trans
anon 1894 UK);P'tit-bonhomme (1893; trans anon as Foundling Mick 1895 UK);
Les mirifiques aventures de Maitre Antifer (1894; trans anon as Captain
Antifer 1895 UK);L'ile a helice (1895; trans William J. Gordon as Floating
Island, or The Pearl of the Pacific 1896 UK);Clovis Dardentor (1896; trans
anon 1897 UK);Face au drapeau (1896; trans Mrs Cashel Hoey as For the Flag
1897 UK; vt Facing the Flag 1897 US);Le Sphinx des glaces (1897; trans Mrs
Cashel Hoey as An Antarctic Mystery 1898 UK) (also published with its
source [by Poe] as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Le Sphinx des
glaces [omni 1975 UK]);Le superbe Orenoque ["The Superb Orinoco"]
(1898);Le testament d'un excentrique (1899; trans anon as The Will of an
Eccentric 1900 US);Seconde patrie (1900; trans Cranstoun Metcalfe in 2
vols as Their Island Home 1924 US and Castaways of the Flag: The Final
Adventures of the Swiss Family Robinson 1924 US);Les histoires de
Jean-Marie Cabidoulin (1901; trans I.O. Evans as The Sea Serpent: The
Yarns of Jean Marie Cabidoulin 1967 UK);Le village aerien (1901; trans
I.O. Evans as The Village in the Tree Tops 1964 UK);Les freres Kip ["The
Kip Brothers"] (1902);Bourses de voyage ["Travelling Grants"] (1904);Un
drame en Livonie (1904; trans I.O. Evans as A Drama in Livonia 1967
UK);L'invasion de la mer ["The Invasion of the Sea"] (1905);Le phare du
bout du monde (1905; trans anon as The Lighthouse at the End of the World
1923 UK);Le volcan d'or (1906; trans I.O. Evans as The Golden Volcano 1962
UK);L'agence Thompson and Co. (1907; trans I.O. Evans in 2 vols as The
Thompson Travel Agency 1965 UK);La Chasse au meteore (1908; trans
Frederick Lawton as The Chase of the Golden Meteor 1909 UK);Le pilote du
Danube (1908; trans I.O. Evans as The Danube Pilot 1967 UK);Les naufrages
du Jonathan (1909; trans I.O. Evans as The Survivors of the "Jonathan"
1962 UK) (partly by Michel Verne);Hier et demain (coll 1910; trans I.O.
Evans as Yesterday and Tomorrow 1965 UK);Le secret de Wilhelm Storitz
(1910; trans I.O.Evans as The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz 1963
UK);L'etonnante aventure de la mission Barsac (1919; trans I.O. Evans as
The Barsac Mission 1960 US) (mostly by Michel Verne).L'epave du Cynthia
(1885; trans anon as The Waif of the "Cynthia" 1886 US) (almost all by

Laurie) is an interesting novel not among the Voyages
extraordinaires.About the author: Jules Verne (1940) by Kenneth ALLOTT;
Jules Verne: une lecture politique (1971; trans as The Political and
Social Ideas of Jules Verne 1972 UK) by Jean Chesneaux; Jules Verne (1973;
trans Roger Greaves as Jules Verne: A Biography 1976 UK) by Jean
Jules-Verne, JV's grandson, particularly valuable for its bibliography;
Jules Verne: Inventor of Science Fiction (1978) by Peter Costello; Jules
Verne: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1980) by Edward J. Gallager,
Judith Mistichelli and John A. Van Eerde; Jules Verne Rediscovered:
Didacticism and the Scientific Novel (1988) by Arthur B. Evans;Jules
Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Self (1990) by William Butcher; The
Mask of the Prophet: The Extraordinary Fictions of Jules Verne (1990) by
Andrew Martin.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; ASTRONOMY; ATLANTIS; AUSTRIA;
BENELUX; BIOLOGY; BOYS' PAPERS; CHILDREN'S SF; DIME-NOVEL SF; DISCOVERY
AND INVENTION; DYSTOPIAS; EVOLUTION; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FRANCE; GOTHIC
SF;
HISTORY OF SF; ISLANDS; LOST WORLDS; MACHINES; MOON; MUSIC; NEAR FUTURE;
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; POWER SOURCES; PREDICTION; SCIENTIFIC ERRORS;
SPACE FLIGHT; SPACESHIPS; TECHNOLOGY; TRANSPORTATION; UNDER THE SEA;
WEAPONS.
VERNE, MICHEL
[r] The STRAND MAGAZINE ; Jules VERNE.
VERNON, ROGER LEE
(1924-1980) US writer and schoolteacher whose awkwardly routine sf is
contained in an assemblage of original stories, The Space Frontiers (coll
1955), and the novel Robot Hunt (1959). [JC]
VERRILL, A(LPHEUS) HYATT
(1871-1954) US naturalist, explorer and writer, most of whose 100 or so
books were nonfiction. He also wrote juveniles, of which the Boy
Adventurers sequence is of some sf interest; relevant titles are The Boy
Adventurers in the Land of El Dorado (1923), The Boy Adventurers in the
Land of the Monkey Men (1923) and The Boy Adventurers in the Unknown Land
(1924). The Radio Detectives Under the Sea (1922) is the most sf-like of
his Radio Detectives children's sequence. His adult novels explore similar
territory. The Golden City (1916) and The Bridge of Light (1929 AMZ
Quarterly; 1950) are of interest as typical LOST-WORLD stories; they are
set in South America, where AHV did much of his real-life exploration
(whose extent he reportedly exaggerated). 9 novels in all appeared in AMZ
and AMZ Quarterly 1926-35, though only 2 have reached book form, Bridge of
Light and When the Moon Ran Wild (1931 AMZ Quarterly as AHV; 1962 UK) as
by Ray Ainsbury (it is not known why this title was thus ascribed). AHV's
work shows the marks of a somewhat desultory interest in fiction, and of
the PULP-MAGAZINE markets he served, but does vividly dramatize his
professional concerns. [JC]Other works: The Trail of the White Indians
(1920).See also: ANTHROPOLOGY.
VERSINS, PIERRE
The name adopted by French scholar, writer and self-styled utopian
Jacques Chamson (1923- ), a survivor of Auschwitz. He began writing sf in

the 1950s and published 3 novels, En avant, Mars ["Forward to Mars"]
(1951), Les etoiles ne s'en foutent pas ["The Stars Care"] (1954) and Le
professeur ["The Professor"] (1956), and over 20 stories (some with his
wife Martine Thome) while editing Ailleurs (1957-62), a critical FANZINE
of high repute. A later novel was Les transhumains ["The Transhumans"]
(1971). While resident in Switzerland, where he lived for 33 years, PV
also produced Passeport pour l'inconnu ["Passport for the Unknown"], a
regular sf RADIO programme for Radio Geneva. He will be remembered more
for his scholarship than for his fiction: a keen researcher and
bibliographer, he is a foremost authority on early sf and donated his
priceless collection of books, magazines and sf memorabilia to the town of
Yverdon-les-bains, Switzerland, in 1975, acting for 5 years as the curator
of the unique local sf museum thus created, La MAISON D'AILLEURS . PV's
major achievement is undoubtedly his massive 1000pp Encyclopedie de
l'Utopie et de la sf ["Encyclopedia of Utopia and SF"] (1972), which was
given a Special Award at the 1973 Toronto World SF Convention. An
invaluable if idiosyncratic volume, particularly useful on sf outside the
USA and the UK and prior to 1900, it remains to this day one of the finest
reference books on sf; it has not been translated. PV's scholarship was
honoured by the SFRA with a PILGRIM AWARD in 1991. [MJ/PN]See also:
CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; FRANCE.
VERTEX
US magazine, slick BEDSHEET format Apr 1973-Apr 1975, tabloid format June
1975-Aug 1975. 16 issues, 13 bimonthly, the last 3 monthly, published by
Mankind Publishing, Los Angeles; ed Donald J. PFEIL. Subtitled "The
Magazine of Science Fiction", V was a magazine of imaginative layout and
much internal illustration, the first "slick" in the sf field. The covers
were often semi-abstract. Like most SF MAGAZINES since the 1970s, V ran
many nonfiction pieces: interviews with authors and good science-fact
articles. Stories were by, among others, Ed BRYANT, F.M. BUSBY, Terry
CARR, George Alec EFFINGER, Joe HALDEMAN, William ROTSLER, Robert
SILVERBERG and Norman SPINRAD. V was something of a showcase for
up-and-coming US authors like Alan BRENNERT, William CARLSON, George R.R.
MARTIN, Steven UTLEY and John VARLEY, and in quality was the strongest of
the new 1970s sf magazines, but financial problems (at $1.50 it was
unusually expensive) and a paper shortage forced a change to newspaper
format on cheap paper for the last 3 issues, then closure. [PN/FHP]
VESSER, CAROLYN
(? - ) US writer whose first novel, Hellwalker (1988), is an sf adventure
set on a distant planet. [JC]
VETCH, THOMAS
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author of The Amber City: Being Some
Account of the Adventures of a Steam Crocodile in Central Africa (1888), a
Jules- VERNE-like excursion narrated by the protagonist, Thomas Vetch, who
takes his flying ship into a mild-mannered LOST WORLD where people live in
houses built of amber. [JC]
V FOR VENDETTA
Alan MOORE.

VIAN, BORIS
(1920-1959) French writer in various genres, his collected works
amounting to more than 50 vols; he was Transcendental Satrap of the
College de 'Pataphysique, and a fine dramatist of the absurd ( FABULATION)
who will be perhaps best remembered for his songs ( MUSIC) and for such
plays as Equarrissage pour tous (1950; trans Simon Watson Taylor as The
Knackers' ABC 1968 US), which savagely mocks the military mind and
military punctilio, and Les Batisseurs d'Empire ou le Schmurz (1959; trans
Simon Watson Taylor as The Empire Builders 1962 UK), a surreal excursus
upon pain. One of the main personalities of the post-WWII French sf scene
- though sf made up only a small part of his activities - BV translated
writers like A.E. VAN VOGT, William TENN, Henry KUTTNER and Ray BRADBURY,
and was himself a writer of speculative fiction years ahead of his time.
His first novel, J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946 as by Vernon
Sullivan; trans BV and Milton Rosenthal as I Spit on your Graves 1948 as
BV), pretended with some success to be a US tough-guy detective novel, and
extended only peripherally into the fantastic. But the stories assembled
in Les Fourmis (coll 1949; trans Julia Older as Blues for a Black Cat 1992
US) were deeply indebted to sf and Surrealism, as were his later novels,
particularly L'Ecume des jours (1947; trans Stanley Chapman as Froth on
the Daydream 1967 UK; vt Mood Indigo 1968 US), L'automne a Pekin ["Autumn
in Peking"] (1947), a desert utopia set in an ALTERNATE WORLD, L'herbe
rouge ["Red Grass"] (1950), a surreal tale which mixes TIME TRAVEL and
nostalgia, and L'Arrache-Coeur (1953; trans Stanley Chapman as
Heartsnatcher 1968 UK), a fable of metamorphosis. Throughout his career,
BV used sf devices to articulate a sense of the world's violent
impingement on the self, though sometimes his characters transcended their
shackles; in the 1960s his work was particularly influential on writers of
the UK NEW WAVE. [JC/MJ]See also: FRANCE.
VICKERS, AL
[s] Alexander POPOV.
VICTOR GOLLANCZ LIMITED
GOLLANCZ.
VIDAL, GORE
(1925- ) US writer, resident for some years in Italy, best known for such
satirical works outside the sf field as Myra Breckinridge (1968) and its
sequel Myron (1974) and for several vols of essays, from Rocking the Boat
(coll 1962) to Armageddon? (coll 1987), whose contents are frequently
apocalyptic. Messiah (1954; rev 1965), the sf novel which closed his
first, precocious phase of novel-writing, is a dark SATIRE on RELIGION in
which a new MESSIAH teaches a defeatedly secular USA how to worship death.
A play, Visit to a Small Planet (1956; 1960), filmed in 1960, again
satirizes contemporary Western civilization in the story of an ALIEN
child, capable of changing the past, who comes close to wrecking our
corrupt society before its guardians arrive to take it back. Kalki (1978),
a further satirical assault upon one of GV's most persistent betes noires,
organized religion, depicts the devastating consequences of its
protagonist's belief that he embodies the returned essence of the
world-destroying Hindu deity Kalki - devastating because he turns out, in

a sense, to be right; the assault on religion is if anything intensified
in Live From Golgotha (1992), in which tv crews, taking advantage of a new
technology, compete to film the crucifixion. Duluth (1983) is a FABULATION
which uses any device available - including sf instruments - to sustain a
deeply savage view of US life. GV has been for nearly 50 years a
pessimistic, sharp-tongued, knowledgeable critic of his native land; his
sf must be read as an attempt to dramatize the long jeremiad. [JC]Other
work: A Search for the King: A Twelth Century Legend (1950See also: UFOS.
VIDEODROME
Film (1982). Filmplan International/Guardian Trust/Canadian Film
Development Corp. Written/dir David CRONENBERG, starring James Woods,
Sonja Smits, Deborah Harry, Peter Dvorsky, Les Carlson. 89 mins.
Colour.Bravely placing his outrageous exploitation movie squarely in the
centre of media-theorists' debates about interaction between viewer and
screen, Cronenberg here produces perhaps the best (and also the oddest) of
his series of sf scenarios of medicine, media, metamorphosis and religion,
the emphasis here falling on the last 3. Woods plays the cable-tv-station
executive in charge of sex'n'violence programming who stumbles across a
private programme called Videodrome. This, on the surface sadistic
pornography, metamorphoses him (either mentally or physically), so that a
videocassette slit forms in his belly and his hand becomes (naturally) a
handgun. This second part of the film, where even the tv set becomes
organic and protrudes lips (the Word made Flesh), may also be read as a
prolonged hallucination. It is an intricate tale, also featuring a media
guru, O'Blivion - modelled apparently on Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) whose daughter pronounces after his apotheosis into software: "I am my
Father's Screen." Too schlocky for the squeamish - especially the scene
where talk-back hostess Nicki Brand (pop star Deborah Harry) burns her own
breasts with a cigarette - and too intellectual for exploitation-movie
fans, the film naturally flopped. But it may have been the most
significant sf film of the 1980s, and is certainly - and very early on the most CYBERPUNK. The novelization is Videodrome * (1983) by Jack Martin
(Dennis Etchison [1943- ]). [PN]See also: CINEMA; PARANOIA; SEX.
VIERECK, GEORGE S(YLVESTER)
(1884-1962) German-born US writer, well known between the Wars as an
apologist for defeated Germany, as in The Kaiser on Trial (1937), though
his views on Hitler were considerably more guarded. On his refusal to
register as a German lobbyist or agent in WWII he was imprisoned, gaining
his release only in 1947. His first fiction of interest was The House of
the Vampire (1907), a psychosexual fantasy in a late-Decadent style shared
by writers like Hanns Heinz EWERS, but he is best remembered for his
Wandering Jew trilogy, with Paul ELDRIDGE: My First Two Thousand Years:
The Autobiography of the Wandering Jew (1928; cut 1956), Salome: The
Wandering Jewess (1930; cut vt Salome: My First 2000 Years of Love 1954)
and The Invincible Adam (1932). The immortal protagonists ( IMMORTALITY) the 3rd being a vigorous young masculine figure, Kotikokura, who
represents Natural Man - intermingle their adventures through time, and,
at times egregiously, symbolize mankind's striving after reality and love.
Alone, GSV wrote a kind of pendant, Gloria (1952 UK; vt The Nude in the

Mirror 1953 US), ostensibly an espionage thriller set on an ocean liner;
but the female spy involved turns out to be, almost certainly, the goddess
of love. Didactic and subversively erotic anecdotes about the true nature
and history of humanity surface throughout all 4 books. The plot of Prince
Pax (1933 UK) with Eldridge conveys similarly undemocratic ironies about
the species: a RURITANIAN ruler acquires a high-tech weapon and uses it to
commit a surly world to an enforced peace. [JC]See also: ADAM AND EVE;
ORIGIN OF MAN.
VIGLIANTE, MARY
Working name of Mary Vigliante Szydlowski (1946- ), who has also
published sf as by Jarl Szydlow; she writes woman-centred tales whose
taste for violence has struck from the first a note of ambivalence. Titles
include The Ark (1978) as by Szydlow and the Aftermath Books, a postHOLOCAUST sequence comprising The Colony (1979) and The Land (1979). Also
as MV she has published 2 similar tales: Source of Evil (1980) and Worship
the Night (1982). Unlike FEMINIST work, her novels seemed to express a
sense that the oppression of women could be exhilarating. [JC]
VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED
Film (1960). MGM. Dir Wolf Rilla, starring George Sanders, Barbara
Shelley, Martin Stephens. Screenplay Sterling Silliphant, Rilla, George
Barclay (Ronald Kinnoch, the producer), based on The Midwich Cuckoos
(1957) by John WYNDHAM. 77 mins. B/w.In this faithful but pedestrian
adaptation of Wyndham's novel, everyone in a UK village mysteriously falls
asleep for 24 hours. During this period all the women of childbearing age
are unknowingly impregnated by ALIENS. In due course they give birth to 12
strange children who grow very rapidly and possess powers of telepathy and
mind control. Some years later it is realized that the children represent
an attempt by another planet to colonize Earth, and they are destroyed by
the scientist (Sanders) who has been their friend - with difficulty, since
the method of destruction (a bomb) has to be mentally concealed from them.
The children, with their glowing eyes, are the most successful feature of
the production; their sang-froid is chilling and seems authentically
alien. A virtual remake of this film, this time in an urban setting, was
CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED (1963). [JB/PN]
VILLAINS
The division of people into simple archetypes of good and bad, HEROES and
villains, has always been stronger in popular literature than in more
serious fiction; indeed, the essence of the serious novel of character has
ever been to explore the shades of grey between the moral absolutes of
black and white. Thus sf's villains are mainly associated with
PULP-MAGAZINE sf, not just in the post-1926 specialist sf magazines but in
the pulp magazines generally from the 1890s onwards. The history of
villainy in popular literature of this sort is sociologically fascinating
in the way that it reflects the fears and bigotries of the societies that
produced it, especially insofar as commercial fiction is generally written
in response to a known popular demand.UK sf during 1890-1920 (and to some
extent later) was notably xenophobic: foreigners were not to be trusted.
The same was true to a lesser extent in the USA, whose East Coast cities
were by now a melting-pot of different national and racial backgrounds, to

the alarm of the more conservative. Antisemitic views were expressed
surprisingly seldom, although the capitalist villain of George Allan
ENGLAND's The Golden Blight (1912; 1916) is a Jew, and M.P. SHIEL's
stories often contain Jewish villains, although Shiel himself was
ambiguous on the subject, and was sympathetic to Zionist aspirations.
Better known are the Yellow-Peril books, and here Shiel figures largely,
with The Yellow Danger (1898; rev 1899) and The Dragon (1913; rev vt The
Yellow Peril 1929). Floyd GIBBONS's The Red Napoleon (1929) features a
Mongol world-conqueror. The most famous Oriental villain of all was of
course Sax ROHMER's Dr Fu Manchu, the slant-eyed supermachinator set on
world domination.With Fu Manchu we enter the arena of the
hero-versus-villain pulp magazines of the 1930s, some, such as DR YEN SIN
and The MYSTERIOUS WU FANG , modelled directly on Rohmer's work. By the
1930s the hero-vs-villain confrontation had developed into a simple
formula, still popular long after WWII, as in Ian FLEMING's James Bond
books. A small group of fighters for right, with the aid of highly trained
reflexes and an armoury of superscientific devices, stands off a variety
of almost indistinguishable mad SCIENTISTS and/or ambitious businessmen
and politicians who plan to conquer all. The best-known sf archetype is
DOC SAVAGE, but CAPTAIN HAZZARD, CAPTAIN ZERO, DUSTY AYRES AND HIS
BATTLE
BIRDS, the SPIDER and The Avenger were all cast in the same mould. Hero
magazines were more popular than villain magazines; the latter included
Doctor Death, The OCTOPUS and The SCORPION . Although the pulps are dead,
the great success of MARVEL COMICS in the 1960s was built on the same
formula, with the villains as nasty as ever - although the heroes, in this
less straightforward age, were more introspective.The Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor in Dec 1941 may have been seen by some in the USA as a
retrospective justification of the Yellow Peril stories - and by cynics,
conversely, as the realization of a self-fulfilling prophecy - but pulp sf
of WWII and immediately afterwards tended to substitute brutal
European-style fascists in place of wily Orientals. Eric Frank RUSSELL
wrote many amusing stories of caricature-Teutonic aliens being thwarted in
their myopic militarism by nimble-witted heroes working almost alone. Far
more interesting were the villains of Cold-War sf in the 1950s, when the
USA evinced extreme anxiety over the "communist menace" (many of these
stories are discussed under PARANOIA). The day of the individual villain
was in decline; he had given way to the group-villain, often symbolized,
indeed, in the form of a HIVE-MIND. The fear of communism was frequently
expressed as a loathing for an expansionist movement in which
individuality was subjugated to the demands of the mass. Thus in Robert A.
HEINLEIN's The Puppet Masters (1951) the villains are indistinguishable
from one another. In this case they are aliens, and this points up a
difference between sf and most other genres: although sf heroes are
usually human, the villains may easily be MONSTERS, ALIENS, ROBOTS or
SUPERMEN. However, a little analysis of what sort of monster or superman
the villain is often shows that there is some readily identifiable human
analogue, or at least human fear, involved.The robot destroying everything
in its path is usually simply our fear of TECHNOLOGY writ large. It is
interesting that, after a long period of quiescence - partly as a result
of Isaac ASIMOV's Robot series, in which robots were depicted as decent,

occasionally to the point of saintliness - in the 1980s the killer-robot
story (and the anti-technology Luddite story generally) returned to the
CINEMA, where it gained phenomenal popularity. The cinema is the closest
modern equivalent in its values and narrative structures to pulp fiction,
and it feeds very much the same appetites, at least at its lower levels.
It is in the cinema, in COMICS, on TELEVISION and in HEROIC FANTASY that
today's hero-vs-villain stories are mostly found. The return of the
anti-technology theme, exemplified by many of the films of Michael
CRICHTON and John BADHAM, may represent fears related to those that have
brought the rise of ecological factions to a position of importance in
world politics.In written sf, the heyday of the sf villain was over by the
1960s-70s. Villains still exist, of course, but they cannot generally be
so easily categorized; very often they remain faceless: behind-the-scenes
manipulators, politicians, militarists, ad-men, commercial interests,
corporate polluters of the environment working at a distance or through
bureaucracies. This reflects a growing fear in the real world that we are
all filed and docketed on a COMPUTER databank somewhere, and have no way
of identifying the enemy out front. In the USA it could be called the
Watergate syndrome; after Watergate the number of films about government
conspiracies notably increased ( PARANOIA). Invisible pullers of strings
need not be grey or boring villains, however, and Jack VANCE's 5 Demon
Princes in his Demon Princes series are satisfyingly melodramatic, as are
the 9 immortals who run things in Philip Jose FARMER's A Feast Unknown
(1969), Lord of the Trees (1970) and The Mad Goblin (1970). A common
variant of the unseen manipulator as villain is the AI, as in William
GIBSON's Neuromancer trilogy, in THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (1990 UK) by Gibson
with Bruce STERLING, and in Dan SIMMONS's Hyperion books.The type of
villains produced in GENRE SF depends to a degree on the type of sf in
question. In HARD SF the villains are often those who fear progress and
doggedly oppose it, while in the NEW WAVE it was more likely to be the
technocrats themselves who were the villains, mindlessly calling for
"growth" regardless of the sociological consequences. Individual sf
writers are naturally liable to incorporate any sort of personal or
political resentment or distaste into their creation of villains Heinlein often laid the blame on flabby liberals, for example - but no
useful generalization can be made about villainy at this level.An
occasional amalgam in sf is the hero-villain, an imaginative territory
staked out by Alfred BESTER in the figures of Ben Reich and Gully Foyle,
the protagonists of his first 2 novels; they are saturnine, vengeful,
obsessive malcontents, for all the world like figures out of a
17th-century revenge drama. Villainy generated by the self but unknown to
the self has of course been a theme of the HORROR IN SF subgenre since
Robert Louis STEVENSON's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), if
not earlier. This theme has always remained popular, as in Bester's
"Fondly Fahrenheit" (1954) and, from the cinema, the Monster from the Id
in FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) and the telekinetic superbeing who does not
recognize his own malign powers in The POWER (1967). [PN]
VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM...
Full name: Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, (Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste,
Comte de)(1840-1889) French writer - mostly of poetry, plays and short

stories - and an extremely impoverished member of the Breton aristocracy.
His best-known prose work remains Contes Cruels (coll 1883; trans Robert
Baldick as Cruel Tales 1963 UK), a title which itself came to designate a
category of the French conte or moral fable which emphasizes the punitive
twists of fate, the arbitrary chill of the world. The book contains a
number of bizarre fantasy stories, several of them sf, including
"Celestial Publicity", in which advertising slogans are projected onto the
night sky by electric light. An early translation of VDL-A's work, which
also took stories from Nouveaux Contes cruels ["New Contes Cruels"] (coll
1888), was Sardonic Tales (coll trans Hamish Miles 1927 US). Of more
direct sf interest is L'Eve future (1886; trans Marilyn Gaddis Rose as The
Eve of the Future 1981 US; new trans Robert M. Adams as Tomorrow's Eve
1982 US), in which a handsome young lord despairs when his fiancee turns
out to be extremely crass - but a fictional character called Thomas Alva
Edison comes to the rescue with an impeccable robot duplicate (
EDISONADE). Seen as an important contribution to the Symbolist movement,
the novel is philosophical, ironic and mockingly contorted. Claire Lenoir,
which appeared originally as part of Tribulat Bonhomet (coll 1887) and was
trans Arthur Symons (1925 US), applies similar ornate twists to a horror
tale involving possession and hideous paroxysms of female guilt. VDL-A
remains best known for his final work, the ecstatic play and prose-poem
Axel (1885-6 Jeune France; rev 1890; trans H.P.R. Finberg 1925 UK; new
trans June Guicharnaud 1970 US), whose dramatization of the Symbolist
inturning of the imagination inspired Edmund Wilson's famous Axel's
Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (1931). The
eponymous count - an unimaginably wealthy Rosicrucian savant whose
supernaturally impregnable fortress can stave off the armies of the world,
and who remains adamant in his refusal to taste the desolations reality
imposes on dreams - is a figure who has influenced generations of writers,
including almost certainly the 1980s sf and fantasy creators of Dying
Earths heavily populated by aesthetic aristocrats weary unto death of
vulgar sensation. Axel's near-final declaration - "Live? Our servants will
do that for us" - is a brilliant epigraph to the gesture he represents.
[JC/PN]See also: ABSURDIST SF; ADAM AND EVE; FRANCE; HISTORY OF SF;
HUMOUR; SATIRE; SCIENTISTS.
VILOTT, RHONDI
Working name of US writer Rhondi A. Vilott-Salsitz (? - ), whose work as
RV, and less frequent titles as R.A.V. Salsitz, has been restricted to
fantasies (see listing below), but whose work as by Charles Ingrid has
been sf. Of the 3 series of Ingrid military SPACE OPERAS, the best is the
1st, the Sand Wars sequence: Solarkill (1987), Lasertown Blues (1988),
Celestial Hit List (1988), Alien Salute (1989), Return Fire (1989) and
Challenge Met (1990). The Marked Man sequence includes The Marked Man
(1989) and The Last Recall (1991); the Patterns of Chaos sequence began
with Radius of Doubt (1991). [JC]Other works as Rhondi Vilott: Black
Dragon's Curse (1984); Challenge of the Pegasus Grail (1984); The Dungeons
of Dregnor (1984); Runesword! (1984); Spellbound (1984); Sword Daughter's
Quest (1984); The Towers of Rexor (1984); The Unicorn Crown (1984);
Aphrodite's Mirror (1985); Hall of the Gargoyle King (1985); Maiden of
Greenwold (1985); Pledge of Peril (1985); Secret of the Sphinx (1985);

Storm Rider (1985).As R.A.V. Salsitz: The Dragons sequence, comprising
Where Dragons Lie (1985), Where Dragons Rule (1986) and Night of Dragons
(1990); The Unicorn Dancer (1986); Daughter of Destiny (1988).
VINCENT, HARL
Working name of US engineer and writer Harold Vincent Schoepflin
(1893-1968) for all his fiction, beginning with "The Golden Girl of Munan"
for AMZ in 1928; little of it has reached book form. He was a popular
writer in the PULP MAGAZINES of sf's early prime, publishing frequently in
The Argosy, AMZ, ASF and other magazines until WWII, stopping then until
just before his death, when some further stories appeared, including
several reprints, and a novel, The Doomsday Planet (1966), a PLANETARY
ROMANCE in the traditional mode. His work was vigorous. [JC]See also: AIR
WONDER STORIES; GREAT AND SMALL; PARANOIA; ROBOTS.
VINGE, JOAN (CAROL) D(ENNISON)
(1948- ) US writer, with a degree in anthropology from San Diego State
University; she has been married twice, to sf writer Vernor VINGE 1972-9
and to sf editor Jim FRENKEL from 1980. She began publishing sf with Tin
Soldier (in Orbit 14 [anth 1974] ed Damon KNIGHT; 1990 chap dos), whose
theme (like much of her later work) is taken from fairy tale or MYTHOLOGY
and rewritten in sf terms, the source in this case being a story by Hans
Christian Andersen (1805-1875).Andersen was also the remote source of her
second, very popular novel - it won a 1981 HUGO - THE SNOW QUEEN (1980;
rev 1989). Though the title and some of the plot come from Andersen, this
is an essay in ANTHROPOLOGY, much of it founded in the pseudo-scientific
anthropology of Robert GRAVES in The White Goddess (1947 US), which Brian
M. STABLEFORD argued in a review "is rather like a chemistry graduate
writing a story whose plot hinges on the phlogiston theory". The broad
romantic sweep of the tale, however, carried most doubters with it. A
primitive planet with a long year is supported by off-world technology
(brought in by transmission via BLACK HOLE) in its long winter, at the end
of which the Winter Queen will be supplanted by the Summer Queen, and the
offworlders will leave. The Winter Queen plots to renew her reign (via
cloning) in summer. The fact that this novel's power rested more in
generic dexterity (much of it taken from HEROIC FANTASY) than in
conceptual strength may help explain why, after such a strong beginning,
JV has not, despite expectations to the contrary, been reckoned one of the
major sf writers of the 1980s. The other books in the Snow Queen series
are World's End (1984) and The Summer Queen (1991), the latter being very
long indeed.Before THE SNOW QUEEN was published JV had already had much
success with her short fiction, some of which deals with COMMUNICATION
between humans and ALIENS, including the title story of The Crystal Ship:
Three Original Novellas of Science Fiction (anth 1976) ed Robert
SILVERBERG. JV's early short fiction was collected in Fireship (coll 1978;
vt Fireship; and Mother and Child UK) and Eyes of Amber and Other Stories
(coll 1979). The 1977 title story of the latter is another good
communications story; it won a Hugo for Best Novelette. A further
collection of 6 stories was Phoenix in the Ashes (coll 1985).JV's first
novel, The Outcasts of Heaven Belt (1978), pits an egalitarian society
with strong women against male-dominated, collapsing societies in an

ASTEROID belt. The novel belongs to the Heaven Belt series of stories; it
was assembled with a novella from the series, Legacy (1980 dos), as Heaven
Chronicles (omni 1991). More impetuous is the Cat series, begun with Psion
(1982) and continued with Catspaw (1988; vt Cats Paw 1989 UK), the 2
collected as Alien Blood (omni 1988). Psion, which unlike its successor
was published as a juvenile, is actually a development, years later, of
the first long fiction JV wrote as a teenager. Cat, an orphan (half human,
half Hydran, a race despised by humans) with catlike eyes and PSI POWERS,
has full-blooded, melodramatic, SPACE-OPERA adventures. None of these
books approach THE SNOW QUEEN in scope, and indeed - in what seemed a
distinct lowering of her sights - JV spent much of the mid-1980s writing
film ties, starting with the juvenile Star Wars: Return of the Jedi: The
Storybook * (1983 chap) and including: Tarzan, King of the Apes * (1983);
The Dune Storybook * (1984 chap), juvenile; Return to Oz: A Novel *
(1985); Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome * (1985); Ladyhawke * (1985);
Santa Claus, the Movie: A Novel * (1985); Santa Claus, the Movie Storybook
* (1985 chap), juvenile; and Willow * (1988).In an interview JV has said
that the first sf she grew to love was by Andre NORTON; it may be as a
colourful exponent of the tradition to which Norton belongs (and which
Norton did much to establish) - in which mythic themes are patterned into
a world that is only superficially sciencefictional - that JV will be best
remembered. [PN]Other works: Joan D. Vinge Omnibus (omni 1983 UK),
containing Fireship and The Outcasts of Heavens Belt.See also: ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION.
VINGE, VERNOR (STEFFEN)
(1944- ) US writer and professor of mathematics at San Diego University;
married to Joan D. VINGE 1972-9. He began publishing sf with "Apartness"
for NW in 1965, and published fairly regularly in ASF, his best work
appearing in True Names and Other Dangers (coll 1987), which contains HARD
SF responsive to the thrust of technological progress (the title novella
had earlier appeared as TRUE NAMES [1981 dos]), and Threats . . . and
Other Promises (coll 1988), which includes more diverse material. His
first novel, Grimm's World (in Orbit 4 [anth 1966] ed Damon KNIGHT as
"Grimm's Story"; fixup 1969; exp vt Tatja Grimm's World 1987), is a
colourfully told adventure set on a primitive human planet exploited by
interstellar slavers, with intriguingly elaborated detail. It is
significantly less anodyne (or RURITANIAN) than its description implies,
and the punning title of the book turns out to be not inappropriate. From
the first VV combined a feeling for the movement and thrill of humanity's
high-tech progress through the Universe, with a sense that individual
lives were bleak and often brutish. His second novel, The Witling (1976),
repeats a situation basic to the first - intruding humans on a colony
planet are confronted by non-humans with heightened PSI POWERS - and
confirmed the essential chill of his vision.TRUE NAMES (1981 dos) was the
first of his tales to establish his reputation firmly as one of the more
interesting writers of the period. It depicts a kind of CYBERSPACE
inhabited by hackers intent on creating a VIRTUAL-REALITY environment, but
threatened by the incursion of a possibly paranormal (or demented)
colleague seeking absolute power over the world. The story is
intermittently tangled, but the cyberspace vision was prescient. The

Realtime sequence-The Peace War (1984) and Marooned in Realtime (1986),
assembled as Across Realtime (omni 1986; with "The Ungoverned" added, exp
1991) - is similarly acute in its presentation of technologies not yet
competently handled by sf, from COMPUTERS to GENETIC ENGINEERING, though
its use once again of protagonists with seemingly paranormal powers tends
to reduce any sense of novelty. The intricately plotted progress of
various characters from near to far future, via an inventively deployed
stasis-field technology, is narratively arousing, as is the murder mystery
they find on an Earth which, like an abandoned playground, has long ago
been left behind by an evolving humanity. However, the background to these
exhilarated tales is depicted with VV's usual coldness. He is a writer
who, while risking the worst of genre sillinesses, remains dangerously
acute, as his most recent and longest novel, A FIRE UPON THE DEEP (1992),
demonstrates. The tale - which involves converging interstellar quests for
a MCGUFFIN "Countermeasure" capable of destroying a dread Power that has
been reawakened from 5 billion years' sleep and is destroying millions of
civilizations - is set in a complexly visualized Galaxy-wide SPACE-OPERA
setting, skilfully designed to give room for human-scale action within a
vast canvas, though in fact Homo sapiens is a very minor player in this
arena; the information webs which convey near-infinities of information
among the myriad worlds of the venue amusingly reflect the
telephone-linked computer nets of the 1990s. The tale as a whole is
cunningly crafted, deftly told, and bracingly chill in its ultimate
implications; it shared the 1993 HUGO Award with Connie WILLIS's DOOMSDAY
BOOK (1992) . [JC]See also: GAMES AND SPORTS; LIBERTARIAN SF; TIME TRAVEL;
VIRTUAL REALITY; WEAPONS.
VINICOFF, ERIC
(? - ) US writer whose first novel - after the publication of a short
tale, Spacing Dutchman (1978 chap) with Marcia Martin - was Maiden Flight
(1988), a post- HOLOCAUST story which, like many from the last decades of
the 20th century, sees the destruction of the current world civilization
essentially in terms of the opportunities it presents for making a better
future. EV's USA, like a great adventure playground, rewards the high-tech
citizens of the new order who occupy it, en passant fighting off a local
menace before settling into productive relationships. [JC]
VINTER, MICHAEL
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
VIRTUAL REALITY
Since the mid-1980s, a popular item of sf TERMINOLOGY, and for a century
or so - in a rather more extended sense - a popular sf theme. In ordinary
usage a virtual reality is a computer-generated scenario which seems real
(or at least all-encompassing) to the person who "enters" it; one
essential quality of virtual reality is that the person who enters it
should be able to interact with it. To a degree all computer GAMES, as
habitual players well know, already offer a primitive form of virtual
reality. In other words, the ever-changing picture on the screen, plus the
touch of the fingers on the keyboard, is enough to give the illusion of
being"in" the game. But the term is usually reserved for those COMPUTER
simulations and games currently being developed in which the "player"

wears a helmet and gloves whose sensors are electronically connected to
the machine "intelligence", so that a turn of the head or a raise of the
hand alters the field of vision or the posture of the player's alter ego
within the simulation. A further step, not yet available in the real world
but a commonplace in sf, is the use of a direct electronic interface
between the human brain and the AI which gives the plugged-in person the
illusion of occupying and interacting with a reality whose apparent
locations may extend beyond the AI to those of the data-networks of which
it is a part. Such - it is the most famous recent example - is the
CYBERSPACE envisaged by William GIBSON's Neuromancer trilogy (1984-8), in
which hackers can jack into a "cyberspace deck" and project a "disembodied
consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix". A
good popular guide to the meaning of the term in its more limited,
scientific application is Virtual Reality (1991) by Howard Rheingold. The
term may have grown from the term "virtuality", used by Theodor Nelson in
"Interactive Systems and the Design of Virtuality" (Nov/Dec 1980 Creative
Computing). The coining of "virtual reality", probably around 1981, is
usually attributed to computer guru Jaron Lanier, founder of VPL Research
Inc., the company that markets DataGloves. The first sf usage we can trace
is in The Judas Mandala (1982 US; rev 1990) by Damien BRODERICK, a book
with many and confusing virtual realities.This comparatively restricted
use of the term rapidly became a cliche of the CYBERPUNK movement, but it
is only a special case of the larger theme of virtual reality. One reason
why virtual realities have been popular so long in sf is the somewhat
recursive fact that stories themselves are virtual realities (though we
interact with them only in a metaphoric sense); so the notion holds an
intrinsic fascination for writers of stories, each of whom is, to a
degree, a god creating an imaginary world which is real to the characters
within it and partly real to the reader who shares their experience, a
notion central to L. Ron HUBBARD's story "Typewriter in the Sky"
(1940).Broadly, a virtual reality can be defined as any secondary reality
alternate to the character's world of real experience in which the
character finds himself or herself, and with which he or she can interact.
The purist might insist that such a world be machine-mediated. If it is
not (or, less obviously, even if it is) then all sorts of questions of
METAPHYSICS instantly intrude. How sure are we that our own world
represents the "real" reality? This is not only the sort of question that
troubles the protagonists of many novels by Philip K. DICK, including THE
THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH (1965). It has troubled writers since
the dawn of Western civilization, including PLATO, who wondered if what we
perceive as reality is only the flickering shadows on a cave wall,
reflections of a higher, more solid (or Platonic) reality that we cannot
perceive with the senses. The idea that our world may, in fact, be only a
virtual reality remains intensely popular in fiction and is central, for
example, to the situation in which most of Jack CHALKER's characters find
themselves. Any virtual-reality world might be assumed to have a creator
or programmer, a kind of god, so virtual-reality stories are often stories
of god-like or demonic creators ( GODS AND DEMONS and PERCEPTION for
further examples). One good example is Daniel F. GALOUYE's Counterfeit
World (1964 UK; vt Simulacron-3 US), filmed as WELT AM DRAHT (1973, vt
World on a Wire), which contains a receding and potentially endless series

of virtual realities. Other examples are listed under POCKET UNIVERSES.The
idea of the virtual reality has often been linked with game-playing, and
GAME-WORLD stories are often based around virtual realities. An early
example (although not machine-mediated) is Lewis CARROLL's Through the
Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), in which the virtual
reality that Alice enters through the mirror is a game-world based on an
actual chess game, whose other player is effectively God, and whose
puppet-pieces are arguably deprived of free will. The idea, more simply,
of plugging into a virtual-reality world for entertainment is also old: E.
M. FORSTER's "The Machine Stops" (1909) envisages a world of isolated
cells whose occupants derive all their entertainment through plugging into
global information networks; Aldous HUXLEY's BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932) has a
future whose people are entertained by "feelies", apparently a kind of
cinema that operates on all the senses to give an illusion of reality (but
the experience is passive, so the basic element of interaction is absent);
in Arthur C. CLARKE's The City and the Stars (1956), an expansion of
Against the Fall of Night (1953), occupants of a static UTOPIA (not unlike
Forster's) amuse themselves with violent, melodramatic adventure scenarios
into which they plug themselves to take part.While this topic has remained
a minor constant in sf, it suddenly blossomed into a major theme around
the end of the 1970s and through the 1980s. Sometimes the virtual
realities of this recent fiction are generated by manipulative
superbeings, sometimes by machine intelligences. In John VARLEY's Titan
sequence (1979-84) the artificial world is effectively a theme park, whose
nature is protean, subject to the whims of its creator. Theme parks
themselves can be read as a form of virtual reality, and often appear in
sf, as in Steven BARNES's and Larry NIVEN's Dream Park sequence (1981-91)
or in the film WESTWORLD (1973). The typical theme-park story has the
expected manipulations of a game turned into the nightmare manipulations
of PARANOIA.Films and stories in which humans are, or become, trapped in
virtual realities, quite often computer-generated, include Hugh WALKER's
Reiter der Finsternis (1975; trans as War-Gamers' World 1978), WELCOME TO
BLOOD CITY (1977), Vernor VINGE's TRUE NAMES (1981 dos; 1984), Octagon
(1981) by Fred SABERHAGEN, TRON (1982), BRAINSTORM (1983), DREAMSCAPE
(1984), Gillian RUBINSTEIN's Space Demons (1986), Andrew GREELEY's God
Game (1986), Kim NEWMAN's The Night Mayor (1989) and The LAWNMOWER MAN
(1992).A popular variant of the theme is the reality generated by one
person's godlike will; such are the deliquescing subrealities - rather
like hallucinations which others are forced to share - created by the
protagonist of Ursula K. LE GUIN's The Lathe of Heaven (1971), filmed for
tv as The LATHE OF HEAVEN (1980). Another variant is the computer game
seen by the unaware protagonist as only a game (i.e., virtual), which
turns out to generate a reality that is often alarming (i.e., real). This
is the scenario of Orson Scott CARD's ENDER'S GAME (1977 ASF; exp 1985)
and of the film WARGAMES (1983), in both of which a war-game turns out to
be war itself, the gaming computer being actually in a position of
military command. A computer game is used to entice the young hero of The
LAST STARFIGHTER (1984), his virtual-reality skills being required for the
waging of a real galactic war.A final variant is found in those stories in
which (normally for purposes of psychotherapy) one person enters another's
mind and interacts with what he or she finds there, a classic of this

genre being THE DREAM MASTER (1965 as "He Who Shapes"; exp 1966) by Roger
ZELAZNY. One mind, in this instance, becomes a virtual reality for the
other, and in these stories the transfer is typically machine-mediated, as
in Greg BEAR's Queen of Angels (1990), in which the reality entered is a
malign landscape generated by the mind of a murderer. Many more stories of
this type are listed under PSYCHOLOGY.Because of the metaphorical power of
virtual-reality stories to examine the processes of creation (and, rather
differently, to conjure up paranoid visions of manipulation) it is likely
that they will remain popular. [PN]
VIRUS
FUKKATSO NO HI.
VISIAK, E.H.
Working name of UK poet, critic and novelist Edward Harold Physick
(1878-1972). His fiction - like The Haunted Island (1910), a complex tale
featuring ghosts, MAGIC and piracy - is essentially fantasy, although
Medusa: A Story of Mystery (1929), an almost surreal FANTASTIC VOYAGE into
unknown seas, gives the eponymous South Pacific sea monster an sf-like
rationale. "The Shadow", a good surrealist ghost novella, appeared in
Crimes, Creeps and Thrills (anth 1936) ed John GAWSWORTH. As a friend of
David LINDSAY, EHV contributed an essay to The Strange Genius of David
Lindsay (anth 1970). [JC/PN]
VISION OF TOMORROW
Australian/UK magazine, monthly, BEDSHEET-format, 12 issues, Aug 1969-Sep
1970, published by Ronald E. Graham, an Australian sf enthusiast; ed
Philip HARBOTTLE from the UK. VOT featured work by many UK writers,
including Kenneth BULMER, Michael MOORCOCK and E.C. TUBB, with the
emphasis on straightforward action stories, and several posthumous works
by John Russell FEARN. Graham vetoed the inclusion of US writers, but
encouraged Australian authors, including Damien BRODERICK, Lee HARDING and
Jack WODHAMS. Cover artists included Eddie JONES, Gerard A. QUINN and
David HARDY, the latter also producing many full-colour illustrations for
the inside back cover. VOT was the first English-language magazine to
publish a story by Stanislaw LEM: "Are You There, Mr Jones?", in #1. The
Impatient Dreamers, a history of UK sf publishing and FANDOM by Walter
GILLINGS, E.J. CARNELL and others, ran through all issues. Because of a
change of printers, #3 (Nov 1969) appeared before #2 (Dec 1969). [BS/PN]
VISSARION, I.C.
[r] ROMANIA.
VIVIAN, E(VELYN) CHARLES
(1882-1947) UK writer of popular fiction, born Charles Henry Cannell but
changing his name to ECV in early adulthood, though he wrote some
non-genre novels as Charles Cannell. He is now best remembered for the
Gees sequence of novels (see listing below), all written as by Jack Mann,
about a psychic detective whose cases sometimes involve sf-like phenomena
- e.g., travel through other DIMENSIONS - but are essentially fantasies.
Much of ECV's prolific output had a mystical tinge. Some of his novels,
like Passion-Fruit (1912), had fantasy elements, and several were
LOST-WORLD tales, including: City of Wonder (1922), which features Asian

survivors from Lemuria; the Aia sequence, comprising Fields of Sleep
(1923), in which Babylonian survivors are trapped in a Malaysian valley by
a strange plant within range of whose aroma, once inhaled, one must stay
or die, and People of the Darkness (1924), set in an underground world
inhabited by a tentacled species who were originally slaves in ATLANTIS;
The Lady of the Terraces (1925) and its sequel A King There Was - (1926),
which feature pre-Incan survivals and further hints of Atlantis; and Woman
Dominant (1929), set in Asia, where an aged woman rules a land through the
agency of a drug which makes men halfwitted. ECV's most straightforward sf
tale, Star Dust (1925), describes an inventor/scientist's attempts to make
the world better by indiscriminately transmuting dross into gold; this (he
thinks) will make some sort of UTOPIA inevitable. Not one of ECV's books
is fully satisfying; not one is without interest. [JC]Other works, all as
Jack Mann: Coulson Goes South (1933), marginal; Dead Man's Chest (1934);
the Gees sequence, comprising Gees' First Case (1936), associational, Grey
Shapes (1937), Nightmare Farm (1937), The Kleinert Case (1938),
associational, Maker of Shadows (1938), The Ninth Life (1939), Her Ways
are Death (1939) and The Glass Too Many (1940).See also: HISTORY OF SF;
MACHINES.
VOERMANS, PAUL
(? - ) Australian writer whose first sf novel, And Disregards theRest
(1992 UK), mixes sf and magic realism into a somewhatspatchcocked tale of
NEAR-FUTUREAustralia beset by ALIENS, themetaphysical consequences of an
earlier performance of William Shakespeare's The Tempest(written c1611),
and much else. The Weird Colonial Boy(1993UK) is set in an ALTERNATE WORLD
in which the British Empirecontinues to rule an oppressed Australia, but
is opposed by revolutionaries whose raids combinesurreal horseplay and
violence. PV continues to grapple with a plenitude of influences; but
mayestablish a singular voice. [JC]
VOGEL, [Sir] JULIUS
(1835-1899) UK politician who spent much of his professional life in NEW
ZEALAND and whose sf novel, Anno Domini 2000, or Woman's Destiny (1889),
set partly in New Zealand and Australia, treats the dawning 21st century
as both benignly prosperous and much obsessed with matters of royalty. The
current British Emperor causes much fuss in the USA when he refuses to
approve any change in the succession laws which would permit a female to
succeed to the throne. But after a war all ends well, with various women
achieving their destiny in a series of marriages. [JC]
VOGH, JAMES
John T. SLADEK.
VOID PUBLICATIONS
Paul COLLINS; VOID SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY.
VOID SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY
Australian DIGEST-size SEMIPROZINE, 5 issues 1975-7, thereafter
continuing until 1981 as a series, 4 books, 3 numbers per book, which
effectively constituted an original-anthology series; published by Void
Publications; ed Paul COLLINS. #1-#3 were published from Queensland, the
rest from Melbourne. At a time when Australian sf had few local outlets,

VSFAF was a brave venture, though in appearance it could be described, in
its 1st incarnation, as a fiction FANZINE, with an overcrowded layout on
cheap paper. It contained some original and reprint work from the US, but
was primarily a platform for such Australian sf writers as A. Bertram
CHANDLER, David LAKE and Jack WODHAMS. VSFAF was dated by year only, and
only one issue (#2) was numbered. #6-#8 were published in book form as an
original anthology, Envisaged Worlds (anth 1977), #9-#11 as Other Worlds
(anth 1978), #12-#14 as Alien Worlds (anth 1979) and #15-#17 as Distant
Worlds (anth 1981). A further anthology, Frontier Worlds (anth 1983) was
offered to subscribers in lieu of #18. [PN]
VOINOVICH, VLADIMIR (NIKOLAEVICH)
(1932- ) Russian writer known mostly for his mainstream satires. Active
in the 1970s, he found himself in confrontation with the Soviet
authorities, and finally emigrated in the early 1980s to Germany. All his
works display an offbeat and at times heavy-handed fantastication. His
only sf tale, Moskorep (1986 France; trans Richard Lourie as Moscow 2084
1987 US), carries a contemporary protagonist 100 years forward by TIME
TRAVEL to the redoubled bureaucracy that rules in AD2084, en passant
satirizing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918- ). The outlandishness of the sf
enactment of VV's conceit is balanced by the grimness of his sense that
Soviet bureacracy would almost infinitely worsen. [VG/JC]
VOISKUNSKY, EVGENY (L'VOVICH)
(1922- ) Russian naval officer, journalist and writer; he wrote in
collaboration with Isa Borisovich Lukodianov (1913-1984), a design
engineer, until the latter's death. Their first novel was Ekipazh
"Mekonga" (1961; cut trans Leonard Stoklitsky as The Crew of the Mekong
1974 Russia), a long but fast-moving HARD-SF examination of 2 intersecting
projects: an attempt to increase the surface tension of oil so that it can
be sent without needing pipelines; and an investigation of the scientific
principles behind an ancient knife whose blade is interpenetrable with
matter. En passant, the Caspian Sea is raised. A sequel, Ur, Syn Shama
["Ur, Son of Sham"] (1975), depicts an encounter with ALIENS, who bring
the protagonist, an ancient Babylonian kidnapped eons earlier, back to
Earth. Tchiorny Stolb (1963), a short novel trans anon as "The Black
Pillar" in The Molecular Cafe (anth ed anon Arkady and Boris STRUGATSKI
trans 1968 Russia), depicts a NEAR-FUTURE global catastrophe as the result
of deep drilling of Earth's mantle. In Otchen' Daliokii Tartess ["Far
Distant Tartess"] (1968) ATLANTIS meets its doom when local
scientist-priests discover the secret of atomic energy. Plesk zviozdenykh
Morei ["Star Seas Lapping"] (fixup 1970) deals with the TERRAFORMING of
VENUS, and a long-frustrated but finally successful attempt to initiate
interstellar travel. Some short work was assembled in Na Perekriostkakh
Vremeni ["At the Crossroads of Time"] (coll 1964); a late novel was
Nezakonaia Planeta ["The Illegal Planet"] (1980). [VG/JC]
VOLLMANN, WILLIAM T(ANNER)
(1959- ) US writer whose debut novel, You Bright and Risen Angels: A
Cartoon (1987 UK), is an immense FABULATION whose interweavings of
PARANOIA and CYBERPUNK tended to remind critics of the work of Thomas
PYNCHON. The war between the villain, who is attempting to control the

world through an information web, and the "bugs" caught in his system, who
attempt to remain subversively free, is also, in Postmodernistic fashion,
a war of words between contrasting methods of defining and controlling
"reality". The ongoing sequence entitled Seven Dreams: A Book of North
American Landscapes- of which The Ice-Shirt (1990 UK) is the 1st
instalment, Fathers and Crows (1992) is the 2nd, and The Rifles (1994) is
the 6th - attempts to construct out of language and myth and history a new
version of the USA. The stories assembled in The Rainbow Stories (coll of
linked stories 1989 UK), though they depict extreme states of being,
almost entirely eschew fantasy. [JC]
VOLNY, ZDENEK
[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
VOLTAIRE
Pseudonym of Francois-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), enormously productive and
successful French philosopher, historian, playwright, belletrist. Of
interest to the student of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION is Micromegas (1752 UK;
trans anon as Micromegas, a Comic Romance 1753 UK; best new trans W.
Fleming as coll vt Micromegas and Other Stories 1989 UK), in which two
giants, one from a planet circling Sirius and one from Saturn, visit
Earth, where their responses to human life make some satirical points, not
least that our species may not be so very important in the much larger
Universe that was coming to be accepted at the time V was writing. Candide
(1759), the best known of all tales of the innocent abroad, can be seen as
a precursor of satirical picaresques from Kurt VONNEGUT Jr to Robert
SHECKLEY. Certainly a FANTASTIC VOYAGE, Candide is arguably also an early
example of anthropological sf; it was made into a musical comedy in 1957
by Leonard Bernstein. Other contes philosophiques with explicitly
fantastic content include Zadig (1747; trans with other tales as
Miscellanies [coll 1778 US]; many other trans exist) and Le taureau blanc
(1774; trans as The White Bull 1774 UK; new trans with other tales as The
White Bull, With Saul and Various Short Pieces [coll 1929 UK]). [JC/PN]See
also: FRANCE; GREAT AND SMALL; OUTER PLANETS; RELIGION; SATIRE.
VONARBURG, ELISABETH
(1947- ) French-born Canadian writer, teacher and critic, in Quebec from
1973. She began publishing sf with "Maree haute" for Requiem in 1978; the
tale appeared as "High Tide" in Twenty Houses of the Zodiac (anth 1979 UK)
ed Maxim JAKUBOWSKI. Many of her stories (some award-winning) have been
assembled as L'Oeil de la nuit ["The Eye of Night"] (coll 1980) and Janus
(coll 1984 France), most being set in either of 2 cycles (with great gaps
in the published chronology), the more important being the Baiblancaor
Mothers' Landseries, in which a semi-decadent society in a far-future
Europe sees the gradual appearance of shapeshifting MUTANTS (the
"metames"). The series continues in Le Silence de la cite (1981 France;
trans Jane Brierley as The Silent City 1988), whose young female
protagonist leaves her underground sanctuary and goes to the surface, with
its wild tribes, where she begins to transform the benighted world.
Revelations of the artificial nature of the feminist governance of
Mothers' Land sharpens the rite of passage story at the heart of
Chroniques du Pays des Meres (1992; trans [prior to French-language

publication] by Jane Brierley as The Maerlande Chronicles 1992; vt IN THE
MOTHERS' LAND 1992 US). In the 2nd cycle, a Bridge serves as a door to
other universes. EV is a very deliberate writer who brings great care and
thought to her work, and to the depiction of characters and background.
She was fiction editor 1979-90 and editor 1983-5 ofSOLARIS. [LP]Other
works: Comment ecrire des histoires ["How to Write Stories"] (1986);
Histoire de la princesse et du dragon ["The Story of the Princess and the
Dragon"] (1990); Ailleurs et au Japon ["Elsewhere and in Japan"] (coll
1991); Les Voyageurs Malgre Eux (1994; trans as Reluctant Voyagers
1995.See also: CANADA.
von DALIN, OLOF
[r] SCANDINAVIA.
von DANIKEN, ERICH
(1935- ) Swiss writer of a series of purportedly nonfiction books,
beginning with Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (1968 Germany; trans Michael
Heron as Chariots of the Gods? 1969 UK), which, based on a mass of often
suspect and internally inconsistent data, argues that the Earth was
visited by at least one ALIEN spacefaring race before and at the dawn of
historical time; thus, for example, the Great Pyramid (a CRYOGENIC
chamber) and the Easter Island statues (images of the visiting aliens)
were quarried with lasers and lifted into place by helicopters. It is
central to his thesis - which was far from original to him - that all
ancient peoples were moronic, capable only of copying what the spacemen
showed them. Scientific howlers abound, and logical flaws proliferate; yet
the books sold in their millions and sparked off a host of imitators, some
of which - like Mystery of the Ancients (1974) by Craig and Eric Umland,
claiming that the Maya are the descendants of stranded explorers from
beyond the Solar System - are so entrancingly funny that they may in fact
be spoofs. A hagiography of EvD is Daniken Intim (1976; trans David B.
Koblick as Disciple of the Gods 1978 UK; vt Erich von Daniken: Disciple of
the Gods) by Peter Krassa. A cheerful and detailed demolition is The
Space-Gods Revealed (1976) by Ronald Story (1946- ); there is further
useful discussion by E.C. Krupp in In Search of Ancient Astronomies (anth
1979; rev 1984) ed Krupp.The vast publicity given to EvD's speculations
has had a negative effect on sf, in that the whole notion of ancient
astronauts became such anathema, even to those of only moderate scientific
literacy, that it became an sf TABOO. It is hard to find a worthwhile sf
treatment of the topic in the years since 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968),
although the idea of an ancient race having "seeded" the Galaxy,
populating its worlds or spreading scientific knowledge to assist their
primitive indigenous lifeforms, has become almost a CLICHE of SPACE OPERA.
[JS/JGr]See also: ADAM AND EVE; COMICS; GODS AND DEMONS; MYTHOLOGY; ORIGIN
OF MAN; PARANOIA; PSEUDO-SCIENCE.
von GRIMMELSHAUSEN, JOHANN JAKOB CHRISTOFFEL
[r] GERMANY.
von GUNDEN, KENNETH
(1946- ) US writer whose 1st work of sf interest was Twenty All-Time
Great SF Films (1982) with Stuart H. Stock, and who came to somewhat wider

notice with his 1st novel, StarSpawn (1990), which interestingly
introduces an ethically advanced hive race of interstellar explorers into
medieval England, though an associated species escapes their ship and
causes some havoc. The K-9 Corps sequence - K-9 Corps (1991), K-9 Corps
#2: Under Fire (1991) and #3: Cry Wolf (1992) - less engagingly confronts
a team of super-dogs with challenges on alien planets. [JC]Other Works:
The Sounding Stillness (1993); The Pale Companion (1994).
von HANSTEIN, OTFRIED
[r] GERMANY.
von HARBOU, THEA
(1888-1954) German writer, most noted for her novels based on screenplays
written by herself and her husband, Fritz LANG, who divorced her after she
joined the Nazi Party in 1932; she was co-author of the screenplays for
all the films Lang made before leaving Germany in 1933. Neither Metropolis
* (1926; trans anon 1927 UK), filmed as METROPOLIS (1926), nor Frau im
Mond * (1928; trans Baroness von Hutten as The Girl in the Moon 1930 UK;
cut vt The Rocket to the Moon; from the Novel, The Girl in the Moon 1930
US), filmed as Die FRAU IM MOND (1929), has much of the films' symbolic
force, and both are thickly propagandistic. [JC]See also: AUTOMATION;
CITIES; GERMANY; WOMEN SF WRITERS.
VONNEGUT, KURT Jr
(1922- ) US writer born in Indianapolis. He was a PoW near the end of
WWII in Dresden during the saturation bombing of the city and the
subsequent firestorm. He later studied at the universities of Tennessee
and Chicago, and began to write for various magazines in the early 1950s,
his first sf story being "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" for COLLIER'S
WEEKLY in 1950. His first appearance in an sf magazine was "Unready to
Wear" (Gal 1953), but KV tried hard to avoid categorization as a GENRE-SF
writer. He first became widely popular in the mid-1960s and is now
recognized as a major US writer of the post-WWII period.His first novel
was the DYSTOPIA of AUTOMATION, PLAYER PIANO (1952; vt Utopia 14 1954),
which describes the dereliction of the quality of life by the progressive
surrender of production and political decision to MACHINES. The mixture of
heavy irony, bordering on black HUMOUR, and unashamed sentimentality
displayed in this novel became the hallmark of KV's work, and is
progressively exaggerated in later novels. THE SIRENS OF TITAN (1959) is a
fine complex SATIRE about the folly of mistaking good luck for the favour
of God; it features the first of a number of mock- RELIGIONS that KV would
invent - the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent - and concludes with
the revelation of the manipulation of human history by Tralfamadorian
ALIENS sending messages to one of their kind stranded on Titan. One
leading character has an extratemporal viewpoint from which all moments
appear co-existent - a theme which crops up again, along with the
Tralfamadorians, in KV's novel about the firestorming of Dresden,
Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death
(1969). Mother Night (1962) is a non-sf novel about the struggle of a US
ex-Nazi double agent to discover his "true" identity; several of its
characters reappear in later work, helping to connect all his work into a
single evolving patchwork. Cat's Cradle (1963) features a confrontation of

the opposing philosophies of scientist Felix Hoenikker, inventor of
"ice-nine" (which threatens to bring about the END OF THE WORLD), and
Bokonon, a rebel against rationality and architect of an avowedly fake
religion whose purpose is to protect believers against the harshness of
reality. God Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1965) is a non-sf novel about the
one man in the world who does not suffer from samaritrophia (chronic
atrophy of the conscience), but it is closely allied to much of KV's sf;
it contains an oft-quoted paragraph about sf writers, makes much of the
misadventures of sf writer Kilgore Trout - who reappears in Breakfast of
Champions, or Goodbye, Blue Monday! (1973) - and overlaps somewhat with
Slaughterhouse-Five, the story of Billy Pilgrim, survivor of the Dresden
firestorm, who finds peace of mind after being kidnapped by
Tralfamadorians and thus learning that the secret of life is to live only
in the happy moments. Most of KV's 1970s work showed a marked decline in
vitality - both Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!
(1976) verge on lachrymose self-parody and are shot through with
shoulder-shrugging, verbal tics-but he recovered a measure of his
authority in a series of novels about unfortunate innocents abroad:
Jailbird (1979) and Dead-Eye Dick (1982). His most impressive novel of
this period is, Galapagos (1985), a darkly humorous apocalyptic fantasy
narrated by a remote and happily devolved descendant of the few survivors
of the HOLOCAUST; but Hocus Pocus, or What's the Hurry, Sam? (1990), which
carries its protrayal of a self-destroying USA through the turn of the
century, is almost as compelling.Vonnegut's best sf - which includes some
of the short stories first assembled in Canary in a Cat House (coll 1961)
and subsequently recombined with new material in Welcome to the Monkey
House (coll 1968) -has a unique flavour, not only because of its sardonic
Weltschmerz but also by virtue of his consistent refusal to look for
scapegoats to blame for the sad state of the world. KV is content to
attribute human misery and misfortune to the carelessness of God the
Utterly Indifferent; he is full of pity for the human predicament but can
see no hope in any solutions, save perhaps for the adoption of actions and
beliefs which are absurdly irrational. This is a philosophy very much in
keeping with the contemporary Zeitgeist. KV has also written a play with
sf elements, Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1973), and had a hand in the
production of a tv play based on extracts from several of his works,
Between Time and Timbuktu (1972; book version Between Time and Timbuktu,
or Prometheus-5: A Space Fantasy 1972). KV's essays, talks and various
journalistic oddments are assembled in Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
(coll 1974), Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (fixup 1981), and
Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s (fixup
1991). A novel attributed to Kilgore Trout, written by Philip Jose FARMER,
appeared as Venus on the Half-Shell (1975). [BS]About the author: Much has
been written about KV; the following is a selection of books. Kurt
Vonnegut Jr (1972) by Peter J. Reed; Kurt Vonnegut: Fantasist of Fire and
Ice (1972) by David H. Goldsmith; The Vonnegut Statement (anth 1973) ed
Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer; Kurt Vonnegut Jr (1976) by Stanley
Schatt; Kurt Vonnegut (1977) by James Lundquist; Kurt Vonnegut (1982) by
Jerome Klinkovitz.See also: ABSURDIST SF; COMMUNICATIONS; CYBERNETICS;
DISASTER; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; EVOLUTION; FANTASY; GENERATION
STARSHIPS; HISTORY OF SF; INTELLIGENCE; ISLANDS; MEDIA LANDSCAPE;

MERCURY;
METAPHYSICS; OUTER PLANETS; OVERPOPULATION; PARANOIA; PERCEPTION;
POLITICS; POLLUTION; PREDICTION; RECURSIVE SF; SCIENTISTS; SPACESHIPS;
TIME TRAVEL.
von NEUPAUER, JOSEPH RITTER
[r] AUSTRIA.
von TROJAN, KURT
(1937- ) Writer born in Vienna but now Australian. His first novel, The
Transing Syndrome (1985), uses "transing" ( MATTER TRANSMISSION) to move
the plot along in an alternate-world DYSTOPIA; the protagonist worries
that his identity may be fading with each transmission, like increasingly
obscure photocopies of a photocopy. Bedmates (1987) is set in a future
Australia dominated by AIDS and sexual fear: "bedmates" are mindless
artefacts always ready for sex. Both novels are effective and sometimes
harrowing, but flawed. KVT's best work may be the non-sf autobiographical
novel Mars in Scorpio (1990). [BF/PN]
von VOSS, JULIUS
[r] GERMANY.
VORHIES, JOHN R(OYAL HARRIS)
(1924-1975) US writer in whose NEAR-FUTURE Pre-Empt (1967; vt The Nathan
Hale 1968 UK) a nuclear-submarine captain enforces world peace by dropping
a few demonstration missiles on the USA and USSR. Despite the title, the
USA does not opt for a pre-emptive strike. [JC]
VORNHOLT, JOHN
(? - ) US writer known only for 2 STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION ties:
Masks * (1989) and Contamination * (1991). [JC]
VORTEX
UK small- BEDSHEET size magazine. 5 issues Jan-May 1977, published by
Shalmead (Jan-Feb), Container Publications (Mar), Cerberus Publishing
(Apr-May); ed. Keith Seddon. V was a glossy magazine with some interior
illustration in full colour. The first 3 covers, by Rodney MATTHEWS,
suggested an orientation towards fantasy which was not evident in the
actual magazine. #1-#4 serialized Michael MOORCOCK's The End of All Songs
(1976); #5 contained the 1st instalment of The Chaos Weapon (1977) by
Colin KAPP. Other stories were for the most part experimental pieces by
previously unknown authors, such as Ravan Christchild, who in most cases
were pseudonyms of the editor. The circulation never looked like covering
the high production costs. [MJE]
VORTEX, THE
US FANZINE. 2 issues 1947, ed Gordon M. Kull and George R. Cowie from San
Francisco. TV is listed in some indexes as a professional SF MAGAZINE, but
the fiction in #1 was by unknown amateurs and it was distributed free. It
was attractively printed on glossy paper. #2 had name writers like David
H. KELLER and Stanley MULLEN, but was mainly mimeographed. [MJE/FHP]
VORTEX SCIENCE FICTION
US DIGEST-size magazine. 2 issues, May and Oct 1953, published by

Specific Fiction Corp., New York; ed Chester Whitehorn. VSF was designed
to showcase a large number of very short stories in each issue, achieving
this goal in #2, but the idea did not prove popular. Not all the 9 new
writers who made their debut in the second issue were doomed to remain
unknown: Marion Zimmer BRADLEY had 2 stories there. A later magazine
(1954) with the same publisher and editor was SCIENCE FICTION DIGEST.VSF
should not be confused with VORTEX or The VORTEX . [FHP/PN]
VOYAGE A TRAVERS l'IMPOSSIBLE, LE
(vt Whirling the Worlds; vt An Impossible Voyage) Film (1904). Star.
Prod/dir Georges MELIES. 30 mins. B/w.This was only the 2nd sf-oriented
film to be more than 5 mins long - there had been several around 1 min made by French cinema pioneer Melies; the 1st was his Le VOYAGE DANS LA
LUNE (1902). It involves a newly invented experimental train taking off
from the summit of the Jungfrau, travelling through space and crashing
into the Sun; its occupants then return to Earth by space submarine and
land in the sea. All this was achieved with primitive but ingenious
special effects, including stop-motion photography, split-screen, multiple
exposures, giant moving cut-outs and live action combined with painted
backdrops. It was so popular that Melies added 5 mins to the end, showing
the equipment used on the trip being recovered by a giant electromagnet.
[JB/PN]
VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE, LE
(vt A Trip to the Moon) Film (1902). Star. Prod/dir Georges MELIES, who
also played the inventor. 21 mins. Tinted.This is the 1st sf film (apart
from short subjects lasting only 1-2 mins). French CINEMA pioneer Melies
based this amusing spectacle extremely loosely on Jules VERNE's De la
terre a la lune (1865; trans as the first half of From the Earth to the
Moon 1873 UK) and H.G. WELLS's First Men in the Moon (1901), borrowing a
spacecraft propelled by a gun from the former and hard-shelled Selenites
from the latter. No attempt is made to depict the flight seriously; the
Moon projectile is loaded by a line of grinning chorus girls; the Man in
the Moon is shown with the projectile stuck in his eye; the Moon
travellers encounter a group of Selenites who explode when tapped with an
umbrella; and the travellers safely return home, due to the pull of
Earth's GRAVITY, in time to see a statue erected in their honour. The
innovatory special effects are naturally primitive, but encompass many
techniques still in use today. [JB/PN]
VOYAGERS
US tv series (1982-3). Universal. Created James D. Parriott, prod Jill
Sherman, Robert Steinhauer. Dirs included Virgil Vogel, Bernard McEveety,
Allan Levi, Ron Satloff. 20 50min episodes.Phineas Bogg (played by Jon
Eric Hexum) and Jeffrey Jones (played by Meeno Peluce) are time-travelling
Voyagers who put history right (which is to say, the way we know it to
have been). The premise could have been interesting, but remained trivial
(reminding the Wright Brothers to invent the aeroplane, helping Babe Ruth
hit his 60th home run and, more inventively, saving Jean Lafitte the
pirate so that the British do not win the Battle of New Orleans). In the
final episode, Jack the Ripper turns out to be a renegade Voyager trying
to corrupt history. Not helped by the woodenness of its handsome leading

players, V seems to have received very little foreign distribution and to
have been largely ignored by the sf community. [PN]
VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
1. Film (1961). Windsor Productions/20th Century-Fox. Dir Irwin ALLEN,
starring Walter Pidgeon, Robert Sterling, Joan Fontaine, Barbara Eden,
Peter Lorre. Screenplay Allen, Charles Bennett. 105 mins. Colour.The crew
of a glass-nosed nuclear submarine has a mission to fire an atomic missile
into the Van Allen belts, which have been set on fire by meteors (!) and
are melting the icecaps. Despite enemy submarines, a giant octopus and
other hazards, the mission succeeds. As with most of Allen's productions,
the plot does not survive an instant's rational scrutiny; it is full of
astonishing SCIENTIFIC ERRORS. The novelization was Voyage to the Bottom
of the Sea * (1961) by Theodore STURGEON.2. US tv series (1964-8). An
Irwin Allen Production for 20th Century-Fox TV/ABC. Created Irwin Allen,
who was also executive prod. Story consultant Sidney Marshall. Writers
included William Welch (34 episodes), Richard Landau, Harlan ELLISON (1
episode as by Cordwainer Bird), Robert Hamner, Rik Vollaerts. Dirs
included Leonard Horn, Sobey Martin, Felix Feist, Harry Harris, Sutton
Roley, Jus Addiss. Special effects L.B. Abbott. 110 50min episodes. Season
1 b/w, the remaining 3 seasons colour.Based on 1, this series concerned
the exploits of the experimental submarine Seaview; it starred Richard
Basehart and David Hedison. Early episodes had fairly conventional stories
involving secret agents and threats from unfriendly foreign powers, but
later the plots became increasingly fantastic: not only were the crew
faced with such dangers as giant whales, giant jellyfish, giant octopuses
and giant "things", but their submarine was regularly invaded by a variety
of esoteric menaces ranging from sentient seaweed to the ghost of a U-boat
captain, other uninvited guests including a lobster man, a mummy, a
leprechaun, a blob and a mad robot. Throughout, Basehart and Hedison kept
straight faces. Abbott's special effects won several Emmy awards. Book
spin-offs were VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA* (1965)by Raymond F. JONES
and City Under the Sea* (1965) by Paul W. FAIRMAN. [JB]See also: UNDER THE
SEA.
VOYAGE TO THE END OF THE UNIVERSE
IKARIE XB-1.
VOYAGE TO THE PLANET OF PREHISTORIC WOMEN
Roger CORMAN; PLANETA BUR.
VOYAGE TO THE PREHISTORIC PLANET
Roger CORMAN; PLANETA BUR.
VYNALEZ ZKAZY
(vt The Diabolic Invention; vt The Deadly Invention; vt The Fabulous
World of Jules Verne; vt Invention of Destruction; vt Weapons of
Destruction) Film (1958). Kratky film Praha/Studio loutkovych filmu
Gottwaldov. Dir Karel Zeman, starring Lubor Tokus, Arnost Navratil,
Miroslav Holub, Jana Zatloukalova. Screenplay Zeman, Frantisek Hrubin,
based primarily on Jules VERNE's Face au drapeau (1896; trans as For the
Flag 1897), but also drawing on sections of his Vingt mille lieues sous
les mers (1870; trans as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas 1872),

L'ile mysterieuse (1874-5; trans as The Mysterious Island 1875) and Robur
le conquerant (1886; trans as The Clipper of the Clouds 1887). 83 mins.
B/w.This Czech film is a charming blend of cartoon animation, puppet film
and live action, with the overall style patterned on 19th-century steel
engravings. A monomaniacal scientist invents an incredibly powerful new
explosive; he and his assistant are captured by a Captain Nemo-like
character and his followers. There are various adventures with submarines,
BALLOONS, a giant octopus and a vast cannon. At the end patriotism
triumphs over unscrupulous technology. Zeman directed a number of
excellent films of this sort ( CZECH AND SLOVAK SF). [JB/PN]

SF&F encyclopedia (W-W)
WADE, TOM W.
(? - ) UK writer who published mainly with sf publishers John Spencer (
BADGER BOOKS) under various pseudonyms. As Victor Wadey he wrote two bad
yet charming sf novels, A Planet Named Terra (1962) and its sequel The
United Planets (1962). The distant planet confusingly called Terra is
populated by the REINCARNATIONS of people from Earth, notably Elizabeth I,
as space explorers from Earth discover to their amazement. He wrote Chaos
in Arcturus (1953) and Chariot into Time (1953) under the house name Karl
Zeigfreid as well as, fairly certainly, the remaining unidentified title
listed in the Karl ZEIGFREID entry. Under the house name Victor LA SALLE
he wrote Assault from Infinity (1953), The Seventh Dimension (1953) and
Suns in Duo (1953). As TWW he wrote 2 later tales, The World of Theda
(1962) and The Voice from Baru (1963). [JC/JGr]
WADEY, VICTOR
Tom W. WADE.
WADSWORTH, PHYLLIS MARIE
(? - ) UK author whose Overmind (1967) deals with ALIENS who contact
humanity from another DIMENSION. [JC]
WAGAR, W(ALTER) WARREN
(1932- ) US academic (professor of history since 1971 at the State
University of New York at Binghamton, which has since 1991 been Binghamton
University) and writer. He has published sf - his first story being
"Heart's Desire" for IASFM in 1984 - but his involvement in the field
comes primarily through his many years of work on H.G. WELLS in books like
H.G. Wells and the World State (1961) and H.G. Wells: Journalism and
Prophecy, 1893-1946 (coll 1964). In these WWW concentrates upon a side of
Wells not generally thought very congenial: the insistent, peremptory,
secretly authoritarian proselytizer for a world UTOPIA. The image of Wells
as a simple propagandist does not survive WWW's analysis. Later books,
like Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things (1982) and A Short
History of the Future (1989; rev 1992), demonstrate the complexity and
darkness that Wells, and others, brought to their prophecies; the 2nd vol
is a literal recasting of one of Wells's favourite modes, the future
history told as a nonfiction narrative, with illustrations. Terminal
Visions, an important work of sf scholarship, is a social history of
apocalyptic thought in literature, covering (but not confined to) GENRE

SF. [JC]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF.
WAHLOO, PER
(1926-1975) Swedish writer, best known for his detective novels, mostly
with his wife Maj Sjowall (1935- ); on some of his books his name appears
as Peter Wahloo. His NEAR-FUTURE sf thrillers include Mord pa 31: a
vaningen (1965; trans Joan Tate as Murder on the 31st Floor 1966 UK; vt
The Thirty-First Floor 1967 US), which was filmed as KAMIKAZE 1989 (1982),
Stalspranget (1968; trans Joan Tate as The Steel Spring 1970 UK), about a
deadly plague in Sweden, and Generalerna (1965; trans Joan Tate as The
Generals 1974 US), a trial novel set in a military DYSTOPIA. [JC]
WALDO
An item of sf TERMINOLOGY originated by Robert A. HEINLEIN in his short
novel Waldo: Genius in Orbit (1942 ASF as "Waldo"; a title story of Waldo
& Magic, Inc. [coll 1950]; 1958). The eponymous hero suffers from a
crippling wasting of the muscles, and invents a number of remote-control
devices, also called waldoes, to amplify the power of his feeble muscular
movements. The term has since come into general use in technology to
describe a whole range of remote-control devices, now commonplace. It has
expanded in meaning to include devices for handling radioactive or other
dangerous materials in isolation from the handler, and those concerned
with fine and precise rather than powerful movements. [PN]
WALDROP, HOWARD
(1946- ) US writer, an important member of the Texas-based school of sf
writers, much of whose work is set in the South. His first sf story was
"Lunch Box" (1972) for ASF. His first novel, The Texas-Israeli War: 1999
(1974) with Jake SAUNDERS, makes little capital of its transpositions of
genres and nationalities. In 1976, however, he began to produce more
characteristic work, including a wildly elaborate collaboration with
Steven UTLEY, "Custer's Last Jump" (1976) - an ALTERNATE-WORLD story in
which powered flight has reached the USA in time for the Civil War and the
Indian Wars - and "Mary Margaret Road-Grader" (1976), an accomplished
post- HOLOCAUST story in which Native American trials of strength are
conducted with ageing bulldozers. There were several more collaborations
with Utley, and these along with HW's solo work have been regularly
anthologized.HW is one of the few contemporary sf writers whose work is
mostly short fiction. He has never been especially prolific, and his
stories mine the same rich vein of alternate history almost too
repeatedly, but his combination of deadpan humour and genuine scholarship
(in both academic history and popular culture) has won him a loyal
readership. Although his yoking together of disparate material sometimes
appears crazed, with hindsight it is often strangely logical. Only HW
would have written - it was his first solo novel - an alternate history
(featuring 4 alternate worlds) with time travel from a dystopic future,
Amerindian Mound Builders, Aztec Invaders, ancient Greek merchants in
power-driven boats and much more, in Them Bones (1984); it is both
astonishing and moving. His only other novel (really a novella) is A Dozen
Tough Jobs (1989), a tall tale retelling the labours of Hercules in a late
1920s Mississippi setting; it says a little about ancient Greece and a lot
about Black workers and rednecks.The strain of putting the pieces together

sometimes shows, but at his (moderately regular) best HW has been one of
the unforgettable sf voices of the 1970s and 1980s. Among his memorable
pieces - somewhere between FABULATIONS and GENRE SF - are "Save a Place in
the Lifeboat for Me" (1976), "The Ugly Chickens" (1980), about how the
dodo became extinct in the Deep South, which won a NEBULA, "Ike at the
Mike" (1982), "Flying Saucer Rock & Roll" (1985), "Night of the Cooters"
(1987) - describing what the Martians which had landed in Texas were doing
while their counterparts, as featured in WAR OF THE WORLDS, were ravaging
England - "Do Ya, Do Ya Wanna, Wanna Dance?" (1988) ( MUSIC) and "Fin de
Cycle" (1991). It took a surprisingly long time for any collections to
appear. The first 2 were Howard Who? (coll 1986) and All About Strange
Monsters of the Recent Past (coll 1987), assembled as Strange Things in
Close-Up: The Nearly Complete Howard Waldrop (omni 1989 UK); the 2nd
collection was reissued with A Dozen Tough Jobs included as Strange
Monsters of the Recent Past (omni 1991). His 3rd collection was NIGHT OF
THE COOTERS: MORE NEAT STORIES (coll 1990), republished with A Dozen Tough
Jobs as Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stuff (omni 1991 UK). [PN]See
also: GOTHIC SF; HOLLOW EARTH; HUMOUR; LOST WORLDS; OMNI; TIME TRAVEL.
WALKER, ALICE
(1944- ) US writer best known for novels like The Color Purple (1982),
exploring from a FEMINIST perspective the fate of being Black in the USA.
One of the protagonists of The Temple of My Familiar (1989), an extremely
long FABULATION, is immortal or has suffered numerous incarnations, and
the tales she tells embody a savage indictment of racism and patriarchal
dominance over the centuries. Counteracting this, deep memories of a
benign matriarchy also emerge, though shrouded in myth. [JC]
WALKER, DAVID (HARRY)
(1911-1992) Scottish-born writer, a Canadian citizen from 1957, best
known for sentimental evocations of Scottish spirit like Geordie (1950),
later filmed. Winter of Madness (1964) is a NEAR-FUTURE drama and The
Lord's Pink Ocean (1972) a tale of POLLUTION and DISASTER in which all but
one of the world's oceans die. [JC]
WALKER, HUGH
Pseudonym of German writer Hubert Strassl (1941- ), whose Darkness
sequence - featuring a character who first creates a wargame and then
becomes absorbed within it - is Reiter der Finsternis (1975; trans
Christine Priest as War-Gamers' World 1978 US), Das Heer der Finsternis
(1975; trans Christine Priest as Army of Darkness 1979 US), Boten der
Finsternis (1976; trans Christine Priest as Messengers of Darkness 1979
US) and Damonen der Finsternis ["Demons of Darkness"] (1978). [JC]See
also: VIRTUAL REALITY.
WALKER, PAUL
(1921- ) US writer and critic in whose sf novel, Who Killed Utopia?
(1980), the first murder to have taken place for a century brings
suspicion upon the poet/computer at the heart of things. PW contributed
book reviews to Gal in 1978, and in the same year published a collection
of postal interviews, Speaking of Science Fiction: The Paul Walker
Interviews (coll 1978). [JC]

WALKHAM, WALTER
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
WALL, G.A.
[r] E.A. ROBINSON.
WALLACE, DOREEN
Working name of UK writer Dora Eileen Agnew Wallace Rash (1897- ), author
of much popular fiction over a 65-year career. Forty Years On (1958) is
set in the fens of Eastern England on the Isle of Ely (in fact not an
island but a marsh-surrounded hill surmounted by the famous cathedral)
after a nuclear HOLOCAUST. Here, under pastoral guidance, a chaste rural
Fabian socialism soon takes control. The narrator visits other - visibly
less blessed - parts of the fragmented UK, where cannibalism and US pop
songs create general misery among the survivors, mostly working-class, who
continue pertinaciously to attempt to breed. [JC]About the author:
Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists
(1989) by Susan J. Leonardi.
WALLACE, (RICHARD HORATIO) EDGAR
(1875-1932) UK author, playwright and editor, best known for his
thrillers. EW used his experiences of the Boer War in the future- WAR
novels Private Selby (1909 The Sunday Journal as "'O.C.' - A Soldier's
Love Story"; 1912) and "1925": The Story of a Fatal Peace (1915). He
featured the application of Pavlovian conditioning techniques to human
beings in The Door with Seven Locks (1926) and "Control No. 2" (1934);
impending world catastrophe in The Fourth Plague (1913), The Green Rust
(1919; vt Green Rust 1920 US), "The Black Grippe" (1920) and The Day of
Uniting (1921 Popular Magazine; 1926); the counter-Earth theme in
Planetoid 127 (1924 The Mechanical Boy; as title story of coll 1929;
1986); and weird fiction in "The Stranger of the Night" (1910), "While the
Passengers Slept" (1916) and Captains of Souls (1922 US). While working in
Hollywood he assisted on the screenplay of KING KONG (1933), though his
contribution may have been minimal - the novelization, King Kong * (1932),
was by Delos Wheeler Lovelace (1894-1967) - and scripted a horror film,
The Table, novelized as The Table * (1936) by Robert G. Curtis. [JE]Other
works: The Council of Justice (1908); The Death Room (1909-29 var mags;
coll 1986).See also: BOYS' PAPERS; HISTORY OF SF; WEAPONS.
WALLACE, F(LOYD) L.
(? -? ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Hideaway" for ASF in
1951, but was more strongly associated with Gal in the 1950s, the period
of his greatest activity. Worlds in Balance (coll 1955 Australia)
assembles 2 typical stories. Address: Centauri (1952 Gal as "Accidental
Flight"; exp 1955), features volunteer cripples setting off for the stars,
where they find redemption in being of use to the human race. [JC]
WALLACE, IAN
Pseudonym of John Wallace Pritchard (1912- ), US clinical psychologist
and teacher who spent his working life - from 1934 until his retirement in
1974 - in professional education. As a writer he has been active mainly
since 1967, though under his own name he published some nonfiction in the
1940s and the non-sf Every Crazy Wind (1952).Beginning with Croyd (1967),

IW produced a remarkable series of sf novels, most of them more or less
closely linked to a common background about 500 years hence, though the
baroque contortions of his storylines tend to obliterate any sustained
sense of continuity and often to make it very difficult to determine the
precise era of the tale in question. This freewheeling dreamlike
arbitrariness - as well as a startlingly inept sense of dialogue - has
caused him more than once to be likened to A.E. VAN VOGT, though a sharp
sense of humour has always been evident in IW's work. The common
background to his books has a Solar System that dominates a large group of
planets. Various ALIEN creatures - some godlike - participate in and
impinge upon this central system. Transcendental TIME PARADOXES and loops
abound, as do all the other appurtenances of the more intricate sort of
SPACE OPERA, including HEROES.Of the 2 series sharing this background, the
St Cyr Interplanetary Detective sequence is the more approachable. The
individual titles - The Purloined Prince (1971) set in AD2470 (although
this and other dates, while provided in the texts, are of little help in
tales involving TIME PARADOXES and the like), Deathstar Voyage (1969) set
in AD2475, and The Sign of the Mute Medusa (1977) set in AD2480 - tend
like most detective novels to accept the nature of the world as a given
and to concentrate upon problem-solving plots. Each book features Claudine
St Cyr, an ace officer whose missions embroil her in complicated dilemmas
on various planets; TIME TRAVEL is not eschewed, but is kept relatively
straightforward. Of greater interest - but more taxing - is the Croyd
sequence, comprising by order of event Z-Sting (1979), set in AD2475,
Heller's Leap (1979), set in AD2494 and involving St Cyr, Croyd, set in
AD2496, Dr Orpheus (1968), set in AD2502, A Voyage to Dari (1974), set in
AD2506, Pan Sagittarius (1973), set in AD2509, and Megalomania (1989), set
subsequently. In the earlier-published volumes, IW generally managed to
control his tendency to create heavy-handed exercises in what might be
called Gamine Baroque; Croyd and Dr Orpheus are among the most
exhilarating space-opera exercises of the post-WWII genre. Croyd himself,
the effective ruler of the human worlds for much of the series, frequently
has to withstand - or initiate - radical changes in the rules that ground
the Universe, and as a result must constantly busy himself with matter of
cosmogonic grandeur. In Dr Orpheus, for instance, he must combat a plot on
the part of distant but approaching aliens desperate to implant their
fertile eggs in humans. The aliens have, in an earlier time, given the
egomaniacal Dr Orpheus the use of an IMMORTALITY drug, anagonon, which has
the side-effect of forcing those who take it to obey anyone whom they
intuitively recognize as their hierarchical better - e.g., Orpheus himself
- and thus, according to the aliens' plan, the human race should now be
ripe for implantation. Croyd's counteroffensive involves a great deal of
paradoxical time travel, including a sojourn in ancient Greece. Even at
its most exciting moments, the story is conveyed at a contemplative
remove, permitting the reader to enjoy its intricacies with relative calm.
Of those books not identified with any series, only The Rape of the Sun
(1982) seems clearly not to inhabit the basic and voluminous shared
Universe. The World Asunder (1976) is connected to Pan Sagittarius, and
The Lucifer Comet (1980), a successful tale, is attached by a tangle of
strings to Croyd.The dreamlike tone of IW's work is retrospective in
effect, rather than wish-fulfilling as with Van Vogt; it is only when this

central calm declines to something approaching indifference - however
laced with mysticism and occult plot turns - that IW's novels become
inconseqential. [JC]See also: BLACK HOLES; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; GALACTIC
EMPIRES.
WALLACE, JAMES
G.J. BARRETT.
WALLACE, KING
(? -? ) US writer whose sf novel, The Next War: A Prediction (1892), not
untypically for its time and place of origin, plays on White fears of
Negro uprisings. After failing to poison all US Whites, the Blacks lose
the ensuing rebellion and disperse into the hinterlands, where they become
extinct. [JC]See also: POLITICS.
WALLEY, BRYON S.
[s] Orson Scott CARD.
WALLING, WILLIAM (HERBERT)
(1926- ) US writer whose sf novel is No One Goes There Now (1971), in
which a distorted human culture on a colony planet finds itself
confronting ALIENS who will not abide our games of violence. He is not to
be confused with William A. Walling, an academic critic, one of whose
books is referred to under Mary SHELLEY. [JC]
WALLIS, B.
[r] George C. WALLIS.
WALLIS, DAVE
(1917- ) UK writer, possibly pseudonymous, of the near-future DYSTOPIAN
fantasy Only Lovers Left Alive (1964), in which the mass suicide of the
adult population leaves teenagers on their own in what rapidly becomes an
anarchic UK. The book expressed contemporary PARANOIA about scooter gangs,
adolescent violence, teen sex, loud music and funny hairstyles, yet,
significantly, retained faith in the fundamental decency of human beings:
it was not wholly pessimistic. [JC/JGr]See also: BOYS' PAPERS.
WALLIS, GEORGE C.
(1871-1956) UK writer, printer (before WWI) and cinema manager who began
writing sf and historical and adventure fiction in 1896 for the penny
weekly adult magazines and then, from the turn of the century, for the
"slick" magazines. Around 1903 he began to write almost exclusively for
the BOYS' PAPERS, ceasing around 1912. With the genesis of GENRE-SF
magazines in the 1920s he began to write again, with "The World at Bay" as
by B. and G.C. Wallis (the "B" was his cousin and literary agent) for AMZ
(1928). During 1938-41 he had 9 SPACE OPERAS published in Tales of Wonder.
Only 3 of his early sf and fantasy novels were reprinted as books:
Children of the Sphinx (1901), a historical fantasy set in Egypt, A
Corsair of the Sky (1910-11 Lot-O'-Fun; 1912) as by Royston Heath, in
which an airborne pirate declares war on the world, and Beyond the Hills
of Mist (1912 Lot-O'-Fun; 1913), in which a Tibetan lost race ( LOST
WORLDS), equipped with aircraft, plans world domination. Other early
novels, some in serial form, were "The Last King of Atlantis" (1896-7
Short Stories), in which an ancient MS describing the destruction of

ATLANTIS is found in a UTOPIAN world of the future, "The World Wreckers"
(1908 Scraps), a future- WAR story influenced by George GRIFFITH, "The
Terror from the South" (1909 Comic Life), in which an Antarctic lost race
becomes belligerent, and "Wireless War" (1909 Comic Life), with A.J.
Andrews, another future-war novel. GCW also published at least 7 sf short
stories 1896-1904, including "The Last Days of Earth: Being the Story of
the Launching of the 'Red Sphere'" (1901 The Harmsworth Magazine), an
END-OF-THE-WORLD tale set in AD13,000,000, and "The Great Sacrifice" (1903
The London Magazine), in which benevolent Martians save us from ourselves.
GCW was probably the only Victorian sf writer to continue to publish after
WWII. His last novel was The Call of Peter Gaskell (1947), in which yet
another lost race, this time Incan, plots to conquer the world. He is
interesting not as a good writer but because he so exactly typifies the
themes of Victorian sf and the longevity of their sales appeal. [JE/PN]See
also: FAR FUTURE; SUN.
WALLIS, G(ERALDINE JUNE) McDONALD
Writing name of US writer and actress Hope Campbell (1925- ), who acted
under her own name and as Kathy McDonald, and has written non-sf under her
own name and as Virginia Hughes, concentrating on juveniles. The Light of
Lilith (1961 dos) and Legend of Lost Earth (1963 dos), both as by GMW, are
unremarkable but adequately stirring examples of adventure sf. Both are
set initially on other planets but focus, in the end, on a threatened or
desirable Earth. [JC]
WALSH, J(AMES) M(ORGAN)
(1897-1952) Australian-born writer who moved to the UK; he wrote
primarily mystery stories, some as by Stephen Maddock. His Vandals of the
Void (1931), its sequel, "The Struggle for Pallas" (1931 Wonder Stories
Quarterly), and Vanguard to Neptune (1932 Wonder Stories Quarterly; 1952)
are fairly routine early SPACE OPERAS, the first of which sees an attack
by MERCURY on Venus, Mars and Earth. The Secret of the Crater (1930) as by
H. Haverstock Hill (1939) has fantasy elements; the AMZ serial "The Terror
out of Space" (1934) is also as by Hill. [PN]Other works: Secret Weapons
(1940).See also: AUSTRALIA; OUTER PLANETS; PUBLISHING.
WALTER, W(ILLIAM) GREY
(1910-1977) UK writer and pioneer, between 1936 and 1956, of the
development and use of electroencephalography in the UK; his early popular
study, The Living Brain (1953), was influential in its time. His sf novel,
Further Outlook (1956; vt The Curve of the Snowflake 1956 US), affords
illustrative, fundamentally OPTIMISTIC views of future HISTORY up to
AD2056 through the use of a TIME MACHINE. [JC]
WALTERS, GORDON
[s] George LOCKE.
WALTERS, HUGH
Pseudonym of UK writer Walter Llewellyn Hughes (1910- ) for his fiction,
all CHILDREN'S SF, and all restricted for many years to his Chris Godfrey
of U.N.E.X.A. sequence of interplanetary adventures: Blast Off at Woomera
(1957; vt Blast Off at 0300 1958 US), The Domes of Pico (1958; vt Menace
from the Moon 1959 US), Operation Columbus (1960; vt First on the Moon

1960 US), Moon Base One (1961; vt Outpost on the Moon 1962 US), Expedition
Venus (1962), Destination Mars (1963), Terror by Satellite (1964), Journey
to Jupiter (1965), Mission to Mercury (1965), Spaceship to Saturn (1967),
The Mohole Mystery (1968; vt The Mohole Menace 1969 US), Nearly Neptune
(1969; vt Neptune One is Missing 1970 US), First Contact? (1971), Passage
to Pluto (1973), Tony Hale, Space Detective (1973), Murder on Mars (1975),
Boy Astronaut (1977 chap), The Caves of Drach (1977), The Last Disaster
(1978), The Blue Aura (1979), First Family on the Moon (1979), The Dark
Triangle (1981) and School on the Moon (1981). Chris Godfrey starts as a
boy, but grows up and advances through the ranks of U.N.E.X.A. - the
United Nations Exploration Agency, the "organization responsible for the
exploration of the Universe"-until he becomes Director, from which point
he supervises younger characters, like the mechanic Tony Hale, who
dominate the action of later books. [JC]Other works: P-K (1986).See also:
MERCURY.
WALTHER, DANIEL
(1940- ) French editor and writer who began publishing short stories in
1965, and proved an eclectic author and easy stylist who could switch from
HARD SF to HEROIC FANTASY. Requiem pour demain ["Requiem for Tomorrow"]
(coll 1976) shows him at his most experimental, gathering work which
reminded critics of Harlan ELLISON; Les Quatre Saisons de la Nuit ["The
Four Seasons of the Night"] (coll 1980) assembles dark fantasies. Mais
l'espace . . . Mais le temps ["What about Space? What about Time?"] (1972)
is a long novella blending space technology and MAGIC. He ed Les soleils
noirs d'Arcadie ["Black Suns of Arcadia"] (anth 1975), a manifesto for the
NEW WAVE. His first novel, L'Epouvante ["Dread"] (1979) remains
untranslated; "The Gunboat Dread", the story from which it was derived,
appeared in Maxim JAKUBOWSKI's Travelling towards Epsilon (anth 1976). As
the editor of the Club du Livre d'Anticipation he published US heroic
fantasy in translation, including work by C.J. CHERRYH, who reciprocated
by bringing the early vols of his FAR-FUTURE Swa sequence to the USA. Le
Livre de Swa (1982; trans Cherryh as The Book of Shai 1984 US) and Le
Destin de Swa (1982; trans Cherryh as Shai's Destiny 1985 US) are
intricately composed post- HOLOCAUST dramas of some moral complexity in
which young Swa (Shai) confronts and attempts to bring together the
various raging factions of a balkanized world. [MJ/JC]See also: FRANCE.
WALTON, BRYCE
(1918-1988) US writer, prolific under his own name and others in several
genres, including tv work. He wrote some sf as Paul Franklin, Kenneth
O'Hara and Dave Sands, though his first story, "The Ultimate World" for
Planet Stories in 1945, was as BW. He contributed actively to the
magazines until about 1960, less frequently thereafter. Sons of the Ocean
Deeps (1952) faces a failed space cadet with the chance to mature in the
benthos, which he grippingly does. [JC]
WANDREI, DONALD
(1908-1987) US writer and editor, founder with August DERLETH in 1939 of
ARKHAM HOUSE, formed initially to publish the work of H.P. LOVECRAFT, whom
both admired deeply. DW resigned his interest in the firm after WWII when he also stopped writing new fiction - and after Derleth's death in

1971 declined to resume it. As a writer he was justifiably best known for
his FANTASY and weird stories, beginning with "The Red Brain" (1927 Weird
Tales), a tale that incorporates a bungled sf premise about the nature of
matter into a narrative whose deepest effect is one of chill horror at the
cosmos. Later sf work, much of it in ASF in the 1930s, is similarly
compounded of disparate ingredients, and the tales assembled in the
posthumous Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei (coll
1989) share the sense of the grotesqueness of the world espoused in that
first story. In addition to some unremarkable verse, gathered in Ecstasy
and Other Poems (coll 1928 chap), Dark Odyssey (coll 1931 chap) and Poems
for Midnight (coll 1965), he published a collection of fantasy, The Eye
and the Finger (coll 1944), a Lovecraftian Cthulhu Mythos tale, The Web of
Easter Island (1948) - probably his finest single work, making, as usual
in DW's work, opportunistic use of sf devices (in this case travel between
the DIMENSIONS) to colour the horror - and Strange Harvest (coll 1965).
With Derleth he selected the contents of the first Arkham House Lovecraft
collections and ed 3 vols of Lovecraft's Selected Letters: 1911-1924 (coll
1965), 1925-1929 (coll 1968), and 1929-1931 (coll 1971).DW's brother,
Howard Wandrei (1909-1956), was an illustrator and the author of some
fantasy stories under his own name, and as by Robert Coley and H.W.
Guernsey. [JC]See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; COSMOLOGY; END OF THE
WORLD; GREAT AND SMALL; PARALLEL WORLDS; SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED
EDITIONS.
WANDREI, HOWARD
[r] Donald WANDREI.
WAR
One of the principal imaginative stimuli to futuristic and scientific
speculation has been the possibility of war, and the possibility that new
TECHNOLOGY might transform war. This stimulus was particularly important
during the period 1870-1914 and in the years following the revelation of
the atom bomb in 1945.Antique futuristic fictions such as the anonymous
Reign of George VI, 1900-25 (1763) anticipate little change in the
business of war; here King George, sabre in hand, leads his cavalry in the
charge. In the mid-19th century, however, awareness of technological
change spread rapidly. Herrmann LANG was able to envisage very different
patterns of future combat in The Air Battle (1859), and many new
technologies were displayed during the US Civil War (1861-5) and observed
by representatives of various European nations. When the German Empire was
consolidated after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 the strength and
firepower of the new German Army inspired an urgent campaign for the
reform and rearmament of the British Army. The case was dramatized by Sir
George CHESNEY in The Battle of Dorking (1871 chap), a drama-documentary
illustrating the ease with which an invading German army might reach
London. It caused a sensation, and initiated a debate which continued
until WWI itself broke out ( INVASION). A new subgenre of fiction had been
inaugurated, and future-war stories were established as a brand of popular
romance; the development of the subgenre, well documented in I.F. CLARKE's
Voices Prophesying War, 1763-1984 (1966), featured such successful
alarmist works as Erskine CHILDERS's The Riddle of the Sands (1903) and

William LE QUEUX's The Invasion of 1910 (1906), which made a great impact
when it was serialized in the newborn Daily Mail. Many products of this
glut of jingoistic fiction enthusiastically embraced the myth of a war to
end war - enthusiastically mapped out in Louis TRACY's The Final War
(1896)-and the popularity of this kind of fiction helped to generate the
great enthusiasm which Britons carried into the real war against Germany
when it finally came. The great bulk of this fiction was relatively
mundane, envisaging quite modest alterations in tactics as a result of new
TECHNOLOGY. The Captain of the Mary Rose (1892) by W. Laird Clowes
(1856-1905), Blake of the Rattlesnake (1895) by Fred T. JANE and "Danger!"
(1914) by Arthur Conan DOYLE are outstanding examples of the realistic
school of speculation; and the most careful of them all, The Great War of
189 - : A Forecast (1893) by P.H. Colomb (1831-1899) and other military
experts, instituted a tradition of drama-documentaries subsequently
carried forward by Hector C. BYWATER's The Great Pacific War (1925) and,
much later, The Third World War (1979) by General Sir John HACKETT and
others.Airships and submarines were by far the most popular innovations in
early future-war fiction. They were displayed to lavish effect by George
GRIFFITH, the most extravagant of the subgenre's writers, in The Angel of
the Revolution (1893) and Olga Romanoff (1894). The discovery of X-rays in
1895 encouraged writers to dream up more fanciful new WEAPONS; in
Griffith's posthumously published The Lord of Labour (1911), the future
war is fought with atomic missiles and disintegrator rays. The worst
excesses of this subgenre are parodied in Michael MOORCOCK's The Warlord
of the Air (1971) and The Land Leviathan (1974); Moorcock also edited a
notable theme anthology of works from the period, published in 2 vols as
Before Armageddon (anth 1975) and England Invaded (anth 1977). An
ambitious but reasonably disciplined imagination was brought to bear by H.
G. WELLS in "The Land Ironclads" (1903), The War in the Air (1908) and the
atom-bomb story The World Set Free (1914). The British High Command,
however, continued to the bitter end to show an extreme conservatism of
imagination, refusing to believe in the potential of the tank, the
submarine or the aeroplane until they were shown the way by the
Germans.Future-war stories enjoyed a second heyday in the UK between the
Wars, when the actual example of WWI caused many writers to believe that a
new war might mean the end of civilization - a conviction bleakly
expressed by Edward SHANKS in The People of the Ruins (1920) and Cicely
HAMILTON in Theodore Savage (1922). This kind of anxiety intensified in
such novels as Neil BELL's The Gas War of 1940 (1931 as Miles; vt Valiant
Clay 1934 as NB) and John GLOAG's Tomorrow's Yesterday (1932), and became
almost hysterical as Europe lurched towards a new war following Hitler's
rise to power (see also HITLER WINS). Invasion from the Air: A Prophetic
Novel (1934) by Frank McIlraith and Roy CONNOLLY, Day of Wrath (1936) by
Joseph O'NEILL and Four Days War (1936) by S. Fowler WRIGHT all feature
chilling accounts of cities devastated by aerial bombing with poison
gas.US future-war fiction was not so prolific, nor-understandably, in view
of the USA's very different experience of WWI - did it ever become so
pessimistic. Frank R. STOCKTON's The Great War Syndicate (1889) and
Stanley WATERLOO's Armageddon (1898) are mild by comparison with
contemporary UK works, and the invasion of the USA by Asiatics, although a
staple of pulp melodrama, never really seemed likely enough to inspire

genuine alarmist fantasy. The bleakest visions of future war written in
the USA before 1945 - Herbert BEST's The Twenty-Fifth Hour (1940) and L.
Ron HUBBARD's Final Blackout (1940; 1948) - both describe the devastation
of Europe. This situation changed dramatically, however, with the advent
of the atom bomb, which bred an alarmism all of its own and inspired a new
subgenre of stories concerning the HOLOCAUST AND AFTER.Wells's THE WAR OF
THE WORLDS (1898) was a logical extension of the more conventional
19th-century future-war story, as was Robert William COLE's story of
colonial war against Sirian aliens in The Struggle for Empire (1900), but
the other-worldly wars fought in most pulp interplanetary romance of the
Edgar Rice BURROUGHS school were mostly fought with swords. The specialist
sf pulps, however, embraced a more conscientiously futuristic outlook
whereby interplanetary wars were to be fought by fleets of SPACESHIPS
armed with marvellous ray-guns and the like. SPACE OPERA thrived on wars
between races, worlds and GALACTIC EMPIRES. Wherever its HEROES went they
found cosmic conflicts in progress, and they never felt inhibited about
joining in. Such was the moral insight of pulp fantasists that these
heroes hardly ever had the slightest difficulty in selecting the "right"
side: it was handsome and honourable vs ugly and treacherous.The quest to
discover bigger and more powerful weapons was driven to its limits in a
few short years. Spectacular genocide became commonplace, as in Edmond
HAMILTON's "The Other Side of the Moon" (1929), and stars were blown up in
prolific quantity. War waged across time between ALTERNATE WORLDS was
invented by Jack WILLIAMSON in THE LEGION OF TIME (1938; 1952). Anti-war
stories like Miles J. BREUER's "The Gostaks and the Doshes" (1930) and Nat
SCHACHNER's "World Gone Mad" (1935) were in a tiny minority until the
outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 helped encourage a new seriousness, most
conscientiously displayed in John W. CAMPBELL Jr's ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION, where A.E. VAN VOGT began chronicling The War Against the
Rull (1940-50; fixup 1959). Ross ROCKLYNNE's "Quietus" (1940) made an
issue of the dilemma which had been so easily sidestepped in the past:
when visitors from elsewhere find two creatures locked in conflict, how do
they choose which to help? After WWII, anti-war stories appeared far more
frequently in the sf magazines; notable are several stories by Eric Frank
RUSSELL, including "Late Night Final" (1948) and "I am Nothing" (1952),
and several by Fritz LEIBER, including "The Foxholes of Mars" (1952) and
"A Bad Day for Sales" (1953). More ironic approaches to the question
include several stories in which war has become institutionalized as a
spectator sport ( GAMES AND SPORTS), such as Gunner Cade (1952) by Cyril
Judd (C.M. KORNBLUTH and Judith MERRIL) and Mack REYNOLDS's Mercenary from
Tomorrow (1962 as "Mercenary"; exp 1968). Sf writers' reflections on WWII
itself are assembled in The Fantastic World War II (anth 1990) ed Frank
McSherry Jr and S.M. STIRLING, while notable stories of nuclear war are
collected in Countdown to Midnight (anth 1984) ed H. Bruce
FRANKLIN.Although the possibility of future wars on Earth and images of
nuclear holocaust dominated the imagination of sf writers from 1945
through the 1950s, more exotic wars continued to be fought, and stories of
interplanetary or interstellar war became a safer haven for militaristic
adventures. The melodramatic excesses of space-opera warfare faded with
the pulps, although they never entirely died out, and there grew up a more
disciplined and more realistic notion of the kind of armies which might

fight interplanetary and interstellar wars, and the kinds of weapons they
might use. In this context a new tradition of militaristic sf grew up in
the 1950s and 1960s, notable early examples being Robert A. HEINLEIN's
STARSHIP TROOPERS (1959) and Gordon R. DICKSON's The Genetic General
(1960; exp vt DORSAI! 1976). The latter began the long-running Dorsai
series, which aspires to offer a serious commentary on the evolution and
ethics of militarism and is still being extended through such novels as
The Chantry Guild (1988). Other important early contributors to this
tradition include Poul ANDERSON, as in The Star Fox (fixup 1965); it was
most aggressively carried forward through the 1970s by Jerry POURNELLE in
such novels as A Spaceship for the King (1973) and The Mercenary (1977).
The initial historical context of this fiction was provided by the Korean
War, where the intervention of UN troops embodied a new philosophy of
military action and responsibility, but doubts about the role played by US
forces were subsequently amplified in no uncertain terms by the progress
of the Vietnam War. Ideas about the moral justifiability of war and the
POLITICS of militarism became matters of fierce debate, exemplified in sf
by such novels as Joe HALDEMAN's THE FOREVER WAR (fixup 1974), clearly
modelled on STARSHIP TROOPERS but overturning many of the assumptions the
earlier novel had taken for granted, and Norman SPINRAD's vivid and
vitriolic The Men in the Jungle (1967). Spinrad went on to write The Iron
Dream (1972), in which the fascist fantasies of one Adolf Hitler, who
emigrated to the USA in the early 1930s and became a minor sf writer,
superimpose all the CLICHES of pulp future-war fantasies on the rise of
the Third Reich, the fighting of WWII and the "final solution" to the
problem of the insidious "Dominators". The most successful mainstream
anti-war novel of the 1960s, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), influenced
sf stories like Barry N. MALZBERG's "Final War" (1968 as K.M. O'Donnell),
which represents war as a surreal and purposeless nightmare.The
polarization of the sf community by the political conflict over the
Vietnam War was vividly illustrated by a pair of advertisements which
appeared in GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION (June 1968), listing on facing pages
those sf writers for and against the War. Memories of that war have
continued to haunt sf, directly reflected in such anthologies as In the
Field of Fire (anth 1987) ed Jeanne Van Buren Dann and Jack DANN and such
novels as The Healer's War (1988) by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (1947- )
and Dream Baby (1989) by Bruce MCALLISTER, and indirectly in such novels
as Lucius SHEPARD's Life during Wartime (1987). Alongside these works,
however, the tradition of militaristic sf has not only flourished since
the Vietnam War's end but has become extraordinarily strident. David A.
DRAKE, author of several horror stories reflecting his own experiences in
Vietnam, has written numerous books about the heroic exploits of future
mercenaries, including the Hammer's Slammers sequence: Hammer's Slammers
(coll of linked stories 1979), The Forlorn Hope (1984), Rolling Hot (1989)
and The Warrior (1991). These books helped initiate a fad that has been
extrapolated in various anthologies and SHARED-WORLD series and in novels
such as The Warrior's Apprentice (1986) and its sequels by Lois McMaster
BUJOLD. Other fiercely militaristic sf novels of the 1980s include
Christopher ANVIL's The Steel, the Mist and the Blazing Sun (1983) and
Joel ROSENBERG's Zionist Not for Glory (1988). The annual series of
anthologies begun with There Will Be War (anth 1983) ed Pournelle and John

F. CARR, following Reginald BRETNOR's earlier anthology series The Future
at War (3 vols 1979-80), has generated some controversy. This subgenre has
merged with and absorbed various older materials, including Fred
SABERHAGEN's Berserker series begun in 1963 and the episode in Larry
NIVEN's Known Space future history expanded for The Man-Kzin Wars
SHARED-WORLD series (3 vols 1988-90). Although the popularity of this kind
of fiction can be largely accounted for simply as a love of melodrama, it
does seem to reflect an innate aggression in US culture - a concept
discussed at some length by H. Bruce Franklin in his excellent study of
war as a theme in US imaginative fiction, War Stars: The Superweapon and
the American Imagination (1988). [BS]
WARD, E.D.
E.V. LUCAS.
WARD, HENRY
(1913?- ) Perhaps a pseudonym of a French writer - possibly Henri Louis
Luc Viard (1921- ) as Donald H. TUCK claims. HW's sf novels are L'enfer
est dans le ciel (trans Alan Neame as Hell's Above Us 1960) and Les
soleils verts (1956; trans Neame as The Green Suns 1961). The latter book
contains a detailed biography of HW in the introduction, claiming that he
is a scientist educated at Cambridge in the UK and then Columbia in the
USA, that at the request of the State Department he liaised between atomic
research units in France and the USA in 1939-40 (which Viard at age 18
could not have done), and that he was later connected with the destruction
of the V-Bomb centre at Peenemunde. However, this information may be a
hoax to lend verisimilitude to the two books, both documentary-style
thrillers involving conspiracy at high political levels involved with the
investigation of implausible sf events vis a vis the space programme,
aliens, the Suez conflict and PARALLEL WORLDS. HW appears as a character
in both. [PN]
WARD, HERBERT D(ICKINSON)
(1861-1932) US writer, most of whose short stories of sf interest were
political dramas whose venues were only marginally displaced from the
late-19th-century USA, even though some of the tales assembled in A
Republic Without a President, and Other Stories (coll 1891) were
ostensibly set 100 years hence. The White Crown, and Other Stories (coll
1894) continued in the same vein, though the title story itself is a
future- WAR tale of some interest. [JC]Other works: The Master of the
Magicians (1890) with Elizabeth Stuart Phelps; A Dash to the Pole: A Tale
of Adventure in the Ice-Bound North (1895).
WAR GAME, THE
Made-for-tv film (1965). BBC/Pathe Contemporary. Prod/dir/written Peter
WATKINS. Narrators Michael Aspel, Dick Graham. 50 mins, cut to 47 mins.
B/w.This pseudo-documentary about a nuclear attack on England and its
aftermath in a small town in Kent was refused a showing by BBC TV, though
made for them, on the grounds that it was too realistic and might disturb
audiences - as it was designed to do. Since then it has had a wide
theatrical release and won an Oscar. Though clumsily made, it is full of
shattering images: the glare and concussion of the bomb; the raging

firestorms; the hideously disfigured casualties; torment and slow death
from radiation poisoning; mass cremations; buckets of wedding rings
gathered from the dead; and execution squads, composed of uniformed
constables, shooting looters. Its first UK tv showing was in 1985. [JB]See
also: CINEMA.
WARGAMES
Film (1983). Sherwood Productions/MGM/UA. Dir John BADHAM, starring
Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, Ally Sheedy, Barry Corbin.
Screenplay Lawrence Lasker, Walter F. Parkes. 113 mins. Colour.Teenager
David (Broderick) attempts to use his computer to hack into the programs
of a computer-games manufacturer. Accidentally - after a week's research
from which he deduces a secret password that will give him access to the
system - he breaks into WOPR, the giant Department of Defense computer
with which the USA will, if necessary, direct the operations of WWIII.
Unable to distinguish between game theory and real life, WOPR, in playing
the game of Global Thermonuclear War with David, almost sets off
Armageddon. The film is briskly directed, with an ingenious first hour and
so engaging a narrative sweep that the gaping logical holes in its plot
may become evident only at a second viewing. It is in fact silly, not
least for the crudely drawn character of Falken (Wood), WOPR's creator,
who thinks we all deserve to die anyway (like the dinosaurs), and appears
to change his mind only because David's girlfriend (Sheedy) is cute; the
metaphor of WAR as video game is both amusing and tritely reductive, and
became an sf CLICHE in the 1980s ( CYBERSPACE). Badham is a good action
director whose films often collapse into ethical confusion on any
examination of their superficially liberal credentials.The novelization is
WarGames * (1983) by David F. BISCHOFF. [PN]See also: CINEMA; VIRTUAL
REALITY.
WARHOON
US FANZINE (1952-85), ed from New York and Puerto Rico by Richard
Bergeron. From undistinguished early issues, W became a large, attractive,
duplicated fanzine containing careful and literate articles on sf and
FANDOM. John BAXTER, James BLISH and Robert A.W. LOWNDES were among the
regular sf columnists, and Terry CARR, Bob SHAW, Harry WARNER Jr and Walt
Willis were fan columnists. Occasional contributors included Robert BLOCH,
Harlan ELLISON and Ted WHITE. In 1980 (though dated 1978), 10 years after
#27, #28 was published; this was a 600+pp hardbound collection of the
writings of Willis since 1947. It was almost certainly the largest fanzine
issue ever published, its size being the reason for the hiatus. There were
3 further issues to June 1985. In 1962 W won a HUGO as Best Fanzine.
[PR/RH]
WARLAND, ALLEN
[s] Donald A. WOLLHEIM.
WARNER, HARRY (BACKER) Jr
(1922- ) US journalist and sf fan, publisher of several FANZINES,
including Spaceways and the long-lived Horizons, which has appeared
regularly in FAPA since 1939. His history of sf FANDOM, All Our Yesterdays
(1969), is an affectionate and thorough examination of individuals, fan

organizations and fanzines in the 1940s. The 2nd part, A Wealth of Fable
(3 vols, mimeographed 1976; exp 1992), continues the history through the
1950s. HW won HUGOS as Best Fan Writer in 1969 and 1972; and the 1992
version of A Wealth of Fable won the 1993 Hugo for Best Non-fiction title.
[PR]
WARNER, REX
(1905-1986) UK writer and translator who remains best known for his
earliest adult novels, The Wild Goose Chase (1937), The Professor (1938)
and The Aerodrome (1941), political allegories some of whose devices
relate to the KAFKA-esque side of sf ( ABSURDIST SF; FABULATION). In The
Wild Goose Chase 3 brothers bicycle into a strange country in search of
the eponymous goose, and encounter and participate in a revolution - which
ultimately they cause to triumph - in a DYSTOPIAN society. The Aerodrome
depicts within the allegorical confines of an aerodrome an attempt at
violently remoulding human nature. Why Was I Killed? (1943; vt Return of
the Traveller 1944 US) is an afterlife fantasy. RW was always clear about
which side he stood on in these metaphysical conflicts, a didactic
sidedness which sometimes quite evidently detracted from the imaginative
power of his fiction. [JC]See also: HISTORY OF SF.
WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST
The AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN .
WAR OF THE MONSTERS
GOJIRA.
WAR OF THE SATELLITES
Roger CORMAN.
WAR OF THE WORLDS
1. US RADIO play (30 October 1938). Part of the Mercury Theatre on the
Air series of plays, WOTW was the most famous broadcast ever made; an
adaptation by Howard Koch (1902- ) of H.G. WELLS's 1898 novel, it was
produced by and starred Orson Welles (1915-1985), who gained immediate
notoriety when a huge number of listeners believed that the play
represented a live newscast of an actual INVASION from MARS. The Invasion
from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic, with the Complete Script of
the Famous Orson Welles Broadcast (1940) by Hadley Cantril (1906-1969)
reports on a series of interviews begun by Princeton University a week
after the broadcast, confirming that the panic was surprisingly widespread
(Cantril estimates that well over a million listeners - more than 10% of
the total audience tuned in - were actively frightened by the broadcast);
but also demonstrates, by reprinting the original script, that neither
Koch nor Welles could have intended to hoax the radio public. Though it
was indeed presented in the form of a series of emergency newscasts,
dramatic devices (the passage of hours, for instance, in a few minutes of
radio time) were conspicuous even during the first half of the broadcast,
which caused the most panic; the second half, after a brief programme
break, was set several days later. A made-for-tv movie giving a somewhat
exaggerated account of the night's events is The NIGHT THAT PANICKED
AMERICA (1975), and what has become a national myth has been incorporated
in several other films, including The ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS

THE 8TH DIMENSION (1984) and SPACED INVADERS (1989). In 1991 the original
play was broadcast on BBC radio. [JC/PN]2. Film (1953). Paramount. Prod
George PAL. Dir Byron HASKIN, starring Gene Barry, Ann Robinson, Les
Tremayne. Screenplay Barre Lyndon, based on THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898)
by H.G. WELLS. 85 mins. Colour.Few details of Wells's novel remain.
Following the success Welles had had in updating the story in 1938, the
setting is changed to 1950s California. The Martian war machines are
altered from walking tripods to flying saucers shaped (rather beautifully)
like manta rays. A stereotyped Hollywood love interest is substituted for
the original story of a husband searching for his wife. Despite
indifferent performances, the film is well paced and generates
considerable excitement, partly through the spectacular special effects.
The wires supporting the war machines are too often visible, but as a
whole the effects - Gordon Jennings was in charge - are very impressive,
especially in the final attack on Los Angeles: the manta-shaped vehicles
gliding down the streets with their snake-like heat-ray projectors
blasting the surrounding buildings into rubble are among the great icons
of sf CINEMA. The dazed conservatism of the human response to the Martians
is true to Wells, as is the subtext suggesting that a retreat into
religious piety is also an inadequate answer, though here Pal has it both
ways: we are told that it was "God in his wisdom" who created the microbes
that ultimately defeat the invasion. WOTW is George Pal's most successful
film production.3. US tv series (1988-90). Ten-Four/Paramount, for
syndication. Created Greg Strangis. Executive prods Sam Strangis, Greg
Strangis. Prod Jonathan Hackett, starring Jared Martin, Lynda Mason Green,
Philip Akin, Richard Chaves. Dirs included Colin Chilvers, Herbert Wright,
Neill Fearnley, Armand Mastroianni, William Fruet. Writers included Greg
Strangis, Tom Lazarus, Patrick Barry, D.C. FONTANA, Durnford King. 2
seasons; 100min pilot plus 41 50min episodes. Colour.The pilot episode,
The Resurrection, tells us that the events described in the 1953 film were
followed by a government hush-up and the storage of Martian bodies in
barrels at a military base. A terrorist attack on the base breaches some
barrels, and the Martians (no longer identified as such, now just vague
ALIENS) come back to life (the microbes did not kill them but threw them
into estivation, and have now been destroyed by radioactivity). They adopt
the bodies of the terrorists. (Shapeshifting was not an alien skill in the
earlier versions; WOTW borrows heavily from the tv series The INVADERS
[1967-8], and the films of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS [1955, 1978].)
Their human bodies damaged, so that they look like zombie refugees from
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), the aliens again attempt to conquer the
world, initially by jumping out at people and grabbing them with big
flabby hands. Our heroes (male scientist, pretty female microbiologist,
wisecracking Black man in wheelchair) have trouble convincing the
powers-that-be that the aliens even exist, the destruction of Los Angeles
three decades earlier having apparently gone unnoticed. The series had
vigour if nothing else, and continued for 2 seasons with the usual
variants on the INVASION theme. In season 2, now renamed War of the
Worlds: The Second Invasion, the series eliminated some characters, added
new ones, introduced alien-human miscegenation and made moral distinctions
between good and bad aliens, but sagged anyway. [PN]See also: PARANOIA.

WAR OF THE WORLDS - NEXT CENTURY, THE
POLAND.
WARP/WARPDRIVE/WARP FACTOR
FASTER THAN LIGHT; SPACE WARP.
WARREN, BILL
Working name of William Bond Warren (1943- ), sf fan and film buff,
author with Allan Rothstein of the RECURSIVE SF murder mystery Fandom is a
Way of Death (1984 chap), set in and distributed at a World SF CONVENTION
in Los Angeles. BW's extraordinarily useful and interesting film reference
books, the most detailed and accurate available for the period, are Keep
Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties:
Volume I: 1950-57 (1982) and Volume II: 1958-62 (1986), on both of which
he was assisted in research by Bill Thomas. They are not, despite the
title, restricted to US films, but include many foreign films released in
the US ( CINEMA). BW has also written some sf and fantasy, starting with
"Death is a Lonely Place" in Worlds of Fantasy #1 (1968). [PN]
WARREN, CHAD
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
WARREN, GEORGE
[r] Nick CARTER.
WARRICK, PATRICIA S(COTT)
(1925- ) US academic. Most of PSW's work has concentrated upon the themes
explicated in the book version of her PhD thesis, The Cybernetic
Imagination in Science Fiction (1980), supplemented by Machines That
Think: The Best Science Fiction Stories about Robots & Computers (anth
1984) with Isaac ASIMOV and Martin H. GREENBERG. In essays published from
the mid-1970s, and in Science Fiction: Contemporary Mythology (anth 1978)
with Greenberg and Joseph D. OLANDER, she focused on the relationship
between Homo sapiens and its CYBERNETIC offspring, a focus which led
naturally to a concentration on the work of Philip K. DICK. After editing
(with Greenberg) a collection of his work, Robots, Androids, and
Mechanical Oddities: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick (coll 1984),
she examined his whole career in Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K.
Dick (1987), the most thorough study of his entire oeuvre yet published.
[JC]Other works: Martin H. GREENBERG for other team anthology productions
with PSW under his general editorship.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; COMPUTERS;
SOCIOLOGY.
WARRIORS OF THE WASTELAND
George MILLER; 1990: I GUERRIERI DEL BRONX.
WASON, SANDYS
(c1870-? ) UK writer and-apparently - cleric whose sf novel, Palafox
(1927), features an introduction by Compton MACKENZIE, a style mildly
reminiscent of Ronald Firbank's, and a thought-reading machine. [JC]
WASP WOMAN, THE
Film (1959). Filmgroup/Allied Artists. Prod/dir Roger CORMAN, starring
Susan Cabot, Michael Mark. Screenplay Leo Gordon, based on a story by

Kinta Zertuche. 73 mins. B/w.One of Roger Corman's more routine efforts,
this may have been rushed out to capitalize on the publicity received by
The FLY (1958). Cabot plays well the ageing cosmetics executive who, in a
successful attempt at rejuvenation, takes a form of royal jelly (from
wasps not bees) prepared by loony apiarist Zinthrop (Mark). The
side-effect is that she occasionally grows an unconvincing wasp's head and
eats people. TWW is a shabby, rather unhorrifying film. [PN]
WATCHMEN
Perhaps the most famous of all GRAPHIC NOVELS, written by Alan MOORE and
illustrated by Dave GIBBONS. W appeared initially as a 12-part COMIC (Sept
1986-Oct 1987 Watchmen), each part corresponding to a chapter of the full
novel, which was published as Watchmen (graph 1987 US; with additional
material 1988 US). The initial premise is ingenious: given a late-1930s
USA where costumed SUPERHEROES exist, maintaining law and order on a
vigilante basis, what sort of ALTERNATE WORLD might develop by the
mid-1980s? The changes suggested are subtle: a modest increase in the rate
of scientific development; a Western dominance of the political scene; and
an initial acceptance of the superhero coterie, followed by a period of
repression. The story takes place in 1985, as members of the second
generation of superheroes attempt to trace the person who is murdering
them, one by one. At the same time, a number of signs are pointing towards
imminent nuclear war (and towards a secret plot to frighten the world out
of nuclear madness), which some of the protagonists sense coming but which
none of them know how to confront. An actual HOLOCAUST does take place,
proving terminal for 2 million New Yorkers; but its effects prove
ambiguously positive.W offers a satirical analysis of the human cost of
being (or needing) a superhero, and a portrait of the kind of world in
which one might exist. It also provides, en passant, an extremely sharp
analysis of the psychological makeup (and needs) of those who read
superhero comics. Moreover, the densely packed narrative is perfectly
conveyed through word and image - Moore was at the height of his powers as
an innovative figure in commercial US comics publishing, and Gibbons was
equally primed to generate a sophisticated visual language, through which
subtexts and subplots might interweave with (as rereading makes evident)
the utmost clarity. By subjecting the fantasy worlds inhabited by
comic-strip superheroes to the estrangements of adult-sf scrutiny, W
worked as a threnody for some of the more childish visions of omnipotence
which had crippled the genre; and by rendering visible some sf
conventions, it turned the tables, to a degree, on the scrutinizing
medium. W is one of the central sf novels of the 1980s. [JC]
WATER, SILAS
Noel LOOMIS.
WATERLOO, STANLEY
(1846-1913) US writer whose first sf novel, The Story of Ab: A Tale of
the Time of the Cave Man (1897; vt A Tale of the Time of the Cave Men;
Being the Story of Ab 1904 UK), a juvenile whose hero acquires the
necessary inventions and culture to begin the march to civilization, is
among the earliest romances of ANTHROPOLOGY. Further novels were
Armageddon: A Tale of Love and Invention (1898), in which an Anglo-US

supremacy over the rest of the world is achieved through the use of an
armoured dirigible in a near-future WAR; and A Son of the Ages: The
Reincarnations and Adventures of Scar, the Link: A Story of Man from the
Beginning (1914), which carries Scar, via a sequence of REINCARNATIONS,
through various significant moments in history, including a visit to
ATLANTIS. SW was a routine stylist with a good nose for structure and
idea. [JC]Other work: The Wolf's Long Howl (coll 1899), containing some
marginal sf tales.See also: ORIGIN OF MAN.
WATERS, T(HOMAS) A.
(1938- ) US author who began writing sf with Love that Spy! (1968), a
spoof TECHNOTHRILLER featuring a scientist named Niflheim who specializes
in ultra-cold warfare. TAW's first sf of more orthodox interest was The
Probability Pad (1970), a novel which concluded the trilogy begun in
Chester ANDERSON's The Butterfly Kid (1967) and continued in Michael
KURLAND's The Unicorn Girl (1969). This is a lightweight RECURSIVE tale
involving the 3 authors as characters in Greenwich Village, along with a
good deal of alien-inspired body duplication. A countercultural ethos also
inspired the grimmer Centerforce (1974), in which motorcycle dropouts and
commune dwellers combine in opposition to a NEAR-FUTURE police-state USA.
[JC]
WATKINS, PETER
(1935- ) UK tv and film director. Educated at Cambridge, PW worked in
documentary films from 1959. He made a reputation with two
quasidocumentaries for BBC TV, Culloden (1964) and The WAR GAME (1965). He
was one of the pioneers of the technique of staging historical or
imaginary events as if they were contemporary and undergoing tv-news
coverage. The WAR GAME (1965) adopted a cinema-verite manner to simulate
the likely consequences of nuclear attack on the UK, and did this
horrifyingly enough for the film to be denied a screening on tv, for which
it was made, until 1985; it was successful when released in the CINEMA.
His next film, PRIVILEGE (1966), has a pop star used as a puppet by a
future government in a cunning propaganda plan for the manipulation of the
nation's youth. GLADIATORERNA (1968; vt The Peace Game), made in Sweden,
and PUNISHMENT PARK (1971) are both set in the future, and both use
stories of channelled violence to argue a pacifist case, the latter more
plausibly. An interesting paradox is that, while his theme is normally the
use of mind control by future governments to channel the aggressive
instincts of the people, and his purpose is to generate moral indignation
at this cynical curtailment of our freedom, his own work equally uses the
illusion of fact to present a propaganda fiction. Whether knowingly or
not, he is fighting fire with fire. After its initial success, PW's work
has been treated less kindly by critics, who do not doubt his sincerity
but deprecate his methods; it is felt by some that he has thumped the same
tub for too long. [PN]
WATKINS, WILLIAM JON
(1942- ) US writer and academic, associate professor of English at
Brookdale Community College. His first sf novels, with Gene SNYDER, were
Ecodeath (1972), a POLLUTION story in which the leading characters are
called Snyder and Watkins and the plot is fast and furious, and The Litany

of Sh'reev (1976), in which a healer with precognitive powers becomes
involved in a revolution. WJW's solo books are similarly - and at times
haphazardly - venturesome. Clickwhistle (1973) deals in a relatively sober
vein with human/dolphin COMMUNICATION, but The God Machine (1973), in
which political dissidents shrink themselves with a "micronizer" to escape
a mechanized future, is insecurely baroque. What Rough Beast (1980) pairs
an altruistic ALIEN with a world-class computer net to save erring
humanity. The LeGrange League sequence - The Centrifugal Rickshaw Dancer
(1985) and Going to See the End of the Sky (1986) - is adventure sf whose
settings, and quality of writing, are negatively affected by helterskelter
plotting. The Last Deathship off Antares (1989) is a tale of real
intrinsic interest; despite the failings characteristic of all his work,
the philosophical arguments underpinning a revolt of imprisoned humans
aboard a prison ship are sharply couched, and WJW never allows the
grimness of the conflict to slide into routine. He remains, however, a
writer whose ideas are perhaps more interesting to describe than to read.
[JC/PN]See also: ECOLOGY.
WATSON, BILLY
[s] Theodore STURGEON.
WATSON, H.B. MARRIOTT
H.B. MARRIOTT-WATSON.
WATSON, HENRY CROCKER MARRIOTT
Henry Crocker MARRIOTT-WATSON.
WATSON, IAN
(1943- ) UK writer and teacher who lectured in English in Tanzania
(1965-7) and Tokyo (1967-70) before beginning to publish sf with "Roof
Garden Under Saturn" for NW in 1969; he then taught Future Studies for 6
years at Birmingham Polytechnic, taking there one of the first academic
courses in sf in the UK; he has been a full-time writer since l976.IW has
published over 100 short stories, at a gradually increasing tempo and with
visibly increased mastery over the form; his collections are The Very Slow
Time Machine (coll 1979), Sunstroke (coll 1982), Slow Birds (coll 1985),
The Book of Ian Watson (coll 1985 US), Evil Water (coll 1987), Salvage
Rites (1989), Stalin's Teardrops (coll 1991) and The Coming of Vertumnus
(coll 1994). It is as a novelist, however, that he remains best known. His
first novel, THE EMBEDDING (1973) won the Prix Apollo in 1975 in its
French translation, L'enchassement; although it is not necessarily his
finest work, it remains the title by virtue of which his stature as an sf
writer of powerful intellect - the natural successor to H.G. WELLS - is
most generally asserted. Through a complex tripartite plot, the book
engages in a searching analysis ( COMMUNICATIONS; LINGUISTICS; PERCEPTION)
of the nature of communication through language; the Whorfian hypothesis
that languages shape our perception of reality - a hypothesis very
attractive, for obvious reasons, to sf writers - is bracingly embodied in
at least two of the subplots: one describing a cruel experiment in which
children are taught only an artificial language, and the other showing the
ALIENS' attempt to understand Homo sapiens through an analysis of our
modes of communication.Again and again, IW's novels reveal themselves to

be very much of a piece, a series of thought experiments which spiral
outwards from the same central obsessions about the nature of perception,
the quest for what might be called the True Names that describe ultimate
realities, and the terrible cost to human beings - in betrayals and
self-betrayals - of searching for transcendence. The Jonah Kit (1975),
which won the BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD for 1978, describes the
imprinting of human consciousness into whales, and the transcendental
whiffs of alien INTELLIGENCES to which those consciousnesses become heir.
The Martian Inca (1977) reverses the operation, as a transformative virus
invades Earth. Alien Embassy (1977) foregrounds a constant IW
preoccupation - his concern with the control of information and perception
by the powers-that-be, generally governments - in a tale about the
frustrated transformation of the human race. Miracle Visitors (1978) again
combines speculations about perception and transcendence, in this case
suggesting that UFOs work as enticements to focus human attention on
higher states of communication. God's World (1979) reworks IW's ongoing
concerns in yet another fashion, describing another ambivalent alien
incursion, this time in the form of the "gift" of a stardrive which will
take a selected team to the eponymous world, where they will undergo
dangerous transfigurations.IW's first 6 novels, then, comprised a set of
virtuoso variations on his central themes. His next, The Gardens of
Delight (1980), conflates sf and fantasy to step sideways from the early
work, describing a world whose transformative energies have resulted in an
environment which precisely replicates the painting The Garden of Earthly
Delights by Hieronymus Bosch (1460-1516). Under Heaven's Bridge (dated
1980 but 1981), with Michael BISHOP, shows the flavour of the latter
writer's mind as its protagonist investigates an alien culture in terms
more relevant to ANTHROPOLOGY than IW would alone have been inclined to
employ; from 1980 on, his novels tended to show a greater inventiveness in
plot and style, and some even attempted humour, though the impatience of
his quick mind does not often make for successful light moments.
Deathhunter (1981) suggests that humans give off a pheromone-like signal
at the point of death, which attracts Death himself in the form of a
mothlike insect ( ESCHATOLOGY). Chekhov's Journey (1983), perhaps his
least enticing novel through its entanglement in too large a cast (IW has
never been a sharp delineator of character), revolves around the Tunguska
explosion of 1908. The Black Current trilogy-The Book of the River (fixup
1984), The Book of the Stars (1984) and The Book of Being (1985), all
assembled as The Books of the Black Current (omni 1986 US) - was his major
1980s effort; in a world divided by a mysterious and apparently sentient
river into two utterly opposed halves, the heroine Yaleen suffers rites of
passage, uprootings, rebirths and transcendental awakenings as she becomes
more and more deeply involved in a final conflict between the Worm and the
Godmind, the latter's intentions being deeply inimical to the future of
humanity. More expansive, and easier than his earlier books, the Black
Current sequence has been, except for a tie (see listing below), IW's
closest attempt to gain a wide readership.Subsequent books are if anything
even more varied. Converts (1984) is a brisk comedy about EVOLUTION and
the misuse of power. Queenmagic, Kingmagic (1986) is a slightly over-perky
FANTASY based on chess and other board games. The Power (1987) and Meat
(1988) are horror. Whores of Babylon (1988) is set in what may be a

VIRTUAL-REALITY version of Babylon reconstructed in the USA, and details
its protagonists' suspicions that a COMPUTER is generating them as well as
the city. The Fire Worm (1988) is a complex and gripping tale in which the
medieval Lambton Worm proves to be the alchemical salamander of Raymond
Lully (Ramon Lull; c1235-1316). THE FLIES OF MEMORY (1988 IASFM; exp 1990)
dazzlingly skates over much of the thematic material of the previous 20
books, as the eponymous aliens memorize bits of Earth so that the Universe
can continue remembering itself, while various human protagonists embody
linguistic concerns and dilemmas of perception. Space-opera antics
continue en passant.IW's intelligent, polemical pieces about the nature of
sf - many of which appeared in SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, FOUNDATION (for
which he served as features editor 1976-91, sitting on the Council of the
SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION for the same period) and VECTOR - throw some
light on the intentions of his sometimes difficult fiction, and is also,
in a sense, of a piece with it. As a whole, his work engages vociferously
in battles against oppression - cognitive or political-while at the same
time presenting a sense that reality, so far as humanity is concerned, is
subjective and partial, created too narrowly through our perception of it.
The generation of fuller realities - though incessantly adumbrated by
methods ranging from drugs through linguistic disciplines, focused
meditation, radical changes in education from childhood up, and a kind of
enhanced awareness of other perceptual possibilities - is never complete,
never fully successful. Humans are too little, and too much, for reality.
IW is perhaps the most impressive synthesizer in modern sf; and (it may
be) the least deluded. [JC/PN]Other works: Japan: A Cat's Eye View (1969
Japan), a juvenile; Orgasmachine (1976 France) with Judy Watson, a fable
(never published in English) about the manufacture of custom-built girls;
Japan Tomorrow (coll 1977), linked stories set in various projected
Japanese futures; Kreuzflug ["Cruising"] (coll 1987 Germany, in German
trans); 3 Warhammer 40,000 ties ( GAMES WORKSHOP): Inquisitor *
(1990),Space Marine * (1993) and Harlequin * (1994 ); Nanoware Time (1991
dos US); the Books of MANA sequence, elaborately intricate tales based on
the Finnish Kalevala saga and set on a colony planet, comprising Lucky's
Harvest (1993) and The Fallen Moon (1994). As Editor: Pictures at an
Exhibition (anth 1981); Changes: Stories of Metamorphosis: An Anthology of
Speculative Fiction about Startling Metamorphoses, both Psychological and
Physical (anth 1983 US) with Michael Bishop; Afterlives: An Anthology of
Stories about Life After Death (anth 1986 US) with Pamela SARGENT.About
the author: The Work of Ian Watson: An Annotated Bibliography & Guide
(1989) by Douglas A. Mackey.See also: ANTIMATTER; ARTS; CONCEPTUAL
BREAKTHROUGH; COSMOLOGY; CYBERNETICS; DEVOLUTION; GAMES AND SPORTS;
GAME-WORLDS; HISTORY IN SF; INTERZONE; MACHINES; MARS; METAPHYSICS;
NEW
WAVE; NEW WORLDS; NEW WRITINGS IN SF; PASTORAL; PHYSICS; PSYCHOLOGY;
RELIGION; SF IN THE CLASSROOM; SEX; SOCIOLOGY; SUPERMAN; TIME TRAVEL;
UFOS; UNDER THE SEA; WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST.
WATSON, JUDY
[r] Ian WATSON.
WATSON, RICHARD F.

[s] Robert SILVERBERG.
WATT-EVANS, LAWRENCE
Working name of US writer Lawrence Watt Evans (1954- ), who began
publishing sf in 1975 with "Paranoid Fantasy #1" for American Atheist as
Evans, creating a hyphenated surname in 1979 to distinguish himself from
another Lawrence Evans. He has written several scripts for MARVEL COMICS;
a GRAPHIC NOVEL is projected, Family Matters. He has not been prolific as
a short story writer, though "Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers"
(1987) won a 1988 HUGO. As a novelist, his work has been varied from the
start, ranging from the somewhat overblown high FANTASY of his first
sequence - the Lords of Dus series comprising The Lure of the Basilisk
(1980), The Seven Altars of Dusaara (1981), The Sword of Bheleu (1982),
The Book of Silence (1984),Taking Flight (1993) and The Spell of the Black
Dagger1994 - through the genre-crossing War Surplus series - The Cyborg
and the Sorcerers (1982) and The Wizard and the War Machine (1987) - which
combines SWORD AND SORCERY, military sf and some speculative content about
the CYBORG protagonist, and on to singleton sf novels like The Chromosomal
Code (1984) and Denner's Wreck (1988). The latter is perhaps his most
sustained tale: on the planet Denner's Wreck two kinds of humans primitive descendants of a crashed starship and tourists posing as wilful
gods - must come to some sort of mutual comprehension. Nightside City
(1989) tends to submerge the HARD-SF challenge at its heart - to elucidate
human actions on a slow-spin planet whose terminator is advancing fatally
on the city of the title - in the palely conceived escapades of a female
detective. Though LW-E's novels inhabit traditional venues, and their
protagonists undergo traditional trials without much affecting the reader,
his ingenuity is manifest. [JC]Other works: The Legend of Ethshar fantasy
sequence, The Misenchanted Sword (1985), With a Single Spell (1987) and
The Unwilling Warlord (1989); Shining Steel (1986); Nightmare People
(1990), horror; Newer York: Stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy About
the World's Greatest City (anth 1991), ed; The Rebirth of Wonder (coll
1992); Crosstime Traffic (1992); Split Heirs (1993) with Esther Friesner
(1951- ); Out of this World (1994).See also: ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE
FICTION MAGAZINE.
WAUGH, CHARLES G(ORDON)
(1943- ) US academic and anthologist, most of whose work has been in
collaboration with Martin H. GREENBERG, either alone or with further
collaborators. All titles shared solely with Greenberg, or with Greenberg
and only Joseph D. OLANDER, are listed under GREENBERG. All titles shared
also with "name" authors will be found under the "name" authors in
question: Robert ADAMS, Poul ANDERSON, Piers ANTHONY, Isaac ASIMOV, David
A. DRAKE, Joe HALDEMAN, Barry N. MALZBERG, Richard MATHESON, Robert
SILVERBERG, S.M. STIRLING and Jane YOLEN. [JC]See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS;
CHILDREN IN SF; COMPUTERS.
WAUGH, EVELYN
(1903-1966) UK writer, known mostly for a series of black inter-War
satires, such as Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), and
for Brideshead Revisited (1945). Some of his early fiction, like Black
Mischief (1932) and Scoop (1938), utilizes imaginary African countries for

satirical purposes, and Vile Bodies (1930) ends in an apocalyptic Europe
torn by a final war, but it was only in some post-WWII works that he wrote
fiction genuinely making use of sf displacements. Scott-King's Modern
Europe (1947 chap) satirizes post-WWII totalitarianism through the
imaginary state of Neutralia. Love Among the Ruins: A Romance of the Near
Future (1953 chap)-also included in Tactical Exercise (coll 1954
US)-combines the chemical coercion of Aldous HUXLEY's BRAVE NEW WORLD
(1932) with the drabness and scarcity of the needs of life of George
ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) in a brief but savage attack on the
joylessness of a Welfare State UK a few decades hence. Miles Plastic, his
free will bureaucratically threatened, his lover co-opted by the state,
takes refuge in "gemlike, hymeneal, auspicious" acts of arson. It is a
book, like most of EW's work, in which humour only brings out the more
clearly a radical despair. [JC]See also: DYSTOPIAS.
WAY, PETER
(1936- ) UK writer whose first novel, The Kretzmer Syndrome (1968), is a
NEAR-FUTURE tale set in a bleak conformist UK susceptible to the theories
of the eponymous scientist, who articulates PSYCHOHISTORY laws that risk
translating the country into a rigid DYSTOPIA. Later novels, like
Super-Celeste (1977), Sunrise (1979) and Icarus (1980), are
TECHNOTHRILLERS. [JC]
WAYMAN, TONY RUSSELL
(1929- ) UK-born writer who spent some years in Singapore, where he was
actively involved in film-making; he subsequently moved to the USA. He
began writing sf with the Dreamhouse sequence - World of the Sleeper (1967
dos) and Ads Infinitum (Being a Second Tale from the Dreamhouse) (1971) which tells 2 associated tales. The first features a man transported into
another world - rather resembling Malaya, the basic plot having originally
been the script for a Malayan film. The other places a similar character
in a GAME-WORLD-like fantasy environment, Commercialand. Dunes of Pradai
(1971), a complex PLANETARY ROMANCE of some speculative interest, is
stifled by TRW's congested style. [JC]
WEAPONS
In the catalogue of possible technological wonders offered in the New
Atlantis (1627; 1629), Francis BACON included more powerful cannon, better
explosives and "wildfires burning in water, unquenchable". Such promises
could not be left out if his prospectus were to appeal to the political
establishment - his most important predecessor as a designer of
hypothetical machines, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), had likewise sought
sponsorship on the basis of his ingenuity as a military engineer.In the
second half of the 19th century, when the effects of technological
progress on society became the subject of widespread speculation, the
advance of weaponry became one of the most important stimulants of the
imagination. George CHESNEY's The Battle of Dorking (1871 chap)
popularized the concern felt by a number of politicians that the UK's
armaments had fallen considerably behind the times. In the new genre of
popular fiction which it inspired, the future- WAR story, speculation
about the weapons of the future soon became ambitious. In The Angel of the
Revolution (1893) George GRIFFITH imagined a world war fought with

airships and submarines, armed with unprecedentedly powerful explosives.
The French artist Albert ROBIDA offered spectacular images of future
weaponry in action in La guerre au vingtieme siecle ["War in the 20th
Century"] (1887). Jules VERNE's Face au drapeau (1896; trans as For the
Flag 1897) features the "fulgurator", a powerful explosive device with a
"boomerang" action - a primitive guided missile. H.G. WELLS's "The Land
Ironclads" (1903) foresaw the development of the tank, and bacteriological
warfare was anticipated in T. Mullett ELLIS's Zalma (1895) and M.P.
SHIEL's The Yellow Danger (1898).The discovery of X-rays and radioactivity
in the last years of the 19th century gave a tremendous boost to the
hypothetical armaments industry. The imagination of writers leaped ahead
to imagine all kinds of weapons causing or using the energy of atomic
breakdown. In The Lord of Labour (1911) George Griffith described a war
fought with atomic missiles and disintegrator rays, and awesome rays have
remained a standard part of the sf armoury ever since. During WWI William
LE QUEUX attempted to raise morale with his account of the fight to
develop a new ray to function as The Zeppelin Destroyer (1916). Percy F.
Westerman's The War of the Wireless Waves (1923) was one of countless
NEAR-FUTURE thrillers featuring arms races; here the British ZZ rays must
counter the menace of the German Ultra-K ray.Criminal SCIENTISTS often
armed themselves with marvellous rays or atomic disintegrators, as in
Edmund SNELL's The Z Ray (1932), Austin SMALL's The Avenging Ray (1930 as
by Seamark) and one of the earliest examples of Soviet sf, Giperboloid
inzhenera Garina (1926; rev 1937; trans as The Deathbox 1936; new trans of
rev edn vt The Garin Death Ray 1955 USSR) by Alexei TOLSTOY. Few actually
succeeded in destroying the world, although Neil BELL's The Lord of Life
(1933) almost did. Criminal scientists deployed more subtle agents, too:
Sax ROHMER's Fu Manchu was especially adept with exotic poisons, and
biological blights were used as threats in Edgar WALLACE's The Green Rust
(1919), William Le Queux's The Terror of the Air (1920) and Robert W.
SERVICE's The Master of the Microbe (1926). Others, not quite so
egotistical, tried to use their weapons altruistically to force peace upon
the world; they included the heroes of His Wisdom the Defender (1900) by
Simon NEWCOMB, Empire of the World (1910; vt Emperor of the World UK) by
C.J. Cutcliffe HYNE and The Ark of the Covenant (1924; vt Ultimatum) by
Victor MACCLURE.Few early writers were aware of the differences which
advanced weaponry might make to the nature of warfare, and only H.G.
Wells, in Anticipations (1901), realized what an appalling difference very
simple innovations like barbed wire might make. George Griffith recognized
that aerial bombing would not discriminate between combatants and
noncombatants, although he did not explore the political ramifications.
After 1918, however, poison gases of various kinds became the major
bugbear of UK future- WAR stories, deployed to bloodcurdling effect in
such stories as Shaw DESMOND's Ragnarok (1926) and Neil Bell's The Gas War
of 1940 (1931 as Miles; vt Valiant Clay 1934 as NB). It is perhaps
surprising that the scientific romancers' pessimism about the likelihood
of the Geneva Convention being observed in the next war proved largely
unjustified. Other political fantasies of the period, including Harold
NICOLSON's atom-bomb story Public Faces (1932) and John GLOAG's Winter's
Youth (1934) - which features a kind of super-napalm called "radiant
inflammatol"- also proved (mercifully) a little too cynical.The early

pulp-sf writers took to superweapons-particularly rays - in a big way.
E.E. "Doc" SMITH's The Skylark of Space (1928; 1946) features heat rays,
infra-sound, ultraviolet rays and "induction rays", and an entire planet
is aimed towards Earth at hyperlight speed in the Lensmen series. His
contemporaries were hardly less prolific. John W. CAMPBELL Jr's "Space
Rays" (1932) was so extravagant that Hugo GERNSBACK thought he must be
joking and billed the story as a "burlesque", apparently offending
Campbell sufficiently to deter him from submitting to WONDER STORIES
again. In an era when fictional large-scale destruction could be achieved
at the flick of a switch, an amazing example of restraint can be found in
Thomas P. KELLEY's SPACE OPERA "A Million Years in the Future" (1940),
which features SPACESHIPS armed with gigantic crossbows mounted on their
prows. At the opposite extreme, Jack WILLIAMSON's The Legion of Space
(1934; rev 1947) features the super-weapon AKKA, which obliterates whole
space fleets at the push of a button, and Edmond HAMILTON was fond of
disposing of worlds and stars with a similar casual flourish. After this
there seemed no further extreme available, so innovation thereafter
followed more modest paths. Two standard types of personal weaponry became
CLICHES, the stun-gun and the BLASTER; modern space-opera heroes often
carry modifiable pistols usable in either way, after the fashion of STAR
TREK's "phasers". 20th-century developments have contributed only minor
inspiration: T.H. Maiman's discovery of the laser in 1960 merely
"confirmed" what sf writers had always known about DEATH RAYS, just as
Hiroshima had "confirmed" what they already knew about atom bombs.WWII
renewed fears about the destructive potential of war, but there was little
room left for imaginative innovation, although mention must be made of the
"doomsday weapon": an ultimate deterrent which, if triggered in response
to attack, will annihilate life on Earth. Alfred NOYES's The Last Man
(1940; vt No Other Man 1940 US) invokes such a weapon but leaves the
destruction conveniently incomplete. US GENRE SF now began to reproduce
the hysteria of earlier UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES in lamenting Man's
propensity to make and use terrible weapons; superweapons were more often
treated as ultimate horrors than as fancy toys. Notable examples of the
new attitude are Bernard WOLFE's bitter black comedy on the theme of
"disarmament", LIMBO (1952; vt Limbo '90 1953 UK), and James BLISH's story
about nasty-minded ways and means of guiding missiles, "Tomb Tapper"
(1956). Such stories initiated a tradition which extends through DR
STRANGELOVE: OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB
(1963)
to such works as Marc LAIDLAW's Dad's Nuke (1985). The post-WWII years
also saw the growth of a macabre interest in the subtleties of
"psychological warfare", which sparked off many thrillers about
"brainwashing"; the tradition is gruesomely extrapolated in Gregory
BENFORD's Deeper than the Darkness (1970; rev vt as The Stars in Shroud
1978).This anxiety interrupted but never killed off either the more
romanticized varieties of futuristic swashbuckling or the fantasies
inspired by threats to the US citizen's constitutional right to bear
weapons. A.E. VAN VOGT's Weapon Shops series of the 1940s made much of the
slogan "the right to bear weapons is the right to be free". The intimacy
of the relationship between HEROES and their weapons is related to the
kind of simplistic power fantasy which underlies much SWORD AND SORCERY

and much sf on the FANTASY borderline, but some writers, notably Charles
L. HARNESS in Flight into Yesterday (1949; exp 1953; vt The Paradox Men
1955), have been ingenious in inventing technological reasons (in this
case that FORCE FIELDS are less opaque to slow-moving objects) for the
survival in advanced societies of swordplay a la Edgar Rice BURROUGHS.
Such power fantasies are, of course, reflected in the PSYCHOLOGY of the
actual arms race which obsessed the USA and the USSR for nearly half a
century after 1945; this is parodied in Philip K. DICK's The Zap Gun
(1967). Arms-race psychology reached a real-world climax in the 1980s with
the sciencefictional SDI project, aptly dubbed "Star Wars" by those
cynical about its practicability; the most respectful treatment it
received may have been in David A. DRAKE's ALTERNATE-WORLD story Fortress
(1987), but this text features an orbital launch facility protected by
point defense wapons, which do not much resemble SDI proposals. The
history of the US fascination with the idea of superweapons is detailed in
H. Bruce FRANKLIN's War Stars: The Superweapon and the American
Imagination (1988).Power fantasies involving "intimate weaponry" have made
rapid progress in recent times. The futuristic suits of armour worn in
Robert A. HEINLEIN's STARSHIP TROOPERS (1959) and the supertanks of Keith
LAUMER's interesting Dinochrome Brigade series, collected as Bolo (coll of
linked stories 1976; exp vt The Compleat Bolo 1990) are modest inventions
compared to the more dramatic kinds of CYBORG-ization featured in Poul
ANDERSON's "Kings who Die" (1962), Laumer's own A Plague of Demons (1965)
and Gordon R. DICKSON's The Forever Man (1986). The relatively modest
enhancements featured in the tv series The SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN are
easily adaptable to routine power fantasy, but adaptations as intrusive as
that featured in Anderson's "The Pugilist" (1973) - which brings a new
perspective to the phallic symbolism of weaponry - belong in a different
category.Modern sf has discovered various more subtle ways to fight wars.
The dependence of modern society on sophisticated technologies opens up
new opportunities for ingenious sabotage, as explored in Mack REYNOLDS's
Computer War (1967) and Frederik POHL's The Cool War (1981). The ultimate
defensive technology featured in Vernor VINGE's The Peace War (1984) turns
out, however, to bring only temporary respite from more destructive
conflict. Laser warfare, as described in Light Raid (1989) by Connie
WILLIS and Cynthia FELICE, also turns out to be less clinical and coherent
than might have been hoped, and the day of fabulously macho weapons, like
the one featured in Roger McBride ALLEN's Farside Cannon (1988), is
clearly by no means done. The most competent survey of the modern
sciencefictional armoury is David LANGFORD's excellent War in 2080: The
Future of Military Technology (1979), some of whose research was
redeployed in the novel The Space Eater (1982), a then-state-of-the-art
account of weapons technology which cheerfully ranges from the most
gruesomely intimate to the most hugely destructive. [BS]
WEAPONS OF DESTRUCTION
VYNALEZ ZKAZY.
WEAVER, MICHAEL D.
(1961- ) US writer and systems programmer who began publishing sf with
Mercedes Nights (1987), a dark CYBERPUNK-flavoured fable of cloning - the

title is the plural of the name of the protagonist, Mercedes Night, a film
star whose illegal CLONES are being sold as love-slaves. The 21st century,
heated and hectic and violent, seems to be about to endure a World War IV.
Set in the same universe, centuries later, My Father Immortal (1989)
counterpoints the isolated spacefaring lives of the survivors of Earth's
traumas with sequences depicting the lives of the "fathers" before the
children left the planet. MDW's other main work is the Wolf-Dreams fantasy
sequence: Wolf-Dreams (1987), Nightreaver (1988) and Bloodfang (1989), all
assembled as Wolf-Dreams (omni 1989 UK). [JC]
WEBB, JANE
Jane LOUDON.
WEBB, LUCAS
Robert REGINALD.
WEBB, RON
[s] Sharon WEBB.
WEBB, SHARON (LYNN)
(1936- ) US nurse and writer who began publishing sf with a poem, "Atomic
Reaction" for FSF in 1963 as by Ron Webb, and whose first story, "The Girl
with the 100 Proof Eyes", also as by Ron Webb, appeared a year later in
the same journal. She began to produce fiction regularly only at the
beginning of the 1980s, after about a decade in nursing, which figured in
her comeback story,"Hitch on the Bull Run" (1979), the first of the Terra
Tarkington tales about a nurse engaged in escapades throughout the Galaxy,
assembled as The Adventures of Terra Tarkington (fixup 1985). SW is
perhaps better known for the Earth Song sequence-Earthchild (fixup 1982),
Earth Song (1983) and Ram Song (1984) - in which the introduction of an
IMMORTALITY process generates social upheaval, at first because the
process must be initiated before the end of puberty, but in the long run
because those who become immortal lose any capacity to create works of
art. The protagonist of the sequence, a musician involuntarily subjected
to the process, helps create, over a 100-century period, a world whose
inhabitants can choose between the ability to make art and the chance to
live forever. SW's subsequent novels - Pestis 18 (1987) and The Halflife
(1989) - are medical horror thrillers, the first dealing with a deadly
virus, the second with a government experiment in personality manipulation
that goes wrong. [JC]
WEBB, WILLIAM THOMAS
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
WEBER, DAVID
(? - ) US writer of several sf adventures, all with Steve White:
Insurrection (1990), set in a rebellion-torn Terran Federation, Mutineers'
Moon (1991), a TIME-TRAVEL tale in which the rebels, along with their
sentient spaceship, are transported into Earth's distant past, continuing
their adventures in The Armageddon Inheritance (1993); and Crusade (1992),
in which another spaceship, this time ancient, destabilizes a Galaxy-wide
peace. His greatest solo success has been the Honor Harrington sequence of
space operas, featuring a female protagonist in a series of military

adventures which have been likened to C.S. FORESTER's Hornblower books,
but which are far more action-oriented; the series comprises On Basilisk
Station (1993), The Honor of the Queen (1993), The Short Victorious War
(1994) and Field of Dishonor (1994). [JC]Other Works: Path of the Fury
(1992).
WEBSTER, [Captain] F(REDERICK) A(NNESLEY) M(ITCHELL)
(1886-? ) UK writer, much of whose work related to athletics. His fiction
typically concentrated on mysteriously sapient species ( APES AND CAVEMEN)
in Africa who are persuaded to raise humans as their own. Of the CLUB
STORIES assembled in The Curse of the Lion (coll 1922), "The Ape People",
which posits a separate language of the apes, explores this theme, as does
the not dissimilar Lord of the Leopards (1935). The Ivory Talisman (1930),
Gold and Glory (1932), Lost City of Light (1934), Second Wind (1934),
Mubendi Girl (1935), The Trail of the Skull (1937) and The Land of
Forgotten Women (1950) are LOST-WORLD tales. [JC]Other works: The Odyssey
of Husky Hillier (1924; vt Husky Hillier 1938); The Man who Knew (1927);
Star Lady (1935) and its sequel, Son of Abdan (1936); When Strange Drums
Sound (1935); Dead Venom (1937).
WEBSTER, ROBERT N.
Raymond A. PALMER.
WEDGELOCK, COLIN
Christopher PRIEST.
WEEKEND
Film (1968). Comacico/Copernic/Lira/Ascot Cineraid. Written/dir Jean-Luc
Godard, starring Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Valerie
Lagrange, Jean-Pierre Leaud. 103 mins. Colour.A FABULATION rather than sf
proper, Godard's satirical and violent film contains sf elements in its
allegory of the Decline of the West. The progression of the film is from
social order through ever-worsening scenes of ENTROPY, mainly imaged in
increasingly large-scale car smashes, to anarchy, paralleled by a
stylistic shift from naturalism to near-Surrealism. One extraordinary
tracking shot begins in the real world and moves into motorized
apocalypse. The bickering middle-class couple who at the outset started
off on a weekend drive to the country observe the road accidents and
associated violence with cool detachment, as does the film itself.
Disturbing, sometimes lovely, images proliferate. Finally the couple
continue on foot and join some armed anarchists; then the woman eats the
man. Godard's previous quasi-sf film was ALPHAVILLE (1965). [PN/JB]See
also: CINEMA.
WEEKLEY, IAN (GEORGE)
(1933- ) UK writer whose sf novel, The Moving Snow (1974), rather
prosaically describes how a family copes with climatic change that brings
severe Arctic conditions to the UK. All in all they do quite snugly. [JC]
WEHRSTEIN, KAREN
[r] S.M. STIRLING.
WEINBAUM, STANLEY G(RAUMAN)
(1902-1935) US writer whose interest in sf dated from his youth (he

published "The Lost Battle", depicting the end of WWI in 1921, in a school
magazine, The Mercury, in 1917) but who did not begin to publish sf
professionally until the 1930s, after selling a romance novel - "The Lady
Dances" (1934) as by Marge Stanley - to a newspaper syndicate, and after a
first sf novel, The Mad Brain, had been rejected. Although he did not
graduate from the University of Wisconsin, he turned his two years spent
there studying chemical engineering to good stead from the beginning of
his sf career with "A Martian Odyssey" in WONDER STORIES in 1934; this
broke new ground in attempting to envisage LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS in terms
of strange and complex ecosystems with weird ALIEN lifeforms. Told in
SGW's fluent style, it became immediately and permanently popular, ranking
behind only Isaac ASIMOV's "Nightfall" (1941) as the favourite example of
early GENRE-SF short fiction. Other SGW stories in this vein include "The
Lotus Eaters" (1935), which features an interesting attempt to imagine the
worldview of an intelligent plant, "The Mad Moon" (1935), "Flight on
Titan" (1935) and "Parasite Planet" (1935). In a series of comedies
featuring the eccentric scientist Van Manderpootz - including the
ALTERNATE-WORLD story "The Worlds of If" (1935), "The Ideal" (1935) and
"The Point of View" (1936)-he flippantly devised absurdly miraculous
MACHINES. His "Brink of Infinity" (1936) is a rewrite of George Allan
ENGLAND's mathematical puzzle story "The Tenth Question" (1916).SGW
imported some of the methods and values of his early romantic fiction into
sf in "Dawn of Flame", but could not sell it. It was first published as
the title story of Dawn of Flame and Other Stories (coll 1936), a memorial
volume put together by The Milwaukee Fictioneers ( SMALL PRESSES AND
LIMITED EDITIONS) - a FAN group which included, among others, Robert
BLOCH, Ralph Milne FARLEY and Raymond A. PALMER - to express a sense that
SGW's short innovative career had been of great significance in the growth
of US sf. Nor could he sell a version with gaudier superscientific
embellishments, "The Black Flame", which also appeared posthumously (1939
Startling Stories); both tales were combined in The Black Flame (fixup
1948). He continued to produce pulp-sf stories prolifically, including an
early story of GENETIC ENGINEERING, "Proteus Island" (1936), and the
superman story "The Adaptive Ultimate" (1935 as by John Jessel); he also
collaborated on 2 minor stories with Farley. His premature death from lung
cancer robbed pulp sf of its most promising writer, although the full
measure of his ability became apparent only when his posthumous works
appeared. The New Adam (1939) is a painstaking account of the career of a
potential SUPERMAN who grows up as a kind of "feral child" in human
society; it stands at the head of a tradition of stories which drastically
altered the role allotted to superhumans in pulp sf. Another posthumously
published sf novel was the psychological horror story The Dark Other
(1950), an early exploration of the Jekyll-and-Hyde theme. All 22 of SGW's
short sf stories are assembled in A Martian Odyssey and Other Science
Fiction Tales (coll 1975) ed Sam MOSKOWITZ, which combines the contents of
2 earlier collections, A Martian Odyssey, and Others (coll 1949) and The
Red Peri (coll 1952) and adds 1 previously uncollected piece; Moskowitz
had previously ed a smaller collection, A Martian Odyssey and Other
Classics of Science Fiction (coll 1962). The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum
(coll 1974) contains 12 stories. The King's Watch (1994 chap) is a
previously unprinted hardboiled detective tale. SGW, like his contemporary

John TAINE, was occasionally slapdash in his work-which he produced at a
very considerable rate - but the swift and smooth clarity of his style was
strongly influential on the next generation of sf and fantasy writers. He
was a central precursor of the GOLDEN AGE OF SF. [BS/JC]See also: ADAM AND
EVE; ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; BIOLOGY; COMICS; COMMUNICATIONS;
ECOLOGY;
HISTORY OF SF; ISLANDS; JUPITER; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; MARS; MYTHOLOGY;
OUTER PLANETS; PSYCHOLOGY; PUBLISHING; VENUS.
WEINBERG, ROBERT E(DWARD)
(1946- ) US editor, publisher, bookseller and author of FANZINES focusing
on his main interest, the PULP-MAGAZINE world. Much of his task as an
editor and publisher has been to rediscover and reprint magazine stories
from the pulps which would otherwise have disappeared utterly. His
earliest work seems to have been bibliographical - e.g., An Index to
Analog (January 1960 to June 1965) (c1965 chap) - and privately printed;
other untraced titles have almost certainly survived. (A sign of his
interest in ongoing bibliograpgical projects is the much later
publication, through his Robert Weinberg Publications, of Mike ASHLEY's
The Complete Index to Astounding/Analog [1981].) Further bibliographical
and critical guides include The Robert E. Howard Fantasy Biblio (1969
chap) and its sequel, The Annotated Guide to Robert E. Howard's Sword &
Sorcery (1976 ), the valuable Reader's Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos (1969
chap; rev 1973 chap) with Edward P. Berglund, and The Hero-Pulp Index
(1971 chap) with Lohr McKinstry. The climax of his bibliographical work is
almost certainly A Biographical Dictionary of Science Fiction and Fantasy
Artists (1988), whose 279 entries cover the field very amply; though
marred by some inaccuracies, it remains the central resource for
researchers in the field.As the 1970s began, REW moved from privately
produced pamphlets and fanzines into SMALL-PRESS publishing proper,
becoming associated with T.E. DIKTY, who founded in 1972 both STARMONT
HOUSE, for which REW worked for about a year (long before it actually
began to issue books), and FAX COLLECTOR'S EDITIONS, in which REW's
involvement was late and short-lived, though he issued 3 anthologies
through the firm: Famous Fantastic Classics #1, 1974 (anth 1974) and #2,
1975 (anth 1975), and Far Below and Other Horrors (anth 1974; republished
1987 by Starmont). He also part-wrote and edited The Weird Tales Story
(anth 1977), but by then he had left to found his own firm.Robert Weinberg
Publications (1974-81) concentrated on the reprinting of weird and fantasy
fiction. Series included the Pulp Classics, reprint booklets ed REW; out
of the 22 published, those of direct genre interest include Pulp Classics
#1: Gangland's Doom (1973 chap) by Frank Eisgruber Jr; #2: Captain Hazzard
(1938 Captain Hazzard as "Python Men of Lost City"; 1974 chap) by Chester
Hawk; #3: Revelry in Hell (coll 1974 chap); #5: The Moon Man (coll 1974
chap); #6: Dr Satan (coll 1974 chap) by Paul ERNST; #8: The Mysterious Wu
Fang (1975 chap) by Robert J. Hogan ( The MYSTERIOUS WU FANG ); #9: Dr.
Yen Sin (coll 1975 chap) by Donald E. Keyhoe ( DR. YEN SIN); #11: The
Octopus (1939 The Octopus as "The City Condemned to Hell"; 1976 chap) (The
OCTOPUS ) and #12: The Scorpion (1939 The Scorpion as "Satan's Incubator";
1975 chap) (The SCORPION ), both by Randolph Craig (Norvell W. PAGE); #13:
Death Orchids & Other Bizarre Tales (coll 1976 chap); #17: The Secret Six

(coll 1977 chap) by Robert J. Hogan; #19: Dr Death (1935 Dr Death; 1979
chap) and #20: Phantom Detective (coll 1979 chap). Similarly, the Lost
Fantasies series republished work by Otis Adelbert KLINE and Jack
WILLIAMSON as well as several REW anthologies: Lost Fantasies #4: Lost
Fantasies (anth 1976 chap); #5: Lost Fantasies (anth 1977 chap); #6: Lost
Fantasies (anth 1977 chap); #8: The Lake of Life (anth 1978 chap) and #9:
The Sin Eater (anth 1979 chap). The Weird Menace Classics series comprised
several REW anthologies: Weird Menace Classics #1: The Corpse Factory
(anth 1977 chap); #2: Satan's Roadhouse (anth 1977 chap); #3: The Chair
where Terror Sat (anth 1978 chap); #4: Devils in the Dark (anth 1979
chap); #5: Slaves of the Blood Wolves (anth 1979 chap) and #6: The Dance
of the Skeletons (anth 1980 chap). In homage to Lester DENT REW ed The Man
behind Doc Savage (anth 1974). WT50 (anth 1974) was a homage to WEIRD
TALES, the rights to which he owned, eventually forming Weird Tales
Limited to protect and license the name. It was through REW that George H.
SCITHERS arranged to continue Weird Tales. Some of the contents of WT50
reappeared as The Weird Tales Story (noted above).Other small presses in
which REW has been involved include Science Fiction Graphics (1977) and
Pulp Press (1979-82); but as the 1980s advanced he became less directly
involved in publishing activities, concentrating for some time on a
mail-order book business. He has ed 1 anthology with Martin H. GREENBERG,
Lovecraft's Legacy (anth 1990), plus 7 with Greenberg and Stefan R.
Dziemianowicz: Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors (anth 1988), Rivals of
Weird Tales: 30 Great Fantasy & Horror Stories from the Weird Fiction
Pulps (anth 1990) and Famous Fantastic Mysteries: 30 Great Tales of
Fantasy and Horror from the Classic Pulp Magazines Famous Fantastic
Mysteries and Fantastic Novels (anth 1991); Weird Vampire Tales (anth
1992); The Mists from Beyond (anth 1993); 100 Creepy Little Creatures
(anth 1994) and 100 Wild Little Weird Tales (anth 1994). Solo REW ed The
Eighth Green Man & Other Strange Folk (anth 1989). More interestingly,
with the Alex and Valerie Warner series of horror tales he began to
publish fiction in his own right. The Devil's Auction series - The Devil's
Auction (1988), The Armageddon Box (1991), The Black Lodge (1991) and The
Dead Man's Kiss (1992) - shows a vast knowledge of generic tricks and
baggage, and considerable wit. [JC]Other Works: the Today's Sorcery
sequence of fantasies, beginning with A Logical Magician (1994; vt A
Modern Magician 1995 UK) and A Calculated Magic (1995).See also: H.P.
LOVECRAFT.
WEINER, ANDREW (SIMON)
(1949- ) Canadian writer who began publishing sf with "Empire of the Sun"
in Again, Dangerous Visions (anth 1972) ed Harlan ELLISON, but who became
active only in the early 1980s, with 30 stories released in that decade.
About half of his work was assembled in Distant Signals, and Other Stories
(coll 1989); "Distant Signals" (1984 Twilight Zone) was televised in the
Tales from the Darkside series. Station Gehenna (fixup 1987 US)
intriguingly confronts its protagonist - sent to Gehenna to investigate a
mystery involving the station crew and the partially terraformed
planet-with an ALIEN enigma, a possible murder, and much material for
thought. Craftsmanlike and quietly substantial, AW has yet to gain an
appropriate reputation. [JC]See also: CANADA; TERRAFORMING.

WEINSTEIN, HOWARD
(1954- ) US writer whose work has been restricted to ties. Those for STAR
TREK include The Covenant of the Crown * (1981), Deep Domain * (1987) and
The Better Man* (1994); those for STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION include
Power Hungry * (1989), Exiles * (1990) and Perchance to Dream * (1991);
those for "V" include Prisoners and Pawns * (1985), Path to Conquest *
(1987) and, with A.C. CRISPIN, East Coast Crisis * (1984). [JC]
WEIRD AND OCCULT LIBRARY
UK pocketbook magazine. 3 numbered, undated issues 1960; published by
G.G. Swan, London; no ed named, but possibly Walter Swan. WOL contained a
mixture of weird, sf, mystery and adventure stories, most of which had
been sitting in Swan's drawer since WWII. Like its companion, SCIENCE
FICTION LIBRARY, it was difficult to read because of its small print.
[FHP]
WEIRD FANTASY
EC COMICS.
WEIRD SCIENCE
1. Comic. COMICS; EC COMICS.2. Film (1985). Universal. Written/dir John
Hughes, starring Anthony Michael Hall, Kelly LeBrock, Ilan Mitchell-Smith,
Bill Paxton. 94 mins. Colour.A pair of teenage nerds feed pin-up-girl
pictures to their computer, and it conjures up a sex goddess (LeBrock) who
is nice to them and gives them moral lessons (rather as one might expect a
scoutmaster to do). Finally they develop the courage to evict some bikers
from a party, and win the hearts of two more appropriate teenage girls;
the nasty older brother is turned into a monster, but the status quo is
restored in time for the parents' return after a weekend away. Starting as
sf, WS quickly turns to supernatural fantasy in which anything goes and
nothing means much; its attitude towards all the women (some undressed
against their will) is infantile. This was one of a series of sf teen
movies made at around the same time ( CINEMA), and perhaps the worst,
though occasionally Hughes's real ability to observe teenage mores shows.
[PN]
WEIRD TALES
1. US magazine, small PULP-MAGAZINE-size (9in x 6in [23cm x 15cm])
Mar-Apr 1923, BEDSHEET-size May 1923-May/July 1924, pulp-size Nov
1924-July 1953, DIGEST-size Sep 1953-Sep 1954. 279 issues Mar 1923-Sep
1954. Published by Rural Publishing Corp. Mar 1923-May/July 1924, Popular
Fiction Co. Nov 1924-Oct 1938, Short Stories Inc. Nov 1938-Sep 1954; ed
Edwin Baird Mar 1923-Apr 1924, Otis Adelbert KLINE May/July 1924,
Farnsworth WRIGHT Nov 1924-Dec 1939, Dorothy McIlwraith Jan 1940-Sep 1954.
WT was founded in 1923 by J.C. Henneberger and J.M. Lansinger; the former
retained an interest in the magazine throughout its existence. Its early
issues were undistinguished (despite the presence of writers who later
became regular contributors, such as H.P. LOVECRAFT, Seabury Quinn and
Clark Ashton SMITH) and the bumper Anniversary issue, May/July 1924, was
to have been the last. But it reappeared in Nov 1924 with a new publisher
(actually still Henneberger, but now without Lansinger) and a new editor.
It has been suggested that the controversy caused by a necrophiliac horror

story ("The Loved Dead" by C.M. Eddy [1896-1967] with H.P. Lovecraft) in
the May/July issue - attempts were made to have it removed from the
news-stands - gave WT the publicity boost it needed to survive.Under the
editorship of Wright WT developed into the "Unique Magazine" its subtitle
promised. Its stories were a mixture of sf - including some by Ray
CUMMINGS in the 1920s and a lot by Edmond HAMILTON throughout - HORROR
stories, SWORD AND SORCERY, exotic adventure, and anything else which its
title might embrace. The early issues were generally crude in appearance,
but the look of the magazine improved greatly in 1932 with the
introduction of the artists Margaret BRUNDAGE and J. Allen ST JOHN.
Brundage's covers - pastel chalks depicting women in degrees of undress
being menaced in various ways - alienated some readers, but promised a
sensuous blend of the exotic and the erotic which typified the magazine's
appeal. The 1930s were WT's heyday; in addition to Lovecraft and Smith, it
regularly featured August DERLETH, Robert E. HOWARD (including his Conan
series), David H. KELLER, Otis Adelbert KLINE, Frank Belknap LONG, C.L.
MOORE (especially with her Northwest Smith series), Jack WILLIAMSON and
others - although the most popular contributor was Seabury Quinn
(1889-1969), with an interminable series featuring the psychic detective
Jules de Grandin. Although WT printed its share of dreadful pulp fiction,
in the early 1930s it was, at its best, much superior to the largely
primitive sf pulps. However, Wright's WT never really recovered from the
almost simultaneous loss of 3 of its key contributors with the deaths of
Howard (1936) and Lovecraft (1937) and the virtual retirement of Smith.
New contributors in the late 1930s included Henry KUTTNER and artists
Hannes BOK and Virgil FINLAY.At the end of 1939 Wright, in poor health,
was replaced by Dorothy McIlwraith. The magazine continued steadily
through the 1940s - although after being monthly Nov 1924-Jan 1940, with
very few exceptions, it was now bimonthly (and would remain so) - and
featured such authors as Robert BLOCH, Ray BRADBURY, Fritz LEIBER and
Manly Wade WELLMAN with his John Thunstone stories. However, the editorial
policy was more restrictive and WT was no longer a unique magazine: other
fantasy magazines had appeared and, in the case of UNKNOWN, overshadowed
it. Nevertheless, it continued to be the only regular magazine outlet for
supernatural fiction until its death in 1954, when its publisher went
bankrupt. It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of WT in the
genres of weird fiction and Sword and Sorcery; though the emphasis was
always on fantasy and the supernatural, it published a surprising amount
of influential sf, and many sf writers published their early work in its
pages. WT is perhaps rivalled only by ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION in terms
of the number of stories of lasting interest which it produced.2.
Subsequent series. Various nostalgic attempts, mostly unsuccessful, have
been made to revive WT-or at least its title. The first was in 1973, with
4 pulp-size issues, Summer 1973-Summer 1974, ed Sam MOSKOWITZ, published
by Weird Tales, Los Angeles (Leo MARGULIES), and continuing the original
WT numeration (Vol 47, #1-#4).The rights to WT were bought by Robert E.
WEINBERG, who eventually formed Weird Tales Limited to protect and license
the name. He published a nostalgic anthology in homage to WT, WT50 (anth
1974), ed Weinberg, some of whose contents re-appeared in The Weird Tales
Story (anth 1977), which he ed and partly wrote.The 3rd WT series was
published as a paperback quarterly ed Lin CARTER, published by Zebra

Books, who leased the rights from Weinberg. There were 4 issues: Weird
Tales 1 (anth 1980), #2 (anth 1980), #3 (anth 1981) and #4 (anth 1983).
Then came the 4th, confusing, series from a small press, the Bellerophon
Network, owned by Californian publisher Brian Forbes. Advance publicity
suggested alternately that the editor would be Gil Lamont or Forrest J.
ACKERMAN, but in the event there were only 2, not very remarkable issues,
both ed Gordon M.D. Garb, these being marked Fall 1984 (appeared 1985) and
Winter 1985 (appeared 1986); they were vol 49, #1 and #2. The superior #1
included fiction by Harlan ELLISON, Stephen KING and R.A. LAFFERTY.The 5th
series, ed George H. SCITHERS, Darrell SCHWEITZER and John Gregory
BETANCOURT, published by another small press, the Terminus Publishing Co.,
Philadelphia, has been by far the most successful relaunch. Its numeration
began with #290 (which counted in the 10 abortive relaunch issues which
had preceded it); the pulp format neatly duplicated the two-column
appearance of the original WT. It contains weird fiction and
sword-and-sorcery, but little if any sf. From #300 (1991) it has been ed
Schweitzer alone. It changed to a more conventional small-bedsheet format
and design with the Winter 1992/93 issue, #305. There were only two copies
a year for each of 1992, 1993 and 1994, the second of 1994 being retitled
to Worlds of Fantasy and Horror, vol 1, no 1, Summer 1994, when the
license to the WT title expired. The latter - effectively a new magazine
despite the very similar content - was announced as quarterly, and #2,
Spring 1995, has appeared. It is still ed Schweitzer. The last WT proper
was #308, Spring 1994. 3. Reprint editions and anthologies. 3 UK edns were
published at various times. In the first half of 1942 Swan Publishers
produced 3 unnumbered issues. 1 more came in Nov 1946 from Merritt.
Finally, Thorpe & Porter published 28 issues, numbered #1-#23, and then
vol 1 #1-#5 Nov 1949-July 1954. There were 2 Canadian reprint editions:
1935-6 (vol 25 #6-vol 28 #1), 14 issues, and 1942-51, 58 issues.WT has
been exhaustively mined for anthologies, and many of its contributors from
the 1930s have gone on to new heights of popularity with paperback
reprints of their stories. The long-running Not at Night series of horror
anthologies (1925-34) ed Christine Campbell Thomson (1897-1985) drew
largely on WT stories, sometimes publishing them even before they appeared
in the magazine. Weird Tales (anth 1976) ed Peter Haining (1940- )
reprints a selection in facsimile. Other reprint anthologies were Peter
Haining's Weird Tales: A Facsimile of the World's Most Famous Fantasy
Magazine (anth 1976), Mike ASHLEY's Weird Legacies (anth 1977 UK) , Marvin
KAYE's Weird Tales: The Magazine That Never Dies (anth 1988); and 4
anthologies ed Leo Margulies: The Unexpected (anth 1961), The Ghoul
Keepers (anth 1961), Weird Tales (anth 1964) and Worlds of Weird (anth
1965), the latter 2 being ghost-edited by Sam Moskowitz. Many other
anthologies drew a large part of their content from WT, notably The Other
Worlds (anth 1941) ed Phil STONG, 11 of its 25 stories being from WT.Major
index sources are Index to the Weird Fiction Magazines: Index by Title
(1962 NZ) and Index to the Weird Fiction Magazines: Index by Author (1964
NZ) by T.G.L. Cockcroft, and Monthly Terrors: An Index to the Weird
Fantasy Magazines Published in the United States and Great Britain (1985)
by Frank H. Parnell with Mike ASHLEY. [MJE/PN]See also: GOTHIC SF; SF
MAGAZINES.

WEIRD WORLD
UK magazine, PULP-MAGAZINE size. 2 undated issues, 1955-6, published by
Gannet Press, Birkenhead; ed anon. WW printed a mixture of sf and fantasy,
including some reprints. The fiction was of fairly low quality. The
advertised companion magazine, Fantastic World, never appeared. [FHP]
WEI SHILI
[r] CHINESE SF.
WEISINGER, MORT(IMER)
(1915-1978) US editor, an active sf fan from the early 1930s, editing
Fantasy Magazine, the leading FANZINE of its day; he also sold a few sf
stories, starting with "The Price of Peace" for Wonder Stories in 1933. In
1936 he became editor of THRILLING WONDER STORIES; later he also ed its
companion magazines STARTLING STORIES and CAPTAIN FUTURE, the latter being
probably his own conception. Under his direction TWS was openly juvenile
in appeal, its garish covers giving rise to the term "bug-eyed monsters" (
BEMS). In 1941 he became editor of the COMIC book SUPERMAN, and
subsequently editorial director of the whole range of National Periodical
Publications ( DC COMICS), to which he recruited many sf writers,
including Alfred BESTER, Otto Binder ( Eando BINDER), H.L. GOLD, Edmond
HAMILTON and Manly Wade WELLMAN. His career is outlined in "Superman" in
Seekers of Tomorrow (1965) by Sam MOSKOWITZ. [MJE]
WEISS, JAN
[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
WELBY, PHILIP
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
WELCH, L(UDERNE) EDGAR
(1855-? ) UK writer, in the USA for at least 10 years until 1905, after
which nothing is known of LEW, who wrote under pseudonyms. Most of his
work was published as by Grip, including his first 2 sf novels, The
Monster Municipality, or Gog and Magog Reformed (1882), a DYSTOPIAN
prediction that socialist reforms will torture London in 1885, and How
John Bull Lost London, or The Capture of the Channel Tunnel (1882), one of
the earlier future- WAR novels - if not the earliest - to warn against a
tunnel connecting the UK to France ( TRANSPORTATION). LEW is also cited as
the author of Politics and Life in Mars: A Story of a Neighbouring Planet
(1883), anon, in which advanced MARS is contrasted with backward Earth though Darko SUVIN, in Victorian Science Fiction in the UK (1983), doubts
the ascription because the opinions expressed are UTOPIAN. As J. Drew Gay,
LEW was definitely responsible for The Mystery of the Shroud: A Tale of
Socialism (1887), in which a fog gives a socialist secret society the
chance to conquer England, but the chance is muffed. [JC]
WELCH, ROWLAND
L.P. DAVIES.
WELCOME TO BLOOD CITY
Film (1977). An EMI/Len Herberman Production. Dir Peter Sasdy, starring
Jack Palance, Keir Dullea, Samantha Eggar, Barry Morse. Screenplay Stephen
Schneck, Michael Winder. 96 mins. Colour.This UK/Canadian coproduction is

one of the earlier movies to take VIRTUAL REALITY as its theme (but see
also WELT AM DRAHT [1973]). A group of amnesiacs find themselves in a
savage township of the Old West, where social advancement is by murder.
They do not realize that they are inhabiting a computer-generated reality,
one of whose supervisors, a woman (Eggar), develops an emotional fixation
on a new conscript (Dullea), and interferes illegitimately with the
"game". This game is designed to find people with high survival quotients,
who will then, in the real world, lead guerrilla units in an unspecified
ongoing war. Flat direction and poor performances fail to make anything
much of the intriguing premise, though the end is touching. [PN]
WELCOME TO OBLIVION
Roger CORMAN.
WELDON, FAY
(1931- ) UK writer. Almost all of her work has - with passion, anger and
a highly charged creative ambiguity - dealt with issues and situations
generally conceived of as FEMINIST. Much of her later fiction verges on
the supernatural or edges into the future, or both. In Puffball (1980) a
pregnant woman is influenced by Glastonbury Tor. In The Rules of Life
(1987 chap), set in AD2004, a dead woman communicates her memoirs through
a computer console. In The Cloning of Joanna May (1989) a man has his wife
"cloned" ("not cloning in the modern sense, but parthenogenesis plus
implantation", the book explains) so that he can enjoy various younger
versions of her. The novel was dramatized as a tv miniseries, The CLONING
OF JOANNA MAY (1991). [JC]Other works: Female Friends (1975); Watching Me,
Watching You (coll 1979); Wolf the Mechanical Dog (1988 chap), an uneasy
sf fable for children.See also: CLONES; WOMEN SF WRITERS.
WELLEN, EDWARD (PAUL)
(1919- ) US writer, almost exclusively of short stories, mostly in the
mystery genre. His first sf was a "non-fact article", "Origins of Galactic
Slang" for Gal in 1952, and was followed by a sequence of Galactic Origins
spoofs. His actual fiction was concise, literate, cynical and frequently
anthologized, and is overdue for collection. In his only novel, Hijack
(1971), told with a delicate balance of spoof and splatter, the Mafia
learns that the US Government is secretly preparing to escape the Solar
System because the Sun is going nova, and muscles in on the action. In the
end, a representative sample of humanity heads toward the stars. [JC]See
also: MESSIAHS.
WELLES, ORSON
[r] The TRANSFORMERS - THE MOVIE ; WAR OF THE WORLDS.
WELLMAN, MANLY WADE
(1903-1986) US writer, born in Angola (though his family returned to the
USA when he was 6), prolific in both FANTASY and sf, though far more
significant for works in the former; he also wrote Westerns - though less
frequently than his brother, Paul I. Wellman (1898-1966) - and crime
fiction. MWW began publishing with a fantasy, "Back to the Beast" for
Weird Tales in 1927; his first sf story proper, "When Planets Clashed",
appeared (in Wonder Stories Quarterly) as late as 1931. Both were under
his own name, though much of his early work appeared under pseudonyms,

including Levi Crow, Gans T. Field and the house name Gabriel BARCLAY.
Much of his early work appeared in THRILLING WONDER STORIES and STARTLING
STORIES, and was suitably vigorous and high-coloured. His first book was a
short SPACE OPERA, The Invading Asteroid (1932 chap). Giants from Eternity
(1939 Startling Stories; 1959) featured the rebirth of medical geniuses
from Earth's past to confront a future menace; Sojarr of Titan (1941
Startling Stories; 1949) was a Tarzan-derived tale set in space; and the
Hok series, stories published 1939-41 in AMZ and 1942 in Fantastic
Adventures, were sf adventures set in various early mythic
civilizations.Of greatest sf interest were novels like Twice in Time (1940
Startling Stories; cut 1957; with text restored and 1 story added, rev as
coll 1988), an effective TIME-TRAVEL tale featuring a vivid portrayal of
Leonardo da Vinci's Florence, and Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds
(fixup 1975), with his son Wade Wellman, which intricately involves the
detective with the Martian INVASION featured in H.G. WELLS's novel. But in
general MWW's sf almost completely lacks the folkloric tone and cunning
quietude of his best work.MWW's fantasy ranged from early weird stories
derivative of H.P. LOVECRAFT through tales of the occult, tales that
evoked Native American legend, and on to the sequences noted below. Much
of his miscellaneous work was assembled in Worse Things Waiting (coll
1973), a large volume which helped inspire the growth of interest in his
work over the last years of his life. More centrally, the Judge Pursuivant
series (in Weird Tales 1938-41), as by Gans T. Field, and the John
Thunstone series - some of the original stories, published in Weird Tales
from 1938, being originally published as by Gans T. Field - were assembled
in Lonely Vigils (coll 1981). What Dreams May Come (1983) and The School
of Darkness (1985) continued to feature Thunstone. Both Thunstone and
Pursuivant are occult detectives, and the range of their investigations is
compendious, encompassing most of MWW's general periods and venues of
interest, from the US Civil War to the rural USA of the 20th century. From
1951 - with stories appearing frequently in The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND
SCIENCE FICTION , which had taken over from Weird Tales as his main
journal - much of MWW's energy was devoted to his most famous sequence,
the stories and novels set in the Appalachian regions of North Carolina
and following the career of witchcraft-fighter and minstrel Silver John or
John the Balladeer: Who Fears the Devil? (coll of linked stories 1963; exp
vt John the Balladeer 1988), The Old Gods Waken (1979), After Dark (1980),
The Lost and the Lurking (1981), The Hanging Stones (1982) and The Voice
of the Mountain (1985). Along with the stories assembled in The Valley so
Low: Southern Mountain Tales (coll 1987), the series remains his most
significant achievement. [JC]Other works: Romance in Black (1938 Weird
Tales as "The Black Drama"; 1946 chap UK) as by Gans T. Field; The Beasts
from Beyond (1944 Startling Stories as "Strangers on the Heights"; 1950
UK); The Devil's Planet (1942 Startling Stories; 1951 UK); The Dark
Destroyers (1938 ASF as "Nuisance Value"; 1959; cut 1960 dos); Island in
the Sky (1941 TWS; 1961); a CAPTAIN FUTURE novel, The Solar Invasion *
(1946 Startling Stories; 1968); The Beyonders (1977); Cahena: A Dream of
the Past (1986).About the author: Manly Wade Wellman, the Gentleman from
Chapel Hill: A Memorial Working Bibliography (1986 chap) by Gordon BENSON
Jr.See also: ARTS; COMICS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY
AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MYTHOLOGY; PASTORAL; REINCARNATION; SUPERMAN

[character]; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
WELLS, ANGUS
(1943- ) UK writer, previously a paperbacks editor. Most of his novels
have been Westerns as by Charles L. Pike, James A. Muir and other names.
As Ian Evans, he wrote Starmaidens * (1977), an sf tv tie. Under the house
name Richard Kirk, which he shared with Robert P. HOLDSTOCK, he
contributed to the Raven fantasy series Swordsmistress of Chaos (1978)
with Holdstock and, solo, The Frozen Gods (1978) and A Time of Dying
(1979). As AW he has written the Book of the Kingdoms fantasy sequence Wrath of Ashar (1988), The Usurper (1989) and The Way Beneath (1989) - and
begun a second sequence, the Godwars books, with Forbidden Magic (1991)
and Dark Magic (1992). Lords of the Sky (1994) is also fantasy. In 1973-5
AW ed a series of collections assembling for UK readers the "best of"
various sf authors, including The Best of Isaac Asimov (anth in 2 vols
1973), The Best of Arthur C. Clarke (anth in 2 vols 1973), The Best of
Robert A. Heinlein (anth in 2 vols 1973), The Best of John Wyndham (anth
1973), THE BEST OF FRITZ LEIBER (anth 1974), The Best of A.E. van Vogt
(anth 1974), The Best of Frank Herbert (anth 1975) and The Best of
Clifford D. Simak (anth 1975). [JC]
WELLS, BASIL (EUGENE)
(1912- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Rebirth of Man" for
Super Science Stories in 1940, and whose generally unremarkable work is
assembled in Planets of Adventure (coll 1949) and Doorways to Space (coll
1951). He also wrote 4 tales as by Gene Ellerman. He became comparatively
inactive after about 1957. [JC]
WELLS, CATHERINE
Working name of US writer Catherine Jean Wells Dimenstein (1952- ) whose
sf, a tightly-woven sequence set aeons hence in an ecologically devastated
Earth,comprises The Earth Is All (1991), Children of theEarth(1992) and
Earth Saver(1993). In the first volume an embittered high-tech woman falls
in love with a man fromone of the tribes - CW bases them on Native
American models - whose lifestyle has placated thesentient being of Mother
Earth,while simultaneously young Coconico must defend this world
frominterference from the stars. The second and third volumes are
fantasy-like in the telling, asCoconico, cast centuries forward, battles
to return to his time and his love; back in time, however,he has become a
legend. Stories are interwoven.In the end, a return in time and to proper
living isconsummated. [JC]
WELLS, H(ERBERT) G(EORGE)
(1866-1946) UK writer. At the time of HGW's birth his father was a
shopkeeper - having earlier been a gardener and cricketer - but the
business failed and HGW's mother was forced to go back into domestic
service as a housekeeper. Her desire to elevate the family to middle-class
status resulted in "Bertie" being apprenticed to a draper, like his
brothers before him, but in 1883 he become a teacher/pupil at Midhurst
Grammar School. He obtained a scholarship to the Normal School of Science
in London and studied biology there under T.H. Huxley (1825-1895), a
vociferous proponent of Darwin's theory of EVOLUTION and an outspoken

scientific humanist, who made a deep impression on him. HGW resumed
teaching, took his degree externally, and wrote 2 textbooks (published
1893) while working for the University Correspondence College. He dabbled
in scientific journalism, publishing the essay "The Rediscovery of the
Unique" in 1891 and beginning to sell articles and short stories regularly
in 1893.The most ambitious and important of his early articles was "The
Man of the Year Million" (1893), which boldly describes Man as HGW thought
natural selection would ultimately reshape him: a creature with a huge
head and eyes, delicate hands and a much reduced body, permanently
immersed in nutrient fluids, having been forced to retreat beneath the
Earth's surface after the cooling of the SUN. In other articles HGW wrote
about "The Advent of the Flying Man", "An Excursion to the Sun" (a poetic
cosmic vision of solar storms and electromagnetic tides), "The Living
Things that May Be" (on the possibility of silicon-based life) and "The
Extinction of Man". A good deal of this speculative nonfiction is
reprinted in H.G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction
(coll 1975) ed Robert M. PHILMUS and David Y. Hughes. His early short
stories are less adventurous, mostly featuring encounters between men and
strange lifeforms, as in "The Stolen Bacillus" (1894), "In the Avu
Observatory" (1894), "The Flowering of the Strange Orchid" (1894) and
"Aepyornis Island" (1894).The Chronic Argonauts, a series of essays
written for his amateur publication The Science Schools Journal in 1888,
became the basis for HGW's first major fiction, The Time Machine: An
Invention (1895 US; rev 1895 UK), which maps the evolutionary future of
life on Earth. The human species subdivides into the gentle Eloi and the
bestial Morlocks; both ultimately become extinct, while life as we know it
slowly decays as the Sun cools. His interest in social reform and
socialist political ideas is reflected in the fantasy The Wonderful Visit
(1895), in which an angel displaced from the Land of Dreams casts a
critical eye upon late-Victorian mores and folkways. The central themes of
these novels - the implications of Darwin's evolutionary theory and the
desire to oppose and eradicate the injustices and hypocrisies of
contemporary society - run through all HGW's work. In the
quasi-allegorical The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) he developed ideas from
an essay, "The Limits of Plasticity", into the story of a hubristic
SCIENTIST populating a remote ISLAND with beasts which have been
surgically reshaped as men and whose veneer of civilization exemplified by
their chanted "laws"-proves thin. "A Story of the Stone Age" (1897) is a
notable attempt to imagine the circumstances which allowed Man to evolve
from bestial ancestors. His short stories grew bolder in conception, as
exemplified by the visionary fantasy "Under the Knife" (1896), the cosmicDISASTER story "The Star" (1897) and the cautionary parable "The Man who
Could Work Miracles" (1898), later filmed (see below). The novella A Story
of the Days to Come (1899 Pall Mall Magazine; 1976) is an elaborate study
of future society, imagining a technologically developed world where
poverty and misery are needlessly maintained by class divisions, while The
Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance (1897) is a second classic study of
scientific hubris brought to destruction.In THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898;
with epilogue cut 1898 US) HGW introduced ALIENS into the role which would
become a CLICHA: monstrous invaders of Earth, competitors in a cosmic
struggle for existence ( WAR OF THE WORLDS for radio, film and tv

versions). When the Sleeper Wakes (1899; rev vt The Sleeper Awakes 1910)
is a robust futuristic romance of socialist revolution, whose hero awakes
from SUSPENDED ANIMATION ( SLEEPER AWAKES) to play a quasi-messianic (
MESSIAHS) role. (HGW was never able to believe in proletarian socialism,
assuming that social justice would have to be imposed from above by a
benevolent intelligentsia.) In THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901 US) he
carried forward the great tradition of FANTASTIC VOYAGES to the MOON, and
described the hyperorganized DYSTOPIAN society of the Selenites. HGW's sf
works of this period were labelled "scientific romances" by reviewers, and
HGW spoke of them as such in early interviews, although he later chose to
lump them together with such fantasies as The Sea Lady (1902) as
"fantastic and imaginative romances". Despite this apparent disowning of
their distinctive qualities, Wells's early SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES became the
archetypal examples of a distinctive UK tradition of futuristic and
speculative fiction.Wells's early realistic novels drew heavily upon his
own experiences to deal with the pretensions and predicaments of the
aspiring lower-middle class. The Wheels of Chance (1896) is light comedy
in a vein carried forward by the more successful Kipps (1905), The History
of Mr Polly (1910) and Bealby: A Holiday (1915), but HGW wanted to make
his name as a serious novelist, and attempted to do so with Love and Mr
Lewisham (1900). He remained an ardent champion of the novel of ideas
versus the novel of character, and he set out to tackle large themes and
to attack issues of contemporary social concern. His most successful
effort along these lines was Tono-Bungay (1909), followed by Ann Veronica
(1909), a polemic on the situation of women in society, and the political
novel The New Machiavelli (1910 US). The longest and most pretentious of
these novels is The World of William Clissold (3 vols 1926). Some of the
later novels of ideas apply fantastic twists for dramatic purposes
although remaining basically realistic; the most effective is that
deployed in The Dream (1924).In his essays HGW began to direct more effort
to careful and rational PREDICTION, and became a founder of FUTUROLOGY
with the series of essays collected as Anticipations of the Reaction of
Mechanical and Human Progress upon Human Life and Thought (coll 1901). He
tried to justify the method of this work in a lecture, published as The
Discovery of the Future (1902 chap), which marked a turning-point in his
thought and work; from then on he abandoned the wide-ranging, exploratory
and unashamedly whimsical imagination which had produced his early
scientific romances and focused on the probable development of future
HISTORY and the reforms necessary to create a better world. His
futurological essays brought him to the attention of Sidney (1859-1947)
and Beatrice (1858-1943) Webb, and he joined the Fabian Society in 1903.
His subsequent career as a social crusader went through many phases. He
tried to assume command of the Fabian Society in 1906, but failed and
withdrew in 1908. During WWI he was active in the League of Nations
movement. Between the Wars he visited many countries, addressing the
Petrograd Soviet, the Sorbonne and the Reichstag. In 1934 he had
discussions with both Stalin and Roosevelt, trying to recruit them to his
world-saving schemes. His real influence, however, remained negligible,
and he despaired of the whole business when the world became embroiled in
global war for a second time.In his UTOPIAN novels A Modern Utopia (1905)
and Men Like Gods (1923) HGW described technologically sophisticated

societies governed by socialist principles, and in his other work he tried
to describe the new people who might help to bring such worlds into being.
In The Food of the Gods, and How it Came to Earth (1904) the new race is
produced by a super-nutrient which enlarges both body and mind. In In the
Days of the Comet (1906) the wondrous change in human personality is
brought about by the gases in a comet's tail, through which the Earth is
fortunate enough to pass. The most interesting of HGW's later scientific
romances, however, are those which attempt to apply a more rigorous logic
to the imagining of future WAR. In "The Land Ironclads" (1903) he
anticipated the use of tanks, and in The War in the Air, and Particularly
How Mr Bert Smallways Fared while it Lasted (1908) he envisaged colossal
destruction wrought by aerial bombing. In The World Set Free: A Story of
Mankind (1914) similar destruction is wrought by atomic bombs whose "chain
reactions" cause them to explode repeatedly, and the story embodies HGW'S
growing conviction that a new and better world could be built only once
the existing social order had been torn down. When WWI began in actuality
HGW was for this reason initially enthusiastic - a point of view expressed
in what remained for some time his most famous novel, Mr Britling Sees it
Through (1916) - but events after 1918 failed to live up to his hopes. He
clung nevertheless to the idea that some such pattern of events would come
about, as displayed in the last and most comprehensive of his speculative
histories of the future, The Shape of Things to Come (1933), based on his
last major summary of his utopian philosophy, The Work, Wealth and
Happiness of Mankind (2 vols 1931 US). The Shape of Things to Come became
the basis of HGW's script for the film THINGS TO COME (1935; book version
1935). He also scripted the 1936 film The Man who Could Work Miracles
(script published 1936 chap; not to be confused with the book publication
of the original story); both scripts were assembled as Two Film Stories:
Things to Come; Man who Could Work Miracles (omni 1940). His other
filmscripts, including one for The King who Was a King (1929), never
reached the screen.HGW became increasingly impatient of the follies of his
fellow men, and dubbed the post-1918 world the "Age of Frustration" - a
notion eccentrically elaborated in The Anatomy of Frustration: A Modern
Synthesis (1936). This attitude underlies an extensive series of
"sarcastic fantasies" begun with The Undying Fire (1919), an allegory in
which the Book of Job is re-enacted in contemporary England, with a dying
Wellsian hero "comforted" by various social philosophers. That book
reflected a brief reinvestment in religious faith which HGW explained in
God the Invisible King (1917) and dramatized in The Soul of a Bishop
(1917). In Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928) a shipwrecked man
tries to convert superstitious savages to the ways of common sense but
cannot prevail against their cruel and stupid tribal customs; in the end
he discovers that he has been delirious, and that Rampole Island is New
York. In The Autocracy of Mr Parham (1930) an inoffensive individual
becomes possessed by a "master spirit" which drives him to seek
charismatic political power as "Lord Paramount". In The Croquet Player: A
Story (1936 chap) a village is haunted by the brutal spectres of Man's
evolutionary heritage, but the allegory is lost on the socialite of the
book's title. In The Camford Visitation (1937 chap) the routines of a
university are upset by the interventions of a mocking disembodied voice.
In All Aboard for Ararat (1940) God asks a new Noah to build a second Ark;

Noah agrees, provided that this time God will be content to remain a
passenger while Man takes charge of his own destiny. In the gentler Star
Begotten: A Biological Fantasia (1937) cosmic rays emanating from Mars may
or may not be causing a mutation in the human spirit comparable to that
wrought by the miraculous comet of In the Days of the Comet. The Holy
Terror (1939) is a painstaking study of the psychological development of a
modern dictator based on the careers of Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler.Most
of HGW's short stories were initially reprinted in 5 collections: The
Stolen Bacillus, and Other Incidents (coll 1895), The Plattner Story, and
Others (coll 1897), Tales of Space and Time (coll dated 1900 but 1899),
Twelve Stories and a Dream (coll 1903) and The Country of the Blind, and
Other Stories (coll 1911). The contents of these were reprinted in The
Short Stories of H.G. Wells (coll 1927; vt The Famous Short Stories of
H.G. Wells 1938 US; vt The Complete Short Stories of H.G. Wells 1965 UK)
along with THE TIME MACHINE as well as 3 stories which had previously
appeared in the US collection Thirty Strange Stories (coll 1897 US) and 4
others, including the prehistoric fantasy "The Grisly Folk" (1921) and an
apocalyptic fantasy, "The Story of the Last Trump", from the non-sf book
Boon (coll 1915 as Reginald Bliss; 1920 as by HGW). The short stories not
included in this omnibus were reprinted in The Man with the Nose and Other
Uncollected Short Stories (coll 1984) along with the script for an unmade
film. HGW's most notable long scientific romances were collected in The
Scientific Romances of H.G. Wells (omni 1933; cut vt Seven Famous Novels
1934 US), re-edited as Seven Science Fiction Novels (omni 1950 US).HGW
possessed a prolific imagination which remained solidly based in
biological and historical possibility, and his best works are generally
regarded as exemplary of what sf should aspire to do and be. His other
ambitions persuaded him to put his bold and vigorous imagination into a
straitjacket for the bulk of his career, but he nevertheless remained the
founding father and presiding genius of UK scientific romance, and he was
a significant influence on the development of US sf. He never managed to
resolve the imaginative conflict between his utopian dreams and his
interpretation of Darwinian "natural law", as is evidenced by the
despairing passages of his essay Mind at the End of its Tether (1945
chap), which opines that mankind may be doomed because people cannot and
will not adapt themselves to a sustainable way of life. He seems to have
imagined his own career as an analogue of the situation of the hero of The
Undying Fire or that of the luckless sighted man in The Country of the
Blind (1904 The Strand; 1915 chap US; rev plus original text 1939 chap UK)
- although he also portrayed himself ironically as a deluded idealist in
Christina Alberta's Father (1925) and seemed quite unable to decide how to
portray himself in his quirky Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and
Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866) (2 vols 1934), though
its continuation, H.G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in
Autobiography (1984) - not published during his lifetime because of its
sexual content, and because it mentioned living persons-did something to
round out the picture. HGW slightly revised many of his works for the
26-vol Atlantic edition of The Works of H.G. Wells (1924-7 US). New and
definitive editions of the most famous scientific romances - current
editions of which reveal many textual variations - were in active
preparation from various houses before revision of international copyright

conventions extended the period of protection beyond 50 years after the
author's death; editions which have, all the same appeared, includeThe
Time Machine/The War of the Worlds: A Critical Edition (omni 1977) ed
Frank D. McConnell which presents some valuable information, though the
texts themselves are corrupt; The Definitive Time Machine: A Critical
Edition (1987) ed Harry M. Geduld, which is more reliable; THE ISLAND OF
DR. MOREAU (1993), a variorum text (eccentrically based on the US version
rather than the UK) ed Robert M. PHILMUS; A Critical Edition of The War of
the Worlds (1993) ed David Y. Hughes and Harry M. Geduld.Films based on
HGW's work include ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932), The INVISIBLE MAN (1933),
The WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953), The TIME MACHINE (1960), The FIRST MEN IN
THE MOON (1964), The ISLAND OF DR MOREAU (1977) and, very loosely, FOOD OF
THE GODS (1976). Notable RECURSIVE SF in which HGW is a character includes
The Space Machine (1976) by Christopher PRIEST, Time After Time (1976) by
Karl Alexander (filmed as TIME AFTER TIME [1979]), and "The Inheritors of
Earth" (1990) by Eric BROWN. [BS]Other collections: Many further
collections are merely re-sorts of material first or most reliably
published in the collections listed above. Useful collections include 28
Science Fiction Stories (coll 1952), Selected Short Stories (coll 1958)
and The Best Science Fiction Stories of H.G. Wells (coll 1966).Other
novels: The Research Magnificent (1915); The Bulpington of Blup (1932);
You Can't Be Too Careful: A Sample of Life 1901-1951 (1941).Nonfiction:
Mankind in the Making (1903); New Worlds for Old (1908); The War that Will
End War (1914); The Outline of History (1920); The Salvaging of
Civilization (1921); A Short History of the World (1922); The Way the
World is Going: Guesses and Forecasts of the World Ahead (1928); The Open
Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution (1928); The Science of Life
(1930) with Julian Huxley and G.P. Wells; World Brain (1938); The Fate of
Homo Sapiens (1939); The New World Order (1939); Phoenix (1942); The
Conquest of Time (1942); The Happy Turning: A Dream of Life (1945 chap);
Journalism and Prophecy 1893-1946 (coll 1964; cut 1965) ed W. Warren
WAGAR.About the author: Of the numerous critical works on HGW, those of
interest include: The Early H.G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances
(1961) by Bernard Bergonzi; H.G. Wells and the World State (1961) by W.W.
WAGAR; H.G. Wells: A Collection of Critical Essays (anth 1976) ed
Bergonzi; The Logic of Fantasy: H.G. Wells and Science Fiction (1982) by
John Huntington; The Life and Thought of H.G. Wells (1963 Russia; trans
1966) by Julius KAGARLITSKI; H.G. Wells and the Culminating Ape:
Biological Themes and Imaginative Obsessions (1982) by Peter Kemp; The
Science Fiction of H.G. Wells (1981) by Frank McConnell; The Time
Traveller: The Life of H.G. Wells (1973) by Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie;
H.G. Wells (1970) by Patrick PARRINDER; H.G. Wells: The Critical Heritage
(anth 1972) ed Parrinder; H.G. Wells: Critic of Progress (1973) by Jack
WILLIAMSON; H.G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction (anth 1977) ed Darko
SUVIN and Robert M. PHILMUS; Aspects of a Life (1984) by Anthony WEST,
HGW's son by Rebecca West (1892-1983); H.G. Wells: A Comprehensive
Bibliography (latest edn 1986) published by the H.G. Wells Society; H.G.
Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography (1986) by David C. Smith; H.G.
Wells under Revision: Proceedings of the H.G. Wells International
Symposium, London, July, 1986 (anth 1990) ed Parrinder and Christopher
Rolfe.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; ANTIGRAVITY; ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF;

APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD); AUTOMATION; BIOLOGY; CITIES;
CLUB
STORY; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; COMICS; COSMOLOGY; CRITICAL AND
HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DEATH RAYS; DEVOLUTION; DIME-NOVEL SF;
DIMENSIONS; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; ECONOMICS; EDISONADE; END OF THE
WORLD; ENTROPY; ESP; FAR FUTURE; FRANCE; GAMES AND TOYS; GENETIC
ENGINEERING; GREAT AND SMALL; HEROES; HISTORY OF SF; HIVE-MINDS; HUMOUR;
IMAGINARY SCIENCE; INVASION; INVISIBILITY; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS;
MACHINES;
MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF; MARS; MATHEMATICS; MEDICINE; MONEY;
MONSTERS;
MUSIC; MUTANTS; NEAR FUTURE; NUCLEAR POWER; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM;
ORIGIN
OF MAN; PARALLEL WORLDS; PERCEPTION; PHYSICS; POLITICS; POLLUTION; POWER
SOURCES; PROTO SCIENCE FICTION; PULP MAGAZINES; RADIO; RELIGION; ROCKETS;
RUSSIA; SATIRE; SCIENTIFIC ERRORS; SEX; SOCIAL DARWINISM; SOCIOLOGY;
SPACESHIPS; SUPERMAN; TECHNOLOGY; THEATRE; TIME TRAVEL;
TRANSPORTATION;
WAR OF THE WORLDS; WEAPONS.
WELLS, HUBERT GEORGE
Forrest J. ACKERMAN.
WELLS, JOHN JAY
Juanita COULSON.
WELLS, (FRANK CHARLES) ROBERT
(1929- ) UK writer who began publishing sf with "The Machine that was
Lovely" for the Observer in 1954, and who later concentrated on novels,
beginning with The Parasaurians (1969 US), in which play-safaris against
ROBOT dinosaurs turn into a more serious threat to the hero. The
Spacejacks (1975 US) is a traditional SPACE OPERA. [JC]Other works: Candle
in the Sun (1971); Right-Handed Wilderness (1973 US).
WELLS, RONNIE
[r] LATIN AMERICA.
WELT AM DRAHT
(vt World on a Wire) Made-for-tv film (1973). ARD. Dir Rainer Werner
Fassbinder (1946-1982), starring Klaus Lowitsch, Barbara Valentin, Mascha
Rabben, Karl Heinz Vosgerau, Wolfgang Schenk, Gunter Lamprecht. Screenplay
Fritz Muller-Scherz, Fassbinder, based on Counterfeit World (1964 UK; vt
Simulacron-3 US) by Daniel F. GALOUYE. Originally broadcast in 2 parts,
each 105 mins. Colour.Fassbinder was perhaps the most brilliant German
film director of the 1970s; this was his only sf film. For the purpose of
exploring new technologies, the Institute for Cybernetics and Futures
Investigation has its giant COMPUTER, Simulacron, create a possible future
within its own circuits: a VIRTUAL REALITY whose "human" occupants - in
reality, programs-are unaware of their status and can be deleted if they
behave wrongly. In the real world, in the Institute itself, mysterious
incidents occur, and the protagonist, Stiller, realizes that his world too
is a simulation controlled from a higher level, and that to learn this
truth is fatal. His lover turns out to be a projection from the higher

level, a level in which a Stiller-equivalent is the ultimate manipulator
pulling wires. Stiller succeeds in taking the place of his higher-level
counterpart.In Galouye's novel our reality is the middle level, whereas in
the film our world is the top level, but that does not diminish the film's
threatening effect, for an atmosphere is built up of exchangeability on
all levels, so that reality is dissolved and no place is left for
security. Fassbinder made the most of his low tv budget by exploiting real
locations in modern offices, using glass, concrete and neon lights
alarmingly to create a sense of the artificiality of the real. [HJA]
WENDELESSEN
[s] Charles DE LINT.
WENTWORTH, ROBERT
[s] Edmond HAMILTON.
WEREWOLVES
SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.
WERFEL, FRANZ
(1890-1945) Austrian poet, playwright and novelist, born in Prague, known
mainly for his sentimental novels, though he achieved his early fame as an
Expressionist poet and dramatist. After escaping the Nazis via Spain as
WWII loomed, he went to California, where he wrote Stern der Ungeborenen
(1946 Austria; trans Gustave O. Arlt as Star of the Unborn 1946 US) before
dying in US exile. This long, contemplative UTOPIA depicts a
philosophically complex FAR-FUTURE Earth through the eyes of a narrator
(named Franz Werfel) who is guided through the 3 parts of the novel by a
mentor explicitly associated with DANTE ALIGHIERI's Vergil. This
narrator's response to the depopulated, deeply alienating, surreal world
about him seems cunningly to mirror the exiled author's real-world
experiences of California. The melancholy underlying the story, and its
long effortless perspectives of time and thought, give the book a clarity
and reserve reminiscent of the work of Olaf STAPLEDON. [JC]See also: ARTS;
AUSTRIA; GERMANY; RELIGION.
WERPER, BARTON
House name used by US writers Peter T. Scott (? - ) and Peg O'Neill Scott
(? - ) for their unauthorized NewTarzan sequence, each working solo, with
Peter Scott writing all but the 3rd vol: Tarzan and the Silver Globe
(1964), Tarzan and the Cave City (1964), Tarzan and the Snake People
(1964), Tarzan and the Abominable Snowman (1965) and Tarzan and the Winged
Invaders (1965). It enjoyed a short shelf-life; the Edgar Rice BURROUGHS
estate successfully sued the publisher, and the books were withdrawn in
1966. Peg O'Neill Scott, as Scott O'Neill, has written Martian Sexpot
(1963). [JC]
WESSEL, JOHAN (or JOHN) HERMANN
[r] DENMARK; SCANDINAVIA.
WESSEX, MARTYN
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
WESSO, H.W.

Working name of German-born US illustrator Hans Waldemar Wessolowski
(1894-? ). HWW was educated at the Berlin Royal Academy. He emigrated to
the USA in 1914, and soon found work as an illustrator (both covers and
interiors) for a variety of magazines. When the Clayton magazine chain
created ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION (then called Astounding Stories of
Super-Science) in Jan 1930 they hired HWW, who painted all 34 covers of
the Clayton ASF. His black-and-white ILLUSTRATION was similar to that of
his contemporary Frank R. PAUL, but his colour paintings were very
different; where Paul's were crowded and often artificially busy,
HWW's-often watercolours - were more open, and he seemed more concerned
with the overall design of each piece. His best covers create an almost
abstract beauty out of the conventional icons of SPACE OPERA. HWW did work
for many sf magazines in the 1930s and early 1940s, including more for ASF
in the late 1930s (more accomplished than before) and AMZ, Amazing Stories
Quarterly, Captain Future, Marvel Science Stories, Startling Stories and
TWS. [JG/PN]
WESSOLOWSKI, HANS WALDEMAR
H.W. WESSO.
WEST, ANTHONY
(1914-1987) UK writer, in the USA for much of his life, son of H.G. WELLS
and Rebecca West (1892-1983). His H.G. Wells: Aspects of a Life (1984),
published just after his mother's death, was widely understood as an act
of retribution aimed mainly at her - he was an illegitimate child and was
raised eccentrically - and only secondarily at Wells. His first novel, On
a Dark Night (1949 UK; vt The Vintage 1950 US), is an afterlife fantasy
describing a suicide's questings through space and time for the meaning of
life. Another Kind (1951 UK) is a NEAR-FUTURE story with love in the
foreground and a UK civil war filling the scene. [JC]
WEST, (MARY) JESSAMYN
(1902-1984) US writer most famous for tales of rural Quakerism like The
Friendly Persuasion (1945). Her sf novella, The Chilekings (1954 Star
Short Novels as "Little Men"; 1967), is a moral fable in which children
switch statures with adults and take control. [JC]See also: GREAT AND
SMALL.
WEST, MORRIS (LANGLO)
(1916- ) Australian novelist, in his early years a lay monk, and best
known for novels like The Devil's Advocate (1959). In The Navigator (1976)
a lost ISLAND is found in the South Pacific, and a UTOPIAN community is
founded there. The Clowns of God (1981), set at the end of the century,
deals in apocalyptic terms with a Pope convinced that the Second Coming is
nigh. [JC]
WEST, OWEN
Dean R. KOONTZ.
WEST, PAMELA
(1945- ) US writer whose sf novel, 20/20 Vision (1990), is an intricate
TIME-TRAVEL tale in which a murder in 1995 is brooded over by a detective
in 2020 and solved through the agency of time-travelling archivists from

2040, who send the detective back to explore the causes of the crime. [JC]
WEST, WALLACE (GEORGE)
(1900-1980) US lawyer, writer, public-relations man and pollution-control
expert who began publishing short stories with "Loup-Garou" for Weird
Tales in 1927 and sf with "The Last Man" for AMZ in 1929, thereafter
appearing fairly regularly in the magazines until the late 1960s. His
stories, though unpretentiously told, exhibit a level-headed cognitive
vigour that keeps even his early work from dating. Some of his tales-like
"Dust" (1935) - made significant early attempts to put POLLUTION and other
side-effects of progress on the sf agenda. 2 magazine series collected in
book form were The Bird of Time (fixup 1959), a PLANETARY ROMANCE set on
MARS, and Lords of Atlantis (coll of linked stories 1960), which features
the rulers and scientists of ATLANTIS who, after the island sinks, live on
as the gods of the Greek pantheon. Most of WW's novels were revisions of
pre-WWII material, though The Memory Bank (1951 Startling Stories as "The
Dark Tower"; 1961) demonstrates his marginally more awkward later form. He
was never a remarkable writer, nor did he ever devote himself full-time to
fiction; but he was never dull. [JC]Other works: Betty Boop in Snow-White
* (1934) and Alice in Wonderland * (1934), both film ties; Outposts in
Space (1931 Weird Tales; exp 1962); River of Time (1963); The Time-Lockers
(fixup 1964); The Everlasting Exiles (fixup 1967).See also: OUTER PLANETS;
POLITICS.
WESTALL, ROBERT (ATKINSON)
(1929-1993) UK author, art teacher (1960-85) and antique shop proprietor.
Until near the end of his life his work was mostly for older children. His
debut novel, The Machine-Gunners (1976), which formed the basis of the
play The Machine-Gunners (1986) and won the Carnegie Medal, is a realist
tale set during the war he described in his nonfiction Children of the
Blitz: Memories of Wartime Childhood (1985); the novel's sequel was Fathom
Five (1979).His second novel The Wind Eye introduced supernatural forces
(in the form of St Cuthbert), and these recur often in novels such as The
Watch House (1977), Ghost Abbey (1988), Old Man on a Horse (1989 chap) and
The Promise (1990), and in many stories in his collections Break of Dark
(coll 1982), The Haunting of Chas McGill and Other Stories (coll 1983 US),
Rachel and the Angel and Other Stories (coll 1986), Ghost and Journeys
(coll 1988), The Call and Other Stories (coll 1989), Echoes of War (coll
1989), A Walk on the Wild Side: Cat Stories (coll 1989), The Stones of
Muncaster Cathedral (coll 1991), The Fearful Lovers (coll 1992; vt Fearful
Lovers 1993), plus two retrospective assemblies, Demons and Shadows; The
Ghostly Best Stories of Robert Westall (coll 1993 US) and Shades of
Darkness: More of the Ghostly Best of Robert Westall (coll 1994 US). RW
also published a fine collection of ghost stories for adults, Antique
Dust: Ghost Stories (coll 1989), in which a certain primness only adds a
horrific reticence to the resonances of M.R. James (1862-1936). He ed
Ghost Stories (anth 1988).RW, who by the 1980s had established a
considerable reputation and went on garnering awards, wrote only one pure
sf novel, Futuretrack 5 (1983), set in a conformist future that
lobotomizes individualists. This was good, but better was the earlier
TIME-TRAVEL fantasy The Devil on the Road (1978), where a young biker

finds himself confronting Witchfinder Hopkins in the 17th century. The
Cats of Seroster (1984) is, unusually for RW, SWORD AND SORCERY, set in an
imaginary medieval world. Urn Burial (1987) hovers between sf and horror
in its tale of the awakening of long-dormant aliens. [PN]Other works: The
Scarecrows (1981); The Creatures in the House (1983); Blitzcat (1989); The
Kingdom by the Sea (1990); Stormsearch (1990), not fantasy; Yaxley's Cat
(1991); The Christmas Ghost (1992 chap); some books for younger
children.See also: CHILDREN'S SF; FANTASY.
WESTALL, WILLIAM (BURY)
(1835-1903) UK author and journalist, foreign correspondent for The Times
of London, who travelled in South America. The Phantom City: A Volcanic
Romance (1886) describes a LOST-WORLD race of Maya-type people at
pre-Conquest level. A Queer Race: The Story of a Strange People (1887) is
concerned with a lost race of Elizabethan Englishmen who have undergone
strange mutations in pigmentation. Don or Devil? (1901) is a rare
lost-world text. [JE/EFB]Other works: Tales and Legends of Saxony and
Lusatia (coll 1877); Tales and Traditions of Switzerland (coll 1882).See
also: ANTHROPOLOGY.
WESTERMAN, PERCY F.
[r] WEAPONS.
WESTERN FICTION PUBLISHING CO.
DYNAMIC SCIENCE STORIES; MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES; MARVEL STORIES.
WESTLAKE, DONALD E(DWIN EDMUND)
(1933- ) US writer, mostly of detective novels and thrillers, often
slapstick, under his own name and under pseudonyms, notably Richard Stark;
he won an Edgar award with God Save the Mark (1968). He began publishing
sf - always of secondary interest in his career, though never carelessly
done - in 1954 with "Or Give Me Death" for Universe, and assembled much of
his short work in The Curious Facts Preceding My Execution and Other
Fictions (coll 1968). His first novel of sf interest, Anarchaos (1967) as
by Curt Clark, is an adventure tale set on a planet where one's own death
is the only crime recognized; along with 9 stories - mostly early - this
novel was assembled as Tomorrow's Crimes (coll 1989) as DEW. High Jinx
(1987) and Transylvania Station (1988), both with Abby Westlake, are
mysteries incorporating elements of spoofed horror. A polished,
intelligent, witty writer, DEW has left sf the poorer by his decision not
to concentrate seriously on the genre. [JC]Other works: Ex Officio (1970)
as by Timothy J. Culver, marginal; Humans (1992), a fantasy.See also: PULP
MAGAZINES.
WESTLAKE, MICHAEL
(1942- ) UK writer and editor whose One Zero and the Night Controller
(1980) is a FABULATION in which a taxi driver tracks down an occult
nocturnal mystery, whose Imaginary Women (1987) plays with questions of
reality, and in whose 51 Soko: To the Islands on the Other Side of the
World (1990) four Japanese men send letters to various English figures,
weaving a pattern whose links are supernatural, and describing en passant
several ALTERNATE WORLD versions of UK history. Of specific sf interest is
The Utopian (1989), a double narrative contrasting the life of an insane

contemporary man with that of his namesake - or metaphorical double, or
literal REINCARNATION - in the communal matriarchy which obtains in
AD2411. Though the tale might seem to read as delusional, both lives are
equally weighted: the delusion, if any, might be the world of 1989. [JC]
WESTON, GEORGE
(1880-1965) US writer best known for His First Million Women (1934; vt
Comet "Z" 1934 UK), an early version of the theme in which sterility
affects all but one man - a theme more widely used after the first nuclear
explosion. GW's protagonist uses his new-Adam status to promulgate
disarmament, until the dissipation of Comet "Z"'s effects makes it
possible for him to be ignored. [JC]Other works: The Apple Tree (1918);
Queen of the World (1923).
WESTON, PETER
(1944- ) UK sf fan and editor, active mainly in the 1960s and 1970s. He
published a FANZINE, SPECULATION, organized the Speculation sf conferences
in Birmingham (1970-72), was TAFF winner in 1974 ( AWARDS), and was
Chairman of the 1979 UK World SF CONVENTION. He also edited the Andromeda
sequence of original sf anthologies-Andromeda 1 (anth 1976), #2 (anth
1977) and #3 (anth 1978) - which published work by a number of authors
including Brian W. ALDISS, Harlan ELLISON, Fritz LEIBER, Christopher
PRIEST and Bob SHAW. [PR]See also: HUGO.
WESTON, SUSAN (BROWN)
(1943- ) US writer whose Children of Light (1985), set in a USA direly
but not terminally threatened by HOLOCAUST, treats the possibilities of
human survival with warmth and some plausibility. [JC]
WESTWORLD
Film (1973). MGM. Dir Michael CRICHTON, starring Yul Brynner, Richard
Benjamin, James Brolin. Screenplay Crichton. 88 mins. Colour.Westworld is
in a future theme park, Delos, that contains also Roman and Medieval
"worlds"; its permanent occupants - even the horses - are ROBOT simulacra,
controlled by human technicians in an underground laboratory. Two male
visitors on holiday enjoy out-drawing the local robot gunman (Brynner) and
sleeping with the acquiescent robot saloon girls, and it seems that the
film will be a comedy about the tawdriness of men's machismo fantasies,
safely acted out in a purely Hollywood "Wild West". Next day, however, the
Brynner robot shoots one of the men dead, the beginning of a revolt by the
machines with the implacable gunman as its focus. The puncturing of the
fantasy forces us to question our reliance on machinery rather than on
ourselves (Crichton's theme for several films to come). With a subtext
about our exploitation of slaves and coolies, Crichton's first theatrical
feature - he had directed the made-for-tv PURSUIT (1972) - is wittily
macabre, and makes its debating points with clarity if not with subtlety.
The novelization, by Crichton, is Westworld * (1974). W's inferior sequel
was FUTUREWORLD (1976), not by Crichton. A tv series, Beyond Westworld
(1980), ran for only 3 episodes, with 2 further episodes made but unaired.
Prod and mainly written by Lou Shaw for MGM TV, this told of a Westworld
scientist who steals androids for sinister purposes. [PN/JB]See also:
CINEMA; VIRTUAL REALITY.

WETANSON, BURT
(? - ) US writer who collaborated with Thomas HOOBLER (whom see for
details) on The Hunters (1978) and its sequel, The Treasure Hunters
(1983). [JC]
WETMORE, CLAUDE H(AZELTINE)
(1862-1944) US writer of several novels. Of sf interest is Sweepers of
the Sea: The Story of a Strange Navy (1900), written with the assistance
of Robert M. Yost, in which 2 young Incans resolve to create the United
States of Incaland and to dominate the Southern Hemisphere as the USA does
the Northern. With the aid of Incan treasure they create a navy of
impregnable ships, defeat the British, make peace with North America, and
prepare to rule. [JC]
WHARTON, WILLIAM
Pseudonym of a US painter and writer (1925- ), living in Paris, who
wishes not to reveal his name. Best known for FABULATIONS with a
MAGIC-REALIST colouring, like Birdy (1979 US) and Dad (1981 US), he moved
gradually into tales whose resolution depends upon their being read as
FANTASY, like Tidings (1987 US). Franky Furbo (1989 US), like almost all
his work, can be read as an intense evocation of WW's own family, this
time in sf terms. The eponymous talking fox - at first presented as a
delusional fantasy on the part of the protagonist, author of short stories
featuring the animal - turns out to be a genuine visitant from the future
who has taken on the protagonist's human form in order to become the
mutant progenitor of the new race to which - in the future - he belongs,
and which has inherited the battered Earth. [JC]
WHEATLEY, DENNIS (YEATS)
(1897-1977) UK writer who served in both WWI and WWII, in the latter with
the Joint Planning Staff 1941-4. He was a prolific and extremely popular
author of many espionage thrillers and historical romances, although the
best of his work - and since his death the only category of his large
oeuvre to be read at all widely - consists of a number of black-magic
tales in which contemporary political knots are unravelled through occult
means. Characters tend to appear and reappear from book to book, genre to
genre, throughout his work, so that the black-magic books form a
quasiseries; they include The Devil Rides Out (1935) - the best of them and its sequel Strange Conflict (1941), Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts (coll
1943), The Haunting of Toby Jugg (1948), To the Devil - A Daughter (1953),
The Ka of Gifford Hillary (1956), The Satanist (1960), They Used Dark
Forces (1964), The White Witch of the South Seas (1968), Gateway to Hell
(1970) and The Irish Witch (1973); a late omnibus is The Devil Rides Out
and Gateway to Hell (omni 1992). Closely associated with these are several
LOST-WORLD novels, including The Fabulous Valley (1934), They Found
Atlantis (1936), Uncharted Seas (1938) - set in a monster-choked Sargasso
Sea and filmed as The LOST CONTINENT (1968) - and The Man who Missed the
War (1945), set in the Antarctic; the last 3 were assembled as Worlds Far
from Here (omni 1952). DW's black-magic and lost-world novels are neither
short nor amusing, though an intermittent story-telling gift sustains
readers through passages of political and racial abuse; his remaining sf,
unfortunately, was less gifted by his story-telling instinct, nor did his

scientific speculations show much acumen. Titles include Such Power is
Dangerous (1933), Black August (1934) - the Prince Regent of England
defeats the forces of totalitarianism - The Secret War (1937), Sixty Days
to Live (1939)-a comet destroys human civilization - and Star of Ill-Omen
(1952), about flying saucers ( UFOS), the last 2 being assembled with a
non-sf novel as Into the Unknown (omni 1960). [JC]Other works: A Century
of Horror Stories (anth 1935).See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; ATLANTIS; UNDER THE
SEA.
WHEELER, DEBORAH
(? - ) US writer who began publishing work of genre interest with
WHEELER, (JOHN) HARVEY
(1918-?1988) US writer, co-author with Eugene L. BURDICK (whom see for
details) of Fail-Safe (1962). [JC]
WHEELER, SCOTT
(? - ) US writer whose Matters of Form (1987) depicts the long campaign
of a group of ALIENS, stranded on Earth in the 20th century, to upgrade
human civilization to a level at which star travel is possible. Later
sections of the book, introducing a second (and evil) alien race, are less
effective. [JC]
WHEELER, THOMAS GERALD
(? - ) US physician and author whose juvenile sf novel Lost Threshold
(1968) is a very late LOST-WORLD story, set underground. Loose Chippings
(1968), also a juvenile, is a borderline-sf tale set in an anachronistic
village in England. [JC]
WHEELER-NICHOLSON, MALCOLM
(1890-1968) US writer, a prolific producer of pulp fiction who was also
important in the history of COMICS as the founder of the firm which became
DC COMICS. Death Over London (1940) is uninteresting sf featuring Nazi
spies destroying US installations with sympathetic vibrations. [RB]
WHEELWRIGHT, JOHN T.
[r] Robert GRANT; John Boyle O'REILLY.
WHELAN, MICHAEL
(1950- ) US illustrator, in his popularity the heir to Frank Kelly FREAS.
He has won 11 HUGOS (Freas won 10), of which 10 have been for Best
Professional Artist - every year 1980-86, and again in 1988, 1989 and
1991; the other was for Best Nonfiction in 1988 for Michael Whelan's Works
of Wonder (1987), a book collecting some of his work. A Californian, MW
studied art and biology at San Jose State University and then worked at
the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. In 1975 he began painting
covers for DAW BOOKS, then for ACE BOOKS and MARVEL COMICS, and soon for
other paperback houses including DEL REY BOOKS, earning high praise for
his work on several series, such as reissues of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's
Barsoom books and Michael MOORCOCK's Elric books. His popularity increased
on publication of Wonderworks (1979), collecting his work, which was a
bestseller (in art-book terms); it was for his 1979 publications that he
won his first Hugo. MW continually tops the LOCUS poll ( AWARDS) for Best
Artist by a very substantial margin. He has dominated sf book-cover

ILLUSTRATION right through the 1980s. He is given many of the most
prestigious commissions, and his original work fetches astonishingly high
prices at sf art auctions. MW has spoken of his consciousness that it was
during the 1980s that sf art became - at least at the top - a well paid
profession for almost the first time. His huge popularity is difficult to
explain or analyse, though his work is clearly very proficient: vivid,
colourful, meticulous, giving an appearance of naturalism no matter how
"alien" his subject, and highly finished - if occasionally a little
languid. Often he adopts a fully realistic approach; sometimes surreal
objects hover enigmatically. He has acknowledged a debt to his UK
colleagues, and certainly MW's style can be compared with that of, say,
Jim BURNS; it is probably not coincidental that Burns was the first artist
to break MW's run of Hugos (and that was in a year when MW withdrew from
the Hugo contest). [PN/JG]
WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH
Film (1969). Hammer/Warner. Dir Val Guest, starring Victoria Vetri, Robin
Hawdon, Patrick Allen. Screenplay Guest, from story by J.G. BALLARD. 100
mins. Colour.This was originally written by J.G. Ballard, but director
Guest got to the script and eliminated anything expensive, original or
intellectual. Still a bit livelier than most prehistoric romances, this is
one of a series of them made by Hammer, the first being ONE MILLION YEARS
BC (1966). The usual story: woman of one tribe (Vetri) falls for man of
another (Hawdon) and also makes friends with a dinosaur. Those who stand
between the star-crossed lovers are conveniently wiped out by vast tides
whipped up by a still gaseous Moon (a survival from Ballard's original
story, which made much of astronomical cataclysms). The dinosaurs and
giant crabs were designed by a team led by Jim Danforth. [PN]
WHEN THE WIND BLOWS
Animated film (1986). Meltdown Productions. Dir Jimmy T. Murakami,
starring the voices of John Mills, Peggy Ashcroft. Screenplay Raymond
BRIGGS, based on his own When the Wind Blows (graph 1982). 84 mins.
Colour. Before turning his bestselling GRAPHIC NOVEL into a screenplay,
Briggs made a RADIO adaption, with the unfortunate effect that WTWB is
shackled to the non-stop chatter of its two (working-class) characters.
Jim (Mills) and Hilda (Ashcroft) live in Sussex, and are concerned about
the approach of WWIII. They follow advice given in official pamphlets, but
the aftermath of the Bomb proves much worse than the pamphlets
contemplate, and they are left on their own. Moaning about international
crises they have not bothered to be interested in, misled by memories of
the cameraderie of WWII and somewhat unfairly patronized by the film, they
are shattered to learn that nuclear HOLOCAUST means no more milk
deliveries, a toilet that will not flush and destroyed curtains, as well
as presumably terminal radiation sickness. While Murakami, who had dir the
live-action BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS (1980), uses state-of-the-art
animation technology to make the best use in the medium of
three-dimensional sets since Hoppity Goes to Town (1941), the film suffers
from a certain middle-class Campaign-for-Nuclear-Disarmament smugness,
with Sir John Mills and Dame Peggy Ashcroft trying to sound as obtuse as
"ordinary" people. There is an irksomely dirge-like David Bowie theme

song. [KN]
WHEN TIME RAN OUT . . .
Irwin ALLEN.
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
Film (1951). Paramount. Dir Rudolph Mate, starring Richard Derr, Barbara
Rush, John Hoyt, Larry Keating. Screenplay Sydney Boehm, based on When
Worlds Collide (1933) by Philip WYLIE and Edwin BALMER. 83 mins.
Colour.WWC, which helped spark the 1950s sf-movie boom, was George PAL's
2nd sf production, made after his DESTINATION MOON. 2 wandering planets
are approaching Earth; US scientists calculate (though a disbelieving
world, led by philistine UK scientists, rejects their conclusions) that
the first will pass close by, creating tidal waves and earthquakes, and
the second will annihilate Earth by direct impact; only the construction
of a space ark (like Noah's) will save a handful of survivors. The
spacecraft (launched on an upwards slanting railway line) carries 40
people to one of the two planets, Zyra, which is habitable. A routine love
interest, and melodrama about who gets on the ark and who does not, leaves
the single-minded thrust of the film surprisingly undamaged; it continues
to grip. A low budget meant that the first near-miss sequence was montaged
largely (and effectively) from stock shots - though the liners famously
afloat in city streets in 2 brief shots are new; Earth's final death is
over in an eye-blink, and the new planet is obviously a bright green
painting (by Chesley BONESTELL). The religious subtext - Earth wiped out
for its sins, and new Adams and Eves in a new Eden - is presented with no
great moral conviction. [PN]See also: HOLOCAUST AND AFTER.
WHERE HAVE ALL THE PEOPLE GONE?
Made-for-tv film (1974). Metromedia/NBC. Dir John L. Moxey, starring
Peter Graves, Verna Bloom, Ken Sanson, George O'Hanlon Jr. Teleplay Lewis
John Carlino, Sandor Stern, from a story by Carlino. 72 mins. Colour.A man
and his teenage children are in a cave when a solar flare creates a virus
(!) which kills, then reduces to something like sand, almost everybody on
Earth. The family journeys across California to their seaside home, where
they hope to find the mother alive. They encounter other survivors, some
unfriendly, and packs of dogs running wild. Routine stuff, competently
directed; an interesting twist has the teenagers showing initiative while
the father is passive. [JB]
WHIRLING THE WORLDS
VOYAGE A TRAVERS L'IMPOSSIBLE.
WHITE, (GEORGE) ARED
(1881-1941) US military officer and writer, one of the organizers of the
American Legion in 1919; Camp White in Oregon was named for him. Of his
numerous stories and 4 novels, 2 books are sf. Attack on America (1939)
describes a weakened, unprepared USA attacked through Mexico by an
international coalition dominated by Germany; as with its model, George
CHESNEY's The Battle of Dorking (1871), most of the book consists of vivid
descriptions of army movements and battles (which the USA loses, though
she emerges victorious at the end). In Seven Tickets to Singapore (1939),
US agents pursue spies who have stolen a "detonation ray"; the book is

interesting only for its depiction of a Chinese detective substantially
more intelligent and resourceful than his US employers. The Spy Net (1931)
and Agent B-7 (1934), not sf, combine the worst elements of E. Phillips
OPPENHEIM and William LE QUEUX. [RB]
WHITE, FRED(ERICK) M(ERRICK)
(1859-19? ) UK writer who contributed sf to Pearson's Magazine, The
Strand Magazine and other general fiction magazines in the early 1900s. He
continued writing well into the 1920s, being best known for his Doom of
London DISASTER series for Pearson's Magazine - "The Four White Days"
(1903), "The Four Days' Night" (1903), "The Dust of Death" (1903), "A
Bubble Burst" (1903), "The Invisible Force" (1903) and "The River of
Death" (1904) - in which London and the UK are subjected to a variety of
calamities. Catastrophe is turned to the UK's advantage in his only sf
novel, The White Battalions (1900): a shift in the flow of the Gulf Stream
leads to arctic conditions in mainland Europe, so that the UK is able to
win a WAR. [JE]
WHITE, GEORGE H.
[r] SPAIN.
WHITE, JAMES
(1928- ) UK writer from Ulster who worked as publicity officer with an
aircraft company 1968-84. He began to publish sf with "Assisted Passage"
for NW in 1953. To many readers (though his singleton novels are equally
engaging) he is known almost exclusively for the tales about galactic
MEDICINE comprising the Sector General sequence, set in a 384-level
space-station/hospital "far out on the galactic Rim" and designed to
accommodate all known kinds of XENOBIOLOGICAL problems. Dr Conway (he
seems to have no first name), a human member of the 10,000-strong
multi-species staff, solves alone or with colleagues a series of medical
crises with humour, ingenuity and an underlying Hippocratic sense of
decency. The sequence includes Hospital Station (coll of linked stories
1962 US), Star Surgeon (1963 US), Major Operation (fixup 1971), Ambulance
Ship (fixup 1979 US), Sector General (coll of linked stories 1983 US),
Star Healer (1985 US), Code Blue - Emergency (1987 US) and The Genocidal
Healer (1992). Some further Sector General tales appear, along with
stories set in similar sf venues, in The Aliens Among Us (coll 1969 US;
cut 1979 UK) and Futures Past (coll 1982 US; with 1 story dropped and 1
added rev 1988 UK). White's capacity to conceive and make plausible a wide
range of alien anatomies seems unflagging.Other collections include Deadly
Litter (coll 1964 US) and Monsters and Medics (coll 1977), but their
contents are generally less appealing than his series tales, though they
share an ease with sf hardware and a quickness of plot. His singleton
novels are more impressive. Second Ending (1962 chap US) encompasses in a
few pages the end of humanity, an eons-long perspective, and new hope for
a sole survivor. Open Prison (1965; vt The Escape Orbit 1965 dos US) is
exhilarating adventure sf. Perhaps the most successful is the ingenious
The Watch Below (1966 US), a tale whose two narrative lines dovetail
cleverly. In one a WWII merchant vessel sinks, leaving 3 men and 2 women
to survive in a large air pocket, work out life-maintenance systems and
eventually breed there UNDER THE SEA while 100 years pass. In the other,

water-dwelling ALIENS, who have long been seeking a wet world like Earth
to inhabit peacefully, land their starship in the sea in time to save the
descendants of the 5 20th-century survivors. The various correspondences
between the two sets of "prisoners" are neatly and humanely stressed. In
The Dream Millennium (1974) a physician dreams a Jungian version of the
human story in SUSPENDED ANIMATION as his slower-than-light ship takes him
and other passengers to a paradisal planet. Underkill (1979) marks a grim
contrast, suggesting that an alien race's response to the internecine
savageries of humanity might be the just extirpation of almost the entire
species. It might be noted that JW tends to grow more genial the further
from the present he sets his stories; if some of the Sector General tales
seem at times almost wilfully upbeat, their ebullience may have been
palliative in nature. Underkill clearly represents a vision any writer
might be glad to step around. [JC]Other works: The Secret Visitors (1957
dos); All Judgement Fled (1968); Tomorrow is Too Far (1971 US); Dark
Inferno (1972; vt Lifeboat 1972 US); The Interpreters (1985 chap dos); The
Silent Stars Go By (1991 US), an ALTERNATE-WORLD tale.About the author:
James White, Doctor to Aliens: A Working Bibliography (1986 chap) by
Gordon BENSON Jr.See also: CRYONICS; GENERATION STARSHIPS; MYTHOLOGY; NEW
WORLDS; NEW WRITINGS IN SF; POLLUTION.
WHITE, JANE
(1934-1985) UK writer, mostly of tales for older children, whose only sf
novel, Comet (1975), treats the title's threat from the humanizing
perspective of its young protagonists. All proves well in the end. [JC]
WHITE, JOHN
[r] W. Graham MOFFAT.
WHITE, STEVE
[r] David WEBER.
WHITE, STEWART EDWARD
(1873-1946) US writer of travel books and novels, many of the latter
being historical tales set in California. In his later years he became
interested in Spiritualism, believed he was in contact with his dead wife,
and wrote some books about the other world, including The Unobstructed
Universe (1940) and 2 sequels. His sf novels are The Mystery (1907) with
Samuel Hopkins ADAMS, a complicated tale involving an abandoned ship on
the high seas, and the mysterious "celestium" which the mutineers who have
stolen it do not know has the effect of making anyone nearby jump into the
sea; and its sequel, The Sign at Six (1910 Popular Magazine as "The City
of Dread"; 1912), by SEW alone, in which the investigative protagonist of
the previous book uncovers a mad SCIENTIST who threatens to freeze New
York City with his "nullifier". [JC/PN]
WHITE, TED
Working name of US writer and editor Theodore Edwin White (1938- ) who
became-after working as assistant editor for FSF 1963-8 - the sometimes
controversial editor of AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC 1969-78; he
noticeably improved the magazines, buying original stories and emphasizing
matters relating to sf FANDOM. He later ed HEAVY METAL 1979-80 and
Stardate 1985-6. TW is known, too, for the many chatty, aggressive,

self-defensive and polemical letters he published in such fanzines as The
ALIEN CRITIC , and for his continuing column in ALGOL, which had the same
qualities, as did his editorials in AMZ and Fantastic. He won a HUGO as
Best Fan Writer in 1968.His writing career began with "Phoenix" for AMZ in
1963 with Marion Zimmer BRADLEY; this became part of Phoenix Prime (fixup
1966), #1 in his Qanar series of quest tales, which continued with The
Sorceress of Qar (1966), where a good SUPERMAN fights bad supermen, and
Star Wolf! (1971). His first novel was a TIME-TRAVEL tale, Invasion from
2500 (1964) with Terry CARR, together writing as Norman Edwards. Most of
TW's subsequent titles are unremarkable examples of adventure sf like
Android Avenger (1965 dos) and its sequel The Spawn of the Death Machine
(1968), about the ANDROID Tanner and his adventures, and The Secret of the
Marauder Satellite (1967), an sf juvenile. He also wrote the ending of the
Philip K. DICK serial "A. Lincoln - Simulacrum" (AMZ 1969-70), though
Dick's own ending was restored when it was published as We Can Build You
(1972). TW's 2 novels of some distinction are The Jewels of Elsewhen
(1967), a vividly imagined tale of strife among the DIMENSIONS, and By
Furies Possessed (1970), a tale of PARASITISM in which the invading ALIENS
turn out to be symbionts. [JC/PN]Other works: Lost in Space * (1967), a tv
tie ( LOST IN SPACE) as by Ron Archer, with Dave VAN ARNAM, and Sideslip
(1968), also with Van Arnam; a Captain America tie, The Great Gold Steal *
(1968); No Time Like Tomorrow (1969); Trouble on Project Ceres (1971), a
juvenile; The Oz Encounter (1977) with Marv Wolfman (1946- ), written by
Wolfman from characters and a scenario devised by TW; Phoenix (1977) with
Wolfman; Forbidden World (1978) with David F. BISCHOFF.As Editor: The Best
from Amazing Stories (anth 1973); The Best from Fantastic (anth 1973).See
also: CITIES; INVASION; SF MAGAZINES.
WHITE, T(ERENCE) H(ANBURY)
(1906-1964) UK writer whose overwhelming nostalgia for a lost England
expressed itself most vividly in his 2 best-known works, Farewell Victoria
(1933) and a superlative tragicomic fantasia on Le Morte D'Arthur (1485)
by Sir Thomas Malory (c1408-1471), The Once and Future King (1958), a book
comprising 3 earlier novels, substantially recast, plus a previously
unpublished 4th section; it was adapted by Alan Jay Lerner (1918-1986)
into the stage musical Camelot in 1960 (published as Camelot: A New
Musical 1961; filmed 1967). Those 3 earlier novels - The Sword in the
Stone (1938; rev 1939 US), made into a philistine feature cartoon by Walt
Disney in 1963, The Witch in the Wood (1939 US), retitled "The Queen of
Air and Darkness" in the recasting, and The Ill-Made Knight (1940 US) are themselves of very considerable interest as fantasias, as is THW's
original concluding section (the 1958 conclusion was written later), The
Book of Merlyn (1977 US), whose rejection by THW's UK publishers during
WWII, because of its pacifist content, delayed for 15 years the
publication of any version of the whole. The 1958 novel, despite The Sword
in the Stone being a juvenile, constitutes a remarkable and pessimistic
exploration of the complexity of Evil, of the decay of the Matter of
Britain - modern England is envisioned with particular venom in the ant
DYSTOPIA to which Merlyn subjects the young Arthur as part of his
education - and generally of the loss of innocence.Other books by THW are
of some sf interest. Early on, Earth Stopped (1934) and Gone to Ground

(coll of linked stories 1935), introduced an sf HOLOCAUST to underline the
points THW wished to make about contemporary civilization through the
conversations and fox-hunting manias of a large cast; in the 2nd vol,
survivors of the final WAR tell each other exemplary tales ( CLUB STORY)
while hiding in a cave. Without any source being cited, all the
supernatural tales in Gone to Ground were reprinted in The Maharajah, and
Other Stories (coll 1981), losing most of their effectiveness through the
unacknowledged uprooting. Mistress Masham's Repose (1946 US) tells how a
group of Lilliputians, transported to England by Gulliver, have survived
in the capacious grounds of the vast estate of Malplaquet for 200 years,
until a young girl almost destroys them by treating them as pets. The
protagonist of The Elephant and the Kangaroo (1947 US) is a mocking
self-portrait of the author; he becomes a new Noah in a hilariously
pixilated Eire. In The Master (1957), an sf juvenile, a boy and a girl
come across a plot to rule the world from the deserted island of Rockall,
where the Merlyn-like Master, 157 years old, has perfected both hypnotic
control and a vibration device that will destroy all machines; fortunately
he trips over the children's dog, injures himself, and drowns himself in
the sea. THW's sf was of a piece with all his work, sharing the
sentimentality, satirical power, sadness, longing for retrospectic havens,
manic humour and compassion of his best fantasy. [JC]About the author:
T.H. White: A Biography (1968) by Sylvia Townsend Warner.See also:
CHILDREN'S SF; GREAT AND SMALL; SWORD AND SORCERY.
WHITE, TIM
Working name of UK illustrator Timothy Thomas Anthony White (1952- ), one
of the new school of super-realists that has shaped UK sf ILLUSTRATION
since the mid-1970s. After 2 years in advertising he received his first sf
commission in 1974. Immediately successful, he soon became one of the UK's
premier book-cover illustrators; he has painted several hundred of them.
There is a case for calling him the finest technician in UK sf
illustration, and along with Chris FOSS and Jim BURNS he has produced the
UK's most influential sf artwork of the past two decades. Using very fine
detail, his paintings have a luminous clarity sometimes reminiscent of
Rene Magritte (1898-1967) or (rather differently) of Andrew Wyeth (1917). His work is figurative, often uses unusual perspectives, and regularly
makes much of grass and sky in the landscapes in which the sf images are
set. The Science Fiction and Fantasy World of Tim White (1981), a very
strong collection, contains 111 paintings, nearly all book covers.
[PN/JG]See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD.
WHITE DWARF
GAMES AND TOYS; GAMES WORKSHOP.
WHITEFORD, WYNNE N(OEL)
(1915- ) Australian sf writer and (retired) motoring journalist, whose
first sf may have been "Beyond the Infinite" for Adam and Eve in 1934. He
wrote more sf in the 1950s, beginning to sell to overseas markets with
"The Non-Existent Man" (1958 AMZ) and remaining quite prolific in US
magazines until 1960. His third period of writing began with short stories
in the Kesrii series in 1978. His first novel, Breathing Space Only
(1980), a rather downbeat post- HOLOCAUST tale, ends with its protagonist

isolated among superior humans, returned from the stars, with whom he has
nothing in common. It was followed by Sapphire Road (1982), Thor's Hammer
(1983), The Hyades Contact (fixup 1987 US), which is part of the Kesrii
series, Lake of The Sun (1989 US) and The Specialist (1990 US). Several of
these books imagine forms of evolved humanity; all are thoughtful,
competent sf adventure stories. [PN]See also: AUSTRALIA.
WHITE HOLES
BLACK HOLES.
WHITLEY, GEORGE
[s] A. Bertram CHANDLER.
WHO?
(vt The Man in the Steel Mask) Film (1974). Hemisphere/Maclean & Co. Dir
Jack Gold, starring Elliott Gould, Trevor Howard, Joseph Bova. Screenplay
John Gould (Jack Gold), based on WHO? (1958) by Algis BUDRYS. 91 mins.
Colour.Released long after being made, and publicized not at all, this
taut, efficient little metaphysical thriller, hinging on questions of what
constitutes identity, deserved rather better. A key US scientist (Bova) is
terribly injured on the East German border and later returned, fixed up by
the Russians, in CYBORG form with a metal face and hand. Or is he a
planted double agent? Gould plays the US security man who sees to it that
the cyborg is constantly watched. With a series of Cold-War riffs, a
rather good subtext is set up about the human-seeming machine of the state
apparatus (on both sides) versus the machine-seeming human (with more
human feeling than he putatively had before, as shown in a touching scene
with the ex-wife). The prosthetic "monster" finally rejects secret
scientific work; instead he retires, quite alone, to a farm. The mask is
never removed, not even metaphorically, and the mystery is only solved
(for alert viewers) through ironic indirection. Gold is known mainly as
one of the UK's better tv-drama directors. [PN]
WHO WOULD KILL JESSIE?
KDO CHCE ZABIT JESSII?
WHYTE, ANDREW A(DAMS)
(? - ) US bibliographer whose main work has been to compile with Anthony
R. LEWIS (whom see for titles) several vols of The N.E.S.F.A. Index to
Science Fiction Magazines and Original Anthologies during 1973-84. Solo he
produced The New SF Bulletin Index to SF Books, 1974 (1974 chap). [JC]
WIBBERLEY, LEONARD (PATRICK O'CONNOR)
(1915-1983) Irish writer who lived in the USA from 1943, and who
published at least 103 books, beginning in 1947; much of this work was for
children, and a modest proportion of it was sf or fantasy. His first and
most famous sf novel, the ostensibly adult tale which begins the Grand
Fenwick sequence, is The Mouse that Roared (1955; vt The Wrath of Grapes
1955 UK), a RURITANIAN spoof involving a super- WEAPON; it was filmed in
1959. The subsequent vols - Beware of the Mouse (1958), which is a
prequel, The Mouse on Wall Street (1969) and The Mouse that Saved the West
(1981) - make little use of sf devices except in the most cursory fashion,
except for The Mouse on the Moon (1962), which involves spaceflight, and

which was filmed in 1963. A singleton, One in Four (1976), depicts a USA
threatened by immaterial entities from the FAR FUTURE. Encounter Near
Venus (1967) and its sequel, Journey to Untor (1970), are CHILDREN'S SF.
Of fantasy interest were several further juveniles, including Mrs
Searwood's Secret Weapon (1954), McGillicuddy McGotham (1956), Take Me to
Your President (1957), The Quest of Excalibur (1959), Stranger of
Killknock (1961) and The Crime of Martin Coverly (1981). LW was an
intermittently clever writer whose books were eaten by sweetness. [JC]
WICKS, MARK
(? -? ) UK writer whose To Mars Via the Moon: An Astronomical Story
(1911) describes a UTOPIA whose Martian venue owes an acknowledged debt to
the theories of Percival Lowell ( MARS). The book was probably intended as
a fictionalization of popular science for younger readers. [JC/PN]
WIENER, NORBERT
(1894-1964) US mathematician and writer who established the contemporary
sense of the word CYBERNETICS in his book Cybernetics (1948; rev 1961).
Some of his speculations in this field appear in The Human Use of Human
Beings (1950) and in God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where
Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (1964), which directly influenced Frank
HERBERT's Destination: Void (1966). As W. Norbert he published 2 sf
stories, "The Miracle of the Broom Closet" in FSF (1952) and "The Brain"
in Crossroad in Time (anth 1953) ed Groff CONKLIN. A novel, The Tempter
(1959), is not sf. Ex-Prodigy (1953), nonfiction, is an interesting
speculative study of the intellectual SUPERMAN. [JC]About the author: I Am
a Mathematician (1956), autobiography.
WIGNALL, T(REVOR) C.
(1883-1958) UK author, usually for children as Trevor Wignall, whose sf
novel Atoms (1923) with G(ordon) D(aniel) Knox posits a world with
abundant atomic energy and broadcast power. These developments are
described with wooden glee. [JC]
WILBRAHAM, JOHN
Robert POTTER.
WILCOX, DON
Working name of US writer Cleo Eldon Knox (1905- ), who taught creative
writing at Northwestern University; most of his work, sometimes as Cleo
Eldon, Miles Shelton or Max Overton, was for Ray PALMER's AMAZING STORIES
and Fantastic Adventures, where he published his first story, "The Pit of
Death", in 1939. A good GENERATION-STARSHIP tale, "The Voyage that Lasted
600 Years" (1940), soon followed. DW used the house name Alexander BLADE
at least once, and also published a novelette, "Confessions of a
Mechanical Man" (1947), as Buzz-Bolt Atomcracker. The Ebbtide Jones
stories (1939-42; the 1st in AMZ, the rest in Fantastic Adventures) were
published as by Miles Shelton. DW's "The Whispering Gorilla" (1940) was
cobbled together with "The Return of the Whispering Gorilla" (1943) by his
ZIFF-DAVIS stablemate David Vern, writing as David V. REED, to form The
Whispering Gorilla (fixup 1950 UK), published as by David V. Reed. [JC/PN]
WILCOX, RONALD

[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
WILD CARDS
ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series, ed George R.R. MARTIN, set in a SHARED WORLD,
each volume comprising stories woven ( BRAID) into a more-or-less
integrated narrative. Martin prefers to think of these books, because
their contents are planned and linked, often as "mosaic novels", though we
treat them as, only technically, anthologies. The 1st vol, Wild Cards: A
Mosaic Novel * (anth 1987; vt Wildcards 1989 UK), shows its alternate
Earth's history ( ALTERNATE WORLDS) deviating from our own in 1946 with
the release over New York of a virus developed by ALIENS. The effect of
the "Wild Card" virus is to kill immediately and horribly one out of ten
people it infects. Survivors are mutated, mostly in useless, often
monstrously damaging ways, in which case they are called "Jokers". One in
ten is mutated beneficially: these become superpowered "Aces". The
dividing line can be blurred; for example, physical deformity can be
offset by an immense gain in strength.Ten vols have been issued to
mid-1992, the remainder being #2: Aces High * (anth 1987), #3: Jokers Wild
* (anth 1987), #4: Aces Abroad * (anth 1988), #5: Down and Dirty * (anth
1988), #6: Ace in the Hole * (anth 1990), #7: Dead Man's Hand * (1990),
#8: One-Eyed Jacks * (anth 1991), #9: Jokertown Shuffle * (anth 1991) and
#10: Double Solitaire (1992). Double Solitaire is a novel by Melinda
SNODGRASS, the first single-author novel in what has otherwise been an
oritinal-anthology series, but is copyrighted in Martin's name; Snodgrass
acted as assistant editor on the series since #6. . The books focus on a
cast of Aces and Jokers through the decades. The strongest stories are in
the 1st vol, which deals impressively with the McCarthy era. Later volumes
are more comic-bookish, and history's incredible resilience becomes
irritating: when a secret Ace of enormous power runs for the presidency,
events contrive to bring about a victory for George Bush. Despite this, WC
is one of the better shared-worlds series, showcasing hard-edged writing
by Edward BRYANT, Lewis SHINER, Walton Simons, Walter Jon WILLIAMS and
others.A companion comic-book series comprises Wild Cards #1: Heart of the
Matter (graph 1990), #2: Diamond in the Rough (graph 1990), #3: Welcome to
the Club (graph 1990) and #4: Spadework (graph 1990), collected as Wild
Cards (graph omni 1991). [RuB/RT]See also: GAMES AND TOYS; SUPERHEROES.
WILDER, CHERRY
Pseudonym of New Zealand-born writer Cherry Barbara Grimm, nee Lockett
(1930- ), resident in Australia 1954-76 and then in Germany. After
publishing short fiction and poetry she turned to sf, and chose the name
Wilder. The themes of her first published sf story, "The Ark of James
Carlyle" in New Writings in SF 24 (anth 1974) ed Kenneth BULMER, are the
gradual rapprochement of, and changes in, human and ALIEN after First
Contact. These themes recur in the well realized Torin series - THE LUCK
OF BRIN'S FIVE (1977 US), The Nearest Fire (1980 US) and The Tapestry
Warriors (1983 US), all first published as juveniles - and in the adult
novel Second Nature (1982 US), which tells of a castaway society on the
planet Rhomary. The Torin books focus on the relationship between the
marsupial natives of the planet Torin and the succession of humans who
become fruitfully involved with them, though the young protagonists do

tend - perhaps rather conventionally - to open not only their own eyes to
the wonders of the world but also those of their native hosts. CW's most
significant achievements may lie in her complexly achieved short stories
like "Something Coming Through" (1983) and "The Decline of Sunshine"
(1987), in which a wry mythopoeic vein shines through. Some of her short
fiction returns to Torin and Rhomary. CW's work, notable for its narrative
skill, evocative style and rounded characterization, should by now have
given her a higher reputation. [JC/MM/PN]Other works: The Rulers of Hylor
fantasy trilogy, comprising A Princess of the Chameln (1984 US), Yorath
the Wolf (1984 US) and The Summer's King (1986 US); Cruel Designs (1988
UK), occult/horror set in contemporary Germany.About the author: The CW
issue of FOUNDATION, #54, Spring 1992, contains an autobiographical essay
and "The Wilder Alien Shores, or The Colonials are Revolting", a critical
assessment by Yvonne Rousseau.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; AUSTRALIA;
CHILDREN'S SF; NEW WRITINGS IN SF; NEW ZEALAND; PASTORAL.
WILDING, PHILIP
(? - ) UK author of 2 routine sf adventures, Spaceflight - Venus (1955)
and Shadow Over the Earth (1956). As John Robert Haynes he wrote The
Scream from Outer Space (1955), also unremarkable. [JC/PN]
WILD IN THE STREETS
Film (1968). AIP. Dir Barry Shear, starring Christopher Jones, Shelley
Winters, Diane Varsi, Millie Perkins, Hal Holbrook, Richard Pryor.
Screenplay Robert Thom. 97 mins. Colour.Holbrook is the Kennedy-style
Californian senator who, when he realizes that, through demographic shift,
half the population are under 25, enlists a rock star (Jones, looking like
James Dean) to help sway the youth vote. The strategy backfires when the
senator's quid pro quo of lowering the voting age (it is eventually 14)
allows the rock star himself to become president; in an act of revenge
against his awful mother (Winters) he then consigns all the over-35s to
concentration-camp retirement homes where they are force-fed LSD. The
film's LSD-in-the-water-supply sequence created a stir at the time, and
inspired some real-life imitations. The tongue-in-cheek script - the hippy
sections badly dated - is still good, especially the finale where the
subteens are fomenting further revolution. [PN/JB]See also: CINEMA.
WILD PALMS
US tv miniseries (1993). ABC-TV. Created and written by Bruce Wagner.
Exec prods Wagner and Oliver Stone. Six hours. The first two-hour episode
"Everything Must Go" dir Peter Hewitt; the next one-hour episode "The
Floating World" dir Keith Gordon; the next one-hour episode "RisingSons"
dir Kathryn Bigelow; the next one-hour episode "Hungry Ghosts" dir Keith
Gordon; the last one-hour episode "Hello, I Must Be Going" dir Phil
Joanou. StarringJames Belushi, Dana Delany, Robert Loggia, Kim
Cattrall,Angie Dickinson, Ernie Hudson and Brad Dourif.This is the closest
US television has got to CYBERPUNK, and to hammer the point homeWilliam
GIBSON has a walk-on part as himself. The series is loosely based on a
series of comicsby Wagner published in Details magazine. The year is
around 2007. HarryWyckoff (Belushi) is a California attorney whose life is
turning weird; he keeps seeing a possibly hallucinatory rhinoceros; his
son is cold and withdrawn. He joins a group of religious cultists (the"new

Realists" who believe in "synthiotics") run by a sinistersenator,who has a
new media tv network that projects holograms ostensibly for entertainment
purposes, actually for mind control, with the help of drugs. Nanochips,
the Japanese and conspiracy theories are involved. It is often difficult
to separate VIRTUAL REALITY from mundane reality. People suffer from image
sickness. The whole thing is a paranoid tapestry,saturated in pop culture
both contemporary and as projected into the near future, unusually
virulent for tv (especially the blinding scene), and is somewhere between
completely over-the-top comic-strip melodrama and genuinely impressive
intensity. It is certainly stranger than any tv predecessor, with the
possible exception of the cult tv series Twin Peaks, which many critics
thought it somewhat resembled. Perhaps the outstanding sf television of
the 1990s,though there are certainly plot oddities not really cleared up.
The series, apparently unedited,is available on videotape. The relevant
book is Wild Palms: The Teleplay (1994) byBruce Wagner. [PN]
WILD, WILD WEST, THE
US tv series (1965-9). A Michael Garrison Production/CBS TV. Created
Michael Garrison. Prods Garrison, Fred Freiberger, Gene L. Coon, Collier
Young, John MANTLEY, Bruce Lansbury. Writers included Henry Sharp, John
Kneubuhl, Ken Kolb, Ken Pettus. Dirs included Paul Wendkos, Richard
Donner, Irving Moore, Robert Sparr, Alan Crosland Jr, Marvin Chomsky. 4
seasons; 104 50min episodes. Season 1 b/w; colour thereafter.An amusing,
sophisticated and successful mixture of Western and secret-agent fantasy,
TWWW series had Robert Conrad playing Jim West, an 1870s James Bond. The
plots usually involved anachronistic, futuristic devices and often
featured mad scientists attempting to overthrow the government, using
everything from manmade earthquakes to time machines. At its best TWWW had
something of the bizarre quality of The AVENGERS (1961-8), to which it was
the nearest US equivalent, but its stylization was not always light or
witty enough. Low-angle shooting and clever use of sets ensured a genuine
sense of decadent menace in the more baroque episodes. Michael Dunn played
an often reappearing villain, the dwarf scientist Dr Loveless who invents
ANDROIDS, miniaturization, hallucinogens and a lot more. The bland persona
of the hero was offset by Ross Martin's jovial performance as his partner,
Artemus Gordon. The series can be seen as anticipating STEAMPUNK. 2
sequels appeared a decade later as made-for-tv movies: The Wild Wild West
Revisited (1979) and More Wild Wild West (1980), both dir Burt Kennedy.
[JB/PN]
WILD, WILD WEST REVISITED, THE
The WILD, WILD WEST .
WILEY, JOHN
[s] Rog PHILLIPS.
WILHELM, KATE
Working name of US writer Katie Gertrude Meridith Wilhelm Knight (1928), married to Damon KNIGHT; beyond her writing, she has long been
influential, along with her husband, through his founding of the MILFORD
SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' CONFERENCE in 1958 and its offshoot, in which she
was directly involved, the CLARION SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' WORKSHOP; she

edited one of the anthologies of stories from the latter, Clarion SF (anth
1977).But KW early became best known for her writing, and by the 1980s was
a ranking figure in the field, though her first work would eventually be
seen as atypical. She started publishing sf in 1956 with "The Pint-Size
Genie" for Fantastic, and continued for some time with the relatively
straightforward genre stories of the sort to be found in her first book,
The Mile-Long Spaceship (coll 1963; vt Andover and the Android 1966 UK);
it was not until the late 1960s that she began to release the mature
stories which have made her career an object lesson in the costs and
benefits of the market, for it seemed clear from about 1970 that she was
most happy as a writer at the commercially unpopular novella length, and
least happy as a novelist. Her response was to publish short stories and
novellas, frequently brought together in book form as "speculative
fiction", while at the same time producing intermittently capable and
variously ambitious full-length tales. The shorter fictions were assembled
in: The Downstairs Room, and Other Speculative Fiction (coll 1968), which
includes the NEBULA-winning "The Planners" (1968); Abyss: Two Novellas
(coll 1971); The Infinity Box: A Collection of Speculative Fiction (coll
1975), the title story of which - also republished as THE INFINITY BOX
(1971 Orbit 9 ed Damon Knight; 1989 chap dos) - is a darkly complex
depiction of a NEAR-FUTURE USA as refracted through the slow destruction
of the conscience of a man gifted with a PSI POWER; Somerset Dreams (coll
1978); Listen, Listen (coll 1981); Children of the Wind: Five Novellas
(coll 1989), which includes the NEBULA-winning The Girl who Fell into the
Sky (1986 IASFM; 1991 chap); State of Grace (coll 1991 chap) and And the
Angels Sing (coll 1992), which includes "Forever Yours, Anna" (1987), also
a Nebula-winner. The strongest of these stories are exercises in capturing
the significant texture of the new in the context of individual lives;
time and again, a tale begins within the shaky domesticity of the family
and moves suddenly to an sf or fantasy perspective from which, chillingly,
the fragility of our social worlds can be discerned. At this point, at the
point of maximum realization, her best stories generally stop.With novels
it has tended to be otherwise. After More Bitter than Death (1963), a
mystery, her first sf novel was The Clone (1965) with Theodore L. THOMAS,
one of the rare sf books to use CLONE in the strict biological sense, in
describing a formidable, voracious and ever-growing blob, and a competent
demonstration of her workmanlike capacity to cope with genre content. The
Killer Thing (1967; rev vt The Killing Thing 1967 UK), set almost uniquely
for KW on another planet, also shows some facility in telling conventional
sf tales. But The Nevermore Affair (1966) and Let the Fire Fall (1969; cut
and rev 1972 UK), which attempt to investigate character within
novel-length plots, fail in the first through overexplication and in the
second through an uneasiness of diction, so that the near-future religious
revival at its heart is depicted with a diffuse sarcastic loquacity. This
sense of drift - this sense that her novels wilfully continue past the
point at which her interest in maximum realization has begun to flag - is
avoided in some instances. For example, WHERE LATE THE SWEET BIRDS SANG
(fixup 1976) - which won HUGO and Jupiter AWARDS for Best Novel successfully translates her interest in clones (this time in the sf sense
of "people-copies") to a post- HOLOCAUST venue in the Appalachians where
an isolated community of clones has been formed to weather the interregnum

until civilization can spread again, but develops in its own, perilously
narrow fashion; significantly, the book is made up of 3 novella-length
sequences, each superb. The Clewiston Test (1976) balances the effects on
the eponymous developer of a dubious drugs project against those on her of
an unhappy marriage; for the world of experimental BIOLOGY - in which KW
has always been interested - cannot be divorced from the lives it affects,
a truism rarely brought to bear with such sharpness. Fault Lines (1977),
not sf, uses a displaced and edgy diction to present a woman's broken
remembrances, the fault lines of the title representing her own life, her
future, her unhappy marriages, the earthquake that traps her, and a
powerful sense that civilization itself is cracking at the seams. But
these novels stand out.More normally KW's novels - like A Sense of Shadow
(1981), Welcome, Chaos (1981 Redbook as "The Winter Beach"; exp 1983) and
Huysman's Pets (1986) - tend to dissipate powerful beginnings in generic
toings and froings. Her Leidl and Meiklejohn sequence of sf/horror/fantasy
detective tales - The Hamlet Trap (1987), The Dark Door (1988), Smart
House (1989), Sweet, Sweet Poison (1990) and Seven Kinds of Death (1992) seem in their compulsive genre-switching almost to parody this proclivity;
but Crazy Time (1988), a late singleton, more successfully embraces the
insecurity of the novel form as KW conceives it, and the ricochets of the
plot aptly mirror the discourse it embodies upon the nature of
institutionalized definitions of sanity and insanity. Most successfully of
all, DEATH QUALIFIED: A MYSTERY OF CHAOS (1991) - whose sequel, The Best
Defense (1994) is associational - combines detection and sf in a long,
sustained, morally complex tale whose central story-telling hook - solving
a murder in order to free the innocent protagonist of suspicion - leads
smoothly into an sf denouement involving Chaos theory, new perceptions and
a hint of SUPERMAN. It is the longest of her novels, yet the one which
most resembles her successful short fiction. [JC]Other works: The Year of
the Cloud (1970) with Theodore L. Thomas; Margaret and I (1971); City of
Cain (1974), a near-future psi thriller with many sf trappings; Juniper
Time (1979); Better than One (coll 1980) with Damon Knight, each
contributing separate items; Oh, Susannah! (1982); Cambio Bay (1990);
Naming the Flowers (1992 chap); Justice for Some (1993), associational.As
Editor: Nebula Award Stories Nine (anth 1974).See also: ECOLOGY;
IMMORTALITY; INTELLIGENCE; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE;
MEDICINE; MONSTERS; POLLUTION; ROBERT HALE LIMITED; SCIENTISTS; WOMEN SF
WRITERS.
WILKINS, JOHN
(1614-1672) UK philosopher who served as the Bishop of Chester. He wrote
no fiction, but was one of the first popularizers of science and a
propagandist for scientific progress whose speculative nonfiction is
remarkable. The 3rd edn of The Discovery of a New World (1638; 3rd rev ed
1640) includes a brief discourse on the possibility of travel to the MOON.
Mathematicall Magick (1648) is a treatise on TECHNOLOGY, including essays
on submarines, flying machines and perpetual-motion MACHINES (of whose
feasibility he was sceptical). While he was Master of Wadham College,
Oxford, he founded the Philosophical Society, which in 1662 became the
Royal Society. [BS]See also: RELIGION; SPACESHIPS; TRANSPORTATION; UNDER
THE SEA.

WILKINS, (WILLIAM) VAUGHAN
(1890-1959) UK writer best known for his historical romances, but who
wrote some tales of sf interest. Being Met Together (1944), though
marginal, interestingly describes an attempt to rescue Napoleon using a
submarine ( UNDER THE SEA) designed by the US engineer and inventor Robert
Fulton (1765-1815). After Bath (1945) is an ornately fantastic juvenile.
The City of Frozen Fire (1950) is an energetic LOST-WORLD tale set in
South Africa. Fanfare for a Witch (1954) is historical fantasy. Valley
Beyond Time (1955) describes trips through the DIMENSIONS to the haven of
the title and back again to a time-ridden, grief-enfolded Earth. [JC]
WILLARD, TOM
(? - ) US writer of military-sf adventures: the Strike Fighters sequence
- Strike Fighters (1990), #2: Strike Fighters #2 (1990), #3: War Chariot
(1991), #4: Sudden Fury (1991) and #5: Red Dancer (1991) - and the
Afrikorps sequence as by Bill Dolan - Afrikorps (1991) and #2: Iron Horse
(1991). [JC]
WILLEFORD, CHARLES (RAY)
(1919-1988) US writer, best known for his police thrillers in the
Miami-based Hoke Moseley series. His The Machine in Ward Eleven (coll
1963) has more than once been listed as sf, but is not, although one of
its stories is a surreal fantasy. [PN]
WILLER, JIM
(? - ) Canadian writer whose sf novel, Paramind (1973), takes a DYSTOPIAN
view of the commanding role of the COMPUTER in a 21st-century world. [JC]
WILLEY, ROBERT
[s] Willy LEY.
WILLIAM ATHELING Jr AWARD
AWARDS.
WILLIAMS, CHARLES
(1886-1945) UK writer whose novels are essentially theological fantasy
thrillers; he was closely associated with C.S. LEWIS and J.R.R. TOLKIEN.
His romantic and obscurely devout use of Tarot and Grail imagery helped
bring these themes into the generic mainstream. Of his novels, Many
Dimensions (1931) bears some remote resemblance to sf, in that it depicts
the world as being threatened by the dangerous powers (in particular
TELEPORTATION) of a magical stone that can be split into endless identical
copies; but in this, as in the remainder of his fiction, the bent of the
fantasy is towards RELIGION. The TIME TRAVEL in All Hallows' Eve (1945) is
devoted to similar ends. [JC/DRL]Other works: War in Heaven (1930); The
Place of the Lion (1931); The Greater Trumps (1932); Shadows of Ecstasy
(1933); Descent into Hell (1937).About the author: Shadows of Imagination:
The Fantasies of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams (anth
1969) ed Mark R. HILLEGAS.See also: FANTASY; MYTHOLOGY.
WILLIAMS, ERIC C(YRIL)
(1918- ) UK writer, previously a bookseller, who began publishing sf with
"The Desolator" for Science Fantasy in 1965 and was the author of some

routine sf novels for ROBERT HALE LIMITED, starting with The Time
Injection (1968). The Drop In (1977), not for Hale, is an alien- INVASION
novel of some interest. [JC]Other works: Monkman Comes Down (1969); The
Call of Utopia (1971); To End All Telescopes (1969); Flash (1972);
Project: Renaissance (1973); Largesse from Triangulum (1979); Time for
Mercy (1979); Homo Telekins (1981).
WILLIAMS, FRANK
Working name of UK writer Edward Francis Williams, Baron Francis-Williams
(1903-1970), whose sf novel is The Richardson Story (1951; vt It Happened
Tomorrow 1952 US). [JC]
WILLIAMS, GORDON (MacLEAN)
(1934- ) Scottish writer best known for the Hazell detective novels with
Terry Venables (1943- ), writing together as P.B. Yuill. Of sf interest is
his solo Micronauts sequence - The Micronauts (1977 US), Microcolony (1979
US; vt Microanaut World 1981 UK) and Revolt of the Micronauts (1981) about government agents miniaturized to perform intricate assignments.
[JC]
WILLIAMS, JOHN A(LFRED)
(1925- ) US writer, almost all of whose work has reflected his
experiences (including service in WWII) as a US Black. The Man who Cried I
Am (1967) posits a Black genocide plot on the part of the US Government,
to be put into action in case of civil uprising. Sons of Darkness, Sons of
Light (1969) presents a Black revolt centred on Manhattan, comparable to
Warren MILLER's The Siege of Harlem (1964) as a MAINSTREAM use of sf
material. Captain Blackman (1972) features a time-travelling hero who
takes part, as a Black soldier, in all the wars of US history. [JC/PN]See
also: POLITICS.
WILLIAMS, JON
Walter Jon WILLIAMS.
WILLIAMS, J.X.
House name used on pornographic novels, several with sf content,
published by Greenleaf Classics, a company owned by one-time sf editor
William HAMLING. The Sex Pill (1968) as by JXW is by Andrew J. OFFUTT. 2
further fantastic titles, Her (1967) and Witch in Heat (1967), are by
unidentified authors. [PN]
WILLIAMS, MICHAEL LINDSAY
(1940- ) US writer who published 2 sf novels - Martian Spring (1986) and
its sequel, FTL: Further Than Life (1987) - which tackle conflicts between
Earth and MARS, and consequent attempts to transcend these ills by gaining
rapport with a transplanetary group mind; verve and clarity are
lacking.MLW should not be confused with the Michael Williams involved in
various DragonLance ties like DragonLance Heroes: Weasel's Luck * (1989)
and DragonLance Heroes II: Galen Beknighted * (1990), as well as an untied
fantasy series, From Thief to King: A Sorcerer's Apprentice (1990) and A
Forest Lord (1991). [JC]
WILLIAMS, NICK (VAN) BODDIE
(1906-1992) US newspaperman - he was with the Los Angeles Times 1931-71,

serving as its chief editor from 1958 - and writer who contributed short
material to various "slicks"; he reported having published his first sf
story pseudonymously in Weird Tales in the late 1920s, but could recall
neither title nor pseudonym. The Atom Curtain (1956 dos) is set in a
thoroughly unusual post- HOLOCAUST USA 170 years after an atomic barrier
has isolated it from the rest of the world. Inside, a crazed immortal
rules a population rapidly reverting to Neanderthal status, and a cave
woman, after being clubbed, falls in love with the barrier-penetrating
protagonist. [JC]
WILLIAMS, PAUL (STEVEN)
(1948- ) US editor and writer, founder of Crawdaddy, the first US rock
magazine, in 1966, and author of several books on the subject, including
the best books yet written on Bob Dylan. As literary executor of the
Philip K. DICK estate he was from the first involved in the Philip K. Dick
Society and was instrumental in the wisely phased and commercially
successful publication of Dick's posthumous works. In Only Apparently
Real: The World of Philip K. Dick (1986) he set some early guidelines for
the comprehension of Dick's difficult final decade; and with The Ultimate
Egoist (coll 1994) by Theodore STURGEON, he inaugurated a carefully edited
collected edition of Sturgeon's short work, planned to extend to as many
as 10 volumes. [JC]
WILLIAMS, PAUL O(SBORNE)
(1935- ) US writer and professor of literature who won the JOHN W.
CAMPBELL JR. AWARD for Best New Writer in 1983, and who is known in the sf
field almost exclusively for his Pelbar sequence - The Breaking of
Northwall (1981), The Ends of the Circle (1981), The Dome in the Forest
(1981), The Fall of the Shell (1982), An Ambush of Shadows (1983), The
Song of the Axe (1984) and The Sword of Forbearance (1985) - set, 1100
years after a meteor shower has instigated a devastating nuclear WAR, in
the balkanized and barbarian heart of the USA at a time when fragmented
local cultures must begin to come together once again, hopefully without
warfare. The sequence is unusual - and in deep contrast to SURVIVALIST
FICTION - in its disregard for violence and its lack of gear fetish; it
has been compared with Edgar PANGBORN's Davy books. The Dome in the
Forest, which tells of the discovery of an inhabited nuclear shelter,
interestingly explores the psychology of the POCKET UNIVERSE; later
volumes, in which the tempo of technological change begins to increase,
are perhaps less engaging. The series as a whole suffers from a certain
leadenness of narrative diction, but never fails to question generic
assumptions about the nature of a post- HOLOCAUST civilization. The Gifts
of the Gorboduc Vandal (1989) is not part of the sequence. [JC]See also:
ANTHROPOLOGY; HISTORY IN SF.
WILLIAMS, RAYMOND (HENRY)
(1921-1988) Welsh writer, professor of drama and cultural critic, long
famous for his incisive studies of the interconnections between literature
and society like Culture and Society (1958) and The Country and the City
(1973). Of sf interest is The Volunteers (1978), a tale set in the late
1980s when political conflict in the UK has come to a violent head.
[JC]Other works: George Orwell (1971), nonfiction; Keywords (1976),

nonfiction; The Fight for Manod (1979).See also: PROTO SCIENCE FICTION.
WILLIAMS, ROBERT MOORE
(1907-1977) US writer, active in the sf field under his own name and
various pseudonyms, including John S. Browning, H.H. Harmon, Russell Storm
and the house name E.K. JARVIS. He began publishing sf as Robert Moore
with "Zero as a Limit" for ASF in 1937, and by the 1960s had published
over 150 stories. Though most are unremarkable, he was an important
supplier of competent genre fiction during these decades. Typically
adequate is the Jongor series: Jongor of Lost Land (1940 Fantastic
Adventures; 1970), The Return of Jongor (1944 Fantastic Adventures; 1970)
and Jongor Fights Back (1951 Fantastic Adventures; 1970). He did not begin
publishing books until The Chaos Fighters (1955), but thereafter released
many novels of the same general calibre as his short fiction. Notable were
Doomsday Eve (1957 dos), a post- HOLOCAUST drama in which the world serves
as an arena for struggling SUPERMEN, and the Zanthar series: Zanthar of
the Many Worlds (1967), Zanthar at the Edge of Never (1968), Zanthar at
Moon's Madness (1968) and Zanthar at Trip's End (1969). Zanthar is a
professor with the gifts of a HERO. RMW wrote few original words, but
rarely a dull one. [JC]Other works: Conquest of the Space Sea (1955 dos);
The Blue Atom (1958 dos); The Void Beyond and Other Stories (coll 1958
dos); To the End of Time and Other Stories (coll 1960 dos); World of the
Masterminds (1960 dos); The Day They H-Bombed Los Angeles (1961), which
includes a RECURSIVE reference to Doomsday Eve; The Darkness Before
Tomorrow (1962 dos); King of the Fourth Planet (1962 dos); Walk Up the Sky
(1962); The Star Wasps (1963 dos); Flight from Yesterday (1963 dos); The
Lunar Eye (1964 dos); The Second Atlantis (1965); Vigilante-21st Century
(1967); The Bell from Infinity (1968); When Two Worlds Meet: Stories of
Men on Mars (coll of linked stories 1970); Beachhead Planet (1970); Now
Comes Tomorrow (1971); Seven Tickets to Hell (1972). Nonfiction: Love is
Forever - We Are for Tonight (1970), autobiography.See also: ROBOTS.
WILLIAMS, TAD
[r] DAW BOOKS.
WILLIAMS, T. OWEN
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
WILLIAMS, WALTER JON
(1953- ) US writer whose first works were nautical tales as by Jon
Williams, beginning with The Privateer (1981). He began to publish sf with
Ambassador of Progress (1984), an unexceptional novel in which a female
agent whose mission is to revive civilization makes contact with an
abandoned, semi-feudal colony planet. Knight Moves (1985) describes the
attempts of an immensely powerful immortal and his old friends and enemies
to discover a technique of MATTER TRANSMISSION and to repopulate an almost
abandoned Earth with fantastic creatures taken from MYTHOLOGY, in a style
reminiscent of the early Roger ZELAZNY. But it was with the appearance of
CYBERPUNK that WJW seemed to have found his true voice as a writer. In the
Hardwired sequence - Hardwired (1986), stories like "Video Star" (1986),
Voice of the Whirlwind (1987) and Solip:system (1989 chap) - he displayed
a fascination with intensely detailed surfaces, biologically invasive

gadgetry, and the effects of powerful corporations and rapidly changing
technology on (romanticized) social outsiders. The first tale, in which
underdogs of a repressed Earth rebel against dominant orbital corporations
- proved sufficiently popular to spawn a role-playing game ( GAMES AND
TOYS) based on it, despite the unlikelihood of much of its plot; the game
is presented in Hardwired: The Sourcebook (1989 chap). In the rather
better second tale the CLONE of an alienated one-time corporate soldier,
brought to life on the original's death, hunts for clues to that first
demise in a narrative richly informed by Zen and speculations on the
nature of identity.The Crown Jewels sequence - The Crown Jewels (1987) and
House of Shards (1988) - comprises two "divertimenti" describing the
adventures of a Raffles-like burglar in a cod-Oriental future human
culture heavily influenced by ALIENS to whom style is sacred. But WJW
retained a cyberpunk outlook for his next major novel, Angel Station
(1989), in which family groups of interstellar traders both fight to
survive as major corporations squeeze down their markets, and also betray
each other for the chance to deal with a newly discovered alien race.
Facets (coll 1990) assembles most of his short fiction. In the tautly told
Days of Atonement (1991) WJW moved to a NEAR-FUTURE USA where a macho
small-town sheriff struggles with the physics needed to understand an
apparent outbreak of bodily resurrections at the nearby Advanced
Technological Laboratories. ARISTOI (1992) goes in the other direction,
into a FAR-FUTURE venue once again evocative of Zelazny. Wall, Stone,
Craft (1993 chap) ingeniously posits an ALTERNATE WORLD in which Lord
Byron, unhampered by a club foot, becomes one of the heroes of Waterloo,
and subsequently interacts with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, here
powerfully imagined, so that Frankenstein (1818), and all of sf to come,
is inevitably created. Ingenious and energetic and knowing, WJW seems very
much at home with the mature GENRE SF of the 1980s and 1990s. [NT]Other
works: Elegy for Angels and Dogs (1990 dos), a sequel to Zelazny's The
Graveyard Heart (1964 Fantastic; 1990 chap dos), with which it is bound
sequentially ( DOS-A-DOS); Dinosaurs (1991 chap).See also: CYBORGS; PSI
POWERS; WILD CARDS.
WILLIAMSON, JACK
Working name of US writer John Stewart Williamson (1908- ) from the
beginning of his career in 1928, though his Seetee stories were originally
signed Will Stewart. JW was born in Arizona and raised (after stints in
Mexico and Texas) on an isolated New Mexico homestead; he described his
early upbringing and his encounter with 1920s sf in the introduction and
notes to The Early Williamson (coll 1975), which assembles some of the
rough but vigorous stories he published 1928-33; and amplified this
material in Wonder's Child: My Life in Science Fiction (1984), which won a
1986 HUGO. These reminiscences reconfirm the explosively liberating effect
early PULP-MAGAZINE sf had on its first young audiences, especially those
who like JW grew up in small towns or farms across a USA hurtling out of
its rural past.After discovering AMAZING STORIES, and specifically being
influenced by its 1927 serialization of A. MERRITT's The Moon Pool (1919),
JW immediately decided to try to write stories for that magazine. His
first published fiction, "The Metal Man" in 1928 for AMZ, was deeply
influenced by Merritt's lush visual style, but like most of his early work

conveyed an exhilarating sense of liberation. JW was from the first an
adaptable writer, responsive to the changing nature of his markets, and
his collaborations over the years seemed to be genuine attempts to learn
more about his craft as well as to produce saleable fiction. His first
great teacher after Merritt was Miles J. BREUER, whom he came across
through his early association with fan organizations like the
International Science Correspondence Club and the American Interplanetary
Society, and to whom he deliberately apprenticed himself. Breuer, he
reported in The Early Williamson, "taught me to curb my tendencies toward
wild melodrama and purple adjectives"; what JW gave Breuer in return was
an inspiring fount of energy, and both of their book collaborations - The
Girl from Mars (1929 chap) and The Birth of a New Republic (1931 AMZ
Quarterly; 1981 chap [but large pages]) - were written primarily by the
younger man, following Breuer's ideas.JW's development was swift. From the
very first he was equally comfortable with both story and novel forms;
indeed, by 1940 he had published over 12 novels in the magazines,
including The Alien Intelligence (1929 Science Wonder Stories; with 2
shorter stories as coll 1980 chap [but large pages]) and the unreprinted
"The Stone from the Green Star" (1931), "Xandulu" (1934), "Islands of the
Sun" (1935), "The Blue Spot" (1937) and "Fortress of Utopia" (1939); and
in his later career he concentrated even more heavily on longer forms. The
best of his pre-WWII work was probably the Legion of Space series, which
initially comprised The Legion of Space (1934 ASF; rev 1947) and The
Cometeers (coll 1950) - itself containing 2 items, The Cometeers (1936
ASF; rev for 1950 coll; 1967) and One Against the Legion (1939 ASF; with
the new "Nowhere Near" added, as coll 1967) - all this material being
subsequently assembled as Three from the Legion (omni 1979). The Queen of
the Legion (1983) was a very late and significantly less energetic
addendum. The series depicts the far-flung, Universe-shaking, SPACE-OPERA
adventures of 4 buccaneering soldiers. (Giles Habibula, the most original
of the lot - though his conception clearly owed much to RABELAIS and to
Shakespeare's Falstaff - became a frequently used model for later sf
life-loving grotesques, including Poul ANDERSON's Nicholas van Rijn.) More
or less unaided, they save the human worlds from threats both internal and
external in conjunction with the woman whose hereditary role it is to
guard from evil a doomsday device called AKKA. The influence of E.E. "Doc"
SMITH's Lensmen saga can be felt throughout; and JW's relative incapacity
to impart a sense of scale was perhaps balanced by a very much greater
gift for characterization. Other early novels, like The Green Girl (1930
AMZ; 1950) and Golden Blood (1933 Weird Tales; rev 1964), share a crude
narrative brio, adaptability to various markets, vivid characters, and
some lack of ambition. The exception, perhaps, was the Legion of Time
sequence (not connected to the Legion of Space sequence), assembled as THE
LEGION OF TIME (coll 1952; vt Two Complete Novels: After World's End; The
Legion of Time 1963), containing THE LEGION OF TIME (1938 ASF; cut 1961
UK) and After World's End (1939 Marvel Science Stories; 1961 UK). One of
the earliest and most ingenious stories of ALTERNATE WORLDS and TIME
PARADOXES - with conflicting potential future worlds battling through
time, each trying to ensure its own existence and deny its opponent's the sequence inspired one of the most penetrating studies yet written
about a pulp-sf novel, Brian W. ALDISS's "Judgement at Jonbar" (1964),

published in SF Horizons.By the 1940s, however, John W. CAMPBELL Jr's
GOLDEN AGE OF SF had begun, and JW was suddenly an old-timer. Though JW
did not much participate in its inception, he did adapt to the new world
with commendable speed, and by the end of the decade had published what
will probably remain his most significant work. A transitional series the Seetee ANTIMATTER tales - came first: Seetee Ship (1942-3 ASF; fixup
1951) and Seetee Shock (1949 ASF; 1950), both published as by Will Stewart
but reissued in 1968 as by JW, assembled as Seetee Ship/Seetee Shock (omni
1971; vt Seetee 1979), and designed to be read in the original magazine
order. These confront the world with the engineering challenge of coping
with the antimatter that is found to make up part of the ASTEROID belt;
more smoothly told than its predecessors, the series still unchallengingly
presents its asteroid miners and their crises in the old fashion, with a
great deal of action but little insight. Its success led to JW's creation
of a COMIC strip, Beyond Mars, which ran for 3 years in the New York Daily
News. Far more significant was DARKER THAN YOU THINK (1940 Unknown; exp
1948), a remarkable speculative novel about lycanthropy which early
presented the thesis that werewolves are genetic throwbacks to a species
cognate with Homo sapiens ( SUPERNATURAL CREATURES). Also in the 1940s
came JW's most famous sequence, the Humanoids series: "With Folded Hands"
(1947), The Humanoids (1948 ASF as ". . . And Searching Mind"; rev 1949) both assembled as The Humanoids (coll of linked stories 1980) - "Jamboree"
(1969) and The Humanoid Touch (1980). Once again at an early point in the
genre's history, these confronted the near impossibility of assessing the
plusses and minuses of a humanoid (i.e.,artificial- INTELLIGENCE-driven)
hegemony over the world, however benevolent. In The Humanoids itself it is
suggested that humanity's new masters are contriving to force people to
transcend their condition; in The Humanoid Touch this ambiguity is lost
for, at the end of the Galaxy, long hence, the euphoria induced by
humanity's keepers is both impossible to perceive and mandatory.In the
early 1950s JW began to suffer from a writer's block which he did not
fully escape for more than two decades, though he continued to produce
novels of interest like Dragon's Island (1951; vt The Not-Men 1968), whose
presentation of GENETIC ENGINEERING once again conceals a prescient
numeracy under a bluff, slightly archaic narrative style. Much of his new
work from this point was collaborative, and the continued modernizing of
his techniques and concerns can be seen as an ongoing demonstration of his
remarkable willingness to learn from the world and from others. Star
Bridge (1955) with James E. GUNN was just a competent space opera, but
JW's ongoing partnership with Frederik POHL was of more interest, though
their first sequence, the Eden series of juveniles - Undersea Quest
(1954), Undersea Fleet (1956) and Undersea City (1958) - was routine; all
3 were eventually assembled as The Undersea Trilogy (omni 1992). The
second, the Starchild tales - The Reefs of Space (1964), Starchild (1965)
and Rogue Star (1969), assembled as The Starchild Trilogy (omni 1977) also fails to combine space opera and METAPHYSICS convincingly as it
traces the problematic epic of humanity's EVOLUTION into a mature
planet-spanning species ( LIVING WORLDS). The Cuckoo series - The Farthest
Star (fixup 1975) and Wall Around a Star (1983), both assembled as The
Saga of Cuckoo (omni 1983) - does not quite succeed in bringing to life
its cosmogonic premises or its LINGUISTIC concerns. On the other hand,

Land's End (1988), with Pohl, is an enjoyable singleton; in it a comet
destroys the ozone layer and humanity seeks refuge UNDER THE SEA. The
Singers of Time (1991), with Pohl, is also strong.In the 1950s JW embarked
on a second career at Eastern New Mexico University, where he took a BA in
English and an MA with an unpublished 1957 thesis, "A Study of the Sense
of Prophecy in Modern Science Fiction". He taught the modern novel and
literary criticism until his retirement in 1977, while being deeply
involved in promoting sf as an academic subject ( SF IN THE CLASSROOM). He
had taken a PhD with the University of Colorado in 1964 on H.G. WELLS's
early sf, and expanded his thesis into H.G. Wells: Critic of Progress
(1973), a book which, despite some methodological clumsiness, valuably
examines Wells's complex development of ideas as they relate to the idea
of progress. In 1973 JW received a PILGRIM AWARD for his academic work
relating to sf.In the meanwhile he began slowly to enter the Indian summer
of his writing career, though novels like The Moon Children (1972) and The
Power of Blackness (fixup 1976) are surprisingly insecure and the series
continuations (see above) lack the force of their models. It seemed that
his old age would demonstrate his slow - even though technically
productive - decline. But The Best of Jack Williamson (coll 1978) again
demonstrated his early strengths, and although Brother to Demons, Brother
to Gods (1979) was weak, in the 1980s JW began to produce work of an
astonishing youthfulness. Manseed (1982) uses the space-opera format to
investigate, with renewed freshness, the imaginative potential of genetic
engineering. Lifeburst (1984) is an exercise in interstellar Realpolitik,
grim and engrossing in its depiction of the parcelling out of Earth,
sophisticated in its presentation of sexual material; its sequel, Mazeway
(1990), has the air of a juvenile in its vivid presentation of the
eponymous galactic test that the young protagonists must pass to render
humanity eligible for higher things. Firechild (1986) generates a rhetoric
of transcendence - very much in the fashion of the 1980s - out of BIOLOGY.
Into the Eighth Decade (coll 1990) serves as a brief resume of JW's
post-WWII career. Beachhead (1992) describes an expedition to a MARS
according to contemporary knowledge, although the plot itself is redolent
of a much earlier era. Despite its title, Demon Moon (1994) is also highly coloured - sf. In 1976 he was given the second Grand Master NEBULA
award (his sole predecessor was Robert A. HEINLEIN). He has been an sf
writer of substance for over 60 years. In his work and in his life he has
encompassed the field. [JC]Other works: Lady in Danger (1934 Weird Tales
as "Wizard's Isle"; 1945 chap UK), a novelette with a short story by E.
Hoffmann PRICE added; Dome Around America (1941 Startling Stories as
"Gateway to Paradise"; rev 1955 dos); The Trial of Terra (fixup 1962 dos);
The Reign of Wizardry (1940 Unknown; rev 1964; again rev 1979); Bright New
Universe (1967); Trapped in Space (1968), a juvenile; The Pandora Effect
(coll 1969); People Machines (coll 1971); Passage to Saturn (1939 TWS;
1973 chap UK); Dreadful Sleep (1938 Weird Tales; 1977 chap).As Editor:
Teaching Science Fiction for Tomorrow (anth 1980).Nonfiction: Science
Fiction Comes to College (1971 chap; exp 1971 chap); Science Fiction in
College (1971 chap; exp 1972 chap); Teaching SF (1972 chap; exp 1973 chap;
again exp 1973 chap; exp 1974 chap).About the author: Jack (John Stewart)
Williamson, Child and Father of Wonder (1985 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr.See
also: AIR WONDER STORIES; ALIENS; ANDROIDS; ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION;

AUTOMATION; BLACK HOLES; CHILDREN IN SF; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS;
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FASTER THAN LIGHT; GALACTIC
EMPIRES; GREAT AND SMALL; HEROES; HISTORY IN SF; HISTORY OF SF; LIFE ON
OTHER WORLDS; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); MACHINES;
MATTER
TRANSMISSION; MESSIAHS; MONSTERS; MOON; MUTANTS; MYTHOLOGY; ORIGIN OF
MAN;
OUTER PLANETS; PARALLEL WORLDS; POLITICS; POWER SOURCES; ROBOTS; SF
MAGAZINES; SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA; SPACESHIPS; STARS; SUN;
SUPERMAN; TERRAFORMING; TIME TRAVEL; TRANSPORTATION; WAR; WEAPONS;
WRITERS
OF THE FUTURE CONTEST.
WILLINGHAM, CALDER (BARNARD Jr)
(1922-1995) US novelist and scriptwriter whose flamboyant Southern
regionalism was most fully expressed in Eternal Fire (1963). His sf novel,
The Building of Venus Four (1977), a SEX-loaded spoof SPACE OPERA, fails
to convey much sense of his best work. An original filmscript for Stephen
SPIELBERG had been completed just before his death. [JC]
WILLIS, CHARLES
[s] Arthur C. CLARKE.
WILLIS, CONNIE
Working name of US teacher and writer Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis
(1945- ). She began publishing sf with "Santa Titicaca" for Worlds of
Fantasy in 1971, but appeared only intermittently in the field until the
early 1980s, when she began to write full-time, winning several awards
almost immediately. Most of her best work of the 1980s was in short-story
form, and her first book, Fire Watch (coll 1985), assembled a remarkable
range of tales. "Fire Watch" (1982) itself, which won both NEBULA and
HUGO, uses its TIME-TRAVEL premise - a future institute of historiography
sends individuals back in time to study artifacts in situ - to embed its
protagonist in a richly conceived UK at the time of the Blitz, when he
engages himself in attempts to save St Paul's Cathedral from bombing. "All
My Darling Daughters" - published as an original in Fire Watch because its
language and theme were still unacceptable in the US magazine market of
1980 - is a significantly harsh tale of alienation and SEX set in a
boarding school in an L5 orbit, where the male students rape alien
lifeforms which have vagina-like organs, making them scream in pain; and
the female protagonist tries to make sense of her hyperbolic adolescence
in terms strongly reminiscent of J.D. Salinger (1919- ). Among other tales
of interest in this first collection are Daisy, in the Sun (1979 Galileo;
1991 chap), "A Letter from the Clearys" (1982), which won a Nebula, "The
Sidon in the Mirror" (1983) and the comic "Blued Moon" (1984). A later
novella, "The Last of the Winnebagos" (1988), won CW both the Hugo and the
Nebula;"At the Rialto" (1989) won a Nebula;"Even the Queen" (1992) won a
Hugo and a Nebula for Short Story and"Death on the Nile" (1993) won a Hugo
for Short Story.As a novelist, CW began slowly with the relatively
lightweight Water Witch (1982) with Cynthia FELICE, set on a sand planet
where the ability to dowse for water is a precious gift. Light Raid (1989)
with Felice also skids helter-skelter through an sf environment, in this

case a post- HOLOCAUST balkanized USA fighting off Canadian royalists,
featuring the adventures en route to spunky maturity of a young female
protagonist much like those found in Robert A. HEINLEIN's less attractive
books. But it seemed clear that both CW and Felice were treating their
collaborations as jeux d'esprit, and CW's first solo novel, Lincoln's
Dreams (1987), aimed successfully at a very much higher degree of
seriousness, winning the JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD. Once again - as
with much of her most deeply felt work - the enabling sf instrument is
time travel, though in this case via a psychic linkage between a
contemporary woman and General Robert E. Lee (1807-1870), while at the
same time the male protagonist increasingly, and without a breath of
frivolity, seems to be taking on the psychic attributes of General Lee's
famous horse, Traveller (himself the protagonist of Traveller [1988 US] by
Richard Adams [1920- ]). The power of Lincoln's Dreams lies in the
haunting detail of CW's presentation of the American Civil War, which
seems in her hands terrifyingly close - both geographically and
psychically - to the contemporary world. Her second solo novel, DOOMSDAY
BOOK (1992), which shared the 1993 Hugo award and won the Nebula, is
another time-travel story. The frame setting - a mid-21st-century
historiographic unit attached to Oxford University - is shared with "Fire
Watch", but the tale itself is set at the time of the Black Death (around
1350), and mounts gradually to a climax whose intensely mourning gravity
is rarely found in sf, even in novels of travel to times past, where a
sense of irretrievable loss is commonly expressed.In the best of CW's
stories, and in her novels, a steel felicity of mind and style appears
effortlessly married to a copious empathy. Her more recent fascination
with the intersections of film realities and worlds of the past or future
may constitute something of a byway in her career, though several of the
stories in IMPOSSIBLE THINGS (coll 1994) - as well as the hilarious
spoofing of Hollywood Westerns in space in Uncharted Territory (1994; with
2 stories added, as coll 1994 UK), and the delving into the Marilyn Monroe
mythos embedded into Remake (dated 1994 but 1995) - are of sustained
interest. She continues to seem to be one of those writers from the 1980s
who are now approaching their best work. [JC]Other works:Distress Call (in
The Berkley Showcase #4, anth 1982; 1991 chap); The New Hugo Winners:
Volume III (anth 1994) with Martin H. GREENBERG.See also: ISAAC ASIMOV'S
SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; OMNI; PHYSICS; PSYCHOLOGY; WEAPONS.
WILLIS, MAUD
[r] Eileen LOTTMAN.
WILLIS, WALT
[r] HUGO; HYPHEN; NEBULA SCIENCE FICTION; QUANDRY; Bob SHAW; SLANT;
WARHOON; XERO.
WILLUMSEN, DORRIT
[r] DENMARK.
WILSON, [Sir] ANGUS (FRANK JOHNSTONE)
(1913-1991) UK writer best known for Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) and
other novels sharply anatomical of modern life. His one sf novel, The Old
Men at the Zoo (1961), applies MAINSTREAM techniques to a 1970s

NEAR-FUTURE vision of the UK threatened internally by loss of nerve and by
neofascism, and externally by a federated Europe. AW was an early
supporter of the hardcover PUBLISHING of GENRE SF in the UK, and edited
the book of the best stories entered for the Observer sf prize in 1954, A.
D. 2500 (anth 1955). The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (1977),
nonfiction, analyses KIPLING in terms which elucidate the haunting power
of that author's genre work. AW was knighted in 1980. [JC]See also:
HISTORY OF SF.
WILSON, ANNA
(1954- ) UK-born writer, now resident in the USA. Her novels are sharp
FEMINIST parables. Altogether Elsewhere (1985) depicts a NEAR-FUTURE
feminist backlash against male violence. Hatching Stones (1991) portrays a
society in which males largely abandon females when GENETIC ENGINEERING
allows them to clone "sons", although a modified form of the family
survives in a quasi- UTOPIAN society where all the adults are female.
[BS/JC]
WILSON, COLIN (HENRY)
(1931- ) UK writer of speculative works best known for his first book,
The Outsider (1956) (in which he gave graphic expression to the brilliant
autodidactism, the erratic system-building mentality, and the voracity for
new mental sensations that would mark the very numerous titles he would
produce over the next several decades, many of them of indirect interest
to sf and fantasy writers and readers), for his numerous books on crime,
notably A Criminal History of Mankind (1984) and Written in Blood: A
History of Forensic Detection (1989), and for his investigations of the
paranormal, of which the most important are The Occult (1971), Mysteries:
An Investigation into the Occult, the Paranormal, and the Supernatural
(1978), Poltergeist! (1981) and Beyond the Occult (1988). Sf critics have
not generally responded with much warmth to CW's later work, perhaps
because his eagerness to penetrate the barriers of "orthodox" science has
led him into assumptions about and formulations of the nature of
consciousness that seem to lurch dangerously far into the realms of
PSEUDO-SCIENCE; that is, the science he uses as underpinning for his sf is
often not generally accepted as such. A further difficulty is that, as his
total oeuvre has grown, it has become harder to work out which texts are
deeply considered, which are blarney, and which are
potboilers.Nevertheless, his sf is of considerable interest. The Return of
the Lloigor (in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, anth 1969 US; rev 1974 chap
UK) is fantasy. His only sf short story is "Timeslip" (in Aries 1 [anth
1979] ed John Grant [Paul BARNETT]). His first sf novel, The Mind
Parasites (1967), combines the long temporal perspectives of H.P.
LOVECRAFT's Cthulhu Mythos with the transcendental solipsism of A.E. VAN
VOGT and the metabiological pathos of George Bernard SHAW in a tale which
suggests that humanity has for eons been deliberately hampered by ALIEN
entities, and that these shackles could be cast off. The Philosopher's
Stone (1969), perhaps the most intellectually stimulating of his novels,
with an appealingly ramshackle construction, again invokes Cthulhu to
suggest that the Old Ones who seem to be keeping humanity in thrall are in
fact asleep and indifferent. The Space Vampires (1976; vt Lifeforce 1985

US), filmed as LIFEFORCE (1985), promulgates the same message in the form
of a partly SPACE-OPERA horror tale featuring, once again, parasitic
aliens and a human race of thwarted (but infinite) potential. A similar
dynamic of oppression and release serves as the philosophical base
underlying the boys'-fiction dramaturgy of the later Spider World sequence
- Spider World: The Tower (1987; vt in 3 vols as Spider World 1: The
Desert 1988 US, Spider World 2: The Tower 1989 US and Spider World 3: The
Fortress 1989 US), Spider World: The Delta (1987) and Spider World: The
Magician (1992) - set in a FAR-FUTURE Earth whose human remnants live in
thralldom to giant arachnids. [JC/JGr]Other works: Many works including
the Gerard Sorme series - Ritual in the Dark (1960), Man Without a Shadow:
The Diary of an Existentialist (1963; vt The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme
1963 US and 1968 UK) and The God of the Labyrinth (1970; vt The Hedonists
1971 US)-of which the 2nd is borderline fantasy and the 3rd fantasy
proper; The Black Room (1971), about sensory deprivation; the Chief
Superintendent Gregory Saltfleet series of psi/occult whodunnits, being
The Schoolgirl Murder Case (1974) and The Janus Murder Case (1984); The
Personality Surgeon (1985).Nonfiction: Many works including The Strength
to Dream: Literature and the Imagination (1962); The Strange Genius of
David Lindsay (1970; vt The Haunted Man 1979 US) with E.H. VISIAK and J.B.
Pick, on David LINDSAY; Tree by Tolkien (1973 chap); Science Fiction as
Existentialism (1978 chap); Starseekers (1980); Frankenstein's Castle
(1980); The Quest for Wilhelm Reich (1981); Afterlife (1985).As Editor:
Dark Dimensions: A Celebration of the Occult (anth 1978 US); The Book of
Time (anth 1980) with John Grant; The Directory of Possibilities (1981),
also with Grant; The Mammoth Book of the Supernatural (anth 1991) with
Damon Wilson.About the author: Colin Wilson: The Outside and Beyond (1979)
by Clifford P. Bendau; The Novels of Colin Wilson (1982) by Nicolas
Tredell; The Work of Colin Wilson: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide
(1989) by Colin Stanley.See also: GREAT AND SMALL; MONSTERS; PARASITISM
AND SYMBIOSIS; SUSPENDED ANIMATION; TIME TRAVEL.
WILSON, F(RANCIS) PAUL
(1946- ) US physician and writer who began publishing sf with "The
Cleaning Machine" for Startling Mystery Stories in 1971, and who has
written some associational work as by Colin Andrews. His early career was
much influenced by John W. CAMPBELL Jr, in whose ASF he published several
of his best 1970s stories, including the early versions of tales which
reached book form as the LaNague Federation series - Healer (1972 ASF as
"Pard"; exp 1976), which was elected to the Prometheus Hall of Fame in
1990; Wheels within Wheels: A Novel of the LaNague Federation (1971 ASF;
exp 1978), which won the first Prometheus AWARD for LIBERTARIAN SF; and An
Enemy of the State (1980), all 3 being assembled as The LaNague Chronicle
(omni 1992). The sequence engagingly deployed FPW's knowledgeability, the
deft clarity of his writing, and his unabashed and comfortable use of pulp
concepts - like the protagonist Steven Dalt, an immortal psychiatric
healer who repeatedly saves the Solar System from enemies internal and
external - to express what might be called philosophical perspectives on
the world: the influence of Albert Camus (1913-1960) upon the creation of
Dalt has been adduced.In the 1980s, FPW began to concentrate on novels
like The Keep (1981), the first novel in the Adversary sequence, an

impressive horror tale set in WWII in the Transylvanian Alps, where a Nazi
garrison is being slowly destroyed by vampires indigenous to the eponymous
lodging; it was filmed in 1983. The first sequel, Reborn (1990), is less
assured, and demonstrates some lack of commercial facility during those
moments when the buried Evil from the first book is unconvincingly shown
to be living-dead; but Reprisal (1991; vt Reprisals 1991 UK) more
successfully broadens the compass of the conflict between humans and a
dark nemesis, a broadening which also marks Nightworld (1992 UK). Although
Dydeetown World (fixup 1989) is an sf thriller reminiscent of his 1970s
work, FPW had clearly evolved from the genre by this point, and in 1991 he
stands as a potentially major HORROR writer, an estimate not materially
affected by novels like The Select (1994), a medical sf thriller amply
tinged with horror. [JC]Other works: The Tery (1973 Fiction 4 as "He Shall
Be John"; exp 1979 chap dos; with stories added, further exp as coll
1990); The Tomb (1984); The Touch (1986); Black Wind (1988); Soft and
Others (coll 1989); Ad Statum Perspicuum (coll 1990); Midnight Mass (1990
chap); Pelts (1990 chap); Sibs (1991; vt Sister Night 1993 UK); Buckets
(1991 chap); The Barrens (1992); Freak Show (anth 1992).See also:
PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS.
WILSON, (JOHN) GROSVENOR
(1866-? ) US writer in whose sf novel, The Monarch of Millions, or The
Rise and Fall of the American Empire (1900), a 1950s USA is strictly
organized according to wealth, with the Emperor richest of all; the
sciences have advanced remarkably but the people remain potentially
restive, and young Demos from Alaska is able to topple the old plutocracy.
Unfortunately - despite this cosmetic democratization - the power
structure remains intact. The book's cynicism tends to neutralize some of
the foggy allegory.
WILSON, J. ARBUTHNOT
[s] Grant ALLEN.
WILSON, RICHARD
(1920-1987) US writer and director of the News Bureau of Syracuse
University until his retirement in 1982. Involved in sf from an early age,
he was a founder of the FUTURIANS in the 1930s, publishing his first sf
story, "Murder from Mars", with Astonishing Stories in 1940; "Stepsons of
Mars", which he wrote with fellow Futurian C.M. KORNBLUTH under the house
name Ivar TOWERS, appeared in the same issue. A further Towers story, "The
Man without a Planet" (1942), was by RW alone; he later used the pseudonym
Edward Halibut for "Course of Empire" (1956). War service interrupted his
career, but after 1950 - perhaps finding the new atmosphere in sf
congenial to his gently satirical, humorous bent - he contributed
prolifically to the magazines for some years, and soon published his first
novel, The Girls from Planet 5 (1955), the first of 3 in which ALIENS
comically invade Earth ( INVASION; SEX; WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE
FICTION); the others were And Then the Town Took Off (1960 dos) and 30-Day
Wonder (1960). In each, RW made use of the arrivals from outer space to
generate mocking perspectives on our own behaviour: from the strident
patriarchy still attempting, in the first novel, to keep Texas pure
although the rest of the USA has become a matriarchy, to the appalling

consequences, in the third, of being exposed to aliens who observe to the
literal letter all Earth laws and enforce similar behaviour on us.
Similarly couched SATIRE dominated his first 2 collections, Those Idiots
from Earth (coll 1957) and Time Out for Tomorrow (coll
1962).Unfortunately, from the mid-1960s RW published no books at all Adventures in the Space Trade (1986 chap dos), a memoir, A Rat for a
Friend (1986 chap), a story, and The Kid from Ozone Park & Other Stories
(coll 1987 chap), though welcome, were pamphlet-length - and most of the
graver, smoother, finer stories of his last decades remained uncollected.
He won a 1968 NEBULA for his novelette "Mother to the World" (1968); other
late stories of interest include "See Me Not" (1967), "A Man Spekith"
(1969), "The Day They had the War" (1971) and the contents of The Kid from
Ozone Park (all originals). In his later years, RW reportedly made it
clear to colleagues that he remained too content in his professional life
to continue seriously in a writing career. It is understood that a long
story awaits publication in Harlan ELLISON's projected Last Dangerous
Visions. [JC]About the author: A Richard Wilson Checklist (1986 chap dos)
by Chris DRUMM.
WILSON, ROBERT ANTON
(1932- ) US writer who remains best known for the first Illuminatus!
sequence - The Eye in the Pyramid (1975), The Golden Apple (1975) and
Leviathan (1975), assembled as The Illuminatus Trilogy (omni 1984) - all
written with Robert SHEA. Shea did not collaborate on Cosmic Trigger: The
Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977), The Illuminati Papers (1980), Masks
of the Illuminati (1981) or Right Where You Are Sitting Now: Further Tales
of the Illuminati (coll 1982) - some of these volumes being presented as
nonfiction - or on The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, set in the 18th
century: The Earth Will Shake (1984), The Widow's Son (1985) and Nature's
God (1991). Shea did, however, write continuations of his own (see his
entry). The series combines detective, FANTASY and sf components into the
extremely complex tale of a vast conspiracy on the part of the Illuminati,
historically a late-18th-century German association of freethinkers but
here rendered into the gods of H.P. LOVECRAFT's Cthulhu Mythos, among
other incarnations, so that mortals cohabit irretrievably with warring
gods; throughout, the PARANOIA engendered by any and all attempts to
understand immortal conspiracies, of which all the things of the world
were emblems, reminded many readers of Thomas PYNCHON, but an
unPynchonesque lightheartedness permeates the sequence. On the basis of
their other works, this nihilistic gaiety derived in the main from RAW,
and was clearly evident as well in The Sex Magician (1974), which was
expanded and transformed into the ultimately opaque complexities of
Schrodinger's Cat: The Universe Next Door (1979), II: The Trick Top Hat
(1980) and III: The Homing Pigeons (1981), all 3 assembled as
Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (omni 1988), a sequence which transformed the
worlds of subatomic physics into a pattern of ALTERNATE WORLDS. It might
be thought that RAW, like many 1980s writers, would slip into
VIRTUAL-REALITY venues when attempting to manipulate levels of perception;
but ultimately he refused to supply comforts of that ilk, for in his work
there is no centre to the labyrinth, no master waiting to reward the
heroes of the quest. [JC]Other works: Semiotext(e) SF (anth 1990) with

Rudy RUCKER and Robert Lamborn Wilson; Reality is What You Can Get Away
With (1992), an sf spoof.See also: HUMOUR; LIBERTARIAN SF; MUSIC; PHYSICS;
THEATRE.
WILSON, ROBERT CHARLES
(1953- ) US-born writer, in Canada from 1962, who began to publish sf
with "Equinocturne" for ASF in 1974, though he did not make a significant
impact on the field until the 1980s, when he began to publish his polished
and inventive novels. His first, A Hidden Place (1986), prefigures much of
his work in positing an emotion-drenched binary between the mundane world
and an ALTERNATE WORLD, in this case the latter being the realm of Faery,
though presented in an sf idiom; as in his later work, a protagonist
embedded in everyday reality must come to terms with - and perhaps take
ethically acceptable advantage of - the fragile opening to a better place
that seems to be on offer. The "other place" in Memory Wire (1987) is a
kind of LOST WORLD temporally removed from a CYBERPUNK 21st century; the
protagonists make contact with it through "oneiroliths" or dream stones.
In Gypsies (1989 US) an entire family of Earth children live in various
states of pathological denial of their capacity to walk through the walls
of this world into a variety of parallel existences ( PARALLEL WORLDS);
out of one of these, which is profoundly DYSTOPIAN, comes the Grey Man who
haunts the family in his attempts to lure the children "back" to the
dreadful world in which he claims they belong. But they escape him, ending
in a pastoral world much like a realm of the Pacific Rim in which it does
not rain much. The Divide (1990 US) locates the binary within the skull of
a character who contains 2 utterly distinct selves; the book slips into
melodrama - it is perhaps RCW's weakest novel - and its split-brain
conundra are solved by a blow to the head. In A Bridge of Years (1991 US)
the divide lies between the present and 1961, which are connected through
TIME TRAVEL and a plot which deals, in familiar terms, with a long-ranging
time-war between vying reality-lines. The persistency of RCW's basic
concerns allows him, on occasion, to slide into routine formulations; but,
throughout, he expresses with vigour and imagination the great Canadian
theme (for the sense of being on the lonely side of a binary has sparked
much of the best Canadian sf) of geographical alienation. In The Harvest
(1993), his most ambitious novel to date, an alien group intelligence
offers humanity gifts of immortality, undying curiosity and wisdom; most
accept, for a variety of reasons presented by RCW with the kind of
informed sympathy found in writers of the 1990s - but not generally in
more optimistic decades - for actions of this sort. Mysterium (1994)
returns poignantly to the theme of alienation, describing in considerable
detail what happens to the residents of a small town when it is translated
into a parallel world.RCW should not be confused with the author of The
Crooked Tree (1980), Robert C(harles) Wilson (1951- ). [JC]See also:
CANADA; SUPERMAN.
WILSON, ROBERT HENDRIE
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
WILSON, ROBIN SCOTT
(1928- ) US editor, writer and academic, currently President of
California State University, Chico. He began publishing sf with "The State

of the Art" for FSF in 1970; his best story is probably "For a While
There, Herbert Marcuse, I Thought You Were Maybe Right About Alienation
and Eros" (1972). His early work was published as by Robin Scott. RSW was
most influential as the founder, with Damon KNIGHT and others, of the
CLARION SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' WORKSHOP in Clarion, Pennsylvania, in
1968. In addition to directing the workshop, he ed Clarion: An Anthology
of Speculative Fiction from the Clarion Writers' Workshop (anth 1971),
Clarion II (anth 1972) and Clarion III (anth 1973); in the last he
announced his retirement from Clarion. Additionally, RSW ed Those who Can:
A Science Fiction Reader (anth 1973), in which, interestingly, writers
discuss their own and others' stories in the anthology under various
critical headings. [JC]
WILSON, SNOO
(1948- ) UK playwright and novelist whose sf novels Spaceache (1984) and
Inside Babel (1985) comprise a short series of SATIRES whose targets are
contemporary politics and culture. Unfortunately, his use of sf
instruments is significantly less than competent - most notably, his
attempt to make fun of SPACE OPERA founders on his manifest ignorance of
its conventions and, indeed, of the scientific rationales underpinning
them. [JC]See also: OVERPOPULATION; RADIO.
WILSON, STEVE
(1943- ) UK writer who published non-sf short fiction and 3 biker
thrillers before the appearance of The Lost Traveller (1976) - not to be
confused with Ruthven TODD's The Lost Traveller (1943). SW's version, set
in a desolate post- HOLOCAUST venue at century's end, extols the survival
capacity of a group of Hell's Angels, one of whom becomes a MESSIAH
figure. At novel's end, after a battle with the army, it looks as though
agriculture will be revived. [JC]
WILSON, WILLIAM
(? -? ) UK writer, one of several contemporaries with the same name, who
devoted 2 chapters of his book of criticism, A Little Earnest Book upon a
Great Old Subject (1851), to "The Poetry of Science", defining there a
species of literature called "Science-Fiction" (the first use of the term)
as writing "in which the revealed truths of science may be given,
interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true thus circulating a knowledge of the Poetry of Science, clothed in a garb
of the Poetry of Life". His (unconvincing) example is The Poor Artist by
R.H. HORNE (c 1844; 1871). [BS]See also: DEFINITIONS OF SF.
WILTSHIRE, DAVID
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
WINDLING, TERRI
(1958- ) US editor, artist and writer who began in the first capacity in
1979 at ACE BOOKS, where she developed the company's fantasy line,
discovering such authors as Steven BRUST and Charles DE LINT, and
launching the Ace Fantasy Specials with Emma BULL's War for the Oaks
(1987). Also while at Ace she launched the Fairy Tales series with Brust's
The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars (1987). She moved to TOR BOOKS in 1987 as
consulting editor; the 4th and subsequent Fairy Tales books were published

by that house. The winner of 4 World Fantasy Awards for her editorial
work, TW also edited with Mark Alan Arnold Elsewhere (anth 1981),
Elsewhere, Volume II (anth 1982) and Elsewhere, Volume III (anth 1984),
and edits with Ellen DATLOW (whom see for details) the Year's Best Fantasy
annual anthology. [PNH] Other works: Faery! (anth 1982); the Borderlands
SHARED-WORLD anthology series, the first 2 vols ed with Mark Alan Arnold:
Borderland (anth 1986), Borderland 2 (anth 1986) and Life on the Border
(anth 1991); and 2 anthologies of Twice-Told Wonder Tales with Datlow:
Snow White, Blood Red (anth 1993) and Black Thorn, White Rose (anth 1994).
WINGED SERPENT, THE
Q.
WINGRAVE, ANTHONY
S. Fowler WRIGHT.
WINGROVE, DAVID (JOHN)
(1954- ) UK writer whose career breaks into 2 logical sequences. In the
first he concentrated on critical work, the earliest significant example
of which - The Immortals of Science Fiction (written 1980) - was printed
but never released (although apparently copies have been circulated).
Apertures: A Study of the Writings of Brian Aldiss (1984), with Brian
GRIFFIN, was both admiring and reasonably comprehensive, and marked a
close association with its subject, who introduced The Science Fiction
Source Book (1984), which packs into relatively few pages a surprisingly
comprehensive "Consumer's Guide" to sf novels; its main flaw is its
sublimely overcomplicated quadripartite rating system. Aldiss then invited
DW to participate with him in revising his energetic history of sf,
Billion Year Spree (1973); the result, published as Trillion Year Spree:
The History of Science Fiction (1986), with DW listed as co-author,
attempts with partial success to sustain the elan of its much shorter
parent, but falters in its coverage of the late 1970s and 1980s. It
received a HUGO.DW's career then changed direction, being subsequently
dominated by the release of the first vols of his enormous Chung Kuo
sequence, projected to reach 8 vols, and to date comprising The Middle
Kingdom (1989), The Broken Wheel (1990), The White Mountain (1991), The
Stone Within (1992), Beneath the Tree of Heaven (1993) and White Moon, Red
Dragon (1994). Set in a 22nd- and 23rd-century Earth dominated by a
monolithic Chinese hegemony which has successfully stymied all
technological development, the sequence elaborately delineates a stalled
and static culture, and clearly seems to be preparing the scene for a
radical transformation of the world; the early volumes, perhaps
consequently, are stronger as dynastic history than as sf. [JC]See also:
CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DEFINITIONS OF SF; GOTHIC SF;
PROTO SCIENCE FICTION.
WINIKI, EPHRIAM
[s] John Russell FEARN.
WINSOR, G(EORGE) McLEOD
(? -? ) Author, generally thought to be UK, in whose first sf novel,
Station X (1919), a psychic INVASION from Mars is repelled by an
Earth-Venus alliance; the book was reprinted (1975 US) with an intro by

Richard Gid Powers which mystifyingly claims it to be an important work.
In The Mysterious Disappearances (1926; vt Vanishing Men 1927 US) a
criminal scientist uses a kind of ANTIGRAVITY to commit the sort of
"impossible crime" so popular in the detective fiction of the early
decades of this century. [JC/PN]
WINSTON, STAN
[r] PREDATOR 2; The TERMINATOR.
WINTER, H.G.
[s] Harry BATES; Desmond W. HALL.
WINTERBOTHAM, RUSS(ELL ROBERT)
(1904-1971) US newspaperman and writer, active as an author of sf and
Westerns, as the creator of at least 60 Big Little Books ( DIME-NOVEL SF;
JUVENILE SERIES) - including tales about Maximo the Amazing Superman (all
1941) - and as the author of various COMIC strips throughout his career
(he retired in 1969), initiating Chris Welkin, Planeteer in 1951 and
scripting it into the 1960s. He published his first sf story, "The Star
that Would not Behave", with ASF in 1935, and contributed most
prolifically to the genre before WWII. After concentrating on work for
Whitman Publishing Company (generator of the Big Little Books and other
series for children), he returned to sf writing from 1952 and was again
noted as a prolific author of unambitious work, soon publishing his first
novel, The Space Egg (1958), about an INVASION of Earth; several other sf
adventures followed, including The Other World (1963) as by J. Harvey
Bond, and Planet Big Zero (1964), as by Franklin Hadley. [JC]Other works:
The Red Planet (1962); The Men from Arcturus (1963); The Puppet Planet
(1964); The Lord of Nardos (1966).
WISE, ARTHUR
(1923- ) UK writer and drama consultant, most of whose works were
thrillers; he wrote also as John McArthur. Most of his sf was borderline,
using genre elements to heighten the suspense. The best known of these
tales was probably The Day the Queen Flew to Scotland for the Grouse
Shooting (1968), about the abduction of the monarch. A second NEAR-FUTURE,
political novel was Who Killed Enoch Powell? (1970), where the
assassination of that politician sets a complex thriller in motion,
escalating to racial violence at Wimbledon. The displacement into sf of
all his work is minimal. [JC]Other works: The Little Fishes (1961); The
Death's-Head (1962); Leatherjacket (1970).As John McArthur: Days in the
Hay (1960); How Now Brown Cow (1962).
WISE, ROBERT
(1914- ) US film director. RW began as a film-cutter at RKO Studios and
by 1939 was a fully qualified editor. He worked on Orson Welles's Citizen
Kane (1941) and also - at the studio's insistence when the director was
out of the country - directed a few scenes in Welles's The Magnificent
Ambersons (1942). He then worked with the Val Lewton unit at RKO, first as
editor, then as director. He made 3 films for Lewton - Curse of the Cat
People (1944; co-dir with Gunther von Fritsch), Mademoiselle Fifi (1944)
and The Body Snatcher (1945) - and stayed with RKO until 1949. In 1951 he
dir The DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL . He did not return to the genre until

The ANDROMEDA STRAIN (1971). A versatile director, he has made many kinds
of films, including the musicals West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of
Music (1964). He has made 2 superior contributions to the supernatural
genre aside from his Lewton films: The Haunting (1963), based on Shirley
JACKSON's The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and Audrey Rose (1977). He
returned spectacularly to sf with the controversial STAR TREK - THE MOTION
PICTURE (1979), an ambitious attempt to fuse the simplistic original tv
series with post- STAR WARS special effects and a transcendental 2001: A
SPACE ODYSSEY vision. Subsequently he has directed only the feeble youth
musical, Rooftops (1989). RW's work in sf and supernatural fantasy, at
least until 1971, did more than that of most directors to bring some
maturity to these genres in the cinema. [JB/PN/KN]
WISE, ROBERT A.
Pseudonym of UK writer Fred J. Gebhart (? - ), whose sf novel was the
routine 12 to the Moon (1961). He is unconnected with the film director
Robert WISE. [JC]
WISMER, DON(ALD RICHARD)
(1946- ) US writer who began publishing sf with Starluck (1982), a
competent sf adventure. Warrior Planet (1987) combines sf and fantasy
elements in the story of an interstellar conflict between wizards and
thieves. Planet of the Dead (1988) rather more convincingly sets a cadre
of PSI-POWERED samurai warriors in pursuit of an interstellar drug gang.
[JC]Other works: A Roil of Stars (1991).
WITKACY
Stanislaw Ignacy WITKIEWICZ.
WITKIEWICZ, STANISpsAW IGNACY
(1885-1939) Polish playwright, novelist and painter, who also signed
himself Witkacy; he committed suicide just after the Nazi invasion of his
country when he learned that Soviet armies had attacked from the east, the
direction in which he was fleeing. Much of his work, some eerily
prophetic, deals darkly and humorously with the theme of a conservative
world suddenly subjected to change, the clash of cultures, apocalypse and
future totalitarianism. Of his 30 surviving plays, the most notable in
this vein include the DYSTOPIAN fantasy Gyubal Wahazar, czyli Na
przeleczach besensu ["Gyubal Wahazar, or Along the Cliffs of the Absurd"]
(written 1921; 1962), Matwa, czyli Hyrkanicznyswiatopoglad ["The
Cuttlefish, or The Hyrcanian World View"] (written 1922; 1923), and most
of the violent dramas of a surreal future assembled in The Madman and the
Nun and Other Plays (all written 1920-30, published 1925-62; coll trans
Daniel C. Gerould and C.S. Durer 1968 US); of these, perhaps the most
important is the blackly terrifying Szewcy (written 1930; 1948; here trans
as The Shoemakers), which predicts WWII. His 2 published novels are sf:
Pozegnanie jesieni ["Farewell to Autumn"] (1927) and Nienasycenie (1930;
trans Louis Iribarne as Insatiability 1977 US). In the former, Communists
take over a future Poland. The latter, set in the 21st century, shows a
fractured, ersatz West, a consumer society subject to a growing appetite
for novelty, being taken over by Chinese Communists and Eastern mysticism,
whose purveyors also provide happy pills. It is a distinguished and

important novel. An uncompleted further tale, Jedyne wyjecie ["The Only
Way Out"] (written 1931-3; 1968), furthers the discourse of its
predecessor. It was not until 1962 that the Polish Government began,
gingerly, to publish a collected edition of his work. [PN/JC]About the
author: Witkacy: Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz as an Imaginative Writer
(1981) by Daniel C. Gerould.See also: POLAND.
WITT, OTTO
[r] SCANDINAVIA.
WITTIG, MONIQUE
(1935- ) French writer whose first sf novel, Les Guerilleres (1969; trans
David Le Vay as The Guerilleres 1971 US), transforms the arguments of
FEMINISM into a series of narrative litanies that work movingly to
describe an abstract "tribe" of lesbian Amazons in a constant state of
warfare with their natural enemy; the novel balances exquisitely between
sf (when its images are taken literally) and poetry. In Virgile, Non
(1985; trans David Le Vay as Across the Acheron 1987 UK), DANTE
ALIGHIERI's Inferno is taken as a model of destructive patriarchy, and a
deadly threat to any lesbian (a category which MW uses to designate a
condition beyond the binary oppositions of our "normal" state) future.
[JC]See also: WOMEN SF WRITERS.
WLUDYKA, PETER
(? - ) US writer whose The Past is Another Country (1988) describes a
USA, 143 years after a Russian invasion, in which thought-control is
almost complete. The young protagonist discovers some of the truth about
Christ and the disappeared city of New York, but only at great cost.
Unfortunately for the book, the basic premise - that mutual disarmament
was a Russian trick to gull pacifistic Americans - very soon became dated.
[JC]
WOBIG, ELLEN
(1911-1989) US writer whose The Youth Monopoly (1968 dos) is an
unremarkable sf adventure about rejuvenation. [JC]
WODEHOUSE, [Sir] P(ELHAM) G(RENVILLE)
(1881-1975) UK writer, resident in the USA from long before WWII, known
mainly for his non-genre novels, most of them comic, published in an
unbroken stream from 1902 to the end of his life. The Swoop! or How
Clarence Saved England: A Tale of the Great Invasion (1909) spoofed the
future- WAR/INVASION genre so popular in the UK before 1914 with its
description of 9 simultaneous invasions, 7 of which collapse, leaving the
German and the Russian armies in command. Their chiefs compete with one
another in music-hall recitals of their feats until Boy Scout Clarence
Chugwater exposes the fact that one of them is being paid more than the
others; the invasions end in ignominy. In Laughing Gas (1936) rival
dentists' anaesthetics cause an identity switch between an earl and an
obnoxious child star; the resulting story has all the marks of the typical
PGW comedy, however, and is not easy to think of as sf. [JC]See also: CLUB
STORY; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION.
WODHAMS, JACK

(1931- ) UK-born writer, in Australia from 1955, who began publishing sf
with "There is a Crooked Man" for ASF in 1967, and who has since
contributed actively (though less prolifically since the 1970s) to
magazine markets, both in Australia and in the USA, specializing in
clear-cut tales about problem-solving; he primarily writes short fiction,
with over 70 stories published. His cold style is sometimes marred by
facetiousness, in the Sunday-writer manner typical of many HARD-SF
figures. Although the 4 novelettes assembled in Future War (coll 1982)
were original to that volume, the thrust of his ASF style can still be
felt in tales whose overwhelming message is one of bleak disdain for sf's
own visions of the wars of the future. His novels are The Authentic Touch
(1971 US), Looking for Blucher (1980) and Ryn (1982). The first, perhaps
rather hopefully, suggests that things might get out of control in a
planet made over into theme parks; Looking for Blucher investigates
similar material in a loose-structured narrative about shared dreams; Ryn,
probably his best novel, tells of a 62-year-old Black Zimbabwean
reincarnated, to his bafflement, as a white baby in the Brisbane of a
reticently depicted NEAR-FUTURE Australia. JW's hard-bitten humour can be
tiresome at novel length, and he structures longer works badly. His short
fiction is proficient, often witty, and good on military matters. Notable
and typical is "Mostly Meantime" (ASF Feb 1981), about the difficulties of
ordering replacement computer parts over galactic distances. [PN/JC]
WOJNA SWIATOW-NASTEPNE STULECIE
POLAND.
WOLD, ALLEN L(ESTER)
(1943- ) US writer who began with an unremarkable sf adventure, The
Planet Masters (1979), followed by the more ambitious Star God (1980). He
then became known for some "V" ties: "V": The Pursuit of Diana * (1984),
"V": The Crivit Experiment * (1985) and "V": Below the Threshhold *
(1988). In Jewels of the Dragon (1986) a young man in search of his lost
father finds himself involved in events on a planet choked with romantic
ruins. The Eye in the Stone (1988) is a fantasy. Crown of the Serpent
(1989) is juvenile sf. The Lair of the Cyclops (1992) returns to the mode
of Jewels of the Dragon, following the quest of a young man who finds
something ancient on a planet. [JC]
WOLF, CHRIS L.
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
WOLF, GARY K.
(1941- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Love Story" for Worlds
of Tomorrow in 1970, and followed with several sharply SATIRICAL tales
over the next few years; the best of them, like "Dr Rivet and Supercon
Sal" (1976), are generally thought to scan US society with a sharper,
cleaner vision than that attained in his longer work. Soon, however, he
began to concentrate on novels, beginning with Killerbowl (1975), a
briskly violent portrait of a world - rather similar to that of ROLLERBALL
(1975) - in which games are used to sublimate more politically dangerous
passions ( GAMES AND SPORTS). A Generation Removed (1977) depicts a
NEAR-FUTURE society in which the young have violently taken the reins of

power and euthanasia of the middle-aged is common; here the analogy would
be with LOGAN'S RUN (1976). The Resurrectionist (1979), which develops the
MATTER-TRANSMISSION premise of "The Bridge Builder" (1974), again exposes
a corrupt world to violent retribution. Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (1981),
filmed by Walt Disney in conjunction with Steven SPIELBERG's Amblin
Entertainment as Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) dir Robert Zemeckis, could
not in retrospect compete with the extraordinary and moving animation
techniques which made the film an instant classic. A sequel, Who
P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit? (1991), involves the same cast in another
adventure, this time a quest of the truth behind a rumoured love affair
between Clark Gable and Roger's girl. The film itself has been followed by
2 Roger Rabbit shorts, Tummy Trouble (1989) and Rollercoaster Rabbit
(1990); work on a further feature is (1992) at drawing-board stage. [JC]
WOLFE, AARON
Dean R. KOONTZ.
WOLFE, BERNARD
(1915-1985) US writer best known for his work outside the sf field. He
gained a BA in psychology from Yale in 1935, worked for 2 years in the
Merchant Marine, and for a time was a bodyguard to Leon Trotsky
(1874-1940) in Mexico. He subsequently became a war correspondent,
newsreel editor and freelance writer, and contributed stories and articles
to many leading magazines. His first contribution to sf was a novelette in
Gal, "Self Portrait" (1951), soon followed by his only sf novel, LIMBO
(1952; vt Limbo '90 1953 UK; cut 1961 US). This large and extravagant book
is perhaps the finest sf novel of ideas to have been published during the
1950s. It portrays a future in which men have deliberately chosen to cut
off their own arms and legs in order to avoid the risk of war. Complex
(making use of many ideas from CYBERNETICS), ironic, hectoring and full of
puns, LIMBO was firmly based on BW's knowledge of psychoanalysis and in
particular on his understanding of the masochistic instinct in modern Man.
It is perhaps for this last quality that J.G. BALLARD has hailed it
several times as the greatest US sf novel; Ballard may have sensed, too,
that LIMBO also functions as a corrosive assault upon the premises and
instruments of sf itself. BW wrote very little subsequent sf, although
Harlan ELLISON persuaded him to contribute 2 stories to Again, Dangerous
Visions (anth 1972): "The Bisquit Position", an impassioned
anti-Vietnam-War story, centres on the image of a napalmed dog, and "The
Girl with Rapid Eye Movements" is about sleep research and ESP. In his
"Afterword" to these stories, BW expressed an extreme hostility to science
and also to sf, which he considered its handmaiden. Further details of
BW's remarkable career can be found in his Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy
Pornographer (1972). [DP]See also: CYBERPUNK; CYBORGS; DYSTOPIAS;
MEDICINE; WEAPONS.
WOLFE, GARY K(ENT)
(1946- ) US academic and writer, long associated with Roosevelt
University in Chicago, since 1991 as its Professor of Humanities at its
School of Continuing Education. Some of his earlier essays, like "The
Known and the Unknown: Structure and Image in Science Fiction" (1977),
prefigured the typology of sf he presented in full in his most significant

work, The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction
(1979), in which sf texts and their essential icons are defined according
to their relationship to the permeable membrane separating us from the
unknown, which GKW feels all sf attempts - or pretends to attempt - to
pierce. The discussion is arranged around a lucid disposition of icons the SPACESHIP, the city, the wasteland, the ROBOT and the MONSTER - and
the book has served as an admirable mapping of its thesis ( CONCEPTUAL
BREAKTHROUGH). In Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A
Glossary and Guide to Scholarship (1986) GKW made a first attempt - a
revised edn would be welcome - to describe the critical vocabulary used by
scholars in their attempts to encompass this protean genre. [JC]Other
works: Science Fiction Dialogues (anth 1982); David Lindsay (1982 chap.See
also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DEFINITIONS OF SF; GENRE SF;
PILGRIM AWARD; PLANETARY ROMANCE; SPECULATIVE FICTION.
WOLFE, GENE (RODMAN)
(1931- ) US writer, born in New York, raised in Texas, and now living in
Illinois. After serving in the Korean War - his experiences there are
recorded in Letters Home (coll 1991), which contains correspondence with
his mother between 1952 and 1954 - he graduated in mechanical engineering
from the University of Houston and worked in engineering until becoming an
editor of a trade periodical, Plant Engineering, in 1972. Since retiring
from this post in 1984, he has written full-time. Though neither the most
popular nor the most influential author in the sf field, GW is today quite
possibly the most important.He started writing early, but did not find it
easy to break into print; his first published story, "The Dead Man" for
Sir, appeared as late as 1965, years after he had begun to create fiction
of some distinction. In his early career, much of his best work tended to
appear in various volumes of Damon KNIGHT's Orbit anthologies, starting
with "Trip, Trap" (1967) and climaxing with the superb KAFKA-esque
allegory, "Forlesen" (1974). In the middle of the series came "The Island
of Doctor Death and Other Stories" (1970 Orbit 7), which was assembled along with The Death of Doctor Island (1973 Universe 3, anth ed Terry
CARR; 1990 chap dos), "The Doctor of Death Island" (1978), and "Death of
the Island Doctor" (original to the coll) - as The Wolfe Archipelago (coll
1983). These 4 stories, each fully autonomous though each mirroring the
others' structural and thematic patterns, comprise an intensely
interesting cubist portrayal of the mortal trap (or coffin) of identity,
written in terms that are instrinsically sf in nature. From the first, in
other words, GW created texts which - almost uniquely-married Modernism (
FABULATION) and sf, rather than putting them into rhetorical opposition;
his ultimate importance to world literature derives from the success of
that marriage, though his use of a thoroughly natural sf idiom has of
course ensured that the response to his work, on the part of non-sf
critics, has been poverty-stricken. CHILDREN - as very often in his work tend to be the viewpoint characters in the Archipelago stories, giving the
texts a supremely deceptive air of clarity-for although the surface is
nearly always described with precision in a GW tale, the true story within
is generally conveyed by indirection, revealing itself through the
reader's ultimate comprehension of the proper and hierarchical sorting of
its parts. Constrained to metaphorically fecund ISLAND contexts, the

Archipelago tales are particularly intricate. The first treats with
assurance the shifting line that divides fantasy and reality as a young
boy retreats from a harsh adult environment into the more clear-cut world
generated by a pulp magazine. "The Death of Doctor Island" expands and
reverses this theme in describing the treatment of a psychologically
disturbed child constrained to an artificial environment which responds to
his state of mind. In "The Doctor of Death Island" a cryogenically frozen
prisoner is awakened to find that his bound isolation has been hardened
into IMMORTALITY. All 3 protagonists must attempt - it is a compulsion
that GW would inflict upon many of his characters - to decipher and to
penetrate the stories that tell them, and by so doing to leap free. GW won
a Nebula for "The Death of Doctor Island".During the 1970s, GW continued
to publish short stories at a considerable rate, at least 70 reaching
print before the end of the decade; in the 1980s, as he concentrated more
and more fully on novels, this production decreased markedly. His short
work has been assembled in THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR DEATH AND OTHER STORIES
AND OTHER STORIES (coll 1980), Gene Wolfe's Book of Days (coll 1981),
Bibliomen: Twenty Characters Waiting for a Book (coll of linked stories
1984 chap), Plan[e]t Engineering (coll 1984), Storeys from the Old Hotel
(coll 1988 UK) and Endangered Species (coll 1989). Short stories of
particular interest include "Three Million Square Miles" (1971 Ruins of
Earth, anth ed Thomas M. DISCH), "Feather Tigers" (1973 Edge), "La Befana"
(1973 Gal), The Hero as Werwolf (1975 The New Improved Sun, anth ed Disch;
1991 chap), "Tracking Song" (1975 In the Wake of Man, anth ed Roger
ELWOOD), "The Eyeflash Miracles" (1976 Future Power, anth ed Gardner
DOZOIS and Jack DANN), Seven American Nights (1978 Orbit 20, anth ed Damon
Knight; 1989 chap dos), "The War Beneath the Tree" (1978 Omni) and "The
Detective of Dreams" (1980 Dark Forces, anth ed Kirby McCauley). Later
work was variously interesting, though in the 1980s GW was increasingly
inclined, in short forms, to restrict his energies to the composition of
oneiric jeux d'esprit.GW's first novel, Operation ARES (1970), in which a
21st-century USA is invaded by its abandoned Martian colony, was heavily
cut by the publisher, and reads as apprentice work. His next, THE FIFTH
HEAD OF CERBERUS (fixup 1972), comprises 3 separate tales, one previously
published but all so closely linked as to be crippled in isolation. Set on
a distant two-planet system colonized by settlers of French origin, the
book combines ALIENS, ANTHROPOLOGY, CLONES and other elements in a richly
imaginative exploration of the nature of identity and individuality. It
was the first significant demonstration of the great difficulty of reading
GW without constant attention to the almost subliminal - but in retrospect
or after rereading almost invariably lucid and inevitable - clues laid
down in the text to govern its comprehension. As with all his most
important work to date, the protagonist (in this case there is also a more
elusively presented second protagonist) tells from a conceptual or
temporal remove the story of his own childhood, in the form of a
confession whose truth value is unrelentingly dubious. The parenthood of
the clone who narrates the first part of the novel is problematical - or
concealed - as is usual in GW's work; questions of identity are poignantly
intensified as it becomes clear - perhaps only upon a second reading that, before the main action of the tale has begun, a shapeshifting alien
(the second protagonist) from the oppressed second planet has taken on the

identity of a visiting anthropologist. By the end of the novel, both
protagonists - one a clone engineered into repeating previous identities,
the other an impostor caught in the coffin of his fake self and literally
imprisoned as well - have come to represent a singularly rich, singularly
bleak vision of the shaping of a conscious life through time.Peace (1975),
an afterlife fantasy set in the contemporary middle USA, was, word for
word, perhaps GW's most intricate and personal work; though not sf, it is
central to any full attempt to understand his other novels, his sense of
the great painfulness of any shaped life, or his methods in general. The
protagonist of the book - who tells the story of his childhood, all
unknowingly, from beyond the grave - is both a self-portrait of the artist
as a teller of stories and a rounded, and murderous, character in his own
right. The Devil in a Forest (1976), a juvenile set at the time of King
Wenceslas, with little or no fantasy element, shares some of the lightness
of tone of Pandora by Holly Hollander (1990), which some feel may have
been written around this time, a non-fantastic detective novel which might
also be described as a juvenile of sorts.It was his next and most
ambitious work - the long central tale and appendages of The Book of the
New Sun sequence - which finally brought GW to a wide audience. The heart
of the sequence was a single sustained long novel broken into 4 parts for
commercial reasons and published as THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER (1980), The
Claw of the Conciliator (1981), The Sword of the Lictor (1982) and The
Citadel of the Autarch (1983); the first pair were assembled as The Book
of the New Sun, Volumes I and II (omni 1983 UK; vt Shadow and Claw 1994
US), and the second pair as The Book of the New Sun, Volumes III and IV
(omni 1985 UK; vt Sword and Citadel 1994 US). Essays and tales in
explanation of The Book of the New Sun were assembled as The Castle of the
Otter (dated 1982 but 1983); tales supposedly extracted from one of the
seminal books carried throughout his travels by Severian, the protagonist
of The Book of the New Sun, were published as The Boy who Hooked the Sun:
A Tale from the Book of Wonders of Urth and Sky (1985 chap) and Empires of
Foliage and Flower: A Tale from the Book of Wonders of Urth and Sky (1987
chap); "A Solar Labyrinth" (1983) was a metafiction about the entire Book;
and the whole edifice was sequeled in The Urth of the New Sun (1987 UK).
The 1st volume gained a World Fantasy Award and the 2nd a Nebula.As a
synthesizing work of fiction - a type of creation which tends to come, for
obvious reasons, late in the period or genre it transmutes - The Book of
the New Sun owes clear debts to the sf and fantasy world in general, and
in particular to the dying-Earth ( FAR FUTURE) category of PLANETARY
ROMANCE initiated by Jack VANCE. Though it is a full-blown tale of
cosmogony, the entire story is set on Urth, eons hence, a world so
impacted with the relics of humanity's long residence that archaeology and
geology have become, in a way, the same science: that of plumbing the body
of the planet for messages which have become inextricably intermingled
over the innumerable years. The world into which Severian is born has
indeed become so choked with formula and ritual that early readers of THE
SHADOW OF THE TORTURER could be perhaps forgiven for identifying the text
as SWORD AND SORCERY, though hints that the book was in fact sf-oriented
SCIENCE FANTASY were - in the usual GW manner - abundant. Apparently an
orphan, Severian is raised as an apprentice torturer in the Matachin Tower
which nests among other similar towers in the Citadel compound of the

capital city of Nessus, somewhere in the southern hemisphere (one of the
easier tasks of decipherment GW imposes is that of understanding that the
Towers are in fact ancient spaceships). Severian grows to young adulthood,
falls into too intimate a concourse with an exultant (a genetically bred
aristocrat) due to be tortured to death, is banished, travels through the
land, becomes involved in a war to the far north where he meets-not for
the first time - the old Autarch who dominates the world and who
recognizes in Severian his appointed heir, and himself becomes Autarch.It
is a classic plot, and superficially unproblematic. But Severian himself
is very distant in conception from the normal sf or science-fantasy hero
he seems, at some moments, to resemble. As usual with GW, the protagonist
himself narrates the story of his childhood and early youth from a period
some years later; Severian makes it clear that he has an infallible memory
(but is less clear about the fact that he is capable of lying); he also
makes it clear that he has known from an early age that he is (or has
been, or will be) the reborn manifestation of the Conciliator-a MESSIAH
figure from a previous, or through TIME PARADOXES, a possibly concurrent
reality - whose rebirth is for the purpose of bringing the New Sun to
Urth. At this point, sf and Catholicism - GW is Roman Catholic - breed
together, for the New Sun is both white hole and Revelation. The imagery
and structure of The Book of the New Sun make it explicitly clear that
Severian himself is both Apollo and Christ, and that the story of his life
is a secular rendering of the parousia, or Second Coming. His cruelty to
himself and others is the cruelty of the Universe itself; and his
reverence for the world constitutes no simple blessing. His family is a
Holy Family, lowly and anonymous, but ever-present; and their absence from
any "starring" role - GW refuses in the text to identify any of them - has
religious implications as well as aesthetic. (Much attention, some of it
approaching the Talmudical, has been spent on identifying this Family,
which does clearly include: Dorcas, Severian's paternal grandmother; his
unnamed though Charonian paternal grandfather; his father Ouen; his mother
Katherine; and-almost certainly - a sibling, who may be the homunculus
found in a jar in The Citadel of the Autarch.) The sequel, The Urth of the
New Sun, takes Severian through reality levels of the Universe to the
point-ambiguous in time and space, though related to the Omega Point
posited by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) - where he will be
judged as to his Autarchal fitness to bring the New Sun home. As
foreordained, he passes the test. Urth is drowned in the floods that mark
the passing of the white hole, the rebirth of light. Some survive, to
begin again; or to continue in their ways.Subsequent 1980s novels were
very various. Free Live Free (1984) is a TIME-TRAVEL tale, extremely
complex to parse, through which shines a retelling of L. Frank BAUM's The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). There Are Doors (1988), set in a bleak
PARALLEL WORLD redolent of the USA during the Depression, most
ambivalently depicts a man's life-threatening exogamous passion for a
goddess. Castleview (1990) implants very nearly the entirety of the
Arthurian Cycle in contemporary Illinois, where a new Arthur is recruited
for the long battle. Most interesting perhaps is the Latro sequence,
comprising Soldier of the Mist (1986) and Soldier of Arete (1989), with
further volumes projected. Set in ancient Greece about 500BC, it is
narrated in short chapters each representing a day's written-down

recollections on the part of Latro, a soldier whom a goddess has punished
by removing his capacity to remember anything for more than 24 hours. The
sequence thus works, on every possible level, as a mirror image of The
Book of the New Sun, with Latro's memory-loss reversing Severian's
inability to forget, ancient Greece reversing Urth - being at the start
rather than the end of things - and the series as a whole being
conspicuously open-ended rather than shaped inexorably around Severian's
Coming.In The Book of the Long Sun - comprising Nightside the Long Sun
(1993) and Lake of the Long Sun (1994), both assembled as Litany of the
Long Sun (omni 1994), plus Calde of the Long Sun (1994), with 1 further
volume projected - GW returned to the New Sun universe, though to a
setting some thousands of years earlier, and to the large-scale sf
mythopoeisis that so profoundly characterizes the earlier novel. Like New
Sun, The Book of the Long Sun is in fact a single narrative, and cannot
properly be assessed until its completion. What can be said is that the
entire tale is - so far - set within a vast GENERATION STARSHIP, in closed
universe called the Whorl, and that the protagonist, Pater Silk - having
had a vast infodump of memories epiphanically given him on the first page
of the story by an AI who seems to be the avatar of some figure from Urth,
and perhaps a proclaimer of Christ - gradually becomes a central figure in
the destiny of the decaying cultures of the ship.It may be that GW has
never had an original sf idea, or never a significant one, certainly none
of the calibre of those generated by writers like Larry NIVEN or Greg
BEAR. His importance does not reside in that kind of originality. Setting
aside for an instant his control of language, it is possible to claim that
GW's importance lies in a spongelike ability to assimilate generic models
and devices, and in the quality of the transformations he effects upon
that material - a musical analogy might be the Baroque technique of the
parody cantata, in which a secular composition is transformed by reverent
parody into a sacred work (or vice versa). GW's actual language, too, is
eloquently parodic, and many of his short stories are designed
deliberately and intricately to echo earlier models, from G.K. CHESTERTON
and Rudyard KIPLING on through the whole pantheon of GENRE SF. GW's
importance has been, therefore, twofold: the inherent stature of his work
is deeply impressive, and he wears the fictional worlds of sf like a coat
of many colours. [JC]Other works: At the Point of Capricorn (1983 chap);
The Arimaspian Legacy (1987 chap); For Rosemary (coll 1988 chap UK),
poetry; Slow Children at Play (1989 chap); The Old Woman whose Rolling Pin
is the Sun (1991 chap); Castle of Days (omni 1992), assembling Gene
Wolfe's Book of Days, The Castle of the Otter, plus new material; The
Young Wolfe (coll 1992).About the author: Gene Wolfe (1986) by Joan
Gordon; A Checklist of Gene Wolfe (1990 chap) by Christopher P. STEPHENS;
Gene Wolfe: Urth-Man Extraordinary: A Working Bibliography (1991 chap) by
Gordon BENSON JR and Phil STEPEHENSEN-PAYNE; Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary
for the Urth Cycle (1994) by Michael Andre-Driussi.See also: BRITISH
SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CONCEPTUAL
BREAKTHROUGH; ESP; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FANTASY; GODS AND DEMONS;
GOTHIC SF;
JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD; LINGUISTICS; METAPHYSICS;
MYTHOLOGY;
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; POCKET UNIVERSE; SERIES; SUN; SUPERNATURAL

CREATURES; TIMESCAPE BOOKS; WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST.
WOLFE, LOUIS
(1905-1985) US writer in whose Journey of the Oceanauts: Across the
Bottom of the Atlantic Ocean (1968) 3 genetically engineered ( GENETIC
ENGINEERING) humans make the eponymous trek. [JC]
WOLFMAN, MARV
[r] Ted WHITE.
WOLLHEIM, DONALD A(LLEN)
(1914-1990) US editor and writer, and one of the first and most
vociferous sf fans; with Forrest J. ACKERMAN, DAW was perhaps the most
dynamic member of the embryo FANDOM of the 1930s. A lifetime resident of
New York City, he published innumerable FANZINES, was co-editor of the
early semiprozine FANCIFUL TALES OF TIME AND SPACE in 1936, founded the
Fantasy Amateur Press Association ( FAPA), and was one of the founders in
1938 of the FUTURIANS, becoming deeply involved in its pursuits and feuds.
His long-standing quarrel with James BLISH - whom he does not mention in
his anecdotal analysis of sf, The Universe Makers (1971), whose premises
reflect 1930s enthusiasms - began at this time, and was at least partially
rooted in political differences, for in the years before WWII DAW stood
far to the left and Blish far to the right. DAW's part in early fandom was
extensively chronicled in The Immortal Storm (1954) by Sam MOSKOWITZ and
in The Futurians (1977) by Damon KNIGHT. DAW ed Operation: Phantasy: The
Best from the Phantograph (anth 1967 chap), a collection of early fanzine
material.His first published story was "The Man from Ariel" for Wonder
Stories in 1934, but he did not begin to publish fiction with any
regularity until the 1940s, by which time he had already embarked on his
major career as an editor. In 1941 he became editor of COSMIC STORIES and
STIRRING SCIENCE STORIES, both of which he produced creditably on a minute
budget, publishing many stories by his fellow Futurians (most prolifically
C.M. KORNBLUTH). He also compiled 2 pioneering sf ANTHOLOGIES: The Pocket
Book of Science Fiction (anth 1943) and Portable Novels of Science (anth
1945). For his short stories he often used the pseudonyms Millard Verne
Gordon and Martin PEARSON, as well as the collaborative pseudonyms Arthur
COOKE and Lawrence WOODS, and he once wrote as Allen Warland; as Pearson
he published the Ajax Calkins series which later formed the basis of his
novel Destiny's Orbit (1962) as by David Grinnell, sequelled by
Destination: Saturn (1967) as by Grinnell with Lin CARTER.After WWII DAW
worked for Avon Books (1947-52), for whom he edited the AVON FANTASY
READER and the AVON SCIENCE FICTION READER anthology-like series (which we
treat as magazines) as well as OUT OF THIS WORLD ADVENTURES, 10 STORY
FANTASY and, uncredited, the first sf ORIGINAL ANTHOLOGY, The Girl with
the Hungry Eyes (anth 1949). He subsequently moved to ACE BOOKS in 1952,
where he created and for the next 20 years ran one of the 2-3 most
dominant US sf lists, winning a 1964 HUGO for his work. Taking advantage
of the Ace Double Novel format ( DOS-A-DOS), he published the first or
early works of many writers who later achieved fame, including John
BRUNNER, Samuel R. DELANY, Philip K. DICK, Thomas M. DISCH, Harlan
ELLISON, Ursula K. LE GUIN and Robert SILVERBERG, though the bulk of the
list was cannily built around colourful sf adventures with a strong

emphasis on SPACE OPERA; by the 1960s, the list had begun to fade
seriously, though it is clear in hindsight (see discussion of DAW BOOKS
below) that he himself had lost nothing of his acumen. During the 1950s he
also worked editorially on the magazines ORBIT and SATURN, and edited a
great many anthologies, often for Ace; these included such theme
collections as The End of the World (anth 1956), Men on the Moon (anth
1958 dos; rev 1969) and The Hidden Planet (anth 1959), the latter being of
stories set on VENUS.DAW's own writing in the 1950s and 1960s consisted
largely of novels. These divided into CHILDREN'S SF published as DAW and
adult novels as by David Grinnell, none of the latter being particularly
notable. However, the Mike Mars series of children's books, exploring
different facets of the space programme, was popular: Mike Mars, Astronaut
(1961), Mike Mars Flies the X-15 (1961), Mike Mars at Cape Canaveral
(1961; vt Mike Mars at Cape Kennedy 1966), Mike Mars in Orbit (1961), Mike
Mars Flies the Dyna-Soar (1962), Mike Mars, South Pole Spaceman (1962),
Mike Mars and the Mystery Satellite (1963) and Mike Mars around the Moon
(1964).In 1965, DAW began to issue an annual "year's best" anthology,
World's Best Science Fiction; this continued until the end of his life in
an unbroken yearly succession, although there was some highly confusing
retitling (occasioned in the first instance by his shift from Ace to DAW
Books). The sequence was: #1: World's Best Science Fiction: 1965 (anth
1965) with Terry CARR (who was co-editor through the 1971 volume); #2:
1966 (anth 1966); #3: 1967 (anth 1967); #4: 1968 (anth 1968); #5: 1969
(anth 1969); #6: 1970 (anth 1970); #7: 1971 (anth 1971); #8: The 1972
Annual World's Best SF (anth 1972; vt Wollheim's World's Best SF: Series
One 1977) with Arthur W. SAHA (who was co-editor through the 1990 volume);
#9: 1973 (anth 1973; vt Wollheim's World Best SF: Series Two 1978); #10:
1974 (anth 1974; vt World's Best SF Short Stories #1 1975 UK; vt
Wollheim's World Best SF: Series Three 1979); #11: 1975 (anth 1975; vt
World's Best SF Short Stories #2 1976 UK; vt Wollheim's World Best SF:
Series Four 1980 US); #12: 1976 (anth 1976; vt The World's Best SF - 3
1979 UK; vt Wollheim's World Best SF: Series Five 1981 US); #13: 1977
(anth 1977; vt The World's Best SF - 4 1979 UK; vt Wollheim's World Best
SF: Series Six 1982 US); #14: 1978 (anth 1978; vt The World's Best SF - 5
1980 UK; vt Wollheim's World Best SF: Series Seven 1983 US); #15: 1979
(anth 1979; vt Wollheim's World Best SF: Series Eight 1984); #16: 1980
(anth 1980; vt #9 1985); #17: 1981 (anth 1981); #18: 1982 (anth 1982); #19
(anth 1983); #20 (anth 1984); #21: 1985 (anth 1985); #22: 1986 (anth
1986); #23: 1987 (anth 1987); #24: Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1988
Annual World's Best SF (anth 1988); #25: 1989 (anth 1989) and #26: 1990
(anth 1990).In 1971, DAW left Ace and in 1972 he founded DAW BOOKS, which
he continued to run until 1985, when ill-health induced him to appoint his
daughter, Betsy Wollheim, president. With his new firm, he began almost
immediately to shift from the format- and content-constraints that had
plagued his later career at Ace: series were emphasized heavily; space
opera gave way to PLANETARY ROMANCE; authors like C.J. CHERRYH and Tanith
LEE, who were comfortable with science fantasy, were strongly encouraged;
and he allowed his authors very considerable latitude (compared with his
days at Ace) to explore moderately TABOO areas (John NORMAN moved over
from BALLANTINE BOOKS, presumably to take advantage of this liberty) and
to write at very varying lengths. Though he continued not to pay well

enough to retain best-selling authors, he kept his firm healthy and active
for the remaining years of his career.For 50 years DAW remained one of the
most important editorial influences on sf, and in his later years despite his very well known capacity to carry on disputes half a century
old - he became a revered figure. His death marked - as clearly as those
of Isaac ASIMOV and Robert A. HEINLEIN - the passing of the generation of
the founders. [JC/MJE]Other works: The Secret of Saturn's Rings (1954),
The Secret of the Martian Moons (1955), One Against the Moon (1956) and
The Secret of the Ninth Planet (1959), all juveniles; Two Dozen Dragon's
Eggs (coll 1969); The Men from Ariel (coll 1982); Up There and Other
Strange Directions (coll 1988).As David Grinnell: Across Time (1957); Edge
of Time (1958); The Martian Missile (1959); To Venus! To Venus! (1970
dos).As Editor: The Fox Woman & Other Stories (coll 1949), stories by A.
MERRITT; Flight into Space (anth 1950); Every Boy's Book of Science
Fiction (anth 1951); Prize Science Fiction (anth 1953; vt Prize Stories of
Space and Time 1953 UK); Adventures in the Far Future (anth 1954 dos);
Tales of Outer Space (anth 1954 dos); The Ultimate Invader and Other
Science Fiction (anth 1954); Adventures on Other Planets (anth 1955) and
More Adventures on Other Planets (anth 1963); Terror in the Modern Vein
(anth 1955; vt in 2 vols as Terror in the Modern Vein 1961 UK and More
Terror in the Modern Vein 1961 UK); The Earth in Peril (anth 1957 dos);
The Macabre Reader (anth 1959) and More Macabre (anth 1961); Swordsmen in
the Sky (anth 1964); Ace Science Fiction Reader (anth 1971; vt Trilogy of
the Future 1972 UK); The Best from the Rest of the World (anth 1976); The
DAW Science Fiction Reader (anth 1976).See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL
WORKS ABOUT SF; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GOLDEN AGE OF SF; GREAT AND SMALL;
HISTORY OF SF; NEAR FUTURE; NEW WAVE; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM;
PUBLISHING.
WOLVERTON, DAVE
(1957- ) US writer. He began entering literary contests in 1985, winning
a few small competitions and then the Best of the Year award in the
WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST for 1986, with "On My Way to Paradise",
which appeared in L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future, Volume III (anth
1987). This novella was the basis for his first novel, On My Way to
Paradise (1989), a thoughtful but violent tale of a Latin-American
mercenary force conscripted to fight for a conservative Japanese colony on
another planet. It is packed with sociobiological speculation, and veers
interestingly between HEINLEIN-esque and CYBERPUNK scenarios, and is not
altogether accepting of the LIBERTARIAN ideas which in part it dramatizes;
it was runner-up in 1990 for the PHILIP K. DICK AWARD. Serpent Catch
(1991) - along with its sequel, Path of the Hero (1993) - confirmed him as
belonging to the central extrapolative tradition of sf. Big and almost
over-packed like its predecessor, the first volume is set on a terraformed
moon of a GAS GIANT, whose continents are separated by eco-barriers, part
of an experiment in closed environments and reconstructed geological eras.
Genetically engineered human scientists are driven from space by advanced
aliens and forced down into this zoo they have created, where they
interact complexly (the future meeting the past) with Neanderthals and
other prehumans, dinosaurs, sea-serpents and so on, as the eco-barriers
break down. The novel - which seems to require sequels - is conceptually

ambitious and very idea-driven.His initial involvement with the Writers of
the Future organization deepened with the partial retirement of A.J.
BUDRYS in 1991; DW subsequently co-edited Writers of the Future #8 (anth
1992) with Budrys; and edited solo Writers of the Future #9 (anth 1993)
and Writers of the Future#10 (anth 1994). [PN]Other works: Star Wars: The
Courtship of Princess Leia *(1994); The Golden Queen (1994).
WOMACK, JACK
(1956- ) US writer whose first 5 novels are stylish and potent exercises
in a post- CYBERPUNK urban idiom, and comprise the first instalments in a
loose ongoing series about the NEAR-FUTURE state of the USA. The sequence,
reminiscent at points of the baroque New York detective fictions of Jerry
Oster (1943- ), is projected to stop after 5 vols. AMBIENT (1987), set in
the complexly desolated warzone which New York has become in the early
21st century, evokes comparisons with James Joyce (1882-1941) and Anthony
BURGESS in its sensuous, choked, eloquent, linguistically foregrounded
presentation of the victims of a radioactive accident who populate the
fringes of the fragmented city, and who so hypnotically manifest the
Goyaesque horrors of the scene that volunteer "normals" mutilate
themselves and join the ranks of the sinking. In the story itself,
however, JW exhibits a certain lack of plotting imagination, and neither
tycoon Thatcher Dryden nor the megacorporation, Dryco, which he runs
nearly singlehanded are particularly convincing when set against the mise
en scene. Out of that venue, the protagonists of Terraplane (1988) hurtle
pastwards into an ALTERNATE-WORLD version of late-1930s New York, an
apartheid-ridden DYSTOPIA - the oppressed lives of Black Americans are
described with haunting intimacy - whose vileness may, or may not, be seen
as worse than the radiation-corrupted, corporation-dominated
nightmarishness of our own new era. Somewhat less scourgingly, Heathern
(1990 UK) returns to New York and to Thatcher Dryden, who on this occasion
must try (he fails) to make sense of a MESSIAH figure whose fate in this
venue is dourly predictable and whose humaneness seems, in this context,
otherworldy. Elvissey (1993) - which tied for the 1994 PHILIP K. DICK
AWARD with Richard GRANT's Through the Heart (1993) - incorporates the
Elvis Presley myth into the ongoing sequence; and Random Acts of Senseless
Violence (1993 UK) brings the sequence close to the present, conflating
the ravaged life of a streetwise girl with the increasing entropy of a
social system that has lost both energy and heart. JW's vision of the
world continues, perhaps, to lack some focus, though not heat; with
completion of his New York quintet, that focus will almost certainly
sharpen, and the heat will burn deep. [JC]See also: MUSIC.
WOMAN IN THE MOON, THE
Die FRAU IM MOND.
WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION
In "The Image of Women in Science Fiction" (1971 Red Clay Reader) Joanna
RUSS wrote, "There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There
are hardly any women." Things have changed in the subsequent decades,
chiefly due to the impact of FEMINISM and to the increasing numbers of
women writing sf in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, but the absence of
realistic female characters remains a glaring fault of the genre.Since

GENRE SF developed in a patriarchal culture as something written chiefly
by men for men (or boys), the lack of female protagonists is unsurprising.
When women do appear they are usually defined by their relationship to the
male characters, as objects to be desired or feared, rescued or destroyed;
often, especially in recent, more sexually explicit times, women
characters exist only to validate the male protagonist as acceptably
masculine - that is, heterosexual. Before the 1970s even WOMEN SF WRITERS
tended to reflect the prevailing view about women's place by writing about
men's adventures in future worlds where women stayed home to work the
control panels in automated kitchens. The main alternative to men's
adventure stories was ladies' magazine fiction, in which the domestic
virtues of the sweet, intuitive housewife-heroine somehow saved the day.It
would be hard for even the most ardent fan to list a dozen sf novels
written before 1970 which feature female protagonists: Naomi MITCHISON's
MEMOIRS OF A SPACEWOMAN (1962), Robert A. HEINLEIN's Podkayne of Mars
(1963), Samuel R. DELANY's BABEL-17 (1966), Alexei PANSHIN's RITE OF
PASSAGE (1968), Joanna Russ's Picnic on Paradise (1968) and Anne
MCCAFFREY's The Ship who Sang (1969) are probably the best known, and all
date from the transitional period of the 1960s. Betty King provides a
detailed and apparently exhaustive list from 1818 on in Women of the
Future: The Female Main Character in Science Fiction (1984). Moreover, as
Suzy McKee CHARNAS pointed out in an essay on how and why she came to
write ("No-Road" in Denise Du Pont's Women of Vision [anth 1988]), it is
easy to write a thoroughly sexist story around a female protagonist, and
the real test of whether or not female characters are being written about
as human beings is whether the protagonist is connected in any important
way to other complex female characters, or if she is significantly
connected only to males.Not allowed the variety or complexity of real
people, women in sf have been represented most frequently by a very few
stereotypes: the Timorous Virgin (good for being rescued, and for having
things explained to her), the Amazon Queen (sexually desirable and
terrifying at the same time, usually set up to be "tamed" by the
super-masculine hero), the Frustrated Spinster Scientist (an object lesson
to girl readers that career success equals feminine failure), the Good
Wife (keeps quietly in the background, loving her man and never making
trouble) and the Tomboy Kid Sister (who has a semblance of autonomy only
until male appreciation of her burgeoning sexuality transforms her into
Virgin or Wife). But of course the vast majority of male characters in sf
are stereotypes too. David KETTERER in New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic
Imagination, Science Fiction and American Literature (1974), among others,
has argued that the "weaknesses" of poor characterization and lack of
human interest in much sf can be seen as a strength, at least in "cosmic"
fictions in which individual concerns - including gender - are
unimportant.Some find the lack of any female characters in much sf more
disturbing than the use of stereotypes, but Gwyneth JONES (in "Writing
Science Fiction for the Teenage Reader", in Where No Man has Gone Before
[anth 1990] ed Lucy Arnitt) has argued that "Accepting a male protagonist
on the printed page does not mean accepting one's own absence. Indeed the
almost total absence of female characters makes simpler the imaginative
sleight of hand whereby the teenage girl substitutes herself for the male
initiate in these stories." Jones went on to argue that the "feminization"

of teenage sf, through the presentation of more realistic female
protagonists, "does not necessarily mean a better deal for girls", because
such stories reinforce the status quo of a subordinate role for women.
Although Jones was writing about teenage sf, her point may be more widely
applied. Susan WOOD, in her essay "Women and Science Fiction" (in ALGOL,
Winter 1978/79), expressed the desire that women should reclaim rather
than reject the archetypes which lie behind the usually disparaged
stereotyped characters that populate sf. Many women have done so, as well
as creating new possibilities for the expression of female humanity.From
the 1960s, sf was increasingly seen to have the potential to explore
serious human issues, while at the same time many writers (especially
those identified as members of the NEW WAVE) were rejecting the old
PULP-MAGAZINE conventions in favour of experimentation and more artistic
values. As more women were attracted by the changing image of sf (and here
the influence of STAR TREK should not be underestimated), as sf became
more than a minority taste and began to sell in numbers previously
unimaginable, and as more women moved into editorial positions, the role
of female characters in sf became more important not only for aesthetic,
personal or political reasons but also for commercial ones: surveys have
shown that more women than men buy books, so a would-be bestseller cannot
afford to alienate the female audience.The old stereotypes are still
around, although women writers more often give them a subversive twist:
the Good Wife is married to a lesbian star-pilot, the Spinster Scientist
has a rich and fulfilling sex life, the Amazon Queen triumphantly refuses
to be tamed. If women writers feel able to play around with archetypes and
stereotypes, male writers are more likely to avoid them for fear of being
misunderstood and alienating much of their likely audience. Sometimes
their efforts to include female characters are mere tokenism: a few female
spear-carriers, soldiers or scientists appear, but questions of who's
minding the kids and how does this apparently egalitarian society really
work are never even posed. A few of the newer male writers - among them
Greg BEAR, Colin GREENLAND, Paul J. MCAULEY, Ian MCDONALD and Bruce
STERLING - have written novels about strong and interesting self-motivated
women, although female protagonists - particularly ones who are more than
a fantasy figure with an all-male supporting cast - are still more likely
to be found in books by women writers.Unfortunately, these positive
changes in the literature have been countered by a retrogressive movement
in popular sf films, where women's roles are limited and male-determined:
if involved in the action they are victims, ROBOTS or prostitutes
(sometimes all three at once), otherwise they are waiting patiently for
the hero in kitchen or bedroom. The role played by Sigourney Weaver in
ALIEN (1979) stands out as a notable exception: a female HERO. She is just
as human as the rest of the mixed-sex crew, and is menaced by the alien to
the same degree and in the same way. She is no weaker because she is a
woman, and no more special. But in the sequel, ALIENS (1986), the
human/alien battle has become a heavily symbolic fight between two
females. Weaver's character is lumbered with a stray child to make the
final battle acceptable to even the most fearful of immature male viewers:
this isn't a woman fighting a MONSTER, but two mothers doing what comes
naturally, battling to protect their children. [LT]See also: CLICHES.

WOMEN SF WRITERS
In the opinion of many it was a woman, Mary SHELLEY, who created sf with
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818; rev 1831). But after such a
strong start women's contributions to the genre, while never entirely
absent, were not substantial until the late 1960s.As a commercial genre,
sf was formed chiefly by the men who edited, wrote for and read the US
PULP MAGAZINES of the 1920s and 1930s. For decades the belief that most sf
readers were adolescent males imposed certain restrictions on subject
matter and style - women, and women's supposed interests, were
sentimentalized or ignored, and SEX was TABOO. Yet women not only read but
wrote sf, sometimes under androgynous bylines, real or assumed. Pamela
SARGENT has drawn attention to some of the more memorable stories written
by and about women in her excellent anthologies Women of Wonder (anth
1974) and More Women of Wonder (anth 1976). Among the most popular some,
like Leigh BRACKETT, C.L. MOORE and Andre NORTON, wrote vivid,
action-packed adventure tales, as ungendered as their names, while others,
like Mildred CLINGERMAN, Zenna HENDERSON and Judith MERRIL, wrote often
sentimental stories dealing with more acceptable feminine concerns. Other
women known for writing sf prior to the 1960s include Marion Zimmer
BRADLEY, Miriam Allen DEFORD, Clare Winger HARRIS, Joan Hunter HOLLY,
Lilith LORRAINE, Katherine MacClean, Margaret ST CLAIR, Wilmar H. SHIRAS,
Evelyn E. SMITH, Francis STEVENS, Leslie F. STONE and Thea VON HARBOU. In
addition, there have always been women producing borderline sf in the
MAINSTREAM or in sf-related fields such as FABULATION, surrealism and
ABSURDIST, experimental, GOTHIC and UTOPIAN fiction. And women have quite
often been unattributed collaborators in works published under the names
of their male partners, a role that has only recently begun to be
recognized.By the 1960s the sf field was changing in ways that would make
it more accessible and exciting to a wider audience. Younger writers, in
particular, rebelled against the old pulp limitations and set about
writing sf which would combine the old-fashioned SENSE OF WONDER with more
sophisticated literary values. New editors, some of them women, none of
them committed to the concept of a primarily adolescent readership, played
a large part in this expansion. In particular, Cele GOLDSMITH encouraged
many new writers during her editorship of AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC
(1958-65). Ursula K. LE GUIN, now one of the most respected and
influential of all contemporary sf writers, credits Cele Goldsmith with
"opening the door to me".In 1972 Harlan ELLISON stated (in his intro to
"When it Changed" by Joanna RUSS in Again, Dangerous Visions [anth 1972])
that "the best writers in sf today are the women" - an opinion echoed by
other knowledgeable readers throughout the 1970s, occasionally with the
caveat "excepting James TIPTREE Jr". Despite Robert SILVERBERG's now
notorious claim that there was something "ineluctably masculine" in the
Tiptree stories (in "Who is Tiptree, What is He?", intro to Tiptree's Warm
Worlds and Otherwise [coll 1975]), in 1977 Tiptree was revealed to be
Alice Sheldon. Of the response to her unmasking, Sheldon commented in an
interview with Charles PLATT (in Dream Makers: Volume II [coll 1983]),
"The feminist world was excited because, merely by having existed
unchallenged for years, 'Tiptree' had shot the stuffing out of male
stereotypes of women writers."The reason that sf began to change in the
1960s and 1970s was that increasingly writers were drawn to it not because

of an interest in its pulp traditions but for its still largely unexplored
potential. The effect of the (largely male) NEW WAVE is often cited, but
the impact made on the field by such diverse writers as Le Guin, Kate
WILHELM, Russ, C.J. CHERRYH and Tiptree was undoubtedly stronger and more
lasting than that of any single, self-proclaimed movement. Others might
agree with Suzy McKee CHARNAS (in Aurora #26, Summer 1990): "My own view
of the matter was and is that in the 1960s SF was a dying or at least
moribund genre (the New Wave was an effort, not very successful in my
opinion, to remedy this by importing some technical stunts from the
mainstream), and feminism came along in the 1970s and rescued it." (
FEMINISM.)Among the women sf writers who came to prominence in the 1960s
and 1970s are E.L. ARCH, Bradley, Rosel George BROWN, Octavia E. BUTLER,
Charnas, Cherryh, Jo CLAYTON, Juanita COULSON, Sonya DORMAN, Suzette Haden
ELGIN, Carol EMSHWILLER, M.J. ENGH, Gertrude FRIEDBERG, Phyllis GOTLIEB,
Diana Wynne JONES, Lee KILLOUGH, Tanith LEE, Madeleine L'ENGLE, Le Guin,
A.M. LIGHTNER, Elizabeth A. LYNN, Anne MCCAFFREY, Vonda MCINTYRE, Janet
MORRIS, Doris PISERCHIA, Marta RANDALL, Kit REED, Russ, Sargent, Josephine
SAXTON, Jody SCOTT, Kathleen SKY, Tiptree, Lisa TUTTLE, Joan D. VINGE,
Cherry WILDER, Kate WILHELM, Chelsea Quinn YARBRO and Pamela
ZOLINE.Writers who became better known in the 1980s and 1990s include Gill
ALDERMAN, ANNA LIVIA, Lois McMaster BUJOLD, Pat CADIGAN, Storm
CONSTANTINE, Candas Jane DORSEY, Carol Nelson DOUGLAS, Sheila FINCH,
Caroline Forbes (1952- ), Karen Joy FOWLER, Sally Miller GEARHART, Mary
GENTLE, Lisa GOLDSTEIN, Eileen Gunn, Barbara HAMBLY, Gwyneth JONES, Janet
KAGAN, Leigh KENNEDY, Nancy KRESS, Kathe Koja, R.A. MACAVOY, Julian MAY,
Judith MOFFETT, Pat MURPHY, Jane PALMER, Rachel POLLACK, Kristine Kathryn
RUSCH, Melissa SCOTT, Joan SLONCZEWSKI, Sheri S. TEPPER and Connie WILLIS.
In addition, a number of MAINSTREAM writers have made detours into sf,
even if their publishers have not always labelled their novels as such.
They include Margaret ATWOOD (THE HANDMAID'S TALE [1985]), Maureen DUFFY
(The Gor Saga [1981]), Zoe FAIRBAIRNS (Benefits [1979]), Cecelia HOLLAND
(Floating Worlds [1976]), Rhoda Lerman (1936- ) (The Book of the Night
[1984]), Doris LESSING (the Canopus in Argos series), Marge PIERCY (WOMAN
ON THE EDGE OF TIME [1976]), Fay WELDON (The Cloning of Joanna May [1989])
and Monique WITTIG (Les guerilleres [1969; trans 1971]). Writers as
diverse as Jean M. AUEL, Christine BROOKE-ROSE, Angela CARTER, Anna KAVAN,
Ayn RAND, Emma TENNANT and Christa Wolf (1929- ) have also, upon occasion,
been claimed for sf.The above lists make no claim to being anything like
complete, but their very existence should make it clear that, while women
writers of sf may still be outnumbered by men, they are by now far too
numerous to be considered rare, and too various to be generalized about or
compressed into a subset of "women's sf". Women contribute to all areas of
the genre. Where once anthologies of stories entirely by men were
customary, now they are unusual.Between 1953, when it was established, and
1967 there were no women winners of the HUGO; between 1968 and 1990 there
were 21 awards to women out of 92 in the fiction categories, while of the
NEBULA awards for the years 1968-90 the figures are better still, at 28
awards to women out of 91. Better again are the results of the JOHN W.
CAMPBELL AWARD for Best New Writer, with 8 of the 19 awards to date going
to women. In all cases, more men than women vote.Have women writers been
discriminated against? Such things are hard to quantify or prove, and,

although most women in the field can cite occasional instances of sexism
(the editor who declares that sf by women doesn't sell; the disgruntled
author who scents a feminist conspiracy when his novel fails to win
awards; the claim from an old-time fan that the values of HARD SF are
being destroyed by female editors with an innately feminine preference for
fantasy), on the whole the Old Boy Network of sf has been remarkably
receptive to any women who care to join. The catch is one common to most
societies: those who join are expected to do so on terms already
established, to follow the rules and, as newcomers, know their place.
Unfortunately, even after 30 years women are still considered "newcomers"
by most men, and women who become too successful or break the unspoken
rules and stretch the boundaries of sf, all too often arouse male
hostility. Hence the antagonism so often directed at Joanna Russ - "the
single most important woman writer of science fiction" according to Sarah
LEFANU (in In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science
Fiction [1988]) - is probably as much for her challenging literary
experimentation as for her uncompromising feminism. Presumably because she
is so respected outside the genre, Le Guin is every so often unfairly
accused by men who are not of having "renounced" sf.Women writers are by
now a well established presence within sf, but this situation may not
last. In How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983) Russ has argued,
polemically but effectively, that even the most popular and influential
female writers have been peculiarly subject to excision from the
male-controlled canons of literary history. An economic contraction,
followed by a redefinition of genre boundaries, might send written sf the
way of Hollywood, where sf films are as narrowly confined to catering to
the fears and desires of the adolescent US male as the old-fashioned pulp
magazines ever were. [LT]See also: WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION.
WONDERS OF THE SPACEWAYS
UK pocketbook-size magazine, 10 numbered, undated issues 1951-4,
published by John Spencer, London; ed Sol Assael and Michael Nahum, both
uncredited. One of the 4 poor-quality Spencer juvenile-sf magazines, all
very similar, the others being FUTURISTIC SCIENCE STORIES, TALES OF
TOMORROW, and WORLDS OF FANTASY. They contain some fiction by R.L.
FANTHORPE. [FHP]
WONDER STORIES
1. US magazine amalgamated from AIR WONDER STORIES and SCIENCE WONDER
STORIES, 66 issues as WS. Volume numeration continued from Science Wonder
Stories, thus beginning with vol 2 #1. WS was published by Hugo
GERNSBACK's Stellar Publishing Corporation June 1930-Oct 1933, and by
Gernsback's Continental Publications, Inc. Nov 1933-Apr 1936. The title
was then sold to Better Publications, to reappear as THRILLING WONDER
STORIES in Aug 1936, with vol numbers continuing from WS. WS was monthly
June 1930-June 1933, skipped to Aug 1933, monthly Oct 1933-Oct 1935, then
3 last issues: Nov/Dec 1935, Jan/Feb 1936 and Apr 1936. It began as a
BEDSHEET-size pulp, but was forced to revert to standard PULP-MAGAZINE
format Nov 1930-Oct 1931, returning to bedsheet size Nov 1931 and
shrinking again from Nov 1933 until it was sold. David Lasser was managing
editor until Oct 1933, being succeeded by Charles D. HORNIG, although

Gernsback remained editor-in-chief throughout. Illustrator Frank R. PAUL
was the cover artist for all issues.WS was Gernsback's most successful
magazine. It encouraged the growth of sf FANDOM by sponsoring the SCIENCE
FICTION LEAGUE in 1934. Notable stories include John TAINE's The Time
Stream (Dec 1931-Feb 1932; 1946), Stanley G. WEINBAUM's classic "A Martian
Odyssey" (July 1934) and Jack WILLIAMSON's "The Moon Era" (Feb 1932). John
Beynon Harris (John WYNDHAM) had his first story and much of his early
work in WS, and Clark Ashton SMITH published his best sf stories in it,
including "City of the Singing Flame" (July 1931) and "The Eternal World"
(Mar 1932). One author particularly associated with WS was Laurence
MANNING, all of whose major work appeared there: "The Wreck of the
Asteroid" (Dec 1932), the Stranger Club series (1933-5) and the Man who
Awoke series (1933). Leslie F. STONE, a woman writer (in those days a
rarity), had 5 stories in WS.If Gernsback had paid his authors more (or,
in some cases, at all) the magazine might have continued longer, but by
1936 he was finding it difficult to attract decent writers, circulation
had dropped, and WS was sold.2. After the demise of TWS in Winter 1955,
the Wonder Stories title was resuscitated for a reprint magazine,
subtitled "An Anthology of the Best in Science Fiction", ed Jim Hendryx
Jr, of which there appeared only 2, widely separated, issues, dated 1957
and 1963, the first a digest, the second a pulp. These continued the TWS
numeration, as vol 45, #1 and #2. [BS/PN]
WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY
US PULP MAGAZINE, BEDSHEET-size Fall 1929-Summer 1932, pulp-size Fall
1932-Winter 1933, 14 issues, published by Hugo GERNSBACK's Stellar
Publishing Corporation as a quarterly companion to SCIENCE WONDER STORIES
and AIR WONDER STORIES, and then to WONDER STORIES, the first 3 issues
appearing as Science Wonder Quarterly. David Lasser was the managing
editor. WSQ featured mostly space stories. A complete novel was featured
in every issue, and the magazine was notable for its translations (by
Francis Currier) from the German ( GERMANY), including Otto Willi GAIL's
"Shot into Infinity" (1925 Germany as Der Schuss ins All; trans Fall 1929)
and its sequel "The Stone from the Moon" (1926 Germany as Der Stein vom
Mond; trans Spring 1930), and Otfried Von Hanstein's "Electropolis" (1928
Germany as Elektropolis; trans Summer 1930) and "Between Earth and Moon"
(1928 Germany as Mond-Rak 1. Eine Fahrt ins Weltall; trans Fall 1930).
There were 2 stories by the early woman pulp writer Clare Winger HARRIS,
and WSQ published the 1st fan letter from Forrest J. ACKERMAN. [BS/PN]
WONDER STORY ANNUAL
US reprint PULP MAGAZINE published by Better Publications, 1950, and Best
Books, 1951-3, ed 1950-51 Sam MERWIN Jr and 1952-53 Samuel MINES. The lead
novels were reprinted from WONDER STORIES and STARTLING STORIES, the most
notable being Manly Wade WELLMAN's Twice in Time (1940 Startling Stories;
1950; 1957) and Jack WILLIAMSON's "Gateway to Paradise" (1941 Startling
Stories; 1953; vt Dome around America 1955. [BS]
WONDER WOMAN
US tv series (1974-9), based on Wonder Woman, the COMIC book inaugurated
by DC COMICS in 1942. Warner Bros TV for ABC, then for CBS. The complex
production history falls into 3 parts.1. The 2hr pilot for ABC, Wonder

Woman (1974) dir Vincent McEveety, written John D.F. Black, starring Cathy
Lee Crosby. This flopped.2. Series for ABC with a new Wonder woman, Lynda
Carter: The New Original Wonder Woman, with a 1975 2hr pilot, and 12 50min
episodes 1975-6. This endeavoured to recapture the feeling of the original
comics. Wonder Woman (Carter) leaves her Amazon home of Paradise Island to
help out the USA during WWII, taking with her a golden belt (for strength)
and a golden lariat whose movements she controls. Prod Wilfred Baumes,
this was perhaps the best of Wonder Woman's 3 tv phases; its writers
included Jimmy Sangster, and its dirs Herb Wallerstein and Stuart
Margolin. It was scheduled erratically by ABC, so never really had a
chance.3. The commercially most successful phase. CBS took over the
series, now retitled The New Adventures of Wonder Woman and set in the
present day, but still starring Lynda Carter and made by Warner Bros; this
was the version that was most widely circulated outside the USA. Now prod
Charles B. Fitzsimons and Mark Rodgers, it opened with the story The
Return of Wonder Woman in 1977. 2 seasons, 1 80min pilot and 45 50min
episodes, 1977-9. Dirs included Jack ARNOLD, Alan Crosland, Michael
Caffey, Curtis Harrington, Gordon Hessler. Writers included Stephen
Kandel, Alan BRENNERT, Anne Collins.In 2 and 3 Wonder Woman (herself more
a figure of fantasy than of sf, and looking rather like a busty, glitzy
cheerleader) is regularly confronted by sf-style problems, ranging from a
Nazi superwoman and an alien visitor in 2 to artificial volcanic
eruptions, malign ANDROIDS, a disembodied brain and mind-capturing
pyramids with alien occupants in 3, though for the pure-fantasy fans there
was also a leprechaun. Like so much sf on TELEVISION, there was an air of
camp parody about the whole thing (rather as in the Batman series whose
great success 1966-8 set the pattern for this sort of SUPERHERO-on-tv
enterprise). [PN]
WOOD, J.A.
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.
WOOD, PETER
[s] Barrington J. BAYLEY.
WOOD, R(OBERT) W(ILLIAM)
(1868-1955) US writer and optical physicist whose sf works were written
with Arthur TRAIN (whom see for details). [JC]About the author: Dr Wood,
Modern Wizard of the Laboratory (1941) by William Seabrook.
WOOD, SAMUEL ANDREW
(1890-? ) UK author and journalist who wrote 2 minor LOST-WORLD novels,
Winged Heels (1927) and, as by Robin Temple, The Aztec Temple (1955), as
well as a reworking of the airborne-pirate theme, I'll Blackmail the World
(1934 The Blue Book Magazine as "The Man who Bombed The World"; rev 1935).
[JE]See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.
WOOD, SUSAN (JOAN)
(1948-1980) Canadian sf critic and academic, with a PhD in 19th-century
Canadian literature, who taught English (including sf) at the University
of British Columbia. An sf fan of great energy, she won a 1973 HUGO as
Susan Wood Glicksohn with her then husband Mike Glicksohn for Best Fanzine
(Energumen), a 2nd (now as Susan Wood again) for Best Fan Writer in 1974,

and a 3rd for Best Fan Writer (tied with Richard E. GEIS) in 1977; her
4th, also for Best Fan Writer, was awarded posthumously in 1981. SW wrote
much criticism, including introductions for GREGG PRESS books and a review
column in ALGOL which campaigned vigorously against sexism ( FEMINISM), as
did her essay in book form The Poison Maiden & The Great Bitch: Female
Stereotypes in Marvel Superhero Comics (as Susan Wood Glicksohn 1974 chap;
as Susan Wood 1990). An important essay was "Women and Science Fiction"
(1978), reprinted in Teaching Science Fiction (anth 1980) ed Jack
WILLIAMSON. She edited and introduced The Language of the Night: Essays on
Fantasy and Science Fiction (coll 1979) by Ursula K. LE GUIN. SW's health
was delicate and she drove herself too hard; her death was untimely. She
wrote the CANADA entry for the 1st edn of this encyclopedia. [PN]See also:
SCI FI; WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION.
WOOD, WALLY
Working name of US illustrator Wallace A. Wood (1927-1981). His first
work was in newspaper COMIC strips in the late 1940s; he soon moved to
comic books, joining EC COMICS in 1951 and working on their sf titles
Weird Science and Weird Fantasy. His sf-comics and war-comics work won
high praise, as did his slightly later work on EC's very successful MAD
Magazine, founded 1952, for which he drew the famous sequence
"Superduperman". One of the most influential comics artists of the
century, WW has been claimed as the best of all artists ever to work in sf
in comic-book form. When EC folded its comic books in 1955 and began to
concentrate on MAD, he remained as one of the senior artists.WW had
already done some sf-magazine illustration (in 1953, for Planet Stories)
when, in 1957, he branched out more fully into this field, mostly
black-and-white interiors, especially for Gal and its sister magazines If
and Worlds of Tomorrow; he also painted 6 covers for Gal. His interior
illustrations were some of the finest ever printed; the chiaroscuro in his
black-and-white work gave it an unmatched feeling of depth.However, WAW's
first love remained comics, though he had resented the restrictions, from
1954, imposed by the Comics Code Authority. From 1966 (8 issues) and again
in 1976 he published an underground magazine, Witzend, featuring stronger
material, sometimes erotic. In the mid-1960s, a boom-time for comics, WAW
gave up most of his sf-magazine illustration and did some good work for
Warren Publications on their horror comics Creepy and Eeerie; in the 1970s
he worked on Vampirella. Also important was the SUPERHERO strip Dynamo
which appeared in Tower Comics's THUNDER Agents (1965-9). Some of WAW's
erotic work for National Screw is collected in the book Cons de Fee
["Fairy Tails" would be a loose translation of this obscene French pun]
(1977 France). He continued in comics until his suicide in 1981. [PN/JG]
WOODBURY, DAVID O(AKES)
(1896-1981) US writer in whose Mr Faraday's Formula (1965) enemy agents
steal a GRAVITY-control device. Part of a non-sf series, the book verges
on being a TECHNOTHRILLER. [JC]
WOODCOTT, KEITH
John BRUNNER.
WOODRUFF, CLYDE

[s] David V. REED.
WOODS, LAWRENCE
Pseudonym used on magazine stories in 1941 by Donald A. WOLLHEIM, 1 solo
("Strange Return"), 1 with Robert A.W. LOWNDES ("Black Flames"), and 1
with John Michel ("Earth Does Not Reply"). [PN]
WOODS, P.F.
[s] Barrington J. BAYLEY.
WOOLF, VIRGINIA
(1882-1941) UK writer famous for novels whose structures sensitively
emblematized the forms of inner consciousness. Of sf interest is Orlando:
A Biography (1928), whose androgynous hero/heroine survives from
Elizabethan to modern times, changing SEX more than once, and coming
ultimately to represent a vision of the nature of England itself.
[JC]Other works: A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (coll 1943).
WOOTTON, BARBARA
(1897-1988) UK economist, academic and writer; created a life peer in
1958, becoming Baroness Wootton of Abinger. London's Burning: A Novel for
the Decline and Fall of the Liberal Age (1936) was set in 1940 and
described the totalitarian implications of the aftermath of a general
strike. [JC]
WORLDS OF FANTASY AND HORROR
WEIRD TALES.
WORLD OF GIANTS
US tv series (1959). CBS TV. Prod and created William Alland. 1 season.
Each episode 25 mins. B/w.Marshall Thompson played a man who, on a secret
mission, becomes the victim of atomic radiation and is shrunk to 6in
(15cm). The government keeps him on as a secret agent, using him for
assignments where his small size will be an advantage. His full-size
partner on these missions was played by Arthur Franz. The short-lived
series was really an excuse to use all the giant-sized props left over
from The INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957), which Alland had produced for
Universal. [JB]
WORLD ON A WIRE
WELT AM DRAHT.
WORLDS BEYOND
US DIGEST-size magazine. 3 issues, monthly Dec 1950-Feb 1951, published
by Hillman Periodicals; ed Damon KNIGHT. WB was divided between original
and reprint material, and between sf and fantasy. New stories of note
included "Null-P" by William TENN (Dec 1950) and Harry HARRISON's first
story, "Rock Diver" (Feb 1951); Harrison also did illustrations for the
magazine. Other contributors included C.M. KORNBLUTH, Richard MATHESON and
Jack VANCE. Knight wrote book reviews. WB was cancelled by the publisher
after adverse sales reports on #1. #2 and #3 were by then advanced in
preparation and duly appeared. [MJE]
WORLD SCIENCE FICTION SOCIETY

HUGO.
WORLD SF
International association of sf professionals (not only writers, but also
artists, critics, editors, agents, publishers, etc.), founded in Dublin,
Sep 1976, by professionals at the First World Science Fiction Writers'
Conference, and coming into operation as of the 1978 Dublin meeting. WSF's
stated aim is "the general dissemination of creative sf, the furthering of
scholarship, the interchange of ideas . . . the fostering of closer bonds
between those who already hold such deep interests in common around the
globe". Presidents have been Harry HARRISON (1978-80), Frederik POHL
(1980-82), Brian W. ALDISS (1982-4), Sam J. LUNDWALL (1984-6), Gianfranco
Viviani (1986-8), Norman SPINRAD (1988-90) and Malcolm EDWARDS (1990-92).
Pohl instituted the Karel Award for excellence in sf translation. Under
Aldiss the Harrison Award, for improving the status of sf internationally,
and the President's Award, for independence of thought, were added.
WSF-related books have been The Penguin World Omnibus of Science Fiction
(anth 1986) ed Aldiss and Lundwall and Tales from Planet Earth (anth 1986)
ed Pohl and Elizabeth Anne Hull. The 1st World SF Newsletter appeared in
1980 ed Niels DALGAARD and the 3rd in 1991 ed James Goddard. Annual
meetings after 1978 were: 1979 Stockholm, Sweden; 1980 Stresa, Italy; 1981
Rotterdam, Netherlands; 1982 Linz, Austria; 1983 Zagreb, Yugoslavia; 1984
Brighton, UK; 1985 Fanano, Italy; 1986 Vancouver, Canada; 1987 Brighton,
UK; 1988 Budapest, Hungary; 1989 San Marino; 1990 The Hague, Netherlands;
1991 Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China; 1993 (none in 1992) Jersey, Channel
Islands, UK. [RH]
WORLDS OF FANTASY
1. UK pocketbook-size magazine, 14 numbered, undated issues 1950-4,
published by John Spencer, London; ed anon Sol Assael and Michael Nahum.
WOF is almost identical to the other 3 Spencer juvenile-sf magazines,
FUTURISTIC SCIENCE STORIES, TALES OF TOMORROW and WONDERS OF THE
SPACEWAYS, all containing fiction of very low quality.2. US DIGEST-size
magazine. 4 issues 1968-71, #1 published by Galaxy Publishing Corp., #2-#4
by Universal Publishing; #1-#2 ed Lester DEL REY, #3-#4 ed Ejler
JAKOBSSON. This attempt to produce a fantasy companion to GALAXY SCIENCE
FICTION - it published a lot of SWORD-AND-SORCERY material - might well
have succeeded had it had better distribution. The standard was good: WOF
published The Tombs of Atuan (WOF 1970; exp 1971) by Ursula K. LE GUIN and
early stories by Michael BISHOP and James TIPTREE Jr. [FHP/PN]
WORLDS OF IF SCIENCE FICTION
IF.
WORLDS OF THE UNIVERSE
UK pocketbook-size magazine. 1 undated issue 1953, published by
Gould-Light Publishing, London; ed anon (though probably Norman Light). No
notable stories. Copies are rarely seen. [FHP]
WORLDS OF TOMORROW
US DIGEST-size magazine. 26 issues in all, originally published by
Barmaray Co. (Apr 1963) and then by Galaxy Publishing Co. as a bimonthly
companion to GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION and IF, Apr 1963-May 1967, 23 issues,

ed Frederik POHL. The bimonthly schedule slipped when Aug 1964 was
followed by Nov 1964, and it went quarterly May 1966-May 1967. WOT was
briefly revived by the Universal Publishing and Distributing Co. after
they bought the Galaxy group, with 3 disappointing issues published
1970-71 ed Ejler JAKOBSSON. Notable stories included Philip K. DICK's "All
We Marsmen" (Aug-Dec 1963; exp vt Martian Time-Slip 1964), Samuel R.
DELANY's "The Star Pit" (Feb 1967), Larry NIVEN's first novel World of
Ptavvs (Mar 1965; exp 1966) and the early stories in Philip Jose FARMER's
Riverworld series, including "Day of the Great Shout" (Jan 1965), which
was incorporated into the HUGO-winning TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO (fixup
1971). A much-discussed article on CRYONICS by R.C.W. Ettinger (June 1963)
ultimately led to the magazine publishing a symposium on the subject (Aug
1966). WOT was absorbed into its senior partner Worlds of If Science
Fiction after May 1967.The UK edition, published by Gold Star, ran for 4
issues Spring-Winter 1967. [BS/PN]
WORLD'S WORK
TALES OF WONDER.
WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL, THE
Film (1959). Sol Siegel-Harbel/MGM. Dir Ranald MacDougall, starring Harry
Belafonte, Inger Stevens, Mel Ferrer. Screenplay MacDougall, based on The
Purple Cloud (1901) by M.P. SHIEL. 95 mins. B/w.As in Arch Oboler's FIVE
(1951), this wordy film tells of a tiny group of survivors in a
nuclear-bomb-ravaged USA. In this case there are 3: a young White woman, a
Black man and a cynical adventurer (White and male). The film is
evocative, as in the Black man's entry into the empty metropolis (although
no explanation is offered for the lack of bodies) and in the final hunt
through the deserted streets of New York. The plot is simple: Black man
finds White woman but hesitates to form a relationship with her; White man
finds both of them and wants woman, who is willing to remain with Black
man; a running duel takes place between the men. Eventually they realize
the futility of it all, and the film ends with all 3 walking off (rather
daringly for the time) hand in hand. The script is more sophisticated than
the banality of the plot would suggest, but the treatment of the racial
theme is embarrassingly tentative, and compromised by the use of so
handsome and light-skinned a Black as Belafonte. There were just 2
survivors in Shiel's The Purple Cloud (1901; rev 1929), on which this film
is based only remotely. [JB/PN]
WORLD WITHOUT END
Film (1956). Allied Artists. Written/dir Edward Bernds, starring Hugh
Marlowe, Nancy Gates, Rod Taylor, Lisa Montell, Nelson Leigh. 80 mins.
Colour.After orbiting Mars, a spaceship goes through a timewarp. The 4
astronauts land on a post- HOLOCAUST Earth in AD2508 and find the surface
inhabited by grotesque MUTANTS and giant spiders, while the remaining
humans live underground - the men impotent, the women sexy, the race dying
out. The astronauts stay, clearing the surface with bazookas. This is not
a particularly low-budget film, and the effects (by Milton Rice) are
passable, but direction and design are poor. The story is an
unacknowledged inversion of H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE (1895), with
Morlock surrogates on the surface and Eloi surrogates underground. Wells's

novel was to be better filmed by George PAL as The TIME MACHINE (1960).
[PN/JB]
WORMHOLES
BLACK HOLES.
WORMSER, RICHARD (EDWARD)
(1908-1977) US writer in various genres. He wrote a Green Hornet
comic-book/tv tie, The Green Hornet in the Infernal Light * (1966) as by
Ed Friend. Under his own name and of some sf interest were Thief of Bagdad
* (1961) and The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah * (1962), both film ties,
and Pan Satyrus (1963). [JC]
WORNER, HANS
[r] GERMANY.
WORTH, PETER
A ZIFF-DAVIS house name used on magazine stories; it appeared in their
various sf magazines 10 times 1949-51, usually concealing Chester S. GEIER
or Roger Phillips Graham (Rog PHILLIPS). [PN]
WOUK, HERMAN
(1915- ) US writer known primarily for meaty bestsellers like The Caine
Mutiny (1951) and The Winds of War (1971). His sf SATIRE, The "Lomokome"
Papers (1956 Collier's; 1968), somewhat clumsily puts allegorically
opposing UTOPIAN societies on the MOON and sets them at each other's
throats. [JC]See also: HISTORY OF SF.
WRATISLAW, A(LBERT) C(HARLES)
(1862-? ) UK writer in whose King Charles & Mr Perkins (1931) a TIME
MACHINE transports Perkins to Restoration England and retrieves him just
before he would have been executed. [JC]
WRAY, REGINALD
William Benjamin HOME-GALL.
WREN, M.K.
Working name of US writer Martha Kay Renfroe (1938- ) whose early work the Phoenix Legacy trilogy, comprising Sword of the Lamb (1981), Shadow of
the Swan (1981) and House of the Wolf (1981) - was fantasy. A Gift Upon
the Shore (1990), on the other hand, is an ambitious and eloquently
written post- HOLOCAUST sf novel in which two women seek to preserve
knowledge - in the form of books - for future and more fortunate
generations, in the face of destructive and attemptedly murderous enmity
from the religious zealots with whom one of them must learn to live.
[JC/JGr]
WREN, THOMAS
Thomas T. THOMAS.
WRIGHT, AUSTIN TAPPAN
(1883-1931) US lawyer who spent much of his leisure time composing
numerous manuscripts about a very large imaginary ISLAND called Islandia,
a place easily described as a UTOPIA, though in fact too densely imagined
and free of cognitive shaping to fit happily into that conventional

category; the island was conceived as being set near the Antarctic and
relating complexly to the real world. Unlike J.R.R. TOLKIEN, whose The
Lord of the Rings (1954-5) originated in similar private activities, ATW
died before putting his work into publishable form, and his daughter,
Sylvia Wright, with the help of Mark SAXTON (whom see for his
continuations), condensed a number of his manuscripts into the novel
Islandia (1942; with intro by Basil DAVENPORT), an enormous book
ostensibly describing the travels of a visitor to the island, and in fact
providing an extremely elaborate picture of an invented alternative
society and its - richly drawn - inhabitants. [JC]
WRIGHT, FARNSWORTH
(1888-1940) US editor. An early contributor to WEIRD TALES - his first
story was "The Closing Hand" in 1923 - FW became editor in November 1924
after #13, and continued in the post until December 1939, at which point
he had produced 177 issues. Under his guidance Weird Tales presented a
unique mixture of horror stories, sf, occult fiction, FANTASY and SWORD
AND SORCERY. In 1930 he began a companion magazine, Oriental Stories,
featuring borderline-fantasy stories (many by regular Weird Tales
contributors) in an exotic and largely imaginary Eastern setting. Oriental
Stories became Magic Carpet in 1933 and ceased publication in 1934.
Another project was a PULP-MAGAZINE edn of A Midsummer Night's Dream; FW
was a Shakespeare enthusiast. He suffered from a form of Parkinson's
disease which made it impossible for him even to write his name, except
with a typewriter. Very soon after deteriorating health had forced him to
leave Weird Tales he died. In its field, FW's Weird Tales rivals John W.
CAMPBELL Jr's ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION in terms of the number of stories
of lasting interest which it produced in its field. [MJE]
WRIGHT, HAROLD BELL
(1872-1944) US clergyman and enormously popular writer whose only sf
novel, The Devil's Highway (1932) with John Lebar, pseudonym of his son
Gilbert Munger Wright (1901- ), features a wicked SCIENTIST whose
thought-control device suppresses the better instincts of its victims, who
are then inclined to further his plots. [JC]Other work: The Uncrowned King
(1910), fantasy.
WRIGHT, HELEN S.
(? - ) UK writer whose A Matter of Oaths (1988) engagingly presents a
familiar sf character - the amnesiac protagonist who experiences flashback
hints of a destiny larger than any of those around him dare contemplate within a cogently described post- CYBERPUNK frame dominated by The Guild
of Webbers, starship pilots who mediate between complex interstellar
empires. [JC]
WRIGHT, KENNETH
[s] Lester DEL REY.
WRIGHT, LAN
Working name of UK writer and white-collar worker Lionel Percy Wright
(1923- ) for all his fiction. He began publishing sf with "Operation
Exodus" for NW in 1952, and was active for over a decade. His Johnny
Dawson series in NW, about intrigues between Earth and the planet Luther,

were partly assembled in Assignment Luther (1955-7 NW; fixup 1963);
"Joker's Trick" (1959) and "The Jarnos Affair" (1960) remained
uncollected. LW had earlier begun publishing novels with Who Speaks of
Conquest? (1957 dos US). [JC]Other works: A Man Called Destiny (1958 dos
US); Exile from Xanadu (1964 dos US; vt Space Born 1964 UK); The Last Hope
of Earth (1965 US; vt The Creeping Shroud 1966 UK); The Pictures of
Pavanne (1968 dos US; vt A Planet Called Pavanne 1968 UK).See also: MATTER
TRANSMISSION.
WRIGHT, S(YDNEY) FOWLER
(1874-1965) UK writer. SFW worked until middle-age as an accountant, was
twice married and had 10 children. In 1917 he was a founder of the Empire
Poetry League and edited the League's journal Poetry, which serialized his
translations of DANTE ALIGHIERI's Inferno and Purgatorio; he also edited
many anthologies for the League's Merton Press, publishing some early work
by Olaf STAPLEDON. SFW's first book was Scenes from the Morte d'Arthur
(coll of poetry 1919) as by Alan Seymour. His first-published novel, The
Amphibians: A Romance of 500,000 Years Hence (1924; vt The World Below
1953 UK), was issued by the Merton Press. He later founded Fowler Wright
Books Ltd to issue his translation of the Inferno (1928) and a novel which
he had written in 1920, Deluge (1928).The Amphibians describes a
FAR-FUTURE Earth where mankind is extinct and new intelligent species are
engaged in their own struggle for existence; its imagery was strongly
influenced by Wright's work on Inferno and its structure recapitulates
HOMER's Odyssey. It was meant to be the part 1 of a trilogy, but part 3
was never written and the concluding chapters of part 2 - added to part 1
in The World Below (1929; vt in 2 vols as The Amphibians 1951 US and The
World Below 1951 US; vt in 2 vols as The World Below 1953 UK and The
Dwellers 1953 UK) - are rather synoptic. Deluge, a DISASTER story in which
most of England sinks beneath the sea - so that the Cotswolds are
converted into an archipelago - enjoyed considerable critical success and
was filmed in 1933 as DELUGE (with New York as the setting); SFW promptly
retired from accountancy and began a second career as a writer.The Island
of Captain Sparrow (1928) deliberately recalls H.G. WELLS's The Island of
Dr Moreau (1896) in its image of an ISLAND inhabited by satyr-like
beast-men who are prey to the corrupt descendants of castaway pirates. It
also features a feral girl, the first of several similar figures used by
SFW to celebrate the state of Nature in opposition to the brutality of
"civilized" men. Dawn (1929), a sequel to Deluge - with which it was
assembled as Deluge, and Dawn (omni 1975 US) - also contains much bitter
commentary on the corruptions of comfort and civilization and carries
forward a Rousseau-esque glorification of Nature and insistence on the
fundamentality of the Social Contract. The Margaret Cranleigh trilogy
began with Dream, or The Simian Maid (1931), which carries these
philosophical arguments to further extremes in telling the story of a
woman transported back to a lost prehistory to witness a battle for
survival between a humanoid species and ratlike predators. The 2nd volume
was ultimately published - shorn of connecting material - under the
pseudonym Anthony Wingrave as The Vengeance of Gwa (1935; reprinted as by
SFW); and the 3rd did not appear until much later, as Spiders' War (1954
US). Beyond the Rim (1932) is a determinedly eccentric lost-race ( LOST

WORLDS) story set in the Antarctic; it is much more interesting than SFW's
lacklustre later works in a similar vein, The Screaming Lake (1937) and
The Hidden Tribe (1938), although its sf content is only marginal.SFW's
vivid short fiction of this period was assembled in The New Gods Lead
(coll 1932; exp vt The Throne of Saturn 1949 US), which groups 7 vitriolic
DYSTOPIAN stories under the heading "Where the New Gods Lead" (the new
gods in question being Comfort and Cowardice). These include a notable
fantasy of IMMORTALITY, "The Rat" (1929), a trilogy of parables about the
taking over of human prerogatives by MACHINES, "Automata" (1929), and 2
polemics against SFW'S pet hates, birth control and the motor car,
"P.N.40" (1929 as "P.N.40 - and Love") and "Justice".Power (1933) belongs
to that subgenre of SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES in which a lone man in possession
of some awesomely destructive WEAPON attempts to blackmail the world.
SFW's protagonist is among the more altruistic and ambitious, but the
story ultimately fades into a mere thriller. SFW visited Nazi Germany in
1934 in order to write a series of newspaper articles, and this inspired a
trio of highly melodramatic future- WAR stories: Prelude in Prague: The
War of 1938 (1935 Daily Mail as "1938"; 1935; vt The War of 1938 1936 US),
Four Days War (1936) and Megiddo's Ridge (1937). By this time he was
falling prey to old age, but he produced a final vivid image of the future
in The Adventure of Wyndham Smith (1938), partly based on a short story,
"Original Sin" (which ultimately saw publication in The Witchfinder [coll
1946] and in The Throne of Saturn). In the novel the inhabitants of a
stagnant and sterile quasi- UTOPIAN state decide to commit mass suicide,
and unleash mechanical Killers to hunt down a handful of rebels. Apart
from Spiders' War and the brief parables "The Better Choice" (1955) and
"First Move" (1963), none of his later work was published; all the
manuscripts have been lost except for the still unpublished fantasy novel
Inquisitive Angel.He also wrote numerous detective stories, all as by
Sydney Fowler in the UK although some appeared as by SFW in the USA. The
Bell Street Murders (1931), as Sydney Fowler, features an invention which
records moving images on a screen; its first sequel, The Secret of the
Screen (1933), as Fowler, has negligible sf content. The weak futuristic
thriller The Adventure of the Blue Room (1945) also appeared under the
Fowler byline.Despite the considerable number of his published works,
SFW's literary career was a chronicle of frustrations. The 2 projects
dearest to his heart - the long Arthurian epic of which Scenes from the
Morte d'Arthur is but a small part, and a long historical novel about
Cortez, For God and Spain - were never published. Although
self-publication led him to brief fame and fortune, he failed in his
ambition to become a social commentator of Wellsian status and ended up
trying to resuscitate his career by reprinting his early works under the
Books of Today imprint while he was editing a trade journal of that title
in the late 1940s. Even The World Below, despite its classic status as a
vividly exotic novel of the far future, is only half the work it was
originally intended to be. Nevertheless, he was a strikingly original
writer and one of the key figures in the tradition of UK scientific
romance. [BS]About the author: "Against the New Gods: The Speculative
Fiction of S. Fowler Wright" by Brian M. STABLEFORD, Foundation #29 (Nov
1983); Sermons in Science Fiction: The Novels of S. Fowler Wright (1994)
by Mary S. Weinkauf.See also: BIOLOGY; CITIES; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT;

FANTASTIC VOYAGES; HISTORY OF SF; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; MEDICINE; ORIGIN
OF
MAN; ROBERT HALE LIMITED; SOCIAL DARWINISM; SOCIOLOGY; TECHNOLOGY.
WRIGHT, STEPHEN
(1946- ) US writer whose only novel of sf interest, M31: A Family Romance
(1988), is a FABULATION in an agglutinative style reminiscent of that used
by William Gaddis (1922- ) in The Recognitions (1955). Abandoned by their
parents - Dot and Dash, who claim descent from the inhabitants of the
Andromeda Galaxy (M31) - the protagonists of the book ricochet numbly
through the nightmare shopping malls and 7-11s of the modern "rural" USA.
The vacuum family they make together and the horrors they commit
contribute to an extremely distressing vision of the latter moments of the
century. Going Native (1994) is a road-novel, searingly and hilariously
told, apocalyptic in tone, but not sf. [JC]
WRIGHT, WEAVER
[s] Forrest J. ACKERMAN.
WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST
This contest, originally sponsored by L. Ron HUBBARD and later, after his
death, by Bridge Publications in the USA, is between short stories or
novelettes of sf or fantasy submitted by novice authors who have
previously published no more than 3 short stories or 1 novelette. Contests
have been held quarterly since 1984; the 3 place-getters receive cash
awards as well as publication in the L. RON HUBBARD PRESENTS WRITERS OF
THE FUTURE series of original anthologies. Winners of the quarterly award
receive $1000; in addition, from 1985, an annual winner, chosen from the
quarterly winners, receives the "L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future
Award" and $4000.Sums very much larger than these have been spent on
publicizing the awards. This practice has aroused controversy, being seen
by some as part of a campaign by the Church of SCIENTOLOGY to elevate
Hubbard's status within the sf community and the literary community at
large. On the one hand, Algis BUDRYS, administrator of WOTFC until 1992,
says that, though he is personally an admirer of Hubbard's fiction, there
is no connection between WOTFC and the Church of Scientology. On the other
hand, the sponsor, Bridge Publications, was originally set up to publish
textbooks of DIANETICS and Scientology; the launch parties and general
publicity given by Bridge to WOTF, which appear to be funded from an
almost bottomless pocket, have been so lavish as to send frissons of
pleasure or disgust through the entire sf community. The company called
Author Services, Inc. - active in publicizing L. Ron Hubbard - which acts
as co-host with Bridge at WOTFC award ceremonies, was alleged in 1984
newspaper reports to have at that time assets of $44 million derived from
the Church of Scientology.WOTFC has had its successes. The first of these
has been the astonishingly prestigious panel of judges it has built up,
including Gregory BENFORD, Ben BOVA, Ramsey Campbell (1946- ), Anne
MCCAFFREY, C.L. MOORE, Larry NIVEN, Frederik POHL, Robert SILVERBERG,
Theodore STURGEON, John VARLEY, Jack WILLIAMSON and Gene WOLFE. Only the
most determined of conspiracy theorists could see these writers as
representing a secret pro-Scientology agenda; it seems clear that they
wish merely to assist young writers. The second success has been the

writers themselves. By no means all contest winners have gone on to
greater things, but Robert REED (who entered the contest as Robert
Touzalin), Dave WOLVERTON and David ZINDELL have certainly produced
admirable work since, as has Karen Joy FOWLER, who though not a winner has
been perhaps the most distinguished of all the WOTFC graduates. The
general standard of the anthologies drawn from contestants' stories has
been quite high. An Illustrators of the Future Contest is run in parallel.
The WOTFC programme also includes writers' workshops, directed by Budrys
in association with such other writers as Orson Scott CARD, Tim POWERS and
Ian WATSON. These workshops are notable for being - at least in some
sessions - based very specifically on advice to writers originally
formulated by Hubbard many decades ago. Those who do not accept Hubbard as
one of sf's real craftsmen, though he certainly could write vividly and
excitingly, see an irony in this.The listing below is by the year in which
the awards ceremony was held, and refers to work of the previous year.
Those named for 1985 are quarterly winners; the first "L. Ron Hubbard
Writers of the Future Award" proper was presented the following year.
[PN]Winners:1985: Dennis J. Pimple; Jor Jennings; David ZINDELL1986:
Robert Touzalin (Robert REED)1987: Dave WOLVERTON1988: Nancy Farmer1989:
Gary W. Shockley1990: James Gardner1991: James C. Glass
WU, WILLIAM F(RANKING)
(1951- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "By the Flicker of the
One-Eyed Flame" for Andromeda 2 (anth 1977) ed Peter WESTON, and who has
produced considerable work in various genres, receiving nominations for
various awards; several tales make use of his own Chinese-US background.
His novels are less impressive. The first, Masterplay (fixup 1987), though
not set in a franchised GAME-WORLD, flirts with the intoxications of a
role-playing venue whose outcomes determine real events. The protagonist
of Hong on the Range (1989) had appeared earlier in "Hong's Bluff" (1985).
The Shade of Lo Man Gong (1988 Pulphouse; 1991 chap) is also fantasy. His
other books have been ties: 2 tales in the Robot City sequence, Isaac
Asimov's Robot City #3: Cyborg * (1987) and #6: Perihelion * (1988); Dr
Bones #2: The Cosmic Bomber * (1989); and a Time Tours tale, Robert
Silverberg's Time Tours #1: The Robin Hood Ambush * (1990); 6 volumes of
Isaac Asimov's Robots in Time sequence: #1 Predator* (1993), #2 Marauder
*(1993), #3 Warrior* (1993), #4 Dictator* (1994), #5 Emperor *(1994) and
#6 Invader* (1994); and Mutant Chronicles: In Lunacy *(1993). [JC]Other
work: Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, 1850-1940
(1982); Shaunessy Fong (1992 chap); Wong's Lost and Found Emporium (coll
1992).
WUCKEL, DIETER
Bruce Bingham CASSIDAY.
WU DINGBO
(1941- ) Chinese academic and sf scholar based at the English Department
of the Shanghai International Studies University. His PhD in English is
from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, his dissertation being titled
"Utopias by American Women". With Patrick Murphy he ed Science Fiction
from China (anth 1989 US), which contains 8 Chinese sf stories and a
chronological bibliography. He is a member of WORLD SF and has had more

than 40 articles and translations, in Chinese and English, published in
the USA and China. He wrote the CHINESE SF entry in this encyclopedia.
[PN]Other works as editor: Selections of American Science Fiction (anth
1983); Star Ducks (anth 1983).
WU FANG
The MYSTERIOUS WU FANG .
WUL, STEFAN
Pseudonym of French dental surgeon and writer Pierre Pairault (1922- ),
who swept onto the sf scene with 11 consistent and imaginative novels, all
published 1956-9. Niourk (1957) is a J.G. BALLARD-like account of a
drowned world. Oms en serie ["Oms by the Dozen"] (1957) inspired the
animated film La PLANETE SAUVAGE (1973). The apparently human protagonist
of Le temple du passe (1958; trans Ellen Cox as The Temple of the Past
1973 US), having crashed on an ALIEN planet, attempts to save his
colleagues after they have all been swallowed by an indigenous whale,
enters SUSPENDED ANIMATION, and is discovered eons later by genuine human
folk and identified as a survivor of ATLANTIS. After 1959, SW fell silent
until the appearance of Noo (1977), a lengthy and flamboyant saga which,
like his earlier novels, shows a deep understanding of the traditions of
US pulp sf. [MJ/JC]Other works: Retour a O ["Back to O"] (1956); Rayons
pour Sidar ["Rays for Sidar"] (1957); La peur geante ["The Immense Fear"]
(1957); L'orphelin de Perdide ["The Orphan from Perdide"] (1958); La mort
vivante ["Living Death"] (1958); Piege sur Zarkass ["Trap on Zarkass"]
(1958); Terminus 1 (1959); Odyssee sous controle ["Controlled Odyssey"]
(1959).See also: FRANCE; UNDER THE SEA.
WULFF, EVE
[r] James L. QUINN.
WURF, KARL
[s] George H. SCITHERS.
WURLITZER, RUDOLF
(1937- ) US novelist and screenwriter, most of whose tales may be read as
FABULATIONS in which sf elements are bleakly pickled. Nog (1969; vt The
Octopus UK), Flats (1970) and Quake (1972) share an apocalyptic mise en
scene similar in feeling to, but not clearly identified as being, the
post- HOLOCAUST world so familiar to sf readers. Slow Fade (1984) verges
on similar territory. [JC]
WYATT, B.D.
[s] Spider ROBINSON.
WYATT, PATRICK
Pseudonym of a UK writer, possibly female. PW's Irish Rose (1975) is a
love story set in a world where almost all white women have died - except
in Ireland - as a result of taking the Pill. The RELIGION of the
frustrated male population is, perhaps predictably, misogynist. [JC]
WYKES, ALAN
(1914- ) Prolific UK writer, mainly of nonfiction, whose sf SATIRE
Happyland (1952) depicts an arcadian fantasy- ISLAND in which happiness is

literally obtainable. A UK magnate turns the place into a holiday camp; a
new kind of bomb finally eliminates it. [JC]
WYLDE, THOMAS
(1946- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Target of Opportunity"
for Gal in 1974, and who has continued to produce short fiction regularly,
some of it HARD SF tinged with ironies. His novels have all been ties: 2
tales in the Alien Speedway sequence, Roger Zelazny's Alien Speedway #2:
Pitfall * (1988) and #3: The Web * (1988); and 2 in the Dr Bones sequence,
Dr Bones #3: Garukan Blood * (1989) and the last in the series, #6:
Journey to Rilla * (1990). [JC]
WYLIE, DIRK
Name adopted by Joseph H. Dockweiler, a member of the FUTURIANS fan
group, for several stories written in collaboration with Frederik POHL. C.
M. KORNBLUTH also had a hand in one. "Highwayman of the Void" (1944) is by
Pohl alone. [BS]
WYLIE, PHILIP (GORDON)
(1902-1971) US author who became notorious for his penetrating surveys of
US mores and behaviour, and who coined the term "Momism" to describe the
US tendency to sacralize motherhood, thus making family dynamics and
morality impenetrable to reflection; outside sf he probably remains best
remembered for Generation of Vipers (1942), where the coinage appeared. In
the sf field he was most significant for 4 works: Gladiator (1930), filmed
as The Gladiator (1938), about a young man endowed with superhuman
strength, a tale directly responsible for the appearance of the comic-book
hero SUPERMAN (though there PW's traditional scepticism about the
relationship of a superior being to normal humanity was safely displaced
onto the morose Clark Kent); When Worlds Collide (1933) and its sequel,
After Worlds Collide (1934), both with Edwin BALMER, a retelling of the
Noah's ark legend involving the END OF THE WORLD and interplanetary flight
(the 1st vol was adapted into an sf COMIC strip and a successful film,
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE [1951]); and The Disappearance (1951), which
ingeniously assaults the double standard through a tale in which the men
and women of Earth disappear from one another, having been suddenly
segregated into 2 PARALLEL WORLDS.The first 3 of these novels were
published early in PW's career, the period during which he produced his
most highly regarded single work, Finnley Wren (1934), a baroque anatomy
in fictional terms of the young century into which were embedded 2 tales
of sf interest, "An Epistle to the Thessalonians" and "Epistle to the
Galatians". Other work from the 1930s included The Murderer Invisible
(1931), a tale inspired by H.G. WELLS's The Invisible Man (1897) (with
R.C. SHERRIFF, PW scripted the 1933 film version of The INVISIBLE MAN );
the screenplay for The ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932), adapted from Wells's
The Island of Dr Moreau (1896); The Savage Gentleman (1932), in which a
child is brought up isolated from humanity, and excoriates the social
world when finally exposed to it; and scripts for 2 further films, The
King of the Jungle (1933) and Murders in the Zoo (1933).In the early 1940s
his attention became fixed upon the apocalyptic implications of nuclear
energy, and in "The Paradise Crater" (October 1945 Blue Book) - upon whose
earlier submission to American Magazine he was put under house arrest for

undue prescience - he described a high-tech post-WWII 1965 threatened by
an underground Nazi attempt to rule the world through the use of atomic
bombs; fortunately the hero blows up the villains' Californian HQ, causing
a tsunami which takes care of Japan as well. In Blunder: A Story of the
End of the World (1946 chap), atomic experiments blow up the entire
planet. In several later works PW continued to address the new
vulnerability of the world. Titles include The Smuggled Atom Bomb (1951
Saturday Evening Post; in Three to be Read [coll 1951]; 1956),
"Philadelphia Phase" (1951), The Answer (1955 chap) - a pacifist fantasy Tomorrow! (1954) and Triumph (1963), the 2 latter novels being pleas for a
nuclear Civil Defence. Towards the end of his life he turned from atomic
DISASTER to ecological disaster in The End of the Dream (1972) ( ECOLOGY)
and a The Name of the Game tv tie, Los Angeles: A.D. 2017 * (1971). He
also wrote an essay on sf, "Science Fiction and Sanity in an Age of
Crisis", which appeared in Modern Science Fiction (anth 1953) ed Reginald
BRETNOR.PW was a highly successful commercial writer, much of whose work
pretended to no more than entertainment value. In his sf, however, though
he never abandoned a commercial idiom, he gave something like full rein to
the anatomizing and apocalyptic impulses which made him, during his life,
a figure of controversy to his large readership. [JC]Other works: The
Golden Hoard (1934) with Edwin Balmer, a mystery; Night unto Night (1944),
a ghost story; The Spy who Spoke Porpoise (1969).About the author: "Philip
Wylie" in Explorers of the Infinite (1963) by Sam MOSKOWITZ; Still Worlds
Collide: Philip Wylie and the End of the American Dream (1980 chap) by
Clifford P. Bendan.See also: DYSTOPIAS; FEMINISM; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER;
INVISIBILITY; NUCLEAR POWER; POLLUTION; SEX; SOCIOLOGY; SPACESHIPS;
SUPERMAN.
WYNDHAM, JOHN
That fraction of his full name used by UK writer John Wyndham Parkes
Lucas Beynon Harris (1903-1969) after WWII, and by far his best-known
byline; before WWII, he had signed work as John Beynon Harris, John
Beynon, Wyndham Parkes, Lucas Parkes and Johnson Harris. As well as
changing names with frequency, JW often revised - or allowed others to
revise - works from early in his working life; at times this led (as with
Planet Plane; see below) to an excessive number of versions of unimportant
titles.As a whole, JW's career broke into 2 parts: before WWII and after
it, when he became Wyndham. His first career was inconspicuous. He began
publishing sf in 1931 with "Worlds to Barter" as by John Beynon Harris for
Wonder Stories, and contributed adventure sf and juveniles to various UK
magazines throughout the 1930s. Some of this early work was assembled as
Wanderers of Time (coll 1973) as by JW, the title story having been
reprinted earlier as Love in Time (1933 Wonder Stories as "Wanderers of
Time" as by John Beynon Harris; 1945 chap) as by Johnson Harris; most of
the contents of Exiles on Asperus (coll 1979) as by John Beynon were also
pre-WWII. His first novel, The Secret People (1935 as by John Beynon; rev
1964 US; text restored 1972 UK as by JW), was a juvenile sf adventure set
in a underground world threatened by a project to transform the Sahara
into a lake for irrigation purposes. Planet Plane (1936 Passing Show as
"Stowaway to Mars" as by John Beynon; full text 1936 as by John Beynon;
cut 1937 in Modern Wonder vt "The Space Machine"; differing cut [by

another hand] vt Stowaway to Mars 1953; text restored 1972 as by JW) was a
rather well told, though only intermittently subtle, narrative of
humanity's first space flight to Mars, where Vaygan the Martian and the
machines destined to succeed his dying species deal swiftly with 3
competing sets of Earthlings who have landed almost simultaneously. Vaygan
himself impregnates Joan, the stowaway of the magazine title; given the
moral strictures then applying to magazine fiction, it is unsurprising
that she dies in childbirth and that her child is deemed illegitimate. The
sequel, "Sleepers of Mars" (1938 Tales of Wonder as by John Beynon; as
title story in Sleepers of Mars [coll 1973] as by JW), deals merely with
some stranded Russians, not with the miscegenate offspring. In Bound to be
Read (1975), the memoirs of UK publisher Robert Lusty, the John Beynon
Harris of these years appears as a rather diffident, obscure, lounging
individual at the fringes of the literary and social world; there was no
great reason to suppose he would ever erupt into fame.WWII interrupted
JW's writing career, and his later works showed a change in basic subject
matter and a much more careful concern for the responses of the
middle-class audience he was now attempting to reach in slick journals
like COLLIER'S WEEKLY. Where much of his pre-WWII tales were SPACE OPERAS
leavened with the occasional witty aside or passage, JW's post-WWII novels
- most notably The Day of the Triffids (1951 US; rev [and preferred text]
1951 UK; orig version vt Revolt of the Triffids 1952 US), filmed as The
DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (1963), and The Kraken Wakes (1953; rev vt Out of the
Deeps 1953 US), both assembled with Re-Birth (1955 US; rev vt The
Chrysalids 1955 UK) as The John Wyndham Omnibus (omni 1964) - present an
eloquent post-trauma middle-class UK response to the theme of DISASTER,
whether caused by the forces of Nature, alien INVASIONS, EVOLUTION or
Man's own nuclear warfare. JW did not invent the UK novel of
secretly-longed-for-disaster, or what Brian W. ALDISS has called the COSY
CATASTROPHE, for this had reached mature form as early as 1885, with the
publication of Richard JEFFERIES's retrospective After London, or Wild
England, and the techniques for giving actuality to the moment of crisis
had been thoroughly established, by H.G. WELLS and others, well before
WWI; but he effectively domesticated some of its defining patterns: the
city (usually London) depopulated by the catastrophe; the exodus, with its
scenes of panic and bravery; and the ensuring focus on a small but growing
nucleus of survivors who reach some kind of sanctuary in the country and
prepare to re-establish Man's shaken dominion. UK writers as diverse as
John CHRISTOPHER, Aldiss and M. John HARRISON have used the pattern with
notable success. Their natural tendency has been somewhat to darken JW's
palette and to widen its social relevance, for his protagonists and their
women tend to behave with old-fashioned decency and courage, rather as
though they were involved in the Battle of Britain, a time imaginatively
close to him and to his markets.Three considerably overlapping story
collections assembled shorter material produced after WWII: Jizzle (coll
1954), Tales of Gooseflesh and Laughter (coll 1956 US) and The Seeds of
Time (coll 1956). In them, JW again demonstrated his skill at translating
sf situations into fundamentally comfortable tales of character, however
prickly their subject matter might be. In the UK, though not in the USA,
he was marketed as a middlebrow writer of non-generic work, and was not
strongly identified with sf.Though published and associated with the cosy

catastrophe tales, Re-Birth - JW apparently preferred the title The
Chrysalids, by which the book has always been known in the UK - marked a
new phase, in which the invasion comes not from abroad but in the form of
MUTANTS who must survive in a normal world, and whose threat to "normal"
humans was expressed in bleakly Social Darwinist terms; in the end, a
somewhat traumatized "cosy" normalcy is retained when the novel's mutant
protagonists are forced to leave the human hearth. In his next - The
Midwich Cuckoos (1957; rev 1958 US; vt Village of the Damned 1960 US),
filmed as VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960) and as CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED
(1963) - the incursion is unqualifiedly inimical: the ALIEN invaders who
inseminate the women of Midwich, and the consequent very effectively
spooky offspring, mark a decided inturning from the comfortable
assumptions of earlier books. Later novels, like Trouble with Lichen
(1960; rev 1960 US), are conspicuous for their facetious unease, and it
might be suggested that the potency of JW's impulse to cosiness may well
have derived from some profound cultural and/or personal insecurity he was
unable to articulate directly. But he wrote effectively for a specific UK
market at a specific point in time - the period of recuperation that
followed WWII - and he will be remembered primarily for the half decade or
so during which he was able to express in telling images the hopes, fears
and resurgent complacency of a readership that recognized a kindred
spirit. During that period, in the UK and Australia at least, he was
probably more read than any other sf author. As late as 1992, his books
appeared regularly on school syllabuses in the UK. [JC]Other works: The
Outward Urge (coll of linked stories: 1959; with 1 story added, rev 1961),
published as by JW and Lucas Parkes; Consider Her Ways & Others (coll
1961) and The Infinite Moment (coll 1961 US), 2 titles whose contents are
similar, though each book was conceived separately; Chocky (1963 AMZ; exp
1968 US); The Best of John Wyndham (coll 1973; without intro or
bibliography vt The Man from Beyond and Other Stories 1975; full version
in 2 vols vt The Best of John Wyndham 1932-1949 1976 and The Best of John
Wyndham 1951-1960 1976) ed Angus WELLS; Web (1979); John Wyndham (omni
1980) assembling The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The
Chrysalids, The Seeds of Time, The Midwich Cuckoos and Trouble with
Lichen.About the author: John Wyndham, Creator of the Cosy Catastrophe: A
Working Bibliography (latest rev 1989 chap) by Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See
also: BOYS' PAPERS; CHILDREN IN SF; CLICHES; FEMINISM; GOTHIC SF; HISTORY
OF SF; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; IMMORTALITY; MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF;
MONSTERS; MUSIC; PSI POWERS; PUBLISHING; RADIO; SEX; UFOS; VENUS.
WYNNE-JONES, DIANA
Diana Wynne JONES.
WYNNE-TYSON, ESME
[r] J.D. BERESFORD.
WYSS, JOHAN RUDOLF
(1781-1830) Swiss philosopher and writer, of sf interest for Der
Schweizerische Robinson (1812-13; trans - perhaps by William Godwin
[1756-1836] - as The Family Robinson Crusoe 1814 UK; new trans as The
Swiss Family Robinson 1818 UK), which, together with the tale which
inspired it, Daniel DEFOE's Robinson Crusoe (1719), served as a central

model for sf tales of the COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS. (For fuller
discussion ROBINSONADE.) [JC]

SF?
XENOBIOLOGY
The study of lifeforms that may exist elsewhere than on Earth is called
xenobiology or exobiology. It is one of the few legitimate sciences to
have, as yet, no direct experimental application other than the tests
carried out on the surface of Mars to see if the soil showed any of the
biological activity that might be associated with the presence of
microscopic lifeforms. (It seemed for a time as if some of the results of
this experiment might be positive; it is now thought they were caused by
nonbiological factors.) Numerous essays on exobiological themes have
appeared in scientific journals, on subjects ranging from SETI ("Search
for Extraterrestrial Intelligence"), through speculations about
non-carbon-based lifeforms to the thoughts of Freeman DYSON and others
about the relation of COSMOLOGY to biology. Popular introductions to
speculative biology of this sort include Life in Darwin's Universe:
Evolution and the Cosmos (1981) by Gene Bylinski and Darwin's Universe:
Origins and Crises in the History of Life (1983) by C.R. Pellegrino and J.
A. Stoff. Two pioneering works, both more theoretical and the latter a
little more technical, are Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966) by I.S.
Shklovskii and Carl SAGAN (based on Vselennaia, Zhizn, Razum [1963] by
Shklovskii alone; trans Paula Fern, rev and exp so greatly by Sagan as to
become a co-authorship) and Interstellar Communication: Scientific
Perspectives (1974) ed Cyril Ponnamperuma and A.G.W. Cameron. A good
overview is given by The Search for Life in the Universe (1978) by Donald
Goldsmith and Tobias Owen. The subject is, of course, central to sf about
ALIENS and LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; a survey of it written very much from an
sf writer's viewpoint is Extraterrestrial Encounter: A Personal
Perspective (1979) by Chris BOYCE. There is an exobiology lab at the
University of Hawaii. [PN]
XERO
US FANZINE (1960-63), ed from New York by Richard and Pat LUPOFF. Large
and attractively produced, with illustrations by Roy G. KRENKEL, Eddie
JONES and others, X was particularly well known for its articles on
COMICS, notably the series All in Color for a Dime by Richard Lupoff, Ted
WHITE and others. Together with new pieces by Harlan ELLISON and Ron
GOULART, these articles were published by ACE BOOKS as All in Color for a
Dime (anth 1970), ed Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson. X also contained
material on sf and FANDOM, contributors including James BLISH, Lin CARTER,
Avram DAVIDSON, Wilson TUCKER and Walt Willis. X won the 1963 HUGO for
Best Fanzine. [PR/RH]
X-FILES, THE
US tv series (1993- ). Ten Thirteen Productions in association with 20th
Century Television. Series created by Chris Carter who is also executive
producer; co-executive prods R.W. Goodwin, Glen Morgan and James Wong;
supervising prod Howard Gordon; prods Joseph Patrick Finn, Paul Brown,

David Nutter; co-prod Paul Rabwin; music Mark Snow. Directors include
Carter, Goodwin, Nutter, Michael Lange, Robert Mandel, Rob Bowman, Harry
Longstreet, Daniel Sackheim. Writers include Carter, Brown, Gordon,
Morgan, Wong, Darin Morgan, Chris Ruppenthal. Starring David Duchovny as
FBI agent Fox Mulder and Gillian Anderson as FBI agent Dana Scully. Two
seasons to date, the first of 24 one-hour episodes Sep 1993-May 1994, the
second season, began Sep 1994, current, 21 one-hour episodes to the end of
March 1995. Colour.This, which may come to be seen as one of the key sf tv
series of the mid 1990s, has been neither a failure nor a great success in
the ratings, but has rapidly garnered a very committed cult following.
Very much the brainchild of creator/executive producer/director/writer
Chris Carter, it is a comparatively low-budget series administered by him
from Los Angeles and ostensibly set in the USA but actually shot in
Canada, in and around Vancouver. A small, secret department of the FBI is
dedicated to investigating cases that appear to have an element of the
paranormal about them, and the files dealing with these cases are called
the X-files. There are only two investigators in the department, male
agent Fox Mulder (Duchovny), who is emotional, open-minded, ready to
believe in all sorts of strange phenomena, and his female colleague agent
Dana Scully (Anderson), who is cool, medically trained, logical,
sceptical. The premise is not especially original; the series is a little
like PROJECT UFO (1978-79), and more closely resembles the earlier
KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER (1974-75), which Carter was devoted to as a
child. The X-Files, however, is both more sophisticated and darker than
either of these.The phenomena investigated cover the full gamut of tabloid
weirdness in the area of "the unexplained", ranging from abductions of
humans by aliens in UFOs-a recurrent theme-through tales of telepathy,
projection of nightmares, vampires, werewolves, alien life-forms found
frozen in the arctic, unusual longevity, shape-shifting, monsters,
DNA-spliced hybrids, and so on almost indefinitely. In most cases a
sufficient veneer of rationalisation exists (events pass too quickly for
most viewers to subject these rationalisations to real scrutiny) for the
series to qualify as definitely sf rather than fantasy. But this is sf
slewed towards the GOTHIC, the menacing, towards HORROR. The programme
owes a debt to Twin Peaks, a cult tv success of the early 1990s and not
itself sf. More direct, famous sources, such as the film THE THING (1951),
are plundered regularly and remorselessly, but with sufficiently clever a
blend of homage and variation-on-a-theme to avoid the accusation of
plagiarism. Many of the strange events in the series result, it seems,
from secret, cynical government experiment, and it is here that its
characteristic tone- PARANOIA-evolves. A running theme is the existence of
high-level conspiracies, possibly centred in the Pentagon, which
constantly threaten the professional integrity not to say the lives of
Mulder and Scully. The FBI-itself infiltrated-seems helpless in the face
of greater powers. The second season, in fact, is a continuous story
involving Scully's apparent abduction into a UFO, connections between this
and government conspiracies and the temporary forced closure of the
X-files department.What makes the series work so well is its willingness
to penetrate a very long way indeed into the over-the-top and the bizarre
(almost to the verge of black farce) combined with an (apparently)
completely serious tone. The relationship between Mulder and Scully, no

ordinary love relationship, is subtle, developing and absorbingly
displayed: the performances are very good. The whole series, indeed, is
presented with passion and intensity, which makes for unusual tv
viewing.[PN]
X-MEN
US COMIC-book series, created by Jack KIRBY and Stan LEE for MARVEL
COMICS in 1963. It had a 66-issue run, and then ran reprints until #94
(1975), when new stories resumed featuring the new team of X-Men that had
been introduced in Giant-Size X-Men #1 a few months earlier. Kirby drew
the first 11 issues and Lee wrote the first 19. Many highly regarded
artists have worked on the series over the years, notably Neal ADAMS, John
Byrne, Dave Cockrum, Jim Lee, James STERANKO and Barry Windsor-Smith;
while later writers have been Roy Thomas (#20-#43, #55-#64 and #66),
Arnold Drake (#44-#54), Denny O'Neil (#65), Len Wein (#94-#95 and Giant
Size #1) and Chris CLAREMONT (#96-#279). Claremont has now left the
series, after a dispute; his 16-year unbroken writing run is a record for
a Marvel title.X-Men, now retitled The Uncanny X-Men, differs from
apparently similar costumed- SUPERHERO comics in that the X-Men, "feared
and hated by the world they have sworn to protect", are all MUTANTS.
Ignorance and fear of mutants was the subtext to the 1st run, and in the
2nd series much emphasized by Claremont, who saw the comic as showing
"racism and prejudice . . . and what it's like to be a victim of it". He
most successfully realized this theme in God Loves, Man Kills (1982), an
X-Men GRAPHIC NOVEL in which a fundamentalist televangelist launches a
crusade against mutants. X-Men was the best-selling US comic for most of
the 1980s, its success spawning numerous miniseries and the ongoing The
New Mutants (1983-91), X-Factor (1986-current), Excalibur (1988-current),
Wolverine (1988-current), Marvel Comics Presents (1988-current) - an
anthology title with Wolverine the main story - X-Force (1991-current) and
a second X-Men (1991-current). Nearly all the traditional sf themes, from
GENETIC ENGINEERING to TIME TRAVEL, have been used in X-Men. [RH]
X - THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES
(vt The Man with the X-Ray Eyes) Film (1963). Alta Vista/AIP. Dir Roger
CORMAN, starring Ray Milland, Diana Van Der Vlis, John Hoyt, Don Rickles.
Screenplay Robert Dillon, Ray Russell, based on a story by Russell. 88
mins cut to 80 mins. Colour.A surgeon, Dr Xavier, uses an experimental
drug to develop X-ray vision and thus perform operations more skilfully,
but the process affects his mind. He accidentally kills a colleague and
hides in a carnival sideshow where he is exploited as a faith healer. His
X-ray vision becomes a metaphor for insight into all the ugliness and
sadness of life. A series of events bring appalling visions which alienate
him progressively from ordinary, unseeing humanity. Finally he encounters
an evangelist holding a religious meeting in the desert; when the man
cries "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out!", Xavier does just that.
Though close to being a Poverty Row product (the special effects are not
quite up to showing Dr Xavier's ability to "see through the centre of the
Universe") this bleak film is sometimes considered Corman's masterpiece.
[PN/JB]See also: CINEMA.
X THE UNKNOWN

Film (1956). Hammer/Warner Bros. Dir Leslie Norman (replacing Joseph
Walton), starring Dean Jagger, Edward Chapman, William Lucas, Leo McKern,
Anthony Newley. Screenplay Jimmy Sangster. 86 mins, cut to 78 mins in the
USA. B/w.In this Hammer sf/ HORROR film made soon after the success of
their The QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955) - the"X" in both cases being
intended to signal unimaginable horrors, as in X-rated (adults only)
movies - a radioactive blob, a sort of primal, semi-fluid, living creature
brought to the surface by tidal pressures in Earth's core, emerges near a
village in Scotland and heads for the nearest source of radioactivity,
melting people who get in its way. It is a tense, low-budget thriller,
with both Jagger and McKern good, one as a scientist, the other as an
investigator from the Atomic Energy Commission. The anxious atmosphere is
amplified by moody photography, with many sequences shot at night. Routine
in concept, the film is well above average in execution. [PN/JB]
XTRO
Film (1982). Ashley Productions/Amalgamated Film Enterprises. Dir Harry
Bromley Davenport, starring Bernice Stegers, Philip Sayer, Danny Brainin,
Simon Nash, Maryam D'Abo. Screenplay Iain Cassie, Robert Smith, based on a
screenplay by Michel Parry, Davenport. 86 mins. Colour.UK sf/ HORROR
exploitation movie in which a man is kidnapped by a UFO. 3 years later the
UFO returns, an ALIEN gets out and rapes a nearby woman, who that same
night gives birth (disgustingly) to a fully grown man, the same man who
was kidnapped in the first place. He goes home, infects his son with alien
spores; the son uses new telekinetic powers to murder a neighbour with his
animated toy clown, and then wraps the au pair girl in a cocoon, where she
metamorphoses and produces eggs; meanwhile the husband, making love to his
wife, starts visibly to decay. Generally and probably justly panned by the
critics, this post- CRONENBERG movie still has something to offer for
connoisseurs of bargain-basement Surrealism, some of the wholly arbitrary
sequences being carried off quite startlingly. In a spirit of total
randomness the director shot 2 endings. The film release has father and
son leaving in the UFO, while wife discovers multiple clones of son all
saying "Mummy!" The videotape version has wife being murdered by a thing
from an egg the au pair laid. [PN]
"XYZ"
POWER SOURCES.

SF?
YAMADA, MASAKI
[r] JAPAN.
YANDRO
US FANZINE. 259 issues 1953-86; ed from Indiana by Robert and Juanita
COULSON, the last 2 issues by Robert Coulson alone, last issue not
distributed until 1991. Originally published as Eisfa, Y was one of the
longest-running large fanzines. Its contents, in the normal tradition,
were not restricted to sf but included regular columns, articles, reviews
and letters. Y won the 1965 HUGO for Best Fanzine. [PR/RH]

YANKEE SCIENCE FICTION
SWAN YANKEE MAGAZINE.
YARBRO, CHELSEA QUINN
(1942- ) US writer and composer, active in the mystery and occult genres
as well as sf. In the 1980s she became (and has remained) best known for
the Saint-Germain sequence of fantasies about a sympathetic immortal
vampire of aristocratic birth. Set in Europe and elsewhere over a span of
centuries, the main sequence comprises Hotel Transylvania: A Novel of
Forbidden Love (1978), The Palace (1978), Blood Games (1980), Path of the
Eclipse (1981), Tempting Fate (1982), The Saint-Germain Chronicles (coll
of linked stories 1983; exp vt The Vampire Stories 1994), Out of the House
of Life (1990), The Spider Glass (1991 chap), Darker Jewels (1993) and
Better in the Dark (1993); a subsidiary sequence, the Atta Olivia Clemens
books, about Saint-Germain's vampire lover, comprises A Flame in Byzantium
(1987), Crusader's Torch (1988) and A Candle for D'Artagnan (1989). As
both sequences have progressed, CQY has decreasingly concentrated upon the
vampirism of her protagonists and spent much more energy establishing some
historical verisimilitude for the territories visited, sticking more and
more frequently to the end of the Roman Empire.In other words, CQY has
moved a significant distance from sf - which she began publishing with
"The Posture of Prophecy" for If in 1969 - and seems unlikely to return
except casually. Her most significant sf work, most of it decidedly more
pessimistic about the world than her tales set in the past, came early.
The stories assembled in Cautionary Tales (coll 1978) share an energetic
starkness, a tendency for her characters - as James TIPTREE Jr remarked in
the introduction to the book - to engage in rather arousing operatic duets
and tirades, and a genuinely DYSTOPIAN vision of times to come; some other
tales of interest were assembled in Signs ?
first sf novel, Time of the Fourth Horseman (1976) - in which a plan to
head off OVERPOPULATION by reinfecting children with various diseases gets
radically out of hand - confirmed this sense of her work; as did False
Dawn (in Strange Bedfellows [anth 1973] ed Thomas N. SCORTIA; exp 1978),
which is set further into the future and likewise deals with a world
ravaged by mutated diseases. Nor did Hyacinths (1983), set in a
NEAR-FUTURE dystopian USA characterized by a wrecked economy and mind
control, modify the sense that CQY was an author entirely in control of
what she wished to say, and in what genre. Sf was a genre which enabled
her to look forward into the dark, once in a while. For the most part, she
has gazed elsewhere. [JC]Other works: The Ogilvie, Tallant ?
detective series, with fantasy elements, comprising Ogilvie, Tallant ?
Moon (1976; vt Bad Medicine 1990), False Notes (1991), Poison Fruit (1991)
and Cat's Claw (1992); the Michael series of occult quasifictional tracts,
comprising Messages from Michael on the Nature of the Evolution of the
Human Soul (1979) and More Messages from Michael (1986); Dead ?
(1980), a film tie; Bloodgames (1980); Sins of Omission (1980); Ariosto:
Ariosto Furioso, a Romance for an Alternate Renaissance (1980); On Saint
Hubert's Thing (1982 chap); CQY (1982 chap); The Godforsaken (1983); A
Mortal Glamour (1985); Nomads * (1984), a film tie; Locadio's Apprentice
(1984); Four Horses for Tishtry (1985); To the High Redoubt (1985); A
Baroque Fable (1986); Floating Illusions (1986); Firecode (1987); Taji's

Syndrome (1988), an sf medical horror novel; Beastnights (1989); The Law
in Charity (1989), a Western; Crown of Empire (1994), essentially by her,
but #4 in the Crisis of Empire sequence created by David DRAKE.As Vanessa
Pryor: A Taste of Wine (1982), associational.As Editor: Two Views of
Wonder (anth 1974) with Thomas N. SCORTIA.See also: ARTS; DISASTER; GOTHIC
SF; IMMORTALITY; LEISURE; MEDICINE; MUSIC; OVERPOPULATION; PSI POWERS;
PSYCHOLOGY; SURVIVALIST FICTION.
YATES, ALAN G(EOFFREY)
(1923-1985) UK-born author, in Australia from 1948, who was best known
for his long series of detections under the house name Carter Brown; he
wrote also as Tom Conway, Dennis Sinclair, Paul Valdez and Peter Yates. He
began to write sf - usually to rigid formula - with some short stories
around 1950, with G.C. Bleeck, for THRILLS INCORPORATED; and with a series
of short novels in the Scientific Thriller sequence, not all of which have
been examined, but many of which contain sf (and sometimes supernatural)
elements. Not all titles in the following list, therefore, may be of genre
interest; all are as by Paul Valdez: Hypnotic Death (1949 chap); The Fatal
Focus (1950 chap); The Time Thief (1951 chap); Flight into Horror (1951
chap); Killer by Night (1951 chap); Ghosts Don't Kill (1951 chap); Satan's
Sabbath (1951 chap); You Can't Keep Murder Out (1951 chap); Kill Him
Gently (1951 chap); Celluloid Suicide (1951 chap); The Murder I Don't
Remember(1952 chap); There's No Future in Murder (1952 chap); The Crook
Who Wasn't There (1952 chap); Maniac Murders (1952 chap) and Feline
Frame-Up (1952 chap). Under his own name, AGY released only one sf
title,Coriolanus, the Chariot! (1978 US), set on a planetoid called
Thespos where - in quarantine enforced by a fearful Galactic Federation actors learn to become shape-changing illusionists. Within Thespos,
PARANOIA and VIRTUAL-REALITY-like manipulations flourish, the Tarot and
the world of Shakespeare intermingle, and the protagonist, having gained
supremacy in the toxic game, determines to break out. Florid and intense,
the book is unlike anything else AGY ever wrote, unless some of the
Scientific Thriller titles prove more than routine. Booty for a Babe
(1956) as by Peter Carter Brown, though not sf, has RECURSIVE elements,
being set at an sf CONVENTION. [JC]
YEFREMOV, IVAN (ANTONOVICH)
(1907-1972) Russian paleontologist and writer, a leading figure in the
renaissance of Soviet sf ( RUSSIA). He began writing "geographical" sf on
a modest scale in the 1940s, assembling his early work in Vstretcha Nad
Tuskaroroi (coll 1944; trans M. and N. Nicholas as A Meeting Over
Tuscarora 1946 UK), Piat' Rumbo ["Five Wind's Quarters"] (coll 1944) and
elsewhere. Some of the contents of the 1st vol overlap with those
assembled in Stories (coll trans Ovidii Gorchakov 1954 Russia); new to
this were 2 novellas, "Zviozdnyie Korabli" (1947; trans as "Shadow of the
Past") and "Ten' Minuvshego" (trans as "Stellar Ships"), in which
paleontologists make discoveries which offer them glimpses of spectacular
possibilities, with hints of interstellar travel. Another important
novella, "Cor Serpentis (Serdtse Zmei)" (1959), appeared as the title
story of The Heart of the Serpent (anth trans R. Prokofieva 1961 Russia;
vt More Soviet Science Fiction 1962 US, with new intro by Isaac ASIMOV);

it is an ideological reply to Murray LEINSTER's "First Contact" (1945),
dissenting from the attitude of suspicious hostility manifest in
Leinster's story and contending that people "mature" enough to undertake
interstellar exploration will have put such anxieties (the alleged result
of alienation under capitalism) behind them.It would be difficult to
overestimate the importance to Soviet sf (and sf in Eastern Europe) of
IY's first novel, the utopian Tumannost' Andromedy (1958; trans George
Hanna as Andromeda 1959 Russia; filmed in 1968 as TUMANNOST' ANDROMEDY), a
full-scale panorama of the FAR FUTURE, the first (and one of the few)
attempts by a Communist writer to create a literary model of the ideal
socialist state envisioned by Marx. In his last published novel, IY
returned to the future HISTORY begun in Andromeda; but Chas Byka ["The
Hour of the Bull"] (1968; exp 1970) was banned almost immediately upon
publication, due to its dystopian mood and to some hints of an
eco-catastrophe ( ECOLOGY) caused mostly by the ignorant, corrupt and
tyrannical ruling elite. The book interestingly confronts a "communist
UTOPIA" with a "capitalist DYSTOPIA" in a structure similar to that
employed by Ursula K. LE GUIN in The Dispossessed (1974). Other novels
include Lezvie Britvy ["The Razor's Edge"] (1963), a large borderline-sf
"experimental" tale, and historical novels about the ancient civilizations
of Egypt and Greece: Na Kraiu Oikumeny (1949; trans George Hanna as The
Land of Foam 1957 Russia) and Tais Afinskaia ["Thais of Athens"] (1968).In
the introduction to Stories IY produced a manifesto for Soviet sf: "To try
to lift the curtain of mystery over these roads, to speak of scientific
achievements yet to come as realities, and in this way to lead the reader
to the most advanced outposts of science - such are the tasks of
science-fiction, as I see them. But they do not exhaust the aims of Soviet
science-fiction: its philosophy is to serve the development of the
imagination and creative faculty of our people as an asset in the study of
social life; and its chief aim is to search for the new, and through this
search to gain an insight into the future." The emphasis here is
significantly different from that in most US DEFINITIONS OF SF, stressing
as it does the social role of sf as an imaginative endeavour. [BS/VG]See
also: ALIENS; SPACESHIPS.
YELNICK, CLAUDE
(? - ) French writer whose L'homme, cette maladie (1954; trans as The
Trembling Tower 1956 UK) depicts the inter-dimensional relationship
between Earth and another world via a lighthouse. [JC]
YEOVIL, JACK
Kim NEWMAN.
YEP, LAURENCE (MICHAEL)
(1948- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "The Selchey Kids" for If
in 1968. Most of his books have been juveniles, including an sf novel,
Sweetwater (1973), set in a dying city on a strange planet, and the highly
successful Dragonwings (1975), a non-sf story about Chinese-Americans that
won several awards in the field; Child of the Owl (1977) is also about
Chinese-Americans. A later fantasy series, the Shimmer and Thorn sequence
- Dragon of the Lost Sea (1982), Dragon Steel (1985), Dragon Cauldron
(1991) and Dragon War (1992) - as well as Monster Makers, Inc. (1986),

which is about GENETIC ENGINEERING, were also for children; The Rainbow
People (coll 1989) assembles juvenile stories rewritten from
Chinese-American folktales. Throughout these books a melancholy
sensitivity is generally permitted to discover material for quiet
affirmation, and LY's own Chinese-American background can be easily
discerned, especially when ALIENS are being treated. His 1st adult sf
novel, Seademons (1977), tells of colonists on another world and of their
relation to the beings there, evoking an atmosphere of strangeness in a
nuanced prose. His 2nd is a Star Trek tie, The Shadow Lord * (1985).
[JC/PN]Other works: The Ghost Fox (1994 chap), a juvenile.See also: ARTS;
MUSIC.
YERXA, FRANCES
[r] Leroy YERXA.
YERXA, LEROY
(1915-1946) US writer for the PULP MAGAZINES, particularly the ZIFF-DAVIS
productions AMZ and Fantastic Adventures. He published as LY, as Elroy
Arno, and under the house names Richard CASEY and Alexander BLADE,
beginning with "Death Rides at Night" for AMZ in 1942 as LY, and
contributing prolifically until his death. The Freddie Funk series in
Fantastic Adventures, from "Freddie Funk's Madcap Mermaid" (1943) to
"Freddie Funk's Flippant Fairies" (1948), was completed by his wife,
Frances Yerxa, who also wrote some stories solo, and married William L.
HAMLING. [JC]
YEUX SANS VISAGE, LES
(vt Eyes without a Face; vt The Horror Chamber of Dr Faustus US) Film
(1959). Champs-Elysees/Lux. Dir Georges Franju, starring Pierre Brasseur,
Alida Valli, Edith Scob. Screenplay Jean Redon, Franju, Claude Sautet,
Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, from a novel by Redon. 95 mins, cut to 88
mins, further cut to 84 mins. B/w.Released in the USA under the schlock
"Horror Chamber" title and condemned in the UK as outrageous and
disgusting, this is, though the inspiration for many a subsequent
exploitation movie, actually an austere and poetic work in the surrealist
tradition, even in its use of stereotyped plot devices from pulp horror
fiction. The sf element is advanced plastic surgery: a surgeon (Brasseur),
guilty over his daughter's (Scob's) facial disfigurement (she wears a
mask) in an accident for which he was responsible, uses his assistant
(Valli) to kidnap young women; he attempts, without success, to transfer
their faces to his daughter; she goes mad and releases his experimental
dogs; they chew his face off; she drifts away surrounded by doves. Scob's
wistful, masked performance is extraordinary, as is Maurice Jarre's
gravely classical film score. [PN]
YE YONGLIE
[r] CHINESE SF.
YOKE, CARL B(ERNARD)
(1937- ) US scholar and writer, much of whose early work was concerned
with Roger ZELAZNY, including Roger Zelazny (1979), a critical study, and
Roger Zelazny and Andre Norton: Proponents of Individualism (1979 chap).
Death and the Serpent: Immortality in Science Fiction (anth 1985) with

Donald M. HASSLER and Phoenix from the Ashes: The Literature of the Remade
World (anth 1988) are carefully conceived examinations of the sf themes of
IMMORTALITY and the HOLOCAUST AND AFTER. [JC]
YOLEN, JANE
(1939- ) US writer who began publishing poems and articles when still in
college, and who first came to notice with books for children, the first
of many being Pirates in Petticoats (1963). Of her c120 titles to date,
most are for children (see listing below for some of these), and much of
her adult fiction is FANTASY, told in a style whose accomplished and
eloquent transparency often conveys a sense that folktales are being
recollected in tranquillity. Tales of Wonder (coll 1983) assembles typical
work for adults, some of it sf; as does Merlin's Booke (coll of linked
stories 1986), set in the world of the eponymous magus. The Pit Dragon
trilogy for young adults - Dragon's Blood (1982), Heart's Blood (1984) and
A Sending of Dragons (1987) - is set on another planet, but is devoted
primarily to the breeding and training of dragons ( SUPERNATURAL
CREATURES), though the sequence eventually moves into more complex
political territory. The Great Alta sequence - Sister Light, Sister Dark
(1988) and White Jenna (1989), assembled as The Book of Great Alta (omni
1990) - is adult fantasy; and Briar Rose (1992) is a Twice-Told version of
the tale of Sleeping Beauty, set within the context of the Final Solution,
and ultimately amenable to a non-fantasy reading. Her most sf-like novel,
Cards of Grief (fixup 1984), is a sophisticated PLANETARY ROMANCE in which
an intense and story-bound race is observed by humans from an off-planet
station, and is inevitably affected by the interaction of species. In none
of JY's work, however, is there a sense that sf dominates the sometimes
complex generic mix; she is a fantasy writer who visits sf. [JC]Other
works include: The Witch who Wasn't (1964); the 6 Commander Toad
picture-book sf tales for younger children, beginning with Commander Toad
in Space (1980 chap); The Robot and Rebecca (1980); The Boy who Spoke
Chimp (1981); Dragonfield (coll 1985); Wizard's Hall (1991); The Sword and
the Stone (1985 FSF; 1991 chap); Wings (1991); Storyteller (coll 1992);
Here There be Dragons (coll 1993); Here There be Unicorns (coll 1994).As
Editor: Zoo 2000 (anth 1973); Shape Shifters (anth 1978); 2041 A.D. (anth
1991); 5 anths ed with Martin H. GREENBERG (whom see for details); the
Xanadu series of original fantasy anthologies, comprising Xanadu (anth
1993), Xanadu 2 (anth 1994) and Xanadu 3 (anth 1995).Nonfiction: Touch
Magic: Fantasy, Faerie and Folklore in the Literature of Childhood (1981).
YORKE, PRESTON
Harold Ernest KELLY.
YOST, ROBERT M.
[r] Claude H. WETMORE.
YOUD, CHRISTOPHER
John CHRISTOPHER.
YOUNG, JIM
Working name of US writer, and officer in the American diplomatic
service, James MaxwellYoung (1951- ),whose first novel, The Face of
theDeep (1979), is set in a medieval environment which - it soon

becomesclear - is located on the planet Bok II, and is threatened by an
exploding sun.The style is gritty, theaction compressed; and JY's
departure from the field - he had also been involved in the
activeMinneapolis scene which eventually gave birth to the group of
fantasy writers known as theScribblies - was regrettable.Fortunately,
Armed Memory (1995), marks his return tothe field. [JC]
YOUNG, MICHAEL
(1915- ) UK sociologist and writer whose Family and Kinship in East
London (1957), with Peter Willmott, had a seminal effect on
community-planning priorities. His sf work, The Rise of the Meritocracy
1870-2033: An Essay on Education and Equality (1958), not only gave the
word "meritocracy" to the language but extensively defined it: a
meritocracy is an elite whose members are recruited on the basis of merit
(largely INTELLIGENCE) in a competitive educational system; it is also, as
the book sardonically emphasizes, a form of government. The book itself
takes the form of a report written in AD2033 by an historical sociologist
(its only character in any ordinary sense); and some libraries have
catalogued it as nonfiction. Though the narrator supports the system he
describes, it is quite clear that MY does not; the book is a subtle and
interesting DYSTOPIA. Its ending, in which the narrator is reported as
killed in a populist revolt, is ironic and mutedly apocalyptic. [PN/JC]See
also: SOCIOLOGY.
YOUNG, ROBERT
Robert PAYNE.
YOUNG, ROBERT F(RANKLIN)
(1915-1986) US writer who turned full-time after engaging in a number of
menial occupations. His first sf story was "The Black Deep Thou Wingest"
for Startling Stories in 1953, and he published short work quite
prolifically for the next 3 decades. RFY was a slick, polished writer; his
stories are readable, although often superficial. The best generally
appeared in FSF, although he wrote also for most of the US sf magazines
and for the Saturday Evening Post and others. His modes ranged from the
heavily satiric - typified by a series of stories, "Chrome Pastures"
(1956), "Thirty Days Had September" (1957) and "Romance in a Twenty-First
Century Used Car Lot" (1960), in which the US automobile mania is
extrapolated to absurd extremes - to the strongly allegorical, in such
tales as "Goddess in Granite" (1957); but a romantic sensibility, at rare
intervals mawkish, permeated all his work. His earlier stories were
assembled in The Worlds of Robert F. Young (coll 1965) and A Glass of
Stars (coll 1968); the numerous tales published after 1968 remain
uncollected. After a novel released only in French, La Quete de la Sainte
Grille (1964 AMZ as "The Quest of the Holy Grille"; exp 1975 France), RFY
published in Starfinder (fixup 1980) a stirringly romantic SPACE OPERA
whose main device - riding to the STARS within the bodies of dead "space
whales" - is powerfully evocative; it is by far his best novel in English.
The Last Yggdrasil (1959 FSF as "To Fell a Tree"; exp 1982), an
over-extended novel version of a strong story, seems sentimental in
contrast, failing to impart much plausibility to the story of a
tree-cutter on a colony planet who is hired to kill the one huge remaining

tree in the area, to the entirely predictable detriment of the planet's
ECOLOGY. RFY's final novels - Eridahn (1964 If as "When Time was New"; exp
1983), which features TIME TRAVEL into prehistory, and The Vizier's Second
Daughter (1965 AMZ as "City of Brass"; exp 1985), a humorous fantasy neither built nor detracted from his reputation. He will be best
remembered for some of the acerbic short tales of his early career.
[MJE/JC]See also: AMAZING STORIES; MESSIAHS; PSYCHOLOGY; ROBOTS;
TRANSPORTATION.
YOUNG EINSTEIN
Film (1988). Serious Productions. Prod/dir Yahoo Serious, starring
Serious, Odile Le Clezio, John Howard. Screenplay Serious, David Roach. 91
mins. Colour.In an alternate 1905, Albert Einstein, a young Tasmanian
apple farmer, discovers that E = mc(2), splits the beer atom, meets and is
loved by Marie Curie, has his formula stolen, invents the surfboard, the
electric guitar and rock'n'roll, and saves the world. Serious and his
rather narcissistic film both strain too hard to be likable, and both are
soft-centred and not especially funny. [PN]
YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN
FRANKENSTEIN.
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
Film (1967). Eon/United Artists. Dir Lewis Gilbert, starring Sean
Connery, Donald Pleasence, Akiko Wakabayashi, Tetsuro Tamba, Mie Hama.
Screenplay Roald DAHL, based very loosely on You Only Live Twice (1964) by
Ian FLEMING. 116 mins. Colour.Several of Fleming's James Bond novels were
TECHNOTHRILLERS, mildly sf-oriented (though set in the present) and
sometimes featuring scientist VILLAINS and superweapons. Most of the very
popular and long-lasting series of spin-off movies have emphasized although less so, perhaps, in the mid-1980s - the sf gadgetry, and have
often provided at least one major futuristic set: these include DR NO
(1962), Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965), On Her Majesty's Secret
Service (1969), Diamonds are Forever (1971), The Man with the Golden Gun
(1974), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Never Say Never Again (1983) and A
View to a Kill (1985) as well as the spoof Casino Royale (1967). Along
with MOONRAKER (1979), YOLT contains the most sf hardware. A US satellite
is swallowed up by a mystery craft in outer space. The super-criminal
organization SPECTRE has constructed a secret rocket base inside a
Japanese volcano from which it launches its bizarre vehicle to capture
both US and Russian spacecraft, in an attempt to provoke a war between the
two nations. James Bond (Connery), with the help of Japanese secret
agents, foils SPECTRE's plans. Despite the spectacular sets - which
upstage the humans, even the always-efficient Connery - and vast budget,
there are longeurs in pacing and lapses in the special effects. [JB/PN]See
also: CINEMA.
YOURELL, AGNES BOND
(? -? ) US writer whose A Manless World (1891) speculates about what
might happen to the human species were an interstellar gas to have
destroyed sexual desire in everyone except - it is mooted - the Jews, who
might find an elixir: riots and pogroms would occur; the race would

vanish. In a manner not uncommon to 19th-century fiction of this sort, the
tale is told in an "as if" mode, and claims to do no more than present the
speculative thoughts of an embittered old man. [JC]
YUGOSLAVIA
At the time of going to press, it is not clear what the future status of
Yugoslavia will be - if, indeed, there will be even a rump territory left
with that name.Yugoslavia was established as a nation in 1918, but the
first sf works in 2 of its 3 linguistic areas - the Serbocroat and the
Slovenian - long predated that. The first sf book to appear in Serbocroat
was the translation in 1873 of Jules VERNE's Voyage au centre de la terre
(1864), while the first sf work by a native author was the drama "Posle
milijon godina" ["A Million Years After"] (1889 in the magazine Kolo) by
Dragutin Ilic. This is one of the earliest fully sf plays published
anywhere in the world ( THEATRE). In 1902 Lazar Komarcic published a work
of extreme modernity for its time and place: the most exciting passages of
Olaf STAPLEDON are anticipated in his Jedna ugasena zvezda ["One
Extinguished Star"] (1902).In the period up to the beginning of WWII, the
most important sf novels were Kroz vasionu i vekove ["Through the Universe
and Centuries"] (1928) by Milutin Milankovic, Gospodin covjek ["Man, the
Noble"] (1932) by Mate Hanzekovic, and Zivot u vasioni ["Life in the
Universe"] (1933) by Stojan Radonic. In the 1930s a number of sf novels
were published in instalments in periodicals; these novels were,
generally, imitations of popular sf classics, signed mostly by pseudonyms.
Of these, 3 by "Aldion Degal" are the most noteworthy: "Atomska raketa"
["An Atomic Rocket"] (1930), "Zrake smrti" ["Death Rays"] (1932) and
"Smaragdni skarabej" ["The Emerald Scarab"] (1934). In 1935 the first
Yugoslav COMIC strip was published: Gost iz svemira ["The Guest from Outer
Space"], by Bozidar Rasic and Leontije Bjelski.In the 1950s the first
specialized sf publishing imprints appeared - Biblioteka fantasticnih
romana, Fantasticni romani and Lajka - but this was an era dominated by
translations of Russian sf novels in the mode of "socialist realism" (
RUSSIA). Yugoslav sf authors published during this period were writing
mostly for a juvenile readership. The first of importance in the post-WWII
period were Zvonimir Furtinger and Mladen Bjazic, who set the tone of the
first half of the 1960s with novels like Osvajac 2 se ne javlja
["Conqueror II Fails to Report"] (1959) and Svemirska nevjesta ["The Space
Bride"] (1960). In that decade new sf book imprints began to publish
translations of contemporary US and UK sf authors. The most important is
Kentaur, with nearly 100 translations of major sf books published since
1967. By the end of the 1960s the first Yugoslav sf magazine, Kosmoplov
["Spaceship"], had appeared; it ran for 24 issues 1969-70. The founder of
this magazine, Gavrilo Vuckovicc, in 1972 also founded Galaksija
["Galaxy"] magazine, which had an sf section almost continually during the
next 18 years.In 1976 the important sf magazine Sirius started; mainly as
a monthly and ed most often by Borivoje Jurkovic, it achieved 164 issues
(it ended in Jan 1990), regularly publishing Yugoslav sf in addition to
translations. Yugoslav sf had its moment of international triumph, too, in
the 1970s: the film Izbavitelj ["Saviour"] (1977; vt The Rat Saviour), dir
Krsto Papic, won the main, Golden Asteroid, award at the Trieste Film
Festival that year. A second Yugoslav film later received an award at this

festival: Posjetioci iz galaksije Arkana ["Visitors from the Arcana
Galaxy"] (1980) dir by the Oscar-winning Dusan Vukotic.The 1980s were
years decisively marked by the arrival of private as opposed to
state-owned publishing houses and by the emergence of many young sf
authors. In 1982 Zoran ZIVKOVIC andZika Bogdanovic started a privately
published sf imprint, Polaris, which specialized in rapidly taking up new
sf hits; among the books whose world 1st edns have been under this imprint
is 2010: Odyssey Two (1982) by Arthur C. CLARKE. Another private series,
Znak Sagite ["The Sign of the Sagitta"], founded 1985 by Boban Knezevic,
also brought out some important sf books.Though there are as yet only
part-time sf writers in Yugoslavia, several of the authors who made their
debut in the 1980s have the potential to become full-time. These include
Damir Mikulicic, author of O ["O"] (coll 1982); Predrag Raos, author of
Brodolom kod Thule ["Shipwreck at Thule"] (1978), Mnogo vike nizasto
["Much Shouting about Nothing"] (1985) and Null Effort (1990); Slobodan
Curcic, author of Sume, kise, grad i zvezde ["Forests, Rains, the City and
the Stars"] (1988); Dragan Filipovic, author of Oreska ["Oreska"] (1987)
and Zlatna knjiga ["The Golden Book"] (1988). Recently some widely
acclaimed mainstream writers have entered the sf field. Borislav Pekic,
for example, has published 3 sf novels: Besnilo ["Rabid"] (1983), 1999
(1984) and Atlantida ["Atlantis"] (1988).Young Yugoslav sf comic-strip
artists, most prominently Zeljko Pahek, Igor Kordej and Zoran Janjetov,
are published not only at home but also in other European countries.
Successful GENRE-SF artists such as Bob Zivkovic also appear. Sf has also
entered academic circles; after initial pioneering studies in the sf genre
by Ivan Foht and Darko SUVIN, 3 men have since the 1970s successfully
defended MA and doctoral dissertations about sf: Ferid Muhic, Zoran
Zivkovic and Aleksandar B. Nedeljkovic. After the mid-1970s, FANDOM began
to flourish, and a number of local and international CONVENTIONS were
organized. There are many clubs and societies. [ZZ]
YUILL, P.B.
Gordon WILLIAMS.
YULSMAN, JERRY
Working name of US writer and photographer Jerome Yulsman (? - ), of whom
little is known beyond his signed cheesecake photographs from as early as
1957 for magazines like True Adventures, and for his authorship of the
impressively suave and moody ALTERNATE-WORLD tale Elleander Morning
(1984), in which the assassination of Hitler as a young man in Vienna
generates a differing 20th century. H.G. WELLS makes a RECURSIVE
appearance in the complex tale, which is set partly in 1913 and partly in
the transformed 1980s. It has also been suggested - though not confirmed that JY wrote a series of sex novels under a pseudonym or pseudonyms about
the erotic Lady Jenny Eversleigh. [JC]
YUMEMAKURA, BAKU
[r] JAPAN.
YUMMY FUR
Chester BROWN.
YUTANG, LIN

LIN YUTANG.

SF?
ZACHARY, HUGH
Zach HUGHES.
ZAGAT, ARTHUR LEO
(1895-1949) US writer, extremely prolific in a number of PULP-MAGAZINE
genres, publishing about 500 stories; of the relatively few that are sf,
several were with Nat SCHACHNER, including ALZ's first, "The Tower of
Evil" for Wonder Stories Quarterly in 1930. The 11 tales produced
collaboratively before they separated in 1931 were ALZ's best early work.
After about 1936, most of his work appeared in Argosy, including the
Tomorrow series, set in a NEAR-FUTURE post- HOLOCAUST USA; the 1st tale in
the sequence, "Tomorrow" (1939), later appeared in Famous Fantastic
Classics 1 (anth 1974). In Drink We Deep (1937 Argosy; 1951) strange
subterranean dwellers call a human downwards to them. In Seven Out of Time
(1939 Argosy; 1949), his best novel, 7 contemporary humans are studied by
people of the future to rediscover the value of emotions. A post-WWII
novel, "Slaves of the Lamp" (1946 ASF), was little noticed and did not
reach book form, for ALZ had failed to adjust his style and plotting to
the demands of the new world. [JC]See also: GENRE SF; INVASION; OPERATOR
#5; THRILLING WONDER STORIES.
ZAHN, TIMOTHY
(1951- ) US writer with a master's degree in physics who came into sudden
prominence in the sf field in the 1980s with the rapid release of several
books. He had begun publishing sf with "Ernie" for Analog in 1979, and
early proved himself an adept and productive creator of the
problem-oriented HARD SF characteristic of that magazine. Some better
examples of his work are assembled as Cascade Point (coll 1986), Time Bomb
and Zahndry Others (coll 1988) and Distant Friends and Others (coll 1992);
the title story (1983 ASF) of the 1st of these won a HUGO on its original
release, and has also been published as Cascade Point (1988 chap dos). The
title of the story, which fascinatingly reveals the outward-looking bent
of this early work, refers to a point in space where ships flicker from
one star system to the next; at the point of transition, ALTERNATE-WORLD
versions of the humans on board ship manifest themselves hauntingly. An
experiment designed to elicit more knowledge about humankind from this
convergence of differing versions of lives turns out in the event most
usefully to reveal methods for making the transition itself more
efficient. In work like this, TZ proved himself an exemplary member of the
ASF stable.But the rest of the sf world began to take more notice of him
after he began to publish novels in 1983 with the 1st vol of the
Blackcollar sequence, The Blackcollar (1983), followed by Blackcollar: The
Backlash Mission (1986), both tales being set on an Earth dominated by
ALIEN invaders and describing the eponymous guerrillas' supernormal feats
of resistance against the enemy. The Cobra sequence - Cobra (1985), Cobra
Strike (1986), assembled as Cobras Two (omni 1992), plus Cobra Bargain
(1988) - located similar military/commando heroes in a galactic venue. A

Coming of Age (1985), a singleton of much greater interest, is set on a
colony planet where a mutation has given children telekinetic powers,
until puberty yanks them back into normality; the plotting is complex and
swift, and TZ showed creative awareness as well of the profound issues he
was exposing to the light - for any novel in which puberty marks a passing
of glory from the Earth is a novel about the human condition as well as,
more prosaically, a novel about why children entering puberty begin to
read sf. Other novels of interest are Spinneret (1985), Triplet (1987) and
Deadman Switch (1988), another tale of considerable underlying complexity,
set in a galactic civilization which exploits its retention of the death
penalty by using the condemned as pilots to penetrate an area of space
that only corpses can navigate. TZ's venues have been at times
conventional, and even silly; but again and again he has transformed
routine adventure-sf conventions into moral puzzles, without sacrificing a
jot of momentum.After several years without any prospect of a new Star
Wars movie, TZ was commissioned to write a Star Wars trilogy,
comprisingHeir to the Empire * (1991), Dark Force Rising * (1992) and The
Last Command* (1993); they carry on from RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983),
starting 5 years after the end of that film. [JC]Other works: Warhorse
(fixup 1990); the Conquerors trilogy, commencing with Conqueror's Pride
(1994).See also: PSI POWERS; SHARED WORLDS; SOCIOLOGY; SUPERMAN.
ZAHORSKI, KENNETH J.
[r] Marshall B. TYMN.
ZAMIATIN, YEVGENY (IVANOVICH)
(1884-1937) Russian writer. YZ graduated in naval engineering from St
Petersburg Polytechnical Institute, his studies interrupted by
participation in the 1905 Revolution as a Bolshevik, prison and
deportation (a sentence which was renewed 1911-13). He began writing in
1908, withdrew from active politics, lectured at the Polytechnic Institute
until his emigration, ran foul of the Tsarist censor in 1914, and built
icebreakers in the UK 1916-17.YZ wrote about 40 volumes of stories,
fables, plays, excellent essays and 2 novels. After the October Revolution
he became a prominent figure in key literary groups, guru for a whole
school of young writers, and editor of an ambitious publishing programme
of books from the West; he wrote prefaces for works by Jack LONDON, George
Bernard SHAW, H.G. WELLS, etc. From 1921 on he incurred much critical
disfavour and some censorship which culminated in a campaign of
vilification by the dominant literary faction, especially after My (see
below) was published in an emigre journal in 1927. After writing a
dignified letter to Stalin, YZ was allowed to go to Paris (retaining his
Soviet passport), where he died shunned by both Soviet officialdom and
right-wing emigres. My (written 1920, circulated in manuscript; trans
Gregory Zilboorg as We 1924 US; first Russian-language book publication
1952 US) deals with the relation between the principles of Revolution
(life) and Entropy (death). By incorporating elements of Ostrovityane
(written 1917; 1922 chap; trans Sophie Fuller and Julian Sacchi as the
title story in Islanders, and The Fisher of Men [coll 1984 chap UK]), a
satirical novella he had written about UK philistinism (which features
coupons for rationing sex, and the "Taylorite" regulation of every moment

of the day), YZ signalled his intention to extrapolate upon the repressive
potentials of every centralized state. Committed to the scientific method
even in his narrative form, which mimics lab notes, YZ's explanation for
why rationalism turns sour is mythical: every belief, when victorious,
must turn repressive, as did Christianity. The only irrational elements
remaining are the human beings who deviate: these include the narrator - a
mathematician and designer of a rocket ship - and the woman who represents
an underground resistance. The plot is modelled on an inevitable Fall (for
the rebellion inevitably fails), ending in an ironic crucifixion. In YZ's
terms, My judges yesterday's UTOPIA, as it becomes an absolutism, in the
name of tomorrow's utopia - for the principle of utopia itself is not
repudiated; the book is thus not a DYSTOPIA.The expressionistic language
of My, which imparts a sense of elegant but humanly charged economy to the
text, helps to subsume the protagonist's defeat under the novel's concern
for the integration of humanity's science and art (including love). YZ
demonstrates that utopia should not be a new religion (albeit of
mathematics and space flights) but should represent the dynamic horizon of
mankind's developing personality. My is the paradigmatic anti-utopia,
prefiguring George ORWELL and Aldous HUXLEY and superseding that tradition
of utopianism, from Sir Thomas MORE on, which ignores technology and
anthropology. By analysing the distortions of the utopia through the
hyperbolic prism of sf, YZ wrote an intensely practical text. It is both a
masterpiece of sf and an indispensable book of our epoch. This sense of
the book was finally confirmed by YZ's rehabilitation in the USSR in the
glasnost year 1988. [DS]Other sf work: "A Story about the Most Important
Thing" (1927 Russia; trans Michael Glenny in YZ's The Dragon, coll
1966).About the author: A Soviet Heretic by YZ (1970); Metamorphoses of
Science Fiction (1979) by Darko SUVIN; Evgenij Zamjatin (1973 Holland) by
Christopher Collins; The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin (1968 US) by
Alex M. Shane; "Yevgeny Zamyatin" by Michael Beehler in SubStance 15.2
(1986); "Brave New World", "1984" and "We" (1976) by E.J. Brown; The Shape
of Utopia (1970) by R.C. Elliott; Clockwork Worlds (anth 1983) ed Richard
D. Erlich et al.; "Imagining the Future: Wells and Zamyatin" by Patrick
PARRINDER in H.G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction (anth 1977) ed Suvin;
"Three Postrevolutionary Russian Utopian Novels" by Jurij Stridter in The
Russian Novel from Pushkin to Pasternak (anth 1983) ed J. Garrarad.See
also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; HISTORY OF SF; LINGUISTICS; MUSIC; POLITICS;
RUSSIA.
ZARDOZ
Film (1974). John Boorman Productions/20th Century-Fox. Prod/dir/written
John Boorman, starring Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, Sara Kestelman,
John Alderton. 105 mins. Colour.A future society is divided into 2
regions: the Vortex and the Outlands, separated by an impenetrable FORCE
FIELD. Within the Vortex live the Eternals, IMMORTAL and given to a
decadent aestheticism, while in the Outlands dwell the Brutals, including
a group called the Exterminators whose job is to keep the population level
down. One of these Exterminators, Zed (Connery), infiltrates the Vortex
and his presence catalyses events which destroy both the Immortals and
their computer-run society. Zed represents the primal force that brings
back to the impotent, static Immortals such old favourites as Emotion,

Sex, Fear and Death, releasing them from their artificial world and
allowing them to become part of the Natural Scheme of Things again; that
is, dead. The film is self-indulgent; its profundity is all on the surface
and its oscillation between parody and solemnity is distracting. But
Boorman's presentation of old ideas as if they were just new-minted has a
certain silly charm, and the film has considerable visual brio, assisted
by Geoffrey Unsworth's photography and the beautiful Irish settings.The
novelization, by Boorman and Bill Stair, is Zardoz * (1974). [JB/PN]See
also: CINEMA; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER.
ZAREM, LEWIS
(? - ) US writer in whose The Green Man from Space (1955) a Martian is
discovered on Earth looking for greens, and is taken back home. LZ also
wrote nonfiction on aeronautical subjects. [JC]
ZARNAY, JOSEF
[r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF.
ZAUNER, GEORG
[r] GERMANY.
ZEBROWSKI, GEORGE
(1945- ) Austrian-born writer of Polish descent, in the USA from 1951,
one of the first alumni of the CLARION SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' WORKSHOP
to achieve recognition in the sf world. He has lived with Pamela SARGENT
for many years. GZ began publishing sf stories with "The Water Sculptor of
Station 233" for Infinity One (anth 1970) ed Robert HOSKINS, and remained
active as a short-story writer, releasing about 50 titles over the next 2
decades, some of the best being assembled as The Monadic Universe (coll
1977; exp 1985). From 1970 to winter 1974-5 he was editor of the SFWA
BULLETIN, and from 1983 to date has served as US editor. His first
published novel was the 2nd instalment, in terms of internal chronology,
of his Omega Point sequence - comprising Ashes and Stars (1977) and The
Omega Point (1972), both revised and assembled along with a previously
unpublished 3rd part as The Omega Point Trilogy (omni 1983). Within a
SPACE-OPERA frame, a metaphysical drama is enacted, pitting the sole
survivors of a destroyed culture - created through GENETIC ENGINEERING,
and whose rationale owes something to the theories of the evolutionary
theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)-against the inimical
Earth Federation responsible for its elimination; after his father's
death, Gorgias finds the eponymous WEAPON, but Omega Point turns out to be
fundamentally a focus of transcendental empathy. The Star Web (1975
Canada) is an unambitious space opera, but the 2 star-spanning forms of
TRANSPORTATION featured in the text are of interest; revised, the book
became the first third of Stranger Suns (1991), a long novel written in
the STAPLEDON-esque vein that marks GZ's most highly regarded single work,
Macrolife (1979; rev 1990). Though otherwise unconnected, the 2 books
share an elevated purposefulness about depicting humanity's future and a
tendency to depend on insufficiently plausible lines of plot. Macrolife
begins on Earth, but soon departs the home planet for self-sufficient
star-travelling SPACE HABITATS, and carries onwards to the end of the
Universe; Stranger Suns views with considerable bleakness the

opportunities taken - and missed - by humanity when given the chance to
use a complex stargate that gives access not only to the Universe as we
know it but also to alternate universes ( ALTERNATE WORLDS).GZ has been
active since early in his career as an editor, producing Tomorrow Today
(anth 1975), an original anthology, and co-editing Faster than Light (anth
1976) with Jack DANN and Human-Machines (anth 1975) with Thomas N.
SCORTIA, a collection of whose stories, The Best of Thomas N. Scortia
(coll 1981), GZ also ed. In the 1980s he began the SYNERGY series of
ORIGINAL ANTHOLOGIES: Synergy: New Science Fiction #1 (anth 1987), #2
(anth 1988), #3 (dated 1988 but 1989) and #4 (anth 1989). Beneath a Red
Star: Studies in International Science Fiction (coll 1991) assembled
essays on the sf of Eastern Europe. [JC]Other works: 3 short stories for
juveniles, Adrift in Space (1974 in Adrift in Space and Other Stories,
anth ed Roger ELWOOD; 1979 chap), A Silent Shout (1979 chap) and The
Firebird (1979 chap); the Bernal One sequence of juveniles, Sunspacer
(1984) and The Stars Will Speak (1985).As Editor: Creations: The Quest for
Origins in Story and Science (anth 1983) with Isaac ASIMOV and Martin H.
GREENBERG; Nebula Awards 20 (anth 1985); Nebula Awards 21 (anth 1987);
Nebula Awards 22 (anth 1988).About the author: The Work of George
Zebrowski (last rev 1990) by Jeffrey M. ELLIOT and Robert REGINALD.See
also: ASTEROIDS; COSMOLOGY; CYBORGS; ESCHATOLOGY; GENERATION STARSHIPS;
NEBULA; RELIGION; SOCIOLOGY.
ZEDDIES, ANN TONSOR
(1951- ) US writer whose sf novel, Deathgift (1989), though not
technically a POCKET-UNIVERSE tale, embodies a fundamental rhythm of
constriction and release through the story of a young boy abandoned to the
Native-American-like tribes that mediate among the medieval cities which
surround them, and who only later discovers that his "world" is a "neutral
zone" on a planet torn by interstellar strife. The story unfolds
constantly, is very competently managed, and the sequel, Sky Road (1993),
intriguingly mixes sf hardware (there are several setpiece battles between
natives and the invasive enemy) and a move toward reconciliation (after
the revenge-choked thinning of the narrative in volume one) more typical
of fantasy. [JC]
ZEIGFREID, KARL
A John Spencer ?
some occasions; John S. GLASBY used the title once, and Tom W. WADE used
it twice. It is possible thatBeyond the Galaxy (1953) is by John F. Watt
(? - ). For their later BADGER BOOKS line, Spencer used the name for a
number of sf novels, mostly by R.L. FANTHORPE (13 titles). [JC]
ZELAZNY, ROGER (JOSEPH)
(1937- ) US writer, born in Ohio, with an MA from Columbia University in
1962. In 1962-9 he was employed by the Social Security Administration in
Cleveland, Ohio, and Baltimore, Maryland; from 1969 he wrote full-time.
His arrival in the sf world in 1962, along with Samuel R. DELANY, Thomas
M. DISCH and Ursula K. LE GUIN, marked that year as a milestone in what
seemed at the time to be the inevitable maturing of sf into a complex and
sophisticated literature, whose language might finally match its
intermittent hubris. With Delany, Disch and (to a lesser extent) Le Guin -

and with Harlan ELLISON goading all and sundry - RZ became a leading and
representative figure of the US NEW WAVE, writing stories whose emphasis
had shifted from the external world of the hard sciences to the internal
worlds explorable through disciplines like PSYCHOLOGY (mostly Jungian),
SOCIOLOGY and LINGUISTICS. To a greater extent than any of his colleagues,
however, RZ expressed this shift by using mythological structures - some
traditional, some new-minted - in his work. It has been argued that in
true MYTHOLOGY the voyage into CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH of the Hero of a
Thousand Faces always climaxes in the Eternal Return, so that any
20th-century sf tale which retells a myth incorporates, by so doing,
ironies and metaphors highly corrosive of any rhetoric of outward thrust,
and mockingly dismissive of the reality of breakthroughs. It may be for
this reason that RZ's sf was language-driven, irony-choked, corrosively
playful, and - after the early years of his career - intermittent; and
that he is now best known for his works of fantasy, in particular the 2
linked sequences making up the ongoing Amber series. The 1st, featuring
Corwin, is Nine Princes in Amber (1970), The Guns of Avalon (1972), Sign
of the Unicorn (1975), The Hand of Oberon (1976) and The Courts of Chaos
(1978), all assembled as The Chronicles of Amber (omni in 2 vols 1979).
The 2nd, featuring Corwin's son Merlin, comprises Trumps of Doom (1985),
Blood of Amber (1986), Sign of Chaos (1987), Knight of Shadows (1989) and
Prince of Chaos (1991). There are 2 pendants, A Rhapsody in Amber (coll
1981 chap) and Roger Zelazny's Visual Guide to Castle Amber (1988) with
Neil Randall. Like C.S. LEWIS's Narnia, the land of Amber exists on a
plane of greater fundamental reality than Earth, and provides normal
reality with its ontological base. Unlike Narnia, however, Amber is the
Yin in the Yang of Chaos the father, with consequences very far from
Christian, for the Universe so defined is both cyclical and eternally
insecure; and Amber itself is dominated by a cabal of squabbling siblings
whose quasi-Olympian feudings generate vast cat's-cradles and imperfect
nestings of Story, out of which the fabric of lesser realities takes its
shape. The Amber books constitute RZ's most substantial edifice, though
not his finest work, which is sf. Other fantasies have been lesser.RZ's
first published story was "Passion Play" for AMZ in 1962, and for several
years he was prolific in shorter forms, for a time using the pseudonym
Harrison Denmark when stories piled up in AMZ and Fantastic, and doing his
finest work at the novelette/novella length; he assembled the best of this
early work as Four for Tomorrow (coll 1967; vt A Rose for Ecclesiastes
1969 UK) and The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth, and Other
Stories (coll 1971). The magazine titles of his first 2 books were as well
known as their book titles, and the awards given them were attached to the
magazine titles. THIS IMMORTAL (1965 FSF as ". . . And Call me Conrad";
exp 1966) won the 1966 HUGO for Best Novel; THE DREAM MASTER (1965 AMZ as
"He Who Shapes"; exp 1966) - the magazine version was eventually released
as He Who Shapes (1989 dos) - won the 1966 NEBULA for Best Novella; and in
the same year The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth (1965 FSF;
1991 chap) won a Nebula for Best Novelette. Taken together, the 3 tales
make up a portrait of RZ's central worlds, themes and protagonist, a
portrait which would be repeated, with sometimes lessened force, for
decades. The VENUS on which "Doors" is set, like most of RZ's worlds to
come, is fantastical, densely described, almost entirely "unscientific";

the plot intoxicatingly dashes together myth and literary assonances - in
this case Herman MELVILLE's Moby-Dick (1851) - and sex. THIS IMMORTAL
takes place in a baroquely described post- HOLOCAUST Earth which has
become a kind of theme-park for the ALIEN Vegans; in this shadowy realm of
belatedness and human angst, the immortal Conrad Nomikos serves ostensibly
as Arts Commissioner but turns out to be in a far more telling sense the
curator of the human enterprise, for, despite the US thriller idioms he
uses in his personal speech, he closely resembles Herakles - whose Labours
the plot of the novel covertly replicates - but is certainly both the Hero
of a Thousand Faces and the Trickster who mocks the high road of myth,
redeemer and road-runner both. Under various names, this basic figure
crops up in most of RZ's later books: wisecracking, melancholic, romantic,
sentimental, lonely, metamorphosing into higher states whenever necessary
to cope with the plot, and in almost every sense an astonishingly
sophisticated wish-fulfilment.In THE DREAM MASTER - for one of the few
times in his career - RZ presented the counter-myth, the story of the
metamorphosis which fails, the transcendence which collapses back into the
mortal world. In THIS IMMORTAL, RS had already evinced a tendency to side,
perhaps a little too openly, with complexly gifted, vain, dominating,
immortal protagonists, and, as THE DREAM MASTER begins, his treatment of
psychiatrist Charles Render seems no different. Render is eminent in the
new field of neuroparticipant psychiatry, in which the healer actually
enters the mindspace of his patient - which is laid out like a Jungian
tournament of the cohorts of the self - and takes therapeutic action from
within this VIRTUAL REALITY. But Render becomes hubristic, and when he
enters the mind of a congenitally blind woman, who is both extremely
intelligent and insane, his attempts to cope with her intricate madness
from within gradually expose his own deficiencies as a person, and he
becomes subtly and terrifyingly trapped in a highly plausible psychic
cul-de-sac. All the sf apparatus of the story, and its sometimes overly
baroque manner, were integrated into RZ's once-only unveiling of the
nature of a human hero who could not perform the moult into
immortality.After these triumphs, LORD OF LIGHT (1967), which won a 1968
Hugo, could have seemed anticlimactic, but it is in fact his most
sustained single tale, richly conceived and plotted, exhilarating
throughout its considerable length. Some of the crew of a human colony
ship, which has deposited its settlers on a livable world, have made use
of advanced technology to ensconce themselves in the role of gods,
selecting those of the Hindu pantheon as models. But where there is
Hinduism, the Buddha - in the shape of the protagonist Sam - must follow;
and his liberation of the humans of the planet, who are mortal descendants
of the original settlers, takes on aspects of both Prometheus and Coyote
the Trickster. At points, Sam may seem just another of RZ's stable of
slangy, raunchy, over-loved immortals; but the end effect of the book is
liberating, wise, lucid.None of RZ's subsequent sf quite achieved the
metaphorical aptness of his first 3 novels, but Isle of the Dead (1969)
and Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969) both embody complex plots,
mythic resonance and a fluent intensity of language. Damnation Alley
(1969), a darker and coarser tale, depicts a post-holocaust
motor-cycle-trek across a vicious USA; it was filmed with many changes as
DAMNATION ALLEY (1977). Jack of Shadows (1971), though set on a planet

which keeps one face always to its sun, has all the tonality and
dream-like plotting of a fantasy: a fine one.From the mid-1970s on, RZ's
work maintained a certain consistency, and always threatened to explode in
the mind's eye; but did not quite do so. Deus Irae (1976), with Philip K.
DICK, is uneasy. Doorways in the Sand (1976) is a delightfully complicated
chase tale, involving a MCGUFFIN and an entire galactic community. My Name
is Legion (fixup 1976) - which included the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Home
is the Hangman (1975 ASF; 1990 chap dos) - puts into definitive form the
Chandleresque version of the RZ HERO. Roadmarks (1979) engrossingly
fleshes out the notion that the turnings off a metaphysical freeway might
constitute turnings in time not space. The Last Defender of Camelot (1980
chap), which became the title story of The Last Defender of Camelot (coll
1980; with 4 stories added, exp 1981), Unicorn Variations (coll 1983),
which included the Hugo-winning "Unicorn Variation" (1981), and Frost and
Fire (coll 1989) - which contained "24 Views of Mount Fuji" (1985) and
"Permafrost" (1986), both Hugo-winners - represent competent later short
stories. Eye of Cat (1982) is a proficient sf thriller with a striking
alien and some effective Navajo venues. Had it not been for the romantic
sublimities of his first years, RZ's career might have been seen as
triumphant.He is not, however, regarded as a writer whose later works have
fulfilled his promise, and it may be that he has suffered the inevitable
price of writing at the peak of intensity and conviction when young: that
he may already have put into definitive form the heart of what exercises
him as a man and as a writer. The plummets into INNER SPACE, the
sensitized baroque intricacy of his rendering of the immortal longings of
men who all too easily slip into secret-guardian routines, the rush into
metamorphosis: all have had their cost. Though his Amber books and some
other fantasies (see listing below) exhibit a sustained freshness, RZ's sf
readership has been left with the inspired facility of an extremely
intelligent writer who does not desperately need to utter another word.
[JC]Other works: Today We Choose Faces (1973); To Die in Italbar (1973),
featuring Francis Sandow, the protagonist of Isle of the Dead; Poems (coll
1974 chap); Bridge of Ashes (1976); The Illustrated Zelazny (graph coll
1978; rev vt The Authorized Illustrated Book of Roger Zelazny 1979); the
Changing Land sequence, comprising The Bells of Shoredan (1966 Fantastic;
1979 chap), The Changing Land (1981) and Dilvish, the Damned (coll of
linked stories 1982); For a Breath I Tarry (1966 NW; 1980 chap); When
Pussywillows Last in the Catyard Bloomed (coll 1980 chap), poetry; the
Wizard World sequence, comprising Changeling (1980) and Madwand (1981),
both assembled as Wizard World (omni 1989); Today We Choose Faces/Bridge
of Ashes (omni 1981); To Spin is Miracle Cat (coll 1981), poems; Coils
(1982) with Fred SABERHAGEN; A Dark Traveling (1987), a juvenile; The
Black Throne (1990) with Saberhagen, a RECURSIVE fantasy starring Edgar
Allan POE; The Mask of Loki (1990) with Thomas T. THOMAS; The Graveyard
Heart (1964 AMZ; 1990 chap dos); Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming
(1991) with Robert SHECKLEY; Gone to Earth (coll dated 1991 but 1992);
Flare (1992) with Thomas, describing a deadly solar flare; Way Up High
(1992 chap); Here There be Dragons (1992 chap); A Night in the Lonesome
October (1993); If at Faust You Don't Succeed (1993) with Robert Sheckley;
Wilderness (1994) with Gerald Hausman, associational.As Editor: Nebula
Award Stories Three (anth 1968).About the author: "Faust ?

The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (coll 1977)
by Samuel R. DELANY; Introduction by Ormond Seavey to the 1976 GREGG PRESS
printing of THE DREAM MASTER; Roger Zelazny (1980) by Carl B. YOKE; Roger
Zelazny: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1980) by Joseph L. Sanders;
A Checklist of Roger Zelazny (1990 chap) by Christopher P. STEPHENS.See
also: ACE BOOKS; AMAZING STORIES; ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; COMICS;
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; CYBERNETICS; ESCHATOLOGY; ESP; FANTASY; GALAXY
SCIENCE FICTION; GAMES AND SPORTS; GODS AND DEMONS; GOTHIC SF;
IMMORTALITY; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; The MAGAZINE OF
FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MARS; MATTER TRANSMISSION; MESSIAHS;
MUSIC;
OMNI; PARALLEL WORLDS; PARANOIA; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; PSI POWERS;
REINCARNATION; RELIGION; ROBOTS; SCIENCE FANTASY; SUPERMAN;
SUPERNATURAL
CREATURES; TERRAFORMING; UNDER THE SEA.
ZERO POPULATION GROWTH
Z.P.G.
ZERWICK, CHLOE
(1923- ) US writer and editor who collaborated with Harrison BROWN (whom
see for details) on The Cassiopeia Affair (1968). [JC]
ZETFORD, TULLY
Kenneth BULMER.
ZHURAVLYOVA, VALENTINA
[r] Genrikh ALTOV.
ZIESING, MARK V.
[r] MARK V. ZIESING.
ZIFF-DAVIS
US magazine-publishing house, based in Chicago until 1950, then New York.
It entered the sf field in 1938 when it bought AMAZING STORIES from Teck
Publishing Corp, New York, the 1st Z-D issue being April 1938, ed Raymond
A. PALMER under Bernard G. Davis (the Davis of Ziff-Davis) as
editor-in-chief. Under Palmer and later Howard BROWNE, AMZ was the most
juvenile and lurid of the pulp SF MAGAZINES. The Z-D stable was expanded
in May 1939 with the founding of a new title, FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, also
lurid. Local Chicago writers, many of them hacks, churned out material for
Z-D at immense speed, and often under the huge variety of house names that
characterized these magazines and made them a bibliographer's nightmare:
Chester S. GEIER, David Wright O'BRIEN, Rog PHILLIPS, Leroy YERXA and many
others whose work was hardly known outside the Z-D publications. Covers
were colourful, to the say the least, J. Allen ST. JOHN being especially
notable in this regard; Robert FUQUA was also a regular cover artist and
Rod RUTH drew many interior illustrations.As the pulp era drew to a close
in the 1950s, many sf magazines failed, and others converted to the DIGEST
format, as AMZ did in 1953. By then Z-D had founded a new digest magazine,
FANTASTIC, in 1952. This covered similar ground to Fantastic Adventures,
which it absorbed in 1953. The only sf/fantasy addition to the stable
thereafter was the short-lived DREAM WORLD, ed Paul W. FAIRMAN, in 1957,

though Z-D did publish occasional COMICS titles, like Space Patrol in
1952. Stories created by factory-production techniques continued in the
new digest magazines, now based in New York; Robert SILVERBERG was one who
learned his craft in the 1950s by being slotted into the assembly line.
Both AMZ and Fantastic improved enormously under the editorship of Cele
GOLDSMITH 1958-65, but it was too late. Bernard G. Davis had left in the
1950s, and fiction magazines were becoming anomalies in the Z-D line-up,
now largely concentrated (because of the potential for advertising
revenue) on specialist nonfiction magazines like Popular Photography and
Popular Electronics. Fantastic and AMZ were sold in 1965 to Sol Cohen's
Ultimate Publishing Co., where he made a good thing for years recycling
Z-D backlist stories in new magazines, as well as continuing the 2 main
titles. The newly married Goldsmith stayed with Z-D to work on Modern
Bride. Bernard Davis's son Joel went on to form his own publishing
company, Davis Publications, which founded ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION
MAGAZINE and later bought ASF. The Davis sf dynasty, therefore, continued,
in a much different guise, until 1992, when Dell Magazines bought both
journals. [PN]
ZILLIG, WERNER
[r] GERMANY.
ZIMMER, PAUL EDWIN
(1943- ) US writer, brother of Marion Zimmer BRADLEY, with whom he wrote
his first sf, the 2nd vol of the Survivors sequence, The Survivors (1979),
a somewhat congested sf adventure. A series by PEZ alone, the Dark Border
sequence - The Lost Prince (1982), King Chondo's Ride (1982) and A
Gathering of Heroes (1987) - is fantasy, as are his singletons Woman of
the Elfmounds (dated 1979 but 1980), Blood of the Colyn Muir (1988) with
Jon DeCles, and Ingulf the Mad (1989). [JC]
ZINDELL, DAVID
(1952- ) US writer with a degree in mathematics who began publishing sf
with "The Dreamer's Sleep" for Fantasy Book in 1984, though his career
properly began when he won the WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST with
"Shanidar" (1985). His 1st novel was the long and remarkable Neverness
(1988), an extremely ambitious example of the tale of cosmogony (a tale usually containing some plot mixture of SPACE OPERA and PLANETARY ROMANCEwhose protagonist's life leads to an encounter with questions about the
origins, the ontological nature and the end of the Galaxy or Universe).
The young protagonist has all the necessary complexity and drivenness to
occupy centre-stage "cosmogony opera"; indeed, as he recollects his cruel
and ornate life at a distance of some years, Mallory Ringess may for some
readers too much resemble the Severian of Gene WOLFE's The Book of the New
Sun (1980-83), though he does eventually establish his own chilly
selfhood. The planet in which the city of Neverness nestles is drawn with
a long-breathed relish reminiscent of Wolfe's own model, Jack VANCE; the
growth to manhood of Ringess in this environment is expressed with cold
ornateness, an assiduous attention to character and a sense of immanent
significance. As space-pilot in the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and
Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame, Ringess eventually becomes involved
in a search for the Elder Eddas which bear messages of import about

reality; encounters an entity whose brain is composed of moon-sized
ganglia; betrays, comes to understand, and saves himself; and penetrates
the eons-deep secrets of the nature of things. The author of Neverness is
romantic, ambitious, and skilled.Full understanding of DZ's immense second
novel - whose first 2 instalments may or may not constitute the entire
story - awaits its full publication. The first volume, The Broken God
(1993 UK), carries on the overall project outlined in Neverness, primarily
through the viewpoint of Ringess's son. The recomplications and
innovations of the tale are consistent with those adumbrated in the
earlier book, which serves as a kind of prelude. A second volume, The Wild
(1995 UK), is projected. [JC]See also: BIG DUMB OBJECTS; COMMUNICATIONS;
DEVOLUTION; FASTER THAN LIGHT; GODS AND DEMONS; MATHEMATICS; MUSIC;
PSEUDO-SCIENCE.
ZINOVIEV, ALEXANDER
(1922- ) Russian writer whose Ziyayushchie Vysoty (1976 Switzerland;
trans Gordon Clough as The Yawning Heights 1979 US) clearly models the
closed DYSTOPIAN society at its heart upon the gerontocracy which then
dominated the USSR. [JC]
ZITRA VSTANU A OPARIM SE CAJEM
(vt Tomorrow I'll Wake up and Scald Myself with Tea) Film (1977). Filmove
studio Barrandov. Dir Jindrich Polak, starring Petr Kostka, Jiri Sovak,
Vladimir Mensik, Vlastimil Brodsky. Screenplay Polak, Milos Macourek,
based on a story by Josef NESVADBA. 90 mins. Colour.Not widely known in
the West (although it has been given a UK tv showing), this Czech
production is one of the most sophisticated TIME-TRAVEL films yet made,
written by a team whose members all have ample sf experience ( CZECH AND
SLOVAK SF). The insanely convoluted comic story, with a richer use of TIME
PARADOXES than is ever seen in Western sf cinema, involves going back in
time to give the H-bomb to Hitler. Though farcical, it throws up
interesting questions of causality. Polak also dir IKARIE XB-1 (1963), and
Macourek, who has been involved with many of the best Czech sf comedies,
codir KDO CHCE ZABIT JESSII? (1965). [PN]
ZIVKOVIC, ZORAN
(1948- ) Yugoslav sf publisher and researcher, based in Belgrade. He
received his doctorate at Belgrade University in 1982; a version of his
dissertation, "The Appearance of Science Fiction as a Genre of Artistic
Prose", was published in his Savremenici buducnosti ["Contemporaries of
the Future"] (anth 1983) along with some of the stories he discusses. He
has translated about 50 sf books and published more than 100 under his
Polaris imprint, the first privately owned sf publishing house (founded
1982) in YUGOSLAVIA. Zvezdani ekran ["The Starry Screen"] (1984) is a book
about sf cinema, based on the tv series of the same title which he wrote
and hosted. His most ambitious work is the 2-vol Enciklopedija naucne
fantastike ["Encyclopedia of Science Fiction"] (1990). He wrote the
YUGOSLAVIA entry in this volume. [PN]
ZOLA, EMILE (EDOUARD CHARLES ANTOINE)
(1840-1902) French writer whose long and intense Rougon-Macquart sequence
of Naturalist novels (1871-93) includes tales like Nana (1880; trans E.A.

Vizetelly 1884 UK), for which he was once notorious. EZ is of sf interest
for Verite (1903; trans E.A. Vizetelly as Truth 1903 UK), the 3rd vol of
his unfinished Les Quatre Evangiles ["The Four Evangelists"] quartet,
which was planned to espouse a kind of Tolstoyan socialism. The action in
Truth extends to 1980, and there are hints of advanced TECHNOLOGIES. [JC]
ZOLINE, PAMELA
Working name of US painter and writer Pamela Lifton-Zoline (1941- ), in
the UK 1963-86. She illustrated, in a collage-derived style, several
stories for NW in the late 1960s, including the magazine publication of
Thomas M. DISCH's CAMP CONCENTRATION (1968 UK). Her debut sf story, "The
Heat Death of the Universe" (1967 NW), is a finely structured application
of the concept of ENTROPY to the life of a US housewife, through whose
perceptions its rise is experienced literally. The story appeared in PZ's
1st collection, Busy About the Tree of Life and Other Stories (coll 1988
UK; vt THE HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE AND OTHER STORIES 1988 US); the long
story which gives its title to the UK edn is also sf. With John T. SLADEK,
PZ ed both issues of and contributed to Ronald Reagan: The Magazine of
Poetry (1968); other contributors included Disch and J.G. BALLARD. In
Telluride, Colorado, she has since 1986 written, designed and produced sf
plays for the Muddbutt Mystery Theatre. [JC]Other works: Annika and the
Wolves (1985 chap US), a children's fantasy.See also: COSMOLOGY; OULIPO.
ZOMBIE(S)
DAWN OF THE DEAD.
ZONE TROOPERS
Film (1985). Altar/Empire. Executive prod Charles BAND. Dir Danny Bilson,
starring Tim Thomerson, Timothy Van Patten, Art La Fleur, Biff Maynard.
Screenplay Bilson, Paul DeMeo. 86 mins. Colour.This curious, small, honest
film is as close as the cinema has ever got to the flavour of pulp sf.
Three GIs and a war correspondent are trapped behind German lines in Italy
in 1944. In between repeated clashes with Germans they befriend a BEM female, we later learn - from a crashed spaceship, whom the Germans wish
to interrogate. All is played straight and gung-ho, catching delightfully
the tone of 1940s war films. The film ends appropriately with a shot of a
(phony) PULP-MAGAZINE cover, Fantastic Fiction. [PN]
ZOOL, M.H.
Group pseudonym used by members of the Oxford University Speculative
Fiction Group for the Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Science Fiction and
Fantasy (1989), a compact and knowledgeable biographical and
bibliographical dictionary whose usefulness would have been considerably
enhanced had its authors been granted more space. "M. H. Zool" stands for
Massed Hordes of Zool, a recurring phrase found in "Time Warriors of Zool"
(1979) by William Bains, a narrative - distributed in mimeographed form
only - which memorializes the Oxford SF Group in spoof recursive terms.
The main editors/authors involved in the Bloomsbury book were Neal
Tringham (1966- ), Ivan Towlson (1967- ) and Mo Holkar (1967- ). Both
Tringham, as writer of several entries, and Holkar, as coordinator of
entries from other members of the Speculative Fiction Group (not all of
them part of the original Zool enterprise), participated in this

encyclopedia, as did Zool participants Tim Adye (1964- ), Matthew Bishop
(1968- ), Adrian Cox (1968- ) and Penelope Heal (1970- ); other members of
the Zool enterprise included John Bray, Malcolm Cohen, Paul Cray, Melanie
Dymond, Paul Marrow and Simon McLeish. [JC]
Z.P.G.
(vt Zero Population Growth UK) Film (1971). Sagittarius/Paramount. Dir
Michael Campus, starring Oliver Reed, Geraldine Chaplin, Diane Cilento,
Don Gordon. Screenplay Max EHRLICH, Frank DeFelitta. 97 mins. Colour.This
film was a product of a period when, not before time, the question of
OVERPOPULATION had almost overnight become a matter much publicized by the
media, books like Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968) had become
bestsellers, and the Club of Rome was about to publish a very alarmist
report in The Limits to Growth (1972). "Zero population growth" is a term
which refers to a situation where the population of a society remains
steady, neither increasing nor decreasing. But the screenwriters of Z.P.G.
assume, absurdly, that it means nobody having any children at all during
the 30-year period of a world government's ban. A married couple defy the
edict and have a baby secretly. They are betrayed by a jealous neighbour,
but escape the authorities by descending into a sewer. Where they escape
to is not explained. The novelization is The Edict * (1971) by Ehrlich.
[JB/PN]
ZSCHOKKE, HEINRICH
[r] GERMANY.
ZSOLDOS, PEER
[r] HUNGARY.
ZUpsAWSKI, JERZY
(1874-1915) Polish playwright, poet and novelist, of sf interest for his
untranslated trilogy about the colonization of the MOON: Na Srebrnym
Globie ["On Silver Globe"] (1901), Zwycie
ZWIKIEWICZ, WIKTOR
[r] POLAND.

SF&F encyclopedia
A Rose for Armageddon
SCHENCK, HILBERT(Pocket Books/Timescape, 1982)As a new dark age looms, a
handful of aging intellectuals race to finish a project in the computer
simulation of social relationships in the history of a small island. A
mystery emerges whose solution may offer an opportunity for redemption not
only to the unhappy characters but also to their unhappy era. Poignant and
beautifully written; highly original in its recompilation of the timeslip
romance. Compare and contrast Jack Finney's Time and Again . See also TIME
TRAVEL
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS(Scribner, 1886)This classic 19th-century
presentation of dual personality dramatizes the good and evil within each
human. Aware from his youth of a certain wickedness within his nature, Dr.

Jekyll experiments and develops a drug that brings his alter ego into
ascendancy, thereby transforming himself physically into Mr. Hyde. One
learns of the mystery through the eyes of the lawyer Utterson, but only a
final manuscript, the full statement of Henry Jekyll, explains the
relationship between him and Hyde. See also PSYCHOLOGY
Solar Lottery
DICK, PHILIP K(INDRED)( Ace, 1955)The initial version of this work
appeared as an Ace Double paired with The Big Jump by Leigh Brackett, a
work about as antithetical to Phil Dick's style and approach as it was
possible to get. A reissue, sans Brackett, by Gregg in 1976 contained an
appreciation by Thomas Disch. A world supposedly run at the top by the
random chances of a great lottery is actually a congeries of rival
industrial fiefs; would-be Quizmasters seek to rig the odds, and a former
Quizmaster by the rules of the game has the right to assassinate his
successor if the assassin can get past the incumbent's telepathic guards.
The complex plot is driven by games theory, which at the time of writing
was just coming into vogue; von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games
had recently been published, as well as a popularization titled Strategy
in Poker, Business, and War. Dick was concerned lest the mathematics of
games theory dissolve all political claims of law, tradition, and
morality, leaving only the rules of the game: "Minimax," he said in a
statement included with the book, "is gaining on us all the time." Dick's
first major work. Contrast A. E. van Vogt, The World of Null-A . See also
GAMES AND SPORTS
Rite of Passage
PANSHIN, ALEXEI(Ace, 1968)The heroine belongs to a starfaring culture,
and her rite de passage into adulthood involves her descent into a colony
world whose culture is very different. A homage to Robert A. Heinlein's
juveniles but more carefully and painstakingly constructed than most of
his models; compare especially his Tunnel in the Sky . Nebula winner,
1968. See also GENERATION STARSHIPS
Pavane
ROBERTS, KEITH(Hart-Davis, 1968)Fix-up novel describing what appears to
be an ALTERNATE WORLD where the Catholic church retained its hegemony in
Europe because of the victory of the Spanish Armada. But this
technologically retarded world also harbors fairies who know the real
truth, and when progress rears its ugly head again, its value is brought
sharply into question. A rich, many-faceted narrative, written with great
care and delicacy; one of the finest SF novels of the period. U.S.
editions add an extra episode. Compare Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for
Leibowitz and Kingsley Amis's The Alteration .
Mechasm
SLADEK, JOHN T(HOMAS)(Ace, 1969) Brit. title: The Reproductive
System(Gollancz, 1968) Metal-eating, self-replicating ROBOTS threaten to
destroy the fabric of civilization if they cannot be controlled and
contained, although if used responsibly they might pave the way to
paradise. A satirical parable of man/machine relationships. Compare and
contrast Rudy Rucker's SOFTWARE .

Neuromancer
GIBSON, WILLIAM(Ace, 1984)In a highly urbanized future dominated by
cybernetics and bioengineering, anti-hero Case is rescued from
wretchedness and given back the ability to send his persona into the
cyberspace of the world's computer networks, where he must carry out a
hazardous mission for an enigmatic employer. An adventure story much
enlivened by elaborate technical jargon and sleazy, streetwise
characters-the pioneering " CYBERPUNK" novel. Compare Vernor Vinge's TRUE
NAMES, Bruce Sterling's ISLANDS IN THE NET, and the film Blade Runner.
Hugo winner, 1985; Nebula winner, 1984
The Left Hand of Darkness
LE GUIN, URSULA K(ROEBER)(Ace, 1969) Recommended ed.: Walker, 1994.Humans
on the world of Winter are hermaphrodite, able to develop male or female
sexual characteristics during periodic phases of fertility. An envoy from
the galactic community becomes embroiled in local politics and is forced
by his experiences to reconsider his attitudes toward human relationships.
Serious, meticulous, and well written, the book has been much discussed
and praised because of its timely analytic interest in sexual politics.
The 1994 Walker reprint includes a new afterword and approximately 60
pages in four appendixes. Compare Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X (1960).
Hugo winner, 1970; Nebula winner, 1969. See also SEX
The Big Time
LEIBER, FRITZ (REUTER)(Gregg, 1978)Serialized in Galaxy in 1957, "The Big
Time," a saga of soldiers from all times who have been recruited as
"Spiders" or "Snakes" to battle each other and alter past events to the
advantage of their own side, won the Hugo for that year. The primary
action takes place in a Spider R&R center outside the cosmos and is staged
theatrically, no doubt reflecting Leiber's own experience in his father's
repertory Shakespeare company. That novel (The Big Time, Ace, 1961) and a
collection of shorter stories on the Spiders-versus-Snakes theme, The Mind
Spider (Ace, 1961), were combined with other related pieces in this
collection from Gregg. Jack Williamson had anticipated the theme of
time-soldiers battling to change events in The Legion of Time , but
Williamson's version assumed a conventional Good-Evil dualism. Leiber's
vision was breathtakingly relativist; one principal character in The Big
Time, from a World War II that turned out differently, is the Nazi
gauleiter of Chicago! A major and disturbing work. Contrast Poul Anderson,
Time Patrol , and Leiber's own Destiny Times Three. Hugo winner, 1958. See
also TIME TRAVEL
The Einstein Intersection
DELANY, SAMUEL R(AY)(Ace, 1967)In the far future the nonhuman inhabitants
of Earth mine the mythologies of the ancient past in search of meanings
appropriate to their own existence; the hero must undertake an Orphean
quest into the underworld of the collective unconscious, confronting its
archetypes. A fabulous tour de force of the imagination. Compare Roger
Zelazny's THIS IMMORTALand Angela Carter's Infernal Desire Machines of Dr.
Hoffman. NW, 1967. See also MYTHOLOGY
Nine Hundred Grandmothers

LAFFERTY, R(APHAEL) A(LOYSIUS)(Ace, 1970)The first and best of Lafferty's
collections, followed by Strange Doings (1971), Does Anyone EIse Have
Something Further to Add? (1974), Ringing Changes (1984), and various
collections issued by small presses. Lafferty's shorter works tend to be
highly distinctive and idiosyncratic, often mixing materials from Celtic
or Amerindian folklore with SF motifs in order to produce tall stories
with a philosophical bite. At his most stylized he is comparable to Italo
Calvino's Cosmicomics , but he is rarely so abstracted and his stories
have a characteristic warmth as well as a breezy imaginative recklessness
and a good deal of wit. See also FABULATION
White Light
RUCKER, RUDY(Ace, 1980)A strange fantasy of life after death that has
abundant SF interest by virtue of the author's use of "higher dimensions"
as a milieu for displaying ideas drawn from number theory and other areas
of higher mathematics. The author suggests that this exercise in
"transrealism" can be regarded as the first element in a trilogy completed
by The Sex Sphere (1983), in which a hypersphere trapped into an
intersection with our 3-D space obligingly responds to the sexual
fantasies of the male characters, and The Secret of Life (1985). Rucker's
work invites comparison with some very early SF writers, including Camille
Flammarion and C. H. Hinton, as well as avant-garde figures like John
Shirley and Bruce Sterling. See also MATHEMATICS
Software
RUCKER, RUDY(Ace, 1982)Artificial intelligence has developed to the point
where computers can begin the inevitable power struggle with mankind.
Should we be prepared to put aside our frail flesh in favor of inorganic
forms that will preserve our personalities in their software? The
extravagant plot is well spiced with wit. The equally well done sequel is
Wetware (1988), and a third volume is expected. Both Software and Wetware
won the Philip K. Dick Award. Compare Marge Piercy's He, She, and It . See
also CYBERPUNK
The Wild Shore
ROBINSON, KIM STANLEY(Ace, 1984)After the nuclear holocaust the United
States is quarantined by the United Nations, and the survivors must remake
their civilization in isolation. The protagonist, his role analogous to
that of Huckleberry Finn, explores this new frontier world. The most
sophisticated example of contemporary American romantic catastrophism.
Compare Tim Powers's Dinner at Deviant's Palace and David Brin's The
Postman. Robinson followed The Wild Shore with two more novels set in the
same location in Southern California, thematic sequels considering
alternate historical possibilities. The Gold Coast (1988) describes a
near-future Orange County of superhighways and designer drugs that is only
marginally different from our own. Pacific Edge (1990), which won the JWC
Award, is set in a postdisaster, small-scale community where everything is
done with an eye toward its effect on the ecology. See also PASTORAL
Homunculus
BLAYLOCK, JAMES P.( Ace, 1986)Intricately plotted action-adventure story
set in Victorian England where the natural philosophers of the

Trismegistus Club battle a sinister reanimator of corpses and a greedy
entrepreneur while a tiny alien imprisoned in one of four identical boxes
is passed unwittingly from hand to hand, causing havoc wherever he goes. A
witty and very stylish combination of SF and Victorian melodrama. In the
sequel, Lord Kelvin's Machine (1992), the Earth is nearly destroyed by a
passing comet. Compare Tim Power's THE ANUBIS GATES (1983) and K. W.
Jeter's Infernal Devices (1987). See also STEAMPUNK
Synthajoy
COMPTON, D(AVID) G(UY)(Hodder & Stoughton, 1968) A machine is developed
that can record emotional experiences for later transmission into the
minds of others. Abused by its inventor, it is subsequently used in the
psychiatric treatment of his wife and murderer. Intricately constructed,
with fine characterization and compelling cynicism. Compare Barry N.
Malzberg's Cross of Fire. See also PSYCHOLOGY
Soldiers of Paradise
PARK, PAUL(Arbor, 1987)On a planet called Earth by its inhabitants,
though it and its solar system differ dramatically from our own, the
seasons last for lifetimes and, as in Brian W. Aldiss's Helliconia series,
they change with such violence that entire civilizations are in danger of
dying or being transformed. Two misfit members of the Starbridge family,
the planet's ruling class, wander through the confusion and growing
revolution of the oncoming springtime, pondering the ills of their
society. Soldiers of Paradise is nearly plotless, but its beautifully
wrought prose, carefully etched characters, and strong moral sense make it
an unforgettable experience. Two fine sequels are Sugar Rain (1989) and
The Cult of Loving Kindness (1991). Compare Aldiss's HELLICONIA series,
Michael Swanwick's STATIONS OF THE TIDE , and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New
Sun . See also PLANETARY ROMANCE
Islands in the Net
STERLING, BRUCE(Arbor, 1988)There's a perfectly fine plot here, involving
data piracy, and some nicely developed characters, including Laura, who
goes out and has adventures while her husband takes care of the baby. What
stands out in Sterling's novel, however, is the extraordinarily detailed
and highly believable world he has created. The almost universal presence
of the data Net, the widespread use of creative ecological engineering,
the economic and cultural interpenetration of formerly separate societies,
the fads and styles, all come together in one of the most fascinating
sociological and political SF novels in recent years. Compare Neal
Stephenson's SNOW CRASH. See also POLITICS
The Jaguar Hunter
SHEPARD, LUCIUS(Arkham, 1987)One of the finest collections of fantasy and
science fiction published in the 1980s. Probably the best story included
is the Nebula- and Locus Award-winning "R&R," the tale of an American
soldier on leave from a future war in Central America, which was later
incorporated into Shepard's second novel, Life During Wartime. Other
outstanding stories, many of them award nominees, include "The End of Life
as We Know It," "A Traveler's Tale," "The Man Who Painted the Dragon
Griaule," and "A Spanish Lesson." The Jaguar Hunter won the 1988 World

Fantasy Award for best collection. Shepard's second volume of short
stories, The Ends of the Earth (1991), also a World Fantasy Award nominee,
includes such fine pieces as "Delta Sly Honey," the award-nominated
"Shades," "The Ends of the Earth," and "Surrender." Compare James
Tiptree's Tales of the Quintana Roo(1986). See also FANTASY
The Luck of Brin's Five
WILDER, CHERRY (pseud. of Cherry Barbara Grimm)(Atheneum, 1977) Young
adultScott Gale, navigator of a terran bio-survey team on Torin,
crash-lands and is found and befriended by Dorn, member of the family
called Brin's Five. According to custom, the family considers Scott a
Diver and their new "luck." Through the ensuing adventures-in particular,
those involving flying machines and air races-and the dangerous intrigue
of those opposed to change, Scott proves he is indeed a "luck" and
precipitates a new openness to change among the people. Although the
narrative pace flags occasionally, the novel creates an original world and
culture vaguely Oriental. Sequels are The Nearest Fire (1980), which just
as engagingly continues to detail Torin, and The Tapestry Warriors (1983).
Compare Laurence Yep's Sweetwater. See also PLANETARY ROMANCE
A Song for Lya and Other Stories
MARTIN, GEORGE R(AYMOND) R(ICHARD)(Avon,1976)The title story of this
collection (Hugo winner, 1975) is one of several notable studies of an
alien species whose biology is such that their religious faith in life
after death has material foundation. One of the protagonists goes native
to take advantage of this opportunity, but her lover cannot. Martin is
generally at his best in medium-length stories. Nightflyers (reprinted as
a book, 1985) is another story of contact with mysterious aliens, while
the title story of the collection Sandkings (1981; Hugo winner, 1980) is a
memorable account of insectile "pets" learning to see their "owners" in a
new light. His other collections are Songs of Stars and Shadows (1977),
Songs the Dead Men Sing (1983), and, most recently, Portraits of His
Children (1987), whose Nebula-winning title story concerns an author whose
stories quite literally come alive. See also ALIENS
Macroscope
ANTHONY, PIERS (pseud. of Piers Anthony Jacob)( Avon, 1969)The macroscope
is an instrument allowing human observers access to the wonders of the
universe. When Homo sapiens is relocated in this cosmic perspective, the
narrative shifts to a quasi-allegorical mode in which the symbolic
significance of astrological lore is reworked. A more extended exercise in
the same vein is the trilogy God of Tarot (1979), Vision of Tarot (1980),
and Faith of Tarot (1980), which similarly attempts to display a modern
philosophy of life by reinterpreting the apparatus of an occult system. A
future series of this type, using even more baroque apparatus and taking
its pretensions even more seriously, is The Incarnations of Immortality, a
seven-volume saga begun with On a Pale Horse (1983). See also
COMMUNICATIONS
The Whole Man
BRUNNER, JOHN(Ballantine, 1964) Brit. title: Telepathist(1965)Developed
from two novellas. A crippled and deformed social outcast is nearly

destroyed by his telepathic powers, but learns to use them to create
therapeutic dreams for others and eventually to create a new art form.
Good characterization and sensitive narration. Compare Robert Silverberg's
Dying Inside and Roger Zelazny's THE DREAM MASTER . See also PSI POWERS
Walk to the End of the World
CHARNAS, SUZY MCKEE( Ballantine, 1974)In a grim, postholocaust world, the
Holdfast is a nightmarish, intensely patriarchal society where women are
treated as no more than subhuman breeders of the next generation of men.
The symbolically named Alldera escapes from captivity to the wilderness
and a new life. In Motherlines (1978) she discovers a number of all-female
societies, none of them utopian. Although both novels have occasional
weaknesses in style and plot, they serve as powerful indictment of
patriarchal attitudes. The Furies (1994), set much later, chronicles
Alldera's return to the Holdfast at the head of a conquering army. Compare
Sally Miller Gearhart's The Wanderground (1978) and Sheri S. Tepper's THE
GATE TO WOMEN'S COUNTRY. See also FEMINISM
The Space Merchants
POHL, FREDERIK, and C(YRIL) M. KORNBLUTH(Ballantine, 1953)Serialized in
Galaxy, 1952, as "Gravy Planet." Between the 1930s and the 1950s the
target of social criticism in America shifted from Wall Street to Madison
Avenue. In this novel, reflecting that shift, the world of the future-an
overcrowded, resources-starved future-is ruled by two rival advertising
agencies. Thematically related to the mainstream novel (and film) The
Hucksters, but carried out to a SATIRICreductio ad absurdem.Kornbluth
later stated that he and Pohl packed into this story everything they hated
about advertising, and it came out with Swiftian savagery. One of the
first novels by writers with primary roots in the pulps to make an impact
in mainstream circles, and, by mainstream measurements a bestseller. A
sequel by Pohl (after Kornbluth's death), is The Merchants' War (St.
Martin's, 1984); both are collected as Venus, Inc. (Nelson Doubleday,
1985).
Untouched by Human Hands
SHECKLEY, ROBERT(Ballantine, 1954)Sheckley's first story collection, and
a brilliant debut, contains "Seventh Victim," in which an otherwise
conventional near-future society sanctions the lethal but apparently
stress-reducing game of Hunter and Victim; it was made into an effective
movie, Tenth Victim. "The Monsters," a straight-faced exercise in cultural
relativism, has one of the most startling opening lines in all science
fiction (or, indeed, in all fiction). "Specialist" carries Adam Smith's
stodgy Division of Labor to its ultimate logical conclusion; "Cost of
Living" does the same with the problem, already severe in the 1950s, of
mounting consumer debt. The U.K. edition published by M. Joseph, 1955,
drops and replaces two stories. Sheckley's voice represented an early
break with, and fresh contrast to, the styles and themes of Golden Age SF.
Compare William Tenn, OF AII POSSIBLE WORLDS . Sheckley enthusiasts should
investigate The Collected Short Stories of Robert Sheckley, a five-volume
set issued in 1991. See also SATIRE
Of All Possible Worlds

TENN, WILLIAM (pseud. of Philip Klass)(Ballantine, 1955)Seven stories and
an essay, "On the Fiction in Science Fiction," in this first collection by
a writer with an even more savage wit than Robert Sheckley, if that be
possible. Memorable items include "Down Among the Dead Men," in which
recycled soldiers' corpses are fitted out to fight again because the world
is running out of cannon fodder; "The Custodian," a last-person-on-earth
story, sort of a jazz variant on Mary Shelley's The Last Man; and "The
Liberation of Earth," a sarcastic parable on the hapless fate of small
nations invaded and counterinvaded by ideologically well-intentioned
superpowers. A U.K. edition (M. Joseph, 1956) drops two stories and adds
three, including "Project Hush," a satire on the fetish of military
security, and "Party of the Two Parts," which makes fun of prurience from
an unusual angle. Those two stories may also be found in another U.S.
collection of Tenn's work, The Human Angle (Ballantine, 1956). See also
SATIRE
Ringworld
NIVEN, LARRY(Ballantine, 1970)An exploration team consisting of an exotic
mix of humans and aliens investigates a huge artifact occupying a
planetary orbit around a sun. A novel of imaginary tourism; its real hero
is the artifact, whose nature is further explored and explained in
Ringworld Engineers (1980). Compare Arthur C. Clarke's RENDEZVOUS WITH
RAMA. Hugo winner, 1971; Nebula winner, 1970. See also BIG DUMB OBJECTS
A Case of Conscience
BLISH, JAMES(Ballantine, 1958)Except at the simplest level (the overthrow
of the fundamentalist dictatorship in Robert A. Heinlein's "If This Goes
On-") RELIGION in Golden Age SF was almost as taboo a subject as sex.
(This is one more demonstration of difference between U.S. and U.K.
sensibilities; compare the serious theological argument of C. S. Lewis
and, in an entirely different way, of Olaf Stapledon.) James Blish tackled
the subject head-on. Lithia is a newly discovered planet whose intelligent
inhabitants have developed a culture that is completely ethical, rational,
and without religion. The very absence of visible moral evil in them makes
them, in the eyes of Jesuit priest/biologist Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, creations
of the devil. He brings one of them in embryo back to Earth; it grows up
traumatized (by Earth's own moral evil?), creates social chaos, flees back
to Lithia followed by the priest, who exorcises the planet, which is
immediately (coincidentally?) destroyed. A rich, ambiguous, deep-cutting
probe into the most ultimate of concerns. HW, 1959
The Lovers
FARMER, PHILIP JOSe(Ballantine, 1961) Recommended ed.: Ballantine,
1979Expanded from a 1952 story in Fantasy & Science Fiction that provoked
controversy at the time for its SEXual content. Hero and his wife, on a
wretchedly overpopulated Earth ruled with fiendish ingenuity by an
oppressive state church (the "Sturch") that considers all sex evil except
for procreation, are-understandably!-unhappily married. Sent to help kill
off an intelligent insect-like race on a planet slated for colonization,
the man falls in love with a female of another alien species, which can
mimic human appearance and behavior up to and including sex, but the
consequences are tragic and horrible. Films like Alien and its sequels may

have taken the edge off the raw shock this story would have given some
readers a generation ago. Compare Gardner Dozois, Strangers; contrast
Lester del Rey, The Eleventh Commandment. See also BIOLOGY
Neutron Star
NIVEN, LARRY(Ballantine, 1968)The first collection of Niven's hard SF
stories, early works developing the Known Space future history. The title
story (Hugo winner, 1967) is one of several in which Beowulf Shaeffer is
blackmailed into taking on a dangerous mission in an exotic environment.
The bibliography of Niven's collections is complex, stories being
recombined into some later selections, but The Shape of Space (1969), All
the Myriad Ways (1971), and A Hole in Space (1974) preserve most of the
important early fiction. Tales of Known Space (1975) is useful for the
notes about the future-historical background. The title story of
Inconstant Moon (1973) (Hugo winner, 1972; also in All the Myriad Ways) is
a marvelously vivid story in which people on the night side of the world
realize that the sun has gone nova when the Moon becomes much brighter. A
more recent, but relatively minor collection is Limits (1985), which
includes a number of collaborative stories. N-Space (1990) and Playgrounds
of the Mind (1991) are retrospective collections covering Niven's entire
career. These volumes include essays, novel excerpts, appreciations by
other writers, and bibliographies, but leave out some of Niven's better
early stories. See also HISTORY IN SF
Startide Rising
BRIN, DAVID(Bantam,1983)The intelligent species of Earth (men, apes, and
dolphins) seem to be highly exceptional in having advanced to
technological sophistication without the alien Patrons that generally
supervise the "uplift" of sentient species throughout the galactic
culture. Now a dolphin-commanded starship has made a significant discovery
in deep space, but must take refuge in an alien ocean from its rivals.
While the dolphins struggle desperately to survive, the starships of a
number of alien races do battle overhead for the prize. Superior SPACE
OPERA of a very high order. Brin's "Uplift" universe was first introduced
in Sundiver (1980). Compare Larry Niven's Known Space series. Hugo winner,
1984; Nebula winner,1983
The Female Man
RUSS, JOANNA(Bantam, 1975)A contemporary woman encounters three
"alternative selves," including a version from the feminist utopia
Whileaway, a version from a world where patriarchy is more powerful and
more brutally imposed, and a version from a world where the sex war has
exploded into armed conflict. The juxtaposition of these alternatives,
phantasmagoric and very witty, provides an extraordinarily rich and
thought-provoking commentary on sexual politics. A key novel of feminist
SF. Compare Marge Piercy's WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME and Josephine
Saxton's Queen of the States . See also FEMINISM
Venus of Dreams
SARGENT, PAMELA(Bantam, 1986)A long novel about the relationship between
two people involved in a project to terraform VENUS. The book is carefully
constructed and delicately handled, with some striking imagery to set off

the love story. The political background is complex. ln the sequel, Venus
of Shadows (1988), humans have descended to the partially terraformed
surface, living in domed cities. Although the settlers are able to control
the planet, they are unable to control themselves, and political and
religious rivalries begin to tear the colony apart. Compare Kim Stanley
Robinson's RED MARS .
Strange Invasion
KANDEL, MICHAEL(Bantam, 1989) Shapeshifting alien invaders turn Earth
into a tourist site, bizarrely unsettling the global political balance.
Wildly funny satire with a sting in its tail from the renowned English
translator of Stanislaw Lem. Contrast Fredric Brown's Martians, Go Home!
(1955). See also INVASION
Growing up Weightless
FORD, JOHN M. (Bantam, 1993)Thirteen-year-old Matt Ronay lives in a
crowded, complex lunar society, which enjoys the benefits of highly
advanced CYBERNETICS but is constrained by its limited water resources.
Matt is inventive and exceptionally bright, but lives in horror of his
father, a successful public figure who seems to Matt a kind of monster.
With his equally brilliant friends, Matt conspires to take an unauthorized
expedition to the far side of the MOON, a journey that tests his resources
and forces him to confront his fears and prejudices. Ford's vision of the
crowded, information-dense interstellar civilization is a dazzling one,
and his novel-narrated in one long scene, without breaks of any kind-is
demanding but exhilarating. Compare Robert A. Heinlein's THE MOON IS A
HARSH MISTRESS for a very different view of life on the Moon. (GF) See
also COMMUNICATIONS
In the Mothers' Land
VONARBURG, ELISABETH(Bantam, 1992)Vonarburg's second novel is set in the
same background as her first, the award-winning The Silent City, a world
devastated centuries earlier by ecological catastrophe, in which some
centers of high technology remain in enclaves amid pastoral wilderness.
The land of Bethaly is governed by a benign matriarchy, which deals with
the problems facing it-a paucity of fertile males; the threats posed by a
radiological Badlands nearby; an unexplained malady that kills most
children before their seventh birthdays-in ways that strike the reader as
both understandable and deeply strange. Lisbei grows to early adolescence
in a communal yet stratified society, first as a young child in the
"garderies" (where children are tended anonymously and left largely
untaught, so the society need not expend emotional and other resources on
charges who will soon die), then as an adolescent being groomed for high
administrative office, and then after as an itinerant young adult. Her
growth to adulthood affords the reader a comprehensive and complex tour of
the novel's imagined world. The most striking feature of In the Mothers'
Land is its dramatization of developing consciousness: long passages are
told through the point of view of Lisbei as a young child, who sees both
strange and mundane events as equally marvelous. Jane Brierley's excellent
translation conveys this Proustian language in lyrical English, making
Vonarburg's long novel a pleasure to read. Compare Kate Wilhelm's WHERE
LATE THE SWEET BIRDS SANG and C. J. Cherryh's CYTEEN. (GF) See also CANADA

Stranger in a Strange Land
HEINLEIN, ROBERT A(NSON)(Putnam, 1961)Of all Heinlein's works this is the
best known. It reached large audiences farther away from his science
fiction roots than anything else he wrote, and inspired insurgencies both
right and left. An uncut version was issued posthumously by Putnam in
1991. The contradictory libertarian and authoritarian elements in this
writer are both present in the saga of Valentine Michael Smith, born
human, raised Martian, who returns to Earth a religious, political, and
sexual MESSIAH. The first third of the novel, set in one of Heinlein's
typically believable sociopolitical milieus (a world government that has
grown out of the present United Nations, with the secretary-general as its
focus) is well and suspensefully told. Soon thereafter, however, Heinlein
ascends into the pulpit where, sadly, this highly creative writer would
remain for the next quarter-century, preaching, with unfortunately few
lapses into good storytelling (that is, showing, not telling) such as The
Moon ls a Harsh Mistress. Stranger's cultural impact on an entire
generation is, nonetheless, undeniable. Hugo winner, 1961
The Ring of Ritornel
HARNESS, CHARLES L(EONARD)(Gollancz, 1968)A fine SPACE OPERA in which a
corrupt galactic empire faces apocalyptic destruction as the contending
forces of chance and destiny (personalized in rival deities) resolve their
conflict. Will the cosmos be reborn and renewed when the cycle ends? The
themes echoed here from the earlier Flight Into Yesterday (1953) recur in
Firebird (1981), and these three works are among the most stylish modern
space operas. Compare lan Wallace's Croyd series and Barrington J.
Bayley's The Pillars of Eternity (1982).
Impossible Things
WILLIS, CONNIE(Bantam, 1994)Willis became one of the most celebrated SF
authors of the 1980s, winning numerous awards for her scrupulously
crafted, emotionally intense fiction. Like her 1985 collection Fire Watch,
the present volume favors novelettes and novellas, often dealing with
"classic" SF themes- TIME TRAVEL or post-disaster stories-whose careful
treatment and low-keyed style belie their deep feeling and emotional
complexity. "The Last of the Winnebagoes" (Hugo winner, 1989; Nebula
winner, 1988) tells a complex story of guilt and recrimination in a near
future in which dogs have become extinct after a viral epidemic; the
seemingly prosaic theme in fact reinforces its powerful impact. Several of
the other stories approach farce; the best of them, "Even the Queen",
makes screwball comedy out of the subject of menstruation. (GF) See also
HOLOCAUST AND AFTER
The Sound of His Horn
SARBAN (pseud. of John W. Wall)(Davies, 1952) Recommended ed.:
Ballantine, 1960A British POW "escapes" from a Nazi prison camp into an
alternate future world in which the Nazis won World War II. Kingsley Amis
aptly pointed out in his introduction to this story that although most
U.S. SF dystopias of the 1950s (for example, those of Frederik Pohl and C.
M. Kornbluth) were urban in setting and tone, rural life can know horrors
of its own; in this case, a forested estate where feudal barons stage

great hunts with human beings as prey (hence the story's title, quoted
from the Scottish fox hunting ballad "John Peel"). An understated but
quite harrowing tale. Compare the even more chilling "Weihnachtsabend" by
Keith Roberts (in David Hartwell, World Treasury of Science Fiction );
contrast the Japanese-occupied San Francisco locale in Philip K. Dick, THE
MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE . See also HITLER WINS
Gateway
POHL, FREDERIK(St. Martin's, 1977)Mankind "inherits" the stars by finding
and exploiting (with considerable difficulty) the starships and gadgets
left behind by the alien Heechee. The flippant, guilt-ridden hero has
greatness thrust upon him by degrees as he picks up his winnings in the
game of Russian roulette that men must play in gaining control of the
Heechee artifacts. His luck continues to hold in Beyond the Blue Event
Horizon , which ends with his finding out why the Heechee ran away. This
is fine contemporary space opera, with some neatly ironic
characterization. Less successful are the later volumes in the series,
Heechee Rendezvous(1984), in which the aliens finally arrive on stage,
Annals of the Heechee (1987), and The Gateway Trip: Tales and Vignettes of
the Heechee (1990). Hugo winner, 1978; Nebula winner, 1977. See also BIG
DUMB OBJECTS
The Sirens of Titan
VONNEGUT, KURT(Dell, 1959)In this second novel Vonnegut took some of the
standard gambits of SF (time travel, interplanetary exploration, an
invasion from Mars) and put a reverse-English spin on them. This is not so
much a work of science fiction as a takeoff from, or jazz variation on,
the genre; this novel's closest kin in the modern period may be the works
of Douglas Adams. But Vonnegut is after bigger game than is Adams: "I was
a victim of a series of accidents," the story's stumbling hero proclaims.
"As are we all." Monuments on Earth and on Saturn's satellite Titan exist
only to convey a message from one galactic civilization to another; and
the message is utterly banal. The high "Tralfamadorian" culture that spans
all time simultaneously will reappear as the matrix for the adventures of
Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut's most bitterly autobiographical novel,
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE. The journeyings in this earlier work, from Earth to
Mars to Mercury to Titan, are not the jaunty adventures they would have
been in the pulp; they are darkly disturbing, which may be a reason
conventional science fictionists were slow to respond to this work. The
Dell paperback preceded hardcover publication by Houghton Mifflin (1961).
See also ABSURDIST SF
The Ophiuchi Hotline
VARLEY, JOHN(Dial, 1977) Contact with aliens at first brings new
opportunities, but then come the Invaders, determined to take over the
solar system and expel humankind. What future can there be for displaced
persons in the galactic civilization? Compare David Brin's STARTIDE
RISING. See also INVASION
In the Ocean of Night
BENFORD, GREGORY(Dial, 1977)A fix-up novel in which the hero looks for
evidence of the existence of aliens, and ultimately meets one; contact may

invigorate a world becoming gradually decadent. In a sequel, Across the
Sea of Suns (1984), the difficulty of coming to terms with alien beings,
and the necessity of so doing, lie at the heart of a complex plot
involving the confrontation of alternative human philosophies of life.
Thoughtful hard SF, its visionary element less wide-eyed than in Poul
Anderson's The Avatar and other like-minded works. See also ALIENS
Mission of Gravity
CLEMENT, HAL (pseud. of Harry Clement Stubbs)(Doubleday, 1954)Serialized
in Astounding (April, May, June, July 1953), this novel in its initial
form was accompanied by an article, "Whirligig World"(June, 1953;
reprinted in some later editions), in which Clement described how, in
consultation with Isaac Asimov and others, he concocted the planet on
which the story takes place. That is an accurate description of the way
writers like Clement work: get the science right and it will drive the
plot. But this is also a First Contact story of a very high order, between
explorers from Earth and a most unhuman sentient native species, to the
benefit of both; rejecting the cliche one still sees in movie and TV
science fiction that alienness equals evil. Clement stated on more than
one occasion that Mission of Gravitywas his personal philosophical bottom
line, and the novel deserves a careful reading not only for its scientific
ingenuity but for the working out of that philosophy. A major work. Sequel
is Star Light (Ballantine, 1971). Compare Robert L. Forward, DRAGON'S EGG
;Poul Anderson, The Enemy Stars . See also GRAVITY
Pilgrimage: The Book of the People
HENDERSON, ZENNA(Doubleday, 1961)Short stories that originally appeared
in Fantasy & Science Fiction, with connecting narrative. "The People" are
humans who came to Earth after their sun became a nova and went into
hiding. They have telepathy and telekinesis, which they use solely for
benevolent purposes and conceal most of the time lest they rouse hysteria
against them as "witches." The host culture they live among is southern
Appalachian, which Henderson understood and portrayed accurately and
sympathetically; reminiscent in that regard of the fantasy (not the SF) of
Manly Wade Wellman. Confrontations with Earth folk that endanger their
cover drive most of the story plots, which are saved from sentimentalism
by the People's realization that in any revelation of what they are their
existence may be at stake; compare Howard Fast, "The First Men," and
Wilmar H. Shiras, "In Hiding." A sequel is The People: No Different
Flesh(Gollancz, 1966). The saga of the People lent itself readily to a TV
series format, which aired in the 1970s. See also PSI POWERS
The Dragon in the Sea
HERBERT, FRANK(Doubleday, 1956) Variant titles: 21st Century Sub, (Avon,
1956); Under Pressure, (Ballantine, 1974)Originating as an Astounding
serial titled "Under Pressure," this was Herbert's maiden voyage, so to
speak. Far transcending its routine plot-a "subtug" seeks to steal oil
deposits from the unspecified enemy's continental shelf, with a crew, one
of whom must be a spy (shades of The Hunt for Red October!)-the story
conflates the deep, closed-in submarine environment with the crew members'
psychic stress; they are both materially and mentally "under pressure."
The seemingly half-mad captain has echoes of Captain Ahab, and there are

allusions also to the Book of Job and Freud. The writer who one day would
produce Dune was well on his way. See also PSYCHOLOGY and UNDER THE SEA
The Martian Chronicles
BRADBURY, RAY (Douglas)(Doubleday, 1950)U.K. title: The Silver Locusts
(Hart-Davis, 1951)Even after forty years there is Golden Age magic in The
Martian Chronicles. What Bradbury did in effect was transplant his boyhood
"Green Town, Illinois" to Mars, and there work out the two planets' tragic
but ultimately redemptive destiny. The stories worked together into this
book had been previously published in the 1940s; some in mainstream
magazines, most in SF pulps, notably Planet Stories. Several of the
chapters have been reprinted in The Stories of Ray Bradbury, but not all;
one notable omission, ". . . And the Moon Be Still as Bright," originally
in Thrilling Wonder Stories (June, 1948), contains the key to Bradbury's
entire argument. Conversely, expanded versions of The Martian Chronicles
published in 1963 (Time, Inc.) and 1977 (Doubleday), added other Mars
stories that had not been included in this initial edition, and such
stories do appear in the Stories. ln 1980 The Martian Chronicles was made
into an episodic, uneven, but at times highly effective TV miniseries,
starring Rock Hudson as the spaceship captain. By any measure this work is
a major landmark, both as SF and as literature. See also MARS
Novelty
CROWLEY, JOHN(Doubleday, 1989)This collection contains four stories, the
novella "Great Work of Time," and three shorter pieces, "In
Blue,""Novelty," and "The Nightingales Sing at Night.""Great Work of Time,
" winner of the 1990 World Fantasy Award and the centerpiece of the book,
is an ALTERNATE HISTORY story in which Cecil Rhodes, founder of Rhodesia,
also set up the Otherhood, a secret society of time travelers whose
purpose is to preserve the British Empire. Due to their meddling, England
wins World War I without help and dominates the world to this day.
Eventually, however, the Otherhood discovers that its present course will
lead to disaster and that, to save the Earth, the Empire must fall.
Crowley is one of science fiction's finest stylists and these stories are
a delight. Compare Michael Flynn's In the Country of the Blind (1990) and
Poul Anderson's Time Patrol (1991).
Lord of Light
ZELAZNY, ROGER (Doubleday, 1967)A colony world has used its powerful
technology to recreate Hindu culture, its elite assuming the roles of the
gods. The hero first rebels against these "gods" on their own terms, but
then opposes them more successfully with a new faith. Pyrotechnically
dramatic and imaginatively fascinating. The similar Creatures of Light and
Darkness (1969), which draws heavily on Egyptian MYTHOLOGY, is less
successful. Hugo winner, 1968
Nova
DELANY, SAMUEL R(AY)(Doubleday, 1968) A grail epic as space opera, whose
hero must trawl the core of an exploding star for the fabulous element
that is the power source of the galactic civilization. The most romantic
and action-packed of Delany's novels, but no less sophisticated for that.
Beautifully written. See also GALACTIC EMPIRES

What Mad Universe
BROWN, FREDRIC(Dutton, 1949)After a succession of well-crafted murder
mysteries this was Brown's first SF novel. The protagonist, a science
fiction magazine editor, is thrown into an alternate universe where space
travel was accidentally discovered in 1903 and General Eisenhower is
now-1949-leading a space war against invading Arcturans. In this universe
every cliche in pulp science fiction exists as a reality: bug-eyed
monsters, young women in see-through space suits, a superhero who is also
a scientific genius-and who turns out to be a particularly vapid and
obnoxious science fiction fan in "our" universe who had been writing nasty
letters to the editor-hero's magazine. Brown wrote this story before the
pulps were quite extinct, so the SATIRE had a recognizable bite. Vis-a-vis
science fiction in the visual media it still does. Compare Douglas Adams,
THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY ; contrast Harry Harrison, Bill, the
Galactic Hero (1965).
Inverted World
PRIEST, CHRISTOPHER(Faber, 1974)A city is subject to space-time
distortions that force its inhabitants to move it en masse, pursuing a
point of stability across a hyperbolic surface, although observers from
outside see it progressing across Europe. A fascinating juxtaposition of
incompatible worldviews, with some fine imagery in the description of the
hero's mission away from the city. Compare Philip K. Dick's Martian
Time-Slip . See also POCKET UNIVERSE
A Wrinkle in Time
L'ENGLE, MADELEINE(Farrar, 1962); Young adultMeg and Charles Wallace
Murray, along with Calvin, Meg's classmate, become involved in an attempt
to find Dr. Murray, a brilliant scientist who has mysteriously
disappeared. Under the direction of Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs.
Which, three "angels," they "tesseract" to Camazotz, a distant star, where
the children must save Dr. Murray, held captive by "It" in Central
Intelligence. Eventually, it is the self-effacing love of Meg, and not the
brilliant intelligence of Charles, that saves their father. One of the
contemporary fantasy-science fiction novels that enmesh young people in
planetwide struggles between good and evil. Well written, firm
characterization, provocative themes. Contrast Robert A. Heinlein's The
Rolling Stones . Companion novels are A Wind in the Door (1973), in which
Charles Wallace's bloodstream becomes an arena for a clash between good
and evil; A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), in which an older Charles
Wallace, aided by Meg and the unicorn Gaudior, goes back in time to
resolve several moral crises and avert nuclear catastrophe; and An
Acceptable Time (1989). 1963 Newbery Award; 1965 Lewis Carroll Shelf
Award; 1965 Sequoyah Children's Book Award; 1980 American Book Award for A
Swiftly Tilting Planet. See also CHILDREN IN SF
Rogue Moon
BUDRYS, ALGIS(Gold Medal, 1960)This probes a major metaphysical problem
with the widely used SF concept of matter transmission ("beaming aboard,"
in Star Trek parlance): If a person is "scanned," sent in dissociated form
to wherever, and then reassembled, does not the scannee (from his/her own
point of view) cease to exist? In this instance a Moon-based receiver

merely duplicates the traveler, leaving the original on Earth, resulting
eventually in a situation in which the transportee must die, so that there
will not be two of him. Budrys cuts deeply into some age-old questions
about the nature of the self, or soul. But this is no abstract philosophic
discourse; the situation is handled with unsparing realism, and the
psychic aberrations of the major characters led James Blish to exclaim
when the book first came out that they were all certifiably insane. A
major work, well meriting its Hugo nomination and (in novella form) Nebula
Award. See also MATTER TRANSMISSION
I, Robot
ASIMOV, ISAAC(Gnome, 1950)Nine stories from early-forties Astounding,
which illustrate Asimov's (and, perhaps, John W. Campbell's) "three laws
of robotics." With the memorable exception of Eando Binder's "I, Robot"
(Amazing, 1939), this was the first major breakaway from the
ROBOTS-as-menace cliche; contrast Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,
Frankenstein , Karel Capek, R.U.R. , and Miles J. Breuer, "Paradise and
Iron" (1930). Asimov broke with another genre cliche in this series by
introducing a high-powered scientific thinker who was not male, Dr. Susan
Calvin. Harlan Ellison wrote a film script from these early robot stories
of Asimov, structurally modeled on Citizen Kane, published serially in
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, 1985; Ellison's adaptation of the
story "Liar!" is especially powerful. Asimov continued to write robot
stories throughout his life; many are collected in The Rest of the Robots
(Doubleday, 1964).
Rendezvous with Rama
CLARKE, ARTHUR C(HARLES)(Gollancz, 1973) A vast alien spaceship passes
through the solar system, using the Sun's gravity to boost its velocity.
Human explorers witness the brief blossoming of its artificial life
system, but do not meet its makers. Ten years later, in Rama II (1989) by
Clarke and Gentry Lee, a second spaceship repeats the maneuver and a
second group of human explorers is dispatched. When the Raman ship departs
the solar system, however, three of the explorers go along for the ride.
In Clarke and Lee's The Garden of Rama (1991), by far the most successful
of the two writers' collaborations, the three humans aboard the Raman
vessel spend 13 years on their journey. Not expecting to see Earth again,
they settle in, have babies, and explore in much greater depth. They also
meet other alien residents of the vessel, though not the Ramans
themselves. Eventually reaching a gigantic space station, they Iearn much
more about the Ramans, though enough mysteries remain for a promised
fourth volume. Compare Larry Niven's RINGWORLD and Bob Shaw's Orbitsville
for similarly charismatic artifacts. Hugo winner, 1974; Nebula winner
1973. See also BIG DUMB OBJECTS
Golden Witchbreed
GENTLE, MARY(Gollancz, 1983)Lynne Christie, envoy of Earth Dominion, has
been sent to Orthe to determine whether its humanoid inhabitants are ready
for diplomatic and economic relations. She discovers a complex world with
factions both friendly to and hostile to her goal. Gentle's Orthe is a
superb example of world building, comparable in many ways to Frank
Herbert's DUNE or Ursula K. Le Guin's THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS . Compare

also C. J. Cherryh's THE FADED SUN . The excellent sequel is Ancient Light
(1987). See also PLANETARY ROMANCE
The Embedding
WATSON, IAN(Gollancz, 1973)An intricately constructed novel about the
power of language to contain and delimit "reality." It features an
experiment in which children are taught an artificial language to alter
their perception of the world; an Amerindian tribe whose use of
psychotropic drugs is associated with transformations of their native
tongue; and alien visitors who seek to understand humans via their
communicative artifacts. Original and mind stretching, something of an
imaginative tour de force. Compare Samuel R. Delany's BABEL-17. See also
LINGUISTICS
The Difference Engine
GIBSON, WILLIAM, and BRUCE STERLING(Gollancz, 1990)The Victorian
scientist Charles Babbage designed a primitive but workable mechanical
computer. He never built it, of course, but what if he had? The novel
postulates an enormously accelerated Industrial Revolution fueled by
construction of gigantic Babbage machines and, as a result, a social
revolution as well. Lord Byron, leader of the Industrial Radical party,
has become Prime Minister, and the country is largely run by a
science-based meritocracy. Against this wonderfully complex backdrop, the
authors work a fairly straightforward mystery plotline. It seems that a
valuable deck of programming cards has been stolen and a variety of
powerful people are willing to do virtually anything to recover them. One
of the joys of this rather erudite novel lies in spotting the many
historical personages and figuring out exactly how their lives have
changed. Compare Michael Flynn's use of the Babbage machine in In the
Country of the Blind (1990). See also STEAMPUNK
On Wings of Song
DISCH, THOMAS M(ICHAEL)(St. Martin's, 1979)The hero, growing up in the
ideologically repressive Midwest, yearns to learn the art of "flying," by
which talented individuals can sing their souls out of their bodies. He
loses his freedom, his wife, and his dignity to this quest, but in a
cruelly ambiguous climax might have achieved an absurd triumph. Clever and
compelling; a disturbing satire subverting SF myths of transcendence.
Contrast STARDANCE by Spider and Jeanne Robinson and Arthur C. Clarke's
CHILDHOOD'S END. See also ARTS
Roderick
SLADEK, JOHN T(HOMAS)(Granada, 1980) Original U.S. edition (1982) was
abridged, but 1987 reprint was completeFirst part of a two-decker novel
completed in Roderick at Random (1983). A satirical bildungsroman in which
the title character, a ROBOT, slowly develops through eccentric infancy to
detached maturity while various enemies attempt to locate and destroy him.
Very funny, picking up themes from The Reproductive System in presenting
its satirical account of man/machine relationships but extrapolating them
to new extremes. If Roderick is the epitome of the good robot, his
opposite is found in Sladek's Tik-Tok (1983). Tik-Tok is a robot whose
"asimov circuits" malfunction, allowing him to become as morally defective

as the humans who made him and thus enabling him to build a spectacular
career for himself. A fine black comedy. Compare David Gerrold's When
HARLIE Was One .
Star Man's Son: 2250 A.D.
NORTON, ANDRE (pseud. of Alice Mary Norton)(Harcourt, 1952) Variant
title: Daybreak 2250 A.D.; Young adultRejected by his father's clan, young
Fors, a mutant, runs away to prove himself a Star Man, or explorer. Along
with Arskane, a black youth who befriends him, Fors is successful in
uniting the several clans against their common enemy, the Beast Things,
and in instilling in the former the dream of starting over without
repeating the mistakes of the Old Ones. The author's first SF novel, one
of her best, both a fine study of coming of age and a convincing portrait
of postholocaust world. Compare Robert A. Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky or
Red Planet (1949). See also CHILDREN IN SF
Graybeard
ALDISS, BRIAN W(ILSON)(Faber, 1964)Unwise experimentation with nuclear
devices has led to the sterilization of mankind, and there seems to be no
hope for the future. The central characters, waiting for the END, consider
the ironies and frustrations of their situation. A key work in the
tradition of British disaster stories. Compare F. Wright Moxley's Red Snow
(1930) for an earlier variation of the theme.
Heroes and Villains
CARTER, ANGELA(Heinemann, 1969)After the HOLOCAUST, the flame of culture
and learning is kept alight by Professors guarded by Soldiers, while
barbarians and mutants threaten to extinguish it. The heroine, a
Professor's daughter, runs off with a barbarian and enjoys her just
desserts. A strange combination of the Iyrical, the ironic, and the
author's usual flirtation with horrors.
The Time Machine
WELLS, H(ERBERT) G(EORGE)(Heinemann, 1895) The Definitive Time Machine,
ed. by Harry M. Geduld, Indiana Univ. Press, 1987Critics have emphasized
the splitting of humanity into the Eloi and Morlocks so much as Wells's
vision of the outcome of the Marxist class struggle that its implication,
taken from Thomas Huxley, that humanity cannot control the cosmic
EVOLUTIONary process, and is, therefore, its victim, has not been
adequately emphasized. One should not overlook the fact that the book's
climax is the vivid scene of the dying Earth. It must be read as being
extremely pessimistic. The final speech of the traveler reveals the inner
tensions within Wells that may explain why he turned increasingly to a
heavy didacticism. See also TIME TRAVEL
The Handmaid's Tale
ATWOOD, MARGARET(McClelland & Stewart, 1985) DYSTOPIAn novel of a world
ruled by militaristic fundamentalism in which sexual pleasure is
forbidden. Conception and childbirth have become difficult and the
handmaid of the title belongs to a specialist breeding stock. The story is
annotated by a historian in a further future, whose shape is not revealed.
The 1990 film was somewhat sterile. Compare John Wyndham's "Consider Her
Ways" (1956) and Suzy McKee Charnas's WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD.

The Atrocity Exhibition
BALLARD, J(AMES) G(RAHAM)(Cape, 1970)U.S. title: Love and Napalm: Export
U.S.A. (1972)A series of "condensed novels"-collages of images presenting
a kaleidoscopic pattern of 20th century myths and motifs, particularly
those that dominated the 1960s. Political assassinations, customized cars,
the space program, the arms race, the media as brokers of celebrity-all
are juxtaposed here in a nightmarish panorama of a culture out of control,
subject to a cancerous malaise. Compare William S. Burroughs's Nova
Express. See also NEW WAVE and MEDIA LANDSCAPE
Riddley Walker
HOBAN, RUSSELL(Cape, 1980) A POSTHOLOCAUST story in which gunpowder is
rediscovered but set aside by the naively wise hero, who believes that
mankind must find a new path of progress this time. The first-person
narrative is presented in the decayed and transfigured dialect of the day
and represents a fascinating linguistic experiment. Compare Brian W.
Aldiss's Barefoot in the Head.
Out of the Silent Planet
LEWIS, C(LIVE) S(TAPLES)(Bodley Head, 1938)This was the initial volume of
Lewis's acclaimed Space Trilogy, which constitutes as a whole a highly
sophisticated Christian rebuttal to the worldview-today called "secular
humanism"-of H. G. Wells. The religious dimension is least evident in this
first volume, set on a well-realized, ecologically distinctive Mars. It is
more so in the second, Perelandra (Bodley Head, 1943; variant title Voyage
to Venus, Pan, 1953), in which the Garden of Eden temptation is replayed
on a marvelously described ocean-covered Venus (this time humankind does
not fall), and centrally so in the third, That Hideous Strength (Bodley
Head, 1945; abridged as The Tortured Planet, Avon, 1958), which angered
some American science fictionists when it first appeared because they
misread it as an attack on science. Lewis's actual target was scientism.
The trilogy has been compared to J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, but
that would be to throw it into a "heroic fantasy" mold, which really does
not fit. It can, however, be contrasted with James Blish's religious
fantasies such as Black Easter (Doubleday, 1968) and The Day After
Judgment(Doubleday, 1971). See also RELIGION
A Canticle for Leibowitz
MILLER, WALTER M(ICHAEL), JR. (Lippincott, 1960)Novelized from three F &
SF stories in the fifties; happily, the seams do not show. The Earth
plunges into a new dark age after nuclear war. Scientists, scapegoats
blamed for the war, flee to monasteries, which shelter them; as in the
previous downfall, the one coherent surviving social institution is the
Catholic church. A new Renaissance, in a context of warfare between
city-states, sees the rediscovery of electricity and, as an inescapable
consequence, weapons development. Still later, a new high-tech
civilization falls once again into nuclear war, although missionaries on a
starship that got away will plant a new, autonomous church on a far
planet. Bare-bones criticism cannot do justice to this outstanding work;
it must be read, or rather experienced. Compare Orson Scott Card, Folk of
the Fringe (1989), for a different church as the chrysalis of a new

civilization. Hugo winner, 1960. See also HOLOCAUST AND AFTER and RELIGION
334
DISCH, THOMAS M(ICHAEL)(MacGibbon & Kee, 1972)A dystopian vision of
future New York, focusing on various residents of a huge apartment house
and other parties interested in it. A brilliant work, utterly convincing
in its portraits of people trying to get by in a world they are powerless
to influence or control. The most eloquent display of the pessimism that
became newly acceptable in New Wave SF. Compare John Brunner's STAND ON
ZANZIBAR. See also ARTS
A Princess of Mars
BURROUGHS, EDGAR RICE(McClurg, 1917)Published under the pseudonym Norman
Bean as "Under the Moons of MARS" in All-Story (1912), A Princess of Mars
introduces Burroughs's most epic adventure and his finest imaginary world,
Barsoom, a construct based loosely on Percival Lowell's theories. Against
a dying planet torn by strife, John Carter fights his way across the
deserts, gaining the friendship of such warriors as Tars Tarkas of Thark
and the love of the incomparable Dejah Thoris, princess of Helium. They
live happily for nine years until by accident Carter ends up on Earth at
the cave where he escapes marauding Apaches by willing himself to Mars.
The Gods of Mars (1918) and The Warlord of Mars (1919), both seeing
magazine publication in 1914, complete the personal saga of Carter. Eight
other novels follow the adventures of his family and friends. This first
novel introduced the conventions Burroughs used throughout his various
series, including some of the tales of Tarzan, but no other series proved
so effective. Permutations of Barsoom survive in the worlds of "swords and
sorcery" so popular in contemporary SF.
A Voyage to Arcturus
LINDSAY, DAVID(Methuen, 1920)A classic allegorical romance in which the
landscapes and inhabitants of the planet Tormance provide an
externalization of the moral and metaphysical questions that preoccupied
the author. Its incarnate theological system influenced C. S. Lewis's Out
of the Silent Planet, and it also bears some similarity to George
Macdonald's Lilith (1895), although it is very much a work sui generis.
Lindsay's other metaphysical fantasies belong to the same species as
Charles Williams's theological fantasies, but generally find Christian
theology inadequate to their purpose (an exception is the posthumously
published novel The Violet Apple, 1978). Devil's Tor (1932) is a
particularly fine novel in this vein. See also PLANETARY ROMANCE
Last and First Men
STAPLEDON, (WILLIAM) OLAF(Methuen, 1930)An "essay in myth creation"
documenting the entire future history of the human race and its lineal
descendants. The "eighteenth men," living nearly 2 billion years in the
future, look forward with equanimity to the end of the story. The book has
dated somewhat, not just because its early chapters have been superseded,
but also because evolutionary biology has advanced since the 1920s;
nevertheless, it remains something of a masterpiece. The immediate sequel,
however-Last Men in London(1932)-is less impressive, involving an
elaborate commentary on the contemporary world from the imaginary

viewpoint of one of the eighteenth men. The 1988 J. P. Tarcher reprint of
Last and First Men includes a foreword by Greg Benford and an afterword by
Doris Lessing. See also GENETIC ENGINEERING
A Woman of the Iron People
ARNASON, ELEANOR(Morrow 1991)Co-winner of the first annual James Tiptree
Award for science fiction, which examines problems of gender. An
ANTHROPOLOGICAL team from Earth discovers an alien society where women
create all culture and technology, while men live in primitive style on
the fringes of civilization. Compare Sheri S. Tepper's THE GATE TO WOMEN'S
COUNTRY and Pamela Sargent's VENUS OF DREAMS for other variations on this
idea.
The Essential Ellison: a 35-Year Retrospective
ELLISON, HARLAN(Nemo Press, 1987) Ed. by Terry Dowling, Richard Delap,
and Gil LamontMore than one thousand pages of Ellison's work as a science
fiction and fantasy writer, essayist, screenwriter, television and film
critic, and all-purpose social commentator. Most of the classics and award
winners are here, including "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes," "I Have No Mouth
and I Must Scream," "'Repent Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," "A Boy and
His Dog," and "Deathbird." Less well known are some of Ellison's earlier
stories and his nonfiction. See also FABULATION
Gather, Darkness!
LEIBER, FRITZ (REUTER)(Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1950)This was first a serial
in Astounding in 1943, and built on the religious dictatorship theme
pioneered by Robert Heinlein in "If This Goes On-" (Revolt in 2100, in The
Past Through Tomorrow). Unlike the fundamentalist Protestant regime
envisioned by Heinlein the structure of this one is basically Catholic,
although with the magazine taboos of the time Leiber was careful to fuzz
the details. His real innovation, which drives the plot, is a
revolutionary underground whose goal is the restoration of political and
particularly scientific freedom, but which wraps itself in the trappings
of Satanism, complete with witches who zap around on jet-propelled
broomsticks. A brainwashing of the hero that temporarily recruits him into
the power elite he opposes ("memory can link anything") raises darker
issues of social control, although at the end of the story the forces of
enlightenment do prevail. Compare Lester del Rey, The Eleventh Commandment
. See also RELIGION
The Road to Corlay
COWPER, RICHARD (pseud. of John Middleton Murry, Jr.)(Gollancz, 1978)The
first of three novel-length sequels to the fine novella, "Piper at the
Gates of Dawn" , which deals with the revival of a heretical cult in a
post HOLOCAUST Britain dominated by oppressive religious orthodoxy. The
cult, organized around the symbol of the White Bird of Kinship, enjoys the
advantage that its most talented members can invoke and use a paranormal
empathy, often associated with music. In A Dream of Kinship (1981) the
cult has been transformed by the passing of centuries into an alternative
orthodoxy, but in A Tapestry of Time (1982) it undergoes a further
renewal. The books are Iyrical fantasies affirming the author's conviction
that it is spiritual rather than technological development that truly

constitutes human progress. U.S. editions include"Piper at the Gates of
Dawn" as a prelude. Compare Ursula K. Le Guin's ALWAYS COMING HOME .
The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories
WOLFE, GENE(Pocket Books,1980)Collection, including the title story and a
novella that inverts its themes, "The Death of Doctor Island" (Nebula
winner, 1973). They deal with the subtle interaction of "private"
fictional worlds and "public" real ones. Wolfe is playing, as in The Fifth
Head of Cerberus, with relationships between appearance and reality more
subtle and mystifying than those to be found in such Philip Dick novels as
Martian Time-Slip and DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?. This
preoccupation recurs in many of his other stories. Later Wolfe
collections, all of them excellent, include Gene Wolfe's Book of Days
(1981), Storeys From the Old Hotel (1988),Endangered Species (1989), and
Castle of Days (1992). See also FABULATION
The Man in the High Castle
DICK, PHILIP K(INDRED)(Putnam, 1962)An alternate history in which Germany
and Japan won World War II and partitioned the United States, except for
the Rocky Mountain States, which were left in a kind of political limbo.
Faction-ridden Nazism oppressively rules the Eastern United States (and is
exploring Mars); the West Coast, however, and its Japanese overlords are
working out a modus vivendi, exchanging Oriental and American cultural
values. In this cosmos an underground novel circulates, in which the
Allies won the war; but, characteristic of Dick's layers-within-layers
approach to "reality," it is not quite our history. Dick stated that at
crucial turning points in the plot he, the author, used I Ching to decide
what his character would do next, and it may be a testament to that kind
of divination that at the end everything does come out in the wash, sort
of. This is Dick's most important early book. Younger readers may need to
have identified for them the various World War II Nazi leaders who on this
alternate time track were still around in 1962. Compare Gregory Benford
and Martin H. Greenberg, Hitler Victorious. Hugo winner, 1962. See also
HITLER WINS and ALTERNATE WORLDS
Who?
BUDRYS, ALGIS(Pyramid, 1958)They did not call them " CYBORGS" when this
story was written; Budrys blended that theme with the competitive
dehumanization inherent in the Cold War. A scientist of humble immigrant
origins-a status in itself sufficient to make him suspect in some
paranoid, subversiveness-haunted minds-is injured in a laboratory accident
and falls into Soviet hands. The Russians equip him with a metal face and
other mechanical parts. He returns to the United States and is forbidden
to continue his research on the ground that nobody can prove who he really
is. A strong indictment of the idiocies dignified at that time (and to a
great extent still today) as "security," but a parable also of
estrangement and alienation more generally. Compare Bernard Wolfe's LIMBO.
Limbo
WOLFE, BERNARD(Random, 1952)U.K. title: Limbo 90 (Secker, 1953)
Recommended ed.: Carroll & Graf, 1987Hailed as America's answer to the two
greatest British dystopias,Nineteen Eighty-Fourand Brave New World, this

remarkable novel blends satire, Freudian psychoanalysis, outrageous puns,
literary allusions, and straight-line scientific and technical
extrapolation. After World War III, allegedly pacifist regimes come to
power in what is left of the United States and the U.S.S.R., based on
voluntary quadruple amputation. The assumption is that people cannot march
against each other if they have no legs; to disarm is necessary,
literally, to dis-arm. Of course, as a doctor learns who returns to this
mad culture after 18 years on a remote island, the actual state of affairs
is not one of peace and joy. All that was dysfunctional in the world of
1950 as Wolfe saw it is carried forward forty years into an appalling
future, including a truly dismal forecast of the future of sex. Although
lapsing at times into didacticism, especially toward the conclusion, the
narrative is hard-driving and dramatic. The "author's notes" in the 1987
reprint describing the intellectual influences upon him when he wrote the
story include both Norbert Wiener and A. E. van Vogt! By any measure,
including that of "mainstream" literature, this is a major achievement.
See also DYSTOPIAS
Man Plus
POHL, FREDERIK(Random, 1976)The protagonist is technologically adapted
for life on MARS. The process by which he is made into an alien is
revealed, ironically, to be part of a plan to save humanity from the
coming self-destruction of a nuclear war. A convincing and critical
reexamination of the theme of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. A
less successful sequel, Mars Plus (1994), was outlined by Pohl and written
by Thomas J. Thomas. Nebula winner, 1977
Player Piano
VONNEGUT, KURT(Scribner, 1952) Variant title: Utopia 14, Bantam, 1954.It
used to be called "technological unemployment"; then "automation"; now,
euphemistically, "job displacement." Vonnegut in this first novel
realistically traced the personal and political consequences of such
transformation, with most working people forced into a future WPA while
the upper class languishes in the vapid corporate culture of William C.
Whyte's The Organization Man. In his opposition to replacing people with
machines, the rebellious hero identifies with the Luddites of the
Industrial Revolution and with the native Americans' last Ghost Dance
uprising: quixotic, but necessary "for the record." The story has touches
of the absurdism that would become manifest in Vonnegut's later work, but
on the whole it can be read simply as science fictional extrapolation into
a quite possible future. Compare Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, THE
SPACE MERCHANTS. See also SATIRE
The Fifth Head of Cerberus
WOLFE, GENE(Scribner, 1972)Three linked novellas forming a coherent whole
(whose coherence has not been obvious to all readers). The key issue is
the identity of the main characters. One is a boy who is the latest in a
series of CLONES whose failure to achieve success in life has become the
focal point of obsessive "self"-examination; the other is apparently an
anthropologist who offers a strange "reconstruction" of the life of the
alien aborigines that were supposedly wiped out by human colonists but
actually used their shape-shifting powers to mimic and displace the humans

(including the anthropologist). A supremely delicate exercise in narrative
construction; not easy to follow, but one of the true classics of SF.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
ORWELL, GEORGE (pseud. of Eric Arthur Blair)(Secker, 1949)One of the
greatest novels of the 20th century, which anti-SF critics still insist is
not science fiction. Although British in flavor, this is a universal
future projection of the totalitarian state: its nature, purposes, and
prospects. Plotted like a suspenseful pulp thriller, but with characters
with whom the reader empathizes, it carries one along to its last ironic
line. And it should be read that way, freshly, even though a substantial
cottage industry of criticism has grown up around it like suburbs at the
base of a lofty mountain. The fact that the actual year 1984 came and
found not a Big Brother watching in London but an indulgent and
inattentive Old Uncle in Washington does not diminish the importance of
the warning; eternal vigilance, well before the event, is still the price
of liberty. This story was made into an effective motion picture in which
Richard Burton played his last screen role as the inquisitor, O'Brien.
Compare Aldous Huxley, BRAVE NEW WORLD, and Damon Knight, HELL'S PAVEMENT
. See also POLITICS
The Demolished Man
BESTER, ALFRED(Shasta, 1953)A Freudian-tinged murder mystery given a
science fictional spin: how does one premeditate a murder, knowing that
police detectives are all telepaths, and expect to get away with it? A
convincing portrait of how a society of mutual mind readers might actually
function. Tricks of typography on the page, showing for example the
interweaving of thought-conversations at a telepaths' cocktail party,
further the impact of this first novel by Bester. Written in close
consultation with Galaxy editor Horace Gold-as much a midwife of ideas, in
a different way, as John Campbell-this story richly earned its Hugo for
Best Novel, in the first year that prize was awarded. Compare Robert
Silverberg, Dying Inside. Hugo winner, 1952. See also CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
and PSI POWERS
The Forever War
HALDEMAN, JOE(St. Martin's, 1975)Fix-up novel of interstellar WAR against
hive-organized aliens. Realistic descriptions of military training and
action, with interesting use of relativistic time distortions. A reprise
of and ideological counterweight to Robert A. Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS
. Compare also Orson Scott Card's ENDER'S GAME . Hugo winner, 1976
The Lost Face: Best Science Fiction From Czechoslovakia
NESVADBA, JOSEF(Taplinger, 1971) Trans. by Iris Urwin)Most of these
stories were published in a Czech magazine; this translation dates from
1964 and was issued in the United Kingdom as In the Steps of the
Abominable Snowman (Gollancz, 1970). Science fiction with an East European
accent, but drawing upon the Anglo-American SF tradition also. One story,
"Dr. Moreau's Other Island," is a variant on one of H. G. Wells's grimmer
tales, and another owes much to Tarzan-and-Jane. Two-"Expedition in the
Opposite Direction," a time travel story, and "The Lost Face," about some
startling consequences of plastic surgery-deal in fresh ways with the

perennial question of determinism versus freedom of the will. In that
discussion, Marxist considerations are minimal; the only figure in the
book who quotes Engels (in the time travel story) is a rather
unsympathetic character. The stories are told with verve, humanity, and
wit. See also APES AND CAVEMEN
Wild Seed
BUTLER, OCTAVIA(Doubleday, 1980)The first story in Butler's Patternist
series in terms of internal chronology, though not in terms of
publication. In ancient Africa, Doro, an immortal telepath, begins the
work of genetic manipulation that will help him create an empire. Doro's
work comes to apparent fruition with the creation of his telepathic
daughter, Mary, in Mind of My Mind (1977). In Patternmaster (1976) we see
an entire telepathic society. Survivor (1978) is another book in this
well-done series. Although Clay's Ark (1984) is not a Patternist novel, it
explores similar themes. Compare Theodore Sturgeon's MORE THAN HUMAN. See
also GENETIC ENGINEERING
Human Error
PREUSS, PAUL(Tor, 1985)A biologist and a computer scientist combine their
artistry to produce a powerful biochip microcomputer. Inevitably, though,
the potential of the new creation extends far beyond the purpose for which
it was intended. Not as apocalyptic as Greg Bear's BLOOD MUSIC but very
effective in its fashion. See also NANOTECHNOLOGY
Take Back Plenty
GREENLAND, COLIN(Unwin, 1990)This sophisticated and enormously funny
postmodernist SPACE OPERA owes a debt not only to the pulp tradition, but
also to Lewis Carroll. Tabitha Jute, a free-lance space trucker with a
penchant for partying and choosing unsuitable lovers, is hired to
transport a rather shady troupe of entertainers from the decaying space
habitat Plenty to the surface of Titan. The entertainers, however, are not
what they claim to be, and Tabitha soon finds herself up to her neck in
intrigue. Compare lain M. Banks's The Player of Games.
Worlds
HALDEMAN, JOE(Viking, 1981)The first volume of a trilogy, followed by
Worlds Apart (1983). Earth lurches toward World War III, after which
devastation the future of humankind will become dependent on the society
of the "Worlds"-orbital space colonies. Near-future realism combined with
loosely knit action-adventure. The long-delayed and very well done
concluding volume, Worlds Enough and Time (1992), describes the difficult
journey of one of those colonies to another star system. Compare Ben
Bova's Colony. See also SPACE HABITATS
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
ADAMS, DOUGLAS(Pan, 1979)Adaptation of a much-loved and very funny
British radio series. Earth is demolished to make way for a new
hyperspatial bypass, but the hero stows away on a starship with a reporter
for the eponymous reference book. Their outrageous extraterrestrial
adventures are part SATIRE, part slapstick. The Restaurant at the End of
the Universe (1980) completed the adaptation of the original radio
scripts, but Adams then added Life, the Universe and Everything (1982), So

Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984), and Mostly Harmless (1992).
Although all five books sold well, the later volumes seem less inspired
and tend increasingly toward dark humor and irony. Readers who can't get
enough of this series should investigate Neil Gaiman's Don't Panic: The
Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion (1988). Compare Robert
Sheckley's Options (1975).
Helliconia Spring
ALDISS, BRIAN W(ILSON)(Cape, 1982)The first volume in a trilogy continued
in Helliconia Summer (1983) and Helliconia Winter (1985). Helliconia is a
planet whose sun eccentrically orbits a much brighter star and thus has a
"great year" extending over hundreds of generations. Its societies undergo
vast changes, interrupted by periodic plagues, and the relationship
between humans and the cold-loving phagors also alters dramatically.
Observers from Earth watch with interest from an orbital station and relay
the story of one great year back to an avid audience on Earth. The
dedication states that the trilogy takes up themes from Aldiss's non-SF
novel Life in the West (1980) in attempting to analyze the "malaise" from
which our time is suffering. Superb world-building SF. Compare Paul Park's
Starbridge Chronicles and Michael Swanwick's STATIONS OF THE TIDE. See
also PLANETARY ROMANCE
The Boat of a Million Years
ANDERSON, POUL(Tor, 1989)Through the ages random genetic mutation has
bestowed IMMORTALITY on a small number of human beings. Beginning in 310
B.C., Anderson chronicles the lives of a number of such immortals, some
who partake in society, some who remain aloof from it. Eventually, tiring
of an Earth that has grown too tame, the immortals build a starship and go
off to explore the universe. Although the novel is a bit rambling,
Anderson's historical detail is endlessly fascinating. Compare Roger
Zelazny's THIS IMMORTAL.
The Enemy Stars
ANDERSON, POUL(Lippincott, 1959) Recommended ed.: Berkley, 1979Serialized
in Astounding in 1958 as "We Have Fed Our Sea" (a title derived from a
Kipling poem that is quoted effectively at the story's conclusion), this
is Anderson at his tragic-heroic best, blending meticulous astrophysics
with brooding romanticism. Four astronauts-Japanese, Russian,
Australasian, North European (with the fascinating projected futures of
their respective cultures deftly sketched in)-are, in the Star Trek sense,
"beamed aboard" an ion-drive spacecraft in orbit around a dark star, whose
unexpectedly powerful magnetic field cripples both the ship and their
means of escape from it. Working against a dwindling stock of rations to
make repairs, each crew member in the face of death must come to terms
with the universe and with personal fate. The 1979 revision updated the
science. Compare Algis Budrys, ROGUE MOON. See also MATTER TRANSMISSION
The Complete Stories
ASIMOV, ISAAC(Doubleday, 1990-1992)Volume one assembles 46 stories from
three Asimov collections, Earth Is Room Enough (1957), Nine Tomorrows
(1957), and Nightfall and Other Stories (1959). Although not everything
here is memorable, there are a number of excellent pieces, including two

of the author's own favorite short stories, "The Last Question" and "The
Ugly Little Boy," plus the classic "Nightfall" and"Dreaming Is a Private
Thing." Volume two collects an additional 40 stories. See also GOLDEN AGE
OF SF
The Gods Themselves
ASIMOV, ISAAC(Doubleday, 1972)A novel reflecting Asimov's fascination
with the sociology of science, reminiscent in parts of J. D. Watson's The
Double Helix (1968). The energy crisis is "solved" by pumping energy from
a parallel universe, whose alien inhabitants must try to communicate with
humans in order to tell them that both races are in deadly peril. Written
with a verve and economy that are missing from Asimov's later novels.
Compare Bob Shaw's A Wreath of Stars (1976). Hugo winner, 1973; Nebula
winner, 1972. See also ALTERNATE WORLDS
Through Darkest America
BARRETT, JR., NEAL(Congdon and Weed, 1986)When his isolated farm is
destroyed and his family is murdered, young Howie Ryder sets off to seek
revenge. As he travels across a continent still recovering from a nuclear
war in the past, Howie discovers a horrifying world of
government-sanctioned cannibalism, slavery, and child abuse. This is one
of the bleakest and most powerful post- HOLOCAUST novels ever written.
Dawn's Uncertain Light (1989) is a competent, but somewhat less harrowing
sequel. Compare Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ and Edgar
Pangborn's DAVY.
Timescape
BENFORD, GREGORY(Simon & Schuster, 1980)As the world lurches toward
disaster, scientists in 1998 try to transmit a warning message to 1962 by
means of tachyons. Their story is told in parallel with that of the
scientists trying to decode the transmission, and the two plots converge
on the possibility of paradox. Unusual for the realism of its depiction of
scientists at work; admirably serious in handling the implications of its
theme. Compare Carter Scholz and Glen A. Harcourt's Palimpsests (1985).
Nebula winner, 1980. See also TIME TRAVEL
The Great Short Fiction of Alfred Bester
BESTER, ALFRED(Berkley, 1976) 2 vols., titled The Light Fantastic and
Star Light, Star BrightSixteen stories from 1941 to 1974 in this author's
distinctive style. The earliest is his somber "Adam and No Eve."
Significant headnotes to each story describe the circumstances and
emotions surrounding its composition, although as a good Freudian Bester
warns against drawing causal inferences; at the time of writing, your
rational composing mind doesn't know what your unconscious is doing. Time
travel especially engaged Bester, as in "Hobson's Choice,""Of Time and
Third Avenue," and "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed." But here also are
"Time ls the Traitor" (1953)-not time travel, despite the title, but a
wildly neurotic love story; "Fondly Fahrenheit" (1954); and "They Don't
Make Life Like They Used To" (1963), which in tone and temper came close
to the verge of SF's modern period. Bester concluded the collection with a
wry, lively, informative essay, "My Affair With Science Fiction."
================================================ The Stars My Destination

BESTER, ALFRED(Signet, 1958) Brit. title:Tiger! Tiger! (Sidgwick,
1956)Although the magazine serial version (in Galaxy) and the U.S. edition
were both titled The Stars My Destination, the U.K. title, with its
allusion to Blake, is far more apt. The character "burning bright/ln the
forest of the night" is Gully Foyle, the protagonist of an
escape-from-prison story Bester said he modeled on The Count of Monte
Cristo. But this story veers in a different direction; whereas the Count's
dominant motive after his prison break is to wreak vengeance on the men
who framed him, Foyle's is to undercut the entire rapacious class system
that brutalized him, by bringing to all humankind the power to
teleport-"jaunt," in the story's jargon-anywhere in the universe. The
author, in the concluding essay to his short story collection called this
character an "antihero," contrasting with the cleancut "Doc" Srmith type;
however, Gully Foyle is perhaps more accurately seen as a proletarian hero
in the tradition of Victor Hugo. Texts of the U.S. and U.K. editions
differ. See also SUPERMAN
The Best of James Blish
BLISH, JAMES(Del Rey, 1979)This posthumous collection draws upon all of
Blish's earlier story collections, assembling a dozen stories and an essay
to show the full range of Blish's work. "Surface Tension," Blish's famous
story of microscopic humans building a two-inch-long wooden "spaceship" in
order to cross from one puddle of water to another, presents Blish at his
most accessible, dramatizing an adventure story with intellectual rigor
and mythopoeic power; "Common Time" and "Testament of Andros," which
explore issues of PERCEPTION and reality, are as intriguing as they were
when first published in 1953. Two late stories, "A Style in Treason" and
"How Beautiful With Banners," show the mature Blish at his elliptical,
dense, and saturnine best. (GF) See also CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH
The Seedling Stars
BLISH, JAMES(Gnome, 1957)Four magazine-derived stories, blended into an
account of "pantropy": the genetic alteration of humans in order to
colonize radically non-Earthlike planets. This method of planetary
settlement is presented as more viable than creating an artificial Earth
environment under domes or terraforming the planet to make it resemble
Earth. The opening section, in which Earth's military tries to destroy the
initial pantropic experiment as Frankensteinian, and the closing chapter,
in which, much later, the environmental devastation of Earth by its own
inhabitants has rendered the planet uninhabitable except by panatropically
Adapted Men, make it clear that Blish was writing not only about
biological adaptation in the far future but about racism and social
adaptation in the here and now. Blish's characteristic care and craft in
revising his own work can be traced from the pulp-era "Sunken Universe,"
first published in Super Science Stories in 1942, through the more mature
"Surface Tension" from Galaxy in 1952 (SFHF), to Book Three of this work;
an example of an author committing a kind of pantropy upon his own
literary offspring. See also GENETIC ENGINEERING
The Uplift War
BRIN, DAVID(Phantasia Press, 1987)Whoever owns the secret discovered by
the dolphins of Startide Risingcan gain control of the entire galactic

civilization. The planet Garth lies on the other side of the galaxy from
the site of that discovery, but the alien Gubru, in a bold move to force
humanity to give up the secret, have taken that planet and its population
of human beings and neo-chimps hostage. Only a small band of humans and
chimps stands between the Gubru and success. The setting here is less
exotic than those of the previous two books in the Uplift series, but
Brin's character development is particularly good and the neo-chimps
especially are a wonderful creation. Hugo winner, 1988. See also GALACTIC
EMPIRES
The Shockwave Rider
BRUNNER, JOHN(Harper, 1975)The third of Brunner's massive alarmist
fantasies, partly inspired by Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, warning
against the loss of individual freedom that might result from widespread
use of information technology and against the psychological effects of
rapid technological change. Brunner complained bitterly about Harper's
insensitive editing; the 1976 Ballantine reprint restored the author's
text. See also COMMUNICATIONS
The Vor Game
BUJOLD, LOIS MCMASTER(Baen, 1990)The culture of the planet Barrayar
values men only to the extent that they prove themselves in the military,
and Miles Vorkosigan, the disabled son of Lord Aral and Lady Cordelia
Vorkosigan, has determined to succeed in such a career despite his
disability. Miles proves his worth, first at an isolated weather station
and then in space, where he rescues his runaway cousin, the Emperor
Gregor, from possible death. This is superior SPACE OPERA with a touch of
humor. Earlier books in the series include The Warrior's Apprentice
(1986), Brothers in Arms (1989), and Borders of Infinity (1989), one
previously published section of which, "The Mountains of Mourning," won
both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novella in 1990. All the Miles
Vorkosigan books make for fine reading. Mirror Dance was published in
1994, and more volumes are promised. Compare C. S. Forester's Hornblower
novels. Hugo winner, 1991
================================================ Tarzan of the Apes
BURROUGHS, EDGAR RICE(McClurg, 1914)Published in All-Story (October 1912)
and serialized in the New York Evening World before book publication, the
novel emphasizes the boyhood and youth of Tarzan, Lord Greystoke,
Burroughs's most famous (and most macho) hero, the only one to attain
mythic proportions and become a part of worldwide popular culture.
Burroughs claimed that Tarzan combines the best of environments (unknown
Africa) and the best of heredities (British aristocracy). Because D'Arnot
is his teacher, taking him to Paris, one cannot fail to compare him to
Rousseau's Emile (1762), especially in terms of education, to contrast the
18th and 20th centuries, both emphasizing the "natural man." Tarzan saves
Jane Porter from an unwanted marriage, but does not wed her in this first
novel. Because attention to Jane and Jack (Korak the Killer), the son of
Tarzan, aged the apeman, his family was omitted from most of the later
novels, while Tarzan roamed the jungles and veldt, always beloved by a
conveniently available primitive beauty. One should compare the Africas
and the love stories of Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard to see the

contrasts. For other treatments of Tarzan, one should consult Philip Jose
Farmer's Lord Tyger (1970) and Tarzan Alive (1972), as well as Gene
Wolfe's "Tarzan of the Grapes" (1972). Among the innumerable films are Bo
Derek's feminist Tarzan- which attempts the story from Jane's point of
view-and the neo-behaviorist Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan (1984), with
its brilliant cinematography. See also APES AND CAVEMEN
Kindred
BUTLER, OCTAVIA(Doubleday, 1979)Dana, a well-educated contemporary
African-American woman, suddenly finds herself pulled into the past to
save the life of a distant ancestor, an early-19th-century southern white
boy named Rufus Weylin. Although she returns to the present moments later,
she soon finds herself saving Rufus again and again. Although only a short
time passes for her between each bout of TIME TRAVEL, years pass for
Rufus, who gradually grows into adulthood and becomes a slave owner. This
sometimes painful novel features superb character development. By forcing
Dana to confront her own white ancestry, Butler points out the necessity
of coming to terms with the past without oversimplifying it. Compare Lisa
Tuttle's Lost Futures (1992) and Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic
(1988).
Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card
CARD, ORSON SCOTT (Tor, 1990)This enormous volume, some 46 stories,
represents most of Card's short fiction. Included are such well-known
pieces as the award-winning "Lost Boys" and "An Eye for an Eye,"
"Dogwalker," "Unaccompanied Sonata," "Ender's Game," " The
Originist,"and"Kingsmeat." Some of the early fiction and particularly the
non-science fiction is minor but, generally speaking, this is an excellent
collection from a controversial and important writer, who provides
commentary on the stories. See also CHILDREN IN SF
The Faded Sun: Kesrith
CHERRYH, C. J. (pseud. of Carolyn Janice Cherry)(DAW, 1978)The first
volume in a three-part novel, completed in The Faded Sun: Shon 'Jir (1979)
and The Faded Sun: Kutath (1980). An alien society organized somewhat in
the fashion of an anthill hires out its warriors as mercenaries. But when
its clients get into a WAR with humankind, the warriors and their kin are
virtually wiped out. The client species sues for peace, but the survivors
go their own way. One human involves himself with their cause and their
quest to save their race. Compare Jayge Carr's Leviathan's Deep.
The Fountains of Paradise
CLARKE, ARTHUR C(HARLES)(Gollancz, 1979)An engineer succeeds in building
a space elevator connecting a tropical island (modeled on Sri Lanka, where
Clarke lives, but moved for geographical convenience) to a space station
in geosynchronous orbit. Imposing propaganda for high TECHNOLOGY as the
means of human progress and salvation. Charles Sheffield's The Web Between
the Worlds (1979) develops the same premise in a more conventional
fashion. Hugo winner, 1980; Nebula winner, 1979
================================================ The Steel Crocodile
COMPTON, D(AVID) G(UY)(Ace, 1970) Brit. title:The Electric
Crocodile(Hodder & Stoughton, 1970)Two workers at a secret research

institute act as agents for a dissident group, but ultimately cannot
oppose the claustrophobic conservatism that has sterilized both scientific
and moral progress. Subtle and very convincing. Compare Kate Wilhehlm's
"April Fool's Day Forever" (1970). See also OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM
Jurassic Park
CRICHTON, MICHAEL(Knopf, 1990)A wealthy industrialist bankrolls an
attempt to recreate dinosaurs using Cray computers, the latest in gene
sequencing technology, and DNA recovered from prehistoric insects trapped
in amber. Succeeding, he builds a glorified theme park to house them but,
just as the park is about to open, things begin to go wrong and the
dinosaurs break loose. Although somewhat predictable, the novel is
tremendous fun. It's also much more intelligent than viewers of the
Spielberg film might be led to believe. Compare Larry Niven's Dream Park
(1981). See also GENETIC ENGINEERING
The Man Who Melted
DANN, JACK(Bluejay, 1984)A man searches for his lost wife in a world
where social order has been torn apart by outbreaks of hysterical
collective consciousness, which have spawned a new religiosity and an
epidemic of schizophrenia. An ironic reconstruction of the voyage of the
Titanic is featured in the plot. Aggressively decadent, with a hint of
Jacobean tragedy. Compare Roger Zelazny's THE DREAM MASTER. See also PSI
POWERS
The Best of Avram Davidson
DAVIDSON, AVRAM(Doubleday, 1979) Ed. by Michael KurlandEleven stories and
a book chapter, from 1956 to 1971. Editor Kurland's short, sarcastic
introduction rerninds us that academicians seek to "classify" a
magnificently unorganized writer like Davidson at their peril. "Now Let Us
Sleep" and, less convincingly, "Help! I am Dr. Morris Goldpepper," are
conventional SF; as for the others, if they are as good as "King's Evil"
and "The Golem," does it really matter whether they are SF or fantasy?
Peter Beagle, a student of Davidson's during that writer's brief (and
quite ungovernable) sojourn as a college professor, testifies in a
foreword to Davidson's incredible, casual erudition; Davidson himself
wrote a modest afterword. Some readers may prefer the story selection in
Or All the Seas With Oysters (Berkley, 1962), whose Hugo-winning title
story this collection unaccountably omitted. See also GOLEM
Lest Darkness Fall
DE CAMP, L(YON) SPRAGUE(Holt, 1941)Originally a novel in (December 1939),
this was one of the earliest stories from the pulps to be taken up by a
mainstream hardcover publisher. (A specialty house, Prime Press, published
it again in 1949.) Aware of a problem with the"Connecticut Yankee" theme,
namely that not even a supergenius from the modern era could have
singlehandedly introduced the full panoply of modern industrial technology
into antiquity, de Camp gave his hero, stranded in A.D. 535 in the
post-Roman interregnum, the one indispensable survival skill: he can
understand spoken Vulgar Latin! Martin Padway then proceeds to introduce
what the primitive technology of the period could actually have absorbed.
In his headnote to the version, regrettably omitted from the book, de Camp

in scholarly fashion listed his sources: Cassiodorus (who figures as a
character in the story), Procopius of Caesarea, Gibbon, Bury; the author's
meticulous care in this regard breathes life into what is by all odds de
Camp's finest book. See also ALTERNATE WORLDS
Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia
DELANY, SAMUEL R(AY)(Bantam, 1976)This complex novel considers the
problems that might arise for an individual trying with difficulty to
orient himself in a culture where people have almost unlimited choice of
identity and social role. The uncertainty of the protagonist's life is
reflected in the unstable politics of the solar system, which ultimately
becomes embroiled in a brief but catastrophic war. A rich, dense
dramatization of issues in existential philosophy and sexual politics. See
also UTOPIAS
A Scanner Darkly
DICK, PHILIP K(INDRED)(Doubleday, 1977)The protagonist is, as usual in
Dick's novels, gradually enmeshed by a web of circumstance in which he
ceases to be able to distinguish between reality and hallucination. The
fascination with which the author had previously contemplated such
situations is here replaced by horrified revulsion. An affecting, powerful
novel. See also PERCEPTION
The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick
DICK, PHILIP K(INDRED)(Underwood-Miller, 1987) 5 vols.With introductions
to its individual volumes by Roger Zelazny, Norman Spinrad, John Brunner,
James Tiptree, Jr., and Thomas M. Disch, the appearance of this work was a
major publishing event in SF. The 118 stories range from Dick's first
published one, from the lurid pages of Planet Stories in 1952, to a few
that appeared in this collection for the first time. Those in Vols. 1
through 4 were composed in SF's "early modern" period, ending in 1963;
those in Vol. 5 in the "modern" period that began in 1964, but Philip Dick
was so far ahead of most of his contemporaries in the 1950s that it is
hardly appropriate thus to periodize him; and Damon Knight's premature
judgment after the earliest of these stories had appeared [In Search of
Wonder], that Dick "writes the trivial, short, bland sort of story that is
instantly saleable and instantly forgettable" can now be set aside. The
existence of this collection corrects the critical record; much as had
happened earlier to Scott Fitzgerald, voluminous discussion of the novels
had obscured the author's gifts as a craftsman of shorter tales. Endnotes
to individual stories, written by Dick for earlier collections published
in 1977 and 1980, are informative and, one must say, wise. To single out
particular morsels from this rich banquet would be a disservice; however,
the author did state in 1976 that the story "Human Is" (written 1953; in
Vol. 2) "is my credo. May it be yours." A trade paper edition shifting two
stories between volumes and retitling was published by Citadel Twilight,
1990-1992. See also PERCEPTION
VALIS
DICK, PHILIP K(INDRED)(Bantam, 1981)A convoluted novel in which the
author figures as character, though his role is subservient to that of his
alter ego, Horselover Fat, who achieves miraculous enlightenment courtesy

of the godlike Vast Active Living Intelligence System, but has difficulty
communicating his insights to others. Radio Free Albemuth (1985) uses
similar materials, apparently being a different draft for the same
purpose. See also RELIGION
Galactic Pot-Healer
DICK, PHILIP K(INDRED)(Berkley, 1969)A very curious novel in which the
hero, a dissatisfied mender of pots, joins a group of misfits assembled by
a godlike alien to raise a sunken cathedral, while other ALIENS read the
runes that may indicate the destiny of the universe. A prefiguration of
the metaphysical themes of Dick's last novels, developed in a mock-naive
fashion slightly reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut's THE SIRENS OF TITAN.A Maze
of Death (1970) picked up the theological issues for more earnest
development. Our Friends From Frolix 8 (1970) reassigned them to a
throwaway role as an alien god is discovered dead in the void and his
human messiah plays an essentially ambiguous role.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
DICK, PHILIP K. (Doubleday, 1965)In an early 21st century afflicted by
ecological catastrophes and forced emigration into space, Barney Mayerson
hopes to avoid being drafted to the Mars colony and keep his job as a
designer of dollhouses for Walt and Perky Pat, theminiature dolls whose
perfect lives offer vicarious escape for the miserable Martian colonists.
With Can-D, a hallucinogen manufactured by Barney's employer, the
colonists can enjoy brief hallucinations of suburban bliss as the poised
Walt and Perky Pat. However, Can-D is threatened by a new and more
powerful drug, Chew-Z, which is introduced onto the market by the
mysterious Palmer Eldritch after he returns from ten years in another star
system. While Can-D is short-lived in its effects and requires the use of
commercial accessories, Chew-Z seems indistinguishable from reality, and
appears to last forever. Only gradually do people realize the ontological
nightmare created by the sinister Palmer Eldritch, whose control of
reality makes him a kind of malign deity. Dick's explorations of altered
perceptions, his satire of American life in the early 60s, and his zany,
slapdash plot and settings are nowhere more vivid than in The Three
Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which most Dick fans consider his finest
novel. Although it is not as well-written or carefully constructed as THE
MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, its intensity and emotional power are matched only
by the much later A SCANNER DARKLY andVALIS. For different renditions of
the borderland between reality and illusion, compare Salman Rushdie's
Grimus and James Morrow's The Continent of Lies. (GF)See also DRUGS and
PERCEPTION
The Weathermonger
DICKINSON, PETER(Gollancz, 1968) The first volume in the Changes trilogy.
Geoffrey and Sally, brother and sister, having been abandoned to die as
witches, escape to France. There they are urged to return to England and
discover the cause of the changes that have thrown the British Isles back
into the Middle Ages, where ignorance and superstition again rule, all
things mechanical are feared, and even the weather is controlled by
incantation. The children find out that Merlin's sleep has been disturbed,
and, unhappy with what he sees, Merlin has sent England back to a time he

knows. Geoffrey and Sally convince him to wait for a more suitable time to
return and he relents, freeing England from its curse. A brilliantly
imaginative combination of myth and science fiction. Heartsease (1969)
recounts the successful rescue of a witch by a group of children. In The
Devil's Children (1970), Nicky and a band of Sikhs, free of the madness
caused by the changes, become allies, settle on a farm, and beat off
various threats to their safety. Compare William Mayne's Earthfasts or
John Christopher's The Prince in Waiting. See also HOLOCAUST AND AFTER
The Start of the End of It All
EMSHWILLER, CAROL(Women's Press, 1990)The most recent (and best) of the
author's story collections, following Joy in Our Cause (1974) and Verging
on the Pertinent (1989); gathers 18 stories from sixties, seventies, and
eighties. Some are straight mimetic fiction, but most construct absurdist
SF scenarios enabling brilliantly pointed observations of sexual politics,
such as the cat-hating aliens of the title story, whose attitudes converge
with those of human men toward women. The text of the 1990 U.K. and 1991
U.S. editions differs. Compare the stories of Joanna Russ. See also
FABULATION
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
FARMER, PHILIP JOSe(Putnam, 1971)The entire human race is reincarnated
along the banks of a huge river. Sir Richard Francis Burton sets off to
find out who accomplished this remarkable feat, and why (HW, 1972). In The
Fabulous Riverboat (1971), Sam Clemens undertakes a similar quest. Both
characters, and others who become involved in further books of the series,
The Dark Design (1977) and The Magic Labyrinth (1980), are continually
sidetracked by violent conflicts in which characters from various phases
of Earth's history are idiosyncratically matched against one another,
causing the main issue to be constantly confused, sometimes to the
detriment of the story. Associated stories outside the main sequence are
"Riverworld" in Riverworld and Other Stories (1979) and Gods of Riverworld
(1983). An early version of the story, written in the early 1950s for an
ill-fated competition, was rediscovered and issued as River of Eternity
(1983). Like a number of authors of successful, long-running series,
Farmer has recently franchised out the River World, editing a
shared-universe anthology, Tales of the Riverworld(1992), which features a
new novella by Farmer, "Crossing the Dark River," plus solid fiction by
Phillip C. Jennings, Harry Turtledove, Allen Steele, and others. Hugo
winner, 1972. See also ESCHATOLOGY
Sarah Canary
FOWLER, KAREN JOY(Holt, 1991)In 1873 an apparent madwoman stumbles into a
Chinese labor camp in Washington state and is led to a nearby insane
asylum. The woman, named Sarah Canary at the asylum, escapes and wanders
the Pacific coast, accompanied by a host of fascinating characters. But
who is Sarah, a broken victim of male oppression, the simple madwoman she
first appeared to be, or something more sinister, a vampire perhaps, or
something not of this planet? We never find out for sure, which has
frustrated critics bent on sticking the book into a generic pigeonhole.
What is certain, however, is that Sarah Canary is a brilliantly conceived,
beautifully written book. Compare Robert Charles Wilson's A Hidden Place

(1986). See also ALIENS
Rumors of Spring
GRANT, RICHARD(Bantam, 1987)A strange blend of satire, fable, science
fiction, and fantasy set on a far-future Earth where technology is in a
state of collapse, entropy seems to be gaining, and a badly damaged
ecology is actively fighting back. The First Biotic Crusade, a group of
eccentrics worthy of a Mervyn Peake novel, sets out in a huge Rube
Goldberg-like vehicle to uncover the truth behind the strange goings-on in
the world's last woodland, the Carbon Bank Forest. At once a cutting
attack on government bureaucracy, a sprightly and somewhat silly adventure
story, and an ecological fable, Rumors of Spring is beautifully written
and constantly surprising. Compare John Crowley's Little, Big (1981). See
also PASTORAL
The Hemingway Hoax
HALDEMAN, JOE(Morrow, 1990)John Baird, a Hemingway specialist at Boston
University with severe financial problems, falls in with some shady
characters who persuade him to fake and then claim to have rediscovered a
series of stories that Hemingway is known to have lost on a train trip.
Unbeknown to Baird or his confederates, however, some very strange
people-people not from our world-have a stake in Baird's not writing the
stories. Haldeman's intimate knowledge and love of Hemingway and his work
is highly apparent in this very short, very intense novel based on a Hugo
and Nebula Award-winning novella of the same name. Compare MacDonald
Harris's non-SF novel, Hemingway's Suitcase (1990). See also ALTERNATE
WORLDS
Make Room! Make Room!
HARRISON, HARRY(Doubleday, 1966)A classic novel of OVERPOPULATION and
pollution, reprinted in connection with the film version (which certainly
fails to do the book justice) as Soylent Green. An archetypal example of
1960s alarmism. (Compare John Brunner's STAND ON ZANZIBAR.)
A Storm of Wings
HARRISON, M(ICHAEL) JOHN(Sphere, 1980)A sequel to the downbeat sword and
sorcery novel The Pastel City (1971). It begins the transformation of the
city Viriconium into a milieu for more sophisticated literary exercise,
extended in In Viriconium (1982; U.S. title: The Floating Gods) and
Viriconium Nights (1984). Images of decadence and exhaustion abound in
this series, which contrasts with other images of FAR-FUTURE cities in
Edward Bryant's Cinnabar and Terry Carr's Cirque and has strong affinities
with certain aspects of Michael Moorcock's work. SF motifs are relatively
sparse in what is essentially a fantasy series, but the use of entropic
decay as a prevalent metaphor sustains the bridge between genres.
Starship Troopers
HEINLEIN, ROBERT A(NSON)(Putnam, 1959)Heinlein's Annapolis and Regular
Navy background form the context for the training and baptism-of-fire of
future space cadets. A well-told story, this novel won the Hugo in 1959,
but, later got caught in the crossfire of powerful pro- and anti-Vietnam
War feeling, which divided the SF community as it did the "mainstream."
The paradox is that Heinlein, with this work, gave aid and comfort to the

war supporters, a group to which he belonged in the sixties; while with
another novel, Stranger in a Strange Land , he helped to energize the
radical student generation that opposed the war. Compare E. E. Smith's
LENSMAN series; contrast Edgar Pangborn, A MIRROR FOR OBSERVERS. Hugo
winner, 1959. See also WAR
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
HEINLEIN, ROBERT A(NSON)(Putnam, 1966)Colonists of the Moon declare
independence from Earth and contrive to win the ensuing battle with the
aid of a sentient computer. Action-adventure with some exploration of new
possibilities in social organization and fierce assertion of the motto
"There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch." Though not a true sequel, The
Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985) is a much weaker novel set in the same
universe and with some of the same characters. Compare John Varley's Steel
Beach and Greg Bear's Moving Mars (1993). Hugo winner, 1967. See also
POLITICS
The Past Through Tomorrow
HEINLEIN, ROBERT A(NSON) (Putnam, 1967)Most of this omnibus compilation
had been previously published in four separate books: The Man Who Sold the
Moon (Shasta, 1950); The Green Hills of Earth (Shasta, 1951); Revolt in
2100 (Shasta, 1953); and Methuselah's Children (Gnome, 1958). These in
turn derived from magazine stories, starting in 1939 and continuing
through the 1940s; mainly in Astounding, a few in the Saturday Evening
Post. Collectively they constitute the bulk of Heinlein's future history:
a detailed forecast for the next two centuries, from the "Crazy Years"
(which, by Heinlein's calendar, have already happened!) to the beginning
of the first "mature" civilization 200 years hence. Other science fiction
writers (Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, James Blish, H. Beam Piper,
Cordwainer Smith) have undertaken future-building of this kind, but rarely
with Heinlein's degree of verisimilitude. The one major story omission
from the future history is "Universe" (in Orphans of the Sky), and of that
story only its brief prologue is really germane. But "Life-line,""Requiem,
""Blowups Happen,""Logic of Empire,""If This Goes On-,""Coventry,""The
Green Hills of Earth,""The Man Who Sold the Moon," they're all here. See
also PREDICTION
The Rolling Stones
HEINLEIN, ROBERT A(NSON)(Scribner, 1952) Young adult The Stone family, at
the instigation of the twins, Castor and Pollux, reconditions a spaceship
as a family yacht, The Rolling Stone, and embarks on various adventures,
including selling used bikes on Mars and flat cats (which proliferate
hugely) in the asteroids. Its humor and wit still fresh, its portrait of
family life still winning although sexist, and its hard science plausible
and detailed, the novel aptly illustrates the author's eminence as writer
of science fiction for young readers. See also CHILDREN IN SF
White Queen
JONES, GWYNETH(Gollancz, 1991)This gender-bending story concerns a
reporter who, blackballed from his profession and living a hand-to-mouth
existence in a second-rate African city, is contacted by an apparently
female alien who offers him an interview and later seduces/rapes him.

Although the ALIENS look human, their thought patterns are radically
different from ours, and Jones does a particularly good job of portraying
them. Compare Gardner Dozois's STRANGERS.
The Stand
KING, STEPHEN(Doubleday, 1978) Recommended ed.: Doubleday, 1990This new
edition not only restores cut material, but updates the book as well,
setting it in the 1990s and improving the science content. The basic plot
remains unchanged: a killer flu escapes from a bio-weapons facility and 99
percent of the human race dies. In the United States, most of the good
people who are left gather in Boulder while most of the evil people end up
in Las Vegas. Armageddon follows. The novel's greatest strength lies in
King's ability to portray characters who are either highly believable or
chillingly twisted. Contrast David Brin's The Postman. See also HOLOCAUST
AND AFTER
The Best of Damon Knight
KNIGHT, DAMON (FRANCIS)(Nelson Doubleday, 1976)Twenty-two stories,
ranging from 1949 to 1972-"most of the best work I did during that time,"
Knight attests. They include "To Serve Man," which became a memorable
Twilight Zone episode; the sardonic "Not With a Bang"; "The Analogues,"
which became the first chapter of Hell's Pavement; "Babel II," in which a
visiting alien that looks like Happy Hooligan scrambles all human speech
and writing; "Special Delivery," in which a pregnant woman learns she is
carrying a fetal supergenius; several TIME TRAVEL stories "that God sent
me," Knight writes, "as a punishment for having said that the time-travel
story was dead"; "The Handler," about a socially rejected dwarf who inside
a "big man" humanoid shell is the life of the party; and, somewhat
atypically for Knight, "Mary," a powerful love story with a quite
unexpected happy ending. Barry Malzberg's introduction, "Dark of the
Knight," is short and laudatory; Knight's own headnotes are
disconcertingly frank about his personal life at the time the stories were
written, but that has always been his way.
The Best of C. M. Kornbluth
KORNBLUTH, C(YRIL) M. (Nelson Doubleday, 1976) Ed. by Frederik
PohlNineteen stories, from 1941 to 1958, attest to the high quality of
what Kornbluth wrote in his tragically short career: "The Adventurer,"
with its devastating punchline, as well as "The Little Black Bag" , "The
Luckiest Man in Denv,""Gomez" (perhaps the first SF story set in a New
York City Hispanic milieu), "The Marching Morons" (SFHF), "With These
Hands," and one he had barely completed at the time of his death, "Two
Dooms." Most have been repeatedly anthologized. Pohl, Kornbluth's frequent
collaborator, selected the stories and wrote the introduction. Only a
rubric against annotating pure fantasy stories prevented listing also
Thirteen O'Clock (Dell, 1970), which reproduced the sprightly tales
Kornbluth (under the name "Cecil Corwin") wrote in the early forties as a
teenager; no one should be denied the pleasure of reading them.
The Best of Henry Kuttner
KUTTNER, HENRY(Nelson Doubleday, 1975)Seventeen stories, mostly from
1940s Astounding. Science fiction with an acute psychological sensibility,

straightforwardly told. Ray Bradbury contributes an appreciative
introduction. Here are stories originally penned under Kuttner's mordant
Lewis Padgett pseudonym, such as "The Twonky,""The Proud Robot," and the
haunting "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" (SFHF)-the most plausible explanation
yet of where Lewis Carroll really got that nonsense poem. Other stories
had first been published under Kuttner's own name, including the powerful
"Absalom." There are no stories under the "Lawrence O'Donnell" nom de
plume (that is, co-written with C. L. Moore), although that is always a
hard judgment call with that highly symbiotic husband-wife writing team.
Mutant
KUTTNER, HENRY, and C(ATHERINE) L. MOORE (published under the name Lewis
Padgett)(Gnome, 1953)These are the "Baldy" stories, published in
Astounding between 1945 and 1953; the first, which assumed a
post-atomic-war "balance of terror" among independent city-states linked
by commerce, interestingly appeared in the magazine just before the actual
atomic bomb. Radiation-induced mutation has begotten a race of telepaths,
with a secondary genetic trait of baldness, hence the name. To wear a wig
or go proudly naked-headed signifies an ideological division, between
living as harmoniously as may be with the nontelepath majority and
aggressively asserting superiority on Nazi "superman" lines. The rational
working out of this dilemma created a warm, socially and politically
thoughtful story. Compare Alfred Bester, THE DEMOLISHED MAN; contrast
Zenna Henderson, PILGRIMAGE. See also PSI POWERS
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
LE GUIN, URSULA K(ROEBER)(Harper, 1974)This story contrasts the
poverty-stricken world of Anarres, whose political order is anarchist and
egalitarian, with its rich neighbor Urras, from whose capitalist and
competitive system the settlers of Anarres initially fled. A physicist who
must travel from one world to the other serves as a self-conscious and
anxious viewpoint character. A dense and very careful work, arguably the
best example of how SF can be used for serious discussion of moral and
political issues. The quality of the writing is also outstanding. Compare
Doris Lessing's Canopus in Archives series and Hermann Hesse's Magister
Ludi (1943). Hugo winner, 1973; Nebula winner, 1974. See also UTOPIAS
The Wind's Twelve Quarters
LE GUIN, URSULA K(ROEBER)(Harper, 1975)The first of Le Guin's short
fiction collections. The stories are various in theme but uniformly well
written, ranging from the philosophical "Vaster Than Empires and More
Slow" and the moving story of clone siblings, "Nine Lives," to a brief
prelude to The Dispossessed, "The Day Before the Revolution" (Nebula
winner, 1974), and the dark fable, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"
(Hugo winner, 1974). Within the SF field their elegance is matched by some
of the work of Thomas Disch, but their earnest seriousness is without
parallel. Le Guin's more recent collection, Buffalo Gals and Other Animal
Presences (1987), includes a number of stories available in her earlier
collections but is notable for her Hugo award-winning fantasy tale,
"Buffalo Girls, Won't You Come Out Tonight?" See also CLONES
The Word for World Is Forest

LE GUIN, URSULA K(ROEBER)(Berkley, 1976)Short novel originally published
in Again, Dangerous Visions . Human colonists on an alien world cause
untold damage to the innocent natives and their environment. A harsh
comment on the ethics and politics of colonialism, making good use of
anthropological perspectives. Compare Michael Bishop's Transfigurations.
Hugo winner, 1973. See also COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS
The Norton Book of Science Fiction
LE GUIN, URSULA K., and Brian Attebery, eds(Norton, 1993)Unlike the usual
Norton anthology, this enormous, 67-story, 864-page volume makes no
pretense of establishing a canon of standard classics. The selection,
although excellent, is somewhat idiosyncratic, excluding such expected
names as Bradbury, Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke (only North American
authors are included), with coverage limited to the 1960-1990 period. Many
of the genre's acknowledged masters are here, however, among them
Sturgeon, Blish, Dick, Benford, Butler, Gibson, and Le Guin herself, but
also included are stories by less well known writers such as Eleanor
Arnason, Molly Gloss, Andrew Weiner, and Diane Glancy. The book places an
unusually strong emphasis on women, minority and, oddly, Canadian writers.
The 129-page paperback teacher's guide, by Attebery alone, provides
one-page commentaries on each story and short chapters on teaching SF, SF
history and marketing, critical approaches to SF, primary and secondary
bibliographies, and a list of resources. Compare David Hartwell's The
World Treasury of Science Fiction (52 stories, 1,083 pages); contrast the
1946 golden age Raymond J. Healy/J. Francis McComas classic, Adventures in
Time and Space (33 stories, 997 pages). See also GOLDEN AGE OF SF
The Best of Fritz Leiber
LEIBER, FRITZ (REUTER)(Nelson Doubleday, 1974)Twenty-two stories from the
mid-1940s through the 1960s. Poul Anderson contributes an appreciative
introduction; Leiber wraps it up in an afterword. Stories range from
fiendish Astounding puzzlers ("Sanity," "The Enchanted Forest") through
early-fifties dystopias ("Coming Attraction," "Poor Superman") to
atmospheric tales from the late fifties such as that ultimate tribute to
Marilyn Monroe, "A Deskful of Girls," and the quietly creepy "Little Old
Miss Macbeth." Only one story is in Leiber's supernatural horror vein, and
there are none of his sword-and-sorcery tales. Readers may argue
endlessly, however, as to whether "The Man Who Never Grew Young"-the only
story retained from Leiber's first, long-out-of-print collection Night's
Black Agents (Arkham, 1947)-is SF or fantasy.
The Wanderer
LEIBER, FRITZ(Ballantine, 1964)Worldwide disaster occurs when a
mysterious, planet-sized spaceship appears out of nowhere, goes into Earth
orbit, and begins to take the Moon apart, apparently for fuel. Leiber's
characters and dialogue haven't held up all that well over the years, but
his description of a large-scale catastrophe still impresses. Compare
Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer's When Worlds Collide and Greg Bear's The
Forge of God. Hugo winner, 1965. See also INVASION
Solaris
LEM, STANISLAW(Walker, 1970) Trans. (from a French translation) by Joanna

Kilmartin and Steve CoxWritten in Polish in 1961, this novel combines
profound philosophic speculation with the structure of traditional
action-adventure SF, embodied in a clear, vivid writing style that somehow
survives two translations. A planet under study by Earth scientists for
many decades is swathed in a world-girdling ocean, which, the scientists
have realized after initial skepticism, is one immense sentient organism.
For purposes of its own (never disclosed), this ocean "reads" the deepest
memories of the four men housed at Station Solaris and sends each a
double-"Phantom"-of a woman in his past; in the case of the viewpoint
character his estranged and since deceased wife, Rheya. But the phantom
Rheya thinks she is the real Rheya. And the mysterious world-ocean,
constantly flinging up strange shapes that defy the savants' efforts at
classification, may be the first, infantile phase of an emerging
"imperfect God." A major work by any measure. In the Soviet Union Solaris
was made into a well-received film. Compare Robert Silverberg, The Face of
the Waters (1991). See also LIVING WORLDS
Galaxies
MALZBERG, BARRY N(ORMAN)(Pyramid, 1975)Expanded from the novelette "A
Galaxy Called Rome." The plot, deliberately designed as a hard SF story,
involves a spaceship endangered by a black hole, on whose fate much
depends; this is blended with an elaborate commentary on the psychology
and sociology of SF writing, using the story as paradigm. It thus becomes
a brilliantly self-conscious work of art, more telling in many ways than
Malzberg's Herovit's World (1973). See also RECURSIVE SF
Memoirs of a Spacewoman
MITCHISON, NAOMI(Gollancz, 1962) U.S. paperback edition, Berkley, 1973The
viewpoint character's scientific specialty is COMMUNICATION with aliens.
Women, in this intergalactic future, are by and large better at that kind
of work than men; likelier to perceive the reality of sentience in bizarre
lifeforms, and more adroit at devising ways of making contact.
Extraterrestrials in this novel include a starfish-like, radially
symmetrical species whose mathematics and philosophy differ profoundly
from Earth's simple, on-off; yes-no bilateralism, and a
caterpillars-and-butterflies race whose adult form abuses and lays guilt
trips upon the sentient larval stage from which it metamorphosed. This
story also explores, more boldly even than Philip Farmer, the
possibilities of interspecies sex (and parenting). Considered a pioneering
proto-feminist work; certainly the female protagonist's outlook differs
markedly from that of the extroverted aggressive male heroes of most space
opera.
The Cornelius Chronicles
MOORCOCK, MICHAEL(Avon, 1977)Omnibus containing The Final
Programme(1969), A Cure for Cancer (1971), The English Assassin (1972),
and The Condition of Muzak (1977), the first three in slightly revised
form. Jerry Cornelius, the contemporary and near-future avatar of the
multifaceted Moorcockian hero, features in the tetralogy in various roles:
secret agent, messiah, corpse, dreary teenager and even a negative image
of himself. The first novel begins as a parody of heroic fiction, its
events running parallel to two of Moorcock's early Elric stories, but

moves on to parody other themes in popular fiction. The middle volumes
present a kaleidoscopic display of 20th-century motifs, and the fourth
moves on again to subvert the fantasy elements in the first three and add
its own theme of tragedy, symbolized with the aid of images drawn from
harlequinade. The series is a sprawling masterpiece: a dream story loaded
with all the threads of contemporary consciousness and modern mythology,
bearing an appropriate burden of nightmare and irony. The ubiquitous Jerry
can also be found in associated materials. See also NEW WAVE
The Best of C. L. Moore
MOORE, C(ATHERINE) L. (Nelson Doubleday, 1975)Ten stories from 1933 to
1946. Lester del Rey, a longtime admirer, selected them and wrote a
biographical introduction; Moore added a personal afterword. Outstanding
are three stories from Astounding: "The Bright Illusion" (1934), a
human-alien love story that anticipates issues raised by Ursula Le Guin's
THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS; "No Woman Born" (1944), about the triumphant
return to the stage of a singer-dancer all but destroyed in a fire, whose
brain has been transplanted into a robot body; and "Vintage Season" (1946;
SFHF)-originally bylined as Lawrence O'Donnell, the pseudonym employed for
collaborations between Moore and her spouse Henry Kuttner, here claimed as
Moore's alone-about time traveling tourists and the present-day man who
rents his house to them with tragic results. From Weird Tales the
collection includes Moore's first story, "Shambleau" (1933), which
introduced her popular interplanetary roamer, Northwest Smith, and two
tales of her medieval female knight Jirel of Joiry. A highly satisfying
collection. See also WOMEN SF WRITERS
This Is the Way the World Ends
MORROW, JAMES(Holt, 1986)Satirical apocalyptic fantasy in which the few
survivors of the holocaust are put on trial by those who would have lived
if only their ancestors had ordered their affairs more reasonably. Clever
and elegant. Compare Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle . See also HOLOCAUST AND
AFTER
The Mote in God's Eye
NIVEN, LARRY, and JERRY POURNELLE(Simon & Schuster, 1974)Superior space
opera in which Earth's interstellar navy contacts and does battle with an
enormously hostile alien race. The scenes of space warfare are well
handled, and the alien Moties are fascinating. The sequel, The Gripping
Hand (1993), is more mundane. Compare C. J. Cherryh's DOWNBELOW STATION or
Vernor Vinge's A FIRE UPON THE DEEP. See also ALIENS
A Mirror for Observers
PANGBORN, EDGAR(Doubleday, 1954)Martians in underground cities for
thousands of years have manipulated Earth's historical development.
Martian Elmis foresees a great new ethical age for Earth under the
leadership of a Gandhi/M. L. King saint-figure; Martian Namir looks toward
a "final solution" for the Earth problem in mutually annihilative war. The
conflict between Elmis and Namir has been compared with that of God and
Satan in the Book of Job; and beyond that, wrote Peter S. Beagle in
afterword to a later edition of the novel (Bluejay, 1983, p. 228), it
reflects "the endless internal battle that everyone fights who cannot

quite abandon hope of one day waking from the nightmare of our species'
history." Contrast Kurt Vonnegut, THE SIRENS OF TITAN . See also OPTIMISM
AND PESSIMISM
Woman on the Edge of Time
PIERCY, MARGE(Knopf; 1976)A Hispanic-American mother undergoes
experimental psychosurgery. She makes psychic contact with the
22nd-century world that has resulted from a FEMINIST revolution whose
success may depend on the subversion of the experiments in which she is
involved. Outstanding for the elaborate description of the future utopia
and the graphic representation of the inhumanity inherent in the way that
contemporary people can and do treat one another. Compare Joanna Russ's
THE FEMALE MAN.
The Anubis Gates
POWERS, TIM(Ace, 1983)An academic interested in a minor Victorian poet
named William Ashbless is recruited as a kind of tour guide to a time
traveling expedition whose members expect to hear Coleridge lecture. When
he is marooned in 1810 he has to fight a multitude of enemies, including
the man who marooned him. His struggle for survival, which necessitates
his becoming Ashbless, makes a fabulous adventure story with some
excellent gothic elements. More fantasy than SF, but the ingeniously
constructed paradox-avoiding time-tripping draws heavily on the SF
tradition. Compare James P. Blaylock's HOMUNCULUS. See also STEAMPUNK
Strata
PRATCHETT, TERRY(Colin Smythe, 1981)The heroine, a "worldbuilder,"
deserts her work in order to investigate the mysterious works of others
(presumably aliens) in the same vein-in particular, a flat Earth enclosed
within a crystal sphere, complete with monsters and demons. She sets out
with two alien companions to explore it, attempting to find out who built
it and why. An absurdist RINGWORLD, subverting SF cliches. See also HUMOUR
An Infinite Summer
PRIEST, CHRISTOPHER(Faber, 1979)Priest's second collection, superior to
Real-Time World (1974). The mundane lives of the characters are usually
interrupted by fantastic distortions of time and space, whose consequences
are seductive but possibly subversive of sanity. Includes "Palely
Loitering" and "The Watched." See also TIME TRAVEL
The Glamour
PRIEST, CHRISTOPHER(Cape, 1984)Outcasts of society, who pass unnoticed in
"the hierarchy of visual interest," can make themselves invisible, a
talent that is, ironically, the "glamour" of the title. The amnesiac hero
gradually relearns the use of this talent and rediscovers his love for the
heroine. A delicately ambivalent tale of welcome alienation. The U.S.
edition (Doubleday, 1985) is substantially revised. Compare Fritz Leiber's
The Sinful Ones(1953; revised 1980). See also PERCEPTION
Gravity's Rainbow
PYNCHON, THOMAS(Viking, 1973)A sprawling novel about a World War II
psychological warfare unit full of weird characters, one of whom seems to
be determining the pattern of V-2 rocket attacks by his sexual activities

but refuses to submit to study and possible control. Extraordinarily
elaborate black comedy. Compare the research establishment in Carter
Scholz and Glen A. Harcourt's Palimpsests (1985). See also ENTROPY
Red Mars
ROBINSON, KIM STANLEY(HarperCollins, 1992)This novel, the first of a
projected trilogy, is, without a doubt, the most detailed and impressive
portrayal of the exploration and colonization of another planet ever
published. Robinson is in complete control of his materials, whether he is
describing the engineering difficulties involved in the building of a
large-scale underground habitat or the political wheeling and dealing
involved in placating a wide range of political, religious, ethnic, and
commercial interests, all of which want a slice of the Martian pie. The
novel features a large cast of well-developed characters, breathtaking
descriptions of the Martian landscape, and a sophisticated understanding
of the complex interplay between technology and politics. Red Mars may
well be the finest hard-science fiction novel of the last decade. Sequels
are Green Mars (1994) and Blue Mars. For a competent, smaller-scale
approach to the exploration of the Red Planet, compare Ben Bova's Mars.
See also MARS
The Planet on the Table
ROBINSON, KIM STANLEY(Tor, 1986)Collection of early fiction by one of the
genre's finest literary writers, including Robinson's World Fantasy
Award-winning story about the Spanish Armada, "Black Air," and the fine
alternate history tale, "The Lucky Strike," which is set in a world where
the bomb was not dropped on Hiroshima. Robinson's other major collections
are Escape From Kathmandu (1989), which includes the Hugo- and Nebula
Award-nominated title novella, and Remaking History (1991), which includes
the Nebula-nominated "Before I Wake," as well as "Vinland the Dream,"
"Glacier," and 12 other fine stories. Compare John Kessel's Meeting in
Infinity. See also ALTERNATE WORLDS
Stardance
ROBINSON, SPIDER, and JEANNE ROBINSON(Dial, 1979)Based on a novella (Hugo
winner, 1978; Nebula winner, 1977). A story of exotic redemption in which
a crippled dancer becomes involved in humanity's first contact with
ALIENS, and helps set the stage for a mystical communion between the
species. The sequel, Starseed (1991), is much less successful. Compare
Orson Scott Card's Songmaster (1980).
The Child Garden: A Low Comedy
RYMAN, GEOFF(Unwin, 1989)This brilliant postmodernist extravaganza takes
place in a tropical future London where genetic engineering has abolished
cancer, mastered the art of passing on knowledge through viruses, allowed
human beings to photosynthesize and, tragically, caused an irreversible
change in human genetics, which leads most human beings to die in their
mid-thirties. The complex plot centers on a pair of artist-lovers-Milena,
a mediocre actress with a talent for directing, and Rolfa, a huge,
genetically engineered Polar Woman who sings opera. For comparably
audacious speculation about bioengineering, see Greg Bear's BLOOD MUSIC .
For a comparable picture of a city transformed by the greenhouse effect,

see Elizabeth Hand's WINTERLONG . Winner of the 1990 Arthur C. Clarke
Award and the JWC Award and a nominee for the British SF Association
Award. See also DYSTOPIAS
Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women About Women
SARGENT, PAMELA, ed.(Vintage, 1974)Twelve reprinted short stories by
women writers, all devoted to the examination of sex roles. Included are a
number of classics, among them Judith Merril's "That Only a Mother," Anne
McCaffrey's "The Ship Who Sang," Sonya Dorman's "When I Was Miss Dow,"
Kate Wilhelm's "Baby, You Were Great," Carol Emshwiller's "Sex and/or Mr.
Morrison," Ursula K. Le Guin's "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow," and
Vonda N. Mclntyre's "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand." Sargent's long
introductory essay is particularly valuable. A second reprint volume, More
Women of Wonder (1976), featured another introduction by Sargent and seven
novelettes, including C. L. Moore's "Jirel Meets Magic," Joanna Russ's
"The Second Inquisition," and Le Guin's "The Day Before the Revolution." A
collection of original fiction, The New Women of Wonder (1978), included
Dorman's "Building Block," Eleanor Arnason's "Warlord of Saturn's Moons,"
and others. Two new Women of Wonder anthologies were nearing completion in
late 1993 and will be published in 1995. Compare Cassandra Rising (1978)
edited by Alice Laurance, Millennial Women (1978), edited by Virginia
Kidd, and Aurora: Beyond Equality (1976), edited by Vonda N. Mclntyre and
Susan J. Anderson. See also FEMINISM
The Ragged Astronauts
SHAW, BOB(Gollancz, 1986)In a planetary system where two worlds share a
common atmosphere the inhabitants of one are forced by circumstance to
migrate to the other in hot air BALLOONS. An unusual adventure story in
which good characterization helps to make extraordinary events plausible.
The somewhat less successful sequels are The Wooden Spaceships (1988) and
The Fugitive Worlds (1989).
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
SHEA, ROBERT, and ROBERT ANTON WILSON(Dell, 1984)An omnibus edition of a
three-decker novel whose separate parts-The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden
Apple, and Leviathan-first appeared in 1975. A wild extravaganza that
hypothesizes that all the secret societies claiming access to a special
enlightenment were and are part of a huge conspiracy that will take over
Earth unless the heroes of the counterculture can stop them. A crazy
compendium of contemporary concerns. Compare Thomas Pynchon's GRAVITY'S
RAINBOW . See also PARANOIA
Is That What People Do?
SHECKLEY, ROBERT(Holt, 1984)This collection recombines stories from
earlier collections, as did The Wonderful World of Robert Sheckley (1979).
A five-volume set collected 132 stories, The Collected Short Stories of
Robert Sheckley (Pulphouse, 1991). His stories are very funny, but the
HUMOR is generally underlaid with a dark and serious suspicion of the
follies of human vanity. His robot stories are exceptionally fine and
should be compared and contrasted with the Isaac Asimov stories, whose
themes they often subvert and mock. Compare also the short fiction of John
Sladek.

A Time of Changes
SILVERBERG, ROBERT(Doubleday, 1971)A colony world preserves a strange
culture based on self-hatred, but the protagonist learns individualism
from a visiting Earthman and becomes a revolutionary advocate of a new
kind of community. Unlike Ayn Rand's Anthem , with which it inevitably
invites comparison, it is not a political allegory but an exploration of
the value of human relationships. Nebula winner, 1971. See also PSYCHOLOGY
Science Fiction Hall of Fame
Vol. I (Doubleday, 1971); Vols. IIA and IIB (Doubleday, 1974)Volume 1
edited by ROBERT SILVERBERG consisted of 26 short stories and novelettes
chosen by ballot of the Science Fiction Writers of America as the best
shorter works in the field to have been published before 1965. The oldest
story in the collection is Stanley Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey" (1934);
the newest is Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" (1963). An
editorial decision to limit the collection to one story from each author
may have slightly skewed the selection. Is "The Roads Must Roll" the story
by which we wish to remember Robert Heinlein? On the whole, however, this
anthology may be taken as definitive, and it works effectively in the
classroom, except among the worldly-wise who "have read all those stories
before." For Volume 2, Ben Bova edited 22 novellas chosen the same way, 11
in each sub-volume. They range from H. G. Wells's indispensable The Time
Machine (1895), through Golden Age classics like Heinlein's "Universe" and
John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" to strong works from the early 1960s
such as Jack Vance's "The Moon Moth." In both Bova's and Silverberg's
anthologies there is surprisingly little overlap with the Hugo winners; in
fact, but one short story, "Flowers for Algernon," and one novella "The
Big Front Yard," which may say something about the differences between
fans' and writers' literary tastes. See also GOLDEN AGE OF SF
Way Station
SIMAK, CLIFFORD D(ONALD)(Doubleday, 1963)A Civil War veteran comes home
to the family farm, which becomes a station or stop for interstellar
travelers. Time passes more slowly inside the disguised farmhouse, so that
the stationmaster's longevity in the outside world (which he enters to
pick up his mail!) attracts the attention of hostile neighbors and of an
implausibly understanding CIA agent. The story gets its effect from casual
juxtaposition of bizarre alien visitors and artifacts with realistic
southwestern Wisconsin locale. lt carries Simak's perennial message that
all sentient beings can and must get along, or perish; the various
galactic races face the same danger from themselves as do Earth's own
warring peoples. A tragic counterpoint is a bittersweet, thwarted love
between the hero and a composite "ghost" of two women from his wartime
past. A sentimental story, but effective; it won the Hugo Award in 1963
for best novel. Hugo winner, 1963. See also PASTORAL
Hyperion
SIMMONS, DAN(Doubleday, 1989)Hyperion is the first half of one of the
most complex space operas ever written. With a structure based on the
Canterbury Tales, it tells the story of a pilgrimage of sorts to the
planet Hyperion, where the Time Tombs, alien artifacts that run backward
through time, are about to open. As in Chaucer, each pilgrim has his or

her own story to tell; stories that are individually riveting and
contribute thematically to the novel as a whole. The book ends just as the
travelers reach their destination. The Fall of Hyperion (1990) takes its
inspiration from Keats's poem of the same name. It continues the narration
of events at the tombs, but also opens up into a portrait of a
sophisticated interstellar culture where teleportation is so basic that
people routinely build homes with rooms on more than one planet. Powerful
players are interested in the events on Hyperion, and the individual
crises faced by the pilgrims may have galaxy-spanning outcomes. The
Hyperion books suffer from occasional problems of continuity, but they are
beautifully written and have few equals for sheer, large-scale sense of
wonder. A third volume is promised. On a somewhat smaller scale, compare
Alexander Jablokov's Carve the Sky . Hugo winner, 1990. See also
METAPHYSICS
The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwai
SMITH, CORDWAINER (pseud. of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger)(NESFA Press,
1993) Ed. by J. J. Pierce Gathers 33 stories, including two previously
unpublished, thus replacing The Best of Cordwainer Smith (1975; U.K.
title: The Rediscovery of Man) and The Instrumentality of Mankind (1979).
Most tales belong to an elliptical, vaguely allegorical future history,
relating colonization of space and achievement of virtual immortality,
both purchased at the price of growing class division between
Instrumentality and Underpeople, genetically engineered slaves. Most tales
can stand alone, and many are classics: "Scanners Live in Vain," "The Dead
Lady of Clown Town," "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell," and others. Norstrilia
(1975), a novel relating the accession of Underpeople to full civil
rights, continues the overarching story. The future history is evocative,
baroquely brilliant (though at times politically dubious), moving between
the early scientific romances of H. G. Wells and sixties New Wave. See
also FAR FUTURE
The Lensman Series
SMITH, E(DWARD) E(LMER)(Fantasy Press, 1948-1954)The SPACE OPERA to end
all space operas, with humans and aliens arrayed (some on each side) in a
cosmic war of Good and Evil, which even George Lucas would be hard put to
top. For all its implausibilities, this series represents a vast
improvement in "Doc" Smith's novelistic skills of storytelling and
character portrayal over his archetypal, but crude, Skylark of Space .
Readers' response to the "Civilization" vs. "Boskonia" theme as an
allegory of the "West" vs. "Fascism" during World War II was an important
factor in the stories' initial reception. The novels are best read in the
order in which they appeared in Astounding: Galactic Patrol (1937-1938),
Gray Lensman (1939-1940), Second-Stage Lensmen (1942), and Children of the
Lens (1947-1948). Triplanetary is a fix-up novel, which converts an
earlier, previously unrelated serial in Amazing into a "prequel" to the
series; it and First Lensman, written after the initial tetralogy but
preceding its chronology, give away Smith's conceptual scheme, which his
Lensman-hero had to puzzle out the hard way through four long novels.
Vortex Blaster (1960) is peripheral to the main series, although occurring
in the same future universe; it grew out of short stories in the more

obscure pulps (Comet, Super Science) in 1941.
Star Maker
STAPLEDON, (WILLIAM) OLAF(Methuen, 1937)A companion piece to LAST AND
FIRST MEN , taking the essay in myth creation still further to present an
entire history of the cosmos and an account of its myriad life forms. The
narrator's vision expands through a series of phases, each giving him a
wider perspective until he finally glimpses the Star Maker at his work,
experimenting in the cause of producing new and better creations. A
magnificent work by any standards; the most important speculative work of
the period. Of related interest is Nebula Maker, a preliminary and less
mature version of Star Maker, written in the mid-1930s but not published
until 1976. See also LIVING WORLDS
Snow Crash
Stephenson, Neal(Bantam, 1992)An outrageous combination of CYBERPUNK
tropes, sophisticated linguistics theory, and postmodernist satire, Snow
Crash is set in a near-future America where government has broken down and
just about everything is done by franchise. The main character, Hiro
Protagonist, a.k.a. the Deliverator, is a genius hacker and samurai
warrior, but he makes his living delivering pizza for the Mafia. When a
deadly disease, the snow crash virus, begins to take out hackers and
threatens virtual reality itself, Hiro is the man to tame it. The novel is
a complex stew of cyberspace high jinks, religion, off-the-wall humor, and
action-adventure sequences. It's crammed with delightful throwaway ideas,
such as Mafia-enforced, potentially deadly, 30-minute pizza delivery
deadlines and semi-intelligent, nuclear-powered watchdogs. Although not
calculated to bring pleasure to fans of old-fashioned, meat and potatoes
hard SF, Snow Crash is a genuinely dazzling novel. Compare William
Gibson's NEUROMANCER and Pat Cadigan's SYNNERS .
The Diamond Age
Stephenson, Neal(Bantam, 1995)The age of Stephenson's title is the era of
NANOTECHNOLOGY, when molecular control of manufacturing processes permit
light and superstrong materials fabricated from (usually) crystalline
carbon. In the 22d century, fully developed nanotechnology has produced a
world with little material want, but numerous bizarre systems of social
control, including a revival of tribalism, innumerable tiny nation-states,
and a transnational society called the neo-Victorians, who look for social
stability in the hierarchies and intricate structures of 19th-century
England. John Percival Hackworth, a rising neo-Victorian who works for the
posh design company Bespoke, illicitly copies an advanced interactive
device called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, only to lose it in a
mugging. When one of the muggers presents the device to his sister, Nell,
its enormous transformative potential is loosed upon the hypercomplex but
unsuspecting molecularly-engineered civilization. Stephenson combines
nanotechnology with STEAMPUNK in a flamboyantly inventive work of
sustained virtuosity, an infusion of nanotech speculation (about which
Stephenson has done more of his homework than most SF writers) into the
model of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE. A
pastiche more than a work of imaginative originality, The Diamond Age is
an enormously entertaining, wide-screen science fiction entertainment.

(GF)
Schismatrix
STERLING, BRUCE(Arbor House, 1985)The hero, in the course of a long and
eventful life, witnesses the political and technological evolution of the
solar system after Earth has been devastated. The long struggle between
the biotechnologically inclined Shapers and the electronically expert
Mechanists is complicated by the arrival of aliens and the eruption of new
ideological movements. A marvelous compendium of ideas; an imaginative
tour de force. Compare Jack Williamson's Lifeburst . See also GENETIC
ENGINEERING
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology
STERLING, BRUCE, ed.(Arbor, 1986)Reprint anthology of the latest New Wave
movement in American SF, edited by one of the major proponents and
theorists for " CYBERPUNK," which features a streetwise and cynical
assessment of future possibilities generated by new information and
biotechnology. Other leading figures in the movement-William Gibson, Pat
Cadigan, and John Shirley prominent among them-are of course represented.
The Ugly Swans
STRUGATSKII, ARKADII NATANOVICH, and BORIS NATANOVICH
STRUGATSKII(Macmillan, 1979) Trans. of Gadkie lebedi , 1972, by Alexander
Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone NakhimovskyIn a decadent future stange weather
conditions bring fantastic changes to a region where children appear to be
evolving into superhumanity. Contrast Arthur C. Clarke's CHILDHOOD'S END .
See also CHILDREN IN SF
More Than Human
STURGEON, THEODORE(Farrar, 1953)Winner of the International Fantasy Award
in 1954, and deservedly so. Growing out of the acclaimed novella, "Baby ls
Three," this excellent work describes the rise, against all the meanness
and bigotries of the surrounding world, of Homo Gestalt, an individual
composed of the blended intelligences of numerous people, each of whom
retains personal identity while contributing a particular special strength
or talent to the whole. An emergence-of-the-superhuman story; made more of
a struggle than it was for the superchildren in Arthur C. Clarke's
CHILDHOOD'S END, but shorn also of the inevitable tragedy forecast for the
superhumans in Olaf Stapledon's Odd John . Arguably Sturgeon's best book,
and frequently on lists for school courses in SF. See also PSI POWERS
Gravity's Angels
SWANWICK, MICHAEL(Arkham, 1991)This collection of Swanwick's major short
fiction includes such fine stories as "The Feast of St. Janis," "The
Transmigration of Philip K," "Mummer's Kiss," "The Edge of the World," and
"Trojan Horse." A number of these stories are award nominees and all are
beautifully written. One of the best collections in recent memory. Compare
Bruce Sterling's CRYSTAL EXPRESS and William Gibson's BURNING CHROME .
Stations of the Tide
SWANWICK, MICHAEL(Morrow, 1991)The jubilee tides are coming, and the
heavily populated lowlands of the planet Miranda are about to be drowned.
Entire cities must relocate to the highlands. Against this chaotic

background a government agent known only as the bureaucrat searches for
the outlaw Gregorian who, although locally rumored to be a magician, is
actually the possessor of stolen and very dangerous nanotechnology.
Swanwick presents a marvelously complex world in a very small space,
filling it with finely drawn characters, superb stylistic flourishes,
tantric sex, literary allusions galore, and fascinating bits of cybernetic
technology, including an almost magical artificial intelligence briefcase
and a government office complex located exclusively in virtual reality.
For similar literary excellence, albeit on a much larger scale, compare
Dan Simmons's HYPERION. Nebula winner, 1991. See also PLANETARY ROMANCE
Of Men and Monsters
TENN, WILLIAM (pseud. of Philip Klass)(Ballantine, 1968)After Earth is
invaded and colonized by gigantic aliens, humanity is driven to live a
ratlike existence within the walls of the invaders' dwellings. Years
later, a few courageous human beings steal an alien spaceship and head for
the stars. A fine novel by a talented writer who largely dropped out of
the field in the late 1960s and whose work is little remembered today.
Compare Thomas M. Disch's The Genocides (1965) and Gregory Benford's Great
Sky River. See also INVASION
The Gate to Women's Country
TEPPER, SHERI S.(Doubleday, 1988)After the nuclear war women rebuilt
society with themselves in control of all government, commerce,
agriculture, and art. The men live in garrisons outside the city walls
devoting themselves to games, parades, military training, and occasional,
strictly controlled, small-scale wars. When they come of age, boys are
given the choice of leaving the city to join the men or remaining as
servants. One young woman takes exception to this system and runs away
with her male lover. Although Tepper has occasionally been criticized for
the stridency of her message,The Gate to Women's Country is in reality a
subtle and sophisticated novel. Compare Joan Slonczewski'sA Door Into
Ocean and Eleanor Arnason's A WOMAN OF THE IRON PEOPLE. Contrast David
Brin's Glory Season (1993) and Orson Scott Card's The Memory of Earth
(1992). See also FEMINISM
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever: The Great Years of James Tiptree, Jr.
TIPTREE, JAMES, JR. (pseud. of Alice Sheldon)(Arkham, 1990)More than 500
pages of the best fiction of one of the best short story writers in the
genre, including such award winners as "The Women Men Don't See," "Love Is
the Plan, the Plan Is Death," "The Screwfly Solution," and "Houston,
Houston, Do You Read?" Among Tiptree's other fine collections are Ten
Thousand Light Years From Home (1973), Warm Worlds and Otherwise (1975),
Star Songs of an Old Primate (1978), Out of the Everywhere and Other
Extraordinary Visions(1981), the World Fantasy Award-winning Tales of the
Quintana Roo(1986), The Starry Rift (1986), and Crown of Stars (1988). Her
most effective stories seem motivated by outrage, using SF motifs to set
up situations in which the injustices and tragedies of our world are
magnified. Scientism, cruelty, and sexism are all attacked. Among those
writers currently publishing, the closest in spirit to Tiptree may well be
Sheri Tepper. Compare her Grass and its sequels. Compare also Joanna
Russ's EXTRA(ORDINARY) PEOPLE . See also OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM

The Weapon Shops of Isher
VAN VOGT, A(LFRED) E(LTON)(Greenberg, 1951)The bibliographic history of
this work is complex. Two short stories, "The Seesaw" and "The Weapon
Shop" appeared in Astounding in 1941 and 1942. These were incorporated
with a magazine version of "The Weapon Shops of Isher" (Thrilling Wonder,
1949), plus new material, to make up a book of the same title. However, a
magazine version of "The Weapon Makers," originally a sequel to the two
short stories, appeared in Astounding in 1943; then that story, even
though published before "The Weapon Shops of Isher," was rewritten to make
it a sequel to Shops; a publishing history that matches the intricacy of
van Vogt's plots. Greenberg published The Weapon Makers as a sequel in
1952. The National Rifle Association should love this series about the
Weapon Shops with their slogan "The right to buy weapons is the right to
be free." A van Vogtian superhero named Hedrock defends the Shops against
the machinations of the wily Empress Innelda . . . but it turns out that
he, Hedrock, centuries ago founded the Empire in the first place, as well
as the Shops. So schizoid a balance between LIBERTARIANISM and
authoritarianism may unconsciously say more about our own culture than
about that of van Vogt's far future.
The Dragon Masters
VANCE, JACK (pseud. of John Holbrook Vance)(Ace, 1963) Recommended ed.:
Gregg, 1976Hugo for best novella, 1962. At the edge of the galaxy, what is
possibly the last human-controlled world is periodically invaded by the
lizardlike "Basics"; in the interim, the humans fight each other. The
Basics use as their troops GENETICALLY ENGINEERed humans; the planet's
human defenders deploy dragons, of several sizes and degrees of ferocity,
which have been developed from "Basics" eggs. However, no summary can do
justice to the richness of Vance's atmospherics. Critics have pigeonholed
his style as "baroque"; anyhow, it is uniquely his. This book is a
landmark in the transformation of SF away from both Golden Age and 1950s
themes, yet in a different direction from the emerging "New Wave." The
advent of the dragon as a popular theme, foreshadowing Anne McCaffrey's
"Weyr Search" (Hugo winner, 1968) and its many sequels. The Gregg edition
features an introduction by Norman Spinrad.
The Last Castle
VANCE, JACK(Ace, 1967)A novella in which FAR-FUTURE Earth is recolonized
by humans who establish themselves as an aristocracy supported by alien
underclasses, but become vulnerable to revolution. Elegant exoticism with
an underlying political message. Compare Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia.
Hugo winner, 1967; Nebula winner, 1966
The Persistence of Vision
VARLEY, JOHN(Dial, 1978) U.K. title: In the Hall of the Martian Kings,
1978The first of Varley's short story collections, followed by The Barbie
Murders and Other Stories (1980) and Blue Champagne (1986). The title
story (Nebula winner, 1978; Hugo winner, 1979) is a parable in which men
are so alienated that the path of true enlightenment is reserved for the
handicapped. "In the Hall of the Martian Kings" has castaways on Mars
saved by the advent of miraculous life-forms. Varley almost always deals

in extremes, and the fervent inventiveness of his early stories made them
very striking. Compare the short fiction of James Tiptree, Jr. See also
PLANETARY ROMANCE
A Journey to the Center of the Earth (Voyage au centre de la terre)
VERNE, JULES(1864) Recommended trans. by Robert Baldick, Penguin,
1965.More than half the book is given to the preliminaries before the
actual descent begins, the first two chapters relying on a standard point
of departure, the discovery of a manuscript giving the location of the
caverns in Iceland. The narrative shows Verne's intense care in presenting
the latest scientific thought of his age, while the sighting of the
plesiosaurus and the giant humanoid shepherding mammoths indicates how
well he incorporated lengthy imaginary episodes to flesh out the factual
report. See also HOLLOW EARTH
================================================ From the Earth to the
Moon (De la terre a la lune)
VERNE, JULES(1865) Recommended trans. by Walter James Miller, Crowell,
1978The influence of Poe's "Hans Pfaall" on this novel by Verne remains
uncertain, for most of the narrative is given to building a cannon and
locating the site from which the shot is to be made. The actual shot
(flight) provides the climactic action of the novel. Not until Round the
Moon (Autour de la lune) (1870) did the readers learn that because of
deflection by a second earthly moon (Verne's invention) the ship merely
orbited the MOON and splashed down in the Pacific. Since the dark side of
the Moon was invisible to them, the voyagers saw nothing of it. That fact
raises a question about Verne's imagination: did he have to depend on
factual sources for his works? In this case, like Edgar Allan Poe and
Richard Adams Locke, he may have pulled his own hoax, for there existed a
long tradition of lunar descriptions. See also FANTASTIC VOYAGES
The Snow Queen
VINGE, JOAN D(ENNISON)(Dial, 1980)A colorful amalgam of SF and heroic
fantasy borrowing the structure of Hans Christian Andersen's famous story,
set on a barbarian world exploited by technologically superior
outworlders, against the background of a fallen galactic empire. The
convoluted plot makes heavy use of ideas drawn from Robert Graves's
classic The White Goddess. World's End (1984), a more modest sequel,
relates the adventures of an important secondary character from the first
book. The Summer Queen (1991) ties together plot threads from both of the
previous novels. Lacking the fairytale-like qualities of The Snow Queen,
it is a well-done but somewhat more conventional story of planetary
intrigue and interstellar politics. Compare Frank Herbert's DUNE and Mary
Gentle's GOLDEN WITCHBREED. Hugo winner, 1981. See also PLANETARY ROMANCE
A Fire Upon the Deep
VINGE, VERNOR(Tor, 1992)The Milky Way is divided into four concentric
zones, the Unthinking Depths, the Slow Zone, the Beyond, and the
Transcend. Inherent in the basic physics of these zones are limitations to
intelligence; intellect increases as one moves outward. Humanity,
originally from the Slow Zone, is merely one of uncounted races on the
Known Net. It is a mark of our success, however, that we have planted
thriving colonies well into the Beyond. A human research team exploring

the edge of the Transcend accidentally releases a Power, a malevolent
superbeing that begins laying waste to the galaxy, wiping out entire
intelligent species in a matter of days. Two human children, survivors of
the accidental release of the Power, hold the key to its defeat, but they
have been shipwrecked on a distant planet on the edge of the Slow Zone and
their rescue will be difficult. Vinge's plot is big and bold, almost in
the manner of E. E. Smith, but his scientific content is quite
sophisticated and his character development is solid. His doglike aliens,
with their limited group minds, are endlessly fascinating. Compare David
Brin's STARTIDE RISING . Hugo winner, 1993. See also GALACTIC EMPIRES
True Names
VINGE, VERNOR(Bluejay, 1984)Novella first published in 1981. Clever
computer hackers have established their own fantasy world within the data
matrix of the world's computers, where they can work mischief and enjoy
themselves-until someone (or maybe something) tries to take over the world
and the hero, blackmailed into cooperating with the FBI, has to stop the
rot. A lively and fascinating extrapolation of the idea that advanced
technology opens up the opportunities traditionally associated with
wizardry. A precursor of William Gibson's NEUROMANCER . See also CYBERPUNK
Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade
VONNEGUT, KURT(Delacorte, 1969)Billy Pilgrim survives the Dresden
firestorm as a POW but subsequently becomes unstuck in time after being
kidnapped by Tralfamadorians and caged with a blue movie starlet. Thus he
learns that everything is fixed and unalterable, and that one simply has
to make the best of the few good times one has. A masterpiece, in which
Vonnegut penetrated to the heart of the issues developed in his earlier
absurdist fabulations. A key work of modern SF. See also ABSURDIST SF
Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories
WALDROP, HOWARD(Ursus, 1990)Most recent collection, following Howard Who?
(1986) and All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past (1987; U.S.
paperback, Strange Monsters of the Recent Past , 1991, adds novella "A
Dozen Tough Jobs"), gathering ten stories from the eighties. All are
outrageously imagined and narrated with scathingly deadpan humor. The
title story retells H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds in a Texas setting;
"Thirty Minutes Over Broadway" recreates the atmosphere of early comic
books; "French Scenes" hilariously applies sampling/mixing technologies to
film. The three collections are filled with deceptively lightweight but
ingeniously crafted gems, marking Waldrop as one of best new short story
writers of the eighties. Compare stories of R. A. Lafferty. See also
FABULATION
The Flies of Memory
WATSON, IAN(Gollancz, 1990)Aliens who look very much like human-sized
flies visit the Earth and spend most of their time viewing our great works
of art and architecture, as well as our natural wonders. They say their
purpose is simply to record what they're seeing, but then some of the
objects begin to disappear, including a significant part of the city of
Munich. Compare Mark S. Geston's Mirror to the Sky (1992). See also
PERCEPTION

The Island of Dr. Moreau
WELLS, H(ERBERT) G(EORGE)(Heinemann, 1896) Variorum ed. by Robert
Philmus, Univ. of Georgia, 1993Reading Moreau as a version of the
Frankenstein myth overlooks the fact that, unlike Faustus or Victor
Frankenstein, Moreau has no sense of guilt or controlling humanity. He is
the most terrible of the three and cannot be called a tragic hero. Both in
the narrator Pendrick and the "Beast People," Wells shows the uneasy
tension between "natural" and "civilized" humanity. "The Law" satirizes
any attempt to codify religio-moral concepts intended to curb the natural
man. Wells emphasizes through his satire after Moreau's death that only a
fragile shell of civilization restrains humanity from its natural
bestiality. This thrust undercuts the long-time romantic idealization of
the natural man. Compare Brian W. Aldiss's Moreau's Other Island (U.K.,
1980; U.S. title: An Island Called Moreau, 1981). See also DEVOLUTION
The War of the Worlds
WELLS, H(ERBERT) G(EORGE)(Heinemann, 1898) A Critical Edition of The War
of the Worlds, ed. by David Y. Hughes and Harry M. Geduld, Indiana Univ.
Press, 1993The dramatic effectiveness of the novel lies in the detailed
realism with which Wells destroys Richmond, Kingston, and Wimbledon. He
brings horror to very familiar doorsteps. Perhaps more than any of his
other works, this dramatizes humanity's fragile place in the universe, a
theme that obsessed him from the first and that he desperately tried to
communicate to his contemporaries. Filmed in 1953, its most memorable
dramatization was the 1938 Orson Welles broadcast. See also INVASION
The Infinity Box
WILHELM, KATE(Harper, 1975)Perhaps Wilhelm's best early short story
collection, including the fine title novella and "April Fool's Day
Forever," the latter presenting a characteristic Wilhelm theme: a new and
promising discovery with tragic side effects. The earlier collections, The
Downstairs Room (1968) and Abyss (1971), also have some strong material;
the former includes "The Planners" (Nebula winner, 1968), one of many
convincing stories of SCIENTISTS at work in the forefront of genetic and
behavioral research. Other collections are Somerset Dreams and Other
Fictions (1978); Listen, Listen (1981); Children of the Wind (1989), which
includes the Nebula Award-winning "The Girl Who Fell Into the Sky" and the
Nebula-nominated "The Gorgon Field"; and And the Angels Sing (1992), which
features the Nebula-winning "Forever Yours, Anna." Wilhelm has no peer as
a writer of realistic near-future SF stories examining the human
implications of possible biological discoveries. Compare Karen Joy
Fowler's ARTIFICIAL THINGS .
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
WILHELM, KATE(Harper, 1976)Ecocatastrophe destroys the United States, but
a family of survivalists comes through the crisis, using CLONING
techniques to combat a plague of sterility. But are their descendants
really victors in the struggle for existence, or has their artificial
selection simply delivered them into a different kind of existential
sterility? Compare Frank Herbert's Hellstrom's Hive (1973) and Pamela
Sargent's Cloned Lives (1976). Hugo winner, 1977

This Immortal
ZELAZNY, ROGER(Ace, 1966)Expanded from a shorter version titled "And Call
Me Conrad" (Hugo winner, 1966). The superhuman hero must defend an
extraterrestrial visitor against the many dangers of a wrecked Earth where
mutation has reformulated many mythical entities. A fascinating
interweaving of motifs from SF and mythology-perhaps the most successful
of Zelazny's several exercises in that vein. Compare Samuel R. Delany's
THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION. See also MYTHOLOGY
The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth...
Full title: The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, and Other
Stories ZELAZNY, ROGER(Doubleday, 1971)A fine collection; the title story
(Nebula winner, 1965) concerns a man facing up to his fears in the shape
of a Venerian sea monster, and "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" is a poignant
story about a man who unwittingly brings faith to a Martian race on the
brink of extinction. The earlier collection, Four for Tomorrow (1967), is
equally good, but two subsequent short story volumes, My Name Is Legion
(1976) and The Last Defender of Camelot (1980), are weaker, although the
former does feature "Home Is the Hangman" (Hugo winner, 1976)-a
suspenseful story about an enigmatic robot executioner. Zelazny's most
recent collections are Unicorn Variations (1983), which features "Unicorn
Variation" (Hugo winner; 1981), and Frost and Fire (1989), which contains
"Permafrost" (Hugo winner, 1986) and "24 Views of Mt. Fuji by Hokusai"
(Hugo winner, 1985). See also PLANETARY ROMANCE
The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories
ZOLINE, PAMELA(Women's Press, 1988) Brit. title: Busy About the Tree of
Life, 1988Zoline doesn't write very much, but what she does produce is
superb. Her first story, "The Heat Death of the Universe," was hailed as a
masterpiece when it appeared in New Worlds in 1967. In the following
decades, however, she published only three more stories. This first
collection includes five stories, all of Zoline's previously published
fiction plus the new title story, a cutting satire on evolution. Compare
Langdon Jones's The Eye of the Lens and Pat Cadigan's Patterns . See also
NEW WAVE
No Enemy But Time
BISHOP, MICHAEL(Timescape, 1982)A strange, alienated child has lurid
dreams of the Pleistocene era, and discovers the truth of them when he
becomes a TIME TRAVELer in adulthood. He joins forces with a band of
habiline protohumans and fathers a child, which he brings back to the
present. Brilliant and memorable, written with great conviction. Compare
Vercors's You Shall Know Them. Nebula winner, 1982
JEM: The Making of Utopia
POHL, FREDERIK(St. Martin's, 1979)A new planet is ripe for exploitation
by Earth's three power blocs: food-exporting nations, oil-exporting
nations, and people's republics. Three species of intelligent natives
enter into appropriate associations with the three colonizing groups, and
are thus drawn into the web of conflicts and compromises that reproduces
all the evils of earthly politics. A cynical ideological counterweight to
stories of human/alien cooperation along the lines of Poul Anderson's

People of the Wind (1973). See also COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS
The Legion of Time
WILLIAMSON, JACK(Fantasy, 1952)A classic of pulp SF in which a small army
of soldiers of fortune is co-opted into a war between alternate futures to
settle which of them will really exist. The gaudy costume drama is
sustained by the power of the central idea, which was new in 1938 when the
novel was serialized in Astounding. See also TIME TRAVEL
Slan
VAN VOGT, A(LFRED) E(LTON)(Arkham, 1946)The author's first novel-length
work, serialized in Astounding in 1940, was also one of the first SF
stories from the magazines to make it into hardcover publication.
According to editor John Campbell, van Vogt used a "trick" to solve the
problem of how a merely human writer convincingly describes a superhuman
being who by definition is beyond human comprehension: compare Stanley G.
Weinbaum, The New Adam ; Olaf Stapledon, Odd John . The trick was to cast
the superbeing as a 9-year-old boy on the lam from the human dictator's
cops, and tell the story as a don't-pause-for-breath chase sequence.
Another explanation, offered by van Vogt himself at the 1946 Worldcon, was
that he took the interstellar alien monster viewpoint character he had
used in several previous stories, made it sympathetic, and installed it in
a human body. Whatever the explanation, it worked, in 1940, 1946, and
1951; the reader will have to decide whether it still works today. Simon &
Schuster published a revised edition, in 1951, but the first edition is
preferred. (Note: SIan, The Voyage of the Space Beagle, and The World of
Null-A were assembled as Triad: Three Complete Science Fiction Novels,
Simon & Schuster, 1959.) See also SUPERMAN
Stand on Zanzibar
BRUNNER, JOHN(Doubleday, 1968)A complex novel borrowing techniques from
John Dos Passos and ideas from Marshal McLuhan and other 1960s
commentators to provide a multifaceted image of an overpopulated near
future. Clever, highly detailed, and frequently very witty, the book is a
successful experiment and one of the key works of the period. Compare A
Torrent of Faces (also 1968) by James Blish and Norman L. Knight. Hugo
winner, 1969. See also OVERPOPULATION
Looking Backward: A.D. 2000-1887
BELLAMY, EDWARD(Ticknor, 1888)Without doubt the most famous of the
American UTOPIAS, this was the progenitor of several hundred works, both
in the United States and Europe, as individuals sided with Bellamy or
attacked him. Science is incidental to the text, although technology has
made the utopian state possible. The controversial issue centered on
socialism. See Roemer's The Obsolete Necessity (1976) for the most
detailed contemporary discussion of Bellamy and the United States in
utopian literature at the end of the century. For very different
treatments of socialism, see William Morris's News from Nowhere , Ignatius
Donnelly's Caesar's Column , and Jack London's The Iron Heel .
A Million Open Doors
BARNES, JOHN(Tor, 1992)The Thousand Cultures, once separated by
interstellar distances, are now being connected by instantaneous matter

transmission, and each formerly isolated planet is going through intense
culture shock. Giraut, who comes from a high-tech, pseudomedieval culture
of duels, troubadours, and chivalry, finds himself employed on Caledony, a
grim, no-frills world run according to the utilitarian dictates of
Rational Christianity. The clash of cultures is fascinating, though too
much of the novel's action occurs offstage. Compare Robert A. Heinlein's
BEYOND THIS HORIZON . See also UTOPIAS
Unconquered Countries
RYMAN, GEOFF(St. Martin's Press, 1994)Four novellas, three set in
troubled societies in the near future and a fourth in a far-future
galactic milieu, each dealing in different ways with the subversive nature
of sexuality, the ambivalent responses of the individual to
well-intentioned oppressors, and the pain of exercising one's conscience.
"The Unconquered Country," Ryman's best-known work, relates the horrific
story of Third Child, whose agrarian society is devastated when a distant
superpower arms its enemy as part of an uncomprehended geopolitical
strategy. The story, an unmistakable allegory for the tragedy of Cambodia,
retains its power despite an occasional mawkishness. "Fan," perhaps the
best in the book, tells of an unskilled and disenfranchised young woman
named Billie, whose bleak life as a single mother is ambiguously redeemed
by her years-long infatuation with a piece of interactive software
designed to mimic the responses of a revered pop singer. "A Fall of
Angels," the longest and earliest story, is more promising than
accomplished, but the other three stories are beautifully written and
deeply felt, and stand among the finest long stories in recent science
fiction. Compare Gwyneth Jones's DIVINE ENDURANCE and WHITE QUEEN. (GF)
See also WAR and COMPUTERS
Use of Weapons
BANKS, IAIN M.(Macdonald, 1990)Already widely known for his intense and
emotionally charged mainstream novels, Banks began in 1987 to write a
series of violent but ironic and sophisticated SPACE OPERAS. The Culture,
a wealthy and peaceful high-tech civilization, has reached the state of
total freedom from political oppression or material needs, and its members
spend most of their time exploring the universe in vast interstellar
ships. Most of the novels in this series-which includes Consider Phlebas
(1987), The Player of Games (1988), The State of the Art (1989), and
Against A Dark Background (1993)-confront the Culture with less fortunate
civilizations that still engage in savage behavior, which various Culture
agents must deal with. Consider Phlebas, the first in the series, follows
a deadly mercenary in his doomed campaign against the Culture, while Use
of Weapons takes a Culture secret agent through a series of disastrous
campaigns that leave him emotionally devastated, and call into question
the Culture's morally privileged position. For a different look at the
dynamics of interstellar civilizations, compare Vernor Vinge's A FIRE UPON
THE DEEP and John Barnes's A MILLION OPEN DOORS. (GF)
Synners
CADIGAN, PAT(Bantam, 1991)In near-future United States, an obsessed video
artist pioneers brain-socket implants that allow electronic "uploading" of
consciousness, but the artist suffers a stroke while psychically online,

releasing a destructive virus into the worldwide computer network. A loose
fraternity of teen hackers, aging rock-and-rollers, and corporate moguls
struggles to eradicate the virus and restore the "crashed" system. Tense
and complex, brilliantly wedding CYBERPUNK with the disaster story; along
with Mindplayers (1987) and Fools (1992), this establishes Cadigan as a
visionary explorer of high technology, pop culture, and cyborg
consciousness. Compare Norman Spinrad's Little Heroes and Marc Laidlaw's
Kalifornia.
The Shadow of the Torturer
WOLFE, GENE(Simon & Schuster, 1980)The first volume of The Book of the
New Sun, a superb four-volume novel completed in The Claw of the
Conciliator (1981; Nebula winner, 1981), The Sword of the Lictor (1982),
and The Citadel of the Autarch (1983). SF and fantasy motifs are combined
here in a far-future scenario akin to Jack Vance's THE DYING EARTH , but
much more ambitious; planetary resources are exhausted and civilization is
in the final stages of decline. The hero, Severian, is a disgraced
torturer who embarks on a long journey, becoming involved with a religious
order that preserves a relic of a long-gone redeemer, and eventually with
a plan to renew the Sun. A rich, many-layered story; the detail and
integrity of the imagined world invite comparison with Frank Herbert's
Dune and J. R. R. Tolkien's "Middle Earth," but it is a unique literary
work that transcends issues of categorization. The Urth of the New Sun
(1987), a separate novel detailing Severian's later, off-Urth quest for
transcendence, is a lesser, but still worthwhile story. Nightside the Long
Sun (1993), first volume of The Book of the Long Sun, is set on an
extremely baroque generation starship and supposedly has connections to
the earlier series, though they aren't yet apparent. See also FAR FUTURE
The Last Starship From Earth
BOYD, JOHN (pseud. of Boyd Upchurch)(Weybright & Talley, 1968)An
alternate Earth is ruled by a dictatorship that employs religion and the
insights of social science to secure its hegemony, exporting dissidents to
the planet Hell. The hero plans to save the world by striking at the very
heart of the despised order, preventing Christ's conquest of Rome. Clever
development of an interesting premise. Compare Brian Earnshaw's Planet in
the Eye of Time (1968). See also ALTERNATE WORLDS
The First Men in the Moon
WELLS, H(ERBERT) G(EORGE)(Bowen-Merrill, 1901)At first this seems the
most traditional of Wells's romances because of its inclusion of so many
conventions, including negative gravity. The Selenites have evolved a
highly complex and insectlike social order. The confrontation between
Cavor and The Grand Lunar owes much to Jonathan Swift in that humanity is
found wanting in terms of the Lunar's concept of rational norms. Wells
criticizes the Selenite specialization. Cavor is destroyed by his
inquiring intellect; his companion, Bedford, is saved by his
individuality. See also MOON
War With the Newts
CAPEK, KAREL (Allen & Unwin, 1937) Trans. by M. Weatherall and R.
Weatherall of Valkas mloky, 1936This novel is basically an elaboration of

the theme of R.U.R.The newts are an alien species liberated from their
subterranean home by an accident. They begin to learn human ways, and
learn them all too well. Eventually, they replace their models, providing
in the meantime a particularly sharp caricature of human habits and
politics. Slightly long winded, but remains the most effective of Capek's
works. See also APES AND CAVEMEN
The Quiet Pools
KUBE-MCDOWELL, MICHAEL P.(Ace, 1990)The purpose of the Diaspora Project
is to send humanity to the stars. One starship has already left and a
second, the Memphis, is nearly completed. Many people are opposed to the
project, however, in part because of the enormous cost and in part because
of the ecological damage humanity might do to another planet. Anti-Project
terrorism has become common. Chris McCutcheon, an archivist working on the
Memphis's library, but not himself scheduled to take the journey, must
make up his own mind as to the rightness of the Diaspora Project. He must
also unravel the frightening biological secret that makes the project a
necessity. Compare Vonda McIntyre's Starfarers (1989). See also SPACE
FLIGHT
An Alien Light
KRESS, NANCY(Arbor, 1987)Humanity is at war with the alien Ged and
apparently winning. Unable to understand the human propensity for
violence, the Ged conduct an experiment on two isolated and primitive
human societies that are hereditary enemies, hoping to uncover the key to
defeating a more advanced human foe. They build a gigantic maze-like
structure, lure humans from both cultures into it, and then study their
interactions. Kress's characters are well developed and sympathetically
portrayed. Her ideas on the nature of human violence are thoughtful,
though she differs from many of the recent feminist SF writers who have
examined the issue. Contrast Sheri S. Tepper's THE GATE TO WOMEN'S COUNTRY
and her Raising the Stones. See also PSYCHOLOGY
The Robots of Dawn
ASIMOV, ISAAC(Phantasia, 1983)The heroes of Asimov's earlier robot
detective stories, The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun , undertake a new
investigation on the utopian world of Aurora, where men live in harmony
with their machines. The murder mystery becomes a peg on which to hang
part of the argument connecting the robot series with the Foundation
series. The argument is further extended in Robots and Empire (1985), in
which robots renegotiate the famous laws of robotics and set humankind on
the road to galactic empire. Prolix, but better connected with their
antecedents than the new Foundation novels. See also ROBOTS and CRIME AND
PUNISHMENT
The Remaking of Sigmund Freud
MALZBERG, BARRY N(ORMAN)(Ballantine, 1985)A fix-up novel featuring an
alternate world where Freud psychoanalyzes Emily Dickinson from afar and
is assassinated by a disappointed patient, and a future where he is
reincarnated aboard a spaceship to save its crew members from the kind of
extraterrestrial angst that was suffered by the protagonist of Beyond
Apollo . Lacks the fluency of Malzberg's early novels but gains in

complexity by way of compensation. Compare Jeremy Leven's Satan (1982).
See also ABSURDIST SF
Winterlong
HAND, ELIZABETH(Bantam, 1990)Hand's first novel features gorgeous prose
reminiscent of Gene Wolfe and an exotic and decadent setting, the City of
the Trees in the Northeastern Federated Republic of America, in essence a
far-future Washington, D.C., half destroyed by global warming, biological
warfare, and time. Among the characters are Wendy Wanders, half-mad victim
of a government-sponsored parapsychology program, and Margalis Tast'annin,
the Mad Aviator, hero of the Archipelago Conflict. Tast'annin has been
sent to close down the parapsychology program and execute all those
involved in it. When Wendy escapes, he must pursue her through the
nightmarish City. Two loose sequels to Winterlong are Aestival Tide (1992)
and Icarus Descending (1993). Compare Geoff Ryman's THE CHILD GARDEN and
Storm Constantine's The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit. See also
HOLOCAUST AND AFTER
Hell's Pavement
KNIGHT, DAMON (FRANCIS)(Lion, 1955) Variant title: Analogue Men, Berkley,
1962The coming of a bland totalitarianism that does not need to resort to
the crude tortures of a Nineteen Eighty-Four was a favorite theme in 1950s
SF. This novel also exemplifies a political theme we have heard in
mainstream life more recently: the unintended consequences of successful
action. Disturbed individuals are provided with "analogues" within their
own psyches that prevent them from antisocial or dysfunctional behavior.
The motive for such therapy is exemplary: to forestall the alcoholic from
drinking, the kleptomaniac from stealing, the pedophile from molesting.
Then it goes on to mass treatment against crimes of violence and
immunization from corruption for all candidates for public office, and it
is a short step from there to conditioning against any attempt to
overthrow the government. The inevitable tyranny that results permeates
the entire society except for an underground of "immunes" who cannot
respond to such therapy. Compare Anthony Burgess, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE ;
contrast B. F. Skinner, Walden Two . See also CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
The New World: An Epic Poem
TURNER, FREDERICK(Princeton Univ. Press, 1985)Narrative poem that begins
in A.D. 2376, in a fragmented America riven by war and choked by energy
shortages. New York City lies in rubble-but an intellectual aristocracy of
Free Counties tenders future hope. Written in unrhymed, five-stressed
lines, by an English professor, Shakespeare scholar, and science fiction
novelist (A Double Shadow, 1978). Turner's several POETRY collections
contain occasional SF entries; and his Genesis: An Epic Poem (1988) is
another futuristic chronicle, featuring a trip to Mars, which one day may
become habitable to humans. Compare Harry Martinson, Diane Ackerman.
Transfigurations
BISHOP, MICHAEL(Berkley, 1979)Expanded from the novella, "Death and
Designation Among the Asadi." One of the more impressive SF novels using
perspectives and themes drawn from ANTHROPOLOGY to aid depiction of an
enigmatic alien culture. Compare Ursula K. Le Guin's THE WORD FOR WORLD IS

FOREST.
Strangers
DOZOIS, GARDNER(Berkley, 1978)Expansion of a novella tracking the love
affair between a man and an alien woman whose reproductive BIOLOGY is
exotic. A virtual reprise of Philip Jose Farmer's THE LOVERS , with added
depth of characterization.
Orbit
KNIGHT, DAMON F., ED. Putnam (nos. 1-12), Berkley (no. 13), Harper (nos.
14-21), 1966-1980The last of the pioneering original ANTHOLOGY series.
Knight's relationship with the Clarion workshops ensured that he was often
in a position to find talented new writers as their careers were just
getting under way, and the series played a major role in establishing the
careers of several major writers, including Kate Wilhelm and Gene Wolfe.
R. A. Lafferty was also extensively featured. An early preference for
material with particularly polished literary style gradually gave way to
an interest in esoteric material, sometimes without much discernible
speculative content, but the series was a worthy experiment whose early
volumes feature some very fine material.
The Ragged World: A Novel of the Hefn on Earth
MOFFETT, JUDITH(St. Martin's, 1991)A starship commanded by the alien
Gafr, but crewed by a different race, the Hefn, returns to Earth to
retrieve Hefn mutineers left behind centuries ago and to stop humanity's
destruction of the ecosystem. The aliens decree that no more human babies
will be born until we cease polluting. Originally a series of short
stories, including two award nominees, this fixup novel is a powerful
indictment of humanity's ability to foul its own nest. In the more unified
sequel, Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream (1992), two young people grow up
in the more primitive world that has resulted from the Hefn's stay on
Earth. Moffett continues her ecological theme, but also deals movingly
with the topic of sexual abuse. Compare Joan Slonczewski's The Wall Around
Eden. See also POLLUTION
Good News From Outer Space
KESSEL, JOHN(Tor, 1989)The millennium is at hand and America is in bad
economic and spiritual shape. To make matters worse, the aliens have
apparently landed, though they refuse to show themselves and their
purposes remain highly ambiguous. At once chilling and very funny, this
novel is notable for its portrayal of aliens whose motives are beyond our
comprehension. For other portraits of millennial fervor, compare James
Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter (1990) and Mark Geston's Mirror to the Sky
(1992). See also ABSURDIST SF
Halo
MADDOX, TOM(Tor, 1991)Mikhail Gonzales, an auditor, is dispatched to the
Halo space station to keep an eye on a daring but costly experiment, the
attempt to download the personality of a dying man into the station's
artificial intelligence, Aleph. The experiment is fraught with
difficulties, but things get worse when the corporation that owns both the
station and Aleph decides to pull the plug. Halo features a number of
engaging characters, several of whom are artificial intelligences, and an

engrossing examination of the nature of consciousness. Compare Lisa
Mason's Arachne (1990), David Gerrold's When HARLIE Was One, and Greg
Bear's Queen of Angels . See also CYBERPUNK
10 Story Fantasy
10 Story Fantasy, Spring 1951Published by Avon Periodicals (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1951 Avon Periodicals)
Galileo
Galileo, Sept. 1976 Published by Victor Hugo Publishers Cover
illustrations by Tom Barber (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop, Ltd. (c) 1976
Avenue Victor Hugo Publishers)
Gamma
Gamma, Feb. 1965 Published by Star Press, Inc. Cover illustration by John
Healey (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Star
Press, Inc. (c) 1965 Star Press, Inc.)
Great Science Fiction
Great Science Fiction, Fall 1967 Published by Ultimate Publishing Co.
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Ultimate
Publishing Co. (c) 1967 Ultimate Publishing Co.)
Hyphen
Hyphen, March 1962 Published by Walt Willis (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Walt Willis, Publisher. (c) 1962
Walt Willis)
If
If, May-June 1970 Published by Quinn Publishing Co. Cover illustration by
Ken Fagg (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with permission of Galaxy (R). (c) 1970 Quinn Publishing Co.
Inc.)
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy, Oct. 1950 Published by Clark
Publishing Co. Cover illustration by Hannes Bok (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Clark Publishing Co. (c) 1950
Clark Publishing Co.)
Imaginative Tales
Imaginative Tales, July 1957 Published by Greenleaf Publishing Co. Cover
illustration by Malcolm Smith (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Greenleaf Publishing Co. (c) 1957 Greenleaf Publishing
Co.)
Infinity Science Fiction
Infinity Science Fiction, July 1957 Published by Royal Publications Cover
illustration by Ed Emshwiller (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Royal Publications. (c) 1957 Royal Publications)
International Science Fiction
International Science Fiction, June 1968 Published by Galaxy Publishing

Corp. Cover illustration by Jack Gaughan (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of
Galaxy (R). (c) 1968 Galaxy Publishing Corporation)
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, May 1985 Published by Dell
Magazines (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Dell Magazines. (c) 1985 Dell Magazines)
Magazine of Horror
Magazine of Horror, Sept. 1968 Published by Health Knowledge, Inc. Cover
illustration by Virgil Finlay (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Health Knowledge, Inc. (c) 1968 Health Knowledge, Inc.)
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Jan. 1953 Published by
Mercury Press/Fantasy House Cover illustration by Alez Schomburg (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted from The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. (c) 1953 Mercury Press)
Marvel Science Stories
Marvel Science Stories, Aug. 1951 Published by Stadium Publishing Corp.
Cover illustration by Hannes Bok (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1951 Stadium Publishing Corporation)
Most Thrilling Science Fiction Ever Told, The
The Most Thrilling Science Fiction Ever Told, Winter 1970 Published by
Ultimate Publishing Co. (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.
, Riverside. (c) 1970 Ultimate Publishing Co.)
New Worlds
New Worlds, No. 191 Published by Michael Moorcock (M. M. Kavanagh. Cover
illustration: Mal Dean. Courtesy of Michael Moorcock. (c) 1969 Michael
Moorcock)
Novae Terrae
Novae Terrae, May 1938 Published by Science Fiction Association Cover
illustration by H.E. Turner (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. (c) 1938 Science Fiction Association)
Omni
Omni, June 1979 Published by General Media Cover illustration by Don
Dixon (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Cover
illustration: Don Dixon / Courtesy of OMNI Magazine. (c) 1979 Omni
Publications International, Ltd.)
Orbit Science Fiction
Orbit Science Fiction, No. 4 Published by Morris S. Latzen (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 19 Morris S.
Latzen)
Original Science Fiction Stories
Original Science Fiction Stories, May 1956 Published by Columbia
Publications, Inc. Cover illustration by Ed Emshwiller (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Columbia Publications, Inc.

(c) 1956 Columbia Publications, Inc.)
Other Worlds
Other Worlds, Sept. 1936 Published by Gryphon Publications Cover
illustration by Paul Blaisdell (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. (c) 1936 Gryphon Publications)
Out of This World Adventures
Out of This World Adventures, Dec. 1950 Published by Avon Periodicals
(Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1950 Avon Periodicals)
Overland Monthly
Overland Monthly, June 1890 Published by Overland Monthly Publishing
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1890
Overland Monthly Publishing)
Planet Stories
Planet Stories, Spring 1942 Published by Love Romances Publishing Co.,
Inc. Cover illustration by Leydon Frost (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1942 Love Romances Publishing Co., Inc.)
Psychotic
Psychotic, Nov. 1967 Published by Psychotic Press Cover illustration by
Ron Cobb (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
(c) 1967 Psychotic Press)
Quandry
Quandry, July 1952 Published by Lee Hoffman Cover illustration by Lee
Hoffman (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c)
1952 Lee Hoffman)
Riverside Quarterly
Riverside Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 4 Published by Students' Union Press
Cover illustration by Vincent Di Fate (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Student's Union Press. )
Rocket Stories
Rocket Stories, July 1953 Published by Space Publications, Inc. Cover
illustration by Alex Schomburg (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. (c) 1953 Space Publications, Inc.)
Satellite Science Fiction
Satellite Science Fiction, Feb. 1958 Published by Renown Publications
Cover illustration by Alex Schomburg (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1958 Renown Publications)
Saturn
Saturn, March 1957 Published by Candar Publishing Co., Inc. (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.Candar Publishing
Co., Inc. (c) 1957 Candar Publishing Co., Inc.)
Science Fiction Digest
Science Fiction Digest, Sept.-Oct. 1982 Published by Davis Publications
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1982

Davis Publications, Inc.)
Science Fantasy Yearbook
Science Fantasy Yearbook, 1970 Published by Ultimate Publishing Co.
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1970
Ultimate Publishing Co.)
Science Fiction Adventures
Science Fiction Adventures, July 1953 Published by Future Publications,
Inc. Cover illustration by Alex Schomburg (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1953 Future Publications, Inc.
)
Science Fiction Classics
Science Fiction Classics, Summer 1968 Published by Ultimate Publishing
Co. Cover illustration by Frank R. Paul (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1968 Ultimate Publishing Co.)
Science Fiction Monthly
Science Fiction Monthly, Aug. 1951 / No. 12 Published by Hamilton & Co.
(Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. )
Science Fiction Plus
Science Fiction Plus, Dec. 1953 Published by Gernsback Publications, Inc.
Cover illustration by Frank R. Paul (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1953 Gernsback Publications, Inc.)
Science Fiction Quarterly
Science Fiction Quarterly, May 1954 Published by Columbia Publications,
Inc. Cover illustration by Alex Schomburg (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Columbia Publications, Inc. (c)
1954 Columbia Publications, Inc.)
Science Stories
Science Stories. Oct. 1953 Published by Bell Publications, Inc. Cover
illustration by Hannes Bok (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Bell Publications, Inc. (c) 1953 Bell Publications,
Inc.)
Science Wonder Stories
Science Wonder Stories, June 1929 Published by Stellar Publishing Corp.
Cover illustration by Frank R. Paul (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1929 Stellar Publising Corp.)
Science-Fiction Studies
Science-Fiction Studies, Nov. 1992 Published by SF-TH, Inc. (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. DePauw University.
(c) 1992 SF-TH, Inc at DePauw University)
Scorpion, The
The Scorpian, Feb. 1975 Published by Seaboard Periodicals, Inc. (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1975 Seaboard
Periodicals, Inc.)
Slant

Slant, Winter 1951-52 Published by Oblique House Cover illustration by
James White (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
(c) 1951 Oblique House)
Space Science Fiction
Space Science Fiction, July 1953 Published by Space Publications, Inc.
Cover illustration by van Dongen (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1953 Space Publications, Inc.)
Space Stories
Space Stories, Feb. 1953 Published by Standard Magazines (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1953 Standard Magazines)
Spaceway
Spaceway, Feb. 1954 Published by Fantasy Publishing Co. Cover
illustration by Mel Hunter (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Illustrator: Mel Hunter. Used by permission of the
artist. (c) Mel Hunter)
Stardate
Stardate, Oct. 1985 / No. 8 Published by Associates International, Inc.
Cover illustration by Vincent Di Fate (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1985 Associates International, Inc.)
Startling Stories
Startling Stories, Aug. 1952 Published by Better Publications Cover
illustration by Earle K. Bergey (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1952 Better Publications, Inc.)
Strange Adventures
Strange Adventures, Aug.-Sept. 1950 Published by National Comics
Publications, Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1950 National Comics Publications, Inc.)
Strange Stories
Strange Stories, Feb. 1939 Published by Better Publications (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.Better
Publications, Inc. (c) 1939 Better Publications, Inc.)
Strange Tales
Strange Tales, Oct. 1932 Published by The Clayton Magazines, Inc. Cover
illustration by H.W. Wesso (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. (c) 1932 The Clayton Magazines, Inc.)
Super Science Stories
Super Science Stories, May 1943 Published by Fictioneers, Inc. Cover
illustration by Virgil Finlay (Reprinted by permission of Argosy
Communications, Inc. Copyright 1943 Fictioneers, Inc.)
Super-Science Fiction
Super-Science Fiction, June 1957 Published by Headline Publications Cover
illustration by Ed Emshwiller (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. (c) 1957 Headline Publications)
Suspense

Suspense, Winter 1952 Published by The Farrell Publishing Corp. (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1952 The
Farrell Publishing Corp.)
Tales of Tomorrow
Tales of Tomorrow, No. 5 Published by John Spencer & Co. (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. John Spencer & Co. )
Thrilling Wonder Stories
Thrilling Wonder Stories, July 1940 Published by Better Publications
Cover illustration by Howard V. Brown (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Better Publications. (c) 1940 Better
Publications, Inc.)
Thrust
Thrust, Winter-Spring 1982 / No. 18 Published by D. Douglas Fratz Cover
illustration by Brad W. Foster (Courtesy of D. Douglas Fratz. (c) 1982 D.
Douglas Fratz)
Tops in Science Fiction
Tops in Science Fiction, Fall 1953 Published by Love Romances Publishing
Co. Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
(c) 1953 Love Romances Publishing Co., Inc.)
Treasury of Great Science Fiction Stories
Treasury of Great Science Fiction Stories, 1964 / No. 1 Published by
Popular Library (Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1964
Popular Library, Inc.)
Uncanny Tales
Uncanny Tales, May 1940 Published by Manvis Publications, Inc. (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1940 Manvis
Publications, Inc.)
Universe Science Fiction
Universal Science Fiction, Dec. 1953 Published by Palmer Publications,
Inc. Cover illustration by Mel Hunter (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Illustrator: Mel Hunter. Used by permission of
the artist. (c) Mel Hunter)
Unknown
Unknown, Sept. 1939 Published by Street & Smith Cover illustration by
H.W. Scott (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
(c) 1939 Street & Smith)
Vanguard Science Fiction
Vanguard Science Fiction, June 1958 Published by Vanguard Publishing Co.
Cover illustration by Ed Emshwiller (M. M. Kavanagh. (c) 1958 Vanguard
Publishing Co., )
Vargo Statten Science Fiction Magazine
Vargo Statten Science Fiction Magazine, Jan. 1954 Published by Scion,
Ltd. (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c)
1954 Scion, Ltd.)

Venture Science Fiction
Venture, Aug. 1970 Published by Mercury Press Cover illustration by Bert
Tanner (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. (c) 1970
Mercury Press)
Vision of Tomorrow
Vision of Tomorrow, Aug. 1970 Published by Ronald E. Graham, Ltd. Cover
illustration by Eddie Jones (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. (c) 1970 Ronald E. Graham, Ltd.)
Vortex Science Fiction
Vortex Science Fiction, 1953 / Vol. 1, No. 2 Published by Specific
Fiction Corp. (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1953 Specific Fiction Corp.)
Vortex Science Fiction
Vortex Science Fiction, 1953 / Vol. 1, No. 1 Published by Specific
Fiction Corp. (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1953 Specific Fiction Corp.)
Warhoon
Warhoon, Nov. 1968 Published by Fantasy Amateur Press Association (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1968 Fantasy
Amateur Press Assn.)
Weird Tales
Weird Tales, March 1933 Published by Weird Tales Ltd. Cover illustration
by M. Brundage (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Weird Tales, Ltd. Copyright 1933
Popular Fiction Publishing Co.)
Wonder Stories
Wonder Stories, Dec. 1932 Published by Stellar Publishing Corp. Cover
illustration by Frank R. Paul (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. (c) 1932 Stellar Publising Corp.)
Wonder Stories
Wonder Stories, 1957 / Vol. 45, No. 1 Published by Better Publications
Cover illustration by Richard Powers (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Better Publications, Inc. (c) 1957 Better
Publications, Inc.)
Wonder Stories Quarterly
Wonder Stories Quarterly, Summer 1930 Published by Stellar Publishing
Corp. (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c)
1930 Stellar Publising Corp.)
Worlds Beyond
Worlds Beyond, Dec. 1950 / Vol. 1, No. 1 Published by Hillman
Periodicals, Inc. Cover illustration by Paul Colle (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1950 Hillman Periodicals, Inc.
)
Worlds of Tomorrow

Worlds of Tomorrow, Jan. 1966 Published by Institute for the Development
of the Harmonious Human Cover illustration by McLane (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1966 Galaxy Publishing
Corporation.)
Yandro
Yandro ed. by Robert & Juanita Coulson Cover: Robert & Juanita Coulson
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Robert and Juanita Coulson. (c) 1995 Robert and Juanita Coulson)
Monkey Wrench Gang, The
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey Cover: Avon Books, 1975 (Casey
Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1975 Avon Books)
Man with the Broken Ear ,The
The Man with the Broken Ear by Edmond About Cover: Holt & Williams, 1872
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
President John Smith
President John Smith by Frederick Adams Cover: Charles H. Kerr & Co.,
1898 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Sentience
Sentience by Terry A. Adams Cover: DAW Books, 1986 illustration by James
Gurney (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1986 DAW Books, Inc.)
Terror on Planet Ionus
Terror on Planet Ionus by Allen A. Adler Cover: Paperback Library Inc.,
1966 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Paperback Library (c) 1966 Paperback Library Inc.)
Survivalist #1: Total War, The
The Survivalist #1: Total War by Jerry Ahern Cover: Zebra Books, 1981
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.Zebra Books.
(c) 1981 Zebra Books (Kensigton Publishing Corp.) )
Seventh Carrier, The
The Seventh Carrier by Peter Albano Cover: Zebra Books, 1983 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Zebra Books. (c)
1983 Zebra Books (Kensigton Publishing Corp.) )
Lunarian Professor, The
The Lunarian Professor by James B. Alexander Cover: James B. Alexander,
1909 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Voyage of the Ark , The
The Voyage of the Ark by F. M. Allen Cover: Ward and Downey, 1888 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Genesis Five
Genesis Five by Henry Wilson Allen Cover: Pyramid, 1970 illustration by
John Schoenherr (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All

rights reserved. (c) 1970 Pyramid Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Rhubarb Tree, The
The Rhubarb Tree by Kenneth Allot & Stephen Tait Cover: Cresset Press
Ltd., 1937 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Cresset Press Ltd. (c) 1937 Cresset Press Ltd.)
Notes from the Future
Notes from the Future by Nicolai M. Amosoff Cover: Jonathan Cape, 1971
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Random Century House UK Limited. (c) 1971 Johnathan Cape London)
Magellan
Magellan by Colin Anderson Cover: Sphere Books Ltd., 1971 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Sphere Books Ltd.
(c) 1971 Sphere Books Ltd.)
Strange Adventure of Roger Wilkins, The
The Strange Adventure of Roger Wilkins by R. Andom Cover: Tylston &
Edwards, 1895 illustration by A. Carruthers Gould (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
World's Beginning
World's Beginning by Robert Ardrey Cover: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Duell,
Sloan and Pearce (c) 1944 Duell, Sloan and Pearce)
Man's Mortality
Man's Mortality by Michael Arlen Cover: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1933
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday
Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1933 Doubleday , Doran & Co.)
When the Bells Rang A Tale of What Might Have Been
When the Bells Rang: A Tale of What Might Have Been by Anthony Armstrong
& Bruce Graeme Cover: George G. Harrap & Co., 1943 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. George G. Harrap & Co. (c) 1943
George G. Harrap & Co.)
Grim Caretaker, The
The Grim Caretaker by Eugene Ascher Cover: Strothers Bookshops Ltd., 1944
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Strothers
Bookshops Ltd. (c) 1944 Strothers Bookshops Ltd. (UK))
War-God Walks Again, The
The War-God Walks Again by F. Britten Austin Cover: Doubleday, Page & Co.
, 1926 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used
by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1926 Doubleday, Page & Co.)
Maze Maker, The
The Maze Maker by Michael Ayrton Cover: Bantam, 1969 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam

Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1969
Bantam Books)
New Atlantis, The
The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon Cover: Cambridge: At the University
Press, 1900 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
)
Stars Are Too High, The
The Stars Are Too High by Agnew H. Bahnson Cover: Bantam, 1960 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group,
Inc. (c) 1960 Bantam Books)
Symbiote's Crown
Symbiote's Crown by Scott Baker Cover: Berkley, 1978 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1978 The
Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Kings of Infinite Space
Kings of Infinite Space by Nigel Balchin Cover: Modern Literary Editions,
1967 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Modern
Literary Editions (c) 1967 Modern Literary Editions)
Galactic Convoy
Galactic Convoy by Bill Baldwin Cover: Popular Library, 1987 illustration
by John Berkey (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1987 Popular
Library)
Sell England?
Sell England? by Dacre Balsdon Cover: Eyre & Spottis-Woode, 1936 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Eyre &
Spottis-Woode (c) 1936 Eyre & Spottis-Woode)
Quest of the Absolute
Quest of the Absolute by Honore de Balzac Cover: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1908
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
The Sea is Boiling Hot
The Sea is Boiling Hot by George Bamber Cover: Ace Books, 1971
illustration by Jack Gaughan (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1971 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
House-Boat on the Styx, A
A House-Boat on the Styx by John Kendrick Bangs Cover:
HarperCollins/Harper & Bros., 1895 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Use of Weapons

Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks Cover: Bantam, 1990 illustration by Paul
Youll (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used
by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1990 Bantam Books)
Odysseus Solution, The
The Odysseus Solution by Michael A. Banks & Dean R. Lambe Cover: Baen
Books, 1986 illustration by Stephen Hickman (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of BAEN
PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c) 1986 Baen Books)
Ashes, Ashes by Rene Barjavel Cover: Doubleday & Co., 1967 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1967 Doubleday)
One Half of the World
One Half of the World by James Barlow Cover: Cassel & Co., 1957 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.Cassel l & Co. (c)
1957 Cassel & Co.)
Immortals' Great Quest, The
The Immortals' Great Quest by James William Barlow Cover: Smith, Elder &
Co., 1909 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Interplanetary Hunter
Interplanetary Hunter by Arthur Barnes Cover: Gnome Press, 1956
illustration by Ed Emshwiller & W.I. Van der Poel (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Gnome Press (c) 1956 Gnome)
L.P.M.: The End of the Great War
L.P.M.: The End of the Great War by J. Stewart Barney (John Stewart
Barney) Cover: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1915 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of The Putnam Publishing Group. )
Man With Only One Head, The
The Man With Only One Head by Densil Neve Barr Cover: Rich & Cowan, 1955
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Rich &
Cowan (c) 1955 Rich & Cowan (UK))
The Face & the Mask
The Face & the Mask by Robert Barr Cover: Frederick A. Stokes, 1893
illustration by A. Hencke (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. )
Trivana 1
Trivana 1 by Charles Barren & R. Cox Abel Cover: Panther Books, 1966
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
with permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1966 Panther
Books)
When the Whites Went
When the Whites Went by Robert Bateman Cover: Brown, Watson Ltd., 1963
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Brown
Watson Limited (c) 1963 Brown Watson Ltd.)

Tik-Tok of Oz
Tik-Tok of Oz by L. Frank Baum Cover: The Reilly & Lee Co., 1914
illustration by John R. Neill (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. )
Secret of the Earth, The
The Secret of the Earth by Charles Willing Beale Cover: F. Tennyson
Neely, 1899 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
)
Peace Under Earth
Peace Under Earth by Paul Beaujon Cover: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1939 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Dodd, Mead & Co.
(c) 1939 Dodd, Mead & Co.)
Howling Man, The
The Howling Man by Charles Beaumont Cover: TOR/Tom Doherty & Associates,
1988 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1988 Tor Books)
Torch , The
The Torch by Jack Bechdolt Cover: Prime Press, 1948 illustration by L.
Robert Tschirky (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Prime Press (c) 1948 Prime Press)
Star Woman, The
The Star Woman by H. Bedford-Jones Cover: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1924 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Dodd, Mead & Co.
(c) 1924 Dodd, Mead & Co.)
One Sane Man, The
The One Sane Man by Francis Beeding Cover: Little, Brown & Co., 1934
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Published
by Little, Brown and Company (Inc.) (c) 1934 Little, Brown and Company
(Inc.))
Guardsman, The
The Guardsman by P.J. Beese & Todd Hamil Cover: Pageant Books, 1988
illustration by Tom Kidd (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Pageant Books (c) 1988 Pageant Books)
Seventh Bowl, The
The Seventh Bowl by Neil Bell Cover: Collins, 1934 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of
HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1934 Collins)
Twenty-five Short Stories
Twenty-five Short Stories by Stephen Vincent Benet Cover: Sun Dial Press,
1943 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Sun
Dial Press (c) 1943 Sun Dial Press)
Thyra
Thyra by Robert Ames Bennet Cover: Henry Holt & Co., 1901 illustration by
E.L. Blumenschein (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,

Riverside. )
Long Way Back, The
The Long Way Back by Margot Bennett Cover: Coward-McCann, 1955 (First
American Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Coward-McCann (c) 1980 Coward, McCann )
Lord of the World
Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson Cover: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1908
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Le Sud
Le Sud by Yves Berger Cover: Bernard Grasset Editeur, 1962 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Bernard Grasset
Editeur. (c) 1962 Bernard Grasset Editeur)
Sun Grows Cold, The
The Sun Grows Cold by Howard Berk Cover: Delacorte Press, 1971 (First
Printing) illustration by Mike McIver (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Delecorte Press, a
division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1971
Delecorte Press.)
New Race of Devils, The
The New Race of Devils by John Bernard Cover: Anglo-Eastern Publishing
Co., 1921 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Anglo-Eastern Publishing Co. (c) 1921 Anglo-Eastern Publishing Co.)
The Galactic Invaders
The Galactic Invaders by James R. Berry Cover: Laser Books, 1976
illustration by Kelly Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Laser Books (c) 1976 Laser Books)
The A. I. War
The A. I. War by Stephen Ames Berry Cover: TOR/Tom Doherty Associates,
1987 (First Printing) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1987 Tor Books)
Revolt of Man, The
The Revolt of Man by Walter Besant Cover: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1897
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
with permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. )
Space Raiders, The
The Space Raiders by Barrington Beverley Cover: Phillip Allan, 1936
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Philip
Allan (c) 1936 Philip Allan)
Space Stadium
Space Stadium by H.U. Bevis Cover: Lenox Hill Press, 1970 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Lenox Hill Press
(c) 1970 Lenox Hill Press)
The Devil's Dictionary
The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce Cover: World Publishing Co.,

1942 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. World
Publishing Co. (c) 1942 World Publishing Co.)
Poison War, The
The Poison War by Ladbroke Black Cover: Stanley Paul & Co., Ltd., 1933
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Stanley
Paul & Co., Ltd. (c) 1933 Stanley Paul & Co., Ltd.)
1957
1957 by Hamish Blair Cover: William Blackwood & Sons, Ltd., 1930 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. William Blackwood
& Sons, Ltd. (c) 1930 William Blackwood & Sons, Ltd.)
Purple Sapphire, The
The Purple Sapphire by Christopher Blayre Cover: Phillip Allan & Co.,
1921 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Philip
Allan & Co. (c) 1921 Philip Allan & Co.)
Man from Mars, The
The Man from Mars by Thomas Blot Cover: Bacon & Co., 1891 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Simultaneous Man, The
The Simultaneous Man by Ralph Blum Cover: Bantam, 1971 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1971
Bantam Books)
Red Star, The
The Red Star by Alexander Bogdanov Cover: Indiana University Press, 1984
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Indiana
University Press. (c) 1984 Indiana University Press.)
Sons of the Mammoth
Sons of the Mammoth by Vladimir Bogoraz Cover: Cosmopolitan Book Corp.,
1929 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Cosmopolitan Book Corporation (c) 1929 Cosmopolitan Book Corporation)
White August
White August by John Boland Cover: Michael Joseph, 1953 illustration by
Wildsmith (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Courtesy of Michael Joseph Ltd. (c) 1953 Michael Joseph Ltd.)
Others, The
The Others by Margaret Wander Bonnano Cover: St. Martin's Press, 1990
illustration by Adam Niklewicz (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Cover: Adam Niklewicz. Courtesy of St. Martin's Press.
(c) 1990 St. Martin's Press)
Jehovah's Day
Jehovah's Day by Mary Borden Cover: Heinemann, 1928 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1928 William Heinemann,
London)
Spurious Sun

Spurious Sun by George Borodin Cover: T. Werner Laurie, Ltd., 1948 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. T. Werner Laurie,
Ltd. (c) 1948 T. Werner Laurie, Ltd. London)
Nightmare Collector, The
The Nightmare Collector by Bruce Boston Cover: 2 AM Publications, 1988
illustration by Gregorio Montejo (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of 2 A.M. Publications.
(c) 1988 Bruce Boston & Gregorio Montejo. Published by 2 AM Publications.)
World Wrecker, The
The World Wrecker by Sydney J. Bounds Cover: W. Foulsham & Co. Ltd., 1956
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. W. Foulsham
& Co. Ltd. (c) 1956 W. Foulsham & Co. Ltd. London)
Kallocain
Kallocain by Karin Boye Cover: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. University of
Wisconsin Press. (c) 1966 University of Wisconsin Press.)
X People, The
The X People by Vektis Brack Cover: Gannet Press, 1953 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Gannet Press (c) 1953 Gannet
Press)
Voyage from Utopia, A
A Voyage from Utopia by John Francis Bray Cover: Lawrence and Wishart
Ltd., 1957 (First Edition) illustration by Brooks (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Lawrence and Wishart Ltd. (c) 1957
Lawrence and Wishart Ltd.)
The Girl from Mars
The Girl from Mars by Miles Breuer Cover: Stellar Publishing Corp., 1929
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Stellar Publishing Corporation (c) 1929 Stellar Publising Corp.
)
Purple-6
Purple-6 by Henry Brinton Cover: Avon Books, 1962 (Casey Brown/Eaton
Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by permission of Avon
Books. (c) 1962 Avon Books)
Purple Plague, The
The Purple Plague by Fenner Brockway Cover: Sampson Low Marston & Co.,
Ltd., 1935 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Sampson Low Marston & Co., Ltd. (c) 1935 Sampson Low Marston & Co., Ltd.
London)
Xorandor
Xorandor by Christine Brooke-Rose Cover: Avon Books, 1988 (Casey
Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1988 Avon Books)
Sky Lords, The
The Sky Lords by John Brosnan Cover: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1988 (Casey

Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with the
permission of Victor Gollancz Ltd. (c) 1988 Victor Gollancz Ltd.)
Under the City of Angels
Under the City of Angels by Jerry Earl Brown Cover: Bantam, 1981 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group,
Inc. (c) 1981 Bantam Books)
Swastika Night
Swastika Night by Murray Constantine (Katharine Burdekin) Cover: Victor
Gallancz Ltd., 1937 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with the permission of Victor Gollancz Ltd. (c) 1937
Victor Gollancz Ltd.)
Time of the Hawklords, The
The Time of the Hawklords by Michael Butterworth & Michael Moorcock
Cover: Warner Books, 1976 (First US Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Warner
Books, Inc. (c) 1976 Warner Books, Inc.)
Jonah Watch, The
The Jonah Watch by Jack Cady Cover: Avon Books, 1983 (Casey Brown/Eaton
Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by permission of Avon
Books. (c) 1983 Avon Books)
White Prophet, The
The White Prophet by Hall Caine Cover: Heinemann, 1921 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1921 William Heinemann,
Ltd. )
Omega Sub #4: Blood Tide
Omega Sub #4: Blood Tide by J.D. Cameron (Mike Jahn) Cover: Avon Books,
1991 (Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown
by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1991 Avon Books)
Red Planet, The
The Red Planet by H.J. Campbell Cover: Panther Books, 1953 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with
permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1953 Panther Books)
Moonspin
Moonspin by Elmer Carpenter Cover: Caravelle Books/Flagship Book, 1967
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Flagship
Book (c) 1967 Flagship Book )
Ophidian Conspiracy, The
The Ophidian Conspiracy by John F. Carr Cover: Major Books, 1976 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Major Books (c)
1976 Major Books)
Room Beyond, The
The Room Beyond by Robert Spencer Carr Cover: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
Inc., 1948 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Appleton-Century-Croft, Inc. (c) 1948 Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc.)

2010
2010 by Frederic Carrel Cover: T. Werner Laurie Ltd., 1914 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Siren Stars, The
The Siren Stars by Richard and Nancy Carrigan Cover: Pyramid Books, 1971
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1971 Pyramid Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Perilous Descent into a Strange Lost World, The
The Perilous Descent into a Strange Lost World by Bruce Carter Cover:
Bodley Head, 1952 (First Edition) illustration by Tony Weare (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Random
Century House UK Limited (c) 1952 The Bodley Head )
Icosameron
Icosameron by Giacomo Casanova Cover: Jenna Press, 1986 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Jenna Press (c) 1986 Jenna
Press)
Peacemakers, The
The Peacemakers by Curtis Casewit Cover: Avalon Books, 1960 illustration
by Ed Emshwiller (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Courtesy of Thomas Bouregy & Co. - Avalon Books (c) 1960 Avalon
Books)
Star Country, The
The Star Country by MIchael Cassutt Cover: Doubleday, 1986 illustration
by Cathy Hull (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday
Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1986 Doubleday)
Satellite E One
Satellite E One by J. Lloyd Castle Cover: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1954 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Dodd, Mead & Co.
(c) 1954 Dodd, Mead & Co.)
6,000 Tons of Gold
6,000 Tons of Gold by Henry Chamberlain Cover: Flood and Vincent
Chautaugua Century Press, 1894 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. )
Red January
Red January by William Chamberlain Cover: Paperback Library, 1964 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Paperback Library
(c) 1964 Paperback Library)
King in Yellow, The
The King in Yellow by Robert William Chambers Cover: F. Tennyson Neely,
1895 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Living Gems, The

The Living Gems by Paul Charkin Cover: Brown, Watson Ltd., 1963 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Brown Watson
Limited (c) 1963 Brown Watson Ltd.)
Jingo, The
The Jingo by George Randolf Chester Cover: Grosset & Dunlap, 1912
illustration by F. Vaux Wilson (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. )
The Man Who Was Thursday
The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton Cover: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1908
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Marble City, The
The Marble City by R.D. Chetwode Cover: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1895
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Riddle of the Sands, The
The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers Cover: T. Nelson & Sons, 1913
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Lost Children, The
The Lost Children by H. Herman Chilton Cover: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., 1931
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Random Century House UK Limited. (c) 1931 Hutchinson & Co.)
World Unknown, A
A World Unknown by John Clagett Cover: Popular Library, 1975 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1975 Popular Library, Inc.)
Queen Victoria's Bomb
Queen Victoria's Bomb by Ronald Clark Cover: Panther Books, 1967 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with
permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1967 Panther Books)
Light in the Sky, The
The Light in the Sky by Herbert Clock Cover: Coward-McCann, 1929 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Coward-McCann (c)
1929 Coward-McCann )
Master of His Fate
Master of His Fate by J. MacLaren Cobban Cover: Greenhill, 1890 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Solo Kill
Solo Kill by S.K. Boult Cover: Berkley Medallion, 1977 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1989 The
Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Night of the Toy Dragons, The
The Night of the Toy Dragons by Barney Cohen Cover: Berkley/Berkley
Medallion, 1977 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,

Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1977 Berkley Medallion. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Philosophical Corps, The
The Philosophical Corps by Everett B. Cole Cover: Gnome Press, 1961
illustration by W.I. Vander Poel, Jr. (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside.Gnome Press (c) 1961 Grome Press)
Seeker from the Stars
Seeker from the Stars by James Coleman Cover: Berkley/Berkley Medallion,
1967 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1967 Berkley Medallion. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Valley of Eyes Unseen, The
The Valley of Eyes Unseen by Gilbert Collins Cover: Duckworth & Co., 1923
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Duckworth &
Co. (c) 1923 Duckworth & Co.)
Tetrarch
Tetrarch by Alex Comfort Cover: Shambhala, 1980 illustration by Fred
Marcellino (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Shambhala (c) 1980 Shambhala)
Star Spangled Crunch, The
The Star Spangled Crunch by Richard Condon Cover: Bantam, 1974 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group,
Inc. (c) 1974 Bantam Books)
Nordenholt's Million
Nordenholt's Million by J.J. Connington Cover: Constable & Co. Ltd., 1923
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Constable & Co., London. (c) 1923 Constable & Co. Ltd.)
Invasion from the Air
Invasion from the Air by Roy Connolly Cover: Grayson and Grayson, 1934
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Grayson and
Grayson (c) 1934 Grayson and Grayson)
Reckoning, The
The Reckoning by Joan Conquest Cover: Macauley Co., 1931 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Macauley Co. (c) 1931
Macauley Co.)
Inheritors, The
The Inheritors by Joseph Conrad & Ford M. Itueffer Cover: McClure,
Philips & Co., 1901 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Rahne

Rahne by Susan Coon Cover: Avon Books, 1980 (Casey Brown/Eaton
Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by permission of Avon
Books. (c) 1980 Avon Books)
Jesus Factor, The
The Jesus Factor by Edwin Corley Cover: Coronet Communications, 1971
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Paperback
Library (c) 1971 Paperback Library Edition Coronet)
Sword of Lankor, The
The Sword of Lankor by Howard L. Cory Cover: Ace Books, 1966 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1966 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Revi-Lona
Revi-Lona by Frank Cowan Title Page: Arno Press, 1978 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Out of the Silence
Out of the Silence by Erle Cox Cover: Rae D. Henkle Co., Inc., 1928
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Rae D. Henkle Co., Inc. (c) 1928 Rae D. Henkle Co., Inc.)
Ionia
Ionia by Alexander Craig Cover: E.A. Weeks Co., 1898 (First Edition)
illustration by J.C. Levendecker (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. )
Salathiel the Wandering Jew
Salathiel the Wandering Jew by George Croly Cover: Funk & Wagnalls Co.,
1900 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Year of Consent
Year of Consent by Kendell Foster Crossen Cover: Dell, 1954 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Used by Permission of Dell Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1954 Dell Books)
Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton, The
The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton by Wardon Curtis Cover: Herbert
S. Stone & Co., 1903 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Yngling, The
The Yngling by John Dalmas Cover: Pyramid Books, 1971 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1971 Pyramid
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Inferno
Illustration from Dante Alighieri's Inferno (1861). Engraved by Gustav
Dore. (M. M. Kavanagh. )

Man of Double Deed, A
A Man of Double Deed by Leonard Daventry Cover: Doubleday, 1965 (First
Edition) illustration by Al Nagy (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1965 Doubleday)
Howling Mad
Howling Mad by Peter David Cover: Ace Books, 1989 illustration by Hiro
Kimura (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1989 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Karma Machine, The
The Karma Machine by Michael Davidson Cover: Popular Library, 1975 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1975 Popular Library, Inc.)
Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, A
A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James De Mille Cover:
HarperCollins/Harper & Bros., 1888 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
In the Face of My Enemy
In the Face of My Enemy by Joseph Delaney Cover: Baen Books, 1985
illustration by Kevin Johnson (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of BAEN PUBLISHING
ENTERPRISES. (c) 1985 Baen Books)
Shapes
Shapes by Richard Delap & Walt Lee Cover: Charter Books, 1987 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.Charter Books (c)
1987 Charter Books)
Lovely Monster, A
A Lovely Monster by Rick DeMarinis Cover: Dell, 1977 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Dell
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1977
Dell Books)
World in Eclipse
World in Eclipse by William Dexter Cover: Paperback Library, 1966 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Paperback Library
(c) 1966 Paperback Library)
War World
War World by William C. Dietz Cover: Ace Books, 1986 illustration by Miro
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1986 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Mind One
Mind One by Mike Dolinsky Cover: Dell, 1972 (Casey Brown/The Eaton

Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Dell Books,
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1972 Dell
Books)
Radium Terrors, The
The Radium Terrors by Albert Dorrington Cover: Doubleday, Page & Co.,
1912 illustration by A.C. Michael (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1912 Doubleday, Page &
Co.)
Two Boys' Trip to an Unknown Planet
Two Boys' Trip to an Unknown Planet by Francis Doughty Cover: Charles
Bragin, 1901 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. )
They Went
They Went by Norman Douglas Cover: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1926 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Dodd, Mead & Co.
(c) 1926 Dodd, Mead & Co.)
Pharaoh's Broker
Pharaoh's Broker by Ellsworth Douglass Cover: C. Arthur Pearson Ltd.,
1899 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. )
Man from Mars, The
The Man from Mars by Henry Wallace Dowding Cover: Cochrane Publishing Co.
, 1990 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Cochrane Publishing Company (c) 1990 Cochrane Publishing
Company )
Solution T-25
Solution T-25 by Theodora Du Bois Cover: Doubleday, 1951 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by
Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1951 Doubleday Science Fiction)
Trilby
Trilby by George Du Maurier Cover: Popular Library, 1963 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of
Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1963 Popular Library, Inc.)
Gor Saga
Gor Saga by Maureen Duffy Cover: Eyre Methuen, 1981 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1981
Eyre Methuen)
Last Adam, The
The Last Adam by Ronald Duncan Cover: Dennis Dobson Ltd., 1952 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Dennis Dobson Limited (c) 1952 Dennis Dobson Limited)
Last Revolution, The
The Last Revolution by Lord Dunsany Cover: Jarrolds Ltd., 1951 (Casey

Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.Jarrolds Publishers
Ltd. (c) 1951 Jarrolds Ltd. London)
Swimmers Beneath the Night
Swimmers Beneath the Night by M. Coleman Easton Cover: Popular Library,
1987 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1987 Popular Library)
HAB Theory, The
The HAB Theory by Allan W. Eckert Cover: Popular Library, 1977 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1977 Popular Library)
SF Book of Lists, The
The SF Book of Lists by Malcolm Edwards Cover: Berkley, 1983 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1983 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Terminus
Terminus by Peter Edwards Cover: St. Martin's Press, 1976 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1976 St.
Martin's Press)
What Entropy Means to Me
What Entropy Means to Me by George Alec Effinger Cover: Doubleday, 1972
(First Edition) illustration by Dickran Palulian (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by
Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1972 Doubleday)
Zalma
Zalma by T. Mullett Ellis Cover: Ash Partners Ltd., 1897 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Smoky God, The
The Smoky God by Willis George Emerson Cover: Forbes & Co., 1908
illustration by John A. Williams (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. )
World Aflame, The
The World Aflame by Leonard Engel Cover: The Dial Press, 1947 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1947 The Dial Press)
Woman Alive
Woman Alive by Susan Ertz Cover: D. Appleton-Century, 1936 illustration
by Bip Pares (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. D. Appleton-Century Company (c) 1936 D. Appleton-Century
Company Inc.)
Watchers of Space, The
The Watchers of Space by Nancy Etchemendy Cover: Avon Books, 1980 (Casey

Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1980 Avon Books)
Ninya
Ninya by H.A. Fagan Cover: Jonathan Cape, 1956 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Random Century House
UK Limited. (c) 1956 Johnathan Cape London)
Groundties
Groundties by Jane S. Fancher Cover: Warner Books, 1991 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of
Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1991 Warner Books, Inc.)
Hartmann the Anarchist
Hartmann the Anarchist by E. Douglas Fawcett Cover: Edward Arnold, 1893
illustration by Fred T. Jane (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. )
World Next Door, The
The World Next Door by Brad Ferguson Cover: Tom Doherty Associates, 1990
illustration by David Mattingly (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1990 Tor
Books)
Through the Earth
Through the Earth by Clement Fezandie Cover: Century Co., 1898 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Random
Century House UK Limited. )
Messengers Will Come No More, The
The Messengers Will Come No More by Leslie Fiedler Cover: Stein and Day,
1974 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Stein
and Day (c) 1974 Stein and Day)
Molly Dear
Molly Dear by Stephen Fine Cover: St. Martin's Press, 1988 illustration
by Robert Bull Design (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Cover: Robert Bull Design. Courtesy of St. Martin's Press. (c)
1988 St. Martin's Press)
Time Marches Sideways
Time Marches Sideways by Ralph L. Finn Cover: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., 1949
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Random Century House UK Limited. (c) 1949 Hutchinson & Co.)
Terror Strikes
Terror Strikes by N. Wesley Firth Cover: Hamilton & Co. Ltd., 1948 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with
permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1948 Hamilton & Co.)
Let Out the Beast
Let Out the Beast by Leonard Fischer Cover: New Stand Library, 1950
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. New Stand
Library. (c) 1950 New Stand Library)

Meda: A Tale of the Future
Meda: A Tale of the Future by Kenneth Folingsby Cover: Stationers' Hall,
1891 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Peacemaker, The
The Peacemaker by C.S. Forester Cover: Little, Brown & Co., 1934 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Published by
Little, Brown and Company (Inc.) (c) 1934 Little, Brown and Company
(Inc.))
Shepherd, The
The Shepherd by Frederick Forsyth Cover: Bantam, 1976 illustration by Lou
Feck (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used
by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1976 Bantam Books)
Lost Garden, The
The Lost Garden by George C. Foster Cover: Chapman & Hall, 1930 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1930 Chapman &
Hall)
Revolt of Angels, The
The Revolt of Angels by Anatole France Cover: Calmann-Levy, 1986 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1986 CalmannLevy)
Mind Net, The
The Mind Net by Frank Herbert Cover: DAW Books, 1974 illustration by
Kelly Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1974 DAW Books, Inc.)
Return of the Time Machine, The
The Return of the Time Machine by Egon Friedell Cover: DAW Books, 1972
illustration by Karel Thole (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1972
DAW Books, Inc.)
By Rocket to the Moon
By Rocket to the Moon by Otto Gail Cover: Sears Publishing Co., 1931
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1931
Sears Publishing Co.)
Last Rose of Summer, The
The Last Rose of Summer by Stephen Gallagher Cover: CORGI
Books/Transworld Publishers, 1978 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1966 Corgi Books, Transworld Publishers)
Not in Solitude
Not in Solitude by Kenneth Gantz Cover: Doubleday, 1959 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by
Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1959 Doubleday)
Skylark of Space, The
The Skylark of Space by E.E. Smith, Ph.D., & Mrs. Lee Hawkins Garby

Cover: Hadley Publishing Co., 1947 illustration by O.G. Estes (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1947 Hadley
Publishing Company)
Lady into Fox and a Man in the Zoo
Lady into Fox and a Man in the Zoo by David Garnett Cover: Garden City
Publishing Co., 1924 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1924 Garden City Publishing Co., Inc.)
Mirror in the Sky
Mirror in the Sky by Dav Garnett (David S. Garnett) Cover:
Berkley/Berkley Medallion, 1969 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1969 Berkley Medallion. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Twilight of the Gods, The
The Twilight of the Gods by Richard Garnett Cover: John Lane, 1911 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Warriors of Spider, The
The Warriors of Spider by W. Michael Gear Cover: Donald A. Wollheim, 1988
(First Edition) illustration by San Julian (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1988 Donald A. Wollheim)
Red Napoleon, The
The Red Napoleon by Floyd Gibbons Cover: Jonathan Cape, 1929 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Courtesy of Random Century House UK Limited. (c) 1929 Johnathan Cape
Harrison Smith)
Late Final
Late Final by Lewis Gibbs Cover: Dent, 1951 (First Edition) (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1951 Dent)
Space Hawk
Space Hawk by Anthony Gilmore Cover: Greenberg, 1952 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1952
Greenberg)
Watch the Northwind Rise
Watch the Northwind Rise by Robert Graves Cover: Avon Books, 1969
illustration by Bob Boster (Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of
Calif., Riverside. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1969 Avon Books)
Runts of 61 Cygni G
Runts of 61 Cygni G by James Grazier Cover: Belmont, 1970 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Belmont
Books (c) 1970 Belmont Books)
God Game, The
The God Game by Andrew Greeley Cover: Warner Books, 1986 (First Edition)
illustration by Boris Vallejo (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1986

Warner Books, Inc.)
Time Beyond Time
Time Beyond Time by I.G. Green Cover: Belmont, 1971 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1971
Belmont Books)
Wandor's Ride
Wandor's Ride by Roland Green Cover: Avon Books, 1973 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1973 Avon Books)
Warrior Within, The
The Warrior Within by Sharon Green Cover: Donald A. Wollheim, 1982 (First
Edition) illustration by Ken Kelly (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1982 Donald A. Wollheim)
Time and Timothy Grenville
Time and Timothy Grenville by Terry Greenhough Cover: New English
Library, 1975 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of Hodder Headline, POC. (c)
1975 New English Library)
Green Isle of the Great Deep, The
The Green Isle of the Great Deep by Neil Gunn Cover: Faber and Faber Ltd.
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Courtesy of Faber and Faber Ltd. (c) 1944 Faber and Faber Ltd.)
Starwolves, The
The Starwolves by Thorarinn Gunnarsson Cover: Warner Books, 1988 (First
Edition) illustration by John Harris (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc.
(c) 1988 Warner Books, Inc.)
King Solomon's Mines
King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard Cover: Cassell & Co., 1885
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. )
Man's World
Man's World by Charlotte Haldrane Cover: Geo. H. Doran Co., 1927 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1927 Geo H.
Doran Co.)
Man with Two Memories, The
The Man with Two Memories by J.B.S. Haldane Cover: Merlin, 1976 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
(c) 1976 Merlin Press Inc.)
Pretender
Pretender by Piers Anthony & Frances Hall Cover: Borgo Press, 1979
illustration by Larry Ortiz (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. (c) 1979 Borgo Press)
Impromptu in Moribundia

Impromptu in Moribundia by Patrick Hamilton Cover: Constable and Co. Ltd.
, 1939 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Courtesy of Constable & Co., London. (c) 1939 Constable and Co. Ltd.)
What Farrar Saw
What Farrar Saw by James Hanley Cover: Nicholson & Watson, 1946 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1946 Nicholson
& Watson)
Thuka of the Moon
Thuka of the Moon by Charles Hannan Cover: Digby, Long & Co., 1906 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
War Games
War Games by Karl Hensen Cover: Playboy Press Paperbacks, 1981
illustration by PEI Books, Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1981 Playboy Press. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Land of the Changing Sun, The
The Land of the Changing Sun by Will N. Harben Cover: Merrian Co., 1894
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Outrider, The
The Outrider by Richard Harding Cover: Pinnacle Books, 1984 illustration
by Michael Meritet (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1984 Pinnacle Books)
Imitation Man, The
The Imitation Man by John Hargrave Cover: Big Ben Books, 1940 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1940 Big Ben
Books)
Symmetrians, The
The Symmetrians by Kenneth Harker Cover: Compact Books, 1966 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Lifetime Books. (c) 1966 Compact Books)
Gypsy Earth
Gypsy Earth by George Harper Cover: Doubleday, 1982 (First Edition)
illustration by Bruce Schluter (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1982 Doubleday & Co.)
Pantopia
Pantopia by Frank Harris Cover: The Panurge Press, 1930 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1930 The Panurge Press)
Romance in Radium, A
A Romance in Radium by J. Henry Harris Cover: Greening & Co. Ltd., 1906
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Warhaven

Warhaven by M. Elayn Harvey Cover: Franklin Watts, 1987 illustration by
Carl Lundgren (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1987 Franklin Watts)
Mind Brothers, The
The Mind Brothers by Peter Heath Cover: Lancer Books, 1967 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1967 Lancer
Books)
Tenebrae
Tenebrae by Ernest Henham Cover: Skeffington & Son, 1898 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Sidney's Comet
Sidney's Comet by Brian Herbert Cover: Berkley, 1983 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1983 The
Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game)
Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game) by Hermann Hesse Cover: Bantam, 1970
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by
Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1970 Bantam Books)
Galactic Warlord
Galactic Warlord by Douglas Hill Cover: Laurel-Leaf Books, 1987 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1987
Laurel-Leaf Books)
New Earth and a New Heaven, A
A New Earth and a New Heaven by William Boyle Hill Cover: Watts & Co.,
1936 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c)
1936 Watts & Co.)
Liege-Killer
Liege-Killer by Christopher Hinz Cover: St. Martin's Press, 1987 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of St.
Martin's Press. (c) 1987 St. Martin's Press)
Toddle Island
Toddle Island by James Dennis Hird Cover: Richard Bentley & Son, 1894
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Termush
Termush by Sven Holm Cover: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1969 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Faber and Faber
Ltd. (c) 1969 Faber and Faber Ltd.)
Hunters, The
The Hunters by Thomas Hoobler Cover: Playboy Press Paperbacks, 1978
illustration by V. Segrelles (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1978 Playboy Press. Reproduction,

duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
By Aeroplane to the Sun
By Aeroplane to the Sun by Donald W. Horner Cover: Century Press, 1910
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Random Century House UK Limited. )
This Was Ivor Trent
This Was Ivor Trent by Claude Houghton Cover: Doubleday, Doran, & Co.,
Inc., 1935 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1935 Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc.)
Philip Dru, Administrator
Philip Dru, Administrator by Edward Mandell House Cover: BW Huesch, 1912
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
John of Jingalo
John of Jingalo by Laurence Housman Cover: Henry Holt & Co., 1912 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Intrigue on the Upper Level
Intrigue on the Upper Level by Thomas Hoyne Cover: Reilly & Lee Co., 1934
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1934
Reilly & Lee Co.)
Green Mansions
Green Mansions by W.H. Hudson Cover: Airmont Publishing, 1965 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Airmont Publishing Co., Inc. - Airmont Books (c) 1965 Airmont Publishing
Company )
Valley of Terror
Valley of Terror by Russell Rey (Dennis Hughes) Cover: Curtis Warren Ltd.
, 1953 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c)
1953 Curtis Warren Ltd.)
Not in Our Stars
Not in Our Stars by Edward Hyams Cover: Longmans, Green & Co., 1949
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1949
Longmans, Green & Co.)
Lottery, The
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Cover: Popular Library, 1949 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1949 Popular Library, Inc.)
Starship Orpheus I
Starship Orpheus I by Symon Jade Cover: Pinnacle Books, 1982 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1982 Pinnacle
Books)
Tower to the Sky
Tower to the Sky by Phillip Jennings Cover: Baen Books, 1988 illustration

by Stephen Hickman (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of BAEN PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c)
1988 Baen Books)
Long Journey, The
The Long Journey by Johannes Jensen Cover: Makinlay, Stone & Mackenzie,
1923 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c)
1923 Makinlay, Stone & Mackenzie)
Logan's Run
Logan's Run by George Clayton Johnson & William F. Nolan Cover: Dell,
1969 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used
by Permission of Dell Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1969 Dell Books)
On the Last Day
On the Last Day by Mervyn Jones Cover: Jonathan Cape, 1958 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Courtesy of Random Century House UK Limited. (c) 1958 Johnathan Cape
London)
Ten from Infinity
Ten from Infinity by Ivar Jorgenson Cover: Monarch Books, 1963
illustration by Ralph Brillhart (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1963 Monarch Books Inc.)
On the Marble Cliffs
On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Juenger Cover: New Directions, 1947 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1947 New
Directions)
HEROD Men, The
The HEROD Men by Nick Kamin Cover: Ace Books, 1971 illustration by John
Schoenkerr (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1971 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
People of the Twilight
People of the Twilight by H. Kaner Cover: Kaner Publishing Co. Unlimited,
1946 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1946 Kaner Publishing Company)
If the South Had Won the Civil War
If the South Had Won the Civil War by MacKinlay Kantor Cover: Bantam,
1961 illustration by Lisa Barnett (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1961 Bantam Books)
Incredible Umbrella, The
The Incredible Umbrella by Marvin Kaye Cover: Doubleday, 1979
illustration by Cathy Canzani (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1979 Doubleday)

Tunnel, The
The Tunnel by Bernhard Kellermann Cover: Macauley Company, 1915 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Passenger
Passenger by Thomas Keneally Cover: HarperCollins/Collins, 1979 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1979
Collins)
Triuneverse, The
The Triuneverse by R.A. Kennedy Cover: Chas. Knight & Co., Ltd., 1912,
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. )
Out of the Silent Places
Out of the Silent Places by Brad Kent (Maurice G. Hugi) Cover: Curtis
Warren, 1952 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1952 Curtis Books)
Summervale
Summervale by James Kenward Cover: Constable and Company Ltd., 1933
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Courtesy of Constable & Co. , London. (c) 1933 Constable and
Company Ltd.)
Kepler's Somnium
Kepler's Somnium by Johannes Kepler Cover: U. Wisconsin Press, 1967
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1967 U.
Wisconsin Press)
Retread Shop
Retread Shop by T. Jackson King Cover: Popular Library, 1988 illustration
by Tom Kidd (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1988 Popular Library)
New Dominion, The
The New Dominion by Arthur Wellesley Kipling Cover: Francis Griffiths,
1908 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. )
With the Night Mail
With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling Cover: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1909
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by
Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1909 Doubleday, Page & Co.)
Unrest of their Time
Unrest of their Time by Nellie Kirkham Cover: Cresset Press, 1935 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
(c) 1935 Cresset Press Ltd.)
Seventh Day, The
The Seventh Day by Hans Hellmut Kirst Cover: Doubleday, 1959 illustration
by Richard Powers (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,

Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday
Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1959 Doubleday)
Starmaster's Gambit
Starmaster's Gambit by Gerard Klein Cover: DAW Books, 1973 illustration
by Kelly Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1973 DAW
Books, Inc.)
Jim McWhirter
Jim McWhirter by W.P. Knowles Cover: C.W. Daniel Co., 1933 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
(c) 1933 C.W. Daniel Company)
Memories of the Future
Memories of the Future by Ronald A. Knox Cover: George H. Doran Co., 1923
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1923 George H. Doran Company)
Last Thing You'd Want to Know, The
The Last Thing You'd Want to Know by Eric Koch Cover: Tundra Books, 1976
illustration by Molly Pulver (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. (c) 1976 Tundra Books)
Jehovah Contract, The
The Jehovah Contract by Victor Koman Cover: Avon Books, 1984 illustration
by Gary Ruddell (Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif.,
Riverside. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1984 Avon Books)
Supernova
Supernova by Eric Kotani & Roger MacBride Allen Cover: Avon Books, 1991
(Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1991 Avon Books)
Space Mavericks, The
The Space Mavericks by Michael K. Kring Cover: Leisure Books, 1980 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1980 Leisure
Books)
Pandora's Genes
Pandora's Genes by Kathryn Lance Cover: Popular Library, 1985
illustration by David Mattingly (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c)
1985 Popular Library)
Sword for the Empire
Sword for the Empire by Gene Lancour Cover: Doubleday, 1978 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1978 Doubleday & Co.)
World Called Camelot, A
A World Called Camelot by Arthur Landis Cover: DAW Books, 1976
illustration by Thomas Barber, Jr. (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc.

(c) 1976 DAW Books, Inc.)
Two Planets
Two Planets by Kird Lasswitz Cover: Southern Illinois University Press,
1971 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c)
1971 Southern Illinois University Press.)
Mudd's Angels
Mudd's Angels by J.A. Lawrence Cover: Bantam, 1978 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1978
Bantam Books)
Time & Space
Time & Space by Rand Le Page Cover: Curtis Warren, 1952 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1952
Curtis Warren Ltd.)
Iron Man and the Tin Woman, The
The Iron Man and the Tin Woman by Stephen Leacock Cover: Tonbridge
Printers, 1929 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1929 Tonbridge Printers)
Mountains of the Sun, The
The Mountains of the Sun by Christian Leourier Cover: Berkley, 1974
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1974 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Time Machine, Special Edition: World War II Codebreaker
Time Machine, Special Edition: World War II Codebreaker by Peter Lerangis
Cover: Bantam, 1989 illustration by Steve Fastner (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1989
Bantam Books)
Insect Warriors, The
The Insect Warriors by Rex Dean Levie Cover: Ace Books, 1965 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1965 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Gods of Foxcroft, The
The Gods of Foxcroft by David Levy Cover: Arbor House, 1970 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of William Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) 1970 Arbor House)
Unexpected Island, The
The Unexpected Island by Lin Yutang Cover: The Windmill Press, 1955
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1955
The Windmill Press, Surrey England )

Nothing Ever Happens
Nothing Ever Happens by Maurice Lincoln Cover: John Hamilton Ltd., 1927
illustration by Tom Cotnzell (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins Publishers
Limited. (c) 1927 John Hamilton Ltd.)
Golden Book of Springfield, The
The Golden Book of Springfield by Vachel Lindsay Cover: Macmillan, 1920
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Identity Seven
Identity Seven by Robert Lory Cover: DAW Books, 1974 illustration by
Kelly Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1974 DAW Books, Inc.)
Operation Orbit
Operation Orbit by Kris Luna Cover: Curtis Warren, 1953 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1953 Curtis Books)
Message from Mars, A
A Message from Mars by Lester Lurgan Cover: Greening & Co., 1912 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Greening & Co. )
Mad Scientist, The
The Mad Scientist by Raymond McDonald Cover: Cochrane Publishing, 1908
illustration by Charles Beecher Bunnell (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Cochrane Publishing Co. )
Great God Pan and The Inmost Light, The
The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light by Arthur Machen Cover: Robert
Bros., 1894 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
)
Vanishing Professor, The
The Vanishing Professor by Fred MacIsaac Cover: Henry Waterson Co., 1927
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1927
Henry Waterson Co.)
Yellow Wave, The
The Yellow Wave by Kenneth MacKay Cover: Richard Bentley & Son, 1895
illustration by Frank P. Mahoney (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. )
Panchronicon, The
The Panchronicon by Harold Steele Mackaye Cover: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1904 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Lunatic Republic, The
The Lunatic Republic by Compton Mackenzie Cover: Chatto & Windous, 1959
illustration by Clark Hutton (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Random Century House UK Limited. (c) 1959
Chatto & Windous)
Tragedy of Man, The
The Tragedy of Man by Imre Madach Cover: Corvina Press, 1963 (Casey

Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1963 Corvina
Press)
God's Grace
God's Grace by Bernard Malamud Cover: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Jacket design: Honi Werner. Reprinted by permission of Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, Inc. (c) 1982 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Design
(c)1982 Honi Werner)
Unknown Shore, The
The Unknown Shore by Donald Malcolm Cover: Laser Books, 1976 illustration
by Kelly Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1976 Laser Books)
They
They by Marya Mannes Cover: Modern Library Editions, 1968 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Modern Library
Editions (c) 1968 Modern Library Editions)
When the Earth Died
When the Earth Died by Karl Mannheim Cover: Sydney Remberton, 1950 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Sydney Pemberton
(c) 1950 Sydney Pemberton)
Marahuna
Marahuna by H.B. Marriott-Watson Cover: Longmans, Green & Co., 1888
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Longmens, Green & Co. )
Upsidonia
Upsidonia by Archibald Marshall Cover: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1917 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Dodd, Mead & Co. )
Ogden's Strange Story
Ogden's Strange Story by Edison Marshall Cover: H.C. Kinsey & Co., 1934
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1934 H.C. Kinsey & Company)
Summer in 3,000
Summer in 3,000 by Peter Martin Cover: Quality Press, 1946 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
(c) 1946 Quality Press UK)
Stones of Enchantment
Stones of Enchantment by Windham Martyn Cover: Herbert Jenkins Ltd., 1948
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Courtesy of Random House UK Limited. (c) 1948 Herbert Jenkins
Ltd.)
Kavin's World
Kavin's World by David Mason Cover: Lancer Books, 1969 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1969 Lancer Books)

Stolen Planet, The
The Stolen Planet by John Mastin Cover: Philip Wellby, 1906 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Scars, and Other Distinguishing Marks
Scars, and Other Distinguishing Marks by Richard Chrisitan Matheson
Cover: Scream/Press, 1987 illustration by Mya Kramer & Jeff Conner (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1987
Scream/Press)
Not in Our Stars
Not in Our Stars by Michael Maurice (Conrad Arthur Skinner) Cover: J.B.
Lippincott, 1923 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1923 J.B. Lippincott)
Next Chapter, The
The Next Chapter by Andre Maurois Cover: Kegan Paul, 1927 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1927 Kegan
Paul London)
Path of Exoterra, The
The Path of Exoterra by Gordon McBain Cover: Avon Books, 1981 (Casey
Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1981 Avon Books)
Screaming Dead Balloons, The
The Screaming Dead Balloons by Philip McCutchan Cover: Berkley, 1969
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1969 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Janus Syndrome, The
The Janus Syndrome by Steven E. McDonald Cover: Bantam, 1981 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group,
Inc. (c) 1981 Bantam Books)
Scorpio
Scorpio by Alex McDonough Cover: Ace Books, 1990 illustration by John
Jude Palencar (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1990 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Shattered Stars, The
The Shattered Stars by Richard S. McEnroe Cover: Bantam, 1984 illustation
by John Berkey (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1984 Bantam Books)
Ghoster

Ghoster by Lee McKeone Cover: Popular Library, 1988 illustrated by James
Warhola (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1988 Popular Library)
Helix and the Sword, The
The Helix and the Sword by John McLoughlin Cover: TOR/Tom Doherty
Associates, 1983 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1983 Tor Books)
Pilgrimage
Pilgrimage by Drew Mendelson Cover: DAW Books, 1981 illustration by John
Pound (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1981 DAW Books, Inc.)
Great Awakening, The
The Great Awakening by Albert Adams Merrill Cover: George Book, 1899
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
House of Many Worlds, The
The House of Many Worlds by Sam J. Merwin Cover: Doubleday, 1951 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1951 Doubleday)
Skirmish
Skirmish by Melisa Michaels Cover: TOR/Tom Doherty Associates, 1985
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1985 Tor Books)
Winter World
Winter World by C.J. Mills Cover: Ace Books, 1992 illustration by Jean
Targete (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1992 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Star Quest
Star Quest by Robert E. Mills Cover: Belmont Tower Books, 1978 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1978 Belmont
Tower Books)
Into the Sun and Other Stories
Into the Sun and Other Stories by Robert Duncan Milne Cover: Donald M.
Grant, 1980 (First Edition) illustration by Ned Dameron (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used with permission of
Donald M. Grant. (c) 1980 Donald M. Grant)
Three Go Back
Three Go Back by J. Leslie Mitchell Cover: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1978
illustration by Bill Tinker (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Bobbs-Merrill Co. (c) 1932 Bobbs - Merrill Co.)
Last American, The
The Last American by John A. Mitchell Cover: Frederick A. Stokes &
Brother, 1889 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,

Riverside. )
Procurator
Procurator by Kirk Mitchell Cover: Ace Books, 1984 illustration by James
Gurney (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1984 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Sleeping Bomb, The
The Sleeping Bomb by James Moffatt Cover: New English Library, 1970
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
with permission of Hodder Headline, POC. (c) 1970 New English Library)
Time Before This, The
The Time Before This by Nicholas Monsarrat Cover: William Sloane
Associates, 1962 illustration by Walter Ferro (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. William Sloane Associate (c) 1962
William Sloane Associate)
Wonderful Electric Elephant, The
The Wonderful Electric Elephant by Frances Trego Montgomery Cover: The
Saalfield Publishing Co., 1904 illustration by C.M. Coolidge (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Slater's Planet
Slater's Planet by Harris Moore Cover: Pinnacle Books, 1971 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Pinnacle Books (c)
1971 Pinnacle Books)
Heart Clock
Heart Clock by Dick Morland Cover: New English Library, 1974 illustration
by Keef (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with permission of Hodder Headline, POC. (c) 1974 New English
Library)
Gumption Island
Gumption Island by Felix Morley Cover; Caxton Printers Ltd., 1956 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. By permission of
the publisher, The Caxton Printers, Ltd., Caldwell, Idaho. (c) 1956 Caxton
Printers Ltd.)
Sheriff of Purgatory, The
The Sheriff of Purgatory by Jim Morris Cover: TOR, 1987 illustration by
Royo (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1987 Tor Books)
No Man on Earth
No Man on Earth by Walter Moudy Cover: Berkley, 1964 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1964 The
Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Tangled Webs

Tangled Webs by Steve Mudd Cover: Popular Library, 1989 illustration by
Blas Gallego (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1989 Popular
Library)
Kinsmen of the Dragon
Kinsmen of the Dragon by Stanley Mullen Cover: Shasta, 1951 (First
Edition) illustration by Hannes Bok (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Erle Melvin Korshak. (c) 1951
Shasta)
Vendetta
Vendetta by M.S. Murdock Cover: Popular Library, 1987 illustration by Tim
Hildebrandt (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Popular (c) 1987 Popular Library)
Gobi or Shamo
Gobi or Shamo by Gilbert Murray Cover: Longmans, Green & Co., 1889 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Portrait of Jennie
Portrait of Jennie by Robert Nathan Cover: Popular Library, 1962
illustration by Zackerberg (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. (c) 1962 Popular Library, Inc.)
Sinister Researches of C.P. Ransom, The
The Sinister Researches of C.P. Ransom by Homer Nearing Cover: Doubleday,
1954 (First Edition) illustration by Edward Gorey (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a
division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1954
Doubleday)
Place Beyond Man, A
A Place Beyond Man by Cary Neeper Cover: Dell, 1977 illustration by Boris
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by
Permission of Dell Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1977 Dell Books)
His Wisdom, the Defender
His Wisdom, the Defender by Simon Newcomb Cover: HarperCollins/Harper &
Bros., 1900 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. )
Night Mayor, The
The Night Mayor by Kim Newman Cover: Carroll & Graf, 1990 (First US
Edition) illustration by Ray Colmer (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with
permission of Tony Greco & Associates, Inc. (c) 1990 Carroll & Graf)
Timelapse
Timelapse by David F. Nighbert Cover: St. Martin's Press (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
St. Martin's Press. (c) 1990 St. Martin's Press)
Great Secret, The
The Great Secret by Hume Nisbet Cover: F.V. White & Co., 1895 (First

Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
I Killed Stalin
I Killed Stalin by Sterling Noel Cover: Eton Books, 1952 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Eton Books (c) 1952 Eton
Books)
Ultimate Solution, The
The Ultimate Solution by Eric Norden Cover: Warner Books, 1973
illustration by Seymour Chwast (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1973
Warner Books)
Under-People, The
The Under-People by Eric Norman Cover: Award Books, 1969 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Award Books (c) 1969 Award
Books)
Untamed, The
The Untamed by Victor Norwood Cover: Scion, 1951 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1951 Scion, Ltd.)
Last Man, The
The Last Man by Alfred Noyes Cover: John Murray, 1940 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. John Murray
(c) 1940 John Murray UK)
Pallid Giant, The
The Pallid Giant by Pierrepont Noyes Cover: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1927
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1927 Fleming H. Revell Company)
Lovers: 2075
Lovers: 2075 by Charles English (Charles Nuetzel) Cover: N.A.C.
Publications, 1964 illustration by Gus Albert (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. N.A.C. Publications (c) 1964
N.A.C. Publications)
Third Policeman, The
The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien Cover: Lanser Books, 1967 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Lancer Books (c)
1967 Lancer Books)
Plutonia
Plutonia by Vladimir A. Obruchev Cover: Foreign Languages Publishing
House, 1960 illustration by G. Nikolsky (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Foreign Languages Publishing House (c) 1960
Foreign Lnaguages Publishing House )
Last War, The
The Last War by Samuel W. Odell Cover: Charles H. Kerr, 1898 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
On the Eighth Day
On the Eighth Day by Lawrence Okun Cover: Playboy Press Paperbacks, 1980

(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1980 Playboy Press. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
North Sea Bubble, The
The North Sea Bubble by Ernest Oldmeadow Cover: E. Grant Richards, 1906
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. )
Mystery of Evelin Delorme, The
The Mystery of Evelin Delorme by Albert B. Paine Cover: Arena, 1894
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. )
This Time Tomorrow
This T ime Tomorrow by Lauren Paine Cover: World Distributors, 1963
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. World
Distributors (c) 1963 World Distributors)
Watcher, The
The Watcher by Jane Palmer Cover: Women's Press, 1986 illustration by
Fiona Macvicar (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Courtesy of The Women's Press, London. (c) 1986 The Women's
Press)
Scarlet Empire, The
The Scarlet Empire by David Perry Cover: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1906 (First
Edition) illustration by Hermann C. Wall (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Titus Groan
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake Cover: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reynal & Hitchcock (c) 1946 Reynal & Hitchcock)
Iron Pirate, The
The Iron Pirate by Max Pemberton Cover: Rand, McNally, 1897 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Man Who Never Missed, The
The Man Who Never Missed by Steve Perry Cover: Ace Books, 1985
illustration by James Gurney (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1985 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Revolt of the Horses
Revolt of the Horses by Walter Copland Perry Cover: Grant Richards, 1898
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. )
King of Argent
King of Argent by John T. Phillifent Cover: Donald A. Wollheim, 1973

(First Edition) illustration by Kelly Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Donald A. Wollneim (c) 1973 Donald
A. Wollheim)
Tachyon Web, The
The Tachyon Web by Christopher Pike Cover: Bantam, 1986 (First Edition)
illustration by Kevin Johnson (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1986 Bantam Spectra)
Lizard Music
Lizard Music by Daniel Pinkwater Cover: Dodd, Mead, 1976 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.Dodd, Mead
(c) 1976 Dodd, Mead & Co.)
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe Cover: Limited
Editions, 1930 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1930 Limited Editions)
Up and Out
Up and Out by John Cowper Powys Cover: MacDonald, 1957 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.MacDonald
(c) 1957 MacDonald)
Shiloh Project, The
The Shiloh Project by David C. Poyer Cover: Avon Books, 1981 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside.
Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1981 Avon Books)
Green Man of Kilsona, The
The Green Man of Kilsona by Festus Pragnell Cover: Phillip Allan (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Philip Allan (c) 19 Philip Allan)
Guts
Guts by Byron Preiss & C.J. Henderson Cover: Tempo Books, 1979 (First
Edition) illustration by Gray Morrow (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Tempo Books (c) 1979 Tempo Books)
Strange Gateways
Strange Gateways by E. Hoffman Price Cover: Arkham House, 1967 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Courtesy of Arkham House Publishers. (c) 1967 by Arkham House Publishers,
Inc.)
Return of the Ceteosaurus, The
The Return of the Ceteosaurus by Garnett Radcliffe Cover: Drane (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Drane. )
Remember the Alamo!
Remember the Alamo! by Kevin D. Randle & Robert Cornett Cover: Charter,
1980 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Charter Books (c) 1980 Charter Books)

Jaguar
Jaguar by Bill Ransom Cover: Ace Books, 1990 (First Edition) illustration
by Royo (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1990 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Maru Invasion, The
The Maru Invasion by Luan Ranzetta Cover: Brown, Watson Ltd., 1962 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Brown Watson Limited (c) 1962 Brown Watson Ltd.)
The Camp of the Saints, The
The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail Cover: Ace Books, 1975 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1975 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Strange World of Planet X, The
The Strange World of Planet X by Rene Ray Cover: Herbert Jenkins Ltd.,
1957 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Courtesy of Random House UK Limited. (c) 1957 Herbert Jenkins
Ltd.)
Seedy, The
The Seedy by Robert Ray Cover: Panther Books, 1969 (First Edition) (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with
permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1969 Panther Books)
Whispering Gorilla, The
The Whispering Gorilla by David V. Reed Cover: Sydney Pemberton, 1950
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Sydney Pemberton (c) 1950 Sydney Pemberton)
Yellow-Back Radio Broke-Down
Yellow-Back Radio Broke-Down by Ishmael Reed Cover: Avon Books, 1969
(Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1969 Avon Books)
Savage Stars, The
The Savage Stars by Richard Reinsmith Cover: Tower, 1981 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Tower Books
(c) 1981 Tower Books)
Monodyne Catastrophe, The
The Monodyne Catastrophe by Joseph Renard Cover: Major Books, 1977 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Major Books (c) 1977 Major Books)
Voyage to Purilia, A
A Voyage to Purilia by Elmer Rice Cover: J.J. Little & Ives, 1930 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. J.
J. Little & Ives (c) 1930 J.J. Little & Ives)

Pindharee
Pindharee by Joel Richards Cover: TOR/Tom Doherty Associates, 1986 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1986 Tor Books)
Strayed Sheep of Charun, The
The Strayed Sheep of Charun by John Maddox Roberts Cover: Doubleday, 1977
(First Edition) illustration by Michael Flanagan (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a
division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1977
Doubleday)
Report on the Status Quo
Report on the Status Quo by Terence Roberts Cover: Merlin Press Inc.,
1955 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Merlin
Press Inc. (c) 1955 Merlin Press Inc.)
Longhead
Longhead by Charles Henry Robinson Cover: L.C. Page & Co., 1913 (First
Edition) illustration by Charles Livingston Bull (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Mindfogger
Mindfogger by Michael Rogers Cover: Dell, 1976 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Dell Books,
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1976 Dell
Books)
Run to the Stars
Run to the Stars by Michael Scott Rohan Cover: Ace Books, 1986
illustration by John Berkey (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1986 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu, The
The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer Cover: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1985
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. J. M. Dent
& Sons (c) 1985 J.M. Dent & Sons)
Maniac's Dream, The
The Maniac's Dream by R. Horace Rose Cover: Duckworth, 1946 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Duckworth & Co. (c) 1946 Duckworth & Co.)
Man Who Lived Backwards, The
The Man Who Lived Backwards by Malcolm Ross Cover: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux/Farrar, Straus & Co., 1950 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Jacket design: Malcolm Ross.
Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. (c) 1950 Farrar,
Straus and Company. Design (c) 1950 Malcolm Ross.)
Staroamer's Fate

Staroamer's Fate by Chuck Rothman Cover: Popular Library, 1986
illustration by Enric (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1986 Popular
Library, Inc.)
Gods of Cerus Major, The
The Gods of Cerus Major by Gary Alan Ruse Cover: Doubleday, 1982
illustration by Soren Arutyunyan (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1982 Doubleday)
Satan in the Suburbs
Satan in the Suburbs by Bertrand Russell Cover: Bodley Head, 1953 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Courtesy of Random Century House UK Limited (c) 1953 Bodley Head Richard
Clay & Co.)
Inner Eclipse
Inner Eclipse by Richard Paul Russo Cover: TOR, 1988 illustration by
David Mattingly (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1988 Tor Books)
La Passion Selon Satan
La Passion Selon Satan by Jacques Sadoul Cover: Editions J'ai Lu, 1960
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Editions
J'ai Lu (c) 1960 Editions J'ai Lu)
Leaves of October, The
The Leaves of October by Don Sakers Cover: Baen Books, 1988 illustration
by Judith Mitchell (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of BAEN PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c)
1988 Baen Books)
Throwbacks, The
The Throwbacks by Roger Sarac Cover: Belmont, 1965 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Belmont Books (c) 1965 Belmont
Books)
Way-Farer
Way-Farer by Dennis Schmidt Cover: Ace Books, 1978 illustration by Ben
Venuti (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1978 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Travels in the Interior
Travels in the Interior by Luke Courteney (Alfred Taylor Schofield)
Cover: Ward & Downey, 1887 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. )
Palimpests
Palimpests by Carter Scholz & Glenn Harcourt Cover: Ace Books, 1984
illustration by Attila Hejja (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1984 Ace

Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
We Are All Legends
We Are All Legends by Darrell Schweitzer Cover: Donning Co., 1981
illustration by Fabian (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Donning Company Starblaze Editions (c) 1981 Donning Company
Starblaze Editions)
Project Dracula
Project Dracula by Alan Scott Cover: Sphere Books Ltd., 1971 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Sphere Books Ltd.
(c) 1971 Sphere Books Ltd.)
Master of the Microbe, The
The Master of the Microbe by Robert W. Service Cover: Barse & Hopkins,
1926 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Barse
& Hopkins. (c) 1926 Barse & Hopkins)
TekWar
TekWar by William Shatner Cover: Ace Books, 1989 illustration by Boris
Vallejo (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1989 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Quest for Simbilis, A
A Quest for Simbilis by Michael Shea Cover: DAW Books, 1974 illustration
by George Barr (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1974 DAW
Books, Inc.)
Girl Who Knew Tomorrow, The
The Girl Who Knew Tomorrow by Zoa Sherburne Cover: William Morrow & Co.,
1971 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Shown
by permission of William Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) 1971 William Morrow & Co.,
Inc.)
Maxwell's Demon
Maxwell's Demon by Martin Sherwood Cover: New English Library, 1976
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
with permission of Hodder Headline, POC. (c) 1976 New English Library)
Man Who Lost Himself, The
The Man Who Lost Himself by Osbert Sitwell Cover: Duckworth, 1929 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Duckworth & Co. (c) 1929 Duckworth & Co.)
Ship of Destiny
Ship of Destiny by Henry J. Slater Cover: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1951
illustration by Nettie Weber (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Thomas V.Crowell Co. (c) 1951 Thomas Y. Crowell )
Indians Won, The
The Indians Won by Martin Cruz Smith Cover: Leisure Books, 1970 (Casey

Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Leisure Books (c)
1970 Leisure Books)
Very Large Array, A
A Very Large Array by Melinda M. Snodgrass Cover: U. of New Mexico Press,
1987 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. University of New Mexico Press. (c) 1987 University of New
Mexico Press.)
Hawks of Arcturus, The
The Hawks of Arcturus by Cecil Snyder III Cover: DAW Books, 1974 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with
permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1974 DAW Books, Inc.)
Testament XXI
Testament XXI by Guy Snyder Cover: DAW Books, 1973 illustration by Kelly
Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1973 DAW Books, Inc.)
Tomorrow's Comet
Tomorrow's Comet by Lewis Sowden Cover: Robert Hale Ltd., 1951 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1951 Robert
Hale Ltd.)
Sever the Earth
Sever the Earth by Jacques Spitz Cover: Bodley Head/John Lane, 1936
(First Edition) illustration by Denis Tegetmeier (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Random Century House
UK Limited (c) 1936 John Lane London)
Village of Stars
Village of Stars by Paul Stanton Cover: William Morrow & Co./M.S. Mill
Co., 1960 illustration by Charles Gear (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Shown by permission of William Morrow & Co.,
Inc. (c) 1960 William Morrow & Co., Inc.)
Smith's Dream
Smith's Dream by C.K. Stead Cover: Longman Paul Ltd., 1986 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Longman Paul Ltd.
(c) 1986 Longman Paul Ltd.)
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson Cover:
Longmans, Green & Co., 1886 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Tracker
Tracker by Ron Stillman Cover: Diamond Books, 1991 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Diamond Books (c) 1991 Diamond
Books)
Polaris and the Immortals
Polaris and the Immortals by Charles B. Stilson Cover: Avalon Books, 1968
illustration by Gray Morrow (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Thomas Bouregy & Co. - Avalon Books (c)

1968 Avalon Books)
Last Fall
Last Fall by Bruce Stolbov Cover: Doubleday, 1987 (First Edition)
illustration by Margo Herr (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1987 Doubleday)
King of the Air
King of the Air by Herbert Strang Cover: Humphrey Milford (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside Humphrey
Milford (UK). )
Promising Planet, A
A Promising Planet by Jeremy Strike Cover: Ace Books, 1970 illustration
by Jack Gaughan (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1970 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Woman Who Couldn't Die, The
The Woman Who Couldn't Die by Arthur Stringer Cover: Bobbs-Merrill Co.,
1929 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c)
1929 Bobbs - Meerrill Co.)
Hard to Be a God
Hard to Be a God by Arkady & Boris Strugatski Cover: Seabury Press, 1973
(First Edition) illustration by Alan Peckolick (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Seabury Press (c) 1973 Seabury
Press)
Star Raiders, The
The Star Raiders by Donald Suddaby Cover: Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1950
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Geoffrey Cumberlege (c) 1950 Geoffrey Cumberlege)
Riallaro
Riallaro by Godfrey Sweven Cover: G.P. Putnam's Sons (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
The Putnam Publishing Group. )
Portal
Portal by Rob Swigart Cover: St. Martin's Press, 1988 (First Edition)
illustration by Jean-Francois Podevin (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Cover: Jean Francois Podevin. Courtesy of St.
Martin's Press. (c) 1988 St. Martin's Press)
Mirror Friend, Mirror Foe
Mirror Friend, Mirror Foe by George Takei & Robert Asprin Cover: Playboy
Press, 1979 illustration by Ken Barr (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1979 Playboy Press.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission

is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Greek, The
The Greek by Tiffany Thayer Cover: Albert & Charles Boni, 1931 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Albert & Charles
Boni (c) 1931 Albert & Charles Boni)
Teg's 1994
Teg's 1994 by Robert Theobald & J.M. Scott Cover: Swallow Press Inc.,
1972 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Swallow Press Inc. (c) 1972 Swallow Press Inc.)
Green Ray, The
The Green Ray by Vance Thompson Cover: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1924 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1924 Bobbs Meerrill Co.)
Power of the Serpent, The
The Power of the Serpent by Peter Timlett Cover: Bantam, 1976 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group,
Inc. (c) 1976 Bantam Books)
Giphantia
Giphantia by C.F. Tiphaigne de la Roche Cover: Robert Horsfield, 1761
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Robert
Horsfield )
Mind out of Time
Mind out of Time by Angela Tonks Cover: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1958 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with the
permission of Victor Gollancz Ltd. (c) 1958 Victor Gollancz Ltd.)
Immortal Error, The
The Immortal Error by Elleston Trevor Cover: Gerald Swan Ltd., 1946
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Gerald Swan
Ltd. (c) 1946 Gerald Swan Ltd.)
Submarine Girl, The
The Submarine Girl by Edgar Turner Cover: Stanley Paul & Co., 1909 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Man Whose Name Wouldn't Fit, The
The Man Whose Name Wouldn't Fit by Theodore Tyler Cover: Doubleday & Co.,
1968 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used
by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1968 Doubleday & Co.)
Red Court, The
The Red Court by Rena Vale Cover: Nelson Publishing Co. (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Nelson
Publishing (c) 1952 Nelson Publishing Co.)
Sideslip
Sideslip by Dave Van Arnam & Ted White Cover: Pyramid Books, 1968 (First

Edition) illustration by Jack Gaughan (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1968 Pyramid Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Where Were You Last Pluterday?
Where Were You Last Pluterday? by Paul Van Herck Cover: DAW Books, 1973
illustration by Karel Thole (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1973
DAW Books, Inc.)
Planet of the Gawfs
Planet of the Gawfs by Steve Vance Cover: Leisure Books, 1978 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Leisure Books (c)
1978 Leisure Books)
Pleasure Planet
Pleasure Planet by Edward E. George (Robert Vardeman) Cover: Carlyle
Communications, 1974 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Carlyle Communications (c) 1974 Carlyle Communications)
Hellwalker
Hellwalker by Carolyn Vesser Cover: TOR, 1988 (First Edition) (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
permission of Tor Books. (c) 1988 Tor Books)
My First Two Thousand Years
My First Two Thousand Years by George S. Viereck & Paul Eldridge Cover:
Macauley Co., 1928 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Macauley Co. (c) 1928 Macauley Co.)
Tomorrow's Eve
Tomorrow's Eve by Adam Villiers de L'Isle Cover: University of Illinois
Press, 1982 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
University of Illinois Press. (c) 1982 University of Illinois Press.)
Solarkill
Solarkill by Charles Ingrid (Rhondi Vilott) Cover: DAW Books, 1987 (First
Edition) illustration by Frank Morris (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc.
(c) 1987 DAW Books, Inc.)
StarSpawn
StarSpawn by Kenneth Von Gunden Cover: Ace Books, 1990 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1990 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Metropolis
Metropolis by Thea Von Harbou Cover: Uzeanische Bibiothek, 1984 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Uzeanische
Bibiothek (c) 1984 Uzeanische Bibiothek)

Pre-Empt
Pre-Empt by John R. Vorhies Cover: Avon Books, 1969 illustration by
Milton Charles (Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif.,
Riverside. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1969 Avon Books)
Lord's Pink Ocean, The
The Lord's Pink Ocean by David Walker Cover: DAW Books, 1972 (First
Edition) illustration by Josh Kirby (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc.
(c) 1972 DAW Books, Inc.)
War-Gamers' World
War-Gamers' World by Hugh Walker Cover: DAW Books, 1978 illustration by
Michael Mariano (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1978 DAW
Books, Inc.)
Light of Lilith, The
The Light of Lilith by F. McDonald Wallis Cover: Ace Books, 1961 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1961 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Vandals of the Void
Vandals of the Void by J.M. Walsh Cover: John Hamilton Ltd., 1931 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with
permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1931 John Hamilton
Ltd.)
Requiem pour Demain
Requiem pour Demain by Daniel Walther Cover: Nouvelle Edition Oswald,
1982 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. N.E.O.
Nouvelle Edition Oswald (c) 1982 N.E.O. Nouvelle Edition Oswald)
Sons of the Ocean Deeps
Sons of the Ocean Deeps by Bryce Walton Cover: John C. Winston Co., 1952
illustration by Paul Orban (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. John c. Winston Company (c) 1952 John C. Winston
Company)
Wild Goose Chase, The
The Wild Goose Chase by Rex Warner Cover: Lowe and Brydonne Ltd., 1944
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Lowe and
Brydone Ltd. (c) 1944 Lowe and Brydone Ltd. UK)
Palafox
Palafox by Sandys Wason Cover: Cope and Femrick, 1927 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Cope and Femrick (c) 1927
Cope and Femrick)
Probability Pad, The
The Probability Pad by Thomas Waters. Cover: Pyramid Books, 1970 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.

Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1970 Pyramid Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Tactical Exercise
Tactical Exercise by Evelyn Waugh Cover: Little, Brown & Co., 1954 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Published by
Little, Brown and Company (Inc.) (c) 1954 Little, Brown and Company
(Inc.))
Mercedes Nights
Mercedes Nights by Michael D. Weaver Cover: St. Martin's Press, 1987
(First Edition) illustration by Bill Sienkewicz (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Cover: Bill Sienkewicz. Courtesy
of St. Martin's Press. (c) 1987 St. Martin's Press)
Insurrection
Insurrection by David Weber Cover: Baen Books, 1990 illustration by Paul
Alexander (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection. Reprinted with permission of
BAEN PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c) 1990 Baen Books)
Hijack
Hijack by Edward Wellen Cover: Beagle, 1971 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Beagle (c) 1971 Beagle)
Wrath of Ashar
Wrath of Ashar by Angus Wells Cover: Bantam, 1990 illustration by Larry
Elmore (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used
by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1990 Bantam Books)
Planets of Adventure
Planets of Adventure by Basil Wells Cover: Fantasy Publishing Co., 1949
illustration by Jack Gaughan (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Fantasy Publishing Co. (c) 1949 Fantasy Publishing Co.)
Star of the Unborn
Star of the Unborn by Franz Werfel Cover: Bantam, 1976 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1976
Bantam Books)
Phantom City, The
The Phantom City by William Westall Cover: Cassell & Co. (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Sweepers of the Sea
Sweepers of the Sea by Claude Wetmore Cover: The Bowen-Merrill Co., 1900
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. )
Matters of Form
Matters of Form by Scott Wheeler Cover: DAW Books, 1987 illustration by
Vincent Di Fate (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,

Riverside. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1987 DAW
Books, Inc.)
Spaceflight - Venus
Spaceflight - Venus by Philip Wilding Cover: Hennel Licke Ltd., 1954
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Hennel Licke Ltd. (c) 1954 Hennel Licke Ltd.)
Valley Beyond Time
Valley Beyond Time by Vaughn Wilkins Cover: Jonathan Cape, 1955 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Courtesy of Random Century House UK Limited. (c) 1955 Johnathan Cape
London)
Many Dimensions
Many Dimensions by Charles Williams Cover: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1931
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with the permission of Victor Gollancz Ltd. (c) 1931
Victor Gollancz Ltd.)
Richardson Story, The
The Richardson Story by Frank Williams Cover: Heinemann, 1951 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
(c) 1951 William Heinemann, Ltd. )
Micronauts, The
The Micronauts by Gordon Williams Cover: Bantam, 1977 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1977
Bantam Books)
Sex Pill, The
The Sex Pill by J.X. Williams Cover: Phoenix Press, 1968 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Phoenix Press (c) 1968
Phoenix Press)
Martian Spring
Martian Spring by Michael Lindsay Williams Cover: Avon Books, 1986 (Casey
Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1986 Avon Books)
Station X
Station X by G. McLeod Winsor Cover: Herbert Jenkins Ltd. (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Random
House UK Limited. (c) Herbert Jenkins Ltd.)
Space Egg, The
The Space Egg by Russ Winterbotham Cover: Monarch Books, 1962
illustration by Jack Schoenherr (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside.Monarch Books, Inc. (c) 1962 Monarch Books, Inc.)
Starluck
Starluck by Don Wismer Cover: Dell, 1986 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Dell Books,
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1986 Dell

Books)
Guerilleres, Les
Les Gueilleres by Monique Wittig Cover: Avon Books, 1973 (Casey
Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1973 Avon Books)
Star God
Star God by Allen L. Wold Cover: Bart, 1988 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Bart. (c) 1988 Bart)
Journey of the Oceanauts
Journey of the Oceanauts by Louis Wolfe Cover: Pyramid Books, 1970 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1970 Pyramid Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
London's Burning
London's Burning by Barbara Wootton Cover: Allen & Unwin, 1936 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1936
Allen & Unwin)
Thief of Bagdad
Thief of Bagdad by Richard Wormser Cover: Dell, 1961 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Dell
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1961
Dell Books)
Matter of Oaths, A
A Matter of Oaths by Helen S. Wright Cover: Popular Library, 1990
illustration by Martin Andrews (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1990
Popular Library)
Swiss Family Robinson, The
The Swiss Family Robinson by Johan Rudolf Wyss Cover: Ernest Nister, 1899
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. )
Lost Prince, The
The Lost Prince by Paul Edwin Zimmer Cover: Berkley, 1983 illustration by
PBJ Books, Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1983 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Outpost Mars
Outpost Mars by C.M. Kornbluth & Judith Merril Cover: Dell, 1954
illustration by Richard Powers (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Dell Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1954 Dell)

Puttering About in a Small Land
Puttering About in a Small Land by Philip K. Dick Cover: Academy Chicago
Publishers (First Edition) illustration by Armen Kohoyian (M. M. Kavanagh.
(c) 1985 Academy Chicago)
Street Lethal
Street Lethal by Steven Barnes Cover: Ace Books, 1983 illustration by
Barclay Shaw (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1983 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Soul of the Robot, The
The Soul of the Robot by Barrington Bayley Cover: Allison & Busby, 1974
illustration by Richard Glyn Jones (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Allison & Busby (UK) (c) 1974 Allison & Busby)
Wizard of Lemuria, The
The Wizard of Lemuria by Lin Carter Cover: Ace Books, 1965 illustration
by Sray Morrow (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1965 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Midnight Dancers, The
The Midnight Dancers by Gerard Conway Cover: Ace Books, 1972 illustration
by Dani Maltzer (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1972 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
StarBridge
StarBridge by A.C. Crispin Cover: Ace Books, 1989 illustration by Boris
Vallejo (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1989 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Second Game
Second Game by Charles De Vet Cover: DAW Books, 1981 illustration by
Michael Mariano (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1981 DAW
Books, Inc.)
Jewels of Aptor, The
The Jewels of Aptor by Samuel R. Delany Cover: Ace Books, 1978 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1978 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)

Solar Lottery
Solar Lottery by Philip K. Dick Cover: Arrow Books (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Arrow Books. )
Sparrowhawk
Sparrowhawk by Thomas Easton Cover: Ace Books, 1990 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1990 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Prodigal Sun, The
The Prodigal Sun by Philip E. High Cover: Ace Books, 1964 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1964 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
On Wheels
On Wheels by John Jakes Cover: Warner Books, 1973 illustration by
Donchatz (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1973 Warner Books)
Planet of the Double Sun, The
The Planet of the Double Sun by Neil R. Jones Cover: Ace Books, 1967
illustration by Gray Morrow (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1967 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Quiet Pools, The
The Quiet Pools by Michael Kube-McDowell Cover: Ace Books, 1990 (First
Edition) illustration by Chris Moore (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1990 Ace Books. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Worlds of the Imperium
Worlds of the Imperium by Keith Laumer Cover: Ace Books, 1962 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1962 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Ring, The
The Ring by Robert E. Margroff & Piers Anthony Cover: Ace Books, 1969
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1969 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Rite of Passage

Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin Cover: Ace Books, 1968 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1968 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Probability Corner, The
The Probability Corner by Walt & Leigh Richmond Cover: Ace Books, 1977
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1977 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Pavane
Pavane by Keith Roberts Cover: Ace Books, 1969 illustration by Leo &
Diane Dillon (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1969 Ace Books. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Men and The Mirror, The
The Men and The Mirror by Ross Rocklynne Cover: Ace Books, 1973 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1973 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Sight of Proteus
Sight of Proteus by Charles Sheffield Cover: Ace Books, 1978 illustration
by Clyde Caldwell (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1978 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Wild Card Run
Wild Card Run by Sara Stamey Cover: Ace Books, 1987 illustration by
Stephen Hall (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1987 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Warlock in Spite of Himself, The
The Warlock in Spite of Himself by Christopher Stasheff Cover: Ace Books,
1969 illustration by Jack Gaughan (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1969 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
King's Blood Four
King's Blood Four by Sheri S. Tepper Cover: Ace Books, 1989 illustration
by James Christensen (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,

Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1989 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Second Ending
Second Ending by James White Cover: Ace Books, 1962 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1962 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Rebellious Stars (The Stars, Like Dust), The
The Rebellious Stars (The Stars, Like Dust) by Isaac Asimov Cover: Ace
Books, 1951 (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1951 Ace Books. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
World Jones Made, The
The World Jones Made by Philip K. Dick Cover: Ace Books, 1956
illustration by Kelly Freas (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with
The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1956 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Ganymede Takeover, The
The Ganymede Takeover by Philip K. Dick & Ray Nelson Cover: Ace Books,
1967 illustration by Jack Gaughan (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1967 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Space Chantey
Space Chantey by R.A. Lafferty Cover: Ace Books, 1968 illustration by
Vaughn Bode (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1968 Ace Books. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Mechasm
Mechasm by John T. Sladek Cover: Ace Books, 1969 (First US Edition)
illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1969 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Phoenix and the Mirror, The
The Phoenix and the Mirror by Avram Davidson Cover: Ace Books, 1970
illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1970 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)

Soft Targets
Soft Targets by Dean Ing Cover: Ace Books, 1979 illustration by Deal
Ellis (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1979 Ace Books. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Interfaces
Interfaces by Virginia Kidd Cover: Ace Books, 1980 illustration by Alex
Abel (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1980 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Them Bones
Them Bones by Howard Waldrop Cover: Ace Books, 1984 (M. M. Kavanagh.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1984 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Peace Company
Peace Company by Roland Green Cover: Ace Books, 1985 illustration by Luis
Royo (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1985 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws. )
On Stranger Tides
On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers Cover: Ace Books, 1988 illustration by
James Gurney (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1988 Ace Books. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Tides of God, The
The Tides of God by Ted Reynolds Cover: Ace Books, 1989 (M. M. Kavanagh.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1989 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Wall at the Edge of the World, The
The Wall at the Edge of the World by Jim Aikin Cover: Ace Books (First
Edition) illustration by John Jude Palencar (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 19
Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
We Claim These Stars
We Claim These Stars by Poul Anderson Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by Kelly Freas (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with
The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 19 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)

The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream
The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream by G.C. Edmondson Cover: Ace Books
(First Edition) illustration by Kelly Freas (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1965Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Oxygen Barons, The
The Oxygen Barons by Gregory Feeley Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by Dave Archer (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with
The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1990 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Neuromancer
Neuromancer by William Gibson Cover: Ace Books, 1984 (First Edition) (M.
M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. (c) 1984 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Growing up in Tier 3000
Growing up in Tier 3000 by Felix C. Gotschalk Cover: Ace Books (First
Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1975 Ace Books. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Left Hand of Darkness, The
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin Cover: Ace Books, 1969
(First Edition) illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon (M. M. Kavanagh.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1969 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
World Swappers, The
The World Swappers by John Brunner Cover: Ace Books illustration by Kelly
Freas (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) Ace Books. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Man with Nine Lives, The
The Man with Nine Lives by Harlan Ellison Cover: Ace Books, 1960 (First
Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1960 Ace Books. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Million Year Hunt, The
The Million Year Hunt by Kenneth Bulmer Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by Jack Gaughan (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1964 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate

permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
New Worlds of Fantasy
New Worlds of Fantasy by Terry Carr Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by Kelly Freas (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with
The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1967 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Lords of the Starship
Lords of the Starship by Mark Geston Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by John Schoenherr (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1967 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Past Master
Past Master by R.A. Lafferty Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1968 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Star Well
Star Well by Alexei Panshin Cover: Ace Books (First Edition) illustration
by Kelly Freas (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1968 Ace Books. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Island Under the Earth, The
The Island Under the Earth by Avram Davidson Cover: Ace Books, 1969
(First Edition) illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon (M. M. Kavanagh.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1969 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Preserving Machine, The
The Preserving Machine by Philip K. Dick Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1969 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws. )
Nine Hundred Grandmothers
Nine Hundred Grandmothers by R.A. Lafferty Cover: Ace Books, 1970 (First
Edition) illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1970 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Mister Justice
Mister Justice by Doris Piserchia Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by Kelly Freas (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with

The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1973 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home
Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home by James Tiptree, Jr. Cover: Ace
Books, 1973 (First Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with
The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1973 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
White Light
White Light by Rudy Rucker Cover: Ace Books, 1980 (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1980 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Spacetime Donuts
Spacetime Donuts by Rudy Rucker Cover: Ace Books, 1981 (First Edition)
(M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1981 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Software
Software by Rudy Rucker Cover: Ace Books, 1982 (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1982 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
57th Franz Kafka, The
The 57th Franz Kafka by Rudy Rucker Cover: Ace Books, (First Edition) (M.
M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. (c) 1983 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Wild Shore, The
The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson Cover: Ace Books, 1984 (First
Edition) illustration by Andrea Baruffi (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1984 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Icehenge
Icehenge by Kim Stanley Robinson Cover: Ace Books, 1984 (First Edition)
illustration by Mark Weber (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with
The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1984 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Green Eyes

Green Eyes by Lucius Shepard Cover: Ace Books, 1984 (First Edition)
illustration by Kathryn Holt (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1984 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Homunculus
Homunculus by James P. Blaylock Cover: Ace Books, 1986 (First Edition)
illustration by James Warhola (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1986 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Net, The
The Net by Loren MacGregor Cover: Ace Books (First Edition) illustration
by Earl Keleny (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1987 Ace Books. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Metrophage
Metrophage by Richard Kadrey Cover: Ace Books (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1988 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Win, Lose, Draw
Win, Lose, Draw by Sara Stamey Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by Stephen Hall (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1988 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Svaha
Svaha by Charles De Lint Cover: Ace Books (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1989 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Stress of Her Regard, The
The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers Cover: Ace Books, 1989 (First
Edition) illustration by James Gurney (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1989 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Orbital Decay
Orbital Decay by Allen Steele Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by Romas (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The
Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1989 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)

Redshift Rendezvous
Redshift Rendezvous by John E. Stith Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by Alan M. Clark (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1990 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Songs of Chaos
Songs of Chaos by S.N. Lewitt Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by Peter Bollinger (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1993 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Synthajoy
Synthajoy by D.G. Compton Cover: Ace Books, 1968 illustration by Leo &
Diane Dillon (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1968 Ace Books. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Eighth series
The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Eighth Series ed. by Anthony
Boucher Cover: Ace Books, c. 1960 illustration by Ed Emshwiller (M. M.
Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1960 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
When Smut Goes
When Smut Goes by Arthur Keppel-Jones Cover: African Bookman, 1947 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. African Bookman
(c) 1947 African Bookman)
Horror on the Asteroid, The
The Horror on the Asteroid by Edmond Hamilton Cover: Philip Allan, 1936
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Philip
Allan (c) 1936 Philip Allan)
Kairos
Kairos by Gwyneth Jones Cover: Allen & Unwin (First Edition) illustration
by John Millar (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins
Publishers Limited. (c) 1988 Allen & Unwin)
Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future
Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future by John Jacob Astor
Cover: Appleton, 1894 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. )
Twistor
Twistor by John G. Cramer Cover: Arbor House, 1989 (First Edition)
illustration by Bob Eggleton (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Shown by permission of William Morrow & Co., Inc. (c)

1989 Arbor House)
Moon of Ice
Moon of Ice by Brad Linaweaver Cover: Arbor House, 1988 illustration by
Peter Thorpe (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Shown by permission of William Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) 1988
Arbor House)
Soldiers of Paradise
Soldiers of Paradise by Paul Park Cover: Avon Books, 1990 illustration by
Gary Ruddell (Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif.,
Riverside. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1990 Avon Books)
Talking Man
Talking Man by Terry Bisson Cover: Arbor House (First Edition)
illustration by Stephen Gervais (M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by permission of
William Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) 1988 Arbor House)
Islands in the Net
Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling Cover: Arbor House, 1988 (First
Edition) illustration by Don Bolognese (M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by
permission of William Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) 1988 Arbor House)
Someone in the Dark
Someone in the Dark by August Derleth Cover: Arkham House, 1941 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Arkham
House Publishers. (c) 1941 by Arkham House Publishers, Inc.)
Web of Easter Island, The
The Web of Easter Island by Donald Wandrei Cover: Arkham House, 1948
(First Edition) illustration by Audrey Johnson (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Arkham House
Publishers. (c) 1948 by Arkham House Publishers, Inc.)
Jaguar Hunter, The
The Jaguar Hunter by Lucius Shepard Cover: Arkham House, 1987 (First
Edition) illustration by Jeffrey K. Potter (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of
Arkham House Publishers. (c) 1987 by Arkham House Publishers, Inc.)
Who Made Stevie Crye?
Who Made Stevie Crye? by Michael Bishop Cover: Arkham House (First
Edition) illustration by Glennray Tutor (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of
Arkham House Publishers. (c) Arkham House Publishers, Inc.)
Moon-Flash
Moon-Flash by Patricia McKillip Cover: Berkley, 1985 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1985 The
Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Rim of Space, The
The Rim of Space by A. Bertram Chandler Cover: Avalon Books, 1963 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Thomas
Bouregy & Co. - Avalon Books (c) 1963 Avalon Books)

Green Planet, The
The Green Planet by Joan Hunter Holly Cover: Avalon Books, 1961
illustration by Jack Schoenherr (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Thomas Bouregy & Co. - Avalon Books (c)
1961 Avalon Books)
Perfect Planet, The
The Perfect Planet by Evelyn E. Smith Cover: Lancer Books, 1963 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Lancer Books (c)
1963 Lancer)
Quarreling, They Met the Dragon
Quarreling, They Met the Dragon by Sharon Baker Cover: Avon Books, 1984
(Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1984 Avon Books)
Living Way Out
Living Way Out by Wyman Guin Cover: Avon Books, 1967 (First Edition)
illustration by Ronald Walosky (Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University
of Calif., Riverside. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1967 Avon
Books)
Song for Lya and Other Stories, A
A Song for Lya and Other Stories by George R.R. Martin Cover: Avon Books,
1976 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif.,
Riverside. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1976 Avon Books)
Saltflower
Saltflower by Sydney J. Van Scyoc Cover: Avon Books, 1977 (Casey
Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1977 Avon Books)
Macroscope
Macroscope by Piers Anthony Cover: Avon Books, 1969 (First Edition) (M.
M. Kavanagh. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1969 Avon Books)
Moderan
Moderan by David R. Bunch Cover: Avon Books (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) Avon Books)
No Time Like the Future
No Time Like the Future by Nelson Bond Cover: Avon Books (First Edition)
(M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1954 Avon Books)
Little Fuzzy
Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper Cover: Avon Books (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1962 Avon Books)
Pure Cold Light, The
The Pure Cold Light by Gregory Frost Cover: Avon Books/AvoNova (First
Edition) illustration by Gregory Frost (M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1993 AvoNova)
In the Country of the Blind
In the Country of the Blind by Michael Flynn Cover: Baen Books, 1990

(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
with permission of BAEN PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c) 1990 Baen Books)
Petrogypsies
Petrogypsies by Rory Harper Cover: Baen Books, 1989 illustration by Tom
Kidd (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with permission of BAEN PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c) 1989 Baen
Books)
Khyren
Khyren by Aline Boucher Kaplan Cover: Baen Books, 1988 illustration by
Larry Schwinger (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of BAEN PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c)
1988 Baen Books)
Marching Through Georgia
Marching Through Georgia by S.M. Stirling Cover: Baen Books, 1988
illustration by Kevin Davies (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of BAEN PUBLISHING
ENTERPRISES. (c) 1988 Baen Books)
Torch of Honor, The
The Torch of Honor by Roger MacBride Allen Cover: Baen Books, 1986 (M. M.
Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of BAEN PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c)
1986 Baen Books)
Shards of Honor
Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold Cover: Baen Books, 1986 (M. M.
Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of BAEN PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c)
1986 Baen Books)
Master of the Fist
Master of the Fist by Edward P. Hughes Cover: Baen Books, 1989
illustration by Ken Kelly (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of
BAEN PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c) 1989 Baen Books)
Man-Kzin Wars, The
The Man-Kzin Wars created by Larry Niven with Poul Anderson & Dean Ing
Cover: Baen Books, 1989 illustration by Steve Hickman (M. M. Kavanagh.
Reprinted with permission of BAEN PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c) 1989 Baen
Books)
ME: A Novel of Self-Discovery
ME: A Novel of Self-Discovery by Thomas T. Thomas Cover: Baen Books, 1991
(First Edition) illustration by Gary Ruddel (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted
with permission of BAEN PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c) 1991 Baen Books)
Hunting Party
Hunting Party by Elizabeth Moon Cover: Baen Books (First Edition)
illustration by Stephen Hickman (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission
of BAEN PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c) 1993 Baen Books)
Whole Man, The
The Whole Man by John Brunner Cover: Walker & Co., 1970 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of

Walker and Company. (c) 1970 Walker & Company)
Tarnsman of Gor
Tarnsman of Gor by John Norman Cover: Tandem (British Reprint) (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Tandem. (c) 19
Tandem)
Night Walk
Night Walk by Bob Shaw Cover: Banner, 1967 (First Edition) illustration
by Frank Frazetta (M. M. Kavanagh. Banner. (c) 1967 Banner)
Lani People, The
The Lani People by J.F. Bone Cover: Bantam, 1962 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1962
Bantam Books)
Startide Rising
Startide Rising by David Brin Cover: Bantam, 1983 (First Edition)
illustration by Jim Burns (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1983
Bantam Books)
Reach
Reach by Edward Gibson Cover: Doubleday, 1989 (First Edition) (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1989 Doubleday)
Mutant Prime, The
The Mutant Prime by Karen Haber Cover: Doubleday, 1990 (First Edition)
illustration by Jim Burns (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1990 Doubleday)
High Couch of Silistra
High Couch of Silistra by Janet E. Morris Cover: Bantam, 1977 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group,
Inc. (c) 1977 Bantam Books)
Paradise Plot, The
The Paradise Plot by Ed Naha Cover: Bantam, 1980 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1980
Bantam Books)
Labyrinth Gate, The
The Labyrinth Gate by Alis A. Rasmussen Cover: Bantam, 1988 (First
Edition) illustration by Larry Schwinger (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1988
Bantam Books)
Neverness

Neverness by David Zindell Cover: Bantam, 1989 illustration by Don Dixon
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by
Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1989 Bantam Books)
Third from the Sun
Third from the Sun by Richard Matheson Cover: Bantam, 1955 (M. M.
Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1955 Bantam Books)
Rama Revealed
Rama Revealed by Arthur C. Clarke & Gentry Lee Cover: Bantam, 1995 (First
Edition) illustration by Stephen Youll (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission
of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group,
Inc. (c) Bantam Books)
Synners
Synners by Pat Cadigan Cover: Bantam (First Edition) illustration by
Francisco Maruca (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a
division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) Bantam Books)
Slow Fall to Dawn
Slow Fall to Dawn by Stephen Leigh Cover: Bantam (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) Bantam Books)
Missing Matter, The
The Missing Matter by Thomas R. McDonough Cover: Bantam (First Edition)
(M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) Bantam Books)
Memories
Memories by Mike McQuay Cover: Bantam (First Edition) illustration by
Frank Riley (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a
division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) Bantam Books)
Red Genesis
Red Genesis by S.C. Sykes Cover: Bantam (First Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh.
Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) Bantam Books)
Line to Tomorrow
Line to Tomorrow by Lewis Padgett Cover: Bantam (First Edition)
illustration by M. Hooks (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1954
Bantam Books)
Star Trek 1
Star Trek 1 by James Blish Cover: Bantam, 1967 (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1967 Bantam Books)
Venus of Dreams
Venus of Dreams by Pamela Sargent Cover: Bantam, 1986 (First Edition)
illustration by Pamela Lee (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam

Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1986
Bantam Books)
Lincoln's Dreams
Lincoln's Dreams by Connie Willis Cover: Bantam, 1987 (First Edition)
illustration by Keith Batcheller (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1987 Bantam Books)
Memory Wire
Memory Wire by Robert Charles Wilson Cover: Bantam (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1987 Bantam Books)
Wild Cards: A Mosaic Novel
Wild Cards: A Mosaic Novel ed. by George R.R. Martin Cover: Bantam (First
Edition) illustration by Stan Watts (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1987 Bantam Books)
Strange Invasion
Strange Invasion by Michael Kandel Cover: Bantam, 1989 (First Edition)
illustration by Edwin B. Hirth III (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1989 Bantam Books)
On My Way to Paradise
On My Way to Paradise by Dave Wolverton Cover: Bantam, 1989 (First
Edition) illustration by Steve and Paul Youll (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by
Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1989 Bantam Books)
Spirit Crossings
Spirit Crossings by Claudia Peck Cover: Bantam (First Edition)
illustration by Mike McGinty (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1991
Bantam Books)
Silicon Man, The
The Silicon Man by Charles Platt Cover: Bantam (First Edition)
illustration by Jean Francois Poderin (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission
of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group,
Inc. (c) 1991 Bantam Books)
Sheltered Lives
Sheltered Lives by Charles Oberndorf Cover: Bantam (First Edition)
illustration by Oscar Chichoni (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1992 Bantam Books)
Growing up Weightless
Growing up Weightless by John M. Ford Cover: Bantam, 1993 (First Edition)
illustration by Pamela Lee (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1993

Bantam Books)
Love & Sleep
Love & Sleep by John Crowley Cover: Bantam, 1994 (First Edition)
illustration by Jamie S. Warren Youll (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission
of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group,
Inc. (c) 1994 Bantam Books)
In the Mothers' Land
In the Mothers' Land by Elisabeth Vonarburg Cover: Bantam, 1992 (First US
Edition) illustration by Oscar Chichoni (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by
Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1992 Bantam Books)
Mind Parasites, The
The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson Cover: Barker, 1967 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Barker. (c)
1967 Barker)
Pagan Passions
Pagan Passions by Randall Garrett & Larry M. Harris (Laurence M. Janifer)
Cover: Beacon (First Edition) illustration by Robert Stanley (M. M.
Kavanagh. Beacon Press. (c) 1959 Beacon Press)
Odyssey to Earthdeath
Odyssey to Earthdeath by Leo P. Kelley Cover: Belmont, 1968 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Belmont Books (c)
1968 Belmont )
Unearth People, The
The Unearth People by Kris Neville Cover: Belmont, 1964 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Belmont Books (c) 1964
Belmont )
Of Godlike Power
Of Godlike Power by Mack Reynolds Cover: Belmont (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Belmont Books. (c) 1966 Belmont )
Shadow of Alpha, The
The Shadow of Alpha by Charles L. Grant Cover: Berkley, 1970 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1970 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Stranger in a Strange Land
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein Cover: Berkley, 1970 (M.
M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. (c) 1970 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Transfinite Man, The
The Transfinite Man by Colin Kapp Cover: Berkley, 1964 (Casey Brown/The

Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1964 The
Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Manifest Destiny
Manifest Destiny by Barry B. Longyear Cover: Berkley, 1980 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1980 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Garbage World
Garbage World by Charles Platt Cover: Berkley, 1967 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1967 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Stardust Voyages, The
The Stardust Voyages by Stephen Tall Cover: Berkley, 1975 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1975 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
ParasaurIans, The
The ParasaurIans by Robert Wells Cover: Berkley, 1969 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1969 The
Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Mile-Long Spaceship, The
The Mile-Long Spaceship by Kate Wilhelm Cover: Berkley, 1963 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1963 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Quy Effect, The
The Quy Effect by Arthur Sellings Cover: Berkley, 1967 (M. M. Kavanagh.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1967 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Reefs of Earth, The
The Reefs of Earth by R.A. Lafferty Cover: Berkley, 1968 (M. M. Kavanagh.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights

reserved. (c) 1968 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Sardonyx Net, The
The Sardonyx Net by Elizabeth Lynn Cover: Berkley, 1981 (M. M. Kavanagh.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1981 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Spectrum 5
Spectrum 5 ed. by Kingsley Amis & Robert Conquest Cover: Berkley, 1968
(M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1968 The Berkley Publishing Group.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Terminal Beach, The
The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard Cover: Berkley (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Passport to Eternity
Passport to Eternity by J.G. Ballard Cover: Berkley (First Edition)
illustration by Richard Powers (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1963 The
Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Ring of Ritornel, The
The Ring of Ritornel by Charles L. Harness Cover: Berkley, 1968 (First
Edition) illustration by Paul Lehr (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1968 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Titan's Daughter
Titan's Daughter by James Blish Cover: Berkley, 1961 (First Edition) (M.
M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. (c) 1961 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Grimm's World
Grimm's World by Vernor Vinge Cover: Berkley, 1969 (First Edition) Cover:
Don Lehr (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1969 The Berkley Publishing
Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)

Tintagel
Tintagel by Paul Cook Cover: Berkley (First Edition) illustration by
Richard Lon Cohen & John Townley (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1981 The
Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Vector Analysis
Vector Analysis by Jack Haldeman Cover: Berkley, 1978 illustration by
Norman Adams & Sol Novins (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1978 The Berkley Publishing Group.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Missing Man, The
The Missing Man by Katherine MacLean Cover: Berkley (First Edition)
illustration by Richard Powers (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1975 The
Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Rapture Effect, The
The Rapture Effect by Jeffrey A. Carver Cover: Tom Doherty
Associates/TOR/Bluejay, 1987 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Book jackets reprinted by permission of Bluejay Books
Inc. All rights reserved. (c) 1987 Bluejay Books Inc. )
Planet of Whispers
Planet of Whispers by James Patrick Kelly Cover: Tom Doherty
Associates/TOR/Bluejay, 1985 illustration by Victoria Poyser (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Book jackets
reprinted by permission of Bluejay Books Inc. All rights reserved. (c)
1985 Bluejay Books Inc.)
Song of Kali
Song of Kali by Dan Simmons Cover: TOR, 1986 illustration by Jill Bauman
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1986 Tor Books)
Impossible Things
Impossible Things by Connie Willis Cover: Bantam, 1993 (First Edition)
illustration by John Jude Palencar (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1993 Bantam Books)
Widow's Son, the
The Widow's Son by Robert Anton Wilson Cover: Tom Doherty
Associates/TOR/Bluejay (First Edition) illustration by Bryn Barnard (M. M.
Kavanagh. Book jackets reprinted by permission of Bluejay Books Inc. All
rights reserved. (c) 1985 Bluejay Books Inc.)
Two Hours to Doom
Two Hours to Doom by Peter Bryant Cover: Boardman, 1958 (First Edition)

(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Boardman
(c) 1958 Boardman)
Murder Madness
Murder Madness by Will Jenkins (Murray Leinster) Cover: Brewer and
Warren, 1931 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. (c) 1931 Brewer and Warren)
Gulliver of Mars
Gulliver of Mars by Edwin Lester Arnold Cover: Ace Books illustration by
Frank Frazetta (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1964 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Misplaced Persons
Misplaced Persons by Lee Harding Cover: Bantam, 1983 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1983
Bantam Books)
Time Trap
Time Trap by Rog Phillips Cover: Century, 1949 (First Edition)
illustration by Malcolm Smith (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Random Century House UK Limited (c) 1949
Century)
Unquenchable Fire
Unquenchable Fire by Rachel Pollack Cover: Century (First Edition)
illustration by Philippa Bramson (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of Random
Century House UK Limited (c) 1988 Century)
Hadrian the Seventh
Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe Cover: Chatto and Windus (First
Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of Random Century House UK Limited. )
Hiero's Journey
Hiero's Journey by Sterling E. Lanier Cover: Bantam, 1974 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group,
Inc. (c) 1974 Bantam Books)
Starcrossed, The
The Starcrossed by Ben Bova Cover: Chilton, 1975 (First Edition)
illustration by Craven & Evans (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of Vincent Di
Fate. (c) 1975 Chilton Book Company)
Verging on the Pertinent
Verging on the Pertinent by Carol Emshwiller Cover: Coffee House, 1989
(First Edition) illustration by Janice Perry (M. M. Kavanagh. (c) 1989
Coffee House Press)
Great War Syndicate, The
The Great War Syndicate by Frank R. Stockton Cover: Collier, 1889 (First

Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Tin Men, The
The Tin Men by Michael Frayn Cover: Ace Books, 1965 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1965 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Machine That Thought, The
The Machine That Thought by William Callahan (Raymond Z. Gallun) Cover:
Columbia, 1942 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Columbia Publications, Inc. (c) 1942 Columbia)
Sundered Worlds, The
The Sundered Worlds by Michael Moorcock Cover: Compact, 1965 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Lifetime Books. (c) 1965 Compact Books)
Pennterra
Pennterra by Judith Moffett Cover: Congdon & Weed, 1987 illustration by
Bryn Barnard (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Congdon & Weed (c) 1987 Congdon and Weed)
Man Who Pulled Down the Sky, The
The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky by John Barnes Cover: Congdon & Weed
(First Edition) illustration by Bob Eggleton (M. M. Kavanagh. Congdon &
Weed (c) 1986 Congdon and Weed)
Station Gehenna
Station Gehenna by Andrew Weiner Cover: Congdon & Weed (First Edition)
illustration by Bob Eggleton (M. M. Kavanagh. Congdon & Weed (c) 1987
Congdon and Weed)
Night of the Big Heat, The
The Night of the Big Heat by John Lymington Cover: Hodder & Stoughton
Ltd., 1959 illustration by Peter Rudland (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of
Hodder Headline, POC. (c) 1959 Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.)
Revolt on Alpha C.
Revolt on Alpha C. by Robert Silverberg Cover: Tab Books, 1959
illustration by William Meyerriecks (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Tab Books, Inc. (c) 1959 Tab Books, Inc.)
Sound of His Horn, The
The Sound of His Horn by Sarban Cover: Davies, 1952 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Davies (c) 1952 Davies)
Gate of Ivrel
Gate of Ivrel by C.J. Cherryh Cover: DAW Books, 1976 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of
DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1976 DAW Books, Inc.)
Mirror Image

Mirror Image by Michael G. Coney Cover: DAW Books, 1972 illustration by
Kelly Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1972 DAW Books, Inc.)
Warriors of Dawn, The
The Warriors of Dawn by M.A. Foster Cover: DAW Books, 1975 illustration
by Kelly Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1975 DAW
Books, Inc.)
Walkers on the Sky
Walkers on the Sky by David J. Lake Cover: DAW Books, 1976 illustration
by Richard Hescox (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1976 DAW
Books, Inc.)
2018 A.D.
2018 A.D. by Sam J. Lundwell Cover: DAW Books, 1975 illustration by Josh
Kirby (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1975 DAW Books, Inc.)
Passing for Human
Passing for Human by Jody Scott Cover: DAW Books, 1977 illustration by
Bob Pepper (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1977 DAW Books, Inc.)
Space Opera
Space Opera by Jack Vance Cover: DAW Books, 1965 illustration by Don
Maitz (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c)
1965 DAW Books, Inc.)
Merovingen Nights Festival Moon
Merovingen Nights Festival Moon by C.J. Cherryh Cover: DAW Books, 1987
illustration by Tim Hildbrandt (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission
of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1987 DAW Books, Inc.)
Spaceship for the King, A
A Spaceship for the King by Jerry Pournelle Cover: DAW Books (First
Edition) illustration by Kelly Freas (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with
permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1973 DAW Books, Inc.)
We Can Build You
We Can Build You by Philip K. Dick Cover: DAW Books, 1972 (First Edition)
illustration by John Schoenherr (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission
of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1972 DAW Books, Inc.)
Whenabouts of Burr, The
The Whenabouts of Burr by Michael Kurland Cover: DAW Books (First
Edition) illustration by Kelly Freas (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with
permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1975 DAW Books, Inc.)
Hellflower
Hellflower by Eluki bes Shahar Cover: DAW Books (First Edition)
illustration by Nicholas Jainschigg (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with
permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1991 DAW Books, Inc.)

Joshua, Son of None
Joshua, Son of None by Nancy Freedman Cover: Delacorte Press, 1973 (First
Edition) illustration by Paul Bacon (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Delecorte Press, a
division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1973
Delecorte Press.)
Sirens of Titan, The
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Cover: Dell, 1959 (First
Edition) illustration by Richard Powers (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by
Permission of Dell Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1959 Dell Books)
Penultimate Truth, The
The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick Cover: Dell, 1980 (First Edition)
illustration by Richard Corben (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Dell
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1980
Dell Books)
Golden Apple, The
The Golden Apple by Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson Cover: Dell, 1975
illustration by Carlos Victor (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Dell
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1975
Dell Books)
Logan's Run
Logan's Run by William Nolan Cover: Dial Books, 1967 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by
Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1967 Dial Books)
Ophiuchi Hotline, The
The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley Cover: Dial Books, 1977 (First
Edition) illustration by Boris Vallejo (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1977 Dial Books)
In the Ocean of Night
In the Ocean of Night by Gregory Benford Cover: Dial Press, 1977 (First
Edition) illustration by Larry Kresek (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission
of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1977 Dial Press)
Thunder and Lightning Man, The
The Thunder and Lightning Man by Colin Cooper Cover: Faber and Faber Ltd.
, 1968 (First Edition) illustration by Charles Mozley (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Cover: Charles Mozley.
Courtesy of Faber and Faber Ltd. (c) 1968 Faber & Faber)
Marooned
Marooned by Martin Caidin Cover: Bantam, 1969 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1969

Bantam Books)
What Happened to Emily Goode After the Great Exhibition?
What Happened to Emily Goode After the Great Exhibition? by Raylyn Moore
Cover: Donning, 1978 (First Edition) illustration by Kelly Freas (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Donning Company
Starblaze Editions (c) 1978 Donning Company Starblaze Editions)
Tin Woodman
Tin Woodman by David F. Bischoff & Dennis R. Bailey Cover: Doubleday,
1979 illustration by Gary Mouteferante (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1979 Doubleday)
Goddess of Atvatabar, The
The Goddess of Atvatabar by William R. Bradshaw Cover: J.F. Donthitt,
1892 (First Edition) illustration by C. Durand Chapman (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of
Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c)
1892 J. F. Donthitt )
Sibyl Sue Blue
Sibyl Sue Blue by Rosel George Brown Cover: Doubleday, 1966 illustration
by John Alcorn (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday
Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1966 Doubleday)
Sunrise West
Sunrise West by William K. Carlson Cover: Doubleday, 1981 illustration by
Marge Herr (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1981 Doubleday)
Navigator's Sindrome
Navigator's Sindrome by Jayge Carr Cover: Doubleday, 1983 illustration by
Jan Esteves (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1983 Doubleday)
No Place on Earth
No Place on Earth by Louis Charbonneau Cover: Doubleday, 1958 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1958 Doubleday)
Mission of Gravity
Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement Cover: Doubleday, 1954 (First Edition)
illustration by Joe Magnaini (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1954 Doubleday)
Masters of Solitude
Masters of Solitude by Parke Godwin & Marvin Kaye Cover: Doubleday, 1978
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,

Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday
Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1978 Doubleday)
Sword-Swallower, The
The Sword-Swallower by Ron Goulart Cover: Doubleday, 1970 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1970 Doubleday)
Pilgrimage: The Book of the People
Pilgrimage: The Book of the People by Zenna Henderson Cover: Avon Books,
1961 (Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown
by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1961 Avon Books)
It Can't Happen Here
It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis Cover: Doubleday, 1961 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1961 Doubleday)
House of Zeor
House of Zeor by Jacqueline Lichtenberg Cover: Doubleday, 1977 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1977 Doubleday)
How the Gods Wove in Kyrannon
How the Gods Wove in Kyrannon by Ardath Mayhar Cover: Doubleday, 1982
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1982 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
World out of Mind
World out of Mind by J.T. McIntosh Cover: Doubleday, 1953 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by
Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1953 Doubleday)
West of the Sun
West of the Sun by Edgar Pangborn Cover: Doubleday, 1980 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of
Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c)
1980 Doubleday)
Pig World
Pig World by Charles Runyon Cover: Lancer Books, 1971 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.Lancer Books (c) 1971 Lancer)
No One Goes There Now
No One Goes There Now by William Walling Cover: Doubleday, 1971 (First
Edition) illustration by Marvin Mattelson (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a
division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1971

Doubleday)
Healer
Healer by F. Paul Wilson Cover: Dell, 1977 illustration by Kresek (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Dell Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1977 Dell Books)
Killerbowl
Killerbowl by Gary K. Wolf Cover: Doubleday, 1975 (First Edition) (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1975 Doubleday)
Mike Mars, Astronaut
Mike Mars, Astronaut by Don Wollheim Cover: Doubleday, 1961 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1961 Doubleday)
His Monkey Wife
His Monkey Wife by John Collier Cover: Doubleday, 1957 illustration by
Margot Tomes (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division
of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1957 Doubleday)
Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat
Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat by Ernest Bramah Cover: Doubleday Doran, 1928
(First US Edition) illustration by J. Nadejen (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by
Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1928 Doubleday Doran)
Long Tomorrow, The
The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett Cover: Doubleday (First Edition)
illustration by Docktor (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Doubleday,
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) Doubleday)
Martian Chronicles, The
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury Cover: Doubleday (First Edition)
illustration by Lidov (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a
division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) Doubleday)
Novelty
Novelty by John Crowley Cover: Doubleday, 1989 (First Edition)
illustration by Mike Fisher (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c)
1989 Doubleday)
Revolving Boy, The
The Revolving Boy by Gertrude Friedberg Cover: Doubleday (First Edition)
illustration by Tom Chibbaro (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c)
Doubleday)
Keepers of the Gate
Keepers of the Gate by Steven Spruill Cover: Doubleday (First Edition)

(M. M. Kavanagh (c) Doubleday)
Shadow on the Hearth
Shadow on the Hearth by Judith Merril Cover: Doubleday (First Edition)
illustration by Edward Kasper (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c)
1950 Doubleday)
Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter
Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter by Paul French (Isaac Asimov) Cover:
Doubleday, 1957 (First Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c)
1957 Doubleday)
Torrent of Faces, A
A Torrent of Faces by Norman L. Knight Cover: Doubleday (First Edition)
illustration by James Barkley (M. M. Kavanagh. (c) 1967Doubleday)
Lord of Light
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny Cover: Doubleday, 1967 (First Edition)
illustration by Howard Bernstein (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c)
1967 Doubleday)
Nova
Nova by Samuel R. Delany Cover: Doubleday, 1968 (First Edition)
illustration by Russell Fitzgerald (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c)
1968 Doubleday)
Hieros Gamos and Sam and An Smith, The
The Hieros Gamos and Sam and An Smith by Josephine Saxton Cover:
Doubleday (First Edition) illustration by Peter Rauch (M. M. Kavanagh.
Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1969 Doubleday)
Gardens One to Five
Gardens One to Five by Peter Tate Cover: Doubleday (First Edition)
illustration by Catherine Hopkins (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c)
1971 Doubleday)
Tarzan Alive
Tarzan Alive by Philip Jose Farmer Cover: Doubleday, 1972 (First Edition)
illustration by Milton Glaser (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c)
1972 Doubleday)
Shining, The
The Shining by Stephen King Cover: Doubleday (First Edition) illustration
by Dave Christensen (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a
division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1977
Doubleday)
Vergil in Averno

Vergil in Averno by Avram Davidson Cover: Doubleday, 1987 (First Edition)
illustration by Candy Jernigan (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c)
1987 Doubleday)
Nothing Sacred
Nothing Sacred by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Cover: Doubleday (First
Edition) illustration by Jamie S. Warren Youll (M. M. Kavanagh. (c) 1991
Doubleday)
Golden City, The
The Golden City by A. Hyatt Verrill Cover: Duffield, 1916 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
San Diego Lightfoot Sue
San Diego Lightfoot Sue by Tom Reamy Cover: Ace Books, 1983 (First
Edition) illustration by David Heffernan (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The
Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1983 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Unborn Tomorrow
Unborn Tomorrow by Gilbert Frankau Cover: Macdonald, 1953 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. MacDonald
(c) 1953 MacDonald )
Season of the Witch
Season of the Witch by Hank Stine Cover: Essex House, 1968 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Essex House (c)
1968 Essex House)
Lord of the Flies
Lord of the Flies by William Golding Cover: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1954
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Faber and Faber Ltd. (c) 1954 Faber and Faber Ltd.)
Mister da V. and other Stories
Mister da V. and other Stories by Kit Reed Cover: Faber and Faber Ltd.,
1967 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Courtesy of Faber and Faber Ltd. (c) 1967 Faber and Faber Ltd.)
Tunc
Tunc by Lawrence Durrell Cover: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1969 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Faber
and Faber Ltd. (c) 1969 Faber and Faber Ltd.)
Inverted World
Inverted World by Christopher Priest Cover: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1974
(First Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of Faber and Faber Ltd. (c) 1974
Faber and Faber Ltd.)
Non-Stop
Non-Stop by Brian W. Aldiss Cover: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1958
illustration by Peter Curl (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of

Calif., Riverside. Cover: Peter Curl. Courtesy of Faber and Faber Ltd. (c)
1958 Faber and Faber Ltd.)
Sunken World, The
The Sunken World by Stanton Coblentz Cover: Fantasy Publishing Co., 1948
(First Edition) illustration by Charles E. McCurdy (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Fantasy Publishing Co. (c) 1948
Fantasy Publishing Co.)
Genus Homo
Genus Homo by L. Sprague De Camp & P. Schayler Miller Cover: Fantasy
Press, 1950 (First Edition) illustration by Edd Cartier (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Fantasy Press (c) 1950
Fantasy Press)
Titan, The
The Titan by P. Schuyler Miller Cover: Fantasy Press, 1952 (First
Edition) illustration by Hannes Bok (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside.Fantasy Press (c) 1952 Fantasy Press)
Legion of Space, The
The Legion of Space by Jack Williamson Cover: Fantasy Press, 1947 (First
Edition) illustration by A.J. Donnell (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Fantasy Press (c) 1947 Fantasy Press)
Wrinkle in Time, A
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle Cover: Farrar Straus & Giroux,
1970 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Jacket
design: Ellen Raskin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
Inc. (c) 1970 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Design (c)1962, renewed 1990
Crosswicks Ltd.)
Love in the Ruins
Love in the Ruins by Percy Walker Cover: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1981
(Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1981 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.)
Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts
Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts by Donald Barthelme Cover: Farrar
Straus & Giroux (First Edition) illustration by Janet Halverson (M. M.
Kavanagh. Jacket design: Janet Halverson after a lithograph by Daumier.
Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. (c) 1968 Donald
Barthelme)
Science Fiction Omnibus
Science Fiction Omnibus ed. by T.E. Dikty & Everett F. Bleiler Cover:
Garden City Books, 1952 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.
, Riverside. Courtesy of Lifetime Books, Inc. (c) 1952 Garden City Books)
Planets for Sale
Planets for Sale by E. Mayne Hull Cover: Fell, 1954 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Lifetime Books,
Inc. (c) 1954 Fell)
John Carstairs: Space Detective

John Carstairs: Space Detective by Frank Belknap Long Cover: Fell, 1949
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Lifetime Books, Inc. (c) 1949 Fell)
Saraband of Lost Time
Saraband of Lost Time by Richard Grant Cover: Avon Books (First Edition)
(M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) Avon Books)
Winterlong
Winterlong by Elizabeth Hand Cover: Bantam (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) Bantam Books)
Pity About Earth
Pity About Earth by Ernest Hill Cover: Ace Books (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1968 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Gemini God
Gemini God by Garry Kilworth Cover: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1981 (First
Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. (c) 1981 Faber and Faber Ltd.)
Hercules Text, The
The Hercules Text by Jack McDevitt Cover: Ace Books, 1986 (First Edition)
illustration by Earl Keleny (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with
The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1986 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Planet Buyer, The
The Planet Buyer by Cordwainer Smith Cover: Pyramid Books (First Edition)
(M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1964 Pyramid Books. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Marathon
Marathon by D. Alexander Smith Cover: Ace Books (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1982 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Wild Sheep Chase, A
A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami Cover: Kodansha, 1989 (First US
Edition) illustration by Shigeo Okamoto (M. M. Kavanagh. Kodansha (c) 1989
Kodansha)
Nightwatch
Nightwatch by Andrew M. Stephenson Cover: Dell, 1979 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Dell
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1979

Dell Books)
Prelude to Space
Prelude to Space by Arthur C. Clarke Cover: Galaxy, No. 3/World Editions,
Inc., 1951 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Galaxy (c) 1951 Galaxy, No. 3 World Editions, Inc. )
Warrior Who Carried Life, The
The Warrior Who Carried Life by Geoff Ryman Cover: Allen & Unwin, 1985
(First Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of
HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1985 Allen & Unwin)
White Book
White Book by Pavel Kohut Cover: George Braziller, 1977 (First US
Edition) illustration by Ross Studio (M. M. Kavanagh. George Braziller (c)
1977 George Braziller)
Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw Cover: Georgian House, 1948
illustration by Bruce Roberts (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Georgian House (c) 1948 Georgian House)
Minions of the Moon
Minions of the Moon by W.G. Beyer Cover: Gnome Press, 1950 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside.Gnome Press (c) 1950 Gnome)
They'd Rather Be Right
They'd Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton Cover: Gnome Press, 1957
illustration by W.I. Van de Poel (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside.Gnome Press (c) 1957 Gnome)
This Fortress World
This Fortress World by James Gunn Cover: Gnome Press, 1955 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Gnome Press (c)
1955 Gnome)
Judgment Night
Judgment Night by C.L. Moore Cover: Gnome Press, 1952 (First Edition)
illustration by Kelly Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside.Gnome Press (c) 1952 Gnome)
Shrouded Planet, The
The Shrouded Planet by Randall Garrett & Robert Silverberg Cover: Ace
Books, 1982 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1982 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Survivors, The
The Survivors by Tom Godwin Cover: Gnome Press, 1958 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Gnome Press
(c) 1958 Gnome Press)
Golden Witchbreed

Golden Witchbreed by Mary Gentle Cover: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1983 (First
Edition) illustration by Chris Brown (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with the permission of Victor
Gollancz Ltd. (c) 1983 Victor Gollancz Ltd.)
Hole in the Zero
Hole in the Zero by M.K. Joseph Cover: Avon Books, 1967 illustration by
Ed Soyka (Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside.
Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1967 Avon Books)
On Wings of Song
On Wings of Song by Thomas M. Disch Cover: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1979
(First Edition) illustration by Malcolm Ashman (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted
with the permission of Victor Gollancz Ltd. (c) 1979 Victor Gollancz Ltd.)
Roderick
Roderick by John T. Sladek Cover: Granada, 1980 (First Edition)
illustration by Ray Winder (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of
HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1980 Granada)
Wine of the Dreamers
Wine of the Dreamers by John MacDonald Cover: Greenberg, 1951 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Greenberg. )
Jack of Eagles
Jack of Eagles by James Blish Cover: Greenberg, 1952 (First Edition) (M.
M. Kavanagh. Greenberg (c) 1952 Greenberg)
If All Else Fails
If All Else Fails by Craig Strete Cover: Greenwillow, 1980 illustration
by Margo Herr (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Greenwillow (c) 1980 Greenwillow)
Winterking
Winterking by Paul Hazel Cover: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1984 (First
Edition) illustration by David Palladini (M. M. Kavanagh. (c) 1984
Atlantic Monthly Press)
Nightshade
Nightshade by Jack Butler Cover: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989 (First
Edition) illustration by Byron Taylor (M. M. Kavanagh. (c) 1989 Atlantic
Monthly Press)
Heart of a Dog
Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov Cover: Grove Press, 1968 (First US
Edition) illustration by Arnold Levin (M. M. Kavanagh. (c) 1968 Grove
Press)
Paris au XXe Siecle
Paris au XXe Siecle by Jules Verne Cover: Hachette, 1994 (M. M. Kavanagh.
Hachette Livre (c) 1994 Hachette Livre)
Mightiest Machine, The
The Mightiest Machine by John W. Campbell Cover: Hadley Publishing Co.,
1935 illustration by Robert Pailthorpa (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,

Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Hadley Publishing (c) 1935 Hadley Publishing
Company)
Space Hostages
Space Hostages by Nicholas Fisk Cover: Hamish Hamilton, 1967 illustration
by Dexter Brown (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1967 Hamish Hamilton )
Winds of Gath, The
The Winds of Gath by E.C. Tubb Cover: Ace Books, 1982 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1982 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Traveler from Altruria, A
A Traveler from Altruria by William Dean Howells Cover:
HarperCollins/Harper & Bros., 1908 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Texts of Festival, The
The Texts of Festival by Mick Farren Cover: Avon Books, 1975 (First US
Edition) (Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside.
Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1975 Avon Books)
Star Man's Son: Daybreak-2250 A.D.
Star Man's Son: Daybreak-2250 A.D. by Andre Norton Cover: Ace Books
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1952 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Other Side of the Sun, The
The Other Side of the Sun by Paul Capon Cover: Heinemann, 1950 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1950 William
Heinemann, Ltd. )
Time Machine, The
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells Cover: Heinemann, 1895 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Mandrake
Mandrake by Susan Cooper Cover: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964 (First
Edition) illustration by John Woodcock (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of Hodder Headline,
POC. (c) 1964 Hodder and Stoughton)
Mind of Mr. Soames, The
The Mind of Mr. Soames by Charles Eric Maine Cover: Panther Books, 1969
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
with permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1969 Panther
Books)
Wine of Violence, The
The Wine of Violence by James Morrow Cover: Ace Books, 1982 (Casey

Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1982 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
War with the Newts, The
The War with the Newts by Karel Capek Cover: Bantam, 1959 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with
permission of The Oxford University Press. (c) 1959 Bantam)
Uncertain Midnight, The
The Uncertain Midnight by Edmund Cooper Cover: Hutchinson, 1958
illustration by Pat Marriott (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Random Century House UK Limited. (c) 1958
Hutchinson & Co.)
Strange Evil
Strange Evil by Jane Gaskell Cover: Hutchinson, 1957 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Random Century
House UK Limited. (c) 1957 Hutchinson & Co.)
Journey into Space
Journey into Space by Charles Chilton Cover: Herbert Jenkins Ltd., 1954
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Jenkins.
(c) 1954 Jenkins )
Paper Dolls, The
The Paper Dolls by L.P. Davies Cover: Doubleday, 1966 illustration by
Larry Ratzkin (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday
Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1966 Doubleday & Co.)
Man Who Pulled Down the Sky, The
The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky by John Barnes Cover: Worldwide, 1986
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Worldwide
(c) 1986 Worlwide)
Journal of Nicholas the American
Journal of Nicholas the American by Leigh Kennedy Cover: Jonathan Cape,
1988 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Courtesy of St. Martin's Press. (c) 1988 St. Martin's Press )
Maggot, A
A Maggot by John Fowles Cover: Jonathan Cape (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Courtesy of Random Century House UK Limited. (c) 1985 Johnathan
Cape)
Spy with the Blue Kazoo, The
The Spy with the Blue Kazoo by Dagmar (Lou Cameron) Cover: Lancer Books
(First Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Lancer Books (c) 1967 Lancer Books)
Kelwin
Kelwin by Neal Barrett, Jr. Cover: Lancer Books, 1970 (First Edition) (M.
M. Kavanagh. Lancer Books (c) 1970 Lancer)

Woman Who Did, The
The Woman Who Did by Grant Allen Cover: Robert Bros., 1895 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Out of the Silent Planet
Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis Cover: Bodley-Head, 1943 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Courtesy of Random Century House UK Limited. (c) 1943 Bodley - Head)
Herds
Herds by Stephen Goldin Cover: Laser Books, 1975 (First Edition)
illustration by Kelly Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside.Laser Books (c) 1975 Laser Books)
Mindwipe!
Mindwipe! by Stephen Robinett Cover: Laser Books, 1976 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Laser Books (c) 1976 Laser
Books)
Seeds of Change
Seeds of Change by Thomas F. Monteleone Cover: Laser Books (First
Edition) illustration by Kelly Freas (M. M. Kavanagh.Laser Books (c) 19
Laser Books)
Skies Discrowned, The
The Skies Discrowned by Tim Powers Cover: Laser Books, 1976 (First
Edition) illustration by Kelly Freas (M. M. Kavanagh.Laser Books (c) 1976
Laser Books)
Mr. Adam
Mr. Adam by Pat Frank Cover: J.B. Lippincott, 1946 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Lippincott (c) 1946 Lippincott)
Journal from Ellipsia
Journal from Ellipsia by Hortense Calisher Cover: Little, Brown & Co.,
1965 illustration by Saul Lambert (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Published by Little, Brown and Company (Inc.) (c)
1965 Little, Brown and Company (Inc.))
Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, The
The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron Cover:
Little, Brown & Co., 1954 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Published by Little, Brown and Company (Inc.) (c) 1954
Little, Brown and Company (Inc.))
Mouse That Roared, The
The Mouse That Roared by Leonard Wibberley Cover: Little, Brown & Co.,
1955 illustration by John Morris (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Published by Little, Brown and Company (Inc.) (c)
1955 Little, Brown and Company (Inc.))
334
334 by Thomas M. Disch Cover: MacGibbon & Kee, 1972 (First Edition)
illustration by Michael Hasted (M. M. Kavanagh. MacGibbon & Kee (c) 1972
MacGibbon & Kee)

Space Scavengers, The
The Space Scavengers by Cleve Cartmill Cover: Major Books, 1975 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Major Books (c)
1975 Major Books)
Princess of Mars, A
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs Cover: McClurg, 1917 (First
Edition) illustration by Frank E. Schoonover (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Planet of Peril, The
The Planet of Peril by Otis Adelbert Kline Cover: McClurg, 1929 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
McClurg (c) 1929 McClurg)
Heat Death of the Universe, The
The Heat Death of the Universe by Pamela Zoline Cover: McPherson & Co.,
1988 (First US Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of McPherson & Company.
(c) 1988 McPherson & Co.)
Those Who Can
Those Who Can by Robin Scott Wilson Cover: Mentor (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Mentor (c) 1973 Mentor)
Voyage to Arcturus, A
A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay Cover: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1946
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
with the permission of Victor Gollancz Ltd. (c) 1946 Victor Gollancz Ltd.)
Last and First Men
Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon Cover: Dover, 1968 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Dover
Publications, Inc. (c) 1968 Dover Publications, Inc.)
Pandora's Planet
Pandora's Planet by Christopher Anvil Cover: DAW Books, 1972 illustration
by Kelly Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1972 DAW
Books, Inc.)
Woman of the Iron People, A
A Woman of the Iron People by Eleanor Arnason Cover: William Morrow & Co.
, 1991 (First Edition) illustration by Bob Silverman & Gary Buddell (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of William Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) 1991 William Morrow & Co.,
Inc.)
Radix
Radix by A.A. Attanasio Cover: Bantam, 1985 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1985
Bantam Books)
Third Eagle, The

The Third Eagle by R.A. MacAvoy Cover: Doubleday, 1989 illustration by
Jim Burns (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1989 Doubleday)
Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga, The
The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga by Colonel S.P. Meek Cover:
William Morrow & Co., 1935 illustration by Richard Floethe (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of William Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) 1935 William Morrow & Co.,
Inc.)
Sugar Rain
Sugar Rain by Paul Park Cover: William Morrow & Co. (First Edition)
illustration by Don Maitz (M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by permission of William
Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) 1989 William Morrow & Co., Inc.)
Master of the Moon
Master of the Moon by Patrick Moore Cover: Museum Press, 1952 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Museum Press (c)
1952 Museum Press)
Night Land, The
The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson Cover: Nash, 1912 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Jupiter Project
Jupiter Project by Gregory Benford Cover: Nelson, 1975 (First Edition)
illustration by Don Davis (M. M. Kavanagh. Nelson Publishing (c) 1975
Nelson Publishing Co.)
1925: The Story of a Fatal Peace
1925: The Story of a Fatal Peace by Edgar Wallace Cover: Newnes, 1915
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. )
Time Jumper
Time Jumper by William Greeleaf Cover: Nordon, 1980 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Nordon. (c)
1980 Nordon)
Landscape with Landscape
Landscape with Landscape by Gerald Murnane Cover: Norstilia Press, 1985
(First Edition) illustration by David Wong (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Norstrilia Press (c) 1985
Norstrilia Press)
Omni Best Science Fiction One
Omni Best Science Fiction One ed. by Ellen Datlow Cover: Omni Books
(First Edition) illustration by Michael Parkes (M. M. Kavanagh. Cover
illustration: Michael Parkes / Courtesy of OMNI Magazine. (c) 1992 Omni
Publications International, Ltd.)
Wraeththu
Wraeththu by Storm Constantine Cover: Orb, 1993 illustration by Sam

Rakeland (M. M. Kavanagh. (c) 1993 Orb)
Ice
Ice by Anna Kavan Cover: Doubleday, 1970 (First US Edition) illustration
by Alan Peckolick (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday
Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1970 Doubleday & Co.)
Q: Seeking the Mythical Future
Q: Seeking the Mythical Future by Trevor Hoyle Cover: Panther Books, 1977
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
with permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1977 Panther
Books)
Uninhibited, The
The Uninhibited by Dan Morgan Cover: Brown Watson Ltd., 1963 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Brown Watson
Limited (c) 1963 Brown Watson Limited)
Omha Abides
Omha Abides by C.C. MacApp Cover: Paperback Library, 1968 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Paperback Library
(c) 1968 Paperback Library)
Gather, Darkness!
Gather, Darkness! by Fritz Leiber Cover: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1950
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Pellegrini
and Cudahy (c) 1950 Pellegrini and Cudahy)
Wings Across Time
Wings Across Time by Frank Edward Arnold Cover: Pendulum, 1946 (First
Edition) illustration by Bob Wilkin (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Pendulum (c) 1946 Pendulum)
Warchild
Warchild by Richard Bowes Cover: Popular Library, 1986 illustration by
Richard Corben (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1986 Popular
Library)
Shadow Hunter, The
The Shadow Hunter by Pat Murphy Cover: Popular Library (First Edition)
(M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1982
Popular Library, Inc.)
Venus Equilateral
Venus Equilateral by George O. Smith Cover: Prime Press, 1947 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Prime Press (c)
1947 Prime Press)
Myths, Legends, and True History: Author's Choice Monthly
Myths, Legends, and True History: Author's Choice Monthly by Geoffrey A.
Landis Cover: Pulphouse Publishing (First Edition) illustration by George
Barr (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of Pulphouse Publishing. (c) Pulphouse
Publishing Inc.)

Telempath
Telempath by Spider Robinson Cover: Ber/Day, 1976 (First Edition) (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Ber/Day (c) 1976
Ber/Day)
Transfigurations
Transfigurations by Michael Bishop Cover: Berkley, 1979 (First Edition)
illustration by Mike Hinge (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with
The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1979 The Berkley
Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Strangers
Strangers by Gardner Dozois Cover: Berkley (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1978 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Orbit 9
Orbit 9 ed. by Damon Knight Cover: Putnam (First Edition) illustration by
Paul Lehr (M. M. Kavanagh. Used with the permission of Damon Knight. (c)
1971 The Putnam Publishing Group. )
Light at the End of the Universe, The
The Light at the End of the Universe by Terry Carr Cover: Pyramid Books,
1976 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1976 Pyramid Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Islands
Islands by Marta Randall Cover: Pyramid Books, 1976 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1976 Pyramid Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Wall Around the World, The
The Wall Around the World by Theodore R. Cogswell Cover: Pyramid Books
(First Edition) illustration by John Schoenherr (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted
by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1962 Pyramid Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Sturgeon in Orbit
Sturgeon in Orbit by Theodore Sturgeon Cover: Pyramid Books, 1964 (First
Edition) illustration by Ed Emshwiller (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1964 Pyramid Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)

I Have No Mouth. . .
I Have No Mouth. . . by Harlan Ellison Cover: Pyramid Books, 1967 (First
Edition) illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1967 Pyramid Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Who?
Who? by Algis Budrys Cover: Pyramid Books, 1968 illustration by Kelly
Freas (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1968 Pyramid Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Laying the Music to Rest
Laying the Music to Rest by Dean Wesley Smith Cover: Popular Library,
1989 illustration by Barclay Shaw (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c)
1989 Popular Library)
Johnny Zed
Johnny Zed by John Gregory Betancourt Cover: Popular Library, 1988 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1988 Popular Library)
Limbo
Limbo by Bernard Wolfe Cover: Ace Books illustration by Jack Gaughan (M.
M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. (c) 1961 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Savoy Dreams
Savoy Dreams by David Britton Cover: Savoy Books, 1984 illustration by
BBC Hulton Picture Library (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Savoy Books (c) 1984 Savoy Books)
Murder in Millennium VI
Murder in Millennium VI by Curme Gray Cover: Shasta,1951 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Erle Melvin Korshak. (c) 1951 Shasta)
Interface
Interface by Mark Adlard Cover: Ace Books (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The
Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1977 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Hampdenshire Wonder, The
The Hampdenshire Wonder by J.D. Beresford Cover: Eyre & Spottiswoode,
1948 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Eyre &
Spottis-Woode (c) 1948 Eyre & Spottis-Woode)

Greener than You Think
Greener than You Think by Ward Moore Cover: Sloane, 1947 (First Edition)
illustration by Wolfgang Roth (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Sloane (c) 1947 Sloane)
Tomorrow Revealed
Tomorrow Revealed by John Atkins Cover: Spearman, 1955 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Spearman (c) 1955 Spearman)
Menace from Mercury
Menace from Mercury by Victor La Salle (R.L. Fanthorpe) Cover: John
Spencer & Co., 1954 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Spencer (c) 1954 Spencer [UK])
Vaneglory
Vaneglory by George Turner Cover: Sphere, 1983 (M. M. Kavanagh. Sphere
(c) 1983 Sphere)
New Worlds 5
New Worlds 5 by Michael Moorcock Cover: Sphere Books Ltd., 1973 (First
Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Sphere (c) 1973 Sphere)
Movement of Mountains, The
The Movement of Mountains by Michael Blumlein Cover: St. Martin's Press
(First Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of St. Martin's Press. (c) 1987
St. Martin's Press)
Ragged World, The
The Ragged World by Judith Moffett Cover: St. Martin's Press (First
Edition) illustration by Ron Walotsky (M. M. Kavanagh. Cover: Ron
Walotsky. Courtesy of St. Martin's Press. (c) 1991 St. Martin's Press)
Out of Space and Time
Out of Space and Time by Clark Ashton Smith Cover: Panther Books, 1974
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
with permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1974 Panther
Books)
Twice in Time
Twice in Time by Manly Wade Wellman Cover: Galaxy Publishing Corp., 1958
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Galaxy (c)
1958 Galaxy, No. 3 World Editions, Inc. )
Ralph 124C 41+
Ralph 124C 41+ by Hugo Gernsback Cover: Stratford, 1925 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Stratford (c) 1925
Stratford)
Rosemary's Brain
Rosemary's Brain by Martha Soukup Cover: Wildside Press (First Edition)
(M. M. Kavanagh. Wildside Press (c) 1992 Wildside Press)
Taking of Satcon Station, The
The Taking of Satcon Station by Jim Baen & Barney Cohen Cover: TOR, 1982
illustration by Howard Chaykin (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of

Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1982 Tor
Books)
Probe
Probe by Carole Nelson Douglas Cover: TOR, 1985 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Tor
Books. (c) 1985 Tor Books)
Mirabile
Mirabile by Janet Kagan Cover: TOR, 1991 (First Edition) illustration by
Rich Sternbach (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1981 Tor Books)
Good News from Outer Space
Good News from Outer Space by John Kessel Cover: TOR, 1989 (First
Edition) illustration by Cityline Communications (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Tor
Books. (c) 1989 Tor Books)
Heritage of Flight
Heritage of Flight by Susan Shwartz Cover: TOR, 1989 illustration by
Wayne Barlowe (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1989 Tor Books)
Rainbow Man
Rainbow Man by M.J. Engh Cover: TOR, 1993 illustration by Paul Lehr (M.
M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1993 Tor Books)
Human Error
Human Error by Paul Preuss Cover: TOR, 1985 (First Edition) illustration
by Paul Stinson (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c)
1985 Tor Books)
Terrarium
Terrarium by Scott Russell Sanders Cover: TOR (First Edition)
illustration by Angus McKie (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of
Tor Books. (c) 1985 Tor Books)
Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future
Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future by Michael Resnick Cover: TOR (First
Edition) illustration by Michael Whelan (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
permission of Tor Books. (c) 1986 Tor Books)
Iceborn
Iceborn by Paul Carter Cover: TOR (First Edition) illustration by Mark
Maxwell (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1989
Tor Books)
Phylum Monsters
Phylum Monsters by Hayford Peirce Cover: TOR (First Edition) illustration
by Bruce Jensen (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c)
1989 Tor Books)
Halo
Halo by Tom Maddox Cover: TOR (First Edition) illustration by David

Mattingly (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1991
Tor Books)
Price of the Stars, The
The Price of the Stars by Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald Cover: TOR
(First Edition) illustration by Romas (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
permission of Tor Books. (c) 1992 Tor Books)
Jumper
Jumper by Steven Gould Cover: TOR (First Edition) illustration by Romas
(M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1992 Tor Books)
Phoenix in Flight
Phoenix in Flight by Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge Cover: TOR, 1993
(First Edition) illustration by Jim Burns (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
permission of Tor Books. (c) 1993 Tor Books)
Mother of Storms
Mother of Storms by John Barnes Cover: TOR, 1994 (First Edition)
illustration by Bob Eggleton (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of
Tor Books. (c) 1994 Tor Books)
Walkaway Clause, The
The Walkaway Clause by John Dalmas Cover: Tom Doherty Associates/TOR
(First Edition) illustration by Tom Kidd (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
permission of Tor Books. (c) 1986 Tor Books)
Invasion of 1910, The
The Invasion of 1910 by William Le Queux Cover: Eveleigh Nash, 1906
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. )
Short History of the Future, A
A Short History of the Future by W. Warren Wager Cover: University of
Chicago Press, 1989 illustration by Ted Lacey (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Univ. Chicago (c) 1989 Univ.
Chicago)
Secret Life of Houses, The
The Secret Life of Houses by Scott Bradfield Cover: Unwin Hyman (First
Edition) illustration by Ian Miller (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with
permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1988 Unwin Hyman)
Take Back Plenty
Take Back Plenty by Colin Greeland Cover: Unwin Hyman, 1990 (First
Edition) illustration by Steve Crisp (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with
permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1990 Unwin Hyman)
Slow Dancing Through Time
Slow Dancing Through Time by Gardner Dozois & Susan Casper Cover: Ursus
(First Edition) illustration by Vern Dufford (M. M. Kavanagh.Ursus
Imprints (c) 1990 Ursus Imprints)
Star Web
Star Web by Joan Cox Cover: Avon Books, 1980 (Casey Brown/Eaton

Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by permission of Avon
Books. (c) 1980 Avon Books)
Travails of Jane Saint, The
The Travails of Jane Saint by Josephine Saxton Cover: Virgin Books (First
Edition) illustration by Conny Jude (M. M. Kavanagh. Virgin Books (c) 1980
Virgin Books)
Transvection Machine, The
The Transvection Machine by Edward Hoch Cover: Walker & Co. (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection. Reprinted with permission of Walker and
Company. (c) 1973 Walker & Company)
Starbrat
Starbrat by John Morressy Cover: Walker & Co., 1972 (First Edition)
illustration by James E. Barry (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of Walker and Company. (c)
1972 Walker & Company)
Hong on the Range
Hong on the Range by William Wu Cover: Walker & Co., 1989 illustration by
Phil Hale & Richard Berry (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of Walker and Company. (c)
1989 Walker & Company)
Plunge into Space, A
A Plunge into Space by Robert Cromie Cover: Frederick Warne, 1890 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Glove of Maiden's Hair, The
The Glove of Maiden's Hair by Michael Jan Friedman Cover: Warner Books,
1987 illustration by James Warhola (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc.
(c) 1987 Warner Books, Inc.)
Story of Ab, The
The Story of Ab by Stanley Waterloo Cover: Way and Williams, 1897
illustration by Wil Bradley (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. )
Last Starship from Earth, The
The Last Starship from Earth by John Boyd Cover: Weybright and Talley,
1968 illustration by Paul Lehr (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Weybright and Talley (c) 1968 Weybright and Talley)
Short Account of a Remarkable Aerial Voyage. . ., A
A Short Account of a Remarkable Aerial Voyage. . . by Willem Bilderdijk
Cover: Wilfion Books/UNESCO, 1989 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Wilfion Books/UNESCO (c) 1989 Wilfion Books/UNESCO)
Secret of the Black Planet
Secret of the Black Planet by Milton Lesser Cover: Belmont, 1969 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Belmont
Productions (c) 1969 Belmont Productions)

Trouble on Titan
Trouble on Titan by Alan Nourse Cover: Winston, 1954 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Winston (c)
1954 Winston)
Sinister Barrier
Sinister Barrier by Eric Frank Russell Cover: Dennis Dobson, 1967 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Dennis Dobson
Limited (c) 1967 Dennis Dobson Limited)
Intelligence Gigantic, The
The Intelligence Gigantic by John Russell Fearn Cover: World's Work, 1943
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. World's
Work (c) 1943 World's Work)
People Maker, The
The People Maker by Damon Knight Cover: Zenith, 1959 (M. M. Kavanagh.
Zenith (c) 1959 Zenith)
Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, The
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike by Philip K. Dick Cover:
Ziesing, 1984 (First Edition) illustration by Dell Harris (M. M. Kavanagh.
Ziesing (c) 1984 Ziesing)
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1984 Published by
Mercury Press Cover illustration by R.J. Krupowiczfor (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted from The Magazine
of Fantasy and Science Fiction. (c) 1984 Mercury Press)
Planet Stories
Planet Stories, July 1952 Published by Love Romance Publishing Co., Inc.
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1952
Love Romances Publishing Co., Inc.)
Science Fiction Adventures
Science Fiction Adventures, Sept. 1957 Published by Future Publications,
Inc. Cover illustration by Ed Emshwiller (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1957 Future Publications, Inc.
)
Startling Stories
Startling Stories, June 1943 Published by Better Publications (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1943 Better
Publications, Inc.)
Strange Adventures
Strange Adventures, Oct.-Nov. 1950 Published by National Comics
Publications, Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1950 National Comics Publications, Inc.)
Thrilling Wonder Stories
Thrilling Wonder Stories, Dec. 1949 Published by Better Publications
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Better
Publications, Inc. (c) 1949 Better Publications, Inc.)

Unknown
Unknown, Feb. 1940 Published by Street & Smith Publications (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1940 Street &
Smith)
Sword of Rhiannon, The
The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett Cover: T.V. Boardman & Co., 1955
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. T.V.
Boardman & Company (c) 1955 T.V. Boardman & Company)
Venture Science Fiction
Venture Science Fiction, July 1958 Published by Edward L. Ferman Cover
illustration by Ed Emshwiller (Reprinted from The Magazine of Fantasy and
Science Fiction. (c) 1958 Edward L. Ferman)
Weird Tales
Weird Tales, June 1934 Published by Weird Tales Ltd. Cover illustration
by Margaret Brundage (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Weird Tales, Ltd. Copyright 1934
Popular Fiction Publishing Co.)
Twenty-four Hours
Twenty-four Hours by Neil Charles Cover: Curtis Warren Ltd., 1952 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Curtis Warren Ltd.
(c) 1952 Curtis Warren Ltd.)
Lunar Activity
Lunar Activity by Elizabeth Moon Cover: Baen Books, 1990 illustration by
Vincent Di Fate (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of BAEN PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c)
1990 Baen Books)
Through Darkest America
Through Darkest America by Neal Barrett, Jr. Cover: Congdon & Weed, 1986
(First Edition) illustration by Joe Burleson (M. M. Kavanagh. (c) 1986
Congdon & Weed)
Moving Mars
Moving Mars by Greg Bear Cover: TOR, 1993 (First Edition) illustration by
Wayne Barlowe (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c)
1993 Tor Books)
Star Light: The Great Short Fiction of Alfred Bester
Star Light: The Great Short Fiction of Alfred Bester by Alfred Bester
Cover: Berkley, 1977 illustration by Richard Powers (M. M. Kavanagh.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1977 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Stars My Destination, The
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester Cover: Bantam, 1970
illustration by Paul Lehr (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1970

Bantam Books)
Uplift War, The
The Uplift War by David Brin Cover: Bantam, 1987 illustration by Michael
Whelan (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1987 Bantam Books)
Vor Game, The
The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold Cover: Baen Books, 1990 illustration
by Tom Kidd (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of BAEN PUBLISHING
ENTERPRISES. (c) 1990 Baen Books)
Kindred
Kindred by Octavia Estelle Butler Cover: Beacon Press, 1988 illustration
by Joanna Steinkeller & Laurence Shwinger (M. M. Kavanagh. (c) 1988 Beacon
Press)
Steel Crocodile, The
The Steel Crocodile by D.G. Compton Cover: Ace Books, 1970 (First
Edition) illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1970 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Man Who Melted, The
The Man Who Melted by Jack Dann Cover: Bluejay Books, 1984 (First
Edition) illustration by Al de Angelo (M. M. Kavanagh. Book jackets
reprinted by permission of Bluejay Books Inc. All rights reserved. (c)
1984 Bluejay Books Inc.)
Triton
Triton by Samuel R. Delany Cover: Bantam, 1976 (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1976 Bantam Books)
Galactic Pot-Healer
Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick Cover: Berkley, 1974 illustration
by Paul Lehr (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1974 The Berkley Publishing
Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, The
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich by Philip K. Dick Cover: Bantam,
1977 (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1977 Bantam Books)
Weathermonger, The
The Weathermonger by Peter Dickinson Cover: Delacorte Press, 1986 (First
US Edition) illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by
Permission of Delecorte Press, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1986 Delecorte Press)
Start of the End of It All, The
The Start of the End of It All by Carol Emshwiller Cover: Mercury House,

1991 illustration by Renee Flower (M. M. Kavanagh. Published by Mercury
House, San Francisco, CA. (c) 1991 Mercury House)
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer Cover: Berkley, 1971
(M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1971 The Berkley Publishing Group.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Rumors of Spring
Rumors of Spring by Richard Grant Cover: Bantam, 1987 (First Edition)
illustration by Gervasio Gallardo (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1987 Bantam Books)
Hemingway Hoax, The
The Hemingway Hoax by Joe Haldeman Cover: Avon Books, 1991 illustration
by Gary Ruddell (M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c)
1991 Avon Books)
Make Room! Make Room!
Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison Cover: Bantam, 1994 illustration
by Mick McGinty (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a
division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1994Bantam
Books)
Starship Troopers
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein Cover: Ace Books, 1987
illustration by James Warhola (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1987 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, The
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein Cover: Berkley, 1968
illustration by Paul Lehr (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with
The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1968 The Berkley
Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Past Through Tomorrow, The
The Past Through Tomorrow by Robert A. Heinlein Cover: Berkley, 1983 (M.
M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. (c) 1983 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Star Beast, The
The Star Beast by Robert A. Heinlein Cover: Ace Books, 1972 illustration
by Steele Savage (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The
Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1972 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)

White Queen
White Queen by Gwyneth Jones Cover: Orb, 1994 (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted
by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1994 Orb)
Wind's Twelve Quarters, The
The Wind's Twelve Quarters by Ursula K. Le Guin Cover: Bantam, 1976 (M.
M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1976 Bantam Books)
Word for World Is Forest, The
The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin Cover: Berkley, 1976
illustration by Richard Powers (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1976 The
Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Solaris
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem Cover: Berkley, 1971 illustration by Paul Lehr
(M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1971 The Berkley Publishing Group.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Galaxies
Galaxies by Barry Malzberg Cover: Pyramid Books, 1975 (First Edition) (M.
M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. (c) 1975 Pyramid Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Memoirs of a Spacewoman
Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison Cover: Berkley, 1973
illustration by Vincent Di Fate (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1973 The
Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Mirror for Observers, A
A Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn Cover: Dell, 1980 (M. M.
Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Dell Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday
Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1980 Dell Books)
Glamour, The
The Glamour by Christopher Priest Cover: Doubleday, 1985 (First US
Edition) illustration by Linda Fennimore (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by
Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1985 Doubleday)
Red Mars
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson Cover: Bantam, 1993 (First US Edition)
illustration by Don Dixon (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1993
Bantam Books)

Planet on the Table, The
The Planet on the Table by Kim Stanley Robinson Cover: TOR, 1986 (First
Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1986
Tor Books)
Stardance
Stardance by Spider Robinson & Jeanne Robinson Cover: TOR, 1983
illustration by Victoria Poyser (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission
of Tor Books. (c) 1983 Tor Books)
Ragged Astronauts, The
The Ragged Astronauts by Bob Shaw Cover: Baen Books, 1988 illustration by
Alan Gutierrez (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of BAEN
PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c) 1988 Baen Books)
Wreath of Stars, A
A Wreath of Stars by Bob Shaw Cover: Dell, 1978 (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by
Permission of Dell Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1978 Dell Books)
Illuminatus! Trilogy, The
The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson Cover:
Dell, 1984 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Courtesy of Dell Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1984 Dell Books)
Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I, The
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I by Robert Silverberg Cover: Avon
Books, 1971 (M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1971
Avon Books)
Hyperion
Hyperion by Dan Simmons Cover: Bantam, 1990 illustration by Gary Ruddell
(M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1990 Bantam Books)
Rediscovery of Man, The
The Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith Cover: NESFA Press, 1993
(First Edition) illustration by Jack Gaughan (M. M. Kavanagh. Cover
Illustration: Jack Gaughan. (c) 1993 NESFA Press)
Star Maker
Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon Cover: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1987 illustration
by Tanya Maiboroda (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of the Estate of William Olaf
Stapledon. (c) 1987 Jeremy Tarcher / The Putnam Publishing Group.)
Snow Crash
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson Cover: Bantam, 1993 illustration by Bruce
Jensen (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1993 Bantam Books)
Schismatrix
Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling Cover: Arbor House, 1995 (First Edition)
illustration by Ron Walotsky (M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by permission of
William Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) Arbor House)

Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology ed. by Bruce Sterling Cover: Arbor
House, 1986 (First Edition) illustration by Dorothy Wachtenheim & Abbe
Lubell (M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by permission of William Morrow & Co., Inc.
(c) 1986 Arbor House)
Gravity's Angels
Gravity's Angels by Michael Swanwick Cover: Arkham House, 1991 (First
Edition) illustration by Pablo Picasso (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of Arkham
House Publishers. (c) 1991 by Arkham House Publishers, Inc.)
Stations of the Tide
Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick Cover: William Morrow & Co.,
1991 (First Edition) illustration by Daniel Horn (M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by
permission of William Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) 1991 William Morrow & Co.,
Inc.)
Of Men and Monsters
Of Men and Monsters by William Tenn Cover: Walker & Co., 1970
illustration by Jack Gaughan (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of
Walker and Company. (c) 1970 Walker & Company)
Gate to Women's Country, The
The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper Cover: Bantam, 1989
illustration by Wilson McLean (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1989 Bantam Books)
Her Smoke Rose up Forever
Her Smoke Rose up Forever by James Tiptree Cover: Arkham House, 1990
(First Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of Arkham House Publishers. (c)
1990 by Arkham House Publishers, Inc.)
Weapon Shops of Isher, The
The Weapon Shops of Isher by A.E. Van Vogt Cover: Ace Books, 1970
illustration by John Schoenherr (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1970 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Last Castle, The
The Last Castle by Jack Vance Cover: TOR, 1989 illustration by Brian
Waugh (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1989 Tor
Books)
Persistence of Vision, The
The Persistence of Vision by John Varley Cover: Dell, 1979 (M. M.
Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Dell Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday
Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1979 Dell Books)
True Names
True Names by Vernor Vinge Cover: Dell, 1981 illustration by Tsui (M. M.
Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Dell Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday
Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1981 Dell Books)

Slaughterhouse-Five
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Cover: Dell, 1991 illustration by
Carin Goldberg & Gene Greif (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Dell
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1991
Dell Books)
Night of the Cooters
Night of the Cooters by Howard Waldrop Cover: Ursus, 1990 (First Edition)
illustration by Don Ivan Punchatz (M. M. Kavanagh.Ursus Imprints (c) 1990
Ursus Imprints)
Island of Dr. Moreau, The
The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells Cover: Bantam, 1994 illustration
by Rousseau Le Douanier (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1994
Bantam Books)
This Immortal
This Immortal by Roger Zelazny Cover: Ace Books, 1966 (First Edition)
illustration by Gray Morrow (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with
The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1966 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Gods Themselves, The
The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov Cover: Bantam, 1990 illustration by
Don Dixon (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division
of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1990 Bantam Books)
JEM
JEM by Frederik Pohl Cover: Bantam, 1980 (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by
Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1980 Bantam Books)
Legion of Time, The
The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson Cover: Pyramid Books, 1967
illustration by Jack Gaughan (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1967 Pyramid
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Galaxy
Galaxy, Aug. 1958 Published by Galaxy Publishing Corp. (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of
Galaxy (R). (c) 1958 Galaxy Publishing Corporation )
Galaxy
Galaxy, Jan. 1956 Published by Galaxy Publishing Corp. (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of
Galaxy (R). (c) 1956 Galaxy Publishing Corporation )
Galaxy
Galaxy, Jan. 1953 Published by Galaxy Publishing Corp. (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of

Galaxy (R). (c) 1953 Galaxy Publishing Corporation )
Galaxy
Galaxy, May 1957 Published by Galaxy Publishing Corp. (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of
Galaxy (R). (c) 1957 Galaxy Publishing Corporation )
Galaxy
Galaxy, April 1954 Published by Galaxy Publishing Corp. (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of
Galaxy (R). (c) 1954 Galaxy Publishing Corporation)
Galaxy
Galaxy, April 1960 Published by Galaxy Publishing Corp. (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of
Galaxy (R). (c) 1960 Galaxy Publishing Corporation )
Galaxy
Galaxy, Feb. 1960 Published by Galaxy Publishing Corp. (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of
Galaxy (R). (c) 1960 Galaxy Publishing Corporation )
Galaxy
Galaxy, Jan. 1952 Published by Galaxy Publishing Corp. (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of
Galaxy (R). (c) 1952 Galaxy Publishing Corporation )
Galaxy
Galaxy, Feb. 1951 Published by Galaxy Publishing Corp. (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of
Galaxy (R). (c) 1951 Galaxy Publishing Corporation )
Galaxy
Galaxy, Oct. 1950 Published by Galaxy Publishing Corp. (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of
Galaxy (R). (c) 1950 Galaxy Publishing Corporation )
If
If, March 1967 Published by Quinn Publishing Co. Inc. Cover illustration
by Ken Fagg (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with permission of Galaxy (R). (c) 1967 Quinn Publishing Co.
Inc.)
If
If, Sept. 1953 Published by Quinn Publishing Co. Inc. Cover illustration
by Ken Fagg (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with permission of Galaxy (R). (c) 1953 Quinn Publishing Co.
Inc.)
Slan
Slan by A.E. Van Vogt Cover: Berkley, 1975 illustration by Paul Lehr (M.
M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. (c) 1975 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)

Heritage of Hastur, The
The Heritage of Hastur by Marion Zimmer Bradley Cover: DAW Books, 1975
illustration by George Barr & Richard Hescox (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted
with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1975 DAW Books, Inc.)
Million Open Doors, A
A Million Open Doors by John Barnes Cover: TOR, 1992 (First Edition)
illustration by Vincent Di Fate (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission
of Tor Books. (c) 1992 Tor Books)
Unconquered Countries
Unconquered Countries by Geoff Ryman Cover: St. Martin's Press, 1994
(First Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of St. Martin's Press. (c) 1994
St. Martin's Press)
Time Machine, The
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells Cover: Ace Books, 1988 (M. M. Kavanagh.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1968 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Sandman: Season of Mists, The
The Sandman: Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman Cover: DC Comics, 1992
illustration by Dave McKeon (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by permission of DC
Comics. (TM) & (c) 1992 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.)
Glass Houses
Glass Houses by Laura J. Mixon Cover: TOR, 1992 (First Edition)
illustration by Tom Canty (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor
Books. (c) 1992 Tor Books)
Journal Wired
Journal Wired, Winter 1989 Published by Andy Watson & Mark Uziesieng (M.
M. Kavanagh. (c) Andy Watson and Mark Ziesing)
Nexus
Nexus, April 1991 / No. 1 Published by SF Nexus (M. M. Kavanagh. (c) 1991
SF Nexus)
Science Fiction Chronicle
Science Fiction Chronicle, Feb. 1992 Published by Andrew I. Porter Cover
illustration by David Cherry (M. M. Kavanagh. Cover: David Cherry.
Courtesy of Andrew I. Porter. Copyright 1992 by Science Fiction Chronicle)
War with the Newts
War with the Newts by Karel Capek Cover: Berkley (M. M. Kavanagh.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Worlds of Fantasy
Worlds of Fantasy / No. 2 Published by John Spencer & Co. (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) John Spencer &

Co.)
Wonder Stories
Wonder Stories, 1957 Published by Better Publications (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Better Publications, Inc.
(c) 1957 Better Publications, Inc.)
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Feb. 1986 Published by Dell
Magazines (Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside.
(c) 1986 Dell Magazines)
Hambly, Barbara
Barbara Hambly (1951- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Harrison, Harry
Harry Harrison (1925- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Kelly, James Patrick
James Patrick Kelly (1951- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Haldeman, Joe
Joe Haldeman (1943- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Jablokov, Alexander
Alexander Jablokov (1956- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Kagan, Janet
Janet Kagan (1945- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Kandel, Michael
Michael Kandel (1941- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Kessel, John J.
John J. Kessel (1950- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Kingsbury, Donald
Donald Kingsbury (1929- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Gentle, Mary
Mary Gentle (1956- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Gerrold, David
David Gerrold (1944- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Shepard, Lucius
Lucius Shepard (1947- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Shiner, Lewis
Lewis Shiner (1950- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Silverberg, Robert
Robert Silverberg (1935- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Shwartz, Dr. Susan
Susan M. Shwartz (1949- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Scott, Melissa

Melissa Scott ( ? - ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Schmidt, Stanley
Stanley Schmidt (1944- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Sheffield, Charles
Charles Sheffield (1935- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Saberhagen, Fred
Fred Saberhagen (1930- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Rusch, Kristine Kathryn
Kristine Kathryn Rusch (1960- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Robinson, Spider
Spider Robinson (Paul Robinson, 1948- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C.
Valada)
Rasmussen, Alis (Kate Elliot)
Alis A. Rasmussen (1958- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Reed, Robert
Robert Reed (1956- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Resnick, Michael
Michael D. Resnick (1942- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Pratchett, Terry
Terry Pratchett (1948- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Pournelle, Jerry E.
Jerry E. Pournelle (1933- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Powers, Tim
Tim Powers (1952- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Murphy, Pat
Pat Murphy (1955- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Newman, Kim J.
Kim J. Newman (1959- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Norton, Andre
Andre Norton (1912- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Turtledove, Harry
Harry Turtledove (1949- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Vance, Jack
Jack Vance (1916- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Vinge, Vernor
Vernor Vinge (1944- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
White, James
James White (1928- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Wilhelm, Kate
Kate Wilhelm (1928- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)

Williams, Walter Jon
Walter Jon Williams (1953- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Williamson, Jack
Jack Williamson (1908- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Niven, Larry
Larry Niven (1938- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Willis, Connie
Connie Willis (1945- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Wu, William F.
William F. Wu (1951- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (1942- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Yolen, Jane
Jane Yolen (1939- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Zahn, Timothy
Timothy Zahn (1951- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Zelazny, Roger
Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Knight, Damon
Damon Knight (1922- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Kress, Nancy
Nancy Kress (1948- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Lafferty, R.A.
R.A. Lafferty (1914- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Leiber, Fritz
Fritz Leiber (1910-1992) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Longyear, Barry
Barry B. Longyear (1942- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Matheson, Richard
Richard Matheson (1926- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
McIntyre, Vonda
Vonda N. McIntyre (1948- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Moorcock, Michael
Michael Moorcock (1939- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Morrow, James
James Morrow (1947- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Stirling, S.M.
S.M. Stirling (1954- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Haldeman II, Jack C.

Jack C. Haldeman II (1941- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Landis, Dr. Geoffrey
Dr. Geoffrey Landis (1955- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Rosenberg, Joel
Joel Rosenberg (1954- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Wolfe, Gene
Gene Wolfe (1931- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Watt-Evans, Lawrence
Lawrence Watt-Evans (1954- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Varley, John
John Varley (1947- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Swanwick, Michael
Michael Swanwick (1950- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Moon, Elizabeth
Elizabeth Moon (1945- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Ing, Dean
Dean Ing (1931- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Hartwell, David G.
David G. Hartwell (1941- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Gaiman, Neil
Neil Gaiman (1960- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Gibson, William
William Gibson (1948- ) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)
Greenland, Colin
Colin Greenland (1954- ) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)
Gunn, James E.
James E. Gunn (1923- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Harrison, John M.
Harrison, M. John (1945- ) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) ( Bettmann. )
Hesse, Hermann
Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) ( Bettmann. )
Hogan, James P.
James P. Hogan (1941- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Holland, Cecelia
Cecelia Holland (1943- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Hubbard, L. Ron
L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986) ( Bettmann. )

Huxley, Aldous
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) ( Bettmann. )
Kerr, Katharine
Katherine Kerr (1944- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Kipling, Rudyard
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) ( Bettmann. )
Koontz, Dean R.
Dean R. Koontz (1945- ) ( Bettmann. )
Kube-McDowell, Michael P.
Michael P. Kube-McDowell (1954- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929- ) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)
Lee, Tanith
Tanith Lee (1947- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Lewis, C.S.
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) ( Bettmann. )
Linaweaver, Brad
Brad Linaweaver (1952- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
London, Jack
Jack London (1876-1916) ( Bettmann. )
Mason, Lisa
Lisa Mason (1953- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
May, Julian
Julian May (1931- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Merril, Judith
Judith Merril (1923- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Orwell, George
George Orwell (1903-1950) ( Bettmann. )
Piercy, Marge
Marge Piercy (1936- ) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)
Poe, Edgar Allan
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) ( Bettmann. )
Pohl, Frederik
Frederik Pohl (1919- ) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)
Robinson, Frank M.
Frank M. Robinson (1926- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Rushdie, Salman
Salman Rushdie (1947- ) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)
Ryman, Geoff
Geoff Ryman (1951- ) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)

Shaw, Bob
Bob Shaw (1931- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Steele, Allen
Allen Steele (1958- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Sturgeon, Theodore
Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Swift, Jonathan
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) ( Bettmann. )
Tepper, Sheri S.
Sheri S. Tepper (1929- ) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)
Tolkien, J.R.R.
J.R.R. Tolkien (1902-1980) ( Bettmann. )
Tuttle, Lisa
Lisa Tuttle (1952- ) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)
Vidal, Gore
Gore Vidal (1925- ) ( Bettmann. )
Vinge, Joan D.
Joan D. Vinge (1948- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Vonnegut, Jr., Kurt
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922- ) ( Bettmann. )
Wells, H.G.
H.G. Wells (1866-1946) ( Bettmann. )
Goonan, Kathleen Ann
Kathleen Ann Goonan (1952- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Lethem, Jonathan Allen
Jonathan Allen Lethem (1964- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
King, Stephen
Stephen King (1947- ) ( Bettmann. )
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Illustration from Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. (
Phototheque-Hachette.)
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Illustration from Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Artwork by Riou, engraved by Pannemaker. ( Phototheque-Hachette.)
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Illustration from Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Artwork by Riou, engraved by Pannemaker. ( Phototheque-Hachette.)
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Illustration from Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Artwork by Riou, engraved by Pannemaker. ( Phototheque-Hachette.)

Journey to the Center of the Earth
Illustration from Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Artwork by Riou, engraved by Pannemaker. ( Phototheque-Hachette.)
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Illustration from Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Artwork by De Neuville, engraved by Hildebrand. ( Photothque-Hachette.)
Heinlein, Robert A.
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Reynolds, Mack
Mack Reynolds (1917-1983) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Herbert, Frank
Frank Herbert (1920-1986) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
van Vogt, A.E.
A.E. van Vogt (1912- ) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Verne, Jules
Jules Verne (1828-1905) (Nadar / Photothque-Hachette (c) 1995 Nadar /
Photothque-Hachette)
Gallun, Raymond Z.
Raymond Z. Gallun (1911- ) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Laumer, Keith
Keith Laumer (1925-1993) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Leinster, Murray
Murray Leinster (1896-1975) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
MacLean, Katherine
Katherine MacLean (1925- ) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Malzberg, Barry N.
Barry N. Malzberg (1939- ) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Moore, C.L.
C.L. Moore (1911-1987) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Piper, H. Beam
H. Beam Piper (1904-1964) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Sargent, Pamela
Pamela Sargent (1948- ) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Simak, Clifford D.
Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Smith, E.E.
E.E. Smith (1890-1965) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Wilson, Richard
Richard Wilson (1920-1987) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Wollheim, Donald A.

Donald A. Wollheim (1914-1990) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Zebrowski, George
George Zebrowski (1945- ) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Thomson, Amy
Amy Thomson (1958- ) (Steven Smith. (c) 1995 Steven Smith)
McHugh, Maureen F.
Maureen F. McHugh (1959- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Miller, P. Schuyler
P. Schuyler Miller (1912-1974) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Shaara, Michael
Michael Shaara (1929-1988) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Ley, Willy
Willy Ley (1906-1969) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Galouye, Daniel F.
Daniel F. Galouye (1920-1976) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Kuttner, Henry
Henry Kuttner (1914-1958) (From the Archives of the J. Wayne & Elise M.
Gunn Center For The Study of Science Fiction at The University of Kansas.
)
Lovecraft, H.P.
H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) (From the Archives of the J. Wayne & Elise M.
Gunn Center For The Study of Science Fiction at The University of Kansas.
)
Stapledon, Olaf
Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) (From the Archives of the J. Wayne & Elise M.
Gunn Center For The Study of Science Fiction at The University of Kansas.
)
Weinbaum, Stanley G.
Stanley G. Weinbaum (1902-1935) (From the Archives of the J. Wayne &
Elise M. Gunn Center For The Study of Science Fiction at The University of
Kansas. )
Gernsback, Hugo
Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967) (From the Archives of the J. Wayne & Elise M.
Gunn Center For The Study of Science Fiction at The University of Kansas.
)
Merritt, A.
A. Merritt (1884-1943) (From the Archives of the J. Wayne & Elise M. Gunn
Center For The Study of Science Fiction at The University of Kansas. )
Gold, Horace L.
Horace L. Gold (1914- ) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Griffin, Russell M.
Russell M. Griffin (1943-1986) (Courtesy of: Publicity Dept. - University

of Bridgeport. )
Hamilton, Edmond
Edmond Hamilton (1904-1977) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Harris, MacDonald
MacDonald Harris (1921- ) (Barbara Hall. (c) 1995 Barbara Hall)
Keyes, Daniel
Daniel Keyes (1927- ) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Lupoff, Richard A.
Richard A. Lupoff (1935- ) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Palmer, David
David Palmer (1941- ) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Pangborn, Edgar
Edgar Pangborn (1909-1976) (Eliot Rowe. (c) 1995 Eliot Rowe)
Panshin, Alexei
Alexei Panshin (1940- ) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Preuss, Paul
Paul Preuss (1942- ) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Reamy, Tom
Tom Reamy (1935-1977) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Sladek, John T.
John T. Sladek (1937- ) (Tom Jackson. (c) 1995 Tom Jackson)
Tenn, William
William Tenn (1920- ) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Twain, Mark
Mark Twain (1835-1910) ( Bettmann. )
Vonarburg, Elisabeth
Elisabeth Vonarburg (1947- ) (Robert Laliberte. (c) 1995 Robert
Laliberte)
Wilder, Cherry
Cherry Wilder (1930- ) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Womack, Jack
Jack Womack (1956- ) (Meghan Boody. (c) 1995 Meghan Boody)
King, T. Jackson
T. Jackson King (1948- ) (Teresa Edgerton. (c) 1995 Teresa Edgerton)
Soukup, Martha
Martha Soukup (1959- ) (Fred A. Levy Haskell. (c) 1995 Fred A. Levy
Haskell)
Noon, Jeff
Jeff Noon (1957- ) (Sigrid Estrada. (c) 1995 Sigrid Estrada)
Nicholls, Peter

Peter Nicholls (1939- ) (Ponch Hawkes. (c) 1995 Ponch Hawkes)
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Nov. 1963 / Vol. 25, No. 5
Published by Mercury Press Cover illustration by Hannes Bok (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted from The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. (c) 1963 Mercury Press)
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Sept. 1962 / Vol. 23, No. 3
Published Mercury Press Cover illustration by Ed Emshwiller (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted from The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. (c) 1962 Mercury Press)
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Winter-Spring 1950 / Vol. 1,
No. 2 Published by Mercury Press (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction. (c) 1950 Fantasy House Inc.)
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1971 / Vol. 40, No. 4
Published by Mercury Press Cover illustration by Kelly Freas (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted from The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. (c) 1971 Mercury Press)
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Jan. 1931 / Vol. 40, No. 1
Published by Mercury Press Cover illustration by Vaughn Bode (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted from The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. (c) 1971 Mercury Press)
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1973 / Vol. 44, No. 4
Published by Mercury Press Cover illustration by Don Davis (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted from The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. (c) 1973 Mercury Press)
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Dec. 1967 / Vol. 33, No. 6
Published by Mercury Press Cover illustration by Jack Gaughan (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted from The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. (c) 1967 Mercury Press)
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Oct-Nov 1991 / Vol. 81, No.
4-5 Published by Mercury Press Cover illustration by Bryn Barnard (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted from The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. (c) 1991 Mercury Press)
Sawyer, Robert J.
Robert J. Sawyer (1960- ) (Carolyn Clink. (c) 1995 Carolyn Clink)
Sterling, Bruce
Bruce Sterling (1954- ) (Photo provided by author. )

Stith, John E.
John E. Stith (1947- ) (Kavin Tris King. (c) 1995 Kavin Tris King)
Griffith, Nicola
Nicola Griffith (1960- ) (Kelley Eskridge. (c) 1995 Kelley Eskridge)
Gaiman, Neil (SF & History)
Neil Gaiman admits that he researches history on a lazy but continual
basis. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Gaiman, Neil (SF & History)
Neil Gaiman admits that he researches history on a lazy but continual
basis. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Gibson, William (Neuromancer)
William Gibson on Neuromancer. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Gibson, William (Neuromancer)
William Gibson on Neuromancer. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Haldeman, Joe (The Hemingway Hoax)
Joe Haldeman had to study how Hemingway misused metaphors and botched
punctuation in The Hemingway Hoax. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing,
Inc.)
Haldeman, Joe (The Hemingway Hoax)
Joe Haldeman had to study how Hemingway misused metaphors and botched
punctuation in The Hemingway Hoax. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing,
Inc.)
Jones, Gwyneth (Divine Endurance)
Gwyneth Jones talks about the Key to the Universe. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Jones, Gwyneth (Divine Endurance)
Gwyneth Jones talks about the Key to the Universe. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Kress, Nancy (On Using Language to Invoke the Future)
Nancy Kress says that the future will feel so strange that writers will
not need to invent jargon to describe it. ( (c) Grolier Electronic
Publishing, Inc.)
Kress, Nancy (On Using Language to Invoke the Future)
Nancy Kress says that the future will feel so strange that writers will
not need to invent jargon to describe it. ( (c) Grolier Electronic
Publishing, Inc.)
Le Guin, Ursula K. (On Computers)
Ursula K. Le Guin has no deep thoughts about computer technology. ( (c)
Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Le Guin, Ursula K. (On Computers)
Ursula K. Le Guin has no deep thoughts about computer technology. ( (c)
Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)

McHugh, Maureen (China Mountain Zhang)
Maureen McHugh discusses China Mountain Zhang and her perception of what
it may be like to like in a third world country of the future. ( (c)
Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
McHugh, Maureen (China Mountain Zhang)
Maureen McHugh discusses China Mountain Zhang and her perception of what
it may be like to like in a third world country of the future. ( (c)
Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Martin, George R. R. (On the Promise of SF)
George R. R. Martin would like to see the fictions of SF become real in
his lifetime. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Martin, George R. R. (On the Promise of SF)
George R. R. Martin would like to see the fictions of SF become real in
his lifetime. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Moorcock, Michael (On Alienation)
Michael Moorcock thinks that it's easy for SF writers to describe
outsiders, since most authors are alienated themselves. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Moorcock, Michael (On Alienation)
Michael Moorcock thinks that it's easy for SF writers to describe
outsiders, since most authors are alienated themselves. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Morrow, James (This is the Way the World Ends)
James Morrow cites children as an inspiration in working for disarmament.
( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Morrow, James (This is the Way the World Ends)
James Morrow cites children as an inspiration in working for disarmament.
( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Niven, Larry (On Telepathy)
Larry Niven thinks that it's a good thing that we can't read minds. ( (c)
Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Niven, Larry (On Telepathy)
Larry Niven thinks that it's a good thing that we can't read minds. ( (c)
Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Pohl, Frederik (Aliens in JEM)
Frederik Pohl makes admits to making up his descriptions of aliens as he
goes along. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Pohl, Frederik (Aliens in JEM)
Frederik Pohl makes admits to making up his descriptions of aliens as he
goes along. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Robinson, Kim Stanley (On Dreams)
Kim Stanley Robinson believes that dreams have power in our lives even if
we can't remember them. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)

Robinson, Kim Stanley (On Dreams)
Kim Stanley Robinson believes that dreams have power in our lives even if
we can't remember them. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Ryman, Geoffrey (The Child Garden)
Geoffrey Ryman discusses his book, The Child Garden, the lack of the
spiritual element in our lives. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Ryman, Geoffrey (The Child Garden)
Geoffrey Ryman discusses his book, The Child Garden, the lack of the
spiritual element in our lives. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Silverberg, Robert (The Immensity of the Universe)
Robert Silverberg on the smallness of Us and the immensity of It. ( (c)
Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Silverberg, Robert (The Immensity of the Universe)
Robert Silverberg on the smallness of Us and the immensity of It. ( (c)
Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Simmons, Dan (Hyperion)
Dan Simmons on his book, Hyperion, and on John Keats. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Simmons, Dan (Hyperion)
Dan Simmons on his book, Hyperion, and on John Keats. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Sterling, Bruce (On Television)
Bruce Sterling is definitely plugged in ( (c) Grolier Electronic
Publishing, Inc.)
Sterling, Bruce (On Television)
Bruce Sterling is definitely plugged in ( (c) Grolier Electronic
Publishing, Inc.)
Stephenson, Neal (Future Virus)
Neal Stephenson on viruses; when you just can't get that tune out of your
head. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Stephenson, Neal (Future Virus)
Neal Stephenson on viruses; when you just can't get that tune out of your
head. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Swanwick, Michael (Transcendence)
Michael Swanwick on reaching an audience through the power of mystery. (
(c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Swanwick, Michael (Transcendence)
Michael Swanwick on reaching an audience through the power of mystery. (
(c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Vonarburg, Elisabeth (Writing for SF Fans)
Elisabeth Vonarburg talks about her audience and herself. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Vonarburg, Elisabeth (Writing for SF Fans)

Elisabeth Vonarburg talks about her audience and herself. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
On Being a Science Fiction Writer
There are better ways of becoming a millionaire than by writing science
fiction, according to those who know. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing,
Inc.)
What Science Fiction Does or Should Do
Other than providing a good read, SF writers hopefully see their novels
helping people deal with future change and exposing them to new horizons.
( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Women in Science Fiction
Various views: Women of SF and Women in SF. ( (c) Grolier Electronic
Publishing, Inc.)
Powers of the Mind
James Morrow and Geoff Ryman make a case for the power of skepticism and
reject the simplicity of New Age answers. ( (c) Grolier Electronic
Publishing, Inc.)
The Outlaw in Cyberpunk
The romance of the life of the outlaw has long been a theme in books and
movies. These SF writers agree that we can learn something about how our
society functions by those who don't follow the rules. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Virtual Reality
For some people, virtual reality is a term that has little to do with how
we live. For others, the future is already here - or just a phone call
away. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Space Technology
What interests SF writers is not the spaceship but what the spaceship
adds to the story and to the reader's flights of imagination. ( (c)
Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Post Apocalypse
It's been a theme since antiquity - the End of the World, Post-Holocaust,
Planetary Disaster. Whether the result of bombs, plagues, or cosmic
explosions, SF writers have long imagined whether our world will end with
a bang or a whimper. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
The Time Machine
Robert Silverberg discusses the man who inspired and touched many
generations of SF fans: H.G. Wells. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing,
Inc.)
Time Travel
SF writers discuss the challenges of Time Travel and agree that it's not
the mechanics but the metaphors that have meaning. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Jones, Gwyneth

Gwyneth Jones (1952- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Kornbluth , Cyril M.
Cyril M. Kornbluth (1923-1958) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I.
Porter)
Langford, David
David Langford (1953- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Lem, Stanislaw
Stanislaw Lem (1921- ) (Franz Rottensteiner. (c) 1995 Franz
Rottensteiner)
L'Engle, Madeleine
Madeleine L'Engle (1918- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
MacDonald, James D.
James D. MacDonald (1916-1986) (M. M. Kavanagh. (c) 1995 M. M. Kavanagh)
Popkes, Steven
Steven Popkes (1952- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Rodgers, Alan
Alan Rodgers ( ? - ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Sanders, Scott Russell
Scott Russell Sanders (1945- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I.
Porter)
Spruill, Steven
Steven G. Spruill (1946- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Stableford, Brian M.
Brian M. Stableford (1948- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I.
Porter)
Watson, Ian
Ian Watson (1943- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Webb, Sharon
Sharon Webb (1936- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Ransom, Bill
Bill Ransom (1945- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
ab Hugh, Dafydd
Dafydd ab Hugh (1960- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
MacIntyre, F. Gwynplaine
F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre (?1948- ) (M. M. Kavanagh. (c) 1995 M. M.
Kavanagh)
Roessner, Michaela
Michaela Roessner (1950- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Scarborough, Elizabeth Ann
Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (1947- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)

Robinson, Kim Stanley
Kim Stanley Robinson (1952- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I.
Porter)
Nourse, Alan E.
Alan E. Nourse (1928-1992) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Simmons, Dan
Dan Simmons (1948- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Long, Frank Belknap
Frank Belknap Long (1903- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Pike, Christopher
Christopher Pike ( ? - ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Turner, George
George Turner (1916- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Rotsler, William
William Rotsler (1926- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Wolverton, Dave
Dave Wolverton (1957- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Wellman, Manly Wade
Manly Wade Wellman (1903-1986) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I.
Porter)
Goulart, Ronald
Ronald Goulart (1933- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Wilson, F. Paul
F. Paul Wilson (1946- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Nelson, Ray
Ray Nelson (1931- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Zindell, David
David Zindell (1952- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Hoffman, Lee
Lee Hoffman (1932- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Martin, George R.R.
George R.R. Martin (1948- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
The Blob
One of the relatively few 1950s monster movies to feature a villain that
is something other than a giant vermin or an awakened prehistoric
creature, The Blob (Tonylyn/Paramount) offers an amorphous protoplasmic
mass. Its success suggests that formless threats can be as frightening as
gigantic pests. (Courtesy of Jack H. Harris. (c) Jack H. Harris)
Grant, Richard
Richard Grant (1952- ) (Rick Hawes. (c) 1995 Rick Hawes)
Hoban, Russell

Russell Hoban (1925- ) (Jerry Bauer. (c) 1995 Jerry Bauer)
Holdstock, Robert P.
Robert P. Holdstock (1948- ) (Dick Jude. (c) 1995 Dick Jude)
Kennedy, Leigh
Leigh Kennedy (1951- ) (Dave Holmes. (c) 1995 Dave Holmes)
McAuley, Paul J.
Paul J. McAuley (1955- ) (Freda Warrington. (c) 1995 Freda Warrington)
O'Donnell, Kevin Jr.
Kevin O'Donnell, Jr. (1950- ) (T. Jackson King. (c) 1995 T. Jackson King)
Priest, Christopher
Christopher Priest (1943- ) (Dick Jude. (c) 1995 Dick Jude)
Rucker, Rudy
Rudy Rucker (1946- ) (Rick Hawes. (c) 1995 Rick Hawes)
Russell, Eric Frank
Eric Frank Russell (1905-1978) (Harold Gottliffe. (c) 1995 Harold
Gottliffe)
Russ, Joanna
Joanna Russ (1937- ) (Rick Hawes. (c) 1995 Rick Hawes)
Saxton, Josephine
Josephine Saxton (1935- ) (Dick Jude. (c) 1995 Dick Jude)
Sheckley, Robert
Robert Sheckley (1928- ) (Rick Hawes. (c) 1995 Rick Hawes)
Shirley, John
John Shirley (1954- ) (Rick Hawes. (c) 1995 Rick Hawes)
Tiptree, Jr., James
James Tiptree, Jr. (1915-1987) (James Reber. (c) 1995 James Reber)
Waldrop, Howard
Howard Waldrop (1946- ) (Rick Hawes. (c) 1995 Rick Hawes)
Wilson, Robert Anton
Robert Anton Wilson (1932- ) (Gamma. (c) 1995 Gamma)
Wingrove, David
David Wingrove (1954- ) (Colin Ramsey. (c) 1995 Colin Ramsay)
2001: A Space Odyssey
This Polish poster of 2001: A Space Odyssey(MGM, 1968) reflects the
nature of Poland's celebrated poster art, which emphasizes design
qualities rather than merely illustrating a movie. As in other Eastern
European SF art, this poster suggests the themes of consciousness and
"inner space" rather than space flight. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie
Posters. )
The Amazing Colossal Man
One of many 1950s films that dramatized gigantic mutations as a result of

atomic testing, Bert I. Gordon's The Amazing Colossal Man (Malibu/AIP,
1957) combined the story of an innocent, if massive, young man with
special effects that were noted for their tackiness. His lack of success
did not prevent Allied Artists from making Attack of the 50-Foot Woman the
following year. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
The Conquest of Space
One of a small number of 1950s films to seek respectability through
claims of scientific authenticity, Byron Haskin's The Conquest of Space
(Paramount, 1955) strove, like George Pal's early and more successful
Destination Moon, to seem as much anticipatory documentary as fiction.
(Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
The Creature From the Black Lagoon
Most 1950s monster movies were at the same stage of sophistication as the
1930s pulp magazines: the monsters were primarily interested in our women.
Other than that cliche,The Creature From the Black Lagoon (Universal,
1954) is a vivid and enjoyable film, with an archetypal and graceful
amphibious Creature. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
The Day the Earth Stood Still
While most 1950s science fiction movies saw aliens and monsters as
threats to be destroyed, The Day the Earth Stood Still (20th Century Fox,
1951) made a plea for an end to mankind's violent ways. This theme would
become popular in SF cinema some twenty years later. (Ronald V.
Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
I Married A Monster From Outer Space
While most 1950s invasion movies showed monsters on the rampage, several
explored the theme of the covert invasion, which had obvious affinities
with the Red Scare. Gene Fowler's I Married A Monster From Outer Space
(Paramount, 1958) enjoyably exploits the chills implicit in the theme of
the Enemy Among Us, with a sexual subtext to heighten the effect. (Ronald
V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Jack Arnold's film of The Incredible Shrinking Man (Universal, 1957) was
based on Richard Matheson's script of his novel, The Shrinking Man, and it
boasts both an intelligent script and excellent special effects. Save for
its enabling device - the substance which starts the protagonist's
uncontrollable shrinking is a radioactive cloud - the film eschews most of
the political touchstones that characterize 1950s SF movies and focuses
instead on the theme of Man against Nature. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood
Movie Posters. )
Invaders From Mars
William Cameron Menzies's Invaders From Mars (National Pictures/20
Century-Fox, 1953) makes strong use of the popular 1950s theme of a
takeover by alien invaders. As in the later Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, there is an ending with a twist. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood
Movie Posters. )
The Invisible Man
Although the H.G. Wells novel had neither black comedy or gothic chills,

James Whale's film version of The Invisible Man (Universal, 1933) managed
to combine both elements while still being true to Wells's story. The
special effects - especially of the dying invisible man returning to
visibility organ by organ - remain extremely effective. (Ronald V.
Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
Island of Lost Souls
With Wells's idealistic Dr. Moreau converted into a sadistic Hollywood
villain, Island of Lost Soulsis not particularly faithful to Wells's
novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau, but it does work well as a generally
perverse and horrific film. The movie was banned in England, which
reportedly delighted Wells. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
It Came From Outer Space
Ray Bradbury's screen treatment forIt Came From Outer Space (Universal,
1953) cleverly inverts the themes of many alien invasion films. The
shape-shifting aliens that crash in the Mojave Desert and begin assuming
the form of local inhabitants pose no threat and merely want to get home.
(Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
King Kong
The appeal of M.C. Cooper's King Kong (RKO, 1933) was immediate and
universal. This French movie poster ("avec Fay Wray") offers the same
Beauty-and-the-Beast thrills that captivated English-speaking audiences.
(Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
Lost Horizon
One of the relatively few Hollywood films to deal with the theme of a
lost civilization,Lost Horizon (Columbia, 1937) is a sentimental tale of
happiness found, lost, then regained. The story is essentially a fantasy;
no attempt is made to rationalize the lost city or its secret of
immortality. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
The Lost World
Best remembered for its novel and largely successful use of model
animation combined with live action, The Lost World (First National, 1925)
was not a memorable film. What remains striking is Willis O'Brien's
pioneering work in stop-motion photography. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood
Movie Posters. )
Metropolis
Fritz Lang's most famous film and the masterpiece of early SF cinema,
Metropolis (UFA, 1926) combines both SF and gothic elements in its vision
of gleaming towers and futuristic spectacle above, and a downtrodden
proletarian underworld below. It remains an impressive film even today.
(Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
The Mysterious Island
Numerous film versions of Jules Verne's The Mysterious Islandhave been
made, with the 1961 spectacle being merely the best known. This poster is
from a 1929 MGM production, ninety percent of which was filmed in color.
(Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
The Night of the Living Dead

Night of the Living Dead (Image 10 Productions/Walter Reade-Continental,
1968) is George Romero's electrifying low-budget film of the dead who
returned to life to prey upon the living. It partakes more of horror than
of SF proper (its SF rationale is mentioned only in passing and is
risible), but it has had a great effect and influence upon SF and horror
films. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
Them!
The first of the giant insect movies, Them! (Warner Brothers, 1954)
borrowed the desert locale of It Came from Outer Space and the device of
atomic test radiation from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. The resulting
film became the template for a decade's worth of giant crabs, tarantulas,
and other vermin. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
The Thing
The first of two film adaptations of John W. Campbell's "Who Goes
There?", Howard Hawks's The Thing (Winchester Pictures/RKO, 1951) does not
exploit the paranoid potential of Campbell's conceit - a shapeshifting
alien that kills and replaces the bodies of his vfictims, prompting
survivors' suspicions that one of them is the monster - but does create an
unusually suspenseful and gripping movie. The 1982 version by John
Carpenter does adopt Campbell's shapeshifting theme. (Ronald V.
Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
Things To Come
Menzies's relentlessly high-minded adaptation of H.G. Wells's Things to
Come (London films, 1936) may have lacked drama and complex
characterization, but its special effects and visual tableaux give a real
indication of what SF cinema could do. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie
Posters. )
The Time Machine
George Pal's production of The Time Machine (Galaxy Films/MGM, 1960)
remained faithful to the Victorian milieu of Wells's novel, as his earlier
production of The War of the Worlds had not. Ironically, the earlier film
remains true to the spirit of Wells's story while the visually appealing
tale of Wells's time traveller becomes a typical Hollywood adventure
story. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
The Wasp Woman
Although this undistinguished Roger Corman film featured a beautiful
woman who grows the head of a wasp, the poster for The Wasp Woman
(Filmgroup/Allied Artists, 1959) portrays a wasp with the head of a woman.
The film may tempt viewers to freely interpret the deep and dark reasons
for this particular creation, but it was probably merely an attempt to
cash in on the success of The Fly. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie
Posters. )
When Worlds Collide
Paramount spent less than a million dollars on When Worlds Collide
(1951), no great sum for an end-of-the-world spectacular. Money for the
project reportedly ran out before the matte painting of the new planet
could be produced. Chesley Bonestell's preliminary artwork was used

instead, and it shows. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
The Golem
Although the Golem is not a technological creation, its story is
interwoven with some of the same themes as the tale of Frankenstein. The
1920 film The Golem (PAGU-UFA, 1920) seems strongly to foreshadow a scene
from The Bride of Frankenstein. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters.
)
The War of the Worlds
The 1953 film version of H.G. Wells's novel,The War of the Worldsshifted
the invasion site from Victorian England to contemporary Los Angeles, and
it changed the war machines from H.G. Wells's walking tripods to chrome
flying saucers with Fifties-style fins (Paramount, 1953). But this George
Pal film retains the essential excitement of the original novel. As the
poster suggests, the concept of an alien invasion was still novel to movie
audiences. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
The Lost World
This poster advertising the original release of The Lost World (First
National, 1925) offered the same audience appeal that the 1950s monster
movies did thirty years later, save for the presence of a streetcar
instead of an automobile. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
King Kong
This page from the original pressbook describes the various posters that
theatre owners showing King Kong (RKO, 1933) could purchase for their
lobbies. RKO anticipated the film's enormous success from the outset.
(Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
The Invisible Man Returns
Neither Director James Whale nor star Claude Rains returned to work on
The Invisible Man Returns (Universal, 1940), the first of many sequels to
the original 1939 classic. Merely "suggested" by H.G. Wells's novel, this
movie bears no direct relation to either the novel or the film version of
The Invisible Man. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
The Invisible Woman
The Invisible Woman (Universal, 1940) uses the device of invisibility no other element remains from H.G. Well's original novel. This light
comedy involves a beautiful model turned invisible by an eccentric
professor, to the intense interest of both her playboy sponsor and an
enterprising gangster. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
The Batman: The Electrical Brain
Although Batman boasted no superpowers, his adversaries occasionally
wielded science-fiction devices. In The Batman: The Electrical Brain
(Columbia, 1943) the caped crusader matches wits with a prototypical
computer. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
The Adventures of Captain Marvel
Captain Marvel was a comic book superhero, who bore more than a passing
resemblance to Superman.The Adventures of Captain Marvel (Republic, 1941)
dates from the heyday of Republic movie serials. Although the original

Captain Marvel disappeared with the settlement of a lawsuit in 1953,
numerous subsequent versions, using either the character's name or
attributes, have appeared since. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters.
)
The War of the Worlds
This half-sheet poster for The War of the Worlds (Paramount, 1953) is
more painterly than most movie poster art of that time or since: posters
today generally use stills from the film or highly realistic paintings
made from stills. This is especially the case with SF cinema, where the
prospective audience must be assured that the special effects are
realistic. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
Godzilla
AlthoughGodzilla (Toho/Embassy, 1954) is in most respects a conventional
monster movie - its resemblance to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is
evident. Godzilla's campiness and kick-down-Tokyo vigor has made him a
familiar, even beloved figure in the movie monster pantheon. (Ronald V.
Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
2001: A Space Odyssey
When it first appeared, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (MGM,
1968) was the most audacious and visually spectacular SF film ever made.
Many people believe that this is a distinction the film still possesses.
(Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
The Manchurian Candidate
Released the year before the assassination of President Kennedy, The
Manchurian Candidate (MC/Essex/United Artists, 1962) explores a hothouse
of fevered conspiracy themes that would excite the popular imagination in
the years to come. It is perhaps more popular today than it was upon its
original release. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
Les Oiseaux
Alfred Hitchcock's film,The Birds (Universal, 1963) lacks many of the
attributes of science fiction, but its vision of members of an
unthreatening animal species suddenly attacking mankind offers a link
between 1950s monster movies and the revenge-of-Nature movies of the 1970s
and 80s. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
On The Beach
Most 1950s SF films, however cautionary, end in triumph for the
protagonists; On the Beach (United Artists, 1959) was a striking
exception. Its anti-war message was unequivocal. (Ronald V.
Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
A Trip To The Moon
The Man in the Moon gets it right in the eye in Georges Melies's sportive
A Trip to the Moon(Star, 1902), the first feature-length science fiction
film. Melies appropriated his tale from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, who
were quite earnest about space travel. But Melies seemed unable to take
the idea of travelling to the Moon seriously. (Photofest. )
A Trip To The Moon

Director George's Melies drew his own rendition of the "Les Selenites" in
A Trip to the Moon(Star, 1902). While H.G. Wells's aliens were fearsome
examples of the hive mentality, Melies's were strictly for fun.
(Photofest. )
Star Trek (TV)
Created by Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek was a true phenomenon. Many
reputable SF writers wrote teleplays for the series and many wrote
novelizations. The stars of the series, of course, are the ubiquitous
Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy), here in a
scene from the original television series. (Photofest. STAR TREK courtesy
of Paramount Pictures. (c) Paramount Pictures)
Star Trek (TV)
In a scene from the original Star Trekseries, Captain Kirk (William
Shatner) strikes a characteristic pose as Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and a
friend look on. (Photofest. STAR TREK courtesy of Paramount Pictures. (c)
Paramount Pictures)
Star Trek (TV)
Captain Kirk (William Shatner) confronts a vermin problem as his crew
looks on in "The Trouble with Tribbles", one of the most popular episodes
of the original Star Trek television series. (Photofest. STAR TREK
courtesy of Paramount Pictures. (c) Paramount Pictures)
Invisible Man, The
The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells Cover: Bantam, 1993 illustration by Roger
Kastel (M. M. Kavangh. Used by permission of Bantam Books, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1993 Bantam Books)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, and King Donovan examine a "pod person" in
the first version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Allied Artists,
1956). Although the film has been interpreted as both right-wing paranoia
about a communist takeover and as left-wing paranoia about McCarthyism,
the theme is loss of individual identity and feeling. It remains one of
the most popular B movies of the 1950s. (The Everett Collection, Inc.
Courtesy of Republic Entertainment Inc. (c) Republic Entertainment, Inc.)
Solaris
Andrei Tarkovsky's adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris (Mosfilm, 1971)
has, like Lem's novels, received less attention in the English-speaking SF
world than in Europe. Its brooding tone and metaphysical themes set it
apart from most Hollywood SF films. (The Everett Collection, Inc. Courtesy
of Corinth Films Inc. (c) Corinth Films Inc. )
Robocop
Paul Verhoeven's stylish and violent Robocop (Orion, 1987) seemed at once
exploitative and satirical of its high-impact Grand Guignol. Like The
Terminator before it and films like Predator 2 afterward, Robocop explores
what proved a popular theme of high-tech urban mayhem. ( Artwork (c) Orion
Pictures Corporation.)
Mad Max

Mad Max (Mad Max Pty., 1979), George Miller's film debut, made a star of
Mel Gibson. More importantly, it helped create a vogue for films about
resolute individualists who prevail as civilization collapses around them,
a theme that finds an echo in the widespread appeal of survivalist
sentiment today. (The Everett Collection, Inc. Artwork (c) Orion Pictures
Corporation.)
Total Recall
In Total Recall(Carolco, 1990), Director Paul Verhoeven's taste for
intense onscreen violence mixes uneasily with Philip K. Dick's pacifist
whimsy. The film supposedly cost more than sixty million dollars, much of
the money obviously spent on special effects. (The Everett Collection,
Inc. Courtesy of Carolco Pictures Inc. (c) 1990 Carolco Pictures Inc. /
Carolco International Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
The Empire Strikes Back
More so even than its predecessor, Star Wars,The Empire Strikes Back
(Lucasfilm/20th Century-Fox, 1980) offers the lush cinematic equivalent of
the space opera of the 1930s pulp magazines. This storyboard image of the
enemy walkers shows another influence: the walking tripods of H.G. Wells's
The War of the Worlds. (COURTESY OF LUCASFILM LTD. Empire Strikes Back
(TM) & (c) Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) 1980. All Rights Reserved.)
Star Wars
George Lucas's blockbuster, Star Wars (20th Century-Fox, 1977) is perhaps
the most influential of all SF films. Its tremendous financial success
convinced film studios and SF publishers that space opera was the way to
go. (COURTESY OF LUCASFILM LTD. Star Wars (TM) & (c) Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)
1977. All Rights Reserved.)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Dayboth vividly dramatize the
problems of that famous cyborg, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Both films are
action thrillers, the latter probably the most expensive film ever made.
(Courtesy of Carolco Pictures Inc. Terminator (TM) 2 : Judgement Day (c)
1992 Carolco Pictures Inc. / Carolco International Inc. All Rights
Reserved.)
The Day of the Triffids
The Day of the Triffids (Security Pictures/Allied Artists, 1963) is
typical of the British disaster story: a tale of ordinary folk coping with
an unearthly calamity by behaving sensibly. The scenes of the monstrous
triffids on the attack, however, recall the more florid monster movies of
Hollywood. (Courtesy of Impact Entertainment Inc. (c) Impact Entertainment
Inc.)
The War of the Worlds
Updated Martian war machines attack Los Angeles in The War of the Worlds
(Paramount, 1953), which boasted expensive and superior special effects
quite different from those described in the H.G. Wells novel. Few SF films
of the time were in color, so The War of the Worlds was especially
memorable. (WAR OF THE WORLDS courtesy of Paramount Pictures. (c)
Paramount Pictures)

The Little Shop of Horrors
Roger Corman's ineffably silly The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) is one
of the few monster movies of its day to successfully combine horror and
humor, and it has become a cult classic. ( )
Roddenberry, Gene
Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991) ( Bettmann. )
10,000 Years in a Block of Ice
10,000 Years in a Block of Ice by Louis Boussenard Cover: F. Tennyson
Nealy, 1898 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif. Riverside. )
Infinity's Web
Infinity's Web by Sheila Finch Cover: Bantam, 1985 (Used by permission of
Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1985 Bantam Books)
Long Mynd, The
The Long Mynd by Edward P. Hughes Cover: Baen Books, 1985 (Reprinted with
permission of BAEN PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c) 1985 Baen Publishing
Enterprises)
Keepers of the People, The
The Keepers of the People by Edgar Jepson Cover: C. Arthur Pearson Ltd.,
1898 ( )
Sunset Warrior, The
The Sunset Warrior by Eric Van Lustbader Cover: Doubleday, 1977 (First
Edition) illustration by John Cayea (Used by permission of Doubleday, a
division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1977
Doubleday Books)
Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum Cover: University of
California Press, 1986 illustration by Barry Moser (Illustrator: Barry
Moser. Used by permission of the artist. (c) 1986 University of California
Press.)
Moore, C.L. and Kuttner, Henry
Left: C.L. Moore (1911-1987) Right: Henry Kuttner (1914-1958) (University
Archives of the University of Southern California. )
Introduction to this Disc
The Multimedia Encyclopedia of Science Fiction brings the visual,
interactive, and navigational powers of CD-ROM technology to what Frank
Herbert called "the most valuable science fiction source book ever
written." The first edition of The Science Fiction Encyclopedia
(Doubleday/Dolphin Books, 1979), edited by Peter Nicholls, was immediately
recognized as the standard single-volume reference in its field and won
the Hugo Award as the best SF nonfiction book of the year. The second
edition, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Little, Brown, 1993), edited
by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, represented a major update and vast
expansion of the original work, virtually doubling the amount of

information. The Clute/Nicholls opus was awarded another Hugo Award for
nonfiction.The second edition of ESF provides the foundation and framework
of this CD-ROM. An organic metaphor may be more appropriate than an
architectural one, however, as the original text has taken on qualities of
a growing, breathing life-form. To begin with, the editors have
contributed another major revision of their text. Their work for this
project has included the updating of existing articles for important dates
and developments through 1994 and into 1995, the addition of scores of new
articles on contemporary SF subjects, and the correction of errors brought
to their attention by colleagues and the reading public. The nature and
extent of their revisions are detailed in the "Authors’ Introduction to
the CD-ROM Edition."The animate quality of the text lies also in the
extensive network of cross-references, "see also" citations, and other
editorial conventions that interconnect the entire body of information.
The application of database and hyperlinking technologies enables the user
to circulate among the articles with the click of a mouse. The ease and
speed of accessing related information makes it possible to research a
subject, follow one’s curiosity, or just plain browse as never before
possible. Combining a thorough and elegantly constructed body of knowledge
with the power of computer technology brings science fiction to life, we
think, in a kind of Frankensteinian marvel.Adding sound, pictures, and
video was like endowing the creature with human senses. The subject matter
itself presented an endlessly tantalizing range of possibilities-far
greater than time, disc space, or some rights holders would allow. As a
kind of guiding principle, it was decided that the multimedia content of
the disc should do justice to the richness, variety, and true-fan spirit
of the original Clute/ Nicholls work. The result, we think, is an
encyclopedic collection of book, magazine, and fanzine covers (over
1,500); author portraits (over 350); movie stills and posters; vintage
Hollywood "trailers"; and videotaped interviews with top SF writers. Every
piece of photography, sound, and video is linked to related encyclopedia
articles for direct access, and they are all collected for leisurely
browsing in the Gallery feature.Yet another vital organ of this multimedia
creature comes in the form of book synopses-critical summaries of more
than 300 science fiction classics, from The War of the Worlds to The
Martian Chronicles and Red Mars-as they appear in Anatomy of Wonder (R.R.
Bowker, 5th ed., 1995), another work once nominated for a Hugo Award. The
synopses are made available by special arrangement with the publisher.For
the creators of this disc, database technologies presented a further
opportunity: to organize all the text and multimedia material in some
sensible, navigable, compelling way. The question, really, was how to
"organize" science fiction-a notion anathema to SF and its fans, perhaps,
but an exercise vital to the creation of a quality CD-ROM. The answer, of
course, was multifaceted. Science fiction and its media artifacts can be
catalogued any number of ways, several of which are made operational in
this disc: alphabetical, thematic, chronological, and by media type. From
the opening screen graphic, the user has access to several navigational
modes and content constructions:Archives-The Archives mode enables the
user to access the core content of the encyclopedia-more than 6,000
articles and cross-references (with associated media)-quickly and easily.
By selecting"All Articles" from the Info Region, the user is presented

with a complete list of articles in alphabetical order. Scrolling to the
desired article, highlighting it, and clicking the mouse button will call
up the article and present it on the screen.Other categories in the
Archives enable the user to narrow their search or browse in five major
article groupings. (These represent a clustering of the 12 categories
identified by Clute and Nicholls in "Notes on Content,"). The five,
broadly defined categories contain articles on the following
subjects:Authors-writers, editors, bibliographers, poets, critics,
screenwriters, and the pseudonyms;Themes & Terms-the common themes, genres
and subgenres, and lexicon ofSF, from "Absurdist SF" to "Zombies";Films &
TV-movies, television shows, radio programs, film-makers,
directors,producers, and special-effects creators;Publications &
Art-magazines, books and book series, anthologies, fanzines, comics,
games, fictional characters, illustrators, animators,and theater and set
designers;SF Community-book and magazine publishers (companies and
individuals),scientists and scholars, awards and contests, game companies,
writers’ groups, SF in other countries, book and paraphernaliacollections,
clubs and associations, and other random subjects.Themes-The Themes mode
provides direct access to, and a sub-classification of, the more than 200
theme articles (and related media) described above. All theme articles are
classified in at least one of the five following "superthemes": Time,
Space, Life Forms, Science & Technology, and About SF. For example, the
articles on "Aliens" and "Cyborgs" can be accessed by clicking on Life
Forms; "Worm Holes" and "Neutron Stars" by clicking on Space; and "Women
SF Writers" and "Comics" by clicking on About SF. In addition, each of the
five major categories is introduced by a special "Theme Video" and
includes video presentations of conversations with top SF writers about
related subjects.Time Machine-The Time Machine is a graphic timeline of
science fiction, highlighting landmark events in the history of the genre.
Literary, cinematic, and other classic works are shown in chronological
context, with contemporaneous events in world politics and technology.
Also embedded in the Time Machine are short audio-anecdotes about science
fiction through the decades-the personalities, behind-the-scenes tales,
and social influences that have helped create the unique folklore of
SF.Book Browser-The Book Browser brings together more than 300 summaries
of SF literary classics. Included with each summary are basic information
about the work-such as the author, publisher, and copyright date-and a
synopsis of the story and its major themes. Directly accessible from many
of the summaries are a photo of the book cover and, in some cases, a taped
interview with the author or an author photo portrait.Gallery-The Gallery
is a fully indexed, easily searched collection of all the pictures,
sounds, and video available on the disc. Selecting "All Media" from the
control panel will present an alphabetical list of the complete offerings.
To narrow the search (or browsing session), the user can select "Author
Sound Bites," "Author Videos," "Books/Magazines,"" Movie Clips & Stills,"
"Portraits," or "Theme Videos."The various methods of classifying articles
and media are admittedly arbitrary in design and execution. Defining
"superthemes" and pigeon-holing theme articles both require subjective
judgments with which thoughtful readers inevitably will disagree. The true
science fiction fan may also disagree, just as frequently and just as
strongly, with the inclusion of some media materials and the omission of

others. Even the written and verbal content of this "encyclopedia" should
not be mistaken as objective in character or intent. The articles, book
synopses, and taped interviews may incur the wrath of SF readers for their
critical judgments and interpretive assumptions no less than any other
materials.The mad Frankensteins of this disc not only recognize the
controversial character of their work, they embrace it. They loose their
creation upon the SF community, fanatics and neophytes alike, with every
expectation-indeed every hope-that it may spark a powerful response,
whether love or rage. It may lurch and heave, but we think... it’s alive!
Let us know what you think.
Intro to the CD-ROM Edition
This CD-ROM edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction differs from
the 1993 book text in two ways. 1) We have corrected all the 1993 errors
which we have ourselves discovered, or which have been brought to our
attention through the ongoing conversation we have been privileged to
conduct with scores - more like hundreds - of correspondents and
colleagues. We have also added information such as dates where we had
missed them, or where they had not previously been brought to light. 2) We
have updated the body of the work from mid-1992 to approximately the end
of 1994 (a few important 1995 dates and items have been admitted as well).
There are approximately 25,000 words of new entries, ranging over the
entire range of the book; and (we can only make a guess at this point, as
these new words have been woven into the texture of the existing book)
perhaps as many words again added to update previous entries. The areas of
the book in which the updates are concentrated are Authors, Awards, Films,
Magazines, Television and some Themes. As the 1993 book edition was
probably closer to 1,350,000 words than the 1,300,000 we calculated
hurriedly at the time, this brings the total length of the book to around
1,400,000 words.A book like this can only be truly and happily successful
if it is understood to be part of this ongoing conversation about the
field. Our debts to all those who have taken part in this conversation are
as before; only larger. We would like, too, to thank all those who voted
for us in the many awards, including the Hugo, which the 1993 book edition
won.We intend to continue revising and updating our sf data with future
editions. As before, so now, we deeply appreciate all the help we can get.
Letters can, of course, be sent via our publishers; or suggestions and
corrections about author entries can be sent directly to John Clute, 221
Camden High Street, London NW1 7BU, England, and about all other entries
to Peter Nicholls, 26A Wandsworth Road, Surrey Hills, Victoria 3127,
Australia.John Clute and Peter Nicholls, May 1995
Notes on Content
From The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute and Peter Nicholls,
eds.In the book editions of this encyclopedia we laid out frankly what was
included and what we had chosen to leave out. Let us do so again, by
examining one at a time the various subcategories (authors, themes,
magazines, films, etc.) into which, for administrative purposes, we have
normally divided the work when discussing its structure.1. Authors In the
beginning it seemed very simple. In late 1976, as the first edition of
this encyclopedia began to take shape, we decided that we would give an

individual entry to any writer who published a book of sf in English
before the beginning of 1978, as well as entries to some authors who had
never published a book of their own. We had no idea how huge a task we had
taken on, though it did not take us more than a couple of months to
discover that our goals were unattainable.Very soon we decided that, even
with English-language book authors, we would have to exercise some
discretion. We would have to exclude some authors of genre sf who seemed
to have made no impact on the field in general; generally speaking these
authors had published only one book and were not expected to publish any
more (we did not treat authors who had only recently published a first
book as one-book authors in this sense). And we would exercise a similar
(though less easily defined) control over non-genre sf authors as well,
especially those who wrote prior to the 20th century.Genre sf, by
definition, had reasonably distinct boundaries, and we were able to be
pretty sure (errors aside) that we had covered the territory. Non-genre sf
was, however, another matter. Because many of the research aids we now
take for granted had not yet been published in the mid-1970s, we only
slowly discovered the hugeness of the world of non-genre sf, and how
remarkably difficult it was going to be to know when to stop looking for
authors who merited inclusion. In fact we never did stop finding
previously unsuspected sf books of interest by non-genre writers, and we
probably never will. By the time we ceased adding entries to the first
edition, we found that we had given as many entries to non-genre writers
as to genre ones, although our central focus on genre sf meant of course
that we paid far more attention to writers like Isaac Asimov and Robert A.
Heinlein than to literary figures (some major, like Vladimir Nabokov) who
made occasional use of sf devices. In the end, taking Authors, Editors and
Critics together, we had a total of 1817 entries on individual writers in
the 1979 edition.For the second 1993 edition we eliminated about 50 of
these writers, on several grounds, all of which apply also to more recent
candidates for inclusion:1. Because of the increasingly book-oriented
nature of written sf, we with reluctance decided not to give entries to
writers who have not yet published a book of their own; individual stories
by these writers will of course be referred to in the relevant Theme
entries.2. Some fantasy writers, we have come to feel, did not in fact
have enough impact on the sf world to warrant an entry.3. We no longer
knowingly include writers whose books have been solely published by vanity
presses.4. We no longer give individual entries to authors none of whose
books in other languages have been translated into English (these authors
are of course treated in Country entries.5. We eliminated a few routine
one-book authors.Having by these means reduced the total to below 1800, we
then added more than 1100 new entries to the 1993 book edition. The new
total of Author entries was 2900+.Some of the new entries are devoted to
authors we missed the first time around: some were culpably omitted, and
some were authors neither we (nor anybody else then in print) had known
were responsible for sf books, but most were authors of works in subgenres
associated with sf, which we now cover more thoroughly (see below).
However, more than half of the new entries are devoted to authors who
published their first book after the beginning of 1978. Some writers whose
impact has been negligible have been excluded deliberately, just as in
1979; and almost certainly there will be others who have been excluded in

error. And we have had some new things to think about, too. There has been
a huge growth, for instance, in ties of all sorts, including a large
number of shared-world productions. We have excluded very few sf authors
who have solely written books tied to shared-world endeavours (like STAR
WARS or STAR TREK), but we have excluded some authors solely of books tied
(for instance) to films (novelizations), to fantasy role-playing games and
also choose-your-own-plot format game books. Although we do not feel it
desirable (or possible) to give an entry to every writer of sf for
children, we are now much more inclusive in our coverage, leaving out
mainly (it is an area extremely difficult to define) authors of sf written
specifically for younger children. Finally, although the number of entries
for non-genre sf writers has grown very considerably, we remain very
conscious of the impossibility of definitively covering an area whose
boundaries cannot be defined (but see below for genres and subgenres
which, although affiliated to sf, are not sf as we understand the term).
These caveats and exclusions are, we recognize, numerous enough to give us
considerable latitude in our selection of authors to include or leave out.
Within these terms, however, we have attempted to give an individual entry
to every writer who has published an (inarguably) sf book in English - or
had one translated into English - before the beginning of 1992.In
selecting fantasy and supernatural-horror authors for inclusion, we have
attempted to restrict our coverage to those authors whose works have had
some significant influence on the complex webs that bind the three genres
together, or whose work contains many elements of rationalized fantasy or
horror. In the first category, it is obvious that, the earlier a writer
is, the more likely it will be that his or her work has had time to affect
the world (and the genres) around him; and we have therefore given entries
to writers like Algernon BLACKWOOD, James Branch CABELL, Lord DUNSANY,
E.R. EDDISON, Robert E. HOWARD, H.P. LOVECRAFT, George MacDONALD and
J.R.R. TOLKIEN.The second category is infinitely debatable, and it is here
that subjective judgements have had to come into play. Much fantasy and
horror makes use of idea-clusters (or tropes or motifs) that are also
fundamental to sf. The four most important are perhaps ALTERNATE WORLDS,
MONSTERS, PSI POWERS, and TIME TRAVEL. These tropes are commonly used as
magical facilitating devices or threats, but sometimes they are given
sufficient logical cohesion and grounding as to be readable in sf terms;
indeed, MAGIC itself - as often in John W. Campbell's magazine UNKNOWN can be treated like this. But we have entered the borderlands, where
nothing can be finally and entirely clear. A particularly common feature
of fantasy (for instance) is time travel accomplished by fantastic means,
as in several tales by the significant children's author E. Nesbit; we do
not regard such books as sf. At the same time we do regard Mark Twain's A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), in which time travel is
also accomplished by fantastic means, as an important sf text. We do not
(for instance) give entries to such exemplary writers of horror fiction as
Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, James Herbert, Thomas Ligotti or Peter
Straub, even though we are aware that an occasional sf trope makes its way
into their pages; we do give entries to Charles L. GRANT and Whitley
STRIEBER, though primarily for their post-HOLOCAUST novels. Many popular
fantasy writers, like Craig Shaw Gardner and Robert Jordan, have been left
out; while others, like David GEMMELL and Barbara HAMBLY, have entries

because we judge their work to be sufficiently akin to sf. When we have
erred in making these decisions, we hope that we have done so on the side
of inclusiveness.In our treatment of authors (most of them dating from the
late 19th and early 20th centuries) who specialized in subgenres
associated with the development of genre sf (but not usefully defined as
being themselves early sf), we do not pretend to be comprehensive. We do
not attempt to provide entries for all authors of lost-world novels,
fantastic voyages, prehistoric romances, future-war tales, occultist
stories set on this or other worlds, stories of possession and split
personality, tales of reincarnation and immortality, contes philosophiques
and utopias, especially utopias set in the present day. But the last
decades have seen an enormous increase in the field's understanding of the
intersecting genres that helped shape modern sf, and we now have a much
better idea of the amount and variety of early sf and its siblings. We
have therefore very considerably increased our author coverage in these
areas.In our treatment of authors (most of them writing after WWII) who
make occasional use of sf devices to propel plots set in an undated near
future, we have been highly selective, for most of these books are neither
written nor read as sf, and do not reward any attempt to incorporate them
as sf or sf-ish, though we have given entries to a few (e.g., Ian
Fleming). With political thrillers or satires set in an undated near
future, we have erred on the side of inclusiveness (Alan Drury, for
instance, is given an entry), and do so out of a genuine insecurity as to
the sf nature of some political thought.We regret that several factors
have persuaded us to drop a feature from the first book edition that we
know some found useful: there, we listed all separate, uncollected short
stories (when we could locate them) that belonged to a series, as well as
all the books in the series. We still list all series books, but we no
longer, normally, append uncollected short stories. The main factor is
utility: it is now very uncommon for readers to have ready access to the
sort of magazine collections that would allow them to find these stories;
the shift away from magazine publication towards book publication of
recent work - as well as the extensive republication of worthwhile early
work in book form - also argues against the inclusion of this feature.So
far we have been speaking only about fiction writers. We have been
moderately generous, but not comprehensive, in giving entries to editors
of sf magazines and sf anthologies (and few editors of only one or two
anthologies have been included). More often than not, of course, the issue
of inclusion or exclusion does not arise on this score, because many perhaps most - sf editors have also been sf writers.For critics and
scholars and other authors of relevant nonfiction, we have been highly
selective. We divide nonfiction authors into two categories:1. Authors
about sf. The number of books, pamphlets, chapbooks and so on published
about the field is now very large, and authors of only one book about sf
may not receive an entry. Nonetheless, the number of "academic" and
"bibliography" entries is considerable.2. Authors whose ideas have fed so
strongly into sf (for good or ill) that we thought a summary of their work
would be useful to readers. They run all the way from Plato to Erich Von
Daniken, taking in Immanuel Velikovsky and others en route. We are not at
all inclusive about this category. Many writers have been left out, with
no imputation intended as to their stature. If the scientist Stephen W.

Hawking does not appear while the scientist Freeman J. Dyson does, it is
because the latter has given his surname to a concept used widely in
modern sf.Author entries were written mostly by John Clute, some in
collaboration; Peter Nicholls wrote more than a tenth of them, and Brian
Stableford also contributed many major entries. Neither Malcolm Edwards
nor David Pringle had time to rework their numerous 1979 entries (although
the latter was able to revise his J.G. Ballard entry), and these have been
updated by Clute and Stableford. John Eggeling was able to do some
revision work on his entries. E.F. Bleiler and Neil Tringham each supplied
several new entries. Other contributors of one or more author entries to
this work are listed under Checklist of Contributors.2. Themes The theme
entries are the connective tissue of this encyclopedia and constitute a
quarter of its length. Through them it is possible to derive a coherent
sense of the history of sf (itself a theme entry) and of what sf is all
about. We are aware, too, of the usefulness of theme entries to teachers
and academics, who may wish to use sf stories to throw light on
contemporary issues but be at a loss to know which stories or novels would
best be chosen for the task. Together, the theme entries form a very
detailed lexicon of sf's main concerns, its subgenres, the genres to which
it is most closely related, and the terms we use in talking about it.
Entries range from ANTIMATTER and ATLANTIS through CONCEPTUAL
BREAKTHROUGH, DYSTOPIAS and FUTUROLOGY, via NEAR FUTURE and ORIGIN OF
MAN
to VENUS, UNDER THE SEA and WEAPONS.The theme entries were a major feature
in the first book edition, and loom even larger in the second book edition
and here. There is no clear distinction between a theme entry and a
terminology entry (see below), but the theme entry is likely to be
substantially longer (most over 1000 words, and some over 3000) and to
give more examples from actual sf texts. However, many common items of sf
terminology (ANDROIDS, ROBOTS, CRYONICS, MATTER TRANSMITTERS,
TERRAFORMING
and so on) are so important that they warrant a full theme entry.Since the
first edition we have upgraded some terminology entries to full theme
entries, and reclassified some shorter theme entries as terminology
entries. The upshot is that there is a total of 212 theme entries in all.
Some new entries relate to recent developments in sf: BIG DUMB OBJECTS,
CYBERPUNK, GAMES AND TOYS, GAME WORLDS, GRAPHIC NOVELS,
NANOTECHNOLOGY,
SHARED WORLDS, SURVIVALIST FICTION, VIRTUAL REALITY and so on; others
could well have appeared in the first edition had we thought of them: APES
AND CAVEMEN, AWARDS, BALLOONS, CLUB STORIES, GOLEM, HITLER WINS,
HOLLOW
EARTH, LIBERTARIAN SF, MONSTER MOVIES, POETRY, RURITANIA, SENSE OF
WONDER,
SLEEPER AWAKES, SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS, SPACE HABITATS and
SUPERHEROES are some of these. Some relate to genre criticism: EDISONADE,
HORROR IN SF, PLANETARY ROMANCE, POCKET UNIVERSE, POSTMODERNISM AND
SF,
RECURSIVE SF and TECHNOTHRILLER are the main ones.Brian Stableford has
written 78 theme entries, this being where he has left his profoundest
mark on the work, and revised others; Peter Nicholls has written 71; John

Clute has written 14. Other theme entry authors include Brian W. Aldiss,
Everett Bleiler, Damien Broderick, Professor I.F. Clarke, Robert Frazier,
Neil Gaiman, David Pringle, Tom Shippey, and John Sladek.3. Terminology A
terminology entry is effectively a short theme entry. This edition
contains 65 terminology entries. Most are terms often used in sf, but
sometimes found obscure by new readers, like AI, BEM, CORPSICLE, GAS
GIANT, ION DRIVE, LAGRANGE POINT, PARSEC, RIMWORLD and TELEKINESIS. Some
areterms used in describing sf and associated genres, like BRAID, HEROIC
FANTASY, MAGIC REALISM, OULIPO, ROBINSONADE, SCIENTIFICTION, SCI FI,
SEMIPROZINE, SHARECROP, SLIPSTREAM, SPECULATIVE FICTION, SPLATTER MOVIES
and TIE. There are also entries on certain movements allegedly connected
to sf, such as GENERAL SEMANTICS and SCIENTOLOGY. For a full list of
terminology entries see TERMINOLOGY. Most terminology entries are by Peter
Nicholls, some are by John Clute.4. Science Fiction in Various Countries
It would be redundant to give separate entries for the USA and the UK,
since sf from these areas dominates the encyclopedia. We do, however, give
entries to three other English-speaking countries, Australia, Canada and
New Zealand. The entry for Canada is divided into two sections: one for
English-speaking Canada and one for French-speaking Canada.This area of
the encyclopedia is, relatively, the most expanded from the first edition,
and was perhaps the most difficult to put together. Communications
difficulties with parts of the world in considerable turmoil have left
some entries with an occasional date or translation of title missing. We
retain entries for Benelux and Scandinavia (with Denmark and Finland now
separate entries), but two other portmanteau entries from the first
edition have been broken up, to a degree, into their component nations.
There are no longer entries for "Eastern Europe" and "Spain, Portugal and
South America" but, as the list below shows, some new portmanteau entries
are now included. It should be noted that the Yugoslavia entry was sent to
us in December 1990 before that nation began to split into a group of
smaller states with a Serbian rump still calling itself Yugoslavia. We
decided for ease of reference not even to attempt to divide the Yugoslavia
entry into its component nation-states of Croatia, Slovenia, etc.The full
list of 27 entries is as follows (new entries asterisked): ALBANIA*,
ARABIC SF*, AUSTRALIA, AUSTRIA*, BENELUX (Belgium, Luxembourg,
Netherlands), BLACK AFRICAN SF*, BULGARIA*, CANADA, CHINESE SF*, CZECH AND
SLOVAK SF*, DENMARK*, FINLAND*, FRANCE, GERMANY, HUNGARY*, ISRAEL*,
ITALY,
JAPAN, LATIN AMERICAN SF* (primarily Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico), NEW
ZEALAND*, POLAND*, ROMANIA*, RUSSIA, SCANDINAVIA (Sweden and Norway),
SOVIET UNION* (more a note than an entry), SPAIN* and YUGOSLAVIA*. All but
a handful of these have been written by experts from the areas or nations
concerned. We have not attempted to contact scholars from every country.
We apologize to Greece, India and all the many other countries where we
know some sf exists, but where we did not have the necessary contacts to
enable us to codify it. What was approximately 14,000 words in 1979 has
been expanded to around 40,000, close to three times the length. The
Anglo-American readership must be our first concern; they make up the vast
majority of our audience. But we feel that, while we might not have done
full justice to sf in non-English-speaking countries, then at least we
have outlined, on a scale not previously attempted in an English-language

sf reference work, the extraordinary scope of what has now become a truly
international literature.All authors - about 300 of them - who receive
substantive treatment in the Country entries are cross-referred to there
from the rest of the encyclopedia. On the other hand, when a Country entry
mentions authors who are well known in English translation and therefore
have their own entries, their names are given in CAPITALS, referring
readers to those entries, with generally only a brief coverage in the
Country entry. Under France, therefore, there is not much about Jules
Verne, and in Russia not much about the Strugatski brothers.5. Films Our
coverage of films is thorough but not fully comprehensive. Depending on
where you draw the boundaries, there may have been 2000 sf films made.
There are now around 580 film entries. Sf/fantasy/horror film-making, as
readers will know, has become almost the dominant genre in the industry
since at least the time of STAR WARS.Dates of films are difficult to
establish with certainty. Most written sources give the copyright date,
some the date of first release (often a year later), and some appear
simply to guess. An examination of the film itself will give only the
copyright date, and we have where possible given date of first release,
but there are a number of cases, especially with older films, where we
cannot be certain of the category into which the date falls.We have
included representative films from the fringes of sf, such as near-future
thrillers about, for example, a presidential assassination or a
technological breakthrough. By far the most important of the fringe
subgenres is the rationalize horror film or monster movie (there are many
in this CD-ROM) where the monster is provided with a scientific
explanation, and, more importantly (as in the case of George A. Romero's
zombie films), where the apparently supernatural threat is regarded with a
sciencefictional eye. (Can you train zombies? Do they have a society? What
will their presence do to existing society?)We count made-for-tv films as
film entries rather than tv entries, in part because many US films made
for tv have been given theatrical release abroad. Also (like ordinary
theatrical movies) many are available on videotape, and not distinguished
in the video shop from ordinary movies. There may be some apparent
inconsistencies here, because we count tv miniseries as tv series rather
than films, even though versions of miniseries - THE STAND,for example sometimes turn up on videotape or on tv as if they were single films.
Made-for-tv films are identified as such throughout. Because their
standard is on average lower than that of theatrical films, we do not
attempt in this area the same level of comprehensiveness.A word about
omissions: most (but not all) sf films exclusively for children are out,
hence few Disney films; most foreign-language films with little or no
circulation outside their country of origin are out (though many
foreign-language films remain in); most superhero films are out (e.g.,
Spiderman, Batman) unless there is a strong sf rationale (e.g., Darkman);
horror movies and monster movies that effectively rely on the supernatural
are out (e.g., Wolfen, Nightwing, Gremlins); time-travel accomplished by
fantastic means is usually out (e.g., Biggles, The Navigator: A Medieval
Odyssey, Peggy Sue Got Married, Somewhere in Time, Time Bandits); apart
from the great originals, films about monsters made from body parts are
out, especially if jokey (e.g., most post-war films in the Frankenstein
series, The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant); most Bigfoot films are out

(e.g., Legend of Boggy Creek); most ESP thrillers are out (e.g., Eyes of
Laura Mars, The Medusa Touch); many future-gladiator, post Mad Max films
are out (e.g., The New Barbarians, Steel Dawn, Turkey Shoot, The Salute of
the Jugger [vt The Blood of Heroes]); many limp parodies are out (e.g.,
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Class of Nuke 'Em High); many mediocre
sequels and remakes are out, or more probably, mentioned in passing (e.g.,
Critters 2, The Stepford Children). We hope we have given separate entries
to all the better sequels and remakes.Readers of sf in the written form,
for whom this work is primarily designed, may justifiably feel that films
are given undue prominence. After all, we do not discuss individual novels
in anything like the same detail given to individual films. On the other
hand, the audience for sf cinema is massively greater than that for sf
books, and in the light of the huge popular interest in sf films it seemed
a thorough coverage was necessary, especially since we enjoy them
ourselves. All the same, sf-cinema entries, including those on
film-makers, constitute less than 10% of the entire text, though at
110,000 words this makes the film section of this work one of the most
comprehensive studies available.All the original 1979 entries (John
Brosnan was then the primary contributor in this area) have been
thoroughly revised and in many cases wholly rewritten. New film entries
are mostly by Peter Nicholls, quite a few by Kim Newman, some by other
hands.Theme entries about films are CINEMA, HORROR IN SF (in part),
MONSTER MOVIES, SPLATTER MOVIES and SUPERHEROES (in part), all by Peter
Nicholls. Relevant magazine entries are CINEFANTASTIQUE, STARBURST and
STARLOG. 6. Film-makers There were 19 film-maker entries in the first book
edition, or more if one counts such entries as those on Charles BEAUMONT,
Michael CRICHTON and Richard MATHESON (and in this edition Alan BRENNERT
and Glen A. LARSON) who would have received entries in any case on the
basis of their sf work in written form. There are now 34 film-maker
entries in all, many written by Kim Newman. The film-maker entries
(including some whose work was primarily in television) are Irwin ALLEN,
Gerry and Sylvia ANDERSON, Jack ARNOLD, John BADHAM, Charles BAND, James
CAMERON, John CARPENTER, Larry COHEN, Roger CORMAN, David CRONENBERG, Joe
DANTE, John FRANKENHEIMER, Ray HARRYHAUSEN, Byron HASKIN, Gale Anne HURD,
Nigel KNEALE, Fritz LANG, Stanley KUBRICK, George LUCAS, Georges MELIES,
George MILLER, Terry NATION, Willis O'BRIEN, George PAL, Gene RODDENBERRY,
George A. ROMERO, John SAYLES, Ridley SCOTT, Rod SERLING, Curt SIODMAK,
Steven SPIELBERG, Andrei TARKOVSKY, Peter WATKINS and Robert WISE.7.
Television As with films, we are thorough without being fully
comprehensive. There are about 110 tv entries in all. Most of these
entries are for tv series, some for tv miniseries and serials.
(Made-for-tv movies we classify as films, as noted above.) We do not
include animated tv series for children, such as The Jetsons, with the
exception (by popular demand) of the various animated puppet series, like
Stingray, made by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. A fringe area, where we have
made decisions which will certainly be seen by some as arbitrary, concerns
tv series centering on a Superhero whose powers (generally) stem from some
sort of scientific disaster. Thus we do have an entry for The Incredible
Hulk, but no entry for The Flash, which we see as a crime show rather than
sf. We have been rather niggardly about including serials and miniseries,
concentrating primarily on those, like the four Quatermass stories and

(much more recently) The Cloning of Joanna May, that have aroused much
general interest or are of obviously high quality. We do tend to give
entries in cases where there was a film spin-off, or a film of the same
title, so as to clear up possible confusion, as with The Trollenberg
Terror and Day of the Triffids. We believe there are no omissions at all
of live-action tv series for adults in the English language up to 1991
that lasted any length of time and are inarguably sf in content. We also
give entries for famous fantasy series with occasional sf content, such as
The Twilight Zoneand Amazing Stories. Tv entries for this CD-ROM edition
have mostly been written by Peter Nicholls, some by Kim Newman; many
surviving from the first book edition are by John Brosnan.8. Magazines We
give entries to the most important pulp and other general-fiction
magazines that printed sf before the advent of genre-sf magazines in 1926,
such as The Argosy and The Strand Magazine; these are listed under ARGOSY
and The STRAND MAGAZINE; these are listed under MAGAZINES or PULP
MAGAZINES. We include a number of the SUPERHERO and supervillain pulps of
the 1930s, like CAPTAIN HAZZARD and DR. YEN SIN; these, too, will be found
listed under PULP MAGAZINES. We count in the catch-all magazine category
(as opposed to the specialized FANZINE category) maybe 10 critical
journals about sf, some wholly academic, like SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, and
some less so, like SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY BOOK REVIEW. We also include
the most important sf-movie magazines: CINEFANTASTIQUE, STARBURST and
STARLOG.But the centrepiece of our magazine entries comprises the fiction
magazines, whether fully professional or SEMIPROZINES. We attempt to give
entries to all professional sf magazines and semiprozines in the English
language, past and current, but will not tempt fate by claiming 100%
success in this surprisingly difficult exercise; in the first book edition
we claimed (slightly incorrectly) to give entries also to "all fantasy
magazines that regularly printed stories by sf authors", but we do not
repeat that claim here: the borderland between fantasy magazine and sf
magazine is grey; and while we hope to have given entries to all fantasy
magazines that extend clearly if occasionally into the sf area, and to
some like Unknown that rarely did but nevertheless featured largely in the
ethos of the sf community, we have eliminated some entries, like Coven 13,
Mind Magic and Fantasy Tales, where the distance from sf magazines proper
seems too large. On the other hand, we have resuscitated some candidates
not given entries first time around, like magazines of horror, which have
a genuine sf relevance, and generally we still include a great many
magazines, like Bizarre Mystery Magazine, that were or are fantasy
magazines primarily. The line has to be arbitrary, and we do not claim
omniscience at generic diagnosis.All magazines can be regarded as
anthologies, and the distinction between the two is not nearly as clear as
might be thought. In cases where original-anthology series announce
themselves as periodicals by being numbered and dated (especially on the
cover), and especially when they contain magazine features like letter
columns, editorials and so on, they can be regarded as magazines, even if
they physically resemble paperback or even hardcover books. Some announce
themselves as such, Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine being one. Further
borderline examples are Avon Fantasy Reader (regarded by the fans of the
time as a magazine, and so indexed in the standard magazine references by
Donald Day and Erwin Strauss), Destinies, Far Frontiers and New Destinies

- there are others. The main practical result of this policy is that we do
not necessarily separately list every title in such series as we would
have done if we regarded them as original-anthology series proper.There is
a total of about 240 fiction-magazine and critical-journal entries. Some
of these single entries cover two magazines with identical titles, so
about 250 magazines are given entries. We do not generally give entries to
foreign-language magazines, though a good many of these are cross-referred
to the relevant Country entry. Most magazine entries were written by Brian
Stableford, Peter Nicholls, Frank Parnell, Greg Feeley and Malcolm
Edwards. It is no longer the case that our encyclopedia gives the most
comprehensive magazine coverage (see the reference book by Marshall Tymn
and Mike Ashley), but it is certainly the most comprehensive in a work not
exclusively devoted to the topic.9. Fanzines There are 36 entries devoted
to individual fanzines, this branch of amateur publishing being of central
importance to the history of the sf community. (Data on an additional
dozen or so titles are available by following up cross-references, title
changes being common in fanzine publishing.) However, we have been highly
selective, concentrating on fanzines that have generally been quite
long-running and which have as part of their content some serious comment
on sf, as opposed to general news or gossip. There is a very thin line
between fanzines and critical journals on the one hand, and fanzines and
semiprozines on the other, so our count of 36 might be higher or lower
than another's. Most of these entries were written by Peter Roberts (first
edition), Rob Hansen and Peter Nicholls.10. Comics Comic books and comic
strips are taken more seriously by many more people now than was the case
a decade ago, partly as a result of artistic developments in the field. We
have reflected this widespread interest by expanding the size and number
of entries dealing with both historical and contemporary sf comics. The
two main theme entries dealing with comics are COMICS and GRAPHIC NOVELS;
a third entry, SUPERHEROES, deals primarily with comics, films and tv. We
have entries on three comic-book publishers, DC COMICS, EC COMICS and
MARVEL COMICS. The entries on comics titles and comics characters are
ALLEY OOP, AMERICAN FLAGG!, BARBARELLA, BRICK BRADFORD,BUCK ROGERS IN
THE
25TH CENTURY, CAPTAIN MARVEL, CONNIE, DAN DARE - PILOT OF THE FUTURE,
FLASH GORDON, GARTH, HEAVY METAL, JEFF HAWKE, JUDGE DREDD, LEGION OF
SUPER-HEROES, LOVE AND ROCKETS, METAL HURLANT,MISTER X, NEXUS,
SUPERMAN,
SWAMP THING, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, 2,000 A.D., WATCHMEN and
X-MEN.
Entries on writers and illustrators primarily associated with comics are
Neal ADAMS, Enki BILAL, Vaughn BODE, Brian BOLLAND, Chester BROWN, Charles
BURNS, Dick CALKINS, Howard CHAYKIN, Chris CLAREMONT, Richard CORBEN,
Philippe DRUILLET, Dave GIBBONS, Jean GIRAUD (also known as Moebius),
Frank HAMPSON, Jack KIRBY, Stan LEE, Winsor McCAY, Dave McKEAN, Lorenzo
MATOTTI, Frank MILLER, Gray MORROW, Alan MOORE, Katsuhiro OTOMO, Alex
RAYMOND, Bill SIENKEWICZ, Dave SIM, James STERANKO, Osamu TEZUKA and Wally
WOOD. That makes 59 strongly comics-oriented entries. There are of course
many further entries on artists we think of primarily as sf book and
magazine illustrators, but who also worked in comics, such as Frank
FRAZETTA. Many entries on writers and editors include discussion of their

work in comics. These would include Alfred BESTER, Eando BINDER, James
CAWTHORN, Gerard F. CONWAY, Gardner F. FOX, Neil GAIMAN, H.L. GOLD, Ron
GOULART, Edmond HAMILTON, Harry HARRISON, Michael MOORCOCK, Philip Francis
NOWLAN, Julius SCHWARTZ, Mort WEISINGER, Manly Wade WELLMAN.The majority
of comics entries were written by Ron Tiner and Steve Whitaker; but nine
other contributors have also written some.11. Illustrators We include no
entries for "gallery" artists like John Martin (1789-1854) whose work
occasionally (with hindsight) included sf themes: the END OF THE WORLD in
Martin's case. We restrict ourselves to GENRE-SF artists whose sf
illustrative work is most closely associated with magazines and books,
though some have also worked in films, record covers or calendars. There
is some cross-over between the SF-Illustrators category and the Comics
category; several artists listed above under Comics, like Gray Morrow and
Wally Wood, worked also for the sf magazines. There are 65 entries in this
category, aside from artists listed under Comics and occasional artists
(e.g., Fred T. JANE, Keith ROBERTS) who would have appeared in this volume
anyway for their fiction.Most illustrator entries were written by Jon
Gustafson, the majority in collaboration with Peter Nicholls.The 64
SF-Illustrators entries are George BARR, Wayne BARLOWE, Earle K. BERGEY,
Hannes BOK, Chesley BONESTELL, Howard V. BROWN, Margaret BRUNDAGE, Jim
BURNS, Thomas CANTY, Edd CARTIER, David A. CHERRY, Mal DEAN, Roger DEAN,
Vincent DI FATE, Leo and Diane DILLON, Elliott DOLD, Bob EGGLETON, Edmund
EMSHWILLER, Stephen E. FABIAN, Virgil FINLAY, Christopher FOSS, Frank
FRAZETTA, Frank Kelly FREAS, Robert FUQUA, Jack GAUGHAN, H.R. GIGER,
Richard GLYN JONES, James GURNEY, David HARDY, Eddie JONES, Josh KIRBY,
Roy G. KRENKEL, Paul LEHR, Brian LEWIS, A. LEYDENFROST, Angus McKIE, Don
MAITZ, Rodney MATTHEWS, Ian MILLER, Leo MOREY, Paul ORBAN, Frank R. PAUL,
Bruce PENNINGTON, Richard M. POWERS, Gerard A. QUINN, Anthony ROBERTS,
Albert ROBIDA, Hubert ROGERS, ROWENA, Rod RUTH, J. Allen ST JOHN, Charles
SCHNEEMAN Jr, John SCHOENHERR, Alex SCHOMBURG, Barclay SHAW, Rick
STERNBACH, Lawrence Sterne STEVENS, Darrell SWEET, Karel THOLE, Ed
VALIGURSKY, Boris VALLEJO, VAN DONGEN, H.W. WESSO,Michael WHELAN, Tim
WHITE.12. Book Publishers We have expanded our coverage of mass-market and
general publishers with strong sf lines, while continuing our coverage of
specialist sf publishers. The result, if these are read together with the
publishing and small presses and limited editions theme entries, is a
history (not comprehensive) of post-war publishing of sf books and also
books about sf. Publisher entries are ACE BOOKS, ADVENT PUBLISHERS, ARKHAM
HOUSE, ARNO PRESS, BADGER BOOKS, BALLANTINE BOOKS, BANTAM BOOKS,
BLUEJAY,
BORGO PRESS, CURTIS WARREN, DAW BOOKS, DEL REY BOOKS, DOUBLEDAY, ESSEX
HOUSE,FANTASY PRESS, FANTASY PUBLISHING COMPANY INC., FAX COLLECTORS
EDITIONS, GARLAND, GNOME PRESS, GOLLANCZ, GREENWOOD, GREGG PRESS,
HADLEY
PUBLISHING COMPANY, HYPERION PRESS,LASER BOOKS, MIRAGE PRESS, PRIME
PRESS,
ROBERT HALE LIMITED, SCIENCE FICTION BOOK CLUB, SHASTA PUBLISHERS,
STARMONT HOUSE, TIMESCAPE,TOR BOOKS, UNDERWOOD-MILLER and MARK
V.ZIESING.
There are 35 entries in this selective list.13. Original Anthologies The
most important location, after the magazines, of sf short fiction - sf

being one of the few forms of fiction where the short story and the
novella are still very much alive - is in original anthologies
(anthologies of stories not previously published). There are some hundreds
of these, far too many to list individually. We do, however, give entries
to English-language original-anthology series devoted to genre-sf stories,
provided that the series contains three or more books. One or two such
series may have slipped our net, but we believe we have caught most of
them. We do not, however, give entries to shared-world original-anthology
series, though we make an exception for wild cards and some more are
listed under games workshop. When an original-anthology series like
Destinies or Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine describes itself as a
magazine, even though it is in book form, then we list it under Magazines.
The Original-Anthology entries were mostly written by Malcolm Edwards
(first edition) and Peter Nicholls (subsequent editions).14. Awards There
will always be argument as to the true significance (if any) of sf awards,
but it is obviously necessary to give the most important, and to list all
their winners. The general question of awards is discussed under AWARDS,
which also lists the 11 major awards, notably the HUGO and the NEBULA,
that receive their own entries.15. Miscellaneous There remains a residue
of bits and pieces, mostly about sf organizations (Clarion SCIENCE FICTION
WRITER'S WORKSHOP, SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION, SCIENCE FICTION
RESEARCH
ASSOCIATION, WORLD SF and others), sf fandom (APA, CONVENTIONS, FANDOM,
FAN LANGUAGE, FANZINE, FUTURIANS and others) sf COLLECTIONS (four of
these), different publishing formats (BEDSHEET, DIGEST, etc.), and even a
couple on characters like CAPTAIN JUSTICE. There are 30 miscellaneous
entries, some of the fannish ones originally by Peter Roberts and revised
by Rob Hansen, most of the rest by Nicholls.
Intro to the 2nd Book Edition
From The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute and Peter Nicholls,
eds.The first edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction won a Hugo
Award as best nonfiction sf book of its year, and immediately became the
standard one-volume reference in the field. However, as the years passed,
its usefulness diminished as it fell slowly out of date. That first
edition was completed in June 1978, and published in 1979. This is its
second edition, from new publishers. It has been not only updated, but
also wholly revised and almost wholly rewritten. In effect it is a new
book, and we believe it is a better one. It is certainly very much bigger.
Excluding straightforward cross-reference entries, the first edition
contained approximately 2800 entries; measured on the same basis, this new
edition contains over 4360. The first edition was approximately 730,000
words long; this new edition is approximately 1,300,000 words long. In
addition to the 4360+ entries, it contains around 2100 cross-reference
entries.The first edition was written faster than any of us were
comfortable with (about 20 months); this edition took two years to write,
a tight timetable, but manageable in part because of the technology of
computer wordprocessing. The book has been typeset from computer text
generated by the editors. The three senior editors - John Clute, Peter
Nicholls and Brian Stableford - were the same three who were primarily
responsible for the first edition, and feel that our mutual familiarity

made the task much easier this time round. Moreover, in the late 1970s the
number of secondary sources available for cross-checking were
comparatively few; now they are many. We continued to use primary sources
whenever we could locate them, which we usually could, but it was a burden
removed from our shoulders to have these secondary sources as a back-up.
Our Acknowledgments section lists some of those we found most useful.On
the other hand, the world of science fiction is much more complex than it
was in 1978; genre sf continues to grow and flourish, and its description
remains our central task; but genre sf more and more occupies a world
which, because of new category and marketing distinctions, is difficult to
comprehend at a glance. Game worlds, film and tv spin-offs, shared worlds,
graphic novels, franchises, young-adult fiction, choose-your-own-plot
tales, technothrillers, survivalist fiction, sf horror novels, fantasy
novels with sf centres, and so on - all contribute to a structure that
hardly existed in the 1970s. The world of sf is also harder to describe
now - not just because it has become more difficult, but because we have
begun to discover that it always was. We entered on the first edition with
joyful naivete; we are older and wiser now, and we know that the secret
history of sf, like the house in John Crowley's Little, Big (1981), is
bigger on the inside than the outside, and that the further in you go the
bigger it gets. This is by way of apology: for every problem we have put
right, two more have raised their heads; every discovery we (and others)
make opens vistas which need to be explored. We know our book is neither
perfect nor complete.We have tried to cope with the expanding world of sf,
and with our expanding perceptions of that world, by including many more
theme and terminology entries with - we hope - a clarifying effect. There
are, indeed, more entries in every category in the book, not just entries
dealing with updatings over the past 14 years, but entries covering the
whole body of the genre as we have found out more about it.There is
another difference between this edition and the last. The first time Peter
Nicholls was where the buck stopped. This time John Clute, Nicholl's
Associate Editor in the first edition, is a full and equal partner. There
is no seniority on either side, and editorial differences of opinion have
been remarkably few. The only problems have been the communications
difficulties brought about by Clute working in London, UK, while Nicholls
worked in Melbourne, Australia. To simplify matters when we began work (in
August 1990) we agreed, like the ancient Romans, to split the Empire.
Clute, who for several years has been updating a bibliographic data bank,
took charge of author entries; Nicholls took charge of the rest. This
system (which to a degree reflects what happened in practice on the first
book, too) works out at about half the book each. Each of us, however, has
written entries for the other's half, and each of us has checked the
other's text. Brian Stableford has been our safety net, and a major
contributor in his own right. We have commissioned many new writers (and
received a gratifying number of volunteers), some for single and some for
multiple entries, but none of these, this time around, has written as many
entries as did, for the first edition, Malcolm Edwards - who was with
Stableford then a Contributing Editor - John Brosnan and David Pringle;
many of their entries survive in this edition, in (almost always) modified
form.In this second edition, to a greater degree than in the first, most
of the writing - perhaps 85% - is by Clute, Nicholls and Stableford, who

despite small disagreements have displayed a critical consensus over a
stikingly large range of issues. This means, for good or ill, that the
book has a more unified tone of voice than most reference works (whose
editors often write only a small proportion of the book themselves). We
should point out, remembering charges of Anglophilia made of the first
edition by a vocal minority, that only Stableford is English. Paul
Barnett, the Technical Editor, is Scottish. Clute is Canadian and Nicholls
Australian, and both have spent some years in the USA, whose culture they
regard as adoptively an important part of what they are, and central to
what sf is.All entries are signed by initials. We do this to give credit
where credit is due, and also to apportion responsibility for those cases
where the reader may feel that the content of an entry has gone beyond the
strictly factual into the judgmental. In the interest of liveliness and
readability, we continue to allow, as we did in the first edition, a
modicum of explicit critical comment. There is, anyway, no such thing as a
purely objective reference work, since the very choice of what is
discussed (and at what length) will suggest (to some readers) a value
judgment. But here a cautionary note: the length of an entry depends on
many factors; we cannot stress too strongly that conclusions drawn by
readers about editorial preferences, on the basis of an entry's length,
may well be wrong. To restate: opinion has been kept minimal, and in every
case it is possible to identify, through the initials used, whose opinion
it may be, though this second edition does contain many more examples of
entries signed by two, three or even four initials than did the first.
Some of this results from editorial modification of existing entries whose
authors in many cases were not able to revise their own entries; some
entries were collaborative from the first. The first initial given is
generally that of the primary contributor. However, even though every
entry is signed, there is a real sense in which this volume is a team
effort, not least in that each entry has been scanned by at least four
readers apart from its author, resulting often in the incorporation of
uncredited suggestions and corrections.The final manuscript (on computer
disk, not paper) of this encyclopedia was completed in mid-August, 1992,
though some subsequent modifications (and small factual additions relating
to awards, deaths and so on) continued to be made up to the last possible
moment.This is intended as a book to be dipped into or read for pleasure,
not merely as a reference source for data. Serendipity may bring curious
and pleasing conjunctions of entries together; an elaborate system of
cross-references is designed to allow the reader to weave zigzag trails
from entry to entry, constructing interrelations - sometimes surprising as they go. We see this book as more than merely an encyclopedia of sf; it
is a comprehensive history and analysis of the genre.John Clute and Peter
Nicholls, November 1992
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More's Utopia
Thomas MORE's (perhaps ironic) description of an ideal society was the
beginning of the literature of UTOPIAS, a word More coined. Utopian

societies flourished in early SF.
Godwin's The Man in the Moone
Francis GODWIN's account of a voyage to the Moon and the utopian society
that exists there is one of the first accounts of space travel in fiction.
See Also: SPACE FLIGHT
Swift's Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan SWIFT's account of Captain Gulliver's four voyages to bizarre
alien societies was SATIRIcal in intent, but had a great influence over
several traditions of subsequent SF.
Voltaire's Micromegas
VOLTAIRE's account of two aliens' trip to Earth (and their commentary on
what they see) is one of the first stories to present humanity as
unimportant in the cosmic scheme of things.
Shelley 's Frankenstein
Despite its GOTHIC elements and overt philosophizing, Mary Wollstonecraft
SHELLEY's novel contains the major elements of science fiction. It
contributed enormously to SF's development.See Also: FRANKENSTEIN
Seaborn's Symzonia
Adam SEABORN's tale, Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery, is both the first
American utopian novel and the first novel to dramatize the HOLLOW EARTH
theories popular in the early nineteenth century.
The Moon Hoax
The New York Sun publishes accounts of life on the MOON, as seen through
a powerful new telescope. This famous hoax remained popular for decades,
and inspired other fantastic tales.
Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym
Ostensibly a FANTASTIC VOYAGE to the Antarctic (then almost wholly
unknown), Edgar Allan POE's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym also plays
with the HOLLOW EARTH theme. Both remained popular subjects in nineteenth
century SF.
Hawthorne's Rappaccini's Daughter
Much of Nathaniel HAWTHORNE's fiction contains GOTHIC or PROTO SCIENCE
FICTION elements. "Rappaccini's Daughter", which is SF, is one of the
finest nineteenth century American short stories.
Journey to the Center of the Earth
The most famous of the nineteenth century HOLLOW EARTH stories, Jules
VERNE's novel invests its expedition with a sense of exploration and
wonder.See Also: JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH
Verne 's From the Earth to the Moon
The first attempt to propose a realistic space voyage, Jules VERNE's
novel helped move SF from the realm of fantasy into rational
speculation.See Also: SPACE FLIGHT; FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON.
Verne 's Twenty Thousand Leagues
Although primitive submarines had existed since the eighteenth century,

Jules VERNE's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was the first book to
exploit the dramatic potential of undersea exploration.See Also: UNDER THE
SEA.
German Invasion genre
George T. CHESNEY's The Battle of Dorking inaugurates the" German
INVASION" genre of British SF, which remains popular right up to the
outbreak of World War I.
Greg's Across the Zodiac
Percy GREG's Across the Zodiac: the Story of a Wrecked Record combines
numerous nineteenth century conventions - ANTIGRAVITY, the communist
UTOPIA, and the manuscript of a travel diary - with unusual care and
conviction.
Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde
Robert Louis STEVENSON combined gothic and SF elements into the
archetypal tale of multiple personalities in The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so famous that it has become part of the English
language.See Also: PSYCHOLOGY.
The first time travel paradox story
F. ANSTEY's The Time Bargain, though it contains no time machine or
theory of time travel, is the first story to utilize the time travel
paradox.See Also: TIME PARADOXES.
Wells 's The Time Machine
H.G. WELLS 's THE TIME MACHINE, which originated the idea of the time
machine, provided a rationale for TIME TRAVEL, until then a fantasy
device.
Wells 's The War of the Worlds
The first novel of an alien INVASION, H.G. WELLS's WAR OF THE WORLDS is
closer to its modern successors than to the essential gothic SF of most of
the nineteenth century.
Wells 's First Men in the Moon
Science fiction had not yet discovered space travel as its quintessential
theme when THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, H.G. WELLS's novel of a modern
FANTASTIC VOYAGE, appeared.
German invasion spoof
England had worried about the military threat posed by Germany for a
generation, inspiring dozens of alarmist novels. P.G. WODEHOUSE's spoof,
The Swoop! Or How Clarence Saved England: A Tale of the Great Invasion,
came only five years before World War I really did break out.
The conquest of space coined
H.G. WELLS coined the term" the conquest of outer space "in The World Set
Free in 1914. At least three books have used it as a title, the most
famous being Willy LEY's 1949 work, The Conquest of Space.
Lindsay's Arcturus
David LINDSAY's 1920 fantasy, A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS, although forgotten
for decades, enjoyed a newfound popularity in the 1970s. Today it is

regarded as a classic of science FANTASY.
Metropolis opens
Like all SF films of its day (and most since) METROPOLIS is
unsophisticated in its story, but its exceptional visual power
demonstrated SF CINEMA's potential.
Stapledon's Last and First Men
Perhaps the finest of Olaf STAPLEDON's meditations upon the FAR FUTURE
and humanity's destiny, LAST AND FIRST MEN was for a time famous outside
the science fiction genre.
Taine's The Time Stream
Serialized in Wonder Stories, John TAINE's best novel is a sophisticated
treatment of TIME TRAVEL innovations and paradoxes; it had an enormous
influence on subsequent SF.
Huxley's Brave New World
Aldous HUXLEY's mordant SATIREon twentieth century scientism, BRAVE NEW
WORLD, does not belong to American genre SF, but it had an enormous
influence over it.
Moore's Shambleau
Written when she was twenty-two, C.L. MOORE's first story made her famous
in the world of SF PULP MAGAZINES, where she became a major figure for the
next quarter century.
Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey
Although Stanley G. WEINBAUM died within a few years of publishing this
story, its vivid evocation of ALIEN life was deeply influential.
Things to Come opens
THINGS TO COME, a grandly conceived and big-budget film, was one of the
few 1930s films to capture SF's SENSE OF WONDER, as well as its prophetic
clunkiness.
Stapledon's Star Maker
Perhaps Olaf STAPLEDON's finest novel, STAR MAKER offers a breathtakingly
panoramic vision of the future which exerted a great influence upon genre
SF writers.See Also: FAR FUTURE.
Williamson's Legion serialized
Jack WILLIAMSON's THE LEGION OF TIME , a tale of alternate futures
battling for control, combined melodrama with metaphysics and contributed
significantly to the TIME TRAVELtheme.
Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet
Although it partakes of religious allegory, C.S. LEWIS's novel is true
SF, of the British tradition that owed nothing to American pulp magazines.
See Also: PLANETARY ROMANCE.
Golden Age of SF
Although good SF had been appearing in England for some time, the period
1939-46, called "the GOLDEN AGE OF SF", saw the first mature and
sophisticated SF from the American pulp magazines.

1st World SF Convention
East Coast fans, following up the success of a New York convention in
1938, met the next year, grandly naming the CONVENTION after the World's
Fair in progress.
Heinlein's first story
Robert A. HEINLEIN's first story, written in response to a story contest,
but submitted instead to Astounding Science Fiction, won him immediate
popularity and launched his career.
van Vogt's Black Destroyer
A. E. VAN VOGT's first story - a taut melodrama of an alien besieging an
unsuspecting spaceship crew - won him immediate and lasting acclaim.
Lest Darkness Fall serialized
The first sophisticated alternate history in American pulp magazines, L.
Sprague DE CAMP's early novel, LEST DARKNESS FALL, contributed enormously
to this subgenre.See Also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; HISTORY IN SF.
Slan serialized
The most famous story of persecuted SUPERMEN in science fiction, SLAN, by
A. E. VAN VOGT, invests its ingenuous tale with the dramatic power of wish
fulfillment fantasy.
The Incompleat Enchanter serialized
Humorous fantasy was virtually unknown when L. Sprague DE CAMP and
Fletcher PRATTcreated Harold Shea and his series of adventures in
alternate mythologies.See Also: ALTERNATE WORLDS.
Hubbard's Fear
Now famous as the creator of DIANETICS and founder of the Church of
SCIENTOLOGY, L. Ron HUBBARDwas first a successful pulp SF writer. Fear and
"Typewriter in the Sky" are among Hubbard's best work.
Sturgeon's Microcosmic God
Theodore STURGEON's tale of a power-mad SCIENTISTand his warring
creations has few similarities to his later work, but remains one of the
best-remembered stories from SF's GOLDEN AGE.
Stars Wars and Close Encounters
No one would have predicted at the beginning of 1977 that the sci-fi film
would become a blockbuster genre. The runaway successes of STAR WARS and
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND prompted a boom in SF.See Also: CINEMA.
Padgett's Mimsy
The SF stories that Henry KUTTNER and C.L. MOORE published under the
byline Lewis Padgett were among the finest of the 1940s. "Mimsy Were the
Borogroves" is perhaps their finest tale.
Wylie predicts atom bomb
When Philip WYLIE submitted his story, "The Paradise Crater", to American
Magazine, his prediction of an atom bomb got him placed under house
arrest.
Moore's Vintage Season

C.L. MOORE's novella of tourists from the future arriving to watch an
imminent catastrophe presages the tone and style of much 1950s SF.
Heinlein for young readers
Upon returning to writing at the end of World War II, Robert A. HEINLEIN
began his enormously successful series of SF novels for young readers,
starting with Rocket Ship Galileo.See Also: CHILDREN'S SF.
Shasta and Gnome publish
American SF was almost entirely published in magazines until after World
War II, when several small presses, SHASTAPublishers and GNOME Press,
began to publish major writers in hardcover.
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
George ORWELL was known as a radical journalist and minor comic novelist
when he published his last novel, NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. He did not live to
see it become a classic of political SF.See Also: DYSTOPIAS.
Vance's The Dying Earth
Although Jack VANCE's cycle of stories in THE DYING EARTH are set in a
decadent future and are more fantasy than SF, they have had an immense
influence upon both SF and fantasy writers.
Kornbluth's The Little Black Bag
C.M. KORNBLUTH's story of a bag of medical marvels timeslipped from the
future is by far his most famous story, and has been adapted to
television.See Also: MEDICINE.
Leiber's Bad Day for Sales
Fritz LEIBERoffers a withering view of American consumerism in "A Bad Day
for Sales".
Kornbluth's The Marching Morons
C.M. KORNBLUTH's story of how eugenics backfires when only intelligent
people practice birth control is famous enough to be cited in political
arguments.See Also: INTELLIGENCE.
The Demolished Man serialized
Alfred BESTER's first novel made his name in science fiction, and
inaugurated a decade of writing masterful SF. THE DEMOLISHED MAN remains a
compelling read after forty years.
Vonnegut's Player Piano
Kurt VONNEGUT's PLAYER PIANO is a SATIRE on automation and Madison
Avenue. It was published as a contemporary novel, but it was reprinted in
paperback as SF as Utopia Fourteen.
Norton's Star Man's Son
Andre NORTON's first SF novel, and in many ways her best, was STAR MAN'S
SON, 2250 A.D. . This book served as an introduction to SF for a
generation of readers.
Sturgeon 's More Than Human
Expanded from his 1952 novella "Baby Is Three", Theodore STURGEON's MORE
THAN HUMAN is a novel about a group mind and probably the first SF novel

to make use of gestalt theory.
SF Book Club starts
The SCIENCE FICTION BOOK CLUB began in the United States around 1953,
published by Nelson Doubleday, Inc. The company was sold to the German
company, Bertelsmann, in 1986. Since its beginnings, the Book Club has
made many hardcovers available to SF readers.
The Space Merchants
The first and best of Frederik POHLand C.M. KORNBLUTH's social SATIREs,
THE SPACE MERCHANTS is a savage satire of Madison Avenue chicanery, and
remains readable today.
Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. TOLKIEN had labored for decades on his epic tale of
Middle-Earth, which attracted only a modest - if enthusiastic - readership
for the first decade of publication.See Also: FANTASY.
The Twilight Zone on television
Although most of its episodes were fantasy and many were predicated on
surprise endings, TWILIGHT ZONE did much to popularize SF in TELEVISION.
Keyes's Flowers for Algernon
Daniel KEYES's 1959 novelette won the Hugo Award; its 1966 novel version
won a Nebula, and the 1968 film CHARLY won Cliff Robertson an Academy
Award for Best Actor.
Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz
A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, Walter M. MILLERJr.'s classic novel of humanity
rising from the ashes of nuclear HOLOCAUST, has moved readers from far
outside the SF genre.
Leiber writes Buck Rogers
Fritz LEIBER, unable to make a living by his fiction, spends a year
writing continuity for the BUCK ROGERS comic strip. He also writes a
Tarzan novel.
Stranger in a Strange Land
Although Robert A. HEINLEIN's novel won him his third Hugo Award, its
real fame came only later in the sixties, when STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
gained a counterculture following that Heinlein did not especially
welcome.
The Man in the High Castle
Although it was not the first novel in which the Allies lost World War
II, Philip K. DICK's THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE was one of the best, and
it remains his best-known work.See Also: HITLER WINS.
Vance's The Dragon Masters
THE DRAGON MASTERS, Jack VANCE's elegant novella of a war fought between
factions using biologically engineered "dragons" , remains one of his
finest works.
New generation of writers
Ursula K. LE GUIN, Samuel R. DELANY, Roger ZELAZNY, Thomas M. DISCH, and

Keith LAUMER all publish their first stories. All but Delany make their
first sales to Amazing Stories.
Zelazny's Ecclesiastes
Only a year after selling his first story, Roger ZELAZNYpublished" A Rose
for Ecclesiastes", one of the finest evocations of SF romanticism.
Moorcock editor of New Worlds
Michael MOORCOCK took over the editorship of NEW WORLDS in 1964, but it
was not until he became publisher in 1967 that the magazine came into its
own.
Pangborn's Davy
"DAVY", Edgar PANGBORN's novel of a POST-HOLOCAUST PASTORAL America,
commanded a small but enthusiastic readership for many years and is
probably due for revival.
Herbert's Dune
Published in a small edition by a little-known publisher, Frank
HERBERT'sDUNE became a paperback best-seller and one of the most famous
novels in the history of SF.See Also: ECOLOGY; SF02925 MESSIAHS.
The Lord of the Rings in paperback
Although first published in 1954-55, it was only a decade later that J.R.
TOLKIEN'sLord of the Rings, issued in paperback, began to reach its
enormous audience.See Also: FANTASY.
Star Trek on American television
Although comfortingly familiar to viewers today, STAR TREK's multiracial
crew, with women and an alien on the bridge, seemed dauntingly futuristic
in the show's first season.See Also: TELEVISION.
Knight's Orbit series
One of the first original anthology series in the U.S., ORBIT published
much of the best short SF to appear in the late sixties and early
seventies.See Also: Damon KNIGHT.
Niven's Neutron Star
Larry NIVEN's early story set the tone of his Tales of Known Space
series, which remains popular thirty years later.
Zelazny's Lord of Light
Roger ZELAZNY's third novel and almost certainly his best, LORD OF LIGHT
is a mixture of SF and mythology that has never been surpassed.
Zoline's Heat Death
Pamela ZOLINE's famous first story, "The Heat Death of the Universe", has
lost none of its freshness since its first appearance in New Worlds in
1967.See Also: ENTROPY.
2001: A Space Odyssey
200L: A SPACE ODYSSEY, Stanley KUBRICK's big-budget, 2 1/2 hour SF epic,
struck many as obscure or pretentious upon its first theatrical release,
but others recognized it as a strikingly original and ambitious
accomplishment.

Sladek's Reproductive System
The Reproductive System, John T. SLADEK's hilarious novel of
self-replicating systems run amok, was first published in the US
as"MECHASM"It seems even more timely today than when it was published in
1968.
Wilhelm's The Planners
Although Kate WILHELM had earlier published mysteries and traditional
outer-space SF, her stories dramatizing present-day technological
forebodings are widely considered her best.
Knight's Masks
This dense, allusive story, first published in Playboy, is perhaps Damon
KNIGHT's finest short work.
Le Guin 's The Left Hand of Darkness
THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, Ursula K. LE GUIN's novel of a world whose
inhabitants are all of the same sex, won acclaim upon its first appearance
and is regarded today as an SF classic.
Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron
Widely condemned in its time, Norman SPINRAD's BUG JACK BARRON dealt with
issues of sexual politics and power fantasies that struck many readers as
obscene and depraved.
Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt VONNEGUTlived through the firebombing of Dresden. AndSLAUGHTERHOUSEFIVE combines autobiography with absurdist fantasy, vividly evoking the
subjective experience of war.
Star Trek series ends
STAR TREK goes off the air, but lives on as a cause for a growing number
of Trekkies. Over the next decade the show achieves a greater popularity
than it had enjoyed during its original broadcasts.See Also: TELEVISION.
Niven's Ringworld
RINGWORLD, Larry NIVEN's third novel set in his Tales of Known Space
series, is a great success, and helps inspire the enduring vogue for BIG
DUMB OBJECTS.
Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber
Roger ZELAZNY's 1970-78 series about warring princes in the one true
realm is FANTASY rather than SF, but the novels have been popular and
influential in both genres.
Lem's Solaris in English
Stanislaw LEM was virtually unknown in English until the publication of
Solaris, still his best-known novel. Within ten years he was the
best-known Central European SF writer.See Also: POLAND.
THX 1138
THX 1138, George LUCAS's first feature film, began life as a film school
project. It was a commercial failure but presaged the visual intensity of
SF films.

Russ's When It Changed
Joanna RUSS published many of her best stories in the early seventies.
"When It Changed" and "Nobody's Home" are among her finest.
Le Guin wins book award
Ursula K. LE GUIN wins the 1972 National Book Award for Best Children's
Book for The Farthest Shore. In her acceptance speech, she defends SF and
Fantasy.
Pynchon refuses book award
Thomas PYNCHON's Gravity's Rainbow fails to win the NEBULA, is vetoed for
the Pulitzer, and wins the National Book Award, which Pynchon refuses.
Le Guin's The Dispossessed
THE DISPOSSESSED: AN AMBIGUOUS UTOPIA, is Ursula K. LE GUIN's novel of a
society of utopian anarchists and their dialectical struggle for survival
against a more powerful industrial culture. It was one of the most widely
read political SF novels of the 70s.See Also: MATHEMATICS; ANSIBLE.
Haldeman's The Forever War
Joe HALDEMAN's gritty account of the unglamorous combat soldier of the
future in THE FOREVER WAR can be read as both a reply to Robert A.
HEINLEIN's Starship Troopers and a reflection of Haldeman's own Vietnam
experience.
Varley's Eight Worlds series
John VARLEY's Eight Worlds stories, collected in The Persistence of
Vision and Picnic on Nearside, were among the most popular of the 70s.
Russ's The Female Man
THE FEMALE MAN, Joanna RUSS's third novel, was derisively received by
most SF reviewers, but it went on to develop a reputation as one of the
finest works of FEMINISTSF.
Stars Wars and Close Encounters
No one would have predicted at the beginning of 1977 that the sci-fi film
would become a blockbuster genre. The runaway successes of STAR WARS and
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND prompted a boom in SF.See Also: CINEMA.
Pohl's Gateway
Frederik POHL enjoyed a creative renaissance in the mid-70s, writing
better than he ever had before. Gateway is widely considered his best
novel.
Tiptree is Alice Sheldon
James TIPTREE, Jr., whose personal reticence was a matter of widespread
curiosity, was revealed to be Alice Sheldon, a retired psychologist.
The real Enterprise
The prototype Space Shuttle is named the Enterprise, after the vessel in
STAR TREK.
1st Omni issue
First issue of OMNI, the first successful SF slick magazine. Although
most of the magazine is devoted to popular science, it becomes a

prestigious market for short SF.
Star Trek The Motion Picture
The long-awaited return of STAR TREK comes as a big-budget motion
picture, STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE, which devotes enormous energies to
dramatizing a surprisingly standard Star Trek story.
Space elevator proposed
Arthur C. CLARKE and Charles SHEFFIELD both publish novels proposing a
space elevator running from Earth to geosynchronous orbit.See Also:
DISCOVERY AND INVENTION.
The Book of the New Sun
After seven years of writing, Gene WOLFE publishes The Shadow of the
Torturer. The next three volumes of his tetralogy follow at yearly
intervals.
Hoban's Riddley Walker
RIDDLEY WALKER, Russell HOBAN's first SF novel, is a moving and
stylistically inventive post- HOLOCAUST novel and one of the finest in
science fiction.See Also: LINGUISTICS.
Tor Books publishes first titles
Published by the just-founded Tom Doherty Associates, TOR Books became
(along with Bantam Spectra) one of the two leading American SF publishers
in the 1980s.
Timescape Books launched
Although it lasted only three years, TIMESCAPE BOOKSpublished a large and
distinguished line of important SF books.
Thomas's The White Hotel
D.M. THOMAS, a British poet who has published SF-tinged poetry in NEW
WORLDS and elsewhere, becomes famous with the publication of "The White
Hotel".
Sterling's Shaper/Mechanist series
Bruce STERLING publishes "Swarm" and "Spider Rose", the first stories in
his Shaper/Mechanist sequence, which will culminate in his 1985 novel,
SCHISMATRIX.See Also: CYBERPUNK.
Powers' The Anubis Gates
Tim POWERS's The Anubis Gates, a grotesque and colorful fantasy set in
Dickens's London, helps inaugurate the STEAMPUNKmovement.
Jones's Divine Endurance
Gwenyth JONES's DIVINE ENDURANCE, called by some the greatest British SF
novel, appears in England.
The Terminator opens
Based on numerous SF inspirations - including Harlan ELLISON's Outer
Limits script, "Soldier" - " THE TERMINATOR" was a remarkably energetic
film and a great critical and popular success; it spawned a sequel and
numerous imitators.See CINEMA.
Heyday of cyberpunk

William GIBSON's Neuromancer wins the NEBULA, the HUGO, and the PHILIP K.
DICK AWARD. CYBERPUNK enters the mass media.
Willis's All My Darling Daughters
Connie WILLIS's short fiction won praise and numerous awards in the
1980s. This story, perhaps her most controversial, did not appear in any
SF magazine prior to publication in her collection, Fire Watch.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Eighteen years after the original STAR TREK went off the air, STAR TREK:
THE NEXT GENERATION premieres after a near-frenzy of anticipation. More
sophisticated than the first series, it is an enormous success.See:
TELEVISION.
Simmons's Hyperion
Dan SIMMONS published three novels in 1989. HYPERION, the best-known, won
the HUGO Award.
The Difference Engine
The widely anticipated A DIFFERENCE ENGINE brought together SF's two
central writers of CYBERPUNK - Bruce STERLING and William GIBSON -in a
novel that seemed an epitome of the STEAMPUNK subgenre.
Total Recall opens
Paul Verhoeven's TOTAL RECALL, a big-budget attempt to combine the
popularity of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Piers ANTHONY, and Philip K. DICK,
opened in the summer of 1990.See Also: CINEMA.
Pynchon's Vineland
Thomas PYNCHON publishes Vineland, his first new work in seventeen years.
It contains elements of both fantasy and cyberpunk.See Also: FABULATIONS.
Swanwick's Stations of the Tide
Michael SWANWICK's third novel, STATIONS OF THE TIDE, combines a number
of classic SF themes in a dense, fast-moving, and complex story; it won
the NEBULA Award.
Robinson's Red Mars
The first novel of Kim Stanley ROBINSON's expansive and audacious
trilogy, RED MARS won the NEBULA Award. Its successor, Green Mars, won the
HUGO later that year.
Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep
Vernor VINGE's expansive novel, A FIRE UPON THE DEEP, combines SPACE
OPERA, CYBERPUNK, and intrigue in a rousing galactic adventure.
Willis's Doomsday Book
TIME TRAVEL has long been a favorite theme of Connie WILLIS.DOOMSDAY
BOOK, her longest work, sends a time traveller to the era of the Black
Death. It won the NEBULA and HUGO Awards.
Jurassic Park opens JURASSIC PARK, Steven SPIELBERG's film of Michael
CRICHTON's novel about resurrected dinosaurs was an enormous popular
success, the highest-grossing film of all time.
Arslan

ENGH, M. J. (Warner, 1976)U.K. title: A Wind From Bukhara 1979Having
already defeated the Soviet Union and the United States in battle, Arslan,
a charismatic young Asian conqueror, personally oversees mopping-up
operations in the American Midwest. Deciding to make a small town in
Illinois his temporary headquarters, Arslan at first rapes and terrorizes
the citizens, but then seduces them by the force of his personality. This
frightening and disconcerting novel features superb character development
and fascinating POLITICAL insights. Compare Sinclair Lewis's It Can't
Happen Here . Engh's recent novel,Rainbow Man (1993), deals with the theme
of personal responsibility in a radically different but equally
fascinating manner.
And Chaos Died
RUSS, JOANNA(Ace, 1970)A castaway on a colony world, whose inhabitants
have been taught telepathy by mysterious aliens, picks up the gift
himself, but then finds himself alienated from ordinary humans, able to
remain sane only among members of what is now his own kind. A determined
attempt to examine psi power from a new angle. Compare Arthur Sellings's
The Uncensored Man (1964). See also ESP
Artificial Things
FOWLER, KAREN JOY(Bantam, 1986)It's rare for a new SF author's first
published book to be a short story collection, but Fowler's polished tales
have had a powerful and immediate impact within the genre. Included are
the hysterically funny "The Faithful Companion at Forty," which gives us
the truth about the Lone Ranger's relationship with Tonto, as well as such
fine pieces as "The Gate of Ghosts,""The View From Venus,""Praxis," and
"The Lake Is Full of Artificial Things." Compare Kate Wilhelm's THE
INFINITY BOX and other collections.
Aegypt
CROWLEY, JOHN(Bantam, 1987)Crowley's lyrical and multileveled meditation
on time, history, and the nature of narrative may seem a combination of
fantasy and contemporary novel, but its inquiry into the meaning of
history and the secret significance of the Renaissance places it within a
tradition of science that also includes Robert Anton Wilson's work and
Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Pierce Moffett, a
thirty-four-year-old academic who has "lost his vocation" and also his
university job, moves from Manhattan to the bucolic Blackbury Jambs in the
Faraway Hills, where he attempts to write a book about the traces of
Hermetic thought, once believed to come from the priest-kings of Egypt
("not Egypt but Aegypt"), that persist in modern life. While Moffett muses
about the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill, or why Gypsies are
believed to be able to tell fortunes, he becomes involved both with local
village life and with the life of Fellowes Kraft, a minor historical
novelist of the 40s and 50s whose last, unfinished manuscript Pierce
discovers. The novel strongly hints that Pierce, unknown to himself, is a
voyager from outside this universe, his original mission forgotten when he
took on the torpid garb of physical matter in this gnostic universe.
Crowley's very original and beautifully written novel-the first of a
planned quartet-continues its tale in Love & Sleep(1994). Both Mary
Gentle's Rats and Gargoyles and Michael Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's THE

ILLUMINATUS! TRILOGY deal (in very different ways) with some of Crowley's
themes. (GF) See also HISTORY IN SF and CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH
Always Coming Home
LE GUIN, URSULA K(ROEBER)(Harper, 1985)An elaborate account of the
culture of the Kesh-people living in "the Valley" in northern California
in a postindustrial future. The main narrative sequence concerns the
experience of a girl fathered on a woman of the Valley by an outsider, but
there is a great wealth of supplementary detail to set this story in
context; the environment, mythology, and arts of the imaginary society are
scrupulously described. A fabulously rich work, the most elaborate
exercise in imaginary ANTHROPOLOGY ever undertaken, even including a
cassette recording. Compare Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia and John
Brunner's STAND ON ZANZIBAR .
Aristoi
WILLIAMS, WALTER JON(Tor, 1992)In the far future, a galaxy-spanning human
empire is ruled by the Aristoi, supercompetent geniuses with vast psychic
powers and sophisticated technological support. Although the rule of the
Aristoi is far from democratic, humanity has achieved unprecedented
comfort and harmony under them. When the Aristo Gabriel uncovers a plot to
overthrow the system from within, he takes it upon himself to defeat the
traitors. This is a beautifully written, morally complex novel, that
explores the nature of personal power and its ability to corrupt. Compare
Michael Moorcock's The Dancers at the End of Times . See also
NANOTECHNOLOGY
Ambient
WOMACK, JACK(Weidenfeld, 1987)In a future milieu as gritty and dark as
that of the cyberpunks, but minus their ubiquitous computer technology,
the Dryco Corporation dominates the world through its control of the
recreational drug market. The various members of the Dryden family, owners
of Dryco, seem to be involved in endless, borderline-psychotic plots to
increase their power over the world around them. Later books in the
series, not all of which are tightly connected to Ambient, include
Terraplane (1988), Heathern (1990), and Elvissey (1993). Womack's books
are difficult because he writes in a futuristic slang, much as Anthony
Burgess did in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. See also DYSTOPIAS
After Things Fell Apart
GOULART, RON(Ace, 1970)A detective pursues a gang of feminist assassins
through the eccentric subcultures of a balkanized future United States.
The best of the author's many HUMORous SF novels, with a genuine satirical
element to add to the usual slapstick. Compare Robert Sheckley's Journey
Beyond Tomorrow (1962).
Alyx
RUSS, JOANNA(Gregg Press, 1976) Variant title: The Adventures of
AlyxIncorporates the novel Picnic on Paradise (1968) with four short
stories featuring the same heroine. Alyx's native land is the cradle of
civilization, where she is an outlaw because her ideas are so far ahead of
her time, but in the novel she is snatched out of context to become a time
traveling agent charged with rescuing a group of tourists trapped on a

resort planet where local politics have turned sour. Clever and lively.
Another similar novel is The Two of Them (1978), in which a female agent
is dispatched to a quasi-lslamic world where she rescues a girl from a
harem. See also FEMINISM
Air Wonder Stories
Air Wonder Stories, July 1929 / Vol. 1, No. 1 Published by Stellar
Publishing Corp. Cover illustration by Frank R. Paul (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of the Estate of
Frank R. Paul. (c) 1929 Stellar Publising Corp.)
Algol
Algol, Summer-Fall 1977 Published by Andrew I. Porter Cover illustration
by Richard Powers (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1977
by ALGOL MAGAZINE)
Alien Critic
Alien Critic, Nov. 1973 / Vol. 2, No. 4 Published by Richard E. Geis
Cover illustration by Stephen Fabian (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1973 Richard E. Geis)
Amazing Stories
Amazing Stories, June 1947 Published by TSR Inc. Cover illustration by
Robert Gibson Jones (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR, Inc. (c) 1947 TSR, Inc.)
Ansible
Ansible, Oct. 1984 Published by David Langford (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1984 David Langford)
Ariel: The Book of Fantasy
Ariel: The Book of Fantasy, 1977 / No. 2 Published by The Morning Star
Press Cover illustration by Frank Frazetta (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. The Morning Star Press. (c) 1977
The Morning Star Press)
Arkham Sampler
Arkham Sampler, Winter 1949, #5 / Vol. 2, No. 1 Published by Arkham House
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1949 by
Arkham House Publishers, Inc.)
Astonishing Stories
Astonishing Stories, March 1942 Published by Fictioneers, Inc. Cover
illustration by H.W. Wesso (Reprinted by permission of Argosy
Communications, Inc. (c) 1942 Fictioneers, Inc.)
Authentic Science Fiction
Authentic Science Fiction, March 1953 Published by Hamilton & Co.
(Stafford) Ltd. Cover illustration by Richards (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of
HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1953 Hamilton & Co.)
Avon Fantasy Reader
Avon Fantasy Reader, No. 9 Published by Avon Books (Casey Brown/Eaton
Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by permission of Avon

Books. (c) Avon Books)
All Our Tomorrows
All Our Tomorrows by Ted Allbeury Cover: Warner Books/Mysterious Press,
1989 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1989 Mysterious Press. )
Accommodation Offered
Accommodation Offered by Anna Livia Cover: Women's Press, 1985 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of The
Women's Press, London. (c) 1985 The Women's Press)
Atta
Atta by Francis Bellamy Cover: A.A. Wyn, Inc., 1953 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. A.A. Wyn, Inc. (c) 1953 A.A.
Wyn, Inc.)
Atlantida
Atlantida by Pierre Benoit Cover: Duffield & Co., 1920 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
And Having Writ. . .
And Having Writ. . . by D.R. Benson Cover: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1978 (First
Printing) illustration by Bill Tinker (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Bobbs-Merril Co. (c) 1978 Bobbs - Merrill Co.)
American Book of the Dead, The
The American Book of the Dead by Stephen Billias Cover: Popular Library,
1987 (First Printing) illustration by Gary Ruddell (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Warner
Books, Inc. (c) 1987 Popular Library, Inc.)
Adam Link , Robot
Adam Link, Robot by Eando Binder (Otto Oscar Binder) Cover: Paperback
Library, Inc., 1965 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside.Paperback Library (c) 1965 Paperback Library, Inc.)
After the Cataclysm
After the Cataclysm by H. Percy Blanchard Cover: Cochrane Publishing Co.,
1909 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Airship Nine
Airship Nine by Thomas H. Block Cover: Berkley Books, 1984 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1984 The Berkley Publishing Group Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Aerial Burglars, The
The Aerial Burglars by James Blyth Cover: Ward, Lock & Co. Ltd., 1906
illustration by Harold Piffard (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. )
Aleph, The

The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges Cover: Bantam, 1971 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1971
Bantam Books)
After the Good War
After the Good War by Peter Breggin Cover: Stein and Day, 1972 (First
Edition) illustration by Tim Gaydos (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Stein and Day. (c) 1972 Stein and Day)
Auroraphone, The
The Auroraphone by Cyrus Cole Cover: Chas. H. Kerr & Co., 1890 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Ape of London, The
The Ape of London by Frank R. Crisp Cover: Hodder and Stoughton, 1959
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
with permission of Hodder Headline, POC. (c) 1959 Hodder and Stoughton)
Around a Distant Star
Around a Distant Star by Jean Delaire Cover: Jonn Long, 1904 illustration
by Alfred Touchemolin (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. )
Asylum Earth
Asylum Earth by Bruce Elliott Cover: Belmont Books, 1968 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Belmont Books . (c) 1968
Belmont Books)
Arslan
Arslan by M.J. Engh Cover: Warner Books, 1976 (First Edition) (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1976 Warner Books, Inc.)
Avenger #1: Justice, Inc., The
The Avenger #1: Justice, Inc. by Paul Ernst Cover: Paperback Library,
1972 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside.Paperback Library (c) 1972 Paperback Library)
A.D. 2000
A.D. 2000 by Alvarado Fuller Cover: Laird & Lee Publishers, 1890 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Angels & Visitations
Angels & Visitations Neil Gaiman Cover: Dream Haven Press, 1993 (First
Edition) illustration by David McKean (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1993 Dream Haven Press)
Abyss of Light, An
An Abyss of Light by Kathleen O'Neal Gear Cover: Donald A. Wollheim, 1990
(First Edition) illustration by San Julian (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1990 Donald A. Wollheim)
Angel Island
Angel Island by Inez Haynes Gillmore Cover: Henry Holt, 1914 (Casey

Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Amphibion's Voyage, The
The Amphibion's Voyage by Parker Gillmore Cover: W.H. Allen, 1885 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Armageddon 190
Armageddon 190 by Ferdinand H. Grautoff Cover: Kegan Paul, Trench
Trubner, 1907 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. )
Angel of the Revolution, The
The Angel of the Revolution by George Griffin Cover: Tower, 1894 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Angilin
Angilin by A.L. Hallen Cover: Digby Long, 1907 (First Edition) (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Away from the Here and Now
Away from the Here and Now by Clare Winger Harris Cover: Dorrance & Co.,
1947 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c)
1947 Dorrance & Co.)
Autopsy for a Cosmonaut
Autopsy for a Cosmonaut by Jacob Hay Cover: Popular Library, 1969 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1969 Popular Library, Inc.)
Anvil of the Heart
Anvil of the Heart by Bruce T. Holmes Cover: The Haven Corp., 1983 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1983 The Haven
Corporation)
Alien Perspective
Alien Perspective by David Houston Cover: Leisure Books, 1978 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1978 Leisure
Books)
Almuric
Almuric by Robert E. Howard Cover: Ace Books, 1964 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The
Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1964 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
After London
After London by Richard Jefferies Cover: Cassell & Co., 1885 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
After the Flood
After the Flood by P.C. Jersild Cover: William Morrow & Co., 1982 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of William Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) 1982 William Morrow & Co.,
Inc.)

Archer's Goon
Archer's Goon by Diana Wynne Jones Cover: Berkley, 1987 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1987 The
Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Aleriel or a Voyage to Other Worlds
Aleriel or a Voyage to Other Worlds by W.S. Lach-Szyrma Cover: Wyman &
Sons, 1883 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
)
Amazing Mister Lutterworth, The
The Amazing Mister Lutterworth by Desmond Leslie Cover: Brown, Watson
Ltd., 1958 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
(c) 1958 Brown Watson Ltd.)
Anti-Grav Unlimited
Anti-Grav Unlimited by Duncan Long Cover: Avon Books, 1968 illustration
by Ron Walotsky (Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif.,
Riverside. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1988 Avon Books)
Ambrov Keon
Ambrov Keon by Jean Lorrah Cover: DAW Books, 1986 illustration by Walter
Valez (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1986 DAW Books, Inc.)
Adrift in the Stratosphere
Adrift in the Stratosphere by A.M. Low Cover: Blackie & Son Ltd., 1937
illustration by George W. Blow (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. (c) 1937 Blackie & Son Ltd.)
Arachne
Arachne by Lisa Mason Cover: William Morrow & Co., 1990 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of William Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) 1990 William Morrow & Co.,
Inc.)
Arsenal out of Time, The
The Arsenal out of Time by David McDaniel Cover: Ace Books, 1967
illustration by Kelly Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1967 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Architects of Hyperspace, The
The Architects of Hyperspace by Thomas McDonough Cover: Avon Books, 1987
illustration by Ron Walotsky (Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of
Calif., Riverside. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1987 Avon Books)
Ant-Men, The
The Ant-Men by Eric North Cover: John C. Winston (First Edition)
illustration by Paul Blaisdell (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of

Calif., Riverside. John C. Winston Company. )
Alien Skies
Alien Skies by Peter Dagmar (Frank J. Pinchin) Cover: Brown, Watson Ltd.,
1962 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Brown Watson Limited. (c) 1962 Brown Watson Ltd.)
Argus Gambit, The
The Argus Gambit by David D. Ross Cover: St. Martin's Press, 1989 (First
Edition) illustration by Rats Patterson and the Flying Salvucci's (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Cover: Rats
Patterson and the Flying Salvucci's. Courtesy of St. Martin's Press. (c)
1989 St. Martin's Press)
Alongside Night
Alongside Night by J. Neil Schulman Cover: Ace Books, 1982 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1982 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Agent of Entropy
Agent of Entropy by Martin Siegel Cover: Lancer Books, 1969 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Lancer Books. (c)
1969 Lancer Books.)
Adam Experiment, The
The Adam Experiment by Geoffrey Simmons Cover: Berkley, 1979 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1979 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Adrift in a Boneyard
Adrift in a Boneyard by Robert Lewis Taylor Cover: Avon Books, 1947
(Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1947 Avon Books)
Absolute Zero
Absolute Zero by Ernest Tidyman Cover: Dial, 1971 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a
division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1971 Dial
Press)
Agent of Byzantium
Agent of Byzantium by Harry Turtledove Cover: Congdon & Weed, 1988 (M. M.
Kavanagh. Congdon & Weed. (c) 1988 Congdon and Weed.)
Amber City, The
The Amber City by Thomas Vetch Cover: Biggs & Debenham (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Biggs & Debenham. )
Ark, The
The Ark by Jarl Szydlow (Mary Vigliante) Cover: Manor Books, 1978 (Casey

Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.Manor Books (c)
1978 Manor Books.)
Anno Domini 2000
Anno Domini 2000 by Julius Vogel Cover: Hutchinson & Co. (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Random Century House UK Limited. )
Address: Centauri
Address: Centauri by F.L. Wallace Cover: Gnome, 1955 illustration by Ed
Emshwiller (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside.Gnome Press (c) 1955 Gnome)
Angry Espers, The
The Angry Espers by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. Cover: Ace Books, 1961 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1961 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Architect of Sleep, The
The Architect of Sleep by Steven R. Boyett Cover: Ace Books, 1986
illustration by James Gurney (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1986 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Alien from Arcturus
Alien from Arcturus by Gordon R. Dickson Cover: Ace Books, 1959 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1959 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
At the Seventh Level
At the Seventh Level by Suzette Haden Elgin Cover: DAW Books, 1972 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with
permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1972 DAW Books, Inc.)
Arsenal of Miracles, The
The Arsenal of Miracles by Gardner Fox Cover: Ace Books, 1964 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1964 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Alien Planet
Alien Planet by Fletcher Pratt Cover: Ace Books, 1962 (M. M. Kavanagh.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1962 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Aquarian Attack, The

The Aquarian Attack by Kevin Randle & Robert Cornett Cover: Ace Books,
1989 illustration by Miro (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with
The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1989 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
And Chaos Died
And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ Cover: Ace Books, 1970 (First Edition)
illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1970 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Anita
Anita by Keith Roberts Cover: Ace Books (First Edition) illustration by
George Ziel (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1970 Ace Books. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Alien Light, An
An Alien Light by Nancy Kress Cover: Arbor House (First Edition)
illustration by Ron Walotsky (M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by permission of
William Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) 1988 Arbor House)
Armageddon 2419
Armageddon 2419 by Philip Francis Nowlan Cover: Ace Books, 1963
illustration by Ed Emshwiller (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1963 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Arthur War Lord
Arthur War Lord by Dafydd ab Hugh Cover: Avon Books, 1994 (First Edition)
(M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1994 Avon Books)
Armageddon Blues, The
The Armageddon Blues by Daniel Keys Moran Cover: Bantam, 1988
illustration by Jim Burns (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1988 Bantam Books)
Adventures of Terra Tarkington, The
The Adventures of Terra Tarkington by Sharon Webb Cover: Bantam, 1985
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by
Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1985 Bantam Books)
Alien Tongue
Alien Tongue by Stephen Leigh Cover: Bantam (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) Bantam Books)

Alien Earth
Alien Earth by Megan Lindholm Cover: Bantam (First Edition) illustration
by Chichoni (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a
division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) Bantam Books)
Artificial Things
Artificial Things by Karen Joy Fowler Cover: Bantam, 1986 (First Edition)
illustration by Tito Salomoni (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1986 Bantam Books)
Aegypt
Aegypt by John Crowley Cove: Bantam, 1987 (First Edition) illustration by
Ed Lindlof (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division
of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1987 Bantam Books)
Assemblers of Infinity
Assemblers of Infinity by Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason Cover: Bantam,
1993 (First Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books,
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1993 Bantam
Books)
Agent of Byzantium
Agent of Byzantium by Harry Turtledove Cover: Congdon & Weed, 1987
illustration by Gerry Hawkins (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside.Congdon & Weed. (c) 1987 Congdon and Weed.)
Authentic Touch, The
The Authentic Touch by Jack Wodhams Cover: Curtis/Modern Library
Editions, 1971 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Curtis Modern Library Editions. (c) 1971 Curtis Modern Library
Editions)
As the Curtain Falls
As the Curtain Falls by Rob Chilson Cover: DAW Books, 1974 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with
permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1974 DAW Books, Inc.)
Angel with the Sword
Angel with the Sword by C.J. Cherryh Cover: DAW Books, 1985 (First
Edition) illustration by Kenneth May (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with
permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1985 DAW Books, Inc.)
Algorithm
Algorithm by Jean Mark Gawron Cover: Doubleday, 1978 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by
Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1978 Doubleday)
Agency, The
The Agency by David Meltzer Cover: Essex House, 1968 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Essex House. (c) 1968 Essex
House)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll Cover: Macmillan, 1865
(First Edition) illustration by John Tenniel (M. M. Kavanagh. )
Alien Accounts
Alien Accounts by John T. Sladek Cover: Granada (First Edition)
illustration by Tim White (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of
HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1982 Granada)
Altered States
Altered States by Paddy Chayefski Cover: Bantam, 1979 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1979
Bantam Books)
Atrocity Exhibition, The
The Atrocity Exhibition J.G. Ballard Cover: Panther Books, 1969 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with
permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1969 Panther Books)
Angry Planet, The
The Angry Planet by John Keir Cross Cover: Lunn/Coward-McCann Inc., 1946
(First Edition) illustration by Robin Jacques (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Lunn [UK] (c) 1946 Lunn (UK).)
Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy, The
The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy by Avram Davidson Cover: Owlswick,
1990 (First Edition) illustration by George Barr (M. M. Kavanagh. Owlswick
Press (c) 1990 Owlswick Press.)
Adventures in Unhistory
Adventures in Unhistory by Avram Davidson Cover: Owlswick, 1993 (First
Edition) illustration by George Barr (M. M. Kavanagh. Owlswick Press. (c)
1993 Owlswick Press.)
Air Trust, The
The Air Trust by George Allan England Cover: Phil Wagner, 1915
illustration by John Sloan (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. )
After the Zap
After the Zap by Michael Armstrong Cover: Popular Library, 1987
illustration by Les Edwards (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1987
Popular Library)
Alicia II
Alicia II by Robert Thurston Cover: Berkley, 1978 (First Edition)
illustration by Norm Walker (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1978 The Berkley Publishing Group.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Autumn Angels
Autumn Angels by Arthur Byron Cover Cover: Pyramid Books (First Edition)

illustration by Ron Cobb (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with
The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1975 Pyramid Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Alternate Presidents
Alternate Presidents ed. by Mike Resnick Cover: TOR (First Edition)
illustration by Barclay Shaw (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of
Tor Books. (c) 1992 Tor Books.)
Alternate Kennedys
Alternate Kennedys ed. by Mike Resnick Cover: TOR (First Edition)
illustration by Barclay Shaw (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of
Tor Books. (c) 1992 Tor Books.)
Aristoi
Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams Cover: TOR, 1992 (First Edition)
illustration by Jim Burns (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor
Books. (c) 1992 Tor Books.)
Agyar
Agyar by Steven Brust Cover: TOR (First Edition) illustration by Jim
Burns (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1993 Tor
Books.)
Alternate Warriors
Alternate Warriors ed. by Mike Resnick Cover: TOR (First Edition)
illustration by Barclay Shaw (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of
Tor Books. (c) 1993 Tor Books.)
Alternate Outlaws
Alternate Outlaws ed. by Mike Resnick Cover: TOR (First Edition)
illustration by Barclay Shaw (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of
Tor Books. (c) 1994 Tor Books.)
Archivist, The
The Archivist by Gil Alderman Cover: Unwin Hyman (First Edition)
illustration by Lee Gibbons (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of
HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1989 Unwin Hyman)
All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past
All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past by Howard Waldrop Cover:
Ursus, 1987 (First Edition) illustration by Don Ivan Punchatz (M. M.
Kavanagh. Ursus Imprints. (c) 1987 Ursus Imprints)
Ambient
Ambient by Jack Womack Cover: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987 (First Edition)
illustration by David Shannon (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of Grove /
Atlantic, Inc. (c) 1987 Weidenfeld & Nicolson.)
A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine
A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, Feb. 1950 / Vol. 1, No. 2 Published by
Recreational Reading, Inc. Cover illustration by Lawrence Sterne Stevens
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by permission of Argosy Communications, Inc. Copyright 1950 Recreational

Reading, Inc.)
A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine
A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, April 1950 / Vol. 1, No. 3 Published by
Recreational Reading, Inc. Cover illustration by Norman Saunders (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
permission of Argosy Communications, Inc. and Mrs. Norman Saunders.
Copyright 1950 Recreational Reading, Inc.)
A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine
A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, July 1950 / Vol. 1, No. 4 Published by
Recreational Reading, Inc. Cover illustration by Norman Saunders (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
permission of Argosy Communications, Inc. and Mrs. Norman Saunders.
Copyright 1950 Recreational Reading, Inc.)
A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine
A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, Oct. 1950 / Vol. 2, No. 1 Published by
Recreational Reading, Inc. Cover illustration by Norman Saunders (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
permission of Argosy Communications, Inc. and Mrs. Norman Saunders.
Copyright 1950 Recreational Reading, Inc.)
Air Wonder Stories
Air Wonder Stories, Oct. 1929 Published by Stellar Publishing Corp.
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1929
Stellar Publising Corp.)
Air Wonder Stories
Air Wonder Stories, Jan. 1930 Published by Stellar Publishing Corp.
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
the Estate of Frank R. Paul. (c) 1930 Stellar Publising Corp.)
After Things Fell Apart
After Things Fell Apart by Ron Goulart Cover: Ace Books, 1970 (First
Edition) illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1970 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Anubis Gates, The
The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers Cover: Ace Books, 1983 (First Edition)
illustration by Don Brautigan (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1983 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Air Wonder Stories
Air Wonder Stories, Feb. 1930 Published by Stellar Publishing Corp. Cover
illustration by Frank R. Paul (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of the Estate of Frank R. Paul. (c) 1930
Stellar Publising Corp.)
Air Wonder Stories

Air Wonder Stories, Aug. 1929 Published by Stellar Publishing Corp. Cover
illustration by Frank R. Paul (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of the Estate of Frank R. Paul. (c) 1929
Stellar Publising Corp.)
Air Wonder Stories
Air Wonder Stories, March 1930 Published by Stellar Publishing Corp.
Cover illustration by Frank R. Paul (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of the Estate of Frank R. Paul. (c)
1930 Stellar Publising Corp.)
Air Wonder Stories
Air Wonder Stories, Nov. 1929 Published by Stellar Publishing Corp. Cover
illustration by Frank R. Paul (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of the Estate of Frank R. Paul. (c) 1929
Stellar Publising Corp.)
Air Wonder Stories
Air Wonder Stories, Sept. 1929 Published by Stellar Publishing Corp.
Cover illustration by Frank R. Paul (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of the Estate of Frank R. Paul. (c)
1929 Stellar Publising Corp.)
Amazing Stories
Amazing Stories, April 1926 Published by TSR, Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR,
Inc. (c) 1926 TSR, Inc.)
Amazing Stories
Amazing Stories, Sept. 1929 Published by TSR, Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR,
Inc. (c) 1929 TSR, Inc.)
Amazing Stories
Amazing Stories, May 1929 Published by TSR, Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR,
Inc. (c) 1929 TSR, Inc.)
Amazing Stories
Amazing Stories, Jan. 1929 Published by TSR, Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR,
Inc. (c) 1929 TSR, Inc.)
Astounding Science Fiction
Astounding Science Fiction, Jan. 1930 Published by Street & Smith
Publications (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1930 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., (c) renewed 1957
by Conde Nast Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of Dell
Magazines, Inc. All rights reserved.)
Astounding Science Fiction
Astounding Science Fiction, April 1930 Published by Street & Smith
Publications (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1930 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., (c) renewed 1957

by Conde Nast Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of Dell
Magazines, Inc. All rights reserved.)
Astounding Science Fiction
Astounding Science Fiction, Sept. 1934 Published by Street & Smith
Publications (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1934 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., (c) renewed 1961
by Conde Nast Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of Dell
Magazines, Inc. All rights reserved.)
Astounding Science Fiction
Astounding Science Fiction, June 1936 Published by Street & Smith
Publications (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1936 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., (c) renewed 1963
by Conde Nast Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of Dell
Magazines, Inc. All rights reserved.)
Astounding Science Fiction
Astounding Science Fiction, Sept. 1941 Published by Street & Smith
Publications (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1941 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., (c) renewed 1968
by Conde Nast Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of Dell
Magazines, Inc. All rights reserved)
Astounding Science Fiction
Astounding Science Fiction, Aug. 1942 Published by Street & Smith
Publications (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1942 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., (c) renewed 1969
by Conde Nast Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of Dell
Magazines, Inc. All rights reserved)
Astounding Science Fiction
Astounding Science Fiction, Feb. 1940 Published by Street & Smith
Publications (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1940 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., (c) renewed 1967
by Conde Nast Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of Dell
Magazines, Inc. All rights reserved)
Astounding Science Fiction
Astounding Science Fiction, Jan. 1944 Published by Street & Smith
Publications (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1944 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., (c) renewed 1971
by Conde Nast Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of Dell
Magazines, Inc. All rights reserved)
Amazing Stories
Amazing Stories, Nov. 1928 Published by TSR, Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR,
Inc. (c) 1928 TSR, Inc.)
Amazing Stories
Amazing Stories, Aug. 1927 Published by TSR, Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR,
Inc. (c) 1927 TSR, Inc.)

Amazing Stories
Amazing Stories, Aug. 1928 Published by TSR, Inc. Cover illustration by
Robert Gibson Jones (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR, Inc. (c) 1928 TSR, Inc.)
Amazing Stories
Amazing Stories, Sept., 1928 Published by TSR, Inc. Cover illustration by
Robert Gibson Jones (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR, Inc. (c) 1928 TSR, Inc.)
Astounding Science Fiction
Astounding Science Fiction, April 1942 Published by Street & Smith
Publications (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1942 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., (c) renewed 1969
by Conde Nast Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of Dell
Magazines, Inc. All rights reserved)
Absolute Magnitude
Absolute Magnitude, Spring 1995 / No.2 Published by DNA Publications
(M.M. Kavanagh. Cover: Bob Eggleton. Reprinted with permission of DNA
Publications. (c) DNA Publications)
Analog Science Fiction Science Fact
Analog Science Fiction Science Fact, April 1972 Published by Conde Nast
Publications (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Dell Magazines, Inc. All rights
reserved (c) 1972 by Conde Nast Publications, Inc., reprinted by
permission of Dell Magazines, Inc. All rights reserved.)
Amazing Stories
Amazing Stories, Sept. 1972 Published by TSR, Inc. Cover illustration by
Robert Gibson Jones (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR, Inc. (c) 1972 TSR, Inc.)
Amazing Stories
Amazing Stories, Nov. 1927 Published by TSR, Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR,
Inc. (c) 1927 TSR, Inc.)
Amazing Stories
Amazing Stories, Oct. 1927 Published by TSR, Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR,
Inc. (c) 1927 TSR, Inc.)
Amazing Stories
Amazing Stories, June 1927 Published by TSR, Inc. Cover illustration by
Robert Gibson Jones (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR, Inc. (c) 1927 TSR, Inc.)
Air Wonder Stories
Air Wonder Stories, April 1930 Published by Stellar Publishing Corp.
Cover illustration by Frank R. Paul (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of the Estate of Frank R. Paul. (c)
1930 Stellar Publising Corp.)

Air Wonder Stories
Air Wonder Stories, May 1930 Published by Stellar Publishing Corp. Cover
illustration by Frank R. Paul (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of the Estate of Frank R. Paul. (c) 1930
Stellar Publising Corp.)
Amazing Stories
Amazing Stories, June 1926 Published by TSR, Inc. Cover illustration by
Robert Gibson Jones (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR, Inc. (c) 1926 TSR, Inc.)
Allen, Roger MacBride
Roger MacBride Allen (1957- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Anderson, Poul
Poul Anderson (1926- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Anthony, Piers
Piers Anthony (1934- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Adams, Douglas
Douglas Adams (1952- ) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)
Asimov, Isaac
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Aldiss, Brian W.
Brian W. Aldiss (1925- ) (Marisa D'Alessandro. (c) 1995 Marisa
D'Alessandro)
Astounding Science Fiction
Astounding Science Fiction, Aug. 1947 Published by Street & Smith
Publications (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1947 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., (c) renewed 1974
by Conde Nast Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of Dell
Magazines, Inc. All rights reserved)
Astounding Science Fiction
Astounding Science Fiction, Jan. 1950 Published by Street & Smith
Publications (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1950 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., (c) renewed 1977
by Conde Nast Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of Dell
Magazines, Inc. All rights reserved)
Aldiss, Brian (Helliconia Spring)
Brian Aldiss creates the seasons for Helliconia Spring. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Aldiss, Brian (Helliconia Spring)
Brian Aldiss creates the seasons for Helliconia Spring. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Asimov, Isaac (Preparing for the Future)
Isaac Asimov discusses how we have to gamble on the ability of technology
to solve problems - we have no other choice. ( (c) Grolier Electronic

Publishing, Inc.)
Asimov, Isaac (Preparing for the Future)
Isaac Asimov discusses how we have to gamble on the ability of technology
to solve problems - we have no other choice. ( (c) Grolier Electronic
Publishing, Inc.)
Aliens
The recipe for creating an Alien: bells, whistles, and Hubert Humphrey. (
(c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Artificial Intelligence
What will happen when machines are smarter than we are? SF writers
discuss the pitfalls of creating machines with superior intelligence. (
(c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Astounding Science Fiction
Astounding Science Fiction, Oct. 1940 Published by Street & Smith
Publications (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1940 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., (c) renewed 1967
by Conde Nast Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of Dell
Magazines, Inc. All rights reserved)
Auel, Jean M.
Jean M. Auel (1936- ) (John Emmerling. (c) 1985 John Emmerling)
Attack of the Crab Monsters
Despite being made cheaply by Roger Corman, Attack of the Crab Monsters
(Los Altos/Allied Artists, 1957) is one of the best of the many 1950s
movies to deal with the giant vermin created by atomic bomb tests. (Ronald
V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
Alphaville
Despite its talk of intergalactic secret agents and supercomputers,
Jean-Luc Godard's film,Alphaville (Pathe-contemporary/Chaumiane-Film,
1965), is only nominally science fiction. Its New Wave combination of film
genres- film noir and crime elements are as prominent as the SF onesoperate in service of an allegory about modern life. As such, it has more
in common with Godard's later film,Weekend, than with any other movie
about interstellar intrigue. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
Attack of the 50-ft. Woman
The poster for the original version ofAttack of the 50-ft. Woman (Allied
Artists, 1958) may be the best thing about the film, although some have
seen positive value in its potential as a metaphor for female empowerment.
(Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
Aelita
The Queen of Mars, caught in a sportive mood, looks rather like a flapper
in Aelita (Mezhrabpom, 1924). The Expressionist set style is here clearly
apparent and is said to have influenced the design of the Flash Gordon
series. (The Everett Collection, Inc. )
Astounding Science Fiction
Astounding Science Fiction, June 1932 Published by Street & Smith

Publications (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1932 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., (c) renewed 1959
by Conde Nast Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of Dell
Magazines, Inc. All rights reserved)
Acknowledgments
From The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute and Peter Nicholls,
eds.We must first thank all the contributors, to both the first edition
and the current edition. We thank especially our Contributing Editor,
Brian Stableford, whose influence extended far beyond the 200,000 words
signed with his initials, for his tasks included a severe examination of
the entire text for errors of fact and critical blunders. We thank our
Technical Editor, Paul Barnett, whose logistic and computer skills brought
this book into publishable shape, and whose editing skills importantly
influenced its language and form. We thank our proof-reader, Lydia
Darbyshire, a model of meticulousness whose examination of data for
consistency was itself tantamount to a critical reading of the text. We
thank also all those sf authors and critics who took the time to fill out
a questionnaire or otherwise provided us with vital information. We also
thank John Jarrold, the original commissioner of this volume.It is not
possible individually to thank all those who helped in other ways, for the
list would contain some hundreds of names. It goes without saying that we
remain grateful to all those we thanked in the preface to the first
edition, and we do not repeat their names here. Of the large number who
helped us with the current edition, there are some in particular whose
extensive help we must comment on. Neil Barron, whose reference books were
among those we most often consulted, provided us with much other
information and with constant encouragement. Everett F. Bleiler, who read
critically many parts of the encyclopedia that pertained to his areas of
particular expertise, generously contributed to it - out of his deep love
for the subject - several substantial entries on early sf and sf writers.
His son, Richard Bleiler, also altruistically contributed advice and
entries, as did Professor I.F. Clarke. Judith Clute kept John Clute alive,
while painting in the next room. Clare Coney (Nicholls) provided not only
support well beyond the call of wifely duty but also considerable
editorial assistance. J. Fisher provided much biographical data on
authors, along with other suggestions. Hal W. Hall generously provided
research materials. Steve Holland helped us make sense of the bibliography
of 1950s sf in the UK. Roz Kaveney commented on hundreds of author entries
as they were drafted, and then read the manuscript. David Langford gave
essential computer advice and help, made many suggestions throughout, and
read the manuscript. Helen Nicholls understood her brother and her friend.
Robert Reginald, author of the basic and essential checklist of sf
literature from 1700 to 1974 (see below), made available successive drafts
of his 1975-1991 supplement (now just published), and we supplied him in
turn with final drafts of this encyclopedia. John Clute read and
criticized the checklist; Reginald did the same for the encyclopedia. We
are all hoping that both books show the benefits of this sharing of
resources.Others whose help was substantial (often in locating
hard-to-find data, and in setting us right on first-edition errors)
include Paul Alkon, Brian Ameringen, Mike Ashley, Nick Austin, John

Betancourt, Jenny Blackford, Damien Broderick, John F. Carr, T.G.
Cockcroft, Michael Rice Colpitts, Ian Covell, Richard Dalby, John Dallman,
John Davey, Joyce Day, Jane Donawerth, Nann du Sautoy, John Eggeling, Alex
Eisenstein, Alan C. Elms, Brian Forte, Andrew Fraknoi, D. Douglas Fratz,
Neil Gaiman, Martin Gardner, C.N. Gilmore, Mark Goldberg, Paul Gravett,
Scott Green, the Reverend Ron Grossman, Rob Hansen, David Hartwell,
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Richard J. Hooton, Maxim Jakubowski, Laurence M.
Janifer, Don Keller, David Ketterer, Michael Klossner, Justin Knowles,
Eleanor Lang, Anthony R. Lewis, Duncan Lunan, Kerzin Alexey Lvovich,
Patrick McGuire, Murray MacLachlan, Sean McMullen, Barry N. Malzberg, Lee
Mendham, Walter E. Meyers, Chris Morgan, Caroline Mullan, Alan Myers, Kim
Newman, John C. Nine, Jaroslav Olsa jr, Jan O'Nale, Bernie Peek, Dominique
Petitfaux, Andrew Porter, David Pringle, Jenny Randles, Kim Stanley
Robinson, Roger Robinson, Cornel Robu, Yvonne Rousseau, Darrell
Schweitzer, the Science Fiction Foundation, A. Langley Searles, Efim Shur,
Cyril Simsa, John Sladek, John B. Spencer, Phil Stephensen-Payne, Darko
Suvin, Braulio Tavares, Sheldon Teitelbaum, Ron Tiner, Igor Tolokonnikov,
Ian Watson, Bob Wayne, Janeen Webb, Andrew Wille, Madawc Williams, G.
Peter Winnington, and Zoran Zivkovic.In the first edition it was still
possible to acknowledge individually the reference books that formed the
basis of our research library. There are now too many, though perhaps we
can select a few which were of special and continuous use: Neil Barron's
Anatomy of Wonder, Fantasy Literature and Horror Literature; Everett F.
Bleiler's Science Fiction: The Early Years; the annual sf/fantasy
bibliographies edited by Charles N. Brown and William G. Contento for
Locus Press; Thomas D. Clareson's Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s;
the sf and fantasy book-review annuals compiled by Robert A. Collins and
Robert Latham; William G. Contento's indexes to sf anthologies and
collections; L.W. Currey's Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors: A
Bibliography of First Printings of their Fiction; Donald B. Day's Index to
the Science Fiction Magazines 1926-50; Hal W. Hall's various guides to sf
book reviews and research papers; Phil Hardy's The Aurum Film
Encyclopedia: Science Fiction; George Locke's A Spectrum of Fantasy; the
NESFA sf-magazine indexes covering publications subsequent to 1965; Robert
Reginald's Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature: A Checklist, 1700-1974
and Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, 1975-1991; Erwin S. Strauss's
Index to the S-F Magazines, 1951-65; Darko Suvin's Victorian Science
Fiction in the UK; Donald H. Tuck's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and
Fantasy through 1968; Marshall B. Tymn's and Mike Ashley's Science
Fiction, Fantasy and Weird Fiction Magazines; the two volumes of Bill
Warren's Keep Watching the Skies; Robert Weinberg's A Biographical
Dictionary of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists.We end by issuing a
conventional but heartfelt apology and thanks to all those others who have
helped and have not appeared on the above lists.John Clute and Peter
Nicholls
Atterley's Voyage to the Moon
In A Voyage to the Moon, a scientifically detailed and rationalized
account of a trip to the Moon, Joseph ATTERLEY invents the idea of
antigravity propulsion.

Abbott's Flatland
Edwin Abbott's novel, FLATLAND: A ROMANCE OF MANY DIMENSIONS, is short on
plot but playfully dramatizes mathematical concepts in a manner that
remains readable today.
Aerial bombardments foreseen
H.G. WELLS 's The War in the Air foresaw a ruinous world WAR, involving
aerial bombardments and guerilla warfare.
Amazing Stories founded
Hugo GERNSBACK, always more interested in science than in fiction, had
earlier edited Modern Electrics before launching his brainchild, Amazing
Stories. Gernsback coined the term "scientifiction" to describe the tale
of future science he wanted to publish.See Also: DEFINITIONS OF SF.
Ace Specials series
Terry CARR convinced ACE Books to allow him to edit a line of ambitious,
attractively packaged SF novels; the Ace Specials included some of the
best American SF of the late Sixties.
Asimov's first robot story
Isaac ASIMOVpublishes" Reason", his first ROBOTstory, at the age of
twenty. Its title suggests Asimov's rationalistic approach to a lurid
genre theme.
Asimov 's Nightfall
Isaac ASIMOV was only twenty-one when he published this story in
Astounding Science Fiction. It has become one of the most famous stories
in modern science fiction.See Also: Nightfall by Robert SILVERBERG.
Asimov 's Foundation
Published as a series of novelettes and short novels throughout the
1940s, Isaac ASIMOV's FOUNDATION series became a trilogy upon book
publication a decade later.See Also: GALACTIC EMPIRES; HISTORY.
Ace Books founded
Famous for its Doubles, ACE BOOKS never possessed the prestige of
Ballantine or Bantam, but published a large number of important books in
the fifties and sixties.
Anderson's Brain Wave
Poul ANDERSON's early novel about a change that increases the
intelligence of every creature on Earth is a sensitive and persuasively
understated novel.
Anderson's Call Me Joe
Poul ANDERSON's early novella shows his characteristic strengths in
developing character, setting, and narrative, and it anticipates his later
long stories.
Aldiss's Greybeard
A melancholy, meditative post-holocaust novel, GREYBEARD has never been
greatly popular in the US, but may be Brian ALDISS's finest novel.
Ace Specials series

Terry CARR convinced ACE Books to allow him to edit a line of ambitious,
attractively packaged SF novels; the Ace Specials included some of the
best American SF of the late Sixties.
Asimov's The Gods Themselves
"THE GODS THEMSELVES", Isaac ASIMOV's first novel in sixteen years was a
major event in 1972. Its imaginative virtuosity surprised many readers,
and it won the NEBULA and the HUGO Awards.
Asimov's The Bicentennial Man
This is certainly the finest piece of short fiction Isaac ASIMOV wrote
after the 1950s. It won numerous awards and has been widely reprinted.
Asimov's SF Magazine
As GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION was dying, ISAAC ASIMOV'SSCIENCE FICTION
MAGAZINE rose to replace it, becoming the most consistent and reliable SF
magazine of the 1980s.
Alien
ALIEN opens, creating an audience for a darker, high-tech SF film than
those of George LUCAS and Steven SPIELBERG.See Also: CINEMA.
Aldiss's Helliconia Spring
Brian ALDISS's most substantial effort in world-building, the HELLICONIA
trilogy was a British best-seller and an imaginative triumph.See Also:
PLANETARY ROMANCE.
Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
Known primarily as a contemporary novelist and poet, Margaret ATWOOD
produced THE HANDMAID'S TALE, a genuine SF DYSTOPIA of religious
fanaticism. The book became the basis of the 1990 film of the same name.
A. Merrit's Fantasy Magazine
A. Merrit's Fantasy Magazine, Dec. 1949 / Vol. 1, No. 1 Published by
Recreational Reading, Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Argosy Communications, Inc.
(c) 1949 Recreational Reading, Inc.)
Archer's Goon
Archer's Goon by Diana Wynne Jones Cover: Berkley, 1987 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1987 The
Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Babel-17
DELANY, SAMUEL R(AY)( Ace, 1966)An unorthodox heroine must come to terms
with an artificial language whose constraints on thought and behavior make
it an effective weapon of war. Clever, colorful, and highly original; it
updates and sophisticates the theme of Jack Vance's The Language of Pao.
Compare also Ian Watson's THE EMBEDDING. NW, 1966. See also LINGUISTICS
Bone Dance: A Fantasy for Technophiles
BULL, EMMA( Ace, 1991)Sparrow, a sexless, artificial person who makes a
living tracking down and selling videos and other aging technological

artifacts in punked-out, postnuclear war Minneapolis, accidentally becomes
involved with the Horsemen, U.S. government-developed secret agents
capable of entering the minds of others. In the past the Horsemen were
secretly used to destabilize foreign governments until their actions
triggered the nuclear war; now they serve other masters, and Sparrow,
simply having discovered their existence, is at risk. To complicate
matters, there is evidence that at least some of what's going on is
supernatural, rather than merely weird science. Bull's world is gritty,
well realized, and a lot of fun. For a variant on the possession motif,
see Pat Cadigan's Fools. See also HOLOCAUST AND AFTER
Bug Jack Barron
SPINRAD, NORMAN(Walker, 1969)A TV personality makes a powerful enemy when
he attacks a plutocrat who is trying to develop an immortality treatment.
Taboo-breaking in its day because of its sexual frankness and extravagant
cynicism; remains significant as an early examination of the growing media
and their manipulators. Compare Bruce Sterling's The Artificial Kid
(1980). See also MEDIA LANDSCAPE
Bring the Jubilee
MOORE, WARD(Farrar, 1953)With the possible exception of Sir Winston
Churchill's brilliant essay in If, or History Rewritten, this is far and
away the best story ever written on the theme of the South having won the
Civil War. Moore's fine historical sense led him to describe some perhaps
unexpected consequences; in a less affluent North the presidency is won
three times by William Jennings Bryan, and in a backlash against the
prewar antislavery movement the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union
veterans' organization, becomes a terrorist outfit like the Klan.
Imaginative rethinking of real history; highly recommended. (This
annotator, born and raised in Yankeeland, trembles at the thought of
"Johnston's terrible march to Boston"; serves us right, a staunch Southron
might reply.) See also ALTERNATE WORLDS
Behold the Man
MOORCOCK, MICHAEL(Allison & Busby, 1969)Expanded from a novella (Nebula
winner, 1967). The alienated hero travels back to the time of Christ in
the hope of enlightenment, but he finds Jesus grotesquely ill-fitted to
the role of messiah and must take his place. Darkly ironic; a fascinating
exercise in the PSYCHOLOGY of martyrdom. Compare Barry N. Malzberg's The
Cross of Fire.
Beggars and Choosers
KRESS, NANCY(Tor, 1994)The sequel to Kress's 1993 novel Beggars in Spain
continues the tale of the Sleepless, a strain of genetically altered
humans who need never sleep, and who consequently grow to adulthood
learning faster and better than normal humans. Their cognitive powers make
them virtual SUPERMEN, and the Sleepless outstrip their merely human
siblings in power and achievement, but at the price of provoking a
dangerous resentment. In Beggars and Choosers, set some years later,
humanity has become divided into various genetically-enhanced elites, some
of them scarcely human, and the "Livers"-the great mass of humanity, who
are unable to compete intellectually with these elites and exist in an

enormous restive welfare state. Kress's conscientious, sometimes earnest
prose explores the difficult issues honestly and without melodrama.
Compare Bruce Sterling's SCHISMATRIX and C. J. Cherryh's CYTEEN. (GF) See
also GENETIC ENGINEERING and INTELLIGENCE
Blood Music
BEAR, GREG(Arbor House, 1985)A genetic engineer conducts unauthorized
experiments that result in the creation of intelligent microorganisms.
Having infected himself, he becomes a "universe" of sentient cells, and
when his "disease" becomes epidemic the whole living world undergoes an
astonishing transformation. A brilliant novel, expanded from a novelette
(Hugo winner, 1984) that extends the SF imagination to new horizons.
Compare Arthur C. Clarke's CHILDHOOD'S END and A. A. Attanasio's Radix.
See also NANOTECHNOLOGY
Barrayar
BUJOLD, LOIS MCMASTER(Baen, 1991)Cordelia Naismith and Aral Vorkosigan
were once enemies in an interstellar war. Now a fragile peace has been
established and they're a married couple expecting their first child.
Cordelia, a liberated woman, is ill at ease among the more conservative,
less civilized people of Barrayar and, when her husband is named regent,
she realizes that she, Aral, and their unborn baby are in great danger.
Traditional SPACE OPERA at its very best. Bujold's highly competent first
novel, Shards of Honor (1986), details Cordelia and Aral's first meeting
in the midst of war. Compare C. J. Cherryh's Rimrunners and other novels.
Hugo winner, 1992
Burning Chrome
GIBSON, WILLIAM(Arbor, 1986)Ten short stories by the most innovative new
voice to enter the science fiction field in decades. Included here are
such superb short fictions as "Burning Chrome,""The Winter
Market,""Dogfight" (co-authored with Michael Swanwick), and "Hinterlands,"
as well as collaborations with Bruce Sterling and John Shirley. Several
are award nominees. Many of these stories are set in the sleazy, CYBERPUNK
future made famous in Gibson's novels. Compare Bruce Sterling's CRYSTAL
EXPRESS and Global Head (1992).
Beyond This Horizon
HEINLEIN, ROBERT A(NSON)(Fantasy, 1948)Originally in Astounding, 1942.
After society achieves an economy of abundance for all, what do people do
with their time? Especially, how fares the omnicompetent Heinlein hero,
who no longer has anything to challenge him? Themes that would occupy
Heinlein later on, such as the political pitfalls of human genetic
engineering, got a preliminary airing in this novel: also the existential
implications of mortality versus immortality (his tentative solution,
worked out in science fictional rather than occultish terms:
reincarnation). An important early work, toward which a later generation
of criticism has been unfairly condescending. See also UTOPIAS
Brightness Falls From the Air
TIPTREE, JAMES, JR. (pseud. of Alice Sheldon)(Tor, 1985)A thriller in
which a lonely outpost of galactic civilization is taken over by gangsters
while the debris of a nova comes ever closer. The violent oppression

recalls old sins committed and old hurts sustained by the human and alien
characters. Seemingly modeled on the 1948 film Key Largo. Compare C. J.
Cherryh's DOWNBELOW STATION . The Starry Rift (1986), although billed as a
sequel, is actually a collection of three novellas with the same
background, including "The Only Neat Thing to Do. See also SPACE HABITATS"
Brave New World
HUXLEY, ALDOUS (LEONARD)(Doubleday, 1932)A devastating criticism of the
kind of technological utopia outlined in J. B. S. Haldane's essay
"Daedalus; or, Science and the Future." Its principal images are well
established in the modern mythology of the future, and it remains the
definitive critique of the technologically supported "rational" society,
exposing the darker side of scientific humanism. It is a brilliant and
perceptive polemic, and the opposing side of the argument has found no
advocate of comparable eloquence. It stands alongside We and NINETEEN
EIGHTY-FOUR as one of the classic dystopian novels. Many of the concerns
of the novel were treated in a later nonfiction work, Brave New World
Revisited (1958). See also DYSTOPIAS
Best Science Fiction Stories of Brian W. Aldiss
ALDISS, BRIAN W(ILSON)(Faber, 1962)U.S. title: Who Can Replace a Man?
(Harcourt, 1966)Assembling these 16 stories (14 in the earlier editions,
22 in the latest), Aldiss confessed, made him "realise how rapidly change
moves," in SF as in everything else. The stories are arranged in a rough
chronological order which, the author comments, "seems to represent also
an order of complexity." From the straightforwardly told "Who Can Replace
a Man?" (included also in The Canopy of Time ) to the subtlety of "A Kind
of Artistry," or from the hero's anguish at his time-trapped predicament
in "Not For an Age," 1957, to the startlingly nonchalant outlook of a chap
in a somewhat comparable situation in "Man in His Time," 1966, the reader
will perceive the evolutionary process to which Aldiss referred; and yet,
a reader of a generation still further down the road from this book's
publication will find almost all of these stories fresh and
contemporary-sounding, regardless of when they were written.
Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede
DENTON, BRADLEY(Morrow, 1991)Oliver Vale, in his late twenties and not
terribly successful, has spent his entire life acutely aware that his
mother conceived him at the very moment in 1959 when rock star Buddy
Holly's plane crashed in lowa. Now, in 1989, the deceased Holly has
inexplicably begun to appear "live" on every TV set in the world.
Apparently broadcasting from one of Jupiter's moons, he informs the Earth
that Oliver is responsible for Holly's usurpation of the airwaves.
Needless to say, Vale soon ends up on the run, pursued by the police,
angry neighbors, secret agents, his therapist, a cyborg doberman named
Ringo, and some very strange aliens. This is gonzo, ABSURDIST fiction at
its best. For similar delights compare John Kessel's GOOD NEWS FROM OUTER
SPACE .
Beyond Fantasy Fiction
Beyond Fantasy Fiction, July 1953 Published by Galaxy Publishing Corp.
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Galaxy

Publishing Corporation. (c) 1953 Galaxy Publishing Corporation)
Beyond Infinity
Beyond Infinity, Dec. 1967 Published by I.D. Publications, Inc. (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. I.D. Publications,
Inc. (c) 1967 I.D. Publications, Inc.)
Battle of London, The
The Battle of London by Hugh Addison Cover: Herbert Jenkins Ltd., 1924
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Random House UK Limited. (c) 1924 Herbert Jenkins Ltd.)
Black Oxen
Black Oxen by Gertrude Atherton Cover: Al Burt Co., 1923 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Al Burt Co. (c) 1923 Al Burt
Co.)
Bison of Clay
Bison of Clay by Max Begouen Cover: Longmans, Green & Co., 1926 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Longman's, Green,
& Co. (c) 1926 Longmans, Green & Co.)
But Soft - We Are Observed!
But Soft - We Are Observed! by Hilaire Belloc Cover: Arrowsmith, 1928
illustration by G.K. Chesterton (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Arrowsmith. (c) 1928 Arrowsmith)
Beyond These Suns
Beyond These Suns by Rand LePage (William Henry Bird) Cover: Curtis
Warren Ltd., 1952 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Curtis Warren Ltd. (c) 1952 Curtis Warren Ltd.)
Battle of Dorking, The
The Battle of Dorking by George T. Chesney Cover: Wm. Blackwood and Sons,
1871 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. )
Benedict's Planet
Benedict's Planet by James Corley Cover: The Elmfield Press, 1976
illustration by Josh Kirby (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. The Elmfield Press (c) 1976 The Elmfield Press)
Babel-17
Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany Cover: Ace Books, 1966 (First Edition) (M.
M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. (c) 1966 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Book of the Damned, The
The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort Cover: Ace Books, 1964 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1964 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)

Barking Dogs
Barking Dogs by Terence Green Cover: St. Martin's Press, 1988 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Courtesy of St. Martin's Press. (c) 1988 St. Martin's Press)
Broken Worlds, The
The Broken Worlds by Raymond Harris Cover: Ace Books, 1986 illustration
by Ron Miller (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1986 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Binary Divine
Binary Divine by John Hartridge Cover: Doubleday, 1970 illustration by
Margo Herr (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1970 Doubleday & Co.)
Borrowed Time
Borrowed Time by Alan Hruska Cover: Dial Press, 1984 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.Used by Permission of
Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c)
1984 Dial Press)
Blake of the Rattlesnake
Blake of the Rattlesnake by Fred T. Jane Cover: Tower Publishing Co.,
Ltd., 1895 illustration by Fred T. Jane (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Blood Sport
Blood Sport by Robert F. Jones Cover: Dell, 1974 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Dell Books,
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1974 Dell
Books)
Brave Old World
Brave Old World by Hugh Kingsmill Cover: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1936 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
(c) 1936 Eyre & Spottis-Woode)
Blue Fairy Book, The
The Blue Fairy Book by Andrew Lang Cover: Airmont Publishing, 1969 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Airmont Publishing Co., Inc. - Airmont Books (c) 1969 Airmont Publishing
Company )
Brains of Helle, The
The Brains of Helle by Benfo Mistral (Norman A. Lazenby) Cover: Gannet
Press (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Gannet Press, London.)
By and By
By and By by Edward Maitland Cover: Richard Bentley & Son, 1873 (First

Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Richard Bently and Son, London )
Bridge, The
The Bridge by D. Keith Mano Cover: Doubleday, 1973 (First Edition)
illustration by Paul Bacon (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a divisionof Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1973 Doubleday)
Bedsitting Room, The
The Bedsitting Room by Spike Mulligan Cover: Tandem, 1970 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1970 Tandem)
Bettyann
Bettyann by Kris Neville Cover: Tower, 1970 (M. M. Kavanagh. Tower Books
(c) 1970 Tower Books)
By the Gods Beloved
By the Gods Beloved by Baroness Orczy Cover: Greening & Co., 1910 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Becoming Alien
Becoming Alien by Rebecca Ore Cover: TOR/Tom Doherty Associates (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1988 Tor Books)
Brain Twister
Brain Twister by Mark Phillips Cover: Pyramid, 1962 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1962 Pyramid Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Bugs
Bugs by Theodore Roszak Cover: Doubleday, 1983 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a
division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1983
Doubleday)
Bandersnatch
Bandersnatch by T.E. Ryves Cover: Grey Walls Press, 1950 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Grey Walls
Press (c) 1950 Grey Walls Press)
Book of Stier, The
The Book of Stier by Robin Sanborn Cover: Berkley, 1971 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1971 Berkley
Medallion. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Beyond the Great South Wall
Beyond the Great South Wall by Frank Savile Cover: Grosset & Dunlap, 1901
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )

Black No More
Black No More by George S. Schuyler Cover: Macauley Co., 1931 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Macauley Co. (c)
1931 Macauley Co.)
Blue Germ, The
The Blue Germ by Martin Swayne Cover: George H. Doran, 1918 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Beyond the Spectrum
Beyond the Spectrum by Martin Thomas Cover: Brown, Watson Ltd., 1964
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Brown
Watson Limited (c) 1964 Brown Watson Ltd.)
Bird of Time, The
The Bird of Time by Wallace West Cover: Ace Books (M. M. Kavanagh.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1959 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Breathing Space Only
Breathing Space Only by Wynne N. Whiteford Cover: Ace Books, 1986
illustration by Don Dickson (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1986 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Building of Venus Four, The
The Building of Venus Four by Calder Willingham Cover: Manor Books, 1977
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.Manor Books
(c) 1977 Manor Books)
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
Beneath the Planet of the Apes by Michael Avallone Cover: Bantam, 1970
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by
Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1970 Bantam Books)
Big Time, The
The Big Time by Fritz Leiber Cover: Ace Books, 1961 (First Edition) (M.
M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. (c) 1961 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Bloody Sun, The
The Bloody Sun by Marion Zimmer Bradley Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by Jack Gaughan (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1964 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Black Snow Days

Black Snow Days by Claudia O'Keefe Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by Kevin Jankauski (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1990 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Bone Dance
Bone Dance by Emma Bull Cover: Ace Books, 1991 (First Edition)
illustration by Jean Targete (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1991 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Believers' World
Believers' World by Robert A.W. Lowndes Cover: Avalon Books, 1961
illustration by Ed Emshwiller (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Thomas Bouregy & Co. - Avalon Books (c)
1961 Avalon Books)
Bug Jack Barron
Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad Cover: Avon Books, 1969 (First Edition)
illustration by Alex Gnideziejko (Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University
of Calif., Riverside. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1969 Avon
Books)
Bring the Jubilee
Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore Cover: Avon Books, 1972 (M. M. Kavanagh.
Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1972 Avon Books)
Behold the Man
Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock Cover: Avon Books, 1969 (First US
Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1969 Avon
Books)
Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, The
The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World by Harlan Ellison
Cover: Avon Books, 1969 (First Edition) illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon
(M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1969 Avon Books)
Book of Rack the Healer, The
The Book of Rack the Healer by Zach Hughes Cover: Award, 1972
illustration by Jack Gaughan (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Award Books (c) 1972 Award)
Burster
Burster by Michael Capobianco Cover: Bantam, 1990 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1990
Bantam Books)
Bander Snatch
Bander Snatch by Kevin O'Donnell Cover: Bantam, 1979 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1979

Bantam Books)
Best SF: 1969
Best SF: 1969 ed. by Harry Harrison Cover: Berkley, 1971 illustration by
Paul Lehr (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1971 The Berkley Publishing
Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Born of Man and Woman
Born of Man and Woman by Richard Matheson Cover: Chamberlein Press, 1954
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Chamberlain Press (c) 1954 Chamberlain Press)
Birthgrave, The
The Birthgrave by Tanith Lee Cover: DAW Books, 1975 (First Edition)
illustration by George Barr (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1975
DAW Books, Inc.)
Baphomet's Meteor
Baphomet's Meteor by Pierre Barbet Cover: DAW Books, 1972 (First US
Edition) illustration by Karel Thole (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with
permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1972 DAW Books, Inc.)
Body Snatchers, The
The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney Cover: Dell, 1955 illustration by John
McDermott (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Used by Permission of Dell Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1955 Dell Books)
Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica, The
The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica by John Calvin Batchelor
Cover: Dial Press (First Edition) illustration by Jack Ribik (M. M.
Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday
Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1983 Dial Press)
Big Eye, The
The Big Eye by Max Ehrlich Cover: Doubleday, 1949 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a
division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1949
Doubleday)
Black Alice
Black Alice by Thom Demijohn Cover: Doubleday (First Edition)
illustration by Virginia Fritz (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c)
1968 Doubleday)
Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction
Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction by Edward L. Ferman Cover:
Doubleday (First Edition) illustration by Peggy & Ronald Barnett (M. M.
Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday
Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1971 Doubleday)

Brave Little Toaster, The
The Brave Little Toaster by Thomas M. Disch Cover: Doubleday, 1986 (First
Edition) illustration by Karen Lee Schmidt (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by
Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1986 Doubleday)
Beloved Son
Beloved Son by George Turner Cover: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1978
illustration by Dave Griffiths (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Cover: Dave Griffiths. Courtesy of Faber and Faber Ltd.
(c) 1978 Faber and Faber Ltd.)
Big X, The
The Big X by Hank Searls Cover: Dell, 1959 illustration by Western
Printing and Lithographing Co. (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Dell Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1959 Dell Books)
Black Cloud, The
The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle Cover: Heinemann, 1957 illustration by
Desmond Skirrow (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1957 William Heinemann, Ltd. )
Black Roads, The
The Black Roads by Joe Hensley Cover: Laser Books, 1976 illustration by
Kelly Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Laser Books (c) 1976 Laser Books)
Blake's Progress
Blake's Progress by Ray Nelson Cover: Laser Books, 1975 illustration by
Kelly Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Laser Books (c) 1975 Laser Books)
Birthright
Birthright by Kathleen Sky Cover: Laser Books, 1975 illustration by Kelly
Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Laser
Books (c) 1975 Laser Books)
Before Adam
Before Adam by Jack London Cover: Bantam, 1970 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1970
Bantam Books)
Blind Spot, The
The Blind Spot by Austin Hall & Homer Eon Flint Cover: Prime Press, 1951
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Prime Press
(c) 1951 Prime Press)
Butterfly Kid, The
The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson Cover: Pyramid Books, 1967
illustration by Gray Morrow (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1967 Pyramid Books. Reproduction,

duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Black Flame, The
The Black Flame by Stanley Weinbaum Cover: Fantasy Press, 1948 (First
Edition) illustration by A.J. Donnell (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Fantasy Press (c) 1948 Fantasy Press)
Bedbug, The
The Bedbug by Vladimir Mayakovsky Cover: World Publishing Co. (First
Edition) illustration by Elaine Lustig (M. M. Kavanagh. World Publishing
Co. (c) 1960 World Publishing Co.)
Beggars and Choosers
Beggars and Choosers by Nancy Kress Cover: TOR, 1994 (First Edition)
illustration by David Richeid (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of
Tor Books. (c) 1994 Tor Books)
Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede
Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede by Bradley Denton Cover:
William Morrow & Co. (First Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by permission
of William Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) 1991 William Morrow & Co., Inc.)
Boat of a Million Years, The
The Boat of a Million Years by Poul Anderson Cover: TOR, 1989 (First
Edition) illustration by Vincent Di Fate (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
permission of Tor Books. (c) 1989 Tor Books)
Blood Music
Blood Music by Greg Bear Cover: Ace Books, 1986 illustration by Don
Brautigam (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1986 Ace Books. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Barrayar
Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold Cover: Baen Books, 1991 (First Edition)
illustration by Stephen Hickman (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission
of BAEN PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c) 1991 Baen Books)
Best of Avram Davidson, The
The Best of Avram Davidson by Avram Davidson Cover: Doubleday, 1979
(First Edition) illustration by Roger Zimmerman (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by
Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1979 Doubleday)
Burning Chrome
Burning Chrome by William Gibson Cover: Arbor House, 1986 (First US
Edition) illustration by Rich O'Donnell (M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by
permission of William Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) 1986 Arbor House)
Best of C.M. Kornbluth, The
The Best of C.M. Kornbluth by Cyril M. Kornbluth Cover: Science Fiction
Book Club, 1978 illustration by Gary Viskupic (M. M. Kavanagh. Jacket:
Gary Viskupic. Reprinted with permission of Doubleday Book and Music

Clubs, Inc. (c) 1978 Doubleday Book & Music Clubs, Inc.)
Brightness Falls from the Air
Brightness Falls from the Air by James Tiptree Cover: Orb, 1993
illustration by Joe Bergeron (M. M. Kavanagh. (c) 1993 Orb)
Best SF Stories of Brian Aldiss
Best SF Stories of Brian Aldiss by Brian W. Aldiss Cover: Faber and Faber
Ltd., 1972 illustration by Bridget Riley (M. M. Kavanagh. Cover: Bridget
Riley. Courtesy of Faber and Faber Ltd. (c) 1972 Faber and Faber Ltd.)
Butler, Octavia Estelle
Octavia Estelle Butler (1947- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Brin, David
David Brin (1950- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Bujold, Lois McMaster
Lois McMaster Bujold (1949- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Bonanno, Margaret Wander
Margaret Wander Bonanno (1950- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Bova, Ben
Ben Bova (1932- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Bradley, Marion Zimmer
Marion Zimmer Bradley (1930- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Brust, Steven
Steven Brust (1955- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Bryant, Edward
Edward Bryant (1945- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Budrys, Algis
Algis Budrys (1931- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Benford, Gregory
Gregory Benford (1941- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Bear, Greg
Greg Bear (1951- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Barnes, John
John Barnes (1957- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Bishop, Michael
Michael Bishop (1945- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Bisson, Terry
Terry Bisson (1942- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Borges, Jorge Luis
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) ( Bettmann. )
Bradfield, Scott
Scott Bradfield (1955- ) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)

Ballard, J.G.
J.G. Ballard (1930- ) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)
Banks, Iain M.
Iain M. Banks (1954- ) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)
Burroughs, Edgar Rice
Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) ( Bettmann. )
Blish, James
James Blish (1921-1975) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Bester, Alfred
Alfred Bester (1913-1987) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Brackett, Leigh
Leigh Brackett (1915-1978) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Butler, Jack
Jack Butler (1944- ) (Bill Parsons (c) 1995 Bill Parsons)
Bradbury, Ray
Ray Bradbury (1920- ) (Tony Hauser. (c) 1995 Tony Hauser)
Barnes, Steven (On Virtual Reality)
Steven Barnes discusses Virtual Reality: the Pros and Cons. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Barnes, Steven (On Virtual Reality)
Steven Barnes discusses Virtual Reality: the Pros and Cons. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Bear, Greg (About Viruses)
Greg Bear discusses the mysteries and complexities of the virus - and the
challenges viruses will supply for technology of the future. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Bear, Greg (About Viruses)
Greg Bear discusses the mysteries and complexities of the virus - and the
challenges viruses will supply for technology of the future. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Benford, Gregory (The Feel of the Future)
Gregory Benford on creating the "feel of the future" with words. ( (c)
Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Benford, Gregory (The Feel of the Future)
Gregory Benford on creating the "feel of the future" with words. ( (c)
Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Bishop, Michael (No Enemy But Time)
Michael Bishop and his attempt to dramatize the Origin of Species. ( (c)
Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Bishop, Michael (No Enemy But Time)
Michael Bishop and his attempt to dramatize the Origin of Species. ( (c)
Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)

Brin, David (On Survivalists)
David Brin warns those who yearn for the Fall: it's not a Macho thing. (
(c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Brin, David (On Survivalists)
David Brin warns those who yearn for the Fall: it's not a Macho thing. (
(c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Brunner (Why SF?)
John Brunner discusses the influence of War on his imagination. ( (c)
Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Brunner (Why SF?)
John Brunner discusses the influence of War on his imagination. ( (c)
Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Bujold, Lois McMaster (Falling Free)
Lois McMaster Bujold discusses her novel, Falling Free. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Bujold, Lois McMaster (Falling Free)
Lois McMaster Bujold discusses her novel, Falling Free. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Baxter, Stephen
Stephen Baxter (1957- ) (Sandra Shepard. (c) 1995 Sandra Shepherd)
Beaumont, Charles
Charles Beaumont (1929-1967) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I.
Porter)
Busby, F.M.
F.M. Busby (1921- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Ballantine, Ian
Ian Ballantine (1916-1995) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Barnes, Steven
Steven Barnes (1952- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Bretnor, Reginald
Reginald Bretnor (1911-1992) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I.
Porter)
Brunner, John
John Brunner (1934- ) (Rick Hawes. (c) 1995 Rick Hawes)
Bischoff, David F.
David F. Bischoff (1951- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Barbarella
Roger Vadim's film version of the French comic strip Barbarella (De
Laurentiis-Marianne/Paramount, 1968) was, by modern standards, definitely
not politically correct, but its visual splendor and its self-conscious
1960s sexual daring gives it a sense of freshness and charm. (Ronald V.
Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
Yet another film about enormous monsters created or roused by atomic
testing, Eugene Lourie's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Mutual
Pictures/Warner Brothers, 1953) turned Ray Bradbury's story "The Foghorn"
into a fairly standard monster movie, involving a dinosaur that attacks
New York. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
The Bride of Frankenstein
James Whale's sequel to his 1931 Frankenstein is one of the finest of all
science fiction movies. Many believe that The Bride of Frankenstein
(Universal, 1935) surpasses its predecessor - to say nothing of its
innumerable sequels - in pathos, thrills, and terror. (Ronald V.
Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
Buck Rogers
The movie serial of Buck Rogers (Universal, 1939) duplicated the success
of Universal's two Flash Gordon serials, which also starred Larry
("Buster") Crabbe. The design of both series owes something to the cover
paintings of SF pulp magazines. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters.
)
Buck Rogers
The movie serials of the Thirties and Forties appeared in installments
that were only ten to fifteen minutes long, and each episode required at
least one action scene. Movies like Buck Rogers (Universal, 1939) had
quite a frenetic pace. (Courtesy of Crystal Pictures, Inc. (c) Crystal
Pictures, Inc.)
Bilderdijk's A Short Account
Willem BILDERDIJK's A Short Account of a Remarkable Aerial Voyage and
Discovery of a New Planet is the story of a balloonist's inadvertent
voyage to a small satellite. It is perhaps the key transitional work
between earlier FANTASTIC VOYAGES and later SF.
Bellamy's Looking Backward
Edward BELLAMY's Looking Backward, 2000-1887, is a tour of the UTOPIAN
society of the future. Although it is almost devoid of drama, it was one
of the most famous novels of the future during the nineteenth century.
Burroughs's Tarzan
Serialized in 1912, then published in book form in 1914, Edgar Rice
BURROUGHS'sTARZAN OF THE APES has been enormously influential in both SF
and fantasy literature, although it is not strictly Science Fiction.
Burroughs's A Princess of Mars
Second in popularity only to Tarzan, Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's 1912 serial,
A PRINCESS OF MARS (published in book form five years later),
singlehandedly created the fictional romance of MARS.
Buck Rogers comic born
Based on the magazine serial, Armageddon 2419 AD," BUCK ROGERS in the
Twenty-Fifth Century" first appeared as an American comic strip in 1929,
where it continued for nearly forty years. A movie serial, a TV series,

and a feature film eventually followed.
Bantam Books founded
Ian BALLANTINE, who had earlier imported Penguin Books into the US during
World War II, believed in paperbacks. He founded BANTAM Books as a source
of inexpensive reprints.
Brown's What Mad Universe
Fredric BROWN's novel, WHAT MAD UNIVERSE, is one of the very first comic
SF novels, and still one of the best. He is best known for his mystery
novels and very short SF stories.See Also: ALTERNATE WORLDS.
Bradbury 's Martian Chronicles
Ray BRADBURY's cycle of stories in THE MARTIAN CHRONICLESdeal more with
the MARS of the early pulp magazines than the Mars known to astronomers by
1950. The stories still generate a powerful sense of romantic nostalgia.
Blish's Okie
James BLISH's stories of the flying cities - called the Okie stories in
magazines, and CITIES IN FLIGHT upon book publication - combined pulp
style with rigor and intelligence.
Ballantine Books founded
Ian Ballantine had earlier founded Bantam Books, but wanted to create a
paperback company that emphasized originals rather than reprints.
BALLANTINE Books was the result.
Blish's Surface Tension
James BLISH's sequel to his early and little-known "Sunken Universe"
remains a classic of science fiction. In it, microscopic humans pilot an
inch-long spaceship between two puddles.
Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder
Ray BRADBURY's slick and expert TIME TRAVEL story was published in both
Collier's and Playboy before being reprinted by an SF magazine, and so it
reached a very wide audience.
Beginning of Scientology
L. Ron HUBBARD breaks with DIANETIC Foundation, and founds the Church of
SCIENTOLOGY. Incorporated in 1955, the Church of Scientology soon had
adherents all over the world.
Blish's attack on McCarthy
James BLISH's 1954 story, "At Death's End", contained a portrait of a
demagogic politician clearly based on Senator Joseph McCarthy; the 1956
novel version, They Shall Have Stars, intensified Blish's attack.See Also:
HISTORY.
Blish 's A Case of Conscience
Based on his 1953 novella, James BLISH's theological SF novel, A CASE OF
CONSCIENCE, was one of the most sophisticated and moving SF novels of the
fifties, and won the HUGO Award.
Budrys's Rogue Moon
The culminating novel of Algis BUDRYS's first period, an allusive and

sophisticated novel that many readers regard as a classic.
Ballard's The Voices of Time
The first of J.G. BALLARD's stories to dramatize the themes of ENTROPY,
natural DISASTER, and surrender to strangeness that will preoccupy him for
the rest of the decade.
Burgess's A Clockwork Orange
Anthony BURGESS's dark SF novel, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, was best-known for
the radical argot of its narrator; it was the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film
that gained notoriety for its violence.See Also: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.
Ballard's condensed novels
The first of J.G. Ballard's condensed novels, You and Me and the
Continuum, baffled and irritated conservative readers. It eventually
appeared as part of The Atrocity Exhibition.
Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar
John BRUNNER's ambitious novel of the overpopulated 21st century adopted
a range of stylistic techniques from John Dos Passos, but STAND ON
ZANZIBAR achieved its own vision and voice.See Also: DYSTOPIAS.
Benford's Timescape
TIMESCAPE, Gregory BENFORD's novel of tachyon research, near-future
ecological catastrophe, and alternate time streams is perhaps the most
credible time travel novel ever published.See Also: SCIENTISTS.
Blade Runner opens
The Ridley SCOTT film," BLADE RUNNER", opens and William GIBSON publishes
"Burning Chrome", two important works in the developing CYBERPUNK
sensibility.See Also: CINEMA.
Bear's Blood Music
An early story of nanometer-scale engineering, Greg BEAR's BLOOD MUSIC
presages science fiction's great interest in NANOTECHNOLOGY.See Also:
GENETIC ENGINEERING.
Brin's Startide Rising
David BRIN's second novel, STARTIDE RISING, wins both the NEBULA and HUGO
Awards, and his Uplift series becomes enormously popular.
Bantam launches Spectra
BANTAM's science fiction line, revived in 1983, is christened Bantam
Spectra and launched with hoopla. It will be one of the most influential
SF book publishers of the decade.
Bisson's Bears Discover Fire
Hailed as one of the finest SF short stories in many years, "Bears
Discover Fire" won the NEBULA and HUGO Awards, and became the title story
to Terry BISSON's first collection.
Birth of the Paperback
Although American science fiction had been almost entirely a magazine
genre in its first twenty years, the development of the paperback after
World War II provided an enormous new market for the field. BALLANTINE

BOOKS, founded in 1952, specialized in science fiction; and ACE BOOKS,
founded a year later, published SF almost exclusively. The creation of
small presses to reprint science fiction serials in the late forties, and
the formation of the SCIENCE FICTION BOOK CLUB in the early fifties,
confirmed SF’s trend away from the magazines and into book form.
Childhood's End
CLARKE, ARTHUR C(HARLES)(Ballantine, 1953)Earth, on the verge of nuclear
Mutual Assured Destruction, is saved by the intervention of benevolent
aliens who have the form of traditional devils. A calm interregnum
prepares the way for the last generation of children, who are telepaths.
The adults left behind watch helplessly as the children, outgrowing them
as no young generation ever has before, rise up and merge with the
spiritual powers of the cosmos. The influence of Olaf Stapledon, who was
as formative for Clarke's generation of SF writers, at least in the United
Kingdom, as H. G. Wells, is patent. The pedestrian, at times downright
static, pace of the novel has apparently not interfered with its immense
popularity. Perhaps it has been received not as a story but rather as a
scripture: Fallible humanity can't make it without transcendent help. If
so, that says a lot about the audience for early nuclear age SF, which
would have upset that era's for the most part quite hard-headed writers.
See also CHILDREN IN SF and ESCHATOLOGY
City
SIMAK, CLIFFORD D(ONALD)(Gnome, 1952)Eight quietly told stories from
Astounding, 1944 to 1951, which describe the decline and disappearance of
humanity once it abandons its most characteristic habitat, the city. Some
of the more venturesome leave civilization to imprint their psyches on
wild, non-tool-using animals native to Jupiter ("Desertion"); others
retreat to automated estates, as in "Huddling Place," a locale that recurs
in later stories, run by an ageless robot butler named Jenkins and
inhabited by sentient, peaceable dogs who are taking over humans'
erstwhile role of planetary custodians. (Meanwhile the ants, also evolved
into sentience, pursue bizarre and incomprehensible goals of their own.)
In book form, the stories are framed as "legends," told around campfires
by the dogs, who politely debate whether humans in fact ever existed. A
haunting, elegiac tale, diametrically opposed to the "can do" spirit of
most Golden Age SF. An additional story, "Epilog," was added for a later
edition (Ace, 1981). A major work, which in 1953 won the International
Fantasy Award. See also PASTORAL
Camp Concentration
DISCH, THOMAS M(ICHAEL)(Hart-Davis, 1968) A political prisoner is a
guinea pig in an experiment that uses a syphilis-related spirochete to
boost IQ to unparalleled levels. The author boldly presents the story as
first-person narrative and carries it off brilliantly. A key work of
avant-garde SF, written with its serialization in New Worlds in mind.
Compare Daniel Keyes's FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON. See also INTELLIGENCE
Cosmicomics
CALVINO, ITALO(Harcourt, 1968)Trans. by William Weaver of Le Cosmicomiche
(1965).The childlike Qfwfq has the entire cosmos and all eternity as his

playground, and naively confronts the great mysteries of time and space in
12 bizarre tales. t zero (1969) offers more of the same. Zestful modern
fabliaux with a unique charm. Weaver won the National Book Award for
translation for Cosmicomics. See also FABULATION
Cold Allies
Anthony, Patricia (Harcourt, 1993)Fine first novel. The world is in sorry
shape because of the climatic changes of the greenhouse effect. Famine is
widespread, and just about every nation is at war with another, struggling
over the planet's dwindling resources. Then enigmatic ALIENS appear; they
are seen only as cold blue lights, floating over the battlefields,
occasionally kidnapping people. Anthony is a fine prose stylist with a
knack tor creating believable characters in a small space, evident also in
her second novel Brother Termite (Harcourt, 1993). Compare John Kessel's
Good News from Outer Space and Joan Slonczewski's The Wall Around Eden.
A Clockwork Orange
BURGESS, ANTHONY (pseud. of John Anthony Burgess Wilson)(Heinemann,
1962)In highly inventive future slang based on Russian loan-words, the
story's hero tells how casual recreational gang violence, including
murder, got him into prison and then into super-Pavlovian therapy; after
treatment, even the thought of violence makes him sick. But so, as side
effects, do sex and his former love for classical music; the point
apparently being that it is better to do bad things as a free person than
not to do them as the result of conditioning. Recognized
by"mainstream"critics who probably wouldn't call it SF, and filmed
effectively by Stanley Kubrick, this is a world as bleak and vicious as
Nineteen Eighty-Four-and disturbingly closer, now, than Orwell's to our
own. However, Kubrick's version was based on the first U.S. edition of the
book, which omitted the crucial last chapter, in which (as Burgess pointed
out in a new introduction, 1987)" my young thuggish protagonist grows up .
. . and recognises that human energy is better expended on creation than
destruction," which radically changes the meaning of A Clockwork Orange
from the way it had been received in America. Compare Damon Knight, Hell's
Pavement ; contrast B. F. Skinner, Walden Two . See also DYSTOPIAS
Courtship Rite
KINGSBURY, DONALD(Timescape, 1982) U.K. title: Geta, 1984A colony on an
arid world is in cultural extremis because of its lack of resources, and
the central characters become involved with a challenge to its established
order. An unusually detailed and complex novel, interesting because of its
carefully worked political and ANTHROPOLOGICAL themes. Compare Frank
Herbert's DUNE.
China Mountain Zhang
MCHUGH, MAUREEN F.(Tor, 1992)The title character of McHugh's first novel
is a Chinese American living in a United States that has fallen to
third-world status just as China has risen, through apparently peaceful
means, to dominate the world. In this hierarchical culture, Zhang's
ancestry automatically places him above most Caucasians in status (though
below native-born Chinese). Zhang, however, has a couple of dirty secrets.
First, he's only half-Chinese, though his parents had him genetically

adjusted to hide his Hispanic ancestry. Second, he's gay, and both China
and Chinese-dominated America are puritanical societies. As the story
progresses, we follow Zhang's rise from construction worker to successful
architect. The novel's two greatest strengths lie in its depiction of a
believable and sympathetic gay character and in its equally believable
portrayal of a Chinese-dominated 21st century. Besides receiving
nominations for the Hugo and Nebula, China Mountain Zhang won both the
Tiptree Award and the Locus Award for best first novel. Compare David
Wingrove's Chung Kuo. See also SEX
Chronopolis and Other Stories
BALLARD, J(AMES) G(RAHAM)(Putnam, 1971)Ballard's short fiction is
distributed over more than a dozen collections, in various combinations,
but this selection-which overlaps considerably withThe Best Short Stories
of J. G. Ballard (1978)-preserves the best of his early work. Alienated
protagonists bear witness to the world's descent into a perverse
decadence; if they attempt to resist (many do not), they are likely to be
maddened by the consciousness of their hopeless entrapment. "The Terminal
Beach" (1964) marked a turning point in the concerns of British SF, and
signaled the start of the era of avant-garde methods. See also OPTIMISM
AND PESSIMISM
The Crystal World
BALLARD, J(AMES) G(RAHAM)(Cape, 1966)Completes a quartet of apocalyptic
novels begun with The Wind From Nowhere (1962) and continued with The
Drowned World and The Drought. Time begins to "crystallize out," causing
vast tracts of African rain forest to undergo a metamorphosis that echoes
and contrasts with the metamorphosis of human flesh that is leprosy. The
hero's symbolic odyssey, like that of the protagonist in Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness, brings him to a more fundamental existential level.
Superb imagery. See also END OF THE WORLD
Cities in Flight
BLISH, JAMES (Avon, 1970)U.K. title: A Clash of CymbalsThis is a
tetralogy, of which the stories comprising Earthman, Come Home (Putnam,
1955) were written first. John Amalfi is mayor of a future New York, which
flies through interstellar space trading work for supplies; it, and other
such itinerant cities, are" Okies." Two "prequels,"They Shall Have Stars
(Faber, 1956) and A Life For The Stars(Putnam, 1962) describe respectively
the development of the cities' means of propulsion (under cover of a
boondoggle construction job on a vividly but archaically described
Jupiter) and the subsequent flight of the cities from Earth's dreary
totalitarian government. Finally in The Triumph of Time (Avon, 1958; U.K.
title A Clash of Cymbals), Amalfi's can-do New Yorkers are faced with the
ultimate challenge of the collapse of the universe, and contrive to solve
even that. An essay at the end of the four volumes by Richard Mullen,
originally published in Riverside Quarterly, parallels the
youth-maturity-senescence cycle Oswald Spengler charted for the
comparative history of civilizations in The Decline of the West with a
similar cycle for Blish's "Earthmanist" civilization. A major, if
ponderous, work. See also SPACE OPERA

Cyteen
CHERRYH, C. J. (pseud. of Carolyn Janice Cherry)(Warner, 1988)The rulers
of the planet Cyteen have a monopoly on the creation of Azi, the
artificial human beings who have featured so prominently in such earlier
Cherryh novels as Downbelow Station and the underrated Forty Thousand in
Gehena (1983), and they also have the rarely used ability to CLONE human
beings. When the aging Ariane Emory, ruthless director of the planet's
genetic labs and a major political figure, decides to have herself cloned,
the resulting child becomes a pawn in a complex series of political
manipulations. This powerful psychological study is Cherryh's longest
novel and her most difficult, but there's plenty of meat here to reward
the diligent reader. For a very different novel that nonetheless asks
similar questions about genetic determinism, compare Ira Levin's The Boys
From Brazil. Hugo winner, 1989
Citizen of the Galaxy
HEINLEIN, ROBERT A(NSON)(Scribner, 1957) Although marketed as a juvenile
novel, this work was serialized for adults in Astounding. The Horatio
Alger hero is in an interstellar setting, except that this lad starts out
closer to the edge than Horatio's bootblacks and newsboys: he is a slave
on a far planet of a despotic empire. He escapes into space with a nomadic
trading company and eventually gets back to Earth, where he assumes (by
inheritance!) the headship of a giant financial corporation. This is a
bildungsroman, except that the young hero never really grows up; but
Heinlein's knack for creating sociologically plausible cultures is well
displayed. Alex Panshin in Heinlein in Dimension, argued that Citizen of
the Galaxy, with a plot revealed at the end to be essentially circular, is
normative for all of Heinlein's longer work. See also CHILDREN'S SF
Crystal Express
STERLING, BRUCE(Arkham, 1989)Early short fiction by one of the cofounders
of the CYBERPUNK movement. Included is Sterling's entire Shaper/Mechanist
series, most importantly "Swarm," as well as such excellent stories as
"The Flowers of Edo," "Dinner in Audoghast," "Green Days in Brunei," and
"Twenty Evocations." A number of these are award nominees and all are
worth reading. A more recent, equally good collection of Sterling's short
fiction is Globalhead (1992). Compare William Gibson's BURNING CHROMEand
Pat Cadigan's Patterns.
Cinefantastique
Cinefantastique, Feb. 1994 Published by Frederick S. Clarke Cover
illustration by John Hanley (M.M. Kavanagh. Frederick S. Clarke. (c) 1994
Frederick S. Clarke.)
Comet
Comet, July 1941 Published by H-K Publications, Inc. Cover illustration
by Leo Morey (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. H-K Publications, Inc. (c) 1941 H-K Publications, Inc.)
Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine
Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine, July 1977 Published by
Baronet Publishing Co. Cover illustration by Vincent Di Fate (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Baronet Publishing

Co. (c) 1977 Baronet Publishing Co.)
Crank!
Crank!, Winter 1993 Published by Broken Mirrors Press Cover illustration
by Ian Miller (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Broken Mirrors Press. (c) 1993 Broken Mirrors Press.)
Critical Wave
Critical Wave, July 1988 Published by Martin Tudor and Steve Green (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Martin Tudor and
Steve Green. (c) 1988 Martin Tudor and Steve Green.)
Conditioned for Space
Conditioned for Space by Alan Ash Cover: Ward, Lock & Co., 1955 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Ward, Lock & Co.
Limited (c) 1955 Ward, Lock & Co., Ltd.)
Conquest of Earth
Conquest of Earth by Manly Banister Cover: Airmont Publishing, 1957
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Airmont Publishing Co., Inc. - Airmont Books (c) 1957 Airmont Publishing
Company )
Chains (Vol. 1)
Chains (Vol. 1) by Henri Barbusse Cover: International Publishers, 1925
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
International Publishers (c) 1925 International Publishers)
================================================ Ashes, Ashes
Child of the Dawn, The
The Child of the Dawn by A.C. Benson Cover: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1912
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Children of the Night
Children of the Night by John Blackburn Cover: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1970
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Random Century House UK Limited. (c) 1970 Johnathan Cape)
Centaur, The
The Centaur by Algernon Blackwood Cover: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1911
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Macmillan
and Co., Ltd. London (c) 1911 Macmillan and Co. Ltd.)
Children of Anthi
Children of Anthi by Jay D. Blakeney Cover: Ace Books, 1985 illustration
by Griesbach & Martucci (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.
, Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. (c) 1985 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Crime of Under Seas, A
A Crime of Under Seas by Guy Boothby Cover: Ward, Lock & Co. Ltd., 1905
illustration by Stanley L. Wood (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. )

Centuries Apart
Centuries Apart by Edward Bouve Cover: Little, Brown & Co., 1894 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Published by Little, Brown and Company (Inc.) (c) 1894 Little, Brown and
Company (Inc.))
City of Masques
City of Masques by Alan Brennert Cover: Playboy Press Paperbacks, 1978
illustration by Dennis Luzak (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1978 Playboy Press. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Cassiopeia Affair, The
The Cassiopeia Affair by Harrison Brown & Chloe Zerwick Cover: Doubleday,
1968 illustration by Lawrence Ratzkin (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1968 Doubleday)
Chivalry
Chivalry by James Branch Cabell Cover: HarperCollins/Harber & Bros., 1909
(First Edition) illustration by Howard Pyle (M. M. Kavanagh. )
Colonists of Space
Colonists of Space by Charles Carr Cover: Ward, Lock & Co., 1954 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Wand, Lock & Co.,
Ltd. (c) 1954 Ward, Lock & Co., Ltd.)
Coma
Coma by Robin Cook Cover: Little, Brown & Co., 1977 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Published
by Little, Brown and Company (Inc.) (c) 1977 Little, Brown and Company
(Inc.))
Cette Cher Humanite
Cette Cher Humanite by Philippe Curval Cover: Editions Robert Laffont,
1976 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Editions Robert Laffont (c) 1976 Editions Robert Laffont)
Christmas Carol, A
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens Cover: Yale University Press (The
Pierpont Morgan Library), 1993 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Yale University Press (c) 1993 Yale Univ. Press (The
Pierpont Morgan Library) )
Caesar's Column
Caesar's Column by Edmund Boisgilbert, M.D. (Ignatius Donnelly) Cover:
Arena Publishing Co., 1894 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. )
Complex Man
Complex Man by Marie Farca Cover: Doubleday, 1973 illustration by Anita
Siegal & Jonathan Field (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.

, Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1973 Doubleday)
Cold Cash Warrior
Cold Cash Warrior by Bill Fawcett & Robert Asprin Cover: Ace Books, 1989
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1989 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Circus of Dr. Lao, The
The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles Finney Cover: Bantam, 1964 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group,
Inc. (c) 1964 Bantam Books)
City of Endless Night
City of Endless Night by Milo Hastings Cover: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1920 Dodd, Mead)
Crisis! - 1992
Crisis! - 1992 by Benson Herbert Cover: Richards, 1936 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1936 Richards)
Contagion to This World
Contagion to This World by Fedor Kaul Cover: Geoffrey Bles, 1933 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
(c) 1933 Geoffrey Bles)
Copper Crown, The
The Copper Crown by Patricia Kennealy Cover: Bluejay, 1984 illustration
by Michael Embden (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Book jackets reprinted by permission of Bluejay Books Inc. All
rights reserved. (c) 1984 Bluejay Books Inc.)
Creator
Creator by Jeremy Leven Cover: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan Inc., 1980
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1980
Coward, McCann & Geoghegan Inc.)
Carder's Paradise
Carder's Paradise by Malcolm Levene Cover: Walker & Co., 1969
illustration by Lena Fong Luen (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of Walker and Company. (c)
1969 Walker & Company)
Childermass, The
The Childermass by Wyndham Lewis Cover: Chatto & Windus, 1928 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Random
House UK Limited. (c) 1928 Chatto & Windous)
Coming Race, The
The Coming Race by First Baron Lytton Cover: Donohue-Hennberry & Co.,
1890 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.

Donohue-Henneberry & Co. )
City of Gold, The
The City of Gold by Edward Markwick Cover: W. Thacker & Co., 1898 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. W.
Thacker & Co. UK )
Chance
Chance by Ann Maxwell Cover: Popular Library, 1975 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Warner
Books, Inc. (c) 1975 Popular Library, Inc.)
Crisis in 2140
Crisis in 2140 by John J. McGuire & H. Beam Piper Cover: Ace Books, 1957
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1957 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Caleb Catlum's America
Caleb Catlum's America by Vincent McHugh Cover: Stackpole Sons, 1936
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1936 Stackpole Sons)
Club Tycoon Sends Man to Moon
Club Tycoon Sends Man to Moon by Felix Mendelsohn Cover: Book Co. of
America, 1965 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1965 Book Co. of America)
Created, the Destroyer
Created, the Destroyer by Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir Cover: Pinnacle
Books, 1976 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Pinnacle Books (c) 1976 Pinnacle Books)
Cloud Chamber
Cloud Chamber by Howard L. Myers Cover: Popular Library, 1977 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1977 Popular Library, Inc.)
Cityless and Countryless World, A
A Cityless and Countryless World by Henry Olerich Cover: Gilmore &
Olerich, 1893 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. )
Creation's Doom
Creation's Doom by Desiderius Papp Cover: D. Appleton-Century Co. Inc.,
1934 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. D.
Appleton-Century Company (c) 1934 D. Appleton-Century Company Inc.)
Centenarians, The
The Centenarians by Gilbert Phelps Cover: Heineman, 1958 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1958
William Heinemann, Ltd. )
Central Passage

Central Passage by Lawrence Schoonover Cover: Dell, 1962 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Dell
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1962
Dell Books)
Crossroads to Nowhere
Crossroads to Nowhere by Raymond Stark Cover: Ward, Lock & Co. Ltd., 1956
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Ward, Lock & Co. Limited (c) 1956 Ward, Lock & Co., Ltd.)
Concrete
Concrete by Aelfrida Tillyard Cover: Hutchinson & Co., 1930 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Random
Century House UK Limited. (c) 1930 Hutchinson & Co.)
Crash Landing on Iduna
Crash Landing on Iduna by Arthur R. Tofte Cover: Laser Books, 1975
illustration by Kelly Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside.Laser Books (c) 1975 Laser Books)
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, A
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain Cover:
HarperCollins/Harper & Bros., 1899 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Cure for Death
Cure for Death by Victor Valentine Cover: Foursquare Books, 1960 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Foursquare Books
(c) 1960 Foursquare Books)
Crew of the Mekong, The
The Crew of the Mekong by Evgeny Voiskunsky & Isa Borisovich Lukodianov
Cover: Mir Publishers, 1974 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Mir Publishers (c) 1974 Mir Publishers)
Chariots of the Gods?
Chariots of the Gods? by Erich Von Daniken Cover: Bantam, 1970 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group,
Inc. (c) 1970 Bantam Books)
Chariot into Time
Chariot into Time by Karl Zeigfreid (Tom W. Wade) Cover: John Spencer &
Co., 1953 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
John Spencer & Co. (c) 1953 John Spencer & Co. UK)
Children of the Sphinx
Children of the Sphinx by George C. Wallis Cover: Cosmopolitan Printing
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.Cosmopolitan
Printing (c) 1925 Cosmopolitan Printing)
Children of the Light
Children of the Light by Susan Weston Cover: St. Martin's Press, 1987
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
St. Martin's Press. (c) 1987 St. Martin's Press)

Chung Kuo: The Middle Kingdom
Chung Kuo: The Middle Kingdom by David Wingrove Cover: Delacorte Press,
1990 (First Edition) illustration by Jean Tuttle (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Delecorte
Press, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1990
Delecorte Press.)
Chaos in Arcturus
Chaos in Arcturus by Karl Zeigfreid Cover: John Spencer & Co., 1953
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. John
Spencer & Co. (c) 1953 John Spencer & Co.)
Cold Cash War, The
The Cold Cash War by Robert Lynn Asprin Cover: Dell, 1977 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Dell Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1977 Dell Books)
Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille
Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille by Steven Brust Cover: Ace Books, 1990
illustration by James Gurney (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1990 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Crisis on Cheiron
Crisis on Cheiron by Juanita Coulson Cover: Ace Books, 1967 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1967 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Cradle of the Sun
Cradle of the Sun by Brian Stableford Cover: Ace Books, 1969 illustration
by Jack Gaughan (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1969 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Crack in Space, The
The Crack in Space by Philip K. Dick Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by Jack Gaughan (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1966 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Castle Perilous
Castle Perilous by John DeChancie Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by James Gurney (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1988 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate

permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Cry Republic
Cry Republic by Kirk Mitchell Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by James Gurney (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1989 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Cybernetic Shogun, The
The Cybernetic Shogun by Victor Milan Cover: William Morrow & Co., 1990
(First Edition) illustration by Don Bolognes (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Shown by permission of William
Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) 1990 William Morrow & Co., Inc.)
Crystal Empire, The
The Crystal Empire by L. Neil Smith Cover: TOR, 1986 illustration by
Michael Whelan (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1986 Tor Books)
Clone, The
The Clone by Theodore L. Thomas Cover: Berkley (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1965 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
City of Glass
City of Glass by Noel Loomis Cover: Columbia, 1942 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Columbia Publications, Inc. (c)
1942 Columbia Publications, Inc.)
Caliban Landing
Caliban Landing by Steven Popkes Cover: Congdon & Weed (First Edition)
illustration by Bob Walters (M. M. Kavanagh. Congdon & Weed (c) 1987
Congdon and Weed)
Cage a Man
Cage a Man by F.M. Busby Cover: Science Fiction Book Club, 1973
illustration by Gary Viskupic (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Jacket: Gary Viskupic. Reprinted with permission of
Doubleday Book and Music Clubs, Inc. (c) 1973 Doubleday Book & Music
Clubs, Inc. )
Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats
Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats by Gene DeWeese & Robert Coulson
Cover: Doubleday, 1977 (First Edition) illustration by Peter Rauch (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1977 Doubleday)
Conscience Place
Conscience Place by Joyce Thompson Cover: Doubleday (First Edition)
illustration by Fred Marcellino (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of

Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c)
1984 Doubleday)
Copy Shop, The
The Copy Shop by Evelyn E. Smith Cover: Doubleday, 1985 (First Edition)
(M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1985 Doubleday)
Capella's Golden Eyes
Capella's Golden Eyes by Christopher Evans Cover: Faber and Faber Ltd.,
1980 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1980 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Children of the Atom
Children of the Atom by Wilmar Shiras Cover: Gnome Press, 1933
illustration by Kelly Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Gnome Press (c) 1933 Gnome)
City
City by Clifford Simak Cover: Ace Books, 1973 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The
Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1973 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Code Three
Code Three by Rick Raphael Cover: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1967 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with the permission of Victor Gollancz Ltd. (c) 1967 Victor
Gollancz Ltd.)
Course of the Heart, The
The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison Cover: Victor Gollancz Ltd.,
1992 (First Edition) illustration by Dave McKean (M. M. Kavanagh.
Reprinted with the permission of Victor Gollancz Ltd. (c) 1992 Victor
Gollancz Ltd.)
Creed for the Third Millennium, A
A Creed for the Third Millennium by Colleen McCullough Cover: Avon Books,
1985 (Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown
by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1985 Avon Books)
Colossus
Colossus by D.F. Jones Cover: Berkley, 1966 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The
Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1966 The Berkley
Publishing Group . Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Camp Concentration
Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch Cover: Hart Davis, 1968 (First
Edition) illustration by Ken Reilly (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with

permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1968 Hart Davis)
Chain Reaction
Chain Reaction by Chris Hodder-Williams Cover: Doubleday, 1959 (First US
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1959 Doubleday & Co.)
Crying of Lot 49, The
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon Cover: J.B. Lippincott, 1966
(First Edition) illustration by Milton Charles (M. M. Kavanagh. JB
Lippincott Co. (c) 1966 JB Lippincott Co.)
Cold War in a Country Garden
Cold War in a Country Garden by Lindsay Gutteridge Cover: Jonathan Cape,
1971 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Courtesy of Random Century House UK Limited. (c) 1971 Johnathan
Cape)
Child Buyer, The
The Child Buyer by John Hersey Cover: Bantam, 1961 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1961
Bantam Books)
Colour out of Space, The
The Colour out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft Cover: Lancer Books, 1969
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Lancer
Books (c) 1969 Lancer)
Carmen Dog
Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller Cover: Mercury House, 1988 (First Edition)
illustration by Renee Flower (M. M. Kavanagh. Published by Mercury House,
San Francisco, CA. (c) 1988 Mercury House)
Case of the Little Green Men, The
The Case of the Little Green Men by Mack Reynolds Cover: Phoenix Press,
1951 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Phoenix Press (c) 1951 Phoenix Press)
Collected Feghoot, The
The Collected Feghoot by Briarton Grendel Cover: Pulphouse Publishing
(First Edition) illustration by Tim Kirk (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of
Pulphouse Publishing. (c) 1992 Pulphouse Publishing, Inc.)
Coming Self-Destruction of the United States, The
The Coming Self-Destruction of the United States by Alan Seymour Cover:
Panther Books, 1971 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited.
(c) 1971 Panther Books)
Cortez on Jupiter
Cortez on Jupiter by Ernest Hogan Cover: TOR, 1990 illustration by Ron
Walotsky (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1990 Tor Books)

China Mountain Zhang
China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh Cover: TOR, 1992 (First
Edition) illustration by Wayne Barlowe (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
permission of Tor Books. (c) 1992 Tor Books)
Complete Stories (Vol. I), The
The Complete Stories (Vol. I) by Isaac Asimov Cover: Doubleday, 1990
(First Edition) illustration by Barclay Shaw (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by
Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1990 Doubleday)
Chronopolis
Chronopolis by J.G. Ballard Cover: Berkley, 1972 illustration by Richard
Powers (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1972 The Berkley Publishing
Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Crystal World, The
The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard Cover: Berkley, 1967 illustration by
Richard Powers (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1967 The Berkley Publishing
Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Cities in Flight
Cities in Flight by James Blish Cover: Avon Books, 1970 (M. M. Kavanagh.
Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1970 Avon Books)
Cyteen
Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh Cover: Warner Books, 1988 (First Edition)
illustration by Don Maitz (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of
Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1988 Warner Books, Inc.)
Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, The
The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick by Philip K. Dick Cover: Citadel
Twilight, 1991 illustration by Kevn Kelly (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of
Carol Publishing Group. (c) 1991 Carol Publishing)
Cornelius Chronicles, The
The Cornelius Chronicles by Michael Moorcock Cover: Avon Books, 1977
(First Edition) illustration by Fernandes (M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1977 Avon Books)
Child Garden, The
The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman Cover: Unwin Hyman, 1989 (First Edition)
(M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins Publishers
Limited. (c) 1989 Unwin Hyman)
Crystal Express
Crystal Express by Bruce Sterling Cover: Arkham House, 1989 (First
Edition) illustration by Rick Lieder (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of Arkham
House Publishers. (c) 1989 by Arkham House Publishers, Inc.)

Claremont ,Chris
Chris Claremont (1950- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Clayton, Patricia Jo
Patricia Jo Clayton (1939- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Chalker, Jack
Jack L. Chalker (1944- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Charnas, Suzy McKee
Suzy McKee Charnas (1939- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Crispin, A.C.
A.C. Crispin (1950- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Clement, Hal
Hal Clement (1922- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Cherryh, C.J.
C.J. Cherryh (1942- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Cadigan, Pat
Pat Cadigan (1953- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Cabell, James Branch
James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) ( Bettmann. )
Carroll, Lewis
Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson, 1832-1898) ( Bettmann. )
Carter, Angela
Angela Carter (1940-1992) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)
Clute, John F.
John F. Clute (1940- ) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)
Crowley, John
John Crowley (1942- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Clarke, Arthur C.
Arthur C. Clarke (1917- ) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Campbell, John W. Jr.
John W. Campbell, Jr. (1910-1971) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Carr, Terry
Terry Carr (1937-1987) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Crichton, Michael
Michael Crichton (1942- ) (Joyce Ravid (c) 1995 Joyce Ravid)
Coville, Bruce
Bruce Coville (1950- ) (Jules. (c) 1995 Jules)
Charnas, Suzie McKee (No Truce)
In Suzie McKee Charnas's work, Space belongs to everyone. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Charnas, Suzie McKee (No Truce)

In Suzie McKee Charnas's work, Space belongs to everyone. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Clute, John (Adolescent Sensibility)
John Clute on the adolescent sensibility of SF readers. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Clute, John (Adolescent Sensibility)
John Clute on the adolescent sensibility of SF readers. ( (c) Grolier
Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Clarke, Arthur C. (On Following *2001)
Arthur C. Clarke describes the difficulties of creating a being with
superhuman intelligence. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Clarke, Arthur C. (On Following *2001)
Arthur C. Clarke describes the difficulties of creating a being with
superhuman intelligence. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Cities & Space
SF writers use the concept of Space in a variety of ways, from a good
place to hang out in the future to a metaphor for the unexplored in the
human psyche. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Calvino, Italo
Italo Calvino (1923-1985) (Denis Gibier. (c) 1995 Denis Gibier)
Carver, Jeffrey
Jeffrey Carver (1949- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Chandler, A. Bertram
A. Bertram Chandler (1912-1984) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I.
Porter)
Cogswell, Theodore R.
Theodore R. Cogswell (1918-1987) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I.
Porter)
Coney, Michael G.
Michael G. Coney (1932- ) (Rick Hawes. (c) 1995 Rick Hawes)
Copyrights & Credits
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Contributors
From The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute and Peter Nicholls,
eds.Each contributor to this encyclopedia may be identified by his or her
initials, as tabulated against his or her full name below. Rather more
than half the contributors themselves receive entries in this book, and
are listed below with their surnames capitalized. Data on other
contributors appear below the list. Names asterisked once (*) are
responsible only for material retained from the first edition; names
asterisked twice (**) appear newly in this second edition. The remainder

have worked on both editions.** Ivan Adamovic IA* Mark Adlard MA** Tim
Adye TA* Brian W. Aldiss BWA** Hans Joachim Alpers HJA** Mike Ashley MA**
Miquel Barcelo MB** Zoran Bekric ZB** Matt Bishop MB** Russell Blackford
RuB** Everett F. Bleiler EFB** Richard Bleiler RB** Scott Bradfield SB**
Damien Broderick DB* John Brosnan JB** Stanislav Cermak SC** Jacques
Chambon JCh** I.F. Clarke IFCJohn Clute JC** John Robert Colombo JRC**
Adrian Cox AC** Niels Dalgaard ND** J.A. Dautzenberg JAD** Hugh Davies HD*
Thomas M. Disch TMD** Jane Donawerth JD* Malcolm J. Edwards MJEJohn
Eggeling JE** Gregory Feeley GF** Brian Forte BF* H. Bruce Franklin HBF**
Robert Frazier RF** Neil Gaiman NG** Vladimir Gakov VG** Bruce Gillispie
BG** John Grandidge JoG** John Grant (Paul Barnett ) JGr** Colin Greenland
CGJon Gustafson JG** Rob Hansen RH* Jim Harmon JH** Penny Heal PH**
Stephen Holland SH** John-Henri Holmberg J-HH** Jyrki Ijas JI* Maxim
Jakubowski MJ** Colin A. Johnson CJ** Jorg Kastner JK** Roz Kaveney RK
David Ketterer DK** Robert K.J. Killheffer RKJK** Michael Klossner MK**
David Langford DRL** Peter Kuczka PK** Sam J. Lundwall SJL* Robert Louit
RL** Murray MacLachlan MM* David I. Masson DIM** Charles Shaar Murray CSM*
Alan Myers AM** Kim Newman KNPeter Nicholls PN** Phil Nichols PhN**
Patrick Nielsen Hayden PNH** Jaroslav Olsa jr JO** Carlo Pagetti CP* Frank
H. Parnell FHP** Ellen Pedersen EP* A.B. Perkins ABP** Luc Pomerleau LP**
Alexander Popov APDavid Pringle DP** Phil Raines PhR** Jenny Randles JR**
Robert Reginald RoR* Peter Roberts PR** Roger Robinson RR** Cornel Robu
CRFranz Rottensteiner FR ** Marcus Rowland MR* John Scarborough JSc**
Mauricio-Jose Schwarz M-JSTakumi Shibano TSh* Tom Shippey TS* John Sladek
JS ** Krzysztof Sokolowski KSBrian Stableford BS* Tony Sudbery TSuDarko
Suvin DS** Braulio Tavares BT** Sheldon Teitelbaum ST** Ron Tiner RT**
Igor Tolokonnikov IT** Neal Tringham NT** Lisa Tuttle LT** Hermann Urbanek
HU** Janeen Webb JW** Steve Whitaker SW** Chris Williamson CW** Ralph
Willingham RW** Wu Dingbo WD ** Zoran Zivkovic ZZ Tim Adye is a member of
the M.H. Zool group, members of which were collaboratively responsible for
the Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy (1989);
several Zool group members made individual contributions here, and are
identified below. Zoran Bekric and Brian Forte are freelance writers,
based in South Australia, who have expertise in comics. Matt Bishop is
with the Zool group. Stanislav Cermak is a Czech film critic and sf fan.
Jacques Chambon is a French sf critic and publisher. Adrian Cox is with
the Zool group. J.A. Dautzenberg is a Dutch college teacher and literary
critic for a national newspaper, De Volksrant. Hugh Davies is a UK
composer and musicologist. Jane Donawerth is a Professor of English at the
University of Maryland at College Park, with a specilized interest in
women's literature. John Eggeling is a UK antiquarian bookseller and
expert in early sf publishing. John Grandidge is with the Zool group. Jon
Gustafson is a US art and artbook appraiser, expert in sf art, who has had
a column on the subject in Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine. Rob Hansen is
a UK fan, expert on the history of (in particular) UK fandom, as shown in
his fanzine Then. Patrick Nielsen Hayden is a senior editor at Tor Books.
Penny Heal and Colin A. Johnson are with the Zool group. John-Henri
Holmberg is a Swedish editor and critic, author of several books on sf.
Jorg Kastner is a German sf author and critic, whose criticism has
appeared in Science Fiction Times. Robert K.J. Killheffer is Books Editor
of Omni Magazine. Michael Klossner is a US critic with special interest in

sf in film and tv, and a frequent contributor to SFRA Review. Robert Louit
is a French critic, journalist and translator who has also been an sf book
editor. Murray MacLachlan is a New Zealand freelance writer with a special
interest in sf. Charles Shaar Murray is a UK rock-music critic and
historian, author of Shots from the Hip (coll 1991) and other books. Alan
Myers is a UK teacher of Russian, and translator from the Russian. Phil
Nichols is a video engineer and producer, for some time Information
Officer of the BSFA. Frank H. Parnell is an authority on sf and fantasy
magazines, compiler of Monthly Terrors: An Index to the Weird Fantasy
Magazines Published in the United States and Great Britain (1985). Ellen
Pedersen is a Danish critic and translator. A.B. Perkins, a UK researcher,
has a special interest in UK boys' sf of the 1950s. Phil Raines is with
the Zool group. Jenny Randles is an international researcher in ufology.
Peter Roberts was for many years a fanzine editor in the UK. Marcus
Rowland specializes in computers and games for a local education
authority. John Scarborough is a US professor of medical history. Tony
Sudbery is a lecturer in mathematics, and was for some time a regular sf
critic in Speculation and elsewhere. Ron Tiner is a UK book and comics
artist, and is author of Figure Drawing without a Model (1992). Igor
Tolokonnikov is one half of the Russian literary agency Baziat. Neil
Tringham, now with the Institut fur Astonomie & Astrophysik in Munich, was
also with Zool group. Hermanm Urbanek is a German fan and sf critic,
author of "SF in Germany", an occasional column in Locus. Janeen Webb is
an Australian lecturer in literature, with a specialized interest in sf
and fantasy, both for children and adults. Steve Whitaker is a comics
historian, teacher, critic, strip cartoonist and colourist. Chris
Williamson is with the Zool group. Ralph Willingham is the US author of a
PhD dissertation, "Science Fiction and the Theatre.".
Cole's The Struggle for Empire
The first major novel to adopt an interstellar venue, Robert W. COLE'sThe
Struggle for Empire: A Story of the Year 2236 anticipated the pulp SPACE
OPERA genre, with its fast-paced space battles and grand scale.
Campbell's Twilight
First published under a pseudonym, John W. CAMPBELL's moody and evocative
tale was unlike either his previous fiction or the fiction he later
published as editor of Astounding.
Campbell editor of Astounding
An influential and rising young SF writer when he took the position as
editor of Astounding, John W. CAMPBELL abandoned his writing career but
became the most influential editor in SF history.
Campbell's Who Goes There?
The basis for the SF horror movie, THE THING, John W. CAMPBELL's tale of
a shape-changing alien attacking an Antarctic research station epitomizes
the strengths of American pulp fiction.
Cordwainer Smith's first story
Cordwainer SMITH publishes "Scanners Live in Vain"in an obscure SF
magazine after everyone else rejects it.

Clement's Mission of Gravity
One of the classics of hard science fiction, Hal CLEMENT's MISSION OF
GRAVITY is a tale of humans and aliens on an ultra high- GRAVITY world. It
was serialized in Astounding Science Fiction before being published by
Doubleday.
Clarke's Childhood's End
For many years Arthur C. CLARKE's most famous novel, and still one of his
best (and most popular), CHILDHOOD'S END is a tale of humanity growing
into transcendent adulthood - with the help of alien tutors.
Carter's Heroes and Villains
Angela CARTER's fourth novel, HEROES AND VILLAINS, is a post-holocaust
tale of considerable wit and subversive invention. Carter, a British
fabulist, is better known outside the SF world than within it.See Also:
FABULATION; POSTMODERNISM AND SF.
Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama
Arthur C. CLARKE's novel about a derelict spaceship won all the major
awards but not the critic's hearts. Still, RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA
communicated a sense of wonder that made it a hit with audiences and one
of the most popular SF novels of the 70s.See Also: BIG DUMB OBJECTS.
Crowley's Engine Summer
John CROWLEY's third novel, ENGINE SUMMER, is a dense and beautiful
meditation on memory, mortality, and consciousness; many readers consider
it one of the finest SF novels ever written.
Cherryh's Downbelow Station
A central work in C.J. CHERRYH's future history, DOWNBELOW STATION is her
finest early novel. It won the HUGO Award.
Card's Ender's Game
Based on his 1977 story, Orson Scott CARD's 1985 novel, ENDER'S GAME, won
both the NEBULA and HUGO Awards and remains his best-known work.
Divine Endurance
JONES, GWYNETH(Allen & Unwin, 1984)On a FAR-FUTURE Earth, in an isolated
citadel in central Asia, live the IMMORTAL cat Divine Endurance and the
last of the manufactured humans, Chosen Among the Beautiful. When the
machines that imprison them finally cease functioning, they venture forth
into the wasteland to see the world. In Southeast Asia they find what
might well be the last human civilization on Earth. Cho was created with
the need to fulfill human desires, but the people she meets find her
presence to be at best a mixed blessing. A densely written and difficult
novel, with a touch of Jack Vance, though lacking his wittiness and of
radically different political sensibility. Compare Joan Slonczewski's A
Door into Ocean.
Dhalgren
DELANY, SAMUEL R(AY)(Bantam, 1975)To the depopulated city of Bellona,
which is subjected to occasional distortions of time and space, comes a
youthful hero hungry for experience and keen to develop his powers as a
creative artist. A dense and multilayered novel that alienated some

readers who had previously applauded Delany's colorful fantastic romances,
but that reached a much wider audience. Convoluted and fascinating, it
remains one of the key works of avant-garde SF, by an author determined to
extend the limits of the genre. See also FABULATION
Dune
HERBERT, FRANK(Chilton, 1965)The first of a seven-volume bestselling
series is the story of a selectively bred messiah who acquires paranormal
powers by use of the spice that is the main product of the desert planet
Arrakis, and uses these powers to prepare for the ecological renewal of
the world. Politics and metaphysics are tightly bound into a remarkably
detailed and coherent pattern; an imaginative tour de force. The series as
a whole is overinflated, the later revisitations of the theme being
prompted more by market success than the discovery of new things to do
with it. The series demonstrates how a good SF writer's ability to build a
coherent and convincing hypothetical world can serve the purpose of making
philosophical and sociological questions concrete; the series thus becomes
a massive thought experiment in social philosophy, and is more
considerable as such than Isaac Asimov's FOUNDATION series or Marion
Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series. Hugo winner, 1966; Nebula winner, 1965.
See also ECOLOGY
The Dying Earth
VANCE, JACK (pseud. of John Holbrook Vance)(Hillman, 1950)A hauntingly
beautiful story of a FAR FUTURE Earth "steeped," as Norman Spinrad has put
it, "in magic born of rotting history." Scientific experiment has given
place to charms and enchantments that really work. Six loosely connected
episodes derive not from technophile Golden Age SF but from a quite
antithetical tradition: the world-ends-in-magic milieu explored in the
1930s by Clark Ashton Smith, and picaresque sword-and-sorcery such as
Fritz Leiber's early-forties Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tales, with a dash
(Chapter 5) of Lord Dunsany. A slender thread of scientific hope is held
out in the concluding episode, whose hero, given since childhood to how
and why questions and driven by doubts about an approach to reality in
which magic spells are learned by rote, makes his way through strange
landscapes and degenerate towns to the Museum of Man. But that hope of a
scientific renaissance was not to be realized in this novel's several
sequels, good as some of them were as stories. Little noticed at initial
publication, this work launched a whole subgenre of fictional futures in
which magic replaces science, a development not altogether healthy for
science fiction or implicitly for the place of science in modern
civilization. Interestingly, a countertrend has appeared in the fantasy
field, of formerly effective magic that became displaced by the emergent
scientific world view of the 17th century, as in Tim Powers's On Stranger
Tides (Ace, 1988).
Dragon's Egg
FORWARD, ROBERT L(ULL)(Ballantine, 1980)A race that evolves on the
surface of a neutron star lives on a vastly compressed time scale, but
nevertheless manages to make contact with human observers. A fascinating
and ingenious example of hard SF. Its representation of SCIENTISTS at work
compares with Gregory Benford's Timescape. In the sequel, Starquake

(1985), the aliens achieve technological sophistication, are returned to
primitivism by a "starquake," and rebuild their civilization-a process
that takes several of their generations but only 24 hours of our time.
Compare John Brunner's The Crucible of Time (1984).
Dangerous Visions
ELLISON, HARLAN, ed.(Doubleday, 1967)The first big hardcover anthology of
original SF stories-a classic that launched a publishing vogue as well as
providing a manifesto for the American NEW WAVE. Ellison's combative
introductions set off the stories superbly, though some of the efforts at
"taboo-breaking" now seem a little sophomoric. A very influential book,
followed by the even bigger and equally fine Again, Dangerous Visions
(1972). An endlessly promised volume, The Last Dangerous Visions, was the
subject of a scathing pamphlet by Christopher Priest, The Last Deadloss
Visions (1987), reprinted with revisions as The Book on the Edge of
Forever (Fantagraphics Books, 1994).
Dreamsnake
MCLNTYRE, VONDA N(EEL)(Houghton Mifflin, 1978)Novel based on the short
story "Of Mist and Grass and Sand" (Nebula winner, 1973). A healer whose
instruments are metabolically engineered snakes must journey to a city
that has contacts with the star worlds in the hope of replacing the
dreamsnake that eases the pain of her clients. A convincing mixture of
stoicism and sentimentality, rather highly strung. Compare James Tiptree's
Up the Walls of the World . Nebula winner, 1978; Hugo winner, 1979. See
also HOLOCAUST AND AFTER
Davy
PANGBORN, EDGAR(St. Martin's, 1964)Nuclear war is now 300 years in the
past, but the world is still a primitive place. The title character begins
life as a bondsman and grows to become a great leader. Though his intent
is serious, Pangborn's tone is satirical and a bit bawdy throughout.
Numerous critics have noticed similarities between Davy and Henry
Fielding's Tom Jones. Set in the same postholocaust world are The Judgment
of Eve (1966), The Company of Glory (1975), and stories found in the
collection Still I Persist in Wondering (1978). Compare Walter M. Miller's
A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ and John Crowley's ENGINE SUMMER . See also
HOLOCAUST AND AFTER
Downbelow Station
CHERRYH, C. J. (pseud. of Carolyn Janice Cherry)(DAW, 1981)Political
space opera set on the star station Pell, caught in the middle of the
conflict for control of humankind's fragile interstellar " EMPIRE."
Complex and multifaceted: the many-sided conflict provides action and
intrigue while the central characters try to construct viable personal
relationships and work out careers in a fluid situation. The novel is a
key work in an elaborate future history used as a background for several
other novels, including Merchanter's Luck and Voyager in Night (1984).
Hugo winner, 1982
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
DICK, PHILIP K(INDRED)(Doubleday, 1968)In a future where technological
sophistication has made the ersatz virtually indistinguishable from the

real, the hero is a bounty hunter who must track down and eliminate
ANDROIDS passing for human. But android animals are routinely passed off
as real by people trying to purge human guilt for having exterminated so
many living species, and the new messiah is an artificial construct; so
what is the difference between the human and the android? A key novel in
Dick's canon. The film, Blade Runner, is a very pale echo. We Can Build
You (1972) further explores the ambiguity of such distinctions as
human/android and sane/schizophrenic in a haunting story of people who
create machines more human than themselves.
Dorsai!
DICKSON, GORDON R(UPERT)(DAW, 1976)Revised version of The Genetic General
(1960), the first volume in one of the more popular science fiction
series. Some of the later books in the series are, in whole or in part,
revised versions of earlier books. The Dorsai are the greatest soldiers in
the galaxy, having developed a mercenary culture in order to gain the
capital necessary to survive on a resource-poor planet. In Dickson's
universe humanity has fragmented into three basic genetically determined
types-men of faith, of WAR, and of philosophy-with the Dorsai exemplifying
men of war. The three types, however, are destined to come together again
to form a new, higher type of human being called the Ethical-Responsible
Man. Donal Graeme, Dorsai, military genius, and psychic SUPERMAN, is the
first of this new kind of human being. Dickson has outlined an ambitious
plan to write a dozen novels describing the evolution of the
Ethical-Responsible Man from our past, through the present, and into the
future, called the Childe Cycle. So far none of the novels set in the past
or present have appeared, and it seems unlikely that they will. The early
Dorsai novels were primarily action-adventure of a superior sort. The
later novels have become increasingly philosophical and perhaps a bit
long-winded. Compare David Drake's Hammer's Slammers (1979) and its
sequels and Jerry Pournelle's The Mercenaryand sequels.
Dragonflight
MCCAFFREY, ANNE(Ballantine, 1968)First of the Pern series, combining the
novellas "Weyr Search" (Hugo winner, 1968) and "Dragonrider" (Nebula
winner, 1968). Immediate sequels are Dragonquest (1971) and the
best-selling The White Dragon (1978); these novels appear in an omnibus
asThe Dragonriders of Pern (1978). An associated trilogy aimed at younger
readers is Dragonsong (1976), Dragonsinger (1977), and Dragondrums (1979).
Later novels set on Pern include Moreta, Dragonlady of Pern (1983),
Nerika's Story (1986), Dragonsdawn (1988), The Renegades of Pern (1989),
and All the Weyrs of Pern (1991). Pern is a lost colony where dragons
telepathically bonded to male riders breathe fire to burn up the spores of
deadly vegetable invaders that appear at long intervals. The dragons can
also travel through time whenever the plots require a deus ex machina.
Despite the commercial success of later volumes, the quality and
originality of the books decline somewhat as the series proceeds, although
the most recent addition, All the Weyrs of Pern, represents something of
an improvement. The author appears to have achieved in these novels a mode
and intensity of feeling that broke new ground in fitting SF to the
imaginative needs of alienated teenage girls, thus helping to break the

masculine mold of most previous SF. Compare Jacqueline Lichtenberg's
Sime/Gen series, beginning with House of Zeor (1974) and C. J. Cherryh 's
Morgaine series, beginning with Gates of Ivrel (1976), both of which show
McCaffrey's influence. See also COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS
Death Qualified: A Mystery of Chaos
WILHELM, KATE(St. Martin's, 1991)Barbara Holloway, a former lawyer who
quit in disgust with the legal system, is persuaded to take her first case
in five years. A woman is accused of murdering her husband, whom she had
not seen for seven years prior to the day of his death. There's no real
motive, however, and Holloway quickly discovers that someone doesn't want
her on the case. Further, there is evidence that the deceased husband may
have been involved in some very peculiar scientific experiments in
PERCEPTION. For another novel that puts chaos theory to good use, compare
Arthur C. Clarke's The Ghost From the Grand Banks (1990). See also
SUPERMAN
Darker Than You Think
WILLIAMSON, JACK(Fantasy, 1948)Originally published in Unknown in 1940,
this may be Williamson's finest work-a pioneering effort to give "
SUPERNATURAL" phenomena, in this case Iycanthropy, a scientific rationale.
The science is a bit shaky from today's perspective, but the felt response
of the viewpoint character as a werewolf and in his other shape-changes,
is vivid and convincing. The experience also converts his purpose from a
stock pulp-heroic defense of humanity against the encroaching lycanthropes
to a Nitzschean "beyond good and evil" embrace of his antihuman role,
reminiscent of the change in the way the young giants are perceived in the
course of H. G. Wells's The Food of the Gods. In a sense this is a
variation on the Superman theme, except that it does not depict the
superbeings as benevolent toward humanity; their coming regime truly will
be "darker than you think." A Dell edition in 1979 reproduced the original
magazine illustrations by Edd Cartier. Compare Richard Matheson, I Am
Legend; contrast Olaf Stapledon, Odd John .
Doomsday Book
WILLIS, CONNIE(Bantam, 1992)Kivrin, a TIME TRAVELing history student from
21st-century Oxford, is sent back to the 14th century for her Practicum.
It's supposed to be a routine trip, but everything seems to go wrong at
once. Kivrin is accidently set down in the heart of the Black Plague and
soon falls ill. Worse still, 21st-century Oxford is also hit by some sort
of plague, making her immediate retrieval impossible. This is a grim, but
beautifully written novel, full of carefully drawn characters and
fascinating historical detail. It's one of the best tirne travel stories
ever written. The title piece from Willis's collection Fire Watch is set
in the same universe as Doomsday Book. Compare Mike McQuay's Memories and
Michael Bishop's NO ENEMY BUT TIME. Hugo winner, 1993; Nebula winner, 1992
The Dream Master
ZELAZNY, ROGER(Ace, 1966)Expanded from the novella "He Who Shapes"
(Nebula winner, 1965). A psychiatrist links minds with disturbed patients
to construct therapeutic dream experiences. He tries to train a blind
woman in the relevant techniques, despite opposition from her

intellectually augmented guide dog, and finds his own balance of mind
threatened. Compare Ursula K. Le Guin's THE LATHE OF HEAVEN and Greg
Bear's Queen of Angels. See also PSYCHOLOGY
Driftglass
DELANY, SAMUEL R(AY)(Doubleday, 1971)A collection of shorter works,
including the brilliant "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious
Stones" (Nebula winner, 1969) and "The Star Pit." A later, slightly
overlapping collection is Distant Stars (1981), which includes the short
novel, Empire Star (1966), a highly sophisticated space opera. See also
NEW WAVE
Dynamic Science Fiction
Dynamic Science Fiction, Jan. 1954 Published by Columbia Publications,
Inc. Cover illustration by Milton Luros (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Columbia Publications, Inc. (c) 1954 Columbia
Publications, Inc.)
Destinies
Destinies by James Baen Cover: Ace Books (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years, The
The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years by Chingiz Aitmatov Cover:
Indiana University Press, 1988 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Indiana University Press. (c) 1988 Indiana University
Press.)
Dark Messiah
Dark Messiah by David Alexander Cover: Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.,
1987 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc. (c) 1987 Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.)
Deathstones, The
The Deathstones by E.L. Arch Cover: Avalon Books, 1964 illustration by Ed
Emshwiller (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Courtesy of Thomas Bouregy & Co. - Avalon Books (c) 1964 Avalon Books)
Daze, the Magician
Daze, the Magician by Anthony Baerlein Cover: Arthur Barker Ltd., 1936
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Arthur
Barker Ltd. (c) 1936 Arthur Barker Ltd. )
Deliver Me From Eva
Deliver Me From Eva by Paul Bailey Cover: Murray & Gee, 1946 illustration
by Jack Lynch (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Murray & Gee (c) 1946 Murray & Gee)
Demonists, The
The Demonists by David Gurney (Patrick Bair) Cover: Manor Books, 1971
Photo: Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Manor Books (c) 1971 Manor Books)

Drums of the Dark Gods
Drums of the Dark Gods by W.A. Ballinger (W. Howard Baker) Cover:
Dell/Mayflower Dell, 1966 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Dell Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1966 Mayflower Dell)
Dakota Project, The
The Dakota Project by Jack Beeching Cover: Dell, 1971 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Dell
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1971
Dell Books)
Demigods, The
The Demigods by Alfred Bennett Cover: Jarrolds Publishers, 1939 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Jarrolds
Publishers Ltd. (c) 1939 Jarrolds Publishers)
Doomsday Clock
Doomsday Clock by Elizabeth Benoist Cover: The Naylor Co., 1975 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. The Naylor Co. (c)
1975 The Naylor Co.)
Dread Visitor
Dread Visitor by Bryan Berry Cover: Panther Books/ Hamilton & Co., 1952
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
with permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1952 Panther
Books/Hamilton & Co.)
Dream of the Heroes, The
The Dream of the Heroes (El Sueno de los Heroes)by Adolfo Bioy Casares
Cover: Editorial Losada, SA, 1954 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Editorial Losada, SA (c) 1954 Editorial Losada, SA)
Doubting Thomas
Doubting Thomas by Winston Brebner Cover: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958 (First
Edition) illustration by Graham Oakley (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Rupert Hart-Davis (c) 1958 Rupert Hart-Davis
London)
Death Star, The
The Death Star by T.C. Bridges Cover: HarperCollins/Collins, 1940
illustration by J. MacGillivray (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins
Publishers Limited. (c) 1940 Collins)
Deus ex Machina
Deus ex Machina by J.V. Brummels Cover: Bantam/Bantam Spectra, 1989
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by
Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1989 Bantam Spectra)
Doctor Jones' Picnic
Doctor Jones' Picnic by Samuel Chapman Cover: Whitaker & Ray Co., 1898
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )

Double Planet
Double Planet by Marcus Chown Cover: Avon Books, 1988 (Casey Brown/Eaton
Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by permission of Avon
Books. (c) 1988 Avon Books)
Day the Fish Came Out, The
The Day the Fish Came Out by Kay Cicellis Cover: Bantam, 1967 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group,
Inc. (c) 1967 Bantam Books)
Dream Lords, The
The Dream Lords by Adrian Cole Cover: Zebra Books, 1975 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Zebra Books. (c) 1975 Zebra
Books )
Domesday Village
Domesday Village by Ian Colvin Cover: Falcon Press, 1948 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Falcon Press (c) 1948 Falcon
Press)
Da Vinci Machine, The
The Da Vinci Machine by Earl Conrad Cover: Modern Library Editions, 1968
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Modern
Library Editions (c) 1968 Modern Library Editions)
Devil Man from Mars, The
The Devil Man from Mars by James Corbett Cover: Herbert Jenkins Ltd.,
1935 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Courtesy of Random House UK Limited. (c) 1935 Herbert Jenkins Ltd.)
Daybreak
Daybreak by James Cowan Cover: George H. Richmond & Co., 1898 (First
Edition) illustration by Walter C. Greenough (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Drop in Infinity, A
A Drop in Infinity by Gerald Grogan Cover: John Lane, 1915, (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Day the Earth Froze, The
The Day the Earth Froze by Gerald Hatch Cover: Monarch Books, Inc., 1963
illustration by Ralph Brillhart (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1963 Monarch Books, Inc.)
Death Wind
Death Wind by William C. Heine Cover: Pyramid Books, 1974 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1974 Pyramid Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Devil's Elixir, The
The Devil's Elixir by E.T.A. Hoffman Cover: William Blackwood, Edinburgh,
1824 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )

Derelict
Derelict by Robert L. Hovorka Cover: Ace Books, 1988 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1988 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Different Drummer, A
A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelly Cover: Bantam, 1964 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group,
Inc. (c) 1964 Bantam Books)
Dragon Lensman, The
The Dragon Lensman by David A. Kyle Cover: Bantam, 1980 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1980
Bantam Books)
Drome
Drome by John Martin Leahy Cover: Fantasy Publishing, Inc., 1952
illustration by John Martin Leahy (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1952 Fantasy Publishing Co.)
Devil's Rain, The
The Devil's Rain by Maud Willis (Eileen Lottman) Cover: Dell, 1975 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Dell Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1975 Dell Books)
Demon-4
Demon-4 by David Mace Cover: Ace Books, 1984 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The
Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1984 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Day of Misjudgment
Day of Misjudgment by Bernard MacLaren Cover: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1956
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
with the permission of Victor Gollancz Ltd. (c) 1956 Victor Gollancz Ltd.)
Doomsday, 1999
Doomsday, 1999 by Paul MacTyre Cover: Ace Books, 1962 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1962 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Dreamers, The
The Dreamers by Roger Manvell Cover: Bantam, 1963 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1963

Bantam Books)
Devil in Crystal, The
The Devil in Crystal by Louis Marlow Cover: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1944
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Faber and Faber Ltd. (c) 1944 Faber and Faber Ltd.)
Dream Wall, The
The Dream Wall by Graham Dunstan Martin Cover: Unwin Hyman, 1987 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1987
Unwin Hyman)
Doom Star
Doom Star by Richard S. Meyers Cover: Carlyle Books, 1978 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1978 Carlyle
Books)
Dreamrider
Dreamrider by Sandra Miesel Cover: Ace Books, 1982 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The
Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1982 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Desert Eden
Desert Eden by J.M. Morgan Cover: Pinnacle Books, 1991 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.Pinnacle Books (c) 1991
Pinnacle Books)
Duchess of Kneedeep, The
The Duchess of Kneedeep by Atanielle Annyn Noel Cover: Avon Books, 1986
(Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1986 Avon Books)
Dry Deluge, The
The Dry Deluge by Kathleen Nott Cover: Hogarth Press, 1947 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Hogarth Press (c) 1947 Hogarth Press)
Deluge, The
The Deluge by Robert Payne Cover: Lion Books, Inc., 1955 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Lion Books, Inc. (c) 1955
Lion Books, Inc.)
Dreams of an Unseen Planet
Dreams of an Unseen Planet by Teresa Plowright Cover: Arbor House, 1986
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Shown by permission of William Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) 1986
Arbor House)
Downriver
Downriver by Iain Sinclair Cover: HarperCollins/Paladin Grafton Books,
1991 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Paladin Grafton Books (c) 1991 Paladin Grafton Books)

David's Sling
David's Sling by Marc Stiegler Cover: Baen Books, 1988 illustration by
David Mattingly (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of BAEN PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c)
1988 Baen Books)
Destiny's End
Destiny's End by Tim Sullivan Cover: Avon Books, 1988 illustration by Ron
Walotsky (Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside.
Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1988 Avon Books)
Day of the Brown Horde, The
The Day of the Brown Horde by Richard Tooker Cover: Payson and Clarke
Ltd., 1926 (First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Payson and Clarke Ltd. (c) 1926 Payson and Clarke Ltd.)
Discovery of the Dead, The
The Discovery of the Dead by Allen Upward Cover: A.C. Fifield, 1910
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Published
by A.C. Fifield )
Dark Tower, The
The Dark Tower by Peter Vansittart Cover: Thomas Crowell Co., 1969
illustration by Richard Cuffari (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Thomas V.Crowell Co. (c) 1969 Thomas Crowell Co.)
Death over London
Death over London by Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson Cover: Gateway, 1940
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Gateway (c)
1940 Gateway)
Devolutionist and the Emancipatrix, The
The Devolutionist and the Emancipatrix by Homer Flint Cover: Ace Books,
1921 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1921 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Doomsday Eve
Doomsday Eve by Robert Moore Williams Cover: Ace Books, 1957 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1957 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Dr. Blood Money
Dr. Blood Money by Philip K. Dick Cover: Ace Books, 1965 (First Edition)
(M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing
Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1965 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Day of the Minotaur
Day of the Minotaur by Thomas Burnett Swann Cover: Ace Books (First

Edition) illustration by Gray Morrow (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1966 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Deeper than the Darkness
Deeper than the Darkness by Gregory Benford Cover: Ace Books, 1970 (First
Edition) illustration by Kelly Freas (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1970 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Digging Leviathan, The
The Digging Leviathan by James P. Blaylock Cover: Ace Books, 1984 (First
Edition) illustration by James Gurney (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1984 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Divine Endurance
Divine Endurance by Gwyneth Jones Cover: Allen & Unwin, 1984 (First
Edition) illustration by Miller, Craig & Cocking (M. M. Kavanagh.
Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1984
Allen & Unwin)
Demon Kind
Demon Kind ed. by Roger Elwood Cover: Avon Books (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1973 Avon Books)
A Deeper Sea
A Deeper Sea by Alexander Jablokov Cover: Avon Books/AvoNova (First
Edition) illustration by Eric Peterson (M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1992 AvoNova)
Daughter of Elysium
Daughter of Elysium by Joan Slonczewski Cover: Avon Books/AvoNova (First
Edition) illustration by Tim Jacobus (M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by permission
of Avon Books. (c) 1993 AvoNova)
Dover Beach
Dover Beach by Richard Bowker Cover: Bantam, 1987 illustration by Franco
Accornero (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1987 Bantam Books)
Death World
Death World by Harry Harrison Cover: Bantam, 1960 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1960
Bantam Books)
Down the Stream of Stars
Down the Stream of Stars by Jeffrey A. Carver Cover: Bantam, 1990
illustration by Shusei (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam

Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1990
Bantam Books)
Dark Sky Legion
Dark Sky Legion by William Barton Cover: Bantam (First Edition)
illustration by Stephen Youll (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) Bantam Books)
Dark Universe
Dark Universe by Daniel F. Galouye Cover: Bantam (First Edition)
illustration by M. Hooks (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c)
Bantam Books)
Dhalgren
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany Cover: Bantam, 1975 (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1975 Bantam Books)
Dream Years, The
The Dream Years by Lisa Goldstein Cover: Bantam (First Edition)
illustration by Larry Winborg& Jeffrey Mangiat (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by
Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1985 Bantam Books)
Doomsday Planet, The
The Doomsday Planet by Harl Vincent Cover: Tower, 1966 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.Tower Books (c) 1966 Tower
Books)
Different Light, A
A Different Light by Elizabeth Lynn Cover: Berkley, 1978 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1978 The
Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Dr. Adder
Dr. Adder by K.W. Jeter Cover: Tom Doherty Associates/TOR/Bluejay (First
Edition) illustration by Rhea Braustein (M. M. Kavanagh. Book jackets
reprinted by permission of Bluejay Books Inc. All rights reserved. (c)
1984 Bluejay Books Inc.)
Doings of Raffles, The
The Doings of Raffles by Arthur Conan Doyle Cover: George H. Doran Co.,
1919 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Dune
Dune by Frank Herbert Cover: Chilton, 1965 (First Edition) illustration
by John Schoenherr (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1965 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation

of Federal copyright laws.)
Diadem from the Stars
Diadem from the Stars by Jo Clayton Cover: DAW Books, 1977 illustration
by Michael Whelan (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1977 DAW
Books, Inc.)
Douglas Convolution, The
The Douglas Convolution by Edward Llewellyn Cover: DAW Books, 1979 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with
permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1979 DAW Books, Inc.)
Dragon's Egg
Dragon's Egg by Robert L.Forward Cover: New English Library, 1980 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with
permission of Hodder Headline, POC. (c) 1980 New English Library)
Door into Fire, The
The Door into Fire by Diane Duane Cover: Dell, 1979 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Dell
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1979
Dell Books)
Dragon in the Sea, The
The Dragon in the Sea by Frank Herbert Cover: Avon Books, 1967
illustration by John Schoenherr (Casey Brown/Eaton Collection, University
of Calif., Riverside. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1967 Avon
Books)
Dangerous Visions
Dangerous Visions by Harlan Ellison Cover: Doubleday, 1967 (First
Edition) illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by
Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1967 Doubleday)
Decouverte Australe, La
La Decouverte Australe by Restif de la Bretonne Cover: 1781 (First
Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. )
Desolation Road
Desolation Road by Ian McDonald Cover: Bantam (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1988 Bantam Books)
Difference Engine, The
The Difference Engine by William Gibson & Bruce Sterling Cover: Victor
Gollancz Ltd., 1990 (First Edition) illustration by Ian Miller (M. M.
Kavanagh. Reprinted with the permission of Victor Gollancz Ltd. (c) 1990
Victor Gollancz Ltd.)
Devil Rides Out, The
The Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley Cover: Bantam, 1967 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group,

Inc. (c) 1967 Bantam Books)
Devil Tree of El Dorado, The
The Devil Tree of El Dorado by Frank Aubrey Cover: New Amersterdam, 1987
illustration by Leigh Ellis & Fred Hyland (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. New Amsterdam. (c) 1987 New
Amsterdam)
Death of Grass, The
The Death of Grass by John Christopher Cover: Joseph, 1956 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Joseph (c) 1956
Michael Joseph Ltd. London)
Double Feature
Double Feature by Emma Bull & Will Shetterly Cover: NESFA Press (First
Edition) illustration by Nicholas Jainschigg (M. M. Kavanagh. Cover
Illustration: Nicholas Jainschigg. (c) 1994 NESFA Press)
Days Between Stations
Days Between Stations by Steve Erickson Cover: Posideon Press (First
Edition) illustration by George Corsillo (M. M. Kavanagh. Posideon Press
(c) 1985 Posideon Press)
Day of the Drones, The
The Day of the Drones by A.M. Lightner Cover: Bantam, 1970 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission
of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group,
Inc. (c) 1970 Bantam Books)
Dome World
Dome World by Dean McLaughlin Cover: Pyramid Books, 1962 illustration by
Ed Emshwiller (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All
rights reserved. (c) 1962 Pyramid Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Dr. Grimshaw's Secret
Dr. Grimshaw's Secret by Nathaniel Hawthorne Title Page: Riverside Press,
1882 (First Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. )
Denner's Wreck
Denner's Wreck by Lawrence Watt-Evans Cover: Science Fiction Book Club,
1988 illustration by Ron Walotsky (M. M. Kavanagh. Jacket: Ron Walotsky.
Reprinted with permission of Doubleday Book and Music Clubs, Inc. (c) 1988
Doubleday Book & Music Clubs, Inc.)
Demolished Man, The
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester Cover: Shasta, 1953 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Erle Melvin Korshak. (c) 1953 Shasta)
Davy
Davy by Edgar Pangborn Cover: St. Martin's Press, 1964 (First Edition)
illustration by Robert Finegold (M. M. Kavanagh. Cover: Robert Finegold.

Courtesy of St. Martin's Press. (c) 1964 St. Martin's Press)
Dragon Lord, The
The Dragon Lord by David Drake Cover: TOR (First Edition) illustration by
Steve Hickman (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c)
1982 Tor Books)
Dr. Grimshaw's Secret
Dr. Grimshaw's Secret by Nathaniel Hawthorne Frontispiece illustration:
Riverside Press, 1882 (First Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Riverside Press. )
Downbelow Station
Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh Cover: DAW Books, 1981 illustration by
Rego (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c)
1981 DAW Books, Inc.)
Dorsai!
Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson Cover: TOR, 1993 illustration by Royo (M. M.
Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1993 Tor Books)
Diamond Age, The
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson Cover: Bantam, 1995 illustration by
Bruce Jensen (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a
division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) Bantam Books)
Dragon Masters, The
The Dragon Masters by Jack Vance Cover: Ace Books, 1971 (M. M. Kavanagh.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1971 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Death Qualified
Death Qualified by Kate Wilhelm Cover: St. Martin's Press, 1991 (First
Edition) illustration by Doris Borowsky (M.M. Kavanagh. Cover: Doris
Borowsky. Courtesy of St. Martin's Press. (c) 1991 St. Martin's Press)
Darker than You Think
Darker than You Think by Jack Williamson Cover: Lancer Books, 1963 (M. M.
Kavanagh.Lancer Books (c) 1963 Lancer)
Doomsday Book
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis Cover: Bantam, 1992 (First Edition)
illustration by Jacobus (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1992
Bantam Books)
Dream Master, The
The Dream Master by Roger Zelazny Cover: Ace Books, 1966 (First Edition)
illustration by Kelly Freas (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with
The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1966 Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories, The
The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories by Roger

Zelazny Cover: Avon Books, 1974 illustration by Jeff Jones (M. M.
Kavanagh. Shown by permission of Avon Books. (c) 1974 Avon Books)
Dann, Jack
Jack Dann (1945- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
De Camp, L. Sprague
L. Sprague De Camp (1907- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
De Lint, Charles
Charles De Lint (1951- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Delany, Samuel R.
Samuel R. Delany (1942- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Denton, Bradley
Bradley Denton (1958- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Dickson, Gordon
Gordon R. Dickson (1923- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Donaldson, Stephen R.
Stephen R. Donaldson (1947- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Dozois, Gardner
Gardner Dozois (1947- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Drake, David A.
David A. Drake (1945- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Duane, Diane E.
Diane E. Duane (1952- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle, [Sir] Arthur Conan (1859-1930) ( Bettmann. )
Dickens, Charles
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) ( Bettmann. )
Douglas, Carole Nelson
Carole Nelson Douglas (1944- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Durrell, Lawrence
Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) ( Bettmann. )
del Rey, Lester
Lester del Rey (1915- ) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Disch, Thomas M.
Thomas M. Disch (1940- ) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Davidson, Avram
Avram Davidson (1923- ) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Dick, Philip K.
Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) (Jay Kay Klein. (c) 1995 Jay Kay Klein)
Downing, Paula E.
Paula E. Downing (1951- ) (T. Jackson King. (c) 1995 T. Jackson King)

Delany, Samuel (Technology & Magic)
Samuel Delany on the relationship between technology and magic. ( (c)
Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Delany, Samuel (Technology & Magic)
Samuel Delany on the relationship between technology and magic. ( (c)
Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Dunn, J.R.
J.R. Dunn ( ? - ) (M. M. Kavanagh. (c) 1995 M. M. Kavanagh)
Dowling, Terry
Terry Dowling (1947- ) (Catriona Sparks. (c) 1995 Catriona Sparks)
Destination Moon
The success of Destination Moon (George Pal/Eagle-Lion, 1950) initiated
the 1950s boom in science fiction movies, few of which possessed the
high-minded aspirations of this low-keyed, semi-documentary film. Based
(very loosely) on Robert Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo, it eschewed the
sensationalism associated with most 1950s SF films to attempt a realistic
dramatization of the first trip to the Moon. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood
Movie Posters. )
Doctor X
An early Technicolor film, Doctor X (First National/Warner Brothers,
1932) combines elements of SF, horror, and mystery. Its SF element - an
emotionally unstable scientist wreaking havoc with the aid of short-lived
artificial flesh - is put to more sophisticated use in the 1990 film
Darkman. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
Donovan's Brain
From Felix Feist's adaptation of Curt Siodmak's novel, Donovan's Brain
(Dowling Productions/United Artists, 1953) is memorable more for its
performance by Lew Ayres - who comes under the telepathic power of the
evil brain he has kept alive in a tank - than for its anticipation of some
elements of cybernetics. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
Dr. No
The first of the James Bond movies, Dr. No (Eon/United Artists, 1962) set
the stage for three decades worth of semi-sciencefictional thrillers
involving supervillains, attempts to take over the world, and implements
of doom. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
del Rey's Nerves
Lester DEL REY's story of disaster, panic, and coverup at a NUCLEAR
POWERplant was prophetic in many respects.
Dianetics article in Astounding
Upon publishing his essay on his home-grown science of DIANETICS, L. Ron
HUBBARD abandoned his career as a pulp SF writer and devoted himself to
Dianetics and (later) SCIENTOLOGY.
Davidson's The Golem
Combining elements of SF, historical fantasy, and contemporary humor,

Avram DAVIDSON's novel of a GOLEM in Southern California is a classic of
American humor.
Dickson's Dorsai!
Gordon DICKSON's sequence of genetic supermen and the destiny of humanity
began in 1959.
Dick's Palmer Eldritch
One of the first SF novels to deal with the existential horrors of
hallucinogenic drug abuse, THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH is one of
Philip K. DICK's best and most famous novels.
Dangerous Visions
Announced as "a revolutionary book", Harlan ELLISON's DANGEROUS VISIONS,
an anthology of 32 ambitious stories, overturned conventions and broke new
ground for science fiction.
Disch's Camp Concentration
Thomas M. DISCH's novel of mind-altering experiments carried out on
anti-war dissidents seemed aggressively NEW WAVE, but CAMP CONCENTRATION
develops several classic SF themes.
Delany's Nova
Samuel R. DELANY had won the Nebula Award for his previous two novels,
but achieved true SF fame for NOVA, a pyrotechnic SF retelling of the
Prometheus legend.
Davidson's The Phoenix and the Mirror
Avram DAVIDSON's magisterial account of Vergil the Sorceror is one of the
finest accounts of the science in Renaissance magic, and has influenced
numerous SF and fantasy writers.
Delany's Dhalgren
Samuel R. DELANY's first SF novel in seven years, the 879-page DHALGREN
seemed an unreadable self-indulgence to many readers. It nevertheless
found a large and enthusiastic audience.
Del Rey Books launched
Judy-Lynn DEL REY made DEL REY BOOKS a major commercial powerhouse,
especially in genre fantasy. Many Del Rey books became best-sellers.
Dick's Valis
Philip K. Dick's first novel in four years, VALIS was an anguished work
that suggested a religious solution to Dick's 1970s spiritual crises. His
final two novels would continue this theme.
Dune opens
David Lynch's film, DUNE, based on the novel by Frank HERBERT, was deeply
idiosyncratic and proved a major box-office failure.
E Pluribus Unicorn
STURGEON, THEODORE(Abelard, 1953)Thirteen fine, emotionally intense
stories, ranging from "The World Well Lost," probably the first serious
and sympathetic treatment in magazine SF of homosexuality, to "The
Professor's Teddy Bear," in the most horrific Weird Tales tradition; from

the touching love story "A Saucer of Loneliness" to a celebration of jazz
musicianship (by one who understood what he was writing about), "Die,
Maestro, Die!" Sturgeon's forte was telling stories about people at the
edge, and treating them with compassion and nonjudgmentally even when they
acted as shockingly as at the climax of "A Way of Thinking." A showcase
for a very talented writer, which can be interestingly compared with the
earlier collection of Sturgeon's Golden Age work, Without Sorcery.
Earth Abides
STEWART, GEORGE R(IPPEY)(Random, 1949)In a near future, a plague
devastates humankind, leaving isolated pockets of survivors. The story
follows the fortunes of one group in the San Francisco Bay area, who
subsist for quite some time on the bounties of civilization that have
remained intact. But the subtler social fabric, formerly held together by
the cooperation of large numbers of people, is too much for this handful
to sustain. With a mournful backward look at the millions of now-doomed
volumes in the University of California library, the protagonist teaches
the new children how to make bows and arrows. He lives long enough to see
society forming itself anew at the tribal level. He himself is fated to be
misremembered as a legendary culture-hero. The quotation from which the
title derives (Ecclesiastes 1:4) is apt. Compare Jack London, "The Scarlet
Plague" (in The Science Fiction of Jack London); Stephen King's THE STAND
; Mary Shelley, The Last Man. First winner of the International Fantasy
Award, 1951; a major work. See also HOLOCAUST AND AFTER
Eon
BEAR, GREG(Bluejay, 1985)World War III looms as an asteroid starship
mysteriously orbiting Earth is taken over by Americans, who discover that
it is an artifact from the future that offers a gateway to infinite
opportunity. Hard SF unfolding into vast realms of possibilities. In the
sequel, Eternity (1988), humans explore the seemingly endless corridor of
the Way and the alternate universes and time periods that lead off it.
Compare Robert Reed's Down the Bright Way. See also BIG DUMB OBJECTS
Extra(ordinary) People
RUSS, JOANNA(St. Martin's, 1984)A collection of linked stories,
deliberately didactic in form, in which liberated women in different
societies challenge the forces of oppression. Includes "Souls" (Hugo
winner, 1983). As with The Female Man , the result is multifaceted and the
call for a revolution in sexual politics is eloquent even though the
stories retain a full appreciation of the difficulty of compiling a
manifesto for a nonsexist society. Other, more varied, collections are The
Zanzibar Cat (1984), which features the Nebula Award-winning "When It
Changed," the seed story for The Female Man, and The Hidden Side of the
Moon (1988), which includes such stories as "The Dirty Little Girl" and
"Reasonable People. See also FEMINISM"
Ender's Game
CARD, ORSON SCOTT(Tor, 1985)The CHILD hero is subjected to horrific
manipulation by the military in order to make him the perfect commander
able to annihilate the insectile aliens who have twice attacked the solar
system. Based on a novelette, the expanded version includes much

discussion of moral propriety and undergoes a dramatic ideological shift
at the end, but remains in many ways a sophisticated power fantasy. Grimly
fascinating. The sequel, Speaker for the Dead (1986; Hugo winner, 1987;
Nebula winner, 1986), takes off from the climactic shift in perspective to
construct a very different story in which Ender becomes a more Christ-like
savior. The third book in the series, Xenocide (1991; HN, 1992), is most
notable for a new subplot, the story of a world whose future leaders are
genetically engineered for brilliance, but also for a crippling
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder designed to limit their power. The ending of
the novel is weak, shifting into wish fulfillment fantasy. Compare Robert
A. Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS , Joe Haldeman's THE FOREVER WAR, and Dave
Wolverton's On My Way to Paradise (1989). Hugo winner, 1986; Nebula
winner, 1985
Emphyrio
VANCE, JACK(Doubleday, 1969) The protagonist must travel to Earth to
recover the knowledge necessary to free his world from the cultural
rigidity imposed on it by alien rulers. Picks up themes from earlier Vance
novels, including The Languages of Pao , to further illustrate the
author's fascination with colorful, exotic cultures and messianic rebels
against their stagnation. See also SOCIOLOGY
Engine Summer
CROWLEY, JOHN(Doubleday, 1979)In a far-future America returned to
agrarian primitivism by disaster, the hero has recorded for future
generations the story of his youthful quest for enlightenment. Beautifully
written and eloquently argued; it can be appreciated even by those who
lack sympathy with the ideology behind its Arcadian romanticism. Compare
Ursula K. Le Guin's ALWAYS COMING HOME. See also HOLOCAUST AND AFTER
Extrapolation
Extrapolation, Winter 1992 Published by Kent State University Press (Casy
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of The
Kent State University Press. (c) 1992 Kent State University Press.)
Empire of the Senseless
Empire of the Senseless by Kathy Acker Cover: Grove Press, 1988 (First
Edition) illustration by George Corsillo (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
(c) 1988 Grove Press)
Eternal Enemy, The
The Eternal Enemy by Michael Berlyn Cover: William Morrow & Co., 1990
(First Printing) illustration by Vincent Di Fate (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Shown by permission of William
Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) 1990 William Morrow & Co., Inc.)
Even a Worm
Even a Worm by J.S. Bradford Cover: Arthur Barker Ltd., 1936 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Arthur Barker Ltd.
(c) 1936 Arthur Barker Ltd. )
Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, The
The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit by Storm Constantine Cover:

MacDonald & Co., 1987 illustration by Kenny McHendry (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Macdonald & Co. (c) 1987
MacDonald & Co.)
Encounter Program
Encounter Program by Robert Enstrom Cover: Doubleday, 1977 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1977 Doubleday & Co.)
Eternal Moment, The
The Eternal Moment by E.M. Forster Cover: Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd., 1928
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Sidgwick &
Jackson Ltd. (c) 1928 Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd.)
Elixir, The
The Elixir by James N. Frey Cover: Zebra Books, 1986 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1986 Zebra Books
(Kensigton Publishing Corp.) )
Exit Sherlock Holmes
Exit Sherlock Holmes by Robert Lee Hall Cover: Playboy Press Paperbacks,
1977 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights
reserved. (c) 1977 Playboy Press. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Earthquake, The
The Earthquake by W. Holt-White Cover: E. Grant Richards, 1906 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Earth Lies Sleeping
Earth Lies Sleeping by Laurence James Cover: Zebra Books, 1974 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1974 Zebra
Books)
Erone
Erone by Chalmers Kearney Cover: The Commodore Press Ltd., 1945 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1945 The
Commodore Press Ltd.)
English Revolution of the Twentieth Century, The
The English Revolution of the Twentieth Century by Henry Lazarus Cover:
F.L. Ballin, 1897 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. )
Etidorhpa
Etidorhpa by John Uri Lloyd Cover: John Uri Lloyd, 1895 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. John Uri Lloyd )
Extrapolasis
Extrapolasis by Alexander Malec Cover: Modern Library Editions, 1967
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1967
Modern Library Editions)

Elephant, The
The Elephant by Slawomir Mrozek Cover: Macdonald & Co., 1962 illustration
by Daniel Uroz (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Macdonald & Co. (c) 1962 MacDonald & Co.)
Exercise for Madmen, An
An Exercise for Madmen by Barbara Paul Cover: Berkley, 1978 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1978 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Egghead Republic, The
The Egghead Republic by Arno Schmidt Cover: Marion Books, 1982
illustration by Imre Reiner (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside.Marion Books (c) 1982 Marion Books)
Eclipse
Eclipse by John Shirley Cover: Bluejay International, 1985 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Book jackets
reprinted by permission of Bluejay Books Inc. All rights reserved. (c)
1985 Bluejay Books Inc.)
Empty World, The
The Empty World by D.E. Stevenson Cover: Herbert Jenkins Ltd., 1936
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of
Random House UK Limited. (c) 1936 Herbert Jenkins Ltd.)
Eagles Restrained
Eagles Restrained by Brian Tunstall Cover: Edinburgh Press, 1936 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Edinburgh Press
(c) 1936 Edinburgh Press)
Ether Ore
Ether Ore by H.C. Turk Cover: TOR, 1987 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of Tor
Books. (c) 1987 Tor Books)
Elleander Morning
Elleander Morning by Jerry Yulsman Cover: TOR, 1984 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of
Tor Books. (c) 1984 Tor Books)
Eye in the Sky
Eye in the Sky by Philip K. Dick Cover: Ace Books, 1957 illustration by
Kelly Freas (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1957 Ace Books. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Einstein Intersection, The
The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany Cover: Ace Books, 1967
(First Edition) illustration by Jack Gaughan (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by

arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1967 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Eclipse of Dawn, The
The Eclipse of Dawn by Gordon Eklund Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1971 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Escape Plans
Escape Plans by Gwyneth Jones Cover: Allen & Unwin (First Edition)
illustration by Lionel Jeans (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of
HarperCollins Publishers Limited. (c) 1986 Allen & Unwin)
Edge of Tomorrow, The
The Edge of Tomorrow by Howard Fast Cover: Bantam, 1961 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1961
Bantam Books)
Emergence
Emergence by David Palmer Cover: Bantam, 1984 illustration by Mark
Harrison (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1984 Bantam Books)
Ecotopia
Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach Cover: Banyan Tree, 1975 illustration by
Patricia Tobacco Forrester (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. (c) 1975 Banyan Tree)
Emprise
Emprise by Michael P. Kube-McDowell Cover: Berkley, 1985 illustration by
Ron Miller (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1985 The Berkley Publishing
Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Eater of Darkness, The
The Eater of Darkness by Robert Coates Cover: Contact Editions, 1929
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Contact
Editions (c) 1929 Contact Editions)
Exiles of Time
Exiles of Time by Nelson Bond Cover: Prime Press, 1949 illustration by
James Gibson (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Prime Press (c) 1949 Prime Press Philadelphia )
Engine Summer
Engine Summer by John Crowley Cover: Doubleday, 1979 (First Edition)
illustration by Gary Friedman (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c)

1979 Doubleday)
Eye of the Queen, The
The Eye of the Queen by Phillip Mann Cover: Arbor House, 1983
illustration by Loretta Trezzo (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Shown by permission of William Morrow & Co., Inc. (c)
1983 Arbor House)
Embedding, The
The Embedding by Ian Watson Cover: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1973 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Reprinted with the permission of Victor Gollancz Ltd. (c) 1973 Victor
Gollancz Ltd.)
Essential Ellison, The
The Essential Ellison by Harlan Ellison Cover: Nemo Press, 1987 (First
Edition) illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon (M. M. Kavanagh. Nemo Press
(c) 1987 Nemo Press)
Evil Is Live Spelled Backwards
Evil Is Live Spelled Backwards by Andew J. Offutt Cover: Paperback
Library, 1970 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Paperback Library (c) 1970 Paperback Library)
Eye, The
The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov Cover: Phaedra (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Phaedra (c) 1965 Phaedra)
Eyes in the Fire
Eyes in the Fire by Deborah Grabien Cover: St. Martin's Press, 1988
(First US Edition) illustration by Steven Rydberg (M. M. Kavanagh. Cover:
Steven Rydberg. Courtesy of St. Martin's Press. (c) 1988 St. Martin's
Press)
Eon
Eon by Greg Bear Cover: TOR, 1985 illustration by Ron Miller (M. M.
Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1985 Tor Books)
Elvissey
Elvissey by Jack Womack Cover: TOR, 1993 (First Edition) illustration by
John Berkey (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c)
1993 Tor Books)
Erewhon
Erewhon by Samuel Butler Cover: Turbner, 1872 (First Edition) (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Extra(ordinary) People
Extra(ordinary) People by Joanna Russ Cover: The Women's Press, 1985
illustration by Judith Clute (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of The Women's
Press, London. (c) 1985 The Women's Press)
Enemy Stars, The
The Enemy Stars by Poul Anderson Cover: Berkley, 1965 (M. M. Kavanagh.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights

reserved. (c) 1965 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication
or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Ender's Game
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card Cover: TOR, 1994 illustration by John
Harris (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1994 Tor
Books)
Emphyrio
Emphyrio by Jack Vance Cover: Dell, 1970 (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by
Permission of Dell Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1970 Dell Books)
Effinger, George Alec
George Alec Effinger (1947- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Etchemendy, Nancy
Nancy Etchemendy (1952- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Ellison, Harlan
Harlan Ellison (1934- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Eco, Umberto
Umberto Eco (1932- ) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)
Emshwiller, Carol
Carol Emshwiller (1921- ) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)
Ecology
SF writers are among the small group of people who ponder the future of a
planet with limited resources and who imagine, in fictional terms, what
might happen if humans don't adapt to a rapidly changing world. ( (c)
Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Eshbach, Lloyd Arthur
Lloyd Arthur Eshbach (1910- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I.
Porter)
Edmondson, G.C.
G.C. Edmondson (1922- ) (Rick Hawes. (c) 1995 Rick Hawes)
Edwards, Malcolm
Malcolm Edwards (1949- ) (Jo Fletcher. (c) 1995 Jo Fletcher)
Editorial Practices
From The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute and Peter Nicholls,
eds.In Contents of this Encyclopedia we briefly describe the principles
governing its construction, and the kinds of information which may be
found here. We have tried throughout to present this material as clearly
as possible, but some pointers may be helpful.CROSS-REFERENCES1.
Approximately 2100 out of the 6460+ entries in the encyclopedia are
cross-reference entries. Many simply cross-refer a term to the entry where
it is covered, for example: PERU LATIN AMERICA.When one name is simply
cross-referenced to a second, then the first name is a pseudonym of the
second that has been used on a book, for example: O'DONNELL, K.M. Barry N.

MALZBERG.When one name is cross-referenced to a second but with the
addition of an [s], then the first name is a pseudonym of the second but
has been used only for stories, for example: SMITH, WOODROW WILSON Henry
KUTTNER.When one name is cross-referenced to another entry but with the
addition of an [r], then the first name is not a pseudonym of the second,
for example: SMITH, LAURA Seth McEVOYSPITTEL, OLAF R. GERMANY.2. Within
the text of entries, and in the See also sections attached to many of
them, any word given in CAPITALS constitutes a cross-reference.AUTHOR,
CRITIC AND EDITOR ENTRIES Names Each entry begins with the author's full
real name, working name or pseudonym, whichever is best known. We step
outside normal practice only with the concept of the working name, which
we have defined as one which encompasses in easily recognizeable form a
significant portion of a full name - as in the case of Connie Willis,
which we treat as Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis's working name.Titles
For all authors writing in English we attempt to treat or to list every
adult book with any significant sf content, to treat or (more commonly)
simply to list all fantasy and horror books, and to at least list most
children's books of genre interest; for foreign-language authors we do not
claim to list all sf/horror/fantasy work not translated into English. We
list most nonfiction works written by sf authors about the field or about
other authors; we also list, sometimes selectively, nonfiction works of
science or popular science by sf authors who also work in those fields. In
author entries, each book is given a full ascription (see below for
details); other kinds of entry (theme entries in particular) often
identify titles in a briefer format. In our selection of titles we have
tended to be extremely catholic; one may occasionally find - especially in
the Other works list of titles at the foot of some entries - novels whose
generic status is doubtful, and collections containing only a few relevant
stories. This is deliberate: when we err, we prefer to do so through
inclusion rather than exclusion.We do not list all short stories by
authors.Story titles are given in normal face, within double quotes (""),
with dates in normal face. Book titles are given in italics with dates in
bold face. Subtitles are sometimes omitted, though we do include them when
appropriate. We do so for clarity's sake - there are, for instance, three
Stanley G. Weinbaum collections which can be distinguished only through
subtitles: A Martian Odyssey, and Others (coll 1949), A Maritan Odyssey,
and Other Classics of Science Fiction (coll 1962), and A Martian Odyssey,
and Other Science Fiction Tales (coll 1975). And we list subtitles when
they seem to be of inherent interest; for instance, Keith Laumer's Bolo:
The Annals of the Dinochrome Brigade (coll of linked stories 1976). Series
titles are given in bold face.We generally give the title of singletons books which are not part of series - according to normal bibliographical
practice by which the title as it appears on the title page (rather than
on the cover or elsewhere) is deemed the true title. With books which are
part of series, we have decided that normal bibliographical practice is of
little use in helping sf readers through the often confusing tangle of
conventions used to identify (and advertise) this category of title. Where
there is no series identification, we list the title only as we would with
a singleton, though in a context which makes clear its connection to its
series-mates. Where series are accorded some form of ongoing title,
wherever placed, we try to ascribe the first volume in full, but

subsequently (as soon as individual volume titles can be clearly
distinguished) we reduce that overall title to a number: as in David
Meltzer's Brain Plant sequence, which we render as Brain Plant #1: Lovely
(1969), #2: Healer (1969), #3: Out (1969) and #4: Glue Factory
(1969).Ghost titles and projected titles Books whose existence we doubt
and books whose release we had not confirmed by press time we give in
normal face between chevrons (), giving their publication date in normal
face.Ties We define a Tie as any text whose contents take their substance
from some prior inspiration, which may be a shared-world bible, a film, a
tv series, a role-playing or other form of game. All such novels,
collections, anthologies and omnibuses are identified by an asterisk (*)
placed immediately after the title, as with Donald F. Glut's The Empire
Strikes Back* (1980), which novelizes the film The Empire Strikes
Back.Ascription data about titles is contained within brackets, and has
been kept as simple as is consistent with our desire to provide as much
information as we can, within the constraints of our encyclopedia format.
We do not, for instance, normally provide full bibliographic data (i.e.,
city of publication, publisher, pagination, etc.), where we discuss and
recommend various sf and fantasy checklists. Most novels - i.e., Isaac
Asimov's The Gods Themselves (1972) - therefore need no more than a simple
date of publication; collections can be identified by the term "coll"
placed directly before the date.However, we use several further terms to
describe books. Abbreviations placed before the date include: collcoll of
linked storiesfixupanthomni A fixup - briefly - is a book composed of
previously written stories which have been cemented together. An anth is
an anthology, while an omni is an omnibus - a book that assembles
previously published volumes.Abbreviations placed after the date include:
chap ( chapbook)DOS"Chap" designates a book fewer than 100pp in length;
"dos" designates two titles usually (but not always) bound back-to-back
and upside down with respect to one another. We also indicate country of
publication when a book was first published in a country other than its
author's normal country of residence, as with Thomas M. Disch's 334 (coll
of linked stories 1972 UK).When titles are published in two countries
within a few weeks of one another we "follow the flag" and treat first
publication as being in the author's country of residence.We give variant
titles, where they exist, for all books and films. A variant title may be
identified by the abbreviation vt placed initially, as in Daniel F.
Galouye's Counterfeit World (1964 UK; vt Simulacron-3 1964 US). We treat
vts as variants of a main title, and therefore do not print their dates in
boldface.We designate revised editions of all books listed. However, we
are not always able to specify the nature of the revision, in which case
the revised edition will be identified by the abbreviation rev placed
initially, as in Marta Randall's Islands (1976; rev 1980); if we have
further knowledge, we use such terms as cut, exp, much exp, text restored,
all of which are intended to be self-evident.In the case of novels, we
attempt to give magazine publication where it precedes book publication by
three or more years, as with George Allen England's The Golden Blight
(1912 Cavalier; 1916). We usually give the magazine title of a story when
this differs from the book title, though we do so less consistently in
cases where the story was published two years or less before the book
version.Translations Whenever possible we notate translated books

according to the following example by Vladimir Nabokov, Priglashenie na
kasn' (1938 France; trans Dmitri Nabokov and VN as Invitation to a
Beheading 1959 US). As we treat translations as separate entities, we date
them in bold face. We do not, however, necessarily list all variant
translations, sometimes giving only the first. When untranslated books are
mentioned, a rough English translation of the title appears in square
brackets immediately after the original, as with Arno Schmidt's Schwarze
Spiegel "Black Mirrors" (1963).CHECKLIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Abbreviations
listed below in bold face are explained in Editorial Practices You May
Need to Know About. Abbreviations in CAPITALS also have their own entries,
where they are more fully explained. projected or ghost title refer to
(the entry thus indicated)* a tied title ( TIE)# numberAMZ AMAZING
STORIESanth anthologyASF ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION/ANALOGb/w - black and
whitechap - under 100pp coll - collectiondir - directed/directorDOS bound back-to-backed - edited/editoredn - editionexp - expandedFIXUP novel made up from storiesFSF - The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE
FICTIONGal - GALAXY SCIENCE FICTIONIASFM - ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION
MAGAZINENW - NEW WORLDSomni - omnibusprod - produced/producer[r] - not a
pseudonym of the name to which it is cross-referredrev - revised[s] pseudonym used only for short fictionsf - science fictiontrans translatedtv - televisionTWS - THRILLING WONDER STORIESvar mags published in various magazinesvol - volumevt - variant titleWW - World War
Ellis's The Steam Man of the Prairies
Mechanical men were common figures in nineteenth century fiction; Edward
S. ELLIS's creation was based on an actual device, and inspired imitations
in its turn.See Also: ROBOTS.
Ellison's 'Repent, Harlequin!
Harlan ELLISON spent a decade-long apprenticeship before he discovered
his own voice. "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman+" is one of the
most frequently reprinted stories in SF.
Ellison's best stories
Harlan ELLISON produced his finest fiction in the late sixties and early
seventies, including "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" and "Pretty
Maggie Moneyeyes". These intense and memorable stories have remained
popular for the past three decades.
E.T.: The Extraterrestrial
For many years the top money grosser, E.T.: THE EXTRATERRESTRIALis the
story of a friendly alien who encounters suburban America.See Also:
CINEMA; STEVEN SPIELBERG.
First issue of Interzone
The first British SF magazine since NEW WORLDS, INTERZONE began as a slim
quarterly but grew to be a substantial monthly.
Fourth Mansions
LAFFERTY, R(APHAEL) A(LOYSIUS)(Ace, 1969)An innocent tries to understand
the enigmatic events and secret organizations that are symbolic
incarnations of the forces embodied in the (highly problematic) moral
progress and spiritual evolution of humankind. A bizarre tour de force;

one of the finest examples of American avant-garde SF. Compare Roger
Zelazny's THIS IMMORTAI and Samuel R. Delany's THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION.
See also HISTORY IN SF
Fire on the Mountain
BISSON, TERRY( Arbor, 1988)The Civil War as we know it never occurred in
this alternate universe because John Brown, with Harriet Tubman acting as
his lieutenant, sparked a successful slave rebellion. The outcome was a
divided United States with an African-American-dominated South emerging as
a socialist utopia. This somehow led to a Europe that avoided world war
and to an Africa that developed free from the worst results of colonial
rule. The viewpoint alternates between Yasmin, a successful anthropologist
and citizen of the utopian South; her great grandfather Abraham, who, born
a slave, took part in the rebellion; and Dr. Hunter, a white abolitionist
who served as Abraham's mentor. The novel's basic premise seems a bit
farfetched, but Bisson's alternate 20th century is endlessly fascinating
and well worth a visit. Compare Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South
(1992). See also ALTERNATE WORLDS
Friday
HEINLEIN, ROBERT A(NSON)(Holt, 1982)An artificially created superwoman,
courier for a secret organization, has to fend for herself when the
decline of the West reaches its climax; she ultimately finds a new raison
d'etre on the extraterrestrial frontier. Welcomed by Heinlein fans as
action-adventure respite from his more introspective works, but actually
related very closely to some sections of Time Enough for Love and refers
to much earlier material ("Gulf," 1949). See also SUPERMAN
Four Hundred Billion Stars
MCAULEY, PAUL J. (Ballantine, 1988)Explorers from Earth discover a planet
that doesn't seem old enough geologically to have developed its complex
native ecology. Adding to the mystery, abandoned, hive-like cities are
discovered, even though the dominate life-form, the nomadic herders, seem
to be only semi-sentient. Humanity is currently engaged in an
interplanetary war elsewhere in the galaxy, and the naval officers in
charge of the expedition fear there may be some connection between the
primitive herders and humanity's enemy. This seems unlikely until someone
notices that the abandoned hive-cities are coming to life and the herders
are beginning to change their age-old behavior patterns. McAuley's
exploration of the complex herder species is fascinating and his
protagonist, the astronomer Dorthy Yoshida, an unwilling psychic, is well
developed. Eternal Light (1991) is a direct sequel to Four Hundred Billion
Stars and is every bit as good. Of the Fall (1989), titled Secret
Harmonies (1991) in its British edition, is a solid, but relatively minor
tale set in the same universe as the other two novels. All three books,
along with McAuley's first short story collection, The King of the Hill
(1991), demonstrate the author's genius for creating fascinating aliens.
Compare Gregory Benford's Great Sky River and its sequels. See also ALIENS
Flowers for Algernon
KEYES, DANIEL(Harcourt, 1966)Developed from a Hugo-winning short story
with the same title. A mentally retarded man's intelligence enhanced, to

that of a normal adult and then to supergenius. "Progress reports" in his
diary, with successive changes in diction and spelling as well as
intellectual content, chronicle his triumphant progress; and then, as the
treatment fails, the reports record his collapse back into subnormality. A
sensitively told, low-key masterpiece that was made into a surprisingly
good film, given Hollywood's usual heavy-handed ways with "sci-fi."
Compare Poul Anderson's Brain Wave and Theodore Sturgeon's "Maturity" (in
Without Sorcery), contrast Howard Fast's "The First Men" (in The Edge of
Tomorrow), and Wilmar H. Shiras's Children of the Atom . See also
INTELLIGENCE
Fahrenheit 451
BRADBURY, RAY (DOUGLAS)(Ballantine, 1953)Expanded from a novella "The
Fireman" (Galaxy, February 1951; SFHF). Firemen no longer put out fires;
they start them, for the purpose of burning books. The title refers to the
temperature at which paper will catch fire. The hero, a fireman but a
closet reader, eventually joins an underground of itinerants who have
committed the literary classics to memory and recite them orally. The much
admired film made from the novel, by making the firemen into brutal,
black-uniformed Nazi types, missed a point made by Bradbury early on: that
hostility to books and ideas was generated by ordinary people, not simply
imposed upon them by government. Frequently reprinted since its original
publication and often used in the classroom, although I consider the
original novella from the magazine tighter, more vivid, less diffuse-in
short a better literary work than the full-length book. See also DYSTOPIAS
Foundation's Edge
ASIMOV, ISAAC(Doubleday, 1982)Fourth volume of the Foundation series,
uncomfortably extending its themes and beginning the work of binding it
into a common future history with Asimov's robot stories. In the 1940s the
series seemed sophisticated in introducing political themes into space
opera, but SF has evolved so far in the meantime that the new book seems
rather quaint despite its popularity. It is a feast of nostalgia for
longtime readers. The story continues in Foundation and Earth (1986), with
the hero pursuing his quest to track down the origins of mankind and
gradually learning the truth about Earth. Prelude to Foundation (1988) and
Forward the Foundation (1993), which Asimov left unfinished at his death,
predate the other novels in the series in terms of internal chronology,
describing the early life of Hari Seldon. Hugo winner, 1983. See also
GALACTIC EMPIRES
The Foundation Trilogy
ASIMOV, LSAAC(Doubleday,1963)Asimov described the gradual fall of a
GALACTIC EMPIRE, and the eftort of psychohistorian Hari Seldon to shorten
the ensuing Dark Ages by setting up a hidden Foundation in a remote corner
of the galaxy, in stories published in Astounding in the early 1940s and
collected as Foundation (Gnome,1951). Other, longer Astounding stories,
describing an attempt at reconquest of the Foundation by the last
competent imperial general Bel Riose (like Belisarius, who similarly
attempted to reconquer the Roman West for East Roman Emperor Justinian),
and an initially more successful capture of the Foundation by "the Mule,"
a mutant not subject as an individual to the statistical "laws of

psychohistory," were collected as Foundation and Empire (Gnome,1952).
Finally, two Astounding serials in the late forties described the Mule's
search for a Second Foundation, established by Seldon as a backup in case
something went wrong for the First; these became Second Foundation (Gnome,
1953). Asimov then laid this theme aside for thirty years, until popular
demand and his publisher's prodding led him to compose Foundation's Edge,
Foundation and Earth, and a "prequel," Prelude to Foundation , describing
how Hari Seldon discovered the laws of psychohistory in the first place.
At the time of his death in 1992 Asimov had completed four further
adventures of Hari Seldon, which were collected as Forward the Foundation.
Special Hugo Award for all time best series, l966.
Falling Free
BUJOLD, LOIS MCMASTER(Baen, 1988)Leo Graf, a welding engineer hired to
train workers on a space station, is astonished to discover that his new
pupils are "quaddies," genetically engineered living tools with extra arms
where normal people have legs. Designed by the GalacTech corporation to be
perfect zero-gravity employees, the quaddies unfortunately have failed to
turn a profit for their owner/employers. Soon after Graf's arrival, the
corporation decides to cut its losses and return the quaddies to Earth,
where they will presumably be dumped in nursing homes on a small pension.
The quaddies, however, have other ideas, and convince Graf to join them in
revolt. Originally published as a serial in Analog in 1987-1988, this is
an example of old-fashioned, Campbell-style hard SF at its best, but with
a fascinating FEMINIST twist. Compare Allan Steele's Orbital Decay. Nebula
winner, 1988
Fundamental Disch
DISCH, THOMAS M.(Bantam, 1980)Disch's longest and most comprehensive
collection, which includes both SF, fantasy, and contemporary stories. In
addition to "The Asian Shore," Disch's celebrated tale of an American
architect who succumbs to the sense of the arbitrary that the landscape
and architecture of Istanbul come to represent, the volume also contains
"Bodies" and "Angouleme," two especially strong stories from the sequence
of tales that make up the novel 334. Some stories, such as the elegant and
disconcerting "Slaves," are not science fiction at all, while others,
including "The Squirrel Cage" and "The Master of the Milford Altarpiece,"
are metafictions from the heyday of the NEW WAVE. "Et in Arcadia Ego," one
of Disch's few works of off-planet pure SF, treats its theme in a manner
that most aficionados of hard SF would find startling, even
incomprehensible. Also included are an opera libretto (of "Frankenstein"),
an essay on "The Uses of Fiction," and an introductory essay by Samuel R.
Delany. See also CITIES
Fool's Run
MCKILLIP, PATRICIA A(NNE)(Warner, 1987) CYBERPUNK SF by a writer better
known for her high fantasy. Several years ago Terra Viridian murdered some
1,500 innocent people in response to an overwhelming but unexplained
vision. Now, apparently psychotic, she bides her time in the Underground,
a grim orbital penal colony. When a high-tech band is brought up to the
Underground to give a performance, the stage is set for some very strange
goings-on. Although the plot of Fool's Run is occasionally a bit

confusing, this is a beautifully written novel with lots of lush visual
imagery. Compare Pat Cadigan's SYNNERS and Norman Spinrad's Little Heroes.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
ABBOTT, EDWIN A. (as A Square)(Seeley, 1884)The narrator, citizen of a
two-dimensional world, uses the land for some satire, especially of
education and women. He briefly envisions a one-dimensional world
(Lineland) where motion is impossible. A three-dimensional man (Sphere)
intrudes into the plane of Flatland, thereby giving knowledge of
Spaceland. The two speculate about a world of four dimensions. The book
becomes a mathematician's delight, an exercise in the limits of
perception. Compare the ingenious speculations in A. K. Dewdney's The
Planiverse (1984). See also MATHEMATICS
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
SHELLEY, MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT(1818; rev. ed. 1831) Ed. by James Rieger
(Bobbs-Merrill, 1974); Ed. by Leonard Wolf (Clarkson Potter, 1977)Whatever
her literary indebtedness-classical myth, Faustus, or Milton-Mary Shelley
gave form to one of the enduring myths of SF: the creation of life by
science. Guilty of the sin of intellectual pride, Victor Frankenstein
epitomizes a shift in the scientists of the 19th century in that he turns
from alchemy to electrical forces, a phenomenon that fascinated writers
throughout the century. Mary Shelley acknowledged an indebtedness to the
physiologists of Germany and Dr. Erasmus Darwin. Brian W. Aldiss has
argued that Frankenstein is the first SF novel, although H. G. Wells
called it more magic than science. See Aldiss's Frankenstein Unboundfor a
late treatment of the theme. The 1831 edition is commonly reprinted.
Rieger and Wolf reprint the 1818 edition. Rieger includes variations and
notes, Wolf many illustrations along with notes. See also MONSTERS
Famous Fantastic Mysteries
Famous Fantastic Mysteries, April 1942 Published by The Frank A. Munsey
Co. (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. The
Frank A. Munsey Company. (c) 1942 The Frank A. Munsey Company.)
Famous Science Fiction
Famous Science Fiction, 1967 / No. 3 Published by Health Knowledge, Inc.
Cover illustration by Virgil Finlay (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Health Knowledge, Inc. (c) 1967 Health
Knowledge, Inc.)
Fantastic Adventures
Fantastic Adventures, Feb. 1950 Published by Ziff-Davis Co. Cover
illustration by Robert Gibson Jones (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR, Inc. (c)
1950 TSR, Inc.)
Fantastic Science Fiction
Fantastic Science Fiction, 1952 / No. 2 Published by Capitol Stories,
Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Capitol Stories, Inc. (c) 1952 Capitol Stories, Inc.)
Fantastic Story Quarterly
Fantastic Story Quarterly, Spring 1950 Published by Best Books, Inc.

(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Best Books,
Inc. (c) 1950 Best Books, Inc.)
Fantastic Universe
Fantastic Universe, June 1956 Published by King Size Publications, Inc.
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.King Size
Publications, Inc. (c) 1956 King Size Publications, Inc.)
Fantasy
Fantasy, 1939 Published by George Newnes, Ltd. Cover illustration by S.R.
Drigin (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
George Newnes, Ltd. (c) 1969 George Newnes, Ltd.)
Fantasy Book
Fantasy Book, Jan. 1950 Published by Fantasy Publishing Co. Cover
illustration by Jack Gaughan (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Fantasy Publishing Co. (c) 1950 Fantasy Publishing Co.)
Fantasy Book
Fantasy Book, June 1986 Published by Fantasy Book Enterprises Cover
illustration by Corey Wolfe (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Fantasy Book Enterprises. (c) 1986 Fantasy Book
Enterprises)
Fantasy Commentator
Fantasy Commentator, Winter 1989-90 Published by A. Langley Searles Cover
illustration by Frank R. Paul (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of the Estate of Frank R. Paul, and A. Langley
Searles, FANTASY COMMENTATOR. (c) 1989 A. Langley Searles)
Fantasy Fiction/Fantasy Stories
Fantasy Fiction/Fantasy Stories, May 1950 Published by Megabook, Inc.
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.Megabook,
Inc. (c) 1950 Megabook, Inc.)
Fantasy Magazine/Fantasy Fiction
Fantasy Magazine/Fantasy Fiction, Aug. 1953 Published by Future
Publications, Inc. Cover illustration by Hannes Bok (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Future Publications, Inc. (c) 1953
Future Publications, Inc.)
Fantasy Review
Fantasy Review, May 1984 Published by Florida Atlantic University Cover
illustration by Ken McGregor (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Florida Atlantic University. (c) 1984 Florida Atlantic
University)
Fantasy Review
Fantasy Review, 1946-47 Published by Vampire (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Vampire. (c) 1946 Vampire)
Far Frontiers
Far Frontiers, Spring 1986 / Vol. V Published by Baen Publishing
Enterprises (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Courtesy of Baen Publishing Enterprises. (c) 1986 Baen Publishing

Enterprises)
File 770
File 770, March 1987 Published by Mike Glyer Cover illustration by Brad
Foster (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Mike
Glyer. (c) 1987 Mike Glyer)
Forgotten Fantasy
Forgotten Fantasy, Dec. 1970 Published by Nectar Press, Inc. Cover
illustration by George Barr (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Nectar Press, Inc. (c) 1970 Nectar Press, Inc.)
Foundation
Foundation, 1957 Published by Gregg Press (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Gregg Press. (c) 1957 Gregg Press)
Frank Reade Library
Frank Reade Library, Sept. 1892 Published by Frank Tousey, Publisher
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Frank
Tousey, Publisher. (c) 1982 Garland Publishing, Inc.)
Future Fiction
Future Fiction, Aug. 1941 Published by Columbia Publications, Inc. Cover
illustration by Forte (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Columbia Publications, Inc. (c) 1941 Columbia Publications,
Inc.)
Future Science Fiction
Future Science Fiction, Nov. 1953 Published by Columbia Publications,
Inc. Cover illustration by Alex Schomburg (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Columbia Publications, Inc. (c)
1953 Columbia Publications, Inc.)
Futuristic Science Stories
Futuristic Science Stories, No. 9 Published by John Spencer & Co. (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. John Spencer & Co.
)
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott Cover: Little,
Brown & Co., 1915 illustration by Edwin A. Abbott (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Published by Little, Brown and
Company (Inc.) (c) 1915 Little, Brown and Company (Inc.))
First Light
First Light by Peter Ackroyd Cover: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989 (First
American Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Courtesy of Grove / Atlantic, Inc. (c) 1989 Grove Weidenfeld)
Freedom's Rangers
Freedom's Rangers by Keith W. Andrews Cover: Berkley, 1989 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1989 The Berkley Publishing Group Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal

copyright laws.)
Fourth Connection, The
The Fourth Connection by R.D. Bagnall Cover: Dennis Dobson, 1975
illustration by Richard Weaver (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside.Dennis Dobson (c) 1975 Dennis Dobson Limited)
First Team, The
The First Team by John Ball Cover: Bantam, 1971 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1971
Bantam Books)
Fall of Chronopolis, The
The Fall of Chronopolis by Barrington Bayley Cover: DAW Books, 1974
illustration by Kelly Freas (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1974
DAW Books, Inc.)
From Monkey to Man
From Monkey to Man by Austin Bierbower Cover: Ingersoll Beacon Co., 1906
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Fail-Safe
Fail-Safe by Eugene Burdick Cover: Dell, 1962 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Dell Books,
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1962 Dell
Books)
Fire, Burn!
Fire, Burn! by John Dickson Carr Cover: Hamish Hamilton, 1957
illustration by Philip Gough (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Hamish Hamilton, London. (c) 1957 Hamish
Hamilton )
Future Imperfect
Future Imperfect by Bridget Chetwynd Cover: Hutchinson & Co., 1946 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Random
Century House UK Limited. (c) 1946 Hutchinson & Co.)
Funco File, The
The Funco File by Burt Cole Cover: Avon Books, 1970 (Casey Brown/Eaton
Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by permission of Avon
Books. (c) 1970 Avon Books)
Flood, The
The Flood by John Creasey Cover: Hodder and Stoughton, 1958 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with
permission of Hodder Headline, POC. (c) 1958 Hodder and Stoughton)
Fifteen Hundred Miles an Hour
Fifteen Hundred Miles an Hour by Charles Dixon Cover: Bliss, Sands and
Foster, 1895 illustration by Arthur Layard (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )

Flying Draper, The
The Flying Draper by Ronald Fraser Cover: Jonathan Cape, 1942 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Courtesy of Random
Century House UK Limited. (c) 1942 Johnathan Cape London)
Foolish Immortal, The
The Foolish Immortal Paul Gallico Cover: Lancer Books, 1953 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. (c) 1953 Lancer
Books)
Father to the Man
Father to the Man by John Gribbin Cover: TOR Books/Tom Doherty
Associates, 1989 (First Edition) illustration by David Mattingly (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
permission of Tor Books. (c) 1989 Tor Books)
Fourth Seal, The
The Fourth Seal by Pelham Groom Cover: Jarrold's (First Edition) (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Jarrolds
Publishers Limited. )
First American King, The
The First American King by George Hastings Cover: Smart Set Publishing
Co., 1904 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Fantazius Mallare
Fantazius Mallare by Ben Hecht Cover: Covici-McGee, 1922 illustration by
Wallace Smith (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1922 Covici-McGee)
First to Awaken, The
The First to Awaken by Granville Hicks & Richard M. Bennett Cover: Modern
Age Books, 1940 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. (c) 1940 Modern Age Books)
FreeMaster
FreeMaster by Kris Jensen Cover: DAW Books, 1990 (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of DAW
Books, Inc. (c) 1990 DAW Books, Inc.)
Flyer
Flyer by Gail Kimberly Cover: Popular Library, 1975 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by permission of
Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1975 Popular Library, Inc.)
Fire Sanctuary
Fire Sanctuary by Katharine Eliska Kimbriel Cover: Popular Library, 1986
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted
by permission of Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1986 Popular Library)
Fearsome Island, The
The Fearsome Island by Albert Kinross Cover: Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1896
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. )

Falsivir's Travels
Falsivir's Travels by Thomas Lee Cover: Proprietor, 1886 (First Edition)
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Forbidden Planet
Forbidden Planet by W.J. Stuart (Philip MacDonald) Cover: Bantam, 1956
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by
Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1956 Bantam Books)
Find the Kirillian!
Find the Kirillian! by Seth McEvoy Cover: Bantam, 1985 illustration by
Stephen Fastner (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1985 Bantam Books)
Fall of Worlds, The
The Fall of Worlds by Francine Mezo Cover: Avon Books, 1980 (Casey
Brown/Eaton Collection, University of Calif., Riverside. Shown by
permission of Avon Books. (c) 1980 Avon Books)
Further East than Asia
Further East than Asia by Ward Muir Cover: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton,
Kent & Co., 1919 (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins Publishers Limited.
)
Final War & Other Fantasies
Final War & Other Fantasies by K.M. O'Donnell Cover: Ace Books, 1969 (M.
M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. (c) 1969 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)
Flame Winds
Flame Winds by Norvell W. Page Cover: Berkley, 1969 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1969 The
Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or transmission
without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Final Solution
Final Solution by Richard E. Peck Cover: Doubleday, 1973 (First Edition)
illustration by Anita Seigel (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection., Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1973 Doubleday)
Fault Lines
Fault Lines by Alvah Reida Cover: Berkley, 1972 (First Edition) (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1972 The Berkley Publishing Group. Reproduction, duplication or
transmission without appropriate permission is a violation of Federal
copyright laws.)

Flight from Time One
Flight from Time One by Deane Romano Covre: Walker & Co., 1972 (First
Edition) illustration by Enrico Scull (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection,
Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of Walker and
Company. (c) 1972 Walker & Company)
Frozen Pirate, The
The Frozen Pirate by W. Clark Russell Cover: Donohue, Henneberry & Co.
(First Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif.,
Riverside. Donohue, Henneberry & Co. )
Frankenstein
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Cover: Colburn & Bentley, 1831 (M. M.
Kavanagh. )
Firebird
Firebird by Kathy Tyers Cover: Bantam, 1987 illustration by Kevin Johnson
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by
Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1987 Bantam Books)
Five Weeks in a Balloon
Five Weeks in a Balloon by Jules Verne Cover: Worthington Co., 1885
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. )
Forty Years On
Forty Years On by Doreen Wallace Cover: HarperCollins/Collins, 1958
illustration by Kenneth Farnhill (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ.
of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins
Publishers Limited. (c) 1958 Collins)
Futuretrack 5
Futuretrack 5 by Robert Westall Cover: Green Willow Books, 1983
illustration by Dav Holmes (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside. Green Willow Books (c) 1983 Green Willow Books)
First Flight
First Flight by Chris Claremont Cover: Ace Books, 1987 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1987 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
First on the Moon
First on the Moon by Jeff Sutton Cover: Ace Books, 1958 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1958 Ace
Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate
permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Freehold
Freehold by William C. Dietz Cover: Ace Books, 1987 illustration by
Sandra Filipucci (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The
Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1987 Ace Books.

Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Far-Seer
Far-Seer by Rob Sawyer Cover: Ace Books (First Edition) illustration by
Tom Kidd (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley
Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1995 Ace Books. Reproduction,
duplication or transmission without appropriate permission is a violation
of Federal copyright laws.)
Fourth Mansions
Fourth Mansions by R.A. Lafferty Cover: Ace Books, 1969 (First Edition)
illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c)
1969 Ace Books. Reproduction, duplication or transmission without
appropriate permission is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Forever Drug, The
The Forever Drug by Steve Perry Cover: Ace Books (First Edition)
illustration by Barclay Shaw (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement
with The Berkley Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) Ace Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
Fire on the Mountain
Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson Cover: Arbor House, 1988 (First
Edition) illustration by Peter Thorpe (M. M. Kavanagh. Shown by permission
of William Morrow & Co., Inc. (c) 1988 Arbor House)
Five-Twelfths of Heaven
Five-Twelfths of Heaven by Melissa Scott Cover: Baen Books (First
Edition) illustration by Kevin Johnson (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with
permission of BAEN PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c) Baen Books)
Frontera
Frontera by Lewis Shiner Cover: Baen Books (First Edition) illustration
by Vincent Di Fate (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of BAEN
PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c) 1984 Baen Books)
Fire
Fire by Alan Rodgers Cover: Bantam, 1990 illustration by Alan Ayers
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by
Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1990 Bantam Books)
Female Man, The
The Female Man by Joanna Russ Cover: Bantam, 1975 (First Edition) (M. M.
Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1975 Bantam Books)
Full Spectrum 4
Full Spectrum 4 by Lou Aronica, Amy Stout & Betsy Mitchell Cover: Bantam
(First Edition) (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a
division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1993 Bantam

Books)
Fossil
Fossil by Hal Clement Cover: DAW Books, 1993 (First Edition) illustration
by Romas (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c)
1993 DAW Books, Inc.)
Forests of the Night
Forests of the Night by S. Andrew Swann Cover: DAW Books (First Edition)
illustration by Jim Burns (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of
DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1993 DAW Books, Inc.)
Fugue for a Darkening Island
Fugue for a Darkening Island by Christopher Priest Cover: Faber and Faber
Ltd., 1972 (First Edition) illustration by Judith Ann Lawrence (M. M.
Kavanagh. Cover: Judith Ann Lawrence. Courtesy of Faber and Faber Ltd. (c)
1972 Faber and Faber Ltd.)
Famous Fantastic Classics
Famous Fantastic Classics by Ralph Milne Farley Cover: Fax Collector's
Edition, 1975 illustration by Michael William Kaluta (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Fax Collector's Edition (c)
1975 Fax Collector's Edition)
Foundation
Foundation by Isaac Asimov Cover: Gnome Press, 1951 (First Edition)
illustration by David Kyle (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of
Calif., Riverside.Gnome Press (c) 1951 Gnome Press)
Final Blackout
Final Blackout by L. Ron Hubbard Cover: Hadley Publishing Co., 1940
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.Hadley
Publishing (c) 1940 Hadley Publishing Company)
Facial Justice
Facial Justice by L.P. Hartley Cover: Doubleday, 1960 illustration by
Vera Bock (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Used by Permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1960 Doubleday & Co.)
Flowers for Algernon
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes Cover: Bantam, 1967 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1967
Bantam Books)
Fade-Out
Fade-Out by Patrick Tilley Cover: Dell, 1975 illustration by Ken Kelley
(Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by
Permission of Dell Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. (c) 1975 Dell Books)
Four-Gated City, The
The Four-Gated City by Doris Lessing Cover: Bantam, 1969 (Casey Brown/The
Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Used by Permission of Bantam

Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1969
Bantam Books)
Forever War, The
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman Cover: St. Martin's Press, 1974 (First
Edition) (Casey Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside.
Courtesy of St. Martin's Press. (c) 1974 St. Martin's Press)
Finder
Finder by Emma Bull Cover: TOR (First Edition) illustration by Richard
Bober (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1994 Tor
Books)
Fourth Guardian, The
The Fourth Guardian by Ronald Anthony Cross Cover: TOR (First Edition)
illustration by Ron Walotsky (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of
Tor Books. (c) 1994 Tor Books)
Flame Is Green, The
The Flame Is Green by R.A. Lafferty Cover: Walker & Co. (First Edition)
illustration by Richard Roth (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of
Walker and Company. (c) 1971 Walker & Company)
Find the Feathered Serpent
Find the Feathered Serpent by Evan Hunter Cover: Winston, 1952 (Casey
Brown/The Eaton Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Winston (c) 1952
Winston)
Falling Free
Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold Cover: Baen Books, 1988 (First
Edition) illustration by Alan Gutierrez (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with
permission of BAEN PUBLISHING ENTERPRISES. (c) 1988 Baen Books)
Flux
Flux by Orson Scott Card Cover: TOR, 1992 illustration by Peter Scanlon
(M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c) 1992 Tor Books)
Faded Sun: Kesrith, The
The Faded Sun: Kesrith by C.J. Cherryh Cover: DAW Books, 1978 (First
Edition) illustration by Gino D'Achille (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with
permission of DAW Books, Inc. (c) 1978 DAW Books, Inc.)
Fundamental Disch
Fundamental Disch by Thomas M. Disch Cover: Bantam, 1980 (M. M. Kavanagh.
Used by Permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. (c) 1980 Bantam Books)
Fool's Run
Fool's Run by Patricia A. McKillip Cover: Popular Library, 1988
illustration by Michael Whelan (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of
Warner Books, Inc. (c) 1988 Popular Library)
First Lensman
First Lensman by E.E. Smith Cover: Pyramid Books, 1971 illustration by
Jack Gaughan (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by arrangement with The Berkley

Publishing Group. All rights reserved. (c) 1971 Pyramid Books.
Reproduction, duplication or transmission without appropriate permission
is a violation of Federal copyright laws.)
From the Earth to the Moon
From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne Cover: Bantam, 1993
illustration by Richard Oelze (M. M. Kavanagh. Used by Permission of
Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
(c) 1993 Bantam Books)
Fire upon the Deep, A
A Fire upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge Cover: TOR, 1993 illustration by
Boris Vallejo (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted by permission of Tor Books. (c)
1993 Tor Books)
Flies of Memory, The
The Flies of Memory by Ian Watson Cover: Carroll & Graf, 1991 (First US
Edition) illustration by Tony Greco & Kersti O'Leary (M. M. Kavanagh.
Reprinted with permission of Tony Greco & Associates, Inc. (c) 1991Carroll
& Graf)
Fantastic
Fantastic, July-Aug. 1953 Published by TSR, Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR,
Inc. (c) 1953 TSR, Inc.)
Fantastic
Fantastic, Jan.-Feb. 1953 Published by TSR, Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR,
Inc. (c) 1953 TSR, Inc.)
Fantastic
Fantastic, Dec. 1977 Published by TSR, Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR,
Inc. (c) 1977 TSR, Inc.)
Fantastic
Fantastic, Nov. 1959 Published by TSR, Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR,
Inc. (c) 1959 TSR, Inc.)
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott Cover: Dover
Books, 1952 illustration by Menten, Inc. (M. M. Kavanagh. Courtesy of
Dover Publications, Inc. (c) 1968 Dover Books)
First Men in the Moon, The
The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells Cover: Oxford University Press,
1995 (M. M. Kavanagh. Reprinted with permission of The Oxford University
Press. (c) Oxford University Press. Cover illustration reproduced by
permission of the Mary Evans Picture Library.)
Fantastic
Fantastic, Sept. 1973 Published by TSR, Inc. (Casey Brown/The Eaton
Collection, Univ. of Calif., Riverside. Reprinted with permission of TSR,

Inc. (c) 1973 TSR, Inc.)
Foster, Alan Dean
Alan Dean Foster (1946- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Farmer, Philip Jose
Philip Jose Farmer (1918- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Finch, Sheila
Sheila Finch (1935- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Ford, John M.
John M. Ford (1957- ) (M. C. Valada. (c) 1995 M. C. Valada)
Fast, Howard
Howard Fast (1914- ) ( Bettmann. )
Fiedler, Leslie
Leslie Fiedler (1917- ) (Miriam Berkley. (c) 1995 Miriam Berkley)
Forstchen, William
William R. Forstchen (1950- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Fowler, Karen Joy
Karen Joy Fowler (1950- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Frankowski, Leo A.
Leo A. Frankowski (1943- ) (Beth Gwinn. (c) 1995 Beth Gwinn)
Feeley, Gregory
Gregory Feeley (1955- ) (M. M. Kavanagh (c) 1995 M. M. Kavanagh)
Frankenstein
What hath Mary Shelley wrought? Metaphors, symbols, and a huge influence
on SF. ( (c) Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.)
Fearn, John Russell
John Russell Fearn (1908-1960) (The Andrew I. Porter Collection. )
Felice, Cynthia
Cynthia Felice (1942- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Fanthorpe, R. L.
R.L. Fanthorpe (1935- ) (Andrew I. Porter. (c) 1995 Andrew I. Porter)
Forward, Robert L.
Robert L. Forward (1932- ) (Rick Hawes. (c) 1995 Rick Hawes )
Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars
A sequel to the original 1936 serial, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars
(Universal, 1938) brought back Ming the Merciless (Charles Middleton) for
a second assault upon Earth. This time Ming's center of operations is
Mars, a locale made popular by the success of Orson Welles's 1938 radio
broadcast of The War of the Worlds. (The Everett Collection, Inc. )
Fahrenheit 451
Francois Truffaut's film version of Fahrenheit 451 (Anglo Enterprise and
Vineyard/Universal, 1966) reflects the French New Wave more than it does

Hollywood. The moral piety of Ray Bradbury's famous novel has been
replaced with seeming ambivalence; the good guys seem scarcely more
animated than the villains. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
Forbidden Planet
Most of the SF films of the 1950s that aspired to respectability presumed
scientific authenticity; the pretentions of Forbidden Planet (MGM, 1956)
were more literary. This loose adaptation of The Tempest is silly in many
respects, but the film possesses a visual splendor unsurpassed in its
time. Robby the Robot became one the most famous figures of 1950s SF
cinema. (Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
Frankenstein
James Whale's adaptation of Frankenstein (Universal, 1931) was not the
first film version of Mary Shelley's novel, and it may not be the best. It
has certainly been the most influential. Virtually every subsequent film
about Frankenstein and his creation use the image created by Boris Karloff
(and makeup artist Jack Pierce) for the monster. (Ronald V.
Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars
This three-sheet poster from the original release of Flash Gordon's Trip
to Mars (Universal, 1938) is high camp at its most exhilarating. (Ronald
V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters. )
Flash Gordon
Although its sets were supposed to be Mars and not Mongo, Flash Gordon's
Trip to Mars (Universal, 1938) retains basically the same cast of
characters as the original and remains fun to watch after more than half a
century. ( )
First Americans: Beyond the Sea of Ice, The
The First Americans: Beyond the Sea of Ice by William Sarabande Cover:
Bantam, 1987 (Used by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. (c) Bantam Books)
Flash Gordon comic born
" FLASH GORDON" first appeared as an American comic strip in 1934 and
continues to this day. The character also inspired a 1936 movie serial, as
well as paperbacks and comic books.See Also: SPACE OPERA.
First SF convention
By the mid-thirties, SF fans were holding meetings and formal
CONVENTIONS. The first US convention was in 1938.
First of Padgett's Gallagher stories
Lewis Padgett's comic series of the drunken inventor Gallagher and his
vain robot is replete with pre-Word War II slang and conventions, yet it
remains funny even today.See Also: C. L. MOORE; Henry KUTTNER.
First issue of F&SF
Called The Magazine of Fantasy in its first issue, the MAGAZINE OF
FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION eschewed interior illustrations and pulp
melodrama to become the most literate of American SF magazines.

First issue of Galaxy
Aggressively marketed to compete with John W. Campbell's ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE FICTION, GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION was a fresh new market with an
open mind, and quickly dominated the SF field.
First Hugo Awards
Officially called the Science Fiction Achievement Awards, the HUGOS are
given out each year at the WORLD SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.
Forbidden Planet opens
FORBIDDEN PLANETwas born from a determined effort to produce a quality SF
film - it was based on Shakespeare'sThe Tempest, and it had high
production values. It ended up being enjoyable camp.See Also: CINEMA.
First Milford Conference
Founded by Damon KNIGHT, Judith MERRIL, and James BLISH, the MILFORD
Writer's Conference became an important institution in modern SF, and
inspired other workshop programs that continue today.
First woman wins a Hugo
Anne MCCAFFREY became the first woman to win a BETTAUER, HUGO Award for
fiction with "Weyr Search" in 1968. The following year both she and Kate
WILHELM won the NEBULA Award.